#they don’t know what is wrong with her yet but she is 94 so her being not ok either is very plausible

[cannot-copia]

this year so far

[httpsdana]

Heeyy!! Could u do a jamal musiala with promt 94 where he breaks up with reader (like they've been together since they were teens 🤭) because he wants "focus" on his career (he was actually just stressed 💀) but later on he REALLY regrets it and ask the reader to take him back with promt 28 and 54

One Last Chance~Jamal Musiala

*Pictures are from Pinterest*

enjoy this <3

request from here

master list -> part 2

players/drivers I write for

28-"Don't you ever do that again

"54-"can I kiss you?"

Jamal sat at the edge of his bed, head in his hands, the quiet of the room wrapping around him like a suffocating blanket. The weight of everything – football, the endless expectations, the noise from the media – it had all become too much.

y/n had always been there for him, always supporting him, always by his side since the two of them were teenagers. Yet, he felt overwhelmed, lost in the chaos of trying to be the perfect footballer, the perfect boyfriend, the perfect everything.

She was perfect, though. She’d been his anchor when everything around him seemed so unstable. But lately, he found himself retreating, thinking that if he could just have some space, maybe the weight would lift.

That thought had festered until he convinced himself that the only way he could truly focus on his career was if he pushed y/n away.

That’s how he found himself on the verge of the biggest mistake of his life.

He looked up when her entered the room. Her soft smile faded when she saw the pained expression on his face, and she instantly came to his side, her hand gently resting on his shoulder.

"Jamal, what’s wrong?" she asked, concern lacing her voice.

He swallowed hard, knowing what he was about to say was going to shatter her.

“I... I think we need to break up,” he forced the words out, his throat tight, chest heavy with the weight of his lie.

Her hand froze on his shoulder, and her expression crumbled into confusion.

"What? Jamal, why... why would you say that?" She crouched in front of him, her eyes searching his face desperately for an explanation that made sense.

“I just need to focus on my career right now. Football’s getting intense, and I don’t think I can balance everything” he continued, hating himself more with every word.

“But Jamal, we’ve always made it work,” she replied, her voice trembling as she fought back tears.

“We’ve been through so much together. I can be there for you, like I always have. You don’t have to do this.”

The look in her eyes almost made him break. But he kept his resolve, believing that this would help him focus, that she deserved someone who didn’t carry the stress of the world on his shoulders. He couldn’t bear to drag her through it all.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his voice barely audible. “But I need this.”

The silence that followed was crushing. y/n stared at him in disbelief, her heart breaking right in front of him. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she quickly wiped them away, standing up and stepping back, as if the distance could somehow shield her from the pain.

“Fine,” she said, her voice stronger than he expected, though he could see the devastation in her eyes. “If that’s what you want, Jamal, then... then I won’t stand in your way.”

She turned and left the room, leaving him sitting there, alone. As soon as she was gone, the silence became unbearable, the regret already gnawing at him. But he stayed there, convincing himself it was the right thing to do. He needed to focus, needed to prove to himself – and the world – that he was good enough.

•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•

Months passed, and in those months, Jamal realized just how much of a mistake he had made. At first, he threw himself into football, into training, hoping that the ache in his chest would go away. But it never did. Every time he returned to an empty apartment, every time he found himself alone with his thoughts, it hit him like a tidal wave.

y/n wasn’t there. The one constant in his life, the one person who had loved him unconditionally, was gone. And it was his fault.

He missed everything about her – her laugh, her smile, the way she always knew how to calm him down when the pressure got too much. He thought cutting her off would ease his stress, but all it did was leave him feeling hollow.

The final straw came one night after a particularly grueling match. He had played well, but the win felt empty. As he scrolled through his phone aimlessly, his thumb hovered over her contact.

He hadn’t reached out since the breakup, convincing himself that he needed to let her move on. But now, as he stared at her name, he couldn’t stop himself from texting.

“Can we talk?” he typed out, his heart pounding in his chest as he hit send.

To his surprise, she responded quickly.

“There’s nothing left to talk about, Jamal.”

The coldness of her response hit him like a punch to the gut. She was done, and he deserved it. But he couldn’t give up. He couldn’t let go of the one person who made him feel whole.

“Please, just give me a chance. I made a mistake,” he sent, desperate now.

There was a long pause before her next message.

“Fine. Come over tomorrow evening.”

•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•

When Jamal arrived at y/n's door the next evening, his heart was racing. He hadn’t seen her in months, hadn’t heard her voice except in his memories. But as soon as she opened the door, all the regret, all the pain came flooding back.

She looked... different. Stronger, maybe. But he could see the hurt lingering in her eyes, the walls she had built up since he had shattered her heart.

“Come in,” she said, her voice neutral as she stepped aside to let him in.

He followed her into the living room, his heart heavy. y/n sat down, crossing her arms, clearly waiting for him to speak first.

“I’m sorry,” he began, his voice thick with emotion. “I’m so, so sorry. I thought pushing you away would help me focus, but all it did was make me realize how much I need you. How much I—” He paused, swallowing hard. “How much I love you.”

Her expression softened for a moment, but the pain remained in her eyes.

“Jamal, you broke my heart,” she said quietly, her voice trembling. “You didn’t even give me a chance to understand what was going on with you. You just... left.”

“I know,” he whispered, shifting closer. “I was stressed, and I handled it the worst way possible. I should have leaned on you, talked to you, but I didn’t. And I regret it every single day.”

y/n didn’t say anything, and the silence between them was suffocating. Desperation clawed at him, and before he could stop himself, he asked, “Can I kiss you?”

y/n looked at him, the vulnerability in his eyes breaking down some of the walls she had put up.

“Jamal...” she started, but she didn’t pull away when he closed the distance between them.

His lips brushed against hers tentatively, as if he was afraid she might push him away. But when she didn’t, he deepened the kiss, pouring every ounce of regret, every apology into it.

When they finally pulled back, she rested her forehead against his, both of them breathing heavily.

"I'm sorry" he murmured, his voice deep in regret and guilt

“Don’t you ever do that again,” she whispered, her voice shaky.

“I won’t,” he promised, his hands trembling as they cupped her face. “I swear, I won’t.”

Tears spilled down y/n's cheeks, and he wiped them away gently, pulling her into his arms. They both sat there for what felt like hours, holding each other tightly, the weight of the past months falling away.

She wasn’t sure if things would be easy from here, if the trust could be rebuilt. But for now, in his arms, she allowed herself to believe in the possibility of healing.

[dfroza]

Today’s reading from the ancient books of Proverbs and Psalms

for April 4 of 2023 with Proverbs 4 and Psalm 4, accompanied by Psalm 16 for the 16th day of Astronomical Spring, and Psalm 94 for day 94 of the year (with the consummate book of 150 Psalms in its 1st revolution this year)

[Proverbs 4]

Gather, children, to hear your father’s instruction.

Pay close attention so you will understand,

For I am passing down to you important precepts.

Do not abandon these valuable life lessons.

Back when I was young—the very image of my father,

and yet from my mother’s view, still her only boy—

My father, with his years of experience, became my teacher.

Father: Son, grab on to every word I say to you—hold them close—

stay true to my instructions as you live, and they will serve you well.

Whatever it takes to gain Wisdom, do it.

To gain understanding, do it! Never forget this!

Never stray from what I am telling you.

If you don’t forsake Lady Wisdom, she will protect you.

Love her, and she will faithfully take care of you.

Gaining sound judgment is key, so first things first: go after Lady Wisdom!

Now, whatever else you do, follow through to understanding.

Cherish her, and she will help you rise above the confusion of life—

your possibilities will open up before you—

embrace her, and she will raise you to a place of honor in return.

She will provide the finishing touch to your character—grace;

she will give you an elegant confidence.

Hear my words, my son, and take them in;

let them soak in so that you will live a long, full life.

I have pointed you in the way of wisdom;

I have steered you down the path to integrity.

So get going. And as you go, know this: with integrity you will overcome all obstacles;

even if you run, you will not stumble.

Tighten your grip around wise advice; don’t let it slip away.

Protect Wisdom, for without her, life isn’t worth living.

Do not start down the road of the wicked—

the first step is easy, but it leads to heartache—

do not go along the way of evildoers.

Stay away from it; don’t even go past it—

and if you find yourself anywhere near it,

turn your back and run as far as you can in the opposite direction.

For evildoers are so twisted they cannot sleep unless they have caused harm;

they’ll lie awake all night until they figure out a way to cause someone to stumble.

For they feed on evil the way most eat bread;

they drink violence the way most guzzle wine.

Yet the way of those who do right is like the early morning sun

that shines brighter and brighter until noon.

Evildoers travel a dark road because they love to hide their deeds in darkness;

they can’t see the perils ahead that cause them to stumble.

My son, pay attention to all the words I am telling you.

Lean in closer so you may hear all I say.

Keep them before you; meditate on them;

set them safely in your heart.

For those who discover them, they are life.

They bring wholeness and healing to their bodies.

Above all else, watch over your heart; diligently guard it

because from a sincere and pure heart come the good and noble things of life.

Do away with any talk that twists and distorts the truth;

have nothing to do with any verbal trickery.

Keep your head up, your eyes straight ahead,

and your focus fixed on what is in front of you.

Take care you don’t stray from the straight path, the way of truth,

and you will safely reach the end of your road.

Do not veer off course to the right or the left;

step away from evil, and leave it behind.

The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 4 (The Voice)

A set of notes from The Voice translation:

It’s perfectly natural to envy those who are successful. It’s even natural to want to imitate them. But what about those who’ve gotten ahead by doing the wrong thing? Sometimes it seems crime does pay, the good do die young, and the wicked do have more fun. But it only appears this way; it is not reality. In reality the success of wrongdoers is short-lived. God is against them, and their house is built on the sand. Even if it seems to be a grand house, it will soon come crashing down.

Fathers have a crucial role in instructing their sons. It’s easy and natural to teach children about some things: how to take care of a car, how to hit a ball, or how to mow the lawn. But what about deeper things, the kinds of things that make life worth living? These are much harder. They must not be left for someone else to do. Paul wrote, “And, fathers, do not drive your children mad, but nurture them in the discipline and teaching that come from the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). Instructing children in the ways of God is crucial work.

[Psalm 4]

For the worship leader. A song of David accompanied by strings.

Answer my prayers, O True God, the righteous, who makes me right.

I was hopelessly surrounded, and You rescued me.

Once again hear me; hide me in Your favor;

bring victory in defeat and hope in hopelessness.

How long will you sons of Adam steal my dignity, reduce my glory to shame?

Why pine for the fruitless and dream a delusion?

[pause]

Understand this: The Eternal One treats as special those like Him.

The Eternal will answer my prayers and save me.

Think long; think hard. When you are angry, don’t let it carry you into sin.

When night comes, in calm be silent.

[pause]

From this day forward, offer to God the right sacrifice from a heart made right by God.

Entrust yourself to the Eternal.

Crowds of disheartened people ask, “Who can show us what is good?”

Let Your brilliant face shine upon us, O Eternal One, that we may know the undeniable answer.

You have filled me with joy, and happiness has risen in my heart, great delight and unrivaled joy,

even more than when bread abounds and wine flows freely.

Tonight I will sleep securely on a bed of peace

because I trust You, You alone, O Eternal One, will keep me safe.

The Book of Psalms, Poem 4 (The Voice)

[Psalm 16]

A prayer of David.

Protect me, God, for the only safety I know is found in the moments I seek You.

I told You, Eternal One, “You are my Lord,

for the only good I know in this world is found in You alone.”

The beauty of faith-filled people encompasses me.

They are true, and my heart is thrilled beyond measure.

All the while the despair of many,

who abandoned Your goodness for the empty promises of false gods, increases day by day.

I refuse to pour out blood offerings,

to utter their names from my lips.

You, Eternal One, are my sustenance and my life-giving cup.

In that cup, You hold my future and my eternal riches.

My home is surrounded in beauty;

You have gifted me with abundance and a rich legacy.

I will bless the Eternal, whose wise teaching orchestrates my days

and centers my mind at night.

He is ever present with me;

at all times He goes before me.

I will not live in fear or abandon my calling

because He stands at my right hand.

This is a good life—my heart is glad, my soul is full of joy,

and my body is at rest.

Who could want for more?

You will not abandon me to experience death and the grave

or leave me to rot alone.

Instead, You direct me on the path that leads to a beautiful life.

As I walk with You, the pleasures are never-ending,

and I know true joy and contentment.

The Book of Psalms, Poem 16 (The Voice)

[Psalm 94]

O Eternal God of vengeance,

O God who sets things right, shine upon us.

Rise, O Judge who presides over the earth,

and pronounce Your sentence upon the proud.

Give them what they deserve!

How long, O Eternal One, how long

will the guilty revel in their prosperity?

Arrogance pours from their mouths;

all these troublemakers brag of their exploits.

They have broken Your people to pieces, O Eternal One,

and brought ruin to Your future generations.

They slay a widow, kill a newcomer,

and murder an orphan.

Then they say, “The Eternal can’t see what we’re up to;

the God of Jacob’s people pays no attention to us.”

Think, brainless people;

stupid people, when will you get it?

Does the God who set the ear in its place not hear?

Does the God who made the eye not see?

Does the God who teaches the nations

and guides humanity to knowledge,

not exercise just correction?

The Eternal knows the highest thoughts of the wise,

and they are worthless.

How fortunate are those You discipline, O Eternal One,

those You train by Your divine law;

You relieve them in times of distress,

until a grave is dug for evildoers.

The Eternal will not abandon His people;

He will not turn away from those He redeemed

Because justice is coming for those who do what is right

and all the good-hearted will pursue it.

Who will back me up when evildoers come against me?

Who is willing to take my side against the wicked?

If the Eternal had not come to my rescue,

my soul would have descended to the land where death silences every voice.

When I said, “My foot is slipping!”

Your unfailing love, O Eternal One, held me up.

When anxiety overtakes me and worries are many,

Your comfort lightens my soul.

Can wicked tyrants be Your allies?

Will You align with rulers who create havoc with unjust decrees?

They have joined forces against the life of the just-living, the right-seeking,

and have sentenced the innocent to death.

But the Eternal has been my citadel;

my God, a sure safe haven.

He will fold their wickedness back upon them,

and because they are malicious, He will silence them.

The Eternal, our True God, will scatter them.

The Book of Psalms, Poem 94 (The Voice)

[fastlikealambo]

link to chapter one.

link to chapter two.

link to chapter three.

link to chapter four.

link to chapter five.

link to chapter six.

link to chapter seven.

link to chapter eight.

link to chapter nine.

