#there are probably Many of you who got here after I was in grad school and not really writing much anymore

[motorsportbarbie13]

Forbidden - Part 1

In which you reconnect with an old friend, much to the dismay of your brother.

Warnings: None. This is mostly background and will be several parts.

Pairing: Max Verstappen x LeClercSister!Reader Word Count: 2.6k words Masterlist Here

It started slowly, this thing between your brother's best friend and biggest rival and you. So slowly that you hadn't been directly involved, you probably wouldn't have even noticed the clandestine brushing of fingers to skin in the paddock or the flickering looks that lingered just a bit too long. Even the way Max managed to stare at you from his garage went unnoticed by everyone but you. But what started slowly over one summer quickly snowballed into something that nearly destroyed you both.

You'd known Max since you were young, of course, so maybe that was why the pair of you managed to keep things hidden for so long. You two being friendly wasn't all that out of the ordinary so maybe that was why it took people longer to connect the dots. You two had always been friends, but it was a quiet friendship so not many people picked up on it, even back then. But he had always been firmly in the ‘my brother’s best friend and track rival’ category for as long as you could remember.

Did it drive you crazy that they were much quicker to involve your younger brother, Arthur, in their antics instead of you? Yes. But Charlie and his friends were like the untouchable super hero's you watched in movies: larger than life and totally invincible so you always lapped up any ounce of attention they gave you.

As you got older though, your trips to the track became less and less frequent with you picking up your own interests. You traded weekends at the track for weekends spent with friends your own age who didn't worship the ground your brother and his friends walked on. Before long, you were headed off to university in New York City, wanting a bit of space from your famous brother and his aura. You loved Charlie and Arthur to death, they were your favorite people in the world after all, but it was difficult being the 'normal' sister to such talented men and the space had allowed you to thrive on your own, in your own way. 

You went home to Monaco infrequently, the trip from New York to the small principality being just long enough to be annoying to do regularly and traveled to races even less. It wasn’t that you didn’t support Charlie. You always made sure to be at his home race in Monaco and the race in Monza of course, but your life was in New York. First it was your rigorous coursework for your degree in economics from NYU that kept you away and then you continued on with a Master’s degree in economics and international business, the intensity of both programs serving you well crafted excuses for years. 

“You’re really going to come travel with us?” Charlie was unable to hide his surprise and excitement this morning when you called to tell him your post-graduation plans. 

“It’s been the hardest year of my life, between my thesis, interning at the investment firm in Manhattan, and finishing up grad school, I’ve barely had a chance to breathe for years. I need a break Charlie.” You sigh, settling into your couch that faces the floor to ceiling windows in your New York apartment that was currently full of packing boxes. 

“I know you do. You’re the hardest working person in this family.” 

You chuckle, knowing that this wasn’t true. Your two brothers worked just as hard, if not harder, at their careers in motorsport. There was no way Charlie would have reached F1 if he hadn’t been a hard worker. You might be the smartest LeClerc though, although you knew Arthur would never admit to that even if Charlie would. 

“What happened to that job in London?” 

You pick at an invisible piece of lint, wanting to avoid the question, as you shrug even though your brother couldn’t see you. “I told them I wasn’t interested. They wanted too much from me and I’m just so close to being burnt out. I’m taking on a consulting gig with the Bank of London. They’ve agreed to allow me to work remotely so I can live in Monaco and travel. I’ve missed so much of your career Charlie, I hate that I’ve been so absent from everyone for so long.” 

Charlie’s voice goes soft at the sound of regret in your voice, “Oh, petit papillon.” My little butterfly. You can’t help but smile at the nickname, despite the melancholy mood that had settled over you. “We know you did what you had to do to make you happy, we don’t blame you for being gone for so long. All that matters now is that your studies are done and we get to see you more.” 

Your heart warms in your chest. Of course Charlie hadn’t held your distance against you, it wasn’t in his nature to hold grudges against you, even when you fought the hardest. “I’m so excited to come home, Charlie.” 

*Six Weeks Later*

A faint tapping on the front door catches your attention from where you sat in Charlie’s living room, staring at the same spreadsheet you had been working on for the last hour. “Saved by the knock.” You mutter, getting up from your spot on you’re brother’s couch. You’ve spent so much time on the plush piece of furniture over the last few days, busy with work, that you’re surprised there’s not a permanent indent of your backside on the cushion. 

Finding an apartment in Monaco was proving harder than you had thought. Every flat you looked at in the city was either so far out of your price range or was missing something you deemed essential to have in your living space so for the time being you were staying with Charlie and Alexandra in their guest bedroom until the right place came around. 

“Coming!” You call out, hoping to alert the person knocking on the front door to your approach. Although you couldn’t fathom who would be at the door in the middle of the day on a Tuesday afternoon. You quickly run through an inventory of where the important people in your life were: Charlie was at a sponsor event while Alex was at doing some content creation in Paris for the gallery that she worked for. Your mother was at work of course and Arthur was off somewhere with his girlfriend Jade today. Everyone accounted for and busy. 

Without checking the peephole, you swing the door open wide, relieved for an excuse to take a break from the project that had found its way to your inbox early this morning. 

“Maxie!” You gasp, launching yourself into the unprepared arms of the Dutchman who you hadn’t seen in years. 

Max was thankful for his quick reflexes that were required of a world championship winning F1 driver because without them, the two of you would have found yourselves in a heap of limbs on the floor. “Beestje! You nearly took me out.” Max sets you down carefully but not before you have a chance to swat at his arm. 

“You know I hate when you call me that.” You pout, nipping at his finger when he teasingly swipes at your lip. Max had called you ‘little beast’ for as long as you could remember, always delighting in your cries of protest when he did. If there was one thing Max loved, it was teasing Charlie’s sister.  

He grins down at you, dimples winking out at the corner of his mouth. “That’s why I do it.” 

Rolling your eyes, you open the door wide enough to allow the both of you to enter the empty apartment. Max follows you into the living room, where your computer sits discarded. 

“I didn’t know you were visiting.” Max says, trying to remain calm as you settle down on the couch opposite of him. 

You had always been gorgeous, those good looking LeClerc genes that Charles was so famous for had obviously been passed on to you as well, but now? You were hands down the most stunning woman Max had ever seen in his entire life. Your social media presence was sparse, at best, so while he followed you, it was rare for you to post much of anything. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw you in person either, knowing that you much preferred to avoid the harsh light of fame that came with being a LeClerc. 

“Charlie didn’t tell you? I moved back!” You wave a hand towards your laptop, “I got a job with the Bank of London doing consulting work, fully remote.” 

“No, Charles didn’t tell me.” Max says, narrowing his eyes. He had just played padel with Charles and Carlos the other day and he hadn’t made a single mention of you being back. “Where is he, anyway? I came by to see if he wanted to go for a run tonight.” 

You shrug, trying to force your heart rate to slow to a pace that couldn’t potentially be heard by people playing the slots at the famous Monte Carlo Casino down the street. You had always had a juvenile crush on Max. Honestly, who wouldn’t? His demeanor on the track and in the paddock was completely opposite of who he was in private. You may have not spent much, if any, time with him the past decade but you knew that the Max that had been your brother’s childhood best friend and rival was the same Max sitting next to you right now. Nothing had changed.

“He’s at some event for Ferrari. I’ll never understand why people want to pay thousands of dollars to get to talk to the likes of you chuckle heads. How would those donors feel knowing they invested so much in a person that once got so drunk on their birthday they thought the Uber driver was trying to kidnap them because they, and I quote, ‘could totally make a killing with the ransom Christian would pay to get me back.’” 

“That was ONE time!” He croaks, blinking at you in surprise. “And how the fuck did you know about that? Charles swore he’d never tell anyone about that.” 

You can’t help the laughter that bubbles out and Max momentarily forgets how embarrassed he is that you know that story. It’s light and airy, the notes dragging their fingers down Max’s skin. “I’m not ‘anyone’, Maxie darling. You know that.” 

And boy did he. Just the way you wink at him while calling him ‘Maxie darling’ is enough to send his mind into overdrive, wondering how it would feel if more of your attention was turned his way. 

Max just smirks back, fighting to keep up the cool facade he’s usually got so carefully constructed in place. He expertly steers the conversation away from anymore potentially embarrassing stories and towards you. How you’ve been. The near year you spent writing your thesis paper for your Master’s degree. The life you’ve built so far away from Max. It makes his heart squeeze something fierce knowing that you two have drifted so far apart.

Before you know it, the sun is sinking low in the sky, casting a glittering glow over the water just outside the apartment. The sunlight filters in through the half-drawn curtains, bathing you in a golden light. Max had never understood why everyone raves about the beauty of ‘golden hour’ until he saw the setting sun reflected in your eyes. 

He was in so much trouble. 

You two are so lost in your conversation you don’t notice the front door swing open or Charles bustling through the door hours later. Charles pauses when he sees the two of you sat on the couch together. Somewhere between the first and second glass of wine that you had poured when it became evident neither of you wanted the afternoon to end, you had ended up quite close to Max. His hand sat outstretched over the back of the couch, hovering just out of reach of your shoulder. You were leaning into him ever so slightly, laughing at something Max had said moments before. The obvious intimacy between the two of you set off alarm bells for Charles, not liking how Max was looking at you over the rim of his wine glass. 

The thing was, Charles is quite protective of you. It was one of the reasons you always tried to leave the details about your love life out of any conversation you had with either of your brothers. Arthur was bad enough, but your twin? Charles was of the opinion that no one was ever good enough for you. Especially someone like Max. While he wasn’t as bad as some of the guys on the grid (lookin at you Lando Norris), Max still liked to party and take advantage of how often pretty girls threw themselves at him. He did not want someone like that interested in his sister. He knew how much you valued your privacy and that was not something someone like Max could offer you. 

“What’s going on here?” Charles fought to keep the hostility out of his voice, crossing his arms over his chest. 

Max jumped off the couch like it had suddenly burst into flames. He knew how protective Charles was over you and judging by the stormy look on your brother’s face, he wasn’t happy to find him there tonight. 

You, on the other hand, found it amusing how quickly your brother’s protective side reared it’s ugly head. There was nothing to be ashamed of, you knew that. You were just two friends catching up after being apart for so long. Totally innocent. Right? Right. 

“Max stopped by to see if you wanted to go on a run and we just got lost in conversation is all, Charlie.” You sooth, knowing your brother has a short fuse when it comes to you. 

Charles narrows his eyes at Max as if he doesn’t believe your words and to be honest, he probably shouldn’t. If he had known the thoughts racing through Max’s head over the last few hours, Max would have probably found himself in the gravel pit of whatever race was next on the calendar. 

“I was just leaving.” Max stutters, glancing down at where you still sit on the couch, amused grin playing at the corner of your lips. 

“It was nice to see you Maxie.” 

Max doesn’t miss the way Charles clenches his fists when you say his name like that. 

“Always a pleasure, Beestje.” He teases, hoping that Charles doesn’t pick up on the nervous waver in his voice. 

You tip your wine glass towards him in a mock salute before picking up your laptop where it’s sat discarded for the last few hours while Max makes a beeline for the front door. Charles follows him out, eyes trained on the back of his friends head, trying to calm the storm of anger that is swirling around his gut. 

“I don’t think it needs to be said but stay away from my sister.” Charles practically growls when Max’s hand closes over the doorknob. 

“We’re just friends Charles. I haven’t seen her in ages, we were just catching up.” 

“I don’t look at my friends the way you were just looking at her.” Charles grouses. “Just don’t, okay? I don’t want to give her any reason to leave again. If you hurt her, she’ll go running. Leave her alone.” 

Max nods, unable to find the words he wants to use because he has a feeling ‘fuck you, I’ll do whatever I want with your sister’ seems like a bad way to end the conversation. But as he waits for the elevator in the quiet hall, he knows that staying away from you is going to be near impossible. 

[andhumanslovedstories]

A while ago at work, I had a patient whose condition rapidly deteriorated during my shift, which I believed at the time was due to me not monitoring certain therapies closely enough. Essentially patient had parameters that their oxygen saturations should be between 88-92%. The patient was on supplemental oxygen via a nasal cannula, and was having oxygen saturations of 95% or more. The patient later became lethargic, confused, and hard to rouse. The patient was in hypercapnic respiratory failure, where they essentially were not exhaling enough CO2, the waste product of respirations. Patients who have oxygen parameters of 88-92% tend to be COPD patients, and I'd been taught where giving them too much oxygen can result in CO2 retention.

We ended up having to call a rapid response on that patient who needed to go on the bipap (non-invasive ventilator) to help them breathe effectively, and I went home from that shift feeling certain that I killed this person. That I had triggered a terminal decline that the patient would never recover from.

(Perhaps some context here: my grandfather went into hypercapnic respiratory failure and then died within a few days. Maybe he would have passed either way, I think probably he would have, but the respiratory failure was the moment his decline started accelerating. After he went hypercapnic, he was non-responsive from that point on.)

I called in sick to my next shift because I couldn't face going in. I spent the day thinking about what I'd done, what my moral obligations were, how do you atone for something when you cannot reverse the effects of the original error, and how paralyzed by shame I felt. What did I owe the patient? What did I owe the family? What did I owe myself? How many times had this happened before and I just didn't know because the decline happened after my shift ended?

It was a productive if unpleasant day of trying to sincerely examine myself and the things I'd done wrong without flagellating myself. It'd be almost easily to complete condemn myself and to stop nursing because I'm a Bad Nurse than it would have been to acknowledge the many steps that led to this patient outcome, only some of which I had a hand in. But this was my patient. They were my responsibility. What was the right reaction to have? What should I be feeling? In the course of doing my job, I caused harm to someone I swore to take care of. I still think that I am a thoughtful, hardworking, and compassionate nurse. I don't think the hospital would be better off if I quit. But I hurt someone.

I thought a lot about how this outcome happened, came up with steps to prevent it in the future, and found a new commitment within myself for continued learning. (If you've got a timeline of my particular fixations, this is about when my determination to go to grad school began.) I also thought about how much shame was making me sick. When my patient started declining and I realized the effects of my actions and inactions, one of my first thoughts was genuinely, "Everyone's going to know what I did." It was thought with absolute horror. I'd hurt someone and everyone was going to know it. They were going to know I was bad at my job and bad as a person.

And I was struck by what an unhelpful emotion that was. How much it made me, if only for a moment, tell NO ONE what was going on and what I believed to be the root cause. That it'd be better to let the decline continue rather than intervene because if I intervened that'd be admitting that I'd done something wrong. I didn't listen to that voice that told me to hide what I'd done, but I instantly understood the power of it.

There's this thing called the Compass of Shame which is about the different ways people handle their own feelings of shame--they avoid the shame, they withdraw from themselves and others, they attack others, they attack themselves. I know my own reactions to shame and try therefore not to go with my gut instincts, which are always to say I'm an irredeemably bad person and no one can know about this and if anyone does not about what I've done wrong, I deserve literally whatever punishment they could give me. I've had to learn I can both have failed to complete my responsibilities and still not deserve to lose my job or my flunk this class or give up on college or lose all my friends. But there is something appealing about masochistic shame. Like you can prevent others from judging and punishing you if you sufficiently judge and punish yourself. You'll still be a wretched monster, but no one else needs to know that.

That's actively dangerous for patients, who are the victims of healthcare errors, and it doesn't help prevent future mistakes if we are too ashamed to talk about what happened and why. We'll just keep fucking up in the exact same ways because no one else told us how they'd fucked up that way in the past and here's how we've changed the process because of that. I therefore have an ethical obligation to not internalize shame when I make mistakes at my job. I have tried to remember that while also trying my best to not make the same mistakes twice.

And then a week later, I was sent back to the same floor with the patient who'd declined on my watch. Because I'm a float RN and therefore don't have an assigned unit, I go to different floors every night (occasionally multiple floors on the same night). I see patients for 12 hours and then almost never see them again. Since I was back on the floor, I girded myself and went to go visit the patient, who to my surprise was alert and upright and about the same as I'd seen her at the beginning of my shift before they'd gotten bad. I said hi and asked how the patient was doing, and the answer was that patient was doing about the same as they'd been doing for the last month.

