#why is posting updates the scariest thing in the world

[duskandcobalt]

Everywhere, Everything: Chapter Four

Chapter Summary: Azriel meets Elain’s new boyfriend at Nyx’s birthday party. Graysen has some questions about Elain’s “friend.”

Word Count: 4.4K

Missed the first three chapters? You can find the Masterlist for this fic here 🥰

A/N: chapter four already!! Thank you to everyone that’s read this fic and commented or interacted in anyway! I’ve had the loveliest messages come through and it’s been such a joy to chat with you guys about this. I’m a little extra nervous to post this chapter, please keep in mind that this is a bit of a slow burn and we must suffer a little before we get our reward. Alternate title is “Graysen Slander (Azriel’s version)”

ENJOY XX

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Flying back home to Velaris had caused Elain a level of anxiety that had previously been unknown to her.

There used to be a time where she enjoyed seeing her city from the birds-eye-view of an airplane window. She loved to look down and admire the twinkling lights on either side of the sprawling river that split her hometown in half. She liked to scan the buildings as they came into view and point out each place that held a space of her heart because of the special memories attached.

There was her elementary school, the movie theater parking lot where she had her first kiss, and her favourite library. There was the ice-cream shop located a few blocks from their childhood home that she and her sisters would sneak out to at all hours of the night for their cookie dough fix, not bothering to change out of their robes and slippers. She’d look out for the small park where she and Nesta spent their Saturday’s sprawled in the grass, reading books and gossiping. Her heart ached as she spotted the rose and sculpture garden she and Azriel liked to stroll through early on Sunday mornings, hot cups of coffee warming their hands as they walked and talked, Azriel leaning in close to tell Elain that the roses there had nothing on the ones that she grew in her garden.

She hadn’t bothered to point any of those places out to Graysen as their flight had made its descent. Hadn't really felt the need or desire to share those parts of herself with him. She’d just sat quietly, staring straight at her own reflection in the little screen in front of her as she took deep breaths to try and ease the rapid beating of her heart.

Her anxiety had calmed a little once they’d landed and disembarked, emerging from their gate to Nyx’s loud squeal of her name which brought her back to reality just in time for her to drop her bags and catch his tiny body as he ran towards her at full speed and flung himself into her outstretched arms. 

“Hi, baby!” She’d hugged him tight, overwhelmed by just how much she’d missed him.

“Hi, Lain!” Nyx giggled, his little face tucked tight against her neck.

She hadn’t questioned the nickname, one her nephew had never called her before, because she had been too distracted breathing in the scent of his hair - the scent of the same watermelon shampoo that her mother had used during bath time when she and her sisters were kids. It was comforting and familiar and exactly what she needed to push past the worry that had rendered her useless for the past few hours.. 

The initial introductions had gone as well as she could’ve hoped.

Graysen had defaulted back to the easy charm that he’d used back in the day to talk Elain into a drink and it seemed to work on Feyre and Rhys well enough that the drive back to their house and the late dinner that followed were easy and painless. The only hiccup was that Nyx refused to even greet Graysen and had thrown him the most menacing looks he could muster up each time Graysen so much as attempted to hold Elain’s hand. 

“He’s jealous,” Feyre had laughed nervously, embarrassed by her son’s behavior after he’d insisted on sitting next to Elain at dinner. “He’s always been a little territorial when it comes to her and since he hasn’t seen her in a few months…” 

Graysen had laughed it off but Elain had caught the annoyance in his demeanor at the idea of having to share her. Even if the person he was sharing her with was just her soon-to-be five year old nephew. 

Elain’s anxiety returned in full force the next afternoon when guests began to arrive for Nyx’s party. No amount of rearranging balloons or organising the treat station could keep her attention off the front door each and every time it opened. It was only a matter of time before he showed up and the wait was torture. In the years she’d known Azriel, he’d never once missed an important event when it came to his friends and there was no way he’d start now. 

“So…” Nesta appeared next to her suddenly, head cocked to the side as she leant against the table and watched in amusement as Elain straightened the goodie bags for the seventh or eighth time that hour. “Graysen seems nice.” 

“Yeah,” Elain nodded, not bothering to look up from the little cellophane bags full of treats that she’d been busying herself with for the last ten minutes. She didn’t need to look at Nesta to know her true feelings. She could hear it in her voice. “He’s great.” 

“He’s very… passionate.” Her sister studied her nails as she fought to hold back the teasing smile that played on her lips.  “About work. And golf. And work. And his car… Did I mention his work? Because he certainly did.” 

“Okay, okay.” Elain groaned, casting a fleeting glance across the room where Graysen was still chatting to Rhysand. 

She sent a thank you to the universe that Feyre had married a man that had the talent and patience to talk to absolutely anyone. She couldn’t say the same for Cassian, who had quickly maneuvered out of that conversation and over to the backyard to terrorize the kids, instead. 

“He just loves his job,” Elain shrugged, finally turning to face her sister. 

Nesta raised a perfectly manicured brow, fixing Elain with a pointed look. “You mean he loves money.” 

There was a reason Elain had never introduced a boy to her family and the reason was standing directly in front of her, all perfectly coiffed hair and dangerous eyes. Feyre could find a way to see the good in anyone and the boys would say they were okay with whoever Elain dated as long as she was happy. But Nesta - Nesta had always had a knack for seeing straight through any of Elain’s lies and she’d never been afraid to call her out when necessary. It was a quality Elain had come to appreciate from time to time but she didn’t appreciate it today.

“I mean… he does work in finance.” 

“Elain.” Another pointed look was thrown in her direction.

“Nesta.” 

“He looks like he pays more for a haircut than I do.” 

“Nesta!” Elain hit her sister on the arm, unable to stifle the laugh that bubbled to the surface. She knew exactly how much Graysen paid for his hair cuts and Nesta was right. “He’s nice.”

“You know who’s nicer...” Nesta said it under her breath but Elain heard her loud and clear. 

“Stop,” Elain lowered her voice. “Please. You promised.”

“I promised I wouldn’t tell the boys and I haven’t,” she replied without missing a beat. “I never promised we wouldn’t talk about it at all.” 

“Nesta, please. I can’t talk about this now.”

What Elain really wanted to say was that she couldn’t talk about this ever, but she knew that would only result in more back and forth and right now all she wanted was for this conversation to be over.

“He’s miserable, El.” Nesta lowered her voice to match Elain’s. “He’s very good at acting like he’s fine but he’s not. You just left and I know you’ve cut him off completely since and -”

“I haven’t spoken to anyone, really. It’s not like I’ve only stopped talking to hi-” Elain abruptly stopped speaking, standing up straight and plastering a smile on her face just as she spotted Graysen beginning to make his way towards them.

He didn’t have a chance to say anything, had only just managed to sling an arm around Elain’s waist when the front door swung open and Shadow came flying through. She was nothing but a black blur, ducking and dodging around furniture as she ran straight through to the kitchen. She paused in front of Rhys for a quick hello before she made a beeline towards where Elain stood with Nesta and Graysen by the dining room table. 

Her long tail wagged furiously, whipping against the wooden leg of the table. Shadow was seemingly unbothered, too busy flailing around happily between Nesta’s legs before she finally came to a stop in front of Elain. Her long snout nuzzled into Elain’s open palm and her lean body leant heavily against her thighs.

Much like Nyx, Shadow paid Graysen little to no attention other than to sniff  in his direction just once which Elain thought quite strange given that Shadow loved meeting new people and she’d famously always favored the company of men. 

“Hi, Shadow girl!” Elain cooed, crouching down to properly greet the dog that had come to feel like her own over the years. She’d gone with Azriel the day he’d picked her up and brought her home, had even helped name her. “Look how gray you’ve gotten!”

“She’ll be nine next week.”

The timber of his voice hit her at the exact same time as the familiar scent of his cedar cologne and Elain was suddenly grateful that she was already on the ground because if she’d been standing, she was sure her knees would’ve given out completely.

Elain swallowed her nerves, raising her eyes from Shadow’s sweet salt and pepper face to look up at Azriel only to find that every bit of his attention was focused solely on her.

“Hi, Lain.”

There were a couple beats of silence before Elain got a hold of herself and stood up. She stepped forward and before she could stop herself, she raised onto the very tips of her toes and wound her arms around his neck. Azriel’s arms wrapped around her waist in turn, tentatively at first before she felt his fingers flex against the middle of her back as he relaxed, readjusting his grip to pull her tight against his chest as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Probably because it had been at one point in time.

“Hi, Az.” She whispered into his neck, breathing in the divine scent of him. The scent of home.

“Hey, Azriel!” Nesta said loudly from behind them, effectively breaking the trance that Elain had unwittingly found herself in. 

She let go of Azriel quickly and took a large step back, bumping into the dining table, as Nesta took her place in his arms. 

She was only just aware of Graysen staring at her in her peripheral, his hand once again heavy against her hip.

“Were you planning on introducing me?” He asked her as Azriel and Nesta separated and Azriel turned to face them again. Elain hadn’t noticed that she’d been staring dumbly straight ahead - directly at Azriel’s chest. 

He was wearing an oatmeal coloured fisherman’s sweater that she’d told him she loved on him more than a few times and a small, stupid part of her wondered if she crossed his mind when he slipped it on this morning.

“Oh, yes!” She shook her head, laughing nervously. “Um, Az… this is Graysen, my uh…”

“Boyfriend.” Graysen finished the sentence for her, extending his hand towards Azriel. “And you are…”

“This is Azriel. My…. Azriel.” Elain stuttered as she watched the two men shake hands.

She allowed herself the tiniest shake of her head to ease the frustration she felt towards herself. She sounded like an absolute idiot.

“I think I’ve missed something,” Graysen looked between Elain and Azriel, eyebrows lifting slightly. “How do you know each other?

“We’re good friends.” Azriel answered at the same time Elain said “He’s Rhys’ best friend.”

Jesus. Fucking. Christ. 

She couldn’t possibly have handled that any worse.

“So you’re Rhys’ friend or Elain’s friend?” Graysen asked, the slightest hint of a frown forming on his lips. 

Any hope that Elain had of him dropping this topic evaporated in front of her eyes.

“We’re all friends. We met through Rhys when he started dating Feyre and we all spent basically all our time together.” She answered quickly, briefly meeting Azriel’s eyes.

Another mistake. 

All she saw was hurt. No one else would’ve noticed because the emotion was there and gone in a flash but Elain saw past the mask. She saw the hurt she’d caused him. Hurt at being reduced to a friend of a friend, as if he wasn’t so much more to her. As if they hadn’t spent years of their lives seeing each other almost every day. Trading secrets. Letting each other see parts of themselves they’d never allowed anyone else to see.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Azriel smiled politely, redirecting his attention to Graysen. “I’m gonna go find the birthday boy but I’ll talk to you guys later, I’m sure.”

He didn’t look at her again before he walked away, Shadow obediently following right behind him. Even Nesta quickly excused herself so she didn’t have to be around to witness the uncomfortable tension that had settled heavily between Elain and Graysen..

She had absolutely no idea what had come over her. She thought she’d been somewhat prepared to see him again but nothing could’ve prepared her for the reality of him standing in front of her. Smiling at her. The feel of his arms around her - strong and sure and familiar. Nothing could have prepared her for seeing him walk away from her, disappointment lingering behind his eyes. She’d done that to him and she hated herself for it.

She silently cursed herself for ever thinking that bringing Graysen back here would be a good idea. Mere minutes had passed and she’d already fucked up. She had no idea how the hell she was supposed to make it through this day, let alone survive an entire weekend of this.

“What the hell was that?” Graysen muttered as Elain turned in his arms, once again plastering on a smile in a last ditch effort to rectify the mess she’d just made of that introduction.

“Nothing,” She shook her head, leaning in to kiss his cheek. “That was nothing.”

… 

When Azriel walked into Rhys and Feyre’s house earlier and caught a glimpse of Elain for the first time in four months, she was wearing another one of those dresses that threatened to send him to his knees. 

He loved each and every one of her dresses but the one she wore today was a pale blue with delicate straps that tied at her shoulders and draped elegantly over her frame in a way that just about teased at each dip and curve concealed by the lightweight, silky material. It was perfectly demure for a children’s birthday party but something about that dress on her was downright sinful. 

Maybe if the circumstances were different, he’d be able to steal a glance every now and then and attempt to carry on with his life, but the circumstances were not different and Azriel was cursed to get through this afternoon looking at Elain in that dress with some other guy’s arm around her waist. 

He hadn’t been able to get her out of his head. Even if he had no right to think of her in that way. Not when she’d made it abundantly clear not once but twice now, that she didn’t want him like that. Still, he couldn’t help that the memory of her kneeling on his bed and tracing a path across his hips with that pretty mouth of hers came rushing back to the forefront of his mind in the ten or so seconds that she’d been on her knees in front of him, patting his dog and looking up at him with those big, brown eyes. 

Any satisfaction that he’d gotten from that memory or simply from seeing her and having her in his arms again, disappeared the second she stepped back and he’d been introduced to her boyfriend.

He knew there was something off with the way they interacted within the first few minutes of watching them together that afternoon. Azriel knew that the smiles she gave him weren’t genuine because they never quite reached her eyes. Elain evaded Graysen’s touch, swiveling out of his grasp each and every time he went to put his hand on her hip, ducking her head so the kiss he intended to give her landed on her forehead instead of her lips. 

He wondered how no one else seemed to notice it when he could see it so clearly. He was in tune with her every emotion, knew her better than he knew the back of his own hand. He’d had time to hone that skill and right now, the piece of his brain that was dedicated solely to her was screaming that something wasn’t right. 

Azriel hated the way she acted around him. Hated the way Graysen acted towards her. Actually, Azriel just outright despised Graysen.

He’d come into this day wanting the best. He genuinely wanted to see Elain happy even if the notion of her being with anyone else made his chest constrict in a way that couldn’t possibly be healthy. But he knew she wasn’t happy and one handshake was all it took for Azriel to know exactly what kind of guy Graysen was.

His grip had been firm but his hands bore no evidence of ever doing anything more difficult than swinging a heavy golf club. Graysen had a smile befitting of a politician’s son - charming but edged with insincerity, like he’d do or say whatever was necessary to get what he wanted. He carried himself with the ease of someone that had had things handed to him on a silver platter for his whole life and there was a certain arrogance to him that had Azriel wondering what Elain could possibly see in him. He knew her well enough to know that it wouldn’t have been the expensive clothing or the twenty thousand dollar watch on his wrist that had piqued her interest just like he knew that the glittering diamond tennis bracelet circling her wrist was for Graysen’s benefit and not hers.

He’d endeavored to try and find out if the guy had any redeeming qualities at all to help Azriel come to terms with them being together but he’d been stopped every time he’d tried to approach Graysen.

Azriel almost found it amusing the way Elain had been running what could be considered award winning interference between himself and her boyfriend all day, somehow managing to keep them well away from each other in and amongst entertaining her nephew and his flock of tiny friends. But now that all Nyx’s friends and their parents had gone home and the sun was beginning to set, there was very little Elain could do to keep them from speaking. 

Graysen had started the conversation as they sat on the couch next to each other, just behind where Elain was sitting on the floor helping Nyx unwrap the copious amounts of presents he’d received today. Graysen asked Azriel about how he had met Rhys and Azriel explained that they’d met when they were kids and Rhys’ family had all but adopted him as one of their own. The topic had turned to Velaris and Azriel had sat through mind-numbing comments about how the river looked nicer in pictures, how things closed too early, and how there was no real potential for growth. 

He’d just nodded and shrugged wherever he thought appropriate and he’d failed to get more than a sentence in but then Cassian had asked if Azriel was still planning on staying at their place after dinner with everyone the next night and when Azriel had answered that he would as long as he managed to finish the ring he’d been working on, Graysen had suddenly had a lot of questions. 

“So you set up a little stall at what? … Weekend farmers markets? Sell jewelry to old ladies and teenage girls?”  Graysen asked after Azriel patiently explained exactly why he was making jewelry. “And you make money from that?”

Azriel noticed the way Elain stiffened at the condescending tone of Graysen’s voice. The snide way he laughed as he reduced Azriel’s work to the equivalent of a children’s roadside lemonade stand. She set down the toy she’d been unboxing for Nyx and swiveled around to face them.

“He’s not making jewelry with dollar store plastic beads, Gray.” It was maybe the most fed up Azriel had ever heard her sound. He’d always known her to stay quiet and avoid confrontation. He didn’t even need one hand to count all the times he’d seen her snap and each of those times had been at Feyre or Nesta so he didn’t really count them. “It’s his business and he’s done really well.”

“It’s fine, Lain.” Azriel said softly, his heart swelling in his chest at the way she defended him even if he was unbothered by Graysen’s comments. It was nothing he hadn’t heard before from his own father or brothers. He continued to speak, confidently taking Graysen’s questions in stride in a way that Elain hadn’t quite been able to.“I actually work in data security but I make jewelry in my spare time and sell custom pieces online. Although, I did have some pretty successful mornings at farmer’s markets when I was just starting out and -”

“I thought you didn’t like being called that.” Graysen interrupted him, calculating eyes shifting from Azriel to Elain.

“What?” Elain asked, eyebrows furrowed in a way that Azriel would’ve found endearing in any other circumstance.

“He calls you ‘Lain.’” Graysen replied. “You told me you hated when I called you that.”

“I just prefer ‘El,’” She shrugged, picking at the sleeve of the cream cardigan she’d thrown on over her dress. “And he isn’t the only one. Nyx has called me that all day today, as well.” 

Azriel stayed silent. He knew exactly where Nyx had picked that nickname up from but he wasn’t about to expose himself for cornering his friend’s kid into multiple conversations with the secret agenda of trying to siphon information about what Nyx’s Auntie was up to these days. 

Graysen huffed, crossing his arms like an overgrown child as he sat back. He’d dropped his line of inquisition for now but Azriel had a feeling that wasn’t the last Elain would hear of this topic and the thought made him sick.

He’d been carefully watching all afternoon - noticing the way Graysen spoke about Elain and the possessive way he touched her as if she was something to have or to own. It had turned his stomach, memories of the way he’d seen his father treat his mother seeping into his mind despite his best efforts to keep them at bay.

Azriel paid extra attention to him now, picking up the way Graysen acted towards Elain as he continued to answer questions about his jewelry. He cringed at the scowl that found a home on Graysen’s lips each time her attention was pulled away from him and the way that scowl only deepened at each passing remark that hinted that maybe Azriel and Elain had, in fact, been closer than what she might’ve alluded to earlier. 

He wasn’t sure exactly what she’d told Graysen about him. He had a feeling she hadn’t told him much at all. But he saw the wheels turning in Graysen’s head when Azriel’s craft came up again and Azriel explained exactly what type of jewelry he made and Graysen’s eyes had drifted to the chain that had faithfully stayed clasped around Elain’s neck year after year. 

His suspicions were confirmed an hour or so later when Azriel rounded a corner, making his way towards the powder room at the foot of the stairs only to stop halfway there when he was distracted by a pair of low voices coming from Rhysand’s office across the hallway. 

It was just a simple hushed whisper but his ears perked up at the voice he’d come to find grating over this very long, very tortuous day. 

He could hear his mother’s voice in his head telling him that it wasn’t polite to eavesdrop, that nothing good every came from it, but he couldn’t help himself as he stood there - still as night, locking in on the hushed conversation and blocking out the raucous laughter coming from the kitchen. 

“You know what I find most interesting about all of this?” Azriel heard Graysen ask. “In four months, I’ve heard about your sisters and their husbands but you haven’t even mentioned his name once.”

“He’s just a friend,” Elain answered quietly. “I swear.”

“Right,” Graysen scoffed. “And I suppose he’s the friend that gave you that necklace?”

Azriel swallowed,  his eyes pinching closed at the animosity - the clear jealousy - that laced Graysen’s question. He could hear the malice in the way he spat out the word ‘friend’. He could only imagine the way he’d be glaring at the little gold oval that Azriel knew Elain would be clutching in between her thumb and index finger.

Graysen had asked her about the necklace, that thin gold chain Azriel had gifted her all those years ago that sat faithfully around her neck every day since. It was his only sign, as delusional as it might’ve made him, that she still thought of him. After everything that had happened the year prior, Elain still wore that small, handmade pendant and even if they didn’t speak, even if his messages had gone unanswered… Maybe her continuing to wear that necklace meant that she didn’t completely despise him. 

Azriel kept moving, not allowing himself to so much as breathe until he was safely behind the closed door of the powder room. He had wanted to keep listening but he knew he shouldn’t. He didn’t think he could stand to hear her answers to Graysen’s questions. Didn’t want to know if she’d attempt to explain to Graysen whatever this thing was between them or if she’d continue to insist that he was nothing more than a friend. 

But Azriel wanted an answer. He deserved an answer. He just didn’t want to get it by eavesdropping on a conversation he wasn’t a part of. He needed to hear it directly from her. He needed to talk to her.

[intrepidacious]

time after time [6]

series summary: After what starts out as a fairly normal mission, you find yourself stuck in a time loop. Which would already be bad enough in itself if it didn’t also mean having to watch Bucky die over and over again.

pairing: bucky barnes x f!reader

word count: 12.8k

chapter warnings: maybe reacquaint yourselves with the story premise, it's been a hot minute; characters refusing to be honest with themselves and each other; violence against side characters, minor injury descriptions; strange is still annoying

a/n: this is quite possibly the scariest fic update i've ever made. a lot has happened since the last chapter was posted, and i won't bore you with all of it. suffice it to say, i missed sharing this story. thank you for being patient with me.

series masterlist | main masterlist | read on ao3

six: butterfly effect

Working with Sam and Bucky was different than working with Natasha and Steve had been.

At the Compound, it had felt terrifyingly easy to find your place, to slip into the new role they granted you as if you were always meant to fill it. You’d felt that way before, and it hadn’t turned out quite so well. Maybe that was why you used to dread the end.

Now, however, for the first time in a while, you constantly had to prove yourself in order to not be left back in that dark place they’d found you in, alone and trying to make sense of any of it. And you liked that. The challenge was something you could live with, something you could enjoy more than the ever chilling anxiousness that things were simply too good to be true.

So when Sam called you on for a follow-up mission shortly after the first one, you jumped at the chance.

It didn’t matter that you barely talked about anything but work, even when you were hanging out in your spare time; in fact, you much preferred that to digging up the past. You even learned to find a wicked sort of enjoyment in provoking Bucky’s initial dislike of you to the point of where he would barely speak to you at all unless it was to snap at you.

You weren’t sure what you wanted him to do, but it was fun to watch the time bomb tick.

It wasn’t as easy to get under the new cap’s skin.

"You’re making us sound like we’re partners in a law firm," Sam said, a smile clearly audible in his voice even though his eyes didn’t betray it. Bucky didn’t even dignify you with a clench of his jaw.

"What?" you said, crossing your legs. "Every newspaper in the city calls you 'Wilson and Barnes'. Don’t you ever read the articles about yourselves?"

"Unlike some people, I don’t have all the time in the world," Sam said, leaning back on the couch with his eyes closed.

"Pity. The Bulletin called you the 'nation’s new dynamic duo' last week." You looked at Bucky, your eyebrows raised in amusement. "You’ve officially been downgraded to a sidekick, Barnes."

He answered with an empty glare of his own. "And what does that make you?" he said, but not like a question.

"Nothing at all," you still grinned. "Everything is right in the universe."

The reporters had yet to pick up on your addition to the team, which was proof enough that your powers still sufficed to fly under the radar. Combined with the fact that you were actually regularly talking to people again—and people who weren’t your therapist or your customers no less—, things almost felt like they were settling into a new kind of normal. Still somewhat weird, and still a struggle each day, but somewhat hopeful, nevertheless.

You’d almost forgotten what that could feel like.

“Right. You’d prefer people not knowing about your creepy powers.”

"Aww." You tilted your head to the side happily. "You think I’m creepy."

Bucky scoffed into his mug, refusing to look at you like he always did, and then he strolled off again.

In truth, you couldn’t blame him all that much. You’d lived with your powers all your life and still found them unsettling sometimes, particularly when they got away from you and left you trapped in a universe that refused to move.

That was none of his business, though.

Besides, Bucky had taken to moving around so quietly you could never tell he was there until he’d cough and you’d flinch, usually dropping whatever you were holding in your hands. You’d already cracked your phone screen twice.

Not that he’d know, or care if he did. It gave you great satisfaction to erase his amused smirk from existence.

"Give it time," Sam said without moving. "He doesn’t like new people."

"Neither do I," you murmured, and he snorted. "What?"

"Pretend with me all you want, but maybe do a bit of introspection there."

You crossed your arms with a pout. "You sound like my therapist."

"Mhm," Sam hummed, opening one eye to look at you. "You owe me fifty bucks for that."

"Fuck you."

"Oh, would you look at that, the price just went up."

He chuckled as you flipped him off and went to look for the coffee pot.

Of course, your way got blocked. The downsides of not hating having people around.

Bucky was leaning against the counter, considering you. "You go to therapy?"

"You should try it some time," you said distractedly, reaching around him to get your favorite mug. Bucky recoiled like he was afraid you’d burn him. You shook your head in annoyance. "Helps with the stink eye."

"Is that what they told you?"

"They told me I needed to process my grief, but I decided to focus on some more achievable goals." You took a sip of your coffee, sighing in comfort. "We came up with a compromise."

Bucky scoffed, pushing his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He still hadn’t taken his gloves off around you.

"Sounds like a way to drag it out," he said.

You frowned into your cup. "It’s not a race, Barnes. There’s no finish line for this shit."

Something odd went over his face, but he went back to avoiding your gaze when you tried to make it out. You knew him well enough by then to get the hint, and so you left him alone.

What was it to you if he didn’t want to warm up to you. That had no bearing on the fact that overall, your situation wasn’t all too bad anymore.

It was something, you supposed as you curled up in your spot on the couch with your book later that day, slipping in and out of time to keep your company a little longer because deep down, you knew you were sick of being alone.

It was weird and different, yes, but it was still something anyway. Something to do with your afternoons again.

A reason to get up in the morning.

*****

"What are you talking about?" Bucky asks quietly, carefully, but he makes no attempt to pull back from your embrace. It allows you to take another shuddering breath, inhaling his scent until it makes you dizzy.

The fact that you probably won’t be this close to him again any time soon makes you press into his chest even harder, hard enough to feel his heart flutter against your forehead, the shock of the situation making it pick up speed.

For a split second, you slip into a sort of vacuum, your thoughts quieting as he keeps mumbling to you, and in that blissful moment, your situation doesn’t seem quite so dire anymore, more like a bad dream. You’re safe now, aren’t you? How could you not be?

But then you blink back into reality again when Bucky sits you down on the closed lid of your toilet and slowly makes you let go of his shirt, kneeling down in front of you. The blue of his eyes is devastating, even though you have to keep blinking to keep him in focus.

You don’t want to have to do this, you realize once your gasps for air start calming again. You’re not sure if you can bear it.

But nothing in this loop has been about what you wanted.

And so your resolve is made, with your heart sinking until it’s hidden away deep, deep inside of your chest. You ball your hands into fists to keep your fingers from twitching.

Two or three times he watches you inhale, start to say something, halt before you can, almost choking on it. Like your body is refusing to go through with it.

"How do you know when I’m lying?" you finally ask, and your voice sounds oddly clear in your small bathroom.

Bucky’s face goes from concern to confusion, his frown deepening. You want to smoothe it away with your thumb.

You close your eyes so maybe the temptation goes away.

"What?" he asks, and he still sounds so damn gentle.