Fall of 94′: Eddie Munson x Black Fem Reader Chapter 10

summary:

it’s been nearly 8 years since the events of hawkins and out of the entire party, the only one to stay behind is the one and only eddie munson. with a five year old daughter in tow, his life is a simple one, still trying to escape the dark cloud over him that never went away.

but when all too familiar hellish events start happening again eddie must team up with his daughter’s favorite and mysterious new teacher to protect his little girl and the town he owes nothing to.

word count:2,599

warnings: violence,  gore, religious trauma, soft dom! eddie, discussions of mental health and ptsd, praise kink,  childhood trauma, smut,  hawkins, indiana is a warning to me.  

warnings for this chapter: injuries, cpr, discussions of mental health, praise kink, consenting penetrative sex, pinv, oral f receiving, telekinetic sex, edging, use of pet names, protected sex ( be safe people!) 

minors dni, I check.

We have reached our season finale! Thank you for reading Fall of 94 and I can’t wait to see you next season :)

Make sure you read the entire thing..... wouldn’t want to miss something ;)

“I’m okay, I was just resting my eyes.” You said to Eddie, slowly opening your eyes to find yourself no longer in Eddie’s arms but in the middle of the road.

“Eddie, where are you?” You called.

Instead of an answer, you were met by someone nervously clearing their throat and a pair of white tennis shoes.

You looked up to see none other than the cheerleader from the road standing in front of you, holding out a hand to help you up.

Chrissy Cunningham.

“Oh god, am I dead?”

“No, not yet anyway. We don’t have much time, I need to show you something.” She said and this time, you took her hand and got your feet.

“But Eddie, I need to know if he’s okay first.”

 Chrissy gave your hand a comforting squeeze and smiled sadly.

“Don’t worry, Eddie’s got you.”

No.

Absolutely fucking not.

“You don’t get to just die, not now, not after this shit, you hear me?”

 Eddie focused through his fear, checking your still non existent pulse for the third time. The sun was nearly up, he was sweating but he started the chest compressions again, hands interlocked in the center of your chest, using all of his body weight to pump your chest, counting aloud. 

“I really don’t want to explain the concept of death to a five year old, please breathe!” He said, sealing your mouth with his and exhaled air into your lungs. He watched your chest rise with each rescue breath, only to fall again, he checked for a pulse, only for the same result.

He couldn’t stop.

So he started again.

And again.

And again.

This was bad.

Everyone made it out last time, what was different this time?

He was just out of the hospital the last time, the final time they went against Vecna. He did what was told then, hung back and kept Dustin from running headfirst into danger while everyone else became heroes.

Eddie Munson was no hero.

When the fighting was finished, graduation came and gone,  the panic attacks started and the recklessness to alleviate his pain took flight in his trips to and from Hawkins.  He hid his pain from his friends who started their own new chapters while his own were starting to mirror his old man’s.

He wasn’t even there when Rosie was born, or there when she was left on Wayne’s doorstep. He was terrified then but he focused through his fear, took far too many parenting classes, signed up for every first aid class just in case his nine month old decided to take up boxing. 

It would be easy to say that Rosie put him back on the right path, saved him, but that was wrong. A child is not supposed to be a fix-all, and Rosie wasn’t a human bandaid on years of mental and physical trauma.

But in order for his little girl to be the best version of herself he had to be the best version of himself, or at least a version that could start to heal.

 In order to heal, he had to try.

 In order to try, he had to get help and that scared him.

He was scared every time Rosie left his presence, but this, right now, wasn’t just fear.

This was helplessness, a certain brand of helplessness he hadn’t felt since that night in 86. 

This was all his fault.

He should have never come back here.

“I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry,  please wake up! “Eddie yelled, tears starting to cloud his vision as he found himself  at the end of a cycle, shaking fingers against your neck, waiting and praying to anyone and anything that the outcome would change.

And the outcome was nothing.

And then, something. 

There was a weak pulse beneath his fingertips.

He nearly cheered at that, the first part of a twofold victory completed.

You still weren’t breathing.

“Where are you taking me?” You asked Chrissy as you walked in comfortable silence, however comfortable a walk with a dead person could be.

“We’re not far now, promise.” She said by way of an answer.

“Can you at least tell me where we are?”

“Somewhere in between, not quite Hawkins, not quite the other place.” 

So not hell, heaven, or purgatory, that was good news.

Chrissy led you up a hill before finally stopping at the very top, an inch away from the edge.

“We’re here.” She said quietly, pointing over the cliff.

Chrissy’s grip on your hand tightened as you peered over the edge to see all of Hawkins beneath you, every street, house, and parking lot covered in glowing red holes in the ground.

Just like the gate.

“Are those gates?”

“When El closed the gates eight years ago and destroyed the one you know as Vecna, something changed in Hawkins, something dead. I can’t move on from this place like I’m supposed to and neither can anyone else who dies in Hawkins. Every single death since Vecna’s has opened a new gate into the Upside Down.”

Well, fuck.

“So I have to close all these gates before the dead can move on and before anything else crawls out and destroys the town?”

Chrissy nods and before you can reply, there’s a rumbling beneath your feet.

“Another gate is opening, we gotta go!”

Chrissy leads you back down the hill and you both run back to the place where she found you.

“This is as far as I can go for now, but you’ll find your way back. Can you do something for me?” She asked, the rumbling getting worse, the road shifting beneath your feet. 

“Anything.”

 “ Tell Eddie it wasn’t his fault and he doesn’t have to be sad anymore. Tell him, I heard him play.”

“I will, I promise.” You said firmly and Chrissy pulled you into a hug, turning you away from the crumbling road, getting closer to you both.

“What happens now?”

“You breathe.” Chrissy whispered.

And you did.

Well sort of, it was more one choking gasp after another but you did breathe, coughing and sputtering while someone gently rolled you on your side and rubbed your back. 

“You’re okay, you’re okay, just breathe. I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere so you just keep breathing, okay?”

You knew that voice. 

Opening tired eyes, you saw Eddie’s tear stained face in front of yours, the morning sun behind him.

You were back.

“You’re okay… you’re okay right?” You said, lifting a hand that he took, kissing your knuckles.

“You’re the one who almost died and you’re asking me if I’m fine?”  Eddie asked with a laugh that quickly turned into crying as he pulled you into a tight hug.

“I almost lost you.” He whispered as you stroked his hair.

“But you didn’t, you saved my life.” You kissed his forehead.

“Come on, let’s get you out of here.” Eddie picked you up as gently as possible off the forest floor and headed back to the car.  He wrapped you in his jacket before buckling you in, shaky hands closing the door.

“Next stop, Hawkins Memorial.” He said, pulling back onto the main road.

“Wait, no, Eddie, I don't need a hospital. What time is it?” You looked back at the clock.

“ Your heart stopped, you’re going to get checked out angel.”

“ It’s barely 7, you gotta go pick up Rosie.” 

“So I’ll pick her up and take you to the hospital, problem solved.”

“Eddie, Carver is dead, you can’t be seen anywhere a police car might be. I’m fine.” You said and even you can’t believe that lie.

“Okay, everything hurts and I think you might have bruised two of my ribs but you can just drop me off there. There’s so much I have to tell you but for now, go do something normal for a change. You got me through the hard part, this I can handle alone. Now go be a dad.”

It takes some convincing but he drops you off at the emergency room away from the cameras with the promise to call him once you’ve been by a doctor.

You wait until he’s out of sight before you turn right around and painfully head toward a pay phone instead. The first call is to the school, telling them you’ll be out sick, the next to check on your car at the mechanic, and the third to a cab to take you back to your own apartment.

You had enough of being poked and prodded by doctors for a lifetime and this wasn’t the first time you had your ribs broken.  Eddie had been through enough tonight, you could take care of yourself. 

Your apartment was just as you left it but you couldn’t help but feel that Eddie’s couch was more of a home to you then this place.

You had saved the world but still ended up just as alone as you started.

But Hawkins was safe, at least for the next hour. 

Your reward would be bandages and a hot shower.

ONE MONTH LATER.

“How many gates are we talking about here? Two? Three?”

“More like fifty.”

“For fuck’s sake!”

So, your first date with Eddie was going great, spaghetti, candles, you finally telling Eddie about the gates just sorta slipped out.

“Eddie-

“How are you supposed to close that many gates, you nearly died closing one!”

With a sigh you put your glass down.

“I know, and we will figure it out, together, just not tonight. Tonight, we are normal people on a normal date.” You said from your place on the couch.

“Don’t think I’ll be able to watch Lady and The Tramp with the threat of imminent doom hanging over my head, sweetheart.” He said.

You smirked, getting up from the couch to straddle Eddie, his hands settling around your ass.

“I can think of something that will take your mind off it.” You said, catching Eddie’s lips in a searing kiss.

“ I bet you can, angel.”

You kissed down his neck as he carried you to the bedroom, kicking it closed.

“ Are you sure you’re okay with this? ” Eddie asked, eyes concerned, gently placing you on the bed as he waited for you to speak.

“I’m okay with this, are you okay with this?” You said, waiting for verbal consent before going any further.

“I’m more than okay with this, I’m gonna take such good care of you, if you’ll let me.” Eddie said with a smile.

“Show me how good, Mr. Munson.” You whispered, unbuttoning his shirt.

With each button of your dress Eddie undoes, he kisses the spot, nipping at your brown skin all the way down your body while you undo his belt and pants with your mind, stroking his cock through his boxers with one hand, wiping your nose with the other.  You can feel him getting harder with each item of clothing he removes from you, saving your panties for last.

“ Can I take care of you, angel? ” Eddie asked, sliding your underwear down to your ankles.

“Yes.”

“Yes, what beautiful?” He repeated, slipping one finger inside you, cold ring against your clit, a soft moan escaping you.

“Yes, please.”

“That’s it, good girl. “  Another two slips in and you whimper, shaking against his pumping fingers while he finishes what you started, relieving himself of his boxers and rolling a condom on his cock.

“Don’t stop, Eddie.” You begged, hand on the back of his head as he switched from his fingers to his tongue, flitting over your clit. He eats you plenty, every single yelp goading him on, your toes curling on the bed.

“You’re fucking soaked pretty girl and we’re just getting started.” Eddie said, sliding you forward on the bed, hands pinning you to the bed.  His cock enters you, teasingly slow till you’re all but  panting beneath him.

“Eddie, please!”

“You want this cock gorgeous?”

“I do.”  You said, back arching in anticipation as he teased you again before fully thrusting into your swollen pussy, increasing in speed.

 He barely notices as things from your nightstand start to slowly float off the table the longer you fuck.

“ That’s my girl, cum for me, you can do it, I’m right here.” He soothed, lips crashing on yours as you bucked beneath him.

“ Fuck Eddie, I probably should have mentoned this-”  You cut off, letting an orgasm take hold, pleasure wracking your body as you came, slowly but surely levitating you both off the bed, inch by inch.

“Holy shit, are you doing this?” He asked in  wonder as you stayed floating, giving him a weak nod.

“Whatever you do, don’t stop.” You whispered.

“That I can manage, god you’re fucking amazing, angel.”  Eddie muttered, increasing in speed and pressure until his back almost touches the fucking ceiling. He holds you tightly as you finish, slowly lowering you both back down to the bed.

With a kiss on your cheek, Eddie pulled out of your dripping cunt, cleaning you both off with a nearby towel and wrapped the sheets around you both, quietly. 

“You okay?” You asked, pulling him close and bringing your forehead to his.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you before.” Eddie said.

“ You mean to tell me that everyone doesn’t fly during sex? This is news to me.” You joked. He smiled before laying his head on your chest, listening to your heartbeat.

“You know you’re a hero right?” You asked.

Eddie looked up at you, starting to shake his head but you stopped him.

“You saved a kid, hit and shot a monster repeatedly, and saved my life. That makes you a hero Eddie Munson and Hawkins deserves to know the truth.”

“You know the truth and that’s enough for now.” He said, slipping an arm around your waist.

You knew what was coming, the battle that lay ahead, but for now you were content with the metalhead who fell asleep to the sound of the heart he begged to beat not one month ago.

For now, you were happy. 

And that was enough. 

THE END.

 JUST KIDDING HERE’S A POST CREDIT SCENE.

“Daddy, what’s hooky?” Rosie asked.

“It’s what you and I are playing today, munchkin! I have the day off so you and I are going to spend the day together, no school, what do you say?”

Rosie squealed in excitement.

“Can we go to the park? And then get ice cream?” Rosie asked.

“ We can do whatever you want, princess.” Eddie said happily, returning to the kitchen to make breakfast, halfway through the eggs when he heard a crash in the living room and came running.

One of Rosie’s porcelain dolls lay in pieces in the middle of the floor.

“Rosie, what have we talked about being careful? I’m not mad, I’m not upset, we both just need to be more careful next time, okay?” Eddie said, sweeping up the glass before Rosie could get any closer.

“It wasn’t me Daddy, honest! ”  Rosie said, shaking her head.

Eddie knelt in front of his daughter, concerned. 

“Then who did? You can tell me baby, I won’t be upset with anything you say you tell me as long as you tell me.” Eddie said, his heart beating out of his chest at Rosie’s distressed face.

“He said I’m not supposed to tell you.”

“He who, Rosie?”

“ My friend Henry, he’s standing right behind you.”

SEASON 2 IS COMING SOON.

gardenof-venus

@trvlllx

ccoreo

@queeniebeenie

richonne4life

@thotyana-in-this-hoe

lolzskye

ziasbl0g

randomwerido

killer-joy3

danielle-19

asagesworld

@revivedhyperfixations

@yeah-seems-legit

@thirddeadlysin

@killslumflower

@notthe-latte-hottay

@matthew666660

@revivedhyperfixations

@fckwritersblock

@onecentricsoul

@venuslovr

@lunaleah

[femininefutbol]

prompt list

1. “are you crazy? of course, i love you”

2. “are you flirting with me?”

3. “but i don't want to do that anymore! i want you!”

4. “can i kiss you?”

5. “can i touch you?”

6. “can you stop ignoring me please?”

7. “come back! i'll do anything!”

8. “do me a favour and lose my number”

9. “do you have any idea how adorable you are?”

10. “do you really still not get it? i lied”

11. “don't call this number again”

12. “don't fucking touch me!”

13. “don't go! don't leave me. i can't do this without you!”

14. “don't leave me, i’ll do anything, please”

15. “forget it. just forget it”

16. “friends don't look at each other the way you two do”

17. “get over it, you can't get upset over these things if you're living this life"

18. “god, you're perfect”

19. “goodbye, my love”

20. “gosh, you're beautiful”

21. “has it always been just an act?”

22. “hold me closer?”