This was not good news for the patient, who was still medically complex, still dealing with an extremely difficult to address condition, but they were also not in the ICU, dying, or dead which is what I'd feared. And with the new knowledge that the patient was, if not okay, than at least stable as ever despite my actions, I could look back on that shift and see it differently, namely that this patient kept continuing to go into hypercapnic respiratory failure with or without oxygen. And then I looked into what I thought I'd been negligent about before and found that the scholarship on it was more complicated and divided than I'd thought. That the mechanism of action that I thought was driving the hypercapnic respiratory failure was in fact waaaaaaaaaaay more complicated than just over oxygenation, particularly in this patient who had a number of muscular abnormalities that made much more of an impact on ventilation than the oxygen would have. And while I still had to improve my practice, upon more reflection I could no longer say there was a direct one to one of my actions and the patient's decline.

I felt simultaneously forgiven, absolved, and humbled. I cannot describe to you the almost sheepish relief that rushed over me. Nothing that bad had happened. What did happen was only ambiguously my fault.

There's a power fantasy to shame sometimes, that you are uniquely bad and that your actions have monumental consequences. My actions on the job can have monumental consequences, but usually they are little things, little cares, little turns, little med doses, little therapies, little steps, little tasks, little jobs, little kindnesses or little cruelties that help a patient move forward or which hold a patient back. I'm there for 12 hours and never again. I can do a lot in that time, but I'm not gonna cure them and I'm probably not going to kill them. It's a relief, and it's a strange disappointment. We want to be important, even in bad ways.

While I can certainly fuck things up for patients, while I can certainly kill patients or traumatize them or withhold care or misuse my position, while I can do all those things, I don't actually have that much power over life and death. Everything that goes wrong isn't my fault. And sometimes something is your fault and nothing really happens except a few people have a bad night and you try not to do it again. I think that last bit is the most important part. I still should have titrated her oxygen down. I'm more careful about that now. I'm trying not to fuck up in the exact same way. I'll find exciting new ways to fuck up, and then I'll learn from those too.

[chaoticneutralgood2627]

Advice to College Students (From someone who's trying to apply for a master's program)

Note that these are in no particular order and from my own particular experience. I will add if I think of more.

TAKE NOTES ON EVERYTHING, ESPECIALLY IF YOU FIND IT COOL: your brain will tell you 'I'll remember that fact, it's so neat!' Your brain is a BITCH. You will not remember SHIT. Take ALL the notes. If you can record your classes, even better!

Write down who your professors are for each class. Make a big document. All the years. Write them. Write down their vibes and if you like them. Write down what sort of assignments they gave. Because I'm over here trying desperately to remember which professors I had multiple classes with so I can beg them for recommendations.

Save your assignments. Even if they're horribly cringey. You can use this to gauge how far you've come. I know it hurts your soul. I have fanfic from when I was 12. Do it anyway.

When they tell you the grad school shit, pay attention. Even if you don't plan to go back to school. Because I didn't listen and now I have changed my mind and I have no recollection of that section of school.

Networking. Gather contacts from your classmates. If for no other reason than because you think they're intimidating and you don't want your LinkedIn to look depressing. They're probably just as intimidated by you. And if not, you can pretend they are.

College is not high school. Next to no one has friends at first. Everyone is a disaster. Talk to people. You might not find Your People in your first friend group. That's fine. There are people there somewhere that can make life less awful. The worst they can say is no, you can't be friends with us (and most people aren't that bitchy). The universe is big and no one is judging you harder than you are.

It's not that friends Can't Live Together, it's that people have different organization styles and needs for survival and sometimes those Do Not Mesh. If you're going to live with someone, make sure that you have talked about things.

Everything can go on a resume if you word it right. Editing a friend's paper? Congrats, you have editing and tutoring experience. Playing DND on weekends? Cooperation and teambuilding to work towards a common goal, sometimes in the face of creative differences (your friends want to Fight Everything and you want to Stay Alive (or reversed)). EVERYTHING CAN GO ON A RESUME.

There are so many resources on campus. Use them, for the love of god because then you're going to be an adultier adult and realize that there is not a med center right across the campus.

Find what motivates you. Mine is spite, I am applying to grad school to get out of retail and to spite 2 specific supervisors. Cling to that when you want to drop out and quit.

There is not a specific route to take in college. Or out of college. Listen to yourself rather than everyone's advice (I am aware that this is ironic to be on an advice post).

If you think you can wake up at 9 after like 4 hours of sleep, that is the devil talking to you. Go to bed.

On the same note. I am aware that you woke up at like 5 for high school. You will not want to exist before noon. 8 am classes are not illegal, but they should be.

Take care of yourself. You're paying a shit ton of money to be there, you can take an hour to eat the food. Plus, if you take care of yourself, then you will work better.

There will be weird shit happening all over. Just roll with it. Unless it's hurting someone or has the potential to hurt someone (my one friend got stalked).

You are not required to stay somewhere social if it's creeping you the fuck out or if you aren't comfy. I think I went to a single party in my entire college life and I hid in the corner with their illegal kitten the whole time.

Speaking of illegal kittens. If you know someone has an illegal kitten, no the fuck you do not. There probably will be at least one. And you do not know about it.

[elasticitymudflap]

If Betty returns in season two, what kind of plot lines and character arcs would you like to see for her? Which characters do you want to see her interact with?

oh man. okay buckle up because you are about to endure my full frontal autism.

first you're going to have to go into this post knowing that i am insane about betty grof. i am aware of this. but they also called me crazy back in 2012 when i said simon and betty probably loved each other very much despite the fact she disappeared, and that she was probably a huge chaotic badass, AND I WAS RIGHT so.

all of this aside, here are a couple things i think would be epic and sexy of them to address:

~betty's past~

GIRL WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS.

no, seriously. i hate that the cut content from the storyboards revealed so much about her that didn't make the final 'jerry' cut. betty is passionate, intense, and liked simon's work because he was this weird little guy who proudly had all these "out there" theories. she even stated that "ancient magic" was once her major, so it's no fucking wonder she was so jazzed to find the one other guy who studied and believed in the strange things she did.

how did betty come to have these strange beliefs, and to the point of pursuing it in fucking grad school? was she just always like this? did her interests and beliefs put her at odds with others when she was growing up, little miss dig-her-way-down-to-the-devil, and that's part of the reason she wanted all the more to support simon?

reading that scene in temple of mars where magic betty laments "what remains" of her original self after spending so long dedicated to simon, even if you take into account the way MMS is warping her perspectives and cranking her obsessive tendencies to 11, i find it hard to believe betty didn't grow up with some kind of instability or trauma that made her more prone to throw herself completely at someone who showed her genuine love and kindness. this isn't necessarily a fault on simon's part, he probably didn't even clock it because he was so caught up with trying not to fuck things up with her (he's got his own issues). but it definitely seems like this is something deeply coded into her being, especially when you consider she was willing to leave everything she knew behind in an instant for him.

and i NEED to know more about the wacky shit she was up to in ooo, before and after becoming magic betty. did she ever go to wizard city? did other wizards even know about her? what does she think about her time as magic betty? moreover, how the hell did king man even get betty to agree to his weird idea of cognitive behavioural therapy?? how did she actually go from literally willing to kill herself via time travel to actually accepting that she needed help getting over simon?? did prismo and the cosmic owl get involved?? what is their connection to king man and mars anyway, i mean we know grob gob glob grod hung out with them?? do you think betty knew at any point about simon's head holding the fionna and cake universe?? SO MANY QUESTIONS RAAARRGHGHHGHH

also, not to get super sappy, but i want to see the enchiridion expedition from her perspective!! i want to see her progression from 'hell yeah im going on an adventure with that guy whose research i admire' to 'oh my god i love his stupid ass help????'.

~betty's guilt (feat. regrets)~

i don't care what the alternate bus stop scene said, you will never convince me betty grof has "no regrets". i think she has 'no regrets' in terms of loving simon, and she would never want him to think that she regrets their relationship because of what it "did" to her (turned her into a kaiju). i think this scene was betty trying to give simon a modicum of closure by reassuring him of that fact, and trying to help him reckon with the fact that there's no going back and changing how things ended up for the two of them; from here on out they can only move forward.

that being said, we know that betty will often push simon into doing things she thinks are best for him, whether he wants these things or not, such as not getting held up by snakes or not dying. she's a quick thinker and a risk taker who doesn't like looking at the 'big picture', and these are things she's probably very aware about herself.

i think, in the 12 years that they were apart, betty probably had a lot of time to reflect on her decisions after the crown came into their lives. how her hubris in trying to study magic ended up in her becoming "magic betty", how magic betty nearly ended/condoned the end of the world multiple times, how she ultimately did cure simon but almost killed him in the process. most of all, you cannot convince me betty wouldn't agonize over how her split-second decision to jump into the future affected simon. you really think betty fucking grof would've have been totally unaffected by the revelation that simon spent nearly ten human lifetimes agonizing over driving her away?

in her last interaction with him, magic betty's recklessness cured them... only to then be grotesquely crushed to death inside of golb. but he didn't get upset with her, he didn't panic, he didn't even fight it, he just... gave in. there's this air of acceptance to him, an acceptance that comes after prolonged and complicated grief, that i'd argue, wasn't the culmination of being cured, but the culmination of his long and painful battle over losing her; he was content to die as long as he was with her. that must have been... really something for her to mull over.

i could easily see her developing a bit of a complex over it. i think it would be fascinating to see a betty who now, after all the dust as settled, has looked at their history and concluded that she was the common denominator in all of this, that she is bad for simon, that in a way she is a "curse" to him. and that it would be the perfect justification for her staying away from him all these years, thinking without her influence he could finally move on from her and live the rest of his human life happily with his new magic future friends.

i don't think betty has necessarily "moved on" from simon, i think she still loves him dearly... but as i said, thoroughly convinced she'll only damage him further if she keeps trying to pursue him, and that simon's breakdown during season 1 was only more evidence to that fact.

i think she's trying to lead him to get over her 'for his own good', and that she's purposefully being vague and simplifying conclusions about their relationship so he doesn't try to fight her on it like he always does when she makes these huge decisions for them. she's not bringing any of the stuff she actually regrets up with him because only betty sees it as a problem. simon is so enamoured with her he probably wouldn't even entertain the possibility that she had negative effect on him, but he would believe the reverse in a heartbeat.

this isn't me saying they're ""toxic"" at all, i'm saying that these are two very damaged people who would benefit from multiple types of therapy. and that, as they are, they currently are more likely to keep going in loops with unhealthy behaviours and blaming themselves ad infinitum rather than try to reckon with how they can change, and how it is a problem that they'll always do it for the other, but never for themselves.

even if all of my above ramblings turn out to be bunk: betty grof needs some kind of therapy for her pre-existing self sacrificial tendencies and self worth issues, a space for her to process and work through all of the things that happened to her in ooo, couple's counselling, and the biggest blunt known to man.

you might be wondering "emery, why are you talking about her like she isn't beyond such things? she's golb now, the embodiment of chaos! her ""arc"" is over."

~golbetty conspiracy theory time~

i'm not entirely convinced betty is golbetty as we've come to understand her. i stand by this with my crumbs of a conspiracy theory in that when simon first did the ritual, it was ORIGINAL golb's face that flashed over the scene (not golbetty or even the statue's face), and how golbetty seemed to transform back into Golb Classic after she blew simon away into the void. there's also this weird thing where golbetty had these holes or rips on her leg when she rotated; i thought it was an animation error but then it was also in the storyboards so idk what to believe...

plus the boards ive seen seem to only refer to them as "GOLB", never 'GOLBetty', which i just find... interesting

and i keep thinking about simon info-dumping about golb to betty in the 'come along with me' flashback and the specific wording that was used: "imagine if we could somehow harness all that dank energy..." and then comparing it to the specific wording of betty's wish "... however it has to happen, I wish for the power to keep Simon safe"

there's a couple lines in 'you forgot your floaties' regarding betty's work before becoming magic betty that i feel often get overlooked, one being how tiny manticore describes the situation as "she thinks she can save her BF, Simon, by finding the source of magic," and in betty's own words: "studying [magic madness and sadness] could lead me to their underlying cause, and then I'll control the forces that hold sway over Simon"

i've always wondered if part of the reason betty's wishes to "banish golb from this world/for golb to disappear" didn't work was not just because they didn't tap into her heart's deepest wish (keeping simon safe), but because a wish like that would also require some kind of fundamental change to the laws of the universe first in order for it to work. magic betty even references golb as "the most powerful force in the universe," so how would the crown ever hope to compete with that? according the ancient candy elemental, wish magic has the potential to cause "irreversible damage to the very structure of existence". maybe the crown itself couldn't banish golb with a simple wish, but it could restructure the world to create someone who was powerful enough to control even golb, if only it were structured through the correct wishing language.

and it would make total sense for betty to become that person.

i've been thinking about the way the candy elemental tries to warn evergreen from using the crown: "this wish may see things in you you cannot see yourself, can you truly say you know your heart's truest desire?"

i wonder if there may have been two elements to betty's wish, and the part of it that betty "didn't see in herself" was her worded in the language of "power"; betty's desire to gain control over forces of the universe no human could ever hope to fight against, let alone win.

she spent her human life fascinated by ancient magic, fighting to get her's and simon's work recognized as valid and worthwhile. then, she's suddenly in the future, fighting to stop simon from dying, physically fighting at times, and fighting to find a way to gain control over these "forces" that held him prisoner. she essentially is fighting to become the conqueror of magic, madness, and sadness... and she fails, becomes a victim of it. and it all goes downhill from there, the loss of control over herself, over her mind, over her goals, yet the most 'betty' thing about her is that she's still fighting, albeit a bit crooked and to the detriment of all else. in the end, she's even fighting with herself, fighting to remember who she even is without the fight, not even sure if that person exists anymore.

and then she's freed, suddenly, from the confines of MMS to the literal confines of a quickly shrinking prison. when you watch the two of them in that scene, she isn't fighting to escape the same way finn is literally fighting the wall, but you can tell she's not giving up. part of her is still fighting to think of a way out, even when it feels like there's absolutely no hope left.

her desire "for the power" could mean, in a sense, to have the ability to be in control of all that she couldn't at one time or another: time, fate, magic, life, death, chaos... but this was articulated through her love for simon, because it's the only way she probably even recognizes it within herself.

this is why i don't entirely think betty and golb are fused, or that betty is solely "golbetty". i think being "fused" with no possibility of escape would be antithetical to the language and possible wider implications of her wish. this is why i think she's something above even golb, like a being with the ability to possess/harness the power of other deities. and i think she does this specifically in scenarios where simon is in immediate danger and she needs to control them or harness their power in order to protect him.

i'm ready to be proven wrong, and i probably will be. still, i rotate these thoughts in my head at a dangerous velocity, and none of you can stop me.

~ok i'm done ill stop being insane now (lying)~

so to... actually answer your question, i REALLY want betty to meet fionna and cake, because it sounds to me like they remind simon a lot of her. i would just love to see the absolute fucking tornado they'd be when put in a room together.

also, obviously first and foremost, I NEED BETTY TO TALK TO MARCELINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

anyway, as far as season 2 goes, something is definitely up with prismo. and since he's guardian/creator of multiverse entities, who the fuck knows what that means for the fabric of existence if he's glitching out.

all im saying is, i wouldn't be surprised if our main trio end up having to save the multiverse and have to do so with help from other... entities. bettities, even. (hehe. bettity)

[gyunglitter]

➷ prologue ➷

-“oh, the way he makes me feel that love isn’t real -– cupid is so dumb”

or

unlike you, your brother’s best friend just doesn’t know when to quit

word count: 1,205

warnings: not too many, just hints of angst and a SINGULAR curse word (for now lmao), i hate editing sooo this is VERY unedited lmao

tags: brother’s-best-friend!beomgyu x reader, ??? to ???, angst, fluff(??), beomgyu is the cool boy-next-door, reader is an independent girlboss (or trying to be, at the least), beomgyu’s gonna be GROVELING, simp!gyu, pathetic pining from both sides lol, maybe some cringe from reader (she was a teenage girl in love, have some empathy plz😭)

notes: super excited for this story! inspired by my personal love life (except for the fact that no one’s groveling for me, just the first half of the story🥴) but we believe in happy endings here!! enjoy a story of pining and crying and groveling<3

–> masterlist <–

Shit. You were so late.

It wasn’t necessarily your fault. Okay, maybe it was. After getting off your flight, you had made the irrational decision to stall your return home by stopping by your childhood best friend’s grad party, as she had also graduated from college at the same time as you. (Thank instagram for providing you with that information.) And so what, you got caught up and now you’re twenty minutes late to the dinner your parents were putting together for you–it’s for your graduation, it’s not like they can start without you anyway. 

At least, that was the reassurance you kept repeating to yourself as you begged your uber to speed up the rest of the way to your childhood home.

