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jimlingss · 5 years ago

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Sugar and Coffee [Finale]

Chapter 22 - Chapter 23 [Finale]

➜ Words: 5.1k

➜ Genres: 99.5% Fluff, 0.5% Angst, Pâtisserie school!AU

➜ Summary: It isn't hard to be a pâtisserie chef, but it's not a piece of cake either. It seems like for you in particular, life keeps throwing in one wrench after another. It always finds ways to make your sweets bitter. The cherry on top is Jeon Jungkook — a rival with a sensitive sweet tooth who always finds ways to complain about you.

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Baking is an art form. It takes more than just having ingredients and following a recipe. It’s the flavour, texture, taste, and the presentation. It’s knowing why when things go wrong and how to fix it. It’s knowing the right kinds of ingredients to pick, how much of each should be combined, what techniques and methods to use. Baking is therapy. Baking is scientific. It is art. The ingredients are as follows:

Fresh strawberries

White chocolate sponge cake

Sugar

Butter

Eggs

You place the fresh strawberries into the refrigerator as the stand mixer whips the six large egg whites and two cups of sugar. When it's combined, you place a bowl over a double boiler on the stove and whisk until the mixture is hot. You put it on your stand mixer again until the white chocolate swiss meringue buttercream is stiff. The cubed butter and white chocolate is added shortly after until it's smooth. Once you’ve got your components prepared, you slice the cooled white chocolate cake into two layers and set the bottom layer on a cake board on the turning cake table. You spread the meringue buttercream evenly with an offset spatula and layer the strawberries. Afterwards, you put the other chocolate sponge cakes over it and repeat the process. You finish the white chocolate strawberry swirl cake with white chocolate strawberries on top for decorative purposes and pipe flowers with a twelve inch piping bag. “It looks fucking incredible.” Jungkook leans over the counter, peering at the frosted cake you’ve just made. “It was supposed to be white chocolate raspberry swirl, but I know you like strawberries, so….” The boy grins, a wide smile that makes his big nose scrunch. “I love it.” You burst out into giggles. “You haven’t even taken a bite yet!” Jungkook begins slicing the cake. You’re proud of what you’ve made — but it’s kind of sad at the same time. This is the final product of your portfolio before it's ready for submission. You’re glad it’s over, but it also means your journey here is ending. It’s November now. And it’s been one whole year since your relationship with Jungkook shifted. A year ago — when the internship posting went up and you found out he was going to be your partner over the summer. When you were made his exam partner in your fine pastries class. When that Friday night happened and you bursted out crying in the kitchen, and he comforted you to no avail despite it being a cold night where the air bit his skin and turned his cheeks rosy. Where he bought you grape soda for no reason whatsoever other than a poor attempt at trying to make things better. It seems like it was so long ago, but it’s only been three hundred and sixty days. It makes you wonder what will happen a year from now or two or ten. “Not too sweet?” You watch your boyfriend’s expression carefully. Jeon Jungkook has his brows deeply furrowed with a thoughtful expression like he’s trying to give honest output. His fork is cleaned empty and it lowers to grab another bite. “It’s perfect.” He melts into a smile. “Maybe you made my sugar tolerance go up.” “Maybe because I improved.” You loll your head to the side, challenging him. “It’s almost as good as your chocolate-covered strawberry cupcakes, huh?” Jungkook scoffs lightly. “I wouldn’t go that far, babe, but we can all dream.” You sulk. “I’ll find out that recipe one day, Jeon. You mark my words and when I do, I’ll profit off of it.” He laughs, the sound tickling and boyish, causing another smile to rise onto your features. Jungkook digs in, having yet another bite and he lets his teeth rot with the sweetness. It’s not long before he remembers something, strides away with a hum and returns with a cold tray. “What is it?” you ask curiously as he sets it down and removes the saran wrap. “It’s truffles. I made it in my art of chocolate class, but it’s an original recipe. Give it a try.” He pushes the tray towards you and you don’t hesitate to grab a chocolate truffle. You would never, on any planet, deny the opportunity of consuming chocolate, especially when it’s made by Jeon Jungkook. You’ve never said it out loud before, but for some reason he always makes the best. No grocery brand or chocolatier can beat what he often bakes for you. So you try not to devour the truffle all in one bite, opting to relish and savour it. You take half of the truffle into your mouth and chew with the same consideration he had for you. And you’re surprised as the deep flavour melts on your palate. “Coffee?” Your brows furrow and you lick your lips. “Did you put black coffee into it?” “I was inspired by a memory,” Jungkook says with a soft smile. “What do you think?” “I love it,” you exhale in awe, finishing the bite and licking your fingers. It tastes kind of bitter, but it has a sweet note at the end. It’s bittersweet. But mostly ends up sweet.

Life with Jungkook continues. Lectures and workshops become more hectic the closer the end comes, but in between classes and late nights spent in the kitchens next to ovens, you and Jungkook still find plenty of time with one another. Or at least enough that you still have your dumb debates and have your hour of snuggling — which Jungkook regularly falls asleep during. The honeymoon phase of your relationship eventually fades away, but luckily it molds into a comfortable pattern that neither of you mind whatsoever. There are still knowing gazes shared across busy rooms, his hand that often comes on your lower back that you find security in, tender kisses shared when the two of you greet each other and bid temporary farewells. You still love Jungkook very much and you don’t ever find yourself afraid of him leaving you abruptly. Your relationship becomes normal too, so Yoongi and Taehyung has little to tease you both about. They instead relish in bullying Jimin when he ends up going out with a coworker of his at his new part-time job, much to the shorter man’s dismay. Hoseok, on the other hand, while no longer in a relationship, finds an interest in teaching and starts to look into what it would take to become an instructor. You’re happy for him and so is Aeri who tells you she’s considering going abroad someday to expand her culinary skills and cook more international cuisine. She keeps herself preoccupied by improving herself and becomes someone worthy of your admiration. But for the most part, things remain consistent and constant. There’s still bickering over lunchtimes and dinner times across the cafeteria table. Still nights of crashing Yoongi and Hoseok’s apartment and playing games. The five of you also start playing Dungeons and Dragons much to Taehyung’s delight who becomes the dungeon master — and while Yoongi always says he wants to stab himself halfway through every session, you’re sure he enjoys it as much as everyone else does. The memories made are ones you cherish the most. And before you know it, graduation has come. “You look beautiful, dear,” Jungkook’s mom holds back tears as she grasps your hands tightly. “Congratulations.” “Thank you.” “Come on, you two!” His dad suddenly calls, holding an old camera up to his chin. “Let’s take some photos to remember the occasion!” One hand holds your rolled certificate and the other holds your navy gown, you stand in front of the school sign with Jungkook who adjusts his black cap. He drapes his arm over your shoulder and the both of you tilt your heads towards each other and give the biggest grins. The camera flashes. Again and again. The corner of your mouth starts moving as your smile twitches. “How many is he taking?” “Just smile,” Jungkook mutters through his grin as both his parents, his aunt and uncle, Lia and Eunbi, and grandma look on proudly. “He’ll do more if you try to argue.” “Two more!” His dad shouts, despite taking another five. His entire family seems so elated that your heart swells with endearment. “I didn’t know your family would be so happy when you told them we were dating,” you murmur, switching your poses a bit. “You know, your grandma just asked me when we’re getting married.” “Really?” He glances at you and then scoffs with another smile that’s more genuine. “Be lucky she has half a mind not to start asking when we’re having kids. Unless…...” “I swear to god, Jungkook, if you get down on your knee in the middle of our graduation with everyone watching, I’m going to kick you in your shin.” He giggles, nose scrunched, eyes crinkled. It’s not long before Jungkook’s mother drags over Jimin overbearingly by the hand with Taehyung, Hoseok, and Yoongi for a group photo. There’re so many parents, family members, and phones and cameras being passed around that your plastered smile starts to break on your face. Everyone’s mother and their goddamn cousin’s cousin wants three copies of the same exact picture. “Oh my god, kill me now,” Yoongi groans but still has that dumb fucking grin on his face. He looks more like a kid showing off his braces or a grandpa who has his dentures stuck. You think he’s putting on that idiotic grin just to ruin the pictures — even his mom is yelling about it on the sidelines. “Just a few more,” Jimin whispers with more perseverance than anyone else has. “Who is even taking our picture, right now?” Hoseok asks, his brows furrowing. “Does anyone even know who that lady is?” “I think she’s the associate dean’s assistant who’s going to put it on the website.” Taehyung breathes out, his cheeks aching from his smile. “Either that or that’s my cousin’s brother-in-law’s younger sister’s friend.” “Alright, that’s enough.” Yoongi gives up and walks out of the frame. Everyone starts dispersing before there are protests and they’re rounded up for another pointless photo session. But after a while, you’re granted some freedom to roam around with Jungkook. There’s still a few more photos taken, ones with Aeri and classmates and teachers, like Miss. Kang, who you always liked. “I always knew the two of you could be close.” The female teacher has the cheesiest smile and you have to admit, you’re glad she never changed Jungkook’s internship like he wanted. In a way she’s like your matchmaker, but you’ll never say it out loud in case you give her more credit than it’s due. She already seems to know it anyway. “Good luck on your future journeys. You both have great potential.” Namjoon and Sejeong also show up to congratulate the pair of you as well. And they meet Jungkook’s family who seems to adore the couple straight away, asking plenty of questions of what their shop is like and if their son was in any way helpful. But while you’d like to stick around to hear all the conversations, it’s nice to take a break from the bustle to just walk on the paths that you used to take all the time with Jungkook. You don’t know what it’s going to be like when you leave this place. “Aren’t you kind of sad?” Your hand squeezes Jungkook’s and you turn to look at him. “Yeah,” he admits. “But I’m also happy we don’t have to submit projects or do exams anymore. I’ll miss the routine. Of being able to hang out with the guys and eat with them all the time. But they’ll still be around and I have you.” Jungkook’s gaze meets yours. His eyes are tender, soft. You smile at him. That’s right — this chapter might be ending, but you’ll still have many more with him. “Y/N!” There’s a call of your name and you turn to see your family waving at a distance. Your mom holds a flower bouquet, most likely for you and your cheeks swell with a smile. Your arm extended in the air to wave back and your steps quicken with Jungkook’s to meet them.

A lot happens after graduation. There are many changes and alterations. While you’ll still always be learning until the end of time, you’re no longer an official student and you’re thrown to the hounds called the real world. But it’s not all that bad. You get hired back at Kim’s Wedding Cake Company and work with Soohyun who’s returned from maternity leave. Yuna also sometimes joins during the weekends and much to your delight, she tells you that she’s enrolled in the institution as she had wanted. You can only imagine what kind of knowledge she’ll gain and stories she’ll end up having there like you did. But there’s not a lot of time to reminisce when there’s work and a ton to learn, but you find yourself enjoying it more than finding it difficult. Jungkook, on the other hand, doesn’t return to the company. He instead gets hired at a chocolatier shop not far from where you work. It’s only a ten minute walk down the block; five for each of you when you meet halfway like you frequently do for lunch. He tells you that he’s learning a lot, on what it takes in the artistry of chocolate, that there’s more meticulousness than what meets the eye. It sounds like an absolute nightmare to you, but he loves it — especially on the days when he smells sweet and there’s some chocolate smeared on his cheeks. And you don’t hate that he often brings you home truffles and caramels to try. The two of you also move in with each other, sharing an old apartment not far from your workplaces. It’s not much different from how you used to live on campus at different dorms, except now there are bills to be paid and Jungkook steals all the hot water in the shower. You wonder if this is what it feels like to be an adult. “Y/N?” There’s a familiar voice, but one you haven’t heard in ages. A smooth timbre that sounds light and humorous at the corners. You whirl around, regarding the tall man with dark hair, dressed in a dark turtleneck and a black trench coat. His sheepish eyes crinkle in his smile, lips pink and plush. “Jin?” A grin spreads into your face as well. “Oh my god! How are you? It’s been so long! What are you doing here?” “I live here, remember,” he reminds in the midst of squeaky giggles. “And I’m good. I’m actually on my way to a meeting. I’m working in management of Toute Pastries and Pâtisseries.” “Wow, working in commercial bakeries? That’s impressive.” But you’re not exactly surprised. You knew Seokjin always had it in him and you feel proud that someone you used to know has become so great. Seokjin laughs. “Not really. It’s kind of less hands-off than I’d like, but what about you?” “I’m good too. Just heading to my friend’s bakery.” You hitch a thumb over your shoulder. “Today’s the opening. Do you want to come?” “I’d love to, but the meeting starts in twenty. I saw the sign the other day though. The bakery is that place that was being renovated on Imlingss Avenue, right?” “Yeah. It’s next to the department store.” “I’ll swing by when I have some time then.” “When you have some time?” You eye him playfully and cross your arms. It might be inappropriate to be so sarcastic with an acquaintance, but being with Jungkook has made you more snarky than is probably socially acceptable. “So you’re a hot shot, now, aren’t you?” Luckily, Jin doesn’t take offence and simply laughs. “I swear I’m not!” It’s good to see him. You thought you never would again, at least not face-to-face like this. But what you least expected was that your conversations could be so light and natural. It isn’t difficult at all and you don’t find yourself uncomfortable nor holding any resentments. You aren’t sad or angry. It’s like seeing an old friend again. “I heard you were with Jungkook,” Jin says with the corner of his mouth quirked. “That’s a surprise.” “Isn’t it?” Whenever Jungkook used to come up in a conversation, all you ever said to Seokjin was how trash he was. But that was before you really knew anything about him. “But he’s great. An idiot sometimes. But it’s great.” Jin can see the happiness radiating off your face and it’s infectious. “I’m happy for you, Y/N.” He says it sincerely, genuinely, and your smile widens. “Thanks.” The both of you share a little more small talk before you’re on your way. And once farewells are said and done, you don’t look back or peek over your shoulder for another glance at him. You’re content continuing straight forward. “Sorry, I’m late.” The door chimes as it slowly shuts after you, the warm furnace heating the air and melting off the coldness of your skin. “Of course you’d be late.” Yoongi is in his black apron, white shirt rolled up to his elbows and his arms crossed. “We already took the photos, don’t expect that we’ll re-take them.” “A joy as always, Yoongi.” You smile at him, taking off your jacket and putting it on the coat rack at the corner. Jimin comes to greet you and you sigh softly. “Why’d you ever agree to open a bakery with him, Chim? You must be a saint to deal with his shit all the time.” “I heard that.” Jimin laughs. “Trust me, he kept on asking Jungkook when you would come. He’s all bark but no bite,” he whispers but it’s loud enough that Yoongi looks sorely unimpressed. The shop is cute and spacious. It’s rather modern with square tables and chairs lining the walls. The lights come from the sides of the fancy ceiling, and there’s a counter to check out at with a main glass case where people can choose pastries from. In the corner, there’s also several smaller pastry display cases where patrons can grab trays, tongs and fill up their own plates. You quickly greet everybody and then move to grab your one prized possession. “Lemon meringue pie?” Taehyung laughs, watching you put two on your plate. “You know I just have to.” You smile and sit at one of the tables, luckily having it on the house. Taehyung sits across from you. “Man, you’re so nice to let Yoongi have the entire recipe since it’s yours too.” He shrugs. “It wasn’t like I had any plans with it in the first place, plus it was Yoongi’s idea to add the secret ingredient.” “Which is?” Taehyung grins his infamous boxy smile. “Nice try.” “I’ll find out one of these days,” you warn. Taehyung handed you the recipe a long time ago but he conveniently omitted the secret ingredient and you haven’t forgiven him since. “And then I’ll be making it for myself every other night instead of giving my pretty penny over to Yoongi and Jimin.” “Yeah, good luck with that.” He leans back in the comfortable chair. “I’m sure Yoongi will be protecting that from you for the rest of his life. He might be willing to exchange information though if he can get his hands on Jungkook’s chocolate-covered strawberries.” Taehyung wiggles his brows, but you shake your head with a sigh. “He won’t tell me. I swear he’s holding it above my head so I can never ditch him.” The man laughs and takes a look around the new shop. Everyone is here — Hoseok, Jimin, Yoongi, Jungkook, Taehyung, Aeri and you — the entire crew with no one else missing. There are other people as well, sponsors and Yoongi and Jimin’s other acquaintances, but you muse how hard it is these days to gather up like you used to. Everybody was busy and on their own paths. Doing their own thing. But it’s what made moments like these more precious. “I would’ve joined them, should’ve,” Taehyung says wistfully with a sigh. “The original plan was actually Jimin, Yoongi, and I.” “Yeah, but you wouldn’t have been happy.” You take another bite of the pie, chewing in your cheek. “Yeah, that’s true.” “Do you regret it? Going back to school?” “No.” Taehyung smiles gently. “I love learning and I knew after graduation, I wanted to keep learning. I’m not as good at cooking as I am at baking, but it’s still fun and I think I’m getting better. The only issue is Yuna.” The man visibly and dramatically shivers and it elicits laughter from you. “Does she bother you a lot?” “Less like bothering and more like she literally pops up wherever I go,” he tells. “Sometimes I’m just minding my own business and then boom, out of nowhere, I turn the corner and she’s there. I’m starting to think she’s like a ghost or like….like…” “—a witch,” Jungkook finishes and then leans down to plop a kiss at the top of your head. “Hey.” “Hey.” You smile and he leans down to steal a bite of your pie, but you don’t mind much. “You’ll never guess who I saw earlier.” Curiosity gleams in Jungkook’s eye and you grin, wanting to put him suspense for a little longer. “I’ll tell you about it later, but is everyone grabbing dinner afterwards? I haven’t checked the messages yet.” “Yeah, we are.” Soon, Hoseok comes over and introduces his lady-friend that he brought with him as Naul. But you know through advice he’s sought through you a few weeks back that he’s been seeing her and taking it slow. It’s nice to finally meet someone you’ve heard about, and you find that her calm and collected personality fits into Hoseok’s quite well. You also meet Jimin’s girlfriend who is sweet and an avid talker about all things deli meats. At your surprise of how ham supposedly doesn’t taste as good as some other cold cuts, she insists that you and Jungkook need to have a double date with her and Jimin so she can enlighten you on the world of salamis — to which you agree needs to happen. She’s peculiar, but sweet and cute when she’s with Jimin. “So you’re really going?” you ask after Aeri confirms it. She had told you a month ago that she applied to study abroad and you couldn’t be anything but happy. Especially now that she’s just told you that she’s been accepted, you have nothing but eagerness for her. “Yeah, I’m a bit nervous, but I’m super excited.” You pull the girl into a tight embrace. “I’ll miss you, but have fun and stay safe. Stay in touch.” “Thanks and I will, Y/N.” She giggles against you and pulls apart. “I hear Amsterdam is really nice and my aunt keeps advertising it, so I’m looking forward to it.” “Apparently, those Dutch men are really something,” you murmur and she laughs. “You know, if I wasn’t in a happily committed relationship and with my dream job, I’d probably ask if I could come with you cause damn, they’re like a tall glass of water. You need to take advantage of that.” “Who’s a tall glass of water?” Jungkook approaches with a sorely unimpressed expression. It makes you go tight-lipped and Aeri giggles, slinking away before she’s caught in the crossfire. While you and Jungkook playfully bicker in the middle of the store and he grabs you in a chokehold and you tickle him — much to the shock of the other patrons who don’t know you — Yoongi looks on behind the counter with a displeased expression. Except that’s only his natural resting bitch face and not what he thinks internally. Or at least that’s what Jimin realizes when Yoongi says to him privately— “They’re a pretty good match, huh? Jungkook and Y/N.” “Yeah.” Jimin smiles, watching the two of you act like children. “They are.” It’s sad when the opening event eventually ends. The night comes and dinner is soon over too. Everyone ultimately says their farewells, waving before they go off on their own way and you linger just a moment until everyone’s gone. It’s nostalgic to be around them, reminding you of days that seemed simpler and easier, and when you were unaware of these facts. It’s sad to say goodbye since you don’t know when you’ll see all of them again. At one place. At one time. But at least you have Jungkook with you, so you’re far from being alone. “Don’t worry,” Jungkook jokes around, “They’ll be back for our wedding.” “When is that going to happen?” you scoff, looking at him and how his features are illuminated under the lampposts that you pass. You squeeze his hand in yours. “It’s a surprise,” he answers slyly. You grin. “And what if I reject you?” “Then I’ll be a very sad man.” “And if we don’t work out at all?” “Then we’ll still be best friends,” Jungkook says and interlaces his fingers with yours. “I’ll always be here for you. Because I’m lame and I think I’ll always be head over heels for you.” He smiles wide, bunny teeth revealed and features soft. “It’s a promise.” And one you believe in. Luckily, you and Jungkook never split. You end up getting married two years later with Aeri as your maid of honour and Taehyung as the best man — the brunette giving you so much anxiety with his spontaneousness that you nearly wish it was Jimin who was the best man instead. But everything ends up without too many hitches or difficulties. It’s hectic lives that you and Jungkook lead, but ones you love. Ultimately, the pair of you get a townhouse together halfway between the suburbs and the city. You wind up running Kim’s Wedding Cake Company with Yuna many years down the line after Namjoon and Sejeong step down to retire. And Jungkook achieves his dream of becoming a chocolatier and ends up getting silver in The World Chocolate Masters competition. The two of you have your first child together one drunken night when you both think it’s a good idea to have sex in your sacred spot — a professional kitchen. It’s the first and last time, swearing you’ll never do it again when you’re both on your hands and knees afterwards, sanitizing the entire area for fear of losing your jobs for the violation of health codes. But you end up conceiving that night and it’s the first of many kids — rascals with sweet-tooths. Life with Jungkook is a mundanity you could’ve only dreamed of. And you often count your blessings that you somehow ended with such a cheeky, lovable boy.

[Epilogue] “And that’s how I met your grandmother.” There’s a plump toddler sitting on his knee, slobbering as he babbles, and a slightly older girl sitting cross-legged in front of him on the carpet. She’s no more than five years old and blinks up at the old man with matching doe eyes. “So a stupid man dumped grandma and then you came in and saved her?” she asks in a high-pitched voice. “Essentially.” The old man nods and takes off his rounded spectacles to place on the small table beside his plush armchair. It’s his special seat for story time, placed under the picture frames of you and Jungkook over the decades, from your graduation to your wedding. “We were friends first and then started to date afterwards, but yes, it’s right to say I did save her.” “Like a superhero?” He grins and confirms, “Like a superhero. Now, do you know what the moral of the story is?” His granddaughter shakes her head. “No. What is it?” “The way to a person’s heart is through the stomach,” he declares with a smile. “If they like chocolate, you make sure you’re good at making chocolate. You like chocolate, right?” “I like grandma’s cakes!” she exclaims much to his amusement. “What nonsense are you telling her?” You’re leaning on the doorframe leading to the kitchen, sighing lightly as you shake your head with your arms crossed. Your hair is slowly turning gray, but you’re still as attractive — if not even more so. Jungkook always mused how much more beautiful you got the more you learnt and experienced. And he likes the wrinkles around your eyes, even when you don’t. It reminds him of how many times he’s made you laugh over the years. “Grandma!” Your granddaughter jumps up with a big grin that’s reminiscent of a bunny. She has big doe eyes that seem to sparkle in the afternoon light shedding into the cozy home. “Grandpa was just telling me how you guys met. He said he saved you. Is that true?” “I saved him, dear.” You pat her head gently. “Without me, your grandpa would be hopeless.” The older man at his armchair chuckles. “That is true.” “It’s time for lunch, you three.” You hold up your grandson and your granddaughter skips towards the kitchen. Jungkook staggers upwards from his seat with weaker knees and muscles that feel exhausted to the bone. He’s still in rather good shape though for just turning sixty three two months ago. Even when you constantly worry about him, he can still play catch with the kids in the backyard and put them on his back without hurting it much. When he comes into the kitchen, the two kids are in their seats and busy already digging in. His mug that says ‘Jungkook — World’s Best Chocolatier’ sits at the corner of the fruit place mat you bought at the thrift store. The letters of the mug are worn around the edges, handle chipped at the bottom, but it’s still his favourite. But Jungkook doesn’t sit down to eat just yet. He rounds the table and comes to the sink where you’re humming away. He leans his arms on the edge of the counter, standing right behind you and leans in as you turn your head. Jungkook kisses your cheek. “I love you.” You smile, the same one he fell in love with all those decades ago when you both were still young students who knew nothing about what was to come. “I love you too.” Much to Jungkook’s contentment, you lean into him, filling his senses with your scent as you press a soft kiss to his lips. And it’s not bitter whatsoever. It’s sweet.

#bts fanfic #bts scenario #jungkook fanfic #jungkook fluff #jungkook scenario #bts series #bts baking series #bts baking AU #bts baking!AU #jungkook x reader #jungkook reader insert #and with this the entire series is complete #thank you for reading #for those who read every single chapter and every single word I had to offer #I really appreciate following me for such a long journey and I hope it was worth it #:>

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dwellordream · 3 years ago

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“As the chief unwanted suitor of Merry Wives, Falstaff furnishes a broad target for women's jests drawn from the rich literature of comic wooing. The "scornful maid" topos extends from Petrarchan lyric, to bawdy wooing ballads, to jest books and plays. From Anne Page's dismissal of Doctor Caius ("I had rather be set quick i' th' earth, / and bowled to death with turnips" 3-4.86-87) to the wives' hilarity over Falstaff's cloned letters, the women of Windsor act as keen-eyed judges of men's romantic performances. Training in such critical skills came early in life, and the need for them often lasted for years. Early modern women married late, and many remarried after a spouse's death; in both cases they often endured years of courtship. Wooers were expected to show dogged persistence, and women were expected to "scorn, jeer and generally discourage the advances of a suitor."

They could certainly find ammunition in jests and ballads, where anti-suitor mocks arise in all sorts of sexual encounters-from romantic to rapine-between predatory men and unwilling women, young or old, rich or poor, maid, wife or widow. Lovesick serenades, for example, always end badly: "A Gentleman made musick at his Mistress windowe, and sing her a Song which began this: My secret passions, &c. An other gentlewoman being then in place, and hearing him begin so, said, Belike your servant is sicke of the pyles." Another suitor who can play the balidore well but sings poorly performs under a lady's window. He asks, "how she lik'd his musicke? She answered, You have played very well, and you have sung too."

…"Women" played by boys control these highly ironic stagings, inviting non-elite onlookers to jeer and laugh at their social superior-a ludicrous, greedy, predatory knight played by a socially marginal actor. By exposing his lechery and cowardice to the delighted mockery of their neighbors, two gossips manage to overwrite the scene of their defamation with the spectacle of his shame. Physical "gests" such as the dousing of Falstaff may have had strong appeal, but for most women the arts of the tongue were more important in daily life. Antifeminist saws derided women's cleverness at explaining away improprieties (a woman's answer is never to seek) but no matter how exasperating to men, this quick-wittedness could also be considered a survival skill in a world that constantly called women to account for their honesty.

For women, some anti-suitor stories may have served a didactic function; this would not seem a novel concept to early moderns, who heard jests in sermons and read them in conduct books and polemics. Considering the importance of women's sexual reputations and how frequently men accosted women, the mildest joke in which a woman parries a pass may point out the simple lesson, still taught to women today, that safety lies in groups. Protecting one's name also meant being able to spurn a compromising remark with a sharp answer in the hearing of others.

In one jest that illustrates this situation, a married woman rides on horseback down the street among her gossips. A stranger, thinking she is alone, leers at her new-shod foot and tries out a jape: you have a very fine foot. Does it have a twin? Were they both born at one time? "No, indeed sir," she shoots back archly, "there hath beene a man borne betwixt them." She says this so her friends can hear: "Wherewith her neighbours that rode by her, falling into a laughing, made him find that she was a married wife." She is on safe ground and knows her audience. As for her would-be admirer, he was "much troubled by her answere, and with lack of wit to reply, galloped away with a flea in his eare."

A sexual aggressor may press money on a woman or threaten rape; in such scenarios jesting women often apply the ancient justice of "the biter bitten." In Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, for example, a poor ferrywoman outwits two friars who try to rape her by telling them that they will have a better time by landing on an island, where they may lie down. She manages to slip away as they clamber off ("she was as sensible and shrewd as they were vicious and stupid") and mocks them as she rows away: "You can wait till God sends an angel to console you, Messieurs! ... You're not going to get anything out of me today!" She fetches the law, her husband, and her neighbors, who seize, bind, spatter, and beat the friars.

Real wives who were propositioned or attacked usually told their husbands and friends because quickly resorting to kin and neighbors could serve as a woman's primary defense against the slanders of a rejected pursuer. The Windsor wives' decision to keep Falstaff's overtures hidden from their husbands would have been unusual in both common practice and the narratives of the jesting literature. Tales about wives' liaisons with desired lovers typically show women colluding in secret to achieve their ends. But women who reject advances frequently go straight to their husbands and gossips to report any overture, recruiting mixed-gender groups of neighbors and kin to play "merry tricks" to confound them.

