#this cannot be us. never again. we cannot pretend reality away we cannot choose not to see it. itll kill us.

[mosstrades]

watching isttvg with your partner and holding their hand with the sudden awareness of how close you came to death. thinking: we are alive, we are alive, we are alive. thinking: every day we save ourselves from more and worse. thinking: for the love of god, dont let go.

[kirans-wonderland]

Hi! I had a fun idea! I didn’t see a character limit, so I’m going to request a small thing for all the boys (you can choose whomever you wanna write for if there is a character limit, but at least have Lilia please :’) )

Let’s say every time it’s someone’s birthday, the prefect gives the birthday boy a kiss on the cheek as “it’s tradition where I’m from~”

Hi Anon! This is such a cute request <3. Thank you for sharing it! This is the third thing I’ve written about kissing Lilia in less than two days- what is happening with me. >:)

~~~~~

A Kiss for the Birthday Boy~

“Happy Birthday!!” You cheered for the boy of the hour and *mwah* kissed him on the cheek. “Just a little thing we do where I’m from~” 

~~~~~

Lilia:

Surprised for an instant 

immediately becomes cheeky 

He chuckles and smirks 

“Heheheh~ I am curious as to know more about your little tradition… perhaps you should demonstrate it again~” 

~~~~~

Riddle: 

The boy is a tomato 

Stuttering and stammering all over the place 

Congratulations! You broke him 

“I- Rule 4- uhm 4-45! No public displays of a-affection in the gardens! On a.. a Wednesday!!”(He’s grasping at straws here) 

Trey:

It definitely surprises him 

He puts and hand over his face trying to cover his flushed cheeks and laughs 

He doesn’t know what to do guys he’s caught of guard

“Wow- thank you (y/n), it means a lot.” *cue the sweet boi smile* 

Cater:

“Wait Wait Wait do it again!” 

You’re confused but do it again 

*click* aaaaand he took a picture 

“Wait till my followers see that I got a kiss from THE prefect~” 

“Cater- put the phone down” 

Ace: 

Cocky cocky cocky 

Boy did you activate this mans ego 

“Are you sure you didn’t just want an excuse to kiss me~?” *eyebrow wiggle* You turn around to walk away. “NO WAIT (Y/N) COME BACK!” 

Deuce: 

You broke him too 

You’d swear he had completely disassociated from reality 

“Hello? Earth to Juiceeee??” Shut up Ace 

His face suddenly takes on a look of determination and his kisses your cheek back 

“Uh- I um- you- uhhhhh-“ he cannot form words 

Leona: 

Honestly surprised he showed up for the event 

He pretends to be disgusted swatting you away like you’re a fly 

“Yeah yeah just don’t do it again herbivore.” 

He actually does want you to do it again :/ 

Ruggie: 

Happy boy happy boy happy boy 

Immediately holds his cheek like he doesn’t want the feeling to go away 

Teasing teasing teasing 

“Shishishi looks like you finally stole something from me.” 

Jack: 

The man goes stifffff 

He turns his head away to save face (he’s blushing)

Don’t look now but his tail is wagging 

“That’s- yeah- … thank you.” 

Azul: 

You’re breaking so many boys 

He tries to be so calm and composed but the red shade of his face betrays him 

“Well- *clears throat* that was unexpected prefect… But d-don’t think that’s any sort of payment!” 

Jade: 

He’s pleasantly surprised 

His eerie smile never leaves his face

“Oh? What an interesting custom. Why don’t you tell me more?” 

Floyd: 

Smiles with allll his sharp teeth 

He’s a gigglin

“Ohh shrimpy~ I think you missed~” 

Run. Start running. You are no longer safe. He’s chasing you.

Kalim: 

Happy happy happy!!!

immediately grabs your face to kiss your cheek back. 

REALLY?? THATS SO COOL!!” he’s literally beaming

Jamil: 

shook 

You kissed him? Him!?! 

He doesn’t really know what to do or what to say. 

“Oh.” 

Give him a break. This is new to him. 

Vil:

He’s used to attention but not quite this type of attention 

As long as you didn’t mess up his makeup, you’re fine 

Takes out a mirror to check if you left a mark (lol) 

“Hmm thank you. Your gesture is much appreciated dear.” 

Rook: 

Immediately grabs your hands with a smile that’s kinda scary- 

Starts muttering rapidly in fluent French before he says anything intelligible

“Mon Dieu! It’s Magnifique! What a tradition!!” 

He’s loud and dramatic about it

Epel: 

He’s a mix of shock/confusion and cocky 

He grabs your shoulders and shakes you aggressively 

Now you’re confused 

“EY- YOU CANT JUST GO ROUND DOIN SUMTHIN LIKE THAT” 

“But you could do it again�� i-if you wanted.” 

Idia: 

I see two possibilities for this 

1. He actually leaves his room for the party 

Idia.exe has shut down 

You absolutely fried him 

I quote him from the ghost marriage event “Dude, I will literally DIE if we smoocharoo”

2. He sends his tablet in his place 

You kiss the screen 

Now he can die happily in the comfort of his own room 

Either way he’s a sputtering mess

Ortho: 

Happy babey happy babey 

He’s floating circles around you 

“I have to go tell my brother!!” 

Malleus: 

He’s immediately all smiley 

He grabs your hand and places a kiss to your knuckles 

“I quite enjoy your homelands tradition my Child of Man, may I attempt it?” 

Yes please do

Silver: 

He was asleep and your kiss woke him up (sleeping beauty much?)

“What? Oh. Thank you.” 

He kisses your forehead

“It is only right that I return the gesture” 

Sebek: 

He has to buffer for a second before

Oml the volume-

“I APPRECIATE YOUR TRADITION, BUT PLEASE REFRAIN FROM DOING SUCH THINGS IN THE EYES OF THE PUBLIC AND MASTER MALLEUS” 

It’s because you did this before the hand holding stage- so inappropriate 

[comebacktomerm]

inside the mind of his favourite entertainer

part 2;

lust; a very strong sexual desire.

Although in his lyrics he mentioned about love but it was never it; only lust that mistaken as love.

He did made her confused of her own feelings sometimes.

Did she like him? or the attention he gave? or was it because of the countless sex they did?

He was her first time, thought to be just a one night stand, but one became two and more.

Said wanted to stop, but decided to continue.

"you decide as you are the adult here" but they both were adults.

It was just an excuse because she cannot leave him I guess.

addicted of the intimacy? or him personally?

She did remember what happened that night.

because practically she also planned it to be happen.

just pretended to be a dumb and naive girl. always asked for his help. liked what he liked. listened what he wanted to say, spent time together alone and make sure to tell him that he was better than others.

men always like that, men that her type.

"we are playing chess right now" he said proudly.

little did he know she knew so well where the game would brought them to.

with a wide smile plastered on his face, he declared; "I won," that what was he thought but to be frankly honest she was the winner. she always the winner. 

she always got what she wanted. and this time she wanted to feel what it was like to be completely engulfed with lust.

it was just she loved to see them winning. raised their pride, raised their ego. loved to see them think they got her, got to control her. but in reality they were playing in her game and she was the player.

but sometimes player also can not help but play their game emotionally.

***

She always thought she had a power; power to attract men. but too bad they were always the bad apples one.

so she thought because she was a bad gardener.

because this time another apple fell from someone's garden and rolled to hers. again.

Unfortunately, just like previous apple, she choose to be ignorant, she choose to forgot; that he was from someone's garden, someone's world. someone's love. someone's.

and she also had her own apple.

one's that she always doubted and complained to others. one's that she always found flaws to use for her detachment. one's she didn't think the future together. or didn't want to think.

bad gardener and bad apple.

Somehow both of them clicked together so well where they didn't expect it. or at least that what she felt.

She wondered how could this happened. how come he could be near to her comfort state, in less than two months, where others need to take their times.

How it was so easy for her to listened and laughed at his stories at 4 am?

was it because he almost identical to her 3-years apple? that made her confused? or because the 80-20 theory? or perhaps both.

However, he won over her own apple. He got to know the real her. not everything but things only he knew but others didn't. things she swore to keep shut to bring in hell alone. things she hoped to have someone to share with without being judged.

And she wanted to share more.

But again, that seemed too much for them that didn't have a title.

too much for him as he got his own gardener to be with.

too much for him as in this platonic relationship.

too much for him as she wish to not want him in her garden in future silently.

***

"do you know the butterfly effects?" she asked him, immediately averted her eyes away from his as soon as his met hers.

they had been sharing stories and forgot the time. although her eyes heavy from the lack of sleep she usually would get and tired body from the sex they did last night, she wouldn't want to miss this moments of them.

he reverted a no, and she wasted no time to explain to him. eager to.

there were times, so many times, she thought about all her decisions she made before. about the game she started. 

the butterfly effect they said. what if what if.

what if she didn't choose to go to that place.

what if she didn't choose to be friend with that "friends".

what if she didn't stay that night.

this would not happen but it happened.

the thing between them. would never happen but it happened.

she always found it fascinating how her decisions can lead to such situations.

it was so fascinating that sometimes it scared her.

***

she always hated her hometown and people there. they didn't bring anything good to her except broke her heart into pieces. somehow her home still wanted her to be there and she still wanted to be there.

and him perhaps gonna be another reason why she always hated to be there.

"do you have feelings for me?" yes he did. but not as much as to his own gardener.

"how much?" it was in a point where he could be responsible to what he did.

was that because of love? or it was just a temporary limerence because of the lust they created between each other?

she didn't like his answer.

because she couldn't find it trustworthy.

all she could hear was a lie lie lie.

all men do were lying. all men do were leaving.

things would be easy if no feelings involved, she thought.

but oh boy, she was so in denial that she didn't realised hers already involved.

that was why they still stuck with each other.

***

She cannot helped but replaying all the things they did in her head.

but this one particular moment was too much for her. too much that she cannot helped but reached her hand down to her flower while replaying that scene in her head. too much for her that she can felt how wet she was, only because she cannot forget it.

/

"i'm not done yet," he said as he shove her down again. her face and chest met the mattress once again, while her bottom was up. a soft moan escaped her lips followed a short laugh.

what's so funny? she also didn't know, her brain cannot function properly. all she can think was she wanted him inside her again. to ruin her.

he just finished one second ago and at the time she thought they were done but he said otherwise, he did otherwise.

She almost wanted to cry. she tried her best to be quiet but it was so good. all she can felt was his went in and out of her. it made her mouth loose and the sound of their body slapping together just made her wetter. and when he pulled her hair and his other hand wrapped on her neck, God, she can felt both her eyes rolled in.

and when he pulled out and cum on her back, she gave out a soft whine. missing the feeling of him inside her.

and also because she really wanted him to cum inside her. to fill her up.

/

oh boy, did it by herself was so different. it did not feel the same as he did.

her fingers tried to keep the same pace as she remembered. but the satisfaction was far from it, she could not reach it. like what he did.

and it was so lonely, no kisses for her. no kisses from him.

she liked kisses and she guessed he also liked it. it was like they can kissed each other until both of their lips bleed. until the sun was rising.

and when she went and met her own apple, the kisses didn't feel the same. it was short and empty. it didn't feel like his. somehow while they kissed she only can think about her bad apple, 

how she wished he could be with her at that moment.

***

she was on top of him, riding him; one of his favourite positions he mentioned, she tried to make he felt good - no she wanted to make him felt good. she was not experienced and her body was not flexible and soft like a dancer. so she always wondered that if did she returned him the satisfaction like what he gave to her?

that was why she bought that pretty red lingerie with the thought of him. just because she remembered he really liked the red color and just because he mentioned his own gardener never wear it for him. so she bought it just for him. she wore it just for him.

/

then she remembered the thing he mentioned through text before; threesome. she was not dumb, she knew what it mean.

seemed like the thought of it excited him. so did to her.

but she did also feel scared. she was always had a hard time on meeting and adjusting herself with strangers or people in general. always wanted her circle small as possible and always avoid meeting new people. always rejecting physical interaction or intimacy from others. probably because of her social anxiety. or probably because she didn't want other people to see and to be near the real her.

so the thought of someone she was not close to doin sex with them did scared her shit.

"you don't mind sharing me?"

"but only if you want to," he replied.

at that moment her heart did sunken a little bit by his statement. so he did want and like that. only if she did give him a chance.

but she only wanted him.

but she guessed he only saw her as one of his toys to be with.

***

"if you have me why you still need him?" he asked.

"if you have me why you still need her?" she retorted.

she wanted to laugh at his face so bad but can not because he was inside her. and hearing her answer probably did something to him as he started to fuck her again. made her forgot what he just asked a moment ago.

/

"do you think you can let go of me?" she asked. both of her hands on his chest as he rode him.

he only gave a small nod. and she didn't like his answer so she gave another same but different question;

"do you want to let go of me?"

"no,"

she hummed with satisfaction. even though back in her mind said not to trust it.

not to hold on it.

***

[garbobezo]

01/30/22

D A M E

Here's the corrected version of the text:

I want you. Do you want me too? If I don't reach out, will you ever speak up? If I don't reach out, will we never speak again? The thought of you consumes me to the point where I question myself, my own reality, my own sanity - how can this be normal? No one tells you what's involved with falling in love. I dreamt about you the other night; she was there too... even in the astral, I can't seem to get rid of her. Honestly, I only have one picture of the story, my side, but I don't see hers. And you see both 'cause you're in both... I often wonder if you were watching a movie or a TV character who was in the exact situation as you, knows everything you know, done everything you've done, basically, if you watched your actions and behaviours on a TV screen, if you would like your character. Would you like you? Would you like how you treat my character? Would you yell at yourself to chase after me? Would you yell at yourself to choose me? If you could see yourselves from outside yourself... what would you think?

I think I put you on too high a pedestal. I think I see you through rose-colored glasses because my head knows you're bad for me, but my heart still wants you. I wonder, do you feel for her what I feel for you? Is that why you can't let go, even though you know I'm better? Even though my love is better? Even though you know I'm the one? If you did love her the way I love you, you wouldn't have cheated... open and honestly 'cause I would never do to you what you have done to me. And you never hurt the person you love like that because to hurt them is to hurt yourself, because you take their heart as your own.

You see, that's what I think the difference between my love and your love is. Your love is flawed, faded, and grey; mine is strong, royal, and bright, and I do everything in my power to try and share my love with you, to give my love to you, and every time you take pieces of me. Every time you leave me feeling existential pain in which I cannot describe, and months later, I do it all over again because despite you being the only person who hurts me so deeply, you seem to be the only remedy for my broken heart, so I come back again and again, trying to collect the pieces of myself I left in you. Only every time I fall deeper and deeper in love with you and deeper and deeper entangled. Fighting between my head and my heart. Fighting between walking away and holding on. But holding onto this is like trying to row a boat while another person is shooting holes into it. We're actively working at two opposite things. I try to be close to you, and you try to distance yourself from me. All while having sex with me... how is that working out for you? The further you run from me, the more you hurt yourself. You know this by now, right? Why do you deny or ignore the incredibly deep connection we share? A connection that we don't have with anyone else, no matter how hard we try. A chemistry we can't find even with people we have loved. A bond that no matter how much time goes by and no matter how hard we try to break, seems impermeable. A cycle that no matter how many variations we choose, constantly repeats?

How can you be so indifferent? How can you pretend you don't see this happening? How can you pretend you don't feel it too? 'Cause I know you feel it too, because I've learned in the last 4 years that everything I feel, you feel... that's how spiritual our bond is. We mirror each other in thoughts and feelings. What I don't understand is how can you gaslight me into thinking what I'm feeling isn't real? That it's all in my head? That there isn't something happening in the universe and spiritually constantly keeping us together, even when we try to leave? That we don't show up in each other's dreams? That songs and shows don't hold messages from each other? That any of this isn't real? How can you deny it? I'm just as scared as you are, remember, everything you feel, I feel too. You think this doesn't scare me or freak me out? You think I'm not scared that this is bigger than us? You think I'm not scared of how this will end? You think I don't think it can only end in one of two ways? Do you think I don't think? 'Cause I do. I do all the time. I have to stop myself from thinking all the time, 'cause your presence consumes me. The thought of you lives rent-free in my mind. My heart beats for you. My soul longs for you. And my ego and my pride can't stand you. 'Cause you break me, and you do it so effortlessly. You do it with no repercussions; you do it with no hesitation. You put yourself first because you think if you don't, no one else will, but haven't you seen all I do is put you first? We're together spiritually, but I'm all alone here. We travel together but unconsciously because you don't acknowledge it. You want to free yourself from the blindfold around your eyes and the ties around your hands that are all so loose you could break free if you just tried.

I want to message you so bad, but I know it'll be the same old song. It'll never end if I continue to interrupt your karma. I can't keep screaming to you and pouring my heart into someone who pours nothing into me. You don't see what you're doing to my soul; you don't know how much you refusing to love me and accept the nature of this connection dims my light. I want you, I still want you. I still only want you, and I don't know what to do if you can't love me. Can you please tell me what to do? If you don't love me, can you please let me let you go? Can you please let me let you let me go? This is too much to bear if you don't get the lesson...

[turnpage]

send me a ✐ for a random sentence starter from my muse (1-1500) — tw: profanity, mild nsfw, long list

generator here quotes compiled from here inspired by

feel free to change to fit your preferences as need.

❨1❩ ❛ They are dreams, but I’m too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I’ve already lost too much to let them take over. ❜
 ❨2❩ ❛ Sometimes human places create inhuman monsters. ❜ ❨3❩ ❛ I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in. ❜ ❨4❩ ❛ Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win. ❜ ❨5❩ ❛ The world's a hard place. It doesn't care. It doesn't hate you and me, but it doesn't love us, either. ❜ ❨6❩ ❛ The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge. ❜ ❨7❩ ❛ Pull your act together and just go on. ❜ ❨8❩ ❛ I had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there is nothing physically wrong. I hurt all the time. ❜ ❨9❩ ❛ Tough old world, baby. If you're not bolted together tightly, you're gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty. ❜ ❨10❩ ❛ Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford? ❜ ❨11❩ ❛ Truth comes out. In the end it always comes out. ❜ ❨12❩ ❛ Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are. ❜ ❨13❩ ❛ No matter where you go, the same asshole gets off the plane. ❜ ❨14❩ ❛ We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives. ❜ ❨15❩ ❛ That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. ❜ ❨16❩ ❛ Human nature, baby. Grab it and growl. ❜ ❨17❩ ❛ God wiped snot out of his nose and that was you. ❜ ❨18❩ ❛ Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you. ❜ ❨19❩ ❛ How many times, over how many years, have I—a grown adult—asked for the mercy of another chance? ❜ ❨20❩ ❛ I was suddenly so sick of myself, so revolted. ❜ ❨21❩ ❛ You listen to me. I’m going to talk to you about it this once and never again this same way. ❜ ❨22❩ ❛ But those pieces, they’ll never fit just the same way again. Never in this world. ❜ ❨23❩ ❛ Dying is a part of living. You have to keep tuning in to that if you expect to be a whole person. ❜ ❨24❩ ❛ Officious little prick. ❜ ❨25❩ ❛ I’ve been sleepwalking again, my dear. — The plants are moving under the rug. ❜ ❨26❩ ❛ How I wish you were fear. ❜ ❨27❩ ❛ But it was a dreadful kind of curiosity, the kind that makes you peek through your fingers during the scariest parts of a scary movie. ❜ ❨28❩ ❛ All we have is time, you know. An eternity of time. Or shall we end it? Might as well. After all, we're missing the party. ❜ ❨29❩ ❛ We all remember our pleasant dreams more clearly than the scary ones. ❜ ❨30❩ ❛ The way things should be and the way things are hardly ever get together. ❜ ❨31❩ ❛ Got to be regular if you want to be happy. ❜ ❨32❩ ❛ But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. ❜ ❨33❩ ❛ He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none. ❜ ❨34❩ ❛ Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep. ❜ ❨35❩ ❛ It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment's carelessness.  ❜ ❨36❩ ❛ If I had ever believed it, I no longer do. ❜ ❨37❩ ❛ I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands. ❜ ❨38❩ ❛ I cannot bear this world a moment longer. ❜ ❨39❩ ❛ I have a better idea. I will do as I please. ❜ ❨40❩ ❛ All my life has been murk and depths, but I am not a part of that dark water. I am a creature within it. ❜ ❨41❩ ❛ You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see. ❜ ❨42❩ ❛ When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world. ❜ ❨43❩ ❛ When I was born, the word for what I was did not exist. ❜ ❨44❩ ❛ But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults. ❜ ❨45❩ ❛ I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. ❜ ❨46❩ ❛ This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive. ❜ ❨47❩ ❛ You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you. ❜ ❨48❩ ❛ Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me. ❜ ❨49❩ ❛ If now I am wise, it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes. ❜ ❨50❩ ❛ You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite. ❜ ❨51❩ ❛ Give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for. ❜ ❨52❩ ❛ I have been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that is only a shape I’ve been poured into. I do not have to keep it. ❜ ❨53❩ ❛ I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. ❜ ❨54❩ ❛ Understanding the world is a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves. ❜ ❨55❩ ❛ Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two. ❜ ❨56❩ ❛ The truth is, men make terrible pigs. ❜ ❨57❩ ❛ My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it. ❜ ❨58❩ ❛ This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh. ❜ ❨59❩ ❛ Witches are not so delicate. ❜ ❨60❩ ❛ Those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats. ❜ ❨61❩ ❛ I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. ❜ ❨62❩ ❛ There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too. ❜ ❨63❩ ❛ The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them. ❜ ❨64❩ ❛ Life is warped. I'm just in sync. ❜ ❨65❩ ❛ Now it's a whisper from the past. ❜ ❨66❩ ❛ But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more. ❜ ❨67❩ ❛ Why is it always such a surprise? The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush. ❜ ❨68❩ ❛ Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it. ❜ ❨69❩ ❛ What is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?  ❜ ❨70❩ ❛ I have scars, inside me. ❜ ❨71❩ ❛ The dead are not entirely dead but are alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. ❜ ❨72❩ ❛ However dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void. ❜ ❨73❩ ❛ Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic. ❜ ❨74❩ ❛ It is another way of saying tough luck. To people you aren’t going to help out. ❜ ❨75❩ ❛ I'm waiting, far off in the future. ❜ ❨76❩ ❛ The only sure camouflage is unpredictability. ❜ ❨77❩ ❛ There are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. ❜ ❨78❩ ❛ First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled. ❜ ❨79❩ ❛ I long to swim in liquid moonlight. ❜ ❨80❩ ❛ That's right, I don’t like to be summoned on trivial matters. ❜ ❨81❩ ❛ The part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. ❜ ❨82❩ ❛ Cut that part out of us: the grinning, elemental malice. Begin us anew. ❜ ❨83❩ ❛ Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot. ❜ ❨84❩ ❛ At last. It's you. ❜ ❨85❩ ❛ No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish. ❜ ❨86❩ ❛ Take what the moment offers. Don’t close doors. Be thankful. ❜ ❨87❩ ❛ How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. ❜ ❨88❩ ❛ Is it disapproval or extreme lust? With some men it’s hard to tell the difference. ❜ ❨89❩ ❛ My hair was driving me crazy, but then … I died. ❜ ❨90❩ ❛ Seek and ye shall find, eventually. And you found. You’re right, I don’t dispute that. Sorry. ❜ ❨91❩ ❛ Everything digests, and is digested. ❜ ❨92❩ ❛ My head was once a filing cabinet. Now it’s a flurry of papers, floating on a draft. ❜ ❨93❩ ❛ You cannot keep bumping your head against reality and saying it is not there. ❜ ❨94❩ ❛ I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s something nobody knows about. ❜ ❨95❩ ❛ And if I don’t want to die, I’ve got to start living. ❜ ❨96❩ ❛ The world is a beautiful place. Don’t forget that. And don’t miss it. ❜ ❨97❩ ❛ I was fighting for my life. So I must not want to die. ❜ ❨98❩ ❛ Something’s happening to me, through me, something dangerous and new. ❜ ❨99❩ ❛ It’s taken root, a poison tree; it’s grown, fanning out, vines winding round my gut, my lungs, my heart. ❜ ❨100❩ ❛ We’re interpreters. We’re translators. ❜ ❨101❩ ❛ You’ll notice I’m not asking what made you this way. ❜ ❨102❩ ❛ No family, happy or unhappy, is quite like any other. Tolstoy was chock-fullo’shit. Remember that. ❜ ❨103❩ ❛ We lived in monochrome those nights. ❜ ❨104❩ ❛ You live in a dream. You’re a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? ❜ ❨105❩ ❛ Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you’d find swine? ❜ ❨106❩ ❛ I stand here in the dark: cold, utterly alone, full of fear and something that feels like longing. ❜ ❨107❩ ❛ The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. ❜ ❨108❩ ❛ Not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye. ❜ ❨109❩ ❛ Selective emotional detachment. ❜ ❨110❩ ❛ Not for me, or at least not today. ❜ ❨111❩ ❛ Dead but not gone, watching life surge forward around me, powerless to intervene. ❜ ❨112❩ ❛ Do I sound like a hillbilly saying that? ❜ ❨113❩ ❛ Remember, you’ve got your secret weapon. ❜ ❨114❩ ❛ The dream drains away like water. The memory, really. I try to scoop it up in my palms, but it’s gone. ❜ ❨115❩ ❛ My shadow stretches along the carpet, as though trying to detach itself from me. ❜ ❨116❩ ❛ It curls away from me, like blood in water. ❜ ❨117❩ ❛ It’s been so long since I felt the rain. Or wind—the caress of wind. ❜ ❨118❩ ❛ But snow I never want to feel again. ❜ ❨119❩ ❛ Through adversity to the stars. ❜ ❨120❩ ❛ No hero. No sleuth. I am locked in. I am locked out. ❜ ❨121❩ ❛ Thinking hasn't gotten me anywhere so far. ❜ ❨122❩ ❛ The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you. ❜ ❨123❩ ❛ Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. ❜ ❨124❩ ❛ Women get consumed. ❜ ❨125❩ ❛ Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them. ❜ ❨126❩ ❛ A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort. ❜ ❨127❩ ❛ Safer to be feared than loved. ❜ ❨128❩ ❛ I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence. ❜ ❨129❩ ❛ It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wish I could stop trying. ❜ ❨130❩ ❛ I always feel sad for the girl that I was. ❜ ❨131❩ ❛ Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes. ❜ ❨132❩ ❛ How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen. ❜ ❨133❩ ❛ See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was. ❜ ❨134❩ ❛ Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand. ❜ ❨135❩ ❛ To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting. ❜ ❨136❩ ❛ I'm here. I don't usually feel that I am. ❜ ❨137❩ ❛ I'm tired of dying. ❜ ❨138❩ ❛ What if you hurt because it feels so good? ❜ ❨139❩ ❛ How confusing to live in the shadow of a shadow. ❜ ❨140❩ ❛ Do you ever feel like bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them? You can’t do anything, you just have to wait? ❜ ❨141❩ ❛ Sometimes my scars have a mind of their own. ❜ ❨142❩ ❛ Everyone has their own version of a memory. ❜ ❨143❩ ❛ Isn’t a smile a girl’s best weapon? ❜ ❨144❩ ❛ My sense of weightlessness, I think, comes from the fact that I know so little about my past. ❜ ❨145❩ ❛ Do what I want; I might like you. ❜ ❨146❩ ❛ I feel sorry for Persephone because even when she’s back with the living, people are afraid of her because of where’s she’s been. ❜ ❨147❩ ❛ She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. ❜ ❨148❩ ❛ The sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human. ❜ ❨149❩ ❛ It infects you. It ruined me. ❜ ❨150❩ ❛ Your health is not a debt you just cancel. The body collects. ❜ ❨151❩ ❛ Men love to put things inside women, don’t they? ❜ ❨152❩ ❛ We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. ❜ ❨153❩ ❛ Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women. ❜ ❨154❩ ❛ The strongest of all warriors are these two — time and patience. ❜ ❨155❩ ❛ If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war. ❜ ❨156❩ ❛ There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth. ❜ ❨157❩ ❛ The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness. ❜ ❨158❩ ❛ Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy. ❜ ❨159❩ ❛ It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong. ❜ ❨160❩ ❛ You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. ❜ ❨161❩ ❛ If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed. ❜ ❨162❩ ❛ We are asleep until we fall in love! ❜ ❨163❩ ❛ I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. ❜ ❨164❩ ❛ Everything I know, I know because of love. ❜ ❨165❩ ❛ Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. ❜ ❨166❩ ❛ If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. ❜ ❨167❩ ❛ Yes, love, but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. ❜ ❨168❩ ❛ How can one be well...when one suffers morally? ❜ ❨169❩ ❛ Kings are the slaves of history. ❜ ❨170❩ ❛ God is the same everywhere. ❜ ❨171❩ ❛ Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy. ❜ ❨172❩ ❛ One must be cunning and wicked in this world. ❜ ❨173❩ ❛ We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them. ❜ ❨174❩ ❛ When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair! ❜ ❨175❩ ❛ For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed? ❜ ❨176❩ ❛ He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died. ❜ ❨177❩ ❛ Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps. ❜ ❨178❩ ❛ Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible. ❜ ❨179❩ ❛ The distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable. ❜ ❨180❩ ❛ How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? ❜ ❨181❩ ❛ The wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe. ❜ ❨182❩ ❛ When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. ❜ ❨183❩ ❛ My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: the parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely. ❜ ❨184❩ ❛ Would it be worse to love someone who is no longer there, or not to love someone who is? ❜ ❨185❩ ❛ Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness. ❜ ❨186❩ ❛ It is not that I was credulous, simply that I believed in all things dark and dangerous. ❜ ❨187❩ ❛ Sometimes you do things you regret, but there's nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on. ❜ ❨188❩ ❛ Love will be an impulse that will inspire and ruin in equal measure. ❜ ❨189❩ ❛ He died alone. It don't matter a rat's ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone. ❜ ❨190❩ ❛ It was love, I knew, and it tasted like champagne in my mind. ❜ ❨191❩ ❛ The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck. ❜ ❨192❩ ❛ She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble. ❜ ❨193❩ ❛ Daylight is always safe. ❜ ❨194❩ ❛ If not for death, they'd be content to simply exist, but with death, well, their lives will have meaning. ❜ ❨195❩ ❛ You want to know the future, love? Then wait. ❜ ❨196❩ ❛ There are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm. ❜ ❨197❩ ❛ Fairy tales are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated ❜ ❨198❩ ❛ But sometimes you leave blood on your instruments. ❜ ❨199❩ ❛ I'd like to be a wolf. Not all the time. Just sometimes. In the dark. I would run through the forests. ❜ ❨200❩ ❛ You've seen them. They have mouths that twitch, and eyes that stare, and they babble and they mewl and they whimper. ❜ ❨201❩ ❛ They are not mad, or rather, the loss of their sanity is the lesser of their problems. ❜ ❨202❩ ❛ Good a reason for writing as I know: releasing demons, letting them fly. ❜ ❨203❩ ❛ That miserable state in which everything seems flat and of equal importance; when nothing matters, and in which reality seems scraped thin and threadbare. ❜ ❨204❩ ❛ Someone had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the metal: JUST DIE, it said. Like it is easy. ❜ ❨205❩ ❛ Winter started today. The sky turned grey and the snow began to fall and it did not stop falling until well after dark. ❜ ❨206❩ ❛ Memory is the great deceiver. ❜ ❨207❩ ❛ Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. ❜ ❨208❩ ❛ I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control.  ❜ ❨209❩ ❛ If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. ❜ ❨210❩ ❛ I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other. ❜ ❨211❩ ❛ But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. ❜ ❨212❩ ❛ I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other would have borne it. ❜ ❨213❩ ❛ There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves. ❜ ❨214❩ ❛ One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. ❜ ❨215❩ ❛ Better be without sense than misapply it as you do. ❜ ❨216❩ ❛ You must be the best judge of your own happiness. ❜ ❨217❩ ❛ Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing ; but I have never been in love ; it is not my way, or my nature ; and I do not think I ever shall. ❜ ❨218❩ ❛ Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise. ❜ ❨219❩ ❛ If I have not spoken, it is because I am afraid I will awaken myself from this dream. ❜ ❨220❩ ❛ If a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. ❜ ❨221❩ ❛ Faultless in spite of all her faults. ❜ ❨222❩ ❛ A heroine whom no one but myself will much like. ❜ ❨223❩ ❛ There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart. ❜ ❨224❩ ❛ Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its fragrance on the desert air. ❜ ❨225❩ ❛ I pity you. I thought you cleverer. ❜ ❨226❩ ❛ Evil to some is always good to others. ❜ ❨227❩ ❛ I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do. ❜ ❨228❩ ❛ She is loveliness itself. ❜ ❨229❩ ❛ Time does not compose me. ❜ ❨230❩ ❛ A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her. ❜ ❨231❩ ❛ I do not find myself making any use of the word sacrifice. ❜ ❨232❩ ❛ I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be any more. ❜ ❨233❩ ❛ I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment. ❜ ❨234❩ ❛ I examined my own heart. And there you were. Never, I fear, to be removed. ❜ ❨235❩ ❛ With all your little faults, you are an excellent creature. ❜ ❨236❩ ❛ You have another long walk before you. ❜ ❨237❩ ❛ The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. ❜ ❨238❩ ❛ What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? ❜ ❨239❩ ❛ Out of the frying pan into the fire! ❜ ❨240❩ ❛ We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity. ❜ ❨241❩ ❛ She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. ❜ ❨242❩ ❛ And, oh, God . . . how frequently I weep! ❜ ❨243❩ ❛ From the coffin of your madness there is no escape. ❜ ❨244❩ ❛ I am feeling supernatural tonight. I want to eat diamonds. ❜ ❨245❩ ❛ All the same there is a chance that if we keep on shaking our chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles will part. ❜ ❨246❩ ❛ It was sad music fit to make you cut your throat. ❜ ❨247❩ ❛ Nothing is more boring than being forced to play. ❜ ❨248❩ ❛ Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest? ❜ ❨249❩ ❛ Wherein does a woman’s honour reside? In her vagina or in her spirit? ❜ ❨250❩ ❛ Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment! ❜ ❨251❩ ❛ Have you ever stared stark failure in the face? The trick is to outstare it. ❜ ❨252❩ ❛ Sometimes it seems that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the one who will wear them, who will bring them to life. ❜ ❨253❩ ❛ I have the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet I exist. ❜ ❨254❩ ❛ I felt myself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea. ❜ ❨255❩ ❛ She looks wonderful, but she doesn't look right. ❜ ❨256❩ ❛ The one-eyed man will be King in the country of the blind. ❜ ❨257❩ ❛ I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs! ❜ ❨258❩ ❛ I love to hear my bones rattle. That’s how I know I’m alive. ❜ ❨259❩ ❛ I learnt, first, as the birds do, from the birds. ❜ ❨260❩ ❛ Inside and outside match exactly, but both are badly wrong. ❜ ❨261❩ ❛ During the less-than-blink of time it took the last chime to die, there came a vertiginous sensation. ❜ ❨262❩ ❛ I fear a wound not of the body but the soul, an irreconcilable division between myself and the rest of humankind. ❜ ❨263❩ ❛ I fear the proof of my own singularity. ❜ ❨264❩ ❛ Still nothing could calm the fearful storm in my erupting skin. ❜ ❨265❩ ❛ Petersburg, loveliest of all hallucinations. ❜ ❨266❩ ❛ A breathless second between black forest and the frozen sea. ❜ ❨267❩ ❛ I'm beginning to feel totally cut off from the world. ❜ ❨268❩ ❛ What does this all mean? Where are we? ❜ ❨269❩ ❛ Sometimes I bleed. ❜ ❨270❩ ❛ If you see a ghost, you say "hello". ❜ ❨271❩ ❛ The war is not over. ❜ ❨272❩ ❛ You're not going. You left us once already. ❜ ❨273❩ ❛ You can’t go! ❜ ❨274❩ ❛ I loved you, but that wasn't enough, was it? ❜ ❨275❩ ❛ If you're dead, then leave me in peace. ❜ ❨276❩ ❛ The only thing that moves here is the light, but it changes everything. ❜ ❨277❩ ❛ I won't ask for forgiveness for something I didn't do! ❜ ❨278❩ ❛ Sometimes the world of the living gets mixed up with the world of the dead. ❜ ❨279❩ ❛ Death of a loved one can lead people to do the strangest things. ❜ ❨280❩ ❛ Sooner or later, they will find you. ❜ ❨281❩ ❛ They're everywhere - they say this house is theirs. ❜ ❨282❩ ❛ You're always teasing me, and telling lies. I'm sick of it. ❜ ❨283❩ ❛ Others will come. Sometimes we'll sense them. Other times, we won't. ❜ ❨284❩ ❛ No crying now. No crying. Stop that. Here. Look what an awful face you've got when you cry. ❜ ❨285❩ ❛ You listen to me. I've seen them too. ❜ ❨286❩ ❛ You'll see. There are going to be some big surprises. There are going to be... changes. ❜ ❨287❩ ❛ Why did you go and fight that stupid war that had nothing to do with us? Why didn't you stay like the others did? ❜ ❨288❩ ❛ Your place was here with your family. ❜ ❨289❩ ❛ So you say you know this house well? ❜ ❨290❩ ❛ I wasn't expecting you so soon. ❜ ❨291❩ ❛ What's the matter? Has the cat got your tongue? ❜ ❨292❩ ❛ You mean they just vanished? Into thin air? ❜ ❨293❩ ❛ No door must be opened without the previous one being closed first. ❜ ❨294❩ ❛ Here, most of the time, you can hardly see your way. ❜ ❨295❩ ❛ Whatever you do, don't open the curtains. ❜ ❨296❩ ❛ Now, come on. Eyes closed. ❜ ❨297❩ ❛ We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. ❜ ❨298❩ ❛ By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be. ❜ ❨299❩ ❛ I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. ❜ ❨300❩ ❛ And the reasons? There are no reasons. ❜ ❨301❩ ❛ Love does not exist, it's like religion, made to control you. ❜ ❨302❩ ❛ After all, we're not fucking stupid. At least, we're not that fucking stupid. ❜ ❨303❩ ❛ You fucking knew that fucking cunt would fuck some cunt. ❜ ❨304❩ ❛ Everything in the street today seems soft focus. ❜ ❨305❩ ❛ What does that make us? The lowest of the low. ❜ ❨306❩ ❛ Take your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you're still fuckin’ miles off the pace. ❜ ❨307❩ ❛ It’s as if everything is a copy of what you knew before, similar, yet somehow lacking in its usual qualities, a bit like the way things are in a dream. ❜ ❨308❩ ❛ It’s all okay, it’s all beautiful; but I fear that this internal sea is going to subside soon, leaving this poisonous shite washed up, stranded up in my body. ❜ ❨309❩ ❛ It cuts me up. It confuses me. ❜ ❨310❩ ❛ It's not funny laughter. This is lynch mob laughter. ❜ ❨311❩ ❛ Protect me from those who wish to help us. ❜ ❨312❩ ❛ They mean well, and they mean well to me, but there's no way under the sun that they can appreciate what I feel, what I need. ❜ ❨313❩ ❛ The pit of melancholy is a bottomless one, and I am descending fast. ❜ ❨314❩ ❛ Living like this is a full-time business. ❜ ❨315❩ ❛ I’ll stand or fall alone. ❜ ❨316❩ ❛ We are no wiser now than at the start. ❜ ❨317❩ ❛ This is pathetic, and fucking boring. ❜ ❨318❩ ❛ Death is usually a process, rather than an event. ❜ ❨319❩ ❛ We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? ❜ ❨320❩ ❛ We are all acquaintances now. ❜ ❨321❩ ❛ The problem is that this beautiful ocean carries with it loads of poisonous flotsam and jetsam. ❜ ❨322❩ ❛ Life is beautiful. I'm going to enjoy it, and I'm going to have a long life. ❜ ❨323❩ ❛ The grim reality of impending death can be talked away by trying to invest in the present reality of life. ❜ ❨324❩ ❛ There must be more to life than this. ❜ ❨325❩ ❛ We all see what we want to see. ❜ ❨326❩ ❛ Statistically speaking, you're more likely to be killed by a member of your own family or a close friend, than by anyone else. ❜ ❨327❩ ❛ What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question. ❜ ❨328❩ ❛ Maybe that's what love is: it's being pissed off. ❜ ❨329❩ ❛ You can forget who you are if you're alone too much. ❜ ❨330❩ ❛ Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God. ❜ ❨331❩ ❛ Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly.  ❜ ❨332❩ ❛ We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing. ❜ ❨333❩ ❛ Everyone wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing. ❜ ❨334❩ ❛ We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young. ❜ ❨335❩ ❛ How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it. ❜ ❨336❩ ❛ Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering: Mine! Mine! ❜ ❨337❩ ❛ All creatures know that some must die ; that all the rest may take and eat. ❜ ❨338❩ ❛ Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? ❜ ❨339❩ ❛ Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance. ❜ ❨340❩ ❛ Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy? ❜ ❨341❩ ❛ Love is useless, it leads you into dumb exchanges in which you give too much away, and then you get bitter and mean. ❜ ❨342❩ ❛ Maybe sadness is a kind of hunger. Maybe the two go together. ❜ ❨343❩ ❛ Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody -- a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules. ❜ ❨344❩ ❛ If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time. ❜ ❨345❩ ❛ You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them. ❜ ❨346❩ ❛ I'm fine, for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in. ❜ ❨347❩ ❛ Because if you can't wish, why bother? ❜ ❨348❩ ❛ It's better to hope than mope! ❜ ❨349❩ ❛ Reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows. ❜ ❨350❩ ❛ In any case, time is not a thing that passes, it’s a sea on which you float. ❜ ❨351❩ ❛ I know I’m deceiving myself, but I prefer to deceive myself. I desperately need to believe such pure joy is still possible. ❜ ❨352❩ ❛ Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered. ❜ ❨353❩ ❛ Behind my eyelids I saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned. ❜ ❨354❩ ❛ ‘Why can't I believe?’ I asked the darkness. ❜ ❨355❩ ❛ Everyone’s too sad for everything. ❜ ❨356❩ ❛ If you can’t stop the waves, go sailing. ❜ ❨357❩ ❛ I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary. ❜ ❨358❩ ❛ Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. ❜ ❨359❩ ❛ In the end, we'll all become stories. ❜ ❨360❩ ❛ I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead. ❜ ❨361❩ ❛ If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. ❜ ❨362❩ ❛ If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. ❜ ❨363❩ ❛ Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results. ❜ ❨364❩ ❛ Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been. ❜ ❨365❩ ❛ Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? ❜ ❨366❩ ❛ We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly. ❜ ❨367❩ ❛ If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon? ❜ ❨368❩ ❛ You fit into me like a hook into an eye. ❜ ❨369❩ ❛ Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened. ❜ ❨370❩ ❛ Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. ❜ ❨371❩ ❛ Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. ❜ ❨372❩ ❛ This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons. ❜ ❨373❩ ❛ Get rid of death. Make it be spring. ❜ ❨374❩ ❛ You are innocent as a bathtub full of bullets. ❜ ❨375❩ ❛ I am the space you desecrate as you pass through. ❜ ❨376❩ ❛ Favour me and give me riches, destroy my enemies. Save me from death. ❜ ❨377❩ ❛ She is a raw voice loose in the rooms beneath me. ❜ ❨378❩ ❛ Isn't the moon warm enough for you, why do you need the blanket of another body? ❜ ❨379❩ ❛ This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn. ❜ ❨380❩ ❛ If you look long enough eventually you will see me. ❜ ❨381❩ ❛ I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head. ❜ ❨382❩ ❛ I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief. ❜ ❨383❩ ❛ But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling. ❜ ❨384❩ ❛ How else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin? ❜ ❨385❩ ❛ What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question. ❜ ❨386❩ ❛ Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything. ❜ ❨387❩ ❛ We loved with a love that was more than love. ❜ ❨388❩ ❛ Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. ❜ ❨389❩ ❛ The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? ❜ ❨390❩ ❛ There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion. ❜ ❨391❩ ❛ Never to suffer would never to have been blessed. ❜ ❨392❩ ❛ Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear. ❜ ❨393❩ ❛ And all I loved, I loved alone. ❜ ❨394❩ ❛ Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute. ❜ ❨395❩ ❛ The best things in life make you sweaty. ❜ ❨396❩ ❛ There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. ❜ ❨397❩ ❛ Anything is better than this agony. ❜ ❨398❩ ❛ You fancy me mad. ❜ ❨399❩ ❛ I hear all things in the heaven and in the earth. ❜ ❨400❩ ❛ Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? ❜ ❨401❩ ❛ Leave my loneliness unbroken! ❜ ❨402❩ ❛ A more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrills every fibre of my frame. ❜ ❨403❩ ❛ The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. ❜ ❨404❩ ❛ Let my heart be still a moment. ❜ ❨405❩ ❛ You call it hope —  It is but agony of desire. ❜ ❨406❩ ❛ Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? ❜ ❨407❩ ❛ To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths! ❜ ❨408❩ ❛ The beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage. ❜ ❨409❩ ❛ Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive. ❜ ❨410❩ ❛ I have been happy, though in a dream. ❜ ❨411❩ ❛ Nevermore. ❜ ❨412❩ ❛ The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life. ❜ ❨413❩ ❛ I am convinced that every thing is going wrong. ❜ ❨414❩ ❛ The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls. ❜ ❨415❩ ❛ And if I died, at least I will have died for you! ❜ ❨416❩ ❛ It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. ❜ ❨417❩ ❛ Hurt and humiliation — But this, I can not take. ❜ ❨418❩ ❛ The walls in there have ears. ❜ ❨419❩ ❛ This is for your ears only. ❜ ❨420❩ ❛ What is it? You have me scared. ❜ ❨421❩ ❛ Whoever isn’t for us, is against us. ❜ ❨422❩ ❛ You are just a body; to be dumped, disposed of like a carcass, left out for the birds to feed on. ❜ ❨423❩ ❛ The dead will have to forgive me. ❜ ❨424❩ ❛ From now on and no matter how your mind may I change, I will not accept your help. ❜ ❨425❩ ❛ If death comes, so be it. There will be glory in it. ❜ ❨426❩ ❛ Live, then; and live with your choice. ❜ ❨427❩ ❛ I am doing what has to be done. ❜ ❨428❩ ❛ Nothing is going to stop the ones that love you from keeping on loving you. ❜ ❨429❩ ❛ Worst is the man who has all the good advice, and then because his nerve fails, fails to act in accordance with it, as a leader should. ❜ ❨430❩ ❛ Only a loony would walk himself into this. ❜ ❨431❩ ❛ Why do you need such fences and defences? ❜ ❨432❩ ❛ Enough. Do not anger me. ❜ ❨433❩ ❛ The gods, you think, will side with the likes of him? ❜ ❨434❩ ❛ Watch it. You are over stepping. ❜ ❨435❩ ❛ I warn you. You should keep a civil tongue. ❜ ❨436❩ ❛ There is no such thing as an oath the can not be broken. ❜ ❨437❩ ❛ Every now and then, the things you’d hardly let yourself imagine, actually happen. ❜ ❨438❩ ❛ And you stand over this? This is the truth? ❜ ❨439❩ ❛ The bigger the resistance, the bigger the collapse. ❜ ❨440❩ ❛ Iron that’s forged the hardest, snaps the quickest. ❜ ❨441❩ ❛ Even the wildest horses come to heel when they are reined & bitted right. ❜ ❨442❩ ❛ That’s how guilt affects some people. They break and everything comes out. ❜ ❨443❩ ❛ Will it be enough for you? To see me executed? ❜ ❨444❩ ❛ So you know something no one else knows? ❜ ❨445❩ ❛ They know it too. They are just too afraid to say it. ❜ ❨446❩ ❛ If you die, how will I keep on living? ❜ ❨447❩ ❛ There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'. ❜ ❨448❩ ❛ How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. ❜ ❨449❩ ❛ Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body. ❜ ❨450❩ ❛ I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me. ❜ ❨451❩ ❛ For this moment, this one moment, we are together.  ❜ ❨452❩ ❛ Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. ❜ ❨453❩ ❛ I am as neat as a cat in my habits. ❜ ❨454❩ ❛ Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me. ❜ ❨455❩ ❛ I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room. ❜ ❨456❩ ❛ We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe ❨457❩ that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie ❨458❩ asleep. ❜ ❨459❩ ❛ These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom. ❜ ❨460❩ ❛ Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. ❜ ❨461❩ ❛ The moment is all; the moment is enough. ❜ ❨462❩ ❛ I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given. ❜ ❨463❩ ❛ I am not one and simple, but complex and many. ❜ ❨464❩ ❛ And if you are dead, I shall weep. ❜ ❨465❩ ❛ But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful. ❜ ❨466❩ ❛ But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love. ❜ ❨467❩ ❛ I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams. ❜ ❨468❩ ❛ Life is a dream surely. ❜ ❨469❩ ❛ I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. ❜ ❨470❩ ❛ Oh, I am in love with life! ❜ ❨471❩ ❛ I have been knotted; I have been torn apart. ❜ ❨472❩ ❛ There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death. ❜ ❨473❩ ❛ I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am. ❜ ❨474❩ ❛ I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me. ❜ ❨475❩ ❛ I am above the earth now. I am no longer upright, to be knocked against and damaged. ❜ ❨476❩ ❛ I see it all. I feel it all. ❜ ❨477❩ ❛ Death is woven in with the violets. Death and again death. ❜ ❨478❩ ❛ We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember. ❜ ❨479❩ ❛ If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged. ❜ ❨480❩ ❛ When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass. ❜ ❨481❩ ❛ Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word; - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase.  ❜ ❨482❩ ❛ Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor. ❜ ❨483❩ ❛ If the world treats you well, you come to believe you are deserving of it. ❜ ❨484❩ ❛ If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go. ❜ ❨485❩ ❛ It’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength. ❜ ❨486❩ ❛ There is no fool like an educated fool. ❜ ❨487❩ ❛ There are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. ❜ ❨488❩ ❛ I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened. ❜ ❨489❩ ❛ Underneath it all is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful. ❜ ❨490❩ ❛ And underneath all that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but ripe and splitting open of its own accord.  ❜ ❨491❩ ❛ The small details of life often hide a great significance. ❜ ❨492❩ ❛ Guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that others have done to you. ❜ ❨493❩ ❛ I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once? ❜ ❨494❩ ❛ It is always a mistake to curse back openly at those who are stronger than you unless there is a fence between. ❜ ❨495❩ ❛ Some call this "Eve's curse," but I think that is stupid because the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam. ❜ ❨496❩ ❛ I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again. ❜ ❨497❩ ❛ I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely. ❜ ❨498❩ ❛ If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one. ❜ ❨499❩ ❛ It’s as if I never existed, because no trace of me remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed. It is almost the same as being innocent. ❜ ❨500❩ ❛ Today you wear your habitual expression of strained anxiety; you smell of violets. ❜ ❨501❩ ❛ Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude. ❜ ❨502❩ ❛ I wonder what would become of me, and comfort myself that in a hundred years I will be dead and at peace. ❜ ❨503❩ ❛ For it is not always the one that strikes the blow that is the actual murderer. ❜ ❨504❩ ❛ There is a “do this” or “do that” with God, but not any “because”. ❜ ❨505❩ ❛ If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything. ❜ ❨506❩ ❛ They say, why don’t you ever smile or laugh, we never see you smiling, and I say I suppose I have gotten out of the way of it, my face won’t bend in that direction any more. ❜ ❨507❩ ❛ I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out. ❜ ❨508❩ ❛ I see what you’re after. You are a collector. You think all you have to do is give me an apple, and then you can collect me. ❜ ❨509❩ ❛ If you want to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before you have made the same life choice. ❜ ❨510❩ ❛ Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo. ❜ ❨511❩ ❛ Nature is to zoos as God is to churches. ❜ ❨512❩ ❛ After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? ❜ ❨513❩ ❛ There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive. ❜ ❨514❩ ❛ These things sneak up on me for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency. ❜ ❨515❩ ❛ Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast. ❜ ❨516❩ ❛ You can’t buy it, but it has a price. Everything has a price. ❜ ❨517❩ ❛ As a species were doomed by hope, then? You could call it hope. That, or desperation. ❜ ❨518❩ ❛ I am not my childhood. ❜ ❨519❩ ❛ Human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else and live on forever. ❜ ❨520❩ ❛ “I'll make you mine”, lovers said in old books. They never said, “I'll make you me.” ❜ ❨521❩ ❛ How much is too much, how far is too far? ❜ ❨522❩ ❛ Expectation isn't the same as desire. ❜ ❨523❩ ❛ Why not cut to the chase? ❜ ❨524❩ ❛ Maybe there aren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. ❜ ❨525❩ ❛ I thought you didn’t believe in God. ❜ ❨526❩ ❛ I need at least the illusion of being understood. ❜ ❨527❩ ❛ What change would have altered the course of events? In the big picture, nothing. In the small picture, so much. ❜ ❨528❩ ❛ You are only looking at the dirt under your feet. It's not good for you. ❜ ❨529❩ ❛ I like to keep only the bright side of myself turned towards you.  ❜ ❨530❩ ❛ Grief in the face of inevitable death. The wish to stop time. The human condition. ❜ ❨531❩ ❛ So many crucial events take place behind people’s backs, when they aren’t in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. ❜ ❨532❩ ❛ Would you kill someone you loved to spare them pain? ❜ ❨533❩ ❛ When the water’s moving faster than the boat, you can’t control a thing. ❜ ❨534❩ ❛ Don't be so fucking sentimental. ❜ ❨535❩ ❛ Wrong, as usual. ❜ ❨536❩ ❛ Why do you want to talk about ugly things? ❜ ❨537❩ ❛ I understand why serial killers send helpful clues to the police. ❜ ❨538❩ ❛ Take your time, leave mine alone. ❜ ❨539❩ ❛ You will hear thunder and remember me. ❜ ❨540❩ ❛ If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly. ❜ ❨541❩ ❛ I seem to myself an accidental guest in this dreadful body. ❜ ❨542❩ ❛ Call me a sinner, mock me maliciously. ❜ ❨543❩ ❛ I, from the very beginning, seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium. Or a reflection in someone else's mirror. Without flesh, without meaning, without a name. ❜ ❨544❩ ❛ I knew the list of crimes that I was destined to commit. ❜ ❨545❩ ❛ The future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future. ❜ ❨546❩ ❛ You are untranslatable into any one tongue. ❜ ❨547❩ ❛ I was hoping my silence would fit yours. ❜ ❨548❩ ❛ See, we were never about butterflies. All about us is unearthly and radiant. ❜ ❨549❩ ❛ You do not know just what you've been forgiven. ❜ ❨550❩ ❛ I need to slaughter my memory.  ❜ ❨551❩ ❛ Forgive me that I appeared to you in waking dreams. ❜ ❨552❩ ❛ I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy. ❜ ❨553❩ ❛ I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death. ❜ ❨554❩ ❛ Wild honey smells of freedom. But gold smells of nothing. ❜ ❨555❩ ❛ You are three times more beautiful than angels. ❜ ❨556❩ ❛ I will kill you without spilling your blood on the ground, not touching you with my hand, not giving you one glance. ❜ ❨557❩ ❛ You invented me. There is no such earthly being. ❜ ❨558❩ ❛ You’re late. Way too late. I’m glad to see you, nonetheless. ❜ ❨559❩ ❛ Forgive me that I felt forsaken. Forgive me that I kept mistaking too many others for you. ❜ ❨560❩ ❛ Real tenderness can’t be confused, it’s quiet and can’t be heard. ❜ ❨561❩ ❛ What else lived in that house besides us? ❜ ❨562❩ ❛ How unhappy we are together! ❜ ❨563❩ ❛ I defend not my voice, but my silence. ❜ ❨564❩ ❛ Without love, I'm more at ease, I'm sure. ❜ ❨565❩ ❛ I've got no more tears or explanations. ❜ ❨566❩ ❛ I’m not complaining. Happiness is not for me. ❜ ❨567❩ ❛ Are you not the only tie between good and evil, earthly pits and paradise? ❜ ❨568❩ ❛ In the morning we shall find out who has died in the night. ❜ ❨569❩ ❛ I was not a lovable child, and I've grown into a deeply unlovable adult. ❜ ❨570❩ ❛ The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it. ❜ ❨571❩ ❛ I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark. ❜ ❨572❩ ❛ I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don't even ripple. ❜ ❨573❩ ❛ I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way. ❜ ❨574❩ ❛ I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there - hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen. But the meanness usually wins out. ❜ ❨575❩ ❛ I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn't have loosened. A stitch come undone. ❜ ❨576❩ ❛ Everyone who keeps a secret, itches to tell it. ❜ ❨577❩ ❛ Coffee goes great with sudden death. ❜ ❨578❩ ❛ I should just listen to my gut and then do the opposite. ❜ ❨579❩ ❛ “Smile, it can't be that bad!” Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad. ❜ ❨580❩ ❛ Everything bad in the world already did happen. ❜ ❨581❩ ❛ You’re going to find peace? Like knowing is somehow going to fix you? ❜ ❨582❩ ❛ Instead of asking yourself what happened, just accept that it happened. ❜ ❨583❩ ❛ Homesick for a place I've never been. ❜ ❨584❩ ❛ Worries find you easily enough without inviting them. ❜ ❨585❩ ❛ It is always consoling to think of suicide. It's what gets one through many a bad night. ❜ ❨586❩ ❛ Do you understand this is serious? ❜ ❨587❩ ❛ Sometimes it feels good to fuck with something. Instead of always being fucked with. ❜ ❨588❩ ❛ How could you kill something you cared enough to name? ❜ ❨589❩ ❛ Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs. ❜ ❨590❩ ❛ We have the same chemicals in our blood: shame, anger, greed. Unjustified nostalgia. ❜ ❨591❩ ❛ I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. ❜ ❨592❩ ❛ The phrase fuck you may not rest on the tip of my tongue, but it’s near. Midtongue. ❜ ❨593❩ ❛ Nothing to it but to do it. ❜ ❨594❩ ❛ There are a lot of people who deserve a lesson, deserve to really understand, that nothing comes easy, that most things are going to go sour. ❜ ❨595❩ ❛ If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we’d all have a very Merry Christmas. ❜ ❨596❩ ❛ Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. ❜ ❨597❩ ❛ What does it do to a girl who knows her mother is a murderer? ❜ ❨598❩ ❛ That mean old bitch across the street bit it. ❜ ❨599❩ ❛ Survival is a talent. ❜ ❨600❩ ❛ Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. ❜ ❨601❩ ❛ Who has the courage to burn themselves? ❜ ❨602❩ ❛ Is insanity just a matter of dropping the act? ❜ ❨603❩ ❛ Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? ❜ ❨604❩ ❛ You need to be well fed, clothed, and housed to have time for this much self-pity. ❜ ❨605❩ ❛ When I am supposed to be awake, I am asleep; when I am supposed to speak, I am silent. When a pleasure offers itself to me, I avoid it. ❜ ❨606❩ ❛ There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same. ❜ ❨607❩ ❛ In a strange way we are free. We've reached the end of the line. We have nothing more to lose. ❜ ❨608❩ ❛ The world won’t stop because we aren’t in it anymore. ❜ ❨609❩ ❛ I can't answer the real question. All I can tell you is, it's easy. ❜ ❨610❩ ❛ I am lighter, airier than I’ve been in years. ❜ ❨611❩ ❛ I am not dead, yet something in me definitely is. ❜ ❨612❩ ❛ You meant that as an insult but I am taking it as a compliment. ❜ ❨613❩ ❛ What life can recover from that? ❜ ❨614❩ ❛ It's a fairly accurate portrait of me. It's accurate but it isn't profound. ❜ ❨615❩ ❛ Pull yourself together! There's nothing wrong with you. ❜ ❨616❩ ❛ It's quiet. It's like― I don't know. It's like falling off a cliff. ❜ ❨617❩ ❛ Once you start parsing a face, it's a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots. ❜ ❨618❩ ❛ I lost him. I did it on purpose. ❜ ❨619❩ ❛ It’s a mean world. There’s nobody to take care of you out there. ❜ ❨620❩ ❛ Reality is getting too dense. ❜ ❨621❩ ❛ I'm ambivalent. In fact that's my new favourite word. ❜ ❨622❩ ❛ I can't come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions you raise. ❜ ❨623❩ ❛ A spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather. ❜ ❨624❩ ❛ Twenty-five chocolate chip cookies would be the perfect dinner. ❜ ❨625❩ ❛ A thought is a hard thing to control. ❜ ❨626❩ ❛ Life demands skills I don’t have. ❜ ❨627❩ ❛ Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful. Most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them. ❜ ❨628❩ ❛ It never stops, even at night, it’s my lullaby. ❜ ❨629❩ ❛ Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. ❜ ❨630❩ ❛ This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes. ❜ ❨631❩ ❛ I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. ❜ ❨632❩ ❛ Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. ❜ ❨633❩ ❛ Hatred is easier. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love. ❜ ❨634❩ ❛ Potential has a shelf life. ❜ ❨635❩ ❛ Don’t move. Stay like that, let me have that. ❜ ❨636❩ ❛ I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over. ❜ ❨637❩ ❛ Never pray for justice, because you might get some. ❜ ❨638❩ ❛ It disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional. ❜ ❨639❩ ❛ We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something. ❜ ❨640❩ ❛ This is what I miss, not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. ❜ ❨641❩ ❛ I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly. ❜ ❨642❩ ❛ You are amazing. Amazing and agonising and almost lethal. ❜ ❨643❩ ❛ In my dreams of this city I am always lost. ❜ ❨644❩ ❛ I don't know where these feelings have come from, I don’t know what I've done. ❜ ❨645❩ ❛ I am not the centre of your story, you are.  ❜ ❨646❩ ❛ I’m mad because you’re an asshole. ❜ ❨647❩ ❛ It's enormously pleasing to me, walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will. ❜ ❨648❩ ❛ There is never only one of anyone. ❜ ❨649❩ ❛ I can't do this without feeling I'm acting. ❜ ❨650❩ ❛ I am prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence. ❜ ❨651❩ ❛ I’m losing my appetite for strangers. ❜ ❨652❩ ❛ You wear your cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. You want it all. ❜ ❨653❩ ❛ Knowing too much about other people weakens you. You are forced to understand their reasons for doing things. ❜ ❨654❩ ❛ I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now. ❜ ❨655❩ ❛ Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it's enough to see by. ❜ ❨656❩ ❛ Whoever cares the most will lose. ❜ ❨657❩ ❛ Young women need unfairness, it’s one of their few defences.  ❜ ❨658❩ ❛ Time has gone on without you. ❜ ❨659❩ ❛ Don't let the bastards grind you down. ❜ ❨660❩ ❛ Who can remember pain, once it’s over? Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind. ❜ ❨661❩ ❛ Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse, for some. ❜ ❨662❩ ❛ There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. ❜ ❨663❩ ❛ Remember that forgiveness too is a power. ❜ ❨664❩ ❛ I am not your justification for existence. ❜ ❨665❩ ❛ I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. ❜ ❨666❩ ❛ If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. ❜ ❨667❩ ❛ All you have to do is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard. ❜ ❨668❩ ❛ Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations. ❜ ❨669❩ ❛ I want everything back, the way it was. ❜ ❨670❩ ❛ You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave. ❜ ❨671❩ ❛ Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. ❜ ❨672❩ ❛ To want is to have a weakness. ❜ ❨673❩ ❛ There isn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. ❜ ❨674❩ ❛ The past is a great darkness, filled with echoes. ❜ ❨675❩ ❛ Ordinary is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary. ❜ ❨676❩ ❛ I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilised. I wish it showed me in a better light. ❜ ❨677❩ ❛ The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. ❜ ❨678❩ ❛ By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you. ❜ ❨679❩ ❛ Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard. ❜ ❨680❩ ❛ Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. ❜ ❨681❩ ❛ Keep the others safe. Don't let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. ❜ ❨682❩ ❛ The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand. ❜ ❨683❩ ❛ The world is full of weapons if you're looking for them. ❜ ❨684❩ ❛ Nobody's heart is perfect. ❜ ❨685❩ ❛ One false move and I'm dead. ❜ ❨686❩ ❛ Watch out. I've got my eye on you. ❜ ❨687❩ ❛ Fear is a powerful stimulant. ❜ ❨688❩ ❛ I couldn't afford to lose you. ❜ ❨689❩ ❛ Name one hero who was happy. ---- You can’t. ❜ ❨690❩ ❛ I feel like I could eat the world raw. ❜ ❨691❩ ❛ We are like gods at the dawning of the world. ❜ ❨692❩ ❛ I could recognise him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world. ❜ ❨693❩ ❛ There are no bargains between lion and men. I will kill you and eat you raw. ❜ ❨694❩ ❛ You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature. ❜ ❨695❩ ❛ He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. ❜ ❨696❩ ❛ Some men gain glory after they die, others fade. ❜ ❨697❩ ❛ I am made of memories. ❜ ❨698❩ ❛ Will you come with me? ❜ ❨699❩ ❛ I wish I had let you all die. ❜ ❨700❩ ❛ It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after. ❜ ❨701❩ ❛ Bury us. Let us be free. ❜ ❨702❩ ❛ Go. He waits for you. ❜ ❨703❩ ❛ Nothing could eclipse the stain of this dirty, mortal mediocrity. ❜ ❨704❩ ❛ I know I have told you of this. ❜ ❨705❩ ❛ I don't know how you remember them all. I swear they look the same to me. ❜ ❨706❩ ❛ Perhaps you should get some new stories, so I don’t fucking kill myself of boredom. ❜ ❨707❩ ❛ I yearn for the darkness and silence of the underworld, where I can rest. ❜ ❨708❩ ❛ There is no honour in betraying your friends. ❜ ❨709❩ ❛ There is no answer. Whichever you choose, you are wrong. ❜ ❨710❩ ❛ Divine blood flows differently. ❜ ❨711❩ ❛ How is there glory in taking life? We die so easily. ❜ ❨712❩ ❛ This is what I will miss, I think. I will kill myself rather than miss it. ❜ ❨713❩ ❛ How long do we have? ❜ ❨714❩ ❛ Do you think we fight hopeless wars? ❜ ❨715❩ ❛ There is no law that gods must be fair. ❜ ❨716❩ ❛ I do not fear ridicule. I never have. ❜ ❨717❩ ❛ You were always better with words than I. ❜ ❨718❩ ❛ Who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? ❜ ❨719❩ ❛ When you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. ❜ ❨720❩ ❛ That's how the madness of the world tries to colonise you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality. ❜ ❨721❩ ❛ The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear. ❜ ❨722❩ ❛ Silence creates violence. ❜ ❨723❩ ❛ Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough. ❜ ❨724❩ ❛ There are certain kinds of connections that are so deep that when broken you feel the snap of it inside you. ❜ ❨725❩ ❛ Nothing that ever lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth. ❜ ❨726❩ ❛ We all live in a kind of continuous dream. ❜ ❨727❩ ❛ You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you. ❜ ❨728❩ ❛ What can you do when your five senses are not enough? ❜ ❨729❩ ❛ We will neither be what we had been nor what we would become once we reach our destination. ❜ ❨730❩ ❛ Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable. ❜ ❨731❩ ❛ When you are too close to the centre of a mystery there is no way to pull back. ❜ ❨732❩ ❛ I long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no. ❜ ❨733❩ ❛ I look not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I try to imagine what kind of life lives in those celestial tidal pools so far from us. ❜ ❨734❩ ❛ I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, I think. If so, it was a very small part. I ran. ❜ ❨735❩ ❛ I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. ❜ ❨736❩ ❛ All of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. ❜ ❨737❩ ❛ We don’t have real answers, because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish. ❜ ❨738❩ ❛ This part I will do alone. Don’t follow. ❜ ❨739❩ ❛ People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control. ❜ ❨740❩ ❛ Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead? ❜ ❨741❩ ❛ I loved them, but I didn’t need them, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. ❜ ❨742❩ ❛ Places can impress themselves upon me, and I can become part of them with ease. ❜ ❨743❩ ❛ There is no one with me. I am all by myself. ❜ ❨744❩ ❛ Pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic. ❜ ❨745❩ ❛ I think you're confusing suicide with self-destruction, and they're very different. Almost none of us commit suicide, whereas almost all of us self-destruct. ❜ ❨746❩ ❛ What did you eat? You had rations for only two weeks. You were there for nearly four months. ❜ ❨747❩ ❛ Something here is making giant waves in the gene pool. ❜ ❨748❩ ❛ I need to know what’s inside. ❜ ❨749❩ ❛ These aren't decisions. They're impulses ❜ ❨750❩ ❛ What do you think I do when you’re away? Do you think I’m out in the garden pinning, looking up at the sky? ❜ ❨751❩ ❛ If I know what’s happened I can save their life. ❜ ❨752❩ ❛ They either went crazy or something in here killed them. ❜ ❨753❩ ❛ Something is coming through the fence! ❜ ❨754❩ ❛ Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny. ❜ ❨755❩ ❛ People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. ❜ ❨756❩ ❛ Happy endings are still endings. ❜ ❨757❩ ❛ We believe in all sorts of things that aren't true; -- we call it history. ❜ ❨758❩ ❛ Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? ❜ ❨759❩ ❛ In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realise it is far more common for men to turn into rats. ❜ ❨760❩ ❛ Girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the side stepping of compromise.  ❜ ❨761❩ ❛ Love makes hunters of us all. ❜ ❨762❩ ❛ There is much to hate in this world and way too much to love. ❜ ❨763❩ ❛ You confuse not speaking with not listening. ❜ ❨764❩ ❛ As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention. ❜ ❨765❩ ❛ The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say. ❜ ❨766❩ ❛ Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. ❜ ❨767❩ ❛ We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. ❜ ❨768❩ ❛ The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness. ❜ ❨769❩ ❛ I know you don't want to hear this but someone has to say it! You are out of control! ❜ ❨770❩ ❛ Even at the very worst - there is always choice. ❜ ❨771❩ ❛ Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven. So you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it. ❜ ❨772❩ ❛ Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on -- or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the entire universe is changed. ❜ ❨773❩ ❛ That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness. Life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same. ❜ ❨774❩ ❛ I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without. ❜ ❨775❩ ❛ It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new. ❜ ❨776❩ ❛ Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Always the godfather, never the god. ❜ ❨777❩ ❛ The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew. ❜ ❨778❩ ❛ Evil is an act, not an appetite. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal. ❜ ❨779❩ ❛ How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table?  ❜ ❨780❩ ❛ Even God used silence as a strategy. ❜ ❨781❩ ❛ I learned failure early and mastered it. ❜ ❨782❩ ❛ It isn't whether you do it well or ill, it's that you do it all. ❜ ❨783❩ ❛ This is why you shouldn't fall in love, it blinds you. Love is a very wicked distraction. ❜ ❨784❩ ❛ Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery. ❜ ❨785❩ ❛ Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience. ❜ ❨786❩ ❛ Such brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly. ❜ ❨787❩ ❛ I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can. ❜ ❨788❩ ❛ Tell me to mind my own business, tell me to go fuck myself, to piss off, go on, say it, but don’t tell me nothing’s wrong. ❜ ❨789❩ ❛ The truth isn't a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on. ❜ ❨790❩ ❛ One can't make peace with another by force. ❜ ❨791❩ ❛ I am a forgettable leaf on a tree. ❜ ❨792❩ ❛ That's all I want; --- to do no harm. ❜ ❨793❩ ❛ I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is. ❜ ❨794❩ ❛ Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. ❜ ❨795❩ ❛ You’re too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to that we manage to endure the burden of the past. ❜ ❨796❩ ❛ Love, no matter what else it might be, is a natural talent. You are either born knowing how, or you never know. ❜ ❨797❩ ❛ Whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life. ❜ ❨798❩ ❛ There is no God worth worrying about. ❜ ❨799❩ ❛ The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love. ❜ ❨800❩ ❛ Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good. ❜ ❨801❩ ❛ Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the very end in itself. ❜ ❨802❩ ❛ Only God knows how much I love you. ❜ ❨803❩ ❛ There is no greater glory than to die for love. ❜ ❨804❩ ❛ Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies. ❜ ❨805❩ ❛ Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life. ❜ ❨806❩ ❛ Today, when I saw you, I realised that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion. ❜ ❨807❩ ❛ I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century. ❜ ❨808❩ ❛ I want to be myself again, to recover all that I was obliged to give up. ❜ ❨809❩ ❛ The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name. ❜ ❨810❩ ❛ This soup tastes like windows. ❜ ❨811❩ ❛ Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist? ❜ ❨812❩ ❛ One has to live a long time to know a man's true nature. ❜ ❨813❩ ❛ No, not rich, I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing. ❜ ❨814❩ ❛ My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse. ❜ ❨815❩ ❛ That may be the reason he does so many things, so that he will not have to think. ❜ ❨816❩ ❛ Love if it exists, is something separate: another life. ❜ ❨817❩ ❛ Things did not go as badly for me as they would for you. ❜ ❨818❩ ❛ There are things you do only for love. ❜ ❨819❩ ❛ I’ll have plenty of time to rest when I die. ❜ ❨820❩ ❛ There is no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age. ❜ ❨821❩ ❛ You treat me as if I were just anybody. ❜ ❨822❩ ❛ The symptoms of love are the same as those of cholera. ❜ ❨823❩ ❛ There is no law, human or divine, that you have not ignored. ❜ ❨824❩ ❛ Why is it that I feel I've known you so many years? ❜ ❨825❩ ❛ Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. ❜ ❨826❩ ❛ It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. ❜ ❨827❩ ❛ We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real? ❜ ❨828❩ ❛ There must be something, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing. ❜ ❨829❩ ❛ If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn. ❜ ❨830❩ ❛ If you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore. ❜ ❨831❩ ❛ You can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. ❜ ❨832❩ ❛ It was a pleasure to burn. ❜ ❨833❩ ❛ I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? ❜ ❨834❩ ❛ Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? ❜ ❨835❩ ❛ Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays? ❜ ❨836❩ ❛ Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? ❜ ❨837❩ ❛ I don't talk things. I talk the meaning of things. ❜ ❨838❩ ❛ I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning. ❜ ❨839❩ ❛ I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. ❜ ❨840❩ ❛ That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want. ❜ ❨841❩ ❛ Someday we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up. ❜ ❨842❩ ❛ You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. ❜ ❨843❩ ❛ You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. ❜ ❨844❩ ❛ When they give you lined paper, write the other way. ❜ ❨845❩ ❛ The sun burnt every day. It burnt time. ❜ ❨846❩ ❛ We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing. ❜ ❨847❩ ❛ I feel I'm doing what I should've done a lifetime ago. ❜ ❨848❩ ❛ I'm not afraid. Maybe it's because I'm doing the right thing at last. Maybe it's because I've done a rash thing and don't want to look the coward to you. ❜ ❨849❩ ❛ Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life! ❜ ❨850❩ ❛ How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you? ❜ ❨851❩ ❛ It must be right. It seems so right. ❜ ❨852❩ ❛ To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. ❜ ❨853❩ ❛ It's my game. And no one can help me. Not even you. ❜ ❨854❩ ❛ What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. ❜ ❨855❩ ❛ Death is a long process. Your body is just the first part of you that croaks. Beyond that, your dreams have to die. Then your expectations. Your anger and memories must die. Your ego. Your pride and shame and ambition and hope. ❜ ❨856❩ ❛ Help me give up my addiction to hope. ❜ ❨857❩ ❛ Life is short, death is forever. ❜ ❨858❩ ❛ Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break. ❜ ❨859❩ ❛ If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes. ❜ ❨860❩ ❛ We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired. ❜ ❨861❩ ❛ All the demons of hell formerly reigned as gods in previous cultures. No it's not fair, but one man's god is another man's devil. ❜ ❨862❩ ❛ I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful. ❜ ❨863❩ ❛ It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. ❜ ❨864❩ ❛ You fucked up. Game over. So just relax. ❜ ❨865❩ ❛ The greatest weapon any warrior can carry into battle is absolute certainty of her eternal soul. ❜ ❨866❩ ❛ If killing you will end my existence as well, be it. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living. ❜ ❨867❩ ❛ I might be a touch of a sadist and a little bit jejune but at least I'm not a victim, not any longer. I hope. ❜ ❨868❩ ❛ Dying seems like the greatest weakness, and in a world where people say you're lazy for not shaving your legs, then being dead seems like the ultimate character flaw. ❜ ❨869❩ ❛ Any concept of right versus wrong, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. ❜ ❨870❩ ❛ To prove that I exist I must kill you. ❜ ❨871❩ ❛ I'd say that my life has been a way-too-long case history of chasing rainbows. ❜ ❨872❩ ❛ The world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard. ❜ ❨873❩ ❛ Every garden looks beautiful in May. ❜ ❨874❩ ❛ When we neglect to fear such brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless. ❜ ❨875❩ ❛ My taste for power continues to grow, as does my ability to accrue it. ❜ ❨876❩ ❛ Such language! Why don't you just take a dump in my ears? ❜ ❨877❩ ❛ You’d be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. ❜ ❨878❩ ❛ Depending on her mood, she can be more frightening than any demon or devil you might ever run across. ❜ ❨879❩ ❛ Cross your fingers! Maybe death won't happen to you. ❜ ❨880❩ ❛ Do not die while wearing cheap shoes. ❜ ❨881❩ ❛ Old habits die hard. ❜ ❨882❩ ❛ It's our attachments to a fixed identity that torture us. ❜ ❨883❩ ❛ What do I think I am? In a thousand words; I don't have a clue. ❨884❩ ❛ If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me. ❜ ❨885❩ ❛ All I wanted was to be loved for myself. ❜ ❨886❩ ❛ I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer. ❜ ❨887❩ ❛ Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? ❜ ❨888❩ ❛ You have a heart that can hold the entire empire of the world. ❜ ❨889❩ ❛ Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you. ❜ ❨890❩ ❛ Tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead. ❜ ❨891❩ ❛ You are afraid of me! And yet I am not really wicked. Love me and you shall see! ❜ ❨892❩ ❛ Are people so unhappy when they love? --- Yes, when they love and are not sure of being loved. ❜ ❨893❩ ❛ Your soul is a beautiful thing. No emperor received so fair a gift. The angels wept tonight. ❜ ❨894❩ ❛ Blood!...Blood!... That's a good thing! ❜ ❨895❩ ❛ Now I want to live like everybody else. I want to have a life like everybody else. ❜ ❨896❩ ❛ You will be the happiest of women. And we will sing, all by ourselves, till we swoon away with delight. ❜ ❨897❩ ❛ I should be as gentle as a lamb; and you could do anything with me that you pleased. ❜ ❨898❩ ❛ I am going to die of love, I am dying of love. That's how it is. I loved you so. I still love you so. ❜ ❨899❩ ❛ I am dying of love for her, I tell you! If only you knew how beautiful she was when she let me kiss her. ❜ ❨900❩ ❛ He fills me with horror but I do not hate him. How can I hate him? ❜ ❨901❩ ❛ Holy angel, in Heaven blessed, my spirit longs with thee to rest. ❜ ❨902❩ ❛ Nothing is colder or more dead than my heart. ❜ ❨903❩ ❛ I had loved an angel and now I despise a woman. ❜ ❨904❩ ❛ Our lives are one masked ball. ❜ ❨905❩ ❛ Why do you condemn a man whom you have never met, whom no one knows and about whom even you yourself know nothing? ❜ ❨906❩ ❛ He would commit murder for me. ❜ ❨907❩ ❛ If I don't save her from the hands of that humbug, she is lost. But I shall save her. ❜ ❨908❩ ❛ We will go from here together or die together. ❜ ❨909❩ ❛ Your fear, your terror, all of that is just love and love of the most exquisite kind, the kind which people do not admit even to themselves. The kind that gives you a thrill, when you think of it. ❜ ❨910❩ ❛ Destiny has chained you to me forever. ❜ ❨911❩ ❛ You must never ask me that. ❜ ❨912❩ ❛ Are you afraid that you will change your mind? ❜ ❨913❩ ❛ You must come and fetch me in my dressing room at midnight exactly. ❜ ❨914❩ ❛ The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps. ❜ ❨915❩ ❛ I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts. ❜ ❨916❩ ❛ There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home. ❜ ❨917❩ ❛ I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head. ❜ ❨918❩ ❛ It’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to even mourn for it. ❜ ❨919❩ ❛ There’s nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion. ❜ ❨920❩ ❛ When did you become so weak? ❜ ❨921❩ ❛ I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it. ❜ ❨922❩ ❛ Let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers. ❜ ❨923❩ ❛ Sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them. ❜ ❨924❩ ❛ I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it. ❜ ❨925❩ ❛ I’ve just got to let myself feel the pain, because if I don’t, if I keep numbing it, it’ll never really go away. ❜ ❨926❩ ❛ I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way. It’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move. ❜ ❨927❩ ❛ Who was it that said following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all. ❜ ❨928❩ ❛ It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. ❜ ❨929❩ ❛ Sometimes I catch myself trying to remember the last time I had meaningful physical contact with another person, just a hug or a heartfelt squeeze of my hand, and my heart twitches. ❜ ❨930❩ ❛ I have to find a way of making myself happy, I have to stop looking for happiness elsewhere. ❜ ❨931❩ ❛ How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn? ❜ ❨932❩ ❛ Now look -- Now look what you made me do. ❜ ❨933❩ ❛ It’s okay, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness. ❜ ❨934❩ ❛ They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be. ❜ ❨935❩ ❛ You broke me and I broke us. ❜ ❨936❩ ❛ I’ve been the fool. If he does it with you, he’ll do it to you. ❜ ❨937❩ ❛ I’d never realised, not until now, how shameful it is to be pitied. ❜ ❨938❩ ❛ Sometimes, I don’t want to go anywhere, I think I’ll be happy if I never have to set foot outside the house again. ❜ ❨939❩ ❛ I don’t believe in soul mates, but there’s an understanding between us that I just haven’t felt before, or at least, not for a long time. ❜ ❨940❩ ❛ There can be no greater agony, nothing can be more painful than the not knowing, which will never end. ❜ ❨941❩ ❛ Being the other woman is a huge turn-on, there’s no point in denying it: you’re the one he can’t help but betray his wife for, even though he loves her. That’s just how irresistible you are. ❜ ❨942❩ ❛ I feel a rush of gratitude so strong, it feels almost like love. ❜ ❨943❩ ❛ You don’t know how determined I can be. Once I’ve made my mind up, I’m a force to be reckoned with. ❜ ❨944❩ ❛ The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be. ❜ ❨945❩ ❛ You don’t have to be afraid of being alone. It’s not the worst thing, is it? ❜ ❨946❩ ❛ I have felt this way before. On a larger scale, to a more intense degree, of course, but I remember the quality of the pain. You don’t forget it. ❜ ❨947❩ ❛ If he thinks I’m going to sit around crying, he’s got another thing coming. ❜ ❨948❩ ❛ I don’t like to lose. It’s not like me. None of this is like me. I don’t get rejected. I’m the one who walks away. ❜ ❨949❩ ❛ I don’t remember anger, raging fury. I remember fear. ❜ ❨950❩ ❛ I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in days. I hate it, hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain going round, tick, tick, tick, tick. ❜ ❨951❩ ❛ Maybe the courage I need has nothing to do with telling the truth and everything to do with walking away. ❜ ❨952❩ ❛ I’m not beautiful, and I can’t have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless. ❜ ❨953❩ ❛ Failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under and I gave up hope. ❜ ❨954❩ ❛ It’s an odd thing to say, but I think this all the time; I don’t feel bad enough. ❜ ❨955❩ ❛ Some battles aren’t worth fighting. ❜ ❨956❩ ❛ I never felt guilty. I pretended I did. I had to. ❜ ❨957❩ ❛ I never meant for any of this to happen, we fell in love, what could we do? ❜ ❨958❩ ❛ What bothers me most is that I haven’t got to the end of my story, and I can’t start over with someone else, it’s too hard. ❜ ❨959❩ ❛ A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended. ❜ ❨960❩ ❛ It isn’t only wickedness and scheming that make people unhappy, it is confusion and misunderstanding. ❜ ❨961❩ ❛ Falling in love can be achieved in a single word—a glance. ❜ ❨962❩ ❛ Though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you. ❜ ❨963❩ ❛ I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. ❜ ❨964❩ ❛ It might hurt, it is horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but it is what it is to be in love. ❜ ❨965❩ ❛ It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. ❜ ❨966❩ ❛ Come back, come back to me. ❜ ❨967❩ ❛ In my thoughts I make love to you all day long. ❜ ❨968❩ ❛ The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence and I don’t think I can blame the heat. ❜ ❨969❩ ❛ Beauty occupies a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, has infinite variation. ❜ ❨970❩ ❛ Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy? ❜ ❨971❩ ❛ However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I’ve always been. ❜ ❨972❩ ❛ Hate is a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational. ❜ ❨973❩ ❛ I’m going mad. Let me not be mad. ❜ ❨974❩ ❛ Is everyone really as alive as I am? ❜ ❨975❩ ❛ Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone teaches you something about yourself. ❜ ❨976❩ ❛ Something has happened, hasn’t it? ❜ ❨977❩ ❛ I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness. ❜ ❨978❩ ❛ Is it possible that I am, in the modern term, in denial? ❜ ❨979❩ ❛ How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect? ❜ ❨980❩ ❛ Not everything has a cause. Some things are simply so. ❜ ❨981❩ ❛ I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m torn between breaking your neck here and throwing you down the stairs. ❜ ❨982❩ ❛ How old do you have to be before you know the difference between right and wrong? ❜ ❨983❩ ❛ It was never meant to be read. ❜ ❨984❩ ❛ If I fell in the river, would you save me? ❜ ❨985❩ ❛ That was an incredibly bloody stupid thing to do. ❜ ❨986❩ ❛ I want to thank you for saving my life. I’ll be eternally grateful to you. ❜ ❨987❩ ❛ I’m very, very sorry for the terrible distress that I have caused. I’m very, very sorry. ❜ ❨988❩ ❛ Don’t call me that! – Please don’t call me that. ❜ ❨989❩ ❛ It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it’s mine. ❜ ❨990❩ ❛ Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer. ❜ ❨991❩ ❛ No one ever really gets used to nightmares. ❜ ❨992❩ ❛ I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I’m not. ❜ ❨993❩ ❛ Sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila. ❜ ❨994❩ ❛ Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it. ❜ ❨995❩ ❛ Beautiful women are always drawn to men they think will keep them beautiful. ❜ ❨996❩ ❛ The ruminations are mine, let the world be yours. ❜ ❨997❩ ❛ You will fulfil a promise I made years ago but failed to keep. ❜ ❨998❩ ❛ Darkness never satisfies. Especially if it takes something away which it almost always invariably does. ❜ ❨999❩ ❛ I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore. ❜ ❨1000❩ ❛ What can I say, I’m a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff. ❜ ❨1001❩ ❛ Is it possible to love something so much, you imagine it wants to destroy you only because it has denied you? ❜ ❨1002❩ ❛ It’s just silent, no sound at all. It’s like something’s waiting. ❜ ❨1003❩ ❛ I guess I’m hoping the weapons will make me feel better, grant me some kind of fucking control. ❜ ❨1004❩ ❛ Oh and something else: – Fuck you. ❜ ❨1005❩ ❛ God I’ve never been afraid like this. ❜ ❨1006❩ ❛ I miss you. I love you. There’s no second I’ve lived that you can’t call your own. ❜ ❨1007❩ ❛ I’m so tired. Sleep’s been stalking me for too long to remember. Inevitable I suppose. ❜ ❨1008❩ ❛ Not seeing the rip doesn’t mean you automatically get to keep clear of the Hey-I’m-Bleeding part. ❜ ❨1009❩ ❛ These days fantasies flourish and die like summer flies. ❜ ❨1010❩ ❛ Yeah I know, I know. This shit’s getting ridiculous. ❜ ❨1011❩ ❛ ‘Fuck’ and 'fall for’ have very different meanings. The first one you do as much as you can. The second one you never ever, ever do. ❜ ❨1012❩ ❛ It’s a nice idea but it reeks of hope. False hope. ❜ ❨1013❩ ❛ It’s, well…one thing in two words: fucked up…very fucked up. Okay three words, four words, who the hell cares…very very fucked up. ❜ ❨1014❩ ❛ Do you think I could spend the night at your place?  ❜ ❨1015❩ ❛ Any fool can pray. ❜ ❨1016❩ ❛ I feel like I haven’t slept in months. My neighbours are scared of me. ❜ ❨1017❩ ❛ I’ve lost my mind? Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe I’m just really drunk. ❜ ❨1018❩ ❛ Perhaps by cleaning out my system I’ll come to a clearing where I can ease myself into peace. ❜ ❨1019❩ ❛ I should be dead. Why am I still here? ❜ ❨1020❩ ❛ Fuck if I know. Your guess is as good as mine. ❜ ❨1021❩ ❛ You are my flesh. You are my bones. I know you too well. I read you too perfectly. ❜ ❨1022❩ ❛ Not all complex problems have easy solutions. ❜ ❨1023❩ ❛ Do you believe in God? I don’t think I ever asked you that one. ❜ ❨1024❩ ❛ We all create stories to protect ourselves. ❜ ❨1025❩ ❛ Are you kidding me? This place is scary. ❜ ❨1026❩ ❛ These days the only thing that gets me outside is when I say: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. ❜ ❨1027❩ ❛ You like that crap because it reminds you of you. ❜ ❨1028❩ ❛ You may suddenly realise things are not how you perceived them to be at all. ❜ ❨1029❩ ❛ The two hardest tests are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter. ❜ ❨1030❩ ❛ People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves. ❜ ❨1031❩ ❛ Be crazy! But learn how to be crazy without being the center of attention. Be brave enough to live different. ❜ ❨1032❩ ❛ You are someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that in my view is a serious illness. ❜ ❨1033❩ ❛ God chose you to be different. ❜ ❨1034❩ ❛ Why are you disappointing God with this kind of attitude? ❜ ❨1035❩ ❛ You have two choices, to control your mind or to let your mind control you. ❜ ❨1036❩ ❛ Everyone is indeed crazy, but the craziest are the ones who don't know they're crazy; they just keep repeating what others tell them to. ❜ ❨1037❩ ❛ Haven't you learned anything, not even with the approach of death?  ❜ ❨1038❩ ❛ If people don't like it, they can complain. And if they don't have the courage to complain, that's their problem. ❜ ❨1039❩ ❛ Nothing in this world happens by chance. ❜ ❨1040❩ ❛ I want to continue living my life the way I dream it, and not the way the other people want it to be. ❜ ❨1041❩ ❛ Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains. ❜ ❨1042❩ ❛ Collective madness is called sanity. ❜ ❨1043❩ ❛ Consider each day a miracle - which indeed it is, when you consider the number of unexpected things that could happen in each second of our fragile existences. ❜ ❨1044❩ ❛ You say they create their own reality, but what is reality? ❜ ❨1045❩ ❛ Many people don't allow themselves to love because there are a lot of things at risk. A lot of future and a lot of past. ❜ ❨1046❩ ❛ Death frees from the fear of dying. ❜ ❨1047❩ ❛ The danger of an adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort. ❜ ❨1048❩ ❛ The happier people can be, the unhappier they are. ❜ ❨1049❩ ❛ Life is always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act. ❜ ❨1050❩ ❛ It's best to accept life as it really is and not as you imagined it to be. ❜ ❨1051❩ ❛ You don't seem mad at all. ❜ ❨1052❩ ❛ We’re allowed to make a lot of mistakes in our lives, except the mistake that destroys us. ❜ ❨1053❩ ❛ You’re what you are, not what others make of you. ❜ ❨1054❩ ❛ Am I cured? ❜ ❨1055❩ ❛ Real love changes and grows with time and discovers new ways of expressing itself. ❜ ❨1056❩ ❛ A lot of people think something is right, and so that thing becomes right. Is that it? ❜ ❨1057❩ ❛ They think they're normal, because they all do the same thing. ❜ ❨1058❩ ❛ I didn't know that other ‘me’s existed inside me, ‘Me’s that I could love. ❜ ❨1059❩ ❛ I have no idea what's awaiting me. ❜ ❨1060❩ ❛ What will happen when this all ends? ❜ ❨1061❩ ❛ I know that you are capable of great deeds. ❜ ❨1062❩ ❛ A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart. ❜ ❨1063❩ ❛ The truth is that everyone is bored. ❜ ❨1064❩ ❛ I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. ❜ ❨1065❩ ❛ If there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love. ❜ ❨1066❩ ❛ Who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for even a single moment's suffering? ❜ ❨1067❩ ❛ It's not easy. I've been thinking it over for years. ❜ ❨1068❩ ❛ While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. ❜ ❨1069❩ ❛ People are more often bad than good. ❜ ❨1070❩ ❛ I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learned that it can be murderous. ❜ ❨1071❩ ❛ What interests me is living and dying for what one loves. ❜ ❨1072❩ ❛ In fact, nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. ❜ ❨1073❩ ❛ Nothing in the world is worth turning one's back on what one loves. ❜ ❨1074❩ ❛ Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ❜ ❨1075❩ ❛ There are more things to admire in men then to despise. ❜ ❨1076❩ ❛ It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence. ❜ ❨1077❩ ❛ What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this? ❜ ❨1078❩ ❛ Your code of morals? What code, if I may ask? ❜ ❨1079❩ ❛ I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding anything. ❜ ❨1080❩ ❛ No doubt our love is still there, but quite simply it is unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. ❜ ❨1081❩ ❛ I’m not happy to go, but one needn't be happy to make another start. ❜ ❨1082❩ ❛ I am incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that I am incapable of anything really worth while. ❜ ❨1083❩ ❛ I should have found the words to keep her with me. ❜ ❨1084❩ ❛ We can't stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody. ❜ ❨1085❩ ❛ The evil that is in the world comes out of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. ❜ ❨1086❩ ❛ There are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live. ❜ ❨1087❩ ❛ The best protection against anything is a good bottle of wine. ❜ ❨1088❩ ❛ There is no peace without hope. ❜ ❨1089❩ ❛ It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment. ❜ ❨1090❩ ❛ There is always something left to love. ❜ ❨1091❩ ❛ A person doesn’t die when he should but when he can. ❜ ❨1092❩ ❛ Things have a life of their own. It's simply a matter of waking up their souls. ❜ ❨1093❩ ❛ Tell me something: why are you fighting? ❜ ❨1094❩ ❛ I've come to realise only just now that I'm fighting because of pride. ❜ ❨1095❩ ❛ One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship. ❜ ❨1096❩ ❛ It's better than not knowing why you're fighting. Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn't have any meaning for anyone. ❜ ❨1097❩ ❛ Holy Mother of God! ❜ ❨1098❩ ❛ A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground. ❜ ❨1099❩ ❛ I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch. ❜ ❨1100❩ ❛ Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it. ❜ ❨1101❩ ❛ I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance. ❜ ❨1102❩ ❛ Get those bad thoughts out of your head. You're going to be happy. ❜ ❨1103❩ ❛ Children inherit their parents' madness. ❜ ❨1104❩ ❛ I'll turn to ashes in here but I won't give this miserable town the pleasure of seeing me weep. ❜ ❨1105❩ ❛ You would be good in a war. Where you put your eye, you put your bullet. ❜ ❨1106❩ ❛ Men demand much more than you think. ❜ ❨1107❩ ❛ Even the craziest and most persistent love is just a temporary truth. ❜ ❨1108❩ ❛ If we’re alone you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of. ❜ ❨1109❩ ❛ You have taken this horrible game very seriously and you have done well because you are doing your duty. ❜ ❨1110❩ ❛ We have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect. ❜ ❨1111❩ ❛ What worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death. ❜ ❨1112❩ ❛ What worries me is that you've ended up as bad as they are. ❜ ❨1113❩ ❛ It is characteristic of men to deny hunger once their appetites are satisfied. ❜ ❨1114❩ ❛ Dying is much more difficult than one imagines. ❜ ❨1115❩ ❛ If you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourself! ❜ ❨1116❩ ❛ We have still not had a death. ❜ ❨1117❩ ❛ How awful, the way time passes. ❜ ❨1118❩ ❛ You may be in command of your war, but I'm in command of my house. ❜ ❨1119❩ ❛ I missed you every hour. ❜ ❨1120❩ ❛ You know what the worst part was? It caught me completely by surprise. ❜ ❨1121❩ ❛ I’ve risked my life for you. ❜ ❨1122❩ ❛ The problem with wanting is that it makes us weak. ❜ ❨1123❩ ❛ I love you, even the part of you that loved him. ❜ ❨1124❩ ❛ I’m sorry it took me so long to see you. ❜ ❨1125❩ ❛ I never really belonged anywhere. ❜ ❨1126❩ ❛ Thanks for being my best friend and making my life bearable.  ❜ ❨1127❩ ❛ Thanks for finding me. ❜ ❨1128❩ ❛ You and I are going to change the world. ❜ ❨1129❩ ❛ I’ve been waiting for you a long time. ❜ ❨1130❩ ❛ I’m not used to people trying to kill me. ❜ ❨1131❩ ❛ You’re shaking. ❜ ❨1132❩ ❛ There's nothing wrong with being a lizard. Unless you were born to be a hawk. ❜ ❨1133❩ ❛ Make me your villain. ❜ ❨1134❩ ❛ Just you and me. It’s always just you and me. ❜ ❨1135❩ ❛ Do you blame me for every mistake I made? For every dumb thing I’ve said? ❜ ❨1136❩ ❛ Well, if it gets too bad, give me a signal. ❜ ❨1137❩ ❛ Did you tell him what I showed you in the dark? ❜ ❨1138❩ ❛ Did you miss me when you were gone? ❜ ❨1139❩ ❛ What is infinite? The universe and the greed of men. ❜ ❨1140❩ ❛ You’re interfering with my plan. ❜ ❨1141❩ ❛ Too much champagne? ❜ ❨1142❩ ❛ I hope you don’t expect fairness from me. It isn’t one of my specialties. ❜ ❨1143❩ ❛ There is something more powerful than any army. Something strong enough to topple kings. Faith. ❜ ❨1144❩ ❛ All you said was that I had to kill you. You didn’t say how. ❜ ❨1145❩ ❛ What is she? She’s everything, you dumb son of a bitch. ❜ ❨1146❩ ❛ She’s an ugly little thing. No child should look like that. Pale and sour, like a glass of milk that’s turned. ❜ ❨1147❩ ❛ I wouldn’t make that mistake again. ❜ ❨1148❩ ❛ It’s a great honor, to save a life. You saved many. ❜ ❨1149❩ ❛ In this world, there are things you can only do alone. ❜ ❨1150❩ ❛ What seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else. ❜ ❨1151❩ ❛ If you really want to know something, you have to be willing to pay the price. ❜ ❨1152❩ ❛ Why should you be interested in me? ❜ ❨1153❩ ❛ I have been told I've got a darkish personality. A few times. ❜ ❨1154❩ ❛ It's not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There's shadowy middle ground. ❜ ❨1155❩ ❛ I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel. ❜ ❨1156❩ ❛ The spotlight doesn't suit me. I'm more of a side dish. ❜ ❨1157❩ ❛ The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you.  ❜ ❨1158❩ ❛ So once you're dead there's just nothing? ❜ ❨1159❩ ❛ If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality. ❜ ❨1160❩ ❛ Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action? ❜ ❨1161❩ ❛ Nobody can shake off their own shadow. ❜ ❨1162❩ ❛ The silence is so deep it hurts. ❜ ❨1163❩ ❛ I may not look it, but I can be a very patient guy. ❜ ❨1164❩ ❛ Killing time is one of my specialities. ❜ ❨1165❩ ❛ You can't fight it. ❜ ❨1166❩ ❛ Tell me something,—do you believe in reincarnation? ❜ ❨1167❩ ❛ I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it. ❜ ❨1168❩ ❛ I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner.  ❜ ❨1169❩ ❛ I do have a few things wrong with me, but those are strictly problems I keep inside. ❜ ❨1170❩ ❛ I can't take it any more, I can't go on any more. ❜ ❨1171❩ ❛ You don't really have it together. ❜ ❨1172❩ ❛ Is it against the law for me to know it? ❜ ❨1173❩ ❛ I keep having the same dream. ❜ ❨1174❩ ❛ Are you asking because you really want an answer? ❜ ❨1175❩ ❛ I hate this! I don't want to be changed this way! ❜ ❨1176❩ ❛ No contradictions, no irony. They do everything according to numerical formulas. ❜ ❨1177❩ ❛ Want to hear the rest? If you’re not interested, I can stop. ❜ ❨1178❩ ❛ If I didn’t have these memories inside me, I would’ve snapped a long time ago. I would’ve curled up in a ditch somewhere and died. ❜ ❨1179❩ ❛ I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend. ❜ ❨1180❩ ❛ What are you doing here, honey? ❜ ❨1181❩ ❛ You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets. ❜ ❨1182❩ ❛ You don't understand me. ❜ ❨1183❩ ❛ All wisdom ends in paradox. ❜ ❨1184❩ ❛ It is love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. ❜ ❨1185❩ ❛ I have lost my gift. ❜ ❨1186❩ ❛ Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair. ❜ ❨1187❩ ❛ The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us. ❜ ❨1188❩ ❛ They're just memories now. It’s time to forget. ❜ ❨1189❩ ❛ The time has to be right and the heart willing. ❜ ❨1190❩ ❛ The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season. ❜ ❨1191❩ ❛ Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy. ❜ ❨1192❩ ❛ Grief is natural, overcoming it is a matter of choice. ❜ ❨1193❩ ❛ I want out of that decorating scheme. ❜ ❨1194❩ ❛ With most people suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. ❜ ❨1195❩ ❛ You never get over it but you get where it doesn't bother you so much. ❜ ❨1196❩ ❛ Don't waste your time on life. ❜ ❨1197❩ ❛ I'm a teenager. I've got problems! ❜ ❨1198❩ ❛ Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it. ❜ ❨1199❩ ❛ Obviously, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl. ❜ ❨1200❩ ❛ It was a mistake. ❜ ❨1201❩ ❛ It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever. ❜ ❨1202❩ ❛ Buffeted but not broken. ❜ ❨1203❩ ❛ Shit. What have kids got to be worried about now? ❜ ❨1204❩ ❛ If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh. ❜ ❨1205❩ ❛ I can't wait until I get out of here. ❜ ❨1206❩ ❛ When she jumped she probably thought she’d fly. ❜ ❨1207❩ ❛ I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help. ❜ ❨1208❩ ❛ You're a stone fox. ❜ ❨1209❩ ❛ It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight. ❜ ❨1210❩ ❛ Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. ❜ ❨1211❩ ❛ He broke my heart. You merely broke my life. ❜ ❨1212❩ ❛ I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is. ❜ ❨1213❩ ❛ Words without experience are meaningless. ❜ ❨1214❩ ❛ I loved you. I was a monster, but I loved you. ❜ ❨1215❩ ❛ Come just as you are. ❜ ❨1216❩ ❛ If a violin string could ache, i would be that string. ❜ ❨1217❩ ❛ Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again. ❜ ❨1218❩ ❛ What's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own. ❜ ❨1219❩ ❛ Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me. ❜ ❨1220❩ ❛ You took advantage of my disadvantage. ❜ ❨1221❩ ❛ I walk in a maze I cannot get out of. ❜ ❨1222❩ ❛ Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses. ❜ ❨1223❩ ❛ Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me. ❜ ❨1224❩ ❛ There is no harm in smiling. ❜ ❨1225❩ ❛ There is no point in staying here. There is no point in staying anywhere. ❜ ❨1226❩ ❛ There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. ❜ ❨1227❩ ❛ I am so tired of being cynical. ❜ ❨1228❩ ❛ Come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me. ❜ ❨1229❩ ❛ This is the only immortality that you and I may share. ❜ ❨1230❩ ❛ I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. ❜ ❨1231❩ ❛ I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! ❜ ❨1232❩ ❛ Years of secret suffering has taught me superhuman self-control. ❜ ❨1233❩ ❛ Solitude is corrupting me. I need company and care. ❜ ❨1234❩ ❛ I've missed you terribly. ❜ ❨1235❩ ❛ I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you. ❜ ❨1236❩ ❛ It doesn't matter a bit, because you've stopped caring anyway. ❜ ❨1237❩ ❛ What makes you say I've stopped caring for you? ❜ ❨1238❩ ❛ Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. ❜ ❨1239❩ ❛ The sun climbs high in the sky, then starts down. People come, then go. ❜ ❨1240❩ ❛ Tell me, have you ever thought of killing me? ❜ ❨1241❩ ❛ I can not believe you are the same human being. ❜ ❨1242❩ ❛ Just how urgent is it? ❜ ❨1243❩ ❛ It is time for you to be going. ❜ ❨1244❩ ❛ How is it you know something like that? ❜ ❨1245❩ ❛ I don’t mind. Your mess is my mess. ❜ ❨1246❩ ❛ Everybody has one thing they do not want to lose. ❜ ❨1247❩ ❛ I’ll be late tonight, so don’t wait up for me. ❜ ❨1248❩ ❛ Nothing I’ve tried to do by myself has ever come off. ❜ ❨1249❩ ❛ I am not catching you in the middle of anything important, am I? ❜ ❨1250❩ ❛ Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. ❜ ❨1251❩ ❛ My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. ❜ ❨1252❩ ❛ To get irritated is to lose our way in life. ❜ ❨1253❩ ❛ A friend to kill time is a friend sublime. ❜ ❨1254❩ ❛ I don't really know if it's the right thing to do. ❜ ❨1255❩ ❛ Faster cars and more cats run over? Who needs it? ❜ ❨1256❩ ❛ Most of everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories. ❜ ❨1257❩ ❛ Your fate is and will always be the fate of a dreamer. ❜ ❨1258❩ ❛ You’re loads better than you think you are. ❜ ❨1259❩ ❛ You’re only half-living, the other half is still untapped somewhere. ❜ ❨1260❩ ❛ The song is over. But the melody lingers on. ❜ ❨1261❩ ❛ You are extraordinary. ❜ ❨1262❩ ❛ We tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on. ❜ ❨1263❩ ❛ It could be five years or ten years or one month. It's all the same. ❜ ❨1264❩ ❛ I’m forever realising things too late. ❜ ❨1265❩ ❛ I’m not complaining when I say my life is boring. ❜ ❨1266❩ ❛ Weakness is something that rots in the body. ❜ ❨1267❩ ❛ Coming from your mouth, it has the ring of truth, but I doubt anyone would believe me if I told them. ❜ ❨1268❩ ❛ You can't expect something unreal to last anyway, can you? ❜ ❨1269❩ ❛ A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat. ❜ ❨1270❩ ❛ So, kill me. Tell the others I attacked you so you killed me. ❜ ❨1271❩ ❛ Should never have come here. ❜ ❨1272❩ ❛ Hard to guess my tastes. ❜ ❨1273❩ ❛ Can’t it wait until the morning? ❜ ❨1274❩ ❛ You’ll find temper tantrums won’t help you here. ❜ ❨1275❩ ❛ It must have taken courage to return. ❜ ❨1276❩ ❛ It all sounds grimly dystopian. ❜ ❨1277❩ ❛ I am not afraid of you! ❜ ❨1278❩ ❛ All this could be avoided! ❜ ❨1279❩ ❛ You consider me a murderer? ❜ ❨1280❩ ❛ Gross way to die. ❜ ❨1281❩ ❛ What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. ❜ ❨1282❩ ❛ My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops? ❜ ❨1283❩ ❛ Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others. ❜ ❨1284❩ ❛ I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there. ❜ ❨1285❩ ❛ You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human. ❜ ❨1286❩ ❛ Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible. ❜ ❨1287❩ ❛ Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty. ❜ ❨1288❩ ❛ Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths. ❜ ❨1289❩ ❛ Dreams are all I have ever truly owned. ❜ ❨1290❩ ❛ Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters. ❜ ❨1291❩ ❛ I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. ❜ ❨1292❩ ❛ By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. ❜ ❨1293❩ ❛ The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken. ❜ ❨1294❩ ❛ Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right. ❜ ❨1295❩ ❛ The weak are meat the strong do eat. ❜ ❨1296❩ ❛ Do whatever you can't not do. ❜ ❨1297❩ ❛ What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. ❜ ❨1298❩ ❛ I remain thankful to God for all his mercies. ❜ ❨1299❩ ❛ You can maintain power over people, as long as you give them something. Rob a man of everything, and that man will no longer be in your power. ❜ ❨1300❩ ❛ Power. The ability to determine another man's luck. ❜ ❨1301❩ ❛ Pain is strong, aye - but friends' eyes, more strong. ❜ ❨1302❩ ❛ Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively. ❜ ❨1303❩ ❛ Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions? ❜ ❨1304❩ ❛ You can’t lie to your soul. ❜ ❨1305❩ ❛ Why would I want to do a thing like that? ❜ ❨1306❩ ❛ We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. ❜ ❨1307❩ ❛ Better to make life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be. ❜ ❨1308❩ ❛ I’m not running away, I’m moving on. ❜ ❨1309❩ ❛ The reasons? There are no reasons. ❜ ❨1310❩ ❛ Some people are easier to love when you don’t have to be around them. ❜ ❨1311❩ ❛ Love does not exist. ❜ ❨1312❩ ❛ Fuck that ‘regrets’ bullshit. ❜ ❨1313❩ ❛ How does it make you feel? ❜ ❨1314❩ ❛ It’s horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone. ❜ ❨1315❩ ❛ Choose us. Choose life. ❜ ❨1316❩ ❛ You fucking knew that fucking cunt would fuck some cunt. ❜ ❨1317❩ ❛ I’m more of a warrior than you’ll ever be. ❜ ❨1318❩ ❛ What does that make us? The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. ❜ ❨1319❩ ❛ You don’t have to run away.  ❜ ❨1320❩ ❛ I tried to stop because it was only causing pain. I couldn’t. ❜ ❨1321❩ ❛ I’m not going to get crushed. ❜ ❨1322❩ ❛ I love doubt in a woman. It’s nearly as sexy as determination. ❜ ❨1323❩ ❛ Take your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty. ❜ ❨1324❩ ❛ You’re a mess. ❜ ❨1325❩ ❛ I know that it’s never left you alone. ❜ ❨1326❩ ❛ Are you asking me or telling me? ❜ ❨1327❩ ❛ You just get used to all the shit. ❜ ❨1328❩ ❛ You can’t afford a conscience in this life. ❜ ❨1329❩ ❛ None of us are saints and scapegoats are always handy. ❜ ❨1330❩ ❛ Doing things doesn’t hurt you; you get hurt by avoiding them. ❜ ❨1331❩ ❛ What was that? ❜ ❨1332❩ ❛ Protect me from those who wish to help us. ❜ ❨1333❩ ❛ You can’t love yourself if you want to hurt things like that. ❜ ❨1334❩ ❛ What happens when people open their hearts? ❜ ❨1335❩ ❛ Nobody likes being alone that much. ❜ ❨1336❩ ❛ I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.” ❨1337❩ ❛ Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that. ❜ ❨1338❩ ❛ You need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. ❜ ❨1339❩ ❛ I want you always to remember me. ❜ ❨1340❩ ❛ Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt. ❜ ❨1341❩ ❛ What stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish. ❜ ❨1342❩ ❛ All I want in this world is you. ❜ ❨1343❩ ❛ I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning. ❜ ❨1344❩ ❛ No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. ❜ ❨1345❩ ❛ What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously. ❜ ❨1346❩ ❛ If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark. ❜ ❨1347❩ ❛ I’ve had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy. ❜ ❨1348❩ ❛ People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die. ❜ ❨1349❩ ❛ Stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they’re supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. ❜ ❨1350❩ ❛ When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you’re in big trouble. ❜ ❨1351❩ ❛ When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it. ❜ ❨1352❩ ❛ If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well. ❜ ❨1353❩ ❛ Hey, what is it with you? Why are you so spaced out? You still haven’t answered me. ❜ ❨1354❩ ❛ People are strange when you’re a stranger. ❜ ❨1355❩ ❛ The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living. ❜ ❨1356❩ ❛ You don’t get it, do you? ❜ ❨1357❩ ❛ I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed human being than you ❨1358❩ realise. ❜ ❨1359❩ ❛ At least let me know whether or not I hurt you. ❜ ❨1360❩ ❛ All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. ❜ ❨1361❩ ❛ I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die. ❜ ❨1362❩ ❛ So I’m not crazy after all! ❜ ❨1363❩ ❛ I miss you terribly sometimes, but in general I go on living with all the energy I can muster. ❜ ❨1364❩ ❛ Will you wait for me forever? ❜ ❨1365❩ ❛ I don’t want our relationship to end like this. ❜ ❨1366❩ ❛ When am I going to be able to talk to you? I want you to tell me that much, at least. ❜ ❨1367❩ ❛ It hurts not being able to see you. ❜ ❨1368❩ ❛ I’m not totally mad at you. I’m just sad. ❜ ❨1369❩ ❛ The world is an inherently unfair place. ❜ ❨1370❩ ❛ Life frightens me sometimes. I don’t happen to take that as the premise for everything else though. ❜ ❨1371❩ ❛ I’m a real bargain, don’t you think? If you don’t take me, I’ll end up going somewhere else. ❜ ❨1372❩ ❛ We’re all kind of weird and twisted and drowning. ❜ ❨1373❩ ❛ Don’t you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don’t know a soul? ❜ ❨1374❩ ❛ You’re not telling me anything I don’t know already. ❜ ❨1375❩ ❛ He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. ❜ ❨1376❩ ❛ If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. ❜ ❨1377❩ ❛ We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness. ❜ ❨1378❩ ❛ Until they become conscious they will never rebel. ❜ ❨1379❩ ❛ Power is not a means; it is an end. ❜ ❨1380❩ ❛ They are not interested in the good of others; they are interested solely in power, pure power. ❜ ❨1381❩ ❛ Now you begin to understand me. ❜ ❨1382❩ ❛ In the face of pain there are no heroes. ❜ ❨1383❩ ❛ Big Brother is watching you. ❜ ❨1384❩ ❛ Power is tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. ❜ ❨1385❩ ❛ It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. ❜ ❨1386❩ ❛ The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. ❜ ❨1387❩ ❛ Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind. ❜ ❨1388❩ ❛ Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. ❜ ❨1389❩ ❛ We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them. ❜ ❨1390❩ ❛ How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? ❜ ❨1391❩ ❛ You must try harder. ❜ ❨1392❩ ❛ Confession is not betrayal. ❜ ❨1393❩ ❛ What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. ❜ ❨1394❩ ❛ If they could make me stop loving you —- that would be the real betrayal. ❜ ❨1395❩ ❛ Of pain you can wish only one thing: that it should stop. ❜ ❨1396❩ ❛ To die hating them, that will be freedom. ❜ ❨1397❩ ❛ No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. ❜ ❨1398❩ ❛ What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself? ❜ ❨1399❩ ❛ To keep them in control is not difficult. ❜ ❨1400❩ ❛ So long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. ❜ ❨1401❩ ❛ The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. ❜ ❨1402❩ ❛ The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. ❜ ❨1403❩ ❛ Stupidity is as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain. ❜ ❨1404❩ ❛ I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones. ❜ ❨1405❩ ❛ The past is dead, the future is unimaginable. ❜ ❨1406❩ ❛ You know the answer already. Everyone knows it. ❜ ❨1407❩ ❛ You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself. ❜ ❨1408❩ ❛ It is not easy to become sane. ❜ ❨1409❩ ❛ No emotion is pure anymore, because everything is mixed up with fear and hatred. ❜ ❨1410❩ ❛ They say that time heals all things —- they say you can always forget. ❜ ❨1411❩ ❛ The object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. ❜ ❨1412❩ ❛ I sold you and you sold me. ❜ ❨1413❩ ❛ You do not exist. ❜ ❨1414❩ ❛ How does one man assert his power over another? By making him suffer. ❜ ❨1415❩ ❛ Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? ❜ ❨1416❩ ❛ Everything else we shall destroy – everything. ❜ ❨1417❩ ❛ Two and two makes five. ❜ ❨1418❩ ❛ Facts, at any rate, can not be kept hidden. ❜ ❨1419❩ ❛ The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. ❜ ❨1420❩ ❛ So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing. ❜ ❨1421❩ ❛ If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then? ❜ ❨1422❩ ❛ The lie became the truth. ❜ ❨1423❩ ❛ It is like swimming against a current that sweeps you backwards however hard you struggle. ❜ ❨1424❩ ❛ Turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. ❜ ❨1425❩ ❛ It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything. ❜ ❨1426❩ ❛ I don’t want to die without any scars. ❜ ❨1427❩ ❛ This is your life and it’s ending one moment at a time. ❜ ❨1428❩ ❛ You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways. ❜ ❨1429❩ ❛ You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. ❜ ❨1430❩ ❛ You are not special. ❜ ❨1431❩ ❛ You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. ❜ ❨1432❩ ❛ The things you used to own, now they own you. ❜ ❨1433❩ ❛ Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you. ❜ ❨1434❩ ❛ Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves. ❜ ❨1435❩ ❛ Only after disaster can we be resurrected. ❜ ❨1436❩ ❛ Everything is evolving, everything is falling apart. ❜ ❨1437❩ ❛ We’ve all been raised believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. ❜ ❨1438❩ ❛ Don’t you have other things to do? ❜ ❨1439❩ ❛ Prove you’re alive. If you don’t claim your humanity you will become a statistic. ❜ ❨1440❩ ❛ You have been warned. ❜ ❨1441❩ ❛ If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t. ❜ ❨1442❩ ❛ It’s not love or anything, but I think I like you, too. ❜ ❨1443❩ ❛ If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person? ❜ ❨1444❩ ❛ Why did I cause so much pain? ❜ ❨1445❩ ❛ The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly. ❜ ❨1446❩ ❛ Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer. ❜ ❨1447❩ ❛ May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. ❜ ❨1448❩ ❛ Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head. ❜ ❨1449❩ ❛ We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. ❜ ❨1450❩ ❛ The girl is infectious human waste. ❜ ❨1451❩ ❛ I want to destroy everything beautiful I’ll never have. ❜ ❨1452❩ ❛ On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. ❜ ❨1453❩ ❛ If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? ❜ ❨1454❩ ❛ It is like you’re never really awake; but you’re never really asleep. ❜ ❨1455❩ ❛ Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave. ❜ ❨1456❩ ❛ A moment is the most you could ever expect from perfection. ❜ ❨1457❩ ❛ The people you’re trying to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. ❜ ❨1458❩ ❛ You have to give up! ❜ ❨1459❩ ❛ Reject the basic assumptions of civilisation, especially the importance of material possessions. ❜ ❨1460❩ ❛ Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. ❜ ❨1461❩ ❛ You have to realise that someday you will die, Until you know that, you are useless. ❜ ❨1462❩ ❛ A tiger can smile. A snake will say it loves you. ❜ ❨1463❩ ❛ Lies make us evil. ❜ ❨1464❩ ❛ If you died right now, how would you feel about your life? ❜ ❨1465❩ ❛ You always kill the one you love. ❜ ❨1466❩ ❛ Maybe we should always assume the worst. ❜ ❨1467❩ ❛ Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains. ❜ ❨1468❩ ❛ Which is worse? Hell or nothing? ❜ ❨1469❩ ❛ A minute of perfection is worth the effort. ❜ ❨1470❩ ❛ You’re going to die, tonight. You might die in one second or in one hour, you decide. ❜ ❨1471❩ ❛ Lie to me. Tell me the first thing off the top of your head. Make something up. ❜ ❨1472❩ ❛ I don’t give a shit. I have a gun. ❜ ❨1473❩ ❛ I know who you are. I know where you live. ❜ ❨1474❩ ❛ Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your life. ❜ ❨1475❩ ❛ My philosophy of life is that I can die at any moment. And the tragedy of my life is that I do not. ❜ ❨1476❩ ❛ Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. You can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you. ❜ ❨1477❩ ❛ There are a lot of things we don’t want to know about the people we love. ❜ ❨1478❩ ❛ We just had a near-life experience. ❜ ❨1479❩ ❛ If people think you are dying, they give you their full attention. They listen instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. ❜ ❨1480❩ ❛ I am nothing, and not even that. ❜ ❨1481❩ ❛ This isn’t really death. —- We’ll be legends. We won’t grow old. ❜ ❨1482❩ ❛ Stop trying to control everything and just let go. Let go. ❜ ❨1483❩ ❛ The amazing miracle of death, when one second you’re walking and talking, and the next second you’re an object. ❜ ❨1484❩ ❛ Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved. ❜ ❨1485❩ ❛ I never thought about how important the sky was until I didn't have one. ❜ ❨1486❩ ❛ Dreams are like that: they go in and out of memories and scenes, but they're never real. They're never real, and I hate them because they aren't. ❜ ❨1487❩ ❛ Power isn’t control at all — power is strength, and giving that strength to others. ❜ ❨1488❩ ❛ A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger. ❜ ❨1489❩ ❛ A leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own. ❜ ❨1490❩ ❛ In the end, we are alone. ❜ ❨1491❩ ❛ It is like a piece of my soul is lost, empty. ❜ ❨1492❩ ❛ If my life on Earth must end, let it end with a promise. Let it end with hope. ❜ ❨1493❩ ❛ Sorry? Sorry isn't enough. ❜ ❨1494❩ ❛ Every single thing I ever loved is beyond my reach now. Everything I ever wanted. Everything I ever was. ❜ ❨1495❩ ❛ Will you stay with me? ❜ ❨1496❩ ❛ A leader doesn't make pawns - he makes people. ❜ ❨1497❩ ❛ Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. ❜ ❨1498❩ ❛ It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me. ❜ ❨1499❩ ❛ There is nothing between us but rain. There is nothing between us at all. ❜ ❨1500❩ ❛ I like a little chaos. ❜