"I’ve never been able to lie to you," you say. "What’s my tell?"

You can feel him move away from you and the ache of it makes you look again. His shirt and his hands are covered in his own blood, and you’re sure there’s some fucking metaphor in the way it stains the golden inlets of his vibranium arm crimson but for the most part, you can’t unsee the damn irony of it all.

Because you’ve pissed him off now.

"You scared the shit out of me, Y/N. And Sam, too." There’s the sharpness in his voice you know all too well. You haven’t heard it in a while. "What the hell is going on?"

"I’m trapped in a time loop," you say, squeezing your fists more tightly. "I’ve been reliving this day for weeks, my powers aren’t working, I’m the only one who can stop time from completely collapsing, I can’t do that without my powers, and you’re gonna die later today. Am I lying?"

It’s maybe the worst way you’ve ever told him, because watching Bucky’s face change is almost too much. This is exactly why you’re doing it, though; as long as you’re going through this loop with a giant guilty knot in your stomach, you’re not going to make any progress. And you need to put an end to all of it.

So you meet his gaze, almost unwavering, and you don’t blink.

His shock bursts free as an incredulous laugh. "What?"

"I’m stuck," you say again, slower, nodding at his hands, his blood, continuing to push, "and you keep dying."

Bucky looks down, then, before his gaze falls back onto you and he sits back on his heels. The pause lasts for way too long, heavy and smelling of iron, and you’re pretty sure you’re suffocating. He only says one word, and it sounds so defeated. "How?"

You swallow heavily. "You got shot on a mission," you say, but he shakes his head, the fire returning to his eyes.

"No. How did you get stuck?"

"I …" You blink, because you’re not prepared for this question, because you can never predict what he’s going to say, because he keeps doing that to you, because somehow, and not like you’ve expected, you feel like you’ve been here before.

How did it happen? That’s not … Okay.

"It was an accident," you finally say, helplessly, defensively.

There’s a flicker of something in Bucky’s eyes. "What happened?"

"You died. You died that first time and I didn’t—I couldn’t …" You swallow the sob that threatens to shake your voice again. Damnit, you’re supposed to push him away.

He moves his arm, then hesitates, as if he wants to reach out to you but changes his mind at the very last moment.

Right. He doesn’t normally do that.

Except he has.

He has held your hand and pulled you closer and written on your arm and let you lean on him with the full weight of your body, as if to him, you weighed nothing at all. He’s been offering to carry your load so many times, and he doesn’t remember a single one of them.

"Please don’t look at me like that," you say tonelessly, watching Bucky retreat.

"Like what?"

"Like I’m gonna fall apart at any moment. And yes," you add when his mouth opens, "I—I know I just did, I’m aware of the irony, but this is exactly why I can’t keep telling you, I don’t—I can’t stand it." You press your wrists against your temples, ignoring the buzz of the whirling time symbols against your skin, the stinging in your eyes. "You shouldn’t even—I mean, are you even the slightest bit worried about yourself? Because I feel like I’m the only one here, and I should’ve just—"

You stop yourself, shaking your head. Your hands are very clammy all of a sudden, and when you tug at your rings just to do something, one of them slips off your finger and clangs against the tiles as if to punctuate the silence.

When you reach down, you move your wrist in a way that makes you hiss in pain and flinch back. Bucky’s eyes flit between your own and your hand, his frown deepening in a strangely soft way. "Did you break it?" he asks quietly.

"I’m fine," you mumble, and he looks at you disapprovingly. "You’d grabbed my hand just before …"

His jaw twitches as the blame settles in again, and you would do fucking anything to finally make him understand that none of this is his fault. That you should be in pain for what you’re putting him through.

"It should’ve been me," you tell him, because it’s true.

Even earlier in the week, you would’ve taken great delight in seeing Bucky Barnes’ face fall at something you’d said. Hell, you’d have probably enjoyed it on Thursday, because there used to be this easy sort of gratification that came from riling him up, from catching him off guard.

Seeing it now, though?

It makes your fingers twitch.

"Don’t say that. Not even as a joke."

"I’m not joking." You can feel your pulse in your ears. "They aimed a shot at me, and you pushed me out of the way, and you died. So by all accounts, if your instincts weren’t so damn noble all the time, it should’ve been me, and if I weren’t such a fucking coward, I’d have gone back and switched places with you weeks ago."

The thought terrifies you, even though it’s true. No part of you wants to go through the things Bucky is, but if someone gave you the choice between either one of you right now, you wouldn’t even have to think about it.

Maybe that’s the most terrifying thought of them all. You would die for him. Once, twice, however many times are necessary if that meant that he’s safe.

"I’d like to see you try," Bucky says, and something slams into your chest as an old familiar shiver runs down your spine.

There’s a pained edge to his gaze, contemplative and heartbreaking and …

"You’re doing it again," you say, your voice barely above a whisper.

"What am I doing?" His hand brushes your knee, and your skin is left searing.

You swallow heavily. "Being noble."

Bucky chuckles softly, and his eyes leave yours for just a moment. "Don’t exactly feel like that."

He’s beautiful.

It’s a new thought, despite everything. Even when you’ve noticed it before, you’d roll your eyes at the fact and move on, because this was Bucky. So what if his face was delectably handsome?

But it seems like you haven’t known it at all, because right now, you feel the knowledge of it, of him, surge through you with all its facets. You can’t even begin to put it into words, because where would you start? How do you explain what he makes you feel when he hasn’t been there himself, not in any way that matters or sticks? And if it’s never happened at all, if time keeps unraveling like this, how can it even be real?

So it’s pure instinct that makes you move, like someone would pinch themselves to ensure they’re not asleep, even though you’re very aware that this isn’t just a dream. You need to confirm that Bucky is real, though.

The air stands still when your fingertips trace along his cheekbone, leaving a delicate flush behind in their trail, barely touching and yet …

And yet.

His breath hitches when they dip lower, almost reaching the place you’ve watched dimple when he laughs, but he doesn’t move away. He doesn’t laugh, either.

There’s a scraping sound at the closed bathroom door, followed by a short knock. You flinch backwards.

"I’m leaving the first aid kit on the bed," Sam calls from the other side. "Just … holler if you need me."

"Thanks, Sam," Bucky says coarsely, and you can hear steps receding. The scratching continues, though. That damn cat.

Finally, he breaks eye contact, clearing his throat.

"Do you want me to help you clean up?"

You shake your head. You’re not sure you could stomach more of this. "I’m good, don’t … Don’t worry about it."

Bucky drags a hand through his hair, muttering something to himself you can’t quite make out. Slowly, he gets to his feet again.

"We need to come up with a plan," he says, and you want to cry except … you’re tired. Tired and sick of this.

"I need to come up with a plan," you correct him. "We have been trying to do this as a team for weeks, and it doesn’t change anything except waste time and …" And hurt. "I can’t do it anymore, Buck."

There must be something in your voice that thaws his defiant glare a little. "So what’s the plan?"

And with a sigh, you fill him in on everything that’s been going on with Strange and your powers. Again. One last time.

You have to do this alone.

Bucky ignores your insistence that you can manage just fine and sets your wrist while you talk. Alpine, now free to roam wherever she pleases again, has decided the bathroom isn’t quite that interesting after a short look inside, and is now taking a nap in the spot of sunshine next to your bed.

"New deal," he says once you’re done, once he’s thought about it all, and you raise your eyebrows. "Don’t do anything stupid."

"You know me," you smile, checking the makeshift dressing around your hand. The green symbols are hidden by the layers of gauze.

Bucky doesn’t bite. "I’m serious, just—don’t."

"How would you know?"

"I wouldn’t," he says, snapping the first aid kit shut so vehemently Alpine’s tail twitches. "But I trust you."

Your head whips up at his words, even though his back is still turned to you. He doesn’t see your face as your heart is jostled into a new rhythm, so violently and unexpectedly that you lift your hand without thinking, pinkie outstretched.

"Promise."

He smiles when he notices, and you wish you could take a picture to carry with you through the rest of this nightmare.

That day, he dies with your stupid nickname on his lips, twisted into something that looks strangely close to that earlier smile. This one doesn’t have time to reach his eyes, though.

***

There’s been a change in the weather.

Not literally, no; of course not literally. Fuck, you long for a single cloud, a raindrop, a damn hailstorm to break the streak of endless perfectly sunny days that don’t fit your mood in the slightest.

But there’s a tinge to the sky that makes your stomach turn. It’s not very obvious to anyone who hasn’t looked at the exact same sunset for weeks on end, just a single strip of color across a storybook horizon. It looks like a crack.

"Do you see that?" you ask warily when you notice it for the first time, ominous and yet almost completely hidden by the trees and the buildings. Just dancing around the edge of your vision like another mockery.

"What?" Sam asks, eyes not leaving the path ahead.

"That … thing in the sky. What is that?"

Bucky stops and squints at where you’re pointing. "It’s called a cloud," he says dryly.

"With that color?" you murmur, but continue walking when he stops to turn to you, your wrist tingling. His stare is searing your neck, but you ignore that, too.

The best course of action, you’ve learned, is to shut your brain off as soon as you get out of the quinjet and just go through the motions, trying to ride out the mission like you’ve done dozens of times before. There’s a sort of autopilot you’ve fallen into after a couple of days, and it’s the only thing keeping you somewhat sane. Most days, it means it’s all over quickly, and you can’t help but feel glad about that.

You’ve given up trying to change your own actions to get him through the day.

But this …

It’s something new, and in all this monotony, that thought is both frightening and exciting. It distracts you enough to get you off script.

"Lovely interior design," Sam mumbles like he always does.

"Remember how this was supposed to be a day off?" You kick one of the pebbles in your path with a sigh. "What happened to 'don’t worry, Y/N, after training the day is all yours'?"

"Occupational hazard," Sam says, checking his map for the thousandth time.

"You know what I mean."

"Don’t you have tomorrow off?" Bucky says over the intercom.

Tomorrow. "Right." It comes out somewhat strained, your fingernails digging into the palm of your hand. "And why do you know that?"

Sam shakes his head and there’s a brief crackle of static in your ear. For a fraction of a second, you nearly dare to hope Bucky will give you an answer, even though you have no clue what it would be.

"They’re heading your way now," he says instead, "so get a move on."

And just like that, you’re back on track.

Quickly clearing your throat of the lump that has formed there, you say tonelessly, "I probably only have one reset left. Two, if we’re lucky and you two aren’t being stupid again."

It’s taken you a while to get used to it. To the constant lying.

You’ve worn fingerless gloves on missions before, so that’s not raised any questions from the others yet, and your rings stay hidden away. You’ve been more reluctant to take them off since the one you lost on your bathroom floor vanished into thin air.

The other thing you’ve picked up on while endlessly repeating this day is that Bucky is less likely to catch you in a lie if he can’t see your face.

So you’ve made an effort of spending as little time as possible with him.

It’s surprisingly easy to stay in your room for the majority of the day, because he doesn’t remember it ever being any other way. Even today’s little exchange will be lost to the loop soon enough, just like that little pause he made, just like the bullet through his heart.

Still, when you wake up with a start on Friday, July 4th, you look at the sky first. Its perfect blue doesn’t soothe the sinking feeling in your stomach at all.

You’ve been waiting for something to change for weeks, and now that it’s here, you don’t like it at all.

"What did you expect?" Strange says with an infuriating composure once you’ve nervously recounted your experience. "I told you, time isn’t supposed to get stuck in this way. Of course your reality was going to act up sooner or later."

"I really feel like you should be more concerned about this," you mutter, letting a ball of green energy pass from your left hand to the right. It’s about the size of a quarter now.

"Honestly," Strange answers, "I thought something like this would have happened a while ago." He taps his fingers together. "Again. Slower."

"So what am I supposed to do then, just ignore it?" The green ball pulses with your indignation, turns around itself once and then sinks into your palm again.

"In all likelihood, it’s a one time glitch. If everything is back to normal today, I wouldn’t worry about it."

Your thumb rubs across the empty space on your finger. "Easy for you to say if you’re not the one who’s stuck in an endless hellscape."

"Aren’t I?"

You both roll your eyes at each other, but then you bite the inside of your cheek again, unable to shake the feeling of a whole new shade of dread. "What if it’s not just a one time glitch?"

The corners of Strange’s cloak roll up on themselves, and he doesn’t meet your eye when he says, "We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it."

It’s still early when you return to the present, too early for Bucky to be back from wherever he’s always going, so you decide to venture out of your room again, stretching your tired limbs. You’re pretty sure at this point that waking up on the floor is never going to feel fun.

Sam is in the kitchen as always, reading something on his laptop. He’s still sitting down, which means that it’s even earlier than you expected. You miss these early parts of the day, the calm before the storm.

If today were only made up of these few hours, you suppose, it might not be half so bad.

You pull up a chair next to him and lean a cheek against your hand. "What’re you doing?"

"Research." Sam sighs, rubbing his temples. "Remember that ULTIMATUM group?"

"Never heard of them," you say with a small yawn. "Is that an acronym? What does it stand for?"

Sam gives you a glare and your mouth twitches slightly.

"Anyway," he continues, turning his laptop so you can see the article he’s reading. "They’ve been more active again lately. Acquired a couple thousand dollars’ worth of lab equipment through one of their contacts and then went underground again."

Of course, you know all this. You’ve been over it again and again, back when you were all still trading information like it could save Bucky’s life. Like there was a deeper meaning behind any of this damn loop other than the fact that you, and you alone, fucked up.

Useless.

You close the mental door on those thoughts and take a deep breath. You hate to admit it, but all of this sitting around with your thoughts bullshit you’ve been doing has actually helped you to clear your head somewhat—if only to make it through the parts of the day you can’t avoid.

"And now what?" you ask, pretending to just have reacquainted yourself with the topic.

"Now," Sam says, taking his laptop with him as he stands up and strolls over to the kitchen island, "I’m waiting for Torres to get back to me so we can decide our next steps once we’re all recovered." He gives you a meaningful look and you scowl.

Then, slowly, his words register in your brain, and you stare at his back as he stretches and then moves to make some coffee, wordlessly taking one of your mugs out of the cupboard as well as his own.

"You don’t seem too worried," you say hesitantly.

Sam shrugs. "Until we have a proper lead, there’s not much we can do. And I doubt they’ll be doing any actual damage any time soon. They’re a lot more covert than the Flag Smashers ever were."

"Right," you say, more to yourself than in response.

"Try that again, less convincing?"

"I don’t know," you mutter, slowly following him to lean against the fridge. "Just … what if Torres did find something? Should I be getting ready?"

Sam frowns. "Are you not telling me something again?"

You try to shake the thought, pulling your arms around you. "Forget it."

You don’t, though.

It keeps bugging you, because that day like any other day, he knocks on your door at 4:32 on the dot, and you go on that mission anyway. And even though this has been happening for weeks, you’re just starting to suspect that you are, in fact, still not getting the whole picture.

***

Catching a glimpse of Sam’s phone turns out to be more difficult than you first thought.

You’re still trying to get the timing exactly right a couple of days later, and you miscalculate enough to catch Bucky on his way upstairs.

"Hey," he says, his shoulders tense when he looks at you. There’s a restlessness to him that he’s not quick enough to hide; or maybe you’ve just grown more perceptive when it comes to him.

"Hi," you say, crossing your hands behind your back. "Where’ve you been?"

He shrugs. "For a walk."

You already know he won’t elaborate if you try poking, so you don’t. "Was it good?"

"Lotta people." He hesitates when you continue to not meet his eye, and then he says, "Do you want to talk about it?"

You swallow, ignoring the tingling sensation on your wrist. "Not particularly. Do you?"

Bucky’s jaw twitches. "Nah."

Somehow, you feel like that’s also a lie. Once again, you’re left wondering.

The silence between you stretches as you continue to not quite look at each other, until you finally clear your throat, nodding at the front door. "I’m getting coffee, do you want something?"

Honestly, it’s just an excuse as to why you need to leave before he notices something off again somehow, but Bucky tilts his head in amusement.

"Didn’t you just get some this morning?"

"So? I like coffee."

"Really. I never knew."

"Screw you."

You can hear him huff behind you, but thankfully the door falls shut before you can do anything stupid. Like turning around to face him, for example.

You miss his eyes.

Why won’t you look at me?

When the elevator doors open, you almost yelp into your delivery guy’s face. He stumbles a half-step backwards, somehow managing to keep a hold of the boxes precariously balanced on his arm while he’s reading something on his phone.

"Oh my god," he lets out, "I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I was just …"

"Early." You blink.

"Sorry?"

"Nothing," you say, frowning only a little. "Wait, let me get that."

You quickly sign for the delivery and open the door with your keycard, holding it open for him. You’re not exactly afraid of burglars these days, and besides; you know this guy by now.

"If you could just go straight ahead and to the right, that’s where the kitchen is."

"Sure thing," he shrugs. "Thanks—"

His mouth snaps shut and he blushes a little as if he wanted to say something else but thought better of it.

You’ve introduced him to Sam enough times you know he’s going to be fine, so you just smile and wave him in.

When you step out on the street, you instinctually look up at the sky. It’s outrageously blue, blatantly perfect for an endless Friday, and even when you squint, you can’t make out any irregularities.

It’s a tiny relief, but a relief nontheless.

Lucy is leaning against the wall just out of sight of the storefront, an unlit cigarette dangling between her lips as she rummages through her pockets. Her colorful makeup has begun to melt off in the sweltering heat, making the red-white-and-blue stars on her cheeks bleed into each other to look somewhat purplish.

"Are you off or on break?" you call over.

She lifts her head, the glare vanishing when she recognizes you. "Counting the seconds," she says. "Don’t you have anything better to do?"

You sidestep a couple of pedestrians hurrying to cross the street and join her. "Not really."

"I hate you." She finally fishes a lighter out of her back pocket, sighing contentedly as she takes her first drag. "I swear, this day just won’t pass."

Fine. Maybe your chuckle is a little shrill. "I’m sorry."

Lucy waves you off with a gesture crude enough to make a young dad with a stroller send the two of you a dirty look. "You without your shadow today?" she asks, inspecting her nails.

You blink. "My shadow."

"You know. Your friend who’s been in here eight thousand times and still gets confused when he orders." A cloud of smoke vanishes into thin air. "Kind of the lingering type, isn’t he?"

"He’s old," you say, because for some reason nothing else comes to mind.

"Not that old."

"No," you agree, "not that old."

For a moment, you’re afraid she’s going to ask you to pass her number along to him, and you’re already scrambling to find an answer somewhere in the depths of your brain, coming up empty. That’s the problem with being able to unhave entire conversations; you don’t usually really have to deal with reactions if you don’t want to.

Without your powers, though, you’re stuck, and it’s making you wish you hadn’t come here at all.

Instead of any of that, she pulls a flyer out of her other pocket. "Sorin and Cass are doing a gig in Brooklyn next week, do you wanna come with? They’re still terrible, but they got a new bassist who seems alright."

You take the flyer, staring at it. "I didn’t know they’re in a band," you admit.

The truth is, you’ve never paid that much close attention to the people you work with. Maybe that’s been a mistake.

Lucy shrugs. "You’re always doing your own thing." It stings, even though you’re pretty sure she doesn’t mean for it to. "It’d be fun if you came, though."

"I’ll think about it," you say, and your smile is a little unsure, but genuine.

So is hers.

"If you don’t want to hang with us all night, you can bring some friends, too." Her emphasis hangs in the air between you like a dare.

You snort. "I feel like this isn’t quite their scene."

"You feel like or you know?"

"Isn’t that the same thing?"

"No." She puts her cigarette out on the wall behind her. "Knowledge is based on experience. On memories. Your feelings don’t sit in your head. And so they don’t make sense and they’re not necessarily true." She winks.

"You’re weirdly smart," you say, shaking your head.

"I know. It’s a curse." Lucy sighs. "Anyway, think about it. I gotta get back to hell."

"You know," you say with a grin, "I could really do with a frappuccino right about now."

"You know what you could do?" she answers in her sweetest customer service voice, pointing you down the street. "Get in a trash can."

Damnit. You might actually grow to like Lucy.

She taps her fingers against her temple and then shuffles back inside, a hot rush of air blowing out of the AC as the door opens. You fold the flyer up to fit into your back pocket, hoping you’ll make it to that concert one day, and then you walk on, aimless again for the moment.

***

Time passes while it’s standing still.

The problem is, at least for the moment, that by all appearances you’ve reverted back to square one. Going through your day as though any of this is even remotely normal, counting the hours and minutes to reenter the astral plane and feel some semblance of control again.

It’s been nice, really, if you’re ignoring the constant underlying feeling of dread.

Which you’re getting better at.

You wake up with a start to the sun in your face and FRIDAY blasting The All-American Rejects at full volume.

Rinse and repeat.

You wake up with a start to the sun in your face and FRIDAY blasting The All-American Rejects at full volume.

Even on days when you’re sure you’re making progress with your powers, every reset makes it just a little harder to keep dragging yourself onwards.

You wake up with a start to the sun in your face and FRIDAY blasting The All-American Rejects at full volume.

"You look like shit."

Your head rolls to the side slowly, allowing yourself a glance while Bucky is still distracted with his arm. Concentration makes his brows knit, and something warm spreads in your chest.

"I’m so tired," you say, voice barely above a whisper.

He doesn’t look at you, but you’re grateful for it for once. Your eyes are stinging a little.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Yes. Yes. Yes.

"Not particularly."

"Do you want to talk about something else?"

You almost smile. "Like what?"

Bucky shrugs with one shoulder. "Like the fact that you just planted Sam into the mat head-first and yet made a face like you killed a puppy?"

Sometimes you wonder how he still manages to slip in without you noticing, no matter how many times he does it.

"Did I?"

"Did you kill a puppy? I’d hope not."

Your body’s been getting stronger, anticipating Sam’s every move. At this point, it’s not so much training as it is an exercise in muscle memory; but how would he know that?

It still isn’t enough. It’s never enough.

You pitiful, selfish, useless bastard.

"You’re doing it again," Bucky says and you blink.

"Doing what?"

"I don’t know, but I don’t like it."

Something inside you twinges uncomfortably and you wrap your arms around your knees, pulling them into your chest. "That might just be me, period."

Bucky huffs. "Take the towel on the right," he says. "I already used the other one."

So you do.

And then you wake up with a start to the sun in your face and FRIDAY blasting The All-American Rejects at full volume, and then you wake up with a start to the sun in your face and FRIDAY blasting The All-American Rejects at full volume, and then you wake up with blah, blah, blah.

"I can’t do this anymore."

Strange watches you, but you don’t get up from where you’re lying, blankly staring at the ceiling, feeling like your chest is about to explode.

You don’t want to feel like something is tearing you apart every single time, even though you know it’s not permanent. There’s always the tiniest glimmer of hope that this will all be over soon.

Or maybe it’s dread.

"Maybe you can’t," Strange answers.

You blink, sitting upright. "What?"

"Maybe you are actually incapable of cleaning up your own mess. You’ve never had any training before, after all. Maybe you’re too weak."

Useless. Not good enough. Waste of time.

"If this is reverse psychology, it’s not working," you say through gritted teeth, pressing your eyes shut so tightly they don’t burn anymore.

Strange ignores you. "Maybe you’re going to be stuck in this loop forever. If that’s the case, there’s no point to keep trying either. Maybe we should just call it a day."

You can feel your breaths coming in shorter.

"Maybe you’re just going to keep failing to save anyone for the rest of your life."

"Stop it!"

An explosion of power goes through your body, bouncing off the walls and bathing the room in a ghostly green light. You cough and curl into yourself as you watch it billow, still echoing the words back at you, "too weak", "stuck in this loop forever". Your bones are heavy with exhaustion.

Strange crouches down next to you and a cup of fragrant tea draws itself up to the side of your face.

"You’re drawing the bulk of your power from pain. From a desire to fix things that you think you alone are responsible for when the truth is that each and every one of us is constantly creating reality."

"Fuck you," you mumble. When you sit up, your head is still swimming.

"You cannot keep this up."

"If I’m such a lost case, then why do you bother?"

"I’m trying to tell you that you’re not." He points at the walls, still covered by that greenish fog. "This is the strongest display of your powers I’ve seen from you yet, and it only happened because you were lashing out. Pain is not a sustainable source of energy. Imagine what you could do if you could be in control."

Do as I tell you.

"There’s no way to control my powers on a larger scale. It’s impossible."

"You keep telling me that, and yet you keep coming back. Why?"

You push yourself up to your elbows, wiping at your face. "Because I have to hope, right?"

"And there it is."

You take a sip of your tea and some feeling returns to your translucent fingers. Strange’s cloak draws itself around your shoulders.

The wizard himself stays quiet for another minute or two, before he asks, "Why do you think I’m talking to you right now? Helping you, even, nevermind your constant whining and your insistence that this won’t work, after you’ve spent your whole life running away from anything resembling actual responsibilities."

"I didn’t—"

"Answer the question."

"Because I created a time loop?" you guess.

"But you already know that this loop is just one point on the timeline. A single day, repeated endlessly, but going exactly like it was always supposed to, once resolved. So, without the time stone and my privileges as the Sorcerer Supreme, and with your protections still in place, how would I have found you?"

He knew exactly where and when to look for you. But he’s right, that shouldn’t even have been possible unless …

"I came to you," you realize. "Or, I will, once I get out of this." The relief that washes over you makes you want to sob. "So there is a way out?"

"Of course there is," he says, surprisingly gently. "Time isn’t supposed to get stuck."

You sit with that for a minute, hiding your face in your hands as Strange stays silent. Finally, you take a deep breath and look at him again with newly sharp focus.

"So why don’t you just tell me how to do it?"

He raises an eyebrow. "You know that’s not how it works."

"Yes. It is. It’s literally what I do all the time."

"What you do is leaving realities you don’t like by turning backwards."

"That’s not true."

"Just because your motivations aren’t entirely selfish doesn’t mean you’re right."

You’re so damn exhausted. The frustration of this whole thing is really starting to scratch at your sanity, and there’s an ache in your chest as you stare at your own sleeping face, biting the inside of your cheek, thinking.

Strange snaps his fingers to get your attention back.

"I’m not a mind reader," he says. "Out with it."

"I want to see him," you say, getting up. The cloak flaps around you in a very satisfying way. "Bucky. It’s early this morning, right? Just before the loop starts again. That means he’s upstairs."

"And what’s seeing him going to do?"

You ignore him and walk towards the door, reaching for the handle. Your hand goes right through it. You try it several more times, to no avail.

"Heaven help me," Strange mutters behind you.

Shutting your eyes, you take a deep breath. The circle of green tingles around your wrist.

Then, you walk through the closed door.

You fully expect to crash into the wood head first, but instead you feel the door moving through your noncorporeal form, and then you’re standing on the other side.

With a startled hum, you turn left, not waiting to see if you’re being followed.

You only hesitate in front of Bucky’s bedroom door. You’ve never actually been inside his room since he’s moved in; well, apart from that time he patched up your feet and you woke up in the astral plane for the first time. It feels odd to consider entering without him actually being aware of it.

Then again, there’s quite a few things at this point that he’s unaware of.

Before you can make up your mind, the door swings open just a little, and you automatically take a step back. Alpine sleepily slinks through the gap and trots off in the direction you came from, probably to sit in the kitchen and mope until FRIDAY activates the food dispenser again. On the stairs, she passes Strange who raises an eyebrow at you.

"Changed your mind?"

You glance into the room.

At first, you can’t find him. The bedding looks untouched, and there’s a brief flurry of panic that makes you step inside before you can keep questioning yourself.