The accosted wife in the famous Attowell's Jig tells her husband and the seducer's wife, who is a near neighbor, and enlists them both in a bed trick: the seducer ends up sleeping with his own wife. A bloodier revenge occurs in Tacke of Dover his Quest of Inquirie (1604), a tale in which a doctor tries to seduce a mealman's wife. After the wife tells her husband, they recruit their neighbors to assist in a plot in which the husband pretends to be mad when the doctor arrives. He manages to trick and tie down the doctor, whom his neighbors beat and harry. Finally, a surgeon "cuts both his stones."”

- Pamela Allen Brown, “Near Neighbors, Women’s Wars, and Merry Wives.” in Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England

#pamela allen brown #better a shrew than a sheep #history #renaissance #shakespeare #tudor #elizabethan #jacobean

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stonesparrow · 4 years ago

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Dr. Stone/Atla AU pt. 1: The Little Water Dragon

Story beats for a fic in the works by yours truly, though you could always wait until I get around to publishing it so as to avoid spoilers.

Ryusui Nanami is born to the Nanami family of the Northern Water Tribe. His father is a cousin of Chief Arnook, making Ryusui and Princess Yue second cousins. When Ryusui is four he discovers that he is a waterbender, much to the delight of his family.

When Ryusui was five, his cousin Princess Yue was born, though it quickly spread throughout the palace that the newborn infant was sickly and may die. When Yue was saved by the Moon Spirit, there was much rejoicing and a grand party was held in celebration of the princess, where young Ryusui gave an excited greeting to the baby in her cradle.

Ryusui begins his waterbending lessons at age six, training with Master Pakku, though the hyper little boy gets on Pakku’s nerves a lot. One day due to his mischief and experimentation with advanced moves that Pakku told him he was too young for, ten year old Ryusui injured himself and was sent to the healing huts, where he met Yagoda. Amazed to see waterbending healing for the first time, Ryusui thanked Yagoda and asked if she would teach him healing, but was told that boys can’t learn healing and girl’s can’t learn fighting. Ryusui was confused, and eventually concluded that a true master waterbender would know the arts of both combat and healing. He thus decided to ask Pakku to teach him healing. When Pakku dismissed it as ridiculous and “unbecoming of a man” to learn women’s work, Ryusui became frustrated.

Soon after though, he’s approached by some of the waterbender girls from the healing huts, who offer to teach him healing in exchange for him teaching them combat waterbending. Thus starts Ryusui’s secret training along with a group of girls who eventually become good friends of his.

When Ryusui is 12, one of his and Yue’s older cousins becomes betrothed, but doesn’t seem to be happy about it. Ryusui asks her what’s wrong, since he thought that girls liked falling in love and getting married. His 16 year old cousin says that she didn’t want to get married just yet, and that her fiancé is a stranger to her. At the wedding Ryusui notices that his cousin has a sad expression on her face, and decides that if he gets married it will be to someone who wants to marry him.

By the time he turns 21, Ryusui is one of the best benders in the entire tribe, but his flamboyant personality causes his family to be rather annoyed with him. Ryusui is a bit of an oddball - though he is a master bender and has hundreds of Northern forms memorized, a lot of his techniques involve improvising and combining moves in unique ways, utilizing his innate sense of the water’s movement. From his secret study Ryusui has also become very skilled in healing, though he wasn’t able to practice on actual people.

Ryusui’s friends/students from the healing huts total to about a dozen young women and teenagers, all of whom have become strong combat benders in their own right through his secret tutoring. As a promising young bender and member of the nobility, Ryusui is considered prime son-in-law material and his parents really want him to get married, but somehow he manages to keep pissing off any potential in-laws, thus avoiding all marriage proposals.

Ryusui attends the banquet celebrating the arrival of Avatar Aang and their kin from the Southern Tribe. Afterwards he goes to meet them, loudly introducing himself and saying that as someone who desires to be the master of all waterbending, he would like to learn their Southern waterbending forms. Katara is a bit intimidated by his personality, but agrees, saying they could exchange techniques in the morning when they meet Master Pakku.

Ryusui’s face falls when he hears them mention his master and explains that Pakku will never agree to train Katara. Aang suggests that perhaps he’d be more open to a request from the Avatar himself, but Ryusui says the old man is hopeless. He then advises Katara to find Sifu Yagoda before bidding them goodnight.

The next day after a rather unpleasant encounter with Pakku, Katara furiously heads over to the healing huts to find Yagoda. After the healing lesson, Yagoda reveals that Katara’s grandmother Kanna was Northern, and points her in the direction of Ryusui’s secret training grounds.

Aang and Katara visit the location late at night, where they find Ryusui and a handful of teenagers and young women practicing waterbending forms, much to their surprise. Ryusui spots them and introduces Katara as “our sister master of the Southern style,” which Katara says is flattering but a bit of an exaggeration. Ryusui reveals that for years they have been training and planning for an opportunity to show off their skills to the Chief in the hopes of convincing him to change the rule about gender segregated bending styles, and that Katara and Aang’s assistance might be the last push they need.

When the group of waterbenders goes to confront the Chief, an uproar is sent up, with Pakku declaring that Ryusui has sullied the sacred art of waterbending by learning healing and teaching combat bending to women. Ryusui shoots back that he and his sister benders have become strong waterbenders not because they wish to defile the sacred arts, but because they love and appreciate all types of bending and the knowledge passed down from the ancestors. Katara ends up starting a fight with Pakku, which culminates in a free for all where the women waterbenders demonstrate their skills, using Ryusui’s uniquely adaptive style.

When Pakku traps the benders in a hail of icicles and starts to walk away, Ryusui nods to Katara and the benders melt the ice to form a podium that raises Katara and the women high up so they can address the gathered crowd.

Katara and the other women deliver a speech about how the Water Tribes have lost their way during the war. The tribes are meant to symbolize the love and community that keeps hope in people’s hearts in times of change and turmoil, but the Southern Tribe has fractured, their spirits broken from the endless war. In order to reunite the tribes and defeat the Fire Lord, should not the Tribes embrace change as water itself does? Water is the element of change, after all. Women are not only good for healing, and men are not only good for combat. Each individual knows their own capabilities best, and not allowing the power of choice limits their ability to fight against the Fire Nation.

Their display is compelling, but Chief Arnook still looks reluctant to change such an old tradition. Yue however stands up and asks if she can say a few words. Arnook allows it, and Yue points out that if the Avatar were to incarnate into the Northern Water Tribe as a woman, would the sages dare tell her that she was not to learn bending, to not claim her spiritual destiny? Aang himself says if anyone likes, he could probably call up a female waterbender past life of his to add her perspective. Chief Arnook sees the logic in the argument, while Pakku is forced to admit defeat.

#dcst #dr stone #dr. stone #dcst atla au #atla au #au #alternate universes #fanfic #my writing #nanami ryusui

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whitewall660 · 4 years ago

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Home Alone, Eat your Hole Out as Santa Cums Unexpectedly...Twice

It would be the last house they would ever break into in fact it would become their permanent new home as sadly for two totally straight guys like John and Darren, breaking into houses over Christmas would prove to be fatal very fatal as they chose a legal licensed Hpno Masters house to break into, tut! tut!.

In our very liberal state Masters who have the gift of Hypnotism have certain rights and privileges under state law, these include, correcting youths who break the law or play ball on the sidewalk particularly if the ball comes into the garden of the Master, assisting the Police in getting truthful answers from would-be criminals and then helping to reprogram prisoners after they've served some time in prison, ironically most of which end up in the porn business but it means they get a good honest living even if it isn't a straight one, lol, while I might add helping to recruit the right honest hunky sexy cadets for the local Police Academy and U.S. Marines Recruiting Office in town among other things.

The Masters also have the right to own and possess anything or anyone that comes onto their property with out rightful intent and this unfortunately for John and Darren would include them.

The Master was lying in his bed horny as fucking hell as he sold his latest "Fuck Boy" just before Christmas as there is only so much FFF a fuck boy can take before he become loose eventually that is, FFF being Fingering Fisting and Fucking I might add, but as you can imagine he was horny for a bottom but he didn't think for one minute that Santa would bring two of the tightest fuckholes he would enjoy ridding in a long long time over the Christmas period that would follow.

Darren and John where up to that point total straight, in fact they hated fags and enjoyed beating them, they here both in their mid 20's and both had kids, John had three boys and one girl on the way but had served time in juvey for getting his sister pregnant, and because John's parents where strong religious believers she would eventually give birth too twins so that meant John technically had 5 kids, Darren on the other hand her two girls with his current girlfriend but had a kid each with the last 2 girlfriends, However both regularly sold loads of cum to the local speambank so good knows how many kids they had, but unfortunately for them after tonight any loads that would come out of their knobs from this point on would be for anything other than baby making.

The Master heard a noise while he was lying in his bed and got up to investigate and when he came out in the living room he found Darren and John rummaging through a pile of presents under the tree, He turned on the lights yelling "HEY" at the same time and as you can imagine both John and Darren turned to look in shock at the Master who at the same time simply snapped his fingers using both hands beautifully in a split second sending John and Darren into an instant trance.

The Master was annoyed and walked over slapping both guys across the face no less than 3 times each with his massive haired shovel like hand, he then paused and eyed them up and down before instructing them to strip butt naked and answer a series of questions they would answer honestly and without fail or hesitation,

The question where simple, their names, where they where from, what they were doing, where they been, in asking this he also found out they had a van parked near by with the serious spoils of several other houses particularly houses that were empty of people over the season, but he decided to move on to the more important stuff as the spoils could wait.

Are you straight or gay, not that it made any difference to the Master but he preferred straight, have you any wife's partners boyfriends or kids, where do you live, What do you do for a living, how much money do you have in the bank and of course how big are your dicks.

Although the Master had a passion for a big cock himself he had no problem with guys who had small dicks, but anyone with a small dick would have to have their balls stretched substantially with their knobs being heavily pierced with a large Prince Albert Ring which would keep a small cock down in it's small state, but Darren and John were packing much to the Masters delight, John coming in at 11.5 inches that would put Daddy D to shame while Darren had just over 9 inches of a cock that was almost the spit of Jeff Strikers Powertool, but both their balls were quite full in body almost as big as Spanish Onions and where well packed in at the base of the shaft.

The also both had tattoos, Johns current pussy was Asian so she persuaded him to get and SISU Dragon Tattoo something the Master would change eventually along with the tattoo on his ass cheek that indicated who his first fuck was and the date of same, but the Master first thoughts and impressions are always his best so he decided he would eventually get a large "[B”] for Bareback over the Dragon and he would put "Property of" over the first fucks tattoo on his ass not to mention his slave number which would be 187 for John, this would be on the back of the head just above the collar line for all to see of course in due course, needless to say Darren got 188 as his slave number and had his only tattoo which was his first born kids name of which the Master would also eventually change to a large pride flag, and not to feel left out where John's two where concerned Darren would get a black fisted arm tattooed on his back with its index finger pointing down to and just touching the top of his soon be new FFF hole,

One of the Masters favorite pastimes was getting his slaves to bend over, he would then grab their ball sack with his left hand squeezing's their nuts between his thumb and first finger, and then swinging downward from a height in a long armed seriously swift swing slapping the bollox in the severe download trust in the process, and on a regular basis I might add particularly if he was annoyed with slaves, why, well its because he totally enjoyed the mooning and screams which gave him a substantial hard on himself, and as John and Darren had broken window getting into the house a severe ball spanking had to be delivered.

With most of the Masters neighbors away the punishment that had to be delivered needless to say was not heard by anyone, but there moans and groans which where being recorded gave their first ever Master an aching hard on himself, the recordings would later be used to sell the boys but could be listened to again and again as subsequent slapping's wouldn't sound the same.

When he had finished and the boys had eventually composed themselves from the severest pain they ever endured he instructed him to walk towards the spare room that would be there new sleeping quarters, their they found a series of dog baskets on the ground that would be there beds for the rest of their time with him and he allowed them to ponder this for a good while before instructing them to shower and then pick a basket where they would wait until he whistled for them, he then went in to his own boudoir to have a shower himself popping a couple of Viagra first as he was now planning a long fucking night of Fingering Fisting and Fucking of this wonderful double gift from Santa..... "Happy Mastermass"

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dragons-bones · 5 years ago

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FFXIV: Pearls of Wisdom

A/N: This opening sentence has lived in my head for over three years, and now I finally release it unto the world.

Don’t be drinking anything, friends, this is seventy-five percent Rereha POV, which means irreverence is now in full effect and the concept of “being serious” has been chucked directly out the window.

Please enjoy!

RATING: T/PG-13 Word Count: 5,335 Cross-posted to AO3

-------

Rereha threw open the doors to Aymeric’s office, shite-eating grin firmly plastered on her face as she skipped inside, and sang out, “Congratulations! It’s twins!”

Two things happened.

First, as soon as the doors opened, but before Rereha even opened her mouth, Lucia, she of finely honed Frumentarium instincts and years of friendship with a lalafell infamous across the realm for her Theatrics and Shenanigans, reached out and yanked the multitude of reports on the desk in front of Aymeric out of the way.

Second, Aymeric, who had been taking a sip of tea at the exact moment Rereha entered the office, choked and spat out said tea across his desk—and where all of the paperwork had once been not even a second before—in the most glorious spit take Rereha had ever engendered. A tiny part of her was saddened at the waste of perfectly good tea, but, wow, that had been spectacular. She gave herself a mental pat on the back and came to a stop in the middle of the office, grin widening to manic levels.

Lucia pounded Aymeric on the back between his shoulder blades as he coughed and sputtered, stopping only when the Lord Commander wheezed out, wide-eyed, voice high-pitched and halfway to a full-blown panic, “WHAT?!”

Rereha clasped her hands behind her back and rocked back on her heels. “You heard me,” she said, sing-song.

He wheezed again, wordlessly this time, and stared at her with huge blue eyes as all the color slowly drained from his face. He opened his mouth, but only a strangled croak emerged. The grip on his teacup slackened, and Lucia hurriedly whisked it out of his hands and set it aside as she narrowed her eyes at Rereha, one blonde brow slowly ticking upwards.

Really? That expression said.

…All right, perhaps she could have phrased it a little differently to the man who was the bastard son of the last archbishop. Oh, well. She had committed to it, no time to backtrack.

Especially since Synnove had finally arrived, having been forced to take the stairs when Rereha commandeered the elevator up to the Lord Commander’s Seat to beat her there.

Her friend pelted into the office at full tilt, wearing an even wider, more manic grin than Rereha herself was sporting, Galette determinedly hanging onto her left shoulder and Ivar dangling from her right. She was still dressed for the cozy, well-insulated confines of the Arcanists’ Guild offices and laboratories rather than winter, never mind the everwinter of Coerthas: cotton shirt in storm grey under an unbuttoned deep green waistcoat, black slops rolled up to the knees, strappy sandals, everything wrinkled to the seven hells and back because she had been living out of her office for a sennight (again). The bags under her gleaming green eyes were dark and huge, and the thick plait of hair down to her waist was nearly half undone and ghostly-hued from constantly running her chalk-covered hands through it.

Synnove was a godsdamned mess, but for all that her grin was dangerously manic, her overall expression was radiant, easily able to outshine the sun.

The Highlander swerved around Rereha to smack first into Lucia. The Garlean yelped in surprise as Synnove lifted her off her feet in a bear hug, no small feat considering Lucia was taller by a few ilms and also wearing full formal plate. (Galette headbutted Lucia sympathetically.) Synnove set her down again and gave her a loud, smacking kiss on the cheek—Lucia blinked rapidly, too stunned to respond as she stumbled and recovered her balance—and then turned her attention to Aymeric.

She did a brief twirl on the ball of her right foot—the carbuncles made distressed noises at this: Mommy, please stop with the spinning/Mama, nooooo not again—and came to a stop next to Aymeric, grinning down at him like a lunatic. He briefly glanced at her (flat) stomach, then up at her beaming face, mouth working soundlessly as he tried to regain his ability to speak. Before he could manage that, however, Synnove grasped his face in her hands and swooped down to kiss him. Aymeric flailed helplessly for a moment in shock, then gripped her elbows and went limp and—wow.

Lucia coughed and glanced away and up, finding a particular spot on the ceiling of great interest, a light blush on her cheeks, while both Galette and Ivar recoiled and loudly gagged. Rereha wolf-whistled and applauded, impressed but also surprised. Godsdamn, Synnove. That officially outdid every filthy kiss described in any of the trashy romance novels Rereha had ever read, and she had read a lot of trashy romance novels in her life.

(Also, if she was focusing on that, she wasn’t focusing on her sister-by-choice with said sister-by-choice’s tongue down her lover’s throat, ugh ew ew ew grosssssss.)

Synnove drew back, leaving Aymeric stunned and breathless and gaping like a fish at her as she did another, more energetic twirl. (Lucia ducked around Aymeric’s chair to the other side of the desk to avoid getting smacked by flying carbuncle tails, or potentially flying carbuncles as they struggled to hold on and whined in protest.) She raised her arms, shouting, “I’m a fucking GENIUS!”

“Oh, Fury’s spear,” Lucia said in exasperation, “which laws of reality did you break this time?”

“Not broken,” Synnove replied cheerfully, “just bent!”

Rereha meandered over to the desk and stood up on tiptoe to grasp the edge. With a small grunt of effort, she pulled herself up and clambered onto the desktop, momentarily sprawling on her back and ignoring Lucia’s angry hiss as she disturbed the piled-up paperwork. “Our darling Synnove,” said Rereha primly, lacing her fingers together across her stomach, “has had a breakthrough on her artificial aetheric gemstone infusion process.”

“I’m a fucking genius,” Synnove said again, sing-song. “But I did have a little help…”

---

Synnove dropped into her chair with a soft groan of relief, shaking off her boots and kicking them into the space beneath her desk. She had made it back to Mealvaan’s Gate just in time to assist with getting all the storm shutters closed before the nor’wester hit Limsa Lominsa, and the wind now howled as it pushed through the city, so strong it was raining sideways. The skywatchers were reporting the storm would last another day, possibly two, and if the temperature kept dropping, they might even see a proper snowfall on Vylbrand for the first time in ten years. The Admiral had ordered the city shut down earlier in the day in advance of the storm, the harbor closed, and Limsa Lominsa had been eerily still as her citizens battened down the figurative hatches and got under cover.

The Gate was one of the best places to weather a storm, so Synnove would be camping in her office and living out of the mess hall, the same as many of the other arcanists who had homes outside the city and hadn’t been able to safely leave before the nor’wester struck. Her office at the top of the northeast tower was well-insulated, the Guild larders were well-stocked, and she had a freshly laundered pile of pillows and blankets with which to turn her couch into a nest or pillow fort. And, most importantly: she had treats.

She grinned and dragged the pastry box sitting at the corner of her desk towards herself. The second box full of goodies from her favorite Ala Mhigan café was safely stashed in a locked coldbox, and Galette’s phase-shift functionality disabled, so that box should hopefully last the remainder of the storm. Meanwhile, the carbuncles were enjoying their individual spoils from this first box: Galette was face down in a huge bowl of rose water malabi; Tyr’s muzzle was rapidly being stained purple by his blueberry papanaşi; and Ivar had an entire tray of Grisheld Reeve’s cinnamon and dragon pepper baklava all to himself.

Synnove wiggled her fingers in delight and opened the box, carefully removing the four squares of amandina cake that were alllllll for her and setting them on a clean plate fetched from beneath a pile of paperwork. She rummaged up a fork from one of her desk drawers, and was almost about ready to settle in. Now she just needed reading material.

She reached out to another corner of her desk, hooking her fingers over the edge of a wooden box full of tomestones and pulling it over. The box was neatly divided into sections for different types and she tapped her finger against the box’s rim as she considered the selection. There were the old standbys, full of compiled data on a random assortment of topics ranging from mathematics to gemology, but… Hm, no, something new. Lucia had, for Starlight, gifted her a set of tomestones one of her contacts had, ah, liberated from the laboratory of some chief engineer of one of the Garlean legions, Synnove couldn’t remember which one. Surely there was something on one of those that would pique her interest.

Lucia’s gifts weren’t on the top tray in the box, however, and Synnove lifted it to check the bottom one. Not those, nor those, but—ahah! There they were. She fished out three, set them aside, switched the trays so the bottom one was now on top, and dug out her tablet with the tome reader port from under another stack of papers.

(Perhaps she should do her paperwork instead?

…Nah.)

She clicked one of the tomestones into the port on her tablet and let the translation program run that would turn Old Allagan into a horrifying hodgepodge of Eorzean, Garlean, and Hannish for her to muddle through without needing two separate dictionaries and three grammar primers. (The Echo was useful most of the time, but it was absolute shite at turning highly technical Allagan textbooks into only equally highly technical Eorzean. Better to just read the things in the three scientific languages she knew to which the translator could find an accurate match somewhere.) As the program ran, Synnove resettled herself in her chair to sit cross-legged, and cut off a bite from one of the amandina squares with her fork to pop into her mouth.

Synnove closed her eyes and hummed as she slowly chewed. Mmmm. Layers of rich chocolate buttercream sandwiched between chocolate sponge that had been gently soaked in a caramel-rum syrup, all covered in a layer of almost ganache-like chocolate fondant. Auntie’s version used almond buttercream, but the Reeves’ version was just as good.

As she savored a second bite, her tome reader chimed a cheery little ditty—duhna na na na na na na-nana!—that Rereha had somehow managed to program into it, signaling that the tomestone had been fully translated. Synnove swallowed her cake and picked up the reader, thumbing to the menu.

The Journal of Mathematical Physics, volumes 101-200, from the Meracydian Institute of Physics.

Synnove gasped in delight and hugged her tablet. “Oh, fuck yes. Lucia, you are my new favorite person.”

The next few hours passed by quickly: reading the articles in each journal, occasionally gloating at realizing she or one of her colleagues had figured out a matter that had puzzled the ancient Allagans or frowning thoughtfully at new concepts and taking notes; nibbling intermittently on her cakes, rather than eating immediately one after another, so they lasted longer; breaking from reading, spine cracking unpleasantly from sitting hunched over for so long, to first clean her carbuncles’ faces of sticky sweets, then to head down to the mess for dinner; and finally cozying up on her couch in a nest of pillows with her tablet to continue reading, Tyr cuddling against her right hip and Galette and Ivar burrowing into her left. The last amandina cake was balanced on a plate on the back of the couch next to her head and the lights all turned on, casting a warm glow throughout her office, the arched gable of the tower ceiling lost in shadow.

Synnove hummed thoughtfully as she skimmed through volumes 144 and 145 of the journal. As with all academic treatises, some scientists were better writers than others, and the past few volumes of the journal hadn’t been bad, just…not very engaging. She flicked back to the menu and selected the table of contents for volume 146.

No, no, no, emphatically no, n—wait, yes. Yes, Roksana Blackspark, she had written a few articles in this collection of journals that were entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking; at least half the notes she had scribbled out were because of her. Shame she wasn’t as prolific as some of her colleagues, but that always seemed to be the case with the genuinely talented ones. And this article seemed especially promising: mapping aetheric polarity for spell customization.

She had the sneaking suspicion that sharing this one with the rest of the Guild would lead to some truly spectacular explosions.

Snuggling down into the cuddle pile with a gleeful chortle, Synnove reached for her plate of amandina, setting it down in her lap. (Galette’s nose twitched in her sleep, but she was too cozy and too full to properly awaken to investigate the sugar less than a fulm away.) Cake easily at hand, she began reading, picking up her fork without looking and cutting off another bite to eat.

Synnove was halfway through her cake when her face and hands went slack, fork and tablet both nearly dropping, and her jaw falling open as she stared at the tablet screen.

…What.

While the astral-aspected elements fire and wind have proven to be remarkably stable in self-maintaining neutral polarity, levin frequently skews too far towards astral—or even umbral, in rare cases—to be reliable at high voltages beyond explosive thaumaturgical uses. A similar problem exists with water and ice, which frequently skews too far to umbral, whereas earth aether will achieve polar equilibrium on its own.

The following equations take this lack of natural equilibrium into account when stabilization is required…

What.

“What the fuck,” Synnove said softly as she read, feeling as if she had been clubbed over the head by a gigas’s club. The equations bore a passing resemblance to classical aetheromagnetic theorems on polarization density, except completely turned on its head.

There was no way the problem with her aetheric infusion project was that simple. Swiving aetheric polarization. No. Swiving. Way.

And yet…

It was one of the most basic principles of magic, not just arcanima: astral elements and umbral elements. It was such an accepted, unquestioned foundation that she had never even considered that the three elements most commonly used by arcanists for their carbuncles were not all the same primary polarity. Every element could manifest as either polarity, but Roksana Blackspark was correct, now that Synnove properly thought about it: wind, earth, and fire were much, much more likely to be found in a stable state. Even the Guild’s enormous aether batteries, all the way down in subbasement twelve, had been initially tricky to install until they found the right combination of overgrown elemental clusters, with most of the problems coming from the water, ice, and levin clusters.

Of course trying to infuse any sort of gem with those three elements specifically was going to fail, they were fucking overaspected to astral or umbral. The equations didn’t fucking work as they should because they were built to account for elements that naturally occurred in stable states, and so the infusions fizzled and the gemstones cracked and no carbuncles could manifest.

But.

But if she did account for instability, or, in fact, deliberately found crystals with which to infuse gems that were of opposite polarities so that the final infusion was stable…

A new thought made itself known, and Synnove stuffed the rest of her cake in her mouth, set the plate and fork aside, bookmarked her spot in the journal, and opened up the note taking program, yanking the stylus from the side of the case. As she chewed, she began scribbling in frantic shorthand. Perhaps in addition to ensuring stable aetheric polarity, she could also try infusion over time as well? Even when artificially infusing emeralds, topazes, and rubies, the stones still cracked every one time out of eight. Certainly, working with water, levin, and ice aether would benefit from a slower infusion speed, as it would allow her to keep a better eye on maintaining polar equilibrium, and if that issue was what was affecting the failures for wind, earth, and fire, then that would be two problems solved.

…Perhaps three, Synnove sucking in a deep breath and her heart pounding as she wrote. A proper balance of aetheric polarization combined with a slow enough infusion potentially meant that she could, theoretically, infuse any precious stone she desired, not just ones with a specific hardness and durability. Of course, the equations would need to be further adjusted to take into account the specific chemical properties of the specific gems and how they would need to interact with different elemental aether, but that, while difficult and tedious, was still doable.

Synnove began to vibrate with excitement and she let herself indulge in a wide, half-mad grin.

---

“Obviously I didn’t come up with the correct solutions immediately,” Synnove said, practically buzzing as she finished explaining, “but Roksana Blackspark’s equations proved an excellent starting point. And it WORKED!” She threw her arms up in the air again—Galette and Ivar groaned, once more nearly losing their grip—and danced in place, cackling.

Aymeric was slowly beginning to regain his color, though he was still a bit wide about the eyes and generally poleaxed in appearance. Lucia, not having had the shock of her life nor been snogged until her brain was a puddle, tilted her head thoughtfully, a smile slowly beginning to grow across her features. “And what,” she said, excitement coloring her voice, “did you use as a gemstone for proof of concept?”

“Gemstones,” said Synnove with unmistakable glee. She pulled up the left sleeve of her shirt and thrust her arm out towards Lucia, hand bent upwards. On her wrist, almost glowing against her bronze skin and the green aetheric ink of her tattoos, was the thin braided leather bracelet on which she kept the emerald, topaz, and ruby that were the foci from where Galette, Tyr, and Ivar manifested.

Two new additions hung from the well-worn braid: a pair of truly massive pearls, each perfectly spherical and equal in shape and size to one another, as big as the first phalange of Synnove’s thumb. One was black, with a gorgeous purple iridescence; the second was white with a lovely overtone of sky blue.

In showing off the pearls to Lucia, Synnove had inadvertently positioned her wrist almost directly in front of Aymeric’s face. He finally shook himself to full awareness, crossing his eyes to stare at the bracelet. He said, “Are those the pearls I gave you for Starlight?”

“Yes, they are!” Synnove chirped. “I hadn’t yet decided how I wanted to use them, and considering the oddity of their creation, I wondered if infusing them at the same time might produce interesting results.” She giggled in delight. “And it did!”

Rereha knew the pearls quite well: they had originally been in her mother’s collection before Shushuha sold them to Aymeric (at a friends and family discount, of course). They were properly twin pearls, found in the same giant clam at the estuary of the White Maiden where it emptied into the Strait of Merlthor at the Yafaem Saltmoor. They had a very odd aetheric signature, per Mama’s description (not quite water-aspected, not quite levin), and were unable to be separated more than six ilms before one or the other would…blink back to the side of its sibling. And the clam itself had been the only one still living in the bed: half of the clams in the bed, based on the decay reported from the divers who found the pearls, had been killed from ceruleum poisoning, runoff from the Battle of Silvertear Skies, and the other half had been warped beyond all recognition into the sickly orange crystal growths left by wild aether from the Calamity.

