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alwaysmychoices · 3 years ago

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Retirement Talks

Synopsis: Charlie decides to return to Edenbrook to meet Kyra for lunch, but little did she know that a scandal has rocked the hospital. During lunch, secrets on all sides are revealed - some of which make Charlie question if she should leave medicine altogether.

Chapter 25 of the “with and without” series

Previous Series: “a weekend with dr. ramsey”

Pairing: Dr. Ethan Ramsey x MC (Charlotte “Charlie” Greene)

Words: 5.8k

Rating: Teen

Also available on AO3 & Wattpad (link in Masterlist)

Charlie was back in Edenbrook.

Not by her own desire, of course.

It was her therapist’s idea. She thought visiting Edenbrook would help Charlie so she could see it without the looming threat of a bioterrorist attack or meeting Ethan’s estranged mother. Her therapist hoped that it would ease Charlie’s anxiety and show her that Edenbrook really was just a building at the end of the day.

Not some evil place full of death and destruction. Even if it housed her most painful memories, those were just memories. She couldn’t fault the building itself.

She needed to stop fearing Edenbrook. If she didn’t, she could never return to Edenbrook.

Those were easy things to say – very appealing in its rationality.

But if it was just a building, it was a building haunted. The halls were lined with ghosts of memories long gone, seemingly forgotten by all but Charlie. All the hope and innocence she saw on her first day was replaced with stinging bitterness. She was afraid of what Edenbrook would take from her next.

She didn’t want to be here.

She probably would have left if she hadn’t made lunch plans with Kyra – who, of course, was late.

It had already been fifteen minutes since they’d initially planned to meet, and Charlie saw no sign of Kyra showing up any time soon. Charlie initially waited in the lobby, but after a text from Kyra that said she was stuck in an emergency staff meeting, Charlie moved to Kyra’s office to wait in privacy.

It was easier to wait there. Charlie had very few memories in the administrative wing of the hospital – even fewer negative ones. There were also fewer onlookers in Kyra’s office, and Charlie didn’t want to be stared at. Besides, Kyra kept snacks in her desk, and Charlie was starving.

This wasn’t the first time Charlie had stolen from Kyra’s snack drawer, so when she walked in, she knew exactly where it was. A few months ago, lunches like these were regular occurrences. Then secrets – primarily Charlie’s relationship with Ethan – started to separate her from her friends, little by little. Most of her spare time was taken from her friends and immediately dedicated to the intoxicating and less than honorable pursuit of falling in love with Ethan Ramsey.

Charlie had been lying for a very long time.

Two months of her relationship – almost three. Even longer if she counted the build-up.

Her friends allowed it. She wasn’t sure why, but as she stole a Twizzler from Kyra’s desk, she had the distinct feeling that she didn’t deserve it.

Just before Charlie could lose herself in the depths of guilt and a dizzying inner monologue, her companion finally appeared.

20 minutes late, not that Charlie or her grumbling stomach were counting.

“Twizzlers, thank God,” Kyra skipped the pleasantries, instead making a beeline for her friend and the snacks in her hands. Kyra took a handful from the snack drawer and waited until she’d chewed through at least one before turning to Charlie.

Kyra looked amazing.

Particularly for being on death’s door only a month earlier.

Charlie wished she had been there for more of the recovery. After finding out Kyra survived the surgery, they had an emotional moment, and they frequented each other’s room in the hospital. But after the memorial service, Charlie and Ethan left town, and Charlie struggled once she returned to Boston.

During that time, Charlie visited Raf and Kyra. Sometimes, seeing them was the only time she left her apartment. But Kyra was the strongest of all of them – to no one’s particular surprise. Kyra returned to work within only a few weeks, and with Raf and Kyra still on leave, they primarily heard from her via text or rambling phone calls where Kyra shared hospital gossip they didn’t understand.

Looking at Kyra and Charlie, you could tell that one of them almost died, but you’d think it was Charlie, not Kyra. Kyra was stylish and trendy with high heels, a freshly shaved head, and a new series of gold ear piercings to celebrate her successful surgery. She oozed effortless coolness and accentuated it with a devilish smile everyone adored.

Charlie, on the other hand, hadn’t bounced back so smoothly. She’d dressed for the snow by picking up a pair of jeans she hadn’t washed in over a week, and coupled with her anxious expression, her style that usually read as classic and laidback seemed boring and stiff.

Or at least that was what Charlie felt like in comparison.

“Everything okay?” Charlie asked, claiming another Twizzler for herself as she settled comfortably on the edge of Kyra’s desk.

“Just the hospital freaking out,” Kyra grumbled, digging through her snack drawer for something else. She didn’t seem satisfied with any of her options, so she settled on a pack of fruit gummies from the bottom of the drawer.

“About what?” Charlie’s interest was piqued, though she tried to keep her tone casual. After staying home for so long, she couldn’t help but be intrigued.

“Another crisis,” Kyra evaded her, “Which isn’t helping the dire financial straits the hospital was already in.”

“Oh… Are you sure you can still get lunch today?”

“Are you kidding!” Kyra’s eyes widened as if horrified by the idea of a cancellation, “After all that, I need lunch. Let’s get out of the hospital and actually go somewhere good.”

Kyra wanted to get Charlie out of the hospital. Something about her eagerness to do made Charlie suspicious but not enough so that she would push it further. She was so eager to leave – despite her therapist’s suggestions – that she quickly accepted the proposal.

“Sounds perfect,” Charlie agreed.

After only a few moments of discussion, they decided to go to a restaurant within walking distance. Despite its close proximity, it was unpopular with Edenbrook workers because it was notorious for slow service, a recipe for disaster for short lunch breaks. Charlie, who had nowhere else to be for the rest of the day, didn’t mind. Kyra, who regularly extended her break beyond its limit, suggested it on purpose so she could avoid their coworkers.

As they walked to the restaurant, Kyra silently lamented she’d brought Charlie to Edenbrook on the worst day possible.

But she smiled and kept it to herself.

When they took their seats, Kyra started her usual game of looking for the craziest thing on the menu and deciding she should get it just so she could live a little. She inspired Charlie to order something a little more adventurous than the basic chicken sandwich she’d been eyeing when they first walked in.

After they ordered, Kyra was smiling.

“What?” Charlie asked, “The chicken won’t be that spicy,” she felt the need to defend her order, assuming her friend was judging her hot chicken and waffles – an impulsive choice on Charlie’s part but familiar enough that she was comfortable with it.

“Not that,” Kyra rolled her eyes dramatically, still grinning though, “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” Charlie smiled back – genuinely.

“I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever,” Kyra shook her head as if shocked by their recent time apart.

“I know… I haven’t been around much,” Charlie admitted sheepishly, reaching for her water as if she could hide behind the glass.

She didn’t need to feel embarrassed about needing time after the attack to heal. But that wasn’t really what she was embarrassed about. It was the weeks of lying and hiding that preceded it.

“I’ve heard,” Kyra smirked softly into her drink.

“You’ve heard?” Charlie repeated, her heart rate spiking just a bit.

“I mean, even before everything happened, you were getting hard to find. And then, after the attack, you’re entitled to space, but…” Kyra smirked like she knew some grand secret, and Charlie’s stomach flipped. “Honestly, all of your roommates wonder where you are but are too polite to ask because of all you’ve been through.”

Charlie’s face fell.

Shit.

She should’ve known. Of course, they’d eventually put it together that she was often gone and frequently spent nights away, but she didn’t realize they were talking about it.

Charlie swallowed hard, and Kyra took that as her sign to continue.

“At first, they thought you were seeing someone casually and didn’t want to tell anyone after what happened with Raf, but then they thought they would have come around after the attack. For a little while, they thought you were with Raf and had secretly united after he broke up with his girlfriend because you guys were suddenly getting along again,” Kyra explained, watching as Charlie’s blanched with shock, “And he explained your absences a lot of the time, but he denied being your boyfriend, by the way. So, if you are having a secret love affair, you should know that your boyfriend denies it.”

“And do you guys still think I’m with Raf?” Charlie couldn’t believe there had been this much discourse about her absence. How many theories had they gone through?

“No,” Kyra shook her head, “You guys don’t act like a couple when you’re together. Plus, there’s no real reason to keep it a secret.”

Right…

Charlie was amazed Rafael hadn’t told her about all the gossip, but he was probably just trying to protect her from it.

“You guys aren’t, are you?” Kyra asked, just to be sure.

“No, definitely not,” Charlie insisted forcefully enough that Kyra was satisfied she was telling the truth.

“Good,” Kyra grinned in relief, “I already made a bet with Elijah that you two weren’t together, so he owes he me $20 now.”

Charlie couldn’t help but laugh.

Still, her curiosity burned.

“So, what are the other theories?”

Kyra raised an eyebrow, surprised Charlie was digging into it more. Clearly, something was there if she was this curious.

“Some are better than others. Aurora thought you might have a secret apartment to be by yourself. Sienna thinks you’re just going around to different supporters like Dr. Banerji when you need them. She usually thinks you’re at his cabin when you’re away. Bryce likes to joke that you’re out at bars on the prowl for a new boy toy,” Kyra winked with a laugh, “And then there’s this really funny one we came up with at Donahue’s, but it’s probably not true.”

“What is it?” Charlie pushed.

Kyra blushed. She was embarrassed to tell her how crazy their conspiracies had become.

“Well… it’s just that Dr. Ramsey’s been really supportive and protective since the attack. And we all saw how devastated he was right after. Plus, he’s the one who took you to Dr. Banerji’s cabin,” Kyra began, but the way she spoke made it clear she thought it was unlikely.

But she was right.

“After everything that happened with you last year, I know that you probably wouldn’t even give him the time of day, especially since you’d started dating other people right before you got sick. But… we thought you and Dr. Ramsey were, you know, together.”

Kyra expected an emphatic rebuttal or an amused laugh. Instead, Charlie stared.

“You weren’t, right?” Kyra laughed, waiting for her expected response.

“Um…” Charlie hesitated.

She wondered if she should keep lying.

But she couldn’t fathom it, not anymore.

“I was, actually,” Charlie said it casually, like it wasn’t an earth-shattering revelation that she had reunited with the man who broke her heart last spring.

Kyra was stunned to silence.

So stunned that she hardly noticed the waitress deliver their meals. Charlie thanked her on behalf of both of them.

Charlie waited for Kyra to do something.

Literally anything.

But she was just staring.

“We were actually together before the attack, though,” Charlie spoke up, trying to fill the silence. She kept her tone nonchalant in hopes it would keep the conversation that way, reducing the impact of her truth, “About a month. Not including the back and forth preceding it, where we slept together a few times.”

Kyra’s eyes widened more and more until they couldn’t possibly get wider.

“I thought you liked David! Didn’t you go out with him to get over Ethan?” Kyra asked, having set up them up just so Charlie could stop crushing on her boss.

“I did like him! But… I only saw him once. And I actually cut that date short because Ethan called me drunk, and I wanted to check on him,” Charlie admitted sheepishly.

“And that’s when you decided to be with Ethan?”

“No,” Charlie averted her eyes, “It was about a week later, I think. We, um… we had sex in Ethan’s office. We didn’t mean to do that, but as you already know, it wasn’t the first time. So, Ethan suggested that we start an actual relationship. I said no initially, but the next day, I said yes.”

“You’re in a relationship?”

“Oh… yeah,” Charlie winced, realizing her friend thought they were just sleeping together.

“How serious?”

“Like we’ve met each other’s parents, and we regularly say, ‘I love you’ serious,” Charlie’s voice got higher as she spoke until she was almost squeaking.

This was crazy. She’d been having a secret relationship – and not the kind where you text someone and show up at their door. She’d been building something meaningful with Ethan. She loved Ethan. She truly wanted to spend the rest of her life with Ethan, and along the way, she’d forgotten that her friends had no idea.

“Holy. Shit,” Kyra’s jaw dropped, and she leaned in close, “Tell me everything.”

She was smiling, and Charlie let out a deep sigh of relief.

So, Charlie told her.

Their promise to have a one-night stand. The way they pulled away and always came back. Her first date with David and the night she spent with Ethan. The morning where they shared breakfast and became friends again. The night in Ethan’s office where he offered a relationship and her teary acceptance the next night. The first time they said I love you. The way he helped put her back together after the attack. Their fight about her returning to Edenbrook. Everything.

Kyra was enthralled.

She asked more questions.

Most of which involved how Ethan was in bed. The others questioned how such an asshole could be a good boyfriend. And most importantly, why they’d kept it a secret.

On that front, Charlie didn’t have a great answer.

It was obvious why they kept it a secret from most of the hospital. The hospital didn’t approve of interdepartmental relationships, particularly if one party was a superior. It could jeopardize her place on the Diagnostics Unit, and rumors of sleeping to the top could damage her career permanently.

But why she didn’t tell her friends?

At first, just to keep the secret from spreading and maybe because she thought they’d think it was a terrible decision. Then… as time went on, it was just harder to share.

Though disappointed with Charlie’s lack of an answer, Kyra loved the conversation.

A few months ago, she’d strongly urged Charlie to stay away from Ethan, convinced he could only hurt her if they got any closer. But now that Ethan had seemingly proved himself, Kyra was eager to hear everything.

The rest of lunch was spent dishing on Charlie’s secret relationship and gossiping about the fabulous men – and the gorgeous woman – Kyra had been casually seeing in the last few weeks. Out of all of them, the only one who came close to acting like a partner was ironically Bryce – the only one she wasn’t sleeping with. Charlie, as always, encouraged Kyra to ask Bryce out and act on their perpetual flirting. Kyra just waved off the suggestion.

It wasn’t until the end of the meal that the conversation naturally drifted back to the financial state of Edenbrook and the resulting long hours Kyra had been working.

Kyra forgot why she didn’t bring it up earlier. She forgot that, as much as she loved Charlie, certain topics were still of limits. Something about the conversation made Kyra feel safe and comfortable – like she was catching up with an old friend, not protecting her from a hospital tragedy.

“I didn’t realize things were that bad,” Charlie confessed, signing her name on the check as they collected their things to leave.

“The whole thing’s on the verge of collapse,” Kyra sighed, “We’re trying everything –even begging our donor list to the point where they hate us. And things are going to get so much worse after today…”

“Today? What happened today?” Charlie asked curiously. Kyra, who had just looped her arm through Charlie’s, stilled as she realized her mistake.

“Just a little crisis. Nothing we can’t handle,” Kyra murmured casually.

“Is that why you had the emergency meeting?” Charlie prodded innocently, unaware of the change in her friend.

“Mmmhmm,” Kyra hummed avoidantly.

“Well… What was it?” Charlie asked again, growing more intrigued by the minute, “There hasn’t been an emergency admin meeting since someone tried to kill me. And before that, the last one was when Mrs. Martinez’s family threatened to sue. It’s got to be something big.”

And it was.

Something monumental and horrible.

“It’s not great,” Kyra warned, “You probably don’t want to hear about it…”

Well, now Charlie had to know.

“Kyra,” she said softly, pausing on the sidewalk once they exited the restaurant, “what is it?”

Kyra chewed on her lower lip, mulling over the decision on whether or not to tell her.

If Kyra was the one to tell her, at least she could control the way the information was spread. Charlie wouldn’t first be exposed to the news through sensationalized gossip or accusatory questions.

Maybe it was better this way.

“An intern made a mistake, or we think it was a mistake,” Kyra began, her hand resting on Charlie’s arms as they moved through the bitterly cold city. Even with their heavy jackets, they huddled together for warmth, and Kyra was comforted by Charlie’s closeness.

“A mistake,” Charlie repeated, the cogs in her brain already churning.

The last time the administrative wing panicked because of an intern mistake, it had been her own.

“What unit?” Charlie asked, hoping it would be something completely unrelated to her line of work. Maybe surgery made the wrong cut or psych misdiagnosed. Even dermatology was capable of mistakes if they tried hard enough.

“Diagnostics,” Kyra’s soft voice was almost lost to the roar of the Boston streets.

Charlie knew.

Without being told, she knew exactly what happened.

And the fact it came so easily to her meant that she had known the risk before now.

She let it happen.

“Esme,” Charlie blurted out her assumption. She prayed that Kyra would correct her.

“How did you know?” Kyra asked, bewildered.

Charlie winced.

“And the patient was Levi Coates.”

“Did someone already tell you?” Kyra’s eyes were so wide they took up most of her face. She was astonished – maybe even a little relieved she wouldn’t have to share the gory details if Charlie already knew.

Charlie couldn’t speak.

Without either noticing, the crosswalk turned green.

Most of the lunch rush had already left the city streets and returned to their office building, so the sidewalks weren’t crowded. Only a few people stood next to Charlie and Kyra, and once the light changed, they left the pair on the sidewalk by themselves.

“No…” Charlie murmured finally, only becoming aware of the crosswalk once it turned red again and stranded them in their original location.

No one needed to tell Charlie.

It all came back to her in horrific detail.

The day she came back to work – her last day before she abandoned Edenbrook and the care of her intern.

Esme acted strangely. She said things she shouldn’t have said to Charlie. She asked dangerous questions. She was too close to Levi – and too willing to take on the risks involved with helping him. And the party…. The party should have been a sign. No one survived a party at Edenbrook, it seemed.

But back then, Charlie couldn’t take it on. She was too fragile and overwhelmed to assume the responsibilities, stress, and mistakes of another. She couldn’t care for herself enough to teach someone else.

She’d left Esme.

She assumed someone would take over, spot it, and do something.

Or her little warning speech would be enough to warn Esme off from career-ruining misery.

But now, Charlie saw it wasn’t enough.

She failed Esme. She failed Edenbrook, and now she failed Levi.

Charlie didn’t want to ask what Esme had done, but she hoped it was benign – something like threatening a parent and having a lawsuit thrown in her face. She couldn’t watch another bright young intern lose a patient and devastate a family.

“What happened?” Charlie asked, not to sate curiosity but to be prepared. She knew that everyone would stare and whisper once she walked into Edenbrook again.

She didn’t look at Kyra as the light finally turned green again. While Kyra collected her thoughts, Charlie tugged her friend across the crosswalk.

Kyra sighed. There was no right way to say it, but even still, it felt wrong to say, “Levi died.”

Charlie’s world felt like it ended again.

“What?”

Charlie stopped in the middle of the street. Locked into her arms, Kyra was stuck there with her.

“She overdosed him. After everything his body went through, he couldn’t take it,” Kyra explained, looking at the crosswalk sign as she was eager to get out of the road.

“So, it was an accident?” Charlie meant to clarify, but it sounded more like a demand.

“Well…” Kyra swallowed, “We’re not sure.”

“You’re not sure?”

“She was close to the patient, and judging by the interviews we’ve conducted thus far… it’s possible that she did this to spare him, most likely with his permission. And that’s the result the admin office wants.”

“Why would they want that? That’s illegal in Massachusetts,” Charlie demanded, seemingly oblivious to the countdown on how much longer they had in this street.

“Charlie, let’s get out of the road,” Kyra implored.

“Just tell me.”

Kyra huffed, eyes scanning the cars waiting for the green light to run them over. Backed into a corner, she confessed, “Because, if she did, the hospital isn’t liable, and we can’t afford the lawsuit right now.”

Oh my God.

Finally, Charlie took a step, and Kyra immediately ushered them to the other side of the street. Only moments later, cars roared through the intersection, much to Kyra’s relief.

But Charlie was disgusted.

She was horrified. She hated that a death had turned into money so quickly. She hated that she hadn’t saved Esme and Levi. She hated that her experience with Mrs. Martinez had been repeated in another generation.

For the next block or so, Kyra and Charlie walked in silence.

Then Edenbrook came into view.

That place.

Full of death and destruction. Pain and misery. Mistakes and heartache.

An anxious building was suddenly clothed in danger.

She hated it. She hated the whole place and all it had done to those she cared about.

Kyra watched her carefully, hoping that she wouldn’t have to leave her friend in a bad state. Finally, she asked, “Should I not have told you?”

“No, you should have,” Charlie murmured, “Better you than someone like Declan Nash telling me it’s a tradition.”

Kyra squeezed Charlie’s arm, wishing she could absorb whatever terrible emotions she felt. She’d been through enough already.

“Do you think it was an accident?” Charlie bit her lip, unsure if she wanted the answer, “If only you got to decide, what would you do?”

“Me?” Kyra considered it, “I don’t know. I’ve only read a few interviews, and I hardly know her. But… looking at his file, I wouldn’t blame Esme if she did. With parents who wouldn’t allow him to give up, he didn’t have many other options, but… I don’t want her to get blamed for this for the sake of a hospital budget.”

Charlie appreciated Kyra’s fair consideration, but personally… Charlie felt sure of what Esme had done. And she couldn’t blame her, not when she saw Levi’s suffering. But it felt like a failure on Charlie’s part nonetheless. She should have been there to find other alternatives before it came to this.

They were close to Edenbrook now.

Soon, they’d say goodbye.

“Are you going to be okay?” Kyra inquired. She wouldn’t leave her friend like this, but she didn’t know what else to do. She couldn’t bring her back to the chaos in the administrative wing, and aside from Rafael, all of their other friends were currently working in Edenbrook, the source of the tragedy.

“I’ll be fine,” Charlie affirmed half-heartedly.

“Do you have any plans for the rest of the day?” Kyra asked casually. Or it was supposed to sound casual – because, in actuality, it definitely wasn’t. Kyra wanted to know that Charlie wasn’t going to mope about all day or go on a downward spiral after the news.

“Not particularly,” Charlie shrugged, “While I’m here, I think I’ll run up and see Ethan.”

“Your boyfriend?” Kyra teased, and Charlie shot her a glare. Kyra nudged her playfully, “You should tell everyone, you know.”

“I will… eventually.”

“Eventually? So, they’ll find out by getting a wedding invite?”

“I’ll tell them when it’s time,” Charlie insisted, a ghost of a smile creeping across her lips at the joke.

“Just make sure I’m there when you tell Bryce. I want to see his reaction. Promise me, okay?” Kyra demanded once they got to the front door.

“Okay,” Charlie agreed weakly, feeling the color drain from her face as she stepped inside.

“Alright…” Kyra sighed, hesitating to leave. She balanced on either foot as she tried to think of a reason to stay, but ultimately, she just gave Charlie a hug, “Call me later, okay?”

Charlie nodded her agreement.

Kyra wasn’t totally satisfied, but she walked back to the admin office anyway.

Leaving Charlie in Edenbrook.

This building. This horrible building.

Charlie started walking to Ethan’s office on autopilot, but the halls plagued her. Ghosts of patients lost, mistakes made, and heartaches received whispered to her. And then they screamed.

The panic built in her chest – mixing with her sense of regret and responsibility.

Everything here had been a devastating failure.

In her blind rage, she knew exactly what she needed to do.

Ethan felt something similar as he walked to his office.

He’d spent his lunch break with Naveen. Their scheduled lunch had been disrupted by a crisis with Dr. Ortega, and their resulting time together amounted to picking up food from the cafeteria and eating it in Naveen’s office between emergency meetings.

This lunch turned into what Ethan usually called Naveen’s “retirement talks.” Every year or so, Naveen would tire of the politics and stress associated with their profession. He would meet Ethan for drinks or dinner, and he would propose a retirement. Throughout the meal, Naveen would build a fantasy of retirement – one where he read, fished, and hosted dinner parties with frequency. Ethan played the role of reminding Naveen why he loved his job. At the end of all of these talks, Ethan’s side always won because, truthfully, Naveen was never looking to retire. After all, even when Naveen almost died, he couldn’t stay retired for even a week after his recovery.

But today was different.

Today, during the hurried meal, Naveen hadn’t built a fantasy. He reflected on the reality of their job and the pain it can produce. The death of Levi Coates and the accusations against Dr. Esme Ortega were proof enough that this was a difficult burden to bear. Naveen felt responsible. So did Ethan.

It was Ethan’s department, and she worked under Ethan – not that Ethan could say he’d given much effort to her education recently. He’d been so entangled in his own life that he hadn’t been much of an attending. Perhaps he could have taught her something to prevent this.