23. “how about a kiss?”

24. “i always knew I'd never be able to keep you”

25. “i always wondered why you were everything i could never have”

26. “i can't believe you're mine”

27. “i can't keep doing this. i can't keep kissing strangers and pretending they're you”

28. “i can't sleep without her holding me”

29. “i deserve this”

30. “i don't know where i'd be without you”

31. “i don’t want to lose you”

32. “i found love, and then i lost it”

33. “i have a surprise for you”

34. “i just want to you love me one more time”

35. “i like it when you talk a lot”

36. “i love making you laugh”

37. “i loved you”

38. “i miss being in your arms”

39. “i missed you so much”

40. “i never got to say goodbye”

41. “i never meant to hurt you”

42. “i never stopped loving you”

43. “i thought I told you to leave me alone”

44. “i tried but I can't forget”

45. “i want a fucking answer”

46. “i want to kiss you so badly but there are too many people here”

47. “i want to show you how much you mean to me”

48. “i wasn't aware i had done anything to you”

49. “i wish you were here with me”

50. “i- um. Is it ok if i hold your hand?”

51. “i'll always choose you”

52. “i'll always protect you”

53. “i'm growing bored of you”

54. “i'm in love with you and it's driving me crazy”

55. “i'm up for the challenge”

56. “i've always loved you” 

57. “i’ll always be there for you”

58. “i’ll keep you safe. i promise”

59. “if you die, i'm going to kill you”

60. “if you love me so much then you should be able to say it, right?”

61. “is that your idea of an apology?”

62. “it reminds me of her”

63. “it smells just like her”

64. “it was an accident”

65. “it was supposed to be us”

66. “it's hard to tell someone you love them when you know it's not true”

67. “it's just us. it'll always be us”

68. “it's really not that complicated”

69. “it's three in the morning”

70. “just shut up and kiss me”

71. “let me carry you”

72. “let’s keep it a secret”

73. “no matter what you decide, i'll be by your side through it all”

74. “promise me you won't forget me”

75. “she deserves better”

76. “she is the most beautiful person i’ve ever seen”

77. “she was the only good thing to ever happen to me, and now she's gone”

78. “she's not going to make it, is she?” 

79. “some people are just worth suffering for”

80. “sometimes i wonder why i even try anymore”

81. “stay with me”

82. “stop saying that you're okay! i know you're not”

83. “take me back” “i can't”

84. “take my jacket”

85. “thanks for nothing”

86. “the hurt isn't ever going to go away, is it?”

87. “this is the stupidest thing i've ever heard”

88. “wait a minute…are you jealous?”

89. “wait, don't pull away... not yet”

90. “wait… is that my shirt?”

91. “wait, let me walk you home”

92. “walk out that door and we're over!”

93. “want me to hold your hand?”

94. “was i just a game to you?”

95. “we can't be friends, i will always see you as something else”

96. “we play dumb, but i swear we know exactly what we're doing”

97. “we used to do that all the time”

98. “well…this is awkward”

99. “what did you expect?”

100. “what do you have behind your back?”

101. “what the hell is wrong with you?”

102. “what, you never thought about us?”

103. “what? you think that was funny?”

104. “where the hell have you been?”

105. “who said friends can't kiss?”

106. “who were you talking to?”

107. “why are you looking at me like that?”

108. “why can't you listen to a single thing i say?”

109. “why do i still like you, knowing you're a total asshole?”

110. “will you marry me?”

111. “will you say something or just keep staring at me?”

112. “wow- you look.... amazing”

113. “you broke her, don't you understand?”

114. “you can call me whenever you want”

115. “you can't leave me”

116. “you can't really blame me, it was all your fault, to begin with”

117. “you can't run from your problems forever”

118. “you deserve this”

119. “you didn't miss me at all?”

120. “you didn't” 

121. “you don't need to leave so soon”

122. “you fucked up”

123. “you have got to be kidding me”

124. “you know i'll always be here for you, right?”

125. “you know we can't keep this up forever”

126. “you left me!”

127. “you look like you need a hug”

128. “you look really cute when you're half asleep like this”

129. “you look really good in my sweater”

130. “you look... stunning”

131. “you made me feel weak”

132. “you made me want to become a better person”

133. “you make everything just a little bit better”

134. “you never cared that you broke my heart”

135. “you promised you wouldn't forget me”

136. “you ruined everything”

137. “you seem somewhat familiar”

138. “you were always a coward”

139. “you were the only person i thought i could trust”

140. “you'll be my wife one day”

141. “your kisses are all i need right now”

142. “you're beautiful, you know that”

143. “you're just not the same person”

144. “you're mine. all mine”

145. "you're my dream come true”

146. “you're so fucking hot when you're mad”

147. “you're the one i've been waiting for my whole life”

148. “you're joking, right? please. please just say you're joking”

149. “you're never going to let that go, are you”

150. “you're the reason she's gone”

[dyns33]

J'ai publié 2 284 fois en 2022

C'est 303 billets de plus qu'en 2021 !

2 151 billets créés (94%)

133 billets reblogués (6%)

Les blogs que j'ai le plus reblogués :

@commander-vas-normandy

@dyns33

@just-someone-who-likes-to-write

@kindlyanni

@anonymousfiction211

J'ai étiqueté 1 167 billets en 2022

Seulement 49% de mes billets ne comportaient pas de tag

#daredevil - 468 billets

#matt murdock - 387 billets

#matt murdock imagine - 293 billets

#matt murdock x reader - 288 billets

#moon knight - 185 billets

#spiderman - 184 billets

#deadpool - 175 billets

#team red - 161 billets

#matt murderdock - 145 billets

#earth 65 - 132 billets

Longest Tag: 112 characters

#i want him to be super clever and super strong and super scary and super protective of his silly little brothers

Mes billets vedette en 2022 :

n°5

Y/N : "You are staring. Stop." 

Matt : "I can't stare." 

Y/N : "Your ear is turned in my direction. In Murdock's language, it's staring." 

Matt : "... Sorry sweetheart if your voice and heartbeat are so melodious they’re distracting me." 

Y/N : "Fuck off, charmer."

1 254 notes - publié le 18 mai 2022

n°4

Mando : "I need some advices... to court Y/N."

Cara : "Tell her you like her."

Karga : "Give her money."

Fennec : "Kill for her."

Bobba : "Take off your helmet."

Paz : "Teach her the way."

Luke : "Be sure she's not your sister."

Mayfeld : "Poetry, maybe. What, I'm a romantic, fuck you !"

Peli : "Fuck her nicely."

Ahsoka : "I'm not sure I can help with that."

Grogu : *is adorable, draws a picture of him, Mando and Y/N together, and gives it to Y/N*

Y/N : "Aaaaw, for me ? It's us ? Oh, me and your daddy are holding hands, it's so cute !"

Din : "... You are all useless, only my son is helping."

1 440 notes - publié le 13 juin 2022

n°3

Daredevil : “I heard about a new vigilante. Moon Knight.” 

Spiderman : “Yeah ! He seems so cool ! Maybe we can work with him !” 

Deadpool : “Hmm... I don’t know man.” 

Spiderman : “Why ? I know he killed people, but you killed people too Wade. People can change !” 

Daredevil : “I heard he was a bit crazy. But we’re all a bit crazy here. Except Peter.” 

Spiderman : “I can be super crazy !” 

Daredevil : “You can be super reckless. So what’s the problem Wade ?” 

Deadpool : “... He has to change his costume.” 

Spiderman : “What ?” 

Deadpool : “Team Red. RED ! It will be all wrong if he joins us ! Or we all have to change. Oh ! We’ll be the Pretty Soldiers ! He’ll be Sailor Moon, I’ll be Sailor Mars, Peter will be Sailor Mercury and Matt is Sailor Uranus !” 

Spiderman : “What the hell are you talking about ?” 

Daredevil : “Why Uranus ?” 

Deadpool : “Ah ! You said ‘your anus’ !” 

1 662 notes - publié le 19 janvier 2022

n°2

Soulmark

So I did another Matt Soulmate AU 

( @1800-fight-me​  @poemsforparker​  @ferxaniti​ I didn’t forget !)

It was rare to be born without a soulmark.

Most people had one, sometimes even several.

To be born without a soulmark, and therefore to live without a soulmate, was not easy.

People always asked why. Was the right person already dead?  Not born yet ?

Or did you have no soul ? Were you unlovable ? Did you have a problem ?

Y/N's parents didn't ask these questions when they saw that their daughter's body had no name on it.

They decided to be patient. Then later, when she still didn't have a soulmark, they decided it didn't matter.

They loved her anyway, with all their hearts, showering her with affection and making sure she knew she was perfectly normal, perfectly lovable, perfectly perfect.

People had to admit that the parents were right.

There didn't seem to be a problem with the young Y/N. She was a child, then a joyful, pleasant, kind young woman. Few people disliked her, and many would have liked her to be their soulmate.

Not having a soulmark didn't always mean being alone.

In addition to those who were born without a name, there were also those who had the misfortune to lose their better half, sometimes before even meeting them, sometimes after being able to spend some time with them.

So there were potential partners who gravitated around Y/N.

But none caught her attention.

Until Matthew Michael Murdock.

It was quite an impressive name. A beautiful alliteration.

The man was also impressive. Tall, handsome, funny, kind. A lawyer.

And blind. It wasn't a problem. Not at all. Neither for him nor for her. It only underscored even more how special he was.

Like the day they met, it was a bit… strange.

She had met Franklin, Foggy, while having a drink with friends. The man had chatted with her a bit while she was ordering a new beer at the bar, she found him funny and friendly. He hadn't tried anything weird, since he had already found his soulmate, Marci.

Without really knowing why, certainly because she felt that she could trust him and that he was a good person, they had exchanged their numbers, they had often discussed, they had become friends, and one day Foggy had invited her to meet his associates, Karen and Matt.

As she shook his hand introducing herself, she felt Matthew tense, grimacing as he looked up at her, as if his eyes behind his glasses were trying to perceive her, and he held her hand longer than necessary.

Then he quickly said his name, something odd in his voice, like shame, panic, despair.

Y/N thought he must be shy around people he was meeting for the first time. Even though he couldn't see it, she smiled tenderly at him, trying to put him at ease.

Because, like Foggy, Matt seemed like a good person, with whom she hoped to become friends with.

He looked disappointed, a somewhat awkward silence settling in until Karen offered coffees and started talking about the case they were working on.

After that, Y/N and Matt talked. Very often. According to Foggy, it was the Murdock effect, with his smile, his shirt, his big charming phrases.

Voir l'intégralité du billet

1 781 notes - publié le 9 février 2022

Mon billet n°1 en 2022

Y/N : “...Steven and I are supposed to go to the museum together today.” 

Marc : “Well, sorry, but I have something to do. Something more important.” 

Y/N : “Let me guess. A stupid mission for your dear God, Chouchou.” 

Marc : “... What ?” 

Y/N : “... Mushu ? 

Marc : “No. Not Mushu.” 

Y/N : “Shang Chi ?”

Marc : “Khonshu.” 

Y/N : “That’s what I said. Kimchi.” 

Khonshu : “She’s an idiot.” 

Marc : “She is, but not because she can’t get your name, because she’s doing it on purpose, not caring about pissing a God off.” 

Y/N : “Oh, Si Fu is pissed ? So sad.” 

3 649 notes - publié le 4 avril 2022

Obtenez votre année 2022 en revue sur Tumblr →

[smartypants196]

A Teacher With a Gun is Like a Cook With Rat Poison

A Teacher With a Gun Is Like a Cook With Rat Poison by Katherine Valentine

Do you like pink and blue AR-15s?

A teacher teaches; a gun kills. Teaching is not killing; killing is not teaching. In fact, one could say that killing is the very opposite of teaching.

We would not be talking about arming teachers if it were not for so many school shootings — 27 so far this year. There would not be so many school shootings each year if it were not for gun manufacturers and distributors and the National Rifle Association. Gun manufacturers and distributors and the NRA would not be big business if there were not big profits to be made by selling guns.

It’s all about selling guns, ammunition, body armor, holsters, concealed carriers, bore sights, cleaner kits, spare magazines and speed loaders, storage cases and gun safes, and ear protection. And more guns.

And lots more profit.

Guns are not like bread. You eat up a loaf of bread in a week or so and then must either forgo sandwiches and toast or buy more bread. Manufacturers of bread are assured of continued profits. Meanwhile, there’s a Winchester 94 .30–30 1899 Lever Action Rifle from 1894 on sale right now that’ll still kill you. (I’m not going to link to the advertisement for safety reasons.) Gun manufacturers don’t mind if you collect an old weapon here and there, but to ensure their profits continue, they have to get you to buy the latest, in-style killing machine. The AR-15 will do it — you know, like the one that kid used on May 24 to kill 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Better yet, two.

Salvador Ramos, the shooter at Robb Elementary, has become an “influencer” in the killing industry! Like any influencer, he encourages people to buy products and thereby create profit for manufacturers and distributors. Like any recent AR-15 influencer, he creates profit for Colt, the manufacturer of this most popular (and profitable) rifle, and for 52,779 gun stores in this country. Ramos and the other AR-15 influencers do this by making us afraid for our safety and the safety of our children. We are now so terrified for our safety that we buy 20 million guns a year and now live in a gun culture.

So now at school, we want to arm teachers.

Think about this for a moment. Which of the teachers you had would you have wanted up in front of your glass in body armor with weapon in holster and gun finger at the ready?

Would it be Miss Summers? Remember her coming into second-grade class that day with a basket of daisies from her garden? She gave a lovely flower to every boy and girl in class. No, Miss Summers loved everybody, probably even if they had an AR-15. She could never shoot anybody.

How about Mr. Frasier? Mr. Frasier once picked up a boy and turned him completely upside down to demonstrate what “invert” means. But when he wasn’t inverting fifth-grade boys and fractions, we could see that Mr. Frasier had this tremor in his hands. He might have shot the wrong person.

Then there was Mrs. Barkley, who really did bark in high-school English class when anybody began a paragraph in an essay with “But.” But Mrs. Barkley once called Abie a “Jewboy,” and she always gave him a bad grade. No, arming Miss Barkley would surely be like giving the cook rat poison.

Think back. Do you remember any teacher you had who would have been capable of protecting students with a gun? I can’t. Besides, the idea of arming teachers so the gun industry can continue to rake in big profits really is the stupidest idea ever.

Or maybe you agree with Ted Cruz — you know, that senator who’s been bought by the gun lobby — that the best protection from gun violence is more guns. Well then, after the next school shooting, you’ll probably be talking about arming not only the teachers but all the students, too. I’ll bet Colt will be happy to produce a backpack-sized lighter-weight version of the popular killing machine, in pink for girls and blue for boys. Maybe they’ll call it the MAR-15 (M for mini).