Bucky is lying on the floor next to the bed, his hands balled tightly into an old throw blanket. It’s haphazardly draped across his torso, like he’s been trying to wriggle free during the night. He grimaces in his sleep.

Try the floor.

You can’t help but wonder when he’s last tried the bed.

"Can he hear us?" you ask quietly, not needing to look over your shoulder as you sink to the floor next to Bucky.

"No," Strange says. "Not until you put in a lot more work."

"Would he remember if I did?"

"I don’t know."

You do look back at him, then. "You know, considering your position you don’t know a whole lot of things."

You concentrate on your own hand until you’re starting to feel cool metal underneath your fingertips, ignoring the throbbing of your head. Carefully, you touch the crease between his brows, smoothing it out tenderly.

Bucky sighs a little in his sleep, but doesn’t stir. Doesn’t stop quietly murmuring in his dreams.

"You feel better?" Strange asks.

"Not really." You’ve already reached out to him without it having any repercussions too many times. "But that wasn’t the point."

"What was?"

"Just …"

Comfort. He brings you comfort, even when he doesn’t know it. It’s the same reason you keep waiting for him to arrive in the gym in the mornings, even though you could probably hurry up and miss him.

Even if the loop never ends, it’s still good to see that it’s bringing him back like it’s supposed to.

How incredibly selfish, you think as you continue looking at Bucky and letting a quiet, hesitant wash of calm come over you.

And then, all of a sudden, his eyes open.

You flinch backwards, but even though you’re almost face to face, he seems to stare right through you, his breaths heavy.

"Did I do something?" you say quietly.

"No," Strange answers. "This is just when he wakes up."

You watch as Bucky drags a hand over his face and then gets up with a determined tick in his jaw, grabbing a notebook from the nightstand. He scribbles something down, hastily, like it’s threatening to get away from him if he doesn’t hurry. You don’t have to read it to know it has something to do with what he’s seen in his sleep.

When the words stop flowing, he sits on the edge of the bed for a minute longer, but the tension doesn’t leave his shoulders. Finally, he rolls his left arm a few times before pulling on a shirt and his running shoes.

He always goes for a run in the morning. You’ve made fun of him for it before, but you hadn’t put together that while Strange was trying to get you to clear your own head through sitting still, Bucky might be doing the exact opposite to get the same result.

The door clicks shut.

"Are we done with the spying, then?" Strange says.

"No need to get weird about it," you mumble and take his outstretched hand.

***

Something changes once you know that your situation actually has an end date, even though Strange either cannot or will not tell you how many more loops you’re going to have to go through until then. Even so, there’s a new assurance to your every step again, a determination grown from the knowledge that all this isn’t for nothing. That there is an out.

You can cling to that.

"What would you do if you were stuck in a time loop?" you ask, letting your legs dangle over the ledge of the roof.

"Ew, no," Lucy replies, shaking the few remaining ice cubes in her cup emphatically. "My shift was long enough as is, and I’ve been looking forward to my Sunday off all week."

"Fair point," you concede.

It’s early afternoon then, and you’ve found a quiet spot on the top of the Tower. If Lucy was at all confused why you’d shown up at the store right when she clocked out and asked her to hang out, she’s not showing it. Over the past couple of loops, you’ve learned that she really likes to go with the flow, and you appreciate that.

"If it’s not today, though," she continues, like she’s thinking aloud. "Imagine the books you could read. You could try out all that stuff that you say you want to do, and then you never have the time to actually do them."

It’s a good thought, but a lack of time has never really been an issue for you. "Nothing you do would really stick, though."

She squints against the sun. "You realize that’s a pro, right? No consequences whatsoever. I could cut my bangs again and they’d be gone the next day."

"You used to have bangs?"

"Never, and I’m willing to state that in a court of law."

You smile and lean back on your elbows. "If something good happened, that’d be gone, too, though. You don’t get to keep that, either."

"Yeah," Lucy says thoughtfully. "I’d still remember it though, right? It still happened. I could make it happen again."

"Maybe." Your thumb scratches the empty space on your pinkie. Even though you’ve turned your entire bathroom upside down, your ring is still gone, like it just up and disappeared from this reality. You can’t help but wonder if that rift in the sky from a few todays ago has anything to do with that.

"What about you?"

"Hm?"

Lucy takes another slurping sip from her almost empty cup. "What would you do in a time loop?"

You can’t help but laugh. "I’d try to keep making the good things happen, I guess."

"Sounds like a lot of work."

It is.

"Are you out of your damn mind?" someone shouts behind you. "It’s in the fricking nineties today and you’re baking?"

"Technically, we are baking," you say, nodding at Lucy and leaning back further so you can look at Sam upside down. "And we’re baking for you."

"Hi, cap," Lucy says, pulling her sunglasses off.

"Hey." Sam crosses his arms and fixes you with a very cap-like glare. "Why are you baking for me."

"Y/N said it’s for your birthday."

"My—" He cuts himself off, rubbing his temples. "My birthday’s in September."

"Whoops," you say, your grin just believable enough. "My bad, cap."

"You’re not funny," Sam says, "I hope you know that."

You know.

Of course, today isn’t actually his birthday, not even if time were allowed to pass normally. It is day forty-fucking-nine of the loop, though, which makes it your fiftieth time living through this crap and frankly, you all deserve some damn pie.

It’s not going to make a difference in the long run, of course, and yet you can’t help but feel like keeping count of those little markers of time helps to hold your head above water. Making the good things happen, even if they don’t change a thing and no one but you is going to remember.

So you simply say, "It’s turtle pie," because you know that it’s Sam’s favorite. "Hey, what’s the time?"

"Oh, it better be," he says, holding his phone up for you to read and then marching out of your field of vision.

Sadly, you’re just about a minute early.

"He could’ve stayed," Lucy says when you let out a frustrated huff.

"He has that thing at the Garden," you tell her distractedly, taking a mental note to stall Sam a little longer next time.

"There you are."

You flinch at the sound of Bucky’s voice, barely daring to move your head when he sits next to you, his back to the brink.

He never comes up here. That’s the whole point.

"Hi?" you say carefully, and a grin tugs at his mouth.

"Not you," he says, nodding to the ground in front of him.

You turn around fully to find Alpine taking a nap just a few feet behind you, her snowy tail wrapped around a flower pot.

You let out a relieved breath and ignore the small sting in your chest. Of course he’s not up here because of you. Why would he be?

"Gee, thanks," you murmur, quietly shifting around so your hands are hidden underneath your legs. "You sure know how to charm the ladies."

You glance back at Lucy, but she’s looking at her phone, her eyes once again indecipherable behind the large sunglasses.

Bucky raises an eyebrow. "Think you could handle my charm, Y/L/N?"

He might has well have doused you in a bucket of ice water. You’re suddenly very aware of every single cell in your body, and you don’t like the challenge sparkling in his eyes.

So you do what you always do and you block it out. Dismiss and distract.

"Does Alpine seem weird to you?"

He tilts his head, his jaw tight. "Weird how?"

"I don’t know," you say, staring at her. "She’s just been acting … odd, lately. Today, I mean."

And following you around in a way you’re pretty sure she’s never done before. Not before the loop, at least.

Bucky sighs. "Did you make her scratch you again? Because I’ve told you before that I’m not getting rid of her for enforcing her boundaries."

"First of all, I never make her scratch me, she does that well enough on her own."

"That’s victim blaming," Lucy says without looking up. Bucky snorts and you almost roll your eyes.

"Second of all, she’s up to something. I know it."

"Oh, yes," Bucky says dryly just as Alpine makes a small noise in her dreams, her nose twitching. "That’s the embodiment of evil right there."

"I don’t trust her," you mutter.

"And yet the cat’s the weird one."

"I hate you," you mumble, standing up. "I’m gonna go check on the pie."

"There’s pie?" Bucky says.

"Not for you!"

You turn at the door to see Lucy leaning in to show Bucky something on her phone; the frown has disappeared from his face, his shoulders relaxed. If he’d pull off his glove right now, it’d almost be like sitting in a park.

That’s good, you tell yourself as the door slams shut behind you with a bit too much gusto. Reminds you that there’s nothing special about you in particular, which is much needed, really.

Can’t wait to punch that one out of your system later.

Again and again and again and a—

"Whoa, whoa, you alright?"

You blink. Riff slumps to the ground in front of you, body limp.

Bucky stares at you in concern, his hand still on your shoulder. His lip has split open and there’s the usual bruise already forming on his cheekbone. You can’t help it. Your gaze is drawn down, your breathing shallow.

You screw your eyes shut to snap yourself out of it, but when you open them again, Bucky hasn’t moved an inch.

"Never better," you whisper, and for a split second, you almost believe it yourself.

Liar, liar, liar.

***

At least, you suppose, reality seems considerably less broken these days. No more cracks in the sky.

You get your wake-up call when you wake up with a start to the sun in your face and FRIDAY …

"… FRIDAY?" you say into the silence of your room, your heart pounding wildly. This cannot be happening. Not now.

Not yet.

He got shot again yesterday.

A pleasant jingling sound rings out. "Good morning, Ms. Y/L/N."

You look at the clock on the wall. Ten to eight, just like every morning. "What day is it?"

"Today is Friday, July 4th."

You can taste bile in your mouth despite your relief. There’s an impatient thrum to the symbols around your wrist, like a noose that’s tightening.

What did you expect?

"Rise and shine, McFly! Time to get your ass kicked!"

"Didn’t you set FRIDAY to wake me?" you ask Sam as you’re climbing the stairs, nerves on edge.

He looks at you weirdly. "I did. You’re up, aren’t you?"

You bite the inside of your cheek. "Didn’t sleep well."

That much, at least, is still true. Full nights of sleep are a long distant memory from before constant back-to-back repetitions. The only time your body shuts off is when you manage to sleep for a little bit in between your astral visits and the mission call.

"I hope you don’t think that’s an excuse," Sam says, bumping your shoulder, and you manage a tired grin.

"You wish."

Today, you let him win, even though your ankle makes an odd crack when you land on the mat. You’ll take care of it later.

"You look like shit."

Grief and relief, you’ve learned, both taste like salt and iron, but the latter is so much easier to swallow.

"That makes two of us," you say, sitting up slowly. "How was your run?"

"Good," Bucky says, putting the cloth away and stretching his fingers out. They catch a ray of sunlight. "What’s wrong with you?"

Not this again.

"Later, okay?" you answer, because that’s not a lie. "Let’s just … not, right now?"

"Alright," he says.

And, oh, you want to tell him again. Because he doesn’t press it. Because you miss having someone to share things with. Because you miss telling him the whole truth. Because you’re scared, and tired, and sick of losing him.

But those are egotistic thoughts, and so you keep them all to yourself and take the towel on the right.

There’s one good thing about this today. You make it to the living room just in time to finally catch a glimpse of Sam’s phone right when it pings with Torres’ message.

I can check it out on Monday if you’d like.

That’s it. No urgency, weirdly proper spelling, not even an exclamation mark.

In other words, you’re not sure what you expected but you’re no closer to answers than before.

"What does it matter?" Strange sighs when you tell him all of this with a frown.

"It matters," you reply, "because if we hadn’t gone on the mission, Bucky wouldn’t have died that first time and none of this would’ve happened."

"So what?" he says. "It’s already done."

"But if I could prevent it—"

"It already happened."

"I can make it not happen."

"You and what powers?" Strange says sharply. "Even if you did that, it wouldn’t stop the loop."

"How do you know that?"

"Because you’ve already seen first-hand that it’s bound to you and your powers, not to whatever you do or don’t do during the day. Karma is a fairy tale for those who don’t want to take responsibility for their actions."

"Do you really still think this is me not taking responsibility?" There’s a green flare that goes through you, hot and seething and making goosebumps crawl down your arms.

Strange smiles at the sight. "Let’s find out."

He extends his arms and slowly opens his fists until orange symbols dance across his shaky fingers. The band around your wrist prickles at the weight of his magic flooding the air.

Strange’s cloak nudges you towards the center of the room and your heart gives a heavy thud. "What, right now?"

"Would you prefer being stuck for a couple weeks more?"

"Of course not it’s just—I don’t feel ready."

"No one ever feels ready until they try."

And maybe it’s because it reminds you of something Steve once said, but it makes you step up, falling into the stance you’ve practiced over and over again. You breathe in deeply and close your eyes.

The pull comes easier now. Your powers have just been resting, nestled somewhere deep inside your bones like glowing embers, waiting for you to call upon them.

When you look at your open palm, the green wisps of your powers have curled up to the size of a ping-pong ball. You take another steadying breath and let it glide to the tips of your fingers, carefully letting it balance itself out for a second before moving your other hand.

"Good," you can hear Strange say quietly.

Slowly, carefully, you let the threads untangle until they’re just about to touch the green band circling around your wrist. You can feel the electric tingle of it, the soft beat of each passing second contained within, and you push past it.

You’ve done this before, so you’re not surprised when you feel the energy drain from your body almost immediately. Up until now, though, it’s just been trial and error, not expecting anything to happen. This time, you have Strange’s magic feeding some of his strength into you as well, and so instead of hesitating, you press on, your heartbeat speeding up.

The band around your wrist does the same.

"Don’t lose your focus." Strange’s voice sounds very far away, almost warped.

Very funny, you might have said, but you’re too busy watching it all unfold.

The whirring inside of your head grows louder as the circlet of time keeps rotating with accelerating speed, faster and faster until your eyes start tearing up and there’s something that looks almost like a crack.

You gasp quietly. At first, you think you might have just imagined it, but then the split starts growing, the symbols growing farther and farther apart as the band itself keeps spinning. Your pulse is beating in your ears. Your wrist feels like it’s being set on fire.

There are voices, then, quiet and fast, like you’re watching a sped up movie, music and noises and chatter and birdsong and a whooshing sound like something flipping right past you. Then, something like distant shots.

I’m getting Bucky out of this, you think as the green band continues rotating until suddenly, there is a shockwave of green light that takes up your entire field of vision.

You close your stinging eyes, keeping your feet firmly planted on the floor as your powers rush through you once more and then, with a shudder, settle down again, exhausted. The glare subsides. Something like a trickle of sweat runs down your noncorporeal neck.

"Did it work?" you ask, your voice rough, not daring to look for yourself. There’s no answer, though. "Doc?"

Slowly, your eyes readjust to the gloomy darkness of your room in the astral realm. The only source of light is the glowing green band continuing to circle around your wrist, the rifts stabilizing again like it’s clicking back into place.

You swear under your breath and turn around to ask what went wrong, but Strange is no longer standing beside you.

You’re all alone.

***

Three, two, one—

"Iced grande extra whip caramel macchia—shit!"

You catch the plastic cup before it drops onto the suit of the business man standing in line in front of you. "Here you go, sir."

He grabs his drink with a grunt and hurries back outside. One of these days, you might ask him why he’s in such a hurry, but it’s not today.

You’ve grown to adore the noise of the pre-noon rush. The cacophany of the whirring machines, the AC and the people is just loud enough to make your head calm down a little. Besides, being alone in a crowd has never been easier than when you know for a fact they are not going to remember you.

The drinks are starting to pile up at the hand-out, and because you feel bad for your colleagues, you start handing them out to people. You’ve been here a lot, after all.

"Tall hazelnut latte for Misty!"

Plus, it helps to keep your mind from wandering back to everything that’s going wrong.

Strange still hasn’t returned.

The astral dimension feels different when you return the day after your experiment, like someone’s been pulling invisible strings to make everything just slightly more disordered and dark.

It’s cold, too. You watch your body shiver in her sleep as you wrap your arms around yourself. The books are still there, shimmering slightly with the magic they contain.

"Doc?" you call out, and the vibrations of this place hum it back at you. There’s no answer.

The book at the top of the pile is still opened to a page, as if it’d just been left a moment ago, and you pick it up. The words glide around like they are looking to jump back into an inkpot, and you have to squint to make out any of them.

Incursion, the section header reads. Result of a contraction in a universe’s timeline. Can cause premature disintegration or collapse of any one reality within the multiverse.

"Just great," you say, slapping the book shut again. "I get it, alright? You can come out now."

But there’s no sound apart from your own heartbeat.

Your noncorporeal head is swimming with pressure as you pass through the closed door and into the hallway. The walls seem larger than usual, the stairs warping ever so slightly underneath your feet so that you can’t look at them for too long without feeling seasick.

Upstairs, the air doesn’t feel quite as heavy. The silence follows you, though, lingering in the grayish morning shadows like the remnants of a nightmare.

Bucky still mumbles in his.

You can’t make out what he is saying, and you wouldn’t have understood the words, anyway, but there’s sweat on his brow again. His fingers are tightly clutching the thin throw blanket like it’s shielding him from whatever he’s seeing in his dreams.

You take a step closer to him, desperate to do something, anything, when you notice movement out of the corner of your eye.

Alpine is perched on top of the bed, complacently tucked into herself on one of the fluffed up white pillows like it’s really her room, not Bucky’s.

And she’s staring right at you.

You take a step to the side, then another. Alpine tilts her head, her large eyes fixed on you. They follow your gestures as you wave your hand.

A quick glance tells you that Bucky is still sleeping. You take a deep breath and conjure up a small dot of bright green light, letting it dance across your fingertips. Alpine uncurls herself in interest, her tail twitching.

"You can see me," you whisper, and the little spec of your power disappears.

The cat meows in disappointment.

Carefully, you move closer to the bed, reaching out your translucent hand until you place it on Alpine’s head.

She rubs against your palm.

You chuckle incredulously, scratching behind her ears. "You little devil."

Alpine seems particularly pleased with herself. She starts purring.

This is simply bizarre, you think as you continue petting her soft fur. You’re expecting a sarcastic comment from behind your shoulder any minute now, but it doesn’t come.

So, you lower yourself down on the floor next to Bucky, the tips of your fingers not quite grazing his arm as you swallow heavily.

And then you wait until he gets up.

It’s possible, you think as you watch him leave and then make yourself wake up too, that Strange is simply messing with you for the hell of it. You don’t like the timing of this, though. Your day still continues on and on and on, like it always does, but it seems just a little too pointed that this would happen right after you had your first hopes of getting out of here in a long time.

It doesn’t help that the reality glitches have decided to return with a vengeance.

Every day is still July 4th. You wake up with a start, you train, you get coffee, you fight over lunch, you take your astral visit, you go on that damn mission. It’s the details that start to get … fuzzy.

In the beginning, every single thing around you was the exact same every single day. Now, though, there are sometimes details that are just wrong. A different mug left on the drying rack. A mess all over the tables in the lab. Weird noises all over the Tower.

You don’t know what to make of any of it, and so in general, you follow Strange’s rule of thumb and simply ignore the things that are wrong one day and then right the next—which, thankfully, is all of them. You just go with it, telling yourself that this is simply reality malfunctioning a little, like a machine that needs oiling.

Weirdly enough, that doesn’t reassure you in the slightest.

But what else can you do?

You lose a few hours here and there, time seemingly speeding up at random sometimes now. One morning, Bucky isn’t in the gym like he usually is, and you work yourself up over it so much you nearly have a panic attack. In the end, you almost crash into him outside of his room, and a rush of reassurance floods through you with such force you can’t even look at him.

That time, Sam is there when Bucky gets shot, and it’s his cry that follows you into the next day. Your hands are clean this time, and somehow that feels worse.

Everyone’s back to their usual stuff again, and that’s that.

Another time, you’ve barely rolled out of bed and into your bathroom—"Rise and shine, McFly!"—when you’re suddenly jolted forwards and you wake up with a start to the sun in your face and FRIDAY blasting The All-American Rejects at full volume. Your stomach feels like it’s still turning, nauseous, as if you’d sat up too fast.

That feeling still leaves a bad taste in your mouth, sticking to the back of your mind like the blood you haven’t even had time to wash off.

The thing that demands most of your attention, though, is the pile of books waiting for you in the astral realm. Since you don’t have any control over the loop itself, you pour all of your energy into trying to understand the theory behind your powers. It’s giving you a constant headache, and it takes a lot longer than you would like to admit, but at least you feel like you’re doing something that’ll last.

Nothing else will.

There’s one last lonely cup sat on the counter next to your own, which signals that the rush is over for now. You can see Lucy wiping her forehead as you wave your goodbye, picking up both drinks on your way out and handing one of them to the guy just hurrying back downstairs.

"Here you go," you say without stopping, glancing at your phone. You haven’t stayed this late before.

"What the—" you hear behind you, just before the doors glide open and you’re greeted by the sound of traffic and a hot breeze of air.

If you’re lucky, you can make it back to your room without anyone seeing you. You’ve moved on to a particularly hefty tome about relativity, and you’d like to—

"Hey! Miss? Hold on a second!"

You look over your shoulder to see the delivery guy has run after you, cup still in his hand. His bike is leaned against a lamp post nearby, his cap dangling off one of the handles.

You found out a couple of weeks ago that he takes his break just after dropping off your order, but you don’t usually make eye contact anymore.

Now, he holds out his cup accusingly. "That’s my drink."

You smile. "Good for you."

"No. No, that’s not—I mean—how did you know it was my drink?"

And because nothing really matters and you really want to go home, you say, "It has your name on it, doesn’t it?"

You expect him to look at you with wide eyes, just like people normally do when you know things you’re not supposed to. His mouth will drop open, speechless, his frown will deepen, and you can wink at him and continue on your way so he can spend the next couple of hours wondering what just happened.

The cup falls out of his hand, but somehow he manages to catch it before it hits the sidewalk. When he looks up at you again, and his expression is unlike anything you’ve seen coming.

"But that’s not …" he says quietly. "Do you remember me?"

And then it’s you who’s speechless, because the shock on Peter Parker’s face is more than you bargained for.

*****

"Honestly, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this," you said quietly, looking over the rim of your glass at the crowd.

"You complaining?" you heard Sam’s voice say over the little earpiece you were wearing.

"Not at all."

Apparently, people connected to terrorist organizations threw incredibly fancy parties.

You hadn’t felt this glamorous in a while, if ever, dressed up to the nines in a dark green jumpsuit with an incredibly flattering cut that you’d never had a reason to wear before. Despite your initial doubts about this whole thing, you felt great, for the first time in way too long.

"Are you gonna move any time soon?"

Well. Mostly.

At least Barnes cleaned up nice, you supposed; it almost made up for his grouchy demeanor.

With a sigh, you downed the rest of your drink and got back to work. You let the crowd swallow you up, seemingly on your way to the restrooms, and then you stopped it all to slip upstairs unnoticed by prying eyes and cameras.

You didn’t hold it for very long; you had to rattle some doors, after all, and despite your espresso martini, it was still hard to tell if you could manage several redos back to back. After all, you’d only been back in the game for a couple of weeks.

It took you a few tries to find the right office, and locating the files was comparatively easy with what you already had access to. There it was, proof that ULTIMATUM had managed to secure most of the Flag Smashers’ previous supporters as well as some high brow weapon dealers.

While you copied everything onto a flashdrive, your eyes caught one of the designs. You frowned.

Even though you couldn’t pinpoint what it was, exactly, something about it seemed just slightly too highbrow for an organization of the international bad egg committee that was supposedly still mostly underground. Your gaze started drifting through the rest of the office, noting the usual boring books and glass awards in the bookshelves on the far wall. You pulled open one of the desk drawers.

"You almost done in here?"

"Fuck!" You slammed the drawer shut again, getting your pinkie stuck in the process. "Damnit, where did you come from?"

Bucky pointed over his shoulder.

"Fuck me," you murmured, your eyes stinging at the pain.

Bucky looked nonplussed. "Can’t you just undo it?"

"Great input, thank you." The flashdrive beeped softly and you shut everything down again. At least you were definitely sober now. "What are you, anyway, my babysitter?"

"Wouldn’t have to be if you could check in on time," he answered, checking the corridors, then nodding for you to follow.

"Time’s a social construct," you murmured, but followed him, the flashdrive hidden in your fist.

You didn’t even make it to the staircase.

"Didn’t I tell you?" a voice said right before several triggers clicked and you both froze. "I knew I’d recognized that arm. And who do you have with you here, Winter Soldier?"

No one, you thought, and then you yanked time backwards so forcefully you stumbled into the desk, your heart still racing. The copy sat at 57%.

You felt almost seasick with the rewind, but there wasn’t any time. "Keep going upstairs," you said into your earpiece.

"What?" Bucky said.

"I’m fine. Don’t come get me. Just keep going," you gritted through your teeth, trying to calm your breaths. 70%.

"Exit plan C, then," Sam said.

Bucky didn’t answer. You looked at your hands. There was a slight tremor to them, but nothing too bad. If you could get the nausea under control, you could probably make it past the cameras one more time.

You should’ve eaten more.

As soon as the flashdrive was done, you ripped it out and forced everything to a halt again. Your palms were sweaty as you hurried out of the office and in the direction of the staircase, your lungs burning. This didn’t feel like a good sign.

You stumbled over your damn heels and the noise returned for that moment you lost your concentration.

Not good enough.

Sweat pearled on your forehead as you and the universe held your breath again. You could feel your hold slipping with every second that wasn’t allowed to pass. Time was impatient with you.

A small crowd had assembled at the bottom of the stairs. As you closed in on them, you felt a jolt go through you and suddenly found yourself surrounded by people as time attempted to right itself again. Your nails dug into the skin of your palm so hard you could feel yourself draw blood.

It went quiet again and you moved through them, almost blindly. Everything seemed to be spinning.

Behind your shoulder, you could hear several people talking, interrupted only by the world stopping around them every now and then.

"—d’you—see that—"

"—could’ve—sworn there—”

And with time stumbling and flailing around in confusion, you made it out of the building and into the waiting cab.

chapter seven

thank you for reading!! you can follow my library blog @intrepidacious-fics for update notifications 💚

[happypedrohours]

Choose 1, or 2 or 3 (or all of them) from the following lists and send them to fellow Happy Pedro Hours partakers to get to know them better and to have a good laugh!! (We kindly remind you of the Tumblr etiquette back in the day which is that if you receive an ask, it's customary to send one back to the person so they get to answer one (or two or three) themselves)

Don't forget to tag all your replies #happypedrohours !!

June 22nd updates: added questions to Would you rather and Get to know me lists, new Either Or list at the bottom of the post

Would you rather list

Have mint ice cream or chocolate gelato

Have blackberry sherbet or lemon popsicle

Drink Coca Cola or Pepsi

Eat a pizza with mushroom or pineapple on it

Spend one day in a spaceship or one day on an icebreaker

Visit Mars or Saturn?

Live in a little cottage surrounded by frog pond or fields of horses?

Road trip through the US or Australia?

Spend a day wearing no make up or wearing too small shoes?

Learn how to make sushi or noodles?

Eat a hamburger dipped in chocolate or fries dipped in fluff?

Hike an active volcano or a rainforest during a storm?

Cuddle a bear cub or a litter of baby squirrels?

Go on the Orient Express or trek to Victoria Falls?

Sleep under the stars by a swamp or in a hammock hanging from a cliff?

Have universal respect or unlimited power?

Swim in a pool full of Nutella or a pool full of maple syrup?

Spend a week in the forest or a night in a real haunted house?

*updated list*

Always have to tell the truth or always have to lie?

Run your tongue down a NYC sidewalk or press your tongue into a stranger's nostril?

Be in the real-life version of "The Walking Dead" or "American Horror Story"?

Have the hiccups for the rest of your life or always feel like you're about to sneeze but can't?

Use sandpaper as toilet paper or hot sauce as eye drops?

Be sticky for the rest of your life or be itchy for the rest of your life?

