#this is exactly how i expect a death psychic to act

[clockwards]

i laughed so hard at this scene i had to pause and find the transcript

[trustmypoison]

Orbit - Act Two

Y/N has a little problem and it’s that she’s literally never alone. She hasn’t known what a little peace and quiet is for nearly a decade. When her therapist suggests a wellness retreat, she expects to be bored to death and just maybe learn to like meditation a little bit. She does not expect to meet someone that she has an insane connection with. Too bad it might be too good to be true.

You can find the masterlist here. 

Genre: medium au, a hint of soulmate au, heavy on the angst 

Pairing: Minghao x reader (featuring therapist!Jeonghan, best friend!Junhui, and ghost!Vernon, with a tiny bit of coworker!Seungkwan)

TW/CW: *deep breath* a lot of discussion of death and moving on (or not) afterwards, grief, trauma (specifically regarding a car accident), therapy, meditation, hypnosis, sleep disturbances, psychic abilities, discussion of mental illness and treatments, and explicit smut. MDNI. 

There are some difficult topics in this story and they are handled as delicately as possible, but proceed with caution if anything here might be upsetting.

Word count: 9.4k

Jeonghan sets a metronome in front of you and you glare at him. 

“I am not in the mood,” you warn, feeling particularly temperamental today. You’re running on next to zero sleep and the only reason you showed up today is because he’d give you a hard time for cancelling on him. Again. Jeonghan huffs at you.

“Y/N, you have to work with me here. I’m a therapist, not an expert in mediumship, but I’m really trying here.”

“Where did you even get that thing? And are you trained in hypnosis? You know it’s not a recommended practice, right?” Your tone is biting, and Jeonghan narrows his eyes at you across the coffee table. 

“You’re in a fine mood today,” he bites back. “And if you must know, I borrowed it from a friend and I did take a class. And I was the one that sent you the article saying it was not recommended, remember? But your file breaks all of the rules for typical therapy, so I’ve tossed out the rule book when it comes to you.” 

In the six months since your wellness retreat, Jeonghan had doubled down on trying to find things that could help you gain control of your abilities. He had seemed to fully accept that you were indeed a medium. 

Maybe it had something to do with you relaying a message for him from behind the veil. His grandmother was not happy about the woman he was dating. Jeonghan had thrown his notebook in the trash can and announced his resignation, particularly after you nailed the way his grandmother would have ranted about it. And yet, he was there the next week, ready to try something new. 

He’d pressed about how your wellness retreat had gone and you’d done your best to dance around the topic. Yes, it was insightful but it would take some practice. He’d given up on pressing for more details and just asked for you to send him the things you found insightful so he could research them. This had led him down the rabbit hole over the last few months and now today’s experiment was apparently hypnosis. 

You’re still glaring at him from across the table. “What’s your goal with hypnosis?”

“First, to see if it works,” Jeonghan bites, before huffing, settling into his seat, taking on a defensive pose that you almost call him out for. “I think it might since the meditation has been working. And I’d like to explore your lost time.”

You tense. “What lost time exactly?”

Jeonghan hesitates before finally saying, “I’d like to explore the lost time of your accident. But we can start with smaller bouts of lost time instead, if you’d prefer.”

You shake your head. “I don’t know that it would be worth exploring the lost time during the accident. Supposedly, I was unconscious upon impact.”

Jeonghan nods, pursing his lips. “Maybe. But one thing I’ve learned from working with you is that you can’t assume that a word like ‘unconscious’ means ‘unaware’.” 

Your jaw ticks. He’s asking you to relive the genesis of all your troubles now. The only thing that could be worse than not knowing like you have for almost a decade is actually knowing. A lot of days, the facts you’d been given were enough. “If I… agree to this, how do you pull me out? I’m not interested in being re-traumatized on this fine Tuesday afternoon.” 

Jeonghan looks pleased that you’re even considering it. “We’ll use a code word that we establish up front. It would ideally have nothing to do with your situation and hearing it should break you from whatever you’re experiencing.” 

You can’t help but grimace a little. “You really have been to a hypnosis training, huh.” 

Jeonghan rolls his eyes. “Are you in or out? I have a back up for today if you’re out.”

You don’t have much to lose, except for maybe your sanity, but that’s been hanging by a very thin thread for a while. But missing your subway pickup might snap that thread just as easily. “I’m in.”

Jeonghan has you sit in the center of the couch, leaning back into the cushion. He says it’s important that you’re comfortable and relaxed. He even gives you a pillow to hold, musing that you can keep your defensive pose if it makes you feel safer. Then he sits up across from you, starting the metronome that faces you on the coffee table. 

“This is similar to meditation in the beginning. Watch the metronome, get in tune with the ticking. Maybe even sync up your breaths with it if it’s comfortable. When you’re ready, close your eyes,” Jeonghan instructs, sitting back in his seat. 

You’d gotten a little better at filtering and meditation, so you slip into that state with only a little resistance. Your eyes drift closed after a while, focusing on the steady click of the metronome amongst the noise. That noise starts to fade, but you hear Jeonghan somewhere in there. “Y/N, if you can hear me, nod your head.” You respond robotically. “Good. Our code word is ‘elephant’. If I say it, I want you to come back.” 

Silence stretches for a while and you do your best to focus on Jeonghan’s voice amongst the ticking when he speaks again. “Let’s go back to that night. You were driving right? What were you listening to?” 

You feel your body jerk in a weird way and then suddenly your hands are on the wheel. It’s dark and your passenger seat is full of bags. Jeonghan calls your name. “Some rock station, I don’t know the song,” you mumble. 

“Good. What were you planning to do that night when you got to your parents’ house?”

It’s not a memory exactly, but rather an active thought. You can’t wait to have dinner. Your mom is making one of your favorites because it’s your first time back home in nearly six months. “Hungry,” you say shortly. “Mom is making dinner for me.”

“You’re doing good, Y/N. How’s the weather?”

“Terrible. A lot of snow. I’m driving slow but it’s still slick.”

“Okay.” You wait, still ‘driving’ with your grip on the steering wheel tight. “Now, think about just before the accident. What do you see? Take a look around.” You look around, right and then left. There are no turns ahead yet but there’s a car coming your way on the other side of the road. The headlights veer in an unsettling way and then the light closes in on you fast. Panic slices through you. “Deep breath, Y/N. It’s a memory. It can’t hurt you. Slow things down. This is all up to you. Hit pause and look around.” Jeonghan’s wrong. It isn’t all up to you and you can’t hit pause because the car is on you in a heartbeat. But, unlike how your memory stops at that moment, you’re still conscious. “Y/N?” 

In the blink of an eye, you’re in the ditch, a horn blaring, but you aren’t sure which car it comes from. You look to the left. “It’s a tan sedan,” you blurt. 

“Okay. Can you make out anything else?”

You shake your head in this little vision of yours because you can’t. It’s too dark. There’s motion from the other car and even though you’ve sort of lived this before, relief floods you. Someone approaches in the darkness, but you can’t make it out. Whatever out of body you’re experiencing is starting to fade. Your neck and left side suddenly hurt. You’re in the car and yet you’re not. 

When it starts to become unbearable, you hear Jeonghan say, “elephant” and then you’re slamming back into your body. You squeeze your eyes shut because the light is too bright and all the noise makes you feel like your head might explode. All of it makes you fold into the pillow in your lap. The clicking stops and Jeonghan’s hand is on your back, a solid pressure that gradually brings you back to reality. He hands you a wad of tissues when you sit up. When you wave him off, he gets you some water and sits back down across from you, not looking relaxed at all. 

“Anything?” He finally asks. 

You shake your head, feeling defeated. “No. Not really.” The timer goes off and he turns it off, before pinning you with a long look. 

“Do you want to talk about it now? Or do you want some time to think about it?”

You feel so drained that the only thing you can say is, “I’ll see you next week.” He lets you go without a single snarky comment this time. 

You arrive to work a few minutes early and are kind of surprised by how many people are already there. Seungkwan spots you from the crowd and comes to meet you at your desk. “Did I miss a meeting invite?” You ask, scrambling for the app on your phone. 

“No. Didn’t you get the email?” Seungkwan asks, confused. You give him a blank look that must be answer enough. “Mr. Kim died yesterday.” 

Your eyes widen and you place the phone on your desk, giving Seungkwan your full attention. Mr. Kim was one of your managers, a sweet old man that was well past retirement age but enjoyed working to keep busy, particularly after his wife had passed and his kids had all moved away. His death isn’t a surprise exactly, but it’s still devastating in that he was such a positive force in the office. Everyone loved working with Mr. Kim. “What happened?” You ask weakly.

“He wasn’t feeling well and stayed home from work yesterday. When he didn’t answer the phone, one of his neighbors came to check on him. Must have gone in his sleep,” Seungkwan explains, clearly upset. You mask your relief because it’s not at all appropriate to show, but you think that it’s a good thing that it was in his sleep. You’ve seen what a traumatic death does to someone and you would never wish it on anyone, least of all Mr. Kim. 

“That’s awful,” you sigh. “Have they made arrangements yet?” 

Seungkwan shakes his head. “Not yet, but I hear they will today.”

You nod, letting Seungkwan drift to someone else as they approach with the same confusion that you had. You make it a point to not go to funerals for obvious reasons, but you’ll make the exception for Mr. Kim. 

Speaking of, you sit down at your desk… and see Mr. Kim. He’s sitting at his desk, twiddling a pen with a soft smile. He makes eye contact with you, raising the pen in his boney fingers like he’s waving at you. You smile to yourself, before wiping it away because it’s totally inappropriate amongst the grieving and log in to your computer. You have a feeling he won’t stick around for long, which is all you hope for Mr. Kim, even if you’ll miss him. 

You make it a point to not go to funerals, but you know you should show up to one with flowers when you go. After all, you had nineteen normal years to teach you those sort of things. 

You get to the area of town that the funeral home is in early and find the nearest florist shop. It’s a cute, little place, the exterior a dark red brick with pristine white shutters nailed around the wide windows. The bell dings above the door when you walk in and the shop is empty, save for you and a bunch of plants. 

Plants aren’t your forte, but you browse them. Most are too bright for the occasion - you don’t need a florist to tell you that. “Hey, I’m sorry, I was wrapped up in something.” 

You twirl at the sound of the voice, not because it came out of nowhere, but because it’s familiar. Minghao is standing behind the counter, clad in an apron, wiping his hands on a towel. He looks equally shocked. 

“Y/N? This is a surprise.” You feel warm all over at how his face lights up, like he’s genuinely happy to see you despite how you’d left things six months ago. You give him a shy smile back. 

“It is. I didn’t know you were a florist.” You glance around the shop before looking at him again. “This does remind me of you, though. It’s… comforting in here.”

He looks a little sheepish. “Maybe. I’m still trying to make it mine. I bought it off of the previous owner last year. I worked for her for years and couldn’t stand to see the place fall into someone else’s hands.”

You feel even more warm and fuzzy. “That’s thoughtful of you.” You both stare at each other for a long moment. “I’m… sorry I didn’t reach out. I feel stupid about it, but I lost your number somewhere between the airport and home.”

Minghao kind of looks entertained. “And here I thought you were just ghosting me.”

“No, not on purpose anyway,” you chuckle. 

He’s still smiling softly as his eyes sweep across you. “You look good, Y/N. Dare I ask what brings you here though?”

You’re not sure what kind of answer he expects, but he turns sympathetic when you say, “I’m attending a funeral in a couple hours.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss. Let me help you find something,” he says, walking around the counter to meet you out in the open. He takes you to a particular shelf containing some muted flowers. “Can I ask who it’s for?”

“One of my managers. He was a sweet guy, always looking out for everyone, particularly the younger team members,” you answer, feeling the sadness creeping up again every time you think about it. You haven’t had to grieve very many people in this way, though you’d sort of grieved plenty of people you didn’t know. Minghao’s hand brushes your shoulder in comfort and you suck in a breath as the sound mutes just like it did six months ago. He must think he’s done something wrong, because he pulls back quickly, going back to business.

“Roses and Lillies are typical choices for something like this. You can’t really go wrong with it. Marigolds work too.” You wait because he doesn’t seem totally pleased with any of these options when you glance up at him. “These are from you alone?” You nod. He abruptly spins, walking to the other side of the shop and you follow. “These are hyacinths. The purple ones symbolize sorrow.” You look at the flowers in front you and then up to him questioningly. He gives you a bit of a rueful smile. “Your relationship with this sort of thing isn’t really typical. You need something a little special.” 

You look up at him, blinking back tears. He might think it’s because of where you’re going later today, and it certainly contributes, but really you’re overwhelmed just like you were six months ago by how he just gets you. Your voice is a little watery when you say, “That sounds great.”

He arranges everything just so with a level of perfectionism that feels unmatched. You wonder if he puts that kind of work into every order. Perhaps he does. He seems like a meticulous personality, but you kind of wish this was something special for you and you feel selfish for the thought. When you pull out your wallet and ask how much you owe, he waves you off. “Minghao, please let me pay.” He stubbornly shakes his head, handing you the bouquet over the counter. You sigh, accepting them and holding them against your chest gently. “Thank you, Minghao.”

You aren’t ready to leave right this second and he must sense it. He walks around the counter, taking the bouquet from you and lying on the counter. Then he’s opening his arms to you and you don’t think twice falling into them. It’s not even the silence that is peaceful. It’s his scent and warmth and the way he gently rubs your back. When you eventually pull away, he beats you to drying your tears, hand lingering against your cheek. 

The shop phone rings, the tone shocking you out of the moment. “I’m sorry, I should let you get back to work,” you say, pulling away from him. He lets his arms fall but he doesn’t rush for the phone, watching you grab the bouquet and make your way to the door. Your hand is on the door knob when he calls out your name. 

“Don’t be a stranger. You know where to find me now.”

You smile and nod. You do know where to find him and you don’t know if he was ever really a stranger. You just don’t know what to do with any of that because the connection with him is scary in its intensity. 

You don’t have time to think about it because you have to get to the funeral home. 

Vernon nudges you awake sometime after 3am. You blink sleepily at him and you can already tell what he’s going to say because you’ve seen that face before. “Working again?” You mumble. 

“Yeah. It was a lot this time. Scoot over,” he says simply. You do as he says and he plops down next to you. You feel yourself dozing off again, the effects of the medication you took before bed still strong in your system. You hadn’t made a habit of taking it, but you thought you might need some help tonight after spending the afternoon at a funeral home - aka a hotbed for ghosts. “It hasn’t been quite that bad in a while,” Vernon muses, making you jolt from sleep.

“Had to go to a funeral today. I think I have some stragglers,” you mumble, rubbing your eyes. 

“Ah,” Vernon says like it makes all the sense in the world. Maybe it does to him, being on the other side of the veil. 

“Vernon?” He hums. “Do you remember dying?”

He’s quiet for a long time. This is a topic that you don’t bring up often. He just doesn’t seem to want to talk about it. Eventually, he says, “Sort of.”

You look at him with hopeful eyes. “I’m not the only one with breaks from time?”

Vernon shakes his head. “No, you aren’t the only one.” He stares up at the ceiling for a while. “I remember drifting away. But I don’t remember a lot before that moment. One moment I’m with my friend and the next I’m staring up at a bunch of doctors and nurses, fading in and out.”

You blink at him in the darkness. In the nearly ten years that he’s been around, he’s never given this much information. “That must have been scary,” you mumble. 

Vernon looks at you with an entertained smile. “It’s funny that you of all people should say that. The only difference is that you didn’t drift away for good.”

“Can I ask you something?” You say. He raises an eyebrow, probably biting back a comment that says you already have. “Do you know why you haven’t moved on yet?”

“Trying to get rid of me?” Vernon teases. You pin him with a look and he rolls his eyes. “Sorry, sorry.” Then he gets serious. “I don’t know. It’s not like I haven’t tried. It’s just out of reach and I don’t know why.”

You nestle into your pillow a little more, lost in thought. “I’m sorry.” 

He shakes his head at you. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry for. Life keeps going, even when it looks a little different. Go back to sleep. I’ll be here.”

As you doze off again, you resolve that if you can ever figure out how to use this little gift, you’ll help him move on if he wishes. You just have to figure out how to do that first. 

Some Saturday mornings, you’re so restless that while you’d love to be in bed asleep, that doesn’t happen. You give up trying to go back to sleep around 5:30am and get dressed for the day. You kind of like to walk it off while the city is still sort of asleep. So you slide on your headphones and start walking aimlessly. 

You end up on the subway, riding for a while, then pick a stop at random really, getting off to walk the streets some more. Your mind is elsewhere and this isn’t quite the time loss that you and Jeonghan talk about all the time, but it’s certainly related. You don’t know where your mind is at when you end up in front of Minghao’s shop hours later. 

It’s a nice morning now, a little breezy but sunny at nearly 10am. You study the front of the flower shop. The lights are on but the sign on the door is flipped to Closed. You turn, thinking about where to go next. Your head is a little fuzzy when you snap back to reality like this, like parts of your brain are still booting up, and you don’t hear the shop door open behind you, too busy thinking about which line you should get back on, or if you should just hike it now that it’s daylight. The sunlight would be good for you, probably. 

“Y/N?” 

You spin, wide eyes meeting Minghao’s. He’s propped the door open, maybe to let some fresh air in. He smiles like he did last week when you stopped in and surprised him, but the longer he looks at you, his face starts to shift in concern. If he had any smart ass comment or cheery good morning, he doesn’t say it because he must sense you’re a little off kilter. “Do you want to come in?” 

Your feet carry you in without your mind really catching up. Minghao lets you ramble the store for a while, while he does some opening chores. You don’t hear him sneak up on you, but you know he did when the world goes quiet at the pressure of his hand on your shoulder. 

“Why don’t you help me water some of these?” 

You’re suddenly totally with it, looking sheepish. “Oh, I shouldn’t. I have absolutely no green thumb. It might actually be a danger to your business for me to even be here.”

His eyes crinkle when he smiles. You hadn’t noticed it before. Maybe he just hadn’t smiled like he is now. It’s relaxed and easy, soothing even. “I trust you.”

“You shouldn’t,” you snort. “At best, I’ll under-water it, and at worst I’ll drown it.” 

He picks up a small watering can from one of the shelves, handing it to you. He lets go of your shoulder and your eyes widen because the sound doesn’t rush back, at least not how it often does with him. It’s not a 0 to 10 sort of thing today. It’s more of a 0 to 5 at most. Not that you even know what to say about it, but he’s leading you to one of the shelves by the window, pulling you out of your thoughts. 

He keeps you busy most of the morning and you let him. A handful of customers trickle in, most for orders that are waiting for them already. You even handle a couple of those while Minghao consults with customers who aren’t sure what to buy. 

The afternoon is quiet. He’s taught you how to properly trim stems so you both are working on that when he asks, “feel better?” 

You feel so transparent around him, and normally that sort of thing would drive you up the wall, but you find it makes you feel safe with him. “Yeah, thank you for letting me hang out here.”

“My door is always open for you.” The ingenuity in his voice makes your throat clog up with emotion. “Do you wander like that often? You seemed kind of checked out.”

“Occasionally,” you say. “There are some gaps of time where I do that. I’ve been told it’s a stress response, but I don’t know.”

He’s quiet for a bit, but you know he’s not ignoring you. You know better than to think that. Whatever he says is always thoughtful. So you wait patiently, snipping stems. 

“I thought about you, you know?” You glance up at him and he’s not really cutting anymore, stem and scissors loose in his hands. He must think you mean about your last night together and he shakes his head. “Not like that. At least not as much as I was worried about you. I left that retreat wanting to see you happy, not being weighed down by everything you experience.”

You always feel so fucking emotional with him. You suck in a shaky breath, busying yourself with another stem. “It’s gotten… better. Incrementally, at least. I’ve kind of resigned myself to not having a cure for this sort of thing, but it’s not quite as suffocating as it once was.” You stop yourself before you tell him how much of an impact he had in just a few days on that. 

His gaze is sweet and you have to look away again, busying yourself with the next stem. You don’t know how many seconds, or even minutes, tick by before he finally says, “that’s great, Y/N. I’m really glad I met you.”

You give him a shy smile, hoping your eyes don’t shine as much as you feel that they do. “Me too, Minghao.”

Jeonghan gives a look that is crystal clear. That’s one thing about him, he does very little to mask what he’s thinking. He probably could (and he’d be far more ‘professional’ for it), but there’s something disarming about him choosing not to. It sort of takes the edge off of his typical bluntness when he speaks. 

Minghao squirms under Jeonghan’s look, which makes Jeonghan’s mouth tip upwards even more. Minghao knows he’s in trouble when Jeonghan puts his notebook aside, settling into his seat with a sly smile.

“Xu Minghao is twitchy. This should be something,” Jeonghan muses, waving his hand expectantly. “Come on, tell me.”

Minghao pins him with a look. “I regret ever calling you and making an appointment. You’re actually the worst.”

Jeonghan snorts. “You think that offends me? Someone threw a pillow at me yesterday and that was the gentlest of threats during that session.”

“You probably deserved it,” Minghao bites, crossing his arms. “You like to mouth off.”

Jeonghan still looks highly entertained. “That’s what I was told then too.” He finally settles, smile dimming to something more appropriate for therapy. “Come on. What’s on your mind?” Minghao blinks a few times. Jeonghan narrows his eyes and then groans, rubbing a hand down is face. “What is it with you people shutting down on me in the first five minutes?”

“Try having some tact,” Minghao smarts, picking up a pillow to hold in his arms. Jeonghan watches him move into the defensive pose, an unusual look flashing across his face, before he shakes it off. 

“Fine. Serious therapist face on now. What’s the deal today?”

“It’s kind of a long story,” Minghao dodges. 

Jeonghan gives him a dry look. “You have an hour and you’re paying me to listen. So I have time.”

Minghao scoffs, looking anywhere but Jeonghan. He doesn’t like therapy. It requires divulging things that he feels are too personal, which he only does on the rarest of occasions. He knows that’s the entire point but it makes him squirm in a way that he normally never would. He sometimes forgets why he called and made an appointment almost two years ago, mostly because he clammed up in the first appointment and has stayed clammed up ever since. 

He’s also not prone to blurting out things, but he just spits it out because it might drive him crazy to hold it in any longer. “Do you believe in soulmates?” 

Jeonghan’s quiet for a few long beats and Minghao is afraid to look at him, opting to stare at a pot of fake flowers on Jeonghan’s bookshelf in the corner. Minghao keeps telling Jeonghan he’ll just bring some fresh ones in regularly and Jeonghan brushes him off every time. He thinks he might just do it one day without asking.

“I can’t say I’ve ever experienced something like that myself, but I’m kind of a fan of the concept. It’s pretty romantic. Why do you ask?”

“I met someone,” Minghao finds himself mumbling. 

He doesn’t have to look at Jeonghan to know that he’s intrigued. “Oh? Recently?” 

“Not exactly.” Minghao twirls the tassels of the pillow distractedly. “It was about six months ago. At that retreat. I ran into her again recently though.” 

Jeonghan hums and Minghao sort of wishes he’d pick up the notebook again. He hates when he makes a ton of notes, but he thinks he hates it more when he completely abandons the concept of notes altogether. “Fascinating.”

“Try to seem less excited. You’re supposed to be sympathetic,” Minghao practically begs. 

“You haven’t given me any information to be sympathetic about yet. And I wouldn’t think finding someone you consider your soulmate warrants sympathy, anyway. So I’ll need you to fill in the gaps here.”

Minghao isn’t really proud by how so not composed he is when he huffs, tossing the pillow aside and standing to pace. He feels Jeonghan watch him and Minghao’s sure he’s entertained. He’s never been a pacer in therapy, or really anywhere else in his life. He’s usually not even much of a talker. Jeonghan has to work pretty hard for the bits of information he does get in their sessions. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever connected with someone like that before. It’s something really special. To me, at least.” 

“And you said that you’ve run into her recently?” 

“I didn’t think I’d see her again actually. I don’t even know her last name or what she does for a living or much of anything else because it never even came up. And then I didn’t hear from her after we left the retreat. And then she just walks into my shop one day six months later. We were both surprised.”

“Romantic, something out of a movie, really,” Jeonghan muses. “Is she into all the spiritualist stuff too?” 

Minghao snorts. “Not really. At least, not much.” 

“Why is that?” Jeonghan asks curiously. 

Minghao wants to say more, wants to get it all off his chest, but it’s not his thing to share. “It’s hard to explain. But she started to come around to it at the end of the retreat.” 

“And does she seem into you?” 

The question shouldn’t blindside him the way it does, but he stops in his pacing. He rubs the back of his neck. He thinks you probably wouldn’t have slept with him that night if you weren’t at least a little into him. You don’t strike as the type to just do that. Not that it would be a problem, but you seem to like your space and a one night stand felt uncharacteristic. It makes him wonder why he seemed to be an exception. 

Jeonghan calls his name and Minghao is pulled out of his daze. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Jeonghan’s smile is light, losing the look of pure entertainment from a few moments ago. He shrugs. “It’s worth exploring. I can’t make any comments on soulmates or anything.” He rolls his eyes, “but I’ve been researching some pretty interesting things lately, so… just see where it goes. What’s her name?”

“Y/N,” Minghao says, sighing a little, defeated. Jeonghan’s expression changes for only a flash before he is smiling lightly again. 

“See where it goes. Not just anyone shakes the Xu Minghao.” 

Minghao decides to take the leap. At some point today, anyway. When he works up the courage, that is. 

It’s a slow day at the shop. All orders have been filled and he doesn’t expect a lot of business today since it’s the middle of the week. There will be a rush after most people start getting off of work, but until then he has nothing to do. No orders. No watering. No repotting. 

That means he has all the time in the world to stare at your contact on his phone. 

It’s a pretty new addition, just entered into his phone a couple weeks ago when you last visited. It was you who thought to ask and he was elated to give his number to you. But since trading numbers, he hadn’t heard from you. Hadn’t seen you either. Since the beginning of all this, he’d decided to let you come to him. You seem like you wouldn’t like the pressure of him pursuing you. But he was getting antsy to be in your presence again. He wishes he had something, anything to do to keep him from almost calling or texting. He can’t think of a single time that a woman had made him so… twitchy. That was the word that Jeonghan had used. He’d known he was in trouble the moment he met you that first morning at the retreat. Then he thinks maybe that’s not totally true and brushes it off, busying himself with moving pots here and there in the window just for the sake of something to do. 

Minghao’s rewritten a single text a dozen times and finally feels satisfied enough to hit send when his phone buzzes and he almost drops it, heart racing. It’s a message from you. ‘Do you happen to be free tonight?’

It takes him an embarrassingly long time to reply because he needs some time to panic. Finally, he sends back, ‘You read my mind.’ He trades a few more messages with you to make plans.

Minghao closes up shop right at 5pm and rushes home to shower. His hands shake a little when he pulls up in front of your apartment building. He said he’d go up and get you when he was here, but he parks and turns off the car, just taking a breather. Pursuing this is simultaneously the best and the worst thing he could do. But he would be helpless to turn you down. He’s felt that way since he met you. 

He jumps at a small ‘knock knock’ on his passenger window. It’s dark but he knows it’s you. He just knows. It’s so ridiculous how all his panic drains as you open the door and slide into the passenger seat, giving him a soft smile. 

