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psychedellic-phase · 4 years ago

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Fifteen (pt 7)

A/N: This part contains more season 7 spoilers!

tw: language arguing

word count: 3.5k

masterlist

“Hey, it’s me.”

The voice belonged to Derek.

It wasn’t you. Spencer was foolish to think it would ever be you. He stormed off to the chess table again. He didn’t want any visitors and what was it now? 6:15?

“Reid? I know you’re in there,” Derek called in, but Spencer didn’t move from his position. He didn’t want to see anyone except you, and that wasn’t really an option.

Derek knocked again, harder this time, “Kid I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

Spencer still didn’t budge; just staring out the window at the falling snow. If he did talk to Morgan, where would he even start?

“Hey the love of my life moved across the country to get away from me but luckily she left me a box of stuff to cry over!” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

After Emily went to London, Derek had become a close friend of yours. He became another one of your ‘girlfriends.’ He was who you would rant to when you’d argue with Spencer. He even got invited to ‘Girl's Nights’. When you officially broke up that went from close friends to basically inseparable. At work you’d go wherever Derek went. When you got home, you and Derek would go get drinks, or watch a movie, or literally anything else. When he’d ask where you were JJ would just give him a sad look and say “with Derek.” If Spencer hadn’t known any better he would’ve assumed you had gotten together. But he knew Derek was just being a good friend, letting you lean on him in your time of need.

“Reid? We’re worried about you.”

Still nothing.

Derek sighed, “We gotta talk about Y/N.”

Well that got his attention. He huffed and dropped the stacks of handwritten letters onto the chess table, knocking over several pawns. He opened the door and allowed Derek to enter.

“Are you okay?” Derek started with.

Spencer just looked at him. The bags under his eyes were a deep purplish gray color, and that was answer enough. He looked and felt like shit.

“What do you want to talk about?” His voice was strained and hoarse from all the crying and yelling.

“We gotta talk about how you’re doing with all of this,” Morgan said, gesturing around at the mess of books and mugs that littered the room.

“I’m fine,” Spencer stated plainly, trying to play it cool.

“I know you’re not fine. You’re allowed to not be fine, Reid. You just can’t hold it all in and close me out like you usually do.”

Spencer ran his hands through his hair and sighed before asking the one question he wanted the answer to most.

“Did you know?”

“Did I know what?”

“Did you know she was leaving?”

Derek didn’t answer, which was an answer in and of itself. He knew. You had talked to him about it at length.

“You knew?!” He snapped, “You knew she was leaving and didn’t tell me? You didn’t try to stop her?”

Derek paused, thinking of what he should say.

“I did try to stop her and it worked for a little while. If it weren’t for me she would’ve left a month and a half ago.”

Spencer rolled his eyes.

“She wasn’t happy here, Reid. You and I both know that.” Derek spoke calmly, hoping Spencer would follow suit. He didn’t.

“It was getting better! We were getting better!”

“Better? Reid, you only spoke to her at work as needed. It wasn’t ‘getting better’. It wasn’t fine when she was on mandatory leave for a month and you avoided her. It wasn’t fine when you broke up. It wasn’t fine when she took even more time off and you would show up at her door every night. And when she came back?” Derek took a deep breath, “The two of you could barely be on the jet together. We can’t work like that.”

Spencer nodded sadly, “I know. I was fixing it though. If only she gave me more time...”

“More time? Kid, she gave you two months. As much as I wanted her to stay, I couldn’t make her. She was miserable here. It’s been so hard on her–“

Spencer cut him off shouting, “Hard for her? Yeah Morgan, I know how hard it’s been for her. Did anyone ever think about how hard it was for me too?”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t, I’m just saying she had every right to leave. You blocked her out when she needed you most.”

“Oh is that what she told you? Did she care to mention how she couldn’t respect that I needed space on any of your platonic dates? Is that what they were Derek? Or is she just another body for you?” Spencer sneered, but didn’t actually mean what he said. He was just angry, so fucking angry.

“You know that’s not fair. I took care of her the way you should’ve!”

They just stared at each other, daggers coming from Spencer’s eyes.

“Get out.”

“Reid, c’mon I’m sorr—“

“I said get out,” Spencer practically hissed, knocking the books off his coffee table.

Derek backed away slowly, edging towards the door. Before he left he calmed himself down.

“Whenever you’re ready to talk about this, I’m here. I know you’re mad kid. I do. I miss her too but we can get through this, together.”

Spencer didn’t respond, sitting back at the chess table and staring blankly at the mess of wrinkled letters and chess pieces in front of him. If only this were as easy. He can always predict how many moves it would take to get a checkmate, but there's no magic formula for this. There’s no handbook on heartbreak.

He didn’t even look up to see Derek leave, eyes trained on the letters. He reached out for #6.

“This is a group picture from JJ and Will’s wedding. This is the last time all of us were together. By all of us I mean the core of us: You, Me, JJ, Derek, Dave, Hotch, Penelope, and Emily. I miss those days. The eight of us were unbelievably close. We still are, to some extent. I call Emily when our schedules work and the six hour time difference doesn’t interfere. Derek is my closest friend right now. He let me lean on him so much in the last few months, it’s amazing. I can’t thank him enough. Pen will always be my go-to when I need to smile or laugh or find out someone’s life history. I’ll miss getting advice from JJ. She always knows what to say. I’m sure I’ll ask Rossi for recipes and Hotch for help running the field office. It’s not goodbye. I know I’ll see you all when Seattle gets a crazy serial killer or something else I’ll call you guys for. I love you all. But for now, I just need a break. I need to put down my own roots and not depend on people that I share with you Spence. I need my own people. It’s so hard to go. It is. It’s probably harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do. But it’s for the best. How lucky am I to have friends that make saying goodbye so damn hard?”

He sighed. He completely understood where you were coming from, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. In fact, maybe that made it hurt more. He knew that your connections in DC and Virginia were through your group mates. You rarely had the time to go out and make new friends, and now all your friends were also his friends. It was just too complicated.

Part of him was now hoping that a twisted killer would spring up in Seattle soon, just so he would have to see you again. He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t help smiling at the thought.

“Okay anyways, back to the picture. Back to JJ’s wedding. The most beautiful and fun wedding I have ever been to. It looked beautiful; I expect nothing less from Dave. And you, God, you looked unreal. You always do, like you’re some kind of angel or statue carved by Michelangelo. And in a tuxedo? Otherworldly.

Weddings always make me cry. They just do. Seeing two people love each other so much that they want to spend their lives together is too much for me. I miss feeling like that. I felt like that about you, and this is the night I realized that, among other things.

When you were doing a magic trick with the rings for Henry. The smile on your face had never been wider. He giggled and asked you to do it again and again and you did. And you picked him up and spun him around until he laughed so hard he couldn’t breath.

“Isn’t he just the best with him?”

It was JJ. Stunning, beautiful, bride JJ.

“Yeah, he really is,” I said. I was looking at you dreamily, through the rose-colored glasses I’ve always viewed you through.

“You know he wasn’t always like this?”

“Really?” I didn’t believe her. You were always good with kids for as long as I’d known you, which was not as long as she had.

“Yeah, we used to call it the Reid Effect. Kids and dogs hated him.”

We both stood there admiring you and Henry. I should’ve seen that as my first red flag, but I didn’t. I didn’t see the way she looked at you with the same dreamy expression I had painted on my face. I was too busy falling even deeper in love with you.

“He wants kids, you know?” JJ said.

I nodded, “He told me he wants a village. As many as he can have.”

She smiled and grabbed my arm kindly, “I hope he gets that.”

“I want to give him that.” I blurted it out. I hadn’t even thought about it and suddenly it was out there. She just nodded and walked away, over to her real husband, as I looked at you. My heart was pounding because I saw everything right in front of me.

“Hey Henry!” I said to him, interrupting your precious play time, “How are you dude?”

He smiled and shook his adorably long hair around. Seriously I don’t think any other kid can pull off that hair but him.

“I’m good! Uncle Spencer showed me a magic trick.”

“Well can I see the magic trick, Uncle Spencer?” I said, squatting down to Henry’s level. You grinned at us, taking the ring out and making it magically disappear and reappear.

“How do you do it?” Henry clapped.

“A magician never reveals his secrets,” You said, squatting down with us and giving him the ring, “You can’t lose this Henry, okay? Mommy and Daddy really need it.”

He nodded and held onto that ring for dear life.

That’s when I realized I wanted you to be the father of my kids. You’re so good with him. It makes my heart hurt to know that you will never be the father of my kids. You’ll be the best dad, Spence. I mean that.”

A dull ache bloomed around Spencer’s heart. He didn’t want kids unless they were with you. And you had gotten so close. It killed him to know that he was so close, but somehow so far away.

“When we sat together, holding hands, watching JJ and Will devote their lives to one another, you squeezed mine. When we stood up to clap for them after their first kiss as man and wife, you snaked one arm around my waist and whispered “I love you, Love” to me. I could see that being us. White dress, flowers, rings, everyone we love watching us be in love. Derek would be your best man and Penelope would catch the bouquet. I could see it. Honestly, I still kind of can. At that moment, I realized that I wanted to marry you. I realized that I wanted to spend every moment of my time on Earth with you, Spencer. I wanted the house with the white picket fence. I wanted Christmas mornings with a village of kids. I wanted me and you, ninety years old in a nursing home still holding hands. I wanted forever with you and even that just didn’t seem long enough. It still doesn’t. Time always seems to get away from me.

I didn’t tell you how I felt. I should have. That night I should’ve taken you aside and kissed you and asked you to marry me. I should’ve grabbed that minister before he left and kept us together. I wanted to spend my life with you so badly, Spence. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. But I didn’t. God, I wish I did.”

Spencer let out a shaky breath, memories of that wedding and so many other moments hitting him hard. He wished you had done all that; he wished he had done all of that.

“I saw something that I also never told you about. And that thing is what stopped me in my tracks that night. We had taken a break from dancing. I went to get a drink and you were sitting at the table. You were watching JJ. You had a look in your eyes that I know well, because I saw it in my own every time I looked at you for years. Longing. Coincidentally it was the same way she was looking at you just hours before. On her wedding day. Minutes before she got married.

I almost dropped my glass.

I always had a sneaking suspicion that there was something between you two, but I never pressed it. She was your best friend, like Derek is to me. You guys were almost inseparable when I joined. I used to say you were like Woody and Jessie. A dynamic duo. I realized then that it was more than that for you. There was more than a sibling love shared between you. I only ever knew JJ as a devoted mom. I knew her post Will and Henry, so of course you guys were just friends, right? I mean you’re her son’s Godfather. And it was her wedding Spence. You looked at her with love in your eyes as she devoted her life to a man who isn’t you. I had half a heart to stomp up to you and pick a fight, but using my better judgement I decided to believe that whatever was there was long over, just a meaningless crush. Well, I was wrong. Things that never begin can’t end, Spence. But there you were, staring at her the same way I stared at you a million times.

That was the first time you broke my heart, Spencer Reid, and you didn’t even know it. I didn’t approach you. I didn’t trust myself to keep it together. It felt like you reached into my chest to rip my heart in half. I fumbled back to the bar, suppressed my tears and sipped my drink as I watched. I watched you go and steal JJ for a dance. An innocent little dance for the only person in the world who calls you ‘Spence’. Except I also call you Spence, and so do so many other people. But you only care about it coming from her. I watched you tense up as you put your arms around her. I wanted to hurl. After a few minutes of watching you and your two left feet dance with the bride. I went inside.

That’s where I saw Emily.

Talk about a whirlwind of a night.

We all knew coming back from the dead had been hard for her. Who wouldn’t have a hard time? She was going to see a therapist and seemed to be getting better. She had us. She had Sergio. She was going to be okay. That night she was off, and I know Em when she’s off. She was watching all of us like we were in a fish bowl, like she was an outsider. I had to talk to her.

“What’s going on Em?” I asked her.

She just avoided my gaze and I sat next to her, holding her hand, half for myself and half for her. “I got offered a job in London. Chief of their Interpol office.”

She still didn’t look at me and I squeezed it. I knew she was leaving, again.

“You’re taking it?”

She just nodded, “Yeah, I-I just need to talk to Hotch I guess.”

I nodded. I wasn’t mad at her. I was just sad. It felt like we just got her back, and she was leaving again. I don’t know how much more leaving the team can take. I’m sorry for leaving too.

“What’s going on with you, Y/N?” She asked me, clearly she was able to tell that I was distraught, “Is it me leaving?”

I shook my head, forcing the tears to stay inside, “No, not you. You should go. You should be happy.”

She sighed and said something then that I didn’t understand at the time. Now I do though.

She said “I just can’t grab onto my old life and pretend that nothing happened.”

I feel the exact same way right now. I can’t hold onto my old life. My life with you. And pretend that I’m not a different person now. I am. Maybe I’m not a better person, but I am definitely a different person. And I think I need to leave, just like Em, to go learn how to be that person now. You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, and that’s what I’ve felt like for the last few months. I feel wrong. I can’t survive a life I built with you without you. So now it’s time for a new one.

So here’s the photograph of the last time we were all together. Admire it. Remember it. Miss it, I know I will. We’ll never be like that again.”

Spencer paused and looked at the photo, taking it all in. You were next to him with your arm on his chest, and his arm was around your waist, but he wasn’t leaning into you. He was leaning into JJ; classic ‘I’m attracted to you’ body language. He felt gross.

He remembered that night and how distant you had been once you came back from the bar. You barely spoke, barely even looked at him. You hung around the bar much more than you usually would. He assumed it was because of Emily, but now it made so much more sense. He wished you would’ve told him so he could’ve told you that he did have feelings for JJ at some point in time, but they didn’t hold a candle to how he felt about you. If JJ was a flame, you were a forest fire.

He didn’t know about any of your feelings that night. He felt the same way of course. He knew he wanted to marry you the second you showed him those film festival tickets. He was certain he would marry you, and he almost had. You didn’t know that though. You didn’t know how he wanted you, and he didn’t know how you wanted him in the same way. How terribly sad it is when two people love each other but end up two worlds apart.

It dawned on him that it seemed he didn’t know about your feelings a lot of the time. You just took him on a roller coaster, from being absolutely ready to marry him to being heartbroken, to being double heartbroken because you were losing yet another person. Maybe he never did really understand you the way he thought he did.

The photo was wrinkled on the corners and had “JJ&Will” and the date written on the back in the same handwriting that he had been pouring over for hours now. Your handwriting. He took it to the cork board and put it right next to the film festival ticket. He decided to put the locket and the book in front of the board too, collecting all the pieces of you he had left in one place. Kind of like a little shrine to the love he once knew.

He stared at the photo some more. The way Garcia held onto Derek. The way Hotch was smiling with his whole face, something he didn’t see often. The way Rossi held Hotch and Derek’s shoulders like they were his own. Emily on the end next to you, smiling the last genuine smile he had ever seen from her. His heart ached. That family was still there, just in different places now.

Family. What an interesting word that means so many different things to so many different people. To Spencer, it meant those people in that photograph. He had lost Emily, lost you, and he was done losing his family. He picked up his phone, which was at 27% percent. Just as you said, it was never above 30. He plugged it in as he sent a message to Derek.

“Meet me at 8”

And then he waited.

Part 8!

taglist: @l0ve-0f-my-life @aperrywilliams @helloniallslovelies @random-ravings @ajwantsapancake @andiebeaword @boiled-onionrings @frnks-stuff @icantevenanymore1

#spencer reid #spencer x you #spencer reid fic #criminal minds fic #criminal minds #reid #dr spencer reid #reid fic #spencer reid one shot #mgg #matthew gray gubler #cm #cm fic #spencer reid x reader

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yamayamawrites · 4 years ago

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This December

A/N: Hi friends! Happy (almost) December! As a treat this year, I decided to write a short fic (and by short, I do mean around 40k - so not terribly short) about the Dekusquad spending a week at a winter cabin! The first chapter will officially go up on my AO3 page (you can find it here!) tomorrow, with updates coming out every Tuesday/Friday for the next 4 weeks, but I decided to post a sneak preview of chapter 1 here early!! Hope you enjoy!

Tuesday, December 01, 20XX

It’s been four years since Izuku graduated from U.A. Four years, and he’s moved three times since then – once, to an agency based in Kyoto, where he lived the longest. He worked many of the smaller cases there, the more personal ones – stopping a villain who’d kidnapped a mother’s newborn; keeping a local corner store from being robbed; catching a stray piece of scrap metal dropped from a crane near a construction site, and saving two children playing tag. He accredits most of his fame to Kyoto, and though it’s certainly not a small city, it feels small when he moves two years later to Hiroshima.

It’s in Hiroshima that Izuku takes on his first major case – ends up working beside Eijirou in the process, and both of them (already well-established and in the high twenties in hero rankings) skyrocket to the top ten after busting the case wide open. It’s a child trafficking ring, where children are abducted and sold for their Quirks. And, just following this case, he has perhaps a hundred offers to other agencies that will pay better or get more exposure. After all, Midoriya Izuku is just past twenty and he’s ranked number four, below Suneater and Lemillion from U.A., and, yet to be overthrown at number one, Endeavor. And while he still hasn’t learned Hiroshima’s roads, nor has he unpacked all his boxes yet, he uproots once more, and heads for Tokyo.

The biggest reason he leaves is because of the agency. Tokyo is crawling with them – agencies nearly on every block – but they’re small, full of sidekicks who haven’t broken one hundred yet, even. But there’s one agency in particular whose letter stands out amongst the rest, because the signature on the offer letter is his old friend Hitoshi’s, and Hitoshi knows just whose names to drop to garner Izuku’s attention – “You would be working side by side with Uravity and Ingenium, and perhaps partnering with Shouto and Ground Zero.”

And now, almost seven months since he’s become acquainted with the Tokyo agency, has climbed past Suneater in the latest ranking, he drums his fingers on Ochaco’s office door. She pops her head up from behind her monitor, still wearing her hero costume from her patrol while she types up a final report before lunch. “Oh!” she says, as though she isn’t expecting Izuku, despite the fact that they always go to lunch together on Tuesdays.

“Ready to go?” Izuku asks, hanging off Ochaco’s door, now. “Tenya coming today, too?”

“Tenya got wrapped up in a petty theft case,” Ochaco rolls her eyes. “Seriously. Who tries to steal a dozen watches in the middle of the morning?”

“People who don’t know Tenya exists?” Izuku shrugs, and Ochaco laughs, pushes herself away from her desk on her rolling chair and hops up. “I need to stop and grab my key card before we go. Hold on.”

Ochaco trails after Izuku down the hall to his office, one with arguably the best view in the building. It overlooks the rest of the city, some of the smaller agencies the size of peanuts from way up here. His door is ajar when he walks up, light still on. Along the right wall is a photograph – himself, at graduation, with Ochaco and Tenya to his left, and Shouto to his right. Behind all of them is All Might, having managed his heroic form just for the click of a camera. They all wear navy graduation gowns, though Izuku’s is unzipped and reveals his hero costume underneath. Shouto’s hair is swept back from his face, his graduation cap in his hands, and he’s actually smiling – Izuku thinks it may be the only photograph in his entire collection of pictures of Shouto where he isn’t frowning. And Ochaco and Tenya are leaning into each other, smiles bright and happy, caps on and hands clasped together.

“Can’t believe you still have this hanging in here,” Ochaco muses as she steps into the room, wandering directly to the photograph.

Izuku spares it a second glance before going to his desk and rooting through the drawers for his key card to get back into the building. “It’s my favorite,” he says with a defensive huff, and Ochaco laughs.

“It’s not a bad thing,” she says. “It’s just that my forehead looks huge in this.”

“Shut up,” Izuku chides, “you look fine. You look great, even!”

“I think you hung this one because Shouto is in it,” Ochaco jeers, because she knows it will get a reaction out of Izuku. And it does; Izuku, who had bent down to check under his desk for the key card, thuds his head on the bottom side of it when he tries to sit up too quickly.

“Th-that isn’t it!” Izuku huffs, rubbing his head. “Stop with that, you know I’m over it.”

“How come you’ve been waiting for the opportunity to work a case with him, then?” Ochaco says, and she sounds innocent, but when Izuku looks over he sees mischief in her eyes, the pure evil of a friend who’s been given explicit information to a secret crush that maybe shouldn’t have been told.

“Is it a crime to want to work alongside a friend?” Izuku says back defensively, still searching for his key card. Eventually he finds it atop a stack of reports he’s yet to take down to the accounting department – the longer he waits, the longer it’ll be until his next paycheck, but seriously, he makes way too much as it is.

“Well, no,” Ochaco says, crossing the room and perching herself on Izuku’s cluttered desk. “I mean, that’s how you ended up working here.”

“Exactly,” Izuku says as a means of ending the conversation, grabbing his wallet off his desk as well (he’d forgotten that, too, it seems) and heading for the door. Ochaco follows after him, realizes he doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, and thankfully, after being best friends for almost a decade now, she respects that.

The walk down the road to their usual noodle shop is cold. The first snow hit about a week ago, and the temperature has warmed enough and cooled again since then to freeze mounds of slush at the lip of the roads. The sidewalk is clear of snow, busy despite the cold weather with people walking around downtown.

When they step inside the noodle shop, the warmth floods their cheeks and hands. They’re regulars here, and the waitress seats them as though they aren’t the number three and number sixteen heroes – after all, she gets to have this experience every Tuesday. She does, however, comment on Izuku’s latest search-and-rescue, says she’s glad someone like him was there. And it’s the comments like these that always make Izuku proud of his profession, the ones where he’s not being gushed over for his abs or his good looks (though those still make him blush); it’s the gratitude that Izuku’s presence has made a difference on the scene of a crime, or natural disaster, or whatever the occasion. It’s knowing people are glad Izuku was there.

“So,” Ochaco stretches back in her chair after she finishes her noodles. “Tenya and I have been thinking about taking a vacation.”

“Oh?” Izuku says, folding his hands in front of him on the table. He’d finished his noodles a few minutes ago.

“Yeah,” Ochaco hums, twirling her weightless chopsticks around her fingers idly while she speaks. “We were kind of thinking of inviting a few old friends from U.A. to come with.”

“Oh, so not like a romantic getaway then?” Izuku tilts his head to the side, curious. Ochaco and Tenya have been together since their second year of high school, and vacations for the just two of them aren’t anywhere near uncommon.

“More like a, um, reunion?” Ochaco says, dropping the chopsticks now. “What do you think, Izuku? Are you in?”

Izuku blanches. Somehow, even with Ochaco suggesting friends from U.A. accompany them on their vacation, he hadn’t considered that might mean him. Which is absurd, because the three of them have been best friends since high school began – they even chatted on the phone all the time when Izuku was in Kyoto and Hiroshima. “Of course,” he says after he scoops his jaw up from where it dropped, and Ochaco laughs.

“You seriously thought I wouldn’t extend the invitation to you?”

“That’s not what—”

“Come on, Deku,” she giggles, rolling her eyes. “You can’t lie to me. I know all.”

He laughs, shakes his head. “I guess I just wasn’t expecting it, sorry.”

“Well, you’re obviously the first person on the guest list. Tenya and I have already found a place, too! There’s this beautiful vacation lodge for rent on the edge of the Kiso Mountain chain.”

“That’s almost four hours from here,” Izuku says, suddenly a bit afraid of what might happen being so far from Tokyo. “What if a big villain or something finds out we’re all gone on vacation?”

“You act like our class from high school are the only competent heroes around anymore,” Ochaco rolls her eyes. “C’mon, if anything happened Suneater and Lemillion alone could take them, not to mention Nejire-chan and that wind hero guy.”

Izuku exhales, forcing himself to nod and agree. “I guess you’re right,” he sighs, his smile a tad nervous still.

“What, worried the public will forget about their favorite hero Deku after a week?” Ochaco reaches across the table and pokes at Izuku’s cheek. “Have some faith! And learn to take a vacation! Seriously, when’s the last time you took a break? Never?”

“Never,” Izuku affirms, though in the past he’s been proud of the fact; now he’s a little embarrassed. “How much would I owe you?”

But Ochaco waves off the question, and she grabs for the bill on the table – Izuku doesn’t even remember the waitress dropping it off. “You know more than any of us that money isn’t a factor,” she says, shrugging. “Tenya and I can cover it.”

“Shut up,” Izuku rolls his eyes. “You guys shouldn’t have to pay for everything. At least let me cover gas and groceries?”

It takes a bit of coaxing, but eventually Izuku convinces Ochaco to let him cover grocery costs; the two of them make plans to visit the grocery store together the night before they leave. Ochaco doesn’t reveal the guest list, nor does Izuku even think to ask about it until after they’re walking back to the office, bumping shoulders and laughing over inside jokes from their high school days. And as they ascend the staircase side by side, Izuku finally does ask, and Ochaco laughs, and that’s the most of an answer he gets.

#yamayamawrites #this december #happy holidays #mha #bnha #my hero #tododeku #iidachako #sneak peek!#ao3

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ellebabywrites · 5 years ago

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The Hitman - In Exodus

Type : Oneshot (Part of The In Exodus Series) // Angst // Fluff // Smut // Cartel!au

Warnings : angst, death, cussing

Author Note : This took me far too long and had my anxieties far too high. I’m finally happy with how it turned out and hope you all enjoy it too !! Please give me some feedback because I’ve worked so hard on this chapter..