Pedro Boys edition

Would would win in a hand-to-hand fight? Dave York or Din Djarin?

Who's the better parents? Din Djarin or Mrs Flores?

Who would win the race? Frankie Morales or Din Djarin (Razor Crest edition, no space jump allowed)

Who would win in a fight? Oberyn Martell or Marcus Moreno?

Who the better cuddler during wintertime? Javi G or Marcus P?

Who's the grumpiest when they show up at their surprise birthday party? Joel or Javi P?

Who has more fashion sense? Javi G or Oberyn Martell?

Who has the best aim with a gun? Joel or Dave York?

Who has the scariest intimidating scowl? Javi P or Joel?

Who is better at reading bedtime stories? Din or Marcus Moreno?

Who’s the best movie night buddy? Dieter or Javi G?

Who’s the best at barbecuing? Frankie or Joel?

Who would win in a eating contest? Marcus P or Max Philips?

Get to know you list

If you could go back to any time period, where would you like to go and why?

What's your favorite color and the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of it?

If you could be transported in any fictional universe, where would you go?

What's a song that reminds you of your favorite season?

Do you read books and if yes, what's your favorite genre?

Do you cook and what's your favorite dish to make?

What's the one place in the world you have always dreamed of visiting?

What is the first concert you attended to?

What did you want to be when you were small?

What’s your favorite swear word (in any language) and why?

Are you a morning person or a night owl?

What was/is your favorite subject in school?

If you could only wear one color for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Who was your first celebrity crush?

What’s a weird smell that you really enjoy?

Do you have a favorite kind of flower?

Which meal is your favorite: breakfast, lunch, or dinner?

Do you collect anything?

*updated list*

What color is your toothbrush?

What's your favorite summer activity?

What's the strangest thing you've ever eaten?

What's the sexiest animal?

What is the worst job you could have?

If you could paint anything, what would you paint?

Who is your favorite cartoon character?

Who's your favorite superhero and why?

*New category*

Either or

Museum or carnival?

Horror movie or romcom?

Tea or coffee?

Friends or How I Met Your Mother?

Cat or dog?

Left side or right side of the bed?

Bath or shower?

Paintings or sculptures?

Summertime or wintertime?

Hugs or kisses?

Apple juice or orange juice?

Unicorn or mermaid?

Apple or Android?

Netflix or Disney+?

Instagram or TikTok?

Cereal or toast?

Burger or tacos?

Dinosaurs or dragons?

Greek mythology or Egyption mythology?

New York City or Los Angeles?

Crossword puzzles or jigsaw puzzle?

[chaosmagetwin]

Hello! My name is Halie (Pronounced Hay Lee), my pronons are She / It, I'm 31 years old, I'm pansexual normally(but right now I’m Asexual. Not aromantic though!) but a bit demi with it, and this post is about who I am! While I'm here, if you're a terf, go away <3 If you're a minor you're on thin ice, just DNI. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother flirting atm, but if you feel the need, just come into it with literally 0 expectations of a response. There's a solid 75% chance I'll delete or ignore horny posts, even if I do like you. That said, feel free to send prompts of any kind into my box, especially for stories of some kind. The weirder and more genderfucky, the better.

Owner is @thewhorehome Love you Daddy <3

These're my gender graphs. I would love to consolidate them all into one graph, but IDK what program that would be or what that would even begin to look like considering how many variables there are, so, ya know, I did my best. These are not gender graphs that are a "one size fits all", they are mine. If you feel like associating with them feel free, but if you want to know why [Insert gender thing for you] isn't on here, it's because I have no opinion on it, don't know it exists, or don't think it applies to me! I associate with demons a lot (as the graph says) but I recently discovered that the type of demon I am is the Acedia Demon, or Noonday Demon. Aka, the demon of depression. Basically, I murdered the host of this body and replaced him. Now I’m making it my own body. I strongly feel like I’m not the original host, but I have access to those memories.

Now for a little bit more about me. CW: my BDSM test, A master list to my different writing projects, some selfies (SFW only), and maybe a few other things.

It's funny, a year ago that "Dominant" was at 7%, and switch was sub 20%. Sadist was also at a sub 20%, and voyeur was... sub 40% I think? I've gone through some things, most of which is from one off dates.

Now, for the Master list! If you're from The Old Times (there's like.... 4 of you, idk if you're even real, but w/e.) you MIGHT recognize this. It's been 8 million shwillion years, and I've decided to update. Don't go thinking that this means this blog is going to go and get serious though.

First up, the major projects!

Do not read this on phone. The footnotes DO NOT WORK in a decent manner. I'm sorry.

Layla is a transgirl space scavenger mechanic, an anarchist from Mars where Hypercorps run everything, and she's just hit a minor jackpot; an empty cargo ship filled with material that can not only earn her a lot of credits, but also reputation. There's just one problem; there's no pilot, there's no destination, and there's nothing to indicate what really happened.

Set in Eclipse Phase (A Transhumanist Sci-fi TTRPG), Hive's Story is a horror, about the scariest parts of being early in transition; not knowing who you are, or who you'll become, and how people abandon you. It's still a work in progress, naturally.

Charm used to be human... before she died, anyways. She's wound up in another world, and she feels different, but it's difficult to say how exactly! She doesn't remember NOT being a Hellsworn, even in her old life, but there weren't exactly Hellsworn there. She's lost, confused, and worse, she seems to be hated by anyone who isn't a hellsworn as well, and now she's being forced into the slums outside the city! Slums that are roiling with deceit, and love, and a fomenting rebellion that major players in the slums are trying to prevent. But she's not the only one who's been isekai'd; John's still trying to run the rat race; he figures he can start small, just be a mason, try to live a quiet life. He didn't think he was interested in a loud life... but something is wrong. He was doing that in his last life... and died for it! He's alone, surrounded by people who tolerate and use him, but he doesn't know what to think anymore.

Hellsworn Charm is a story about a girl on an upwards trajectory from the bottom and finding a ceiling of oppression, and about a man who is on a downwards trajectory from... well, not the top. Both struggle with their lack of purpose, but where one gets a support network, the other does not, and the two's trajectories are on a collision path. The story is more world-building than plot, and once i realized I didn't really have one, it sputtered out.

Next up, some minor projects! Some have been dropped, some are still being worked on.

This post goes into what what it is, as well as explains where it's from ^.^

WHEW. The OG. The one that... almost started it all. There were a few versions of AOM before this, but goddamn, this is the one I put the effort into. It's got some notes in it from when I was trying to rework it, which I still might do, but this version is better than the newer one, even still.

I still want to work on this one, tbh. It's a story about an apocalypse of magic (AOM), with the main character, Rhea, waking up in a hospital, having survived a magical plague in 2020 (I swear, I wrote this in 2012 or something, cut me some slack) that turned her into a Kitsune, and her brother into a Giant. At first, it's all about survival. Later, it's about realizing the depravity of humanity.

The other OG. Lesbians witches who hate each other, and also have to deal with their country falling apart. One is the princess, the other a rebellious peasant. I used prompts to get started on each part.

Honestly, don't know that I'll ever pick this one up again. I like their dynamic, but the world just wasn't it, I think. I've tried reworking it, like, 4 different times.

My very first ever long story, and also my longest even now. Almost 90 pages! I got so far! And god, my pacing was terrible. Fun though. It's FILLED with my annotations.

Aisleigh is a very poor woman who just got invited to Chile to go to a very rich mans party. She gets experimented on midway, and it goes from "Poor girl being uplifted to high society" to "kind of super-hero origin story, except she's now a brilliant fox girl". Listen, young Halie was cooking, but she did NOT know what she was doing.

A super hero origin story, except in this one, the main character began to lose her emotions. Can't really talk much about this one, pretty sure I was writing it while feeling dysphoric and worried about the apathy that was consuming my life :)

That's pretty much all of what I'm willing to share from my projects these days, but I've got a few more I'm still working on. I may add more to this over time. As of September 2024, these projects are a Mecha story, a post apocalypse mage who is so lonely she's disassociating, and whatever else happens to catch my attention.

Anyways, here's me

Also, since I'm here, I might as well talk about what I'm even into, fandom / hobby wise (besides writing)

In no particular order

She-ra, House, The Owl House, Sewing, Music, Signalis, Art (even if I can't draw y.y I love looking at it), Cooking (Is there greater joy than cooking for people and making a delicious meal? No.), TTRPG's, RP, FF14, Metroid (I've never played a single game of it, but I love Samus and always have and always will), Halo (I had every book at one point), Starfinder (I have a lot of books! I'm still trying to collect them all. Don't get to play it much though y.y), Eclipse Phase, Homestuck, and Traveller's Tale! I also love astronomy, the deep ocean, spiders, castles, knights, witches, dolls, empty spaces versions of those a little bit, fashion, goth fashion and especially pastel goth, and some others but that's all I can think of.

Thanks for reading!

[oraclekleo]

Jungwon (ENHYPEN) Relationship Role Tarot Reading

Disclaimer:

All celebrity readings have purely entertainment nature

I don’t know any of the celebrities personally

Don’t base life decisions purely on tarot readings

I can never guarantee any of what’s said in the reading

Feedback: Feedback is very important for content creators and for me it’s even more important. Please, let me know whether the tarot readings resonate. If there’s anything you dislike or find off about my readings (like wording, topics, focus), just tell me. I don’t want you to write 1000-word feedback, very simple comments will do for me to stay motivated. I don’t know why I have to keep repeating this but this is something I do for you, guys, and when I don’t feel motivated to do tarot readings, I have many other things to do. The more motivation I get, the more readings you will get to read. The logic is very simple but it’s two sided.

Reading Info:

Rating: 18+

Reading Type: Single - Couple

Requested: Yes - No

Requester: /

Deck(s): E. A. Poe Tarot

Spread: Relationship Role

Questions:

Friend

Boyfriend

Lover

Husband

One-Night-Stand

Celebrity Info:

Full Name: Yang Jung Won

Stage Name: Jungwon

Group: ENHYPEN

DOB: 09.02.2004

Blood Type: AB

MBTI: ISTJ

Sun Sign: Aquarius

Chinese Sign: Wood Monkey

Life Path Number: 8

Masterpost: Enhypen

Yang Jung Won

Jungwon (Enhypen)

Deck: E. A. Poe Spread: Relationship Role

Friend - 8 of Wands, 10 of Wands

Jungwon is likely to be a very dynamic, busy and fast moving friend. His mind is likely to be way too quick for his friends to comprehend. He might lose focus and get bored easily and he’s always looking for new hobbies and activities to explore with his group of friends. He’s likely to be overwhelming sometimes, maybe even too wild. He’s likely to be the one friend always rushing the rest.

Boyfriend - XIII The Death, 10 of Cups

When it comes to dating, Jungwon is a completely different person. He becomes compassionate, loving, caring and joyful. He’s both a romantic and faithful boyfriend. He’s a ray of sunshine and makes every day feel special and new for his significant other.

Lover - Knight of Cups, King of Wands

Lover Jungwon is courteous and romantic. He knows how to set the right mood for the night and there’s no creature in this world that could resist his seducing. He’s also a goal oriented lover and his goal is the pleasure of his partner. Jungwon knows how to transform ideas and dreams into reality and he takes love making seriously. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for his lover to make them feel special and at the top of the world.

Husband - 5 of Pentacles, 10 of Pentacles

Jungwon might be rather pragmatic about marriage. The cards suggest strong material influence. It’s possible Jungwon wouldn’t have a problem getting married in order to unite two families and their wealth. For him, the institution of marriage is a serious matter. He wants to leave something behind, a legacy for next generations. And he will work for it.

One-Night-Stand - 7 of Pentacles, Knight of Wands

Jungwon is not very likely to be into random love affairs. If he ever slips, it’s more likely due to his recklessness and ill judgement of the situation. He might see it as a way to cope with stress but afterwards he will probably think it was a mistake and will try to bury the memory of it.

I have promised to post this reading again, once Jungwon is legal, which happened in February.

First of all, Jungwon, welcome to adulthood - the scariest hood. 😂

Also, this reading was done in March 2022 so if it doesn't resonate that much, Jungwon might have grown up or matured over the time. I don't follow ENHYPEN so you have to tell me whether an update is needed.

My YouTube suggested me the upcoming comeback highlight and... you guys who stand ENHYPEN and follow me have to be pretty excited, right? 🤣 I can't even tell the members apart but it looks pretty impressive. 🤭

Thank you for reading!

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[inamindfarfaraway]

I love mind control tropes, I love Black Friday, and arguably the most moral characters in the play Tom and Becky being turned by Wiggly into selfish, callous, ruthless antagonists is one of the scariest parts of the play for me. So I ended up writing a little glimpse into Tom’s mind when he’s completely in Wiggly’s thrall, falling deeper and deeper. I’m posting it in case anyone in this fandom shares my love of scenes like this. It’s set right after he leaves Becky and Hannah for dead.

Update: now on AO3 with a second chapter adapting the “If I Fail You” scene.

***

Tom ran. His footsteps thundered across the eerie, deserted courtyard. The mall was still swarming with brutal cultists, cultists headed by Linda Monroe at that. Most of them had blood on their hands from the rioting earlier. They would tear him to shreds for the cloth and foam he was clutching. Not to mention Becky would be furious when she woke up - he was sorry, but he couldn’t help that he needed Wiggly more than her, and it was her own fault for sedating herself and becoming dead weight. The sooner he was out of here, the better. The air was thick with tension. Acidic storm clouds were gathering in his stomach, the sense of foreboding that the situation in the mall would only get worse, and he didn’t want to stay to find out how lest hell rain down upon him.

Hell. Wasn’t that kind of funny? All hell breaking loose, over a random toy.

A good toy though, he would admit. His throbbing stab wound made him slow to a walk and he took the time to reexamine his prize. Wiggly really was cute, with his big fuzzy eyebrows and little fingers like twirly straws and soft, fluffy body. Stroking his tumsy-wumsy did feel satisfying.

Hello Tom. I’m so glad you found me. I was afwaid I would never get to play with you.

Whoever designed this little guy knew what they were doing. And the marketing was great. He still couldn’t get that song out of his head. So the mania and murderous cult wasn’t justified, obviously, he wasn’t saying that, but… maybe it was understandable. Maybe Tom could understand all hell breaking loose.

(It didn’t occur to him to be confused that Wiggly knew his name and was saying things besides his scripted lines. It was impossible to be suspicious of anything said in such an endearing voice.)

“My son’s gonna love you,” he muttered.

Tim’s smile beamed in his mind’s eye, so close and ever closer. His face lighting up as he realized why his dad had really left, his laughter as he played with his new toy, a proper embrace between them for the first time in far too long. Tom might have failed his wife and his sister-in-law and his old flame, but he wouldn’t - couldn’t fail his son too. He was still a good dad. He was, dammit. And this would prove it. He had to come through for Tim, no matter the cost.

If he couldn’t even be a good dad anymore… he was nothing. And what kind of parent would he be if he wasn’t willing to do anything for his child?

A failure.

See? He totally needed Wiggly the most! Wiggly was what Tim wanted and as he said, Tim would definitely love him.

Of course he will. Everyone loves me. Everyone wants me, so you’ve got to hold onto me. And I’ll hold onto you too. That’s what fwends do, isn’t it?

What a nice thought: a toy that loved you back. Maybe hell on Earth wasn’t that bad if it meant magic was real.

He nodded at Wiggly in agreement. “No way am I letting you go.”

That’s right. Just hold on; never let go. You’re my fwendy-wend now, and you’re going to play my game. This will be so much fun!

“Yeah. Thanks to you, everything will be perfect,” he breathed, and putting it into words felt like finally sliding a round peg into a circular hole. A beacon of happiness crystallizing in a world of chaos, pain and misery. He had what he needed. It would all be okay. He and his son would live happily ever after, just like life was a story being written for them, with hope building in every subsequent word.

Wiggly’s laughter echoed around his skull. Now Tom didn’t even notice that it wasn’t the same as the recorded version or pay attention to exactly what was said next. Why should he? He already knew that he’d agree with it, because Wiggly was about the only thing that made sense anymore. He was so glad he’d found him. Even the bitter sting of leaving Becky behind faded into sweet oblivion, eclipsed by the joy of a Tickle-Me Wiggly secure in his hands. For the first time since he’d lost Jane, he was getting what he wanted. He was in control of his life again.

You’ve settled right in in Drowsy Town, Tom. Keep enjoying your sleep. Soon it’ll be forever and ever and ever.

He had never been happier.

[kiribaku-queen]

The Blood King and his Queen [7]

Pairing: Bakugou x reader

Romance, Angst, Drama

Word count: 2.4K

Summary:  From being a mere servant girl to marrying the scariest prince in existence, your world changed right before your eyes. Exchanging places with the princess, you knew, wasn’t going to be easy. But could you have found love on the way? Or was it never meant to be?

A/N: I hope you guys really enjoy this chapter because I think its my favorite chapter so far! FYI, if I don't update this series in a while, it'll be because I am working on an 18+ oneshot for a collab for Bakugou's birthday. So if that does happen, the regular uploads will happen after Bakugou's birthday. And let me tell you, its going to be S P I C Y~

But I can't express how surprised I am by all the love I'm receiving! I really wish I could respond to all your comments, but again, this is my side blog so I can't comment! If ya'll want to follow me on my main... please dont. LOL not to be mean or anything but I don't use my main at all and I don't post ever so there's no point in following me there :)

PLEASE ENJOY AND LET ME KNOW IF YOU WANT TO BE ADDED TO THE TAG! JOIN THE FAMILY!

[previous]                                                                                               [next]

Your heart physically dropped when he said that. You felt sick. Your palms were sweating and shaking. The air around you grew dense and you felt like you couldn’t breath. You couldn’t move for that matter.

Ruin?

What would he do to you if he found out that you weren’t really a princess? That you were a fake lying to him this whole time. It made you sick, just imaging every cruel thing he could do once he found out. But then you remembered, he wasn’t like all the rumors you heard. He was different. He was kind and understanding. He wouldn’t really ruin you if he found out, would he? You shook away the thought. The more you think about it, the more you were likely to get caught.

You were completely exhausted from all that labor you produced in a week’s time. Town after town, you were able to help his people even if it was just a little bit. But it sure depleted a lot of energy out of you. You don’t know if you’ve ever been this drained before in your entire life. It’s not like you had to do hard physical labor back at the palace. This experience was hard on you but also gave you insight on the prince and his kingdom.

Completely drained of your energy, you sat down on one of the tree trunks his soldiers brought for you at the camp not far away from the village you were at. The impoverished village didn’t have enough shelter as is, so you were left with no option but to set up your own shelter. It wasn’t a big deal to you anyway since that’s how you’ve been spending your nights so far.

All the soldiers had gathered around to take a breather for the night and drink away the stress. You weren’t a drinker, but enjoyed the atmosphere the soldiers created: fun and rowdy, like they didn’t give a care in the world. They were dancing on tables, clinking their drinks together, singing songs while hooking their arms around each other’s shoulders.

You laughed at the sight and stretched out your arms. How you wanted to continue the night away but your muscles were soar and aching. A physical exhaustion that you weren’t used to and didn’t want to get used to.

Bakugou was watching his crew from the door, arms crossed and enjoying his crew have fun. He was never the one to be center of attention, so he had his own fun from the back. He saw the way you extended your arms, faced wincing from how sore you were. Cute. It was your last night of volunteer work, why not end the night with something special?

You felt the Blood Prince’s breath sneak up behind your neck, sending chills down your spine.

“Tired?” he asks.

“Maybe just a little,” you admit. You look up at him and he’s giving you those soft yet piercing eyes. He goes to sit next to you and everything is just… peaceful. In that moment you felt content. You felt free. If this was how life was out of the palace, if this was more to life than just serving a spoiled princess, then you didn’t want to leave.

“I am impressed, princess,” Bakugou spoke. “This whole trip, you never, not once sat out. You helped the whole time. Are you sure you’re a princess?” he side eyed you.

“If I am not a princess, then what am I?” you asked back. (y/n), what are you doing? You could expose yourself and everything would be ruined! But for some reason, you wanted to be selfish. You wanted to know his reaction and how he would respond. Maybe you would give up your whole mission for him.

“An innocent and hardworking beauty that is not a princess. She is my future queen who will help me restore this kingdom.” He came closer to you, meaning every single word. Your eyes softened and you got emotional, almost to the point of tears. He’s smiling at you, but suddenly gets up. But gestures for you to take his hand. Of course you did.

“I want to show you something,” he says and leads you away from the crowd of people and into the woods.

You two were walking for a while, your hand in his the whole way. He hadn’t told you where he was leading you to but it had to be something special if he was dragging you to what seemed like all across the country to get to your destination.

“Your highness, are we almost there yet?” you asked, fatigue hitting you once again.

“Almost,” he responds, continuing to look ahead. You huffed and held on tight to his hand so you didn’t get lost or left behind. After a few more minutes of walking, you felt the air get hotter and thinner. Bakugou smiles in front of you, looking excited.

“We’re here,” he announces. He pulls back these huge leaves, revealing a natural hot spring. The water was clear enough that you could see right through it, steam rising from the water, and rocks surrounding it, creating this gorgeous, peaceful atmosphere. Your eyes lit up and a loud gasp escaped your lips.

“How did you find this place?” you asked, getting closer to the hot spring.

“You like it? None of my men know about this place,” he says.

“It’s beautiful!” you continue to gasp, feeling the water with your hands. The heat of the water made you giddy and you couldn’t wait to hop in.

“You deserve it,” Bakugou comes up to, whispering in your ear. His statement made you blush, but this time, you didn’t hide it. He smirks behind you and you heard something falling to the floor. You dare turn around to see Bakugou shirtless, discarding his clothes one by one. As if your face wasn’t hot enough, steam was coming out of your ears with embarrassment.

“What are you doing?” you freaked out, turning around immediately.

“Getting in,” he said in the most obvious tone of voice.

“Together?”

“You’ll be on one side and I’ll be on the other,” he points out a huge rock, separating the hot spring into two pools. That seems a little better, but the idea of soaking in a hot spring together with the prince was nerve wracking.

“Princess, you can enter first, if that makes you feel better,” he suggested. When you turn to look at him, he already had his back turn out of respect for you.

So you undress and enter the heated water, noticing that all your muscles relaxed and the aches started going away as soon as you hit the water. You lean the back of your head on the rock and allow yourself to fully relax and destress. You could hear water splashing from the other side of the rock, indicating that Bakugou had also entered the water. Humming in satisfaction. You grew deeper and deeper in the hot spring until your nose was sitting on top of the water.

“Princess, I realize that I don’t know your name,” Bakugou spoke. Your name? You stayed silent. Was it wise to use your own name or should you continue to play as the princess?

“(y/n).” you decided.

“(y/n),” Bakugou repeated, elongating your name as if he stopped saying it, it’d disappear from him forever. The way your name left his lips felt like butter to him. He couldn’t help himself from repeated your name over and over again in his mind. You giggled and looked over the rock, arms crossed and head resting over them.

“Your highness, allow me to scrub your back,” you offered. Bakugou waved his hand while shaking his head.

“Nonsense. You shall not attend to me. We’re here to relax,” he had to remind you. But you insisted.

“But I want to, Prince Bakugou,” you pouted, jutting out your bottom lip.

“The high and mighty princess wants to wash the blood Prince’s back?” he questions playfully. He glances back to see you resting on top of the rock, giving him your big doe eyes.

“If you insist,” he gave up. He turns his back again, making sure to give you the privacy you needed to be able to come over to his side. You make your way over to him, covering your breasts in case. When you got settled behind him, you started washing his back.

You expected Bakugou to have scars from his many battles he’s had, but you didn’t expect his back to be covered in decolored and deformed wounds. Unknowingly, your hands went up to caress each scar.

“Does that frighten you?” he asks.

“Not at all,” you tell him honestly. “I think it makes you very brave.”

A comfortable silence fell upon you. Only the sound of water running and insects in the background could be heard. That was until you felt poke your butt. The hairs on your body hiked and you screamed as loud as you could, rising from the water in panic.

“Princess!” Bakugou instinctively put protection mode on, shooting up from his place to see what the danger was. You immediately clung to him, Bakugou wrapped his arms around your waist and pulled you close. What Bakugou saw wasn’t an enemy but rather, a wild Japanese macaque monkey poking his head out of the water.

“Shoo!” Bakugou scared the monkey out of the water and back into the forest. Bakugou grunted and relaxed his shoulders. “Damn monkeys. I thought they only came out during the winter season. Are you okay, prin…cess,” he looked down at you only for you to look up at him with your exposed chest fully pressed against his chest. Now this could easily be the most embarrassing moment of your entire life. Your face heated up with embarrassment and you let out another scream, using all your force to slap him across the face. Bakugou wasn’t expecting such a reaction and it caught him off guard. You put for much force into the slap that Bakugou flew back and fell into the water. You ran out of the spring, covering up as fast as you could.

Bakugou had never been so flustered in his life. He was a blushing mess and now the image of your naked breasts on him could not escape his mind. He needed time to calm himself down and a certain friend from getting too excited.

When you both had returned back to the rest of the crew, everybody had been knocked out cold from the alcohol. Thank goodness, because they couldn’t see how awkward you two were at the moment. That night, you slept in the tent again while Bakugou camped outside.

But you couldn’t sleep. How could that situation happen to you, out of all people? You weren’t sure how much he saw of your naked body. Maybe he didn’t see anything at all. But you saw the expression on his face, he definitely saw something. You covered your chest and closed your eyes. To think that a man saw your body and it wasn’t even your wedding night.

You felt the wind enter your tent, the chill making you shiver. If it was cold inside the tent, it must be extra cold outside. Bakugou was sleeping outside. You bit your lip in confliction. You wanted him to be warm but that means you had to confront him. Ah, fuck it. You opened your tent and saw Bakugou resting on the grass with his cape wrapped around him. And it wasn’t doing a very good job because you could see him shivering. He couldn’t hide it no matter how hard he tried.

“Would you like to come inside?” you invite him in.

“It’s for you, princess,” he reminded you.

“I understand. But it’s too cold to be sleeping out here. Please. I insist,” you urged. He opens one eye and sighs.

“As you wish, princess,” Bakugou gave in. You scooted over to make room for the large man to sleep next to you. Bakugou made himself comfy but he was a tad too tall for the tent that he had to have his legs hanging out. The opening of the tent revealed the big, bright moon overhead.

“I’m sorry for hitting you,” you apologized. Bakugou just lets out a breath.

“It’s whatever. I didn’t see anything, by the way,” he reassures you. Embarrassed again, you unconsciously covered your chest.

“You sure?”

“Erased from my mind,” he says as he closes his eyes and moves his hands around his head, as if he was erasing his memory. You laugh at his antics, more comfortable with the mood that was created. Bakugou laughs with you and turns to you, meeting eyes. This is the nth time that his heart leapt when you stare at him with those innocent, childlike eyes. He clears his throat and all of a sudden, his ears got red.

“The moon is beautiful, isn’t it?” Bakugou professed. You blinked in confusion. You weren’t sure why he said that. Glancing up at the moon, you guess you could say that it was beautiful. It was a full moon, and shone brightly above your heads. You weren’t versed in the poetics so you couldn’t comprehend the message the Blood Prince was trying to get at you.

“The moon is especially beautiful tonight. But isn’t the moon beautiful every night?” you responded.

Bakugou looks are you in mortification. Fuck, did he just get rejected? His ears got hot and he covered his mouth with his hands.

