#this next drawing project was diamonds' idea believe it or not

[euclydya]

ok One (1) more gay ass yearning related drawing. and then we're Done for a while. prommy.

[lemme-just-oops]

Hii!! Could I request the arcana twilight boys x a pisces (zodiac sign) mc?

Alpheratz: Both of you are easy going, putting little effort into the things you want to do. He relaxes with you quite a lot. But you do seem to feel emotions more intensely. Whether you laugh or cry, you are a ball of energy for that. Sometimes you are contagious and he laughs with you.

Arcturus: Others will call you two the grandparent couple, because of your artistic hobbies. Not that he minds it, your hobbies may be weird or uncommon, but what about it? You encourage one another and often end up giving each other ideas. Challenge him to knit a full sized dragon and you will get it. And the same way, he will tell you what you can do with your hobby. But it took quite a lot of time for the two of you to confess. Seriously, he was too shy to mention it and you were oblivious to him being red around you. It got so bad, your friends had to interfere.

Pollux: Both of you need some work with your self-confidence. There is no way about it, you might end up pushing each other into a spiral of self-doubt by accident. But he has his ways of deleting those thoughts. Usually by taking you on an improvised date, where you might need to talk about your emotions. Despite being energetic, he admires that you talk so wisely and hopes to see more of your emotional maturity soon.

Sirius: His goal was to take advantage of your kindness, but it got boring quickly, because you never seem to judge anyone. So, he made sure to mess with your unpredictable mind by giving you hobbies you never imagined to have. You are known for your creativity, so you now have to find a creative way to solve sudoku. When you solve it, you get a reward of your choice. Even if you wish for a diamond ring. You tend to talk about other people in a positive way, but he wants to see their bad sides. Because sometimes, toxic people are the most charismatic ones and he wants you to be safe from such people.

Spica: The way you never seem to stress amazes him. In fact, he admires it a little too much. Maybe it is because he has more work to do than even the principal, but he wants your aloofness to rub off on him. And it does. After working, he only needs to hear your voice oe to text with you, because his troubles will vanish. When he is extremely exhausted and you sit next to him, he will rest his head on your shoulder. Don't worry, he makes sure to praise you a lot as well. For the impact you have on him. You are yourself and that alone helps him live more freely.

Vega: You are two opposites. Energy and calm, emotional and logical. A team of many sides, whole by themselves and still completed by one another. It seems that you are contagious to one another, "correcting" each other's flaws. He will learn to be more cautious with his words, and you learn to be more suspicious of other people's motives. Believe him or not, but he thinks the world is a good place, but he is unable to vocalize it. And your presence is the proof of it. Though if you need help with a creative hobby/project, his suggestions are dull to say the least. Want to draw something new? Draw a duck with wings.

[blockgamepirate]

On Philza and Tommy

I’ve been wanting to talk about this for a while but I just didn’t wanna rewatch ANY exile streams because they genuinely make me so depressed and anxious but I finally forced myself to rewatch the one where Phil visits Tommy. Or I say “rewatch”, I actually never saw the whole thing before, I kept popping in and out of the stream while it was live bc of the aforementioned anxiety and shit..

Anyway, I’ve seen arguments over the topic of whether Phil is a terrible person for not helping Tommy or not. And I wanted to offer my take on it. So I’m just gonna go through the arguments:

1: “Phil is Tommy’s dad and has a duty to look after him“

I’m not gonna spend too much time on this because for one thing it’s not really canon and for another, I actually don’t think it’s the relevant issue here. Even if Phil was Tommy’s dad, Tommy has already basically been living independently for a while. And even back when Phil and Will were still talking about the family relationships being canon, Phil said as much: that he doesn’t have authority over his boys, they’re independent people.

2: “Phil doesn’t even know Tommy and it’s unfair to ask him to look after a stranger”

I legitimately have no idea where this take came from or what it’s based on. I feel like it’s so obvious that they knew each other from before Phil even joined the SMP. Tommy recognises him right away (1), they act very familiar with each other, Phil immediately attacks Dream when Dream blows up Tommy’s house (2), Tommy tries to convince Phil to join NLM but Phil is torn because he’s friends with both Techno and Tommy (3), they plan to make their houses in NLM next to each other and Phil helps Tommy build his (4), Phil specifically gives Tommy one of the three friendship emeralds he has (5)... Also OOC Phil refers to himself as basically a father figure to Tommy (6).

The reason their relationship becomes colder is because Tommy doesn’t approve of Phil staying friends with Techno. I think this is made pretty obvious too. Tommy gets upset with Phil when he sees him hanging out with Techno (7) and when Phil comes to visit him in exile, Tommy immediately acts cold towards him and accuses him of being Techno’s friend before softening a bit when Phil gives him gifts (5).

Ref:

1: I assume you’ve all seen this one it’s in Tommy’s video

2: Philza’s Twitch Archive: Nov 16 (around 03:44:30)

3: Tommyvods: Tommyinnit speaks to Philza’s wife (around 37:40)

4: Philza’s Twitch Archive: Nov 18 (around 18:55)

5: Tommyvods: Tommy Is Holding It Together in Exile with Dream (around 24:35)

6: Philza’s Twitch Archive: Jan 27 (around 01:20:30)

7: Tommyvods: Tommy & Wilbur make Tubbo a gift and he hates it (around 19:30)

3: “Phil didn’t help Tommy at all while he was in exile“

Oh shut up, watch reference video 5 again. He brought Tommy tons of useful shit, a stack of coal blocks, 8 iron blocks, diamond boots, how was he supposed to know that it would all get destroyed by Dream? When asked, he also helped Tommy with his projects at Logstedshire.

4: “Even if Phil isn’t Tommy’s father OR his friend, he still has a duty to save an abused kid”

Okay this is finally getting to the actual point.

So I wanna refer back to video number 5 up there on my references list again and I’m gonna go through that stream here:

- Ghostbur brings Phil over to meet Tommy

- Tommy is mad because Phil is friends with Techno

- Tommy gets distracted by Phil’s new clothes and the vision of Tubbo reappearing

- Phil gives Tommy a bunch of presents, including “Tommy Slippers“ (for the cold) and a friendship emerald from Techno. Tommy is excited about the slippers, somewhat apprehensive about the emerald until Phil assures him that it’s a gift from him to Tommy, not from Techno

- Tommy decides that Phil is his friend after all

- Dream shows up and acts all casual and friendly, Phil greets him politely but doesn’t interact much with Dream unless prompted to

- Tommy asks Phil and Ghostbur if they’re even real because he keeps seeing Tubbo

- Phil asks if Tommy has been drinking the sea water

- another vision of Tubbo, only Tommy and Ghostbur see him

- Ghostbur shows Phil around while Tommy tells Dream not to tell Phil about the beach party because it’s a surprise

- Tommy asks if the reason why Phil didn’t visit earlier was because there wasn’t a path and if the path made it easier for him and Phil says yes, because he didn’t actually know how to get there before

- More Tubbo hallucination shenanigans which I’m gonna cut out from now on, just assume that it keeps happening

- Phil tells Tommy not to drink the sea water, Tommy goes “I DID DRINK THE SEA WATER BECAUSE IT TOLD ME TO!“

- Tommy asks Phil (and also Fundy who showed up) to leave the VC so he can talk to Ghostbur and Dream alone (about the secret beach party plan)

- Tommy is happy about the fact that the path he made seems to be working and people are coming to visit him

- Dream notes that they aren’t even really hanging out with him so they might just be visiting Logsted, not him (which... Tommy literally asked them to leave them alone so they could plan, Dream is just blatantly trying to fuck with his head) and Tommy deflates and agrees that Dream is probably right

- Ghostbur invites Phil and Fundy to help decorate the beach (not telling them what for but it’s like super obvious that they’re planning a party) and they do

- all five of them work on the beach for a whole while and goof around until the end of the stream

So from Phil’s point of view Tommy is acting kind of cold towards him and doesn’t seem to particularly want him around (combined with the fact that he later doesn’t get an invite to the beach party that Tommy was obviously planning). Phil brought Tommy basic survival stuff and the slippers to keep him from getting cold, not knowing that all of that is going to get destroyed by Dream anyway. He seems a bit worried about the hallucinations but assumes it’s because Tommy’s been drinking sea water and tells him to stop doing that. He also notes that Tommy looks kind of rough but doesn’t push the issue.

Meanwhile Tommy is being manipulated by Dream into believing that Phil didn’t actually come to visit him, even as Phil is literally visiting him, with named gifts and everything. And he’s already doubting if Phil is even really present because he keeps seeing Tubbo who isn’t actually there so Phil could just as well be a hallucination too, or he could easily be convinced later that Phil was a hallucination.

Basically Phil sees that Tommy is having a hard time but there’s no obvious sign of anything being wrong besides him not taking very good care of himself and feeling lonely. Tommy says he hasn’t been sleeping and that he’s been drinking sea water (which is probably a joke but anyway). Him and Dream seem to be very friendly with each other, they even keep having all these secret chats that Tommy is telling Phil to leave for.

So.... assume this is your friend who you’ve recently had a bit of a falling out with. What kind of conclusions would you draw and what would you do? Honestly, yes, Tommy’s condition seems pretty worrying, but everything just points to him being lonely and depressed about being exiled, which isn’t really something Phil can easily fix other than just visit him more. But then Tommy gives really mixed signals about whether he actually wants Phil there or not (which is because he’s planning the party but Phil doesn’t know that) and then when Phil finds out about the party he doesn’t get an invite to it (because Dream stole the invites but, again, Phil doesn’t know this). So Phil just kinda has to decide whether to go there uninvited and presumably unwanted, or just vibe and wait to hear from Tommy. Meanwhile he has stuff to do with Techno who DID invite him to hang out.

Also Tommy seems to be doing better, he’s very excited about his beach, he’s excited about the fact that he’s getting more visitors (not just Phil but Fundy too) and he’s convinced that there will be more now that there’s a path. So as far as Phil is concerned, it seems like things are getting better and Tommy might end up doing okay after all, despite everything

As a sidenote also, Phil is a bit of a hermit, right? I feel like that’s fair to say about his character. He doesn’t mind hanging out with people but to him living alone in the wilderness isn’t a bad deal at all. Obviously he understands that Tommy is not like him and needs company but you can see how he might not see the situation as all that urgent. And you can argue about what Tommy’s canon age actually is but he’s been living independently and taking care of himself like an adult during his entire time on the server, this shouldn’t really be that different. Obviously the fact that he’s exiled is bad and upsetting for him but there’s nothing Phil can do about that either. He doesn’t have control over L’Manberg or Dream.

And I just wanna point out that all of this is exactly how abusive relationships work, right? Dream is deliberately distancing Tommy from everybody he knows and making him think that Dream is the only one who cares about him. And that shit can be really hard to pick up on. It might just seem like your friend is becoming kind of distant and has different friends now. And I’ll tell you, even if you DO see the signs, it’s really hard to decide when or how to intervene, or if you’re just paranoid about it.

It’s easy to say Phil should do this or that when you’re watching Tommy’s streams and KNOW what’s happening, but try to put yourself in Phil’s shoes for a second and actually think about what you’d do in a situation like this. Also please do so while assuming that Phil is a real person with his own life to live too.

You can say that he should have been more worried and more suspicious of Dream and gone to see Tommy anyway, that’s fair. But that’s a normal human mistake and also something pretty much everybody else should have done too by that logic. And Tommy was not being very receptive to help because he was being manipulated by Dream. Honestly this was probably something where Tommy needed to figure out for himself to break free. Which he did. (And speaking from a narrative perspective: that was the best possible ending to that arc. Tommy finding his own strength and willpower again, on his own.)

I’m gonna leave this here but I might reblog with more points (or make a new post). It does take ages to go through the vods, though, and I only made it up to December 9th so far.

[fluffyglass]

WELCOME TO DILLYDALE! (UPDATED!)

The updated cast is finally here!

Y'know how I mentioned my sister and I were working on a project? Yeah, this is that.

Welcome to Dillydale! is a fanmade Reboot of The Mr. Men Show, thought up by two teenagers who have absolutely nothing better to do.

With a much more story-focused narrative aimed at slightly older kids, Welcome to Dillydale! features numerous small story arcs starring all your favorite little misses and mr. men!

Full Cast + Extra Info below the cut

Mr. Tickle - You know him, you love (or don't love) him, he's the absolute classic.

Mr. Greedy - Your friendly neighborhood chef, taste-tester and gourmet all in one!

Mr. Happy - Dillydale's favorite constantly-smiling TV host!

Mr. Sneeze - Achoo!

Mr. Bump - The accident-prone little dude himself.

Mr. Small and Mr. Nosey - that one gay couple who everyone knows and yet nobody seems to remember how they met

Mr. Messy - The filthiest resident of Dillydale.

Mr. Fussy - The least filthy resident of Dillydale.

* Mr. Clumsy - While not a resident of Dillydale, he occasionally pops by to visit his cousin, Mr. Fussy!

Mr. Nervous - Dillydale's paranoid jelly man. Don't startle him, or he'll melt into a puddle before your eyes!

Mr. Lazy - Possibly the second-most brilliant inventor in Dillydale - if only he had the motivation to act on his ideas.

Mr. Mean - Probably deserves Mr. Stubborn's catchphrase more than he does.

Mr. Bounce - Boing! Boing! Boing! Boing! Boing! B

Mr. Strong - If anyone in Dillydale had to be the most fitness-obsessed, it would have to be Mr. Strong. That's like - his thing, y'know?

Mr. Quiet - Can't hear you, next please!

Mr. Grumpy - Getting too old for this entire town's nonsense.

Mr. Skinny - Was incredibly easy to fit in this character list!

Mr. Cool - Whatever he is, he's too cool for you.

Mr. Rude - At this point, he's more tired of everyone's stupidity than actively rude. He's still rude though, don't get me wrong.

Mr. Scatterbrain - Can probably bend reality. If he could/can, he'd use it to make himself a sandwich.

Mr. Stubborn - May or may not be an alien. He's totally an alien.

Mr. Crosspatch - Violence incarnate.

Little Miss Bossy - Karen

Little Miss Naughty - A criminal

Little Miss Sunshine - Dillydale's favorite female constantly-smiling TV host! After all, they can't just pick between her and Mr. Happy!

Little Miss Tiny - Just you wait until she grows up! (She never will)

Little Miss Helpful - She is not helpful. But she sure does try to be.

Little Miss Magic - (⊃｡•́‿•̀｡)⊃━⭑･ﾟﾟ･*:༅｡.｡༅:*ﾟ:*:✼✿

Little Miss Shy - Barely anyone knows her, because she barely leaves the house. Poor girl, honestly.

Little Miss Splendid - Can afford to live in a way fancier city, but stays in Dillydale because she knows she can flaunt her wealth better there.

Little Miss Late - Her description was late, it'll be here in a few hours. Or days.

Little Miss/Mr. Twins - Which is which? Why, if they swap their bows, nobody could tell!

Little Miss Chatterbox - Oh, Little Miss Chatterbox is such an interesting character! Y'know, while I was drawing her, I remember thinking to myself "oh, Miss Chatterbox has such an iconic design!" and thus she ended up being one of the characters who's design didn't change at all, oh, speaking of characters who didn't change, I also-

* Little Miss Stubborn - Lives on a farm out in the countryside. Still pissed that an alien stole her identity.

Little Miss Fun - Can't sit still for more than 3 seconds at a time.

Little Miss Somersault - Good at basketball, probably

Little Miss Scary - RAWR!!!

Little Miss Whoops - Probably the clumsiest resident of Dillydale, much to the dismay of her brother, Mr. Bump.

* Little Miss Calamity - Disappeared from Dillydale years ago. Her whereabouts are still unknown.

Little Miss Princess - Wait, wasn't Dillydale's monarchy overthrown?

Little Miss Hug - *Hugs you*

Little Miss Inventor - The actual most brilliant inventor in Dillydale.

* Little Miss Daredevil - She moved to the moon, but visits home often. Why did she move to the moon? She's Miss Daredevil, that's why!

Wow, what a lovely group of characters!

BUT WAIT, THERE'S EXCLUSIVES!

(Aka ocs we put in for funsies)

Little Miss Autistic - Dillydale's resident "if you ask me about this book series I will tell you every fact about it known to man" girl.

Little Miss Gleeful, Little Miss Rampant, and Mr. Witty - Miss Bossy's three little tyrants.

Mr. Fancy - Prettier than you.

Little Miss Perfect - Perfect, perfect, perfect.

Little Miss Purity - The purest diamond around. Or so she'd like you to believe.

I reached the image limit for a tumblr post, so the remainder of the characters shall be in a reblog! See you there!

[bangtae-sohotddaeng]

we’ll be counting stars | k.th. | 1

(^ gif cred: ON THE VOYAGE | pinterest)

pairing: idol!Taehyung x publisher!Reader

rating: nc-17 (for language and themes)

summary: You’d sworn off love and relationships forever. You were here to do your job - work with the biggest boyband of the world. Not forge friendships and...and whatever it was that you and Taehyung were building up with these sneaky glances. It was, to be very fair, your Chief Editor’s fault that you’d landed in this mess. Maybe you should quit your job? Maybe you should quit life -

Oh, he was staring again, and did he freaking lick his lips?

warnings: swearing (reader’s got a potty mouth) + this is set like 5 years in the future + reader has emotional issues, she's a relationship phobe + mentions of weed

genre: so much ANGST ugh + fluff + comedy + some crack

words: 2.1 k

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gimme feedback, much much appreciated!

SIX MONTHS AGO

“Wait a second, really?” You blinked up at the Chief Editor, your boss, in wonder. “Heading this?” 

The chocolate skinned, tall woman smiled at you. “Yes, heading this. I’d been looking to hand you something from a really long time, to be honest. This is just the right fit."

You grinned at her, hugging the contract file to your chest. In your thirteen months of employment at the publishing company, through the departmental transfer from HR to Editorial and then the promotion to the Associate Editor position, this was the best thing to happen to you, so far. You finally had a project you were gonna head. You would finally, finally get to handle things on your own—curate your own team, work on an individual project where you made all the decisions.

You breathed out, happily. “I’ll read this thoroughly and report back within an hour, boss. With my sign on it, in all likelihood.”

“I’m counting on it.” Your boss smiled at you.

You looked down at the file. You were going to work with a K-pop group on their auto-biography. You were gonna fly to fucking Korea, for six full months. This was huge. This was awesome. This was what you fucking needed, right now. Your best friend that you had been rooming with for a year was starting to get too comfortable. You were so not up for that kinda shit again.

You looked at the bottom of the front page. Athena had drawn up this contract. Your eyebrows arched. It was no secret that she was your boss’s favourite Acquisition Editor. Some even suspected they were having an affair, despite the gleaming diamond you could see—even right now—on the woman’s finger. 

This project had to mean a lot to your boss. And she’d picked you to head it.

“This sounds big, boss,” you mumbled, leafing through the hefty files. You were gonna need a couple hours, maybe, to go through this properly. “And looks big, too.”

“It is big, Y/N. In all the ways. This idea had been brewing in my head for a really long time. I had Athena make the proposal to this K-pop group’s management company, a few months back, and they said yes. She and I had been brainstorming how to approach this. Those guys are pretty tight about their privacy and, um, well. Fraternising policies. It’s all in there, you’ll see.” She pointed a finger at the file in your hands. “We were finally able to draw up the contract with the company’s CEO and Manager. And you were the only one I had in mind when we thought up of building a team and having someone head it so that we don’t have to leave.”

You gave a small, delighted giggle. “Thank you so much, boss. I won’t disappoint you.”

“I know you won’t.”

You got back to your desk and flipped to the first page of the file.

BTS

Your eyes bulged. You had been a busy—and irritable because of all the stupid shit that just constantly kept on happening in your personal life—woman during the past couple of years and really uninvested in anything and everything that had to do with entertainment. This past year had been especially rough ever since your move to the States. You freaking smoked pot when you needed to unwind, what could be worse than that.

But. But—before, when you were a normal, happy woman with a soul, BTS had been kind of a really humongous deal. Did that somehow change in the past couple of years? You strongly doubted it, recalling how huge they’d been growing worldwide, the last time you kept a check. Which you did like crazy.

You momentarily wondered if your boss would still have you as the first consideration if she knew about your crazy ARMY days…

You blinked, coming back from the mental journey, and turned the page. BigHit’s owner was still the same, obviously, but the group members now apparently had individual managers. You blinked, uncomfortable at the knowledge. Reading further, you found something that disturbed you even more.

All the BTS members were done with their Military Service, with Jungkook, Jimin and Namjoon having returned from it just this year.

You swallowed, thickly. A lot had changed in the world outside of the one you’d been living in, too, apparently.

You read through the terms and conditions and your duties, thoroughly. Few points were pretty obvious and things you’d been expecting, but some of them made you frown.

You brought one such issue to your boss’s acknowledgement when you were done reading the entire booklet of a contract, nearly two hours later. You were ready to sign the thing, otherwise.

“And? What about it?” Your boss blinked at you, unfazed.

You sighed, and lifted your left hand up, pointing at your empty ring finger. “No ring, no fiance, boss. They want the team members to be at least engaged. I’m as single as it gets.”

She chuckled at that. “Tell me honestly, are you unprofessional enough to fraternise on your job? Such a high profile one, at that?”

You worried your bottom lip between your teeth. “I don’t think they’d care about what I think, boss, or that they’d even ask.”

Your boss gave an exasperated sigh. “Okay, let me put it in a different way.” You tilted your head to show your interest. “What’s your opinion on relationships, in general?”

You grimaced, unable to help your knee-jerk response. But then you shrugged, trying not to scowl while you said the words you’d started to believe in since the past couple of years. “Well, as I’d informed you through my quite less-than-professional letter at the time of my joining, boss, I think relationships are pointless. Humans keeping relationships beyond professionalism with each other is pointless, actually, because with a personal attachment comes a buckload of expectations, and then it’s just a rabbit hole down the middle of the earth. At the end of which, we burn.”

Your boss seemed to be suppressing laughter. Did the moral of your life amuse her? “You actually quoted the letter word by word, there, Y/N.”

You sighed. “That wasn’t something I’d thought through when I mailed it, boss. The voice input tool turned my rants into a letter. And my frustration over your concerns about fraternising in the office made me mail it.”

Your boss nodded. “Well, I talked to BigHit’s manager over the phone. The company’s not the group’s,” she added when you frowned in confusion at the singular term. “I explained to him about where you stood—taking references from this letter—and explained to him why I needed my most valuable Associate on the team.”

Your cheeks heated up, both due to the huge praise and embarrassment over the exposure of your letter. “Oh, um. Thank you. I guess?”

“Ugh, sign the damn piece of paper and start collecting the damn team, Y/N!”

You’d resorted to staying back at the office till late hours just to avoid your roommate.

When you’d moved to the country, thirteen months back, and decided to share your decade old friend’s flat—feeling lucky as shit that he worked in the same city as you—you and him had been on the same page. You’d both been fed up with the concepts of relationships and entanglements, even the strictly-physical ones, and wanted to just burn away your youth on the grind and pot-smoking weekends.

But then, gradually, you noticed the shift in him. He was trying to get into your pants. It could not end well.

It wasn’t to say you weren’t attracted to him. You’d jump the gorgeous guy’s bones in a heartbeat, in an alternate universe. But in this one, you’d had a first hand experience of ruining multiple friendships, and you so did not wanna risk another.

That idiot didn’t get it, though.

Hence why you were brainstorming your project’s team at ten oclock of the night in your nearly empty office building.

“Any luck?” Your okay-ish colleague—the least clingy out of the lot—peered at your spreadsheet over your shoulder.

“Why the heck are you so against it, Sana?” you groaned into your palm, frustrated.

“Because I’m ARMY!” she said in an aghast tone.

“So? Dude, that’s nearly 70% of the earth’s population, at this point, I’m guessing.”

“Um, maybe, but. I don’t trust myself to be professional, Y/N,” she morosely mumbled, dropping into an empty chair on the table next to you.

