#which is fantastic and more labor like that should be taken over

[sunnygang]

the problem with articles discussing "feeding our ever growing population" never seem to consider is the food waste produced by capitalism. if we eliminate capitalism, or at the very least start to discourage reckless, over spending that then LEADS to food waste.

[cuubism]

Made in an Instant (5/5)

Dream's eldritch pregnancy, conclusion

Hob has never been so angry in his eternal fucking life. He’s going to find whoever decided to kidnap his pregnant husband and brutally murder them. Back in his day, people lost hands for stealing. Maybe he’ll bring back drawing-and-quartering. Now that was a good punishment.

With Matthew and Lucienne’s help from the Dreaming, he’s managed to track the kidnappers down to an abandoned prison just outside London. It’s really too on the nose. Dream will be peeved about the lack of creativity. Hob gets teary at the thought. Fuck he’s worried about him.

He doesn’t encounter anyone as he breaks into the place, which is worrisome. Shouldn’t there be someone? Guards? Kidnappers? He’s got his ancient broadsword strapped to his back—it felt more poetic than a gun—and he’s itching to just swing it through someone. Getting hacked in half will teach them to mess with Dream.

He passes dozens of empty, decrepit cells, walking faster as he still doesn’t find anyone— then stops. Turns to the cell at his right. That’s Dream’s magic. He feels it. And as he steps closer, he finds runes traced along the floor, along the walls and bars, a cage of magical lettering.

The only problem: the cell door is already open. And Dream is nowhere to be seen.

Shit. Is Hob too late? Did they take Dream somewhere else? Did they hurt him again? He spins in place, already starting to panic, he’s going to have to—

“Hob.”

Hob whirls around. Dream is standing at the other end of the hall. His coat is rumpled, but he looks generally unharmed. Most importantly, he’s not in a prison cell.

Hob rushes over to him, embraces him. Dream hums with pleasure at the touch. “Thank God. Oh, love, thank goodness you’re okay.” He holds Dream at arm’s length, looking him over. “Are you okay? What happened? Did they let you go?”

“I freed myself,” says Dream. He holds out his wrists, which have what look like burn marks on them from some sort of manacles. “I am. Mostly. Unharmed.”

Hob takes his hands, looks over his wrists carefully. “If they bound your powers like that, then how did you get out?”

“My powers were bound.” Dream smiles craftily. “But hers were not. I wished for us to get out. And she unlocked the cell.” He really seems quite proud of it. “We worked together.” Then he grimaces, pressing a hand to his lower belly. “Unfortunately, she has now taken this wish on as her own, and, I believe, decided she wants to get out. Now.”

“Now?” Hob flits around him, trying not to panic. Again. “Isn’t it too soon?”

“Wishes are often made in an instant,” says Dream.

Hob takes him by the arm and starts bundling him towards the exit. “Alright, let’s go home, then. Christ. Did you kill the kidnappers?”

“I do not kill humans,” says Dream.

“Did you eternally punish the kidnappers?”

“Yes.” He seems frighteningly unperturbed considering he’s just been kidnapped and is now apparently going into magical labor. Maybe he’s just compartmentalizing. Dealing with it all by not thinking about it. Hob will just have to do all the freaking out for the both of them.

He gets Dream into the car. Buckles him in. Starts driving at a speed that would definitely get him a ticket if he wasn’t married to someone who could just make police officers become suddenly and mysteriously distracted.

“How are you feeling?” he asks as he drives.

Dream considers. “Hmm. Restless. I’m curious what will happen.”

“You don’t know what will happen!?”

“This is untrodden ground, Hob,” says Dream. He does not sound as concerned about it as Hob thinks he should be. But then, the pregnancy itself has never seemed to concern him as much as it has Hob. It’s the grander scale of the thing that weighs on Dream’s mind. “No Endless has carried a child before.”

That’s just absolutely fantastic.

“We will find out,” says Dream, settling deeper into his seat.

Yeah, we sure fucking will, Hob thinks.

Matthew catches up with them partway through the drive home. Dream must have sent him a message in whatever dream-way he has, though Hob doubts he intended for Matthew to actually come find them. Hob feels briefly bad about not trying to contact Matthew himself, to let him know Dream was okay, but he was a bit distracted by the whole magical labor situation.

“Who the fuck kidnaps a pregnant lady?” Matthew exclaims as he soars in through the open car window, landing awkwardly on the dashboard. Dream slants a look at him, and Matthew amends, “Uh, I mean, a pregnant dude.”

Hob’s pretty sure that wasn’t the part of the statement Dream objected to and that calling Ye Olde Lord of Dreams dude might actually be worse.

“Does that make it worse or better?” Matthew wonders.

“Their fates were sealed the moment they threatened my child,” Dream intones, ominous as a storm front. “Now their minds belong to the Dreaming, where they will be fed upon by nightmares bearing the faces of their most deeply held fears. For eternity.”

“Definitely don’t kidnap pregnant ladies,” Matthew mutters. He ruffles his feathers in a shiver. “You good now, boss?”

Dream just inclines his head.

“You good, Hobster?”

“Well, my husband is going into some kind of unprecedented magical labor,” Hob says, voice tight. “And I didn’t even get to chop anyone’s head off, so I’m a bit worked up.”

Matthew squawks in alarm. “Labor?!”

“Do not be dramatic,” says Dream.

“Sure, sure,” says Hob. “It’s a regular Tuesday.”

“I am fine,” Dream says, more firmly—this time to Matthew. “Please inform Lucienne all is well. I will send for you at a later time.”

“You freaking sure?”

This time Dream gives him a stern look, and Matthew ducks his head. “Right, right. Well, see you later, then, I guess? Um. Good luck?”

He cringes to himself, but then wheels away out the window again. Dream rubs his forehead tiredly. 

“Don’t want the whole peanut gallery in the delivery room?” Hob asks, and Dream cracks a small smile.

“Would you truly have killed them?”

“I was kind of looking forward to it actually. Bit peeved you dealt with them first.”

Dream chuckles, tension easing. Hob’s still going way above the speed limit, and should really keep his attention on the road, but still he holds out his hand on the center console. And Dream takes it.

--

At home, Dream continues to be restless. Hob bandages his wrists, not that he thinks it will really do much. Dream changes into some of Hob’s comfortable loungewear. And then just starts pacing. Walking restless circles between the kitchen and living room, back and forth, back and forth. Hob’s never seen him like this. Normally Dream is very still, in control. He doesn’t fidget.

“Shouldn’t you lie down or something?” Hob asks. The way Dream is treating this is really not helping him fret any less.

Dream keeps pacing around the kitchen. “Hmm. No. I am going for a walk,” he says, and heads for the front hall.

“A walk?” Hob follows him at a rush, nearly tripping over his own feet. “Dream—”

Dream is already putting on his shoes. “Wear a coat at least,” Hob says, draping one of his own over Dream’s shoulders.

Dream gives him an arch look. “Are you not coming along?”

“Of course I’m coming!” With a frustrated sigh, Hob puts his own shoes on too.

He follows Dream out to the street, empty at this hour of the night, and across to the park, where Dream trudges off into one of the woodland trails like he’s on a mission. Hob follows, scrambling to catch up.

The forest path is absolutely dark at this hour, lit only by scant patches of moonlight. But Dream has always seemed comfortable in the nighttime, so he doesn’t seem perturbed. Meanwhile, the empty surroundings are not settling Hob’s anxiety.

“Dream, are you sure we should be wandering about in the park?” he asks.

Dream raises an eyebrow at him. “It is not as though we will need to go to a hospital.”

“It’s just— it’s the middle of the night.” And you were just kidnapped, he thinks but doesn’t add. Hob doesn’t know what delivering an Endless baby is supposed to be like, but he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to do it in the fucking woods. “We can go to the Dreaming if you like?”

Dream shakes his head. “She wishes to be born in the Waking. I believe so she can properly meet you.”

“…Oh.” Hob’s heart squeezes. And he resigns himself to doing whatever Wish wants, even if it means delivering in Richmond Park. She’s going to be a spoiled terror, he already knows it. Much like Dream, if he’s being honest.

“Fine,” he says, and takes Dream’s arm. Pulls him close. “Why are we in the park, then?”

“Wish is restless,” Dream says. “And. I am restless. I can feel all her budding dreams, her feelings, they are wrapped up in me far more tightly than any other dreamer’s and the process of disentangling them is agitating us both. And out here it is…” He looks up at the empty sky. “Quiet.”

Again, Hob is painfully reminded that Dream verbalizes so little of what he actually feels. And he’s reminded, too, just how strange, how beyond comprehension, this pregnancy really is. Human pregnancies are already strange and miraculous, but this is… soul-bending. He can’t imagine how it must feel, for Dream to be so close to their daughter for so long and then have to figure out how to let her go.

“Okay,” he says, wrapping an arm around Dream’s waist and letting him lean on him. “Take your time, then. Both of you.”

“I was not ready,” Dream admits, “for this to happen now. I thought there would be more time.”

“I know, darling. Me too.” Hob kisses Dream’s temple, rests their heads together as they walk. “You’ll still have her though, yeah? Even after she’s born. She’s not going anywhere. It will just be a change.”

Hopefully Dream will stick to his agreement to take some maternity leave after the birth. He is really going to need it.

“And you will get to meet her,” Dream says. “I look forward to that.”

Hob does, too. God. So soon.

For a while they are quiet, just listening to the low breeze, the night birds, and the waving branches, taking in the moonlight and the isolating darkness of the park at night. It’s peaceful. A bit eerie, too. But this atmosphere is Dream’s element. He is a creature stepped right out of it. And it seems to calm him.

Finally, Hob asks, “Does it hurt?” Surely if it did he wouldn’t be strolling around out here, but then, Dream is very catlike in that he does not like to let on when he is hurting. Hob knows it well.

“No, except in the way exhaustion might be said to ‘hurt,’” Dream says. “But it’s no matter. You needn’t worry about me.”

“Dream,” Hob says quietly, “I thought we’d gotten past the point where you realize that I’m always going to worry about you.”

Dream stops walking, pulling Hob to a stop beside him. He turns to Hob, brow furrowed, and Hob takes him by the arms. “You deserve someone to worry about you,” he says. “Someone to care whether you’re feeling well. I want to do that. I want to fuss over you.”

Dream keeps staring at him, expression pinched, but then softens and says, lowly, “I like when you do.”

He’s said so before, but it can be hard, sometimes, to get things internalized with Dream. To get him to feel he can have it. Count on it.

“It’s settled, then,” Hob says, and Dream huffs. “I’ll take care of you.”

“As you wish,” says Dream, but leans in close to Hob as they start to walk along again.

Hob wonders what it all feels like. He had never watched Eleanor go into labor, it wasn’t really the done thing at the time, but he grasps the idea of what it’s meant to look like. But Dream doesn’t show much on the outside, other than his evident restlessness. Everything about his pregnancy, if something so nontraditional can be called that, is so cerebral, it leaves Hob apprehensive for how the ‘birth’ is meant to go.

It’s all a lot. It’s a lot.

“Hey,” Hob says abruptly. “I’m proud of you.”

“For… being… pregnant?”

“Yeah, for being pregnant— but more for trying again. I— even so many years later, I think about Robyn, and the things I didn’t do or should have done, and it’s daunting to put myself in that position again. Even if I want it. So, I’m glad that you’re willing to try again, because I know it’s the same for you—maybe even more so.”

“We promised to make it good,” Dream says quietly. Something Hob said to him once, when Dream had first dramatically announced that he was inexplicably expecting a child.

“And we will,” Hob promises. The more he thinks about it the more freaked out he gets, honestly, but he’s going to be self-assured for Dream. At least externally. “We will, darling.”

“You never had other children,” Dream says, more confirmation of a fact than a question.

Hob grimaces. “Couldn’t bear to. I think, if I didn’t have you, I wouldn’t want to now, either. I can’t have another family pass me by while I go on. Hurts too much.” He owes Death free drinks at the Inn till the end of the world, this time around.

“Yes,” Dream agrees, solemnly. “Better, this time. I hope.”

It will be. Hob’s determined.

He kisses Dream’s cheek, keeps him close in the circle of his arms. And they walk on into the night.

--

It’s some time later when Dream stops, seemingly at random, and says, “Okay. We can go home now.”

Hob says, incredulously, “Dream, we’re on the complete other side of the park.”

“Easily remedied,” says Dream, pulling out his sand. Before Hob can say, wait maybe you shouldn’t do that right now, the world is spinning violently around them, and their bedroom rushes up to meet them.

Dream lands primly on the bed. Hob hits the floor, only just managing to get a hand up in time to not break his nose. He rolls over onto his back, looking up at Dream. “Not to be like that, but I think pregnancy is making you crazy.”

“I have been balancing her powers with mine for months now, splitting my focus to prevent it from creating chaos in the Dreaming.” Now he sounds truly weary. “As she has grown it has become more challenging and occupied more of my attention. Her power is impulsive. Whimsical. It is like trying to contain sparks.” He smiles tiredly. “I suppose it has made me scattered, yes.”

Hob finally pushes himself up from the floor, goes to perch beside Dream. He kisses Dream’s temple. “I like your crazy.” He lays his hand on Dream’s stomach. “And hers. Even if it means I have to buy extra fire extinguishers for the sparks.”

Dream smiles, tilting his head against Hob’s.

“Now you just stay there,” Hob tells him, helping Dream get out of his coat, pulling his shoes off, and nudging until he gets settled in the center of the bed, “and let me get you whatever you need.”

“Only you,” says Dream.

Hob fetches him some water anyway.

When he gets back, he slides into bed beside Dream. “It is not long now,” Dream tells him, solemnly.

Heart lurching, Hob braces a hand on Dream’s shoulder, and… waits.

He doesn’t know what he’s waiting for.

“What are we waiting for, exactly?”

“Patience,” says Dream.

Does he have to be like that?

Well, at least he’s not writhing in pain. Hob will take the confusion of… whatever this is… over having to watch him in pain.

Dream holds out his hand. Hob takes it, twining their fingers, heart pounding with anxiety. He recognizes the moment when Dream lets most of his focus slip into the Dreaming, into himself, that endless ocean of him. His eyes fall shut, his rigid spine relaxes ever so slightly, his jaw loses its tension, and he becomes distant. Hob keeps squeezing his hand, grounding him.

Dream lets out a huge breath, squeezing tight on Hob’s hand, and reality sort of… slips.

It breaks down the middle and skids sideways, and for a moment everything is all mashed together, like a door that’s never meant to be unlocked is being jammed open so something can get through, and Hob can’t tell where his hand ends and Dream’s begins, if he’s still awake or what year it is or if they’ve been flung into the Dreaming sea, there’s a deafening whine in his ears rising in pitch, his skin prickles all over with static. And then Dream reaches into himself, into the everything-that-is-him, and where his hands go his form goes sort of inside out like he’s actually reaching out of himself instead of in. It’s incredibly nauseating to watch but Hob can’t look away, never mind that he’s not sure which direction is even up anymore.

When Dream withdraws his hands, he’s holding a baby.

For a long moment, Hob can only stare at the two of them, speechless, his tiny daughter and his insane husband who’s pulled an infant out of fucking— out of where? Hob still hasn’t gotten an answer on whether he has a uterus!

The lack of physical progression is breaking Hob’s brain, it feels like Dream’s pulled Wish right out of the fucking ether, and Hob really might pass out but he can’t pass out because Dream’s the one who’s manifested-or-whatever a whole baby so if anyone gets to pass out it’s him.

“Dream…” he whispers, incredulous.

Dream smiles tiredly. He looks absolutely exhausted now, like it’s all crashed down on him all at once. He looks down at the baby, meeting her eyes as something passes between them, then leans down to kiss her forehead. Then he shows her to Hob, holding her carefully. “Your daughter, Hob Gadling.”

Wish looks up at him with wide eyes. She isn’t crying, which normally would alarm him, but nothing about this is normal, and she didn’t come out of a womb—apparently—so she isn’t covered in blood or amniotic fluid or anything, she’s just there. She actually exists. It wasn’t all some insane fever dream.

And she looks so much like Dream, with her tuft of fluffy black baby hair and bright blue eyes. Hob touches her cheek lightly in wonder, and gets a little static shock for his trouble. When he yanks his hand back, Dream chuckles, and Hob swears Wish is laughing at him, too. He just knows it. Co-conspirators, they are. “Sparks, you said.”

“Yes. One of her many abilities.” He gestures for Hob to take the baby. “She will not shock you again.”

“Eh, I’ve dealt with worse than a little electrocution.” Hob carefully takes Wish and cradles her in his arms. “Alright, Sparkle, let’s not burn down the flat just yet, yeah?”

He barely gets the sentence out before Dream bursts into tears.

Hob only manages not to jump in shock through years of ancient holding-babies instincts. As it is, panic spikes, because Dream doesn’t cry. Not really. He often looks like he’s going to cry, but rarely lets the tears fall.

Now he’s sobbing. Hysterically sobbing, chest shaking, clutching at Hob’s shirt. Hob would be worried about his ability to breathe if Dream actually needed to breathe in the first place.

“Okay, alright, sweetheart, it’s alright.” Hob maneuvers Wish into one arm so he can cradle Dream with the other. Dream presses his face into Hob’s shoulder and wails. “Shhh, honey, oh, love, it’s okay.”

Endorphins crash? Hob thinks desperately, because he’s never seen Dream sob like that. Or at all. But he imagines it must be jarring to gradually grow a whole being inside you and then be abruptly thrown off the cliff of separation.

“Here, love. Breathe. Come on, now.” He takes Dream’s hand and guides him over so that Wish can grasp onto his finger with her little baby hand. “Do you want her back?”

Dream shakes his head, but stops hyperventilating, pushing himself further into Hob’s side. “No. You should hold her. It is just that. I cannot feel her as I once did.” He takes a shuddering breath, but steels himself. Hob wishes he wouldn’t. If there’s any time Dream shouldn’t have to shore up his emotions, it’s now. “I knew this would happen. But I have grown selfishly accustomed to her presence close to mine.”

“It’s not selfish,” Hob tells him, heart breaking. “It’s not. It’s okay. You love her. And she needed you. She still does.”

Dream lets out the heaviest of breaths, and slumps against him, utterly spent. He slips one bandaged arm behind Hob’s back, the other still stretched towards their daughter. God. Their daughter. Who Dream pulled out of what feels like thin air. It only gets stranger and more amazing the longer he thinks about it.

He looks down at her, cradled so tiny in the crook of his arm. Was Robyn that small? He can’t fully remember. But Robyn screamed and cried so much his presence filled up the room either way. Wish is quiet, just looking up at him with her wrinkly newborn face. She’s like a wisp of thought, a silent scattering of light, like Dream on some days when he fades into the shadows, just a bit. Dream had described her internal world as whimsical and vibrant and so this transition into waking must be quite overwhelming indeed. Just like it so often is for Dream.

“She’s beautiful, Dream,” he says quietly, getting choked up. Dream hums in agreement. “She’s perfect. The both of you are.” He kisses the top of Dream’s head. “I’m proud of you.”

Dream grumbles, but Hob knows how he needs to hear that sometimes.

“You should rest,” Hob continues. “You’ve been through a lot.” More than a lot. Hob still hasn’t fully gotten the panic of Dream’s disappearance out of his system. And he would not be surprised if it was affecting Dream more than he let on, too.

“I do not…” Dream starts, but trails off.

“You’ve kept an eye on her for months, darling. I’ve got her now.” He bids Dream to lay his head down on his chest, pets his hair, and Dream makes a low, pleased groan. “We’ll be okay, love. Promise.” And maybe by the time Dream wakes up again Hob will have been able to wrap his head around the existence of Wish. Probably not, but he can hope.

Dream sighs again, tiredly, but subsides, and soon enough seems to slip into proper sleep, Wish’s tiny hand still latched on to one finger.

Dream wrapped under one arm, Wish cradled in the other, Hob lets out a long breath and privately takes a moment to be relieved that everything went okay. No matter how many times Dream had tried to assure him, he had never been fully able to shake the fear that lingered from Eleanor’s death. But thankfully, weirdness of it all aside, everything seems to have worked out.

Hob looks down at Wish, who’s still just gazing up at him peacefully. Pretty soon he’s going to have to get up to get her sorted with diapers and a swaddle and whatever else a sort-of-human baby needs. She’ll need to eat as well, and he’s not sure how Dream wants to handle that. But he doesn’t want to disturb Dream’s peace so for now he just stays, holding her against his chest.

“Think it’s just us for a while, love,” he tells her. “It’s alright. It’s all been a lot for you, I bet. But you saved your da, d’you know that?” It’s pretty remarkable, when he thinks about it, that her powers had manifested enough that Dream was able to use them to escape. “You’re going to be a right terror, I can just tell already. Wishing all sorts of mischievous things. Going to have to get some proper child locks or you’ll wish yourself right out onto the street, won’t you?”

She makes a soft cry, and Hob knows it’s normal for her to cry, good even, but still it hurts his heart. Fuck, he really is going to have to move either her or Dream in order to arrange some milk. But if he takes Wish with him to the kitchen to prepare some formula, Dream will be distressed if he wakes alone. If he leaves her in a bassinet, he’s going to be stressed to leave her unattended. Maybe he’s not as prepared for this as he thought. Maybe there is no true being prepared. Especially when it had all been so different, the last time he’d had a child.

“Yo!”

Hob almost jumps again as Matthew appears and flutters down to land on the foot of the bed. If he’s not careful he’s going to have a heart attack. “Jesus Christ. Some warning?”

Matthew cringes. “Sorry. I just came to make sure he’s okay. The Dreaming went sort of inside out and it freaked everybody out.”

Hob strokes a hand through Dream’s hair. He doesn’t stir. “I think he’ll be out for a while. Did the Dreaming sort itself out?”

“Yeah, it settled down.” Matthew hops closer, peering down at Dream and Wish, tilting his head. “Damn. He really did it. I mean, I knew a few people who had babies, when I was alive— but jeez, I’m not really sure I believed it.”

“Tell me about it.” Matthew keeps peering at Wish, so Hob adds, “You can say hi to her. I promise she’s real.”

“‘Real’ doesn’t really mean much when it comes to dreams, dude,” Matthew says. But he leans down by Wish. She studies him, eyes wide and blue. “Holy shit she looks just like him.”

“I know, right?” Hob’s not sure if it’ll stick. It’s easy to say the baby looks like Dream now based on her blue eyes and tuft of black hair, but babies’ features can change a lot as they grow.

“Wow. This is… a lot.” 

“How do you think I feel?”

“I can’t imagine,” says Matthew. “I’m glad everything worked out, though.” He hops down to the bed and plucks at Dream’s hair affectionately with his beak. Dream still doesn’t stir.

“He’ll probably come to check in on the Dreaming in short order, knowing him,” Hob says. He’s not exactly happy at the thought of it. They might have been able to avoid Dream getting pulled temporarily back into work if he hadn’t gotten kidnapped by a group of incompetent occultists, but Hob knows he’s going to want to at least set foot in the palace briefly after all that. “Do me a favor and kick him out as fast as you can?”

“Kick him out. Yeah, that’ll end well for me,” Matthew says, then shrugs in a flutter of wings. “I’ll do my best. And I should probably go let Luce know everything went fine. Is, uh, there anything I can do to help before I go?”

Hob’s about to say no, then reconsiders. “D’you think you can make baby formula without hands?”

--

While Matthew is in the kitchen attempting to do that according to Hob’s instructions, Wish finally decides that she’s proper hungry, actually, and lets out a loud shriek that nearly pierces Hob’s eardrums.

Dream sits bolt upright like he’s been struck by lightning and spins towards him.

“You’re alright, love,” Hob says, even as Wish shrieks again and he grimaces at the volume. God, she’s like a fire alarm. Add soundproofing to the list of modifications Hob’s going to have to make to their flat. He hands Wish back to Dream as Dream reaches for her. “She’s just hungry. I deputized Matthew to make some formula.”

“There is no need,” Dream says, and holds the baby close.

“Matthew, nix the formula!” Hob calls out to the kitchen. “Dream’s going to handle it.”

Matthew calls back, “I don’t want to think that about my boss!”

“You’re the one who’s sexualizing a perfectly natural process!”

Matthew squawks in outrage, and Hob laughs as he hears the fluttering of wings that heralds him fleeing back to the Dreaming.

“I think you delight in tormenting him,” Dream says.

“He started it.”

Dream doesn’t berate him for it. He only smiles down at their daughter, running a light fingertip through her fluffy hair. And Hob remembers a conversation they’d once had, about what it would be like when Wish was born.

“Were you excited to be born, Hob?” Dream had asked.

“How the fuck should I know?” Hob had said. “I was three seconds old.”

“Hm,” Dream had mused. “I was never truly ‘born’ in this sense, but I believe if I were I would have been very displeased about it.”

It had made Hob laugh in the moment, and then made him feel sad when he thought on it later.

It was said that raising a child let you relive your own childhood. Hob had found it to be true with Robyn, despite how Robyn had grown up in an era so different from his own, so much more comfortable, never going hungry, or wanting for the things that Hob had wanted for as a boy. When he’d seen Robyn play, seen him learn, he’d remembered things he’d forgotten, moments of life lost to time. Wish’s childhood will be different in ways he can’t even imagine. Supernatural baby, supernatural parent, modern world of modern dangers and wonders. But still so much of it comes back to the simple things, growing and learning and playing.

He doesn’t think Dream really had a childhood. Never had the chance to grow and learn and play. He doesn’t know all the detail of how it was with Orpheus, but he knows Dream looks back on that time primarily with guilt. And it can’t have been easy to try to raise a child when you were never one yourself.

Hob had promised Dream that he would make it better this time. That he would make it good. He wants to show Dream what childhood can be like. What a happy family can be like. Had Dream and Calliope had that, if only for a time? He hopes so. He really hopes so.

Either way, Hob is determined to show him. And when he looks at Dream smiling down at their daughter… he thinks he might even succeed.

[lolotheparagon]

What non S- or A-list Batman villain would you like to see more of? I could really go for a good modern take on Crime Doctor (I'm not counting Villains United)

That’s the thing with Batman villains: outside of the Rogue’s Gallery with Joker, Penguin, Riddler etc., all the other cooler villains that are dripping with potential get shoved to the wayside or be D-list villain of the week fodder cos they’re not fantastical looking enough.

Remember that Hugo Strange was actually one of the Batman’s oldest foes, even older than Joker. And it wasn’t until Arkham City and the Gotham series when they made him an actually interesting character. Every other previous iteration just has him as the typical mad scientist you see in every superhero story.

So I definitely think we need more supervillains outside of the big boys, cos they’re so overdone it’s not even fun anymore. Outside of say Joker or Riddler, they’re all just stagnating the same character traits for decades. Which is why superhero and comic book adaptations are so drab nowadays.

So my personal D list villains that should get a comeback are:

Clayface - he’s been fodder for too long and the potential behind him being an accomplished actor and the ability to become anyone is just huge. Like why is the Harley Quinn show the only one that capitalised on this idea? I want more goofy Clayface instead of generic clay monster

Calendar Man - Im tired of the Zodiac Killer angle, make him a guy who commits crimes on completely random holidays and the crime relates to that holiday? Imagine him robbing banks on bank holidays or kidnaps every construction worker in Gotham on Labor Day. I dunno, just go nuts with the calendar aspect. Not every villain has to be a serial killer to be taken seriously

Hush - considering his past friendship with Bruce Wayne since they were childhood friends and were dark reflections of each other. I’m surprised he didn’t become just as popular as the other big guys in the Rogues Gallery. You can do a lot of interesting depths into Bruce Wayne as a character and how it relates to Hush, cos remember before Hush was this murderer who killed and skinned people to look like Bruce, Hush was a victim of abuse by his rich parents and tired of being treated like shit for so long, he killed them and became a professional surgeon. The only reason he was toppled off to the dark side was cos he was commited to Arkham and had the goddamn SCARECROW as his therapist. You can do a lot of tragic and sad stuff with Hush and his past friendship with Bruce, much like that scene in Fox in the Hound where Copper says to Todd, that those days are over.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee - WHY DIDNT MAD HATTER HIRE THESE GUYS TO BE HIS SIDEKICKS?? THAT’S GOLDEN COMEDY POTENTIAL

Killer Moth - make him the biggest butt monkey of all butt monkeys. I want him to be the Robbie Rotten of the Batman franchise.

Ratcatcher - guy who commands an army of rats just sounds funny to me

[the-fluffiest-trainer]

[A video recording is attached. The view is mostly static, as the camera is levitated in one place over near the factory president's office door. Two voices can be heard from inside the room, one of them recognizable as Lysandre's.]

...Which brings me to the other matter. I need your professional judgement as an expert on pokeballs.

Yes? What seems to be the matter?

I recently encountered a wild pokemon of an unusual variant. A beautiful creature, a floette, carrying a flower I have never seen. I just had to capture it for examination, for preservation of its unique qualities.

Yet, when my scanner ball ran its initial tests – fantastic invention, that, you have this scientist's thanks – I noticed there appears to be an error. The age readout says this pokemon is over three thousand years old.

Oh, dear. That does sound a little implausible.

Just what I thought. Though I cannot rule out the possibility of a pokemon from another time, or another parallel world, falling into our present day. There is a Faller who works for Lysandre Labs, in fact. But the far more likely scenario in my mind is simply a software malfunction, which is why I have come to you. Do you share my assessment? Has anyone reported similar bugs in their scanner balls before?

Hmmm. Not that I personally have been made aware of, but it's been years since I sat at an R&D desk myself... I may have to dig into the code myself and get back to you. I believe the latest edition of scanner balls measure age via development of the aura rather than physical characteristics, as this is more difficult to mistake, though it is also somewhat less understood. Perhaps your floette experienced an anomaly, which left a lingering effect large enough to fool the readouts?

Possible. I regret that I cannot leave the pokemon here with you, but my curiosity is too great, and I must employ my own devices in its study. Should you find any quirks in the source code which would be of interest, do contact me; you have my number. For now, I must return to my own labors.

[At the sound of this, Twilight and Fluttershy both look to each other for a second with the same worried expression, then turn in unison to Talia.]

Camera to the ceiling, now! No one ever looks up. Act natural, everyone, we only just got here and definitely haven't been listening...

[As the camera is lifted up, Calem comes into view at the edge of the frame, hurrying toward the two ponies.]

You were right, the guy's a fake, Trevor's batt–

Calem, shhh! Act natural.

[The office door opens and Lysandre steps out. He is slightly taken aback by the sudden sight of two ponies, a human teenager, and a gardevoir, but quickly regains his composure and greets Twilight as if seeing her is not unusual at all.]

[Video ends.]

[hellsitesonlybookclub]

It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 25-26

CHAPTER XXV

HOLIDAYS were invented by the devil, to coax people into the heresy that happiness can be won by taking thought. What was planned as a rackety day for David's first Christmas with his grandparents was, they saw too well, perhaps David's last Christmas with them. Mary had hidden her weeping, but the day before Christmas, when Shad Ledue tramped in to demand of Doremus whether Karl Pascal had ever spoken to him of Communism, Mary came on Shad in the hall, stared at him, raised her hand like a boxing cat, and said with dreadful quietness, "You murderer! I shall kill you and kill Swan!"

For once Shad did not look amused.

To make the holiday as good an imitation of mirth as possible, they were very noisy, but their holly, their tinsel stars on a tall pine tree, their family devotion in a serene old house in a little town, was no different at heart from despairing drunkenness in the city night. Doremus reflected that it might have been just as well for all of them to get drunk and let themselves go, elbows on slopped café tables, as to toil at this pretense of domestic bliss. He now had another thing for which to hate the Corpos—for stealing the secure affection of Christmas.

For noon dinner, Louis Rotenstern was invited, because he was a lorn bachelor and, still more, because he was a Jew, now insecure and snubbed and threatened in an insane dictatorship. (There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the régime under which they live, so that even a commercial-minded money-fondling heavily humorous Jew burgher like Rotenstern is still a sensitive meter of barbarism.) After dinner came Buck Titus, David's most favorite person, bearing staggering amounts of Woolworth tractors and fire engines and a real bow-and-arrow, and he was raucously insisting that Mrs. Candy dance with him what he not very precisely called "the light fantastic," when the hammering sounded at the door.

Aras Dilley tramped in with four men.

"Lookin' for Rotenstern. Oh, that you, Louie? Git your coat and come on—orders."

"What's the idea? What d'you want of him? What's the charge?" demanded Buck, still standing with his arm about Mrs. Candy's embarrassed waist.

"Dunno's there be any charges. Just ordered to headquarters for questioning. District Commissioner Reek in town. Just astin' few people a few questions. Come on, you!"

The hilarious celebrants did not, as they had planned, go out to Lorinda's tavern for skiing. Next day they heard that Rotenstern had been taken to the concentration camp at Trianon, along with that crabbed old Tory, Raymond Pridewell, the hardware dealer.

Both imprisonments were incredible. Rotenstern had been too meek. And if Pridewell had not ever been meek, if he had constantly and testily and loudly proclaimed that he had not cared for Ledue as a hired man and now cared even less for him as a local governor, yet— why, Pridewell was a sacred institution. As well think of dragging the brownstone Baptist Church to prison.

Later, a friend of Shad Ledue took over Rotenstern's shop.

It can happen here, meditated Doremus. It could happen to him. How soon? Before he should be arrested, he must make amends to his conscience by quitting the Informer.

Professor Victor Loveland, once a classicist of Isaiah College, having been fired from a labor camp for incompetence in teaching arithmetic to lumberjacks, was in town, with wife and babies, on his way to a job clerking in his uncle's slate quarry near Fair Haven. He called on Doremus and was hysterically cheerful. He called on Clarence Little—"dropped in to visit with him," Clarence would have said. Now that twitchy, intense jeweler, Clarence, who had been born on a Vermont farm and had supported his mother till she died when he was thirty, had longed to go to college and, especially, to study Greek. Though Loveland was his own age, in the mid-thirties, he looked on him as a combination of Keats and Liddell. His greatest moment had been hearing Loveland read Homer.

Loveland was leaning on the counter. "Gone ahead with your Latin grammar, Clarence?"

"Golly, Professor, it just doesn't seem worth while any more. I guess I'm kind of a weak sister, anyway, but I find that these days it's about all I can do to keep going."

"Me too! And don't call me 'Professor.' I'm a timekeeper in a slate quarry. What a life!"

They had not noticed the clumsy-looking man in plain clothes who had just come in. Presumably he was a customer. But he grumbled, "So you two pansies don't like the way things go nowadays! Don't suppose you like the Corpos! Don't think much of the Chief!" He jabbed his thumb into Loveland's ribs so painfully that Loveland yelped, "I don't think about him at all!"

"Oh, you don't, eh? Well, you two fairies can come along to the courthouse with me!"

"And who may you be?"

"Oh, just an ensign in the M.M.'s, that's all!"

He had an automatic pistol.

Loveland was not beaten much, because he managed to keep his mouth shut. But Little was so hysterical that they laid him on a kitchen table and decorated his naked back with forty slashes of a steel ramrod. They had found that Clarence wore yellow silk underwear, and the M.M.'s from factory and plowland laughed—particularly one broad young inspector who was rumored to have a passionate friendship with a battalion-leader from Nashua who was fat, eyeglassed, and high-pitched of voice.

Little had to be helped into the truck that took Loveland and him to the Trianon concentration camp. One eye was closed and so surrounded with bruised flesh that the M.M. driver said it looked like a Spanish omelet.

The truck had an open body, but they could not escape, because the three prisoners on this trip were chained hand to hand. They lay on the floor of the truck. It was snowing.

The third prisoner was not much like Loveland or Little. His name was Ben Trippen. He had been a mill hand for Medary Cole. He cared no more about the Greek language than did a baboon, but he did care for his six children. He had been arrested for trying to strike Cole and for cursing the Corpo régime when Cole had reduced his wages from nine dollars a week (in pre-Corpo currency) to seven-fifty.

As to Loveland's wife and babies, Lorinda took them in till she could pass the hat and collect enough to send them back to Mrs. Loveland's family on a rocky farm in Missouri. But then things went better. Mrs. Loveland was favored by the Greek proprietor of a lunch-room and got work washing dishes and otherwise pleasing the proprietor, who brilliantined his mustache.

The county administration, in a proclamation signed by Emil Staubmeyer, announced that they were going to regulate the agriculture on the submarginal land high up on Mount Terror. As a starter, half-a-dozen of the poorer families were moved into the large, square, quiet, old house of that large, square, quiet, old farmer, Henry Veeder, cousin of Doremus Jessup. These poorer families had many children, a great many, so that there were four or five persons bedded on the floor in every room of the home where Henry and his wife had placidly lived alone since their own children had grown. Henry did not like it, and said so, not very tactfully, to the M.M.'s herding the refugees. What was worse, the dispossessed did not like it any better. "'Tain't much, but we got a house of our own. Dunno why we should git shoved in on Henry," said one. "Don't expect other folks to bother me, and don't expect to bother other folks. Never did like that fool kind of yellow color Henry painted his barn, but guess that's his business."

