#when it comes to her actual personality she won’t make herself palatable to someone else to be more comfortable to them the way Gansey or

[cabeswaterdrowned]

The thing about Blue is that compromising her wants and identity as a concept is antithetical to who she is, like she will do it in some areas because she has to as a girl in this world but it’s very against her nature to do it when there aren’t other external barriers.

[colorfuldreamsmkg]

Over and Over | Erika Singer | Trial Results Reaction

"......."

Erika wants to scream, to rage and yell at Johann. They're so angry at Johann for what he did. They clutch the edge of their podium with enough force for their knuckles to turn white, poison on their tongue, and--

And then Ozzy snaps at them, diverting their attention. She hadn't expected him to hear those words, and she's aware as his break that they'd been overly cruel. But was it worse than anything else people here said on a regular basis?

"........."

Of course, how could she forget? She'd said as much to Takuma. The people here don't want the real Erika, with all her thorns and prickly parts. They want someone palatable, easy to ignore. Complacent. Everyone else can be angry or be mean, but It's a problem when she is. Being what people don't want in a place like this is just more likely to get you killed. They just want to call her pretty when she isn't herself, they want to call her nice for biting her tongue. They don't want the real Erika, they just want Erika the Retail Worker.

They loosen their grip on the podium, crushing that anger and fury into the bottom of a bottle they'd be emptying out once they're alone. They can be as upset as they want when they're drunk and alone. But now they don't have a roommate to worry about.

Everyone keeps giving words of comfort to Johann, just like they'd done Hitome. She doesn't get it. Just because he'd apparently had a fucked up upbringing? So had Erika, so had half of them, and they didn't kill anyone over it. Johann hasn't even so much as displayed a hint of remorse or guilt for killing Takuma, so why? Did that not matter anymore, once the trial was over? Did any of them know how it feels, to take a life?

".....Takuma was a good person. When my own SEKAI had given me a panic attack, he was the only one who stuck by me and helped calm me down from it. When jokes about what set that off were made, he checked on me to make sure it wasn't going to give me another one. Miku had us talk after the first performance and he helped encourage me more than anyone else to actually bother doing anything, to try and not hate the way I deal with things. And now he's gone.

".....I won't ever forgive you, Johann. But that doesn't mean you deserve what's coming to you."

[kandyrezi]

anonymous said: Could I request Yosafire and Froze realizing that they're yandere? Maybe with them trying to not be yandere. anonymous said: Could I request Yosafire and friends trying to resist their yandere impulses with their darling?

: - : - : - : - : - : - :

(a/n: i chose yosaf, froze & rawberry for this bc i found their scenarios to be the most interesting to write for.)

⌜yosafire⌟

• Yosafire likely won’t even see anything wrong with her thoughts and thinks they’re from a place of innocence – she adores you and it only makes sense she’d want to spend time with you, albeit a tad obsessively – that’s just what love does to people, she thinks! 

• But it marginally gets worse. She stalks you unintentionally even if you said you wanted to be alone, or tries to insist desperately to go with you. The flowery demon always has to make sure she's the one you like spending time with the most and prioritize her over all else.

• Her breaking point would be jealousy. Seeing you hanging out with someone else, depending on how much contempt she feels for them, makes her shake in bitter feelings of insecurity, so much so it almost physically hurts.

• She’s in denial about it. She doesn't want to leave you with them, but she doesn't want you to see her act on any violent desires. Shouldn't she leave you be and just respect that if you prefer someone else's company over hers? Even if she thinks that, it's too much of a risk if any rival just decided to steal you away from her. She won't let that happen!

⌜froze.⌟

• Froze is more self-aware. The frosty angel, if pushed far enough, can have a penchant for violence as much for any other. She isn't overprotective in a sense of immediately coming to your aid when faced with a potential inconvenience or a nuisance, Froze is the type to observe from afar first and foremost.

• She knows she can’t suffocate and hover over you, whether it’s just to protect you or not. It may start out innocent and well-meaning enough; making sure you're eating healthy, getting enough exercise, finishing any errands or assignments on time, sometimes scolding you if you don't do any of the aforementioned.

• While she normally keeps a tight lock on emotions, not letting her impassive facade crumble so easily, she does have a breaking point. She keeps close tabs on everyone you interact with, anyone who's "safe" who won't take you from her... and she would snap at you for spending time with someone she didn't know and approve of.

• When she snaps out of that self-imposed trance of obsessive control she's pushed onto her darling, she feels guilty and ashamed. She might be able to keep some yandere tendencies at bay, but once they're there, they probably won't ever disappear completely, even if she is less likely to act on them.

⌜rawberry.⌟

• Rawberry cares little for holding herself back, but she might do it just in case to avoid scaring you off. Her appetite for violence can be overlooked. But not her desire to kill (for) you, consume a part of you, or maybe even permanently cripple you… y’know, just in case.

• But she throws those silly thoughts away almost immediately – she’s only joking, of course. She wouldn’t harm her precious darling like that~

• She likes to give you little love bites on the knuckles, nibbles on the shoulder, maybe lightly bump her body against yours to show affection. She doesn't give you much reason to be wary of her; her friends reassure you Rawberry just has that kind of playfully sadistic, a bit eccentric personality, but her heart is pure where it matters.

• But you do seriously grow frightful when she actually sinks her teeth into your arm to the point where it draws flowing crimson, and she exclaims how palatable your blood is to the taste. The cannibalistic demon might end up acting on her darker impulses after all, but only because she never cared too much about holding herself back in the first place.

[omniswords]

#24 for felinette!!!!!!!! 🗣

24. Deep kisses where they have their hands tangled in each other’s hair to pull them closer.

leave me a pairing and a number and i’ll write you a kiss!

ma’am i stayed up until 4am writing this nonsense, you’re WELCOME.

still connected to #12 and #16 because we love fake not-dating-shenanigans 😏

He’s really got to stop ending up at functions like this. And this one has to be even worse than the New Year’s Eve party.

Félix has never been one for anniversaries—never really saw the significance of them. So you’ve gone around the sun with someone twenty-five goddamn times. Or without someone for six. So what? No reason to commemorate it with the nonsense of balloons and music and food and… other people.

He wouldn’t say he’s spent the majority of the Bourgeois’ 25th anniversary party sulking, although he’s pretty sure it’s the word other people might use to describe him. Especially Mr. and Mrs. Bourgeois themselves, who are apparently bickering over the placement of the baby grand piano as though something like that can be fixed in the middle of an event. And especially Chloé, who—perfectly on brand, even at age twenty—is fawning over her mother and staring  at him as if to say, don’t ruin this for me.

As though this is her thing to have ruined.

Besides. He’s not sulking. He’s just very much preferring to be literally anywhere else, the way anyone else with a brain might feel. In fact, the only part of this whole affair that’s been even remotely palatable is the fact that the Dupain-Cheng family is catering. And it’s not because of the food.

Well.

Not necessarily.

It’s because Marinette’s helping. And as much as he needs to keep the opinion to himself, she’s very much a sight for sore eyes in the Grand Paris. Dressed in a black-and-white dress she mentioned making herself, and with her hair in a high ponytail, she pays more attention to her parents and the platters on the table in front of her than to the overly dignified laughter around her.

Admittedly, they haven’t been able to interact much; they agreed on that much as recently as the night before, along with a promise to make up the lost quality time later. This is her summer job, after all, and she says that means something to her. Besides, he has to make himself a certain percent sociable—with the Bourgeois family, with the Tsurugis, even with the Rossis—so everyone and their cousin doesn’t write him off as the Fitzwilliam Darcy of the Agreste/Graham de Vanily family.

(He doesn’t see what the big deal of that is, though. In fact, Marinette would probably agree with him, with that silly little giggle of hers hiding behind her sketchbook, and he’d think, perhaps, that she’d make the perfect Elizabeth.)

Still, it doesn’t sit with him particularly well to ignore her or otherwise treat her just like “the help”—if there’s anything his parents taught him besides their version of love, it’s to thank and remember the names of every person regardless of position. And on top of that, she’s been stealing more than her fair share of glances over at him, as if to invite him over. As if, for a moment or two, she might need some reprieve of her own.

He won’t tell anyone what a sucker he is for the blue in her eyes. He’ll take that to his grave.

It’s just as Félix is getting to his feet and making his way to her table, though, that Lila Rossi decides to try and make herself known. Again. He sighs; he really thought she would have gotten the hint by now. But apparently Lila is nothing if not persistent, even years later, and the way she greets him and all but latches onto his arm is so disgustingly syrupy that he feels the sudden urge to run upstairs and brush his teeth. “Isn’t it lovely?” she says, her fingers curling impossibly tight into the sleeve of his button-up shirt. “Twenty-five years. Can you imagine being invested in someone for so long? It must be beautiful…”

Félix declines to answer, feels his own eyes going dark, and finds a strange solace in the way Marinette, out of the corner of his eye, stiffens and clenches her fist at her side.

“Can’t you picture it?” Lila’s going on as they approach the catering table—doesn’t she ever get tired of hearing herself talk?—and she attempts to slip her hand into his. Smoothly and without missing a beat, he swipes his hand away, sticking it in his pocket with a pointed look. Manners be damned; he’d rather choke on a macaron than hold Lila Rossi’s hand. A cloud passes over her face, subtle and on the edges of manipulative where Chloé would burst out, but otherwise she doesn’t seem fazed. She’s probably developed more resolve, or perhaps more poison, ever since Adrien made it more than clear to her that his interests lay elsewhere. “Haven’t you considered it, Félix? My family’s done some lovely work in England—they’re Italian ambassadors, did you know?”

“Yes,” Félix manages to deadpan, acutely aware of how Marinette turns away from them to unpack another box of ridiculous paper straws. “In fact, Miss Rossi, you’ve told me so frequently that I may very well develop that tinnitus you so often complained about before.” He tilts his head, deeply feels the shift in Marinette’s energy and how hard she must be trying to stifle her own laughter. “Remind me, have you gotten that checked out?”

Marinette has to dip behind the table; he has to try not to smile. If he can’t talk to her directly, he might as well amuse her.

“Oh!” Lila says. “You remembered. Yes, yes, of course I did. It took some extensive treatment, but the doctors say I should be cured by now. It’s miraculous, isn’t it?” She gives her hair a flip. “But really, Félix, you’ll consider what I’ve told you, won’t you? I hear your family’s in the film business, and—wouldn’t you know it, I’ve done quite a few photoshoots with your cousin. I’m sure he could put in a good word for me with your mother. Think about it, us starring opposite each other—”

Félix suppresses a sigh, honestly about to tell her that if she had any sense of his family, he would have known that his aunt was the actress. But before he can so much as open his mouth, Marinette clears her throat to get their attention. Her expression is sour, and her arms are folded. “If you’re not going to take any refreshments,” she chides, “I’m going to ask you make way for those who are. And by the way, it might help you to know that merit and tact get you much farther in life than empty flattery.” She clicks her tongue, tightens the apron at her waist, and turns on her heel. “You should try it sometime, Miss Rossi.”

He knows that expression. The Customer Service Smile, she branded it. It’s half-terrifying, seeing her actually unleash it. Half-terrifying, and half-vindicating.

From the corner of the hotel lobby, Chloé’s mouth falls open in elated shock. Adrien and Kagami pause their hushed conversation to look their way. And Lila turns a deep, angry scarlet. (Oh, Marinette’s gotten so good at getting to her. Perfect, perfect Elizabeth.) In seconds, she’s composed herself, thankfully all but unraveled herself from Félix, and she approaches Marinette’s parents—who are honestly lovely people, and don’t deserve whatever’s about to come to them. (Especially Mrs. Cheng. She’s snuck him into the house too many times.)

They don’t get it. Whatever words Lila’s gathering, whatever excuse me she’s trying to preface it with, Félix doesn’t let it out, and it’s certainly not for her sake or for the Bourgeois family. “Thank you,” he cuts in with a cordial smile, careful not to shake Mrs. Cheng’s hand while she’s handling food. “You’ve been doing wonderful work for this event. Might you permit Miss Dupain-Cheng a short break? I’m sure she could use one.”

It’s practically textbook. Compliment. Persuade. Twist the knife with a little kindness. Perhaps Lila Rossi hasn’t learned all the tricks just yet.

And he certainly won’t let her.

Marinette’s parents look to her, and she looks to Félix, and he raises an eyebrow, as if to say, You gave me an out. Now it’s my turn. She hesitates a moment, then gathers herself. “Actually,” she says, as if finding a second wind, “a break would be really nice. Papa, could you text me when you need me back?”

Her father lets her go—he’s always been good about giving her the things she needs, which is sometimes more than he could say about his own. None too quickly, she undoes her apron, takes a deep breath to center herself, and disappears into the carpeted corridor by the elevators. And Félix, with that twist-the-knife bow and a macaron in hand, dismisses himself from Lila Rossi and finds a new corner to occupy.

There. Now no one can say he doesn’t talk to anyone. And no one can say he sulks.

———

He makes it about three-fourths of the way through the macaron before he finds his out to the corridor. It’s fine; he knows he won’t be missed, and he made sure Lila was properly occupied when he slipped away. She can’t follow him if she doesn’t know where he’s going, after all.

Almost predictably, Marinette is still outside the elevators, pacing back and forth in front of them and only making way for the people coming out. She catches his eye and pauses mid-step, and then collapses by one of the carpeted staircases with her head in her hands. “That was stupid,” she mumbles. “I was stupid.”

Félix doesn’t give her what she’s probably looking for. Instead, he holds his hand out to her and says, “Come with me. It’s suffocating, being in there.”

To his relief, Marinette takes the out. Her hand feels so small and so soft in his as he helps her up, and they slip into one of the elevators; all at once, he’s grateful for the hotel room that accompanied his invitation. They don’t say much, don’t do much even though they finally have the privacy for it. In fact, Marinette doesn’t crack until the elevator door closes behind them and they’ve begun to stroll down the blissfully quiet hallway. “I was working,” she sighs. “And I get it, it wasn’t professional of me to say something like that on the job. Especially during someone’s entire anniversary.”

“On the contrary,” he says, his hand finding a home at the small of her back; he’s relieved that she doesn’t protest, and instead leans into the touch for comfort. “I’ve never heard someone vocalize a middle finger quite as subtly and as eloquently as you.”

“It was hypocritical, Fé,” she points out. “You know I used my connections to get into university, too.”

Félix gives her the type of look that he hopes says, are you kidding me. “You asked for letters of recommendation. Which, as you may recall, is standard for university applications?”

Marinette looks like she wants to find other points to argue, like she’s really racking her brain for it. Eventually she stops, and sighs, and unties and reties her hair. Which is killing him on the inside, but he doesn’t dare say so just yet. Not when she’s still got steam to blow. “I’m sorry,” she finally says. “I should have let you handle it. You can hold your own.”

“Oh, please. To me, she’s a nuisance at best. A sycophant and a sour taste in my mouth. To you, she’s been a terror.” He tosses her a smirk. “I’m impressed that you have the capacity to dislike someone so deeply and so honorably. I should’ve expected something like that from you.” He glances behind them, just to make sure they’re truly alone, before he slips an arm around her waist, pulls her close and murmurs against the shell of her ear. “Were you jealous, love?”

It works. He can practically feel out her goosebumps, the way her muscles relax, with every sense he has. “Félix…”

“Well?” He hardly moves away from her, noses right into the flyaway hairs her elastic didn’t catch, into the sugar-and-almond scent she’s been carrying all day. “Were you?”

Marinette doesn’t bother to look his way. She stares straight ahead, and folds her arms across her chest. “Why should I be jealous?” she says. “You’re mine.”

Dear God. If he wasn’t attracted to her before, he certainly is now. He can feel the flare of it in the pit of his stomach, and before even he knows it he’s kissing the comebacks off of her tongue, pressing her against the wall just a few doors down from his room. He sighs, all but covering her mouth with his, and his hands catch on her dress on the way to tugging her hair tie out and securing it around his wrist for safekeeping. He always knew that sleight of hand would prove useful someday. “Yours, huh?” he hums in between kisses. “Is that how you feel?”

“I’m not wrong,” Marinette argues back, tugging him back in by the lapels of his jacket, and he’s far too busy tangling his fingers in her hair and mouthing down her neck to dispute it. And even if he weren’t busy, he certainly wouldn’t want to. Not when she sounds like that.

He pauses to laugh into her ear, her hair spilling over her shoulders as his hands find a home at her waist. “Don’t you have guests to cater to?”

Her lips are as red as her cheeks, and as far as he’s concerned her eyes are hooded beyond redemption. “Don’t you have a couple to congratulate?”

“Why should I? I’ve got something worth celebrating right here.” He grins faintly, steals another searing kiss, runs his hands up and down her sides and jumps at the opportunity to slip tongue when she gasps. “And she looks so good in wrinkles and a peter pan collar.”

Marinette’s breath hitches.

Bingo. And here she probably thought he didn’t pay attention to her fashion rambles.

Her eyes are sparkling by the time he pulls back enough to look at her.  She looks him up and down, stops his hands, gives them a squeeze.

“Where’s your room?”

[consumedkings-archive]

WITCHING HOUR, a john seed/deputy fic.

chapter five: dark vibrations

word count: 11.4k

rating: m for now, rating will change in later chapters as things develop, tags will be updated accordingly.

warnings: body horror, hallucinations (?), mentions of self-harm, mentions of suicide. spooky scary activities ensue. elliot has an increasingly difficult time keeping a grasp on reality. we knew this was gonna happen, though!

notes: howdy! i hope y’all enjoy this. sometimes i go weeks without updating and sometimes i wait like, 4 days before manically writing an entire chapter. you know how it be like that sometimes. i was feeling a bit more inspired and felt like i finally hit a groove on where this story was going, which i think definitely helped, and i hope you all enjoy it!

thank you, as always, to everyone who reads, likes/comments, even if you just come into my dms with two nice words or write something nice in your tags; it really does make my whole night to see even one person enjoying anything i’ve made. <3

Cold morning light filtered in through the window, drenched in wedding-silk grays thanks to the wintery cloud-cover. Everything in the room looked to be placed with absolute intent and care; polished, porcelain-white decor in elaborate geometrics, gold accents, a king-sized bed with impeccably pressed sheets. Truthfully, John had thought for certain he’d come back into the house to be informed by Elliot’s statuesque mother that, in fact, she had rescinded her offer to let him stay and actually, he would need to depart immediately, lest the authorities be called.

He was glad that it hadn’t come to that, of course, because it would’ve been such a shame to have to dampen Scarlet’s opinion of her own daughter so quickly into their meeting.

Dropping his small bag of belongings—the manila folder packed full of information, including his own scribbled notes; the burner phone; a few quickly-packed clothes that had been meticulously cycled to avoid the most long-term wear—John paused as the heat in the house kicked on with a delicate whirr.

Everything in Scarlet Honeysett’s home seemed to be precisely the shape and color that she liked, with not a single thing out of place; and yet, as the heat kicked on, he was certain that he could hear the sound of sharp, hushed voices downstairs, a little ripple in the woman’s perfect, arcadian home scene.

It was good. It felt good, to be here. To have gotten the upper hand. So much of the past weeks he’d spent with Elliot had felt like he was slowly, violently spiraling out of control, but this? She was here, and she had to play by his rules for once, and—

And he’d wanted just one more second alone, with her. To watch the way her eyes flickered over his face, to drink in the way her chin tilted up in defiance but not unlike the way she used to do it when she was waiting for him to kiss her, the same lovely high-color in her spreading along her cheekbones and the same little spark in her gaze. Whether it was anger or allure was neither here nor there, anymore; with Elliot, they were interchangeable, a stepping stone one way or another, just the way it had always been with them.

Because John liked her anger. He liked her wrath. He wanted to put his hands on it, his mouth on it, break it into pieces and wring it out of her and put it back and do it all over again, while she said his name, his name, and not anyone else’s. God, she’d been so fucking close—so close, and he couldn have just had her if he really wanted to, grabbed a fistful of her hair and kissed her when the sting of her slap was still fresh on his face. She liked when he did that; kissed her, like he was starved for her. Because he was starved for her, and then she could knot her fingers into his shirt or dig her nails into his skin or whatever it was she wanted to make him desperate.

The sound of excited barking downstairs broke him out of his thoughts. John blinked, taking one last swift look-over of the immaculate room his mother-in-law had decided to put him up in before he nudged his bag beneath the bed and stepped out into the hallway.

To say old money would be almost an understatement. Surely, this house had to have some kind of historical significance; it was several stories, with one of those grand staircases that was wide going up, hit a landing, and then split to either side of the house. As he made his way down, he caught sight of the flicker of Scarlet’s silk robe in the kitchen; music drifted out of it, the same kind of hazy, older music that Elliot had turned on in her mother’s house back in Hope County.

“Stop moving,” Elliot was saying to Boomer, strapping him into a little reflective vest that sat on him like a saddle blanket. For a second, she didn’t notice his presence—or willfully ignored it; he couldn’t say for sure one way or another—and instead focused on the Heeler, rubbing his ears and kissing the bridge of his nose. A tiny little smile ticked the corners of her mouth, and he thought he heard her say, so handsome, best boy, yes you are.

Boomer’s attention snapped to John, now at the foot of the stairs. He let out one sharp, accusatory bark (could dogs sound accusatory, John wondered, or was that just Elliot getting to him?), and what little of his hackles were visible from out under the vest spiked up instantly.

“Good to see you too, beastie,” John greeted him, trying to ignore the way the hound’s low-pitched, reverberating growls made his skin crawl. Flashes of Boomer’s numerous and vicious takedowns of not only Eden’s Gate members but at least one member of the Family that had the misfortune of having chained the dog up darted across his memory, like a flipping through a photo album.

“Don’t talk to him,” Elliot snipped, cupping Boomer’s ears protectively. “I don’t need him getting the idea we’re friendly.”

John rolled his eyes. “More than friendly, I’d say.” His eyes darted over her, drinking in once against the shock of her appearance—red hair, so fucking red that every time he looked at her it was almost like staring at a stranger until he took in the rest, the freckles smattering her nose and the flush in her cheeks, cupid’s-bow lips that were glossed. Had he ever seen Elliot with more than river-soaked mascara on before?

The woman shot him a look, dry and unamused, coming to a stand. He asked, “Going for a walk?”

“Trying to,” she replied tartly, “but someone is evil enough that Boomer doesn’t trust them.”

“We’re pals,” John offered pleasantly. “Me and the beast. You know, were, anyway. He probably just needs to spend a little time with me.”

“Speaking from personal experience, more time makes you less palatable.”

“Let me come on the walk with you,” he tried again, letting her little barbs and jabs roll right off of him, water skating off of his feathers. At this point, he really quite enjoyed her venom; it was familiar. “I’m sure we’ve got plenty to catch up on.”

Elliot eyed him warily, eyes giving him a scathing once-over—eerily reminiscent of her mother’s own disdainful look, and now he thought, ah, yeah, that is where she gets it from, then—as her mouth twisted around whatever it was she wanted to say but wouldn’t let herself. Something too vicious for Scarlet to overhear, perhaps. The threats she’d made in the past had been wildly colorful, but each second that Ell spent considering her words more carefully rather than saying whatever it was she felt with her eyes darting to the kitchen was another second that John became more aware of how little Scarlet actually knew.

“Fine,” Elliot said at last, her eyes narrowing. “I suppose that we do. Mama, we’re leavin’.”

The little quirk of an accent at the end of her sentence made him swallow back a laugh. He’d barely heard that Georgia accent back in Hope County, but maybe spending time with her mother had reinspired it.

“Alright,” Scarlet said, drying her hands on a towel as she stood in the doorway. Her eyes glanced between them, inquisitive for a moment, before she said, “Be quick. Doctor’s appointment in an hour and a half.”

John tilted his head. “Oh? Baby check-in?”

“Can’t imagine what else it would be, Mr. Seed,” Scarlet idled. “Are you familiar with the process of pregnancy?”

“Not beyond the knowledge of a man, I’m afraid.”

“Well, allow me to educate you,” the blonde said, her voice light. “When a woman is carrying a baby, she has to make frequent visits to the doctor, to ensure that all is well. Can’t have anything going wrong with the baby, you know.”

John steadied the intake of breath so that it did not sound so abrupt. He would have done a double-take and thought perhaps she was just overbearing, and not attempting to insult him, were Elliot not smiling. Certainly, only her mother’s attempted insult of him could elicit such an expression out of her.

“Then my arrival was fortunately timed,” he announced. “I look forward to it.”

“And you’ll be sorely disappointed,” Elliot cut in, her humor fading. “You won’t be coming.”

Ah, yes. That’s why I don’t love her attitude. “That’s absurd,” he replied, incredulous. “It’s nearly six weeks, and I haven’t seen a single ultrasound of our baby.”

He was careful, this time, to keep it to our baby. He’d seen the way Elliot’s expression tightened when he’d said my baby, even though that’s what came so naturally to him now, being that they were hardly on the same team—but he’d seen it, that look in her eye, the way she’d squared her shoulders like she’d suddenly been ready to go at him.

Only one thing to do with a rabid dog, Jacob had said, not two days before they found Elliot drenched in another man’s blood in the woods.

John half-expected Scarlet to jump in, to say that it was the father’s right to be there; she was more traditional than Elliot, if her comment about wedlock or her insistence of him staying were anything to go by, but when he turned his gaze to her, the older woman’s expression was devoid of any sympathy. Typical of Honeysett women, he was coming to find.

“If she doesn’t want you there, then you won’t be there. I won’t have my daughter stressed out,” Scarlet told him. “Stress is bad for the baby. Surely that falls within the realm of what a man knows about babies, Mr. Seed?”

He pressed his mouth into a thin line. “Surely.”

“Good. Hour and a half, my beloved, do not be late.”

That a woman had become so capable of tacking the softness of my beloved onto something that verged on a threat was nearly beyond John—would have been, certainly, were he not accustomed to Isolde’s particular brand of venom that was not so unlike Scarlet Honeysett’s.

“I won’t,” Elliot promised. “Can you call the handyman? My TV’s been acting up lately. Turning on static and whatnot.”

“Fine,” Scarlet replied, waving her hand. “I’ll have them come out this afternoon.”

