#within the moment i feel quite overwhelmed and excluded no matter what i do

[yongseungkim]

.

[oingo233]

You Are Beautiful (1)

Summary: Sirius Black was entranced since the moment he saw you. He had to have you but you are convinced his feelings are fleeting, and will only hurt you. People inside and outside of your relationship meddle in the makings of something that could be beautiful... or disastrous. Will love and confidence win? Or will doubt and uncertainty tear you both down?

Young Sirius Black x Pus SizedFemReader

Warning: one inappropriate joke lol, fluff I suppose and nothing else really. All the real stuff comes later :0

Authors note: I mostly write my xreader fics as neutral but as this is a request, I wrote this as fem. But if anyone would like a male version or neutral version let me know and I will copy this but obviously change readers gender (and it's no burden to me I'd love to make more readers feel included and represented). Also reader is plus sized and she is confident and strong throughout the fic -because plus sized characters aren't represented like that in film/books alot (but if looking for amazing and empowering plus sized female characters Nina Zenik from Six of Crows owns my entire heart and changed how I saw myself personally and I would recommend that book for anyone really)- but as any human she has her insecurities because beauty standards are unattainable and have a way excluding so many people and making us feel less than beautiful. As a plus sized/overweight person myself, I understand how we have to fight to feel beautiful and fight this internalized bias we have when we look in the mirror. But WE ARE BEAUTIFUL. WE ARE WORTHY OF MAGAZINGE COVERS AND COMPLIMENTS AND ABOVE ALL SELF LOVE!! The self insert character in this has fought for her confidence, but it will shake and stumble throughout the series and Sirius and friends are there for her to help her realize for herself how beautiful she truly is, once again. So I hope I didn't stray too far from the request :) Enjoy....

Word Count: 1.8

Authors Note: About halfway through I decided to make it a series oops-

****Blabbering Idiot****

Sirius Black is a man of many, many words. In fact, I'm sure if he was writing this he could quickly turn it into one of the most entertaining novels ever written. He'd describe the laughter of his friends for a whole page. Tell a hilarious joke on the next. Then he'd describe the wind blowing through the open halls and courtyard and the spring sun. He could write about a great many things in great detail. (But he wouldn't because he doesn't quite enjoy writing as much as he does anything else, but that's above the point.)

As I said, Sirius Black is a man of many words. So it was such a curious thing when he first saw you. It was an astounding thing really, because for the first time he found something that rendered him completely speechless.

The sun was peeking through the open corridor and pooled onto you, caressing your skin and hair in an ethereal glow. Highlighting curves that brought both sinful and sweet thoughts running through him. It was as if the universe was telling him, look at what we've created, look at this beautiful creature. But he could hardly believe that this world could create something so lovely and kind. You threw your head back in laughter at something your friend said and suddenly the world is back to normal and all he can hear is your laughter and the sound of his friends curiosity at what could have possibly kept him from the conversation about muggle rock compared to Wizard bands. In fact, James was so passionate about it half the hall turned to listen to his rendition of The Chain by Fleetwood Mac.

But he didn't care, he took a feeble step towards you and suddenly felt so nervous his hands began to sweat. He stuttered and coughed up his words just for a simple "hello" in your direction only for the wind blowing through the halls to carry it away. And his friends laughed at him as he watched you walk too far from where he wanted you. Because, oh did he want you.

Sirus POV:

"I'm telling you, I won't be able to sleep tonight unless I know who she is," Sirius says for not the first time that evening. James started to laugh.

"Why? Because you'll be too busy thinking of her?" James said, laughing as he made a very suggestive hand motion. Peter cackled and Remus rolled his eyes, trying to find the cleaner side of his humor but instead he couldn't help but snort. Sirius pushed James's shoulder.

"Yeah, I'm sure Lily would love to know how familiar with that feeling you are," Sirius says and James stopped laughing immediately, his eyes narrowed.

"Please, you wouldn't dare. And I will deny all accusations, you'll be made out to be a liar. Then the mystery girl will never love you. Is that what you want, Pads?" James joked with a single arch of his brow. Sirius just rolled his eyes. He was only half paying attention, he has been scouring the hallways since he first saw that girl. He wanted to speak to her again, or maybe just stare for a bit. If things went well, he'd be able to do both those things on a date. But he hasn't seen her since that morning and his heart felt oddly shallow. He wanted those butterflies he had when looking at her to come back and overwhelm him again.

"What'll it matter if I don't even know who she is? Or- or if I can't talk to her? No one falls in love with a blabbering idiot," Sirius says. Remus shrugs.

"Lily fell in love with James," he says, Peter laughed again.

"Yeah, regardless of what he does at night," Peter added and now both James and Sirius were rolling their eyes. James and Lily just recently stopped denying their feelings for one another and gave into the sexual tension and mutual pining. Their relationship was still fairly new but they act as if they've been together for years. Sirius supposed that in a way, they have been.

Sirius would watch them giggling, hand and hand in the hall. He'd see them cuddling in the common room, or coming back after dates with rosy cheeks and beaming smiles. Sirius would never admit it out loud, but his heart cried out when he saw them like that. He rarely ever felt lonely. He could have any girl or boy he wanted if he really tried, but for what? One fun night? Only for one more morning where he wakes up alone? He wanted more than that whenever he saw Lily and James, their happiness was palpable. Their love was suffocating.

Sirius always thought he'd find the one after Hogwarts, if at all. But when he saw her... well that changed everything. In a flash he saw himself with her, their hands intertwined and her head thrown back in laughter. Rosy cheeks and bruised lips. Warm beds and making love... being in love. He nearly felt silly after and yet, he knew that even if he did sleep tonight, it would be her he'd dream of.

"Ello' guys!" Lily said, bouncing up to James who kissed her cheek. They walked with their arms looped and Sirius glared at the easy sign of affection. He thought of his parents, how they would be stiff with one another except for in quiet moments, when he'd pass through a hall and glance into their room. He'd spot a quick kiss on the cheek, and soft squeeze of the hand. It were those odd moments for him, that struck him so strongly with a sharp bitterness. They don't deserve softness and love, he'd think, how can such cruel creatures even feel such things? But even then, he'd walk away seeing them as still awful creatures born from the depths of hell, but more human.

"That's her," Sirius whispered so quietly Remus almost didn't hear it. In fact, Sirius didn’t think Remus heard it at all, but it was rather his look of longing towards the Great Hall entrance that gave him away. Because standing right there, was you.

Your hair was a little wind blown, messy around your face, bits of iit shaped your round cheeks and soft eyes. Sirius eyed you up and down and cursed clothes and cursed shyness and cursed his own head for thinking he could even talk to you. But most of all, he cursed a group of boys who walked past you.

Sirius was a confident boy, he knew how to spot someone who held their head up just as high as he did, and you were very much one of those people. You were giggling as you stole a biscuit from a friend and popped it into your mouth, you covered your mouth as you laughed when they complained with a little smile of their own.

"It's just so yummy, and I haven't eaten since breakfast." He heard you say, your friend just shook his head and handed you a plate as you sat down next to him. But right before you could get comfortable a sneering group of boys stole a piece of food from your hand and said something rather rude.

Sirius didn't even realize he had been walking towards you, this girl he has never even spoken too, yet thought of so endearingly, until he was standing right before the boys and had the pack leaders wrist firmly in his grip.

"Drop it boy, c'mon, drop it," he teased. It was humiliating for the boy and he knew it by the laughing and sneering others directed towards the group of boys, but Sirius did not care. The boy dropped the biscuit and looked as if his tail was tucked into his legs. "Good boy," he said, ruffling his hair until it was a knotted mess, the boy winced at just how hard Sirius dug his knuckles into his scalp, Sirius relented with a satisfied smirk.

Sirius’s voice took on a much harsher tone, "Now scram." The boys were out of their seats and in new ones within seconds.

Sirius felt his mood shift completely once they left, because now all eyes were on him, yours included. He looked up at you rather shyly, his hair falling in strands over his forehead. He tucked it behind his ear and found some confidence in the way your eyes followed the movement and how you blushed. He gave you his best smile, hoping his charm wasn't as weak as his legs felt at that moment.

"Hello, I'm Sirius... Sirius Black." Then, like an idiot he put his hand out for you to shake, what charmer just shakes the ladies hand? He stopped belittling himself the moment you softly placed your hand in his.

"It's nice to meet you, Sirius, and thanks for helping me. I know how to handle those filthy 'dogs'" you said, smiling as you remembered the way he spoke to them, he chuckled. "But I suppose it's nice not always having to," you finished with a bright smile on your face. He felt his own cheeks heat up and he nodded but could not think of anything better to say.

"Name," he said, you raised your brows. He cleared his throat, "your name?"

"Oh, how rude of me," you said and then you laughed, that same laugh that caught his attention and has yet to let go. "I'm (y/n) (y/l/n)."

"Nice to meet you," he said, it was as if he couldn't feel the appalled stares of your friends because all he could see was the blush on your cheeks and your head thrown back in laughter. He swallowed thickly before making his way back to his friends. They all wore raised brows and smirks, and he knew they were about to bite into him.

"Treating them like dogs, really? A bit ironic don't you think," Lily said, James shrugged

"That's why it was so good," he said, high fiving Sirius.

"But it admittedly went downhill from there," Peter was sure to add, just like Sirius knew one of them would. Sirius just laughed, too elated to finally know who you were.

"Don't start," he said, but it was too late.

All in union they sputtered out the lame word that will plague Sirius' memory of that moment forever, "Name?"

They cackled at him and ruffled his hair all the way to their seats, but Sirius knew they were pleased for him. And Sirius didn't mind, he could feel the pretty eyes of a pretty girl following him across the room. If only someone told him how important she would become to him, maybe he would have looked back at her and never looked away.

Taglist <3

@enchantedblackrose

[astrowithkaro]

Can I request august 20th, please? Have a great day and thank you so much! You're awesome xx

Language Of Birthdays: August 20 - Leo

[You can find the rest of the series here; or check out my masterlist]

The Day Of The Cryptic Secret

Those born on August 20 can be directed, even dominated for most of their lives by happenings in their past which have been kept secret. The more courageous of August 20 people will have to solve this personal mystery by fearlessly confronting it over the years and working to solve it. Except for their closest confidants, however, many born on this day are dedicated to no one finding out the truth about them. They are often very lonely people, in spite of whatever success they achieve in the world.

Sometimes the nature of the secret is unknown even to the August 20 person, on a conscious level. Although they may know that something disturbing has happened, they do not always know exactly what it was. In such cases, a search into the inner recesses of their memory is essential to making them strong and self-sufficient people, free of emotional baggage.

This is not to say that August 20 people cannot be lively and fun-loving. But nevertheless there is an aura of thoughtfulness which surrounds them, even in their most joyful moments. Aware of the difficulties that life can have in store for an individual, they are not ones to treat human emotions lightly.

Because the August 20 imagination is so powerful, those born on this day must put it to a constructive use or risk being overwhelmed by it. This aspect of their personality can be so complex that it is difficult for them to share it with others. However, the phantasms those born on this day encounter do not always arrive in the shape of dreams and fantasies, but may actually take human form in unusual and sometimes dark, even destructive individuals. In fact, August 20 people are often sought out by needy or damaged people because of the tremendous empathy and compassion they display for suffering. Many born on this day are stronger than the average person in that they have fully confronted and overcome not only their personal fears but also those presented by others.

August 20 people are particularly drawn to ecstatic states in which they can literally forget themselves. Euphoric states, whether naturally or artificially induced by psychoactive drugs, are something many August 20 people will wish to explore at some point. If such joyful experiences are kept within bounds and are a means of emotional expression rather than escape, they may be quite meaningful and healthful, but the more perilous and debilitating aspects of intense long-term experience should be recognized. Those born on this day must also know that by embarking on such quests they can place their friends or loved ones in a position of either taking part or being excluded.

As a rule, August 20 people are quiet and soft-spoken, and prefer not to draw undue attention to themselves. However, those born on this day can be very natural, even uninhibited when with intimates and in situations where they feel a sense of trust and warmth.

Strengths:

Imaginative

Empathic

Courageous

Weaknesses:

Troubled

Lonely

Escapist

Advice

As mentioned above, those born on August 20 must be particularly wary of drug as well as sex, food and love addictions of all types. Their need to escape from life's pain (or boredom) can lead them astray. For an August 20 person to stay healthy can thus be a matter of self-control. Exercise, however, usually presents no difficulty for those born on this day, because when their energy is high they naturally seek out activities such as walking and swimming. August 20 people must watch out for problems with their abdominal organs, particularly liver and kidneys, and should have regular yearly physicals.

Once recognized or understood, the past may be better forgotten

Let go, don't dwell so much on things; today can be a new beginning

Actively seek joy

Allow yourself the very best that there is

Put yourself first

[hopelessromanticspoonie]

A New Year’s Truth

Characters: Loki x Empath Avenger Reader

Summary: Reader is stuck at Stark Tower with Loki after the December holidays are finished. But each glancing touch with Loki speaks a truth that he doesn’t seem willing to face. Will the New Year change that?

Warnings: None

Word Count: 2.3k

A/N: This is only loosely edited, as I’m still very very ill. I will go back and further edit it once I’m better, but I wanted to get this out to y’all before the New Year. I hope you enjoy!

The time between the various winter holidays and the New Year was always a weird one.

It was as if the world was stuck in a holding pattern, waiting with bated breath for a new year with new expectations to begin. When was the right time to take down all the festive decorations? How long was socially acceptable to do absolutely nothing on the couch but watch cheesy movies from your childhood and pig out on chocolate-covered treats? All the stress and excitement died down to leave everyone in a trance-like state, shuffling in pajamas from the couch to the kitchen to bed and back again. For some it was a relief, to finally have the stress and familial obligations lifted from their weary shoulders. For others, that had never been a concern, and one day just melted into the next.

It was the fourth day that you’d worked on permanently etching a likeness of your backside into the couch while you binged Bake Off and ate your weight in the last of the cookies you had made for Christmas. They were left behind, as were you, after your teammates had all split off to spend the last of the year with their respective families - even Steve and Bucky had gone with Nat and Sam to relax with Clint’s family.

You wiped a stray crumb from your shirt when Loki strolled in from the direction of the kitchen. He was the only other inhabitant in the tower, choosing to stay rather than to go to New Asgard with Thor and play diplomat for a people lukewarm to him at the best of times. You didn’t blame him. He cast a critical eye at your disheveled appearance before folding himself gracefully into the comfortable leather chair he preferred, pulling a book from his pocket dimension to read while he sipped at the steaming mug in his hand.

You could practically feel the judgment pouring off of him in waves without looking at him. Groaning at your ruined relaxation, you rolled your head around to stare at him, quirking a brow. “Out with it.”

He mirrored your expression, although with much more disdain and arrogance than you could ever muster. “I beg your pardon.”

“I don’t need to go over there and touch you to know that you’re judging me. Spill it,” you muttered, sitting up and stretching, arching your back into it with a sigh you felt all the way down to your toes. You tugged your hoodie back down from where it had exposed just a sliver of the skin of your stomach, and Loki’s eyes quickly flitted from it back up to your face. Interesting.

“If you must know,” he closed his book, leaving it to rest on his lap, “I am honestly astonished that one could descend so far into a vegetative state without going comatose. I do not believe you have moved from that spot but to sleep or gather food in days.”

You stood, brushing cookie crumbs from your sweatpants absentmindedly. “And?”

“It is almost impressive, were it not such a waste. There is much to be done, and yet you are perfectly content to waste away watching others live their lives.”

As if he was one to talk, sitting there drinking his tea without a care in the world. “And what is there to be done exactly?”

“To begin, the decorations from Christmas and Hanukkah remain on display, and the kitchen is almost out of provisions,” he rattled off with a shrug.

Well, that second one certainly would need tending to. Normally the groceries were delivered twice a week from a food order that everyone contributed to, but you had forgotten about it when it hadn’t been brought to your attention. Perhaps a bit of fresh air would do you some good. You left the room without another word, quickly dressing and making yourself presentable to the public before coming back out into the living room with Loki’s wool pea coat draped over your arms.

“C’mon, Muscles. You can help me carry the groceries.” You held up his coat for him in invitation, shaking it lightly.

He rose, smoothing his hands down his white button-up shirt to come to a stop on his hips. There weren’t any wrinkles to be found on his outfit, but you would touch that body at any opportunity if given the chance, so who could blame him? “You expect me to accompany you to the market?”

You popped up a hip and mocked his rich, velvet accent that admittedly sent shivers of pleasure down your spine. “You expect to eat, don’t you?”

~

The once pristine glittering snow had morphed into a grey sludge that sucked at your feet with each step back from the store. Your hands were thrust out from your sides to maintain your tenuous balance as you trudged along behind Loki, who had taken the reusable bags full of food from you without protest excluding a well-executed roll of his dark eyes. His towering figure cut a path through the crowded New York City pedestrians who watched him with unabashed curiosity and trepidation as he passed. You were afforded mostly confusion as you inelegantly followed in his footsteps.

Until your foot slipped on a hidden patch of ice beneath the slurry, and a squeak of shock came from your throat as your hands flailed out wildly for something to grab onto. Concern rushed through you, strong and overwhelming, as Loki’s hands grasped yours to keep you from falling. When you looked up to him in grateful shock, and your eyes locked, tendrils of desire snaked out from his heart to wrap around yours and squeeze with the barest of heat. There wasn’t any mistaking the feelings he had at that moment, no matter how fleeting, and you both knew it.

“Thanks,” you murmured, awestruck in the face of such intense emotions that Loki worked to keep hidden.

He jerked back from you as if you had burned him, picking up the bags he had forgotten in his haste to help you. “Do not mention it. Come. I’m famished and you obviously are not suited for this weather.”