[fortuositywritings]

I Said No (Wanda x R): Pt 6

Summary: You kissed Wanda. Where do you go from here? Camping. You go camping is where.

Challenge: Take a shot of preferred drink (water for you youngsters, stay hydrated) every time you read "s'mores".

Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3, Pt. 4, Pt. 5

Wanda is beyond frustrated. It has been eight hours since you kissed her on the ferris wheel. Eight painful hours of rewinding the moment in her mind over and over again, wondering what it means because you haven’t said anything about it. You acted no different when you met back with everyone else. No different when Laura asked with a knowing smile how the view was from the top. No different on the car ride home nor when you said goodnight to her like you did to everyone else even if she had lingered behind a little longer in case you maybe wanted to say something while no one else was near.

It’s like it never even happened and now she’s wondering if she’s somehow messing with her own mind. 

No, it definitely happened. Maybe there’s a reason. Maybe you’ll explain. Maybe she needs to sleep. 

She can feel Nat stirring beside her, signaling her to close her eyes and feign sleep.

“I know you’re awake, Wanda. You’re going to have to do better than that,” Nat says. Wanda huffs. She should know better than try to pretend in front of the spy. “What’s wrong? You’ve been tossing and turning all night.”

Wanda doesn’t think Nat would like to hear the reason for her restlessness, but she also knows she can’t get away with lying, so she chooses to say, “I don’t think you would want to know.”

“Wanda,” Nat sighs, almost defeatedly, “I know I have my reservations about you and Y/N but I meant what I said. You are both adults who can make your own choices and if this is really something you both want then I’ll be here for you and her both. I know you might not believe this, but I’d much rather be here to help you prove me wrong than you two go and prove me right.”

Nat is lying on her back now staring at the ceiling waiting patiently for Wanda to say something. Wanda follows Nat’s lead and stares at the blank ceiling trying to get her thoughts in order. Wanda doesn’t like talking about her feelings. She’s one to figure things out on her own but if she doesn’t get answers soon, she is going to go insane. Nat knows Y/N well enough. Maybe she knows why Y/N acted so indifferent. So Wanda decides to trust Nat. “She kissed me.”

Wanda turns her head to see Nat’s expression. Nat’s face remains stoic. “Are you mad?” Wanda asks warily.

“No, but I am surprised,” Nat says with what Wanda could swear is amusement. “I didn’t think she had it in her to go against anything Clint or I say.”

Wanda smiles, “You don’t give her enough credit.”

“Maybe. I think I also give you too much credit. I thought it would be you to do it. You Maximoffs tend to be relentless until you get what you want.” Wanda chuckles acknowledging that sometimes she and her brother annoy the rest of the team until things go their way. “So she kissed you. What’s the problem?”

Wanda’s good mood comes back down as she falls back to reality. “I don’t know if there is a problem is the problem,” Wanda groans in frustration.

“You’ve lost me.”

Wanda can’t have this conversation lying down so she sits up. Nat does the same, giving Wanda her full attention. “It’s just, it’s so push and pull with her. She flirts and I flirt back. Then she says she can’t so I let it go, but later she pulls me in again but then reminds me we can only be friends only to kiss me at the fair. And now she’s acting like it didn’t even happen and it’s all so frustrating,” Wanda vents.

Nat takes a moment to process everything. “You have to keep in mind that Y/N doesn’t do the whole relationship thing. She tried it once and well it didn’t work out. Now when things get serious, she likes to ignore them or as I’m sure you’ve noticed she likes to joke her way out. So if you want to work this out, you’ll have to find a way to talk to her without her freaking out,” Nat advises. 

The mention of a past relationship piques Wanda’s interest. “Y/N’s been in a relationship before? She’s never mentioned it.”

Nat smirks shaking her head, “Of course out of everything I said, that’s what you got. Tell me, have you told her about the robot boyfriend you had not too long ago?” Wanda looks down at the bedsheets in embarrassment. Nat wants to laugh but decides to give Wanda a break. “Look, if you really want to know you can ask Y/N later, okay? Now get some rest. You shouldn’t let guy, girl, or robot problems keep you from sleeping,” she finishes chuckling and gets up from the bed. 

“Where are you off to?” Wanda still goes to lie down but looks up at Nat with tired eyes.

“Going to go for a hike with your girl,” Nat teases as she grabs her clothes and clothes for you.

“She’s not my girl,” Wanda says, tucking her head into her pillow to hide her blush but Nat still caught it. She also catches when Wanda mumbles, “yet.”

“And there’s that bratty Maximoff attitude. I see you’re feeling better now,” Nat laughs and leaves the room without giving Wanda the time to respond, not that Wanda was planning to because Nat was right. Wanda was feeling better now having talked it out with someone. She’ll do as Natasha said and ask you later. With that she closes her eyes and tries to get some sleep.

You didn’t fare too well last either, much like Wanda. You were trying so hard not to think about your kiss with Wanda, but it’s all you could think about. You don’t know what possessed you to do it, but you know you should not have done it. You should not have done it because now all you can think about is doing it again, about doing it again and letting her kiss you back. You shouldn’t have kissed her because you don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, including yourself. It’s happened to you once before and you’re scared because it is happening to you again. 

So, you tried to play it cool. If you act like it was a friendly kiss that didn’t really mean anything, then Wanda will take the hint and when she inevitably goes, so will your feelings. No harm done. Friends kiss sometimes, right? At least that’s what you’ve been trying to convince yourself all night until you fell asleep.

You awaken from your two hours of Wanda-filled dreams by gym clothes smacking your face. You groan, “No, please. Not today, Nat. I barely got any sleep last night.”

“Oh, not you too,” she comments, rolling her eyes at you. You lift your head at that to look at her confused by what she meant. “Come on, some exercise will take your mind off whatever kept you up,” she continues with a knowing smile as she takes a sip of her coffee.  You narrow your eyes at her but eventually give in. Maybe she’s right and it will help you take your mind off of Wanda for even a moment. 

You still need the energy though, so you steal her coffee as you pass by her with your clothes in hand.

The one time you actually hoped Nat would be right, she wasn’t. You’re an hour into your hike and your brain has no vacancy for anything other than Wanda. You want to scream. Instead you push yourself harder. Another hour goes by and your head is still spinning, except this time it might also be because of the lack of oxygen reaching your brain. You go to lay on the dirty ground and attempt to catch your breath. Nat stops, not hearing your footsteps behind her. 

She looks at you a little worried. You are heaving and you are sweaty and you are frustrated and it’s official; a pretty girl named Wanda Maximoff broke you. You start chuckling and soon a full resounding laugh comes out of you like you heard the funniest joke. Nat goes to sit by you warily but doesn’t say anything.

Your laughter dies, replaced by a solemn attitude. You sit up, your shoulder touching Nat’s. She still doesn’t say anything and you’re thankful for that. Without looking at her, you tell her earnestly, “I really like her.”

“Yeah, I know,” she sighs.

“She told you,” you say, no surprise in your voice. You were clued in this morning with Nat’s knowing smile. Nat hums in confirmation. “I know you and Clint warned me, but-”

“But we were wrong,” Nat cuts you off. That has you looking at her, your eyebrows raised in shock. You never thought you’d hear her admit being wrong so blatantly. She laughs, “Don’t get used to hearing that. Seriously though, you don’t need someone telling you what you can or cannot do. It wasn’t right for us to try. So, I’ll tell you what I told Wanda, whatever happens, I’ll be here if you need me.”

“Aww, look who’s taking accountability. Little Romanov is all grown up!” you joke. She rolls her eyes and nudges you saying, “I guess serious talk is over.”

She knows you too well. You smile anyway in appreciation. You both get up and start making your way back to the car. You feel lighter after that conversation. On your walk back, you begin to think, maybe you can give it a shot with Wanda now that it seems Nat and Clint are giving into the idea of you two together. You smile at the thought of you and Wanda together. You can make it work, you think. That is if you can allow trust in yourself to not hurt her and trust her not to do the same. But you have time to work on that. 

When you reach the car, a daunting thought stops you. You don’t have time. “She’s leaving soon.”

Nat opening the car door simply says, “Yeah, guess you have to decide what you want to do quickly.” 

“I’ve decided,” Clint says to everyone at breakfast. When you and Nat had gotten to the house, almost everyone was still asleep. You and Nat only saw Sam and Laura up in the kitchen. You’d guessed the fair wore everyone out yesterday. You and Nat helped Sam and Laura make breakfast. Well, Nat helped. You had been told to sit at the table and let the adults do the cooking. How were you meant to learn if they didn’t let you? At least Wanda had let you help.

Wanda, as if summoned by your thoughts, had appeared then. You saw her hesitate walking into the kitchen. You knew you messed up by ignoring what happened between the two of you. You gave her a smile and patted the seat next to you hoping to alleviate the tension. Luckily for you it seemed to do the trick. You two were back to your usual selves though you both knew you would have to talk about what happened at some point.

Everyone came downstairs one by one and when breakfast was ready, you all headed into the dining room to eat together. Everyone was having their own side conversations but they all hushed down when Clint spoke up saying he decided something.

“And what did you decide?” Laura asks him. You try hard not to laugh, recognizing the same tone she gave you two days ago when you told everyone you were going to the fair. Wanda sees you try to hide your amusement and pinches your side to get you to stop. Being ticklish, you nearly squeal but hold it in. By the way Wanda’s eyes spark up, you know she noticed. You give her a warning stare and mouth “no”.

“My sweet, beautiful wife,” Clint begins sweet talking your cousin, but you’re not paying too much attention as Wanda is trying to tickle your side discreetly with one hand and you are trying hard to keep it away. Across the table, Pietro is not paying attention to Clint either, instead watching you and Wanda interact. He feels so dumb for not noticing it before, but seeing you bring out the playfulness in Wanda, which he hadn’t seen in the longest time, you could make him feel like the dullest bulb in the box and he wouldn’t complain. All three of your attention is brought back to the subject at hand when Clint says, “I’ve decided we’re going camping today!”

The kids, Peter, Sam, and you let out a cheer. You squeeze Wanda’s hand that you managed to catch in yours. You don’t feel any excitement coming from her so you turn to her. She looks discontent at the thought of camping. “Oh, come on. Don’t say you don’t like camping.”

“Pietro and I have not gone camping but the thought of bugs and sleeping on the ground does not sound appealing,” she says tentatively.

“Thank you. She gets it,” your cousin says and Nat nods her head in agreement.

“Don’t listen to the two buzzkills. They never want to do anything.” You ignore the scoff and “excuse me” they give you to instead try to convince Wanda. “I promise it’s going to be fun,” you look into her eyes, practically pleading with her. She huffs, closes her eyes, and says, “Fine.”

“Yes! What about you Pietro?” you ask her brother though you already know where one twin goes the other follows. “Yeah, let’s see what camping is about. Maybe we can share a tent,” Pietro flirts throwing a wink your way, mostly teasing to see his sister’s reaction. You ignore his last comment and start chanting “Camping! Camping!” until Peter, Cooper, and Lila chant along. You don’t notice the glare Wanda throws her brother or said brother trying to hide his smirk.

You take two cars like you had yesterday. This time you ride with Nat, Sam, Wanda, and Peter. Cooper and Lila refused to let Pietro ride in Nat’s car, wanting him to ride with them. Nat is driving with Sam sitting in the passenger seat after having called shotgun. You sat in the middle between Peter and Wanda, having offered her the window seat. The ride to the lake where you usually went camping isn’t long, only about an hour and a half away, but you find yourself falling asleep twenty minutes in when Wanda rests her head on your shoulder to take a nap. 

You and Wanda wake to the car door slamming shut. You both look out the window and see you’ve arrived and it had been Nat who stepped out of the car. From the car, you can see her stretch and take in the view with a disgruntled face. 

“Well someone’s excited,” Sam said sarcastically, having noticed Nat’s attitude toward this trip also. All of you in the car watch her as she sprays a ton of bug repellant on herself while grumbling, “Stupid Clint. I should be relaxing somewhere with AC. But nooo, Mr. ‘I’ve decided we’re going camping’ and Ms. ‘I promise it’s gonna be fun’ want to go camping. Fun my ass.”

You can’t help but laugh when she mocks you and Clint, and everyone in the car joins in. Nat turns to glare at all of you through the windows. “Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up. Just don’t come crying to me when you can’t stop scratching your legs tomorrow. Now chop chop. We’ve got things to bring out.” 

She leaves to help Laura out of the family car that just pulled up beside Nat’s own. She’s always so grumpy when you go camping. At the thought, a joke pops in your head that you can’t help but repeat out loud, “Yeah, she’s never really been a happy camper.”

“Did you just? Nice one!” Peter gives you a high five. Wanda and Sam shake their heads at you but you can see Wanda trying not to smile. Sam catches it and throws his head back groaning, “Bad puns? Really? I gotta start writing things down.” He pulls out his phone and goes to his notes to start a list. “Okay, confident but geeky, talk about Star Wars, bad jokes. Am I missing anything, Wanda?”

You and Peter look at her confused. You are especially intrigued to know what Wanda has to do with whatever the hell Sam is talking about when she flushes and kicks his seat. “We should go help now,” she says, opening the door and hurrying out. You follow behind asking, “What’s he talking about, Wanda?” 

She ignores you. Peter reaches you and says, “I thought it was a good joke.”

Everyone helps out setting the tents, Clint wanting to get that out of the way first. No matter how much of a downer Nat can be on camping trips, you’re always glad she’s there or no tent would stand a chance holding upright. There are three sturdy tents set up a little ways away from the dock by the time you finish. Peter, the kids, the twins, and you run over to the dock in excitement, you pulling Wanda along with you. None of you are in the proper attire to jump in as Laura points out. “Hey, go put on your swim suits if you want to get in!” she shouts from where the rest are setting up everything for grilling.

You all turn back around to put on your swimwear. Best not to anger the pregnant lady. Before you can take a step forward, you feel like someone sweeps you up in their arms but it happens too fast to be sure and suddenly you are falling into the water. Everyone turns back around at the sound of you hitting the water. When your head springs from the water, you look for the culprit and see him smiling at you next to Sam. You do the only thing you can think of as revenge. You pretend to drown. “Help! I can’t-” you spit water everywhere waving your arms hysterically. You can hear footsteps running on the dock but ignore them to see Pietro’s reaction. His eyes widen and in a blink he is gone. 

You hear a splash. Correction, you hear three different splashes. You knew one had to be Pietro and you’re right. He pulls you into him with one arm, saying, “I got you. I got you.” 

You turn in his arm and say, “No, I got you.” He looks confused and you take the opportunity to wriggle loose and dunk his head in the water. The second and third splashes had come from Peter and Wanda, you note, when you hear them behind you say, “Y/N!” and “Are you okay?” You can’t answer because the sight of Pietro coming back up spluttering has you cracking up. 

“I thought you couldn’t swim,” Peter says. This time you do answer, “I told you guys, I was learning on the job.”

Peter starts laughing then, swimming towards Pietro, who took it easy laughing as well. “She got you so good. You should have seen your face,” Peter chuckles. You grin, but that smile falls when you look at Wanda and find her glaring at you.The joy on your face morphs into confusion. You ask, “What’s wrong?”

“That wasn’t funny, Y/N.” She leaves you there with your mouth agape and heads to the shore without another word, swimming past Peter and Pietro who are basically water fighting. You float there for a second wondering what just happened. You don’t know what to do but you think you have to fix it somehow. 

You swim after her. Pietro and Peter stop splashing water at each other, turning their bodies to look at you as you pass by them now able to touch the ground with your feet. Pietro teases, “Oooh, someone’s sleeping on the couch tonight.” 

You wanted to point out that you have been sleeping on the couch the whole week and that technically you’ll be sleeping in a tent tonight. Instead you splash some water at him behind you and try to walk faster against the water to catch Wanda. When you are close enough, you reach out and pull on her wrist to get her to stop walking. You walk around her to stand face to face. She pulls her arm free from your hold and crosses her arms in front of her body looking everywhere but at you. You see her clenching her jaw in irritation and if you’re honest with yourself, you find this angry Wanda pretty attractive, but you remember she’s mad at you and you focus on the matter at hand.

Unbeknownst to you both, everyone’s watching. “Oh, she’s mad mad. Let’s see Y/N try to joke her way out of this one,” Sam says chuckling. Clint and Nat turn to him, Nat smirking and Clint chuckling. Laura is preoccupied putting sunscreen on the kids to be aware of what is going on.

“Oh, come on. Sure, Y/N is smooth but I know Wanda, and that girl is stubborn as hell,” Sam says confidently, remembering the time Wanda had not spoken to her brother for three days because he went to a party with some of the guys forgetting he was supposed to go to the movies with her. 

“Want to bet?” Clint says. 

“20, easy.” Sam shakes Clint’s hand. Off in the water, Peter and Pietro are having a similar conversation. Peter asks if Wanda is actually mad. Peter doesn’t live on the compound and has not had much interaction with Wanda, so it makes sense to Pietro why he would ask. Pietro laughs, “Oh, yes. One time I forgot to go to the movies with her and she did not speak with me for days. She has the same face now.”

You don’t really have a plan here, so you start the way you always do, using humor. “Wanda, are you actually mad? Am I in hot … water?” you flick some water for effect. She doesn’t find it amusing. She scoffs at you, but at least she’s looking at you now. “The water’s cold and jokes won’t get you out of this one.”

“We’ll just have to sea about that,” you try again. You didn’t think she could look more peeved, but look at you making the impossible happen. She says, “It’s a lake,” unamused, and she moves to go around you. So humor is a no go in this situation.

“What did I tell you,” Sam boasts, seeing Wanda look more irritated. “Easiest 20 dollars, I made.”

“Just wait,” Clint says. Laura goes to sit beside him and asks, “What’s happening?”

“Wanda is mad at Y/N. Sam bet Clint 20 dollars that Wanda will stay mad at her,” Nat explains. Suddenly, Sam doesn’t feel so confident when Laura shakes her head at him like he just got played and says, “Oh, Sam.”

“Okay, wait, wait, wait.” You step to the side making sure Wanda doesn’t leave. “I’m sorry. It was just a dumb way to get back at Pietro. I didn’t mean to upset you or freak you out,” you say, pulling her arms apart from where they are still crossed. “The last thing I want to do is make you mad or sad or any of the -ad’s.” You see her tense shoulders loosen up so you add, “You already know how I feel about Brads.”

You know you made the right choice when you hear her giggle at your last comment. You smile and tug on her arm. “So are we good? Or do I have to pull out the famous puppy dog eyes?” you jest and she gives you a real laugh when you actually go for the puppy dog eyes along with a pout. She shoves you playfully and you nearly stumble backwards but you hold onto her arms and pull yourself forward. In consequence you end up closer to each other and Wanda takes the opportunity to pull you into a hug. 

“Just don’t do it again,” Wanda says. You wrap your arms around her waist, welcoming in her hug. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Now let’s go swimming,” you say quickly. She barely catches what you say before you pick her up and take off back in Peter and Pietro’s direction, Wanda laughing the whole way.

“What the hell was that?” Sam refuses to believe what he just saw. 

“Easiest 20 dollars I ever made,” Clint chuckles.

“No, see she’s gotta have some kind of persuasion powers or something. Why isn’t that girl on the team? We could just give her a microphone before we go fight and have her convince the bad dudes to turn themselves in,” Sam says as he reluctantly takes out a twenty dollar bill and gives it to Clint.

Pietro is very much on the same boat as Sam. He decides he needs to learn your secrets. Peter says, “Maybe the movie she wanted to watch was really good?”

You have your fun in the water, especially when the kids and Sam join you deciding they want to play chicken fight. Cooper goes against Lila and despite her being younger and smaller, she manages to push Cooper off Sam’s shoulder. Pietro holds Sam up as he goes against Peter. Sam cheers when Peter falls backwards into the water. Most would be surprised by the win but it was mostly your fault, not having a good stance when trying to hold Peter on your shoulders. 

You go to fight against Wanda next; she takes Sam’s place on Pietro’s shoulders and you sit on Sam’s shoulders. Cooper and Lila count down and when they yell go, you and Wanda are pushing each other’s shoulders. Wanda removes a hand from your shoulder and reaches for your stomach, but you catch her arm quickly. “Not today. You’re going down, Maximoff!”

“Yeah, we’ll see about that-” Wanda begins but doesn’t finish. You can feel her grip loosen on your shoulder when she gives you a look of befuddlement. “Actually, I don’t know your last name.” You smirk, taking this as your opportunity, and say, “Good. Now you can see how I felt.” Then you push her shoulder and she loses her balance. You can smell the victory, but the smell wafts away when you see what looks like a red mist coming from her and hurling towards you. You are practically flung from Sam’s shoulder into the water. 

You resurface, spluttering water. You look around for the person of interest and head towards her when she gets up beside Pietro. “You cheated!” you yell. You’re not actually mad but you are a sore loser. She sees you coming toward her and Wanda can’t help but laugh at how silly you look trying to stomp over to her intimidatingly when you are moving so slowly against the water. “I thought you and I had agreed on no powers.”

“No, you said no more mind reading,” she corrects you with a pleased smile on her face. 

“Well new rule, no powers in general and wipe that grin off your face, no one likes a smart-ass,” you huff. She replies whilst giving your cheek a poke, “Then wipe that pout off your face. No one likes a sore loser.” You shake your head to get her finger off your face, making her laugh again.

Pietro challenges Wanda next and before either of them have a chance to decide who will be carrying them, you dive under Wanda and between her legs, making her yelp in surprise as you lift her up on your shoulders. You hold on tight to her thighs and then reach for her arms to keep her steady. She giggles when she looks down not able to see you behind all the hair in your face. She helps you out and pulls your hair back out of your face. You look up at her, who keeps her hands on your head, and smile in thanks.

You look at Wanda’s opponent. Pietro, who is situated on Sam’s shoulders, is already looking at you like he’s thinking something over. Then he looks above you at Wanda and challenges, “If I win, you have to tell me what Y/N said to not make you angry anymore.”

Sam under him adds, “Yeah, I wanna know why I lost 20 dollars!” You give him a look of bewilderment. Wanda thinks it over and decides, “Okay, but if I win, Sam has to stop trying to be geeky like Y/N and Peter.” You pinch her thigh and Peter shouts “Hey!” at being called geeky. She ignores the two of you, continuing, “And you have to stop flirting with Y/N.”

“Why? Are you jealous, Wanda?” her brother baits her. Your ears perk up awaiting her response.

“No, you’re just annoying,” Wanda says trying to sound nonchalant, but Pietro knows her well. He continues badgering, “Well, what if Y/N likes it?” 

You decide to partake in his teasing her and add, “Yeah, Wanda. What if I like it?” You look up at her with a cheeky smile and find her already looking down at you with an eyebrow raised and her tongue poking at her cheek, a look you feel says “you don’t want to test me”. Gut feelings shouldn’t be ignored, you think, so you look back to Pietro, “Sorry, I guess I don’t like it.” You follow with a dramatic whisper, “Totally jealous.” She tugs your hair in retaliation for your comment.

“So, is it a deal or not, ‘cause my shoulders are starting to hurt,” Sam says. The twins agree and you are thankful Sam got the ball rolling because you didn’t know how much longer you could hold up Wanda. Peter counts down this time. It’s over in less than 3 seconds. It seems Wanda likes to cheat. Everyone sees the red mist fading after Pietro falls into the water. 

“That’s not fair. You used your powers. That’s cheating,” Pietro says when he comes back up and Sam nodding in agreement while Wanda defends herself saying they never said they couldn’t use powers. You tell Wanda to take a breath and close her nose and then fall backwards to get her off your shoulders. Another few minutes of swimming pass by before Clint yells for all of you to get out and go eat. You all head to the little cabin that has the restrooms and showers. Laura meets you there with towels. Those of you that jumped in the lake enter the showers with clothes and all to wash away the lake water and then head outside to rinse off. 

Clint watches you hand your towel to Wanda for her to dry off first. You say something that makes Wanda let out a resonant laugh and in turn makes you smile vibrantly. He’s only ever seen you look at someone like that once. He grimaces at how that turned out. And Wanda he’s actually never seen act like this, so jubilant and lively, playfully rolling her eyes and pushing you away after you make a stupid joke. It brings a smile to his face despite the voice in the back of his head saying this can’t end well.

As everyone eats, they unintentionally group off to have different conversations. Clint, Sam, and Peter stand by the mini grill, Laura and Nat sit in some camping chairs complaining about the bugs, the kids are drawing things on the ground with a stick they found, and you, Wanda, and Pietro are sitting on other camping chairs.

Pietro and Wanda tell you stories of when they were children, both their eyes seem to almost glaze over as they reminisce on fond memories. Though their storytelling styles differ, Pietro with his animated gestures and Wanda with her attention for detail, they both have you captivated. You offer them a few stories of your own childhood, including the ones you found embarrassing like the three different times you called one teacher “mom” and the time you walked straight into a pole talking to your crush in middle school.

“So you weren’t always so smooth as I hear you are,” Wanda comments through her laughter.

“Nope, this awesome personality took years in the making,” you joke, making Wanda shake her head at you. Pietro comments, “Yeah, not everyone can be born with it like I was.”

Wanda laughs at this, which offends Pietro and soon the twins are bickering much to your amusement. Wanda recounts times Pietro was very much not so smooth with the ladies including things he’s done that caused certain girlfriends to leave him, Pietro obviously having excuses as to why something happened. He fires his shot at her when he tells her she can’t begin to talk about relationships when she’s only had one and it was 3D printed. 

You tune them out after this due to shock and confusion. You’re shocked that Wanda’s only ever dated one person. You never really thought to ask about her exes because you thought it might bring up some bad memories knowing she had just gone through a breakup not so long ago. So you also find it shocking that she was so brazenly forward about wanting to try something with you if she doesn’t date like her brother does-like you do which you don’t even consider dating. You kind of want to smile thinking about it. You just know that she has people left and right who would kill for a chance to be with her, but she likes you. You are trying hard not to let it go to your head but can already feel your ego growing in size. The confusion comes from the 3D printed comment. You’ll have to ask about that later.

“-ask Y/N.” You bring your attention back to the conversation when hearing your name.

“She doesn’t do relationships. She’s too busy playing the game and winning,” Sam chuckles standing between the twins’ chairs. You hadn’t even noticed when he joined you three. You don’t know where they were in the conversation and don’t want to explain what you were thinking about if you ask them to repeat the question because you were distracted, so you decide to go along with Sam. You fake a laugh and say, “Yeah, tried it once and it wasn’t for me.”

“You? In a relationship?” You nod at both of Pietro’s questions. “With who?”

“Her name’s Skye and no, she doesn’t live here so don’t try going around town asking about her. I may not have known you for long, but I can just tell you’re both nosy.” You point at Pietro and Sam.

“Then don’t leave us wondering. What happened?” Sam asks. From the look in his eye, you know he won’t let it go. You don’t feel like recounting the details of how you were falling for someone who left you saying they couldn’t do relationships because they were distracting her from trying to do something important. It was a blow to the gut then; you’re sure your face would show it. You don’t want to be a drag. 

“Nothing exciting. She told me relationships weren’t for her at the time,” you say nonchalantly,  shrugging your shoulders like it doesn’t still hurt to think about.

“So you decided relationships weren’t for you,” Wanda speaks up, her stare hard on your profile like she’s trying to figure you out. You think she reads you too well already, there can’t be anything you hide that she won’t find.

“If you can’t beat them, join them,” you say, trying to look unfazed by it all. It seems to work because the guys move on, Sam joking saying that was the reason you partnered with Wanda after you lost the chicken fight. Wanda, however, is still staring at you, trying to decipher your words. You try not to focus on that. The guys laugh when you say that technically you won because Wanda cheated using her powers.

“So it is cheating! If you say you won, that means Sam and I won, so Sam can try to be geeky and I can flirt with you and you have to tell us how Wanda’s mood changed so fast,” Pietro says matter-of-factly. Now this gets Wanda to quit staring at you. Instead she turns her head to Pietro to give him a glare when he mentions flirting with you. You don’t know too much about Wanda’s powers but you would not be surprised if one was killing someone with a look; Pietro would be pulverized from being on the receiving end of her glare and you from how attractive you found it. 

But now is not the time. As much as it hurts your ego that has now flown through the roof, you reach your foot over to loop your ankle around Wanda and say to Pietro, “Okay, then I didn’t win. It was a draw.” Wanda turns her attention back over to you when she feels your ankle against hers.

“Oh, come on! Just tell us how you did it,” Sam says. 

“Guess she just likes me more than you two,” you offer with a cheeky smile. You miss Wanda blushing when Sam says, “That’s for sure.” You didn’t even catch that because the smell of marshmallows roasting called you. You look over Sam’s shoulder and see Clint helping Cooper and Lila make a s’more. You notice Peter talking to Nat and Laura sitting around a small makeshift fire pit starting to poke marshmallows on the ends of some steel sticks Clint must have bought. “Um, what the hell, guys? Was no one going to call us for s’mores?” you yell more so towards your cousin. 

Everyone turns to look at you but your group who look over to see the reason you were yelling. Your cousin gives you a well-job-done look when Lila says, “Ooo, Y/N said a bad word.” As your group heads over to the rest, you give your cousin your don’t-worry-I’ll-fix-it look you’ve given her countless times and tell Lila, “Yes, I did but you can’t. Not until you’re ten.”

“Y/N!” Both Clint and Laura yell while Nat actually tries to fix it and says, “Y/N was just being funny. Don’t listen to her.”

“But you say Y/N is never funny,” Cooper chimes in. Everyone stifles a laugh when you scoff. “That’s because your Aunt Nat wouldn’t know a joke if it bit her in the ass,” you say the last part directly looking at her. You hear Clint say something like “not this again” while most are saying “oooh” including the kids but they say it to point out you said another bad word.

“I don’t know about that one. Why don’t you bite mine and I’ll tell you?” Nat comes back at you and so do the oohs from everyone and a bonus “burn” from Sam. You reply, “No, thank you. Wouldn’t want to accidentally bite into the stick stuck up there.”

“DAMN!” Sam says and before Nat could respond from what you’re sure would be what ends you tonight, your cousin cuts in. “Enough! I thought I would be raising 3 children. I didn’t sign up for 5. Lila, don’t listen to Y/N about the bad words and if she and Aunt Nat keep arguing,” your cousin threatens, “neither will be having s’mores.”

Both your and Nat’s eyes go wide at that. One thing you and she will never argue about is how s’mores are one of the greatest contributions the US has given the world in terms of culinary delicacies. 

“That got them quiet very fast. How good can s’mores be?” Pietro asks. You and Nat gasp so dramatically one would think Pietro insulted your mothers. “You’ve never had a s’more?” you ask both him and Wanda who shake their heads.

“Why was I never made aware of this?” Nat reprimands them as if it’s the twins’ fault they’ve never had s’mores. “Someone get these two a stick and some marshmallows ASAP,” Nat snaps, and you fetch four sticks and the bag of marshmallows, handing Nat, Pietro, and Wanda a stick each. 

“Prepare to have your mind blown,” you say dramatically. Wanda finds your passion for s’mores adorable. She gives you a smile in thanks when you stick two marshmallows at the end of her stick. Pietro is excited to try s’mores after you and Nat having raved about them; he can’t help but wiggle the stick back and forth while you are trying to put some marshmallows on it. You and Nat are helping the twins make their first s’mores when Wanda asks, “Why don’t Lila and Cooper call you Aunt Y/N?” 

“Because children recognize children,” Nat jests, but your cousin says her name as a warning anyway in case you two started up again. You call over Lila and Cooper for them to answer the question for you. Together they recite verbatim what you had told them to say when someone asked. “Aunt is for when you are old, boring, or married and Y/N is young, cool, and single.” You mouth along and give them a proud smile after.

“Exactly! Thank you, critters.” You give each a high five and they run back to their dad. Wanda looks impressed as do the rest. Nat, on the other hand, looks ready to argue again. “Excuse me, so which of the three am I, huh?”

“Well, you’re not married yet, so you take your pick between the other two choices.” Your eyes shimmer in merriment when she says nothing, opting to glare at you. Sam laughs and asks, “How long did it take them to remember that?”

“A whole summer two years ago. I told them I’d buy 4 pints of ice cream to whoever memorizes it first,” you explain. Everyone enjoys their s’mores, Pietro eating too many for his own good, as the sun disappears below the horizon. It’s not too long before Nat starts complaining about the bugs again. She’s cut off by her phone ringing. She stands off to the side to take the call. You joke around with Wanda saying it’s Bruce calling and you play out the conversation you think they’re having. Wanda laughs at your terrible attempt to mimic Nat and Bruce’s voices.

Nat comes back with news. “So, Rodgers can’t pick us up this weekend. He was called on a mission and had to take the jet, but Tony arranged for two agents named Bobby and Daisy to pick us up in 5 days.”

“You’re staying longer?” Lila asks and when Nat nods, she runs to hug Pietro cheering. You and Wanda look at each other after the news, both trying to see the other’s reaction. You give each other a shy smile. Wanda is happy to have more time with you. She was not ready to leave so soon not knowing when she would be able to see you next. You didn’t really know how you felt. You’re suddenly aware of your heart pounding aggressively against your chest. You were dreading your time with Wanda coming to a close but you were also somewhat prepared to hang on until the weekend without messing anything up. Hearing she’s staying for longer is a relief but you are not sure how long you can go without breaking and kissing her again, getting both your hopes up only for it to all come crashing down when she inevitably leaves. 