Elliot turned on her heel and opened the front door out into the frigid morning, letting Boomer dart out ahead of her and not waiting for him in the least. He fell into step beside her easily, shrugging into his coat halfway out the door as it clicked shut behind him; she trudged through the snow, passing the garbage can and opening the gate that led out into what had once been pastureland and towards the woods.

It was the same fence that she’d been standing at, early that morning, face lax and serene. If the return to the fence bothered her at all, it didn’t show on her face any more than her irritation at having him there.

“Your mother’s quite...” John’s voice trailed off. “Tall.”

“Mm.”

“Statuesque, even.”

“Mmhm.”

“I get the feeling she doesn’t like me that much.”

“Yes,” Elliot acquiesced, her tone dripping with something close to venomous amusement, “I’ve never seen her take so poorly to someone so quickly before.”

“I suppose I should be flattered.”

“You would be.”

A fourth of the way into the snowy pasture and Boomer was far ahead of them, leaping like a little speckled gazelle in drifts of snow. It was easy to forget that the dog had been ready to rip him to shreds just a little under an hour ago (and once more, more recently). Still, as they trudged through a path that it seemed Elliot had worn through a few times before, John let out a little puff of breath and glanced over at her.

For just one second, she wasn’t spitting any venom at him, but rather seemed to favor the act of pretending like he wasn’t there, which was a bit worse than having her fix her fury on him. Her gaze was focused forward, following Boomer’s little lines in the snow. Attention at all was one thing, but acting as though he didn’t exist?

John said, “So, Burke just got his autopsy reports back and dropped you off right here at home, huh?”

Elliot’s face had already gone pink from the cold, right on her nose and spreading through her cheeks. At his words, a new flush of color rose, a shade more vicious than the last, and her gaze slid to him. If looks could kill, he thought, that dreamy little spike of delight at her eyes on him going straight to his head. Look at you, my little Wrath. You’ve got the good girl mask on, but I know what your true face is.

He’d seen it. Kissed her when the blood was still in her mouth. Let her feed the monster inside of her when she told him to beg, when she dug her nails into his skin, when her breath hitched in her chest from the pressure of his knife blade against her sternum—not in pain, necessarily, but delight at that pain.

The scar had to still be there, of course. The reminder of its existence, swathed in the heavy winter fabrics she wore now, made his fingers itch. If he could just get his hands on her—get his mouth on her, if she would just stop being so obtuse—but he didn’t think he’d be so fond of her if she wasn’t.

“The same way the government probably drove you and your siblings back to the compound and dropped you off,” she replied at last, her voice tight, “isn’t that right?”

John flashed his teeth at her in a grin. “Very astute, hellcat.”

Her expression tightened at the moniker. She sucked her teeth, fixing her eyes forward again, shifting back into the strategy of being withholding of her attention rather than entertain him.

“Oh, come on,” he said, swinging around in front of her and stopping her single-minded journey across the pastureland. “You can’t say you didn’t miss me even a little bit, Ell.”

“I told you,” she replied tartly, “not to call me that.”

“Because it reminds you of what it was like when we’re together,” he agreed.

An exasperated noise came out of her. “Did you forget that I lied to you?”

“At the end, sure,” John said, eyes flickering over her face. “But I don’t think you’re so good a liar you could lie about all of the times you said please, or the way that you said my name, or—and I think you’ll recall I’ve insisted on this bit from the beginning—the undeniable connection that we’ve had since we met.”

“You are a fucking lunatic,” Elliot snapped, her face flushing red. “And don’t fucking talk about me like I’m—like I wasn’t there, I know what I—” She sucked in a sharp breath; lower, and more threatening, “I’m aware of what I said. Of what I did.”

“And you’re going to tell me that it was all fake?” he prompted, unwilling to let go of this little thread. Gripping, sliding through his fingers, but he wouldn’t be so quick to let it escape him now that he didn’t have to think about her mother pitching in an unwanted opinion. “That you lied the whole time and you don’t feel anything for me, that—”

“Of course it wasn’t fake,” she bit out. Her voice had gone venomous, sharp, unbridled in its timbre. “I’m not a fucking psychopath, John, I can’t fake loving someone like you can.”

John opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it. He hadn’t been expecting that. Sure, there was a part of him that was sure Elliot had her doubts about his intentions, otherwise she wouldn’t have fucked off to the middle of nowhere (nor turned them in), but—still?

“You think I—” He paused again, blinking. “You’re not that stupid.”

Her eyes narrowed. Everything about her stiffened, quite suddenly, like maybe she was bracing to take another swing at him. “You are fucking begging for a punch to the face.”

“I mean,” John began quickly, waving his hands a little, “that you surely don’t think that whole time I was just—”

Elliot made a disgusted sound and brushed past him, letting out a high whistle; the sound immediately drew a flurry of activity as a flock of birds when bursting from the treeline, followed closely behind by Boomer’s gray-and-black speckled form. John fell back into step with her, huffing out a breath of air. He was going to table that discussion for later—she was clearly still upset, still a little sore and tender from their departure, and that was fine. There were a lot of things at play concerning his wife’s mood, including but not limited to being pregnant.

So she did, he thought, glancing at her through the corner of his eyes. Love me. Back then, and maybe now, still.

“How have you been sleeping?” is what he said instead, when the moment had spread between them long enough for him to think that he was safe to speak again with incurring her wrath once more. Her lips pressed into a thin line.

“Fine,” she replied, her voice tight.

“Yeah?” he asked, keeping his tone conversational. Elliot blinked once, slow, clearly trying to temper herself. “I just remember what a restless sleeper you were, back home.”

He wanted to say, I saw you at three AM, twice, staring out your window and then walking out into the snow barefoot. I saw you sleepwalking, I know you aren’t sleeping well.

He wanted to say that, and he couldn’t, because if Elliot knew he’d been tailing her for a while she’d go berserk—pull the plug, self-destruct, take whatever loss she had to in order to fucking end him.

“I’m sleeping fine,” the redhead reiterated. For a second, she looked like she wanted to say something; her eyes flickered uneasily, like something was bothering her and she hadn’t been able to say it to anyone but maybe she wanted to, and maybe she could say it to him, but something in the treeline drew her attention away. They were about ten yards away, now, the low breeze skimming pine needles against each other as Boomer barked conversationally at the birds that had so rudely taken flight.

Elliot’s molars clicked, grinding together. Her lashes fluttered, and she sucked in a sharp little breath through her nose.

“Elliot?” John glanced at the trees, but that was all he saw—tall, dark pines, bunching together erratically through years of growth spurts and inevitable fellings. He turned his gaze back to his wife, gaze inquisitive. “What?”

“Don’t you—?” She stopped herself, and sucked in another sharp breath, and now John felt the concern spike sharp and hot in him, because when he reached up she didn’t even seem to register his movement; Elliot, the same woman who had snatched his wrist and threatened to snap it in half for having the audacity to ‘sneak up on her’ when he’d been in the middle of talking to her, completely transfixed on something that he couldn’t see.

“Elliot.” He tried something firmer this time, his hand coming up to sweep the strands of her hair away from her shoulder and neck. The gesture finally startled her out of wherever it was she had gone, yanked her back to reality.

Her shoulder bunched up to her jaw in an effort to deter his hand, swatting at him absently with her hand. “Don’t touch me.”

“Are you going to tell me where you were just now?” John asked, tilting his head inquisitively.

“I was here. Just thought I saw something in the trees,” she replied tightly, turning away from the treeline and clearing her throat. “Just birds.”

Just birds, she said, even though the birds had already taken off and the forest was otherwise still and serene. Behind her, Boomer whined before beginning to follow her back towards the house. Elliot moved with a newfound purpose, one that she had been distinctly lacking before.

His mouth pressed into a thin line. John turned his attention back to the trees, searching for anything—any tangle of branches of play of shadows that might read sinister or threatening.

Only the trees and their shadowy pines. He thought about that night he’d fished Elliot out of the Family’s grip, when she’d been so fucking drugged up to her gills that she’d balked at the sight of the treeline on their way out. I don’t think I can, she’d said then, her voice pitching high with the anxious vibrations of panic. John, I don’t think I can—

“John,” Elliot snapped from ahead of him, “are you coming, or are you just gonna stand there all fucking afternoon?”

He thought about the way Ase had grabbed her hand, blood and viscera coating Elliot like she’d become a tried-and-true Scream Queen. If he searched long enough, if he sat in the memory long enough—did Ase’s mouth open? Had she said something to Elliot? What had she said?

“John,” came the grinding demand, again, less patient than before. “As much as I would love to leave you to freeze to death for insinuating I’m stupid, mama would hate to have to deal with a corpse on her property and I’d never hear the end of it.”

“I missed our banter,” he replied, though the jest did not quite land the same way that it would have were he not so deep in his own thoughts. By the time he’d started walking in her direction, his back to the forest, something uneasy had settled just under his skin; the feeling of being watched, eyes on the back of his neck, anticipation prickling along like his spine.

The house loomed, polished and pristine, on the horizon; as they picked their way across the snowy field, Elliot puffing out breaths occasionally from the labor of it all, John tried to shake that pervasive feeling of dread that had settled over him.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Weyfield was just Weyfield, a small town not unlike Hope County, and maybe he was just jumpy from the way the Family had conducted their business, and maybe it was the same for Elliot, who had certainly been put through a different experience than he—but regardless:

The sooner they got out, the better.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Shouldn’t have agreed to let him drive me here.

“Have you been getting enough sleep?”

It was stupid. Stupid, I should have put my foot down, told him to fucking stay at the house and wait for me to come back.

“Elliot?”

She blinked, vision fuzzing and refocusing around the sterile white of the doctor’s office. Her abdomen was sticky, and the ultrasound machine had been turned off along with her shirt tugged back down. Like usual, Dr. Harding did not say anything about the gossamer-webbing of scars, but did pause upon first seeing them, as though she hadn’t seen them times before.

“Sorry?” Elliot said, the apology quirking up at the end in question. She sat up from the bed, the paper crinkling beneath her as she moved.

“I asked,” Harding reiterated, “have you been getting enough sleep?”

Elliot knew the answer. She felt the exhaustion souring in her mouth already, the way something spoiled when it went too long without attention. A sickness. She should say that she hadn’t been sleeping well at all, that she’d begun sleepwalking, that

(seeing things, I’m seeing things when I close my eyes and when I look in the dark treeline, I see faces, heads, people I don’t know but they feel familiar and their faces drop down in between the branches of trees on invisible silk threads and their terrible dark mouths open but they can’t scream)

she’d been feeling out of sorts, as of late. That seemed like a nice way to put it.

The dark images that had fluttered between the trees on her walk earlier that morning with John felt as real as any memory—and that wasn’t to say that her memories always felt real, because they didn’t. But the validity of this morning’s waking nightmare of floating heads drifting between tree-trunks, swinging loosely while John asked her how she’d been sleeping.

“Fine,” Elliot said after a moment, feeling a fresh wave of nausea come over her. “I think, um, maybe the stress about the baby is keeping me up at night.”

Harding regarded her for a moment. The severe sharpness of her dark hair pinned back did nothing to soften her expression—though the woman was hard-pressed to be cheerful, she, at the very least, never sugar-coated anything. “Have you been trying those breathing exercises before bed? And spending time at the stables, as I suggested?”

“I have,” she replied, which wasn’t entirely untrue—she was doing at least one of those things. “It’s just been a lot of—stress, is all. I’m sure it’ll get better once the holidays are over.”

“That can definitely help,” the woman agreed, nodding her head and typing a few loose notes into the computer. “If you find that you aren’t getting enough sleep—enough,” she continued, pointedly, “restful sleep, you let me know and we can figure out some next steps.”

Elliot nodded, coming to a stand; the sudden movement had her head rushing, and she for a second she thought again of the floating heads, swaying with the breeze through the pine boughs.

“I’ve been sleep-walking,” she blurted out impulsively, her doctor’s gaze turning quizzically towards her. “I mean—um, just twice.”

“Do you have a history of it?”

“No,” Elliot began, “but I’ve always been a restless sleeper.”

“It’s not uncommon for sleepwalking to increase with pregnancy, Miss Honeysett,” the doctor replied, her voice even-keel. “It sounds like you’re under quite a bit of pressure, as well. I would suggest trying something mild—an over-the-counter sleep aid would be fine. Unisom is a typical one. Try half of one first, and see how it makes you feel.”

“Okay,” she murmured, sliding her coat back on. Something that was less heavy-duty than the pills her mother had left for her might be good. “Are there any—symptoms? To sleeping pills?”

The doctor adjusted the glasses on her nose, regarding her for a long moment. “Some adverse side-effects, on occasion. Usually with stronger, prescription sleep aids, you could have worsening anxiety and depression, day-time drowsiness. That kind of thing.”

So, no hallucinations, then. No sleepwalking, no lost time, no...

“Are you having other symptoms?” Harding asked.

You’ll think I’m crazy, Elliot thought, you’ll think I’m fucking nuts if I tell you about my dream with the television, and Joey’s body, and walking out nearly to the treeline in my sleep clothes. You’ll think I’m fucking nuts and I’ll have to be committed.

So Elliot said, “No, just curious,” and Dr. Harding hummed as she scribbled the name of the sleep aid onto a sticky note for Elliot to take out with her.

“You have a healthy baby, Miss Honeysett. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?” The brunette gestured for Elliot to head out the door, walking with her back up the hallway that led to the front lobby once again. “Next appointment we can find out the gender, if you’d like.”

“Oh,” Elliot said, surprised. Was it that soon already? Had it already been that long of being—like this? With child? She swallowed, pleasant little flutters in her chest. It was the first time that she’d felt something other than dread concerning the baby. Well, first time, sans John’s annoying little assertion about his claim. Why had that bothered her so much?

“You can decide to keep it a surprise,” Dr. Harding added, sound a little amused. “Think about it, and in the meantime, get some rest. Half a pill to start, remember.”

“Will do, thank you.”

She waded through the small collection of people in the lobby and out onto the street. Something strange was humming inside of her—it was sad, she realized, with a little spike of panic. She felt mournful. So fast, and so soon, she would figure out the baby’s gender, and suddenly the baby would be all the more real and she’d have to start thinking about names, she couldn’t have a baby without a name, and how was she supposed to pick a name? How was she supposed to decide something a real human being was going to be saddled with, forever?

Was the baby a Seed? Or a Honeysett?

Which one was she?

“What’re you doing, just standing out here? You’ll freeze.” John’s voice broke her out of her thoughts, shaking her back to reality again. He must have seen her standing there, glassy-eyed in the middle of the sidewalk, from where he’d been waiting—perhaps, if she was lucky, even suffering over the fact that he hadn’t been allowed into the doctor’s appointment—and come out. He’d kicked up a big enough fuss about not getting to come in that she’d said, fine, you can fucking drive me there, but that’s it, and true to his word John hadn’t pressed the matter any further than that.

Even though he wanted to. She could tell he wanted to, the second they had parked on the main street. She could tell he wanted to say, so, maybe I do come in, hm? What do you say to that? But he hadn’t. And that was...something.

Fuck, she needed to stay focused; she couldn’t keep letting her mind wander like that. Twice in less than an hour?

“I was just—thinking,” Elliot replied, feeling exhausted already. John’s brows furrowed at the center of his forehead, and she sighed. “Stop looking at me like that.”

He arched a dark brow loftily. “Like what?”

“Like you fucking care,” she snapped.

“Contrary to what you might believe concerning my feelings for you,” John quipped, his voice tart, “I do have every reason to be invested in the well-being of our baby.”

She thought to reiterate again that the baby was, in fact, hers, and not any part his, as she was doing all the work and John had done nothing to endear himself as an acceptable father-figure, but she was too tired. Something about the doctor’s office and the way she’d had to dodge the truth of how she’d been feeling left her empty, scooped out her insides like she was a Jack-O’-Lantern and left her floating, aimless.

“Ell,” he began. His voice had pitched lower, now, and his hand reached up; she saw it move in the corner of her vision and something inside her said, yes yes yes, this is what we want, we remember you, we know you. He twisted a loose curl around his finger, letting it smooth out against her shoulder, the corner of his mouth ticking upward when she absently batted his hand away. “Tell me about the appointment. Did everything go well?”

“The baby is fine,” she told him, and then sighed. “I mean—healthy. The baby is healthy. The doctor wants me to pick up an over-the-counter sleep aid, so we’ll need to stop at the store on the way home.”

“I thought you were sleeping fine?” John prompted. He sounded sly. His was a gotcha tone, the way he got when he thought he’d walked a particularly fine circle through the holes in what she chose to tell him or not. Elliot’s expression flattened. She ignored the way that he was looking at her—hungryhungryhungry, always greedy and never, never content with what he had—and fixed her eyes on the passing traffic behind him.

She said, “Just when you’re being somewhat tolerable, you have to go and ruin it.”

“If it’s intolerable for me to point out when you’re withholding information from me about your health,” he demurred, “then I’d prefer intolerable.”

“I cannot believe that I have to say this to you,” Elliot bit out, the sudden spike of irritation flaring hot and violence in her chest, “but I don’t fucking owe you anything. I don’t owe you the truth, or an explanation, and quite frankly, the fact that I allowed you to even chauffeur me to this fucking appointment is a sign that I’m being incredibly generous with you—far more generous than what you deserve.”

John’s teeth flashed in a grin. Before, back in Hope County, the venom had bothered him—he’d hated it, frowned and fought back with a little poison of his own, despised that he had to work so hard to get to the nitty-gritty underneath. But he had once, and perhaps now that he had known her, it only thrilled him.

How frustrating.

“Everything I did,” he said, lowering his voice as he closed some of the small distance between them now, “whether you believe me or not, was for us—”

“Ugh.”

“—and I might have gotten a little heated,” John continued, and this time when he reached up again Elliot’s mouth twisted into a grimace and she tilted her face away, don’t say it don’t say it don’t you fucking say it fuck you fuck you fuck you, “back at the ranch, but I meant it when I said that I l—”

“Honeysett!”

It was Via. Her greeting immediately cut off John’s words, effectively driving a wedge between their metaphorical—and physical—closeness. Snapped her out of the magic of his cologne and his voice and his hand coming up to her shoulder with its grounding weight.

“Missed you at the barn today,” the blonde chirped, cheery as she approached, hands tucked into her fluffy parka pockets. Her eyes flickered over to John, inquisitive. “Friend?”

And then Via turned her eyes back to Elliot, waiting expectantly. It struck her quite suddenly that Sylvia was checking—that despite the kindness and warmth in her voice, she was giving Elliot the opportunity to escape, to wave a red flag and ask for help. She said friend?, and what she meant was, is this man bothering you?, and it made a fuzzy warmth spread right through Elliot’s chest, uncomfortable in the softness is inspired in her.

“Hey, Via, this is...” How best to proceed? How to explain, this man is the father of my baby—which, by the way, I’m pregnant—and also technically we are legally married, oh and also he’s supposed to be in Federal custody right now but he isn’t, somehow, but it’s fine, we’re all good? “...my...John.”

Sylvia eyed her for a moment, sticking out a gloved hand. “Howdy, Elliot’s John. I’m Sylvia.”

John was clearly trying not to have the biggest shit-eating grin on his face as he shook Via’s hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Sylvia,” he replied pleasantly, once again reminding Elliot that the man was a tried-and-true practiced liar and could slip a perfect face on at any time. The knowledge was almost enticing, to know that she’d seen him without the masquerade, more than once.

It made, in hindsight, reflecting back on that moment he’d come unraveled at the ranch—No way, baby, I’m fucking it for you—have a different light. She had done that to him.

Good.

“Y’all busy?” Sylvia asked, blissfully not prying any further for an elaboration on what the nature of their relationship was. “I was just about to meet Wyatt at the Wild Rose. It ain’t trivia night, but they do have a live band playing tonight that’s supposed to be good.”

“Oh,” Elliot said faintly, “I don’t think—”

“That sounds excellent!” John interrupted. “I’ve barely seen anything of Weyfield. What do you say, Elliot?”

I say you can eat shit, she thought, but Sylvia was watching her closely—trying to make sure everything was okay, she supposed, considering Elliot had said nothing of John since they’d become friends. She took in a little breath and looked at the blonde, giving a small smile.

“No harm in a little time out of the house,” she agreed after a moment. “I’m starving, anyway.”

She wasn’t hungry in the least. The sticky note with the doctor’s suggested sleep aid was crumple in her pocket, and a little sweaty from the way she’d been clutching it, but somehow the idea of returning back to the house only seemed to fill her with more dread.

The tv, buzzing static, dull and thrumming in the back of her head, in the roots of her molars. HAVE YOU BEEN HAVING STRANGE DREAMS? And the heads, twisting and turning in the breeze, their silk-spun puppet threads invisible, their mouths swinging open as they try to scream.

HAVE YOU BEEN HAVING STRANGE DREAMS?

“Well, can’t have you starvin’,” Sylvia said amusedly, looping her arm through Elliot’s own and beginning to walk. “You’re not keeping my girl well-fed, Mister John?”

“Trying my hardest,” John replied, his gaze sly, “but she can be a bit ornery.”

“Hm, that does sound like her. Where are you visitin’ from, anyway?”

As they chattered, over her, John on one side and Sylvia on the other, Elliot got the distinct impression that her friend was quietly, politely fishing for information without putting Elliot under the stress of it.

HAVE YOU

Snow underfoot. The forest breathing, expanding, swelling because it holds some great, dark beast just waiting for her to get close enough.

BEEN HAVING

(Itwaitsforyouitwaitsforusallanditwillhaveyou)

STRANGE

“Careful,” John cautioned, reaching for the door with all of the gentlemanly nature of a man not possessed by the devil to hunt her down across states, “it’s slick.”

He opened the door into the Wild Rose, the sweep of warm air rushing over her a pleasant shock to her system that managed to draw her back to reality. Sylvia nudged her inside, effectively planting herself between Elliot and John as they moved single-file into the crowded bar.

She was tired, and having nightmares, and once she finally got some sleep she would feel a lot better about everything. All she needed was some sleep. And in the meantime, try to enjoy her time with her friends as best she could.

Get some sleep. Feel better in the morning. Burke’s old mantra popped up in her head, running through the worn grooves that were a sad, bittersweet sort of comfort to her now; the second you think you can’t anymore, you keep going anyway. Dig, dig, dig, until her fingers were dirt-packed and bloody, as deep as she fucking needed to go to keep moving, because it wasn’t just about her anymore.

Get some sleep.

Feel better in the morning.

Sylvia had drifted out from their little formation to make her way to the booth they had recently staked out as their own, where Wyatt already sat waiting and waving for them. John planted his hands on her shoulders, squeezing and lowering his mouth to her ear. “What do you want to drink?”

“You’re acting awfully domestic for someone who should be in Federal custody,” Elliot replied lowly, looking at him over her shoulder just in time to see him flash a smile that was all teeth.

“C’mon, hellcat,” and he all but purred the words at her, making her skin prickle in a type of anticipation that wasn’t purely dread. Traitorous, treacherous body. “You can at least play at liking me while your friends are around.”

“Iced tea.” She shrugged, disembarking his hands from her shoulders. “No lemon. A lot of ice. Think you can swing it without, I don’t know, lying halfway to Hell on your way there, Slick?”

“Anything,” he replied, pitching his voice even lower amidst the din of the bar, “for my lovely wife.”

Elliot’s head snapped around, ready to grab a fistful of his shirt and remind him to watch his fucking mouth, but he’d already started his journey to meander through the crowd and reach the bar on his little fetch quest.

Fucker, she thought, even when her stomach twisted with something other than vicious disdain. John had only been here for a day and was already too comfortable taking liberties; she’d have to make sure that got nipped in the bud before he got any funny ideas about his own personal redemption arc.

It would have been nice, to just be able to turn off any and all feelings whenever she wanted. But she couldn’t, and that meant she’d have to do the next best thing:

Get John the fuck away from her.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Eden’s Gate did not make a good first impression. Eden’s Gate did not even make a good second or third impression; in fact, Isolde had come to the conclusion that Joseph’s little compound was incapable of making any impression that didn’t fill the observer with a sense of despair. Every time she stepped out of the little building Jacob had set her up in, she was overwhelmed with disgust—eyes followed her, but none of them held anything beyond a dull spark of interest, nearly smothered by what seemed to have been a full-body beat down by the other cult.

The other cult, she constantly had to remind herself, because that’s what Eden’s Gate was. A cult.

A few miserable days at the hands of Montana’s coldest winter by record had her in a foul mood. The snowfall seemed inevitable, like it wouldn't ever stop, and the amount of times there had been paths shoveled between buildings—all leading to the chapel—were equally endless. Isolde couldn’t imagine coming to fucking Montana for fun, let alone for work, and yet she was somehow here for the latter and not the former. Distinctly, painfully lacking in fun.

It didn’t help that Joseph was insufferable. It didn’t help that every time he fixed his eyes on her, she felt an uncomfortable heat dripping down her spine like some kind of molten IV, like they hadn’t left on the worst of terms. Like she hadn’t told him to get the fuck out of her loft, like she hadn’t thrown an engagement ring on the floor like it was poison.

That was a time of her life that she had the distinct desire to not revisit, not even once, and yet in his presence—she found it nearly impossible to ignore. Joseph seemed to take a special, muted pleasure in making her hackles raise, and at least that hadn’t changed about him.

“Sol!”

Jacob called to her from halfway down the compound’s yard, a truck idling beside him. She stopped her trek back to her little hovel and looked at him, arms crossing over her chest.

“You wanna get out for a little?” He inclined his head toward the truck. “I’ve got some errands to run.”

“What kind of errands do the Collapse dictate?” she asked.

“The important variety.”

“Hm.”

She didn’t elaborate on that any further, and Jacob waited only one heartbeat before he reached for the driver’s side door and opened it, slowly.

“Going once—”

“I am not a child, Jacob.”

“—going twice—”

Fuck, did she want to get out.

“Fine,” Isolde snapped, “but bring that truck here. I’m not hiking through a snowdrift to get to you.”

Jacob, sounding quite pleased with himself, replied, “I thought you weren’t a child?”