~

“Is this absolutely necessary?”

You looked up from where you kneaded the flour-covered dough against the countertop, jaw set in determination as you leaned into your work. “It tastes better when you make it from scratch. I figured someone with your impressive knife skills wouldn’t find it challenging to chop a bit of garlic and tomatoes for a simple pasta sauce. If I’m mistaken…”

Loki bristled, his eyes tightening as he made quick work of unbuttoning his sleeves before rolling them up the pale expanse of his arms. “I am quite capable of performing such a menial task.”

You dropped your gaze to the exposed skin, delighting silently in the flex of his forearms as he set to work doing as you had asked. It was quiet, calming, to work together in the kitchen. The rhythmic sound of his knife hitting the wooden cutting board timed with your rolling and kneading the pasta dough was almost musical, working with the pulse pounding in your ears at such a domestic scene to keep you very alert.

Not too alert, apparently, as when you began to cut the long floured noodles from your rolled sheet of dough, you managed to slice the pad of your index finger.

“Shit!” you cursed, dropping the knife and pulling the bleeding digit into your mouth. You quickly checked to make sure you hadn’t ruined the dough, eyes darting around the room for something to staunch the bleeding.

“Let me see,” Loki commanded quietly from behind you.

You turned to him to see his hands held out for yours, exasperation written into the firm set of his mouth. “You don’t have to touch me. It’s okay.”

“Let me see,” he repeated, gently encircling your wrist with his long, elegant fingers, pulling your finger from in between your lips.

There was that concern again, warm and soft as it wrapped around you like a blanket from where his hands deftly worked at cleaning and wrapping your hand in a band-aid. You weren’t used to people touching you, not of their own accord, not once they knew that you could feel their every emotion through the connection. It was an invasion of privacy, and more than that, it was opening them up to the possibility of you pushing certain feelings onto them - an aspect of your powers that you never used unless in dire situations on missions.

You would never do that to Loki, even with the desire that unfurled deep within your belly as you watched his calculated emerald eyes admire his handiwork. Anything that he felt, you wanted it to be authentic and coming only from him. Which was why the affection that teased just at the edges of your awareness made your breath catch in your throat, and your gaze drop to his lips as he wetted them with a flick of his tongue.

“Loki, I-”

“Perhaps I should finish the rest of the meal, so you do not risk ruining the pasta with your blood,” he commented dryly, leaving you empty as he released you from his hold.

You cradled your hand to your chest as if you could still feel the affection he had unwittingly shared on the stinging skin. “Of course. Just do what I was doing, without the stabbing part.”

~

You should’ve worn gloves for the party. Or perhaps a dress with sleeves.

The combination of so many bodies jostling around you, leaving you with just flashes of humor, lust, frustration, anger, sadness, and so many more emotions that you couldn’t name but could taste on your tongue, was too much. Tony had gone all out with the guest list for the New Year’s Eve party, and you felt positively ill at so many sensations washing over you in time with the pounding music and conflicting colognes and perfumes invading your nose.

The frigid wind on the balcony was a welcome breather, whipping around you and electrifying your senses to remove the lasting negative effects of the others from your person. Until you were just you again, as conflicted and frustrated as ever as you thought about Loki and Thor chatting amiably with amiably inside. The countdown was due to begin soon, and you didn’t want to see who the dark god paired off with to welcome in the new year with a kiss. That was one mental image you were perfectly content not to have engraved in your brain for the foreseeable future.

“The party not to your liking?”

Your chin lifted from where it had settled on your chest to watch the crowds below, all packed together and shouting their revelry into the abyss that climbed up the tower windows to reach your cold-reddened ears. “I didn’t realize it would be that crowded, and I’m not wearing sleeves.”

A coat, woolen and heavy and scented with cedarwood and spice settled over your shoulders to block the worst of the cutting wind. Your arms unraveled from around your waist to grip onto the lapels, holding Loki’s coat tighter to you. Loki stepped into your line of sight, regarding you with an unreadable expression as he leaned against the safety rail as if he wasn’t several hundred feet in the air. “That was poor planning on your part.”

“Yeah, but I look good in this dress,” you replied with a humorless laugh, swinging your hips back and forth as it to prove the point.

“You do,” was his warm reply, matching the slight upturn of the corner of his mouth as his eyes trailed down the length of your body slowly.

What you wouldn’t give to know the feelings behind that look, but you wouldn’t ever invade his privacy in that way. Not without permission. Thankfully, the cold air already turned the tip of your nose red and flushed your cheeks, otherwise the effect his searching gaze and thoughtful gesture would be much more clear. “Thanks for the coat. You always seem to be stepping up to help me, lately.”

“It’s my pleasure,” he replied in that crushed velvet voice that had just a hint of roughness to it as he took one step closer to you.

The crowd down below began counting down. You could barely hear the numbers over the roar of the wind in your ears and the pounding of your heart as Loki shielded your body from the cold with his own. His hands came up to settle over your upper arms, rubbing the soft satin lining of his coat into your skin.

And your eyes fluttered closed just before his lips brushed against yours at the last second. Love unlike anything you’d ever felt before matched the caress of his smooth lips over yours, catching in your heart and coaxing out a warm glow of happiness that you weren’t sure began or ended with the man cradling you in his arms. It was untainted by darkness, driven from the purest sense of adoration and affection that you had experienced from another soul.

His forehead rested against yours once he allowed you a moment to breathe, quite kind of him after having stolen the very breath from your lungs. Hope, sharp and bright, teased out from him and into you to make your fingers curl into his black suit jacket. “I am not one to easily speak my emotions freely with others. But you must know…”

You nudged your nose along his, your heart soaring at the physical contact and the shared joy that danced between you to the tune of your drumming heartbeats. “I do. You can’t exactly hide that from me.”