Unlike the last time you had stepped foot in your family’s home, you were now twenty-one—a real adult—with your bachelor’s and a promising full-time job. Just like you had promised yourself when you were eighteen and moving out almost four years ago: you’d grown up.

There were a few promises you weren’t able to keep, but you’d rather not think about that as you rang the doorbell to your old house.

“Y/n! You’re finally here!” The shrill that came out of your mother was nothing but joyful, as she ran from her side of the doorframe to hug you tightly. “Where have you been? Dinner was supposed to start at seven!”

You patted her on the back, laughing sheepishly. “Sorry, traffic was terrible,” you lied, wincing at yourself. You’d made sure to wash your teeth in your friend’s bathroom before leaving and sprayed a ton of perfume on yourself in the uber before coming over to the door to hopefully drown out the smell of your previous engagement, but that didn’t stop you from fearing your mother’s strange intuition.

Luckily for you, she’d bought it, probably too caught up in the excitement of you being home after so long. You didn’t come home to visit since you had left abroad for school. If your parents ever wanted to see you, they would fly out instead, sometimes bringing your older brother and making the visit a family vacation instead. There were a few times you could’ve gone home and made it easier for your family to see you, but you always came up with an excuse. You’d gone to great lengths to not step foot in this house. Until now, of course.

You stepped inside, taking off your shoes as your mother asked you a ton of questions regarding your food storage, laundry, and how much the uber was. All the usual things she asked you when she got the chance. It made you laugh a bit, before going to deny it.

“Eomma, you have nothing to worry about! My well being and financial state are fine at the moment,” you reassured her.

This didn’t work, as she continued to rant about her concerns. Oh well, you tried.

You looked down to put on a pair of house slippers, when you noticed an additional pair of shoes sitting by the others. It wasn’t a pair that you recognized, but your heart stuttered a little at the possibility of who the shoes could belong to. You hoped it was one of your uncles you hadn’t seen since you were a kid. Or maybe a grandparent! Hell, you hoped it was your weird-possibly-dead next door neighbor–anybody other than the first name that popped in your head.

Your mother sighed at you, “Honestly, Y/n, it’s been years since you came home! I worry–”

“Is that Y/n?!”

Your head shooting up, you couldn’t stop the grin on your face from growing when you saw your older brother, Soobin, after over a year. He didn’t make it to the last few visits because of work, and it made you miss him dearly. Who would’ve guessed?

“Oppa!” You cried, running over to your brother that already had his arms open for you. Hugging him tightly, you laughed a bit. “Jeez, oppa, what happened to your lankiness? You have muscles now!”

Soobin snorted at that, squeezing you tighter in his arms. “It’s called the gym, ever heard of it? Now that you’ve graduated, you’ll finally have time to go! Congrats, by the way.”

You smiled in thanks. Your brother and parents hadn’t been able to make it to your graduation since it had been a bit of a last second decision–you weren’t too sure when your graduation was supposed to be since you figured you still had a few more credits to go. But you ended up getting cleared after a bit of deliberation, shocking your family as they hadn’t made plans to fly out yet. It was you who had decided that instead of them coming out, you would come home to celebrate and stay for the next couple of months before your job needed you. Your family agreed without hesitation, they had been trying to get you to come home ever since you’d left. And here you were now, after what felt like a lifetime.

“It’s good to have you home, Y/n,” your father shouted, coming from the kitchen.

You grinned at your father and went to hug him as well. He had on an apron, looking like he had just finished making some dessert judging by the chocolate smudges on the front. Unlike the last time you had seen him (which had been about six months ago), he had quite a few more patches of gray hair. But his smile was the same.

“It’s good to be back, appa,” you replied, and it wasn’t a lie.

Looking around the home, you realized not much had changed. Sure, there were a couple new photos hung up and there was some new furniture fitted in, but everything felt the same. Even the sounds of the house were the same: the TV playing some sports game your dad wanted to catch, your mom scolding Soobin as he whined, and the beeping of the oven from the kitchen. Though it had been so long since you last stepped foot in here, you felt like if you closed your eyes, you could be taken back to when you were eighteen. At first, you didn’t mind the thought of that.

Until he came back.

“Hey, little Y/n.”

The smile you had on your face immediately dropped at that voice. That damned voice. 

You could recognize all of the old nostalgic sounds from around the house easily. But none of it compared to the deep tone that sounded behind you. You remember when the pitch had still been higher and louder, before mellowing out to the smooth baritone you had spent your teen years adoring. You swooned when you would hear it around you, and dreamt of when it would be spoken for you.

But that was when you were eighteen. And, with your greatest effort over the years, you were no longer eighteen.

“Beomgyu…I should’ve known those shoes up front were yours.”

–> next <–

[starlightkun]

❧ word count: 11.9k

❧ warnings: cursing, mentions of death/dead people in the context of him being hades, probably more legal jargon than there should be but i tried to make it as easy to understand as possible i promise, it gets pretty existential at some points but never overtly angsty

❧ genre: fluff, getting together, greek gods/goddesses au, hades jaemin, human reader, nades au, paralegal reader, bit of a ham-fisted persephone allegory, inspired by the gods/goddesses assigned to the work it unit in 2020 for this video, appearances by bestie jeno and coworker yangyang

❧ author’s note: ahhh my first fic back after over a year hiatus!! not super accurate to the original greek myths, i was just havin fun with hades as a concept rather than a strict characterization. i also watched mike flanagan’s ‘midnight mass’ and read john milton’s ‘paradise lost’ during the time i was writing this so get ready for some slight spiritual/religious iconography and overtones. hope y’all enjoy, i had so much fun playing around with my writing in this one!!

❧ spotify playlist

⤷ sequel

The god’s���Jaemin’s—eyes continued to stare you down. It felt like he was looking into your soul. And you wanted him to.

“I didn’t summon you,” you told him cautiously. “Or at least I didn’t try to.”

“Okay, so I’m thinking she could accidentally be pushed into oncoming traffic—”

“And who exactly would be doing this accidental pushing?” You cut Jeno off with a scoff.

Currently, you were laying on your back on your bed, head hanging off the end of it and phone in hand. Your best friend, Lee Jeno, was on the other end of the line, jokingly scheming to get you a job at his workplace. Jeno somehow worked as a legal assistant at the best civil law practice in your city, and you, on the other hand, were unemployed. This was what you got for taking an extra year to get your master’s degree to become a paralegal instead of immediately jumping into the workforce after undergrad.

That was where you and Jeno had met: Intro to Philosophy on your very first day of college as two bright-eyed freshmen with surprisingly similar career goals and the same taste in 00s pop punk bands. Now you were a year and a half past graduating with your bachelor’s, and six months past your master’s. And what had that extra effort gotten you? Many, many interviews that all ended the same way: You’re “an incredible applicant,” but “too educated” for the pay of the position and/or “too inexperienced.”

Jeno, on the other hand, had declined your suggestion to further your education together and instead landed himself a legal assistant job right out of college. So now here you were, living off the remnants of your student loans and savings as you desperately hunted for a paralegal job.

Your best friend’s elaborate plans to get you a job at his firm would typically make you laugh, but this time you couldn’t even muster up a chuckle. Earlier today when you checked your bank accounts during a break from emailing out your résumé, you were confronted with the fact that your savings were running out; you didn’t have enough to even get you to the end of your lease in six months.

“God will, duh,” Jeno said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. His current plan was centered around a junior partner’s paralegal dying of a myriad of mysterious causes, and apparently this time involved divine intervention too.

“Oh, right, of course,” you rolled your eyes.

“I’m serious about the fact that Yejin needs to go, though. I have no clue how she’s still employed. And you would be the perfect fit for Ms. Haseul, she kind of does a little bit of everything, but her main focus is general corporate representation. Wasn’t that what you specialized in for grad school?”

“It is, yes.”

“Then there we go!”

“I appreciate the sentiment, Jeno.”

You sighed. All this talk about a job that you’ll never have was bringing down your spirits. “Anyway, I have half a leftover pizza in the fridge calling my name right now. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Alright, bye, Y/N! I’ll keep my ears peeled for any sign of dissent in the ranks so you can slip your way in!”

“Right, bye.”

Hanging up, another sigh tumbled out of your mouth as you tossed your phone somewhere further up your bed. Truthfully, you weren’t hungry in the slightest, you just wanted to get out of that conversation. You brought your hands to your face to rub circles against your temples and closed your eyes; you were getting a headache. Hanging upside down off the foot of your bed certainly wasn’t helping, but you couldn’t be fucked to move at this point.

A moment of self-pity later and you opened your eyes with all intentions to get up and take your migraine medication, but you froze when you were met by a dark shape. Squinting, it took you a second to process that the shape was someone’s legs and shoes, and you let out a yelp. Startled, you went to twist yourself around to face whoever was in your room, but just managed to fall off your bed instead. You very narrowly avoided snapping your neck, landing on your shoulder instead, eliciting yet another yelp, but this time one of pain.

Scrambling to your feet, you were now face to face with the intruder. It was a man, younger, maybe around your age, donned in all black. Black shoes, black slacks, black suit jacket, and black vest underneath that was buttoned but with a neckline cut plenty low enough to show a good expanse of his chest. He had an eerie beauty to him: his face just bordering on gaunt with pronounced cheekbones, a sharp jawline, and a hint of bags under his eyes as if he had just woken up from a night of restless sleep. But he didn’t seem to have recently awoken, very much alert and well put-together in every other aspect. His black hair was perfectly styled back from his face save for one stray lock towards the middle, and his eyes were so dark they reminded you of black holes, threatening to sweep you away forever into a cold unknown. He had more piercings than you could count in the moment, silver and the odd jewel adorning his ears. The vest showed off four or five separate silver chains around his neck.

“What the hell are you doing in my apartment?” You breathed out, desperately trying to blink away the vertigo from your sudden change in orientation.

The man was between you and the doorway, his body language not indicating that he was blocking your way out intentionally. His hands were tucked in the pockets of his pants as he cocked an eyebrow up at your question. He seemed entirely relaxed and yet the air around you still felt as if it were growing colder by the second.

“I should be asking you that. What the hell am I doing in your apartment?” He repeated your question back to you, amusement in his tone as he studied you from head to toe, then back up.

“What?”

“I was summoned by someone. I’m not summoned often, usually Eros or Aphrodite are at the beck and call of humans.”

The names made your head spin, “Eros? Aphrodite? Like, the Greek gods?”

“Yes, of course.” One of his hands left his pocket, the many rings along his fingers glistening in your ceiling fan lights as he went to push the stray lock of hair back from his face. “Humans are always wishing for love or beauty or fame. Not as often are they wishing for my gifts, or at least not with such an intensity that I’m inclined to entertain those wishes.”

Something about his candor inclined you to ask, “Who are you?”

“I’ve had a couple names. Pluto, and you probably recognize me as Hades. But you can call me Jaemin.”

His words made your heart thunder in your chest once again. You wanted to tell yourself that this guy was crazy, but he sounded so assured and calm that it gave you pause. Not mention that he had just appeared in your home out of nowhere.

“Hades? God of the Underworld? In my apartment?”

“The very same. Please, call me Jaemin. As long as I can call you Y/N.”

“Oh, you know my name already,” you stated weakly.

The god’s—Jaemin’s—eyes continued to stare you down. It felt like he was looking into your soul. And you wanted him to.

“I didn’t summon you,” you told him cautiously. “Or at least I didn’t try to.”

He took a step towards you. “And yet here I am.”

Another step. “I was brought here by a desire, your desire. So, what do you really, really want, Y/N?”

His words dripped off his tongue and wound their way through your mind. “A loved one back from the dead? The death of an enemy? To die yourself? So much money you could never spend it all in one lifetime?”

Another step.

“No, none of those,” you shook your head vigorously, feeling like every sense of yours was alight with his proximity to you. Every sound was deafening, your skin tingled, and the scent of cinnamon and citrus danced around you. One more step and he’d practically be on top of you. “I don’t want any of that.”

Another step. He was right in front of you now, his startlingly cool breath washing over your face as he asked, “Then what do you want?”

“I just—” your hands were clenched into fists at your sides, fingernails digging into your palms as you struggled to find the words. “Want to work at Kim & Moon.”

Jaemin’s head cocked to the side as he studied your face, “Why?”

“It’s the best civil law firm in the city. I know it’s where I belong, if I could just get a job there, I know I’d do well.”

“This job? Does it pay well?”

“I-I don’t know,” you confessed. “Jeno hasn’t ever told me how much he makes, but that’s only part of why I want to work there. If all I cared about was paying my bills, I would’ve taken the first job at any sleazy ambulance chaser’s office I could find. But I’d be wasted on something like that. I’m smart, well-studied, and I’ll be good at what I do. I just know it.”

He chuckled, the sound sending a shiver down your spine.

“Yeah, I like that.”

Then all at once, Jaemin was no longer in front of you, and you felt like you could breathe properly again. He dropped himself onto your bed, settling in to recline leisurely against your headboard, legs crossed at the ankle.

“Alright, I’ll grant your wish,” he declared, slipping one of his rings off to roll it along his knuckles. The silver band caught the light and nearly distracted you from his words.

Pulling yourself out of your momentary trance, you immediately said, “But I didn’t ask you to—”

“Of course you did, or I wouldn’t be here. Do we really have to go through this again?” His eyes were fixed on the ring. “Now do you want that job or not?”

“If I say yes, what do you want in return? I doubt Hades himself is in the business of charity.”

“Smart. There will be an exchange, obviously.”

“Then my answer is no, I don’t want to be selling my soul or something.”

Jaemin suddenly flicked the ring up, watching as it did one, two, three flips in the air before landing in the palm of his hand, “As lovely as I’m sure your soul is, I’m not particularly interested in taking it.”

“Well then what would you want from me?”

“A third of your life.” He said it simply, as if you two were talking about him borrowing a cup of sugar, not your life.

“Wh—”

“Let me finish,” he instructed sternly, firm gaze once again on you. “Spend two-thirds of your year here, then spend the remaining third of it with me.”

“If I take four months off work I won't be able to keep the job you get me.”

“It doesn’t have to be consecutive. Give me your nights and I’ll call it even.”

“Why? Why me? Why would you give me so much for just… hanging out with you?”

He shrugged, “I’m tired of spending all my time with dead people.”

Despite his casual tone, you swore you saw something much sadder flash across his face for a moment. It was gone as soon as you had registered it, making you wonder if you just imagined it. When you remained quiet, chewing on the inside of your cheek in thought, he stood up and crossed the room to once again stop just a mere inch or two in front of you, “Do we have a deal, Y/N?”

A chance to use your degree and skills like you’d always dreamed, just for hanging out with a god every night? It sounded... not quite too good to be true, but definitely too easy. You couldn’t remember Hades being portrayed as a tricksy sort in the myths, and everything Jaemin had done tonight—aside from appearing in your room out of the blue—made you think that you could probably trust him.

“Yeah, sure,” you agreed, looking up from where you had been twiddling your thumbs anxiously to his hauntingly beautiful face. “Do we have to do anything to make the deal official or whatever?”

“What, like a kiss?” He grinned at you mischievously. “Since you asked…”

“Jaemin!” You scoffed, feeling like he was teasing you now.

“You’re the one who brought it up.”

“No I didn’t!”

“Anyway, a handshake will do just fine,” Jaemin held his right hand out in the small space between your bodies.

You took it, feeling the cold from his fingers seep into your own, and gave it one firm shake. Before you could take your hand back, he’d tightened his grip and turned it over. His other hand came up to slip a ring onto your ring finger. It was the same silver band he had been playing with before, and it magically changed size to fit your finger perfectly. Jaemin bowed slightly, bringing your hand up to press a feather-light kiss to the knuckle of the very finger he’d just put the ring on. His lips were cool like the rest of him, but you still felt warm at his actions.

“There,” he straightened back up and let go of your hand finally. “That should do it.”

You looked down at the ring he’d just put on your finger. It was a simple silver band of medium width that reminded you of your father’s wedding band.

“Goodbye for now, Y/N.”

“Yeah—” you cut yourself off when you brought your eyes up to see that Jaemin was gone. Staring at the empty space where he just was, you murmured, “Bye, Jaemin.”

That night you dreamt of a man cloaked in shadows guiding you to a tree, instructing you to pick the golden fruit that was growing on it. You gazed at the fruit, in a daze, mesmerized by their beauty. They were so inviting, the man’s voice soothing, and you lifted a hand up towards one.