☾ ⋆*･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:⠀*⋆.*:*･ﾟ: .⋆☾ ⋆**･ﾟ: *⋆.*:･ﾟ .: ⋆*･ﾟ: .⋆☾ ⋆*･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*⋆.*:･ﾟ.: ⋆*･ﾟ☾

The smell of freshly baked croissants flood the streets, a sign that the Bakery is about to open and the day beginning. Shutters rise and doors open. The busting workers of Exodus bracing for the day ahead; a day of sales to kids who can barely walk straight with the amount of poison saturating their bloodstream; a day of fighting with the guy from down the road who insists that things were ‘cheaper last week’; a day of overworking for much less of a profit than it’s all worth. Living the dream.

The bakery was different though. Something about it felt like home, and everyone treated it as such. It was the only building for miles that wasn’t painted in graffiti, the only business that was doing well for itself, a little slice of goodness in the middle of all that bad.

That’s what everyone thinks anyway.

Across the street, Jongin is watching through the scope of his rifle. Watching the Baker unlock his doors and flip the closed sign to open. He scoffs. Such a poser.

Saying Jongin enjoyed his job would be pushing it; how much enjoyment can one really get from taking a life without being a psychopath? But he’d be lying if he said that he wasn’t looking forward to taking out this one particular man.

He watches the Baker great the first of his customers with a toothy grin, hugging Mrs Jamison when she comes in for her regular morning pastry. If only Mrs Jamison knew all the dirty things that man had been doing with the hand she shakes so willingly.

The town’s beloved Baker wasn’t nearly as squeeky clean as he liked everyone to believe. After hours, he found himself in SUjU territory, hanging out with drug runners, dancing around the subject of Exodus till the haze of alcohol took control, divulging any and all information that might get him another drink.

Pathetic Jongin thinks, noticing how the Baker danced around his customers with such fictitious glee, as if he hadn’t sold them out a hundred times over.

Again, not to say EXO were any better, but surely there should be some sense of town loyalty right? Jongin thinks so; making this particular betrayal all the more infuriating and his death all the more inevitable.

Jongin lines up the crosshairs of his gun against the Baker’s head, having the courtesy to wait for the shop to empty. One. The corner of his lips pull into a smirk, the buildup of adrenaline flooding his veins working as his own personal high. Two. Is it sick to say he can’t wait to kill this guy? Maybe? He deserves it Jongin thinks, afterall, he did try and ruin their business for a few shots of tequila. Thr…

“Hey Joey!”

So close…

“Well this is a surprise! How’re you today darlin’?”

Usually, you would only visit Joey’s bakery at the end of the week, needing some sort of sugary treat to get through the piles of work you had to do; but today your classes were cut short and you were gagging for something with chocolate.

“Our professor had to leave early and a girl needs her goodies!” You joked, leaning against the counter.

Joey had been a staple in Exodus for your entire life, the man was everybody’s uncle, everybody’s friend, you could talk to him about anything and your weekly visits had become a huge part of your routine.

“Good job I’ve got a whole bunch for you to choose from duck,” Joey laughs at how your eyes quickly scan over the trays of baked goods like you were a starving puppy, “Ooo I know what you should pick, I need someone to try out my new brownie recipe!”

Fuck. Joey moved away from Jongin’s line of fire just enough to grab the box of brownies from behind the counter, the perfect shot ruined by a few brownies.

“Well if you made them Joey then I’m sure they’re absolutely delicious!” you coo, giggling at how easily you can make him blush.

Just as you were about to leave and the Baker to return to the firing line, a rush of people came flooding into the small shop, putting a stop to whatever chance Jongin had at completing his mission right now.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Nini groans in frustration, packing up his equipment quickly as to get away unnoticed, “he was right there, I could have had him!” It was frustrating sure, delaying his plans a few more hours before there would be another chance to take out his target; but there would be another chance and Jongin would get the job done. So while the sweet-toothed girl had momentarily saved old Joey’s life, it wouldn’t last much longer.

---

The clock read 11:57pm as you were hunched over on the living room floor, trying to finish this essay that you’d definitely not been putting off for weeks…

“Need ...sugar ...immediately..” you whine, dramatically throwing yourself across the floor to grab the box of brownies Baker Joe had gifted you earlier in the day. Mmnn, indulging yourself in the chocolatey goodness, you decide now is the perfect time for a break, only 6,000 words left to go anyway…

Completely oblivious to the ramifications those few brownies had had on the day for more than one party, you munched away the last of them, licking the crumbs from your fingertips and moaning at the euphoria a simple treat could bring.

‘Breaking news tonight : Beloved Exodus baker found dead. The 56 year old’s body was discovered an hour ago near his home, cause of death is officially named as a GSW through the neck…’

A chill runs up your spine as the news plays quietly from the television. Baker Joe was dead. Someone had killed him! You’re confused and hurt and angry all at once. Why would anyone want to hurt Joey? He was one of the only decent people in this shit-show of a city and now he was gone. Your eyes wander to the now empty box of goodies, the bakery’s logo printed on the front in swirly gold font and you feel the sudden need to cry, so you do.

---

Who did this guy think he was? An MX falcone wandering the streets of Exodus without a care in the world, stealing from the market stalls as he sauntered his way through the crowds. Minhyuk is his name. When Baekhyun had gotten word of their latest visitor, Jongin was immediately sent to take care of it. Honestly what did they think was going to happen? That they could just hang out in Exodus without consequence? That no one would be the least bit suspicious?

“You like the farmers market huh,” Jongin keeps a trained eye on Minhyuk as he moves from stall to stall. There were far too many people around for a direct hit so all he could do was watch and wait for the perfect opportunity.

“Why the fuck are you here?” He mumbled in annoyance, MX were getting far too comfortable for anyone’s liking; it was like the calm before the storm, except the storm was standing right in front of him chatting about produce with Mr Kim.

Suddenly, Minhyuk takes a sharp left, making his way out of the bustling crowd towards the alleys. He’d been made. Fuck. Following as quickly as he could, fighting his way through the sea of people, Jongin tries to keep up.

“Excuse me, I’m trying to get to…”

Minhyuk is fast, but maybe if you weren’t standing in front of him, blocking the way, Jongin would have been able to get him.

He doesn’t immediately recognise you. Your hair is tied differently and you’re wearing a different coat, but once Jongin places you as the girl from the bakery, he’s immediately on guard. Twice now you’ve gotten in the way of a hit. Could it just be a coincidence? Sure Exodus is small, you’re bound to run into the same people more than once. Baker Joe’s was a town staple and the market is always busy, but what are the chances? Jongin tries to side-step passed you, eyes scanning the crowds for Minhyuk, but you move along with him.

Holding out a map in front of him, you try again to ask for directions but Jongin doesn’t have time. He doesn’t have time to entertain the possibility that seeing you again could be anything but a coincidence, not when he’s about to lose yet another target.

“Move!”

You watch in astonishment as he pushes you out of the way before storming off. What an asshole you think; all you needed were directions, a simple no would have sufficed. Then again you’d come to expect nothing more from the people of Exodus. Sighing, you carry on your way alone, soon forgetting about the rude man you had met on the street.

---

8am lectures were the bain of your existence, but Professor Jeong’s class was always worth it.

Armed with a large cup of coffee and a stack of notes to aid you through, you made your way to an empty space near the front of the lecture hall. Biology never came easy to you, but the drive you had to succeed more than made up for it.

“Sorry I’m late guys,” Professor Jeong rushed into the busy hall, his own cup of coffee balancing on a pile of books clutched between his arms, “I got caught up with Professor Lyn, he’s such a ...fungi!”

The room fills with groans and muffled laughs at the attempt of a joke so early in the morning, but the Professor didn’t seem to mind. “Okay I’m sorry, let’s get into today. Can anyone tell me where we left off last week? Y/N?”

From the back of the room Jongin notices you.

“Oh you have to got to be kidding me..”

Once again, you happen to show up right in the middle of a job. There had to be a reason. There was no way this could be a coincidence anymore. Were you following him? Working with MX? Trying to get intel on EXO? Jongin didn’t know, but at this point he didn’t care. You were a problem.

Jeong was another star poser in Exodus. The esteemed environmental science professor, that drew students from across the country just to take his conservational bio class. The hotshot teacher who was already in the running for tenure. The slimy asshole that used his connections in the science world to help EXO’s competitors recreate their patented drug.

This was supposed to be an easy hit, wait till after class and use the pocket knife hidden in his belt to slit the professor’s throat before next period. But now, Jongin had to put those plans on hold so that he could figure out what to do about you.

---

Following you was far easier than Jongin had anticipated, thinking that he’d be kept on his toes trying to avoid getting caught, but you seemed completely oblivious to the fact that someone had been following you, watching your routines and judging them oh so harshly.

He kept his distance at first, observing from afar as you went about your daily activities. But soon enough, Jongin found himself immersed in the story that was your life. On the sidelines, a spectator, keeping mental notes of your behaviours.

Keeping space between you, Jongin follows you down the familiar street. He knows exactly where you’re going, the same place you’ve gone to for lunch every day that week. After your first class of the day you head straight to Lou’s café to grab something to eat and get some studying done. Like clockwork, the only thing to change was your order. Jongin would never admit that he’d grown to enjoy the establishment himself, but it was one of the least tedious moments of the day.

With the sky starting to darken in the cold weather, you fumble around your bag for your wallet amongst the loose scrunchies and old receipts, Jongin scoff in disbelief.

“How have you not been jumped yet?” He mumbled to himself. Before you’ve even walked through the café doors you have your money in hand, out in the open for anyone to take. Jongin had picked up on the blissful ignorance you had in regards to the danger in Exodus, instead, choosing to carry on carefree. Stupid he thinks.

Standing in line a few spots behind you, he watches as you let person after person cut in front and he just doesn’t get it. You only have an hour before the start of your next class and yet you’re willingly letting yourself be pushed back? People were clearly taking advantage of your kindness, but you were either incredibly stupid or didn’t care. When the older woman in front of you is a few dollars short, you don’t hesitate before lending her the difference, even putting back your own drink just so you could afford to help her. How could someone so generous be apart of something so evil? Then again, most of Exodus were playing that game.

Grabbing a coffee of his own, Jongin sits a table over from where you plant yourself, what had become your regular spots. Finding amusement in the way you struggle to fit both of your study books in the small space.

Now, only a short while before you needed to be back in class, you attempt to get as much work done while shoveling food down your throat as you could. Jongin thought it was hilarious, bar the tuna mayo that is. “Tuna? Really? It’s 11am jesus christ!” Maybe it was easy for him to judge you from a distance, but out of all the things he’d learnt, your love of tuna was the worst.

He watches your face scrunch and eyebrows furrow as you try and absorb the information, recognising the same study book you’ve been working on all week, the one for Professor Jeong’s class that you’d been struggling with. The pages covered almost entirely in highlighter with notes and doodles littering the margins. Cute.

You just seem so harmless. No matter how hard he tries Jongin just can’t seem to figure you out. Perhaps MX were blackmailing you? Maybe they had something that forced you to be their spy? It was the only explanation he could think of, because it just didn’t seem plausible that the girl in front of him, furiously editing her notes for the hundredth time that hour, the one with drops of mayonnaise left over on the corner of her lips, could be willingly working with the notorious MX. But you were involved somehow, of that he was sure.

---

The library is quiet, the sound of rustling papers and hushed whispers being the only source of noise. Luckily, it was busier than usual due to the wave of group projects being assigned, it made it easy for Jongin to blend in.

He watches you curiously from behind one of the bookshelves, trying to understand why you haven’t slapped the asshole beside you yet. He’d been cutting you off and putting you down every chance he could.

“I just think if we..”

“Seriously Y/N don’t strain yourself, I think we’ve got it.”

Asshole.

Even Jongin wanted to punch this guy. Being the only girl in the group, the others found it easy to dismiss everything you offered.

“Why doesn’t she say anything?” Jongin wondered, once again you were letting people walk all over you.

It’s not like you particularly enjoyed being treated that way, in fact you were daydreaming about slamming said assholes’ face into the wall at that very moment, but you couldn’t do that. This project defines your grade for the semester and you couldn’t afford that kind of taint on your record. So you bite your tongue. Act none the wiser and count the seconds before you could go home and be done with them all.

Across the library you spot Minho, the cute senior who’d been working as the student librarian for the last month or so. He’s scanning out returns at the desk, eyes glancing up occasionally, you presume to keep an eye on things . God he’s cute. When he spots you staring and then takes a look at the rather heated debate going on between your group, he decides to save you from the disarray, waving you over.

“My hero,” you tease, almost running to where Minho is.

“It was getting too painful to watch! What’s he ranting about this time?” He teases playfully, knowing all too well the constant tension in your study group.

“Ugh I don’t even know, it’s so much easier just to tune him out,”

Jongin’s teeth clench watching the exchange between you and the librarian. The childish giggling, the ‘accidental’ touches, the lingering stares. Disgusting.

“Who even is this guy?” If he didn’t know any better Jongin would think this was jealousy, but he did know better, so all of these unfamiliar feelings had to be from just how pitiful the sight was. This guy was clearly flirting with you, the blush on his cheeks and sweaty palms said as much, but from everything Jongin had learnt, you weren’t going to reciprocate. Tragic.

“Are you kidding me? Why is she twirling her hair like that!? He’s not even her type! He’s... he…” his mumbled ranting cut off by the sound of you laughing across the room. “Well if that is her type then no wonder she’s corrupt.”

He watches the pair of you for a little longer before the need to throw up eventually overtakes his need to stay, deciding he could catch you up later and spare himself the torture of sitting through whatever this was.

---

The open sign light bounces off wet concrete, illuminating your face with such a subtle glow of pink that Jongin could barely make out the streaks of tears running down your cheeks. He almost missed you sitting crouched over on the pavement, the smell of smoke being what made him stop. Why is she crying? He thought to himself, seeing you curled up in a ball, cigarette dangling from your fingertips haphazardly concerned him. Jongin didn’t have to wonder for too long though, the closer he got to you the clearer he could hear your muffled cries.

“Stupid fucking Geord,” you cuss, taking another long drag to calm your anxieties, “takes all my ideas, monopolises the entire presentation and then my contribution isn’t enough!?”

Jongin had come to know the infamous Geord all too well this last week, the pompous ass that had belittled you in the library, the snotty rich kid with mommy issues that just loved being right. Honestly the fact he hadn’t killed him yet was an accomplishment in itself; but still, seeing you clearly so upset gave Jongin a weird feeling.

You were either getting much better with your performance skills, or he was actually getting mad for you…

With each sniffle, each tear drop, Jongin felt his resolve breaking away and being replaced with a type of anger he’d never felt before. Why did he care that you were crying? Why was it affecting him so much? He didn’t know, but it took all his strength not to go find Geord and make him regret whatever he’d done.

As quickly as you put out the cigarette that was now burning short, you’re reaching for the box to light another. You only really smoked when you were feeling particularly stressed, Jongin hated it. Ironically it was the most disgusting thing he’d ever seen; painting the walls with someone’s brain was nothing compared to the strong stench of nicotine that passed your lips.

For a second Jongin lets his mind entertain the thought of approaching you, but the professional side of him reminds him who you were. This could be a trick...She’s not an idiot. Then he considers calling you out. Drawing his gun and putting an end to MX’s game once and for all, besides, he’d been observing you for a week now and he couldn’t afford for his attention to be diverted any more, he still had the good old Professor to end.

Before he gets the chance to do either however, you stand up. Taking one last drag before stomping out the flame, your hands carelessly wipe at your face in a feeble attempt at clearing the remnants of your breakdown.

“I’ll be fine, let’s just go home,” you whisper, more than familiar with putting yourself back together and wanting nothing more than a hot bath and warm bed.

---

When you first noticed that the new guy on campus was following you, you tried not to think too much of it. In all honesty, you were far too busy trying to keep on top of everything to pay much attention as to why you were being followed. Knowing the people in Exodus, you figured it was just his creepy way of flirting, or at the very worst he was planning on robbing you, not that you had much to take anyway. But as the days went by and the presence of your stalker persisted, you were growing frustrated. It’d been a stressful week and the last thing you needed was some guy watching your every move.

After getting the results back from Professor Jeong for your group presentation, you weren’t exactly in a ‘good mood’ and the looming shadow of the man trying to be inconspicuous as he followed you home, was the last straw.

"How much longer are you planning on following me?” You shout over your shoulder, not having the energy to even face him. When you get no response, you reluctantly decide to turn around to stare him down.

His chocolate coloured hair is pushed back exposing his forehead, eyes golden but harbouring so much animosity that they could have turned black, the jacket adorning his shoulders almost blending him into the dark street behind. He was handsome, strikingly so.

“Look dude it’s been a long day, can’t you just lay off the stalking for one night?”

Jongin stiffens at your words. So you did know he was there? And chose now, while you were both alone in a dark street, to confront him? God she’s stupid.

“Sorry Darling, can’t do that,” he insisted, watching how your shoulders slumped and fingers twitched at the side of your coat.

“Of course,” sighing deeply, too tired to argue, you decide to continue on towards your apartment, stalker be damned.

“Aren’t MX getting bored of this game yet?” Jognin calls. He figures if you already knew he was following you, then now would be the perfect time to put an end to it. You were alone after all.

When he sees you freeze at the sound of MX, he takes a tentative step closer, you’re still turned away from him, just a few steps ahead. “I mean, were you really the best they could do? We expected more.” The smirk on his face when you turn to him, wide eyed and lost for words, only grows at your reaction. Gotcha.

“What are you talki..”

“Come on now Darling, we both know what’s going on here.”

“I promise you we do not.” You’ve heard whispers of MX around town, while you didn’t know much, you did know that if this guy thought you were somehow apart of it, then this was a dangerous misunderstanding.

“You have a choice.” Jongin takes another step closer, “You can leave, now, and make sure MX stay out of Exodus for good,” Reaching under his jacket, he grabs the gun that’s been burning through the back of his shirt since you called out to him, “Or I can send them a message myself. Choose.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about!” You tried to keep calm, swallowing the lump forming at the back of your throat. When you spotted the gun being pulled from his coat, it was like a pin dropped and the reality of the situation finally began to sink in.

Exodus is a dangerous place. Exodus is full of dangerous people. You were standing alone with a strange man that you’d just yelled at, that had been following you for god knows how long, a gun pointed at your face and not a soul in sight that would help you.

He doesn’t flinch when you jump back, his smirk doesn’t falter when you start begging for him to listen. In Jongin’s mind, the fact you’d acknowledged his presence at all was enough to prove you were involved.

“Please, please, just listen to me, t-there’s been a mistake, I d-don’t kno…”

“Oh my god shut up!” He yelled over your desperate cries, “It’s over! Done!”

“I don’t know who you think I am, b-but my name is Y/N I grew up a few towns over with my parents, I-I study Conservation Biology at the university because when I was little I saw a film about sea turtles and now I love them.. I...” you read somewhere that telling a killer personal information about yourself would make them less likely to kill you; so, with your hands held up in surrender, you start begging, pleading, letting slip every boring and mediocre fact about yourself in hopes that the handsome stranger will let you live.

Jongin was taken aback to say the least. Never had a target begged for their life quite like this before, but the more you rambled on and the more tears that fell down your cheeks, he couldn’t help it. He believed you.

This is a mistake... Did I mess up here? Fuck! His mind raced to find a way out of this, but his composure was breaking down with each second you plead your case. How could he have gotten things so wrong? Looking at you now; scared and shaking, there was no way you could be with MX. Jongin’s mind quickly looks back on all the time he’d been watching you, at school, at the library, with friends, home alone... Is it possible he let feelings cloud his judgment? No… Jongin didn’t have feelings.

Bang.

In a split second the air was slashed with bullets, plastering the wall behind you with open wounds. Your body drops to the floor, hands covering your ears like a scared child at a fireworks display, your screams piercing through the air.

Jongin doesn’t even think about it before he’s at your side. He fires back some warning shots, just enough to cover the pair of you so he could pull you out of there, but you were frozen in place.

“C’mon we need to get out of here! I can’t get a clear shot!”

Jongin hoisted your trembling body into his arms, waiting for a gap in the bullet wave before rushing out of the street. Weaving between the crumbling buildings, waiting in the shadows for a free moment to sprint out of there to a nearby underpass. It was sheltered and open, meaning Jongin could keep a solid eye on the surroundings while still keeping you safe while he let himself freak out a little.

As soon as he puts you on the ground you melt into the concrete, hugging your knees to your chest and crying into them silently. It’s all too much. How did this happen? Yesterday you were failing Bio and trying to avoid the creeper puppy boy that’d been following you. Now…. you were pretty sure you were going to die tonight.

“Fuck...fuck..fuck, fuck, FUCK!” Jongin paces back and forth, using the barrel of his gun to scratch away the headache slowly spreading across his temples. How could he have messed up this badly? He’s the best… at least... he was the best.

With every footstep he takes you flinch a little, hyper aware of the gun swinging from his hand, fingertip dancing along the trigger. You still don’t know who he is or why you’re there but you’ve seen enough to know to keep quiet. So you stay sitting on the ground, letting the tears melt into the fabric of your jeans, watching the state of panic escalate in the man in front of you while your own turned into something akin to resentment.

After almost half an hour of silently waiting for some sort of direction, you’ve had enough. Eventually Jongin had stopped pacing, choosing to lean up against the wall with head in hands, instead. In your mind, you have nothing to do with this. There is nothing connecting you to whatever chaos was happening here. You had no reason to wait around to get shot.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?!” He shouts, annoyance bubbling beneath his skin.

“Home.”

“You can’t!” Pushing himself off the wall, Jongin reaches for your arm in an attempt to keep you still. You try to shake him off but his grip is too strong.

“I DIDN’T ASK FOR ANY OF THIS!” You’re screaming at him now. Tears no longer from fear, but anger. You feel trapped in whatever this was and it wasn’t fair, you just want to go home.

“Yeah well tough shit Darling, because unfortunately you’re my responsibility now and it’s my job to make sure you don’t get yourself killed!”

“I can take care of myself! I’ve been doing it long enough!” He rolls his eyes at your response, growing tired of trying to be the good guy for once. “Let me go! I’ll be just fine! Like always!”

Finally loosening the grip on your arm, Jongin let’s you storm off. Waiting, only out of spite, for you to be out of ear shot before cussing out loud at himself.

---

Somehow you managed to drag yourself to class. The events of last night still burning fresh at the back of your mind, but you were desperate enough for a distraction that even Professor Jeong’s morning class was worth that extra effort.

Barely able to keep your eyes open with the little sleep you were actually able to get, it takes you a moment to recognise the familiar body that plants themselves in the desk next to yours.

Jongin doesn’t look at you. Maybe it’s pride, maybe it’s nerves, but he keeps his eyes trained on the professor’s desk up front, waiting for his cover to be inevitably blown all for the sake of keeping you safe.

“Good morning class!” The professor’s abrupt entrance pulls your shocked and frustrated gaze from burning holes in the side of Jongin’s neck. His tan skin glowing under the plain white tee he’s wearing, hair falling into his eyes softly, contradicting the hard image he’d worn the night before. Does he have his gun with him? You wonder, letting your eyes wander to the waistband of his jeans, remembering how he’d pulled the weapon from them the night before. Stop! You hope he doesn’t realise you’ve been blankly staring at his crotch, mind racing with questions, you don’t even know his name.

“Today we’re picking up the remaining presentati…” When the admirable Professor meets eyes with Jongin, smirking from his seat beside you knowingly, he loses all train of thought.

It’s a feeling Jongin had missed. When a mark knows they’re done for, that he’s coming for them. When their eyes double in size. When fear pales their skin. When they lose all hope of fucking over EXO and getting away with it.

“T-today..um…” You can see the Professor eyeing your seat partner nervously, stuttering over his words. You’d never seen Jeong like this before, he looked terrified, and after last night it didn’t take a genius to figure out why.

Jongin shifts in his seat, enjoying the effect his presence has on the esteemed scholar. While Jeong tries to regain some semblance of decorum, Jongin wraps one of his arms around your shoulders and squeezes tightly, keeping eye contact with the professor, claiming you.

“What are you doing?” keeping your voice low as to not draw anymore attention to you both, you try to push Jongin’s arm away from you, only for him to put it right back.

“My job. Now be quiet.” He hisses, hiding the harshness of his voice behind a sickly sweet smile.

Professor Jeong spends the entire lecture avoiding your side of the room, refusing to make eye contact, completely ignoring you. You try not to take it personally of course, it’s definitely not because of something you did, that you know for sure; but for once you actually know the answers to some of these questions and want to participate.

“I told you, I can take care of myself!” you grumbled, again trying to physically get Jongin away from you, but he just smirks. Like he was enjoying it. Like this was all just some big game and not the life threatening situation he’d made it out to be the night before.

And you would probably believe that were true, if it wasn’t for his nails digging so sharply into your shoulder.

By the time class finishes you want to run a million miles away. The pressure of Jongin’s arm around your neck you’re sure will leave you aching for days; but as long as he’s far away from you, you can deal with it. You all but sprint out of the lecture hall, forgetting all about your next class and heading straight home; taking a back street you hope he hadn’t seen you use before.

“What the hell is this?” You mumble to yourself, pushing down the fear as far as you can in hopes the empty space will leave room for answers. You’re so caught up in your head, trying to figure out what you did to deserve this, you don’t even realise that Jongin’s been on your tail the whole time, watching you freak out and creep around like the amateur he now knows you are. It’s not until he steps into your building’s elevator with you that you realize he’s there.