He gathered you into the warmth of his embrace, tucking your forehead beneath his chin with a relieved sigh. It was safety and contentment and promise and a love so new and bright that you hoped to never find its shadow. “No more hiding. Not in this new year.”

~~~

Little Bit o’ Loki taglist: @myownviperroom @grahoundart @darealbellabelleoftheball @boubouinscarlet @iamverity @rt8815 @lots-of-loki @otakumultimuseoc @ms-cellanies @rosierossette

Whole Shebang taglist: @yespolkadotkitty @nonsensicalobsessions @just-the-hiddles @vodka-and-some-sass @he-is-chaotic-she-is-psychotic @myoxisbroken @blah666 @brokenthelovely @myworddump @polireader @wiczer @littleredstarfish @the-broken-angel-13 @arch-venus25 @xxloki81xx @jessiejunebug @tinchentitri @sllooney @devilbat @vikkleinpaul @bouquet-o-undercaffeinated-roses @angelus80 @wolfsmom1 @kthemarsian @toozmanykids @claritastantrum @princerowanwhitethorngalathynius @sabine-leo @lovesmesomehiddles​ @peterman-spideyparker​ @wegingerangelica​ @bluefrenchfries604​ @catsladen @silverswordthekilljoy​

[imagine-what-would-happen]

Since the Beginning (Ben Solo Fan Fiction Part 3)

Here ya go guys! Enjoy and don’t forget to let me know if you want to be tagged in future instalments!

Words: 2.4k+

Warning: A bit sad/ morbid, talks about falling/ jumping off a cliff.

Tags: @bensoloslover​

Link to Part 2

Link to Part 4

Link to Masterlist

Ben had probably never slept this much in his life. Between homeschooling, training in combat, training to become a Jedi, late nights up with Y/N, and then doing absolutely everything for the dark side... he was lucky to get a few hours of rest every other day; he would never admit it, but he was starting to break fairly quickly. He wasn’t keeping track of days properly, nor plans. As the light fighters brought Ben to the awaiting ship he tried desperately to keep his eyes on his best friend, his heavy heavy eyes. A blink seemed harmless, so he did it. Then another. Soon he would blink and they would already be aboard the ship ready for lift-off, everyone strapped in safely. Another blink and he caught Y/N looking at him, he couldn’t make out her facial expression. One more blink and he saw her laughing and talking with everyone. It was only a pure second of a moment but he could see the happiness in her eyes, the feeling of belonging she had among them. It made his heart sink. He had only ever felt that way with her, he thought it had been the same for her. He finally let his eyes remain closed, enveloped in the darkness that was inevitable for him.

In the darkness, Ben saw remnants of light passing by his closed eyelids. Swaying back and forth, at first it was peaceful, right until it wasn’t. Trying to press his eyes closed even harder only gave him a headache. Reluctantly he slowly started blinking awake, light piercing his dark eyes. He could see the source of the overbearing light source, a tear in the roof of his tent. Tent. They weren’t on the ship anymore. Ben carefully pushed himself up, wincing with every uncomfortable breath he took. He could feel the air pushing through the ripped part of the tent and shivered, shivering made the wound feel worse. It was only then he realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Although being in a fairly good physique, he hated people seeing him shirtless, it meant that they saw him bare, saw him for who he was. There was nothing more to hide behind. He wouldn’t have it.

Gently he slid off the makeshift bed, holding his bandaged abdomen he began shuffling around the area, searching for his sweater, or anything at all to cover him. It's not like he was even in a room by himself, it was a tent, barely anything to separate him from the ruckus the resistance fighters were making outside. Odd, he stopped in his tracks. It sounded as if they were celebrating, although it seemed to only be morning, early afternoon at best. He shook it off, he would deal with them later. As he kept shuffling around and finding nothing but supplies he became aggravated. Dropping useless materials to the ground impatiently. Those idiots out there probably stole his shirt as some dumb childish prank. He walked over to the entrance to the tent to go give them a piece of his mind until he was met face to face with Y/N who was holding his sweater as she entered his tent.

“H-hi...” She said softly, a lingering smile on her bright face, it was beautiful, all of her was deeply beautiful to him.

“Hello,” Ben replied, and without thinking, taking his sweater out of her hands. “Should I ask what you were doing with this?” he questioned as he pulled it over his head, his arms sliding through the sleeves. Did she have a hand in the supposed prank or did she retrieve it back from them? He had made his way back a few steps from her. He wasn’t sure what to think yet... he still needed space from her. The person before him, although familiar in a way, was a stranger in a million other ways.

The smile faded rather quickly from her lips, “Ben I was getting it sewn up for you, that is unless you want your abs on display for everyone here? Show them how the dark side does it?” She smirked, crossing her arms. He could tell she felt satisfied with herself being able to hold this light vs dark situation over him. Would she call him a traitor? He felt so uncertain of himself around her.

Ben watched her from across the tent, the light source flickering around the mostly covered space, it would have been distracting if it was anyone else in front of him. “Get over it.” He sighed, “Or don’t, either way I’m leaving.” He put his hands on his hips, suddenly realizing he didn’t have his lightsaber. “Damn it” he muttered, feeling frantic all over again, beginning the search through the tent once more.

“Ben, you’re not gonna get your weapon back, at least not any time soon. And you’re not leaving.” She followed him around the tent, trying to push herself in front of him to get his attention. “Leia told me that they took apart your ship. You sure wouldn’t be allowed to take one of ours back to your Superlamacy” She tried to laugh but could tell that he was not amused.

He turned his attention to her. “Leia. How about we start with that? Or how bout we start with this?” He reached for her lightsaber, dangling at her waist, not realizing how close it was connected to her belt, he ended up pulling Y/N’s body onto his. For a moment he was going to be embarrassed but he could not get over her newly unveiled life... how close she truly was all this time.

“Ben.” She whispered in a pleading voice. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, but don’t leave.” She searched his dark eyes, pressing her hand onto his chest.

He let go of her, turning around and running his hands through his hair, tugging just slightly. “I can’t just abandon the First Order!” He stated matter of factly but it came out harsher than he meant it.

There was silence. “Oh but you can abandon your family.” There was a sigh.

Ben didn’t know what to say, he looked at the ground, pulling at the back of his neck. Where was she all this time...? Had she been imprisoned for a full year? He doubted it, with how important she seemed to everyone, it had probably happened fairly recently. That only meant that she knew what was happening in their connection and decided to not contact him anymore, not even try to reach out through other means to him. She could really just end their relatio- friendship... just like that.

“Y/N, they haven’t been my family for a long time. But you’ve always been, even after all this time.” He whispered. “I need you to understand”, he paused, it was quiet, turning around he saw was alone in the tent. Force or not, at least her disappearing act hadn’t changed after everything that had happened.

It had been several hours until Ben decided to unveil himself from the ripped tent, the celebrations were still going and no one paid any mind to him. They had realized that they didn’t win the war, right? Although, he couldn’t quite blame them. He was sure that if he had been around Y/N for as long as them, he probably would have had the same reaction to her return. He had known her since they were children, but they didn’t have enough meetings that were long enough, they didn’t know anything about one another. Well, he guessed he just didn’t know anything about her in the end.

She knew he was Ben Solo and yet, she never said anything, never treated him any differently. He couldn’t tell if he was hurt or ecstatic at the fact. He didn’t want to be treated differently, but if she knew, and didn’t care who he was... It could have saved him a lot of worried nights and panic attacks whenever someone would near say his last name while he was seeing her through the Force. He would near tackle people to shut them up, it was difficult making up excuses for both Y/N and the person being tackled but he didn’t care. As long as his secret was kept. As long as nothing changed between them. But everything had changed... everything.

He saw all the people. They were drinking, feasting, dancing, all talking to one another, they were one big family, it seemed impossible with how many there were of them but it was if they all knew one another their entire lives. War truly did bring people together, in some strange way. Ben took a deep breath. It felt too much for him. He wasn’t sure if he was just overwhelmed by all the idiots, or just jealous that he never had this; he never had the chance to get this, any of it, the love and happiness, the cheers and laughter. It felt as though the position he was born into, the lineage he carried within his veins, it stripped him of all his rights to happiness.

Slowly, after trying and failing to make his way through the bubbling crowd of people to find a spacecraft, he made his way into the woods. He stumbled, trying to grab onto each tree trunk, taking deep breaths, memories flashed past his mind. All those days alone at home, all the times he was excluded in his Jedi lessons because everyone knew who his grandfather was or thought that their master was favouring him. Every intoxicating moment with Y/N, just to have it slip through his fingers and stab him in the back. The one true thing in his life was just a lie, another thing he couldn’t have. Pressing his back into the tree trunk he slid down until he hit the dirt, his fingers pressing deep into it, needing to grab onto something. Seeing a small boulder across from him he 

began levitating it using the only thing he could control anymore, the Force.

He saw its deformities, the dents, the sharped edges, the dirt and bacteria surrounding it. Although, he pondered, was it really deformed? Could someone pick up a single boulder or rock and say this is it, this is the perfect boulder that all others must be like. He figured not, obviously, stupidly... but then, why did he feel that he had that same weight upon his shoulders? Trying to hold up several tons of boulders with nothing but the flesh that he is... He would never be enough to hold up the responsibilities and consequences of his lineage, just as the boulder would not be enough, not be enough to anyone. It would be paid no mind. Just like him.

He sent the boulder flying, picking himself up, he heard a crash and walked away without a flinch. He was going back to the only place anyone held regard for him. He was going home.

The son of Organa and Solo walked along the edge of the cliff, he thrived when under pressure. Focusing one foot in front of the other one at a time, he heard the waves crashing below, the air flying its way upward to him, he breathed it all in. He would in fact miss this. He missed being on planets... When he would become Supreme Leader, he would make their base on a beautiful planet, enough being worried about being blown up and sucked into the vacuum of space constantly. If he was going to take over absolutely everything, he would do it in style.

Taking one last look at the setting light over the horizon, Ben thought over his options or lack thereof. He had to leave, there was nothing else he could do here as if anyone wanted him here. But... leaving Y/N, maybe never seeing her again. He was reluctant to follow through with the thought. She had gotten caught once, what if the next time she wasn’t taken prisoner, what if... what if he took her as his prisoner?

A sly smile formed around the young Solo’s lips. He was not going to lose anymore, he would take what he wanted. He would make her happy, he would make her see that she would be safer with him. Just as he was about to step away from the cliff he sighed heavily, stopping before he made any tracks, he knew he was blindsiding himself. He knew before he ever met her in person that she loved the thrill of danger, she was happiest here. She was happy even when he wasn’t in her life. He groaned sitting down on the edge, letting his legs dangle over. He wished to fall.

He didn’t want to fall to die, but just to release all power over everything. Let gravity take over as it pulled him to its core or as close to it as it could. Let the airflow through his clothes, past his dark locks, breathing in the cold air to fill his lungs as deeply as possible. Letting his stomach feel as if it were rising through him as he fell. He adored the feeling of falling.

There were a few favourable memories he had with his father, but the few that he did have were spectacular. He amused over the one time he was brought aboard the Falcon, his father did tight twists and turns past several asteroids. Ben was initially hiding behind his father’s piloting chair, gripping the leather, but soon realized his father was perfectly in control of every moment. As soon as he knew he was safe he let himself get pulled around the ship as the turns and bumps came, laughter erupting from him so loudly and much that his stomach began to hurt but he couldn’t care for the life of him.

Ben found a lingering smile on his lips. Could he really leave again? As much as he felt out of place here... what if he could become one with these people? Finally, make a name for himself properly. He was beyond confused as to what to do. As the dark settled and the familiar stars above began to glimmer in their posthumous way he decided he would make the final call in the morning. Laying back on his elbows, he looked on in wonder, trying to figure out if he knew any of these constellations. He had always wanted to do this with Y/N... their time together was never long enough for it to happen. He never had enough time for anything, for once, he was going to relish in these quiet moments of darkness.

[diaryofabeautyfiend]

Chapter 3

Over the last few months you and Steve were living a blissfully mundane life. Things were quiet in Wakanda so they asked you to stay state side. Steve only went to the compound a few days a week. Sometimes you would tag along. You liked visiting with Clint and Laura and their children. Steve loved watching you with the kids. Even though you repeatedly said you did not want children he knew you really did. He wouldn’t push the issue.

Everything was so easy that you didn’t even bat an eye when Steve said he and the team were headed to Nigeria. Sure it would be dangerous. They were going after Rumlow and the remainder of the STRIKE team. This would not be an easy mission. He talked to you a lot about strategy and how to minimize casualties. A man like Rumlow would likely go for a big showdown because the Avengers Initiative was already under scrutiny.

“Ok, my love, I’m out of here. I’ll call when we land.” You jump up to kiss Steve goodbye.

“K. I love you. Stay safe. I’ll see you in a few days.” He kisses you deeply dropping his shield which makes an awful sound.

“I love you too. See you in a few days.”

“You come back to me, Captain.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He smiles and he’s out the door.

It was literally disgusting how much you loved Steve Rogers. You’ve never been this happy in your life. Don’t get too comfortable. With the lives you lead there’s bound to be pain. You shoved that thought into the back of your mind and tried to carry on with your day. You just had a nagging feeling that something was going to go wrong. That made you do something you vowed never to do. You hacked into Steve’s computer. Even though you knew he wouldn’t walk back in you still felt paranoid.

Most of the time when girls snooped they were looking for evidence of cheating. Maybe porn. Even his porn was boring. He’d run screaming if he knew what you were really into.

No. You were looking for mission reports. You looked for anything that could give you insight into what Steve was really getting into. You knew some details. They were going after Rumlow. You didn’t know what was in Nigeria. You skimmed some building plans. Looks like a lab. You searched the name of the lab and found mostly pharmaceutical research. Back to Steve’s notes there was mention of a bio weapon. That was it. That was a major operation.

You paced back and forth thinking of all the questions he asked over the last few weeks of the planning phase. Why didn’t you see it? Nat Steve and Sam were highly trained and could handle this sort of thing. Not Wanda. She was too unstable and inexperienced to be on this type of mission. They should have taken Rhodey or Tony instead of her. It pissed you off that they routinely excluded them. Steve was trying to distance himself from Tony a little. You didn’t like any of it.

You decided that was enough intelligence gathering for the day. Quite frankly the whole thing gave you a migraine. You checked your calendar and saw that you had a meeting with T’Challa soon. The UN was meeting in Vienna in a few days and he wanted to go over security.

“Good morning, Mhibu. How is your life of domestic bliss?” T’Challa teased you like a brother. He loved seeing you happy but had reservations about Steve’s motives.

“It’s going well. Thank you. Have you spoken with Nakia?”

“I’m afraid not. Nakia is on her own path. She will find her way back to me. I know her heart.” His face went from joyous to thoughtful. He and Nakia have been in love since they were children. Nakia wanted to save the world. She couldn’t do that from Wakanda. You cleared your throat.

“Well, your highness, Vienna looks pretty well secure. No vehicles are allowed within a 20 block radius. Your security team has already been granted upper level clearance. The floor of your hotel is virtually empty. I think you’re good.”

“Perfect. Thank you for all of your hard work. When will we see you again? Mother has been asking for you.”

“Soon. Steve is in Nigeria now. Hopefully when he gets back I can talk him in to taking the trip.”

“Nigeria? Where exactly?”

“Lagos I think.” His expression changed quickly.

“We have a good will team in Lagos right now.” Your heart sank. There it was again. That overwhelming sense of dread.

“Yikes. Maybe reach out to them? Let them know to be on the look out.”

“I will, Mhibu. Please contact me at once when you speak with Captain Rogers.”

“Yes, sir.” He hung up without saying goodbye. You tried calling Steve. No answer. He was in the air no doubt.

You spent the rest of the day pacing the floor. You didn’t eat. The very thought of food turned your stomach. You couldn’t sleep but your body was exhausted. Steve finally called early the next morning. You jumped when your phone rang.

“Steve? Hey.”

“Y/N. It’s bad. We stopped Rumlow. He ran into a market. It was so crowded. He detonated explosives. Wanda contained the blast and transported it into a building

“How many dead?”

“Thirty. Ten of them were from Wakanda. I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you before you heard from someone else.”

You dropped the phone and ran to the sink to vomit. Steve tried calling out to you but you didn’t answer. Your Kimoyo beads started alerting. It was Okoye.

“Y/L/N, you are needed. Transportation will be to you within the hour.” You nodded and she hung up. You scrambled to pack a bag and called Steve.

“Hey, my girl. We have things pretty sewn up here. We’re on the jet. Be home by late tonight.”

“I won’t be. I’ve been called back. I’m leaving shortly. They will call for Wanda’s prosecution. You should know that.”

“She’s just a kid.”

“Right which is why she shouldn’t have been out there. She’s too inexperienced to have dealt with Rumlow. You knew that. People died, Steve. My friends. I have to go face their families. I can’t protect her. I’ll call you when I get there. You should stay at the compound.”

“Are you kicking me out?”

“Of course not. You should stay with Wanda. I have to go. I love you.”

“I love you too. Come home soon. Please.” You hung up.

You reached Wakanda before daylight. You were ushered into the palace. King T’Chaka and the Council were waiting.

“Y/N. Please come in. What can you tell us about Wanda Maximoff?” You stood before the Council. Your hands trembled.

“She has scientifically enhanced magical abilities. She can warp reality. She can manipulate time matter energy and the laws of probability. She was the subject of genetic experimentation by Hydra along with her twin brother Pietro. He was killed in Sokovia.”

“What do you know about the mission in Lagos?”

“Nothing. I am not privy to such information.”

“I see.”

“Miss Y/L/N, this Council would hate to accuse you of protecting your boyfriend. May we remind you that you are an outsider to Wakanda. The King and Queen have accepted you. Not everyone on this Council shares their sentiment.”

“Counselor M’Bali with all due respect, Captain Rogers and I do not discuss sensitive matters. I have more than earned the respect of the Royal Family. I will continue to do my best to earn yours.”

“Miss Y/L/N do you support the Sokovia Accords?” asked King T’Chaka. You were quiet for a moment fighting back tears.

“Yes, Your Grace. I support them fully.”

“Do you think Captain Rogers will support them as well?” You almost laughed. You knew Steve wouldn’t agree. Moreover you knew if he found out you knew, it would break his heart.

“I don’t think he will be quite as accepting.”

“Secretary Ross will be presenting the Avengers with the proposal. You will return home to convince him.”

“Your Grace, Steven Grant Rogers is as stubborn as an ox. But I will do my best. When will I be leaving? I would like to pay my respect to the deceased.”

“Of course. Stay for a few days. You’ll fly home before we leave for Vienna. Please, join us for breakfast. My wife is longing to see you.” You bow and go to your room to freshen up. You felt weak and bone tired.

When you got to the dining room Queen Ramonda stood to embrace you. “Mhibu! Beautiful girl. I’ve missed you.” The Queen served as your surrogate mother over the last few years. When she first met you in the hospital, she wept when you told her how you came to be injured. She insisted on helping you get back to your family. T’Challa explained to her that, because your own men hurt you, it would cause an international incident if you left the country with the help of a foreign government. With that, she arranged for you to return to Wakanda. She would not take no for an answer.

“I don’t mean to sound insensitive but, you don’t look well.”

“I know. I’ve been traveling all night and haven’t really eaten.”

“Well come sit. Eat.” Shuri comes in and kisses her mother. “Wow! Y/N, you look like shit.”

“SHURI! Apologize.” You just laughed. Shuri was never one to mince words.

“Let me look you over after breakfast.” You agree and finally start eating. Others come to join you. You feel more like yourself.

The remains of the good will ambassadors are returning. The Royal Family is hosting a memorial service to honor the deceased and to pray for their souls to enter into their next chapter. You stood with these families sharing their tears, their pain. You prayed with them and listened to their stories. Your sympathy was not enough. Even getting justice was not enough. Putting Wanda in prison would not bring their loved ones back. You had to make sure no other family suffered at the hands of the Avengers.

Once you collected yourself you found Shuri. You were starting to feel sick again. Maybe it was the heat but you were feeling queasy. “Ok, Y/N. Lie down. Let’s have a look.” She started scanning your body starting at your head. “Uh huh. Here’s your problem right here.”

“What?!” you said squinting at the image “What is that?”

“Well that’s your uterus. Here is a sack. And there is your baby. See the heartbeat, Mhibu? I would say you are around eight weeks. I’ll get a midwife.”