You groaned against the bright sunlight streaming in through a crack between your curtains. Directly on your face. You threw your left arm over your eyes to block it out as you continued lying in bed, letting your mind and body wake up gradually.

Memories of last night’s visitor came back to you, and you sighed. Surely it was a dream. A weird, weird dream that your mind conjured up in an attempt to fulfill your wish for a job.

But when you squinted your eyes open and brought your right hand up enough to look at your fingers, the silver band that sat there let you know that it was real. You’d been visited last night, by Hades, who said he’d grant your wish for a job in exchange for a third of your life. And you said yes.

The loud sound of your phone buzzing on your nightstand prompted you to roll over and grab it to look at the caller ID. Lee Jeno.

“Yeah?” You couldn’t even muster up a proper greeting as you picked up, still bogged down by sleep.

“Y/N, great news!”

You glanced at the time on your phone before bringing it back up to your ear, “Jeno, it’s not even 9:30 a.m., why are you calling me? You can’t be on lunch.”

“I know, but as soon as I heard, I had to tell you!”

“Tell me what, exactly?”

“There’s a job opening at the firm! You have to apply!”

That woke you up.

“An opening?” You asked, shooting up into a sitting position.

“Jo Haseul, the junior partner at the firm I’ve been telling you about, her paralegal won the lottery and quit on the spot. No two weeks’ notice, they’re urgently hiring her replacement. I’ll text you the firm administrator’s email for you to send your résumé to!”

“That would be great, thank you, Jeno.”

“Of course!” He said brightly as another phone began ringing in the background. “I’ve got to go now, Ms. Kang is buzzing me.”

“Right, thank you again.”

“Bye!”

“Bye,” you brought your phone down to see he had already ended the call.

As you went to grab your laptop from the foot of your bed to begin drafting that email, your eyes got caught by the silver ring on your hand.

A week later and you were walking into your first day of work at Kim & Moon. The firm administrator, Jeong Jaehyun, was showing you around, and finally stopped his tour in an open-floor plan portion of the office where a grouping of eight desks were. A couple of them were empty, the others filled by various men and women hard at work, and also Lee Jeno.

“Y/N!” Jeno waved at you enthusiastically from where he was on the other side of all the desks, and you lifted your hand to give a small wave back.

“Oh, you know Lee Jeno?” Mr. Jeong asked as he guided you over towards your friend.

“Yes, we were in the same undergrad program.”

“Good, it should be easier to settle in with a familiar face nearby.” The administrator smiled as he gestured to the empty desk behind your friend. The one beside it was occupied by another young man incredibly focused on his screen, headphones in as his fingers flitted over his keyboard and he fervently typed out a court document.

“This is your desk, Ms. Y/L/N. Ms. Jo, your attorney, is on a call right now but she has been informed of your arrival. I’m sure she’ll meet with you when she can. In the meantime, please acquaint yourself with your workspace. Your computer is already logged in, and all of your passwords are on the paper right there. Is there anything you need at the moment?”

“No, no. Thank you so much, Mr. Jeong,” you bowed your head politely to him.

“Of course. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.” He pointed to the landline sitting on your desk next to the computer monitors, “I have a quick-dial button right next to Reception’s. Buzz me if you need something.”

“I will, thank you.”

And with that, Jeong Jaehyun took his leave of the pod that you were in. You sat in your chair, taking in the sparse supplies on your desk: two computer monitors, keyboard, mouse, a landline phone, a couple pens, and one sheet of paper laid across your keyboard. It was a list of your login credentials for your computer, work email, and the firm’s file management software, along with Mr. Jeong’s extension and quick-dial button name.

You turned back around to where you knew Jeno was already waiting for you. Your friend was practically vibrating with excitement in his own desk chair.

“This is so exciting!” Jeno exclaimed, momentarily drawing the attention of all the other employees in your vicinity before they went back to whatever they were doing. He continued on much quieter, “I told you you’d kill it at your interview.”

“Right,” you nodded, trying not to think about the silver ring on your right hand. “Thanks, Jeno, I’m excited to start.”

“I’ll give you the rundown of everyone at the firm, come here,” he scooted his chair over to make room for you to roll yours up to his desk.

His fingers quickly flitted across his keyboard and mouse to pull up the firm website. Hovering over the tab labeled ‘Our Attorneys,’ you saw a list of names drop down. He clicked on the first one, Kim Chaeyoung. It pulled up a profile, the picture showing a very determined older woman, her arms crossed over her chest as she very resolutely stared down the camera.

“This is Kim Chaeyoung, the ‘Kim’ in Kim & Moon. She’s the most senior attorney at the firm, and mostly does corporate compliance and medical malpractice law. She just stepped down from being managing partner at the end of last year.”

He clicked the next name on the list, Moon Taeil. This time a man was on your screen, a bit older than you, but not by too much. No more than ten or fifteen years for sure, quite young to be a managing partner at such a large firm. His gaze wasn’t quite as intense as Kim Chaeyoung’s, but it held an intelligence and wisdom clearly beyond his years.

“Mrs. Kim stepped down to let this man, Moon Taeil, take over as managing partner. Something about wanting younger blood in charge but…” Jeno looked around the pod before he dropped his voice to a whisper so soft you had to lean in to hear him, “The rumor is that Mrs. Kim is going to announce her retirement at the holiday party at the end of this year.”

“And what sort of law does Mr. Moon do?” You questioned.

“Mostly insurance litigation. He tends to get the nastier incidents though: shootings, stabbings, fires, the odd dog bite.”

You then went through the senior partners before getting to the first of the junior partners on the list.

“And here is Jo Haseul, your attorney. She’s the most senior of the junior partners, and rumors also say that she’s going to be made a senior partner by the end of this year.”

“You love your office gossip, don’t you?”

You studied the woman on screen. She was younger than you had expected, a fierceness in her eyes that both intimidated you and inspired you to follow her wherever she led.

“This isn’t even the juicy stuff, wait until you hear about the affair Mr. Noh supposedly had with his assistant in the 80s,” Jeno scoffed, then turned his attention back to the woman on screen. “Anyway, Ms. Haseul is Mrs. Kim’s protégé. She mostly does general corporate matters, medical malpractice, and the occasional pro bono representation for women in need. Restraining orders, child custody, divorce, whatever comes in the door. If you really want to get to know her, ask about those cases.”

“She sounds incredible.”

“I told you you’d be perfect for each other.” Your friend then pulled up the next junior partner, “This is Kim Doyoung, he’s Mrs. Kim’s son but you’d never be able to tell by how they act around each other. All business. I think he doesn’t want people to assume he only got his position because of his mother, but nobody who has actually spoken to Mrs. Kim would ever think she’d do something like that. She’s got some serious integrity.”

Jeno was about to move on to the next attorney profile, a ‘Qian Kun,’ when you heard a ringing from behind you.

“Oh, that’s you, Y/N!”

You quickly wheeled yourself back over to your desk, picking up your desk phone after the third ring, “Y/L/N Y/N speaking.”

“Ms. Y/L/N,” a woman’s voice was on the other end, and when you glanced at the caller ID, you saw ‘Jo Haseul’ across the screen. “This is Jo Haseul. Please come to my office now.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I’m down the hall. Ask another assistant if you need help finding it.”

“Will do, thank you.”

She hung up, and you rushed to stand up. Grabbing one of the pens you saw earlier, you frantically scanned for a notepad to write with, but there wasn’t one on hand at your desk. You whipped around to face your friend, “Jeno, do you have a notepad I can use? Ms. Haseul wants to see me.”

“Here,” he handed you a notepad slightly bigger than your hand, spiral-bound at the top.

“Thank you!”

“The attorney offices are down that hall,” he pointed. “And Ms. Haseul’s will be on your left.”

“Got it, thanks!” You hurried in the direction he gestured.

Thankfully, everyone’s names were engraved on metal nameplates on the doors, making it easy to know when you had stopped in front of your attorney’s. Rapping your knuckles against the wood, you waited for a response.

“Come in.”

You entered already bowing, “Y/L/N Y/N, ma’am. It’s an honor to be here and I am very grateful for the opportunity to work with you.”

Jo Haseul appraised you for a moment from where she was sat behind her desk. She then nodded, “It’s nice to meet you. Now please sit, Y/L/N.”

“Yes ma’am,” you quickly sat in the armchair she had gestured to.

After brief introductions, Ms. Haseul gave you the rundown of the kinds of cases she tended to deal with—which generally lined up with what Jeno had told you earlier, her management style, workflow, and an overview of the duties you’ll be expected to fulfill as her paralegal. At the end of it, you left with pages of notes, a stack of papers in your arms, and your first tasks to do for her.

Stopping at your desk, you didn’t even sit as you organized the papers into three stacks: to correct, to file, and to copy. You picked up the last stack of things that Ms. Haseul wanted copies of, then turned to your friend, “Hey, Jeno, where’s the copier?”

The assistant sat at the desk beside yours was the one who spoke up in response, his headphones set aside now, “Oh, I’m going there right now, I’ll show you!”

“Thanks, Yangyang,” Jeno said, then nodded for you to go along with the other man.

Yangyang grabbed his own paper before leading the way out from the desks. He took off in the opposite direction from the offices down a different hallway, “It’s down this hall, first door on the right.” He then opened said door to reveal a room with four large copy machines in it.

“I’m Liu Yangyang, by the way,” your coworker introduced himself, stopping in front of one machine. “I’m Qian Kun and Dong Sicheng’s legal assistant. They’re Ms. Haseul’s associate attorneys that work under her so you and I will overlap quite a bit. Sicheng usually handles corporate matters with Ms. Haseul while Kun does the med mal portion.”

“I’m Y/L/N Y/N. It’s nice to meet you, Yangyang.”

“You too, Y/N. And I’m sure you’ll meet my attorneys at some point today. I apologize in advance, and yes, they are always like that. Kun’s a workaholic who would be here until two in the morning if somebody didn’t send him home, and Sicheng… you are allowed to say no to him, and I encourage it, actually. Booksmart but doesn’t quite get social cues. I’ve seen him accidentally sweet talk his way into having an assistant pick up his dry cleaning before.”

“Wait, seriously?”

“Yeah, I had to intervene to ensure feminism wasn’t set back fifty years,” Yangyang scoffed.

“Women everywhere commend you for your service to the cause, Yangyang,” you nodded solemnly, to which your coworker snickered.

“The dude’s wicked smart but dumber than a box of rocks. Associates, you know?” He shook his head then returned to instructing you about the machine.

After Yangyang had shown you how to use the multipurpose machine—scanning and uploading, printing, copying, faxing—he took the copies that he had made and left you there. Nobody was at the other copiers, making you the only one in the room. You took a deep breath to compose yourself after having so much information thrown at you from all sides. Right now, at this moment, all you needed to do was make a copy.

Putting the first document in where Yangyang had shown you, you’d just started tapping the touchscreen through to the copying option when a dark figure appeared at the edge of your vision. Your head snapped up to look at the man leaning against the wall beside the copy machine you were at.

You hadn’t seen Jaemin since the night you’d made your deal. You’d spent the entire next night anxiously waiting for him to appear, but he never did, and you eventually gave up and fell asleep. He didn’t come any night after that, and you kind of thought he might’ve forgotten about you, or maybe didn’t really want you to hold up your end of the deal. Realized that he could find better company than you.

But here he was, in your workplace, smirk on his face and delight in his tone, “Surprise! I came to visit you on your first day of work. I’m so proud!”

First rolling your eyes at the sarcasm in his words and the fake tear he wiped away, you then fervently glanced towards the door to the copy room, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m checking on my investment,” he answered coolly.

“What, me? You can check on me at my home tonight, not at my job on my first day of work! Somebody could walk in, how would I explain you?”

“Nobody’s coming.”

“The deal was that I would give you my nights. Sun’s still up.”

“Yes, you’re doing just fine,” he nodded as he adjusted his black tie, seeming satisfied with his ‘check in.’ “I’ll see you tonight, Y/N.”

And he was gone in the blink of an eye.

You immediately flopped down onto your couch when you got home that night. That was the most work you’d done in a while; you were tired both physically and mentally. But it was a good sort of tired. You finally had a job.

“Hi, honey, how was work?”

You shot up at the voice, knowing exactly who it was. Jaemin was poised in your armchair, half a smirk already on his lips. He was in all-black again, though a slightly different suit from last time, his slacks and suit jacket had thin dark grey pinstripes, over a black silk dress shirt with the top three buttons open.

“Oh, uh, it was good,” you said.

Silence fell over you two, and you started fidgeting uncomfortably as it dragged on. Finally, you said, “So... what do you want to do?”

“Have you eaten dinner yet?”

“I feel like you already know the answer to that, but no. I just got home.”

“Let’s get dinner then. Where would you like to go?”

“Uhm...” you wracked your brain for some places nearby. “There’s a ramen place down the street. Let me change out of my work clothes first, hold on.”

Re-emerging from your bedroom in more casual clothes, you saw that Jaemin had moved from his spot on your armchair and was instead standing, gazing out the window. And again, for a brief moment, you could’ve sworn he looked... lonely.

“I’m ready,” you announced yourself. It felt wrong to keep looking at him like that.

Jaemin turned around, focusing a dazzling smile on you, “Lead the way, Y/N.”

The place you were thinking of really was just a couple blocks down the street. Mumbling a thanks to Jaemin as he held the door open for you, you were immediately met with a packed restaurant. It was seat-yourself, and you managed to spot a small table for two in the very back corner, right beside the entrance to the kitchen. Guiding Jaemin over to it, you felt your face turn warm as he pulled your chair out for you.

The menu was a singular piece of laminated paper taped to the tabletop, and your eyes skimmed it. You ordered the same thing every time at this point, but it was something to look at other than the god in front of you. Speaking of, he was a god. Did he even need to eat?

“Jaemin.” You said his name as you looked up from the menu.

His eyes flicked up from where they’d also been reading the options, “Hm?”

“Do you even eat, like, normal food?”

“I can if I want to, I just don’t need it to survive like you do.”

“Oh, I see. And do you... like it?”

“Quite.”

It was then that a familiar waiter came up to your table, “Hi, Y/N! It’s been a while. Almost didn’t recognize you at a table instead of the bar.”

Typically, you would come by yourself and sit at the bartop to eat alone alongside all the other solo patrons. You rolled your eyes at the slight jab, “Thank you, Chenle, I feel so welcome.”

“Aw, you know you’re one of my favorite regulars,” the young man snickered.

“Yeah, whatever. Sorry I haven’t been by lately, I didn’t exactly have the funds to eat out.”

“That’s okay. But you’re back, does that mean that you found a job?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Congrats!” He then focused his attention on the man across from you, “Hi, I’m Zhong Chenle.”

You moved to introduce the two before Jaemin could open his mouth, afraid of what he would’ve said. “Chenle, this is Jaemin, a... friend of mine. Jaemin, this is Chenle, he’s a server here.”

“And I’ll be serving you two tonight. So, what can I get you?”

After taking your orders, Chenle took off to put them in. You shifted in your seat awkwardly. What were you and Jaemin even supposed to talk about?

“You usually sit at the bar?” Jaemin questioned.

“I’m not an alcoholic, despite how Chenle made it sound,” you scoffed. “I usually come by myself, and the bar is the quickest place to get your food and get out. And that way I don’t take up any tables that groups can use.”

“I feel honored that you brought me here, then.”

You searched his face for any hint that he was teasing you, but all you found was sincere curiosity. Suddenly feeling uncomfortable, you changed the topic, “So why did you show up tonight? You didn’t come all last week.”

“Well, I had to hold up my end of the deal first.”

“Right, that... makes sense.” Realizing that you hadn’t even thanked him for whatever he’d done for you, you added, “Thank you, Jaemin. For you know, the job.”

“You’re welcome.”

Chenle returned then with a small bottle of soju for each of you, informing you that your food would be ready soon.

“So is it everything you’d dreamed of? Working at Kim & Moon?” Jaemin asked before lifting his bottle to his lips.

“Today was only my first day but... yes. I’ve already learned a lot, was listened to when I spoke, and the partner I work for seems like an incredible woman so far. It’s wonderful.”

“I hope it stays that wonderful for you, Y/N. I’d like to see your eyes light up like this often.”

Looking down at the green bottle in front of you, you twisted your ring around your finger nervously. You didn’t know what to say back, your heart fluttering around in your chest. Jaemin was charming, too charming for your own good, and you sort of felt like you really shouldn’t have expected any less from a god.

“Are you curious?”