[michals]

Alright so this came outta nowhere but why not. Just a little something in that special niche genre I love: cheerful angst.

Five's technically younger than his siblings so it makes sense that he's going to die last, he doesn't like it but he accepts it. G, 1334 words, major character deaths:

-

It’s stupid, really goddamn stupid, Five thinks, that Luther’s 58 when he dies. He gets the joke, thanks universe, but he doesn’t think it’s funny that his twin is the age Five came back to him as when he dies. Five’s mind is 85 but his body’s only 40 and even though he knows he shouldn’t he still hates that he’s not the first one to go.

It’s the serum’s fault of course. Despite his powers, despite the strength and endurance, people can’t walk around as two different creatures, not forever. Stupider still Luther knows it’s happening.

“Ben’s probably been bored without us,” Luther says, sitting with one arm around Five’s shoulders, Five’s head tucked into his neck. Five feels so small, this time it doesn’t make him angry it just makes him sad.

“He’s waited this long,” Five says.

“It’s okay, we’ll keep each other company until the rest of you get there,” Luther’s voice is quiet, he sounds tired. “It’s okay.”

Klaus tells him after the funeral that Luther stuck around after to tell him to watch over Five and hopes he doesn’t see any of them any time soon.

“Me, look after you? Delusional right at the end wasn’t he?”

Five doesn’t want to smile at that but he does.

-

Diego’s 65 and he dies cause he’s an idiot. That’s what Allison tells him though her voice is choked, trying to speak through tears.

“Still kicked that guy’s ass,” Diego says with a weak grin. He never gave up that whole vigilante thing and no matter how many times they yelled and scolded and at one point actively locked him up, nothing ever stopped him.

“Could’ve picked something cooler than a gunshot wound,” Five says, holding his shoulder in his hospital bed.

“Yeah,” Diego sighs, “that part kind of sucks.” When he coughs Vanya squeezes his hand in hers.

“Fitting,” Klaus says with a smirk though his eyes are watery, “you’d go after Lu, like always.”

Diego chuckles, says, “I’ll tell him you guys say hi.”

At the funeral Five tells himself he only needs to do this three more times, as if that’s a good thing. He’s decided he’s not leaving any of them first. If he has to be the last anyway he’s holding on tooth and nail until he really is the last. He’s 93 in his head, he feels ancient.

“Convenient he was already wearing black,” Klaus says with a cigarette between his lips. This time Allison laughs until she cries.

-

“We’re just going right in order aren’t we?” Klaus mutters as he sniffs a rose. It’s one of thousands that’ve been sent to the mansion, now stacked ceiling to floor with gifts from Allison’s fans.

Heart attack, 82. So mundane and simple for someone like her. Five always figured she’d go out with fireworks but on the other hand it was peaceful and easy and honestly, not a bad way to go. He hopes his own happens like that.

“Vanya you have to take something home,” Claire urges her aunt, “I can’t take all this back to LA.”

Vanya plucks a single lily from a bouquet. “Hmm, I’ll take this,” she says teasingly. Claire rolls her eyes, hugs her for the 100th time.

“We’ll put this half,” Klaus says gesturing to one side of the room, “on Luther’s, and this half on Diego’s.” He twirls the rose, “and this I’ll put in Ben’s little copper hand.”

Five huffs and shakes his head at him though he can’t hide his smirk.

Before Claire goes back to LA a few days later she hugs Five for a long time. She’s not a young woman but Five will always see her as that little 5 year old Allison finally got to bring back to their family home to meet her aunt and all her uncles.

“Bet she and Diego are already arguing,” Klaus says later as they sit by the fireplace.

“Bet Ben’s already sick of all of them,” Five says.

-

Klaus is wrong, he’s not next. Vanya loses her voice to throat cancer a couple months before she goes but it doesn’t actually seem to bother her. It makes Five angry and sad, but she just grins and has whole conversations with him and Klaus by manipulating records and radios and TV’s.

Five’ll ask how she’s feeling and she’ll pull down the soundwaves of the TV playing upstairs, the weather report announcing: “Sunny without a cloud in the sky.”

She’d spent years looking for pictures of Sissy and Harlan, gotten a locket and put them in it. She'd been buried with it but Five puts some of the extra photos by her headstone just to show everyone they were hers too. Klaus lays the violin down with them.

“I broke it,” Klaus says, “Just a little. So it could follow her up there.”

Five is ready to be angry about that, it’s so ridiculous and stupid but then again…well, it is stupid, and sweet and he imagines Vanya entertaining the others with her music, all together again. He surprises himself when he laughs.

“You really did fry your brain didn’t you?”

“Like an egg,” Klaus says.

-

Five was only ever being rational when he figured Klaus would die first. He’d spent most of his life with any variety of poisons in his system, spent decades abusing his body. Five considered it reasonable to brace himself to lose Klaus first.

Except no, Klaus is the last, just he and Five left. Klaus is 93, then 94, and so on and still they both linger. Five’s body is 20 years younger than Klaus’s but his consciousness is 25 years older. His bones shouldn’t feel as old as his mind but they do.

But he’s not lonely. The mansion’s too big for them but neither are willing to give it up, they belong there they figure. When Klaus has to start using a wheelchair he makes Five push him around the house, pretending to give him tours and rattling off absolutely nonsense stories of the past. He still drinks wine and smokes and wears feather boas and Five wakes up every day then has to wait til Klaus rolls out of bed at noon.

As the years pass the others get further away and yet closer at the same time. Klaus tells him what he knows about the afterlife: that it’s there, that it’s bright, that there is color you just have to want it.

-

“No roses,” Klaus says, leaning back in his wheelchair, face to the sun. “Too cliché. Tulips maybe. Marigolds. All together, my grave should look like a parade float.”

“Dandelions,” Five says, leaning his chin on his cane.

“I like dandelions,” Klaus hums. Then: “Not that you’ll be around to put them there.”

Five’s face scrunches, “Of course I will.”

Klaus opens his eyes, turns to him. “No no, I die after you that’s how it goes.” He says it so nonchalant.

“What’re you talking about?” Five is genuinely thrown, “Of course I’ll die first.”

Klaus shakes his head, like Five is being obtuse. “That’s not the deal.”

“What deal?”

Klaus’s turn to be confused, looks him over with a furrowed brow. “Five, have you been waiting around for me?”

Five reels back as far as his body will let him. “Of course I have!”

Klaus shakes his head, smiles like he can’t believe it. “No Fivey, I worked it out with the big one upstairs,” he points heavenward with a boney finger, “I get to stick around for all of you as long as I don’t bother her before then.”

Five sits back against the bench, processing.

“Besides,” Klaus says with a shrug, “Luther told me to look after you.”

Oh, well, that’s that then. Five smiles.

-

Five is 85, Five is 130, and he dies peacefully in his sleep just like he wanted. Klaus sticks around to put him next to his twin, then he sits in the courtyard with Dave's dogtags in his hand, looks skyward, and says, “You all better have rolled out the red carpet for me.”

[kurisus]

Chapter 94-2 thoughts

Had stuff to do last night so here they are now, with a bonus of me speculating on other speculations. As always, spoilers under the cut.

I’m really glad we got that confirmation that Nora was a stillborn spirit/miscarriage/some other such thing. It’s been a fan theory foreeeeever and it does put a lot of things into perspective--why she wasn’t affected by GGS (she likely never had a name to begin with), why Yato saw no real memories when he named her, why she never thought of her and Yato murdering people as wrong, why she envies Hiyori, the list goes on. Yeah, it pretty much explains her entire character. And again, this was something that’s been guessed at for a long time, but having the verbal confirmation is nice.

So then, why does she look like a young teen instead of an infant? I think it’s because she was named with the koto no ha, which allowed her to take on a form closer to how she thought she might look, rather than her literal appearance at death. I don’t think a normal god could even name her, since if she died before being born she wouldn’t really have the will to live on that’s necessary for a shinki, right? But she became a mizuko, ayakashi got hold of her, and Father named her.

Her taking on an idealized appearance for herself is probably why she looks older now than in the Yato flashback chapters. She doesn’t look THAT much older, but I have a feeling she matched her visual appearance to his. Does that mean she could look like an adult if she wanted?

There’s also speculation that she’s trash dad’s biological child with his pockmarked gf, and said gf died while pregnant with her, which is certainly plausible. I don’t really have much of an opinion on this myself, though. If she’s someone else’s kid he could see himself as her savior and thus she’s indebted to him, whereas if she’s his own kid he harbors resentment toward her for her living on (in a way) while his gf did not.

That does raise the question of why Pockmarks didn’t become a spirit. I bet Father was looking for her spirit to name it, whether or not Nora is his daughter. But he never found it, and his hatred toward heaven only grew, so he created Yato instead.

I see a lot of people wondering about the panel of Sakura so here’s my guess. First off, glad to see her again since it’s been a while. Second, I think it’s just because they were discussing a shinki’s past, not that Hiyori is Sakura’s reincarnation or descendant or anything. Hiyori knows what happened to Sakura and the hand Nora had in that (however unintentionally), and how Nora wasn’t affected by the same curse. The panel didn’t strike me as odd while reading, so I just assumed it was because Hiyori was remembering her, and the price she paid for learning her former name.

Every month they don’t reveal Yukine’s final letter my fear grows. It’s gonna be a feelings bomb, I just know it. Whatever it was, it was something that got Nora thinking about her own unusual past.

Moving on to Father, he’s in some strong denial. This chapter was pretty similar to 92-2, in that Father gets his ass kicked by a very angry Yato. So why have a similar thing happen again so soon? I think it’s because now Yato is not only mad on Yukine’s behalf, but his own (this would also explain why Yukine didn’t say anything this chapter). Yato’s been through hell and back recently, trying his hardest to be the one to kill his dad, only for his dad to be like “haha sike tho right”

Kazuma’s slowed down, Yato’s sustained several injuries, but he’s still ready to kill. We truly see his conviction now, and him fighting with his own strength, not just Kazuma’s. Payback is sweet.

All this time, even after all this fighting, even after Yato told him he sold him out, trash dad never thought Yato was seriously out to kill him. Hence the shocked expression on the last page.

Just a couple more things I want to go over. Everyone’s (rightly, imo) assuming that Yato’s last line about “Yaboku” dying with Father as meaning his past self dying, not his present self. Yato has thought of himself as collateral damage this entire arc, but I don’t think he will die. You can all come into my inbox and clown me if I’m wrong, but nowhere in the manga’s future do I see him dying and reincarnating, or just dying. He’s been trying to avoid that his whole life, even though he’s said he’s okay with it if it means his dad goes down.

His past self dying could also be why they drew him in the same outfit he wore as a kid, even though his face was still that of an adult’s. The Yaboku that Father remembers is coming to kill him, and will then be no more.

...and everyone can live happily ever after, right? right???

So, what will happen next? Well, the sun is rising, so if Amaterasu is punctual she’ll get there right as Yato is about to behead Father. But will he be the one to do it? They’ve been building up her involvement, so it feels weird that she wouldn’t do anything against him.

Take and Ebisu still have to destroy his grave, so I think the first half of next chapter will cover their adventure. I wonder how they’ll coordinate the timing of it all, though. Do they have to destroy Father’s soul and his grave at the same time, or just roughly?

we popping the BIGGEST bottles when Father bites it next chapter

After Father dies, what I’m thinking (hoping) will happen is Ooharai will reveal how truly fucked heaven is, and Yato, Yukine, and Hiyori will be like “you know he kinda had a point” and work to fix it. But on the other hand, the mood of late does feel like it’s going to an ending, so my hope could be futile.

I just don’t want it to end anytime soon. this is my emotional trauma support manga and what am I even gonna do with my time if I’m not speculating about what little we know?

Anyway. Hoping for not the end yet, bottom line.

[sheafrotherdon]

I posted 419 times in 2021

94 posts created (22%)

325 posts reblogged (78%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 3.5 posts.

I added 866 tags in 2021

#joe x nicky - 194 posts

#the old guard - 146 posts

#yusuf al kaysani - 132 posts

#nicolo di genova - 117 posts

#tog - 110 posts

#andromache the scythian - 44 posts

#nile freeman - 42 posts

#kaysanova - 28 posts

#luca marinelli - 27 posts

#immortal husbands - 26 posts

Longest Tag: 93 characters

#i cannot imagine how cranky i would be to learn i'm immortal and have pms in rapid succession

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

Sometimes I think about the fact that Joe and Nicky have been together for nine hundred years, and yet still reach for each other when they go to sleep.  A person could be forgiven for wanting some space on the bed after nine hundred years, but no, they curl up together, Joe with his arm tucked around Nicky, Nicky snugged with his back against Joe’s chest, and they sleep touching each other because nine hundred years is apparently not enough time to grow tired of being physically close. It’s not just that they love each other deeply, it’s that they still demonstrate it in their most vulnerable moments, trusting each other, wanting the other there, reaching for each other. jqshlfh I cannot.

467 notes • Posted 2021-11-15 16:27:55 GMT

#4

Joe comes back to the safe house with food and wine, and a large bag that he sets down beside Nile before he starts unpacking the groceries.

“What’s this?” Nile asks.

“We’ll be here a while,” Joe offers. “Thought you could use a distraction.”

“Hmm,” Nile offers, because distractions around here tend to come in the form of hand-to-hand combat and some memorable afternoons spent wielding a sword.  She pulls the bag into her lap and pulls out the first thing she can reach—a box of colored pencils, the good kind, in two-dozen different hues.  She fishes in the bag again, finds sketchbooks and watercolor paper, oil paints and pastels and a brand-new pencil sharpener. There are brushes and a palette, a knife and cakes of pigment, and a handful of eight-by-eight canvases.

“There are bigger ones in the car,” Joe says.

Nile doesn’t know what to say. There’s a small fortune in art supplies in front of her, and she’s still a little hazy on where their money comes from in the first place. She skates her fingertips over the watercolors, settles on, “This is all for me?”

Joe smiles. “Yep.”

“But this is . . .”

Joe hitches a shoulder. “No expectation. You don’t have to use any of it. But if want to, well . . . I think you have pretty much everything.”

Nile flattens her hand over a sketchbook and cautiously returns his smile. “Okay,” she says.

“Okay,” Joe says back.