“Sorry, I got impatient,” you say sheepishly. Your words make all of his insides do little flips. You look pretty, hair pulled up in a ponytail away from your face. You’d followed his instructions, dressing warmly in thick leggings, a sweatshirt, and boots. You’re also wrapped in a puffy coat that swallows you. It makes him so fucking soft and he can’t believe you’re in his car right now. You reached out to him this afternoon to see him.

“That’s okay, I was just about to come and get you anyway,” Minghao answers, feeling sort of shy. 

In the darkness, it seems like you might flush a little. It’s strange because you usually seem so unaffected by those sort of things. Until you two slept together on the last night of the retreat, he really assumed that things were one sided. He’s still not sure if you feel anything close to what he does, but he’s hooked regardless. 

“What did you have in mind?” You ask gently. 

Minghao blinks, coming back to reality. “I was thinking a night drive, maybe look at the stars.” He watches the corners of your lips turn up, eyes turning a little entertained. “Unless you don’t believe in that sort of thing either.”

You snort and he thinks it’s one of his favorite sounds. It’s the type of thing that couldn’t be attractive if anyone else did it, but he loves when you do it. “Hao, I’ll go look at the stars with you. You don’t even have to ask.”

Minghao can’t help the big smile that spreads across his face. This might be the first time he’s felt giddy. “Buckle up.”

Nearly an hour later, he parks in the middle of nowhere outside of the city. He meets you at the hood of the car with a blanket, holding your hand to help you climb on and lay down. When he’s laid down next to you and tossed the blanket across both of you, he finds that you’re already looking at him. Your hand lands on his chest at the exact same time that he throws out his arm for you to slide into. He suppresses a deep sigh once you’re curled up into his side with your head on his chest. His hand curls into your waist and he thinks this must be what peace feels like. It’s what he’s been after for years. 

Minghao kind of thinks you might have dozed off when you surprise him by turning to look at the sky. “So what am I looking at here? Be my tour guide.” He tilts his head down to look at you and you meet his questioning look. A little playful pout falls onto your lips and he really has to resist kissing it off of you. “What? You were my tour guide at the retreat. You know about stars too, right?”

It’s his turn to snort. “Not that much, no. I just think it’s pretty.” You chuckle against his chest and you can probably feel how his heart races. But he still tells you want he knows. It eventually devolves into just finding your own shapes in the sky. But at some point, he realizes that you’ve stopped looking at the sky and are looking at him. He gives you a curious look because he doesn’t quite understand the expression on your face. It’s vulnerable but he doesn’t know what it means. 

“Are you always this romantic?” You ask like it’s a serious question. 

“No,” Minghao says automatically. “At least not like this.”

“Oh, so I’m special or something? You don’t take women out to look at the stars all the time?” You tease, grinning up at him. 

He absolutely cannot help reaching out to brush your cheek. He likes how your eyelashes flutter at the touch. “You’re very special, and no, this would be the first.” He bites his tongue to keep from saying it will probably be the only one too. He can’t imagine doing something like this with anyone else. It would feel too hollow and performative - a strong attempt to be romantic, whereas with you, it’s effortless.

You still look vulnerable, your big eyes staring up at him, but there’s something sobering about your expression. “Hao? What’s happening here?”

That’s such a loaded question and it makes him hesitate. It’s not that he wants to be dishonest - far from it. But there are some things he just doesn’t know how to say yet, so he opts for something he knows is true. “It’s what you want it to be.” 

“So you feel something then?”

Again, such a loaded question. “I feel a lot when it comes to you.” He brushes some baby hairs out of your face. “Do you?”

“Yeah,” you whisper. 

“Oh, thank god,” Minghao sighs. 

You aren’t totally sure how you got here. You and Minghao eventually get cold while laying on the hood of the car but aren’t ready to go home so you both climb in the back seat. As you warm up, it starts with taking off your coats, then your sweatshirts. And now you feel like you’re dripping sweat as you’re nearly naked in Minghao’s lap as he sits in the backseat. 

The tone of this is different than that night at the hotel. It certainly doesn’t lack the intimacy and passion, but it does lack some of the gentleness he used last time. There’s even a tinge of desperation that makes your head spin. You’re enjoying it, the way he grips your hips and leaves some stinging bites on your neck and chest before soothing the sting with a sweet kiss or a soft sweep of his tongue. The back and forth of rough and sweet has you on the edge, gasping for air before he’s even felt how wet you are. 

Minghao finishes sucking a bruise onto your collarbone, sighing against the sore spot between little kisses. “You sound so pretty. Do you feel good?”

Your mind is numb in the best way. Not only is it silent, but you couldn’t imagine thinking about anything besides him. Nothing else exists outside of this car to you at the moment. “Yes,” you mumble, gripping his shoulders as he starts another bruise on your breast this time. “Can I have you?”

He groans against your breast, his fingers digging into your hips roughly. “You already have me.”

Last time was slow, almost painfully so. This time, it’s painful how much time it takes to yank his sweats and boxers down to his thighs and to pull your panties to the side. He maneuvers you by the hip, helping you slide down on him. The deep sigh that he lets out into your ear rattles our brain and when you’re fully seated, the rush from moments ago is gone. Like last time, he stays buried inside of you, totally still. You fold into his neck and his arms wrap around you tightly, hands soothing up and down your back. You wonder if it will always end up being less about the sex and more about the intimacy with him. He took you to the sky last time, of course, but what you remembered the most in the months that passed since then was the way that he held you close like this. 

You have no idea how long you sit in his lap like that. It’s only when you place a mindless kiss on his neck that the fire lights up in you again. The moment your lips hit his neck, you feel the little vibration of the sound he holds back. You place a few more kisses there, testing the waters. But the moment he tilts his head to give you more access, you’re all over him. As you kiss and suck spots onto his neck, you feel him tensing under you - his shoulder under your hand raises a bit, his fingers dig into your waist, his cock twitching inside you as his hips jerk up on occasion. It makes you grind a little and you love how he becomes putty in your hands. A moan falls from his lips and it spurs you on, lifting your head to press your lips onto his. His tongue dips into your mouth as you lift your hips and lower again, starting a slow rhythm. 

Your thighs ache when he finally pulls away from your lips to whisper against your lips, “I’m close.” 

“Come inside, I’m on the pill.” 

The words seem to light a fire. His eyes pinch closed and his hand flies into your skewed underwear to rub your clit. It all has you gasping, tears pricking your eyes at the overwhelm. “Please come. I’ll come with you.”

The promise throws you over the edge, back arching. His hands slam you down to take him deeply and he holds you there, burying his face in your neck as he comes. The feeling is totally consuming, just like everything else with him. 

When you both have come down some, you both relax. He slumps back into the seat and you slump into him. You both have long caught your breath and the sweat has started to dry when you chuckle against the skin of his neck. 

“What?” He asks sweetly. 

“This will sound stupid. But does this mean we’re together?”

You’re sort of afraid to look at him, but he doesn’t make you. You feel his heart underneath your hand and it makes you feel better that you aren’t the only one. His hands sweep up and down your back in a way that you don’t think you’ll ever get enough of. “That’s what I’d like. Do you want that?”

You place a little kiss on his neck. “Yeah,” you whisper. “That’s what I want.” You swear you feel him sigh underneath you.

Minghao is laying in your bed next to you. It’s become a habit over the last month or so since getting together. He likes being in your space and you must like it too because you’ve already given him a key. When you did, he asked if you were sure and you’d given him this look that he still can’t figure out before insisting. 

He kind of feels like he’s floating with you. He gets the stuff that kept him grounded out of the way - he knows your full name, and what you do for a living, and where you’re from. All those things that you both would already know if you had more than a couple minutes of normal chitchat when you first met. But truly, your surname doesn’t matter, and neither does your job or where you’re from. Nice to know, sure, but your answers would have had very little impact on how consuming his feelings for you were becoming. 

You both had dinner together tonight and he agreed to stay over. It’s really his favorite thing, the domesticity of it all. He thinks he’ll never get tired of it. Like now, you’re curled up into his chest, snoring softly. You say you get better rest when he’s here. He does too, even though his night is no less active than usual. 

When he dozes off, he knows the moment that he slips away from his body. It’s happened enough times over the years that he knows it’s not just simple dreaming. Jeonghan calls it drifting. Minghao remembers how perplexed he’d been at his therapist’s word choice, but Jeonghan wouldn’t budge. Maybe it was because things like lucid dreaming or astral projecting didn’t fit into his textbooks or any version of the DSM, at least not in any sort of diagnosable way. Minghao knew that dreaming was really a huge question mark for psychologists, so he had resigned himself to Jeonghan or any other therapist not really being able to fix his issue. 

The drift looks different every time, like he’s standing in a different spot in the room every time. This time, he’s right where he fell asleep, in bed next to you. He can’t feel you curled up next to him, though he can see you. But he sees other things when he drifts. 

At the moment, that’s Vernon, sitting at the desk watching the TV on mute. It’s not the first time he’s seen Vernon. “Do you ever leave?” 

Vernon snaps his head in Minghao’s direction, a guarded expression on his face. “Yes, quite often actually.” He whispers. Minghao doesn’t quite know why he does that, but he thinks maybe Vernon is afraid of waking you up. Minghao still doesn’t understand everything, but it seems like people like you can peek into other planes. Vernon had likened it to a building. He’s upstairs, but when Minghao drifts, he drifts upstairs through the ceiling, usually without meaning to. And you, well… you know exactly where the stairs are whether you realize it or not.

“And you check up on my girlfriend all the time, why?” Minghao prods. 

Vernon rolls his eyes, turning back to the TV. “I’ll have you know that I’ve been visiting her for nearly ten years. You’re the one that’s truly new here.” 

“Do you have a crush or something?” Minghao teases, ignoring the unsettled feeling in his stomach. 

Vernon rolls his eyes again. “You know, I’ve hated you since I met you.” Minghao rolls his eyes back. “No, I don’t have a crush. It’s just that I’d consider her a friend and I worry about her.” Vernon crosses his arms, leaning back into the chair. “Plus, I can’t move on, so…”

Minghao doesn’t quite know what to say because that’s pretty far outside of his wheelhouse, no matter how spiritual he is. Vernon stands, turning off the TV and stretching. “Leaving?”

“Yeah,” Vernon says. “You guys are gross and I’m not needed anyway.” 

“Not needed?” Minghao echoes, confused.

Vernon gives him a look that says, ‘are you stupid?’ “There’s no line. She’s actually sleeping. Seems to be something you can handle, so that means I’m going for a walk.”

Minghao blinks as Vernon leaves, looking around the room. Huh. There is no line. He wonders how long that’s been the case. He doesn’t drift far from his body, just in case. 

It’s on a Sunday in late November when it clicks for Minghao. He’s at your apartment again. The shop is closed today so you and Minghao take it slow this morning. It starts with the sex. He thinks calling it sex is too crass. It doesn’t capture the depth of the moment accurately. He laughs to himself a little as he’s washing your hair in the shower afterwards because ‘making love’ doesn’t feel like it really comes close either. You think he’s laughing at how you’re squinting to keep soap out of your eyes and you scold him lovingly without even looking at him. It doesn’t click then. 

You guys make breakfast together. Since you both have the time you make a big spread, not just some toast. He listens to you chatter the whole time. He thinks he would have never gotten to the point where you talk the way you do with him now. You were so tightlipped when he met you. But he thinks he’d never get tired of the sound of your voice. It doesn’t click then. 

You wash the dishes while he dries them. He makes a smart ass comment and you flick some water at him. The air is sweet, overwhelmingly so, and he really can’t help the grin that’s spread across his face. He gets the cheesy phrases that he used to roll his eyes at. Weak in the knees. Heart racing. Brain empty except for anything to do with you. Head over heels. That last one in particular always made him chuckle, but he gets it now and never wants to not feel that way again. It doesn’t click then. 

It’s chilly, but you guys decide to grab your coats and go for a walk. It’s brief but he holds your hand the entire time. When you guys settle in again at your apartment, he goes to make some tea. You both sit on the couch and watch the TV on a low volume, drinking your tea. When both mugs are empty, you throw back your blanket and lay down, opening your arms to him. His brain stalls out. This is when it clicks. 

There’s some emotion bubbling up in him and his eyes prick with tears that he tries to blink back. He likes taking care of you and protecting you. Likes how you seem to feel secure around him when that seems to be sort of uncommon for you. But when you look at him like that, offering him a warm place to lay under the blanket with you… well, it crushed him in the best way possible. 

Minghao crawls to lay half on top of you, face pressed into your neck. Your arms fold around him and then the blanket comes around you both. That emotion might eat him alive, especially as you start to comb your fingers into his hair. 

“I love you.” Your fingers stop in his hair and he can feel your pulse quicken under his lips. “I’m in love with you. I don’t think it could ever be like this with anyone else.”

You pull back, making him meet your eyes, and his body floods with relief that there’s just as much emotion swimming in your eyes. “I love you too. In love with you. Nothing will ever compare for me either.” 

You both meet in the middle, kissing sweetly. Then his face is back in your neck and your fingers are combing through his hair again. 

He says it at least ten more times that day, if only because he needs you to know how much he means it. You say it back and kiss him every time. 

Jeonghan looks up from his computer when Hana enters his office with a soft knock. She doesn’t look happy to see him, but he isn’t really surprised by that. He’s kind of surprised she hasn’t quit yet, honestly. The downside of dating your receptionist, he guesses. When you break up, things get awkward. 

“I’m heading out,” she says curtly. “Are you staying?”

He bites back a smart ass comment like ‘obviously’, because she has her puffy winter coat on and her bag on her forearm and he’s buried in handwritten notes to type up. Obviously, she’s leaving and he’s staying. But he doesn’t need to give her another reason to hate him. So he nods evenly. “Yeah, I’m going to finish some things up. Go home and have a good night. Be careful.”

There’s a little flash of emotion that she masks almost right away. Their breakup wasn’t bad exactly, but she’d been much more into him than he had been into her. It felt unfair to string her along, so he cut it off as kindly as possible. He didn’t blame her for being bitter and he certainly didn’t blame her for feeling a plethora of emotions bubble up when they did have to interact. He’d be in the wrong profession if that sort of thing bothered him. 

Eventually, Hana nods. “Don’t stay too late. I’ll lock the front door behind me.” And with that, she’s gone. 

He finishes up the stack of patient notes and sighs, turning off the overhead lights and opting for his desk lamp. He grabs a glass and bottle of alcohol from his bottom desk drawer. It’s been one of those days, otherwise he wouldn’t reach for such a vice. He talks to clients all day about bad habits, and tries to not be a hypocrite when he almost lectures them. But the first sip takes the edge off, so he finishes that drink and pours another. He’ll need it because he’s been putting this off. 

The file is buried under a bunch of things on the corner of the desk. He got it weeks ago and has been hesitant to pull it out so it got buried. The tab on the file folder has a date of nearly a decade ago. He takes a deep breath and flips it open. 

He likes a mystery, mostly because he likes to toot his own horn when he’s smart enough to solve said mystery. But this one hasn’t been straight forward, not by a long shot. He needed more information, so he made a few calls. 

He kind of feels like he’s swimming in the deep end when he finally opens the file and picks up the first page inside. Your name is at the top of it, amongst others. 

It really is what you said it was. A not-so-freak accident in bad weather. No driver was deemed at fault because it’s described that even emergency vehicles and tow trucks had a hard time that night getting to the location of the crash. 

Vehicle descriptions are also there. Your black sedan and as well as a tan sedan. That last detail sends a little chill up his spine when he reads it. Occasionally, he doubts your ability, but according to the report, there should have been no way you knew it was a tan car because you were indeed unconscious when emergency personnel responded. But you did under hypnosis. 

He wonders if you’ve seen this report, but he thinks better of it because you’re so avoidant of everything to do with this situation. He thinks about the months that you dodged even addressing it beyond, “I got into a car accident.” He’d had to put in some serious work for you to even tell him how you felt about that accident. 

Objectively, looking at the pictures, he thinks everyone involved could have died. Jeonghan wonders if he should bring any of this up. Your appointment is tomorrow. 

He closes the file, stashing it away in a desk drawer, and finishing his drink. He feels kind of bitter because he’d hoped the contents of the folder would hold all the answers. 

That night, he sleeps restlessly, eventually giving up and opening his laptop. There must be 20 tabs open and he flips between them, well beyond laughing to himself about him, a psychologist, browsing metaphysical sites and articles about psychic abilities, active dreaming, and… soulmates. This whole thing makes him want to scream. 

He resolves to have you try hypnosis again tomorrow. There are dots he can’t connect and he needs you to help him, if only so it saves his sanity. 

[media-illiterate]

your rant in the tags about coursers is so correct btw i want you to know i share like. 90% of those headcanons. the other 10% i dont know enough about to agree yet but im sure i will soon

@orange-coloredsky Thanks! I have more

First: the original tags

Now: more

Some general courser headcanons

I really honestly think that them being elevated from regular synths is ridiculous. They're custom made out of FEV enhanced tissue and superior components. Picking the most "tenacious and independent" units is such a dumb idea. Tenacity and independence are warning signs that a synth may go rogue, not signs you should give them superstength and guns!

Note: synths being FEV enhanced is actually canon. Coursers being EXTRA FEV enhanced is, iirc, also canon. I didn't make that up. Check the wiki.

Also, this is just a general synth headcanon: the recall code doesn't wipe a synth's personality all by itself. Instead, it causes total loss of motor control, essentially trapping the synth inside their own head. When they go into the reclamation chair? They're still fully conscious...

The recall code can also be reversed by reading it back at them. They resume motor function as if nothing had happened. Institute scientists have noted some adverse symptoms (hyperventilating, increased heart rate, adrenaline spikes) to be common upon reversal. They assume this is a glitch, but have yet to find the source...

Everyone in the institute is afraid of coursers. Synths, humans, doesn't matter. They don't act like normal synths, or like normal people even. The way they walk, the way they look at you, the way they're just THERE where you weren't expecting them: coursers scare the shit out of people.

The only people in the institute NOT scared of them are in the SRB. Members of the SRB are in on a secret nobody else in the institute really understands: Coursers are actually more afraid of them.

All Coursers live in a state of fear. As the main instruments of the SRB, they know EXACTLY how thin a line they live on. Coursers are under more scrutiny than anyone else in the Institute, for obvious reasons. They know they're just one slip of the tongue away from being reset.

This is the reason for their jockeying for position and constant paranoid infighting. They're all trying to make themselves indispensable to the Institute so they can have even a tiny bit of a safety net in case someone decides something is off with them. The Institute also rotates underperforming Courser units out of action (recall codes them and puts them in stasis).

The Institute only has a few Coursers active at any one time. 12, 15, maybe 20 max. They have an equal amount in "storage" (recall coded) to replace losses and rotate underperforming units out of active duty.

Coursers are actually physically outmatched by Supermutants, by an order of magnitude. (Courser physical stats are in the high teens. Supermutant physical stats are in the high 20s). Their superior training and equipment usually means they come out on top. Usually.

The Institute could honestly make Coursers scarier if they wanted to. But the need for control outweighs any impulse in that direction. After all, if they were too powerful, what's stopping them from turning on the Institute?

This is the reason they immediately vivisect any and all Psyker Coursers; they have absolutely no understanding of how such powers might be counteracted, and thus cannot allow for the possibility of a Psyker Courser going rogue. Its only happened a handful of times, so they still haven't figured out how it works...

Y3-66 HEADCANONS (haha new oc ;-;)

The first sign that there was something wrong with them was that they became highly agitated in the SRB.

(A lot of death or pain in one place leaves behind some truly rancid psychic vibes. Personality Death counts. To a psyker, the SRB is a horrible, horrible place...)

They didn't join the railroad, despite the offer, because they got the same feeling from the Memory Den. They told their contact they wanted no part of any of it, and bolted.

(It's a choice that the Railroad presents to the synths they help, it really honestly is. But it's not much of one, now is it? And even if it is their choice, that doesn't make destroying your personality any less terrible...)

All they wanted to do was watch the sun set in peace. Just once. And the Institute couldn't even let them have that...

Chase still regrets not getting to them in time. But Y3 would have fucking hated the Island. They would have hated it so much.

(To a psyker, the fog is far more than just fog. To a psyker, the fog has eyes...)

[softpine]

can you go into more detail about what matt meant by stevie not being who we thought she was? i'm still in shock lmao u can't just drop this bomb (we all saw coming but were in denial about) and not give a bunch of background info

DID YOU SAY MORE DETAIL??? 📢

this is not the last time we’ll ever hear from matt, so i’m not going to say anything here that will be said later. but somehow this still turned out to be a very long deep dive into the MANY miscommunications that lead to this outcome fjksjds so let’s dive in

(white text = stevie, yellow text = matt)

right off the bat, we know matt has, at the very least, paid attention to stevie for many years.

later:

so this is where matt starts formulating an opinion of stevie, simply based on what he sees at school, in public settings, etc. he doesn’t know her, but he thinks he does. he didn’t mean to, but he manic pixie dream girl’ed her :/

they begin their relationship in an undefined way:

their first few dates are all really exciting and fun. they go ice skating, then to the winter dance together, then frog catching. this is exactly what matt expected dating stevie would be like.

bear in mind, this is after stevie just witnessed another traumatic death with her own eyes, but she’s still acting like her normal, bubbly self, so matt assumes that this is just how she is all the time. he doesn’t realize this is literally a response to her trauma. stevie even says it herself:

but this is what matt means when he later says “I never saw you get sad about anything. You were always laughing. I thought that was for real.” because, before they got really close, he hadn’t seen stevie at her lowest point. he never saw stevie cry or yell at her parents or get annoyed about small things. all of those things are very human behaviors, but they didn’t fit into the mold matt had created for her in his mind.

then there’s the infamous “couples shit” argument, which stevie herself mentions in the latest post. stevie invited matt over to meet her dad, because to her, that’s what it means to be a real couple. matt was confused by that, because he didn’t think stevie even wanted to be a real couple:

stevie cuts the discussion short because she’s terrified of becoming her parents and arguing constantly, so she’d rather just drop it and live in uncertainty.

after matt witnesses stevie’s parents fighting for the first time, he tries to sneak out the door without interfering, but stevie catches him. instead of admitting that he was overwhelmed and felt weird about being in the house while they fought, matt lies to her and says he was actually trying to sneak stevie out:

matt doesn’t think stevie sees a future with him:

but we know that this is what stevie was really imagining... she just never told him:

(unimportant side note: this daydream happened before matt let his curls grow out, so you can assume stevie told him to do it lol)

matt thought stevie has been dating other people this whole time:

the expression on his face when he says “you wouldn’t be [a bad girlfriend]” was meant to convey guilt, because he was starting to feel like things might get messy...

but there’s a valid reason why he thought they were non-exclusive! a longgg time ago, stevie had this conversation with matt’s friend, bela:

bela was just joking around, but stevie was serious. her feelings only changed later, when she realized she does want to be exclusive, she’s just worried that she’ll be unable to commit to a relationship, like her parents.

and finally... we can’t ignore what alisa, a literal psychic, said about matt when she met him:

matt never wants to hurt anyone’s feelings, especially not stevie’s, because he does love her. he was content to keep telling little white lies or lying by omission to protect her feelings, just waiting for the day when she would get bored and break up with him first. but he knew he went too far when he said “i love you” back to her.

in conclusion: stevie thought matt has been patiently waiting for her to take the next step. matt thought their relationship was just temporary, not serious, and that they would amicably split someday, but continue to be friends. they both completely blindsided each other 😭

[theravennest]

Let’s Talk About Shang Chi...

I just got back from seeing Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. I had a great time with it. Just a lovely experience.

The fights were dope. The music was rocking. The actors’ performances really sold me on everything. I loved all the Xianxia elements. Y’all know fantasy worlds are my JAM!

But it was the characters that really drew me in. Every one of them were pitch perfect for me. The final act got a little jumbled, imo, but the characters and their dynamics were so good that it was enough for me to completely forgive and overlook the somewhat messy final battle. 

The story had a lot of heart. It was so personal and so anchored in real emotions. I highkey fell in love with all the main characters. I love their journeys and their complex  and grounded relationships with each other. I really liked the movie’s examination of grief, loss, and pain and the lengths people will go to in the wake of being overwhelmed by those feelings.

Let’s dig into it! This is gonna be a whole discombobulated mess, I just know it. lmao

***Spoilers below the cut!***

I really felt for Shang Chi, Xialing, and Wenwu struggling to figure out how to be a family again after they were all broken in different ways by the loss of Mama Ying Li. And each one of them trying in their own way to heal from it, some to extremely destructive degrees. 

How Wenwu treated his kids after being consumed by grief and violence was so utterly messed up but in two completely different ways. 

He treated Xialing like she was anathema, like she was literally nothing. Even when they were older and she had grown into an adult, he barely spoke to her in the entirety of the movie, could hardly even look at her. Partially because she looked like her mom and he retreated utterly from the pain of that, and partially because he constantly underestimated her in favor of her brother. This, of course, seeded the resentful tension between Xialing and Shang Chi from the start.

I’m a real sucker for sibling dynamics, as you all know. They’re my favorite types of family-oriented stories. (Side note, I really love the way the MCU has dedicated several stories to sibling relationships. It’s like my favorite thing in the MCU as a whole.)

I completely ate up the harsh and tricky relationship between Xialing and Shang Chi. Shang Chi completely let her down when they were kids, for her POV. (Not really his fault, he was a scared and traumatized 15 year old. Totally understandable.) But there is something to be said about the fact that she was also a child. A child dealing with her mom’s death too AND her dad’s aloofness. Then she was utterly abandoned by her brother. It’s no wonder she never quite forgives him, even though they mostly team up in the movie. They still have a lot to work out between them.

I really loved that she took on leadership of the Ten Rings at the end. The moment Shang Chi said she was “dismantling” their dad’s empire, I knew what was up. Though, the softy in me does hope that eventually they can find true reconciliation between them. I’m excited to see what we’ll see from her in future movies as a potential enemy of Shang Chi. It’ll be really interesting to see how Shang Chi tackles having to go up against his little sister.

And Shang Chi!!! OMG! Let’s talk Shang Chi and Wenwu now. When Wenwu drop kicked him into the ground and started the blame game for Mama Ying Li’s death like bro!!! I was so heated. He was 7 years old. A whole baby! She died because your thousand years of violence and conquering shit finally came home to roost. 

But that one line when Wenwu said Shang Chi’s 7 year old self “just stood there and watched” while his mom was killed actually revealed so much about Wenwu’s character. (The cutting way Tony Leung, a literal legend, delivered that was masterful, btw.) 

I actually think that it was the first time Wenwu has ever verbalized that he blamed Shang Chi for Ying Li’s death. Like maybe he’s always felt that way and all this time he was partially punishing Shang Chi for what he thinks of as a failure to protect or help the woman who meant so much to them.

Like, yes, he was training Shang Chi to take his place with him in the Ten Rings as an assassin but maybe he also wanted Shang Chi to kill his mom’s murderer as penance for letting her die in the first place.

Of course, it’s clear to see that Wenwu was absolutely shifting his own feelings of conflicting guilt onto his kids. Guilt that his past as a warlord is what got her killed. But also guilt that he put down the Ten Rings in the first place when if he had stayed a warlord, this never would have happened. But also the bone deep knowledge that if he hadn’t put down the Rings, Ying Li might never have stayed with him and loved him in the first place.

When Shang Chi threw it back at him that Ying Li probably wouldn’t love the person Wenwu had returned to, Wenwu looked so shook up. Phew! Perfect emoting from Tony Leung in that moment.