So Henry and two of the regulated agriculturists were taken to the Trianon concentration camp, and the rest remained in Henry's house, doing nothing but finish up Henry's large larder and wait for orders.

"And before I'm sent to join Henry and Karl and Loveland, I'm going to clear my skirts," Doremus vowed, along in late January.

He marched in to see County Commissioner Ledue.

"I want to quit the Informer. Staubmeyer has learned all I can teach him."

"Staubmeyer? Oh! You mean Assistant Commissioner Staubmeyer!"

"Chuck it, will you? We're not on parade, and we're not playing soldiers. Mind if I sit down?"

"Don't look like you cared a hell of a lot whether I mind or not! But I can tell you, right here and now, Jessup, without any monkey business about it, you're not going to leave your job. I guess I could find enough grounds for sending you to Trianon for about a million years, with ninety lashes, but—you've always been so stuck on yourself as such an all-fired honest editor, it kind of tickles me to watch you kissing the Chief's foot—and mine!"

"I'll do no more of it! That's certain! And I admit that I deserve your scorn for ever having done it!"

"Well, isn't that elegant! But you'll do just what I tell you to, and like it! Jessup, I suppose you think I had a swell time when I was your hired man! Watching you and your old woman and the girls go off on a picnic while I—oh, I was just your hired man, with dirt in my ears, your dirt! I could stay home and clean up the basement!"

"Maybe we didn't want you along, Shad! Good-morning!"

Shad laughed. There was a sound of the gates of Trianon concentration camp in that laughter.

It was really Sissy who gave Doremus his lead.

He drove to Hanover to see Shad's superior, District Commissioner John Sullivan Reek, that erstwhile jovial and red-faced politician. He was admitted after only half an hour's waiting. He was shocked to see how pale and hesitant and frightened Reek had become. But the Commissioner tried to be authoritative.

"Well, Jessup, what can I do for you?"

"May I be frank?"

"What? What? Why, certainly! Frankness has always been my middle name!"

"I hope so. Governor, I find I'm of no use on the Informer, at Fort Beulah. As you probably know, I've been breaking in Emil Staubmeyer as my successor. Well, he's quite competent to take hold now, and I want to quit. I'm really just in his way."

"Why don't you stick around and see what you can still do to help him? There'll be little jobs cropping up from time to time."

"Because it's got on my nerves to take orders where I used to give 'em for so many years. You can appreciate that, can't you?"

"My God, can I appreciate it? And how! Well, I'll think it over. You wouldn't mind writing little pieces for my own little sheet, at home? I own part of a paper there."

"No! Sure! Delighted!"

("Does this mean that Reek believes the Corpo tyranny is going to blow up, in a revolution, so that he's beginning to trim? Or just that he's fighting to keep from being thrown out?")

"Yes, I can see how you might feel, Brother Jessup."

"Thanks! Would you mind giving me a note to County Commissioner Ledue, telling him to let me out, without prejudice?—making it pretty strong?"

"No. Not a bit. Just wait a minute, ole fellow; I'll write it right now."

Doremus made as little ceremony as possible of leaving the Informer, which had been his throne for thirty-seven years. Staubmeyer was patronizing, Doc Itchitt looked quizzical, but the chapel, headed by Dan Wilgus, shook hands profusely. And so, at sixty-two, stronger and more eager than he had been in all his life, Doremus had nothing to do more important than eating breakfast and telling his grandson stories about the elephant.

But that lasted less than a week. Avoiding suspicion from Emma and Sissy and even from Buck and Lorinda, he took Julian aside:

"Look here, boy. I think it's time now for me to begin doing a little high treason. (Heaven's sake keep all of this under your hat—don't even tip off Sissy!) I guess you know, the Communists are too theocratic for my tastes. But looks to me as though they have more courage and devotion and smart strategy than anybody since the Early Christian Martyrs—whom they also resemble in hairiness and a fondness for catacombs. I want to get in touch with 'em and see if there's any dirty work at the crossroads I can do for 'em—say distributing a few Early Christian tracts by St. Lenin. But of course, theoretically, the Communists have all been imprisoned. Could you get to Karl Pascal, in Trianon, and find out whom I could see?"

Said Julian, "I think I could. Dr. Olmsted gets called in there sometimes on cases—they hate him, because he hates them, but still, their camp doctor is a drunken bum, and they have to have a real doc in when one of their warders busts his wrist beating up some prisoner. I'll try, sir."

Two days afterward Julian returned.

"My God, what a sewer that Trianon place is! I'd waited for Olmsted before, in the car, but I never had the nerve to butt inside. The buildings—they were nice buildings, quite pretty, when the girls' school had them. Now the fittings are all torn out, and they've put up wallboard partitions for cells, and the whole place stinks of carbolic acid and excrement, and the air— there isn't any—you feel as if you were nailed up in a box—I don't know how anybody lives in one of those cells for an hour—and yet there's six men bunked in a cell twelve feet by ten, with a ceiling only seven feet high, and no light except a twenty-five watt, I guess it is, bulb in the ceiling—you couldn't read by it. But they get out for exercise two hours a day—walk around and around the courtyard—they're all so stooped, and they all look so ashamed, as if they'd had the defiance just licked out of 'em—even Karl a little, and you remember how proud and sort of sardonic he was. Well, I got to see him, and he says to get in touch with this man—here, I wrote it down—and for God's sake, burn it up soon as you've memorized it!"

"Was he—had they—?"

"Oh, yes, they've beaten him, all right. He wouldn't talk about it. But there was a scar right across his cheek, from his temple right down to his chin. And I had just a glimpse of Henry Veeder. Remember how he looked—like an oak tree? Now he twitches all the time, and jumps and gasps when he hears a sudden sound. He didn't know me. I don't think he'd know anybody."

Doremus announced to his family and told it loudly in Gath that he was still looking for an option on an apple orchard to which they might retire, and he journeyed southward, with pajamas and a toothbrush and the first volume of Spengler's Decline of the West in a briefcase.

The address given by Karl Pascal was that of a most gentlemanly dealer in altar cloths and priestly robes, who had his shop and office over a tea room in Hartford, Connecticut. He talked about the cembalo and the spinetta di serenata and the music of Palestrina for an hour before he sent Doremus on to a busy engineer constructing a dam in New Hampshire, who sent him to a tailor in a side-street shop in Lynn, who at last sent him to northern Connecticut and to the Eastern headquarters of what was left of the Communists in America.

Still carrying his little briefcase he walked up a greasy hill, impassable to any motorcar, and knocked at the faded green door of a squat New England farm cottage masked in wintry old lilac bushes and spiræa shrubs. A stringy farm wife opened and looked hostile.

"I'd like to speak to Mr. Ailey, Mr. Bailey, or Mr. Cailey."

"None of 'em home. You'll have to come again."

"Then I'll wait. What else should one do, these days?"

"All right. Cmin."

"Thanks. Give them this letter."

(The tailor had warned him, "It vill all sount very foolish, the passvorts und everyt'ing, but if any of the central committee gets caught—" He made a squirting sound and drew his scissors across his throat.)

Doremus sat now in a tiny hall off a flight of stairs steep as the side of a roof; a hall with sprigged wall paper and Currier & Ives prints, and black-painted wooden rocking chairs with calico cushions. There was nothing to read but a Methodist hymnal and a desk dictionary. He knew the former by heart, and anyway, he always loved reading dictionaries—often had one seduced him from editorial-writing. Happily he sat conning:

Phenyl. n., Chem. The univalent radical C6 H5, regarded as the basis of numerous benzene derivatives; as, phenyl hydroxid C6 H5 OH.

Pherecratean. n. A choriambic trimeter catalectic, or catalectic glyconic; composed of a spondee, a choriambus, and a catalectic syllable.

"Well! I never knew any of that before! I wonder if I do now?" thought Doremus contentedly, before he realized that glowering from a very narrow doorway was a very broad man with wild gray hair and a patch over one eye. Doremus recognized him from pictures. He was Bill Atterbury, miner, longshoreman, veteran I.W.W. leader, old A. F. of L. strike-leader, five years in San Quentin and five honored years in Moscow, and reputed now to be the secretary of the illegal Communist Party.

"I'm Mr. Ailey. What can I do for you?" Bill demanded.

He led Doremus into a musty back room where, at a table which was probably mahogany underneath the scars and the clots of dirt, sat a squat man with kinky tow-colored hair and with deep wrinkles in the thick pale skin of his face, and a slender young elegant who suggested Park Avenue.

"Howryuh?" said Mr. Bailey, in a Russian-Jewish accent. Of him Doremus knew nothing save that he was not named Bailey.

"Morning," snapped Mr. Cailey—whose name was Elphrey, if Doremus guessed rightly, and who was the son of a millionaire private banker, the brother of one explorer, one bishop's wife, and one countess, and himself a former teacher of economics in the University of California.

Doremus tried to explain himself to these hard-eyed, quick-glancing plotters of ruin.

"Are you willing to become a Party member, in the extremely improbable case that they accept you, and to take orders, any orders, without question?" asked Elphrey, so suavely.

"Do you mean, Am I willing to kill and steal?"

"You've been reading detective stories about the 'Reds'! No. What you'd have to do would be much more difficult than the amusement of using a tommy-gun. Would you be willing to forget you ever were a respectable newspaper editor, giving orders, and walk through the snow, dressed like a bum, to distribute seditious pamphlets—even if, personally, you should believe the pamphlets were of no slightest damn good to the Cause?"

"Why, I—I don't know. Seems to me that as a newspaperman of quite a little training—"

"Hell! Our only trouble is keeping out the 'trained newspapermen'! What we need is trained bill-posters that like the smell of flour paste and hate sleeping. And—but you're a little old for this— crazy fanatics that go out and start strikes, knowing they'll get beaten up and thrown in the bull pen."

"No, I guess I—Look here. I'm sure Walt Trowbridge will be joining up with the Socialists and some of the left-wing radical ex-Senators and the Farmer-Laborites and so on—"

Bill Atterbury guffawed. It was a tremendous, somehow terrifying blast. "Yes, I'm sure they'll join up—all the dirty, sneaking, half-headed, reformist Social Fascists like Trowbridge, that are doing the work of the capitalists and working for war against Soviet Russia without even having sense enough to know they're doing it and to collect good pay for their crookedness!"

"I admire Trowbridge!" snarled Doremus.

"You would!"

Elphrey rose, almost cordial, and dismissed Doremus with, "Mr. Jessup, I was brought up in a sound bourgeois household myself, unlike these two roughnecks, and I appreciate what you're trying to do, even if they don't. I imagine that your rejection of us is even firmer than our rejection of you!"

"Dot's right, Comrade Elphrey. Both you and dis fellow got ants in your bourjui pants, like your Hugh Johnson vould say!" chuckled the Russian Mr. Bailey.

"But I just wonder if Walt Trowbridge won't be chasing out Buzz Windrip while you boys are still arguing about whether Comrade Trotzky was once guilty of saying mass facing the north? Good-day!" said Doremus.

When he recounted it to Julian, two days later, and Julian puzzled, "I wonder whether you won or they did?" Doremus asserted, "I don't think anybody won—except the ants! Anyway, now I know that man is not to be saved by black bread alone but by everything that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord our God.... Communists, intense and narrow; Yankees, tolerant and shallow; no wonder a Dictator can keep us separate and all working for him!"

Even in the 1930's, when it was radiantly believed that movies and the motorcar and glossy magazines had ended the provinciality of all the larger American villages, in such communities as Fort Beulah all the retired business men who could not afford to go to Europe or Florida or California, such as Doremus, were as aimless as an old dog on Sunday afternoon with the family away. They poked uptown to the shops, the hotel lobbies, the railway station, and at the barber shop were pleased rather than irritated when they had to wait a quarter-hour for the tri-weekly shave. There were no cafés as there would have been in Continental Europe, and no club save the country club, and that was chiefly a sanctuary for the younger people in the evening and late afternoons.

The superior Doremus Jessup, the bookman, was almost as dreary in retirement as Banker Crowley would have been.

He did pretend to play golf, but he could not see any particular point in stopping a good walk to wallop small balls and, worse, the links were now bright with M.M. uniforms. And he hadn't enough brass, as no doubt Medary Cole would have, to feel welcome hour on hour in the Hotel Wessex lobby.

He stayed in his third-story study and read as long as his eyes would endure it. But he irritably felt Emma's irritation and Mrs. Candy's ire at having a man around the house all day. Yes! He'd get what he could for the house and for what small share in Informer stock the government had left him when they had taken it over, and go—well, just go—the Rockies or anywhere that was new.

But he realized that Emma did not at all wish to go new places; and realized that the Emma to whose billowy warmth it had been comforting to come home after the office, bored him and was bored by him when he was always there. The only difference was that she did not seem capable of admitting that one might, without actual fiendishness or any signs of hot-footing it for Reno, be bored by one's faithful spouse.

"Why don't you drive out and see Buck or Lorinda?" she suggested.

"Don't you ever get a little jealous of my girl, Linda?" he said, very lightly—because he very heavily wanted to know.

She laughed. "You? At your age? As if anybody thought you could be a lover!"

Well, Lorinda thought so, he raged, and promptly he did "drive out and see her," a little easier in mind about his divided loyalties.

Only once did he go back to the Informer office.

Staubmeyer was not in sight, and it was evident that the real editor was that sly bumpkin, Doc Itchitt, who didn't even rise at Doremus's entrance nor listen when Doremus gave his opinion of the new make-up of the rural-correspondence pages.

That was an apostasy harder to endure than Shad Ledue's, for Shad had always been rustically certain that Doremus was a fool, almost as bad as real "city folks," while Doc Itchitt had once appreciated the tight joints and smooth surfaces and sturdy bases of Doremus's craftsmanship.

Day on day he waited. So much of a revolution for so many people is nothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists rarely see anything but contentment in a crushed population. Waiting, and its brother death, seem so contented.

For several days now, in late February, Doremus had noticed the insurance man. He said he was a Mr. Dimick; a Mr. Dimick of Albany. He was a gray and tasteless man, in gray and dusty and wrinkled clothes, and his pop-eyes stared with meaningless fervor. All over town you met him, at the four drugstores, at the shoe-shine parlor, and he was always droning, "My name is Dimick—Mr. Dimick of Albany—Albany, New York. I wonder if I can interest you in a wonnerful new form of life-insurance policy. Wonnerful!" But he didn't sound as though he himself thought it was very wonnerful.

He was a pest.

He was always dragging himself into some unwelcoming shop, and yet he seemed to sell few policies, if any.

Not for two days did Doremus perceive that Mr. Dimick of Albany managed to meet him an astonishing number of times a day. As he came out of the Wessex, he saw Mr. Dimick leaning against a lamppost, ostentatiously not looking his way, yet three minutes later and two blocks away, Mr. Dimick trailed after him into the Vert Mont Pool & Tobacco Headquarters, and listened to Doremus's conversation with Tom Aiken about fish hatcheries.

Doremus was suddenly cold. He made it a point to sneak uptown that evening and saw Mr. Dimick talking to the driver of a Beulah-Montpelier bus with an intensity that wasn't in the least gray. Doremus glared. Mr. Dimick looked at him with watery eyes, croaked, "Devenin', Mr. D'remus; like t' talk t' you about insurance some time when you got the time," and shuffled away.

Later, Doremus took out and cleaned his revolver, said, "Oh, rats!" and put it away. He heard a ring as he did so, and went downstairs to find Mr. Dimick sitting on the oak hat rack in the hall, rubbing his hat.

"I'd like to talk to you, if y'ain't too busy," whined Mr. Dimick.

"All right. Go in there. Sit down."

"Anybody hear us?"

"No! What of it?"

Mr. Dimick's grayness and lassitude fell away. His voice was sharp:

"I think your local Corpos are on to me. Got to hustle. I'm from Walt Trowbridge. You probably guessed—I've been watching you all week, asking about you. You've got to be Trowbridge's and our representative here. Secret war against the Corpos. The 'N.U.,' the 'New Underground,' we call it—like secret Underground that got the slaves into Canada before the Civil War. Four divisions: printing propaganda, distributing it, collecting and exchanging information about Corpo outrages, smuggling suspects into Canada or Mexico. Of course you don't know one thing about me. I may be a Corpo spy. But look over these credentials and telephone your friend Mr. Samson of the Burlington Paper Company. God's sake be careful! Wire may be tapped. Ask him about me on the grounds you're interested in insurance. He's one of us. You're going to be one of us! Now phone!"

Doremus telephoned to Samson: "Say, Ed, is a fellow named Dimick, kind of weedy-looking, pop-eyed fellow, all right? Shall I take his advice on insurance?"

"Yes. Works for Walbridge. Sure. You can ride along with him."

"I'm riding!"

CHAPTER XXVI

THE Informer composing room closed down at eleven in the evening, for the paper had to be distributed to villages forty miles away and did not issue a later city edition. Dan Wilgus, the foreman, remained after the others had gone, setting a Minute Man poster which announced that there would be a grand parade on March ninth, and incidentally that President Windrip was defying the world.

Dan stopped, looked sharply about, and tramped into the storeroom. In the light from a dusty electric bulb the place was like a tomb of dead news, with ancient red-and-black posters of Scotland county fairs and proofs of indecent limericks pasted on the walls. From a case of eight-point, once used for the setting of pamphlets but superseded by a monotype machine, Dan picked out bits of type from each of several compartments, wrapped them in scraps of print paper, and stored them in the pocket of his jacket. The raped type boxes looked only half filled, and to make up for it he did something that should have shocked any decent printer even if he were on strike. He filled them up with type not from another eight-point case, but with old ten-point.

Daniel, the large and hairy, thriftily pinching the tiny types, was absurd as an elephant playing at being a hen.

He turned out the lights on the third floor and clumped downstairs. He glanced in at the editorial rooms. No one was there save Doc Itchitt, in a small circle of light that through the visor of his eye shade cast a green tint on his unwholesome face. He was correcting an article by the titular editor, Ensign Emil Staubmeyer, and he snickered as he carved it with a large black pencil. He raised his head, startled.

"Hello, Doc."

"Hello, Dan. Staying late?"

"Yuh. Just finished some job work. G'night."

"Say, Dan, do you ever see old Jessup, these days?"

"Don't know when I've seen him, Doc. Oh yes, I ran into him at the Rexall store, couple days ago."

"Still as sour as ever about the régime?"

"Oh, he didn't say anything. Darned old fool! Even if he don't like all the brave boys in uniform, he ought to see the Chief is here for keeps, by golly!"

"Certainly ought to! And it's a swell régime. Fellow can get ahead in newspaper work now, and not be held back by a bunch of snobs that think they're so doggone educated just because they went to college!"

"That's right. Well, hell with Jessup and all the old stiffs. G'night, Doc!"

Dan and Brother Itchitt unsmilingly gave the M.M. salute, arms held out. Dan thumped down to the street and homeward. He stopped in front of Billy's Bar, in the middle of a block, and put his foot up on the hub of a dirty old Ford, to tie his shoelace. As he tied it—after having untied it—he looked up and down the street, emptied the bundles in his pockets into a battered sap bucket on the front seat of the car, and majestically moved on.

Out of the bar came Pete Vutong, a French-Canadian farmer who lived up on Mount Terror. Pete was obviously drunk. He was singing the pre-historic ditty "Hi lee, hi low" in what he conceived to be German, viz.: "By unz gays immer, yuh longer yuh slimmer." He was staggering so that he had to pull himself into the car, and he steered in fancy patterns till he had turned the corner. Then he was amazingly and suddenly sober; and amazing was the speed with which the Ford clattered out of town.

Pete Vutong wasn't a very good Secret Agent. He was a little obvious. But then, Pete had been a spy for only one week.

In that week Dan Wilgus had four times dropped heavy packages into a sap bucket in the Ford.

Pete passed the gate to Buck Titus's domain, slowed down, dropped the sap bucket into a ditch, and sped home.

Just at dawn, Buck Titus, out for a walk with his three Irish wolfhounds, kicked up the sap bucket and transferred the bundles to his own pocket.

And next afternoon Dan Wilgus, in the basement of Buck's house, was setting up, in eight-point, a pamphlet entitled "How Many People Have the Corpos Murdered?" It was signed "Spartan," and Spartan was one of several pen names of Mr. Doremus Jessup.

They were all—all the ringleaders of the local chapter of the New Underground—rather glad when once, on his way to Buck's, Dan was searched by M.M.'s unfamiliar to him, and on him was found no printing-material, nor any documents more incriminating than cigarette papers.

The Corpos had made a regulation licensing all dealers in printing machinery and paper and compelling them to keep lists of purchasers, so that except by bootlegging it was impossible to get supplies for the issuance of treasonable literature. Dan Wilgus stole the type; Dan and Doremus and Julian and Buck together had stolen an entire old hand printing-press from the Informer basement; and the paper was smuggled from Canada by that veteran bootlegger, John Pollikop, who rejoiced at being back in the good old occupation of which repeal had robbed him.

It is doubtful whether Dan Wilgus would ever have joined anything so divorced as this from the time clock and the office cuspidors out of abstract indignation at Windrip or County Commissioner Ledue. He was moved to sedition partly by fondness for Doremus and partly by indignation at Doc Itchitt, who publicly rejoiced because all the printers' unions had been sunk in the governmental confederations. Or perhaps because Doc jeered at him personally on the few occasions—not more than once or twice a week—when there was tobacco juice on his shirt front.

Dan grunted to Doremus, "All right, boss, I guess maybe I'll come in with you. And say, when we get this man's revolution going, let me drive the tumbril with Doc in it. Say, remember A Tale of Two Cities? Good book. Say, how about getting out a humorous life of Windrip? You'd just have to tell the facts!"

Buck Titus, pleased as a boy invited to go camping, offered his secluded house and, in especial, its huge basement for the headquarters of the New Underground, and Buck, Dan, and Doremus made their most poisonous plots with the assistance of hot rum punches at Buck's fireplace.

The Fort Beulah cell of the N.U., as it was composed in mid-March, a couple of weeks after Doremus had founded it, consisted of himself, his daughters, Buck, Dan, Lorinda, Julian Falck, Dr. Olmsted, John Pollikop, Father Perefixe (and he argued with the agnostic Dan, the atheist Pollikop, more than ever he had with Buck), Mrs. Henry Veeder, whose farmer husband was in Trianon Concentration Camp, Harry Kindermann, the dispossessed Jew, Mungo Kitterick, that most un-Jewish and un-Socialistic lawyer, Pete Vutong and Daniel Babcock, farmers, and some dozen others. The Reverend Mr. Falck, Emma Jessup, and Mrs. Candy, were more or less unconscious tools of the N.U. But whoever they were, of whatever faith or station, Doremus found in all of them the religious passion he had missed in the churches; and if altars, if windows of many-colored glass, had never been peculiarly holy objects to him, he understood them now as he gloated over such sacred trash as scarred type and a creaking hand press.

Once it was Mr. Dimick of Albany again; once, another insurance agent—who guffawed at the accidental luck of insuring Shad Ledue's new Lincoln; once it was an Armenian peddling rugs; once, Mr. Samson of Burlington, looking for pine-slashing for paper pulp; but whoever it was, Doremus heard from the New Underground every week. He was busy as he had never been in newspaper days, and happy as on youth's adventure in Boston.

Humming and most cheerful, he ran the small press, with the hearty bump-bump-bump of the foot treadle, admiring his own skill as he fed in the sheets. Lorinda learned from Dan Wilgus to set type, with more fervor than accuracy about ei and ie. Emma and Sissy and Mary folded news sheets and sewed up pamphlets by hand, all of them working in the high old brick-walled basement that smelled of sawdust and lime and decaying apples.

Aside from pamphlets by Spartan, and by Anthony B. Susan—who was Lorinda, except on Fridays—their chief illicit publication was Vermont Vigilance, a four-page weekly which usually had only two pages and, such was Doremus's unfettered liveliness, came out about three times a week. It was filled with reports smuggled to them from other N.U. cells, and with reprints from Walt Trowbridge's Lance for Democracy and from Canadian, British, Swedish, and French papers, whose correspondents in America got out, by long-distance telephone, news which Secretary of Education Macgoblin, head of the government press department, spent a good part of his time denying. An English correspondent sent news of the murder of the president of the University of Southern Illinois, a man of seventy-two who was shot in the back "while trying to escape," out of the country by long-distance telephone to Mexico City, from which the story was relayed to London.

Doremus discovered that neither he nor any other small citizen had been hearing one hundredth of what was going on in America. Windrip & Co. had, like Hitler and Mussolini, discovered that a modern state can, by the triple process of controlling every item in the press, breaking up at the start any association which might become dangerous, and keeping all the machine guns, artillery, armored automobiles, and aeroplanes in the hands of the government, dominate the complex contemporary population better than had ever been done in medieval days, when rebellious peasantry were armed only with pitchforks and good-will, but the State was not armed much better.

Dreadful, incredible information came in to Doremus, until he saw that his own life, and Sissy's and Lorinda's and Buck's, were unimportant accidents.

In North Dakota, two would-be leaders of the farmers were made to run in front of an M.M. automobile, through February drifts, till they dropped breathless, were beaten with a tire pump till they staggered on, fell again, then were shot in the head, their blood smearing the prairie snow.

President Windrip, who was apparently becoming considerably more jumpy than in his old, brazen days, saw two of his personal bodyguard snickering together in the anteroom of his office and, shrieking, snatching an automatic pistol from his desk, started shooting at them. He was a bad marksman. The suspects had to be finished off by the pistols of their fellow guards.

A crowd of young men, not wearing any sort of uniforms, tore the clothes from a nun on the station plaza in Kansas City and chased her, smacking her with bare hands. The police stopped them after a while. There were no arrests.

In Utah a non-Mormon County Commissioner staked out a Mormon elder on a bare rock where, since the altitude was high, the elder at once shivered and felt the glare rather bothersome to his eyes— since the Commissioner had thoughtfully cut off his eyelids first. The government press releases made much of the fact that the torturer was rebuked by the District Commissioner and removed from his post. It did not mention that he was reappointed in a county in Florida.

The heads of the reorganized Steel Cartel, a good many of whom had been officers of steel companies in the days before Windrip, entertained Secretary of Education Macgoblin and Secretary of War Luthorne with an aquatic festival in Pittsburgh. The dining room of a large hotel was turned into a tank of rose-scented water, and the celebrants floated in a gilded Roman barge. The waitresses were naked girls, who amusingly swam to the barge holding up trays and, more often, wine buckets.

Secretary of State Lee Sarason was arrested in the basement of a handsome boys' club in Washington on unspecified charges by a policeman who apologized as soon as he recognized Sarason, and released him, and who that night was shot in his bed by a mysterious burglar.

Albert Einstein, who had been exiled from Germany for his guilty devotion to mathematics, world peace, and the violin, was now exiled from America for the same crimes.

Mrs. Leonard Nimmet, wife of a Congregational pastor in Lincoln, Nebraska, whose husband had been sent to concentration camp for a pacifist sermon, was shot through the door and killed when she refused to open to an M.M. raiding section looking for seditious literature.

In Rhode Island, the door of a small orthodox synagogue in a basement was locked from the outside after thin glass containers of carbon monoxide had been thrown in. The windows had been nailed shut, and anyway, the nineteen men in the congregation did not smell the gas until too late. They were all found slumped to the floor, beards sticking up. They were all over sixty.

Tom Krell—but his was a really nasty case, because he was actually caught with a copy of Lance for Democracy and credentials proving that he was a New Underground messenger—strange thing, too, because everybody had respected him as a good, decent, unimaginative baggageman at a village railroad depot in New Hampshire—was dropped down a well with five feet of water in it, a smooth-sided cement well, and just left there.

Ex-Supreme Court Justice Hoblin of Montana was yanked out of bed late at night and examined for sixty hours straight on a charge that he was in correspondence with Trowbridge. It was said that the chief examiner was a man whom, years before, Judge Hoblin had sentenced for robbery with assault.

In one day Doremus received reports that four several literary or dramatic societies—Finnish, Chinese, Iowan, and one belonging to a mixed group of miners on the Mesaba Range, Minnesota—had been broken up, their officers beaten, their clubrooms smashed up, and their old pianos wrecked, on the charge that they possessed illegal arms, which, in each case, the members declared to be antiquated pistols used in theatricals. And in that week three people were arrested—in Alabama, Oklahoma, and New Jersey—for the possession of the following subversive books: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie (and fair enough too, because the sister-in-law of a county commissioner in Oklahoma was named Ackroyd); Waiting for Lefty, by Clifford Odets; and February Hill, by Victoria Lincoln.

"But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever came in, Doremus," insisted John Pollikop. (Never till they had met in the delightfully illegal basement had he called Doremus anything save "Mr. Jessup.") "You never thought about them, because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper. Things like the sharecroppers and the Scottsboro boys and the plots of the California wholesalers against the agricultural union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies in Kentucky shot striking miners. And believe me, Doremus, the same reactionary crowd that put over those crimes are just the big boys that are chummy with Windrip. And what scares me is that if Walt Trowbridge ever does raise a kinda uprising and kick Buzz out, the same vultures will get awful patriotic and democratic and parliamentarian along with Walt, and sit in on the spoils just the same."

"So Karl Pascal did convert you to Communism before he got sent to Trianon," jeered Doremus.

John Pollikop jumped four straight feet up in the air, or so it looked, and came down screaming, "Communism! Never get 'em to make a United Front! W'y, that fellow Pascal—he was just a propagandist, and I tell you—I tell you—"

Doremus's hardest job was the translation of items from the press in Germany, which was most favorable to the Corpos. Sweating, even in the March coolness in Buck's high basement, Doremus leaned over a kitchen table, ruffling through a German-English lexicon, grunting, tapping his teeth with a pencil, scratching the top of his head, looking like a schoolboy with a little false gray beard, and wailing to Lorinda, "Now how in the heck would you translate 'Er erhält* [sic] noch immer eine zweideutige Stellung den Juden gegenüber'?" She answered, "Why, darling, the only German I know is the phrase that Buck taught me for 'God bless you'—'Verfluchter Schweinehund.'"

Er erhält noch immer... = "he still obtains..." Lewis evidently intends: Er hält sich noch immer an... = "he still maintains..." —RG]

He translated word for word, from the Völkischer Beobachter, and later turned into comprehensible English, this gratifying tribute to his Chief and Inspirer:

America has a brilliant beginning begun. No one congratulates President Windrip with greater sincerity than we Germans. The tendency points as goal to the founding of a Folkish state. Unfortunately is the President not yet prepared with the liberal tradition to break. He holds still ever a two-meaning attitude the Jews visavis. We can but presume that logically this attitude change must as the movement forced is the complete consequences of its philosophy to draw. Ahasaver the Wandering Jew will always the enemy of a free self-conscious people be, and America will also learn that one even so much with Jewry compromise can as with the Bubonic plague.

From the New Masses, still published surreptitiously by the Communists, at the risk of their lives, Doremus got many items about miners and factory workers who were near starvation and who were imprisoned if they so much as criticized a straw boss.... But most of the New Masses, with a pious smugness unshaken by anything that had happened since 1935, was given over to the latest news about Marx, and to vilifying all agents of the New Underground, including those who had been clubbed and jailed and killed, as "reactionary stool pigeons for Fascism," and it was all nicely decorated with a Gropper cartoon showing Walt Trowbridge, in M.M. uniform, kissing the foot of Windrip.

The news bulletins came to Doremus in a dozen insane ways—carried by messengers on the thinnest of flimsy tissue paper; mailed to Mrs. Henry Veeder and to Daniel Babcock between the pages of catalogues, by an N.O. operative who was a clerk in the mail-order house of Middlebury & Roe; shipped in cartons of toothpaste and cigarettes to Earl Tyson's drugstore—one clerk there was an N.U. agent; dropped near Buck's mansion by a tough-looking and therefore innocent-looking driver of an interstate furniture-moving truck. Come by so precariously, the news had none of the obviousness of his days in the office when, in one batch of A.P. flimsies, were tidings of so many millions dead of starvation in China, so many statesmen assassinated in central Europe, so many new churches built by kind-hearted Mr. Andrew Mellon, that it was all routine. Now, he was like an eighteenth-century missionary in northern Canada, waiting for the news that would take all spring to travel from Bristol and down Hudson Bay, wondering every instant whether France had declared war, whether Her Majesty had safely given birth.

Doremus realized that he was hearing, all at once, of the battle of Waterloo, the Diaspora, the invention of the telegraph, the discovery of bacilli, and the Crusades, and if it took him ten days to get the news, it would take historians ten decades to appraise it. Would they not envy him, and consider that he had lived in the very crisis of history? Or would they just smile at the flag-waving children of the 1930's playing at being national heroes? For he believed that these historians would be neither Communists nor Fascists nor bellicose American or English Nationalists but just the sort of smiling Liberals that the warring fanatics of today most cursed as weak waverers.

In all this secret tumult Doremus's most arduous task was to avoid suspicions that might land him in concentration camp, and to give appearance of being just the harmless old loafer he veritably had been, three weeks ago. Befogged with sleep because he had worked all night at headquarters, he yawned all afternoon in the lobby of the Hotel Wessex and discussed fishing—the picture of a man too discouraged to be a menace.

He dropped now and then, on evenings when there was nothing to do at Buck's and he could loaf in his study at home and shamefully let himself be quiet and civilized, into renewed longing for the Ivory Tower. Often, not because it was a great poem but because it was the first that, when he had been a boy, had definitely startled him by evoking beauty, he reread Tennyson's "Arabian Nights":

A realm of pleasance, many a mound And many a shadow-chequered lawn Full of the city's stilly sound, And deep myrrh-thickets blowing round And stately cedar, tamarisks, Thick rosaries of scented thorn, Tall orient shrubs, and obelisks Graven with emblems of the time, In honor of the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Awhile then he could wander with Romeo and Jurgen, with Ivanhoe and Lord Peter Wimsey; the Piazza San Marco he saw, and immemorial towers of Bagdad that never were; with Don John of Austria he was going forth to war, and he took the golden road to Samarcand without a visa.

"But Dan Wilgus setting type on proclamations of rebellion, and Buck Titus distributing them at night on a motorcycle, may be as romantic as Xanadu... living in a blooming epic, right now, but no Homer come up from the city room yet to write it down!"

Whit Bibby was an ancient and wordless fishmonger, and as ancient appeared his horse, though it was by no means silent, but given to a variety of embarrassing noises. For twenty years his familiar wagon, like the smallest of cabooses, had conveyed mackerel and cod and lake trout and tinned oysters to all the farmsteads in the Beulah Valley. To have suspected Whit Bibby of seditious practices would have been as absurd as to have suspected the horse. Older men remembered that he had once been proud of his father, a captain in the Civil War—and afterward a very drunken failure at farming— but the young fry had forgotten that there ever had been a Civil War.

Unconcealed in the sunshine of the late-March afternoon that touched the worn and ashen snow, Whit jogged up to the farmhouse of Truman Webb. He had left ten orders of fish, just fish, at farms along the way, but at Webb's he also left, not speaking of it, a bundle of pamphlets wrapped in very fishy newspaper.

By next morning these pamphlets had all been left in the post boxes of farmers beyond Keezmet, a dozen miles away.

Late the next night, Julian Falck drove Dr. Olmsted to the same Truman Webb's. Now Mr. Webb had an ailing aunt. Up to a fortnight ago she had not needed the doctor often, but as all the countryside could, and decidedly did, learn from listening in on the rural party telephone line, the doctor had to come every three or four days now.

"Well, Truman, how's the old lady?" Dr. Olmsted called cheerily.

From the front stoop Webb answered softly, "Safe! Shoot! I've kept a good lookout."

Julian rapidly slid out, opened the rumble seat of the doctor's car, and there was the astonishing appearance from the rumble of a tall man in urban morning coat and striped trousers, a broad felt hat under his arm, rising, rubbing himself, groaning with the pain of stretching his cramped body. The doctor said:

"Truman, we've got a pretty important Eliza, with the bloodhounds right after him, tonight! Congressman Ingram—Comrade Webb."

"Huh! Never thought I'd live to be called one of these 'Comrades.' But mighty pleased to see you, Congressman. We'll put you across the border in Canada in two days—we've got some paths right through the woods along the border—and there's some good hot beans waiting for you right now."

The attic in which Mr. Ingram slept that night, an attic approached by a ladder concealed behind a pile of trunks, was the "underground station" which, in the 1850's, when Truman's grandfather was agent, had sheltered seventy-two various black slaves escaping to Canada, and on the wall above Ingram's weary threatened head was still to be seen, written in charcoal long ago, "Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies."