Mama hadn’t been able to sell the pair, no interested buyers in all the years she owned them. Ill luck pearls, supposedly. But Rereha had mentioned them off-handedly to Aymeric while he had been bouncing Starlight gift ideas for Synnove off her and Heron, and he had lit up at the description of them. Synnove, he reasoned, would be delighted by a pair of aetherically strange pearls, even if she couldn’t find an immediate use for them.

(He had been absolutely correct, too; Synnove had shoved the box containing the pearls under nearly everyone’s nose to show them off, squealing in excitement about how Aymeric had gotten them for her and let me tell you the story about them—)

“Twin carbuncles!” Synnove cheered. “I had to infuse them at the same time, so they each contain levin and water aether, but the black pearl absorbs levin more readily, and the white pearl more water.”

“So,” Aymeric said hesitantly, a hint of relief in his voice, “you aren’t pregnant, then?”

“What?” said Synnove, rearing back with a frown. “No! Why would—” She went from confused to unamused in a heartbeat and turned her head to level a poisonous glare on a certain lalafell. “REREHA.”

Ooooh, reverb. But not, I’m going to toss you from the top of the Mizzenmast and into the harbor, levels of reverb. More like, I’m not sharing any of Aunt Angharad’s treats with you.

Rereha shrugged and grinned at her, fairly confidently she wasn’t going to be grievously injured today and that if she was denied Ala Mhigan treats, she could just go to the source of them and make big, sad eyes until Angharad Greywolfe caved. “It’s me,” she said. “Since when have I ever passed up the opportunity to make the obvious joke?”

Synnove gave her a last, vicious look, before turning back to Aymeric with a smile. The elezen had his hand over his mouth, trying and failing to stifle his chuckle.

“Would you like to meet them?” Synnove asked.

“It would be my honor, my love,” Aymeric said fondly, Lucia nodding in agreement beside him.

The arcanist clapped in excitement, spinning on the ball of her foot (Galette and Ivar shrieked and scrambled to hold on), calling out, “Tyr!” and peering down—and stopped, frowning, at the lack of enormous topaz carbuncle by her side. She looked around quizzically. “Where’s Tyr?”

A muffled boof echoed down the hall, from the direction of the Congregation’s lift. Coming, Mama!

Synnove relaxed, bouncing on her toes, ignoring the upset whining of her other two carbuncles trying to stay on her shoulders. Rereha snickered and sat upright, settling herself to sit cross-legged on the edge of Aymeric’s desk.

A few moments later, Tyr trotted into the office, carrying a wicker basket in his mouth. Sorry, Mama, he warbled around the handle. He came right up to Synnove and sat down at her feet. I didn’t want to jostle the babies and had to wait for the lift.

“Aww, you’re such a good big brother,” Synnove cooed, leaning down to scratch behind his ears. Galette and Ivar rolled their eyes and muttered about mama’s boy while Tyr boofed happily, ignoring the two. While Synnove didn’t say anything, she did exaggeratedly shrug her shoulders, jostling her troublemakers; Galette and Ivar yelped, but subsided.

She took the basket from Tyr—who, free of his burden, gave a deep, brassy maow! of hello to Aymeric and Lucia—and set it down in front of Aymeric. “Ready to meet everyone, sweethearts?” she said, sing-song, leaning over the container. (Galette and Ivar used the opportunity to scramble fully onto her shoulders; Galette sat primly, carefully balanced, while Ivar flopped on his belly so he was draped over his perch.)

Two excited cheeps came from inside the basket, only slightly muffled by the wicker. Yeah!

Synnove removed the basket’s lid with a flourish.

A soft green blanket was immediately revealed, under which two forms wriggled. Two little noses poked from beneath the cloth, twitching as the carbuncles to which they were attached scented the air. Then, peeping in excitement, they burst out into the open, pulling themselves up to stand braced on the rim of the basket. HI!

Rereha had, of course, already seen them, but she couldn’t help clasping her hands together and turning into a lump of lalafell mush, even as Lucia gasped in delight and Aymeric visibly melted. The baby carbuncles—and she needed to come up with a cute moniker for that concept; carbunkit? Carbunclet?—were tiny, just big enough for each one to sit comfortably in Synnove’s hands when she cupped them together. They were round and squishy, like a cross between oversized marshmallows and Heavensturn mochi, their legs still stubby and paws itty-bitty, and had yet to grow into their ears and tails: the former were as long as their bodies, and the fluffy trios of the latter as big as the rest of their bodies.

And they weren’t just cute, they were pretty. One was a fathomless black, like the inky depths of the ocean, but as its fur caught the light, it iridesced with an amethyst overlay. The other was the pure, perfect white of midsummer clouds, with the winter sunlight streaming into the office drawing out flashes of blue. The only other spot of color on either was the traditional red triangle cap between their ears and above their huge black eyes.

The twins trilled another high-pitched greeting. HIIIIIIIII!

Synnove, beaming fit to burst, said, “Aymeric, Lucia, I’d like you to meet Amandina and Roksana.” She gently booped the black carbuncle first, then the white one, right between their ears. Amandina wiggled her ears, squinting her eyes closed happily, and Roksana tilted her head back to yip a quick hi mommy! before turning her attention back to the people in front of her and her sister, excitedly waving a paw.

“Roksana, I can understand, but Amandina?” Aymeric laughed, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh, shush, you, there’s precedent,” Synnove snarked back and jerked her thumb at Galette, who puffed out her chest in response. “It’s not as if it’s a well-known Abalathian dessert, either, I can get away with another dessert-named carbuncle.”

Rereha leaned over to stage whisper, “And she would have named Roksana ‘Lucia,’ but in Gyr Abania, it’s bad luck to name someone after a person who’s still among the living.”

Synnove nodded, smiling, even as Lucia blushed with pleasure and said wonderingly, “They’re so small.”

“That’s intentional,” said Synnove, petting the carbunclets (Rereha liked that term best so far) again. They both emitted squeaky purrs, still learning how to make the sound. “The aether infusion needs to be very slow to prevent damage to their pearls, so they currently have just enough to manifest. I’ve put in a request for more water and levin crystals acquired from elemental sprites, but it will be a while before I have the requisite amounts to get them to full size, never mind be combat capable. So, for now: baby carbuncles!”

The twins cheered.

Rereha muttered under her breath, “Carefully programmed to be actual hypothetical carbuncle babies, not just carbuncles in miniature…”

Synnove reached out to attempt to smack her upside the head. Rereha, however, using the knowledge acquired from twenty plus years of friendship, rolled backwards off the desk, catching herself on the edge with both hands as Synnove’s arm whiffed through empty air, then pulled herself back up onto her perch with a smug grin. Aymeric coughed to disguise his laugh while all five carbuncles giggled. Synnove huffed and rolled her eyes, but a smirk twitched at the corner of her mouth.

“And now for the rest of the introductions…” Synnove pointed to Lucia, whose expression had steadily become more and more besotted the longer she stared at the tiny carbuncles in their basket. (Reasonable: the babies were obscenely adorable.) “This,” Synnove said to the twins, “is Lucia! She gave me the tomestone that ultimately helped my breakthrough on aetheric infusion.”

Amandina and Roksana cheered again, tapping their paws excitedly on the edge of the basket. HI, AUNT LUCIA!

Lucia made the tiniest, girliest squeal Rereha had ever heard, not just from the woman in question, but ever period. “Oh, hello, sweethearts,” she cooed. She took off one of her gauntlets and held her bare hand out to them; they immediately headbutted her fingers, cheeping happily, and she smiled so hard her face must have hurt as she gently pet first Roksana, then Amandina. “Aren’t you just the most precious darlings.”

The twins preened as Synnove chuckled and gently stroked them between their ears. “And this,” she continued, pointing to the Lord Commander, the babies obediently swiveling their heads to follow, “is Aymeric! He’s the one who gave me your pearls.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Amandina, Miss Roksana,” Aymeric said, at his most charmingly formal as he smiled down at them.

The babies blinked up at the elezen. Tilted their heads back to look at Synnove. Looked back up at Aymeric. Back at their mama. Up at Aymeric. Looked at each other.

Rereha would swear up, down, and sideways that in the split-second they exchanged glances, those two suddenly wore expressions that could out-do Galette while channeling her Garuda-egi subprogramming at her most demonically mischievous. Galette herself peered down at the pair, perturbed, one ear cocked upright and the other sideways in a perfect ninety-degree angle, while Ivar narrowed his eyes suspiciously at them. Tyr burbled a questioning little maow.

The twins turned back to Aymeric, their faces all sweetness and light once more, and chirped, in chorus, HI, PAPA!

Lucia and Rereha, in unintentional unison, slapped their hands over their own mouths, staring first at the baby carbuncles, before slowing turning to look at Synnove and Aymeric. Synnove and Aymeric, meanwhile, both froze, their minds clearly screeching to a near-audible halt, smiles still locked in place but their eyes widening to almost impossible proportions in shock. Deep, fluorescent blushes crawled up both their faces; Aymeric’s ears practically glowed. Amandina and Roksana started bouncing up and down excitedly, shaking the basket, their ears wiggling and tails twitching, while their delighted yipping chant of hi papa hi papa hi papa hi papa echoed through the office and probably down the corridor.

Ivar made an absolutely disgusted noise, covering his ears with his paws in an attempt to drown out his baby sisters. Galette and Tyr, meanwhile, exchanged a very thoughtful look. Galette flicked an ear. Tyr nodded.

Then they, too, swiveled their heads to look at Aymeric, and proceeded to join the chanting with unrepentant glee: Hi, Papa!

Ivar groaned. No. No, I refuse. His siblings all ignored him, simply chanted louder.

Synnove and Aymeric were flushed so red it was beginning to appear painful. Aymeric made a strangled noise in the back of his throat as he dragged his gaze upward to meet Synnove’s. Synnove opened her mouth to say something, jaw working furiously, but all that came out was a high-pitched squeak.

Rereha and Lucia made the mistake of glancing at one another out of the corners of their eyes. As soon as their eyes met, they both broke, Lucia sputtering and snorting, bringing her other, still-gauntleted hand up to her face in an attempt to muffle the sound of her undignified laughter. Rereha, of course, had never had any dignity, and just threw back her head to ugly cackle like a hyena.

Finally, Aymeric managed words, strained as they were—but with the shock was mixed equal parts delighted laughter and joy: “You’re the one who breaks the news about this to your aunt.”

Synnove squeaked again.

Rereha cackled harder.

And the carbuncles—sans Ivar, still moaning in disgust—kept chanting, Hi, Papa!

#final fantasy xiv #ffxiv #aymeric de borel #aymeric x wol #aymeric x synnove #lucia goe junius #oc: rereha reha #oc: synnove greywolfe #synnove's carbuncles #dt's writing #IT'S DONE #HALLELUJAH

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queenmuzz · 5 years ago

Text

Deep Blue Sea; Chapter II: Steel Grey

A bit of a wordy chapter today. The full story is also available on Ao3 for easier reading

******

You attempted not to look too eager as you walked up the stairs to the stage as your name was called, to receive your diploma. Ten years of hard work, sleepless nights, typing up essays, studying, and research had finally paid off to reward you with your ultimate reward: a PhD in Marine Biology. Of course, you knew you had it easier than most, bankrolled by your wealthy father, you never needed to worry about going hungry and studying, or risking a fail mark in order to deliver pizzas or something.

But you couldn't help but feel proud, you'd finally done it! You'd been wanting to study Marine Biology since you were a little girl, especially when you found out that there were creatures that lived even in pitch darkness on the ocean floor. What amazing discoveries must be waiting for you down there! Of course, you were realistic in that you'd probably never be able be the crew member of ALVIN, or any of the other deep-sea-submersibles, but your assistance would be invaluable to understanding the farthest edges of earthly exploration.

You paused for a moment while the Dean handed you the parchment, and you stared out at the the crowd. The lights shining down on the stage made the audience completely invisible, but the flash of camera lights from a certain section was a good indication where your family and loved ones were. You posed and smiled for their cameras for a few moments, before getting off the stage, terrified you were going to trip on your long flowing robe. So you sat down and politely clapped as each of your fellow graduates had their moment in the spotlight.

After the ceremony, it didn't take long for you to find your guests sitting right where you guessed they were. Your parents, as per usual, were sitting as far as part as possible, but had remained civil to each other, so that was good. Between them sat Sarah, your best friend, and... Frederick, looking as dapper as always, yet nervous as hell. You'd met via your dad's business connections, he was the son of a wealthy fish processing company that your father did regular business with. You always sensed that both your and his parents were gently nudging you to be with each other. Fredrick (never Fred, always the full name) always seemed to be invited to gatherings that your mother or father arranged, and vice versa with his parents and you. So, eventually... you both started dating, much to the delight of everyone. He was pleasant enough, always a gentleman, but there was something missing...

“I'm so happy!” Your mother placed her hands on both of your cheeks and squeezed to an almost uncomfortable degree. “You've done it!”

“Now, now Carolyn, let the girl breathe, she's had a busy day today.” and your father pushed her aside (earning a slight scowl from his ex-wife) before enveloping you in a big hug. “You've made me a very proud father today. I know I can expect great things from you.” He pulled away and joked, “Now, you can work on that Bachelor's degree in Business.”

“Charles!”

“It was a joke, Carolyn”

“OHMYGAAWD! THIS IS AWESOME! Now you can tell people to address you as 'Doctor'!” Sarah screeched as she nearly bowled you over.

“Yes, because I spent a decade of my life just so I could get 'Dr.' on all my stationary,” you remarked dryly.

“Oh yeah, we better get on that. You could design a whole new template!” she replied, completely oblivious to your sarcasm. You loved her to bits, but sometimes... you wondered about her.

Fredrick pulled you away from her into a polite embrace and a chaste kiss. “I'm so happy for you, my dear. You've finally achieved your dream” his smile was sincere and you couldn't help yourself from pulling him closer to you. Having him near you made the rest of the bustle of the world dim slightly.

But of course, things like this could never last, as your father's voice intruded..

“As much as I'd like to stay here and celebrate, I've made reservations at Figaroni's in an hour. We should be able to beat the traffic and get there in time.” Semi-reluctantly, you separated from your boyfriend, and the five of you made your way out of the auditorium past the multitude of families of every shape and size, each celebrating the achievements of their loved ones.

*****

“Ever since I've known you, you've always been in love with with mermaids” Sarah said, standing up and regaling the table with an embarrassing tale disguised as a toast. This had to be her third drink, if the fact that the champagne sloshed a bit from side to side indicated anything. “Brittany was known as 'horse girl', Jessica was known as the 'Ballet girl',” and you,” she grinned, “you got the name of 'Mermaid girl' once Timothy got a hold of your note book, filled to the brim with mermaid drawings.”

She wasn't wrong, you'd had a lifelong fascination of anything mer-related since your childhood. Mermaid figurines, mermaid dolls, mermaid movies were things you were obsessed about Of course, everyone thought it was one of your endearing quirks. But no one knew the real cause of your fascination with them....and to be truthful, you weren't sure you were, either.

“That's not a bad thing!” she clarified “Because of that obsession, you've pushed yourself to greater, and greater heights, and now...” she dabbed her eyes with the linen napkin as she sniffled “I'm so happy I got to see your entire journey. A toast to your future, and I hope it will be 'fin-filling'!”

Polite 'Hear Hear's', and the clinking of glasses followed, and you took a tiny sip of the bubbly drink. In truth, you were ready to go home. Usually you preferred the solitude, only shared by close friends and family, and only for a limited amount of time. But this was an exception, and you would deal with it, just for tonight as you smiled politely at your guests. Your mother and father had been on their best behaviour, even if they were sitting on the opposite sides of the table, separated by Fredrick's parents. You weren't quite sure why they had been invited, but they had been polite guests, and provided the social lubricant to keep the friction down between your parents.

Fredrick's father slapped his son's back, “It's your turn, my boy.” he said with a sparkle in his eyes. Hesitatingly, Fredrick got up, and licked his lips “So, uh...I met you back at one of your mother's charity fundraising dinners, to be fair...I don't even remember what it was about. It really wasn't that important in hindsight it seems. But what I do remember was the moment I met you, and that gorgeous blue dress you wore. And how you were able to discuss topics about practically everything. When you said yes when I first asked you out, I thought I was the luckiest man in the world.... but..uh.. I think I was wrong...”

Your throat closed, and your eyes grew to the size of teacups as he got down on one knee. You could hear the sound of cell phone cameras being whipped out and pictures being snapped. Even the surrounding tables quieted down to observe you. You were beginning to understand why your father hadn't booked a private room, like he usually did for dinners out. He wanted the spectacle.

Fredrick pulled out a black velvet box and it opened it, revealing an obscenely large jewelled ring. You could barely see the gold underneath the beautiful assortment of light pink diamonds.

“Will you now...” he said, “make me the luckiest man in the world?”

You stared, your tongue caught in your throat. You felt the eyes of the table, the restaurant, the world on you...and you knew how you should should answer, but did you really commit to this man for the rest of your life?

The air was pressing down on you as you struggled to answer. Any longer and it would get intolerably uncomfortable

“I... yes... of course... I'd .. love to...!”

And with that, the entire place burst out into cheers, and Fredrick pulled you into a passionate kiss. This was supposed to be the happiest time of your life so far....

So why did it feel so wrong?

*****

By the end of the meal, you were frankly exhausted, and you were happy that your father offered to drive you home, alone After saying farewells to your mother, friend, fiance and future in-laws, you made your way to your dad's car.

You were less than pleased to see a well dressed, yet unsavoury looking individual standing by the car door. Your father seemed more than delighted to see the man.

“Ah, Doctor, apologies for making you wait so long, it's been quite an eventful day.”

“None needed,” he smiled, a bit too widely for your comfort. He turned “By the way, congratulations on your impending nuptials” Did everyone know about your engagement before you did?

You politely shook his hand, as your dad made the introductions. “Sweetheart, this is Dr. Griffon, a marine biologist I've been doing business with. He's been highly helpful with the surprise I've been planning for you.”

Your eyebrows raised questioningly, you had known your father had been renovating (with your permission) your house the past few months as an upcoming present for your graduation, but why did he need the help of someone such as this doctor?

“You'll see very soon, and I think you'll love it..” your father murmured as he held the door open for you.

You all got into the black Mercedes-Benz E-class (your father had just recently purchased yet another one... the man loved buying luxury cars like you love mermaid themed stuff), with you in the front passenger seat, and the Doctor sat in the back.

As you drove off, your guest attempted to make some small talk with you, “So, what are you specializing in, my dear?” “I'm planning to study deep sea life, there's so much we don't know about down there,” you responded politely.

His hands clapped together in glee, “Oh good, a fellow lover of the quest for the unknown! You'll have a banquet laid out for you”

“And you, Dr. Griffon, what's your area of focus?” you asked, truthfully intrigued. The Marine Biology community, even worldwide, was rather small, and it amazed you that you'd never heard of this man. Hopefully your father wasn't being swindled about a con artist.

“Ah, I'm in a rather niche area of study, focused mainly on what the general population terms as 'Cryptos'. For example, creatures such as the Loch Ness monster, although I prefer the ocean based versions, as opposed to freshwater.” He looked at your obviously doubtful face, and smiled. “Ah, I've seen that look a thousand times, but trust me, you'll understand soon.” You wanted to ask more questions, but you resigned yourself to relaxing into the leather seats.

“I'm so proud of you today, sweetheart” your father spoke after a few minutes of silence. “Well, I've been wanting to do graduate into this field for so long, it feels like the end of a journey, and the start of new one...”

“Oh yes, that.. of course, getting your degree is wonderful and all, but I was talking about your engagement. Fredrick's a good match for you, and together I know you'll be able take over the business when I retire. In fact,” he said as he pulled onto the private driveway that led to the family estate.” I was thinking you could spend the next year just relaxing, no pressure. All you would need to do is focus learning the ropes on how to run the business, and...of course, preparing for the wedding. That's going to take a lot of work on your own, even with your mother constantly butting in.” “Ah...I don't know, I was really hoping to start work, there's a lot of offers I have to sift through, and there's a research vessel of the coast of Puerto Rico I was hoping to join...”

“Sweetheart,” your father interrupted, as he pulled into your driveway. “I understand you're eager to put all your knowledge to good use, but you deserve a break, especially with all the upcoming excitement. Look, I'll pay for all your living expenses for the year, and after that,” he turned off the ignition, “You'll be able to focus on your profession, all refreshed”.

You sat there for a second, thinking of his offer, it was very generous, but... you had really wanted to start the journey about studying the newest discoveries on the sea floor... but your father's business, the thing he had carefully crafted to give to you...” “Alright,” acquiesced, and your father grinned as he ruffled your hair.

“Excellent, you've made your old man proud... now... for that surprise. I need you to close your eyes....”

You felt him lead you gently up the steps, heard him jangle the keys, and as you struggled to take off your high heels, (so thankful you didn't have to wear them for a while, your feet were killing you), he gripped your hands as he led you down the living room... “Alright, open your eyes.” and the sight that unfolded you took your breath away.

Replacing so much of your admittedly massive living room was an aquarium. No, an aquarium was an understatement. You'd have mistaken it for an Olympic sized swimming pool, if it weren't for the fact that there was glass panels allowing a full view of the water, as well as an assortment of fish, rocks, and coral. A miniature ocean habitat. You pressed yourself against the glass, your eyes darting this way and that.

“This...this is wonderful! Thank you so much, dad!” you embraced your father.

“Ah...” the Doctor butted in “All of this pales in contrast to the main attraction...although it doesn't seem to be friendly right now...” his eyes surveyed the scene, before his eyes lit up and he pointed to a craggy rock. “There it is... watching us from behind the rock.”

Your eyes followed his finger to the said mentioned rock, and your breath momentarily stopped. There, glaring at the three of you was a pair of piercing grey eyes... a human torso, connected to a dull grey fish tail....a real live merman.

“Is that...” you struggled to form a coherent sentence.

“It is indeed, one of the few ever documented, let alone captured alive, you are a very lucky woman” the Doctor crossed his arms, obviously proud of his achievement. “Your father's help in acquiring it will have my undying gratitude.”

“I'm just glad it's no longer a threat to my ships.” your father grumbled “nearly a dozen of the company's vessels damaged by it, and one sunk...” he paused and looked at the Doctor, very seriously. “You are certain it won't be a threat to my girl? It was extremely hostile to everyone so far”

“I assure you” Dr. Griffon smiled, “I've spent decades researching these creatures, I know how they can be controlled. It won't lay a finger on your daughter, if it knows what it's good for it.”

“Does he have a name?” you interjected, feeling uncomfortable at how this conversation was going.

“I've been calling it 'Angelo' as it is a rather ethereal creature... although in hindsight, Diablos would have been a better name. Until it was restrained, it was a fiendish creature...”

“He hasn't told you his name?” you asked, perplexed.

“My dear,” the Doctor said patronizingly, “It doesn't speak, they don't have the intelligence to, besides,” his hand tapped the thick glass. “Even if it could, you'd never be able to understand it. I do believe that they have some rudimentary form of communication, perhaps via colour change. When it was first captured, it's scales were a bright blue. Unfortunately, it seems to have gone a sickly off white, which I can't understand... his vitals are within normal range”

He can talk, I know he can! You wanted to scream back at them, but you bit your tongue, preferring to remain polite and silent.

It didn't take a Marine Biologist to see that he was in some sort of emotional distress. The defensive posture, the way he attempted to hide, and the hate in his eyes. The hatred blazed out at your father, the Doctor, and even you. It was obvious to you, but neither of elder men seemed to notice anything. They saw 'it' as merely yet another fish, albeit an extremely rare one, one without any emotions, just the will to survive. As your father discussed... something, you kept your eyes locked on him. Had he been a human, going by his torso, he'd probably push six feet, but with the long flowing tail, he almost reached seven and a half. And despite your disdain for the doctor, he was correct, he looked healthy, although the bags under his eyes might mean he'd been sleep deprived. Not that you could blame him. What emotional turmoil had he been going through, for ...how long? You'd heard rumours of an inordinate amount mechanical failures of the ships for the past few months, but you didn't recall when they stopped, so focused on putting the finishing touches on your thesis. To be treated like an animal for any length of time would be torture...this 'gift' seemed worse and worse the more you thought about it. And his eyes, they glared at you, but now they were tempered a little bit with... fear? The mere thought he might fear you made you sick to you stomach.

“Sweetheart, are you listening?” your father asked, oblivious to your emotions. “Dr. Griffon is giving you important information on how to take care of it.”

“Now now,” the slimy old man smiled “I can't say I blame her for being fascinated with it, she's the only person in the world to possess one. If I only had the resources.... but your father has assured me that I will be able to take examinations of it on it's monthly check-ups. For it's health, of course... we wouldn't want such a marvelous specimen to sicken and die. Now, if you both would be so kind and follow me, I've got a notebook full of information to help you take care of it, as well as when the filters need to be changed....”

******

You approached the aquarium glass again, alone at last. It was almost midnight, and both the men had finally left, leaving you with an enormous book of notes that reminded you of being a freshmen in university again.... You'd perused only the basics, feeding and water temperatures, you would focus on the specifics later on.

He hadn't moved an inch since you'd left him, still glaring at you. Although, you noticed the fear was gone... that was good, you'd rather him hate you than fear you.

“Hello,” you cautiously said, introducing your name, and his pale eyebrows moved minutely... so he could at least hear you, that was a good sign.

“I don't believe them at all, I know you're not stupid, you're able to understand what I'm saying, and even talk....” you paused, this was a delicate time, you couldn't push him too much, “I'm not going to ask you to talk if you don't want to...I'm not going to force you to do anything you don't want to. I just... I just want to make sure you're okay...like is the water too warm or too cold? Is it too salty, or not enough? Or food... what do you like to eat? I can try to get you whatever it is you want, and while it might not be as fresh as if you got it from your home...”

There was no response, but his glare had softened, just slightly. You were hopeful, that perhaps some dialogue could be established.... perhaps he had been more talkative prior to his captivity.

“I'm going to sleep right there,” you pointed to your living room couch, “If you need anything....don't hesitate to tap the glass, I'm a light sleeper.” you hesitated for a moment, “I don't want to be your jailer, I want what's best for you”

A swing and a miss, you realized as his gaze hardened...and you decided retreat was the best option now. There would always be tomorrow...and the next day... and the next day...as long, and as much as it takes for you to learn to trust me...

And as you drifted off to sleep on the plush couch, you could still feel his steel grey eyes watching you.

#Devil May Cry #Vergil x Reader #Vergil #Mer!Vergil #Deep Blue Sea

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graciebirdie · 6 years ago

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The Sun The Moon and The Stars Chapter 7

Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6

me showing up with a new chapter of a fic i haven’t updated in like 10 months: i made this.

you guys: *reads it*

Wednesday morning was relatively quiet after the FBI had left. Deputies doing paper work for the most part. Peter was certainly glad he’d never felt the need to join law enforcement if this was what they spent the majority of their time doing.

He sat outside the station going back through the box of his favorite books on magic, both the theory and practice, to make a reading list for Stiles.

He could feel a migraine building above his nose and blamed the perfume someone had sprayed in the car. It was fading but still too strong for werewolf senses.

He’d been able to ignore it relatively easily the day before but even with all the windows rolled down it was starting to grate on his nerves. He missed his own car. It was an odd feeling to have considering he’d had so many different ones over the years. He enjoyed driving as many different kinds as he could, forever looking for the perfect one.

Out of all the cars he could have been thinking of, for some reason the car that came to mind was Talia’s boring and dependable four door soccer mom van. Every time he’d been forced to pick up her kids that was the car he had driven. He could still remember the distinctive scent of it. Pack-food-dirt-cigarettes. Laura’s bad attempt at teenage rebellion.

A creaking sound snapped him out of his thoughts and he realized he was holding onto the steering wheel tight enough his knuckles were white. If he held on for much longer he could easily break it.

He took a long deep breath and forced himself to let go. He was sick and tired of sitting around doing nothing and was still smarting over Stiles inadvertently humiliating him.

Obviously it was time for a bit of a change of pace. The Sheriff would be safe in the station for a few hours while the hunter’s were all being distracted by dealing with the FBI.

Peter drove the borrowed car back to it’s garage, strangely pleased he wouldn’t be needing it anymore but also a touch annoyed he hadn’t thought to do this before.

Peter ran across town to one of Beacon Hills’ self storage lots, the slightly more seedy one. He walked to the front gate, hoping his password still worked. After all, he hadn’t been inside in almost seven years.

He had had automatic payments set up through his personal bank account, the one the pack had known about. Even after almost seven years and being his Power of Attorney Laura haven’t touched it. No doubt she thought it was full of blood money instead of everything he’d made through legitimate work. It was even the account he paid his taxes out of.

The unit he went to wasn’t his only one and of course he had more than one bank account, more than one identity. He liked to be prepared for all different contingencies.

His password to the front gate did work and he ducked through the opening gate, easily avoiding the camera on his way in.

He walked down the road between units until he came to his. He didn’t have his key but he did have a lock picking set in his pocket for just such occasions. He pulled the set out and quickly popped open the lock and slid the garage door up enough to duck under before pulling it closed behind him.

The unit was stuffed full of moving boxes and right in the middle of the organized mess was Peter’s newest car. The one he’d bought just a few months before the fire.