Honestly, Wenwu was having a very tragic and confusing time of it in this movie. Which is probably how that creature from beyond was able to find a crack in his psychic defenses and lure him to the gate. I had a lot of empathy for him even though I disagree so much with what he did to his kids, emotionally.

I really respect the fact that the movie never lost that sense of compassion for all of their feelings including Wenwu. I also respect that the movie really gave them space to grieve not just the loss of Ying Li but also the resulting dissolution of their happy family.

It’s just too bad that Wenwu’s grief made him push his kids away instead of pulling them closer. He completely emotionally abandoned them. A thousand years of power and supremacy yet he was broken because he never in that time fully learned how to process his emotions in a healthier way and his kids paid the price. They could’ve leaned on each other and on the love they found with Ying Li to help them get through but alas that’s the tragedy of the movie. 

I really wanted somehow for Shang Chi to make it through to his dad before he went too far to come back again. I genuinely did not want to see Wenwu die at the end. I wanted him to live and see Shang Chi’s changing dynamic with his father continue. I wanted to see him finally acknowledge his daughter as his true heir and see her accomplishments (dark though they will likely become considering the “softer” version of her is the one that ran an illegal fight club in Macao lmao).

Though I am happy Shang Chi got through to him enough at the end for Wenwu to save Shang Chi’s life, willingly pass the rings onto his son, and somewhat accept his own death after a thousand years of life. That was such a poignant moment between them. And I wonder if in that instant, Wenwu had the thought that in dying he’d at least see Ying Li again.

(Side note: I really hope his soul and the souls of everyone that got eaten were freed when Shang Chi killed the monster. I really want them to be able to move on to the next phase of existence. I really hope they weren’t destroyed after being eaten. I want Wenwu to reunite with Ying Li even in the afterlife, gotdamnit! Sue me, I’m a romantic.)

Let’s talk Simu Liu’s performance here for one second. He was incredible throughout. I completely bought into this strange but so real feeling that while he has a lot of anger towards his father, so much hurt, he also felt a lot of heartache and love for who Shang Chi wanted him to be. And the strange desire to want to help a man who emotionally scarred him so badly.

Simu really brought both sides of Shang Chi’s journey to life. Like, he was tying to find his own path, reconcile with the mistakes he’s made in the past (his sister, killing his mom’s murderer), and facing up against his father’s ideals and expectations. But there was also a side of Shang Chi’s journey that was about finally understand both his sister and his father’s point of views, and of learning/embracing his mother’s history. 

That moment by the lake when he revealed to Katy that he had actually killed the man who killed his mother. Whew boy! The emotions were so poignant. Simu Liu played it like *chef’s kiss* beautiful.

Speaking of character choices, I really rate this decision to have him actually go through with the assassination. It puts Shang Chi in an interesting position emotionally and somewhat morally. Instead of having his breaking point be him unable to kill as his father wishes, it’s instead the feeling of guilt and shame that he actually did kill the man.

I wonder if he felt a sense of satisfaction before the disgust and shame settled in. Because Shang Chi literally watched his mom die, he probably initially wanted to help his father hunt down the man because of that bit of dark need for vengeance. Until he got it, and felt ashamed to fully face his mother’s memory afterwards.

I’m interested to see how future Shang Chi movies and Simu will dig into and unpack that little bit of darkness these events instilled in the character.

Let’s talk Ying Li for a second here. This woman was incredible. An incredible martial artist, for sure, a mystical guardian and warrior...but she was also just an incredible person in general. Mama Ying Li was so self-assured, so steadfast in her convictions. She struck me as someone who knows exactly what she wants and is never afraid to reach for it.

Fala Chen portrayed her with such grace, warmth, and strength of character. It was extremely easy to see why Wenwu fell in love with her. She met Wenwu, a literal thousand year old warlord, and through shear strength of character led him to put down his weapons and his empire to make a home with her.

This man threw away his entire shadow army of assassins, threw away his whole plan to literally demolish her village in the pursuit of power...in order to play Dance Dance Revolution with her and their kids. (The highlight of their romance and the family flashbacks, for me, tbh.) 

And I know it’s not necessarily...positive BUT there is something...hmmmm, crunchy in the fact that Ying Li so completely altered Wenwu’s life by simply loving him that when she died he was willing to raze the whole world to get her back, damn the consequences.

Trying to properly explore toxic and negative turns in previously loving family dynamics is such a difficult task to take on. I really liked the complexity of the Xu family. All the actors really sold the family side of things. It was an almost tangible thing how much you could see how the love they felt had turned bitter and painful over the years.

The final battle was epic and mind blowing (There was a fucking DRAGON flying around for gods’ sake!) but I do wish it had stayed a little more grounded for longer in the beginning of it when the Ten Rings were fighting the Ta Lo warriors. I wanted to see more of that fight before they had the turn to becoming temporary allies against the soul suckers. It became a little too much of a CGI mash, for me, in some parts of it.

Still, the emotional beats held and the core of the story of this grieving family trying to hold on to the tatters of their world stayed consistent even through the final battle. I can forgive a lot because of the strong sense of character and connection there.

Plus, it’s a comic book movie. Spectacle is the name of the game and at least this one had cool fantasy beasts and dope fight choreo. 

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough. Let’s wrap it up here. Suffice it to say, I had a wonderful time with this movie. I’m ready for the next one!

[felikatze]

give me the a brainworms i am deeply invested in this man

(0) (2) (3) (4)

okay first of all you asked for this. second of all if i am a little off track from the game that is explained by me just building thoughts like building blocks without looking back. third i was supposed to be studying for an exam but this counts as practice right? it's character analysis anyway lmao.

buckle the fuck up, my dearest anon, because I have sub headings.

1. A as the Player Character

Let me begin with why I am obsessed with this horrid little guy in the first place: he's a silent protagonist. I am always obsessed with protagonists. It's a law of nature. I love taking hollow characters and dissecting them for scraps. It's a long standing practice of mine.

Being a silent protagonist, A, as X, does not have a set personality. However, there are patterns. Firstly, as any semi-silent protagonist, A is a reactive character. He does not start incidents, he only responds to situations, presented by the Sephirah, as they arise. He does not actively seek out new information, merely going about the routine of expanding departments, but expresses curiosity when information is presented to him.

I'm aware fandom likes to characterize X and A differently, likely because they are initially presented as different characters. I, on the other hand, would like to pose the theory that they are more similar than expected.

I believe that A is also a reactive character, rather than active. Despite the fandom wiki describing him as stubborn, the goal A pursues with such fervor, the completion of the Seed of Light, is not actually a goal he set for himself. Carmen is the one who set this goal for him by leaving him her legacy.

Throughout the backstory we get relating to the Cogito Project, A is Carmen's assistant, whereas Carmen is the driving researcher. This is how many of the City's inhabitants seem to be; going with the flow of goals set for them by superiors. Yes I will get into his attachment to Carmen later.

The above is not to say A isn't stubborn. Once he has accepted a goal as his own, he will pursue it at all costs, as is obvious from any and all flashbacks leading to horrible deaths. But the point isn't his pursuit of the goal, but where that goal comes from. Even Lobcorp itself supports this, despite what Hokma may say; A as X follows the "simple" task of managing the Corp's day to day activities, and executes any mission given to him by the Sephirah. He outranks them, and doesn't actually need to do their missions, but does so anyway. Players are driven by the reward offered by those missions, of course, and A might be the same in that regard. Nonetheless, at no point in gameplay do you do anything somebody else hasn't told you to.

The overarching narrative of the Script would be the most obvious example. Every single person in the game follows the script, whether they know it or not.

Lastly on this note, a phrase we hear attributed to A, "Machines must behave as machines." Now, Angela may be attached to this phrase because it bears significance to herself as a machine, and informs most of A's unjust treatmeant of her. However, what if it doesn't just apply to machines? The phrase reads as such, "Everyone must act according to their own role."

2. A, Carmen, and the disease of the mind

So, A will at any cost pursue goals Carmen set for him. Question is, why? The obvious answer would be saying he's in love with her, which like, true. But also, how did Carmen come to be so precious to him?

Let us return to the comparison, "This is how many of the City's inhabitants seem to be." We don't really know why exactly most characters joined Carmen, excluding mainly Daniel and Benjamin. But this does not mean we can't have theories.

Carmen's ideal was curing the "disease of the mind." What is the disease? Complete hopelessness. The inability to form aspirations and dreams, to think of a better future. A is a very reactive character who does not set goals for himself. Therefore, I personally conclude, that initially, Carmen's ideology resonated with him because he could identify with the disease.

This is the point where I start rewatching Lobcorp story clips. Dear god.

So, by briefly binging day 27 onward, I've come up with lines that very much support this lil theory of mine:

First, from Carmen, a description of the disease, "People lock away their own potential."

Second, a line from Angela, after the memory synchronization, "You've locked yourself in this prison without bars."

Carmen describes A as humble, and Benjamin thinks he is warm. If I suppose A was one of the diseased initially, Carmen would be the catalyst for this change. Carmen was someone with big aspirations, with plans to heal what is wrong with the City, and it gave him hope. He was one of the diseased, but through time with Carmen, with that relentless optimistic spirit, he may have been cured, for a time. It's not a stretch to say that she was his light.

But lor shows us what happens when the seed of light sprouts wrong, doesn't it? It distorts. A grasped hope for the first time and then it is ruthlessly crushed. Carmen was everything. Yes, A is described as a jack-of-all-trades, as a genius in all pursuits he puts his mind to, but what does that matter in the face of someone who can unite people? Who can give them hope of a better world? Who can inspire them to actually use the talents they have?

And what kind of pressure is it to put the legacy of a messiah in the hands of the diseased?

3. A and the Perception Filter: A is weak to White damage

No, I am serious about that. He's extremely weak mentally. Obviously death of a loved one is a changing experience for absolutely anybody, but Carmen's death destroyed him.

Not only did he refuse to confide this grief to anyone and bottled it up, now everybody looked to him to lead the project, but he just isn't Carmen. He isn't an ambitious person, he doesn't have the same optimism, he can't bring people together, but people expected him to, and he failed. Hard.

While he was without a doubt talented in science, he was also just an average guy.

After her death, A grew to hate humans. He lost trust in them. He refused to confide in anyone, and be confided in by anyone. Thus, the team fell apart.

In both lobcorp and lor, we get interesting tidbits about precations taken to protect the manager.

Firstly, Lobcorp's perception filter. The cartoony art-style of the game is a result of the game being in first person. Through the eyes of the manager, everything is cartoony!

This is a measure undertaken to specifically protect the manager's psyche. Angela tells us that, before it was deployed, the manager would frequently go insane, one notable incident including the manager trying to hang himself. When we first hear this, the previous managers and X are still separate in our minds. However, they're all A! A went insane multiple times without it.

This is understandable, considering that employees also frequently go insane and try to kill both themselves and others. But they're there in action, confronting the Abnormalities directly. Just watching them made the manager go mad. They could not handle the responsibility for the employees' deaths.

In lor, Angela explains why she picked the Rabbit Team from R Corp as their main contractor instead of any other team. One team was simply too big for L Corp's narrow hallways, and the other team... dealt in psychic damage. It was simply too big of a risk for the manager. But the manager is always secure behind the cameras. Would that teams methods just be that brutal visually, or would their attacks have reached the manager?

Combined with his immense grief at all of his friends and coworkers dying in part because of him, A cannot bear to look at death.

4. A's greatest flaw: Avoidance

A common thread during Core Meltdown flashbacks: A refuses to look at suffering. He just can't. Whether it be looking away from Elijah writhing on the floor or hanging up on Daniel's panicked report of death.

This is actually the thing Angela takes the biggest issue with, and what hurt her most. A would never look at her, acknowledge her, and she did not understand why. But I think A did not refuse to look at her out of maliciousness. Rather, it was out of grief over Carmen. He could not look at her without being reminded of what he lost.

Angela's creation came about because A wanted someone to guide him, someone like Carmen. He threw himself into the project to the point it made Benjamin happy that A was passionate about anything again. But as soon as the project he distracted himself with is complete, he is filled with regret. Carmen cannot be replicated, and he breaks again.

Furthermore, tying this back to my first point about A being a reactive person, we see Angela take charge over A. She's the one recruiting employees and leading the business. It was likely a relief for him to be able to step down from the leading position.

But avoiding it made everything worse. He did not act when he saw Elijah's unchecked ambition, he did not act beyond a simple check at Gabriel's decay, he gave Giovanni the same hope he clung to to no avail, et cetera et cetera.

Avoiding his problems is making them worse and sending everything down the drain (including his psyche), so he deals with it the only way he knows how, avoiding them more!

Biggest example of A's big avoidance problem as his psyche crumbles: the memory wipe. A, in perhaps his one singular moment of acknowledging his emotions, recognizes that he is incapable of fulfilling the Script in his current state. His grief is just too much.

By erasing his own memory, he could start fresh without his grief, because he might've really killed himself otherwise. His suffering became bigger and bigger, and he coped by avoiding it.

The memory wipe allowed him to distangle his problems. Through his interactions with the Sephirah (which I will not individually detail for the sake of my sanity and because I dumped all this on a friend on discord already), he can deal with and actually process his issues one at a time.

As the motto describes, only by facing the fear can he build the future. Only by finally facing his grief and acknowleding it, seeing that the past cannot be changed and he has no choice to move forward, can he actually do so.

5. The Sephirah as ghosts

Lobotomy Corporation feels like a ghost story. I've touched upon this in my previous A post.

As you reach the Corp's lower levels, there are less Sephirah. First there are four. They act like normal employees, and do not breach into the story's underbelly until you reach their core supressions and the facade breaks. Second, counting Tiphereth as one, there are three. They still go about their duties, but they know what they are. Third, there are two, and the facade is gone. They know what they are, and they will tell you about the sins of the past.

And finally, you reach Keter, and there is only one.

This gradual decay of the facade is what really gets to me. I said that by interacting with the Sephirah, A deals with his issues one by one, but that's what the Sephirah are, in this case. Representations.

The people the Sephirah used to be are dead, and the Sephirah are their ghosts. The core supression involve putting these ghosts to rest. Doesn't it match the progression of a typical ghost story? Find the ghost, find what they used to be, and help them move on.

So, if everyone is a ghost, then A is alone.

But, behind the scenes, the Sephirah are still there. They are still people, and they have changed for the better, too. As always, A simply does not look.

(Does he even see the good others see in him? Does he look away from praise, too? Did he even realize Benjamin's admiration for him? Will we ever know?)

6. A's end.

A's progression of moving on would be fine and dandy if it did not end as thus: A does kill himself.

A sees himself beyond the point of no return. Everyone is dead. He is alone. Carmen is never coming back. He can't call it quits now, or else everything has been in vain. (Even if the last days show us a part of him wants to just quit, so badly.)

So, there's only one thing left to do: follow the Script to its ending. Fulfill Carmen's legacy at all costs. Death as the ultimate release.

This is the point where I admit I do not like the death as release trope. But the game does a good enough job as presenting it as the only option A had, or the only option he saw himself as having.

However, I've mentioned it before, I'll mention it again: A was not alone. Death was his release, but he left wreckage. In order to end his own suffering, he inflicted the same pain he went through on others.

Throughout the game, he moves on and pushes through. The ending shows that in reality... he didn't.

At least in lor the characters stick together and help each other heal.

This has been most of my thoughts on A, amounting to my longest analysis post ever, having taken me approximately two and a half hours to complete, and clocking in at 2337 words including up to this paragraph.

Thank you anon for giving me the incentive to verbalize all of this, so I can finally be at ease having inflicted my thoughts on everybody else.

[elenajohansenreads]

Books I Read in 2021

#111 – Stalking Darkness, by Lynn Flewelling

Rating: 4/5 stars

Darker in theme and content than its predecessor, more polished in terms of plot and pacing, more cohesive from start to finish. Still not without its problems, but I liked this substantially more, more even than I expected to.

Still, I’d rather talk about the problems rather than endlessly gush about how much I adore my best boy Alec. Because I could. But I won’t.

So, those problems:

Micum. He was a major side character in the first book, and this plot would have me believe he’s one of the mystical Four that are needed to save the world from the Big Bad. But he’s not present at all in this book until Seregil goes to fetch him from home 2/3 of the way through, and even when he’s around, he’s not really doing much. The page-space I expected him to fill here was entirely taken up by the military subplot featuring his daughter Beka, and given the triumphant-but-not-perfect way the ending falls out, I honestly don’t see why she couldn’t have taken over his role entirely, even in the prophetic sense.

And while I like Beka and I understand the point of her arc, honestly, the military maneuvering was boring compared to the rest of the story, and it was hard to be invested in the various injuries and deaths among her troops, because I didn’t have time to get to know them, and meanwhile in another plot thread my favorite character was being psychically tortured by an evil, vengeful necromancer. What can stand up to that, in terms of engagement?

Certain aspects of the ending were not just foreshadowed, but telegraphed, to the point where I have a hard time believing Seregil didn’t see it coming…

Which is tied to my dissatisfaction with Nysander’s constant insistence that everything related to the prophecy must be kept strictly secret on pain of death, until oops Seregil figures out a bunch of it on his own, so then Nysander is like “lol I guess you can warn the others then.” And that’s before Alec falls into enemy hands. Why the sudden change of heart? Nysander acts like not telling them is mostly to spare them the dread of knowing that “a terrible Something,” as Seregil puts it, might happen–but then after the fact, Alec is pleased that he couldn’t tell the enemy anything important during his torture, because he didn’t know anything important, despite Seregil explaining the prophecy. The prophecy that was the enemy’s plan in the first place, so didn’t they already know? And the actual information that needed to be kept secret wasn’t something Seregil ever knew, exactly, and wasn’t revealed to the enemy by him, but through the murky Ylinestra/Thero subplot at the beginning. I’m genuinely confused by the ways secrets are regarded and handled in this story, because I can’t figure out why they’re vital sometimes and less dangerous other times.

Maybe not so much a problem, exactly, but this ties up all our plot threads pretty damn neatly, so if I had read this at the time of its publishing, I would have dusted my hands together and said, “Cool ending, that’s taken care of.” But there are five more books. I own the next one and glanced at the author’s note at the beginning, which repeatedly and pointedly declares that “This is not a trilogy.” So where do we go from here? I love Alec and Seregil and will be happy to read more about them, but I feel like the Big Bad is vanquished, and the war that got started in this book may not be over but wasn’t particularly interesting without the mystical evil, so…

[jean-does-not-have-a-horseface]

Neon Silhouettes

Hello! I’m very happy to finally post this because ive been working on this for a month! This is serving as an entry to @ackermans-freedom-inc discord challenge. Behold it’s long!

Word Count: 10.538k, i’m not even sorry

Pairing: Eren/ Reader

Tags: a n g s t, vigilante!au

Warnings: blood, violence, major character death (? its open to interpretation) 

In contrast to yours, Eren's breath is hot and tainted on the nape of your neck when you push him away from your form in an attempt to get more oxygen running through your system. The hazy high of your orgasm is mighty, similar to a fairytale like dream and makes all air around you run thin with each passing second. You're not sure if you're paying much attention to it, though, because your breath seems to be completely restored before you even think about catching up with it.

Eren makes a loud thud as he plops himself into the matress with his utmost enthusiastic moves. You can tell by his reactions that he enjoyed this intercourse even more than he'll ever admit -not that he's shy to ever do so- and that he seeks a way to relax himself from his own high. For that very reason, his hands are rather quick to pull you on his panting chest, just to provide some comfort for himself but in the process your silent plea to get a breather is long forgotten. You feel you head being smashed onto his smooth skin and you relax under the touch, thinking that you could cease this moment to fall into serenity as well.

With your heart still beating through your ribs though, you contemplate on whether or not falling into serenity now is a logical idea at all. Anxiety has planned seeds in your stomach ever since a few hours prior to your solo patrol in this area of Trost, merely at the thought of bumping into Eren. You had been practicing the words your comrades had assigned you to consider one too many times, and yet, the moment you laid eyes on Eren's helmet covered face your nervousness had worked wonders on turning them into thin air. It had happened so fast that you wondered if this was an actual new power you could posses.

Nevertheless, the anxiety is back now and it's growing its bindweeds in the pits of your stomach. A chapped piece of your lip is stuck under your front teeth, ready to be ripped off as your fingers are mimicking a walk, up and down on Eren's chest. You're not sure if you can talk and consequentially, the thin piece of flesh is ripped away from your lips forcefully, allowing the thin, iron like taste of blood to conquer your senses.

And in the moment it's all you can focus on.

It's always like this when it comes to Eren and yours passionate rendezvous; your mind is drenched of any thought other than him, your heart ceases to pulse inside your body and your legs feel like the most trashy, inexpensive jello -yes the one you ought to find at random 7/11s in the middle of nowhere after a long night of patrol when you're so hungry that your stomach feels likes its going to burst throughout your mouth canal. And yes, you've tried to restrain yourself from feeling this way, but it's not easy, especially when Eren's hand comes to tangle its way through your hair, scratching softly at your roots.

Clicking your tongue in your mouth though, you can't help but let your mind wander just for you to realise it's been so long since you've had said trashy jello dessert. It's not like you exactly miss it -no, you wouldn't say you did, its taste was atrocious- but it's nostalgic to think about your debut days as a younger superhero. Especially when you think about that it was due to that that you met Eren.

The thought that feasts on your brain though is nothing more than a projection of everyone's nostalgia of Eren, not only yours. The only reason he's laying underneath you with his right hand bent under his head and catching his heavy breaths as his chest basically pulsates and squirms under your form is because you've chosen to dance in that dark sewer of a world that is the reality of anti heros. Everyone who knows about you and Eren -mostly Levi and Mikasa- have pushed you over the edge of trying to shake him off of his criminal killing rampage, but you know him better than anyone. Thus, in reality, you don't know about whether you should utter that little speech that's at the tip of your tongue.

You nervously chew onto that tiny piece of flesh you've ripped from your lip for over a minute before you dare to try and think about what to do with it. Swallowing seems like a good option, the thought of spitting it like a bitten off nail unsettles you to a certain extent, plus you're not sure if bitten flesh activates Eren's titan senses. You never truly know what triggers people with titan powers and you're not about to risk it. Ironically, that's exactly how you're feeling when it comes to your thoughts but after you feel the teeny bundle of flesh go down your throat your mouth washes the taste of iron away and parts to your brain's command.

"Eren?" You breath out, your eyes despairately trying to fixate on anything other than his form.

Eren's finger is harsh and calloused to the touch as it mellowy grazes the soft skin on the underside of your wrist. Your eyes are finally fixed to the circling movements and though you want to give in the the long for sleep your eyelids suddenly ache for, your mind, much allured by how serene everything feels, pushes you to protest against it. There's nothing you can do about your fast mouth though; resenting it hasn't ever seemed like the way to go through with it.

"Yeah, baby?" Eren half moans to your direction.

You notice how he shifts his form comfortably from underneath you, obviously in search of the perfect sleeping position. Naturally this should have kept you back from speaking further; well this and the fact that he isn't exactly expecting what you're about to say, but nonetheless you swallow hard and bite on the inside of your cheek before you open your mouth to speak once again.

"Can we talk about it, lovey?" You hesitate with the nickname, yet when you utter it you know you dont regret its sappy nature.

"About it?"

"You know," you trail off "About the Titans case."

"What is there to talk about? We'll sort the case out one and for all, we've agreed on it."

Well of course, for both you and Eren, and probably every other person in this world, this case is something that should permanently close. It only seems fair, all those years that you've spent being hunted by those monsters are starting to put an overwhelming amount of weight into modern superheros and anti-heros alike. Everyone basically had the same goal concerning this case, yet people are still split as to how it should be closed.

Eren says it's fitting for The Titans to pay for their sins with more blood than they have managed to spill; they're a top crime syndicate that focuses on abducting humans and mutating them into bloodlusting monsters, just for the purposes of creating their own sick and twisted army of mindless pawns. Eren, having fallen an indirect victim of their brutality stands by his beliefs and won't let a titan standing on their feet when he encounters one.

But he wasn't always like this. Not exactly

Back in the day when he worked as Levi's sidekick, he wouldn't brutalize them to the point where they'd bleed to death, but he would make sure they weren't going ever be healed again, not even if they were ever given an antidote. His falling out with Levi and your team of superheroes though, followed by the brutal murder of his mother had withered Eren's psyche with tormentous force.

You furrow your brows as your mind travels back to those dark memories, dipping into necessary pieces of information that need to be composed in some way for you to reply to him. Ironically, it was when Eren turned his back on your team that you found some major leads as to who run the Titans and possibly even why.

"We'll sort the case," you say "but I don't think you should be murdering them."

Eren takes the hand that acts as a comforter over your harshly and pinches the bridge of his nose as he exhales in disapproval. You know, his face must be scrunched in misery right now, brows puckered over his nose and eyes firmly closed shut. You can listen to his heart and in turn you feel the buzzing his pulse makes as it speeds up a tad.

"We've talked about this. You do you. And I do me."

For a moment you contemplate on whether you want to use your psychic superpowers on him. To think that you can change his mindset is an enchanting thought; in fact right now, it's so alluring that you feel the familiar awakening of your powers rush through your veins. It feels like cotton candy colored poison -that's probably the best way you can describe it according to other psychic's. Your powers, as naive and endearing they may seem can easily flip the cards on you at any given moment of weakness; it's like your natural instincts awaken with a mind of their own to protect and help their host. But it's merely unethical and dictating to force such change on your beloved as much as it is to do so on the next person.

Your mouth puckers to the right as you let your brain roam over every single possible outcome that this conversation can have, yet you never even flinch on Eren's chest, sternly refusing to let your body react to his words. One wrong reaction and Eren's hotheadedness will bite you in the ass.

"Dont be like that, (y/n)." Eren says

You have to admit he's catching you off guard when his hand comes to move your chin to point at his direction. It's his checkmate move and he knows it, blinking his real eyes into yours, he frees his brows from their gathering, leaving small red lines as reminders of his temper behind. You on the other hand, with your short hitched breaths and that constipated look on your face though you can't help but predict his next sarcastic plea.

"Don't look at me like that."

You cough that little angry, hot huff of air that's trapped inside your lungs for oh so long before you plough your elbows under your face to support your form in order to face him. You never detach yourself from him and you don't plan on doing so, this is probably the only way to make him feel that you take into consideration all his boiling bad blood.

"You know damn well why I'm looking at you like that."

"I do." He shrugs casually and then proceeds to shut his eyes in despair "but you're not here to question my means." Eren sighs in defeat as the words come out of him and proceeds to wrap his arm around you again.

However you pucker your eyebrows further, bringing them impossibly closer to your eyes as you boil the words you seek to speak in the back of your throat "I'm not questioning them. I'm resenting them. I'm not even playing the goody superhero on you, but really why are you doing this?"

You never fail to notice how Eren bites the inside of his cheek or how he clenches his grip on you almost like a silent warning at to what territory you're opting to walk into, but you ignore it, sighing all the way through your mouth hoping that the little oxygen you can fill your lungs with is enough to get you through this.

"Everyone misses you. Don't you care about that?"

Does he? Eren wants to believe that whatever he's doing he's doing it because all of you are excessively significant to him. I all honesty he is fuming over the fact that you don't see how this is the only inevitable option. He hates for his alter ego to be called a mass murderer in the news every other day just as much as he hates the fact that people choose to see a redeemable side to human flesh eating mutants.

"If I don't do what I do, history is going to repeat it self." He spits, harshly enough that he's sure you won't reply just yet. "You and this pretentious superhero facade are not going to be here to live it down with me though."