“Yeah… yeah it is,” he agreed, embarrassed. He took a deep breath in and back out again to calm his beating heart. You look over at him to see him a little distressed. You softly smiled, another side you got to see of him. It was cute. You could feel your heartbeat starting to pick its pace up and that’s when you realized. Gathering up all the courage you could muster, you leaned over to kiss him on the cheek you slapped.

“Good night,” you quickly say, then turned over to face away from him. Bakugou stops everything in his tracks and is frozen. He couldn’t help but smile and fall asleep next to you.

The moment you made the decision to kiss him was when you knew that you wanted to be selfish. You wanted to become his queen and rule his kingdom together. You were going to forget your past life. You were going to forget this mission you were on. You were the princess now. That was his truth and you weren’t going to change it.

A/N: For those who don't know, the phrase "the moon is beautiful, isn't it" or 月が綺麗ですね is a more poetic way of saying "I love you" in olden Japanese. And then the response to that would be "I can die happy" or 死んでもいいわ. Just for reference.

As I said before, I absolutely love this chapter and I really really REALLY want to know your reactions and thoughts!

Spoiler: drama starts in the next chapter :)

If you'd like to be tagged, please let me know in the comments or DM me! and if you'd like to be tagged when my 18+ oneshot comes out, let me know too! I love you all!

Tagged: @superblyspeedydragon @melasnchz-things @animexholic @bkgwrites @sam-i-am-1025 @apexqueenie @katsukibabe @germfart3 @tspice283 @angie-1306 @bakugous-trauma @bakugousmrs @random-fandom-girl-24 @monetfatalia @triviajeongin @readingslumpfanfic @softredrobin @briefhoundpartynickel @bnhahegao

[tendermiasma]

i’m not even into overwatch anymore but i just wanted to say I ADORE your art style and hope to develop my own into a similar semi-realism leaning...have you made a post about your art journey? I’m assuming I just need to buckle down and do anatomy studies but any tips are very welcome!! Ty for your time <3

Oh man thank you! I’ve never made a comprehensive post about how I got to *gestures* whatever this point in my art this is, and I definitely sat here wondering what “art journey” means for me since I always feel like I’m stumbling around so I’ll answer as completely as I can. But a great way to develop a realism-minded eye is to draw from photos and life. Everyone in the world has said it over and over but it really gets it done, it’s not any more complicated than that. It’s how I started when I was little and it’s not something I planned, but the Legolas posters were right there so how could I not? Your own non-realism “stylistic” touch will bubble up whether you want it to or not and that’s a beautiful thing. It’s not something you need to look for because it happens on its own, whether it’s you seeing something another artist is doing that you like and assimilating it into your work, or it’s your own unique way that you absorb information from the world and use it to solve problems in the drawing in front of you. Some new artists also still have the idea that using references is cheating-- I’m not blaming them, sometimes this weird thing is circulated by more established people as well-- but this is a very small minority. Please use references. I’d be lost without them. The Castlevania team has a giant collection of references for faces of every character from every angle, props, etc. and I always have a second screen up with 10 different sheets of whoever I’m drawing. Feeding yourself info is essential to getting better. Look at how other artists handle something you’re having a problem with too. If they’re doing a similar pose or something, study their drawing and ask yourself what specifically, extremely technically about that drawing is convincing-- what marks are where, and what is the quality or direction of the strokes? Try it out on your own drawing. If you’re stuck, become aware of if you’re holding on too tightly to what you think something should look like. I have to remind myself this as well. Really try to let go of the idea you have in your head about how something works and simply try instead to draw what you see, even if it feels weird. The results are often pleasantly surprising. 

I have a funny relationship with studies. You seem to be looking at them like a chore and I feel the same way. It’s impossible for me to sit down and just draw something over and over, disconnected from emotion or a larger narrative. I think a wonderful way to “study” is to incorporate those studies into a project that you wanted to do anyway. I’ve used my minicomics to get better at background painting or specific figure poses that I needed for the story but wasn’t sure how to do. I’m a very “oops I need it now better learn TODAY” kind of artist, if that suits you better than buckling down and doing anatomy studies for hours. Both are great ways to improve, but you have options for how to get there. 

In terms of how much time I spend drawing.. well lol it’s a lot. I almost typed “but I don’t do it every day” but yes, my jobs have made sure that I do (I tend to separate personal drawing and job drawing). But the truth is, to get better, a lot of very focused drawing time is important; how much of it is up to you and your schedule. You can sit down for 6 hours and doodle or you can sit down for 3 with an extremely critical eye. It’s about the volume of time as well as focus and I don’t have a clear answer for it, but I can point to one specific year in my life where I made artistic progress like I’ve never seen from myself since. I drew a comic with regular updates during that time and, looking back, the art was not good. But the point was, I was drawing for 7 hours a day after work, at least 5 days a week, and actively looking to draw things that I hadn’t done before or knew that I wasn’t good at, and the result was that every single update was almost like it was drawn by a different person-- readers noticed and commented on the progress as well. It was very much an art bootcamp and I wouldn’t have the skills I do at this point if I hadn’t done it. It’s important that you’re loving what you do if you do it for yourself! That’s how you get through big projects and continue to be excited with where you are. Love is one of the most important motivators and discipline-keepers in art, in my experience. Draw what sets your brain on fire and attack it wholeheartedly even if it’s really weird or niche, not what you think you should be drawing, and you’ll improve a million times faster.

Art journey in terms of what I’ve done with my life (if this is what you meant from the beginning I’M SORRY I’m just trying everything you might have meant) uhhh I haven’t been to art school. I have no idea what my relationship with art would be like now if I’d had any formal training and I don’t really dwell on it. I could either be a testament to being able to get by without it or an example of someone who has no idea what she’s doing at all and lacks many basic foundational art skills. I have an architecture degree. I love architecture, I love the language of space we build for ourselves, and I’m truly, deeply glad for that eye-opening and often grueling experience, but I think my current field is a much better fit. Before animation I worked as a graphic designer mainly drawing storyboards for commercials and internal-industry stuff-- lots and lots of quick colored sketches (one of our main clients was a big glass company and my god I never thought I’d draw so much glass in my life). I was able to do that job due to the skills I developed through personal work. Maybe I’d be a hundred times more powerful if I went to art school! Maybe I’d be completely burned out and bitter and not drawing anymore at all! I just don’t know. I have friends who have had both experiences. Whether you choose art school or not it’s best to keep tabs on if the art you’re currently making brings you joy. Joy and struggle aren’t mutually exclusive. Oftentimes I’m drawing something I care deeply about but it’s VERY FUCKING HARD and I’m frustrated but it’s worth it.

I also do everything while being very scared of the thing. I have a lot of deep-seated anxiety that I’m constantly trying to root out and my brain compulsively twists things around into why I can’t do something, why people secretly know I’m below-par and are just too nice to tell me, how I’m “tricking” people into thinking I’m better than I am, etc. It’s so bad that my first thought when I was initially offered the art test for my current job was to say no; not because I didn’t want it so badly it hurt, but because I thought I’d be too much of a disappointment.  After completing the test I spent an hour figuring out the most gracious way to apologize for not being enough. It’s common, but not something to accept and we’re all working on it. I just thought it was important to mention because art is also a mental journey and forces you to do all this navel-gazey shit in order to advance, and feeling like you are Not Enough is rife in the creative community. The work feels entangled with my value as a person because art is a massive part of my life. Something I’m learning is that I don’t have to be confident or sure of myself all the time. This ensures that the process is usually painful and frightening. Often there’s no way to make it less painful or frightening, and I just have to hold my breath and do it. An oddly comforting thing to me the past couple years is to remind myself that the scary thing I’m about to do won’t be the scariest thing I’ll ever do. I implies both that this isn’t the pinnacle of my progress and also that I will inevitably get over it. If you continue with art you’re going to run into things like this and I guess if it was me it would’ve been helpful to know I’m not alone in it.

I hope that maybe answered some of your questions, maybe? If you have some specific questions feel free and I’ll try my best. Hope you have a good day/night!

[chibimyumi]

Kuromyu 2021 asks

【Response to post: Kuromyu “Secret of the Boarding School Arc”】

Dear everyone,

As many of you have already seen, MKP announced a new Kuromyu after 3 years! “The Secret of the Boarding School Arc”. I have received some asks about this, so allow me to answer them here one by one ^^

Dear Anons,

Yes indeed! “Secret of the Boarding School Arc” is going to be a thing! Erm... well, as you must have seen, no Sebastyun anymore. The announcement is official.

I don’t know Tateishi beyond the most surface level, but from what I do know, he can sing. That’s at least one thing that is promising! But otherwise I have no estimate of him whatsoever. We shall see.

I hope this time the Kuromyu fandom won’t be as nasty about him as they were about Matsushita’s calling him “a helium balloon” or “he sounds like a girl.” And then about Furukawa’s nose at first... =v= I mean, everyone can complain about an actor, but if there’s nothing substantial you can complain about then.... ugh never mind.

【Response to: Werewolf Arc as most likely candidate?】

Dear Anon,

Yes, I did, but I feel like it is useless to answer that specific part of your question now (≽ω≼;) So let’s skip to your following questions.

Well, I wouldn’t call this post a prediction, but indeed, my reasoning that the Werewolf arc would be the most likely next candidate for Kuromyu is obviously wrong, and dramatically so! Here we are, Kuro Potter arc, even though I really thought it would be the LEAST likely one.

But, just like I have explained in the post from October 2019 about a hypothetical Potter Kuromyu, I can’t say I’m really hopeful without lying. I am interested, but not hopeful. All my concerns I spoke of at the time are still my concerns right now.

I worried about Kuromyu becoming Tenimyu, and the musical is mostly likely going to be Tenimyu. Nothing wrong with Tenimyu as such, but Kuromyu is just never made to be like a Tenimyu.

I worried about KuroPotter’s story not suitable for stage adaptations and an expensive cast... and well, indeed, no expensive cast anymore. But then, how will Kuromyu2021 sell their appeal without much of Sebas and Undertaker????

I worried about a different Sebastian inevitably going to be compared to Furukawa, and judging from my Japanese twitter feed, that prediction is not going to be off.

Japanese twitter isn’t even being mean about Tateishi, most people just go: “eh? Suddenly switching out the current prince of the musical world and the Sebastian praised so highly by sensei?” “Those are crushing expectations!” “Will Tateishi be alright? Will he be able to perform outside Furukawa’s shadows?”

All are VERY legit things to say! The scariest thing for Tateishi is not just having to play Sebastian - the perfect demon butler. Nor is it having to compete against Furukawa’s Sebastian. No, he needs to compete against Furukawa’s reputation as “the prince of the Imperial Theatre” no media outlet can NOT emphasise, and the Sebastian declared above canon by Yana herself, and the man who made the highly critical Editor K go gaga for. - Talk about pressure!

But yessss, in short, I am interested and concerned.

Dear Anon,

Grell is not even in the arc... so no, no announcement for any Grell, old or new.

As for Izumi Shuuhei, the thing about supervising the script of Kuromyu2021, that was Izumi’s retweet of Yana’s tweet, not his own. Yana is asked to return for the supervision of the script and the costumes.

There is no reason for any producer to ask an ex-actor to supervise a script for a musical he is not going to be part of.

For anyone interested in what Yana wrote:

In fresh wear that is befitting of a new season called ‘spring’, it has been decided that there shall be a new musical ‘Kuroshitsuji’! This time too I was called to supervise the script and the costumes, and I shall humbly partake. Please look forward to future updates【Toboso】

Dear Anon,

YES APPARENTLY THERE IS GOING TO BE, I AM ALSO SHOCKED!! Σ(ÔAÔ)!

About the new cast, I don’t know ANY of these new actors except 2 from the most surface level, namely Sebastian and Redmond... so I have no idea. Just from instinct though:

🏫Tateishi (Sebastian): You poor... poor man, your life is going to be so hard for at least a short while... Like I said above, Furukawa left impossibly large shoes to fill to begin with, but being made to compete against his reputation as literally the highest rank performers can achieve in Japan is just unfair.

Good luck to you, young man! You seem to be capable of singing, so I hope they at least capitalise on that!

🏫 Konishi (Ciel): ... I already thought 16 year old Sakamoto was too old for Ciel in 2009, and now there’s a 20 year old adult man playing a 13 year old baby-face O.o? I’ve looked up a bit of his acting, it seems decent!

After everyone being used to really young Ciel actors since 2010, and especially with the super small and adorable Reo though... I think this man too is going to have a really hard time getting accepted as Ciel. Though to a lesser extent than Furukawa’s crushing reputation, Reo’s reputation as Ciel really is very pressing too...

But yes, no judging before actually seeing! We shall see.

🏫 Ueda (Undertaker): Like I said in this post, Undertaker really has almost NOTHING to do in this arc, so I don’t have any opinion about Ueda. I have never heard of him before this announcement, but they could have cast an android for Undertaker and the damage would still have been minimal. (I stand by my old point; why bother adapting this arc at all??? Well, at least Ueda is unlikely to be overworked from studying his script.)

🏫 Sana (Redmond): I’ve only known him from Patalliro!, but I never watched it. But for Patalliro! Sana was cast because of his beauty and flair for Maraich. So I am sure Redmond will be just within Sana’s field too!

🏫 Tazuru (Greenhill): NO idea, never heard of him, but he LOOKS the part!

🏫 Satonaka (Bluer), Godou (Violet), Furuya (Clayton), Nakajima (Edward), Taguchi (Maurice): Idem.

🏫 Fukuzawa (Chesslock): Never heard of him either, but he REALLY REALLY REALLY looks the part (≽▽≼) His face just screams: “bruh, whaddya got, loser!?”

🏫 Uchino (Hearcourt): Never heard of him, he looks VERY cute... MKP, couldn’t you cast this youngest actor for Ciel or did he just lose the audition of Ciel? Oh well, he looks appropriately Hearcourt I guess! We shall see.

🏫 Hayakawa (McMillan): Never heard of him, but from the photos I could find he does not really look like what I’d expect of a 3D McMillan. But then again, neither do Furukawa and Uehara, and we all know how much I love them. Looks are just looks ^^ Acting is more important.

🏫 Yamaguchi (Derrick): Never heard of him, looks the part, I’m sure he’ll be fine.

🏫 Agares (Takahashi): Never heard of him, but from his photos he really does have that energy, so I’m sure he’ll be fine!

🏫 Okada (Soma): I..... am actually REALLY surprised, and even right now I’m not sure I found the right guy. Is this really the guy?? Not just a different guy with the same name? I mean, I am sure he is a great actor, but this man is 20 years older than the actual Soma.

They already got 15 young men, they really couldn’t find another one? Oh well, I’m sure he’s a great actor. And otherwise, the role is so incredibly small, any potential damage is limited.

Dear Anon,

Yes, my day is lovely, but also flabbergasting because I spent most of it thinking about this announcement. But I hope your day was lovely too^^

Erm.....about a potential anime adaptation. As has been proven, I am not very good at predicting stuff! So perhaps I am not the right person to ask stuff.

Even though the Universe is probably going to prove me wrong again, I THINK the chances are a bit low for the Boarding School Arc being adapted?

Let us not talk about the Mansion Murder arc, and just look at Circus and Campania arc. Those two are unambiguously the two most popular arcs, but when they got adapted the budget was so horrifically low it was almost embarrassing to look at.

As discussed in this post, Book of Circus was also aired at the weirdest possible times, and that was one of the two MOST popular arcs... as explained before in this other post, the Boarding School Arc is the least popular arc among the main/Japanese fandom... so I personally think the chances for this to get an anime adaption to be fairly low.

Just my thoughts since you asked. The Universe has proven me wrong more often, it might again.

[astonishinglegends]

Ep 201: The Disappearance of Frederick Valentich Part 3

“I am prepared to swear on oath or submit myself to any lie detector test to substantiate this, my statement.”

– Don Cox, who observed a triangle-shaped UFO for 45 minutes from his yard in Adelaide, 385 miles northwest of Valentich’s last known location, just 28 minutes after his radio fell silent.

Description:

As we wrap up our coverage of the Frederick Valentich story in Part 3 of our series, we'll continue our conversation with Melbourne resident Chris Tyler about his research into the case and other possibly related UFO incidents around the same time and area. We'll also examine the Australian Department of Transport accident report's remaining findings and discuss its conclusions. As you begin to reach your own conclusions, it's essential to keep several factors in mind which make the usual mundane explanations seem inadequate. The high number of independent sightings of aerial phenomena occurring in proximity to the disappearance suggests Valentich wasn't alone in witnessing it. The distance a Cessna cowling was found from a potential crash site and the lack of definitive markings makes its discovery inconclusive. Even if the cowling did come from Valentich's plane, it still doesn't account for what caused him to ditch, let alone other missing debris and Valentich himself. Perhaps the most surprising revelation comes from the summary of the report itself. Rather than dismissing the possibility of a UFO entanglement, an official government statement lists it as one of four likeliest scenarios. Remember that Valentich himself never suggested he interacted with a UFO in his last transmission, despite being painted as obsessed with them by his skeptics. When these factors and more are taken together, it's no wonder this incident is one of the most baffling and tragic in the phenomenon's history and leaves us all to wonder, what happened to Frederick Valentich and where did he go?

Location:

Moorabbin Airport, where Frederick Valentich took off from on October 21, 1978, headed for King Island across Bass Strait.

Reference Links:

“UFO suspicions still cloud disappearance of Frederick Valentich” from Melbourne’s Herald Sun

The strange noises heard on Valentich’s last transmission, posted on Facebook by A.U.F.O.A. – Australian UFO Action

“How the 40-year-old mystery of a UFO in New Zealand lives on” from news.com.au, about Quentin Fogarty’s UFO experience

The UFO Documents Index on NSA.gov

Cape Otway Lightstation

“What is the Aurora Australis?” on Universe Today

The Green Flash

“The Disappearance of Flight N3808H, Puerto Rico, 1980” blog post by “karl 12” on AboveTopSecret.com

“Disappearance of flight N3808H 28th of June, 1980” with pilot’s radio transmission on YouTube

“UFOs, USOs and the Island of Puerto Rico.” by “karl 12” on AboveTopSecret.com

“Jet Fighters disappear as they approach UFO in Puerto Rico” section of a documentary on YouTube

“Two F-14s kidnapped by UFO near Puerto Rico” forum thread on unexplained-mysteries.com

“The Valentich Disappearance: Another UFO Cold Case Solved” by James McGaha and Joe Nickell on Skeptical Inquirer

“Spooky Space ‘Sounds’” from nasa.gov

“What Is This Flying Object??? Occurred at Cape Hatteras Lighthouse - 1/7/2021” on YouTube by Wes Snyder Photography

The “PPRuNe” forum or “Professional Pilots Rumour Network” discussing Valentich's radio transmission

The Melbourne Marvels podcast and their episode on “The Unresolved Disappearance of Frederick Valentich”

“10 Truly Bizarre Incidents From The Bass Strait Triangle” from Listverse

The Unsolved Mysteries Wiki on Fandom.com for the Frederick Valentich episode

“Lost yacht mystery continues 30 years on” from abc.net.au

Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race on Wikipedia

“Race Tragedy Tale / Oracle CEO tells all to St. Francis Yacht Club” from SFGate.com

“'Holy grail' or epic hoax? Australian Kelly Cahill's UFO abduction story still stirs passions” from ABC South West Victoria news

“Capturing the Light” – The true story of Dorothy Izatt on Amazon Prime

Close Encounters of the Third Kind feature release date information on IMDb

The Frederick Valentich case on the original Unsolved Mysteries, Season 5, Episode 2 on Amazon Prime

“Last Light: the Valentich Mystery” from The History Listen with Kirsti Melville on ABC.net.au

“Disappearance of Frederick Valentich” on Wikipedia

“What Happened to Frederick Valentich? Possibly the scariest UFO case ever” by OzWeatherman on AboveTopSecret.com

“Valentich Case Files Finally Released” by Kandinsky on AboveTopSecret.com

“The Valentich Abduction/Disappearance: 40th Anniversary” by MirageMan on AboveTopSecret.com

“The Abduction of Fred Valentich” from The Unexplained Files on Discovery UK – YouTube clip of Melbourne Flight Advisor Officer Steve Robey describing his radio communication with Valentich

Complete episode on the Valentich disappearance from The Unexplained Files on the Discovery Channel

Cessna 182 “Skylane”

Valentich’s missing aircraft report online, from the National Archives of Australia

Download of Valentich’s missing aircraft report as a PDF

Bass Strait

Moorabbin Airport

“'Truth' was out there after all –An accidental discovery sheds new light on the mysterious disappearance of a pilot in 1978, writes Miles Kemp” from The Advertiser

Australian UFO researcher, Keith Basterfield

Melbourne, Australia

Tasmania

King Island, Tasmania

Visit King Island at kingisland.org.au

“Biography of Bette Nesmith Graham, Inventor of Liquid Paper” on ThoughtCo.com

Bette Nesmith Graham on Wikipedia

Australian crayfish

The TCAS or Traffic collision avoidance system

“What C.S. Lewis and Martin Luther Would Say About Our Coronavirus Panic”

Black Death

Second plague pandemic

“Plague was one of history’s deadliest diseases—then we found a cure” on NationalGeographic.com

Suggested Listening:

Melbourne Marvels podcast – “a podcast about true stories from Melbourne” CLICK HERE to listen to their episode on “The Unresolved Disappearance of Frederick Valentich”

Check out our good friend Gledders’ paranormal podcast, ANOMALY, where he, his co-host Steve Freestone, and Forrest discuss some of the more weird and wild events of 2020 and more in his latest 2-part series. Click here to subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, the website at anomaly.co.uk, or anywhere excellent podcasts are found.

And then after that, check out Gledders’ “80’s Mix Tape” for the best in 1980s music, Saturdays, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the UK, or stream anytime at Huntingdon Community Radio HCR 104 FM!

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Credits:

Episode 201: The Disappearance of Frederick Valentich Part 3. Produced by Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess; Audio Editing by Sarah Vorhees Wendel. Sound Design by Ryan McCullough; Tess Pfeifle, Producer, and Lead Researcher; Research Support from the astonishing League of Astonishing Researchers, a.k.a. The Astonishing Research Corps, or "A.R.C." for short. Copyright 2021 Astonishing Legends Productions, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

[artificialqueens]

Heart of Glass, Mind of Stone, 1/? (Jiji, Methydoll) - Ella

summary - When Crystal envisioned her life as a law student, she daydreamed of topping her classes and the inevitable sleepless nights that it would come with. What she didn’t expect was to be so tied up to a high-profile murder case that it was next to impossible to get herself out of it.

a/n - welcome to my first ever multichap! ive been planning this for almost a month now, so glad that it’s finally out here! thank you so much to the amazing and talented @imalwaysaslutfordrag for beta-ing! thank you to v as well for helping me sort out some concerns, she’s really really cool :>

feel free to hmu here on tumblr @dawningofdrag or maybe, if you have the time, give this a read on ao3 as well! enjoy some lawyer gays, folks

-

There was a dead body lying on the floor and nobody. dared. to move.

“We killed her,” Crystal spoke, voice so hoarse from the screaming just moments ago that her throat ached.

Her eyes were blown wide- just like everyone else’s -as she stared at the corpse lying lifeless on the dark herringbone floorboards. The bright fluorescent light of the lamp posts that stood outside the property peeked through the sheer curtains of the living room they stood in, almost perfectly framing the bleak expression of the cadaver resting in the middle of the circle the Latina and the rest of the group had created.

A breathy scream broke the silence and Crystal traced the sound back to Gigi, who dropped to the floor in sheer terror. Her green eyes barely broke contact with the body, short erratic breaths escaping her bare pink lips through the pale hand that covered it. Crystal instinctively ran over to where the blonde now sat on the floor, wrapping her arms around her lean frame in an attempt to calm her down.

“She’s dead,” Gigi gasped out, bloodshot eyes still refusing to tear away from the body laid out in front of her. The Latina grasped the blonde’s hand, squeezing it to offer some sense of comfort despite the horrifying circumstances.

The room fell silent, a thick, heavy air resting on their shoulders as they all collectively just stood there, allowing their actions and its repercussions to settle into their conscience.

“We’re murderers,” Gigi whispered through her hiccups, and all Crystal could do was nod. They killed her. They committed murder, and all of a sudden it felt like it was much, much harder to breathe.

- three months before -

Crystal shot the rest of her now lukewarm coffee down her throat in a quick motion, slamming the warm thermos down on her incredibly small desk with a loud thud. She exhaled, setting her bag on the floor next to her chair before inserting herself in it. Her hands grazed the chipped wood that made up her armrests, a soft smile appearing on her painted lips.

First day of law school, totally not the scariest thing in the whole world. Not like she dreamt of this day since she was a little girl, you know?

Crystal could now proudly declare to the world (and her extremely judgemental tia’s and tio’s) that she was studying law at the best law school in the country, sitting in a lecture hall ready to attend a class spearheaded by the sole individual who made her realize she wanted to pursue a law career in the first place. How she wasn’t fully freaking out right now was just as much of a mystery to her as it was to everyone else.

She set her laptop on the desk attached to her assigned chair, flipping through the thin folder of her academic roster with curious eyes. She quickly glanced over her classes, the professors teaching them, taking into account the buildings they were held in and when they started.

The sound of a cough diverted the Latina’s attention, bright green eyes meeting hers.

The woman was clad in an olive green pantsuit and a plain black blouse that seemed to fit her like a glove. It seemed perfectly tailored, almost as if the suit was custom-made. Her short blonde hair was styled to be pin straight, meticulously tucked behind one ear to show off her strong jawline. Her green eyes were narrowed, staring into the Latina’s eyes as if she was guilty of a crime she didn’t commit.

Crystal almost laughed at how hard the woman tried her best to look intimidating.

“Can I help you?” She questioned in a sing-song tone, a perfectly shaped eyebrow raised in confusion. The blonde rolled her eyes.

Crystal narrowed her own. Okay, Elle Woods.

“You’re sitting in my seat.” The woman tapped the sole of her black Louboutin on the tiled floor repeatedly, impatiently waiting for a response.

“Pretty sure I sit here, Ms. Woods.”

“How original.” The blonde scoffed, pulling out a digital image of the assigned seating from her phone to show the Latina who still sat comfortably in her seat, showing no willingness to move whatsoever.

“I sit in the sixth chair from the right.” She stated matter-of-factly. Crystal didn’t even bother hiding her amusement.

She chuckled, turning her body to point at the vacant seat next to her. “I sit in the fifth seat from the right.” Crystal grinned a mischievous smile. “You’re one off, Woods.”

She watched as the blonde woman’s cheeks flared up in embarrassment, quickly taking a seat next to her while keeping her head hung low.

“You’re a law student and you can’t even like, count correctly?” The brunette mocked the woman next to her, nudging her side softly to lighten the mood.

“I’m smart in other ways.” The blonde rolled her eyes once more, but her cold facade faded away just moments after doing so, and a grin started to creep up on the edges of her glossed lips.

“Georgina Goode, Columbia.” She greeted Crystal’s lighthearted gaze with an extension of her arm, hand out for her to shake. “Guess I should master the art of counting before I try to act like I know my shit.”

“Well, you learn new things everyday.” The brunette grinned. Of course she was a Georgina. She reeked of water polo lessons and summers in a beach house in Miami. It further supported Crystal’s initial hypothesis that Ms. Goode, she was definitely an Elle Woods type. You know, the privileged but woke white kid who believed they deserved a medal for recognizing their privilege. She met a couple of them back in pre-law, and they were all so incredibly annoying.

Gigi seemed slightly less annoying though, so she’ll reserve the need to have an opinion until she actually got to know her.