He’d put the car and the boxes in storage only two weeks before the fire. Talia had finally pushed Peter over the edge and he’d been all set to move out of the pack house and into an apartment full time.

He’d had a small one bedroom he rented for when he couldn’t stand to be around the pack, usually only spending a night there every few weeks, but Talia had started to push Peter harder and harder to fully conform to her ideals.

He and Talia had always butted head, fighting over everything from the colors of the living room walls to how to dispose of threats to the pack. They had usually been able to come up with some sort of compromise.

The move had been a compromise. Peter would still have been at Talia’s beck and call but he’d at least have a sense of freedom.

Now he had all the freedom he had ever wanted.

He crouched down to inspect the preservation runes drawn on the floor.

The runes were supposed to keep the unit in exactly the same state it had been the day he’d drawn them. The crystal that was the power source for the runes was still glowing very faintly so he knew so long as the runes were intact everything inside would been as good as new even after years of sitting untouched.

The little tiger’s eye next to the crystal was also glowing softly and Peter smirked, pleased that the witch he had bought them from hadn’t been lying when she’d told him they could last for years.

While the crystal was the power source the tiger’s eye was there to keep the mice out of Peter’s clothes, with the added bonus of keeping other people out too. Even if the payments had somehow stopped no one would have been able to get inside the unit and there were a few other runes beside the preservation one to make sure that no one would have noticed the lack of payments if it had come to that.

He flicked the tarp that was covering the car off to admire it full and lightly ran his fingers over the sparkling green paint of his 1969 Gran Torino. It wasn’t exactly his type or color but he’d seen it at a vintage car show and had been mesmerized by the way it sparkled in the sunlight. He’d had to have.

He wandered around the car, wondering what had happened to his other cars. He’d had three in the garage at the house. He’d grudgingly allowed other pack members to borrow them, in exchange for favors. Usually just picking the kids up from school so he wouldn’t have to, sometimes taking his turn to make dinner when he was too busy with work.

He shock his head, dispelling such maudlin thoughts. The pack had been dead for years now. It was time to move on, on to something better. Stiles’ was going to be more than the pack had ever been and that was really all Peter needed now.

He looked over the boxes and wondered if there was anything in that he would need. Stiles had taken Peter’s jacket, there should be another one somewhere.

He moves the boxes around until he found one labeled winter clothes and smirked at it. He remembered one of the jackets in it vividly. It would be perfect. And if he ran into Derek while wearing it it would make an amusing declaration. His finger’s brushed supple leather and he pulled it out of it’s box. He held the jacket up and grinned at it. “Perfect.”

***

He drove his own car back to the station, smirking the whole time over how well the runes had kept the car and the gas in it in perfect condition.

He settled in to keep watch, in a considerable better mood than he had been since the need to keep watch had started. He’d even found some more books on magic that he’d recently bought. Or rather, bought just before the fire had happened, making it so that he hadn’t had the change to read them yet.

He half read his books and half watched FBI agents slowly bring in hunter after hunter through out the day.

After hours upon hours of waiting he finally heard the Sheriff say something relevant to him. “Well I’m off. I think I’m going to have dinner with my kid.” his tone suggested he was attempting to drop a subtle hint to someone. Peter suspected it was McCall the taller.

As Peter had thought McCall spoke next, sounding patronizing. “How nice for you that your schedule allows that.”

The Sheriff didn’t miss a beat replying “You’re right, it is nice.”

He didn’t wait for answer, instead calling out last minute reminders that the over-time budge was still maxed and to make sure that the FBI had all the assistance that they needed while he was gone.

Peter didn’t hesitate to tail the Sheriff back to his home and settle back down the street. There was a broken street lamp within his hearing range and he was fully intending to nap in the shadows while the Stilinski’s had their dinner and a quiet night in. But of course within minutes the Sheriff was deciding to have dinner out.

And Peter found out Stiles was grounded for some reason. It was incredibly amusing to think that it was because the Sheriff had found out about Stiles mixing with dangerous creatures of the night. It sounded like something his parents would have done to him, only in reverse. Peter had gotten in trouble more than once for attempting to corrupt poor innocent humans. He smirked as he remembered he hadn’t really changed much.

The Stilinki’s went to a tiny diner that was supposed to look like something from the 50s but just ended up looking kitsch and slightly rundown. Certainly, no place Peter was interested in going to. Although he was tempted to go in, just to see how Stiles would react. And the Sheriff too, for that matter. Peter thought the man had probably figured out about him at this point, and if not, it would be at least fun to watch the Sheriff’s face when he did work it out.

Maybe Stiles had even told him a bit about what had been going on, although Peter wasn’t sure when they would have had the time, he’d been watching the Sheriff like a hawk after all. He winced when he remembered he had been asleep at one point. Deeply enough asleep that Stiles had almost snuck up on him.

He pushed the thought away and saw to his delight that the little bakery next door to the diner was still open despite the slightly late hour. He parked and walked up to the bakery’s door to look at the times listed on it and blinked in confusion. The bakery didn’t even open until five in the afternoon and didn’t close until three in the morning. Which were, even for Peter, odd hours to keep.

Maybe the bakery was owned by an independently wealthy elderly person who liked working the night shift. He had certainly seen weirder establishments in his life. Although admittedly not in small town Beacon Hills. Either way, there were only two people inside and Peter was feeling a little hunger.

With a book under his arm he wandered in and ordered a sandwich and black coffee from the stoned looking college student sitting behind the counter. Her eyes were so red she could have passed for an alpha to an equally stoned werewolf.

He took his sandwich, coffee, and book and settled down at a little table in one of the front windows.

The only other costumer in the bakery was a man that had had either much more coffee than was advisable or was planing on robbing the place. He was practically jittering out of his seat and the stench of his anxiety was almost enough to make Peter leave. The tastiness of the sandwich was enough to make him stay.

Eventually the man left and Peter let himself actually pay attention to his book for a while. That was, until he caught the sound of the Sheriff’s voice outside. The tiny hint of concern in it was enough for Peter to jump out of his seat and out of the building, just in time to hear a gun shot.

He saw red and didn’t even try to stop himself from racing towards the sound of Stiles’ frantic screaming. He rounded the corner into an alleyway and there in front of him was gun powerder-blood-fear-Stiles’ fear.

Without hesitation he slammed into the man holding a gun. A gun pointed right at a very terrified and frozen Stiles who was still screaming.

He curled his hands around the man’s neck and wrenched. The man was dead so quickly he didn’t even get a final death rattle in. Peter was actually impressed that he’d managed to have enough restraint to just crush the would-be assassin’s neck and not completely decapitate him. Or tear his insides out.

He took several long deep breaths as he listened to the frantic but steady heartbeats of both the Stilinski’s in the ringing silence left behind once Stiles finally, finally quieted down.

Almost like a switch had been thrown Stiles’ heartbeat slowed and the fear scent was replaced by a numb calmness.

He was still visibly shaking, something that was only made more obvious when he pulled out his phone for it’s flashlight and tired to hold it steady while taking off his, Peter’s, jacket.

Almost on instinct Peter stepped closer, surprise that he was already standing. He didn’t remember standing up but he must have at some point.

Shrugging it off he took the phone from Stiles’ trebling and blood stained hand, holding it steady on where the Sheriff was taking off his own coat to study the long bloody gash on the back of his arm.

The Sheriff would probably be fine. The amount of blood told Peter that the bullet hadn’t hit any major arteries or entered his body. The fact he could move his arm at all was a good sign.

Stiles covered the Sheriff’s arm with Peter’s jacket, no doubt completely ruining the lining with blood. Blood that was filling the air and making Peter feel nauseous because, fuck, he’d almost let the Sheriff get killed, he’d almost lost every change he had at Stiles and it hadn’t even been a week.

“Peter.”

He felt his breath hitch and his spine straighten at how calm and commanding Stiles sounded. His voice didn’t tremble in the least as he asked Peter to call the police and get rid of the body. He didn’t even sound overly concerned that Peter had killed another person in front of him.

Stiles’ calm seemed to flow into Peter and he breathed easier. Stiles wasn’t mad that Peter had let the Sheriff get shot. Peter suspected Stiles didn’t even know about keeping his eye out for them.

The Sheriff, on the other hand, was looking at Peter with calculating and narrowed eyes but his protest against Peter taking the body was weak.

Dead body over his shoulder and an ambulance on it’s way Peter set off to make sure that if Peter got distracted again there wasn’t going to be any hunter’s around to take advantage of it.

***

Peter pulled up in front of the wear house the hunter’s had been using as a second base. He listened for a few minutes, a slow almost feral grin spreading over his face as the five remaining hunters fanatically tried to make contingency plans for in case their attempt on the Sheriff’s life didn’t pan out.

Peter had no idea why they thought killing the Sheriff would help their case when the FBI was in town but he wasn’t about to look the gift horse of panicked and disorganized hunter’s in the mouth. They were making sloppy mistakes and that would just make it easier for Peter to take care of them in one fell swoop.

He got out of his car and pulled the dead hunter of the trunk and over his shoulder again.

Without hesitation he walked right up to the side door of the wear house and knocked it down with one sharp kick.

The metal door made an ear splitting crash as it hit the concrete but Peter didn’t even blink. He throw the body down and smirked at the stunned hunters. “I think this belongs to you.”

The hunters all stared at him for a few more seconds, enough time for Peter to pick up the fallen door and use it as a shield against the hail of bullets that flew at him.

He rolled his eyes at how predictable hunter’s were, quickly sliding down the wall to the little office in the corner. The lack of plies of weapons inside the main part of the wear house told Peter that they were no doubt being kept there.

The door knob turned easily in his hand and he slipped in, crouching so the hunter’s wouldn’t be able to see him through the windows in the office that faced the main wear house.

He glanced around and grinned hugely at the box clearly labeled grenades. He pulled the top off the box and lovingly picked one of the grenades. “Hello lovely.” he cooed.

He propped the metal door against the wall to use as a makeshift barrier, pulled the pin out of the grenade, and thew it out the window towards the shouting hunters.

He curled up and pressed his hands tightly over his ears just before the explosion hit.

Unfortunately he underestimated how much damage a grenade could due and ended up with a thick wooden beam falling right on his head.

***

He woke up to a headache and the familiar feeling of being tied to a chair, his burning writs telling him the ropes had wolfsbane in them.

He sighed deeply.

“Oh? Are you finally awake?” Gerard Argent asked, voice full of grandfatherly interest.

Peter thought the it sounded disgusting, especially with the way it was making his head ache even worse.

He rolled his head up to squint at Gerard. “I so appreciate you waiting to kill me until I was wake enough to enjoy it.”

Gerard smiled at Peter and gave his knee a patronizing pat.

“Allison my dear,” Gerard called, beckoning the girl over from where she was leaning up against a charred wall.

Peter snarled as he finally realized where they were. Fury welled up inside, burning hotter and brighter and more painful than the fires that had taken his life away.

How dare they, how dare they, bring him back here.

He heard Allison gulp loudly, saw her start to visibly tremble, could smell her terror over the stench of smoke.

He snapped jaws that felt too big at her.

She stumbled away from him, loaded crossbow up but shaking too hard to be able to hit him if she let the arrow loose.

Gerard tutted at her and picked up the bright red gas can at his feet. It was the kind that didn’t come with a nozzle and he had to step closer to reach Peter with it. He uncapped it and plashed the disgusting liquid in Peter’s face. It splashed into his mouth and he gagged harshly.

Gerard stopped and grabbed a handful of Peter’s hair, tipping his head back. They stared at each other for a moment before Peter grinned at him and spit the mouthful of gasoline in Gerard’s face. He kicked out and knocked the can out of Gerard’s hand. It splashed over both their legs and the floor around them.

Gerard hummed thoughtfully and wiped his face off with a handkerchief.

Gerard’s hand shot out and caught Peter’s check but the slap didn’t even sting. Peter raised his eyebrow. “Is it your age or the cancer that’s taken all your strength?”

Gerard smiled and pulled a knife out of his pocket. He dragged the tip down Peter’s check and that actually did hurt because the gasoline dripped into the cut before it could heal.

Peter didn’t even blink.

Gerard smiled wider. “Allison sweetheart please bring me another can from the car.”

Allison didn’t move.

“If you were looking for another Kate I don’t think you found her.” Peter said, smiling at Allison.

Her hands trembled even harder.

Gerard sighed and sent her a sad look. “He’s right dear, your aunt would be so disappointed in you.”

Allison dropped the cross bow and doubled over, retching all over it and her shoes.

“Oh how the Argent’s have fallen.” Peter said mockingly.

Gerard sighed again before walking out of the run, presumably going to get more gasoline.

“Does your daddy know where you are?” Peter asked Allison conversationally.

She didn’t even look at him, too busy sniffling into her hands.

“After he forfeited his life just so you don’t have to go to jail this is how you’re going to repay him?”

That got Allison’s attention. “What the hell does that mean?” she asked, voice wrecked from tears and vomit.

“Oh come on Allison I thought you were smarting than that.”

She glared at him, trying to threatening but missing by a mile.

“Don’t you know what happens to hunter’s who betray their own?”

She slowly shook her head.

“They die, Allison.”

She let out a retched sob.

There was a creak of floorboards as Gerard stepped back into the room. He gave her a pitying smile and said “He’s always been too weak for our way of life sweetheart.”

She shook her head vehemently, looking at Gerard with pleading eyes.

He patted her on the head as he walked past her.

Gerard opened the second can and walked around the chair so Peter wouldn’t be able to kick him again.

He pored the gasoline over Peter’s head again and said conversationally “You know, it’s poetic really.”

Peter had no desire to listen to whatever gloating bullshit Gerard had to say. He tipped the chair back, he and Gerard going down with a crash. The chair was rickety and seemed to have barely survived the fire because it and the floor boards all collapsed under the impact.

Peter rolled to his feet to look down the hole where Gerard was laying in a heap of charred wood and spilled gasoline.

“You’re right.” Peter said quietly, pulling a lighter out of pocket. “It is poetic.”

He flicked the lighter open and watched the flame jump up his arm before he dropped the lighter down onto Gerard.

***

Peter laid on the grass next to the lake, staring up at the stars and trying to ignore the tight familiar feeling of healing burns.

Allison was sitting next to him and crying softly.

He was tempted to kill her just to shut her up but she had sprayed him down with a fire extinguisher when he’d been foolish enough to open a lighter with accelerate on his hands. Gerard might had been dumb enough to try and kill Peter with fire but he hadn’t been so dumb he’d forget the fire extinguisher.

Not that it helped him at all in the end.

But it had earned Allison a free pass to cry too loudly next to Peter.

There was the crunch of tires on gravel and a car pulled slowly up to the smouldering house.

“Allison?” Chris Argent called, voice sounding tremulous and stuffy, like he’d been crying too.

Peter rolled his eyes while Allison shot to her feet and ran to her father.

Peter carefully pulled himself up and brushed himself off, winching at the dull pain of the burn scars. They were healing more slowly than he would have liked but he supposed he should just be grateful that they were healing at all.

Argent was standing next to his car and holding onto Allison like he was afraid she was going to disappear like smoke while Allison held on to him just as tightly.

Allison was sobbing into his chest, repeating over and over how sorry she was while Argent shushed her and gently petted her hair.

Peter walked a bit closer, close enough Argent could see the sad state he was in and maybe take pity on him.

Argent stared him down and Peter gave a helpless shrug, winching exaggeratedly at the pull the move made on his scars.

“What happened?” Argent asked quietly.

Allison babbled out a story about Gerard taking her from their hotel room and telling her the only way he would forgive her and her father for giving statements against him was if she helped him kill the rest of the werewolves in Beacon Hills. But when they had gotten to the wear house base and found it mostly rubble with a few dead bodies and a very much unconscious Peter Gerard had been unable to resist. He’d taken both Allison and Peter to the Hale house, stopping along the way for gasoline, and Peter tuned out the rest of her story, he’d been there for that part after all.

“Dad?” Allison asked, obviously about to start crying again. “Is what Peter said true?”

Argent winced and gave Allison an awkward pat on the back. “Usually…the head of the family would say whether another member of the family should be killed.” he paused and gave her a slightly watery smile. “But considering we’re the only two…left maybe it would be for the best if we…”

He trailed off but Allison didn’t hesitate to finish the sentience for him. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Argent nodded and ushered her into the car. He stared at Peter for a moment before sighing and gesturing vaguely towards the car with his hand.

“Oh are you offering me a ride?” Peter asked, pressing his hands to chest and making a face of exaggerated shock.

Argent glared at him before saying “No.” and getting into the car.

They drove off and Peter fraught the urge to yell that he hadn’t wanted a ride anyway, just to get the last word in. It wouldn’t do him any good to try when Argent wouldn’t even be able to hear him.

Peter sighed and resigned himself to a long and uncomfortable walk back to his car. He just hopped it hadn’t gotten impounded while he was gone.

***

Not only had Peter’s car not been impounded no one had even called in the half caved in wear house. He shook his head in mock disappointment over how uninterested the residents of Beacon Hills had gotten.

He slipped into the driver’s seat and groaned loudly over the eventful night he’d had.

Peter glanced over to his old/new leather jacket sitting innocently on the set next to him and suddenly had a vivid sense memory of Stiles on his knees in front of him, bright red blood smeared on his face and shining in the half light. He grinned at the jacket and decided that just because he was fairly sure he’d solved the last of Beacon Hill’s hunter problem didn’t mean he couldn’t drop in on Stiles and his father and make sure they were alright.

***

He leaned up against the side of the house and listened to sound of the shower running and Stiles very softly, almost silently crying.

Fuck, but Peter had had enough of crying for one day. He was about to climb up to Stiles’ window when he heard the soft whoosh of it sliding open and looked up to see Stiles leaning out.

“Peter?” he called softly, his voice breaking in the middle of the word.

And, well, Peter wasn’t about to turn down an invitation like that.

***

Poor Stiles was stressed out, over tired, and under feed and if Peter didn’t like the Sheriff so much he might be tempted to kill him.

The Sheriff closed the door to Stiles’ bedroom the moment Stiles was gone. He turned to Peter and carfully crossed his arms over his chest, leaned his back against the door and raised an eyebrow. “What did you mean by that? He doesn’t have to worry about someone taking a shot at me?”

Peter smiled and it was all teeth. “Just that there wasn’t anyone else to take the shot.”

The Sheriff manged to look even more disgruntled. “And why is that?”

“They were, unfortunately, all of them victims of their own hubris.”

The Sheriff didn’t so much as blink.

“If you want a detailed description of what happened I suggest you ask Allison Argent.” Peter said with a smile.

That, the Sheriff did twitch at. He rubbed his hands over his face and groaned deeply.

“If it makes you feel any better you won’t have to take Gerard Argent to court now.”

The Sheriff groaned again, even louder, and swore under his breath for almost a solid minute. Peter was quietly impressed.

“Let me see if I understand this correctly,” the Sheriff started, staring Peter down almost threateningly. “You killed several hunters tonight and now you’re trying pin it on Allison Argent because you know she’s going to skip town without talking to me.”

Peter grinned. “You know, you’re a very clever man Sheriff Stilinski.”

The Sheriff just glared harder. “There are three reasons I’m not going to arrest you.” he paused for a moment before adding thoughtfully, “Or take the law into my own hands.”

Peter leaned forward eagerly.

“One, you’ve saved Stiles’ life twice now. Two, you’re a werewolf and Stiles says you could very easily escape from prison. And three, for some reason I don’t understand Stiles trusts you enough to leave me in a room with you alone.”

“Sheriff, I wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble I went through to keep you alive if I wanted to just kill you.”

He didn’t look impressed. “So you are my new stalker.”

Peter gave him an innocent smile, not trying to deny it nor surprised the Sheriff had noticed Peter following him around.

“I don’t…like this.” the Sheriff said haltingly. “I don’t…I don’t like any of this. But I know my son, and I know there is absolutely nothing I can do to keep him away from this. So. If you’re going to be hanging around Stiles you’re going to be stuck hanging around me too.”

John gave a decisive node and Peter gave him a huge Cheshire cat grin.

#hello i just wrote 4000 words in one night #my shit #my fics #the sun the moon and the stars #steter

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johnfkennedyjunior · 6 years ago

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Citizen Kennedy On the run from the press all his life, John F Kennedy Jr. joins the media pack. (September, 1995)

It is an overcast, chilly Friday, but the crowd in the ballroom of Detroit’s Westin Hotel is feverish. In the Adcraft Club’s ninety-year history, only Lee Iacocca has drawn more people to a speech. But today’s guest has set pulses revving faster than even Iacocca ever could.

Sighs (“I made eye contact with him!”) and whispers (“His jawline is perfect!”) and four burly guards accompany John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. as he circles the room to the blue-swagged dais. Women creep forward, their cameras flash-framing to capture that famous, evocative face.

After lunch, Phil Guarascio, the sleek advertising master of General Motors, takes the podium and ticks off the handsome young speaker’s accomplishments: his education at Brown University and NYU Law School; stints with the United Nations in India, with economic-development outfits in New York, and with the U. S. Attorney General’s Honor Program; his role in founding a group that helps educate health-care workers; and, most notably, his four years as an assistant district attorney in the office of New York City crimebuster Robert Morgenthau.

But it’s not his resume that’s brought this mob out to hear the thirty-four-year-old son of the country’s thirty-fifth president and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the eternal icon. It’s not even their moist interest in his celebrated romances with Daryl Hannah and other beauties. Nor is it to stare at the buffed pecs and thighs, often captured in Central Park grab shots by New York’s tabloids but today hidden under a dark, conservative suit. No, this crowd has come to learn about the future of the man they still think of as John John.

“I’m well aware of the expectation that sooner or later I would be giving a speech about politics,” he says. “So here I am, I’m delighted to say, fulfilling that expectation.” He speaks a bit more about his career, his prospects, his hope that he’ll do the right thing. Finally, the excitement building, he tells the crowd what it wants to hear.

“I hope eventually to end up as president,” says John F. Kennedy Jr. Three beats. “Of a very successful publishing venture.”

The nineteen hundred car and ad people explode into laughter and applause. They know that this charmer has come to their city to flack the riskiest venture of a pampered life indelibly marked by tragedy: a magazine he’ll launch in September about the family business-politics. More than a few of them will buy ad pages in the publication curiously named George (for George Washington), gambling that Kennedy’s sizzle will attract readers to a subject that Americans love to hate and have never much wanted to read about.

What they don’t fully realize is that they are present at the creation of the latest and most dramatic chapter of the Kennedy saga: a rite of passage of the family’s-if not America’s-crown prince. For much of his life, John F. Kennedy Jr. has been what he seemed-a dilettante, unable to commit to a woman or a career. Now he thinks he has found a way to fulfill his daunting genetic destiny-one that shows his sure grasp of what being a Kennedy is really all about. In his grandfather’s day, money was power. In his father’s day, politics was power. In his own day, media is power. By charging boldly into its realm, John Jr. may prove to be the most genuine Kennedy of his generation.

* * *

“DON’T LET THEM STEAL your soul,” Jackie Onassis would warn her children. John has seemingly spent the last dozen years trying to distance himself from the family legend. Until his full name turned into an advertising draw, he preferred to style himself simply John Kennedy, like at least a half dozen other New Yorkers.

For most people, the montage of images,, triggered by mention of this John Kennedy begins with the picture of a little boy saluting his father’s coffin on a gray November day barely within his memory’s reach. Ever since, he’s held himself a little apart. At the fashionable parties he frequents, he’s had a way of inching his back around to fend off the approach of strangers. That practiced self-protective instinct, the flip side of the intense attention he pays when he does decide to engage someone, has usually served to wall him off from unwanted overtures.

That wall was constructed, solidly and with great difficulty, by his mother. From the moment of her son’s birth by cesarean section on November 25, 1960, two and a half weeks after his father was elected president, the new First Lady tried to shield him and his older sister, Caroline. But President Kennedy didn’t play that way. He plainly understood how the image of a happy family could protect him, as it had his own father, from the consequences of his own philandering. So when Jackie was out of town, he’d contrive to sneak photo opportunities with the kids in the Oval Office.

President Kennedy was assassinated three days before his son’s third birthday. Within a year, Jacqueline Kennedy had created a new life for herself and her offspring in New York, where she later enrolled John and Caroline in private schools. The children became independently wealthy in 1968 when their mother married the squat Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. By the terms of President Kennedy’s will, a trust fund he’d inherited from his father passed to his children upon his widow’s remarriage. John H. Davis, a Bouvier cousin, believes that trust fund doubled in value during the sixties, leaving John and Caroline with about $10 million each.

Onassis helped shield the Kennedys from prying eyes and provided them with the money to support a lifestyle even more lavish than the one they’d experienced in the White House. But the billionaire degraded Jackie by blatantly continuing his longtime affair with diva Maria Callas. And when he died in 1975, he showed his contempt for her by leaving her, John, and Caroline a pittance in his will. An ugly legal battle with Onassis’s daughter, Christina, ended with a settlement that gave Jackie more than $20 million. Maurice Tempelsman, the diamond merchant who became Jackie’s consort in later life, helped her invest that money and plump her estate to somewhere around $100 million, Davis estimates.

The money didn’t free John Jr. from his family’s past and expectations-at New York’s Collegiate School, he was shadowed by Secret Service agents and regularly saw a psychiatrist-but his whispery lioness of a mother raised him to sidestep the family’s darker edge. His cousins might act like a pack of druggy Keystone Kennedys, Uncle Ted might screw and screw up, and Aunt Lee could wind up a fashion flack, but John and Caroline kept their heads down and emerged as decent, intelligent, modest, and good-natured young people.

* * *

POLITICS BECKONED early; public service had a strong plan on John. “He has a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility” his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said a few years ago. “Whenever any of the cousins need help on one of their projects-whether it’s the Special Olympics or the RFK Human Rights or journalism awards or the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation awards John participates.” He helped his cousins Joseph and Patrick Kennedy win House seats and pitched in on cousin Kathleen Kennedy Towns end’s successful bid for lieutenant governor in Maryland. He showed up in court for his cousin Willie Smith’s trial on rape charges. “He’s got a very strong sense of responsibility, but he’s not overwhelmed by it,” said Bobby Jr. “He’s very comfortable with it.”

Comfortable, perhaps, but strangely without passion. When Kennedy went to law school, he was following his sister and six cousins who had studied or were studying to become attorneys. Even his mid-1989 decision to become an assistant district attorney in New York tracked the family record: His uncle Ted had prepped for his first Massachusetts Senate race by serving as an assistant DA in Suffolk County. “John said his heart was never really in it,” says someone who served in the DA’s office with him. “He was doing it for his mother.”

While he waited for the verdict on his New York State bar exam, which Caroline had passed on her first try a few months earlier, John started work as a $30,000-a-year prosecutor. Although this was a competitive position, Bob Morgenthau’s office was also a hiring hall for famous sons. Andrew Cuomo, Cyrus Vance Jr., and Dan Rather Jr. have worked there, as have the sons of Rhode Island senator John Chafee, labor leader Victor Gotbaum, and New York City Council speaker Peter Vallone. So had John’s cousin Bobby Jr., before his resignation amid charges of drug abuse.

John was assigned to the Special Prosecutions Bureau, which handles low-level crimes ranging from corruption, fraud, con games, and check bouncing to arson and car theft. Kennedy was placed thereat first because “we clearly didn’t want him in the trial division,” says Mike Cherkasky, then chief of the DA’s investigative division. “We didn’t want the attention to distract him.”

That fall, John learned he’d failed the bar exam. “John didn’t take the test seriously,” says a fellow assistant DA. He learned he’d flunked a second time (by 11 points out of a needed 660 at the end of April. Although more than half of the other twenty-five hundred aspirants failed as well, only Kennedy was ridiculed on the front pages of the New York tabloids, all three of which used variations of “Hunk Flunks.”

Even so, John kept his cool. “I’m clearly not a major legal genius,” he said.

“He held up under unbelievable pressure,” says Owen Carragher Jr., his officemate at the time. John even kept smiling when a maitre d’ with wobbly English accosted him while he was having a consolation beer, and said, “I heard news you failed! I’m glad!”

Kennedy played his part in the public perception that he was a lightweight. He made his first courtroom appearance as a witness in a case against an immigration officer who’d been charged with making illegal raids and pocketing confiscated money only to have to admit that he didn’t know the title of the landmark Supreme Court case that made the Miranda rights part of every cop’s lexicon. Even after Kennedy laid out $1,000 for a six-week bar-review course, it wasn’t clear that he cared about the exam, especially after he was photographed “studying” poolside at a Los Angeles hotel. But he did pass, earning a $1,000 raise and the right to try cases in court. In his first solo prosecution, he went up against a burglar who was caught asleep in his victim’s bed, his pockets stuffed with her jewelry. He eventually graduated to bigger cases involving Mafia families, labor racketeering at a big newspaper, and construction fraud, but one state-supreme-court judge before whom he’d appeared said, “I don’t think he had the potential to be a great trial lawyer. His passion lies elsewhere.”