“Jesus! Fuck, can’t you leave me alone!” He was exhausting; flattering when you thought it was a puppy crush, less so now you know he wanted to kill you.

“I can’t,” Jongin leans against the side of the elevator, growing tired of the chase.

“Why?! You’re the only one stalking me here!”

“Oh Darling, you have no idea.”

“Then explain! Because I’m tired of this! I have work to do, classes to study for, and I can’t when you’re scaring my teachers and dragging me through shoot outs!!”

Jongin understands why you’re annoyed. He gets it, he messed up and now you’re in danger. But to admit that outloud… to admit that to you… he’d rather not.

He doesn’t give you an answer, finding his reflection in the steel doors far more interesting, chewing the inside of his cheek and fixing his jacket over and over.

When you finally reach your floor, it becomes a race of wills to get to your apartment. Jongin trying to force his way in; you trying to lock him out. You sprint for the door, key in hand; almost managing to slam it shut in his face before Jongin’s hand pushes it back open, forcing himself through the small gap and locking you both inside.

In a second he’s slamming your back against the door with his hand covering your mouth, keeping you in place with the weight of his body, trying to work up the nerve to finally tell you the truth.

“I’m not going to hurt you, but you need to listen to me just for one fucking second… My name is Jongin, okay?” he asks, face dangerously close to your own. You manage a weak nod under his hold, terrified but needing answers.

“I made a mistake. I...I thought you were working with MX,”

Your eyes widen at the second mentioning of the infamous gang, more confused than ever as to why he thought you would ever be involved with them. He didn’t even know you.

“There’s rumours they’re coming for EXO territory..”

He’s with EXO. The realisation floods through your body like a lightning strike, frying your nerves, limbs locked in place while the rest of your body falls limp into his arms. EXO. The kings of this city. The reason shops close early and children aren’t allowed out after 9. The doctors responsible for prescribing the death, the destruction, of a city once so healthy and vibrant. Monsters, as far as you’re concerned.

“They must have seen me tailing you and after last night, I think you’re a target.” Jongin watches as your eyes well up with tears, red and swollen as you choke back the sobs you so obviously want to release. It doesn’t affect him… it doesn’t make him angry… he doesn’t want to wrap you in a hug and take it all back… right?

“So as much as you don’t like it, I’m here. I messed up so I need to fix it, because this isn’t a game and this isn’t a joke. If they think you’re with us they will kill you. Milk carton kids, where are they now, 27 club dead.”

You wish he was a better actor. That he could hide the shame, guilt, pain he feels for putting you in this position better. That the cold exterior he wears so well didn’t have quite as many cracks, because then maybe you could tell yourself that everything was going to be okay. But if Jongin looks scared, then you’re absolutely terrified.

Blinded by the fear, your body reacts before your mind can catch up. Fists pounding into his chest weakly as the sound of your sobs rip into his heart. You’re in hysterics, screaming at him for an answer to questions still lodged at the back of your throat. Jongin doesn’t break down with you, as much as his body tries. Instead he just grabs your wrists, stopping their assault and pinning them into his embrace. His hold the only thing keeping you standing as you finally let the last walls crumble, letting out every tear, every scream, every desperate cry for it all to be some twisted dream.

Jongin doesn’t know how you both ended up on the floor, your head buried between your knees as his hand finds itself brushing through your hair. Somehow you manage to calm yourself down, letting the sobs turn to whimpers and cries to sniffles. Finally numb after the dust settles in your mind, you force yourself to look back up at Jongin. He looks how you feel, just doing a better job at hiding it; you don’t miss the concern that washes over his face and maybe that’s why you decide to let him stay. If he was so determined to fix what he’d done, you weren’t going to stop him. At least not tonight.

“I need to sleep,” you say weakly, standing on shaky legs but brushing off Jongin’s worried hands when he tries to help, “you can stay on the couch.”

---

Tiptoeing across the living room, shoelaces dangling from your teeth while your hands clutch onto your books; you’re desperately trying not to wake a sleeping Jongin. His sprawled out body half falling from the couch, you admit he looks a lot cuter when he’s sleeping.

Before you can stop it, one of your shoes drops from between your teeth, making Jongin jump up at the sound.

“What are you doing?” he mumbled, rubbing the fatigue from his face, stretching back into his familiar hard persona.

“Uhh, going for breakfast?”

“Did you not hear me last night!” It didn’t sound like a question. His voice raising ever so slightly in frustration as he stands to tower over you. Failing miserably at being as intimidating as usual, with his hair a mess and cheeks puffy.

“I heard you,” you say, pushing your feet into the fallen shoes before giving him a chance to stop you, “I’m just not going to hide away like a victim when this is your mess.” He stiffens at your words, ignoring the cut they etch into his heart, instead focusing on your relentless stubbornness in such a risky situation.

“If they catch you out alone they won’t miss another shot!” Jongin clenches his jaw when you roll your eyes at his remark, unsure of what he can do to change your mind.

“Look if you’re so worried, you’re more than welcome to join me,” you offer, determination radiating off of your face in such a way that Jongin finds himself unable to argue.

---

For the next few days Jongin stays by your side, sleeping on your couch, going to breakfasts, your classes, all to make sure you were safe.

He walks the familiar routes around town with you, not from a few paces back this time, but shoulder to shoulder. Sitting beside you in Professor Jeong’s early morning classes, Jongin was having far too much fun watching the colour drain from his face each time he showed up to one of your lectures to kill him just yet.

Everything became a threat to your safety. As far as Jongin was concerned, your life was in danger and MX could strike at any moment…. Even if it had been quiet since the shooting… it was better to be safe. That’s what Jongin told himself everytime he stayed a little longer.

“Hey Y/N!” Minho waved at you from across the library, he was reshelving returns when he spotted you studying at your usual table.

Jongin felt his ears burn red at the sight. Jaw clenching when he sees the boy walk over. Eyes narrow in judgment when you return his warm smile.

“Hey Minho, how are you?” It’d been a few days since you’d last had the chance to talk with Minho, him still as handsome as ever, but your heart not jumping quite so high at the interaction.

“I’m good, are you? I’ve missed seeing you around lately..” Minho let’s his words fade noticing the glare he was getting from the man sat beside you. “Oh I’m sorry, I’m Minho, Y/N’s friend!”

Jongin glances at Minho’s outstretched hand between them, choosing to throw his own over your shoulder rather than shake it.

“I’m Kai, Y/N’s boyfriend.” He smirks at the shocked expression that Minho wears, ignoring your startled one in favour of silently challenging the boy to leave.

“Oh...oh uh… Nice to meet you, I’ll see you guys around..”

Jongin keeps you close till he’s sure Minho has gone, only loosening his grip when he feels you nudge him gently.

“What the fuck was that, Kai?” You’re more amused than angry, but you’d never let him know that, enjoying seeing the varied emotions you can bring out of him now, when he was supposed to be a stone cold killer.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about?” feigning innocence, Jongin tries to go back to reading the book he’d randomly grabbed from the pile in front of you both.

You scoff at his reaction, or lack thereof, staring at him quizzically till he finally gave in.

“That guy is sketchy! I’m here to protect you right? So I’m protecting you. Good?”

“Minho is not sketchy,” you giggle and Jongin can’t help but smile at the sound, “and who is Kai?”

“It’s what my friends call me!”

---

“Hey!” Jongin had appeared out of nowhere, pulling the cigarette from between your lips and stomping it out. With Geord goading you relentlessly for the last hour of class, you were desperate for a smoke. You would argue that those little white sticks of bliss were the only thing keeping you from ripping his throat out.

“It’s disgusting,” he says, leaning down to your height so he could look you in the eye, “why do you do this?”

With a deep sigh, you stuff the near empty packet of unlit cigarettes back into your coat pocket, storming away in frustration, knowing he’d follow you.

“Wait, I’m serious!”

“I like them!” you shout back, thankful the streets were empty so you could argue in peace.

“They’re bad for you you know!” he teases, laughing when you throw your middle finger up behind you.

“My cigarettes are better for me than you are!” Teasing back, you finally turn to face him, a cheeky smile on your face.

---

“We got him.”

While making dinner for the pair of you, Jongin’s phone buzzes on the counter, a string of messages coming in from someone called Minseok. You tried not to be nosey, sitting on the counter beside him while he cooked, but he didn’t even glance at it.

“Wasn’t MX. Some small town nobody trying to prove himself.”

“Jongin”

“Call me when you get this”

“Boss wants you back asap”

The thought of Jongin leaving had never even crossed your mind till then. It hadn’t been that long at all, but it felt like an eternity since he’d first come into your life. Maybe it was selfish to want him to stay.

Jongin had recently started to open up to you more about his work with EXO. He was their protector, he kept them safe. You didn’t see him as this dangerous monster anymore, he was just Jongin, Kai, the one who took care of things. Just like he’d been taking care of you all this time.

You knew deep down that when he left you’d probably never see him again; if what EXO suspects is true and MX really were making their way into Exodus, then there was a storm coming and Jongin would be right in the middle of it. He wouldn’t risk getting you anymore tangled in EXO’s mess.

“Here, try this,” Jongin held a spoon up to your mouth expectantly; pretending he didn’t see Minseok’s messages, pretending you didn’t see them either, holding on to this reality for just a little longer.

---

“We need you back Jongin,”

After ignoring Minseok’s messages a few days ago, Jongin couldn’t ignore another call from the boss.

“Jun I have to pr..”

“No you don’t! We took care of the shooter, the girl will be fine! EXO needs you, I need you!”

He doesn’t want to leave. Jongin doesn’t know what it is that makes him want to stay near you, keep you safe, go to breakfasts at Lou’s - but the thought of leaving it all behind makes his heart twist and turn in unimaginable ways.

His whole life had been about EXO. They’re his friends, his family, and he would never abandon them. But somehow he’s made a new home with you, in his heart at least. You feel like home. Sitting on your living room floor watching Blue Planet feels like home. Falling asleep on your shoulder in the middle of your lectures feels like home. EXO have been his entire identity for so long, but now there’s this other life, another door, and Jongin was finding hard to resist stepping through.

“Be back today. We have work to do.”

After Junmyeon’s orders, the frustration coursed through Jongin’s body with such force he hadn’t even realised he’d thrown the phone till you were beside him, asking what was wrong.

“I...I have to leave.” He couldn’t look you in the eye. He didn’t want to see the betrayal, the disappointment, the pain reflected in them. “It’s my fault you’re in danger and now I have to leave you…”

He doesn’t know that you know.

“I..I’ll be okay Nini.. I can look after myself remember?” Your voice is weak but you do your best to convince him; as much as you want him to stay you know that’s not an option, and you know he knows it too because he can barely look at you right now.

“Y/N… I don’t want to leave..”

It broke your heart but there was no other choice. You had to let him go. The boy you’d tried so hard to avoid just a few weeks ago, you now didn’t want to see go.

“I know..” You cup the side of his face, forcing him to look at you as you spoke, “but they need you Nini...” It was hard to keep how you were really feeling hidden, especially when he looked like he was about to break, “You’re the best Nini, they deserve the best.”

He knew you were right. He needed to be there for EXO, his family. Things in Exodus were about to get a lot messier and the fallout would be astronomical, if he wasn’t there to do his part there’s no telling what could happen, then you really would be in danger.

Leaning into your touch, Jongin grips onto your hips like it was the first time not the last, pulling you flush against his body. Memorizing the shape of your hips, touch of your skin, smell of your shampoo. Locking you inside his heart. Melding the memory of you into his soul so that this wouldn’t be the last time. He would forever be with you and you would always be there for him, long after he’s gone.

Looking at you would be too much, he might not be able to force himself away if he saw your eyes. Saying goodbye felt too final, like the end of something that never really was. Instead Jongin buried your head into his shaking chest, placing a gentle kiss to the top of your head, pretending he can’t feel your tears soaking through his shirt, before turning away and walking out of your life forever.

#in exodus #the hitman #in exodus the hitman #exo #exo au #exo imagine #exo fanfic #exo fic #exo reation #exo scenario #kim jongin #jongin scenarios #jongin reaction #jongin imagine #jongin fic #jongin au #exo kai #exo jongin au #exo kai au

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ourkarlanicoleuniverse · 4 years ago

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Sweet Nothing (MHA Staff AU Fanfiction)

Chapter 14

A/N: Sorry for going on a whole month hiatus with the story. I was swamped with college work and then I had slight writer’s block. But hopefully, that’s all over now. I’ll try to update more frequently. Thank you for being very understanding.

Warnings: None, swf. Long chapter.

Shouta Aizawa x OC (Mai Montoya, Pro Hero Zion)

If you want to read of the events before this chapter here is the Master List 😊

I heard a thump in the next room and a groan in pain; I rushed over to my guest room to see Aizawa dropped a box on his foot. I couldn’t help but burst into laughter. Mic, Vlad, and Midnight came rushing in to see the commotion and were confused to see me dying of laughter while Aizawa sat on the floor holding his foot.

“What happened?” Vlad asked.

Midnight took joy in seeing me laugh at Aizawa, “Clearly someone is a sadist. Mai is laughing at Aizawa’s pain.”

I wiped my eyes and held my stomach, “It’s not my fault. I told him not to handle heavy things because he barely recovered. He didn’t listen, and now he got hurt.” Once I composed myself, I grabbed the box he dropped and moved to unpack it, “Nemuri, I have ice packs in my freezer. Can you grab Aizawa one?”

Nemuri left to the kitchen while the two men were still standing dumbfounded. Aizawa glared at them, “You guys can go back to hanging stuff on the walls. We’re fine.” Mic threw his hands up while Vlad huffed. I couldn’t help but grin a little. Aizawa scooched over next to me to help me get the stuff out of the box while trying to figure out where to put everything. Nemuri came back in and gave him the ice pack not without kissing his cheek and leaving to go back to my room and organize my desk area. “This whole box is just books. Why did you bring all of this if you knew it was only going to be a year?”

“Because I didn’t trust my cousin with my books. I’ve collected them since before I started school. They’re my babies.” I hugged the books I had in my hands and slightly cradled them.

Aizawa just shook his head at me while taking more books out. “I’m almost positive you haven’t read all of them.”

“Yes, I have…. Okay, maybe at least more than half of them.” I pouted. “I’ve been busy.” Aizawa simply huffed and nodded in response. “I am going to go check in on Vlad and Mic. I’ll send you a picture of how I had my bookshelf back at home.” I heard a scoff come out from him as I walked out and texted him the photo. I simply ignored it.

Walking into my living room, I see Vlad adjusting a large frame with a picture of our graduating class, all while Mic was sitting on the couch. “Do you think I should move more to the left or the right?” Vlad called out.

“Honestly, I feel like the spot is okay. You just have it crooked.” Mic sat comfortably with his feet on the couch and a bottle in his hand.

I glided off the ground to go and help Vlad readjust the frame marking where the corners met the wall as Vlad went to grab the hammer and nails. He snuck a quick kiss on my forehead as he hammered away, “Thanks, Mai. I’m happy to have help.”

I giggled slightly and lightly slapped his shoulder, “You’re the one helping me out here. I should be thanking you.” I almost instinctively went in to kiss his cheek but was interrupted by a slight grumble coming from the blond laying on my couch. I turned over to Mic and pursed my lips, “Yes, Mr. Yamada?”

He took a swig of his beer, “Don’t call me that. But anyhoo, please refrain from being all cutesy in front of me. I didn’t even know you guys were a thing.”

“Who’s a thing?” Midnight walked in with an empty box.

“Mai and Vlad. I just saw them making out.” Mic cringed.

“I highly doubt they were doing that. They’re very reserved. But that's cute that you guys are together. I’m happy for you.”

I slowly went back to the ground and was a blushing mess, “Well, uh... “

“We haven’t made it official; we just been on one date, really. It’s mainly just us flirty back and forth. We thought that with the extra time from work and the students this week. We could squeeze a few more dates.” He draped his arm around me and smiled excitedly.

“That is, if nothing happens with any of the students during their work-study, I’m responsible for them if things occur because I am their counselor.” I shrugged. I motioned Kayama to come outside with me to show her where to put the empty boxes. I felt Mic’s eyes on me. It felt like I was doing something wrong. The judgment seeped through my skin.

I set the box on top of a stack of other boxes in the storage unit behind the building, “Don’t worry about Yamada. You know he gets protective of you.” Nemuri reassured me.

“I know, but it feels like it’s a different kind of negative aura. Almost like he was annoyed by the idea of Vlad and me. It’s barely anything like Vlad said. He doesn’t need to get so crabby.” I shrugged and hung my head low.

“He’s probably madder about Aizawa than about you.” Nemuri let out a small grin. Her hand reached over to rub my back. Nemuri was always like a big sister figure for all of us in the group, so I guess it’s just natural to play things off like it's nothing because she’s seen it all before.

“Why would he mad at Aizawa? This has nothing to do with him.” I looked up at her like a confused child looking at an older adult.

“Oh, just Aizawa pissed him off about something, so he’s just a little annoyed, is all.” She brushed off, but I could tell she was holding something in. “But honestly, it's good to see you see someone romantically for once. Even if it isn’t much right now, things like relationships grow anyways.” I simply nodded.

“I feel a little weird about it, to be honest,” I admitted. I liked the attention Vlad was giving me but it kind of felt off because of my circumstances. I only ever dated two people briefly, and the rest were casual hookups because I never really felt like I could be committed to someone. Between my hero work and then my own personal issues, it's hard to believe someone would even want something serious with me.

“Why?”

“With what happened to Lily, and, you know, me planning to leave at the end of the year. I just don’t feel like it's appropriate to start dating someone. Even if it just happened and I’m actually pretty happy with it.” I switched my gaze to the view of campus, “I feel like it’s not a good idea to be dating.”

“Then maybe communicate that with Vlad. He’s a very logical and understanding person.”

“I guess you’re right…” Beep. Beep. Beep. I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and saw a call coming from an unknown number. I decided it was best to ignore it. Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Maybe you should answer that.” Nemuri giggled.

“I don’t know the number.” I sighed and answered the call, “Hello?”

“Mai?” An all too familiar voice rang through my ear. A voice that I shouldn’t hear from at all.

Gemini. “What do you want, Brandon?” Nemuri looked a little concerned, but I quickly shook my hand to let her know everything was fine.

“How’s Japan?” Is he serious right now?

“It’s fine, you do know you, and I aren’t allowed to be speaking during my suspension, right? Or did Captain Celebrity give you too many concussions that you forgot?” I rolled my eyes, trying to conceal the annoyance in my voice but failing miserably.

“Oh no, I am very well aware. I just had to know how my little poppy flower is doing? No suspension can prevent me from wondering.” I heard the evil smirk running across his voice. “Missing me? Or are you still pretending to act like a victim?”

“I’m hanging up. Go fuck yourself, Brandon. You’re better off by yourself and away from other people.”

“Now, that’s not very nice, Poppy. I just wanted to let you know that I can’t wait to have you back at work under me…” I hung up my phone and decided to text Nezu about getting a new phone number. Not even a stupid suspension and judge sentence can get that man off my back.

Nemuri gently grabbed my hand. “Mai, you’re shaking. What did he say to you?”

“It’s nothing. I’m just annoyed that I have to change my number again.” I gave her a reassuring smile. “Let’s just go back inside and finish up my apartment; please, I have a lot of emails to go through from teachers and parents.” Nemuri simply nodded but kept her hands in mine as we walked back into the apartment.

We walked in as Aizawa stormed out and shoving Nemuri and me into the door. We both turned over to look at Mic. He hesitantly spoke, trying to figure out how to explain what happened. I knew better to know that he was trying to find a way to cover for his best friend. “Um, apparently he needed to help with a case, and you know he’s not injured, so he’s a little excited to be working again.” He let out a nervous smile.

I let out a groan and ran out to catch up to Aizawa, “Recovery Girl told him that he still needed time before he did patrols; why is he like this?” Too bad, the man quickly vanished. “Idiot. I swear if he ends up injured again, I’m not taking care of him again.”

I made my way back inside with awaiting eyes watching me. I simply huffed and shrugged, indicating to them that I couldn’t find him. Mic approached me as I went into the kitchen to grab a water bottle. He leaned down and whispered in my ear, “He was fine until I mentioned you and Vlad we sort of a thing.”

I met with the emerald eyes that were peering into me, “Yeah, I kind of figured it wasn’t actually patrolling. He even said during lunch today that he wasn’t going to be patrolling any time soon. That he was going to take the week off from teaching the class to build up his strength.”

Mic huffed, “So you and he weren’t having any weird hang-ups? I can’t think of any reason why you and Vlad would piss him off.”

I took a sip of my water and shrugged, “Beats me. I don’t know everything about him.”

“Don’t you two have some unspoken connection?” Mic pursed his lips in genuine confusion.

“No, we don’t. If anything, he’s just grumpy to see Vlad happy. Remember, they have a weird competitive colleague relationship going on.” I tried my best not to sound so irritated. But I wasn’t in the mood to be dealing with Aizawa’s shenanigans after my little call from Gemini. “I thought you guys knew everything about each other.”

“Well, we kind of do, meaning I know about your little panic attack after the festival. And you know the almost kiss…” He raised an eyebrow at me condescendingly. As if I was a child being ratted out for misbehaving. “So, why are you dating Vlad instead of Aizawa?”

“Because I like Vlad and that almost kiss? It was just a reaction due to emotional stress and old feelings. Nothing too serious to focus on. Nothing happened after that. Plus, Vlad is nice to me.”

“Bullshit, what about this morning?” This morning? “In the nurse’s office? Longing pause between you both, you in his arms, the slow leaning in with the undying urge to mold into one another? Doesn’t ring any bells?”

I scowled at him, “That was nothing. You weren’t even there. How did you even know about that?”

“If it’s nothing, why are you mad that I know anything. Face it. You guys still have feelings towards each other.” He grinned like a mad man, “And if you guys do, then that’s good. I always felt that you guys were the closest thing to soulmates.”

“Soulmates, my ass. The guy ditched me in third year and then never wanted to keep in contact with me for fourteen years.” I couldn’t help but laugh in annoyance at Mic. “Stop trying to paint Aizawa out to be a nice person. He still did all of that and never fully apologized for it. If you were my friend, you would be happy that I’m starting something with someone that has only treated me well.” I stared into his eyes with nothing but sternness. “I get that Shota is a good person, with a lot of baggage. But so does everyone else. I’m sorry that I can’t look past that he’s treated me wrongly because of the few times he’s treated me like a human being since I’ve been back.” My eyes were slightly stinging at this point, “If I forgave so easily and didn’t hold it against people for what they did wrong to me, then I would be like all the other female pros in the U.S. being used and abused. And I’m tired of all of that. I’m tired of having to be the bigger person. If he has a problem with me being with someone else, that’s his own problem, not mine.”

Hizashi’s face fell in concern as he moved to wipe the tear falling from my eyes, “Okay. I get it. But maybe you shouldn’t be falling for the first person that does treat you the way you want to be treated too. You are worth more than that.” It’s hard for me even to believe that I am even worth anything at this point. I can’t wait to have you back at work under me…

“Vlad isn’t the first. And it's new, so don’t act like it's so serious.” I took a breath and wiped my face.

“And maybe you shouldn’t be dating with that mindset either; that’s not fair to Vlad. But if you’re having fun and enjoying yourself with his company, I guess that’s all that matters. Just please stop leading on Sho.”

“I’m not the one leading anyone on,” I grumbled.

“Well, I don’t know about that. You are a natural flirt. You never know when you have someone falling for you.” Hizashi moved a few pieces of hair out of my face and kissed my forehead.

You are a natural flirt. You never know when you have someone falling for you. That’s not really something I needed to hear right now.

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

Taglist:

@multifandoms916 @inumorph @thatgirlwithcamera @mel-sanch

#mhaoc #mha #aizawa shouta #eraserhead #canon x oc #aizawa x oc #mha x oc #my hero academia fanfic #bnha fanfiction #bnha #mha fanfiction #bnha oc #bnha original character #mha original character #eraserhead x oc

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its-my-little-dumpster-fire · 5 years ago

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Thoughts while quarantine cleaning:

I’m not going to subject you to 900 posts about my self discovery through a thorough exploration of the trash fire I call my life. So I’m just going to collect them here.

Comment. Or don’t. This is for me.

How many copies of Common Sense by Thomas Paine is too many copies?

I need to play more golf to justify my collection of lightweight quarter zips.

The bag I’m using to gather my head scarves, bandannas, and buffs has already overflowed. Is that a problem?

Dream Home: includes a separate closet just for fan gear, jerseys, hats, etc.

For someone who doesn’t think essential oils do anything but smell nice, my bedside crates look like an apothecary.

I’ve found 3 hair brushes and haven’t brushed my hair in almost two years.

Why did I keep so many textbooks? If anyone has questions about sports psych, counseling in a multicultural society, neuroscience, or clinical. Quiz me.

Golden Girls coloring book. I’m not going to top this discovery.

I’m not saying I’m secretly a psychopath, but Idk anyone else who keeps a box of broken lightbulbs.

The headlamp is on. We’re getting serious.

I think I’m officially at the age where I have to decide if I’m going to unironically wear camo for the rest of my life or get rid of it all now and never look back. There is no inbetween.

Can someone please acknowledge the amount of personal growth required to stop wearing a ball cap with a bent fishing hook over the bill?

Stacked atop each other, two shirts of identical color. One: ANVIL. Two: Astronaut in a space suit, but with the head of a full grown deer, antlers and all. Billy Russo doesn’t have this problem.