“Just call me Gigi, though.”

Crystal nodded at the information, extending her arm out to receive the open hand.

“Crystal Harness, Yale.”

Their hands collided, a firm couple of shakes and soft smiles before they both pulled away, shifting away from each other to set up their table (seriously though, why were they so small? She wasn’t paying forty grand a semester for her lecture desk to support the weight of half her laptop).

“So, what brings you here?” Crystal couldn’t help but question, starting a conversation between the two and sparking the interest of the woman next to her. It never hurt to make friends in law school.

“I mean, if you were already in Columbia. Don’t they like, top the bars all the time?”

“Oh, easy.” Gigi scoffed at the question as if her answer was so painfully obvious, briefly pointing to the professor’s desk situated just a couple of rows in front of them. “Her.”

I mean, that reason was fair enough. Crystal would be lying if she told you she didn’t also take the attorney into mind when choosing a law school. If she really had to tell the truth, then yes, Attorney Jaida Essence Hall’s teaching position was the sole reason she chose Middleton for law.

Could you blame her though? She was Black, gay, female, and an absolute fucking legend. Harvard Law Valedictorian, record-breaking LSAT score, and built her whole reputation from the ground up. She was a whole ass celebrity in Crystal’s eyes, and hearing that Jaida had a teaching position in Middleton was all the information she needed to choose the university.

“I get it.” Crystal replied after a brief moment, finally relaxing against the back of her chair’s deflated cushions. “I kind of wanna be her.”

“You and every other woman in this class, Crystal.” The blonde mumbled, smirking at her snide remark. “You’re not special.”

Well, she wasn’t wrong.

The booming sound of high heels clicking against the tiled floor almost startled Crystal, immediately turning her attention towards the woman who just entered the room.

“Good morning class, my name is Jaida Essence Hall-”

She set her black Hermes bag on top of the wooden professor’s table with a loud thud, flipping her long dark hair past her shoulder so effortlessly that she had Crystal, Gigi, and the rest of the class absolutely mesmerized.

Professor Hall turned to face the class in one swift motion, sporting a welcoming grin before continuing her entrancing introduction.

“- and welcome to Criminal Law 100.”

Crystal swore under her breath, taking everything in. The reason she wanted to pursue law was standing twelve feet away from her, leaning against the table with her arms crossed around her chest.

The Latina couldn’t even force herself to focus on the rest of Jaida’s probably really inspiring opening monologue, mind still busy trying to wrap about the idea of breathing the same air as Jaida Essence Hall. Was she overreacting? Probably. Did she care? Absolutely the fuck not. Let her have this.

“If you have been keeping yourselves updated on local news, I’m certain that you have crossed the ongoing case regarding the murder of Brianna Heller.”

That sentence pulled Crystal out of the trance she found herself in, the wording of her statement incorrect in her honest opinion. You didn’t need to watch the local news to know about it. If you lived in Philadelphia for a solid five minutes you’d know about the case of Brianna Heller. She was a Middleton undergrad who went missing for a whole month before her body was found two days ago in the basement of an abandoned warehouse, a spot frequented by undergrads looking for their dose of illegal thrill. Each and every aspect of the case felt like it was pulled right out of a murder mystery book, down to the alleged suspects and their relationships with each other. The press was having a field day milking the case dry for any information they could publish.  

Jaida went back and forth across the platform, one hand on her hip as she continued. “Just this morning, I was asked to represent one of the main suspects, Jamie McKenna.”

The woman clicked on her remote, displaying a photo of the woman on the projector screen.

I mean if you were gonna ask Crystal, she thought Jamie did it. After quickly scanning the case a couple of nights ago when she had absolutely nothing better to do, she had a gut feeling the blonde committed the murder. They both had rather large online followings due to their theater backgrounds, but Brianna had much bigger numbers in comparison to Jamie, even though in Crystal’s opinion, Jamie was a much better singer.

There was a very clear motive and intent. All they needed was to find the murder weapon and the case was closed.

The class erupted in loud whispers once the photo displayed itself on screen, Gigi visibly unfazed next to her. Everyone has had a conversation about the case with friends, family, strangers. Talking about it felt redundant and unnecessary, and if you were going to ask Crystal, the conversation was getting really boring.

Jaida paused for a brief moment, allowing the murmurs to die on their own before speaking further. “And although both my associates are very capable individuals, the publicity surrounding the case is unbearable, which means I cannot make one single mistake.”

Crystal narrowed her eyes, confused as to the relevancy of her announcement until it hit her.

Oh my fucking God.

Jaida’s gonna need a team.

“Which means I’m gonna need a team.”

Holy shit.

“For the next week, I will be paying close attention to how you all work during my lectures. My associates will be in attendance, watching from the sidelines, and observing each and every one of you. We need the best of the best so that those chosen will be more of an asset rather than a burden.”

Crystal’s eyes were blown wide at Jaida’s words, her head still spinning as she tried to grasp how big of a deal this actually was. Her eyes met Gigi’s, who was equally as taken back as the Latina, jaw slacked open in shock.

“You will be meeting my associates tomorrow, but make a lasting first impression on me and you might find yourself in the list of people I consider. Am I clear?”

Crystal nodded absent-mindedly, her mind sprinting a million miles a minute as she automatically started to come up with ways to stand out of a class of sixty people.

“Alright, now that that’s all cleared up,” Jaida turned on her heel to fiddle with her laptop, displaying the assigned reading on screen before turning to face the class once more.

“Does anyone want to summarize the case of Commonwealth v. Polachek for me?”

Crystal had never raised her hand quicker in her entire life. It was game on, I guess.

-

Crystal fumbled to pull out the keys of her front door from the pocket of her cross-body bag, feeling the contents with her fingers until she felt the metal touch her skin. She walked past her neighbor, flashing a nervous smile the woman’s way before she stopped just in front of her apartment.

“Weren’t you in Professor Hall’s class today?”

Crystal’s head whipped around to face the woman who stood a couple of feet away from where she stood, leaning against the doorway of the apartment just next to hers.

The Latina’s eyes met the other girl’s equally dark ones, wavy dark hair framing the woman’s face perfectly. She was clad in a tight-fitting black turtleneck tucked into a high waist black pant, dark plaid blazer and gold jewelry breaking the monochromatic fabrics and causing her jet-black hair to stand out against the blazer’s tweed fabric.  

“Yeah. ” Crystal stumbled over her words, running her free hand through her thick curls. How was every single woman in her Criminal Law class so fucking pretty? “Middleton Law too?”

“Mhmm.” Her neighbor smiled, taking a couple of steps forward to close the rather large distance between them both.

She reached out her hand. “Jackie Cox. Harvard Medicine.”

Crystal has never shaken so many hands in such a small period of time. The second they all entered law school everyone became so pathetically professional that it almost humored her.

“Crystal! NYU.” She grinned, shaking her hand before catching onto the words that filled Jackie’s introduction.  

“Wait, medicine?” Crystal questioned, pulling her arm back and tucking it into her jean pocket.

“Yeah.” Jackie shrugged the question off with a rather confused tone, acting as if her circumstances were a normal occurrence. “Medicine got really boring, so did Harvard, so I thought I’d give law a shot.”

The Latina didn’t know how to respond. “Woah that’s uh, really cool.”

Crystal wanted to wince at herself for sounding like a fucking four-year-old. She stepped back, shifted her body away, and lifted her key to the lock. Her mind ran in circles, deciding whether or not to invite Jackie to the dinner she and her roommate planned to have later that night. Making friends in law school had many more benefits than it had consequences, and having an incredibly smart medical student-turned-law student on your side sounded like an incredible asset to have in future study groups. Plus, Jackie just seemed really fucking cool.

“Well, uh, my roommate Heidi is coming tonight and we were planning to get to know each other over dinner at 8 o’clock.” The Latina smiled, meeting Jackie’s eyes once more. “Do you maybe wanna join?”

As if on cue, Crystal’s front door burst open to reveal her roommate, who greeted her and Jackie’s startled dispositions with a toothy grin and bare arms spread wide, ready to envelop the Latina in a warm hug.

“Oh my god, Crystal it’s so nice to finally meet you!” Heidi ran a couple of steps to tackle the smaller woman into a tight hug, rocking from side to side as if they were long lost sisters who had finally been reunited. “I can’t believe we’re here!”

A laugh escaped from deep in Crystal’s chest after her new roommate knocked the wind out of her with an overexcited hug. She paused for a quick moment, still taken back by the sudden action, before wrapping her arms around the shorter woman. “Hi!”

“It’s so nice to finally meet you!” Crystal pulled back a couple of inches, reciprocating the infectious energy her new roommate put out for her to receive.

Crystal had never met Heidi before, they’ve only been exchanging a handful of texts and semi-professional emails just to get their living situation all sorted out before they moved in. The brunette never would have thought that the woman behind the meticulously worded emails she was receiving over the week was an extrovert who would rather give out hugs over a professional handshake. The duality of man, I guess.

She and Heidi exchange introductions, Jackie joining in on the conversation after a while as they talk about their dinner plans together.

“That sounds great!” Jackie grinned at the invitation, beamed almost, unlocking her door with a twist of a key, pushing it open with force. “I’ll bring some baklava for dessert.”

“I have never heard of baklava! Is it like a Middle Eastern thing or sum’n?” Heidi questioned, her fingernails mindlessly picking on the lint of her wool sweater.

Jackie nodded, a soft laugh coming out of her mouth as she did so. “Yes it is, you hit the nail on the head.”

“Well, it sounds delightful.” The Black woman smiled, arm wrapped around Crystal’s waist like they were all of a sudden the bestest of friends. She honestly didn’t mind having someone like Heidi as a roommate, the loving and positive energy just radiating off of her warm skin was a great juxtaposition from the cold and professional people she was probably going to encounter throughout her law student experience.

They bid their goodbye’s, setting up their final dinner plans before they entered their respective apartments, Heidi already chatting up a storm as they turned to leave.

Crystal waved as Jackie disappeared into her apartment, a small grin resting on her painted lips as she turned to swing her front door open. “See ya, Doc.”

-

“Gigi, if you fucking scream one more time I swear to god-” Jackie spoke through gritted teeth, knuckles turning white at how tight she gripped the metal bat in her hand.

Her dark eyes scanned the room, pausing at the surrounding windows to check if anyone was peeking through them. Jackie dropped the bat with caution, afraid that the collision of metal on wood would startle anyone that was currently inside the house. She crouched down to inspect the lifeless corpse that separated her from the rest of the group, delicately grazing the pale skin and dead blue eyes with her trembling fingers. She closed the body’s eyes before meeting Crystal’s brown, much more alive ones.

“We have to get rid of the body.”

“Are you fucking insane?” Crystal scoffed, guiding a very distraught Gigi to sit against the armrest of a lounge chair not far by. She made sure the blonde was much calmer than she was just moments ago before shifting her gaze to the Persian across the room.

“You want us to go out on a Friday night? after finals week?” The brunette spat out, her uncontrollable fear turning itself into annoyance and frustration at the sound of her friend’s suggestion.

“Are you dumb?” Jackie hissed, the heels of her boots clicking against the wood as she looked around for a way to clean up the blood slowly pooling around the corpse’s body. “Our DNA is on her skin, Crystal. Under her nails, on her clothes, on the fucking gun.”

“We go to an incinerator and burn the body.” Jackie reasoned, pulling a handkerchief from her bag and getting on her knees as she soaked up the blood from the floor like it was nothing serious. “We’ll classify the remains as animal carcass.”

Crystal stood in place, jaw slacked open in awe of Jackie’s lack of disgust towards the corpse as she dragged the previously clean fabric across the wooden floorboards. “Get rid of any evidence. We can say she ran away. They’ll believe it, her case was a clear loss anyway.”

The Latina groaned in defeat, pulling a handkerchief from her winter coat as she crouched down to join Jackie in cleaning up the mess they had made together. “Fuck you, Doc.”

“Can’t help that I know my shit, Mistress.”

[route22ny]

I grew up in the Bay Area at the height of AIDS panic, and all of that era’s sex paranoia remains burned into my brain, repurposed for Covid-19 and the act of commingling wet breath. A few weeks into this crisis, I found myself having a ten-foot-distant conversation with my neighbor Patty, both of us incredulous at people who still tried to talk to us in-tight face-to-face, like we weren't all suddenly barebacking reality with everyone they'd chit-chatted with that day and everyone in their lives, etc. Patty allowed that she should be able to strike people she considered a threat. I mentioned Florida's attitude toward this legal principle and firearms. I suggested she become militant. I tell that to a lot of people, but I attenuate the humor of it for the audience. I tell every teacher I know to strike.

There are more sirens now. It's hard to tell, because unlike New York, everything isn't quiet. Cars are out on the road—fewer, but enough that hearing a siren can still be vehicular idiocy and not a more sinister house call. But I still hear more of them.

I don’t know why Luke asked me to write about Coronavirus in Florida. I mostly stopped writing last year when a good friend dropped dead in front of his family. (Subscribe to my Substack—we don't update regularly!) Before that, I felt increasingly overborne by events. Things ground to a halt in 2019, but the machine began to break down long before. I ended the 2016 campaign periodically sitting under my desk, high, feeling secure because I wasn't writing anything stupid and feeling good because I was appropriately afraid of everything, but people thought I was exaggerating when I mentioned it.  

I wish I could say my seriousness about the novel coronavirus stems solely from believing in science and peer review and that I would take it seriously regardless, but my spouse is immunocompromised, and my father, who lives out in the Bay Area, had Covid-19, back in March or early April. He didn't tell us kids until he was out of the woods, but for days he had fevers over 103º. My stepmom, a former emergency room nurse, couldn't get him admitted anywhere, because he wasn't having respiratory problems. He woke up the same every day: It felt like someone had parked a Volkswagen on him.

We're supposed to say he's out of the woods. I'll believe that when he dies of old age, or something more reasonable that kills men in my family, like colon cancer or car accidents. Sometimes I think about him dropping dead like my friend, only from whatever post-Covid-19 effect triggers the brain’s forgetting to tell the lungs to breathe—or from the one that leads to storms of strokes, like a brain's blood vessels recreating the burning energies depicted on a CRISS ANGEL MINDFREAK poster. Then I wonder how I would die, or my wife, or my friend in Atlanta, or my brother. I think about drowning in open air, alone in a hissing world, and being incapable of saying the overdue apologies I ran out of time for.

After a while I realized that basically all Luke wanted was to hear from a coward living in the mismanaged kleptocracy of Florida, and the thing is, I can do that! I’m frightened right now!

I considered opening with, Every day I wake up frightened, to throw a fucking jolt into a piece about facing down a pandemic in a place where they have a paradise just for the cheeseburgers. But the joke is, I'm not wastin' away here in Coronaville. Sometimes I wake up and just have to pee, on the rare days when I don't wake up from the sensation of my son elbow-dropping my head because—how rude of me—it's 6:45 already.

In this respect, I am serene: My son and I exercise outside to burn off his energy, so I'm out in the sun for hours a day. I'm tanner, I've lost weight, and my phlegm feels looser. I grew a lushly indifferent goatee. My haircut looks like something that belongs on the gatefold cover of a concept album about a form of locomotion by a band named after geography. While the term "Lebowski Phase" has been applied to my appearance and to the fact that my leg injury and medical-marijuana prescription have collided with the reality of never having to drive anywhere again, I must insist that in many respects I have come to look like Jesus Christ. I am pro life and take no pleasure in reporting this.

As I have said, I am frequently awakened by my son, whose full name is My Beautiful Five-Year-Old Son Maitland. He is a treasure who spends quarantine within earshot of 24-hour news, regurgitating West Wing Democrat observations of mine with five-year-old precocity to harvest follows for Instagram. Maitland is an influencer already on record as supporting L’Oréal, opposing Medicare For All, and, when I first read him the shaggy start to this piece, he said, "Not a good look." He's a natural.

Waking up is violent but easy. The problem is everything after that. By the time I close my eyes, I'm not sure what I felt most on any given day—anger, sadness, impotence, a resentful churning need for vengeance, despair. Any one can seem like a day's dominant emotional dysfunction and then suddenly be overwhelmed by the dread that suffuses prolonged thought about the world outside.

I am one of the people who is Taking It Seriously. Seriously Taking It Seriously, though—not the people who say they're taking it seriously and then tell you about:

• Going to a recent indoor birthday party.

• Having a multi-course dinner at a fancy restaurant, "But it was okay because it was [extremely not-worth-a-life celebration]!"

• A full-contact playdate their kid had recently with two other children.

I abhor these people. I have an existential loathing of these people, and a granular scientific indictment. I enjoy reading new articles to learn new ways in which they are a danger to me. My apprehension is rich and exquisite. May their friends shun them, and may they be abandoned by their gods.

Sooner or later, every day, I think of the threats arrayed against me and my family. Each day, I see the most recent thing said by my governor, Ronald Fuckface DeSantis, in which he explicitly endorses and declares his intent to pursue actions that all available data say will kill Floridians by the thousands. Each day, I think about how, if I do so much as suggest fostering a free exchange of ideas about the proportional value of using every means to stop him, I will be arrested.

Every day, I bounce the "Evil or Moronic?" debate around my brain. I check in with an alumna buddy in Atlanta to see whose governor has shown more recent determination to murder his citizens. I gotta give Brian Kemp credit, because he's really holding his own. Naturally, this leads to wondering if either of them have a natural or acculturated advantage in terms of idiocy and malevolence. DeSantis' enrollment at Yale and Harvard and service in the military problematizes the idiocy narrative only for as long as it takes to remember all the people you've met who've gone to any of them and were dumber than dogshit. It would seem like fate to be murdered by an oaf, but I don't know that it's not merciful to at least be murdered purposefully rather than contemptuously and indolently.

Eventually, this leads to spending some time thinking about DeSantis as a kind of lethal bro angel. It's hard not to see his shitchyeah, brah, people are dyin', it's classic! expression and recognize that the state's chief executive resembles a lout you don't want to run into walking alone at FSU after a home loss. I prefer my jokes about the governor, but my friend David Roth nailed it when he said that DeSantis seemed like a person who would describe himself as “kind of a DUI guy.”

I know there's supposedly a culture war out there. There's a truck in my neighborhood with a Q sticker, and another with a Three-Percenter sticker, and there are more than a few neighbors of the "easily victimized white dude who owns a $50,000 truck he rarely takes off the pavement and who becomes physically belligerent when you correct him" variety, but there's a reason why you really only see “war” shit on YouTube. Few Americans are hostile to general safety protocols, and even fewer act out against them. I live where hate groups and old fashioned unaffiliated redneck trash drive in from the county to make a show of rebel flags, rolling coal and honking to intimidate protests, but people line up six feet apart at Home Depot, wear masks at Publix and get takeout at the pizza place outside without insisting on barging in. Most wars don’t need one side of them to be this manufactured.

Most of my friends and colleagues from this gig live in New York, so I've already sat through weeks of descriptions of streets silent except for ambulances, and I’ve already woken for weeks to the half-twilight of nightmares where friends died in a spare white hallway. There aren't a lot of surprises in store for Florida, and no images I can describe that would make you want to turn back now. It's like we're waiting for the rolling premiere of a franchise blockbuster. The dead won't really start packing them in for a few more weeks, but all the scariest shit hit YouTube when it opened in New York a thousand years ago. The coronavirus as an image, what it functionally is, as a horror, feels as familiar as the Scream mask, and the context that makes that scary as hell already feels dangerously been-and-gone, like an apprehension that Florida had for too long before the actual scare came.

There's a hope that all this will come to little again. Despite Governor DeSantis' refusal to take the initiative on shutting down the state until the last dollar was wrung from the last snowbird, the original shellacking never came. The Tampa Bay Times sampled smartphone data and concluded that Floridians overwhelmingly took the initiative to stay home, and they were aided in their quarantine process by the fact that Florida is car-dependent and atomized.

The heartbreaking realization, as you gradually run across more people who are Not Taking It Seriously or are Expressing Moronic Skepticism, is that for a month there about 80 percent of America was on board with doing the right thing. We, a people who suck at doing the right thing even for the wrong reasons, stood on the side of doing the harder thing if it helped people who weren't even us.

I really can't tell if I feel more anger than sadness at the fact that those who were meant to encourage us in safety, to serve us by offering difficult guidance, wasted our sacrifice and our trust. They squandered the patience given by a beggared and exhausted people. All they had to do was the right thing, and if they weren't sure what that was, they could have erred on the side of saving people’s lives and hoping it counted, and they failed.  

Instead, more people will die, and we'll be shut down again, and we will realize we are fundamentally unequipped for life with Covid-19. Florida is built on enclosed air-conditioned spaces: It's dependent on divorcing yourself from Florida as a climate and place. Asking Floridians to generate a public life under the unshielded rage of God’s angriest sun and baked from beneath by a sprawling pave-ocalypse requires asking them to rebel against everything their infrastructure has taught them for as long as they can remember. It is a car culture to the flesh and bone, and a restaurant relocating indoor tables to a road patio would park its diners inches away from eternity.

A picnic day like that is months off, again. It's time to go back inside and resume Inside Time. Inside Time melts away. I saw a headline around the Fourth of July, from the New York Times, that read, "In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both," and I remember seeing colleagues tweet, mmmm, so true, and, gets at something crucial we aren't talking about, and shit like that, and I was like, "Buddy, let's get in the DeLorean and visit March." I have nowhere to go, anyway, and all life is timeless.

We have no family in the area and have had no break. It's the three of us, like No Exit, but if most of the dialogue was the word "no" and a lot of stuff about poop and butts and farts, good guys and bad guys, and what Lego Star Wars would do, but with a lot of excruciated pleading for silence because Mom and Dad Are Working Right Now and We Love You Very Much but Jesus Christ Please Stop for the Love of God I Will Give You a Dollar If You Go in Your Room and Be Quiet and Play That Kindle App That Teaches You to Read That You Pay Attention to More Than Us Even Though I Would Read You a Fucking Novel If You'd Just Shut Up and Sit Still.

I'm resigned to staying in here until 2022. I’m screaming, but I will do it. I'm lucky in that I have access to a community pool and a neighborhood where my son and I can roam around on bikes and romp and look at water and birds and turtles. When we're lazy, we have a porch where we can feel nature without feeling exposed. We have a dependable (ok!!! haha!!!) income, and I can do irregularly scheduled work that allows me to be Parent rather than Employee. Exercise, meals and stories take up enough hours that I might as well lean into it.

But we’re lucky. We have a house and prescription mood-altering drugs and one thousand years of undersleep, but we are in less immediate danger than most. The state, almost reflexively, reaches out to open more doors even as Covid-19 blows past reopening benchmark after reopening benchmark.

The inexorable march for commerce doesn’t even come from malice in many cases; people in charge just don’t know how to do anything else but extort and scold people into working under any conditions, so long as it devours most of their time. All the exploitive principles are expected to work the same even if the world they built is fraudulent. We feed meat and the virus into the machines, irrespective of what the data says, and pray for rain. Watching Florida government on the state and local level is like watching two parents bring an alcoholic home after he got kicked out of rehab and deciding that the best course of action is leaving him with $5,000 in an apartment up the street from a dive bar and then going to Cancun for the week. It was on the calendar already, there wasn’t any choice, he looked very healthy at the time!

We have friends who are teachers, and we are scared for their spouses and kids. I don't know what Florida's plan for its teachers is other than to murder them. Again, I don't know if DeSantis is an idiot for flirting with giving enormous bipartisan sympathy to arguably the most effective labor group in the state, or a genius for flirting with finally eliminating a lobbying obstacle to conservative governance by simply liquidating its members as a class.

I worry if I start listing all the things I'm scared of, they'll never stop, but every day I see my son reach for something he should be able to reach for, and I either have a low-grade panic response and stifle it, or I have the panic response and yelp at him to get his attention and tell him to stop, startle him, and add another layer of gun-shy haunting to his day. I'm afraid he'll eventually become an animal in a Skinner Box in which all the buttons and levers are electrocuted, and there are no prizes.

I'm afraid that my son will always be emotionally arrested at two years behind the development of people the same age who had siblings in their house, or who, like many kids in my neighborhood, had parents who thought kids were invincible to Covid-19 and let them play with whomever they wanted. I worry that he may pay a price year after year even into adulthood because other kids got to practice socializing as we rode past. They got to hang out with people their own age and run around and do vitally stupid shit and say "butts" a lot, and he got look at me heartbroken and knowing empirically and epidemiologically that he couldn't play with his friends anymore but still needing to know why, and knowing that I couldn't tell him anything more sophisticated and anything less terrifying than, "So we don't get sick."

The other day he started crying and then screaming, "I hate the sickness! I hate the sickness!" repeating it in a higher and higher register, until he was up even past that piercing birdlike screech that prepubescent boys make whenever trying to sound like lasers or dinosaurs or squealing brakes. Every day I worry that I see another little bit of his capacity for happiness is dying—that the same awkward process of terror that took me from happy little kid to profoundly unhappy teen to scarred adult is even more rapidly at work, and each day another sparkling and joyous little light of childhood winks out in him, replaced by fear as a necessity of life.

I know that there is no plan for us. Conservatives don't want to be taxed or have their businesses lose money, so people are being kicked off unemployment and sent back to work with no test and trace protocols, irregular access to PPE, overwhelmed hospitals and often limited access to any care. We're doing all this as Florida blooms scarlet like paint being spilled into a mold shaped like the state. We're sending the men in the gasoline suits right at the heart of the fire.

It's a cruelly lazy little culling genocide of the working class, a Wall Street gamble that the blow to the labor force won't be more than a blip on the Dow and, a little recession aside, the One Percent will come out ten years later owning an even greater percentage of the United States. To the extent that there is a plan, that's the plan, and whether you land on the dead or the living part of any of those exchanges is more of a Your Problem than a Their Problem.

For now, it's enough to be hermits and hope the rest of Florida goes on strike by going inside and staying there and writing letters to representatives threatening to never come out. Cooking the same things, getting the same exercise in the same places, having the same awkward conversations on VOIP delay, and living every moment outside like we're three drinks in so we’re ready to get belligerent with anyone who is getting too close. Living every moment with some low-level neurasthenia that grows spine-deep and for the rest of our lives sends shuddering disequilibrium at the thought of air that never seems to move, hallways that lengthen without exits, and objects that seem both unavoidable and unclean. It’s fine. We’re all fine, here, now. How are you?

I feel a sudden Git Offa Mah Land thing about my son, a resolute commitment to homeschooling for the foreseeable future and to keeping the gummymint away. It sucks so much. I was so happy to send him to the public school just a few blocks away, instead of the shitty little charter schools nearby, but now that it’s Plague or Parents, he’s got his parents. Between us, he'll have access to 1.5 first-class educations. I still have my grandpa's service weapons from WWII, the last time America was in a war with fascism, when we took the opposing side. I'll empty a couple magazines into anyone who comes onto my property and tries to stop me from teaching my son critical race theory, Howard Zinn, and Leonard Levy's Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side. I refuse to turn my back on the heritage of my youth, of watching thousands of hours of MASH, by refusing to wear a mask outside or in fact any time I am doing anything other than drinking gin that I made in a tent.

Outside, records fall and progress rolls on. A governor whose go-to pejorative for opponents of all ages and sexes is very likely still “queef” watches as even the president concedes that a Republican National Convention here would be too lethal, as the state repeatedly sets records for daily deaths, beats out all of Europe in terms of new daily cases, leads the nation in cases per day, then tries to set them again. And then, every day, our governor makes his ahegao-but-for-ethnic-cleansing face and psychotically clangs a bell indicating that Florida just became the 15,000 customer at Leadshoe Larry’s Kicked-in-the-Dick, and it’s time for all us lucky winners to line up and drop our pants.