*

Nile starts out small, taking one pencil and a sketchbook out to the terrace and sketching the forms of sculptures she remembers, figures coaxed to life from marble and bronze. When she tires of memory, she doodles caricatures at the edges of the page, and then sketches out the view in front of her, the sweep of the garden and the valley beyond. She experiments with color, with watercolors and then pastels, and she keeps things to herself, at least for a while. Joe has nine hundred years of practice under his belt, and she’s seen his art—she feels like a rank beginner when she compares what they produce.

But the way her paintings turns out keeps bothering her—something’s not quite right, and so she seeks Joe out, asks for his critique, and he sits them both down at the kitchen table with glasses of wine, and gets her talking about her technique.  He suggests a few things, adds a pencil line or two to her landscape and transforms how she sees what’s on the page, and from that moment on she shares everything she does.  Joe works beside her sometimes, and she’s blunt when he gets the shading wrong, and he tells her of the artists he’s met—the famous and the forgotten—and she soaks up every word.

One unremarkable Tuesday, a package tied in brown paper, wrapped with string shows up on the kitchen table.  Nile’s name is on it, written in Andy’s hand.  Nile unwraps it while Nicky busies himself with brewing espresso, and finds a thick book on North African art, full of photographs and reproductions with history leaping from every page.

“Oh my god,” Nile says, lifting the book to her fact to smell the new pages.

Nicky sets a cup in front of her, says, “It is not always grief,” and Nile nods with a smile, sits down and begins to read.

509 notes • Posted 2021-06-04 13:10:40 GMT

#3

Nile moves on autopilot through everything circumstance throws at her, right up until the she wakes up in a single bed in a house in Germany where they plan to lie low.  She blinks at the unfamiliar light flooding in through the window.  They arrived after dark; she barely remembers any of it thanks to the disorientation of travel and the exhaustion of being alive. She can’t hear anyone else; she can’t smell coffee; she has no idea what time it is and for a white-hot moment wonders if she’s been left behind.  But reason makes an appeal and she swallows her panic, lifts her chin and pushes back her shoulders before she gets up to find out where she is.

The doors to the other bedrooms are open, and she catches a glimpse of Andy, fully-clothed and face down on a bed, and across the hall a lump she supposes is Nicky and Joe huddled beneath the covers. She keeps going, pads down the stairs and through the hall, ends up in the kitchen.  She stares at the back door before she unlocks it; pulls it open and steps outside. There’s a garden, a rough stone wall, trees and fields and nothing that looks like anything familiar. 

Grief rises up inside her so fast she doubles over, and when the first wave recedes and she can pull in a breath she sits down hard, right in the dirt.

Nile balls up her hands into fists and presses them against her mouth.  Every person she won’t ever see again, every place she can’t return to for a hundred years or more runs through her mind.  She thinks she might scream, or yell, or wail—something inarticulate and pained, rising straight from her heart—and she rocks back and forth as she fights, tooth and nail, to shove it all down. It’s impossible, all of it, that anyone, anything should ask this of her, should turn her from who she was into—what does she even call herself now?

And then Andy sits down beside her, smelling of stale sweat and antiseptic.  She says nothing, but reaches into the pocket of her jacket and pulls out a French chocolate bar, tears it open, and offers Nile half.

Nile isn’t sure that if she takes it she won’t shatter; that she can hold it all together without her hands against her face. But she reaches out anyway, says thank you and is shocked at how hoarse she sounds.

Andy nods and half smiles, and Nile feels her understanding slam into her like some kind of solace, like waking up a second time, like a concussive wave.

542 notes • Posted 2021-06-05 21:07:49 GMT

#2

594 notes • Posted 2021-05-18 01:36:50 GMT

#1

I was studying a map of the Mediterranean yesterday evening when it suddenly struck me so hard that Malta is right between Italy and Tunisia. It represents the meeting point between the two - no wonder the boys think of it fondly.

And then I realized that in the lab, while Nicky is being tortured and Joe is (I think) dead, Nicky’s thinking of home.  He wants to go home.  He wants to take Joe with him.  He wants to escape not just in body but in being - to go somewhere safe that is about the two of them and simply be.

And the idea of Nicky lying there thinking “I want to go home,” is just so deeply human and vulnerable . . . and now I am emotionally compromised for all time.

647 notes • Posted 2021-05-22 10:31:56 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[route22ny]

(Copied here in its entirety below for the paywall-challenged)

***

The Differences Between the Vaccines Matter

Yes, all of the COVID-19 vaccines are very good. No, they’re not all the same.

Public-health officials are enthusiastic about the new, single-shot COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, despite its having a somewhat lower efficacy at preventing symptomatic illness than other available options. Although clinical-trial data peg that rate at 72 percent in the United States, compared with 94 and 95 percent for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, many experts say we shouldn’t fixate on those numbers. Much more germane, they say, is the fact that the Johnson & Johnson shot, like the other two, is essentially perfect when it comes to preventing the gravest outcomes. “I’m super-pumped about this,” Virginia’s vaccine coordinator told The New York Times last weekend. “A hundred percent efficacy against deaths and hospitalizations? That’s all I need to hear.”

The same glowing message—that the COVID-19 vaccines are all equivalent, at least where it really counts—has been getting public-health officials and pundits  super-pumped for weeks now. Its potential value for promoting vaccination couldn’t be more clear: We’ll all be better off, and this nightmare will be over sooner, if people know that the best vaccine of all is whichever one they can get the soonest. With that in mind, Vox has urged its readers to attend to “the most important vaccine statistic”—the fact that “there have been zero cases of hospitalization or death in clinical trials for all of these vaccines.” The physician and CNN medical analyst Leana Wen also made a point of noting that “all of the vaccines are essentially a hundred percent” in this regard. And half a dozen former members of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board wrote in USA Today, “Varying ‘effectiveness’ rates miss the most important point: The vaccines were all 100% effective in the vaccine trials in stopping hospitalizations and death.”

There’s a problem here. It’s certainly true that all three of the FDA-authorized vaccines are very good—amazing, even—at protecting people’s health. No one should refrain from seeking vaccination on the theory that any might be second-rate. But it’s also true that the COVID-19 vaccines aren’t all the same: Some are more effective than others at preventing illness, for example; some cause fewer adverse reactions; some are more convenient; some were made using more familiar methods and technologies. As for the claim that the vaccines have proved perfectly and equally effective at preventing hospitalization and death? It’s just not right.

These differences among the options could matter quite a bit, in different ways to different people, and they should not be minimized or covered over. Especially not now: Vaccine supplies in the U.S. will soon surpass demand, even as more contagious viral variants spread throughout the country. In the meantime, governors are revoking their rules on face masks, or taking other steps to loosen their restrictions. It’s tempting to believe that a simple, decisive message—even one that verges on hype—is what’s most needed at this crucial moment. But if the message could be wrong, that has consequences.

The idea that all of the vaccines are pretty much the same, in that they’re perfect at preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations and death, got its legs on social media. The USA Today op-ed by the former members of the Biden team illustrated this by linking to a data table found on Twitter. Created by the infectious-disease doctor Monica Gandhi, it showed a variety of trial results for six different vaccines. One column was rendered in canary yellow—“Protection from hospitalizations/death”—and every cell read “100%.” A similar table, tweeted out a few days earlier by the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, Ashish Jha, conveyed the same idea through a grid of zeros—as in, zero people hospitalized, zero people dead. The prominent physician and researcher Eric Topol followed with his own clinical-trial data summary featuring a column of 100 percents. “That is impressive!” he wrote across the top. All told, their posts would be retweeted about 15,000 times.

The data were indeed suggestive of an encouraging idea. Based on the numbers so far, we can expect the vaccines to provide extremely high levels of protection against the most dire outcomes. Still, we don’t know how high—and it’s clear they won’t uniformly cause hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 to disappear in vaccinated people.

The experts understand this, of course. Gandhi has been updating her table as more data come in, and now pegs Moderna’s efficacy on that front at 97 percent; Jha has since tweeted that “nothing is 100 percent … But these vaccines sure are close”; and Topol told The Atlantic that the numbers in his tweet are not a sufficient basis from which to draw “any determination of magnitude of effect,” though the fact that they all point in the same direction is “very encouraging.” Still, the message of perfection that their initial tables and tweets spawned—the gist, for many readers, of all those 100s and zeros—has since been picked up far and wide, and misinterpreted along the way.

To grasp the shaky nature of these particular data, it’s important to remember how the vaccine-development process began. Last April, not long after the pandemic began, the World Health Organization set out a target efficacy for vaccines of 50 percent, with options for how that value should be measured. A vaccine could be shown to reduce the risk of symptomatic disease, severe disease, or transmission of the coronavirus. The FDA offered similar guidance in June, and other regulatory agencies also followed the WHO’s lead. Among these choices, symptomatic disease was the most feasible, because it’s both a common outcome and one that’s easier to confirm in a large-scale trial. An outcome that included asymptomatic infections would have been even more common, but screening for all infections would have been prohibitive, especially early in the pandemic. So that’s how the vaccine trials were designed: Each would try to demonstrate at least 50 percent efficacy with respect to symptomatic disease as its “primary outcome.”

The trials could have used severe disease, hospitalization, or death as primary outcomes, but that would have slowed things down. These events are far more infrequent—there could have been 200 infections for each COVID-19 death in the U.S.—and that means it would have taken more time, and larger numbers of trial participants, to generate enough data to be sure of a 50 percent efficacy. Developers did include “severe COVID-19” as a secondary outcome—that is, one that would be measured and analyzed, but for which the trial might not have been designed to provide a definitive answer. Efficacy against hospitalization and against death, however, were not included as secondary outcomes for every trial.

Given that fact, the data can’t support a claim that the vaccines are 100 percent effective at preventing these serious outcomes. (Topol highlighted this very issue in an op-ed last fall for The New York Times.) Out of the six vaccines included in the dramatic data tables that made the rounds on Twitter, the clinical trials for only two of them—Oxford-AstraZeneca’s and Johnson & Johnson’s—included hospitalization for COVID-19 as a secondary outcome, and reported that efficacy rate. The clinical research for one other vaccine, made by Novavax, had hospitalization as a secondary outcome, but that trial hasn’t been reported in full yet. (On my website, I’ve provided more detailed information and analysis of the relevant data.)

Now, a casual reader of clinical-trial reports—or their summaries on social media—might take the fact that no hospitalizations of vaccinated people are mentioned to mean that none occurred. That’s risky, given that pieces of the data have been published across various medical journals and via several different regulatory agencies rather than in full in one place; that the plans for some trials did not specify ahead of time that the vaccine’s efficacy at preventing hospitalizations would be calculated; and that we’ve seen only minimal early data (via a press release from Novavax) from one of them. It would be just as risky to assume that all hospitalizations would be included in the analyses of people who developed severe COVID-19. Hospitalization and severe disease are not synonymous—people could be coping at home even though COVID-19 has caused their oxygen levels to drop severely, and moderately ill people might be hospitalized out of an abundance of caution when they are at high risk of getting worse.

The two vaccine trials that did explicitly report hospitalizations as an efficacy outcome make this latter issue very clear. For the AstraZeneca vaccine, one person in the control group had severe COVID-19, but eight people were hospitalized; for Johnson & Johnson, 34 people in the placebo group had severe COVID-19, but only five people were hospitalized. It’s true that zero vaccinated people were hospitalized in either study after the vaccines took effect. But with numbers that small, you can’t draw a reliable conclusion about how high efficacy may be for these outcomes. As Diana Zuckerman of the National Center for Health Research pointed out about the Johnson & Johnson trial, “It’s misleading to tell the public that nobody who was vaccinated was hospitalized unless you also tell them that only 5 people in the placebo group were hospitalized.” She’s right. And you can’t be confident about predicting effectiveness precisely in a wider population outside the trial, either. For example, some of the vaccine trials included relatively few people older than 60 as participants.

You can see how fragile these numbers are by looking at those compiled for severe disease. In the Pfizer trial, for example, just one vaccinated person developed severe COVID-19 versus three in the placebo group—which meant that a single bout of disease made the difference between a calculated efficacy rate of 66 percent and one of 100 percent. For the Novavax and Oxford-AstraZeneca trials, there were zero people with severe disease in the vaccinated group versus only one in the control group, so adding or subtracting one would have been even more dramatic. The problem is even greater for deaths. For that efficacy analysis, only two of the vaccine trials—for Moderna’s and Johnson & Johnson’s—reported any COVID-19 deaths at all in the control groups.

It’s also important to remember that these are early results: Some people who enrolled very late in the trials aren’t yet included in reported data, and analysis is still under way. Indeed, the FDA pointed out in December that one vaccinated person in the Moderna trial had been hospitalized with apparently severe COVID-19 two months after receiving a second dose. That person was in a group still awaiting final assessment by the researchers, and was not mentioned in Moderna’s formal readout of results.

We’ve learned a little more from the ongoing public vaccination programs. Four important reports have come in the past two weeks. In one, researchers compared about 600,000 people who had had a full course of the Pfizer vaccine in Israel with 600,000 people matched in age and other demographics who had not been vaccinated. The shots’ effectiveness at preventing hospitalization was measured at 87 percent. (“This vaccine is fabulous in a real world setting,” Jha tweeted in response.) A preprint from Scotland reported an efficacy rate against hospitalization of about 80 percent among people 80 or older, almost all of whom had received only one dose of either the Pfizer or the AstraZeneca vaccine. Two reports from Public Health England estimated a reduction of hospitalization of about 50 percent and 43 percent for the same age group, again almost all after just one dose of the Pfizer vaccine. These are exciting outcomes—those vaccines really, really worked! But they oughtn’t lead anyone to think that the vaccines are all the same, and that protection will be perfect.

Where does that leave us for making decisions? As Anthony Fauci told The New York Times last weekend, “Now you have three highly effective vaccines. Period.” Again, you will get a lot of benefit from any of them, and your risk will shrink even more as those around you get vaccinated too. Whichever one you start with, a booster may be coming in the not-so-distant future, of the same vaccine or perhaps a different one. By taking the first vaccine you can get, you’ll also avoid the risk of finding yourself without protection if infection rates surge where you live.

Efficacy is merely one layer, though. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have an edge at preventing symptomatic illness, but the Johnson & Johnson vaccine brings its own advantages. It has no demanding freezer requirements, which means it’s easier to distribute and more accessible to many communities. It’s more affordable than the other two—the company is providing it at cost around the world. Then there’s the fact that resources can be stretched a lot further when only a single dose has to be administered.

For individuals, too, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has benefits. As a one-and-done injection, it’s more convenient. It also has a lower rate of adverse events than Moderna’s. You can’t compare results of these trials too precisely, but there are indications of a striking difference. About 2 percent of those who got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine recorded having reactions, such as fatigue, muscle aches, and fever, that were severe enough to interfere with daily activities. For those getting their second injection of Moderna, that rate was higher than 15 percent. People who are on the fence about getting vaccinated may find that this difference tips the scales in favor of getting a shot. Others who have doubts about the newness of the mRNA technology in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines may appreciate the fact that Johnson & Johnson’s approach has already been deployed in the company’s Ebola vaccine, which got full drug approval in Europe last year.