You snapped your head up to look at your companion, not even attempting to hide your confusion at his words, “About what?”

“What I did, to get you the job.”

“I mean, I am. I assume you had something to do with Yejin winning the lottery? You’re the god of everything below the Earth, including precious gems, gold, silver. The god of riches, wealth. In the modern day that would translate to how we view wealth and riches now, since I’m not really out here buying my groceries with rubies and gold coins. Right?”

Jaemin’s obsidian eyes practically glittered as he listened to you speak, his lips curling up at one corner before he took another swig of his soju. When you were finished, he set the bottle back onto the table to answer your question, “Hit the nail on the head.”

“Honestly, I’m just glad you did that instead of killing her or something horrible.”

His head jerked back as he looked at you with bewilderment, “Now why would I do that? I’m the god of the dead, not death. If you wanted her dead you’re talking to the wrong deity.”

“I don’t want her dead, that’s my point. That’s what Jeno was joking about on the phone before you showed up; I didn’t want you to get any ideas.”

“I don’t really find it fun to just push people into traffic.”

“So you were listening to—” You cut yourself off as you saw Chenle approaching with your food. Not a conversation to be having in front of your normal human waiter.

After he had left your table again, you returned to what you were saying before, “So you were listening to our conversation.”

“Can’t help myself, I’m nosy when it comes to the humans who summon me,” Jaemin admitted.

“So what does Hades do for fun then?” You asked lightheartedly, slurping at some of your broth.

“While I don’t necessarily enjoy pushing people into traffic, I do find it much more fun to let a human become suddenly awash with money and watch what happens when they eventually lose it all. See what they spend it on, who they spend it on. Themselves mostly, sometimes others, trying to get people to be their friends or lovers simply because of what they’ll buy them. I’ll watch them do what humans do best, use and abuse the gifts that were given to them. And then once they’ve been sucked dry both in their finances and their souls, find out how they try to move on.”

“Is that what you’re doing with me?” You set your spoon down, voice wavering. “Watching and waiting for me to end up like that?”

Jaemin took a pause, shifting forward in his seat before responding, “One of my favorite things about humans is how resilient you are. Always trying to bounce back. It’s fascinating to find out your breaking point, when you have no more bounce left.”

An absolutely devilish smile played across his features as he seemed to take delight in the notion. He didn’t exactly answer your question, but the lack thereof felt like enough.

“Why?”

“Because it’s different for every person, and always further than I think it’ll be. Even after so long, knowing that humans can still surprise me, it’s refreshing. Makes me think that…”

You blinked at him, waiting for him to finish. He was definitely well aware that he had your rapt attention, basking in the drama he had created by pausing. His eyes settled on you firmly, holding eye contact as something softer entered them.

“Maybe you’ll surprise me, too.”

Jaemin came back to your apartment with you after you’d decided you were full. You hadn’t had much of an appetite after that harrowing conversation over dinner, and he’d left you with a lot of thinking to do. It wasn’t every day that you heard a god’s perspective on human lives—on toying with human lives, watching for their eventual breakdown in the aftermath of the ‘gifts’ he gave them. If that’s what it did to them all, it seemed much more like a curse to you.

And you were of course thinking about whether it would happen to you too. You hadn’t wished for riches or wealth directly, definitely not so much that it would have the same effect on your life as winning the lottery. But that didn’t mean that you weren’t worried. And the idea of Jaemin watching you every step of the way, waiting to see when you’d slip up, when you’d meet your breaking point, made you shiver instinctually.

“Are you cold?” Jaemin’s question broke the silence that had been hovering over you two since you started the walk from the restaurant back to your apartment.

“Oh, no, I—”

But he had already shrugged his suit jacket off and laid it over your shoulders. There was no residual body heat in it, but it did help block out some of the breeze blowing past you. You hadn’t noticed the temperature at all, too wrapped up in your own thoughts.

“Thanks,” you muttered, wrapping the jacket tighter around your shoulders. It smelled faintly of spiced citrus.

“No worries.”

Back in your apartment, you wanted nothing more than to lay in bed staring up at your ceiling as you gave yourself over fully to the existential crisis you were descending into. But you still had a god to entertain.

A glance at the change in time on your stovetop clock let you know that you were only a couple hours into your commitment. You hoped he didn’t expect you to stay up all night with him. Leaving Jaemin in your living room once again, you changed into pajamas in your bedroom. If he was going to be with you every night from here on out, you were at least going to be comfy for some of it.

Jaemin was back in the armchair he had appeared in at the beginning of the night, one knee crossed over the other and a book in hand. You paused behind him on your way back into the living room to peer over his shoulder, trying to read the title at the top of the page he was on.

“The Turn of the Screw?” You questioned, walking around him to plop down onto your couch.

“I found it on your shelf,” he gestured to the built-in shelves in the walls around the recess that held your TV. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Knock yourself out, I haven’t touched it since I had to read it for a ghost literature class like… four years ago.”

“Ghost literature class?” Jaemin lowered the book to rest on his leg while he regarded you with an eyebrow raised. “Did you go to school in the Underworld or something?”

“It was actually called like ‘Ghost Stories and Haunted Fiction of the 19th Century’ or something. The students just called it ghost lit. We read all these spooky stories, including The Turn of the Screw,” you explained, then looked around your living room. “I have a few more of them around here somewhere. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein— I can’t remember the full reading list, but they’re scattered around.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He raised the book back up to continue reading intently.

Since he seemed occupied for the moment, you pulled out your phone to distract yourself.

A couple hours later and you let out your first yawn of the night. You’d thought that Jaemin was so enraptured by the book that he wasn’t paying any attention to you. The chuckle he gave from across the room proved you wrong, however. There was definitely nothing funny in that story. You threw him a scowl, but he neither looked up from the book nor said anything.

Shifting in your spot to get comfy again, you returned to the article that you’d been reading on your phone and your guest was quiet once again. Another yawn split your mouth, and the words on your screen swam in your vision as your eyes teared up.

“Tired, Y/N?” Jaemin’s eyes still hadn’t left the book as he continued, “You should go to sleep, early day at work tomorrow, right?”

“And what are you going to do?”

“I thought I’d finish this book, if that’s alright with you. I’ve got about… thirty, forty pages left.”

“Oh, uh, sure,” you were surprised both that he was encouraging you to go to sleep during the time you’d agreed to forfeit to him, and that he wanted to finish the book.

Standing up from the couch, you shuffled into your kitchen to fill up a glass of water. After knocking back your nightly medication, you placed the water on your nightstand and went into your bathroom to do your nighttime routine. You found yourself hovering at the threshold between the hallway that contained your bedroom and bathroom, and the living room. It felt weird to just go to bed with someone else in your home, at least not without saying goodnight to them.

“Uhm,” you cleared your throat.

Jaemin turned to look at you from over the back of the armchair, “Yes, Y/N?”

“I just wanted to…” you felt the words catch in your throat. Pushing through your awkwardness, you twisted the ring around your finger as you forced the words out, “Goodnight, Jaemin.”

“Goodnight, Y/N.” He smiled at you before turning back around to face his book, “See you tomorrow.”

And with that, you retreated into your bedroom for the night, falling asleep almost as soon as your head hit the pillow.

The man of shadows was in your dreams again that night, drawing you to the tree with the golden fruit. His voice once more invited you to partake in picking the fruit, and your hand inched up, up, up, towards one. Your fingers had just wrapped around the fruit, ready to pluck it off the branch, when you woke up.

When you awoke the next morning, you went through the motions of your morning routine, strolling from your bathroom out to your kitchen, toothbrush sticking out of your mouth. You continued brushing your teeth with one hand as you grabbed the freshly popped toast from the toaster to put on a plate. As you went to lean over the kitchen sink to spit the toothpaste foam out of your mouth, your eyes got caught on something in the living room, which the sink overlooked. There was a small black pouch sitting on the coffee table, on the corner closest to the armchair.

After wiping your mouth off, you walked over to your coffee table, intrigue building as you picked up the velvet drawstring pouch. Looking around, you were only greeted by your empty apartment. This wasn’t here last night. Or at least, not before you went to sleep.

Pulling it open, you gently shook the contents out onto your palm. It was a silver bracelet, intricate filigree running along the band that was inlaid with gorgeous green and blue gems.

Jaemin’s words from dinner last night echoed in your head.

‘I do find it much more fun to let a human become suddenly awash with money and watch what happens when they eventually lose it all… It’s fascinating to find out your breaking point…’

A foreboding feeling colored your vision, and you rushed to tuck the bracelet back into the bag and throw it onto the table.

When Jaemin came that night, you were cooking dinner in your kitchen. He appeared there with you, leaning against the counter next to your sink as you were standing over the stovetop.

“Good evening, Y/N,” he greeted you.

“Hello, Jaemin.” You steeled your nerves, giving as nonchalant of a nod as you could towards the living room, “You left something here last night. It’s on the coffee table.”

The god regarded you with a tilted head, and you felt his eyes on your empty wrists, “That was for you.”

“I didn’t ask you for anything like that.”

“I know. It was a gift.”

“The job was plenty, Jaemin.”

He was silent as he continued to watch you cook. After a grueling couple of minutes of absolute silence, his eyes burning into you the whole time, you finally turned to properly look him in the face. Throwing on a smile, you informed him, “Dinner’s ready. Ravioli, would you like some?”

“Yes, please.”

You set two places at your dinner table before plating two portions of the pasta. Jaemin was still in his place next to the sink, observing your movements.

“Go ahead and sit, I’m just going to grab a couple glasses,” you gestured towards the kitchen table.

Without even waiting to see if he’d obey, you bustled over to a cabinet and took out two wine glasses, then grabbed a bottle of white wine you’d been meaning to finish off. When you turned back to the kitchen table, you were pleasantly surprised to see Jaemin waiting there patiently, fidgeting with his silverware. Setting the two glasses down, you noticed that Jaemin’s silverware was in different places than you had put them in when you hastily set the table. The fork was on the left of the plate, the knife and spoon on the right with the knife directly beside the plate and the spoon on the other side of the knife. Yours on the other hand were in the haphazard places atop the napkin that you had put them earlier.

“Apologies for the subpar fork placement,” you said, uncorking the wine to begin pouring it out first for Jaemin.

“Oh, it’s just a habit,” he explained. His tone then turned as teasing as yours had been, “My apologies for making you think your fork placement was anything other than above par.”

You then poured for yourself as you continued the banter, “Yeah, you know, I really pride myself on my utensil arranging skills. My feelings have been gravely wounded. I’ll never recover from this.”

“Then would you consider taking this,” he procured a small black pouch from his pocket, and you had a suspicion as to exactly what was in it, “as repentance, with my sincerest apologies?”

A bitter sigh came out of your mouth at him ruining the perfectly normal moment you were enjoying, “Jaemin, I told you I don’t want any more gifts from you.”

The way you spat out the word ‘gifts’ was apparently a lightbulb moment for him as he set the pouch down on the table and all playfulness dropped from his face. Disinterested in whatever he was going to say to try to convince you to take it, you picked up your fork, using the side of the tongs to cut one of your raviolis in half.

“Y/N…” he said your name almost wistfully, leaning forward towards you earnestly. “I really do just want you to have it. It’s not a test or a ruse, just… a token.”

“A token of what?” You snorted, spearing half of the ravioli that you’d just cut and bringing it up to your mouth.

“My affection?”

You choked momentarily on the pasta in your mouth, chewing and swallowing it as quickly as possible and taking a sip of your wine to wash it down. Jaemin still hadn’t touched his food, utensils undisturbed as he waited for you to collect yourself. When you searched his face for a smirk, a mischievous glint in his eyes, anything to indicate that he was being less than truthful, you found none. You were just met with deep open pools of black in his eyes, his mouth set in seriousness, and his hand once again holding the pouch back out to you.

“Your what?”

“I know you heard me.”

“Yes, and now I’m asking for clarification.”

“I find you fascinating, and not in the morbid kind of way like I described to you last night. I’ve found myself starting to become fond of you, and I wanted to show that to you with a… present.”

“What, like getting your puppy a new chew toy because they’re so darn cute?”

Jaemin chuckled, “Not quite. But still, will you please accept it, Y/N?”

You thought it over for another moment, chewing on the inside of your cheek. He was being sincere, you were sure of it. You’d caught brief glimpses of the kinder side to Jaemin just in the few times you’d met him: when he’d leant you his suit jacket walking home last night, telling you he was hoping you’d continue being in love with your job, the gentlemanly peck he’d left on your fingers the night you’d made your deal. And now, as he patiently awaited your answer.

“Alright,” you agreed, taking the small bag from him. “Thank you, Jaemin.”

“Thank you for letting me give it to you.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Pulling the bracelet back out of the pouch, you saw that it had a hinge mechanism on it that you couldn’t manage one-handed, and held it out to the god sitting in front of you, “Will you help me put it on?”

“Of course,” he took it, opening the band up with ease.

You held your right hand out towards him, and he brought the open bracelet up around your wrist. But you weren’t watching the way his deft fingers put it on around your wrist, the tips of them brushing over the sensitive skin at your pulse point, leaving coolness behind. You were watching his face as he focused on the task intently, his brows furrowing in concentration then relaxing after the bracelet had clicked shut. A small but tender smile took over his face, his eyes softening as he turned your hand over palm down, thumb running up your ring finger until it reached the silver band that resided there.

Your skin buzzed in the wake of his touch, an electric cold. You could hear your heart thudding in your ears and hoped that he didn’t have supernatural god hearing or something and could hear it too. If he did, he gave no indication of such. He withdrew his hands, leaving you more dazed than you should’ve been at the minimal contact you had. Jerking your hand back to your side of the table, you turned your gaze down at your food, trying to ignore how hot your cheeks were.

A light laugh came from Jaemin, but you couldn’t force your eyes back up to him, knowing that his were already on you.

That night you dreamt once more of the man cast in darkness, leading you to the tree of golden fruit. This time when he encouraged you to pick one, you grasped at the fruit with two hands, pulling it right off the branch with a firm tug.

Just about one month into your… arrangement with Jaemin, you were rooting through your fridge for something to make for dinner when there was suddenly a cool breeze on the back of your neck. Except you were indoors.

Spinning around, you were immediately met with the god extremely close to you, and let out an exasperated sigh, “God damn, Jaemin, are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“I can’t help it if I make your heart race,” he grinned, the mischievous glint in his eye making your heart pound in a different way that it had been.

“Yeah, because you jumpscared me,” you rolled your eyes, shutting the fridge doors to then lean back against the appliance. “Anyway, it’s not looking like I have anything to make for dinner. You okay with eating out tonight?”

“More than, I was actually hoping you’d let me take you somewhere tonight.”

“Where?”

“My place. You’ve been such a gracious host this whole time, it’s time I repay the favor.”

“Your place, as in... the Underworld?”

“Yeah, why not?” He shrugged nonchalantly, an enticing grin on his features. A grin that invited you to follow its owner to places you’d never been before. “I promise you’ll come back.”

“In one piece?”

“Of course.”

You’d be lying if you said you weren’t intrigued, that you hadn’t tried to picture what the Underworld looked like. All you could come up with was the standard image of hell: flames, pitchforks, eternal torture. But now you were getting an invitation to go there with Hades and come back alive.

“And I’ll be back in time to go to work in the morning?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Alright, sure,” you finally acquiesced. “I’d love to, thank you for inviting me.”

Jaemin offered his hand out to you then, and you placed your atop. He gave yours a light squeeze, “Just focus on me, Y/N. Just look in my eyes.”

“Okay?” You agreed despite your tone pitching it up into a question, unsure of why exactly he was asking you to do that.

Nevertheless, you settled your gaze on his eyes, even as he drew you in closer by the light grip on your hand. You gave him an awkward half-smile, unsure of what exactly to do as you just stared him directly in the eye. His dark eyes had a calming effect, however, as you felt your breathing even out and your heartbeat slow. This close to him, and being able to unabashedly look at him, you were entranced by the unearthly quality to his beauty. It should have been disquieting, this spectral vision in front of you, but you just found yourself drawn even closer in body and mind.

Then suddenly everything around you was darker, as if someone had dimmed your kitchen lights. The air was cooler too, and you had the suspicion that you were no longer in your kitchen. But you were still looking at Jaemin, just like you said you would.

He was looking right back at you, unflinchingly, and a fond smile crossed his lips before he announced quietly, “We’re here. You can look.”