Florida’s lethality is so tacky that it’s almost camp, but there is no satisfaction in being right about how wrong everything is. Nobody gets a prize for correctly guessing the surplus death toll. All you have to do is look someone else in the eye working in life under Covid.

I’m old now, so I have Humiliating Injury Syndrome (HIS), and somehow in the month between the Super Bowl and the pandemic, I tore a rotator cuff, a labrum, or both, by throwing a (mini!!!) football with friends. After four months, I broke down and went to get an MRI. I skulked down corridors and lurked in a corner of a waiting room, like playing spies with an opponent who was the air. Even the clean and modern fixtures felt miasmic and corrupted, like they were a parking garage in an Alan Pakula film.

Eventually a nurse emerged from an office, crinkled her brown eyes, waved and surprised me by asking after my family by name. She lives three blocks away from me and had hosted me at a party once. Later that day, as my car coasted down the approach to my house, I saw a garage door open and my neighbor’s son walk out on his way to his shift at the same grocery store that I treat emotionally like a Superfund site.

I thought about how much I unconsciously held my breath where they work, and how I unconsciously associate those places with poor choices. The danger of the world outside is so massive that I reflexively need to cordon off the threat into areas of blame and blamelessness. In a moment of crisis, years of conservative rhetorical conditioning in the discourse have taught me to reflexively pathologize those in harm’s way. There is less chaos if someone is at least responsible for something. There is less risk to me, if it turns out someone else’s epidemic is someone else’s fault.

But it is someone else’s fault. And it’s not some poor fucker doomed to sit in a box somewhere and accept paper money and hand metal money back and point at where toilets are, because that’s how he keeps the lights on. It’s not the person consigned to some life-sucking task that, on the best of days, is too humiliating and cruelly impoverished of purpose to ever be a reason why someone should die. It’s not the person around whom you hold your breath because you don’t know where they’ve been. It’s the person and people who put us all in position to suddenly feel like we’re suffocating together.

I hate that I sometimes unconsciously hold my breath around strangers, and I hate that they have heard it. I think of my neighbors, and of the workers on whom we’re dependent, and the permanent uncertain shortness of breath I feel, and I want every moment of their anxiety and mine gathered up and then rained on those who shepherded it into being, those who nurtured it and feasted on it, those who profited from it and were indifferent toward it. Those who consider themselves DUI guys and those who pay to elect them and give them sinecures and who are simply too rich to be arrested for boating under the influence anymore.

I think of how I hold my breath near good people and near vulnerable people in places I am wary of and that we all need to share, and I wonder if we will simply hold our breath for the rest of the year, and if we’ve bargained for standing near each other and holding it for all of the next. And I wish so eagerly that all our suspended futures and the air between us might catch at the throats of those who put us here. That justice for a man like Ron DeSantis might be a permanent and sucking terror: stuck always in an involuntary startled gasp at the sight of responsibility, afraid at the approach of every stranger, incapable of drawing a full and restful breath, and never knowing peace again.

Jeb Lund used to write about politics for Rolling Stone, The Guardian and Gawker, and a bunch of other places, and was the Spectacle of Trump Editor at 50 States of Blue. He and David Roth have a podcast about Hallmark original movies that is mostly funny and exasperated and not unkind, and it's not ultimately about the movies anyway. It's fine and people enjoy it. Don't make it weird. He also has a podcast where he watches every Dennis Quaid movie in a row. That is also completely normal.

Ok here’s me again with a couple more things.

You’ll want to read this in the New York Times today about a forthcoming documentary on ICE. After it was completed the filmmakers were apparently threatened with legal action by the agency over the inclusion of parts that made ICE look even worse than they already look doing literally everything else they do.

Some of the contentious scenes include ICE officers lying to immigrants to gain access to their homes and mocking them after taking them into custody. One shows an officer illegally picking the lock to an apartment building during a raid.

At town hall meetings captured on camera, agency spokesmen reassured the public that the organization’s focus was on arresting and deporting immigrants who had committed serious crimes. But the filmmakers observed numerous occasions in which officers expressed satisfaction after being told by supervisors to arrest as many people as possible, even those without criminal records.

“Start taking collaterals, man,” a supervisor in New York said over a speakerphone to an officer who was making street arrests as the filmmakers listened in. “I don’t care what you do, but bring at least two people,” he said.

Here’s one disgusting detail among many.

They followed Border Patrol tactical agents who took pride in rescuing migrants from deadly dehydration even as the agents acknowledged that their tactics were pushing the migrants further into harm’s way. They showed how the government had at times evaluated the success of its border policies based not only on the number of migrants apprehended, but on the number who died while crossing.

***

source:

https://luke.substack.com/p/all-they-had-to-do-was-the-right?utm_source=Brooklyn+Today&utm_campaign=dd6f63665c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_07_28_01_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1ba554d7d5-dd6f63665c-125128182

[noreasonjustbored]

The Truth Is The Scariest Part

Hi! I’m here with something that no one requested but the concept was stuck in my head because I’m Chenry Trash.

If anyone wants to be tagged whenever I upload a fic, please respond to this post and I will do that going forward. Hope you enjoy!

———————————

Everyone had given it a shot and told their best scary stories to no avail. Henry was still unbothered and bored sitting in the Story Tank. After Piper took her turn, she went back to the table with Charlotte and Jasper to help them put Henry’s steaks back into the Bromaha box. They wouldn’t be needing them.

“Can I take this thing off?” Henry whined.

“No you can not!” Ray exclaimed.

“UGHHHHHHHHH” Henry groaned. “Just face it Ray, I won this challenge.”

“I will not face anything! I WILL be chowing down on those delicious steaks.” Ray declares.

Henry simply rolled his eyes in response.

“Well I have a story for you, but it’s not mine” Schowz says with a sly look on his face.

“Okay? What’s the story? I’m sure that I won’t be scared.” Henry replies with the utmost confidence.

“Charlotte told me a great story earlier this week about a guy.”

“Alright. What’s the story about? This guy a ghost or something?” Henry asks.

“No. Just some guy in her class. And he is definitely alive.”

What’s so scary about a guy in Charlotte’s class? Henry thought.

“Who’s alive?” Ray wonders.

“Just a boy that Charlotte was telling me about. She says that he’s super cool.”

Through the immersion, Henry sees an image of Schowz and Charlotte on the Man Cave couch.

“So what did you want to talk to me about Charlotte? A new device? An update for a old device?”

“No, I just wanted to tell you about this super cool guy.”

“Oh, alright girl. Tell me more. Spill the coffee as you kids say.”

“You mean tea?”

“Tea, coffee they both have caffeine. What’s up with this boy? Is he your boyfriend?”

While Henry is in deep thought and not paying them any attention, Schowz walks over to the Story Tank monitor to check on Henry’s Fear-inol levels. The levels were rising slowly. 

I knew that would work! I’m a genius! Schowz thinks to himself.

He looks over at Ray and gestures to the monitor with a slight nod in its direction. Schowz then gives Ray a wink to signal for him to play along. Ray winks back to let him know that he understands.

They’ve both noticed that Henry has been a little more attentive to Charlotte than usual lately. Standing over shoulder while she’s at the console, invading her personal space, bringing her food from the AutoSnacker, riding in the same tube with her when Jasper takes the other. He is not subtle at all. He definitely has a big, fat crush.

The entire interaction goes unnoticed by Henry who is still pondering Schowz’s earlier statement. Charlotte thinks that someone is cool? That’s new. She usually thinks that everyone is lame. Including me. Is this a real guy? 

“Charlotte said that? What else-” Henry clears his throat and tries but fails to sound nonchalant, “Uh, what else did she say?”

“Are you guys talking about Brayden?” Ray cuts in. “Because Charlotte also mentioned this guy to me. She went on and on about how handsome he was” Ray adds helpfully.

“Ray, guess what?”

“What?”

“I think that I know someone who could beat you in the Handsomest Man in Swellview Competition this year.”

“Blasphemy! No one can beat this face!”

“Nope, I really think he could win.”

“Oh yeah? Who is this guy?”

“My friend Brayden.”

“Show me his picture.”

Charlotte pulls out her phone to show him.

Schowz checks the monitor again, there was a spike in Fear-inol AND Urinol after Ray backed his play. Ray walked over to the monitor and saw the increase as well.

“Henry doesn’t stand a chance” he whispers quietly to his shorter friend.

“Absolutely not.” Schowz agrees.

Brayden? Debate team Brayden? Charlotte thinks he’s cool? And handsome? She said that he barely brought anything to the team except for a pretty face. I thought that was an insult to his intelligence. But maybe it was a compliment on his face?

“Did Charlotte tell you about her date with him?” questions Schowz.

Date? What date? Charlotte is dating Brayden now? When did that happen? Why am I just hearing about it?

“Um, they’re going out? Like in real life? And she told you this?” Henry asks disbelievingly.

“She suuuuure did. I heard he was taking her out this Saturday” Ray says with a goofy grin on his face.

Fear-inol levels were now reaching the precipice of the Startled Zone but weren’t quite there yet. Schowz motions to Ray to keep going, letting him know that their scare tactics were working.

Henry takes off the helmet and whips his head over to Charlotte who is sitting at the table with Piper talking animatedly. Jasper is now at the auto snacker ordering more candy and popcorn.

I wonder what they’re talking about. Is it about this so called “date”? Does Jasper know too? Am I the only one who didn’t know? Why didn’t she tell me?

“That-that’s cool. Charlotte has a date. What’s so scary about that?” Henry plays it off but there is a glistening of sweat forming on his brow bone.

“Oh, nothing. I just thought that you’d want to know. Put the mask back on.”

Henry follows the direction without protest. It’s as if he’s in sort of a trance.

“Yeah Henry, isn’t Saturday you and Charlotte’s official Movie Night night?” Ray asks.

In the Story World, Henry and Charlotte are in his room watching movies when they hear a knock on the door. After going downstairs, Henry answers the door to see Brayden standing there with a small bouquet of daises that he hands to Charlotte. She takes the daisies and gives them a big whiff before passing the flowers off to Henry. With a big smile on her face she turns to Henry and says, “Don’t wait up”. She then walks out the door hand and hand with Brayden. Henry is left alone looking down at the daisies.

“It is.” Henry muttered glumly.

“Weellllll, she’s gonna miss that. I heard that they are going to Nacho Ball.” Schowz adds.

Back in the story world, Charlotte and Brayden are sitting on the same side of the booth talking and giggling. They seem to be in their own little world. Charlotte wipes some nacho cheese off the corner of Brayden’s lip with a napkin. They actually look good together.

Henry feels sick to his stomach. “She hasn’t cancelled movie night for this weekend, how do I know that you aren’t just saying this to bother me?” Henry questions Ray and Schowz.

“She probably just hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Too busy thinking about her date with Brayden.” Ray mocks.

“Bother you? Does the fact that Charlotte has a date bother you?” Schowz inquires.

“Uh, no it doesn’t bother me. Why would it?” Henry mutters while scratching the back of his neck.

“You tell us Henry? Are you upset that Charlotte is going on a date?” Ray asks while stepping closer to the tank.

“Psssh, what? No. I’m just upset that she’s going to miss movie night.” Henry says nervously.

“Really?” Ray countered, squinting at Henry in suspicion.

Henry mustered up all his bravado and put it into the next word, “Really.”

“Well I’m sure if you ask her, she’d be willing to reschedule the date for earlier that day.” Schowz suggests as he checks Henry’s Fearinol levels again. The levels are now in the fully in the Startled Zone and creeping to the precipice of Scared. Schowz mouths to Ray, ‘Almost there’.

“Good. And then at movie night, Charlotte can tell you ALL about her date and how great it was.” Ray taunts.

Henry sees a vision of himself and Charlotte in the living room while Charlotte chatters excitedly about the date she just got back from. They haven’t watched one movie yet. They had been talking for an hour about Brayden.

“He was such a gentleman Henry, I think I really like him. He’s so cute and smart and nice and handsome and tall and kind. And did I mention that he was handsome?”

“You sure did Charlotte. Only about a hundred times.”

“Sorry, I’m just so excited that Brayden asked me out. And we’re going on another date tomorrow. I hope we last.”

“Me too” Henry replies in a false cheery tone.

“I wonder if they’ll kiss? What do you think Ray? Think they’ll kiss?” Schowz questions.

“Oh definitely. One thing I know about is teenage boys. I used to be one not too long ago! If I was this guy, I’d definitely shoot my shot. Charlotte’s a catch.”

“True. She’s so smart and pretty. What guy would turn her down?” Schowz adds.

“I don’t know. A chump probably” Ray alleges.

“Do you think that Brayden is a chump Henry?” the foreigner probes.

Now the Story Zone shows Brayden and Charlotte in front of her door after the date.

“I had a great time tonight” Brayden tells Charlotte.  

“Me too” Charlotte answers shyly while looking down at her feet.

“Hey Charlotte?” Brayden whispers.

“Hm?” she says while looking up at him.

Instead of responding verbally, he looks into her eyes and tucks a stray piece of hair behind her ear. Stepping closer, he glances down at her lips and looks back into her eyes that are locked onto his. They both start leaning closer to each other.

Right before imaginary Charlotte and Brayden touch lips, Henry rips the helmet off his head. He’s breathing harshly and looks uncomfortable.

“That’s enough! I-I’m good” Henry rasps out.

Checking the monitor, Henry’s Fear-inol levels were offically in Scared terrority now and steadily increasing. His heart rate is also off the charts.

“Ha! I knew that I could scare you!” Ray gloats.

“I started it. It was my story” Schowz whines.

“Yeah, yeah yeah. Give me those sweet, sweet steaks!” he walks over to the table to collect the meat and then goes through the sprocket door. 

Henry gets out of the Story Tank while Schowz chases after Ray. “I thought we were supposed to be sharing those!”

Sighing, Henry looks over at the table to see only Piper sitting there on her phone. It looks like she hadn’t moved in quite some time.

“Where’d Charlotte and Jasper go?”

“They went upstairs awhile ago to help some customers.”

“Oh okay. Nice. So were you on your phone the whole time or....?”

“Yeah, I’ve been in a Twitflash beef with Jana Tetrazinni for the past thirty minutes.”

“Cool cool cool cool,cool.”

“Still totally heard the fact that you were scared by Charlotte going on a date in a fake scenario.”

“I wasn’t scared! And fake scenario? What do you mean fake scenario? Char’s going out with Brayden this Saturday isn’t she?”

“Uh no dude. The only reason those guys even know about Brayden is because Charlotte was complaining about how he almost made them lose a debate this week. She hates that guy” Piper says as she gets up from the table and walks towards him.

“Oh.” Henry says with obvious relief.

“Yeah, ‘oh’. You need to go and ask her out before you give yourself an aneurysm. I’m not visiting you in the hospital” Piper says sarcastically and pats him on the arm as she passes.

“Ha ha very funny Piper. I don’t see Charlotte like that, we’re just friends.”

“That’s not what your Fear-inol levels say buddy.”

[neshabeingchildish]

League of Extraordinary Geniuses || Chapter 6

I’d been trying NOT to, in case others wanted to read this story, but at this point, I’ve only seen fans of these fandoms interact, so there will be things mentioned that if you didn’t watch the shows, you’ll be lost about. So sorry if there are others here now, but I am mostly writing for those who have interacted and let me know their thoughts and feelings about this story and they’ve all been familiar with Lab Rats, Henry Danger, and The Thundermans, so… this chapter in particular has some things that it would be much too much to explain it all, from LR canon and a bit from HD too, and I’m sorry if there are readers unfamiliar with that, but y’all haven’t let me know that you’re here.

Y’all probably didn’t expect another update this soon, but what had happened was the last chapter would have been too long, so I found a point to cut it for that one. Also, a story line that I wanted to touch on this story, but didn’t realize how I would incorporate it until @kiddangers made a post about it either her or on her Instagram, can’t remember, and she sparked the topic and now it is a major story arc in this fic, which might be hella hurtful at some point, but... If you’re in for the ride, you’re in for it, Friends. 

@verified-dumbass @just-a-j-reallly I’ve decided not to continue tagging anybody else that hasn’t interacted, out of courtesy and just feeling awkward about tagging people that are nonresponsive to it.

What if I’m the Monster

Conspiracy theories were running wild and fortunately, all of the communities that had reason to think that they might be able to be linked to this scandal quickly took action to try to clear their records and discover who the real guilty party was. The bionic, supers, and non-super communities all began their own investigations as to what might have happened while the collaboration of Dystress, Shoutout, Thunderstrike and Chase Davenport were on the ground, assessing the scene themselves. Of course, Chase was the spokesperson and mission leader. That would put everyone at home at better ease. 

“Myself and a team of trusted heroes have been working practically nonstop since the torpedo attack to figure out what took place here. There were some recent developments that I’m not at liberty to speak about, which Davenport Industries had been handling, and one of our facilities was going to be attacked, when fortunately, a superhero stepped in and managed to save it and all surrounding innocents that might have been caught in the crossfire. We have recovered several remains, but they are as of this moment inconclusive. What I can assure the public of is that my current team and the Davenport brand will be working hard to get to the bottom of this tragedy and keep the citizens of Jamaica safe from any further threats…” 

He and Shoutout left the press conference and returned directly back to the crash site that Dystress and Thunderstrike were at. Thunderstrike had telepathically tunneled a lot of the water, froze it in pillars, and Dystress used her scanning systems for wreckage. With this tactic, they had found numerous parts of the jet and some torpedo shrapnel, but it wasn’t until Chase returned, with his hypersenses that they found the first possible remains of an assailant… “I don’t know how to say this,” he said. 

“With your words, perhaps?” Max offered. 

“That’s an android…” He sighed. Max unfroze the pillar, and Chase telepathically collected the android remains to them. The four looked down at it for a while. There was very little human DNA left to him. Some hair and facial components, a few fingers, and everything else was charred and shattered metal. “They’re starting to enlist them against their brethren,” Chase said sadly. “I don’t know why I didn’t think about that happening. Of course they would! Who better to go toe to toe with them than their own kind?” 

Max and Charlotte noticed that he was really upset about this. Charlotte beckoned over some Davenport analysts to quietly collect this, so that the three of them could inspect the body later. She also decided that they had been working too hard and would need a break. At the very least, Mika would, so she dismissed her and told her to try to get some rest.

“And, you probably should too. You’ve been out of your chamber for days,” Charlotte observed. Chase folded his arms and watched as the employees took the android away.

“I want to begin studying him, right away.”

“I do too, but we’re only human. We do need to rest.”

“We’re not ONLY human,” Chase argued.

“No, but we still need rest and we’ve earned it. You, especially.”

“Why, him especially?” Max asked. Charlotte just threw him a look. It was so smart of her to have a mask that covers her mouth instead of one that covered her eyes, because those looks were a weapon of their own. “Fine. But, if he’s resting, we all should rest and let the androids keep watch while the Davenport searchers keep collecting samples.”

“Is that agreeable, Chase?” Charlotte asked. 

Chase sighed and reluctantly nodded his head. He knew that she wanted him to get some rest and she had a point, afterall. The three of them went to the safehouse and tried to calm their nerves and settle in. 

You would’ve thought that they would be so drained that they would immediately all fall to sleep, but all were restless. Max passed by Mika and knocked on the door, “Hey. You gonna get some sleep, or what?” He asked. She furrowed her eyebrows and looked at him, the expression gesturing to the fact that she was clearly on a call. He waved his fingers at Chapa, on the screen and then pointed at Mika, “Sleep in, if you need to in the morning, but try to at least lay down for the night. You can talk to your girlfriend some other time.” 

Mika scoffed and shook her head, “Goodnight, Max.”

Chapa asked, “He thinks we’re girlfriends? Awesome.” 

Mika replied, “He said that just to be annoying. 

Max smirked to himself as he headed for the shower. Charlotte was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth and washing her face and such. She usually did that before getting into the shower, so he said, “I’m goin’ in,” and she nodded. It didn’t bother her, but he liked to at least be clear. He was in the shower, sort of zoned out and thinking while she sprayed her locs with oils and finished up her preshower things. They crossed paths switching up who was in the shower and didn’t even have the energy for some risque joke about it. 

Charlotte knew that it had to be just as heavy on their hearts as it was on hers… They freed the androids and now it seemed that at least one or some of them not only didn’t appreciate it, but might make it hard enough that they could be in serious trouble for even attempting it. 

When she came out of the shower, Max was still in the mirror, doing his thing. This was the one of the quickest times either of them had ever taken in a bathroom before. He was just staring into the mirror, holding his toothbrush, though. “Hey… You okay?” 

He blinked and then looked at her in her robe, holding a jar of body butter. He smiled and nodded. “How can I not be. I’m in the best place in the world - with you.” He came over and kissed her on the forehead. “It’s gonna be okay.”

She sighed, “It better be. You and Chase let go of a lot to be here.”

“I can’t speak for him, but a lot is here for me.” He cupped her face and pressed his forehead to hers. “I’m gonna make sure Mika’s got everything she needs, then I’m crashing in your room, if that’s okay.”

“I was gonna crash in Mika’s room,” she said. “She has nightmares sometimes after a stressful day and the last few days have been hell for me, so I can only imagine what they’ve been for her.”

“You could very well imagine. You’ve been a hero for a while, now.”

“I forgot how this felt. When something serious and dangerous is staring you in the face and you literally don’t know if you’re about to die. I feel… triggered. I hate that she has triggering memories now, and one of the scariest days in her life has taken place because she’s here for me.”

“Mika is where she wants to be. We all are. We chose you, Char. Come on. Let’s check on the kid and get to bed.”

They peeked into Mika’s room and Chase was in there, moving around. “What are you doing?” Charlotte asked in a whisper. 

“She was having a nightmare. I kept hearing her whimpering, so I’m trying to calm her down or something,” he said. He looked tired and irritated, but he was also concerned. Charlotte rubbed his back and took over. She put on some music, sprayed some fragrance, handed Mika her beloved plushie, rubbed some oils on her feet, tucked her in and strummed her scalp. After a moment, she was snoring and the trio left her to it. Charlotte would be back, but she had this grave nagging feeling that she needed to make sure that they got to bed too. She felt like this was her fault, no matter what Max said to try to smooth her over. They had followed her into this and this had become tricky. 

“I’m going to try to get us a bigger space when I have time, so that you two don’t have to squeeze into the same room,” she said, not knowing what else to say.

“It’s fine. I put my chamber in your room, so Max can have the spare to himself.”

“Nice try, but I’m crashing in her room. She’s got all the good sleepy time stuff like candles and… stuff and I’m sleeping in there, as well.”

“It’s fine. You two are always welcome to crash in my room. I’ll set the mood for you.” She similarly fixed the room as she had done for Mika, programmed some things into Chase’s chamber and when both her guys were asleep, she ducked out of the room and into a video call with Jasper and Henry.

“Char! Thank goodness! We’ve been trying to reach you for days. I was starting to think that the footage of Dystress on the news was altered and you’d been taken into some underground prisoner chamber!” Jasper worried.

“Nope. Just been taken to depression town. Was hoping you had some feel good stories about the kids or something to help me cheer up.”

Henry nodded, “Say no more. Jasper’s been making all of these musical fan videos of the kids and putting them on our DingDong account.”

“Oooh, I’m gonna check those out.”

“ALSO… We got the uh… shipment…” Henry said and looked more serious now. “They’re in the Dome. Wasn’t sure if they were capable of being at Budding Flowers.”

“They’re not defected. They’re free, and want to work with children. Your charity is one of the most successful ones in the world, currently. Androids are people too.”

Jasper winced, “Only… They aren’t… and… well…”

“Ray is freaking out about the recent news that androids now have autonomy, because if you remember, a Piper from the future came back to tell us that hell on Earth was a road paved by a robot takeover. They created ones that looked like children. Jasper and I just don’t feel comfortable, at the moment letting androids interact with kids that we’ve vowed to protect…”

“Wow. You two think that I’ve kickstarted the end of the world?” She asked, feeling absolutely worse than she had before she called them.

“No. We think that you would do anything to help others and to fix the world and that there are others out there who will take advantage of that, if they get the chance,” Henry offered.

Jasper added, “Schwoz’s friend from Davenport was telling us all about an android rebellion that once almost took place. His ex girlfriend’s models are the same ones that you designed yours after. Come ON, Charlotte…” 

“She intended for them to be used for evil. There’s a big difference in our work and the results. Wow… I’m going to go check on Mika. Have a good night.”

“Char…” Henry said.

“Good night, Henry!” She hung up, frustrated and ready to cry. Not because she felt like they were being mean or hard on her. Because, they had a point and she couldn’t believe that her messiah complex had allowed her to miss it beforehand. They didn’t even KNOW about the android remains that were found. Oh God, what if she was the figurative first horseman? Conquering the academic world, looking like a savior to all because of her penchant for improving lives and society and her solutions that help and bring about peace… only to also be the reason that war and bloodshed roll in, and then famine and disease and death… How on Earth she got from messiah complex to I am literally the antichrist, she was unsure, but that was where her mind was whenever she began to doze off. 

.

Mika woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare. She was gonna get some warm milk with lavender honey and maybe a patty, if there were any more in there. She found Charlotte, sitting on the patio, asleep with her head on her laptop. She went to get Max, but neither him nor Chase were in their room, so she checked Charlotte’s and there they both were. Chase in his chamber, Max in Charlotte’s bed, covered by pillows, with a sleeping mask on and the smell of candles and incense heavy in the air. She woke him up, “Charlotte fell to sleep outside.”

“What?” He asked, half asleep, but jumping out of bed, anyway. He collected Charlotte. Mika collected her devices and they put her back in her bed. Mika felt left out, and grabbed her blanket and stuffie and came into Charlotte’s room too. With her in Charlotte’s bed, Max made a little fortress on the floor and quickly went back to sleep. Mika was awake for a while, but Charlotte’s arm draped around her and she fell back to sleep. 

Charlotte got up and looked around the room. She didn’t remember coming to bed and now, she had Chase in his chamber, Max on the floor with half of her pillows, Mika in her bed and her own head was spinning, because, as she just recalled, she’d cried herself to sleep. Still, she was the first person awake and she started her day without waking any of the others. Eventually, Max and Chase came into the lab, where she was evaluating all of the diagnostics on the remains, listening to music, and talking on the phone, “Well, if I can get those remains sent to me, it will help me to determine how likely the root of that issue is and to ease your mind and maybe others,’ in the process.” Chase looked at the screen and Max went straight to the autoblender. “Okay. Thank you for your cooperation, and tell Douglas to learn to keep his fat mouth shut when he’s in the room with MY people.” She hung up and looked up, “Good morning.”

“What’s that about Douglas?” Max wondered, while Chase breezed through all of the research. 

“He was talking to Ray and Schwoz about Giselle Vicker’s plans to use androids for a hostile takeover and now, one of THEEEEEEEE STUPIDEST powerful men has ideas in his head about the free androids and a robot rebellion and… Anyway, Schwoz is gonna send me the remains of a robot from the future so that I can study it.”

Max and Chase both stared at her blankly, then looked at each other. “How long have you been awake, Charlotte?” Chase asked.

“I got enough sleep,” she snapped, shaking her head. “In another, idk 20 years or so, maybe less… there is supposed to be a robot takeover inspired by the Terminator movies. Thanks to Douglas having a conversation with Ray, he now thinks that I’ve somehow set things in motion for that to occur.”