Eventually, he won a share of respect from bosses and coworkers. “There’s a premium on certain intellectual as opposed to advocacy skills in investigations,” says Cherkasky. ` John fit that.” Working on what’s called “intake” once a month, interviewing complainants off the street, he proved a natural at getting people to open up and at judging when they were telling the truth.

After two and a half years in the DA’s office, Kennedy transferred to a trial bureau. “He wanted something quicker,” says Carragher. “He wanted the action. He wanted to do a trial where the defendant wasn’t asleep.”

In his first case in the trial bureau, he prosecuted two men who’d run a chicken stand in Harlem that burned down just after they took out fire insurance. An accelerant had been lit with a match in the store, but the evidence against the owners was circumstantial, and the only witness was a felon who didn’t want to testify. Kennedy extracted the testimony he needed during a complex, three-week trial. “It was a loser and John won it,” says Carragher.

That, and others. In four years as an assistant DA-a year longer than the normal term of service-Kennedy had a perfect 6-0 conviction record. A political career now seemed logical. When Kennedy had introduced Uncle Teddy at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, he’d electrified the delegates by invoking his father’s name. “So many of you came into public service because of him,” Kennedy said in a prime-time speech. “In a very real sense, because of you, he is with us still.” The two-minute ovation that followed seemed a fitting kickoff to his first campaign.

During John’s law-school years, he and several friends had convened weekly “issues meetings,” sessions that Bobby Kennedy Jr. characterized as “just a private thing that he does.” Might they lead to elected office? “It’s something that, you know, you never say never and it’s obviously a source of interest, but I’ll just see,” John equivocated shortly before quitting the DAs office. “I don’t really know.”

* * *

JOHN MAY HAVE OWED at least some of his indecision to a more pressing interest in the Kennedys’ other familial pursuit: sexual conquest. A glorious mosaic of women threw themselves at John Jr. At the district attorney’s, a cleaning woman who’d squabbled with Carragher and stopped cleaning his office began spending hours a day in it once John moved in. “She dusted the underside of the desk,” Carragher says. “She just wouldn’t leave.” Paralegals had to screen deliveries and open John’s mail, which often contained unsolicited pictures of women. Once, an admirer sent a cappuccino machine.

Kennedy is a gentleman. “He doesn’t pick up girls and screw them and dump them out of the car,” says a woman who has known him a long time. “He’s pretty tame for a guy who’s that good-looking.” But at the same time, he’s no innocent. Womanizing-and pride in it-is, as historian Garry Wills has pointed out, “a very important and conscious part of the male Kennedy mystique.” John, blessed with looks almost as stirring as his name, was an early enthusiast. A prep-school classmate, when asked what he thought young Kennedy would be doing in ten years, answered plainly: “Dating.”

As an old friend puts it, “He got around a lot. He didn’t capitalize on it. Things just came his way.”

John’s one foray into filmmaking, a 1990 coming-of-age movie written by, produced by and starring college friends and called A Matter of Degrees, played on the young man’s studly proclivities. Identified in the credits as a “guitar-playing Romeo,” he had a tiny role as a fellow consumed with coupling. In one scene, he strums his instrument and tunelessly proclaims to an adoring paramour, “Oh, baby, I can’t live without your love.” Moments later, he is shown quarreling with the woman.

“What does it matter what we do when we’re not together?” he pleads with her.

“Because when we’re not together,” she answers, “you’re fucking Alison,” referring to another of his love interests.

Like his grandfather, who used to keep Gloria Swanson around even while his wife, Rose, was on hand, and his father, who pursued Marilyn Monroe, Angie Dickinson, and Gene Tierney. John Kennedy Jr. has long favored actresses. His longest and most notable liaison was with Daryl Hannah, herself rich and social. They first met as youngsters on vacation with their families on St. Martin. They met again after John’s aunt Lee Radziwill married Herb Ross, who had directed Hannah in the film Steel Magnolias.

That this affair-and numerous others-was carried on in public showed John to be more like his mother than his father. Just like Jackie O., her son can be a furtive exhibitionist. When he strips off his shirt to play Frisbee in the park, when he smooches girls on street corners or coaxes them into shorts at sea, he’s cruising for the cameras, just as his mother was when she unknowingly “posed” for her famous topless photos on Ari Onassis’s island, Skorpios.

Kennedy has kept his voice out of the public record except in carefully crafted snippets, but he puts himself on view with insouciance. He can afford the privacy and luxury of limousines, yet he propels himself around town on Rollerblades and a bicycle. “Aristocrats are dangerously uninhibited men,” writes Nelson W Aldrich Jr., a chronicler of the American upper class. “Like David the King and [Fitzgerald's] Tom Buchanan, they are sensual, ruthless, and intemperate.”

The story is told that John used to walk around the campus of Brown in gym shorts so brief they emphasized an endowment almost as impressive as the university’s. In New York, he has continued to flaunt himself. When he lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, even after he was declared the sexiest man alive, he used to sprawl at an outdoor table at the Jackson Hole hamburger joint, shirt off. One neighborhood woman says Kennedy would stop her to ask for the time. “My sense was that he was dying for attention, dying for people to look at him,” she says.

* * *

JOHN KENNEDY DEVELOPED a public image as a dilettante and nourished it as he grew. As early as 1983, he was dubbed “the least competitive Kennedy” in a book about the family. Once, asked whom he had admired as a child, he said, “I guess I have to answer that honestly. My role models were Mick Jagger and Muhammad Ali, actually.” Even as he spent his days prosecuting petty thieves and swindlers, he seemed to pour his heart mostly into partying and exercising; at one point, he belonged to three Manhattan health clubs at once. “If I had to pick a defect on him, I’d be hard put to find one,” Bobby Kennedy Jr. once said, “except that he pays more attention to his clothes than the rest of us.”

The effect wasn’t always salutary. He showed up at his thirtieth-birthday party in a custom-made maroon zoot suit and leopard wing tips.

His one consistent interest apart from women-acting-heightened the impression that he was unserious. By many accounts, he was a natural and precocious actor. “He’s got an incredible ear for mimicry, and he used to tell us all stories in an Irish brogue or in Russian character or Scottish,” his cousin Bobby once recounted. “This is starting when he was nine or ten years old, and he’d have all the grandchildren listening to him … A lot of us were a lot older than him, and he could keep us entertained.”

It didn’t take long for Kennedy’s hobby to bloom into a potential career path. He was only eighteen when the film producer Robert Stigwood offered him a role playing his father as a young man. That. didn’t happen, but other professional parts did.

Jackie Kennedy soon showed the world how iron her will could be when it came to her son’s future. “Jackie was a loving but extremely demanding mother,” says her cousin John Davis. “John wanted to be an actor, and she dissuaded him. She didn’t think it was a dignified profession. She didn’t like Hollywood at all.”

But Jackie’s friend Rudolf Nureyev criticized John for giving up the stage. “Show some balls!” the ballet star told him, according to author Diana DuBois. “Do what you want!”

One of John’s closest friends heatedly denies that his mother’s influence steered him from his own chosen path. “John has a compass,” he says. “He’s usually pointed in the right direction. Did Jackie guide him? Probably. But he went to law school because he likes to learn and law was a natural thing for him to do.”

Whatever the reason, John abandoned acting for membership on the board of Naked Angels, a society-oriented company that produces plays in Manhattan and benefit galas in the Hamptons.

With an acting career out of the question, John left the district attorney’s office in mid-1993 and seemed to plunge ever deeper into triviality. A very public manwithout-anything-special-to-do, he grew a goatee, showed up at parties for rock groups, and appeared at the opening of a technology installation created by his brother-in-law, Ed Schlossberg, that was held in the lobby of an office building.

He glided around the city like a tomcat. He moved from the Upper West Side to an apartment he shared with Daryl Hannah, then bought a loft in TriBeCa. It looked as if he was finally going to marry the big blond starlet: She was spotted buying an antique wedding dress at a flea market, and the couple went on a scuba trip to the South Pacific and Asia. “Daryl really liked him,” says Chicago gal-about-town and novelist Sugar Rautbord. “She was desperate to marry him.” But John couldn’t, or wouldn’t, commit. Only two months after tabloid reporters descended on Cape Cod, expecting a Kennedy-Hannah wedding, John was seen kissing Carolyn Bessette, a PR woman for Calvin Klein, near the finish line of the New York City Marathon.

* * *

FOR ALL HIS LESS THAN ZERO gadabouting, John was still struggling with the driving Kennedy will to succeed. “You don’t want to be a passenger on the liner,” he’d told Carragher when he quit as an assistant DA. Would he enroll at Harvard’s John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government, or join the Clinton administration, or perhaps even run for Congress? Nothing came of any of it. (He turned down a House race, says Carragher, because “any semblance of privacy John has ever had, he’s had to fight for. The only claim he has to keep it is to remain a private citizen.”)

But the dynastic imperative can overwhelm an American aristocrat. “If society as a whole is to gain by mobility and openness of structure,” a former Harvard president, Charles W Eliot, once said of his class, “those who rise must stay up in successive generations, that the higher level of society may be constantly enlarged.” As Aldrich puts it, this craving for success follows a set pattern. For the founding generation, it’s all about money, ruthlessly acquired (by, say, bootlegging. For the next generation, public service (serving as senator, attorney general, president, for example becomes the vehicle, because nothing better highlights the freedom money conveys than selflessly boosting the commonweal.

The third generation, though, is often swept away by the liberties unsheathed by trust funds. They “exert a terrific centrifugal force on the spirits of their inheritors,” writes Aldrich, “constantly threatening to shoot them out into trackless space.”

Young John Kennedy has certainly seemed more trackless than most. But he was actually trying to keep his end of what Garry Wills calls the “Kennedy contract,” a compact whose components are “power, money, fame.” John Jr. had the latter as a birthright. He had enough of the second to keep him comfortable. All he lacked was the first.

* * *

JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS died of lymphatic cancer at 10:15 P.M. on May 19, 1994, in her Fifth Avenue apartment, with John, Caroline, and Maurice Tempelsman at her bedside. “John was at his desk at 8:30 A.M. the day after the burial,” a friend says. “He did exactly what Jackie would have done. He went back to work.”

What he was working on was a magazine. It was the first real risk of his professional life.

The idea had come to him a year and a half earlier, on a night shortly after Bill Clinton was elected president. Over dinner, John and a pal, Michael Berman, started talking about how the way people looked at politics had changed. “Politicians have taken their cue from the entertainment industry” is how John puts it. “Al Gore on David Letterman was that show’s number-one-rated show for that year.” He pauses and shakes his head in wonder. `Al Gore.”

Was there something in this for them? No one is sure who said it first, but the question was asked that fall night: “What about a magazine?”

The idea was intriguing. Existing political magazines, Kennedy believes, haven’t “caught up with the moment.” Then there were the other, larger issues a publication could capture-”power and personality, triumph and loss, the pursuit and price of ambition for its own sake and for something larger,” all subjects with which John has more than a nodding acquaintance. Despite the irony inherent in running precisely the sort of venture he’d been running away from all his life, he and Berman decided to give it a try.

They’d been friends for years. The son of a real estate developer from Princeton, New Jersey, Berman had prepped at Lawrenceville, earned a degree in history from Lafayette College, and then gone. into public relations. He met Kennedy through mutual friends on the city’s party scene in the early 1980s.

When John entered law school in 1986, he stayed in touch with Berman, and in 1988, they first went into business together. Kennedy had gone kayaking and come home raving about some handmade boats he called “the Rolls Royces of kayaks.” John wanted to buy out the small company in Maine that made them, manufacture kits, distribute them nationally, and teach others to make the kayaks. Nothing came of the plan, but the two men never abandoned the corporate entity they’d established to do the deal. It was called Random Ventures, which for the next six years seemed an apt description of John’s approach to life.

After Kennedy became an assistant DA, Berman evolved into John’s Sancho Panza. “The press became an issue,” says a close friend. So whenever a media problem came up, John suggested that the DA’s overworked press office hand it off to Berman. “At first, it was once every three months,” John’s friend says. “Then it was every three days.” After John failed the bar exam for the second time, the calls started coming every couple of hours.

Meanwhile, Berman was building his own PR business, representing clients like Cointreau, Pfizer pharmaceuticals, DuraSoft, and the Mexican tourist board. Although he was and remains a Democrat, he also helped run the annual White House Easter-egg roll throughout George Bush’s presidency. But by mid-1993, Berman was as eager to move out of PR work as John was to find a direction, so when the men came up with the idea for a magazine, they threw themselves into it with equal fervor.

Working first at a desk at Kennedy Enterprises and later from space in Berman’s office in New York’s Flatiron district, John used his name to secure meetings with potential backers, including Edgar Bronfman Jr., who, like young Kennedy, traced his money to the liquor business but wanted to make his own mark in the world. “Every door was open to them,” says a friend of John’s. “But that was good news and bad news. Did these people believe, or did they just want to meet John?” Berman and Kennedy would joke about charging a million dollars for a first meeting with potential investors, because that was really all many of them wanted.

Kennedy’s mother set up a meeting between John and her friend Joe Armstrong, who’d worked in magazine publishing for twenty years. “John was determined not to do what people expected,” Armstrong says. Soon, he, Kennedy, and Berman were meeting regularly.

The impulse behind the magazine, at least at first, was high-minded. Berman and Kennedy wanted it to be populist, nonpartisan, and centered on process instead of personalities or party politics. They thought that would appeal to people aged twenty to forty who felt disenfranchised by politics but still wanted access to the circles of power. The magazine would have a small circulation based more on subscriptions than newsstand sales. “Publishing,” says Armstrong, recounting his meetings with Kennedy, “looked like a way to approach public service and keep a balance in his life.”

Unfortunately, few of the people they talked to were interested in helping young Kennedy work it all out. When Jann Wenner, a longtime Kennedy-family friend, heard of the project after reading about it in a media newsletter, he was irate. “What’s this about?” he allegedly asked John. “You better see me immediately. Politics doesn’t sell. It’s not commercial.”

Using some of the family’s media contacts, Kennedy and Berman wended their way through the tight inner circles of the New York-based magazine industry, a gossipy enclave whose nervous denizens simultaneously pray for new publications that might employ them and denigrate any new idea that isn’t their own. In connect-the-dots fashion, they talked to several former editors at 7 Days, an upscale New York weekly that flamed and then flopped in the early 1990s. “It was very much amateur hour,” says one of the many people whose brains were picked.

* * *

BY FALL 1994, BERMAN AND KENNEDY were getting dispirited. “People didn’t get it,” a friend of John’s says. “It wasn’t an easy sell.” They’d won the promise of about s3 million in funding, but their advisers warned that it wasn’t enough. Finally, to scare up more interest, they leaked the venture to the gossip columns.

Some were surprised that Kennedy was joining the very craft that had hounded him so mercilessly throughout his life, forgetting that his grandfather had palled around with journalists-had even chased skirts with New York Times Washington columnist Arthur Krock-decades before. His mother, too, had built a sweet career in patrician publishing, editing celebrity and art books at Doubleday, and President Kennedy, so his son was told, had hoped to run a newspaper after leaving the White House. “I think the idea was somewhat inevitable,” John says of the magazine he’d started calling George. “Both my parents not only loved words but spent a good part of at least their professional lives in the word business.”

Undeterred by the naysayers, Berman and Kennedy decided in late 1994 to test their idea by mailing solicitations for the nonexistent George to 150,000 people whose names were drawn from other magazines’ subscription lists. The offer, for a twenty-four-dollar-a-year charter subscription, was aimed mostly at media junkies; the copy said less about George than about other magazines. “George is to politics what Rolling Stone is to music. Forbes is to business. Allure is to beauty Premiere is to films,” read the piece. It was a “soft” offer that didn’t require a check, but the response was encouraging. Mailings that didn’t mention Kennedy’s name got a solid 5 percent response; those that did attracted even more, 5.7 percent.

Sensing, finally, that something might happen with their project, Kennedy and Berman also began changing. The high-mindedness with which they’d originally approached the venture began slowly giving way to a desire to succeed, whatever changes in tone, look, or content that required.

George Lois found this out shortly after he got involved with George.

The rumpled veteran adman, whose Esquire covers in the 1960s set the pace for international magazine design, was one of the many approached by the duo for input. “I’m the kind of schmuck, I got excited,” he says. “And suddenly I was designing his magazine.” Lois designed a logo-a truncated version of George Washington’s signature, pared down to his almost unreadable initials. Beneath it, Lois put the words WE CANNOT TELL A LIE.

Using his own money, Lois also produced a series of outrageous covers. Richard Nixon had just died, so he got Alger Hiss to pose for one, over a headline derived from a classic Esquire line about Nixon: WHY IS THIS MAN SMILING? A photograph of a torso in a pinstripe suit was captioned, TOTALLY NEW ADVICE TO FUTURE CANDIDATES: KEEP IT ZIPPED! A photograph of Barbra Streisand with a smudge on her nose ran with the line BROWN-NOSING: HOLLYWOOD DOES WASHINGTON, WASHINGTON DOES HOLLYWOOD.

Kennedy and Berman loved the covers-at first. “A week later, they’d tell me, `Everybody says you can’t do that,”‘ said Lois. After a few more meetings, he gave up. “If you want a safe magazine,” he told them, “you’ve got the wrong guy.”

Eventually, the notion of using George to stimulate involvement in politics joined irreverence on the sidelines as John and Berman started talking about politics as theater and their magazine as a glossy journal for the not entirely engaged.

“The basic concept,” says Roger Black, the design director of Esquire, who was consulted by the pair at that point, was “to be a half-fan, half-insider magazine, not a New Republic or a political-science journal. They felt people were ready for a magazine treating politics like entertainment.”

“Michael positioned it as a Vanity Fair-ish product,” says one of their consultants. “That wasn’t necessarily John’s first instinct.” But Kennedy quickly got with the program. “They wanted Herb Ritts, Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber, nonpolitical writers,” says John’s close friend.

They edged even closer to glitz after Hachette Filipacchi Magazines got involved. The American arm of a giant French media company, Hachette is the nation’s fourth-largest magazine company, with twenty-two titles and $750 million in revenues. The company, which owns Elle and the successful but unglamorous Car and Driver and Road & Track, has expanded mainly via high-profile acquisitions. Here was an opportunity to get credit for starting something hot and turn America’s crown prince into a corporate hood ornament.

Hachette CEO David Pecker had been pursuing Kennedy and Berman ever since he’d heard about George at a benefit dinner in June 1994. After several months of unrequited messages and letters, John finally called him back. “I just want you to know we have a lot of interest, and not just in having lunch with John Kennedy” Pecker told him.

They finally met in December. Pecker subsequently studied the George projections and called some key potential advertisers, concentrating on the Detroit automobile manufacturers he’d dealt with in his fifteen years as a publisher of car magazines. Other meetings were arranged, with Jean-Louis Ginibre, Hachette’s editorial director, and then, over lunch at Le Bernardin, with Daniel Filipacchi, its chairman.

A fifty-fifty agreement was signed in mid-February between Hachette and the duo’s company, Random Ventures. Their venture wasn’t random anymore. Berman, now George’s executive publisher, sold his PR business and, with editor-in-chief Kennedy, moved into a conference room on the Hachette floor where Elle is produced. Not long afterward, they moved to a floor they share with, among others, the staffs of Elle Decor, Family Life, and Metropolitan Home.

Hachette, a company with a strong newsstand emphasis, isn’t interested in an earnest subscription-based magazine about issues and ideas. “Suddenly, the struggle over the direction of the magazine is very serious,” says someone who’s been inside George. “There are different conceptions. John is smart, but he lacks an edge. He’s one of the least assertive people you’ll ever meet; he’s never had to assert himself-he’s John Kennedy! Now, suddenly, he’s in a huge corporation. He wants a magazine of ideas with a sugar coating. They want a political People.”

Early on, Ginibre suggested renaming the magazine Criss-Cross, after the lines of power, money, and culture that circumscribe the fluid boundaries of its beat. Then, when some of the initial designs seemed to resemble Elle Decor and one of the editors expressed’ his doubts, the art director assigned to the project supposedly snapped, “I was hired by Hachette-I work for Hachette!”

“They got off to a bad start,” John’s friend admits. It was worse for Berman than for Kennedy. Walls had to be torn down to make the executive publisher’s office comparable to the editor in chief’s, although Kennedy’s still has the better view of New Jersey Central Park, and all of northern Manhattan. Pecker won’t discuss the reports of internal discord, but he seems to refer to them in one pointed comment: “Normally in business, the person who puts up the money has the last say.”

Pecker is a happy guy these days, and not just because he has America’s prince in his pocket. George has booked 160 pages in ads for its first issue. “We’ve already sold ads for eight issues,” Pecker crows. “We know where we’re going to be.” It’s said that Ginibre has suggested in a memo that the magazine must go all soft and gooey toward the powerful people it hopes to feature in its pages in order to gain their cooperation, and that John must be as public as Tina Brown. How he’ll cope with that expectation is yet to be seen, but he’s already been reported to have interviewed George Wallace and to have requested a chat with everyone’s favorite undeclared presidential candidate, Colin Powell.

* * *

SO IT IS THAT THESE DAYS, John Kennedy has finally abandoned his directionless life, all but vanished from the club scene, and joined the working class. He gets up early every morning and exercises, then bikes from TriBeCa to his midtown office, carrying his front wheel upstairs in elevators where JFK Jr. sightings have ceased to incite hormonal frenzies. In an office decorated with images of the magazine’s namesake (including a blown-up dollar bill on Kennedy’s door, he meets writers, makes ad calls, and often works late. He’s even issued a memo instructing his staff that he expects them there when he arrives at 8:30 in the morning.

Off-hours, he still sees Bessette, but there are others. “We’re talking about John Kennedy!” his friend guffaws. Finally, he has bigger things on his mind than whom he’ll be with at night; he’s made his bed in a much different place than the one he and Berman first imagined that night after Bill Clinton’s election.

Initially Hachette promised only to produce and distribute two issues of George. But soon, the company upped its commitment, pledging to go bimonthly early in 1996 and monthly in September ’96, two months before the next presidential election, at a total investment it puts, vaguely, between $5 million and $20 Million. “I pushed them to do a magazine that connects with a lot of people,” says Ginibre. From Kennedy and Berman’s original idea of a small journal that encouraged participation in politics, George has grown into a magazine its publishers hope will sell three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand copies on newsstands each month-or about what vanity Fair, with its Hollywood covers, manages to sell.

If George does, the magazine will connect not through the language of politics or journalism but through the new voice of success in America: entertainment. John has made this clear in the way he has described George to potential advertisers. It will showcase “politics as miniseries, suspense thriller, comedy, sometimes even great drama,” he’s said.

Examples? George has commissioned an article on Newt Gingrich’s lesbian half sister, a piece by Roseanne titled “If I Were President,” and a review by James Carville of the new A1 Pacino film, City Hall, which a source says will actually be ghostwritten by a George staffer, and it has considered a story by a New York gossip columnist on fundraising benefits. But the biggest tip-off is George’s covers. The first issue will likely feature Cindy Crawford, shot by Herb Ritts and posed like Washington. Anthony Hopkins, made up for his role as the star of Oliver Stone’s Nixon, is in the running for cover number two.

“They don’t even feel the need to pretend to serious intentions,” says rival Martin Peretz, the editor in chief and owner of The New Republic, a magazine that became indispensable for a time when President Kennedy made it a favorite read (right up there with Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels). “A magazine like this will reflect the interest of the public but cannot stimulate it,” Peretz sniffs.

Samir Husni, the acting chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, has made a ten-year study of consumer magazines. “So far, George has had a great reception in the advertising community because of JFK’s name,” he says. “The danger, of course, is that when you have this high expectation, everyone is going to judge it with a sharp razor edge.”

The big question, concludes Husni, is this: “Is there a magazine behind the hype?”

Even some of the people who worked on the prototype of George are leery about its intentions and prospects. “Glitz is a tightrope walk,” says one. “Run enough stories on Hillary’s dressmaker and Tabitha Soren, and serious people won’t return your phone calls.”

But perhaps they will anyway-showing that John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. may know more about the power of politics and the politics of power than anyone suspects.

By: Michael Gross for Esquire Magazine

#articles

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razieltwelve · 6 years ago

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Grandma Goes Shopping (Final Rose AU Snippet)

Grandma Farron liked to do her shopping locally. It usually made for a more pleasant experience since the store owners all knew her, and there was plenty of time to talk and gossip with them and other locals. She usually had company on these little trips, either her husband or one of her daughters. Today, however, her company was a little… taller.

“Kweh.”

Grandma Farron laughed as Fury plodded along. He was capable of moving at far greater speeds, but he knew she preferred a more sedate pace. At the moment, he was moving at roughly four or five times a human’s walking speed. It was barely more than a crawl for him, so she appreciated the sentiment.

“You could always wait until Saturday,” Grandma Farron said. “Lightning usually does her shopping then.”

“Kweh kweh… kweh.”

“Ah. I see.” Apparently, Fury was not in Lightning’s good books since he had failed to mention that Taren had recently begun dating. His explanation that Taren was a young male who needed to assert his virility had not exactly gone over well with Lightning who had promptly threatened to turn him into shish kebab. The resulting battle had ended with Fury beating a hasty retreat from an irate mother. “What is Taren doing now?”

“Kweh kweh.” Fury snickered. “Kweh.”

Her nephew was currently hiding over at Fraise and Lumina’s house with his cousins since he wasn’t quite up to dealing with his mother’s overprotective wrath. Lumina was also one of the people who could mostly stand up to Lightning’s tyranny, and Vanille was definitely capable of doing it too. The redhead could also sympathise since she too had been forced to beat a tactical retreat from Lightning more than once.

“Well, I’m happy to have you along, Fury.”

Grandma Farron wasn’t lying either. As ferocious as Fury could be, he was also fiercely loyal to those he viewed as part of his flock. Since Grandma Farron was the squishiest member of his flock - most of the others were huntsmen, huntresses, or students at academies - he was especially careful around her.

X X X

Fury waited patiently outside the grocery store, doing his best to appear less menacing, so as not to scare away any customers. The owner was a kind man, and he’d often given Taren small discounts on the food that Fury liked the best. A little boy wandered up to him in awe, and Fury gave a low chirp before bending down to ruffle his hair with his beak.

“Did you see that, mom!” the boy cried, waving his arms around. “That was awesome.”

Fury puffed up at the praise, and the boy gave a cry of delight as Fury rose to his full height and drew his feathers out in a vivid display. A few minutes later, Grandma Farron emerged with the groceries, and Fury dutifully held still as one of the shop assistants helped her place them in the saddlebags that Fury always wore whenever he went on trips like this.

They made their way around the rest of the shopping area, and Fury took note of how little things had changed. It was a good feeling. The world was often a place that changed very quickly. It seemed like only yesterday he had been a tiny chocobo chick and Taren had been a little boy. But here, at least, the same warm, friendly atmosphered lingered, and although the shopkeepers were older and some had been replaced by their children, the same feeling remained. He hoped that when Taren eventually had children of his own that he would settle in a place like this where children could safely walk around and where the old did not have to worry about anything.

X X X

Fury settled down on the porch to enjoy his well-earned reward - an apple pie. As he was enjoying the treat, he spotted a familiar pink-haired woman coming through the front gate. Lightning glared, and Fury glared back, all while continuing to eat his pie. However, their impromptu staring contest was interrupted when Grandma Farron emerged from the front door with a broom.

“Oh, stop it,” she said, waving the broom at Lightning. “Fury has been helping me all afternoon. No glaring at him.”

“Mom…”

“Don’t make me whack you with this broom!” Grandma Farron threatened. “I’ll have you know that I’ve been getting tips on how to swing it from your mother-in-law.”

Lightning couldn’t help the slight twitch of her lips. Her mother was not the most imposing figure, nor did the broom strike fear into her heart. “Fine.”

“Good.” Grandma Farron turned. “I’ve been expecting you. I’ve got some scones in the oven. We can talk over scones and hot chocolate, and I expect you to be reasonable.”

Lightning’s eye twitched as Fury grinned at her. That damn chocobo…

“Taren is growing up, Lightning,” Grandma Farron said. “Why, I remember when a certain someone hid the fact they were going out with Summer, and don’t even get me started on how much a certain someone denied they were seeing anyone when they were really going out with Fang.”

“Mom!”

“Don’t you ‘mom’ me,” Grandma Farron replied. “You might be Lightning Farron, legendary huntress, but I raised you. I remember when you were in diapers, and I remember how much you used to go on and on about how romance wasn’t for you and how you’d be a lone wolf protecting civilisation. So either we can sit down and have a reasonable discussion about your son - who is coming over, by the way - or I can keep spouting anecdotes where Fury can hear them.”