You looked at her from above your glasses. “Why the heck not?”

She ducked her head, her honey blonde hair covering almost all of her face. But you still spotted the red that bloomed across her face. “Because I have a crush on Yoongi, the size of freaking America, Y/N!”

“What? What? That’s your reason?" You covered your mouth with a hand to hold back your laughter. "Lame fucking reason, Sana!” You glared at her when she nervously looked back at you. “Get your shit together, and pack your bags. And give me your husband’s number, I wanna tell him something.”

You hadn’t imagined that picking out five people from a group of thirty would be this hard. You had spent an entire week literally running after these people to convince them. They were all married or engaged save for one, who had plans of proposing to his boyfriend a few months later, during Valentine’s before you convinced him to do it now so that he’d be able to join the team.

You’d come up with a total of four women and two men, including Sana, that were all fluent in Korean. That was kinda one of the biggest prerequisites, other than being in a committed relationship. You’d briefed the lot of them about what was to be done on this trip, who you were dealing with, and how long you’d be off for. They were all on board, now, and the only thing required was your boss’ approval.

And now you were all standing in the Chief Editor’s cabin, waiting for her to finish reviewing the team members’ profiles you’d collected and presented to her.

Your brain was nearly short circuited, at this point. If she said she wasn’t happy with any of your selections you were prepared to tell her to make the new selection herself, because there were only three more married people in this office, and none of them spoke Korean. There were only two more Korean speakers, but they were both female interns who’d be the worst nightmares to put on this project.

You looked at the six people standing next to you, all looking a varied degree of nervous.

But your boss looked impressed as she perused the file. She beamed at all of you, and then nodded. “Prepare for a six months’ stay, people, and prepare to do your best there. The only two real rules to remember are to keep it all a secret until the BigHit people are ready to disclose the news, and not fall in love.”

You all grunted in barely concealed annoyance at the last part, excluding Sana who bit her lip. You rolled your eyes. “It’d be a bigger concern for their partners than it would be to you, if that happens, boss. Don’t worry. We’re all a bunch of professionals, here.” You reassured your boss, shooting a glare at a fidgety Sana. 

“I have complete faith in y’all. Now, off you go. Brush up your Korean, spend time with your partners.” She looked at you. “Or just, you know, catch up on lost sleep. You fly to Seoul this Friday.”

Three days from now, oh God.

You all trickled out of your boss’ cabin with furrowed foreheads. You had the most workload out of them all, though, because in addition to preparing to spend six months in a foreign land, you also were to prepare a formal itinerary for said six months. You, of course, were clear on the details because they were mentioned in the contract, but writing them out for your team would definitely take a lot of time.

You briefly wondered if you should employ Sana’s help, before quickly deciding against it. It wouldn’t do you any good to do anything to sway your professional relationship by asking for personal favours.

“Hey, Y/N, all okay?” Simon, the guy that was proposing to his boyfriend early because of you, asked you when you dropped into your office chair with a huge thump.

You turned to scowl at him. “You guys have got to stop asking me that all the time! When have you ever gotten a good answer?”

Simon’s eyes widened, and he quickly shook his head. “My bad.”

You kept squinting at his retreating figure. Another member of your team met your eye, before quickly scrambling away.

You hummed in thought. Did they all think you were a bitch? Maybe you were.

Good. It’d do you some good in Korea.

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Tags: @tangledsparkles​

[cupcakemolotov]

Far From the Shallow Now

Synopsis: Caroline needs to get her head on straight after the ball and is still awake when Klaus drops by.

Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence × Pre-Relationship × Technically Tyler and Caroline Are Still Together × No cheating × Still Mostly Tyler Friendly × A Moment After the Ball × a what if × Domestic Fluff × Sort Of ×

A tiny pieces would be part of the random snippet series. Just a bit of a what if Caroline had been up when Klaus dropped off the drawing. You can read it here on A03 if you prefer.

                                                       -

The kitchen smelled like her childhood. Warm brown sugar and melting chocolate, the memory of afternoons spent baking with her dad were precious moments that still ached. Pre-vampire Caroline has really hated cooking, and she’d found her opinion hadn’t changed much over the past few months. But baking? With its necessary precision and attention to detail, even the most finicky of recipes soothed her. It had been her dad that had first put a wooden spoon in her hand, who had sighed at her scrunched nose and red face and smoothed her bangs.

“Come on, Care Bear. Let’s try a new recipe today. I’ll let you pick.”

But those memories had been filled with afternoon sunshine and the blare of a radio, and they had been a long time ago. Long before the silence between her parents had grown cold and Bill’s business trips had taken longer and longer. Her childhood was bittersweet and it clogged her throat to think of all the things she’d lost.

But that was for another night.

Tonight, all she had was the silence of her home and the shadows of the neighborhood around her. With her mom working the graveyard shift, she had the house to herself. It had been a relief to come home to shadows and silence after the noise and color of the ball. A chance to process and detox, push away the memory of Klaus’ hands on her skin, the boyish, curling smile on his face and the anger as she’d walked away from him. Breath shuddering in her throat, she stirred the cookie dough a little more thoroughly.

A little pre-baking cleaning had helped calm her juggling nerves and here she was, getting worked up again. The fridge was stuffed with sympathy casseroles, and she’d thrown out dozens of wilting flower arrangements. The cards were neatly stacked and organized in piles alphabetically and according to whom she still needed to reply to.

Her mom probably wouldn’t even notice.

Tomorrow’s project would involve freezing what was left of the food that her mom would eat, she’d already packed the leftovers into Tupperware so she could return the pans to her neighbors. But her dad had taught her to never return a dish empty, so at least her midnight baking would have a purpose. Absently licking at a smear of cookie dough, Caroline watched the clock on the oven click over past 3 AM, and mentally counted her blood bags. She’d need an extra tomorrow, to offset her lack of sleep, but her mind couldn’t stop spinning.

Is it so hard to believe I fancy you?

She’d showered as soon as she’d gotten home, needing to remove Klaus’ lingering scent from her skin. She scrubbed herself pink with her favorite soap, and stood in the shower far longer than needed. The dress was already folded and packed in the box it had arrived in, her bra and underwear at the bottom of her dirty clothes hamper. Now she was sitting in her kitchen in old cheer sweats, and surrounded by two dozen cookies while she worked on the next batch.

And nothing had managed to stop the wheels spinning in her head.

Running a hand down her face, Caroline tried again to decide how she felt about the fiasco that had been her night. The dancing, the hunger and lust in his gaze, those falsely boyish smiles and the rage that had burned when she’d flung his diamonds back at his face.

Klaus had meant every word he’d said and none of it. That was the game he played. Perfection and coercion, falsely sweet words that clung like poisoned honey. It’d been easier to push aside her curiosity, that niggling fascination for how his brain worked before he’d turned his gaze towards her.

Klaus was a monster. But he was a smart one, always steps and steps ahead of his enemies. She didn’t want him, she needed to not want him, and she was pretty sure he didn’t want her either, and it stiffened her shoulders to think he saw her as the distraction Damon insisted she play or his very own potential Trojan horse.

She would never betray her friends.

But Caroline didn’t want to die.

Eyes closing at the thought, she took a careful breath. The games Damon played were dangerous. Esther, Bonnie, all his siblings were spinning on a course that could only lead to collateral damage, and she was sick of it.

Tyler too sometimes only saw her as useful. Her dad had died helping him and still the last time they’d talked he’d wanted her to play more games. As if she wasn’t drowning in grief and what if’s, as if her world hadn’t been twisted as violently as his, as if she wasn’t trapped in a spiderweb she had no idea how to escape. Her fingers tightened on the wooden spoon, and she exhaled slowly.

She and Tyler hadn’t chosen what had been done to them but they could choose how they responded and she was starting to feel less and less comfortable about the bitterness he carried. The hard edge of rage. Whatever had happened when he left and found Hayley had sharpened parts of Tyler she hadn’t known were there and she wondered what he saw when he looked at her. If what he saw made him as uncomfortable as it made her.

Lips flattening at the thought, she reached for the bag of chocolate chips and froze at the sounds of her front door opening. Eyes snapping up, body going taut at the potential threat, her stomach knotted at the sight of Klaus stepping into her home.

For a long moment, they just studied each other.

In the hours since she’d left the ball, he’d ditched his jacket and bow tie, his white waistcoat nowhere to be found. His hair was no longer so perfectly arranged, he’d rolled his shirt sleeves to bare his forearms, and if that wasn’t enough to spike her blood pressure, he still wore his suspenders. Hidden behind the counter-top, her nails dug reflexively into her palm. He’d been stupidly good looking earlier at the ball with his sly smiles and dimpled promises, but this? Rumpled, lips bitten red, his gaze dragging along her body with a slow perusal that set her nerves of fire was something else entirely.

Klaus smiled slow, cheeks creasing, all of the anger from before tucked beneath charm and guile. “I’m surprised you’re still awake, love.”

“Your family is exhausting,” she agreed tartly, straightening her spine. “But of the two of us, I’m the only or who is expected to be here at all. Kind of rude, just bargaining in, don’t you think?”

He gave an elegant little shrug and strolled closer. Her jaw flexed, and he reached into his pocket, pulling out a velvet box and setting it on an empty space on the counter. “I do have an invitation. And perhaps it is also just as rude, don’t you think, to return gifts?”

Shoving the wooden spoon back into the cookie dough before she was tempted to smack him with it, Caroline settled a hand on her hip and faked her bravado. “It’s way ruder to offer gifts with so many strings in the first place.”

An amused glance from beneath his lashes before he peered at her cooling racks of cookies. “Most women enjoy apology jewelry.”

“I must have missed the apology.”

One dimple peaked high on his smile and he snagged a cookie. “I didn’t realize you baked.”

She narrowed her eyes as he took a bite, his clear dodge. This entire conversation felt surreal, a little bit domestic, and a lot concerning. Wasn’t she just thinking about how dangerous he was? This, this charm, only highlighted that danger. He slipped so easily from mood to mood, as mercurial as the wind and she needed to remember that.

Promises or no.

“It’s not like we really exchange small talk. And that’s the only cookie you get. I have a dozen dishes to fill and I need this done before mom gets home.” She tipped her chin towards the dining room table where the clean dishes and tinfoil were waiting for her. She was willing to bet he'd already noted the dishes, but so what. “So why don't you get to your point and leave?”

Klaus made a thoughtful noise as he finished the cooking, dusting his hands of crumbs. “Need help?”

“From you? Absolutely not.” The words slipped out before she could catch him and find something politer to say. This was her grief, her method of coping. He didn't get an opinion and he didn't get to pretend they were friends. Not when he wold kill all of them if he thought it necessary. This? This mess and this grief and this small thing to help her mom was hers.

The smile died on his face but she didn’t flinch. She didn't know what he read on his face, but his head tipped in a silent acknowledgement. Instead of baiting her more, his hand returned to his pocket, and this time he produced a rolled up piece of parchment.

Caroline looked at it warily. “What is that?”

“Part of the apology,” he murmured as he set it delicately on top of the box holding the diamonds. “The bracelet is yours love, no strings. Do with it what you will. As for the rest.” He paused, blue eyes narrowed as he studied her, a hint of gold burning the edges of his iris. “The games my mother plays are not kind to her pawns. Be sure you don’t find yourself in over your head, Caroline.”

She lifted her chin to hide her tremble. “Threats?”

“Call it a warning.” Klaus said. “Likely the only one you’ll get.” Just as quickly, that sense of danger melted under another smile and he snagged a second cookie before turning and sauntering away at her protest.She slid her tongue between her teeth at the sight of just how well his pants were tailored and the way the suspenders highlighted the length of his back. The image was going to be burned behind her eyes for days.

As if he could sense her gaze dragging down his spine, he cast one more boyish smile at her as he opened her door. “The cookies were delicious, love. I do so look forward to learning what other secrets you're keeping.”

She watched him go, barely breathing, a mix of alarm and arousal mixing with adrenaline. So many layers. The hidden threat in his words, the reminder that he could walk into her home whenever he wished. The return of the bracelet, that little bit of claim he’d laid on her life.

An apology.

Swallowing, she wiped her shaking hands on her sweats and reached for the parchment. It unrolled to show the familiar lines of her face and the perfect image of a horse.

Thank you for your honesty.

Swallowing, she set the drawing down and didn’t know what to think.

[ootori-sibs]

Kyoya's second shot

Episode ten: Tamaki makes a discovery!

Tw: self harm (mentioned and implied) starving (mentioned)

The next session was more peaceful, he didn't have to talk to any guests, he could just watch Tamaki, whilst stirring his coffee lazily. Tamaki's way of acting evil was incredibly satisfying to watch; he kept pressing gentle kisses to the prop skull, running his tongue against his perfect teeth, the way he purred his words towards the girls- playing up his natural accent to make the ladies swoon, he drew his words out, lounging about in lazy regality. Kyoya had no idea Tamaki could do that, it was incredible… nearly enough to make him drool if he was honest. He wanted nothing but to sit there under Tamaki and let him woo him like that… but that could never happen. Kyoya looked at the girls, the guests, laughing and giggling and watching Tamaki with wide eyes… and he was consumed by jealousy. How dare they, how dare they get to enjoy so much attention from Tamaki, whilst Kyoya has to sit there, just wishing. They're so horrid, so vapid, they're worse than Haruhi, they don't even deserve his hatred.

Oh. The coffee stirrer had shattered in his hand, he growled under his breath and pushed the cup away from him. He turned to his laptop for comfort, opening the finances, he's not doing anything, just toying with the graphs and such. He takes out his phone as well, opening the council group chat.

Shadow king: Seika, I need you to do something. Now.

Woman#2: Ooh, someone's pissy, what happened?

Shadow king: That is irrelevant, just do something.

Hurt her.

Woman#2: You want me to hurt her? How? Are you sure?

Shadow king: I don't care how. Just do it.

He put his phone back in his bag, hands shaking from the anger. He wanted to leave, he felt angry, he felt he was going to scream. He took his glasses off, rubbing his face and running his hands through his hair, deep breaths, he just has to take deep breaths.

"Senpai?" Haruhi's soft voice cut through his calming breaths, sparking the rage in him again, he looked at her, putting his glasses back on. She looked worried, a soft smile on her face, she had no idea how much she was hated, "are you alright?"

He tenses up, did he have the strength to lie? He felt like punching her in the face here and now, but he knew he couldn't do that. He was tapping his nails on the table, trying not to tell her to fuck off, his lack of ease was clear to her, as he gritted his teeth and forced a smile. "Of course I am, why wouldn't I be? I'm just sorting out the finances right now, did you need anything Haruhi?"

She paused, sensing the danger though being unable to see why, her smile turned to a frown, "I… no, I just wanted to check on you, I'll… go back to my table now." She took a few steps back before turning and heading back to her customers, she should have been focusing on them anyway. Kyoya felt a little worried about how she'd clearly noticed something, wondering if she realised how much he hated her.

He couldn't focus on anything, nothing at all, so instead he took out his notebook, beginning to doodle. It was a human, it had sharper features then a human; a pronounced nose, a tiny neck, very sharp shoulder blades- Haruhi was softer than that, was he drawing Haruhi? He fixed the shoulder, smudging the offending ink with his finger and rounding off the shoulders. He focused on her hair, it was similar to Tamaki's, but uglier, flatter, brown. Her expression was one of disdain, one Kyoya had never seen on her face before, she was disgusted, like he knew she would be when she realised what he'd been doing- if she realised, commoners were never smart. Was the school badge on the wrong side? He always struggled with mirroring, it was hard to remember. Her eyes were bleeding silver from his pencil, he would have grabbed a pen but he had no blue, he didn't want to touch his red, it was the only red pen he had- Haruhi didn't deserve it.

She was disgusting, selfish, she didn't deserve Tamaki, she was just some dumb commoner… commoner, commoner, he said that word a lot, but Yuuichi had said it was regular- just regular people, they were the minority in real life. It was a strange feeling, they all had so much power yet there were so much more commoners in the world, it was strange, it was… odd. His breaths shuddered as he wrote words, the same word, over and over and over and over again around his sketch.

Commoner.

She's a commoner, and he hates her.

The session ended after a while, and the tables were pushed together, guess Tamaki had ordered a meeting. The others had gone to get dressed, so Kyoya hesitantly followed. When he got to his corset, he really didn't want to leave it, besides, the others hardly ever do any inventory so it's not like they'd notice it missing. He toyed with the tightness for a little, before slipping his shirt and blazer over it, something sparking in his mind as he put his tie on. An idea that led him to pull said tie as tight as it could possibly go… then loosen it a little- a tie isn't as safe as a corset apparently.

He took his place at the table, opening his laptop and closing his book, "so, what's this meeting about then Tamaki?"

Tamaki paused, looking unsure for a moment, there was something about how he'd looked at Kyoya that made him suddenly very uneasy, "well, just about everything and anything, just thought I'd switch it up, cause I uh- I wanna do something on Friday!" He smiles, clearly having just made that up, "care to give us a finance report?"

Now that was something Kyoya could do, he nodded, opening the finances graphs and charts and tables. He took out a remote for the projector that sat in the ceiling, waiting until Tamaki got the whiteboard out for him, then he projected his screen onto it. "So," he actually smiled, he loved talking about numbers, "we're actually doing rather well, profits are up and I have to say welldone, all of you are contributing to the profits equally, although of course, Tamaki is still number one." He pulled up a chart depicting each hosts individual profits, complete with images; obviously he'd manipulated the graphs, the twins were actually doing better than Tamaki by 2% but the graphs only purpose was was to make Tamaki feel good, and to hide the fact that Kyoya himself literally avoided hosting at all costs. The hosts seemed to enjoy the graph, though Haruhi had frowned, to which Kyoya nodded, "unfortunately, Haruhi has been slacking recently, is there a reason for this?"

All eyes were on Haruhi, and Kyoya felt incredibly vindicated by this. She paused, blinking in surprise, "well I don't think I was falling behind, I could've sworn I did more hosting then you have senpai…" Her tone was a pondering one, but Kyoya felt the rage spark up again.

"Well there's no need to be so rude about it," Kyoya glanced around, hand on his heart, maybe it was time to take a risk, "you've been awfully spiteful towards me lately and I'm not sure why, is something the matter Haruhi?" He kept his tone soft and almost hurt sounding, hand pressed against his head as the other loosely held the remote for the projector, he did his best to paint Haruhi as the aggressor- he could tell Tamaki was still too hurt from her distance on Sunday to stand up for her, but he looked torn, not sure who to believe. The twins glanced at each other, then between Kyoya and Haruhi, they'd been privy to the discussion that morning and were likely still hesitant. Honey and Mori were the wild card, Mori was unreadable as always but Honey looked sympathetic to Kyoya, and Kyoya felt a little spark of victory.

Haruhi stared across the table at him, trying to read him and failing, Kyoya was not going to let his guard down. So she sighed, "I haven't been rude to you senpai, you've just been jumpy, I even asked if you were alright this afternoon, remember?" Oh god, she was being honest, he wasn't sure how to combat honesty, unless he could twist her words into what he wanted…

"Haruhi, I'll be perfectly honest here, you should probably stop neglecting your duties. As I said this afternoon, I was too busy to converse with you, and you had clients anyway so you should have been at your table instead of bothering me with questions about whether there's anything wrong with me." He paused, taking a breath and letting it sink in, he was taking a huge, huge risk here, and he hoped it would pay off. The twins seemed to at least somewhat agree that Haruhi should have been doing his job, Honey seemed concerned about what was said, Mori was still unreadable, and Tamaki… Tamaki looked almost angry, but at what, Kyoya wasn't sure.

Haruhi was startled, "I… I didn't mean it like-"

Kyoya shut her up with a wave of her hand, "that doesn't matter Haruhi, what matters is that you left your station, and should pay more attention to your duties, are we in agreement?" She nodded and he smiled, changing the slide, "but yes, profits are up, even if the recent theme cost quite a lot, namely in the diamonds for Tamaki's prop skull," he glances down at the king, seeing Tamaki's smile made him feel fuzzy inside, he's so glad these idiots don't think about things for more than three seconds.

But then Tamaki spoke, "oh, about today's theme, I made sure to put all the costumes on the hangers when you were all setting up the table… Do you remember where you put your corset, Kyoya?" Oh god, oh fuck, Kyoya instantly glanced away, hand going to his abdomen, feeling the bones of the corset through his shirt and blazer.

"Well I-..."

Hikaru snickered, holding in a laugh, "did you keep it on? Couldn't you get it off?"

Karou joined in at that, chuckling softly, "like when you took too long this morning? Were you actually just struggling?"

Kyoya felt his face go red, and was glad of the makeup, he frowned and glared over their shoulders, "that's… that's not why I-"

"So you did keep it on?" Honey spoke up, tilting his head, smiling, "but for a different reason?"

Tamaki sighed, "aww Kyoya, I offered you help you if you got stuck, there's no shame in it." The tone he used, it was one you'd use for a jumpy, frightened animal- he was offended but he couldn't say it didn't sooth him slightly. He also felt the idea of Tamaki helping him with the corset was certainly someone that made him feel fuzzy but he was too tired to protest too much. He just sighed.

The meeting was cut short a little, Kyoya wasn't entirely sure what happened, he remembers the twins did a talk about the costumes they have for the themes lined up, and Honey gave feedback on the cakes he had ordered… but Kyoya was a little fuzzy through the whole thing, maybe the corset and the combo was a little too much. He could glance back down at his notebook to clarify that he was taking notes, though it was a larger font.

16:26 - Clothes look good, cake was dry...

It trailed off, and Kyoya's face feels hot, he's dizzy, and feels like he's so close to passing out. He closed his eyes and felt cold fingers against his skin, opening his eyes he saw Tamaki carefully untying the ribbons of his corset for him, his eyes were full of concern, "Kyoya… this is way too tight… how could you breathe?"

"Hm… couldn't…" Kyoya's words were slurring, god, he really was about to pass out.

Tamaki's eyes flickered up to Kyoya's face, noticing how clouded his eyes are and sighing, "oh no…" he reaches up, loosening Kyoya's tie for hum, their faces were so close, and Kyoya wondered if Tamaki could feel the heat from his face, "you tied your tie too tight too… please don't tell me it was on purpose…" he looked at Kyoya with those big doe eyes that Kyoya can't resist, and something in Kyoya just breaks. He's crying now.

Shocked, Tamaki pulls him into an embrace, just letting him cry, "oh… oh Kyoya… why? Why would you do that to yourself? Does this mean you lied about the reason for your starving too? Is this why you've been so antsy?" Kyoya didn't answer, he was sobbing now, the floodgates were open, there was no moving until he was done. Tamaki let him for now, a lot of things probably making sense in Tamaki's mind, he shifted so Kyoya and he were both more comfortable. The curtains parted slightly and Kyoya couldn't see who it was but Tamaki snapped, "hey! Don't look! Let him have privacy, just go home." Kyoya appreciated Tamaki caring so much for his privacy but felt a little bad at intruding on his.

Tamaki cradled him softly, rocking back and forth as Kyoya sobbed in his arms, Kyoya felt awful, absolutely horrible, he had been hurting himself, he had and that was awful, he had upset Tamaki, he upset his darling best friend and crush by letting him find out about the self harm. He was a horrible friend, he should have hidden it better, god he was terrible…

"Kyoya," Tamaki hummed Kyoya's name, pushing back slightly to look Kyoya in the eyes, wiping his teeths gently, "you know you can talk to me about anything right? You're my best friend and I love you, you're very important to me and I don't want to see you so hurt. Take care of yourself, I know it's probably hard, but just try your best, ok?" He smiled softly at him, his hand on Kyoya's cheek, Kyoya's own hand came up and touched Tamaki's, his eyes were wide and he couldn't help but smile. Tamaki's so wonderful, so brilliant, Kyoya loved him with every inch of his being, Kyoya simply adored him. "Promise me I won't ever see you so hurt again?"