It was a little after six in the evening, near Tasbrough & Scarlett's quarries. John Pollikop, with his wrecker car, was towing Buck Titus, in his automobile. They stopped now and then, and John looked at the motor in Buck's car very ostentatiously, in the sight of M.M. patrols, who ignored so obvious a companionship. They stopped once at the edge of Tasbrough's deepest pit. Buck strolled about, yawning, while John did some more tinkering. "Right!" snapped Buck. Both of them leaped at the over-large toolbox in the back of John's car, lifted out each an armful of copies of Vermont Vigilance and hurled them over the edge of the quarry. They scattered in the wind.

Many of them were gathered up and destroyed by Tasbrough's foremen, next morning, but at least a hundred, in the pockets of quarrymen, were started on their journey through the world of Fort Beulah workmen.

Sissy came into the Jessup dining room wearily rubbing her forehead. "I've got the story, Dad. Sister Candy helped me. Now we'll have something good to send on to other agents. Listen! I've been quite chummy with Shad. No! Don't blow up! I know just how to yank his gun out of his holster if I should ever need to. And he got to boasting, and he told me Frank Tasbrough and Shad and Commissioner Reek were all in together on the racket, selling granite for public buildings, and he told me—you see, he was sort of boasting about how chummy he and Mr. Tasbrough have become—how Mr. Tasbrough keeps all the figures on the graft in a little red notebook in his desk—of course old Franky would never expect anybody to search the house of as loyal a Corpo as him! Well, you know Mrs. Candy's cousin is working for the Tasbroughs for a while, and damn if—"

("Sis-sy!")

"—these two old gals didn't pinch the lil red notebook this afternoon, and I photographed every page and had 'em stick it back! And the only comment our Candy makes is, 'That stove t' the Tasbroughs' don't draw well. Couldn't bake a decent cake in a stove like that!'"

[luxuryapartmentsinriveroaks]

The Definitive Guide to High Rise Apartments in River Oaks

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[starryeyedweeb]

Valentine’s Day With Hunter x Hunter

Characters Included: Kurapika, Hisoka, Chrollo, Illumi

Content Included: Floofity fluff- Valentine’s style; fairly gender-neutral

A Valentine’s Day With...

Kurapika

Kurapika’s actually beyond excited for Valentine’s Day with you, and has counted down the days until the event

He has a pretty traditional way of celebrating Valentine’s, but isn’t it tradition because it’s beloved by all?

He had made arrangements to get off work early that evening weeks in advance, and when the day finally comes, he can’t wait to go pick you up for your date

Like most, he had made reservations at a romantic restaurant, but the one he had chosen was more of a hidden gem- in a quieter part of town, with a niche menu, and in an intimate setting

You observe your surroundings in delight as you’re led to your table, where you sit side-by-side in front of a spindly vase of flowers

“Do you like it?” Kurapika asks, a light blush dusting his cheeks as he watches your reactions carefully. “I saw this restaurant months ago, and I’ve always thought you would enjoy it.”

“It’s perfect,” you reply, squeezing his hand lightly, and he averts his eyes with a sheepish chuckle

After enjoying your romantic course meal, Kurapika takes you off to the next spot of the night: an observatory, which is conveniently empty of all other people

“I’ve always wanted to go stargazing with you, but it’s too cold to go now. Even if it wasn’t, though, you can’t really see any stars in the city,” he explains. “So I decided on the next best thing.”

You could sense his nerves, for he wanted so badly for you to enjoy yourself completely

“I love it, I promise.” You press a kiss to his cheek. “Come on. Let’s go sit down and enjoy it.”

With hands still linked, you relax into your reclined seats and stare up at the celestial scene above you, pointing out constellations and naming your favorites

After settling deeply into your contentment at the time you were having with each other, Kurapika sits up slightly and reaches into his pocket

“I’d like to give you your gift now, if that’s alright.”

“You got me something?”

“I did.” He laughs gently, his cheeks reddening again. “I’ve always wanted to get you a nice gift, and this seemed like the perfect occasion.”

He hands you the pristinely wrapped package, which you open to find a delicate necklace, with a single but stunning ruby charm

He had saved up for months to get you something nice, and had labored over picking out something that would remind you of him without being too pretentious on his part

So, needless to say, happiness swells in his chest when you break into a wide grin

“It’s so beautiful,” you breathe

“Would you like me to put it on you?”

You nod, and with gentle fingers brushing against your skin, he fastens the chain around your neck, placing a whisper of a kiss just below your jaw.

“Thank you for spending this time with me,” you murmur as the two of you sit back again, your faces illuminated by the starry scene above

“If it was up to me, I’d never leave.”

Hisoka

Going into Valentine’s Day with a partner as unorthodox as Hisoka left you with many questions about what he would do to celebrate, if anything at all

You were prepared for anything, so you were less surprised than you might’ve been when he shook you awake nearly at the crack of dawn

“What’s going on?” You mutter sleepily. “Why are you awake so early?”

He merely drops a bag down next to you and strides out of the room

“Put that on,” he instructs, shutting the door behind him

Your brows knit in confusion as you reach into the bag and pull out an outfit that toes the line between summery and skimpy, presenting the question of “Is this streetwear or lingerie?”

Knowing it would be more fun to play along with his plan, you do as he told and go to meet him outside the room

Your breath catches in your throat as you see him with his hair down and makeup off, almost as if he was going incognito

“It’s a little cold to be wearing something like this, isn’t it?” you ask by way of announcing your presence

Sighing headily as he takes in the sight of you, he approaches and wraps his arms around you, his hands sneaking down to give your ass a squeeze

“It will make sense soon, I promise.” He grabs your coat off the rack and holds it out for you. “We need to get moving if we’re going to make it on time.”

You allow yourself to be swept up in his plan, which ends up with the two of you on a plane he had “borrowed” from Illumi and the Zoldycks, flying towards an unknown destination

“Seriously, Hisoka, what’s going on?” You demand, peering out the window for clues

“Relax, darling. Would I ever lead you wrong?” He pours you a drink and holds it out to you

You take it and flash him a dubious look. “Do you really want me to answer that question?”

“Fine. I’ll give you a hint. I’ve always hated the cold, so I want to take the opportunity of a romantic holiday to escape it with you.”

“That’s better, I suppose.” You sip your drink, noticing him look you up and down out of the corner of your eye

“I did an excellent job picking out that outfit for you,” he declares, cocking his head slightly sideways. “We still have a while to go. Why don’t we do something to keep busy?

You slide a bit closer to him, drawing a finger up and down his hip. “What did you have in mind?”

Hours later, when the plane finally arrives at the mystery destination, you find yourselves on a secluded island, approaching a quaint beach house that had been carefully prepared for your arrival

“Was this the surprise?” you gasp, staring at the scene in awe.

“It was. Some time away where we can pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist,” he replies with a self-satisfied smirk. “Are you pleased?”

“I am! This is perfect.”

He snakes his arm around your waist, leading you towards the entrance of the house. “Let’s get started, then.”

“I thought we already did get started.”

“Darling, you should know by now that what we did was only a warm up.”

Chrollo

Chrollo had been secretly planning a celebration for months, mapping out all of his operations around keeping that one special day open

On Valentine’s morning, he’s gone, but in his place is a tray of your favorite breakfast and a note instructing you to dress warm and be ready to leave by 7:00 that night

There are no other clues, so as you indulge in the breakfast, you wonder what he could have planned for you

Because with Chrollo, it could be anything

Meanwhile, he’s spending the day making all the last-minute preparations for your celebration, and hen the hour arrives, a knock sounds on your door

But instead of Chrollo, you find a driver that had been sent to take you to the date spot

You end up being driven so far outside of the city you halfway wonder if you’ve finally fallen victim to one of the revenge kidnappings Chrollo had always warned you about

Until the driver pulls up to the base of a massive hill, where your boyfriend waits with a smile on his face

“What on Earth have you planned this time?” You ask as he extends his hand to help you out of the car

“I’m a criminal mastermind, love. I simply cannot afford to be predictable.”

He leads you up to the top of the hill, where he set up a candlelight picnic on a blanket covered in rose petals, situated overlooking a fantastic view of the entire city

“Oh, Chro, it’s lovely,” you breathe, but can’t resist a shiver as you sit down and take the glass of wine he offered

He tuts. “I thought I told you to dress warm.”

“You didn’t leave much more information, so I wasn’t sure just how warm.”

“Well, then, I suppose it’s a good thing that I planned for this, too.”

He takes out a blanket and wraps it around both of your shoulders, and you enjoy your cozy meal whilst overlooking the lights of the city

“Let me guess,” you begin, reaching for yet another gourmet appetizer. “Everything here is stolen.”

“Why, of course it is.”

“And the Troupe is probably quite angry with you for sending them on such a trivial errand to get all of this.”

“Initially, but they were alright with it when I offered them half of the spoils for their own enjoyment.”  He shifts, pulling something from his coat pocket. “But I’d like to give you something that, for the first time in years, I haven’t stolen.”

“You actually bought something?” You gasp incredulously, taking the small box in your hands.

“Sort of. I had it made.” He shrugs. “I wanted it to be perfect.”

With him looking over your shoulder to gauge your reaction, you flip open the top of the box and discover a ring, the delicate silver band formed in the shape of an elegant spider web, tiny diamonds glistening at the points

Once you’ve taken the sight of it in, Chrollo takes the ring out of the box and slides it on your finger

“Since you’re reluctant to get a Troupe tattoo, I wanted something else to symbolize.”

“To symbolize what?” You ask, admiring how the ring glistens in the candlelight.

“To symbolize that you’re my home,” he replies with a cheesy, almost joking expression, but his eyes sparkled with truth. “Do you like it?”

“Chro, I love it.”

The corners of his lips turn upward as he cups your cheek

“And I love you.”

Illumi

Honestly, Illumi had never even heard of Valentine’s Day before you came along

So, needless to say, no plans to celebrate were made until he was out for drinks with Hisoka the night before and Illumi was asked what he was going to do to celebrate

He just blinked, completely confused

“You know, people tend to get very upset if their partners don’t do anything for Valentine’s Day. They’ve probably got something planned for you,” Hisoka teased.

When Illumi was still staring at him with a blank expression, Hisoka explained the concept and helped Illumi make some last-minute arrangements

So, when you wake up on the morning of Valentine’s Day, you find an ornate vase full of orchids and a box of luxury chocolates sitting at the end of your bed

Gotta use and abuse the Zoldyck family funds, you know

You’re overjoyed and pleasantly surprised

Honestly you had expected nothing at all, so assuming that the flowers and chocolates were the entirety of your surprise for the day, you happily go about the rest of your own Valentine’s plans: a day of self-care and self-love

Dating an assassin with a personality like Illumi’s was rewarding, but also immensely challenging, so you definitely deserved it

In light of cliche and tradition, you decide to make some fondue for yourself, and are just getting ready to serve it when you turn around to find Illumi standing behind you in the kitchen

You let out a startled yelp and drop the spoon you’re holding

“Illumi, you scared me!”

“I thought I’ve been teaching you about awareness lately. You should’ve sensed my presence.”

“I was just distracted. Besides, I wasn’t expecting you to be here at all. I thought you were supposed to be working tonight.”

“I just learned what ‘Valentine’s Day’ is. I rearranged the plan so that I could come spend the evening with you.”

You sense a warm feeling spreading across your chest, and have to fight the urge to swallow him in a hug.

“Well, perfect timing. I was just about to serve dinner.”

The two of you share a two-course fondue, then settle in on the couch

Illumi wasn’t really a TV person, so you play some music softly in the background and gaze out the window as rain begins to fall outside

As you lay with Illumi’s arm folded around your waist, you reflect that your quiet Valentine’s Day was a little less than orthodox, but the peace it brought was exactly what the both of you desperately needed

[jedinerd27]

I flirted with the Lord of Dreams in my Dreams... Turns out he's Real: Part 1/?(Short series) Morpheus x GN! Reader

Summary:

You always had strange dreams. You could never really control them, the passage of time, nor the direction they took. So, when you end up in a library looking at stories lost to history and unfinished novels, you bump into a handsome man. A man who quite literally is a man of your dreams.

A/N: Cross posted on my AO3

Word Count 1242

Neil Gaiman please do not read or interact! You may be a huge influence and inspiration for my writing, but I am begging you to please skip over this!

Dreams, something magnificent but also something terrifying. Something that can make sense but also something that can be utter bat shit crazy and doesn’t seem to make any sense.

Your dreams often were the latter, the most chaotic. Never a concrete story line or anything. One moment you would stand in a hallway, the next you're swimming down to the bottom of an ocean. You're walking through a city, next thing you know you can fly, and when you go around the block, it’s a different street. Everything changes. nothing stays the same.

Now whether that’s your subconscious trying to tell you something about yourself, something to do with understanding, or you just had a weird mind.

You have to admit, walking down a bridge into a castle was fantastic. There was even a dragon flapping its wings on the middle spire.

“That’s amazing!” You whisper to yourself as you feel yourself continue to walk towards the castle, and after what felt like a second, you were standing in the middle of the main entrance.

Oh, how your dreams loved to mess around with the passage of time. They were making everything so trippy.

Because what should have taken minutes to walk through the halls to find a library in a massive castle, but you just walked through one set of doors, and you are transported there.

How magnificent the library was, it seems that there are endless levels and shelves of books. Glass panned windows, and an arched ceiling that seemed to have fluffy white clouds wandered through the air.

AS you walk past the books, bound in leather, paperback and hardback, you read off the names of the books.

  Sedition by Jane Austen, Love's Labor's Won, The Dark Tower by C.S. Lewis, Great Gatsby by Zelda Sayre…  

Your eyes wander about this brown mahogany bookshelf, as you look confused. You were no Library, but you did love stories. And these stories were lost, never finished, or the last one had the actual Author’s name.

“What the hell” You swore, your hand instantly reaching for the Jane Austen title.

“Pardon me Mx. but are you interested in more unpublished novels or literature?” A woman’s voice echoed behind you.

Turning your head you saw a woman in a three-piece suit, shaved head, elf ears. She peered at you with utmost politeness and a little bit of curiosity

“Um, Hi” You waved politely, but a bit nervous.

“Hello.” She smiled. “Are you interested, in such books?” She pointed out the one that lay in your hands. “We have plenty more, and stories that have never been written down.”

“Oh, I wish this was real,” You sighed. “Any chance you got the little Iliad? Oh, what about anything from the library of Alexandria? House of wisdom? God, I wonder what my mind can come up with.”

“Right this way Mx. “ The Librarian turned and started to walk down a section between the tall shelves.

AS you follow after, the architecture changes. A more modern library and then as you pass another shelf it has Egyptian pillars with hieroglyphs, with scrolls in the shelves and flickering flames of lamps.

“Alexandrian Literature would be in here, and a few other books will be down the hallway. If you are looking for anything else just ask for me. My name is Lucienne, I am the librarian of the Library of the dreaming.”

“Library of the Dreaming? Wow, what did i eat to Dream of this, hah. Thank you so much!” You cheer smiling before you extend a hand, which Lucienne shakes. She watches as you run off and instantly reach for a scroll. As you unravel the  scrolls, watching as the hairy Greek letters change and shift into something you could actually read.  

“Lucienne?” A voice rings out. Turning your head you watch as a man in all black enter the room, as Lucien was organizing a shelf.

“Right here, my lord. Just helping another Dreamer” She walked over to him, having two books in her arm.

“A dreamer?” The man turned towards you. An unreadable expression upon his face. You wave awkwardly before you go back to reading the scroll.

  The sound of your voice is sweet

  Full like the taste of date wine

  And I, a drunken girl in a tangle of flowers

  Live only captive to hear

A love poem, how quaint. It was cute and sweet.

‘Oh, that one was not lost '' Lucienne said as she noted the scroll in your hand.

“Lost?” The man asked as you rolled it back up.

“I can put it back, right? I don’t want to mess up the organization.” You noted.

“Yes, you can just place it back there. What do you need Lord Morpheus.”

“You're looking at lost literature ?” HE asked me to take a few steps over.

“Uh, yes. I mean, however, my mind wants to create it in my mind.” Your laugh. You had to admit this was the first time in your dreams that a handsome man that was your type had appeared. Yes, wet cat emo-looking man was a type you appreciated.

“Hmm. Interesting.” His eyes scanned over you, and you felt heat blossom upon your cheeks. “Do you enjoy books?”

“Stories, but books fall under that category.” You smile, as you look fondly at the shelves, peering backward you look back and see the bookshelves you passed. “Always wanted a library for me, guess that's why my dreams are trying to tell me.

“What are your dreams trying to tell you?” He chuckled at your admissions. He leans a bit forward with dark eyes that seem to drink in every inch of you.

“I don’t know. Some physiological bullshit? Recreate the type of guy that I am into?” You confess, not using a filter you would have when awake.

The man in front of you seems taken aback, as he flinches away, with wide eyes, taut lips and creased brows.

“What?” You at first though he sounded offended, but the look upon his face was more of shock.

“Thank you brilliant mind of mine” You sigh fondly.

“This dream is over” The man, Morpheus, raised his voice as he raises a hand, swiping the air like a cat.

Next thing you know, you are in your bed.  The room is dark, but you can hear the busy city streets outside. You can here the familiar noise of a local drunk singing at the top of his lungs.

“Back to real life then” You mutter to yourself, wrapping your arms around your front as a way to comfort yourself, but you clutched something in your hand.

A scroll.

The Scroll from your dream.

In the palm of your hand.

“What the actual-”

“WOOF!” came from your closed bedroom door. “WOOOF!”

Your eyes swipe back and forth, between the scroll and your bedroom door.

“Damn it, Achilles” You muttered as you pushed yourself off the bed and palace the scroll upon a night table. Exhaustion washing over you. As you open the door, your golden retriever rushes in and basically throws himself onto your bed. "C'mon boy, not tonight.”

Your dog lets lets out a pleading whimper, tilting his head at you. As you let out a deep breath, your realized your dog has won.

You lay down in your bed as Achilles lays over your stomach and you try to sleep.

You don't dream for the rest of the night.

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[unmaskedagain]

Sorry, it’s reserved

  Honestly neither Marinette nor Chloe had been surprised when Bustier caved to Alya’s insistent requests that the two girls not be allowed to go on the class trip to New York City. Lila had been subtly hinting about how much friendly better thing would be if they weren’t there.

           Mostly because just two weeks ago, Marinette had presented her class trip idea presentation; complete with a potential itinerary, pictures of the grand hotel could stay at, the fantastic tours they could go on, and exciting places they could eat. The class had been suitable wow’d.

           What was surprising was when, after Bustier announced in front of the class that Marinette and Chloe couldn’t go to New York much to the smug faces of the students, Adrien said, “Cool. Then I’ll skip the class trip too.” He then turned to his two best friends. “What do you two want to do instead?” Adrien was sick and tired of the other students in the class. He had been trying to get them to believe Lila was a liar for months but no one, not even Nino, would listen to him.

           Instead, they turned on the two most awesome girls in the class. Well, Adrien wasn’t going to deal with it anymore.

           The look of horror on Lila’s face was priceless. However, there was no backtracking now. The dream of a romantic trip to New York, walking hand in hand with Adrien, burst into flames and was now nothing more than ashes.

“Yeah, I won’t go either,” Nathaniel stated. “Doesn’t seem fair. Marinette worked really hard on the idea for the trip.” He never bought Lila’s crap, and he never understood how anyone else did.

           Marinette smirked, “I’m up for whatever.” She shrugged. “I’m actually looking forward to now having to organize the trip. Or fundraise for it. And to think I was going to start working this weekend.” The bluenette made sure to look directly at Bustier and Alya, her ex-friend when she said this. “Its only October but believe me, you’ll want to start making reservations fast. Nothing was done but the presentation; which you can have by the way. And just a reminder, a lot of places do require a down payment. Also, don’t forget approval from the school board.”

“Which takes like three months btw,” Chloe said with a vicious smile on her face. She was the last class president. She knew exactly how hard getting a fabulous trip approved of was. “Paperwork has to be filled out in triplicates and if you mess up on even one form, they’ll make you fill out the entire thing again.” She pulled out her phone and sent a quick text. “I just let Daddy know that he won’t have to make his annual donation this year for the trip. If you don’t want us there you obviously don’t need it. And to think, he usually funds thirty percent of it. But I’m sure you already knew that.”

           By the looks on the other students’ faces, it was clear that they didn’t know that. However, pride wouldn’t let them back down. Besides, Alya thought, they had the moral high ground. Who wanted to hang with bullies anyway?

           To the other students’ credit, they did manage to raise enough money for the trip to New York. Granted, it wasn’t nearly as much as they usually did. Alya, the new class president, also forgot to make most of the reservations until the last minute, and it was hard to find a fancy hotel willing to accommodate an entire class of rowdy teenagers at the last minute. So they would stay at a Holiday Inn just outside of New York City. The glasses-wearing girl wished Lila had been so busy with her charity work so she would’ve had time to help and maybe they could’ve gotten a much better trip.

           By the end, the class trip the class would be getting wasn’t nearly as were or amazing as the one Marinette had presented at the beginning of the year. However, most were just happy to be going to New York.

           Lila shot four exiled students a victorious look as she bragged about all the things and people she’d get to see in New York. She had spent months trying to get Adrien to agree to go on the trip but he wouldn’t budge.

She sighed dramatically, “I love New York. The only bad part are the superheroes. Last time I was there Robin and Speedy practically got into a fistfight over who’d take me on a date. I hate getting in the way of friendships.”  Marinette snorted. “We leave for New York in three weeks. What will you three be doing then?”

“Waiting for a house to fall on you,” Marinette said easily.

           Adrien chuckled, “We leave for L.A in two days.”

           That got the classes’ attention.

“Sorry, What?” Alya asked; suddenly getting a bad feeling in her stomach.

           Chloe leaned back in her seat, “L.A. It was my idea. We decided since we couldn’t go on your trip we’d go on our own. Let's see… our first stop in L.A, we’ll be there for about a week; we’ll tour some movie studios, go on set for the Star Trek movie that filming. Attending the movie premiere of the newest Marvel movie. Then leave for Indio; it's not that far from L.A, I think. But who cares. We have to be at Coachella, even if only for two days. Then we go to Metropolis. And I can’t remember… Marinette what did you plan for us to do? It was her idea to go there.” She told the class who had looks of sheer dismay on their faces that got worse and worse as the four described the trip.

           Marinette smiled, “Tour of LexCorp, a tour of Daily Planet, reservations for the grand opening of Gordon Ramsey’s new restaurant, we got backstage passes for a 5 seconds of Summer concert-” She was cut off

“Why couldn’t we go see Selena Gomez again?” Adrien frowned.

           Marinette rolled her eyes, “Because you couldn’t beat Chloe in an arm-wrestling contest.”

“She is freakishly strong,” Adrien protested. “And she plays mind games!”

           Chloe blew a raspberry at the other blond.

“We’ll be in Metropolis for about a week,” Marinette continued, as her two friends bickered and Adrien declared he would have his vengeance. “Then Adrien got to pick where we next.”

“Disney World!” The blond shouted. It was his biggest childhood dream and it was becoming a reality. “We’re going to Florida to Disney World, and then Universal Studios; where we’ll get to see the Magical World of Harry Potter.”

“Geek!” Chloe sniped.

“Slytherin!” Adrien hissed back at her.

“And proud,” Chloe crossed her arms. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Hufflepuff?” She said the Hogwarts’ house like it was a dirty word. “Most notable thing a Hufflepuff ever did was die. And then somehow ended up in Twilight.”

           Adrien stood up angrily, “You take that back!”

“Make me!”

           Adrien looked at Nathaniel, “Ravenclaw, do something!” Their two houses went together like PB&J.

           Nathaniel put down his pencil, “No.” And went back to writing. “Make the Gryffindor do it!” He motioned to Marinette.

           Marinette just looked up at the ceiling, praying to gods’ for patience.

           Adrien, she was suddenly reminded, was loyal enough to help hide a body.

           Nathaniel was smart enough to have already come up with an alibi.

           Chloe as conning enough to ensure they got away it, after goading Marinette into doing it in the first place.

           Marinette would eventually snap and kill Lila. She would need them. “We’ll be in Florida for about four days; enough to see both amusement parks. Then all four of us agreed to go to New York next. First, stop Gotham; we’ll be touring Wayne Industries and attending one of the Wayne family annual galas.”

“Then we go directly to New York City,” Chloe said examining her nails. “Mama arranged us a tour of Vogue and Mode. We’ll be going to a few of the runways for Fashion Week. Adrien’s father arranged for us to go see Hamilton on Broadway.”

           It had taken a lot of time, effort, threats of going to the police, press, and CPS regarding child labor laws broken concerning Adrien to get Gabriel Agreste to agree to let his son go on the trip (as well as allow him to actually have a childhood). But there had been several conditions; mostly to do with security and proper supervision; which all the parents had, though not to Gabriel’s extremeness.

           Still, the four kids agreed to the terms.

“We’re going to a baseball game!” Adrien added excitedly. “A real one. I’m going to eat a hot dog the size of my arm. And cotton candy the size of my head.”

           Marinette nodded slowly, already picturing herself patting Adrien’s back as he whined about as stomach ache from eating too much.

           Chloe frown, picturing the same. She had lost a pair of Jimmy Choos after one disastrous trip to the carnival that involved way too much greasy food and rollercoaster with two loops. She shook the nightmarish memory away, “Thanks to Marinette, we’ll be touring the Stark Industries and the Avengers tower. All the hotels we’ll be staying at are 5 stars. Also, we’re going to three, three Michelin star restaurants. I can imagine what would’ve happened if she had made the reservations late. We might have ended up in some god awful Inn.”

“Come to think of it,” Marinette paused thoughtfully, “We should get to New York about the same time you do. What are your plans? No! Don’t tell me. I’m sure they’re amazing and I don’t want to be jealous. I mean you kicked us off the trip so you had to have something out of this world lined up.”

           Alya’s mouth was dry. She tried to come up with something to say; something to brag about but she knew that come September she’d have to pony up the pics. Because Pics or it didn’t happen. Chloe was active on social media; she’d be updating on a daily basis and scooping out her competition. She��d know instantly if they were lying and they’d never live it down.

           Lila fought the urge to throw the biggest tantrum of her life. At the beginning of the year, after Marinette’s trip presentation, she thought getting the bluenette and Blondie off the trip was the perfect plan; even when Adrien said he wouldn’t go. However, it was soon clear that Alya and the other students were in way over their hands. The dream trip that Marinette had spun them would be realized as only a dream as it was clear they wouldn’t manage it without Marinette’s organizational skills and Chloe’s funding.

           The trip they got was the standard tourist one. A look around the city, the statue of liberty, Time Square, and a museum or two. Honestly, Lila took better trips with her grandmother.

           Maybe there was still a way to save things…

“You know,” Lila smiled sweetly. “Since we’re all going to be in New York anyway, we should do everything together-“

“Can’t,” Marinette stated firmly. “Reservations are reservations for a reason. Tickets were bought. You know how it is.”

           Bustier frowned. This had ended the way she thought it would. When Alya and the other students beseeched her to disallow Marinette and Chloe from the school trip, she thought it was for the best. Chloe had always had a hostile attitude that Marinette seemed to have developed as well. It left the rest of the class with negative energy that wasn’t helpful for nurturing their growth.

           However, she couldn’t have predicted just how badly things would go. Alya had come crying to her several times about having to fill out and re-fill out multiple forms for the school board. She seemed to get something wrong every time.

           The children could barely raise enough money for the trip. And it wasn’t nearly as wonderful as the one Marinette had come up with at the beginning of the year. Still, they were going to New York which was what counted. Most classes wouldn’t even have gotten that far, She thought smugly. It would be a good trip. (Caline had dreamed about accidentally running into Steve Rogers or Thor and being swept off her feet. And she thought that dream wouldn’t even be possible if she was too busy trying to reign in her to most troublesome students which were one of her reason her telling the two they couldn’t go.) However, even that trip paled in comparison to the one the bluenette had planned for her and her two friends. 5-star hotels, trips to galas, fashion week, going to the Avengers Towers, possibly meeting Captain America, Thor, and the rest! It all sounded too good to be true.

“There must be something you can do,” Bustier said. “It would be nice if all my students were together.”

           The other students looked at the tour with hope clear in their eyes.

           Adrien, Marinette, and Chloe just looked at the teacher like she was dumb. Each fought the urge to remind the teacher that she was just fine with the three not going less than ten minutes ago.

           Adrien rolled his eyes, “There isn’t. Everything was bought and paid for. They are only expecting four kids which is why we get to go to so many places. Turns out, not many hotels and restaurants want to deal with a bunch of teens at the last minute.”

Marinette nodded, “Besides you wouldn’t want us crashing your trip anyway. We’d hate to get in the way. We know you guys wanted a drama-free trip.” She through the term back in their faces. “But I wouldn’t mind meeting up one day. You guys are doing time square right. Let us know when and we’ll see if we can do it the same day.”

“If we can fit in our schedules,” Chloe snapped. “It's pretty packed.”

“Not as packed as theirs, I’m sure,” Marinette smiled kindly, though inside she was doing a victory dance worthy of a champion. “I can’t wait to see the pictures.”

           The four left that Friday. By Sunday, the social medias were filled with dozens of pictures of beautiful hotel rooms. The next three weeks were the worst in the class’s entire lives. The other students in the class tried their best not to look but it was hard. Particularly when the picture of Marinette, Adrien, and Chloe on the red carpet started to make waves. Pictures of the four meeting various celebrities like Lex Luther and Chris Pine, superheroes like Superman and Batman, of them at Disney World and Coachella had left more than a bit of envy in their hearts.

           Their own trip had started out terribly. Alya hadn’t book enough rooms so they had to triple bunk, with some people having to sleep on a cot. And it turned out that the only tours she had secured was to Elis Island and the New York Art Museum; nothing nearly as exciting as they hoped. So they had been mostly left on their own for sight-seeing.

           Still, it wasn’t a terrible trip. They ate great good and saw the normal New York tourist attractions.

           However, when the time came for them to go to Time Square and meet up with Adrien, Alya, Chloe, and Marinette, Bustier was ready to pull her hair out.

           Bustier never had trouble on any of the previous trips, as they were always organized to the minute, but this one had so much free time the kids didn’t know what to do with themselves which resulted in chaos. And being threatened with being kicked out of the hotel. She didn’t understand what was different. The students were usually so well behaved.

           Sure on previous trips, there had been two more chaperones but Bustier always thought they were unnecessary. Her students were the best and most well behaved in school for the most part. She was positive that they only needed their teacher to watch out for them.

           She was wrong.

           And Bustier was very surprised to see Mendeleiev there with her four wayward students, looking very much like the Cat that got the Canary.

“Demetria,” Bustier greeted politely. “What are you doing here?”

           Mendeleev didn’t bother to hide her smirk. “I was invited as a chaperone. It just me and Gorilla. Between the two of us we keep the delinquents in check,” She said Delinquents at the four who playfully hissed at her. Each of the four wore a black shirt with a different Hogwarts house on it.“Best decision I ever made. I was reluctant at first as it’s not school-related and I wouldn’t be paid for it. But Agreste and Bourgeois are paying me nine times my usual amount an hour to watch the kids like a hawk. Luckily their goods kids. What about you? How is your class trip going?”

           Bustier forced herself to smile, and not bite out angrily that it was driving her insane. The kids were driving her completely up the wall. And Caline was more than a little aware of how amazing her four students trip was and to think Mendeleiev had gotten to do it all with them made her blood boil and her eyes practically turn green with jealousy. “Extremely well. We are having… the time of our lives.”

“I’m sure,” Mendeleiev said. She and the rest of the teachers had never been happy with how Bustier ran her class. Or just how much she and Damocles got away with. However, it didn’t matter. Come September, things would change. Damocles had already gotten fired for taking bribes, breaking procedure, and being a complete idiot.

           Bustier, while technically, hadn’t done anything wrong would still have to listen to the school board tell her everything that was wrong with her class. And there was a lot.

“Have you gone to the Avengers tower yet?” Bustier asked, not subtly at all. She still hoped that if there was time she and her class could tag along.

“We have,” Mendeleiev told her, bursting the bubble of hope that had sprung in Caline. “It was quite wonderful. I had a wonderful debate with Doctor Banner; it turns out he’s read several of my papers and me, his. While the kids are at the baseball game tomorrow, the two of us will be having a lunch date and going over our scientific hypothesis tomorrow.”

“Get it, Ms. Mendeleiev,” Chloe laughed.

           Mendeleiev shot her a stern look but her mouth twitched as she fought a smile.

“Perhaps my class could go with?”

“Sorry, we have a reserved seats.”

Envy flared in Caline Bustier more than ever before in her entire life. If they had been still in Paris, Hawkmoth would’ve had a field day. “Oh but what about watching the kids. Won’t they need you? What would their parents say about this?” A vicious smirk appeared on Bustier’s face. She always thought Mendeleiev needed to be knocked down a peg or two.

Mendeleiev didn’t bat an eye, “Already covered. Already cleared with their parents. After all who’s going to say no to Captain America and Iron Man babysitting their kids. Steve hadn’t been to a game a while and he really wanted to take his son Peter and the rest of Tony’s interns. The kids should have a blast.”

Adrien shot a bright smile at his bodyguard, “Natasha is going too! I still don’t understand how you two know each other.”

Gorilla’s face burned a red color but he remained silent. He wore the bright yellow and black Hufflepuff scarf Adrien had begged him to wear as a show of support, particularly when Mendeleiev revealed herself to be a Ravenclaw (So did Bruce Banner). Captain America and the Winter Soldier high-fived Marinette over being Gryffindors. And Pepper Potts, Iron Man, and the Black Widow introduced themselves as Slytherin alumni.

Where was the Hufflepuff love?

Adrien had looked at Hawkeye with hope but Clint had shrugged and said, “Gryffindor.”

The blond boy huffed and pouted (the pout was how he got Gorilla to wear the scarf). He bet Thor was a Hufflepuff.

           The rest of Bustier’s class still steer clear away from the four; out of pride and envy. Lila had attempted to go near Adrien but was stopped by Alya who didn’t want to risk her bestie getting bullied by the meanest girls in school.

           Alya had decided after seeing the pictures of the four with Superman, The Avengers, Batman, and THE LOIS LANE that life just wasn’t fair. If it was Marinette and Chloe (Maybe even Nathaniel) would be stuck in Paris, crying their eyes out over not being allowed on the trip. It was what they deserved for being such bullies.

           The preplanned tour of Times Square, which was mostly just the kids walking around and awing at the pretty lights. It was actually a bit boring, once the excitement wore off. They found themselves on the highest building there, looking over New York City in its entirety, along with a bunch of other tourists.

           Suddenly all the electronic billboards and every ounce of electricity turned off. Crowds up people looked around confused.

           The giant monitors blurred and a face appeared, “Greetings citizens of New York, I. AM. THE. Electrocutioner!” Lights were centered on the highest building there, and it was clear the villain stood on top of the building. The building of Bustier’s class was on.

           One thought echoed in the minds of each Parisian citizen, “Fuck.”

           Before any of the Paris heroes’ could figure out if they should act or not, another team of heroes arrived.

           The evil-doer had with him a dozen or so henchmen, each more menacing the last.

           The sight of Kid Flash zooming up the side of the building was incredible. Seeing Young Justice kick butt left Marinette a little breathless.

Was this what it was like, she wondered, seeing Ladybug fight.

           When some of the henchmen were ordered to take hostages; Marinette, Chloe, Nathaniel, Adrien, Gorilla, and Mendeleiev fighting back much to the shock of Bustier and her class. Chloe rolled her eyes as she, and the other three pulled out miniature pens from their pockets; did they really not know how often New York is attacked by Super Villians. Seriously.

           With a click of the button, the pen turns into a long whip. Chloe refused to be taken without a fight. Her and Marinette, who now wielded a fighting staff, nodded at each other. The blonde snorted when she looked at Adrien, “A shield, really?”

“I don’t want to hurt people too much,” Adrien defended.

“This is why you’re a Hufflepuff.”

           Nathaniel spun his trident around. It worked like a Taser and could shock people. Luckily only the villain had electricity powers.

Marinette didn’t know how it happened but suddenly she was fighting back to back with Robin.

“Nice moves,” Robin said after Marinette knocked out a henchman with a high kick. He knocked out a henchman with his staff.

“Not too bad yourself.”

           Nathaniel nearly had a heart attack when Aqualad jumped in to help him protect several tourists. When biggest henchmen came rushing at him, the redhead fired up his trident and within seconds the underling was down for the count.

           Kaldur paused, “…Can I borrow that?”

           Chloe used the whip with ease and grace. She has been practicing with it ever since she saw Shadow Hunters for the first time. Isabelle Lightwood was an icon.