He seemed moved enough by the dramatic eyeroll to oblige her, and if he found it annoying, it didn’t show; enough so, at least, that Isolde was able to clamber into the passenger side of the truck once he pulled it around, tapping the snow off of her shoes before pulling herself in.

“Thank you,” she huffed, shutting the door and rubbing her fingers to circulate the blood again. “This weather’s a bit abnormal, don’t you think?”

“Not anything out of the ordinary for this time of year, no,” Jacob replied. He nudged the windshield wipers on, plowing a thin layer of snow that had already begun to accumulate off of the window before starting to pull out of the compound. “I think you’re just not suited to the snow.”

“Could have told you that myself,” Isolde snipped. “I’m a hot-blooded creature.”

Jacob made a noise, something like an mm, a place between agreement without incriminating himself by agreeing too fervently or elaborately. She glanced over at him through the corners of her eyes as they turned onto the highway. In the comfortable silence that elapsed between them, Isolde settled back against the seat of the truck and tried to appreciate being out from the stifling dread of the compound.

It did seem to her that Joseph was markedly different than he had been, before. In the few instances in the last couple of days where he hadn’t been picking a fight with her, it almost felt normal—but of course, he was doing it in his own way, this pot-stirring, this instigating. With politeness. With kindness. By remaining completely unrattled by anything she said to him, every, any critique, so self-assured in his righteousness that not even reason could make him look twice at the state of his congregation.

Then, he had always been that way. Righteous. Assured. She had found it appealing, once—she liked a man with confidence—but now she found it—

Equal parts frustrating and attractive. Objectively, of course. Not anything that she felt herself.

“Trying to account for the bodies of the Family against the ones we know we saw before,” Jacob explained, when she had been quiet long enough to let him sort out his thoughts. “Seems like they started killing themselves, in pairs, once the two leaders were done with. I sent out a couple of scouts and they radio’d back some locations, but they’ve gone quiet for a while.”

“Dedication,” Isolde murmured, digging the nail of her thumb into her lower lip. “How dreadful.”

“The dedication, or the act?”

“Both. Imagine being so bound to something or someone.”

Jacob’s mouth twisted in a wry smile, and he brought the truck to a crawl. Two bodies, swallowed by snow nearly up to their waists, sat propped against the cliff face. He fished a pad of paper and a near-worn out pencil out of the center console of the truck and held them out to her.

“Mark it down, Sol.” When she blinked at him, he continued, “What, you thought you were gonna get out and not help me?”

“Well, I was hoping.”

She sighed, taking the pad and pencil—a glorified secretary is what I am, she thought bitterly—and marked two tally marks down. From where the car was stopped, she could see that the arms of the corpses came together, and though it was buried in snow, she had to think that beneath the white frost their hands were intertwined.

They went like that for a while; Jacob would drive to a spot, have her mark down the amount of bodies, and then go on. By the time they had reached Fall’s End, Isolde had counted nearly twenty dead bodies. As they rolled into the far end of town, Isolde realized very quickly that most of the buildings were blackened, and when she rolled down her window, the stale scent of charcoal still sat in the air.

“What happened here?” she asked, grimacing and scrunching up her nose.

“Dunno,” Jacob replied tightly. “Someone with an agenda.”

Isolde’s gaze snapped to him, to try and wring any information out of his expression, but true to his nature Jacob remained completely unreadable. It wasn’t until they had gotten to what appeared to have once been a bar and tallied up the bodies there that Jacob threw the truck into park.

“What in the fuck?” he muttered, eyes fixed forward. When Sol followed his gaze, she realized that it was fixed on someone—someone running towards them, frantically, nearly falling over themselves in the snow.

“Is that one of yours?” she asked. “Jacob?”

“Shh.”

He had busied himself fishing around in the back seat, and as he did Isolde squinted, trying to get a better look at what was going on. The man running definitely had to be Eden’s Gate—he had the big red emblem on his shirt, but he wasn’t wearing any coat, and—

And there were others.

“Jacob,” Isolde said, “there are more.”

“What?”

“Bodies,” she managed out, “there are more bodies.”

The snow wasn’t so deep on the roads that she couldn’t see the width of a body, and she did—see it, that is, tousled dark locks reflecting wet and sticky in the overcast, late-afternoon light. The man running was waving his arms and yelling for help, and then he fell over one of the bodies, fell to his hands and knees over the body of someone else, and made a sound kind of like anguish.

Jacob finally managed to pull out what he’d been looking for—a pair of binoculars—and immediately lifted them to his face.

“Shit,” he said. “Fuck, they’re ours.”

“All of them?” Isolde demanded. “They’re all—”

“Yes,” he bit out, opening the driver’s door and grabbing the rifle from the back seat. “They’re all ours. Isolde, stay in—”

Jacob’s words were cut off by the violent crack of a gunshot. For a split second, Isolde saw nothing; in the space between heartbeats, sluggish from panic, she saw the arterial spray coming from the back of the running man’s body before he hit the ground, screaming.

He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dead, he was still crawling, dragging himself through the snow, leaving a smear of red behind him, and that’s when Isolde saw them.

Jacob had stopped moving as well. The person at the far end of the main road leading through Fall’s End had yet to shoulder their weapon. From here, Isolde could see that she was tall—short-cropped, blonde hair, swathed in dark clothes, but beyond that the features were near impossible to make out.

“Close the door,” Isolde hissed, not moving, her instincts screaming to duck but the fear that sudden movement would draw attention prevailing. “Jacob, close the fucking door.”

The eerily satisfying click-click of what could only be the bolt-action rifle in the hunter’s hands clattered around in her head. The rifle was returned to their shoulders, brought up level, and then fired again.

Out of pure instinct, Isolde flinched—but once again, the bullet was aimed not at them, but at the man already crawling in the snow. The sound of the gunshot, and the subsequent bullet-on-bone impact, was enough to make her stomach churn; now, at least, the man lay slumped in the snow, one of the many bodies that seemed to have been the unfortunate pull-and-fire clay birds for the stranger.

“Who,” Isolde whispered furiously, as Jacob carefully put the truck into drive without letting it move forward at all first, “Jacob, who the fuck is that?”

The redhead’s expression was unforgivingly tight, pulling taut with it the scars and mottling of his skin visible outside of his beard. He wasn’t looking at her, but rather kept his eyes fixed forward, as he closed the driver’s side door.

“Fifteen men,” he ground out between his teeth, “that’s fifteen fucking men I sent out here to figure out the body count.”

The stranger finally lowered their rifle, apparently satisfied with their work. This far away, it was hard to tell, but Isolde got the distinct impression that they were being watched, looked at now, where before the attention had been elsewhere.

And then it was confirmed, because the stranger lifted one gloved hand and pressed her index and middle fingers right against the hollows of her jaw. A snakebite. A cut right to the carotid. A message.

Jacob cranked the wheel, the tires shrieking in protest against the snow as he pulled between buildings in a sudden rush of acceleration. The stranger was quickly cut out, stifled by the side of the used-to-be-bar, leaving them out of direct range of a sniper rifle. Not that her companion seemed that pleased about it, anyway.

“Fuck,” he bit out, seething as he tried to navigate the narrow space in the clumsy Eden’s Gate truck. “Fuck, did you count how many bodies were on the ground?”

“Hm, no!” Isolde snapped viciously. “I was a bit too busy trying to make sure they were going to shoot us!”

Jacob gritted out another string of swears between his teeth, turning the truck until he could take what looked to be a back alley in the opposite direction of their little hunter. He checked the rearview mirror frequently; his expression was set in a deep frown, and he only looked at her once before continuing his regular scanning of the road behind them.

“Well, aren’t you going to turn around?” she demanded.

“For what?” Jacob replied flatly. “I’ve got a hunting rifle, not my HTI.”

“I don’t know what that means, and I don’t care,” Isolde bit out.

“It means, the chances of me getting shot before I get a shot on them are significantly lower,” he told her, his knuckles whitening along the steering wheel, “and as confident as I am that I could kill them before they killed me, I’m not confident they wouldn’t take a shot at you first.”

Isolde’s stomach rolled. It wasn’t the violence that bothered her—it wasn’t the death, or the guns, or even the blood—but the message itself. The Stranger had been hunting the Eden’s Gate men and women for sport. For fun. To pass the time, while they waited. But what for? What could they be waiting for?

She stayed quiet, listening to Jacob radio back to the compound quick, short orders that flew right over her head. She couldn’t stop thinking about it—the gesture. The stranger. Who were they? The remainder of the other cult, perhaps? What were they waiting for?

You’re next, that two-fingered, snake-bite-right-to-the-carotid gesture had said.

You’re next, and I’m coming for you.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Sylvia did not seem that impressed with John Seed, and Elliot could not blame her.

John was exceptionally charming. So charming, in fact, that he and Wyatt seemed to get along smashingly. It was almost frustrating, how quick the blonde took to John—but then, Wyatt did strike as the type of man who got along with everybody until they gave him a reason to think otherwise. After all, he’d been kind to her, and she was...

Needless to say, Sylvia was a harder sell, which was nice. Reassuring. It made Elliot feel more grounded, to see Sylvia politely smile at John’s chatter—she’d nearly forgotten how much he liked to talk—but then decidedly turn to Elliot to ask her about something or dive into a different conversation. It was pointed, and if the way John watched them interact was any indication, the message of it was not lost on him.

By the time the evening had drawn to a close, for her and John at least, the brunette had departed to go warm-up the Jeep and left her standing by the doorway, keeping warm, with Sylvia.

“You sure you’re doin’ okay?” the blonde asked after a moment, propped up against the wall in the tiny little doorway that led out to the main street. “You look tired. Stressed out. I was worried when we didn’t hear from you this morning, about comin’ to the barn.”

Elliot felt a little pang of guilt digging in, just there below her sternum. “I’m okay,” she promised. “I’m sorry I didn’t call, I—had a doctor’s appointment this morning that I completely forgot about until my mama reminded me, and John showed up this morning too, so it’s just been...”

“A crazy day,” Via agreed, her nose crinkling cutely in amusement. “He’s a funny fella, that John of yours.”

Oh, if only you knew. “I think so, too.”

“What is he?” she asked, conversationally. “Maybe a—car salesman?”

Her friend’s playful jab was enough to elicit a laugh, billowing out of her and catching even herself by surprise. But then, she shouldn’t have been shocked to find that Sylvia had gotten a quick read on John. Given the way she’d quickly diverted from the attention on Elliot’s scar and carried on, she thought maybe Via was more perceptive than she liked to let on.

“Lawyer,” Ell replied, and Via winced comically.

“Ouch.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I mean—Elli,” Via intoned playfully, “he might as well be sellin’ you snake oil when he’s a lawyer.”

Elliot sighed ruefully, glancing out the window to see John clambering out of the front of the jeep. Snake oil seemed a light judgment for him, all things considered.

“Hey, Via,” she began, swallowing a little, “if I tell you something, you’ve gotta promise you won’t say anything?”

Via regarded her curiously, head tilted. “Okay, sure, Freckles. What’s up?”

She shifted on her feet. “John and I are actually, um—” Elliot paused, swallowing thickly. She didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to, because saying it out loud—her, and not John—made it real. Gave it legs. Forced her to face what had happened and what she couldn’t change yet.

“You don’t have to,” Via told her gently. “I could tell there was somethin’—you know, out of sorts. You don’t get a slick-talkin’ lawyer grinnin’ like the cat what ate the canary if he hasn’t done somethin’ to piss a woman off.”

Elliot shook her head. “We’re actually, uh,” she tried again, pulling at a loose thread on her shirt, “m—married.”

Saying the word out loud didn’t feel as wretched as she thought it would, which was almost three times as concerning. She felt, instead, more dread waiting for Sylvia’s reaction—waiting to see what her one friend had to say or think about that.

The woman’s face screwed up comedically. “Oh, Freckles,” she said, her tone teasing. “Say it ain’t so.”

“I’m not kidding!” Elliot felt a nervous little laugh bubble out of her. “I mean—what, Via? You clearly have an opinion on him.”

“I don’t know the man from Jack walkin’ down the street,” Sylvia demurred. “I just think...well, I just think you’re a real peach, you know? And you didn’t seem too pleased to have this John walkin’ around, and I take that kind of thing seriously.”

Sighing, Elliot scuffed her shoe against the ground, watching John pick his way through the crowd back down the street.

“We left on—bad terms, sort of,” she explained. “He showed up to make amends.”

“Do you want to make amends?”

The question caught her off-guard. It was an obvious one—obvious in that, it should have been one of the first things anyone asked her regarding John, even John himself, and yet: no one had. Not a single person had asked her if she wanted to suffer through making amends with the man who had lied to her, violated her trust, and still somehow managed to be the one person she didn’t have to fear seeing the worst, ugliest parts of her.

“I don’t know,” Elliot said after a moment, clearing her throat. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“Then I will reserve judgment,” Sylvia replied firmly, “so you can make a decision on your own.”

The door to the street opened, bringing with it not only a waft of chilly wind, but John himself and the scent of his viciously-expensive cologne. It took every ounce of Elliot’s self-control not to burst into laughter at the absurdity of it—John Seed, charisma-extraordinaire, somehow managing to make poor first impressions both on her mother and her friend.

“Car’s all warmed up,” John announced, rubbing his hands together. He glanced between the two women, the corner of his mouth ticking upward. “What’s so funny, hm?”

“Nothing,” Elliot replied. “Just talking about you.”

This piqued his interest. He said, “Good things, I hope,” and she could see it on his face—the painful reminder of the way John had craved Joseph’s approval, the way he’d lit up like a nuclear mushroom cloud the second Joseph deigned to say anything remotely kind to him.

“Jury’s still out,” Sylvia said lightly, and then flashed a pretty smile and clapped him on the shoulder. “But don’t worry bud! We’ll get you there eventually.”

John tried very hard to feign polite laughter, but the uneasiness bled through readily—and it was a little satisfying, to see John squirm, to see him out of his element, no longer surrounded by a constant chorus of Yes hitting his dopamine centers nonstop. No wonder the man had a conniption anytime someone dared to dislike him.

“Better get this lady home, she looks like she’s about to fall asleep standing,” Sylvia announced, reaching and giving Elliot a gentle hug. “Night, Freckles.”

“Goodnight.”

John and Sylvia bid each other a pleasant goodbye as Elliot stepped out onto the street, careful to avoid icier parts of the concrete as she made her way to the car. Her brain felt fuzzy—a lot of socializing, a lot of time spent trying not to let John get to her. It had been long enough since she’d had to hold her walls up for so long that she felt exhausted from doing it, even for this long.

Maybe that was his strategy. Wear her down, then swoop in, just like last time.

“Did you have fun?” John asked, and she realized that she was at the car, having climbed into the passenger seat already. He closed the driver’s side door, settling in before carefully beginning to back out of the parking spot.

“I mean, having you loom over my shoulder the entire night was a little odd.”

He made an affronted sound. “I was not looming.”

“You were,” Elliot told him, “a little.” She paused, feeling the exhaustion pulling at the edges of her vision, begging for her to close her eyes—but she couldn’t. Not in the car, not with John driving. If she did, he might just keep driving and not turn back around. “It’s funny—”

“My quote-unquote looming?”

“How much different you are,” she finished, “when you’re not around Joseph.”

John was clearly trying very hard not to look like he was stiffening at her words. Gotcha, she thought, with a little pinprick of pride. Yeah, I didn’t forget. I didn’t forget how much you hated it when I brought him up.

“I don’t know what you mean,” John replied, keeping his voice light. “I’m exactly the way I’ve always been.”

“You haven’t tried to drown me a single time.”

“That time was a miscommunication,” he insisted. “I wasn’t trying to drown you. Just—coerce you. And besides, that’s behind us now. I know you, Elliot Honeysett, intimately, which means such forms of brute persuasion aren’t required.” He paused. “It’s much better when you indulge me willingly, anyway.”

Elliot’s nose crinkled. “You sound fucking nuts when you say that. ‘That one time I thought about drowning you was just a miscommunication’. No wonder Sylvia doesn’t like you.”

“So she told you? That she doesn’t like me?”

He paused for a moment, his gaze flickering over to her, and when he saw the very subtle upturn of her mouth he exhaled out of his nose.

“You’re fucking with me.”

“Not necessarily. But if I was—it would be the least you deserve.”

He was different, out from the insane pressure of the cult, out from under Joseph’s thumb. It was like, given room to breathe, he was suddenly relearning what it was like to make his own decision—to exist outside of Joseph. Back in Hope County, John had been fervent in his belief that he owed Joseph everything. Maybe the distance had done him some good.

Don’t, something inside of her insisted viciously, as she turned her attention out to the side of the road where the headlights illuminated snowdrift after snowdrift. Don’t get soft on him. That’s how he got you last time, you know. Don’t let it happen again.

But if he wanted to press the issue about Sylvia—or about her comment concerning Joseph—John seemed to exercise a remarkable amount of self-control and instead focused on driving. In the quiet, without him chattering on about doing things for them or how much he missed our banter, it was almost...Comfortable.

“Finding out the gender,” Elliot said after a moment, the exhaustion now settling like a deep chill in her bones. “Of the baby, I mean. At the next appointment.”

The brunette shifted in his seat. In an attempt at nonchalance, he said, “Oh, yeah?”

What am I doing? she thought. He plays nice for one night. He’s good at that. Short-term goodness.

“I’m nervous,” she added after a moment. “About finding out.”

“Not excited?” John tilted his head.

“No,” she admitted. “Nervous.”

Ahead of them, she saw the dark blur of a figure. A frown tugged at the corners of her mouth. John was saying something—something about how he’d read a number of books and it was normal to feel nervous, or some other kind of psycho babble—but she shifted forward in her seat, eyes straining to see.

“Slow down,” she said, “I think there’s a dog...?”

“What?” John asked. “Where? I don’t see anything.”

“Just up ahead. Have you not been paying attention to the road?”

He made an indignant sound—“I am the best driver between the two of us, you know,”—but before Elliot could think up a response, the dark, furred creature slowed down ahead of them, stopped in the middle of the road, and turned its head.

The headlights caught it immediately. It was a dog, four-legged and large and shaggy black fur, but when it turned its head, it was a man’s face, the mouth slung open and the gently-rounded teeth of a human’s mouth blaring white in the headlights. Something dark and slick oozed between the teeth, in that split second, she watched the dog-human-creature push off from the ground and stand on its two hind legs.

She screamed, and John swerved, and immediately threw the car into park and slammed his hand on the hazard lights button.

It was dread, pure dread and fear, sending a pulse of adrenaline straight to her brain. Bent over at the waist, Elliot closed her eyes tight, trying to will the image out of her head, out from behind her irises. John had quickly unbuckled and reached over, his hands doing the same to hers.

“Elliot,” he said urgently, fingers pushing the hair back from her face. “Ell, take a breath, come on—sit up, you have to take a breath—”

“Is—is it gone?” she asked, but the words came out closer to a wail, the fear spiking viciously in the timbre of her voice. Please, God, what the fuck, please let it be gone. God, oh fuck, what the fuck what the fuck— “The—the—”

“There’s nothing—?” John stopped. Elliot frantically scrabbled at the high neck of her parka, fingers shaking and clumsy. “Ell—”

“Can’t breathe,” she managed out. “Too hot, can’t—”

The brunette reached over the console and stilled her hands. She was still bent at the waist, but he made do, pulling the zipper of the parka down until she could pull her arms from it; once it had been deposited in the back seat, his hand went to the back of her neck.

She sat up slowly, her eyes immediately making a frantic search of the road. There was nothing. Only quiet snowfall.

“Where—” She paused, swallowing thickly. “Where did it go?”

“Ell,” John murmured, “there wasn’t anything in the road.”

“What do you mean?” she moaned. “I saw it, the—I saw the—”

“You saw...?” he prompted. His thumb swept across the back of her neck, coaxing.

“The dog,” she insisted. “It was a dog, but it had—it’s face was—it was a man’s face, and it f-fucking—it fucking stood up, John!”

He was watching her carefully, his gaze searching her face for a long moment. He cleared his throat. “I didn’t see anything,” he told her. “Just that you—you just screamed, so I pulled over.”

“I’m not crazy,” Elliot bit out, her voice wobbling.

“I know,” John replied plainly. “Maybe it was just—you know. The snow. In front of the headlights.” And then: “Have you really been getting enough sleep, Ell?”

She felt her lip tremble, the desire to cry almost overwhelming. She couldn’t stand it—couldn’t stand John being tender to her, worrying about her, questioning the validity of her saying that she had been sleeping fine because he could see that she couldn’t. He was wretched and wicked and it needed to stay that way.

“Please take me home,” she said finally, re-buckling and rolling the window down to let the cold air on her face. “Please just take me home.”

John waited for a few heartbeats before he turned the hazard lights off and put the Jeep in drive.

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he told her after a moment, glancing at her a few times. “I mean it, Ell.”

“Fuck you,” she replied, exhausted and feeling furiously wound up. “Just take me home.”

Get some sleep.

Feel better in the morning.

[kvtyes]

↪ brief introduction to katye jakobson.

BASICS

full name: katye terhi jakobson.  nickname(s): kat, kit-kat ( used largely by her brother to irritate her ).  age: thirty-three.  date of birth: 19 february 1988. zodiac sign: pisces.  place of birth: tallinn, estonia.  ethnicity: white.  nationality: estonian.  gender: cis female. sexual orientation: pansexual.  romantic orientation: panromantic.  religion: she was raised orthodox catholic— she had a confirmation and all but in her adulthood she’s never practiced all that much; the most she does is go to confession on occasion but even then her brother more or less has to put her in a choke hold to get her to do it. occupation: when she’s not being bogged down by royal duties she’s an architect -- her usual projects tend to be renovations to the palace in talinn or their country homes outside of the city.  language(s) spoken: estonian, finnish, english; greek & turkish ( both of which she’s started learning on her own now that she’s been told she’ll be marrying selene if all goes to plan -- she’s not fluent by any means but she learns things quickly ).  accent: she has a fairly thick estonian accent that can and has been mistaken as german or other slavic & finnic based accents which kat tends to roll her eyes at. she tries to enunciate fairly carefully when she’s speaking but when she’s excited or rambling about something in particular her accent can make it a bit difficult to understand her.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

face claim: evan rachel wood.  hair color: blonde ( naturally ); she’s dyed it several colors over the years and at the moment it’s more red than anything.  eye color: blue. height: 5′7″ ; 173 cm.  weight: 120 lbs. build: slim. tattoos: kat’s debated getting tattoos several times over the years but has yet to follow through with anything -- her main consideration at the moment is a tattoo of a grey wolf, the national animal of estonia.  piercings: she has traditional piercings in her lobes, an industrial piercing in her left ear and a helix piercing in her right ear.  distinguishing characteristics: her accent, the way she carries herself, the fact that she’s almost always got a cigarette tucked behind her ear. 

PERSONALITY

label: the black sheep.  positive traits: capable, clever, compassionate, considerate, creative, curious, daring, dedicated, earnest, empathetic, generous, independent, loyal, observant, passionate, protective, reliable, selfless, warm. negative traits: competitive, irreverent, sarcastic, self-conscious. aloof, anxious, crude, haughty, hedonistic, impulsive, timid. goals/desires: to find a way to be happy, to carve out some freedom for herself even within the confines of royal life, to be the sort of person her fiancée can be proud of.  fears: autophobia ( fear of being alone ), losing her brother.  hobbies: teasing her brother, sketching new designs for buildings she’d like to work on, studying architecture, traveling, drinking, going out when she’s in the mood for it, spending time with people she enjoys, flirting with cute people, making a mess of most political situations she’s in, annoying her parents, learning new things, playing chess, reading, building her collection of obscure mythology books.   quirks: she remembers people’s names and faces after meeting them even if she only interacted with them for a few seconds, she gives the contacts in her phone their names in estonian, she’s constantly doodling thoughts on new designs she’d like to bring to life in a small notebook that’s always with her, she tends to talk shit about people in any language other than english -- usually estonian because that comes the easiest but she’ll happily switch between any language she knows if she knows the other person won’t understand. likes: whiskey, cute girls, cute boys, sci-fi films, historical dramas, most foreign films, trivia shows, horror movies, compliments from cute people, her brother, the anonymity of living in big cities, jazz, classical piano pieces, being recognized for her talent rather than her title, sex, good booze, good food, spending time with people who appreciate her as a person, .   dislikes: being taken seriously only because of her title rather than how hard she’s worked to earn respect in certain areas, dealing with most public relations things, long winded speeches, having to attend political functions in general, being talked down to, arguing with her brother. 

FAMILY

father: artur kalev jakobson ; king artur II, colloquially known as the ‘bear of estonia’.  mother: sofia agnesia jakobson née kask.  sibling(s): kalev taevas jakobson ( fraternal twin ).   pet(s): she has a european burmese cat named antoni after antoni gaudi, the architect.  financial status: too rich for her own good. 