Kyoya just nodded, he would hide it better next time, he wouldn't let Tamaki see even the idea of Kyoya being hurt, he hated himself for how he'd upset Tamaki- he wouldn't let it happen again. Tamaki had smiled and stood up, helping Kyoya up before fully undoing the corset, letting it fall to the floor. Kyoya felt a shiver run down his spine and Tamaki gasped, "oh you must be so cold! Here, let me help you with your shirt!" He bent down and buttoned Kyoya's shirt back up, humming a sweet little melody, one that made Kyoya's heart soar like a bird. He stood and put a gentle hand on Kyoya's shoulder, "I'll see you tomorrow mon ami, take care of yourself."

Kyoya was silent on the way home, his bodyguards couldn't get a word out of him, his fingers drummed on the cover of his black book, he wanted to write, but he didn't want to have to get his pen out of his bag. They got home eventually and Kyoya stormed up the driveway and into the mansion, he practically ran upstairs, slamming the door to his room the moment he entered it. He threw his bag at the table, before following it and kneeling down, placing his book down and opening it.

17:56 - Tamaki realised why I had the corset so tight, he helped me take it off, his hands are so soft. He knows about the self harm, I promised I wouldn't let him see it again but it's too late: he knows, he knows, he knows, he knows…

[starkergames]

Title: Dance Me to the End of Love Artists: @still-lovelygarnet (sketch), Lighinz (Ink),  @the-mad-starker​ (Color + Writer) Notes: Lighinz: This was the first piece of starker fanart I’ve ever worked on and I’m so glad it was with my lovely teammates. They’re such inspirations! It’s been amazing seeing this all come together. ❤️❤️ Garnet: This drawing has been a journey for me, and I am so happy to see it finished! It’s a beauty and I am proud of my wonderful, stunning, hard working and stupidly talented teammates, @the-mad-starker​ & Lighinz! And let’s not forget the fic that comes with it, Mads being an absolute trouper as always. ❤️❤️ Thank you guys for having me! Mads: I had absolutely no idea how much work coloring was but my teammates were always so encouraging and supportive. QAQ I’ll never take fanart for granted again QAQ But I’m happy I gave this a shot and I’ve learned so much. Thanks to my teammates and for this event for bringing us together 💗 The social media sites and media had gone apeshit over the leak. A certain document started circulating, a marriage license. 

Tony Stark was married. 

The only problem was, whoever had done it had blurred out his spouse’s name. Fic below the cut!

February 14, 2020.

A Friday night to remember since it was not only Valentine's Day but also the Stark Valentine's Charity ball.

Every year, Stark Industries would raise thousands and this year, it would be no different. Most likely, they'd be able to raise more than any other year previously since the spotlight had been on Tony for the past week.

An important document had been leaked.

A marriage license.

It came as a shock.

The social media sites and media had gone apeshit over the leak. A certain document started circulating, a marriage license.

Tony Stark was married.

The only problem was, whoever had done it had blurred out his spouse's name.

And so the paparazzi were on the hunt for a Mrs. or Mr. Stark only to find out Tony had taken a two week business trip.

False, they had discovered. The business trip was actually a honeymoon and the trail went cold until now.

Tony had managed to avoid them once he came back, no husband or wife in sight. That caused an even bigger commotion since it piqued everyone's curiosity. It was easy enough for Tony to remain unreachable, considering the man lived in the penthouse above Stark Industries.

It wasn't as easy for Peter though since he still lived in Queens with his aunt, but no one was all too interested in him. No one, except Tony.

Tony, who, despite Peter's insistence that he didn't need to be picked up, had arrived at his aunt's 5:30 on the dot. It wasn't unusual though since Tony was just spontaneous and hard to say no to.

Peter's boss and mentor sat beside him in the limo driving them to the event. He couldn't help but let his eyes wander over the man sitting beside him.

Tony Stark was aglow from all the sun he'd been enjoying and more than that, he was genuinely happy. The smile on his face said as much, a charming and almost dopey smile that not many were accustomed to seeing. Marital bliss suited the older man even if his smiles deepened the lines on his face.

To Peter, Tony has never looked so handsome.

He fidgeted in his seat, still not used to wearing the kind of attire that's required for these things.

Tony picked out his suit though, a cream-colored piece that only seemed to accentuate his slim but fit body. In contrast, the older man had worn a navy blue suit along with a very light, almost white, pink shirt. A rose was tucked into his shirt pocket and Peter smiled at the sight.

"The polls for the identity of Mrs. Stark is pretty funny," Tony mused as he scrolled through the media sites on his phone.

"Who's winning now?" Peter asked as he leaned closer to peek at his phone.

Pepper Potts's name was nowhere in the list but only because she had adamantly denied it from the very start. The paparazzi had also proven that Ms. Potts had been attending a company business while Tony had disappeared for his honeymoon.

"Who is that even…?" Peter laughed. "Natasha Romanoff…?"

Tony bumped his knee against his and chuckled.

"They got a hold of the guest list," Tony explained, "that's why she's jumped up in the polls."

Peter hummed but leaned back.

"Too bad the only person accompanying you is your protege," Peter said, knee bouncing as he scrolled through the list.

There was a separate poll for men, too, since Tony wasn't exactly shy about his preferences. Peter's heart skipped a beat when he saw his own there, listed near the very bottom at place number twenty-one out of twenty-five.

Warmth. Tony's hand settled on top of his bouncing knee. His wedding ring glinted in the light, a simple golden band with one studded diamond embedded inside.

"Breathe, kid," Tony instructed gently. "You sure you wanna do this? I know these public things aren't your scene."

Peter was anxious and it was obvious. He took a deep breath, stopped his fidgeting, and focused his runaway thoughts.

He knew that if he had said so right now that Tony would bring him home.

That, more than anything, was what had Peter returning the smile. It was a bit strained from the upcoming event, but it was there. He settled a hand over Tony's and felt the smooth, hard metal beneath his fingers. A gentle squeeze was given to show his appreciation.

"I can do this," Peter said and then corrected himself. "I want to do this."

"That's my spunky little intern," Tony smiled back at him.

"Not an intern anymore," Peter reminded him with a fond shake of his head.

He hasn't been an intern for almost two years and was expecting to take over as the R&D department manager of Stark Industries within the next six months.

And the relationship between him and Tony...

Tony grinned at the correction.

"Of course not. How do I keep forgetting?" Tony pretended to chide himself.

Peter was about to make a quip about his age but then the limo came to a stop at the entrance.

Outside, he saw the crowd of reports just waiting to catch a glimpse of Tony's spouse who they expected had ridden with him. He wondered how they'd react when they see just little old Peter Parker trailing after his boss.

Everyone was used to seeing Peter by Tony's side since he joined SI. Tony, himself, had called Peter his protégé, his next big project, the rising star of SI… the list of affectionate nicknames go on and on and has accumulated into a big pile of endearments.

Peter cherished each one.

"Knock 'em dead," was the last thing Tony said before they went to face the crowd.

The camera flashes were blinding. Even after two years of it, Peter still forgot to expect them until it was already too late and dots were dancing in his vision.

As expected of Tony Stark, he owned the audience's attention and smiled at every camera turned his way. Peter followed behind and was careful to keep away from the reporters.

No one was really interested in him since it was Tony that they wanted to get at.

Peter watched, amused, as Tony deflected every inquiry regarding his spouse that was thrown his way. This was a charity ball, after all, and the older man turned every question into answers that promoted and brought the attention back to the event in question.

Peter didn't know how he did it but it was a superpower he'd have to learn in the future.

The event area was decorated in a beautiful mess of Valentine's Day colors. The tables were set in white with stunning displays of bouquets. The roses were in full bloom, vibrant reds that popped out when surrounded by the more gentle pinks and whites of the surrounding flowers.

Crowds of people already sat at their tables, socializing and having a good time with wine being served.

It was a very large event and just standing there, taking it all in, Peter felt he could've easily lost himself in there. But then he felt a strong and familiar presence by his side and he turned, finding Tony right there beside him.

At that moment, the room could've been filled to capacity and Peter wouldn't have noticed anyone else besides Tony.

To him, it was obvious that he was in love with his boss. To others, maybe it wasn't as obvious since they liked to think of him as Tony's mini-me.

A lot of people also felt that they knew what Tony's feelings and thoughts were. It was easy to believe that since Tony was such an outspoken and outgoing person. He could talk on and on about something, injecting his insights and thoughts on a subject, and the listener would only have a glimpse of who Tony really was.

So, everyone thought that they knew Tony Stark because of his past reputation and his easy-going personality.

Then Tony did something like secretly getting married and people suddenly realized how very little they knew about him. They hadn't even known he was dating, let alone serious enough to pop the question.

They didn't see Tony the way Peter did, didn't know him the way Peter did so how could he blame them for being so oblivious?

Every smile Tony gave to others, he gave twice as many to Peter in darted glances and quick flashes. He always pulled Peter into the conversation and Peter wondered if others recognized just how often Tony spoke about him.

Maybe they did. Maybe they brushed it off.

That would change tonight.

Many had asked about the mysterious Mr. or Mrs. Stark. Curious eyes searched for Tony's spouse by his side and seemed to slip right over Peter. It didn't upset him at all. It made him happy that he was such a well recognized figure in Tony's life.

The money came pouring in for the charity and Tony gave them his dazzling smile. Appetizers were served, the guests' chatter dropping to low murmurs as they were served finger foods that could've easily replaced dinner with how generous it was.

A short speech was made and Tony looked so handsome with the mic in his hand and a bright gleam in his eye.

Peter, from his seat at the front table, could practically feel how the guests were hoping for Tony to introduce his spouse.

And like the tease Tony was, just shortly before concluding his speech, he had the audacity to say, "I know many of you are dying to meet my sweetheart." He gave the crowd a wink, "And it is Valentine's Day so it would make sense, huh?"

A pause as the crowd waited patiently or impatiently for the big reveal.

"But this ball isn't about me or my newly beloved, but we'll see if we can get some more surprises in by the end of the night. Dinner should be coming out shortly and then, we'll get to the fun part of the evening. Dancing!"

Tony rejoined the first table, completely at ease with his selected dinner mates. He flashed Peter a quick grin before he nudged his seat closer.

"What do you think? Will they be lucky enough?" Tony leaned in to ask.

Beneath the table, a warm hand settled on his knee, a reassuring weight. Peter had to fight to keep the smile from splitting across his face.

The whole dancing part of the event made him nervous and Tony had promised him that he didn't need to. Just thinking about it made his heart pound but when he looked at the older man, he felt it melt into a mess of goo and affection.

He subtly slipped his hand beneath the table, settling it above Tony's and gave it a squeeze.

"Maybe," he said with a faint smile.

They withdrew both their hands as the waiters came out and served dinner. The dinner SI provided for their guests was almost decadent. It warmed their bellies with good food and along with the alcohol from the open bar, laughter and smiles were being exchanged with ease.

The clatter of utensils working over near and veggies filled the room and the soft quiet conversations lulled as people ate.

And just as dinner was wrapping up, a familiar tune started to play. Peter glanced and Tony and found the man staring back at him, unabashed and grinning from ear to ear.

He returned it with an exasperated shake of his head, but when Tony held his hand out… Peter took it.

He was pulled from his seat and led onto the empty dance floor. The music swirled around them and the entire hall fell into a hush as more and more people noticed the pair on the floor.

Tony led Peter in a dance and it was there that everyone's eyes were finally opened to the truth.

The person they had been looking for all evening had been by Tony's side the entire time.

There was no doubt about it now, as the audience's eyes followed the pair. Fluid, graceful movements… Hand in hand, they swept across the dance floor, perfectly in sync in body, as well as mind.

It was undeniable, the tenderness that spread across Tony's face as he looked at Peter

Undeniable, when Peter smiled so sweetly at him.

They danced and danced and to Peter, it was like the entire hall disappeared. There was no one else but them and all the anxiety, all the doubts faded away as he looked into Tony's eyes.

They had taken a long path to get where they were today. What started as a simple, professional relationship slowly transformed into a quiet, but comfortable silence as they worked.

The silence became filled with chatter and once one started talking, the other would answer. Their quiet work hours became filled with laughter and scandalized jokes then with soft teasing. The hunger for each other's company grew until it spilled out of the lab and brought them together in movie theaters then quiet little evenings in Peter's apartment.

Their first kiss was a memory that made them both grin and laugh. A moment of spontaneity as Tony babbled on and on, a flush of excitement tinting his cheeks red. Then shocked silence as Peter shut him up with a press of his lips.

Do that again, Tony had dared and Peter hadn't backed down since. He'd done it countless times until they were both breathless from it.

Countless dates and secret smiles being exchanged at the office. I love you's being exchanged softly and meaningfully. Reverently. Then the ease in which those words came, each dropping it casually in their texts and whenever they parted. It didn't make those significant words any less meaningful. In fact, it only reaffirmed, over and over, how they felt about each other.

Months fast-forwarded and then Tony was kneeling in front of him, a black box in hand and Peter staring dumbly at him like he hadn't expected it at all. The mister to my Mr. Stark, Tony had casually said once upon a time and now… Now, the ring sat on Peter's fingers, a quiet but unbreakable declaration.

All those memories whirled around them as they danced. The ease in which they trusted one another was obvious. The love they had was now glaringly obvious, as obvious as the beautiful sparkle that Peter's diamond ring gave off, a perfect mirror to Tony's wedding band.

And when the song came to an end, Tony's mic turned on. That voice that Peter has heard whispering love into his ears come on the speakers, breathless from excitement and exertion.

"I don't need to make introductions," Tony said while looking into Peter's eyes. "You all know who he is." -- Thank you to our wonderful artists and writer who participated in the first Starker Games!

[baekhyyun]

Accused Love | KNJ

» pairing: kim namjoon x reader (ft. lim jaebeom and byun baekhyun)

» genre: angst(???), cause it ain’t fluff children rn, sfw, mystery, stranger to semi-lovers

» rating: PG13

» word count: 3.3k

» Warnings: strong language, the lack of namjoon's name being used, jaebeom and baekhyun got more screen time than the damn main character i’m sorry

a / n: THIS IS ACTUALLY A NAMJOON FIC JGSKVSDS , even tho i mention his name like 5 times (ITS NOW 8) throughout the whole this fic (!!!!!) , this is also my first full fic so bare with my shitty writing and it's debuting after 5000 years. This beauty is apart of the Luv Library Project under the mystery category! There will be more than one part !!!! I wanted to post something before we got to the good part jfksnkvjdfkj. Thank you to everyone who has helped me and encouraged me with this fic!

Special thanks to @jungtaeyoongles for being there with me from the beginning, bouncing ideas off with, helping me plan this whole story and beta reading as well! Thank you to @meowxyoong for bouncing ideas with me too! Thank you to @thinksshesawolf and @ dee-ehn for beta reading this mess and clowning me in the process. We know who the real main character is in this fic.

The night sky was pitch-black, making the stars shine bright like diamonds against the darkness. Being located in the heart of Seoul, the stars shined brighter than the lights hopping off all of the tall buildings in the quiet, busy city. Jaebeom, one of the many infamous mafia leaders in South Korea, found himself waiting in the night for his next crime. Being the head meant sending someone under him to do the crime itself without getting his hands dirty. Yet with bad timing, he was out of luck for the night. All of his men found themselves in different missions committing different sins to bring in the money that the head wanted.

 After becoming the head boss, he stopped going out and living life to protect his own, his hands never touching anything besides the gun strapped to his chest hidden from the public eye or the money that was earned by his henchmen. He felt like he was on top of the world again after being away from the scene for so long. Jaebeom, believing his skills were rusty, turned to money laundering to build up his skillset again. Oh, was he wrong.

 He was on a hot streak and subsequently oozed cockiness from each movement he made. Every step Jaebeom took felt like pure muscle memory. He was a greedy man that wanted money. Money made the world go round. You could buy anything and anyone with a couple of hundred-dollar bills. The man had an insatiable desire for money. $100,000 was not enough to sustain his need for money.  He wanted more. He wanted $500,000. It felt right to him. Not bothering to double-check his work, he just went for it as his life depended on it.

 Never in a million years, would he have thought that he would be wiring money from a gaming company. Tencent, one of the largest Asian companies and known worldwide, did not scare him. He felt that this job was easy. Getting access to this place was a piece of cake, he thought. His charming personality is what got him the keys to the records room, housing every transaction that the company has ever made.

 Jaebeom thought everything was going smoothly, but he could not be more wrong. After being here for three hours wiring this money, he realized that he made a rookie mistake. How could he use his ID card to get access to the files? Why did he not use his boss's card to open up the files? All these questions went through his head at lightning speed that caused his heart to start racing, he felt like his ears were going to burst from the sound of his own heart. The world around him was crashing down at a fast pace that he had to think of something fast.

 "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" Jaebeom hissed to himself. How could I be so reckless? I can't let myself get caught over this shit. I gotta get out of here!"

 His senses went haywire where he couldn't think straight. Getting caught in this building around this time was the least of his worries. He needed out and that's what he was trying to do with his mind racing.

 As the clock ticked, Jaebeom rushed out the building to his car that was parked 5 blocks down the road. His only thought was to find a solution to this shit show that he had created the minute he walked in that building. His luck ran out.

 "Fuck me, man!" he continued to tell himself while running as fast as he could.

 "T-this is the o-one that f-fucks me o-over, and it's the simplest-t s-shit that gets me," he stuttered trying to control his breathing.

 Relief washed over him as he spotted his car hidden behind a dumpster. He still wasn't out of the clear. Slowing his pace down, a new thought popped in his head: should he have called someone to help him out? He thought it was best, but he didn't want to feel embarrassed at the thought of his underlings catching a whiff of the mess he created doing a simple job. He was the mafia boss for crying out loud. Making a mistake was out of the question, getting help was out as well. The more he thought of calling someone the more he got frustrated with the idea.

 The car roared to life, one hand reached the gear shift and set the car in reverse then back to drive. Hitting the gas pedal, he drove off with nothing but a dust cloud left behind. For being a mafia boss, he sure is fucking stupid, never once did he think that he would be making a mistake like that.

 Reaching a red light at an intersection, he noticed that the city was waking up to begin their day. He only had a couple of hours to come up with a solid cover story until he was supposed to show up at work again. Looking out the window he noticed the cars pass by; one car caught his attention. He thought this was his chance that he couldn't miss. It was a perfect idea from his point of view. Framing someone else was a bit of a bitch move but if he got out the clear, fuck, he would do it a thousand times over.

 He thought that using his rival would get rid of him for good so that he could be number one and rule Seoul from behind the scenes. Having everyone shirk in fear brought such joy to Jaebeom that he needs to go through with this plan. Becoming power-hungry made him crazy. He was thirsty for it and was going to do anything to get it. 

 Realizing that the light turned green, he makes his way back to the company for damage control. Who knew that bringing an end to his rival would make a man smile like a mad-man, but he thought it was so worth it to do so.

 The ride back was fairly quick for Jaebeom. As he got closer to Tencent, the police were there parked in the front of the building. He had to find a way into the building without being spotted. Circling Tencent, he decided to go through the backway. He still had his ID card on him, so if the police caught him right there he for sure would kiss the $500,000 goodbye.

 Parking his car in the alleyway behind the company, Jaebeom made his way to the back door cautiously. The perks of being named leader, it showed that you can handle any situation no matter the outcome, finding a solution to the mess he created was ironic.

 Slowly making his way up the stairs, he avoided any main hallways, not wanting to draw unwanted attention. Climbing twenty flights of stairs was not something Jaebeom planned for. He felt more guilty with each step he took for messing up a simple thing. He wished he had powers to reverse time and start over from the very beginning, but alas, he was never going to get that wish.

 Reaching the eighteenth floor, Jaebeom noticed no one near the entrance to the stairwell. He silently thanked the gods above to have come all the way up without getting caught. Twisting the knob to the door he slowly opened it and peaked his head to see if the coast was clear and surprisingly it was. Closing the door again, he stayed put in the stairwell. He found it strange that no one was guarding this floor, the floor where Jaebeom was located a couple of hours ago.

 Jaebeom's suspicions grew more as he stayed put, thinking of all the possible outcomes of this situation. None of his answers made any sense, the dots were not connecting at all. This pissed him off more than it should have.

 Deciding to give up, he moved on to the top floor where the CEO's office was, along with his own. Jaebeom's job title wasn't much, but that charming personality of his got him that spot on the top floor alongside the CEO. Everyone hated that Jaebeom got special treatment because he came here with no experience. He created enemies, did he care? No. It made him mad with power. He enjoyed that idea of people hating what he had and what they couldn't get.

 There was a scream that pulled Jaebeom out of his thoughts. "Where is he?! What do you mean you can't find him?!" one of the cops said into his phone.

 This is where it became challenging for Jaebeom, finding a clear path into the hallway without getting spotted by anyone. Peeking through the crack of the door, he noticed a tall man with a tan trenchcoat dressed up in an expensive suit. The realization hits him when he notices who the man was. It was none other than Kim Namjoon, a leader in the underground business and upper business, but to Jaebeom he was just a rival.

 He wondered why Namjoon was here, he had no business being here. Yet here he was waltzing into the company like he owns the place. The confidence that Namjoon gave off made Jaebeom sick to his stomach. How could someone just act confident all the time?

 "God, he's so infuriating, like can't this man even act normal," Jaebeom muttered to himself. "I just want to punch that stupid smirk off of his face."

 The wheels were turning in Jaebeom's head that after everything, he was getting some luck after the morning he had today. Reopening the door, he noticed Namjoon walking away from the coat closet. This was his opportunity to get rid of his ID card.

 He couldn't go out into the main hallway, he would get spotted quick. He needed to find a way to get himself into that coat closet. He had to think of something fast, there wasn't much time to waste. Looking back to where the officer was, Jaebeom couldn't find him.

 "Where did he go? He was just there," he told himself. Another voice caught his attention and it was from the CEO, Baekhyun. He was talking to the officer that Jaebeom was looking for. He felt so blessed to have him occupied. Looking left and right, he noticed that the coast was clear and booked it straight to the coat closet.

 Closing the door behind him, he was met with darkness, looking for the light switch with his hands. As he found the switch, the small closed space lit up. "Now where is that trenchcoat of yours," he whispered. "Ah, I found you, my dear sweet savior. Oh, how you are saving me from so much work."

Grabbing his ID from his coat pocket, he quickly placed it in Namjoon's trenchcoat and turned back around. Opening the door, he made sure the coast was clear once again and stepped out. Jaebeom made his way to the CEO's office and knocked on the door. Baekyhun and the officer turned their heads, noticing that it was Jaebeom.

 "There he is! Get him," Baekyhun loudly spoke.

 The officer was charged towards Jaebeom and before he could utter a word his hands were behind his back and his body slammed against the door. Groaning out loud from the impact Jaebeom asked, "What's going on, why am I getting slammed on a damn door by an officer?!"

 "Quit playing coy, Lim, what did you do with the money you stole from the company?" Baekhyun asked.

 Facing the man who asked the question, "I don't know what is going on, I just got here," Jaebeom's voice dropped a few octaves deeper.

 Baekhyun darted towards Jaebeom pushing the officer out of the way and turning Jaebeom around to face him. "Lim, I won't ask you again. Where is the money?!" he yelled, stressing each word as he spoke.

 "And I'm going to tell you again that I don't know what you are talking about!" Jaebeom rebutted back to the CEO.

 Baekyhun was just fuming with anger from Jaebeom's answer. Baekyhun swore that he was just bluffing and acting dumb, but the confusion on his face made his story more believable. Letting go of Jaebeom, Baekyhun walked towards the window of his office that gave him the best view of the busy city below. He was at a crossroads, not knowing what to do. He wanted to believe Jaebeom but the evidence was right there.

 Jaebeom silently watched his boss freak out, trying to understand the words that he spoke. His boss was at war with himself. Jaebeom thought he could use this as an advantage; to confuse the man more than he was.

 "Baekhyun, you know that I would never do anything to harm this company or to betray your trust," he spoke out loud.