#final rose #fanfiction #grandma farron #fury #lightning farron

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uncomfortable-writers · 7 years ago

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Law Studies (Steve x Reader)

(Gif credit to owner)

Fandom: Marvel

Character: Steve Rogers

Persona: Female

Word Count: 1,428

Request: Hi! I just had this idea with Steve. Could u make an imagine where the reader is a waitress on a café, and she's really good friends with Sam (he kinda got friendzoned by her, but later they developed a bro-sis relationship) 1x x2 and 1 day Sam goes there (as always), same seat but this time brings Steve and Buck to show them his fav cake. Reader comes to their assistance and serves them and all that. Reader took a liking to Steve, def curious so she told Sam. So Sam x3 x4 so Sam sets them up, even if Steve said he didn't need a love interest in his life (though it was obvious he had a certain liking to the reader). Could you make the reader a student pls? She studies Law and it's almost finishing it. x5 x6 I'm sorry if it's too specific and also sorry for the bad english (not my first language). Thank you, you can add wtv you want, you can decide the rest :). Have a good day!!

A/N - <3

“I swear they have the best sponge cake I’ve ever tasted”, Sam laughed as he led the two super soldiers down a quiet, suburban walkway, “And the staff aren’t that bad either”. Bucky and Steve caught onto the slight tinge of reject in Sam’s tone, “So did you ask one of them out or something?”, Bucky said with a laugh as he slyly elbowed Steve.

“Yeah. Something like that”, he smiled dejectedly. Bucky smirked, “Called it”. A frown of annoyance flashed across Sam’s face, “Shut it Tinman”. Bucky opened his mouth to retaliate but Steve decided to slide in, “So how far is this place then?”, he asked cutting the tension. “Literally just around the corner”, Sam said with a gesture and sure enough the pack of heroes arrived at the cafe. The Falcon held the door open for his friends, “After you”. Steve entered and was followed by Bucky who accidentally walked into Steve’s back.

“Why’d you stop man?”, Bucky grumbled, stepping to the side to stand next to his best friend. Steve’s blue eyes were trained on a young woman, her (H/C) was tied back. It flowed hastily behind her as she rushed around to each table dishing out their orders. “Just...got distracted”, Steve stumbled to recover. “This way guys”, Sam walked towards a booth placed in the corner, “So what do you want fellas?”.

After hearing their orders, Sam walked up to the counter where you were now situated, “Hey Sam! The usual?”, you smiled. He nodded his head enthusiastically while adding on, “Gimme a couple extra slices of the sponge cake while we’re at it, I brought a few friends”, Sam then turned around to point at the booth. “Awesome”, you waved to the two soldiers who awkwardly waved back, “Will that be it?”

Sam pondered this for a moment, “Yeah for now. Thanks (Y/N)”. You felt an unusual surge of confidence, “Sam, is that the Captain America?”. The Falcon turned to look back at his friends, then he turned back to you, smirk on his face as new ideas started to formulate; “Yeah it is (Y/N), don’t get your knickers in too much of a twist will you?”, he joked, making you hit his arm. “You’ll introduce me right?”. He grinned, “Of course I will, why wouldn’t I?”. Your face lit up like a Christmas tree, “You are the best there is I swear!”, you cheered in delight. “Yeah, yeah”, Sam brushed it off, “But not as good as your Cap right?”, he winked and then he started to return to the table.

It had temporarily slipped Sam’s mind that you were completely and utterly in love with the Captain, you always talked none stop about him. About how much you admired the work he did and the morals he held, quote on quote, ‘The legal system could do with learning a thing or two off of Mr. Rogers’.

Sam used to feel jealous in the past but as time subsided he became happier with being just friends with you.

“So, I miss anything good?”, Sam asked, sitting down in the booth. The two soldiers were smirking, “What was so funny back there then aye?”, Bucky asked placing the menu back into it’s holder, obviously being suggestive. “Oh I’ll tell you soon enough, don’t you worry about that”. “How long you been coming here anyway?”, Steve questioned.

The trio then made small talk until you started to approach, Bucky then hit Steve’s leg playfully, “Here she comes lover boy”. Steve frowned and instantly started to hush his best friend.

You grinned, completely awestruck that Captain America himself was sitting in the cafe you worked at, “Three cups of coffee and three slices of cake, enjoy boys”, you winked, making sure to sway your hips as you walked away. “Thanks (Y/N)”, Sam called after you. Your heart was beating at twice it’s usual rate. You waited until you went out back into the kitchen to squeal out of excitement, but unfortunately it was short lived as more customers needed serving.

Bucky side-eyed Steve, then opened his mouth to loudly ask, “Is (Y/N) single?”. Steve proceeded to slam his hand into his face, “Give it a break Buck will ya?”. The Winter Soldier laughed, “What? We were both thinking and you wouldn’t ask so”. Sam smirked as he took a big bite out of the cake, “Yeah, she is actually”. Bucky looked proudly at Steve, “You’re welcome”, who then proceeded to sigh, “That doesn’t make a difference, I’m not asking her out”. The Falcon’s smirk only deepened, “What if I told you she really, really, likes you?”.

Steve frowned and thoughtfully sipped on his coffee, he was trying to not give too much away but he really did think you were stunning. All of the other Avengers had been telling him to get out more, so maybe he should try? You seemed like a sweet girl, “Well how do you know?”, he asked.

Sam chortled, “Just trust me on this one okay?”. He chose not to tell Steve about how he was basically all you ever talked about.

“She’d probably say no anyway, besides I’ve gotta focus on saving people and stuff”, Steve argued. “C’mon man just give it a try, what have you got to lose?”, Bucky protested, slapping his friend on the back. “No”, Steve was quick to dismiss the persuasion out of fear that he might actually give into the temptation, he was also quick to change the subject too.

Half an hour later and everyone was finished, “So we heading back then?”, Sam stood up putting his jacket on, Bucky followed suit. Steve was so focused on watching you that he hasn’t heard or noticed everyone moving around him, “Ste?”, Bucky finally broke through the spell that had capture the Captain. “Hmm?”, he asked shaking his head slightly and looking up to his best friend. “Are you coming?”. Steve paused. Something in his mind was telling him to stay, although he wasn’t quite sure what it was, “You guys go on ahead, I’ll catch up later”.

The other two knew instantly and they erupted into laughter, “Oolala”, Sam teased, “Just make sure to wear protection and not the shield kind either”, Bucky grinned, the two were then satisfied with their teasing. On his way out Sam made a detour towards you, “Hey (Y/N), make sure you keep Steve company for us will ya? Thanks love”.

You then cast your eyes towards the remaining Avenger who sure enough was already looking at you. You smiled happily at him, it took Steve a moment but sure enough he flashed a smile back at you. Unbeknown to you, he was trying to psyche himself up.

‘Come on Steve you’ve done scarier things than ask a girl out on a date’, ‘You’ve punched Hitler, you’ve fought aliens, hell you even saved a floating city you’ve got this’

As you cleaned the surface of the counter, you noticed Steve was approaching. You mentally screamed.

“Hey Cap! Can I help you?”, your tone was cheerful enough that it masked the clear anxiety you felt. Steve rested a hand on the counter, he looked at the ground for a second, smiled and looked back up, “Yeah...Yeah you can actually”. You nodded encouragingly, waiting for him to state his order. “A little birdie told me that I’m your favourite Avenger?”, he played it cool but he was internally cringing, he was sure you were going to tell him to get lost.

Your cheeks flashed red, “I’m going to kill Sam, but yeah you are. I admire you a lot actually, as uncreepy as this sounds I try to put myself in your shoes when I’m doing the practice cases in my law classes”.

This caused him to smile, “Oh? Thank you I guess, but my decisions aren’t always the right ones”, he responded, “So you’re a student then?”.

“Yeah, I’m almost done with it. I’ve got this huge practice case coming up though, I’m not looking forward to it”, you sighed at the thought of the big essay you’d have to plan and at the evidence you’d need to gather. A light bulb lit up in Steve’s head, “How’d you’d like to have my opinion on it? I can try and help you with it if you’d like, then you won’t have to put yourself in my shoes”, he said smoothly.

“That would be the best thing ever”, you felt giddy. Help from Captain America himself? You’d be daft to turn that down.

“It’s a date then”, he grinned.

#marvel #marvel fanfic #marvel fanfiction #marvel imagine #steve rogers #steve rogers fanfic #steve rogers x reader #steve x reader #reader insert #reader x steve #girl reader #reader x steve rogers #captain america #captain america fanfic #captain america x reader #uncomfortable writers

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shewhowantsmouseears · 7 years ago

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The Son Of Scheherazade, Chapter 4

Notes: As always, big thanks to my wonderful editors Drucilla and BlueShifted!

The last scene is my favorite one. Had I the power and ability, I'd turn it into a broadway smash. I repeatedly had Millionaire by Cash Cash & Digital Farm Animals ft. Nelly and Lottery by Train on as I wrote it.

Summary: As Mickey falls head over heels for the magician's assistant, he learns that not every romance has the chapters needed for a happily ever after.

Romantic love was an abstract concept to young Prince Mickey. It was the sort of thing that he found difficult to believe existed because he didn't quite understand it. He knew his parents loved each other very much, but he also found love to be so embarrassing he didn't know why anyone would want to indulge it. Why would you want to make those silly kissy faces and call someone ridiculous pet names and devote so much of your time to a complete stranger?

It wasn't until that day that Mickey understood that love wasn't something you really had any say in, because if he had a choice, he would not be intently staring at this beautiful girl in a fake magic show while his parents were probably in danger. A part of him was mentally trying to drag himself away and get back to work, but the rest of him had his feet planted and his eyes wide, not budging an inch. He'd watch her for the rest of his life if he could. It wasn't his fault she was so pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty...

“What wonderful tricks will you perform for us, master?” the girl asked, hands clasped together, smiling sweetly.

“Do the monkey trick again!” one audience member cried out, and another shouted, “The card tricks, show us the card tricks again!”

Mortimer ignored these requests, taking off his coat and turning it inside out to show there were no secret compartments. “It's a little chilly today...I wish my coat was made out of...” Another pause, his tongue flicking back and forth as he tried to think of something. “...red, blue, and...gold poodle fur!” And in a puff of pink smoke, that was exactly what it became, much to the audience's surprise and delight.

“Isn't he great?” A man standing beside the prince and his companions laughed. “This guy's been to ten different cities, but he never does the same trick twice... Or at least never in the same exact way.”

“A-huh,” said Mickey who wasn't paying attention to anything being said.

Horace gave up on trying to drag either of his crewmates away, so he crossed his arms and settled in for the long haul. “I guess originality's a good thing, but that kind of seems like a stretch. Why wouldn't you do the same trick in a different town? It's not like they'd know about it.”

“A-huh,” said Mickey who would have found this interesting if the pretty girl on stage didn't exist... who, it seemed, was getting tired? After that last trick, she put a hand to her chest and her breath appeared to quicken.

“And for my next trick,” Mortimer announced after putting his new coat back on, “I will now...” He took off one of his white gloves, “Pull a water buffalo out of my glove!”

Suddenly the girl seemed to jump, and she quickly ran to Mortimer's side, tugging on his coat. “M-Master, we – you can't do that trick!”

Mortimer stopped in place, and his cheesy expression began to grow cold, glaring down at his assistant, his showman's voice now hissing. “What have I told you about interrupting the gig?”

“But, master...” the girl pleaded, trying to keep on a worried smile. “You already performed that trick in the last town, remember...?”

“So what?” Goofy chirped, bouncing on his heels. “I wanna see it! C'mon, where's the water buffalo?”

Horace looked at his captain. “Do you even know what a water buffalo is?”

“Nope! So it makes me wanna see him pull one out even more!”

Mortimer pulled his hand back as he tried to recall what trick was performed where. “Shhhoooot. Why didn't you tell me before I got on stage!”

The girl stepped back, still smiling but it was clear, at least to Mickey, that it wasn't an honest one. “I tried to, master, but you said you didn't need my help...”

“I don't need your-” But Mortimer cut himself off, realizing that this argument wasn't going to help sales. He cleared his throat and chuckled, turning back into the charming performer. “That is...an audience like this doesn't deserve a water buffalo! They deserve something better! Like... an ice buffalo! A buffalo made completely out of ice!” But when he tried to reach into the glove again, nothing came out. He shot the girl an annoyed look, and in turn she merely raised one eyebrow, and he grumbled, “I wish I could pull a buffalo made out of ice from my glove!” This time he had no problem, pulling out a miniature statue of a buffalo made out of ice. “Ta-da!”

The audience cheered and clapped, save for Horace, who was fairly sure Clarabelle was going to kill them for being late, and for Mickey, who was frowning at the mistreatment his first love – shut up, he told his head, no she isn't – was going through. It was oddly enough the right thing to snap him out of his lovesick stupor – which he wouldn't admit to having because if he turned into his mortifying parents... he would rather jump off a cliff. More importantly, Mortimer the Magnificent had no right to treat anyone that way when they were just trying to help.

Mortimer was relieved that he won the audience back over, but he needed to make-up for all the time lost during that argument, maybe even make them forget it ever happened. “And I wish for a mountain of eastern silk robes to appear!” Which, in another puff of pink smoke, appeared. “And now I wish for the robes to turn into cobwebs!” Which they did. “And now I wish the cobwebs to turn into kitty-cats!” Which they did. “And now I wish the kitty-cats were solid gold carrots!” Which they did, making the audience shout “WOW!” louder and louder with each transformation.

Because Mickey was the only one watching the girl instead of the show, he was the only one to notice how exhausted she was becoming, even though all she was doing was encouraging the audience to applaud. With every new trick, sweat began to roll down her fur, her knees began to buckle, and soon she was so overwhelmed she had to sit on the stage.

Mortimer didn't notice, didn't care, or perhaps had some combination of both. “And for my greatest trick, I wish-”

“Master!” the girl suddenly cried out, her hand to her chest, panting heavily. “I... I think the audience is... so moved by your amazing tricks, they need... a minute to let it all sink in!”

Once again, Mortimer stopped being Magnificent and became maddened, storming over and sticking his index finger in her face. “What did I just say about interrupting the show?! Your only job here is to flash those pretty eyelashes and keep the audience hyped!” The girl flinched, drawing back, but Mortimer wasn't finished with her. “Keep this up, and I swear I'll-”

“YOU LEAVE HER ALONE!”

Now everyone's attention was to the far back of the audience where Mickey stood, his hands balled up into fists. Anger like this was still new to him, so he let it flow through every vein and take over his whole mind. Beauty or not, there was no way he was going to let anyone get assaulted in front of him. He began to walk forward and the audience parted like the Red Sea, suddenly frightened by the fire in his eyes. “You will step away from her... right now.”

Mortimer straightened his back, swallowing hard. “Hey, hey, let's take it easy!” He laughed nervously, fingers pressed together. “You're taking this too seriously! This is all... just... part of the act! Right, babe?” He stared at her intensely, trying not to glare while getting the point across.

The girl bit her lip, and then she looked at Mickey – by gosh those were some deep beautiful blue ocean eyes that NO, FOCUS - and while she had looked out at the audience before, it had been as one collective group, never focusing solely on one person. Now she was actually looking at him, and Mickey could feel his heart skipping a beat. She was still tired, her whole body sagging, but those eyes of hers were still as bright and alive as a new dawn. There was surprise here, naturally, but a sadness that couldn't be put into words. Had it been there all this time since he first saw her? What did she look like when she was genuinely happy?

Mickey offered his hand to her, his voice quiet and gentle. “Are you okay?”

The girl looked down at his hand, and for the briefest of moments she seemed to consider it, lifting her own hand up an inch. Yet within seconds any hope within her died, and her hand curled up – it was then that Mickey saw she was wearing golden cuffs on her wrist. He'd seen something like that back in his home – when newcomers would come to the kingdom, and his parents made it explicitly clear that in their laws, one crime against humanity would never be tolerated there – and his rage was ignited all over again. “Is she your slave?!” His hand shot out, grabbing the girl's wrist and holding it up for all to see. There, on her left wrist, the cuff said “Minnie.”

Collective groups of the crowd gasped, others shocked into silence, and Mortimer flailed his arms wildly. “Nooo no no no no no! It's a fashion statement! Look, I've got them too!” He yanked down on his sleeves, and true to his word he was wearing an identical set of cuffs on his own wrists. Sighs of relief smoothed out the audience, but Mickey wasn't convinced.

“What is she to you?” Mickey let the girl – Minnie? What a nice name, pretty name DANG IT KNOCK IT OFF - go and began to reach for the hilt of his scimitar nestled on his belt. “I'm not going to let you treat her like garbage!”

Mortimer's patience for interruptions was wearing thin. “Look, what does it matter to you? It's all a show! Who do you think you are, anyway?”

Mickey stood tall and proud, a thumb to his chest. “I am Prin-”

“Preeettyyy sure that's enough of you, mister!” Horace and Goofy were suddenly on both of Mickey's sides, clamping their hands over his mouth and dragging him away.

“Real sorry about that!” “His first magic show, he got a little too excitable!”

“Keep up the good work!” “Don't mind us!”

Mickey kicked and yelled, but he couldn't free himself from their grasp until they were in the way back of the crowd, the audience beginning to mesh again. Mortimer cleared his throat, brushing down his long coat. “Maybe it's about time I wrap things up! Two more tricks, and then Mortimer the Magnificent's gotta move on out!”

Meanwhile, Mickey finally wrestled his way out of hands and fingers. “What are you two doing?!”

“Saving your hide, thank you very much,” Horace whispered, trying to encourage Mickey to do the same. “You can't go around telling people you're a P-R-I-N-C-E!”

“And why not?!”

“First off, not everyone is as nice as we are,” Goofy explained, tossing his thumb over his shoulder. “Some folks may look good enough, but the moment money enters their mind, it's like they become a different person. They might think they could hold you for hostage, or try to follow you and steal all you've got!”

“Secondly,” Horace continued, “You've got no authority outside of your kingdom! Even if we run into places that use slavery, you've got no power to stop it! And we can't liberate every single person we find, or those higher-ups will make sure we can never enter their lands again! I know it's rough, but if we're gunna try to find your parents, we gotta play it smart!”

Mortimer scanned the audience to find the richest looking individual, which happened to be a short lady covered head to toe in expensive jewelry. “You there, ma'am! What's the most prized possession you own?”

The woman tapped her chin with her finger. “Why, that would have to be my Ming vase, it's worth millions!”

Mickey knew his friends were making sense, but his heart was still burdened by the ethics and morals he thought applied to the entire world. “But if she's really his slave, we can't just leave her with him! It's not right! You can't expect me to just abandon her!”

Mortimer drew himself up, wiggling his fingers. “I wish this woman's Ming vase would appear in my hands!” A puff of pink smoke, and there it was, with the woman laughing gleefully at what she thought was an amazing fake knock-off and the audience clapping.

“Mickey, you have to think real carefully,” Goofy spoke as kindly as he could, kneeling down to meet Mickey at eye-level. “Right now, it's a choice... that girl, or your parents. You can't save everybody.”

Mortimer eyed the vase, drooling at the sight of something that would make anyone owning it rich for the rest of their lives. “And for my last trick... I wish this woman's Ming vase would reappear where I think it belongs.” He smirked as the vase vanished, and the audience burst into wild cheers for his last trick, though they were begging for more as they threw coins at his feet. Minnie began to pick them up one by one, eyeing the boy in the back.

Mickey shook with anger, and he snatched Clarabelle's list from Goofy's hand. “Maybe you can't, but I won't be that kind of person! I refuse! If you can't save everyone, then maybe I don't want to sail with you!” He then ran off as fast as his feet would take him, blinded by anger, frustration, and the horrible realization that Goofy was possibly right.

Horace was about to go after Mickey, but Goofy placed a hand on his shoulder, shaking his head silently. Horace slowly nodded in understanding. Mortimer had also noticed the boy taking off, and he was still burned by embarrassment. “And I wish that boy's most prized possession would reappear where I think it belongs,” he growled under his breath, shoving his hands in his pockets as he began to leave the stage.

Minnie heard this, dropping a few coins in shock. “Master!”

“Don't lose a single one,” Mortimer huffed as the crowd began to disperse. “Then get to the shopping and chores. We're out of here tomorrow.”

Goofy tilted his head, watching Mortimer storm off the stage. “I wonder why, with all his magic, he doesn't just poof himself home.”

Horace put a hand to his face, deciding that it was pointless telling Goofy that Mortimer had no magic.

Which, in a sense, was true.

~*~

Mickey ran and ran until his feet were crying out in pain and he was hopelessly lost. Yet as tired as his body was, he was still surging with anger and hopelessness. People were going back and through the marketplace, no one stopping to bless the Son of Scheherazade for years to come. It was just what he needed, since he didn't want anyone to see how close to tears he was. He really couldn't do anything to help that girl? He had to choose between doing the right thing and helping his parents? Could he live doing that every day? Could his parents understand that choice?

He had taken Goofy's list to prove he could get all the supplies he needed all on his own, but he also needed something to vent himself out on. He ripped the list to shreds, and once it was all gone, he slammed his fists into the wall of a bricked up shop, slammed again, slammed it three times before pressing his forehead to the bricks. What had he been expecting? He was still useless. He'd never be able to do anything. He was nothing but the Son of Scheherazade. A stupid, weak, naive little boy that couldn't do anything on his own.

Mickey sniffled, fighting off tears again, and pushed himself off the wall – just in time to bump into someone carrying so many bags and packages that it covered their face and head. Both shouted in surprise, and all the supplies sprawled out onto the ground. “Oh no! I-I'm so sorry!” Mickey apologized, kneeling down and scrambling to try and pick it all back up.

“No, no, it's my fault, I wasn't watching here I was going.”

“I was the one who...” Mickey trailed off, recognizing that familiar voice. He looked over, and there, now kneeling at his side, was Minnie. He made a most undignified “UH!” sound, feeling his tail snap up straight. What were the odds?! His usual depression and self-loathing were set aside because she was now much much MUCH closer to him than before and she even smelled nice wow...

Minnie blinked twice before her own recognition hit. “Oh! You're the boy from the show!”

Well that nice moment ended quickly. “I'm not a boy,” Mickey insisted, despite mentally calling himself that a minute ago, “I'm a man! I'm an official man, I'm eighteen years old.”

“Official man?” Minnie repeated with a hint of amusement, picking up her things. “So there was paperwork and laws involved?”

Mickey got the sense he was being teased. “Of course not. It just... happens, when you turn eighteen.” He was tempted to ask how old she was, but even he knew that was probably dangerous territory when it came to women, especially women you weren't 100% certain about their names. “I mean, I'm pretty sure that's how it goes... is that not what happens in other kingdoms?”

“Lots of lands have lots of different rules about ages.” Minnie shrugged, her arms full again.

“Sounds like you've been to a lot of places.” He was almost jealous.

“I've been here and there.” but Minnie didn't add anything more, as if reluctant to go into details. “...Thank you for helping me. Is that what official men do?” Another hint of a tease.

“I think this is what anyone with common decency does.” Mickey retorted, his arms also full of all kinds of goodies. “This is a lot of stuff for one little lady!”

“It's not for me, it's for my master.”

Once again, the good mood was snuffed out, and Mickey's face went dark. “You still have to call him that even when you're not performing?”

“It is my duty,” Minnie replied with a tired sigh, not wanting to explain this either. She took a step further to try and take her things from Mickey, but he took a step back.

“If Mortimer the Megalomaniac isn't going to help you,” Mickey insisted, “then I will. Just show me the way, and I'll help deliver it!” He finished with a smile, always happy to help.

Yet Minnie was wary, eyeing him up and down suspiciously. “He won't pay you for your trouble.”

“Okay.”

“...And I can't pay you either.”

“Okay.”

Minnie waited, and then pouted. “Well, then what are you expecting to get out of this?”

Mickey looked at her as if she'd just asked why fish in the sea were wet. Wasn't the answer obvious? “I'm not expecting anything, I just wanna help! Besides, if that jerk gave me a single coin, I'd make him eat it.”

Minnie watched him carefully, a puzzle forming in her head until she seemed to solve it with one nod. “Oh, I see... very well, come along.” She began to walk, and Mickey followed, his own questions unanswered. Why did she seem to distrust him even though he had stood up for her? Had Mortimer corrupted her worldview that much? Boy, if there was anyone in the world that deserved a kick to the shin, or somewhere a little more up north...

“My name's Mickey.” he said, trying to steer the conversation towards something more pleasant. “What's yours?”

She hesitated, but it didn't take long for her to relent. “My name is Minnie.” She paused in her walk to let some playing children pass by.

Mickey had been right, her name was Minnie. Minnie, Minnie, he wanted to practice saying it on his tongue but there was no way he could do it in front of her without sounding nuts. “Have you been in this town long, Minnie?” There, he got away with it once, and it felt pleasant. Minnie Minnie Minnie.

“We've only been here for a few days, and we're leaving tomorrow.” One of the children dropped their straw doll, and Minnie tried to return it while juggling her armload of packages. “I think we're headed for Attalaa next, it's very close.”

Mickey pondered if he could get away with putting that location on their map. “I've never been there... guess you could say I've never really been anywhere. I'm a little bit sheltered.” This got a curious and confused look from his companion. “What?”

“Why would you admit that?” Didn't this boy – man, heehee – have any sense of self-preservation? Who stated their faults that easily?

“...Because it's the truth?” Mickey answered with a big shrug. “Maybe I never had too many normal conversations myself. No one really listens to what I have to say... they care more about what I am than who I am.”

Minnie's eyes went down as much she'd allow without tripping over herself. “I know what that's like. After a while, you wonder what's the point of speaking up.”

“Y-Yeah, exactly! Like, why bother learning how to speak at all if no one listens?”

“But if you never said anything, people act like you're the one with the problem.”

“And you don't know what to do, it's like you can't do anything right! You're useless, you feel like... like... like...”

“You shouldn't exist?”

The mice stopped their walking to have their eyes meet. Despite the conversation starting off nicely enough, neither of them had expected to find a similar suffering. They weren't sure what to do with this information, but it wasn't unwelcome. Minnie shifted the packages in her arms a little, eyes shyly looking back and forth between the ground and Mickey's face.

“I didn't think anyone else felt that way,” she murmured after a moment, perhaps lost in a time of ageless memories. “Maybe I thought no one could ever understand... but...” She then shook her head to dismiss herself of the notion. “I shouldn't...”

Mickey leaned in, wondering what the matter was. “Minnie? What is it?” It was if she was almost admitting something but then had punished herself for daring to try.

“It's nothing.”

“If it's important to you, it's not nothing.”

A stretch of silence passed between them, and then Minnie quietly chuckled low in her throat. “It'd be nice if you stayed this way.” Her eyes saw him again. “The way you were at the show... if you're like that everywhere you go, I don't think you're useless at all.” Then she did something so spectacular, so amazing, so heart-stopping wonderful that Mickey could have died happy right then and there.

Minnie smiled. An honest, true, sincere smile that emphasized the pinkness of her cheeks and the beauty of her face, as if it was one she hadn't given to anyone in a long, long time. Nothing in his mother's stories could have ever described what Mickey was seeing. It wasn't just the fact that she was good looking that made it so special – this was a special smile, a rarity, something she didn't get to do too often, a hidden treasure that had been carefully unlocked. This was a smile that only one person could get to see.

Mickey wasn't prepared for it, and it stunned him so deeply that he dropped all the packages in his arms and said, “Wow.”

Minnie jumped. “What are you doing?!”

“Wha-OH! Sorry, sorry, sorry!” Mickey wildly tried to salvage what had now met the ground twice, hoping he hadn't broken anything. “I'm sorry, it was just, you're so pretty-” No!” “I didn't mean that! Not that you're not pretty, of course you are, I-” Nooo! “I'm sorry, I don't know how to talk like a normal person, not that I'm weird or strange or anything you should be afraid of-” STOP TALKING! “I don't know how to talk to pretty girls!”

Mickey continued to decompose verbally in front of Minnie, flailing and hyperventilating while trying to pick up what he'd dropped, yet dropping it all over again as he kept saying more embarrassing things. Why hadn't his parents prepared him how to talk to girls?! … Oh, right, because Mickey would have run out of the room. Minnie just blinked slowly at this odd spectacle, having never seen anything quite like this in all her years. Because this was something she'd rarely seen, it caused a rare reaction.

Minnie's lips twitched, then quivered, and then she burst – she began to giggle loudly, almost losing her own packages. Her body shook and trembled, and she had to take a step back to make sure she didn't collapse from giggling fits. Mickey's face reddened to bright tomato red, but on the plus side, he had made her laugh, which was worth losing whatever dignity he had. He flashed a toothy grin, chuckling quietly. People passing by stifled their own snickers, thinking that a couple of silly kids were having a very unusual first date.

Minnie finally managed to catch her breath, though a few giggles still slid in between her words. “I-I'm sorry, it was wrong to laugh...”

“I think we both needed it.” Mickey did feel more relaxed after it had all passed, since things probably couldn't get much worse from here on. Besides, he got her to smile and laugh, he was feeling very accomplished. “Besides, if Mortimer gets mad his stuff is busted, he should have used his fancy schmancy magic to poof it up himself.”

“He doesn't want to waste the magic on little things.” Minnie waited patiently as Mickey lifted everything back up a second time.

“That so.” Once Mickey was up and at 'em again, they walked. “So answer me this... If he's so magnificent, why put on a show? Why not just poof up some money and enjoy the high life?”