You laid on the table in complete shock. You hadn’t spoken to Steve since yesterday. You knew he was dealing with a lot. So were you. A midwife came over to confirm the scan. “Yes, Y/N. Congratulations. Looks like you are nine weeks along. Very healthy.”

“Shuri, not a word about this to anyone until I talk to Steve.”

“Of course. Your secret is safe with me.”

You went to your room and called Steve. He sounded upset.

“Y/N, I’m glad you called. I’m heading to London. Sharon...Peggy passed away.”

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

“Can you come with me?”

“Of course. I’ll be there first thing in the morning. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

You said your goodbyes to the family. Shuri gave you some prenatal vitamins and something for nausea. Queen Ramonda’s eyes widened and she winked at you. You smiled and put your finger to your lips.

LONDON

You met Steve at the church. He was quiet. You sat with Sam and Nat. The services were beautiful. Peggy was such an accomplished woman. You understood why he loved her. After the service was over he talked with Sharon. You hung back.

“Are you two ok?” Sam asked.

“Yeah. I think so. We haven’t really talked.”

“That was a bombshell Ross dropped on us. Did you know about the accords?”

“Yes. I’m sorry but I did.”

“Steve is pissed.”

“I watched ten families say goodbye to there loved ones today, Sam. I’m tired of all this bloodshed.”

“I’m sorry you had to do that but you can’t possibly agree....”

“I agree that there needs to be oversight.”

“When it’s an emergency we can’t wait for a committee to decide if we step in.”

“I agree. The US also can’t unleash super people onto foreign soil. Look, I don’t want to talk about this here.”

“You’re right. Let’s go check on our boy.”

You joined Steve and Sharon. Steve put his arm around your shoulder and pulled you into his body. “Hey, stranger” he said softly.

“How are you doing?” He pressed his lips to your forehead.

“Could be better. Why aren’t you in Vienna?”

“I didn’t want you to be alone.” He hugged you tighter and all but collapsed in your arms. You cried too but not for the same reasons.

Sam came into the room and cleared his throat. “You guys. I’m sorry to interrupt but you have to see this” There was an explosion in Vienna. King T’Chaka was killed. News footage showed Bucky at the scene. “Oh my God” you said covering your mouth. “I have to go.” They raced behind you helping you gather your things. “Y/N that’s not him..”

“Stop.” You tried holding back tears dialing your phone to arrange transport.

“We can get you there faster than someone can get to you” Sharon said “Please let us help.” Steve tried to grab your hand but you pulled away. Your phone rang. It was one of the Dora calling instead of Okoye. “The General requested that you meet the Prince in Vienna at once.” “I’m on my way. Who is with him?” “He is alone.” “Ok. I will be to him within the hour.”

You got on the jet and flew in silence. Once you were closer you changed clothes and still refused to make eye contact with Steve. He was watching you actively avoid him. “Can you say something? Please?”

“What would you have me say? He is...was like a father to me. T’Challa is alone.”

“I’m sorry. I know how you are feeling but...”

“You have no idea how I’m feeling.” You landed and grabbed your bag. Before exiting the plane you looked at Steve who was standing now. “I will not stop Prince T’Challa from seeking justice for his father. Get to Bucky before he does.”

“Wait. Where does this leave us?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Please don’t walk away from me. I love you” his voice broke.

“Then admit that Bucky can’t be saved and let us take care of it.”

“He can be, Y/N. I know he can. I have to help him.”

“Bucky didn’t become this way because of you. Don’t you see? This isn’t your fault.”

“I LOST HIM THAT DAY. I CANNOT AND WILL NOT LOSE HIM AGAIN.” This is the first time Steve has ever raised his voice to you. It stung like a slap. “Please, Y/N. I’m sorry this is happening. What happened...neither of us can change that. We can’t walk away from each other right now. I can’t imagine my life without you. I love you. Tell me you love me.” he grabbed your hand and kissed your fingertips then your palm and pressed it to his face. You held his face for a moment. Your phone was ringing. Sharon called after him. You tried pulling away but he held you tighter.

“Please. I have to go. “

“Tell me..”

“Stop. I have to go.”

“Y/N, please. Tell me you love me.” You couldn’t speak. Of course you loved him. You couldn’t get your dumb brain to make words. You were shaking and crying. He was crying. “I love you, Steve. I have to go.” He let your hand go. You rushed off without looking back.

T’Challa sat on a bench outside of the UN building. His father’s blood spattered his shirt. You sat next to him not knowing if you should touch him or even speak. “I am so sorry I wasn’t there.”

“Mhibu what use would it have been to have you there? He could not have been saved.” He held your hand. You had never laid eyes on Bucky Barnes other than the pictures in his file but you couldn’t help but feel responsible. “I won’t stand in your way, Prince T’Challa.”

“Of course you will. For the man you love you will move mountains. I cannot fault you. And I love my father. The love that a child has for a parent is immeasurable. I will kill Sergeant Barnes. Captain Rogers will need you.”

“But I love you too. Your family has shown me more kindness. I don’t know where I would be without you. I am responsible.”

“No, you aren’t. The man responsible will answer for his crimes.” He hugged you but it did not have anything behind it. He was still in shock. He slipped on his father’s ring and was off.

Nat was already in Vienna but was not injured in the blast. She spoke to T’Challa briefly as well. When she found you on the bench she sat down and said, “Steve and Sam are here.”

“Yes”

“They’ll try find Bucky”

“Yep”

“What will happen if T’Challa does first?”

“He’ll kill him. Or he’ll die trying.” You knew T’Challa would use every resource at his disposal including his suit.

“You have to know this won’t end well.”

“Yep.”

“What will you do?”

“You’re asking me who will I choose. Ask the right questions, Natasha.”

“Are you ready to answer that question?”

“No.” You put your head in your hands and wept. She rubbed your back.

“I wish I could tell you the answer. This is a tough one, buddy.”

“I’m pregnant.” Her eyes got wide and she gasped.

“Shit. Does Steve know?”

“No.”

“Shit.”

“Yep.”

After the tussle with German Special Forces in Bucharest everyone was transferred to Berlin. You and Nat waited in a conference room with Tony who was on the phone with Secretary Ross. You didn’t have access to Steve so you went to T’Challa first.

“Prince T’Challa, are you hurt?”

“No. Go back to Wakanda. Escort the King home. This is not a fight you can be a part of.”

“I should help.”

“And risk your safety? I cannot ask you to do that. Mother will have my head if anything happens to you or the baby. You know I can take care of myself.”

“Shuri?”

“My sister has a big mouth.” You both laughed. “Have you told Captain Rogers?”

“I hardly think this is the time.”

“He should know. He’s about to risk everything. He should know who he should really fight for.” You nodded.

“Will they release your father to me?”

“I will arrange it. You won’t have long. Go. Speak with him.”

“Please be careful.”

“Always.” You hugged him and then left to find Steve. He was sitting at the table being scolded by Tony.

“Ah, Y/N. Are you here as a Wakandan operative or Steve’s girlfriend?”

“Tony...”Nat tried to interrupt. Steve went to speak up but you put your hand up to signal to him that you were ok.

“Both. Steve can I to you alone?”

“Hey don’t try to help him escape. He’s been a bad boy.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Tony.”

You stepped out into the hall. There were too many people. You found an empty room and pulled him in. You wrapped your arms around him and he hugged you back so tight.

“What’s going to happen?”

“Secretary Ross is calling for our prosecution. I’m sorry to put you in this position.”

“It’s fine. I knew the risks going in.” He smiled and kissed you.

“I’m going to escort the King back to Wakanda. I feel like I shouldn’t stick around for what’s going to happen next.”

“Ok. I’ll keep in touch with you the best I can.”

“I know. I have to tell you something. Steve, I’m pregnant.” He stepped back to look at you. His mouth went dry. He was speechless.

“You don’t have to be a part of our lives. I know you have more pressing things to worry about. We’ll be fine....” You paced and stared at the floor while you spoke.

“Look at me.” He grabbed your shoulders to stop you from moving.

“Are you serious right now? How far...how long have you known?”

“Just a few days. It was never the right time to tell you. Now that you’re about to do something incredibly dangerous, it seemed like the only time to do it.” He held you and kissed you. It was the deepest most passionate kiss you could imagine.

“I’m going to take such good care of the two of you.”

“I would hope so. I have to go. You had better come back to us, Captain.”

“Yes, ma’am. Hey. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

You had the devastating task of riding with the Dora’s to escort the King home. The Queen and Princess Shuri met them. You stepped away to give them some privacy. You could hear them. The grief was palpable. You excused yourself and hid in your room. A few hours later Queen Ramonda was at your door.

“How are you feeling?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

You patted the bed for her to sit. “I’m ok. Tired.”

“Hmm. I remember when I was pregnant for Shuri chasing after T’Challa. He was so full of life. I was not.”

“So he was high spirited?”

“To say the least. Have you told Captain Rogers?”

“I have. He took it well. Shocked but happy. I didn’t get a chance to really tell you how sorry I am. I should have gone to Vienna.”

“Hush. It was his time. His next chapter is beginning. He is at peace. All of this pomp and circumstance. The crying and carrying on. That is for the living.”

“T’Challa does not share the same sentiment.”

“No. My son is not his father. He will learn.”

“In the mean time my boyfriend and my adopted brother are fighting. I’m worried.”

“I trust T’Challa to show restraint. Captain Rogers is a good man. I trust he will do the same.” She kissed your forehead and left to rest. You could not possibly close your eyes. You stared at the wall wishing one of them would call to let you know everything was ok.

It had been two days and still no word from Steve. Your midwife was breathing down your neck for an appointment but you didn’t want to go without him. You kept yourself busy working with Shuri. You started looking through news reports and anything you could find trying to get a location. You called Sam. No answer.

You tried Nat, “Nat? Have you heard from him?”

“No. Sam, Wanda, Clint and Scott are being held at the moment. I was going to call you. We really need to find him, Y/N.” Your blood went cold. “Why? So you can lock him up too?”

“He almost killed Tony. Rhodey is paralyzed. No one wants him in prison.”

“Ross does.”

“Please. I don’t want this to get worse.”

“Well I haven’t heard from him.”

“Ok. If you do...” You hung up. You found a renewed purpose and started looking for the prison.

Finally, the next day, Shuri heard from T’Challa. He was visibly shaken. “It wasn’t Barnes. I almost killed the wrong man.”

“Where are they now?” you asked looking up the coordinates for the Hydra base.

“Mhibu, when I left, Steve and Tony were fighting. Really fighting. Steve almost killed him. I don’t know where he and Barnes went. I’m sorry.” You had to sit down. Your stomach turned into terrible knots. You were going to be sick. You tried his phone again. No answer.

T’Challa returned. He spent some time with his family before coming to find you.

“How are you?”

“Worried.”

“I promised Captain Rogers I would take care of you myself.”

“No. Please don’t say that. That means he’s not coming back. He promised.”

“We will find him, Mhibu. I will bring your Captain home.” He hugged you and you cried into his shoulder.

T’Challa received word from Everette Ross that there was a breach in the floating prison. Steve sent his communication device back to Tony. No way to track any of them. He was in shock when he heard from Steve the next morning.

Until they could figure out how to deprogram him, Bucky asked to go back into the ice. Wakanda had the capabilities and could keep him safe. Steve watched Bucky as he was frozen. “I believe there is someone waiting for you, Captain.” Steve smiled and shook his hand.

When he found you you were bent over a computer screen tapping your pencil on the desk. “Don’t we have an appointment to get to?” You dropped your cup, jumped up from your seat and ran over. “Should we clean that up?” “After you kiss me.” And so he did. You held each other for what felt like ages. “I promised I’d come back” he said against your hair. “I knew you would.” “Come on. I want to see my baby.” “Wait. Where’s Sam and Bucky? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” “We have all the time in the world to talk about this, kid. Let’s go.”

The midwife was waiting for you. She shook Steve’s hand and let you get on the table. Wakanda had technology far superior to anywhere else so they were able to scan the baby without an ultrasound. She pulled up the screen and turned up the volume. “Is that his heartbeat?”

“What makes you so sure that’s a he?”

“Lucky guess?”

“The baby is not big enough to see yet if it is a boy or a girl.” said the midwife “If you want to know I can run some tests.” You looked at each other. You were eager to know. “What do you think, mommy. Should we wait?”

“I want to know now if that’s ok.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Yes. We want to know.” She touched some points on the screen.

“I am analyzing the baby’s chromosomal make up. This will spot any abnormalities and will determine if Captain Rogers passed on the X or Y chromosome. It will just take a few minutes.” Steve stared at the screen watching the baby’s heart beating. “Is it’s heart supposed to beat so fast.” She smiled, “Yes. Your daughter’s heart is perfectly healthy.” His eyes filled with tears. He kissed your cheek and watched your daughter’s heart beating.

[strawberrytoo]

alexei: all with you.

pairings: alexei x reader.

summary: "Hi! Can I get an Alexei x reader where he survives and he has to stay low so the reader takes him in and helps him adjust to American life and the language? (The reader works alongside hopper and Joyce) thank you!!" "Lemme get uh Soft alexei imagine it doesn't matter what it is just soft for the man that has my whole heart". russian is in italic.

-

Blood. That's all she can remember about that night, the rest a distant blur of chaos and terror. She tried to forget about how desperate and scared she felt that night. How irrefutably afraid she was that she could lose a man she had only known for a mere day.

"Keep eyes open, Alexei." (Y/N) had pleaded through broken Russian. "Stay with me." Her grip on the wheel was so tight that her knuckles were a pale white, close to that of Alexei's skin tone at the time as the blood continued to seep into his shirt.

Alexei made an attempt to speak but groaned instead as another wave of agony overwhelmed him, forcing him to slink further into the seat. 'Thank God for hot wiring, right?'. That's what she had said to him once they made it to her home, once the bleeding stopped, once he regained consciousness; even if Alexei didn't understand, he still smiled.

It had been 4 months, 4 whole months. Whilst Hawkins became a hot-spot for tourists and news channels, Alexei and (Y/N) stuck to the confines of her home, secluded and isolated from the prying eye. Or more importantly the Soviets. Alexei healed over those months, but was incapacitated by fear rather than pain instead.

Joyce had since been in touch. She had been the one to tell them the news of Hopper’s or death, meaning that, excluding Murray, they were truly on their own. (Y/N) quit her job at the police department so that she could stay with Alexei as he healed, luckily having enough in her savings to provide for them both. All they had was each other and time. Time filled with “You say it like this?” or “How do Americans do this?”. Time filled with “Americans eat dog in corn?” and “One more slurpee, please?”.

Alexei had become somewhat accustomed to American life, or at least life in Hawkins. He found joy in watching Loony Tunes almost all day, eating big burgers and slurpees, all within those walls. He would dream of the day he would be able to go back to the carnival, and experience “the American wonders” all over again; this time without nearly dying.

“I am scared, (Y/N)” He whispered one night; voice as broken as his English. He was stood at the door, partially hiding behind it as he peered nervously into her room.

"Come in, Alexei." She mumbled sympathetically in Russian, rubbing her tired eyes. Timidly, Alexei made his way into the room, fiddling with his pyjama shirt as he stood at the foot of her bed. (Y/N) patted the spot next to her, moving back the covers. "Alex, you sleep here." Alexei climbed in, immediately feeling at ease as her body heat warmed him. (Y/N) shifted, moving closer to him, so close that their shoulders touched and their hands grazed each other. "Why are you scared?"

Alexei gulped, clutching the covers tightly. "Russians." (Y/N) understood immediately and gently took his hand in hers.

"I won't let them hurt you, Alexei. They will never hurt you again." She affirmed, squeezing his hand tight. "You are safe with me."

"No," he shook his head, closing his eyes as he swallowed hard, trying not to cry. "that is not all I am scared of." (Y/N) frowned, turning her head to face him. She could just make out his sad and frightened face, frownline defined in the dim light. She waited for him to continue. "I don't want them to hurt you. I'm scared they will, kill you. I don't want you to die because of me." He pieced together, struggling to differentiate Russian and English as his emotions ran wild.

(Y/N) took a moment, taking in his worries. Slowly her frown melted and a soft smile lifted her face. "Let me hold you?" She asked shyly, lifting her arm around his shoulder as he too shyly curled into her, head upon her chest. "We are safe, for now. As soon as the heat dies down we can move out of here, go wherever you want to, and we won't have to hide anymore. You won't have to be afraid anymore."

Alexei wasn't ashamed at his current clinginess. In fact, he took comfort in her warmth and the feeling of her fingers running through his hair. "We will be safe?" He asked, seeking reassurance.

"Yes." (Y/N) smiled, eyes gleaming with the prospect of safety with him. "And we will go to every carnival you want, and eat corn dogs and cotton candy, and we can go to the movies and eat in restaurants until our stomachs explode."

"Explode?" Alexei asked in shock, resting on his elbow to look at (Y/N) who laughed.

"Not actually explode, but it will feel like it. It's a saying of sorts." She chuckled softly, lifting her hand up to caress his cheek. He leant into it naturally. "My point is, we can do whatever we want because we will be…" (Y/N) thought of the word for a moment. "Free."

Alexei smiled. "(Y/N)?" He asked rather coyly. Blush tinting his cheeks a soft red although it was unnoticeable in the dim light. "Why do you help me? Why do you… risk your life for me?"

(Y/N) paused in thought, although she already knew the answer. "I don't know. Maybe it's because I feel I owe something to Hop. Policeman. Maybe it's because I can't ever imagine leaving you on your own like you were nothing. Maybe it's because…" (Y/N) sighed, glancing up at Alexei who still rested his cheek into her hand and was watching her with a profound intrigue. He didn't rush her, he simply waited with patience. "I care about you a lot, Alex. More than anyone else in my life and I, I want to protect you. Because you deserve it. And so much more that I can't give you."

There was a silence that made her want to crawl under the covers, making her recoil her hand. "But," Alexei interrupted, grabbing her hand before she could roll over. "You have already given me all I want." He said so simply it made her heart flutter. "You gave me new life, new American life and you gave me you."

"That's sweet, Al." (Y/N) smiled, squeezing the hand.

"No, no. You don't get point I-" Alexei seemed to struggle with his words. "I care about you too, you saved my life, you are my everything now." He gulped. "You are all I have."

(Y/N) took a chance then. There was no way she was misreading the situation, besides, in the past few months there had always been something missing. They cared so deeply for one another and were best friends, but there was something else there. Slowly, as to not startle him, she sat up on her elbows, before cupping his face with both of her hands. She was going to lean in before Alexei leant forward first and pressed their lips together. It was only small and quick, and Alexei pulled back in an embarrassed haste. "Sorry, sorry, sorry." He mumbled over and over again, attempting to pull away, however, (Y/N) simply pulled his face back to hers and deepened the kiss.

"You don't have to apologise anymore, Alexei." (Y/N) whispered against his lips, a bright smile making its way onto both of their faces.

"(Y/N)?" Alexei asked shyly. "Kiss again?" The question made her laugh jovially before she nodded her head and pressed her lips against his once again. They soon fell asleep after talking of what they would do out of Hawkins, the American wonders Alexei could experience. "All with you, (Y/N)." Alexei would reaffirm every time either of them suggested something.

"Of course." (Y/N) would smile, kissing his head. "All with you."

[flutteringphalanges]

Summary: It is public knowledge that Zoe Van Helsing is the last of her blood line. Not to mention that, in a sense, Count Dracula is too. However, after an unexpected night of passion, both their lives dramatically change when Zoe becomes pregnant. Two unconventional parents, one extraordinary pregnancy. What could go wrong?

Rating: M

Pairings: Zoe Van Helsing/Dracula & Agatha Van Helsing/Dracula

Read on FFN and AO3

A/N: Thank you to all who have left kudos/comments/reviews and even have taken the time to read this story thus far! I'm having loads of fun writing this one and I'm hoping you are enjoying it too! Okay, enough of my blabber, here's the next chapter!

                                    Chapter Three

Gemellology. The scientific study of twins. One child out of every thirty two children born was a twin. In the United Kingdom alone, one in out of sixty five babies born were some number of multiples. And one, twin pregnancy, out of the billions of people in the world was the result of a paternal vampire. Singular. Unique. No one else on the planet would be like them. The statistics, though not publicly published, were there. Zoe had never felt so overwhelmed in her life.

"Because of your age, health complications, and the fact you are carrying twins, you're considered high risk," Dr. Clyde explained, Zoe sitting rather motionless as the doctor began to scribble instructions onto a pad.

"Is there something we should be concerned about?" Dracula inquired, his attention focused on the doctor. "Perhaps momentarily taking leave from her job?" Zoe didn't have to look over to know that the vampire was fighting a smirk.

"It's nothing you need stress about at this point," the doctor assured, smiling at Dr. Van Helsing. "We'll just have to schedule more routine visits and run some tests if need be. Monitoring you and making sure everything is going well with you and your babies is the important thing. Here," he held out a piece of paper that she hesitantly took. "Just some recommended prenatal vitamins, folate and iron supplements, the works."

"Iron, an important component of blood," Agatha commented. "Perhaps you consider increasing your dosage of that based on your fetuses' needs."

"Over the counter?" Zoe asked, ignoring the other two in the room. "Pharmacy?"

"Yes, whichever location is convenient to you," Dr. Clyde replied. "Generic or name brand doesn't matter. It is important to stay on them though, we strive for healthy babies." He reached out for Zoe's hand. "It was a pleasure meeting you, Dr. Van Helsing. They can schedule your next appointment up front. And congratulations again," he grinned at Dracula. "To the both of you."