 Baekhyun just stared at the man, his expression unreadable. Jaebeom couldn't figure out what he was thinking. Was Baekhyun figuring out that everything he's said was a lie? Jaebeom couldn't go down like this, this was not going to be the end.

 "Baekhyun, please I don't know what is going on, but I can tell you that I haven't seen my ID since yesterday. If that can help my case in any way," he hopelessly said.

 Jaebeom silently pleaded with Baekhyun to give him a chance to hear him out, which reluctantly he did. Baekyhun gave a hand signal to the police officer to leave the room and give the men privacy. "You have five minutes to tell me your side of the story or I'll ask the cops to take you away from here," he insisted.

 "As I said before, I haven't seen my ID since yesterday. The last time I saw the thing it was on my desk in my office. After that, I couldn't find it," Jaebeom lied through his teeth.

 "You lost your ID and didn't bother telling anyone about this?" Baekhyun questioned him.

 "Listen, I didn't think much of it when I couldn't find it after I left work. I thought I could find it when I got here today, but here we are." Jaebeom briefly paused.

 "I was planning on telling you today if I ended up not finding it!" he continued, "I can show you where I left it in my office and you can let the officer search too."

 Baekhyun was hesitant on taking Jaebeom's offer on searching his office, he was stressed and he was doubting everything that was said by this man. His trust in him was dropping rapidly, but did he have another choice? He had to go for it even if he ended up looking like a fool.

 Rising from his seat, Baekhyun walked around his desk and stood in front of Jaebeom and just stared him down. "If I found out that you are just fucking around and we find that ID of yours, you are out of here and out of my sight," leaving Jaebeom in his seat, Baekhyun walked towards the door and looked back, "Hurry up, we don't have all day. I have to do damage control because of you."

 Jaebeom quickly got up from his seat and followed his boss from behind, making their way to his office. The officer trailing along asked where they both were heading, Baekhyun quickly answering, "To his office, we are going to search for that ID card of his that supposedly was lost."

 "But sir, we don't have a search warrant to partake in this. We will not be able to assist you," the officer explained.

 Baekhyun continued to make his way to Jaebeom's office, telling anyone that walked past him to follow. Not a word was uttered when he spoke to anyone. The workers just simply followed like mindless slaves, not questioning his orders.

 Walking into the office, Baekhyun strolled quickly to the desk in the middle of the office and began to rummage through the files that laid on top neatly. Everyone that followed along began to do the same, going to different parts of the room and not leaving a corner unturned. Jaebeom just stood by the door not knowing what to do with himself besides watching the disaster unfold.

 Looking up to face the man that caused all the distress, Baekhyun spoke out loud, "Lim, it is best if you stepped outside and just stood by with the officer. You are truly not needed here."

 Jaebeom was offended by the words that the man spoke to him. It never crossed his mind that he would be pushed out of something that involved him. "To be fair Baekhyun, I don't think that is a good idea. What if one of the workers here is the culprit and trying to frame me over what happened? I'm sorry but I am not leaving this room until you all leave with me." His voice roared across the room.

 Baekhuyn rolled his eyes at his subordinate's stubbornness, it made him feel sick to his stomach that he did not want to walk. This was something that Jaebeom took very seriously. Never once did this man raise his voice at anyone during the job. He took everything that was handed to him without a single complaint. It scared Baekhyun that Jaebeom stood his ground and didn't budge one bit.

 "If you won't leave then stand by the door and don't get into anyone's way, Lim," he spoke with venom in his voice.

 Pleased with the response from his boss, he walked back to the door and just watched. No one knew what was to come at the end of this search. It was entertaining to watch everyone look through his belongings. They were never going to find anything and it made him ecstatic to have this type of knowledge over people.

 "Sir, we couldn't find anything in the cabinets,"

 "Sir, the bookshelf is clean,"

 One by one each person that Baekhyun brought with him ended up not finding anything. This made his blood boil, that not only could they not find anything, he as well couldn't come up with anything. His whole office was clean. Countless thoughts came to mind that gave him a migraine. Where could that ID of his be? Who took it? All these questions came to mind and none of the answers that he came up with seemed logical.

 With a huge sigh, Baekhyun told everyone to go back to work, this was a huge blow for his ego. Being proven wrong was his least favorite thing in the world. Being right about everything made his day, the power he felt was his drug. It was intoxicating to him. He needed this. Slamming the folders that laid on the desk, Baekhyun paced towards Jaebeom with anger in his eyes, he was not pleased when everyone came up short in their findings.

 "I don't know where you hid that ID of yours but if it's not found in the next twenty-four hours, you are on your own." he spat.

 Jaebeom wasn't shocked that his boss was worked up over not finding the missing ID. It actually made his day. Playing coy was his strongest suit; he enjoyed playing clueless. This was a win for him, the sight of his boss losing hope little by little. Everything was falling into place on how he imagined it, sweet victory was close. All he needed was the last piece to fall into place.

 Baekhyun sighed out loud, finally releasing Jaebeom from his grip and walked out of the ruined office. Jaebeom looked around and just smirked like a mad man and decided it was time to wrap things up. Shouts could be heard from his office, which made Jaebeom run out to where the commotion was. All he saw was three cops surrounding Namjoon, who was confused with everything trying to explain.

 One of the officers quickly grabbed hold of Namjoon and roughly pushed him against the nearest wall, "Kim Namjoon, you're under arrest!"

 Copyright © 2020 franklytae. All rights reserved. Please do not repost on any platform or translate without permission.

[suspiriu-m]

About Me

Hello! My name is Sal and welcome to my blog, Suspirium! Suspirium is a word that originates from one of my favorite movies, Luca Guadagnino’s 2019 remake of Dario Argento’s classic italian horror movie Suspiria. According to World of Dictionary, Suspirium is a Latin word meaning “Deep breath, sigh”. It’s also the title of one of my favorite songs from the soundtrack to the movie produced by Thom Yorke of Radiohead. I’m a huge horror movie buff so expect to see a lot of that sort of content on my blog if I can incorporate it into any of my work. I chose this as the title of my blog because of how well the word fits into the movie, and I just love the way it sounds. Anybody who’s watched the movie will understand, but I won’t go into detail as to not spoil it for anybody who hasn’t yet seen it.

Throughout my highschool years I technically went to two schools. My main and home school was Middletown High School, and my secondary school was Orange Ulster Boces in Florida New York. In high school I was always in media production and art classes. For example, photography, video editing, drawing & painting classes and my favorite was an Elements of Horror class I took my senior year. Horror being my favorite genre, I absolutely had to take a class that’s dove into the origins of classic horror novels, films and short stories. Leading to me finding my favorite classic horror story Dracula by Bram Stoker, and a multitude of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Continuing on now to college i’m now majoring in Media Production while also still taking some classes in Marketing and Design! I really enjoy both a lot so it’s hard to kind of pick exactly which I want to do, but it’s nice knowing that no matter what path I finally choose I'll still have some experience in the other!

Aside from my education, I love to watch horror movies and read stories in my own free time. Movies in general are a huge hobby of mine and I watch at least 3-4 a week given I have the time. Some of my favaroties of all time concerning classics have got to be the Halloween series, The Evil Dead series and all four of the Scream movies. Other hobbies of mine that take up a huge part of my life and time are video games and music. I have a pretty big record collection that’s continuously growing with at least 80-90 albums and counting. I just recently purchased a few more to add being Sade’s Diamond Life, Whitney Houston’s Whitney and Whitney Houston albums, Lazaretto by Jack White, Texas Sun by Khruangbin & Leon Bridges and Petals for Armor by Hayley Williams. Hopefully my next additions will be What’s Your Pleasure? by Jessie Ware and The Baby by Samia. I’ve been collecting them for years, but especially now since even CD’s are starting to go out of style. I’m the kind of person who still likes to have physical copies of all my music and movies and games so having such big collection is super special to me.

In terms of video games, I try and play as wide of a variety that I can because I believe I can find something I like in any genre. Strategy, shooters, brawlers, online competitive games etc, but I think my favorite style of game is single-player, narrative driven experiences. Most recently I played The Last of Us Part II and was absolutely enthralled with it. I loved the first game so much so getting a sequel was something I was extremely grateful for. I don’t think video games get enough credit for what they do for storytelling. TLOU 1 and 2 are some of my favorite stories that I have experienced in any form of media. The heartbreak, pain, love, fear and excitement those games have succeeded in giving me while just sitting in front of my TV is something no other form of entertainment has brought me. Some of the most touching moments, but also the most excruciating. They also had a queer women front and center throughout the games which is something that isn’t very common in video games so seeing that was really nice to me. Other than The Last of Us, some other solid narrative driven games I’ve played are God of War, Uncharted 1-4, Marvel’s Spider-Man, The Tomb Raider Reboots, Ghost of Tsushima, the Batman Arkham series and Control.

Although story based games are my favorites that doesn’t mean I don’t have a place in my heart for some good old fashioned fun as well! I also really enjoy a lot of the Super Mario and Legend of Zelda games as well. My biggest pet peeve that I have with the gaming industry right now though is Fortnite. I think it’s literally the most annoying game ever created. People spend hundreds and thousands of dollars just to buy skins and weapon packs and I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. The fact that I work at a major video game retailer and constantly have kids running through my store screaming about the damn game at least once a day could also contribute to my hatred. Either way, I want no part and absolutely nothing to do with it.

Going back to queer representation though. I recently watched Pose over the summer. Not only was the show heavily based during the AIDS epidemic in New York City, almost the entirety of the main cast was comprised of Transgender Black women. On prime time television! This is the first show to ever achieve such a feat. Not only was the cast extremely talented, I thought the writing and production of the show as a whole was brilliant. It definitely has its flaws and I could point out a few of them, but I believe all of the good of the show far outweighs the bad. It’s not afraid to tackle extremely real and difficult subjects the Transgender and Black communities have faced in this country and all over the world. It’s so important to see content like this on television as well because EVERYBODY deserves representation. Not only was the cast Trans, but one of the lead writers of the series Janet Mock is also a Black Trans woman! Pose was filled with heartfelt moments that truly had me sobbing in my bed as I watched. I think I actually cried at pretty much every single episode for both seasons. The cast is brilliant, the realism and talent and star power they bring to the show is like nothing that I’ve ever seen before and I’m so glad to be able to see them up on my television. I so badly one day hope that I can be behind the scenes of producing a show of this caliber some day.

While I have yet to help in the production of a show like this, I have had my fair share of of making short films, music videos and even assisting on a friend of mine’s first full length movie that he submitted to festivals. Last year, I had the opportunity to shoot a short horror film with my classmates for our final project. The film was based around a young woman getting trapped at her school in the middle of a blizzard, and slowly beginning to realize that she may not be alone. In a fight for her life, she has to survive till morning while going up against a mysterious killer who lurks the halls of her small town college. Sadly, we didn’t have enough time to produce a full and finalized cut of the film but coming together and working with a few other classmates was still a really fun experience. Not only was I able to play the role of the killer, I aided in audio, music selection, location scouting, props department, shot planning and writing the movie and it was a great time. I also had the pleasure of helping out my friend Matt Vincini in shooting his short film The Cattle Farmer. A horror/thriller film about a boy who is adopted into a family, only to realize that his life might have been planned from the start. It featured a mysterious woodland family who may or may not have had cannibalistic tendencies that included their adopted children. It was a super cool experience to be on a set with a bunch of actors and seeing my friend in action in the role of director. Collaborating on projects like this with friends is always a fun time, even it does get stressful at some points. At one point in the film, one of the characters realizes that the dinner he is currently eating could quite possible be his last meal ever. Which kinda let me to thinking what my last meal would be. After some thinking, I think i’d definitely have to choose my families homemade pasta and meatballs. I know, pretty stereotypical for an Italian family but it’s just so good. We make our own sauce every september and it’s a huge family event. Everybody comes together and one of our houses and it’s literally a whole days worth of work. The best part? At the end of the night, we all have a huge feast and make pasta and meatballs with all of the sauce we just made. It’s one of my favorite things to do with my family and always one of my favorite meals. Not only is it delicious, but also sentimental.

This is all for now! Thanks for stopping by my blog and reading a little bit about me. I could probably keep rambling on for hours but I don’t think that’s the smartest idea. I can’t wait to fill this blog with more content this year and hope to hear from you guys as well! Until then, i’ll be watching more movies and DEFINITELY playing some more games. At this point i’ve been playing the new Marvel’s Avengers video game so, let me get back to kicking some AIM ass!

[erekiosuncreativeideas]

The Part-Time Puppeteer - Chapter 04

<= Chapter 3

Summary : Lukas has a totally normal day at work (spoiler alert: he doesn't). Also available on AO3 : https://archiveofourown.org/works/23828971/chapters/57890368

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New chapter ! I hope you'll like it ! Don't hesitate to leave a comment if you did, it helps me a lot, I can assure you !

Sorry about the drawing not being finished, my tablet is dying and I couldn't do more. I probably won't be able to draw anything for this fanfic until I either solve the problem or buy another tablet...

Anyway, happy reading !

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Chapter 4 - “I’m… I’m sorry?”    

Kaleb did say that Lukas was going to have a lot of work because of the auditions… But the young man really thought it wouldn’t be that bad. For several hours, the student had to do many tasks, a lot of which involving physical efforts. He wasn’t very sporty usually, so it was quite demanding for his body. All his muscles seemed to beg him to stop after a while. After all, spending a few hours moving heavy props around and building stuff was not easy for a young nonathletic man like him. When his mentor, Tom, told him he could take a break, Lukas felt like he was hearing angels singing in the background. The student stretched, feeling his joints crack at the action. Oh, he so needed that.

Lukas approached the coffee machine in the room and prepared himself a cup. He had to drink at least one cup if he wanted to survive for the rest of his shift. He looked at his watch and was relieved to see he only had an hour or so before the end of his workday.

“Thank God,” he thought to himself with a sigh. The day had been quite tiring, both mentally and physically, and the idea of just collapsing onto his bed was extremely appealing to him. Though he knew he had some assignments to finish and that he wouldn’t be able to go to sleep before midnight. Welp, this had to be expected, with his studies and the fact that most of his free time would be taken by this gruelling job.

At least, Mike had done everything to make him feel at ease. His new friend also helped him to get acquainted with the other members of the team and Lukas was really thankful for that. The other man also got to explain why his evil twin was there and it only made the student’s day even more tiring than it already was. Apparently, when the guy had learnt about his brother’s participation in the project, he had “offered” to play a role and was given the antagonist part. However, “offered” wasn’t quite the right word and Lukas guessed that MJ forced himself in the project, from Mike’s face while the latter was explaining it. In a way, his presence was a good thing for the show, since MJ was very famous, even among children. His participation in the project would only raise the ratings of the show and this was something they deeply needed for the show to keep airing. However… MJ’s attitude on set was definitely not needed.

The guy was absolutely detestable, an opinion apparently shared by most people in the team. He was like a diva, but ten times worse. Not only did he criticize most of the stagehands for things he had no responsibility in, but he was also unquestionably disrespectful and odious to everyone, even Grooves himself! The nerves this guy had! He seemed to think he was superior to every person in this room! The only one to whom he was less displeasing was his brother, though Lukas didn’t envy him. If MJ wasn’t mean to him, he was at best condescending and at worst passive-aggressive.

Lukas also had to deal with him at some point, with MJ always pointing at his mistakes and wondering aloud why they hired a student out of all people in need of a job. No need to say that the only thing preventing Lukas to punch him in the face was the money he really, really needed at the end of the month. He hadn’t noticed how patient and calm he could be until now, if he had to be completely honest.

Did this execrable actor have some quality to compensate how rude he was? Not really. However, he did know how to act, almost perfectly. The young man had to admit that, at least. If only the other’s personality wasn’t so terrible… Lukas had been admirative of MJ in the past, when he didn’t actually know him, but now, his admiration had been thrown away. Very, very far away. The question was why no one had actually talked about it on the Internet or in the news. He would have to ask Mike about that, the next time he was alone with him.

His inner monologue was cut short when he heard a knock on the studio door. Well, that was unusual, since the team members came in and out without knocking. It then opened, revealing a man in his forties, soon followed by a little girl, hand in hand. The man was wearing a formal suit, as if he had just left an important meeting. His haircut was well-groomed and while the suit made him look like a strict person, his face seemed rather welcoming.

The little girl was quite young. She probably was an eight or ten years old kid, though Lukas didn’t know much about children, to begin with. She was wearing a black shirt with a glittery pattern the student didn’t recognize from where he was and she had white sleeves underneath. She was wearing light blue jeans overalls as well as a red jacket tied up to her waist by the sleeves. Nervousness could be seen on her face as she and her (probable) father entered the room.

They were probably here for the audition. The studio was looking for children for the main protagonists. Other families had come during his shift to have an audition, though Lukas had been too busy in the backstage to actually watch them. This time, however, he hoped he would be able to during his break. Witnessing an audition in a famous studio! If he had been told that a month ago, he wouldn’t have believed it.

The family was greeted by DJ Grooves and the little girl was handed a script for the scene. Lukas couldn’t hear anything from where he was standing, but he had no problem imagining that the child was been explained the scene she was going to play. Well, she probably rehearsed it plenty of times before, though the anxiety could still make her look for her words. It was just a precaution.

The director then called MJ over. Since the latter was the only actor playing one of the main characters, for now, he had to help with the auditions. The student thought the other would see it as a chore but, on the contrary, he was way too happy to show off his acting skills.

Yep, that was it. Lukas couldn’t stand that guy.

Lukas got closer to the shooting set, hoping he could watch a bit of the audition before going back to work. He held his cup of coffee to his lips, pretending to drink it when he had actually finished it a bit earlier. At least, he would look somewhat busy.

The little girl got up on the shooting set, doing her best to remain calm and taking deep breathes. Her father was watching her carefully with a mix of worry and pride on his face. MJ, on the other hand, seemed just fine and absolutely not anxious. Well, he was used to that kind of thing, so that made sense. And then, MJ’s eyes met his and the other smiled at him hypocritically, just to mock him. Lukas replied with a glare, which only made MJ snicker.

The student hated him. So much.

The actor took a puppet which had been given to him by one of the other stagehands. He readied himself and held it as if it was floating around the child. It was a puppet representing a character with blue skin and a red long coat. His head had the form of a croissant, and its eyes were grey and red, one of them having red diamonds in it. Its fingers were sharp like claws and some fangs could be seen from the puppet’s mouth.

Woah. Creepy.

Just as they were about to start the audition, a loud noise interrupted them, just like Lukas’s train of thoughts.

The door of the room had been opened abruptly, revealing the Conductor, out of breath. His face was covered in black, as if something had exploded next to him. The student did his best not to laugh at his frustrated and angry expression and looked away, not wanting to incur the Conductor’s wrath.

-“You’re late, darling”, remarked Grooves, without his usual glamorous tone. The reproach in his tone of voice was crystal clear, though. The other director lifted his hand to make him stop talking.

-“Oh don’t pecking start, Grooves!” retorted the Conductor, with his strong Scottish accent, emphasizing his partner’s name in a hateful way. Welp, they really couldn’t stand each other, could they? The Conductor approached DJ Grooves as the latter started talking again:

-“Well, I guess someone had another accident today,” said the DJ with a mocking tone: “What was it this time? The train engine blowing up in your current movie?”

The older man took a seat next to Grooves, not even greeting the little girl and her father while doing so. Boy, this audition sure was lively… Lukas couldn’t help but hope the child wouldn’t get too distracted by it. He couldn’t imagine how he would feel in her shoes.

-“Peck off, I’m not in the mood,” warned the Conductor darkly, before taking a speaker cone next to him. DJ‌ Grooves simply rolled his eyes and sighed, as the other director shouted a loud “action!”, still not greeting the family. Well, seemed like Lukas found another person to add in the “not having any fucking manners” list. It sure was getting long after only two days of work…

The child jumped at the loud order but quickly pulled herself together. She took another deep breath and started talking, saying her lines with a confidence Lukas would never have. She was really talented and, even if he hadn’t seen the other candidates earlier that day, he couldn’t help but think she had something. Something which made her different. The way she moved across the stage, the way she said her lines and reacted to MJ’s ones, the fake expressions on her face as she acted… She was talented. Well, Lukas didn’t know much about acting anyway, but he did know that he was really impressed at the performance. It was also easy to see that the little girl was having a lot of fun playing her role. The student didn’t think this day would be enjoyable in any way, but there was something about watching this audition that made his shift infinitely better than what it was before.

That’s why he was astounded when he heard Grooves interrupting the audition with a “cut!”. Why? The young man didn’t understand! She was skilled!

The child’s expression went from the excitement of acting to a much darker one which Lukas knew very well: a mix of anxiety, sadness and disappointment. He felt a huge heartache seeing her like this and couldn’t help but relate. “How disappointed she must be!” was all the student was able to think as he was looking at her.

However, his distress disappeared completely with Grooves’s next sentence:

-“I don’t know… There’s something bothering me with the puppet.”

The words hit Lukas like a train as a huge feeling of surprise settled over him. The… Puppet?

MJ seemed to have the same reaction as him. His eyes widened, as if he had never expected criticism in the first place, which was probably the case in retrospect. The actor furrowed his brow, confused and slightly offended at the same time.

-“What do you mean?” questioned MJ almost innocently, yet it was very easy to see that he absolutely disliked where this conversation was going.

-“Well…” Grooves thought for a few seconds and then pointed to the puppet: “I’m wondering that maybe it might be a little too scary for the children watching the show.”

MJ was about to retort something but the Conductor was quicker and added:

-“For once, I’m gonna agree with DJ Peckneck,” the name made his colleague pinch his nose in disapproval: “It’s terrifying.”

MJ remained speechless for a few moments as if he couldn’t believe what he had just heard. Well, it was true: Lukas was not a puppet specialist or anything, but it was scary as hell. The fangs, the claws, the corpse-looking skin… How could it not be creepy?

The actor straightened himself, looking around him like he couldn’t understand what was being said to him. He seemed like he was searching for someone who could back him up. Mike, who had entered the room not long ago, certainly because of the sudden agitation, noticed his brother’s distress and carefully approached the directors:

-“I-I’m sorry, but…” the lead designer gulped and tried to support his twin: “You asked for a spooky puppet, so I tried to-”

He was soon cut short by the Conductor, who glared at him:

-“Well, yeah, but look at it!” he demanded, pointing to the puppet.

Grooves agreed:

-“It is quite unnerving, darling. Can you, perhaps… Make it cuter or something?”

-“Cuter?!” MJ’s offended voice echoed in the room. His eyes glanced between the directors as he spoke again, full of sarcasm: “I’m sorry, I thought you wanted a villain, not a tea-party monster!”

-“MJ…” Mike warned his twin, surely knowing very well where all of this was going, by the expression on his face. But MJ was not having it.

-“What, Mike? You’re going to let them criticize our work without saying anything? What are you, a doormat?”

Lukas winced at the words and felt his anger coming back full force. How could someone say that to their own brother?

All the stagehands had stopped working and were witnessing the young actor’s outburst.

Mike only remained silent, as the Conductor slammed his fist on the armrest of the chair he was sitting on:

-“That’s enough!” yelled the older director, without even needing the cone speaker to be heard all across the other side of the room.

A few moments passed with deafening silence, as MJ gave the Conductor a death stare, clenching his fists and his jaw, refusing to lose. But the other man was much more persistent than him and soon, MJ just threw the doll onto the floor with a force intensified by his anger.

-“You know what? Fine,” concluded the diva, with a faked gentle tone: “See if you can finish the audition without me, I’m done for today. Do not bother me.”

Lukas saw Mike cringe at the sound of the puppet hitting the floor. As a lead designer, the student couldn’t imagine how painful it must be to see the props you worked so hard on getting thrown away like they were just garbage.