He watches as your face contorts in surprise as his words fall, your mouth snapping open in order to utter your quick fetched reply but he cuts you off with an even harsher tone this time.

"I'm clearing the world from all this alright? There are many people that do so as well-"

"Who? Flotch and Yelena?" You cut him off, but still he brushes it off.

With a shift in your movements you're on your back, your arms moving mechanically to grab onto the covers to bring them onto your bare chest. Eren can read the action all too well and he hates it, he hates it enough that he runs his hands painfully through his hair, despairate to get them away from the burning skin on his neck. Anxiety has worked wonders on his body, he figures.

"You, Levi, Mikasa, Jean, Connie! Want me to throw more names in your face? Me and my team finish off what you guys chicken out to do." Eren's voice is calm yet his tone is drenched in poison, that mellow sound he makes when he re opens his mouth is what's pushing you over the edge, making your blood boil inside your body. It causes you to wrap your fingers tightly onto the blanket that covers your chest, your fists turning white as you clench on it with full force. As if it can help you concentrate all of your anger on the spot.

Naturally, it can't.

"We're not chickening out Eren, we focus on containing all evil, not annihilating it. To think you can do that-"

"I can-" Eren cuts you off, though you won't let him continue until you get your point across.

"You must be really dumb to carry that mindset. What happens after you annihilate the titans, will you do the same for any other similar crime syndicate? Or are your motives personal only when it comes to this one?"

Eren bites on the sides of his tongue with a piercing force and swallows hard on the bitterweet spit that forms due to the action. He forcefully tosses his head to both left and right to shake away any unwanted thought out of his mind but it hurriedly proves to be fruitless. As much as he has liked to think that you can get past that fight on your morals one day, it's obvious to him that it's a fundamental dynamic between the two of you. It's a concrete wall that's none of you can or are willing to try to go through. And he doesn't like that, not one bit.

"Don't try to boss me into your beliefs." His eyes widen as he speaks, voice tainted in a growling anger that he can feel cooking inside his chest.

"I'm not bossing you Eren, stop acting like this."

"Why are you so fucking hang up on this now out of all times?" He spits more so that questions.

"We're so close to catching Zeke and your team is close to doing so as well, I'm just worried." You admit, shyly loosening the clenched cover from your fist in fear of ripping it. "I want us to be a normal couple after this. I care about you."

Your mind is fogged with animalistic rage, yet you still manage to swallow it down, past that lump in the back of your throat that tik dangerously on your clock and threatens to burst. It's only when you try to show the nature of your thoughts and intentions that you watch Eren's face finally contort in rage that's much similar to yours. You fall back for a brief moment, allowing him to take advantage of the silence in the room to answer back to you.

"When I catch Zeke I'm not sparing him."

Eren lets the breath that's trapped in the depths of his chest out before it manages to suffocate him. Thinking about Zeke and how he's standing opposite to him makes him feel sick to the stomach, but he has accepted that it's only just his luck that his half brother happens to be working for the titans. Accepting that Zeke wants to collect all nine original titans for the syndicate to use as they wish has been a hard task to do so, he can admit to that much but he's swore to never let his connection to the man hold him back from putting an end to this misery.

"Eren don't be so stubborn." You plea, brows impossibly covering your eyes as your voice reeks of rage.

"I'm not, quit playing the rightful hero and maybe we can have this conversation when you'll be able to see things from my side."

He can see that you're drowning in your own words, fighting to find the right syllabuses to utter, but he refuses to give you any time, his own rage is ticking like a bomb, he can feel his stomach growling in the familiar numbness anger casts upon his organs and he knows he can't hold back.

"Do what you gotta do, but I'm ending them, I'll fight your team too if I have to get to what needs to be done."

"Oh yeah?" You let out an amused, angry chuckle before continuing "You'll fight me?"

"Gladly!" Eren spits, his eyes wide as his eyebrows twitch in determination.

"Don't say things you can't take back. Don't be an asshole."

"Last time I checked the definition of an asshole was someone who won't support their partner in their decisions, whether they agree with them or not."

You glance towards Eren's drawer, fuming to the point you struggle to control your powers. Your breath is refusing to regulate even if you beg for it to work the way you want it to, causing you to try and think of the most possibly rational plan to get your self out of this situation. You can't stand looking at Eren for the time being, any glance at his side is making you fume to the point your insides coil making you think you're going to start emitting smoke.

"Fuck! Fuck! You won't even try to understand me, I don't even know what I'm doing with you."

You have a small drawer filled with your clothes at Eren's place and he has one in yours. Convently, you've persuaded him to keep a superpower restraining collar in case either of you ever go out of control, which seems to be the case for you now. Eren's last words are poisoning you, burning their way inside your veins. Thus reaching the collar becomes your ultimate goal in the moment; you resent the extend in which your own powers can reach and you refuse to cause more drama by hurting Eren without intending to.

Your ears fall deaf to what Eren is fuming about, its necessary to try and keep ignoring him if you want to focus on completing this simple task. Your head is spinning, lost in the dark colored vertigo you've entered in your effort to focus on your goal. Pushing past it is vital in any case you want to prevent anything from happening. With the sudden swing of your wrist the drawer bursts open with force, the small amount of clothes inside are shot to the ceiling.

The metallic collar shines under the light as it stands proudly in the air as clothes continue to practically spill to any direction. Your stretched fingers make a half turn, as if signing the way to you to the object, your thumb shoting as far back as it can physically can go while your pinky stands inches away from the edge of your palm and your wrist. Your heart is hammering inside your chest for the remaining seconds it takes for the object to come to you and though, even if it's coming to you at full force and speed any passing moment feels like an eon.

You almost manage to sigh in relief as the metal touches tour throat but the action is cut short the moment your breath suddenly hitches reflexively. The collar fails to wrap around your throat and click in place, rather than that its resting in Eren's palm. The veins in his arm are twitching much expectly; he's using all of his force to hold the collar back, fighting your control over the object with his inhuman strength, still you won't let go of your hold either, not caring as to what is going to happen to the object, it won't last for long with all this strength force upon it, you're sure of that.

"If you want to me to respect you enough to fight with you, you won't enslave yourself with none of these fucking shits. Handle your powers on your own."

Your eyes are twitching, your forehead finally giving in to an endless amount of sweaty droplets. There's a throb mirrored by your pulse in the edge of your neck and you throw your head back in defeat before you even manage to think about it. The collar crumbles and smashes in Eren's palm under his grip, the metal cracking slightly as his skin twitches and burns in protest.

"I want us to be free of this, you think if get my hands dirty if it wasn't supposed to end in a way that I expected and calculated meticulously?"

Despite the fact that Eren is spitting those facts, you manage to distinguish the true intention of his choice of words, pushing past his harsh tone. It's unfair that you chose to anger him to such extend, you're angry as well but you come to realise that it's only because you are both afraid. Eren is afraid if losing you and his friends to the hands of another titan and you're afraid to lose Eren in the hands of his bloodlust. The collision between good or bad is only what you try to mask your fears with; what you see as bad and evil, Eren does so as well. Your perspective only changes as to how you view the means to reach the rightful good.

War can't exist without peace and peace can't exist without war.

You think back to what you told him earlier and in a snap you realise that for the time being, that's just about as normal as the two of you can get. An anti hero with his hands clenching a crushed power restraining collar, because he detests anything that strips people off their freedom and their given right to it, and a concerned superhero with her head thrown back in deafeat, giving up on trying to get a so called noble point across. In a way, both you and Eren have chosen this when you decided to take a shared path despite the fundamental differences on your beliefs.

And for a moment you think you're going to get past it. All couple have fights, all couples gets enraged with each other at least once in their span of time but they always manage to bounce back and stand on their feet next to each other. You're not exactly sure if Eren is standing right next to you or if he's opposed to you both literally and mentally but you relax back in the comforter thinking that you'll get an answer in a moment.

Eren's breaths are finally starting to regulate and he can't help but take notice of you slipping inside the comforter, your head hitting the pillow with a muffled thud. His long bangs are sprawled over his face, some fine chocolate hairs tingling the sensitive skin on his nose, some of their edges tickling at his fleshy lips. His mind is blurry, so blurry that he refuses to acknowledge the hand that is still clinging onto the collar, his posture is finally fixed on the bed before he decides to slide down in a movement so that he can lay right next to you.

"I'm sorry." He speaks first, his left hand forming into a fist as it lands on his forehead, pressing with its back on the throbbing veins and nerves that beg to release some of the tention they have gathered.

"I shouldn't have brought it up, it's my fault."

"Seems like we can't meet halfway when it comes to this." He hazes.

“No” 

Sighing, you sink further into the matress, raising your hand to mimic Eren’s actions to cover your face with the back of your hand. You chirp a little sound of misery as you do so, finding hard to swallow down through the knot that has formed in your throat.

"Is this it?" You ask, your voice barely louder than a whisper "Is this how it's going to be for us?"

"If you think I'm going to give up on my beliefs for you then I have some bad news."

Eren turns his head to you, sternly fixing his teal eyes in yours while his jaw is clenching, his bottom lip trembling and worrying as he chews on his words. A hitched sigh exits your nose as your eyes start burning I'm their attempt to hold back tears, the corners of your lips curving downwards causing your button lip to pucker sourly. You keep on staring at Eren and he keeps staring back at you, both of your chests heaving with short chopped breaths. You don't dare touch each other, not right now when you can't hold back your emotions, but you can definitely see how hurt he looks just as much as he can do the same for you.

"Well I can't turn my back on mine either." You choke, not daring to part your mouth enough for the words to exit correctly.

"Maybe you should just-" Eren opens his mouth, twitching out the words before he manages to mumble them "go."

The tears that threaten to spill from the corners of your eyes are finally flowing, running in burning hot streaks past your nose before landing cold onto your ear. You hate it, you hate the moist sensation on your cornch and you hate that Eren's eyes never fail to notice every single tiny droplet that fall from your lips.

His constipated expression won't scatter away from his face, rather than that it only hardens as he tried to hold back and onto those tiny pools in the corners of is eyes.

He wants to speak, you know because he keeps opening his mouth to do so, but the only sounds he emits are deep growls of pain. He doesn't know how to feel about them, you've seen him cry numerous times, yet this heartbreak seems so inevitably painful to endure on his own. It's another love he has to bid goodbye because of those godamn titans and it's even more painful that he knows that by annihilating them, he'll never be able to claim you as his anymore.

He'd rather clear the world for you to live peaceful and free though.

...

The sound of your fists colliding with the back leather of a boxing sack fills the air, bouncing in between the gray marble colored walls of the headquarters. The room you're in is soundproof, causing the sound to linger in the air as you pant, holding your sour spit in your mouth as you throw another punch and kick to the sack. Sweat drips from your forehead and onto the mat beneath you yet you make no movement in trying to wipe it off, you simply let it drip while picking up your foot in order to flip it onto the dummy.

"Easy there now"

When Jean's hand comes to rest on your shoulder giving you a little comforting squeeze, you jump on your spot, startled much by the sudden action. For a moment you avoid turning your head to face him; despite the amount of mellow warmth and comfort his touch provides you with, you don't feel like you can regulate that rush of adrenaline that pumps through your veins.

Your fists, numb by the raw force you've used to launch punches to the boxing sack before you are now inevitably frozen, hugging the dummy with enough strength to make it fall in place. As the sound of the metallic chain clashing fills the air your nostrils snort hot huffs of air, your eyes squinting shut as your brows remain furrowed to forbid any drop of sweat from running down to your face. Jean inspects your constipated expression as he moves around, taking small steps as he approaches you from this new position, finally coming to face you with an understanding smile.

"I noticed you're pushing your self a lot lately." He says, his hand coming to squeeze on your shoulder once again. He presses his lips into a thin line, the action making his straight nose scrunch slightly.

"It's fine." You snark "I could use some excessive combat training to be honest. Mikasa said you and her can help someday."

"Okay then! Let's spare now." Jean says enthusiastically and his hands come to his sides, his fists clenched as a smug expression appears on his face "Ditch the dummy."

Nonetheless you snicker in response. Bringing your finger to your temple, you awkwardly scratch on the tender skin at the tail of your eyebrow. Next, your hands come to your loose ponytail, giving a little tag at the elastic loop that's used to hold them in place, pulling it down to the ends of your hair.

"Sorry, not in the mood." You bite, but Jean is irritatingly not ready to give up on you just yet.

"Weren't you just splitting your knuckles, punching that sack? Like, a few seconds ago? Drop the emo attitude and show me what you got."

Kissing your teeth you bow down, aiming to go for the towel you've neatly folded on your foamy work out mat, taking it carefully in your hands in order to bring it to your sweat dripping face. While crossing his hands to his chest, Jean throws you his signature expression of disapproval -yes, the one he liked to throw at Eren while calling him a suicidal bastard and yes, if Mikasa, not just anyone, asked him he'd admit to having missed the particular interaction with your now ex boyfriend. The male sighs, parting his mouth open, ready to utter what he thinks will help you.

"If it helps, I've been saying Eren is a dick from the very start, I'm sorry you had to be convinced of the fact in such way."

Its your turn to throw him a disapproving look now.

Jean, similarly to the next person, knows how much you hate talking about /that/ fateful night with Eren. The wound is still fresh -whether or not it took place a few weeks ago, the pain of being ripped away from your lover over your ideals isn't a wound that's easy to close and additionally it's rather hard when you know nothing can come of an attempt to reconcile. But Jean can't just silently stand to watch you destroy your self and your relationships with people who care about you.

Each passing day you trade your words for mumbles and grunts, your signs of affection into powerful punches aimed either at that old black dummy you were hugging a few seconds or at a vast amount of metas during nighttime patrols. Knowing you and how you handle such outrages, Jean is sure that at this point you've smashed your fists against each and every single one of these gray marble colored walls, only holding back your self as to not smash Armin's tech corner. But before he gets a chance to shake his head in the slightest only to get ready to mouth his comfort speech to you, the automatic glass doors to the room open.

Turning his head around, Jean is met with Connie and Armin as they enter the room, both of them sparing him their most confused look upon inspecting the scene unraveling before them. Jean shrugs his shoulders, throwing his hands up in defeat, his eyes traveling quickly between you and his friends, signaling them you're proving to be difficult to deal with once again.

As the door behind him closes with a woosh Connie sucks on the inside of his cheek, trapping the tender gum between his teeth, his lips puckering slightly as he looks at you, his otherwise playful eyes now squinted in worry.

"What?" You speak, pressing your lips together and pushing them to the side of your face. Reluctantly, you cock a brow to Connie's direction.

"Me?" With his thumb to exaggerate the word, Connie points to himself and the proceeds to take a few steps towards Jean. Finally, he bends his hand, resting his fist over his hip, throwing his weight onto one leg. "You're the one with the constipated expression."

"Give me a break everyone" you shrug, shaking your head in defeat.

"Sasha said you pushed yourself too far last night during patrol."

"Yeah, so what?" You ask, batting your eyes to the male trio. You're probably as unamused as they are at this point.

You notice how Armin is the one to let out a sigh next, his blonde hair swaying by the force of air that exits his mouth. He's angrily clapping his foot to the ground while clenching his fists to his sides, his baby blue eyes fixated on you. You bring the top of your finger to your head, scratching the skin just below your ear, your foot awkwardly rocking back and forth. It's almost as if no one in the room can avoid the the upcoming conversation right now.

All Armin sees is that your lip is split, bruised much like your eyebrow and a part of your jaw. There's a lot of dried blood on each tiny wound, but the amount is enough to make up for the lack of proper patching and the sight is heartbreaking to the point it makes the blond's blood boil. If Armin could find it in himself to utter a word he would be able to name a good amount of reasons as to why he was enraged with you. One of them being the fact that you've been brutalizing yourself in the streets every night and another one that you've been definitely pushing yourself even more during training, aiming to shut yourself off of your team completely.

"Armin, if you have something to say, then just shoot it."

The way you poke at him is reluctant and nervous in nature. Your jaws clutch together, your shivering teeth making tiny chattering sounds. Armin parts his lips, placing a hand on the gray colored wall behind him, hanging his head down in nervousness. In all reality, he shouldn’t speak his mind, he knows that very well, his personal empathetic feelings for Eren don’t exactly have a reason to have an impact in this situation. Furthermore he’s simply the intel guy, the only member of the team in the team that doesn’t participate in any heroic or vigilantic activity. To interfere with your nightime business would probably harm him more than anyone in the end. As your friend he had to take a stance on what you were going through.

“We’ve all been hurt by Eren.” That’s all that Armin manages to say before putting his feet to work, matching silently to his computer corner, “But, that’s why we are a team. We’re supposed to hold each other when things go wrong. And you need us as much as we need you.”

Rubbing your eyes with your pointer fingers, you let out a deep sigh. When you look up Connie and Jean are half smiling at you, their thumbs pointing upwards and for a fragment of a second, you manage to crack a small smile. You feel your eyes burning slightly, their fleshy corners stinging, but you refuse to let yoyr tears flow now, despite being moved by your friends’ word and noble intentions you keep your emotional breakdown to yourself. You only hope the males are convinced by your small smile.

“Armin has the intel on Zeke’s cargo shipment!” Connie says and immediately his ribs are crushed by Jean’s elbow. “What?”

“Stupiid. We’re not supposed to stress her!”

“It’s fine guys, this is our job.”

Connie links his arm with yours, your sweaty skin littering his long sleeve shirt but he pays the action absolutely no mind, not as much as you at least, and then he proceeds to stick his tongue out to Jean. Jean twitches his eyebrow at him, seemingly irritated by his friend’s smug expression and picks up his feet, marching as fast as you do, trying to catch up. The playful atmosphere is lifting you up, you can definately feel your previous mood lighten by each passing second.

“Speak Armin!” Connie playfully dictates squeishing your elbow in the process.

Armin lets out a laugh, fixing his glasses on the bridge of his nose, his eyes glimmering under the bright blue light of the numerous screens.

“Fine, look,” he says clicking on a tab on the middle screen’s task manager The tab pops up, shining a bright white light thats making your eyes squint. Armin then clicks on some folders and signs at you to wait until the images load. When in turn they pop up, they reveal numerous hsots of the titans new hideaway. Some photos are showing Zeke and his gang standing before it, then entering it. You even catch a glimpse of Pieck, the flash of raven hair is much more evident now that shes standing between her blonde team members.

“Do we have the adress?” Jean asks and you can’t help but notice that the look in his eyes is darkening in an a mere instant.

“It’s in alleyway near the port. Although the front is standing proudly on a very well lit place in 6th Avenue.” You nod steadily, sliding your hand upwards to give a comforting touch to Connie’s fingers that are still linked to the inside of your elbow. “Levi gave me the intel to investigate, he came across them the other day and then he searched for security cameras, you know the drill.”

Jean raises his voice authoritatively and sternly as he points to some photos, informing Armin that he needs to investiagte the area around them and prompts you an Connie to do the same as well. He says that it’s necessary to know the area you’ll be oparating on in the following days. You simply nod, extending yor hand to Armin’s direction to point in which pictures you want him to send you and he does as you say not even giving it a second thought.

“Please don’t send them to Eren.”

You pretend to be shocked, but in reality you're not. You understand where Armin is coming from when he mouths the statement, but you assure him that you won't try to communicate with Eren for any reason. You're in no place to put yourself through such thing, not now, not until your job is done.

...

Pushing on his feet, Eren rushes all of his power to his heels, sending his self in the air. He takes a spin mid air, opening his arms wide on either of his sides after he grabs one the guns that rest on the cases that are tied to his breeches. He manages to grab a new line of bullets moments before he lands and he proceeds to shove it to the butt of the gun, the action sending the loud sound of metal colliding filling the air.

As expectedly, he lands on his feet. The annoying rush of his whole body weight on his heels doesn't bother him anymore, he's grown so used to it that it's become a routine. He throws a quickly glance behind him, making sure Flotch and Yelena are right behind him, running silently on their own pace, jumping from building to building.

"Yelena!" Eren shouts "I'm leaving Pieck and Porco to you. Go for the kill the moment you see an opening. And Flotch" he turns his head to the redhead, his voice reeked in authority even though it was muffled by his metallic helmet "Don't let any hero follow my tracks. No casualties. We're proving a point."

Flotch nods rapidly without uttering another word and spares a look to Yelena before they take turns to opposite directions. Eren continues to run straight ahead, his heavy combat boots clashing with various rooftops as he stomps on each one of them with force.

He immediately stops on his tracks as he catches a glimpse of blond hair in an alley. Peaking his head from the edge of a rooftop, he clicks on the side of his helmet, pushing the button that allowed the goggle feature in his helmet to activate.

Zooming in he sees you, your hands clad in an x above your head as you try to avoid the metallic rock like weapons Zeke is throwing at you with full force. Your left foot is thrown back, fully extended while your right leg is bent, your position providing stability as you try to push past and through Zeke's attack.

Through the distracting commotion, Zeke manages to get close enough to you and Eren watches as he lifts his left leg up, getting ready to clash it onto your head. Eren knows, Zeke's force can easily knock you out for several minutes; if he can break through walls with raw fists, Eren can't even phantom what the full capacity of his brute attack can do to your head.

Eren hisses to himself as he stands on his knees, clenching his fists to himself. Quickly enough the skin under his gloves hardens, forming an iron like material over his knuckles. He briefly makes sure they'd hard enough for the attack he has calculated in his mind by rubbing over his knuckles tenderly.

He inhales a good amount of air, his chest filling to the max as he tried on concentrating on his breathing. Regulating his heartbeat is important but he doesn't have enough time, Zeke is in the midst of throwing another wave of metallic rocks in your way. Suddenly Eren stands on his feet for a brief moment before proceeding to take a jump into the alleyway.

The next thing he knows is that his hardened fist lands exactly where he wanted to on Zeke's face, breaking his nose, the bone crashing and shattering making a horrid popping noise that echoes through the cobblestone walls.

His foot sets to find a way to your stomach, pushing a warning kick but with enough force to send you flying in the air, only for a short period of time though. Grunting, you land in a rooftop, clutching onto your pained stomach, coughing up a few breaths that were stuck in your chest upon impact.

Eren makes a fatal mistake; he turns his head to check up on you, momentarily letting down his guard as some form of guilt runs through him. The blond only manages to grasp onto that tiny fragment of his distraction.

Zeke is out of breath as he runs at his full capacity, counting down the seconds to make it to the end of the alley to escape Eren. Eren is fast, faster than the last time Zeke encountered him and slightly more buff, the blond can make out his muscles twitching in rage as he puts his weight onto the tips of his feet, running restlessly behind him. Eren grabs the spare gun that rests on his right thigh with one hand, the shiny spikes that decorate each side of the gun that could possibly land on him at any given moment dazzling him.

Deciding he can't avoid Eren for too long -hes practically right behind him at the very moment- Zeke turns on his feet and sets his right foot behind his left one, tightening his fists as he feels strength rush through his body.

Eren jumps onto him first delivering the first blow, careful not to take the fist that is aimed to him. He bucks down for a split second, avoiding Zeke's second blow and jumps, splitting his feet so that his left leg collides with Zeke's jaw. The blonde leaves a grunt of pain through his mouth, falling back in haze.

With a mid air spin, Eren lands a few meters away from Zeke. He wastes no time in allowing Zeke to catch his breath; he jumps, knee first to deliver a second kick, thought this time it fails to cause the damage he wants. Zeke catches him by the knee the moment he runs into him, gripping with animalistic force, managing to clash the iron kneecap Eren wears for protection.

Zeke lets out a scream as he lands his fist fiercely on Eren's helmet, successfully breaking a hole in it, the kevlar enhanced plastic helmet making a huge shattering sound, its pieces falling anywhere to the concrete ground bellow, some other smaller ones digging their way into Eren's skin.

The act enrages Eren; he backs away bringing his glived fist to wipe on what he figures is blood that's running from his lip. He watches as Zeke takes the chance to turn on his tracks to leave but he resents the act, he bucks slightly to his knees and proceeds to run full speed in his direction, his ultimate goal setting on tackling his brother.

"You're not getting away." Eren spits angrily.

"You've been practicing on your heroic puns haven't you little brother?" Zeke doesn't turn his head back to face Eren, the end of the alley is only a few meters away now, and he'd like to think that he can make it.

The elbow that crushes onto his face and send him in a momentary haze though does definitely belong to Eren. One because despite the vertigo that engulfs him, he can still hear Eren's iron clad footsteps and two because his body never hits the ground when the elbow detaches from his face.

"Where are you running off to Beast?"

Looking up with half lid eyes Zeke smiles a crooked line with his lips, nodding his head to greet you. You huff through your nose with determination, tightening the fist of your hand, causing Zeke to feel squished by the invisible grip you have on him. He squirms in place kicking his feet and expanding his palm.

"Are you here to save me from your lover boy?" Zeke bites at you loudly and your eyes quickly follow Eren's running form, noticing how his helmet is cracked open. Even if it angers you to see him, you try not to let it show right now. It would only take a tiny slips up for Zeke to manage and take the opportunity to outsmart you and challenge you into a physical battle.

"You're not getting away this time, nice try." You shout, freezing his feet with the slightest move of your hand.

Unexpectedly, Eren jumps, gripping Zeke's foot and hanging from it, tagging at the limb with all force. The eye that isn't masked by his helmet is definitely fixed onto you, worrying its glimmer into your soul. You despairately try to brush it off.

Shaking your head you look around to find anything in which you can move Zeke to help Eren land onto. The ground doesn't seem like a good option, Zeke is smart enough to know you can't last long if you have to let go of the mental grip you're forcing on him. You panic as you figure out that he soon will realise your grip on him is able to wobble enough for him to beat your control over him.

"Hand him over (y/n)." Eren screams in your direction, batting his eye to your direction.

You notice Zeke squirming into your grasp as horrified expression proceeds his face. His eyebrows point upwards causing strong rolls of skin to appear on his forehead, his lips curl down in worry and his eyes widen to their max.

"Can't do that!" You turn to Zeke, shooting him a reassuring look, letting him know you wouldn't allow his assassination before your very eyes.

You only understand how foolish you've been to do so when you watch Zeke take a deep breath. Initially you assume he wants to fill his lungs with oxygen due to your harsh grip and you slowly process in your mind the possibilities of what can happen if you chose to loosen your hold on him. It's only when Zeke lets out an eardrum piercing screech that you curse under your breath feeling your mental grip growing weak. Zeke throws you a sorry smile, startling you enough to take a wrong footing on the brick rooftop you're standing on.

You feel your powers flicker even more, to the point it reminds you of a dying flame but you refuse to believe you've reached the end of your potential use of your own meta ability. You pay no attention to Eren and his momentarily twitching as you try to focus on catching your breath. All it should take is a moment, all you need is a moment to calm down your pounding heart and then-

Bam! Bam! Bam!

You sense Zeke slipping away from you unexpectedly and your mouth falls agape, your hands rushing to your ears, despairate to offer protection and and comfort to the buzzing pain you're feeling. Glancing around you notice Eren swirling his gun in his thigh case, smoke emitting from the small opening of the gun, the smell of gunpowder tingling in your nostrils. Even if you're hazy you immediately understand what has happened; Eren's bullets, following Zeke's coordinate scream sent warning shots to his comrades, letting them know of his exact location and if you could guess correctly, giving them information on his situation.

"AH!" Zeke screams in agony, averting your gaze to the commotion that starts to go down on the concrete ground as the Yeager bothers land forcefully on it. Eren's gun is smashed to his brother's head, the iron spikes splitting his cheek open upon impact.