Then there was the day Charlie came back to work… He’d seen Ortega. She’d been up to something. If Ethan hadn’t been so focused on Charlie, he would have seen it. He could have done something.

Though he felt similarly, he lacked Charlie’s rage and depth of pain.

So, when he opened his office door and saw his beloved girlfriend standing there, he smiled. Because it felt like old times, if just for a minute. When they were so eager for time together that they’d meet here in secret…. His heart ached for the innocence of that time.

Then, he remembered she was still nervous in Edenbrook, and she was pacing the room anxiously. This couldn’t be a romantic visit.

Ethan closed the door behind him quickly and greeted her with confusion, “Charlotte?”

“You know about Esme,” Charlie skipped pleasantries.

In the comfort and safety of this office, the apprehension poured out of her. In front of him, she was going to lose it.

Ethan frowned.

He wished she hadn’t found out yet. It was the last thing she needed.

“So, you know too then?” Ethan clarified, turning the lock on his office door out of precaution.

Charlie didn’t answer. She just held her breath, sucking in air through her nose and holding it in her chest. She thought it would calm her. It didn’t.

“This is my fault,” she decided.

“You weren’t even here!” Ethan objected.

“But she’s my intern.”

“You were mine,” Ethan stepped towards Charlie, “And I never took responsibility for Mrs. Martinez’s treatment.”

“But you were there to teach me. You did what you could. I wasn’t there for Esme. I wasn’t even here at all!” Charlie retorted.

“What do you think you could have done?” Ethan asked, knowing she was expecting too much of herself.

“I knew something was wrong, Ethan. Esme was acting inappropriately. She asked me questions about ‘doing the right thing’ even when it’s not allowed. I should have told someone or at least told her more about what happened to me. All I did was give her a short speech and then leave,” Charlie huffed, “I failed her.”

Ethan felt strongly that she hadn’t. Or even if she had, she was justified given her traumatic near-death experience only a few weeks ago.

“You didn’t administer the dose. You’re not responsible.”

Charlie paused, her green eyes boring into his. He felt exposed as she seemed to read his rawest emotions with ease. And to prove it, she inquired, “You feel no responsibility then?”

Ethan shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t want to lie.

Charlie shook her head as if unsurprised, and she began to pace again.

The panic was rising, and tears prickled at her eyes.

“This fucking place,” Charlie scorned, “All I wanted to be was a doctor. I thought I would come here and learn from the best. I thought I’d leave tired and deeply in debt but satisfied with my decision. And at every turn, something horrible happens. Why am I even here? I came here to help people, but who has been helped? Levi? Mrs. Martinez? Bobby?”

“Charlie…” Ethan eyes softened, “You’ve helped a lot of people.”

“Not enough. Not enough for this…” Charlie felt like she was breaking.

She was cracking and splintering. She was giving up.

“Why am I even trying to be a doctor if I’m just getting people killed?”

“Charlotte,” Ethan didn’t expect to react so viscerally, but something about her accusation stung him deeply. He placed either hand on her shoulder and insisted, “You haven’t killed anyone.”

“I can’t do this,” she shook her head so quickly, so fervently that her snow-dampened curls flew, “I can’t come back here. I can’t come back to Edenbrook, where nothing goes right and everyone gets hurt. Ethan… I’m leaving medicine.”

He could have sworn the earth stopped turning.

“Charlotte,” Ethan began, prepared to give a speech on why she was wrong, but she cut him off.

“I’ve already made up my mind. I made it up before I even got here. I can’t take another tragedy in this hospital. I can’t keep going, Ethan. I’m literally building up my tolerance just to stand in this office! How am I supposed to practice again?”

“You haven’t given yourself enough time!” Ethan asserted.

“It’s been over a month. How much more time will it take, Ethan?”

“Naveen is willing to give you as much time as you need.”

“But when is enough time? Ethan, there isn’t enough time! I am broken. I lost the instinct. I can’t do it anymore,” she felt like she was begging him to understand, just as he was begging her to change her mind.

“You are not broken, no matter what. You haven’t even tested the instinct to know if it’s lost,” Ethan knew that pinpointing the holes in her argument would do little to sway her, but it felt like all he had.

“I can’t keep going like this, Ethan,” Charlie said so passionately that Ethan instantly knew she was right. His hand went to hers, and he squeezed it.

“I know…” he murmured.

For a second, she thought she’d won. But the racing panic and horror didn’t leave her mind…

“But you don’t have to quit to change this,” Ethan decided.

Charlie frowned, but having decided on his mission, Ethan ignored her. He went to his desk and collected the chart for the newest patient of the Diagnostics Team – a patient they hadn’t even seen yet.

He handed the file to her and told her, “Read it.”

“I’m not even on duty. I can’t read this,” Charlie dropped the chart back to his desk.

“You can, and you are. And read it quickly because you’re going with us to meet the patient.”

“I’m on leave.”

“I’m your supervisor, and if you’re going to quit, I’m taking you off leave first,” Ethan determined.

It was a risk.

He could either change her mind or make it much, much worse.

“You should grab your jacket. The patient is at a ski resort, and we’re leaving in half an hour,” Ethan announced authoritatively.

She could say no, of course. She was very good at calling him out on his bullshit, particularly when he claimed authority he didn’t have. But he didn’t think she would because she wanted to know just as much as he did.

“So, what? You don’t want to leave me alone when I’m upset, and you think you can entice me back into work with a mystery? Is that what you have planned?” Charlie accused Ethan.

“No,” Ethan stood firmly, “I’m bringing you because I know you’ll solve it, and you need a reminder of all the good you’ve done here.”

Charlie made a show of rolling her eyes. She hated that he dared to fight her on her own career decisions, particularly after everything she’d been through. But she still reached for the chart. Just as he suspected, she didn’t continue the fight. Instead, she gathered her coat and started reading about the patient.

She wanted to know if Ethan was right.

And honestly… part of her hoped he was.

Author’s Note: Thank you so much for continuing to support this series! I didn’t mean to take this last hiatus, but with finishing up my semester, graduating, saying goodbye to friends, and moving, I ended up needing more time than I originally imagined.

Please share your thoughts on this chapter - and Kyra finding out!

#Choices #open heart #ethan ramsey #ethan ramsey x mc #open heart 2 #pixelberry #dr. ethan ramsey #dr. ethan ramsey x mc #oh 2

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 4 years ago

Quote

The cover features Spider-Man, battered and beaten, laying on his face in grime while two unimaginative robots loom over him. This is as accurate a depiction as to the content within that could possibly exist... ...It's the third major franchise spin-off featuring the child of Peter and MJ within less than 24 years and it is clearly the worst and less inspired of them...To compare this comic to garbage or fecal matter is an insult to both, since both have their uses. This is nothing more than nepotistic hack-work of the highest order. Henry Abrams could perhaps be forgiven for being an inexperienced writer who is coasting on his one asset -- his famous father -- for work. But there is no such excuse for J.J. Abrams, who is being heralded as the savior of STAR WARS and some sort of genius for Lost or Alias. I imagine he is acting as a ghost writer at best, allowing his son to "earn his bones" with this, but surely he should be doing a better job of editing it. Surely as the co-producer of "THE SUBURBANS," he has more of a sense of quality control, right? Right!?...This is an office which considers doing a full monthly series with genuine legends like Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz to be too expensive, yet they likely threw the moon at a "Hollywood guy" and his offspring for little more than having their names on some product to sell. Over a decade's worth of time, energy, and money was devoted to producing this. If the goal was to produce a Spider-Man story that may make fans realize that Dan Slott or Terry Kavanagh were hardly the worst scribes seen on the franchise, then it has accomplished its mission...This story is a failure for more than one reason. Perhaps the most primary is its failure to present established characters as themselves while catering to the most predictable of action films. Peter Parker acts nothing like himself, and is devoid of any sense of responsibility or genuineness. He's a cipher for the standard inattentive or terrible father for trendy films of the 80's and 90's -- which was when J.J. earned his bones. Ben Parker is a wasteland of anxious teenage tropes who needs to be led around by other people, especially women. His path to the legacy of Spider-Man is absurd and more to do with his vandalizing teenage girlfriend than anything in his own heart and soul. It gave MJ a waste of a death and has created a shell of an antagonist as an obligatory menace...If anything, this issue ups the ante in terms of awfulness due to the addition of more Avengers lore. The other two most famous tales about Spidey's children -- Spider-Girl and Renew Your Vows -- had some involvement from other heroes and franchises, but remained firmly rooted in Spider-Man's world. This mini series barely goes halfway before it establishes that the big threat is essentially a disgruntled Iron Man villain looking for another target. Even a rambling drunk version of Tony Stark, which is itself disgusting for fans who like his symbolism revolving around recovery, is able to provide vital exposition and aid that Ben can't or won't figure on his own. It's EDITH all over again: Even Drunk I'm The Hero...The story doesn't even make sense on a narrative level. If Cadaverous is so interested in Parker DNA to the point that he sics the cyborg-zombie Avengers at Ben even after claiming his father, why even allow him to escape after he's bombed the house? All that did was allow Ben time to alert the only other surviving Avenger and set up his own defeat. Cadaverous is mad as a hatter, but that's still a lame justification, and one lame writers have used to explain poor antagonist decisions forever. How can Tony Stark's bunker be that secret when it is beneath statues which are taller than buildings? And how can Ben hate Peter for abandoning him while he's just abandoned May Parker to a bombed out home?... There is no soul in this Spider-Man, just a cynical regurgitation of every weak Hollywood cliche an overrated scion and his son believe is good enough to charge for... ...It isn't, and shouldn't be. A better use for this would be to donate it to third world countries to be used as fuel for heat or to be recycled into vital paper projects like toiletries. It is easily one of the worst comic books of 2019, and if someone put it on their decade list of worst comics, I wouldn't argue the point. Comic books like this are why many people either stop reading them, or paying for them. The only thing amazing, sensational, or spectacular about it is its very gall.

Alex Widen on Abramazing Spider-Man #3

#j. j. abrams #Abramazing Spider-Man #henry abrams #Spider-Man #ben Parker #Benny Parker #Peter Parker #Disney #Marvel

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axiumin · 5 years ago

Text

Lines | Mark x Reader

This is the second fic I’ve written inspired by the incredible moodboards sent to me by the lovely DirectorAnon💕. I’ve been up in my feels about this story for the past month, so I’m absolutely thrilled that I was able to finally finish it. I hope you all enjoy!

He spoke about ambitions, expectations, setbacks. He spoke of expression, and you could hear the longing in his voice. It struck a chord with you, reverberated in your mind until it drowned out the near-constant hum of worry that filled your ears so often these days.

“This is for my dream,” he said. “This is for my love.”

Pairing: Mark x Reader

Genre: Drama, AU

Words: 10.2k

Tap, tap, tap.

The plastic cap of your pen beat an unsteady rhythm against your notebook. The guy sitting beside you shot you a nasty look, but you barely registered it, staring intently as you were at your professor. You watched her lips move, but you couldn’t hear her lecture over the sound of your pulse pounding in your ears.

There had been good days and bad days since you’d come back. Today was a bad day.

As soon as the lecture ended, you swept your blank notebook into your bag and pushed through the throng of students until you emerged into the gloomy afternoon. The cool air was just shy of biting as you let your legs carry you from the main campus, focused on little else but the churning urge to get away.

Strange, you mused, how you had been so eager to return to school only for you to want nothing more than to escape once you got there.

You knew recovery was never going to be a straight line. Your therapist had told you, your family had told you, and yet you still couldn’t help but feel frustrated when anxiety coiled in your chest and clouded your thoughts. It felt like you were just moving backwards.

What you needed was a quiet place to sit and let your thoughts unravel, someplace other than your too-small apartment where the air grew far too stuffy with unspoken words and the tentative tiptoeing of your roommate who very much seemed to fear that any little thing would set you off.

Not that you’d given her reason to think otherwise, you thought wryly. Not while there were still patches of wallpaper that bore the scars of your breakdown.

You’d taken to finding other places to hide out, to provide breathing room for both you and your roommate. Often, you found yourself wandering farther away from campus, winding down side streets and shuffling past derelict shopping centers until you found some unassuming hole in the wall in which to take shelter for the afternoon.

Today, you found yourself drawn to a large wooden door, propped open just enough to allow the scent of fresh-brewed coffee and the dulcet tones of some old-timey crooner escape into the street. The sign above the door read Vinyl Cafe, a name that proved to be rather on the nose when you stepped inside.

The place was the kind of retro that benefited from the hipster movement. Long tables laden with boxes of old vinyl records were pushed against the wall along the far side of the room, and mismatched furniture provided cozy nooks for lounging and reading. It would almost be trendy if the couches weren’t just a little bit too shabby, if the tarnish of the metal fixtures wasn’t just a little bit too real to be an intentional decor choice. Yet the smell of coffee was even stronger and more welcoming once you were inside, so you decided that this would be as good a place as any to spend your day.

The barista was a cheerful fellow with a beanie and a septum ring, and you mentally checked off another stereotype as you gratefully accepted your pour over coffee from him and retreated to the corner of the room.

You chose a large, battered armchair that sank beneath you with the groan of old leather. A large steamer trunk served as the coffee table, and you delicately set your drink down and fished your notebook from your bag. It flipped open to the blank page you’d left off on, and you eyed it with no small amount of disdain.

See, writing was already a hard enough thing on its own. But trying to force yourself to write when you could barely get your own headspace in order? The many other pages of this notebook, riddled with scribbles and countless lines written and struck through, proved how successful you’d been.

You sighed and uncapped your pen. A sip of coffee helped bolster you as you settled in for what you knew was going to be a long wait for inspiration to come. You stared intently at the notebook, eyes gradually losing focus until the blank page almost seemed to change shape under a beam of afternoon sunlight that traveled slowly across the table. As you stared at nothing, you listened.

Slowly, the Vinyl Cafe came to life around you, filling with pleasant chatter, the clink of coffee mugs, and the scrape of furniture against the floor. After some time, you heard the distinct sound of microphone feedback. The conversation hushed, and someone exhaled lightly into the mic.

Then, you heard him. It was almost more spoken word than rap, but you decided that the distinction really didn’t matter, for as he performed, you still felt every syllable hit you. He spoke about ambitions, expectations, setbacks. He spoke of expression, and you could hear the longing in his voice. It struck a chord with you, reverberated in your mind until it drowned out the near-constant hum of worry that filled your ears so often these days.

“This is for my dream,” he said. “This is for my love.”

The voice rang out into the room with finality, and you heard the crackle of the mic as he replaced it on the stand. You came back to your senses to the sound of scattered applause, and your vision suddenly focused on the still-blank page in front of you. You looked up in time to see a man in a baseball cap and hoodie nod in thanks and shuffle off the makeshift stage. You took a sip of your cold coffee and picked up your pen with a sigh. You started writing.

It was late when you pushed your apartment door open. The living room was dark, but you saw a sliver of light spilling from underneath your roommate’s closed door. You hesitated in the hallway, considering whether or not you should knock on her door. After a moment, you simply turned away.

Once your door was closed securely behind you, you made your way to your desk and pulled your notebook from your backpack. Where there was once a pristine page, there were now countless scribbles and strike-throughs. But at the bottom of the page, there was a single sentence completely untouched.

I want to be free.

You scrutinized it, waiting for the familiar tug of anxiety and tangled thread of thoughts. It didn’t come.

You considered that progress.

“I suggest that you consider taking some summer courses in order to make up for your missing time. Tuition is charged per unit rather than for the entire summer session, but it would still be less expensive than adding an additional fall semester. Though that is still a perfectly valid option if you feel you’re not ready to accelerate your coursework just yet.”

You were shaking your head before she could even finish the sentence.

“No, the summer sessions are fine. I just want to graduate on time,” you said firmly.

She frowned and carefully set down her pen before leaning forward over her desk. She looked at you with compassion, and you knew what she was going to say even before she said it.

“There’s no harm in taking more time if you need it. I’m sure you must feel like you need to catch up, but I want to caution you against overworking yourself just because you feel like you need to meet a certain deadline.”

A muscle in your jaw twitched, and you forced yourself to unclench your teeth.

“I don’t need the extra time,” you said, careful to keep your voice even.

She held your gaze for a moment longer before sighing and looking down at your paperwork.

“Alright. Then let’s talk about your upper division requirements.”

You had expected your meeting with your academic advisor to be difficult, but you were still surprised by how wrung out you were when you staggered out of her office and into the tepid spring afternoon. You felt shaky and off-center, and you leaned against the wall of the administration building as you pieced together your composure.

Around you, the campus was bustling. Students chatted amongst themselves as they traveled to and from lectures or pretended to study under the shade of the building’s awning, and they looked so damn normal. They looked exactly like college students should, and you felt more than ever as if you were some imposter hiding amongst them and pretending you fit in.

You wanted to fit in, yearned to be normal instead of feeling plagued by the anxiety that lived deep beneath your ribs and tried to creep up your throat every time you thought you were doing okay.

You wanted more than anything to feel like you belonged here, but there was still that part of you that screamed at you to find a safe place to hide while you healed.

I’ve already begun to heal, you wanted to tell yourself. That was why you were even able to come back here in the first place. You just needed to push through and prove that you were just as capable as anyone else, and then your healing would be complete.

You would find a home in the campus, you resolved. But your resolve was shaky; you had to admit that you needed a break after the conversation you had with your advisor. So, you turned away from the other students and made your way down the now-familiar path that led away from the campus.

The intersections and street names had become quite familiar by now, and you were content to let your feet lead you to your destination. You just hadn’t expected that destination to be the Vinyl Cafe.

It was rare for you to return to any place you’d previously taken shelter in, but you thought back to the single line of text you’d managed to successfully write, and you couldn’t help but hope that something about this cafe would help.

You allowed yourself just a moment’s hesitation before you pushed the heavy door open and stepped inside. The barista called out a cheery welcome, and you were relieved to see that it was a different barista from yesterday— though, you noted idly, she also had a beanie and septum ring. You wondered if that was just a coincidence.

This time, you ordered an herbal tea (“It’s decaf, and it helps when things feel like they’re a bit too much,” the barista said, knowingly. You wondered if you looked as rough as you felt.) and settled into the same worn leather armchair from last time. It still creaked terribly as you sat down, but there was something strangely welcoming about the way the cushion sank underneath you, almost seeming to pull you in.

Your notebook sat open in front of you, a fresh page ready and waiting for the first stroke of your pen. You thought about the words you wrote before, about freedom and what it meant to you. You thought about the words you could say to define the nature of your bonds and your struggle for freedom, but they rang hollow in your head even before you could try writing them down.

You touched the tip of your pen against the paper, as if expecting reflex to kick in and words to come out. Instead, there was nothing. Then, after a long moment, your hand moved and the pen glided across the page, looping aimlessly. You stared at the paper as it slowly filled with ink loops, sometimes forming into small doodles and sometimes just spanning amorphously across the page.

It was somehow alien for you to put pen to paper without the intention of forcing your thoughts into words. You thought perhaps this strange feeling was a taste of the freedom you desired, but then you had to wonder if you even knew what freedom was in the first place.

Almost as abruptly as your looping doodles started, they stopped, your hand coming to a halt in the middle of the page. You sighed and placed the cap on your pen. You reached for your half-forgotten tea and took a sip. Strange, it really did seem to soothe you.

As you settled back into the cushions of the chair, mug clutched in your hands, you took a moment to observe your surroundings. The cafe had filled in a bit since you’d gotten there, and you spied clusters of people sitting together, talking, laughing. The cafe door opened and in walked the man with the hoodie. He didn’t join any of the groups of people, just made his way to the makeshift stage so he could start setting up for what you realized must be another open mic night.

You watched idly as he pulled a laptop out of his bag and started fiddling with the bulky speakers on either side of the stage. More rap than spoken word tonight, you assumed. It didn’t take long for him to finish whatever he was doing and turn towards the mic stand. He took the mic in hand, and you winced slightly as you heard the familiar sound of feedback noise.

The man cleared his throat and hit a button on his laptop. A moment later, the small room filled with a heavy bassline. You stared, eyes unblinkingly focused on him even as your mind chased his syllables through the story he told.

Emotion painted his voice, and his lips twisted into an impassioned grimace as he forced out syllables about disappointment and hurt and the terrible fear of waiting and hoping that healing will come. It was a story so familiar you ached with it. You noticed that he pulled his baseball cap further down his face, hiding his eyes, and you wondered if it was hard to face his demons like this or if it was just therapeutic. Perhaps both.

The song ended without flourish, and the modest crowd burst into applause. You watched, unmoving, as the rapper nodded his thanks and quickly packed up his belongings.

Your eyes followed him as he walked towards the door, and his eyes met yours for just a moment as he passed you. You thought that you should say something, struck by the wild urge tell him that you understood him, perhaps more so than you ever expected to understand anyone else. But the moment passed. He looked away and stepped out into the evening, and you were left alone in a room full of strangers.

You sighed and finished your tea. You took the empty mug to the bussing station near the counter, and the barista caught your eye and smiled kindly.

“Did the tea help?” she asked.

“It did,” you answered, and you were surprised to realize it was the truth.

That night, you stared at your reflection in the bathroom mirror. You looked at the bags under your eyes, the dull cast to your skin, the downturn of your lips. You looked into your eyes and whispered, “I want to heal.” Your reflection stared back at you, wide-eyed and vulnerable, and you thought you understood why the rapper hid his face. It’s easier that way.

The next time you found yourself at the cafe, it was earlier in the day. You stumbled out of your lecture, head full of thoughts that collapsed in on themselves and jumbled over one another until they became a dull roar of white noise in your head. This time, when your feet carried you to the worn wooden door of the Vinyl Cafe, you weren’t surprised. Somehow, it had begun to feel a bit like a strange sort of sanctuary— something you sorely needed.

You sat now on a rough suede loveseat, staring into space and gnawing on the cap of your pen. Your notebook rested on your lap, perilously blank.

The couch cushion beside you sank under someone’s weight, and you looked up to see the rapper from before. When he peeked at you from under the bill of his hat and offered a small smile, you felt your heart skip a beat. It was embarrassing to admit even to yourself, but now that you could actually see his face, you couldn’t help but notice how handsome he was.

“This is for you,” he said, resting a steaming mug on the table in front of you. You looked at it in surprise.

“I didn’t order that,” you said.

He shrugged. “She said you looked like you needed it.” He nodded towards the counter and you turned to see the barista from before. She was wiping down the counter and studiously avoiding your gaze. You turned back to him, and he shrugged again.

“Don’t worry about it. They’re just like that around here. Nice. A little bit nosy.” He smiled, somewhere between fond and wry. You felt your heart flutter again and cleared your throat.

“I see,” you said, hoping your face didn’t look as flushed as you were beginning to feel. You picked up the mug and took a sip. It was the same tea from before, perfectly hot and strangely soothing. You felt the tension in your shoulders let up a bit and turned back to him, bolstered. “And what about you? Nice? A little bit nosy?”

He chuckled. “I guess that’s about right. Name’s Mark.” Mark offered his hand. You accepted it and introduced yourself in return.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Mark said. “I’ve seen you around lately, but you don’t really seem like the other people who come around for open mic nights. What’s your story?”

It was the first time someone asked for your story and you didn’t feel an immediate stab of defensiveness. You thought it might be because you’d already heard about his hurt, had seen the pain he carried with him. It felt a bit like your pain. Like attracts like, you supposed. In more ways than one, you noted wryly, thinking about the way your eyes tripped over the pleasant quirk of his mouth.

“It’s a bit of a messed up story,” you warned, tone light.

Mark seemed unfazed. “You’ve heard me perform, right?” You nodded. “Then I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

You laughed, for the first time in what felt like forever. You had the feeling that you and Mark were going to get along quite well.

It became habit for you to visit the Vinyl Cafe after your day’s lectures were through. Over the weeks, you carved out a space for yourself there. You began to mentally refer to the old leather armchair as your chair, and you got to see the different baristas who cycled through the afternoon shift.