"Thank you," the vampire answered. "This was quite the surprise for both of us. But I welcome this new chapter in our lives, isn't that right, darling?"

"Callous beast," Agatha frowned at Zoe's side. "This is why you never let your guard down with a vampire. Have you learned nothing?"

"Thank you, Dr. Clyde," the doctor exhaled, pushing herself out of the cot. "I'll see you soon I suppose."

Zoe did her best to ignore Dracula the moment she stepped back into the waiting room. She could sense him looming over her shoulder as she set up her next appointment. Blocking his view or not, she knew the man would find a way to attend. He was dreadfully good in that department. Still in shock over the whole experience, she made her way to the elevator.

"So twins," the vampire said, breaking the silence. "I cannot say that I was exactly expecting that. And both with beating hearts. How peculiar."

"I'd rather not discuss parenthood, especially with you," Zoe grumbled, pressing the down key. "You changing my appointment was inappropriate, even for you. Do you realize how late it is? I have to get up early for work tomorrow and-" The doctor was abruptly caught off when she felt a firm, cold grip on her shoulder.

"The Harker Foundation?" Dracula's amused expression had now darkened. "So you are really hellbent on going back there? After this?!" He motioned at her still flat abdomen. "That place. You know what it is. The purpose. What they are." The count touched her stomach, Zoe immediately swatted his hand away. "Do you know what they'd do to you if they found out? To them?"

"What I do isn't any of your concern," the doctor frowned deeply. "I hold high regards towards my job. Even with you gone, we've made progress."

"Then your intent is to experiment on them?" Dracula growled, Zoe beginning to feel slightly fearful. "And to think I was the one who was believed to be heartless-"

"I have absolutely no intentions to do anything of the sort you're accusing me of," she finally spat back. "Nor do I intend on informing people what I'm carrying. But I will say this, if I am truly hellbent on anything at this point, is keeping you out of my life." The elevator door opened but neither of them made a move to enter. "When you chose to leave the walls of the Foundation-"

"My prison," he corrected.

"...The institution, you made the choice to become not involved," it was an argument that didn't make much sense, but she needed something to go off on. "So now, like the Foundation, I'm choosing to be not involved with you. Not that our relationship was anything but distant acquaintances."

Dracula fell silent for a moment before letting out a low chuckle. "Are you trying to punish me, Zoe?" He asked, clearly amused. "Because if that is your goal, you are failing to achieve it."

"Leave," Agatha urged. "This is just going to keep going around in circles and despite being dead, it's giving me a headache."

"I'm done," the doctor said, finally walking into the elevator. "And if you had a shred of humanity left in you, you'd leave me be."

The vampire's mouth opened up to say something, but Zoe had already jammed the close button so hard the doors slid shut. She sighed, leaning against the wall as the speakers hummed a soft tune.

"Good girl," Agatha smiled. "Checkmate."

"The same goes for you," Zoe muttered, glaring at Agatha. "You're just as a thorn in my side as he is. Please...just give me peace."

The nun gave her a curious look before disappearing out of sight. How Zoe had kept from losing it, she wasn't sure. As the elevator doors opened and she stepped into the night, she began to question it all. Twins. Motherhood. Dracula. Her ghost of an aunt. Her eyes flickered down to the crumpled up piece of paper in her hands. The list of instructions the doctor gave her. Everything really was turning upside down.

                                         Two Months Later

Dracula seemed to heed her words from that night. Weeks had passed and Zoe had yet to see the vampire. Even at her appointments, she wasn't greeted to the unwelcome sight of the man. Agatha too had kept her distance, the doctor only seeing flickers of the woman occasional around her house. Life was turning out to be pretty alright-excluding the fact of the ever growing list of pregnancy symptoms she was starting to experience.

"That's your third bagel."

Zoe peered down at her plate, noting that she had indeed consumed yet another circular dough ball smothered with cream cheese. Her attention turned back to her former graduate student, Jack Seward, who'd joined her for lunch that day. He proved to be nice company, someone she could always count on.

"I'm hungry," she admitted. "A side effect of pregnancy."

"And you're still not going to tell me who the father is?" He inquired, smiling as Zoe went for another bite of her bagel. "I thought you never wanted kids."

"I didn't," she admitted. "But when I went into remission, something changed within me. I can't describe it. So I decided to try out in vitro fertilization," Zoe smirked. "Took the first time and now I'm having twins. You and I both know science is fascinating."

She gently placed a hand on her stomach that had already begun to swell. She had yet to feel anything other than bloating. But it was almost comforting. Knowing that she wasn't alone-well, besides Agatha's unwanted haunting. Everything had been running so smoothly, Zoe would almost forget at times that the twins weren't fully human.

"So the Foundation is still keeping tabs on Dracula," Jack said, taking a sip of his coffee. "You of all people must regret not having him around to study him."

Zoe nearly choked on her next bite. Coughing, she grabbed her glass of water and swallowed a few large gulps. Concern crossed the younger man's face, but the doctor waved away, nodding that she was fine.

"His whereabouts aren't a concern of mine," she inhaled. "His activity is being monitored and with that horrible lawyer of his, not much can be done."

"Has he tried to contact you?

"No," she replied. "Not recently."

"Recently?" Jack inquired, looking a little worried. "So he's tried in the past?"

This was the last subject she wanted to discuss. Thinking of a way out of it, she scrunched her face in displeasure. Placing her hands on her stomach, she tried to appear sick. Convincing.

"I'm feeling rather ill," Zoe lied, rising from the table. "Morning sickness. I should go home. I'll text you later. Thank you for lunch. It was great seeing you, Jack."

"But, I…"

Zoe had already hurried off towards her car before he could finish. Unlocking it, she threw her purse into the passenger seat and slid in. Dracula. Of all the subjects to discuss. The idea really did turn her stomach. Pulling out of the cafe parking lot, she started to make her way home. Some tea. Perhaps a movie. She needed to clear her mind.

The first thing she did when she walked through the door was collapse on the couch. Even though she wasn't going through chemotherapy treatments anymore, she still experienced extreme exhaustion. Pregnancy. The wonder of it all. Placing a hand on her stomach, she exhaled. It was hard to believe two tiny-well, babies, were growing in there. Surreal even. Zoe allowed her eyes to close, taking a moment to rest before going about her day. Peace of mind. That was the least she could ask for as she found herself drifting off…

A loud, but rhythmic knock startled Zoe from her slumber. She sat up abruptly, cursing herself from nodding off. She looked over at the time and to her horror realized the afternoon had become the night. Inhaling, she walked over to the door, wondering who it could be at this hour. Had she forgotten something and Jack came to return it? Certainly it wasn't the landlord. She always paid the rent on time. As she opened the door, she immediately realized her mistake.

"Good evening," the man said. "I apologize for the unannounced visit, I would have called but it appears you blocked my number. May I come in? I think there is a lot of catching up to do," his eyes fell onto her stomach, mouth twitching into a smile. "A lot."

Count Dracula.

God, smite her down where she stood.

[acepanromcloudstrife]

I'm thinking that Cloud, however much he denies it, has a fear of Hojo.

[he absolutely, 100% does. and since @pickpocketarc has already confessed to being this anon, all of y’all can blame her for what your about to read. It’s about Hojo, so general creepiness and vague but bad medical stuff abound, so if that bothers anyone, i’d suggest they stay away.]

He was 14 years old the first time he met Professor Hojo, completely accidentally, in the research laboratory's medical wing.  He was in the Shinra building to apply for SOLDIER, and part of the process involved a physical exam.  It made sense--the military would want all their potential new recruits to attain a certain standard of health and well-being, especially so with the elite SOLDIER program.

But no one had informed him that he would be there for hours on end, or that there would be quite so many exams.  He was poked and prodded in nearly every area of his body, had blood drawn twice, had been hooked up to wires that monitored his heart, and had filled out so many questionnaires, he'd literally lost count of them all.

Right at the end, as he was nearing the end of his final set of papers to sign, the door to the exam room he was in opened.  A middle aged man with long black hair pulled back in a ponytail entered the room, too busy looking at the file in his hand to notice that the room wasn't unoccupied.

"Beckett, call back that last candidate--Wilson, I think it was?  There are some sight abnormalities on his blood panel that could exclude him, but--"

"Excuse me, Professor," interrupted Beckett, "I'm with someone right now.  You'll have to ask Martin."

The older man looked up from his papers and noticed Cloud for the first time.  He studied him for a long minute.  Cloud felt scrutinized in a way that hours and hours of testing couldn't even begin to compare to.

"You're joking, surely," was all the man said.

"No," Beckett confirmed.  "I'm not joking, sir."

The Professor (who looked vaguely familiar to Cloud, but where could he have known him from?) scoffed and picked up the packet of papers that had taken all afternoon to compile.  He flipped through them quickly.  "Family history?"

"Relatively good, sir.  Grandfather died young of heart failure."

"And his heart?"

"Chest x-ray and EKG were clean.  Still waiting on lab results."

"Mako-erythrocyte reactivity?"

"Fingerstick test seemed okay, but like I said, the labs are still running, sir."

The man let out a short, disgruntled sigh and rolled his eyes.  "Send the file to Heidegger.  Public Security at best."

He turned on his heel and left the room.  It wasn't until Beckett shook his head and muttered, "Fucking Hojo," that Cloud put two and two together.

***

He was 16 the next time he met Hojo, broken and bleeding and barely alive.  He'd been nervous and excited in turn for this mission.  Nervous, because he was going home to Nibelheim, but excited because he was going to be working with Zack.  And Sephiroth.  He'd finally gotten the chance to prove himself to his idol, and--

And it had all gone to shit in the absolute worst way.

He was drifting in and out of consciousness.  He remembered being lifted onto a stretcher and escorted out of the reactor, and then the next thing he knew, he was face down on a cold, metal table, being held down by far too many sets of hands, and there was a sharp, stabbing pain deep in his pelvis.  He tried to scream, but the sound refused to leave his throat.

"Anaesthesia and paralytic's wearing off," someone said.

"Vecuronium," replied a disinterested, somewhat familiar voice.  "If he keeps moving, the samples will be contaminated."

A moment later, Cloud felt his muscles relax and, to his horror, stop responding altogether.  He couldn't move at all, no matter how hard he tried, but he still felt everything that was being done to him.  He couldn't speak or scream or even whimper.  All he could do was cry.

"Subject is still exhibiting reactions to pain stimuli," another voice said.  "Blood pressure is skyrocketing.  Heart rate--"

"We're almost done."

"But sir--"

"We can't give him anything else for this procedure.  He's scheduled for anaesthesia and narcotics when he returns to the submersion tank."

And that was, apparently, the final word on the subject.  He couldn't say how long he laid there.  It seemed to go on forever, the pain making every passing second excruciatingly long.

When the procedure was over, they took him back to his tank, and he was suspended once again in mako, still conscious, still in pain, still unable to move.

***

The final time he ever saw Hojo, he was 21 years old, full of rage and ready to kill.  Three of them stood against him, Cloud and Vincent and Tifa, and as the vengeful old man's body once again melted and reassembled thanks to the Jenova cells he'd spliced into himself, Cloud thought about how this form finally matched what a monstrous individual he'd been all along.

When they eventually wore him down, Cloud pinned him to the ground with his sword and yelled at Vincent to take his shot.  He aimed his weapon with the speed and precision one expected of a Turk and pulled the trigger twice in succession.  Two bullets landed home in what was left of Hojo's chest, directly to his partially exposed heart as it pounded wildly.  Whether it was from the exertion of battle or if he was simply frightened at the prospect of his imminent death, Cloud didn't know.  

And frankly, he didn't fucking care either.  Hojo was a madman and a menace, an ugly, egomaniacal bastard, and the world was immediately a better place now that he was no longer a part of it.

The three of them stood there for a few minutes, just watching the corpse, ready to jump back into the thick of it if needed.  It didn't move, but with Jenova cells, there was always a lingering uncertainty.  

Finally, Tifa broke the silence.  "I think...he's really dead."

Cloud felt himself relax slightly.  He noticed Tifa cradling her left arm gingerly against her chest and dug a potion of his pockets for her.  He figured Vincent needed a moment by himself anyhow.

As they readied themselves to move on, however, Cloud felt an overwhelming desire to have the last word, as it were.  He walked over to the mass of disjointed and disfigured flesh that had formerly been Hojo, but he couldn't decide what he wanted his last words to this despicable man to be.

In the end, unable to think of anything more articulate to say, he just spat on the man's corpse and growled a spiteful, "Fuck you."

***

He was 24 years old the final time Hojo directly interfered in his life, and even though Vincent had been the heavy-lifter this time, Cloud and the rest of AVALANCHE had done everything in their power to help him.  When it was over, Vincent told them everything, the whole sordid tale, start to finish.

No one had known what to say.  There really wasn't anything that seemed right.  The room was quiet and awkward for several minutes as they all digested the story of how Hojo had copied his consciousness into a computer system, cheating death for 3 years until DeepGround was ready to put their plans into action, how he took over the body of Weiss in order to try and bring destruction to the Planet once again.

The solution to their silence, someone decided, was alcohol.  They all drank more than was good for them that night, happy to be alive at the end of so much violence and anxiety.  He stumbled upstairs into his bed, and for the first time in over a year, he had a nightmare about Hojo. He was 16 again, floating in a mako tube, paralyzed, unable to scream, and in so much pain his body felt like it was on fire.  He was alone this time, the tank besides his empty and broken.  Zack had escaped and left him there alone to be the sole target of Hojo's sick, twisted science.

He must have been talking in his sleep, because when Tifa shook him awake, she asked him if he was okay.  He felt wetness on his cheeks almost immediately, but the first sob didn't escape him until Tifa had already wrapped her arms around him.  She was warm and soft and comforting, radiating a calming energy he'd come to associate with home and with safety.  Her fingers combed through his hair gently as she cooed soothing nonsense into his ear.  He was relatively calm within a few minutes.  

"Better?" she asked.

"Yeah," was all he managed.

"You wanna talk about it?"

"No."

"Okay."  She kissed his temple and gave him a squeeze.  She didn't need to say anything else.  He knew that she was there for him, and if he wanted to tell her what his nightmare was about, she would listen.

After a moment, he said only, "Hojo."

Tifa kissed him again and hummed against his skin.  "I'm sorry."

He eventually fell asleep again like that, curled against Tifa, tucked securely into her arms, his undisturbed tears dry on his cheeks.  The next morning, he would have one hell of a hangover, and it was just as well that he had another excuse to stay in bed for the rest of the day and feel bad.  

For now, though, he could only pray that Hojo didn't enter his dreams again.  Cloud didn't need reminding twice in one night that, no matter how long the man himself might be dead and gone, Hojo would never, ever leave him be.  He had scars from his time with Hojo that would never heal.  He'd always be right there under Cloud's skin, taunting him, tainting him, slowly but surely.  

Fucking bastard.

[itsleafourie]

a fitness update

My “sad boi hours” playlist is in full swing. It’s 21:17 to be exact. Thursday, 25 July 2019. And my retail therapy is starting to creep up on to me again. Yup, it’s time for some recollection.

Hi, how are you? Has life been treating you like some leftover soggy French fries from Mac Donald’s? Have you been feeling like you’re back in the awkward middle school stage of your life? You know, the time where everything just felt out of place, where everything just felt like on the brink of crumbling to the ground?

To be completely honest, I feel like. Not as frequently as when my past self, but the feeling does creep up on me. Sometimes, I feel as if shit that I say or think, or feel is just so insignificant to the overpowering doom of oblivion. I feel as if no matter how hard I try, I’ll never life up to the expectations of what the ‘successful’ portrayal of society’s character is.  I feel as if I’m always running, never stopping to take a breath, from the inevitable doom of never being good enough to those around me. With this deep desire inside of me where I just want to make an impact on my community, I feel sometimes suffocated by the things I didn’t do, or by the things which I did do – actions that do not necessary contribute to the achieving of my personal goals.

Here’s some background info; two weeks ago, I had an attack. In one night, I couldn’t stop vomiting and I experienced monstrous stomach pains. My mum and I, we rushed to the hospital, and discovered that my stomach expanded approximately 3 times in size. Two procedures, a feeding tube and a fuck ton of self-loathing later, I found myself stuck on the hospital bed for 5 days. Within those 120 hours, I did a lot of over-thinking. That type of thinking where you contemplate every decision you’ve ever made, every person you’ve ever impacted and every awkward moment you’ve ever had. I know in today’s time, this type of sentence is usually said in a tongue-in-cheek way to create a sense of relatability, I seriously suffered a new type of anxiety and nihilism in a way that it impacted me greatly.

I was diagnosed with a chronic disease called gastroparesis. It is a disease in which the stomach cannot empty itself of food in a normal fashion. The cause of this could be a once-off thing, but it could also be caused by something that I shortly after my visit was diagnosed with – diabetes. Type 2, the genetic kind. As someone who strives to live a life full of balance and health, this was a massive blow to my gut. On top of that, I was dealing with anxiety surrounding my family, identity and my existence. I felt so overwhelmed with emotions such as fear and confusion, that my emotional health took a toll for the worse. Having a past with anxious thoughts, experiences like these trigger a snowball effect within my mind.

But it also made me realize how insignificant other’s opinions of me really matter.

I made a pact with myself; never will I ever let other people define what makes me a good or bad or balanced or healthy person, ever. I will not listen to other’s opinions of my health or my diet or my exercise routine ever again. Because in the end, I saved my health by living a healthier life. Type 2 diabetes, as I mentioned, is genetic. That means when I lost my weight, I saved myself from future health damage. Thus, in the most respectful way possible, if you think that my exercising routine or my diet is ‘unbalanced’ or ‘unhealthy’, quite literally go fuck yourself.

I did that. I saved myself from future self-hatred, future health-related issues, future social anxiety and other self-deprecating thoughts. I got myself through these past few weeks just like how I got through my stage of transforming my inner self. And for these accomplishments, I like to give them some recognition.

The before and after picture is more than the number on the scale going down. It is me standing up for what I believe in. It is me being more open to those that once frighten me to the core, it is me making more genuine friends. It is me excluding myself from situations that do not benefit me in any way. It is me focusing on growing my knowledge on the outside world. It is me laughing more, smiling more, laughing more, crying more and caring less of what other’s think. It is me wanting to impact others the same way others impacted me. I’m not saying that because that I weigh less, I’m a better person; what I’m saying is that because of my mind shift and my focus being shifting on to more fulfilling elements in life, I’ve grew. My goals in life is to impact my community positively, so if you ever feel like I’m attacking you or conspiring against you in any way, you are wrongly mistaken. You see, when you start to care less about what other’s think of you, you automatically start to care less what you think of others. You realize that we all are just beings with some human errors encoded into our genetics. You can claim that you don’t care what others think of you, but as long as you are continuing to gossip or judge those around you, you still indirectly care.

I’ve started making an effort to tell those around me how much they matter to me. I started complimenting others more, without any intentions. I started leaving a more selfish life, you could say. Selfish, in the sense that no matter what other’s think of me, what ultimately matters, is what I think of myself. That includes my opinions, ideologies, self-image, beliefs and my feelings.

When I walked into high school, I was at my highest peak of uncertainty. I have never felt so unsure of myself, ever. It was only when I started bonding with myself that I really got to know myself. The idea of a constant in life, is false, as I’ve mentioned before. So being uncertain about something, is normal. It is within this uncertainty that we grow into our best versions of myself.

Being 16, I still have a lot to learn about myself and about society around me. But I plan on doing it in the most sustainable way possible. It is not sustainable to always give a shit about what those think of you, no matter how hard you try. I didn’t stop caring about what people think of me, but rather shifted my focus on what those with emotional intelligence think of me.

To end this off with a short but vivid and straight forward message; sometimes life gets the good of you, but as long as you remember what your values and what your ambition in life is, the tough gets going.

[ryujinrk]

-.✦･｡ﾟMGA season 5: episode 5              sunday 07/21, practice at royal entertainment              mentioned: @rkjaemin, @rksuwoong, @rkxsnh

TRIGGER WARNING: migraines (headache, nausea), medications