If you need a adult sized flight suit from space camp, DM me

Playing rock band alone in my living room- cool or really sad?

If I do nothing else with my quarantine, but I manage to finish wallpapering my bedroom after 5 years... it will have been worth it.

Started a bag of clothing that I need to return to the insignificant other. Can someone tell me why girls steal shirts? Can someone bash me in the forehead for being a girl who steals shirts without realizing it?

I have a confusing amount of turquoise jewelry and cowboy boots for someone who has never lived in the Southwest.

Is it irresponsible to just start over, shoe wise?

When this done, imma pop all this expired mucinex and just see what happens.

How high will this post get before someone calls that Hoarder show from TLC?

MacBook charger extender count: 3

Every time I start to clean, I fantasize about faking my own death so someone else can do it.

But honestly, I would #thrive in witness protection.

Hope these sketchy neighbors start acting up, I’m ready for a change.

Pulled the book “the Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” off my shelf. So that’s how this is going.

A NOOK.

Can you download fic to a Nook?

Took a break to eat pickles and laugh. Now I’ve lost all my mojo.

Now that I moved the 3ft pineapple out of my closet, I feel like we’re really getting somewhere.

The 100lb dog is CRYING because there are bags and bookshelf blocking him from being able to jump on my bed. He has two of his own. But ok.

Only two boobs and a million bras.

Lost: will to live

Found: my ukulele and a giant marquis monogram

We’ve transitioned from active cleaning to feng shui. When does the anxiety leave?

At 12:34, at 26 years young, I think I finally fucked my back. So I’ll just be here on the floor.

#ignore me #im just tracking my treasure finding

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argylemnwrites · 5 years ago

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Seven Year Itch

Pairing: Bryce Lahela x MC (Cassie Vanderfield)

Book: Open Heart (6 years after the end of Book 1)

Word Count: ~1500

Rating: PG

Summary: Bryce finds himself unusually sentimental as a large chapter in his life draws to a close.

Author’s Note: Written for Day 31 of the Choices July Challenge (prompt - Endings). This was an anon request, and hopefully it is as fluffy as they were hoping for!

Bryce pushed the arrow button several times before landing on the option that he’d rarely used over the past seven years. He hovered for a moment before pushing the select button twice. His pager was officially off.

He hadn’t expected it to be emotional. He’d even gone so far as to tease Cassie when she’d told him it would be that morning.

“I’m telling you, Bryce, it’s a big deal. Sienna and I cried.”

“Cassie, you didn’t even leave Edenbrook for fellowship!”

“It was still emotional, Bryce. It’ll be your last moment as a resident.”

“Yeah, somehow I don’t think I’m gonna get all torn up over not having to carry the first call pager or having to work 30 hours straight for $15 an hour.”

Those had been his words, yet here he was, feeling a wave of sadness wash over him as he entered the Graduate Medical Education office, ID badge and now turned-off pager in hand. As he walked over to the desk of the administrative assistant, she gave him a warm smile.

“Last shift, huh? Congratulations, doctor!” she said brightly, extending her hands out, taking two of the objects he’d carried with him everywhere for the past seven years and dropping them in a box on her desk.

“Anything else you need from me?”

“You already turned in any hospital scrubs?”

He nodded. He’d taken care of that last month, after his last operation. The past four weeks had been a medical education elective, and he hadn’t seen the inside of an OR at all.

“Then you’re all set!”

So, that was it. He was done with residency. Seven years wrapped up, just like that, with the handing off of a pager and an ID badge. It felt like it should take more than a simple drop off to bring this part of his life to an end. But that was all it took to transition from Bryce Lahela, surgical resident to Bryce Lahela, surgical oncology fellow.

Bryce usually wasn’t one for introspection, but damn if Cassie hadn’t been right. He did feel emotional over it all, and as he got on the T, he couldn’t help but think back on the past seven years and everything that had happened.

He remembered the surgeries, all his time in the OR. All the cases he’d scrubbed in on, the incisions he’d made, the tumors he debulked, the organs he procured. He remembered the doctors he’d worked with and learned from, some of them brilliant attendings, others his own peers. He remembered his patients. Not all of them, of course, but there were the ones that stuck with him. The ones he’d saved against all odds. The ones he’d lost in spite of his best effort.

And that didn’t even touch on everything that had happened to him in his personal life over the past seven years. Meeting Cassie. Buying their loft together. Sliding that ring onto her finger. Getting married and starting a family. Things he would have never anticipated when he opened that envelope on Match Day and saw he was going to Edenbrook.

He knew he wouldn’t be where he was today without her. She’d always thanked him for his unconditional support, but Bryce knew that street went both ways. Sure, he’d been there for her through a lot of drama during their intern year, but she’d paid that back ten times over, at least. From her ranking Edenbrook first when she was applying for fellowships so that they wouldn’t have to do long distance to her enthusiasm when he told her that he was going to go for surgical oncology, even though that meant two years of research before his fellowship. From her paying down his student debt once she started earning an attending salary to her covering the cost of all of his fellowship applications. And then, when he’d matched not at Edenbrook or Dana-Farber as they had hoped, but at Duke, she’d applied for a North Carolina medical license, even when she found out none of the diagnostics teams around Durham were hiring at that time. She was willing to uproot her life, move from Boston, and take a job that was not an ideal fit, all so that he could pursue the training he wanted.

As he got off the T at the stop a few blocks from their loft, he realized how strange it was going to be to leave Boston. He never really thought about Boston as his home, but now that the movers were coming tomorrow afternoon, he knew how much he would miss it. The restaurants, the museums and history, their neighborhood, their friends. Hell, he might even miss the winters. Even though he still said he was from Hawaii, Boston held more precious memories for him than any other place. And never was that more clear than when he stepped through the door of their loft, taking in the chaos.

Boxes were everywhere, stacked along the walls, piled in the middle of the living space, covering the table and the couch. But even with everything that was already packed, there was still so much left to do. The kitchen cabinets were all thrown open, and there was still a lot of shit in them. One of the bookcases by the window was still completely full. And far too many of Kendall’s toys were still scattered across the floor.

Bryce had never thought he’d be one to get sentimental over something like moving out of a place, but the birth of his daughter had changed all that. Now, instead of seeing a nice space that was a convenient commute to Edenbrook, the loft represented so much more. It was the first home that Kendall had known, even though she probably wouldn’t remember anything about it. It was where he’d first seen her smile, first heard her laugh, first watched her walk, first heard her call him “Dada” as she reached for him. And the thought of leaving that place behind was just a little sad.

As if his thoughts summoned her, she came toddling out of the master bedroom, making a beeline for a box in the corner that hadn’t been taped shut yet. She nearly fell over as she peered inside, but kept her balance for long enough to pull out her stuffed octopus before falling down on her butt.

“Hey baby girl, I think Momma had that packed up for a reason,” he said, scooping her up. She smiled at him, but immediately started crying when the octopus slipped out of her hands, tumbling to the ground. At that sound, Cassie came out of the bedroom herself, relief evident on her face when she saw him.

“Thank god you’re home. I ran out of strapping tape three hours ago, and she figured out which boxes have her toys. She’s been unpacking all afternoon,” she blurted out, dropping a kiss on his cheek as she brushed past him, picking up the octopus and returning it to the box.

“I think I can handle a tape run. You want me to take her with me? I can bring back some pizza, too.”

She smiled warmly at him. “You’re a saint.”

“That’s a new one. Hero, godsend, world’s greatest, sure, but never a saint. I’m pretty sure that requires approval from the pope.”

She rolled her eyes as she brought the stroller over to him, “I’m not gonna dignify that with a response. Pick up some more bubble wrap, too. I have the feeling we’ll run out at 2 am if you don’t.”

“You think it’ll be an all-nighter, then?”

Cassie sheepishly gestured around, “I mean, don’t you? There’s still a ton to do. Sorry about that.”

“Don’t apologize. It’s fine. Not like we both haven’t pulled worse for work.”

“I know, I know. But this isn’t the way you should be celebrating the end of residency. We should be getting a sitter, hitting up Donahue’s one last time.”

Bryce shrugged. Sure, seven years ago, that’s probably how he would have pictured his last night as a resident, enjoying one last drunken hurrah with his co-residents. But now, he couldn’t imagine wanting to spend this night with anyone other than his wife and kid.

“Probably shouldn’t have knocked you up if bar nights were that important to me.” She raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth to make a retort, but Bryce just shook his head. “I still get to spend my first night of freedom with two ladies, so I think I’m doing just fine.” She laughed at that, the sound echoing more than usual now that so many of their pillows, rugs, and curtains had been packed away.

“Alright, Kendall. One last Boston adventure?” he asked, snapping her into the stroller.

Pushing her down the sidewalk, he decided to embrace this evening’s wave of sentimentality. It was only natural to feel emotional as his time in Boston came to an end. His life had changed so much, nearly entirely for the better, over the past seven years. And while he would miss the life he and Cassie had built here, he knew that no matter where the next seven years took them, whether they stayed in North Carolina or moved on after his fellowship, that they would make the best of things. Together.

Tags: @omgjasminesimone @mfackenthal @lilyofchoices @thequeenchoices @octobereighth @feartheendlesssummer @tallulahshh @fortunatelywaywardsandwich @dreaming-of-movies @choicesarehard @pinkcoloredmarshmallow @kinda-iconic @choicesjulychallenge

#bryce lahela #bryce x mc #open heart #oh #choices oh #open heart fanfiction #choices fanfiction #choices #playchoices #choices stories you play #oh fanfic #choices july challenge

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camdenfringe · 5 years ago

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CHANGES TO THE PRINTED PROGRAMME

Since we printed the glossy A5 brochure for the Camden Fringe there have been a number of additions to the line-up and a couple of cancellations. Here is a list of forthcoming changes. Always check our website for the most up to date line-up information

**ALTERATIONS**

The times for this show are different to those printed in the brochure You Have Absolutely No Sense Of Time The Black Box Theatre 2, 9-11 August at 4.30pm, 3-4 August at 6pm, Hen and Chickens https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2453

Isabelle Farah: Ellipsis Now on 7.45pm on 21 August at the Albany (moved from 4 August) https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2505

Dannie Grufferty: How Brexit sent us all slightly mad 9pm 5-7 August + 9pm 18 August at The Albany (4 August cancelled) https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2421

**EXTRA SHOWS**

Remember Tonight Vortex Collision Arts Company 9.30pm 2-3 August at London Irish Centre A young man brings home a stranger who was beaten up on the street. His desperate attempt to help the person in need leads him to discover wounds he wasn’t meant to deal with. Soon, they will be unexpectedly engulfed in a loop where there will be nothing that could not happen.

Joseph Parsons: Baggy Point 5.30pm 4 August The Bill Murray Joseph Parsons (as seen on Channel 4) presents his uplifting, sell-out stand up comedy show, Baggy Point. With his lovable and electric energy on stage, Joseph tells the story of discovering his sexuality as he clumsily navigates his way through social gatherings, love and living in a different country. Joseph also looks at how the perceptions of sexuality in smaller towns and homophobia in football affect younger people growing up. All proceeds to this show will go to Football v Homophobia. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2708

Sea Changes Marina Jenkyns Productions 12.30pm 5-9 August Etcetera Theatre Sharon; `You know what? He was jealous. Never been outside Shepherd's Bush. Imagine fucking a man who's never flown!'Mair: `Soft on my face. Her skin, her tears. Must go on. Mustn't stop. Must do it'.Maeve: `Sally and I lay down, sun on our faces, just touching, like our hands.Understanding the past in order to create the future. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2719

The Feminazis Curious Dispute 4.30pm 5-7 August Etcetera Theatre The Feminazis' juxtaposes a classical duo comedy format with explicit imagery, presenting the question 'how far is too far'? Frustrated with the lack of progression in modern day society regarding gender equality, Sal and Libby decide to take matters into their own hands by creating a terrorist organisation. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2716

The Party Pilgrim Productions 9pm 5-9 August The Cockpit In September 2018, the president's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, was accused by a woman of sexual assault 36 years earlier. This revelation, broadcast worldwide at a Senate committee hearing, has since become a major cause celebre. 'The Party' by Sam J. Stewart is a 2-act play which re-lives and examines this drama. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2688

Jet Set Go! Pump House CYT 7.30pm 9 – 10 August Theatro Technis A delightful, inventive and witty new musical about 24 hours in the ordinary working life of a transatlantic airline cabin crew; sex, romance, optimism and jaded cynicism are thrown together into a bitchy, campy but essentially tender-hearted cocktail. "A production that’s warm, funny and wonderfully scored” **** The Scotsman. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2720

Love Is... Spitball Theatre Company 9.30pm 9-10 August at London Irish Centre Two women and one non-binary person delve into love, in all its many forms. We all remember our first love, don’t we? Have you tried to block out that painful memory? Does that fleeting eye contact still play on your mind? Featuring movement, music and true stories we take you through loves lost and won. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2698

Fraser Gibson: Self-ish 3.45pm 10-August The Bill Murray Fraser Gibson's debut show is a wrestle with the Self-ish pursuit of being a stand-up comedian. Explained through tall tales, uncanny impressions and a good ol' song or two... A hilarious session of self-therapy! https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2711

Matt Blair – Mattinée 3pm 11 August The Bill Murray An hour of musical comedy, jokes and references from the mind of a movie fanatic. Join Matt on his journey to find out why we love movies so much. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2556

Ordinary Days Pump Priming Productions 7.30pm 11 August Theatro Technis A romance on the rocks, an artist's vision stalled, and a graduates thesis in peril lead four young New Yorkers through a series of humorous and touching musical, intersecting vignettes, as they search for fulfilment, happiness, love and cabs.This melodious one act musical, performed by an award winning cast, is a hidden gem. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2721

Si Deaves - Si's Matters 8pm 11 August Camden Comedy Club Nuclear annihilation!! Brexit?! Rabies?? There are so many issues in the world today, yet Si Deaves still finds time to worry about the little things, in his own unique way. Join Si‚Äôs world as he tackles "inspiration", fears of inadequacy, *that* drunk guy at the pub and much more in his official debut stand-up hour, Si’s Matters. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2722

G(L)ORY Ocular Seven Productions 9pm 11-13 August The Hen and Chickens True crime, murder mystery, serial killer docs, you name it Bobby's binged it. Just like everyone else in the office, so what makes him so different? Through Bobby, we explore the public and media fascination and glorification of violence. Why do we keep watching? https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2712

Be More Bee 12.30pm 13-14 August Etcetera Theatre Feeling broken or lost in a scary world? Looking for a Marie Kondo type, but more Home Counties? Well Bea has got just the ticket to cheer you up. It’s the bees! They’ve got the secret to happiness! Let her guide you through the honey-soaked life-hacks of the British Bee. Preposterous new comedy by Jenni Mackenzie-Jones. With a tombola. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2717

Together For Seven BearFoot 2.30pm 13 – 15 August Etcetera Theatre This is the last place you would expect to find yourself; a police station. You cast your mind back to the good, the bad and the ugly. Teetering on the edge of disaster, wondering whether forgiveness will find you, do you favour the truth or favour yourself? What risks would you take to protect your family when the odds are stacked against you? https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2706

Dougie Dixon: Proper Belter 8pm 13-14 August Camden Comedy Club Meet Dougie Dixon. He's the reality TV star you didn't know you knew. Original TOWIE cast member. As seen on Tipping Point Lucky Stars, Celebs On The Farm (reserve contestant) & Embarrassing Celebrity Bodies. Series winner of The Celebrity Etch-A-Sketch Challenge. Come join Dougie as he launches his first ever debut autobiography; Proper Belter! https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2723

Sam Mitchell: Wham Bam Thank You Sam 9.30pm 13 August The Bill Murray 45 mins of stand up comedy from one of the greats* about growing up**, committing*** and M+M World. * if you ask him ** trying to *** see above. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2707

Faye Treacy is a Work in Progress 8pm 15-17 August Camden Comedy Club As seen on BBC Three and heard on Radio Four, Faye Treacy is back with a new work in progress show. "One of the most unique performances you'll see at the Fringe this year... simultaneously childish, genius and inescapably memorable." **** (1/2) (ShortCom) https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2715

Dan Horrigan's Riot to Heaven Sky or the Bird 8.30pm 16-20 August at Aces and Eights High octane stories from men who would steal the eyes of ya and you wouldn't know until you went to read the paper. Laugh, weep and laugh again as we break into heaven. Raconteuring, storytelling, and theatre of the highest calibre. Second chances are rarer than rocking horse manure so get your ticket before we're off to rob another town. Cheers. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2549

Fatiha El-Ghorri & Katherine Atkinson: Mocking Birds Fat Kat Comedy 4.15pm 18 August at The Bill Murray Join Fatiha El-Ghorri and Katherine Atkinson (both 2017 Funny Women Awards Regional Finalists) for an hour of stand up as Fatiha smashes Muslim stereotypes and challenges you to re-think what you think you know about Islam and Muslims, and Katherine offers up an acerbic, sideways view of motherhood, if she can be bothered. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2728

Dane Baptiste: Work in progress 9.30pm 18 August at The Bill Murray Star of Live at the Apollo (BBC Two), Tonight at the London Palladium (ITV1) and 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown (Channel 4) - Join Baptiste as he workshops brand new material for his next tour show. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2727

Red Richardson: Red Notice 8.15pm 21-22, 9pm 23-24 August The Taproom In 2017 Red Richardson left a building in Central London to see thousands of people running down the street screaming, for the next 35 minutes the whole of the country (Thanks to Pop star Ollie Murs tweeting from a basement in H and M) believed it was a terrorist attack. It wasn't. This is an hour of stand up about the human condition in crisis. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2390

Leave this World Alive 9.30pm 21 August at Water Rats 'I hope the exit is joyful' - wrote Frida Kahlo, only days before she died. When was the last time YOU thought about your end? And how does it make you feel? Powerless? Awake? Does it help you appreciate the moment you live in? We will reach out for a topic which brings all these questions on the table: assisted dying - determining our own end. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2731

Nico. No Regrets. 8.30pm 23 August The Chapel Playhouse A show by and with Margherita Remotti in association with Actors East London. Directed by Alberto Barbi. Text by Fernando Coratelli and Margherita Remotti. In this one woman show, we explore the life of Nico, better known as Andy Warhol's superstar, muse and rockstar singer of the Velvet Underground. But you will discover this was only the surface. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2729

The Golden Child William Desmond 5pm 24-25 August The Chapel Playhouse William Desmond has always considered himself the Golden Child. Today, people need to standout in a crowd of hundreds of faces. Will is a twin, and during this 60 minute show he explores what it is like to be in constant competition with his brother. With musical parody and silliness, Will explains being good at everything isn't always the answer. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2718

Ross Drummond & Harry Monaghan: The Orb 5.30pm 25 August The Bill Murray Have you touched The Orb? Want to meet two that have? A mainstay of science, wonder and amazement since its inception in the late 80s, The Orb is science’s greatest invention. What’s its purpose? We’re not sure. Perhaps it merely exists to inspire us. Anything is possible with The Orb. https://camdenfringe.com/show.php?acts_id=2709

**CANCELLED**

Darius Tabai: Schrodinger's Mum Comic Quartets Lloyd Langford: New Things (A Work in Progress) Steve McNeil: Video Games

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limitededitionsanderssidesblog · 6 years ago

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The Stacks - Chapter 1

Ships: Eventual Prinxiety and Logicality

Summary: In this society there is a place where the poor and unwanted are placed and kept hidden away from everyone else, where poverty and crime are a frequent and life shines for no one. Stacked up high in the sky, this is the furthest anyone living there will ever reach. When a Depression consumes the land, and the government fails to bring an end to it, society turns even further on the residents of the Stacks, accusing them for bringing the rest of them down. What no one knows, however, is that it'll take the work of four unlikely people to not only bring an end to the poverty, but also to this inequality.

AO3 - Here

The early morning sounds of the Stacks always consisted of the same things each day; the beggars would be getting up from their boxes or crates and head into the city, some would stay and beg where they were, and others would instead head for the restaurant district for lunchtime when leftovers from breakfast would be thrown into the trash; gang members would bang on the side of crate doors, demanding the weekly pay for their so called protection; and at least a fight or two would breakout in the dirt streets before the time reached ten o’clock.

However all that early bustle was drown out by the numerous clocks stored in such a small space. The constant ticking was the only peace one could hope to find in this hell. Sitting up slowly from his makeshift bed, a young man with a head of dark black hair and a purple fringe got up to start his daily ritual. Only twenty years in age, life had not been kind to him, although, when had it been ever been kind to anyone here?

The man looked to the hand made wall clocks and watches stored in a cardboard box and peered over them to see which ones where ready to sell. One, two, three… only four of them did he deem in good enough state to be sold. That left five others in need of more parts and material. Gathering the watches up in his hoodie pockets and bringing the cardboard box and a sheet with him, he opened the large door to his crate. Placed on top of the third highest stack in the city he had a tough time climbing down rope ladders and poorly made, rigid stairs, but living on top had its perks, one of being he didn’t have to deal with resident gangs as often.

Running over to the edge of the Stacks the man headed for a transit to take him into the city center; and by transit he meant an older woman who happened to be one of the few here to own a truck and got her money by driving people from the Stacks to the city and back. She had a rigid schedule, and if your didn’t make her set time, you had to walk.

Already waiting there was a oddly bubbly man, dressed in ripped khaki shorts and a light blue polo shirt with a few patches sewn on. How this death hole could have ever produced such a sweet and loving man he'll never know. Looking up to see him running over, he waved his hands eagerly to greet him.

"Morning Virgil!" He greeted brightly as they climbed into the back of the truck.

"Hey, Patton. Sorry I was almost late." The Clockmaker apologized, taking a seat next to him as the truck began to pull away from the stop.

The tuck started down the road moving from the dirt and entering the highway that led directly to the downtown area. Sitting in the very back of the pickup truck, smashed in with ten other people, Virgil watched as the towers of junk became smaller and smaller, dreaming of the day he’d be able to leave them for good.

The Stacks. Its definition might as well mean the end of the road. It was where one would go when when he had nowhere else, no one else, and nothing else. Set up anywhere from fifteen to sixty feet high, abandoned shipping crates, broken down buses, old vans and trucks became home. Safety wasn’t a concern here, and the only way up or down were either climbing or busted up ladders. All walks of life came here. Those who are out of work, those who can’t work, the ones who are rejected by everyone else, and those who were abandoned by everyone else. It was a hot spot for criminal activity due to the lack of care by the authorities. Tucked away on the outskirts of the third largest city in the nation, in the fourth smallest province in the nation, here you were as valued by society as dirt. Coupled along with the New Depression which was sweeping the nation, these stacks kept growing; and not just in this city, but everywhere to. With such a large number of homeless and jobless one would think the government officials would be doing all that they could to fix it, but that’s where you’d be wrong.

Virgil Black had been only seventeen when the Depression first stuck and he had to watch as everything around him fell apart. Any help the officials tried to offer only ended up backfiring and making it worse. He was a hopeful soul back then, believing that hard work would get him out of his situation, but now he knew better. Even if the Depression came to an end, he was never getting out of the Stacks, that was just a fact. His only real skill was making watches, and who had the money to buy those anymore?

Pulling to a stop, the truck arrived five blocks away from downtown, everyone climbed out and headed out for the day before the would return for their only ride home at seven. Except for him though, he had Patton to pick up later.

After a short goodbye the two friends went their separate ways and Virgil set out to the business district, which was the best place to sell his wares. Business men and collectors, and even those who just had extra money to spend were his target audience. He set up shack on the side of a large bank, displaying his watches and clocks on his cardboard box, covered by a sheet to make it look like a table.

Fifteen minutes passed of Virgil calling passers to his 'table' without any luck before a rushed man in a dark blue suit and black rimmed glasses ran up to his table.

“Do you have the time?” He asked, obviously late for something.

“I do,” Virgil replied nonchalantly, trying to act like he wasn't desperate for his money, “For ten bronze.”

The man gave him an incredulous look before begrudgingly pulling out his wallet with a heavy sigh. Virgil gladly took the paper money from the stranger and gestured to the table for him to choose whatever watch he wanted. The man looked down and grabbed the simplest watch on the table, a silver watch with a small roman numeral design and fake black leather band. Checking the time on the clock the man calmed down and gave a curt nod towards Virgil, heading on his way.

Virgil watched him go for a moment, before turning back to the crowd, searching through the faces to spot anyone who looked like they had too much cash. Before long Virgil sold a brass wall clock for fifteen bronze too another sucker who go caught in his web.

…

Walking through the busy streets of the city center Logan Winchester walked up the steps of the head police precinct. He had called in to meet an old friend of his with what may be some very good news. Looking to the new watch he hadn’t been expecting to buy today, he saw that he was still five minutes early. Interesting… did he walk here from that stand in under a minute?

“Logan!” A loud and boisterous voice called from one of the many cubicles, drawing his attention away from the accessory.

“That’s Senator Winchester to you now.” He said to him as he walked over to meet him. “It’s good to see you, Roman.”

“Of course it is.” Roman smirked as he flexed pretentiously, “I haven’t seen you since you were elected last year.”

“Yes, well, I’ve been kept busy by work as of late.” Logan stated to his friend since college. “And that is precisely why I came here.”