The blonde didn’t know how it happened. But one minute she was fighting off two lame minions then she saw an Arrow guy fighting and then falling off the roof, and the next thing she knows she’s jumping after him. Then they both were dangling off the roof with only Chloe’s whip for support.

“You call this a rescue?” Arrow guy snorted.

“You call yourself a hero?” Chloe snapped.

“Meow!”

           Chloe didn’t see how he did it but one moment she was hanging there; the next Arrow guy was swinging her up back onto the roof.

           He smirked at her, “You’re a pretty one.”

           She waved him off, “Oh go save someone!”

           When Superboy crashed down next to him after taking a brutal hit, Adrien gripped his shield and stood in front of him. Adrien was able to block most of the attempts of the underlings to reach the boy of steel. But it wasn���t long until they had them surrounded. Just when Adrien thought he was a goner, red lasers blasted the henchman back.

           Superboy stood up, “Thanks for the assist.” He smiled at the blond boy. “Nice shield.”

           Gorilla and Mendeleiev handled their own really well. After seeing Gorilla fight, Adrien started to have some serious suspicions about just how his bodyguard knew the Black Widow.

           When the fight was over, and the villains detained, the small group stood with the rest of the civilians until the all-clear was given.

The Bustier and her class stared in awe as the members of Young Justice walked over to the six with large smiles. The heroes didn’t even spare the class a glance. Not even when Alya pushed Lila to the front but Robin and Arsenal never even noticed her.

Dick Grayson, Robin, smiled at the pretty bluenette with bluest eyes he’d ever seen and did his best to ignore Batman in his ear about bringing in the Heroes Ladybug, Chat Noir, Queen Bee, and Bright Roar in to Watch Tower stat. He knew all about Ladybug and, thanks to Batman, knew her civilian identity. But to see her in person was a whole different experience.

No, there was a time and place for everything. And right now the time was to flirt with the Gorgeous Superhero who a skintight red suit.

“You’re amazing,” He told her honestly. “What are you doing for the rest of my life?”

“I swear to god if you propose!” Batman hissed in his ear.

           Marinette blushed a bright red.

           Kaldur handed the trident back to Nathaniel, “This is an amazing weapon. You use it well.” He told the redhead. This must be the new Hero Bright Roar “I wish for one just like it.”

           Nathaniel flushed but handed the weapon back to Kaldur, “Keep it. I’m not that good with it.”

           Kaldur smiled, “Then perhaps you will let me teach you one day. One on one sessions.”

“Really Kaldur,” Aquaman chastised. “This is a mission, not a dating show.”

           Aqualad ignored him.

           Superboy nodded at Adrien, “You’re good,” he told the smaller blond boy. Though from the reports he read about Chat Noir, he was only a year younger than him. “Cool shirt by the way. It's nice to meet a fellow Hufflepuff.” He said and then suddenly his arms were full of a blond boy thanking him for existing.

“Breathe,” Superman chuckled in his ear. “Just breathe, Connor.”

“For such good finders, we’re so hard to find,” Adrien said. “I could kiss you!”

           Superboy turned the brightest shade of red anyone had ever seen.

           Arsenal eyed the hot blond girl, “At least you know how to stay out of the way.”

           Chloe glared at him, “Next time, I’ll just let you die.”

“Then who be the man of your dreams.”

“Freddie Kruger would probably take his job back,” Chloe said with a hand on her hip. “Though his face isn’t as terrifying as yours.”

“That girl will eat you alive,” Oliver warned in his ear.

“So you admit you dream about me,” Roy stepped forward.

           Chloe huffed, “Get real!”

“Hey,” Alya called. “Robin, Speedy, don’t you want to say hi to Lila Rossi.” She motioned to the Italian girl who had gone pale.

“It’s Arsenal now,” Roy corrected.

           Dick nodded, “And who’s Lila?”

           Marinette smiled, “Oh I’d totally marry you now!”

           Robin grinned and raised his arms in victory.

           Batman cursed in his ear.

            Robin, Arsenal, Aqualad, and Superboy kept their attention on the on the four. No matter how much their superhero mentors protested. No matter how much Bustier’s tried to intervene.

              No, their attentions’ were reserved

[lalainajanes]

For the square “water park” on my Klarosummerbingo card! Might be my worst title ever but it’s actually better than the original one so  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Slip and Slide

Caroline speedwalks through the lobby, weaving around people who seem to think it’s the appropriate place for an early morning stroll. “Hold the elevator!” she calls, ignoring the few disgruntled looks she receives.

She hadn’t been that loud, and she’s nearly late for a critical meeting. It’s the first one with a new client, and she’d hate to make a bad first impression.

She’d had to head to the dry cleaners before work, had gotten caught in a traffic snarl in an area she wasn’t that familiar with, and it had taken her way too long to figure out the detour. She should have left her place earlier.

She gets to the security gates, juggling a garment bag, her briefcase, and a portfolio. Her ID seems to be just out of reach, and she jams her hand further into her purse. Albert, her favorite guard, murmurs, “Take a breath, Ms. Forbes.”

She blows one out, frustrated. Rolls her shoulders in an attempt to relax. “Sorry. I’m just…”

“Stressed? I can tell.”

Yikes. Caroline hopes that doesn’t mean her hair has exploded.

She smiles weakly, “Big day today.”

A brand new project, after the last one had been a disaster. Caroline’s comfortable with stress, thrives on high stakes, but she could totally use a win.

Her fingers touch the familiar edge of her badge, and she pulls it out triumphantly. She taps it on the sensor, walks through the revolving gate. “Good luck, Ms. Forbes,” Alfred murmurs as she passes.

It’s a little thing, but Caroline feels a little better knowing someone’s rooting for her.

She’s relieved to spot that one of the elevators is open, a man holding the door, his eyes on her. She doesn’t recognize him, but that doesn’t mean anything. The building has 55 floors, offices for more than two dozen companies within it. He’s dressed in a suit, like the vast majority of the men she sees in the building. His is nicer than most, charcoal grey, perfectly fitted, with a very subtle pinstripe that she only notices when she gets closer. Caroline hurries into the car gratefully. She leans forward, punches 32. “Thank you so much,” she says to him, turning so they’re shoulder to shoulder. “You’re a lifesaver.”

The man on her other side makes a noise, a tiny scoff. Caroline glances at him quizzically. He’s stoic, eyes forward, but she’s sure there’s a hint of amusement on his face.

An arm brushes against hers, drawing her attention. “Feel free to ignore him,” the man who’d held the elevator says. His voice is low, smooth and she’d be charmed by the accent if they’d met in a social situation.

Or any situation, if she’s honest.

“My brother would probably describe me as more of a troublemaker.”

Huh. She hadn’t have figured brothers. They’ve both got attractive and well-dressed going for them but little other familial resemblance. Caroline’s head swings back, “Are you a trouble maker?”

His amusement is plain. His full lips curl, and deep dimples appear in his cheeks.

Oh yeah. Definitely a trouble maker.

“I’m about twenty minutes early for my meeting today; how much of a trouble maker can I be?” His tone is playful, a touch too innocent to be believed.

Damn it. Caroline does not have time for an attractive man this morning. At least she hadn’t changed into the frumpier outfit in the garment bag. Hopefully, she’ll run into this guy again.

“I think I need more info. Could be a one-time thing. I’m almost late for my meeting, which is wildly out of character.”

“Not the trusting sort, are you?”

Caroline shrugs, raising her brows expectantly.

He laughs briefly, “Well, I did send an email ahead to inquire about the coffee preferences of the team I’m meeting. I’m stopping at one of the cafes to pick it up now. Would a troublemaker do that?”

“Hmm, maybe. Could be an underhanded tactic to get on a good side before the trouble starts.”

Dimples’ brother chimes in again, dry this time. “I believe your assistant sent that email. And that she learned the practice from my assistant.”  

Dimples glowers, and Caroline must admit this is a delightful distraction from her anxiety. She glances up at the panel above the door and is disappointed to find they’re almost on her floor. “If you’re going to the café on 36, I recommend the oatmeal raisin cookies. Most people go chocolate chip. Trust me, that’s a mistake.”

The elevator pings, the doors sliding open. Caroline smiles, hitches her briefcase higher on her shoulder. “This is me. Thanks again.”

The receptionist spots Caroline, stands up, a sheaf of papers in her hands, and Caroline’s reminded about how much she has to do. She hurries out, her heels clicking across the shiny tiles of the lobby.

She still glances back at the elevator, can’t help smiling, pleased, when she finds her new friend from the elevator watching her as the doors close.

Even if she never sees him again, he’d made her morning a little brighter.

Now, though, it’s time to work.

* * * * *

Fifteen minutes later, Caroline’s pacing in her office. She’s pinned her hair back and changed into the purple pantsuit she’d picked up at the dry cleaners. It’s a great color but not the most flattering fit. The pants are fine, but the jacket’s boxy, and she’s wearing a plain pink blouse underneath, buttoned to her throat, a thick silver necklace threaded through the collar. There’s a pair of glasses perched on her nose, and she’d changed into sensible flats.

She’d learned her lesson last time, at the first meeting where she’d been the project lead. She’d been called ‘Honey’ and other more annoying pet names and asked to serve coffee and fetch snacks. She’d received skepticism when she’d introduced herself. By the end of that first meeting, Caroline had wanted to scream her credentials – a B.A. and a Master’s in Civil Engineering, a whole pile of certifications, several prestigious internships, and stellar work references, thank you very much – at most of the people in the room.

Ultimately, the project had been successful, but Caroline had experienced frequent bursts of frustration that bordered on rage. Her suggestions were met with questions that made it clear her intelligence was doubted, her corrections with condescension, even though she’d usually been the only one in the room with any significant scientific expertise.

Expertise that’s kind of crucial in designing a water park. It wouldn’t have been a good look, or a sound investment, if guests were to end up injured or dead after paying exorbitant ticket prices and expecting a fun day.

Her skin has thickened considerably, but Caroline hopes that’s less necessary this time. Her boss had assured her that this job would be easier, and Caroline’s choosing to believe her. It’s even potentially exciting – these clients own several international resorts, the park she’s pitching on will be built in Spain.

Being project leader, she’d traveled to oversee construction on the nightmare build, but Tennessee doesn’t carry quite the same appeal as the Spanish coast, at least from the photos Caroline’s seen.

At the very least, it can’t be a worse experience. She hopes.

She hears Katherine coming her way, takes a final deep breath before Kat breezes into her office. “What are you wearing?” Kat asks, sounding both mystified and vaguely disgusted. She pauses in front of Caroline, fingers pinching her lapel and tugging. “Is this polyester?”

“Maybe. I thrifted it.”

Katherine’s face twists in the sort of revulsion one would expect if Caroline confessed to grave robbing the ensemble.

“Ew, why?”

“Figured I needed a costume. To make sure that this time, no one in there thinks to call me ‘sweet cheeks.’”

She’d been paired with another designer last time, Matt Donovan, who was a nice enough guy but had been pretty useless in the having her back department. Caroline likely wouldn’t have cried into her Ben and Jerry’s quite so often had Katherine been her partner. Kat has the unique and impressive ability to make demands and issue orders and have people thank her for it.

Kat snorts, “Elijah Mikaelson would never. He’s aggressively polite. I haven’t spoken to him yet, but I doubt Niklaus would either. I assume he has the same hot accent.”

That’s a new name. Caroline doesn’t like surprises. “And who is Niklaus?”

“A brother. And a business partner. He wasn’t originally scheduled to be here but is unexpectedly in town. What do you think the British equivalent to sweet cheeks is?”

Caroline’s eyes go wide, a few puzzle pieces clicking together. British brothers, twenty minutes early for a meeting. What are the odds?

Crap. Had she been flirting with a client? In front of another client?

There’s a tap at the door, her boss’ assistant’s head poking in, “They’re ready for you in the conference room.”

Ugh. Maybe she’s cursed.

* * * * * 

The presentation goes fantastically.

Katherine had been correct – the Mikaelsons don’t seem to labor under the misapprehension that a conventionally attractive blonde woman can’t grasp complex concepts. They’d shaken her hand when she’d arrived; Niklaus (or Klaus, as he apparently prefers) had looked a bit puzzled when they’d been introduced, Caroline had chalked that up to the outfit. He’d said it was nice to see her again. Explaining her mad dash to the elevator, and Klaus’ assistance, to the room had broken the ice nicely.

Kat kicks them off, and her design is gorgeous; Elijah and Klaus appear suitably impressed. When it’s Caroline’s turn, her nerves fall away by her second PowerPoint slide. She knows her stuff backward and forward, and she’s incredibly pleased with her innovation.

She also begins to feel less bad about the flirting once she sees that Kat throws Elijah a few looks that are borderline inappropriate for the office (that he seems pretty pleased with).

They ask questions, pour over the mock-ups and technical drawings Caroline and Katherine had prepared. Their ideas are actually good, which is a nice contrast for the last project. She’d done far too much lying and finessing to attempt to steer the previous park into a less terrible direction. The Mikaelsons have far fewer notes than Caroline had anticipated, and she promises to put together an update ASAP. They schedule another meeting.

She thinks Klaus’ handshake lingers when they say goodbye, but maybe she’s just riding high on adrenaline and imagining things.

She kind of hopes she isn’t. It’s probably too messy to date a client, but a girl can fantasize, can’t she?

Caroline helps herself to the cookie tray, pleased by the generous helping of oatmeal raisin she finds. Kat’s disappeared, but she knows their boss will want to debrief. Caroline collapses into one of the conference chairs, pulls out her phone to check her messages.

She replies to a few emails before she notices one that’s just arrived.

 Hello Caroline,

I enjoyed your presentation today. I look forward to the next.

Warmly,

Klaus

 She grins to herself, slumps lower in her chair. Clearly, she hadn’t imagined anything if Klaus is emailing her when he’s barely out of the building. She takes a risk and sends a slightly more casual reply than she’d usually attempt at this point.

If he reacts badly, she can up the formality later on. If he doesn’t, well… she’s only fostering a good working relationship. That’ll be essential if they land this contract.

And she’s like 90% sure it’s in the bag.

 Hi Klaus,

Thank you!

The photos your team sent over of the location were gorgeous; both Kat and I were inspired. I think this is some of our best work to date. I’m excited to dive into the updates and meet again next week.

Best,

Caroline

P.S. Thanks for the cookies.

His reply comes minutes later.

Caroline,

I believe it. Your work is impressive, as I’m sure your new ideas will be. Have you ever been to Spain? The pictures hardly do it justice.

Warmly,

Klaus

P.S. You’re welcome. Which coffee order was yours?

 Well, that’s the opposite of a bad reaction.

Caroline sets her phone aside, tells herself she has to be smart here. She’s reasonably sure she’s not doing anything that’s prohibited. The emails will speak for themselves, and they live on the company server. Neither she nor Klaus are offering anything untoward for the contract. If things go well, she may just have to fill out an HR disclosure form. She’ll double-check the firm’s code of conduct.

Just in case.

[desdemonafictional]

Okay I have another little chunk of cleaned up RP from yesteryear. Like the last one, I filled in all the Hisoka stuff after the fact.

This is some self indulgent fantasy guro

---

In the middle of reaching down to the floor, where his pack of playing cards lay in a whimsical heap, Hisoka froze. It was so unlike him to pause that way, stock still in the middle of a graceful sweep--all his movements were graceful, after all, and Gon had taken it for granted until that very moment, watching the ungainly stumble as Hisoka righted himself on suddenly unsteady heels. The cards lay on the ground where they fell, untouched.

Gon would never have thought to look for signs of weakness in Hisoka's bearing, but now that he had tipped his hand they were all Gon could see. He took a step forward, hand lifted, wanting to touch the core that Hisoka's every flicker of tension seemed to curl in over. He stopped short just in time to remember his manners.

"May I?" he said, looking up towards the older hunter's face.

The miasma of Hisoka's ren, as it burst over him, felt as viscous and dark as the first time he had felt its touch, in the Heaven's Arena, without the understanding or the means to counter it. Gon guessed it was kind of like that again. Nen still existed in his body, he'd been assured, but he couldn't seem to access it. Without the ability to pull a cloak of ten around himself, it was almost as if thousands of horrible fingers were dragging at their nails over his skin, pulling and tearing at him.

He let out a steadying breath. The feeling was awful, but at least knowing where it came from was made it easier to endure. And he sure wasn't going to let Hisoka intimidate him, no matter how hard the push was.

Hisoka fixed him with that malevolent feline gaze. "Go on then. If you like," he said. "You may yet live to regret it."

His undershirt was black, a tight stretchy weave underneath one of his billowy crop tops. His body twitched as Gon drew near, but he didn't retreat, or take back his lukewarm consent.

Gon gently took hold of the undershirt's hem, the small knuckles of his fingers brushing against unnaturally chilled skin, and drew it upward.

Underneath there was nothing but a hollowed cavern, like the mechanical core of a toy solider, with the ragged remains of vital pieces hung suspended there. The remaining flesh gave uneasy little twitches, as if his body was desperately trying to carry on its natural function without support. Gon had never seen anything like it. It was terrible, and yet it was oddly neat. It was a horror almost too fantastic to be real. Too bloodless. Too whimsical.

"This is really impressive," he said, as he let go of the hem with one hand. He ran the pad of a finger over the edge of flesh instead, where the great bite had been taken out of Hisoka. He had an urge to touch more, to take the delicate bits of guts in his hand and feel them pulsing in his fingers, but it seemed like it would probably hurt and he didn't want that.

He just wanted... he just wanted...

Hisoka shivered when Gon’s warm finger traced along the gaping ruined flesh.

"It does take some little skill," Hisoka admitted. He was probably going for modesty, but his voice was oddly hoarse.

Gon started to pull away, realizing that he'd probably overstayed his welcome, and that wasn't polite. But as he retreated, the invisible web of Hisoka's nen stuck and pulled at his fingers, as if it didn't want to let him go. The ragged guts gave visible twitches and throbs.

Hisoka moaned a little. His breathing increased, just the slightest bit. He took hold of Gon’s fingers in his own, cool pale digits wrapped around warm dark ones. He started guiding Gon back toward him.

“Go ahead.” As if he could barely contain his excitement, as if it strung through him like a tensed piano wire, driving his heart faster and faster, almost audible in Gon's ears. “Do it...”

Gon stiffened in Hisoka's grip.

A spike of adrenaline lanced his chest. That low noise, which was as familiar as it was worrying in Hisoka's throat, had stirred something in Gon's stomach that even the ren hadn't managed, as lethally dangerous as that had been. The ren had hurt, and it had been a threat against his body in a real way, but it hadn't touched anything inside of him. Not the way Hisoka's soft moans did.

He could pull away. He thought he could pull away. And even if Hisoka wouldn't let him go, he could at least try. But he still wanted to touch--he still wanted--

If anything, the thrill of fear that raced up the back of his neck only sharpened the desire.

It occurred to him that for all that they had been opponents and allies again and again since the day of their first meeting, Hisoka's hand around his now might have been the first time the magician had ever willingly touched him without violence. It was that thought more than anything that made Gon relax into his grip.

Under Hisoka's guidance, Gon slipped his fingers between the ruined flesh. He cupped a length of pale organ, oddly hot compared to Hisoka's chilled fingers. It fluttered under his touch, like a captive butterfly, as he stroked a thumb over it.

Hisoka’s mouth fell open and his forehead tensed, hand loosening around Gon’s, letting him take the lead. “Yes...” he panted, “oh...” The center of his throat had sort of contracted, which made his voice deeper, and his breathing became increasingly labored.

There was no flinch of pain when Gon cupped his insides, thumb stroking a length of skin that should never have been bared to the open air, let alone touched. He marveled at what Hisoka was letting him do. It was gentle, but so invasive. Above him, Hisoka’s shoulders shook. The Nen surrounding his organs and holding them in place may have protected him, but Gon’s blunt fingers were invading that, sliding over it.

“A-ah!” His hand slid off of Gon’s fingers and gripped forearm. He stared down at Gon’s hand inside him, open-mouthed, and shuddered.

"You're so warm here," Gon murmured, not thinking much about it. "Your insides are so soft..."

His sharp nails dug into Gon's skin, drawing blood just below the elbow. Gon paused, looked up--caught sight of Hisoka's throat working, swallowing over and over again, as if he was caught and trying to get free.

“You know, Gon,” he said, at last, “it would be terribly intimate to die with you fondling my most secret areas, but the clock’s ticking, and you haven’t said a word about whether or not you’ll help me. Might we discuss that?”

"Oh!" Gon said. He could feel the nails in his forearm threatening to break skin. He guessed this must be a pretty time sensitive injury. He glanced up at Hisoka's pink tongue, as it traced that familiar path over his lips. It must be pretty serious if Hisoka was passing up the opportunity to ooze his intensity all over Gon the way he usually did. He'd never known Hisoka to flinch back from anything, intimacy or pain or otherwise.

He pulled back, reluctantly, trying to tamp down his own curiosity.

"Of course I'll help you," he said. "If we want to get you help any time in the near future, we're going to have to travel. I think Killua and his sister are sight-seeing on the north end of the continent."

He put a reassuring hand over the claws Hisoka had been digging into his arm. Hisoka probably didn't need any reassurance, but somehow it felt necessary to convey this sincerity. Everyone had told him that Hisoka lived in a different kind of world than most humans. He wouldn't want Hisoka to think he didn't understand the gravity of the situation.

"Don't worry," he said, "I won't let you die."

Hisoka made a choked noise and then, turning away like a cat caught in a moment of dishevelment, pulled his undershirt back down into its proper place.

[itsclydebitches]

RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “Divide”

Hello, everyone, and welcome back! It feels good to be doing some normal RWBY-ing in this strange world of ours. First, some supplementary materials.

Number One: In response to any (valid) questions along the lines of, “Hey Clyde, it’s now been a full year since Volume 7 was airing and you still haven’t answered my ask about it. Or the ones about Volume 6… what’s up with that?” I’ve created what I hope is an informative video detailing the problem:

(I assure you, the Earth, Wind & Fire was a happy accident during the screen recording.)

Needless to say, there’s a lot and I’ve known for some time now that I will LITERALLY never get through all my asks. Which doesn’t mean I don’t want you to send future thoughts in! Just know that as we head into Volume 8 territory I’ll most likely prioritize those, as well as any Volume 7 asks that aren’t woefully out of date. But I do want everyone to know that I read all the asks I receive, appreciate them immensely, and think too much about hypothetical answers, even if I don’t have time to actually write them out 💜

Number Two: There’s a bingo board this year!

Jury’s out on whether I’ll remember to update it, but at the very least this serves as a decent glimpse into my — and others’ — expectations going into this volume.

Number Three: I’ve collected a list of things I’ve heard about Volume 8 from what seem to be reputable sources. I did this because RT is developing a tendency to talk up certain points and then fail to deliver, either because something was taken out of a volume/moved to another, or because RT apparently has radically different ideas about what including something means. So this might be handy to keep on file and ask ourselves two months from now, “Did RT actually deliver on what they promised?”

Emphasis on Ruby’s leadership and how Summer’s death has impacted her

Insight into Ren and Nora’s flaws

May Merigold will supposedly have a larger part

More information about The Long Memory (Ozpin’s cane)

Theme of the volume is that you can respect someone but that doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with them

Very short timeline (supposedly just two days)

Yang in particular is very suspicious and distrustful

I was also going to include a list of all the threads that need to be continued/wrapped up, but honestly that would have taken too large a chunk off my life. Let’s just throw out the highlights:

Are we really going to have Qrow gunning for Ironwood?

Clover is dead regardless. Press ‘F’ to pay respects

Oscar bb you got shot please acknowledge this

Ozpin bb you got done dirty please acknowledge this

Penny is a Maiden now. I feel like the fandom has been sleeping on this (myself included)

Queer baiting, queer baiting… you’re on thin ice at this point, RWBY. Just skate on over to the queer snack bar before you fall straight into the lake.  

Ren spill your deep dark secret already and it had better be something more than just ‘Oh no Nora might someday die :( ’

Salem is here so how the actual fuck is the cast surviving this?

Will Ironwood likewise survive his descent into antagonism? Yes or please yes no?

I think that’s all the biggies. I strive to keep lists like this in mind while analyzing, but honestly RWBY has a hundred moving parts that are abandoned or changed or simply retconned at the drop of a hat. So an attempt will be made.

Number Four (last one I promise!): Normal disclaimers and reminders for Recaps apply:

Please don’t fill up the already full inbox with flames. It’s still 2020. No one has time for that nonsense.

There will absolutely be typos and wonky parts because I try to get these out the same day an episode premieres. I have now been working on this for ten hours, nearly straight, and have no more energy for edits. Apologies in advance and RIP to my Saturdays.

I reserve the right to use stupid GIFs and memes at my discretion.

I strive to keep my focus on recapping/analyzing but salt tends to worm its way in… If you’re a die-hard RWBY fan with little patience for criticism, let alone (at times) snarky criticism, please proceed with caution.

No wait I lied, this is the last thing:

Okay, got that out of my system LET’S DO THIS!

We start not with the episode itself but rather Rooster Teeth’s (RT’s) strange non-promotion of it. If you follow my blog you may have caught the post where I pointed out that there was nothing on RT’s website to suggest that one of their most popular shows—if not the most popular show—was premiering today. Nothing on the main page. Nothing on the RWBY page either, not unless you count the Volume 8 poster background (easily mistaken for the Volume 7 poster) and the trailer buried all the way down past Episodes, past Merch, in the Bonus Features section along with videos like Live From Remnant and the volume intros. RT… the promotion of your feature show is not a bonus. This should be front and center! Honest to god, five minutes before the episode dropped I was checking the website for a Volume 8 section, a countdown, anything that would tell me the episode was imminent without relying on fans on tumblr to keep me in the loop. We got nada, zilch. I’m not sure whether that speaks more to RT’s iffy management of the series or simply the website’s horrible design—RIP losing RWBY on Youtube—but I was surprised when I saw the episode a few minutes after 11:00am. At that point I honestly expected to hear about a dely.

So that’s the mood I entered the premiere in, but truly? We start off strong. Things take a pretty severe nosedive later on, we’ll get to that, but I was impressed with our beginning and that probably has a lot to do with the fact that we start with our villains.

We open on a Cinderella character, Cinder, and thus I’m immediately pleased that we’re getting something about her backstory after all this time. Seven years! She appeared in episode one, folks! To say we’re overdue is an understatement. There isn’t a whole lot to go on, just a younger Cinder sadly scrubbing the floor, poised under a spotlight. What we learn, or potentially learn, is based far more in cultural knowledge than this scene. We know Cinderella’s story, which includes the abusive family, the longing for more, the eventual escape, and thus we’re able to read all of that in this image, despite the image itself not telling us any of this overtly. That means we could be wrong in our interpretation, but if we’re not it’s an easy shorthand in an already packed story.

What I’m really impressed with is the sound bridge between the scrubbing and her nails on the back of Neo’s chair. Fantastic way to confirm that this is Cinder as well as showcasing just how far she’s come. The sound of her labor has been replaced with the sound of her power and given that Cinder’s power is stolen, tied to a grimm arm, the property of a genocidal maniac… that’s messed up. It’s a Cinderella story gone wrong.

So yeah, Cinder tells Neo to head straight into the creepy, grimm infested blood cloud to see Salem and Neo is like, ‘Uh… no thank you?’ lol.

RT does a good job this episode with her expressions, ensuring we know exactly what she’s thinking despite an unwillingness/inability to speak.

Poor Neo might be in too deep, but I quite like the overall atmosphere of this opening. Say what we will about Salem’s awful characterization, at least she has style. This woman knows how to make an entrance and, piggybacking off of the Apathy, RT knows how to infuse horror elements into their fantasy. The red and purple coloring of the clouds, spiked whale teeth peeking through, bright orange in the background looking like explosions… that’s all 👌 Including the intro card.

The only thing I want to gripe about is this:

I’m sorry, why does the whale grimm have landing pads? Or something like it?? The whale otherwise works because it’s poised between the natural and the fantasy synthetic. It looks like a real grimm whale on the outside, but is sporting a throne room, a control panel, and other unnatural elements on the inside. It’s a visual indicator of Salem’s ability to control and change grimm. Now though, the additions are wrong, infringing on the line between organic and tech, the line between what helps the grimm individually (giving monkeys wings) and what just helps Salem. Every other aspect of the whale straddles that line wonderfully, adding to the creep factor, like a grimm version of the Uncanny Valley: it’s not quite a whale anymore… but landing pads? That looks ridiculous. Why does Salem even have that? How many ships are her people feasibly using? Why are there five?

Take it away, please.

Cinder waltzes in like this is a normal home visit, but Neo has an appropriate ‘What the actual fuck?’ face going on.

They approach Salem on her throne where Cinder immediately kneels, greeting her with, “My queen.” I mentioned during my trailer breakdown that I think Cinder is lying her ass off here, and I still think that based on a line we’ll get in a minute, but now at least we have a sense of how she can pull this off. A woman who started out as a (presumed) servant is going to know how to mimic subservience, even if her heart isn’t in it. Salem is very good at playing the girl who will still kneel and scrub the floor for you. She will scrub the floor, she’ll do everything you want, she’ll just be plotting her own rise to power while she does it.

There’s quite a bit of interesting cinematography in this episode, not all of it good, and I think one of the mistakes is here when we get a closeup on Salem’s mouth as she greets Cinder. A closeup like that should be reserved for more significant dialogue—“Rosebud”—and yet we get this shot again when Cinder tells Emerald to be quiet. It’s awkward and coupled with the numerous eye closeups we got in the trailer, I think RT is playing a little fast and loose with the camera. Each shot should add something to the scene, not distract from it. If you don’t have a reason for including a technique like that then leave it be.

Back to the actual dialogue though. We knew that Salem knew Cinder was alive and now it seems that she just expected her to come back? I’m slightly lost. It feels like we’re missing something here. Cinder goes off to secure the lamp, fails, nearly dies, wanders on her own for months, and then randomly shows back up on Salem’s whale doorstep, yet Salem isn’t angry at all? Did she have faith that Cinder would return when she has something to offer? Did she just not care about Cinder, considering her return an unnecessary but otherwise welcome surprise? That would make the least sense given that she holds the key to accessing Beacon’s relic… but that circles right back around to why Salem is seemingly indifferent to Cinder’s comings and goings. Surely she can’t actually believe that Cinder is loyal?

“So I trust you wouldn’t return to me empty handed,” she says. Yeah, trust means nothing in this show, Salem, didn’t you watch Volumes 6 and 7? Again, I simply don’t know. I suppose I’ll just chalk it up to confidence, that if Cinder did bail Salem knew she could track her down again. Deciphering her motivations and beliefs is a lost cause when the show continually gives us so little.

The important thing now is that Cinder does indeed have an offering and you can see that Salem is somewhat surprised at being handed the relic.

Cinder, of course, takes credit for the victory and we’re given another wonderful shot of Neo. ‘YOU took it?’

Oh, Neo. Best get out while you still can.

Tyrian appears having obviously made his way to Salem’s ship sometime between her arrival and now. The exchange is pretty standard for this group. He insults Cinder for failing and needing this victory to make amends, talks about how any win against Ironwood says more about his lack of intelligence than her skill, and Cinder… doesn’t have a whole lot of comebacks, actually. I’d say Tyrian won that verbal spar, enhanced by a better use of the camera when we get his tail looming menacingly towards Cinder and Neo.

He goes on to say that Watts was a “necessary sacrifice” so, uh… I’m just going to toss out the ask I answered yesterday. Based on our intro I’d say Watts is still significant to the volume—hacking Penny is my guess—but by the end? He could be in trouble.

(As a side note: I plan to analyze the intro next week. It’s just easier when it comes first.)

Tyrian also calls Neo “little one” which I just found absolutely hilarious. In an on brand creepy manner, that is. Not that Neo couldn’t kick his ass, but there’s something wonderfully chilling about having the serial killer use an endearment towards a potential victim, one that comments on her size while he’s looming.

In contrast, Cinder refers to Neo as a “valuable asset” and we get our third mood of the episode.

Who’s going to start a Neo reaction image collection?

It’s true enough on the surface—who wouldn’t want an ally who can turn into anyone else?—but we’re still bumping up against question of why Salem needs this. She’s immortal! She has an endless army! Magic! This scene works well with a villain who needs a skillset like Neo’s to succeed, but Salem doesn’t. RT is doing a great job writing a story thus far, just not the story we’ve previously been given. This isn’t the story they set up.

This will come back up when we reach the RWBYJNOR group. Just wait.

Before that though, the gang’s all here as Emerald, Mercury, and Hazel show up, all in new outfits.

I think I like everything except for the weird Xs on Emerald’s jacket—it’s way too distracting and frankly makes an otherwise good look ugly—and the fact that she’s showing her midriff in Atlas. Hazel doesn’t have any sleeves! Oh my god, why doesn’t anyone dress for the weather in this show?

Frankly, I found their reunion to be kind of lackluster. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it. Emerald does sound briefly excited, she does run, and it’s in character for Cinder to cut her off… it just didn’t resonate with me emotionally. I thought after two volumes of thinking she’s dead, then working through the knowledge that she’s alive, that I would feel Emerald’s shock and relief more, but I didn’t. And I’m not entirely sure why. I don’t want to level any accusations at the voice acting because frankly I know next to nothing about that skill (and from what I’ve seen it’s usually praised in the fandom), but I will say that throughout the premiere I was noticing it more than I ever have before. The lack of emotion here and some awkward deliveries later, like when Yang goes, “Ruby, there is no way Ironwood will cooperate with us” and I immediately thought, “Wow, that came out stilted.” These observations stick with me because, as said, voice acting usually isn’t on my radar. It’s not something I’ve studied or had practice analyzing. If you’d never told me that Ren or Qrow’s VA changed then after a year hiatus I literally wouldn’t notice… but there’s something about this episode that didn’t sit right. Anyone else get that sense, or was it just me?

Regardless, the arrival of our other three villains really doesn’t amount to much, though I’m happy for all the Emerald and Mercury fans who get to see them in new outfits. The focus is still on Cinder as she delivers a line indicative of her true motivations: “That power will be mine.” Yeah, she’s not loyal to Salem, she’s just power hungry. Of course, Salem immediately takes note of this and raises her hand, in another nice use of the foreground, reminding her that she hasn’t given that order.

Cinder is shocked, angry even, but quickly covers it up with her “Without you I am nothing” line. If I caught it right I think she also calls Salem “Ma’am”? Hilarious. Again, skilled at playing the servant.

Also, before I forget, it’s worth noting that almost everything from our trailer appeared in this episode. Yeah, there are a few details like Nora attacking some tech and the group on their bikes, but on the whole we’ve already seen the majority of our promo material and will likely get most of the rest next week. It makes me both interested and nervous for what another twelve episodes are going to hold.

Salem opens her whale, or opens a portal type view in it, something that gives us a long-distance look at Atlas. I don’t know what exactly is going on here, but it’s pretty so I’ll take it.

She also delivers the frankly badass line, “Just because you’re more valuable to me than a pawn does not make you a player.”

She waves them all away with perfect ‘You mean nothing to me’ attitude and we sadly leave our villains.

Sad not because I don’t love my farm boy, but because things are about to get a whole lot messier.

Oscar has made his way to a camp of civilian survivors… all of whom are just hanging out in the supposedly deadly cold. Yeah, there’s a single fire, but at least four of them aren’t anywhere near it. Three of them also aren’t wearing gloves. What was that survival rate again?

A nice if gruff dude gives Oscar soup—water?—while showing off his… badger claws? I don’t know what kind of faunus he’s supposed to be, but he feels like the sort of two second, minor character who could easily become a meme lol.

Oscar thanks him (my polite son!) and hands the bowl back after a single sip. Which is impressive because I would have assumed the guy was giving me the whole bowl and just taken it. Hell, I’ve done that even when I didn’t assume it’s all for me. A Starbucks barista once approached me with a tray and a plate of samples, I knew I was supposed to take just one, yet for some reason my hand went to take the whole goddamn plate. He had to tell me off, then I was trying to explain that I didn’t actually want or think I should have eight shots of cappuccino all to myself, I don’t even like coffee, he clearly didn’t believe me… it was awkward. So good job, Oscar. You’re less awkward than me (though that’s not saying much).

Now a question, Oscar. Darling. Brilliant boy who has been through too much: why the fuck aren’t you talking to Ozpin? This will be A Thing later when he presents a lack of time to talk as justification for keeping more secrets (we’ll get to that too…) yet here is time! You’re just sitting there for who knows how long, with plenty of privacy to hide a supposedly one-sided conversation so the Mantle citizens don’t get weirded out or suspicious. Talk to Ozpin. Our headmaster gets two lines in this episode, utterly inconsequential lines like his airship scene, lines that feel like they exist to say, “See? He’s still included in the story!” even though he absolutely is not. Two volumes of mostly silence, a perfect setup to start the reconciliation process, but we’re going to put it off again?