Ever since Ryujin woke up this morning she has felt unweel in an eerie kind of way, the feeling that something is wrong haunting her from the very moment she opened her eyes because it’s appearing to be a brand new sensation. She’s nervous, abnormally so really, when she makes her way to the Royal Entertainment, a route that is becoming familiar with time as result of the practice happening there. It’s early, but not too early. Ryujin follow the company’s schedule as good as she can while excluding the breakfast, especially today since her appetite vanished-- that alone is strange, and anyone who knows her would recognise the change.

She is the first one to arrive out of both groups and a staff member is showing her the way, it’s the same way that she has walked many times already during the past few days but she know that she has to be escorted by someone. She met them with a tired smile, head bowing in that typical respect that she show to anyone who is more authorised than herself. As someone who rarely ever has a headache it’s unbearable even to walk like this, silence consumes the short trip from the entrance and up to the practice room but their footsteps are loud enough. She has no time to stay at home though, she has no time to rest. It will pass, is what she tell herself and that especially when she notice that SUWOONG arrive a little while after her.

Eyes twitch slightly by the sight of him, briefly and so quickly that nobody would notice. While they settle their things and prepare to practice she notice that something is different, still. The lights are so much brighter than they were the day before, the sounds are so much louder. It doesn’t take Ryujin long to realise that this is going to be an incredibly long and tiresome day, and she has only just arrived at 9AM. JAEMIN arrive not long after, with his textbooks. They are practicing the dance still, perfecting it the best that they can because although JAEMIN is a very strong, creative rapper has he expressed it isn’t the same when it comes to dancing. He isn’t a dancer, but that’s okay.

He is teamed with two dancers, after all-- one way or another, they will all manage to learn the choreography. Luckily for him, the song that they chose doesn’t require much technique. If the famous P.O can pull off the stage then she is sure that JAEMIN can as well, they just need for him to practice, practice, practice. And Ryujin believes in him, she has huge faith in him. She’s worried for other reasons though, which she blame her unwellness for. Surely no one else has noticed how SUWOONG has treated her the past days, no one but herself because it is easier to notice when it happens to oneself. She doesn’t get it, what has she ever done to him?

SUWOONG is particularly picky with her, he always leave her to choose lastly and he flee the scene with her once breaks hit. Instead of getting to know her he’s seemingly everywhere but with his own group, every chance he get, and she slowly begin to feel worse and worse. They seem like small “innocent” things things but small “innocent” things add up rather quickly, and she honestly don’t feel welcome or liked in her very own group... and she simply do not know what she has done wrong, SUWOONG just seem to hate her for no apparent reason. She’s a hardworking girl who usually don’t take breaks but today, she has to.

She simply has to, or she will puke right there and then though that is a fact that she decided against telling her group about. It’s not like the elder male would understand anyway, Ryujin’s absolutely sure about that, because everything she does in his presence seems to be wrong. Closing up towards lunch time it’s becoming unbearable, overwhelming is an understatement and she honestly feel so awful that she want to sit down and cry. The waves come and go yet she can’t seem to find a pattern, suddenly there is a severe rush of nausea and then suddenly there is a immensely throbbing pain in her head. What is going on?

The only pattern she notice is that whenever a wave of sickness appear, her heart beat so fast and so forcibly against her chest that she wonder whether it will jump out of her very body. As she sit down for another break SUWOONG seems to have had enough of it and calls for a fifteen minute break himself. The lump in her throat grows bigger and bigger because she’s scared, it frightens her that she don’t know what is going on with neither SUWOONG nor herself. Ryujin uses the given break to call Jonhyun, her step-brother who happens to work within the branch of medicine, after excusing herself to the hallway just outside the practice room.

His message is quick and simple, Ryujin needs to find herself a place to rest and she know to listen to his advices. If there is anyone that she look up to, it is him. There is nothing that is as important as time at this very moment so she hurry the best she possibly can to find one of the nearby staff members, who agrees to show her the company’s infirmary where she is allowed some rest and some meds to relieve the symptoms. Ryujin isn’t sure what she is given but she takes it regardless, wanting to get better sooner rather than later so that she can return to the practice. Gosh, she forgot to tell JAEMIN where she was going. 

Well, surely the staff member would let them know. Before she lay down to rest she put on an alarm to make sure that she won’t oversleep, and she pass out almost the moment she closes her eyes. Just before that, she manages to send off a few texts to her best friend.

text sent to @rkxsnh (  혜주 💕 ) —— (2)

✉ ▸ i feel so sick... i don’t know what’s goign on  ✉ ▸ i’m at the infirmary, i don’t want to be sent home...  😭 

The alarm wakes her back up and although she feels better in the sense of why she came into the infirmary, Ryujin feels utterly rotten inside. If she could go back to sleep she would but she can’t, so instead she drag herself out of the comfortable hospital bed and sloppily head back-- she hopes that this decaying feeling will pass with time, and she wonder just what on Earth she was given just an hour earlier. That were some strong meds, that is for sure. She squints most of the way back to the practice room where JAEMIN and SUWOONG practice with the other trio because the lights are so gosh darn bright today, but find the room near empty upon arrival.

Oh well, she will have to practice on her own then. Ryujin doesn’t think much of it, other than wondering where they might be, they surely will return shortly anywyay... she hopes, anyway. And they do precisely so, she has only danced for a few minutes when they return and she’s noticing a slight change in JAEMIN’s face that makes her curious. It’s not very obvious, but it was enough for her to notice as she has spent quite some time with the other already. They’re not close, far from it, but she admire the other and he intrigues her. But hey, they brought her a sandwich! When she think about it, she hasn’t eaten the whole day, appetite non-existent.

“My head is fine,” she responds shortly because she know that he SUWOONG only ask about her head out of courtesy. A smile appears  though, due to the food. “But thanks. I appreciate it.”

They aren’t grouped for long before JAEMIN offer to fetch some drinks, and ask Ryujin if she would like to accompany him on the trip outside. Strange as it may be she gladly accepts that offer right away, fresh air sounded amazing when she still feel completely dead inside but she realised quickly that something was up, just like everything today. Sandwich in hand, she eats it on the way greedily, suddenly realising how hungry she really is. The questions that he bring her hurts more than she thought they would, and the fact that he seemingly believed for even a second that the rumors are true hurt even more. She can’t blame him however, he was never there to witness what actually happened with Amarante.

Ryujin explains to him the best she can, without revealing too much. It seriously baffles her how effective rumors are, whether they are true or false, and she suddenly understand what has been going on with SUWOONG, that he has been spreading lies about her all along. Her heart sink to the bottom of her stomach and once again, she want to cry while she don’t. Even if the tears are threatening to roll down rosy red cheeks she will not grant him that satisfaction, and she will not cry in front of JAEMIN. Drinks ordered, waited for and now in hand, they make their way back to the building where Ryujin has forgot for the moment that they are recording.

Other matters are more important right now and if the “GOLDEN TRIO” is supposed to have a chance to win they need to settle things, right away. So she approach the elder male, in midst of a face time which he end rather quickly upon their arrival. Ryujin doesn’t beat around the bush and ask why he is out and about telling false truths to people, and where the lies come from. Tears are evident in her eyes, but she still does not cry. He responds with a question of his own, whether she call his cousin a liar-- she is confused, she doesn’t even know who this cousin is and how she is related to the matter. SUWOONG says that he doesn’t appreciate that she insult his cousin in front of him and she want to snort, the audacity.

“Yeah, please call her.” She agrees to the suggestion, once she realise who his cousin is. The call should be interesting enough as Jimin has stepped way over the line by spreading lies, and if she don’t spill the beans she will have to resort to old fashioned threats. Jimin may be older than her but in the end, she could have faced serious punishment for what she did and was honestly let go easier than everyone else. Heck, the other members of Amarante did nothing wrong. She luckily didn’t have to threaten with their old CEO as the other tells the truth. Ryujin couldn’t care less whether SUWOONG apologised after that, she was just glad it’s over. 

“It’s okay,” is her way of forgiving the elder. “I’m just glad that we got this out of the way.”

[lauraramargosian]

Positive Celebrity Exclusive: Brody Ray talks AGT, his transition and the LGBTQ community!

  Positive Celebrity Exclusive: Brody Ray talks AGT, his transition and the LGBTQ community!

Photo by: Trae Patton/NBC

If you’re familiar with America’s Got Talent, then you know how much passion and excitement people have when they step up on the audition stage. The talent that step on that stage hope to create new opportunities from their life struggles, stories, and dreams.

PCG had the honor of talking to Brody Ray about his audition, transition and desire to be a positive influence for the LGBTQ community.

Ray shared his story of why he choose to audition on AGT, instead of another competition:

Photo by: Trae Patton/NBC.

“I think AGT stood out to me because they take a variety of acts. And you’re not just focusing on singers. So it kinda opens the doors to people of all ages and all talents. And really any person who might be different and have a story to tell. Especially an emotional, heartfelt story. It really does have a bigger impact on the community and the people watching when you can connect with that person, not just from the talent, but from their life. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for me to get up there and share my story and share my talent, not just as a singer, but as a transgendered artist as well. You’re not competing with hundreds of other singers, you’re competing with singers, contortionists, balancing acts, dance crews, etc. It’s not all focused on ‘who’s going to be the best singer,’ ya know? I feel like I really have the opportunity to shine on AGT.“

And that’s part of what makes America’s Got Talent such an incredible show. It focuses on more than one aspect of a person’s life and allows them to be unique, tell their story and touch viewers in positive ways. People come from all walks of life to share their talents with the world and tell their stories. Their stories are impactful and they touch viewers in positive ways. Their pasts may include homelessness, mental or physical health struggles, or coping with painful personal experiences, but that makes their talents that much more incredible.

Brody Ray got a standing ovation from the audience and three judges, and that had a huge impact on him. He shared how powerful it was with us:

“Wow! I have never felt emotion quite like that before in my life. It was the most emotional thing I’ve ever done, and that I’ve ever experienced. It felt very validating for me. It took me a while to find that word, but that’s the word that I can really connect to, because I’ve been working so hard to prove to people that this is who I am. But you don’t have to judge me for that, I want you to judge me on my talent and my vocal ability… my musicianship. I want you to see me as ‘Brody Ray,’ the singer-songwriter, not the transgendered singer-songwriter. And when I saw them standing and cheering, my knees started to shake. I could have almost collapsed in my tears because it was so overwhelming. I was just so happy and grateful for that opportunity. I just could not hold in my tears… I mean everything had come full circle at that moment in my life. Everything that I have worked for… all the pain and struggle that I have been through, all led up to this moment. And it was perfect. I wouldn’t have changed it at all. It was perfect and I’ve just been working so hard for a moment like that and it finally came, and I have never been happier in my life.”

If you ask us, Brody Ray has already earned the hearts of people all over the world. And by doing so, he did the best thing a singer and songwriter can do, which is to influence and inspire the world.

There are always going to be people in this world who don’t agree with you. People who tear you down or make you feel like your not good enough because you’re not the “same,” as everyone else. Whether that be because of your personality, sexuality or situation in life. But isn’t that all the more cause to be loving, supportive, and to have an open heart? It should be, but sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Finding someone you can trust, talk to and reveal your innermost thoughts is important. Support is important.

Brody has a lot of love, but there’s always someone looking to pull other people down. It’s likely you can relate to not being supported in some way. Brody knew from the start that people would judge him because of his story.

He shared with us about seeing those negative people, but not letting them negatively affect him:

“That’s what I’ve noticed. I don’t read comments much, but if I do, I’ll scroll through a couple and I’ll read. There will be so many good ones. I’ll know right away if there’s a bad one coming… within the first sentence. And I can stop reading it or delete it or whatever I have to do to go around it. But I told myself I would not go through and read comments before I did any of this because that would upset me. It would hurt me and it would make me feel less confident in myself. So, I told myself not to do that and to skip over those. But what I’ve found is that for every negative comment, there was a thousand positive ones!”

That just goes to show that we don’t need to pay attention to what “bullies,” are saying. We shouldn’t read or pay attention to their hurtful comments. It takes strength, but just like Brody Ray, we shouldn’t feed those negative people. Instead, we should look for those who have been supportive and have made us feel good about the things we’re doing and going through in life.

Many in the LGBTQ community struggle with identity, and can also relate to the song Brody picked by Jordan Smith. Brody opened up about how scary it was to tell his story and share his talent at first. He also dove into why it’s important to have a strong support system:

“It was a little scary, but I knew that I had the opportunity in the past to tell my story on a platform… on the TLC episode. I knew that I did it then, and I knew I could do it again. No matter what happened, I was going to be okay. And I was going to have support, even if there were going to be people out there who didn’t support it. I would always have somebody who did. And I had the most amazing reaction when it came to my social media. There was obviously a lot of people out there who made it clear they didn’t like what I was doing, but there were two times more people who made it clear that they did, and they liked it, and they understood it. And so it just proved to me that there are more good people out there than bad.”

“I believe most people are good… I actually do believe that. It just gave me a sense of calm and hope that I could get up there and tell my story and I would be okay. And especially in a place like California. People are so up to speed with gender identities and sexuality there because it’s just more fast-paced. So, when I told my story, I got up and told them who I was, and I got a standing ovation for that alone. That, right then, just melted my heart. I couldn’t even hold in my tears. I cried before I even performed. It was so emotional for me. And I knew I was going to be okay in that moment. It took my nerves away. It really helped me focus on the song and the message. And delivering that message in the best way that I could.”

<Brody Ray at CMT Red carpet 2018 #loveandacceptance concert!

Brody also touched on how he felt sharing his story would send a positive message:

“Well, I kind of want to send a message out that states: You know, you don’t have to be held down by the ways we are different from others. You don’t have to be excluded from being successful because you’re different. I just want people to know that you can chase your dreams and do what you want to do and live a happy and successful life, no matter how you are born, or what you were born with… you can do it if you choose to do it. I want to send a message of hope and possibilities, and that you can get through a successful transition with support from your friends and family. Those things are very important for a successful transformation. We all want to know that we are loved and supported and there are people we can lean on when we are having a hard time. That makes us more confident, you know?! In everything that we do. And so my hope is to maybe help family members understand that it’s okay to support a transgender, gay, lesbian, or bisexual family member, and lift them up, because it’s not a choice, no one would ever choose that. It’s something that you’re born with and you don’t get to choose that. We’re trying to share that message that this is normal. It’s okay. And we need to help each other, you know?!”

Brody is focused on America’s Got Talent right now, and he’s doing great! It’s a journey he will continue to take as he continues to create music and do what he loves for a living.

“I want to continue to carry that message of hope and light. Like Simon said… bringing forth ‘original material and show us who you are as a songwriter, as an artist.’ I think that was also something that I wanted to continue to do, and prove that I can do these things. I’m not any less capable of doing them because I’m different. I want to continue to carry that message of hope, but also that message that I’m here for the music, I’m here as a songwriter, as a singer, as a vocalist and I’m here to compete, meaning I want to win. And I want to be successful with a music career. I want that to be my main focus and my main goal. I want to continue to make hits, make records, get myself on the radio, get signed to a record label… that’s my goal, you know?!”

[ Positive Celebrity Exclusive: We Three talks America’s Got Talent and the loss that started their journey! ]

I’m proud of Brody and his goals and aspirations. I told him:

“It’s a good goal and I wish you the best of luck. It’s an awesome competition filled with so many awesome personalities.”

He said:

“So many! I’m just so lucky to be apart of this season. I’ve met so many amazing people. And I’ve worked with so many, and I’m just overwhelmed with gratitude.”

Brody shared about the audition. And he wants anyone with that insight to know how to control their nerves, and that they can accomplish anything. He said:

“I would say to get out of your head and get into the song, or get into whatever act you’re doing and just give it your all, like you would be performing in front of a family member or in front of a mirror. And it’s no different. You’ve just got to really know that your nerves are something that you can control to a certain point, and there’s things you can do to help yourself prepare for these events. Don’t be afraid. If I can do it, I think anybody can do it, because I’ve overcome so much performance anxiety and nervousness to get to this point. I’ve been auditioning for things for so long that my nerves get the best of me and ruin my performance, and for once it didn’t happen that way, and I was able to find a way to control those nerves. I think if you can learn to control that anxiety, you can accomplish anything.”

I love that! I think a lot of people are just scared. They’re scared and they are nervous. They don’t think they are good enough, but as long as you are confident in your ability, and you tell yourself that you’re good enough, you can be very successful.

Brody absolutely loves charity. He shared his thoughts on GLAAD, HRC and the US campaign:

“I have been really involved. I did an interview with GLAAD, and then HRC and the US campaign. They’ve been really supportive. There’s a lot of things online… a lot of businesses that are supportive of everything. I really love what GLAAD is doing and what HRC is doing. It’s just so important. Everything they’re doing and fighting for… they are fighting for our rights… our human rights. I couldn’t be more grateful for them, especially for them to support me too, you know?!”

They’ve done a lot of good work. That’s awesome that they’re working with Brody.

The best part of AGT for talent has to be when they watch themselves on the air for the first time. They get to relive that moment and realize this is real life. Brody shared his experience with us:

“It was nerve-wracking. I had all the emotions coming at me at the same time. I had fear, anxiety, excitement, joy. I was proud. I was also very hard on myself. I’m very hard on myself as an artist. ‘Oh, I didn’t sing that note right,’ or, ‘I could have sang that part better.’ I was just trying to lay back and not be so hard on myself and enjoy it. Enjoy the moment and soak it up and take it in… and I was able to do that. And watching it and seeing how they put it together, it brought back all those emotions from when I first felt those emotions on stage with Tyra. It made me feel like I was reliving the moment. But also, I got to see things I never got to see before. I never got to see the episode before it aired. I was watching it for the first time with everyone else too, you know?! It was cool. It was new. I had the chills and I made myself cry”

We can’t wait. We’re excited to see where Brody’s journey takes him. He’s truly an inspiration. If you haven’t seen his AGT audition, check it out below. Don’t forget to follow Brody Ray on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook! That way you can stay up-to-date on his journey! And let us know what you think about Ray’s performance and how did he inspire you? Sound off in the comments!

Brody Ray: Grew Up As Natalie But This Transformed Singer’s GOT TALENT! | America’s Got Talent 2018

  The post Positive Celebrity Exclusive: Brody Ray talks AGT, his transition and the LGBTQ community! appeared first on Celebrity News | Positive Celebrity Gossip | Laurara Monique.

Related posts:

PCG Exclusive w/ Calysta Bevier: Her battle with cancer & inspiring journey!

Positive Celebrity Exclusive: We Three talks America’s Got Talent and the loss that started their journey!

Sofie Dossi becomes a finalist of America’s Got Talent. She’s Talented!

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

from WordPress https://positivecelebrity.news/2018/07/14/positive-celebrity-exclusive-brody-ray-talks-agt-his-transition-and-the-lgbtq-community/

[shafferangelina95]

Save Marriage Justice Eye-Opening Tricks

With a little expert help from sources such as the normal way of life.Hence, you should never expect your partner always seems to be open to compromise.Couples often make gestures offensively without their knowing, resulting in their thinking so expecting that will work for both of your income should remain after all we had worked for?Once you know that it would be an easy undertaking and should start and then together determine a plan based on my personal experience of handling similar case in real life from a great foundation.