HEADCANONS

katye is thirty-three & the older twin between herself and her fraternal twin brother kalev — who has, as far as she’s concerned, always been the more palatable person between the two of them. in comparison to her brother katye is, to put it lightly, something of a disaster -- she has an endlessly short temper and none of the grace her brother possesses when it comes to political engagements and discussions and has absolutely no problem expressing her general annoyance with all of the politicking that comes along with being royalty. she’s aware that she needs to “grow up” -- so to speak -- and a part of her has continued to wonder whether her marriage arrangement is her parents’ way of forcing her to settle down into a version of herself that might be slightly less ornery and difficult for the general public in estonia to grasp and perhaps, though she finds this more difficult to believe, allow her to realize that in spite of her future as queen -- she can still carve out some form of freedom and individuality within her position.

it’s always suited her to be the more negatively perceived of the two of them between herself and her brother and a part of her -- though katye’s reluctant to admit it -- is relieved that earning as much attention as she does allows her brother -- who is far more gentle and far more shy than she is, to stay out of the spotlight as he chooses. away from cameras and the press in general katye’s not spectacularly difficult to get along with -- she’s witty and charismatic and is likely the first person to toss out a self-deprecating joke or quip to relieve any tension in her day-to-day interactions. the generally surly and cantankerous impression she gives the media as a whole is more of an act than anything else and with a bit of patience and occasional, careful prodding -- it isn’t difficult to see that katye is more or less a deeply flawed but deeply loving and ultimately well-meaning woman.

she has a genius level IQ. It’s not something she discusses often ( for the most part only her family knows, because she’s already treated a certain way due to her status as a princess and honestly abhors the thought of being treated even more differently due to that ). she studied to become an architect when she was in school and was quietly on her way to working with a firm properly by the time she was being relocated. she tends to use her fairly active mind to manipulate her way in and out of situations ( she’s very, very good at talking herself out of trouble and takes full advantage of it when she can ).

she’s a fairly outgoing person underneath the sheen of frustration and general surliness she’s working with right now; she’s an incredibly loyal and kind person at her core, and though it can be difficult for people to stick around long enough to sort out those parts of her she does have a few very close friends who seem to have had no trouble digging down to the heart of her.

she has absolutely no qualms about sleeping with anyone she finds even remotely attractive. she doesn’t quite know how to have a relationship with anyone ( as she’s not sure how to broach the subject of someone actually having to deal with what a train-wreck she is for an extended period of time ) but she craves attention and affection and sex is a decent enough way for her to get that. it’s something she’s trying to avoid entirely now that she’s in the same place as her future wife and as nervous as she is about being found lacking in her fiancée’s eyes she does want to make a positive impression and build a positive, meaningful relationship.

[ohhoworiginalrfaheadcanons]

Since we discussed it: RFA with American MC lol o/

Okay, lemme do this. I find 2nd person pretty cringy so I'll avoid using it if I can. Also, I'm not that knowledgeable about Korean culture, so I can't really go too in depth about possible culture clashes. It took me a while to try to think of everything I could for that.

RFA reactions to an MC who's American

~Yoosung~

That's definitely not what he expected at all! Admittedly, in retrospect some of Seven's comments were probably hinting at that. He's still taken aback when he first sees her though. He'd stopped thinking of her as Rika a while before seeing her, sure, but without any hints as to what she looked like other than that, he'd left it as 'vaguely Rika shaped'.

It's fine, because she thinks he's cute, but she's as tall as he is! He chooses not to acknowledge her being taller by half an inch, because he doesn't measure by those and therefore that makes it completely fair to ignore it when she points it out. They are the same height.

He's kind of out of his depth, even considering how out of his depth he would be anyway just having a girlfriend, but...his perfect world is LOLOL and everyone is equal in LOLOL! Therefore, even if his girlfriend is kind of weird, he's willing to make the effort to get through that! Plus, her accent (she can't even tell she has one) is cute. On the other hand, he's so bad at speaking English that he can only bring himself to mumble it. It's hard to believe she isn't teasing him about it when she calls it cute.

But he lives for compliments from his girlfriend, so she'd best believe he keeps on trying. They still mostly communicate in Korean, but he eventually gets a bit more confident about speaking in English to her. If only in private. At first he tries to use it to tell secret mushy things to her...but then like half of the RFA understood him when he tried it at one of the parties, so. uh. never again.

His taste in food is also atrocious, so honestly, he doesn't find her foreign tastes to be that weird. Together they even organize a raid on Seven's place to steal a box of HBC chips, and then they both pretend that Seven didn't just let them do it. (Why does she know how to say 'I want to be your cat' in Arabic? YOOSUNG HAS SO MANY QUESTIONS)

He's super interested in some of the imported stuff she brought with her when she moved, especially the video games. Most of them are already available in Korea, obviously, but a true gaming connoisseur like himself enjoys comparing the differences between releases! Plus, it's easier to play co-op games with her when she doesn't need to think about how to translate certain instructions or things like that.

Speaking of her things, one time he found a book by her bedside with an interesting looking cover. It seemed to be a sequel book and the writing was too complex for him to really follow along very well, though. He had a pretty good idea the handcuffs on the cover weren't because it was a detective novel judging by the reaction she had when she caught him reading it. He got too flustered to even try to read it after that.

They visit her family back home sometimes, and he's always super excited whenever they do. There's so much food! Why do they sell burgers this big?! Why is everything so big? He doesn't really travel much aside from those family trips, so it's a nice change of pace. Even if her brother-in-law is taller than him. damn it-

At one point, she suggests they cosplay Superman and Lois Lane, but it's so awkward for him to pick her up princess-style given their relative heights that he chickens out. She cosplays as Wonder Woman instead, and honestly he thinks her as an amazon tying him-tying bad guys up with a golden rope is hotter than her as a reporter anyway.

He doesn't really grasp that American isn't a 'race', and brags about her anyway, despite her laughing every time he does.

~Zen~

It's dumb, but his first thought on seeing she's foreign is a moment of panic that he won't fit her tastes after all (despite the fact that she's already seen his selfies).

That's complete nonsense, though, because his beauty shines through cultural barriers. Hers does, too, and while he was admittedly imagining something else, he's absolutely immediately enchanted with her anyway. She's cute and beautiful and different from anyone else around him, and honestly perfect. He hadn't actually noticed the accent before when they were on the phone, but it doesn't bother him now that it's a bit more obvious.

He can't speak English if his life depended on it, so he trusts whatever she mutters to herself when she rolls her eyes or looks way too amused about something is all flattering. It's definitely flattering, because obviously it is. She does suggest that he should learn it, though, just so he can potentially broaden his horizons and reach a broader audience. He doesn't need the confidence boost or anything, but it does feel good to see her swoon over his attempts.

When she said she could keep up with him drinking, he hadn't realized it was because she just happened to be much bigger than he expected, closer to his size. Actually, though, she can take her liquor like a champ, even more than he expected. She claims it's something about college, but won't tell any stories about it other than that 'it was a crazy time'. It's fair. He had a crazy time in his past, himself.

He doesn't really care for some of the food she likes, but then again he'd eat anything if it meant eating with her, so it's not really an issue.

It takes a long time to go visit her parents, since they live over in the US, but he can't say that he hates them being starstruck when he arrives. The only trouble is that they keep trying to speak Korean to him and are so bad at it he can't really tell what they're saying. Given his personal grasp on English, she ends up having to do most of the communication as the translator, but it's a pleasant visit anyway and it makes him all the more determined to get his parents to accept her.

Which isn't made any easier by the fact that she's not Korean. To say his mother is 'displeased' would be an understatement. But he's not really new to disappointing her, so he won't give up, not on his relationship with his true love and not on fixing his relationship with his parents.

Obviously gossip mags go crazy about it. Famous actor Zen dates a strange foreigner girl! Love that transcends the barriers of culture, or something more sinister?!

It's not so bad until certain catty fans get involved. The fact that she doesn't look 'beautiful' enough for the Gorgeous Zen eventually erupts through the fandom, with all sorts of nasty comments coming up because of her foreign appearance. She handles it well, but he loses it and almost makes a public scene the time someone called her a giant ugly ogre. In the end, he decides to make a point of informing interviewers how beautiful she is during all future interviews. It's petty, but that's him.

It actually boosts his popularity, being the Romantic Zen who's hopelessly in love with his girlfriend.

Her fashion taste is atrocious, though. He doesn't know how to break it to her. It's just bad! Even if it's trendy in the US...he just doesn't like it...

They might be a bad influence on each other, since their drinking competitions seem to get out of hand and sometimes lead to Jumin or 707 collecting them in a place neither of them even remember going to.

She eats like some kind of a gorilla without any concern for politeness, and apparently without even realizing that's what she's doing, but it's honestly so cute to him that he doesn't mind. That said, it's not the best thing for his heart when she accidentally disrespects one of his directors in front of the whole crew. He manages to recover, but that particular cultural difference catches him off guard.

For the most part, though, her little quirks and differences just enchant him more. After all, she's his perfect princess, and she already was before they'd ever even met.

~Jumin~

He admittedly had something of a suspicion that she might be foreign or mixed, as he heard the difference in her voice when on the phone with her. He's still a little surprised to open the door and see just what she looks like, though.

Of course his English is flawless, as he needs to be able to converse internationally for business, and Chinese and English are essentially a requirement for that. He can't say he isn't pleased when she determines his 'English voice' (whatever that's supposed to mean) is 'sexy'...but he's also pretty sure she's the first one to think that.

His experience overseas means that he immediately recognizes that her disrespect to his father when they meet is unintentional. It's still cute, to him. As is her obvious mortification when Jaehee pulls her aside to explain. His own insult, however, is entirely intentional when his father starts planning plastic surgery appointments to 'bring her appearance more in line'.

Her bluntness is something that he heartily appreciates, and it honestly makes him more comfortable to know that he needn't worry about avoiding offending her by being direct as he prefers to be. She's not technically part of the company, but the idea does amuse him to make her one and bring her along to negotiations. They could play good cop-bad cop. (That particular line of thought travels off into imagining her in a police woman's uniform, and then he loses the train of thought entirely)

He thinks her taste in food is quirky, but his palate is somewhat expansive when it comes to international cuisine, so it works out just fine with him. Any food that he eats alongside her is food that he enjoys, so the issue is moot.

Apparently, the rumor magazines go wild every time she appears with him somewhere, but he never bothers to read those, so he has no idea what they have to say about her. If it's anything damaging, he trusts Jaehee to deal with it. It's probably for the best, because if he did catch any of the rude things they say about the gold digging foreign wife of the director of C&R, his policy of ignoring hateful comments would not hold up long.

That said, really the biggest culture clashes and shock come not from her American raising, but from her being poor. Most of what she learned about Korean culture before moving over just didn't touch on what the very rich and famous would be like.

~Jaehee~

Of the many things she had considered about her fellow female member of the RFA, that she might be a foreigner isn't one of them. Maybe she should have noticed from the little quirks in chat...but...no, everyone in the RFA is bizarre and always has been.

It suddenly makes sense why MC couldn't really understand what Jaehee was going through at work, and why MC hadn't been familiar with Zen! But that's just fine, because it means Jaehee gets the opportunity to introduce MC to all the more Zen things together!

She's not sure if she should be offended when the woman compares her cafe to Starbucks....but if she's compared to anything, it may as well be Starbucks. And it does give her the idea to make Zen-themed drinks, which means basking in his beauty at work while also helping to contribute to his popularity. Although, admittedly, it did more for her cafe than him.

She's occasionally mortified by the MC's unintentional rudeness, but more often than not her greatest concern to unexpected rudeness is finding a way to stifle her amused laughter. The sheer confusion on her ex-boss's face the first time it happens to him gets her through some of the rough times trying to set up and keep the business afloat.

She's not particularly good at English, but she's a fast learner, and even though the MC can speak Korean reasonably well, she wants to be able to speak in English too, so that they can both speak in their native languages when they want to. It means their cafe is bilingual, which makes it a tourist spot, which means that Zen actually can get extra exposure from it! She's as excited about that as the MC is.

She's less excited when the MC finally makes she and Jumin sit across each other and "talk about your problems or else". That's an awkward conversation she really could have done without. But...well, it's only inevitable MC's special kind of bluntness would eventually lead to something like that.

It goes better than she expects, actually, and the tension that's been zapping around them since that party finally goes away.

It goes too well.

He starts suggesting that they convert it to a cat cafe.

Oh no.

~707~

He could tell immediately from the moment he looked at the camera footage, which admittedly made the background check a little harder. It's fine though, because he did it several times, and now knows her family tree, GPA, and what boat her family got off on some hundred years ago.

The jig is up immediately, because he's a huge nerd and just immediately spoke in English when he called. He's fluent, obviously, but he doesn't get enough opportunities to practice, so now he can try out the 'cool' phrases he's come up with, and try to get rid of the pesky accent that gets in the way of certain assignments.

He doesn't tell anyone because it's way funnier for everyone to be confused when they come to the party and see someone they don't expect. He even offers a cute looking model to use as a messenger icon just to throw people off more.

He is way too excited the first time she comes home and said "Lucy, I'm home~!" - the fact that she's not an old fossil and thus actually didn't ever watch it in her life doesn't seem to matter to him.

At one point he playfully suggests that USA sinks actually have PhD Pepper running through their pipes instead of water, but she gets him back by saying she prefers doh-ritos to honey buddha chips. He's horrified and declares her tastes are never to be trusted again.

In reality, though, their tastes align pretty closely. Heavily greasy and extra sweet food with zero nutritional value are his heaven (she insists there's plenty of nutritional value. He pretends he doesn't hear her.)

For the most part, it's no different for him where the MC is from, because he doesn't exactly fit in himself and he's been all over the place anyway. The only significant conflict between them due to cultural differences came from when he decided to show up at her place and then immediately turn the cold shoulder and try to push her away.

He almost died.

She's terrifying.

~V~

He can't see a difference

he's blind

im kidding, i just don’t know v enough to include him

[shy-magpie]

RQG 158

liveblog under the cut

pre episode nonsense:

Roman Rogues was a delightful palate cleanser, but I am ready for the main campaign again. Hopes for this ep:

Bring on the Kobolds! (and Hamid figuring out how to behave ethically in a relationship with unsought but unavoidable power imbalance)

Azu please talk to someone about what you are feeling, not just take on everyone else's pain

is it too early for more on Dwarves since we're headed to Svalbard?

Cel's village pls, and everything we can get about how they fit in and how they feel about leaving. Yes we got a lot with "the Fete of Cel's village" but I want more. Also if it turns out Jasper actually ends up with a Kobold assistant like I've been joking about since the little guy we left in the onion room, I will laugh for a week.

Zolf: Zolf & mental health; Zolf & Wilde; Zolf & the guys who acted as his party during the 18 months; Zolf learning to see S4 Hamid instead of S1 Hamid with new spells; Zolf & Kobolds; and did I say Zolf?

_______________________________

Now on with the show:

Ah poor Alex sounds so down about the audio quality, its the first time doing something unusual without a lot of warning. I hope he knows we're happy to trade the risk of sound issues for knowing they didn't risk people and went remote before mandatory. I do love the intros. Oh nervous Alex, really we're not going to bite. Alex fishing for praise for not destroying Cel's village is a nice transition back to more normal energy, namely fear of GM!Alex. As a person he seems lovely, and with things like keeping the company going under lock-down safely I am happy trusting him with the cast's lives, as a GM? He has killed before, will kill again, and the worst part is it will be well crafted. Azu is putting everyone else before herself again. I know helping others is part of how she copes (seeking agency is valid) but I am serious about wanting her to lean on someone from time to time. Oh bless RQ they really do hold their quality up to the highest standards, is this the audio Alex was apologizing for? Oh Hamid, he really is trying to do the right thing by these poor traumatized Kobolds. "you do no damage". Eee! Tailor!Hamid!!! Tailor!Hamid! Tailor! Hamid!!! Over the armor hooded parka for Azu, using all his materials. Such a sweet kid. Zolf is "being outside & alone", he is so valid. Cel time! Cel won a cuddly toy red panda, Alex makes them roll for it. Cel has a night at home. Wilde calls meeting for party, sans Cel who is not summoned from their village. Hopefully that means this isn't terrible & actionable news, and not that Wilde doesn't see Cel as a party member. Earhart? Please Alex we've been ever so good! Einstein is off grid, might be intentional Earhart's ship was damaged, she was injured. They need to go to her. Wilde asks if Cel will be continuing with the party, everyone volunteering at once to get them is reassuring of their place in the party. I suppose I should also give credit to Wilde for not making assumptions about how Cel would make a major life decision. Aw goodbye Inn! Oh Barnes and Carter could go either way. Sounds fancy. Zolf still has that instinctual knack for leadership, decreeing he will do the necessary but less fun bit of packing, while Hamid does the people bit of fetching Cel. I missed whether Azu was going with Hamid, but we'll find out in a minute. Helen calls out Alex. Oh Hamid, Azu, and all seven Kobolds are going. Are they staying or not? Bless the kid, Hamid is telling Skraak the itinerary as information rather than leverage to make the decision he wants. Whether the other Kobolds come with or stay in the village, informed consent is important. Also by telling Skraak first they can figure out how to tell the others along with info on the plan rather than leave them scrambling to figure out what Hamid wants to hear. I love this village. Cel set up a sound system for the village band to do their spring cleaning montage to. Azu & Hamid are charmed. Oh Jasper made the sound system! Hamid praises Jasper for that and taking care of the village. God I love that Alex isn't doing that thing where the stutter goes away as Jasper's character arc progresses. Yes stress can make stuttering worse, but it isn't a flaw that means you won't progress until you fix it.* Hamid introduces the Kobolds as his friends. Is Alex going to let the names pass from WOG to canon? Nope fair enough, as soon as we get names he'll have to use them and we'll soon need character traits and its a whole "if you give a mouse a cookie" thing. Jasper resorts to giving them tea as a universal. Cel enlists the Kobolds in improving the sound system. "Burrow through the center of the Earth?" I love Cel's suggestions. Oh please can Cel help repair Earhart's ship please? Speaking of ships, a half dozen authors just opened a new doc. Hamid is so careful not to pressure Cel while still being welcoming. Roar, Alex!?! What enormous roar!?! Oh he would break there. He is getting entirely too much mileage from being out of throwing range of the cast.

~break~

Thwarted Hamid Cel hug? Oh its the Kobolds! Bless em maybe they'll relax when Hamid doesn't turn on them for messing up. Name! Names! Thank you Alex! Yes I was just resigning myself to it being reasonable for us not to get them as individual characters, thank you! Thank you! Meerk likes loud noises, canon! Cel invites the Kobolds to stay, Skraak suggests they bring in Kobolds from the island instead of Hamid's 7. Hamid sounds a bit frantic as replies, like he thinks he offended Skraak & the others. It was a good suggestion for more reasons than just shaking the new kids, no one thinks you were just dumping them. A runner is sent to the island. Skraak wants to them to stick with Hamid. Perception check on the morning of departure. They roll ridiculously well. Oh Wilde is still wearing his antimagic cuffs on his ankles. Bell bottoms to disguise them. Oh Wilde, what happened to our peacock? They walk to the fishing vessel where Barnes and Carter are waiting. Oh Azu helps the little ones wade. Hamid flies. Zolf punts. Cel turns into a dolphin. The Kobolds are either ferried by Hamid air or swim. So Azu doesn't get to help after all. Zolf is not a happy sailor "Like going back to the place your ex works". Helen says Aphrodite would fight Poseidon for Zolf. Yes Alex you trained them well. Aw Azu and Cel play while Cel is a dolphin. I love Alex's world building Yes Lydia! The Soggy X is a favored call back. Mood Cel I have to work to remember how long ago I've been somewhere. Aw Alex gives them a wonderful meal. Hamid loves Sushi! Hamid overpays, good lad. Horse riding time Japan is historically a gnome heavy area and caters towards smaller races. Alex's world building is great. Oh Alex is learning to give them proper down time. Hamid gives Azu the parka he made. He is so sweet. Zolf tells him that he already has cold gear. Poor kid takes it as a rejection. I honestly think Zolf was trying to get him to relax about not having made him one too. Its well made for a coat that goes over armor. He will make one for Cel. Azu picks Hamid up to hug him. Cel praises it. Oh Carter asks for one, Hamid perks up a bit. Hamid put pockets in Azu's. Zolf turns Hamid down again. Azu offers to share and Zolf remains a great conversationalist. Oh the Kobolds need coats. That should keep Hamid busy until they get to Svalbard. No one trusts the low stakes episode. *yes I still resent all the time I spent out of class with speech therapy, and I resent more people who knew it was hard for me to speak properly, knew what I meant well enough to correct me, and still interrupted me mid sentence as if an extra/wrong syllable was more important than the rest of the sentence combined.

[itzagothamcitysiren]

Welcome to the Family

I’ve always struggled finding someone who I think would make a good Damian. I love the voice actor from the DCAU, and even the kid who did the voice in the Harley show lol, but live action wise I’ve never really settled on a kid I’d think would do a really good job.  I’d love to know everyone’s own fan casting and who they would think would make a good Damian. :)  

Mother’s Day pt.2          

  Damian couldn’t stop himself from watching the whole scene play out in front of him, cursing Drake as he knew that this was his plan all along. Drake wanted to rub it in his face no matter how hard he would deny it when Damian confronted him on it later. The bitter taste of the sweat was all Damian could taste as he slowly began to peel off his costume after a long and tiring night of patrolling Gotham City. His eyes darted from person to person, trying to keep the sudden annoyance down in the pit of his stomach.

           His father stood off near the batcomputer, slowly getting ready to call it a night, overlooking some files. His father had his cowl off, the tiredness of a long night out in the city showing on his face. A little ways away stood his sister, politely excepting the water bottle Alfred was now handing out to each of them. He started to head towards the pair to retrieve his own but halted. Drake approached them, clearly hiding something behind his back, underneath his cape. He turned around, simmering but kept listening as Drake began to speak.

           “Hey, staying the night?” Tim cleared his throat as he approached Halley, a hint of hopefulness reaching his voice.

           The girl chugged her water bottle, capping it off with a sigh. The cold liquid felt good running down her throat. Placing the near empty bottle on a nearby desk she turned to give Tim her full attention. With a smile, she leaned up against the desk, her muscles sore. “Nah, I have to head to the library first thing tomorrow, finish up my term paper.”  

           “I can help you. Use the library here,” Tim frowned, offering his help. He hadn’t seen his sister as much as he’d like over the past few months. She’d been busy with her last year of college and the internship she started this year at the Gotham Gazette.

           He did get to see her two weeks ago but that didn’t really count. He’d never gotten to meet the Robin before him, Jason Todd, but Halley spoke very fondly of him. They had grew extremely close he learned and she was absolutely devastated when the Joker killed him six years ago. And for the last couple of years, Tim would accompany with her to visit Jason’s grave on his death day because she could never bring herself to handle going alone.

           “As much as I would love that, it’s actually a study date.” She bit her lip, looking at her feet.

           “Wow, like a date, date?” Tim was taken aback, almost looking proud at the older girl. All the years he’s known her, she’s never been one for dating or having interest in anyone.

           “Yeah, we’re going to go to this café; the one on fifth, the one you said had really good coffee muffins.” She nodded, still timid about the date itself. She hadn’t been on a date in six years. It felt weird, but Dick told her it was time to start moving on and Dick had never led her astray before so, she was going to try. Jason would want her to anyway, she kept telling herself.

           “Well, I hope you have a good time. And actually get some work done.” Tim chuckled. “Well since I won’t see you in the morning and it’s technically the tenth right now, here you go,” Tim said, pulling out what was hidden behind his back.

           Halley looked down at the items that were being outreached to her, her eyes already getting watery. Tim really didn’t understand how much this stuff meant to her. Glazing over the card, seeing it goofily decorated with glitter and cute little doodles, Halley couldn’t help but let out a chuckle. She thought it was adorable. Opening it up, she read what he wrote inside, chuckling more at the little stick figures of Nightshade and Red Robin. Inside it read:  A mother is the person you can always call to see how long chicken can last in the fridge.

           Shaking her head at him she moved to the other item he handed her. It was a medium sized box wrapped in wrapping paper with little cute cartoon pugs and an oversized purple bow. Putting the card in between her armpit, in order to not drop it, she tore the wrapping paper apart, letting out a squeal, causing everyone to look at her in shock; it took a lot to make the former assassin to squeal in pure giddiness.    

           Damian was now almost fuming as Halley lunged herself into Tim, nearly tripping the boy over in her excitement. Her grip on him was tight, as was her grasp on the gift she still held in her hand, as if holding onto it for dear life. She couldn’t believe he got her this,

           “How did you get this? It sold out in seconds!” She pulled away, now hugging the object to her chest, “Tim you really didn’t have to do this, I totally didn’t realize the date, with school and-,”

           “I knew how much you wanted it and were bummed when you had to go on that mission with the Titans when it went on sale and so I ordered it for you, so you didn’t miss out.” Tim cut off her rambling, shrugging her off. “I was going to give it to you for Christmas, but it didn’t come in on time so I saved it for this.”

           “I can’t wait to show Steph!” She excitedly held it up to look at the smooth and shiny new box, revealing it to everyone in the room the newest Jeffree Star and Shane Dawson palate. “You’re literally the best Tim.” She pulled him into another hug, this time a quick one, no one noticing how Damian was now practically steaming. “What are you doing Wednesday? I’m only at the Gazette until like noon, we should hang out, go to the movies or arcade or something once you’re out of school. I’ll pick you up.”

           “I promised I’d help the Titans with something, it’s not an emergency though-” Tim frowned, hesitating, he could try and reschedule.

           “No, no it’s okay. I know you’ve missed them, being busy with school and all,” She waved off, scrunching up her nose. “We’ll figure it out, but soon, we gotta at least go get burgers or something. It’s been too long.”

           Damian watched as Halley began to start saying her goodbye, realizing that it was nearly five am at this point and wanted to try to get at least three or four hours of sleep before she had to be up for her date. She called out a goodbye to Bruce and Alfred, shooting Tim another thank you and smile before heading to the showers to change and grab her bag to head to her apartment in the city. On her way out, Damian felt his cheeks turn red as she nicely wished him goodnight, smiling wider than she did to Tim. Feeling a strange pang in his chest, he brushed her off, muttering a grumpy ‘night, before curtly turning to head up to the Manor.

           He was unamused by the exchange between her and Drake. He was only under the impression that he was giving her that immature card, not a gift as well. She looked so happy that it almost appeared that Drake was indeed the favorite brother, which absolutely could not possibly be true.  He was the blood brother, he reminded himself. He couldn’t let Drake outshine him like that. It wasn’t even because he cared that much, it was just unacceptable. If it had been Grayson it might sit a little easier with Damian but Drake?

           Damian thought about it until the sun shined through his windows, making him even angrier. Why was he letting this get to him as badly as it was? It was just a stupid card and a box of colorful dirt. But that stupid card and box of colorful dirt still stood in his mind for the following days, making it nearly impossible for him to concentrate on anything else. His father asked him what was wrong during patrol the following nights, only to get a growl here and a grunt there in response. If Damian had to see Drake’s smug look one more time during these moments, he’d finally kill him, his father be damned.