That was it. Lukas was done taking that guy’s bullshit. He had to say something! But what if he lost his job after that? He couldn’t allow himself to lose an opportunity like this! Sure, the job was hard, but this was the only way he had to fund his studies! If he ever lost it…

His nervous and conflicted thoughts were interrupted as he saw MJ leaving the scene, stomping with fury. But as he was walking with heavy steps towards the door, one of his feet got caught up in the multitude of cables laying on the ground and he fell onwards. The actor’s face met the ground with a loud bump, resonating in all the quiet room. A quiet room which was soon filled with powerful waves of laughter. All the stagehands, even the directors, were laughing at the entitled actor’s fall. Mike, on the other hand, was the only one not laughing at all. On the contrary, the lead designer was watching his brother like one would watch a bomb about to explode. MJ lifted his face off the ground, utterly humiliated and Lukas found it absolutely priceless. The guy got just what he deserved!

And so, Lukas opened his mouth and laughed.

The actor’s face! The way he just fell down to the floor! This day had started so badly but now it was a hundred times better! Oh, he would never forget that!

He laughed for a few more seconds until he felt like something was wrong. And then it hit him like a train: he was the only one laughing now.

The student stopped immediately, closing his mouth as the realization hit him. That’s when he noticed that everyone was staring at him, their eyes widened and their face full of surprise. Oh gosh. It had happened again, hadn’t it? Lukas had laughed too loud and everyone had heard him. Instantly, he put a hand on his mouth.

The young man had always been very insecure about his laughter. For many people, laughing was something normal and easy, but for Lukas… He was absolutely ashamed of the sound and volume of his laughter. A lot of people had made fun of it at school just like many others had pointed it out to him years later.

Thus, with years of bullying and self-confidence destroyed little by little, Lukas had come to hate the sound of his laughter. And now, everyone was just staring at him in bewilderment. As for MJ, the man was glaring at him like he had never before, clenching his teeth and squinting his eyes. Oh, well, now Lukas’s hatred for the guy was mutual. Great.

The student wanted nothing more than to dig his own grave and bury himself in it. This was only his second day of work and somehow, he had managed to screw everything up again. God, what could he do to fix that? Could he even save himself from this situation? And oh, he couldn’t even imagine how MJ was going to go back at him with that… The student was not sure he would stand new hours of bullying about his laughter when he had just managed to keep his anxiety under control only a few years ago. And said anxiety was still hard to control today!

Lukas let out a nervous chuckle, glancing at the other team members, dread settling over him. What could he do, what could he do?

-“Hum… Sorry. I- uh, I’m going to go to the toilets now… Sorry again…” he mumbled, pointing to the door tensely and trying to speak as the words had trouble leaving his mouth. He had to get away, otherwise he would become a total nervous disaster. He had to get away, get away from all these people staring at him…

-“Hey, wait a second,” the Conductor’s voice arose in his back as he tried to leave, stopping him on his track. Oh God, could he get fired for laughing too loud? No, he knew it wasn’t possible, he knew how laws worked! This was just his anxiety talking! He was being irrational! His feelings were a mess and so were his thoughts.

Lukas just wanted to disappear as soon as possible. Yet, he turned back, facing the crowd of people again. The directors were staring at him with a look the student couldn’t recognize. His anxiousness intensified even more. Oh great, even more things to get scared about. He only waited, feeling like he was waiting to be given a death sentence. Finally, after what felt hours to Lukas, the Conductor started talking again:

-“Did you…” he paused, glancing between Grooves and the young man with a mix of confusion and curiosity on his face. It was strange not to see a negative expression on the director’s face. Seeing how the Conductor was looking for his words, Grooves took the reins of the discussion, though very much confused and curious as well:

-“Is that your real laugh, darling?” was the question the DJ asked him.

Lukas was mortified. He was only able to nod slightly, absolutely unmoving. In the corner of his vision, he saw MJ getting up, throwing the cables away from him furiously. When the latter looked up and met the student's eyes, there was definitely hatred in there. Yet, there was something else. And when the other started to smile, Lukas understood that he had been right: the actor would never let him forget what happened today.

He was so screwed.

The directors looked at each other, then glanced between Lukas and MJ. Wait, why were they staring at him too? The student felt like he had missed something, something huge. And when Grooves opened his mouth again, the young man was dumbfounded:

-“How about you got your chance at an audition?”

The word “astonishment” was clearly not strong enough to express Lukas’s state of mind at that particular moment. What?

-“I’m… I’m sorry?” he wondered aloud, certain he must have misunderstood something. There couldn’t be any possible way that he had been asked to try auditioning!

Grooves was about to answer but another voice interrupted him: MJ.

-“Are you kidding me?!” yelled the actor, both furious and confused: “He’s a student! He knows nothing about acting! What role would you give him anyway? A fucking tree in the background? Hah!”

MJ scoffed at his own joke, glaring both at the directors and the student in a superior way, as if he knew that he had always been right all along. But then, the Conductor answered his question, absolutely blowing MJ’s mind, just as Lukas’s.

-“We’re going to give him yours, you peck neck diva.”

Lukas felt the world turning around him. This was all a dream, right? This couldn’t be possibly happening! He was going to wake up and laugh at his stupid dream, and start his day as if nothing had happened! Because that could only be the case, right? This couldn’t be real!

But MJ’s scream, on the contrary, was very much real:

-“What?!” the actor’s voice resonated in all the room: “You’re going to do what?!” His intonation was loud and deadly serious.

Grooves was the one to reply, darkly, glaring at the young actor through his star-shaped glasses:

-“You heard us, darling,” was all the DJ had to say to shut MJ up.

A few moments passed where the latter stayed motionless, shaking from the rage he was trying to contain. In the other side of the room, Mike was watching his twin with extreme worry. And then, the bomb exploded. MJ screamed and stomped to the door, knocking all the shooting equipment on his way out, still screaming all while he did so. All the other stagehands could only stare in bewilderment, not knowing what to do. But before anyone could try to stop him, the actor stormed out and slammed the door behind him. Mike soon followed him, though it was easy to tell from his face that it wasn’t the first time something like that happened.

Lukas, on the other hand, remained unable to move, completely swamped by the events. It is only when he felt a tap on his shoulders that he came back to reality. He turned back, his face extremely pale. His eyes widened when they met Grooves’s ones. The latter was handing him a script, which the student stared, astonished.

-“We still have an audition to finish, darling. Why don’t you come help us to take it up again?”

This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t possibly be real!

But then, the student’s hand mindlessly grabbed the script and, when his fingers felt the soft surface of the paper against his skin… He knew that he was very well awake.

How did he get himself into such a situation…?

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Welp, what a day for Lukas, right? And that's when MJ's true hatred for Lukas starts :)

See you on the next chapter ! Stay safe everyone !

Chapter 5 =>

[ryqoshay]

What are your favorite NicoMaki doujins? (Totally not asking for recommendations)

Oh dear, where to start? ... Uhm... all of them? Well, I suppose there are a few with plots I’m not particularly crazy about and some with art styles that do little for me, but I suppose I can make a quick list here.

I’ll divide up the list based on (N)SFW status for those wishing to avoid such stuff.

And it apparently got really long. I was originally just going to put the NSFW stuff under the cut, but there’s just so much awesome NicoMaki stuff out there, and I’ve even been skipping stuff, and only sticking to what can be found on Dynasty Reader... so I guess the whole thing needs to go under the cut now.

Safe (and probably quite fluffy)

 - Happy Family - Easily earns its “Moe up the butt” tag. Set in the manga’s universe where Nico only has sisters, no brother.  - You Can’t Escape the Yazawas!! - Another by the same author. Flustered Maki is always adorable.  - Never Let Me Go - A short, cute taste of angst.  - NICONICO MAXIMUM double happiness - Created before the anime and deals with the couple’s use of honorifics back then.  - NicoMaki Dating Life: 1 Week, 2 Weeks, 3 Months - Tiny glimpses into the early dating life of NicoMaki. (4 months is NSFW and will be linked below)  - Colorful Shuffle - An interesting take on events from S2 E06. I will never have enough NicoMaki as portrayed by RinPana   - Scandal - tmfly draws adorable NicoMaki (same author as above)  - Let Us Stay For Longer - So of course I need to include more tmfly  - Don't Accept Unpardonable Acts at a Public Place! - and still more tmfly  - Blanket - More moe up the butt  - 365 - A nice collection of adorableness  - NicoMaki Manga - Feels like a chapter left out of the collection above  - Home Sweet Home - More adorableness with the twins  - Oblivious Nishikino Maki - Three chapters of Kou’s utter adorableness  - Kou - Honestly all of Kou’s work is awesome, so I’ll just link it all  - Your Ring Finger - Maki got a ring from...?  - Drill - Another artist who’s NicoMaki work is amazing. I think their portrayal of Nico is a bit more dense than I personally headcanon - I see Maki as being slower on the emotional uptake - but all of the NicoMaki tags on this page are worth checking out, as well as this image in particular, as it was what inspired part of my scene Reconstructed Reunion.  - NicoMaki Relaxed Manga - I doubt I will ever tire of casual, slice of life, domestic NicoMaki  - NicoMaki An Easygoing Birthday - More of the same. Murata has three other on Dynasty Reader, but I’m not quite as crazy about them as I am about these two, so I’ll leave them off this list. Fair warning that two are NSFW  - Maki-chan Kawaii Ka Ki Ku Ke Ko - Flustered Maki is Adorable Maki  - Nico Maki Maki - Probably the best gift one could give to Maki  - NicoMaki Interdict - By the gods do I love this one. The fact that Umi, of all people, is picking up on the NicoMaki vibes, is enough to make me laugh. A lot. And I believe I’ve mentioned that at least once in HtHaN.  - Magnetic Box - An adorable collection from the same author as the last two  - No, 1 - Three long chapters filled with amazing art, a pinch of angst, a sprinkle of spiritual power and many wonderful NicoMaki moments.  - Karuha - I cannot tell you how many times I’ve reread this author’s works. Even the NSFW entries are “porn with plot” and are the kind of thing I would want to emulate should I include such a scene in HtHaN. Honestly, just having linked these here makes me want to reread them all again.  - NicoMaki!! - Tsundere’ish Maki is adorable  - Not a Lover NicoMaki - Never enough cute domestic NicoMaki. I have a handful of notes for future scenes in HtHaN because of this doujin. And someday I may even write them.  - NicoMaki Kiss - A cute depiction of the couple’s first kiss  - NicoMaki Kiss (part 2) - One is never enough  - Springtime Chocolate Day - Honesty may be the best policy, but that doesn’t make it any easier  - NicoMaki Days - A wonderful collection of 4-koma that takes us from Friends, to Dating to Living Together and finally to Married. Always worth a reread.  - Adult NicoMaki - An interesting take on the couple grown up  - My Idol, My Star - I’m not crying, it’s just raining  - Happy Wedding Vacation - Probably the safest Ooshima Tomo work there is. And among my favorite, though Honeymoon Baby down in the Mostly Safe’ish section holds strong in first place for me.  - Nico Senpai Was Hypnotized - Another amazingly safe Tomo work.

Canon Works

 - Love Live! School Idol Diary ch06: The Seven Mysteries of Otonokizaka Academy - Maki is afraid of ghosts. And someone else might be as well...  - Love Live! School Idol Diary ch02: Work, Summer Girl - Nico sells softserve and Maki visits. Adorableness ensues.  - Love Live! School Idol Diary ch04: On The Night Of The Fireworks - NicoMaki wearing yukatas, watching fireworks and being cute together.

Mostly Safe’ish:

 - Sotto Okoshite Yume Misete - Cute short little dream thing. In this set due to a couple camera angles.  - Itsumo Doori ni Dekinai - Is technically SFW, but I put it here because it’s a direct sequel to the one above.  - NicoMaki Had a Baby With iPS Cell Technology - Maternal NicoMaki is always welcome, imho  - NicoMaki Had a Baby With iPS Cell Technology 2 - Thankfully, Tomo feels the same way I do about more maternal NicoMaki - Honeymoon Baby - One of my all time favorite NicoMaki doujins, so much so that it’s directly influenced many of my headcanons as well as plot points in HtHaN. Also, this is about as SFW as Ooshima Tomo gets.  - Back-and-Forth Initiative - Perhaps could be placed on the Safe list, but just in case I’ll put it here. I’ll probably be borrowing some of the ideas here for HtHaN.  - NicoMaki Medical Check - I love the premise and the plot, but one line from Maki makes my eye twitch a bit and thus it ends up in this section of the list.  - Pickle Love - Safer than the inuendo implies. Only dirty minds make it necessary to put in this part of the list  - Nico-chan Wants to Push You Down Too!! - Pretty safe Tomo work.

NSFW

 - NicoMaki Dating Life: 4 Months - The conclusion of the clips from above.  - Rabbit-like Girlfriend - Nico knows how to get what she wants from Maki  - Want Me! - Awkward first time. I’ll likely draw a bit from this should I ever write such a scene for HtHaN.  - Udon - Udon’s work is a mixed bag of Safe and NSFW, but pretty much all cute. I linked my favorite Safe work up above. My favorite NSFW is Good Morning, Good Night.  - Of Course I know How to Use the Public Bath! - Ecchi rather than hentai, but still probably belongs in this section.  - Ooshima Tomo - Most of her doujins are NSFW, but I like the characterizations presented in them. I’m not particularly fond of Offering a Poem of Love to the Upside Down Sun as the tone feels off to me and Limited Edition Yuri Book is futanari, which has never really been a kink of mine. Also, many of her works seem to share a timeline, but she did a team project with EERR which is the next entry  - Crystal Sugar and Machine Gun - A multi-chapter introspective angst fest with a NSFW ending. I hesitate to call this work one of my favorites, but I’ve reread it multiple times nonetheless. Each time it makes me think about the directions I’m taking HtHaN and makes me wonder if I shouldn’t include more angst from time to time. And even if I don’t include it directly, I might reference it via Nico or Maki being introspective and considering less-than-desirable alternatives to how their lives are.

So, yeah... there you have it; what was intended to be a quick and dirty little list of my favorite NicoMaki doujin. And I didn’t even get around to linking to stuff I’ve found on other sites, though some I’m not sure I’d want to link directly to anyway; I’m hoping that stuff will end up on better sites eventually. And for every translated NicoMaki, there are at least half a dozen that remain untranslated; enough that I’m seriously considering learning Japanese just to read them.

There is just so much out there; 9 pages on Dynasty Reader. Compare that to the 5 for NozoEli, 2 for KotoUmi and RinPana. We’re pretty lucky as NicoMaki fans when it comes to quantity of awesome fanworks. I’d highly encourage exploring the rest of the works on Dynasty Reader to see if there is a diamond in the rough that I missed or appeals more to your tastes or whatever.

[undertaleartistshit]

Ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23186284/chapters/60573760#workskin

Aaand the next chapter of my fanfic is out! Btw, does anyone know how to put it under a cut? Cuz idk how 👀

____________

Chapter 2: Morning Meeting

The loud, repetitive beeping of the alarm shook Ink out of his slumber. He didn't dare open his eyes, his head felt too groggy and hazy to even think about properly waking up, however his alarm didn't fail its job of annoying him awake. Despite having no true emotions and having to rely on bottles of paint to feel, Ink made it day to day acting - almost - like a normal monster. He was happy, sassy, bright, he got annoyed *very* easily, and... he was forgetful. Was that an emotion? Ink didn't know, no one ever told him. No one explained exactly what feelings were to him. Since he FELT forgetful, he just assumed it was a feeling everyone got, just like happiness or sadness or whatever else.

Ink opened his eyes to a ceiling marbled silver and gold and walls filled with papers and ideas, sketches mostly. Color peeked through every few inches, giving the room an incomplete feeling and giving Ink the adequate motivation to get up. He hated incomplete things, hated the way it made his head ache and his spine tingle and his chest tighten. He switched the alarm off, wincing at the bright red colored numbers. 6:30. He slid his legs off the bed onto the hardwood floor, not bothering to make the bed. By his logic he was going to sleep in it again in a few hours and felt no reason to waste time on tidying it. Although it was quite contradictory to his hate of incompletion, Ink just didn't have the energy to care about the bed. It wasn't like magic or a drawing; sometimes it doesn't do what you want it to. Some days the fabric is just wrinkly, for example.

He stood up slowly, careful to not jostle his skull too much, and wove his way through the stacks of notebooks and papers and whatnot, careful not to knock anything over as he made his way to the door, the only think uncovered by paper. He took his sash off of the hanger set off to the side and made his way through the house to the living room. It was empty.

Ink was then hit with the memory of the previous night, realizing his mistake far to late.

Meanwhile, Blue was already awake in his tidy room, silently scribbling away ideas and plans at his large desk. He rarely needed sleep and he considered himself lucky, for the most part. He had only slept 3 hours the night before, but he didn't dare go to the kitchen or turn on any significant light source, in case Dream was awake. Dream was like an older and overprotective sibling, however Blue refrained from considering Dream a brother.

He wrote down idea after idea, answer after question, in beautiful cursive handwriting. He was almost done when a soft alarm went off in his pocket. He took out his rather modern phone, shutting off the buzzing immediately. He sighed softly, looking at the time. 6:30 already. Unlike the other Star Sanses and despite what people thought about Blue, he preferred to keep his phone on a dark setting and color scheme. In fact, most objects in his room where either a soft neutral color or a darker color. His eyes didn't burn that way.

He stood up, putting his pen down and pulling out a sweatshirt to wear instead of a tang top. It reminded him of his battle body. He never put it on anymore. He was pretty sure he burned it or at least tossed it. In the past. He shook his head, pulling the grey article of clothing over his skull and left the room soundlessly. He wasn't in the mood to get snapped at by either of his teammates, and no amount of them saving him could put him in the mood for that.

He stopped before going into the living room, taking a second to stop and self reflect. He was still riled up from being kidnapped just two days ago, plus last night's argument between Dream and Ink, and he needed some time to calm himself. He couldn't go into battle like this or even simply have a civilized discussion without his survival instincts kicking in. He had to tell Ink and Dream about it but he had no idea how the two would react. He wanted to put it off but if something happened than he would have no choice. Despite this, he decided to wait.

Blue casually strolled into the room, sitting down besides Ink on the couch, who seemed to be just... blah. "Mornin' Blue," Ink mumbled with a sour biting tone. "Good morning, Ink. Did you sleep well?" Blue inquired softly, keeping his naturally attention seeking voice low. Ink let out a 'hmpf', and let his head flop backwards. "I got sleep but there was no quality to it, if you understand what I mean." Blue didn't quite know what he meant, but he nodded believably anyways.

Dream suddenly walked into the room with a bright and happy pace. "Up and at 'em you two! We have things to do today." Ink groaned rather dramatically, and Blue sighed in frustration. Blue was generally a bright and happy person, but... today he was just so out of it. He was recovering, for Christ's sake. He wasn't happy about being kidnapped at all, and he had a lot on his mind lately.

But, being him, Blue reflected a bit on what the other two are dealing with. First off, they were immortal GODS who needed to protect and help the millions of AUs out in their Multiverse at any cost. That was already almost a good enough reason to spare them a lecture. And Blue could see why having an active mortal ally would be stressful to deal with, especially when going up against the Dark Sanses, who are by far the most dangerous beings out there. The two Gods had to watch their FRIEND get manhandled and get beaten within an inch of his life every single time they went out to fight. It must be hard on them. But Blue had to really wonder for a second. If they cared so much about him, why would they leave him to get kidnapped? The way it happened was quite stereotypical.

Before Blue could start becoming self conflicted, and start another argument within himself, a screeching ringing startled the three skeletons out of any security and peace they'd found in the last few minutes. Dream flinched harshly and wiped his head to the side and glared at the telephone with an intensity that could slice diamond. Blue had a deep blue bone club materialized in his hand in an instant, his stance tense and ready to strike at a moment's notice. Ink had his paintbrush in hand, his eyes already red, pointed and alert, his body language radiating an aura that could startle the most conditioned soldier.

But it was just a telephone call. After a few moments of just sitting there staring daggers and curses into the poor phone, Blue huffed and flopped back down on the couch with a soft thud and dissipated his club. Ink relaxed soon after, not dismissing his brush yet, and Dream grabbed the phone swiftly, not wasting another second. "Hello?... Uh, yes, we have plenty of time... Yes, we're all here toge..." Dream trailed off and his eyesockets widened, a glimmer of happiness dancing across his face. Blue and Ink looked curiously at their teammate, the two sensing either mischief or pure and utter relief and joy coming their way. Or maybe both.

"OHMYGOSHYESI'LLTELLTHEMASAP" Dream blurted, looking at Blue and Ink with a stupid wide grin. "Core found a lot of useful information about the concert thing. They said that they are actually pretty proud of their work!!" Ink cocked a bone brow in confusion and spoke with a cautious tone. "It's great they found that but... what do you mean that they're 'actually proud'? Core loves all the things that they help with."

Blue looked at the two skeletons with a tired glance. "Nevermind that Ink, make a portal already," Dream snapped and quivered with excitement. Ink rolled his eyes and and stood up with his brush, making a portal to Core. Core took a step into the room with a stack of notebooks, binders, and papers and smiled politely. "Nice to see you all again. I have some useful info."

The Star Sanses all smiled softly, except Dream, who was practically vibrating with pure euphoria. "Please sit down on the couch, Core!" Dream grinned as he ushered the monochrome seer to the couch. Dream wedged his way between Ink and Blue, hissing at the latter quietly to scoot. He patted the remaining space besides him for Core, who smiled brightly and laid their stuff out on the empty coffee table in front of them.

Blue blinked a bit, listening as Core started to explain and habitually ignoring Dream's rude gesture. It wasn't a full on conversation, so it was somewhat easier for Blue to follow. Everyone settled in, patiently listening. "So," Core began.

"I have gathered some information about the concert, and although it isn't much to go off of, it's enough to give an idea about how... well, in honesty how thought out this entire event is. First off, general stuff. The place is set in an empty AU, titled "\\\\\tale" and has 3 fixated portal ports, presumably for crowd control. It is accessible by every AU, which may be a problem with culture clash and whatnot. And the date and time is pretty straightforward, maybe they rely on people to translate timezones? We may need to do our part in sending out important points to others if that's the case. The music selection will mostly consist of EDM, house, alternative rock, electro, and remixes of all sorts of other things. Any more info is in these files here."

Ink interrupted quickly. "Uh, I've never heard of \\\\\tale. What is it?" Core hummed for a second, than reached towards a binder, flipping through organized pages filled with notes and a greyscale color spectrum. After a while, Core ran their finger across a line or two, their lips moving ever so slightly in sync. "Oh, it's just an empty copy. Nothing dangero-"

Ink coughed, and pushed away from the three on the couch, and puked putred black ink all over the light colored carpet. Blue made a somewhat frustrated, somewhat skeptical grunting sound, and raced to the closest closet to grab cleaning supplies before the ink stained the carpet. Well, badly, anyways. Dream rushed over to Ink, holding him up a bit while Core sped off to the kitchen with a pitiful "oh dear".

Core scurried back to the living room with a rag and a glass of water in tow. Blue waited until Ink was safely seated on the couch before he began cleaning the carpet vigorously, spraying anti-stain detergent onto the pale flooring, and not holding back with scrubbing. This almost reminded him of the honey-stained floors of his bro's... Blue resisted the urge to knock on his head to erase those past-thoughts out.

Ink rubbed his head, mumbling a soft apology. "Uh..." Ink started slowly. "What were we talking about again..?" Blue sighed, and muttered quiet annoyed curses to himself. Before anyone else could react, Ink glared at Blue, albeit hazily, and he growled defensively. "What's *your* problem..?" Blue glanced up at Ink with a blank expression. "Ink, I'm sorry, but the last few days have been a bit hard on me, and you and Dream as well. I didn't want to deal with your... uh... condition, so to speak on top of everything else."

Ink paused, his facial expression unreadable. Then, slowly but surely, it twisted into confusion. "What the heck happened? And you mean the puking thing right?" Blue sighed and inquired with a gentle but firm tone, balancing between patient and angry, "Do you remember ANYTHING about the concert?" Ink's eyes narrowed in suspicious perplexity, and he shook his head. Blue huffed, picking the cleaning supplies back up and placing them back where they belonged.