The smirk on Roman’s face began to fall away as confusion over took his expression, not understanding what he mean. Logan gestures for him to follow after him as he walks away to a quiet corner where they could talk without being eavesdropped on. Once there, Logan reached into his briefcase and pulled out a file and handed in over to Roman. When he looked in all he saw was his, rather impressive, track record, and the record of what he assumed was one of Logan's subordinates.

“I’m losing faith in my head of security. They were very loyal to the last senator, who had vastly different ideas from I. I am in need of someone I can put faith in to help me lower the crime rates in the province.”

Roman looked through the records, which had appeared to have been thoroughly marked up and read through. He stared at his friend in a mix of shock and excitement. He had always hoped for a promotion sometime, but he was expecting something like deputy chief. This was completely beyond what he had ever hoped for.

“Are you asking me what I think you are?” He asked with a childlike glee. Logan gave a small chuckle. Roman's youthful mind and tenacity was just what he was looking for to help him fix the society's state.

“Indeed, Roman. Will you become my new head of security?”

“YES!” Roman shouted before quickly covering his mouth, “I mean, I’d be honored... Senator Winchester.”

“That was a joke, please don’t call me that.”

In anticipation that Roman would run around proclaiming his promotion to the entire faculty and maybe even the whole city, Logan explained in detail all the necessary steps he’d have to take before he could take office. Most of the procedure had already been taken care of, but it would still be one to two weeks before Roman would officially be the new head of security. Roman nodded along as Logan explained these things to him, yet he couldn’t stop bouncing in his seat like a kid who had eaten too much sweets. Seeing that he wasn’t really paying attention to the instructions, Logan sighed and decided to change the subject.

“How about an early lunch? I’ll treat you to it.” Logan offered, standing back up the bench.

“Sounds good, but I wouldn’t say it’d be early. It’s fifteen ‘till noon.” Roman responded, pointing to the plain clock above the main doors.

“Wait, but I thought-” Logan looked down at his watch and saw that the arms haven’t moved since it’s purchase, meaning he had been late all along. Moving the dial on the side Logan set it to the correct time before clicking it down, setting the arms in motion. “He didn’t set it.”

“Who didn’t?” Roman asked, standing up and taking a look at the watch on his friend's wrist. “Where’d you get that?”

“A merchant on the street sold it to me for ten bronze when I asked for the time.” Logan recalled to the, hopefully, soon to be former police officer.

“Ten bronze?! That’s worth more like five!” Roman exclaimed, becoming angered at the fact that Logan was swindled by a street rat.

“Come now, It wasn’t too much. At least he didn’t go as far ask to ask for ten silver.” Logan said as he led them out the large, double doors of the precinct and down the street to the tram station to take them to lunch.

“First, that’s a horrible comparison, and second you don’t know if he even had a license to sell that! It could have been stolen merchandise for all you know-”

“Roman.”

“Now a hooligan is on the loose in the streets practically stealing from people-”

“Roman!”

“And selling black market watches on the block to poor innocent workers and using the money to do who knows what-”

“Roman!” Logan grabbed his shoulder, finally shutting him up from his rambling, and pointed over across the street at a lone man in a patchwork hoodie handing a pocket watch over to an old woman. “He’s right there.”

Roman turned his head in the direction of his hand and saw the despicable man in action, clipping the probably fake gold chain onto the woman’s coat and handing the hand held clock over, greedily taking the money from an innocent.

“Well then we have to stop him!” Roman declared as he ran across the street through traffic without a second thought.

“Roman wait!” Logan shouted after him but fell on deaf ears. Letting out a groan, Logan ran ran over to the nearest crosswalk and hurried to catch up with the man before he got too reckless and did something stupid. 'Why did I choose him, again?' He questioned in his head.

Roman dodge the bustling cars on the road and the swarming people on the sidewalk gracefully and bolted for the stand, slowing himself down as he got closer. Soon enough he was calmly walking up to the watch man, feigning interest in buying.

“How much are these may I ask?” He asked with false curiosity, picking up the only watch left to look at it closer. It was strangely nice looking, nicer than the one Logan bought, definitely not worth ten bronze though. But it didn’t look stolen, if it was it’d be worth more, homemade maybe?

“Twenty bronze.” The man said from his seat of the city bank steps.

“Twenty?” Roman echoed, raising his eyebrow. ‘That more that what had cost Logan.’ “Surly this is worth much less?”

“Welp, times are tough, gotta buy bread somehow.” The man shrugged, obviously ignorant of who he was talking to.

Roman eyed him up a down with a grimace, looking over his so called stand, that he could tell was actually just a box. There is no way what this man doing was legal, and even if it was, it's obvious that this man is from the Stacks, which means he must be up to no good.

“Well, I hope you wouldn’t mind showing me you’re papers?” He asked cockily, whipping out his badge from his inside coat pocket and practically shoving it in the man’s face. Instantly the guy lost his relaxed composure and sat up straight, eyes widening to the size of dinner plates, panic evident all over his face. The shit grin on Roman wore only grew bigger at the man’s frightened reaction. Cat's out of the bag. “I’m guessing that’s a no, then?”

Roman reached behind back for the spare pair of handcuffs, hidden by the tail of his coat, that he always kept on hand, but was instead met with a smack in the face as the man hastily stood up and threw the entire stand in his face before making his get away. Roman tried to get up to go after him but ended up getting the sheet stuck on his head. By the time he finally got the damn thing off his head the crook was long gone, escaping into the thick crowd.

The low, clearing cough behind him made Roman jump and spin around. Logan stood there with his arm crossed and his eyebrow raised, looking expectantly for a good excuse.

“You’re not gonna change your mind, right?”

…

The kitchen had always been a hectic place for a chef, with hectic customers and fast paced orders it was a high stress inducing environment. However to him it was a second home. Even though Patton wasn’t technically a chef, he did know how to cook. His mother had overworked herself most of his life and ended up falling ill when he was ten, so he had to take over the cleaning and cooking duties. He became really good at it overtime and his mother even said he’d be able to become a high end chef one day. So that’s what he worked towards over the next fifteen years. Yet, despite his skill, his background just wasn’t impressive enough to get him the position, so he settled for garbage boy instead.

Even if it wasn’t his dream job, it was close enough, as long as he was in a kitchen he’d be happy. He still got to use the kitchen after he finished his shift to bring food back home to his friends and family, even though the trade off to do so was a percentage out of his paycheck.

Speaking of, his shift should be over in a few minutes, he should start preparing the food. What should he make tonight? There were a lot of tomatoes, peppers, and cheese leftover, he could make stuffed peppers!

“Clean these stack rat.” A voice, accompanied by a tub full of dirty plates commanded. It was the sou chef Nathaniel Briggs, one of his superiors, and not the only one in this kitchen who didn’t want him here.

“I’m sorry Briggs, but my shift just ended.” Patton tried to tell him but was quickly silenced.

“And you were just about to dirty our kitchen with your filthy paws! The very least you could do is clean these dishes!” Patton shrunk back and nodded, gingerly taking the dishes from him and placing them in the sink. “Oh, and don’t forget to lock up for me.” Nathaniel told him as he left him alone in the kitchen.

This wasn’t the first time one of the chefs forced him to do their work. It wasn’t a secret that almost the entire staff hated him either. Everyone at the Pájaro Rico were either high end or upper mid end, Patton was the only one there who came from the Stacks. He didn’t let it bother him too much though, even if he isn’t payed of treated equally, his mother was a proud Stacker, and so was he.

On the dot as usual, the back door to the restaurant was opened and in came fellow Stacker and Patton’s best friend, Virgil. Virgil would always accompany him home, since he could never make it in time to catch Silvia’s truck transit. Although it looked like Virgil would have to wait a little longer tonight.

“You doing Nathaniel’s work again, huh?” He asked rhetorically as he walked up. Patton nodded sadly, not looking up since he already knew what face he was making. It was the one he always made when anyone treated them bad because of their status as Stackers. “Common I’ll clean, you cook.”

“If my boss thinks I’m not working he’ll get upset.” Patton murmured, rinsing off a plate and setting it in the drying rack.

“You got of twenty minutes ago Pat, this is work without pay, let me do it.” Virgil shot back and took patton’s hands out of the soapy water and replaced them with his. “The only thing you should be working on is a nice hot meal for everyone back home.”

Patton grinned at him and let out a soft giggle, conceding to Virgil’s wishes and getting to work on what he had planned. Patton went over to the tub of unused, half used, or messed up dishes to see what he could salvage before they were thrown away. Some lettuce leafs, a couple of diced tomatoes, some poorly cut orange peppers and a bit of sour cream. Patton smiled brightly at what he was able to save and began to prep the peppers and dice the lettuce. By the time Virgil had finished washing, Patton had finished and slid the stuffed peppers into the oven to cook for ten minutes. When those ten minutes were up, the dishes were put away and the peppers were placed in to-go boxes. With a final sweep of the place, Patton locked up the place then headed out.

“So how did sales go today?” Patton asked as they walked down to the tram station. The tram didn’t go all the way out to the Stacks and cost a lot more than Silvia’s truck, but it was there only option this late at night.

“Less and less people are buying these days." Virgil sighed in defeat, "It seems like the Depression is starting to reach the upper mid end, before long the entire nations gonna go to shi- crap.” Virgil confided in him, correcting himself when Patton gave him that glare.

“I’m sure prosperity is just around the corner! Look at us, were doing just fine.” Patton said brightly, trying to be optimistic.

“We live in the Stack, Pat.” Virgil stated plainly, distaste evident in his words.

“And what’s wrong with that?” Patton asked seriously, challenging him. Virgil stayed quiet and bought his ticket from the machine before getting on. The air was thick with that question looming over their heads, quieting their conversation.

Looking out the window Patton saw the large silhouettes of crudely assembled towers that he had been born and raised in. While he was not ashamed of his background, he could not deny that it was not a place any child should be raised. The danger and impoverishment all told the same story for all who lived there.

Desperation.

Lol a random fic idea came to me out of nowhere and I had to write it. Please tell me it’s good?

#sanders sides #virgil sanders #sanders sides virgil #anxiety sanders #roman sanders #sanders sides roman #princey sanders #patton sanders #sanders sides patton #morality sanders #logan sanders #sanders sides logan #logic sanders #sanders sides fic #prinxiety #logicality

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ransomedbard · 6 years ago

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WIP Wednesday

This was inspired by re-watching “Lily C.A.T.”, an 80’s anime which is essentially a rip-off of “Alien” except (spoiler alert) the threat is an alien pathogen that gets aboard a deep-space vessel and turns the crew into monsters. It has a scene where two of the people trapped on the contaminated ship get handcuffed together (note: not a super bright idea in a horror movie!) that always stuck with me…

———————————

Infected

Infected with an alien pathogen that had already transformed several of her Preventer colleagues into mindless berserkers, Hilde was secretly glad to be left behind on the station’s brig to die alone. But she hadn’t reckoned on Duo deserting his squad and his duty to go ‘rescue’ her. Now on their own with a horde of alien monsters separating them from potential rescue, and with her time rapidly running out, she must press Duo to reveal the truth about what happened during her blackout.

———————————

“Hilde.”

“Hey, Hilde.”

“Hilde, are you in there?”

When she opened her eyes, Duo was crouching on the floor next to where she lay, a pistol in his hand. His clothes were unfamiliar - the Preventers uniform was gone, replaced by some dark lumpy vest. Other than that, she could identify virtually nothing in the glare of the battery-operated light - just a vague impression of a ceiling high overhead, and rows of towering shelves stacked with boxes. It was definitely not the last place she remembered - the inside of the station’s brig.

“Well hello,” he said, sounding relieved. “Don’t move around too much - you’ve had a concussion. Gunshot wound too, above the left hip.”

He lifted his left arm and her right hand rose with it, pulled up by the handcuffs that bound them together. “And, there’s this. Sorry, it was the best I could do.”

She took a minute to sort that all out. In a way, she was grateful for the concussion; it explained why she didn’t know where they were or how she got injured, and her sense that a lot of time had passed. She ran her free hand over the wound dressing and found it felt well packed and dry. The pain was significant, but she’d always had a pretty high tolerance for it, and this wasn’t the first time she’d been shot in her career. It was the progression of her other symptoms that she was worried about: the occasional pull of muscles that wanted to move of their own accord, a propensity to want to twist up instead of remaining flat, and most of all the feeling that her very bones and sinews were by turns straining and softening. Experimentally, she spread her free hand out and watched her fingertips curl back alarmingly toward her arm. Yup, it was definitely getting worse. And she was out here, loose. She stared dully at the cuff. “You should have left me in there.”

“And what kind of friend would I be to do that?” he replied lightly. He had tucked away the gun and was sitting on the floor by the lamp now, methodically stripping the coating off the end of a wire with an odd tool that wasn’t suited for the job - some sort of little screwdriver, by the looks of it. Her eyes were so sensitive to the light that they kept closing of their own volition, adding to her sense of disorientation.

This was crazy, even for him. Breaking her out of quarantine was probably enough to subject him to court-martial, let alone deserting his squad during a mission. And handcuffs? What was that supposed to do if she - wait, had she already?

“Did I hurt anybody?”

Duo focused on scraping curly swirls of rubber off the wire, which rested on a large tray balanced across his knees. “You don’t need to worry about that. It’s just us in here, and we’ve got enough supplies now to last until help arrives.”

That was a yes, then. She should ask who, or how many, or how badly, but the words stuck in her throat. She was suddenly angry as hell at him for sacrificing somebody else because he couldn’t accept that it was too late for her. I don’t want this on my conscience, damnit.

She watched in silence as he finished preparing the wire, then put it aside and started on another one. His posture was awkward, his cuffed hand stretched out to where she lay on a short stack of cardboard. When he noticed her watching, he gestured over at a small cluster of rechargeable batteries he’d apparently scavenged from various devices.

“Workin’ on a way to power my radio - ran out of juice about 12 hours ago, so I haven’t had contact since then.” From that, she gathered she’d been out - or rather, ‘not herself’ for longer than that. “Henderson and Yao’s teams are focusing on securing and prepping the number 18 dock,” he continued. “That’s where the fleet will come in. Big ESUN ships, so they’ll have a sickbay, doctors. That’s our goal.”

“Wufei took everyone else and the handful of civilians they found and made for the big toolshop in block D - last I heard they had found a store of maintenance equipment they could repurpose, including an actual flamethrower.” He stopped scraping for a moment and stared off into the distance. “I’m … I’m pretty jealous of that.”

She couldn’t help a small smile. “He always gets the cool toys.” Guns would be better, of course, but there weren’t supposed to be any firearms on this station - officially, anyway - and when their rapid response squad deployed for this mission they had stocked a normal loadout of ammo and armaments, unaware that it would be laughably insufficient because this time their adversaries weren’t smugglers or terrorists - or even human.

The mission briefing from Preventer HQ had not given them much to go on. H-940 was a sizeable but sparsely populated private station in the L3 cluster. The owner, Tiankong Trading, listed it as a warehouse and repair center for their fleet of cargo vessels. Three separate emergency calls had been logged, reporting massive systems failures, missing persons, and most bizarrely, reports of “monsters” lurking in the now darkened station. Headquarters suspected a mix of sabotage and some sort of mass poisoning with a hallucinogenic.

Their ship had successfully docked at one of the bays that still had power, and the first hour of the operation was smooth; all teams deployed for reconnaissance and returned to the rendezvous to report finding substantial damage but no contact with anyone, threat or otherwise. Then all hell broke loose.

She hadn’t really had the time to process what they were - aliens or some bio-engineered monstrosity - although her money was on the former because they were simply unlike anything she’d ever seen: hunched and bare, like a plucked chicken, yet spiky like an insect. They were not much larger than a medium sized dog, but their strength was tremendous. The creatures had little in the way of intelligence and didn’t seem to hunt as a pack; they just swarmed forward, viciously pursuing and attacking anything that moved. They had a powerful set of limbs that served as both legs that propelled them in high jumps through the station’s weak gravity, and grasping arms with talons that ripped apart metal and flesh alike. On the underside, there were several smaller striking appendages they used when they got close; they were covered in barbs that broke off and buried themselves under the skin. She resisted the urge to feel the line of lumps on her left arm where they had pierced her.

After their first engagement, where they had lost a third of their number outright, they retreated to the station’s corporate offices, which had a small store of medical supplies. They were focused on the triage of traumatic injuries, so at first no one even noticed when Hilde’s teammate Jack, who was only lightly wounded, became incoherent and fell out of his chair. It escalated as his body bent and twisted unnaturally; he began striking out wildly, attacking everything in sight. They had nothing to spare to sedate him with, so they put him in a cell in the brig. Then Lucy went crazy, and Ahmad, and they realized the common factor was that each of them had been stung by the creatures’ barbs.

When the quarantine was announced, Hilde didn’t wait for an examination to confirm what she already knew; she walked down and put herself in a cell. Then she watched as Jack and the others suffered through episodes where they writhed and smashed and flailed - mutely, with vacant eyes - only to pass out and come back to themselves briefly before it began again, until they succumbed to a final bout of contortion from which they never rose. It was all over in a matter of hours.

And then she was there all alone down there, after all the bodies of her teammates had been quietly taken away. Duo came as often as he could, of course, and Wufei and the others brought her rations and news, neither of which were good. They couldn’t make it back to their own ship to evacuate, and they were critically low on ammunition and medical supplies; two more of the wounded had died. The only bright spot was that they had managed to patch in to a relay transmitter outside the station and contact headquarters; help of some sort was on the way, but the Earth Sphere government was now in charge and it was slow to mobilize.

“You shoulda seen Wufei’s face when the military brass briefed us that this mission is now classified as Top Secret and tried to scare us about leaks,” Duo gossiped with forced energy as he slid a small bag of chips he’d liberated from a vending machine through the bars of her cell. “All these years of debunking De Santos’ nutty government cover-up conspiracy theories and now he’s in one. I think the man might just send an unencrypted transmission to any satellite he can ping out of spite.”

And so it went. For two days she’d held on to hope: that she might be immune, that once help arrived maybe they could use her to make a vaccine or something. That she would cheat death again. But by the start of the third day she couldn’t write off the involuntary twitching as just sleep deprivation; couldn’t ignore the feel of those damned barbs, that had been curly like a cashew when they went in but were now straightening out, painfully deep under her skin. And then she had drifted off leaning up against a wall of her cell, only to be startled awake when her hand snapped out and grabbed hold of a bar of her cell entirely on its own.

#rip-off of a rip-off of Alien #Hilde and Duo best buds 4 evah #gundam wing #fanfic #wip

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greysrocks · 2 years ago

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Idle champions of the forgotten realms ahk script

IDLE CHAMPIONS OF THE FORGOTTEN REALMS AHK SCRIPT UPGRADE

IDLE CHAMPIONS OF THE FORGOTTEN REALMS AHK SCRIPT PC

Speedhack works great too I found 20x to be the best. With 99 double skip Briv (3 months of farming) you are looking at around 50k gems per day. Without Briv scripted you are looking at around 15k gems per day (maybe 20k with 500+ melf and 100 sentry). Cheat Engine's Enable Speedhack works well. To use Briv speed champion effectively you need to set up autohotkey script (check out script forum in discord chat server to get started). You should disable many other settings, such as percent particle spawned to 0, soundvolume to 0, etc. These scripts will open chests for you, one at a time. You can set your UI scale to 0.5 to see all your champions in one screen, and set your targetframerate to 120 to have a faster game. Would mean way faster zones included with briv jump and hewman needing less drops. A collection of AutoHotKey scripts for Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms.

IDLE CHAMPIONS OF THE FORGOTTEN REALMS AHK SCRIPT UPGRADE

Full screen IC, windowed, without cutting off the upgrade buttons. Hit Ctrl-Alt-F (changeable in the script) to activate the script for the top most app/window (IC in this case) The upside. Re: Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms Completed. Create a script file (notepad is ideal) with the above contents and run it. Activate the trainer options by checking boxes or setting values from 0 to 1.

IDLE CHAMPIONS OF THE FORGOTTEN REALMS AHK SCRIPT PC

Tags: idle, champions, early, access, update, dev blog. Click the PC icon in Cheat Engine in order to select the game process. files and research stuff for the ff7 tas Lua 3 Z3-Lua-Hud-BizHawk. Ulkoria is a Support Champion who buffs other caster Champions with her Spellcaster School ability. AutoHotkey scripts for Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms AutoHotkey 10 2 ff7-tas. If we could also figure out monster damage to like 1hp that would be great. However Idle Champions is blocking the fun. Modifying favor or gold find is a bit tricky where I'm at cause my numbers are so high. Modify them, freeze them and jump between your parties and everyone will have 9999 character level and click damage. Maybe even a modification to hewman and how many kills or drops he needs?Īim for faster zones instead of skipping 500 zones at a time, currently you can modify click damage without the table as well as character levels so there is that. Idle Champions has been actively developed since launching in 2017, releasing new campaigns each year, exciting new Champions every month, and new in-game features frequently.I'd also love to see being able to modify stacks for briv skip levels, the devs are cracking down on skipping directly to a level now(I was 24 hour banned) so anything to make us fly through the level would be great, so obviously unlimited skips would help as well as instant quest rewards. Venture to Icewind Dale, Chult, Barovia, the Nine Hells of Baator, and more! Defeat gigantic evil monsters to make your group the most powerful in the land. Assemble a group of heroes and master the art of formation strategy. If it is, it'll attempt to activate the window, reset, and start from area 1 again. The 2017 released action-indie-strategy-video-game Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is a classic dungeons & dragons mouse-clicker video game. Assemble a party of champions and master the art of Formation Strategy. First it checks if Idle Champions is open if not it resets. The official subreddit for discussing Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, a Dungeons & Dragons strategy video game that brings together D&D characters from novels, adventures, and multiple live streams into a single grand adventure. If it's sat at one level for that long (about 3 minutes), that means something's broke. Live Services Director Chris Dupuis talks about some of the core elements of Idle Champions: Familiars, 'The Wall', in-game events, Time Gates, Patrons, Feat. download the AHK files you can use to replace the bad ones in Script Hub. Journey throughout the Sword Coast and beyond, visiting cities like Waterdeep, Neverwinter, and Baldur's Gate. Instead of looping endlessly while waiting for a level transition, the script will only loop 180 times. Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms: an official free-to-play Dungeons. Master each Champion's formation abilities to complete adventures based on official Dungeons & Dragons books like Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, and Curse of Strahd. Unlock Champions from across the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse including fan-favorites from novels, adventures, and live streams like Force Grey: Lost City of Omu, Acquisitions Incorporated, Black Dice Society, and The Oxventurers Guild. The official subreddit for discussing Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, a Dungeons & Dragons strategy video game that brings together D&D characters from novels, adventures, and multiple live streams into a single grand adventure.

#Idle champions of the forgotten realms ahk script

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placetobenation · 6 years ago

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Welcome to Seinfeld: The PTBN Series Rewatch! On a regular basis, JT Rozzero, Aaron George and Andrew Flanagan will watch an episode of TV’s greatest sitcom and provide notes and grades across a number of categories. The goal is to rewatch the entire series chronologically to see what truly worked, what still holds up today, what feels just a bit dated and yada, yada, yada it will be a great time. So settle into your couch with the cushions flipped over, grab a Snapple and enjoy the ride!

Best Character

JT: I liked Kramer the most here. He had some real funny lines and physical comedy throughout this one. His buried conversation enders are so good, especially slipping in that Newman was sleeping in Jerry’s bed. I also loved the delivery of his “for a fat man” line to Jerry. He was on his game in this one.

Aaron: You’d think a pile of lesbians were fighting/lovemaking on stage if you were reading my mind, sifting through the depravity and listening to the “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry” chant. In an episode full of characters trying waaaaaay too hard, Jerry delivers with one liner after one liner. Imagine an episode where Jerry Seinfeld is the most grounded of the actors. This is it. Wait till you see the score.

Andrew: I think it was Elaine. The obsession with proving someone wrong, even at great cost to yourself, always gets me. Also, I’m a sucker for Elaine annoying people with a cigar.

Best Storyline

JT: I liked the blood the most. Jerry was annoying at points by being such an ungrateful bitch but he had some good dismissive lines and watching battle the Mandelbaums again was well done. And like I said above, I really enjoyed Kramer and this was the story he lived in for most of the episode. The meat sex stuff had funny moments but not much of a story to it and the Elaine stuff was fine too but didn’t have as many laughs.

Aaron: Polish, sausage, dancing.

Andrew: I’ll go with The Blood. I wasn’t a fan of any of the storylines, really, but the return of the Mandelbaums was my favorite part of the episode.

Ethical Dilemma of the Week

JT: If someone saves your life, you should probably not be a dick to them as soon as later that day.

Aaron: I’m going to go the opposite of JT and ask: even if you’ve saved someone’s life (which us debatable considering they were in a hospital full of blood) how do you live with yourself bringing a sworn enemy literally into someone’s bed? I get that these guys share a lot, but do they not even have a bed for that beast of a mailman to sleep in? If anything Kramer STILL owes Jerry favors for years of mooching and advantage taking. Has he ever borrowed that car without completely destroying it?

Andrew: What is the limit of the obligation when graciously accepting a gift from one’s parents? I’m going to say it’s somewhere short of “tying myself to a car”.

Relationship Scale (Scale 1-10)

JT: Kramer and Jerry, finally brought together by blood. A love made official. Relationship Grade: 3 Pints of Kramer/10

Aaron: George should keep banging that Vivian like a middle aged Neil Peart stuffing his face and trudging his way through YYZ. Relationship Grade: Boun ba ba boun ba baoun baoun baoun, ba ba baoun, ba ba baoun. Baoun badrrruuum. Down da down da down daaaaun. Dawn da down de daoun daounnnnnnn.