Instead Ruby randomly and conveniently appears. I want to know how she found him. Oscar isn’t wearing a tracker. He clearly didn’t call them because he’s surprised when Ruby shows up. He fell alllllllll the way back down to Mantle and then wandered to a random part of the slums. You’re telling me they flew over the entire city—after beginning this search thinking he was in Atlas—and somehow managed to spot him from up in the air? C’mon. I would have rather had a beginning where Oscar makes his way back to the group himself, giving him and Ozpin time to hash things out.

“Need a lift?” Ruby says, eliminating that potential. Sigh.

Oscar immediately starts beating himself up when he gets onboard, saying that he “was stupid to think the General would listen.” Nah, you were stupid to buy into Ruby’s nonsensical confidence and for telling Ironwood he’s as bad as Salem. Sorry, Oscar, but everyone is written badly these days. I will, however, say that I am THRILLED at the group’s reaction to his return. Ruby says that she’s “just glad you’re alright.” Nora has a wonderfully tender moment where she hugs him gently rather than her usual glomp.

That? That added a year to my life. Everyone else seems relieved that he’s okay too, so kudos there. After four years of Oscar being an outsider in the group, this is one of the few moments that feel like he’s 100% accepted. Really glad to see it.

Now let’s see if it sticks after they learn Ozpin is back...

They fly to the Happy Huntresses’ base and I again feel like I’ve missed something crucial. When did they team up? I mean, RWBYJNOR was working directly under Ironwood up until the last hour and Robyn ran off to fight Tyrian/Clover in the last couple episodes. When did she have time to explain her (briefly) changed allegiance and why would the Happy Huntresses trust the group without that? Did Robyn share that Blake and Yang went behind Ironwood’s back for her? Do the Huntresses instinctively trust them because they’re now wanted by the military? How did they even run into each other?

Again, I think we would have been better served to have an episode before all this. Let Oscar make his way back and let the group struggle with the magnitude of their situation on the airship, before they find new allies. Transferring directly to, “They have help and a secret base and a plan in the works!” makes me feel like I missed the real premiere last week. You know, the one where Salem unexpectedly arrived and we left the group like this.

This is where we’ve ended up though. The group is cozy in this hideout, getting info from Joanna, and my only other thought is, “Why is she giving all this exposition?”  

Shouldn’t it be May? I mean, we were told that she was going to play more of a role this volume, a promise that’s pretty important imo given her status as a (so far off screen) trans character, so why not put her in the role of mediator between the Happy Huntresses and RWBYJNR? Giving her that setup as a leader among her people as well as lots of lines would be meaningful. A trans character just existing and being a part of this fight! May could obviously still fill that role—I’m well aware that we’re only one episode in—but it just seems like a missed opportunity to me. Out of all the undeveloped Happy Huntresses, our premiere focuses on the one who has the least importance to the fandom.

As said, Joanna talks a fair bit but what it basically boils down to is trying to get everyone to the crater below Atlas. It’s apparently not safe, but it’s warm, which is what matters right now.

So… let me get this straight. You want to gather everyone into a not safe crater, by leading them through an army of grimm, so that they can wait there in case someone moves the Staff, thus dropping an entire city on top of their heads? That’s the plan? Which admittedly isn’t Joanna’s fault. This is another instance of RWBYJNOR having information that a leader does not and they should really consider speaking up about it. But of course they don’t.

Also, how long does everyone have in regards to the cold? Shouldn’t there be dead civilians by now? The time it would take to find the Happy Huntresses, team up with them, get settled in the base, and find Oscar says that things should be pretty grim right now (pardon the pun), yet every non-aura user in this city seems content to just hang out in the snow. Either the cold is deadly enough to justify moving everyone to the crater, or it’s mild enough to let everyone survive this long, not both.

After hugs are given everyone obviously wants to know what happened to Oscar. His response?

“It’s a… long story. I get the feeling there’s been a few of those tonight.”

That’s a check for the bingo card! We’re halfway through the first episode and we’ve already got another secret. Yes, this is a secret. Oscar actively chooses not to tell anyone that Ozpin is back—something Ozpin himself comments on—and then skillfully draws attention away from himself with “I get the feeling there’s been a few of those tonight.” Indeed, all eyes go to Penny. Oscar’s plight is forgotten, which is what he wanted. His justification?

Ozpin: “You’re not going to tell them?”

Oscar: “You and I aren’t done talking yet.”

Along with this look.

Oscar no. There’s so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s create a list.

As said, you had plenty of time to talk to Ozpin and chose not to. Miss me with this excuse.

You are now doing to your friends exactly what you and your friends did to Ironwood, which in turn is what Ozpin did to you! I can’t believe we’ve got Oscar critically side-eyeing him when they are still—still—repeating the behavior they drove Ozpin away for.

What is there to even talk about now? Oscar didn’t punch himself/Ozpin (lol) but he did steal Jinn’s name from Ozpin in the first place. You got what you wanted, drove him away, and have been lying and keeping secrets ever since. The only thing they should be talking about involves apologizing. Any further criticism—which is what Oscar’s expression and curt reply suggests—is beyond hypocritical.

Seriously, what needs to be discussed? There’s no reason not to tell the group unless Oscar wants to talk about whether they should tell them. There’s no good ending here...

Don’t you think it would be nice to know that Ozpin is back and you’ve got super magic powers while making plans to save the entire world?

This is all especially stupid given Oscar’s “Salem wants to divide us” reminder to Ruby in a moment. Oscar, you are doing the most to divide the group right now. By not forgiving Ozpin. By refusing to work with him. By keeping him secret from everyone else.

This is bad, friends, I worry for what the rest of the volume will bring…

The story is done with Ozpin for now so I guess I will be too. The group continues filling Oscar in and we get some shots of the base, including a rather prominent poster of what I assume are two Happy Huntresses. Did they die in battle perhaps?

It’s a little strange.

Oscar: “Where’s Qrow?”

Me: “Likely still making bad decisions.”

No one knows so they just drop it. Which I kind of get, only so much you can do to find him if he’s not out on the streets like Oscar, but it still reads as kind of iffy that two nieces look down at the ground for a hot second and then move on with their plans, content to leave Qrow to whatever fate befell him. In a minute we’ll see Yang firmly take Ren’s side regarding helping the people they can in Mantle, which frankly comes out of nowhere for her. I think an easy motivation would have been Qrow. Ruby wants to save the world, Yang wants to find and save their uncle, and that just happens to align with Ren’s desire to save the civilians who need immediate grimm and cold help. Don’t get me wrong, I like that there’s finally some division between the sisters, I just wish it hadn’t come about so abruptly. Ren had setup for standing up to Ruby. Yang did not.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Joanna lists the grimm horde and no heat as the major threats to everyone. The group agrees.

Me: What about Salem?

Joanna says that this is all doubly dangerous because there’s “no more military protection.”

Me: Oh, so now you want the military?

This is all so disjointed. Even more-so when Joanna mentions that Ironwood has stopped all evacuations to Atlas, likely due to the “hard light shields” that are the only thing standing between Salem and the city. Thing is, the show never makes this connection, I just did it myself based on this scene and the one that comes later. The show presents Joanna’s line as a pure condemnation. Ironwood won’t let more evacuees in because… he’s just evil, I guess. Yet there is a justification here, namely that continuing the evacuations even while he’s stuck without Penny leaves him wide open to a Salem attack, the death of everyone currently safe, but that argument is never presented to the viewer. I don’t need people to agree with Ironwood’s perspective, I just wish that perspective was offered as an option. The show is very good about acting like RWBYJNOR’s opinion is the only justified opinion, or simply the only opinion at all.

After everything is laid out Weiss goes, “We’re never going to sleep again, I just know it.”

I could make a crack about the lack of continuity and how the group should be collapsing right now… but that was a funny line. It can stay.

What is far more of a problem is the fact that no one is talking about Salem. Okay, that’s a lie. They do talk about her, but in a roundabout way like her presence isn’t impacting every decision they make. That’s the real issue. They’re acting as if Salem isn’t here right now, like she’s off far away, maybe approaching slowly, and they’re arguing over how best to prep the world for her eventual attack. There’s no emotion here—let alone action—to reflect that the series’ Big Bad has arrived and is poised to murder them all. Literally what is this? Ruby is yelling about warning the world and, ignoring the continued question of why that’s a good thing when the world can do nothing to stop Salem and knowledge of her continually drives people to horrible acts, she has yet to acknowledge that… she’s the world? Ruby is the world in this conflict. She, Mantle, and Atlas. Salem is here for you all. Right now. You are, this instant, in the situation you want to warn others about, so why don’t you try to do something about it? Or at least acknowledge it. Ruby wants to warn the neighborhood about a potential fire while her house is actively ablaze, and the fire could have totally killed her by now but decided not to for… reasons.

“Ruby’s right,” Nora says. They have to tell the world so “they can prepare.” How? How are they supposed to prepare for this? The story cannot continue ignoring Salem’s immortality.

“Ruby’s right,” is all Blake says and I’m starting to thinks that’s why her character exists now, to agree with Ruby. It’s great that she’s getting a little distance from Yang, but man.

As Ruby asks whether Pietro can get Amity up and running despite it not being finished (called it) we start an incredibly odd sequence of flashforwards to their individual missions. I’ve seen a lot of praise for this already and though I agree that, in theory, it’s a good way to save time, I found the actual execution to be jarring. Upon thinking back through our timeline, it became clear they were flashforwards, but while watching I thought they might be flashbacks (especially since that’s more common).

Some of the shots, like Nora’s, just look awkward when you’ve got the exact expression and pose transplanted from one scene to another, like she’s a cardboard cutout behind a green screen. To say nothing of how the flashforwards ruin any suspense (I use that word loosely) in the conversation itself. If the question is, “Will they decide to go to the military compound?” then that question is answered when we see Ruby scoping out the compound, not when the group actually decides on the course of action.

It just made an already muddled scene worse for me, so I hope this trend doesn’t continue.

And of course, Amity can be used despite all the info last volume claiming that it wasn’t finished. Pietro suddenly acts like it is finished and the only thing standing in their way is Ironwood providing access. If that were the case, he would have used Amity weeks or days ago like he wanted to! When was it finished? Not after Watts commented on how incomplete it was. When did they get back the resources they needed from Robyn? It’s as ridiculous and retcon-y as I thought it would be.

Yang points out that Ironwood will never listen to them and Ruby counters that “he doesn’t have to.” They’ll just take the access from him. Because why wouldn’t they in a series where they’ve already stolen two airships? Stealing from the super evil military that Joanna wishes were helping them right now is just the group’s go-to plan nowadays.

Pietro isn’t sold on this plan though. He lists at least three obstacles they’d need to get through “and then… oh boy, I might need to think about this some more.” “And just to clarify,” Oscar says, “This is the easy option?” Um...no it’s not? We also know there’s an access point in Ironwood’s office so… why not go there instead? They really think the Academy is less guarded than the military base? There’s a potential justification here along the lines of, “After Neo and Cinder broke into his office Ironwood will have the place on high alert,” but unless I missed it the group doesn’t assume anything like that. They just listen to Pietro point out all the ways they can’t get into the military base and jump straight to that being the best option. It feels like a transparent way to create conflict for the group. We’ll just have them taking the most dangerous route despite an easy route being offered alongside it. Why bother mentioning his office at all? Just have the access in the military base. Boom, done.

It’s that conflict and the fact that Ruby tends to hear “You can’t” and digs in her heels. You can’t go to Atlas. I’ll just steal a ship then. You can’t defeat Salem. Watch me. You can’t break into this base. Guess what I’m doing! She’s dangerous in her fairy tale, meta-driven insistence that everything will turn out her way because she wants it to.

Speaking of, we finally—FINALLY—get someone challenging Ruby. Sort of. Not actually but it’s the closest we’ve ever gotten:

Yang: “Ruby, when we came here we said we’d follow your lead… but things haven’t exactly worked out.”

Now, there are two things to take away from this moment. The first is how utterly shocked Ruby and the others are. I mean, take a look at these expressions.

Ruby straight up can’t believe what she’s hearing. Weiss put her hand to her mouth like this is the most dramatic thing to ever happen to her. Oscar looks down in a ‘Yeah, I agree but please don’t look at me and make me admit that’ way. And Nora looks indifferent in the screenshot but animated she goes sort of stern, likely pissed that Yang would dare say that given her own agreement with Ruby. This not only reiterates that Yang’s challenge came out of nowhere—seriously, how did we move from following Ruby no matter what to this? Last volume she asked a single question along the lines of, ‘You sure?’ and when Ruby said ‘Yes’ Yang was entirely on board—but also demonstrates that no one has EVER said no to her before. Ruby is amazed that someone would challenge her. The act of challenging Ruby is, in and of itself, shocking. This group has gotten so used to following Ruby blindly that the teensiest little pushback is greeted with this.

Because it is teensy. This is the second takeaway: Yang barely challenges her and that challenge leads nowhere. She doesn’t accuse Ruby of anything, she doesn’t question her continued authority, she just broadly implies that things could be better. We followed you, now things are bad, take from that what you will. It’s incredibly mild as far as criticism goes, making the shock all the more, well, shocking, but it also amounts to—wait for it—nothing! Because Yang didn’t truly challenge Ruby’s leadership. She’s still in charge, she’s still calling the shots, and they’re still listening to her. We might have gotten some change if this division had been allowed to play out, but instead Jaune comes in with a, “Let’s go for both!” solution. It let’s both groups get what they want which, in turn, releases them from the need to grapple with whether they’ll listen to Ruby when she’s advocating for something they don’t agree with. We have now lost the chance to see whether, when push comes to shove, Ren and Yang will cave to Ruby’s will or stick by their own beliefs.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s more conflict than we’ve gotten in years, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly compelling conflict. It’s good by RWBY’s standards, which doesn’t necessarily make it good. The actual issues at hand—Ruby’s dangerous arrogance, the group’s loyalty, her choices up until now—are just swept under the rug. For all the visuals we get insisting that there’s this great divide in the group… there’s really not. Not in any way that matters.

Also, Ruby is an idiot. Okay, that was mean, but she really is in this scene. She’s actually not an idiot overall because she was written as wonderfully intelligent in the early volumes, but now? Lately? She makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

“But that’s how Salem got this far,” she cries. “By dividing us!”

Ruby… oh my god, Ruby. No one should have to explain to you that dividing people means turning them against each other, not literally dividing your team to complete separate tasks. This girl honestly thought that because there was this teensy disagreement and that half the team would complete Plan A while she and the other half completed Plan B, both of which notably work towards the goal of, “Protect people from Salem,” that this was somehow what Salem wanted. That is was dangerous. Honestly, it’s a scary look at her view of leadership too: If everyone doesn’t 100% agree with me and do what I say, that’s an objectively bad thing that the grimm queen wants, right? Does Ruby think that unification means following a single person (her) without question or variation? That would explain a lot...

The fact that Oscar needs to explain the difference to her is not good. It really doesn’t say great things about this version of Ruby. Though he was comparing Ironwood to Salem last volume, so really they should all be wearing dunce hats.

Penny offers to take the relic directly to Salem in exchange for her leaving the kingdom alone. I honestly didn’t expect that. If anyone took that risk I would have put my money on Ozpin (but of course, during all this talk of the women he knows best, he’s kept quiet). Oscar is again the voice of wisdom, pointing out that they have no reassurance that Salem will keep her word. At least Penny is thinking about Salem as a threat though, so kudos for that. When this plan is shot down she volunteers to get Ruby past the military security instead and, uh, she’s a little intense about it.

I’m not entirely sure what is going on with Penny. She disagreed with Winter but then seemed to come around to her point of view, enough to help anyway. They had another (stupid) disagreement about the value of individual lives, so that helps to explain why she’s teaming up with RWBYJNOR (if you ignore that Ironwood is also trying to save individual lives...). Did watching Fria die shake her up? Is it being the Winter Maiden that’s not sitting right? Does Penny have lingering feelings about the framing that haven’t shown up until now? Her status as a ‘real girl’? We’ve got a lot of reasons that could definitely explain this sudden need to fight, but we’re not told which—if any of these—is the driving force.  

We’re then given a lot of little details. Someone points out that if Salem gets the staff and “create[s] anything else” then Atlas will fall (so yeah, let’s move the people underneath it). We still don’t know what exactly the Staff does because “creation” is kind of broad and “powering a city to float” doesn’t seem to sit within that category at all. Pietro gives Yang the keys to his lab so they can get the bikes. We see the group dividing in the flashforwards, something I do like, especially since the show has gone out of its way to break up most of the usual duos. Nora in particular is pissed at Ren for his choice.

“Oh, I’m saving Mantle because I actually believe we can do this.”

#yikes. Well, I did say I wanted a conflict other than ‘Oh no, one of us might die’ and it looks like I got it. But Nora, the only reason you can do this is because the plot is in your corner: none of you are collapsing from two major fights, you didn’t lose your aura so the cold isn’t a danger, the military is barely a threat all of a sudden, Salem is helpfully hanging out in her whale instead of killing you, and the story decided that Amity can function so long as you all are the ones who get to use it. That’s why you can do this. Ren, who follows in-world logic and doesn’t want to risk a whole kingdom’s worth of lives on a pipe dream, thinks differently, oddly enough.

As they leave though Penny gets a call from Ironwood. I know precisely what the fandom is going to say here: “This evil man is just trying to use Penny to open the vault!” Of course he is. He needs it open to save everyone he can, Penny included. Plus the concept of “using” her is a double-edged sword. What do we think the group is doing right now? Using her to get past the security. Penny’s power is a tool any way you slice it. Granted, Penny volunteers to help the group, but notably here Ruby speaks for her. Penny seems torn and Ruby takes the scroll away with, “She’s not going anywhere until you change your mind about Mantle.”

Sorry, Ruby, but coming from you that sounds less like a reassurance for Penny and more like just an order for Ironwood. Remember Harriet? We’ll stop attacking you provided you do what we want. Ruby has yet to learn about compromises, let alone acknowledge that she might be wrong. How about you let Penny decide where she goes, especially since by all logic she should have a lot of loyalty to Ironwood. She knew him before she ever met you. She’s worked with him since she was rebuild post-Volume 3. Despite what Penny has said, if the story would just let her think about his actions for a hot second—making her the protector of Mantle, sticking up for her after the framing, sending her to the party, teaming her up with Ruby, etc.—she might realize that the ‘He doesn’t want me to have friends’ and ‘He just treats me like a tool’ assumptions are just that, unfounded assumptions. But no, Ruby speaks for them both because Ironwood is evil now.

“If she makes it through our defenses,” Ironwood says, “everything that follows will be on your hands.”

That’s true! Kind of like how it’s own Qrow’s hands that Clover died. When you insist on making a bad situation worse you hold responsibility when the shit hits the fan. You know though that Salem won’t get through their defenses now, somehow, so that there’s no chance RWBYJNOR will be blamed for it. Or, by that point Ironwood will be so crazed that anything coming out of his mouth is dismissed, no matter how accurate it might be.

We then transfer to the Ace Ops who are, despite what the fandom theorized for many months, clearly upset about Clover. Also pissed. Which they have every right to be. Their friend and leader was killed. Imagine for a moment that Ruby had been murdered by Tyrian with an allies’ help. Exactly what do you think the group would do? Swallow it quietly and get over it? Ha.

I’ve already seen some speculation that Clover survived due to details like showing us the bandage and his room being listed as for a “Patient,” but he looks pretty dead to me.

He got gutted through the chest and left out in the snow for who knows how long. We saw him slip away. Qrow screamed over his dead body. He’s not breathing now. If RWBY suddenly claims he survived this, I’m calling BS.

Most of the other visuals we get here were already dropped in the trailer. Winter is pretty injured from her encounter with Cinder, likely permanently based on her new outfit. Ironwood had to replace his arm—and I am calling BS on that “Losing his arm is reflective of him losing his humanity” commentary from RT. Please go read up on a couple decades worth of ableism in media and then get back to me.

We get Ironwood’s line about the light shields and, notably, a whole lot of empathy. Regardless of what he might want Penny for, he still called her with compassion. He’s watching the Ace Ops mourn their friend. He’s talking about protecting his kingdom. The first thing he says to Winter is, “Thank you, Winter. I don’t know what I would do without you.” Ironwood has a heart! It’s always on display, which makes this scene utterly ridiculous.

I literally don’t know how to respond to this. The gunshot made me jump, both because it’s a gunshot and because, again, what the fuck? I know I said that next volume RT might just have Ironwood descend into full villainy, shooting whoever he pleases now that he’s shot Oscar, but I didn’t actually expect them to do it. Because he never should have shot Oscar in the first place! I wanted the story to let Oscar grapple with it a bit and then quietly backtrack, acknowledging it as the mistake it was. The concept that Ironwood, empathetic Ironwood, rational Ironwood, always thinks before he acts Ironwood, let’s kids yell at him Ironwood, tried to team up with Robyn Ironwood, did everything Ruby wanted Ironwood, won’t kill Watts after he destroyed his arm Ironwood would shoot this guy just to shut him up is absurd. It was absurd then, it’s absurd now.

That being said, there’s a possibility he didn’t actually shoot the council member, but rather just (“just”) gave a warning shot down the hallway. I say this because the reactions to this are pretty tame. Everyone looks startled, yeah, but after the initial shot there’s nothing that I would expect if there was now a guy bleeding out on the floor. The council woman doesn’t scream. Winter doesn’t seem overly shocked. No one is running to try and help him. Basically, if Ironwood had just killed a political figure in front of six witnesses, entirely unprovoked, I would expect a bit more of a reaction than this. This feels far more like a, “Damn he’s not joking around, letting off warning shots to get people to leave him alone” not “WOW, our general just killed someone in cold blood!”

What I really hate though—beyond just assassinating his character—is how many fans think my friends and I are delusional for calling it character assassination at all. I hopped onto the RWBY tag for five minutes this morning and was bombarded with posts about how Ironwood needs to be murdered horrifically, anyone who likes him is sick, the Ironwood stans are as bad as Adam stans, you’re an idiot if you want him redeemed… because apparently the concept of a story writing a character badly doesn’t compute. I’m not here to argue that Ironwood didn’t do these awful things (regardless of whether he actually killed the guy or not). I’m not here to argue that they’re not awful. I’m just here to say that we never should have gotten these scenes in the first place, or if we were going to get them, we deserved an actual descent into murder at the drop of a hat territory. I’ve already explained extensively on this blog how early Ironwood was not accurate foreshadowing for this, and Volume 7 certainly wasn’t setup, but it looks like the majority of fans aren’t interested in examining whether any of this adds up. Which makes my job, as someone trying to examine this series somewhat objectively—in as much as that’s possible for any single viewer—as well as simply enjoy it as a show, really hard. It’s bad enough when a story keeps taking the characters you love and villainizing them, and doing that badly, but then when you turn to the community and see them rallying around the idea that you’re awful for being dissatisfied—you’re the bootlicker, you’re the blind stan, you can’t see what’s ‘really’ going on here… that sucks. For those of you happy and satisfied with Ironwood’s arc, that’s great! I’ve also seen a lot of posts hyping up the complexity of his character now. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying what we’ve been given and I’d never want to imply that just because it’s not what I wanted it’s somehow wrong. I’m honestly thrilled that after a year of worry so many people have adored our premiere, including this scene. I just wish that I could say RWBY had given me something I didn’t want in a persuasive manner and that the fandom as a whole was a bit more welcoming of differing criticisms.

Not that I didn’t already know the RWBY fandom had its flaws, but still lol.

That’s basically it for our premiere. Nice note to end on, huh? Our final scene is of Salem using the lamp to set her bloodhound grimm on the city. Why doesn’t she just go herself? What was she planning to do here in Atlas in the first place, considering that getting the relic was a surprise? Who knows. Little about this holds together. But we do end with another awesome shot, so small favors.

It’s always strange concluding a recap, but even more-so when it’s a premiere, during a historical moment in the U.S., amidst all the nonsense that is 2020. So for now I’ll just conclude with three quick things:

The updated bingo board will be listed at the end of each recap, provided I don’t forget about it lol. Today I’m checking off tone (not nearly enough freaking out about Salem), the team keeping secrets (Oscar), and major plot point dropped (Amity is suddenly finished). I could also probably check off the cold not killing civilians and getting Amity up and running, but we’ll see if any changes with those.

I’m including my Ko-Fi link at the end of recaps now. Not with any expectations. Not with anything resembling pressure. I thought long and hard over whether to include it at all—let alone mention it here—because I love doing these and never want anyone to feel like it comes with strings attached. But life is a little harder and weirder than it was last year, so I figure it can’t hurt. Feel free to pass on by and I won’t be bringing it up past this note.

Far more importantly: thank you for reading! :D

(Bonus 4. Editing this was an absolute nightmare — damn you, tumblr!  — so I apologize if anything is super wonky when I finally post.)

See you next week! 💜

[Ko-Fi]

[whump-town]

Professors

No one asked for more of this AU and, truthfully, I don’t even know why I keep writing it. We all know I have other things to be doing. The Cancer AU, the PowerPoint, and other fics left unfinished. Yet, here I am offering garbage

WARNING FOR Reid whump, implied abuse

Growing up, Spencer Reid relished his escapism. Spending hours, days even, cooped into the smallest holes of his mother’s house with nothing but books and the ability to lose track of time and space. More importantly, his ability to ignore the obvious. Here it did not matter that his mother thought he was a spy. That she’d slapped him so hard he’d felt his teeth smack together and his eyes shake in their sockets. 

Now, he’s a little too old for that. Escaping is so much harder to do. 

“Reid?”

The lights of his office are off, the door shut firmly behind him. With every ounce of his concentration on steading his ataxic gait and forcing his trembling hands around the doorknob of his office, he would have remembered to lock the door on his way in. Unfortunately, his days of complete solitude are behind him. A toll often paid for in order to acquire friends. His fellow professors of-- whatever it is they all teach. 

“Spencer--” Hotch. Thank god. “I’m going to come in okay?”

Now, Reid can remember the distinct tap of Hotch’s approaching figure. Closing his eyes and pushing his head further into his couch, Reid hears the door open. Tap. Hotch’s old shoes scuffing across the unforgivingly rough carpet. Tap, more muffled now. One more half-raised step and the sound of the real, thick wood of Hotch’s cane being hooked over the arm of the plastic chair painted to look wooden to his left. 

“What can I do?”

Reid doesn’t answer, just keeps his sweaty palms pressing into his ears. If he moves, he’s certain that his body will explode. Little bits of genius coating all for walls. His books covered in gore. Another mess. 

“You haven’t been sleeping.”

Hard, calloused fingers wrap around the back of his neck. The tips digging into the stiffened muscles until Reid lets out a whimper. Then, with certainty and reflexive habit, one hand remains kneading the muscles until they ease while the other plants itself firmly on his flank. Stilling his body. Well, to be as still as Reid can. 

His body has been out of his control since he was nine. The maternal drive had not been enough to protect him. For years, his mother had been distracted with work and by his father. She made time for him amidst the books but he was spared her anger and confusion. Until his father left and she could no longer work reliably. Then, one night in a fit of paranoia, his mother had hit him. She’d hit him so hard that no amount of genius had sparred him.

His cerebellum is damaged. 

Garcia could tell you far more about the reasoning behind how he is now. He can too but it’s far too taxing to recount each of his bodily flaws. His disabilities. 

Their silence is interrupted by a soft knock at the door and peaking out from under the suit jacket Reid hadn’t realized Hotch had tucked around him, he can see Emily. Her dark eyes flash twice over the scene before her and immediately she sinks. That’s what he loves most about her. In all her hardness, Emily is easily one of the kindest people he’s ever met.

Raised by her mother’s hip, Emily had known too much about politics and little of the reflexive kindness of those around her. To be born good and to choose good is always a rewarded ideology. People like Penelope Garcia and Derek Morgan. Born good, surrounded by good, and only learning of the evil much later are fantastic people. They have their own struggles but they overcame them. To Reid, there is nothing more interesting than those surrounded by the cold curling fingers of the world but come out good. Emily wasn’t hugged as a child. Praise came at the expense of crushing her peers and never knowing what a good friend was. Hotch was raised by two abusive, domineering parents. For them to choose kindness, to willingly soften their edges is… it’s commendable. 

But maybe that’s all the pointless rambling of a book nerd. 

“Que pasa?” Spanish has always lent itself to be Emily’s most practice language. Perhaps, it has to do with the softened curls and rolls of the language. It’s never sounded rough, coarse coming out of her mouth. She sounds like the women who raised her. The maids who cleaned gravel out of her knees when she fell in the driveway and the calloused fingertips that ran under her eyes to quickly wipe her tears. 

With a soft, tsks Emily comes into the room. “Get off the floor,” she whispers to Hotch. His long spider-like legs curled every which way. She has no way of being able to tell how he’s been on the floor but she knows any length of time will come with repercussions. “If you can,” there is an emphasis on his abilities. Not to push himself. “Get Penelope-- wait…” She realizes a moment too soon that won’t work. “She’s got a class. I need you to get Derek.” 

Garcia is like their shady doctor. She went through all the training-- undergraduate, medical school, and interned. After a bit though, she realized that stitches, sutures, and contusions were not in fact something she loved. Not even a little. So, she went to computers. A huge financial burden to take on but that was her calling. Now she has tenure and spends her time balancing JJ’s art classes with her own class on programming. 

Derek is an actual doctor but he only practice theoretical medicine. Too busy teaching know-it-all medical school students about ethics. Reid likes to joke that he’s just a philosophy professor. Being an english literature professor leaves him pretty open to any comebacks Morgan can think of in the moment. 

Slowly rising to his feet, Hotch totters. Emily’s long fingers curl around his bicep, an unspoken order to hold still for just a moment. Long enough for his labored breathing to calm back down and his back to stop aching so feverishly. “You’ll be no help hurting yourself,” she comments, releasing him. She avoids his eyes, almost flushed having been caught touching him. Stepping into his space. It’s nothing for someone else but Hotch isn’t someone like Garcia and she’s not gentle like Reid. Turning her back, she’s stops any further comment. Any looks or reciprocation of that touch. 

Hotch leans heavily into the cane curling into his right palm. The wood slick with the calmness of his hand. “I’ll be back,” he promises, feeling a sickening twist in his stomach. All too conscious of every step being measured out by the tap, tap of his cane on the cold tiled floor. 

It’s that very sound that alerts Derek to Hotch closing in. 

Unlike Reid, what ails Hotch is undetermined. People, like puzzles, are simple enough to put together with enough the edges put together. For Reid, the edge pieces are his mother’s schizophrenia, her bouts of aggression, and her love of books. From there, blossoms the genius of the youngest professor the school has ever had. His cerebral injury is accounted for by his mother’s illness. Her abuse. No matter how much Reid dances around the use of that word. Her love had taken him here, to this university and to his profound love of books. To Reid, that love, has always mattered more than the rest. 

Hotch, though, he is a man completely lacking in edges. 

What does Derek Morgan know about Aaron Hotchner? He used to work at the District Attorney’s office. There is a mark on his record but the matters of it have been expunged, he was about sixteen according to the date. Those are matter of public record. He likes orange juice better than apple juice. If someone else is making it, he takes his coffee black, but when he makes it for himself it’s a mess of gradually adding sugar and creamer until he’s content. And the cane. It’s purpose is clear. The why is more important. It’s not very typical of men not yet fifty to need mobility aides.  

The tapping stops at his open door, he doesn’t need to look up from what he’s doing to know who it is or where he is. “You’re going to royally fuck your shoulder up if you don’t start using that cane on the other side.” 

As it always does, his comment is ignored. The excuse is always the same. Hotch is left handed, he simply prefers to keep his left hand free. It’s a matter of convenience. “Reid is having an episode--” 

Pushing himself up, Derek doesn’t need to hear the rest. For a moment he does falter. Unsure if should falter back with Hotch, allowing the older man to set their pace rather than making Hotch’s slow, zombie like lurches seem exaggeratedly slowed by Derek’s easy, long pace. Deciding Reid to be what he needs to focus on he simply walks around Hotch. “Use the cane on the other side,” Derek says, as he steps on. “Or I’m going to start emailing you articles about the damage you’re doing to your body.”

Hotch huffs.

“If that doesn’t work I’ll send them to JJ and Emily.”

Hotch curses softly, “you wouldn’t.”

Morgan just smiles, jogging on down the hall, and knowing by the paced tap, tap that Hotch is coming in behind him. 

“Pretty boy.” Sinking to his knees with an ease Hotch could not afford earlier in his comfort, Morgan pushes Reid’s sweat soaked hair back from his skin. The fever and tension become immediately apparent. Reid’s brain, as genius as it is, often forgets that Reid and his body are one. Not two separate things in which one needs to be attacked to protect itself. Today, his entire body suffers with the attack. His stomach aching, brain swelling, and back in flames. His body often betrays him. 

Emily moves away from the pair, untangling her own body to stand and leave the room. Reid won’t appreciate a crowd and Morgan can handle this. Plus, she’s a coward. She doesn’t want to see him in pain any longer. 

“He’s okay.”

Emily steps out into the hall to find JJ and Hotch. Having found a seat in the hall, Hotch is failing to subtly rub at his aching side. JJ, covered in red paint, is only finding his pain as fuel to the fire. Obviously, she is taking his word for a grain of rice. 

“Emily,” JJ greets. “How is he?”

Hotch just shakes his head, leaning his head forward onto his cane. 

“Derek’s with him. He’s just having an… a moment.” Episode sounds too harsh. A thing that Reid can never be. His skeletole, looming gentleness is tender. Clammy, at times, but nothing but loving. “He just needs a moment.” None-the-less, JJ understands exactly what she means. 

But that is, in a way, simply a lie. There is nothing that can be done for Reid in these moments. blinded by pain, he still will not cave. Never, not once, has Reid ever allowed them to give him something to manage the pain. He’ll take vitamins and ibuprofen for headaches but not for the other things. Not for this. 

“Just breathe.”

All they can do is be there. Rub their fingers into the tension and hold his hand. 

[wehavethoughts]

The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins Review!

The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins Written By: Clint, Griffin, Justin and Travis McElroy Illustrated by: Carey Pietsch Comic book First Second Publisher, 2018 Based on the podcast The Adventure Zone: Balance

Rating: 4.5/5 Waves

This review does NOT contain major spoilers for The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins.

Summary: A D&D based adventure comic starring three unlikely friends: Magnus, a human fighter with a heart of gold, Taako, an elf wizard who can charm the pants off a bugbear, and Merle, a dwarf cleric with just enough blood to go around. When a routine delivery to Haverdale goes sideways our heroes must face gerblins, mages, animated robots and the titillating mysteries that unravel in the lost mine of Haverdale.

Review: I’d like to start this review with a disclaimer: I have listened to and thoroughly enjoyed the entirety of the podcast that this comic book is based off of, The Adventure Zone: Balance. Therefore, my review of this comic is going to be a bit biased. I know how this story ends and I’ve already bought into the shenanigans, genius and tomfoolery that are the McElroys playing D&D. Nevertheless, I attempted to approach this re-read from the perspective of someone who didn’t already know and love The Adventure Zone.

The very first thing that stands out about The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins comic is, of course, the art. Carey Pietsch does such a fantastic job of conveying action and emotion that I never lost track of the characters or their movement, even in the most hectic fight scenes. The art style is colorful, detailed and dynamic in a way that is incredibly engaging to look at. Even on my third read through I found new and wonderful details that added to the experience. Comic book art is critical to the enjoyment of comics and I am so glad they hit it out of the park with this one.

Character design is also an important component of why I enjoyed the story so much. As a fan of the podcast I knew what Taako, Magnus and Merle looked like in my head and, while Pietsch puts her own spin on the characters, everyone was perfectly recognizable. Her designs felt faithful to the spirit of the characters and the range of emotions portrayed in her art allowed me to almost hear the characters’ voices in my head.

The plot and the dialogue of The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins is taken from the podcast The Adventure Zone: Balance and they did a good job of keeping both the flow of dialogue and the jokes from the original. There were many scenes in this comic that made me grin so hard my cheeks hurt and some lines like “He vas one day from spider retirement!” had me trying to explain Bryan and Magic Brian to my mother through my laughter (not an easy task). The comic also had an excellent blend of humor and seriousness. The humor rarely distracted from the meat of the story and kept what could have been some extremely depressing plot points relatively light.

The best thing about this comic, in my opinion, is its length. The first arc of The Adventure Zone: Balance podcast is more than 10 hours of audio content. The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins covers the same story, but it can be read comfortably in an afternoon. The comic is also broken up into convenient chapters for people who don’t have time to get through it all at once. I also loved that there is now an alternative to listening to this story via podcast. This may come as a surprise, but I am not a big fan of podcasts and listening to the 80+ hour entirety of The Adventure Zone: Balance was a strenuous labor of love. So for people who don’t have the time, or the mental focus to go through that, this comic is a fantastic way to engage with a potentially inaccessible story.  