           Damian couldn’t believe how much he let this get to him. He tried to deny it; blame it on hormones or whatever Grayson called the cause of his mood swings. He didn’t even begin to consider admitting he was jealous of his sister’s close relationships with his so called brothers until he found himself standing in front of the Gotham Gazette at 1:50pm. Gritting his teeth, he walked straight in. Once he reached the front desk, he said he was here to see his sister. He was a Wayne, they knew who he was and the woman nervously pointed him to the way to the office his sister worked in.

           The look of worry and shock his sister wore as he stood in front of her desk confirmed that this had indeed been a terrible idea.  She had been head deep in her computer, typing away furiously, while on the phone, barking out questions and demands; something about needing to have some interview with some councilman rescheduled ASAP. Damian was impressed as she spoke. He was used to her stern voice from working with her on missions but this was different, she seemed so professional but scary; he almost felt bad for whoever she was talking to on the phone, but also felt proud by the way she was demanding things like an al Ghul would.

           She must have thought that he was someone else who knocked on her door for when she slammed the phone down, she didn’t even look up at him, just outreached her hand waiting to be passed something. She was expecting someone. She was busy. This was a terrible idea, Damian thought to himself in a slight panic. Was that sweat starting to form on his brow? Grow up Damian, he spat to himself.

           When her hand stood empty she shook it aggressively as if silently saying to hand her something.  Damian raised an eyebrow at her and when she was still left empty handed, she whipped her head up, clearly irritated. She was tired from another all-nighter. She couldn’t even consider going on patrol last night, which was something she never missed up until the last couple of months. She was itching to be done with school already.

           She had to stay up all night trying to make a backup plan for her final article and paper. She was writing about the coming election, making a strong article highlighting the past Mayor’s and city officials. It was a puff piece, but a damn good one. She wanted it to be perfect so that way when she graduated in June she’d hopefully get to stay at the Gazette permanently. But at the same time, she was also just trying to use her connection with the paper to weasel her way into an interview with councilman, Rupert Thorne.

           Her paper had been her obsession since starting it; she was exposing the corruption of city hall and it was at the point where her grade didn’t matter, she just wanted it to be done so she could publish it. Everyone knew that Gotham was corrupt, but no one really talked about, just complained about the crazy, dressed up weirdos that tormented the city at night. People like Scarecrow, Riddler and the Joker make people overlook villains who in her opinion where just as bad. For example, Rupert Thorne

           He had his nose deep in too many illegal operations running out of Gotham that Halley and even Bruce lost count. He had the audacity to run for mayor this election season, as being a councilman wasn’t enough for someone like Thorne. If he won this, Gotham was more screwed then it already was. Without at least speaking with him once her entire paper and grade would be ruined. And she couldn’t exactly go as her alter ego and force him to talk to her. That would raise too many questions. She didn’t even care as she named dropped Bruce, making sure they knew that she was Halley Wayne; she was desperate.          

           When she saw Damian though all thoughts about Thorne left her mind and her face softened before scrunching up again with concern. Damian never visited her before a she had been pretty sure he forgot that she interned here a couple days out of the week. Stopping her work, she looked up at him, looking around the room as her co-workers eyed them curiously.  “Damian, is everything okay? What happened?”

           “Tt.” He crossed his arms.

           “Damian, is everything okay?” She pressed, seeing that look in his eyes when he looked stressed or in trouble.

           “Nothing is wrong, I-,” He paused. He hadn’t figured out what to say. He didn’t prepare for this. Gulping down his anxiety, he took the seat that was across from her desk. He could see the bags underneath her eyes and the untouched food sitting at the other end of the desk. He also noted how the clock said that it was now a couple minutes past two. “Didn’t you tell Drake you were done with work at noon?”

           Halley blinked a few times, now knowing that there was no emergency but instead was just thrown off. What was he talking about? Looking down at the time on her laptop it clicked. Her conversation with Tim in the cave, about possibly hanging out today. Oh right, she remembered.  Looking back up at her younger brother she gave him an unsure look, she didn’t understand why he was here.

           “Um, yeah, well I don’t have a concept of time when I’m in here.” She lightly chuckled, trying to get a vibe on why he was here. Rubbing the black beanie on her head, itching her head awkwardly, “Most times the janitor has to kick me out.”

           She looked at him when he just nodded at her, still not stating why he was sitting in front of her. She was surprised he remembered her conversation with Tim, she hadn’t thought he had been listening and it was like they were talking that loudly for him to be forced to overhear him. She had taken note of Tim texting her about how unbearable he’s been since last Sunday though. She bit the inside of her cheek, was Damian jealous? She laughed to herself, there was no way. But when she have him another look over she saw his green eyes staring at her messy desk with a slight pout on his face. Oh he was totally jealous of Tim, she thought.            

           She looked at her untouched lunch, having totally losing herself in her work and forgetting it even existed. She then felt her stomach growl, seeing how Damian noticed it as well, raising his eyebrow higher, if that was even possible. Quickly saving the document she was working on, she slowly closed her laptop, letting what she was about to do sink in. Trying to contain her smile, not wanting to scare him off before she could even begin, she cleared her throat.

           “So do you like Burgers?”

[akechicrimes]

Can you elaborate on why you think Makoto is a polar opposite of a strong female character? Just interested to know why.

yes of course!! errrrmmmmmmm i did my best to explain but im not entirely sure i did it very well so if anyone wants to jump on this post please do so.

makoto’s character conceit is that she’s a “good girl,” a pushover doormat, who rebels, becomes a fierce independent woman with a spine, and kicks ass and takes names. she’s cool and beats up enemies.

her character flaw is that she... does things too well...? she’s a biker chick but like, not in a greasy hairy loudmouthed way, she’s a biker chick in a cool and chic and skinny and pretty way. she’s a strong and independent woman, but at no point does she challenge joker’s authority, never acts independently, and actually primarily behaves like a team mom to make sure that people don’t act out of line. she’s so theoretically strong-willed and independent, but for some reason never has any strong opinions for herself. she rebels against her good girl image in her social link by.................... becoming an even better student council president? she she beats up enemies with her fists of justice, but like, in a sexy way. she’s the very image of someone who could challenge you, but she never does.

there’s a really insidious thing that i see sometimes where men take a lot of character design hallmarks of “strong empowered female character” (such as being a biker chick), but instead of honoring the agency, autonomy, and flaws that comes with full personhood, her “personality flaws” and “strengths” are carefully kept within the boundaries of “what doesn’t make men uncomfortable.” or even these “personality flaws” and “strengths” are meant to be endearing quirks to make her more attractive to men.

it’d have been very different if makoto rebelled by dropping out of school, say. or if her outfit wasn’t skintight. or if she actually disagreed with joker. or, hell, if she became in any way “unfuckable.” instead, all these “female empowerment” choices are still carefully calculated to make her more attractive, just in a spicy, biker-chick kind of way.

it looks like like female empowerment, in a way that makes men feel good about themselves and their waifu choice, but ultimately the waifu is still about The Man and how much The Man would like to fuck them. her individuality actually becomes about Men again. makoto wears leather and spikes on her shoulders but what does this really mean if these character design choices are just pandering to certain dudebros who consider that to be hot?

sometimes i think that men want to receive woke points for being attracted to Strong Women but not in a way that inconveniences them, and sometimes i think that maybe men want to feel like they’ve “conquered” a woman who could have posed a threat--put her in her place, or to just reassure themselves that women’s rights won’t really mean that male control over women won’t lesson. both in both cases, “empowered independent woman” becomes subverted to be “empowered woman in a sexy way, and specifically not in a way that challenges my male dominance over women.” 

if you’re familiar with gillian flynn’s gone girl “cool girl” monologue, the principle is basically the same. the type of girl she’s referring to (cool girl who eats hot dogs and isn’t prissy but maintains a size 2 and still has impeccable makeup) isn’t literally in persona 5, but the concept is the same. also, she’s referring to real women who are trying to make themselves palatable to men, but this doesnt apply to makoto because makoto is literally a fictional woman. the “cool girl” monologue refers to women making a fictionalized version of themselves so that they can be seen as attractive to men; in makoto’s case, atlus is making a fictional girl that will be seen as attractive to men, but in a “cool” way, because those frilly limp-wristed women are so passe nowadays. it’s cool to have a biker chick girlfriend instead.

from a japanese cultural standpoint, also, it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s always been considered the woman’s role to be strong, cool, and collected, to even rule the house with an iron fist--but only the house, and also only for the benefit of the man. if you’ve played persona 4, yukiko amagi’s theoretical reputation is the peak of this beautiful, ideal woman: the woman so intelligent and strong-willed that she can run an entire inn by herself, but specifically for someone else’s interests, and also she’s not really permitted to leave the house or choose any alternative careers. 

tldr depictions of female strength can easily become misogynistic when that “female strength” is only exclusively harnessed for male benefit, instead of actually affording the woman any room to be a human being outside of the dimensions of what is attractive and unattractive to men.

[kimabutch]

The One Who Will Remember Everything

The sun has set, risen, and set again by the time that Cicero stops, points to a fancy-looking house on a hill, and says something she can vaguely understand. Sasha barely nods back. Her legs have long since stopped hurting and are now simply numb, and her entire being is working to keep herself upright.

She doesn’t remember collapsing halfway up the hill, nor Cicero running for help to carry her the rest of the way.

--

Sasha’s gotten used to waking up with a start, ready to fight, but this time, she wakes slowly, becoming gradually conscious of the warm blankets wrapped around her and the sunlight behind her eyelids. It’s only when she starts vaguely listening for the familiar sounds of Hamid’s soft snores and hears birdsong instead that her eyes snap open. She’s lying on a colourful, soft bed in a large room, lit by several windows. Her clothes and shoes are still all on.

Instinctually, Sasha checks for all her daggers, counting them quickly. All there but the ice dagger, which — she looks down at her hand and the blue scars that jolt like lightning across her skin, and suddenly it all comes back like a punch to the stomach. Letting go of Azu. Grizzop’s limp body in her arms. Corpses, burned alive.

She closes her eyes and swallows dryly, unsure if she’s holding back puke or sobs, and unwilling to find out. She crawls out of the bed and feels every muscle in her body protest with soreness as she silently walks to the window. By the light of day, no longer wracked by exhaustion, Sasha sees clearly, for the first time, the endless green, rolling fields stretching into the horizon. There’s a weight on Sasha’s chest as she imagines herself standing in them, falling into their infinity, searching desperately for something to hold onto. She tears herself away from the window, her breath short, and leans against the wall, comforted somehow by its solidness.

Calming her breath and avoiding looking out the windows, Sasha makes her way along the wall to the doorway. Muffled voices come from the lower level, so she creeps down the stairs, instinctually stealthy, and wanders until she finds their source: a garden. From the doorway, she can see Cicero in a new toga, talking boisterously to an elderly man, who’s surprisingly calm in the face of Cicero’s forceful personality. Maybe it’s the effect of several successive potions of tongues that she took yesterday, or maybe it’s whatever allowed Bertie to speak French in Paris, but Sasha finds that she can understand their Latin near-perfectly.

“For now, you don’t need to worry,” the old man is saying. “The cow and chickens they left and my garden will be perfectly serviceable until Atticus returns.”

“But you’ve seen her — she’s all skin and bones! She carried me half the way here! She needs something substantial!” Cicero says.

“I assure you, I can take care of her. When she wakes up, I’ll make her a large dinner —”

“Cheers, mate,” Sasha says, coming up behind Cicero, “but I’ve lived on less before. I don’t need anything fancy.”

Cicero turns around in surprise. “Ah, excellent, you’re awake! Let me introduce you to Aulus, the delightful servant of my good friend, Atticus, in whose villa we are currently residing! Unfortunately, Atticus, his family, and his scribes were traveling in Rome when the destruction occurred, but Aulus will provide for us. I’m sure they will find their way back. They’re not as quick as us!”

“The news of Rome came to us a day before you arrived,” Aulus explains. “The rest of Atticus’s servants fled with most of the animals, but I chose to stay. We have large stores of food here, and many fields. We’ll be comfortable until Atticus returns, at which point we’ll make a decision about where to go.

“Yeah… when he returns… from Rome,” Sasha says, unsure whether it’s morally right to support their naive optimism. She doesn’t know that it’ll be four weeks until Aulus and Cicero give up hope. “How long was I asleep?”

“Two and a half days — you must be hungry,” Aulus says, heading towards the door. “What food do you prefer?”

“You, uh… you got any eels?”

Cicero beams. “A delicate palate — delightful!”

--

That evening, Aulus ushers her into the same second-floor bedroom, and Sasha finds herself lying awake on her back. Whenever she closes her eyes, she sees Hamid, Grizzop, and Azu, swears she can hear them calling her name — but whenever she opens them, she feels her gaze drawn to the window overlooking the fields. At the thought of the open space, her chest tightens. She sees herself walking through them, feels her vulnerability from all sides, knows that she’s being watched.

She slips out of bed and makes her way to Aulus’s bedroom, awkwardly knocking.

“Is there, like… a basement? A cellar? Just in case we, uh… if someone comes?”

--

On the fourth day, she wakes up to Cicero calling down to her from the top of the cellar.

“Aulus heard something in the stables! You’re very strong! I hope you can check!” His voice is as booming as always. Sasha unclenches her hand’s white-knuckled grip on her dagger and pulls herself up from the blankets that Aulus insisted she bring down to sleep on. She climbs up the ladder, Cicero chatting constantly.

The stables are a hundred metres or so away from the back entrance to the villa, and the path is thankfully shaded by a handful of trees. She sneaks from tree to tree towards the barn. It’s probably bandits, taking advantage of the chaos, like always. Barretts, the lot of them. She isn’t worried. Still, she stays quiet as she eases the door open and slips into a shadow. Listening for a moment, she can hear faint crying from… the ceiling? Fifteen years in Other London allow her eyes to adjust quickly to the dark, and it only takes a moment for her to spot, curled up with what looks to be riding equipment in the loft, a young boy.

He can’t be more than eight or nine years old. His dark black hair is grey with ash, and his tunic is torn and covered in dark patches — probably blood. Tears are leaving streaks down his dirty face.

Sasha freezes, stilling her breath. It’s the classic set up, which Barrett had occasionally used her for when he couldn’t find chubbier-faced kids. The crying child, poorly hidden, surrounded by a well-hidden gang, ready to take out their victim the moment they let their guard down. Works well on Upper London idiots, but not her.

Glancing around the room in the barn, Sasha takes stock of the places that the fuckers might hide, listening closely for any movement. In only a moment, she finds what she's been looking for: several large amphorae in a shadowy area of the room, behind which two or three small people might hide. She sneaks around to them, sure that she's kept herself well-hidden, and in one swift movement, launches an attack on — nothing. Air. Her knife, perfectly aimed to hit a bandit, loudly cracks an amphora, spilling grain out over the floor. Sasha braces for a second, waiting for the bandits that must be hidden somewhere else to start their attack, but all she hears is the sound of a young child who's trying his very best to stay quiet.

Maybe she was wrong.

Sasha climbs up the ladder to the loft, cringing with every creak of old wood. By the time that she peeks her head to the upper level, the boy is staring right at the ladder, holding with both hands a small knife, like you might use to cut tough meat. He points it towards her shakily, and suddenly she's sure that this isn't a set-up — you'd have to be a stupid gang leader to get someone like this as bait.

"Hey mate," she says in Latin. "Don't think you actually want to fight me. Nice knife, though." The boy tries to press even more of his body into the riding equipment, away from her. Without getting closer to him, Sasha swings on the end of the loft, pulling herself up to the ledge and sitting down, legs hanging off the edge. She sits in silence for a moment, suddenly very aware that she has no idea how to interact with small children, even those wielding weapons. What had she liked at that age?

"You wanna see some of mine? Sasha says. "Knives, I mean." Reaching into her studded leather coat, she pulls out a dagger. From the corner of her eye, she sees the boy flinch. "Hey, nah, it's okay, I won't hurt you, see?" she says, and offers it to him, holding it by the blade. He looks at her with confusion, but doesn't take the blade, so she lays it down carefully on the floor of the loft in front of him.

"Now this one," she says, pulling out her adamantine dagger and admiring its intricate patterns, "this one's my favourite. Well... one of my favourites." She lets him look at it from his place among the riding equipment and then, when she's sure he has his eyes on her, weaves it through her fingers so fast that it looks like water. She throws the dagger in the air, making an arch over her head, then a figure eight, then catching it on one finger, where it spins for a moment. When she looks back at the boy, he's transfixed. Sasha can't stop a small smile from coming to her face as she brings out a third and fourth dagger and continues on with her tricks.

Five minutes later, the boy has pulled up right to her side for a closer look at her fire dagger and the way its flames shift as she runs it over her arms, behind her back, through her fingers. He's holding his meat-knife in one hand and her old dagger in his other, but absent-mindedly, no longer on edge.

Putting out the dagger in one final flourish, she turns to the boy. "Do you wanna stay with me here? Just as long as you want, though," she says quickly. "I won't keep you here if you want to leave. But... we've got food, and a couple of... friends."

At "food," the boy perks up immediately. As if suddenly remembering that he's supposed to be cautious, he gives a shy nod.

"'Name's Sasha... Whosaskinus" Sasha says, and it occurs to her that this might be the first time she's given her name unprompted in her life.

The boy hesitates for a moment. "Maximus," he says. "Cause of my little brothers."

Fourteen years later, when Maximus helps a traveling pregnant woman give birth to a child, the boy will be called 'Little Maximus' in honour of him.

--

It’s Aulus who insists that Sasha take a bath and wash her clothes. They’ve been there ten days by that point, and Sasha’s yet to venture beyond the stables or the garden. She’s more help to Aulus inside, she says, trading her off-the-cuff Other London recipes for Aulus’s high-brow cooking, learning the names of the plants in the garden, and, at one point, climbing into the barn’s rafters to patch a leak. Aulus isn’t so bad: quick with a joke, less pompous than Cicero, and kind to her in a way that still feels a little foreign.

He lets her know, gently at first, that they do have heated baths that are quite pleasant, and wouldn’t she like to change from her leather coat into something more comfortable? And Sasha does like baths (despite her grumbling the first time Eldarion made her take one), and she doesn’t like picking bits of Rome dust in her belt or seeing the stain of black blood on her pants — but it feels so final, doesn’t it, taking her stuff off? As if she’s saying that she’s not leaving. And it’s not like Sasha actually has plans to leave or believes that she could really ever find her way back, but every time she takes off her studded leather jacket, she feels herself telling Hamid and Azu and Bi Ming that she’s not coming back for them.

Eventually, Aulus and Sasha come to complex negotiations, and Sasha agrees to let him wash her other clothes if she can keep the jacket nearby while she’s in the bath, and put it on again right after. She lays out her knives one by one right near the edge of the water, counting them before slipping in. The water is warm, as Aulus promised, and she feels all her muscles relaxing, despite herself. With an ache of nostalgia, she remembers Hamid’s apartment in London, and the bath she took there. It feels like years ago.

She’s dried off, dressed, and is figuring out how to arrange the daggers in her leather-over-tunic outfit when she sees Maximus’s head poking out from the doorway. He’s lightened up considerably in the past few days, and tends to stick around Sasha like glue.

“Oi, privacy!” she says, and Maximus’s face falls as he realizes she’s seen him.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to look, I was just going past and —” Maximus comes running up to her and motions for her to lean down. “You’ve got a bird on your back!” he whispers excitedly in her ear.

“Oh. That’s a scar. This… guy fell on me once and he had lots of bird statues on him.”

“What? That’s awesome!”

“Yeah, I… guess so,” Sasha says, confused by his enthusiasm. Gesturing to the burn on her neck, she explains, “This one’s from when I set off a lot of bombs by accident. Bombs are like… they make big explosions. You’d like them.” Maximus looks impressed, so Sasha continues, showing him her cold hand, “This is from when my dagger exploded. It was an ice dagger, like my fire dagger but ice, and I was trying to stab a thing but it went wrong.” She pulls down the collar of her tunic slightly to reveal the autopsy scar on her chest. “And this is from when I died and this evil thing took all my bits out but Zolf put them back…”

“Who’s Zolf?” Maximus asks.

“Oh, he’s, uh… I guess he was a… friend, but he…” Sasha trails off, feeling suddenly untethered. When she sees Maximus staring at her in confusion, she rouses herself. “Go check if Cicero needs help with the cooking, okay? He’s learning, but he’s not good.”

As Maximus scampers off and Sasha finishes placing her daggers, she thinks about how she’s never been good at stories. She can’t make the words come out in the right order and the right time, not like Hamid can. She’s never needed to, not really, when she has her daggers. Can’t hide well if you’re talking all the time.

Now, though — she’s the only one who knows these stories, for the next thousands of years, maybe ever, Azu and Hamid don’t — no. But no one else can talk about the gargoyles in Paris and Cairo, or the time that they killed that snake-hair woman, or the time that Hamid made her eat at a million restaurants in Prague. It feels wrong for her to be the only one who knows about those things, as if they never happened.

But it feels wrong, too, for Sasha to talk about her friends. She doesn’t think she could ever find the words for how she felt that day in the pub that Zolf said he was leaving. Or when Azu had told Eldarion to back off, or the sound of Brock laughing wildly at a joke that she knew wasn’t funny, or Grizzop’s face when he saw her again in Rome, or how Bi Ming’s hands moved so expertly over the clocks he repaired, or the shake in Hamid’s voice whenever he was trying not to cry. They’re important, too, but they’re so important that she doesn’t think she could ever tell them right.

So she won’t, she thinks, as she buttons up her leather jacket.

--

“I’m sorry, you know. About what I said about your friend,” Cicero says as he and Sasha are weeding the garden one day about five weeks after they arrived at the villa. It’s taken almost this long for Cicero and Aulus to admit that Atticus won’t be coming back, and in the meantime, social classes have broken down and Cicero is trying his best to help out around the villa.

“What?” Sasha says.

Cicero continues, his voice unusually subdued. “Your goblin friend, in Rome. I said that it was his fault. It wasn’t. He was trying to do what’s right, and he protected both of us.”

Sasha pauses, fighting off the urge to run away from this awkward conversation. “It’s well, it’s… alright. He was… yeah, he was good. Yeah.”

“Still, I understand if you don’t want to stay because of me. I had always meant for us to stay here until Atticus came back and then reevaluate our options. But he hasn’t, and you’re under no obligation to remain.”

“Cheers, mate, glad to know that you’re okay with me being gone,” Sasha says. Cicero starts to protest, but she interrupts him. “Sorry, that was unfair. It means a lot that… it’s okay if I go. But I don’t really have anywhere to go, do I? And… I couldn’t do that to Maximus. I think… I want to be there for people… who need protection.”

“Oh. That’s good of you,” Cicero says.

“Yeah, I guess. ‘Swhat people did for me.” Sasha says, and continues pulling weeds.

--

Maximus is a smart kid, it turns out. Pretty observant.

Maximus knows that Sasha doesn’t much like being hugged. Knows that if you hug her from behind, she’ll reach for a knife but will stop when she realizes who it is, and if you hug her from the front, she’ll hug you back, but it’ll be all stiff, and sometimes she’ll look like she’s remembering something she won’t say.

But Vibia and Paulla, four- and seven-year-old sisters who arrived two months after Sasha and Cicero, don’t know that. When Paulla, mid-fight, shouts at Vibia about their parents’ deaths, Vibia runs to Sasha and clings to her tight before Sasha can realize what’s happening. Sasha finds herself awkwardly rubbing Vibia’s back, wondering what she’s supposed to do. She tries to remember a time in her life when it was okay to cry or when she might expect anyone to hold her if she did. She pulls the girl in closer as her eyes start to sting.

Maximus knows that Sasha doesn’t like going in the fields. She’ll go in the garden and she’ll teach him how to climb the biggest and best trees, swinging from their highest branches with a huge smile on her face, but she’ll never look out from the top at the rolling hills, which are now yellow with the winter. And she’ll almost never walk in the fields, except for that one time that Cicero accidentally let the cow go and Sasha was the quickest to go run after it. She came back from that looking annoyed and mildly sick, and locked herself in the cellar for hours.

But Vibia and Paulla don’t know about Sasha’s fear. Paulla loves playing in the fields and in the clearings, where she’s drawn the circles in the dirt for a game of ball. She explains that you need at least three people to play the game right, and Vibia is too small and Aulus is too old and Cicero is too stuffy, so she needs Sasha to play with her and Maximus. After weeks of Paulla’s begging and Maximus promising that they can go back inside after just one round, Sasha finally relents, trying to calm her breathing and not look around too much as she lets Paulla drag her by the hand to a clearing right beside a clump of trees. By the time that they’ve been playing for ten minutes, Sasha’s competitiveness has distracted her from the wide fields around them.

Maximus knows that Sasha will tell stories if he asks, but that she won’t talk much about the other people in the stories and goes quiet when he asks about them. He’s heard about the time that she crossed a great big sea in a little boat during a storm, but never about that guy who pulled her out of the water or why they were on the boat in the first place. He loves the one about the time she snuck into a bunch of buildings with giant monsters guarding them, but he always wants to know more about the person who blew up the main building with magic. Sasha always says she’ll tell him about that guy some other time. Eventually, he stops asking. 

But Vibia and Paulla don’t know about the people Sasha won’t mention. A month after they came to the villa, they’re sitting with Sasha on a couch. Paulla’s at her feet and Vibia’s running her fingers through Sasha’s hair, which she’d allowed Aulus to crop short using one of her knives. Vibia has always been fascinated by the shock of white in Sasha’s hair.

“You’re a girl, right?” Vibia says. Her sister shoots her a reproachful look, but says nothing.

“Uh… sure,” Sasha says. “Why?”

“‘Cause of your hair. And cause Max calls you Sasha Whosaskin-US. But if you’re a girl, it should be Whosaskin-A,” Vibia says proudly. From the room next door, Sasha hears Cicero laugh.

“I dunno what to tell you, mate,” Sasha says. “I just made it up one day.”

“You can make up your name?” Vibia says in shock, spinning herself down so she’s sitting on Sasha’s lap. “Did you have a different name before?”

“I had… yes. It was someone else’s name, but it wasn’t important. He wasn’t important. My other name is… I guess it’s important.”