Usually, the barista on duty was Jazzmyne. She was the second barista you’d met, the one with the proclivity for tutting and handing you a cup of something steaming as soon as you walked in after a rough day. She was generally a bubbly and happy sort, and you grew accustomed to walking through the door to her loud, cheerful greeting. It became an expected part of any days spent at the Vinyl Cafe, and when you walked in after lecture one day to find a fresh cup of tea already waiting for you on the bar, you realized with a start that she had grown quite accustomed to your presence as well.

Most afternoons found you sitting in your armchair, working through assignments, scribbling down errant thoughts, or simply dozing in the afternoon sunshine. On the days you weren’t in the armchair, you were on the suede loveseat with Mark.

Mark, you’d found, frequented the place almost as much as you did. The obvious draw was the open mic, in which he performed as a regular. On those nights, Mark never seemed to like to talk much. His mouth would be pressed into a tight, thoughtful line until he performed, and it would twist right into a small, wry smile as soon as he finished. You never pushed him for conversation those nights; it was clear that he had much on his mind.

To be honest, you always felt preoccupied on those nights, too. There was something about the way Mark rapped. He was talented— of that you had no doubt. But there was something else, the way he spoke of dreams and ambition and the struggle to find himself through it all that seemed to draw you in. His words spoke to you personally, drew out the echoing hurt and hope in you until your fingers itched with the need to write.

You loved the nights when Mark rapped because those were the nights when you managed to sort through the jumble of thoughts and find words that had actual meaning. They were often fragments— short, isolated phrases that didn’t piece well together— but each one was an honest reflection of yourself.

(Perhaps the fact that they seemed so fragmented wasn’t a reflection on the words you wrote so much as your state of mind. Or perhaps it would be one of those things where distance and time clue you in to the bigger picture. You figured only time would tell.)

But sometimes, Mark went to the Vinyl Cafe just to relax. He was comfortable with the staff and melded seamlessly into the room, just as natural and expected as the vinyls themselves. Though perhaps you were just projecting; in your mind, the Vinyl Cafe and Mark were inextricably bound together.

You loved the nights when Mark rapped, but, almost selfishly, you loved the nights when he didn’t even more. Those nights talking and laughing and dreaming with Mark left you feeling light and comfortable in your own skin.

It was one of those nights that the two of you you sat close together on the suede loveseat and talked until the evening crowd thinned out and it was just the two of you and Jazzmyne, who hummed a sweet tune as she cleaned out the espresso machine.

Both you and Mark had notebooks open in front of you, pretending to write even when you were too busy doing everything from sharing your dreams to arguing the finer points of suping up convenience store food to really pass as being productive. A small voice in the back of your head chided you, reminding you that you had work to do, potential to live up to. But it was hard to worry when Mark’s nose scrunched up just like that when you made him laugh.

“You know,” he said, shoulders shaking with residual laughter, “I don’t know exactly how or why you ended up in this place, but I’m glad you did.”

You bit your lip to try to stifle your smile and looked down at the corner of your notebook, which was methodically being picked apart by your fidgety fingers. “Well, you know,” you said, shrugging. “You wander around town enough, you’re bound to find a place to finally settle on, right?”

Mark considered this. “You come here from the university, right? That’s kind of far to wander, don’t you think?”

You shrugged again. “Maybe. But I guess I needed to be far away from it. I can’t think very well when I’m there. My thoughts get cloudy and I just end up stressing myself out more than anything. Here, though? It’s an escape.”

“I know how you feel,” he said. “Life like that can get suffocating. It’s hard to believe that so many people can survive such a prescribed lifestyle. A cookie-cutter education to prepare yourself for a cookie-cutter job so you can afford a cookie-cutter house in a cul-de-sac.”

You sighed and looked down at the notebook half-forgotten on the table in front of you. You eyed the few lines of text you’d scribbled and crossed out. You wondered if you could agree with Mark this time. Or, more precisely, you wondered what it would mean for you if you did agree.

Without really meaning, your eyes drifted over to Mark’s notebook. The page was almost entirely filled with words and annotations. He had already filled out several other pages like this through the course of the afternoon, and you couldn’t help but sigh wistfully.

“How do you do it?” you asked. Mark hummed in question and you nodded at his notebook. “How do you just write so much?”

Mark sighed and flipped back to the first page of his notebook. You saw flashes of phrases that had appeared in some of his songs, and you wondered what else you might find in there if he let you look. You weren’t sure you had the courage to ask.

“Honestly, most of it isn’t good,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. You tore your eyes from the notebook and looked at him. He smiled back, somewhat sheepish. “But that’s the thing— if I keep writing enough, eventually I’ll find the words for exactly what I want to say. That’s what ends up making the final cut to any songs I write. All the rest of this?” He gestured at the page. “It’s just practice, really.”

You chewed on your lip thoughtfully, mulling over his words. You looked down at your notebook and thought about the way you agonized over each word before you put it to paper. The quality was decent enough, but you still weren’t entirely satisfied with your work.

Mark followed your gaze. “Do you ever think your standards are too high for yourself?”

Surprised, you jerked your head up to look at him. “What?”

“I just mean, you put this immense pressure on yourself to write at your very best, even when you’re not feeling your very best. That can’t be easy, can it?”

“No,” you said slowly. You thought about how you were already more than halfway through the semester with nothing but half-decent grades and a growing dread to show for it. You thought about how you imagined what it would be like when you started taking classes again. You imagined a glorious return, aided by the catharsis of letting your tangled thoughts unravel onto paper. You imagined that writing would heal you, and you would prove that you were resilient and belonged in a community of scholars.

But it had been weeks, months, and you had little more to show for your efforts than a few fragmented sentences and pages upon pages of scribbles.

“No, it’s not easy.”

Mark opened his mouth to speak, but Jazzmyne spoke first.

“Hey, guys?”

You looked up and realized with a start that the cafe had been sorted for the night and Jazzmyne was standing next to the door with an apologetic smile. “I love you guys and you’re always welcome here, but it’s kind of late as hell and it’s time to go home.”

Smiling sheepishly, you quickly gathered your belongings and headed for the exit. Jazzmyne ushered you out with some gentle tutting and locked the door behind you.

“Sorry, Jazz,” Mark said. She waved a dismissive hand.

“No harm done. Don’t stay up too late, you two.” With a wink, she bid a quick goodnight and disappeared into the adjacent parking lot, leaving you and Mark on the sidewalk in front of the cafe.

“I didn’t even realize it had gotten so late,” you murmured, blinking at the time. “Time really flies by in there.” With you, you almost added, but you bit your tongue against it.

Mark hummed thoughtfully. “If you’d like, we could always go back to my apartment. It’s close by, and there’s no closing time there,” he offered.

You bit your lip and shifted your weight from foot to foot, hoping that your pleased blush wouldn’t be too obvious in the dark. “I’d like that, but I have a lecture in the morning, so…” you trailed off, smiling apologetically.

Mark held up his hands. “No need to explain. But if you want, maybe you could come over after your classes are done tomorrow?”

You smiled. “I’d like that.”

“Good,” he said. “I’d like that, too.”

For a moment, the two of you just stood there, smiling at each other. The sound of a passing car shook you out of your reverie, and you sighed. “I should get going.”

Mark nodded. “No, yeah, definitely. Can I call you a lyft, or...?”

You shook your head. “Nah, I got it,” you said, already pulling out your phone.

Mark waited on the sidewalk with you until your ride pulled up to the curb and held the door open as you got settled in.

“Hey,” he said, just as you were ready to go. “I’m looking forward to tomorrow. Text me when you get home.”

The little smile he gave you sent your heart racing doubletime, and you couldn’t help but think about it the entire ride home.

Mark’s apartment was about the furthest thing from a cookie-cutter house in a cul-de-sac that you could imagine. After last night’s conversation, you wondered if it was on purpose.

The building wasn’t ragged, but it was the kind of aged that gentrification itched to get its fingers on. The stairs were unexpectedly solid beneath your feet as you climbed up to the third floor, but you could tell even in just the hallway that the walls didn’t do much to muffle sound between units.

Your stomach fluttered pleasantly with nerves as you counted the numbers on the doors until you reached Mark’s. You took a bolstering breath and knocked firmly. To your surprise, rather than Mark, an unfamiliar man answered. He looked to be about your age, and you reckoned he had a handsome and disarmingly sweet face underneath the dark purple bruises that mottled his skin. He grinned when he saw you.

“You must be Mark’s friend, right?” There was a strange emphasis on the word that left you with the distinct impression that he didn’t think you were just friends. Before you could even begin to respond, he opened the door wider. “Come on in, he’s just in his room.”

Mark must have heard you knock since he was already walking into the living room by the time you finished removing your shoes.

“Hey,” he said, smiling. “I’m glad you made it.” He surprised you by greeting you with a quick hug. It was done and over with before you could properly react, but you felt your cheeks burn and hoped your blush wasn’t too obvious.

To your relief, Mark was too busy looking at Jackson with his eyebrows raised. You weren’t sure of the exact nature of the silent exchange between them, but Jackson was smiling, seemingly quite pleased with himself. You weren’t sure if you were imagining the way Mark’s ears seemed a bit red at the tips.

“Come on,” Mark said, shaking his head fondly. “Let’s go sit down.”

The small living room was nearly buried under cardboard boxes, so the three of you settled in at the cramped kitchen table. You learned that the man was Mark’s roommate, Jackson, and despite the bruises, you got the distinct feeling that he was the kind of guy who had a spark bright enough to shine through the darkness in his life.

You realized your eyes lingered a bit too long on the swollen bruises on his jaw when he flashed you a toothy grin and chirped, “If you think I look bad, you should see the other guy.” The smile tightened and didn’t quite reach his eyes, and you thought to yourself that you’d really rather not see the other guy after all.

Mark rolled his eyes and lightly cuffed Jackson on the back of his head. Jackson dropped the shark-like smile and sank into a pout.

“Why do you always have to play the tough guy?” Mark admonished, sounding exasperated enough that you guessed this was an old quarrel. He turned to you and smiled apologetically. “Don’t worry about him. He’s a boxer, and he always gets a bit dramatic when he wins a fight.”

You eyed Jackson dubiously, but he was still pouting at Mark and waiting for some sort of amends. They came a moment later when Mark sighed and conceded, “It was a pretty good fight, though.” Jackson preened.

The conversation flowed easily for some time, and the minutes blurred together until Jackson shrugged on his jacket and left with a wink and a promise to bring home another win, just for you. The door closed behind him with a reverberating thunk, and for a long moment, that was the only sound in the apartment.

You turned to look at Mark, only to find him staring back at you with an unreadable expression, lips quirked up in a half-smile. You blushed under the unexpected scrutiny and looked away, casting about for something to say. Your eyes settled on the front door, and you thought of Jackson.

“He seems like a nice guy.”

Mark smiled. “He really is. One of the best people I’ve ever met.”

You looked up at him in surprise. “That’s high praise,” you said.

“It’s well-deserved.” Mark shrugged and averted his eyes, suddenly looking bashful. “You’re one of the best people I’ve ever met, too.”

The heat returned to your cheeks, and your stomach fluttered pleasantly with nerves. “You haven’t known me that long,” you said, voice soft.

He shrugged again but looked back at you. “I don’t have to,” he said simply. “Sometimes you just know.”

For a moment, the two of you said nothing, just looked at each other. The air was filled with a strange, sweet tension, and you wondered if maybe you could lean just a bit closer, let the tension break.

But right as you had that thought, Mark let out a quiet breath and sat back a bit. He cleared his throat. “Come on,” he said. He rose to his feet and half-turned away. “Let me show you the best part of the apartment.”

As you followed him, you noticed that the tips of his ears were flushed red. You smiled to yourself.

He took you out to a rickety fire escape overlooking at the alley below. It wasn’t exactly a scenic view, but you weren’t too far from the gap between buildings, through which you could see a sliver of the evening sky. It was a deep, murky purple, both starless and cloudless. But the city lights were bright, and you found it hard to look away from that little sliver of artificial starlight.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Mark asked. He leaned his forearms against the cool metal railing and lifted his face as if basking in the light breeze. “I come out here when I need to think. Or not to think, sometimes.”

You leaned against the railing beside him, not quite touching, but close enough to feel the warmth of his arm beside yours. You copied him, closing your eyes, tilting your face up, and letting the breeze brush over your skin and tug gently at your hair.

This wasn’t the kind of place to boast a perfectly manicured lawn and white-picket fence, showcasing perfection on the outside to hide the artifice on the inside. It wasn’t anything like proud brick buildings boasting the names of wealthy alumni and promising the makings for a bright future while forcing its students into anxiety and debt. You felt at peace out here.

“I think I can see the appeal,” you said at length, opening your eyes to look at him.

For the second time that evening, you caught him looking at you. This time, there was something softer, more open about his face. It was dark out, but his eyes were bright, reflecting the city lights.

You felt that tension again, but it was gentle this time, more coaxing than anything. This time, you let it guide you to take his hand in yours. He didn’t seem surprised, only smiled at you, soft and sweet. You wondered if he felt the tension, too. You wondered if he would have taken your hand if you hadn’t done it first. Perhaps it was inevitable.

“You know,” you said, feeling your heart thrum against your ribcage, “you’re one of the best people I’ve ever met, too.”

Marks smile bloomed into something vibrant and lovely.

You felt the metal grate beneath your feet, the cool evening breeze whispering against your skin, and the warmth of Mark standing close to you, and you felt somehow grounded in the moment. You took a deep breath and released it slowly, and your fingers didn’t once itch for a pen in their grasp. You squeezed Mark’s hand, and he squeezed back, firm and reassuring.

When the night air got too chilly, you retreated back inside. The living room was still quite buried under a stack of cardboard boxes (“Jackson’s,” Mark explained with a sigh. “He’s been fighting with his ex-roommate for months to get his stuff back from his old apartment. The guy finally gave in, but Jackson hasn’t had the chance to unpack it yet.”), so the two of you wound up in Mark’s bedroom. Mark sat at his desk while you perched on the edge of his bed, taking in the rows of vinyl records carefully arranged on his wall.

“I guess there’s a reason why you keep ending up in that cafe,” you mused aloud. Mark followed your gaze and cracked a smile.

“One reason, among others,” he said lightly.

He leaned back in his desk chair and watched you, entirely at ease as you stood up and walked over to his dresser, drawn to the photos arranged on top. You saw some that looked recent: Mark and Jackson, eyes crinkled and heads tossed back in clear laughter; Mark and a woman who bore a striking resemblance to him, just around the eyes, just when they smile; Mark standing on a stage and holding a microphone, mouth open mid-syllable, hat pulled down to cover his face. There were older ones, too, and your eyes tripped over a framed photo of a young Mark beaming and holding up a certificate.

“What’s this one?” you asked, pointing at it.

“I entered a poetry competition during my freshman year of high school. Got first place.” He said it without any hint of a boast, and you looked at him, surprised. He looked steadily back at you, mouth pressed in a tight line so unlike the grinning boy in the picture.

“Isn’t that a good thing?” you asked, puzzled.

Mark shrugged. “I suppose so. It was a good thing back then, in any case.”

You frowned. “What about now?”

He shrugged again. “Now, it’s just another reminder for my parents of the man I didn’t become.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“What do you mean?” you asked at length, voice gentle.

He sighed and averted his gaze. “I was a promising kid. Bright, good at writing. My parents had high hopes for me, wanted me to get into a good college and do them proud.

“I managed to get into a good enough college, and I even got good grades the first semester. But there was something about it that just felt wrong, you know? I just felt like I was going through these motions, jumping through all these hoops— and for what? Where was that going to get me?”

You slowly eased yourself to sit at the edge of Mark’s bed, your eyes never leaving his face and your lungs barely expanding enough to let air in.

“I decided to drop out after my first year,” Mark continued. “My parents were disappointed, but honestly, I didn’t think I could’ve continued to go through it if I tried. Besides, I don’t think there’s anything a college education could have given me. A piece of paper telling me I’m good at English?” He shook his head. “It just felt so weird to me to have someone sit there and tell me how I should write and what I should write about when I’ve been writing my whole life. No one could ever tell me how I should feel or express myself. And you know what? I don’t regret a thing.”

He finished his piece, and silence reigned as you mulled over his words and tried to understand his perspective. It seemed reasonable enough, but when you tried to think about it— really think about it— it just didn’t work. You couldn’t even imagine trying to live your life without education. It had defined you for as long as you could remember. It was the constant in your life, the goal you needed to accomplish, the avenue to recovering and growing into the best version of yourself. You kept thinking about the boy in the photo, holding up his poetry award and beaming.

“Don’t you ever think about going back?” you asked, voice sounding small and alien to your own ears. “I just— you had so much potential.” Your mind was reeling.

Mark looked at you then, and it felt as if he saw you— the scribbles on your mind, the underscore of desperation that made your fingers itch with the urge to write and write until something finally stuck. Mark looked at you, and you understood why he pulled his hat down to cover his eyes when he performed. For someone to see you— truly see you— was the most vulnerable you could be.

“I still have potential,” Mark said, simple and quiet. “And so do you.”

Tap, tap, tap.

The plastic cap of your pen beat a steady rhythm against your notebook. You stared intently at the page until your eyes grew unfocused and the lines of text blurred together. Gone was the roar of white noise that clouded your mind. You sat, anchored to the cold, unyielding plastic of the chair, mind filled with thoughts of Mark. You mulled over his words, over the earnest line of his mouth and the sincerity in his eyes as he spoke to you. ‘And so do you.’

You couldn’t remember the last time you actually thought about your potential. For so long, all you could think about was getting better and proving yourself, but now that you really thought about it, you didn’t know what it was that you were trying to prove. Was it that you had recovered and were ready to move on? If so, who were you trying to prove it to?

Looking around, you realized that you were all but invisible in this room, in the entire campus. There weren’t countless eyes staring at you, waiting to watch you crumble apart. You thought about your family, who just wanted the best for you; you thought about your therapist, who looked at you with kind eyes and told you to pace yourself; you thought about your roommate, who tiptoed around you because you spent so much time and energy avoiding her.

You thought about Mark.

‘And so do you.’

‘You put this immense pressure on yourself.’

You thought about yourself.

‘I want to be free.’

Free from what? Before, you thought you weren’t sure what freedom was. But now, you were beginning to suspect that your bonds were self-inflicted. There was no viable reason for you to gauge your recovery just based on the ability to fulfill your fantasy of blossoming into the perfect student.

‘I want to heal.’

You were never going to heal if you continued to agonize over things beyond your control. You constantly made yourself sick from your imagined shortcomings. So long as you continued to push yourself until you felt a constant need to escape, you would never heal.

Your pen clattered noisily against your desk when your fingers relaxed. You paid no mind to the dirty look from the guy sitting next to you. You just calmly picked up your notebook and bag and walked right out the door in the middle of the lecture. You didn’t look back.

It was a short walk to your apartment. You walked in to find your roommate eating a bowl of cereal on the couch and looking at you with raised eyebrows.

“I’m going to be in my room,” you said. They were the first words you’d spoken to her in weeks.

She nodded mutely, and you walked right down the hall and closed your bedroom door behind you.

You sank down into your desk chair and opened your notebook to a blank page. With a deep breath, you forced away your anxious thoughts of perfection and recovery and simply set your pen to paper. For the first time in months, you gave yourself the freedom to just write.

It had been weeks since you’d last gone to the Vinyl Cafe. Mark had texted you the day after you went to his apartment— and again when you didn’t reply to his first text. You assured him that everything was fine, and he seemed to accept that, but you still couldn’t help but feel nervous as you pushed the cafe door open for the first time in what felt like ages.

You were welcomed by an immediate rush of warm, coffee-scented air. Nat King Cole crooned sweetly from the record player in the corner, and the quiet bustle of the cafe was so achingly familiar that you had to give yourself a moment to soak it all in before you could step inside.

Jazzmyne spotted you immediately. She gasped and beckoned you over before the door even fully closed behind you.

“You’re back!” she cried, smoothing her hands over her beanie and her apron as if she didn’t know what to do with herself. “We were so worried about you!”

You smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. A lot has happened lately. I’ll have to tell you all about it later.”

She narrowed her eyes at you. “You better.” But a moment later, her expression cleared and she beamed at you. “But that’s later. Can I get you something to drink? You look like you could go for some oolong today.”

You shook your head and shifted your weight from foot to foot nervously. “No, thanks. Actually, I was wondering if I could get in on tonight’s open mic.”

Jazzmyne gaped at you for a moment before remembering herself and snapping her jaw shut. “Uh, sure. Definitely. The sign-up sheet is over there.” She gestured at a clipboard nailed to the wall beside the stage.

“Thanks,” you said with a nod. You started to turn away, but Jazzmyne called after you.

“Hey! Are you sure you don’t want a drink? You really do seem like you could use a nice oolong.” She winked and smiled playfully, and you waved her off.

“I’ll take you up on the drink after the open mic. Maybe I’ll need something to help soothe my nerves.”

“Fair enough,” she said cheerfully.

You made your way over to the open mic clipboard and hoped that your name wouldn’t be the first on the list. It wasn’t. Mark’s name was already written on the first line, in the same cramped handwriting that filled the pages of his notebook. You weren’t especially surprised, but your heart still raced at the sight of it. You hesitated for only a moment before picking up the pen and writing your name underneath his.

Your nervousness compelled you to get to the Vinyl Cafe far earlier than necessary, and you realized with slight dismay that you had plenty of time to just wait around and make yourself even more nervous until it came time for you to perform.

For a moment, you considered taking Jazzmyne up on that tea sooner rather than later, but you decided against it. You were nervous, but it was a good kind of nervous, in a way. You felt like this because this was something important to you, not because you felt any actual dread.

So, with a bolstering breath, you simply made your way over to your favorite armchair and sank into the old, creaky leather. You took out your notebook and contented yourself with reviewing the neat rows of writing while you waited.

As always, the cafe became more crowded as it grew closer to the open mic. You eyed the crowd idly, enjoying the sound of casual conversation and laughter. Yet every time the door opened, you caught yourself automatically looking to see who it was. At almost five minutes until the start of the open mic, you finally saw him.

When he walked through the door, his eyes immediately darted to the corner with your armchair. He did a double take when he saw you there, and you saw his steps falter. He looked between you and the stage, and you waited for him to just press his lips in that familiar, determined line and make his way to the stage.

He went to you instead.

He came to an uncertain halt about three feet away from you and shoved his hands nervously into his hoodie pocket. “You’re here,” he said. The tips of his ears grew red.

You cleared your throat and sat up a bit straighter, wondering if you should have prepared yourself better for this conversation.

“Yep, I’m back,” is what you came up with, and you decided that you definitely should have better prepared yourself for this conversation. You resisted the urge to cringe. “Look, Mark—”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what I said to you before,” he said suddenly, words coming out in a rush. “About you pushing yourself too hard and your potential and everything. And I realize that I shouldn’t have inserted myself into your life like that. I just started talking like I knew better than you did, and...” Mark lost momentum when he realized you were shaking your head.

“There’s a difference between pretending you know someone’s struggles better than they do and recognizing when someone needs a change in perspective.” Your lips quirked into a small, wry smile. “Your words helped me a lot, Mark.”

“But…” He looked uncertain. “You disappeared for weeks. I waited for you to come back, but eventually I figured that I just drove you off.”

You chuckled ruefully and shook your head. “I’m not that easy to get rid of. I just needed some time to myself, to think about my priorities and… to heal.”

Mark’s gaze softened. “Did you? Heal?”

You smiled, small but genuine. “A bit, yeah. I’ve still got a ways to go, but,” you shrugged and gestured at your notebook, “I’ll get there.”

For the first time, Mark noticed the neat rows of words filling the page. He slowly lifted his eyes to yours and smiled, so bright and lovely that your heart skipped a beat.

Your cheeks grew warm, and you fidgeted self-consciously. “Most of it is just stream of consciousness. Nothing too great.” You looked up at Mark shyly. “But I found out that just letting myself write without the pressure of trying to make every word perfect actually works for me. I’ve been writing more than I have in months.”