Given these concerns, there’s some danger in the message—however well intentioned—that the COVID-19 vaccines are all the same by any measure, or that they’re perfect wards against severe disease. Vaccination is a public-health imperative, and going full tilt to promote uptake supports the common good. But it’s a personal health decision too. People want to protect themselves and those close to them, and they are likely to care about outcomes other than hospitalization and death, no matter what anyone says now.

Still, raising these concerns in public can be fraught. In response to an inquiry about her data table, Gandhi affirmed the importance of looking at severe-disease outcomes and noted that “careful, collegial and collaborative scientific discourse on the vaccines is imperative moving forward to help us get through the pandemic.” Topol pointed out that he has emphasized the vaccines’ measured efficacy against symptomatic disease many times before, so any isolated reference to his table “takes that particular post out of context.” Jha wrote in an email that he stands by the message of his original tweet, and notes that COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths are so rare among the people vaccinated in these trials, to quibble over differences is akin to “counting how many angels are dancing on the head of the pin.”

I can see why this might seem like quibbling, but I just don’t think it’s a trivial matter. It would be different if I thought the effectiveness of every one of those six vaccines against hospitalizations and death would really end up being close to 100 percent—or if I bought into the idea, now widespread, that they have already been shown to “nearly” or “effectively” eliminate these outcomes. There is very good reason to be encouraged by the data, but to say right now that people who have been vaccinated face zero risk of serious outcomes—that, for them, COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the common cold—is sure to influence behavior. Imagine how people in high-risk groups would feel about going to the movies, or how their employers would feel about putting resources into workplace safety, if we all assumed that vaccines confer perfect protection against hospitalization or death. Now imagine how the same people and employers would feel knowing they were 85 percent protected.

Nor is there any reason to believe that the public or the personal interest will be served by hype. People who think the vaccines provide ironclad protection may lose trust in experts if reality falls short. Trust in coronavirus-vaccine information is already a problem, and could sink even lower. Activists who are opposed to vaccination may end up turning experts’ “super-pumped” promises against them.

“The idea that people can’t handle nuance,” Jha tweeted at the end of February, “it’s paternalistic. And untrue.” I couldn’t agree more. The principle of treating people like adults is fundamental. We don’t need to exaggerate. Talking about the trade-offs between different medicines and vaccines is often complicated, but we do it all the time—and we can do it with COVID-19 vaccines too.

Hilda Bastian is a scientist, writer, and founding member of the Cochrane Collaboration. She was formerly the editor of the PubMed Health project at the National Library of Medicine.

[cg29]

TAG ask game . . .

3, 4 and 19 for Virgil

Q3: How did you get into Thunderbirds?

It all started when the original series of Thunderbirds was shown on BBC 2 in the early 90s. I was hooked from the start and wouldn’t miss an episode and even recorded episodes on VHS so I could watch them back.

My love continued and when they announced the live action film I was very excited. I went to see it at the cinema with my mum and brother and I remember walking away going, “yeah it was great,” but I was actually so disappointed with what they’d done. I just didn’t want to admit it because the show meant a lot to me. After watching it a 2nd time I admitted that I just did not like it. To me they get to much wrong, don’t focus on the other boys, and it’s just not Thunderbirds.

Moving on several years later the Thunderbirds Are Go 2015 reboot was announced and I remember being reluctant to watch it because of the 04 film. However, during a rewatch of my Thunderbirds series on DVD I had an idea for a story which I wanted to write - before beginning to write it I decided to read some other fanfics first and I stumbled on FanFiction.Net and was hooked. I then began writing & posting my 1st fic GONE (based on OS)

Anyways, it was because of reading those fanfics & after chatting to someone on FFNet (Still very good friends with but they’re not on here) convinced me TAG was worth the watch. And I did - and I am so glad! TAG alongside the original has gotten me through some very tough times, and because of it I’ve chatted to a heap of wonderful people, read some awesome fics, now have a few more friends, and 5 gorgeous plushie TAG boys - @tbirds

Q4: Any favourite Thunderbirds memories to share?

The original is so special to me because I got to watch it with my dad (he passed in 94) He loved it from when it was first on and we would watch it together - I remember sitting next to him, or on his lap. Also remember the 1st time I watched Terror in New York City. I was upset because Virgil had been hurt so he comforted me and got me some chocolate.

Q19: Give me a character and I’ll give you a headcanon?

Virgil 🥰😊🥰

I have a few but going to just mention 2 here.

The first is more TOS related (can be linked with TAG) and involves Virgil and water - Mainly because Virg seems to avoid it. He’s asked by TinTin and Gordon to come in and he declines. There is also another episode (gone blank on the episode title) where he seems to avoid it. So my headcanon is that Virgil had an accident when he was younger where he nearly drowned and has had a fear of going in a pool/ocean since.

The second is for TAG and involves Virgil and his secret crush/love for Penelope. Inspired by the screenshot I’ve added below. However, he was always to shy to tell her and no one (apart from possibly Scott) knows about his feelings. When he discovered Gordon liked her and he noticed her attraction towards his little brother he decided that he would never do anything about how he felt. Because he loved his bro too much! I’ve written a mini fic on his feelings ages ago - posting below the pic…

He watched her standing by the pool. Her golden hair glowing in the midday sun while she chatted and laughed the day away. He had known her for years and each of them at some point had admitted to having a crush on her. However, his crush had never dwindled. How could it when she was so amazing… Tenacity, intelligence, an inner beauty… All had radiated out and eventually he had to admit to himself that he was in love with her… Yet, he would never tell her how he felt. He couldn’t, not when she had given her heart to his brother.

[danielxricciardo]

Song lyrics prompt list

1. “It’s the little things about us, that I love so much.”

2. “Last night I told you I loved you // woke up blamed it on the vodka”

3. “It’s a better place since you came along”

4. “You make me love the things I hate “

5. Just a paper sheet and half a cigarette are left in my hand

6. Your faith walks on broken glass

7. "And can you teach me how to dance real slow?"

8. "I'll throw away my faith, babe, just to keep you safe"

9. "One night, you won't forget the rest of your life"

10. "We only said goodbye with words"

11. "I'll try to give you love until the day you drop"

12. "I like the pretty boys with the bow tie"

13. "Lets get drunk forget what we did"

14. Your kisses lift me higher

15. When you're ready we can share the wine

16. "And if you don't love me now you will never love me again"

17. "Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?"

18. "When there's nothing to lose and there's nothing to prove"

19. She's the kind of girl who only asks you over when its raining, just to make you lie there catching water dripping from the ceiling.

20. Now I understand, you're a human, and you got to lie, you're a man

21. The good and the bad times: we've been through them all.

22. Now I ain't educated but I sure ain't stupid

23. I grew up in the shoes they told me I could fill

24. It's hard to say that I'd rather stay awake when I'm asleep

25. A lover would just complicate my plans

26. And in the morning, i’ll be with you, but it will be a different kind

27. My heart is yours, it’s you that i hold on to

28. And with one kiss, you inspired a fire of devotion that lasts for twenty years

29. I let go of my claim on you, it’s a free world

30. I’m in my bed, and you’re not here and there’s no one to blame, but the drink in my wandering hands

31. Cause you gave me peace and i wasted it, I’m here to admit that you were my medicine

32. Oh, dear diary, i met a boy, he made my doll heart light up with joy. Oh, dear diary, we fell apart, welcome to the life of electra heart

33. For you, I would cross the line, I would waste my time, I would lose my mind

34. Is it really me you're missing?

35. Remember that night?

36. How many times can I break till I shatter?

37. As long as I breathe, I’ll call you my home

38. "You wouldn't know love if it crushed your fucking chest."

39. "When we scream our lips don't make a sound."

40. "Please don't let me sink, wrap your arms around me and carry me home."

41. "This hasn't torn us apart so nothing ever will."

42. "A long time ago we believed that we were united."

43. "I miss the person that you were but I don't miss you."

44. "If home is where the heart is, why do I feel so fucking heartless?"

45. "I can't live, I can't breathe with or without you just go away."

46. "I'm not afraid to die, I'm afraid I'll survive and have to watch you suffer."

47. "I wanna hold you high and steal your pain away."

48. "I'm not like you I just fuck up."

49. "All because of you I believe in angels, not the kind with wings, no not the kind with halos. The kind that bring you home when home becomes a strange place."

50. "I just want to go to sleep and never wake up again."

51. “I wish people liked me more.”

52. “How could I ever love someone else?”

53. “I guess you’re getting everything you want.”

54. “She probably gives you butterflies.”

55. “I hope that you’re okay.”

56. “I defended you to all my friends.”

57. “I never cared about what they say, only care about me and you”

58. “Either way i’m gonna lose, so i’m just gonna keep on loving you”

59. “You know i’m bad at communication, it’s the hardest thing for me to do”

60. “Iwas your lover, i was your friend, now I’m only just someone you call when it’s late enough to forget”

61. “It’s fucked up but it’s true that i love you like i do”

62. “Well we both had nights waking up in strangers beds but i don’t wanna, don't wanna, i don’t wanna give up yet”

63. “Tell me I’ve got it wrong somehow.”

64. “I’m begging for you to take my hand.”

65. “I can’t make it go away by making you the villain.”

66. “He feels like home.”

67. “I’d be breaking all my rules to see you.”

68. “But I know you’re not scared of anything at all.”

69. “When can I come back?”

70. “I’m ready to owe you anything”

71. “I’ll always look best in your head”

72. “I know you know it’s wrong, but I’m ready”

73. “All I ever want is breaking me apart.”

74. “Let's talk sweetly like all our love is false.”

75. “You put a fire in my heart, painted blood on my stars, gave me faith.”

76. “I wanna meet your girlfriend, she sounds nice.”

77. “How is kissing me so wrong?“

78. “Can’t you see that I’m already yours?”

79. “I’ve been losing track of the romantic sh*t I’m tryna say but basically I love you"

80. “I don’t wanna be your friend, I wanna kiss your lips, I wanna kiss you until I lose my breath”

81. “I apologize for all your tears, I wish I could be different but I’m still growing up into the one you can call your love”

82. “I’m out of my head, of my heart, of my mind cause you can run but you can’t hide, I’m gonna make you mine”

83. "I never loved someone the way that I love you"

84. "It's the way that you know what I thought I knew, it's the beat that my heart skips when I'm with you"

85. "I hope she gettin' better sex, hope she ain't fakin' it like I did, babe"

86. “I know we’re young and people change and we may never feel the same”

87. “I can’t change the world, but maybe I’ll change your mind”

88. "You don't own me. Don't tie me down 'cause I'd never stay."

89. "Leave everything that is worth a single cent and just take me instead."

90. "And then I got you off your knees, put you right back on your feet, just so you can take advantage of me."

91. "Hey, I can't let you go with nobody. Cause I love you, baby."

92. "Tell me that it wasn't my fault and that I was enough for you."

93. "We were good at faking forever, I get it, whatever."

94. "Cause you had your chance and you blew it. Yeah, you ripped it up and you chewed it."

95. "Well, I'm too busy for your business. Go find a girl who wants to listen."

96. "Stop looking at me with those eyes, like I could disappear and you wouldn't care why."

97. "Oh, we could do whatever you want, but boy, don't go falling in love, you can't stay with me, all you'll ever have is one day with me"

98. "I pray the medication slow me down, but that shit doesn't work when you're around"

99. "Told her that I loved her once and now she'd kill for me"

100. "What the tell were we? Tell me we weren't just friends"

[neo-culture-mafia]

NCT 127 Mafia Dad Reaction to Their Daughter Getting in a Fight

Yes yes yes, here I am. Back with a very long...and long awaited return. Idk I hope someone wanted me back atleast lol.

I have been gone alot recently because I am getting ready for college and May 15 marks the last day for online class for my Senior Year! So I'll be graduating and needed to get some stuff sorted out. I don't want to be away so much but there's not a day I don't go on here just to read everyone's lovely comments and asks that they don't ask me to post. I love you all and will hopefully give you more stuff to read soon.

As I have stated in most of my nct mafia dad reaction (s) I will only be doing the older members because of reality and making it seem believable (??) So '94-'98 line. Sicheng, Kun, and Ten Will not be in this because...idk...maybe...WayV version...coming soon...??...possibly...

Love always,

~J

But here we go~~

Taeyong

To say that he was pissed was an understatement. He had gotten the call that you were in the school office; a girl being hauled off to the infirmary while you sulked in anger.

"Please don't call my dad. Please." You had pleaded the principal as her phone was already next to her ear. Her finger hovered over the 'dial' button. "Then who am I supposed to call?" Her eyes squinted menacingly. "My...my uncle...Jaemin." You ran over all the memorized numbers in your mind.

"As in Na Jaemin." Her words carried his name so poisonous. Your nod had her scoffing. "He's caused more trouble in this school than you have." Her finger dropped onto the dreaded button and it sent you reeling into your office chair.

"Hello, Mr. Lee. This is headmaster Ms. Kwan at your daughter, y/n's school. How are you today?" She had this sinister smile as you stared her down across the dark wood desk.

"Well I'm afraid to inform you that I am not calling you on good terms. It seems as if y/n was involved in a fight today during the school assembly."

The principal nodded as you could tell that your dad was asking questions. "Well we can all talk about that when you come to retrieve her. Unless you send one of her family member's to pick her up." She nodded and smiled. "Thank you and I will relay the message." She said and hung up the phone.

Once the phone was down, her smile fell. "Your father is coming to retrieve you." She said and motioned towards the door.

You waited in the hall in the uncomfortable wooden chair and decided to get some shut eye. You dozed off for the best and quickest nap ever.

Flick

Flick flick

Your eyes opened to your dad infront of you. "What's with you?" He asked and grabbed your arm. You looked back to see the principal waving him off nicely.

You groaned as he dragged you out of the school. "I was in the middle of a meeting, y/n. There was no reason for you to fight." He ranted, eyebrows furrowed.

The black SUV had an empty seat next to the drivers that made you want to puke.

"Then people should learn how to keep their mouths shut." You said and he only picked up speed towards the car.

It was a long car ride home as he lectured you on fighting and the effects it could have on the mind; his position and job totally slipping his own.