"No!" Your eyes widen as you scream, your body moving to take a quick leap down the side of the rooftop, send bricks to stray into the air as you slide down onto them.

Eren's fists are bouncing quickly onto Zeke's head and torso, taking turns to avoid being overworked. Your eyebrow is twitching automatically, your head is practically on fire, your veins popping and flowing with hit throbs and painful sudden rashes of blood. Eren won't react to your screams, you assume his own adrenaline is covering up the sound of your voice for him.

You land right on top of Eren, sending him in collision with Zeke, crashing his jaw onto his brothers chest. The males let out pained mutters, cursing under their breaths as you push your body weight harder onto them.

"Eren don't do this."

You take Eren's torso into your arms, using as much strength as you can manage to press his back into your chest. You ignore the way your heart painfully spreads up, similarly to the way a schoolgirl's at the sight of her crush, you resist the urge to rest your head on Eren's shoulder from the back like you would have done had the circumstances been any different. You only squeal as you try to transfer all your strength to your hands, your feet giving in and your chest heaving as you try to pull Eren even further into you.

"Get off of me." Eren screams thrashing his hands around with enough strength to shoo your grip on him away.

"No!" You chatter, squinting him even more. "You're not killing your own brother."

"Fucking hell, let me go."

Your hand mechanically searches for Eren's thigh even though your vision is still blurry. You're practically ravaging him with one hand for a few seconds, despairately clinging onto whatever resembled the touch of a gun.

"I'm not going to let you do this." You say, pressing him further into you, your heart basically hammering in its skeleton binds.

If Eren believes the guy with gun is always right in a fight, you have to point a gun at him to prove his own point to him. Right?

You clad your arms under his arpits, securing your grip onto the top of his shoulder as you manage to flick him off, balancing his weight onto both your knees. With a jump, you land on your wobbly feet, your iron clad heels making loud thuds as you jolt your body slightly to Eren's direction. Your wrist flicks, signing to Zeke's hands and consecuentially they come together, seemingly tied up by invisible imaginary bounds.

A harden expression masks your face as you point the edge of the gun to Eren, pushing it mere inches away from his face, the cold metal flushing with the outside parts of his helmet.

"Take it off, slowly." You order, your stern eyes never bowing the the puppy like eyes Eren is pointing at you. "I'm the guy with the gun, if you're smart you do as I say." You turn your face to the right, now pointing directly to Zeke. "You too Beast."

Under any other circumstance you would have felt your heart melt at the sight to your left; bellow his helmet Eren is battered, bruised and he's glistering with swear and grease -you assume it's from the creaks of his head cover- this sight should be enough for you to throw the gun away from your hand, or destroy it with your powers.

Eren hisses as his hands move to click on the securing buttons of his helmet, the lightweight iron thrashing into more pieces as it comes undone, the damage it had undergone seemingly unredeemable. You sighed internally, Eren has more than a dozen of them back at his place, so replacing this one wont be an issue, fortunatelly. Your hard eyes never leave him, his own turqouise orbs fixating on you the moment his helmet is put to the ground. His hands shoot up in defeat, his palms extended as he stares at you with an annoyed expression.

“Fine? Got what you wanted?”

“Eren!” you utter, stomping your foot to the ground.

You don’t realise at first -yet it doesn’t slip Eren- but the gun is quaking in your hand. With your trembling hand mere inches before him, it’s hard not to notice in the end, but he spares you of the embarassment for a second, he focuses on how to get himself out of this situation first.

“Sorry, babe.” Eren smiles at you, using his feet to flip himself off of the ground, pushing his weight onto his torse for his feet to levitate off the ground. Shook and thrown off by his sudden act, the gun in your hand slips and you squeal, yur grip on Zeke unfocusing as your powers dictate Eren to come to an halt midair. His body thrashes down to the ground, grunts of agony coming out of his chest.

It happens before you even have a chance to blink; your powers are weakened, Eren screams an ear piercing screech and Zeke starts running towards your direction. Multiple bangs echo through the air and you don’t even have a chance to look up to pinpoint where their source lays, your neck is looped on the inside of an elbow but at this point all you can see is black and white as your ears ring dangerously.

“Zeke! Let her go!” Eren screams, his eyes pacing between Zeke and the new additions to the scene, Flotch and Yelena. They both point their guns to Zeke’s direction, panting and Eren is panting as well, his mouth running miles ahead of his brain. He knows he’s in a sticky situation, left unarmed hen Zeke has managed to grab the gun you dropped, shot on the left bicept, but it’s nothing compared to you

Thick crimson fell in gushes from your head, sipping slightly to the cavity at the edge of your mouth, rushing down the painful path to your neck. Your costume seeped in it, the cloth furiously sipping like a hungry vampire as more blood run over it. Eren didn't dare move his hands, only his real orbs paced between his team members, remaining wide open, despairate to light up in any frail solution he could think of.

"If I let her go, you'll let me take my leave."

Eren's brain throbbed, the coiling cavities swelling and shrinking. He examined the possibilities and went over his options like a madman, there were a few ways in which he could entrust Zeke's extermination to Yelena and Flotch, he could even manage to grab you in the midst of it and bring you to safety. The bullet Zeke has shot towards you hadn't planted its way into your head, it had only scratched over the surface, he should be able to stop the bleeding if he could manage to bring you to safety.

If he was completely honest, he could have numerous opportunies to kill Zeke, he couldn't bring you back though in any case you died.

"Fine." He said, throwing his hands up in defeat. "Get it your way."

"No funny games brother."

With a piercing look thrown at Yelena, Eren leaped a step towards Zeke. The blonde and the redhead lowered their guns pointing their cranes to the cobblestone ground. Eren's iron enhanced footsteps filled the teeny alleyway but they came to an halt as soon as they began. Zeke brought a hand to his nose, pinching the tip slightly despite the fact that his glasses had been shattered to pieces his digits still went for his habitual action of fixing them on his diaphragm.

When Zeke's footing dug into the ground, the material screeching from the intense friction Eren widened his eyes. With your head in his palm he rushed into the wall, blood drenched (h/c) tresses sticking onto his tan skin. With a huge thud he smashed your head against the wall, a roar blurting its way out of the depths of his chest. Then, his feet made the best out of their existence, running as fast as they could, if these were his last moments, at least he caused some mayhem and pain to live up to his reputation.

Eren didn't even have a chance to jump into the commotion in time yet he leaped on your side with your name falling out of his lips in the form of a scream. With no need to be commanded to Yelena and Flotch raised their guns at Zeke, shooting while launching on his direction, leaving Eren and your unconscious body behind.

...

"There's no hope for us right?"

You were dying.

Sprawled over a gray cement built rooftop that paid homage to Trost's biggest neon sign you were taking your last few breaths. And Eren was the only one to blame.

You laid rested on his lap, his hand frozen over the roots of your hair as he felt how tangled they felt with all the dried blood on them. Electric blue neon light fell over his shoulders in the mellowest way, creating a halo over his body, his messy hair and all of its stray strands sticking out as the contrasted the light.

"I'm sorry I brought you here at a moment like this. But since you always said you wanted us to hang out here"

Eren paused to sniffle the little goo at the tip of his nose. A burning sensation in his chest chocked him, it crushed his lungs under an iron grip, the splash of blood and flesh echoing inside his torso. His stomach fell and repositioned itself, his gut churned, his eyes solidified pain in the form of hot, salty tears.

"I couldn't think of anything else."

There wasn't any hope for you. Your skull was cracked open beyond saving, your forehead was jabbed and crushed, your eye bloody and scarlet where bright white should have been. Your nose was broken and crooked. It was only a matter of sorrowful moments before life left your body but Eren couldn't bring himself to help you into descenting faster into the light.

"You probably can't even listen to me. But I love you, always did, always will. I never meant what I said that night. About not knowing why I was with you."

Tears ran down his face, his chest quacking in endless sobs that he tried to muffle. But he couldn't help it, despite having grown into a silent nonchalant adult, he still couldn't push past the hurt if losing someone that close to him. Whatever facade he had ever tried to put on himself was crumbling down in seconds before you, right in this very moment.

"Levi's on his way to take you to a hospital." He announced, yet he doubted you could listen. His hands wiped furiously at his stinging and painful tears. The drops of blood that entered his eyes made him hiss even further.

A bloody palm came to cup under your jaw, and Eren hissed as he felt the bone going stiff. He refused to believe it, he refused to believe your mouth had locked, he refused to believe it was happening. For all that matters he didn't want this to be your last shared moment.

From afar he could see Levi and his former friends approaching, the sound of sirens complimenting the background as the neon sign started buzzing and flickering behind him. When Levi finally stepped his foot to your direction he spoke no word, much like the rest of the team, except for Mikasa who shot him a comforting glare and a pat on the forearm.

Eren watches as Levi checked for your pulse and took you over his back, your body laying numb over his own. He spoke no words as he watched the man pull away and roam between buildings before disappearing. As the neon sign behind him made a chirpy, electronic voice and spurt a few sparks of quickly dissolving fire three more hands came to rest on his shoulders. Jean, Connie and Sasha had all silently tried to seek for a way to comfort him, confiding into mimicking Mikasa. 

 Eren knew he wouldn't ever have the chance to see you illuminated by the cobalt neon light again.

Taglist: @levisbrat25 @nobody-knows-anymore @callmepromise @melancholicmonologue @ladyofpandemonium @alrightberries

Super special thanks to my baby @sasageyowrites and my dear @aichiin (if you don’t check out her art i will be mad!)

[shiningsagittarius]

Why The Shilo Scene Is The Most Emotionally Evocative Scene In TMBS (In My Humble Opinion) And Why It Resonated With Me So Damn Much

While watching episode 5 of TMBS (The Art of Conveyance and Round-Trippery), the scene involving Constance solving the riddle given to the group by Mr. Benedict (25:37-27:41) became my favorite scene in the book-to-screen adaptation, and continued to resonate with me after the first season was over. It took me a while to piece together exactly why this scene moved me more than any other, but I think I finally have a few thoughts put together, which I will now attempt to sort through here.

Expectations For The Show

I think the first and most vital thought I have regarding this scene involves how my overall expectations and hopes for this adaptation have shifted. If you had asked me a few years ago what my perfect book-to-screen adaptation would look like (for any book), I would have said “a beat-for-beat adaptation with no changes to the source material” bar none. As the years have passed, however, I became interested in following how a book-to-screen adaptation is made. From this, I have actually come to appreciate some of the changes made to tighten the script, portray the worldbuilding, and develop the characters in a new and exciting way which stem from creating a television or movie script. (Some. Not all. But that’s another essay for another day.) If my interest no longer lies in seeing a 100% faithful adaptation, then, what exactly am I expecting to experience when watching The Mysterious Benedict Society? I asked myself this question, and the answer ended up being “I want this show to make me feel nostalgic.” As much as I wanted the show to make me feel nostalgic towards the book in general, I also wanted this show to bring me back to when I was reading the books for the first time. How did I experience the world? What did I think and feel? Evidently, seeing Constance solving the puzzle made me think about that time in my life and the endless imagination I had:

I used to play in my yard with my sister and kids from my neighborhood for HOURS. I happen to live in a rather woodsy suburb near a lake, so the environment Constance is in immediately started ringing bells in my mind

A lot of my pretend play was based on espionage and adventure and puzzle solving, which is partially why I adored these books so much in the first place

Seeing Constance alone, alongside the song celebrating an imaginary friend, brought back the bittersweet feeling of playing by myself sometimes, but learning how to enjoy it and even becoming a fan of occasional solitude

As I said in my review of the episode, these are life or death stakes for Constance, but this scene ironically brought me back to the happier, more carefree moments of my childhood. Of course, this scene is poignant beyond the personal connections I found. It is also a turning point for the audience’s perception of Constance.

Constance’s Character Development

Before this scene, I don’t believe there were any moments where Constance is entirely alone (at least, none that the audience gets to see). Throughout the show, Constance struggles with being taken seriously by her friends. She knows she is strong and more than capable of aiding the mission, but time and time again, she is passed over entirely or given menial tasks as her contributions to the team. Of course, she doesn’t help her case by insulting her friends or acting obstinate. It’s quite… contrary- she wants to prove herself to the society and help stop the Emergency, but she also puts a wall between herself and the rest of the team. This is why having her first scene alone be her reaction to the copper waves is so emotionally powerful. There she is, completely dwarfed by the statue, all alone. She looks up in awe, murmurs “It’s beautiful”, and wipes away a tear. In my opinion, there’s two ways to interpret this reaction:

She truly thought the statue was ugly earlier, and needed some time to appreciate it, artist-to-artist

Or,

She was putting up a front earlier to avoid being perceived as “weak” by Kate

There’s certainly enough evidence for either conclusion, but I tend to lean towards the latter myself. This scene takes place about halfway through the first season, so it would make sense for a shift in how the audience perceives Constance’s characterization to occur at the midway point. We see her open up to her friends more in the last episode, but this moment sets the precedent for those bits of emotional honesty to occur. In fact, this scene also sets a nice precent for her solo mission in the next episode, where she once again proves herself to the society. However, this scene has something that her solo mission does not.

Shilo (by Neil Diamond)

The lyrics to this song are placed perfectly with each part of the scene, and I wouldn’t expect anything less. Let’s break it down a little bit:

Dreaming each dream on your own / When children play / Seems like you end up alone

Once again, this is the first scene where the audience has had a chance to see what Constance is like on her own. It highlights her sense of isolation from the rest of the team, and implies that this might not be as voluntary as she lets on. She even has to finish solving this puzzle alone, as the other society members seem to never truly consider her capabilities when deciding how to approach a problem (except Reynie on occasion)

So you turn to the only friend you can find / There in your mind

This lyric further displays Constance’s solitary nature, but also gives some subtle foreshadowing of her psychic powers

Got to go and I know that you’ll understand / I understand

She has come this close to solving the puzzle, and now effectively “understands” it. (I mean, just look at her face when the song says “I understand”) However, the song doesn’t stop here, as she continues to try and figure out how to activate the panel. So, she doesn’t understand as much as she thinks she does.

Overall, it’s a perfect song to drive this scene forward (and it’s very catchy, too).

TLDR;

This scene is emotionally impactful to me personally because I was able to make connections between this scene and my childhood. It is also emotionally impactful to a wider audience, as this is the first peek into Constance’s psyche. The music and environmental storytelling used to craft this moment is masterful. It fulfilled my desire for the show to make me feel nostalgic. Also, it’s a turning point for the show to start revealing more of Constance’s emotional vulnerability. (And it makes me tear up each time I watch it, so there.)

[batarangsoundsdumb]

yet another ask dump yeehaw!

do you ever think that jay's mother was one of those bitch who believes in horoscope and tarots and things like that and so he believes in these things too, or it is just me projecting?

sheila haywood took one look at jason's birthchart said 'nah this won't do' and left.

Wait, but what happens when the justice league does find out that Bruce and John fucked? Lmao it sounds like it would be hilarious, really, I don’t want a justice league that doesn’t make fun of Bruce for like his entire life.

barry runs out of the meeting immediately and comes back with an entire sti testing kit. diana fully seriously wants bruce to get tested while bruce is sitting there like 'come on guys, you're being ridiculous, i already checked twice'

john is standing in the corner clearly offended while bruce is just like 'don't even say anything, constantine, you fucked a shark'

tim was like "i'm drake now" and everyone was like ahh so your fursona is a dragon and tim was like pffffft no. ducks.

on the one hand, good for him, on the other hand, bro, how do you still have a secret identity when your superhero name is just your last name,,,,

Your fic on ao3 was GOLD PLEASE CONTINUE I loved Dinah's cameo btw ( @purple-vixen

thanks so much! i already continued but this ask is like 10 years old because i'm a notorious procrastinator (also yes! i love dinah so much aahhhhhhhhhhhh)

I've FINALLY been watching the Batman animated series and I gotta say, after watching "the gray ghost" I am CONVINCED that Batman is a closeted super hero geek who was 100% freaking out the first time he met Superman and is just REALLY good at hiding it.

bruce internally: holy fuck holy shit holy fuck holy shit holy fuck holy shit holy fuck holy shit holy fuck holy shit bruce externally: get out of my city, alien

AHHH ur multimedia fic is the only thing that brings me happiness anymore continue it forever pls

uhh thanks, but can't continue it forever because my attention span is that of a toddler on crack on a good day and i can't function without at least 10 things going on at the same time and music in the background

Oi, so I'm getting into dc and watching batman the animated series, and they use fruitcake a lot. Which I thought was very funny and wanted to share w you - Denilla

wait like fruitcake (food) or fruitcake (derogatory) ?

young justice 🤝 teen titans slut shaming batman

tim drake and dick grayson to their respective teams 'you guys stop it, that's my dad'

Happyhoganon: If an eighty year old Batman had fought crime in Gotham City for decades and the only threats to him and the city lately are a wheel chair bounded Penguin, your usual purse snatchers and a few con artists popping up every now and then, how well could the Dark Knight do in maintaining the peace in Gotham despite him being just somewhat fit to do that as an elderly man (which says A LOT given how old he is)

uhh he'll probably do what my grandpa does and that is ruthlessly prank them until they die of shame.

in the death in the family interactive movie there's an ending where Jason is tasked with raising Damian and he decides he's gonna raise Damian to take down the waynes and al ghuls which uh maybe isn't great BUT the idea of Jason raising Damian... PRICELESS. CHAOTIC. I just need more people to know about this :)

yes i saw that wow holy shit but jason would accidentally drop damian on his head one (1) hour in and jason just yeets him into the lazarus pit.

Headcanon: The Penguin has a really hard time fighting any of the Robins because of his avian obsession means there's always a small part of his mind that's like "Birb. Child. Protect" ( @subspacecadet )

as soon as dick becomes nightwing the penguin is like 'you know what, fuck this dude' and shoots at him.

Y'all talking about King Shark dating Constantine, let's not forget about John literally hooking up with Satan

listen there's a clear difference between monsterfucker and satanfucker in that king shark is literally a shark and satan still looks like a normal dude

Does everyone in Gotham think Batman is a teen dad?

everyone in gotham thinks batman has been around since gotham was founded, but they do think that bruce wayne is actually a teen father and dick grayson's biological dad.

why. why would you do that fancast when you know it will only hurt people

what? i loved my fancast it was really well done. i did it with good representation in mind and i really managed that with alfred pennyworth being ✨italian✨

Seeing james charles a jason gave me psychic damage how dare you i need to wash my eyes

well that's a you problem isn't it?

do you think dick grayson thirst tweets about nightwing just to annoy his family/cause problems on purpose in general?

he thinks nightwing is hot, next question.

holy jiminy cricket batman, its as cold as the good lords ass crack in here!!

i- what? this is why i don't fuck with english expressions it's way too goddamn weird

Brooooooo, your teen dad!Bruce au is soooo good. I've got brainrot.

Honestly if you ever write anymore, I'd read that shit twice. Sign me the fuck up. Good stuff, Good Stuff.

uh yeah i'm thinking about writing a fic, but i have exams coming up and i don't wanna fail because that would suck. but after i'll certainly be writing more tho

your teen dad AU is so great! bruce acting like a big brother for all of like a week before he's telling everyone about his son. what if in the AU dick meets the JL because they need to rescue him? maybe he's in trouble/kidnapped at a gala and bruce starts calling for JL. clark finds him and has to fly with dick to bring him home - that's how dick and clark meet and superman becomes dick's fave hero. he goes around the manor thinking he can fly with a red blanket draped around him like a cape.

actually- if you want a young dad! bruce fic with like that kinda stuff(just with damian) go check uhh- in for a penny by cdelphiki. it's really good and bruce is like 24/25-ish. (and dick's there!!!)

This account has solely convinced me that Tim is a trash goblin ( @hamilcat-and-magic-turtle )

because he is. that boy has slept in dumpsters on multiple occasions even if he is the son of a billionaire.

Okay but when you said victory dance I did think of the whole justice league defeating the big bad and then they all start flossing

well that's exactly what hal jordan does and that's why batman uses a gun now. no but the victory dance in my opinion is like the 'we're all in this together' dance from high school musical.

The horrors in Invincible s1 was nothing compared to the comics, I cant wait for s2

oh well okay, i mean i personally react to horror and violence by laughing awkwardly so i can't wait to be called a monster for accidentally laughing at a mass murder.

I'm currently watching Batman: The Brave and The Bold and- Bruce is just talking about Oliver like he's an old love (@nightwings-kid)

okay im going to watch that lmao that's totally and completely in character for him tho.

The invincible comic is like super gratuitous with its violence so much so I'm shocked the show was able to adapt it in a faithful way! Anyway had the show been live action it absolutely wouldn't have the same impact as it does as an animated show and I'm so glad so many people agree with me on that

also because a live action casting would've been like uhh amanda stenberg for amber, the dude- the guy from the supernatural but with a mustache for omni-man, and scarlet johanssen for debbie grayson

Debbie grayson is a milf, yes. You're welcome for the invincible propoganda, now you can questions your life. Bruce def seems like the perfect father next to Omni-man. Like they really took a rip off justice league and I was like well, now I'm attached even tho I was like hah I know who they're supposed to be. And then bam- death gore death gore gore gore sad Mark grayson just had to have daddy issues. Why does every character have daddy issues. I'm sick of the attacks

because daddy issues make a person arguably funnier, that's why i'm not even remotely funny (haha good dad flex). i liked that it was dark contextually, but not in the colouring, bc i hate when it's like 'uh yeah graphic murder and now a shot so dark you have to sit in a dark room and squint at the screen to faintly see the characters. (like dcau ugh)

About the Wayne insurance, for a moment I thought you would put the video with moans over the waves.

i mean- i could've done that, but rick rolling seemed more family friendly.

Its the first time in forever that im surpise rickrolled, i usually expect it. Congratulations (i really should know better this is tumblr)

i get rickrolled so often but i actually like the song so i dont really give a fuck

Actually, my information about Damian and John's kids is outdated because it was revealed that the old men telling the kids stories about the Supersons were actually Jon and Damian the whole time. I was blinded by my thirst for Grandpa!Bruce Wayne but I was wrong... I liked my version better, tbh (@artemisa97)

fair enough. but i'd honestly like to see damian and jon getting together, just because it's a really fun dynamic and their friendship was really cute when they were kids. (also idk maybe it would be nice to have one (1) main batfam/superfam character that's not cishet)

How am i JUST finding your blog skdskfkd you're so fucking funny and ur takes are hot

i thought u were calling me hot :( but youre not :( crime detected (but lmao thanks)

So I have depression and I swear that your memes are one of the few things that have made me laugh so thank you 💛🥺 (@katekanebadass)

aw you're welcome, and i hope you're doing okay!

The metropolis memes are so funny, I love them 💀😌

i think metropolis is also so fucking funny it deserves more attention imagine having your entire police force being upstaged by an alien from kansas and his kids

as an american i feel your complete lack of knowledge of us geography is just so sexy (platonic) ❤️

thanks so much (i also don't know any other geography, i'm not kidding, like you can tell me you're from hungary and it will just blank, there will be nothing that comes to mind)

In the DC universe they don't say "Can't have shit in Detroit" they say "Can't have shit in Gotham"

this just reminds me of that guy whose porch got stolen like the steps to his door, and i'm thinking of people living in gotham and waking up without a front door and going "can't have shit in gotham"

honestly all i know about chicago is the bean, so. what would gotham's famous sculpture be?

gigantic gargoyle statue in front of one of the police precincts because a villain thought it was a smart way to keep the police inside, but it's too heavy to move.

why tf do people go on about how batman "works alone" or how he's the "lone wolf" when he like 38290202 members in his family

bc people think it's cool that a grown man in his 30s has no friends or family instead of calling it what it is (sad)

Bruce is gotham's sugar daddy

why would say something so controversial yet so brave.

my favorite batfamily fanfictions are the ones where they use their shitty codenames, unironically, in any context

dick: gerard way are you in position, gerard way are you in position

tim: for the last fucking time, my codename is 'totally not count olaf' this week, abbafan 3000

dick: shut up my codename isn't 'abbafan 3000'

dick: it's 'abbafan number 1' and you know it

I have a feeling Tim drake is ur favourite batfamily member but okay u don't have favs if u say so ok

i mean he is, i won't deny it. but i love each and every one of the batfam just the same, i just have a weak spot for short dumbass nerds, because i'm a short dumbass nerd.

Omg i fuckin love boy meets world too fam shsjkfk

bro boy meets world was the shit!!! it was just fire and awesome and so fucking great like bro. it was so good im not even going to be accepting criticism

you know I find the whole "joker completes batman" thing a bit disgusting considering the horrendous stuff the batfamily went through because of the joker and let's not get started on the "joker has a point" thing like yeah he's this cool complex villain but he's absolutely batshit crazy

like yes! i get what you mean the joker just fucking sucks man he doesn't do shit for batman's character or the batfam he's literally just annoying as fuck. like the joker has a point' shit is so stupid. i will accept 'magneto was right' because he fucking was and i think he didn't do anything wrong, but joker? he's just like that. he's not even cool and complex he's just a weirdo with a bleach kink at this point.

ALSO YOUR RACISM POST- SO TRUE BESTIE

thanks bestie, i'm glad you agree.

in today's essay of why I think cass should become batman- I was thinking Tim would probably be the most efficient batman in many ways but I also think he wouldn't want to be batman tbh none of the batfamily members would want to be batman because they're trying to outgrow him but cass is the one who wants to represent the symbol that is batman

absofuckinglutely i will say it again and again that cass represents the batsymbol more than anyone in the batfam, in batgirl (2000) she literally didn't care about anything else than bruce's oath to not kill, she thought the batsymbol was more important than anything in gotham. she's just an excellent character because her motivation to not kill is not 'i'm scared i can't come back from it' or 'well my dad says no murder so i'll go along with it' but that she's killed somebody as a young child and she never wants to kill a human ever again and that's so fucking beautiful for a new batman like yes.

need more cass, duke and tim inclusion in gothamite memes

yes yes, a tall order of cass, duke and tim coming up in 1-14 business days

oldest to youngest batfam members cus I'm confused as shit

okay order of being taken in: dick, jason, tim, cass, damian, duke order of age: alfred, bruce, dick, cass, jason, tim, duke, damian (though cass and jason are around the same age general consensus is that cass is a little older)

I'm so confused Steph is a redhead?? like how was it that hard to get this right? the source material is literally right there and free

cw is jared, 19

do you receive anon hate? if so, how do you deal with it

uh no, i'm not remotely popular enough to get anon hate and i also don't say a lot of things that would attract anon hate, but i do send anon hate to @the-real-peter-parker because he forgot about the specialists from winx club

Wait how many languages do you speak??

uhh- 5 if you include latin, but that's a dead language and i'm really bad at it. but english, my native language, german, and french also, tho german and french not fluently.

You can mix aguaepanela with aguardiente 😈 and is tasty

okay but now i'm curious if the liquor deserves the 😈 emoji or if that's a you problem. but i googled it and it looks like something you'd take one sip of and then not remember the rest of your evening.

[staysaneathome]

This Was Not A Dare, Reigen

Jon glares at each of the— the suspects traitors in front of him, tape recorder clutched tight in one hand.

Martin, wringing his hands uselessly, eyes wide and beseeching. Tim, fists clenched hard enough for his knuckles to go white and returning his gaze with a death stare of his own. Sasha, arms folded to form a barrier between Jon and herself, expression a perfect mask of concern. Reigen, radiating disappointment in every one of his gestures and quips. Elias, eyes weary, fingers rubbing the bridge of his nose.