Dream sighed softly, putting his hand on the back of his fellow immortal. "Ink, I'll fill you in on what happened." Blue sat down in his spot, Core sitting down next to the former. Ink stared at Blue for a second, as Blue stared at nothingness with an exhausted expression. "Blue...?" Dream asked after noticing his teammates vacant air. Blue looked at the people on the couch with him, and slowly voiced his concern. "We need to work on Ink's memory." Ink looked somewhat offended, but before Blue could elaborate his reasoning, Ink blurted out in outrage.

"Yeah, you think I haven't tried?! I've tried taking notes, sending it on my phone, using connections to things or whatever!" Blue blinked at the outburst, surprised Ink got furious about such a thing. He wasn't exactly a self conscious person... maybe feelings from the fight with Dream last night were putting pressure on his already poor self control. "Well, uh... maybe there's something we haven't tried yet..?" Blue suggested. Blue felt rather helpless. Maybe he should have waited until Ink was filled in on the situation before pointing out the age-old nuisance that plagued his mind.

Ink scoffed, averting his eyes from Blue, with a shaky hiss. "Even if there were alternatives... I don't want to hear them right now. I. Don't. Care." Blue stiffened at the tone, that phrase always seemed to bring back memories after all. He took a deep breath, and-

"Ink, please calm yourself!" Dream begged. Blue blinked and nodded in agreement. "Please?" Ink glared at Blue and Dream. An eternity of silence and harsh tension passed. There was only hostility and anger in Ink's gaze. He was truly offended that Blue thought that it was an easy thing to fix.

Blue was... not in a good mindset. He wanted to smack Ink for not using his brain, he felt like crying or screaming. He wanted to snap at the others for not prioritizing such a huge problem that really needed to be fixed. He was so frustrated and stressed, and he was just so overwhelmed. He was sad and hurt that Ink turned on him so fast as well.

Dream and Core sat helplessly as Ink continued with his rant. "You know what? NO!" he screamed at Blue, grabbing his upper arm with a steely death grip. Dream gasped, reaching out to Ink to make him stop, but Ink pushed him back down. "Dude what the-" Blue panicked. It was too familiar. Too close. Too parental.

Core sat uselessly on the couch. They were worried out of their mind, as well as Dream, but they simply didn't know any of the skeletons, besides Ink, to do anything for them in the situation. If they said something, they were truly worried about the repercussions that would stem from Ink later on.

Blue struggled to get away from the Protector's angry grasp, his mind tittering between pure panic and a sense of normalcy. Ink dragged Blue to a back room. Dream sprinted after the two other skeletons before jumping and holding Ink in place. He could sense that all Ink wanted to do was to hurt Blue, and it made Dream *sick*. Blue released himself from Ink, running to his room before he had the chance to get caught again.

"ALL I WANTED TO TO WAS TALK TO HIM IN A SEPARATE ROOM!" Ink screamed at Dream and he tried to struggle out of his companion's grip. Dream held on tighter and said in a calming voice. "No, you didn't. You wanted to hurt him all because he wanted to get rid of your memory problem. He didn't know it would offend you." Ink still struggled, although too a much lesser degree. "C-c'mon Dream! That was a horrible time to bring it up though! Give me some credit here!" Dream squeezed tighter. "You don't deserve credit here, Inky. Calm down, please." Ink stopped struggling, and began to melt into the tight grip. "I... I'm so sorry..." he whispered. "You need to apologize to Blue, not me. But I forgive you anyways! And, uh, give Blue a minute to cool off before talking. He's probably really mad." Dream released his hug, and looked at Ink as Ink smiled. "Ok.."

The two walked back to the living room where Core was sitting. Dream was beginning to shake as he sat down on the couch, and Core noticed. "Dream..?" Core asked fearfully. "I'm fi... fine..." The sentence started out confident, but then Dream shivered and collapsed on Ink, who was beside him. Ink flinched, as he started to panic as well. "Uh??" Ink's confused voice rasped. "Oh. Uh. Dream probably passed out because of the abundance of negative emotions," Core commented calmly. "It would make sense after all."

Ink nodded, getting up after shrugging Dream off of his side onto the couch so that he was laying where Ink was formerly sitting. Core got off of the couch, lifting Dream's legs up and helped Ink shift Dream's unconscious form into a seemingly comfortable position. A blanket was draped over Dream, and the Guardian of Positivity's golden crown was removed and placed on the table.