(stern dad! Tae?? UGH a fan fav...also i like this gif. Concentrated boi)

Taeil

He was more shocked than anything. Not his precious daughter. No way that it was actually you. As well as he knew, you were the person usually getting picked on and slow to anger. The headmaster just got your name confused...right???

wrong

He hurried to your school to see you sitting in the office with bruised knuckles and tears threatening to spill. He opened the door and didn't even ask questions, just taking you and wrapping you in his arms.

"What happened?" He whispered as he felt you shake with cries. "I want to leave." You whispered. "Mr. Moon. Thank you for coming so quickly." The headmaster approached slowly behind him. "According to multiple witnesses, your daughter was the one who initiated. So if you take a step into my office we can discuss disciplinary mea-" "yeah. Witnesses. Yet when she's come to you on teacher referrals for class bullying, there was 'no witnesses'...right?"

Taeil's mind was racing with anger. The phrase being looped in his head when he had enough of you coming home upset from the constant teasing. He had taken it into his own hands to call the school and the phrase 'no witnesses' now seemed mocking for the situations that had taken place earlier.

"Mr. Moon. We can discuss this as civilized adults in my of-" "No what's going to happen is you are going to get withdrawal papers from your office and bring them to me." His voice commanding and as if the headmaster was programmed; walking into her office and grabbing a stack of papers and returning moments later.

Your dad gripped the stack of papers with one hand, yanking it towards his own figure and turning you both around. You both walked out in silence as his hand rested on your shoulder lovingly.

"Did you eat lunch?" His words trying to distract you from the situation. You shook your head no and he smiled sweetly.

"Let's go get some food and then go to that new dessert cafe that Jungwoo was talking about." He pinched your cheek softly, seeing your usual smile like through a little bit.

You would be okay. You were with him. No one could hurt you when he was around.

(soft taeil is also a fan fav)

Johnny

Jaehyun had popped his head in to the training room, his ear to his phone. "Y/n is about to get jumped." He was so nonchalant that it threw him for a loop.

"She's calling you in a sec- yes. honey, I told him. No. You're not gonna DRAG anyone. NO YOUR NOT GONNA DO AN EVIL DROP BY ON ANYONE'S KNEE CAPS. YOUR MOTHER WOULD KILL US BOTH ARE YOU INSA-." The boys could hear Jae as he walked off down the hall.

Your phone call already had Johnny heading in from training.

"Dad."

"What's up, pumpkin?"

"I'm about to get my ass beat."

Your cold tone died down his smile. "Why?"

"I don't know. The girl. Her boyfriend. Whatever." Your tone seemed flat and like you couldn't be bothered by it.

"What are you doing now? I can be up there in 15 minutes." He said which got the attention of Mark and Taeyong who were training with him.

"I'm eating ice cream at lunch. Just waiting with Jaehyun's daughter." He could basically hear you shrug your shoulders. "Why aren't you in the office or something?!" He asked grabbing his keys and waving the concerned boys off.

"There's no point. If I run away today then the same threat will be there tomorrow." He was already halfway to his car.

"Stop trying to be a hero. Go-"

"Don't touch her, bitch." Then a bunch of muffled and girly screams from the other side...they weren't yours.

He groaned as his engine roared and he was off towards your school.

"You have my temper and your moms attitude." He sighed to himself.

He heard the fight being broken up by what he presumed to be staff of the school.

"Someone call an ambulance!" He heard someone shout and be automatically knew it wouldn't be for you.

~~~~~

You sat in the passengers seat unscathed except for a busted knuckle.

"...that bitch ruined my ice cream..."

"That's all you can think about?!"

"That's all I care about right now!"

"You sent her to the hospital!"

"She started it! She touched my friend and expected me to just be a pushover about it?! I stick to my own and protect who I want to." you mumbled, looking out the window.

"its not my fault she couldn't finish it."

"Can you stop acting like me for 10 seconds?! You don't have 'your own' yet. You're in highschool." He spat and anger etched into your face.

"I'm your kid. I'm going to be like you, Dad. And my own is whoever I want them to be. We've been conjoined at the hip since birth. If I want to stick up for her then I-" "You'd what, y/n?!" His voice now raised.

"I'd do it again." You truthfully spoke and he could only huff through his nose, car becoming deathly silent.

"Her aim was terrible-" "ENOUGH." Your dad rarely shouted but when he did, you knew you were in deep shit.

"Why are you so angry with me?! Jaehyun's daughter was there too. She laid some hits in too. He was smiling when he picked her up!" You said looking at how his knuckles turned white against the steering wheel.

"Because he's not me. I care about you and what you put yourself in to." He said firmly.

"I gave you a heads up, though." You rolled your eyes, sinking into the seat as he pulled into the base. "She did. Not you. You should've called me or atleast told me before it happened." He was now eerily calm. You bit your tongue for any further argument.

"Well it's all over with me now. You have to answer to Mark." You turned towards him with a dropped jaw.

"No Mark."

"Yes. Mark." He smiled and got out. You turned to leave and was met with Mark waiting for you to open your door. He did not look friendly. Your beginning position in the Junior Forces was now going to be exercised.

"I would've rather just gotten jumped."

(angry dad Johnny??? No cap I think he'd be scary when angry)

Yuta

He was just overall confused about the whole situation you had told him about.

"You're doing what?"

"Run...running, dad." He looked to his advisors as if they could hear your out of breath voice in their own ears. "Okay. But, why?" He asked for more clarification.

"Boys. Alot. Jumping. Punched. Running, now." He could hear you wheeze. "Okay well I'll be there but you have to tell me where you are.

"Down street. Open gates. Please." Your voice was calm but draining. He got up and started walking with his advisors close to him. "I'll meet you out there." He had sighed when you ended the call.

"Open the gates. She's in trouble...or started it." He finished off and one of the advisors broke away to carry out orders.

"She's a handful." His advisor had said as they made it out the door and we're walking towards the opening gates. "What do you expect? She's my daughter." He smirked as they now waited.

As if on cue, your slowing form came around the corner of the alley that housed the entrance to the large house; the high and old gates giving the façade of an abandoned or old house.

Behind you was a large group of boys and some men who trailed along loosely. Yuta could tell you were tired and giving up fight with help looking so close.

"Backup at main gate, many people, possibly armed." Yuta's advisor had murmured into his earpiece. Doors opened as more armed guards came to protect their boss and his loving daughter.

While your legs had slowed, some of the group had gained. But once you crossed the path of the gate, your feet were skidding for a stop into your dad's body. He caught you and you practically fell onto your knees for a feel of relief. Your bloody cheek and bruised arms caught his attention as he could examine and treat them later.

The boys skidded behind you and stopped infront of the like of armed guards. Your wheezing didn't quit quickly as you were still facing down danger.

"Are you okay?" Yuta's hands patted your hair in a comforting manner. You nodded, holding onto his suit jacket just to be grounded to reality for a little while longer.

"What's the problem?" He asked the group. "She has our money." One of the representing boys accused. "Money for what?" Yuta has his questions laid out from the moment he had seen you running. "Yakuza fine." He huffed. "I didn't take anything. That wasn't me." You started marching towards the boys but Yuta pulled you back.

"What do you have anything to do with that group?" Yuta asked, his arm around your shoulder so you wouldn't attack.

"Pay-off. We pay them. We get to run our small organized crime unit in Kyoto." Yuta was now pissed at the group. "Why do you think she took-" "She has the tattoo of the enemy." They pointed towards your wrist, a small tattoo of neo cultures symbol on your wrist bone, in sight.

"Do you boys know who I am?" Yuta asked quickly. "And the land I own?" The group had fallen silent. "I am apart of something way larger than the group you ARE scared of." Yuta had let go of you and began walking towards the group himself. "So big infact that I only run our operation in Japan. But I own so much land here," he stood face to face with the representing boy. "I own you." Yuta stated.

The group could see their 'leader' crack. "We got bills to pa-" "Kyoto is my land. You're practically giving donations," Yuta's voice stern, "getting robbed."

Yuta turned around to start walking towards you again. "Her problems are my problems. Stay away from what's mine and don't start trouble~" he sang as he turned you around with him and began to walk towards the door. "Leave and we'll get in contact when we need to. You're on my land," Yuta continued his ramble as he opened the door, poking his head back out once more to look at the group with a fake smile,

"and you have bills to pay." the next order came towards the guards. "Get them off my land."

He shut the door and put both hands on your shoulders, examining your face intently for bad injuries. "Are you okay?" He asked and he was met with a reassuring nod.

"Good. Now let's go eat some food. You need to eat more. You're looking so thin lately-"

(I literally g i g g l e d. this man scary)

Doyoung

He knew your anger popped and sizzled at random moments. You had learned to take care of it but there were always slip-ups and...accidents.

"She did WHAT?!" The whole practice building shook with his scream of disbelief. Everyone jumped as his voice shook the walls.

Taeyong coming in quickly to check on him and was met with a red-in-the-face Doyoung. His hand was gripped onto a knife he was working on before he got the call. The knife now halfway through his work table.

"Tell her I will be there in 30 minutes. No more. No less." He slammed his cell phone down, surprisingly going crack-free.

"What happened?" Tae asked quietly from infront of his friend's desk.

"Y/n. Got in a big fight. Took. Hostages. Weapon? Hairbrush." Doyoung's voice was flat and held no emotion.

"I can go get her if you want. Give you time to cool down." Taeyong offered fearlessly. "No. Its gonna be a long drive home with lots of yelling." He sighed, rubbing his temples.

"There's a bigger issue here that we need to address though." Taeyong said and Doyoung was about to pop himself.

"What. Now." His hands gripped his chair's arms roughly.

"She's been out of her medication for the past 2 weeks. She's honestly, probably going through withdrawal." He broke the news that had been slipping over Doyoung's head.

"I just got her medication-" "2 months ago." Taeyong was firm with this matter. "I only know this because Kun called me this morning. He still has her medication for this month in China. No one wrote off the approval to send it." Taeyong sighed and Doyoung now just felt guilty.

"That explains so much." He rubbed his eyes. "Mood swings. Appetite loss. Fatigue. Rage and violent outbursts. Sweating. Throwing-up. Depressive state. " He started listing off everything he had noticed for the past 2 weeks or so that had been getting progressively worse.

"Please write it off. I'll be back with her in a little bit." Doyoung said getting up and grabbing his keys and phone. "Should I make something for her to eat?" Tae called down the hall. "Please." He sang.

You were unusually calm when he arrived. The rest of the families were there. Doyoung had to apologize profusely and try to explain on why you acted the way you did. One of the students even piped in to say that you were usually so calm and most students knew something was going on but no one knew how to help.

Now with parents and students calmed, you were next.

He walked into the hall again and saw you staring at the floor.

"Come on, sweetie. Let's go home." He held his hand out and you looked up with tears in your eyes. "We're not going to yell are we?" You asked and his heart broke into a million more pieces. "My head hurts so much."

"Of course not. I know what's going on. We're just going to go home and relax. Taeyong has some food waiting for you at home." He pulled you up and walked down the hall with you stuck onto his side.

He was in as much fault with the situation as you were. He wasn't angry at you because he knew you couldn't control it and you didn't know what you were doing. He was mad at himself for not protecting you from something he could have easily fixed if he caught it in time.

Jaehyun [longer - continuation / other half of Johnny's]

He didn't want to train today. He had a long fight with his wife the night before. No one in his house had good sleep last night.

He had woken up early to take you to school and make his wife breakfast before high-tailing it out of there before the aftershocks came.

You both sang songs the whole way to school and laughed at eachother's jokes. "Can we go pick up Uncle Johnny's daughter since it's early?" He looked at the time and shrugged. "Nothing else better to do." He revved and was off down the street of the school to Johnny's place.

You had let both of you in as it was basically a second home.

"John!" You dad shouted and you laughed as you opened your best friend's door. She was still asleep in the muted sheets, sun cascading through the window like in magazines.

"Yah. Wake up already." You nudged her sleeping form and with a groan she was up. "Morning, already?" She asked as you threw her uniform onto her bed. "Yes. Now let's go." You laughed at her expression.

"I just have this off feeling about today." She confessed groggily, wrapping the thick blanket around her shoulders.

You sat down across from her, "well I promise you. We won't face it alone. Whatever it is." You stuck out your finger and she hooked hers around yours with an amused sigh.

"Can you guys not be us for like 10 seconds?" Johnny's sleepy voice said from the door where him and your dad were having a cup of coffee.

You and she laughed for a moment before you actually helped her get ready. "Remember you both are training tonight!" Jaehyun called down the hall from the kitchen. You helped your best friend pack her training bag and get her hair done for school.

"Can you believe her? Acts like I tried to break them up." She shook her head, an anger set into her eyes. "Well I'll break her if she does anything today." You said from her bed. She became cold and gave you a hard look from infront of her vanity.

"You're not going to do anything. You'll get hurt and I'm not going to let that happen." She put her necklace on and grabbed her bags. "Besides, you're supposed to be the nice one out of the two of us." She smiled softly at you. "Your family all acts the same." You huffed and she laughed quickly. "We're caring people. Now let's go." She grabbed your hand and pulled you up.

"Breakfast." Johnny called and held out a plate towards his daughter. "Not hungry. Running late. Love you, dad." She said and ran with your hand in hers.

"Love you too. Eat something!"

"Bye dad, call you at lunch!" You called qyickly.

The front door slammed.

~~~~~

You walked with your friend to lunch. Word around your class is that she's gonna get jumped during lunch. "Please don't fight." You said taking her hand and tugging on it softly.

She only looked at you quickly. "I won't start anything. But I'll finish what I need to." She pulled yours and her seat out and both of you sat down. "I'll go get our lunch. Yell if you need me." Like that she was off into the line.

You grabbed your phone once you saw the group of agitated girls stalking on your friend like she was prey.

"What's new?" Your dad picked up his phone like usual. "She's going to get jumped." You spoke quickly. "Who? You?" "No. ..." "Oh. Well what happened?" He asked. "These girl are mad at her I guess. Go tell Johnny. She's going to hurt people if she fights." You could only hear a sigh and shuffling.

You saw your friend get approached and automatically got a rush of confidence. Your dad's voice was low. "She's calling you in a sec-" "Did you tell him?" "Yes,honey, I told him-" "Dad I'm going to drag them by their hair if they star-" No. You're not gonna DRAG anyone." "-i'm just gonna go pow right on their knees." "NO YOUR NOT GONNA DO AN EVIL DROP BY ON ANYONE'S KNEE CAPS. YOUR MOTHER WOULD KILL US BOTH ARE YOU INSANE?!" "probably." and with that you hung up.

A try was set infront of you as she sat down next to you with her phone to her ear. You ate slowly as you tried to pick up on the conversation. Her ice cream was quickly being eaten as you leaned closer to her ear. You saw her smile as she smeared the cool substance on your cheek.