Some intervention this is turning out to be.

Jon wants to scream. Wants to reach out and shake someone, anyone, until they admit he’s making sense and it’s the rest of the world that’s gone mad.

Every single one of them (except Martin) could’ve killed Gertrude. He knows he has no proof that they did, but he has no proof that they didn’t either, can’t they see that? If they don’t want him to suspect them, it should be easy for them to actually give him proof of their innocence (like Martin did), instead of just repeating platitudes of “you know this isn’t acceptable adult behavior, Jon” and “you’re better than this, Jon”.

Who cares about knowing better or acceptable behavior when it’s your very life on the line? He’s half tempted to throttle the con artist, see how dignified or adult he is when he’s the one with a murderer on his tail!

…Not that Jon is a murderer. It’s just the principle of the thing, is all.

“Jon,” Elias says, tone soothing in all the ways he doesn’t want it to be. “This is absurd. This goes far beyond an unhealthy work environment. I’ll admit it’s partly my fault for letting it get this bad, I should have intervened earlier.”

Reigen cuts in with a hand gesture that is as effusive as it is dismissive. “That doesn’t make his behavior okay, Bouchard-san. It may be bad here, but Jon chose to follow me, Tim and Sasha, and yell at Martin, rather than going to the police or paying a detective, like Herlock Sholmes or something.”

Jon sputters. “Wh- It’s Sherlock Holmes, not—and he’s fictional!”

Reigen blinks sleepily, one eyebrow raised. “Oh? That doesn’t sound right. Are you sure?”

“Yes!” Jon all but shouts, rapidly reconsidering his stance on braining the sardonic little git with his tape recorder. “Don’t you even—an-and you’re deflecting again! Just like with your ridiculous ‘haunted gun’ nonsense!”

“I’m not!” Reigen says, clearly deflecting. “I’ve seen this kind of thing loads of times as the number one psychic. When a weapon kills lots of people over 100 years, the bad energy gets bigger and bigger until the gun grows an evil spirit and is hungry—”

“I refuse to believe Gertrude Robinson was murdered by a sentient blunderbuss!!”

“Be that as it may,” Elias interrupts, shooting them both a stern frown. “This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about, Jon. Given how badly it’s affected your work ethic, I will be taking direct action to ensure it does not continue.”

Jon can feel his shoulders hunch almost against his will, dread pooling in his stomach at the thought of whatever punishment is about to be unjustly inflicted on him.

Only Martin looks half as worried as he feels, glancing between him and Elias nervously. By contrast, Tim looks downright triumphant, smirk nasty and vindictive. Sasha’s somewhere between those two, not openly celebrating his soon-to-be-downfall, but not acting like she’d lift a finger on his behalf either, though he’s unsure why that feels like it should surprise him. She’s always been as neutral as Switzerland.

Reigen, oddly enough, has more in common with Martin than with Tim. He’s staring at Elias like he’s waiting for a bit of news he knows he won’t like.

Jon thinks he’d appreciate that more if he wasn’t about to be unfairly lambasted simply for trying to stop a murderer and bring justice for an old woman who probably died frightened and alone. Much like Jon probably will once he’s been hobbled by whatever Elias is about to say next.

“Such as by restricting access to the archives from members of the public who are ultimately doing you more harm than good.”

…Wait.

What?

“What?!” Tim, Martin, and Sasha echo.

Reigen glances between them all, blinking in confusion.

Jon shares the sentiment entirely. His punishment is…for someone else to be removed from the archives? Someone he doesn’t employ or even like that much, no less?

He must have misheard, surely.

Though maybe not, given how Tim looks aghast, glancing between Elias and Reigen. “Okay, no, Reigen’s clearly not the problem here—”

“I’m very sorry, Tim, but Jon has made several remarks about the disruptive nature of Mr. Arataka’s presence in the archives.” Elias sighs. “From the arguments like the one we just witnessed to the nonsensical purchases of oddities inspired by his presence, such as Duolingo subscriptions,” Meaningful glare at Jon who resists the urge to clutch his phone guiltily, “That are now billed on the Archives’ expenses, it unfortunately seems as though he is dragging down productivity for all of you as an active stressor.”

“But we’re much better equipped to take statements from people who don’t speak English because of that!” Martin protests, stepping forward. “Isn’t it an advantage to have a more, more international perspective for our work?”

“One positive in a sea of negatives does not an advantage make.” Elias says, sounding infuriatingly like he’s misquoting something. “And really Martin, how realistic is it that this would help in more than a few isolated cases? I expected better from you.”

Martin’s face crumples, and his shoulders hunch, making himself smaller.

Jon finds his own mouth opening to—what? Say something? What would he even say?

Luckily, Sasha intervenes before he can dig his own grave further. “That’s as may be, but he’s a wonder for morale. He and Jon are funny, not anything serious, and I don’t think we’d have come to you about Jon‘s behavior unless he encouraged us to—”

“Which only fits into the delusion where Jon feels an outsider is rallying his subordinates against him, which is not good for his paranoid outlook.” Elias replies calmly. “And it’s never a healthy work environment when one employee feels the others are making them the butt of a joke.”

“I’d say that’s not as bad as when the boss feels he has the right to violate everyone’s privacy whenever he wants to just ’cause he’s feeling sad!” Tim growls.

Elias begins to answer, before Reigen finally speaks up.

“Sorry,” The con artist says carefully. “But you are…«I know this one…» banning me from the Archives? Yes?”

“That is the long and short of it, yes.” Elias says, grudgingly

“Why?” Reigen challenges, eyes hard and searching. “What have I, personally, done that’s wrong here? What behavior do I need to correct?”

There’s a moment of silence. The whirring of the tape recorder sounds uncomfortably loud.

“Mr. Arataka, are you currently under the employ of the Magnus Institute?” Elias asks, brow furrowed.

“Ah, no, no, but—”

“Are you looking to become employed by the Institute at this point in time, as a prospective member of the Archival Staff?” He fires off rapidly.

“Su-Sorry, but if you could just go a little slower—”

“Then I am afraid that unless you’re looking to fill out an employment contract or a Statement form, we cannot help you, Mr. Arataka.” Elias spreads his hands wide. “We are an academic institution, a place of research and learning. The Institute cannot allow for social dalliances on company time, especially not when those visits are negatively contributing to the work environment and the wellbeing of our staff.”

Tim throws up his hands, “I-I cannot believe this!”

Reigen’s mouth works soundlessly for a moment.

“Arataka is my…what do you call it? First name?” He says, at last. “Using it in this context is…inappropriate. Please call me Reigen, if you would, Bouchard-san.”

“Of course. My mistake, Mr. Reigen.” Elias does have the decency to look somewhat abashed. “Though, regrettably, I am going to have to ask you to leave the premises within the next twenty minutes, or I will be forced to call security.”

Reigen nods, jerkily, hands stuffed in his pockets.

Jon almost wants to call out to the fraud as he turns to go, grab him by the shoulder, pick another argument, something. He knows he should be happy, be glad that this thorn in his side will finally stop bothering him, but instead he just feels—befuddled. Off-kilter.

What happened to the man who once spent three hours arguing for the “spiritual effectiveness” of entirely performative and useless rituals, saying that ensuring his clients left his office fooled and contented was better than actually uncovering genuine supernatural forces and learning all there was to know about them? Why is he going so-so easily now, when he’s made Jon fight tooth and nail in every debate he’s had with the so-called psychic?

At the door, the con man pauses.

“Bouchard-san. You said I could come back if I had a statement to give?”

Elias shifts in his seat, looking bemused. “W-well, yes. That is a service we do provide. Of course, the statement would have to be genuine, and verifiable as such before we let you back into the Archives.”

“We don’t even do that for most of the rubbish we do take,” Tim mutters under his breath, and though Jon is glad he’s not the one being shot a quelling look, he does have to agree.

The con man turns back.

He’s got that smirk on his face that immediately puts Jon’s hackles up on instinct, prepared to argue against whatever inane point he’s come up with now to defend his phony psychic title.

“Gotcha.” Reigen says, far too cheerfully. «Ja ne.»

Then he strolls out of the office, as cool as a cucumber.

Jon could even swear he hears him whistling as he makes his way down the stairs.

There’s a moment of stunned silence.

“I’d do him.” Sasha pipes up, unhelpfully.

“Sasha!” Martin hisses, scandalized. “D-don’t you have a, a—”

“Oh, I don’t have to worry about that.” She remarks, far too blasé for someone in a newly committed relationship. “Tom’s heard about him too, and he agreed he’s just our type.”

“And I’m not?” Tim jokes, but there’s a hard edge to it that Jon’s found himself increasingly familiar with in the past few weeks.

Sasha shrugs with a mischievous little smile, as if that mattered very little to her.

Elias coughs. “Right. Well. Whatever your relations to Mr. Reigen are, please try to limit them to outside the workplace in future.”

The rest of the intervention is surprisingly subdued. Elias gives Jon access to the footage from the cameras in the rest of the Institute, and Tim bodychecks him on the way out of the office, muttering about how nice it must be to never face any consequences for his actions. Sasha follows, the way she won’t meet his eyes a condemnation in its own right.

Even Martin doesn’t say anything to him, just bites his lip and hurries past back down to the Archives. It doesn’t sting. It doesn’t.

Even as he settles in to watch and rewatch the CCTV records of Gertrude’s last week alive, Jon can’t shake the ridiculous feeling of foreboding that’s dogged him since Reigen left.

Most of him wants to say it comes from the fact that despite the fact that Reigen has not appeared in any of the camera records for the Magnus Institute before he started his term as Head Archivist in 2016, isn’t banning him from the Archives just letting the con man run around London with impunity, with no way for Jon to ascertain his movements or motives? That instead of solving a problem, Elias has just given a potential murderer free reign to escape?

But a small part of Jon, one that never could deny the sensation of being watched, that is frozen in second-hand terror whenever he reads a Statement, knows, Knows that it this stems more from the idea that the fraud will actually accomplish what Elias has unwittingly challenged him to do.

The illogical but pervasive surety that he will do so.

Jon’s not sure if he’s more afraid that Reigen Arataka will vanish entirely, another unfortunate victim become an unsolved mystery.

Or that he’ll come back, and bring whatever he’s managed to unearth on his insane quest with him.

[ssscentral]

Starry Eyes | For Kas

Summary: A movie night is nothing compared to what Namjoon has actually planned for your birthday.

pairing: Namjoon x reader

rating: GA

genre: tooth-rotting fluff !! some crack too

warnings: kissing. kim namjoon’s existence, namjoon is very cheesy

wc: 2.8k

member: Rid & Melody || @taegularities & @hoebii 

a/n: this was written for our beautiful, amazing, intelligent, gorgeous friend @voiceswithoutlips !!! happy, happy birthday - we love you so so much, baby, and not even this fic can express how much you mean to us. here’s to many more years of annoying each other !! <333 also, thank you so much @oftenderweapons​ for beta’ing this, precious !! :-*

The growling of the clouds woke you up.

A storm this early in the morning? That was surely unexpected and unusual. Not that you minded though — not only was it your favourite weather due to its aesthetics, but it calmed you in some odd way as well. However, while you were thoroughly enjoying the sound of the rain, something in the back of your mind reminded you that you were missing something important; something you’d even thought of before falling asleep.

And when you sat up, your eyes automatically shifted to the open window, a small curse escaping your lips as you pulled the blanket away and half sprinted to close it. Yes, rain was cool and all, but it had no business wetting your whole bedroom floor, and you had no wish of mopping the floor right after waking up.

You couldn’t help but cringe as you felt water on the floor while shutting the window, cursing at whoever had opened it last night in the first place. Thankfully, however, the amount of water that the wind had brought wasn’t much. It would dry in a moment, you thought, no need to clean it up. Nope. 

With that, you slunk back towards the bed, ready to return to the land of dreams.

As you were getting cosy again, your phone started vibrating incessantly. Mentally cursing at whatever the reason was for your phone to be buzzing so much, you laid there contemplating if you should just grab the device and chuck it out the window into the ongoing storm. No, control yourself. You don’t have the money to do that.

Grabbing the phone, you didn’t even bother checking what was on it, rather just switching it off in sheer spite. Laying there for a moment after that, you tried going back to sleep but soon realised that you weren’t sleepy anymore.

Grumbling, you decided to wake up the sleeping man beside you. Why? Because if you had to be up so early, then he had to as well.

His eyebrows furrowed as you shook his body, his hand coming up to rub his eyes until he let out an annoyed “What?”

But when he saw your mischievous grin and face so close to his, a smile appeared on his lips, the perfect dimples so deep you wanted to hide in them. The grin of a clown had nothing on the pretty man next to you.

“What?” you asked him with a tilt of your head, eyebrows raising as he pulled you down.

“What do you mean ‘what?’”

“Why are you looking at me like that?” 

The brightness in his expression disappeared slowly as confusion took over, blinking a few times in disbelief until he inquired, “Don’t you remember?”

Remember what?

The cogs in your brain started to rotate again as you thought about his question — and although you soon realised what he was hinting at, you acted oblivious, the need to annoy him too strong to ignore.

“Ah, is it Wednesday already? My assignment is due today,” you groaned, rolling your eyes.

Shaking his head, Namjoon gave you a questioning look. “Babe, I’ve been looking forward to this since this year started and managed to remember it, but you didn’t?”

It was your turn to give him a confused look, brows furrowing. “Why would you be looking forward to the due date of my assignment,” you asked, “actually, how did you look forward to it? We were given the work last week.” 

Before he could reply, you gasped - trying desperately to not burst out in laughter at his face. “Oh my god. Are you psychic?” you fake whispered, acting as if you were asking for the recipe to eternal life.

Namjoon contemplated his life choices as he looked at you baffled, eyes nearly hollow as he shook his head. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Are you sure, because-”

“Babe, just…” he placed a hand on his face, fingers massaging his temples for a second, “Happy Birthday.”

You looked at him with a playful, devilish grin, brushing your chin with your fingers before you exclaimed, “Oh! It’s my birthday!... What’s a birthday again?”

Namjoon tried to suppress the smile that threatened to surface, tongue running along the inside of his cheek before he pulled you into his chest tightly. “Okay, now you’re just fucking with me.”

“What? Me? No,” you said, laughing into his shirt as he squeezed you lovingly, “Why fuck with you when I can fuck you?”

You felt the arms around you loosen before he threw you next to him, the sight too endearing to hold your laughter in. “I hate you.”

“I love you, too, baby. But if you keep pouting, I will bring mint-choco.”

“You hate that, too?” He looked offended but curious as well, one eyebrow cocked at you as he waited for your answer.

You barely shrugged, strands of hair wrapping around your finger. “I wouldn’t be eating it, you would.”

“Why do you hate me?”

You lifted your body, giving him a kiss with a clearly audible muah-sound as you said, “I don’t, baby.”

“My doubt increases the more you threaten me.”

You clicked your tongue, booping his nose. “Then stop giving me reasons to threaten you, sweetheart.”

And when he calmed down, you yawned, listening to the storm as it slowly died down until you finally asked, “So, cooking risotto, baking cake and watching lame movies - that’s the plan for today, right?”

“If we finish all of it, yes,” Namjoon agreed, smiling sweetly - a gesture you found harmless enough to suspect anything behind it.

Jumping from the bed, you tilted your head, stretching out your hand as if you were talking to a child, “Up, up, then.”

Without further annoyance and teasing, the day had passed exactly as you’d expected: with endless giggles, flour on your face (and ass), bad jokes and a near death experience with Namjoon somehow tripping over nothing and barely avoiding a concussion. Finally, he’d managed to serve something somewhat edible while you’d handled the beautiful cake, it was already late, dusk passed and stars twinkled in the clear night sky.

The storm had long vanished and made way to a crystal clear sight - perfect for you to cuddle up and laugh about flopped movies all night long. Stuffing more of the icing and toppings of the cake into your mouth, you barely noticed when he shifted, assuming that he was only going to the bathroom when he pulled you up with him.

Surprised by his sudden move, you looked into his dark, shiny eyes, a questioning look making him speak up, “Do you trust me?”

Scary. One would think a sentence like this meant doom, but the way he looked at you, the fondness and affection so apparent in his gaze, made you simply nod.

“What if I told you there’s something I want to show you that’s a lot better than these movies?”

Then, you broke, eyes rolling as you asked, “Better than badly dubbed Jurassic Park? You have to convince me, Mister Kim.” 

He laughed as he brought his nose to yours, rubbing against it for a second before he pressed a gentle kiss against your lips. When he backed away, he mumbled a “Stay right here” before disappearing into your room. You remained standing at your spot, craning your neck.

“Huh?” was the only sound that left you when he came back with two thin jackets, handing you yours before he took your hand, grabbing the keys and gently urging you out of the apartment.

“Where are we going?” you asked, clutching his hand as he led you to god knew where.

“To the magical lands of Narnia,” he replied, snorting at his own words. He saw an opportunity to tease you and he would be damned if he didn’t take it.

Not one to back down, however, you replied, “Wouldn’t that be through our closet then, Mr. Smartass?”

Rolling his eyes, Namjoon chose to ignore your words, pushing open the door to the roof - making you raise an eyebrow.

“Did you bring me here to push me off for all the comments I’ve made today?” you asked, “‘Cause not only is that illegal, it’s also my birthday so that would be quite rude of you.”

Namjoon rolled his eyes, shaking his head as he answered. “If I wanted you dead, I’d much rather poison you.”

Putting a hand on your chest, you gasped. “How scandalous! Though the food you let me taste did make me suspicious,” you said as if deep in thought. 

Namjoon gave you a flat look, not impressed with your jab at his cooking skills. “Do you not want your gifts? Is that it?”

You perked up at the mention of gifts — plural —, looking at him innocently, “Nooo, I do. Gimme, gimme!”

Approaching the edge of the roof further, you noticed a small table, surprisingly dry and decorated with two little flowers and two weird looking glasses. You looked at him in question, pointing at the objects silently until you’d gathered enough words on your tongue to ask, “When did you do this?”

“I mean, this table is always here, but the rest… uh - remember when I told you that I had to take out the trash but took too long to come back?” When you nodded, he moved his head with you as if to indicate Yes, back then.

“And the glasses?” you inquired as you picked one up, faintly recognising them as those one uses to wear at nights when-

“Wait. Wait. I think I remember reading something about an eclipse somewhere.” You watched his expression change, the nervosity fleeing until he gave you a knowing look. “Oh, wait, really now?”

“Why is that so hard to believe?” He grinned at you, his pretty dyed silver hair floating in the wind as he gestured for you to take a seat. “We’ve looked at the stars before.”

You did as he asked, scanning the table for all its content before landing on a card. Picking it up, you couldn’t help but coo at how cute it was. The card had a cake on it’s center with what seemed to be balloons beside it, Namjoon’s beautiful handwritten ‘Happy Birthday’ on top as a banner. 

“Aww Joonie, you weren’t joking when you said you’d let your niece draw for my next birthday!” you gushed, failing to notice how he gave you an offended look. 

He cleared his throat to get your attention away from the card, “Actually, I made that myself.” 

Your eyes widened at that, lips pressing together so hard that it hurt as you tried not to burst out in laughter. You coughed, trying to mask the chuckles that still left your lips, “Oh babe. That’s um.. I love the card! The attention to all the details on the little cake is so cute!”

He would’ve remarked something snarky, you knew it. But instead, he pointed to the glasses, both of you placing them on your noses before you looked up just in time. Any laughter and giggle left you when you lost yourself in the view above you, mesmerised by the simple natural phenomenon that had you awestruck.

Floating in the eternal void called space, the Earth finally aligned with the sun and moon perfectly, shifting in between and colouring the latter a faint red. It was almost as if your planet’s natural satellite had become angered at the interruption of the sun’s illumination, separated from its lover and showing it in the furious hues of red and orange.

You laughed a little at the thought, sighing right after as your hand moved to find the one of your own lover, clutching it until he moved closer. His fingers left yours soon though, his arm instead wrapping around your shoulder as he pulled you in, your head resting on his chest comfortably as you watched the beauty in the sky silently. With how the colours of the moon changed slowly, the stars were momentarily forgotten, the soft breeze of the spring day grazing your cheeks pleasantly.

And as soon as everything had started, it had ended as well, the Earth finally reconciling the couple in your solar system and you stretched your legs, looking at him in awe. He was folding the glasses in his hands, teeth nibbling at his lower lip nervously without looking at you.

“Joonie,” you called before his stare met yours, eyes so big and confused at his own name that you knew something was off.

But he softened soon, gaze shifting from yours to your nose and settling on your lips. Without a warning, his hand cupped your face softly, mouths colliding and moving tenderly. When he backed away, you smiled, asking, “You’re distracting yourself from the pretty view because of kisses.”

“You’re the prettiest view though.”

“You know exactly what I mean,” you sang-song, wiping the hair away from his eyes.

He pressed you closer, still looking at your lips longingly, his expression nearly melancholic as he whispered, “The eclipse is over.”

“Still.”

“You’re here in my arms. The stars, sun and moon? They aren’t.” Despite loving you more than he’d ever considered possible, his lips on yours were the only thing that could distract him from his nervousness, his pounding heart and his shaking limbs.

Your smile melted his insides entirely, your features so soft and inviting that he couldn’t help but let out an overwhelmed sigh, fingers only pressing into you harder as you said, “I’d totally forgotten about the eclipse today.”

“Well, I’d been planning this for quite some while. Wanted to show you something that’s almost as fascinating as you.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, it is.” The chairs were uncomfortable, but with him, things always felt peaceful and calming, no space to complain ever.

“Okay then,” you started, kissing his cheek just once, “then show the birthday girl how fascinating she is for you.”

“Are you sure I should?”

And here was the nervous nibbling and distressed gaze again, by now worrying you a little as he took a deep breath. “Are you okay?” you asked, eyebrows furrowed. “Did I say something wrong?”

Namjoon was quick to shake his head, waving his hand to dismiss your worries, “You could never, baby.”

“Then what’s up, why do you look so nervous?”

He fidgeted on his spot for a second, trying to come up with the right words to say. “Well, you see, Y/N,” he started, slowly going down on one knee as he pulled out a velvet box from his pocket.

Your breath hitched as you looked at him in shock. Was he going to do what you thought he was?

“You know, I was always a happy, optimistic person and didn’t think life could get better, more wholesome with everything I already had,” he started, taking the glistening in your eyes as a good signal as he continued, “But that was until I met you.”

You could feel the warm tears run down your cheeks and onto the ground, your nails digging into your palms, twitching to reach out for him and hug him as close to you as possible.

“The way you just got me, how you understood me and how we can spend all the nights under this damn sky, look at all the stars and eclipses and shooting stars, and their beauty will still never compare to you. We talk about nothing and everything without any judgement, bicker about the stupidest things but also delve into such deep talks the next second, that’s the happiness you make me feel.” 

There was a clear pause, still something his heart carried, a few words he wanted to say that were the sole reason you didn’t drop to your knees and pressed your lips against his.

“And frankly, I want to keep feeling like this forever,” he said, his voice shaking at the end as the nerves took over yet again. Opening the box in his hand, he presented a beautiful ring that glinted under the moonlight as he finally asked, “So, what do you say, Y/N? Want to make me the happiest man alive and spend the rest of our lives together?”

And finally, your knees gave out, cheeks aching from how hard you were smiling as you pulled him in for a passionate kiss, whispering ‘yes’ over and over again.

Pulling back from you, he looked into your eyes, his own looking as if they were shining. “Are you sure?” he asked, his wide anticipation filled eyes reminding you of a puppy.

“Of course I am! Of course, Joon, I love you so much,” you replied, pulling him back into another kiss, smiling as you felt him put the ring on your finger. 

You broke the kiss, looking down to inspect the ring that sat on your finger. “It’s beautiful.”

Namjoon smiled, pulling you into his embrace and placing a kiss on top of your head. “Not as beautiful as you.”

if you liked the story, don’t forget to like/reblog or send us an ask !! <3

[bunnys-beetlejuice-blog]

come on in, folks, i got some kind of goof ass Beetlejuice/Evil Dead crossover for you to enjoy.

He’s eighteen, and it’s Saturday, which means that he and Lydia are wandering around Manhattan, looking for trouble to get into. Lydia, eleven and ever his little shadow, is standing next to him, as they take a moment, on the busy New York street corner, to sip their boba and think about their next move. They were meant to be watching some horror movie that had looked alright from the previews, but ended up being so stupid, it wasn’t even fun, and the Deetz siblings had found themselves walking out, one hour poorer but a bucket of overly butter saturated movie popcorn richer. “I still can’t believe how bad that was,” Lydia says, again, huffing, because they’d actually paid money to see that stinker, instead of sneaking in, which is their usual habit. “Ya get one big name attached an’ everyone apparently stops givin’ a shit. Musta figured th’ droolin’ masses would eat it up,” he agrees, and he slurps up the last of his tapioca balls, and then proceeds to eat the plastic straw. “Is it too much to ask that characters actually be interesting, and, I don’t know, behave like normal human people?” Lyds bitches, as BJ takes a bite out of his cup, too. She glances up at him, dryly. “I mean, I guess maybe my standards for normality are low, but still.”

He grins at her. “Whatever could you possibly mean, sister dearest?” he puts on a posh, almost transatlantic accent, and she rolls her eyes, and sucks boba up in her straw, then shoots the pearls at him like a pea shooter. He snorts and laughs.

It’s a good day, despite the letdown at the movies. It’s nearly that time of year, just about the start of his seasonal depression, as the sun becomes shy and things go cold and gray. Still, there’s some time left with the sunshine, so he’s drinking it up, savoring it, and it feels good, to stand here with Lyds, and talk about nothing. “Alright, come on, let’s second act it,” he grins, and she perks up. “I think Wicked’s playing!” “Wicked’s always playin’.” “Well, I’m not sitting through Hamilton, it’s a Saturday. I’m not learning if I don’t have to.” “Totally fuckin’ fair. Music Man, maybe?” “Hugh Jackman’s weirdly brick shaped head freaks me out.” “There’s gotta be a show we can sneak into,” BJ frowns, scratching at the scruff of his chin, and then he catches a scent he’s never smelled before, as Lydia puzzles through their remaining options. It’s like death, sort of, but not. Like death warmed over, or death, refried. He takes his sister’s hand, and leads her away from the street corner, following the smell, nose in the air, pupils blown wide, and Lydia laughs. “Great, time to go poke a dead thing. That’s more fun than The Last Four Years, at least.” She’s seen him go like this before, and thinks she knows what to expect.

Neither of them know how to react when they follow the scent down an alleyway and see the violent fight happening in front of them.

Parked at the far end of the alleyway is a car, some 70’s make that he doesn’t know enough about such things to name, and between it, and the Deetz siblings, is an one handed man absolutely going feral on a group of three refried dead smelling zombie… things. “Deadly-vu,” he hears Lydia whisper, as they watch the man perform a scissor kick that sends a zombie head flying. It bounces like a basketball against the brick wall that makes the alleyway, rolls, and lands at the Deetz sibling’s feet. There’s a beat, as they stare at it, and it stares back, before the head on the ground opens its mouth and speaks. “DEMON!” it shrieks, and then it makes the life ending choice to roll at Lydia, teeth bared, and his boot is going through it, crushing through the skull like an overly juicy bug under his heel. He takes a second to wipe the gore from his sole onto the pavement. “Maybe Wicked could be good,” he turns and says to Lydia, who responds by ducking behind him, because the body the head formerly belonged to seems to be stumbling at them, clutching something in it’s boiled and infected and puss covered arms, and it thrusts the thing at BJ, before falling down and collapsing into dust. It’s a book. Some kind of creepy old demon book, from the look of it. He wrinkles his nose in vague disgust, and then takes a sniff. If the zombie things are refried death, this thing is a whole fucking Mexican food buffet of it, and it makes his head spin in a way he’s never felt before. He kind of likes it. He’s about to give the cursed reading material a tentative lick before a boom rings out from in front of them- the one handed man has pulled a sawed off shotgun off his back, and dispatched another corpse thing. There’s one left, and it’s circling the man, who by this point is so blood covered, he looks like he was tricked into being prom queen, or something.