One thing all readers should be ready for with The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins is that it is the first comic in a series and while it has its own stand alone story, the last couple chapters are very clearly setting up the rest of the series. The ending is nearly a cliff-hanger with how much it tries to drag you into the next arc of the narrative, which for some readers is bug and for others it’s a feature. As of February 2021, only three of the eight arcs from The Adventure Zone: Balance have been made into comics so if you are the type of reader who needs to binge the entire thing, you might want to give it a few years.

The reason I didn’t give The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins full marks was because I felt there was a bit of a barrier to entry to enjoy this comic. People who haven’t engaged with the podcast will get a full and satisfying story, but they will miss a good amount of the humor and in-jokes tossed around in the characters’ dialogue. Even me, someone who loves the podcast with all my heart, felt like some things went over my head because it's been years since I finished The Adventure Zone: Balance. Additionally, readers who are not familiar with D&D might have a tough time with some of the scenes. Unlike the podcast wherein the players were learning to play D&D with the audience, the comic assumes the reader has a basic grasp of D&D concepts like what a Dungeon Master does and what a Perception Check is. Background knowledge in D&D isn’t critical to understand most of the plot or characters, but for some scenes my experience with D&D really helped me make sense of what I was looking at. At the end of the day, though, I don’t think either of these barriers would make the comic unreadable.

Overall, this comic is a very fun read with fabulous art, hilarious jokes and an engaging adventure. It’s the perfect length of story to be read and enjoyed over and over again.

[takerfoxx]

Blood Island, Chapter Eight

Friend or Foe?

Peeling off her shirt, Nuriel held it up to regard with a critical eye.

It was a total loss. The back, shoulders, and sleeves had all been ripped to ribbons, and the front had a few large holes where the crocomonster’s teeth had gone through. Most of it was now brown with bloodstains. Shit, she must have been gushing.

Perhaps it could be repaired? But with what, though? Nuriel had no thread or needle, and while she knew her way around both due to the many voyages in which she was made to mend rips and tears in the clothing of whatever crew she happened to be sailing with, this was far beyond her modest skill.

Wrinkling her nose, Nuriel looked up at the towering cliff face and the rest of the island beyond. She didn’t care for the idea of walking around while being so…exposed. Not necessarily for modesty’s sake, as who would see her? But because she hated the thought of leaving herself vulnerable like that.

To whom?

Well, to no one, actually. Save perhaps for her mysterious, red-eyed friend. But even so! It was the principle that mattered!

Why?

Well, it just did!

Why?

Because they did! Because she shouldn’t allow herself to get complacent! Because she had to remain vigilant and not let anything slip, despite being all alone on an unknown island filled with monsters and spirits, and-

Then with a sigh, Nuriel balled the shredded shirt up and tossed it into the open hatch to the cargo hold. Oh, what did it matter? She wasn’t eking out a living in a crowded metropolis or shrouding her identity on a ship, she was marooned on a fantastical island full of monsters and mysteries. The rules were different now.

That decided, Nuriel turned her attention to the Carmilla’s Fancy itself. It didn’t seem to have taken much damage during the rain, if any at all. Which made sense, as it had probably weathered rainstorms before.

She walked around the deck, inspecting each and every hole, crack, and knot. If she had some sort of binding agent, something to plug them up with, she could probably fix those. It would mean she could store stuff in the cargo hold and not worry about it being ruined when it next rained.

Then she glanced over to the captain’s quarters. She probably ought to focus on fixing that up first. It was the place best suited for her to live, after all.

Thinking of settling in?

Nuriel winced. Though it existed only in the back of her mind, Father’s voice was quite loud.

Ought you not be planning how to escape? Or have you resigned yourself to being a prisoner of this island?

No of course not! she replied inside of her head. But finding a means of escape might take some time, and until then I need a home base, so until then…

The thought trailed off. Her face screwing up, Nuriel turned to stare out over the network of canals and tiny islands, out to sea.

Even if she were to escape, where would she go? She didn’t have a home, didn’t have a family, didn’t have any sort of trade beyond thieving, didn’t have anything. She didn’t even have any friends worth speaking of. Her life was one of a constant struggle to survive, fighting to keep herself fed and out of jail. And yes, it was fine, but how much longer would that last? She had been caught more than once, and this last time had nearly cost Nuriel her life. It was pure happenstance that she wasn’t a rotting skeleton at the bottom of the sea, her bones picked clean by fish.

Then Nuriel turned around, facing toward the island itself. Yes, it was in many ways just as dangerous as her previous life had been, perhaps even moreso. An angry man could be outrun, guards could be evaded, but these monsters were like nothing she had to face back in the world of people. She had nearly been torn to pieces by the birds alone. The birds!

No, wait, scratch that. there was no “nearly” about it. The birds had torn her to pieces, and it was only by the grace of her new red-eyed friend that she was even alive.

Then Nuriel frowned. She lifted her right arm and ran the fingers of her left hand up and down its length. Then she reached up over her shoulders to probe her upper back. Come to think of it, how exactly did the red-eyed one heal her? Did it have some strange demon medicine it had given her? Did it invoke hellish magics? She had never heard of the power of Hell being used to heal someone. Usually the stories had it going in the opposite direction.

Furthermore, she was reasonably certain that the green-eyed sea-creature was also involved. Did the two know each other? Were they friends?

Just the thought made Nuriel feel strange. Troubled, but in a way that was unfamiliar. Monsters…with friends? Could that even be a thing?

And here you are, said Papa’s voice. Wanting to make friends with them as well.

Gritting her teeth, Nuriel responded with, I do what I must to survive. What else would you have me do?

To this, there was no answer.

Nuriel shook her head and turned her attention back to the ship. Well, if it was to be her home for the time being, the first thing she ought to do is give it a careful inspection to see what needed fixing and judge what she even could fix. At the very least, it would keep her busy.

…

All told, the condition of the Carmilla’s Fancy was…not good. It definitely would never be seaworthy again. And yet, it wasn’t that bad either.

The worst was the deck. Apparently the birds had tried and fortunately failed to claw through to get in even before Nuriel had taken up residence. It was solid for the most part, but there were still several cracks and holes to deal with.

As for the hull itself, it also was in a state of disrepair, including one particularly large cracked area where it had struck the trunk of one of the trees. But it didn’t look to be in danger of falling apart anytime soon.

But her main attention was with the captain’s cabin, which she wished to turn into her living quarters. For some reason the overpowering stench of bird had faded considerably, perhaps due to the red-eyed monster having cleaned out all trace of its nest, but also perhaps due to the heavy rain.

She walked around the empty space, kicking at the floor with the heels of her boots at times and rapping her knuckles against the wall at others. The beams seemed to be good. A little creaky in places, but they felt like they would hold. Whoever had constructed this ship had known what they were doing. Given the ornate trappings on the hull, it had been someone with money, so the materials were probably of very high quality. It did seem to be some rich wanker’s pleasure craft, but not the flimsy sort never intended to leave the sight of land. This craft had been built for the open sea.

Interesting.

Then she turned her attention to the window, which was smashed and crusted with gunk and mold. The glass was a loss, so she probably should smash out the rest of the way and cover the hole with something a little more substantial, something to keep the creatures out. She wasn’t sure what, but there had to be something on hand.

In the meantime, the interior could be dressed up a bit. The cot could be made more comfortable with grasses and tree fronds, and she supposed she could even make some furniture. Out of what, she still didn’t know, but she could learn. She was good at learning.

Nuriel looked around one more time and then put her hands on her hips with a satisfied nod. Yes, this should do nicely.

…

Now that she had an idea of what she wanted to do with the ship, it was time for Nuriel to assess the area surrounding it.

The Carmilla’s Fancy sat in a small grove of trees on a tiny island that was part of a network chain. To its back was a hill of solid rock topped with moss. And behind that, just across a small channel that wound around her island, was the main island itself, with a beach bordering the channel and the sheer cliff walls rising up beyond that.

Nuriel surveyed the area, doing calculations in her head. Okay, she could probably set up some kind of barrier to seal off the beach right in front of the grove on both ends. A fence, perhaps. Maybe even a wall, one with swinging doors.

As for the hill, its top wasn’t exactly flat. Still, if she could get some kind of platform up on there, it would be an ideal place for a watchtower.

A platform? A watchtower? Made from what? And made from with what labor?

Mine, came the response. It’s not like I don’t have the time.

And when have you ever built anything?

Nuriel shrugged. Good time to start.

The island that the Carmilla’s Fancy sat upon, which she was now thinking of as her island, lay nestled near the back of a large gulf, with the cliffs curving around it like a pincer. The other tiny islands and the canals that split them filled the rest of the space, with the last ones spread out just beyond the shore.

Nuriel looked out over the archipelago. She hadn’t encountered many of the local monsters out on the islands, chirpers aside. Still, she couldn’t afford to not be sure.

Nuriel looked out at the network chain, memorizing its layout the best she could. She ought to ask her new friend for some blank pieces of parchment. A map would be invaluable.

When she was sure that she had a fairly good idea, she climbed down from the ship to the beach. And she started to walk.

Exploring the archipelago turned up little of any value. Few things had made their nest in the islands themselves. Here and there were a few gulls pecking about, she found some pretty big crabs, as well as a few free-standing pools that many spiny and squishy bits of sealife had made their home, but little she could use.

Still, there was also little that could threaten her as well. That was good as well.

There were a few things of note, though. One island was large enough to have a few plants take root, which included a trio of coconut trees! That was good to know. And if there were a few out there, there were probably others.

In fact, now that she thought of it, if her new friend had been able to gather so many kinds of fruit, there was probably plenty of edible plants nearby. Another thing to ask about.

The gulf was large, and there were many islands sitting within, but not so many that Nuriel wasn’t about to get through all of them in under a couple hours, and before long, she was standing on the shore, again looking out to sea.

The surf was calmer during the day, and the tide lower. It sure seemed peaceful enough, and if Nuriel were anyplace else, she would think it a good place to lay down in the sand and take a nap. As it was, she just wanted to take stock of her surroundings.

There didn’t seem to be much out there immediately beyond the island, no seafaring monsters or anything of the sort. But further out there was something.

Nuriel pulled out her spyglass and took a look.

It was as she had thought. Several sharp and jagged spikes of rock were protruding just out of the water’s surface. There were quite a lot of them too, and from where she was, it seemed that they stretched far in either direction.

Nuriel shivered. They probably surrounded the whole island. No wonder it seemed that nobody had visited in a long time. If the tide were higher, the spikes would be hidden from the naked eye, and yet would still rip the hulls out of any approaching vessel, something to keep in mind should the opportunity to escape ever present itself.

Then Nuriel looked down the coast to her left, where she had fled. Her new friend had said that the birds hunted at night, but she wasn’t really interested in pushing her luck just yet.

Then she looked to her right.

Nuriel paused.

There was something there, further down the beach. Actually, there was a lot of somethings. And Nuriel had a pretty good idea what they were.

Swallowing, she cautiously made her way down the coast, keeping her eyes on the objects as they came nearer and nearer. It did not take long to confirm what she had thought upon her first look.

She had come across a graveyard for ships.

Littered all over the shoals and reefs were the decaying carcasses of watercraft, from brigs like her own to smaller schooners. They had been broken and smashed to pieces, some partially intact but clearly never to take sail again, while others had been shattered so thoroughly that it was impossible to tell what kind of boat they once had been. Splintered masts rose into the air like the headstones of an abandoned cemetery, noting to all that might come across them that this was where the dead were kept.

But most impressive was the devastated remains of a Navy frigate, or half of one anyway. It was thrust partially up on the beach itself, one entire side ripped off, exposing what remained of the crew quarters.

Nuriel felt a strange shiver looking out on the skeletal remains of all those ships. At least the Carmilla’s Fancy had been mostly intact. But it was harder to look deader than these things.

Or more haunted.

The smart thing to do would to be to turn around and head right back to her island. She had enough troubles with monsters and spirits of the night to risk disturbing the sleep of the dead. There had to be dozens, if not hundreds of corpses of sailors out in those shoals, their bones picked clean by gulls and sea creatures. That would make one restless enough without some foolish girl poking about their graves.

And yet…

She did have at least one creature of the night on her side, and her new friend had not warned her away from any wrecked ships. It was sort of odd that she would find that comforting.

Besides, with so many wrecks to choose from, there had to be plenty of useful items she could salvage.

Taking a deep breath, Nuriel started to walk toward the remains of the beached frigate. But as she rounded a splintered mast complete with a crow’s nest that was jutting out of the sand, she saw something that made her stop in her tracks.

There was something reclining across the beach, the tip of its tail dangling in the surf. Something alive.

All the stories Nuriel had heard of merfolk had painted them as ethereally beautiful creatures with the bodies and faces of human women and the tails of massive fish where their legs ought to be. They would swim around seafaring vessels or recline sensuously upon reefs and rocks, tempting sailors to their watery deaths with the sound of their songs and their enchanting beauty. Those tales had served as a warning, to not allow one’s heart to be beguiled no matter how lonely you might be, but Nuriel had often come away from those stories not fearful of the sirens of the deep, but envious of them. How much better her life would be if she had the tail of a great fish and could swim wherever she pleased! Hell, there were a few sailors of her acquaintance that she wouldn’t mind leading to their deaths.

But now that she saw one in the flesh, she realized how wrong those descriptions had been, and yet how right.

The mermaid did in fact have a tail that she obviously used for swimming, but it was not the scaled tail of a cold-blooded fish, but a the long and sinuous tail, one that was finned, yes, but not with a split flipper at the end. Instead, it was more like the tail of a great serpent…no, not a serpent, as it had no scales. More like a giant eel, one with greenish-blue skin and stripes of a blue so dark that they were almost black.

As for the mermaid’s body, it was human…ish, and definitely feminine, but no one would mistake it for that of a human. The skin was the same greenish-blue as the tail, with no clear divide between the two parts like mermaids had been described having. Aside from the coloring, her torso was…mostly human in shape, trimmer in the middle and flaring out a bit where her hips extended down to her trail. She even had a navel, so she probably had not hatched from an egg. Her breasts were small, with two tiny, dark-blue nipples. Her arms, which were laid in the sand at her side, were long and slender, and her fingers, six of them on each hand, were likewise longer and more delicate-looking than they had any right to be, with a thin membrane stretching between her fingers. Short black claws protruded from the ends of her fingers.

The mermaid’s face was perhaps the most human-looking, with two eyes, a nose, and mouth all were it ought to be. Long, silky hair of a blue so dark that it was almost black flowed down her back as well. But the teeth in her mouth were obviously sharp and predatory, her eyes glowing a faint green even in the afternoon sun, and the lobe of each ear was a large, fin-like membrane, one that reminded Nuriel of the wings of a bat. Three horizontal black strips slashed their way across her nose.

There was no doubt about it. This was the green-eyed sea monster that Nuriel had seen on her first night on the island.

The mermaid was propped up on her elbows and looking out upon the wreckage all around her, the tip of her tail lazily flicking at the surf. And as Nuriel stared at her, she found herself realizing that while the mermaid clearly did not look like the fishy women from the sailors’ tales, she was still quite beautiful, and Nuriel could understand well the desire to leap in after her after a long and lonely voyage.

Though Nuriel didn’t make a sound, the mermaid must have sensed her anyway, as it suddenly jerked her head to one side and then flipped around onto her belly, hands splayed in the sand, eyes wide and watching warily. Nuriel stiffened.

Then the mermaid saw her. She blinked her green eyes once, head tilted in a manner that reminded Nuriel of that of a curious dog.

Or a wolf.

Then the mermaid seemed to relax. She rolled onto one side, propped up on her arm, and smiled warmly at Nuriel.

Then she raised one webbed hand and waved.

Nuriel was unsure of how to respond. She had spent her whole life fearing the unknown and the inhuman. She had shivered at tales of creatures that looked human but…weren’t, that preyed upon children, that drank blood and devoured souls. And ever since arriving on the island, she had been running from two monsters in particular, one with glowing red eyes that stalked the jungle and one with glowing green eyes that prowled the depths. She had been convinced that if either got their hands or claws on her, it would be all over for her.

But now one was leaving her notes and gifts while the other was waving to her in a friendly manner.

That was odd.

Nuriel waved back. What else could she do?

Satisfied with her response, the mermaid then beckoned at her, indicating for her to come closer.

Now this presented a conundrum. Did she acquiesce and trust that the inhuman creature of the deep, of which many terrifying tales had been told, truly did mean her no harm, or did she play it safe and keep her distance?

Seeing her hesitation, the mermaid sighed in exasperation and beckoned at her again, more insistently this time.

Well, if the mermaid did truly mean her harm, she could have done whatever she wanted to her after plucking her from the crocomonster’s grasp. And Nuriel truly could not see what the mermaid could possibly do now that they were on land.

Nuriel approached, walking through the sand until she was only a few feet away. Then she sat down on her haunches. There, that ought to be close enough.

The mermaid glanced her over, and as she did, Nuriel found herself staring fascinated at her face. Everything about the girl from the sea seemed more monster than woman, from the color of her eyes and skin to the length of her arms. And yet there definitely was a humanlike quality to her, not just because the shape of her body had a resemblance to a woman, but in how she moved, how she looked at Nuriel. As otherworldly as she was, there was a calm intelligence in her eyes, one that didn’t seem alien at all.

Then the mermaid’s brow furrowed. She lifted one webbed hand to her wing-like ear and let out a strange clicking sound.

Confused, Nuriel lifted a hand to her own ear, and found her fingers touching the ragged flesh of her lobe.

The mermaid made that clicking sound again, made a point of looking to the jungle, and then lunged her head forward, her sharp-teethed jaws biting at the air. Nuriel jumped a little, but it wasn’t a threat, it was a question.

What happened to your ear?

Right. Of course a maiden of the deep wouldn’t speak any human language. Actually, a speech made up of clicks and other similar vocalizations made perfect sense, given the environment. It was just bloody useless for Nuriel.

A girl who can’t speak and a girl who can only click, Nuriel thought despondently. This is going to make for a very trying conversation.

Still, at least the mermaid was making an effort to communicate. Nuriel touched her ear again, and then mimed biting onto something with her teeth, her neck twisting as she tore off an imaginary piece of flesh.

The mermaid blinked twice. And by that, it wasn’t that she shuttered her eyelids two times in a row, but that a thin, transparent membrane passed sideways over her eyes before her eyelids closed normally before opening again, with the membrane opening a second later.

And then her face contorted in anger.

The mermaid looked to the jungle again and pointed. She made another clicking sound, this one harsher sounding.

Nuriel stared blankly.

Hissing, the mermaid leaned over and rubbed her palm over a section of the sand, smoothing out an area. She lifted one hand, her index-finger extended.

The black claw at the end suddenly shot out, revealing itself to be long and needlelike.

Nuriel jerked a little. Oh. Retractable claws. Swell.

But the mermaid still didn’t mean her harm. Hunching over, she starting drawing in the sand with her claw.

Still apprehensive but now very curious, Nuriel leaned in to see what the mermaid was drawing. It was a very rough stick-figure of a long-haired woman wearing a dress. The jagged line that the mermaid used for the woman’s mouth indicated sharp teeth.

The mermaid again made a biting motion and indicated the jungle.

Then Nuriel understood. The mermaid wanted to know if the red-eyed monster had been the one to rip part of her ear off, and was angry about the possibility.

Interesting. So, the two did know each other, or at least of each other, but it seemed that they might not be on friendly terms.

Nuriel empathetically shook her head. Then she thought. All right, how could she explain this?

She entwined her thumbs and spread her fingers to imitated the wingspan of a bird. Then she fluttered it around before making her hand-bird dive at her own ear. Then she imitated the mermaid’s biting motion.

The anger cooled on the mermaid’s face, but she still looked horrified. She then pointed to the shoals, where a group of gulls were resting on a piece of railing.

Nuriel couldn’t help but chuckle at the thought. Honestly, she wouldn’t be surprised if gulls turned out to be that vicious on this island.

She shook her head again and did her best to use her rarely-employed voice imitate the hoarse, cackling cries of the deadly birds that had twice almost ended her life.

The mermaid’s brow rose in understanding. Her shoulder slumped and the gills in her neck fluttered in a manner that Nuriel took for a sigh.

Nuriel was struck then at the strangeness of it all. Here were two girls from completely different worlds and even completely different species, both incapable of human speech for their own reasons, still managing to have a conversation. Still, she couldn’t say that the experience was unpleasant.

The mermaid wiped away the sketch of the red-eyed monster from the sand. Then she began drawing again.

First she drew a wavy line. Then beneath it she drew another stick-figure, this one of a person falling backwards, limbs flailing. She pointed at the falling person, and then at Nuriel.

That part was easy enough to understand. It was a picture of Nuriel herself, after she had been thrown overboard into the sea.

Then the mermaid sketched out a person with a long tail instead of legs, clearly herself. She drew a line between herself and the depiction of Nuriel, and then drew a hump on top of the wavy line. This she connected to the sketches of herself and Nuriel with an arrow.

Nuriel slowly nodded in understanding. The mermaid was the reason she was still alive. She had found Nuriel drowning in the sea and brought her to the island. If so, then when she had first appeared to Nuriel on the beach, she had probably just been coming by to check up on her, which was much more

Then she nodded again and held her hands to her chest, as if clutching her heart. Thank you, she mouthed. She didn’t know if the mermaid could read lips or even understand English, but hopefully the sentiment would be conveyed.

The mermaid smiled, so at least some things were universal. And then her expression turned dour.

She wiped away the sketches in the sand. Then she drew the figure of the red-eyed monster again and jabbed a finger at it while shaking her head.

Nuriel frowned. What was the mermaid trying to communicate?

The mermaid again jabbed a claw at the stick-figure. Then she tilted her head to one side, exposing her neck. She tapped the side of her neck, pointed at the stick-figure, and made that biting motion again.

Nuriel still stared blankly at her. Did the mermaid want to eat the red-eyed monster? She really hoped that wasn’t the case. The last thing she needed was to be stuck in the middle of some kind-

And then she got it. The mermaid wasn’t saying that she wanted to eat the red-eyed monster, she was saying that the red-eyed monster had tried to eat her!

Seeing the look on Nuriel’s face, the mermaid nodded once, clicked her teeth together again, and pointed to the sketch of the red-eyed monster with an empathic shake of her head.

Nuriel cast a wary eye over to the jungle, where the red-eyed monster dwelled. Being stalked by inhuman creatures had been bad enough. She had not expected to be caught in the middle of a feud between two of them.

Then the mermaid suddenly stiffened. She looked up at the island, eyes flitting this way and that. Nuriel tilted her head and frowned, silently asking her what was wrong.

The mermaid glanced back at Nuriel, unease in her eyes. She pointed at the marooned girl and let out a low, repeating click. Though the gesture didn’t come with an illustration, Nuriel felt that she had caught the gist.

Be careful.

Moving with the smooth grace of a slithering snake, the mermaid turned herself around and slid back into the sea, her long tail swaying in the sand. A moment later she had disappeared among the flotsam and jetsam.

Nuriel stared after her, out over the partially sunken wreckage. All this time she had assumed that the monster that prowled the night and the monster that prowled the deep had been in cahoots, that there had been some kind of alliance between them. But now, just as she was starting to perhaps trust them both, she learned that such was not the case.

But they had both saved her life! Nuriel would be dead at least three times over if it weren’t for them. And they had both ample opportunity to do her harm had they wanted to.

There was something else going on.

…

The next morning, Nuriel found that her new “friend” had once again returned.

The note Nuriel had written thanking it was gone, and in its place was yet another long letter. There was also yet another basket of fruit and a basket of fish, along with a jug of clean water.

Nuriel ate cautiously, wishing that she could taste the food, if for no other reason than to tell if it had been tampered with. But when it failed to kill her, she turned her attention to her other gifts.

In addition to the note, several sheets of blank parchment had also been left. So her new friend intended to keep communicating from afar as well.

As for the note, Nuriel again had to work to decipher it, but it was shorter this time.

I am so glad! Now, I know this must be very (st…string…strange!) strange to you, so I shall keep my (dictan? No, distance!) distance for now. However, should you need or want anything, do not (oh damn, there was no way she was going to get this one. It started with a “He,” but the next was a jumble of letters) to ask.

And again she had signed her name. And again, Nuriel couldn’t read it.

Once she was done, Nuriel sat back to contemplate what she ought to do.

The red-eyed monster had basically told her to ask for anything, and Nuriel had no doubt that she could provide. But what she really wanted was information.

But should she ask it? Would doing so anger her new benefactor?

Well, only one way to find out.

Nuriel knelt down over a piece parchment, charcoal stick in one hand, the note that the red-eyed monster had left for her in the other.

Writing was not her strong suit. She read well enough to get by, and she could write a little bit, but mostly short phrases she had memorized in order to get by. Complex questions such as the one she wanted took some work.

Fortunately, while hurried, the red-eyed monster’s penmanship was neat and readable, so Nuriel was about to use it as something of a cross-reference to get the words right. Unfortunately, the two words she needed to use weren’t anywhere to be found. Damn it.

Then she sighed. Oh, who cared about spelling? The point would be made regardless.

Sticking the charcoal against the parchment, she carefully etched out the words, HU IS MURMAD?

Hopefully the red-eyed monster would glean her meaning, but just to be sure, Nuriel also took a page from the mermaid’s book and sketched out a person with a fish’s tail beneath her question.

That done, she picked up the hammer and nailed her question to the mast. Now all she had to do was wait. And pray.

[jksangelic]

heaven’s winter (m)

RATING: M

GENRE: fantasy, fluff, smut, a hint of a soulmate au, light angst

PAIRING: village daughter!reader x seraph!yoongi (alternatively, an “angel”)

WARNINGS/TAGS: lots of overthinking/past angst regarding both reader and yoongi separately (yoongi especially), tae is involved as an important plot side character but he’s barely in there i’m sorry, surprise aggression from yoongi because u get in his personal space, slow burn smut but the smut is nice and flavorful, explicit sexual content, body worship, oral sex (female receiving), virgin!reader, clumsy cute smut uwu, unprotected sex (wrap it up pls), several positions, unintentional temperature play?, lots of love and respect up in this house and lots of other things i probably forgot. 

also i wrote a lot for the intro you can skim idc lmao.

SUMMARY: your duty as the village daughter places you in line for the season’s Offering; a tradition not to tread lightly upon. as the snow falls slow and heavy, and the seraph awaits in the shallows of the mountain, you fail to realize what the winter has in store for you.

WORD COUNT: 18,600

NOTE: welcome to my slice of the Fantastical Stories for Curious Souls Collaboration!

it’s always really an honor to be able to work with other writers and i’m really grateful that they allowed my butting-in )))): thank you all!!! make sure to check out everyone’s stories in the link above and let us know what you think!

(uhhh i just..... i spent way too much time on research and the politics behind this fic for it to still be aLL oVer tHe plaCe but please cut me some slack. might i throw in that this has no religious/cultural affiliation and instead has more of a fantastical theme to it that is entirely fictional. especially for the concept of the Offering and how i loosely throw around the word “angel” and “heaven” and etc.)

((might i add that i recently discovered that i am *terrible* at describing geography and am totally basing it off of video-game visuals........ cough cough zeldabreathofthewild))

(((this last one’s kinda important!!!!: yoongi is described to be larger than you bc he’s this magical bird being. i always try to keep reader insert broad in description but if you’re taller than irl yoongi boongi, pssst, you’re not in this universe sorry but i make the rules)))

((((this is currently unedited. @14statelier​ get to work.))))

Part One

The snow falls slow and thick. The children catching it on their tongues and compacting it to shoot at each other, screaming and wailing all the same as it continues to pile. It fell particularly early this time around, normally nothing more than cold bitter to the skin and clouds stirring prediction of the oncoming winter. You were always a heavy sleeper despite the beauty of first frost, long past your days of childish amazement through fogged windows and warm fires but you watched the icy cotton substance pile since dawn this morning. Not even drowsiness will overrun your excitement for the day ahead.

“You light three incense and make sure they burn all the way through before you turn around,” Taehee states.

“Find some stones on your way. Use them to hold the tapestry down as you set up. It looks especially windy today,” Mina adds.

Yoona finishes tucking your hair back rather tightly, “You should stop by Jin’s and pick up some extra bread. You know he’ll give you some of his fresh batch if you asked for it.”

You suppose, not even the nagging of your aunts.

You chew on your fingers, a nervous habit. Taehee pulls your slobbered index from your lips with a wrinkled forehead, “You better remember this, dear. You only have to do it once but if you do it right, it’ll be worth much more.”

You recite drearily, “Follow the path, set up the altar, say our prayers, return home.”

“Once the incense is out, Y/N. You mustn’t forget.”

“And you cannot explore the manor. Don’t walk around. Don’t look through the windows—”

“It’s a manor? How big do you suppose?” you ask with newfound interest to your words.

“That doesn’t matter, girl. You don’t wander. You don’t explore. You do what is told of you and nothing more. What matters is that you don’t spot a seraph, and that the seraphs don’t spot you.”

You never understood that rule. If the seraph tribe was so kind as to help your country win a rather one-sided war, then why the invisible boundary? To be in alliance and never interact was an odd sense of unity to you, if any. “Have you ever seen a seraph? Is it true they have two sets of wings?” You’d always been curious to the subject, a fairytale-like existence just waiting below the peak.

“The elders claim they do. A large and small set. Some say it’s necessary for having human proportions. You know, they say it’s bad luck to stare at a seraph’s wings. ” Mina says in awe in correspondence to the way she suffocates you with your robe’s sash.

You swat her away, forcing down a smile, “I don’t believe that, you haven’t even seen one! How do you even know they exist!”

“Hush! You’ll get into some real trouble if an elder catches you saying that. They exist. And they live up the mountain. And you will do the Offering with utmost delicacy and respect. Besides, you’re the only one coming-of-age this year! A girl to do it by herself is surely something the leaders will appraise of you.” You avoid their scrutinous, expectant gazes.

You could say you’ve been cursed at birth. Weak in basic skills in which an adult, regardless of age, is identified by. You lacked time management and a sense of direction, you harbored a bad habit of looking down when you spoke, you couldn’t even wash the dishes without chipping a glass. Your legs worked against you at random times, quite literally tripping you up and deeming you as a clumsy, pitiful thing. As you grew older, the only skills you were able to contribute were to the fields, where things were organic and didn’t require fragility.

“I am not as useless as you think of me,” the words come out unprompted but true and exposed.

The women gawk and babble like hens in a flurry of angered denial or soft apologies but you no longer have time to discuss unimportant matters.

In the midst, rough, giant hands encase your face. You don’t realize you’re looking to the floor until Taehyung props your chin upwards, met with smiling eyes and an ear-to-ear grin. His name rolls off your tongue in surprise.

“Hey, don’t start moping before you even start. It really isn’t a big deal. You hike all the way up to the riverbank more than the others and that’s a long way. This is no different. And think, when you come home everyone will come to realize how much they’ve missed you! Me included.”

“It’s not that I’m…” You start haphazardly. Well, it’s not that you’re reluctant to do the Offering. To adventure otherwise prohibited land and by yourself, to prove that you can handle life just fine and don’t need to be seared by the judgement of deploring eyes. Some time to enjoy solitary peace. It wasn’t even a whole day, dammit, but you’ll take what you can get. You choose to lie, “I guess I am a bit nervous. I’ll make sure to pace myself. Besides, I’d run myself short if I finished in half-a-day like you.”

Tae puffs, a little proud of himself, “What can I say… I’d like for the little ones to look up to me.” You roll your eyes, scanning your bed for your scarf. Taehyung eyes the cloth as you wrap it around, a rare moment of quiet. He stares, entranced, and you don’t think you’ve ever seen him so focused. As you think about inquiring his statue-like manner, you notice that more of the silence is due to the disappearance of the squawking hens. Those sly, evil matchmakers.

You suddenly pull him along and towards the exit, “You can’t be in here. You’ll get us in trouble.”

He blinks dumbly and slumps against your ministrations. “Your aunts seemed to be fine with it. And it’s not like I haven’t snuck in your window a few… several times.”

Your expressed sheepishness is his favorite source of entertainment, “Goodness, as kids! You make it sound so rebellious.” He winks as if you share a grand secret, all to his imagination of course.

Taehyung, on the other hand, was the village’s be-all and end-all. Born to work and carry everyone else on his back. He stands tall with his shoulders wide and prominent, chestnut waves that reached his cheekbones now. Shirt tight around his torso in ways that could excite anyone that risked a glimpse. You can’t help but find it amazing how much of a crybaby he was when you were young and how sturdy and dependable he is now. He was humorously your polar opposite.

You try to shoo him once more, “Anyways. I’m getting ready and you can’t see me. Go wait with everyone else!” His pout is jarring paired with his hard, strong build. Like a teddy bear with abs and palm blisters from years of physical labor.

His body moves on his own at some point, reluctantly reaching for your door handle, “No parting kiss upon my cheek, fair lady?”

It’s obvious he’s being more daring these days. With frequent visits and gifts on your doorstep, and now requested kisses. The whole town knew you were likely to marry him, a relief for most. But on your hand, you’ve just known him for so long. Practically since you were born. You’ve already shared kisses, you’ve already had those butterflies in your stomach; but the kisses were stolen in secret and the butterflies were stagnant. And although it was never a consistent nor official courting, you felt as though Taehyung was already a route taken. You know better to never admit that into the air, though. Not when everyone expected your cooperation with marriage at the least. To care for someone so special, and to bear his children plump and healthy.

What a static life to live, you try not to think. You instead try to blame such thinking on your inferiority complex, to at least ease some of that horrible guilt in your stomach. You should be grateful for your life. Talentless yet adored. A village princess that was easy on the eyes and sought after by those looking for that beauty and its accompanied dowry.

A proposal was near, that much you could tell with his efforts. In his perspective, the sooner the better lest he want someone else to steal you from him. Contradictory to your own reasoning, the only relief you find is that it is him, your dearest friend. Perhaps the only one to disregard your shortcomings and want to fill your empty spaces as much as he can. He cared about you and that could be enough. So you try to convince yourself of that.  

You kiss his cheek softly and without hesitation. Not so much as a blush. He suspects nothing less than mutual adoration and takes his leave like you request, leaving you alone in silence for a relieving twenty seconds. Then the hens come back inside and squabble about who will be able to sew together your future gown.

 Part Two

It starts under the old pine tree on the far side of the village. A crowd gathers as you wait under the swaying branches, mutters and looks of excitement apparent. A cleric waits beside you with three elder women who prepare your things: a woven satchel loaded with the items that you are to lay out, things like dried flowers, fruits, fine wines, tapestries, collected crystals, baked goods and the incense. A replica display of what little the humans had presented at the foot of the seraphs. Untouchable beings with class and power much above your own. Kindness as well, so it seems; to be provided with just this and offer unparalleled assistance to a hopeless cause in the old wars. You wondered if they still watched from afar, curious to the well-being of their mortal neighbors.

"Dear, keep your mind with us. You'll be off shortly," one of the grandmas whisper, placing a carved selenite athame into a leather holster and slipping it into the confines of your robe, "For protection." You smile and thank her kindly, tuning back into the ceremony and waiting for the second elder. They continue to adorn you in charms and traveling goodies, eventually piling on unnecessary weight that will, for sure, slow you down in the process. The trek was basically a day’s trip. If you moved efficiently, you should be home no later than when the sun begins to set, in time for supper even. As much as you’d like to stay out longer, you dare not risk a night in the mountains.

“—this year’s representative will be just as prosperous. May she bring good fortune and health onto our town just as the many before her has done so,” the old cleric roars into the audience, just about finishing his speech as you start to listen. You hope he didn’t say anything too significant. Can’t possibly hang on to every dry word when you were so close to tasting temporary freedom.

You make your way into the parted sea of people, some who grip your hand as you walk by to invoke strength as you move along. A few grumble good luck’s and come back safe’s. Then an angry baker charging through helpless bodies.

“Take this, you stupid girl. You were supposed to stop by the bakery this morning,” Seokjin whines, thrusting what seems to be a warm pastry wrapped with cheesecloth into your hands.

“Thank—Thank you. I’m sorry, I didn’t want to bug…”

Jungkook pops in from nowhere, hitting your shoulder a little too playfully, “Chin up, love. Don’t be back too soon.” You nod shyly as he distances behind. Jungkook always had a strong nose for your facades but he also always kept your secrets. Clutching your things tightly, you watch your boots as they pick up speed through the mess of attention.

“Good luck!”

“Watch your surroundings, little one.”

“Come home and don’t wander off!”

You leave northbound until you no longer hear their cheers. Until the snow no longer has indented prints and you think you’re alone and off to the races. A sudden tension snaps when you release your sore cheeks from an artificial smile, not even aware you were sporting one in the first place. There was always a heavy pressure when you presented yourself to the public, and while you were no damn princess, everyone ensured that you at least feel the looming responsibility of one. Curse your family’s political ties and all that, otherwise you wouldn’t give a damn if you seemed like an old witch spotted once in a blue moon.