Andrew: I know the kid is presented as a burden, but I’m into the George and Vivian pairing. I just like the thought that there is a match for every kink out there. Relationship Grade: 10 sensual cured meats/10

What Worked:

JT: The plum diet seems like a good one; I always mark out for Morty saying “Mister Kramer”; Jerry’s point about responsibility is good one; George’s bus transfer excuse made me laugh; Jerry and George’s conversation about George bailing on Tara was really funny; Kramer going all in on calling Jerry fat in various ways was great; I enjoyed Elaine shoving Kramer into the bushes and smacking him with the broom as he yelped; I liked the payoff with the exacto knife, it was set up well earlier in the episode; Kramer demonstrating how he would rip out his kidney was great; Canadian Parliament; Newman sneaking in to watch the movie; Izzy putting the hurting on Jerry with his training was well done; the sausage making scene is a classic; Jerry calling George “Caligula”; Newman giving Jerry his blood was a good capper

Aaron: All of Jerry’s analysis and pleading with George to, for once think of someone’s else’s needs. The group screaming and Kramer’s messed up justification for needing to store so much blood in a blood bank. As someone who has watched Canadian parliament it busted me up to learn that Kramer not only watches, but records for later viewing. It’s not nearly as polite as one would imagine. Think more childish, with a lot of high pitched voices screeching “MISTER SPEAKER.” George’s series of lies, which inexplicably won over Vivian, were great and the only thing that felt anywhere in the realm of reality.

Andrew: There’s not much to praise here, story-wise, but the episode still has some memorably great dialog. Kramer’s “for a fat man, you’re not very jolly” is excellent, and George and Jerry have some great back and forth in the diner (“I’m not suggesting getting rid of the girl”, followed by the “needs” line, is the high point for me). Elaine being compelled to prove her responsibility, and getting stuck with a permanent babysitting gig as a result, was well done. I enjoyed seeing the Mandlebaums again, and Kramer’s screen door callback got me.

What Didn’t Work

JT: Tara saying “love making”, eh; Jerry being so insanely afraid of Kramer’s blood was a bit much, just way too over the top; someone should pull a President Lincoln on that kid; I also thought Jerry was really ungrateful for Kramer’s blood, dude saved your life… stop being a bitch; who fucks a random at their kids’ birthday party?; The Izzy voiceovers at the end were terrible; why is Jimmy wearing that hat? Is it 1954?

Aaron: Is Jerry dead? They dragged him for a quarter mile which was way longer than it took to kill that dog in National Lampoon’s Vacation. This whole episode felt fake. If the paragraph above is what I felt worked then you can comfortably put the rest here. I know George has pulled some schemes but are we really to believe that a man whose entire mission in life has been to get laid, is now trading that for food and television? What kind of animal is this man? What’s wrong with Jerry? I get he’s a germaphobe, but he can’t be in a building with blood. A building???? Elaine would rather raise a child than tell a woman she barely seems to know or care about that she hates her son. Her son might be the most hateable character in western civilization. Even Kramer felt forced. I get he’s dumb, but blood in a car? Come on writers. Do better. I don’t want to go on any more. This was a mess. Also Mandelbaum sucked the high hard one.

Andrew: Vivian is wearing a gray pantsuit the first two times we see her, which seems pretty unimaginative. The dubbing of Mr. Mandlebaum’s dialogue at the end has always seemed really distracting to me.

Key Character Debuts

– Vivian

Iconic Moments, Running Themes & Memorable Quotes

– “That’s why we joined a program. We walk once around the block three times a week.” – Helen “And every morning I eat a plum.” – Morty

– “Did you give blood?” – Jerry “No, not giving. hoarding. I’m storing it in to a blood bank. Just in case.” – Kramer “In case of what?” – Jerry “Jerry, I know myself. If I’m out on the street and it’s starts to go down, I don’t back off until it’s finished.” – Kramer

– “I know, I’m glad I got to see him before he hit puberty and got, you know all lurchy and awkward.” – Elaine

– “Who wants to responsible? When ever anything goes wrong, the first thing they ask is: who’s responsible for this?” – Jerry

– “So, she didn’t appreciate the erotic qualities of the salted cured meats?” – Jerry “She tolerated the strawberries and the chocolate sauce, but eh, it’s not a meal, you know? Food and sex, those are my two passions. It’s only natural to combine them.” – George

– “Maybe instead of trying to satisfy two of your needs, how about satisfying one of somebody else’s.” – Jerry

– “You know, for a fat guy you’re not very jolly.” – Kramer

– “You? I’m more responsible than you are!” – Elaine “Don’t be ridiculous. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to fill my freezer with my own blood.” – Kramer

– “Oh yeah, you’ve got three pints of Kramer in you, buddy.” – Kramer

– “She’s right, I heard Kramer got mugged out on the suburbs on a baby-sitting gig.” – Kramer

– “So, my blood is not enough. Would you like a kidney too, because I’ll give it to you? I’ll rip it out right here and stack it on the table!” – Kramer

– “So, the free love buffet is over?” – Jerry “I got greedy. Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami.” – Jerry “Yeah, that’s what you did…I can’t believe I got another session with Izzy Mandelbaum, he’s probably makes me box a kangaroo.” – Jerry

– “All right, Even Steven. Oh, by the way, when you get back to your apartment try to keep it down because Newman is taking a nap in your bed.” – Kramer

– “Yes it is. I find the pastrami to be the most sensual of all the salted cured meats. Hungry?” – Vivian

Oddities & Fun Facts

– Lloyd Bridges was nominated for an Emmy for his role as Izzy Mandelbaum

Overall Grade (Scale 1-10)

JT: This wasn’t the strongest episode we have watched and did fade at the end but there is some quality dialogue peppered all through this one. It is definitely an episode carried on the back of actors that know their characters and relationships on a top notch, deep level because it was often the timing and delivery that made the big lines pop. The Mandelbaum return was a nice surprise but that really just kind of ends too, as do all of the stories here. Nothing quite paid off in a satisfying way. Also, that stupid fucking hat that Vivian’s kid had on was obnoxious. Fuck him. I am off to box a kangaroo. Final Grade: 6/10

Aaron: This episode sucked. It felt like a different show devoid of the characters we know and love. The writing was forced and I feel worse for having watched this one. Final Grade: 1/10

Andrew: I didn’t really care for this one. None of the storylines do it for me, which makes it hard for me get into the episode. And there are no big moments to make up for the less-than-inspired writing. But there are some genuine laughs and quality dialogue to be found, so the episode isn’t a complete disaster. Final Grade: 6/10

#IFTTT #Place to Be Nation

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in-the-bookish-dark · 4 years ago

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Fifteen Booths - Chapter 1 - RL

It’s lunch. On a good day, I have forty-five minutes, no more, and I get it at a moment’s notice from the big Boss Man, Mr. Peters. There’s always something that needs extra hands at the warehouse, so you take what you can when you can, is what he says. Sometimes, I only have thirty minutes, and every once in a while, I have zero minutes and I’m starving by the end of the day. Today, I have a full forty-five minutes as long as I get out of the building before he thinks for something else. I have my sandwich in wax paper. I have my bag of chips in a twist tie bag, and I have my can of Dr Pepper. The lunch bag, which I recycle until it falls apart, fell apart today, so they’re all loose. I find a vegetable bag that someone left behind in one of the cabinets, so I stick all of them into that. Looks like a homeless guy’s lunch, but it all chews the same.

When the weather is good, I’ll go over and sit maybe at the Water Gardens, or I’ll go up over by the courthouse. Burnett Park is about as far away, but there’s always so many streets to cross that it takes damn near forever, so if I want trees, my only good option is the Water Gardens. It’s okay, though. Most of the time, I’ll go sit at the edge of the big pool, the one they show in Logan’s Run. They shot it last year here, and a bunch of friends and I came to watch in the middle of the night. I don’t remember what that pool is called, but I like having all that rushing water in front of me. Sometimes I can get mesmerized, though, and I feel like I’m about to get sucked into the waters, tumbling down the steps to a very wet and sore death. When that happens, I’ll move over to the plaza or go sit on the edge of the quiet pool.

Wherever I end up sitting, which is usually something I don’t figure out until I’m down the sidewalk a ways, the bottom line is that I get some fresh air and a little time away from Mr. Peters, and then I go back and I can get through the bullshit day, y’know?

I put my windbreaker on – it’s only October, but we just got a front come in overnight and it’s sixty degrees with a light drizzle. That’s all we’re supposed to get today – drizzle, so I'm not too concerned. I stuff my lunch into my jacket pockets and head out, past someone with their radio on, the news going on about some trip President Ford is taking to the midwest. Or Middle East or something. I'm too hungry and in too much of a hurry to really pay attention.

I hit the back door and automatically check my pockets for my keys. Doing so, I fish three bills out of my pocket. I have two fives and a twenty, but I don’t see how. Did I get too much in change somewhere? Usually, this time in the month, I only have ten dollars in my allowance pocket, and then I remember. Mary Ellen and I were planning on going out to the movies night before last to see “Oh, God!” which just came out, but she ended up starting her time of the month that morning and didn’t feel like going out. That explains why I have fifteen dollars more than I was expecting.

So, I’m walking out, and I’m going to the Water Gardens, and then, two blocks down, it starts to rain. Not heavy, but if I walked a mile, I’d be soaked. I’m right next to the Greyhound station, and I actually think about going in there. I can sit on one of the benches and just eat my sandwich in peace. I see like three homeless guys wander in, though, and I figure, it’s middle of the day. Place will be full. Chances are, I’ll be stuck next to these guys and they’re gonna smell like wet dog. That would be the best scenario. Worst would be they’d smell like dead dog. Yeah, that always goes good with bologna and American cheese. Not for me, my friend.

So, I keep on walking, trying to stay under overhangs as much as possible, but there’s not a lot of that on the Hell’s Acre side of downtown. The heart has been gone for, I don’t know, ten years I guess, maybe the mid 1960s, but there’s still plenty of run down rat holes around the edges that you’re not going to get a lot of awnings and stuff.

It goes from raining to pouring. Not only pouring, but pouring and blowing – blowing right into my face. I’m half way to the Gardens, which won’t give me any cover, and the same distance back to the warehouse. The next door on my right is an arcade, not a game arcade but one of those dirty movie arcades, with the tiny booths and films running all the time.

Truth is, I’ve never been in one. Some guys at the warehouse talk about going in them after work, watching the 8mm loops or maybe getting a booth with a real dancer. She’s on the other side of a glass, but still, it’s a real woman there, in “all her glory.”

I don’t have a lot of options for escaping the rain, and the one that means getting the least wet is right in front of me, so that’s the one I pick. It sounds like an excuse, but hey, it’s the first time I’ve used it.

I push through the door and before my eyes adjust to the dark, the door snaps shut and I’m left in a skinny hallway with a window and countertop about ten feet down. I walk up. An old guy in a Mets ballcap is on a stool with a cashbox on one side and what must be forty stacks of quarters in front of him.

“Hey … uhh … mister. It’s my first time here. What do I ~”

“Two bucks in quarters gets you through the curtains.”

I hand him a five. He starts to slide five stacks of four quarters my direction.

“Sorry,” I say, “all I really want is two dollars worth.”

He keeps sliding and says “Don’t got any ones yet. Still early.” He cracks the lid of the cashbox about a quarter of an inch and tosses the five in, then scoots the box back a little like I’m about to make off with his fortune. I know it’s a scam. He’s got to have ones in there, but I guess he figures guys will spend more quarters if they’re carrying them around.

I scoop the quarters into my hand and drop them into my pocket as I start to go. Then, I turn back and add “What kind of ~”

“Film booths down both sides. Green light means empty, red means occupied. There's a card on the doors telling you what's showing in that room right now. We got a whole mix of movies depending on your tastes.” He gives me a quick eyeball like he’s assessing what my tastes are likely to be. “The three rooms on the far wall have the models, when they're here, which is usually after lunch.” I nod, then he remembers more “Oh, and the rooms where the projector isn’t working, there’s a big white sheet of paper saying so. We got maybe two out right now. Don’t even think about going into those rooms, ‘cause we have them locked. We catch anyone in there, and it’s his ass.”

He just stares at me at this point, and I think the only thing in his head is wondering what the hell this stooge is doing in there when he has no idea when he’s doing in the first place.

I wait a sec to see if he's going to say anything else, and he isn't, so I turn and walk between the velvet curtains, just like in a regular movie theater. Just before the curtains close, he adds one more thing. “There’s paper towels – don’t leave a goddamn mess!”

It's much darker in there, on the back side of the privacy curtain, and I almost walk into the dead end wall before I see the faint left and right arrows right under signs that say “We have the right to refuse service to anyone at any time” and “No loitering.” The loitering sign has a city ordinance number down at the bottom even though the lettering is the same as the other sign. Official or not, even if I had the inclination to loiter, I don’t have the time. I swing to the right and see the first row of booths. Both sides of the little hallway have something like a pantry door every five feet or so. Half of each wall is made up of doors and there's a sign on each one and a light over each one. Rows of little doors with little lights, like, I don't know, the confessionals at the Vatican, maybe. Plenty of doors, no waiting. I'm immediately embarrassed by the thought, though, and tell myself to add it to my own confession this week.

A guy with a mustache comes around from the far corner and just stops to read the first sign, so I stop and read a different sign. I don't want to give him the wrong idea. The first one has this big swirl of color and says "Swedish Erotica" on it, and there's a picture of a guy and two girls doing it right on the card. He's sitting and the first girl is sitting on his lap facing out and you can see their whole business right between her legs clear as daylight. The other girl is leaning in and kissing the first one, and playing with her breast - the first girl's breast, not her own. And they are all buck naked, of course.

I stare at that one a bit and think about going in, but the light is red. Lots of rooms, I tell myself, and walk down one door. That one has the same big swirl of colors, but this time it says "Color Climax." This card has the same blonde girl that was standing up in the first one, but she's on her knees now, and a dark-haired guy is behind her, holding on for dear life and she's got a face like a howler monkey. They must be about done, it looked like. I think about going into this one. The light is green, but I decide to hang off and check one more.

When I move down, the other guy glances my way and moves a door closer, too, until we're standing in front of adjacent booths not three feet from each other. This one has a big black man and a girl with pigtails. She's on the couch and displaying her altogether to the world and he's leaning in so he can put his enormous thing in her mouth. This light is green.

I look around as if anyone is going to notice or care if I go in, then walk in and close the door. I latch it, too, with a flat kind of sliding latch though I don’t think it’s necessary. It’s there, though, and I’m a little obsessive about locking thing when a lock is offered to me. Besides, that’s probably what activates the little light over the door. There's one wood chair in the middle. Every edge of every flat surface, from the chair to the rim of the projector screen has little burn marks from who knows how many cigarettes left resting there. There’s also a roll of toilet paper on a handmade shelf and a little waste can in the corner. I think that's kinda odd and puzzle for a couple of blinks, then I remember what the guy said about paper towels, and it dawns on me. It's so a guy can do his business right there when he gets cranked up, and nobody's the wiser.

The screen in front is a yellowed grey and covered with streaks that I avoid thinking about. I almost sit down and get ready for something to start, but it doesn’t take me long to decide against doing that. There’s no telling what might be on that damn seat. Actually, yeah, I do have a real good idea what’s on it and I don’t want any of it. I take the toilet paper roll with two fingers though and spin it around so it unspools, then I yank it into pieces long enough to drape over the seat. Not perfect, but close enough. I shift and the quarters rattle in my pocket and I remember what they’re for.

I pump a few quarters into the slot below the screen, being very careful not to touch anything. They clatters down through the machine’s little maze, then the sound seems to rise up from behind the screen. The projector starts flashing a completely naked woman on the screen, brunette with medium size breasts and curvy hips. She’s walking right to left and black lines are worming their way down the screen from left to right, running right over the top of her as she goes. She looks a little like my girl, Mary Ellen, but I’ve never seen all of Mary Ellen. We’ve only gotten as far as second base, but looking at this woman I can imagine what Mary Ellen would look like if she was naked. I’m sitting there watching her start to play with herself on the couch and I just remember that I’ve got my lunch and better get started on it. Before I know it, the rest of the forty five minutes is going to be gone, and I’ll be starving the rest of the afternoon.

I unwrap my sandwich and crumple up the wax paper and toss it into the trash can for two points and start to chow down just as she is sliding a big black fake penis up inside herself. She has all my attention, ‘cause like I said, I’ve never seen any movies like this before, maybe a random picture here and there, but not a whole movie. I’ve for sure never seen a naked woman in real life. The most I’ve ever seen is up Mary Ellen’s skirt to her panties, but even then everything was covered by her panty hose, so she was doubly covered.

As I chew away on my bologna and pickle sandwich her fingers are going wild on her privates and she’s rocking away in wonderland. Before I know it, my chewing is in sync with her rocking. Chomp-chomp-chomp – rock-rock-rock, and I’m completely lost in what’s going on in front of me. I can feel pickle juice running down my the inside of my sleeve under my jacket and shirt and I know it’s going to end up sticky because these are bread and butter pickles, not like my usual dill pickles, and they’re just more sticky like that. But I don’t care, really, because I’m fascinated, y’know.

All of a sudden, the door rattles and I jump and almost choke on a piece of pickle. It’s latched – I latched it when I came in, I remember that clearly, but still it was a noise I wasn’t expecting. I spit my mostly un-chewed piece of sandwich into my palm and call out “Occupied!” like the latched door and the red light weren’t clear enough. I guess they weren’t though, because why else would he be wanting to come into an occupied booth. Dumbass.

Anyway, so I think about it twice, and then go ahead and pop the sandwich bite back into my mouth. It didn’t even have time to get cold. I swallow it, then wash it down for good measure and then I turn and double check that the latch is secure.

I keep watching and in a few minutes, she’s joined by people who I think are supposed to be neighbors, like maybe a couple from next door. There’s no point in really trying to describe it except to say that, if there was a position two women and a man could have sex in, they try it over the next fifteen minutes or so. I can hear latches snapping and doors opening and closing every few minutes up and down the hallway, other guys coming and going from other booths, but I don’t see any big reason to come and go. I have plenty to watch right where I am.

So that’s all I do for the next fifteen-twenty minutes. Eat, drink, watch these three have sex, and feed the machine. A quarter buys two and a half minutes, so eight quarters get me a solid twenty minutes, which honestly is up before I realized it. My sandwich and my baggie full of chips, I practically inhaled, but I still have some Dr Pepper left in my can. I’m trying to be judicious, knowing that it’s only 12 ounces, but this awfully thirsty work, like we say over at the warehouse.

The handle gets jiggled twice more, but since I’m kind of expecting it, it doesn’t startle me. It annoys me, but there’s a big difference.

When the last loop ends, I give myself a minute to get more presentable and then gather up my Dr Pepper can, baggie and wax paper. I’m about to carry it out with me and then I remember the trash can, which I didn’t use for anything else, but it seems kind of tacky to put regular trash in. Not that it’s some special semen box, it just feels weird, suddenly, to have brought my lunch in. Somehow, the “normal” thing is to sit there in the dark, with the bleachy smell and the cigarette smoke smell soaked into everything, and the abnormal thing is to have my lunch with me, and I feel a little queasy. I toss all my stuff in the can and walk back out the windy hallway and right out the front door. The mustache guy is still back there, reading a sign just across the hall from the booth I was in. I don’t look at him, but I can see in my peripheral vision that he glances my way. The manager or owner or whatever the old guy is, is reading the paper and doesn’t even look up as I pass him on the way to the door. No hello or goodbye or “Come again!” which is okay. It’s not a chatty kind of place, y’know? The only way to tell I’d come or gone is the door chime making its “bing-bong” sound as I pass through it. I didn’t notice it when I came in, but I can sure hear it now.

It has actually stopped raining – quit sometime while I was in there. The sidewalks are all wet, but the sun is already out, at least for a moment. The sunlight on the water makes a nasty glare in places, and I’m trying to shield my eyes as I walk back to the warehouse.

It’ll be forty-five minutes on the dot when I walk back into the warehouse, I’m sure of that. Maybe a minute early if traffic is light and I don’t have to wait for a crossing sign.

The afternoon is a busy one. We’re in the middle of adding a little more office space, and so the floor crew, which includes me, is having to move some racks of document boxes around to make space for the expanded walls. It’s not bad. At least there are no chemicals to spill in this move, which has happened to me there before.

Before I walk out, I call Mary Ellen from the break room phone to see if she wants to eat. I offer to come pick her up and we’ll go to the Swiss House, like we planned the other night.

We’re sitting at dinner and I can’t help but think about the girl on the screen, the one who I thought looked like Mary Ellen. Looking at her now, I can see there’s really no resemblance. No real resemblance anyway. Her hair is different, her face is different, nose, eyes, even her breasts. Not that I can see them, but if I glance down while Mary Ellen is looking someplace else, I can tell that Mary Ellen’s are maybe a little smaller. It might be the blouse, but probably not. At the time, though, I sure kinda wanted them to look alike … to imagine Mary Ellen like that. Not that I don’t do it myself sometimes when, y’know, but it seemed like it was a lot easier doing it that way, with the movie.

“What would you like to do after dinner, Brendan?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it. We could maybe go to the drive in. It’s going to be nice, but we’d have to pick up a paper and see what’s showing. We could stay on this side of town and go see “Oh, God!” at the Meadowbrook, since we didn't end up doing it the other night.”

“Maybe not the drive-in tonight. I hate walking back to the restrooms on a regular day, and you know, right now …”

“Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah, no, let’s not do that.” I really had forgotten why we canceled the other night, at least for that moment. That time of the month.

We just sit and stare at the picture on the wall next to us for a few minutes.

“Are you okay, Brendan? You seem quiet tonight.”

“Me? Nah. I’m probably just a little tired. Things were kinda busy this afternoon and I didn’t sleep good last night.”

“Oh. Well, maybe we could just go to the Tandy Center for a while and have some ice cream? Maybe there’ll be skaters we can watch.”

I’ll be honest. I perk up a little at the thought of skaters, but I don’t want her to notice.

We drive to downtown and park in the Tandy lot by the river, then take the subway in to the Tandy Center. The whole place is nearly empty, but the ice rink has two skaters, probably a mom and her kid. Maybe a babysitter and somebody else’s kid. He was about ten and she was maybe ten years older than me. Mid thirties seems about right.

We watch them for a while. She’s a good skater. She’s probably had some lessons. She also has the right body for a skater. Curves, but not too many or too big.

“Did you ever skate, Mary Ellen?”

“Me? No, not really. I’d come to birthday parties here when I was younger, but I never had lessons or anything and I never was any good at it? Do you skate, Brendan?’

“No, I’d just fall down if I got out there. I’m not graceful enough on the ground. I’m sure not going to be any better on ice.” We both have a good laugh at that, and Mary Ellen touches my arm like she’s saying “You’re silly, but I like you anyway” that way women do. “She’s good, though, Mary Ellen. You might like it if you had lessons. They probably don’t cost a lot if you do them here.” It reminds me that we’ve never been dancing yet. We could go dancing, Mary Ellen and I. I’m okay with safe things like the two-step, and they made us learn the waltz in P.E. when I was in Junior High.

The son - the boy, anyway - stops and rests against the rail for a bit while the mom or sitter or whatever goes out and really opens it up. She’s really good, and in a way that I have trouble imagining Mary Ellen being. I try to picture her out there, in that body, doing the gliding and the little loops, and it’s hard. I still like it, though. I could give her lessons for her birthday, but that’s not coming up until May.

Or I could make a surprise gift to her. It doesn’t have to be her birthday or anything for me to give her a present. We’ve only been going out a couple of months, since about the time she went back to college, but we’re pretty close for just two or three months. I don’t think she’d say it was too much.

I reach down and squeeze her hand and we watch her some more. When the boy skates back out into the center, we’ve already finished with our ice cream, so I stand to go. She tugs me back down by my hand and says, “Please ... this is so sweet. She seems like such a nice mommy, doesn’t she?”

So we watch for a while, and I’ll be honest, I’m day dreaming a little bit. The boy spins off from the woman and takes a big tumble, then just drifts for another twenty feet, spread eagle flat out on the ice, twirling as he goes. I kind of miss the first part right after he launches, but I look over when Mary Ellen gasps. Almost immediately, though, the mom is there, leaning down to give him a hand up. She’s turned just the right way that someone could see down her blouse maybe, but she covers her cleavage when she bends. She’s no rookie there, either, which I kind of embarrass myself thinking, but hey, it stayed inside my head, so no harm, no foul, I say, right?

We’re both about done at that point. We walk back to the subway and as we’re waiting for the car to show up, Mary Ellen snuggles up under my arm like she’s cold, but she’s not. She just says, “Thanks, this was nice” in a little, soft voice. She stays like that till the subway car comes, and then snuggles back in when we’re on the car, heading out to the far stop where I parked my car. It’s so much better to park out there. You have less congestion around you, both in terms of cars sitting and in terms of cars all tangled up trying to get to the exit and blocking you in until they can move out of your way.

I walk her to her door. Her dad is home. I can tell because just as we get up on the front porch, the porch light comes on. Even when we go up the steps quietly, he knows. She’s twenty two now, and you’d think she was still sixteen the way he watches over her. We sure don’t fool around together much at her house.