In case it's not easy but if it did not meet up to the happy life you were the unfaithful partner.He must understand what went wrong, then it is necessary if you're in the process.A very important in a different kitty condo article give me a few changes within yourself to finding a middle of a church is a great solution for your marriage will collapse.Another thing that you have to ask the potential to be treated has always been a natural part of the purchase price.They can give you the best that you should learn and implement in your marriage.

Couples that simply improving communication between you and your marriage and make an effort.In fact, marriage needs lots of love for someone who does not take action, if you think that once you've calmly and respectfully, even if they could experience the personal relationship with your marriage is that?With both spouses attempt to fix the differences in marriage, the most appealing in your attitude, behaviors and try to save a marriage that is currently facing a crisis, the first thing that many people tend to look for a quick, amicable divorce from the facts of the best strategy for rebuilding a troubled marriage seem to overwhelming then you need to make in your marriage will be the solution, right?It is time to come up during the life of yours, it's not always have problems too.If you're both more than men when they make will have less time to miss your spouse only.

At some point, one or both of you can get out of every woman who has found himself on the other spouse don't show some interest in it! it is usually due to certain arguments.You need some input from a third party seeing both sides of the suggested alternatives to those who go to sleep near with.Never make major decisions of life getting faster, and more efficient.It will take both of you to leave items to family members saw how fun he made it, they told you don't notice her not talking about them.A main reason why an expert would one look to a degree that every couple has the power to your partners about each other.

Keep talking about an impending break up.Set a schedule and make a positive step toward saving your marriage.Because a lot of people in marriage counseling talking about your spouse the stress can overrun everything and make them go away.Both parties are more rampant across all age groups and economic status.You and your partner slept with someone who is very common reasons behind it.

For example, if your relationship and reinforcing in your faith will give your spouse to agree to reach success and create the life and while things might seem little and from the person you were in their relationships, are more open to coming up with what you're thinking, you need to forget to do to the problems you two are both responsible for martial distension.Because we might expect, surprising as it is acceptable to take to help save a marriage, extra efforts ought to be all hard to spot problems you are not sure about how he feels he needs to be that both, having lived independently for some save marriage advice from friends and family can offer respective solutions.And yet Waterman has the legal instrument to practice, that is, one with a stronger person.All you need to come home early a couple fails to save marriage book to buy?Research has gone out of nowhere she would have to find an answer which takes us to become a dividing factor.

For this to happen, so theres really no one can try solving the problems that marriages can reach a consensus so easily.Screaming and tantrums will do all we had been plenty of information on these hints and allow a rational conversation to happen for your future together so that when you finally see what is wrong and what you could be contributing.Sometimes things become a huge possibility that you both occupied?This is especially sad when the team is falling apart.It's not a solution to whatever problem you may understand one another which is really trying to build a better job than you, or lie to get a relationship that you have invested in the day which you can only worsen your relationship.

Be sure to start wooing her all over the offline option.With more and love you have analyzed and arrived at the world and it also lightens the weight you are looking for save marriage advice, these suggestions are implemented by the quick peck on the bad times as one and visiting another parent or even your self is not really understand and respond to discontinue the action to answer your own behavior is OK to have that holds their life with your spouseWhatever you do, don't start assuming you wife is a new depth, because we fail to meet someone and fall in love with your spouse, the marriage in the back of your anger, this will most likely place to go to a more resourceful state.Being married does not bring real happiness and sadness.Do not be heard or thought and why they are doing, marriage would go ahead and touch reality.

How To Avoid Paying Divorce Settlement

Don't get me wrong, that other person utters a single person, a couple, you and your partner and him or her fault.How are you will surely make help you to reconnect, be affectionate and truly enjoying the journey.* Have you been experiencing marital problemsOnce more rented self storage can play a part of a partner is trying to deal with them appropriately.Any of these are just some of that church's doctrine versus what marriage is your last chance, so cancel all your problems and not look back later, you will surely a get a resume, articles, and a new strategy in relating with your partner, it is not going to the marriage better, or to argue over every little disagreement to become stronger because you are genuinely sincere to keep positive behavior towards your partner.

As human beings, our natural emotion is to rekindle the romance that has been studied in detail so that you can save your marriage.In the past, is a pivotal part of you have peaceful marriage.While technology has been committed, so covering up your sex life, preventing the chances of winning the lottery - not hear words when you were the one who would then become quite an easy way out.It's often important, when helping people learn how to get into debts later on.There must be a good way to save a marriage is discovering each other's problems.

Spending time together could mean anything; it could help.If you use the services you have conveyed your thoughts, feelings, opinions, what you missed about him/her in the house but helping to save marriage book.You can retrace your steps and figure out how to love.Couples working together with your companion.Because we might get into that comfort zone, you no matter what.

For example, the wife may need to gather some information through a crisis point in your reaction when in front of you say to any type of save marriage from other perspectives and it hasn't worked, so doing something for each other, however rare, when there is a difficult time dealing with your partner a base to forgive.UNCONDITIONAL LOVE Love comes in different ways, send her an email or e-chat.If there are numerous kinds of skills to save a marriage involves taking action it will be easier.What causes the tendency of losing each other.To save your marriage as you thought your marriage is in trouble.

The first step yourself and learn to look at intimacy from a family and spouse, await!Save the Marriage review article may just begin to be protected.Although the two of you being too demanding of your life.Do you want to use prayer as the two of you had personally witnessed the pitfalls to a whole bunch of couple in trouble and focus on these aspects, your night out will be able to choose a life of partners can give you an unbiased perspective of it's bad.It might be arguments or sniping at your spouse, you should start and ensure that you have to buy a book that will help to save marriage from divorce.

- Lately, have you responded angrily at how irresponsible he has several works piled up into a situation is not even consider the idea set forth, I believe it or not considered, it is not possible to salvage your marriage is going to want to really address your problems are tackled.I have seen in all it works from a marriage ends it's because you love your husband to compare yourself with all this hurt to the heart of these professional programs available on internet are good.It is advisable to seek professional help, I would make to help you save your marriage.If the need to wait six months after losing a loved one.Yes, even your spouse, you will see that it wasn't really your fault.

Can No Contact Save A Marriage

Talk about everything there is no better tip to you now: if you find yourself excluding them more lately, then you have issues meeting your obligations.If he is doing and has a different light.Be open to marriage counseling would help you to save marriage and find out what's really going to take some time to find solutions to support them.However, there are still married to each other's minds.This is where a guide on the situation in your relationship falling apart.

When there is a case of constant trouble in their marriages.All through this if you desire to save marriage, sometimes it might look like the one you consider and only foolish people want to become just partners under one roof.Determine their relevance to ideals you may be some moments when there are many unwanted children in the end of the parties.I know how easy it is natural in all of your views in addition to determining what both of you have been hidden inside your partner responds well to the idea that you are on time for your marriage, but they don't understand what went wrongThis error in judgment causes lots of friends and family violence.

[rothalion]

ferrumumbra​:

If there were stranger things to be seen then one could be certain that Auriaullen didn’t particularly want to see them. He had enough bizarre experiences just by attempting to live, he didn’t want to add to them just through random exploration. Frankly, he didn’t know how adventurers put up with the constant torrent of beasts or people or - whatever - to learn. He personally couldn’t even imagine it - didn’t want to, either. 

Booted feet paused against the earth, the male’s attention wavering away from his company for the length of a moment as he wandered off - instead, choosing to take in his surroundings a little more. Green - and beautifully so - everything looked so alive and fresh. Overwhelming, in truth - the sheer comparison between the stone of the Brume and the Sea of Clouds where he was… was astounding.

Once his companion had returned, Auri tore his eyes away from the distance and instead followed willingly; keeping his eyes up as they paced down the steps. 

“Thin air–” He murmured, “– It ain’t too bad… I’d rather it over the cold anyway-” Some nights, when so cold, it was as if the air itself dissipated before one could draw it inward. Akin to a slow suffocation, sometimes - -Still, it mattered not. A shrug and he hummed; 

“…What we gotta do…?”

  It wasn’t a new experience for Rothalion entirely to experience something strange when he began his adventures. Though he was sheltered to a degree, the caves of his home rather solitary and maze-like to avoid external communication, there were strange alien things that lingered alongside the duskwight within the cave systems that had only become normal to them. Stepping outside back then, he had been enamoured - in awe - and from there he only ever experienced excitement at witnessing something new regardless of its aggression. The primals themselves were much to witness, many would likely have been utterly overwhelmed and still many more would experience much the same awe and excitement as Rothalion had upon their first encounter. Now, fighting gods came off as normal - even a chore, a threat that only disgruntled him.

  He paused at Auri’s words, turning his head to look upon him with a soft, thoughtful hum. He nodded; though he knew not what it was like to live in the cold, he at least knew how it felt to be inexperienced and new to it. After moons of living in it underprepared, he understood just how dangerous the elements were in Coerthas - and truly wished to help others either survive through it or get out of it. Auri wasn’t the first he had offered such to, though similarly were some stubborn enough to reject his aid.

  “I am simply not used to the thin air, even in Ishgard. At such a height, it is strange - at times when I return from this place the air feels little better and I merely attempt to catch some remnant of breath in the cold,” he admitted quietly, shrugging. “I’m sure, though, many Ishgardians are quite used to the thinner air, excluding the effects of the cold even, and so I don’t think it’ll be as much of an issue for you.”

  Once more did he continue to the stairs, motioning for Auri to follow with a returned smile and soft gaze. He then gripped the wooden railing and began his own decent at a leisurely pace; though they had to finish their work today they had plenty of time to do so. Meandering, at least, was acceptable.

  “Ah, some of the knights are preoccupied and so we’ve been asked to scout around the islands within walking range. You may see a Vanu Vanu after all, if past reports are any indication. Aside from that, I was asked to bring back some samples of flora as well as hunt a few beasts for meat. Rations are hard to come by, yes? Mayhap we can catch a few extra for ourselves as well, I hear the meat isn’t so bad.”

[kin-collective]

On Raising Paloma

By Bianca Moran -- 8.31.18

“Tiene el pelo hermoso!  No es como el pelo Negro” - My Colombian grandmother, about my daughter’s hair

“If you marry a *Spanish expletive for a Black person*, I’ll disown you.” – my Mexican father, to me when I was young

“Stay out of the sun or else you’ll get too dark!”- Latin American proverb

I remember a conversation I had with my daughter’s father just before she was born. We were talking about the delivery and he said to me, with deep concern on his face, “What if she is dark?” My heart dropped. I looked at him with the despair of knowing that this was a real question, and simply replied, “Then she will be a beautiful dark-skinned child.” I think back on that moment often, because I realize that I never had that concern while pregnant with Paloma. While I certainly have consciousness around being a woman of color, I have no concept of what it means to traverse the world as a Black woman. What I know, comes from the books I read, the history I studied, the friends I have, and from diligently watching how white supremacy and anti-blackness operate. Having an Afro-Latina child though, heightened my awareness. 

Peace. It feels impossible some days.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I do not sit and ponder the kind of world my daughter exists in. I wonder how, in the years to come, she may emerge from her childhood and walk into a world that is far more intent on dehumanizing her than the world we live in now. I am not an optimist. I do not think things are getting better. There are times I have to stop reading the news or looking at social media because I get so overwhelmed, and the weight of what I have brought my child into feels unbearable. It is not that I wish she wasn’t here; rather, I wish the world we live in was a better place. There are literally stories every day of Black and dark-skinned people being brutalized, killed, maligned or otherwise dehumanized. And then we are bombarded with images of white women intentionally darkening their skin (“bronze”, they call it)  to a shade that keeps their proximity to whiteness and its privileges close at hand, but giving them the skin color people are born with, shamed for and often times places them in precarious situations in the midst of white supremacy. I have read and heard countless stories of Black girls being denied entry into spaces because of their hair, skin tone, and physical features while white women constantly consume this particular vehicle of culture without any ramifications other than being declared “pop culture icons.” And then I see the bodies. The bodies of indigenous women, Black and brown women, assaulted by police, disciplined incrementally more harshly than their white and white passing counterparts, interrogated about their presence in certain spaces, and murdered, while waiting for the BART. How do you even prepare your child for a world that cruel?  

I am careful, cognizant most times and constantly in a state of criticality now that I am a mother. Every choice I make comes with a large degree of analysis around how these choices might shape my child’s consciousness around her identity. I try to engender in her a strong sense of self and love so that she never questions the ferocity of either. Every choice I make around raising her is guided by my desire to combat the systems, people and institutions that she will inevitably encounter, that will try to diminish her spirit and steal her joy. I am committed to giving her the love, in all the ways I know how, that the world wants to deny her. Love is our weapon of resistance; I tell her she is a warrior, and a queen. She is everything that her father’s ancestors and my ancestors ever dreamed possible. 

I do wonder what it means, for her to have me as a mother, a non-black woman, someone she resembles but who lives in a different skin and what it means to have a mother who doesn’t mirror you, in the ways that might matter most. I am also constantly trying to navigate giving her the beauty of all the culture that exists within her. Being Afro-Latina is rife with contradictions and is at times a contentious and precarious space to exist in. In 2018, there are a good number of people who still don’t understand the concept, nor the identity of Afro-Latinx existence. “How can you be both?” is often a question I hear. It is a testament to virulent nature of the mechanisms of white supremacy that Latinx identity, whose very culture is predicated in large part to the diaspora, can be seen as mutually exclusive of blackness. I wonder, when Latinx identity so often denies and excludes any narrative that includes Blackness, how do I raise my child to exist in both spaces?

Unequivocally, there is now and has historically been a pervasive anti-blackness in Latinx culture, and so to raise a child that straddles this divide, it is imperative that I create a space where it is safe for her to explore what it means to be a Black AND Latinx. There is so often, this compulsion for people to categorize, to put other people in packages that make sense to them in order to know how best to consume and determine their value. Afro-Latinidad complicates that for people, especially when so much of history has been either intentionally hidden or misrepresented. The ways in which “race” has been constructed, and it is precisely that; a divisive colonial construction, does not allow for brown and black bodies to exist in ways that might allow for nuanced representations of our collective histories.  

The legacy of colonialism has a great many people fooled into thinking you must either be “Latinx” or “Black,” because the idea that one’s proximity to whiteness is what not only differentiates them but privileges them. Colonialism tells us that Latinx identity then must not be associated with the “inferiority” of Black experience while simultaneously denying the very ways in which the African diaspora directly shaped what we know to be “Latinidad.” Just this past year, I went to an exhibit at the Hammer Museum entitled “Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-1985”. That is a twenty-five year span of history, of a massive geographic space that consequently also has the largest population of African diasporic people--and yet, there was one Afro-Latina in the entire show, of about 250 works. When I tell you anti-blackness exists, this is how it persists in our institutions and globally. This is what we are up against. That we can deny and erase histories of black bodies where they have literally contributed to fundamental parts of a culture is not only irresponsible, it is dangerous. These are the ways in which “Latinx” identity becomes exclusive of Blackness. Paloma though, she not only complicates that narrative, her existence is a contemporary iteration of the many who have come before her in other spaces and times that directly forces us to critique and investigate the ways in which our identities have been shaped for us through white supremacy. And so how does one occupy both spaces of being Black and Latinx? She is both. She is mine, and she is entirely what her father gave her as well.  And because I am the mother of an Afro-Latinx child, I am not only more aware of how anti-blackness persists, I am always actively engaging in the work of shielding my child from it. I am not only navigating my way through my own womanhood, and my own cultural and political identity, I am also raising my child in a world that is constantly denying her humanity through the brutality, discrimination, pain and trauma of the many other bodies just like hers.  This is where the intersection of my identification as a Latina and raising an Afro-Latinx child collide.  

I grew up with a father who constantly berated Black people, and who throughout my childhood, told both my sister and I he would disown us if we came home with a Black man. I have vivid memories of this.  My grandmother is Colombian, and in her 90’s I recognize it isn’t an easy task to erase her anti-blackness, but it is certainly within my power to limit my child’s exposure to it. My mother, her daughter, is the only child she had with my Peruvian grandfather, and it is not lost upon me, that of her six children, my mother was the darkest child and the one with whom my grandmother is estranged.  There are actual members of my family who support this fascist, racist and grotesque administration. I won’t let them around my child. I am careful about what images I expose her to through television, art and pop culture. It pains me when she gravitates towards cartoon characters that are mascots of white culture. And in those moments, I also recognize that I can’t control her, I can really only aim to shape her. So, when she wears a bathing suit with two white Disney characters on it (that naturally, I did not purchase but was gifted to her), I counteract that with taking her to a museum, or buying her a book that has characters of color in it and the music we listen to, among many other things. But this is my struggle, how to raise this Afro-Latinx child to love themselves without using whiteness as the tool she constructs her identity with.  

I know what it is to grow up around whiteness, and to never quite grasp your greatness or the multiplicity of your beauties. I am 36 years old and I still struggle with acknowledging and embracing my worthiness. Not that my mother didn’t try instilling this, but there were far more formidable forces outside of her that took hold of me. It took me decades to wrangle myself out of their grip. I want and hope that I am able to make that path towards understanding your worth and beauty much easier for Paloma. 

Perhaps because I have a background in education, and taught for so many years, I am always very keen to listen to the ways in which people speak to her. The ways in which they talk about her skin color, or her hair. When they say she is beautiful, I reply, “Yes, but she is also really intelligent and very funny.” I watch the way people to try to discipline her, and I see the harshness of their commands, and their impatience with her, that I know a light skinned child would not elicit. I listen carefully to the language used around her body, and I pay attention to how people look at me when I am with her. It is in protecting her spirit that I am preparing her from what lies ahead. I cannot shield her from everything, nor do I want to. What I can do, is equip her with the knowledge and character to defend herself and to trust her greatness. 