And you finally tore your eyes from him to take in your new surroundings. It was dark, just like you’d noted before, as if it were nighttime. The room you were in had black floors, black walls, and at the very tippy top of the black vaulted ceiling, a black wrought iron chandelier with flames glowing... blue? But you couldn’t focus on the flickering up above you as Jaemin’s fingers entwined with yours and he gently tugged you towards the other side of the room.

“Come on, this way.”

It looked like you were maybe in an entrance hall of some sort. It was then that you spotted a large black throne adorned with silver detailing and embellishments at the front of the room. Jaemin kept walking right past it, though, down an adjoining hallway.

Your wide eyes that had been taking everything in turned downwards to your hand that was holding Jaemin’s. His skin was the usual coolness you had come to expect, and your fingertips brushed against the multitudes of rings on his fingers. Seeing the lone silver band on your hand, the one that he was holding, made your face hot for some reason.

You passed through another doorway into a dining room. It contained a large dining table crafted from dark walnut wood, the twelve high-back chairs around it made of the same. A deep red table runner went across the length of the tabletop, matching the upholstery of the chairs. A feast was already laid out, and place settings for two of the seats were prepared.

Jaemin let go of your hand to pull out a chair for you. You thanked him quietly as you sat down, eyes still scanning over the food options. He sat in the chair caddy-corner to yours, at the head of the table.

“Go ahead, Y/N,” Jaemin encouraged you as he reached forward to grab the bottle of wine that had been on the table as well.

“Everything looks... so good,” you said, not sure what to try first.

He uncorked the bottle, pouring the red wine into your glass first, then his. When he put the bottle down, you still hadn’t moved, too overwhelmed with all the delicious-looking choices.

“Do I need to make your plate for you?” He teased, already standing and grabbing your plate.

“This is good, you’ll probably like this one, oh you’re going to love this one, everyone likes that, mmm definitely not that,” he mumbled to himself as he loaded up your plate with food after food.

Your heart did flips as you looked up at him, the simple kindness of his actions making you feel warm despite the coolness of the Underworld.

Jaemin set your plate back down in front of you between your utensils, spoon on the far right, then the knife beside the plate, and the fork on the left. You waited for him to prepare his own plate of food, then finally be seated. When he’d finished scooting his chair up to table, he looked up from what he’d been doing, eyes catching yours, and a small, affectionate smile crossed his lips before he grabbed his wine glass. Then a wide, charismatic grin overtook his features as he held his glass out towards you, and you followed his lead, picking yours up to clink them together.

“To one month of… you and I. Thank you for agreeing to come here tonight, Y/N.”

‘You and I.’ His words both squeezed your chest and made it feel airy, like someone was inflating a balloon inside of it.

“Thank you for hosting tonight, Jaemin. And here’s to one month of…” you took a sharp inhale as you stumbled through your mind for any other word but couldn’t find one in that moment. “Us.”

You saw Jaemin’s pale lips softly, silently repeat the word before pulling into an alluring smirk.

And you each took a sip of the wine before digging into your food and kicking off the discussion. Over your month of dinners and nighttime socializing with Jaemin, you were used to your conversations meandering between the casual catching up of your workday to the serious contemplations of life and the universe. After all, if you were dining with a god, you were going to pick his brain for some philosophical inquiry. But on the days where some of the medical malpractice or domestic pro bono cases had hit you exceptionally hard and you wanted to leave well enough alone, Jaemin let you keep the topics light and surface level, keeping it at office gossip and the like.

Tonight though, with the special venue on your mind, you immediately delved into the existential, “So what are humans to you?”

“How do you mean?” Jaemin arched an eyebrow at your question.

“You’re a god. You’ve lived for thousands of years. You’ve seen millions of humans live and die. Surely, we all just kind of… blur together for you. Seem the same. Inconsequential.”

“No, not at all.”

“You’re just saying that because I’m here,” you teased before returning to your debate. “Most of us live and die without ever leaving a lasting impact on the world. Not that I think that’s necessary for having lived a meaningful or good life, I think that making even one person smile means that someone lived a good life. But in relation to you, a god, surely that makes us all indistinguishable from one another.”

“Is a play bad because it ends? Is a flower no longer beautiful because it will wilt? I think that humans and your lives are so intriguing because they’re finite.” He was as impassioned as ever when getting into your metaphysical dialogues— voice strong with resolve, leaning forward towards you earnestly, brow set just the slightest not with anger but determination, and hair falling into his onyx eyes that looked into yours without hesitation. “An incalculable but unquestionably limited amount of time, one chance, and each of you choose to live differently.”

“You still think that every human life is different from all the others?”

“Of course.” Apparently sensing that he hadn’t convinced you yet, Jaemin continued with an example, “Just look at you and your friend Jeno. Sure, the two of you converged pretty closely in college, but he made the choice to begin his career while you made the choice pursue higher education. Your two lives aren’t the same.”

“There’s also another major difference between the two of us.”

At the imploring tilt of his head, you deadpanned, “Only one of us made a deal with Hades for a third of our life.”

“An astute observation, Y/N,” Jaemin chuckled, relaxing back in his chair now that you’d changed up the tone of the conversation.

When both of your plates and glasses were empty, Jaemin took you by the hand once again to guide you from the dining room, as he apparently wanted to show you something. You emerged onto a patio of some sort, but that wasn’t what you were focused on. In front of you was a tree maybe ten or fifteen feet tall, an elegantly thin and sloping trunk, and along its many branches were round golden fruit the size of your palm. You couldn’t help the soft gasp that came from you as you took in the dazzling sight. Everything about the tree was normal from the texture of the brown bark to the dark green leaves, and even the dappling of the outer shell of the pomegranates that grew on it looked real, aside from the gilded color. It was magical, and you were happy just to know that something so beautiful existed.

“Thank you for showing me this, Jaemin,” you said, turning to look at the god who had stopped beside you.

You thought that he’d be looking at the scenery too, but his eyes were on you. He had a familiar look on his face, a small, tender smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, dark eyes holding a latent warmth like coals after a fire, and you felt tempted to get even closer to indulge in it.

But instead, you steeled your nerves to ask, “Why do you keep looking at me like that?”

Your tone wasn’t as accusatory as your words were, it was a sincerely curious question.

“Like what?” Jaemin was quick to reply with a question of his own, keeping his attitude light but genuine.

“You keep smiling at me with this soft little smile.”

“I keep doing it? When was I doing it before?”

“When we first got here, when you sat down at dinner tonight, and just now, when you brought me out here.” It had made your heart go haywire every time you noticed it, so you were able to list the instances from tonight off the top of your head. But that wasn’t all, there was a reason why it was imprinted into the back of your eyelids like a burned-out LCD screen, “It’s like… like… you want to kiss me.”

“I do,” Jaemin declared, eyes never leaving yours, voice never wavering, so damn sure of himself. Even as you were here in front of him feeling like you were nearly ready to rip your hair out from just a few little smiles from him.

He was always like this. So charming, so smooth, playfully talking around your questions. Pulling you along with him, dancing with you through your conversation. You had to meet him head on, even if it felt like you were going crazy doing so. You did it during your dinners, you could do it now too.

“Is that why you’re smiling at me like that?”

“Do you want me to? Kiss you?” He took a step towards you. For a brief moment he was all you could see, all dark hair, dark eyes, and silver earrings.

“I want to know why you look at me like that.” You stepped back from him, wrapped in the heady smell of his cologne. Cinnamon, bergamot, an earthy scent too maybe? Your head was swimming with it, but you needed to focus on the conversation at hand.

“And I want to know if you want me to kiss you or not.” Another step, once again narrowing the distance between you.

“I asked first, Jaemin,” you poked your pointer finger against his chest as a warning. “An answer for an answer.”

He stayed put, seeming to be fighting a delighted smirk from his face as he looked between your face and the finger you held up defensively between the two of you. Jaemin’s features relaxed as he clasped his hands together behind his back, looking into your eyes earnestly, “All of those times that I’ve been looking at you tonight, I was thinking to myself, ‘It feels like she’s come home.’ You just looked like you belonged here, in my home, with me. It felt like I belonged with you. And that made me want to kiss you. That’s why.”

Of all the answers you had been expecting, that hadn’t quite been one of them. Grand declarations of love were a faraway possibility, sure, you’d seen movies before. That’s not what this was, though. This was both more and less. You hadn’t anticipated for Hades’ answer to be so simple yet all-soul-encompassing as the idea of coming home. While everything tonight had definitely been new and unfamiliar to you, you hadn’t been intimidated or uncomfortable in any way. With Jaemin at your side, you’d been able to take it all in with wonder and an open mind, knowing that you had him right there watching over you.

“I believe you owe me an answer now too, Y/N.” Jaemin’s voice was quiet, low, meant only for you. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

Your gaze fell to the finger you had to his chest, your right hand. It had lost all the force you started with, limp and simply resting against him. You could see the silver ring there, and lower on your arm was the bracelet he’d given you, both pieces of jewelry glinting in the hazy light afforded in the Underworld. You briefly wondered if they had come from here, from deep under the Earth; if they’d come home tonight, too. The god in front of you remained silent, waiting for your response. If there was one thing Jaemin was good at, it was waiting— after he’d given you his final push.

Then you finally looked back up at his face, into the sunken obsidian black that greeted you there. That ever-stubborn lock of raven hair was hanging between his brows, and you had a sudden and smitten urge to fix it. But you had something more important to do in that moment. After all, he’d given you his answer, now you owed him yours. And you’d made up your mind.

Your mouth had barely started forming around your answer before it was captured by Jaemin’s in a kiss that was equal parts tender and ravishing. It felt like he was trying to devour your ‘yes’ right off your tongue and keep it all to himself. Admittedly, your head had started nodding before your vocal cords could work.

If you thought you were swimming in spices and citrus before, you were drowning in them now. Cinnamon, oranges, and… cedar. Your hand that had previously been poking at his chest was now crumpling the collar of his dress shirt, the other hooking a finger in one of the belt loops at the front of his slacks to yank him closer. His own hands were doing their part, too. One cupped your cheek while the other held you by your waist. The sweetest nectar was being dripped into your veins, and you hungrily took more and more with each wanton kiss from Jaemin.

When his lips finally parted from yours, you couldn’t help but steal just one more kiss. He let out a breathy chuckle as he clasped a hand over the one you were grasping at his shirt with to gently pull it off, his thumb then rubbing slow circles into your palm. His hand that had been on your cheek dipped to gently grip your chin, and as he looked at you, you knew exactly what he was thinking.

“I’m home,” you promised.

The shadowy man was back in your dreams that night, and this time the golden fruit was already in your two hands. He was encouraging you to break it open, feed on its juicy flesh that he promises will taste so good.

You woke up before you could follow through on the decision you’d already made.

⤷ series masterlist   ⤷ blog masterlist

[mac-cheez]

My Guide To Surviving The Waynes

This is inspired by an earlier post of mine and will be in an epistolary/Dracula style in the view of said uni student. I hope y'all like it!

Thxs @arrowheadedbitch for proofread and confidence.

Pt. 2 Pt. 3

--------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Diary,

I'm not a diary person really. I was always told it helps you relax or work through your feelings, but it never seemed worth it...... well not till now. Not till a "normal" morning for me was eating cereal while shouting goes through the house and under threat of death if I finish the milk. This is what's currently happening as I write this on my laptop trying not to spill said cereal. As I listened to another argument between Tim and Damian about something inconsequential (something about galleries robbing banks?), I finally caved and started writing. I figure this could be useful for reference or advice or even study (these bitches are weird as hell). Maybe I should start with how I got here?

I grew up down South. The bible belt was a weird place, but I survived I guess. My parents are loving and as understanding as they can be with their own experiences and opinions. My father is Army so we were lucky to not be on wheels at all times. My only major move was my sophomore year of high school. I decided to apply for the exchange program and was picked due to my fluency in French. I was sent to Paris and, loved it so much I decided to stay. I was able to stay till graduation and still keep in touch with my friends. I know, picture perfect right?

After graduation, I applied to many different Universities and programs hoping for a good criminal justice program to learn in. Forensics was the main interest I was looking for. It just so happened that Gotham University's Forensics and Criminal Justice Facilities just got updated by the Wayne Foundation (probably to deal with the crime problem). I saw that it met all of my criteria and applied not thinking about it. A couple of my picks fell through, but most came back as acceptances. I was about to accept one of my local Universities when I got the Gotham U acceptance letter. It said the usual spiel of "we'd love to have you, blah, blah, blah", I was about to throw it in the pile when I saw one specific detail, "We boast a 95% employment rate of our Science-based graduates."

After some research, I found out that it was true. Most GU grads get hired straight out of school if they have a scientific degree. That paired with the brand new facilities made me reconsider. I talked with my parents, and they agreed that it was likely the best option, but they were concerned about me living in the dorms or an apartment in a place like Gotham. I was about to suggest living in a city nearby and just commuting when my dad asked us to wait for a minute. He made some calls while I talked with my mom about other things concerning the move. When he came back he said he had a friend from work who I could stay with. He told me he had a couple kids my age and plenty of room. It wasn't till I was in the limo with a very nice elderly man on my way to said friend's house that I realized he meant Bruce Fucking Wayne. Once he parked (his name is Alfred btw) I got my luggage out and kinda just stared. He asked to take my bags but I just said no thank you. He hummed and led me to the door. It was quiet when he opened the door which I thought would be normal, but the worry on his face told me otherwise.

Suddenly from the hall, two boys ran by one yelling "MERCY" while the other smaller boy chased him with a sword and........ pink hair? I was concerned, but Alfred seemed more at ease so I tried not to think about it too much. Behind them, a guy came from the same hallway snickering at his phone.

"Master Duke, would you mind filling me in on the situation at hand?" Alfred asked him.

"Oh yeah Alfred, it was hilarious," 'Duke' said laughing, "so Tim put pink dye in the shampoo for Dick and then-," he stopped looking at me. "Uhhhhhhhh, Who's the girl?" He asked.

"A guest of Master Bruce," said Alfred.

"Oh! Oh. Uh, You're not......... ya know..... a guest," he asked.

"No god no I'm not that broke yet," I explained hoping the humor would land.

It seemed to because he immediately brightened and started introducing himself as Duke Thomas, one of Mr. Waynes Wards. I introduced myself and why I was there. It seemed like he was going to ask something when there was a crash and he said he should "make sure no one gets stabbed again".

"Well that was eventful," I said looking towards the hall he exited through.

"I'm sure you'll get used to it," said Afred, worrying me a little. This wasn't an occasional thing?

He started leading me-;skjfbsgdpibzebERROR++vbvnjkm;n;mxcvz;'anrvbA:----

[gravehags]

truth or dare ask game:

🥐🔪🧃🍄🌻🥤🥑🛼(hehe)

yes Im nosey sshhh

🥐 this is an oldie for anyone who was a member of ONTD on livejournal but “i know bitch, i was watching” still makes me laugh and i still quote it to this day

🔪 weirdest topic researched for writing…probably for my undergrad thesis when i was originally planning to include baroque art, i did a deep dive into frederik ruysch’s tableaus of baby skeletons. somewhat related, his daughter rachel was one of the most popular dutch still life artists of the era yet most people don’t know her name.

🧃honestly idk if there is anything about me i haven’t posted lmao i am the queen of oversharing but um. don’t know if i’ve ever talked about how i was chosen as a freshman to present at the deyoung museum on the topic that three years later would become my thesis. it was typically an event only open to seniors but the head of the art history department was so impressed she made an exception :) also connected to that - my grad school capstone advisor was present and the first time i met with her she told me she remembered me and my presentation 12 years later. so keep researching that weird shit you like it will make an impression on at least one person lol

🍄 hmmm since it’s lesbian visibility week let’s go with cirrus/cumulus. i think they were aware of one another in the pit, even intrigued by one another but neither made a move. not until after they were summoned when one evening cirrus got into a scrap with dewdrop and cumulus jumped in to break it up. when dew accidentally swung on her, cirrus lost her whole shit. took aether and mountain holding her back and even then, they got scratched to shit and bit. cumulus, with her eye swollen, walked over to her and gently stroked her face murmuring reassuring words to her. dewdrop felt so guilty he apologized to not only cumulus but also cirrus. it was the last time they ever (physically) fought and every time dew saw cumulus with that black eye it made him sick to his stomach. and the girls? never slept without one another since.