“He craves attention.” Minnie walked with him, a little closer this time. “He wants people praising him all the time. He can't stand not being the center of attention... even if life would be easier otherwise...”

Mickey raised an eyebrow, curious as to how much she'd now allow herself to say. “And I guess he doesn't listen to you when you tell him that.”

Minnie nodded, but her eyes were growing distant, seeing a horizon that Mickey couldn't imagine. “I don't know why I bother. In the end, everyone is the same.”

Mickey furrowed his brows, this once pleasant chat now growing uncomfortable. “What's that supposed to mean?”

She didn't bother to look at him this time. “I'm sure there are lots of good, decent people in the world... but...once someone gets a dose of power...they change. They tell themselves they'll use it to help people, but greed always wins. Deep down, everyone only really cares about themselves, and power brings that out. It's just a matter of time.” It almost sounded like a speech, something she'd said to herself time and time again in an effort to learn.

It also sounded similar to what Goofy had said earlier - Some folks may look good enough, but the moment money enters their mind, it's like they become a different person – and this too didn't sit right with Mickey. No matter how lovely Minnie was or how much he wanted to stay on her good side, this was not something Mickey could let slide. “That's not true.”

Minnie made a tiny scoffing sound. “Is that right?”

“It is right,” Mickey insisted, walking a little faster now. “Not everyone in the world has a greedy person ready and waiting to pop out! There are people who are good all the way through! And you can't let a handful of bad people ruin how the world looks! There are people who will do what's right without rewards or money or power... they'll do it because in their hearts, they know it has to be done!”

Minnie stopped walking, standing in front of a very small clay house that leaned to one side, with all the windows boarded up and big DO NOT ENTER signs plastered all over. “And do you think you're one of those people?”

Mickey almost said “yes” immediately. But would a good person be struggling with the decision between a trapped girl and their own parents? Wouldn't they know the right choice instantly? “...I'm not perfect,” he decided, “And I know sometimes it's just easier to walk away and let things be. But...I am who I am. And I'm not the sort of person who can just ignore someone in trouble, even when there's not much I can do about it. Maybe it makes me good, or dumb, or naive, but there are things about us we can't change. And, honestly, I don't think I want to become that kind of guy who walks away when someone is being threatened. Power wouldn't change that. And I'll tell you that as many times as I need to until we get to Mortimer's place!”

“This is his place.”

“...Oh.” Mickey glanced up. Huh, it sure was a crummy looking house for a magnificent magician. Did he spend all his money on shopping so he didn't have any leftover for a decent place to stay? “...Still meant what I said.” He placed the belongings down beside the front door.

Minnie wasn't entirely touched by his heartfelt words, emptying her own hands beside the house. Mickey glared at the house, clearly wanting to have words with whoever was inside. Minnie stepped to Mickey's side, and her fingers brushed by his arm – he felt a spark fly through his arm and again his anger was put aside to embrace a good old mind malfunction.

“Mickey, whoever you are...” Minnie looked up at him, her fingers now laced together. “I hope that you stay this way forever... and I hope I never see you again.” And Mickey would have probably asked why she said that if she hadn't done what she did next.

She kissed his cheek.

Minnie probably then said something like “goodbye” or “have a nice day” but Mickey didn't hear it, or really pay any attention to her picking up her things and entering the house. He had stopped moving the moment her lips touched his face, and for the next minute he didn't move. He didn't move during minute two either, nor three, nor four.

On minute five, he inhaled. On minute six...

“WHOOO-HOOO!”

This gigantic shout of love-induced euphoria echoed all across the town, which helped José and Panchito locate the mouse, as they had been assigned to find him after something happened on the ship. As they followed the subsequent hooting and hollering, they found Mickey dancing up and down the marketplace, climbing up poles and swinging from curtains, grabbing startled shopkeepers and spinning them in circles. “Aw, he's so happy,” Panchito lamented, “I don't want to tell him the bad news now.”

Mickey turned his head upon hearing that voice, and he sprinted towards the birds, hugging them both. “Guys! GUUUYYS! She kissed me, she kissed me, she kissed me!”

“Huh?” Panchito asked, trying not to drop his guitar.

“Who?” José asked, trying to keep his hat on.

“Minnie, kissed me, on the cheek!” Mickey let them go to break into an impromptu dance routine. “She kissed me, she kissed me, she kissed meee!”

José and Panchito looked at each other, shrugged, and then joined in the dancing and singing, with Panchito strumming the guitar and José miming the action with the umbrella. “She kissed him, she kissed him, she kissed hiiim!”

“She likes me, she likes me, she likes meee!”

“She likes him, she likes him, she likes hiiim!”

“She said she never wanted to see me agaiiin!”

“She said she never wanted to see him agaiiin!” But the birds at least had some common sense, stopping the broadway musical after that lyric. It was José who held up a finger. “Uh, Mickey, mind repeating that?”

Mickey was still making up his own samba, the actual words not hitting him just yet. “She said she never wanted to see me agaiiin-” … Oh, wait, now he heard it. “...She said she never wanted to see me again?” he repeated, frozen in mid-tango, too confused to be heart-broken right away. “Huh? But... she...” Why would she kiss him and then say that? Didn't they connect? Didn't they have a good time? How could things get worse?

“Okay, now we can tell him the bad news!” Panchito pushed his guitar over his back.

“We just got back to the ship...”

“... And Clarabelle told us that Pluto's gone missing!”

#disney #fanfic #the son of scheherazade #mickey mouse #minnie mouse #goofy #horace horsecollar #panchito pistoles #jose carioca

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delightfulnerdinfluencer-blog · 8 years ago

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Misunderstanding Chapter 5 A Mystic Messenger fanfic

A week later…

“Why does Philosophy have to be so boring!” Yoosung cried. The heel of his hands pressed into his eyes. “I was barely able to stay awake!”

Yeoja laughed at her friend as they walked. She was not going to remind him that he was the one that stayed up the night before playing LOLOL with Saeyoung and Saeran. The reason he gave that he was up so long was, he got beat pretty hard by the twins in the game, repeatedly. Thinking that one more match and he would beat them. She had heard all about it on the drive to school that morning. How they must have hacked the system or something. That there was no way they could be that good. She was also pretty sure she would hear all about it when she got home.

“Oh, what are you going to do now?” Yoosung sprung out of his whining fast to ask the question. As if he remembered something.

“Um, going home. You have that three-hour lab. So, I was just going to leave like I normally do.”

“So, um, there is this new café that opened up near the school. After my lab wanna go? I heard that they have really good sweets!” He looked more like a puppy waiting for his treat. This made Yeoja laugh again, her hand came to cover her mouth.

“Were you not the person the other day complaining that they had no money? Now you want to take your best friend’s girl out to a café?” This made Yoosung laugh as well.

“You’re my best friend too! Well, you’re more like my older sister.” A faint blush dusted his cheeks, “My mom sent me a little extra money to take ‘that someone special’ out… well since I still don’t have a girlfriend. You’re the next best thing!”

“I’m honored to be a surrogate ‘special someone’. Yeah, I’ll hang around school until you get out.” Yeoja wrapped her arms around one of Yoosung’s and nuzzled her cheek into his shoulder. “Who knows your special someone might be around the corner!”

As they rounded the corner to an empty hall Yoosung’s shoulders sunk. Yeoja nuzzled his shoulder again trying to make him feel a bit better.

“Sometimes I wonder how much of Saeyoung rubbed off on you.”

“Well… I would go into detail, but good little boys should hear about the birds and the bees from their parents.” Yeoja stood upright and act as much of a teacher as she could while holding back laughing at her beet red friend beside her.

They reached his next classroom and parted ways. He promised that he would text her as soon as he got out. Yeoja smiled before turning to walk outside.

It was warm. The sun was bright in the sky, even though it still hung low in the midday. Yeoja hummed as she made her way to the smoking pit on school grounds. Even though she had stopped smoking completely the day she found out she was pregnant. It was still the most peaceful place in school. She did not want to waste the warm day by being inside the library.

The trees had started to bud with new life. Birds singing the triumphant return of the warm weather to come. The was a light cool breeze but it felt amazing from the bitter cold that was there a few days prior. Nothing remained of the snow storm that had just happened. The snow had melted and in its wake, was left muddy patches on the ground. As if it was all just a dream. Yeoja pulled out her phone to send a text. From: Yeoja To: Saeyoung Hey going to stay late. Yoosung and I are going to this new café down the road from the school after his last class. I will see you later than normal. With that she sent it. It was most likely Saeyoung was still sleeping. The beep of getting a text message told her otherwise. From Saeyoung To Yeoja Oh, so you’re leaving me for someone even younger! Fine! T0T She could see the overdramatic flair this man was doing as she read the text. An arm over his eyes as he sunk to the ground. His voice loud as faked tears rolled down his face. As he reached the ground he would place his head down. With a fisted hand, he would beat the ground below at the indignity of his cruel fate. Wailing loudly as he cursed the cat gods above. From Yeoja To Saeyoung Can I make it up to you by bringing you something from there? ^^;; The respond was quick. From Saeyoung To Yeoja Yes ❤

She giggled as she put away her phone and walked.

The smoking pit was like a small park. It had benches along the wall of the adjacent building. Trash cans that doubled as ash trays in-between them. The small grassy area that in closed the bricked ground was squishy but the buds of flowers were starting to peek through the pine needles. There were two paths leading to the area and out to the two closest buildings. Thankfully no one was there. Knowing that if someone was there she would not have been able to stay. She loved this little area. It was far off from the campus route that unless you were a smoker, no one had a reason to come.

She had picked up smoking in her first year of college. Her dead-end job barely paid her enough to eat and live off of. It was not like her parents could send her money every month to help her out. They barely made enough to live their self, she could not have asked them to send her help. Yeoja was on her own when she moved and she knew it. Picking up the habit after she learned that it kept hunger away, and it worked. For the last few years before meeting the RFA she lived off instant noodles and cigarettes. She tried not to smoke around her new friends, feeling shame that she let them down. Zen was the first to find out. Even though he did not approve he promised he would help her. Like a good big brother would, in his words. When Saeyoung found out, she felt as if her relationship with him was about to end. It was her biggest secret she kept from him. Saeyoung hated that she smoked and she promised that she would quit. she was almost there when she found out. Giving her last unopen pack to Zen. Promising that she would never go back.

Yeoja found a spot in the sun and sat down. The rays warmed her after being stuck in a cold classroom for the last hour and a half. It took her a moment of enjoying the day before she dug out a textbook. Flipping through the pages to find where they were. A voice stopped her.

“You done or do I need to give you another minute?” This made Yeoja look up to who spoke. Knowing who it was before she saw the figure standing at the entrance of the pit. It was her advisor, Dr. Park. A tall, thin woman in her mid-fifties. Dr. Park wore a bright purple shirt and jeans with a light jacket. Her wild salt and pepper hair pulled back in a hair band to keep the untamed curls out of her face.

“No, actually I quit. I still like it here though.” This statement made her advisor’s eyes go wide with delight. The older woman cheered as Yeoja stood and walked to her. Pulling Yeoja in a big hug.

“I knew you could do it!” No one outside of her parents and the RFA knew she was pregnant. She knew the risk of miscarriage at her age. So, she had not planned to tell anyone until she was further along. “So, then, what may I ask are you doing right now? Do you have a minute? I have someone you have to meet.”

“I got a few hours until Yoosung gets out of his class.” Yeoja went back to get her things.

“Good, good.” Dr. Park nodded. “Come with me. Remember we were talking about who would be on your advisory committee? I know we have a few years to worry about your doctoral advisory committee, but I was talking about you to a friend of mine. She said that she would be interested in helping with your Master’s Thesis. I hope you don’t mind I did use your married name when telling her about you.”

“No, you’re good. It’s not but two weeks away now so I got to get used to it at some time. Besides, our friends already do.” Yeoja said adjusting her bookbag as they walked.

“Now, I will tell you a little about her. Her major was law but she also majored in psychology in her undergrad. She was a lawyer for a few years and a good one at that. She actually has daughters your age.” Dr. Park rambled on. Yeoja was just excited to start forming the idea of her master’s thesis. She had ideas passing through her head. Her steps were near skips as they walked to the social sciences hall. If she had access to a former lawyer, then she could cover some legal aspects that might come up in her project. “I have been meaning to ask, Yeoja. Was that Zen in your video project?”

Yeoja stopped a few feet ahead of Dr. Park and looked back at the woman. “Oh, you know Zen?” the question was met with a look as if Yeoja should have known the answer. “Yeah, that was Zen. He’s one of my best friends. Sorry I keep forgetting that he’s kinda well known.”

This got a laugh out of the older woman as she walked up to stand with Yeoja. It was easy to forget who some of her friends were. When they were together they weren’t a director of one of the largest companies in the country, an actor, an assistant, hackers, or gaming addict. They were all normal people inside the chat and when they met in person. They had their flaws and their strengths. Joking and sharing stories about what they were doing at the time. Yeoja kept most of her RFA life apart from her school life. None of her school friends knew about knew who she hung out with the outside of school, aside from Yoosung. On the other hand, everyone in the RFA knew everything about her school life. She trusted them more than anyone else in her life. They were just normal people who she loved. They were her family.

Yeoja pulled out her phone and started to flip through her pictures to find the most recent selfie of her and Zen together. He had helped her with the project since Saeran and Saeyoung were busy with work and she did not want to bother them. He was more than happy to help; writing out most of the script they used since she had no idea know to make the mock session last for over ten minutes. Even pulling most likely the best performances of his career for a school project.

“I’m a big fan of his!” This was a squeal of a fangirl and not a professor of psychology.

“I’ll tell him you were happy with his performance.” Yeoja beamed, then showed the selfie of herself and Zen to her teacher. The way her teacher went on about his acting, Yeoja was not going to bring up that she has been in his house. Or that the hoodie she was wearing was originally his.

Starting back on their trip to the hall, Yeoja had to tell Dr. Park how they met. Or what she had told people about why she went missing for two weeks. Lying that she needed a few days off for her “mental health” that lead to her having a family emergency. So, she had to leave for a bit to take care of her family. In this time, she had met Zen, Jumin, the Choi twins, Jaehee. Yoosung was the easiest to lie about since they attended the same school. As it turned out having a class together before they met. She had never noticed him. The others were harder to tell how they met. In time, she came up with a believable enough story. That through Yoosung she met the rest. The Choi’s are his best friend. While Zen and Jumin were close personal friends of his family. Since Jaehee worked for Jumin, she was a tag along. For some reason, this story worked. Then again how they really met might have sounded more of a lie than the story she told.

“I guess I can’t be surprised anymore with who you know. I mean if Mr. Han is personally funding your education then I guess it’s easy to think that you would know an actor or two.” Dr. Park stated as they walked up the granite stairs to the red brick building with white letters the name of the person who gave to most money to the school for the building.

Jumin somehow found out about her lack of money and school funding. Even though Saeyoung played innocent she was sure it was him. Unlike Yoosung who had a scholarship that paid more than enough to go to school, get his books, and live off of. Yeoja had to take massive student loans out. Jumin offered her a deal when she came back from her trip to get Saeran. Keep her grades up and he would pay off the loans she already had and pay for the rest of her schooling as long as she needed. Even paying her a little each month to live on, saying that was her payment for the work she did within the RFA.

Entering the building they were greeting by two boards up for college updates and another one for student news that students posted their self at the entrance. To the right side was the student lounge complete with vending machines, a couch, TV, and a couple of tables. To the left were the stairs and elevator. The halls were deserted. With the muffled sounds of the various lectors going on behind the closed doors. Everything from Psychology to History was housed in here.

The pair took the stairs. The bright blue and a gold that glittered in the sun of the school’s colors welcomed them. The click of heels and shuffle of sneakers echoed off the walls as they made the hike up the next two floors. They went in silence only letting their footsteps speak for them. Bright sunlight poured in through the windows, warming the stairwell. When they reached the floor, the two made a sharp turn into a back hallway where the professor’s offices were hidden. As they passed an open door a deep male voice rang out.

“Dr. Park got Yeoja for smoking again!” He teased. They stopped and Yeoja walked back to his door and looked inside. A large smile beamed from him. “Such a bad student you are, Yeoja. I mean really” sarcasm dripped from each word he spoke.

Yeoja grabbed her heart and acted as if she was wounded, “Oh, yes, I am truly the worst of them all.”

With a shared laugh, she waved at the teacher and started back with Dr. Park. The rest of the way was short. They stopped at a door with Dr. Park’s name on it. The older woman opened the door and let Yeoja enter first.

“I would like you to meet my friend, Chaeha Chon.” Yeoja stopped as the second older woman stood.

“You’re the Prime Minister’s wife!” Yeoja gasped then quickly bowed to the woman. Her heart thundered in her chest. She was the one that said she would help? No way she could be this lucky. This had to be a crazy dream. No one was this lucky.

Chaeha was about Yeoja’s height at 5’4”. Short cropped black hair framed the older woman’s thin face. She looked as if she had just stepped off of a runway. Dressed in a white pantsuit with a black blouse underneath. Nothing out of place. There was no stray hair or piece of lint on this woman.

“Nice to see you again Mrs. Choi.” Chaeha smiled to the young woman extending a hand to her. Yeoja took a step in a jerking movement to take Chaeha’s hand.

“Oh? You two have met?” Dr. Park looked between the two, puzzled.

“Yes, briefly, when I went to lunch with Chairman Han. She was there with Mr. Han.” Chaeha gave a thin smile to her friend, as she sat back down. The older woman then turned her attention to the younger woman in front of her. Deep chocolate eyes studied the student before her.

“Yeah, I had to talk to him about my grades.” The words had come out quick as Yeoja lied. Praying that Chaeha would not say anything about the RFA. How would she explain that to her teacher?

The two older women talked about little things in hopes to make Yeoja feel more comfortable. In time, Yeoja began to enter the conversation. Stuttering her words at first then becoming more comfortable in her speech. Still, every time Chaeha’s gaze went to her, Yeoja had to look away. Finding many of the little figures and posters that lined the walls of the room very interesting. There was something in her stare that made her feel uncomfortable. Maybe it was just her nerves acting up on her. This woman had been a politician’s wife for many years. She was powerful. Having to hold her own for many years. Maybe this is what made her feel unease towards the woman. This could have been seen nothing more as a job interview.

“So, next semester you will be working for your master’s degree?” Chaeha questioned. Sitting forward in her chair. Elbows coming to rest on her knees. Yeoja shifted again under the watch of the older woman.

“Um, Yeah,” Yeoja mumbled. Taking a deep breath to calm herself. She had to make sure the next words she spoke came in clear. “I mean I am taking next semester off. I will be back in January.” She went to stand straight. Even if she was feeling flustered at that moment, she could not show it.

Another thin smile came to the prime minister’s wife as she sat back in her chair. “Do you have an idea about what you want to do? With your project that is?”

“I had an outline but now that I know you’re willing to help me then I might need to change it. Maybe something with political implications. Still in Psychology that is.” The more Yeoja spoke the more comfortable she felt. Becoming braver with each word that came from her mouth. “My interest is in art therapy, but I do not think my paper has to just focus just in that. Maybe the psychological and political impact of single mothers or something in the family.”

Chaeha laugh ranged loudly, “I see what you meant by this girl will try and change the world.”

Yeoja rocked back on her heels, a large grin on her lips. She was happy with how the prime minister’s wife reacted to her. It seemed as if Dr. Park was happy as well.

“Well, we are about to go eat. You should join us, I’ll pay.” Yeoja looked at her advisor when she clapped her hands. “I mean I might be bragging here to try and get more funding. But Yeoja is one of my best students.”

“I’m sorry.” Yeoja joked back. Then looking at her phone. It had only been 20 minutes since she left Yoosung. She still had time and no college student in their right mind would ever pass up free food. Free food and the chance to pick the brain of a former lawyer. “I have a little time. Yoosung won’t get out for like another two hours.”

A cat like grin went over Chaeha’s lips. “Oh, Yoosung is your husband, right?”

“He’s like my little brother. My husband’s name is Saeyoung, Saeyoung Choi.” Yeoja laughed at what Yoosung would have looked like being called her husband. How the blonde’s face would have red. Stumbling over each word as he tried to clear his name. The genius redhead would blow a circuit laughing at his friend.

“Does your husband know you hang around other men?” Chaeha teased.

“I would hope so since Yoosung is like family to him as well. My other guy friends, we also count as our family. One big dysfunctional family.” This was true. They were their family. “Oh, I need to go to my car to drop off my stuff. I’ll be back.”

Before Yeoja reached the door, Dr. Park caught her, “No, I can drive you there.”

“But, um…” Her voice trailed off as she looked at Chaeha.

“Are you worried about what she’ll think of you if she sees your car? Sweetie, we both were college students. We know it’s almost mandatory to drive a shitty car.” *_*_* Saeyoung typed away, only to pull away for a chip or a drink. He was reviewing the logs that he had hacked from his father. Call log, internet searches, documents, anything that would give Saeyoung an idea about what the Prime Minister was doing. In the week since the meeting, he had done this every day. Still, the man did nothing to even look for the Choi’s. Saeyoung had wracked his brain in ways that he could think of that Chon might try. Nothing. He had not tried to contact either of the twins. He was keeping his word. Hell, the man did not even look up porn on any of his devices.

Placing his head in his hands Saeyoung let out an annoyed groan. As he looked back at the computer screen he noticed something for the next day. He would be talking to a group of new hires. Maybe doing a bit of recon would give him more data.

“Hey,” Saeyoung waited until he heard Saeran grunt to let him know to start speaking again, “So how would you feel if I said I was going to be a new hire under the prime minister?”

“I would say that you’re fucking stupid. Did you get that earpiece fixed?” Saeran was getting just as frustrated with dealing with the Prime Minister as Saeyoung was. Unlike Saeyoung, Saeran could drop the subject and move on with life. If he was leaving them alone then he would do the same thing. Saeyoung just could not leave it alone. Within the past couple of days checking his location on his cell. Checking every day what the man did. Saeran knew his brother’s reason, to keep everyone safe.

“I fixed it so you can hear me.” Saeyoung turned in his chair to face his younger brother. He turned back to the screen and began to hack the server again to put his information down.

Name: Luciel Choi Age: 23 Gender:

Saeyoung stopped as he thought about the last question. He could go as a woman. Luciel could be a woman’s name or a man’s name. That’s was one of the reasoning he liked it.

“Yeoja doesn’t like it when you dress as a woman.” Saeran’s voice in his ear made him jump.

As if on cue the computer beeped to let them know that she had entered the gate. It was a short time later that she walked in the door. The hackers greeted her as she entered the kitchen.

“Babe, so dress or suit?” Saeyoung purred in Yeoja’s ear.

“If you do not get away now I will throw up on you. You reek.” An arm braced her on the counter while the other was around her middle. Saeyoung stepped behind his brother. “If we are talking about the wedding then suit. Any other time I don’t care. If that’s all I’m going to bed.”

“Saeran said that you didn’t like it when I wore a dress.”

“I don’t like you having nicer legs than me. There is a big difference.” She said as she left the room.

Saeran looked at Saeyoung as they went back to the computer room, “I thought it was called morning sickness because it only happened in the morning.”

That earned a laugh from Yeoja from down the hallway, “It’s the biggest lie ever. Morning sickness will hit whenever it damn well pleases.” She shouted.

Saeyoung went back to the file.

Gender:

It was still blank. He only had his female wigs in red. If he wore a skirt and button down he would be a mirror image of the legal twin. With a sigh, he put that he was male. Then filled out the rest. Brown hair and eyes. Saeyoung groaned at the idea of another day with contacts in. The wig was bearable, enjoyable sometimes. For some reason his eyes hated contacts. With a few more details he placed his file with the rest of the new hires.

Saeyoung went to check on Yeoja. Entering the room the lava lamp gave a low glow that let the glow in the dark stars still work. Yeoja was in the middle of the bed with the blankets wrapped around her.

“Change or you’re not getting near me.” This earned a chuckle from the hacker. He complied with her demand before slipping in behind her under the blankets. He loved how she fit just right in his arms and against his body.

“My poor baby. What’s wrong.” He kissed the back of her head.

“Your children do not like me eating. Also, they must have been cold because they lit my heart up. I have some epic heartburn.” Saeyoung quickly rolled over and grabbed his phone. She just shook her head as the messenger beeped. It took her a moment before she reached her phone to find out what her favorite hacker was giggling like a school girl about. Saeyoung: I

Saeyoung: have

Saeyoung: breaking

Saeyoung: news

Saeyoung: ((((DRUMROLL))

Zen: Quit spamming!!

Saeyoung: We

Saeyoung: are

Saeyoung: having

Saeyoung: girls

Saeyoung: !!!!!!!!!!

Saeyoung then flooded the chat with his love emoji.

Yeoja has entered the chat

Zen: I said quit it damn it

Zen: Do you know what he is talking about?

Yeoja: Yeah, I just told him I had heartburn and he got on here.

Zen: Saeyoung I don’t think that’s how it works!

Saeyoung posted a picture of the last ultrasound.

Saeyoung: Aren’t my girls beautiful?

Saeyoung: I would like to introduce the RFA to my girls

Saeyoung: Porsche and Elizabeth

Zen: No!!

Yeoja: Not Porsche

Yeoja: Elizabeth is fine though

Saeyoung: Their first language they’re going to learn is binary

Zen: No!

Yeoja: Hell no!

Jaehee has entered the chat

Zen: As those two godfather I will not stand for you to do that to them

Zen: They will learn Korean first

Jaehee: Since when did you become their Godfather, Zen?

Zen: … well

Zen: I was never asked…

Zen: But I am!

Yeoja: Well, I was going to ask all of the RFA to be the Godparents to them. So he isn’t wrong.

Saeyoung: My pretty girls!!

Saeyoung: Curly red hair and gold eyes!

Jaehee: Saeyoung you can not tell the sex of your children by just her having heartburn.

Saeyoung: I read it online…

Yeoja has left the chat.

Zen: Is she okay?

Saeyoung looked over to see Yeoja putting away her phone quickly as she dashed out the room.

Saeyoung: She’s sick I should go take care of my girls!!

Saeyoung posted another picture of the ultrasound.

Saeyoung has left the chat It was a while before she returned. Just as she entered Yeoja turned around and ran back into the bathroom. He rolled onto his back and covered his eyes with his arm. Saeyoung wished there was more he could do for her. Yeoja did not like the ginger tea he’d made to help and threw up the ginger ale. It was times like these he hated. There was nothing he could do to help. After the third attempt, Yeoja made it back to bed.

“Hey lay on your back.” She did as he asked.

Saeyoung moved to be close to her side. Then began to rub around the bump higher to her stomach then back to circle around the bump again. He pressed a kiss to her forehead as his hand made another go around her torso.

“I’m sorry baby.” Yeoja shook her head as he peppered the side of head and neck with kisses.

“No, thank you, I’m starting to feel better.” Saeyoung smiled as he kissed her hair.

“I’ll make it all better.”

#fanfiction #fanfic #m rating #mystic messenger 707 #707 #MC #spoilers

1 note · View note

initiala · 8 years ago

Note

could you possibly do another smut fic with killian having sex with a guy? Or maybe a threesome fic with him and emma and a nameless guy?

I have a secret hard-on for Captain Hood. In fact, this is something that @idoltina and I texted about for like a week last year and we each went “I’m not writing it, you’re writing it” for at least two days but now I guess I’m writing it. Who’s up for a college sports AU?

(anyway this is my first actual real slash fic, be kind for I only know what not to do. many thanks to @bookstoreromantic for giving this a once over and telling me how soccer works)

It felt like they’d known one another forever. They moved together on the field with ease, passing without thinking, sensing where the other was – just knowing they would be there with the assist. They stayed up late in the common area, going over plays and devising new ones, finishing each other’s thoughts late into the evening until someone inevitably reminded them about morning drills and the need for sleep. When one had a bad day, the other knew and was often the first to drag him out for a pint and some mindless entertainment to cheer him up. They had similar pre-game rituals, sat next to each other on roadies, and their teammates were surprised when one was seen without the other. They laughed and took the piss out of each other like the oldest of mates, but Killian and Robin had only been playing together since their first year at uni – sorry, freshman year.

(Killian still had some trouble wrapping his mind around the linguistic differences between American and British English. At least he’d known better than to ask to borrow someone’s rubber in the middle of class.)

Regardless, he’d certainly heard of Robin Locksley before decamping to America and Robin had heard of Killian Jones; the amateur competitive football world was small back home and everyone knew who was being scouted by the leagues and by the universities. Locksley was good, a striker with the makings of an excellent skipper one day. They’d never played against one another, but everyone kept tabs on the big names.

(No one had ever thought to mention how ruddy fit Locksley was. Oh, he’d noticed at first – beautiful people drew his eye in that way – but he’d had a few other dalliances before realizing just how bloody fucked he was when it came to Robin Locksley. It was during a rain delay that Killian had realized he was absolutely fucked when it came to Robin. They’d gotten caught in a downpour during warm-up drills and everyone had gotten soaked through, but Killian had zeroed in on how Robin’s kit clung to his well-defined muscles and the water ran down his chiseled jaw and bloody fuck he was well and truly fucked.. He’d also decided then that an artist should capture Rob’s beauty in marble, like the Greeks. Though it wouldn’t capture the way the sun glinted off his hair and made it shine, or the way his cheeks dimpled when he laughed, or the cold fury in his eyes when another player committed an unnecessary slide tackle and injured one of their teammates.)