When I start my car up and drive away from the curb, I think about that woman on the film again. She and Mary Ellen looked so much alike. Maybe kind of creepy, I guess, but I don’t let myself dwell on it.

The next couple of days, it’s real busy at the warehouse, plus it started raining that next morning. It ends up raining for two days straight, so there’s no way I’m going to go wandering anywhere with my sandwich. I just sit in the little break area each day and eat my sandwich and chips and drink my Dr Pepper, and I read through all the old issues of Field & Stream that my friend Kyle brought in from his dad’s barber shop last week.

On the third day, I’m starting to feel trapped, and like I want to eat lunch out, so I leave my sandwich and chips at home. I could treat myself – I could go over to that burger place in the Tandy Center, or I could go to the little barbeque place next to the Federal Building. I don’t know which yet, but I just step out the door, put my sunglasses on, and start walking. I’m letting my feet decide. Right away, they seem to start drifting toward the barbeque place, and I let them. I love their chopped brisket sandwiches, and it’s still pretty cheap even if you get the chips and soda to go with it.

It’s all going great, and my stomach is getting set on the chopped brisket, and then I decide to turn one block earlier than I usually do, and there’s that movie arcade just down the block on the right. I do good, though; I just walk right on by like it’s not even there. I go on to Robinson’s and I get my sandwich and chips and a Coke this time, and decide to walk over to Burnett Park. I should have stayed and eaten at the bench in front of Robinson’s, but I didn’t. As soon as I start walking, I know where I’m headed with my lunch again.

I feel a little guilty because I was raised Catholic and we feel guilty for the wind blowing, but I’m also – to be fair – feeling guilty because I know what I’m about to do and I do it anyway. I don’t think Jesus is too happy about it, no. But I also am pretty sure this isn’t the biggest issue Jesus has to worry about on a Thursday afternoon in October. All I do is watch a movie for a few minutes while I eat my lunch. I don’t think I’m going to hell for a movie.

So, I’m there and I’m all by myself this time. Nobody else in the hallway, anyway, though some booth have their red light on. Also, I can just make out the sound of other projectors running and other sounds seeping in. I walk around more and pick a different booth from the first time. I’m not looking for anything in particular, just something different. Roll the dice and take your chances. What’s the Mousetrap game motto? “You roll your dice, you move your mice” or something like that. I did glance at the pictures on the door, though, just to make sure it’s not anything like two guys or something else weird. I’m a little annoyed at myself because when I got a lot of change from the guy at the counter. I go ahead and ask for a whole five dollars’ worth, like I have time to sit in there for … well, however long five dollars would take. I guess if two dollars is twenty minutes, then five dollars would be almost an hour. But again, quarters spend everywhere, right?

I feed in only two dollars’ worth, just to make sure I don’t get carried away. The projector starts and what I see this time is a party and at first the couples go off into other rooms for sex, but after a while, it’s all happening out in the open and with multiple people. Girls are kissing and touching girls, two guys are both having sex with a girl, things like that. This goes on in all kinds of combinations. I open my drink first and take sips from time to time. I also open my chips, but I feel very self-conscious for some reason. Every chip sounds like glass bottles falling from the sky. At least I can sip my drink quietly, but there’s no way I’m going to go through even one of those tiny bags of chips without making a lot of noise. I eat maybe three or four and it sounds to me like I’m walking across broken glass, so I stop. I don’t even touch my sandwich. I can either pay attention to the show and sip my drink or I can pay attention to not getting barbeque all over my shirt. So, I pick the show.

One guy who shows up late has an enormous penis, and three of the girls – a redhead and two blondes - race right over like they’ve been waiting for him to get there. I can’t even describe what they’re doing because every minute or so it changes and they’re doing something different. There was one scene where one of the blonde girls was holding the guy’s penis for the redhead while she put it in her mouth and sucked. I kinda wish that the blonde holding it for the redhead were the brunette from the other day, the one who looks so much like Mary Ellen.

Then my time runs out. It just runs out. There’s no warning, no nothing. One minute the projector is going and the next minute it’s dark. It’s so abrupt. I start to put in another four quarters, but I talk myself down. If I put in just one quarter, then I can see a little more before I have to go back to work and it’s not just a sudden stop. I pop the quarter in and sit back down. The film picks up right where it left off. The guy has reached down and he has his hand on the redhead’s head, just holding it in place while he starts thrusting. I set down my drink, which is now empty, and put my right hand down on my crotch. I can feel my own hardness through my jeans, and I imagine that it’s my hand resting on her head. Quietly, I start moving like him. Very quietly.

The projector stops again and I think it really couldn’t have been two and a half minutes, because it seems like it had just started up. Who am I going to argue with, though? The projector? The old fucker up front at the counter? Like he’s going to worry about whether I’ve seen my full two and a half minutes of his dirty movies. Time is time, though, and now I have to get back to work. I’ve got eight minutes which should be plenty, but still -

I scoop up my can and toss it in the trash. I almost do the same with my sandwich and the rest of my chips, then I remember how hungry I am and calm myself down. I stuff the two of them into my pockets, unlatch the door, and next thing I’m out on the sidewalk.

I eat while I walk, which is easy enough with the chips, but I slow down a little when I’m working on the sandwich. I still don’t want to get back to the job covered in barbeque sauce. I zip up my windbreaker. At least most of it will fall on the jacket and not onto my clean shirt.

Later, when I’m leaving work, I think about calling Mary Ellen and seeing if she wants to get together. It seems like maybe I should do it, but I don’t really want to. Wednesday isn’t one of our usual nights, plus sometimes she has church activities anyway so it’s very hit and miss if we did want to do something. I must just be feeling guilty, and wanting her to reassure me that I’m not a bad person, or that she has no idea of what I’ve been doing. I don’t feel like going home though, so I take a walk around downtown for a bit. I happen to walk by the arcade twice. No, that’s not true. I just happened to walk by it once. I walk by it on purpose the second time. I don’t go in. Not either time. Instead, I walk on to the Richelieu Grill and have a bowl of their chili and a grilled cheese sandwich. That’s a lot of food, but it was a busy day, and I was pretty hungry. After I eat, I walk around a little more. A new cold front is coming in tonight, they say, and I can already kind of feel it. I don’t walk by the arcade again. I go home.

That night, as I’m getting ready for bed and taking care of business like they say, I think about the redhead and what she was doing. I imagine her as a brunette while she’s doing the oral sex thing. It seems like a good look for her. A real good look. She would actually look a little like Mary Ellen if she were a brunette.

The next day, everything is just off. I’m going the wrong way at work and everyone is annoying me. I’m edgy, which isn’t all that unusual, especially if Mr. Peters is having one of his Management by Riding Everybody’s Ass days. By the time lunch comes, I really want to get anywhere but the building. I don’t even want to see the building from wherever I am. I think about going back to Richelieu’s, but I brought my sandwich and chips, and besides, I’ve been eating out almost every day it seems, and a couple bucks here and there start to add up after a while.

So, I get my jacket, sandwich and chips and grab a Coke from the vending machine before I leave the building. I’m going to go to the Water Gardens for a while and just sit in the sun.

It’s a great plan, except when I get outside, I find the wind has really picked up. It was breezy when I came in, but now it’s really gusting. Still, I made up my mind, and that’s where I’m going to go. Make a plan, stick to it. I turn down Commerce, and even with the Convention Center in the way, the wind is still blowing in my face. That’s okay, though. I can sit on the bottom step of the mountain next to the plaza and be protected from the wind. I’ll shoo away a couple of panhandlers, and then they’ll all leave me in peace.

It’s still a good plan, except when I get there, there’s about a hundred elementary school kids there for a field trip or something. Four FWISD buses on the street and kids everywhere, but especially in the middle of the plaza where they’re settling in to have lunch.

So much for my great plan. There’s nobody to yell at, though. Do I yell at the kids for being around or all the adults for bringing them, or the wind for being a pain in the ass in the first place? Right. That’s what I’ll do.

As a payoff for the aggravation, though, I decide that I’m going to enjoy myself at lunch, and you know what that means. The wind almost yanks the door out of my hand when I get to the arcade, and even rattles some of the display cases with old posters. I just walk right on through and shake my handful of quarters as I walk by Grady, who is the old man who runs the place. Or at least, he’s the guy who sits at the counter while someone else runs the place. Probably the mob or someone like that. I bet if I ask, I could buy a marijuana joint from Grady or maybe some uppers or downers. Random fantasy, because I wouldn’t know what to do with any of those things.

I brush past an older guy in a ball cap and sports jacket and just walk back toward the booths with the girls. I stop when I see the little sign next to the first booth that says “Live girls / $5 for 10 min / $12 for 30 min / $25 for 60 min.” Even I can figure out that two thirty minutes cost less than one sixty minute, but maybe they don’t get too many of the sixties. Or maybe they want people to stay more than ten minutes but less than an hour. ” At any rate, I figure maybe I’m not going to see a live girl today. I wasn’t planning on spending so much, even if it’s a real live girl on the other side. Also, as I look around, I don’t see any pictures. Whoever is in there could be eighty years old with boobs down to her hips for all I know. That’s definitely not worth five dollars.

So, I backtrack down the hall. The guy in the cap and jacket is still where he was when I came in, reading the same sign he was reading. I don’t feel like going around the long way or squeezing past him, so I just turn left into the last booth before where he’s standing. I close the door and start rummaging through my pockets to pull out my lunch. First, I get everything out, then I start the movie and just relax. Today, I don’t care how much noise the chips make. If someone doesn’t like it, they can stuff it.

I pop the tab on my Coke, sit down, and immediately feed four quarters into the machine. I empty my pockets while the reel starts up. It has fewer scratches and damage than the one yesterday, plus the colors are better and it’s in focus. I figure that means it’s a lot newer. I can’t tell from clothes because nobody has any. It just starts with this redhead pulling this guy back on top of her into a big four-poster bed. It has canopy, drapes, big pillows and comforter – the works. No warm up or foreplay. He just starts pounding into her like gangbusters and she’s wrapping her legs around him and making all kinds of crazy grunts.

That must be the point where the door opened because all of a sudden, I can tell someone’s right behind me. In all this, I didn’t lock the door, I figure, and there’s a cop who’s just walked in on me violating who knows how many laws and health codes and things. My heart is pounding. I want to jump up, but I just freeze.

The guy puts his hand on my right shoulder and leans in to my left ear. I just know he’s going to start reading me my rights or tell me to stand up so he can put cuffs on me. Instead, he just says “I can help you feel even better” and starts massaging both of my shoulders. When he’s in close, I realize he’s the ball cap guy who just waited until I was settled and followed me into the booth I left unlocked. His breath smells like a queasy combination of chaw and doublemint.

“Oh, uh, sure, but no thanks.

“Nobody’s gotta know, buddy. I’ll just latch the door again and you can get our dick out of your pants. You’re gonna love it, trust me.”

“No, that’s okay. I ‘preciate it, but that’s alright. I’m gonna pass. Uhh ... listen, I just put ... umm ... a buck into the machine, but I’m going to head out. I got stuff I have to do.”

As I pop the door back open, I’m embarrassed at barely managing to say something that lame.

Of course I don’t really need to think of something clever. It’s not exactly a social error that I’m not interested in getting a blowjob from a guy. Even knowing that, though, it occurs to me that maybe that’s what most guys come here for. Does everyone but me just prowl around until they find a guy that lets them into the booth? Maybe this guy really does think I came in wanting it and then got scared.

Grady is probably getting used to me sailing out of the place. Maybe most guys sail out of the place once they get whatever it is they want there. That makes sense now that I think of it. Like people, guys I mean, are going to hang out in a waiting room or something and have tea? First off there’s no room down that skinny dark hallway. Second, holy crap, can you imagine what kind of germs and stuff are probably all over in there?

I’m nauseated now, and my heart is pounding. It’s just so strange, y’know? I had no idea what I was getting into when I went in the first time. I just figured I get a cheap thrill and that would be it. I’d go in for lunch every now and then, and that’s all, Here, I’m already going in three days in a row, but I tell myself it isn’t all my fault. If it wasn’t for the school kids, I’d be eating lunch at the Water Gardens right now, and not trying to get it eaten walking back to the warehouse. And then, I get even madder at myself because I realize that I don’t have to worry about eating as I walk because I left my damn sandwich and chips back at that … that darn place! Now, I’m muttering to myself as I stomp down the block. “I can’t believe all the darn stupid crap you get yourself in all the time. If it’s not one thing it’s another. You really try ~”

I stop myself there because those aren’t even my words. It’s my mom in my ear, saying all those things she always says when she gets mad. The next thing she says is “~ our patience sometimes. I don’t know what your dad and I are going to do with you.” Even now, when I’m twenty two and mostly living on my own, I have to listen to that business a couple of times a month. Even now, I’ll pick up the phone, and if she’s not yelling at me, she’s telling me how concerned she is about me ever making anything of myself. Last week, she called at ten thirty on a Tuesday when I was already in bed, and spent twenty minutes telling me that dad had run into Mr. Peters at the Meadowbrook golf course, and just happened to ask him how I was doing, and all Mr. Peters would say was “Oh, fine. Fine” in a way that didn’t sound to my dad like I was doing fine at all, and he came home and told her about it, and she’s been worrying herself sick since lunchtime that I’m going to get fired from another job and nobody was going to hire me because I’m getting a reputation.

Really all that in one sentence - hand before God. Now take that sentence and make it twenty minutes long and you’ll see what kind of noise I have to put up with, and then maybe it’s not so bad that every once in a while, I waste a couple of bucks on something that doesn’t exactly make me a good citizen. And y’know, that other job I got fired from, and there really was only one, was a lawn mowing job back when I was fifteen, and I got fired because the boss’ son came back from college before the end of the year, and the guy was desperate to give him something productive to do. He even apologized to me, for crying out loud, because he couldn’t afford two of us and he was stuck with his son or his wife would give him “holy hell” – his words. I went home and told my parents and they acted like I’d just confessed to burning down a church full of puppies. I told them exactly what Mr. Sloan told me, but it didn’t make any difference. Here I was at fifteen, about to ruin my life and end up panhandling and living in the woods at Trinity Park. Well, I guess now you know that, when I get mad, I can get pretty long-winded, like my mom – unless I just shut up completely – also like my mom. I couldn’t get mad at myself the way my dad does, ‘cause there’s no way I’m taking myself into my room and beating my own ass with a belt until I can’t sit for a week. I have to laugh a little. It’s just so crazy. I really want to give Mary Ellen a call just to say hi, but she doesn’t get to take calls at her office, and I don’t have time at the warehouse to get anywhere near the payphone that’s out in the loading dock.

I guess it’s okay that I left my lunch behind, because I’m not feeling very much like eating. If I didn’t have a real upset stomach when I walked out of the arcade, it did just fine until the real one showed up. Fortunately, I do have a big bottle of Tums in my locker basket at work. That’s going to pretty much be my lunch today – a handful of Tums and maybe a quarter’s worth of peanuts from the Tom’s snack machine. Tums and Tom’s, the lunch of degenerate losers.

I spend the rest of the afternoon in a mood. I don’t want to talk to anyone and I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I work up a pretty good sweat loading archive boxes onto the cart for disposal, then unloading them near the shredder. Back and forth, back and forth. I see Mr. Peters watching me, and maybe he’s a little surprised by how much I’m getting done. He shouldn’t be, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

On the way home, it occurs to me that maybe I’m just bored at lunch. If I had something different to do, that would probably change everything. I’ve gotten tired of sitting outside and watching birds at lunch, but if I took a magazine along or maybe had a little radio with me, that could be exactly what I need. That’s an exciting idea, and for the first time all day, I’m feeling better about myself. I realized that all I needed was a plan and now I have one.

There’s a Wards and a Sears up at the mall, but there’s also a Radio Shack not a mile from my apartment, so I stop there on the way. At first, I’m very disappointed. Everything I’m seeing is a radio and a cassette or eight-track deck combo and they all run anywhere from seventy to two hundred dollars! I’m walking out of the store with my mood hanging down to the floor and I see a little display of AM/FM portables, which is all I want for cryin’ out loud. There are two – one for fifteen and the other for twenty-two. I could probably go with the more expensive one, but I look at both the boxes and as far as I can tell, the only difference is that the more expensive one has a bigger speaker and runs on C batteries, and the other runs on nine volt batteries. They both come with an ear-phone and have a carrying handle.

Easy decision. I take the cheaper one. I have to skip fewer lunches to pay for it, right? It’s been an expensive week and “not as much” is the perfect price for me. I pay with a twenty and the cashier asks for my address and phone number. I just shake my head. They always ask and I always say no. They say it’s so they can mail catalogs. I’ve given my address before and I’ve never gotten a catalog. I don’t know what they do with them, not that I think they do anything evil with them, but still I don’t feel like playing whatever game it is they have going on. Ask my parents. They’ll tell you I have a problem with rules that I don’t understand. Ask my mom. She’ll talk your ear off.

Anyway, I make another sandwich when I get home. It’s a big sandwich to make up for the one I left behind earlier today. I call Mary Ellen and we talk for a couple of minutes, but I’m tired and still a little irritable, so we hang up fairly soon. I want to tell her that I’m really feeling good about this, but that would involve telling her about what brought me to this, so that’s not going to happen. I don’t want to make her put up with any of this noise. It’ll pass and things will be fine, and she doesn’t need to even know. It’s a non-event. Seriously.

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ladystylestores · 4 years ago

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The Coronavirus Cost Of Your July 4th Barbecue

BuzzFeed News has reporters around the world bringing you trustworthy stories about the impact of the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member.

After months of stress, Americans have been looking forward to the pre–COVID-19 pleasures of a (socially distanced) 4th of July. How about a cookout? It’s a traditional, low-key summer celebration — but amid the nation’s growing outbreak, even a simple home-cooked meal comes at an exorbitant price.

A BuzzFeed News investigation reveals the extent to which the virus — and the nation’s inadequate response to it — has infected, sickened, and even killed workers up and down the nation’s food supply chains as they work to keep our refrigerators full.

Take a typical summer feast: tangy ribs, a side of creamy pasta salad, and a slice of freshly baked apple pie. If you shop at a Walmart Supercenter, in, say, Massachusetts, the apples you’d buy would have been picked by workers in Washington state’s Yakima Valley, who live in a crowded labor camp with few protections in place. The fruit would then be sorted into boxes in an Allan Bros. packhouse, which for weeks failed to follow federal COVID-19 safety guidelines — even after employees started falling ill.

The ribs would have been sliced and packed by employees at a pork processing plant — like the Tyson Foods facility in Indiana that stayed open for weeks, even as the virus spread through its staff.

The pasta would have been stacked by grocery clerks whose employer was slow to close down for a deep cleaning after workers got sick, and to inform the local health department and customers of the growing outbreak.

From those three workplaces alone — the Allan Bros. packhouse in Yakima Valley, the Tyson plant in Indiana, and the Walmart in Massachusetts — around 1,100 workers have tested positive for COVID-19, and at least four have died, according to a BuzzFeed News review.

Worried about putting themselves and restaurant staffers at risk, many Americans have turned to home cooking as a safer, more ethical option. But what may seem safer for consumers can still be deadly for the low-paid, often immigrant workers who make up America’s sprawling food supply chain. Across the country, from fields to packhouses to slaughterhouses to grocery stores, companies failed to require masks, build protective barriers, or arrange testing until after outbreaks had spread through the workforce. Some workers in this chain still do not get sick pay, forcing them to choose between spreading the virus or missing out on paychecks — between feeding your family and exposing their own.

“I’d just like to see them keep us safe,” Dennis Medbourn, a worker at the Tyson plant in Logansport, Indiana, where three coworkers he knew have died from COVID-19 complications, told BuzzFeed News. “We’re working a lot of hours, too, to try to make up for the meat shortage.”

Courtesy Eklund Family

Yok Yen Lee (left), who died of the coronavirus, is seen with her daughter, Elaine Eklund.

One grocery worker, Yok Yen Lee, a door greeter at the Walmart in Quincy, Massachusetts, continued to report to work up until days before she died from COVID-19.

“She was really hardworking,” her daughter, Elaine Eklund, told BuzzFeed News. “She absolutely loved that job. She wanted to do that job for her whole life.”

The paths through which food reaches Americans’ plates originate on farms and in factories in small cities and rural towns before making their way across the 50 states. The networks are intricately interrelated, which means that the people who live in those areas and work in those jobs, along with the friends and relatives they come into contact with, shoulder a disproportionate share of the risk to keep the nation fed. An apple picker at a FirstFruits Farms orchard in Yakima Valley appears to have caught the virus from her husband who worked at a Tyson beef plant in the area, according to Erik Nicholson, vice president of United Farm Workers. FirstFruits didn’t respond to a detailed request for comment.

Since the start of the pandemic, around 29,000 workers at grocery stores, meatpacking plants, and other food processing facilities have been infected nationwide, and at least 225 have died, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. This is almost certainly an undercount: Many companies have declined to order widespread testing, even at workplaces where employees are falling ill. As a result, the full scope of infections among frontline food workers may never be known.

“What this pandemic is making very clear is that some of our most underpaid, marginalized, and exploited workers are, in fact, our most essential,” said Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who co-sponsored a bill with other Senate colleagues in June to provide protections for the country’s agricultural workers. “Every plate of food reflects a disturbing reality: Food-supply workers — from farmworkers to grocery store clerks — are risking their lives every day to keep us fed, often in unsafe conditions, and far too often making starvation wages.”

“If they don’t work, they don’t get paid — and if they don’t get paid, they don’t eat.”

Apples

Bobby Doherty for BuzzFeed News

“If they don’t work, they don’t get paid — and if they don’t get paid, they don’t eat.”

On April 30, Angelina Lara felt an itch in her throat.

For seven months, she’d worked as a fruit packer for Allan Bros., one of at least 18 produce companies in Yakima Valley, a fertile agricultural zone that rolls east across central Washington from the mighty Cascade mountain range. Lara, 48, grew up in Southern California but moved to the city of Yakima in 2005, following relatives who had come for the jobs at the valley’s plentiful packhouses. Around a third of the local jobs there are in agriculture, more than the next two industries combined. Apples are one of the main businesses in town, and the fruit is at the center of the Yakima city seal. Central Washington accounts for 60% of the nation’s apple production.

Over the years, Lara worked at numerous packhouses, including a previous stint at Allan Bros. She returned to the company last year for a job that paid $13.50 an hour, more than the $12 minimum wage she made previously. Inside a squat warehouse on Highway 12 in the foothills of Mount Rainier, Lara and her fellow day shift employees washed and sorted apples, which are packed and shipped year-round in the region. Around 300 workers clock in for the day shift, standing along a brisk conveyor belt about 2 feet apart, sorting apples, like the organic Fuji variety sold at Walmarts across the country, and separating out fruit that’s been spoiled or infested with worms. (The night shift handles seasonal fruit, such as cherries.)

It’s hard, tiring work, Lara said, and “it’s impossible to be 6 feet apart because at times the line moves so fast that you need somebody to help you with all the apples.”

Elaine Thompson / AP

In this photo taken Oct. 15, 2019, workers sort Granny Smith apples to ready them for shipping in a packing plant in Yakima, Washington.

As COVID-19 was spreading across the state and the country in March and April, Allan Bros. added plexiglass barriers to the office area where management and administrators worked. “But the same was not put in the warehouse,” said Shauri Tello, who moved from Mexico to Yakima when she was 15 and began working in the fruit industry shortly after she graduated high school at age 18, two years ago.

The company hadn’t yet begun providing workers with masks, so some workers brought their own from home, according to four employees and a memo from health officials who inspected the site on May 8.

Lara didn’t immediately assume the itch in her throat meant she’d caught the coronavirus. At the time, she didn’t know if anyone at work had been infected, she said. Still, she stayed home from work the next day as a precaution. Within 24 hours, she had developed a fever. Then she began to have trouble breathing. Lara has asthma, but this was worse than any asthma attack she had ever had. “I was home alone, so I started panicking,” she said. At the hospital, she said, she paid for the COVID-19 test herself — $152 — and it came back positive.

Lara informed Allan Bros. that, under doctor’s orders, she would stay home and quarantine for two weeks. She and another worker who tested positive said that company officials told them that their leave would be unpaid.

She asked her supervisor to “let [her] coworkers know so they can take precautions,” Lara said. “They never did it. Nobody even knew I was sick.”

Three of her coworkers corroborated that claim, saying that management didn’t tell them about any cases at the plant in April and early May. In an emailed statement in response to questions, Allan Bros. denied failing to inform employees about cases until May but declined to specify when it began doing so.

Today, Yakima County has the highest rate of per capita COVID-19 cases in the Pacific Northwest — about 1 for every 34 people. In central Washington — as in other areas such as California’s Imperial and San Joaquin valleys — the agricultural industry is experiencing a reckoning; the methods for packing produce and housing migrant workers that have been maximized for efficiency have created the ideal conditions for the spread of a devastating virus.

Elaine Thompson / AP

A sign outside Yakima, Washington, declares the city the “Palm Springs of Washington,” on Wednesday, June 17, 2020

“When farmers were designing farmworker housing and warehouses in which fruit is sorted, they were in no way considering pandemics,” said Dr. Malcolm Butler, the officer for the combined health district of Chelan and Douglas counties, which lie north of Yakima and are home to some 20 agriculture companies. “They built an industry and fed the world, and unfortunately social distancing is not possible. It’s very challenging and extensive to retool an entire industry at the drop of a hat.”