Mark laughed, and it was the most joyful sound you’d ever heard from him. “This is incredible! You wrote all this?”

You nodded, feeling your face grow warm. “Big change, right?”

“That’s one way to put it.” Mark glanced at the notebook again before looking up at you, eyebrows raised hopefully. “Do I get to look?”

Reflexively, you pulled the notebook close to your chest, though you felt more playful than actually chagrined. “Not yet.” You glanced at the stage and back at him. “I don’t want to spoil anything yet.”

Mark’s eyes grew wide as he put the pieces together. “You’re going to perform?” he cried, sounding so surprised that you couldn’t help but laugh.

“Shocking, right? I guess I just decided that I should commemorate the return of my writing by actually sharing my writing.” You looked away and shrugged, trying for nonchalant. “I may or may not have gotten inspiration from someone very dear to me.”

You watched as Mark’s expression morphed from surprise back to delight. A moment later, it shifted to determination.

“You should go first.”

You blinked, caught off guard. “I— what?”

“You should go first,” he repeated. His lips were settling into that thin, determined line. “It can be nerve-wracking to perform the first time, and it’s easier if you just go up and get it done before anyone else. That way, you don’t get the chance to psych yourself out.”

But you were shaking your head before he could even finish. “I couldn’t.” He opened his mouth to protest, but you pushed on. “Really, I couldn’t. All this time of coming to the Vinyl Cafe, and I’ve never seen an open mic night where you didn’t perform first. I need the familiarity and routine.” You smiled, small and a bit tight with nervousness, and Mark visibly deflated.

“Fine,” he said. He pouted, just the tiniest bit, but it was quick to become a smile again. “But just know that I’ll be looking forward to your performance the entire time I’m on stage.” You laughed. “You keep that up and you’re going to make me blush,” you teased. You felt a thrill of delight when Mark smiled and looked down, the tips of his ears turning pink all over again.

He opened his mouth to say something else, but he was cut off by the sound of microphone feedback. Both of you turned to look at the stage, realizing with a start that the sound equipment had been set up and was ready to go.

Mark looked back at you and gave you a small smile. “This is it.”

You nodded. “This is it. See you on the other side?”

“I’ll be waiting.” Mark winked and turned away.

You let out a breath, suddenly feeling a bit nervous as you watched him go. You decided to get a better vantage point for watching him and made your way to the center of the room. Somehow, the suede loveseat was open, and you sank into it gratefully, willing your hands not to shake.

Mark puttered about on stage for just a moment, setting up his laptop and making sure everything was just right before grabbing the mic. He hesitated for a moment, mic in hand, before reaching up and pulling off his hat. He set it aside and ran his fingers nervously through his hair. Even halfway across the room, you could see his entire face perfectly. He looked up and made eye contact with you and nodded.

Then, he began.

He was just as talented, just as passionate, as he ever was. But now, with nothing to hide his face, everything just seemed more intense. He was left exposed and vulnerable, and you locked eyes with him every chance you got, silently affirming him. You recognized this for what it was: a sign of encouragement. He exposed himself so that you could have the courage to do it, too.

It was courage you were desperately grateful for. As the final beats of his song rang out and the audience clapped, you felt your heart skip a beat and start to thrum an unsteady, rapid tattoo against the inside of your ribcage. Your legs almost felt numb as you stood up and began to make your way to the stage.

You passed Mark as you went, and he reached out and rested a hand, warm and anchoring, on your shoulder for just a moment before letting you go. You stepped up on stage and made your way to the mic.

You couldn’t remember the last time you’d been on stage for anything, much less a performance. The crowd wasn’t particularly large this night, but you still swallowed as your gaze flitted over faces half-familiar and new. You looked at Jazzmyne, who grinned and gave you a thumbs-up. You looked at Mark, who nodded.

You took a breath and started.

Words, staccato and fragmented, spilled from your mouth. Then came short, splintered phrases. These were the words that eked past the tight chokehold that fear had held over your mind for so long. They were pieces of a broken spirit, the only cry for help you could manage for far too long.

Slowly, the pieces started to fit together, like pieces of a puzzle. It was a puzzle you'd spent weeks putting together, in the newfound security of an unlikely haven. You spoke of hazy afternoons and golden sunshine, of words spoken and heard and felt. You spoke of hope, freedom, pressure, potential.

You spoke of finding freedom through forgiving yourself, through releasing yourself from many pointless expectations. Finding your footing and realizing that you were always more whole than you ever gave yourself credit for; you just never stepped far enough back to see the bigger picture.

You looked at Mark and took a quiet, shaky breath and finished your poem. "I found a dream. I found a love."

It wasn't perfect. You stuttered and stumbled over your words at times, rushed through a couple of lines only to run out of breath halfway through. But as you listened to the scattered applause of the audience, your fingers buzzed and your heart thudded and it felt like victory.

You stumbled off the stage and over to the suede loveseat, where you all but collapsed as your shaky knees finally gave out. Mark took your hand and squeezed, and you knew. You knew that when you spoke, he heard. He felt.

You looked at him and smiled. He smiled back, and it felt like healing.

“I’ve decided against summer courses. I think I’d rather just take another semester or two in order to finish up. Less pressure that way, you know?”

To her credit, your advisor didn’t so much as blink at your request.

“We can very easily arrange that,” she said. She turned to type a couple of things into the computer, and you spent a moment considering whether her shoulders actually did visibly relax or if you were just projecting. She finished typing with a flourish. “Alright, done and done. Was there anything else you wanted to do today?”

You came back to yourself with a start. “Oh, yes. I actually wanted to add a minor while I’m at it. Creative writing.”

This time, she did blink in surprise. And then she smiled, slow and genuinely happy. “I think we can make that happen,” she said.

You smiled back, and for the first time in a long time, you felt excited about your future classes.

When you stepped out of the advising office, you were greeted by a warm, sunny afternoon. The campus was pleasantly abuzz with activities, students filing to and from classes. You took a moment to stand there and look around. Gone was the familiar wash of longing and sickly nervousness. Instead, as you looked at the sun-soaked grass and chatty students, you felt comfortable, assured. You got this.

It put a bounce in your step as you turned to take the familiar path back to your apartment. It was a short walk from your advisor’s office, and your mood hadn’t dimmed in the slightest by the time you got home.

Your roommate was sitting at the tiny ikea dining table and looked up as you closed the front door behind you.

“Your boyfriend’s already here,” she said in way of greeting, mouth ticking into a smirk. “When are you guys gonna start hanging out at his place instead?”

You rolled your eyes, unable to fight off a smile. “You only say that because you think his roommate is cute and you want me to put in a good word for you.”

She shrugged, utterly unabashed. “Maybe so. But can you blame me?”

You scoffed and turned to start walking down the hall to your room. “I guess not, if he’s your type.”

“Oh, he is!” she called after you, laughter in her voice.

You were still chuckling as you pushed your bedroom door open. You saw Mark, standing near your shelf and browsing through the pictures and books that lined it. You paused in the doorway and just watched for a moment, overcome by a strange sense of deja vu. But before you could reflect on it too long, Mark noticed you and turned towards you with a smile.

“You’re finally here. How did it go?”

You smiled and moved to stand next to him. “I successfully declared my minor. And I think I made my advisor proud of me somehow. That bit was unexpected.”

Mark chuckled and leaned down to press a kiss to your forehead. “What’s there not to be proud of? You’re incredible.”

You scrunched your nose. “You’re biased.”

He grinned and shrugged, unrepentant. “Maybe, but for good reason. Anyway.” He held out a hand to you. “Want to go get a coffee?”

“I’d love to.” You took his hand.

Some of the most daunting boundaries in our lives are the ones we create for ourselves. In order to grow and move forward, we must learn when and how to cross these lines.

#got7 #mark tuan #got7 imagines #got7 scenarios #got7 reactions #got7 one shots #kpop #kpop imagines #kpop scenarios #kpop one shots #got7 mark #mark x reader #mark one shot #mark tuan one shot

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morinokunikara · 5 years ago

Text

Double Date Night

Read on AO3

Fandom: Persona 5

Ships: Shiann, Ryushima

Summary: Shiho, Ann, Yuuki, and Ryuji have a double date planned-but what do they do when Shiho’s still-recovering body has other plans for her?

Notes: Okay there’s a lot of reasons I wrote this fic, but it can basically be boiled down to wanting some gay shit, and wanting people to appreciated Shiho and Yuuki and their potential for friendship more (though the latter ended up…not showing as much as I would have liked). Canon sucks, I’m the writer now, and I will not be stopped.

I have the fic posted here, but please give it a look on AO3 as well, and maybe leave kudos and/or comments! It’d mean a lot to me.

Months had passed since Shiho’s release from the hospital, and things were going rather well. Her biggest problems were she still had to go to physical therapy weekly, and couldn’t walk on her own most days. At the very least, she needed a cane, which didn’t bother her too much. The cane was cool, Ann helped her paint it, and she got compliments on it all the time. On worse days she needed crutches, a little less enjoyable but still tolerable. Then there were wheelchair days. Shiho hated wheelchair days. Lots of places were very inaccessible, and she always got looks, or people trying to help when she didn’t need it. If she had to use the wheelchair, she would rather not go out at all. But overall, she made amazing progress in her recovery. Not just physically, but mentally.

She was never able to return to playing volleyball at her new school, even if she could have physically, but she found joy in watching her former teammates play and almost never missed a Shujin game. She always made sure to be the loudest, most excited fan she could be. She made more friends, and would hang out with those friends when she could. Yuuki became her closest friend. Neither of them really talked when they played together, but they found out they had so much in common from both being trans to having similar struggles in life, and their friendship just stuck. He even helped her with asking Ann out, in return for her helping him ask Ryuji out. The four of them actually had a double date planned, a fairly common occurrence for them. The plan for this one was a movie, shopping, and dinner. However, it seemed that Shiho’s body had other plans.

She woke up nearly paralyzed by pain, so much just pulling herself out of bed made her feel like she just ran 100 laps. Why today of all days? She sat back in bed and pulled out her phone to text Ann.

Shiho: Hey…I don’t think I’m going to be able to go out today.

Ann: Everything okay?

Shiho: Not really. I can barely move. I’d have to use the chair. I really don’t want to have to get around in it. Sorry. You three can still go without me.

Ann: I’ll let the guys know. I hope you feel better soon. <3

Shiho: <3

Ann sighed as she looked at the texts again. She hated having to see Shiho hurt so much. They were all looking so forward to today, too… Sure, Ann could just go with the Yuuki and Ryuji but that defeated the whole purpose of the day… She couldn’t just let their day be cut short like that. She had a plan. It wasn’t guaranteed to work, but it was worth a shot. She made a group chat for her and the guys and sent a text.

Ann: Shiho’s not doing well today. She cancelled our plans.

Ryuji: Damn. Pain again I’m guessing?

Ann: Yeah…

Yuuki: It feels wrong to go without her…should we just reschedule?

Ann: No, I have a plan. Meet me in the underground mall. Bring something fun to do.

Ryuji: Gotcha.

Yuuki: See you soon!

The three met up in the underground mall a little over an hour later, Yuuki with some puzzle books and board games, Ryuji with some video games and DVDs, and Ann with makeup, magazines, and flowers she just bought.

“So I guess the plan is we surprise Shiho with all of this?” Yuuki asked.

“Yep! I can’t say for sure if she’ll like it or not, but I want to try. I’d hate just leaving her out…” Ann’s voice faded a bit, but picked up as she smiled. “So we’re gonna bring the double date to her!”

“Hell yeah!” Ryuji cheered. “Let’s get going!” He started to run off, then stopped a few feet away. “Wait uh…where’s she live again?”

Ann sighed and shook her head. “You’re hopeless… Why did you run off if you don’t know? I’ll lead you guys there.”

There was a short train ride to the Suzui residence, during which the three excitedly talked about what they brought and their plans, and shared their hopes that Shiho would enjoy their day together. Before too long, they were in front of the house. Ann rang the doorbell, and an older woman, Shiho’s mother, answered the door. She smiled as soon as she saw the three.

“Oh, are you three here to see Shiho? She’ll be so happy…she’s in her room right now.” She welcomed the three in, they took off their shoes, and went over to Shiho’s room quietly.

Ann knocked gently on the door, and Shiho called back. “It’s open…” Her voice sounded rather gloomy and strained. It hurt all three of her guests to hear it. Still, they all three kept smiles on their faces as Ann opened the door.

“Surprise!” Ann said cheerfully. “Hope you don’t mind that we showed up.”

Shiho’s whole face lit up slowly when she saw the three. Her pained, grim expression turned into a wide smile, and small tears of joy formed in her eyes. “You three…I told Ann you could go on without me…”

“Well sure,” Ryuji said. “But it wouldn’t be much of a double date if half of one of the couples was gone, would it?”

“We all made sure to bring something to do.” Yuuki showed off the books and games he brought. “We want to make sure your day in is a fun one.“

"Thanks, guys…” Shiho sniffled.

Ann went over to the bed. “I got you these too,” She said as she placed the flowers on the end table and sat on the edge of the bed. “So what do you want to do? We have magazines, makeup, video games, movies, some puzzle books, board games…take your pick!”

Shiho thought for a second. “Oh! Let’s all do each other’s makeup!” She said excitedly.

“Ehhh, I think I’ll pass on that one,” Ryuji said. “That cutesy shit is more Yuuki’s thing.” He patted his boyfriend’s head, and got his hand swatted away in return.

“He’s terrible at makeup,” Yuuki added on. “He tried to do mine once and it was awful.”

“I didn’t even know what half that shit was!”

“It’s really not as hard as you’re acting like it is.”

“It is too! I don’t get how you keep up with all those brushes and colors and stuff…”

Shiho laughed softly at the little playful argument. “You don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah!” Ann agreed. “You can judge our looks instead.”

“Fine…” Ryuji grumbled softly. “But I’m warning you, I don’t know what’s good or bad…”

“Yuuki, can I do yours?” Shiho asked.

“And I wanna do yours, Shiho!” Ann said excitedly.

“I can do Ann’s then.” Yuuki said. “I actually have a look that’ll be perfect for you.”

The three took turns doing each other’s makeup, each person’s unique style showing up in the look of the person that did their makeup. Yuuki ended up with a simple, more natural look, Shiho with a very trendy girly look with lots of pink, and Ann with a more showy dramatic look.

“Alright, Ryuji. Who did best?” Ann asked with a confident grin. She was certain that she’d win.

Ryuji looked closely at the three, spending his time really studying each look and thinking long and hard about his decision. “Uh…they all look the same to me.” He finally said in defeat.

Ann and Yuuki both sighed. “They couldn’t be more different from each other!” Ann exclaimed.

Yuuki took a deep breath. “Ryuji…I say this with all the love I have in my heart…you are completely hopeless.”

Shiho laughed, a bit more than her previous laugh. “Okay, lay off him you two…let’s just call it a tie, okay? I think we all look amazing.”

“You’re way too nice to him, Shiho.” Ann said. “He’ll never learn if we lay off…but fine, if you insist.”

“How about instead, we let him pick what we do next!” Shiho smiled at Ryuji. “You brought some games right? How about we play something?”

“Hell yeah! I brought my full collection cause i wasn’t sure what you liked…” Ryuji brought a stack of games over to Shiho. “Go ahead, pick your favorite!”

Shiho looked at the games thoughtfully, and ultimately picked a co-op RPG they could play together with minimal competition. The four enjoyed their game together, to the point where Shiho’s mother had to come in and ask them to quiet down. They spent hours on the game, eventually coming to a stop when they realized how long it had been. “Wow…I usually don’t play that much,” Ann said with a soft laugh.

“Me either, I just got so caught up in working with everyone, I lost track of the time,” Shiho admitted.

“So…What’s next?” Yuuki asked. Before anyone could suggest their next activity, Shiho’s mother peeked in the room.

“Are you kids hungry? I’m making beef stew tonight!”

“Beef stew?!” Ryuji perked up excitedly. “I could go for some beef!”

“Where are your manners?!” Ann scolded. “Thank you, Mrs. Suzui. Food would be lovely. Do you need any help?”

Shiho’s mom shook her head. “No, no, I wouldn’t want to pull any of you away. I may need help bringing the food here, however. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

While dinner cooked, the four looked at some of Ann’s magazines. For all his griping about makeup, Ryuji was actually quite invested in the fashion (or maybe just the models) and was eager to point out some of his favorite looks, or outfits he thought would look good on others (mostly Yuuki, of course). Once Shiho’s mom called that dinner was ready, Ann went to the kitchen to help her carry the bowls into Shiho’s room. The four all sat and chatted about school, sports, and their other friends while they ate. Once they finished, Ann brought the bowls back to the kitchen, and the four spent some time playing some of the card games that Yuuki and brought.

“And a perfect match~!” Ann cheered, showing off her cards. “I win again!” She sung.

“Man, this is getting boring,” Ryuji whined. “How do you keep winning? You have to be cheating.”

“Or I’m just luckier than you,” Ann said, sticking her tongue out.

“I’m just not getting any matches!” Ryuji griped as he threw down his cards.

“Uh…Ryuji…sweetheart…” Yuuki looked over the cards on the ground. “You have 3 matches here.”

The others looked and sure enough, there were 3 matches scattered across Ryuji’s cards. “Wha…I…Damnit! It’s hard to tell when they’re all scattered like that!” Ryuji’s voice grew even more frustrated than it was over losing.

“You know if you sort them as you get them, that wouldn’t be a problem,” Shiho said. “That’s what I do.”

Ryuji looked at her in shock, completely dumbfounded by the fact that he hadn’t ever thought of that before. “That’s freakin’ genius!”

The four of them spent the rest of the night playing card games and board games, at some point also playing some movies and anime in the background. Before long, it was late into the night.

“We should probably get going,” Yuuki said, slowly rising to his feet. “Wouldn’t want to miss the train home.”

Ann got up and stretched. “I was actually going to stay the night if that’s okay with Shiho.”

“I can’t,” Ryuji said. “Gotta help my mom with chores tomorrow.”

“And I promised my sister we could play some games tonight,” Yuuki added on.

“Well, you two head back then. We don’t need you boys anyways,” Ann teased.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ryuji grumbled before turning to Shiho. “Hope today helped you a bit.”

“Of course it did,” Shiho replied with a bright smile. She opened her arms for a hug. “Come over here.” Ryuji and Yuuki both accepted hugs before heading out and going home.

Once the boys were gone, Ann and Shiho spent the night cuddled up together talking for hours until they got tired.

“Hey Ann?” Shiho said softly as the two began to drift off. “Thanks for this.”

“Hey, it was the guys too,” Ann pointed out. “I can’t take all the credit.”

“But it was your idea, wasn’t it?”

“I mean yeah…but still, we all did our part because we wanted to see you happy.”

“I know you do…”

“I was kind of worried you might be mad to be honest. Like maybe we were being too intrusive or something.”

“Not at all! I’m…” Shiho found herself a bit choked up, but tried to fight back the tears. “I’m glad you all care so much. I felt so useless today but…you all made it a lot better.”

Ann smiled and kissed Shiho’s forehead. “I’m glad. That’s all I want to do for you, ever.”

“I love you so much, Ann. I don’t think I could ever thank you enough.”

“I love you too. Now let’s get some sleep, okay?”

The two fell asleep peacefully in each other’s arms, both so, so thankful for each other and all their friends

#persona #persona 5 #shiann #ryushima

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volturialice · 5 years ago

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red line

Mike Newton catches a train. Oneshot.

rating: T

pairings: gen

warnings for: minor character death, violence, slight xenophobia and sexism, bad language

read on ao3

The sun was just beginning to emerge from behind the clouds as Mike Newton stepped onto the escalator. A few final raindrops plopped half-heartedly onto his head and shoulders as the metal steps bore him sluggishly down into the vast concrete pit, its walls perfectly circular and perfectly useless against the elements. What a stupid way to build an escalator. If the sun hadn’t made its timely appearance, he would have been steadily soaked the whole way down into the bowels of the subway system.

He paid little attention to the weekend tourist bustle around him. He was playing out the usual Saturday morning mental debate over whether to stop and get presents for Chloe when he was already running late. Would it be worth the headache of Jessica pitching another fit, accusing him trying to buy their daughter’s affection and undermine her parenting? Mike couldn’t decide. On the one hand, it was fun to piss Jess off now and then. On the other hand, her voice got so damn shrill.

It was kind of a drag, Mike thought as he stepped off the escalator, that Chloe would only ever know them like this. That she would never be able to remember a time when her parents didn’t hate each other. He and Jess really had been happy for a while, when Chlo was a baby. He imagined trying to explain those college years of giddy freedom and first love to a teenaged Chloe someday, How I Met Your Mother-style, and came up empty.

He needed to get the hell out of this city, Mike knew. It was getting nastier by the day. Chloe should grow up somewhere with fresh air and wide open spaces. He swiped his fare card, pushed through the turnstile, and let his mind conjure up somewhere better—not a lame white picket fence scenario, but maybe a nice condo or something, with gleaming modern architecture and a pool someone else cleaned. There would be a playground for Chlo and a decent bar for him, where the cute girl mixing drinks would ask if he was new in town…

A crowd of fashionably dressed teenagers rushed past, carrying those heavy umbrellas meant to block out UV rays rather than rain and chattering in rapid Japanese. Mike followed them down the stairs to the red line platform at a more leisurely pace. An LED sign announced that next train wouldn’t be arriving for another five minutes—couldn’t they read?

The lower platforms always felt oddly claustrophobic compared to the cavernous upper ones with their vast, inverted ice-cube-tray ceilings. Mike pondered his chances of getting the last car to himself for once. Usually it was a long shot, but today things were looking up: the crowd had gathered on the far end of the platform, where a man with a bass guitar was plucking out the opening bars of “Superstition,” his grin a white flash in the subterranean gloom. He was having a good day, by the looks of it—as Mike watched, one of the tourist kids tossed a few bucks into the open guitar case at the busker’s feet, already full of more bills than coins.

In the lull between trains, the acoustics weren’t half bad down here. The twangs of the bass cut through the air, somehow sharper and cleaner in the dark, without the distracting visual clutter of the aboveground world. Moving closer, Mike switched the water bottle he was carrying into his left hand and pulled out his phone to take a video for Chloe. She was still too little to pay much attention to lyrics, but she loved to dance. Bringing her a video instead of a present would be a good compromise. This way he wouldn’t have to stop and make himself even later to pick her up. And it wasn’t like Jess could object to dim iPhone footage of a Stevie Wonder cover.

He was so focused on the screen that he didn’t realize how close he was to the edge of the platform until he nearly tripped over the little warning bumps they put there for blind people. Oops. Close one.

His stumbling recovery meant he happened to be looking down at just the right moment to notice the stiletto-clad feet strolling along the very lip of the platform, coming down left, right in time to the beat of the music.

Seven years of bad luck, good things in your past…

Mike looked up and felt his breath catch in his throat.

Holy fuck.

Two women were striding up the platform. Two stunningly, unbelievably beautiful women.

The first, the one in stilettos, was petite and Asian. She wouldn’t have looked out of place among the trendy Japanese teens, except that she would have looked out of place anywhere by virtue of sheer attractiveness. Her dark hair was cropped short and slicked boldly back as if to say, look at me, I’m so exquisitely feminine that long hair would be superfluous. Her short, black dress was tight around her slim thighs (Mike swallowed.) The rest of her lithe figure was engulfed in an oversized coat—a strange choice in this hot summer weather. A pair of oversized designer sunglasses completed the look, hiding her eyes.

Like the Japanese girls, she carried a large black anti-UV umbrella, though her skin was such a pale blue-white that it looked like she could’ve used some sun. In her other hand dangled a bag from Saks Fifth Avenue, swinging back and forth in time to the twangs of the guitar.

And a few steps behind her trailed her companion.