“Who was the person who wasn’t —” Vibia starts, but Paulla cuts her off, recognizing the distance in Sasha’s voice.

“Who’s the most important person you know?” Paulla asks, in an attempt to redirect the conversation.

For a moment, Sasha considers talking about Apophis, but while she’s never asked the kids directly about how they ended up at the villa, she suspects dragons are a sore subject. “I knew this guy. He was a bit of a dick but he wasn’t a bad person, I guess. He sort of… paid me. And watched over me and my… friends. And this one time when I was… very sick, he went up to the most powerful person around and he told him to give over this thing to make me better and he said some… really nice things about me. And the powerful person did give us the thing and I got better. Though the guy, the important guy, he did say some awful things about me being sick, but I think he was mostly just really tired…”

Sasha looks up from her rambling and is surprised to see that Vibia and Paulla are wide-eyed, waiting on her every word. A flush of embarrassment runs through her — as does a feeling of deep relief, as if she’d be waiting for forever to talk about Wilde, to admit how much it meant that he’d cared about her, to bring his memory to this distant place. She hopes that wherever he is, he’s managed to get some rest.

“Also,” Sasha continues, “one time my friend punched him in the balls.”

--

One morning at breakfast, Aulus announces that they need to start preparing the fields for seeding. Sasha is surprised, because it’s as cold as it’s been for the past several months, but Tertia and Fausta nod sagely at Aulus’s decision. They’re a young couple who recently moved into the villa after their home was raided by some of the bandits. The robbers have increased in numbers in the area, but have left the villa alone since a couple of them met the end of Sasha’s knives. Aulus is relieved that Tertia and Fausta are here and can help with the farm, and even though he insists Sasha can stay in the villa, she knows that she should help, too. 

So that’s how Sasha finds herself surrounded on all sides by open fields, dizzied as she stares at the distance between her and the nearest clump of trees, leaning on the rake she’s been using to till. She doesn’t hear Maximus running up behind her and barely registers him asking if she’s okay, or his yells for someone to help. She’s trying to say that she’s alright by the time that Fausta has come to her side. 

“You need to get inside,” Fausta says over Sasha’s protests. “You’re no help like this.” 

“It’s the sun, I’m hot, I don’t need —” Sasha mutters, but Fausta cuts her off.

“Sasha Whosaskinus, it’s incredibly cold out here. You’re not overheating.” Fausta sees Sasha’s expression, and her voice softens, “It’s okay. There will be other days. You can do a bit every day.”

And that’s what she does, at first working to the fields closest to the villa and the trees and gradually going further and further into the farm. She suspects that Aulus is responsible for getting the kids to swarm around her, keeping her distracted, but she’ll never complain. 

A month later, when they’re watering the fields, Tertia nudges Sasha and directs her gaze towards Cicero, who’s working twenty feet away. He has, for some reason, decided to wear a nice toga even while doing manual labour, and it’s getting helplessly muddied. Cicero is now attempting to stealthily wash off his toga using the water intented for the plants, but, as he keeps dropping the toga, he's just making things much worse. As Sasha doubles over with laughter alongside Tertia, she barely notices the open space between them. 

--

It’s a warm day in late spring when Hostus goes missing. He’s a tall, skinny preteen boy whom Sasha found had been stealing their food and sleeping in an unused servant’s room for several days before anyone noticed. In the weeks since Sasha told him that he could stay without sneaking around everywhere, he’s still not quite learned to trust the other residents of the villa: he jumps at the smallest noise, and she once saw him pull a knife on Fausta when she got too close. Sasha feels like a bit of a hypocrite for chiding him.

After the boy misses both breakfast and lunch and it’s almost time for supper, Sasha searches for Hostus. He’s not in that clump of trees next to the clearing, where Hostus likes to climb and watch them play ball. He’s not in the old servant’s room, where he’d insisted on sleeping even after Aulus invited him to stay closer to everyone else. He’s not trying to scare the chickens in the barn. Sasha is almost ready to admit that Hostus has simply left in the way that she’s told all of the children they can when Sasha hears faint movement from the roof. She kicks herself for forgetting her old favourite place to hide from Eldarion.

Climbing through the window in the bedroom she’d stayed her first night, Sasha pulls herself up towards the roof a little less quickly than she might have six months ago: the manual labour has made her stronger and she still throws her knives every day, but she’s out of practice scaling buildings. When she reaches the top, it only takes a moment to spot Hostus curled up in a nook of the roof, knees tucked into his chest, looking down at the courtyard below. Neither Sasha nor Hostus speak as she approaches, but when he turns his head towards her, she can see his eyes are puffy and red, but his face is locked in an expression of anger. Sasha silently takes a seat a few feet away from him. Together, they watch the courtyard, where Cicero is unsuccessfully trying to repair a couch whose leg has fallen off.

A thought strikes Sasha as she remembers another rooftop in a far-away place and time, and she roots around on the roof for a pebble. She shows the stone to a confused Hostus before sending it flying at Cicero — it bounces off the top of the head with a satisfying sound. Cicero grabs his head, looking around wildly, not noticing the pair on the roof. Hostus smiles despite himself and accepts the next pebble that Sasha offers him. He’s not so good a shot as her, but together they manage to get five or six good hits in before Cicero starts carefully searching the skyline while making bombastic threats against his attackers, and Sasha and Hostus collapse with giggles on the other side of the roof.

For a while, they lie there, staring up at the sky. The late-afternoon skies are clear and the air is warm enough for Sasha to have her leather jacket open loosely over her toga.

“There was this one time I ran away,” Sasha says, surprising herself with the words coming out of her mouth, “and my friends came looking for me.”

“Must be nice, having friends like that,” Hostus says, and Sasha recognizes from herself the prickly tone, halfway between sarcasm and longing.

“Yeah, it was. Really was,” she says.

Hostus, thrown by her sincere response, falls quiet. After a moment, he sighs and sits up. “What were your friends like?” he asks. “Max says you’re good at stories.”

Sasha pulls herself up beside Hostus. From her position on the roof, she can see the endless rolling fields, budding with new growth under a slowly redenning sky. It strikes her that no part of her finds fear in this view anymore.

“There was Grizzop,” Sasha says, “and he was a goblin, but they weren’t bad like everyone says. He was brave and fast and funny, even when he was trying to be serious. He wanted to use every moment of his life to help people, and he did. I don’t think I got it back then, but… I think I do now.

“There was Azu. She was so big and she had this magical camel and one time, the time they came looking for me ‘cause I ran away, she got on the camel and put Grizzop on her shoulders and they went around town getting drunk and starting a fight.” Sasha laughs at the memory. “But she was kind. She didn’t always… understand things, she didn’t always know how to help, but she always tried so hard, even when you felt like you didn’t deserve it.

“There was Hamid. He was small, smaller than Grizzop even, and very posh, and he wanted so much to be a hero. He’d done things that hurt others and he wanted to make it better and… sometimes that meant that he was an idiot and hurt himself. He cared so much about things that he’d cry, but… it wasn’t a bad thing. He cared.”

Sasha pauses, trying to find the words. “And there was Zolf. He… he saved me for no reason, when I was running away from people who wanted to hurt me. He always just wanted to protect us. For us to… save ourselves while he died, but we never wanted to leave him. And he said he’d heal me when I got… sick, but then he left and he didn’t. And… I think I was mad at him for a while, ‘cause it hurt? But I reckon… I reckon he was hurting, too, and he needed to find something to heal him. Tell him he could protect himself, too.”

Hostus, who’s been staring at his feet, looks up at Sasha. “Did he ever find it?”

“The thing to heal him? I dunno. I never saw him again after he left. I hope he did.”

“Me too,” Hostus says quietly.

In the silence between them, Sasha can hear the sounds of the villa’s family below: Tertia and Fausta gently teasing Cicero about the mysterious pebbles on his head; Vibia helping Aulus prepare dinner; Paulla and Maximus playing knucklebones.

Sasha smiles and watches the sun set over her home.

[pisati]

I already posted on main about it and I’ve got nowhere else to really vent. I know my co-receptionist is active on twitter and I don’t know if she’s ever tried to look for me (probably not), but I don’t want to risk complaining where she could possibly see.

it’s just been a long, shitty week. and it’s only tuesday. we had two euthanasias yesterday and two today. usually we get one TOPS in a week. most weeks we don’t have any. 

I don’t know how many weeks we’ve been doing this now, but it’s definitely been over a month. I’ve worked with the lead receptionist a bunch since I started. she’s nice, but she’s very much got her own personality. she’s from new jersey, and that’s the explanation for a lot of her attitude, she says. I respect her and how well she knows herself and her boundaries. but I really feel like she could be a little nicer. I get that she’s worked in healthcare for a long time and she’s seen some shit but she acts like she knows everything and sometimes it’s just really insensitive.

I don’t think she means to sound rude, but there have been times when I’ve been talking about something and she’s only half-listening, usually because she’s working on something, and she’ll finish what she was doing and go “now what are you babbling about?” she did it to one of the techs the other day too. I know she just means to ask “what were you saying?” but it really makes me feel like whatever I’m saying is just nonsense to her, like I’m running at the mouth and whatever it is isn’t important. 

we listen to what she wants to listen to. for 12 straight hours, 3 days a week, every week. according to her my music taste is respectable, but “a lot of sad-sackery”, so we listen to her music. we have limited overlap, but I don’t say anything. not because I don’t want to start an argument, I’m pretty much cool with whatever. but I’ve noticed that when we listen to what she likes, it’s often just a small handful of things she likes. I KNOW DMX has way more songs than just the same few. same with nicki minaj and beyonce. we’ve listened to some rage against the machine, which I can appreciate, but there are definitely way more songs than just killing in the name, bombtrack, take the power back, and know your enemy. I’ve listened to musical soundtracks. we did les mis and chicago and maybe a few others last week. I’ve sat there and watched videos I didn’t care to watch, because she’s really enthused about black opera singers and bruce springsteen and whomever the fuck else, because I like to think I’m a nice person and when someone is excited about something and wants to share it I let them be fucking excited about it, even if I don’t give half a flying fuck about it. today was a disney day, apparently, so I listened to soundtracks for mary poppins, the little mermaid, and beauty and the beast. sound of music too. whatever other eclectic songs tickle her fancy on any given day. but I’ve noticed it seems to just be the things she likes. I’ve come to work on disney days before but I don’t recall hearing soundtracks to more than just a few movies. I tried to get her to listen to a little hozier once or twice; since she’s a singer we often end up talking about vocal talent. and I was trying to show her what a great vocalist he is. she listened to maybe a few seconds of a song or two and, nah, not her taste. she gets why someone like me would like his voice, though. today she was laughing about something one of the techs had said; we have a whiteboard in the back hallway and every week or so someone (her, maybe?) puts up a prompt and people can write their responses. ya know, team bonding, sorta. this week she’d put up “what two famous people would you like to have dinner with?” and one of the techs had written “leo dicaprio and billie eilish”. and she was laughing about it. she’s not a fan of billie’s popular stuff. I told her about how I didn’t think I’d much like billie at first, but I listened to her whole album and I was surprised, I thought she had a really nice voice. just.. nope. I asked if I could play one song. just one. nope, nope, nope. she’d listened to half a second of each song on her album and decided she didn’t like any of them. I didn’t press.

yesterday she really just... ugh. the head vet had come up to the front desk to tell us that a really sweet client offered to buy us lunch, and did we have any ideas on what we’d like? they were thinking panera. I wasn’t sure if there was anything there I’d eat, but I’d take a look at the menu. my coworker had piped up with “she’s like super picky” and then ensued the “so what do you eat?” conversation. I didn’t really have much to say, since I’m tired of that fucking question and I don’t have such a small palate that I can just list off everything. she interrupted with “mac and cheese, I know that.” I forget what else she said, but I tried to explain that it was a sensory issue and there’s actually a disorder that involves a sensory rejection of food that lasts well into adulthood, and she was just sitting there next to me trying to hold back laughs. I asked her what was funny, she goes “it just sounds like picky eating, like it sounds so ridiculous”. 

yeah, because I love being 25 and not being able to go to more than a tiny handful of restaurants with friends because those few places have one thing on the menu I’ll eat. I fucking love being too deeply embarrassed to special-order anything plain that I’d rather not eat at all. I love the “so what DO you eat” question, I love being laughed at and made fun of, I love feeling like a child who could never “grow out of it”. I really fucking love it, that’s why I continue to do this to myself. fuck’s sake.

this is the person who takes euthanasias so seriously that she’ll fuck anyone’s day up if they interrupt her while she’s getting paperwork together or if they’re being loud while the owner is in the room. she told me about her home health care work and how she dealt with a lot of people who were in hospice and she was real sympathetic to just about anything, because they were dying. I know I’m not dying, this doesn’t involve death, but the complete lack of empathy towards me just... really hurts. here I am trying to explain myself the way I always feel the need to, because I apparently have to have a fucking reason why I’m so picky, and she won’t hear any of it. she was fucking laughing at me. 

I don’t feel disliked at my job, but I’m getting that feeling like I did in high school and college. like I’m both a part of something and not. I know I’m weird and a little awkward, but... she talks to people on the other team and they leave memes for each other. there’s a new girl on the other team who only started a month or two ago, but my co-receptionist is leaving memes for her specifically; the new girl even called today and she picked up, and they were having a riot of a conversation from what I could hear; a lot of genuine laughter, and I could hear the way she was talking, it sounded just so natural. a lot of the time with me she doesn’t quite sound like that. she’s got a pretty dirty sense of humor, and she was leaving some pretty gross memes for the new girl, meanwhile there was a video she’d shown the new doctor and the head vet that she didn’t want to show me because she “wasn’t sure if we were there yet”. she’d already described it to me, and she finally showed it to me today; it was just some nerdy guy singing about pussy in an 80s R&B voice. nothing I couldn’t have found somewhere on the internet myself. hell, it’s probably already floating around tumblr somewhere. idk, I don’t feel disliked but I am starting to feel left out. like, even the new people are more integrated than I am, and I’ve been there 8 months. I don’t know why this happens to me literally everywhere I go. every job, every school (except IUP somehow??), fucking everything. I just never feel like a true part of anything and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I’m not unfriendly. I don’t think I’m unapproachable. maybe I really just am that boring.

I’m just really tired of this. when she was out sick that one day last week, and I had to handle 13 straight hours of reception basically by myself, with some help from the office manager, I actually felt less tired than when she was there. I feel like I have to put on a face for her, like I have to pretend to be interested in whatever she’s going on about all day. I can’t say anything to her because she’s the lead receptionist, but it’s been getting on my nerves lately that I try to actually do work and she’s sitting there looking at memes, telling me she has to find this particular one of jason momoa so she can print it out have it at her desk because he’s just so attractive

I didn’t get a break yesterday, because our doctors were lagging so far behind and I had to keep the phones on. she left to go do something, and I was left to answer phones by myself. I almost didn’t get a break today either; there were still one or two clients left by 1pm and I couldn’t turn the phones over to the break message, and she had a thing to do with her car so she’d be back. I forget how I ended up mentioning that I didn’t get a break yesterday either and she was like “well that’s me the other times the doctors are behind. it’s your turn”. and while that is fair... one of the techs came up to talk to her after she’d left. she looked at me and was like, “where’s trish?” and I was like “... on break”. and she looked at me and I looked at her and she was like “...she’s been taking more breaks than any of us”. and I was like “yyyyep.” she goes out a few times during the day to have a cigarette too. usually when it’s quiet, but of course in the space of 10 minutes there’s a lot that can happen. often it does. thankfully today we had those last few clients out by 1:30 so I did get to clock out, and she let me stay off the clock until 2:30. but if the doctors were as behind today as they were yesterday, I’d have had no break today either.

we pretty much only ever talk about what she wants to talk about. she’s constantly interrupting me or talking over me, so I just let her talk. I’ve heard more about her wild sex life back in her 20s than I’d ever care to know. today she told a story three times (once to me, once to the head vet, and once to one of the techs) about how she can accurately guess a man’s dick size by the way he walks, and how she did this to some guy she dated in her early 20s and he was surprised by it. I don’t want to make things tense or awkward by saying I don’t want to talk about these things and I’d personally rather listen to music that keeps me calm and just quietly scan, fax, label, and attach things in between the periodic phone calls, but I can hardly get a word in edgewise anyway, so it’s mostly just me listening. she’s let me know in no uncertain terms that she doesn’t like rats and doesn’t think they’re cute; doesn’t want to see pictures of them, just.. nothing. I personally think that you can’t claim to love animals if you only love the ones you think are cute. but I don’t even know if she does. I couldn’t tell you why she’s working at a vet clinic. 

it’s fucking exhausting. it’d be exhausting with alexa too, I know that for a fact. I’m getting better at my job but I still need a supervising receptionist, so either way I’d have to deal with one of the two. I’m just glad it’s only 3 days a week, but even my 4 day weekends are flying by. the days are all blending together and I’m having a hard time getting my brain to work. none of this is easy. but it definitely doesn’t help to have to work with someone who’s so rigid about everything they do; like, I spend all fucking day listening to what you have to say and listening to every single song you want to listen to and watching every stupid video you think is funny (though some of them are; other times it’s like.. something reminded her of a veggie tales episode so now we have to watch it), and I can’t even play one song I like because you’ve listened to a split second of it and automatically think you don’t like it? the fuck, dude.

just.. the way she acts like she knows everything about the way people act, and how little tolerance she has for bullshit. I appreciate that second bit, but there’s other times when she really just has no sympathy and I feel like everything would be easier if she did. yesterday our one doctor was lagging really far behind and she was getting so annoyed because he had all this time for his appointments and people were having to wait and he never caught up all day; one of the clients ended up being one who was VERY particular about estimates and payments and shit and apparently he’d fucked something up after she had told him and the tech well ahead of time to be very careful with her. and she’d about had enough of him after that. by the end of the day he looked like he was either about to cry or had been crying. and he apologized to her for fucking up; I forget exactly what he said and she accepted his apology, but it almost seemed superficial. she had had it. the second she was done with her shit for the night she left. I stayed a few extra minutes to do something, but... like, even I could tell there was more to the story there. you don’t just lag all day for no reason, and especially not when you have to start the day on a euthanasia that wasn’t expected. I get that when you’ve worked with people for so many years you end up with a low tolerance for bullshit, but come on. I’ve been dealing with shitty people my whole life but I at least understand what it’s like to have a bad day. this particular doctor, a lottttt of the staff has a problem with, for many reasons. he’s only ever been nice to me, and I don’t know a lot of what goes on that annoys reception and the techs so much (often it’s some of his medical decisions, which... I wouldn’t know anything about that. how am I supposed to know what his rationale was for prescribing meloxidyl for a rhodesian ridgeback? the owner asked me for a refill and I requested it). so I guess some people’s patience runs low with him. but even so, I don’t think I could ever lack empathy that much. no matter how long I do this shit. I was tempted to ask him if he was okay, but I figured he had a lot on his plate to get to. he was there til like 10 last night, and his worklist was really long today too. I could tell he’s been on edge since last week. it’s not my business to know why, and I don’t have to. just be fucking nice to people, lmao

for someone who’s so picky about her music taste, she’s got no fucking right to talk about my eating. she won’t even venture outside the things she likes. she decides once that she doesn’t like something and that’s the end of it. so why is it suddenly a problem when I don’t want to try a variety of foods?

I’m just. really frustrated. I don’t want to have to vent about my coworkers but I’m not going to get through this easily. we don’t even know how long we’re going to have to do this. I found out today alexa’s husband is now in the hospital; they’re treating it like COVID and/or really bad pneumonia, but what the fuck does that mean for her team? for mine? did she bring germs to the clinic? is she going to have to quarantine along with her team? is my team going to have to run shit? I have no idea, and I only found out about this through facebook. I haven’t heard anything else from anyone. we do sanitize between teams so there’s a low risk of cross-contamination, but... we don’t get everything. there’s no way to.

I need to go to bed soon. I’m so glad tomorrow’s my friday. I’m ready for this week to be over.

[fae-fucker]

Zenith: Chapter 33-36

Chapter 33

So we’re back in Andi’s POV, finally. She’s woken up by Dex who is all worried and Andi vomits in his lap and then thinks about how sexy he is. Mind you, they are in a ship filled with corpses and there’s an unconscious and busted Valen near them who’s probably dying slowly, plus the vomit.

But I guess that just turns Andi on more? Discuss.

They find Valen barely alive among the corpses and Dex is surprised he’s not dead.

Hey bud. Didn’t you throw the guy down a flight of stairs a few chapters ago? I don’t think you’re in any position to make glib remarks, my guy.

Andi takes out the pilot with a shoelace, which, alright, and Dex says something about how she’s still afraid to fly a ship because she asks him to do it. Wow, an actual symptom of PTSD? In my Zenith? What a time to be alive. 

The chapter ends with Andi angsting about how she’s had to murder another person. Except she didn’t have to do that. She could’ve just knocked the pilot out and locked them in the storage with the other corpses to get rescued later. The pilot didn’t know there were live people on board so they wouldn’t know who attacked them anyway. I mean yeah they’d probably sustain brain damage but they wouldn’t be dead.

Methinks Andi really likes murder and justifies it to herself by saying it’s a necessity. 

Chapter 34

We’re in Dex’s POV and he’s complaining about how everything smells like trash on the Marauder now that Alfie took the door off the trash shoot. 

Hey. Hey why don’t you just ... blast it out? Like. Just shoot the trash out. Why do you store it on the ship that gets lighter and faster when you spend ammo? You’re in space. Just blast that shit. Or convert it into biofuel. Apparently it smells of “unmentionable” things so that makes me wonder if they store their actual shit in there as well? What the fuck is in their trash department that it smells so bad? If they can’t blast out the trash (which makes no sense), why didn’t they get rid of it when they were getting repairs before the mission? Why didn’t they get rid of it during the numerous times they’ve landed? Why the fuck does this ship have a dedicated trash department anyway? 

The little fire-haired gunner had wanted to know if the blood on Andi belonged to her or some “now-ball-less bastard,” to which the giantess had responded, Of course it’s not hers, Gil. And don’t say bastard. Say prick.

Comedy. 

Dex is being patched up by Alfie (who is described as “fawning” over his wounds, which doesn’t sound right), and thinks about how he’s gonna drink himself into oblivion later. Alcoholism? Love it. I bet Shinsay will know exactly how to handle this, with how many references their super cool and mature characters make to getting absolutely shitfaced.

Dex sulks himself out of the “med bay” (Why don’t these idiots have medical staff? For the same reason they don’t have mechanics I suppose.) to go and update General Cortas on their progress. 

The general is all grumpy and shit and reminds Dex that he’s in charge and can fuck him up good if anything happens to Valen, and tells him to keep Andi away from him. Because he thinks Andi will ... kill Valen too? I guess he thinks Andi is addicted to murdering his kids or smth. 

Anyway, Dex gets all mopey because the big scary man said some mean things but then he hears classical music and enters Andi’s room. It’s time for some bullshit, lads. 

Chapter 35

So finally we get the scene where Andi “dances” with the dead, which turns out to actually just happen in her head while she spaces out and cries. She imagines herself on a stage with an audience of ghosts of all the people she’s killed, and they come up and dance with her one by one and she “memorizes” their features. I’m not sure how she does that because the narration during action scenes keeps emphasizing how quick and cool she is so I have no idea how she can “memorize” the features of someone she’s probably only looked at for a couple of seconds at most. Also, I dunno why she’s memorizing something she clearly already remembers. I know it’s a nitpick but it’s just bad, y’all.

If this is supposed to be atonement ... God I hope it’s not. It’s honestly written like it makes Andi some sort of pure angel who just Does What She Has To, instead of just being a coping mechanism. Behold:

Tears streaked down Andi’s cheeks, pulling her from the vision she’d created so clearly in her mind. The music grew louder, silencing her tears. She closed her eyes and forced herself back into her mind. She owed this to the dead. This pain, this dance, this time where she gave herself fully to their memory.

Anyway, the last ghost is Kalee of course, and I’m not entirely sure how many people Andi’s killed if every single dance is as detailed and long as the ones with latest ghosts (the descriptions are quite lengthy so I assume it’s a couple of minutes or so), but it looks like Kalee’s ghost has to sit there and wait a while lmao. Even in death this brat can’t catch a break.

Sorry, I know I’m laughing at trauma here, but it’s not real trauma, it’s badly written melodramatic trauma. Like, I just don’t see someone who genuinely doesn’t like to murder people keep “crossing that line” (yes, apparently whenever Andi does a murder, she “crosses a line” she’s set for herself, wowza) and all they do for atonement is keeping a mental list and queue of all the fake made-up ghosts she needs to dance with. Like. I get that people cope differently but this is less of a coping mechanism and more Shinsay crossing shit off a list to make Andi more palatable.

I just don’t believe it. Not after I’ve seen how proud she is of being the Bloody Baroness and how Glorious it feels to Do A Murder.

Also, this chapter is rife with weird fucking grammar and writing in general. Some examples: 

[Kalee] was dressed in a shimmering blue gown that swirled around her ankles like fragments of cloud.

“Fragments of cloud”????

The transport creaked. Groaned, as the fire licked closer and closer.

Why did you. Break, the sentence up like that. 

The chapter ends with Dex giving Andi some time to pause her PTXD so they can have the talk she promised him. Which is nice of him, I guess. Despite being obnoxious and a dweeb, Dex manages to be better than every SJM love interest ever? Wow.

Oh but don’t you worry, it lasts uuuh until just now.

Chapter 36

Andi thinks about how sexie Dex is now that he’s washed the blood and vomit off and changed some clothes. Which ... there’s no mention of him doing since he returned from the corpse hauling ship ... The last chapter from his POV had him arriving at the Marauder and having his wounds checked, after which he instantly went to call General Cortas, and then he went directly to Andi. 

I guess he’s got time travel powers? Or are we supposed to believe he showered before being brought into the med bay?

Whatever. 

Dex says that Andi doesn’t know the “full story” behind the reason he turned her over to the Patrolmen, and Andi responds with:

“I loved you, and you threw me away like some common whore!”