“Well… If you have, it’s done now. Besides, the fact that you have a robot from the future to work on is all the proof you need that it was gonna happen anyway,” Max said, making a smoothie. “I wanna see the robot, though. Let me in on that.”

“You and I need to keep searching for remains,” Chase reminded him. 

“That’s not gonna take us the rest of our lives. By the way,” Max said to Charlotte as he poured the smoothie, “Told Mika to sleep in. Marx arrived today, so you can get him to do anything that she was gonna do.”

“Who arrived?” Chase wondered, because he was supposed to approve anybody that anyone was trying to bring into the loop and he hadn’t spoken with Max about anybody. 

“His personal android assistant,” a male voice said from the doorway and Chase gasped and prepared himself to attack. 

Max rushed to jump in front of Chase and said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry… It was supposed to be hilarious, but then things took a turn and I didn’t get a chance to explain to you. This is my personal android assistant, Marx. I made him in the Marcus model form to fuck with you, but I promise, he’s of no actual ties to your Marcus.”

“That you know of,” Charlotte said. “I tried to talk him and Douglas OUT  of this.”

“Douglas missed his son’s face and had some regrets and I wanted a personal android assistant. I thought it would be quite humorous to have him walk up to you one day, but fate had other plans,” Max said.

Chase was staring at the android. It looked JUST like Marcus. Why would Douglas allow this and not tell him? What if Leo had seen this thing? Marx was staring back at Chase, but he had a polite semi smile on his face. “Keep it away from me,” Chase said.

“Marx uses he/him/his pronouns,” Max said and patted Marx on the shoulder. “They/them/theirs, at the very least.” 

Chase smiled tightly, “Keep him away from me, and I MEAN that, Max Thunderman!” He stormed out of the lab and Charlotte shook her head. “I asked you to give Marx a different face.”

“I didn’t have time!”

Marx said, “If it pleases you, I could work on some programming to change my face, however, I don’t prefer to do so.”

“Naw, keep your face. Just… stay away from the little guy.”

“From Mr. Chase Davenport. Got it.”

.

Chase was livid. How could that POSSIBLY be seen as a joke? If he knew about Marcus, he HAD to know about all of the pain and terror he caused the family! That only made him feel a resurgence of hostility towards Douglas. Sure, they were on pleasant terms, but some part of him would always hold on to, at least a little bit, the things that he had been willing to do to his own. Really, he was the reason that Marcus was so terrible, then he just left him, for Giselle Vickers to find and… Chase was getting extremely furious thinking about this. Marcus had been one of the first major betrayals done to him. He thought they were friends, and not only were they actually enemies, but that was his brother who his father had turned against him and he hated that Max Thunderman would casually try to prank him by showing him such a face.

After a while, Max joined him, silently at first, but they both felt the tension there. They were silently working. A few times, a question came up in one of their minds, but neither of them wanted to break the silence, because it was uncertain whether it would relieve the tension. Finally, Max had to break. “It was messed up of me to make a Marcus model android with the intention to shake you up. I knew a little bit about the situation and not whatever it was that your memory tapped into back there. And, I really didn’t know you at the time, either. I didn’t think about how it would affect you like this and I certainly didn’t think you and me would be on the terms we are on right now. So, I hate that I took a joke so far, but it was all me. Douglas really just liked the feeling of seeing his son’s face again. And Charlotte, of course told me the entire time that it would be harmful. I just go too far sometimes.”

Chase was breathing heavy the entire time. Waiting on Max to actually apologize, not just list what happened. But, then again, why would he? He was obviously the type to get pleasure out of people’s pain and not even care about their personal trauma at the expense of a stupid laugh. He was much too smart to just “not realize it’d be that harmful,” so Chase wasn’t eager to listen to him and definitely not going to trust him. 

“I guess the perks of being raised in a picture perfect family don’t include having some respect for others who weren’t so privileged,” Chase said. And that was all he felt like he needed to. To dive deeper, he’d dig deeper into his own problems, and he still had work to do.

“My family wasn’t perfect, but I wouldn’t have wanted somebody to make fun of our problems either. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m sorry…” Max said, and it really sounded genuine. Chase almost let his guard down. But, he knew that he’d let his guard down with Marcus… With Sebastian… He’d been let down basically any time he ever let his guard down and Charlotte was the one exception to that thus far. He was fine with that fact. “Apology accepted,” he lied, and didn’t want to speak of it again. 

Max felt horrible. Chase looked like an angry little sad puppy. Like… Seeing Marcus’ face REALLY did something to him. There wasn’t a lot of information, so he only knew the highlights that had been shared with him from Douglas, and it honestly sounded like, from what he’d been given, that Marcus kinda got the shit end of the stick. Max was starting to see that Chase probably got those types of ends more than his persona of perfection revealed. “If anybody ever tried to do something bad to you, I’m gonna have your back. I’m shitty sometimes. I do mean stuff. I don’t always prove to be the best sort of human, but… You’re a good person, despite how annoying you can be and I’m still probably gonna let you down and give you shit, but… I honestly do have your back,” Max said.  

Chase sighed, “My back is fine. Can we please just finish this up?” Max got back to work, but he heard Chase mumble, “I’m not gonna be fooled again.”

.

All three of them were looking at what they knew to be EVERYTHING that could possibly have been left behind, while the other agencies went through the waters and the islands to double and triple check. Androids were surveilling them, to ensure that nobody planted anything, though Chase at this point trusted the androids about as much as he’d trusted the bionic army.

Max rarely trusted anybody, but he was trying not to waiver in his faith in Charlotte. 

Charlotte was simply defeated and trying to think. “If I have to spend the rest of my life preventing it, I will.” She looked at a chip that was more advanced than her work, but definitely carried her signature and held her emblem. The robots from the future… The ones that would revolt and enslave humanity? They were connected to her work. She threw the chip across the lab in frustration and stormed out. 

Max and Chase waited. They looked at each other and Max wondered, “What do you think?”

“I think that it’s the androids. I think that they have autonomy and that humanity won’t allow harmony and that they will rise up against them after they’ve gotten tired of being oppressed. What I will never believe is that Charlotte is responsible. She wanted to do right for someone. It wouldn’t be her fault that they betray her.” He fumed and groaned, “Androids never should have been created.”

Max scoffed, “We could say the same thing about bionics! And how do we know that it isn’t something that a human tried to do? They always try to harm anybody different, especially if they read as more powerful. It could be one of the thousands of geniuses we’ve sought out over the past few weeks, or one of the… of her trusted employees…” Max tugged his hair a little and said, “Whoever it is… We’ve got to stop them. This can’t be the legacy forged for Charlotte’s good deeds.”

“I agree with that,” Chase said, and he meant it. He summoned the chip to himself and said, “I’m going to use every skill that I have to try to find a link to someone or something that answers these questions. But first, we’ve gotta make sure our woman is okay.”  He set it down and Max nodded his head. They found Charlotte near the Man Copter, hugging Mika and sending her away, for her own safety. Mika was crying and begging her not to do this, but Charlotte was definitely in a mode right now. There was no way she could let whatever was happening tarnish this bright young girl that she loved and cared so much for. 

“I won’t leave you out. I’m sharing everything with you. I just want you out of range until we figure out who tried to attack the place, okay?”

“Okay,” Mika said, ugly crying and nodding. She added, “But as soon as it’s safe, I come back, right?”

“At the very instant!” Charlotte told her. 

“Okay.” She waved at Max and Chase, who she saw watching, then strapped herself in.

“She’s going to one of my safehouses with the twins and their nanny, and will be working remotely. She felt like I was punishing her for this.” Charlotte shook her head. “Listen… I need some physical gratification now. I’m sorry if that seems toxic or foolish, especially considering how things are going at the moment, but I have to have release. I have to feel something primal and satisfactory. So… I’m going to head to Dystopia  for a little bit, but I’ll keep contact with you.”

“Dystopia? What’s in Dystopia that will give you what you need that you can’t have here?” Chase wondered.

“Her boyfriends,” Max said, sadly. 

Charlotte wiped her face, “I just… Need to connect and I need it ASAP. I’m sorry…” 

“Don’t be. We understand,” Max said. She could tell that he was furious, despite his words, but everyone knew that Henry and Jasper were where her home is and she did love Max and Chase, but they didn’t know how to handle everything she was currently experiencing. Plus, she owed the Defenders an apology, for questioning her, when it turned out that despite the fact that the idea came from a sensitive place, the worries were valid.

“We’ll come too,” Chase said. “We’ll stay out of the way, but I don’t think that the three of us should have that much distance between us right now. We need to stick together.”

“I agree,” Max said. 

“Yeah. Of course, if you two still are in it with me.”

“Charlotte, you may not realize this yet, but… Max and I are yours, too.” Chase said. He had blurted it out, and didn’t want to follow it up, but he meant it, and fortunately, Max didn’t argue with him. “So, to Dystopia, I guess.”

“I’ll show you around while they’re having their reunion. You only ever got to visit during crises, right?” Max said, relaxing a little as he turned to Chase, feeling closer to him right now than Charlotte, after this no matter how unintentional, but all too familiar form of rejection from her.

“Yeah.”

“I have some roots in Dystopia. We’ll have a Max’s World Day Out, yeah?” Chase didn’t want to do that at all, but he shrugged his shoulders in surrender, anyway. “To Dystopia,” Max said and wrapped an arm around Chase’s shoulder, walking him away from Charlotte. She gave them a smile, and for a moment, felt like maybe she didn’t need to visit Dystopia and see the guys… But then again, that little moment of complete comfort elsewhere? Well… She’d at least owe it to Henry and Jasper to let them know that maybe her heart had moved on...

[jg-notreallya-blogger]

MY TESTIMONY

Hi Everyone!

This is JG, again.

I will be writing to you about my experiences in life until I have none to talk about. Later, I will give you the daily updates of my life in the blog.

TODAY

I will be talking about how I overcame my anxieties and fear as an 8-year-old kid.

Many of you might not believe and accept the message which I will be sharing but it is what it is. ^^

When I started going to my new Big school. I had 60+ classmates in 3rd grade. Each day was nerve-wracking. I'd get so nervous that I would pass out almost every single day in the morning assembly even before my classes began. Before joining this environment, I was habitual in a completely different one where nothing felt unusual and difficult. It was not the academic which was tough, it was facing those unfamiliar faces and the fact that I knew literally no one out there.

Some mornings, I would cry and whine around my parents and ask them if I could skip school that day. Some days my parents would understand and agree to it but some days I had to go to school, most of those days, I would pass out in the assembly or end up not talking to anyone and having a terrible day. Also, my teacher was extremely loud and one of the scariest one in the school.

Those days felt extremely difficult to get through :/

One morning, I woke up and I asked my dad(he’s a pastor) if I could skip school that day, he asked me "Why?" I answered, "I'm scared". He then told me lots of encouraging things but one thing which is still stuck inside my head is a Bible Verse which he showed to me.

Isaiah 41:10 Fear thou not; for i am with thee: be not dismayed; for i am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness. (KJV)

These words (of God) led me to my salvation.

The relief i felt at that moment when i knew that God is always there for me and i have nothing to fear of, I felt stronger than before. I didn't feel lonely and terrified to face the bigger world anymore because I was not alone.

To my readers, i hope that you too realize that you are not alone and there is always someone who loves you and is thankful for your existence. An 8 year old kid won her battle of anxieties and fear with God. I sincerely hope you do too.

- I am a saved person - I am stronger than before. - I am still unshakable in my faith.

The next post will be up soon, stay tuned!

[0poole]

Some Retrospective Thoughts on Gen 7

Galar’s making me go nuts. You already know. Let’s look back on Alola because why not. I feel like I have stuff to say about it. Also, I just watched the last episode of the Alolan Anime, so there’s that.

Whenever I first think back to Gen 7, I think “Eh, it was alright. Nothing special, I guess.” The Pokemon were decent, apart from being almost universally slow, apart from like 3 speed demons, the starters weren’t much, the story was alright, the location was alright, etc. etc. 

Then, I ACTUALLY think back, and I realize… I have no idea why I was thinking that. This generation was actually amazing.

First of all, they finally put the motif of the Sun and Moon into game types. It’s definitely a breath of fresh air after they tried to use the fucking dimensions in 3D space for titles in Gen 6 (Loved that gen too, but seriously “Life” and “Death” would both be more fitting and not as strange. Maybe they don’t want “Death” as a title tho). Really fits in with how naturally themed everything is too, which is obviously for the best, since this is the most “natural” game to date. Even though we technically already had an America-based region in Unova, Hawai’i is so unique in its own right it definitely fits for a region. I’m usually the type who doesn’t like super overt themes in things, and kind of just wants a very generalized experience, but it’s probably for the good of everyone that they don’t actually follow through with that idea. 

Probably the biggest thing to come out of this generation is the new habit of them posting short little videos on Youtube revealing new Pokemon/features/etc. Obviously they were super trigger happy with them then, but now it seems they’ve taken a step back a little. I do love this idea, though, because it actually hypes me up more than anything else ever could. I remember before, even though I was kinda-sorta trying to follow the updates on Gens 4-6, I never really felt like I could, and even though I was going to get the games no matter what, now I realize I really want to know what I’m getting into. 

I remember exactly where I was for some of the major announcements. For the starters, I was in my high school geometry class, where I watched and re-watched that video dozens of times just so I could keep looking at them. I started off on Rowlet’s side of course, but once I realized he was getting all the attention and ol Popplio was getting basically none, I changed my allegiance and stayed there to this day. Ignoring the fact that I don’t really like any of the final evolutions enough to actually use them in game, I LOVE Popplio himself. It’s seriously a shame that he didn’t become some clown seal like everyone was speculating. Unlike how it seems, I really, really like “normal” clown characters (as in, not “horror” clowns), so he could’ve easily become one of my favorites in that case. Decidueye is definitely my favorite of the final forms, and Incineroar I think is still underrated. Sure, whatever, he’s bipedal, and it’s weirder than it otherwise would be, but for some reason I love how his mouth was an actual modeled mouth and not just an image slapped on there like most Pokemon. It really made him more expressive than the average Pokemon. Plus, the animation for Darkest Lariat is really cool, with his hands flashing against a flat back background for a second before actually doing the move. Even better, it’s great meme potential when hacked onto other Pokemon, like Wailord.

I don’t remember if Solgaleo and Lunala were introduced in that first trailer too, but either way I love both of them. I was a bit more drawn to Solgaleo at first, but Lunala has since grown to be one of my favorite legendaries of all. The starry wings, golden rims, and white skeleton-y body are such a great combo. And yeah, sure, Solgaleo would’ve been more fitting as a fire type or whatever, but since stars form the heavy metals that make it onto planets it’s fine. I won’t accept that Lunala should’ve been a dark type, though. The Moon is a major embodiment of light in the night sky, so if anything it shouldn’t be related to darkness. As for Necrozma, I love his base form a lot. It’s such a strange look, especially how the back of his head is transparent. It’s the perfect “evil prism” pokemon. I really just wish Ultra Necrozma had more detail to him, though. He looks so flat for such a major figure in the games… At least he had a good battle and an even BETTER theme song, hot damn

Guess that’s a good transition to talk about the music, and I guess tangentially about Team Skull, since they were probably the best possible departure from the usual “Evil Team” formula. Them just being random hooligans causing trouble instead of a formal organization trying for world domination is a good change of pace, as pretty much everyone agrees… It wouldn’t have been so great if they didn’t at least try to incorporate rap/trap music into their themes. They’re probably the most music-oriented Team canonically speaking, so they’d have to have a great theme. Also, the idea that they feel left behind by the traditions of the Trials really makes sense, since something so important in their culture would definitely make someone feel left out if they couldn’t get through it. 

Other themes for the more calm situations, like Hau’oli City’s night theme, are also extremely good. I didn’t even realize how much I loved that track until I heard Insaneintherain’s cover of it. It almost sounds like something out of Steven Universe, for how pleasant it is (apart from the piano). Lillie’s theme still gives me the warm fuzzies every time I hear it, too. I don’t think a single game before this has ever done the credits so well, too. Apart from the fun artwork, the last shot of Lillie and the game’s legendary actually just kills me every time. She’s such an adorable, pure soul, it’s crazy to think that when she was first revealed, we thought she was the secret supervillain of the game, just because she looked kinda peeved in her official art. We weren’t far off, though, with the Aether Foundation and all. I love both the calm theme of the Paradise itself AND their evil battle theme. Even though one is obviously an evil theme, it does feel like it came from the same source. Same goes for Lusamine’s theme. I really love the Aether Foundation as a whole too, where we can now have “Good” Foundation archetypes to counter the Evil Team archetype. Plus, their designs all involve white with gold accents, which is basically my brand. I tried to design my own Aether outfit the instant I saw them, since I love their look so much. 

As for battle themes, I love how jazzy Galdion’s battle theme ended up. It made him so much more interesting than just a generic edgelord. The Elite Four’s battle theme might actually be the scariest theme to date for some reason, and yet all I can picture when listening to it is Acerola bobbing joyfully back and forth… Basically the same way, the Tapu battle theme is also pretty crazy, with tribal chants in the back of it. The Tapus are probably the coolest group of legendaries in the game, considering how unique they are, with their oddly wooden shells that represent animals. It really makes them feel like spirits brought about by the people of Alola themselves, instead of just some being that came out of nowhere. Probably the one theme that is the most nostalgic (yes, I know it was only 3 years ago, you can still feel nostalgia damnit) for me is the Kahuna battle theme. It was probably just some random comment on Youtube, but somewhere someone said that it was the perfect theme because it starts off intimidating, but quickly switches into a super fun melody, because ultimately, the Island Challenge is for fun. I just love that. I’m always looking for “Fun” stuff in pretty much everything, so I like a theme that represents that. Also, it’s just super catchy, and even expanded upon in Pokemon Masters. Let it be known that Hapu is the best Kahuna by the way. She cute. Also, watching her become the Kahuna is the best world building you could possibly muster up for this kind of setting. 

Of course, I’m intentionally leaving out a certain group…

You know what I think of when I think of Hawai’i? Pearly white sand beaches… Palm trees… Fruity drinks… oh, and let’s not forget fucking interdimensional aliens. 

The Ultra Beasts are the exact type of thing I’d want to insert into the Pokemon world, and that’s why I love them. They’re so weird in the best ways possible. When they were introduced in a trailer, I had the same reaction as I did with Type: Null. They put him up on the screen for a bit and was like “Haha here’s ‘Type: Null,’ okay next” like EXCUSE ME? YOU CAN’T JUST SHOW ME A POKEMON CALLED “Type: Null” AND NOT EXPLAIN WHAT’S GOING ON. Of course, that’s kind of what the games were for, but it was seriously a shock to the system to see Pokemon with code names instead of actual names. You also can’t convince me that Pheromosa wasn’t designed after Lusamine, and to a lesser extent that Xurkitree wasn’t designed after Guzma. I think it’s canon that Lusamine styled Lillie after Nihilego in her crazed state, but the uncanny likeness between those other two is pretty darn notable. I think from the first batch, Celesteela was my favorite of them all, being like a rusted copper rocket ship or something, who can even smack you with her two giant rockets. Also, Pokemon directly based on folktales are always welcome, no matter what. Meanwhile, with the Ultra games being the first sequels to introduce brand-new Pokemon, Blacephalon easily took top spot. I did say I liked clowns, didn’t I? Plus, the biggest evidence that he’s best boi is that in the anime when he appeared, he didn’t even try to attack anything. He just wanted to show off (specifically, believe it or not, by moonwalking… Whoever’s idea that was needs a raise). I also love detachable heads, which is a great idea to mix with clowns, and I guess also fireworks in this case… I just love him. I really hope that there will be future instances of Ultra Beasts, since it’s apparently super easy to just make them however the hell you want them, and since you’re not limited to a region’s natural environment. Lord knows whoever designed Buzzwole didn’t have any limitations. Exploring his, and really all of their worlds in USUM was extremely fun. It’s a damn shame Blacephalon and Stakataka (again, what a name) didn’t get the same privilege. 

As for the Pokemon as a whole, like I mentioned, off the top of my head I don’t feel super crazy about many of them, even though that’s a total lie. Shiinotic appealed to my inner mushroom-character-lover so much that I basically designed a character that looked identical to him. He’s easily the best mushroom Pokemon to date, where he looks pretty cute while also being just slightly creepy enough, with those souless eyes. The concept for Araquanid is amazing, where he’s a reverse Diving Bell spider. I might’ve designed him a bit differently, but he still looks super cool. The ideas behind Oranguru and Passimian are also cool, since we haven’t delved much into intelligent ape Pokemon enough. Wishiwashi is another great concept, and probably the best fish Pokemon in my opinion because of it. Lurantis and Minior are total cuties, the latter being one of those Pokemon that isn’t always in the forefront of my mind, but the instant it is it reclaims its place as one of my all-time favorites. Golisopod and Kommo-o are two of the coolest Pokemon designs to me, the latter being my all-time favorite Pseudo-Legendary. Vikavolt looks awesome, despite being deceptively slow. Dhelmise looks weird until you realize it’s actually insanely large (like, Wailord large). Mudsdale is just an all-around good-looking horse. Oricorio also looks really cool, especially in her fiery form. Tsareena is, well… Tsareena… That’s not even including the adorable Magearna and Marshadow, who are in generational limbo… Also, I think Mimikyu might be the overall best addition to the franchise ever. No Pika-clone could ever compare. 

I mean, specifically as far as a single Pokemon goes, Mimikyu is definitely the best addition to the franchise. Meanwhile, as far as concepts go, the absolutely HUGE idea of Regional Variants is the best addition. Again, I remember where I was when I heard the announcement: it was some sort of weird fantasy house, with a ton of cool details in it to make it look like a setting in some movie or something. It was awesome there, even if we were staying for only a night or so I think. Either way, the concept of different Pokemon adapting to different conditions in the region is the most perfect way to bring attention back to older Pokemon, and I’m so glad they seem to want to keep the idea for all future generations too. It’s especially fitting for Alola, since it’s a super remote island. I love how goofy Alolan Exeggutor is, especially because everyone else seems to love his goofiness too. Same sort of goes for Dugtrio, since his hair is actually based on a real thing… Marowak becoming a spiritual fire dancer is definitely the best possible iteration for him. My favorite might be the colorful Alolan Muk, though, even if Alolan Vulpix is infinitely cuter and better than fiery Vulpix in every way. I cannot be convinced otherwise.

Also, she’s a perfect fit for Lillie, so I guess I’ll use that as my transition into talking about the characters/anime. I’m just gonna be real with you. I’m not going to hold back. Alola has some of the cutest girls in the entire franchise. But first of all, let’s divert that train and instead lust after a man who is easily the hottest professor in the games yet, Kukui. What self-respecting researcher wouldn’t wear his professor-mandated lab coat without any undershirt? He needs his bulging abs as target practice for his Pokemon’s moves, people. He needs to let them breathe. Also, I was kind of enamoured with Sycamore before him, but you can’t deny the tinted skin gets to you a little. Burnet’s a lucky gal, let’s just say.

Okay, now that we’ve established that my pants don’t discriminate, we have to talk about Wicke. So now that that’s covered, can I just say I love Mina? I’d say she deserves more attention, but she was the only Alolan to make it into Lets Go for some reason, so I guess she’s well off? First of all, I love hippie-esque girls (idealized hippies, at least), so that’s a major plus… I mean, I should probably stop using the word “cute” altogether because it applies to every girl in the game, but yeah. Lana’s highly deserved spotlight in the anime made me love her too, where she was a perfect combination of extroverted while still more soft-spoken. I don’t know if that kind of characters’ an anime trope, but lord knows it’s not in western media, so I love how unique her personality is. Her interacting with Mallow and Lillie in cute, girly ways felt so wholesome. If the anime’s anything, it’s wholesome. 

One sec, though. I have to mention that I really like Hau. He’s obviously the one pinned as “Boo, he’s not a giga-asshole! That means he’s bad!” because I guess the fandom’s hive mind has collectively agreed that the only good rivals are assholes now. Like I said before, this stuff’s more about fun now. Hau’s a fun friend to fight, to the point where you beat him as the Champion you kinda feel bad for knocking him down so much. You feel bad because you like him, you know. Also, I forgot to mention this earlier but even though he isn’t entirely difficult himself, the trials in these games are actually both a difficult and interesting challenge. A 2v1 where you’re at the disadvantage is a great boss battle idea, especially with the strategies set out by a Pokemon’s different abilities and moves. Probably the best was Totem Lurantis, who of course summoned a Sunny Day-based Castform to activate her Chlorophyll and buff her Solar Blade, while adding a diverse fire type into play. It was really difficult, to be honest. Those who say it wasn’t either got lucky or have insane standards that cannot be met because they’re Pokemon Veterans who know every little thing about everything. I’m pretty much in that camp, and I still had to actually plan during the fight. Same goes for Totem Araquanid in USUM. I literally had to poison (not toxic, base poison) stall that guy because I couldn’t do anything to him otherwise. He was pretty much one-shotting everything I sent out, anyway, so I had to stall however I could. You can’t argue that that means it was “easy” because I knew how to beat him. It’s only “easy” if you can just send out pretty much whatever and do whatever and still win. Then there’s the Rainbow Rocket episode in USUM, which is just crazy… There’s not much to say that isn’t obvious there. It was fun seeing the villains that were victorious in a different dimension.

Anyways, for the anime, I also have a similar stance. It really seemed like the only people who started off hating it were anime nerds who had no concept of an in-between frame. I will say that it was a step down from XY/XYZ though, but those seasons’ quality was unusually high. Compared to the animation quality of every other season, it was so much better. First of all, I really don’t even like “anime style” that much, so a slightly more western style was very welcome. Like pretty much every show ever, the animation quality is seriously high where it counts, so there’s not much to be said about that, but I’d say the overall animation quality is a step up in general. The more simplified style only really looked weird in Ash because we’re so used to his more pointy style. Every other character looked totally fine, in my opinion. 

As for the story, I will say I would’ve wanted the scope of the plot to be much larger, like how with the other seasons Ash was going on an adventure, whereas here it was very contained, and centered around the Pokemon School. But, still, like I mentioned, I did enjoy the casual wholesomeness of it all. Not only do I just like mindless fun, but it made the crazy shit feel even crazier. The episode where Faba was trying to catch Nebby is a perfect example. It begins with a nice fun game of all the Pokemon and people jumping rope and having a good time, with some slapstick humor with Faba failing to capture Nebby. Then he does, and shit goes down. First of all, he’s torturing the little thing. Then, ASH (not his Pokemon, Ash himself) tackles Faba. Tell me, what other season had humans fighting other humans? I honestly can’t think of a single time when fighting was done with fists and not Pokemon (although surely I’m forgetting something, there’s gotta be at least one other example, right?) Then, Lillie re-experiences her past trauma of almost being abducted by Nihilego, except now her mom gets abducted in her place… Like, what happened? It was so cute a second ago. That’s always the selling point for any cartoon, for me. Stay casual for a decent amount, then break it with some uncharacteristically high tension. The same goes for the segment where Ash goes into Guzzlord’s post apocalyptic dimension. As for mega-feels, It’s great that they made Litten/Torracat an actual character instead of just some random Pokemon, with Stoutland and whatnot. The episode where they go into Tapu Fini’s mist and Mallow meets her mother, and Torracat meets Stoutland just destroyed me. It was strategically remedied by Lillie and Gladion not seeing their father, suggesting he’s still alive. There were some really great episodes in the season, for sure.

So, yeah… Alola was a good time. Don’t deny it. Galar’s gonna be great too. No game’s ever going to be perfect, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be fun.