If the first woman was inhumanly gorgeous, this one was…indescribable. Where the first girl was an appealingly slender nymph, the second was a full-figured Amazon in leather boots, jeans, and a motorcycle jacket. Instead of dark hair cropped short, magnificent blonde waves cascaded down her back, glinting bronze in the red floor lights. Her features had nothing in common with the first girl’s except for their flawless, airbrushed symmetry—and that her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses.

How could she see? It was dim enough down here even without tinted lenses. Why didn’t she take them off? Mike’s brain filled in the gaps: beneath the glasses she’d have big blue eyes with mascara-commercial lashes, of course.

The red lights at his feet began to flash. Mike felt a shiver of longing as the women passed within inches of him, equally unconcerned with him and the oncoming train. He couldn’t resist checking out the taller woman’s ass as they passed (sure enough, it was as magnificent as the rest of her.) The petite woman’s ass was regrettably shielded from view by her giant coat.

Without thinking, Mike swiveled his phone around to follow the two women.

By now the crowd around the guitarist had begun to disperse along the platform, ready to jockey for seats. Amid the commotion of flashing lights, whooshing air, rumbling train, and the busker’s voice belting out lyrics over the noise, no one else seemed to notice the two mysterious supermodels.

WHEN YOU BELIEVE IN THINGS YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!

Ding ding! Doors opening. Step back to allow customers to exit.

THEN YOU SUFFER!

When boarding, please move to the center of the car.

The two women stopped a polite distance from the busker, who looked up at his audience and immediately missed a note.

Ding-ding-ding-ding! Step back, doors closing.

The back of Mike’s mind prickled uneasily as the train began to pull away. Never mind, he’d catch the next one in seven minutes. He was already late anyway, what were seven more minutes? Right now he was exactly where he wanted to be: in the comfortable darkness of the station, listening to a guy sing about the devil, taking a video for Chloe, and harmlessly ogling two of the hottest girls he was ever likely to see.

The busker had recovered quickly and was strumming with extra gusto, hamming it up for the pretty newcomers now that he was seemingly alone with them on the platform (none of the three had noticed Mike, who was mostly obscured from their sightline by a person-sized billboard ad for grocery deliveries.)

The brunette turned to murmur something to her companion, and as the noise of the train died away, Mike was able to catch a few words.

“—understand, but can’t…until nightfall? …too public.” her voice was as lovely as her face.

The blonde shook her magnificent head. “Easy for you…already fed…stuck down here anyway, and I’m thirsty.”

She was thirsty? Oh, perfect! Mike’s hand tightened around the bottle of water he carried—thank fuck it was unopened. How should he approach and offer it to her? What would be the best, least creepy angle to take?

The busker had evidently had the same idea, because he paused in singing (but not playing) long enough to call out over the music, “You ladies thirsty? I got some Gatorade right here. Help yourselves!”

Mike’s insides seared with jealousy at having been beaten to the punch. The blonde’s face broke into a smile of such dazzling radiance that she almost seemed to glow, a white-and-gold apparition wreathed in shadow.

“Don’t mind if I do,” she said, and disappeared.

Or that was how it looked to Mike. One second she was standing beside the brunette at the end of the platform, and the next she had reappeared fifteen feet away, beside the busker, who had no time to be astonished before she sank her teeth into his throat.

There was an awful, choking gargle and a discordant cacophony of twanging strings as the music cut off.

The busker’s arms flailed in a spasm of shock and pain, striking feebly out at his attacker. She casually pinioned them to his sides. There was a sound like crumpling plastic—had his bones just snapped?

The little brunette had not moved, but was watching these events with an expression of detached resignation. “Oh, Rose,” she sighed, crossing her delicate arms as if her friend’s behavior was just so typically embarrassing.

From where Mike stood, hidden behind the free-standing wall of the advertisement, he could see the creature called Rose in crystal clear detail: her long fingers, gripping the busker’s dirty T-shirt. The twin lenses of her sunglasses, peering blankly over his shoulder. Her perfect pink lips, fastened on his neck in a profane parody of a kiss.

But most of all he couldn’t look away from the muscles of her elegant white throat, pulsing beneath her skin as she swallowed.

She was drinking. Drinking the man’s blood. Holy fucking shit.

It was around this time Mike became aware that he had frozen in place behind the ad, his feet rooted to the tile, his hand still outstretched and still holding his phone, which was still recording.

Right on the heels of the realization that he had just witnessed a murder came the realization that he had captured it all on video. Oh, God. Had they seen him? The light from his phone screen suddenly seemed blindingly obvious. He snatched it back, clutching it and the water bottle to his pounding chest as he pressed himself against the billboard. From this angle he could still see the brunette, but not the blonde—Rose—or her victim. How long did it take to drain a body of blood, anyway? Oh, God. Why hadn’t he just boarded the train?

He checked the LED sign that announced when the next train was coming: five minutes. Five minutes before he could move from his hiding place.

The sound of a train arriving on one of the upper platforms seemed horribly distant, as though he heard it from underwater. To think there were people, regular people going about their days, so close, just up the stairs…if he called for help, would they hear him? Would they make it to him in time?

He remembered the way Rose had seemed to teleport across the platform, and the sound of the busker’s bones snapping, and doubted it.

Above him, the train pulled away. Mike struggled to calm his breathing in the quiet that followed. Cold sweat seeped through the back of his shirt. Four more minutes.

A soft sound floated its way to his ears: someone was humming the melody to “Superstition.” The little brunette had picked up where the unfortunate busker had left off. She was once again swinging her shopping bag back and forth, back and forth, radiating bored impatience as she watched her friend’s sick tableau unfold.

Mike nearly jumped out of his skin as the busker’s body collapsed into his line of sight with a soft thunk. He choked back the scream that wanted to claw its way from his throat as the man’s blank, staring eyes looked right through him.

“You could have waited until the song was over,” scolded the brunette.

“I was thirsty,” came the angelic voice of Rose.

“Then clean up,” ordered the brunette. “We’ve got three minutes.”

The body disappeared from Mike’s view. He heard a horrible wet thump as it hit something—the tracks on the opposite side of the platform? He didn’t care, as long as it didn’t interfere with this next train—his train.

Three minutes. He only had to last three more minutes. Then he could blend in with the crowd, casually board the train. The doors would slide shut and he’d be home free. He could get off at the next stop and go straight to the police. He didn’t need them to believe his whole story, just to watch the evidence on video…

“Did you leave blood on the floor?” came the brunette’s voice. “I’m still seeing an investigation.”

“That’s usually what happens when a person throws himself under a train, Alice,” said Rose.

The water bottle clutched in Mike’s left hand, slick with sweat and condensation, was beginning to slip. Gingerly, hardly daring to breathe, he bent down. Had to put it somewhere he wouldn’t trip over it. Had to set it down slowly, silently, before it could fall and make a noise.

He did it. Not a sound as the plastic touched tile. Mike straightened back up in equal silence, allowing himself a slow exhale of relief. Two minutes. He only had to last two more minutes.

Bzzzzzz. Bzzzzz.

The vibration of his phone, still clutched against his chest, jolted violently through him like a shock from a defibrillator.

Stupid, fucking phone! He shut it off before it could vibrate a third time. Jessica’s smiling face winked out on the screen.

Silence. Mike held his breath. Maybe they hadn’t heard it.

There was a light breeze, a rush of air in the dark.

“Well, well. What have we here?” She was standing before him.

Seen up close, the brunette—Alice, the other one had called her—was tiny. Even in heels, she didn’t reach Mike’s shoulder. Her smile was open, friendly, and devastatingly beautiful. It reached all the way to her eyes, free of sunglasses now. Eyes that were not the brown he’d imagined at all, but a lurid, vibrant crimson.

Rose appeared in the shadows behind her, wiping her mouth. “Is that who was breathing so loud?”

Alice tilted her head, appraising. “I thought he did rather well, all things considered. I’ll take that.” She reached up and slid the phone from Mike’s boneless hand, which offered no resistance.

His arms and legs had turned to useless jelly. His Adam’s apple throbbed as he swallowed, trying to moisten his mouth enough to speak:

“P-please…I have a daughter…”

Alice’s red eyes unfocused. A little crease appeared between her eyebrows. “Oh, she’ll be fine,” she told Mike. “Your ex is about to be promoted and transferred to the suburbs. The schools are much better out there, you know.”

“Quit dawdling, Alice,” scolded Rose. “The train will be here any second. Just snap his neck and let’s go. You already fed.”

Alice looked thoughtful. “Hmm, yes, but I’m not full yet.” She grinned again, exposing back teeth.

Mike’s instincts kicked in. The synapses in his brain fired, commanding his body to bolt for the stairs.

Before his muscles could stir, a little hand clamped around his arm, as hard and cold as iron.

“Sorry,” said Alice. “But you know, ‘waste not’ and all that.”

On the floor, the lights began to flash again, staining her white teeth red.

She leaned in.

Yes I’m AWARE that I have a ton of WIPs but in my defense I was minding my own business waiting for the next train when the muse descended from on high and ordered me to write evil!Alice and Rose before I could finish anything else.

anyway I hope you enjoyed this installment of Evil Cullens Jukebox Hour! Might write more pieces for the other cullen kids if I can come up with Concepts. So far I’m thinking Jasper&Edy and Eleanor&Bells. Lmk who you think they should murder via my askbox

#twilight #twilight fanfiction #rosalie hale #alice cullen #mike newton #nsfr #fic: mine #I guess this could be rose/alice if you want it to be!#anyway we're writing songfic like it's 2006 #evil cullens jukebox

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ceylon-tae · 5 years ago

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Part 3 of 4 This was going to be a footnote on Part 2 but I have strong feelings about this. A previous version of this post used the term “DDNOS” ( dissociative disorder not otherwise specified) because in 2019, I only had an updated copy of the DSM-IV. In 2020 I obtained a copy of the DSM-V and realized the category name was changed to “OSDD” (other specified dissociative disorder). I want to make a point of talking about PTSD and Dissociative Identities. I don’t know what specific kinds of content warnings to put on this. Um. I’m going to talk about other people reacting to DID/OSDD/DDNOS and things that look like it, my experience with dissociation, parts, and recovery. I worked on it a lot this year. Disclaimer that I am not a trained professional, but I HAVE lived with OSDD ever since I can remember, I have been diagnosed, and going through this workbook I mentioned in Part 2 has made a lot of things click into place. I have OSDD and not DID because I don’t ‘lose time’ where I don’t at least know what happened (a requirement for a DID diagnosis in the DSM). This was originally a very long, very angry rant, but I can sum it up in two parts: Dear people who don’t have a dissociative disorder and Dear People who do have a dissociative disorder

The first part is directed at people without DID who are inclined to say: “People who talk to themselves are creepy, lol you're fictionkin? Cringe” DID and other dissociative disorders are responses to trauma. Most people you’ll see talking to various parts of themselves are not faking it. They’re working with what they have. It’s far more normal than you think. If you think that’s cringe, consider shutting the fuck up, growing some fucking compassion, and minding your own fucking business. Don’t harass strangers about it. The second part is directed at people with DID who are inclined to say: ”But some people fake having it because it’s trendy, or try to force themselves to have it, and kinnies make us look bad” Cool I don’t care, you don’t harass strangers about it. Of course having to deal with dismissive or ignorant randos on the internet is exhausting. Trolls and attention-seekers are a drag. It sucks. But there’s assholes and morons everywhere, of every stripe, with every ‘excuse’. Block them. If they’re young and ignorant? You don’t have to educate them. You can block them. There are also people all over this website who would rather commiserate than actually try recovery. That’s sad. But it’s also not your problem. I was over 30 by the time I realized PTSD and dissociation were the medical names for what I was experiencing. If you had told me, as a teenager, that my dissociative disorder was a symptom of PTSD and “please go to therapy”, I would have probably reacted very negatively to that. Partly because I'd have already been in and out of therapy since I was 9, and I would’ve been under no obligation to tell you that. It’s not that my therapist was bad, or that she didn’t know how to treat me. She admitted she simply didn’t want me to feel “broken” since I was already handling it and re-connecting my parts pretty well. But my mental health has been struggling the past few years. In 2019, I needed to know. Now I know. The teenager out there with the upbeat roleplay blog who insists their incredibly important fictionkin / headmate / etc. has “nothing to do” with PTSD? That kid might well have PTSD and not know it. Do NOT say they’re faking it. Do NOT tell them to stop. Do NOT tell them to go to therapy and get a diagnosis, or to get a “better” coping mechanism. Unless they’re a fake account intentionally created to mock DID (like many fake accounts acephobes create to mock asexuality), it’s NOT your problem. Their recovery is also not your problem. If you don’t know them personally, it’s not your problem. Save your concern-trolling, don’t screencap that shit, and mind your own fucking business. Furthermore, fictional parts or alters or ‘headmates’ or whatever else you call them are extremely common. Lots of people reading might already know this. Oftentimes when a kid lived in a terrifying situation for a long time, the only place they saw safety and caring was in a fictional story, and they needed that in their life. That’s also the reason why fictional alters are usually the parts that care for or protect other parts. Although there are toxic ways to use this coping mechanism, it is not a “bad” coping mechanism itself. It’s a good one. Ask Boon, Steele, and Van Der Hart if you don’t believe me (Boon, S., Steele, K.,& Van Der Hart, O. (2011). Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.). If you try to slap that out of their hands because you simply don’t like it, fuck you. That’s the short version. :) Okay enough being mad, let’s talk about ways that having / recovering with a dissociative disorder doesn’t have to be Constant Suffering 24/7/365 If you want to write down the conversations you’re having with yourself, for any reason, please don’t be scared do that. It’s probably much safer if you write them down on paper rather than putting them online, but I’m not your mom. When you write down your conversations, all parts of you can see it right there on the page if one of you is being mean to another part of you. That way, it’s easier to try to change that behavior. It can keep those parts of you accountable. If you’re discussing a topic you personally struggle with, and happen to think of a good solution together, writing it down also means you can read it later and remember how you “worked out this issue” before. It can be a record of your successes. And later, you can reread them and see how much you’ve grown. If some parts don’t want to talk to you, or if there are parts who give you problems, there is real help you can get for that. You CAN work on that. Again, this is the workbook I’ve been using this year. It is very in-depth: Boon, S., Steele, K.,& Van Der Hart, O. (2011). Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. One of my other friends (who was ALSO diagnosed with PTSD and DID in her thirties) has recommended me this workbook which I’ve bought but not started. It mentions parts but is mainly focused on Complex PTSD: Shwartz, Arielle. (2016). The Complex PTSD Workbook. Berkeley, Althea Press. Also here, have a relevant image from Wikipedia in this really long text post:

If someday (even just for a little while), you forget that there were ever parts of you that you felt disconnected from? Fucking superb, you beautiful kintsugi. Here’s the part where I soapbox more. “Recovery” should NOT mean “never mentioning your separate selves again”. It definitely shouldn’t mean you have to stop talking to any of your parts. The goal should be to get all of your parts working together in harmony, not forcibly reducing you to one melody. Heck, here’s a third metaphor that means a lot to me personally. When I’m at my best it, feels like I’m mixing different colors to get just the right hue appropriate to the situation. It’s not that the paint bottles don’t exist anymore - I’m just not stuck painting from just one or two bottles, and I don’t have to paint straight from the bottles anymore either. Boon, Steele, and Van Der Hart literally call it “blending”. I’d been doing it (and using this metaphor) long before reading that but imagine my excitement reading that. Sweet validation. If you’re just starting working with your parts, that can come later. Step #1 is having all your parts acknowledge each other, and talk to each other. Then you try to get better at cooperating together. You’ll do your best to make sure no one gets overwhelmed, and make sure everyone’s needs are met in a feasible manner. And see if you can do a better job at comforting each other. That’s not me soapboxing, that’s straight from the book. If you can do that much, that's a huge step forward to a healthier life. I’m so fucking proud of you. Dissociating and losing time sucks. Being “plural” or whatever you want to call it doesn’t have to suck. Every part of you deserves to feel this good, this connected, and cooperative. Recovery isn’t easy. Even when they give you a workbook with simple prompts and “fill in your own answer” pages. (Which I have.) Even if you think “oh but I already know myself(s) and we’re all fine” but you seem to be struggling in other areas of your mental health (which was me), I guarantee you there will be shit you didn’t know about yourself(s). And it can only get better after you address it, hopefully with professional help. I’m saying you’re doing a bad job on your own, but if you think you could be doing better, go for it. It will be uncomfortable, but whatever little steps you can take (without destabilizing yourself), it’s FUCKING WORTH IT. Notes: Boon, S., Steele, K.,& Van Der Hart, O. (2011). Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Currently finishing up this workbook so yeah I’m really excited about it

#i don't have a 2019 art retrospective #i have a mental health retrospective #that was still really long #ddnos #osdd #did #also the idea that did is caused by therapy is bullshit #i went to therapy at 9 years old for anxiety and aggression #and depression #i never did any memory recovery treatments in therapy #i started writing down my conversations when i was 11 #i don't think i told my therapist about them until i was at least 15 #i told my sister and she thought it was creepy so i stopped telling anyone #she'd just read sybil and that is a WHOLE NOTHER can of worms lmao #but apparently i have no shame about it anymore so here this is

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bougiebutbalanced · 5 years ago

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An Apology & Cease-Fire

I try hard to love myself. It’s something that I actively practice everyday. Now before pass judgement, roll your eyes and think “its easy to love yourself when you look like that” I’m gonna stop you right there. This isn’t how I’ve always looked. And certainly not how I always felt. I’ve battled the demons in my mind and mirror for as long as I can remember.

I grew up in a time when everyone wore extra low rise jeans and tiny tops that displayed their belly rings. Xtina was dirrty, Paris Hilton was hot, 00 was the ideal size and the resident It Girl informed us that nothing tasted as good being skinny felt.

But.... I wasn't built to wear 00 jeans. While my peers struggled to find jeans that were small enough around their waste yet long enough to cover their ankles, I fit comfortably into a size 6. I had an hourglass figure for as long as I could remember. But since I’m not Latina and those only person who it was acceptable to have curves was JLo, I began to develop some insecurities about myself.

From the time I was about 12 I began every morning on the scale. Not my idea, non-optional, and overseen by my mom -one of my main demons disguised as a guardian angel. 3 little numbers would dictate whether I would climb into the shower and danced (150-151lbs) or cried (152lbs): for reference I was about 5’7-5’8. Thus began my war against my body. And I lost every battle.

Growing up, I became aware that every group of friend had a fat friend --And when the DUFF book/movie eventually came out I began to think maybe I wasn't alone-- I had originally noticed this because that friend was always me. I had a habit of scanning whatever room I was in and mentally sorting the girls from best body to fattest. And being excited when I wasn’t in last. Albeit i was usually second to last.

I began to binge. However the only eating disorders that existed were anorexia and bulimia- there was no such thing as a disorder where you ate copious amounts of junk food without the purge part (which for me came later). I was consumed with shame and guilt

The root of my shame and guilt stemmed from my mom. She has a my way is the best way attitude. With everything in life. She has an opinion on everything and if you don’t respond with “wow best idea ever how would I live without you” she gets upset. Those are her own insecurities, but they manifest in unhealthy ways towards me. Having a mom who judged everything I ate created constant shame and guilt around food. But when I wanted to do some kind of diet, she was supportive until it was inconvenient for her. Like if we were going out for dinner or if she was having people over then I should “just have a little.” Or that time everyone was going vegetarian so I tried too and she made ribs and tacos and other things I loved trying to “break” me. Thanks mom

This also led to my distain for exercising. Actually, just my distain for running. I hate running. Always have. It hurts and it’s boring and I’ve never been great at it. But my mom became a runner in her 20s and therefore it’s the only way to get healthy. I would’ve preferred spin classes or to try Pilates and I love swimmning but she didn't like those things and therefore in her mind they were inferior to the almighty option for weight loss: Running. Not cardio in general, just running.

Then, in my early 20′s I got sick. I had a flare up of PCOS (super common auto immune and if you have it go to a naturopath and follow the diet- you’ll feel sooo much better I promise) I gained weight uncontrollably. But I also binged uncontrollably so I’m sure that contributed. I was also dangerously anemic which caused major depression. However I’m going to skip over most that time because it was a long and painful process of recovery.

Before I lost all energy to do anything all I knew was that I was gaining weight and so I lived on celery and hummus and went to the gym twice a day. I also tried to push thru my exhaustion, resting in my mom's eyes in lazy and therefore unacceptable, in her eyes you couldn't possibly heal if you were just laying on the couch, you should be up and moving. A prime example of this is when I got home from Australia, I’d drive the 20min in from our house to her office and I’d be so tired I’d have a headache from keeping my eyes open. But she told me it was jet lag just go to the gym and work it off... it was mono. We found out after it got really bad. I’d helped to unload 200 bails of hay and that night my glands swoll up to golf balls. The next day I was diagnosed and the dr said no impact sports or heavy lifting or my spleen could burst, it was pure luck that I was okay after lifting those bails.

Anyway, I was in my early 20s and now the Kardashians curves were envied and Kate Upton was the epitome of gorgeous, times had changed...but so had I. I was at my sickest, and my heaviest (260lbs) looking back at my high school pictures and wondering why I thought I was fat. If I could just get back to that weight, I’d be so happy. Yet, I’d cry when I saw memes about having a fast metabolism in high school because I never had one. So the war raged on, I hated how I didn’t look like I did in high school, yet I hated that I was skinny in high school....and I never saw the link.

Eventually I healed, and went on a diet (its called Ideal Protein and its Keto). I did this diet 3 times. The first I went back down to 180. Then went off it, and gained back up to about 220. Then I went back on it and dropped to 195, went off and gained back to 210...then slowly over the next year I gained back up to 220. And then I tried to be bulimic. Turns out I like the feeling of throwing up (ya that might be weird) so I’d binge and binge and then throw everything up. I’d go shopping and try things on and when they didn't fit, I’d swear to myself that I’d “commit” to being bulimic, and do it twice a day. But it didn't help me lose weight, it just slowed down the gain.

The third time and final time I did the Ideal Protein I was in a different (and much better) place mentally thanks to the therapist I was seeing at the time. I dropped to 165, and when I went off it I went vegan. I bought my own groceries and even though I live with my parents they work out of town so I’m mostly on my own for meals too. Sometimes I go through phases where I eat unhealthy and I go up in weight and then I go through phases where I eat very healthy, i.e: vegan (not preaching for everyone to be vegan but I’ve found that it works well for me personally) gained up to 175 and then lost (on my own). I’m currently in one of those going up phases and whatever. It started when I went to Bali and enjoyed myself, then I was unemployed and stressed so not a great reaction (I sprained my ankle in Bali so no dynamic exercise and even a lot of yoga poses I couldn't do) and now I’m on vacation for Xmas. I don’t enjoy what my body looks like right now but I’m trying not to care. I know when I go home I’ll choose healthy foods again. When my ankle heals I’ll go back to dynamic execrsices and when I get a new job I’ll begin going to barre classes because they’re my fave.

Most importantly, I recently realized that I had been so wrong. I thought because I’d tried starving my body or tried throwing up everything that wasn't healthy for me, but that didn’t help me to lose weight so I thought I’d lost that battle. I tried to exercise everyday and often I’d push till I couldnt go on, but I didn't see any progress so that didn't work for me and I’d lost that battle too. For reference, the first time I did Ideal Protein I went from 260lbs - 180lbs and even though my jeans were smaller I couldn't see a difference in my reflection....so body dysmorphia was at play. I lost the battle when I tried to be healthy so I’d binge and binge and go months without any form of exercise. And it didn't matter. Because when I was losing weight (minus this last time), or when I was eating chocolate and pizza in the dark, I hated myself. I hated that I had to wear clothes that were “flattering” (I word I despise because in my moms world thats a compliment) instead of clothes that were trendy. And every time I’d see my reflection or a picture of me I’d feel like I’d lost or failed. But I was wrong. But I was wrong in thinking I was the loser in this war. Because I controlled the shots and my body was the one that had to adapt to the restriction or the overload. It was the one that shrunk and grew in response to my actions that were all done out of anger, frustration, and hate so even when my body was getting exercise or nourishment it was always starved of love.