“Is it just me, or do you freaks just keep gettin’ uglier?” the man quips, and the corpse lunges, a stumbling move which earns it the butt of the shotgun to the jaw, which goes flying. The zombie is shot through the gut, and drops, but is a twitching, squirming mess. BJ’s seen enough horror movies to know that thing is getting back up. The stranger has apparently, too. He takes a moment to reload the shotgun, then double taps, blowing clean through the thing’s skull. He blows at the slightly smoking barrels of his sawed off, twirls it, and holsters it, re-slipping it onto his back. It’s a pretty cool move, actually, and the siblings watch in rapt attention. It takes the three remaining people (well, two people, one demon,) in the alley a moment to actually focus on each other, and there’s silence, before the stranger speaks. “Uh,” says the man, covered in blood, and Lydia peaks out from behind BJ, and stares at him, with big eyes. “Kids,” he hears the man mutter. “Great, just what I need, a coupla kids, gettin’ in my way.. Hey, kiddies,” he says, louder, with a smile, which might be really charming when he’s not soaked in rot and blood, but the effect at the moment is not as sincere and friendly as he clearly thinks it is. “Looks like you two little heroes managed to wrangle my book away from those deadites. You wanna do your pal Ash a favor, and hand it over?” He makes a “come here” motion with his stump arm, and then seems to realize that’s not so appealing, because he tucks that appendage behind his back, worried, suddenly, about scaring them. As if a man with a missing hand is the weirdest thing they've seen in the last five minutes.

“What the fuck,” Lydia says, and BJ can’t help but agree with that sentiment. Also, he feels a vague sense of sudden responsibility for this weird old tome. It doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of thing a human should have. Maybe those zombies… deadites? Maybe they were trying to get back what was stolen from them. Though he’s not charitable enough to assume that they’re the good guys in this feud. The stranger, Ash, takes a careful step forward. “It’s alright,” he says, like he’s talking to a wild animal he’s trying to tame, and not a teen and preteen, respectively. “I’m not gonna hurtcha. Just need to get my book back.”

A sudden screeching wind roars down the alleyway, and both living humans react, ducking, as it bellows and swirls around them, kicking up dust and trash and chunks of leftover deadite. “Demon! Aid us!” BJ feels a presence in front of his face, something he can’t see, but a great, ancient something, reaching out to him, demanding, begging, pleading, for him to assist in whatever macabre goal it wants to meet. He responds by sticking his unglamoured tongue out at it. “Ewww, gross. No.”

The thing shrieks again, and makes a beeline for Lydia, which is just about the stupidest thing it could have done, because he drops his glamour fully and snarls, gives the ancient being a psychic push back, and he sends the thing that cannot be seen flying, out of the shady darkness of this alleyway, past what he assumes to be Ash’s car, and out onto the city street, into the sun. It shrieks and moans and curses him. He flips it off, as it dissipates. The vibe in the air, however, tells him it’s not “dead,” just gone.

Ash straightens up and looks at him. BJ’s already slipped his human disguise back on, so the effect is that Ash has just seen what seems to be a slightly too pale and definitely overweight human teen somehow push back an ancient evil, totally unaffected. Now it’s his turn to let out a confused, “What the fuck?”

“Come on, BJ!” Lydia grabs her big brother’s arm and pulls him away, running from the gore and the confused zombie slayer. “Wait, kids-!” Ash rounds the corner, after them, but the Deetz siblings are already gone, disappeared into thin air, flash stepping the span of blocks in the blink of an eye, and they don’t stop until Lydia, sick from the teleportation, gives his hand a squeeze. They appear on a rooftop, confusing and traumatizing some pigeons that had been roosting.

“Wait, why did we run?’ BJ asks, and Lydia looks at him like he’s a moron. “Because that guy was clearly a monster hunter! And kind of really good at it!” she says. He mulls that over, and smiles. “Worried for your big bro?” he bats his eyelashes at her, and she responds by slugging him in the gut, which he reacts the barest amount to. “Last thing I want is to explain to mom and dad how you ended up with a shotgun blast through your skull,” she says, and crosses her arms, before leaning forward, to study the book he’s still holding. “So. What is that?” He grins. “Wanna open it an’ find out?” Read the rest of the first chapter here!

[anjuschiffer]

Amira Wayne - Chapter 19

There’s no way I’m going to keep dragging out this chapter... so here’s the next chapter! Enjoy :3

Chapter 19: Discovery

-

P.Tag: @theatreandcomicfreak @damianette-is-life @toodaloo-kangaroo @elijahcrevan @vixen-uchiha @nathleigh

Tag: @we-want-mini-mini @ramos123 @bluesimani @redscarlet95 @greatcatblaze @promiswords @fantasiame @corabeth11 @anonymously-odd @alexandriamw @officiallydarkgeek @galla02006 @maleive07

Special thanks to @m3owww for helping me with translations!

-

MASTERLIST | FIRST | PREV | AO3

The dreaded school bell rang, signaling everyone that school was over.

Despite Christmas being right around the corner, no one was in the Christmas spirit. After all, how could they after what happened?

“Adrien, Sabrina.” Miss Bustier brought to attention, watching as the two glared at Lila as she walked out the classroom with a few of the girls of the class. 

Lila shrunk into herself, a single tear making its way into her eye as she felt Adrien’s eyes burn at the back of her head.

“Yes, Mlle Bustier?” Adrien asked once he saw Lila out of vision, noticing that Nino was waiting for him right outside the classroom. Ever since that day, the trio of friends traveled in a pack, leaving no one by themselves. 

“I was wondering if you could take some classwork and some break work to Chloe, seeing as the two of you are close friends.” Bustier handed a few papers to Adrien, Adrien gently placing them inside his bag. “And Sabrina. How is Marinette?” She dared to ask after handing Sabrina a large manila envelope. 

With Chloé not being in school, Sabrina had to step up as Vice President and do the Class President’s job of dropping off homework to those who missed class. 

Mlle Bustier didn’t expect for Sabrina to scowl, an expression she never saw on the girl ever since she first started teaching her seven years ago.

“Mlle Bustier, shouldn’t you have already made a home visit by now? Actually, in this type of situation, you should’ve done a home visit the day after the incident. But you didn’t. It’s been two week since then.” Sabrina recalled, taking the manila envelope and walking out of the class, waiting next to Nino.

Adrien didn’t miss the way their teacher shrunk into herself, before attempting to bounce back up.

“I’ll try and make a visit later on today. Ever since the incident, the school-“

“Sabrina has a point, Mlle Bustier. With all due respect, I think you should’ve already visited Marinette and have checked for yourself how she’s doing. After all, that’s part of your job.” Adrien bluntly stated. “And a piece of advice? I know you’re trying to act as if all of this isn’t bothering you, but I suggest you stop acting as if nothing happened. Yes, the akuma happened two week ago, but everyone is still recovering from it.

After all, those memories don’t disappear no matter how long ago it happened. So if you would excuse me, I have some dear friends to visit.”

—

It’s been two weeks since the Banshee incident...that’s 14 days since both Marinette and Chloé haven’t been at school...and 14 days without a single akuma attack, the longest period of rest the team had ever had since given their miraculouses. 

When Chat Noir raced to initiate Plan B with Ryuuko and Osprey, they were halted due to someone else beating them to the Eiffel Tower. 

A guy their age had been the one to get rid of the akuma that had been controlling Marinette and not only that. He had also used Ladybird’s power to reverse the aftermath of the battle and bring back Marinette.

While from a distance he could easily be mistaken for Ladybird, up front, you could tell it wasn’t her.

Said one-time vigilante cradled Marinette in his arms, something that broke Chat upon seeing how shaken she was about the whole thing.

Usually all of those affected by Hawkmoth’s manipulation wouldn’t remember a single thing about their akumatization...but Chat knew…

Something caused her to remember every single detail.

“Who-” Chat Noir started, only for the ‘new’ Ladybug to cut him off.

“Ladybird was the one who told me to finish the job for her. She too had been affected by Banshee’s powers before she was even able to transform. She also told me to relay you a message. Do not worry about her identity being exposed, for she was wearing a mask before giving me her miraculous.” The guy didn’t take off the miraculous, making Chat wonder what exactly was going on.

Where was Ladybird? “Ladybird?” Crap, he said that outloud. “Don’t worry too much about her. She’ll be back the next time the Ladybug miraculous is in use.” Lifting Marinette with ease, Chat wondered if that was because of the magic or because he was able to easily do so himself. “Meanwhile, I’ll take her home. Want to lead the way, or?”

“I’ll lead.” Chat solemnly said. “Just make sure you don’t drop her.”

“Roger that.”

After dropping Marinette to her home, Chat never saw that guy again. Not like he had all the time to mull over him. 

He had to ensure Chloe and Lila’s safety as well, although he didn’t want to do so for the latter. 

He first met up with Gris, who had moved Lila inside the Montparnasse Tower. While she wasn’t psychically hurt, mentally, she was greatly injured. 

Chat explained to her of the next step they were going to take next, explaining how she will have to go to mandatory therapy sessions to ensure her well-being, how he will be escorting her to each one personally so that she doesn’t try and worm herself out of them when she said she didn’t need it. 

“You may think we’re only doing this out of duty, which you’re not wrong, but it is also something Ladybird herself wanted to incorporate in Paris. Something about the lack of a rehab system in Paris.” Chat answered when Lila asked why he was bothering to make sure she was fine. “Also something about preventing a second ‘G.’”

After setting up the next therapy sessions with Lila, Chat and Gris headed over to where Ryuuko and Carapace were dealing with Chloe’s rattled behavior.

“She’s inconsolable.” Ryuuko said when Chat asked why Carapace had a shield around him and Chloe. “She tried to run off multiple times, but we always managed to keep her contained.”

“Let me get someone who can help us.” Chat left the group, dropping his transformation in a safe area before returning as Adrien. “Chloe!”

At the call of her name, Chloe stopped clawing her way from the force field Carapace had placed up, looking over to Adrien. 

She threw herself at him and started to cry into his shoulder, crying how she saw her parents abandon her, how her friends also abandoned her. How she witnessed her best friend’s deaths, Adrien not noticing the way the team stiffed upon hearing their civilian names being said. 

Before spiraling into more crying, Chloé mentioned being a failure of a friend, as she couldn’t stop Marinette from becoming an akuma. 

Adrien didn’t once let go of Chloe, telling the team his gratitude for helping her. 

He guided her to her home, wondering where things were going to play out now that the team took the largest blow yet in their fight against Hawkmoth.

But for now, he knew he had to stay by Chloe’s side. 

---

As Sabrina sat on a kitchen stool, she scrunched up the manila envelope in her hand as her thoughts went back to what caused Marinette to lash out the way she did and caused her to turn into Banshee. 

If only Lila didn’t lie about knowing him. If she didn’t lie about him, then her friends wouldn’t be-

“-Sabrina. Sabrina dear, are you alright?” Sabine asked, worried.

“Mlle Cheng! I’m sorry! I got lost in my thoughts and-”

“It’s alright. I’m guessing that’s for Marinette?” Sabine gestured towards the envelope in her hand. 

“Yes. They’re homework assignments and a few notes from Mlle Bustier.” Sabrina said, handing them over to Sabine. “Oh! Here are my notes for her. She’d probably find these more useful than-”

A scream pierced the kitchen air, Sabrina watching as Selina appeared out of nowhere and rushed up the stairs with two other women right behind her, Sabine quickly grabbing her phone and dialing a number. “Mlle Cheng, what is going-”

“I’m sorry about this Sabrina, but you’ll have to leave. Now.”

Without another word, Sabrina nodded, grabbing her bag and started to head downstairs when she spotted M.Wayne go upstairs, two others right behind him…

Was that Oliver Queen?!

Sabrina watched as the trio walked right into the Dupain-Cheng home, wondering what M.Wayne, M.Queen and the other man were doing there.

What is going on?

--

Selina sat on the chaise lounge, Amira letting out shuddering breaths as she laid against her chest.

When Selina had heard Amira’s screams, she felt her heart stop for the umpteenth time that day.

Ever since that day, ever since the day of the appearance of Banshee, Amira had restless nights, recurring nightmares throughout the day and refusing to see anyone except for Selina and her two therapists. 

“Poor pumpkin.” Harley sympathized, draping a blanket over Amira and Selina. “She shouldn’t have to go through all this. She’s just a kid.”

“To think you’re stupid boyfriend-” Ivy started, making sure that the daisies scattered around the room were doing all right...until Harley jabbed Ivy at her side. 

“Pammy,” she gestured to a silent Selina, “sure, Brucie had some fault to this, but it wasn’t-”

“I know, I know.” Ivy sighed, spraying some water on the daisies. “The tiny magically butterfly-”

“Listen, I didn’t convince Bruce to let you two out of Arkham so that the two of you would shit on the man I’m about to marry and what’s he done.” Selina sighed. “I’m sorry, Ivy. It’s just- Bruce could’ve prevented all this if-”

“Of course he could’ve! If he weren’t such an idiot!” Ivy growled. “Selina, seriously? What do you see in-”

“Pammy, Pammy! Remember? Magical butterflies? Get mad and they’ll come for ya.” Harley reminded Ivy, placing her hands on Ivy’s shoulders. “How about we take a stroll and enjoy the sun a bit, eh? After all Brucie did promise us that he’d-”

“Alright. But just until I calm down, alright? And then back to our hotel, okay? Not fond of the fact of being mind controlled by a stupid butterfly man. Haven’t been there and don’t plan on-”

“Then we better get going Red!” Harley grinned, guiding Ivy to the hatch before stopping to turn to Selina. “Selina. Everything is going to be alright. and if you need us to talk some sense into that boy of yours, Ivy and I have your back.”

With that, the two were gone, leaving Selina alone.

Selina pushed a few strands away from Amira's face, placing them behind her ear. Because Amira always kept a straight face and would directly tell you her opinions, that led many to think she was mature for her age. But they were wrong about that.

She was still a child…

A creak at the floor snapped Selina from her thoughts, watching as Bruce peaked into the room.

“How is she doing?” Bruce asked, eyeing the bean bag and bringing it close to where Selina was. He tucked away a loose hair strand from Amira’s face, watching as she flinched from his touch. 

He watched as his daughter turned away from him and snuggled closer against Selina. 

“Not any better since that day. Even Harley is having trouble getting through to her. Doesn’t help that Amira knows her background with the Joker. Doesn’t trust Harley one bit.” Selina looked over at Bruce before breaking the silence. “You can’t keep in doing this to her Bruce.”

“Selina, she’s my child. My daughter. My one and only daughter.” Bruce reasoned. 

“Bruce. She’s 13. Turning 14 in half a year. She’s not the tiny girl who-“

“I know.” Bruce quietly said, dropping onto the bean bag. “I know Selina, but even so, I can’t help but keep treating her as one.” Bruce places his hand over hers. “You’ve seen first hand the cruelty of Gotham. No one is safe from it, not even Batman. Bruce Wayne? He’s been a target countless times. 

I’ve been held at gunpoint, kidnapped, taken as a hostage, mugged so many times I’ve lost count. To top it off, I’ve been stabbed once when Amira was just a toddler and on the brink of death.

Can you imagine what would happen if word got out that I have a daughter?”

“You’re worrying too much Bruce. And if you’re worried about her safety, you can just-“

“I should’ve worded that better. What would happen if word got out that I have a biological daughter?” 

Selina remained quiet. “The media and people alike swarmed Dick when word got out I adopted him years ago. It’s only gotten worse for him now that he’s 18. Families sending invitations to dinner, some asking for some meetings to see me over how WE should merge with theirs...Dick even gets gifts sent to his apartment, which thankfully he tells the delivery man to always send back or use it for themselves. Marriage is the last thing that should be in his mind.

Right now he’s worried about Slade who made an appearance again at Gotham. We aren’t truly sure why he is here, but perhaps he’s back to trying to “claim” Dick as his successor. He’s been at it the moment he found out we got rid of the Court’s eyes on Dick.”

Selina didn’t know what to say, after all, she was there when it happened. 

“When word got out that Jason has also been adopted, do you know how many attempted kidnaps were stopped? How many people who he trusted before stabbed him in the back to try and get some ransom off a planned kidnapping?

And then there’s Tim. There’s rumors already floating of how he will be the newest addition to the family. The walls have ears and I’ve already heard the upper ring of idiots planning on a way to get a hold of Tim. 

Not only will Tim be part of Wayne Manor, but he is also still a Drake. Can you imagine the golddigger's imagination growing wild at the thought of Tim having both family’s wealth once he’s older?”

Bruce dug his face into his hands. “Selina, these are happening to my kids, my kids who aren’t biologically mine. So what awaits for the one who is biologically mine? Will it be just as terrifying as the dangers my other kids face, or will it be worse?

I don't want her to be thrown into that kind of life. Not her. I just...I just want her to be able to live her life as a proper child. Without the limelight, without the multiple targets that would arise to her back when-”

“So you believe that keeping her hidden was the best thing to do.” Selina concluded.

“She’s safe inside.”

“But is she happy?” Selina watched as Bruce tensed up at those words. “Bruce, look at her.” He did. “Do you call this happiness?

She took upon a mantle so that she can get your attention, your acknowledgement of her existence. Why? Why does she have to prove this to you? Her father? A father who claims that he adores and loves her to pieces? Do you want to know why?” 

Bruce remained silent. “Your love for her caused you to deprive her of the same love you claim to have on her. Your ambition to keep her safe caused you to stray from her, causing her to stay at a large mansion occupied with two people: herself and Alfred. 

How was she supposed to see your love for her when you spent the entire day at work and then dived into vigilantism in the night?” 

Selina carefully slipped Amira off her, allowing herself to sit properly on the chaise lounge. “You made things worse once when you dismissed her approaches to you, dismissing her from joining training, letting her-”

“I let her join-”

“You let her train when you realized she was opening up to her brothers, not before then. I get it, you wanted them to get along, but not letting her join from the get go wasn’t the decision you should’ve made. You should have-”

“She wasn’t ready.”

“How would you know that before even letting her have a go at it? She already knew the basics-”

“Knowing the basics won’t do you much and you know that Selina, better than anyone else. She didn’t have Dick’s flexibility and precision, Jason’s strength and quick thinking. She only knew the basics and that’s it. If I had allowed her-

“Mu’quin?” Amira groggily asked, turning to look at Bruce and Selina with glassy eyes. She missed the gaped mouth from her father and Selina’s wide eyes.

When did she know Mandarin? “Mu’quin?” Amira asked again once she pulled herself closer to Selina, laying her head on her lap. “Ma’ma, don’t...go.” Amira slurred as she went back to sleep, never seeing the look on Selina’s face.

Bruce watched as Selina fought back tears, her hand placed over her mouth as she let out a shuddering breath. She kept blinking in hopes of getting rid of the tears, but her efforts were in vain.

Tears slid down Selina’s face as she stroked Amira’s hair, watching as she comfortably rested.

Bruce continued to watch the interaction between Selina and his daughter, happy to see how close the two have gotten despite the short time spent with one another…

“Selina.” Bruce looked at his soon-to-be-wife, holding her hand in his own. “I’ve made a decision. I’m staying in Paris.”

—

“It got quiet.” Oliver obviously stated. “ Think-”

“I don’t even want to know about what happened in there.” Barry cut off, running a hand through his hair.

“Everything good?” Oliver asked, noticing Barry’s unusual quietness. “Another meta-”

“Ever since the incident, Wally hasn’t been...himself.” Barry confessed. “He’s refused to take time off missions, constantly finding something to do. When it isn’t that, he’s always here, staying by -”

The apartment door cracked open, causing Barry to shut his mouth and for Oliver to turn to see who just entered.

“Well, speak of the devil.” Oliver muttered. “Wally, what brings you here?”

“I came to visit a friend, although the question stands. What brings you to Paris?”

“He’s here with me.” Bruce informed, Wally snapping his head to the man. “I asked him-“

Wally uppercutted Bruce the moment he stepped off the stairs that led to Amira’s bedroom. Bruce stumbles back as the pain spreads around his face. 

“It’s all your fault!” Wally screamed, about to punch him again, only for Barry to hold him back. “It’s all your fault that Amira is like this!” 

“Woah, Wally, calm-” Barry tried to speak, only to turn to Oliver for help. With a nod, Oliver began to search for a tranquilizer on him. 

“Calm down?” Wally screamed. “Barry, he’s the reason why Amira got akumatized!” Wally snarled, trying to pry himself from Barry’s grasp. “If only he had let Amira say goodbye to her brother, to give Jason a proper goodbye! If only! But you didn’t.” A dry laugh escaped him. “No, instead, you sent her here, with her bottled up emotions...here! An ocean away from her family, her friends! People who cared about her!”

Bruce remained silent, Oliver watching the revelation with wide eyes. “Did you know how worried I was about her when I heard she was no longer a moment away but now an ocean away? Amira, being sent away like she was some kind of- some kind of, ARGH!” Wally yelled, not noticing how Barry had already let go of him.

Instead, Barry let him empty out his heart. After all, he needed it, just like how Bruce needed to listen to the consequences of his actions. “That day she was brought to HQ against her will, when she connected the fact that Kid Flash was me, she threw herself at me. At first I thought it was because we hadn’t seen each other in a while, that she was relieved to see me. But no, it was more than that.

 She cried. And let me tell you something, she rarely cries.” Wally told Bruce, feeling his fists starting to hurt. “She always has a stoic face on, always having her guard up in public in case others want to try and make a fool of her. A mechanism she always has on to fool everyone, even herself. 

So can you imagine the feeling I felt when I saw her crying not only in front of me, but also in front of Superman? In a place she wasn’t familiar with?” 

Oliver watched as Bruce shrunk into himself a bit. “She was hurting Bruce. Not only because of Jason’s death, not only because she didn’t have someone to lean on, but because of you. 

You keep pushing her away, telling her ‘no’ to anything she could come up with to try and stay by your side. How do I know this? Because when we were younger, Dick always told me how he felt guilty for being the one to worsen your relationship with her. He always blamed himself for everything wrong that went between you and her.” Bruce’s eyes widened. “Didn’t know, did you, Great Detective? 

If you didn’t know that about Dick, then what about Amira? While you believed to have been protecting her by pushing her away from anything related to vigilantism, she ended up misinterpreting your good intentions. Every time you told her ‘no,’ do you know how she saw it? What she ended up thinking in her mind?

That being your blood child wasn’t enough to get your love. That she had to do something to prove herself worthy of your attention, even a crumb. So if anyone’s to blame for the current situation, it’s you.”

Wally let out a huff, feeling his chest thousands of times lighter. “If only you gave her the love she deserves, the life she was meant to live, then none of this would’ve happened. Hope you’re glad with the way things turned out.” Wally huffed, grabbing his bags. “When I come back tomorrow, I better not see your face unless it’s an apology to Amira.”

A laugh escaped him. “Then again, it would take more than an apology to fix this bullshit.”

With that, Wally left the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

Oliver and Barry didn’t budge, instead, the two men stood there, not knowing what to do when they saw their friend with a hung head.

“Hey, Bruce, you-”

“First Harley, then Selina and now Wally.” Bruce listed. “How was I the only one-”

“Love is blind.” Oliver spoke, finally finding the energy to approach Bruce. “Even parental. All you can do now is move forward.”

Bruce could only nod.

“However, this doesn’t mean you’re off the hook Bruce.” Oliver crossed his arms. “How the hell did you manage to hide your daughter’s existence for the past…” Oliver trailed.

“13 years,” Barry filled in, “she’s turning 14 in July.”

—

Amira let out a sigh the moment she woke up, rolling to her side, away from the afternoon light…

She quickly picked up her phone, noticing that it was already the next day. She placed it back down, wondering how she slept through most of the day. Then again, it was silent in the apartment for once…

Silence...she probably alone...or so she thought.

“Amira.” She flinched, sitting up to prevent another disadvantage. “Amira, how are you?” Slowly, Amira turned her attention to her father. She looked away, hating that tears started to pool in her eyes. “Amira.”

When was the last time she ever heard her name spoken so softly by her father?

“You were right, you know.” She whispered, sitting up. “As you always are. After all, you are the greatest detective in Gotham...and possibly the world, because yes, I know of the countless times you’ve helped the Justice League solve a case they were stumped on. It’s all Wally would talk about sometimes.”

“Amira.” Bruce was about to get closer, but stood by the bed when he watched her curl into herself, her body tensing. “I...I was actually...wrong.” That caught her attention, Bruce watching her loosen her body a bit.

“You? Wrong? Since when?”

“All this time, I thought I could keep you safe if I kept you hidden from the world and yet, it still managed to find you. Or rather, you managed to find it.” Amira watched as her father finally decided to sit at the edge of her bed, the mattress sinking under him. “You managed to prove me wrong, not only once, but multiple times. 

The first time was when you accepted Jason into the family. Then when you finally pushed aside your grudge and accepted Dick into the family. When you accepted him as Robin. Then after his death, you managed to accept his death and move on from it. To be honest, I envied how easily it looked.”

“Even though it wasn’t. I’m still trying to move from it, even now.” Amira added meekly. 

“Then when you came to Paris and continued to move forward. You took up a mantle without a doubt and went with it. You’ve saved countless lives, protected an entire city...all without me. Without my help or intervention.”  

Bruce finally decided to sit down once he saw the opportunity. “You see Amira, I never thought you were ready to become a vigilante, to fight against the cruelty of the world, to live in it and yet...you proved me wrong. You’ve shown me that you were already ready to live in this society riddled with obstacles. You showed me that you were capable of adjusting to whatever was thrown your way...of acting accordingly to society. 

You’ve shown me that you’re no longer the tiny, defenseless infant brought to our home all those years ago. You’re no longer the waddling toddler who had to be spoon fed and changed, having to be supervised 24/7 or else you would fall and earn a new scrape. You’re no longer the girl who struggled to reach the edge of the Batcomputer’s chair nor the girl who couldn’t swing a proper hit.” Bruce wiped away a tear that slid down Amira’s face. “You’re now my pride and joy, a young lady who can easily defend those around-”

“I can’t!” Amira confessed, wondering if her father’s hand had always been this warm...this caring. She pushed it away. “You’re wrong! I can’t defend myself, I can’t defend those-”

“Yes…yes, you can…” Bruce tried to assure, but it made Amira panic even more. “You have a team, don’t you? A wonderful team at that.”

“Didn’t you see what happened to me? I allowed myself to get akumatized. I-I failed.”

“Amira, you didn’t, you couldn’t-”

“I knew what Hawkmoth was capable of and yet I allowed myself to-”

“Amira,” Bruce called to attention. “This wasn’t your fault.” That shuts her up.

“It wasn’t?” She scoffed. “Who let their emotions get the best of them? Who let themselves get a lie get under her skin? Who let themselves get akumatized so that they could get revenge on that little-I am the leader! 