When you reach the border gate is when you see Taehyung for the last time today. It comes as a surprise to see him waiting for you like a loyal dog, dark hair sprinkled with snowflakes, red cheeks a striking contrast against the bright setting. If you were more grateful, you’d think he looks particularly good today. If anything, it strikes you more that you failed to see his face at the send-off.

“Hey. I didn’t want to do this in front of everyone else… and today of all days but if I don’t right now, I don’t think I ever will,” he jumbles. In his hands hold a scarlet scarf, the same one you had seen as a child when his mom would occasionally take care of you, let you help bake, and playfully dress you in her accessories. All but that scarf, folded neatly and tucked into a corner or her closet.

“Oh! Don’t touch that, love,” she said, “That’s something my mother-in-law made for me.”

You had pouted then, a spoiled brat of sorts. But Taehyung’s mother’s eyes were always warm and she spoke softer than cashmere, “I have to give that to my son when he decides to marry. Will you make sure he finds the right one, for me? You are his best friend, aren’t you?”

You remember the challenge you felt, yelling without hesitation, “Taetae will marry me! When we grow up I’ll be his bride and you won’t have to worry!”

She giggled in contentment, eyes squinted in a wide smile and petting you lovingly, “Ah, of course. I know you’ll be a wonderful wife, Y/N. Taehyung will be in great hands.”

“I had been there, you know,” Taehyung chuckles, “When you claimed you’d be my wife when we got older. I was hiding in the hallway and initially, I thought, ‘I’ll never marry my best friend!’. But, now… I just can’t imagine wanting to marry anyone else.”

You grin at him sadly. Of course he had been holding onto this his entire childhood.

“Taehyung…”

“We’re still young, I know that. I just want to give you this for your trip to make me feel more at ease and so you can think about it. You can take all the time that you need. I know Mother wouldn’t mind, especially for you.” You nod. It’s all you can do. Taehyung pulls you into a tight embrace and kisses your hair. When he pulls away, he wraps your neck into the warmth of the scarf you’d always wished to wear. But it’s almost suffocating now, locking in your fate before you even step out of the village boundaries.

“For now, just come back to me. I’ll be waiting for you no matter what you decide.”

You can fathom the communal disappointment of rejecting your strongest suitor. More importantly, you would be shameful to turn down his proposal. Once it was out there, there was no “decision”.

You can imagine your aunts now, squealing in delight and sewing from their best cloths.

 Part Three

Though you never had the chance to explore much, this really was nothing you've ever seen before. An ominous stairway carved into rock weaved in and out of your trail which made it fairly easy to follow along. You can't imagine the labor that went into sculpting this far ahead and all the way up the side of the mountain; it was truly something mind-boggling. As the air begins to thin, the amount of snow starts to grow thicker. If you had waited any longer into the winter you wouldn’t even be able to see the path, you’re sure.

You only need to stop twice to catch your breath and sit down. Snacking on the bread Jin gifted you only a few hours ago. It’s satisfying to look back at the area you’ve covered, how small things look from your height and the beauty of a fresh snow blanket. The scenery to the riverbank was nowhere as near breathtaking to that of the mountain. A dreamscape of evergreen trees and varying shrubbery, crossing over a short wooden bridge floating over a near-frozen stream, even occasional wildlife prancing into view. The summit itself wasn’t terribly high. It was manageable to hike for the most part, more so that your goal wasn’t to reach the peak. 

You could travel all the time, you think. Hike or take a horse somewhere farther than here but that’s not very practical. There was nowhere really to go and you didn’t have the luxury to just up and leave your household, and now Taehyung. The knots in your brain seem to loosen, blame the inclination and dry air infiltrating your head. Knowing your life was to be faced someday and all your immature ambitions to leave the village now seeming childlike and unattainable. The pessimism had yet to blow out your weak flame of philosophical rebellion but it was surely keeping you in check.

Judging by the sun's position, it's midday. Meaning it shouldn't be long before you catch sight of the "manor" and thus will be halfway finished with your journey.

You nearly walk off the cliffside before you notice the route's abrupt change and how it slithers deeper into the eye of the mountain. The farther you walk, the closer the earthy walls begin to shut in on you in a trench-like structure. It's even more unbelievable coming upon a short archway, perhaps man-made and mined through a boulder that could have fallen from atop one of the peaks. Being here, you realize, makes you feel small. Slithering through the terrain like a fairy in the tales your mother had told you at night. Of beasts and cryptids that could appear in the tangles of forest and vanish all in the same. There was a sort of dreamlike trance you found yourself in as you walked under the rock as if it were a portal.

And, unexpectedly, it's there. Atop a few more dreadful flights of stairs, hidden between an odd bundle of trees and beneath a fresh veil of snow, you can barely make out the silhouette of a house. It's still a bit far and eerily surrounded by fog but it's there and it almost looks as if it's... floating. Like a gateway to a secret nook of heaven.

It's one of those odd, puzzle-like mirages when you climb more steps to think you're only getting farther from the house. The swaying of branches keeps you from determining just how big it is and what it could possibly conceal. Even the atmosphere, chill and intimidating, makes your heart skip in perplexed anticipation. Having been at this for hours, if the staircase hadn't just ceased you would have kept walking straight into the dark wooden door.

But your aching legs find relief in the stretching flat surface of a porch and your exhilaration to reaching such a majestic destination that you could squeal. Of course, you don't, and instead get started at the task at hand.

You kneel onto the cool floor and begin to unload your things, neatly and without the need to rush. You lay stones on each corner of the tapestry to hold it down, you lay out the contents in somewhat of an aesthetically manner, you strike a match to light the incense and you mumble your thanks on behalf of the village, all as you were told. The snicker under your breath comes unwarranted as you finalize the display, even Taehyung couldn't have done this well.

It feels a little anticlimactic; a little short-lived. To have come up this whole way and spend a maximum of five minutes in somewhere you could spend days exploring. Idling, you can practically hear the warning clucks of your aunts engraved into your brain.

"Don't dilly-dally!"

"Come straight home."

"Even think of doing anything funny and I'll have Seokjin roast you alive."

Maybe it's why it's even more satisfying to you when you ignore them altogether, standing from your position and just dying to see the rest of the manor's exterior. One peek, one peek and I'll never stray from instruction ever again, you think. Just my last burst of freedom and then I promise to be a good girl with no more personality than a wet dish rag.

So you tiptoe to the massive door and lean your ear against it as if you could hear anything with its size and the strong winds. You questioned if anyone even lived here, void of any decorations or signs of recent activity. Maybe the deer would get to the food you laid out before someone even stepped foot on the property prior next Offering.

When there are no obvious indications of life do you weasel your way around the corner, an extension of the porch wrapping around the side of the house to much of your assumption and revealing an expanse of space. The cabin was two stories at the least, maybe even three if not had been for the first story windows and how incredibly tall they were. You could only imagine the comfort of being inside such a space, being able to wake and watch the snow behind a glass wall of incredible proportions. While you ogle the window do you, of course, fail to realize that it's transparent and startle a bit when something begins to move.

The reflection makes it a bit difficult to pinpoint, a large dark figure shifting ever so slightly in its confines. Like a complete buffoon, you near the wall even closer with squinted eyes just making out the shapes of an entity.

Whatever it is, it's incredibly large. A heart in shape and composed of monochromatic blacks, reaching the floor and surely much taller than you. It was killing you that you couldn't figure out what the hell it was, well-near leaning against the glass as you peer into the private space.

You freeze in place as the elongated heart is really in the shape of wings, accompanied by a body as they’re dragged behind it like a veil. Long and dark and ruffling occasionally as their owner rotates a bit...

But you don't get to see his face. The man in which you firmly believed could be nothing but a myth; as propaganda by the village elders to keep your actions in check. Rather, the seraphs were more authentic than you could have ever imagined, and as magical and inspiring as it may be, so are the Offering rules that are now proved and justified, and that could only mean that this was very, very unfortunate timing to be snooping around property that was not yours.

Your feet scramble backwards in attempt to flee out of sight, instead graciously slipping against the frozen wood and causing you to land quite harshly on your side. Your hip burns at the impact but more horrifyingly important, the crash rattles the side of the floating stoop and his eyes burn into your pathetic body. The moment is wedged between fractions of a second, eye contact barely existent but it's enough to see the daggers in the seraph's irises. It's enough of a warning for you to get back onto your feet and sprint as carefully as possible away from such a gaze that could light this winter wonderland into disastrous flames.

All that comes across your mind as you rush down the steps is how wrong you were. How you unjustly became more and more skeptical of the stories and legends of the creatures that existed in the crevices of the mountains. How numb you became to the warnings as your age drew near for your rite of passage. How much of a taboo you would become if you were to ever tell a living soul that you witnessed a seraph and its marvelous wings. Not that you would.

Your ability to run brings you to the realization that you forgot your things but it was beyond you now. For once in your life, you cherish the idea of being home and hiding under the covers in the tranquil warmth of a familiar fireplace. To dream away the moment that dark angel caught a sly fox trespassing into his territory and, rightfully so, looking as if he craved to skin it alive.

You yelp at the sudden caw of ravens as they fly overhead. Their screeches send shivers to your bones, a sudden chill slowing you down. Rustling in the nearby trees deem you completely terrified, a gut feeling deducting the possibility of winds blowing that strong in the middle of dense shrubbery. Your heart drops once more; your athame was left in the abandoned bag.

The last time you had seen a wolf was when you were barely a toddler, sleepily held in the arms of a younger (and much kinder) Mina. It lurked in the woods just past the fields, a little young and possibly separated from its pack. But wolves were smart and they knew better than to make trouble in a town of loud humans. You remember the way it pulled its ears back and slinked back into the sanctity of its wild home and never to be seen again.

These wolves were smart too, howling their announcement upon finding a small, weak girl all alone and oozing dread. Two pairs of eyes track you as their corresponding bodies stalk out of the bushes, large and sleek and beautiful. Both grey and both incredibly hungry, they begin to pace around you maybe 100 feet away. You startle back and up a stair, most favored option to return to the cabin and retrieve your bag, maybe stay near for a bit until the creatures leave but then another, black and larger than the other two, barks harshly and stands its ground on your sacred steps. You are royally trapped.

“Stay… Stay back,” you warn dumbly, looking to the only open direction in the woods. You wouldn’t be as fast as on the path as long as you had to maneuver through the snow but you could possibly break off a hefty branch. Enough to ward them off to get back to the cabin and pray that the seraph doesn’t pose more of a problem than flesh-eating hounds.

So you sprint, robes clenched in your fists and boots sinking into the pillows of ice, disappearing into the trees and disregarding the snarls that start up behind you. You look desperately for something, anything to help you. Snow begins to find its way into your shoes each time you trip over yourself, wetting the soles of your feet. Hands scraping against bark with each twist and turn and your fingers burn. You only look back occasionally, seeing no more than one pair of eyes at a time at a short distance. This must have been a fun game to them, howling their contents into brisk air.

The black dog truly appears from nowhere, a flash of teeth from your left peripheral before it tackles you to the ground the same moment you find a dead branch and thrust it into its snapping jaw. It all happens too fast. You yipe as you roll through the fall, wolf teeth still digging through your only weapon and snapping the poor thing to two. In pure desperation, you dig the sharper broken half into whatever it’s willing to hit. Fortunately enough, the wolf whimpers and tumbles off you. Then you’re off once again, adrenaline ringing in your ears as you don’t even care to recall which way is which, as long as it’s away from, what can you assume was, the Big Bad Alpha.

More howls from them, more cries from you.

You’re able to return to the path without another spotting. It turns out you were going the wrong way when you’re also met with the narrow exit and that cursed archway. A gateway to inevitable death.  

Halfway through the gap in manic rush and you’re face to face with a beast so pale that it camouflaged with the flurry encasing you both. Eyes clear as water and almost… comforting. Even with the low rumble in its throat and one paw in front of the other in a slow, tantalizing chase. The others growl behind you, an enraged black-furred monster bleeding from its right eye socket turned quite smug now knowing that you were completely, utterly trapped.

It’s when the white wolf soundlessly drags a deep wound into your thigh while the three merely watch is when you ascertain that it is, undoubtedly, the pack leader. You fall back as the beautiful thing toys with you, snatching the front of your thick robe and shredding it with a sickening rip. You scream for the first time this entire chase, grabbing at Taehyung’s scarf in fear that it got caught along with it, caring for it more than your own life at this point.

The scream must have been piercing enough to discombobulate your attacker, it’s large ears flitting around as it jumps away from you. It’s even more of a shock when they all flee out of the divide, leaving you bleeding and too traumatized to move an inch. Whatever alarmed them devastates you even more.

The ravens caw loud and the ground vibrates. Watching the birds circle in the sky, you notice the way pebbles begin to crumble from each peak, how snow begins to over pile on such weak grounds and the way it begins to slide inward.

It’s an odd sound; snow sliding against other layers of snow and having so much weight that it pulls a few small trees with it. And this trench-like area only had so much space and you were positive the amount of white that begins to hurl towards you would fill it like a water cup; bury you with absolutely no chance of being able to dig your way out. Despite your fear, you cower at its charge and wait for the weight to hit.

 And then your head lolls back against something wonderfully warm and dry. You were completely soaked but too exhausted to shiver. In your last moments of consciousness, with your neck craned uncomfortably, you see the ground as the sky and the sky as the ground and feathers as feathers. You think of home. Think of warm summers where you would dip your feet in the riverbed. Think of bonfires with Jungkook and Jin and Hoseok and even Taehyung. But everything is still snow and you think you’re beginning to loathe each damned flake. The only comfort you find is the homeliness of the carmine red material that blows softly against your face. With that and the fleeting thought that you might be righteously transported to heaven do you finally pass out.

 Part Four

Yoongi wasn’t particularly fond of humans. Unlike his brothers and sisters that sympathized with such weak creatures enough to put their own lives at risk, it was just something he would never come around to understand. Species were organized and separated for reasons and intermingling was a curiosity that died ages ago for him.

Which is all a hypocritical contradiction when he sees you sleep soundly on his common room couch, changed into dry clothes and buried beneath a heap of duvets. Whatever had possessed him to go after you was pure impulse after the stunt you pulled on him. Prowling around on private property and, more importantly, breaking the village’s strict ritual rules. Catching him going about on what would be another unmomentous day in his schedule, creating enough of a ruckus to capture his attention, and then fleeing as a feeble mouse.

It’d be a lie if he had said he didn’t watch you scramble away down the steps from the comfort of his front door and a fresh coffee in hand, watching you stumble over nothing on your way. It was more when you had left your things like a pure imbecile, food and tools and all, and left without even waiting for the incense to finish burning. It was then that he came to the conclusion that you were incredibly clumsy and that served as entertainment to him.

The howls were his test of will. Knowing the dogs were way farther up the mountain than they normally were and supposing they had followed your poor, unfortunate soul during your trek, waiting for the perfect time to strike. And you were practically handed to them on a silver platter, considering you’d left your only knife on the cold wood of his porch.

Maybe he had come down, grumpily disturbed from his peaceful Saturday, more to save himself from cleaning the remnants of someone eaten in his vicinity more than the compassion to save you. But that was a tad bit too cruel, even for him. He thinks it was more of that uniquely curious glint in your eyes as you practically skipped into his sight. Daring enough to ignore those rather ridiculous warnings and try your luck. Delicate as a deer in hunter’s perspective. As often as he’d go out to restock supplies in neighboring towns would he never come across a visitor in his own domain. Call him quaint, but it was a mediocre surprise.

He prods the fire, making it crackle and reflame with more vigor. It had barely been a few hours since he’s saved you by the skin of his teeth, almost caught in the landslide himself.

He checks the wound on your leg once more, cleaning it again before securing it in bandages. If only he had gotten there faster, Yoongi tsks, but you’d strayed from the path and he could only follow the prints so quickly before they were covered by the flurry. By the time he found you again, you were knelt in front of the pack and submitting to your death. Had he not been on a hill, had he not been able to utilize his useless wings to glide down before the snow had claimed you first…

You groan softly, unable to roll around without a searing poker sinking into your thigh with each attempt. Contrast to the icicle state the rest of your body sported. You felt like hell. Like hell in hell guarded by those hounds. Hell in your thigh and hell in your head and hell in—

“Don’t move too fast. You have a fever and I just replaced your bandages,” a disembodied voice orders. Your eyes snap open to tall, wooden ceiling. Sitting up is your first horrible mistake, dropping back down immediately with a pained wheeze.

“I just said not to move too fast. If you can sit up normally, you should drink some water. I have some here,” it speaks again. You try again cautiously, blurry spots ruining your vision the farther up you scoot. A silhouette is kneeling beside you, maybe a cup in his hand but you’re too jumbled to confirm.

Yoongi tries his best to fold in on himself, lowering the obvious limbs stuck to his back and appear as human as possible. You wouldn’t be able to run again in your state but he tries his best to be courteous to your skittishness anyway.

“Where… Where am I?” You dazingly question. You don’t really… recall too much. Last memory somewhat muddled between your send-off and contact with those treacherous wolves, very few in between and serving no importance if you couldn’t remember how it ended.

“You’re safe in my house. In the mountains still. You passed out pretty good out there, been out for a bit. Now drink.”

It’s easy to do as your told with you’re running off little brainpower, downing the water hastily.

The voice scolds, “Hey, slow.”

At some point, you can see again. The blankets that cover you and the large room you inhabit. Of course, the seraph from earlier that awaits by your seat. His seat. But you feel no urgency to scurry into safety. You were discombobulated, sure, but you knew enough that this man was kind enough to bring you into his home and care for you. So you fold back the material slowly and watch his face contort into confusion as you try to stand.

“I’ll be on my way. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Thank you for treating me.”

“Woah now. You’re in no condition to be standing. Besides, the path is blocked. Snow was too heavy and caused a slide. I doubt it’ll clear until the spring,” he informs, looking out the window as if to drag your own attention to it. The snow stopped but it’s fallen a few feet, at least. The path, you remember, chased by wolves and led into an ice trap. The few split moments in which the man must have scooped you up before your demise, remnants of being carried back towards his estate.

His place, in which is even more amazing inside than it was outside, a luxurious wooden mansion of sorts, tall and spacious and filled with those incredible windows that displayed better than you could have ever dreamed. The man himself that sits beside you draws full attention. Despite his position, he was large and still intimidating as the moment you crossed sights for the first time. Hair matching his wings in dark palette, soft and delicate looking. His face anything but, sharp eyes and thick brows, lips that curved into a simper. Above all, he looked more human. Even as radiant and prepossessing as he was, if the cape of wings didn’t follow him where he went he would look just as human as the rest of the population.

“Are you a seraph?” You ask dumbly. Dumb, because he laughs and because he obviously is.

“Are you a human, pretty thing?” He retorts. There’s no condescending lilt to his words but it makes him seem otherworldly to you. With such a provoking question and your lightheadedness, he seemed a blessing to be inhabiting such an earth.

You melt into the cushions once more, leg throbbing and eyes heavy. You watch his wings as they bob with his breath, “They say it’s bad luck to lay eyes on the wings of an angel…”

“Why would that be?,” he scrunches his nose, maybe a little appalled by the idea, “Such a misleading myth. Besides, I’m no angel.”

You don’t know why he stands to leave the room after that, unnoticing how you fall back into sedation a minute later.

 Part Five

You wake with clarity. Check your thigh to find it almost completely healed over except a now lingering scar. All’s left is a dull soreness but god it felt so much better. Enough to stand and stretch in the empty room. Enough to coherently realize that you only wear your underwear while the rest of your garments hang torn and sadly on the fireplace screen. It’s not as unbecoming if it had to be done for the sake of your health and wellbeing, right?

Getting dressed is easy when you don’t even bother with your robe, the gash decreeing it useless and instead tying Taehyung’s scarf around your shoulders as a shawl over your tank. You’re lucky it didn’t get torn.

There’s a fleeting moment where you really think you miss Tae, feeling a little regretful to being so afraid of his proposal in light of the recent accident. You’re sure he must be worried sick; must think you’ve perished under the debris and snow if he’s come to look for you. As his best friend, you solemnly wish he was here to hug you close and promise that it would all be okay. To fend off your shame and welcome you back into the village with teary eyes and a warm smile.

“Ah, human. You’re awake.”

You whip around to discover fox eyes in the door frame, poorly lit now that it’s nighttime. The moonlight pairs well with how it sits on his milky skin, almost something out of a painting.

“It’s Y/N. Not ‘human’.” You answer a little sharper than you mean. He notices too, quick to wave it off since he really had popped up out of nowhere. He tries your name once on his own tongue, a satisfying thing to say.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Min Yoongi, in case you don’t want to call me seraph all the time.”

You suddenly grab your thigh, rubbing it over your pants in questionable disbelief, “How long have I been asleep? My leg is almost fully healed…”

He rubs at his eye, a little nonchalant about the scene at hand, “Only overnight and throughout the day today. It’s probably quarter to nine about now. I had medicine to help your cuts heal over nicely. Call it, uh, advanced seraph technology.”

The gashes hadn’t been incredibly deep to begin with, thankfully not going any further than the first layer of skin and just really causing some bleeding, but it was still amazing. The feeling is short lived. Even if only a day, you’ve overstayed your welcome.

“Thank you, um, Mr. Min. For saving my life and everything after that. I’d like to repay you sometime. But for now I’m afraid I should be heading back, I’ve stayed for too long. I’m sure I can find some way over the path.”

It dawns on you that Yoongi is a little facetious, especially when he purrs a, “Well you can do whatever your little heart desires, but I’m here to remind you that there is no path. Here, look out the window.”

You do, tiny bit distracted when he stands by you to point out the ridges of the mountains that surround you. “See those? How they curve in towards the top and how it sort of resembles a bowl? This area was made only for seraphs to get in and out of generations ago; flight only. Trying to climb it would be suicide on both sides. The path that goes through was strictly for human use, and if that’s blocked, there’s no way out, little one.” You weren’t the shortest in your village but Yoongi truly was massive, both lanky and filled-out somehow. Like there’s underlying strength to his lean build. You’re sure if you were to stand directly in front of him, the top of your head would barely surpass his sharp shoulders.

You disregard his name for you, a bit annoyed at this point, “Could you not fly me over the pass?”

Yoongi repeats in disbelief of such a daring request, “Fly… You over the pass… No. I’m sorry. I won’t do that. If you truly want to figure it out, you should do so soon. It's storm season."

Gritting your teeth, you express your discontent for once. What did he save you for, then? For points? You didn't know members of the almighty seraph clan were so keen to half-completed deeds. "And why not? Wouldn't you rather I be on my way? What am I supposed to do if I can't leave?"

"You forget yourself, Y/N. Did I not save your life? Chase after you and save you from being crushed? Buried alive?" He takes a second to straighten himself out, aware of how you look to your feet in frustration.

"Hey," he starts again, "I know you'd like to go home. I only tell you the truth of your situation in its entirety. If I could fly you over the pass I would but unfortunately, I'm out of commission."

You feel heat in your face, embarrassed of the way you address a complete stranger even after all the things he's done for you. But this was frankly a sticky situation to find yourself in, trapped and unable to get Yoongi to help you any further. Though you do wonder what he means by his last statement...

"I'm... I'm sorry. I don't mean to make demands. I'm just scared and in a place I'm not used to and I'm not quite sure what I'm to do from here. Is there no one else who can help me over?"

Yoongi averts his gaze before he shakes his head, "I'm the last one in this country."

That's even more odd to hear but you don't prod for information that isn't yours to learn.

In silence, you contemplate the work that even went into carrying another human body by use of wings that were structurally built for the owner's own weight and possibly nothing else. Now was not the time to be ignorant.

“What am I supposed to do?” You mumble weakly. Yoongi watches your gears turn warily, stress surely beating down on you.

He rubs his neck, ruffles his left wing, “Listen. I promise I’ll help you back come spring. You won’t be able to make a dent in the landslide as long as it continues to build with snow every night.” He tends to forget that humans are pack animals, often lost without one another and feeble in the hands of species not of their own.

Your doe eyes, beginning to well with tears, convince him over tenfold, “I’ll help you in any way possible to pay you back for all the things you’ve done. I know I’ve caused nothing but trouble but if you have the room, is it possible I stay here?”

And Yoongi had enough vacant rooms to house a whole herd of deer now that he’s been alone for these sum of years. It really was no trouble… and he could make use of you as long as you stayed. His brow shoots up, “You can stay.”

Your grin is enough to light the whole room encased in night’s darkness, looking back down to the ground now knowing you had some hope to hold onto in such an eventful day. A whisper of a thank you Mr. Min is thrown in and Yoongi can feel his fists tighten.

He clears his throat, standing a little taller than he already is and acting strict, “But there are some rules. And you can just call me by my first name.”

 Part Six

 It's always a little weird trying to adjust to new scenery. Though your past experiences have been anticlimactically different than this; not exactly the first time visiting a friend's house or dropping off delivered goods from Seokjin's shop and awkwardly facing an elder who forces you to stay for tea.

Yoongi had shown you around the areas you needed to know. Offered you the closest room to the main part of the house with a king bed, fresh sheets and your own majestic window to stare out of. The living room which you had rested in before and the kitchen, grand and spacious just like everything else. He showed you a greenhouse out back that was utterly ginormous. Stone walkways and a hot compost keeping it from freezing, rows of plants you both have and haven't witnessed before. And again, he showed you what you needed to know.

That goes onto the chores he assigned you as long as you stay, to help him clean come Sundays and manage the plants throughout the week which served as no problem. At least with horticulture you proved some use, struggling throughout the weekend to do anything else but cause Yoongi a bit of a headache.

Tuesday rolls around and Yoongi stops by your room with stationary. Tells you he has a messenger bird to deliver any letters you desire to send home and you hop on the opportunity quicker than the landslide had tried to eat you up.

Of course, it was an exceptionally long letter. Longer than the papers Yoongi had given to you and he had to fetch more when you looked absolutely devastated sitting at your desk. You began with the simple phrase, "I'm okay." Filling it with a volley of explanations and apologies, how you were nearly killed, how the seraph had scooped you up to safety and how you inhabit his home now until further notice. You write how you talk, sure the recipients are sure to read in hushed mumbles and run-on sentences. You explain that there's no use to try to get home now while the clouds continue to precipitate and gate your only exit from the bowl-like wonderland. You end with how you miss them already, a request to send back an update or two every once in awhile, and a final wish to have a happy winter without you (though you're sure they won't appreciate that joke).

You think, if they really receive the letter, how terribly furious they'll be with you. Taehyung and Jungkook will probably come hiking up the mountain to try to put a dent in the debris and fail miserably. Your aunts and how they must feel even the tiniest bit of guilt for thinking you so small and helpless. Mina and her jealous wonder that you've done it now, how you've seen a seraph before her and you're positive she'll have a flurry of questions when you return. When you return.

You come out onto the balcony to pay your respects to your so-called "messenger", pretty white thing large and wide-eyed. Humorous is the familiar to another winged being, bird of a feather, you chuckle to yourself. Yoongi pays no attention when he murmurs directions to the bird and sends it off, straight in the direction you were hoping.

Thursday and you think you finally have your routine down. No longer unsure in the hallways and able to sit when your work is done without feeling completely out of place. It's only when you're around the other member of the cabin do you feel a little subdued, reminding you that you burden him and quickly finding something to do out of that guilt.

❋

Today you feel a bit sluggish. You drag yourself down the corridor, opting for the bath until you see a dark head in an open room. Yoongi sits in his study, presumably reading with his back facing you. You can't say you've seen this room before, ceilings just as tall and walls just lined with books, journals, art pieces and things of the like.

"You can come in," he snickers suddenly, maybe feeling the heat from your eyes boring into the back of his head and warming the space entirely.

"This is amazing... Your collection, I mean." You force yourself down in a chair, hands trapped underneath your thighs in case they feel like touching anything.

"Thank you. It took quite a bit of time to build it up. Not by myself, of course."

It makes you ponder. If he's mentioned his state of loneliness twice, then your questions were expected.

"There were more, right? Family of yours? Why are you the only one left?"

"One question at a time, yeah?" He swivels around and takes off a pair of reading glasses that you would have liked to inspect on his face a bit more, "I can't leave because I can't fly, remember? They left because they held no other duty tied to this land. That's all."

You quiet. He returns to reading whatever it is on his flat desk. "Why can't you fly?"

"Because I was hurt."

"How were you hurt?"

"Next question."

"What are you reading?"

"A story of a girl with a terrible habit of too many inquiries."

"You know, I loved to read when I was a kid. All kinds of things. Novels, studies, maps even. Now I never have the time for such pleasantries." A wistful sigh leaves your lips.

Yoongi eyes you beneath his lashes, watches as you survey the room with giddiness and hands taut underneath your bum. "Why's that?"

You frown, "Too many things to do. Jobs and cleaning and family and stress. If I have time to read, I have time to be doing something more important."

His lips curl, amused at this little play-thing in his room. Like a child scolded all her life, whining and pouting in front of a stranger. Yoongi stands tall and shrugs his sweater tighter around him, "Well then, you'd better hop to it."

"Hm?" You squeak, chewing on your lip when you meet his eyes. So innocent.

"You only have the winter to read these. I'd get started soon. After work is done and you want to poke around in here, feel free to do so. Take them to your room if you'd like, just please return them."

And he swears he sees damn stars in your eyes before he turns and leaves the room. He hears your immediate footing once he's halfway to his room, little yelps of excitement enough as his thanks. Yoongi can't help but smirk, eventually floating away and speaking way out of earshot for you to hear.

"Nothing is more important than the things you want."

 Part Seven

 After a month, you find it a little boring. After receiving a teary letter of how your family misses you, not one ounce of scold or chastisement more than it was just wholesome relief to see familiar handwriting, their only wish was for you to stay obedient and not write so often as to waste poor Yoongi's paper. It was typical, somewhat stress-relieving. And that was that.

It was often you spent your quiet interest reading of botany and romance (in what little you found of it) preferably in his study on days he's holed up in his room. At this point, he still remains somewhat of a mysterious entity, conversing when he must and accidentally showing his face once or twice like a ghost. The only times you really see him are for Sundays with idle chit chat.

One particular evening you find an old, ratty recipe book. Handwritten and falling at the seams and that's how you know that there are some golden tips in there for you to test out.

You choose pumpkin bread. Something to warm the palette while ice continues to build outside. And working in Yoongi's kitchen by yourself was oddly fulfilling, no one to correct you or send you off to another job if you fail to do the first. It's probably why your bread turns out perfect, slicing the loaf and placing a piece on a small plate for a friend.

Rather, someone you'd like to establish as a friend.

You haven't seen him once today; not odd but a little lonely. Pacing on the carpets and looking for an open door with any sign of a sly angelic being. Even after a month, it's the first time you've freely made something with intents of sharing with him. Was that rude of you?

Coming upon a jarred entrance, you speak softly, "Yoongi? Are you in there?"

No reply.

You clear your throat and toe the door open just enough to stand in its frame, "Yoongi? I made some pumpkin bread for us—"

Thank your soft voice does it not wake him, still a snoring log in a bed even larger than yours. His limbs sprawled widely, laying on his stomach and breath soft and slow. Sleeping in the middle of the day while his guest slaves over the stove must be quite nice, huffing subtly and placing his plate on his night desk. Sure to be spoiled even more when he wakes to a treat.

As you turn, your eyes can't help but dawdle over the expanse of his wings. One covering a naked back and one hanging off the side of the bed, a marbling effect of muddled sepias and ink blacks, occasional golden ochre pigments seeping through the deepest layers of feathers. It was utterly breathtaking. This has to be one of the first opportunities you've had to inspect them so, equating staring at his monstrously large wings the same as blatantly staring at his junk.

You draw close like a moth to a damn flame, checking to assure he's still sound asleep. Reaching delicate fingers, you dare to lay a palm on the mass. It's surprisingly strong, an odd firmness as you slide your hand down silky plains and watch as the feathers ripple by your touch.

Then, as if you weren't dumb enough to foretell the upcoming events, he wakes.

A whirl of darkness encases you, whips you around so fast that you see stars in the middle of day, completely flipped and pinned to the bed beneath you. The intense heaviness makes you recoil, unable to budge your wrists and legs with Yoongi's strength.

And his face of unadulterated fury is one that would be ingrained into your memories forever. Pupils dilated and nose scrunched like prey warding off predator. Yoongi was surprised to say the least, a scared frenzy of confusion as he growls down at you.

"What were you doing, human?"

Your weeping gains no mercy, "Ow, you're, you're hurting me!"

"What the fuck were you doing?" He spits.

Incoherence is not what he asks for but that's all you can give, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I won't touch them again I was just—"

His wings which were so beautiful to you before, makes you feel nothing but fear now, flapping angrily as he keeps his balance and shrouding you in shallow lack of light. When he lets up on his grip, you gasp like he also held your breath. Immediate relief streams through your blood, though he continues to trap you between his thighs. He asks you again and you sob.

"You know what happened the last time I let one of your kind close? Nearly fucking killed me for no reason. You know why I can't take you down the mountain? Why I'm stuck here by myself? Because a goddamn human stole my ability to fly. I can't fly anymore, do you understand me? That's all that I was and they took it!"

Yoongi sees the pity etching onto your face like some sort of charity case. With your pathetic excuse for tears that claim to sympathize with him and it makes the bile in his throat grow. As for you, you could have never imagined such a travesty. Those words that seem to bounce around in your skull, to be wholesomely one thing and to be rid of it by someone else's doing, you could never relate to that.

You itch to relieve his pain in some way as if he never lashed out on you to begin with. Like you were the one truly at fault here even though you know it's a two-way situation. Your hands struggle to not touch his face, to attempt to alleviate those dark, regretful feelings. "Yoongi, I'm so sorry. I would never—I would have never known--I'm from one of the villages where we look up to the—"

"Yeah, well I don’t trust people," He cracks, lungs filled with muddled sorrow.

Both of your breathing is ragged. He takes his leave off your body and sits on the edge of the bed, wings lamely drooped.

"Leave." So you do.

 Part Eight

 You find the most beautifully carved wooden bow the next morning. Sun barely risen and adventuring around in nooks you haven't looked through before. You find it, accompanied by plenty of arrows, leaning against the wall right outside the backdoor. Though it's been months since you've last hunted, you ache to make use of yourself. Wearing bundled layers of the clothes Yoongi let you borrow from what was left and bounding through the condensed areas of the woods behind the cabin.

Food isn't scarce to hunt for, you've come to realize. Rabbits abundant and easy to kill once you got the hang of it once more. Two are struck and red seeps through white. You always sink your knees into the ground after each kill, whispering your thanks before you move back to the house.

Taehyung's father had taught you the basics of hunting and fishing and everything that came after that. Skinning and cooking and preserving the flesh something everyone in the village should learn to do, he had said. Even after your mistakes, even after your hesitation for your first kill, he'd always pat you on the back and reward you with the first bite of fresh food.

You miss them all, especially now. It wouldn't be long until you saw them again with maybe a bit of heightened skills. You hope they'll be proud of you.

Yoongi wakes a little after you're finished cooking the first rabbit. He stumbles in quiet and groggy, as if having no recollection of the previous altercation. But he doesn't speak, doesn't so much as look your direction before he plops at the head of the dining room table and begins to sulk in an odd inner-turmoil state.

You wait a minute or two by garnishing the meat unnecessarily; perhaps he was waiting to say something. To apologize. To ask questions. To kick you out once and for all. Well, you'll beat him to it then.

You set his plate down in front of him, the jarring sound breaking his trance enough where he can finally meet your face.

"I hope you don't mind I used your bow. I cleaned the arrows afterward and put it back where I found it," you hesitate. "I appreciate your kindness thus far; to take me in like this. I was a complete stranger and you gave me shelter anyway, so I thank you. I've packed and cleaned and I—I think it's time I leave now. I'll find a way to get over, I don't care. And I'm, I'm so sorry for all the trouble I've caused, Yoongi. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable but I overstepped my boundary way too far yesterday and I apologize profusely."

You find that you dig your nails into your palms as you talk, head craned parallel to the floor and you wonder if Yoongi could even hear you when you were so rudely speaking to the rugs.

"Stop, you don't... You don't have to leave. There's still no way you can get over the snow." He massages the back of his neck, tense in his own skin.

"I'm so sorry," you repeat. "I let my stupid curiosity get the best of me and I can very clearly see how that made you feel alarmed and uneasy and—"

He cuts you off, "You know the myth, right? How it's bad luck to see a seraph's wings?"

Confused, you nod.