So this decade. And those that come after it. It will be loved. There’s no wagons to fall off of or tracks to get back on. They’re all phases. Like seasons of the year or phases of the moon, some are darker than others but all are necessary for life and all have their good and bad characteristics. I love that I sometimes allow myself to indulge (such as my current choices). But I also love that I choose to supply nourishment and movement to my body. I love myself enough to supply my vessel with nourishment. Now I move my body in ways that feel good i.e. low impact(yoga, barre, walks with my dog). And I also recognize that sometimes its better that I don’t move at all. Such as, it’s better to take 1-2 days of nothing but Netflix and delivery in order to recharge then to push through stress and exhaustion and struggle through before I eventually burn out, where I spend 2-3 WEEKS watching Netflix and getting delivery but hating myself while doing so and feeling like a failure.

I’m so sorry to my that it went so long without love and validation. I promise to fill the rest of them with compassion and fun and understanding. Here’s to end of 2019 and good start to 2020; the end of a decade, but the start of an age (yes that’s a TSwift lyric)

Love Me <3

#goal weight #weight loss journey #health #fitness #health and body #vegan #body postivity #love yourself #gratitude

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erasethedarkness · 6 years ago

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Silver Threaded Lining -Day 6 | Blind Date / Setup- (Best Jeanist x f!Reader)

Summary: Working at a news station had its perks- and one of them included being friends with a popular newswoman. When asked to take her place in a blind date, you were skeptical but wanted to help her out, accepting the request in the end. Neither of you had any idea what was in store for you once you arrived at the venerated Chateux de Joel Robuchon.

Note: Ship and reader requested by Every.man.at.midnight on Ao3!!! Also, this reader insert is… definitely a more larger than life one. Like, it’s probably not really relatable, but hopefully it’s still one that can suspend your beliefs. The reasoning for this is that I wanted to take into consideration the type of person Best Jeanist is, and this is what I came up with and what felt most intuitive to me. Also, I’m tempted to write a sequel or turn this into a series? Just because it’s … so… fantastical and extra? Let me know what you guys think. Hopefully I didn't butcher his character since this is my first time writing for him.

Theme Song: Tell Me Baby - Red Hot Chili Peppers

Reader: Female (requested)

Words: 2908

Tell me baby, what's your story…

Working as a makeup artist was one of your greatest pleasures. You got to mess around with different palettes, special effects, and meet people from all walks of life. Professionally, you were employed by one of the top news stations, which gave you the opportunity to work on celebrities and heroes. And for fun, you ran a special effects channel with a fairly sizeable following and sponsorships from various makeup brands. Life was pretty solid and good, though you were too busy to focus on every aspect of it. With your work and social life booming, it was only natural that your personal and romantic life were neglected.

“Say, (Y/N), are you free tomorrow night?” one of the news anchors asked as you worked on her makeup. Her eyes were closed and brows raised, so you couldn’t make out much of an expression as you applied some shadows, but you two were fairly close and you could be honest with her. In the workplace, she was basically your best friend.

“Yeah. Why do you ask?”

“Well… could I ask you for a huuuge favor? Please? I’ll seriously owe you one.”

You paused from her makeup, cuing the newswoman to open her eyes and look at you. She was faced with a somewhat worried and skeptical expression as you inquired more.

“What trouble did you get into?”

“It’s not trouble!” she quickly defended herself before sighing and closing her eyes so you could resume your work. “It’s just… One of my friends set me up on a date, but I’ve been talking to this guy from SVME a lot lately and I think we’re hitting it off really well, so... I don’t really wanna go on this date. But, you’re single and pretty and talented and, like… I think that whoever my friend’s got waiting for this date is gonna be a great person and maybe even a good fit for you. It’s someone she’s trying to set me up with, so… it’s not like I mean any disrespect, y’know? I’m just asking for a favor, one girl to another. I’ll make it up to you, I promise. Please?”

You listened to her argument, meticulously applying false lashes and then blending it into the eyeliner so it looked flawless. Taking a step back, you looked at her face to make sure it was symmetrical and up to standard.

“You have no idea who the guy is?” you sighed, giving away that you were seriously considering it. You wanted to help her out, and it’d been about a year since your last date because you were just sick of bothering when you had other things to do, like manage a successful channel on top of working.

“Not at all. She just promised I wouldn’t be disappointed. So… hopefully you won’t be either?”

With a sigh, you told her to open her mouth so you could apply lipstick. “...Alright,” you agreed. “What are the details?” She went into everything she knew- time, location, and expectations- and promised to reimburse you for any money you’d potentially have to spend. You nodded, simply noting everything.

The following night came, and you gave yourself a final look over before leaving. Your makeup was perfect and set, you weren’t worried about your lipstick fading or distorting with dinner, the dress you picked was elegant, flattering, and trendy, and the heels you wore were both fashionable and comfortable. You were aces. The friend you were doing this favor for sent you a car that would take you to your destination, and without time for a moment’s hesitance, you were chauffeured to the rendezvous.

From the moment you arrived, you were treated no less than royalty. As soon as the car pulled up, a valet opened the door for you. “Bonsoir, Mademoiselle. Bienvenue au Chateux de Joel Robuchon,” (“Good evening, Miss. Welcome to Chateux de Joel Robuchon,”) he greeted you with a bow, gesturing towards the western inspired establishment with an immaculate white glove. You smiled politely at him with a small nod of your head, stepping out gracefully. The valet closed the door behind you, the car leaving a second after, and you were left with a small walk across the elegant courtyard to the four-story building. When you arrived, the doors were opened for you once again, and you were greeted with a fusion of elegant French and Japanese hospitality and grace.

It really was like being in a castle. A host came to meet you and took your jacket, while a hostess guided you to the second level where the restaurant and lounge operated. She asked what name the reservation was under, and you gave her your friend’s. With a smile, the hostess suggested you help yourself to a drink at the Rouge Bar while you waited, as you were the first to arrive. Finding that agreeable, you were escorted to an elegant, more than fully equipped and stocked lounge. It was dark with warm, golden lighting that made the red walls something sensual and alluring, rather than loud or intimidating. Black leather furniture beckoned you to take a seat wherever you pleased, and you were promptly met by a waiter offering a drink menu. You ordered a light wine to sip at while you waited for your mystery date, and gazed around the bar. At least it was going to be easy for him to figure out who he was meeting- you were the only lady waiting alone.

As you reclined and sipped, you noticed some of the patrons’ behaviors change. Eyes were skirting to and from the entrance and voices hushed themselves. You managed to hear a woman whisper to another, “Oh my goodness, is that… That’s Best Jeanist!” The temptation to turn around and see the hero for yourself was great, but your dignity and pride were greater, so you didn’t flinch or move to follow everyone else’s gaze. Bringing the wine glass to your lips, you tasted it once again before noticing the curious eyes beginning to fall on you.

“Miss (Y/N)?”

You knew that voice- you knew it from countless interviews, and having met the hero once when he appeared on your news channel. Of all the makeup artists, you were the lucky one who got to powder and touch up his already faultness face. With fluid timing, you blinked while gracefully turning your head to the speaker, eyes opening with an almost hypnotic look. A single green eye received yours, its match hidden beneath fastidiously combed and treated blond hair. His expression was covered by a square silk scarf that was both tasteful and contemporary, complimenting his navy three piece suit. It was no wonder this man was at the forefront of men’s fashion.

“Best Jeanist.” You acknowledged him by his hero name, a calm and sweet smile on your lips. Although you couldn’t see it, you hoped he was smiling from the way the corners of his eyes seemed to just barely move. The hero bowed to you, his hand extended to help you stand, creating a scene that was almost impossible to believe- both to you and those spectating. Delicately, you lifted your hand from the wine glass and placed your fingertips into his palm. With nimble finesse, his fingers curled behind yours, thumb gently crossing over your knuckles as you rose to your feet, and then respectfully let go as you thanked him.

Your thoughts raced as you two were escorted to your table. How could your friend pass this up? On top of that, how did she not know that she was going on a date with Best Jeanist? And who was her friend that was able to convince the No. 3 Pro Hero to even go on a blind date? You had so many questions that were going to be answered the next time you saw her.

A new elegance welcomed you as you two entered Joel Robuchon Restaurant. Dreamy gold lighting and draperies warmed the walls while black dominated everything else. Tables were blanketed in a silky black cloth, their legs just as dark and matching the chairs that framed them. Polished and shining black vases and centerpieces decorated the tables while the flowers, accents, and plates were a stark and contrasting white. It was beautiful and even surreal- especially for a first date, set up or not.

Agreeing on the 6-course specialty menu and a bottle of wine to share, the date began smoothly. You both expressed your preferences and were pleasantly surprised to share some similar tastes, needing to compromise on very little. Starting off this way allowed an immediate familiarity to develop between you two, the conversation becoming more natural and effortless as a result. He made you smile and you made him laugh, all before the bread basket arrived. Even though you were sitting across from the revered Fiber Hero, you didn’t feel any pressure or unease. It honestly felt like you two were on the same page, the same level, in the same ballpark, and just… equal. Already, there was a foundation of mutual respect laid down, and he even asked you to call him by his name as you two worked through the six plates, taking your time and getting to know each other.

“So how is your recovery coming along?” you asked him in a soft voice with genuine concern and interest. Everyone knew the damage he took from All For One and that he would be resting for an unknown but extended period of time.

“Quite well,” he answered professionally. Although he’d been looking at you all night, his gaze became a bit sharper at your question. It wasn’t that he was soured by it, but you could tell it was something he was fairly guarded about. He was able to walk and move, yet there must have been more limitations than before.

“Is that the newsroom answer?”

The hero chuckled at your perceptiveness, making you hope again that he was smiling afterwards. Your imagination was vividly curious of what it would look like, but that was something even you weren’t bold enough to ask yet.

Offering your own smile to him, you carried on gracefully, unaffected by the closed off topic. “I’m glad that you’ve recovered as much as you already have, and look forward to seeing you back in action,” you supported. “I think only the greatest heroes could survive and recover from such grave injuries. It really shows you have so much you want to live for.” Your sincerity softened that steeled look he gave you, and eased away the faint tension that came with it.

“Thank you, (Y/N).” His voice was casual again. Even with the composed and dignified way that he spoke, you were able to pick up the differences between his relaxed and formal speeches. “Experiences like this are rather humbling, for better or worse. They remind us all that heroes, too, are human.”

“Had you forgotten that you were, Hakamata?” There was something coquettish in your voice, bolstered by the confidence you had in catching the nuances he expected to slip through.

“It’s easy to forget,” he responded, meeting your coyness with his own. “I am greatly honored to be a widely received hero and icon- as accessible as the availability and handiness of denim itself. Such responsibilities require a near superhuman balance in life.” The way he spoke of his popularity was anything but arrogant, showing that he took this all very seriously. It wasn’t simply a job or profession- being a hero was an identity that everything else conformed to. “In its own way, the time necessary to heal is a kindness.”

His words were enchanting with the way he spoke. Each syllable was magnetic, tempting you closer to the person across from you not as a hero, but as a man. Your conversation was scarcely interrupted by the restaurant’s staff, plates coming and going as if phantoms were providing them. In this moment, there was only him in your field of view. “How so?”

“It’s the only reason a moment like this is possible right now,” he explained with a foreign glint in his eye. You couldn’t help but wonder if that was what it would look like if eyes could smile. “While we’ve met once before, it was brief and strictly business. Wouldn’t you agree this time is a benevolent result of my injuries?”

Your lips pulled back as you chuckled softly, your cheeks lifting with a smile as you blushed and averted your eyes. For the first time tonight, he charmed you, and he did it without relying on fame or prestige. Seeing a break in the conversation, the attentive wait staff approached your table, retrieving the empty plates and bowls, pouring the last of the bottle of wine for you two, and then presenting you with a dessert trolley that could rival entire bakeries and chocolatiers. An espresso list accompanied the sweets, and you two ended up with the same order, save for a minor detail in your truffles. One was accented by raspberries, and the other by thin orange slices.

“Only in part. This was also the work of our friends, wasn’t it?” you teased him with a mirthful smirk.

“That’s true,” he agreed, explicitly acknowledging for the first time that this was a blind date. “However, no amount of planning could make two unwilling people meet in circumstances like this. Close encounters are perhaps the strongest reminders that, as humans, we seek a love and intimacy beyond praise and fame. And if I may be candid, (Y/N), I’m honored to have been recommended to you. It may seem silly, but… I do place trust and faith in a close friend’s suggestion.”

Once again you blushed, closing your eyes this time as you took a sip of your cappuccino. He was more of a gentleman than you expected- and you certainly had high expectations for such an exemplary hero.

“I take it you’re skeptical of those you meet on your own?” The question was rhetorical. “I suppose you’d have to be; there must be a plentitude of people with ulterior motives seeking your attention and affection.” You placed your cup in its saucer, your hands coming together in your lap afterwards as you sat ladylike with a sweet smile on your face despite the seriousness of your words. “For what it’s worth, I had no idea who I’d meet tonight. When you offered your hand, it felt like a dream- this whole date has.”

At last, you could tell with certainty that Best Jeanist was actually smiling beneath that silk scarf. His handsome expression was as joyous as it was composed, and you were proven very wrong in believing he couldn’t become more of a heartthrob.

“If we continued meeting, would I be able to convince you reality was better than a dream?”

You were stunned by the smoothness of his words. As a rule of thumb, you were exceptionally skeptical of charismatic men, but you made an allowance for the one across from you tonight. While others came off as womanizers and playboys, Hakamata seemed knightly and trustworthy. After all, the whole of Tokyo trusted him with their lives- including you.

“I would love to find out.”

As you two finished dining, the bill was directly handed to the hero. You offered to pay, or at least cover part of it, but his kind eyes and voice told you there was no need, and the expenses were already taken care of. He took the bill, and you could make out that it seemed like some sort of letter before he folded it and slipped it into his breast pocket. Standing, he opened his hand to you once again and guided you to take hold of his arm as he escorted you downstairs. You two walked with a closeness that evolved over the course of your extravagant dinner, and he waited patiently for you as you received your jacket before escorting you outside.

Before getting close enough to signal the valet to open the door, Best Jeanist stopped with you. His arm shifted so that your hand fell into his as you turned to face him. “May I see you again, (Y/N)?”

Your eyes gazed into his and noticed that his hair was pulled back just enough to allow you to see them both. You couldn’t help but grin a bit widely, your teeth just barely showing as you nodded. “Yes,” you answered in what only came out as a whisper. That unmistakable joy gleamed in his eyes at your response, and you two exchanged personal contact information. When it was all saved, he finished walking you to the familiar car that awaited. Just as you were about to sink into your seat, your date brought your hand towards his lips, his other coming up to the scarf and lowering it just enough so he could give it a proper kiss, covering his face afterwards as he brought his eyes to yours.

“Thank you for this wonderful night. I look forward to the next.”

You blushed as you thanked him in return, the door closing soon after and the driver taking you back home. This was a night you’d never forget, and the idea of future ones with him quickened your heart.

… You’re so lovely, are you lonely?

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crazlikafox3 · 5 years ago

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Watching Detective Pikachu a second time observations:

How the hell did a Ditto learn how to text perfect English? We always knew it copied its target’s abilities, but in the case of humans, did that include texting? Human speech? Medical science?! To what extent can a Ditto’s Transform reach?

On that note, why didn’t Ditto just transform into Mewtwo and then get taken over with the neuro-thing-a-ma-bobber? Ditto is basically confirmed to be a failed Mew clone--and can copy almost any ability to some extent--did it not have the Mystery DungeonTM human-soul-into-Pokemon capabilities?

Near the end where people’s souls are being planted into Pokemon, there’s a Machamp in the background examining their own muscles; looking quite pleased with themselves. I see you and you are valid.

Its implied that Tim’s dad was hired to locate and capture Mewtwo after fleeing the Kanto region. How the hell did a Detective and his Pikachu manage to pull that off? I’m assuming it had something to do with the electro-trapper do-dads, but... can you imagine a detective sleuthing his way into finding and somehow CAPTURING Mewtwo? Did they talk it out or something?

If even one giant Torterra from that garden uses Earthquake are we just dead? I think we got bigger priorities than finding your dad, Tim.

Also--Tim meets up with Mewtwo, lead by the world’s squeakiest bulba-bois, a fair distance from the Torterra Garden. Thanks for the heals, Mewtwo--but where the hell were you during that whole mess!? Mewtwo knows the realest threat when they see it.

The dude that Jigglypuff put to sleep in the Hi-Hat Cafe has been knocked out for two nights straight now at the same table. Are they alright?

In the credits, there’s a listing of songs and their composers. A crew of people worked on a song called “Jigglypuff”. If we’re assuming that that’s THE song from the Pokemon anime--can we really say in good faith that this song needed a lyricist?

Considering how terrible Detective Pikachu was at reading Mr. Mime’s gestures--how exactly did Tim’s dad understand anything he was saying as his informant?

Is Mr. Mime okay?

I appreciate the fact that the Machamp in the beginning can be seen redirecting traffic due to a sleeping Snorlax blocking the road. Machamp should be able to lift Snorlax out of the way and then-some given its superpower strength--but this scene was too good to pass up as is and is better this way.

It’s funny that compared to the giant water serpent and fire-breathing pseudo-dragon, the yellow rodent with the cap still has the highest advantage here.

Does this city have a Pokemon Center? There may not be Pokemon battles (legally) in Ryme City, but I really gotta wonder--shit happens--especially with glass shards in this movie--serious yikes.

For that matter, does this city have a Nurse Joy? Officer Jenny? Only saw male police officers on the scene. Are there CRIMES in RYME city?! It has a detective agency, so I suppose that was a given.

If Pokemon trainers exist--and the anime is implied to be a real thing in Ryme City’s world--are gym leaders real? Like do Brock and Misty exist somewhere in this live-action universe with cartoon-counterparts premiering in the same universe’s television?

Is Ash even real? The Detective Pikachu 3DS game made a reference to his existence--does he exist? Is he tangible?

Does his long lost Butterfree exist somewhere in this world? Can we detective our asses onto finding them and fixing a lot of painful childhoods? Are we following the continuity of the anime or manga? Is Professor Oak real? Ask him what his grandson’s name is and we’ll know for sure! Wait--dammit--that’s a dead end if I’ve ever seen one. The world may never know...

Poke Floats!

Shout out to the Braviary bringing the construction workers their tools/lunch--real MVP.

“Angels With Filthy Souls” (x) is playing in Tim’s dad’s apartment when he enters--the classic scene that many of us remember from Home Alone. Does Kevin McCallister exist somewhere in the Pokemon universe?

Cocaine, cancer, and climate change!

While there has only ever been one Mewtwo to know Healing Pulse (from Pokemon Hills in Unova [Genesect and the Legend Awakened]), it at the very least confirms Mewtwo can technically learn it... somehow. I don’t know if Recovery counts as a healing ability beyond only self-application--had to heal Pikachu somehow.

There’s a blimp in the likeness of Mew during the parade--if people know what Mew looks like down to its color and appearance, how big a deal is it really to find/discover it?

Would anyone take a selfie with Mew? Is Pokemon Snap trendy?

For that matter, statues of Arceus, Dialga, and Palkia are smack-dab in the one guy’s office... people just know what Poke-God looks like, huh?

Interesting that Tim proved his dad’s partner Pokemon was alive, but that wasn’t enough to convince the head detective that MAYBE his dad was too. “No one could survive a crash like that”... except for his Pikachu, I guess, but we’ll just ignore that blaring fact for now.

How DID Mewtwo even know Tim’s dad had a son? Seriously--I wanna be in the room where he and Mewtwo conversed with one another. You can’t tell me they didn’t talk during their first encounter! Give me quirky detective vs. demi-god--I demand this scene on my desk before the next 25 years. I’ve waited this long already! Let’s go round 2!

...can a giant Torterra be caught in a Pokeball? They can, right? Mega yikes.

#detective pikachu

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un-tide · 6 years ago

Text

Rupi Kaur Taught Me DIY

(TW for mentions of sexual assault.)

Last year, I wrote a short essay on why I hate Rupi Kaur. Not just why I hate her work, but why I hate her as a writer. Maybe even as a person. I had never (and still haven’t) met this woman, which should have been my first clue that there was something underlying these emotions that probably wasn’t fair to her. But I was comfortable in my hate, even more so when I could articulate everything that was wrong with her in a way that was logical and academic and had nothing to do with me—so much so that I was unable to see that my disdain for this woman did, in fact, have almost everything to do with me.

Growing up as a young girl whose first love was books, I found myself torn between worlds. On my top shelf, I kept some of my favorite series—Percy Jackson, Pendragon, Artemis Fowl. These were books my parents approved of, holding imaginative, fantastical worlds and morals of bravery and friendship. Under my bed were my other favorites—the ones my parents didn’t approve of—The Clique and The Princess Diaries. These kinds of stories were adventurous in a way that was relatable to me, with the struggles of teenage friendship and the perils of mean girls, but they did skip over many of the lessons I got from my more “gender-neutral” books, and they did not have fantastical or imaginative worlds unless they came with a borderline-abusive romance.

Early on, I learned another kind of lesson: as a woman, I will constantly have to choose between books that tell stories that are inspiring and creative, and books that tell stories about people like me.

When I first heard about a young, South Asian, feminist, second-generation immigrant woman who wrote openly about her identity and her story, it was if my childhood prayers had been answered. It seemed too good to be true—I am also a young, South Asian, feminist, second-generation immigrant woman. If I was ever going to find a poet I could relate to, Rupi Kaur was it. Finally, there was poetry being written by people like me for people like me, and I didn’t have to choose between quality and relatability anymore. Imagine, then, how it felt to open up one of her most famous books and read this: “how is it so easy for you/ to be kind to people he asked / milk and honey dripped from my lips as i answered / cause people have not /been kind to me.”

I was dumbfounded. Surely I had picked up the wrong book. This was a book of 2014’s 25 saddest tweets, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Milk and Honey was somewhere else. Where was the symbolism? The wordplay? The rhyme or meter? Even the line breaks had no apparent significance. And above those basic elements of poetry—where was the deeper meaning? It’s a sad conversation, but one that, rather than sitting in a book of supposed poetry, would fit better on a teenager’s Tumblr post, or somewhere else you could read it very quickly, frown a little, and move on. And I did just that.

I returned the book to the stack of fifty just like it, and from Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey I re-learned that same lesson I learned as a child: good books do not tell your story. Move on.

I won’t pretend that my knowledge of poetry comes from more a few college classes, but if there’s one thing I learned, it’s that understanding a poem takes time. Poems hold secrets—alternate meanings and obscure allusions—that you can only discover when you read them again and again. Their meanings can be argued and refuted using symbols and allusions to books written one-hundred years earlier and a comma placed here instead of there. Sure, over-embellished poetry sometimes does hide more than it reveals, especially to the young or less educated reader, but Rupi Kaur’s work strips an idea of all layers beneath its surface.

Some call Kaur’s style accessible, but I call bullshit. Accessibility is about delivering complex concepts while breaking the barriers that typically surround them, whether those barriers be based on education, class, gender, sexuality, or race. Tossing a sad thought you had in the shower to a young audience does not break barriers to feminist or survivor literature of any kind.

On a personal level, I do hold some empathy for Kaur. Her poems attempt to address difficult topics like heartbreak and abuse, and I imagine she has been through some trauma that many women are familiar with, myself included. The meaning of the poem I read in the bookstore was not lost on me: sometimes people are kind because they are already acquainted with cruelty. But simply stating something true or shocking does not make it well-crafted, and it certainly does not make it poetry. Much of Kaur’s success comes from stating the obvious in the most plain way possible, taking a complicated idea and hollowing it out into a pretty painted shell.