I should’ve known better than to let him take advantage of me! But what did I do?

I let him. 

I let him use me, manipulate me, manipulate my emotions, my anger to his benefit. I let him get the better of me and he got what he wanted. He got the strongest akuma he had ever wanted. 

He destroyed my team’s confidence, our strength.” Bruce watched as his daughter stayed quiet, looking down at her hands with disgust. “All it took was one slip up...and that’s probably why you’ve been here all this time, isn’t it? You stayed so that you could take me back to Gotham, isn’t that right?”

Bruce remained silent. “Well, isn’t it?” 

“No.” Bruce didn’t miss a moment. “After seeing how well you’ve been handling this situation, of how proud I am of you finding your suspect on your own, I’ve decided to stay. I’m going to help you take down Hawkmoth, Amira. 

Even if it’s the last thing you want from me.”

Amira watched as her father left, watching as she was left alone once again. 

Tikki flew out from her hiding spot, quickly pressing herself against Amira’s face. 

“Are you okay?” Tikki asked. Amira didn’t respond. “Amira, we need to talk.”

“That we do.” Amira looked at Tikki with glazed eyes. “Tikki. Spots on.” Heading to her skylight, Amira hesitated to open it. 

How will the Parisians react to seeing Ladybird again? 

That didn’t matter. After all, this will be the last time any of them will see her. 

—

A knock came from the door, Chloé not budging from her place in her bed. Then her phone buzzed, but it went ignored.

She was surrounded by post-it notes and papers, Ladybird’s pictures mixed with class notes and online articles trying to find who it was behind the black mask. 

She kept sitting as the door opened, Chloé not lifting her eyes once, listening as footsteps approached her. 

“So, what did Mlle Bustier say this time?” Chloé asked, picking up an article that analyzed Ladybird’s appearance based on people who’ve seen her after she would detransform. They only got one of the details right. She did indeed have green eyes. 

“What she said last time: an excuse for not coming. Now I see how easily it was for you to push her around.” Adrien yelped when Chloé threw a pillow at him. “Hey! I’m only the-“

“I’m not like that anymore.” Chloé muttered, jotting down something on her phone. “I’ve changed.” She hated it when people said she ‘hasn’t changed in the slightest,’ that she was still the same old Chloe. 

“I know.”

“I’m changing. And for the better!” She quickly added afterwards, remembering her last therapy session she had just two days ago. Gris had dropped her off, but Chat stubbornly made it his duty to wait for her and drop her off. She thanked him when he dropped her off and bid her a good night. 

“I know.” The two friends sat in silence, Adrien watching as Chloé kept lifting papers and setting them down. A vast difference to the Chloe who didn’t move a muscle a day after the akuma attack. The Chloe who would wake up nightmare after nightmare, begging those around her to come back. “When do you plan on visiting-“

“I...I don’t know.” Chloé breathlessly said, Adrien regretting asking her when he saw her hands shake. It would always happen no matter where she was. As long as Chloe remembered the events of that attack, it would happen without question. “Every...every time I gather the courage to see her, I see her.” Adrien watched as Chloe’s eyes began to cloud. “I see Marinette, I see her glaring at me, looking at me in disgust. Just like how my mother would look at me whenever I would...I would try to get her attention.” 

Chloé trailed off, shrinking into herself. “She would then pick me apart, telling me every visible flaw she could see before turning around and leaving me. Just like-“

“But you know she would-“

“I know she would never! But seeing that, seeing her walk away from me so easily, without turning back, without shedding a single tear,” Chloé let out a sniffle. “It hurt. And what’s even worse, Sabrina and you would follow her. You guys would walk away from me and leave me.

You guys left me...without a second thought...”

“Chloé, you know we would never do-“ Adrien said with a hug. 

“I know.” Chloé sunk further into the gesture. “I know you guys wouldn’t. But I can’t help but-“

“It will never happen.” Adrien promised. “We won’t allow that to happen. Ever.” Chloé would only him as Adrien rubbed circles on her back, the two continuing to sit in silence. “You know…” a hum. “What if we threw a Christmas party?”

“A Christmas party?” Chloe asked for clarification, already planning for it. “That...that would be...nice.”

“Exactly!” Adrien smiled, now holding Chloe’s hands. “It can just be us! And of course, Nino, Sabrina and Marinette! Just us and that's it. A party amongst friends!” He watched as Chloe’s lips turned upwards. She was on board. “So? What you think?”

“Let’s do it.” Chloe said with a smile, getting off from her bed. “I could use the change of pace.”

“Okay then! Want to make the invitations or plan out the-”

“Why would we need invi-” Chloe started, only to stare at Adrien with wide eyes. “No way.” Adrien simply grinned.

--

Once Adrien had left, telling Chloe his plan, Chloe started to clean up her bed, throwing discarded plans into her trash bin while she took a pile of post-it notes to another part of her room. Or more specifically, her closet.

She picked up a control, the back panel of her wardrobe opened up, exposing an all-points bulletin, photos of Ladybird scattered around the wall, red threads crossing each other. Notes and pieces of news articles were firmly placed alongside the photos, a few of them crossed out or labeled ‘debunked’.

Chloe placed a photo of Bruce Wayne near the index card where the name ‘Amira’ was written. Unlike the other photo Chloe had of Bruce, this one showed him entering the Dupain-Cheng Bakery. It was from earlier today. And unlike the other photo Chloe got from the media, this photo was taken by Sabrina.

Whether this was the first time he’s been there or not, one question remained.

“Why exactly are you here, Bruce Wayne? Are you the reason why Ladybird has not been appearing for the past two weeks?” 

--

Days went by when Adrien decided to visit Marinette again, surprised to see the Dupain-Cheng residency filled to the brim with...strangers.

“Adrien. What brings you here?” Selina snapped him from his trance, not blaming the kid for gaping at the sight of the apartment. 

Dick came unannounced to visit Amira for the upmteenth time that week, this time bringing Kor’i and Roy along. They were busy chatting with a disinterested Amira. Bruce was trying to scold Dick for it, to let Amira settle for the evening, but with Wally just a few feet away, it wasn’t exactly easy. Barry, Oliver and Dinah were chatting away with Ivy and Harley, the adults not giving a care in the world about releasing information about their other ‘job.’

“I came by to see Marinette.” Adrien quietly said, his eyes catching how Marinette perked at the sound of her name and how Wally turned to him as well. “But it seems like now’s a bad time. I could-”

“Nonsense, come in. Ignore the others. Marinette could use an excuse right about now.” Selina pulled him in, closing the door behind him. Adrien watched as Marinette weaved her way towards Adrien, Wally right behind her. He watched as the trio they left behind either smirked or smiled.

“Adrien. You literally texted me just an hour ago.” Marinette brought up. “You could’ve-”

“Are you doing anything for Christmas?” Adrien asked, earning a tilt of a head from Marinette and quirked brows from Wally before his eyes studied him. Adrien felt a shiver down his spine. “I just wanted to invite you to a Christmas party, of course! It’s just going to be us and a few friends! Your friend could come as well, if he wants to!” Adrien quickly added.

Ever since he met Wally, something about him threw Adrien off. At first, he thought it was because he was Marinette’s friend from the States. Wally himself had said he was on Winter Break and decided to spend it with Marinette so that they could catch up...until the attack happened. So Adrien brushed his worry as just a concerned friend thing. But ever since Bruce came into the picture, Wally had gone...aggressive. 

“I…” Marinette started, looking over to Selina. “Can I think over it?” Marinette asked, Adrien noticing Wally gave Marinette’s hand a squeeze. “If that isn’t too much to ask.” Adrien smiled.

“You got two days to think about it. Use all the time you need!” Adrien chirped, waving goodbye to everyone before leaving the apartment.

“Are you sure about this Amira?” Wally asked her, Amira noticing his concern. “You don’t have to force yourself to-”

“I’m not forcing myself.” Amira confessed. “I...I do need time to think about it though. I don’t want to make any mistakes while choosing their gifts.”

“You’re getting one for me too, right?” Dick asked, Amira turning to see her brother by her side. 

“I’m not going to if you continue to pester me about it.” That earned a dramatic gasp from Dick.

“My own sister!”

While Wally smiled at seeing Amira starting to act like herself again, he couldn’t help but continue to stay on high alert. 

Ever since the akuma attack, something has been off and he didn’t know why. 

Seems like only time will tell.

--

Two days came sooner than wanted, Amira standing outside the bakery bundled up with Wally by her side, the snow welcoming them. 

While her father didn’t want her to go, nonetheless with Wally, Selina managed to convince Bruce to go back to Gotham, telling him that Gotham was never uneventful during Christmas Eve nor the day after. Begrudgingly, Bruce went, dragging Dick, Ivy and Harley back with him.

Selina assured Amira that she had nothing to worry about, to go to the party and have fun.

“Are you sure you want me to go ahead?” Wally asked, managing to maintain the stack of gifts in his arms balanced. “I can just zoom there, drop off the gifts and then walk you-”

“Wally. I’m going to be okay.” Amira assured him. “I just want to walk there by myself. Think about a few things before facing...everyone.” Wally’s mouth formed a thin line. 

“Amira, you don’t-”

“I’m not forcing myself.” She cut him off. “I do want to see my friends again...after all, it’s been almost three week since I’ve seen any of them.” Wally sighed in defeat, bouncing the gifts before taking a step forward. 

“Fine. But seriously. If you end up not wanting to go, just call me or text me. I’ll be here in a heartbeat and keep you company back home.”

“I know you would.” She watched as Wally began to walk away. “Wally.” He stopped, watching as Amira skipped towards him. 

“Yeah.”

“Thank you, for always being by my side.” Amira said with a smile, placing a knitted hat on him. “An early Christmas gift...for you.”

Feeling the tips of his ear begin to burn, Wally turned away from her.

“Thanks...I’ll see you there, okay?”

“Yup.” Amira watched as Wally walked towards the Agreste manor, letting her smile drop.

She walked towards the park nearby, listening as her foot crunched the snow beneath her. She continued to walk, going as far as reaching the carousel in the middle of the park. The carousel was perfectly still, it’s lights lowly dimmed, allowing Amira to see the untouched snow surrounding it. She looked behind herself to see that the only tracks in the snow were her own...so then...why was she still able to hear the snow crunch?

“Amira.” Amira regretted not keeping a weapon on her, cursing herself for going soft. “Amira.” The voice said again, Amira picking the voice coming from her right. But no one was there, not even a pair of footsteps. But this voice...it sounded the same as the time she was- “Amira.”

Swiveling so that she was now facing the path that led to the park entrance, Amira locked eyes with a woman she swore she never saw before...and yet…

She seemed familiar. Amira felt like she had seen this woman before, an odd memory flashing before her eyes as she remembered having once seen this woman. But where?

“Why do you know my name?” Amira asked, her mind running through different plans in her head on a way to escape and tell Wally or Selina about her dilemma.

“It’s been so long, Amira.” The woman said, approaching Amira, not making a sound as she made footprints in the snow. How Amira hated that the woman ignored her question, but it intrigued her to know that they did indeed meet once before. But then the questions still remained. Who was she? And how did she know her name? “The last time we saw each other, you were just a child, an infant. Barely able to walk, even babble.”

Amira watched as the woman got closer to her, now circling her. “You were such a quiet baby, never fussed about anything.” Amira watched as the woman placed her hands on either side of her face, her brown eyes analyzing her. “Now look at you, all grown up. Just how many milestones have I missed?”

“You still haven’t answered my question. Who are you?”

“I thought you would’ve already had your answer by now.” The woman said, letting go of Amira only to pull her into a tight hug. “I’m your mother, Amira. My name is Talia Al Ghul...and I’m your mu’quin.”

Just as Amira was about to ask if she was Talia, she felt herself limp and soon, she saw black.

--

Wally stood at the entrance of the Agreste manor, tapping his foot as he checked his phone for the umpteenth time. Something was wrong.

“What’s taking her so long? It’s literally just a few blocks from-”

“Is Mlle Dupain-Cheng still not here?” It took everything in Wally to not immediately turn around and glare at the man. While the man did take the time to greet him, there was no way Wally was going to buy his act, especially when Gabriel looked like he had seen death and just got back.

“I’m going to go look for her.” Wally muttered, quickly putting back his coat and hat and going out to look for Amira. 

Going back to where they saw each other just minutes ago, Wally noticed that her footsteps lead straight to the park, deciding to follow them. But when he got to the end and noticed that the footprints didn’t continue to anywhere, Wally panicked. Using Speedforce, he quickly zoomed around the park, looking for any trace of Amira, but found none.

“Where did you go?” Wally asked no one, feeling his head begin to hurt, finding it harder to breathe. His head began to ring and then it happened. He saw Amira reaching out for him before being dragged away.

It was happening again…

He couldn’t protect Amira… he failed her yet again.

A scream pierced that Christmas Eve’s cold air, the scream carrying out to Christmas Day itself.

What a wonderful gift to start Christmas Day.

NEXT

[genaleah]

ANSWERING WILDCARD QUESTIONS

For the first time in about a year maybe??? Some of these might be even older than that.

Yes, it is Korka! I definitely want her involved, she’s a wonderful character and there is a *lot* of fun paranormal stuff going on in this setting that she can help them research. Also, I’d just love for her and Nelson to become friends!

Thank you! I love him a lot, and it’s fun to picture him interacting with the other guys. They’d all make for some interesting uncle figures, but they might not be that great in terms of role models.

OHOHO. Devilish laugh. That’s a wonderful idea, and a good way to keep him occupied at some point. He’s a great character, but he’s incredibly powerful, and I want these dudes to solve their own problems whenever possible. 

A good question! I don’t remember most of my dreams, but there’s usually a consistent look to the vivid ones. Lots of water, mountains, creeks, and high, winding roads. There are also a lot of buildings that are closely integrated with nature, even though I have almost never seen construction like that. 

I had not, but now I have! Here’s a trailer, for anyone else that missed it:

https://youtu.be/33HXHaaagsw

I really like these new models! I’m looking forward to watching a playthrough when that’s available. Just like with Rhombus of Ruin, I don’t think I’ll be able to play this one myself.

DOUBLE FINE, I WISH TO SPEAK WITH YOU- no, I’m kidding! I think great minds think alike. But I’m really excited to learn more about that character and possibly involve them in this whole au eventually. 

I’ve actually tried to avoid almost any info about Psychonauts 2 so I can go in mostly-blind, and a lot of the characters are vague to me. It’s fun to look forward to, but it’s also a little harrowing because I don’t know how to anticipate for it!

N...NO..... I NEED TO... Honestly those are old enough that it might be a good idea for me to re-make them, as well as the playing cards I made for the mega playlist cover. I think it’d be nice to remake them as vectors... that might make for a nice art stream sometime. I’ll mention publicly if I start doing that, and sharing any of these conceptual Wildcards arts when they’re done. 

And if you’re just curious about what the tarot cards for the other characters are going to be, it’s this:

Eddie: Judgement, The Magician, The Emperor

Manny: Death, Justice, The World

Sam: The Chariot, The Tower, Strength

Max: The Devil, Wheel of Fortune, Joker

Although! I may actually give the Moon card to Max instead of the Devil, and replace the missing card from Nelson’s selection with the High Priestess?  🤔  I’ll decide when I get to it.

Could be! I’ve flip-flopped occasionally on if I want the split-a-cab gang to participate much in the story. I think they deserve a break, and splitting an apartment in New York seems like a good situation for the four of them.

Oh boy, that must be so disorienting for him. The Psychonauts deal with a lot of hippy-dippy weirdness in a seemingly organized way, but it seems like they’re not as paranoid about safety as a real federal organization would be. Not necessarily a good thing, considering one of their camp counselors went AWOL one day, and the head of the Psychonauts got kidnapped the next. They kinda need to get their act together.

Fun fact, in one of the earlier drafts of Chapter 3 I was actually going to make Nelson get scanned by the equivalent of a metal-detector for malevolent thoughts at the door and get really spooked by it, but I decided against it.

YEAH IT’S ON THE LIST

Honestly, a big bulk of the plot in this just regards characters having to face their mental health struggles... via facing it as literal internal demons, unstable powers, etc.  It’s going to take a little while for any of Eddie’s teammates to realize how MUCH he has going on under the surface because he does a pretty good job of hiding it. “Needing to help others above ever helping themselves” is a hard issue to notice if you’re not looking for it. But it’s a guarantee that once they find out he needs help, they’ll give it; whether that’s making sure he’s not working himself too hard, or fighting off demonic cultists. Care comes in many forms.

SHE NEEDS TO REST.... POOR SYBIL (on the upside, they don’t TECHNICALLY work there, so she might be fine most of the time.)

Strong Bad isn’t a Psychonaut! He’s just a vlogger and a petty (psychic) criminal. It’s honestly not very different from canon.

Free Country, USA is a smalltown hotbed of psychic activity. Nearly everyone there has some mild capacity for supernatural powers, but nobody really notices or cares. Strong Bad just pops the tops off of cold ones and.... sometimes alters reality, a tiny bit. But mostly just in regards to media. The cartoons, comics, etc, that he invents and talks about have a tendency to suddenly voip into existence and nobody knows how. I swear, there’s actually a line of him saying something to this effect, but I can’t find it anywhere.  Don’t worry about it! Nobody in town is ever going to do anything truly nefarious with their powers, so it’s not a high priority on the Psychonauts’ radar, just a weird footnote.

The only reason Homestar is an actual agent is because he seems like exactly the kind of guy to sign up for a job like that on accident and then stick with it. And he’s a talented telekinetic! None of his other friends know about his job or notice his absences.

And just for fun, here’s some weird instances of psychic overpowering that happened in the cartoon:

---

(Poor Strong Sad)

I’ve actually answered this one before! BAM  Pretty sure all of it is still accurate.

Nelson: He sees floating sheets of paper containing notes, questions, etc. Anything that he wants to know more about regarding that person. The notes are subject to edits, cross-outs, ripped pages, etc.

Guybrush: He sees the item that the person is carrying that he wants most. As he gets to know people better, he sees them for their useful skills first.

Manny: His view of most living people is not very kind...

The people he’s closest to will eventually look a lot less garish. More like a flattering, camera-ready versions of themselves.

Eddie: Sickass sketch drawings that look like they belong in the margins of a composition book. The illustrations improve as he gets a better picture of where they’d fit in the internal lore of his mental world.

Sam: A lot like Nelson; Sam pictures case files, though his are a bit more in-depth.

Max: Max’s visions of people are highly personal and uncomfortable for those who witness them. He sees Nelson as a puzzle with a piece missing. Guybrush is a ripped up voodoo doll. Manny is a forgotten ofrenda. Eddie is a powder keg with a long, lit fuse. Sam is Sam, but he’s the wrong one.

I also got two questions that were pretty big subjects, or that I didn’t want to repeat, so I’m gonna cover them pretty broadly:

REGARDING [X] CHARACTER OR SERIES INCLUDED IN THE AU

Sure, I support it! I’ve gotten this question a few times in regards to things that I haven’t had time to delve into yet, or I’m not interested in, so I’m not going to include it into the AU myself. But if you want to explore an idea like that, feel free! This AU is pretty dang collaborative.

My main focus is just on the main 6 properties: Psychonauts, Puzzle Agent, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Brutal Legend, and Sam & Max.

But my general rule of thumb for “characters that exist somewhere within the background of this story” are any other properties owned by Telltale, Lucasarts, or Double Fine. And considering all of the licensed games that Telltale was getting into before it kicked the bucket, that includes some really weird characters, even up to the Venture Bros. I loved that series, but I’m not really interested in doing anything with them for this story! Partly for my sanity, the canon I’ve picked are already a lot of content to play with. 

ASSORTED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WILDCARD AU DISCORD

There’s no particular criteria needed to join the discord, and it’s not strictly on a need-to-know basis! Because it’s been a long while since anyone has joined, I've been hesitant about adding new people in... But I‘ve decided to try sending invitations again! Everyone who had asked about it in the past will be getting a ping by me in about a day or so, since I want to double-check if you’re still interested. If you’ve been nervous to ask you can reply to this post or message me privately.

Some things to keep in mind before asking or accepting the invite:

If you’re not a friend or a follower I recognize, I will likely double-check your tumblr along with some other current members before sending the invite. 

Here’s the Rules page, so you know what to expect before you join: 

Be Mindful - Respect other people's boundaries, don't do or say things that would cross the line. If your behavior makes other people feel uncomfortable or unsafe, I will remove you from the chat. In most cases I will try to resolve things with you and offer a chance to do better, but that will depend on the severity of the situation. And if you have any concerns regarding another member of the chat, you can contact me privately.

Health Boundaries - While discussions of mental health do occasionally pop up, do not rely on the chat for help. None of us are equipped to handle serious mental health concerns, and it will only cause distress for everyone. Please seek real help if it is needed! If you rely on people beyond the point that they have asked you to stop, I will remove you from the chat.

NSFW - Generally speaking, try to keep NSFW talk to a minimum. Swearing and humor is fine, but don't get too explicit please! Discussions should usually keep to a PG-13 / occasional R, but no NC-17.

Spoilers & Censorship - Please use the spoiler function to hide story spoilers, as well as discussions and graphic depictions of gore/excessive blood/body horror/severe psychological horror. Include a content warning so that people know what they could potentially be seeing when they click on the censored content. If the spoilered content is the subject of a back-and-forth discussion, please use another warning when you are switching to a different spoilered topic. (Note that these rules were added to the chat later, so be careful when using the search function or back reading.)

The canon series involved with the Wildcard AU are Psychonauts, Puzzle Agent, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Brutal Legend, and Sam & Max. Please be mindful of story spoilers!

Channel Organization - Also be mindful of which channel you're in and move a discussion over if need be! That way they don't get too clogged with unrelated info.

Creative Criticism - When it comes to writing, art, or character creation; try to be open to suggestions from others! Nearly all of the creative work in the chat is collaborative, so input from others is important! Creative criticism is not the same as judgement, and is not a personal attack.

Have fun! - Discussions move quickly in this chat! Don't feel bad if you ever need to step back, whether it's because of the speed or a disinterest in whatever current topic we're focusing on. If you ever want to come back, we're happy to have you and can give quick explanations if you feel out of the loop! :thumbsup:

We’re a group of approx. a half dozen to a dozen people, either posting very very quickly in a span of a few hours or barely anything for a few days. We’ve been in an activity uptick lately and there’s about a year and half of back content, too. If it’s hard to keep up on, not that interesting to read through, or you just have a hard time gelling with the group that's already there, there’s no shame in just lurking or dipping out if you need to.

We also talk a lot about Psychonauts OCs, so anticipate that.

[thenightling]

The Sandman Audio drama Act 2

      On Sunday I finally finished listening to The Sandman Audio drama Act 2.   And... I loved it.  Yet again, James McAvoy’s delivery of Morpheus’s dialogue either exactly matches what I expected or pleasantly surprised me for being better than I expected.  I feared he might have damaged his voice doing the shouting for Lucifer.  

     I feel there was a definite step-up in quality with the second act of The Sandman Audio drama.  The music is excellent and atmospheric. The tone and mood are perfect.  

    The plot mostly deals with Morpheus finally realizing he was wrong to leave his former lover in Hell. (Who would have thought?) and him going to Hell to rescue her only to find out Lucifer has quit and is shutting the place down. Lucifer leaves Morpheus the key to Hell and Morpheus is forced to deal with entities of myth and folklore all vying for the “Prime psychic real estate” that is Hell.  After that there are several semi-stand alone short stories (most of which become important later or already are important and you just don’t realize it yet) and a story about roommates saving their friend from the perils of the very fantasy world she used to escape to as a child. 

     Some of the best moments include line deliveries such as Morpheus’s reaction to Lucifer saying he has quit.  He sounds so delightfully baffled.  You can really sense what he’s feeling and thinking through his line delivery. It’s kind of ironic that we were given an excuse against letting Morpheus have his black-void and star-flare eyes in The Sandman Netflix series that suggested it hindered his acting.  It is ironic when the version of Morpheus we don’t even see on camera (the one played by the great James McAvoy) is able to act so well, perhaps better than characters he has actually played on camera, that there isn’t the slightest bit of difficulty to figure out what he’s thinking and feeling from line delivery alone. I don’t have enough words to praise how good James McAvoy’s portrayal of Morpheus truly is.

      Morpheus scolding Shivering Jenny when she tried to intimidate him actually made me laugh out loud.  It’s the delivery that made it.  

    The voices of Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland are heartbreaking because it makes you realize just how truly young and tragic they were.  I actually get angry at Death in that story because I can’t fathom any justification for leaving poor Edwin in Hell even if he thought he would go there because he wasn’t a perfect kid or because of how he was killed.  I just can’t accept it.  But this is true to the original source material and no fault of the audio drama. 

     The Thermidor chapter is absolutely wonderful.  Hearing Regé-Jean Page singing as Orpheus, in phoenetic Greek, is haunting and beautiful.  It gave me chills. In the Parliament of Rooks chapter, The ‘Lil Endless are adorable and also hilarious. Though I was told in advance about it, hearing ‘lil Morpheus’s voice took me by surprise.

     I love the voice of Eve.  It’s strangely soothing.  The casting here was, yet again, perfect. 

    What changes were made to A Game of You, I feel were positive and reasonable alterations.  Wanda is still tragic and she still has to deal with a painful amount of transphobia from horrible people, including her own family.  It’s too real and I know it hits close to home for a lot of people.  A trans masculine friend of mine cried when he learned the Wanda story, not because he was offended, but because he was so moved and even comforted that Neil seemed to “get it” and he suddenly didn’t feel so alone with how his own family was treating him.  He realized others went through it too and it made him feel a little better to know that.     

     I love the scoring in this audio drama, the music is very atmospheric. The whole thing is very immersive.     

     This audio book / audio drama is so wonderful that I want to listen to it again in the very near future but pace myself more slowly so that I may savor it now. I feel like I had rushed through it the first time.   

     All the flaws and faults I have with The Sandman: Act 2 are mostly nitpicks, some of which exist in the original comics such as loathing the logic in how Hell works or the idea that Hell is even necessary for Heaven- it’s really not.  Duality isn’t always needed, nor necessary, though sometimes I wish The Sandman did have more of a duality theme such as allowing Daniel as Dream and Morpheus to co-exist but I digress.  

     Another nitpick is Wanda sounds quite a lot like she has a Long Island accent, which is strange since she’s supposed to be from Kansas, however, Wanda seemed to take pride in living in New York so she may have picked up the accent or fakes the accent so that is plausible.   

     My biggest nitpick is really quite petty. In a narration about Hell we’re told it was once called Tartarus.  This is odd since in another story (Song of Orpheus) we know the God Hades is real and Tararus is a separate place entirely with a whole other mythology attached to it.  Orpheus, for example, ends up in Elysium (Greek Heaven) and we see him there in The Sandman: The Wake but that’s not in Act 2 of the Audio drama.

     I am still not that big of a fan of Kat Denning’s Death, probably because I already really liked the voice in the fan made motion comic of Sound of her wings up on youtube and Jamie Chung in the DC Showcase Death animated short (bonus feature on the Wonder Woman bloodlines Blu-Ray disc). But Kat Dennings plays the part well and likely is delivering the lines the way we are meant to hear them.  Over-all I love The Sandman audio drama and its second act.   

      I hope more books are adapted as full-cast audio dramas with this much consideration and care with the casting, acting, sound effects, music, and atmosphere. This could be the next step in the evolution of storytelling.