Meanwhile, Blue laid on his bed, experiencing one of the worst panic attacks he's ever had. He was in the past, and the present and future paid him no mind.

~~~[]~~~

Hate, worry, apprehension, fear, anxiety, panic, frustration, anger, nervousness, sadness, and betrayal.

Nightmare's single resting eye opened from his slumber. He took a deep breath, relieved at the singular negative emotions coming from an unknown source. He stood from his simple bed, leaving and walking towards the kitchen, where his fa-... minions were eating breakfast.

"Mornin' Boss!" Cross grinned. "Good morning everyone," Nightmare greeted, walking to the coffee machine, by which Horror was leaning on the counter, his singular eyesight fixated on the filling pot. "What's gotten you up so early?" Horror inquired, slowly. He was never a quick speaker, and the gang respected that. "You're one to talk," Killer snickered. Everyone responded with various levels of laughter and chuckles. "Well," Nightmare began. "I woke up because there was a huge influx of negative emotions from some random unknown place. And I have a feeling that if we go there, we can really fuck up whoever has those feeling, y'know?"

Dust grinned creepily. "Soo you're saying this isn't a slaughter, but a torture?" Nightmare chuckled, "That's one way of putting it. I have the coordinates so we can go right after breakfast. I've never seen code like it before though, we should be careful." All the Sanses agreed, as they began to cook and sip on their preferred drinks.

Little do they know...

[beingallelite]

There's a swarm of people in the building with him, and everyone seems to be working on four things at once. The most pressing project is a scramble to get the latest edition of Road to AEW on TNT up on the fledgling promotion's YouTube channel. Editors jump from computer to computer. All Elite Wrestling's Oct. 2 debut on TNT is weeks away, but the rush is on.

And Cody is in his element.

He, too, is doing four things at once. Gossiping about Chris Jericho's recent lost-and-found escapades with the AEW championship belt. Keeping track of announcer Tony Schiavone as he fights his way here through traffic. Strategizing with members of his team as they plot out story arcs for a wrestling character called "The Substitute" that they invented on the spot when Cody found out that Charlie "Clothesline" Ramone, one of the jack-of-all-trades trainees in his entourage, used to be a substitute teacher.

Oh, and being interviewed. Constantly in motion.

The desk is not his, nor is the building on the outskirts of Atlanta, nor even most of the video team. It's all largesse provided by wrestling legend "Diamond" Dallas Page, who has let the AEW team all but take over his DDP Yoga studio as it launches what could end up being the first true competitor to WWE that wrestling has seen in decades.

When Page walks in, Cody quickly replaces his nameplate with Page's, a bit they would later modify and steal for YouTube.

The mood is light, and Cody's eyes are bright, despite a schedule that would break most mortal men.

It's an energy level that is both exhausting and exhilarating to be around—and those in his wake say this is how Cody operates nearly 24 hours a day. He isn't merely a vice president for the purpose of YouTube sketches. He's working hard, seemingly nonstop, on getting the promotion off the ground. If he's not in a conference call to discuss business operations and budget, he's in one for marketing or for creative concerns.

Or, as he will later this day, he's sneaking in a workout, a reminder that in addition to his many duties in the office, Cody still has to step into the ring and deliver a world-class match, whether against Sammy Guevara in the opening night on TNT or in a title match against Jericho at AEW Full Gear, the company's next pay-per-view, scheduled for Nov. 9.

It's a delicate balance—the same one his late father, "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes, pulled off for years as both one of wrestling's most potent in-ring attractions and one of its most powerful behind-the-scenes forces.

"I've never seen him not in this mode," Page said of Cody. "His old man was always positive, too. It didn't matter how gloomy s--t was, he never sold it. I would be like, 'Dream, how do you stay so positive?' He's like, 'That's the only way to be. You can't sell it, D. You can't let them feel it.' He was saying, 'Don't let them ever see sweat' before it was a commercial.

"Cody has that same confidence."

Schiavone sees the same quality. "He draws people to him. I think he's a natural leader like his dad was. His dad used to say, 'You've got to be able to walk a room like Richard Nixon.' Dusty always said that Richard Nixon could walk a room better than anybody. Dusty was like that, and I think Cody's like that too. I think you're immediately drawn to his confidence and the way he presents himself."

This, Page adds, is exactly what gave Cody the guts to walk away from WWE in the first place, despite being pretty much guaranteed a seven-figure paycheck and an all-but-guaranteed lifetime position with the leading company in his field.

He couldn't imagine life as just another corporate cog, a life where he never gave it his best shot.

"He wasn't afraid to walk away from the table because he knew he had something. Really had it," Page said. "And it don't matter who else sees it. He did."

And AEW will need every bit of that bravado.

Yes, it has the backing of the billionaire Khan family, which also owns the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars among its many assets. Yes, it has a time slot on TNT, one of cable television's premium outlets (and, full disclosure, a corporate partner of Bleacher Report). Those are solid underpinnings to build on.

But entering what wrestling fans are calling the "Wednesday Night Wars," a head-to-head showdown with WWE—which is airing its own popular NXT show in the same time slot as AEW on TNT—this is still very much a startup trying to disrupt a corporate beast.

To succeed, it will need to summon every bit of bravado and energy and leadership Cody has in him.

If it does, it will be remembered as the culmination of a rivalry between two families as alike as they are opposites—families with the drive, creativity, energy and force of will to take a wild and woolly business in their hands and mold it into something remarkable.

While the leading roles in front of the camera have been played by Hulk Hogan and The Rock and Ric Flair, the Rhodeses and the McMahons have spent decade after decade battling for wrestling's very soul. Theirs is the story of two proud families, two distinct visions and just one business—one that the younger Rhodes is betting is big enough for both of them.

A Dream and a Rivalry

Dusty first became a force on the regional wrestling scene in the late 1970s and continued right through the fearsome battles of the '80s. Even in a world filled with big men and even bigger personalities, he was larger than life—275 pounds of blue-eyed soul who became one of the sport's true national acts thanks to the power of Ted Turner's SuperStation WTBS, one of the first cable stations widely available around the country.

His connection with the audience was legendary. In his most famous interview, he literally reached out to the camera, inviting viewers to do the same at home, to touch his hand so they might fight the good fight together. It's enough to give you shivers: emotional, powerful and poignant.

"When he talked, people f--king bought it," said Page, a family confidante. "Because he believed it. Invested 100 percent."

Dusty was savvy enough to make his greatest weakness a strength. Even in his younger days, tight perm shimmering with either sweat or blood, depending on how the match was going, he had a jiggle. By his 30s, there is no polite euphemism for what he was—a fat guy in a muscle man's sport.

Rather than work against him, his appearance was a differentiator. Dusty sashayed around the ring as the avatar of every guy in the audience who had gone slightly to pot but still fancied himself a tough guy despite outward appearances. He was the common man who hid heart, guts and sinew beneath a healthy protective layer of flesh.

But as big as he was in the ring, it was outside the squared circle where he truly made his mark on the industry. He had a vision for wrestling that was bigger than studio television, too big to be limited to National Guard Armories and the like in Florida.

His dream for America was an American Dream: big, grandiose, sometimes crazy and foolish—blood-and-guts action paired with powerful interviews—fueled by borrowed money and hope.

What it wasn't was boring, even for a second.

He created the modern wrestling supershow with Starrcade in 1983 and then powered Jim Crockett Promotions through the early stages of the wrestling wars with idea after idea—a series of stadium shows called the Great American Bash, an ultraviolent spectacle called WarGames and the cable television special Clash of the Champions, to name just a few.

"I don't think people realize the importance of what Dad did in the early 1980s," Cody said. "Boxing comes along later, but before all that, Vince and Dusty put pay-per-view on a map. And it's cool: Every year at the Hall of Fame, when my dad was still alive, he would kind of count the number of people who thanked him. Jokingly, he'd nudge you. Like eight people every year would say, 'Man, thanks Dusty for giving me my start. Without you, none of this would have happened.'"

The other version of wrestling was glitzier, a human cartoon. But while most critics preferred the Rhodes brand, Vince McMahon and his WWE won the wrestling war. Dusty had to swallow his pride, and in 1989 he went to work for his rival.

Put in polka dots as the "Common Man," he made the best of it, turning those yellow circles to gold in memorable, money-making programs with the "Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase and "Macho Man" Randy Savage. It was the Dream without the raw edges, and like most of what McMahon did in that era, it seemed to work.

"Him and Vince butted heads over many things," Dusty's wife, Michelle Runnels, said. "They had different ideas, and they both had really strong personalities. But he had nothing but respect for Vince and what he accomplished. Vince did a lot for this business. He took it from a world of regional promotions to a huge conglomerate. Dusty had nothing but respect for that.

"It was making money for the boys, and for Dusty that meant everything was great."

After a few years working with McMahon, Dusty went back to the WWF's competition until it finally closed up shop. He tried and failed with his own wrestling promotion in the southeast, spent time on the independent circuit, working well into his 50s doing the only thing he'd ever known, putting food on the table the only way he knew how.

Dusty spent his final decade working for the man who had bested him. When the McMahons offered him a lifeline and an opportunity to work with developing talent with their NXT brand, Dusty didn't hesitate. At NXT, he continued to fight for his vision of wrestling. Working this time mostly with Vince's daughter, Stephanie, and her husband, Triple H, he turned his attention to the future of the business.

McMahon may call the shots backstage at WWE Raw, but the passion and spirit that fuels the dreams of many WWE performers was nurtured by NXT's old oak, who often invited them to sit under his learning tree. There is a generation of budding stars who came through the WWE Performance Center in Orlando who call themselves "Dusty's Kids."

His legacy lives through them—and through Cody and Dustin, the original Dusty kids.

"Dad would be really proud of everything his boys are doing, especially Cody," Dustin Rhodes said. "He not only left the other company to go out and do his own thing, but he's actually attacked it and is in a position right now to do some amazing things. And I know Dad would be really proud. I wish he was here to enjoy it with us, because it's a fun time.

"We miss him terribly. We don't like to harp on it a lot, but we do. But we work and we keep going and we keep doing what he taught us to do. That's 'Do the work' as Cody says and 'Keep stepping' like I say. That comes from Pops. That's what we do. That's what our family was raised to do and what we've been doing for so, so long. I think our name, our legacy, is in a good place right now and we are continuing his legacy. And we will keep the name relevant and alive for years to come."

The Scion

Cody has been many things in his 34 years—athlete, actor, husband and executive, to name a few. But before he was any of those, he was a son.

"We were like the Addams Family," Cody said with a laugh. "We lived in a neighborhood full of lawyers and business people, and we were this weird family. [Dad would] come to the pool in his trunks, like his actual 'DR' wrestling trunks and his 300 something pounds...on the diving board. A lot of my friends from the neighborhood, that was their first exposure to me. Like, That's your dad? That guy?"

There is power in names. In some ways they define us, defying us to live up to the expectations that come with them or giving us something to run away from. For Cody and Dustin, their last name opened doors but also came with a price. Dusty spent a lifetime at the top of a very competitive industry, cultivating a few close allies and a much longer list of enemies and fair-weather friends.

So when Cody told Dad one day on the way home from Waffle House that he wanted to give up on an acting career and join him in the wrestling business, his father sat in his enormous F-250 pickup truck and cried.

"He did not want either of the boys to go into the business because there's a hardship," Michelle said. "There are expectations of them. People think they have it easy because of their father when in reality their paths were not easy at all. Dusty had been on both sides of the business, and he'd had a lot to do with people's careers. He made a lot of decisions, and most made one person happy and another upset. There was resentment against him from some people for a long time. And he was afraid those resentments would get transferred to his sons."

Dusty's fears, perhaps, were prescient.

It's easy to dismiss the big gold belts, to scoff at an athletic accomplishment that's gifted before either wrestler hits the ring for a match, but the truth is championships matter in wrestling. There is power in being positioned as the top performer in your industry.

And Cody, despite checking all the boxes one would normally expect a contender to check in his decade in WWE, never won a world championship.

Not that he'll give away responsibility for that.

"There's this long-standing kind of rumor that Vince has it out for the Rhodes family," Cody said. "If he does, it's deep in there. It's not...it was never on the surface. It's deep in there.

"What happened to me at the end of my career in WWE is not WWE's fault at all. Totally mine. It really is. I wasn't ready for the role I thought I was ready for. If you want to be John Cena, you got to do the exact same amount of work he does. And that's a lot of work. I wasn't doing the work that I should have been doing."

The promotion, right or wrong, never saw Cody as a wrestler at that level. And as uncouth as it is to admit, he craved it. He wanted to trade in the goofy gimmick he was wrestling under, Stardust, and ascend the few remaining rungs to the top of the card. The recognition could validate everything—from his decision to walk away from Hollywood to donning the face paint as Stardust to being a team player and making the best of every embarrassing thing he was asked to do.

Maybe it was parental and not professional judgment. Either way, Dusty saw things differently. He saw Cody as a champion, a talent with endless potential to achieve greatness. But by June 11, 2015, it still hadn't happened. Dusty Rhodes died that day of septic shock after a long battle with his own body.

The dream he inspired, however, was too big to ever fully pass into the great beyond.

"I got a boost of bravery when my dad passed away because all I ever wanted to do was be world champion while he was still alive," Cody said. "That was my biggest fear in life: I wouldn't win it. And I didn't win it. It was such a silly fear, but it came true. He didn't get to see it. He never asked for it. He never was pressuring me on it. It was my own pressure.

"But after that, I thought, 'I have zero to be afraid of.'"

Death crystallizes things. Powerful doubts and desires that might otherwise linger in the subconscious rise to the surface and demand action. Cody knew he was unhappy. He knew why. He even knew exactly what his dad would say about it.

"The one thing Dusty really wanted for all four children is for them to be happy and to live up to what he thought their potential was in whatever their chosen path ended up being," Michelle said. "Cody wasn't happy in WWE. Dusty would have said, 'Son, you need to do what you need to do. You do what is right for you.'

"Dusty made a terribly hard choice when he left Florida. Eddie Graham had been his mentor and had been like a father and was very upset, but he had to leave because he wanted the opportunity to be involved in wrestling on a larger scale. He would have understood and seen what was going on with Cody. I don't think he would have been surprised at all."

First Cody went to agents like Arn Anderson, telling them that he needed a change, that he wanted to put the Stardust gimmick away forever. Eventually, he found his way to Vince's office. At every step, he received pushback. And so, he and his wife Brandi decided to walk away. She gave her notice first, and that's when the company realized he might actually be serious about leaving.

"Hunter [Triple H, Vince McMahon's son-in-law and heir apparent at WWE] took it very personally because he had done so much for my dad at NXT," Cody said. "There was one conversation where he said, 'I'm shocked that you feel this way after everything I've done for your family.' But I told him, 'I'm not my dad. I can't stay here out of loyalty to you for giving my dad a job in 2005.' I get it, and the little boy in me really appreciates what you did for my dad. But I'm not him. He's not here anymore. I've got to be me. ...

"I think Hunter, he's been in wrestling long enough that he knew, 'Oh, this is a real one. He's not asking for more money. He's not asking for a title shot. Nothing would matter at this point.' I let the burn get too bad before I said anything, if that makes any sense."

WWE made an effort to keep both Cody and Brandi. They floated the pair contracts large enough to give pause. But understanding what the future held in WWE, Cody and Brandi ventured into the unknown, preferring the uncertainty of precarious potential over a comfortable stagnation.

"They made an offer," Brandi said. "I said, 'Thank you so much. I really appreciate you wanting to keep me here. But it's just not in my heart. I'm not going to be able to do what I want to do here.' And he said, 'Well, this is what we're going to do. We're going to go ahead and pay you through the end of your contract. You'll see real quick that money is going to go fast.' They were trying to scare us. Thank God we didn't listen."

Less than a year after Dusty's death, his younger son had cut all ties with the only real wrestling promotion he'd ever know—the place where he'd grown into an adult, met his wife and made lifelong friendships. When Cody posted the news, along with a list of all the dream opponents he could now face on the independent scene, the wrestling internet exploded. He was ready.

"I'm a big organizer and planner," he said. "So I had been in [WWE wrestler] Kevin Owens' ear, like, 'Hey, what does the world look like? I've saved a chunk of my money and I bought a home and stuff, but I want to make sure I can keep it. What does it look like out there?'

"And Kevin was the one who said, 'I'll introduce you to The Young Bucks. They're the masters of having marketed themselves outside of the company.' Me and Brandi were totally fearless in that moment. It was crazy."

Becoming the Elite

Cody took Owens' advice and connected with The Young Bucks, Matt and Nick Jackson, and through them Kenny Omega, who was building a reputation as the best wrestler in the world.

The Jackson brothers come from opposite circumstances as Cody—self-trained in their backyard on a trampoline and built, not with a famous name, but with a decade of grinding away at it until the audience couldn't help but embrace their passion and enthusiasm for wrestling.

"Cody likes to call us the extra-credit guys," Nick said. "It's really true that we had to do all the extra work to get popular and to get known."

The Jacksons convinced Cody to come to the promotion Ring of Honor for an extended run, scuttling his plans to be a nomad wandering the wrestling landscape like a character in the westerns his dad loved.

"It wasn't until after a few ROH shows that Matt asked me, 'Hey, do you want to ride with all the West Coast guys?' Which was him, Christopher Daniels, Frankie [Kazarian] and [Scorpio] Sky (the tag team trio SCU)," Cody said. "And in that minivan that they still ride in to this day was where all the fun wrestling stuff was happening."

The conversations were the cutting edge of wrestling, from "serious ROH stuff" to Being the Elite, the Young Bucks' viral YouTube show, which through hijinks like extended in-jokes and stunts like invading a WWE event has galvanized a fanbase looking for an alternative.

In the "Elite" stable of wrestlers, fans saw a reflection of themselves—like minds looking for an alternative to what WWE offered. And Cody saw a future.

"That's where I think they found my purpose in the group," he said. "My purpose in that group is as a promoter.

"We combine forces well. Kenny's a great bell-to-bell wrestler, Matt and Nick are tag team specialists, and they have this eye for the absurd and ludicrous. I bring my family's name value—not even my own: my family's name value—and my eye for the bigger picture."

Soon, events were getting so big and raucous that they had to hire security for simple meet-and-greets with the stable.

By September 2018, when Cody and the rest of what would become the AEW leadership team promoted the event All In, they didn't just sell out the Sears Centre Arena in suburban Chicago; they sold out the arena that holds more than 10,000 immediately. It was the proof of concept that solidified things, proved to Tony Khan that his instincts were correct, that wrestling fans were ready for something new.

"We had for two years straight a field test to see what worked with the audience and what didn't," Cody said. "And when we saw Buffalo, New York, was just as popular as San Jose, we were like, 'It's real. You know? It's not just Chicago. It's everywhere.' And we started to think about what might be possible."

At AEW's last big event, All Out in late August, Cody stood in the middle of the crowd and basked in their love, a sea of people who believed in him, who were on this journey with him and his partners, going wherever it led.

"We are in it together with our audience," Cody said. "And anyone who's like, 'Oh, let's see how they maintain their enthusiasm when you get to weekly TV.'  Well, guys, how many times are we going to move the goalposts?

"The argument that, 'Oh, that's not a real audience; it's just a small group of hardcore fans.' That's a dead argument at this point. It's a very real audience. And there's a lack of crossover between our fans and WWE's, which is my favorite part. We had a lady say to us at the Houston Airport, 'I'm one of the returners. I was watching in the late '90s, and now I'm watching again.' And I thought, what a great way to describe some of these folks coming into this. Returners."

It was, as Cody dubbed it, a revolution. Others called it a cult. Either way, the idea Cody is anything but a superstar is downright foolish with the power of hindsight.

At WWE, at some point talent is slotted into a position. Changing that perspective, altering your destiny, becomes almost impossible. And Cody had been trapped in a maze with no exit. Perhaps that's why at AEW's first live event, Double or Nothing, Cody smashed a throne, symbolizing his freedom from tyranny.

"It's very romantic, very like Game of Thrones-style with these warring houses," Cody said. "When I left WWE in 2015, I didn't think, like, 'I'm picking up that sword, we're going to war.' It's a wild, wild series of events. There were so many combustible pieces that led to all of this. You throw them together, and suddenly we are in a situation where I'm standing in front of the Turner Mansion with Brandi, in exactly the same spot Dusty took the team picture with WCW. And we're taking another team picture with a billionaire NFL owner who's a mega wrestling fan, ready to launch another national wrestling promotion. ...

"Had Vince listened to me when I really wanted to make the transition back to being Cody Rhodes, we wouldn't be sitting here. It's that fragile."

Page sees it as the inevitability of a force that can't be restrained.

"I remember Cody telling me when he was in high school, 'Next year I'm going to win. I'm going to win the state championship,'" Page said. "And I said, 'Really? That's a bold statement, boy.' I said, 'You know what that's going to take?' He said, 'Absolutely. You got to put the work in.' He went undefeated.

"Look at his weight belt today. It says, 'Do the work.' You never know what's going to happen because this is a startup company. But this is f--king unprecedented. But I know that if it fails, it won't be because there's not a work ethic put behind it. Why do these people care so much? Because he does. When they say 'All In,' they're not talking about money, bro. That's them telling the fans, 'F--king A, we're going for it."

The Future

Back in Atlanta, when Schiavone finally makes it through traffic and arrives, he's wearing a brand-new blazer Cody just overnighted so he won't look the same in every video and is ready to film a segment for Road to AEW on TNT in front of a giant green screen.

The same harried team, led by Steve Yu, that makes these gorgeous promotional pieces has been tasked with creating a video opener for TNT. Deadlines for everything loom, and amid the excitement, there is also a very real sense that one major misstep could be the domino that topples a carefully balanced workload.

It's unique chaos in a way, but it's familiar in a startup.

Cody's consiglieri, Michael "QT" Cuellari Marshall, is there to offer support in all areas, with students from his wrestling school filling in wherever needed. One day, they might be building the throne that Cody smashed at Double or Nothing. The next, they're feeding his dogs during a busy day. There are opportunities here, to find hidden talents you didn't know you had and to step into the breach and be a hero. Marshall himself is a prime example of how quickly you can become indispensable in a company with more tasks than hands.

"We get to All In, and the guy we had hired to be one of our main producers in the 'go' position got drunk the night before, or he used something, and he got arrested in front of the hotel," Cody said. "He literally started up his car and passed out with it in reverse. He hit another car in the parking lot and got arrested."

Marshall, sitting nearby with a laptop, creating a mock advertisement someone will later clean up and present to a potential partner, continues the story.

"My student sang the national anthem at All In, and I drove her there. I was there to hang out and watch an amazing show. But when they needed someone, I stepped up."

Marshall had previously done commentary for Ring of Honor, which prepared him for the opportunity. "I used it as an internship to see how you did wrestling on TV," he said.

The team is filled with people with similar stories, people who breathe wrestling like it's oxygen.

"Now QT is an associate producer, and he's Tony [Khan]'s favorite," Cody said. "He sits in the go position for every match and tells the director and producer what shots to look for.

"We have a lot of will it into existence at AEW. Some of these guys don't have any specific reason for being here, but the only way you really learn about wrestling is to be around it a bunch."

The result is beauty in diversity.

You can see it in the promotion's YouTube channel, the Bucks' wild 'do-it-yourself' brand existing side-by-side with Cody's polished "Road to..." series that often features serious interviews like you might see ahead of a big boxing match.

And you can see it in the ring. While a WWE show can sometimes feel like a group of performers walking in lockstep for three long hours, AEW provides fans with multiple visions of what wrestling might be on a single show. Joey Janela is there for those who love hardcore stunts, the Bucks and Omega for high-flying precision. Cody represents a modern version of wrestling's yesterdays, the blood-and-guts style of his father presented in a package built for a 2019 audience.

"I think people want us to choose," Cody said. "They encourage us to choose. It's like, 'Well, what's it going to be?' It's all of it. Luchasaurus is on the same show with Arn Anderson. I mean, that's wrestling. I'd rather people have a lot of options."

And he has them.

"It's not just Cody. He's got Nick, he's got friggin' Matt, he's got Kenny, who is a force in that world," Page said. "And now having Jericho and [Jon] Moxley, that's a f--king strong six. And you don't need a strong 28. You just need a handful of people the crowd really cares about."

Cody will be the one headlining the next pay-per-view, against Jericho.

It's a decision that has opened him up to online criticism that he's already using his authority to treat AEW as a vanity promotion, the same kind of vitriol his dad faced in some circles when he made himself the top star in WCW.

"I tell Tony, I tell Matt, Nick and Kenny every day almost, I'm like, 'Man, we need a home run every segment.' Because there's a microscope on top of a microscope on what we're doing," Cody said. "When people are like, 'He's doing the same thing Dusty did.' I always want to say, 'Yeah, well Dusty was one of the most over guys on the show.'

"I could only hope to do what Dusty did."

AEW has four wrestlers in executive roles, both for their expertise and to keep each other honest. Khan, ultimately, will have the final say and settle any disputes. The key, Rhodes says, will be self-awareness and a keen understanding of the audience.

"All of us want to be in the main event. But if you're not, you're not. It's a nice checks and balances we have with Matt, Nick, Kenny and myself. There's three guys who are going to tell you, 'Hey, I don't think it's as big as you think.' Or, 'Let's move on this. MJF is becoming a megastar, let's go this direction.'

"An old-timer wrestler will tell you, 'Hey, we lead them,' and that is not entirely incorrect. We do lead them because we present the product to them. But if they drastically want something different, it is OK to let them lead us as well. And I don't think we're afraid to let them lead a little bit. If the other company had been more aware, even 25 percent more aware, we would not be in the position or even have this opportunity."

It all comes back, as it eventually always does in wrestling, to WWE. The question, a simple one, has remained the same since McMahon expanded nationally decades ago. Can big-time wrestling exist beyond WWE's ever-expanding universe?

For the first time since WCW folded, an organization will truly try to answer it—all because one man refused to be just a gear in the machine.

"They're going to make mistakes, and they'll learn from them. They already have, you know. It's a process," Page said. "They got the hardcore fans. Now it's how does that work to pull over to the casual viewer or the WWE fan who doesn't really know they exist. But there's a lot of wrestling fans who never flipped over after WCW died. They just stopped watching. That's the fan they need.

"This is a David vs. Goliath story. And if that can get brought across to the people well—David versus Goliath always works."

Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.

[apparitionism]

Helicobacter 16

Every single time: In everything I write that suggests these two would get hitched, the JK-played character does the “marry me” asking. Every. Single. Time. I don’t know why this makes such sense to me... I should probably think about flipping that script at some point, in some future narrative, so watch this space, I guess. (I’m sticking with you for now, Tumblr, despite your repeated attempts to drive me away.) Anyway, previously on Helicobacter (in the fifteen! parts that came before this one, which are all available to you on this very judgy social-media platform), we learned that Myka had made a significant miscalculation, Helena can think surprisingly well on her feet, and raccoons are likely to get chatty about Pop-Tarts. Of course the only sensical thing Myka could do then was propose.

Helicobacter 16

Helena managed a weak laugh. She said, “Do you and I really need to enter into yet another faux engagement?”

“No,” said Myka.

“Then—” Wait.

Myka nodded. “Now you’re getting it. And speaking of getting it: who’s got it?” She swung her free hand around, in a gesture that seemed to encompass everyone in the room.

“It? What is it? Who has what?” Helena asked.

“The ring. I know it’s in this room.”

“What?” Helena felt she was losing her purchase on the idea that words were meant to make sense. “You know a ring is in this room?”

Myka was solemn again: “I do.”

“Did you use that phrase intentionally?” Varsha asked. “If so, it’s quite funny.”

“Not as funny as the story,” Abigail said.

“What story?” Helena demanded. “Why is there always a story?”

Rick answered the latter question: “Because life isn’t a series of random collisions of atoms.” So helpful.

“It might be,” Varsha told him.

“But we couldn’t perceive it that way, even if it were,” Steve told her in turn.

“I’m having trouble perceiving it in any way,” Helena lamented.

Myka, who hadn’t released Helena’s hand, pulled on it, drawing her attention back. “Let me help you perceive it my way. It’s pretty simple: I bought a ring for you ages ago, mostly as a sort of... gesture of hope. To say ‘there’s a future in which this will be possible.’ But then I showed it to Abigail, and she said it was too risky for me to have it in my possession, because I’d run into you at some point and feel like it was burning a hole in my pocket and just drop to the one knee, regardless of where and when.” She raised “didn’t you” eyebrows at Abigail, who nodded. Myka went on, “I said that was ridiculous, but then one day I saw you down a hallway at City Hall, and I realized I was in fact about to sprint in your direction and do exactly what she’d predicted, so I literally reversed course and went right to her and handed it over. And promised I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t have it. Because even I need the occasional guardrail.”

Abigail snorted. “Occasional. Right.” To Helena, she said, “We should apply for a federal grant to fund the guardrails-against-Helena project. Anyway, I said I couldn’t hold it all the time, because then she’d know exactly where it was, which was almost as bad, given that I didn’t want to be rudely awakened in the middle of the night some night by some lovelorn lunatic who decided she just had to set phasers to nuptial. So I made her promise also not to ask you if she couldn’t pinpoint its location, and we set up a committee—at first just me and Steve, but after she read Rick in, we decided to draft him, too—to rotate possession. Myka doesn’t know the rotation or the schedule, which makes it hard for her to fight through the bureaucracy to get to it.”

“That’s a clever disincentive,” Jane remarked, causing Helena to note that she had not, in fact, exited the inside-joke snowglobe just yet.

Abigail said, “I modeled it on the demonstration-permit regs. They’re so well thought out.”

“I wrote those,” Jane told her, and when Abigail offered her a disingenuous “you don’t say,” Jane bowed her head. She might have been glowering, laughing, or praying... she offered no clarity with her next words: “My staff: the Machiavelli Players.”

Myka, seeming to resent that the spotlight kept shifting away from her, said, “Anyway, I almost did the asking on Saturday night, because it had to be in that room, too, given the committee. But I figured we were so close to getting the work thing fixed—and you’d probably be more inclined to say yes once we did—that I should wait.”

“I’m the one who’s got it now,” Rick said. “Sort of ironic. And I was supposed to hand it off to Steve today.”

Helena looked to Steve. “Behind my back,” she said, “this entire time?” and Steve had the grace to look at least a bit chagrined.

Myka said, “Not entire. It wasn’t until after I told my mom the truth that I really made up my mind.”

“But then you did?” Helena asked.

“But then I did. I’m serious. You’re looking at me like you don’t believe me, but I’m serious.”

“I’m looking at you like...” Helena tried to find words to say about what she was feeling, words that might possibly be correct. She fought through what she recognized as a Myka-esque pause, search... then surrender. “You’re right, like I don’t believe you. We’ve spent only two nights together!”

“Info that I for one didn’t need,” Rick said. “Or want.”

“This I can vote on,” Varsha agreed.

Steve said, hurriedly, “Passed by acclamation.”

Myka gave that attention-tug to Helena’s hand. “If we were fundamentalists, we’d’ve spent zero nights together.”

“We aren’t fundamentalists,” Helena said. Of that, she was reasonably certain, but what it had to do with anything...

Now Myka blinked at Helena: a slow, soft, indulgent blink. “My point is, depending on the circumstance, two is a lot.”

“World wars, for example,” Abigail offered.

“Isn’t that an argument against their spending more nights together?” Liam asked her.

“Emperors Napoleon?” Abigail tried.

“Nope, there were three of those,” Steve said, “but maybe also part of an argument against? The French probably thought the first one was one too many.”

“Waterloo,” Helena muttered, because she still had no purchase on the situation, but defeat seemed a relevant concept.

“That is a very good song,” Myka told her. “I refer you to the lyrics.”

“Mamma Mia movies!” Liam exclaimed.

“That just makes that ‘argument against’ point stronger,” Steve said, and as Liam protested that he liked them, that there should be lots more, Steve gave him a look that Helena decoded—perhaps based on the personal experience of having sent very similar aspects in Myka’s direction—as “your questionable judgment makes me question my own judgment in finding you so appealing.”

Jeannie said, “Here, I’ll try something in a different genre: one of Myka’s great-great-grandmothers was a mail-order bride. She hadn’t even met her intended before the wedding.”

“I didn’t know that. But they lived happily ever after?” Myka asked, with evident hope.

Jeannie shook her head. “Probably not. It was Colorado in the 1800s.”

Varsha clapped her hands lightly, her face a study in joy. “One or both highly likely to have died of cholera!” Her enthusiasm for that outcome was... unsurprising.

“That pile of ‘against’ points keeps getting bigger, guys,” Myka said, “so maybe leave this to me?”

“No, no, the epidemiological point is that you most likely won’t die of cholera,” Varsha said.

Myka smiled, then squinted. “That’s great, but... how is that an argument in favor of our spending more nights together? And/or living happily ever after?”

Varsha squinted back, saying, “It isn’t. It’s a necessary condition for either or both of those outcomes to occur. You’ll have to make your own argument.”

“I’m trying,” Myka said. “Give me the ring, Rick.”

Rick shook his head. “Can’t.”

“Of course you can. It’s mine. And it’s about to be hers, I hope.”