To put it simply, Kaur’s work is shallow. It seems to lack effort as much as it does depth, and despite her education, it displays little mastery of imagery or symbolism or poetic style. It is less poetry than it is bite-size food-for-thought possibly conceived in a trendy hipster cafe and posted on Instagram as the caption for an aesthetically pleasing but disappointingly grimace-inducing over-sweet cup of milk and honey. Kaur touches the surface of ideas before shying away like a cat from water, and in doing so fails to teach her audience of young women and girls—many of whom might have fallen in love with poetry had they not been alienated by mainstream misogynistic and white-centric classics—how to analyze and write complex ideas that are pivotal to their recovery, their self-esteem, and their survival.

If my school had taught more female-friendly literature when I was in high school, I wouldn’t have begun to hate reading. The books we read that actually included women were traumatic at worst and voyeuristic at best, and my teachers seemed oblivious, perhaps simply starstruck by the stubbornly unwavering fame and brilliance of the classics. Nevermind that 1984 featured a protagonist with a burning desire to rape the book’s only notable female character. Nevermind that the sexual liberalism in Brave New World had my elderly, white, male substitute teaching us that the World State was—despite its female citizens’ complete lack of reproductive autonomy and a suspicious absence of female Alphas—a feminist society. Nevermind that The Handmaid’s Tale, despite actually being a feminist novel, depicts a misogynistic hellscape a little too realistic for comfort.

The older I grew, the more it seemed that very few of the classics were written with women in mind, and almost none of them seemed to be written for women’s benefit, education, or—god forbid—enjoyment.

Disappointed by the classics, I returned to popular fiction as a teenager, desperate for a story with a protagonist I could relate to, or at the very least did not want to strangle every time they opened their mouth. At my local flea market, which I frequented every first Saturday of the month, I had come across a well-stocked used-book stall. While making my way through The Princess Diaries series dollar by dollar, I stumbled upon a book that I can only imagine was placed in flea market stall that day by the Devil himself just so he could have a laugh: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I won’t give away any spoilers, but I’ll give you one guess what happens halfway through. I am not ashamed to say I stopped reading anything other than The Princess Diaries for some time.

I wish I could say my high school experience was unique. There is a profound need for contemporary literature and poetry that not only does not alienate women, but caters to us specifically. We deserve to read books that do not hurt us more than we already are hurting, that address our trauma but don’t weaponize it against us. We deserve to witness other women powerfully and passionately explore and understand our shared experiences and shared pain. We deserve to learn how to explore these ideas for ourselves. The feminist subjects of Rupi Kaur’s poetry deserve nuance, because the more precisely we are able to articulate our experiences and ideas and traumas, the more understood they—and we—become. Much like I was as a young child, the girls devouring Rupi Kaur’s work are still scrambling for crumbs. She had the opportunity to feed a generation of girls starved for poetry free of white men’s hunger, and she didn’t.

Kaur, at first, seemed to me to be nothing new in a world of successful yet seemingly talentless women who continuously fail and profit off of the next generation of starving girls (the Kardashian-Jenner clan comes to mind). But only on my own journey to becoming a writer did I come to understand that Rupi Kaur might be different, that she might actually be trying very hard--that she might be hiding something. As a reader, I never understood that a fact that I am painfully aware of now: writing makes you vulnerable. The more I wrote, the more I began to realize that what I perceived as lack of depth was, perhaps, a terribly relatable inability to be open.

It’s what I hate the most about writing—displaying yourself to the world when your childhood scrapes are still scabbing over and everyone is certain to see under your skin. I’ve never been good at being vulnerable, which makes me a reluctant writer on a good day and a liar on the rest. People do weird things when they’re afraid, like write mediocre poetry or channel all their anger at the world towards someone they’ve never met. I could not do, or at least have not yet done, what I ask of Rupi Kaur. What would I tell her, I imagine, if I ever met her? I could deflect: “Hey Rupi, your poetry about your suffering needs some work.” Or I could be honest: “Please, Rupi, tell my story for me.”

Because isn’t that what I always wanted: a story just like mine, read to me like a mother would read to her child at bedtime, a story about people like me that teaches me I’m not alone. I had waited for representation so long that when it finally arrived, it felt like a betrayal when it fell so far short. I don’t hate Rupi Kaur because her work is bad—I hate her because her work is bad and there are almost no other options. I hate her because she is my generation’s standard for how to write stories like hers and mine, and it does not do them justice. I hate her because I wanted her to do what I didn’t yet have the courage to do myself.

Maybe I’m projecting; maybe Rupi Kaur is exactly as shallow as her poetry suggests and no amount of openness will make it better. It doesn’t change that I expected someone else to be the writer of my story simply because we have a lot in common. I wasn’t fair to Rupi Kaur when I wrote my 300-word-long-rant about theintolerable injusticeshe was inflicting on young women and girls—which I posted, and I’m aware of the irony, on Tumblr and Instagram. I placed the burden of my vulnerability on her shoulders.

I stand by my criticisms of Rupi Kaur, but I also owe her some gratitude, because she taught me another lesson: I can’t rely on other people to tell my story, or stories about people like me. I can’t rely on other people to fill a void in literature or poetry or to fix any other problem I insist needs solving.

If you want something done right, or even done at all, sometimes you just have to do it yourself, even if—especially if—that means opening up about experiences you’d rather keep hidden. If Rupi Kaur is any indication, the bar for young women’s contemporary poetry and literature is evidently on the floor, which, on the bright side, means that any woman who has the courage to openly, honestly, and vulnerably tell her own story—even if she gets ripped to shreds by mean girls like me—will still be doing all of us a favor.

#disclaimer i wrote half of a draft on the train to school and then the final draft the night before it was due #so its not exactly mm.. polished #mine #words #mine words...

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donewithjeon · 6 years ago

Text

Downfall [23]

Characters: Jungkook x Reader

Word Count: 10,206

Genre: Assassin AU

Given the current circumstances that you’re in, you find what you’re about to do to be completely unnecessary—childish, even. But what can you say?

Old habits die hard.

Waking up at a decent time for a change, all thanks to Hoseok’s adjustment to the concoction’s effectiveness, the first thing you do is check your phone for anything you may have missed. You are greeted with no notifications on the screen, which means that there are no orders for the time being—which then means that there is no need for you to check in to headquarters right away.

This is good news for you, since you have a special errand to run.

You take your time to get ready for your outing before heading down to the apartment complex’s garage, where a company car is waiting to be borrowed with one destination in mind.

Garosu-gil.

To be honest, there are many other places below the Han you could have chosen to run your errand, but you have always been partial to this area. It’s not particularly close to your living quarters, but the street is packed with a wide variety of shops all conveniently placed in close concurrence to one another.

While Garosu-gil is aptly named for the ginkgo trees planted along the streets, the area is mostly known for its trendy boutiques and popular cafés. In general, all of the stores fall in the upscale category, making it not too budget-friendly, but to you, this is a good thing. It means that there are less people around compared to other popular destinations such as Hongdae or Myeongdong, which means you can carry out your task with minimal hassle and unnecessary contact with crowds.

On top of that, it’s still a bit early in the day, so not too many of the establishments are open for business yet. Usually, this would be an undesirable matter for visitors shopping in the area, but it’s not like you’re here to go on a shopping spree for fancy dresses and purses.

You’re here for one reason only, and you’re able to easily meet your goal with the first shop you see.

The elevator doors slide closed in front of you as you stand inside the confined space with a simple, white box in your hand. Your morning detour didn’t take very long to complete, and now you’re back at headquarters with the feeling of regret already starting to sink in. You stare at the panel of buttons, each one representing a floor of this lofty building, but none of them are activated yet. You eye a particular one that you know will lead to the infirmary and recovery center, but you can’t bring yourself to push the number.

You were told to stay away, after all.

You find yourself in a dilemma as your mind starts racing over what should be a simple decision compared to many others you had to make during missions and urgent situations. The elevator doesn’t budge from its place on the first level, taunting you with the fact that it has no destination to go to until you make that decision. In order to prevent yourself from overthinking things even further, your free hand instinctively reaches forward to give the number 17 a light tap. The button emits a glow immediately, and soon, the elevator spurs into motion.

This is probably the best bet, and hopefully the least embarrassing route.

Once you make it out of your existential elevator and past the guard on duty who always seems to be less than enthusiastic in his demeanor, you place a few knocks on the acquainted wooden door before letting yourself in.

Jin’s office is neat and organized as always with the layout staying the same as it has always been—you doubt he has the time and energy to redecorate. Your supervisor is sitting in his usual spot at his desk, a few stacks of papers laid out in front of him as his hands hover over the keyboard of his computer. He suspends whatever task he is in the middle of when you walk up to him, and he greets you with a pleasant grin.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“I have a favor to ask,” you start off, making your way to the front of his desk. Jin glances at the box in your hands and his eyes light up in recognition of what the contents may be.

“Come to butter me up?” You chuckle at his reaction, but promptly shake your head.

“No, it’s not that,” you deny, carefully placing the box on a section of the wooden surface before you that is free of his possessions. “Can you give this to Jungkook for me?”

At the sound of your request, Jin’s gaze flits over to the side of his desk where his calendar sits among a few other items. “Is it September already?” he wonders aloud, a pensive expression appearing on his face for just a moment. “Time really flies,” he exhales like a sigh before turning his attention back towards you. “I will make sure this gets to him.”

“Thanks.” You respond to his reassuring answer with a smile. With no other business with your superior, you grant him a curt nod and proceed to exit his room, knowing fully well that he’ll carry out his word no matter how trivial the favor appears to be.

Just as you thought, you can always count on Jin.

You have to say, you couldn’t agree more with his sentiment about time. Every year seems to go by quicker than the last, yet you can’t say that they’re going by with more ease. It just feels like all the worries and problems from the previous years are stacking atop one another, only disappearing out of sight once they’re buried by the current year’s concerns.

You want to say that things were simpler back in the day, but things were never really simple for you. You’ve already accepted the truth that they will most likely never be as long as you’re alive.

If anything, things are only going to get far more complicated.

A blink of light diverts your attention from the target in front of you, causing you to pause in the middle of practicing your pistol aim. You spent a bit of time before this in the armory, sharpening your weapons of choice, but the task of knife maintenance has become second nature by now; it wasn’t quite enough to preoccupy your mind, let alone serve as the distraction you needed, so you resorted to hitting the shooting range to polish up your skills.

When you glance down at the tray in front of you, you not only see that it’s already the early evening, but your phone’s screen has been awakened by a new notification—it’s a message from Jin. You put your handgun down to pick up the device instead, unlocking it in order to read what he has sent you.

Office in 10.

There’s no doubt about this one—it must be a new job.

You’re prompt with clearing up your station, working at an elevated pace so that you can make it in the amount of time granted to you. Thankfully, all you have to do is head over to the elevator, and a brief lift to the 17th floor leads you right back to where you were this morning as you approach the office entrance with two minutes to spare.

The moment you walk inside though, not only do you notice Yoongi sitting comfortably on one of the couches, but you also meet eyes with Hoseok who is across from him, although his posture is not nearly as lax. The latter greets you with a soft smile as you enter the room, and while the gesture should offer you comfort, the presence of your team’s weapons specialist only means one thing.

It’s going to be a big one tonight.

Once everyone arrives, and it truly is everyone currently active on the team, Jin’s explanation of the mission gets underway. It starts off like most of the briefings regularly do as your supervisor gives a general overview of what the job calls for. This time, it’s an infiltration mission, but the main goal is not to exterminate the enemies. Instead, it’s to destroy the information that they stole from your organization.

“The part of the system that was attacked was corrupted after the info was taken, and while that brought the issue to our attention, any clues that might have been there are lost with the data. We do have a lead, but I don’t have further intel for you guys regarding the building’s layout. Unfortunately, the entire structure is off the grid.”

“How did you find out about it then?” you ask Jin, always the one to contribute the most questions no matter their relevance.

“Our informant downstairs—the one who tipped us off about the church as well. He’s proven to be quite useful.”

“You’re welcome,” Jimin proudly proclaims out of the blue.

You turn your head to give him a quirk of the eyebrow, which is more of a reaction than what Jin awards him by dismissing the comment completely and continuing to fill you in on the mission’s details.

The bad news with the structure being off the grid is that you won’t have anything to go off of in order to organize a break in. The good news is that this detail most certainly confirms that this is the hideout you’re looking for—not just any old place would be hidden so well.

You don’t want to jinx anything with your over-enthusiastic thoughts, but it feels as if things are finally going somewhere with this investigation; it’s like the map of the big picture is slowly being filled out. No one has said it outright yet, but it seems as though there is a high chance that the man sitting in the dungeon, the one whom Jimin boastfully got intel from, is the mole your organization has been searching for. That would explain how this person possesses all this crucial information, but the next question you would be concerned with as the organization is why—but perhaps that question has already been answered, as well.

It’s difficult to keep up with the advancement of an operation of this magnitude, especially with the compartmentalization of data, but as long as you are witnessing progress, you can’t complain.

What you can criticize are the details of tonight’s mission.

You find it odd that you’re being ordered to go and physically take care of the stolen information. Usually, situations such as this one are handled digitally in a technological battle of sorts. Actually, the more you think about it, you don’t recall many incidents where the organization’s data ever got stolen—it rarely happens due to the ineffable security systems that protect anything and everything the company wants to keep under lock and key.

Another detail raising your curiosity is that you aren’t going to retrieve the pilfered data—you’re going to destroy it. The evidence is valuable enough to go to extreme lengths to make sure it doesn’t get into or stay in the wrong hands, but apparently, it’s not worth the effort of trying to salvage it. That alone seems off-putting, but you’re sure there are other specifics you are not aware of.

With every passing day, the concept of blind faith is being taken to a whole new level.

You’re used to it by now, as irked as it may make you, and while you appreciate Jin’s candidness with your team when it comes to divulging some fine points of your missions, you can’t help but think of it as a double-edged sword—what he gives you is never satisfying, but it’s just enough to pique your interest to make you start questioning things.

Your job tonight is to infiltrate the enemy building, destroy the stolen evidence, and kill everyone on site—but the kicker is that the last step won’t be done by your regular means.

It will be done by Hoseok’s means.

Once the briefing is finished, the team splits apart in the usual manner to prepare for the mission. Most of the others go with Hoseok to help him gather and load tonight’s ammunition into the van. As for you, the armory you were just in before this meeting looks very promising, not because you need to acquire anything from there per se, but because your brother is heading towards that direction all by his lonesome.

Why you guys are going as far as using explosives to complete the job is beyond your comprehension—in almost all cases, bombs have only been brought in to seal the eradication goods, not people, especially when the good old tactic of going in and getting your hands dirty has been working perfectly fine until now. You would brush it off as being a cautious or safe move due to the unknown nature of the location, but to be quite honest, any time Hoseok’s involved, things tend to get blown out of proportion.

“Don’t you think something seems off?”

No time is squandered in posing your query once you are far enough out of earshot of the others. Namjoon stops in his tracks in the hallway and turns around as you stride up next to him. He doesn’t say anything, but judging by his face, he’s waiting for you to continue your thought, if not just to humor you for the time being.

You have to admit, you gave your brother a whole lot of grief throughout the years by arguing about many of the orders you were given, but this time, you’re not looking to pick a fight—you just need to confirm your suspicions.

“If this is our information that they stole, shouldn’t we be extracting it instead of destroying it? Jin said it himself that it was taken and wiped from our database.”

The look Namjoon gives you is no longer one of tolerance, but it’s a strained stare where the growing tension is released only by a sigh escaping past his lips.

“Why do you always feel the need to question every job you’re assigned?” Namjoon retorts in a rather defeated manner, but it’s with good reason, given that he’s the victim of the majority of your gripes and grumbles.

“It just doesn’t make sense.” You furrow your eyebrows as you drift off to your thoughts once more, all but convinced about it all without even needing the secondary support.

Namjoon suddenly takes a step forward to make the distance between you two a little shorter, and as you glance at him, you notice that his demeanor has changed completely. Sometimes you forget just how capable your brother is of being intimidating, but instances like this do well to jog your memory.

“I know that look,” he states lowly with his eyes boring into you with disapproval in a way you always despised. “I’m warning you now—don’t do anything stupid.”

You merely offer him a nod, although you’re not really sure how sincere it comes off as. You’re sure he knows that the meager response will be the best he’ll get out of you for now, even if it’s not necessarily adequate. Still, it appeases your brother for now, making him back off from his stance.

Sure, Namjoon can be an intimidating figure when he wants to be, but regrettably for him, that act stopped working on you when you were 12.

As he walks off to resume his preparations for the mission, you do not continue following him, having fulfilled the initial purpose of doing so. Instead, you head towards the parking garage in order to meet up with the others, your lips pressed together with the words you so badly wanted to say in place of the obliging nod.

No guarantees.

“How does it look on the other side?”

“The same. No guards, no windows, no doors,” you provide in response to Namjoon over the comms.

After a preliminary sweep of the area to scout out any potential points of entry, you end up with nothing once again. This is the case more often than not for most uncharted locations you’re given, but unfortunately for your team, knocking on the front door isn’t a viable option this time around.

“That’s unfortunate.”

It truly is. The drive out to your destination wasn’t exactly short, and the sky has already darkened from dusk to provide you all with the natural camouflage of nightfall. This proved to be useful in your push to your primary positions, but now you’re faced with the predicament that the building is fortified more than you’d like, but not in the way you would expect.

As with many jobs, you find yourself in a rural area near the edge of the city that is occupied by industrial buildings rather than residential ones. It’s a pretty run-down neighborhood filled with warehouses and large storage units, but the biggest reason for the battered state is only because you’re sure that these structures were built over 50 years ago.

Your point of interest is a shabby, two-story building made of red bricks that look to be weathered due to the many decades of exposure to the elements, judging by the crumbling edges—you understand now why it’s off the grid. You’re not even sure if you’ll be needing Hoseok’s explosives, because it looks like a strong gust of wind could blow the place down, contrary to popular belief based on The Three Little Pigs. However, it’s highly unlikely that nature will be that generous, so you’ll just have to take on the role of the Big Bad Wolf and finish the job.

The team broke in half the moment you arrived, with you scanning the western perimeter with Jimin and Taehyung while Namjoon, Yoongi, and Hoseok examined the other side of the building. The findings are inconclusive so far, and things aren’t looking very opportune. While it’s great that the structure is in poor condition, Hoseok also mentioned that it’s too vast for him to guarantee that it’ll completely collapse by only sabotaging the outer walls. That means you must find a way inside to plant the explosives throughout the interior.

That brings you back to square one.

There are a couple of metal doors at the back of the warehouse, but there don’t seem to be any locks or handles for you to even attempt to pick; you can assume that those can only be opened from the inside. There are also a few windows higher up on the adjacent walls, but they are barred and seem to have been for a long time, as displayed by the rust that matches the red of the bricks. There’s no way for any of you to access the roof to even check if there’s a way in through there; the lack of ladders to climb and other buildings nearby to jump from forces you all to persist on the ground floor. There appears to be virtually no way to sneak in.

Well, there is one way.

“Rally to my position. I have an idea.”

And you’re looking right at it.

During your inspection of the building, you noticed several small air vents lining the bottom of each wall that look to be directly connected to the rooms on the other side. While those are far too narrow for any full-grown human to squeeze through, they give you an idea of whether or not the contiguous rooms are currently vacant or not. Some of the vents remain as dark as the area outside, but others have light streaming through the openings of the grilles, giving you the impression that someone very well may be in there.

That’s where the other vent comes in.

You’re staring at another grille located at the back of the building that is covering a much larger opening for the building’s ventilation system. With this one, you’re confident that you’ll be able to fit through easily as long as you get a substantial boost—you’re fairly certain that it’ll put you above the first level and right under the second. The opening coupled with the discovery that the floor vent nearest to this infiltration point shines no light through it instills the belief that you may just be able to pull this off.

“No, that’s an insane idea.”

Of course, that’s only if your team lets you—more specifically, if Namjoon lets you. While he let you explain your grand scheme of crawling through the vent and planting the explosives discreetly, you’re faced with renunciation at the end of your appeal.

“Do you have a better plan?”

Namjoon keeps his mouth shut as he stares at you, as if hoping that his look of denunciation will be enough to change your mind. It’s not often that your team’s strategist is at a loss for words, and you plan on taking advantage of this opportunity.

“This is the only way without going in and taking people out manually—actually, this is the only way in, period. We have to keep a low profile, right? I’m just trying to do what you said and following the assignment given to me.” You’re sure that your brother felt the bite in that last comment, but his expression doesn’t budge.

“What if she suffocates?” you overhear Taehyung ask from the side.

“I’m sure they still have the AC on. It was pretty hot today,” Jimin replies nonchalantly. Clearly, the two of them are in their own world with different priorities steering their conversation.

“We’ll have some of the others follow you through the vent to provide back-up,” Namjoon suddenly extends. You still haven’t gotten a solid green light for the plan, but it seems like he’s trying to negotiate the terms to come to an agreement.

“You guys are going to wake up the entire block if you do that,” you counter, refusing to give him any slack, but it isn’t without purpose.

While the vent is roomy enough for most of you to fit through—some being more cramped for space than others—you decided to volunteer as the sole torchbearer, if the torch were deadly explosives. Even if everyone is able to crawl in, it would not be a smart move to have the entire team clambering around in the ventilation system like a pack of oversized rats. The mission would be over before it even started.

You pride yourself in being the nimblest of your group, and you always have—quiet and quick are two attributes you have honed as your strengths since the beginning of your training. If anyone is going to be able to sneak in, rig the place with the bombs, and get out before Hoseok detonates them remotely, it’s going to be you.

It’s a little burdensome to have the fate of the mission resting solely on your shoulders, but you welcome the responsibility. You’ll take this over the beginning of your time on this team any day.

If you fail to be discreet and somehow manage to alert the enemies, it’s going to be game over. You know you won’t be able to take all the assailants inside the building by yourself if that happens, which is why you just have to be poised in your abilities to not let that happen. If worse comes to worst, you can always hightail it to one of the exits to allow the rest of the team to provide you with backup.

It’s a risk, but you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t one to take them.

Whether it’s due to being pressed for time or being convinced by your brilliant justifications, Namjoon begrudgingly accepts your proposition. After confirming that none of your other teammates have any qualms with your plan, the arrangements to put it in motion begin.

You’re hoisted up by two of the boys in order to get the grille off of the opening. It takes a bit of gentle but determined jostling, but you’re able to free the rectangular grate from the wall without causing a ruckus. You hand the metal panel down to Yoongi below who takes it out of your hands, and Hoseok replaces the item with a black backpack, one of many that you guys brought from headquarters.

While you aren’t exactly sure what’s inside these backpacks, be it C-4, TNT, or some kind of hybrid mixture Hoseok created, it doesn’t matter to you. All you know is that they’re high explosives you need to spread out on at least one of the inner walls of the building, and if your weapons specialist says that this is enough to make the structure go down, it will go down.

The other bags are distributed throughout the team, and while you are carrying out your part of the mission, they will carry out theirs by rigging the exterior supports with the rest of the bombs.

You take the backpack you’re given and place it into the vent’s opening before Hoseok hands you another one, just so the first doesn’t get lonely. You shove that one in as well, and once you’re sure that they’re far enough in, you gesture your teammates with a thumbs up to signal that you’re ready.

Being hoisted even higher, you’re able to get your head and arms into the vent, and with a bit of effort on both your end and the human forklifts’, you twist your body so that you slide into the metal tunnel on your back. One final push has your head nudging the backpacks you sent in front of you, and your legs are all the way inside along with your feet that are currently shoeless—you don’t want any unnecessary bulk causing a racket.

“Give us the signal when you’re all set,” Namjoon instructs, the sound coming through your earpiece distinctly.

“Good luck,” you hear Taehyung add on, his voice lowered to a whisper.

With that, you’re off.

Saying that it’s awkward shimmying through an air vent would be a severe understatement. It’s completely dark and musty in here, and the opening your teammates left you does nothing to bring in illumination. Your sheathed dagger feels uncomfortable under you as if it’s a speed bump at the back of your waist you cannot go over. You’re just glad that this is an industrial building fitted with an industrial ventilation system. Otherwise, you would actually have to be a mouse to fit. The aspect that you need to slide the bags above you as well makes things more difficult to manage, not to mention that you’re trying to be as silent as possible the entire time; it’s definitely enough to make you work up a nervous sweat.