Nat interrupts your internal turmoil by ways of complaining again about the bugs. “Okay, this is not gonna happen. Clint, let me see your keys.” Clint tosses her his car keys. She pulls the house key from the key ring and tosses the car keys back to Clint. “Cool, see you all at the house tomorrow. Whoever wants to sleep on an actual bed and not in this AC-less mosquito infested site, you are welcome to tag along.”

Laura stands up way too quickly for someone who is pregnant and says she’s going with Nat. Lila tags along, apparently not wanting to sleep here without her mom. “What a baby,” you say shaking your head as you watch Nat’s car’s lights disappear. 

“Well at least now you’ll have more privacy in the tent,” Sam says, smirking at you and Wanda pointing out that you’ll be alone with Wanda in the tent, which you hadn’t put together until this moment. If your heart wasn’t beating like a drum before, it sure is trying to beat out of your chest now. You gulp at his insinuation. Maybe it isn’t too late to run after the car. 

“Ew, I don’t want to hear anything,” Pietro says, Sam and surprisingly Clint agreeing by nodding their heads. Wanda rolls her eyes at him and Peter on the hand is blushing, trying not to look at you or Wanda like he’s already seen something. You’re suddenly aware that all of them are heading to their tents. The fire had been put out and all the leftover food had been put away sometime while you were watching Nat’s group drive away. Pietro and Peter share one tent and Sam, Clint, and Cooper another. 

Wanda stands and looks down at you expectantly. You see she’s holding the lantern Lila always uses cause it’s in her favorite color of blue. “Do you plan to sleep outside?”

You roll your eyes and stand up to follow Wanda into your tent. There are three sleeping bags rolled out in front of you. “Guess we won’t be needing one of those,” Wanda comments behind you. The comment itself should make you nervous but what actually does it is the sound of her zipping the entrance closed. You gulp and can only let out a simple, “Mhm.”

If that alone had you acting this way, you didn’t want to find out what actually looking her way would do to you, so you quickly move, back hunching, to the back pack you brought. You kneel to comfortably search it. You gave her a better answer, clearing your throat. “Actually, Nat was right about the hard ground. You could use it as a double layer.”

“Or we could share it?” Wanda suggests. You stop digging in the bag as your breath catches. You reply, your voice an octave higher, “No, that-that’s okay.” You clear your throat when you notice your pitch and hope Wanda hadn’t. “I’m used to it, but I wouldn’t want to give you a bad impression of camping.” Wanda had. You are back to searching your bag for the sweats you had brought to sleep in.

Wanda notices you seem a little tense, having dug around that bag for awhile. She walks up to you and places a hand on your shoulder. Your body stiffens like a board under her hand. She has to ask, “Are you nervous?”

“Nervous? Pft, why would I be nervous?” You finally find your damn sweats. “I’ve done this a million times.” You are quick to change the subject when the only clothes apart from Nat’s you find beside your sweats are some pyjama shorts and a tank top. “Is this all you brought to sleep in?”

“I didn’t think we were going to be camping when I packed,” Wanda replies to your inquiry but she still has questions of her own she’d like answered. For example, why are you so nervous and what did the kiss yesterday mean for you two. “Y/N, we need to talk.”

“Luckily, Nat left her stuff so you can wear her clothes. Here.” You hand Wanda Nat’s sleepwear. She can obviously tell you were avoiding the conversation. “You can change. I’ll face the other way.” You turn around and change into your sweats. You would have to leave your top on not having planned for it to have gotten wet. You try not to let the sound of Wanda’s quick intake of breath make you blush knowing you didn’t give her any warning. You try really hard not to guess what Wanda is doing based on the sounds you’re hearing when you think she begins changing but your mind tends to wander especially when it comes to the girl behind you. 

“I don’t see why you have to turn around. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of women undress.” The sound of clothes falling to the ground makes you gulp. You are never so nervous and it’s killing you. You try your hardest to find something funny to say but come up empty. Wanda is still waiting on a response, so you say facing a tent wall, “None of those women are you.”

Your words spark something in each of your heads- a decision. You decide to take a chance with Wanda because you do believe it in your heart. Wanda is not like any of the other women including Skye. Even though she has to leave in five days, you can make it work. Wanda, however, is reminded of how she isn’t like other women. She is reminded of what Nat had said before. She decides maybe Vision was right.

As much as you wish you could avoid a serious talk, you know you owe it to her. They do say the secret to a good relationship is open communication. The term relationship usually makes you want to run for the hills but when you think of it tied to Wanda, a flutter tickles your stomach. It’s a feeling you never thought you would welcome again and you have to suppress a smile.

“Okay, you can turn around now,” Wanda says. She notices you hiding a smile and she’s wondering what brought it on. Wanda watches you move Nat’s sleeping bag under the one meant for her and then settle into your own. Your kind consideration makes her smile weakly, thinking of all the things she’ll miss such as you opening doors for her or letting her have your blanket and remain sitting still for the sake of her comfort. You stare up at Wanda who you see is lost in thought but staring in your direction and finally manage to act like yourself. “I’m sure the view is nice from there, but I can assure you I look good from all angles,” you joke and pat her sleeping bag beside you. 

The sound of your hand patting her sleeping bag brings her out of her head and when she processes what you said, she rolls her eyes at you. She grabs the lantern, setting it a little aways from both of you once she gets into her sleeping bag. Both of you turn onto your sides placing your hands under your heads to face one another. You stare at each other for a while before a question pops up in your head. You ask, “What did Pietro mean by 3D printed?”

“Sorry?” Wanda looks confused so you clarify. “When you and your brother were arguing, he said your last relationship was 3D printed.” A light bulb goes off in her head, now knowing you were referring to Vision. “That was just Pietro being a jerk,” Wanda says and then she goes on to explain her relationship with this synthetic being to you. You try really hard not to let the fact that this ex-boyfriend of hers quite literally has a connection to her because how were you supposed to compare to that. 

You shake that off and scrape every corner of your mind for any trace of confidence and gather that to work up the nerve to say, “Off topic, or maybe on topic, but I feel like we need to talk about yesterday on the ferris wheel.”

Wanda sees you struggle trying to start a serious conversation. Trying not to have you freak out, as Natasha had implied would practically be impossible, Wanda meets you in the middle. She tries a bit of humor, something you are more comfortable with. “You mean our friendly date?” She adds in a chuckle so you would know she is kidding with you.

You smile, appreciating her trying to make it easier on you to talk to her. If she’s trying for you, you can try for her, you think. You sober up and a more serious expression falls upon your face. You want Wanda to know you mean everything you are about to say next. Wanda, however, misreads the intent behind your expression. What she sees is you finding the words to let her down slowly again. You had said relationships weren’t for you and talk of past flings proved that, so she took a page out of your book- if you can’t beat them, join them. She can play nonchalant too.

“Yeah, about that. I’m sorry I acted so weird after, like it didn’t happen. The truth is I tried to ignore it, but I can’t because it’s constantly replaying in my head. All I can think about is doing it again and I know I said we could only be friends, but-”

“You were right.” Wanda cuts you off early. “What?” you ask thoroughly confused. She continues, “When you said we should just be friends, you were right. It was silly of me to even suggest anything. I mean I’m leaving in five days, so what is the point right?” Wanda reasons with you and as you are about to rebut to say you can make it work, she continues, “I mean I’m probably not in the right headspace to start anything serious. Vision just broke up with me like a month ago.” 

You are starting to feel like you were gathering up courage for no reason, Wanda not letting you speak and stepping on every butterfly that had flapped its wings in your stomach with every word she says. “I came here to take my mind off of it and like magic, you appeared at the door- the perfect distraction.”

That is the blow to the gut you thought you could forget. You thought Clint was the one with perfect aim but Wanda impresses you with her accuracy, choosing the exact word that kills the last bit of hope left in you. On her side of things, Wanda thinks she is doing the right thing even though it kills her to push aside her feelings. Wanda thinks she is sparing you from having to turn her down again and sparing her feelings from having to hear you reject her once more. 

“So don’t worry about the fair. I can definitely say I was not thinking about Vision on the ferris wheel. You are most welcome to do it again anytime.” Wanda forces out a laugh. You didn’t think the sound that would always make you smile would ever make you want to cry. No, you were not going to cry about a girl, especially in front of said girl no less. 

You are angry with yourself. Angry for being so silly as to think this wouldn’t happen. You really played yourself here believing she would be nothing like Skye. It’s not Wanda’s fault. You know this. Still, you can’t help but place some blame on her, her and her stunning smile and her witty remarks and her gorgeous hair and her soft hands that would hold yours or playfully punch you when you joke around. You are angry and upset, and there are normal ways to deal with those emotions. You could yell, you could cry, you could mope and eat all the ice cream you wish, you could even, god forbid, go for a run, but all of those options are too rational for someone with impulsive tendencies. 

Instead, you blink away the tears that were forming, from anger or sadness you don’t know, and move exceptionally closer to Wanda reaching out to run your fingers through her hair. Her breath catches as she watches your eyes take in every inch of her face with a look she can’t quite place. Her heartbeat paces quickly when she catches your eyes glancing down to her lips and then coming back up to peer into her eyes.

“Friends kiss friends all the time, right?”

You hardly give Wanda any time to nod before you crash your lips onto hers. This time you give her time to respond and the second you feel her kissing you back, you push her to lie on her back. 

If a distraction is what she wants, you’ll show her just how distracting you can be.

______________________________________________________________________

One eternity later... je suis retournée! Thank you kind person who asked about me. I’ve been busy with school stuff but I’m done and graduating in two days so I finally have time to get back to this. So next update will probably be Sunday or Monday. Two more chapters left. 

Next chapter: ;) (aka writer struggles to describe things having no experience of doing such things)

Taglist: @madamevirgo @marvels-writings @gayarchnemissis @myperfectlovepoem @purplemeetsblue @magicallymaximoff @b0mbdotc0m @helloalycia @ironscarletwidowsoilder @cantcontroltheirfear @trikruismybitch @your-my-mission @imagine-reblog @fayhar @idek-5 @causeitswhatjesuswouldfreakingdo @bemyvitamin

[aizawaorkuroo]

A Burnt Offering

Ship: Dabi x f!reader

Rated: Explicit

Word Count: 5.7k

Summary: Your long lost childhood friend sends you letters. And then everything falls apart. Or perhaps together? Otherwise known as “Dabi wants you. And Dabi gets what he wants.”

Warnings: dubcon, non-consensual voyeurism, stalking, manipulation, spitting, dacryphilia, size kink, overstimulation, creampie, cock warming, unprotected sex

A/N: Spoilers for ch. 290 kinda!!! Don’t think too hard about how they’re childhood friends. Not going to be canon compliant cause i make the rules uwu,, also this is a little darker than what I’ve written in the past, (but still pretty soft all things considered) so please read the warnings!!!

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“Dreamed of peach trees. Dreamed, again, of drowning. Dreamed of highways becoming rivers. Dreamed of me, my long hair in flames, my body no longer a body, but a burnt offering, strange smoke rising up to meet him” - Nicola Maye Goldberg

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.

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The first letter you received was a little out of the ordinary, but nothing special. It had been left under your doormat, sticking out ever so slightly. You had brushed it off, assuming they had gotten the address wrong, or meant to send it to the person who lived in your apartment before you.

The right thing would’ve been to leave it there, or throw it away. But curiosity is a fickle beast, choosing to rear its head at strange times.

You furrow your brows, eyes scanning the words hastily scratched onto the paper. It felt familiar, but nothing truly stuck with you. You couldn’t think too hard about it, now when you had so much to get done.

It was a random occurrence, one that slipped your mind as you went about your day, the letter sitting on your kitchen counter.

hey,

we haven’t talked in a while. i miss you i guess. i swear to god i sometimes still feel your hand in mine and sometimes i think of your smile. maybe I’ll see you soon.

It’s left unsigned, and you can’t help but to feel bad that it got sent to you. But there’s no return address, nothing to hint at where it’s supposed to go. So it sits on your counter, slipping out of your mind in the following weeks.  

The second letter sends a small shiver down your spine.

“you will be alone always and then you will die.” i can’t remember who told me that, but it rings around my head. there are days where it feels like it’s true, like time will catch up with me and I’ll be gone. but it’s not true. because I used to have you. but I’ll have you again.

Your eyes gloss over the words, a small frown slipping onto your face. Something melancholic sinks into you, making a home in your chest.

“You will be alone always and then you will die,” you whisper to yourself, fingers grazing over the sloppy letters. You feel guilty that the writer’s thoughts are stuck with you instead of this person they so desperately miss.

Yet there’s something unyielding about the last line, something so definite. Curiosity fills you, and you can’t help but to want to get the letter to where it’s supposed to be. But like the first letter, there’s no return address, no signature, nothing outside of the longing in the letter.

So it sits on the counter with the first, the weight of the words lingering in your chest until it too is forgotten.

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You’re sitting on a hill, watching as the stars plummet down. Someone’s sitting next to you, but when you turn to face him, he stays blurry as if he exists on the edges of reality, unable to be fully perceived.

You watch as a rainbow of flames overtake him and recede, further obscuring him. But the flames continue to cycle in and out, a constant ebb and flow. You know who he is.

He flickers, you cannot touch him. You place your hand on the flames. Nothing burns. When you look up again, the hill is gone. You're sitting in inky darkness, watching as the stars continue to fall all around you. And the boy is gone too. In his place is something of shadow and smoke, two gleaming blue eyes tearing into you. You freeze, unable to do anything but stare.

It stalks towards you slowly, grinning to show rows of sharp teeth. You know what it wants, you can feel the need across the space in between you too. And so close your eyes and tilt your neck, offering yourself up. And you don’t scream when it takes the first bite.

“I’m always on your side.”

You wake up in a cold sweat, heart pounding. You’re awake now, but you feel like the stars are still falling around you and him - right.

Touya.

His name blossoms in your head, memories of laughter and secrets told underneath the shade of a cherry blossom tree. Your head's pounding, and you run to the bathroom, splashing water on your face. That night, the last night you had seen him, when you watched the stars streak across the sky.

“I’m always on your side.”

A promise that withered into something shallow after he disappeared.

You blink at your reflection, fists curled into themselves so tightly it hurts. You wish Touya could hold your hand now.

You don’t go back to sleep.

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The third letter makes you frown a little. Three makes a pattern.

Really wish you would say something back. Has it been that long? Guess that’s to be expected.

You scan the page, melancholic thoughts lingering until you read the last line. Your eyes widen, heart leaping in your throat, as you read it over and over again. Your hands are shaking, mind cloudy, breath short.

Really, say something back y/n.

Your name, clear as day. They know your name. You’re the recipient. You blink blankly as a line from the previous letter pops into your brain. I’ll have you again.

The letter sits untouched on the counter for days before you finally build up the courage to tentatively write back. Who is this?

As you shakily write, it dawns on you how stupid this is. You should be going to the police, or getting a security system. But you can’t help but wonder who it is, and the fickle beast inside of you rears its head.

You tentatively place the response under the doormat, and scurry back inside, as if the action would burn you. The next morning the note is gone.

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It takes a few days for you to get a response. When you get home from work, you’re tempted to walk right past it, pretending to not see it. You could just let it slip from your mind, go on with your life as if nothing has changed. But nothing can ever be simple, and with shaking hands, you steal the letter before locking yourself inside.

I can imagine how scared you must be. I bet you’d look so cute. Part of me wants to make you guess. But I’d rather speed this up. It’s me. Y’know. Touya.

“Touya,” you whisper. It’s heavy on your lips. “Touya.” Your throat is raw. “Touya, Touya, Touya.” Your chest burns. Tufts of red hair, memories of childhood and shooting stars.

Brain pulsing in overdrive, you try to reconcile what you know to be true and what is being told to you.

1. Touya was your best friend.

This one is a fact. You remembered holding his hand, running around the estate. He would be battered, bruises and burns littering his skin. Right. His father. You shiver thinking about the man.

2. Touya disappeared as a child.

Another fact. You remember his mom’s tear-stained face as she turned you away, and when you were back home, safe in bed, you cried so hard you thought you’d never stop shaking.

3. Touya is still alive.

The first in your list that is debatable. No one’s seen him for years. It’s fully possible something horrible could have happened to him. But there’s no evidence he’s dead. If you can reason that Touya is still alive, then it’s possible…

4. Touya is sending you letters. 

The most difficult conclusion of all. If Touya is alive, it could be possible he’s sending you letters. But there’s no way to guarantee it is him. It could be some stranger, some pervert pretending to be your sweet redhead from childhood. You would have to test him.

Your response is careful, calculated as you try to navigate your emotions. Your hands shake as you write the final line, a question.

What was the last thing we did?

A small frown slips onto your face. It’s kind of a lame question, and yet it’s the best you can do. But it’s a baseline, a place to start.

His response comes almost immediately.

We watched a meteor shower. Go ahead. Dig deeper.

You chew on your lip while thinking. “Touya” is off to a good start, but there’s still no guarantee. So you push farther

Where did we hide the bowl I accidentally broke?

C’mon, it was a vase, not a bowl. We buried it along the fenceline. Good try.

You smile at the memory, the way you had cried over the broken porcelain, embarrassment coursing through you. Touya had helped you hide the evidence, telling you no one would find out.

What did you promise me?

I’m always on your side.

You inhale sharply, eyes glued to his messy scrawl. That’s it. It has to be him. You’ve never told that to anyone before. You squeeze your eyes shut, but you can see stars falling all around you. You feel a little light headed.

How did you find me?

Pure chance. I missed you, y/n. Does your face scrunch up when you get mad still? It was so fucking cute.

Shut the fuck up, Touya.

You don’t know how he’s done it, but Touya has inserted himself back into your life, whisking you off your feet with his stupid jokes and laid back attitude. And everyone in a while he’ll say something, that has you burying your face into your pillow, face warm and stomach in knots.

I’m going to hold you, and never let you go.

Would you let me kiss you? Would you let me sink my teeth into you? I bet you would.

I’d kiss you until you melt.

That one in particular made your chest burn, full of something warm and sappy. You read it over and over again, until the words are branded in your brain.

You’re sitting at the kitchen table at 2 am when you realize, you would. You would let him kiss you, let him sweep you off your feet. It occurs to you that you don’t know what he looks like anymore, but his words reach into you, stirring everything around to the point that you’re completely enamored anyways.

A sharp knock draws you from your thoughts. You narrow your eyes, glancing at the clock. Hesitantly, you approach your front door. You hover right in front of it, debating on whether or not to open it again. There’s a chance that no one’s even there anymore.

A second forceful knock makes your stomach flip. Taking a deep breath, you crack the door open.

Your eyes widen, and you're deafened by the blood pumping through you. Patchwork skin, pitch-black hair; you feel yourself begin to panic. 

Dabi. You recognized him from the Fukuoka fight that was on TV. You slam the door shut before he has a chance to say anything.

“No, no, no. Don’t do this to me y/n.” His voice is muffled by the door, but the separation doesn’t hide the way his voice barely cracks. You feel sick, brain cloudy as the room spins around you.

“How do you know my name?” you choke out, stomach growing nauseous.

“I thought we already did this… but you can’t recognize me either.” You furrow your eyebrows in confusion, wracking your brain for what he could be talking about.

“After all those letters.” 

Oh.

Oh.

Your stomach drops, and your heart does with it. Dabi is Touya. Touya is Dabi. You tremble against the door, flashes of red hair and childhood innocence ghosting through your mind. You should’ve paid more attention to how he found you.

“Open the door.” Touya’s voice- no Dabi’s voice? You shake your head at the confusion, finding it difficult to reconcile the two versions of him you know. Regardless, his voice is even now, something sharp lingering beneath the soft surface.

You shut your eyes, letting your head rest against the door; it’s all too much for you. You can practically feel the tears stinging the back of your eyes. Maybe he’ll go away, maybe you don’t have to have a breakdown in the middle of the night.

“Open up for me, Y/N.”

You blink your eyes open, something cold slipping down your spine. He’s not going away. He could burn the door down if he wanted to. You know what he does now, and you feel so fucking stupid. The fact that he’s asking is an unexpected kindness. Summoning all the willpower you have, you open the door, hand grasping the handle to avoid shaking.

Dabi’s head tilts to the side as his eyes meet yours, and a sharp grin pulls at his lips.

“Aren’t you going to let me in?” Your eyes dip to the floor, and you stumble to the side, closing the door as he brushes past you.

You awkwardly stand in front of him, fingers messing with the hem of your shirt as you try to control your breathing. Your stomachs in your throat as Dabi circles you. He is not the boy you knew. There’s an edge to him, a coldness radiating off of him that rolls into you.

“Now you can’t even look at me,” he sneers. Your gaze tilts up to meet him, trembling his words. Your heart lurches as you take in his appearance again. The puckered flesh, the staples, the jet black hair. It’s all too much.

But his eyes.

His eyes are the same, the same vivid blue that haunts your dreams. It hurts looking at him now, but it also hurts remembering what he was.

Hesitantly, you reach out to cup his face. He tenses under your touch, eyes flashing in warning. You swallow past the lump in your throat, forcing out a small “hi.” Your voice cracks under the weight of emotions, but his eyes soften, and he ever so gently tilts his head into your hand. And that’s enough.

A steady stream of tears leak from your eyes; you’re not completely sure why you’re crying, the emotions too jumbled, too complex to pinpoint a specific reason. Your thumb brushes over the marred skin under his eyes, and you feel sick. Like everything that’s wrong with the world has reared its ugly head in your apartment. But it hasn’t. It’s Touya. 

“Awww. Baby girl’s crying for me, huh?” he teases, making you narrow your eyes. He moves quickly, pulling you against him before you can step away. “Still the same crybaby from before.” You squeeze your eyes shut, trying to ignore the way your head’s spinning.

“What else am I supposed to do?” you bite back, letting your head rest against him. “I missed you.” He scoffs at that, hands sliding down to grip your waist.

Your breath stutters, and you squirm in his hold, unsure what to think. His grip tightens, making you wince. You pull your head back to look up at him, trying to keep your breathing even. Touya leans in close, eyes glued to you.

“Glad you missed me,” he mutters, and the borderline painful grip switches to something softer as he massages your flesh. “I missed you too, Y/N.” His voice rumbles through you softly, making your stomach flip. His tongue darts out of his mouth to flash across your cheek, licking the salty trail your tears left behind.

“Touya, what the fuck?”

You jerk away from him, sputtering as he throws his head back in laughter. Your skin feels too hot, and you struggle to put together a thought. You wiggle out of his grasp, wiping your face, and glaring at him.

“C’mon. Don’t be like that,” he laughs, obviously not taking this seriously. But you just shake your head, trying to squash all of your feelings.

“What do you want?” Your voice bends under the stress, and you face screws up, trying to stop the pathetic flow of tears.

“To see you,” he murmurs, eyes softer than before. The feelings behind the phrase are normally enough to make you giggle and your eyes turn into hearts. 

But this is Touya, or Dabi, or some bizarre amalgamation of the two. And you know what he’s done now. You know the price he’s paid. He is not the same.

“That’s not an answer. You shouldn’t be here,” you bite at him. All traces of warmth leave Dabi’s face, and your stomach drops. Something cold and sharp glints in his eyes, threatening to cut you if you get too close. You take a tiny step back, but he simply follows.

“Don’t be like this, Y/N.” His voice is tense, a warning of who he is now, what he’s done, what he could do to you. He cocks his head to the side, eyes trailing over you, gauging your reaction. He’s not the same. You know he’s not the same. His patchwork skin is proof of that enough.

It’s not fair. Echoes of childish giggles and burning blue eyes dance across your thoughts. But what he had done to all those people…You shut your eyes, crossing your arms as if you could hold yourself together.

“Well, what am I supposed to think? You were gone, for so long. And then you sent those fucking letters, and all I could think of was seeing you again. But you’re…” you trail off, but the unsaid hangs heavy in the air.

“Broken,” he hisses out, cold eyes narrowed at you as he gestures to his body. You glare right back at him, tears still flowing.

“It has nothing to do with that,” you manage to force out. “I just- I just don't know who you are.” Dabi’s face twists up into something bitter and forceful, a hurricane that’ll sweep you into something dangerous, you just know it. He is not the same.

“I wrote you those letters, Y/N. I’m still me.” But you don’t know who that is. Not anymore. He abruptly steps forward, forcing you against the wall, eyes wide in panic. He’s too close to your face, too warm, too overwhelming. 

You missed him so much, and it hurts. It hurts to see what happened, how he had to put himself back together, a dull mosaic that’s missing pieces. He reaches out to brush his thumb over your cheekbone.

“I’m always on your side.”

If it had been anyone else but Touya, you would’ve scoffed and kicked them out. But he knows you. He knows how you think, he knows what’ll make you respond. 

After all, he’s been watching you, making sure he knows how to say that’ll make you bend to his will. Touya wants you, his sweet best friend, to be his forever. So he knows what to say.

And something in you finally gives in, and you wrap arms around him, burying your face in the crook of his neck. He slips his arms around your waist, holding you flush against him.

Your knees wobble, legs failing you as you melt to the ground. Touya follows you down, arms circling around you tighter as he smiles into your hair.

Fuck the league. Fuck his family. Fuck a normal life. Fuck, the whole world can burn down. He doesn’t give a fuck. But maybe, just maybe if there’s anyone out there listening, just let him have this. Just this once.

“That’s my baby girl,” he murmurs against you, pulling you into his lap. He kicks out his legs behind you, bending his knees to force snug against him. If he were a better man, he’d be content with this, having you on his side.

But Touya is not a good man. He’s greedy for more, and all he can think about is the heat radiating from your cunt.

His hands splay out against your back, gently rubbing you as you sniffle against him. But he can’t help it when his hands start to travel further down. You sound so cute and desperate, it ignites something within him. He squeezes the flesh of your ass, making you freeze against him. You lean away, lips trembling as your eyebrows draw together.

“Touya, what are you doing?” You sound pathetic to your own ears, and you hate it. But you’re not given any time to dwell on it when he leans forward, lips a few mere centimeters from yours. He rocks you gently against him, watching the conflict in your eyes.

“Hey,” he murmurs, leaning to peck the corner of your lips. “I’m always on your side. Let me make you feel good.”

You stay stiff against him, hands slowly tangling into his hair as he litters the side of your neck with sloppy kisses. One of his hands pushing its way down your little shorts making you gasp. You can feel his erection growing beneath you, and you bite your lip, trying to make a decision to stop him or not.

“Touya,” you ask, “are you sure?”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got you.” You’re not 100% sure if this is the right decision, but he feels so good against you. And he’s handsome, scars and all. The intense warmth from earlier slipping into something more comforting, enveloping you as you rock against his hand ever so slightly.

So you don’t stop him. He would never hurt you, right? And it's been a while since you’ve gotten laid. Touya’s made sure of that. So you let him continue his exploration, melting against him as he gently rubs at your clit.

Touya watches your face, memorizing the expressions you make as he slips a finger into your hot cunt. To be clear, he’s seen your face when you’ve creamed around your little fingers on your own, unaware that he was stroking his cock outside your window. But you look so much better, happier even, when it’s his fingers you’re grinding into.

He nips at your neck, before pulling his fingers out of your shorts. He pushes you off of his lap, rolling his eyes at the way you pout.

“Calm down, baby girl. Wanna taste you.”

“Wait!” you warn. Touya freezes, eyes flicking up to yours, taking you in curiously. “Let’s go to the bedroom,” you stutter out, nervous at the look in his eyes. You can’t help but to feel embarrassed, laying on the floor of your apartment sputtering with your childhood best friend turned villain nestled against the apex of your thighs. Anything that can restore an ember of normalcy to the situation would make you feel better at this point.

Touya rests his head against your thigh, warmth returned to his eyes. He smiles at you a little too widely, too sharply. He resembles a predator, something stalking alone at night. Something you shouldn’t have let inside. He’s going to eat you alive. And maybe you’re okay with it.

“Alright, little girl. Lead the way.”

An awkward, hot tension surrounds you as you scrabble off the floor, grabbing his hand as you pull him towards the bedroom. Your thumb brushes over the staples, heart twisting at the feeling.

But the melancholic sting is forgotten once he’s leaving sharp little bites on your thighs, your clothes and his jacket tossed to a forgotten corner of your bedroom. His breath is hot against your exposed skin, goosebumps following his path to your hot cunt.

You’re nervous, still unsure of your current predicament. But Touya pinches your thigh, bringing your attention back to him as he watches as your thighs tense around him. His eyes meet yours, confident and sure of his place between your legs, and all of your uncertainty vanishes, consumed by the want and desire that fills you.

His eyes meet yours, clear and sharp, and he brings his hands to your pussy, thumbs pulling your folds open. His gaze drops, focused on your cunt, watching the way you clench around nothing. You squirm, embarrassed at the intensity of his stare.

“So wet already,” he mumbles, before his tongue swipes along your slit. You let out a small gasp, slamming your hand to your mouth in a lame attempt to gag yourself. Touya narrows his eyes, as he laps away, tongue flicking up to tease your clit, circling it but never touching the sensitive bud. You whine into your hand, trying to keep your hips still as he takes his time.

“Drop that hand.” The rumble of his voice travels through you, making you shiver. “Drop it, and I’ll touch this cute little clit.” Looking at him nervously, your hand falls tentatively, hovering above his hair, unsure if it’s okay to ground yourself there. Touya rolls his eyes, before pushing your hand down.

His tongue swipes at your clit making your hips jolt. He lets out a snort before repeating the action. Your grip in his hair is light, not wanting to hurt him; but your self-control goes out the door the second his lips make a seal around your clit.

He sucks at the throbbing bud, eyes lighting up at the way you buck against him, moaning loudly. Your fingers tangle into his hair, keeping him snug against your cunt. He slips a finger into your sopping hole, practically melting at how warm and wet it is. He needs to be inside you. Soon.

“Touya,” you moan, rocking in an attempt to increase the friction. He curls his finger inside of you, mouth still focused on your engorged bud. Your grip in his hair tightens, the pleasure that’s been simmering building rapidly.

“Gonna cum!” you squeal in warning. He doesn’t slow down, eyes trained on your face as your jaw drops, a choked noise clawing out of your throat. You tense around him, muscles quivering at the intensity of your orgasm. You whine and buck against him, and he lets you ride at your orgasm.

When his ministrations borderline into pain, you weakly push his head away, trying to catch your breath. He lets you pull away, eyes glimmering cruelly.

“That was fast.”

You whine in response, moving your hands to cover your face. Touya hisses, surging forward to yank your hands above your head. You wince as he squeezes, eyes narrowing on your face.

“Don’t hide what’s mine.” His lips pull back into a lazy grin as his eyes trail over your body, landing on your glistening cunt. “Gonna fuck you so good,” he mutters, mostly to himself. You blink stupidly at him when he lets you go, processing the fact that he’s kicked off his pants and taking his cock out.

Your eyes widen when you see the shiny piercings that gleam on his cock. It excites you, making your cunt clench around nothing. And yet your stomach drops when you finally realize that he’s bigger than you thought he would be. You bite your lip, trying to tame the swarm of nerves that take over the excitement.

“Touya, I think I need-” he cuts you off with a sloppy kiss. Your hips cant when you feel the head of his cock sliding along the lips of your pussy, his piercings tapping at your clit nicely. You’re not sure if you’re ready for him, and it simultaneously excites and terrifies you. But he leans on you, keeping you still with his body weight.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. Open up for me,” he murmurs. And then next thing you know his lips are on yours, but you can’t help but to let out a cry against him when he thrusts his cock into you, bottoming out. He’s red hot inside of you, and tears prickle the corners of your eyes, leaking out as your nails dig into his back.

“So warm,” he murmurs, before pulling his hips back and thrusting into you. You cry out at the harsh stretch, tears falling down your cheeks as his piercings pull at your walls. He seems to like that though, and he brings a hand up to your cheek, thumb stroking the salty liquid. “You’re pretty when you cry.” He punctuates the sentence with a particularly harsh thrust, sending more tears down your face. “Attagirl,” he coos, looking absolutely enamored with your blubbering face.

“Touya, please,” you whine, not exactly sure what you’re asking for. But Touya seems to know, a sharp grin spreading wide on his face.

“Awww, does my baby girl wanna feel good too?” You nod, face twisted as you babble away.

“I’m sorry, baby. I’ll take good care of you.” He kisses you again messily, before slipping a hand in between your bodies to play with your exhausted clit. He massages the swollen bud, sighing as you start to gush around him. “Is that better?” You nod and whine, hands twisting in his hair to hold him against you.

Touya can’t help but chuckle, and he presses another kiss into your neck before sucking on the skin there. His thrusts are gentler now, appreciating the snug warmth that surrounds his cock. If he could stay buried in the heat of your cunt forever, he would.

He’s drawn from his thoughts when you tug at his shirt, wanting it gone. He stills against you, tensing. You look up at him with a pout, eyes begging him to take it off.

“Please,” you whine. “I wanna feel you.” His mouth opens, and you can already hear the annoying quip that lies on the tip of his tongue, so you push forward, hands tangled into his shirt. “I wanna feel all of you.” He pauses, head tilting to the side as you watch the gears turn behind his eyes.

“Please.” Your voice is soft, as you try to avoid squirming around his dick. Something seems to click in his mind because he draws back, pulling his shirt off. Your eyes wander across the expanse of stapled skin, the puckered burns, making your heart squeeze. But there’s nothing you can say, nothing you can change. So you reach out to him, beckoning him into your arms.

He falls forward, barely supporting himself, letting his body cover yours. You wrap your arms and legs around him holding him close as he begins to lightly thrust again.

“You feel so good,” you cry out panting against his face. Touya angles his head to face you, eyes boring into yours as his breaths mix with yours. It’s too hot, too much, but you can’t move away, overwhelmed by the sensations and entranced by his eyes.

Touya’s hips increase in pace, rutting violently against yours, the sharp sting of his skin against yours making you whine. Each thrust into you, steals your breath away, your hands digging into his back.