Abigail said, “We have to vote. The committee. It has to be unanimous. You read the bylaws.”

Myka closed her eyes. She breathed in slowly, then said, “You cannot be serious.”

“Isn’t that usually my line?” Helena asked—joking, but not entirely.

Myka’s grip on her hand tightened again. “I swear to god if you people don’t let me put a ring on it, I will water-gun fake blood on each and every one of you, and that will happen at a time you’ll find extremely inconvenient.”

“I move we hand it over,” Steve said.

“Seconded.” That was from Rick.

“I move we vote immediately on the motion,” Steve continued.

Rick again: “Seconded.”

“Aye,” Steve said.

“Aye,” Rick said.

Abigail said nothing.

“What are you waiting for?” Myka demanded.

“Clean clothes,” Abigail told her. “See, I’ve already been water-gunned. I kind of want to make you sweat.”

“Ill-advised,” Jeannie said.

“Why is everyone stealing my lines?” Helena complained.

Myka darted a glance at Helena, a glance of a quality suggesting that Helena’s repeated noting of line-stealing might have been either immensely alluring or extravagantly irritating—or possibly both—and said to Abigail, “I swear. To god. A ring on this, or.”

Abigail sighed. “Fine. Aye.”

“Now,” Myka told Rick.

Rick reached into his pocket, but in trying to extricate what was presumably the ring, he turned the fabric inside out. A loud clink resounded, as did an “oh jesus” from him and a giggle from Abigail, and then he had dropped to his knees and was scrabbling at the floor, and Helena genuinely expected that in a moment, all of them would be examining the linoleum in great detail, for Myka now wore the expression of someone likely to issue a strongly worded decree about what had better be found right now... but Rick quickly bounced up. “Here,” he said to Myka before he looked directly at her face. “Sorry,” he said, after he did.

She held the ring between the thumb and forefinger of her free hand and shook it at him. “You had a diamond ring loose in your trouser pocket? This diamond ring? You are a ding-dong.” Rick looked for a moment as if he might take the fool’s path and protest... but he kept his mouth closed. Myka said, “Good choice,” and she gave the ring, a simple band upon which sat a smallish yet dazzlingly clear stone, to Helena, placing it in the hand she was not holding. “There. Now do you believe me?” She paused. “And now will you say you’ll marry me?”

Helena looked down at what she held. Could a diamond be content to be affixed to a ring? Happy, even, to be there? Because this one’s shimmering clarity seemed not to bespeak mysterious depths, but rather to nestle it securely into its setting. The diamond knew its mind better than Helena knew her own... she cleared her throat. “I’ve never been proposed to before,” she said.

That made Myka not tighten her hold on Helena’s held hand, but gentle it. “That’s because it was always meant to be me.”

That had to be true. It had felt so right to be engaged to marry Myka, even as fiction... Helena said that aloud.

“Told you,” Myka said, but she was not smug. “See, you knew it even before I did.”

“I didn’t buy a ring and set up a committee.”

“That’s because I’m the planner.”

“What does that make me?” Helena asked, and she did not know what Myka’s answer would be. She didn’t know what she wanted Myka’s answer to be... other than right. But what was right? What was she in this improbable relationship?

“You mean,” Jeannie said, “what does it relegate you to.”

Myka smiled at her mother. Then she smiled at Helena. “Dreamer-in-chief,” she said with certainty. “You know, you should put that on your business card. Steve, don’t you think she’d get more work that way?”

“She’d get different work that way,” Steve said. “But isn’t the goal of all this to make sure she gets... similar work?”

With a small eyeroll, Myka said, “Fine. We’ll relegate it to the vows: ‘Do you promise to faithfully execute the office of dreamer-in-chief? To keep dreaming up the never-fountains?’”

Dreamer-in-chief. Perhaps anything Myka had said would have been the right answer, because perhaps it all was nothing more—or less?—than an inside-joke snowglobe. But why not stay in it? The fountain might not exist, but this could. Surely, after all they had been through, this could. Then there is... Helena cleared her throat again. “As noted,” she said, “I didn’t buy a ring.”

“Cheapskate-in-chief,” Myka said, and that was even more right.

“But will you marry me, too?” Helena asked. It was not what she ever would have planned to say today, but now she had said it. And she did not mean it as any push of problems into the future... no, it was a pull of problems. An invitation to them, in the present and in the future.

“Try and stop me, beautiful cheapskate. Just try.” Myka leaned back against her inadequate pillow, looking for all the world like a spoiled princeling, sure that the world—or at least Helena—was hers for the taking. She was of course right, and Helena leaned in and kissed her, savoring it, savoring all of it, even the obvious absurdity, even the likelihood of additional, or at least eventual, catastrophe... “I haven’t changed,” she still wanted to warn, but she still also remembered Myka’s “maybe you shouldn’t have to.” This is how it feels, Charles might as well have been whispering in her ear, as the right wrecking ball knocks you over.

When the kiss ended, Myka didn’t, to Helena’s surprise, return to smiling. Instead she blinked overwet eyes. The planes of her face were ruddy. “You really do believe it,” she said. Perhaps not so spoiled after all, the princeling...

“I do,” Helena assured her.

Varsha said, “That’s funny too! Even more so, because I don’t think you said it intentionally.”

“I have to confess I find it a little hard to follow what you think is funny,” Rick told her.

Helena echoed, “Hard to follow. I have to confess that I find the turn—turns?—my life has taken a bit hard to follow.”

Myka sighed. “If we’re owning up, then I have to confess that I find myself contemplating more often than is probably healthy how adorable this cheapskate looks in a hardhat.”

“What?” Helena said, startled. “How do you know that?”

“That’s the part that’s a little hard to follow, and I’ll tell you later, but I note that you aren’t disputing your adorableness.”

“I—”

“That better end with ‘love you.’”

“It does,” Helena said. “And you knew that before I did.” She had been holding the ring in the palm of her own free hand, where Myka had placed it. Now, to substantiate her words, she loosed her right hand from Myka’s and used it to place that unassuming band onto the appropriate finger, where it fit as if, yes, it had always been intended to live there. She held her hand up, facing its back, and thus the confident stone, toward Myka. “Well? What do you say to that?”

“Everything,” Myka said, and Helena laughed and kissed her again, because of course she did say everything, anything and everything, all of it exactly what Helena needed—and a reasonable majority of the time wanted—to hear.

When this kiss ended, Helena heard a small sniffle, and she looked up to see Jeannie dabbing at her eyes. “I’m not surprised this got to me,” Jeannie said, “because witnessing my daughter so overcome is, to use an inadequate word, rare... but I didn’t know it would get to anybody else.” She looked at Jane. “I’m glad to know she works for someone with such a heart.”

Helena observed, with astonishment, that Jane was touching her own eyes with her sleeve. Jane said, “I did mention it isn’t made of stone. And with that, I’m leaving, before anyone mistakes me for a sentimental fool.”

“Too late,” Abigail informed her, with a laugh that seemed dangerously near a cackle.

Jane confirmed the danger with a raised eyebrow. “Spread that around, Ms. Machiavel, and I will show you how fast a heart can harden.” She then made an exit of a sort that should have been accompanied by a retinue.

Rick sighed. “I guess that means Myka’s cured, and we better get back to work.”

“Unless someone in this room would like to develop some sort of interesting infection,” Varsha suggested.

“I’d rather my day be boring, thanks,” Rick told her.

Varsha gave his cheek a pat that, if bestowed by anyone else, would have seemed overly aggressive. “Of course you would, wallpaper. See how soothing he is!”

Once Rick and Varsha had gone, Liam said, “I guess they’re right. There’s only so many billable hours I can give up in order to ‘visit a sick friend.’ Or visit a ‘sick’ friend. Or whatever it is we’ve been doing.”

“It’s strange but nice to have seen you in the middle of the day,” Steve said.

“Heart-melter. Maybe I won’t badger you to watch Here We Go Again tonight.”

“Waterloo... knowing my fate is to be with you,” Steve sang softly, and Helena added “Steve singing” to the list of seemingly impossible things that had happened today. He turned to her with a slightly apologetic, self-conscious smile. “If I can’t concentrate this afternoon because that’s running through my head, it’s your fault.”

“Accepted,” Helena said. “I think we can safely assume some similar words will be interfering with my thoughts.”

“Obviously, mine too,” said Myka.

“And mine,” Liam agreed. “Thanks a lot, honey. I’m supposed to be writing a closing argument. What if I accidentally put in ‘I feel like I win when I lose’?”

Steve shrugged. “Depends. How many ABBA fans are on your jury?”

“That isn’t something we commonly get around to in voir dire.”

“Then I think we’ve all learned a lesson or two today, haven’t we? About good questions to ask,” Steve said. He directed a significant look at Helena and Myka, then threw an even more significant one toward Liam. “In particular circumstances.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Liam said as they departed. “I will badger you to watch Here We Go Again. Every night for the next week. Or maybe the next year. Or decades....”

Abigail remarked, “They’re almost as cloying as the two of you, but with less drama. Is that good or bad? Anyway, I’m going to bring this back around to ‘clean clothes,’ and the fact that I’d like some, so I should—”

“They have lovely scrubs here,” Helena told her. “The color of an emergent bruise.”

Myka said, “I’ll admit I got a little overenthusiastic with the ‘blood.’ It’s a lot more fun water-gunning it than actually producing it myself. Although I did end up engaged to the most beautiful cheapskate in the world, both times...”

“It seems entirely unfair to Abigail that you were the only one in possession of a weapon,” Helena said.

Abigail nodded at Helena with enthusiasm. “So true. Unfair to you, too, that first time, even if the weapon was her gut. We’ll have to get back at her somehow—I know, a group paintball tournament! Maybe make it an annual thing. For your anniversary.”

“That is the best idea ever,” Myka said to her. Then she turned to Helena and said, as if referring to the sweetest of intimacies, “Isn’t it.”

“Paintball,” Helena said, and did the tone she took with Myka inevitably sound that same tenderness? “Do you know what Charles says to his wife, Jane, on a regular basis?”

“Unfortunately, he didn’t tell me. Do you want me to guess?”

“Actually... I’d love to hear your guess.”

“He says ‘Jane, isn’t my sister so very lucky to have found Myka, and vice versa.’”

That made Helena laugh. “Although you’ve produced a tolerable version of his voice, I don’t believe he does say that. Not regularly.”

“Well, give it time. What does he really say?”

“He says, ‘What a disaster our first meeting was.’”

“Did she really run into his car? Or was he shining me on?”

“And then he thought to return the favor,” Helena affirmed, “to make sure he had her romantic attention. He didn’t tell you that part?”

“God, no. You Wellses are weird.”

“I talked him out of it!” Helena protested.

Myka, doing princeling-against-the-pillow again, drawled, “That’s your evidence to the contrary.”

Helena said to Jeannie, “Do you know, occasionally your daughter sounds exactly like her father. Who has that irrational fear of raccoons, as I’ve so recently come to understand, so if family weirdness is genuinely on the table—”

“I do know they sound alike,” Jeannie interrupted, “but it’s nice to be reminded of it. Do you sound like your father?”

Helena smiled. “No, but I do sound very like my brother—as Myka has remarked, and which is pertinent, because Charles always follows his initial disaster comment with, ‘What a disaster I would be in the absence of that disaster.’”

“That’s sweet,” said the princeling, “but still weird.”

“My point is that I suspect I’ll be following his lead in these ritual utterances as well.”

“I don’t need clean clothes,” Abigail announced. “I need insulin. Is there a special British kind? Because you never sound like you’re made of sugar, but you are, and that makes it worse. That’s it for me.” She paused at the door, turned around, and pointed at Myka. “Pop-Tarts are one thing, but grapefruit’s another.” Then she pointed at Helena. “And raccoons are one thing, but eleven of you, nobody could take.” She swept out, and Helena suspected she would have wanted her departure accompanied by dramatic exit music.

“Grapefruit,” said Myka. “She’s said that to me before, in relation to you.”

“It has vaguely to do with koans. I’ll tell you the story some other time,” Helena said.

“Why is there always a story?” Myka said, a gentle mock.

“I’m told it has to do with atoms.”

Jeannie said, “Colliding, but not randomly. She was so excited when I finally found that book of yours.”

“I suspect she was primarily pleased to have been right. In her identification.”

“Well, she’s Myka,” Jeannie allowed. “But also... she was overcome. Like today. By you. I’m really not giving away any secret when I tell you this matters to her in an unprecedented way—but even if it were a secret, I’d tell you, because of that unprecedented mattering.”

“I’m in the room, Mom.”

Jeannie ignored Myka. She leveled a not-quite-benign gaze at Helena and said, “Treat her well. You seem like you will—I want to believe that you will—but please.”

Not precisely a talk of shovels, but near enough. “I will work hard at it,” Helena told her. “I’m very good at working hard.”

Myka leaned against Helena again. She said, “Mm. In a selfish, Emperors-Napoleon sense, I’m glad you aren’t overly good at being good.”

Not in front of your mother, Helena thought at Myka. She tried to show, by means of a severe brow-furrow directed at the very contented woman at her side, that she was thinking this instruction, but that made Myka laugh, and that in turn made Helena want to forget about who they were in front of.

“I clearly need to give you two a minute,” Jeannie said, and that was, from Helena’s perspective, an embarrassingly accurate reading of the room’s temperature. “But as I understand it, everybody’s supposed to get back to work. And you might want to remember that the idea behind this whole thing was for everybody to keep having work to get back to...” The door closed behind her.

Guilt: Helena had been so, so uncharitable in her initial assessment of Myka’s Rick-promoting mother, yet Jeannie had, now, provided them with their first instance of clean, unencumbered intimacy. She does want Myka to be happy, Helena now thought. With someone. And she genuinely seems to believe that I am that someone...

That they didn’t lunge for each other seemed, paradoxically, a good sign. A marker of this new reality.

“One minute,” Helena said. “Our first real minute.”

“Speaking of what’s real, tell me, do you really want this?” Myka asked. Helena moved her jaw in disbelief, but Myka went on, “I can take it if you don’t, but only if you tell me right now.”

Helena held her hand up again. “Here is what I’ll tell you right now: I will remove this ring for no reason other than a medical emergency?”

“That could just mean you like rings,” Myka said.

“Have you seen me wear a ring before today?”

“That could just mean you like this ring,” Myka said, but she touched the ring, began playing with Helena’s fingers.

“I have no right answer anymore.”

Myka looked up. “You do if you kiss me.”

So Helena did.

“See?” Myka said, some length of time later. “Now I’m persuaded. Want to persuade me some more? Maybe really, really fast? I think from my side of things, I can promise—”

“No,” Helena interrupted, because if Myka kept talking, the answer was going to be yes, because Helena certainly did want to persuade her some more.

A little pout, a pretty blink. “No?”

“Well, not no,” Helena conceded.

“Not no? Maybe I’m wrong, but that seems like a double negative, which I’m mostly sure works out in the math to be a positive, so—”

Helena had to interrupt again. “I mean, no, but not in perpetuity. No for the present moment.”

“You pick the worst times to be good at being good, but fine. Failing that, I don’t suppose you’d want to just go for the whole cheese plate? Fly to Vegas and get married tonight? Bellagio... fountains.... something like, there is no fountain, then there are lots of fountains, and they dance or light up or do some other—”

Helena kissed her again, and this one was sharp and quick, for it was meant both to stop her and to stop the idea, which was, for all its absurdity, ridiculously compelling: fly away and change everything yet again. She remarked, trying to lighten the idea away, “We’ve both said ‘I do,’ as Varsha found so amusing. Perhaps we’re married already.”

“In some version of the world, I bet we are.”

“I would in some version of the world marry you this minute. But I think we’d both enjoy getting to know each other just a bit better first... more importantly, however, if Charles isn’t invited to the event, he’ll riot.”

“All by himself?”

“That would be very Charles. Also, however, my parents.”

“They’ll riot?”

“Doubtful. Well, my mother might. But I would... want them here. For such an occasion. The right one.”

“If that committee hadn’t let me give you this ring, I would’ve rioted.”

“Once I became accustomed to the idea, so would I.”

Myka said, “I sprang it on you. I’m sorry.” She kissed the ring where it lived on Helena’s finger.

As severely as she could, given the kiss, Helena said, “You are in no way sorry.”

“See, you know me pretty well already. I love that I sprang it on you. I also love that you sprang it on me, reciprocally.”

“It did take me a moment.”

“Scariest moment of my life.”

“You don’t mean that,” Helena said.

“Maybe you don’t know me so well after all. What if you’d said no?”

“You never genuinely entertained that as a possibility.”

“I did though. The look on your face right at first? I don’t ever want to see that look again.” She pulled Helena to her. This kiss said Don’t frighten me.

Helena didn’t want to do that, but she did want to tell the truth. She said, “I’ll be honest: I’m not sure this will work as perfectly as I want it to. As some of our interactions have suggested it might.”

“That you want it to work perfectly is a pretty good start... plus that you think that some of our interactions have suggested it might, that doesn’t hurt. I do too, by the way. Want that. And think that.”

Trying to maintain her honesty, Helena asked, “Is it setting us up for failure? Nothing is perfect.”

“It’s all about goals. What’s failure? Aim for perfect, hit pretty damn wonderful.” And then she clearly decided to tell some truth of her own. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. But nothing will if we don’t start, so let’s.”

“I’m fairly certain we have. Look at what’s on my hand.”

“I had moments when I thought about having bought this thing—this thing that was too dangerous for me to have in my possession—and I wondered who in the world I was, who I thought I was, to even consider something like that. Something like that, with someone like you.”

These insecurities... they were Helena’s fault. “Who were you?” she asked, not at all rhetorically, for she intended to give a convincing, sure answer. “Someone with the fearlessness to consider, to push for, a better future. Meanwhile all I did was feel sorry for us. That was all someone like me could do: sit and wait for someone fearless like you to change the circumstance.”

“Fearless, foolish... but no matter how foolish it was, you’re right, it’s on your hand. I like it there.” She stopped, seemed to consider whether she wanted to go on. “Hm. Did you wear a ring before?”

“No, I’ve never worn one. I did the proposing. Gave the ring.” Did Myka want the reciprocal question? Helena went ahead and asked, “Did you? Wear one?”

This occasioned a sigh. “Weirdly, no. The wedding ring was going to be his grandma’s, and we were vaguely planning to retrofit something to go with it. I didn’t press the issue—didn’t care enough to. That should’ve helped clue me in, shouldn’t it?” That was said with a wry twist of lip, not a smile.

Of course both their pasts contained unheeded clues... “I think it’s fair to say that we’ve both made some errors.”

“I think it’s fair to say that we both failed upward.”

What an exquisite thing to say in this context, about what had gone wrong in the past—so exquisite that Helena could barely stand it. She felt a rush of willingness to take Myka up on the idea of being fast, right here... but that rush was an impulse, not an imperative. Instead, Helena got up from the bed. Stepped away. Regarded the woman still in it. Her face, its lines so deft, its beauty barely contained in a too-precise space, would always raise that impulse—no, imperative—to protect.

Pale, sick Myka, in a bed such as this one. Would Helena ever cease to see that day superimposed on Myka’s face and body? And would Helena ever cease to hear, inside Myka’s voice, an echo of that day’s weakest, most distressed entreaty: Will you be here when I wake up?

Of course I will, Helena had told her, and was that when she herself had made up her mind? When you wake up, I’ll be the first thing you see. Helena hadn’t known it then, but she had already begun speaking the vows. Keeping them. “In sickness...” she now said.

“Don’t worry,” Myka told her. “I’ll inflict plenty of health on you, too. Not to mention their friends: richer, poorer, and better.”

“What about ‘worse’?”

That made Myka smile with mischief. “Now who’s the one tempting fate?”

“Destiny,” Helena corrected.

Myka kept smiling, but she also narrowed her eyes. “Hm. Now that sounds like a koan.”

“What does?”

“I asked, ‘Who’s the one tempting fate?’, and ‘Destiny,’ you said. That’s the one tempting fate.”

“But I meant—”

“So the koan is, what happens when destiny tempts fate?”

Helena said, immediately, because it was true, “Charles would say, a car wreck.”

“What would you say?”

Helena would have smiled, largely and with intent, but she was already doing that, and Myka was doing that too, and Helena suspected they both would keep on doing that. She shook her head and exhaled, a little ripple-chuckle of jubilation. “What happens when destiny tempts fate?” she echoed, and Myka nodded. “What would I say?” Myka nodded again, her smile, impossibly, even larger. Now Helena shrugged. There was only one answer, so she gave it: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

TBC (epilogically in a few scenes that would play over the closing credits...)

[love-takes-work]

Steven Universe Podcast Volume 3: Episode 6: Crossovers and Collaborations

This is Volume 3, Episode 6 of the official Steven Universe podcast, looking at crossover episodes, guest animators, and transitions into other forms of media (like video games!), including input from Rebecca Sugar, Kat Morris, and Joe Johnston.

The official description:

There have been some amazing crossovers and collaborations in the world of Steven Universe - "Say Uncle" with the "Uncle Grandpa" team, Save The Light with Grumpyface Studios, the "Mindful Education" episode with animator Tokafumi Hori, and of course, Monopoly. So creator Rebecca Sugar, and Co-Executive Producers Kat Morris and Joe Johnston return to detail how each was conceived and executed, and to share some anecdotal stories that happened along the journey to bring each collaboration and crossover to the fans.

This, as usual, is bit long so I’ll do my bullet points of interest, with longer descriptions after the jump.

Highlights:

CN shows that were influential and magical for Rebecca and her crew include Samurai Jack, Powerpuff Girls, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Dexter's Lab.

Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Hotel Transylvania, Clone Wars) was incredibly influential for Rebecca because of his input on her pilot and the show concept in general.

Rebecca dreamed of having her own show, but always assumed that was an unattainable dream and fully expected to work a day job as a storyboard revisionist while fulfilling her desire to do personal work through independent comics.

Kat and Rebecca knew each other in college and later lived together in California.

Joe hadn't seen the pilot or met Rebecca until his first day of work, but after he'd seen the sketchbook with planned characters and heard her ideas, he knew he'd made a good decision to work on her show.

Rebecca Sugar describes herself and the Crew as being "very involved" in the Grumpyface Studios game Save the Light. They tweaked dialogue, designed Fusions, developed relationship-based attacks, and contributed canon material and characters to premiere in the game (such as Hessonite).

Rebecca loves that Steven has to heal himself to be around to take care of others in the game or else it's really hard to win, and thinks of that as a really good metaphorical message.

Rebecca as of this recording has not beaten the game yet.

Rebecca wanted Attack the Light to begin with two choices, and if you just listen to Garnet, you completely win the game 100%. She did not get to apply this option.

The Steven Universe Monopoly game is the first place the Beta Kindergarten was revealed.

The Uncle Grandpa crossover episode, "Say Uncle," was Rebecca Sugar's idea at the start. She felt Uncle Grandpa was a sibling show to SU since it came out at the same time and she knew the creator, Pete Browngardt.

Rebecca doesn't like that SU gets used to trash other cartoons and wanted to express through "Say Uncle" that there is room for diverse voices even if they're not like your voices, and that they all belong there. It seemed like a very Steveny message.

Some people think Uncle Grandpa's recommendation that Steven get his Gem polished twice a year was an early bit of foreshadowing that Steven's Gem was a Diamond, since diamonds are supposed to be polished twice a year. Rebecca and Joe acknowledge that this was not intentional as far as they know, but they may have to find out from Matt Burnett if that was written on purpose.

Takafumi Hori was brought into working on "Mindful Education" initially through contact with Jeff Liu on Twitter.

Rebecca's only time off the show since 2011 was three weeks off in 2015, during which she went to Japan and went to Studio Trigger and had a meeting she hadn't been expecting to help set up the collaboration with Hori-san.

Takafumi Hori did key frames for some action sequences and the "Here Comes a Thought" music video.

The detailed summary is below!

[Archive of Steven Universe Podcast Summaries]

McKenzie opens up with a greeting for her guests and begins by asking about how everyone feels about being a part of the Cartoon Network "legacy." Rebecca Sugar goes first and describes it as "unreal," since she grew up on CN shows. She still has trouble processing that her show is to the next generation what CN shows were for her. Joe thinks it's weird too, comparing their show to such iconic shows and seeing that it has the same effect, and Kat agrees--she can't imagine SU having the "same weight," though Rebecca can see from meeting kids who love her work that this is indeed going on. They conclude that those other shows are still kinda magical for them because even though they now have an inside look at how these shows are made, their show's "magic" secrets aren't secrets to them, while those other shows still have mysteries they never saw from the inside.

They discuss a few other CN shows that were influential for the Crewniverse, focusing on the amazingness of Samurai Jack and how Genndy Tartakovsky had been so ambitious to make something so "artful and cinematic"--seeing it actually work was inspiring. When Rebecca worked on another project with Genndy (Hotel Transylvania), she got to ask him who was responsible for some of the most powerful scenes in his Clone Wars cartoon and discuss the experience. Rebecca sometimes used to bring her Clone Wars DVD to entertain babysitting charges with, because that made her the cool babysitter. (Joe says that would work on him NOW.) McKenzie points out that Genndy was involved in giving Rebecca advice at the beginning of Steven Universe, and Rebecca agrees that he even directed her pilot.

Joe prompts Rebecca to explain what it means to direct a piece of animation, so she elaborates on how Genndy influenced how everything moves in the pilot, how the actions are planned out through exposure sheets (and she's been advised never to talk about exposure sheets, ha). So Genndy did animation directing while Rebecca boarded and wrote the pilot.

Joe's beginnings go back to Disney TV, and Kat was on Regular Show. Rebecca's first job of course was Adventure Time; she started as a revisionist and became a boarder. She had a dream of having her own show, but she always had this "realistic" understanding that it wasn't an attainable dream. She thought she would do revisions as her day job and do independent comics for her personal work on the side. She didn't realize that something like Adventure Time would allow her to do personal work, directly communicating messages she wanted to communicate. Everything changed when she realized Adventure Time was the kind of show that WOULD give her that freedom. 

Rebecca did dream of having a show and Kat says she also dreamed Rebecca would have a show. :) Kat remembers wanting to meet her in college because she read her comics online, and then it actually happened. Rebecca has trouble still believing people regarded her that way, especially back then.

Rebecca also really liked Kat's stuff back then--Kat was older so they didn't have classes together (senpai!) but Rebecca thought Kat looked really cool and creeped around trying to inconspicuously look at her drawings. They ended up living together in California because Kat was already out there working on Regular Show, and they'd sit around eating ice cream and watching anime and gaining weight. They discuss how Kat was very sick during that time (sleeping on an air mattress and not going to the doctor) and Rebecca would make her tea. They describe trying to walk to the art store together and almost dying because what looked walkable on a map was not walkable in practice. They ended up not buying anything, even after all that.

Discussing the early days of the Crew, Rebecca brings up Joe's storyboard test. They'd been concerned at the beginning about who would really get their vibe for the show, sorting tests into yes, no, and maybe folders. And when they got Joe's test, they created a "heck yes" folder. Joe points out that he hadn't even met Rebecca until he was hired and it was his first day. She'd met Jeff Liu but not Joe. Joe hadn't seen the pilot until his first day either, and then Rebecca pulled out the sketchbook with all the Fusions in it and explained her ideas, and he realized what a good decision he had made accepting this job.

Next they talk about the collaboration with Grumpyface Studios to make Save the Light, which is now out on Nintendo Switch.

Video games were of course influential for Steven Universe. Rebecca and Kat say they were "Nintendo households" growing up, while Joe didn't have a game system of his own but played games at friends' houses. McKenzie asks how involved the Crew was in developing the Save the Light game, and Rebecca says they were very involved, trying to make its storyline work into the canon. Hessonite is the main antagonist of the game, and she is looped into the show proper.

Rebecca revised some of the dialogue so it would be more accurate to the characters, though many of the ideas came from the Grumpyface team for them to modify or give input on. Squaridot was their idea, which is something Rebecca refers to as tonally different from what they would've invented, but she still likes it a lot--on the show they try to do that too, with letting Crew members contribute an idea and working it in. She uses for example how Squaridot focused on the word "pebble" in a similar way our Peridot used "clod," suggesting maybe all Peridots have this insulting tendency but there's no reason they all have to adopt the same insulting word. There are plenty of bad things you can call someone in the Gem culture.

Rebecca and some others were involved in casting and character design too; Ian had established the style of the video game characters, but Joe drew the Fusions for the game in the style they used. She says they were super excited about the Fusions and the relationship dynamic, since they really didn't get to include Fusions in Attack the Light. (Chronicler's note: they did have an Alexandrite option, but it was just a little battle move and cut scene of Alexandrite pounding the crap out of enemies; there was nothing in Attack the Light like the relationships or fusion possibilities in Save the Light, and Alexandrite was the only combination you could attain.)

The thing Rebecca loves the most about both games is that Steven, as the healer and protector, is so important. It's really hard to win if you don't choose to protect Steven and make sure he heals himself too. Joe really liked getting to play the demos during the beginning, and loved the 3D Beach City. They'd been hoping for a long time that someone would make a game. Apparently a fan had been trying to make a Golf Quest Mini game but they think it disappeared. Rebecca pipes up to say they had early plans to have Greg on the team so they could make him a bard. Joe came up with the combination attacks on a sheet all together. Rebecca hasn't beaten the game yet.

Talking endings, she really wanted multiple ending opportunities for the game. There was no possibility to have alternate endings for the phone game, which Rebecca thought was sad because she loved the idea of having a choice at the beginning: Garnet gives you the advice to NOT take the prism into the light, but you do it anyway and the game starts . . . or you just give the prism to Garnet like she says, and you've just beaten the game and won 100%, credits roll.

Going back to Squaridot (of whom McKenzie is a big fan), Rebecca describes the process of creating the game as a lot of back and forth, and Squaridot having a "contentious relationship" with our Peridot was fun because Squaridot is like Peridot before her redemption arc. They really enjoyed having our Peridot feel enlightened in comparison to a Homeworld version of her. The game just came out for Switch in tandem with the OK KO game, which Rebecca recommends and thinks is really fun.

McKenzie brings up a different kind of game: the Steven Universe Monopoly! Rebecca has a story about it: she points out that the Beta Kindergarten debuted in that game before the Beta Kindergarten was revealed in the show. People did notice it. (Chronicler's note: Oh hey, I told one of my friends about this recently! He questioned whether he could play with the Monopoly without getting spoiled. And I told him actually the game spoiled us on the Beta Kindergarten. And, if I remember correctly, the Great North had not been revealed yet at the time we saw promo pictures of how the board looked.) 

Rebecca thought it was pretty similar to how certain attacks Lamar came up with for "Watermelon Steven" were allowed into the game for Attack the Light. (Chronicler's note: I'm not sure how that lines up because "Watermelon Steven" and those attacks premiered on TV way before Attack the Light came out.) The airing schedule makes things weird, so sometimes stuff they wouldn't have intended to be new to fans ends up being an easter egg.

Next up is a discussion of Steven Universe's crossover with Uncle Grandpa in the episode "Say Uncle." Rebecca said she was super excited to do it because Uncle Grandpa could cross dimensions to help kids and it fit like a natural fit. Rebecca Sugar takes responsibility for the idea for this crossover. She pitched it to Uncle Grandpa's creator, Pete Browngardt, in an airport. The shows basically came out at the same time so they were sort of like sibling shows. Even though Uncle Grandpa is super different from SU, she feels that Steven stands for peaceful coexistence with diversity, and she hated that her show was being used as a way to "trash other shows." She wanted to make it clear that she stood for THOSE different voices too, even if they were doing their thing differently than she was doing her thing.

Joe boarded on "Say Uncle," and he describes the experience as seeming to have surprised the other show's crew--as in, it was apparently a surprise to them that they were doing it at all. The first pass was VERY smooth, they say, and Joe got to include some weird jokes that wouldn't normally fly on the show, like Uncle Grandpa coming out of the clamshell disguised as Rose Quartz, characters' heads flying off to circle the world, tripping over letters, the plot hole, Lars and Sadie's ship, the joke about it not being canon--it's all very Uncle Grandpa style that Joe and Jeff had to absorb and execute quickly.

Rebecca excitedly brings up the joke Uncle Grandpa makes about how Steven should get his Gem polished twice a year, and wants to know whether that was a diamond reference (since it turns out that diamonds are supposed to get polished twice a year, and it would have been an amazing call forward if it had been intentional). Sadly, they were not sure if it was intentional, and they felt they'd have to ask Matt Burnett who wrote that line. Rebecca specifies that she did NOT know diamonds should be polished twice a year so she cannot take credit for that. They think it was completely coincidence.

Regarding the collaboration with Takafumi Hori from Studio Trigger, who worked on "Mindful Education." Kat points out that Jeff had a relationship with Hori-san; they talked on Twitter and the Crew knew he was a fan because he posted fan art. Rebecca has been working full time on the show since 2011, except for three weeks off in 2015, during which she visited Studio Trigger in Japan and met the folks who would be involved with "Mindful Education." They believe they were at the outline phase when they had that meeting, since before that Rebecca thought the episode would be instructional mindful meditation from Steven, not an episode where mindfulness is used to solve a problem. Writing that episode really taught Rebecca a lot about storytelling, seeing characters learn and benefit using the lessons you want to teach the viewers.

Takafumi Hori did key animation on some of the action scenes and music video scenes. They give us some animation lessons on how key frames are one polishing step up from storyboards made by Jeff and Colin in that episode, and Hori-san would make the frames in his style/the show's style, with notes for the in-betweeners. In-betweeners would do the frames in between keys, according to direction from the animation director saying how close each would be to the keys. (Rebecca gives some details about how key frames and in betweens might be used in animating a punch.) There was a lot of back and forth with adding the dialogue and finalizing the scenes (involving track reader Slightly Off Track and Sunmin Animation inking on paper with brush pens), not adding too much action so they could preserve the look they wanted. 

Kat congratulates listeners who actually followed Rebecca's description of how to animate a punch (and would love to see if anyone can demonstrate it), and Joe tells a Hori-story: he got to in-between a couple of Hori-san's Stevonnie action shots and felt like he was experiencing a universal animation language that transcends borders, even though the way the Japanese sheets and the American sheets worked were different.

[Archive of Steven Universe Podcast Summaries]