🌻 someone i appreciate but don’t talk to on a regular basis wow this is a hard one. maybe not a specific person but to everyone who regularly likes or reblogs my fics, even if i don’t follow you trust me i see you 🩵

🥤there are so many people on here who are incredible writers but truly @anamelessfool and @the-lisechen blow me away every time. such beautiful prose that really gets you emotionally and they are both incredible at creating compelling OCs. cannot recommend them more.

🥑 if we lived on the same continent i’d absolutely say @forest-rot but other than them i’d say @bimbotheosis lmao she’s got a bigger car than me that can better hold a body and is close enough that it would be efficiently done

🛼 -> 🙊💦🍜🧎🏻‍♀️🪤

[angelosearch]

Here's a long mushy post because today is a special date.

Way back in the early oughts, I was talking to this guy on AIM (blast from the past, I know). We started talking in November of 2008 and from the first time we chatted, I felt like there was something special about him. We became fast friends and would chat into the early hours as we put off doing our homework. He was funny and smart and would help me with my physics homework and occasionally Rick Roll me.

One time, we worked together to try and figure out if every person in the world moonwalked against the earth's rotation on the equator, could they get the planet to stop spinning (inconclusive, but probably no).

The first time we spoke on the phone (the first time we heard each other's voices) it was the day that Obama was inaugurated. I remember this because I felt overwhelmed and awkward. I didn't know what to talk about, so I brought that up.

I got the sense that he liked me - or at least I hope he did, because I liked him. A super nerd, captain of the fencing team, loved his dog - I DEFINITELY had a crush.

But I wasn't certain that he liked me until February 10th, when he messaged me on AIM and quoted Newton's third law. He said something to the effect of "Newton's Third Law states that reactions are equal and opposite. I really like you - does the law apply here?"

Well, that guy and I have been together 15 years now. After a long distance relationship through the rest of highschool and college, we moved in together in 2014. We got married in 2016. His sister Rick Rolled us at our wedding. We got a congratulations card from Obama (someone mailed him our wedding invite, to this day I don't know who).

It's been an eventful couple of years. We've had jobs and apartments and dogs and roommates. We've gone on amazing adventures, engaged in so many hobbies together, and played through a bunch of videogames side-by-side. There's been hundreds of hours of audiobooks and probably months worth of television. Oh, and A LOT of BeatSaber.

He has been very excited about my return to fanfiction and my renewed love of FFVIII. He has never played the game but he will let me talk about it endlessly and bounce fanfiction ideas off him. Everytime I finish a chapter of something, I send it to him and he gives me feedback. If that's not love, I don't know what love is!

He was there to help me into the car when I was loopy from having my wisdom teeth removed. Before I learned to drive, he took me anywhere I couldn't reach from walking/transit without question. He has seen me through my career ups and downs and is now my biggest cheerleader as I apply to grad school.

Once I hosted an event for a job I had. Doing that always pushed my mental health to the brink. I was staying at a friend's place in the city after the meeting with the plan to metro home in the morning, but the wave of a manic episode that had manifested over the week crashed into my mind and I was caught in the riptide of a panic attack. He drove out during a blizzard in the middle of the night to bring me home and rubbed my back as I laid on the floor of our apartment, sobbing.

Our relationship survived a whole pandemic. When I had struggles with my birth family, we became each other's family, and his family welcomed me too. Then he saw me through my darkest timeline and has supported me through every step of my mental health journey. Just a few hours ago, I was stuck in some memories and he talked me through it. I am tremendously grateful everyday to have such an amazing person in my life.

In October of last year, we moved into our home. For the first time in my life, I feel safe and comfortable in the place I live and waking up to be with him, here, everyday brings me so much joy. I recently heard this song, which really captures how we feel in this moment of our lives:

So happy anniversary to "my Rinoa" - @tharinock (funnily enough the same handle I first got to know you by). Here's to the next 15 years of fun and love.

[zenkindoflove]

This is going to be a little ramble about my fanfic plans for the rest of the year. Because I feel like my head is swimming with too many things.

Okay my priority is to finish PMID by the end of September/beginning of October I hope. There are 7 chapters left for me to write and I've been writing about one chapter a week.

Right now I'm working on one Eris Week one-shot that is probably going to be close to 15k when it's over.

I wanted to write more for Eris Week but I think writing a huge one shot is all I'm going to officially commit myself to. Writing 3 fics for Elucien Week took a long time and was a big commitment so I think I'll pace myself better. The other ideas I had would be shorter, so if I have time/energy I will bang those out really quick and if not, just save them for oneshots in the future not tied to an appreciation week.

Once PMID is over, I will probably do an Elucien one shot that I didn't get to get to for Elucien Week to warm up and then dive back into Golden Visions (sequel to Summer Heat). I envision that Golden Visions will be the focus of October and beyond with maybe one of two little Solstice based one shots at the end of the year. Golden Visions will likely be another 20+ chapter story so I imagine I'll be working on it for a while.

Also for those of you who sent me prompts, know that I have hoarded them in my inbox for special occasions when I need to distract myself with little side projects. This includes those Satharion ones. Since they have such scant fanfic still, I will write them before the others.

This has been such a crazy year. I basically stopped writing fanfic after grad school got intense around 2012 and only did small things here and there. I didn't pick it back up until October 2023 and since then I've written 360k words which is just mind blowing to me. It's been so fulfilling coming back to something I loved to do. So while it's hard at times and I put pressure on myself, it's only because this hobby really fills my soul in a way no others have.

And to all of you who follow my fics, especially those of you who don't care if I'm writing for Elucien, Erixius, or some other couple I get a whimsy for, just know you guys are all really special to me. 💕

[morbsxadorbs]

okay, so!

I know I’ve been talking about a @morvantmortuary ita bag for ages now, but I haven’t posted any photos! this is bc I kept having to migrate it between base bags due to my own indecisiveness/occasional misfortune - I’d find one that I really liked and wear it for a while, but then before long I’d spot another base come down into my price range, but then not long after the zipper would come undone and be nonfunctional, etc. it really felt like I was maybe cursed there for a hot minute :’D

but so today, I finally got a pretty solid-feeling nylon coffin base I ordered not long ago, and it was actually cheaper than the previous coffin-shaped base I’d ordered!!

so I decided I would just go ahead and take photos now, before anything happens to it when I wear it out tonight lmao

Ta-da! here it is, in all its glory. it’s a little lumpy bc I’ve already got all my stuff in there, but I think it works for a more ‘casual outing’ bag.

more photos below to save space 🖤

here’s a tour of the pins in the insert:

so of course as I’m tallying these up, I’m realizing just how many of them are pieces I’ve collected like a magpie over the years :’D but I did go back and find sources for the ones I could!!

I got the Cafe du Monde button and the embalming machine on two separate trips to NOLA, one before I started grad school and one after.

I’m pretty sure I got the hearse and the scythe at an Oddities show in Austin after COVID wound down a bit (but I know the artist for the scythe is BatsintheBelfry on etsy, and I love a lot of their stuff!).

the MCR pin is from a hipdot preorder years ago, the knife was from a kickstarter preorder around the same time, and the love letter (which has more to do with the manuscript version) was a birthday present before I started grad school. (I think it might have come from Maya Kern’s store??? I’m not sure.)

the Horror heart was also I think a lucky freebie in an order for a little outfit for chibi!Maxi.

the death’s head is from VeronaBlack on etsy

the Maggie skele-kitty is from queerwatercolors on etsy

the Eat Racists alligator is from lostlustsupply on etsy

and the bi bracelet I turned into a zipper pull is from FlorenceMaeHandmade, also on etsy

and then we had a lot of room on the side hinge, so I added some pinback buttons that didn’t work on the insert:

the bi heart was I’m pretty sure a xmas present from my favorite ex

the Final Survivor pin is from BearBonesArt on etsy, who does a lot of really cute slasher-related stuff. (it’s more mint-colored than it looks in the photo, my house lighting is just odd.)

and the reassuring reaper pin is from DanyelleOrwickArt on etsy. it’s probably one of my favorites, and she has a whole collection of them that I want to buy the rest of when I have the cash 🖤 maybe at my next job lmao

we did try putting all the tiny!Morvants in the display window! but, uh. :’D

it’s maybe. a little cramped in there. (they did used to call these kinds of coffins toe-pinchers, after all!)

so we might go with something like this for our Outing this evening:

(at least until we’re seated and the lights go down lol.)

while I’m mentioning artists, just a reminder that I got the tiny!Morvants (and stunt!Maxi, who is still undergoing a repair spa stay) from NoizFoxy on etsy! they were a joy to work with each and every time, they were super thoughtful when it came to details, and they always kept me updated in the process, so if you ever decide you want a small friend of your own (be it OC or blorbo), I would recommend them when they have an open listing 🥰

okay! thanks for letting me babble about this, I know it’s super niche but I’m just happy it got put together!! I’m looking forward to wearing it out later 👻🖤

[x0401x]

I think you should do a post after every Tsurune ep, it's really cathartic to read your thoughts!

If I keep getting messages asking for it, then sure! I’m sorry for being so slow with them, though. Grad school entrance exams are draining away every ounce of my sanity. :^)

I guess this ask means you want a review of episode 5 as well, so here we go! Again, sorry for the wait!

So this episode delivers a lot more of the novel that we didn’t get on S1, such as Kaito and Nanao’s family. I love that we finally got to see their moms and sisters, as well as the fact that they often do get-togethers. Bonus for showing what kinds of pronouns/nicknames they use for each other.

We also get more of the girls’ team being an actual part of the club. Getting a new menu for practice, actively interacting with the boys, helping with prep and cleaning, having screen time doing their own training and officially becoming a team of competitors instead of just... being there.

In the middle of the episode, there’s one more peek at Ryouhei’s house (first one was in episode 2) and at long last, his sister shows up! We only see her back but that’s still something. We’re gradually getting eased into what is probably the second most complicated family of the whole series, and I like that the way KyoAni is going about it is exactly how I’d pictured. Well, more like how I wished S1 was.

Most importantly, perhaps for the very first time in the anime, we got to see Minato thinking about Masaki for no reason. I know this doesn’t sound important, but if I were to pinpoint what Minato’s most frequent habit is in canon, I’d say it’s thinking about Masaki. Whenever Minato is thinking of anything in the novel, Masaki pops right up. That, of course, if he wasn’t already thinking about Masaki to begin with. I don’t remember a single scene from any of the three volumes where Minato is thinking or worrying about something without Masaki hijacking his mind. And it’s never accidental or even incidental. Masaki is one of Minato’s main concerns. He thinks of Masaki about as much as he thinks of his own life. Partly because, one way or another, Masaki is always involved in whatever aspect of his life he’s thinking about. And now KyoAni has given us a small, tiny crumb of that. True allies.

At this point, a good portion of this season feels like a catch-up to S1. Many events of volume 2 are being either omitted or cut out so that there's enough space for the content we didn’t get in S1 to be inserted in this one.

Now, as in every episode, for all the canon-compliant content we get, we get just as much (if not double) non-compliant content.

This episode gives us Nanao and Kaito in a symbiosis. Nanao takes care of Kaito, Kaito protects Nanao. They’re essentially opposites who complete each other. If you take out the OOC-ness, there’s no problem with this choice of narrative... except maybe for the fact that it’s extremely overused. I’ve talked about this before but I feel the need to stress out once again that trying to use formulas that have worked for other series isn’t an effective way to garner more popularity. It actually tends to do the contrary. I do have a lot of respect for the original work’s tendency to avoid that at all costs. Instead, it takes the most common tropes and subverts them. Nanao and Kaito have everything to fall into that commonplace storyline, but the author is having none of it.

Novel!Kaito and Nanao are opposites, true, yet not the kind of opposites who complete each other. Rather, the opposite that completes Kaito is Seiya, but KyoAni is still pretending that Seiya has this exact kind of relationship with Minato instead, so as I mentioned when I talked about episode 4, someone has to fill up that hole. Nanao has been replacing Seiya ever since S1, but I guess KyoAni realized how weird and incesty it looked with it being so one-sided. We only had Nanao obsessively looking out for Kaito in the same way that Seiya obsessively looked after Minato, except there was no deeper reason behind it like there was with Seiya (as in feeling guilty for the death of Minato’s mother). So now this relationship is being balanced out, making it a two-way avenue.

In the novel, Kaito’s been looking after Nanao ever since they were little kids because his aunt asked him to. Nanao had always drawn in the attention of the people around him, and this earned him both favor and disfavor. We’ve seen that in this episode. What we didn’t see, though, is that, because of this, Nanao’s mother asked Kaito to protect him, and the result is that Kaito eventually grew up to be Nanao’s dad. Nanao was well-aware of this and often used it to his advantage. Basically, novel!Kaito is an unwilling “father” with a willing “son” and novel!Seiya is a willing “mother” with an unwilling “son”. He and Seiya have that in common; they’re natural-born caretakers, except Kaito doesn’t realize that he’s in this position. It’s just automatic for him. He’s probably been doing this for longer than Seiya has. That last bit was also shown in this episode, but it was instead presented as Kaito taking the burden on his own accord and compared to Seiya taking on the role of Minato’s watchful eye.

In short, the novel draws a parallel between Kaito and Seiya and uses it as a plot device for their relationship, while the anime draws a parallel between Kaito and Nanao's relationship and Minato and Seiya's relationship. The reason why I'm iffy about this is that it acts as if Kaito taking on other people's burdens is something that he simply does out of nowhere. There doesn’t seem to be much reason for it. With Nanao, we can understand, because that’s his family, but what about him trying to take part of the blame for Minato’s screw-up? This is being presented to us as a habit of his, except with no motive other than “that’s just how he is”.

In the canon, that's not how things go. Kaito does have a lot of concerns regarding the people around him, but as any normal person, he won't break boundaries. If he's not being let into someone else's affairs, he won't butt in, no matter how much he wants to. I dare say that this is a major character trait of his and that is what makes him endearing. He's impulsive as shit, but when he sees that he might hurt someone's feelings or that his input won’t be constructive, he backs off. That’s contra-intuitive for the readers, as we go in expecting him to be the cliche that the anime is giving us, but he isn’t. It’s a pleasant surprise.

And just to put it out there, as far as canon goes, there's literally nothing that Kaito wants more than for Seiya to let him into his personal business. He really wishes that Seiya would share the load with him and that is the main source of his character conflicts in the novels. It sometimes even feels like a parallel to Masaki and Minato, where Minato often makes reluctant mental notes on the fact that Masaki hides a lot of stuff from him. Both Masaki and Seiya are described, from Minato and Kaito’s POVs respectively, as having too many secrets. But that's too gay for TV. A gayness that is worsened by the fact that we never get any explanation for this in the novel. Like, none. Kaito isn't like this with anyone else and the text never goes "it's all because of their strong friendship" on these two. Instead, it gives us a love song as the literal only allusion to their relationship. Go figure.

Can't be having that bullshit in the anime, so change it KyoAni shall. Because anime!Kaito started doing this entirely on his own instead of it being a request from his aunt, we’re getting a different dynamic. KyoAni is adamant about Seiya being Minato’s knight-in-shining-armor (even without him getting the glory for it in this season), and without his presence, Kaito was reduced to an onboxious, arrogant little shit without much personality other than being dedicated to nothing but archery and acting mean to everyone except the teachers in S1. Nanao was there as a plot device in order to make Kaito remotely likable and also so that he’d have some inkling of personality himself, given that most of his lines had gone to Seiya. Yet now he’s here to complement Kaito and vice-versa. In building them like that, KyoAni has turned them into Minato and Seiya, except with a rivalry added to it.

From a storytelling point of view, I find this repetition and lack of creativity to be rather underwhelming. And on a personal level, I still think the way KyoAni goes on about Kaito and Nanao’s relationship is tad creepy. It’s just weird and off-putting to see two cousins mourning so sorely the fact that they’re slowly breaking free from this take-what-you-give system they’ve developed over time. In the novel, Kaito is Nanao’s nanny, sure, but it’s literally just small everyday life things that he does, such as helping Nanao carry heavy luggage or patching him up when he gets hurt during practice. That’s as far as it goes, just like Seiya caring for Minato only goes as far as offering him tea and towels during breaks or nursing him when he gets sick (that, of course, after Seiya has had proper closure from his personal conflicts and stopped being paranoid over Minato’s wellbeing). It’s all pretty normal and chill, fitting perfectly within the scope of what relatives and/or best friends do for each other. And the closest it gets to anything marginally negative is Kaito pointing to Seiya that he’s babying Minato too much while Seiya retorts that Kaito babies Nanao too much, which Kaito is in complete denial about.