“Ever since I found you again, I needed to have you, needed you back. I wasn’t going to let myself lose you again,” he growls. You whimper as you gush around him, finding that you want him to stay buried in your pussy forever.

“Stick out your tongue,” he barks out. His eyes flash, and you do as he says, all while letting out little gasps as he thrusts into you. He hovers above you, a cruel grin spread out on his face. You watch as he spits onto your tongue, a shudder going down your spine. He reaches out to grip your open jaw harshly.

“Swallow.” When he lets go you do exactly that, cunt squeezing tightly. “Oh you like that?” he laughs as you nod. He hums before kissing you sloppily.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck. You’re gonna do what I say from now on. I’ll make you feel so fucking good.”

You should be alarmed by the promise of obedience, but you feel too good to care right now.

“Mine, mine, mine.”

It crosses your mind to tell him that you don’t belong to him, but all you can do is nod and hold him closer.

“Wanted to be inside this pussy the moment I saw you. You’re never gonna want another cock than mine.” At this point, all you can do is whine and nod, burying your face in the crook of his neck.

“Nothing’s gonna hurt you again, baby girl. I’ll make sure of it. I’ll take care of you.” Your nails scratch down his back, making him hiss, as your hips rut against him.

“Touya,” you cry out, tears leaking from your eyes so sweetly. “Gonna cum again.” He nods, lips brushing against yours.

“Wanna feel you cream around me, baby girl.” You nod blankly, drunk on the feeling of his cock pounding into you, piercings pulling so nicely at your gummy walls.

Propping himself up with one arm, he slips his hand in between your bodies, fingers playing with your clit again. It’s enough to send you over the edge, and you cry out, writing against him as your pussy gushes around his cock, squeezing him tightly.

He chokes against you, and your pulsating cunt launches him into his own orgasm. Touya’s hips jerk against you as his cum paints the inside of your cunt. He collapses against you as you twitch in a post-orgasmic haze. He nips at your neck, alternating the sharp stings with sweet kisses.

“You did so good, baby. So good to me. I’ll take care of you. I promise,” he murmurs against your skin, making you shiver. You’re still panting, sweeping your hands over his back, before they land in his hair, gently scratching at his scalp. He shuts his eyes, enjoying the sensations and the warmth, letting himself get lost in you, if only for a little bit.

But when he pushes himself off of you, pulling his hips away, you whine. Your legs lock around him, keeping him lodged inside you. He barks out a laugh before flopping down on his side, pulling you against him.

“I’ll stay right here. Don’t worry.”

“Touya…” you murmur, gently. He sends you a questioning gaze, waiting. You lean forward, pressing your lips against his, trying to convey the complexity of what you’re feeling. He responds aggressively, as if you might disappear. But it makes you melt. Maybe he was right about that.

 When you draw back, his thumb strokes at leftover tears on your cheek.

“It’s okay, You’re mine now.” It’s not exactly what you wanted to hear, but it’s all you get from him because he pulls you tight against him, eyes shutting in exhaustion.

You curl up against him, feeling his breathing even out. His cock feels heavy inside of you, and something cold sits in your stomach.

You shouldn’t have done that. He’s not okay. You really shouldn’t have done that. But you would deal with that in the morning.

For now, Touya is yours, and you’ll enjoy the warmth of his skin and the way the stars fall when you shut your eyes.✨

[ghostiewriter]

AJSKDJLES you’re so nice!!! I was 100% using my birthday to manipulate you into giving us more headcanons lol but I wasn’t expecting you to actually get to it today! 🥺🥺🥰 take your time and no pressure but I definitely wouldn’t say no to hearing more about them making wild melodramatic accusations to make each other laugh in public because I can 100% see it. And I can totally see it starting on the surf trip because no one knows them so they’d just like try and embarrass the other? Amazing.

Sorry it’s a day late but I hope you had a great birthday bestie and enjoy the chaos of this wee blurb😂tbh I love this headcanon for them because it’s something they would totally do! But happy late birthday and I hope it was an enjoyable one!!❤️

Word Count: 1.6K

It started of a silly little game.

Keeping true to their word, the second they had graduated from high school and had those diplomas in their hands, JJ and Kiara wasted little time in planning the logistics of their surf trip around the world. So many places to go, waves to surf, sights to see—it was impossible to choose a place to start. However, thanks to Pope and his intense need to create a plan so his two best friends wouldn’t be thrown into the world as they “go with the flow”, he had organised a proper scheme.

JJ didn’t think it was necessary, and Kiara knew they wouldn’t stick to it. But they let Pope continue with it regardless.

Against their better judgement, his route and itinerary around Europe was insanely helpful for the couple as they ventured through the countries, excited to see places they could only dream about. Especially for JJ, it felt absolutely surreal that he was leaving the island, let alone travelling the world with the love of his life at his side. It was something he would never fully believe, but cherish in fear that he would wake up from this perfect dream and return to a shitty life in reality.

But as he turned to look at Kiara, her hair swept back by the breeze and her eyes watching the glittering city below in awe as they stood at the top of the Eiffel Tower, JJ knew that no matter how many times he pinched himself that this was his reality.

“If you’re about to make some cheesy joke about how the view is pretty but you’re prettier, I will throw you off this tower.”

JJ only grinned in response, shaking his head as he finally shifted his attention to the city view. They had just witnessed the sunset and it was one of the most breath-taking views either of them had seen, without a fucking doubt.

“Well now that you’ve stole my thunder and ruined it…” He trailed off with a sigh, but his smile only widened when he heard the soft giggle that escaped her lips.

“Whatever.” She muttered, her features softening as she leaned against the railing and took in the sounds of the streets of Paris.

“I can understand why so many people propose up here, it’s beautiful.” He admitted after a few moments.

Kiara only scoffed.

JJ turned to her, eyebrows raised. “You don’t agree?”

“Because there is nothing more romantic than having a bunch of other tourists watching one of the most intimate moments of your life whilst horns are beeping down below and the wind is blowing hair into your lip gloss.” She deadpanned.

Kiara was a romantic person when she wanted to be, but some gestures were even too much for her.

“Well when you put it like that, it’s no fun.” JJ muttered with a small chuckle, though he could see her point. “Does this mean I should keep the ring in my pocket and scrap the proposal?” He asked with a grin on his face.

Kiara rolled her eyes but she smiled. “Sorry to break your heart, babe, but if you got down on one knee right now, I would have no shame embarrassing you in front of all these people.” She said with a brief glance at the other tourists standing up here with them.

But JJ’s eyes gleamed at the sight of the challenge.

She didn’t have time to question him when he slipped one of the rings off, holding it in his palm before he cleared his throat and got down on one knee.

Her eyes widened as she looked down at him in confusion. “Jay, what are you doing—”

“Barbra Gertie Stonehend,” He started in a loud, boisterous voice to (successfully) catch the attention of the other tourists. “We have spent years together, helping each other through many hardships. I have been there for you since your bed wetting days when you were twelve, I have been there for you since you got your braces stuck in the railing at the zoo, and I have been there for you since your pet piggy was tragically knocked down by a bike. But now I ask that you do me the honour of being there with me at the end of the aisle by the alter?”

He finished his obscene speech, now holding his ring between his fingers and looking up at her with a faux hopeful expression. She pressed her lips together to hold in her snickers as she glanced around, seeing all eyes on them as they awaited her answer. And when her gaze returned to JJ, there was something quite smug shining in his eyes.

JJ had always been the best liar from them all, the way he would so easily be able to spout out nonsense at the drop of a hat. But she was just as competitive and determined as the blond, and willing to challenge him at his own game.

“Oh Bernie…” She sighed, hand placed on her chest as she looked down at him. “How could I ever marry a monster like you! Marge told me everything, I cannot believe you would expect me to marry you after you were the one that killed my pig!”

A few gasps could be heard from the crowd around them.

JJ urged himself not too laugh, though his eyebrows were raised in silent appreciation.

“Boo-Bear, it’s not what it seems! I didn’t mean to kill Vincent!” He urged, reaching out to hold her hands in his own. “I am more than a cold blooded pig murderer, please give me a chance!”

“I love you, my snookums, but I cannot!”

“Please, honey-bunch, don’t listen to Marge!” He cried out as she ripped her hands from his. “She is just jealous of what we have!”

“Then why are you having a child with her?!”

Kiara could’ve sworn she heard someone utter ‘holy shit’ under their breath but urged her face to remain neutral.

“It’s not mine!”

“Then who’s is it?” Kiara demanded, her hand clutching her imaginary pearls.

“My twin brother’s!”

“No!” Kiara gasped, feigning utter shock as she took a few steps back. “It cannot be Bobby’s…because he is the father of my child!”

Another series of gasps echoed amongst the landing.

“You…you were cheating on me with my twin brother?” JJ asked, finally standing up as he looked at her with a look of betrayal.

“I’m sorry, Bernie…” She whispered but JJ dramatically turned away.

“I can’t believe this,” He muttered before heading towards the exit. “I’m taking the dog and going home!”

“BERNIE, NO—”

“Goodbye, Barbra, enjoy your life with Bobby and his stupid exterminating company!”

Whispers murmured around the group and Kiara urged herself to keep a straight face as she waited a few moments before following him down. Once they reached the bottom, it took one glance at each other before they burst out laughing, tears streaming down their faces as they clung onto each other and walked back to their flat.

It was the start of an odd game they played for the rest of their trip. In the most random places they would play out insane scenarios, the aim to be as dramatic as they possibly could until one of them had to physically leave the scene before they burst out laughing. It was just a wee game to spice things up when they were out in public, plus it helped knowing they would never see any of these people again.

The word ‘Eiffel’ just had to be said and the game would begin.

And boy, was it entertaining.

There was the time they were in Austria visiting a vineyard, when suddenly Roberto was just sick and tired of holding back his secret affair he had been hiding behind his wife’s back. Little did he know his wife, Carla, had been sleeping with his secretary too.

Or the time they pretended to be spies on a mission whilst walking through a museum in Australia, pretending to mutter things to one another and even went to the extent of buying walkie talkies so they could suspiciously communicate from opposite sides of the room. That one kind of backfired because they did end up being thrown out by security.

Or the time they were in a small village in Turkey when it was suddenly revealed that Topanga would be leaving her fiancé, Johnny, for a prince that promised her wealth in power. However much to her shock, the prince she had been talking to was actually Johnny catfishing her.

Or there was the time they decided to re-enact the whole plot of Mamma Mia in Greece to see how long it would take people to notice how familiar the whole situation felt. It turned out it took people a tragically long time.

It was a stupid game that they adored and it followed them through the extent of the surf trip and even sometimes when they would returned home. Not to the same extent as they did in the past with fake identifies, but sometimes just odd scenarios to really fuck with their friends’ heads and keep them on their toes.

There was just something so satisfying about turning to each other, matching grins on their faces as they sat at the kegger and listened to some random touron talk about how nothing interesting ever happened on this island whenever she would visit her grandmother.

Ideas racing in their minds and all the possibilities of how they can make this night one to remember were jumping at the possibility to put on a show. With his eyebrows raised, JJ turned to his girl.

“Eiffel?”

“Eiffel.”

“HOW COULD YOU?! THAT GOLDFISH PIZZA MEANT EVERYTHING TO ME AND YOU JUST ATE IT AFTER EVERYTHING WE’VE BEEN THROUGH?”

After all, it started as a silly little but it always ensured chaos.

[delicioussshame]

I remembered this fic only a few days ago. Sorry. Have the second part.

At least he wrote to Luo Binghe before his little stunt.

He hangs onto this small bright spot like a lifeline as he stares at his phone, back in his apartment. Once his disciple has read the message Shen Yuan sent, he’ll understand that his shizun was just pretending to be a bitch. He’ll probably find it in his heart to forgive the humiliation, especially since Shen Yuan will be suffering from it way more than Tianlang-Jun’s fucking son ever will.

If his parents found out he befriended one of China’s richest moguls’ heir, they might ease up on the forced partying, but alas. He won’t tell them. That would ruin his whole schtick.

Never mind that! How the hell is Luo Binghe’s Tianlang-Jun’s son! That was very much not included in the backstory he was given by him! Single mother, poor upbringing, tiny village! Not uber-rich daddy just waiting for him to join him in the big city, woo just as rich women and inherit his endless conglomerate! Tianlang-Jun wasn’t even known to have children! Or a wife! Luo Binghe kept him in the dark! Or he outright lied to him!

Okay, so maybe Shen Yuan did not tell Luo Binghe he also was a scion of the rich and famous of Beijing. They had shared precious little about their personal lives. There had been too many novels to discuss. Luo Binghe must surely have been just as surprised as Shen Yuan himself.

Shen Yuan holds his phone, typing and deleting another message to Luo Binghe. He doesn’t know how to apologise for the frankly abysmal way he’d treated him.

Just as he’s deleting another string of characters, his phone beeps. Shizun remembers our date tomorrow, right?

…So Luo Binghe isn’t angry, right? He’s not, right? He wouldn’t call it a date if he only wanted to break Shen Yuan’s face with his mighty fists, would he?

(Okay, he’s not sure why Luo Binghe is calling it a date anyway, but whatever.)

I do.

Good! I can’t wait to see him!

…Maybe Binghe has an identical twin brother. That would explain everything.

It makes at least as much sense as Luo Binghe being a pure white lotus and a fan of online literature, while also being a rich playboy standing to inherit one of the country’s biggest conglomerates.

…He’ll find out soon enough. See you tomorrow then.

Just to be on the safe side, he’ll stop by a nice bakery before they meet.

_________________

It is possible it’s the fifth time Shen Yuan checks his watch.

It is also possible his nerves got the better of him and made him arrive forty-five minutes early. Sue him.

“Shizun!”

If their relationship is going to continue, he needs to put a stop to this appellation. It’s terrible for both their image.

Shen Yuan turns toward the call, and almost flinches away from the force of his disciple’s radiance. There’s no way this Binghe, cheeks flushed from having rushed over and wide smile on his face, is anything like the lady-killer Shen Yuan crossed the other day.

Identical twins. Shen Yuan is calling it.

“Shizun must forgive me for the other night! If I had known he would be there, I would have warned him!”

For fuck’s sake what the hell is happening. “Binghe doesn’t need to apologise! If anything, I was the one whose conduct was horrid. I should be the one apologising!” He shoves the pretty pastel paper bag in Binghe’s chest “Here, pastries! You like those, right? Take it as a gesture of good will and repentance. And everything we do today is on me.” Not that Luo Binghe needs his money. If anything, he’s probably richer than Shen Yuan’s whole family combined.

Binghe peeks into the bag and thanks him before setting it aside, obviously uninterested for now. “From what I gathered, I suspect we were using similar strategies, since what I’ve heard about you cannot possibly be true. There must be more to this.”

Shen Yuan can imagine what the people he has systematically alienated for years must have told him, and feel dread pooling in his stomach. “What did they say.”

Luo Binghe waves it away. “Nothing important. I don’t believe a word of it. I know Shizun better than they ever will, I’m sure of it.”

Well, okay. Shen Yuan will definitely take it. “How about you, then? Binghe was…” terrifyingly seductive, “another person yesterday.”

“My father’s idea. He said that if I were to integrate his world, it was his duty as a father to make sure I’m not eaten alive. I took acting lessons.”

Acting lessons! Seriously? “And have you considered making that your profession?” Because with that persona, Luo Binghe would become China’s number one heartthrob seconds following his first apparition on a small, or big, screen.

“I’m going to take it as a compliment, especially from you. Your performance was quite notable. It gave me chills.”

Yeah, chills born out of awkwardness. “I’m nothing compared to him. Just to be certain: Binghe pretends to be a smooth socialite to fit in, right?”

Luo Binghe nods.

“How do you stand it? I could never manage to pretend that I appreciate Xiao Gongzhu or Sha Hualing. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that their diet is mainly composed of human flesh, with a preference for young men.”

“Surely Shizun is exaggerating? They were nothing but nice to me.”

“With your looks and your status, of course they were.”

“If that was what they were after, wouldn’t they get along with Shizun just fine? He’s also got both those things.”

Shen Yuan tries not to let his befuddlement appears on his face. “I have status, but not anywhere near as high as yours? That’s all that matters to those girls. If he tried to prepare you, your father must have warned you about people like them.” He’s not even going to abase himself by addressing the looks issue. They both have eyes. Only one of them looks like he could grace the cover of Vogue China, and it sure isn’t Shen Yuan.

“He did warn me of enterprising women in general, before going on a tangent about enterprising women who are too independent to agree to marriage and instead run away to give birth in lost villages without informing their partner, which I have gathered must be about my birth mother. It’s nothing I couldn’t have thought of myself. Anyway, Shizun shouldn’t worry. I have no plans to choose either of them as a partner.”

Shen Yuan lets out a relieved sigh. “Good. Binghe deserves better. He should look for someone he cares for to share his life with.” It’s not like he’ll need their money.

“That’s what I’m doing.”

Already? He didn’t even start class yet. “Good for you. I’m wishing you luck.”

“Thank you, but I will make my own luck.” With a lack of shame Shen Yuan can only envy, Luo Binghe grabs his hand and drags him toward the nearby street. “Let’s go! There is so much to see here! We can’t afford to waste time!”

Shen Yuan smiles, charmed by Luo Binghe’s childish enthusiasm. “Let’s.”

________________________

Shen Yuan returns to his apartment with a peace of mind only one who has buried his terrible mistake down deep in the ground can attain. He explained to Luo Binghe why he acts as he acts, and Luo Binghe accepted it. Luo Binghe explained to him the same, and it made sense to Shen Yuan. They had spent the whole day wandering around the city, eating delicious food and visiting anything that attracted Luo Binghe’s varied interests.

Had Shen Yuan expected to spend an hour comparing cooking utensils? Why, no, he hadn’t. Was it boring? Miraculously, no. Was it worth it, considering he ended up getting invited over to dinner? If the pastries Luo Binghe had made him before were an indication of his general abilities in the kitchen, Shen Yuan would have easily spent three more hours in that shop, listening to Binghe rave about the selection he could have never gotten in his tiny village that was apparently so remote that even ordering online wasn’t always possible, for such an invite.

Reality, sadly, is eager to unbury the mistake he had just set aside.

It does so via an email bearing his mother’s address, reminding him that his presence to Qin Wanyue’s birthday party was very much expected.

Shen Yuan is going to have to prepare his most cutting insults and, fuck, have to double down on ruining Luo Binghe’s reputation, isn’t he? He can’t admit his error. It would leave him open to attacks. He can only act even worse, treating Luo Binghe as if the revelation of his true parentage did not improve his status in Shen Yuan’s eyes.

Fuuuuck. How is he going to manage being meaner than he previously was to such a gentle soul? If Binghe looked hurt for even a second, Shen Yuan’s years of masquerade would burn down in an instant as he exploded in apologies.

He needs a plan.

“Shizun?”

“Binghe! Sorry to bother you so soon after I left, but do you have a minute? It’s important.”

“Shizun could never be a bother. What is he calling about?”

“Are you invited to Qin Wanyue’s party?”

“Yes. So is Shizun? It’s good that we’ll see each other again so soon!”

“No it’s not! I can’t be nice to you! I’m sorry, but you’ll thank me later. I just wanted Binghe to know that I don’t mean anything I tell him. He can’t take it to heart, okay? That’s just something that needs to be done.

“About that, I had an idea. It’ll be fun!”

Shen Yuan blinks. How could anything related to polite society be fun? He’s convinced that if fun and formal parties ever happened in the same space, a singularity would form and swallow the place whole.

And nothing of value would be lost. “What is Binghe’s idea?”

“We’re both acting, aren’t we? How about we flesh out our characters…”

________________________

Face impassive but heart beating so fast it’s about to jump out of his chest, Shen Yuan steps into the perfectly arranged garden party.

Whispers instantly rise. Smothered but mocking laughter can be heard. Eyes rove over him, anticipating the explosion they feel coming.

Luckily for them, they’re about to get their money’s worth.  

Shen Yuan, as is his habitude, settles down somewhere unoccupied and pulls out his phone, trying to forget Binghe’s impending arrival within the pages of a terrible novel he usually loves to rage at. Very good source of inspiration for his current demeanor.

“Oh, it’s you. You dared to show your face here. I can’t believe your gall.”

Shen Yuan doesn’t look up. Xiao Gongzhu doesn’t deserve his attention.

Until she tries to slap him. “So arrogant! I’ll teach you your place!”

Her hand is caught by Luo Binghe, his long fingers curling around her wrist in a way that looks more caress than impediment. “A beautiful lady like you shouldn’t waste your time on the likes of him.”

Shen Yuan lifts his eyes from his phone and gives Luo Binghe his most disdainful glare. “I’d ask you to keep your pet on its leash, but if anyone here is a beast, it must be you, bastard.”

The silence around them is complete.

Tianlang-Jun had never been married. He wasn’t even known to maintain a mistress or two.

The family resemblance wasn’t striking, but present enough that Luo Binghe being an adopted child was unlikely.

Ergo, Luo Binghe is an illegitimate child, probably only brought into the family when the existence of legitimate heirs became unlikely. What a scandal, really.

No one had dared bring this up yet, but if anything would, it would be that asshole Shen Yuan, wouldn’t it?

Luo Binghe’s eyes focus on him, righteous anger on his face. “At least someone wants me. From what I understand, it’s never been your case, was it?”

Shen Yuan shoves his phone in his pocket with a swift gesture conveying fury. “Who would want someone here to want there? Each one more worthless than the other. You’ve really found your place, haven’t you?”

“If this world is so unpleasant to you, how about you leave and never come back? I assure you no one would miss you.” Luo Binghe turns toward the captivated audience. “Would you?”

Again, muffled laughter and cruel eyes, but few open responses. Too dangerous, really. Even if it didn’t compare to Tianlang-Jun’s empire, the Shen family was far from powerless.

Luo Binghe continues as if nothing had happened. “No one to defend you, I see. You didn’t give me a chance to demonstrate it, but I’m usually a kind man. If you had been able to control your nature for a few minutes, we might have become close, you and I. You’ve got so much more experience navigating these troubled seas. I would have welcomed the lessons.” Luo Binghe shakes his head in exaggerated sorrow. “Alas, it wasn’t to be. You have chosen otherwise, so by all means, let’s travel the road you’ve picked, shall we? For all that you’ve called me beast, you’re the raging dog chained to a post, unable to join in no matter how much he rages.” Luo Binghe waves at the air invitingly.” Go on, rage uselessly. It certainly is of no concern to me.”

“Can a head as empty as yours even be concerned with anything? Nothing you’ve said have proved otherwise. As for that taunt you tried to wield against me, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you. I have no interest in responding to you in any way. In fact,” Shen Yuan pulls his phone out of his pocket and goes back to his book, “you’re already wasted too much of my time. Go have fun with your equals. I’m sure they’ll soothe your fragile ego, in-between throwing daggers at your back.”

Shen Yuan stubbornly refuses to react to Luo Binghe’s sightly disbelieving laughter, or to the insults thrown to his face by others. He just lets Luo Binghe shake his head again, as if appalled, and guide his cronies away from Shen Yuan, leaving him in blessed peace.

Just as planned.

________________________

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was how one of Beijing’s elite most infamous rivalry was born.

As far as said elite knew.

[linkspooky]

Kunikida + Oda: Death of a Good Man

While Kunikida and Oda have never met in canon they are characters with a lot in common. They both essentially play the same role, as the moral center of their respective groups (particularly acting as a conscience for Dazai). They both share the same strengths and weaknesses. However, one lives and one dies. MORE UNDER THE CUT. 

1. Relationship with Dazai

Dazai is a character who has trouble seeing himself as a person. That is, he doesn’t see himself as the same as everyone else. (His ability is titled No Longer Human, surprise, surprise). Oda says as much to Dazai, that traditional values like good or evil don’t really mean that much to him. 

“Whether you’re on the side that takes lives, or the side that saves them nothing beyond your own expectations will happen. Nothing in this world can fill the hole that is your loneliness. You will wander for eternity.” 

...

“Be on the side that saves people. If both sides are the same, then choose to be a good person.” - Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era

It’s not that Dazai is a sociopath, or even unfeeling, it’s just that he is so distanced from his own humanity, and from other people. He genuinely believes he can’t feel the same way as they do. Dazai even described the way he saw himself to Fyodor. 

Dazai tells Fyodor that he feels like he’s sperate from everyone else. It’s like he’s the player, and everybody else is pieces on the game board. But, even though he might come up with strategies and move the pieces, he’s not really the one changing things, or affecting other people’s lives because he’s not right there in the middle of things he’s far away. 

Dazai even flashes back to Oda and Gide’s final showdown when trying to explain this feeling to Fyodor. Oda his closest and only friend at the time, who he could not reach out to and save. Dazai believes he can’t touch other people, he can’t reach out and save them, because he sees himself as lacking in feelings or a heart. Which is why, Dazai relies on the people around him. Dazai attached himself to Oda when he was in the Mafia, and then again to Kunikida when he was detective agency to essentially act as his heart, his external conscience for him. That’s the relationship he shares with both of them. It’s why the first two light novels are essentially about Dazai, but narrated from the point of view of his partner at the time. Light novel one is about his partnership with Kunikida, and Light Novel 2 is about his friendship with Oda back in the dark age. The connection between them is that both Oda, and Kunikida are good, just men who have tried to understand Dazai in one way or another. 

The events of both light novels even mirror each other to an extent. Entrance exam is about Dazai joining the agency, Dark Era is about Dazai leaving the mafia. Entrance exam is about Kunikida failing to understand Dazai, but learning to trust him anyway. Dark Era is about Oda being the only one who fully understands Dazai, but then not listening to him at the end of the story. They both end with a symbolic death, Oda commits double suicide with Gide, whereas Kunikida pretends to shoot Dazai in order to follow his plan. 

Dazai’s a master strategist, but he’s not a leader of men, nor does he have any particular ideals he stands for. Dazai was given a position of leadership within the port mafia, and not only did he spend the entire time tormenting his closest subordinate but he didn’t care about the lives of his subordinates the way Chuuya does. 

Dazai sees Kunikida as someone having the ideals he does not have, therefore doing what he cannot, and being what he cannot be to others. This is a role Oda used to serve as his one and only friend. However, while they occupy the same spot as Dazai’s most trusted person their relationships with him are very different.

Kunikida is very combative with Dazai and always fighting against him. He personally expects Dazai to be better in all aspects. He scolds him for being lazy and neglecting his work. When Dazai messes with other people or manipulates them, it’s Kunikida who is the first to get frustrated with him. Kunikida also, tends to lack a fundamental understanding of Dazai. It’s a running joke that he’s always a step behind him (he’s the last person to find out Dazai was a mafia member when everyone else already knew). The literal first thing established about their relationship in the first chapter, is that they are constantly fighting with each other. They barely make it through a dinner with Atsushi. 

However, Kunikida also listens to Dazai when it’s important. It’s the other way around with Oda, Oda is someone who does fundamentally understand who Dazai really is deep down. However, at the same time Oda doesn’t really try to exert any influence over Dazai until the very end of his life. Their relationship was defined by being distant to one another, and not asking questions.

The reason why Ango and I were able to be by his side was that we understood the solitude that surrounded him, and we never stepped inside it no matter how close we stood. 

But in that moment, I kind of regretted not stepping in and invading that solitude.

Dazai Osamu and the Dark Era. 

 Him, Ango and Dazai could only keep meeting as the Buraiha at the Lupin bar if they pretended to not know anything about what each other did outside of the bar. They’re different in one main aspect, Kunikida fights Dazai, and Oda doesn’t start fighting until it’s almost far too late. 

2. Living and Dying for One’s Ideals

One more direct parallel between the two is that Kunikida and Oda are both characters who strive to live up to the ideal they find in a book. Literally. Kunikida obsessively writes out his ideals in his notebook where he has his whole future planned out.

What are ideals? There are innumerable answers to that question. One could say it’s merely a term, or an idea, or perhaps even the soruce of all meaning. But if you ask me, the answer is obvious. It’s the word written on the cover of my notebook.  My notebook has all the answers. It is my creed, my master, and a prophet that guides me. At times, it can either be a weapon ro a solution. Ideals. Everything I am is written in this notebook which I always carry with me. My entire future lies within it - Osamu Dazai’s Entrance Exam

Oda picked up a book and loved it so much he wanted to write the ending for himself.

After worrying about it for so long, I came to one conclusion.  “Then you write what happens next.” I decided to write about it myself. I would become a novelist, and write a story about why the man stopped killing. But to become a novelist, I needed to sincerely know what it meant to live. So, I stopped killing. -   Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era. 

Kunikida and Oda are both characters who find their will to live for the future within the pages of a book. Which makes sense as both characters struggle with lofty ideals and a harsh reality. Oda and Kunikida are characters written about the struggle to be a good man, in a world that is not good. To hold ideals, in a world that is not ideal. This once again ties back to what Dazai said to Fyodor, God isn’t perfect harmony, he’s illogical and absurd.

The world isn’t ideal and orderly. It’s extremely, extremely messy. Kunikida and Oda are both characters who strive to be better, and want the world to be better and because of that they fall into conflict. However, Oda lost his fight, and Kunikida is still fighting. Part of why Dazai got so attached to Kunikida is also because he saw Oda’s ideals within Kunikida, and knew that carrying those ideals could crush him so easily. 

“Justice is a weapon. It can be used to harm, but it cannot protect and save others.”  -Osamu Dazai’s Entrance Exams

The meanings of Dazai’s words are clear when you look at them in the context of what he learned after losing Oda. Oda decided to throw his life away to avenge the children after Gide. He achieved justice then. However, nobody was saved. The children were already dead. Oda himself wasn’t saved. Dazai lost his only friend. 

“Something?” I looked at Dazai. “There isn’t anything, Dazai. It’s all over. Everything. Whatever else happens now is meaningless - just like I’m about to do. AM I wrong?”  “Odasaku...” Dazai said softly. “Forgive me for the absurd wording but - don’t go. Find something to rely on. Expect good things to happen from here on out. There’s gotta be soemthing...”

[...]

Oda’s march against Gide isn’t just tragic, it’s a deliberate choice. It was a suiide. He’s given several oppurtunities to just walk away, or wait for something else to give him a reason to live and he doesn’t. His final actions hurt more than they helped. Yes, he did save Dazai in a way by throwing his life away, but Dazai also lost the person who could understand him. Oda could have lived. He could have done more if he had lived. Dazai even says so in dead apple, saving people is the more beautiful path, but you have to be alive to see that beauty. 

This is also why Kunikida and Oda have such a connection to Dazai. Underneath their struggles to be a good man they are both constantly dealing with suicidal feelings. 

Kunikida is far more fragile than he lets on. Part of the reason he attaches himself to ideals rather than people, is because caring about people hurts, and he is so afraid of failing the people in his life (the same way Oda eventually failed to protect the children) that he can’t admit the depth to which he cares about them.

Kunikida struggles to save everyone in front of him, but that’s also because Kunikida is internally someone who is very fragile. He can’t handle the loss, especially losing those he is close to. When Atsushi is hospitalized after his first fight with Akutagawa, he pretends to be unconcerned. When Atsushi wants to save Kyoka, Kunikida tries to persuade him to not save her. Oda and Kunikida are both avoidant characters, Oda avoided ever stepping inside of Dazai’s loneliness, and Kunikida avoids getting close to others because they fear the people they cannot save. Kunikida cares so much and so deeply, that he’s completely shattered when he fails someone. 

Every strategy by the detective agency’s enemies relies on crushing Kunikida because he’s the easiest target. When he fails like this he wants to give up. Kunikida and Oda have this dark underside to their actions where they’re fighting continually to be better, but when they fail, they long to throw their lives away and give up the struggle. 

Part of the reason they’re attracted to Dazai is deep down Kunikida and Oda both have the same suicidal feelings. Kunikida knows that his ideals will never live up to the reality. 

However, secretly he longs to fail so he won’t have to struggle against it anymore. 

“I let go of Dazai. I understand what he’s aying. Perhaps righteousness isn’t something you seek in others, but something you search for inside of yourself. Even then... Miss Sasaki is dead, and so is Rokuzo.  All I’ve found in my search for righteousness within myself is a sense of hopelessness.”

Osamu Dazai’s Entrance Exam

The question is can you continue to live? Even if you fail over and over again to do better. Even if the things you try to protect all die. Kunikida’s arc so far mirrors Oda’s. The things he told himself he would protect, he failed to. The promises he made, he breaks. He said he was never going to watch a child die in front of him, and then it happens. 

He said he was never going to fail to protect the agency again, but then the agency became the victims of the hunting dogs, and Kunikida had to go completely on the run. He said he was going to throw himself away in a big bang against the hunting dogs to show his ideals would never fail, and instead.

He even loses his ideals and his ability to write in the notebook. So, what is the difference between Kunikida and Oda that allows Kunikida to keep struggling where Oda did not. I think it’s not really a difference between them, so much as it’s a difference between Dazai. Dazai’s grown since then and realized his mistakes with Oda, and because of that doesn’t stay at a comfortable distance from Kunikida.

Dazai has grown enough between then and now he’s able to reach people who feel similiarly to him. He understood the suicidal feelings of both Kunikida, and Oda, but he didn’t reach out to Oda until it was too late. However, Dazai has grown to the point where he not only understands Kunikida’s struggle and sympathizes with him, but he’s also able to say the words he couldn’t say to Oda until it was too late. 

There’s no such thing as a point of no return. There is no point where everything is already over. Even if you fail to protect someone, even if you fail to protect everyone. 

"Anything I would never want to lose will be lost. It is given that everything that is worth wanting will be lost the moment I obtain it. There's nothing worth pursuing at the cost of prolonging life of suffering."

Dazai is still the same person that said this. Deep down that’s what Kunikida and Oda both fear, that after Oda failed the orphans, that after Kunikida could not save an innocent child in front of them, that no matter how hard they fought all of their attempts to protect someone would fail that way. At which point their fighting seemed to become meaningless.

Dazai knowing those feelings has moved past that lament. He still believes that the struggle may be meaningless, but he reassures them that they can keep fighting anyway. 

If there’s no great glorious ideal to live for, if nothing we do matters, than all that matters is what we do. The world isn’t good, the world will never be as good as we want it to be, yet Kunikida can still strive to be good in the face of that.

[dracothedeatheatingcupcake-ao3]

TPWP SPOILERS!!

Hi guys!! This is a post I’m adding to the story that explains a part that occurs in the last chapter, so please don’t read until after reading the chapter, since it’s very spoilery!!! Thanks!!!

(And, yes, I am posting tonight! It’s just late since I had homework and a meal with family, ha. But I wanted to post today no matter what, so here we are, ha.)

(Also! I use part of something else I wrote on Tumblr, so if you’re reading and think it looks familiar, it’s because I reused it from something else. Most of this is new, though, ha.)