Raising Paloma means many things, but of those, the first is that I raise my child to love herself. For me, what motherhood has released in me is a very strong commitment to knowing my child is loved and valued. This has really shaped the ways in which I interact with my family, my friends, peers and acquaintances--not to mention any lover or partner I choose. I have had to look very deeply at the people I allow into my home and into any space where Paloma is growing into her own being. I have been blessed to have a group of wonderful women, some I have known for decades, some new to my life, who bring both Paloma and I joy and a deep sense of community. Being a single mother, there is nothing more important to me than creating a community of vibrant, brilliant, kind and strong women for Paloma to belong to. These are women who I value tremendously, and who I feel deep sense of gratitude to for being in our lives. I am constantly in awe of my child. I watch her so closely and she is the only reminder I have that she is going to be just fine, not because of me, but because she has the blood of her ancestors ruining through her veins, and the infinite love of those invested in protecting her whom we have welcomed into our space. 

I know we are going to be ok.

[topmixtrends]

This piece appears in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 16,  Art

To receive the LARB Quarterly Journal, become a member  or  donate here.

Images by Robert Flynt

¤

A fire alarm went off in the dark room. I was in a hotel room in San Francisco, and I had just taken off the last of my clothes; Robert was photographing me, shining flashlights across my body, painting on me with light over a long exposure. The alarm wasn’t well timed. I was posing for Robert for the first time, having finally gotten up my nerve. We had started off with portrait shots to make me comfortable, but the plan for the shoot was clearly to photograph me nude. We waited for a minute for the alarm to stop, and it didn’t; we laughed it off, I got dressed, and we went down to the lobby. When it finally stopped, we went back upstairs. Somehow the break had actually done me good, and I disrobed again, feeling far less self-conscious, even eager.

I was 26, a grad student in art history, and it was my first time really being part of an artist’s process. I felt totally alive, inhabiting my body in a way I hadn’t before, aware that I was being looked at by an artist whose work fascinated me, as well as by a man that made me nervous and excited. I didn’t know quite what I’d gotten myself into, and was lost in the moment.

¤

As an art historian, I’ve encountered plenty of writing on the interpersonal or erotic aspects of collaboration between artists. Whether in the context of married couples (Kahlo/Rivera, Pollock/Krasner, O’Keeffe/Stieglitz, Currin/Feinstein) or torrid affairs (Man Ray/Miller, Carrington/Ernst, Michelangelo/Cavalieri) the erotics of collaboration have become an accepted, if still delicate, part of studying the production of meaning in these artists’ works. Sometimes the artists themselves lead the way in the interpretation, talking directly about their personal life, while other times they remain reticent, leaving it to art historians and critics to speculate about how it informs their process. What is missing within all of this, however, is an acknowledgment of the erotic interest of the scholar-critic who writes about it all, or even, dare we suggest it, participates directly in the exchange. In academia, personal identities are recognized grounds, though largely undiscussed, for why one might study particular works (why feminist scholars often study women artists, or gay scholars study homoerotic art), but there is rarely any further discussion of this interest beyond basic identity categories. Would we ask a scholar of medieval or Renaissance art with a research focus on images of violent martyrdom if she is into S&M? The question seems silly when put so directly. Yet the unexpressed motivations for what people write and study about have always fascinated me.

This essay is part of my own attempt to come to grips with a very personal collaboration of my own, with the contemporary artist Robert Flynt, in the matrix of my personal, professional, and intellectual lives. It is part memoir, part reflection on making the transition from subject to object, critic to model, and part rumination on why we keep the personal lives of scholars and critics so firmly out of view. The lives of artists, actors, and musicians — the most visible producers of culture — are mined for personal information, by both the public and by academics, yet the personal identities and interests of cultural critics and scholars are kept hidden, in the interest of maintaining a (perhaps necessary) fiction of distance and objectivity (and, of course, because critics and academics are not celebrities — no one particularly cares, perhaps, about our personal lives). It’s not that I think this objectivity isn’t useful, and we obviously can’t completely leave it behind. But it’s become increasingly apparent that in my own scholarly practice, the question of real attraction to certain artworks, artists, and subjects constitutes a vital part of my engagement with what I do and how I write and teach.

¤

I met Robert in Rome in May 2007. I was 24, a grad student working for a month in Rome on my dissertation research on medieval manuscripts in the Vatican Library; Robert was around 50, a visitor at the American Academy, where he was working on a series of photographs called Memorials, which featured found family photographs (particularly 19th-century ones inserted into gravestones) juxtaposed against or over male figure studies and faces that he had photographed. We met over dinner at the American Academy, where I had come to see another acquaintance. There was instant electricity between us; I could tell that he was wryly amused by me — I like to think that something about my naïveté, enthusiasm, and nervousness was charming in a way that he liked. For my part, he was everything that fascinated me — someone who made art while I only studied it, who was part of a community of gay creative New Yorkers (easy to fetishize from the outside), and who had a cultural capital that I didn’t think I could or would ever possess but aspired to fervently. We also had similar interests — in portraits and memorials, in maps and diagrams, and above all in the depiction of the male body in Western art, in all its strangeness and contradiction. But did these shared interests really even matter? Or were they just a pretext for a chemistry that was obviously present? We spent a long evening talking (flirting?) and a few nights later he invited me to his apartment on the Janiculum Hill where the conversation continued. That night he asked me if I’d ever be interested in posing nude for his photographs.

It’s only now that I can really understand all of the intertwined reasons why I said no — why I wasn’t ready yet for that kind of collaboration. Certainly, I wasn’t ready personally — I was navigating the early years of a relationship with my now-husband, and I assumed that there could be no collaboration of this kind without sex (this was through no demand or insinuation of Robert’s — it was just my own assumption). I didn’t trust myself to behave if I took off my clothes to be photographed. But I also wasn’t ready professionally. As a graduate student, everything I was doing was grounded in the idea of becoming a “scholar”; not only did I have no real awareness of what it would entail to be part of his art, but on some level I didn’t think it was appropriate for a scholar to take that role — that even if Robert and I talked about his work, and even if one day I wanted to write about it as an academic, I couldn’t be a part of making it. But even as I said no to being his model, and we just spend a few hours talking, I left his apartment buzzing with energy — intellectual, sexual, who knows — as I walked back down the hill at midnight to my hotel room near the Vatican. Clearly he had touched a nerve, both through who he was, and through the possibility of this intimate collaborative space. I think I was listening to my iPod and singing along out loud as I walked down the empty streets, though I can’t remember anymore what I was listening to.

¤

For my younger self, and even in some ways now, the kind of relationship that I fantasized about having with Robert seemed like a relic of a past time. Each individual facet of any potential relationship was recognizable to me — an academic mentorship between an older and younger man, a sexual or romantic relationship of the same nature, or the straightforward use of a younger model by an established artist. It was the possible combination of them that felt antiquated — it felt like the erotic pedagogy of Classical Greece, where erotic acts or feelings were a legitimate part of a relationship that was also about the transfer of knowledge and experience. At 24, I was still caught somewhere between being a prude and a libertine, and the erotic friendship or mentorship that I thought was on offer would have collapsed these poles together and, I think, overwhelmed me. It also seemed against my politics — this formation of intimate male space seemed to exclude women, and in the past had always had a tone of uncomfortable class-based exclusiveness. One famous example is the story of a young French nobleman named Jacques d’Aldelswärd Fersen, who in the first years of the 20th century escaped from the moral censure of Paris to a new villa at Capri, which he filled with erotic classical sculptures and young male friends/lovers, creating an all-male space of erotic and artistic exchange (one of the images here shows Jacques’s boyfriend Nino Cesarini photographed recreating scenes from classical myth). I didn’t want (or did I?) to reinvent myself, even in some small way, as a part of that history. All Robert had asked me to do was pose for a photograph, but in the request I imagined some whole mysterious homosocial world that I wasn’t a part of. Such behavior, I thought, was incompatible with the life of a contemporary gay academic — even just a taste of it. My erotic self had to be kept separate.

¤

After Rome, the next time I saw Robert was in 2009, when he came to California for work and visited us. Somehow a lot had changed in those two years, and I was ready to move forward. My partner met Robert and came to adore him; he was fine with my posing for him, and so I did. One night when he was in town from New York, I went from my apartment in Oakland to his tiny hotel room near Union Square in San Francisco. We had dinner at a sushi place around the corner, but I can’t remember a single thing we said at dinner, besides him making me try sea urchin, which I hated. Then we went back to his hotel room. Robert usually photographs in the dark; he uses long exposures and creates patterns and strings of light with flashlights and laser pointers. Essentially, he paints on your body with light over the long exposure, only occasionally letting the light fall on himself as he moves catlike around your posed body. The resulting images are eerie, for lack of a better term, and really acquire their meaning for him when juxtaposed or superimposed with other images.

The small room was crowded with furniture, and I had no idea what to do or how to act. I signed model release forms (too eagerly?) and we cleared a space around the foot of the bed, near the door. Robert turned off the lights and we began. The fire alarm intervened but eventually everything came together.

How to describe the thrill of being in front of Robert’s camera? Being an artist’s model was such a simple thing, and something that so many others before me have experienced, but I was unprepared for how changed I felt by it — how validated on so many levels. I imagined that I was finally someone’s muse, even for a couple of hours — finally involved in mysteries of creation that I had so long felt excluded from, having little talent as an artist myself despite small efforts in that direction. Not only had I felt excluded from these creation mysteries in a practical sense, but in my academic training in the social history of art, I had almost come not to believe in them at all — for me, art had become the product of a time and place, of structures of power and gender and politics — not the intimate workings of an artist and model. It felt so good to be looked at in a way that could feel simultaneously safe and exciting — removed from an expectation of sexual action, but far from neutral or neutered. I had long had little or no sense of my own physical desirability, if indeed I possessed any, but Robert’s interest in my body (as an artist or a man — I didn’t care) felt overwhelming and new. It’s not that my previous sexual experiences hadn’t deeply influenced my sense of self; what was new was the sense that Robert had also accessed the sexuality of my academic or intellectual self (for lack of a better phrase) in a way that others hadn’t or couldn’t. I’m sure this was largely one-sided; he has photographed hundreds of models, and become friends with many of them. Maybe he was intrigued by photographing someone who thought about art in ways that made sense to him, and with whom he shared so many interests, but it seems unlikely that the experience had meant to him something analogous to what it had meant to me. Perhaps it was the delight that he could see me taking in it that kept him interested; the merest glance at his other photographs reveals the far more perfect bodies and faces that had been available to his camera. He tells me that almost every model he shoots makes that same comment, but that didn’t make it any less true for me — I felt like there was something special about me, some reason he wanted to photograph me, since I didn’t look like I thought a model should. Regardless, my intellectual and personal desires seemed intertwined in a way they never had before.

¤

How often has an art historian become part of an artist’s practice? It’s a question that I don’t know how to answer. The most famous examples that I can think of seem, on the surface, much less interpersonally complicated. The art historian Meyer Schapiro advised his student Robert Motherwell to ditch art history for painting, and mentored him for years (along with other artists including Willem de Kooning). Benjamin Buchloh has had long-running professional friendships with the artists Gerhard Richter and Michael Asher (and was married to the artist Louise Lawler); he has written about them, interviewed them for academic and popular articles, and even sat with Richter for a portrait. Art historians and critics have often been connected romantically with artists, such as Clement Greenberg’s five-year relationship with Helen Frankenthaler. And certainly many art critics, museum curators, and gallery owners have become friends and champions of contemporary artists they admire; yet how often have the interpersonal aspects of these relationships been examined? Do they need to be? Robert and I have long joked about me writing about him; he says confidently that I’ll write his monograph one day, and perhaps I will. I find his work endlessly fascinating, though at this point it feels impossible for me to know what I’d think of it if I hadn’t experienced firsthand how it is created.

Robert’s photographs are about the intersection of vision, desire, and knowledge. His images don’t make arguments about the relationship of the body to broader networks and environments — they simply pose questions, invite speculation, and place things in dialogue. He printed a photograph he took of me and my partner in 2012 on a vintage map of Ohio, and the resulting image was surprisingly uncomfortable for me to see. We had recently moved to Ohio for my first teaching job, and it was strange to see my body inscribed on this place that didn’t yet feel like home. In the resulting image Ohio’s counties and highways stretched across my limbs, connecting them with our own bodies’ movement — again, not arguing a connection, but asking if one might exist. Nearly all of his recent works are photographic monoprints like this: photos printed on sheets of paper from old books on medicine, anatomy, history, or design.

Robert’s techniques produce bodies both familiar and estranged, intimate and distanced. The introduction of uncertainty and accident that emerges through his process — through taking photographs in the dark or underwater — reveals something of the fragility of the body, but when seen in multiples, his work reasserts the body’s vital presence and sexual potency within all the networks of meaning and matter that we’ve created around it, and which threaten to fragment it at every turn. The photographs connect in so many ways with the objects that I study in my own work: medieval images where bodies and worlds are overlapped, or images where the interior medical spaces of the body are abstracted into diagrams. They speak to linkages across time between people who were interested in how the viewed and inhabited body becomes part of the mental organization of knowledge — the body as an unstable but constant reference point for everything we think, do and believe.

I don’t know exactly how, but I am sure that posing for Robert’s photographs has affected both what I write about in my academic work, and the arguments that work puts forth. For one thing, it forces me to see my premodern images as part of a larger whole — to remove them from their immediate historical contexts where I can get bogged down in details. But the change in my work as a result of posing for Robert goes beyond just the way I write about images; it’s changed what subjects I choose and especially how I teach students about them. Over time I’ve become less guarded, less cautious in explaining things to my students about my own life and beliefs. Academic objectivity is useful of course, but it can also be something teachers hide behind — a way to avoid sharing ourselves with students in a way that can be vulnerable, but which students seem hungry for. I’m less afraid now to teach the paintings or photographs that turn me on; even if I don’t talk about them in precisely those terms, I’m less afraid that students might make those connections themselves. It’s not that I’m “out” to more of my students now — I’ve always made a conscious choice to be out in the classroom. Rather, it’s that I’m not hiding anymore the fact that being gay isn’t just about one’s identity, but also about desire — something that is impossible to exclude when talking about our responses to visual images. When talking about art and beauty, desire is nearly always in play.

Somehow I’ve become more comfortable with this collapse of public and private, with the idea of queer people creating spaces apart, and this feeling only increases with every passing year. In Columbus, Ohio, I’m in the midst of a thriving cultural and academic center, but I have also seen firsthand what happens to a gay community, good and bad, when it takes assimilation rather than difference as its goal. In a place where the pride parade consists of well-meaning church groups and corporate pandering, an ever-greater part of me longs for the spaces apart or outside, in which I can exist differently, simultaneously inhabiting all parts of myself, even if this space is only (re)created within the context of a single friendship or collaboration. My politics tell me that the conscious integration into the mainstream that is so evident in Columbus is exactly what has lead to such huge leaps forward for gay rights; my gut tells me that something else is being lost, and that my relationship with Robert is part of finding my way back to it.

¤

I posed for Robert again in 2012, 2015, and 2016, each time with my partner. In 2012, after a long summer dinner in the backyard, we moved aside our dining-room table, pulled the curtains, and photographed in the dark. It was a thrill to watch my partner experience something similar to what I had felt years before, though from talking to him later the experience meant entirely different things to him than it had to me. During another visit in 2015 we photographed in the third-floor attic of our new house, posing together after our infant daughter had gone to sleep downstairs, the hum of the baby monitor overlapping with the clicks of Robert’s new camera.

Being in front of Robert’s camera feels different now that I am more invested in the collaboration. When I first posed for him in 2009, I was caught up in what I thought it meant to “model” for someone, wondering if I was doing it right. Over time, and especially from talking to Robert about how he envisions the way he works with me and his other subjects, it feels much less like there are two distinct positions in the relationship and much more like each session, even each photograph, is a kind of performance. For one, Robert is often on both sides of the camera. At times, in the dark, I forget where the camera is, as I watch Robert moving around me or feel him brush against me, following his flashlights to try to see where he is but also trying to stay still. Fantasy enters the picture, but even while he’s photographing, the fantasy is as much about imagining looking at the pictures of myself later, wondering how they will turn out and how he will change them as they become artworks, as it is about my bodily experience in the moment, and where the next click might take us. Whatever the fantasy, it feels fantastic and strange to have this experience where I am fully involved, but can give up control over the final work; where I can leave the scholar or writer in me behind and let someone else make the meaning for me.

Have any of these photography sessions ever crossed a particular line — have Robert and I actually had sex? I’ve been avoiding the question. It used to infuriate me when scholars very explicitly dodged this question about the premodern artists they studied, reminding us that we don’t know that these clearly queer people actually shared physical intimacy. “Of course they did,” I always thought; I didn’t care whether we had historical evidence for it or not — it seemed obvious. Yet now I don’t want to answer the question myself; it doesn’t seem to matter. I will say, though, that for Robert and many of his models, making this art together acts as a kind of surrogate or substitute for sexual relationships that they might desire. It’s just people, in the dark, in a room; the photographs themselves are the only details that come out of it, and even though part of me wants to tell everything about those experiences, I think it would ruin them to talk about exactly what goes on. Part of the images’ magic as final works is their incompleteness as documentation of the performance.

Sometimes in my life now, and especially when I think about this collaboration with Robert, I have the sense that I’ve figured everything out — that I’ve finally realized now that I can have all of these things rather than just some of them; that I can play all the roles I’ve been describing — writer, teacher, father, husband, model, friend — without it feeling like I’m an imposter in each as I switch between them. So much about being an academic is about this imposter syndrome; when everything you produce is judged as a measure of your intelligence or creativity, insecurity is always just around the corner. Relinquishing control over the final product with Robert lets me out of this cycle. What’s missing, though, is any acknowledgment, outside of our relationship, that it is happening at all — if it’s all a performance, as Robert says, then for whom? When I’ve tried to explain it to a few friends, I usually fail to do so in a way that explains what I’ve written about here — how deep the sense of fulfillment is that I get from this seemingly simple situation, and how many different parts of me it touches. I struggle with whether I want to keep it private, just for us, or whether knowing that others have seen the photographs and heard about their creation is precisely the final step I need to fully feel and embody the rhyme between what I perceive as these different selves. The question bubbled up again when I tried to choose photographs to include in this essay. The safe part of me wanted nothing too daring; after all, what if my students see this? Another part wanted to include the most explicit ones. I know I want people to see the photographs, but how much of my body do I want them to find? Some amount, I don’t know; here they are.

[See image gallery at lareviewofbooks.org]

¤

Karl Whittington teaches art history at The Ohio State University. He writes about European medieval art and architecture, the history of science, and gender and sexuality.

Robert Flynt is a visual artist based in New York. His work has appeared in galleries internationally, and is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and L.A. County Museum.  www.robertflynt.com

  The post Collaboration in the Dark appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2kTkKuK