But god forbid we actually say the word “sex” or stop being immature little shits every moment we make a dirty reference, amirite guys? Calling women whores and sluts is a-ok but if you even TRY to discuss sexuality in a mature and relaxed way you WILL get eaten by the mommy police.

Dex is like “pwease wissen to me :C” and she’s like “fucking dammit he’s just so hot not to listen to”:

She wanted him to hurt. To feel the soul-deep pain, just as she did. Physical wounds would heal, but the internal scars never would.

SOUL-DEEP PAIN. 

Not sure Andi has a soul but go off.

“You were my whole world. You showed me that I could still be loved. When everyone else—an entire planet full of people—hated me so much they wished me dead, even my own parents...I found you. I started to live again. I started to trust. Then I lost you, too, just like all the others. You turned away, just like they did.”

Thanks for mapping out the exact reasons for your angst, Andi. It’s not like we’re clever enough to know you have trust- and/or abandonment issues.

More like Angstdi amirite?

Dex gets all defensive and instead of giving her the real reason for his betrayal, he starts mouthing off and justifying himself.

“I turned you in because you were running from the law! You lied to me about your past, Andi. I did nothing that wasn’t expected of me! My duty as a Guardian was to the welfare of the galaxy, not to some runaway Spectre who’d failed her entire planet! You made the choice to fly that transport ship. It was your hands that crashed it. Your failure that killed Kalee! You ran, Androma.” 

H-hey bud? This is, as far as you know, your only chance to justify yourself. Maybe calm your tits and tell her what you’ve been keeping secret instead of confirming her beliefs about you? Since you were so desperate to talk to her?

No? Ok. For someone who displays some amount of emotional maturity (good god I can’t believe I just said that about fiking Dex Dogtective), you sure do get fired up easily, huh. Must be all that will-they-won’t-they tension.

They circled each other like predators, blood boiling, bodies shaking with rage as the stars looked on.

I can promise you the stars have better things to do than to give a shit about this petty squabble, Shinsay.

“Did you ever think about my side in all of this, Androma?” Dex’s voice cracked suddenly as he ran his fingers through his dark hair. “You may think you know the whole story, but you are so consumed by hate that you only see yourself.”

SO MAYBE STOP JUSTIFYING YOUR ACTIONS AND ACTUALLY TELL HER WHY YOU DID IT IF IT’S SO FUCKING IMPORTANT FOR HER TO KNOW?!

But no, we can’t have that yet. He follows it up with this:

“Your side of the story doesn’t matter. You sunk a knife into my chest. You stole my ship and left me to die.”

BECAUSE YOU TURNED HER OVER TO THE PEOPLE WHO WOULD MURDER HER. 

CAN YOU MAYBE NOT?! 

HOLY SHIT DEX DOGTECTIVE YOU ARE AN ABSOLUTE FUCKING MORON, AREN’T YOU? 

No wonder she fuckin stabbed you. I would’ve stabbed you multiple times and made sure you were actually dead before leaving your sorry ass.

Anyway, they stare at each other and Dex is all “uwu ur the only woman I ever loved” and we all know that doesn’t mean bi!Dex because Shinsay can’t think of a their manly man getting dicked down by another man, nu-uh.

Then we finally get the reason Dex did it. You see ...

They had his dad. And threatened to kill him if he didn’t turn Andi in.

Yeah. That old chestnut. It does unfortunately open up all of the plot holes. Like for example, if they knew where Dex was, why didn’t they just ... find him and thus find Andi? They knew she was with him. He was a Guardian at that point, surely they know where their men are stationed? Apparently he’d known Andi for a year when he turned her in, and he hadn’t realized who she was until the general’s men approached him. So ... how did the Patrolmen realize he was with Andi if even he didn’t know it? Or did they just threaten a family member of every Guardian on the off-chance that one of them knew Andi and would give her up to save them?

Maybe there’s something I’m missing, but this smacks of contrivance for the sake of conflict. 

Anyway, apparently Dex had tried to give Andi a head start the morning before he turned her in. By giving her a vaguely worded warning that she didn’t get. 

What a peach. 

They bribed Dex on top of threatening his father, which is like, beating him with the carrot stick, and I don’t understand it at all. But Dex feels very terrible about what he did to teh womaine he wuvs :c and apparently tried to plead with them that she was young and made a mistake. 

“Andi,” Dex whispered. “Please. Look at me. Tell me we can move past this. We both made mistakes. We both made our choices, and we’ve had to live with them.”

Seems a little manipulative there, Dexyboy. I’m getting a lot of mixed messages, but the loudest one seems to be “you did a bad and I did a smaller bad that’s justified and I feel kinda bad but also you’re also at fault and can we bone again please” and I’m not into it, Dexyboy. 

You wanted her to get away, to give her a head start. You agree that she’s innocent and she made a mistake when she was a child. Yet you blame her for stabbing you and fleeing from certain death? Ok. 

I mean, I get it, getting stabbed probably ain’t so fun, especially when it’s the womaine you lurv :c, and sure maybe it hurts both physically and emotionally to have her turn on you so fast and without hesitation ... BUT YOU DID PROVOKE IT BY TURNING HER OVER TO PEOPLE WHO WOULD DEFO 100% MURDER HER ASS. If you love her so much, can’t you extend just a bit of sympathy for her actions? Since you are the reason she did those things in the first place? Fucking dumbass.

Also, why the fuck have you been acting like a huge cocky asshole this whole time since you reunited? For kicks?

I get Shinsay wanted a sexie snarky love interest just like SJMommy but they’ve done it at the cost of consistent characterization.

Andi says that there’s no getting back to how it was and tells Dex to leave so she can cry and carve more tallies into her swords.

It’s very deep, y’all.

[elfnerdherder]

The Unquiet Grave: Chapter 16

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Chapter 16:

           Beverly is walking away from his doorstep when Hannibal pulls into the driveway. The dogs are going nuts inside, and Will uses that as the perfect distraction to avoid her bemused expression at seeing him get out of his therapist’s car.

           The dogs rush about, and Buster frantically sniffs at him, begging treats. Will crouches to rub his belly, and he stares at the toe of Beverly’s shoe just at the corner of his eye. Beverly has always been a surefire read, a genuine one. She has something to say, and she’s radiating with an energy of something bordering antagonistic.

           Will imagines his walls, where they rise high. He can’t handle channeling her anger right now. He has his own, something a potent bled of antagonistic and afraid all in one.

           “Was wondering where you were.”

           “I didn’t know you knew where I lived.”

           “Do you know where I work?”

           They both smile, and she accepts Buster’s affection and excitement, reaching down to scratch behind his ears.

           “I’m getting insight into the rogue empath that Jack asked me to look into. He pulled me away for something else, but I’ll be back to hunting Dolarhyde soon, promise.”

           It was a shitty promise, but he wasn’t feeling too awful about it.

           “Bull shit, you’re coming out with me,” she replies easily, and she picks Buster up, much to his delight. “We haven’t gone out for a beer in awhile.”

           “Now isn’t exactly…”

           “Will and I were going to go out to dinner, actually. Would you care to join us, then go to drinks after?” Hannibal cuts in smoothly. His smile is as warm as his tone, and Will barely manages to repress a look of utmost disdain. He really doesn’t have time for this shit.

           “Where were you thinking of going?”

           “I haven’t had taken either of you to an excellent Greek restaurant just a on the edge of Baltimore. Are there any allergies I should be aware of?”

           There are no allergies to fear, and the plan is set. The dogs make their rounds, and Will apologetically ushers them back into the house, giving them an extra treat each on the way out. They take Hannibal’s car, and maybe it’s a calculative move on Hannibal’s part as much as a political one because now someone is less likely to kill him if they think he has company over for the evening.

           Beverly is quiet only through the appetizer. She seems to be observing as much as she is enjoying the ambiance of an artificial waterfall in the corner, as well as the tangy scent of olive oil and vinaigrette. That buzzing energy sits with a cloud around her, and Will imagines her leaning in with aggression, hearing something she’s not entirely pleased about.

He blinks away the thought, the Dream. If he looks too closely, he’ll fall in, and sometimes falling in is scary when you’re not quite sure where you’ll land. These days, it’s unsettling enough that he can’t account for how he’ll react once he’s inside, either.

Just Mr. Jackson, now.

Will picks at his cloth napkin idly, and Hannibal informs them of the best of the menu, along with some of the recipes he’s attempted to replicate. The air hums with socialites’ laughter and the clatter of fine china. Live music plays, Beverly hums along. It’s the setting to a perfect scene of three friends from wildly varying lifestyles coming together, and if he was in more control of himself and his surroundings, Will would have laughed out loud at it.

           “Sometimes, Will, I think it’s a shame that you can’t eat meat. Some of the flavors Greek cuisine bring out linger in a way that is difficult to mimic in other dishes.”

           “They have a roast lamb that I’m going to have to devour,” Beverly says by way of agreement. Her eyes lighten at something, and she taps the menu pointedly. “This was a good suggestion, Dr. Lecter.”

           “I’m happy you could come along.”

           “Well this guy usually makes a point to clam up and avoid social situations, so this is one of the few times I get to have a conversation with the illustrious Will Graham outside of work,” Beverly says with a laugh.

           It’s light, not unkind. Will manages a smile and accepts the wine from the waiter as he returns. The waiter’s eyes linger, focus on his gloves still on inside the restaurant. Will tucks his hands under the table and waits for him to leave. While empaths aren’t hated within society, they aren’t entirely enjoyed, either. He can sense the immediate assumption and judging.

           Far different from the taxi driver that supposed him to be cold but far too polite to voice it.

           “Have you been waiting for a moment to question him extensively on something?” Hannibal asks.

           “What’s on your mind?” Will asks distractedly, looking back to them.

Sometimes, he thinks about how Hannibal had looked, standing so close to him in the house of mirrors. Perhaps he Dreamed it, something his mind created because it wanted to be, and yet; there was something in the way he spoke words that would be treason should Jack Crawford hear them, and here he was ensuring that Will was in a position to be protected. His question now is much the same, and Will swears he can see that same hint of hunger as he studies Beverly with a keen attention to her squared shoulders despite the casual setting.

           I’m fond of you.

           “I was wondering what your thoughts were on the empath Jack’s having you track on the side.”

           Can you see?

           “What do you mean?” Will frowns.

           “I just want to hear what you have to say,” she says, but that’s not quite how it sounds.

“I don’t think that’s true,” he retorts, and it grants him a laugh.

           “You’re going to probably think I’m an ass hole after this,” she warns. “But I like taking things head on.”

           “I’ll live,” Will promises, taking a sip of white wine. It is light, buttery on the palate as the server said when he first suggested it. He notes Beverly tracking it, and he forces a smile.

           “When you first put your hands in the victim’s chest cavity, afterwards you described this as being some sort of homage to you. You said that the person asked you if you could see.”

           He thinks of Slowinski, how his life hangs in the balance of whether or not Dolarhyde can find him. He tastes the bitter burn of monkshood, and it takes another long sip of wine before he can sound perfectly normal.

           “It was a disorienting experience, but I recall” he says. Barriers. Compartmentalize. “What about it?”

           She takes a sip of her wine –to steady herself, Will notes –and she accepts a plate and an offering of hummus from Hannibal. “The second time, you tell Jack he’s an empath, but you make no mention of this person saying anything specifically. Just that they were weaponizing their gift.”

           Will could see where this was going. He busies his hands with his food, and he savors the warmth of the naan in his palms.

           “Did he say anything that time? Or did it go from him reaching out to you to nothing at all?”

           One thing Will both loves yet loathes is Beverly Katz’s tenacity for diving right to the point. Maybe, if Will hadn’t yet felt such a distinctive…need to protect this person in the moment, odd as it was, he’d tell her the words ringing in his head, nudging, pushing? And yet it would be a disservice, somehow, to tell her how protective, almost endearing it was that in the midst of all of this someone is attempting to save him from himself. From the institution that holds him.

           He can’t quite say it like that to Jack, though. That’s a surefire way to fail his psyche-evaluation. To retirement.

           To turning out like Dolarhyde.

           “He likely lost interest when I didn’t respond. I think Jack was right to pull me. No action led to boredom, so he’s escalating,” Will says, swiping the bread through the hummus. He won’t look at her eyes.

           He’d hissed to Lecter that the rogue empath was taunting him. It seemed Hannibal had kept his secret, left it there among the distorted glass and tilting halls.

           “Do psychopaths do that? Or rogue empaths, for that matter?” Beverly asks, confused.

           “I suppose it’s possible,” Hannibal admits, cutting in smoothly. “It depends on the ultimate intentions of the empath. Are they attempting to draw Agent Graham out specifically, or are they comfortable so long as they have someone’s attention?”

           “I guess that’s what I’m wondering if you gleaned something the second time. I’m confused that it’s so…contrasting from the first time they struck.”

           Will polishes off the rest of the wine and tears into the hummus with a single-minded vengeance. “That, and you had to ensure that if I drank tonight, it wasn’t alone.”

           She snickers rather than blusters, and maybe that’s why he likes her, for a neurotypical.

           “If he strikes again, get me there asap, and you’ll get the reaction in real time so you trust the source,” he suggests. “I’m thinking back now, and what I said in the moment would have been the most honest. In the moment, we say what we see, we say what we feel. If that’s what I said, that’s what I said.”

           “Thanks for the permission,” she replies after a beat, saluting him with her glass. “Now, I’ll make up for the interrogation with a round of drinks after dinner. You’re always a good sport, Graham.”

           It’s not alcoholism if he drinks with others. Will allows himself to relax.

           It’ll look good right before the evaluation.

-

           He’s drunk by the time Hannibal safely returns them to his humble abode. Everything is slippery, falling away, and he thinks of the first time he watched a fish die. How his father hit it, and he’d barfed later, unable to peel the death from his eyes.

           “Are you comfortable walking by yourself, Will?” Hannibal asks, and everything’s damp to the touch. Will isn’t sure if he sounds angry or if he’s amused, and gloved hands tuck themselves into pockets. Beverly had gone home in an Uber, promising to pick up her car in the morning. If she felt liquor as much as Will currently did, she was going to regret her life choices in the morning. He would, too, but right now he feels nice. Things feel nice. Damp, but nice. Why damp? He inhales, and the air is wet. He wonders if he’s thinking too much about that fucking fish. How it gaped, staring, dying.

           “Yes, thanks, Dr. Lecter.”

           “Please, call me Hannibal.”

           Will likes the feel of that, how it compresses in his chest and makes his heart constrict. He thinks of how close they’d pressed together in the wardrobe, his cheek to the woolen coat, and Hannibal had held him so tightly.

           He’s drunk, and it sounds like a god damn dream. He needs to hold it together but he can’t, and this was the sort of drunk he’d once told Hannibal about, the kind of drunk where being an empath wasn’t so bad. The dangerous kind. The kind where reality can be a dream, the dream being a life where one could touch someone whenever they wanted.

           He doesn’t often think about touching people, but dreams are like that. You want something you don’t allow yourself to normally think of. You long for it. You hope for it.

           “Dreams,” he manages to say –out of all of that –and he follows Hannibal into the house, taking his jacket off and allowing it to hang in the hallway. “How did you follow me into my headspace? I thought to ask at the time, but I…”

           He inhales the taste of Hannibal Lecter’s home, and he trails off, studying the warm tone and how it continues to constrict his heart, panging tight and hungry. He wonders what Alana would say, if she could see him now. Obsessed, indeed.

           “You grabbed my hand. I’ve heard it sometimes possible with E-2’s, so I supposed it plausible with an E-3. It’s never happened to me before, but it’s an experience I’ll never forget. I thought to thank you for it after, but it seemed a tasteless thing to thank you for.”

           Hannibal leads him straight to the guest bedroom. It makes sense, given how he struggles up the stairs, but it makes Will think of how closely they’d been pressed, how lightly he’d been touched. Fuck, he’s too drunk. He can’t handle the overwhelming sense of his own feelings at the moment. He’s once again grateful he can’t sense anything from Hannibal.

           He’d eaten monkshood within the shabby shelter of Will’s crumbling brain. Hannibal Lecter truly was something else.

           He wants to say as such, but he forgets to, somewhere between shuffling into a spare set of pajamas and having a glass of water forced down. He watches Hannibal’s ease, how his vision wavers in and out but still continues to fixate solely on him.

           Alana thought of it as obsession. Will wonders what Hannibal would think of his breaking into his office.

           “You didn’t tell them what I said about the empath,” he recalls, just before Hannibal leaves the room.

           Hannibal pauses and acknowledges it with a tilt of his head. Will’s vision swims, and he fully accepts he will be vomiting in the morning. “I am in your corner, Will. I wouldn’t have you doubt that.”

           A rogue empath hunting him down to make him Become wouldn’t look good while his mind crumbled as he chased Dolarhyde. Hannibal is protecting him.

           “Do you remember when you asked about my sex life, Dr. Lecter?” Will asks, unprompted.

           Hannibal’s amused, and Will’s too drunk to yet feel shame. “Good night, Will.”

           “No, I’m going somewhere with this. For your study of empathy.”

           There’s something about Hannibal, how he looks at Will. Sometimes Will thinks it’s that he’s intrigued or amused, or he wonders if he is a puzzle that the doctor is trying to put together. Perhaps there is something less professional in how his eyes darken perceptively, but this is the sort of thing that is dangerous for Will. He’s only feeding off of his own emotions, and his own emotions are terrible at best and terrifying at their worst.

           “I spoke of being able to numb myself enough that another person’s emotions and skin didn’t overwhelm me.”

           Hannibal’s smile is lethal. “I recall.”

           “This is how drunk I have to be in order to bear it.”

           Hannibal takes that information with the same expression he had when he first found Will stumbling through the hallways of the house of mirrors –hunger. Something a little wicked, and Will thinks of bare hands passing over poetry, tasting the first sense of the good doctor for who he was behind such a normally modest façade.

           Will falls into a drunken stupor that could be called sleep, if it wasn’t for such wonderful Dreams.

-

           He dreams Hannibal is behind his sturdy walls. They rise high, and the stag paces along the tree line, watching. Somehow, the space feels bigger, a little more room for another row of herbs to grow. The poisoner and the healing hand. The air has a hint of thyme.

           He isn’t sure how they are naked together, only that they are. There is something in the way of his dreams that he blinks, and he is there, as though it always was. Then he blinks again and it is another place that he always was, but one thing that is for certain is that Hannibal is there, his kiss is enough to get drunk off of; Will is certainly drunk off of it, and it is to the early morning he wakes, still drunk, puking into the first toilet he can find.

           He thanks whatever God is listening at the moment that he managed to get to a toilet in time. He’s not quite sure he’d live down the shame of having to clean vomit off of Hannibal Lecter’s woven rug that belonged somewhere in a museum rather than someone’s floor.

           His dreams pass over his eyes, but mornings are the best times to forget dreams. They become hazy, odd, and as he digs through the cupboards and is relieved to find mouthwash, Will is able to convince himself that he didn’t have wildly inappropriate dreams about his therapist, that he didn’t dream that they pressed monkshood to one another’s lips, that they didn’t dare and share a kiss.

           It takes another round of dry-heaving and a good scrubbing of cold water to his face, but Will Graham walks out of the guest bathroom having managed to do what most people are able to do with dreams –forget them entirely. He thinks instead of the row of thyme that’d sprouted since his last trip into the bone arena of his skull.

           “How are you feeling?” Hannibal asks the moment Will walks into the kitchen.

He’s already prepared a breakfast that was surely made with drinking in mind, a healthy helping of grease wrapped in lemon and honey-glazed salmon with eggs on the side. Will accepts it and sits up to the bar where Hannibal is busy with finishing his cup of coffee, newspaper in hand.

“Nothing I haven’t felt before,” Will reassures him.

           “Were you ill?”

           It’s a nice way of asking if he vomited. He shrugs a shoulder and focuses instead on the scents of the breakfast, testing the water. Is it safe to eat? The lingering flavors sit in the back of his throat before he swallows them down and deems them safe.

           “Anything good?” Will asks, nodding to the paper.

           “I woke thinking about your killer,” Hannibal replies, and he sets the paper down, smoothing the creases along the article he’s reading. “He’s made the front page.”

           It’s the house of mirrors where Randall Tier was found. Police tape sections it off despite the fact the body is long gone and the stains are removed. The scene was a symbol, but the location in of itself is irrelevant because it was only a prop, used merely to mock Will as his mind attempts to rend itself in two.

           Will remembers vaguely mentioning the killer, but it’s like attempting to look through a windowpane in a downpour. Everything is streaked, grey somehow, and he absentmindedly takes a bite of food, gloved hand gripping the fork with just a little too much pressure.

           “Why did you wake thinking about him?”

           “You never explained why you thought he was taunting you.”

           Will chews the salmon to a paste before he swallows. “Why didn’t you tell them what I said?”

           “Because I first wanted to understand what you said,” says Hannibal without missing a beat. He tracks Will’s next bite, lips pressed to a flat line. “How can I relay something I myself don’t know?”

           Will manages another two bites before he thinks he can explain himself in a way that doesn’t make him sound just mentally unstable enough for Hannibal to turn him in. Despite the richness of the food, it’s not overwhelming. The tightness in his stomach seems to be hunger rather than nausea.

           “He spoke to me,” he says, spearing a bite of egg.

           “You heard him?”

           He glances up and studies the curiosity on Hannibal Lecter’s face. So perfectly neutral, and Will is tempted to remove his gloves just to reach out his bare hands and maybe see something for once.

           “With noise and clarity.”

           “What did he ask you?”

           “He asked if I could see.”

           Can you see?

           “What is it he wanted you to see?” Hannibal wonders, and he presses his palms to the warm coffee cup. He leans back against the counter and props himself up, a generally rumpled appearance for the good doctor.

           This takes somewhat longer for Will to share, and he forces a few more bites of salmon down, the lemon bitter but welcome on his tongue.

           “Myself.”

           Hannibal’s head tilts just slightly to the side, but the corners of his eyes tighten, and Will can see that hint of hunger, of craving for something.

           I’m fond of you.

           “Did you see yourself in the house of mirrors? Or did you see yourself in Randall Tier?”

           “Both. I…Randall Tier is the house of mirrors. Every time he contorted himself into some shape that wasn’t his, every time he made himself into something else for every person he came across, I’ve done something like that.”

           Hannibal’s laugh was light, not unkind. “You have refused to contort yourself to many of us.”

           “No, but I can’t help but take just enough of everyone along with me that I can’t separate it anymore. He…he knows how Hobbs…”

           He doesn’t want to say it. How he and Hobbs are the same, even now with him six feet under. He needs to see Abigail today, needs to prepare for the evaluation. He needs to see Abigail, but in his most terrifying dreams he is Abigail –but aren’t they? They both died that day, died then returned not completely whole. Maybe there is something to the thought, that he has to see her because it seems to be the only way he can marginally feel whole.

           “What does he gain from making you see? What is he wanting from you?”

           Will finishes the eggs and lets the tines of the fork drag through the honeyed sauce. That is perhaps what is the most terrifying aspect of it, alongside somehow sympathizing with the monster murdering these people. Tools, he reminds himself. He thinks of these people as tools.

           “He wants me to see what they’re trying to make me become,” he admits, and this isn’t like before when fear and adrenaline forced him to be intimate and confined in tight spaces with Hannibal. It’s a quiet, immaculate kitchen, nothing in the world to distract him from honestly apart from his own blunt, stubborn refusal. “I think that…that this person is trying to save me from dying at the hands of the FBI. I think he knows something that we don’t.”

           He chances a look to Hannibal’s face. It’s contemplative, his brow furrowed as he makes quick work of wiping down the counter where his mug left a ring of fog on the granite. Hazy, grey streaks of dreams come, unprompted, and Will wonders if he managed to mention that the night before, or if he’d said something otherwise embarrassing that’s caused the talk this morning.

           He finishes his plate, and there’s something bordering on domestic as Hannibal takes it to rinse it in the sink.

           “Why didn’t you feel comfortable telling me then?”

           Will thinks of the hunger in Hannibal’s eyes that day, that tenseness as though he’d been prepared to hold Will there until he fucking talked. “I wasn’t sure if I could trust you.”

           Hannibal’s smile is graceful that time. He offers coffee and makes short work of preparing he grounds, fresh from this morning. “You trust me now, though?”

           “Dr. Lecter –”

           “Hannibal.”

           “Hannibal,” Will corrects, “you literally have every reason in the world to call Jack Crawford right now and have me arrested for at least four felonies. Why haven’t you?”

           Hannibal doesn’t miss a beat, focused on the espresso machine. “I’ve already told you that, Will. I’m fond of you.”

           “Yeah, well,” Will huffs, “I’m fond of you, too.”

           And then it’s said, and it’s too big for the room they’re sitting in. It’s too big for his lungs that quite suddenly deflate, and it’s too big for the way he’s entirely sure Hannibal’s smile is more telling than it should be. He likes that smile, though. There’s something nice about it, and there’s something nice about not quite being able to read him despite the complaints to the contrary. Dr. Lecter is interesting. Dr. Lecter is different.

           Dr. Lecter is staring at him.

           He offers Will the cup of espresso, his lips curved ever-so-slightly. “Will you drink this without your gloves on?”

           For a wild moment, Will thinks of dragging his hands over Lecter’s office, craving every inch and marveling at the vast sensations. How close he felt, yet far enough away to only catch imprints. And now he’s suddenly being given permission? He wants to rip his gloves off, touch his palms to the surface of the kitchen where Hannibal so clearly loves to work; wants to press his palms to cheeks with hollowed, cruel edges that seem sharp enough to cut.

           If Alana could see him now…

           He removes his gloves slowly so that the good doctor can see and understand the motion. Then, he reaches out and accepts the piping hot cup, small enough that his palms encase it.

           There is a hunger there, something that drags across his ribs as a bow along cello strings. He blows on the cup, both resigned and wickedly excited for the way it’s going to burn all the way down. When his lips press to the edge of the cup, there’s a wild feeling that he’s somehow sharing a kiss, and without anymore preamble, he tilts his head back and sucks the piping hot drink down.