~~~~~~~

 So… Mondo’s behavior in this chapter. I know a lot of people won’t like it and that it’s gonna be controversial, but I still wanted to have it like that, for a couple reasons. One reason is because, in canon… Mondo isn’t the best person, y’all. He has good qualities, yes, but he also has bad ones. His anger causing him to kill Chi, anyone??? And I just… I didn’t want to ignore that, you know? I wanted to address it and acknowledge it, since a lot of people kind of just… ignore it or push it aside. But it’s a big part of him! So… yeah. 

 Another reason is that I honestly think it’s how Mondo would react, based on how I’ve been writing him. Like… Mondo has been doing his best to accept everything that’s been going on between him and Taka, but so much has happened in such a short amount of time that he’s not been given the time to really come to terms with everything. He keeps pushing it down, keeps ignoring it, and that… that’s bad. Ya know? 

 The entire thing with the ‘not-a-date date’ was Mondo trying to test the waters. He was trying to see if a relationship between him and Taka could work out. If such a thing were possible. He didn’t ask Taka out, since he knows he has problems with that, and also… it would have made it so much harder for him, having it be voiced like that. It would make it real, a real thing they’re doing, and the pressure would have destroyed Mondo. Completely and fully. 

 In fact, that’s why Mondo ran at the end of the last chapter. By having Taka say “I’m in love with you,” suddenly everything became real in a way Mondo couldn’t handle. He was doing his best to go through the date without freaking out, without panicking. But then Taka kissed him, said he loved him, and for the first time Mondo allowed himself to acknowledge that oh god, Taka actually means this, he’s in love with him, it’s not just puppy love, and that just… it was too much. He couldn’t handle it and everything he was trying so hard to keep down came back up again. His self-hatred. His lack of self-worth. He didn’t deserve Taka’s love, he felt. He didn’t deserve to have Taka view him positively. He didn’t deserve to have Taka, period. 

 He spent their entire friendship dreading the day Taka would leave him, since he was convinced Taka would, and for the first time… Mondo had to deal with the thought that maybe Taka wouldn’t leave. That maybe Taka was content with staying for the rest of his life, if possible. And that scared Mondo so much, because he knows what he’s like. And he knows that he’d find a way to ruin it. That even if Taka doesn’t want to leave now, Mondo would ruin it and hurt Taka, and Mondo… Mondo couldn’t do that. Couldn’t hurt Taka, not on purpose. Not on accident. He couldn’t bear the thought of hurting Taka, but he knew that he would if he stays with Taka.  

 When he ran, that wasn’t out of malice or a desire to hurt Taka. Instead, that was Mondo’s way of protecting Taka from the panic Mondo could feel building inside of him. Panic that he knows from experience turns all too easily to rage. He didn’t want to hurt Taka. He never wanted to hurt Taka, but he could feel it building up and he knew he couldn’t stop it no matter how hard he tried. So, he fled, knowing that running was the only thing he could possibly do to make things even somewhat better. 

 Taka running after him was probably one of the worst things Taka could have done for Mondo in that moment. And it’s not Taka’s fault! Not at all! In fact, it’s very understandable why he ran after him, and in the grand scheme of things it’s what was needed for them to work through their problems. But for Mondo and his well-being… he honestly needed to be left alone to comprehend everything that had happened in a timely manner. 

 By running after him and forcing him into the conversation, Taka was backing Mondo into a corner, something Mondo cannot handle. The feeling of being trapped made Mondo lash out, even though he didn’t want to. He was scared, and when he’s scared he tries to regain his footing by being bigger and badder than the thing causing his fear. Which, sadly in this case, was Taka. 

 This is something that has come up many times in this story. When scared, anxious, or nervous, Mondo will say anything possible to regain his footing. He will say things he doesn’t mean, he will scream and snarl and act every inch the monster he thinks himself to be. And this isn’t good! This is bad, very bad, but Mondo doesn’t know what else to do. He was never taught how to act any different. Daiya tried, but honestly, Daiya wasn’t perfect and he had his own things he was struggling with. Not to mention he was only eight years older than Mondo and was young himself. He didn’t know how to help Mondo with his anger, so he did what he could to teach Mondo how to direct his anger at people who ‘deserve’ it and keep it from those who don’t. Having all those rules of what a ‘real man’ can and cannot do. But that doesn’t help when the anger is so bright Mondo can’t contain it at all. He never learned how to contain it. 

 All of this came to a head in the bathroom. Everything Mondo had been keeping down for months had come out in the worst possible way and Mondo was finding himself saying things he didn’t mean in order to try and protect himself. And it was abusive and cruel, and Mondo later does acknowledge this. He acknowledges that he was abusive and he doesn’t let Taka just excuse it away like Taka always does when people hurt him. But neither does Mondo let it ruin what he and Taka have. He acknowledges it, vows to do better, but he doesn’t let it bog him down with insecurity. 

 At the end of TPWP, there is a lot that is not resolved, and the main reason for that is because things in real life often don’t get resolved all at once. It takes time and effort and dedication. Mondo isn’t going to magically get better just because he wants to. Neither will Taka. And the problems the two of them have aren’t just going to magically go away just because they love one another. They will have to work on it, and that’s going to take a lot of time and effort to have happen. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write sequels to TPWP, and I was able to write a little, but I’ve just been struggling with writing lately, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to write all I wanted to, sadly. Just know that, no matter what, they do manage to work things out eventually. This is a non-despair AU, so they have the rest of their lives to work on things. As long as they have open communication… they can make it, I believe. 

 Overall, the main reason I chose to have Mondo say and do those things is because I wanted to show that just because Mondo has anger issues and lashes out, does not make him irredeemable. He messes up and he hurts people badly. Very badly (again, what he did to Chi in canon, anyone???). But that doesn’t make him inherently evil or unworthy of having a second chance. He acknowledges his mistakes, knows intimately his flaws, and he actively works towards getting better and not being the person he was. 

 Now, in real life, this sort of thing is very tricky and you should always be careful when around someone who acts like Mondo. Just because they don’t want to be abusive doesn’t mean they won’t be. ‘Good people’ can hurt people just as much as ‘bad people.’ Often times, it’s the ‘good people’ you have to be most careful around, since it’s often times hard to see it coming with them. 

 But I didn’t want to ignore Mondo’s canon problems. His canon anger and proclivity to saying things that are hurtful. It’s nice in fanfic to ignore things like that and say ‘well, they’d never hurt the person they love, not even by accident, so it doesn’t matter!’ Which is… wrong. Mondo has as much likelihood of hurting Taka as he did of hurting Chi in the game. It’s all about context and situations. And Taka… like I said earlier. Taka kind of forced Mondo into a situation where he felt trapped and as such he lashed out. And, again, it’s not Taka’s fault! And Taka definitely did not deserve what Mondo did. But I don’t think it was uncharacteristic for Mondo to act like that. 

 It doesn’t mean that’s all there is to Mondo, though. Like in the game, he has multiple layers to him. And while it’s definitely a red flag that Mondo will do things like this, I think it says a lot about his character that he acknowledges his issues and consciously makes an effort to change. And he does. By the end of this chapter, he makes a conscious, deliberate decision to stop being the way he is, even despite Taka saying he doesn’t want Mondo to change. He makes a choice to do better. Will he never mess up? No. He will. He will mess up and he will likely hurt Taka again, though I don’t think he’d ever do it to this level, never again. But the point is he will always, always try to do better. 

 A lot of people in modern times like to pretend that people can only be good, or only be bad. But the reality is that people are neither. People are inherently neutral and we make good or bad choices. What matters most in my eyes is what you choose to do. Mondo messes up and he hurts people. In canon, he straight up murdered Chi all because of his anger and his inferiority complex. Mondo is the only person in the first game who’s murder was not premeditated at all. Leon had at least some time to cool down and think about what he was doing and Celeste obviously planned her murders. Mondo killed primarily because he got angry, and that’s not something I wanted to just ignore. 

 Like it or not, Mondo is flawed. He hurts people and oftentimes you can’t fix that sort of thing. He couldn’t in canon. Does that mean he can’t ever get better, though? Does that mean he can’t ever change? I don’t think so. I don’t want to think so. I want to believe that anyone can change if they truly want to. And I personally believe that Taka does, too. Which is why Taka believes so much in Mondo. In this story, at least. Taka isn’t naive, he just has hope for Mondo. And it’s something to be careful about, since it so, so easily can turn out bad for the two of them. 

 But… in my eyes, it doesn’t. Not in the ‘Problems’ universe. Mondo— despite messing up sometimes— ultimately learns to control his anger over time, consciously working on controlling it every day. And Taka helps him. Taka encourages him and guides him and helps him. Just like Mondo helps Taka with his insecurity and anxiety. It’s all about give and take. And you can guarantee that their friends are looking out for them, you know? Hina especially, making sure that things turn out for the better for the pair. 

 The main point of this all is just… Mondo is flawed, but that does not define him. Just like Taka’s anxiety doesn’t define him, either. Mondo’s anger issues aren’t his fault, the reason he lashed out here was because he felt cornered and overwhelmed and kind of scared, which reminds him of his past and his trauma, but that doesn’t mean he is allowed to leave it unchecked and hurt people without care. And he knows that. And he actively works towards making it better. And that… that’s so, so important in my mind. People mess up. People hurt other people, sometimes irreparably. But they still have the ability to try and do better, even if they can’t fix the things they’ve done. Everyone always has the ability to try, if they so choose to take it. 

 Anyway. I hope this explains why I chose to have Mondo do the things he did in this chapter. I knew it was going to be controversial, but I wanted to do it anyway. And I’m not trying excuse his actions away, I’m not. I’m just… I’m trying to explain them and show that doing horrible things doesn’t always permanently ruin you. There’s more I could go into here, but I don’t want to get super controversial, so I’ll leave it here. 

 I don’t know. I hope y’all like the ending regardless, or at least can understand why I did what I did. I do, and I personally am very happy with it. And at the end of the day, that’s what matters most, I suppose. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[writings-of-a-hufflepuff]

‘Big Killer Clone’

Fandom: Star Wars: The Clone Wars + Original Character

Collection/Series: N/A

Pairing: Captain Bear (Clone Trooper OC) x  GN! Reader

Writer: @writings-of-a-hufflepuff​ aka @hufflepuffing-all-day-long​

Rating: T

Warnings: Angst, a senator is a dick to our boy. He’s very unhappy and upset, but there’s a lot of comfort. Swearing, a lot of angst, my friends.

Summary: There is only one person Bear wants to see after a senator makes a comment about him being a danger to the younglings, and that is you. 

Notes: Inspired by this comment by @alamogirl80:  I bet he specifically requests to work in or near the Jedi temple so he can escort the crèche younglings. And it breaks his big ol heart when certain clone hating senators make comments to the crèche master that it’s dangerous to let a “big killer clone” like him around the kids. 

I just picked a random corrupt senator for this.

Mando’a:

Shebs’palon - asshole

Shebs - Ass

Vod - Brother

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Bear likes working in the Jedi temple, he likes the Jedi themselves. They’re respectful, generally kind and do not treat him as if he is some mindless machine or identical clone without a personality or views of his own. But, what he likes most about working in the temple is that he is almost always put on creche and youngling duty. 

It is a well known fact that Bear enjoys working with the little ones, even more so that the little ones enjoy his presence. He has a ‘way’ with them as he’s been told time and time again, something many of his other brothers struggle with. He enjoys being asked to escort the younglings through the temple or to stand watch during their break times between lessons, to make sure they do not get up to mischief or in some cases help them get up to mischief. Some clones complain that it’s glorified babysitting, but he likes babysitting. He’d rather nurture and protect the little ones than fight and kill. It suits him better. 

It is fun for him to stand there and smile as the little ones run and play, as they act like children for the few precious moments they are allowed. It warms his heart when little arms wrap around his legs in a hug or the children choose to use him as a living climbing frame. He feels wanted, needed, useful. The children do not balk or shy away from him despite his large size, they are not scared of the scar that covers his left cheek and they do not mind his deep voice. Instead they run to him and call his name and demand he play with them, they like him, and it is in many ways bittersweet. 

They are lovely, sweet. They cause a smile to light up his face, and yet, they are a reminder of what he isn’t allowed to have. What he isn’t allowed to have with you. He is a clone trooper, romantic relationships are not allowed. He breaks that rule regularly to be with you. Families, children, aren’t allowed either. A babe would be harder to hide, a family almost impossible and so they remind him of the thing he so desperately wants but is told he cannot have. He hopes...he hopes that one day he can have that, but hopes are not realities. 

Still, it is his favourite duty and so he does not expect to leave the jedi temple that day in a foul or unpleasant mood. He expects to be full of life, energy and smiles, after a day of children chattering away at him, drawing new things on his armour and sharing their new tricks with him. He always left the temple in the best mood.

But that shebs’palon of a senator Danry Ledwellow, the Er’Kit, small and blue, had ruined his day. Completely, entirely and only with a passing comment hissed out from behind sharp teeth and a look of distrust and disgust. It didn’t matter that Master Yoda had come to Bear’s defence or that he didn’t care much for the senator at all, the fact remained that his mood had been ruined. 

He was used to comments. He was a clone. There were many people that distrusted them, disliked them, and made it clear what they thought whenever they were given the chance. When he was shiny, it had bothered him more, as a cadet he would get angry, frustrated, irritated. As he grew he learnt to shrug it off, that it didn’t matter so much. Once you’d heard one insult, you’d heard them all...or so he thought. 

He’d been watching the younglings train when Dandry had made a passing comment with disgust riding his voice to Master Yoda, about how ‘dangerous’ and ‘irresponsible’ it was to have a ‘big killer clone’ like him around such small and defenceless younglings. As if Bear would ever hurt them, as if he could ever be considered a danger to them, as if he knew Bear and knew who he was and what he was capable of. 

He had, in the moment, chosen to stare straightforward, to bite his tongue and let the feeling sit inside his chest. His helmet was in place and that helped to hide the anger he was feeling. He was surrounded by little one’s, many under the age of 7 and he refused to give into emotions that would only confirm that senator’s views or scare the little one’s. He left Master Yoda speak in his defence, in truth, barely hearing the words. His mind was cloudy with frustration,fixed on replaying the words ‘dangerous’ and ‘killer’ over in his mind. 

The children had noticed a change after that, tugging on his fingers and demanding he sit as they clambered around him and told him stories. They tried to lighten his mood, something he was grateful for but that failed. He pretended for them, although he suspected many did not believe him, their natural intuneness with the force allowing them to sense his mood better than many. 

Kal and Delta didn’t ask when he stormed into the barracks intent on putting away his armour and leaving as soon as possible to see you, knowing that you’d find a way to brighten his mood like you always did. It was obvious to the two of them that an angry Bear was best left well enough alone, they didn’t see their captain storming around often. They shared a look, both deciding they didn’t want to be on the receiving end of his shitty mood. Kal returned to cleaning his blaster and Delta pretended to fall asleep in his bunk.

The new kid, Jammy, or Shiny as they’d taken to calling him looked on with trepidation. He’d not been with the squad long, a couple of months, and in that time his Captain had always been smiley and cheerful or neutral at worst. He’d never actually seen him angry, it was...a little intimidating given Bear’s already immense stature. He decided it was best to just not stare at his captain. 

Sunny didn’t seem to have the same worries as the rest, “What’s eating you, Cap?” He’d stopped mid way through messing with those vibrant orange curls of his, hand still raised to the top of his head. It was clear to Sunny that his vod wasn’t his usual self, especially considering it was known he’d been working with the younglings that day. He was never in a bad mood after working with the younglings. 

“Don’t want to talk about it.” He’s already by his bunk unlatching each piece of his armour and putting it away in his footlocker. He doesn’t want to hang around and the intensity of the stares from his brothers isn’t helping his mood. He’s not usually quick tempered, that’s Kal’s thing. In fact, he rarely finds himself having any sort of outburst, but he can feel it rising in him today. It’s unwelcome, unfamiliar. He doesn’t like how angry he feels. How his mood is changing, shifting. How one stupid senator could change his whole mood just like that. It was stupid. Who cared what a low level, unimportant senator thought? It shouldn’t even bother him...but it did. 

“You sure?” 

“Yes!” It comes out clipped and harsh, a shout that has Bear’s shoulders dropping with a sigh. He turns his eyes on Sunny, with an apologetic frown, “Sorry...I just, I don’t want to talk about it, Sunny, okay?” The regret mingles with the anger and frustration and it tastes like rot on his tongue. 

“Yeah, yeah, hey. I shouldn’t have pushed. Anything we can do, vod?” He’s concerned for Bear. Sunny has never seen his brother, his captain, so agitated and it’s worrying. But he knows Bear will tell them about it later, when he’s calmed down, when he’s got his head back in the right space. He was the most level headed of all of them, he’d sort it out himself, even if he didn’t ask for help. At least, not from them. The whole squad knew there was only one person he’d want to see right now, you. 

Bear shakes his head, dark brown curls flying with the movement as he lets them loose from the big bun he’d shoved them in that morning to get his helmet on. 

“No...Just need some time.”

In truth Bear just wants to get away from the Barracks and run to your quarters, to hold you in his arms and bury his face in your shoulder, to breathe you in. You are a comfort to him, greater than anything he’s ever known and his soul is calling for you, calling for your gentle touch and soothing words. He knows you’ll have the right thing to say, that you’ll ease the anger that bristles his shoulders. You always manage to brighten his day, to make things seem better even when they’re at their worst. 

It’s you that he runs to after a difficult mission. It’s you that he seeks out when he wakes in the middle of the night from some bad dream or memory. It is you who he goes to when he needs comfort. He loves his brothers, but he is still their captain and there are just some things he can’t do around them. Being entirely vulnerable and open is one. 

“I’ll...I’ll see you late, vod.” 

They don’t ask where he’s going as he storms out of the barracks in only his blacks. They know.

The corridors are filled with his brothers, some nod in recognition, others ignore him, not knowing him personally. None stop to talk to him, perhaps they notice his mood or perhaps they’re too busy, either way Bear is grateful. He’s even more grateful that your quarters are down an empty and quiet corridor, where no one can see him coming and going or stop to question why he’s there. 

It’s late enough in the evening that he knows you’ll be back soon, that your shift will end and the medical droids will take over for the night, unless there’s an emergency. 

You gave him the code to your quarters months ago, he’s memorised it so well that he doesn’t even have to think as he inputs it, muscle memory does the majority of the work for him instead. He knows your quarters as well as he knows his bunk in the barracks, has his own drawer of clothes there, nothing fancy, but you insisted he have something comfortable and cozy to wear when he stays over. 

He uses the refresher first, cleans the dirt off his skin and if he turns the temperature higher and lets the hot water attempt to burn away the comment, then that’s something he won’t mention later. It helps, a little, but not entirely. 

You're tired when you finish your shift, always are. Being a doctor for the GAR was exhausting and today was no different. Still, you have enough wits about you to notice the lights are on and there’s a familiar pair of boots by your door when you enter your quarters. 

“Bear? You here?” You call out to him, kicking off your shoes and shrugging out of your doctor’s coat. You hear a muffled ‘here’ from the direction of your bedroom and wander in that direction. 

You can tell he’s used the refresher before you see him, just by the smell of warm water and soap that permeates the air in the corridor, there’s a warmth to it that says it wasn’t long ago and that’s confirmed by the sight of him still wrapped in a towel on the edge of your bed. 

Bear has his elbows on his knees, hunched over with his face in his palms. His long brown curls are wet and mussed, his skin has a tint to it that says he had the water on too hot and he looks decidedly unlike himself. It worries you the moment you see him and you find yourself kneeling beside him, knees unhappy about the hard floor. It matters little when he’s so clearly upset. 

You’re gentle as you pull at the hands covering his face, they are easily double the size of your own and cover him too well, hide him from you. The moment you can see his eyes they shift to you, deep and sad, it’s clear something has happened and it makes your chest ache. 

You keep a hand in his while your other cups his cheek, stroking softly over the freckles that dot his skin like constellations without names. He leans into your touch, a heavy sigh that falls from his chest and with it some of that tension that he holds in his shoulders too. 

“What happened, big?” 

Your gaze feels like it’s scanning his soul, intent, but not unwelcome, he begins to speak freely for the first time all day. His mouth wraps around the words like they’re poison and each element of the story only deepens the frown that furrows your brow. 

“Senator Ledwellow stopped by the temple today while I was watching the younglings, shebs thinks I'm a ‘danger’ to the younglings, a ‘big killer clone’ he called me, as if I'd ever hurt them! I’d die for those little one’s, I’d...I’d...I’d never...I’d never hurt them!” There are tears streaming from his eyes, big fat ones that call to how deeply the thought of ever hurting those children or being thought of as a danger to them cuts him.  

“I know, big, I know! Hey…” You cup both cheeks with your hands, pulling his face closer to your own as you reach up on your knees to meet him. His skin is warm against yours as his forehead comes to rest against your own, but his tears are cool and wet as they drip from his skin onto your own in rivers. 

You stay there, rocking slightly with him as he cries. It is the sort of cry that wrenches free from the depths of his chest hard and raw and causes your own throat to close up with emotion. 

You have seen Bear sad, you’ve seen him scared, but those were small things. The melancholy of a bad memory or the fear from a nightmare, this is...this is different. It speaks of the fear he has deep within him that he is a danger to those children, that he is the big bad killer clone and not who you know him to be. Safe. Kind. Gentle. Caring. Loving. You have never doubted your safety in his presence and you have never doubted the safety of any child around him either. 

You want to storm from your quarters and find Senator Ledwellow, to slap him across the face or at least give him a good talking too. To even think, to even suggest that Bear was anything but gentle with those children, to suggest he would hurt them, be a danger to them...it lowers your opinion of the senator and swaps your mood from worried to angry. 

Still, Bear needs you more than the senator needs a slap, so you stay and you hold him to you. Letting his tears wash over your skin and his large hands grip at your back and shoulders as if that will ground him and keep him sane. 

It feels like hours by the time the tears and the gasping slows, and a quick glance at the time tells you it has been. You are gentle as you tug him to his feet and help him dress, there is a new exhaustion that fills his bones now. The sort that can only come from crying out all your emotions. He is grateful as you tug his legs through a comfortable pair of trousers and carefully maneuver his head and hair through a shirt. 

“Sit down for me, big.” You sit him at the edge of the bed again and grab a comb from the side, the one that goes easily through his curls and pulls the knots free. He is quiet as you tug at the knots and braid his hair back and out of the way for sleep. 

It’s a little thing, something he would have forgotten to do, but that makes the world of difference when he wakes in the morning. It is the little things you do that make his chest ache for you, his heart hurt in the best sort of way. You know him. You care for him. You treat him with a  tenderness that most don’t because of his size and his place as a clone trooper. Today is a day that he especially needs that tenderness, so he lets you braid his hair without comment and lets you ease him under the covers of your bed before you get into your own night clothes. 

You look radiant. That’s what he thinks when he watches you dress. There’s something about the low light of the lamps across your skin and the fabric of your night clothes, silky and shiny, that makes him wonder if you aren’t secretly part Diathim, glowing, angelic and something more. 

You tread carefully, turning down all the lights before slipping under the covers with him and urging him to rest on his side, back facing you. He doesn’t question nor does he complain as you curl against his back, holding him as if he were smaller than you and capable of being the little spoon. 

It is comforting, the way your legs tangle with his own and your arms wrap fully around him. The weight and warmth of you at his back as you press little kisses into the space on the back of his neck. 

“I know you, big. I love you and I don’t think you’d ever do anything to put those children at risk or hurt them. I hope you know that about yourself too.” You murmur it into his ear, soft and quiet, almost afraid to speak too loud and disrupt the peace. You tighten your grip on him and hope, hope that he doesn’t think he’s a danger to the younglings, hope that he doesn’t doubt himself because he is the gentlest person you have ever met. 

He can’t find words, not really. Can’t express the gratitude and love he has for you in that moment. That you allow him a safe place to cry and feel, so be something other than captain and clone. Instead he reaches for your hand on his stomach and holds it in his own, presses it to his heart with a squeeze before pulling it to his lips and pressing a kiss to your skin. 

His beard tickles the back of your hand, like always, and it instantly makes you smile. He doesn’t need to say it, you know he loves you and you don’t expect to hear it tonight. Not after the tears and the clear pain he’s gone through. 

Still it is a lovely surprise to hear, when he clears his dry throat and quietly whispers, “Love you too, Sunshine” at you. His voice is raspy and deeper than normal, dry from his crying and his words are soft and quiet, barely audible. 

You pull him tighter against you and hold him, rubbing circles into his chest and pressing kisses to his neck for a good hour before he falls asleep. The quiet little snore he does, oddly not irritating or disturbing at all, a noise you’ve grown fond of, rhythmic in nature lets you know he’s officially asleep. 

It’s only then that you let yourself fall asleep as well. Only once you know he is asleep and won’t be awake and alone that you can allow yourself to drift off, content in the knowledge that he’d be okay. You promised yourself that if you saw Senator Ledwellow any time soon you’d have a bone or two or maybe ten to pick with him.

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

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[shadowsfascination]

Shadamy Swordland | Ch 1 | The Hayloft

In reference to this post Sorry if it’s a little long!I might add a second chapter to this. I got carried away and alrady wrote the draft, aaah! ^^

The Chaos energy that we know from the canon is seen here as a source of magical powers. One can master spells and learn the sacred arts to perform them. Special thanks to @shadamyheadcanons for writing all these beautiful headcanons. You may not know, but your writings are a huge inspiration to me and brighten up my day (:  I’m not even sure whether I write well, but here goes, lol! ___________________________________________

There’s a hidden entrance to the hayloft above the stables-building where Shadow used withdraw himself after a day of training his students or intense swordfights. It’s accessed by a ladder, stuffed away in a dark corner of the stables-building. One must know about it’s existence to use it or one will not even find it. To keep it like this, Shadow told no one about it, so he’d be left alone, even if he has a pleasant home to go to. His house was located near the central square on the academy and therefore way too noisy for him. Shadow liked the quiet so he could think. He was sensitive to incentives, which could be a blessing and a curse all at once. In addition to the crowdy location of his home, there’d also be the many, many encounters he’d have with young female students who always ‘happened’ to run into him on his way home that he’d rather go without. Notorious for being an excellent swordsman and a noble too, there’d always be female students trying to catch his eye. When both not intending to engage in nor interested in any romantic affair, he’d also feel extremely awkward not knowing how to let them down easily. He had a reputation of being blunt and did not want to add to it. Especially after he’d been called to the board to explain why there had been gossips around the academy about a romantic involvement with one of his students, Amy Rose.

He made clear to the board there was no such thing going on between them and offendedly told them that their presupposition was to be unheard of. He was her superior, she was his trainee. It was unthinkable that he’d become romantically involved with her. Even more so because he was a noble and she was not. No, Shadow had no interest in romance whatsoever. His work as a trainer and duty as a knight was too important to him and he did not let anything distract him from that. And so he returned to his hayloft, alone. Or so it seemed…

A cloaked Amy Rose snuck out of the trainees’ dorm in the middle of the night, remaining in the shadows of the academy buildings. When unable to avoid stepping into the range of the torchlights on the streets, she used her special skill to briefly turn invisible and disappeared into the shadows again. No one would catch a glimpse of her. She’d been doing it for about two months now and became more skilled in the art of hiding, blending into the background and admitted to herself that she even enjoyed sneaking around. Checking for the last time to see if the coast was clear, she placed her boots on the spurts of the ladder and carefully climbed up. Once she made it to the stables-building, she was safe. No one would come around at this hour and it was far away from the dorm. And that meant she didn’t have to be quiet anymore. A wave of excitement rushed through her as she stepped further, peaking around one of the wooden support-beams. Her trainer and now secret lover was napping in the hay, a twig of wheat between his lips, armor and sword removed. Even without any of it he was still extremely handsome.

“You’re here.” “Hey you!” Amy felt caught. She kept forgetting how well developed his senses were. A heat gushed to her cheeks. “Did no one see you?” “No. Surprisingly, there wasn’t anyone out there tonight.” Amy stepped in on him, out of the small, faint light that managed to beam into the loft. “Lucky you.” “I am. I get to spend time with you.” She seductively winked at him. “We see each other almost every day. I would say we already spend a lot of time together.” “Yes, but almost never can I do this…” Amy bent over and gave him a quick peck on the lips. Shadow then grasped her wrists and pulled her into him to passionately return her gesture and playfully pulled her over into the stack of hay he laid in. Twigs of straw flew up around them and the old, wooden floors creaked at her landing, slightly startling the horses in the stables beneath them. Cloak and rapier were taken off to be placed near his sword and amor. Besides her room at the dorm and the bathing facility, this was the only place where she’d put her sword away. Even when their district wasn’t engaged in a war currently, there were lots of obscure figures around with bad intentions and she should be able to handle them herself at all times. But not here. She was safe around him and could even pretend to be a damsel in destress if she wanted. She properly sat next to him, being handed a handmade clay cup with fresh water, which was all he could provide her up here. It was unevenly round and was a steal from the dorm-kitchen.

“Sadly you cannot. I was called to the board a few days ago.” “What? Why?” “They asked me to explain the apparently present gossips about us being romantically involved. I believe they bought my story, seeing how the apologized for the improper assumption after my offended reaction.” “There’s gossips about us? That’s bad! I cannot imagine who would have caught onto us. We’ve been really careful.” Amy chewed her lip and drew a sorrowfully face, staring at her reflection in the cup.