I'm also not behind the rivalry between Kaito and Nanao. It totally overshadows the one between Minato and Shuu, and narrative-wise, that's not supposed to happen. It also makes any other sort of rivalry from this point on to feel somewhat repetitive and it doesn't have much of a reason to exist other than cover up for the fact that Nanao and Kaito have no personality otherwise. Besides, it's a contradiction, as far as the boys' skills go. Nanao is a great archer, but he isn't supposed to be able to compete with Kaito. Kaito being the ace is what makes him the oomae to begin with.

Anyway, case in point. I'm not digging this route in the anime, but I’m just gonna turn a blind eye to it. I think we’ve earned a lot of positive stuff from this mess.

Yeah, the flashbacks had some weird undertones. But they were accurate. Everything we got in them after the innitial parts that show the beginning of the duo’s symbiosis is completely in tune with canon. The difference is that we got this in the books in the form of description, while the anime has given us actual scenes, with dialogue and all that. They even include a nod to S1′s drama CD, which elaborates on Kaito and Masaki’s first meeting (something that we also only get in the form of a monologue in the novel).

Speaking of monologues, I like that we’re finally getting some stuff from Nanao’s point of view. In S1, we see very little of him and only through other characters. This time, he’s being his own person and although he’s very toned-down in the anime (just like everyone else, really), that’s still his canon personality. He’s a lot less sparkly than his canon counterpart, but the essence of his character is indeed being presented to us viewers. Add that to the fact that he’s been given his original hairstyle in this season, and there you have it. At long last, it feels like I’m finally seeing Kisaragi Nanao in the anime for the very first time.

Not just that; I feel like we’re also properly seeing his relationship with other characters for the first time. In S1, we basically only got snippets of his relationship with Kaito and that’s it. Here, though, we’ve been getting to see not just a deeper look into said relationship but also him interacting significantly with other characters. The other boys analyzing him and Kaito, looking out for them, knowing them. These boys are on each other's radars. That’s some refreshing shit right there. At last, it feels like we're watching a series about a group of friends. I especially like the emphasis on Minato and Nanao's interaction. Another thing from volume 1 that's being added here. Better late than never.

I gotta confess that every time KyoAni fixes something they left a hole in during S1, it’s as if the fact that something was missing the whole time is being thrown in our faces. It also somehow feels like KyoAni is offering us an apology with each of these little fixes. It leaves a bitter aftertaste, but frankly, I appreciate the effort.

In conclusion, I can overlook the creepy vibes that Kaito and Nanao’s relationship give me in the anime because the pros are worth the cons in my book. But here’s where I draw the line: Kaito being portrayed as violent.

Kaito is described in the novel, throughout all three volumes, as “aggressive”. Because he is. Just not physically. He’s quick-tempered and he runs his mouth when he’s mad, and he’ll go as far as glaring and closing up distance with whoever he’s having a heated discussion with, but never, ever, has he laid a hand on anyone. As far as canon goes, Minato and Seiya are much more likely to throw fist than Kaito. The closest he’s gotten to hitting someone was in a scene where Eisuke insults Kazemai to their faces and he almost loses it, but his arm accidentally hits Seiya’s glasses and knocks them to the floor, which gives him immediate regret. The thing nobody should ever forget about Kaito is that he’s dense and inept, but he has a pure heart.

So Kaito punching his former teammate back in the day? Whack.

Kaito getting pissed during practice and being disrespectful in the dojo? Whack.

Kaito pulling Nanao and Seiya’s collars? Fucking whack, my dudes.

I know that the anime isn’t depicting Kaito like he’s an asshole. Rather, he’s being treated as a reckless kid who takes things too seriously and pushes his feelings and values onto other people. That’s how the novel treats him as well. But the whole point of Kaito is that he seems menacing yet isn’t. He’ll talk shit, sure, but it takes a lot to make him even be willing to physically harm someone. This felt like one of the by-the-book safe-formula things that KyoAni has added to the series because they learned it from Free!, and I’m not a fan of it.

There are things in this episode that I'm a fan of, though. I think the frame composition in this one was especially good. I specially love the way that Kaito and Nanao were placed in all sorts of yin-yang ways on-screen (even though this is something that's supposed to be a Minato and Shuu thing, I'm just taking whatever I can get). But above all, I love the way that Seiya and Kaito are poisitioned in the scenes where they appear together. Finally, the anime is beginning to take a step on closing the distance between them. The physical distance, at least. Their relationship is still nothing like it is in canon, but maybe this is a hint that they will get somewhere near the general area of how deeply connected they are in the books. Maybe.

There's some more stuff that I wanna give my two cents on, but I gotta take a look at the next episodes to make a judgement, so I'll leave just this here for now!

[catboybiologist]

hey how did you get into studying bio?

i'm asking cause i'm looking at potentially going into a biology adjacent field and i was wondering how you got into bio in the first place and why

My disclaimer on stuff like this is PLEASE do not treat me as an authority, I'm one grad student and not even a particularly significant one at that. I'm one experience of many.

So first off, the why: I've always enjoyed nature, and loved animals, so there was never really a moment in my life that I wasn't going to do something like that. I originally entered college as an ecology major, and did volunteering related to that, but I soon realized several things about ecology I didn't like while simultaneously gaining a keen interest in lab biology. An interest in animals and nature just kinda made me ask more questions about how things worked on a more and more fundamental level, until I realized I was more interested in genetics than I was about food webs.

Second off, the how: my career/education has had a pretty standard outline, at least for the US, with a couple of small notes. Got a bachelor's at a local state college, stuck around that same college to wait out two years of my life while the world was fucked (wooo undergrad class of 2020), and now I'm doing my PhD after that.

There are two notes I would give:

1, start undergrad research early. Your mentors, advisors, hell pretty much anyone in the older generation or even a slightly different field may tell you to either pursue internships or not to worry about research too much. They're wrong. Standards have generally increased, especially for grad school applications, and undergraduate research experiences counts in industry as well. Yes, it's completely fucked, because its a system that exploits free labor, but that could be a post of its own that I will probably make at some point.

2, my master's degree was technically unnecessary, but practically very necessary to get into my PhD program. It's hard to say whether this was just my admittance year, because it seems like everyone had a similar idea to me (get more experience through either a MS or industry in a safer, more known environment before uprooting your life for a PhD), so my PhD cohort has a relatively high proportion of people already with master's degrees. Its hard to say whether this is a phenomena isolated to my admit year, or whether this reflects the trend of increased admission standards over time (which, even aside from this, has been noted by many). If this is the route you wanna take, you'll have to evaluate what kind of degrees you want when you get there.

Any time I talk about career trajectories, I also include this little note: remember that there are two PhD systems in the world. The one I'm talking about is used in the Americas and East Asia from what I know. In this system, PhDs only require a bachelor's degree for admittance, but take 5-7 years. Usually, there's a midway point where you can "master out" and quit with a MS. So for me, already having a MS wasn't strictly necessary.

There's another system used by most of Europe, Oceania, and other places that I couldn't rattle off that's somewhat different. Here, PhDs only take 3-5 ish years, but they usually require that you already have a MS or additional technical certifications for admittance.

Both are essentially equivalent, I just include a little note about it when I talk about my MS. When I say it's unnecessary it sometimes confuses people who are mostly familiar with the second system.

I'm open to questions about this but again, remember I'm just one perspective, not an authority.

[inkofamethyst]

October 2, 2023

After two and a half days of illness, I'm pretty much back to regular functioning (with occasional sneezes but at least the sinus pressure has majorly receded). This does mean that I'm about two days behind where I wanted to be, but I'm going to have to try as best as I can to catch up so Thursday doesn't ~suck~. I don't really want my sleep to suffer though [edit 2, next morning: failed, reverse bedtime procrastination strikes again], that's a habit I'd like to leave back in undergrad if possible. Man, I can't wait until I'm done with (undergrad-level) classes (though then I'll have to structure my own days which is another kind of challenge).

Anyway back to the house conversation, I'm obviously facing a major hurdle preventing ownership: the down payment. I know I listed out all of those "little" savings goals a bit ago, but preparing for a down payment is a huge goal, like tens upon tens of thousands of dollars in some places, and I don't want that to bite into my emergency fund which I am also trying to build (though the emergency fund will likely be much smaller than the down payment goal). The toughest part is that saving in grad school is terribly difficult. The first year and a half are so are going to be weird because I don't really know what my taxes will look like, but budgeting should become easier as I settle in.

And then and then not only do you have to do a down payment, but also hoa fees, monthly mortgage, insurance, figuring out how to get things fixed when (not if) they break, not to mention all the fees you have to worry about before moving in and all the people you have to pay... so many things to consider, so much cash to raise. And like yes I know that serious saving requires serious sacrifice, but bread and roses man. I wanna get a bass guitar in two years, I'm solidifying a wardrobe, I wanna keep sewing. I don't wanna be so single-track-minded that I'm totally miserable for years (like they tell phd students to not let Being In School stop them from living their lives).

I need to talk to a financial advisor, agh. So many things online are saying that renting could be the better move,,,,, but something deep in my bones tells me that it's propaganda of some sort.

God the way I could've been absolutely insufferable as a (metaphorical) finance bro had I actually taken accounting seriously in high school. Like I totally could've gotten a degree in finance and gone into consulting had I not taken money for granted in high school and really thought seriously about it. Honestly...? That probably would've been an easier way to live than the path I've chosen, but I suspect that what I'm doing will be a bit of fun and probably more intellectually stimulating. So that's okay. I guess.

Another funny thing about this whole ~house~ mini-obsession is that it was merely a month ago that I was freaking out (mildly) about the idea of moving away from home lol.

On to different topic entirely, Knowt has got to be my fav quizlet successor. Having anatomy experience is definitely making these practical cram sessions go by faster.

Today I'm thankful that I'm mostly back to normal and also that I decided to go to this social hour thing where I might've made a new friend (someone who knows my puzzle-friend actually lol)! Now comes the tough part--finding and scheduling things to do with them. It's not like high school where you are with people all the time and come to learn who they are gradually. This takes a lot more conscious effort I feel like.

Okay, enough time spent here. I have (too many) things to do.

[edit, like 20 minutes later: I think I just worked through necessity vs sufficiency in my head and im so proud]

[ra0n]

KI RAON / intro (under the cut) / application / visage / profile

helllooo it's kira here and i'm v excited to bring you miss "princess u" ki raon !! you've probably seen her a) skateboarding around campus, b) constantly trying to find some new plight to throw herself into so she can write a song about it or more recently c) stuck in a gossip-girl-reported catfight between her and her sister (s'nu subplot). i'm super excited to get to know everyone so please like this for me to message u or feel free to message first &lt;3

warning: super sorry for how long and messy this is i was horribly unprepared

basics: 24, (grad) music production and sound engineering student at snu and the princess/princess u skeleton of s'nu

backstory it's just been her and her mom for as long as she remembers in their over-familiar, little town. grew up being taught to stay humble and always shrink herself into the background so nobody would take notice of her

but raon's always had a fiery spirit (exhibit one: constantly got scolded for shoving the same tacky boy over in the playground when they were five) (exhibit two: fought with a classmate over the last doraemon toy and came home with scratches. she won the fight btw) (exhibit three: picked up a guitar in eighth grade and never looked back, much to her mother's chagrin)

she always believed that she was destined for greater things despite the financial limits on her and discovering music felt like the final puzzle piece being slotted into place. "borrowed" instruments from her highschool's run down music room, not that anybody noticed, and taught herself between studying and her part time job at the local convenience store

developed a knack for song-writing and more specifically, music production using youtube videos and free programs though she saved up to buy some proper ones later on, essentially trying to translate her life of poverty into songs. many of them revolve around the hardships of her life and distant relationship with her mother

starving artist trope to the maximum

but yeah eventually graduated high school and told her mom she got into snu for business and management when in reality, it was for music production

ensue very messy argument when she found out which ended in raon running away with what she had saved up from her job to seoul. didn't talk to her again after that until raon found out she passed away

and then gets hit with news that the one of friends she's surrounded herself with is her actual step sister, and then realises with the help of gossip girl that they both like prince charming

no rest for the wicked!!! half loves half hates the attention on her - love because she likes to pretend to the world she has a strong front and nothing can sway her, hates because she actually does not have that strong of a front

just trying to get through university and graduate with a decent job at a music studio or big shot entertainment company, but if she can make some mess whilst she's here she might as well

character wise she's very entitled, genuinely believes she has a gift that nobody else does and that because she's gone through a life of poverty and struggles, she "deserves" good things to happen to her more than anyone else

which is why she's very determined to make sure prince charming is hers at the end - why should her sister whose lived a life of luxury get the first pick in a relationship, too?

takes a lot of pride in her music and works very hard, essentially a perfectionist when it comes to the stuff she produces so constructive criticism is accepted though not easily, especially if you're someone who isn't in the music field

has a bad habit of mistaking being blunt for being honest, not one to be soft-spoken but does talk quite a lot. initiates conversations most of the time ("hey wasn't that lecture so fucking boring") even if she's never met you before

super flighty as a person though it's unintentional. here one second, gone the next. always looking for inspiration, for something exciting, for someone interesting

works part-time as a night bartender at a club near snu because of the perks (aka free drinks plus sometimes, they let her mix the tracks on the dj deck)

also in an indie rock band that plays around bars and shows!! she's the guitarist and sub vocalist - not sure if they're trying to do something serious or just a ragtag group bound together by love for music but

sorry i'm not organised enough to have a plots page set up but throwing some ideas out there id love anyone from the s'nu subplot!! also band members (she loves you guys); regulars at the bar she works at; regulars at her band's gigs; fellow creatives; fellow skateboarders; ex-best friends; fwbs; fwbs getting increasingly messy; exes; someone she sees as her "muse"; someone who's been a fan of her music since her (unironic) soundcloud days; companies trying to recruit her for producing; someone who knew her pre-seoul; ride or die; found brother/sister (since she's waging war on her actual one); someone she keeps skating into accidentally and fuck she's so sorry for making you spill coffee over yo-

[archive-double-knots]

life update since it’s 2:20 am and I can’t sleep.

In particular, I’m sure a lot of you remembered that Cider died a few months ago. I’ve been dealing with the grief, the recovery, etc. & I’m finally at a better place where I don’t cry every time I say his name. No, I’m not getting a new bunny right now. I’m not ready yet, and that’s okay. but hopefully by the time the 4H kids start showing their bunnies, I’ll feel more open to the idea. My hope is that I’ll feel ready a month after Easter, as that’s usually when there’s many more bunnies in need of homes. Reminder: don’t get a bunny for Easter :)

Beyond that, there was also the issue with my grandma. Who, again you probably remember, is basically my mother & got diagnosed with cancer. So the good news is that she’s halfway done with treatment, one of her 2 tumors has shrunk significantly, and she’s doing really really well. The less than good news is that she is on oxygen permanently now, which means that our whole routine & lives have completely changed. We’ve been calling it the ‘new normal’; ya know, doctor visits multiple times a week usually, trying not to step on the oxygen cord, family chores being split up differently, etc etc. again, all to say, we’re figuring it out. It’s going pretty well, all things considered. Definitely a better outlook than a few months ago.

Lastly, you’ve also probably noticed that I simply don’t do as much tumblr stuff anymore. And it’s not that I don’t want too. I’ve simply noticed that my mental health drops when I’m on tumblr a lot, and that’s obviously no one’s fault. It kinda just stems from the feeling of being on a lifeboat amongst other ships. It’s possible to reach out, but damn, it can be hard with the waves. And that feeling often leads to me feeling really disconnected from all of you, even though I don’t want to be. There’s also the feeling of just feeling like I care more than others about certain things, and that’s okay! But it gets disheartening after a while, especially when you think of someone as important to you, but you realize you aren’t to them the same way. It’s not a bad thing, but it can make writing here feel lackadaisical, especially compared to like discord one on one. Which is partially why I’ve sorta stepped back. I never want to be gone, but I wanna be able to do things by myself, for myself, or at least, not on tumblr. I still hang out on mobile, and check in when I switch tabs (which is probably why it seems so sporadic when I’m on lol), and when something like the new owl hour episode drops I’ll be here! But uh. Yeah, I am cooking a lot more, hanging out with friends, i help with the toddler during the day, I stream video games, refound my love of word-searches, and will be attempting to do origami more since i miss having hobbies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ anyway, that’s about it, I think?

Oh also, grad school sucks lol that’s a thing too. I’m not good at school anymore and idk how that happened, but it turns out, I’m not good @ nonfiction writing lol who could’ve guessed