You gasped and wiped it off quickly. Next thing you knew, your ass was lying cold on the ground with a welt on your cheek. You sat there stunned for a moment. "Don't touch her, bitch." And you watched in slow motion as your best friend lunged at the girl who had been at bark and no bite up until this moment.

You scrambled but were pushed back by eager eyes. You fought your way through to the front so you could pull her off of the unprepared girl who was currently getting her ass beat.

"Get off of her. Please." You were pulling but she didn't let up. Someone grabbed you and knew you had to fight for yourself first though. Your fists were leading as the girl that latched onto you was now on the ground too. But you knew you had to stop.

"Someone call an ambulance!"

~~~~~~

Your legs were jittery as you waited to be picked up. "Its okay." You kept repeating to your still worked up and angry friend. "Don't touch me right now. I love you and I'm sorry but I just don't want to pop on you too."

She stated flatly and you nodded, tears pricking your eyes as you played with your hands. Dried blood making them feel like paper.

"Are you okay though?" She asked and you nodded, wiping the beginning to fall tears with the back of your hand.

"Yo." You both looked up to see Johnny. "Let's go." He pointed to his own daughter.

"I'm not leaving till she gets picked up." She was being hard and uncooperative since she was carried down her by staff.

"No, you need to go." You sniffled and nudged her off the wooden bench.

"I'll be fine." You smiled and you could see your best friend fight against her better judgement and personal morals.

"Your dad is just in the office signing some stuff." Johnny looked at you, rubbing your head in a comforting manner. "I'll see you at training." She pinched your cheek softly and returned to a cold persona.

She got up annoyed and lead the way down the hall. Your own dad rounding the corner at the same time with a smile on his face.

The dam behind your eyes broke as your dad motioned for you to walk closer. "Don't cry." He put his arm around you and brought you in for a hug.

"Nobody is mad at you." He said but that didn't help your situation.

"You were defending yourself." He reassured you as he began leading you both out of the school. "The principal saw everything over the cameras. You're not in trouble at all." He said and you nodded, wiping the remaining tears.

"Are you okay though?" He asked and you nodded once again.

"Let's go relax before training. Knowing Mark he'll probably do team punishment today." He sighed but you didn't really care. You just wanted everyone to be okay in this situation.

Jae was super scared when he got the call from your principal saying you were involved. Yet as he watched the clips of you defending yourself and trying to break it up; proudness swelled into his chest and it was threatening to pop.

It showed how you were growing up right before his eyes and were gaining your own morals. You knew when something was too much and when to stop. He could never be happier than when you were smart, but most importantly safe.

("yo who messed with my daughter?" -mark)

Jungwoo

You got your attitude from him and your firecracker-like anger from your environment. It shaped you but it was also helpful in certain situations.

He wasn't expecting to get a call on a lunch date with his wife to hear that you had been in a fight during school.

"We'll be right there." He said and hung up, his wife looking with curious eyes. "Y/n was in a fight." Then she sighed. "Oh thank God. I thought she was going to be a pushover." She said and Jungwoo could only stare in shock. He looked to his phone to his wife and just have this shocked look on his face.

"We'll take everything to go and just. Go and see...what...our daughter...got in a fight about." Jungwoo and she didn't know what to do. They didn't teach them what you do in the situation in their parenting books.

"Do we scold her? I can't scold her. She's too cute-" "I don't know." She cut him off. "We should see what happened first." She said and he nodded in agreement. "Yes. Good plan." She laughed at his blown-away state.

~~~~~

"Are you mad at me?" Your voice spoke from the back seat.

"Well." Your mom spoke with uncertainty. "Candy?" Jungwoo asked for what felt like the millionth time. "You punched a boy in...his parts...over candy?!" He asked and you had to stifle a laugh.

"You and mom always said to make sure boys understood when I said, 'no'." You shrugged. "He kept reaching and grabbing." "No. That's for another- oh whatever." She didn't fight it anymore.

"Uncle Mark always told me to stand up for what is mine." At the red light, Jungwoo banged his head lightly against his steering wheel.

"The candy was Mine." You kept going.

I don't think Jungwoo would know exactly what to do once you all got home. Or how to explain to Mark what he indirectly caused.

Both Jungwoo and his wife would need to go to one of their parent-y friends to figure out what to do yet would have a hard time enforcing any punishment.

They both knew you didn't mean trouble. You were just a very literal kid that...quite literally did what you were told and taught.

(domestic jungwoo = best jungwoo)

[fernstream]

For months, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a good soldier for the Democratic Party and Joseph R. Biden Jr as he sought to defeat President Trump.

But on Saturday, in a nearly hourlong interview shortly after President-elect Biden was declared the winner, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made clear the divisions within the party that animated the primary still exist. And she dismissed recent criticisms from some Democratic House members who have blamed the party’s left for costing them important seats. Some of the members who lost, she said, had made themselves “sitting ducks.”

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

We finally have a fuller understanding of the results. What’s your macro takeaway?

Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a free fall to hell anymore. But whether we’re going to pick ourselves up or not is the lingering question. We paused this precipitous descent. And the question is if and how we will build ourselves back up.

We know that race is a problem, and avoiding it is not going to solve any electoral issues. We have to actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.

But we also learned that progressive policies do not hurt candidates. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat.

To your first point, Democrats lost seats in an election where they were expected to gain them. Is that what you are ascribing to racism and white supremacy at the polls?

I think it’s going to be really important how the party deals with this internally, and whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost. Because before we even had any data yet in a lot of these races, there was already finger-pointing that this was progressives’ fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives.

I’ve already started looking into the actual functioning of these campaigns. And the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating D.C.C.C.-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns.

Some of this is criminal. It’s malpractice. Conor Lamb spent $2,000 on Facebook the week before the election. I don’t think anybody who is not on the internet in a real way in the year of our Lord 2020 and loses an election can blame anyone else when you’re not even really on the internet.

And I’ve looked through a lot of these campaigns that lost, and the fact of the matter is if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. And not a single one of these campaigns were firing on all cylinders.

Well, Conor Lamb did win. So what are you saying: Investment in digital advertising and canvassing are a greater reason moderate Democrats lost than any progressive policy?

These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?

If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.

Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.

There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party — in and of itself — does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.

If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: “This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.” And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election? They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.

Is there anything from Tuesday that surprised you? Or made you rethink your previously held views?

The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realizing what work we have to do.

We need to do a lot of anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country. Because if we keep losing white shares and just allowing Facebook to radicalize more and more elements of white voters and the white electorate, there’s no amount of people of color and young people that you can turn out to offset that.

But the problem is that right now, I think a lot of Dem strategy is to avoid actually working through this. Just trying to avoid poking the bear. That’s their argument with defunding police, right? To not agitate racial resentment. I don’t think that is sustainable.

There’s a lot of magical thinking in Washington, that this is just about special people that kind of come down from on high. Year after year, we decline the idea that they did work and ran sophisticated operations in favor of the idea that they are magical, special people. I need people to take these goggles off and realize how we can do things better.

If you are the D.C.C.C., and you’re hemorrhaging incumbent candidates to progressive insurgents, you would think that you may want to use some of those firms. But instead, we banned them. So the D.C.C.C. banned every single firm that is the best in the country at digital organizing.

The leadership and elements of the party — frankly, people in some of the most important decision-making positions in the party — are becoming so blinded to this anti-activist sentiment that they are blinding themselves to the very assets that they offer.

I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years. That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss.

So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy. And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.

What is your expectation as to how open the Biden administration will be to the left? And what is the strategy in terms of moving it?

I don’t know how open they’ll be. And it’s not a personal thing. It’s just, the history of the party tends to be that we get really excited about the grass roots to get elected. And then those communities are promptly abandoned right after an election.

I think the transition period is going to indicate whether the administration is taking a more open and collaborative approach, or whether they’re taking a kind of icing-out approach. Because Obama’s transition set a trajectory for 2010 and some of our House losses. It was a lot of those transition decisions — and who was put in positions of leadership — that really informed, unsurprisingly, the strategy of governance.

What if the administration is hostile? If they take the John Kasich view of who Joe Biden should be? What do you do?

Well, I’d be bummed, because we’re going to lose. And that’s just what it is. These transition appointments, they send a signal. They tell a story of who the administration credits with this victory. And so it’s going be really hard after immigrant youth activists helped potentially deliver Arizona and Nevada. It’s going to be really hard after Detroit and Rashida Tlaib ran up the numbers in her district.

It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout.

If the party believes after 94 percent of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic Party is the John Kasichs won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.

You are diagnosing national trends. You’re maybe the most famous voice on the left currently. What can we expect from you in the next four years?

I don’t know. I think I’ll have probably more answers as we get through transition, and to the next term. How the party responds will very much inform my approach and what I think is going to be necessary.

The last two years have been pretty hostile. Externally, we’ve been winning. Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.

Is the party ready to, like, sit down and work together and figure out how we’re going to use the assets from everyone at the party? Or are they going to just kind of double down on this smothering approach? And that’s going to inform what I do.

Is there a universe in which they’re hostile enough that we’re talking about a Senate run in a couple years?

I genuinely don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to be in politics. You know, for real, in the first six months of my term, I didn’t even know if I was going to run for re-election this year.

Really? Why?

It’s the incoming. It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy. When your own colleagues talk anonymously in the press and then turn around and say you’re bad because you actually append your name to your opinion.

I chose to run for re-election because I felt like I had to prove that this is real. That this movement was real. That I wasn’t a fluke. That people really want guaranteed health care and that people really want the Democratic Party to fight for them.

But I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same.

[magicrowiswritingstuff]

Prompt List 1

Random Dialogue Prompts (mostly from my Book of 5.000 Prompts or ones I wasn’t sure where to sort into)

Pronouns can be changed to I/You/He/She/… just send the right one with your request as well as the category you want it to be written in! Also, I'll add more over time.

1. “No, it’s really not that complicated. He’s a bad person.”

2. “Hey... what’s wrong with your face?”

3. “Dude. It’s three in the morning.”

4. “Um, sorry. That one’s not for sale.”

5. “You’ve got thirty seconds to explain to me what you’re doing here.”

6. "I know this may be hard to believe, but I’m on your side.”

7. “Never heard of that being used as a weapon before.”

8. “Just sit around and cry, then. I don’t have that luxury.”

9. “I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

10. “Of course, we’re (best) friends. No one else would put up with our shenanigans.”

11. “That’s the least of your worries.”

12. “Do you trust me?” / “Yes/No.” (please choose one)

13. “I haven’t tried this on a human yet, but it should work.”

14. “What? I meant it as a compliment.”

15. “Who put this in my coat pocket?”

16. “I can’t do this anymore.”

17. “I know you did your best, but it wasn’t enough.”

18. “Even if I could stop it, I wouldn’t.”

19. “You have got to see this.”

20. “I don’t really think of myself as a thief...”

21. “Are you just going to keep walking by my house or are you going to come in?”

22. “Where are your clothes?”

23. “Well, this contest isn’t going to rig itself.”

24. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

25. “I should have told you this a long time ago.”

26. “I thought we were friends!”

27. “That’s not a good look.”

28. “I love you, but I don’t even think I know who you really are.”

29. “She’s evil, but she does have a point there.”

30. “I didn’t know you could talk.”

31. “Sweetie, what were you thinking?!”

32. “What makes you think it was an accident?”

33. “Sorry. You’re the first person I’ve spoken to in a long time.”

34. “According to this, you owe them eighty thousand dollars.”

35. “I would break his thumbs right now if I could.”

36. “Why are you helping me?”

37. “I told you not to read that.”

38. “Where did you learn how to do that?”

39. “How could you do this to me?”

40. “I thought you had him!”

41. “Humility is not one of my many virtues.”

42. “You don’t have the correct paperwork.”

43. “Careful not to break the – oh.”

44. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but yeah.”

45. “Well, aren’t you the cutest little thing?”

46. “Please don’t use sarcasm. It confuses me.”

47. “After we lost you, things just weren’t the same.”

48. “If you were logical you would’ve killed me already.”

49. “Well, that could have gone better.”

50. “Sometimes I feel like she’s still at my side.”

51. “We’ve been waiting for two hours!”

52. “Your services are no longer required.”

53. “I feel like we’ve met before...”

54. “Yes, it’s a questionable line of work, but I’m good at it.”

55. “Wow! It’s an honor to meet you!”

56. “Let’s face it: you don’t blend in.”

57. “Forgive me if I’m misreading things, but do you want to make out?”

58. “The next time you shoot a guy, don’t do it in front of witnesses!”

59. "Maybe you don’t believe in me, but I definitely believe in you.”

60. “Just get out there and smile and act like everything’s fine.”

61. “Keep your head down!”

62. “I still miss being with you.”

63. “Well, change it back!”

64. “I’m not mad at you for lying. I’m mad at you for being so bad at it.”

65. “Ugh, I still have glitter all over me.”

66. “I know it’s going to hurt to leave -like cutting off your own leg to get out of a trap- but you have to do it.”

67. “I’ve been patient for five minutes!”

68. “I’m not the best, but I’ve got the best timing.”

69. “That’s a discussion for another time.”

70. “Are you embarrassed to be seen with me?”

71. “You know who always wants more money? Rich people.”

72. “You’re the one who left. Not me.”

73. “Of course, I’m scared. I’m not an idiot.”

74. “Did you make that yourself?”

75. “You were in there so long I got worried.”

76. “No, this isn’t the point of no return. That was a few points back.”

77. “It seemed like a good idea at that time.”

78. “I felt so dirty that I just wanted to die.”

79. “That’s going to cost you extra.”

80. “Hang on, this is going to hurt. A lot.”

81. “I don’t know why I waited so long to do this.”

82. “Whatever you do, don’t open your eyes.”

83. “If you don’t tell her, I will.”

84. “Quit whining. The woman won.”

85. “What do you want?”

86. “What do you want?”

87. “Who are you talking to?”

88. “I am the humblest person you are ever likely to meet.”

89. “I’ve kept this baby alive for a full year now and I’m very proud of that.”

90. “This is why I don’t have a lot of friends.”

91. “I should have warned him, but I wanted to see how it would play out.”

92. “I’ve figured out my life’s true purpose.”

93. “My back’s killing me.”

94. “I never, ever want to hear you say that again.”

95. “Could you please not use that tone of voice?”

96. “Don’t tell me to calm down!”

97. “... I wasn’t paying attention.”

98. “You’ve caught me at a really bad time.”

99. “... I’ll take that as a compliment.”

100. “Didn’t your parents ever tell you not to talk to strangers?”