“Beats me.” “So, what did you tell them?” “I might have raised my voice and angrily scolded them for daring to accuse me of such foul, improper behaviour, you know?” Shadow said with a neutral expression. Amy heaved a sigh. “Plagues, Shadow! You really said that? Oh, who am I kidding? Of course that’s what you said!” “What are you being so dramatic for? It is in fact one of the very few assets that comes with the title of being a noble.” “You’re hopeless. Others will despise you for this kind of behaviour.” “What business do I have with others? Besides, they’re already not very fond of me. I’m an outsider and always will be. Anyway, we have got to be extra cautious from now on. They let me off with a warning, but this is serious.” “Serious, how?” “If they have the slightest proof that something is in fact going on, I’ll be suspended from training students and you’ll…” A long pause followed while Shadow looked away from her.

“You’ll be refrained from participating in battles, not allowing you to advance in your training or education. Worst case scenario might be that you’ll even be transferred to another academy.” “Aaargh! That’s so unfair!”

Amy intensified the grip on the cup enough to cause a crack in the enamel and angrily muttered about the ways she could scold the board for being this unreasonable. If it weren’t the middle of the night her somewhat impulsive, hot-headed nature might’ve gotten the best of her, storming off to the board to give them a piece of her mind. That was if they’d even let them see her. It wasn’t her place, coming from a lower-rank family. She furiously hated the hierarchy in the world and let out a curse. Shadow then grabbed her face and accidentally squeezed her muzzle a little too hard. Interrupting her many wrath-driven ideas to change the board’s vision, she was now forced to look at him. “I’m telling you now: you are NOT to mingle in this! I forbid it.”

“You forbid it?!” Amy broke away from his grip, bewildered and offended by his statement. “Yes, I forbid it. One of the benefits of being both your trainer and your lover. You’ll only make things look more suspicious.” An angry frown appeared on her face. “It’s not okay that they have that much power! I hate it! It shouldn’t matter! It doesn’t matter how big the gap between us is! I don’t understand how you’re not upset about this?!” “Fire and torments, Amy!” Shadow yelled at her. “Just get over it! Both our futures are at stake here! You have great potential to become a fine swordswomen and I’m not just saying that because you’re my trainee.” “So, our career-perspective is all that matters to you?” A sudden cold gushed through his body and Shadow’s face grew pale, leaving his hands to tremble and fists clenched. “How dare you say that to me?!” He whirled around, pushed her down and bent over her. The heart that had eagerly anticipated being with him tonight was now afraid of him for the first time in her life. It cramped inside her chest in fear, but that feeling faded to be replaced with a mixture of compassion and sadness when she caught his gaze. “BLAST, women! You’re the only person I choose to hang out with voluntarily. THE ONLY ONE!” A crack in his voice ended his scream. Startled by his outburst and her own false accusations, mean even in a way, Amy fell quiet. He wasn’t angry. He was afraid! Afraid to lose her. Shadow turned his face away from her, swallowed and bitterly stated: “If that’s what you think of me, you’d better take lea-“ Amy leaned in on Shadow, pulling him into her and silenced his doubts with a passionate, yet tender kiss. The hands that were clenched together as fists just a moment ago, opened up and slid under her back to lift her in his arms, holding her closer to his body. Her heartrate changed into a different pace, still rapid, but now driven by the intimate connection between them. She broke away from their kiss, eyes tearing up. “I don’t! At all!” He nodded at her once, closing the remaining distance between them again before she could entirely finished her sentence. He not only locked lips with her once more, but lifted her muzzle with his index-finger to force her gaze upon his. Amy then clasped her hands onto his back, slightly losing touch with reality with every touch. She ran her fingers through his quills in ways that made him shiver, returning his hasty, impatient ways of loving her. Shadow’s lips found their way to the soft lines that formed her jaw, then her neck and softly, heatedly blew in her ear, sending a hot rush through her veins. Abruptly he sat up. “Shadow, wha-“ He silenced her at once. His ears then twitched. Did he hear something? She held her breath. Suddenly the least of background sounds were highly present and she couldn’t differentiate them anymore. Luckily, as a feature of the ultimate lifeform, he was more than qualified to. When he breathed out at last, she followed his lead. “False alarm. I thought I heard something there for a minute.” Already leaning in to pick up where they left, Shadow was stopped by Amy. “Hey…I’m really sorry about before…” “Just promise me that you’ll stay out of it.” “I’ll bear with it.” “It’s only until you graduate. Now, can we please drop the subject?”

“Sure thing, my lord.”

She stuck out her tongue, knowing he hated to be called that and gave him a playful push, but was suddenly startled by the sound of a crack coming from the ladder. “Someone’s here!” She whispered with eyes wide open. She panicked, grasped in the direction of her belt to find that her sword still laid on the haystack and rushed over to get it. Being followed by Shadow, who also gathered his armor and sword and pulled her close to him. She looked at him in confusion. “Trust me, I have a trick up my sleeve: Chaos Control.” Having arrived at his house by teleportation caused by what Amy guessed was a high level sacred art spell, she heavily breathed out the tension in her body.

“That was amazing! How did you…What kind of spell was that?!”

“Plagues, Amy! Your cloak!”

“No, no, no!” she called out in despair, but regained hope when Shadow pointed out this was an excellent occasion for her to use her special skill.

He warped them back to the stables and hid somewhere, waiting for her to come back with the cloak.

Amy turned invisible and entered the spurts of the ladder as quiet as possible.

She quickly scanned the loft for the stranger. Her vision became more blurry when using her special skill, which was one of the downsides of it.

She was in luck: there was no one around. The other must have left.

There it was!

She swiftly footed her way to the piece of clothing, grabbed it and turned around to leave.

In the blink of an eye Amy regained visibility when a hand cupped her mouth from behind.

Amy let out a muffled cry.

The free hand of the stranger pushed her arms behind her back and fumbled the cloth around them.

“Surprise!”

[1000generations]

Thank you for the tag @little-lightning-lavellan and @rosella-writes!

This is from a story in which Fen'Asha Lavellan, in a desperate attempt to stop Solas from destroying Thedas as we know it, transports him to another world. Our world.

It's been a WIP for... 6 years. 😅 There is like... 200,000+ words of this self-indulgent nonsense. It needs so much reworking it's daunting. lol

This scene is from Solas and Fen'Asha exploring McDonald's...

Fen’Asha put her lips to the straw. She wanted to taste what he was tasting, wanted to partake in his world. She was bold enough to walk the Fade, confront dragons, defeat Corypheus. Plus, she was used to tea.

”Vhenan?” asked Solas, reaching out for Fen’Asha as she began coughing.

She shivered slightly, the coughs still plaguing her throat. The sweetness was shocking, as was the cold. “Shit.”

A woman from the table next to her shot her a glare.

“What is it?” asked Solas.

“It is so strange,” said Fen’Asha. “I have never had tea like this before…”

“Yes,” he said. “Most curious.”

She tinkered with her straw, raising it up and down in the lid of her cup and finding that it made an interestingly musical noise. She shook her head.

“Many things in this world are not as they seem,” said Solas. He dabbed a fry in Fen’Asha’s Sweet and Sour Sauce and pondered it.

“What do you mean?”

“Your tea is not tea,” said Solas. “The People’s Courtis not court.”

She nodded, letting go of her musical straw.

“Yet many things are real,” said Solas. “The news depicts real events, albeit with a unique point of view.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, picking up a fry.

“It appears that there is always something at the root of a viewpoint,” he said. “Some kind of interest. For the most part, this is translucent and I presume most anyone could see through the many smokescreens. And yet, I am not so sure.”

“They seem happy enough,” said Fen’Asha.

“They are being influenced,” said Solas. “To what degree they allow it is the question. It seems clear they are involved in their own manipulation to some degree, as this world does not behave in a way that would be considered sympathetic to its own survival. They ruin large swaths of their habitats, they commit horrendous crimes against one another for trivial reasons…”

“That does not sound unlike Thedas. The Blight…”

“A worthy example,” said Solas. “Many were not willing to see the Blight as a threat. Others preferred the comfort of their ignorance and concocted many alternatives to actual events. Just like here.”

She nodded.

“That is why it is important to remain vigilant,” said Solas. “With so much dishonesty, it can be easy to go astray. And it can be easy to want to go astray, especially if reality is painful.”

“I have never opted for what was comfortable,” said Fen’Asha. “Clearly.”

Solas nodded. “This is certainly true. Our path to here could not have been easy.”

“Nothing about this has been easy,” she said. “It has taken a great deal of time to come to peace with everything that happened. And even now, I’m not even close to being there.”

“You are uncertain about me?”

She nodded.

“There were – there are – reasons for my reluctance. I could not and cannot reveal the entirety of my plans because you would try to stop me," He paused, considering her. "I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She sighed. “I am sitting here in a restaurant with you. You want to destroy Thedas, our world, and I’m sipping some silly drink like nothing’s wrong with that. We had sex, shared a bed. We make small-talk. We go for walks, make plans for a future like we’re some stupid couple. Nothing about this makes sense and no, Sloane, nothing about this has been easy. It won’t ever be easy, Sloane.”

Solas made a face as a small child shrieked nearby. He turned to see the culprit racing away through a set of glass doors with an enraged adult chasing behind in a yellow coat.

“And yet what can I do?” she continued. “I’m here in this strange land, like you keep saying. I’m here with you whether I like it or not.”

“I see,” said Solas.

“You hold out hope that you’re going to get back to Thedas to finish what you started,” she said. “I hold out hope that I’ll be able to stop you from doing that. I can’t pretend that’s not happening.”

“I appreciate you speaking plainly, Vhenan.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “Because I have questions.”

“I am sure you do.”

“Why me?” she said.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” he said.

“You are older than Arlathan?”

He sighed.

“And you are thousands of years old,” she said. “So why me? Why did you love me? My life is a flash for you, an inconsequential blip. You have lived so long. I have lived for mere minutes in contrast. I am…a fly.”

“That is a crude analogy,” he said.

“And you’re Fen’Harel. My god. Why would I think you would love me? Knowing everything…”

“I was never a god,” said Solas. “But that was what you wanted, what you expected. Your heart was always destined to break if it became entangled with mine.”

“So?”

“So I had already broken your heart once as Solas,” he said. “I had no desire to do so again.”

“But that is my burden, my pain. The choice is not yours.”

“My duty would always tear us apart, Fen’Asha,” he said. “It was because of me that you could not hold the gift of immortality. If there is a Maker in this world or the others, surely the Maker is laughing at me.”

“I think the Maker is laughing at both of us,” she said.

“At least as Fen’Harel, I could be near you,” he said.

“But you could have said…”

“We are moving in circles,” Solas said. “I tried to reduce my feelings. I knew what we had would only lead to lathbora viran, but you called for me and I answered. Like I always will.”

“You can’t keep…”

“I was selfish then. I am selfish now,” he said. “As Solas, as Fen’Harel, as Sloane.”

She sighed.

“I had hoped to assuage any temptation,” he said. “But reality crashed through. Our reality. When I learned of the Qunari plot at the Exalted Council, I had to act. And now, my mistakes must be rectified. There is no other way.”

“There always is another way,” she said.

“There should never have been a Veil. My life…much of it…seems to be a series of mistakes.”

“You would take so much to fix your error? You would insist the rest of us pay the price for your compensation?”

“There are other things at stake,” said Solas. “It is not so simple. The lyrium. The Blight. It matters little now I am here.”

“Thank the Maker for small mercies.”

He looked at her and for a moment irritation seemed to flicker across his face. He amended it into a tentative grin, then looked away as his eyebrows lowered.

“I will always try to stop you,” she said.

“I know,” said Solas. “But Thedas must be left behind for the time being.”

She nodded.

“And my desire for you…”

“You will leave that behind, too,” she said.

“No,” he said. He reached across the table for her hands. “No.”

“It’s not a good idea,” she said.

“You have doubts?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Then I wish to rectify that,” he said.

“Do you have doubts about me?”

“Not for a moment.”

“You haven’t made this easy,” she said. “Little of this makes sense.” She looked at a fry.

“I know,” he said. “But love defies explanation.”

“My mother said it was a gift…”

“Yes,” said Solas. “A choice. The reasons I choose to love you are…I simply want to. As you wanted to love me at one time. It is desire.”

“Love is more than desire,” she said deliberately.

“But desire is at the core. You can remove the love from desire, but you cannot remove the desire from love.”

“You are wise, Sloane,” she said after a pause.

“Even wisdom has limits,” said Solas.

Fen’Asha agreed, sipped her iced tea. She was getting used to the awful sweetness, to the way the drink cut into the corners of her mouth and made her tongue feel rough.

“For all the desire I felt for you,” continued Solas, “I subjected you to cruelty because of my selfishness. I never should have persisted in my desires. I should have fled sooner.”

“That’s one thing you do not understand,” she said. “I wouldn’t have traded in any of my moments with you. Even the painful ones. Because they were moments with you.”

“You could’ve been with someone, grown old with someone, had a family…” he said.

“I do not share the same wishes,” said Fen’Asha. “My family was you. Sera. Dagna. The Inquisition.”

“You did not desire children?”

She shook her head.

“But Hightown…?”

“You saw me in Kirkwall?”

Solas nodded. “I saw you through the eyes of the children, saw your kindness at the orphanage. Saw your insurrection in the faces of the nobles as they cursed you for bringing such a place to Hightown in the first place.”

Fen’Asha felt a chill. She had used Varric’s gift to her in Kirkwall, a mansion in the grandiloquent neighbourhood of Hightown, as an orphanage for the disadvantaged. She’d hired staff and enticed the right nobles, but that didn’t mean everyone took to the idea well. She thought back to the children in Thedas, wondered how they were doing.

“Some of the children saw it as a palace, a fairytale unwinding beneath their feet,” continued Solas. “Others saw dark corners and sinister hallways, not yet able to shed the horrors of their pasts. But in all of them, you were beautiful, an angel, bright as the sun.”

“More members of my family.”

Solas smiled warmly. “You would make a wonderful mother.”

“In the minds of many,” she said. “But it is not my choice in this life.”

He looked down.

“I am happy, Solas,” she said. “I do not wish for the same things as others, that’s all. I don’t want to be pitied because I don’t desire a family of my own. I am a Red Jenny. I was the Inquisitor. I was…yours. I served my clan. For a young elf from nowhere, for a nomad…it has been an incredible life.”

“It has.”

“And you were a huge part of that,” said Fen’Asha. Her fries were cold. “You still are.”

“You may be but a shooting star in my universe, a fleeting moment,” said Solas. “But you have made a permanent impression.”

She warmed. She wanted to touch him, feel him near. She wanted to reach across the table, wanted to kiss him with the mothers and fathers and children of this Edmonton watching. She didn’t care where she was as long as she was with him. She knew he would be the end of her. She knew she would be the end of him. She knew it hardly mattered now. She knew it was a horrible idea.

“I will always cherish you, Vhenan,” said Solas. “I will always love you.”

She was in his arms on his side of the table. She was sitting on his lap and he was caressing her back. She was cradling his face under his hood, under his necessary subterfuge against the misunderstandings of this world. She was breathing as he touched her hair, felt through its tresses. She closed her eyes as she kissed him.

He held her tight.

“I love you, Vhenas,” she said. “Always. Anywhere.”

I have no one in particular to tag. But I love to see what people are working on in the fandom if they care to share. 😊

[lancermylove]

The Dark Side (HC)

Fandom: BSTS

Pairing: All x fem!Reader

Warning: N.SFW

Requested by: Anon

Prompt: Umm.. This might gonna sound a little bit weird but I can request hc for bsts boys, nsfw, but… them finding out that their s/o (fem) is into bdsm stuff? That sounds crazy but I’m also so curious.

A/N: It’s not crazy at all. I think I’ve included whether or not they would like bdsm for almost all the general n.sfw hcs. I’m not comfortable writing out a full-blown hc for the BDSM plays, so fingers crossed that’s not what you were hoping for. ><

———————————————

Kokuyou was a bit stunned that you enjoyed BSDM, “That’s unexpected.” 

He doesn’t mind as long as the plays are not too dark or too violent. Though he may be rough around the edges, he still doesn’t want to get too intense with you. 

His favorite plays are sub/dom with him being the dom and light bondage.

In the sub/dom, he likes to pull some of your strings and set a bunch of rules for which he can punish you if you break them. 

For bondage, he likes to tie your arms to the bed and tease you until you beg for him to take you. 

“Oh, someone likes to get very naughty,” he smirked when he learned that you are found of the darker arts of lovemaking. 

Though he’s pretty open to experimenting, Akira isn’t that comfortable with BDSM. He will try pegging once just to see how he likes it; if he does, he will gladly let you peg him, but if he doesn’t, he will never try it again.

He doesn’t mind plays like roleplaying as long as it doesn’t involve something like master/slave or too high of dominance in general, be it him dominating or you dominating him.

His favorite with roleplaying is idol/fan or any outfit that involves you looking cute, short-frilly skirts are his favorite. 

Taiga's cheeks glowed red when you told him that you were into BDSM as he never expected it. 

He isn't that comfortable with it, but he loves roleplaying. Roleplay any game character for him, and Taiga will be all over you, but he doesn't care for normal roleplaying, like doctor/nurse (unless you're an anime or game nurse).

A smirk danced on his lips when he learned that you like BDSM. "Then, what would you like to try first?"

If pain is your pleasure, then he will deliver to your needs. Tell him what you want, and this man will make even your darkest dreams come true. 

Takami's favorites are sensory deprivation and bondage. He likes testing your limits and will actively try to cross your limits, but not to the point where he puts you in the uncomfortable zone. 

He is also a fan of master/servant but will not push you into it. He will never force you, especially if you think of it as demeaning. He may have a dark side to him, but Takami has no intention of hurting you. 

"I see..." That all he says when he learns about your desires. 

Sin isn’t really fond of BDSM and prefers to stay away from it. He’s more of a romantic who will put on music and light candles to create the atmosphere. 

Though if you push him a little, he may try some of the lighter plays, but don't expect him to try anything deemed dark. 

“I am sorry...” Kei averted his eye and mumbled. 

He will never agree to do anything that will cause you pain or will require him to dominate or demean you, so no BDSM. Though, he may be willing to try the lightest BDSM plays - keyword: may. 

Kei cannot understand the world of BDSM and prefers to stay away, but he does ask you why you enjoy it and adds that he respects your choices. 

Sotetsu is pretty open to trying some of the BDSM plays but will refuse to give in to anything too dark, so when he learns you’re into it, he flashes one of his signature devilish smirks. 

He wouldn’t mind experiment with dom/sub (him being the dom), bondage, biting, hair pulling while taking you doggy style, ice play, and a light version of humiliation play. 

If you ask him to hit you with anything or strangle you or play with dangerous toys, then he will straight up refuse. 

“What is BDSM?” He asked, and when you explained, Gui felt uncomfortable. 

He refuses, especially if pain is your pleasure, so no BDSM. If he hurts you, he would never forgive himself. The concept of pain can bring pleasure eludes him.

Gui doesn’t understand roleplaying either, but you’re welcome to try to make him understand. 

“Uh...o-okay,” he whispered in a shaking voice, “I...c-can’t.” 

Ginsei will not agree to BDSM no matter what...even if it makes you happy. Just the thought of it makes him nervous. 

He will always apologize to you for not fulfilling all your desires and also thank you for understanding. 

"Is that so...," he asked with wide eyes, "um...then would you try out things I like?" 

Yoshino is big into age play, namely being called daddy, as it makes him feel powerful. 

He can also resort to dirty talk/name-calling when he gets rough, and his softer expressions are replaced by darker ones.

He doesn’t mind roleplaying and is rather fond of sub/dom. Whether he wants to be a sub or dom depends on his and your mood. 

Hidden behind his sweet face is another face that is only reserved for you when you're in the bedroom alone with him. 

"I don't...sorry." He touched the back of his head and flashed an apologetic smile.

Anything that could cause you pain or injuries or requires him to use or listen to demeaning language is a no.

His heart is too gentle to even consider taking the light plays into account. 

"What is...BDSM?" Sinju asked. 

This boy is too pure to even think about doing anything beyond vanilla. Actually, he even has a hard time thinking about doing anything intimate. 

"Interesting," Menou smiled and glanced at you with unreadable eyes.

Menou is a fan of roleplaying. He’s an actor, and acting is the most important thing in his life (next to you, of course). Roleplaying means getting to act, so he will be willing to roleplay as anyone.

But if you like anything darker, which doesn’t require Menou to put in too much effort, he will be a little less willing. Though, he does have a dark side, so he may turn all your dreams into reality.

"I see, but unfortunately, I am not interested, especially not in the heavier plays," he frowned slightly.

Maica is a picky man and would be very choosy about what he likes, especially with BDSM. He wouldn’t mind trying some of the lighter plays once, but nothing too heavy. 

He wouldn’t go out of his way to try anything BDSM-related though. If you like it, then he will think about trying out the less pain-giving plays. 

"You do?" His eyes widen for a second before he flashes a smile, "As do I." 

Yakou likes BDSM, namely restraints, temperature play, and sensory deprivation. 

His absolute favorite is eating you out with your hands cuffed to the bed and running an ice cube over your body. He's a bit wary of hot temperature play though, so he will choose to avoid that. 

Anything that involves torture, whips, choking, or causing too many injuries is a no for him. 

He stared at you for a while, wordlessly. "Good for you, but I dislike it." 

Mokuren isn't a fan of BDSM and would not be willing to try. If you try to force him, then he will take that as you don’t care about his feelings or opinion. 

“Hm? Is that so?” He raised an eyebrow and tapped his chin.

Hari prefers to stay away from BDSM and will not be willing to give into it even if you ask him to, especially if pain is your pleasure. 

That concept eludes Hari, but he will be interested to learn why you think that way.  

Rather than having s*x with him, you will be stuck trying to explain the way your mind works when it comes to BDSM. 

"B...DSM? Oh." Though he chuckled, there was something hidden behind his reaction.

Kasumi is intrigued with BDSM but would not be too willing to try it himself. If you push him a little, then he would open up to the lighter players that don’t require him to unleash his dark side.

“Sorry, my dear. I simply cannot...,” Qu sighed and touched your cheek, “I hope you can understand.” 

Qu is not a big fan of BDSM, especially if there is a high chance of leaving mark on the skin. Taking care of the skin is important to him, be it his skin or yours. 

He also is uncomfortable with trying out anything that could be considered demeaning, physically or verbally. 

A never-before-seen twisted smile appeared on his lips, "Then, we are the same." 

Zakuro loves BDSM, especially sub/dom play and discipline. If you're uncomfortable with this, he won't push you but will ask you to try it once.

He has a decent collection of BDSM toys and will want to try everything if you agree. Yes, he has a BDSM dungeon.

If you like the darker plays, no matter how painful they may be, Zakuro will consider accepting your requests.

"Huh? What's that?" Mizuki asked loudly, tilting his head.

He isn’t all too familiar with BDSM, but Mizuki is open-minded to trying almost anything at least once. If you like it, he will give it a try. 

Due to his past, he will refuse to do anything that involves hitting you with an item, drawing blood, or injuring you beyond giving bruises. 

His favorite is hair pulling, be it you pulling his hair or him pulling your hair. 

Kongou quickly averted his eyes and bit his lower lip, "Please don't ask me to do anything..." 

Anything BDSM is a big no. Kongou's main fear is that he may hurt you due to his size and strength.

Aside from that, he is too much of a gentle soul to consider taking part in the darker side of lovemaking. 

"Oh? Then let's try something you like!" Ran flashed his shark teeth and got an almost crazy look in his eyes. 

Ran doesn’t mind roleplaying, and his favorite is idol/fan roleplay. He likes being an idol while you act as the lustful fan, but he also enjoys you pretending to be an idol and performing for him.

Biting…he will not bite you unless you want him to draw blood. If you do like him drawing your blood, then he will gladly leave bite marks all over your body.

Anything darker, he will be curious to try out and will agree to it at least once. 

Due to his love for fire, he is interested in trying out hot temperature play. 

"I...see..." Heath mumbled and shook his head, indicating that he is not too willing. 

Like some of the other men, Heath will avoid anything BDSM-related, unless it’s something on the very light side, like temperature play with ice.

Even then, he is going to worry about possibly giving you ice burns. 

"Then what are we waiting for?" Rico whispered, twirling a few strands of your hair on his index finger, "Where would you like to go? My home or yours?" 

Rico enjoys BDSM quite a bit and will try anything to a limit, the super heavy stuffy he will avoid though. He needs to make sure his skin is in perfect condition, so he doesn’t want to get injured either.

His favorite is dom/sub, with him being the dom, and humiliation play.

Whether you want him to humiliate you verbally or not, he will end up using that language while he fcks you into the bed. 

"What is that?" He asked, looking perplexed. 

Just like Sinju, Unei is too pure to even think about BDSM. He doesn’t know what that is and would be permanently scarred if he looked it up. 

———————————————

➣ BSTS Masterlist

[ghost-in-the-stalls]

Neil Josten's Playlist Part 1: Andrew

Masterpost and link to the playlist in its entirety

These songs are going to be the biggest chunk of the playlist. Are we surprised?

Okay here we go:

1. Take Me To Church - Hozier

I was not joking about Neil being a Hozier fan. You cannot tell me this boy doesn’t hear this song on the radio and immediately think of Andrew. Every time it came on he’d make sure the radio stayed on the station so he could listen all the way through. It got overplayed but he’s probably the only person in the world who never got sick of it at the time. He got used to listening to the same songs over and over again with his mom, so he's even comforted by repeating songs now.

5. Stay - Rihanna & Mikky Ekko

So one night, after several nightmares within the span of a few hours, Neil wasn’t too proud to admit that he absolutely wasn’t going to get any decent sleep that night. Andrew took him on a long drive without even having to be asked. The silence was shoving Neil even further into his thoughts, so Andrew turned on the radio. He settled on a station that was playing softer music that Neil probably wouldn’t hate, and he just kept driving. Once this song came on, Neil became enamored with it. It’s another one of those songs that makes him think of Andrew, but it’s more because he listens to the lyrics and realizes Andrew has said half of these things to him. It’s now a song that, even years later when he and Andrew are living in separate states and desperately trying to land contracts with the same team, Neil listens to on bad nights.

6. River - Bishop Briggs

Listen... this is just another really solid Andreil song.......... and I’m absolutely positive this is a song that Neil would like. Let me have this.

For Neil everything with Andrew is simultaneously loud and quiet and intense and gentle and hard and soft. He’s never known someone to make him feel so much yet calm him down from panic to nothing so smoothly. Even their intimacy holds so much complexity and weight to it. This is a song I feel like Andrew introduced him to, because it absolutely makes him think of Neil too (not that he'd say that out loud).

8. Dreams - The Cranberries

Renee likes the Cranberries and she got Andrew into them too. Andrew pretends this song doesn’t make him think about Neil but no one is actually fooled by that when they catch him listening to it. Least of all Neil because he feels the same thing listening to the lyrics. Not much explanation past that. Neil vibes with this song right from the opening lyrics (”Oh, my life is changing every day in every possible way”), to the comparison of a lover to a dream (he still remembers when Andrew called him a pipedream, even if he didn’t understand at the time), to the vocal breaks in the middle and at the end where it just sounds like someone singing their soul right out of their body.

Neil is a private person and not someone to ever scream his love from rooftops. But that doesn’t mean the concept doesn’t hit him deep. He’s been through a lot and he’s come out the other end with a love of his own that’s deeper and more than anything he ever imagined. His lack of expressing passion about most things (Andrew) doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel incredibly passionate about certain things in a way that cuts deep. He found love and it’s incredible

12. Easily - Bruno Major

I've mentioned this previously, but I hc that Andrew and Neil almost broke up in Neil’s last year at Palmetto. Not going to get into it, but this song had a big part in pulling Neil through that whole year, ESPECIALLY the situation with Andrew. Maybe I’ll make a separate, more detailed post about that sometime. But basically I hc that neither of them were in good spots emotionally. And Andrew was very close to giving up on everything - including Neil.

They managed to pull through and stop one another from giving up on it all, even when things got really hard.

15. Sunlight - Hozier

No I’m not done with the Hozier songs. Did I say I was done with the Hozier songs? Not gonna happen.

Anyway so the story of this song is he was talking with Allison and Nicky once about music and their SOs (well he was listening more than talking but he wasn’t ignoring them), and Nicky outright asked him if there was a song that made him think of Andrew. He’d heard this one for the first time recently and it was just the most recent of many songs that make him think of Andrew, so he threw it out there to humor them. They hadn’t heard it but were very doubtful that any song titled “Sunlight” could have anything to do with Andrew at all, so he showed it to them. They didn’t really change their minds and instead Allison went on another tirade about how Neil is gone for Andrew in a way that Andrew couldn’t possibly be for him and how she was worried for him. Nicky stood up for his cousin a bit, but ultimately was still agreeing with Allison to a degree that Neil may be expecting more than what Andrew could give him blah, blah, blah.

Neil wasn’t happy. Instead he found himself latching onto this song even further and becoming even more assured that it was a song for Andrew. Just because the others refused to understand who Andrew really is and the ways he’s learning to grow and heal and the fact that he’s someone worth loving god dammit, doesn’t mean Andrew is the monster they make him out to be.

For a while afterwards, he’ll put this song on if he’s ever given the aux cord. Because he’s petty. If Andrew catches on to what he’s trying to do, he never says anything.

19. Little Talks - Of Monsters and Men

This is definitely a song that makes Neil think of Andrew, though he'd never tell him that. They have both played both parts in this song, and it makes Neil's heart ache to think of all the bad nights that they weren't there for one another - whether it was distance or stubbornness or just general shitty circumstance. They both can get so trapped in their own heads in different (and sometimes similar) ways, and they're relationship has really been built in a lot of ways on the depth of emotional support they've learned to give one another in rough times. That steadiness, that presence that stays by you and keeps you grounded even when you want to crawl out of your own skin and hide somewhere far away. That is what they give one another.

24. Day After Day - Badfinger

This is another one he used to listen to with his mother, but he didn't really latch onto it until his final year at Palmetto when he and Andrew were doing long-distance. He learned in that year just how sentimental he had become in some ways. He finds it in the bone-deep longing he gets on late nights when he just wishes he could lie in bed next to Andrew - because he knew that's when he sleeps best. He'd listen to this song and let himself wallow for a little while, and then eventually put it away and carry on because he didn't have the time to slow down and feel things too hard.

Things are much better now and he doesn't feel as bad when he listens to the song. It's just a pleasant sound he leans into sometimes.

26. Don't Dream It's Over - Crowded House

This is another one that he first heard from his mother, but kept for himself without allowing it to be stained with her memory. It is one of those ones he listened to a great deal during his last year when things with Andrew got hard. He committed himself to not letting him go or breaking off what they had unless Andrew ever directly asked him to. He couldn't find it in himself to ever do that.

This song reminds him of that commitment and helps him stay strong with it, for better or worse. Everyone was convinced from the beginning that either Neil was bad for Andrew (Aaron) or Andrew was bad for Neil (everyone else except Renee and Nicky basically). This reminds him that he knows Andrew better. He knows HIMSELF better. He knows they aren't perfect, but he refuses to let himself fall into their blocked mentality where they choose to be blind to the reality of Andrew's character (or his own for that matter). He knows they are good together. He knows they help one another, they don't hold each other back. And he refuses to give up on them unless Andrew asks him to.

28. How Deep Is Your Love - The Bird and The Bee

This is another final-year-at-Palmetto one. He stumbles across this song while listening to one of Robin's playlists while he was driving her to practice. Listen to the lyrics and hear just how Andreil this song is. It fits so well, and Neil has to pull over and collect himself for a moment when he first hears it. It had been an especially rough week and he'd been struggling trying to balance giving Andrew space and support with communicating his own needs. This gives him the push he needs. He calls him later that night to talk and their time apart starts getting a bit more bearable for it.

29. TALK ME DOWN - Troye Sivan

This was Andrew's song that made him think of Neil. In every way. He found it while they were doing long distance. Neil first heard it on a midnight drive they took while he was visiting Andrew. They didn't say anything, but they didn't need to. Neil eventually asked him why he listens to this one when his taste is usually much louder stuff. He was expecting a stoically-delivered joke denying any potential relation to Neil or a comment about how Nicky got it stuck in his head or something while they were video chatting one weekend. Instead, Andrew just responded "You know why."

Neil stored the song away to listen to later on when they were once again sleeping in separate beds in separate states, knowing Andrew was probably listening to it as well.

38. Talking Bird - Death Cab for Cutie

Neil doesn't know why this song makes him emotional (yes he does). He doesn't know what it is about it that feels like it cuts so deep (it's because Andrew sent it to him). He doesn't get why Andrew showed it to him (it's because Andrew asked him to stay, but would never force him to if he ever did decide to run). He just listens and feels comforted.

44. I'm so Tired - Lauv & Troye Sivan

This is another one Neil found when he and Andrew were doing long distance. It was a bit of a rocky time for them and there were several of those make-or-break moments. You know, the kind any relationship has where you either pull through it together and are stronger for it, or end things where they are and go your separate ways. I imagine - during a particularly rough patch - Neil heard this song from one of his underclassmen roommates. He was thinking about Andrew (when is he not) and part of him wondered if Andrew was better off finding guys in bars to take home and have no connection to. It was a spiteful moment of self-pity that he let himself indulge in before coming to his senses and giving Andrew a call to smooth things over a bit.

He still listens back to the song sometimes. It has a nice, soft, smooth feeling to it. Now when he listens to it, he finds himself focusing more on the singer asking their lover to take them home so they can move forward because they're too tired to fight. He remembers how, when he and Andrew have reached that point, they've continuously chosen to fall back to one another instead of pulling away. It's a very comforting thought for him.

45. NFWMB - Hozier

I don't even know if I have to explain this one.

There are a lot of things that Andrew and Neil see in one another, but I think one major thing is how strong they both are in their own ways. Neither of them are someone you want to fuck with. This song is perfect for that.

And, once again I will say, Neil is a Hozier fan and I'll die on this hill.

50. It Will Come Back - Hozier

Another Hozier song look at that

Anyway this is song encapsulates exactly how Andrew feels about Neil repeatedly choosing Andrew (at least, how he feels about it in the beginning of their relationship). And Neil isn't blind to this at all. What he also isn't blind to (but that he knows Andrew forgets sometimes) is how Neil is also the stray Andrew showed too much kindness. Andrew is as stuck with Neil as Neil is making himself stuck with Andrew.

51. Love Lies - Khalid & Normani

If asked why he likes this song, he'd say it's because Matt showed it to him and it reminds him of Matt and Dan's inspiring relationship. There are very few people he'd admit the truth to.

Something about the song feels too typical and approachable to admit applying to him and Andrew. They don't have a "normal" relationship and there are a lot of norms they don't stick to. Neither of them are ashamed of that in any capacity (as they absolutely shouldn't be), and ultimately it just feels very strange to them both to consider what's between them as being on the same level of what other's have. Not necessarily in a better-worse context, more just an acknowledgment of stark differences.

But I think Neil also experiences a certain level of comfort when he catches himself relating to other "normal" people. So when he finds himself thinking of Andrew when he hears this song, he's not going to ignore that or let it go. He may, however, keep it to himself for a while. It just feels nice to do that.

72. 99 Luftballons - Nena

As a general rule, Neil doesn't like loud music. This one is an exception (though "loud" may be a bit of a stretch here) because he once got to hear Andrew singing along to it in the car late at night.

Andrew does that sometimes, sings along to songs when it's just him and Neil. It's never with a great deal of gusto or volume, more so just a soft mumble on a late night drive to ground them both. This song came on on a particularly rough night, but by the end of it Andrew was singing along louder than he ever did. Still not saying much, but it was a noticeable change to Neil.

Neil knows he was allowed to see something special that night - Andrew allowing himself to let out something he was feeling. Neil got to see Andrew in what amounts to a moment of vulnerability for him. It means the world to him.

74. Gooey - Glass Animals

This song makes Neil feel the way Andrew makes him feel. There's no other way to describe it. When it's just the two of them and they have moments of quiet intimacy, there's a specific feeling Neil starts getting - float-y but secure. Like he'd drift away if it weren't for an invisible string Andrew was holding.

If Andrew caught Neil humming this song one night as he fell asleep, unaware, he kept quiet about it.

75. Turn - The Wombats

This song Neil keeps because it's one Andrew specifically sent him. He didn't give an explanation, just "for your playlist, rabbit".