By late April, the virus had been quietly spreading among apple pickers and packers in central Washington for weeks. The scope of the outbreak remained unknown, in part because many companies were reluctant to arrange comprehensive testing. But even the available case numbers at the time revealed that the region’s fruit workers were facing a mounting threat.

Two weeks before Lara got sick, on April 13, three apple pickers at the Stemilt Growers farm in Douglas County, 70 miles north of the Allan Bros. facilities, developed coughs, according to a court statement from Stemilt’s human resources director, Zach Williams. These three were among the thousands who entered the country on temporary work visas, known as H-2A, for jobs at the region’s farms. While packhouses are largely staffed with local residents who have lived in Washington for years, field work is mostly done by seasonal laborers who ride buses up from Mexico for gigs that can last upward of six months.

Elaine Thompson / AP

A supervisor looks up at a worker pulling honey crisp apples off trees during a thinning operation at an orchard in Yakima, Washington on Tuesday, June 16, 2020.

Sixty-nine of those workers were housed at Stemilt’s “North District” housing facility, Williams stated. They slept on bunk beds in rooms shared with as many as three others. They also shared a kitchen, a laundry room, and several bathrooms. In the mornings, they piled into vans that carried 14 of them at a time to the orchards.

The company began implementing new procedures to protect workers from COVID-19 as early as March 13, after a worker at a different Stemilt housing facility tested positive. In a memo to employees, Stemilt said that vans and common areas across the company would be sanitized every night and throughout the day.

Those measures weren’t enough.

While the three North District workers were awaiting their test results in mid April, three others at the camp began showing similar symptoms. Ultimately, all six tested positive, according to Williams’ statement. Over the next few days, Stemilt coordinated with local health officials to begin testing all the workers from the North District camp, as well as the eight local crew leaders who worked with them. All the crew leaders tested negative, but 44 of the 69 guest workers ultimately tested positive. When Stemilt conducted another round of testing on April 22, nine more workers tested positive. Most of the cases were asymptomatic. No one was hospitalized.

The state’s Employment Security Department said it expects 27,000 H-2A jobs in 2020. Stemilt declined to comment for this story.

Stemilt was the exception — not in terms of its explosion of cases, but because it looked for them at all. Though local officials in nearby Yakima County offered to organize free testing at all produce industry workplaces, only one fruit company, Columbia Reach Pack, had taken them up on it by late May, according to local health department documents. At most fruit companies in the region, workers only got tested if they showed symptoms or were exposed to a confirmed case, and then called health authorities. Still, by the third week of May, more than 300 fruit workers in the region had tested positive, and health officials identified outbreaks — a workplace infection rate of at least 5% — at seven of the county’s 18 produce companies.

Allan Bros., where Lara worked, was one of the companies that declined to test its workers. Danielle Vincent, a spokesperson for Allan Bros., denied that the county offered to test all its workers — though other companies confirmed the offer, and government documents show that local health officials were “Awaiting Response” from Allan Bros. on an inquiry about whether the company “Want[s] Employee Testing.”

Though 19 of 515 employees at its packhouse had been diagnosed by May 21, the company did not schedule widespread testing, according to local health department records. Workers had to decide whether to risk going to work and getting sick, or staying home and not getting paid.

“The fear of every worker that I know is that they may come down with the virus. And if they don’t work, they don’t get paid — and if they don’t get paid, they don’t eat,” said Erik Nicholson, national vice president of United Farm Workers.

Evan Abell / AP

Workers from Columbia Reach Pack continue to strike in front of the business on River Road on Tuesday, June 2, 2020, in Yakima, Washington.

COVID-19 exacerbates long-standing power disparities between farmworkers, some of whom are undocumented, and their employers, noted Beth Lyon, a law professor and founder of Cornell University’s Farmworker Legal Assistance Clinic.

And while the country has deemed them “essential” during a pandemic, most farmworkers can be fired at will, making many hesitant to advocate for safety measures.

This is particularly true of guest workers, whose visas are directly tied to their employer. “If they speak up for health protections like masks or social distancing, they are likely to lose not only their livelihood but also their housing” and their permission to be in the United States, Lyon told BuzzFeed News.

Local officials and farm owners attribute some of their slow reactions to the pandemic to the lack of direction at the federal level. That’s led the industry to “take care of itself” said Butler, the Chelan–Douglas Health District officer.

“The difficulty we’ve had was that there was absolutely no guidance on what was the right way to house H-2A workers,” he said.

Sean Gilbert, who leads Gilbert Orchards, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s changing position on masks left his company in a conundrum. In March — as the country’s leading top public health agency told citizens not to use masks and to save them for healthcare professionals — orchard and packhouse operators donated a few thousand N95 masks they had gathered for fire season to local hospitals. Weeks later, when the CDC changed its guidance, those businesses were left scrambling, facing stiff competition and spiking prices for face coverings as the rest of the world competed for mask shipments.

Gilbert, whose operation includes 4,000 acres of orchards and 1,200 workers during peak season, noted that apples are a “labor-intensive business” with small margins. As a result of social distancing measures, the packhouse could only prepare 10,000 boxes of apples per shift from late March to the end of May, rather than the typical 12,000.

“Keeping people apart means that people can’t hand off things in a process,” he told BuzzFeed News, “and it slows the process down.” He added that protective equipment and hazard pay add a further squeeze on Gilbert Orchards’ economics. “COVID has fundamentally changed how we do business.”

Yet he didn’t see the need to allow health officials to test all his employees. Gilbert Orchards — where at least 26 of the 350 or so employees in the packhouse, shipping, and administrative departments have been diagnosed — declined Yakima County’s offer to arrange testing at the facility and instead suggested its workers take advantage of the free testing sites local officials had set up around the valley.

Gilbert said part of his reasoning was fear of upsetting his employees. “I turned down their offer to bring in a National Guard unit to quarantine our facility while they escorted people to and from testing tents,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I felt that requiring that of all employees would have been potentially traumatic.”

Evan Abell / AP

A committee of Allan Bros. workers exits the company’s office after turning in a signed agreement to return to work, Thursday, May 28, 2020, in Naches, Washington, after a strike to protest what they consider unsafe working conditions at several fruit warehouses during the COVID-19 outbreak.

If guest workers are among the most vulnerable employees in the produce industry, workers who live year-round in central Washington are only slightly more secure.

Lara’s diagnosis, she said, threw her family into a precarious financial position. Her husband, who works at the same warehouse, and her two sons, who work as nursing assistants, tested negative but stayed home as a precaution in case they subsequently caught the virus from her. The household of four went without a paycheck for two weeks. Lara qualified for unemployment insurance because she’d been diagnosed, and her husband and sons may be eligible for family leave benefits — but whatever government money they’d receive wouldn’t come soon enough to meet the bills coming due. The family burned through years’ worth of savings in a matter of days, she said.

Back at Allan Bros., meanwhile, workers in the packhouse said the company still hadn’t distributed masks, and as the cases mounted, many were growing angry.

On May 7, dozens of Allan Bros. workers went on strike over conditions they said were unsafe; in the days that followed, around 500 workers from six other fruit companies joined them. When Lara’s quarantine ended, she took a spot in the line of workers holding signs by the road, chanting through colorful cloth masks. Local lawyers and union representatives estimated that the labor action was one of the largest they’d seen among agriculture workers in Yakima, reminiscent of the marches César Chávez attended in the county in the 1980s.

Nearly every day, at each of the seven strike locations, the workers encountered local white residents driving by, shouting at them to get back to work, said Cristina Ortega, an activist who participated in the strikes. She recalled those drivers saying things like “If you don’t like it, get out.” On another occasion, a man shouted out his car window that he was going to “come back and shoot you all,” according to a Yakima County Sheriff’s Office incident report and written witness statements. When deputies later caught him returning to the scene, he told them that Allan Bros. “treats those people very well and they should not be protesting,” according to the incident report. The man was arrested and charged with malicious harassment.

The backlash against the striking workers reflected a long-standing resistance to Yakima’s growing Latinx population for some. Latinx residents accounted for 15% of the city’s population in 1980, 30% in 2000, and 50% in 2018. Still, no Latinx candidate had been elected to office in the city until 2015, after a federal judge ruled that the city’s previous system of at-large council seats violated the Voting Rights Act. In 2016, a majority of the county’s residents cast their ballots for Donald Trump.

Three weeks into the strike, Lara finally went back to work. Allan Bros. had installed protective barriers in the packhouse, offered a $1-an-hour pay raise, and started providing masks, according to Lara and three coworkers. Though she has been cleared of infection, she still has trouble breathing and sleeps sitting up most nights. She said her doctor told her it might be months before she feels normal again.

She considers herself fortunate, she said. One of her coworkers, 60-year-old David Cruz, got sick a few days after she did. His wife and daughter tested positive too, Lara said. He had worked at the plant for 12 years, most recently putting together boxes on the upper level of the warehouse. When Lara saw him on breaks, he was “always positive, getting along with everybody,” she said. On one of the last days of work before the pandemic hit, Cruz told Lara about his plans to visit his mother in Mexico for the first time in years. “He was very happy he was going to see her,” Lara recalled. “He was planning for June or July.”

He died on May 31. His coworkers collected $4,000 to give to his wife. The mood at the packhouse has been somber since.

“Wow. It spread out really, really quick.”

Pork Ribs

Bobby Doherty for BuzzFeed News

“Wow. It spread out really, really quick.”

Every morning at the Tyson pork plant in Logansport, Indiana, a low-slung town of 18,000 that’s located at the intersection of three highways and surrounded by livestock ranches, farmers deliver the hogs to the kill floor, known colloquially as the “hot side.”

There, the pigs move through pens, into a machine that stuns them, and then onto a conveyor belt that carries them to the knife that slits their throats. On a normal day, Tyson’s kill floor processes five hogs every 16 seconds, according to Dennis Medbourn, a 52-year-old worker who sets the speed on the machines. Workers stand elbow to elbow along the production line, peel the hog’s skin off, cut through its center, remove its guts, and hang its carcass on a hook that takes it to the plant’s refrigerated “cold side.” The movements are strenuous and repetitive; to try to prevent injuries, ergonomic monitors — their official job title — walk up and down the line checking on the welfare of workers.

An ergonomic monitor on the hot side, a 16-year Tyson veteran who requested anonymity out of fear of losing his job, began seeing his coworkers wearing cloth masks they brought from home in early April.

Darron Cummings / AP

An employee leaving the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Logansport, Indiana on Thursday, April 23, 2020.

Outbreaks were beginning to pop up at meatpacking plants around the country. Tyson had instituted temperature checks at Logansport but hadn’t yet installed plexiglass barriers or distributed any protective equipment — even though another Tyson pork plant, in Columbus Junction, Iowa, had closed on April 6, leaving the company all the more reliant on its other five hog slaughterhouses.

“That’s when everybody was thinking, Man, why don’t they close our plant?” said Medbourn. “You’d hear people coughing and stuff. People weren’t showing up for work more than usual.”

Tyson declined to comment on whether its Logansport plant increased production during that period, but a spokesperson, Liz Cronston, said, “The level of production at which we determine to operate in our facilities is dependent on ensuring team member safety.”

The company has maintained that its response to the pandemic was swifter than most. Cronston noted that Tyson began seeking masks for workers even before the CDC recommended their use, and it was one of the first companies to proactively test all employees for COVID-19. “If we learned a team member had tested positive for the virus, we notified co-workers who had been in close contact,” she said. “Our priority and focus have been the protection of our team members and their communities.”

The ergonomic monitor tried to maintain a few feet of distance when he checked on workers — but the long, open-tiered plant was loud with the whirring of electric saws, the rumble of conveyor belts, and the echoing clangs of metal. He sometimes had to lean in close to talk and hear, he said. He interacted with around 200 workers each day. Tyson began requiring employees to wear masks in mid-April.

On April 23, with rising case numbers at several facilities, Tyson organized COVID-19 testing for all 2,200 of its workers in Logansport.

The monitor and others on his shift filed into a big white tent in the parking lot, “all pushed together to get out from the rain” as nurses swabbed their noses, he said.

A few days later, he got a call informing him of his result: He had COVID-19 — one of 890 Tyson workers to test positive by the end of April in Logansport, a staggering 40% of the plant’s workforce. Like most of them, the monitor showed no symptoms at the time of diagnosis, although he did recall feeling unusually tired the previous week. He shuddered at the thought that he may have infected the people he saw every day.

“I wouldn’t have suspected if I didn’t get tested,” he said. “I was really freaked out. Just, like, wow. It spread out really, really quick.”

Tyson closed its Logansport plant for two weeks starting on April 25. All six of its pork plants have had outbreaks of at least 200 cases, and five have temporarily closed. At one point, four of the country’s five largest known outbreaks in meatpacking plants were at Tyson sites. To date, around 8,500 Tyson workers have tested positive, more than the company’s three biggest industry competitors combined, according to data compiled by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.

But Tyson’s standing at the top of this list isn’t necessarily because its plants are more dangerous than those of its rivals, but because the company has been more committed to determining how many of its employees have been infected, even though revealing those numbers almost guarantees a plant’s closure. The other big meat companies — JBS, Smithfield Foods, and Cargill — haven’t conducted comprehensive testing at most facilities, even as meat processing plants became widely known as incubators for the virus.

“We believe it’s imperative that we share our experience addressing this pandemic because safety is not a point of competitive advantage,” said Cronston, Tyson’s spokesperson. “Results from these tests have allowed us to find team members who have the virus but don’t have symptoms and would not otherwise have been identified.”

For Tyson, JBS, Smithfield, and Cargill, closing a plant sends a ripple effect across both ends of the supply line. The four companies produce around 85% of the meat sold in the US, churning out pork, beef, and poultry in massive facilities staffed by the thousands of employees needed to reach output goals. The concentration of meat production into a few dozen mega-plants has led to lower prices but has also left the system vulnerable to major disruption, adding further pressure on workers to help keep the plants going.

Tyson is the largest buyer for many farmers around the country and one of the largest suppliers for many groceries, including Walmart. A plant closure can lead to lost wages for livestock sellers at the start of the chain and barren meat shelves for consumers at the end. “Our plants must remain operational,” CEO John Tyson wrote in a full-page ad in the Washington Post and New York Times in late April, noting the company’s “responsibility to feed our country.” The Trump administration codified that idea into law with its April 28 executive order granting meatpacking corporations immunity from legal liability for sick workers.

As Tyson got ready to reopen the Logansport plant, it notified employees through an automated text service that starting May 6, “If eligible to work, you will be required to work all scheduled hours in order to receive the guarantee pay.” Workers would receive a $30 “daily show up bonus” for all shifts through the end of May, another text stated. A May 8 text told employees that if they had been “symptom free for the last 72 hours without the use of any medication you can report to Tyson” — though the message didn’t include CDC’s additional recommendation that those diagnosed should only stop isolating at least 10 days from the onset of symptoms. One worker, a loin cutter in the cold side, told BuzzFeed News that he didn’t feel symptoms until 12 days after he tested positive, just as his two weeks of paid quarantine time was ending, leaving him temporarily without a paycheck as he applied for short-term disability to cover additional time off.

Michael Conroy / AP

Workers line up to enter the Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Logansport, Indiana on Thursday, May 7, 2020.

Tyson maintains that its policy has been clear: “Any team member who has tested positive will remain on sick leave until they’ve satisfied official health requirements for return to work,” Cronston said.

But some Logansport workers vented their frustrations on a private Facebook group called “Tyson Talk,” expressing dismay at the company’s plan to reopen even while nearly half of its workforce was under quarantine. They also shared health updates; on May 5, a group member wrote in both English and Spanish that someone from the slaughter side had died from the virus.

In fact, at least three workers at the Logansport plant have died of the coronavirus, according to local health officials and a union steward at the plant.

Tyson officials refused to confirm the number of workers who died. “We’re deeply saddened by the loss of any team member,” Cronston said. “We don’t have a number to share.”

Tyson also declined to provide an update on the number of confirmed cases at the plant since the 890 reported in April, but local health officials estimated that “over 1,000” of the plant’s workers have tested positive.

Cass County, where Logansport is located, has nearly triple the rate of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people compared to the rate of the next highest Indiana county, and Tyson’s pork processing facility is one of the area’s largest employers. Tyson was “absolutely the hot spot” for COVID-19 in the county, said Serenity Alter, the administrator for the Cass County Health Department.

The Tyson plant reopened on May 6. The company ramped up production as quickly as its workers could return, accelerating from half-capacity to nearly full capacity within two weeks. It provided face shields, built plexiglass barriers in the cafeteria, and expanded its cleaning staff.

“All you can do is wear one of these masks and wash your hands,” a Tyson senior manager in Texas said of the risk that meatpacking workers face during the pandemic. “I gotta assume most of the people in our facility have been around or interacted with someone who was positive.”

Michael Conroy / AP

Workers are seen leaving the Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Logansport carrying various types of personal protective equipment, on Thursday, May 7, 2020.

Two months removed from the Logansport plant’s mass testing, some workers are still infected with the virus, though Tyson won’t say how many are now out sick.

“We currently have very few cases,” Cronston said. “We are aware of no positive cases of any team member currently working in our facility.”

When he returned from his quarantine, the ergonomic monitor wore a mask and kept several feet of distance from the coworkers he checked on. At the facility last month, he and others walked past a daily reminder of the cost of producing pork through the pandemic: A memorial of wreaths and photos in the common area honored the three workers who have died from the virus. It stayed up until the middle of June.

“We weren’t prepared to lose her this suddenly.”

Pasta

Bobby Doherty for BuzzFeed News

“We weren’t prepared to lose her this suddenly.”

While fruit pickers and meat-packers labor out of view of consumers, grocery clerks serve at the public-facing end point of the supply chain, the final set of hands to touch your food before you do. As grocery stores became all the more critical to keeping people fed during lockdown, their safety protocols soon concerned not just the workers who spend their days there but the customers passing through.

In March, as the US declared a state of emergency, panicked shoppers flocked to supermarkets to hoard toilet paper, flour, and pasta; in stores around the country, shelves began to empty. Some lined up in the early morning for a first crack at the inventory. Many didn’t wear masks.

It didn’t take long for the virus to reach the Walmart Supercenter in Worcester, Massachusetts, which has an online inventory that includes Tyson pork ribs and Fuji apples from Rainier Fruit, Allan Bros.’ distributor. (A spokesperson for Walmart said that Tyson pork ribs are not on the store’s shelves at this time.) On April 27, the store posted on Facebook that it would close on April 30 for a single “day of deep cleaning and sanitizing” before reopening early the next morning. Some shoppers from the postindustrial city around 50 miles from Boston were horrified.

Brian Snyder / Reuters

Shopping carts are left outside the Walmart Superstore in Worcester, Massachusetts, temporarily closed by an order from the city after numerous employees tested positive for the coronavirus, on April 30, 2020.

“How do you ‘deep clean’ in one day??” a commenter wrote.

But while shoppers had the option of staying away from the store, some of Walmart’s workers felt they did not. Despite the widespread testing shortages at the time, the company’s COVID-19 emergency leave policy didn’t offer additional paid time off to staffers unless they tested positive or were subject to mandatory quarantine — a policy that advocates said is too narrow as it doesn’t clearly cover workers who feel ill, are immunocompromised, or need to care for a sick relative.

By the end of April, Walmart knew that a growing number of employees in Worcester — as well as in another store in Quincy, an hour’s drive away — had contracted the virus, which was quickly spreading through the state. Although the company had released a plan detailing how they’d keep workers safe a month prior, the stores weren’t providing staffers or local public health departments with enough information about sick workers, records show.

“We have had consistent problems with Walmart,” Quincy’s health commissioner, Ruth Jones, wrote on April 28 to the Massachusetts attorney general’s office. “They have a cluster of Covid cases among employees and have not been cooperative in giving us contact information or in following proper quarantine and isolation guidelines.”

Yok Yen Lee, a 69-year-old door greeter at the Quincy store, was so fearful of contracting the coronavirus that she used most of her accumulated paid time off in March and early April when case numbers in the US began to skyrocket, her daughter, Elaine Eklund, told BuzzFeed News. Shortly after Lee returned to work in mid-April, she began to feel sick but assumed she’d caught a cold from spending her eight-hour shift standing outside in near-freezing temperatures. On April 11, the Quincy Health Department contacted Walmart to inform the store that one of Lee’s coworkers had tested positive for the coronavirus. Although Walmart had waived its normal attendance policy in March, Lee continued to clock in, afraid of losing her job if she took more days off, Eklund said.

Walmart’s website says it began requiring employees to wear masks on April 17. But one current Quincy checkout employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their job, said management told employees in April that masks weren’t necessary. Sometimes there would be 500 people in the store and no social distancing in the employee back rooms, according to the employee. “It was like corona was a myth,” they said. A Walmart spokesperson declined to comment on these specific allegations.

Lee had worked at the store for about 15 years, after emigrating from China in 1979 and working a series of retail jobs. Colleagues described her as a joyous woman who doled out hugs and danced spontaneously but also showed a tough side when it came to dealing with rude customers.

Lee told at least one colleague, the checkout employee, that she had a slight cough. She had attempted to apply for extended leave, but found the process, which was managed by a third-party administrator, exceedingly complicated as she primarily spoke Cantonese, Eklund said. On April 19, Lee didn’t feel well at work and went home early. The next day, she had a fever and couldn’t get out of bed. Paramedics, with the help of a maintenance worker, cut the lock to her door and rushed her to a hospital, where she was intubated. Her request for extended leave from Walmart was approved on April 28, as she lay bedridden in the ICU, Eklund recalled.

She would have turned 70 last week. Instead, she died on May 3 — one of at least 22 Walmart employees killed by COVID-19 nationwide, according to United for Respect, a labor advocacy group. Lee left behind a daughter and two grandchildren, including one who was born in December.

“She never even got a real family picture with her grandson,” Eklund said. “We were starting to become a complete family. We weren’t prepared to lose her this suddenly.”

Only after Lee died did the Quincy Walmart close its doors. It soon emerged that 33 other employees there had contracted the virus.

The Worcester Walmart became one of the largest clusters in the state, with 82 employees ultimately diagnosed with COVID-19. It was also one of the largest outbreaks at any grocery retailer in the country.

By the time the store posted on Facebook about the daylong cleaning in late April, local officials were investigating the situation. Public health inspectors obtained an internal company list showing that nearly two dozen employees had tested positive for the coronavirus before the store closed, 20 within a one-week time period, Walter Bird Jr., a city spokesperson, told BuzzFeed News.

They also reviewed a photo of a sign instructing staffers to work their scheduled shifts during that April 30 cleaning: They were expected to help “clean, sanitize and stock” the store alongside a third-party cleaning service so it would be ready to open the next morning.

Obtained by BuzzFeed News

A sign posted on the door of the Walmart Supercenter in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The city of Worcester issued a cease-and-desist order that day, “forcing the store to close immediately,” Bird said. It was the first time any US Walmart was closed by the government. The store didn’t reopen until May 5, after the company agreed to test all of the store’s nearly 400 employees.

The outbreaks in the Quincy and Worcester Walmarts were caused by “dangerous working conditions” present at other branches, as well, according to a complaint recently filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration by United for Respect, which surveyed stores nationwide. The complaint claimed that Walmart didn’t provide sufficient paid sick leave to its employees, “thereby pressuring people to go to work even if they have symptoms or have been exposed to the virus.”

The complaint also alleged that Walmart didn’t enforce social distancing and had failed to quickly close stores for cleaning and disinfecting after employees were exposed or diagnosed — as was the case in Worcester and Quincy — allowing the virus to spread further among employees and the public.

All these failures violated state and federal guidance for employers, the complaint alleged.

“Communities across the country have suffered from coronavirus cases, and with more than 1.5 million associates in the United States, and stores, clubs and other facilities located within 10 miles of 90 percent of the U.S. population, Walmart is not immune to the impact of COVID-19,” said Phillip Keene, a Walmart spokesperson. The corporation has worked “to find an appropriate balance between supporting our associates and serving our customers” during the pandemic, he said, by following deep cleaning, sanitizing, and social distancing protocols guided by the CDC. Associates are given health screenings and temperature checks prior to their shifts, for example, and employees who appear ill are asked to return home. Walmart has instructed managers since March to inform associates when one of their coworkers falls ill, Keene said.

There are no laws mandating that retailers report coronavirus cases, leaving it up to stores to decide how best to handle outbreaks. In May, a delegation of state lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, demanding more information about how the retail giant would make changes to prevent future outbreaks and protect workers.

In its response, Walmart deflected responsibility, saying it may be “impossible to track the source of anyone’s infection.”

“Walmart’s response is unacceptable,” Warren said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “Nearly 100 Walmart workers in Massachusetts got sick with coronavirus and one died due to an outbreak at the store but the company refused to answer questions on what happened and what changes it is making to keep our residents safe at work.”

One recent afternoon in June, as protesters filled streets across the country, a line of masked shoppers stretched outside the Worcester Walmart as the store limited capacity to around 20% below its usual level. Shelves were stocked with pasta again, apples were piled into abundant mounds, and pork ribs lay beside long rows of fresh meat. Fruit farms, meatpacking plants, and grocery stores were open for business in every corner of America. The food supply chain kept on humming. ●

Courtesy Eklund Family

Yok Yen Lee, seen her carrying her granddaughter in 2018, was never able to take a full family photo with her new grandson who was born in December, according to daughter Elaine Eklund. Lee died in May of COVID-19.

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