"It's not literal. It's a metaphor that it's bad luck to see our vulnerabilities. Our faults. Years and years and years ago, when the war was still active, I got mixed up with a human. Within enemy boundaries. I was naive and trusting and they made use of that. They sought out my weaknesses, ate 'em up and covered my suspicions with false adoration and love," he says the word like it's an illness, "But then. But then one night, they put something in my water. Drugged me. Something was wrong and I didn't fully go under. I suppose their original plan was to take me, probably torture me as a prisoner. But I caught on and still had a bit of composure and when they realized the drugs didn't work, they sought to kill me instead. Used a dagger and plunged it into my back as hard as they could. Right," he reaches an arm behind and massages a spot, "Right in the cross-section of where all four wings meet. I should have been paralyzed but we're tough. I can still move them but I haven't been able to fly since. Thank heavens I wasn't killed but..."

You can tell by the way that there’s no emotion in his statement, how true it rings, "That day, I might as well have been."

You wipe the pools of tears with your scarf, heartbroken for the shattered man that sat in front of you. Having to bear the sight of his wings every day and full-knowing he would never be able to use them again.

His voice croaks, "In their eyes, my own family's eyes, I commit a sin just by making such a fool of myself. The war ended and I was punished. They left me here and claimed loneliness is what I deserve."

Yoongi then realizes he sounds as if he's trying to justify yesterday's actions and literally sinks to the ground, "This isn't supposed to be a pity party. I just thought you might want to know why I am the way I am and how I had no right to snap like I did. I know you're from the north most village. And that you would never try to do what they did and I was wrongfully paranoid."

Then, out of all things unexpected, he grabs a bare ankle and lifts it out of the length of your dress. When you hobble, he grabs your gentle hand with his other to balance you. He can see the marks he left, not too dark but enough to tell and he can't help but despise himself. In pure remorse, he presses his lips softly to each bruise, not lingering for more than a second, before cowering to the ground with his head low.

"My sincerest apologies, Y/N. You don't have to leave if you don't want to. I prefer if you wouldn't. I'd like to get to know you and redeem myself, as selfish as that may seem. Maybe, until spring, I can make up for the things I've said and done—"

You sputter, voice too high and full of embarrassment as you struggle to pull him up, "Please! P-Please get up! I am at fault here! Don't kneel, please! You have nothing to make up for!"

Mouth agape and eyes wide, he watches you yell your affirmations and weakly tug on his arm. It was like watching a little kid throw a fit and that makes him chuckle aloud, how could he have ever suspected you as harmful? When your large eyes shed tears like no other and you impulsively make decisions for others before yourself. You were kind and he could see that. He laughs hard and you stop your squawking.

In disbelief you fall to your knees right beside him, looking plain stupid while you're at it. It occurs to you that you've never heard him laugh like this, smile so wide that his eyes crescent endearingly and it just lights up the room. After watching his handsome face radiate forgiving happiness, you join in too.

You eat rabbit together. The conversations from there on out easier to come up with, more emotional and found in the midst of tranquil understanding. Like you now shared a bit more of each other than before.

Occasionally, you think of all the sadness he must have accumulated until now. Of the things that happened to him that shouldn't have, and those years of isolation and abandonment that he suffered. But now you realize, too, how he's able to laugh and continue on despite those melancholy winters in a desolate place that he once called home. How it's all he can do as his only sign that he's still alive.

 Part Nine

The weeks after that seem to breeze past you; time racing when you have more things to do and someone to do it with. Yoongi really meant it when he said he would try to make up for his past harshness; never daring to miss a meal, spending more time in the livelier rooms if it meant that it was to accompany you, going as far as helping you out with your own chores if he hadn’t taken them over entirely. It was a polar opposite of who you knew before.

The first time he joined you to hunt again, in favor of how you had cooked his meat the last time, he layered himself in clothing that made his appearance softer than you’d ever imagined. Leaning towards darker garments that contrasted against his opalescent skin.

In some haughty attempt to show off your archery skills do you aim for a squirrel in a less-than-mediocre angle, letting the arrow fly without a second thought and piercing good ol’ trunk. Yoongi had a fabulous time laughing at your mishap, yanking the wasted arrow from the bark and handing it back to you.

“That was a horrible shot,” he said.

The temperature of your cheeks could have melted the snow, taking the thing with shaky, embarrassed hands, “I was being hasty.”

“You got two rabbits. I know you’re good. Let me just show you some things.”

You walked behind, letting him tread through the snow first so it was easier for you to fall into his prints.

“There. Squirrel,” he whispered. Probably the same one, mindlessly crawling up and down trees like target practice.

“Let me see your form again.” You aimed, self-conscious and probably showed it. You shivered when he swiped a hand under your grip arm, pushing it back.

“Keep it aligned with how the arrow is facing. Completely centered. You can widen your feet a little too,” his voice soft. “Don’t completely lock your elbow but tighten your back muscles before you hold. Does that make sense?”

“Mm. It won’t stop moving though, the squirrel.”

“Watch this.”

Then Yoongi had dug through the snow for a small stone with enough weight to throw. Aiming for a far tree to the right, he tossed just hard enough to cause a knock to echo in its vicinity. The squirrel halts, presumably looking for what caused the noise in its unknowing last thoughts.

“Shoot.”

And it landed perfectly.

He watched you silently each time you had knelt next to the victim and mutter your thanks, both sorrowful and appreciative. It was the first time he ever witnessed someone, frankly, talking to dead animals and at some point he asked you why you did so. You responded with a giggle, briefly claiming how all living creatures deserve the same respect, to be mourned, to not be wasted. Yoongi finds interest in the concept of valuing each as their own and of the same importance in the Grand Circle of Life, probably something his family would never have stopped to think about. The seraphs had always placed themselves above others in a deserving, self-righteous kind of way. It made him think.

❋

A particularly windy night and you caught him in the seat of his study's window, drawn to the mirage of colliding trees and listening to the croaks of the house on its plot. A muddled bottle sat on his desk, its glass counterpart being twirled in his hand.

"Do you like storms?" You asked.

"I didn't used to," he answered, unfazed by your sudden entrance, "Caused problems a lot of times. But I think they're pretty fun nowadays. And you?"

"I like when there's thunder and lightning."

Yoongi faced you at that, your twiddling fingers and the way you scanned the dim room.

"Would you like to join me for a drink?" Although it was a question he poured you one anyway, barely anything more than a few sips worth. Obliging, you took the liquid. Pride a little stung in all honesty, pretty aware of your high tolerance.

He tittered, "Don't pout. You can pour as much as you'd like. But this stuff is ancient, concocted from poison and the desire of Death itself. Watch yourself."

It was always a trait of yours to take on a challenge, though, ignoring his warning and foolishly gulping it down. The burn was subtle despite its awful, awful taste, yet you poured another and let Yoongi watch you spiral down the rabbit hole.

Two stories and one half-glass later and you draped yourself very unladylike on his desk, too warm and too moist and too loud.

"Yoongi..."

"Yes?"

"Min... Min. Mr. Yoongi."

"That's wrong but that's me."

"Yoongi you have to keep a secret. That I'm going to tell you! From Yoo—from Yoongi!"

"Wait, that you're trying to keep a secret from me or—"

You must had forgotten, instead focused on bunching your skirt and tying it higher up your thighs, "Soooo hot. Too warm. I'm going to leave it like this, ‘kay?"

"You don't have to pass it by me. They're your clothes," he said, biting back laughter. His accidental peak of pretty, bare legs could have made him think different though. Reverting his gaze back out the window, he wouldn't have been surprised to see lightning that night.

Taking his eyes off you wasn't his best idea. Hobbled out of his chair and sneaking to his place with hands buried in feathers before he could shy away. Yet the wonder stained your eyes with childlike amusement and he wouldn't dare change that face. So he idled in a flustered mess, relaxed in the way you unknowingly massaged his muscles.

"Pretty wings, Mr. Yoongi... Can I touch them?" You asked stupidly. Yoongi grumbled.

When you finished evaluating, you swiveled awkwardly and tripped over his knee, a yelp escaping your lips as if he wouldn't catch you in one swift motion and onto the safety of his lap. Yoongi could smell the bite of alcohol that stained your breath; could see how swollen and red and beautiful it had made your gentle face. The proximity was deadly and your innocent, apologetic features could have slain him right then and there. You didn't even make another peep, eyes drooped in what he assumed was embarrassment for your clumsiness.

In which he thought wrong, your hands slapping each side of his face and squishing it together horrifically. "Pretty face, Mr. Yoongi."

"Alright, time for bed."

You fought all the way until he tucked you in, out with soft breaths and sprawled arms. Even after he had laid you down to rest and calmed back in his lair, there was no slowing the fondness that grew in his ribs.

❋

You don’t know when you’ve started looking forward to Sundays, springing out of bed in the morning with a green thumb and a will to dig, or so you imagine. You knew Yoongi would be waiting for you in the greenhouse and spent a little extra time rinsing your face, doing your hair, and double-checking nothing was in your teeth.

Yoongi was already checking the pots when you had gotten there, wrapped in black per usual and winking as you walked by. The familiarity by now was tangible. There was always a nice flow to your conversations and Yoongi doesn’t back away when you naturally find yourself in his space like he used to. It was both a prideful accomplishment and an endearing new relationship that sparked joy every time you were able to do something together. To step back and see the difference over your time spent here, the things you’ve done, and the way Yoongi warms up slowly.

He watches you mindlessly hum as you harvest what you can, voice soothing when most times it would have been dead quiet. That’s what it felt like being around you: like a void suddenly filled, his whole being gravitating to your aura. You were addicting, if he had to admit.

The scarf, somehow pristine despite how often you wear it, is shuffled up your neck as you do one thing or another. Like a constant reminder that it’s there, you always feel the need to touch it.

Yoongi points to it, “Did you make that yourself?”

“Hm?” You follow his line of sight and crumple the red thing in your hands, “Ah! No. It… It was a gift.”

“Ooh, from a suitor?” He doesn’t mean any harm when he jests but it prompts the things you’ve left at home. No matter how much you’ve tried to suppress it down and not nitpick on the responsibilities you’ll have to return to. Awful as it seems, it makes you take notice to the sun and how it begins to peak out more with every day. You push the thought down once more.

Instead you laugh nervously. Yoongi knows immediately when you say nothing but, “Mmm…”

His gut twists from a melting of surprise and disappointment. How could he be so dim? To not even hypothesize the mere possibility of someone else being in your life. Though the feeling weighs heavy on his head, he speaks lightly and with a smirk.

“You must miss him then.”

“Yes. Of course. We’ve known each other since birth and have been best friends for as long as I can remember!” You chuckle, “He gave this to me right before I left and claimed we could get married once I returned. I was so shocked that I made myself sick thinking about going back. Just nervous, I suppose.” Taehyung, as expected, never said anything in the occasional letter updates to you. He meant it when he said he would only wait to talk about it for when you came home but you ponder how he feels now; what he’s been doing. If he’s changed his mind once he’s realized how incapable you are that you couldn’t even do the Offering correctly, but you know that isn’t true. Maybe just wishful thinking.

You throw dead leaves in the compost and Yoongi eyes you.

“’Shocked’? It’s not something you’ve been looking forward to?”

You look down, “It’s not that I—I don’t know! I just have seen him as family for so long and then there’s this sudden proposal without even talking about it beforehand… And everyone expects it. For me to just be married and have a family and all of that but I just, I just don’t see that for me so soon.” Your words begin to jumble and Yoongi hasn’t seen you so stressed within the span of twenty seconds before.

“Forgive me and my input but isn’t the most important thing what you want? You could just turn down his proposal,” He suggests like it’s the easy answer, hoping you don’t suspect a hopeful tone in there.

“Does it really matter what I want?” You stop to think about the people who matter to you and what would ease their minds most when it comes to your future. Marrying Taehyung seemed like the only option. “I can’t turn him down simply because I don’t want to. That’s selfish.”

“That doesn’t make very much sense to me.”

“Well,” you sigh, “in the village it’s courtesy to accept a marriage proposal regardless of how you feel. It’s the receiver’s obligation to be grateful towards—”

“Is that how humans treat their women?” Yoongi spits, agitated just by the thought. He leans against a table next to you, arms crossed like he’s simply not having it, “To ignore your own say and force you to think you should just be appreciative? That’s some bullshit.”

“It’s not as serious as I’m making it seem it’s just…” You think of your aunts and the elders and Taehyung’s mom. How you’ve grown into a nuisance, lacking here or there. The time where you were supposed to return to the village after a successful Offering and marry and finally be someone to be proud of. “In my case, especially, it’s probably better off I’m just someone’s wife. I’ve never been much to begin with.”

And that’s truly heartbreaking for Yoongi to hear, so much that he becomes enraged with whatever twisted society you grew up in, “Y/N. What have you been doing these last few months?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, what have you been doing? Just sitting around? Watching me sweep circles around you? Serve your meals on a silver platter and draw your baths? No, because you’ve been doing that yourself. For yourself. By yourself.” The look of confusion on your face causes him to huff before he continues. “Sure, you were a little rough around the edges with some things but who isn’t? You hunt, you cook, you read like no other, you do a lot of great things and it’s not because you’re trying to do it right. You do it right when you like what you’re doing.”

“Yoongi, I understand. Thank you but you don’t have to—”

He walks toward you, lecturing on. “I know it’s by unwanted circumstances. But has your time here been horrible? Have you despised being here and doing these things?”

Your answer is immediate, “No. Not at all.”

“Has it not been nice to have your own space and do things simply because you want to? Because you were thinking of yourself?”

“I-It has been… I don’t know where you’re getting at.”

Your legs hit the corner of another table and you notice he’s backed you up into it.

“So, you go back and you do what you want like you have here. Don’t worry about what they think. Wait until you’re ready. Marry for absolute, unwavering love. Be a little selfish,” Yoongi hooks your chin with his index and props it up. You didn’t even realize you were looking to the ground. “Look up.”

Your heart stammers, “But Taehyung…”

So Taehyung is his name, Yoongi thinks. He frankly does not care.

“Do you love him?”

“W-What?

“Perhaps I was mistaken. Do you want to marry Taehyung because you truly love him?”

You see his lips before you hear his words, parted and nearing you bit by bit. So close that you feel his warmth, aching to close the distance. “I…”

A shovel clatters onto the stone and Yoongi removes his arm that’s found its way around your back, shuffles backwards and lets your hand fall from his face. It was natural to touch him, you realize, unaware that you feel distant and cold when he’s away.

Yoongi picks the damn thing up and curses. It wasn’t like him to be so forward, close to doing the unimaginable to you. You, who was involved with someone else. Heading towards the door, he ruffles his wings like he’s restarting.

“Forget I said that,” he requests, “I’m going to wash up.”

You nod, frozen in your spot with legs too unstable to dare walk. Without even knowing you had reached for him, so close to doing something you’ve only been secretly daydreaming about of recent and how incredibly wrong it was for you to think this way. But in another sense, you would feel worse lying to yourself by saying you weren’t attracted to the seraph. It was a twisted contradiction of emotions and you could scream.

Needless to say, you don’t see Yoongi until the next day, and even then nothing is mentioned of the almost.

Part Ten

On Tuesday, the bird returns with a letter from your family and Taehyung. It’s brief, with evident relief that the snow is melting and how happy they’ll be to see your face. Your heart sinks at how much you miss them yet how angry you are to receive the letter. To what extent would they be happy to have you home? Until you dare humiliate Taehyung when you turn him down? To dishonor your name and his parents and gain the glances of people who care more about your failures?

You calm and shoo such immature feelings away. Yoongi is confused when you don’t send a letter back and you return to your room early that night.

❋

You haven’t had a full night’s rest that entire week. You’re sure Yoongi notices the tension and that makes you feel horrible, but the lingering necessity to run to him and never go back to the village is too prominent to just face head on.

He’s been checking the trail every day, making dents on the softer parts of the snow when he can and updating you when he returns. You know he doesn’t want you to leave and you know he thinks you feel the same. Maybe it would have been better if you hadn’t said anything about the proposal that day.

Flipped onto your back, you stare at the ray of moonlight that floats atop your bed. You would miss it here, so much that it hurts your throat. You would miss the windows, the kitchen, the greenhouse, the library that Yoongi was happy to share. It goes without saying that you would miss him the most.

Unprompted imaging of a possible future with him interrupt your thoughts, something so uncertain and fortuitous in comparison to the stone-set fate you have now. What the stoic seraph would think if you just asked him to stay a little longer, until you know you would never leave. The landslide and how much you had hated that unfortunate event seems so insignificant now, replaced with a dimmed appreciation for this life detour, no matter how short lived it will end up.

You’re probably on the verge of sleeping now, thinking of the incident and it’s wild connection to your present out of pure lunacy. You could bet your entire existence on the fact that you were meant to meet him; your entrapment by the snow no mere coincidence. Neither was Yoongi’s endless solitude atop this mountain. It had to be fate that you two were to meet at this moment and your heart feels it so strongly.

Even for you this could be too far-fetched, or maybe you were just trying to cover up the way your heart is undoubtingly falling for Min Yoongi.

 Final Part

 You prod the logs, provoking them to catch more of the fire. In your last night do you decide to pour a glass of wine, kneel on a pile of blankets and snack on the charcuterie board you made for yourself. In the past, you used to be so hesitant about helping yourself to the manor’s amenities, having no problem doing it now.

The lame, weak fire is your only source of light in the large living room, clouds blocking the moon from shining through. You feel, immaturely, just as cloudy. Set in your intentions to leave your feelings locked away as to not cause more trouble, confusion, and inevitable heartbreak.

“You look quite comfortable,” Yoongi surprises you and he can tell when you jolt. Speaking of the devil. He looks great in the dark too, leaning against a wooden pillar with folded arms.

“Well, it feels like I’ve lived here for quite a bit. Just,” you break to sigh with exaggeration, “soaking it in before I leave. Too beautiful to not.”

If not for the crackling between the wood, it’d be dead quiet.

“Would you like to join me?”

He titters, rolling his eyes before he walks your way. Laying on his side, you offer him your glass. “I hope you don’t mind that I used the wine from the ritual contents. With the stuff you normally drink, this must be nothing.”

“Like water to me but I’ll enjoy it nonetheless.”

You cheers to nothing with one glass to share. Occasionally picking off meat and fruit from the board and enjoying how the fire builds up.

“Your family will be so happy to see you.”

You hum. You suppose they would. Avoiding the bitterness you still associate with the thought.

“And I’m sure Taehyung will be too.” He says a little clipped. Not in a way to be facetious or sarcastic but because he feels the need to address it.

Yoongi is caught on the carmine scarf again, downing the rest of your poor wine.

Forcing a smile, you speak faintly, “Let’s not talk about that.”

At this point you both know. He nods to keep you happy, but there is no hiding or pretending. In front of the flames, your lies and justifications seem to melt away unspoken. Changing the subject, you shove him lightly, “You’ll miss me when I’m gone. I don’t think you’ll ever learn to bake as well as I do.”

He tuts, which is refreshing. “I’m great at cooking and baking, I’ll have you know. It was just nice having someone else do it for once.” You feign betrayal and scoff aloud. He mumbles low, “But I’ll miss you for more reasons than that.”

And he breaks an unmade promise not to bring it up again. Feeling the need to throw it out in the open and even with the simplicity of admitting that he’ll miss you, you really know what he means. The seraph feels for you. He feels deeply. Yoongi doesn’t expect a response, just pops more food in his mouth and rests his eyes.

You contemplate, following suit with a bite to a grape and thinking hard. What to do. What to say. How to say it if you did. You weren’t supposed to feel this way and it goes way beyond the rule of even coming in contact with a seraph, let alone unconsciously falling in love with one. 

But that’s just it: how you live by assumptions and rules based off the words of the ignorant villagers and the elders, how they all believe the seraphs are all still here, how they think there’s a direct relation to the Offering and a year’s good harvest, how it’s bad luck to see a seraph’s wings when it’s brought you anything but. If you learned anything from this winter, it was that you found you own way of living, thank the curiosity your home curses you for. Making your own path instead of aimlessly walking one that was already paved. You learned to trust yourself a little more while Yoongi propelled you forward and believed you deserved it all. You learned you did deserve more. You learned what love really felt like when it was new and fresh and exciting and real. And Yoongi. Yoongi, Yoongi, Yoongi was the wine to your previously empty glass, and this winter with this man, it was heaven.

You decide the realization is enough for you. Have been gifted with so many things and blessings that you’re grateful for the chance to have met someone like him.

“I’ll miss you, Yoongi.”

Yoongi tastes bitter in his mouth. He felt that if all these years left alone in a manor of silence and rejection was to eventually meet you he would do it a million times, but if all you could reciprocate was this then it just wasn’t meant to be for him. It felt unfair but it also wasn’t his decision. He takes the sourness with him and stands. “I suppose I should head to bed.”

Your sad stare breaks his heart, even more so when you give up and nod. The fire catches your attention as it pops and you leave it at that. He tries to walk away, footsteps haunting, until he stops altogether.

It comes unexpectedly when he wraps his arms around you tightly, pressing his knees into your back. A weird sight it is to see his wings unfurl and curl around your rigid body. “Are you satisfied? Is this enough for you?” His voice is soft, like he could take either answer as long as he heard it from you directly.

“No.”

“Why don’t you ask for more.”

“You’ve already done too much for me, how could I possibly ask you for more?”

He hisses liar into your ear. “Is it your family?”

“No.”

“Is it him? Taehyung?”

Here you are again, faced with a question that tore you apart in the garden while you ached to be with Yoongi anyway. But there were no distractions here; nothing to interrupt your thoughts. Just you, Yoongi and your truth. He loosens his grip so you can face each other, knees between knees. Instinctively, you reach out for his feathers and indulge yourself with their softness. He pushes his wing into your hand as if to bribe you like a child.

He grows impatient, “Do you love him?”

You don’t waver, “No.”

A quick glint in his eye, a sort of relief, and then he finishes what he’s started and kisses you. It’s wrong how right it feels, lonely lips moving in tandem to find comfort in one another. Yoongi leans into it, absolutely devastated by your simple touch. The strength of the wine remains on your lips and he can’t help but lick into the flavor, drunkenly entranced by such luxuries. Yoongi’s hands can’t stay, snaking up your back, caressing your face, dragging his knuckles across your jaw and finally grabbing at the scarf. Carefully, he unwraps it from your neck, slow enough to feel it tickle your shoulder blades, before he folds it respectfully and places it elsewhere.

You sigh, more weight taken off your shoulders than there should be.

“Is this okay?” His voice raspy, speaking into the corner of your mouth. You’re stiff, nodding shyly and lacking the fire you brought up until this point.

He rewords, “Do you want me?” Yoongi feels the need to confirm, waiting for this moment for so long that it seems superficial. Like if he’s not careful, you’ll disappear into another one of his many short-lived dreams.

“Of course I want you, Yoongi. I want you more than anything…” But your eyes flicker to the ground, your lip tucked between your teeth.

“Then what’s wrong, lovely? You don’t have to.”

“No! I want to, I just… I’ve never done this before. I want you so bad but I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing—”

His laughs are light, his hand on the small of your back as he dips you onto the floor. Holding himself above, he plants a soft kiss on your cheek. “You don’t have to do anything. I’ll take care of you. I want you and we’ll go slow and if you decide you don’t want to anymore, we won’t.”

The way he makes you feel, how gentle he is, you couldn’t imagine a more perfect way for this to happen. It eases you slightly, letting your arms snake around him in an attempt to let your guard down. He’s patient and wonderful and you mumble about it. “Mhm, okay.”

The night robe he’s gifted you now poses a problem, his slender fingers looping through the bow that keeps it wrapped, “Can I?” You nod again, and he unties you like his own present. The feeling of being bare in front of him becomes apparent when he sucks in and the heat from the fire dances against your skin. Other than that, you look to the window to avoid his face.

“My love, look at me.”

His commands are easy to follow but you cover your breasts to hang onto your last bit of pride, granting eye contact at the least.

Face flushed, you can tell he, too, is trying his best. “You’re incredible. More prepossessing than I could have ever imagined. You shouldn’t be embarrassed in front of me.”

“Well,” you retaliate, “it’s hard not to be when I’m the only one naked.”

He grins at the challenge, sitting up to shed his layers, never noticing his garments having to wrap around in a way to accommodate to his wings. You just thought it was just a more ornamental way of dressing that the seraphs took to. He’s left down to tight underwear that hugs him incredibly, beautiful milky skin exposed and tinted with golden light. “Satisfied?” He lilts.

“You look like an angel,” you trace indents of faint abs. Wide shoulders that taper into a tiny waist, a slim build that you could study forever.

He kisses your words away, pushing you into plush comforters and pillows. A makeshift nest unintentionally built for the two of you. A groan rewards him when he licks your bottom lip teasingly, taking your wrists swiftly to pin them above you. “Pretty thing, I don’t have a halo.”

He starts from the top, kissing each inside of wrist before moving down your arm, slithering onto your shoulder, then into the crook of your neck with gentle suckles. Teeth grazes before puncturing, eliciting a yelp from you that satisfies him. He does this over and over, decorating the canvas of your neck.

“I want to burn you into my memory. I don’t ever want to forget this,” he moans with a wake left down until he meets cleavage. His muscles were relentless, impatient and eager, wanting to worship ever square inch of your body as you rightfully deserved. Your squeaks serve his purpose, his muse as he continues his ministrations down.

Out of nowhere, “I don’t want you to leave me, Y/N.” The profession makes you giddy, happy you’re not the only one who feels so. A hidden insecurity acknowledged and lifted.

“I don’t have to if you don’t want me to.”

“Let’s talk about it after?”

“Mmm.”

He reaches your stomach and doesn’t hesitate to nibble there too, flinching when your hand flies to his head and buries itself in his hair. He ditches his current plan to grab your hand and plant a kiss to your palm in a second, making you giggle.

He admits, “I like when you touch me.”

“I want to. I feel so useless letting you do this alone.”

“You’ll get a chance if you’d like later. But right now, it’s all about you.” Husking it out. Of course, the idea sounds blissful, but the scene of having you cum by his actions sound better. “Need to cherish what’s in front of me properly.”

So he dips dangerously, laving at the skin above the hem of your panties and hooking his fingers under the sides, “Please,” he breathes.

“You… can do whatever you’d like to me. I want it all.”

He tugs his lip between his teeth, pulling it down. An unexpected wetness strings between your skin and the cloth and you both see it; him amazed, you horribly mortified. You stutter trying to explain yourself, oblivious that you could even feel as aroused as you do now. But his forehead falls onto the jut of your hipbone and you can hear subtle teasing in his tone. “I-I’m just as nervous and that was so incredibly sexy. I don’t think I can go on, shit.”

You laugh stupidly. “Quiet! Not another word! Just hurry up and—”

That terrible habit of looking away becomes your biggest fault, unprepared for Yoongi to filthily bury his tongue into your heat. He flattens his tongue and tantalizingly drags up until he can just barely flick your clit with the tip. Growling in the process.

“You are so sweet. The sweetest I could ever have. You will be the end of me.” Rushed in panted breaths as he does it again. And again. And again. So much that the growing sound of wet against wet echoes in the empty room and renders you paralyzed.

The feeling of it makes you squeamish, like you want to move, buck your hips, pull his hair. Despite the lewdness of having his rough tongue against you and lapping you clean, you could never ask him to stop.

“You just… keep getting… wetter…” He says between turns. “You really wanted me this much?”

“Yoongi—ah! Please, I can’t. It feels weird.”

“You don’t want me to continue, my love?” He asks lightly, blowing cold air onto damp skin and really forcing you to buck.

“No! I just… I have never felt like this. I want you to but I can’t sit still.”

“Oh? Let me help you then. But you have to let me finish.” So you shyly nod and loosen your legs. He uses the prompt to scoop them underneath his arms and attach the back of your knees atop his shoulders, your hips curving up and towards him in a new, tight position.

“Yoongi!”

“No matter how you feel, just let it happen.”

Sultry wails are music to his ears when he brutally sucks on your clit, licking your folds here and there and using all his strength to keep you in place. He spells out his love with his tongue, digs it into you sweetly. His power, though, anything but kind.

“Uncover your eyes,” he orders deeply.

You whimper, begging for mercy.

“Look. At. Me.”

Unveiling your view, his stare immediately burns into your veins. Looking at you under dangerously slanted lids and that sinful mouth. Holding you in place with strength that could leave prints into your soft legs. With one roll of your clit under his teeth, you feel in ways you never knew how, as if all the pressure that built up in your abdomen suddenly overflowed with a tight burst. Choked sobs and hand gripping his hair enough to make him moan into you, vibrating wonderfully as he works you through it. 

He lets you go, remnants of syrupy arousal trickling down his chin; watches your legs fall open widely and your chest heave for air. Your features bring him joy, loving the way your hair sticks to your face with sweat, eyes closed, and brows knit together in concentration. He loved seeing you painted in warm hues and although he was never an artist, he could replicate this scene exactly how it’s displayed in front of him.

“How do you feel, lovely?”

You respond with a weak smile. “You’re so cruel… Min Yoongi.” You felt flimsy; weightless. A feeling you could come to love too much if you aren’t careful.

“I just wanted to make you feel good,” slithering back up to rest his head in your neck, giving you more kisses like you haven’t had enough. You’re happy he’s back, massaging your hands over his torso, up his neck, down his spine. And then you hit it and he tenses.

Thick and raised, an area between his wings that softly juts out. It was fairly large and the texture varied from the rest of his beautiful planes of skin. It was a scar. Wide as a dagger.

“I wish it wasn’t there. I know it’s—”

“Yoongi, baby.” You nudge him to lift his head and he does unwillingly, face turned away. “My Yoongi, it’s nothing. What happened was horrible but it’s over. And I will do everything in my power to make it up to you by giving all of me.”

His lips stop you tenderly, a whisper of affection that pours out love, “You didn’t do anything. In fact, you’ve made me better. I wasn’t able to feel anything for a long time until you. So. Thank you.”

Any remaining embarrassment vanishes. Not when Yoongi’s done his part and you would do anything to take care of him.

Sweat molds your bodies together, heat emanating from a fire that’s ablaze now. There’s a private summer in this room while winter continues outside and it feels special to you. It’s hot here, hot when Yoongi scrapes his teeth against yours, hot where his pelvis lays. You take notice to the hard thing twitching against your thigh, making you flinch.

“Ah, I’m sorry. And we’re in A Mood and all.” Yoongi snickers.

“Don’t be,” you purr, feeling a bit lustful and reaching down to grab it through the cloth.

He hisses, “Fuck! Fuck, please, I’m so sensitive at the moment.”

Ignoring him, you unskillfully maneuver your fingers around him. Just touching to be familiarized with it. He surges forward accidentally, sighing in your ear as he shamelessly humps the space between your groin. You use his distracted state to pull his shorts down, the sudden reality of his skin touching yours bringing about sensual noises from the both of you. A sudden spurt of precum makes it easier for him to drag his heavy cock against your hip.

“I’m sorry. It just feels so good.”

“Stop apologizing. I’ll help you.” You stare down as you flick your wrist, encircling him with fingers shaped in an o and pumping him slow.

“Squeeze,” he pleads and you oblige.

“Is it… supposed to be this large?” It’s a stupid question to ask, especially when you’re not entirely clueless. You know his size exceeds average proportions.

“Don’t spoil me. Seraphs have always been larger than humans. Height wise, I was the smallest of my brothers though.” Which seemed unimaginable to you, not when he towers over you and could easily devour you in a hug. Cock hanging low and barely able to keep in your single hand. He must be acting coy.

“Now you’re just bragging!”

“I’m just being honest. I’m automatically pleasing to the likes of you,” he chuckles.

The dampness overflows, smears over your skin in incredible amounts and how you wish you could taste out of pure curiosity, but he has other plans for you.

“I don’t think I can hold myself any longer. Please.”

“That’s… fine. Um, should we? Like this?”

“It’s so hot, could you flip on your side?” You roll and he figures he’s made a mistake. Entranced by the way your weight, breasts and soft curves, naturally gravitate down in a seductive pose.

“Like this?” You ask, unaware that he could simply die right now.

He lifts your leg to rest on his shoulder again, easy to stretch. “Perfect, my love. I’m going to go slow. If it’s too much we can try again another time, okay? No rush.”

Challenged by his kindness, you shake your head, “I’m fine. I’m ready.”

Whatever’s left of the arousal between you both is more than enough to let him enter easily. Head of his member no problem to push past that initial tension.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

But it’s his shaft that makes you keen, entire length seeming endless as he fills you and overloads your maximum space. You cry, nerves making you writhe, “It’s not going to fit all the way—hah…wait.”

Yoongi struggles to hold himself back, perspiration dripping down his nose, “Are you okay? Does it hurt? It doesn’t need to, I’m pretty close to being all the way in anyway.”

“I’m fine,” you pant, head lolled to the side as he stretches you out in an odd, numbing way. “You can… you can move.”

His hips test it, pulling out so little to only be sucked back in with a leveled grunt. “Baby, you’re barely allowing me to.”

“It feels so tight,” you sigh, worried that if you move it’ll really begin to hurt.

“Ah, really? Let’s do this then.” He quick to please, wanting your pleasure before his own and getting you to flip, propped onto your elbows and filled from behind. Smooth chest meets your arched back, him hiding a kiss below your ear while he’s there. A moan aches in your throat as his dick unintentionally digs deeper inside, easier to move and to the hilt.

“Is this better, Y/N?”

“Hah… Yes. Yes, so much better. So good. Please move.”

His hips roll, just enough to grind into you which feels nothing but euphoric in itself. You mimic each other’s lusty whimpers with every movement. Caving into each other’s kisses and licks and pants that you feel synchronized.

Yoongi grows impatient with himself, exaggerating how he pulls out and slams himself back inside. The mere force that he fucks into you sends you forward, opting to lay on your chest and bite the blankets beneath you to keep from screaming. “You feel so good. So, so good. I’m sorry it hasn’t been long, but I feel like…”

His wings fall at his sides and cover you in shadow. It’s weird to see them like this, in a way you could imagine the perspective of having them yourself. But it covers you in unnecessary warmth and makes you grunt.

“It’s hot,” you admit with a quick breath, “Let me on top. I’ll finish.”

The way his member slides out; the way it leaves you tensing over nothing is a sad, needy feeling. You don’t slow at the chance to lay him down and take control, straddling him and watching his face contort in loving awe.

Sitting on him is an entirely different feeling and Yoongi keeps himself from cumming inside you right away, a choke in his throat. “Fuck, fuckfuckfcuk. Y/N, I won’t last like this for long please—”

“I’ll make it quick.” You lean over him, palms to the ground as you start moving, grinding and using him to your advantage. The nerves start again and you shake with pleasure.

“Yoongi, Yoongi, Yoongi!”

Slender fingers dig into your velvety hips as he forces himself into you with harsh, quick jabs. “Baby, I have to cum.” He smooths his knuckles over your cheek, pulling you down into a tongue heavy-kiss in an impossibly fiery caress.

The ramming he enforces take incoherent sobs from your lips. You feel a ghost of a smile, sure Yoongi is enjoying your shameless display of indulgence; coming undone before his very eyes.

You arch into him, clenching tighter and falling onto his chest. With impeccable timing he pulls out, strings of hot white flooding between your stomachs.

“A lot,” you complain.

“Mmm. Because I’ve been waiting so long to have you.”

Without the pressure of moving, you lay on him despite the humidity. Petting the underside of his wings as they drape so gracefully against the blankets and the rug.

“Yoongi?”

“Yes?”

“I need to go home tomorrow.”

His heart sinks, “Oh?”

“To see my family. To come home and let them know I’m okay.”

“Yes, of course.” He’s afraid that you won’t come back, though.

“And… to turn down Taehyung’s proposal in person.”

Yoongi looks down and can’t see your face but he’s imagined it’s worried. “Y-Yeah?”

“Yeah. And Yoongi?”

He waits. You speak again, “Do you really want to be with me? For me to stay?”

“More than anything.”

He feels the tug of your cheeks on his chest; a wide smile.

“Then I’ll need to get my stuff.” And that makes him want to cry. After traumatic betrayal and years of loathing his punishment of isolation, he’s finally being let out of his cage. Free to be with someone that cares for him as much as he cares for you.

Your last thoughts remain on the fire and how it’s the only other entity to to swallow your talks, plans and confessions. Of his feathers like his arms as they fold in comfortably next to you, feeling like they’re meant to be there. Like you really were fated to be skin-to-skin with this man in his manor. Entwined by trust and love and an unprecedented future that would be everything as long as he’s in it. An irony of a useless girl and flightless wings.

Yoongi watches you fall under, wiping his thumb over your lips, trailing it down your chin and covering your naked body with his wing. Slumber finds him soon after, mind stuck on his self-epiphany that he had to lose his wings to gain you, and how incredibly lucky he is to have it that way.

a/n: ahAhaA, i’m sorry. please feel free to let me know what you think.

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