Crawling through a vent with backpacks full of explosives—what could go wrong?

You continue to push on despite the fact that you feel like it’s getting stuffier by the second. You need to find an exit and fast, since it’s hardly realistic to spend more than a few minutes in here; it’s not exactly an efficient mode of sneaking.

You’re surprised at the state of these metal tunnels though. It’s almost a given that they are riddled with dust and other particles, but they’re exceptionally sturdy, seeing that it’s holding your weight without so much as a creak. You suspect that it has been remodeled not too long ago—the condition of it doesn’t match that of the decrepit building itself.

Unfortunately, there’s no more time for you to admire the building’s integrity, because you have found what you’ve been looking for: a way in. You don’t realize that the side of the vent you’re approaching has a different texture until you’re grazing your shoulder with it. A few more investigatory grasps with your hand indicate that this is indeed a grate, and a pretty sizable one at that.

Peering through the cracks, the room looks just as pitch black as the vent you are lying in. You strain your ears for a few seconds for signs of any movement, but all you can hear is the sound of your own breathing and the occasional confirmations through the comms by your other teammates.

Since the coast seems clear, you proceed to try and get a steady grip on the grate as you employ the same motion as before to loosen it out of place. With a bit of coaxing, you feel the grille give way and slip out of place. As you try to push it further out, you notice that only the top two corners are free; the bottom edge remains in place by a hinge that allows the panel to stay attached after swinging down. This helps out your case immensely, since you won’t have to juggle with a giant sheet of metal on your way down. You’re able to extend your upper body just a little more and silently let the grate go so that it rests flat against the wall below the opening.

You halt for a moment just to make sure no one heard you and scan the room once more now that you have a better view. Your eyes are finally starting to adjust to the darkness, and you’re able to examine your surroundings with more clarity. The drop below doesn’t look to be that far at all, with the grille having been installed in the partition rather than the ceiling. There are what appear to be filing cabinets of some sort off to the right side against the wall, and several more are spread throughout the lengthy room to give you the impression that this place is used for storage. The outline of a door is visible on the wall opposite to the one you’re currently at, and from what you can see, it’s closed shut.

Taking into account all the facets you inspected, you determine that this is a feasible way in; all that’s left is to reposition yourself and your belongings in the vent so you can get out.

You do your best to look behind you, or perhaps in this situation it’s above you, so that you can pull the bags in your direction and let them out of the vent first. This will give you more room to maneuver your body when it’s your turn, and it will get rid of the possibility of not being able to reach for the goods if you decide to go first.

Grasping one by the shoulder strap, you carefully scoot back down and press up against the wall contrary to your newfound entryway. You manage to squeeze one of the backpacks past you and through the opening, and with precision and effort, you tenderly lower it down, aiming for the top of the cabinets you spotted earlier. This will hopefully dampen the noise of setting down the explosives by reducing the distance of the drop. Once you feel the weight of the bag come in contact with the surface, you gradually release the strap until it is no longer in your hand.

One down—one to go.

Reaching for the second backpack, you begin pulling it towards you until something catches your eye in the process. As you move the obstructive object from the tunnel and shove it through the opening like the last, your line of sight is finally unrestricted. You unquestionably see something further through the vent, and the fact that you can see something only means one thing.

Light.

The source of it seems to be another grille just like the one you’re near, except there’s a luminous glow seeping in from the one further in—and just like an insect, you’re attracted to it.

Swiftly repeating your tactic of placing the backpack onto the top of the cabinet, you manage to make this one stick the landing as well. It’s now your turn to exit the air vent, but before you can even think about what the best method to do so is, you’re already advancing towards the light source.

You’re indubitably aware of how high the stakes of your actions are, but something inside of you, whether it’s instinct or curiosity, is telling you to go survey this other room. You’ve done well not to make any sounds that may alert the enemies so far, and you’re sure that this will only take a second. You’re just going to have a peek to gather more knowledge about the building and its occupants so that you can better fulfill this mission.

As you close in on the grate, you ensure that your movements remain undetectable and your breathing is silent—the latter may not make much of a difference, but it definitely gives you assurance. Spying through the slots of the grille, you see a room with a very similar layout to the previous one. The door leading into the space is also on the opposite wall, but this one is left wholly open so that you’re given a glimpse of what the hallway outside looks like—it’s honestly just as drab as this area. There are shelves and cabinets in the area that match the monotony of the faded white walls and worn gray floor, but the detail that sets this apart from the other room is that there is someone in here.

You can distinguish a single man sitting at a pretty hefty metal table near the right corner. He is facing the wall that the ventilation system runs through, but he is much too busy with what’s directly in front of him to look up and perceive your presence. An electronic monitor sits atop the blemished surface of the steel, and with the way the man clicks on the wired mouse ever so often, you can assume that the machine he’s engrossed in is a computer.

Taehyung’s luck must have rubbed off on you with just his simple well-wishes.

A sudden urgency comes over you as your mind constructs the best approach to this situation. After one last review of the room, you decide that it’s best to return back to where you dropped off your backpacks—you’ll cultivate the rest of your plan from there.

It’s just as difficult sliding the reverse direction, if not worse, especially now that you have to be extra cautious not to make any suspicious noises. Thankfully, you make it back to the opening you breached for yourself, but this time, you’re in an appropriate position to exit. Your feet make their exit first as you try your best to twist your body in order to make the process less challenging. Soon, your lower body is out of the vent with your torso following suit, and maintaining a strong grip on the ledge of the opening, you lower yourself down to the floor slowly to muffle your landing. Your feet make an ever-so-slight tap when they meet the firm floor, and you can feel the coolness of the concrete through the bottom of your socks.

With your vision finally adjusted as much as possible to the darkness, you turn around to face the shadowy room, taking in every detail there is to observe. As suspected, there is a lack of surveillance cameras present, something you noticed in the room with the computer as well. This makes sense with what Jin spoke of about this place being off the grid. While it was initially disadvantageous for you, now that you’ve made it inside, it should prove to be beneficial.

Carefully, you reach up to grab one of the backpacks you left atop the cabinet and place it on the floor in front of you. Kneeling down to open it, you take notice that it’s held shut by a simple buckle rather than a zipper. You mentally thank Hoseok for always thinking ahead as you easily unclasp it in one fell swoop and start removing the contents from within. Proceeding to carry out your weapons specialist’s instructions, you take the explosives and begin lacing the four walls of the room with them.

The bombs are in the shape of rectangular blocks with an adhesive on one of the larger sides to secure them onto the walls. You do just that, going around to manually place each individual device until one of the backpacks is completely empty. With that out of the way, you take the second bag and put it on, tightening the straps on your shoulders to make sure it stays on.

Contemplating your next step, you recall your teammates confirming that the room across from you is also blacked out, most likely revealed by the floor vent indication. That is probably the safest route to take, but you already decided on which room to visit the moment you saw that computer.

It would be a blatant lie if you said that you didn’t have your own agenda when agreeing to infiltrate the building alone. What you inquired Namjoon when you received the mission still continues to bother you, along with the biggest question of all: what exactly is the information that was stolen?

There’s only one way to find out.

If your brother knew of your true intentions, you know he would have never agreed to let you take on this mission. But that’s the beauty of going in alone—you get to make all the decisions.

With your mind made up, you head towards the lone door in the room and wrap your hand around its handle. Your other hand works to unsheathe the knife you always carry at the back of your waistband before holding it steadily beside you. Pausing to check that you don’t hear anyone on the other side, you cautiously turn your grip and push the door open just a crack.

As you peer into the hallway, nothing catches your attention at all. As a matter of fact, this part of the building seems unused altogether, and you can see that the majority of the light radiates from the front, along with the noise. There are some muted voices traveling from the other end, but you detect no figures to attach them to. Seeing this as your chance, you push the door open just enough for you to slip out, and you immediately turn to the left, already plotting a potential escape route.

Even through the darkness, you can make out the shapes of bolts on the back door above the handles, each one equipped with its own lock hanging from the rings. Not only do your enemies appear not to utilize that entry, but they don’t seem to want anyone else messing with it either. This puts a bit of a wrench in your contingency plan of busting out of here, but you’re sure you’ll find a backup plan.

With nothing left to see there, you turn in the opposing direction, your eyes locking onto the open doorway you are looking for. There’s not a doubt in your mind that it’s the room immediately beside the one you just came from, and you waste no time in sneaking over to it.

You persist light but brisk on your feet while still being wary of the bag on your back and the dagger in your hand. Once you hone in on the entrance to the room, you get as close to the wall as you can and lean past the corner, checking in to see if everything is as you left it. You’re able to discern the location of the grate in which you were spying from before over to the right of the opposite wall, and to the left sits the man at his computer, ceaselessly clicking away at his mouse.

With not another minute to lose, you get out of your hiding spot and advance forward. Your pace is deliberate while still maintaining its silence as you keep your center of balance low by stooping down as you move. The foe in the chair seems completely oblivious thus far, so the second you consider yourself close enough, you strike.

Both hands lurch forward simultaneously, with the empty one moving to cover the man’s mouth and the equipped one swinging in from the side to incapacitate him with the knife. Both of your limbs meet their marks as you feel the blade sink directly into the flesh of the front of his throat and the jolt of the beginning of a scream that doesn’t have time to come to fruition—a surefire sign that your intended strike to cut the vocal cords was successful. You remove the knife only to stab him once more, the sharp steel embedding itself right under the first insertion, just to speed up the process. It only takes a few seconds for the man’s body to change from rigid to limp, and when you let go of your hold on his mouth and pull the blade out a subsequent time, his head lolls lifelessly at a harsh angle.

With the target neutralized, you can now set things in motion.

Your first move is to turn back around and lock the door—you wouldn’t want anyone interrupting your important business. The consequences of leaving the door open are much higher than the potential attention you may attract by closing it, so you opt to do the latter. Sheathing your dagger while pacing towards the door, you reach for the handle and swing it closed, decelerating enough to prevent it from creating noise when it completely shuts. That’s when you take a closer look at the mechanism to realize that there does not appear to be any way to lock it. It’s unfortunate, but all you can do is keep the detail in mind as you hastily start your second round of explosive placements.

Putting the backpack on the floor, you carry out the job the same as before, placing each bomb across the four walls, or at least wherever you could. Some of the areas, namely the corner where the computer is located, are blocked off by tall shelves and other obstacles, so rather than maneuver your way around them, you just resort to placing the last few where the main infrastructure is more exposed.

“Step one complete,” you whisper quietly, feeling confident enough that there is no one nearby to hear you.

“Excellent,” you receive Namjoon’s reply before the rest. “We’re all done with preparations on our side as well.”

“We’re ready to detonate. Once you’re out in the clear, give me the signal,” Hoseok adds on, reminding you about step two of the plan.

Too bad you have your own plan.

Waltzing in front of the large metal table, you push the deadweight in the seat to the side so you can center yourself better. Luckily, he’s in a roller chair, so you’re able to wheel him a few paces to the right and out of your way. Bending forward to get a better look at the screen, you take the mouse in your hand and continue from where the man left off.

If you’re not going to be given answers, you’re going to take them yourself.

At first glance, the layout of the data seems pretty intuitive, if not familiar, and you suspect that you won’t need to look too hard to find what you’re looking for. What exactly it is you’re looking for, you’re not entirely sure, but it doesn’t hurt to check it out if the opportunity to do so is literally right in front of you.

It definitely looks like a directory of some sort, or perhaps compiled records. Either way, it seems like a bunch of inconsequential numbers on the surface, with far too many on the list to count. You keep scrolling down to see if anything stands out, but as you pause to stare a little longer, something clicks in your mind; it’s like finding a key to the lock of the pattern you’ve been seeing. Curious to test out your hypothesis, you hurriedly search for a series of numbers you know by heart.

135-729-06-12

The command is entered, and not even a second later, a result is found. You feel the sudden need to hold your breath as you click on the folder to open it, waiting to see if you hit the jackpot, or if it’s just a bust. The screen instantly shifts into a different arrangement as words replace all the numbers, but they’re not just any words.

They’re names—and you spot yours in the middle of the list.

This part is not too great of a shocking revelation, since the numbers you entered represent your team’s credentials—you noticed Jin writing it at the top all of his reports enough times to memorize it. It looks to take on the form of some kind of roster or roll book, and this alone is enough to confirm that what you’re looking at is the information stolen from your organization.

What you do find shocking though is the amount of detailed data stored within each of these files. You never doubted that the company kept tabs on its employees, with the assassins being no exception, but you were always told that any records you had before entering the orphanage were erased, and that any and all information that currently exists about you is strictly business-oriented and in the sole hands of the organization.

If that’s the case, then why is it that the information on the screen begs to differ?

You have your file opened up to scan through the details, and there appears to be information that should not exist, according to the organization’s policy. There are some things you recognize, such as the date of your arrival at the orphanage, but then there are other things that you can’t quite understand the purpose of keeping, such as general facts about your familial ties. Yours is both unsurprising yet disheartening to see, with the names of both your parents followed by cross marks.

Curiosity taking over once again, you return back to the list of names and begin searching for some other familiar ones. There are quite a few on here that you have never seen or heard of, but you can assume that those are the names of the previous assassins who were assigned to this particular squad before your arrival. Scrolling through the extensive list, you stop when you find a name you most certainly recognize.

Kim Taehyung.

When you open the file, your attention is automatically drawn to the section you were examining previously. Just like you, there are two X marks beside the pair listed as his parents, but for some reason, something doesn’t sit well with you. Exiting again, you try to find another teammate.

It takes you a few seconds to realize that the names you are seeing are not the ones given to you by the orphanage. These are the names originally given at birth, which explains some of the unfamiliar surnames you’re seeing. You’re not used to even thinking about the actuality that your teammates have last names—they’re not exactly valuable in your profession, nor are they desired. Nonetheless, you manage to find some of your other members. You know you’re pressed for time, so you decide to just skim through the status of their parents, since that’s what seems to be holding your attention at the moment.

Park Jimin, check marks.

Jung Hoseok, cross marks.

Min Yoongi, checks.

Kim Seokjin, more checks.

Jeon Jungkook…

You blink as you stare at the screen, waiting to make sure that everything has been loaded correctly. Under Jungkook’s parents, not only does he have dash marks where the checks or crosses should be, but the areas where the names should be present have the same basic icons.

You were really hoping to find answers by going through this information, but all it’s doing is confusing you moreover. You didn’t expect to be able to make all the connections in your mind right off the bat, but you’re really being thrown for a loop about what could mean.

It just doesn’t make sense.

Why does the organization even have all this seemingly useless information? Better yet, how did your enemy know about these records when you yourself weren’t aware of their existence? To take it a step further, what were they planning on accomplishing by stealing this?

“Are we clear?” you hear Namjoon’s voice interrupt your thoughts.

“Not yet,” you whisper, eyes still glued to the monitor as you back out of your team’s folder.

“What’s taking so long?” you catch a different voice this time, one belonging to the ever-so-polite Yoongi.

“Just hold on,” you relay a bit more brashly before returning to investigating the list. You’re back at the start with the sequences of numbers, and as you’re scrolling to find any that call for your attention, one particular set stands out from the rest.

415-809-00-00

It’s the only one without designated numbers the extensions, so you furrow your eyebrows and click to take a look. Inside is a list of names, not unlike the one you were browsing through before, but when you open up a few profiles, you realize something concerning that only complicates things even more. The people in these files aren’t assassins like the previous list.

They’re children.

The element you focus on with this group of records is that all of the documented birth years are well into the 2000s, with the arrival into the orphanage being even later than that. Some of them don’t even have an arrival date—there are just hyphens in its place, exactly like the ones you saw under Jungkook’s profile.

What the hell…?

All of a sudden, you hear footsteps quickly approaching at some distance behind you. You spin sharply around to face the noise, but by the time you realize that they’re stopping in front of your door in the hallway, you know you missed your opportunity for escape. Recalling that there’s no lock on the door, you only have a few seconds at the most to come up with a strategy before you’re compromised.

There’s no time at all for you run, and with your only exit blocked, there’s no place for you to run either. You briefly remember the ventilation grille in this room that you previously discovered and peered through, but it’s impossible to reach it in time to make it a practical escape route. There is nowhere to hide as well, but hiding yourself would do you no good with all the bombs decorating the walls and the bleeding man slumped in his chair.

Since running and hiding are both completely out of the question, you have to resort to your only other option—attacking.

One thing you do have going for you is that you still hold the element of surprise. Instead of playing evasively, you need to take advantage of this and go on the offensive before the enemy has a chance to flip the situation. Rushing over to the door with hushed steps, you press yourself against the wall beside it, your dagger already finding its way back into your hand for a second round. As you hear the handle turn, the entry opens and makes way for a robust but unsuspecting figure.

Not allowing him to take more than two steps into the room, you pounce forward for a peripheral attack. Your movements are fast as you take a swipe at the side of his neck, but unfortunately, his reflexes are equally as impressive. The target dodges off to the side, his body pivoting towards you in astonishment as you manage to nick the targeted spot with your blade. He stumbles backwards in the slightest as you see him reach for something at his waistline. You know that this means you’ll be in danger very soon, but for this fraction of a moment, he is preoccupied and unable to block.

Taking this as an opportunity for your second strike, you move forward with heightened vigor, propelling yourself as close to the man as you can. Like an extension of your arm, you reach further with your knife, using the momentum of your leap to drive it straight into the middle of his throat. You think that you’ve subdued the enemy when you see his face contort into a scream deprived of a sound to match, but you’re wrong.

The object that the man was reaching for is in his grasp now—it’s a handgun the man kept at his hip, and you can see his arm swing up from his side in what seems like a last ditch effort to foil you. Anticipating his aim, you pull your blade from the man’s neck and duck down to ram it straight into his torso, piercing his heart in what you hope is the final blow.

Just then, the earsplitting sound of a gunshot interrupts the silence as the man fires. It’s only after you remove your knife and see him crumple down into a heap that you are able to see that the bullet went nowhere near you. In fact, you see a clear mark on the concrete floor where the round made a noticeable dent upon impact.

That’s when you realize that he wasn’t trying to aim for you at all—the shot was an alarm.

“What was that?” your brother immediately asks, but you’re more concerned with answering to the consequences of that gunshot. The sound most likely traveled through the building to do its job of warning the others. More enemies will most likely arrive soon to investigate the disturbance, and when they do, you’ll basically be a sitting duck.

You know you only have yourself to blame; you were ignorant of your circumstances and took far too long with promoting your own agenda. However, it was only because the information seemed crucial that you were willing to take the risk.

Now you’ll just have to face the aftermath.

“There has been a slight change in plans,” you reluctantly reply, collecting your thoughts as you weigh your options.

You definitely can’t make a mad dash to the front and expect to survive. Who knows how many people will be waiting to gun you down once you step out into the hallway—you’ll be running straight into death’s arms. The ventilation system is still an impossible alternative as well, and any other form of hiding will only trap you even more. Engaging the enemies will only waste precious time on your end, and it may give them a chance to escape or even capture you—neither of those outcomes are allowed.

Much like the other dilemmas of the night, you’re only left with one choice.

“We’re going in,” Namjoon states to you, but it sounds more like an order to the rest of the team.

“No,” you sternly refute. “Stay where you are. I never said your part of the plan is changing.”

The whole place is locked down, and they know that just as well as you do. Even if they are able to break into the building, there’s a high probability that it’ll be too late. They won’t be able to save you from this mess.

You’re on your own, but that’s a reality you already accepted the moment you went in alone.

“What are you talking about?”

The question is articulated in a raised voice. Anger is something that very rarely comes to the surface with Namjoon, but you can tell that it’s threatening to show its colors. You have no time to pay it any mind though—your eyes are hurriedly scanning the room to take note of all the bomb placements. Your gaze then falls upon the corner of the room where the computer still sits on the table, the screen displaying the last list you were viewing before the interruption.

It’s now or never.

“You told me to give you my signal,” you explain as you briskly make your way to the front of the screen. Without a second thought, you place your arms across the tabletop, and with a heavy sweeping motion, you send the items off the edge of the surface, causing a disordered clatter as they hit the floor. “This is it.”

Your decision is met with an uproar of comments, with one particular “she’s insane” coming from your favorite rooftop partner in crime. Ignoring the jumbled speech flooding the comms, you continue with your plan B—or perhaps this is plan C. You pull the heavy metal table forward from the farthest edge so that it starts tipping towards you, balancing on the two front legs.

“We are not detonating until you’re out of the building,” Taehyung’s voice cuts through unexpectedly, sounding more serious than you’ve heard him be in a long while.

At that moment, the table staggers past the tipping point and crashes onto the floor with a loud clang, just barely missing your feet as you step backwards. The noise must have carried, because the other side of the comms has suddenly hushed down. In lieu of their chatter, a different set of voices starts to crescendo into existence, and while they originate from down the hall, you know that they’re only getting closer.

“Sorry, but I won’t be leaving.” You hop over the tabletop that is now perpendicular to the floor and turn around to pull at the legs in order to position the piece of furniture more into the corner. “This is the only way the plan is going to work.”

You suddenly detect movement at the doorway, which means your time is almost up. There’s no need to even look at the first man who enters to know that he has his weapon trained on you. On instinct, you duck straightaway to crouch behind the table you propped up for yourself, and just as you do so, you hear a gunshot being fired.

“Hoseok, you have to trust me!”

Your weapons specialist has stayed quiet throughout this entire exchange, but you know that he’s listening—he has to be. The words come out more frantic than you would have liked, but you’re just really hoping that you can persuade him in time to do as you say, no matter how unreasonable the request seems.

“In here!” you perceive a male voice shout, most likely alerting the others of your location. The approaching enemy presence means that they’re extremely close to nabbing you, but there is another thought on your mind. Their proximity to you means that they’re also as close to the explosives as they can and will ever be. No matter what happens, it needs to be done this very instant.

“Now!” you yell out almost threateningly, hoping that the aggression is communicated with enough force to stir Hoseok into action. It’s beyond being a request at this point—it’s a command.

You decide to brace yourself regardless of not knowing whether or not the detonation will occur—better safe than sorry, although that sounds a bit ridiculous coming from you in your current situation. Getting on your knees, you stoop down into a ball, joining your hands so that you are covering the back of your head. You close your eyes and press your forearms against your ears just as another precaution; your hearing should be the least of your worries, but assuming this emergency position is just something you were taught to do automatically.

It’s a futile attempt though, because you are a fool for thinking that anything could prepare you for what comes next.

The explosion is unlike anything you have ever experienced. You’ve been in the vicinity of bomb detonations before, but never this close. The initial blast is so violent, you feel everything around you shake uncontrollably to the point where it feels like the powerful ripples of energy are searing through your entire body. Then there is the sound—you have never heard something so deafeningly loud, and you wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t hear anything again.

You feel yourself getting thrown by the imposing force—in what direction, you’re not exactly sure. Everything is an overwhelming attack on your senses, until suddenly, it’s like everything you’re feeling starts to dull. A bloom of white light appears before your closed eyelids that replaces the darkness, and a wave of white noise numbs all the senses that were on overload, leaving you to feel as if you’re just floating through an infinite abyss. That abyss is spinning around you at an incredible speed that your dizzy mind cannot even begin to distinguish. All you can really think of in that moment is how you want it to stop.

It’s not too long before you get your wish, because after a few moments, the swirling of the world comes to an abrupt halt, the noises become absolutely mute, and it’s like your senses don’t exist anymore—like nothing exists anymore. This is because it wasn’t the world that stopped like you were hoping for.

It was you.

#it's getting harder for me to find fitting banners for each chapter lol #BUT HEY NO REGRETS #downfall #bts scenarios #jungkook scenarios #jungkook x reader #jungkook #bts #bts scenario #jungkook scenario #bts fanfiction #bts fanfic

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