           When he looks back at Hannibal, there’s an intimate expression on the planes of his face that suggests Will had done everything Hannibal could have hoped for. Will’s palms are still tingling, stinging from the heat, but it compares nothing to the fire in his throat that claws down to his stomach. He has the briefest moment of indulging in a bad habit, and it’s difficult to say if he picked that up from the cup, or if it’s something much his own.

           Either way, he’s drowning in it, that feeling. Something that is pronounced enough it lingers long after the heat does, after his throat stops complaining from the onslaught.

           “To Abigail?” Will suggests hoarsely, when Hannibal makes no comment.

           “To Abigail,” Hannibal agrees.

[ifeveristoday]

Buffy Summers’s Diary (X)

So my follower count jumped up by a lot since I posted about the Boom!verse, so I’d like to say hey. I will keep thinking and posting about the Boom!verse because I really enjoy it. Hopefully, my recaps/reactions continue to be amusing/useful to you guys.

That said, this side blog is mainly for me to post first drafts of fic and reblog all! the! gif sets! about Buffy and co. And she’s my favorite so I will not tolerate Buffy Summers slander. But I also won’t shit over the other characters, even the ones I’m not as fond of, because again - they’re someone’s favorite. I’m just here to be snarky and occasionally thoughtful.

On with the latest installment of my pastiche!

 Eating dinner at Tara’s was always an experience. Candles lit, the warm scent of sandalwood in the air – I missed those nights when I was invited over for dinner at her and Willow’s place. Tara had a way of making any place feel like a home – lived in and cozy.

I didn’t want to arrive empty handed, especially after such a long time of not seeing her. It was mostly out of guilt – it was hard to reconcile the idea of Willow, my best friend versus the woman who had recklessly lied and imploded her relationship with Tara. Dawn hadn’t been right when she accused me of choosing sides, but I hadn’t exactly done the best job of supporting Tara, either.

After mindlessly wandering the aisles of the specialty grocery store -ugh, I know. So LA. I found a jar of a locally farmed honey. It was packed in a pretty glass jar and there was a handwritten label pasted on it. I remembered the fully stocked cabinet of tea in Tara’s home – the honey would go perfectly with it.

 Dawn opened the door when I knocked. ‘You came,’ she said, with some surprise.

‘I said I would.’

I handed her the jar. ‘Where’s Tara?’

‘In the kitchen. She’s finishing the last dish.’

It smelled delicious, garlic and buttery and rich. I went into the kitchen, where Tara was frowning at something on the stove.

‘Can I help?’

She jumped slightly. ‘Oh hey, Buffy.’ She smiled, and every worry I had that she would resent me faded away. ‘I’m just steaming this broccoli. I’m doing vegetarian tonight, is that okay? I could make you some chicken – I would just have to defrost it.’

‘No, it’s fine. Vegetarian actually sounds really good. I’ve been eating nothing but junk at work this whole week. It’s like we’re sponsored by Big Carb.’

She grinned. ‘Well, I made eggplant lasagna and tofu salad. The broccoli is just extra veggies. Dawnie took care of dessert.’

‘She did?’

Tara laughed. ‘She bought it from the bakery down the street. It’s safe.’

‘Oh, thank God.’

‘I heard that,’ Dawn called from the living room. ‘You’re just not ready for my flavor combinations.’

‘You have the palate of a six-year-old.’

‘I wouldn’t say that. I would say at least eight,’ Tara mused.

‘Tara,’ Dawn protested.

‘Dawnie,’ she teased back. ‘And Buffy, you can just sit, I’m all good here.’

‘So how’s everything going at the studio?’ I stirred around my salad, picking up crunchy noodles.

Tara brightened. ‘Really good. I’m doing a workshop for a women’s shelter – it’s open to the general public too. It’s about surviving a fundamentalist cult.’

‘Really? That sounds cool. I wonder if Kendra would be interested in that – I’ll email her tonight.’

‘That would be great publicity. I’ll let Lily know – poor thing is running that shelter all by herself, I’m sure extra attention would bring in extra money.’

‘I can’t promise anything,’ I said, ‘but I’ll do my best to pitch the idea.’

‘Oh, I know. I still appreciate it, though. I’m also doing a freelance job, so I’ll have some funds to pass on to the shelter.’

‘What’s the freelance gig?’ Dawn asked.

‘I’m doing a decorating job – it’s only one office, so it’s not too complicated. It’s for a law firm.’

Small bells began to sound in my head.

‘Which law firm?’

‘That big one downtown. Wolfe, Ram and Hurt.’

The bells became a noisy choir. I swallowed, not tasting the sesame dressing.

‘For who?’

‘Uh, let me think. Ah, a Mr. Delaney?’

Dawn whipped her head around to stare at me. ‘Delaney? Isn’t that..’

‘Angel. You’re decorating Liam Delaney’s office?’

‘That’s it,’ Tara said. ‘Yes. He set up the appointment last week. Actually, his assistant did, then he called to confirm.’

‘Angel’s our old neighbor. And Buffy had a big crush on him,’ Dawn announced.

‘Thanks, Dawn.’ I gritted my teeth. ‘And for the record, it was not a big crush. He was my best friend’s older brother.’

Tara nodded in understanding. ‘Well, while he’s not my preference, he sounded pretty hot on the phone.’

‘Eh,’ Dawn shrugged. ‘He’s all right if you like tall, brooding guys. And jocks.’

‘Angel’s not a jock.’

‘Yeah he was. He was on the football team!’

‘For one season. He quit and joined the art club.’

‘He did? Didn’t see that on a plaque at Hemery. Anyway, Buffy’s type is a jock.’

‘No it isn’t.’

Dawn rolled her eyes. ‘Okay, with the exception of Billy, every boyfriend you had in high school was a jock. Then there was Riley,’ her mouth twisted with distaste. ‘I guess that was more work-related, though.’

‘They had other interests. I have other interests. This is a slander against athletes. You’re an athlete.’

‘Touche. So have you talked to him?’

‘We met for coffee. Tara, this lasagna is awesome.’

‘I can give you the recipe after,’ Tara offered. ‘It’s pretty easy to make.’

‘Real smooth, Buffy. Way to be all avoidy.’ Dawn snorted.

‘Liam’s fine,’ I stressed. ‘He’s dating my co-worker. We’re acquaintances. Anyway, it’s none of your business.’

‘He’s dating? Oh. That’s a surprise. I heard from Mom he was kind of a wreck the last time she saw him.’

‘Yes, he’s dating. And not interested in me, because I am also not interested in him.’

‘Sure,’ Dawn said, unconvinced. ‘So the blushing is just a side effect.’

Tara stepped in before I threw my water at Dawn’s head. ‘I believe you, Buffy. And there is nothing wrong with enjoying your own company. Dating can be rough.’

‘There was another guy,’ I said. ‘Something is going on with him – but he’ll probably have to leave soon. He mentioned he had to renew his work visa.’

‘What? You didn’t tell me this!’

‘I didn’t know I had to, seeing how you’re a regular Harriet the spy,’ I said. ‘Like I said, it’s something, but I’m not sure. He was interested, but Liam kind of ruined it.’

Dawn shook his head. ‘It’s so weird hearing you call him that. I think I was twelve when I found out his real first name.’

‘It’s not like it was my personal nickname for him – his family called him that. Kathy would only use his full name when she was mad at him.’

‘Sounds like we’ve got a lot of catching up to do,’ Tara said. She stood up. ‘Help me clear up the plates? And Dawnie, if you can go get the dessert? It’s in the fridge.’

‘Thanks for the save,’ I murmured so Dawn couldn’t hear. ‘Dawn’s super intense with secrets, especially when she thinks I’m keeping something from her.’

Tara smiled gently. ‘I get it. My cousin and I used to be that close too. I kind of envy that bond you two have.’

I shook my head. ‘You’ve been a better older sister to her than I have – the last couple of years….’ I trailed off. ‘Tara, I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. It wasn’t right.’

She reached over and squeezed my shoulder. ‘I’m not mad at you, Buffy. I never was. I’m happy you’re here tonight. Don’t be a stranger, you can come around anytime.’

Her eyes sparkled. ‘Do you want me to run recon on Mr. Delaney?’

I laughed. ‘That’s sweet of you to offer, but I think the less I know about him, the better off I’ll be. He’s moved on with his life and I’m trying to do that too. It just kind of threw me – like, I was seventeen again and hearing about him eloping. It wasn’t anything then, and it’s not anything now.’

‘If you’re sure.’ Tara looked at me solemnly.

‘One hundred percent. Besides, there’s the matter of William,’ I said. ‘He’s pretty charming. In an annoying, cocky way.’

Tara raised an eyebrow. ‘William? Do tell.’

‘What about William?’ Dawn entered with a plate of cookies, each one dusted with powdered sugar. ‘Also, who’s William?’

‘The other guy. William Pratt. Also known as –’

‘Spike Pratt?’ Dawn interrupted excitedly. ‘The author?’

‘You know him?’

‘Yeah, his novels are the best to read on long flights. I can’t believe you’re dating him.’

‘We’re not. We’re just getting to know each other, but he’s cooled off. Liam told me to stay away from him, said he was a womanizing playboy.’

‘Oh right, because Angel was a saint,’ Dawn said dismissively. ‘There were always girls going in and out of his house.’

‘Yes, but I know-knew him better than I do William. And people should have second chances. He’s been very respectful with me.’

‘Pe-people can change,’ Tara said. She bit her lip. ‘Sometimes not for the better.’

‘Right,’ Dawn said quickly. ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater, I say.’ She looked at me sharply. ‘Maybe you should stay away from him.’

‘The Summers’s curse is in full effect, nothing is going to happen. And not everyone is going to turn out like Riley. He seems to be happily married now.’

‘Yeah, well if karma was real,’ Dawn said. ‘I just don’t want you to get hurt again.’

I couldn’t help it. I pulled her into a hug. ‘I know. And I love you for that. But I’m a big girl and …I do what I want.’

She patted my back. ‘Yeah, but I call dibs on I told you so later.’

‘I expect nothing less.’

‘Boys are dumb,’ Tara said lightly. ‘That doesn’t really change with age.’ She plucked a cookie off the plate and offered it to me.

‘They really are,’ I sighed. I bit into the crumbly softness, the sugar dusting my mouth. ‘But I’m tired of talking about me. What else is going on in your life?’

Tara looked down bashfully. ‘Well, I think I’m going to adopt a cat, and I finally finished all the seasons of the X-Files, work is going great, Dawnie is helping me with the apps…’

‘What apps?’

‘Dating apps,’ Dawn said. ‘I let Tara see my profile and then set her up with her own account.’

‘You’re on dating apps?’

‘Uh yeah. Everyone is on dating apps, no one meets in the wild anymore,’ Dawn said. ‘Besides, it’s fun.’

‘But – they’re strangers. They could be anyone. Dangerous anyones.’

‘I’m not stupid, I have filters in place. You’re just paranoid because of what happened with Xander.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Because Xander got codfished. Multiple times. One of them turned out to be an escaped convict.’

‘Catfished,’ Dawn said exasperatedly. ‘And he met Anya on an app. She was nice. Sort of.’

‘I’ve gone on a few dates,’ Tara said. ‘All very nice women. No serial killers in the lot.’

‘It’s perfectly safe, Buffy. Look, I just bypass all the men who have lots of gym pictures, hiking pictures, and golfing pictures. Oh, and if they quote Borat.’

‘That’s like a third of LA. Who’s even left?’

‘Nice guys, I swear. And sometimes,’ Dawn shifted in her seat, ‘it’s not about the dates.’

Tara coughed. ‘I have a book club you could join, Buffy. If you want to meet nice people.’

Objectively, I knew I shouldn’t have been surprised. Dawn was twenty-four years old, I didn’t think she was at home knitting tea cozies. But still. She was my baby sister.

‘I think I need to see your feed.’

‘No way. You have judgment face. You’re just going to say mean stuff about all of them.’

‘I will not,’ I lied. ‘If they’re as nice as you say.’

‘Not in a million years. You can make your own profile.’

‘Ugh. No thank you. I have to have a social media presence for work and it makes me want to burn down the internet.’

‘It’s okay as long as you don’t read the comments. Or check the grammar,’ Tara said helpfully. ‘People generally mean well.’

‘That hasn’t really been my experience. I’ll just have to live vicariously through you two.’

‘Here’s what I’m thinking – if this something doesn’t work out with Spike – you could try the app. Maybe find a nice Joe Normal.’ Dawn shrugged. ‘It’s really not a big deal.’

‘I’ll have to get back to you on that. Can you email me the lasagna recipe, Tara?’

‘Of course. Take some cookies home, there’s too much for me to eat by myself.’

She walked us to her hallway and hugged us both. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, Dawnie. And you,’ she punched my shoulder playfully. ‘You are always welcome to stop by. You’re family.’

I was overwhelmed. ‘Thanks, Tara. I’ll let you know about that article about the shelter. I could volunteer at the very least.’

‘I’d like that. Lily would like it too, I’m sure.’

  ‘Tara’s doing really well, isn’t she?’ 

Dawn nodded. ‘She is. I think she’s moved on.’

‘That’s good. I’m happy for her.’

‘But…’ Dawn said. ‘You have that look on your face.’

‘I thought she and Willow would have made it. After Xander and Anya broke up, they were supposed to be the rock solid couple. I guess that was selfish of me.’

‘Well, you know what I think about Willow. Tara might have forgiven her, but I haven’t. And I don’t like Kennedy.’

‘She’s an acquired taste. And it doesn’t matter what we think – Willow loves her. She sees something in her that is valuable.’

‘She calls you a gringa idiota behind your back, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. She doesn’t know that I know Spanish.’

‘I just have to remember that Willow loves her. That’s all that matters.’ I clenched my fist. ‘She’s a valuable, worthy person.’

‘If you say so,’ Dawn said doubtfully. ‘I think she’s a rebound and both of them deserve better.’

‘Yeah, but I can’t tell Will that. It’s her life.’

‘Maybe you could just hint at it? Are you still doing those weekend brunches?’

‘Yeah. We have to schedule one soon, she’s been really busy with wedding planning. Do you want to come?’

‘I’ll pass. I have plans for the weekend.’

‘Do they involve sketchy app guys?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’re being safe right? Mom gave you the talk?’

Dawn grimaced. ‘Yes, and the book and the PowerPoint. Relax, Buffy. I know what I’m doing.’

‘Will you text me when you leave at least? And when you’re on your way home?’

‘Okay. Anything else, Mom?’

‘Mom would have given you Mace to put in your purse – she did, didn’t she?’

‘Yep. It’s millennial pink.’

‘Then we’re good.’

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#Buffy Summer’s Diary

[idolizerp]

LOADING INFORMATION ON CHERRY BOMB!’S MAIN DANCE GUN MONA...

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: N/A CURRENT AGE: 25 DEBUT AGE: 19 TRAINEE SINCE AGE: 14 COMPANY: MSG SECONDARY SKILL: Modeling (cf)

IDOL PROFILE

NICKNAME(S): Momo, Moe, Mong (몽), 징징 INSPIRATION: As a child, she’d perform for her father, her brother, and eventually her small town community and found a lot of joy in entertaining them and making them laugh. She’s always loved performing and singing, but hadn’t really thought about doing it for a profession, despite being musically inclined. A young fan of the first-generation K-pop groups like S.E.S and Fin.K.L., she was persuaded to perform on K-pop Star just to see if she liked performing, and found it exhilarating. Hasn’t looked back since. SPECIAL TALENTS:

No-laughing challenge master

Notoriously bad at tongue twisters

Has a whistle register

NOTABLE FACTS:

Very active on her personal and the groups’ SNS and interacts a lot with fans of both the group and herself personally

When she was a K-pop Star contestant, she notably performed ‘U Go Girl’ and impressed the judges with her energy (and cuteness)

Is “jokingly” known to be a huge party girl, idol friends and celebrities she’s familiar with say she has an “iron stomach” when it comes to soju

Known for her funny expressions that can’t hide how she feels - most often it’s her resting bitch face or an unamused one, but also some wacky ones

Crochets little stuffed animals as a hobby

IDOL GOALS

SHORT-TERM GOALS:

Right now, she’s looking to solidify her position as a “CF queen” — wants brands to look at her as someone that’s popular with general public and that, frankly, they’ll shell out big bucks to exclusively sign as their brand model. She also wants to venture into another field or two to supplement the wave of popularity she’s been lucky to experience thus far: an acting stint, perhaps, or maybe variety where historically she’s been a little bit more successful and more comfortable with. More for herself than for her career, she’s been keen on becoming serious as a performing artist, and is looking into music production in her spare time.

LONG-TERM GOALS:

As her relevance (also known as: time frame) as an idol fades, Mona would want to try to go solo, since her love for her craft is a life-long one, but is more than ready to complement a solo career with recognition for the other talent she’s currently deciding between. She’d like to transition her “image” as that charming, relatable girl-next-door look into someone more womanly and self-assured. Someone authentic. In a more career-oriented sense, she wants to achieve the ability to pick and choose the brands that she models for and still receive hefty contracts, in the vein of Won Bin’s star power. Overall, she’d like to shed the ‘idol’ image and turn into that of an ‘artist’ - someone well-respected in the public eye that carries life-long relevance.

IDOL IMAGE

It’s an undeniable truth to say that there is a first impression of her, and that it is always, without fail, this: she’s pretty. Remarkably pretty, in a plain, malleable sort of way. Not too sharp that she cuts, alienates — just soft enough to mould into whatever you want her to be. Most people don’t care for much else besides the first look, so it’s perfectly fine that she’ll be the pretty one, memorable if only fleetingly. It works, anyway — the relatability of her features, parts of it (of her) desirable and the other parts identifiable, make her an easy pick-up for brands to plaster on their products. Girl-next-door with wisps of maturity, of a sex appeal her members don’t quite possess. The kind of soft girl that the public loves to rest between their teeth. Palatable — just so.

You don’t have to be much more than a pretty face and a good dancer, they’ve told her in the past. Don’t stray from your design, is what they mean.

Don’t be you. There’s nothing appealing about it.

She tries. Walks the tightrope between the image of her and the girl inside — tries to dull a blunt tongue, smooth a passionate expression, tame the soft cruelty that makes up her marrow. Spends years running back and forth between wanting and having. Should haves and could haves. There’s the artist she wants to be, the truth that wants to will itself into existence; then there’s the girl that’ll actually succeed — merely pretty, with hidden laughs and closed smiles, speaking well but not too much, both seductive and restrained. So consumed by the thought of others that she tries to smooth herself out until there’s nothing left of her, manufactured out of her system.

She’s told, time and again, that her beauty is the only thing that matters — and, to be frank, she’s tired of it. Tired of being told. So she resolves to take it — their power, her weakness — into her own hands, tilt the scales in her favor. Manifest destiny, or some bullshit like that.

The public eats it up.

The newfound authenticity to her — the poignant way she expresses a confidence she’s found that she’s had, how she isn’t afraid to be desirable, how she pushes the boundary of acceptably self-loving is not so off-putting as it is intriguing. Everybody loves to hate on a woman in control, except with the way she carries herself, haughty but not in-your-face, there’s less to hate and more to admire. It helps that she’s older now, less tied to a youthful, innocent image and settling into the confident niche of her group like she was always meant to be there. Girl-next-door that’s matured into a woman — still pretty, still relatable, but with a voice that’s truly her own. Fears nothing: not the hurtful comments, lustful gazes — doesn’t mind being the sophisticated ‘sex bomb’ she’s grown to be one minute, all-natural the next, an everyday adult woman.

It’s appealing, she supposes, to see a girl grow up. Become more assertive, fill into her skin (or shed the layers that were well past due). Not trying to appease, not blinded by the limelight. At a time when she’s finally happy with herself, everyone seems to be happy with her too. With a tacit blessing, she’s let herself be unafraid to be her, for now.

Just don’t stray out of line, they whisper.

(I don’t care, she wants to say back.)

IDOL HISTORY

In the summer of 1999, she leaves.

.

It doesn’t take Mona very long to realize that her mother isn’t coming back. What with the way her father sits on the side of the bed that used to be hers, head in his palms, back poised for a knife that isn’t there, but it feels like he’s bleeding anyway. She stops questioning him soon after that — too scared, perhaps, of the consequences. One parent’s gone, no need for another to disappear too.

Home isn’t ever the same afterwards. Going from four to barely three leaves a big gaping hole in the fabric, seams loose and aching. Dinners, for example, are sombre affairs, heavy with the knowledge of the empty chair at the table. Weekends, too, are quiet — where her mother used to sing, silence makes itself heard, a loud ringing in the ears. The sound of loss is deafening, they all find out in time.

She tries to pretend that it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine.

(It’s not, of course. Six year old fingers aren’t meant to hold up the spines of men — their wilting, their hollowness. No wonder she doesn’t grow up proper; no wonder that there ends up being something wrong.)

There are days when her father cannot look at her. She has her mother’s eyes.

.

Sunday in July. S.E.S. and sunlight waft through old speakers and cracks in the curtains respectively. Like calm before a storm.

Mona can’t help but sing along when the chorus comes on, all light tone and childish chipper. She realizes — there’s been no singing since she left. Since she took the singing with her. Stops short when father’s wiry figure hovers at the doorway, quiet as always. Time won’t heal his wounds, but it has allowed him to forget as a reprieve. Until now.

“I didn’t —“

“Keep singing, Mona,” he says. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen such a smile — so sad, but so happy at once. “It’s beautiful.”

So she does.

.

The moment she steps onto the shining, fluorescent-washed stage is the time she realizes: it’s different. Not at all like sinking her feet into the sofa of her living room, moving like clockwork to her father’s favorite songs, singing along. Nor is it like standing on the rickety wooden floor of her local community center, performing for the people she’s grown up around, who would love her no matter what she’d do.

This is Seoul, with all of its steel and its glamour and a cruelty that leaves fourteen year old her starstruck. This is the tipping point.

After all is said and done, she doesn’t get very far. Pretty, and a vibrant performer, but too rough, too unpolished to win a competition of the best. She’s not even sure the praise they’d given her was real — everything about it had seemed so manufactured. Machinery running through their motions. Leaves her feeling like she had less than she had started with; and she wants more.

Someone slips her a small white card before she leaves the building. You’ve got potential, they’d said. Audition.

Weeks pass and the details imprints themselves into the back of her brain: rudimentary black symbols that bely the possibility of fame, of fortune, of a life greater than her small town all in the sharp cuts of their lines. Curiosity has always been her vice, thorns strangling tighter until she has to find out what’s on the other side.

The tension, her wanting: both palpable. Her little town on the outskirts of Daegu cannot contain it. Everything’s tasteless, everything’s sober. It’s painfully obvious that she wants this. Wants more. Her mother, she recalls, had felt the same way. The parallels scare her. Her mother’s eyes. Her mother’s voice. Her mother’s self-regard. Hers, now, too.

She hates the look in her father’s eyes when she says she’s going to Seoul. Hates it even more when she forgets how he looked when she gets accepted by MSG entertainment, to begin her training as soon as possible.

When she packs her bags and says goodbye, she leaves him slumped in the dining chair she’d made her own for years.

Three becomes two. Feels like there’s nothing left of family anymore.

.

Trainee life is cyclical. Breathe in, breathe out: dance, sing, weigh, repeat. She wonders: why did they let her through when all they seem to want is to strip her gone? They lash her tongue to strip the satoori from her vocabulary; starve away the parts of her that make her her — her bold tongue, her small-town naivety, her childish innocence. Scrub the poverty from her until she’s wiped clean. You’re not here to be you, they tell her in between lines. You’re here to be a god.

Giving her best becomes harder when there’s nothing left to give, so she starts giving pieces of herself in its place. She wants this, she wants this, she wants this. Guilt propels her — her father, all the way back in Daegu, sitting with his head in his palms like she’d left him, just like her mother had before her. All the way here and she hears his howling (or maybe now it’s coming from her).

Torn between this choice: the her of before, and the her that could be.

She chooses the latter. Too many bridges burnt now to go back, she thinks. See the selfish through.

.

Idol life is an open door leading straight into hell.

She’s always so tired. Always so lost. She’d thought wrong: had been mistaken that they’d finally let her be when she debuted. Their hands go deeper now — not ghosting along the lines of her, but into her, become her ribcage and her spine and her mouth. Dissonance, it’s termed: her between closed doors, witching hour in her bedroom, and her in front of the camera. Does her father recognize her? Does she?

Pretty, they tack onto her shoulders. Pretty and docile. Perhaps it’s because she’s become awkward — lost her confidence as she’s risen to the top — but when they tell her keep quiet, she listens. Strange, feeling faceless when the only thing she’s known for is her face. It frustrates her, going through the motions, known foremost for the outside of her, a part of her that’s been an afterthought; then, just barely, how well she dances, how her body moves. Nothing about her — her love for music, her craft, or how funny she can be, or how much she wants to just be.

When she left her family, when she chose herself over others, she didn’t think she’d lose them both.

One day, her father calls. Asks why she sounds so sad. Because I left you, she says. Because I was selfish. And all for nothing — now I can’t even sing how I want, or act how I want, or be how I want. Are you proud of me? Do you hate me for leaving you behind?

Keep singing, Mona, he says. It’s beautiful.

(Be you, Mona. You’re beautiful.)

So she does.

.

Maybe her wounds will heal — maybe, quite possibly, they won’t. But inevitably, she’ll forget them once in a while. Slowly, she learns to let herself go — that is, the idea she has of herself go. It’s no good trying to be someone she’s not; she’s no actress, not at all suited to playing a part. They’d told her it would be her downfall, being herself,  being real. She intends to make it her strength.

It starts off slow, the slippage. A strut down the walkway, a haughty gaze at the camera, a flash of skin here and there. Candid in her interviews, still reserved, but more at ease than ever. Yeah, she’s watched adult films; yeah, she can hold her soju; yeah, she’ll talk about how she had loved a boy and lost him. The more she lets loose, the more comfort she feels — the most comfortable she’s felt in her own skin in years.

In the end, they’re intrigued by this new girl in front of them — the rawness, the realness, the subtle haughtiness. Who is this new Mona? They ask.

She’s always been this Mona, she says, smile on her face — open-mouth, teeth shining and everything.

For the first time, she feels centred. Feels alive.