The fact that they’d both been scouted for this small university’s football team – rather, soccer, as the Americans stubbornly continued calling it – just happened to be a twist of fate.

A rather cruel one, if he was going to be melodramatic about it – which he was apparently rather adept at, according to Swan.

Swan was his roommate, a lacrosse player with a mean right hook, a passion for grilled cheese, an old Volkswagen Beetle that he was constantly trying to keep running for her, and a penchant for throwing her pre-law books at him when he was in one of his “melodramatic moods”. And yes, Emma Swan was a girl – woman, as she and her friend Snow were fond of reminding him.

The university’s rather liberal policy of gender neutral residence halls had ended up quite in his favor, despite the book-throwing. While even he could admit that Swan was a striking example of womanhood, his tastes ran more towards the men. And sharing a room with another man had always run hit-or-miss for him in the past. Swan hadn’t even batted an eye that first year, offhandedly mentioned an ex-girlfriend named Lily, and then asked if his practice schedule was as grueling as hers.

They’d been the best of friends ever since.

“If I have to hear you sigh over Robin’s quads one more time, I’m banishing you to the lounge for the night,” she grumbled, highlighting something in a textbook.

“They’re just so–”

“Perfect, so I’ve heard. Just ask him out already.”

“I had to wait fifteen minutes before I could shower,” Killian said, flopping back on the futon with one of his lit texts. “Bloody git took forever.”

“Scandalous,” she remarked, her voice dry. “Can’t even shower together. Oh wait, yes you can, because half the LAX team is gay and we have no problem.”

“Women don’t have knobs, bit different,” he retorted.

He could practically hear her rolling her eyes. “There is nothing sexy about a locker room, Jones. Quit being a – a, what is it you always call Will?”

“Bellend,” he deadpanned.

“Right, that. Stop being a bellend and just say something. And don’t give me another speech about ruining the team ‘vibes’.” She actually used air quotes, the sarcasm dripping from her tongue. “If nothing else, you have to learn to keep personal shit off the playing field. Or use it as fuel during a game.”

Killian sighed, resting his book on his face. She was right, he knew she was right, but when it came to actually admitting his own feelings, he was the biggest chickenshit – one of Swan’s delightful Americanisms that had rubbed off on him.

He just didn’t know how Rob would react.

It wasn’t as if his teammates didn’t know about his sexuality; as Swan had said, coming out to his mates hadn’t ruined any of the team’s closeness. Locksley had clapped his shoulder, thanked him for his trust and honesty, and assured him that the team would do their best to return that trust and honesty.

Well, that was all very well and good when stating a general interest in men and women, but in Killian’s experience, men who had no interest in other men tended to react… poorly.

To put it mildly.

“Rob’s not like that.” Swan’s quiet voice broke through his thoughts.

“What, are you a mind reader now, love?”

She snorted. “No, that’s you. I just recognize that silence.”

“Come here.”

She did, dragging her textbook with her and settling against his side on the futon. She could be a pain in his arse sometimes, but she also knew the value of physical contact; he was, admittedly, more free in his general affection towards friends, but he counted himself lucky to be one of the small handful of people that Swan regularly showed any sort of affection towards.

“I’ll bring it up tomorrow,” Killian said quietly.

Swan made a noise as if she didn’t entirely believe him, and truth be told he didn’t entirely believe himself, but it was said and it would be enough for her to hold him to it. “I have a test tomorrow,” she told him, settling more comfortably into the crook of his arm.

He breathed a laugh and pulled her in closer, picking his own book back up to get some reading done before he was too inconsolable to think of studying.

Perhaps Swan was right about his inclination towards the melodramatic.

His body may have been at practice, but his head clearly wasn’t. He was passable at drills, but he was easily distracted during the scrimmage and it did not go unnoticed.

“Jones,” Robin called.

His skip’s voice cut through the locker room chatter. Killian paused only after securing a towel around his own hips, ready to half-drown himself in the showers after that abysmal practice. “Aye, mate?”

Robin made his way through their teammates, giving Killian a critical once-over before speaking. “You alright?” he asked, dropping his voice now.

Killian glanced up, then away, irritated at himself for a multitude of reasons now. “Aye. Long night. Sorry, skip, I’ll get right tomorrow.”

Robin was silent for a moment, then reached out and clapped Killian’s shoulder. Killian had to fight the urge to lean into it, to show how the familiar gesture affected him as he stood there half-naked in the bloody locker room. “Shower up, we’ll go for a pint and a chat,” Robin ordered and turned before it could be argued.

Killian stared after his friend’s retreating back, taking a long moment to compose himself and adjust the towel a bit before grabbing his caddy and stalking off to the showers.

The hot water and soap didn’t make him feel anything other than clean of sweat and grass stains. Try as he might, letting the water beat against his skin did nothing to relieve the guilt of giving less than his best or the anxiety gnawing at his gut at the conversation to come.

After he dressed, he went out into the hall to find Robin waiting for him. Wordlessly, they fell into step together, practice bags slung over their shoulders and hands shoved into their pockets. He followed Robin’s lead as they left the training facility and went down the street to their favorite dive bar – fairly empty at this hour, which would make Robin’s scolding easier to hear.

They ordered, and after the waitress brought their pints, they each took a long drink as Robin regarded Killian thoughtfully over the rim. “So,” he said, setting his glass down. “Something’s eating at you. And don’t give me any nonsense about everything being fine or I’ll go talk to Emma and she’ll tell me what’s really going on with you.”

Killian winced, setting his own glass down. Swan absolutely would, if for no other reason than she was an abysmal liar. “That’s a low blow, Locksley.”

“Aye, but you’re a right stubborn bastard when you put your mind to it, so my hand is forced. You’ve never played so badly, not in all the years I’ve known you. Even after the mess with that lass Milah and then your disastrous rebound with Jefferson.”

Those had been easier to handle – after Milah left, there had been nothing for him but throwing himself into the game, leaving everything on the pitch until he was spent, an empty shell left for Swan to care for, making sure he ate and had a decent night’s rest. Jefferson had been an angry affair, both of them lost and angry and winding up hurting the other more. But it had only led to more fuel, something like a dam breaking in Killian’s soul that flooded his body with pain and rage and powering his game until he was left with only quiet and acceptance inside.

But this, this situation held more at stake.

Swan’s voice was in his head, telling him she’d hold him to his statement yesterday, but he reasoned that if such a confession went poorly he would have nowhere to turn. He’d left his feelings out on the pitch after Milah, after Jefferson, but the pitch was where Robin was. Robin was his friend, his teammate, his skipper.

Robin kept things grounded with the rest of Killian’s world had fallen apart.

Killian took a long pull from his glass, stalling for time. Thankfully, their food arrived, and both young men were too well-mannered to talk and eat at the same time – Robin’s family descended from some stuffy upper class lot, Killian’s mum drilling the mantra of “manners maketh man” into his head as a lad. During a lull, he finally said, “All twisted around about someone, s’all.”

His burger sat heavy like lead in his stomach, watching Robin’s face. Robin’s eyebrow lifted. “Enough to ruin your football? Don’t tell me it’s Emma.”

Killian tried not to laugh. Swan was gorgeous, but it wasn’t meant to be. “Roommates are off-limits, remember? Or have you and Regina started sharing a bed as well as a room?”

Robin’s cheeks pinked and he stabbed a chip into the ketchup. “I should bloody well think not… Very well then, who are they?”

His mouth felt dry, no matter how much of his beer he drank – indeed, he drained the glass and still felt parched. The waitress came and got him a refill and Killian stopped himself from guzzling it down lest he hurry along his buzz. He hardly thought a drunken confession of attraction would make things any better. “It’s… complicated,” he finally said. “Telling them, it would change a great many things that I’m loathe to give up.”

He met Robin’s gaze then, willing him to understand the words he wasn’t saying, but he knew it often took a straight answer for things to sink in. Robin’s blank look confirmed that. Killian swallowed hard, then said, “I value our friendship too much, Rob, to allow my personal feelings to get in the way if it makes you uncomfortable. I apologize if this admission alters the way you think of me –”

Robin’s eyes widened and Killian shut up fast; Robin was a good man, but he’d known plenty of men who turned on a dime at the thought of a man desiring them. “Bloody hell, me?” Killian’s mouth opened wordlessly, an icicle of fear slicing down his back as he tried to figure out whether he should run for it now or go down swinging. Robin blinked, shaking his head. “Well. I have to admit, Jones, this is a surprise, but I can’t say I’m not flattered.”

It was Killian’s turn to blink, his emotions a complete jumble. “You’re not…”

Robin met his gaze. “Killian, don’t be a tosser, I’m not upset.”

“Well, you don’t go shouting about your conquests in the locker room, so I couldn’t be sure if it would be received well or not.”

Robin grinned. “No, we’ll leave that to Will. As it happens, I suppose it’s never really mattered to me.”

“Oh.”

“Indeed.”

There was a long pause and Killian fought the urge to gulp half his beer to fill the silence. His fingers must have twitched towards his pint, though, because Robin started to grin. “So, is this a date, then, or should we do one proper another time?”

Killian stared, flabbergasted. “One - what? And two, are you seriously asking me out right now?”

“Well, you should probably be the one to do the asking, but you seem – for the first time in your life, I might add – at a loss for words.”

“Rob, don’t indulge me if you’re not serious about this.”

“Who says I’m not?”

“You’re being awfully flippant.”

“I’m not getting on one knee, if that’s what you want.”

Killian felt his ears burning and he wasn’t sure what the cause of it was: embarrassment or anger, possibly a mix of the two. “Look, just forget it,” he said, balling up his napkin and tossing it on the table. He dug in his back pocket for his wallet, trying to look anywhere but at Robin; but when Killian opened the tri-fold to look for cash, he stilled when Robin’s hand covered his.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and Killian looked up to see a soft, earnest look on his face that matched his voice. “I thought – well, occasionally humor helps to ease tension, and I see now that it was a mistake.”

“Too bloody right,” Killian muttered.

Robin’s hand was warm, an odd but nice mix of calluses and softness against his own skin. Killian called up every ounce of courage he had, then turned his hand over to clasp Robin’s. His friend looked surprised at the gesture, perhaps a little unsure of how to handle it, but seemed neither disgusted nor displeased. “We’ve got a match Saturday afternoon, but how about after dinner we ditch the team and take in a movie?”

There were normally team dinners after matches, so it made sense – no need to alert anyone of anything new developing. And Killian and Robin normally went out after matches, though normally with Emma or Regina and their friends (they’d agreed that both of their roommates were useful in separate situations: Emma might not be a wild party girl but her LAX teammates knew how to celebrate a victory, while Regina and her group knew the perfect way to drown out any anger at a loss)

“Alright,” Killian said. Then, feeling bolder and remembering Robin’s remark about humor, added, “Though just so you know, I don’t put out on the first date.”

Robin blinked and Killian thought his joke may have missed the mark, then Rob started to laugh. “You’re probably a bloody awful kisser anyway.”

He thought about proving him wrong right then and there – he’d received approximately zero complaints about his technique, thank you very much – but in all honesty Killian was too busy trying to hide the fact that he was now very much staring at Robin’s mouth, wondering how he kissed and what the combined sensations of their beards might feel like.

Swan, bless her, did her best not to gloat when he told her what had happened later that night.

Though given the fact that he couldn’t stop grinning, he probably wouldn’t have minded a bit of gloating anyway.

Their style of play didn’t falter and Killian’s ability returned now that he was free of the stress of any difficult conversations. He’d been out with Robin before and though he fundamentally knew this was different, part of him wasn’t able to truly understand that this was a date and not just two friends out on the town. Perhaps that’s why he could keep his head on straight over the next few days, even managing to score a goal and assist on two others to help win the match on Saturday.

It wasn’t until after the team dinner that Robin caught his gaze and gave him a meaningful look.

That’s when the waves of butterflies hit.

They took Robin’s truck – Killian had never gotten the hang of driving on the wrong side of the road and happily allowed others to chauffeur him around – and headed out to the shopping mall on the far side of town. There was a theater there that gave student discounts. Knowing their teammates, no one would be out that way celebrating, and it wasn’t likely that they’d run into Emma (the LAX team was on a retreat for the weekend) or Regina (who had an organic chemistry exam on Monday and had threatened to set anyone who disturbed her on fire).

Killian had found that there was always an odd moment concerning who paid when on a date with a man, but it seemed that Robin had already thought of that. “You get tickets, I’ll buy snacks?” he asked as they jumped out of the truck.

“Sounds good to me.”

They wound up eating most of the popcorn halfway through previews, making snide comments to the other about trailers for this overblown blockbuster or that lackluster comedy. By the time the lights went out, Killian was feeling more relaxed, though it still felt decidedly more like friends hanging out rather than a date.

About forty-five minutes in, he decided to make it feel like a date.

It took another fifteen minutes to build the courage to do it, sneaking glances at the armrest that lay between them and Robin’s arm casually resting on it.

He felt Robin still when Killian took his hand, and almost withdrew, but then Robin’s fingers laced with his and Killian’s heart soared.

He couldn’t remember the rest of the movie if he tried.

They were quiet as they left, Robin’s hands casually tucked in his pockets. There weren’t many people leaving the theater at the same time, so Killian pretended to stumble, bumping their shoulders together and making Robin laugh. He nudged back and it turned into a little game, shoving one another until Robin finally just threw his arm around Killian’s shoulders. It was almost a headlock, and to anyone observing it would appear so, but he recognized it for what it was.

Maybe Robin understood the value of physical contact, too.

“So,” Robin said as he pulled up to Killian’s dorm a while later.

“Yeah.”

“That was nice.” Killian scoffed and Robin grinned. “Right, you have a better adjective?”

“I had a good time,” Killian said, his voice pitching high at the end, silently asking if Robin felt the same.

Robin smiled and reached over the center console to take Killian’s hand again. “I did too. Though perhaps next time we not dine with our teammates beforehand?”

“Is there a next time?”

“I’d like there to be.”

They stared at one another for a long moment until Killian smiled. “Alright. Next week?”

They had two more dates before the championship tournament hit, and Killian didn’t like to admit how it frustrated him to put whatever this was between them on hold for the sake of the game. At the same time, he knew it was more important to focus on winning, that there would be more time in the off-season, but he was frustrated all the same.

More because Robin seemed to hide behind his skipper mask, even when it was just the two of them discussing plays after a scrimmage.

He missed his friend. Or his… whatever this was.

They won the next game, solidifying their place in the quarterfinals, but only by the skin of their teeth. Everyone was frustrated after the game, Robin snapped at everyone in the locker room, and Killian’s own frustrations at his own poor play combined with his personal frustrations towards Robin. He managed to hold his tongue until everyone else had gone, finally lashing out, “It’s enough that we’re aware of our own mistakes, mate, there’s no need to be a prick to us all on top of it!”

“I’m skipper, Killian, it’s my damn job to be a prick when you all deserve it!”

“And whose job is it to put you in your place when you’re being an unjust prick?!”

“Not yours, that’s for certain! Take it up with the manager if you have a problem with my skipping!”

Killian fumed. “It’s not enough to know your team isn’t happy with their treatment? You stubborn arse, we selected you and we can damn well take that away. We know we won by the skin of our teeth, we know we need to do better next match, and trust me when I say we’re all going to be beating ourselves up over these mistakes until the next time we can go out there and prove we can do better than before.”

“It’s not enough,” Robin said, scowling.

“What should we do, Robin, become gods? Invest in a Time-Turner? Because the only way we can fix what already happened is to–”

Anything else he might have had to say was abruptly cut off, his ability to speak lost as Robin surged towards him, gripped his shoulders, and fused their mouths together.

If Killian had any lingering doubts about Robin’s intentions – if he was merely indulging Killian’s crush or humoring him so as not to cause any alienation or hurt feelings – they vanished. Hands moved slowly, from clutching to embracing, fingers tentatively twining in hair. They both were in need of a haircut, too superstitious about it at this stage in the game, but something deep and primal in Killian’s bones liked being able to twist his fingers through Robin’s hair as his tongue traced the seam of his lips and begged for entrance.

He hadn’t any expectations for what kissing Robin Locksley would be like, hadn’t allowed himself to think that far ahead or get his hopes up. But even in his wildest fantasies he couldn’t have imagined this – there was a soft urgency to his kiss, unsaid words pushed into actions and touches and the soft glide of their tongues, and Killian could feel Robin’s restraint, how much he was holding back, his inability to lose control in this moment and give in to the feeling.

He vowed to work on that.

Both were breathless when they parted, only enough to get air. Their foreheads touched and Killian almost chuckled when Robin’s mustache tickled his lip. He liked this – really liked this – the feeling of Robin’s arms around him and their bodies pressed chest to thigh. Though, he did try to angle his hips away, feeling his cheeks heat up as he realized Robin could surely feel his erection pressed against his thigh.

But if Killian wasn’t mistaken, and he’d bet a lot that he wasn’t, Robin wasn’t feeling very calm after that himself.

“Bad form,” Killian said finally, giving in and resting his head on Robin’s shoulder. It was a bit awkward, as Robin was actually a bit shorter, but he liked it anyway.

“Are you really commenting on my technique?” Robin asked, sounding both amused and exasperated.

“No,” Killian said with a laugh. “Bad form for shutting me up in the middle of a tirade. As for the actual kissing, that’s a solid eight out of ten.”

“I’m going to regret asking how one scores a perfect ten, aren’t I?”

Killian only grinned.

It was a hard loss.

The weeks leading up to the finals had been good ones. Robin had eased up a little, leaving any discipline discussions up to their manager and refocusing his energies on team morale. He’d confessed to Killian that part of his outburst had been fueled by his nerves about advancing their relationship.

Killian, in turn, was too stunned about Robin defining this as a real relationship to comment.

Little touches had helped. Lingering shoulder claps or gentle touches when they thought no one was looking. Spending time together after practices also helped; Swan knew enough that they could hang out in Killian’s room without much fuss, but Robin wasn’t sure about Regina’s reaction just yet. If anyone asked, they were studying together. If anyone took a closer look, they’d notice Killian’s hand on Robin’s thigh, or the casual way Robin’s arm slung around Killian’s shoulders.

Well, maybe one didn’t need to look too much closer.

Still, playing the last few matches with that kind of support, that kind of assurance, helped. They’d entered the final match with their heads held high – all of them, everyone on the team – but losing in the championship would sting regardless of their pre-game morale.

Losing 5-0 basically annihilated whatever morale they had left.

The team was slow to leave the locker room. Robin had no rousing speeches or kind words – in fact, he had no words at all. No one spoke, the silence dulled only by the steady hiss of the showers and punctuated by the occasional slam of a locker. Everyone trickled out in ones and twos, their heads decidedly less high than they’d been earlier that morning, until only Killian remained in the main room.

Sometimes he did this, lingering in the locker room, letting himself feel whatever emotions he felt after a match without worry that anyone would see. Today he sat with his head in his hands, going over every play in his mind and trying to find what he could have done differently, what plays they could have made instead.

He heard both Robin and Swan in his mind, telling him not to do this to himself, that he knew better.

Well, he did know better, but it was all he could bloody think about.

Disgusted with himself, Killian stripped off his grass-stained jersey and shorts, tossing his dirty uniform into a bag to be washed and grabbing his towel and shower things; everyone else would be back at the hotel by now and he’d join them later, but right now he had to wash off the stink of failure.

It appeared he wasn’t alone in thinking that.

He hadn’t noticed the water still running, but there was a lone occupant in the communal showers: Robin. Killian tried to think back to the last time he’d seen him and concluded that his boyfriend had probably been trying to literally drown his misery for at least three quarters of an hour.

Boyfriend. That was still strange.

Killian dropped his things in the partition, then stepped into the steam. “Rob.”

Robin turned slightly and Killian’s heart broke all over again at the self-loathing and anguish on his face. It mirrored his own feelings, but actually seeing it made him push them away and focus on trying to make Robin feel better. Or at least stop looking like he’d never feel happiness again.

As Killian went to hug him, it dimly registered that not only was this the first time in several years that he was seeing Robin naked, it was the first time they were even touching one another in an intimate way without clothes. And there was nothing sexy about it. And that was perfectly fine.

They didn’t speak, the water beating down on both of them and keeping them warm as Killian held Robin close; and it wasn’t as if he disliked the way that Robin clung to him, he just wished it were for any other reason than misery. And he really had no idea how to make it better.

“You’re going to prune,” he finally said, voice barely audible over the hiss of the water. Robin only nodded, tucking himself under Killian’s chin. “Did you wash at all?” This time Robin shook his head.

Well, that was easily taken care of. Killian eased back to grab his things, then set to work.

He always found value in casual displays of affection. Whether it was hugging friends or letting Swan sleep on his lap when they watched telly or now gently washing Robin’s hair, Killian knew that simple touch, simple gestures of care, warmth, and safety were so scarce these days that the extra effort was appreciated by anyone on the receiving end.

He raked his fingers through Robin’s hair, massaging the shampoo in and scrubbing out the sweat and lingering feelings of defeat. Robin’s eyes were closed and slowly his features relaxed, following Killian’s gentle lead to tip his head back under the spray to wash away the soap suds. Then came the body wash and Killian was hesitant as he lathered up his hands and spread them across Robin’s chest. It was then that Robin opened his eyes, meeting Killian’s hesitant gaze with his own. “Can you handle it?” Killian asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Robin said; it was hard to hear him over the sound of running water, his voice hoarse from shouting on the pitch and likely from the emotions that kept him shut away in his self-imposed confinement.

Killian nodded and stepped back, going to scrub his own hair while Robin got the soap.

He sighed as he stepped into the spray, scrubbing his fingers against his scalp and inwardly bemoaning the fact that he desperately needed a haircut. With finals coming up he’d be hard pressed to find time to get it done, though perhaps he’d ask if one of Swan’s teammates knew how to cut hair.

“Killian.”

He jerked up, wiping water out of his face as Robin took a step towards him. Their lips met and Killian grunted in surprise, hands automatically moving to cup Robin’s head and circle his waist. “Make me forget,” Robin whispered against his lips. “Make me feel good, Killian, please.”

His cock swelled at the words and nudged Robin’s. Killian swallowed hard, pulling back only enough to look his boyfriend in the eyes. “Are you sure?”

He didn’t want this to be something Robin regretted, this large of a step in their relationship brought on only by the urge to expunge negative feelings. But by God, did he want to.

Robin gave a small nod. “Yes.”

Killian surged forward, their lips crashing together and making Robin stumble back slightly. They turned so that Robin was practically pinned against the wall but for Killian’s hand reaching down to grip his ass. They both groaned, Robin’s hips jerking up as Killian kneaded and squeezed the firm muscle. Killian moved quickly, kissing a path down his jaw and gently biting the thick cords of Robin’s neck before reaching the juncture. He bit a little more hard, then sucked. Laving his tongue against the skin, desperate to mark him in some primal need to stake his claim, and squeezed Robin’s ass in time with his sucks. Killian pulled back with a slight popping sound, then dropped to his knees, ignoring the hard tile as his free hand traced the muscled lines of Robin’s stomach. Even over the water, Killian heard Robin suck in a breath when his hand reached his cock; glancing up, Killian saw he was being watched with an intense expression and hooded eyes. “You like this?” he asked, running gentle fingers over Robin’s cock before wrapping his hand around it.

He gave it an experimental pump, watching Robin’s eyes flutter shut and his head fall back against the wall. “Ah, ah,” Killian scolded, getting used to the feel of Robin’s cock and moving his hand in firm, even strokes. “Watch me.”

With that, Killian leaned forward and flicked his tongue against the head. He heard Robin groan as he tasted the salty precum leaking from the tip, then wrapped his lips around the head.

Robin’s hand fisted itself in Killian’s hair as he promptly put every other blowjob he’d ever given to shame. His tongue swirled around the head and traced the fat vein pulsing along the side of the shaft. Robin’s cries echoed through the room, his hips jerking in Killian’s hold and forcing his cock further down Killian’s throat. He only gagged the first time, not expecting it, but relaxed and tried to keep a stronger hold on Robin as he continued.

When one hand went to fondle Robin’s balls, that seemed to be the breaking point. Killian eagerly swallowed his release as Robin came with another shout, only wincing slightly as the hold on his hair tightened. Only when he’d licked the last of it away did Killian sit back on his haunches, looking up to see the results.

Robin slumped against the wall, head tilted back as he caught his breath. As his eyes opened, Killian grinned. “Get up here,” Robin practically growled, taking the offered hand and hauling him up.

Something had snapped in him; Killian felt it as Robin’s kisses became fiercer, more possessive. Killian groaned deep in his throat as Robin practically shoved him back against the wall, his mouth tracing a similar path that Killian’s had done earlier, though Robin paid attention to different areas of his body. Robin nibbled his ears before nipping his way down Killian’s neck; his hands weren’t idle either, running down Killian’s sides and kneading his ass in a decidedly greedy manner. Killian shuddered as Robin’s fingers danced along his thighs, wondering what it might feel like to be pinned to the wall and properly fucked – but that would have to be another time, when they were prepared and not trying to distract each other.

As he mused, Robin slowly dipped down, pausing briefly to pay attention to Killian’s nipples and nose through the thick, wet hair covering his chest. (One of the many things Killian appreciated was that Robin was nowhere near as hairy as he was; only one of them needed to be part-wolf.) His breath hitched as Robin ran his tongue along his abs, tracing a path down to Killian’s aching cock and wasting absolutely no time at all before wrapping his lips around the head.

Killian would have to take a moment later, when he wasn’t about to collapse from pleasure and when he wasn’t trying to contain screams, to appreciate that as both of them were uncircumcised, both knew exactly how to handle the other’s cock. It was a marvel, and one he would put into appreciative words.

Later.

Eventually.

When his boyfriend wasn’t going down on him so earnestly, one hand playing with his balls and the other teasing Killian’s ass and making him want to melt into a puddle of goo.

He tried so hard not to rut his hips, not to fuck Robin’s mouth, but God he couldn’t help it. He did his best to keep his thrusts shallow, but then the goddamn son of a bitch sucked hard and Killian’s body jerked involuntarily; he felt the head of his cock brush the back of Robin’s throat and almost came right then.

He decided to copy Robin’s earlier move and threaded his fingers through Robin’s hair; he silently urged him to move faster, desperate for more and half-wild from the need to come. Robin obliged, his tongue swirling and his teeth ever-so-slightly grazing along the shaft and Killian vaguely tasted blood from biting his lip too hard to keep from crying out.

He didn’t remember an orgasm that powerful before, his hips rutting and rutting into Robin’s willing mouth as he came down his throat. He sagged when it was over, when he was finally spent, and released Robin’s hair to let him up. Killian fell gratefully into Robin’s kiss, both of them more relaxed and their touches more tender, less frantic than before. “Water’s getting cold,” Robin said softly, cupping Killian’s face briefly before tracing the line of his jaw.

“Someone interrupted my wash,” Killian said, his weak joke earning a grin in response.

Robin ducked out first, letting Killian scrub himself, though he was a bit more reluctant to wash away the feeling of Robin’s lips over his body. It was a consolation to realize they could do it all over again another time, with more time and more preparation and less chance of someone walking in on them in a somewhat public locker room.

Nothing sexy about locker rooms, he thought, Swan’s words from several months ago coming to mind, we’ll see about that. He wasn’t one to kiss and tell, but he’d give a mild update to Swan when they returned.

Perhaps. Or perhaps he’d keep this new, warm feeling in his chest to himself for a while longer. His own private happiness to keep the demons of defeat away.

Or perhaps it was a private happiness to be shared by two people; Robin’s face when Killian went to change was a complete 180 from before, soft and with a glow that matched the one Killian felt.

They kept sneaking glances at each other as they dressed, smiling when their eyes met. When Killian’s head popped through the opening of his shirt, Robin was there, moving to gently cup the back of Killian’s head and touch their foreheads together. “Thank you,” he said softly.

“Anytime,” Killian replied. “Really.”

That made Robin laugh. “Next time let’s be a bit more private, though, eh?”

They slung their bags over their shoulders and Robin took Killian’s hand as they left the facility. Killian gave it a squeeze, a reassurance that it would be okay – and it would, they both knew it. Their shower dalliance bled away most of the poison but some of the sullenness would return.

But it would be okay. They had each other.

They’d be okay.

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boschlingtumbles · 5 years ago

Text

Chapter 39

Ned woke up in his childhood bed feeling tranquil and happy. The last two weeks had been a hurricane of happy chaos, what with trying to find space in their apartment and their lives for a second child. The good news is that Jon was the calmest sweetest baby Ned had ever encountered. The bad news is that Robb was quickly teaching him all his bad habits. One of the Mormont girls was coming to babysit today, and Ned privately prayed for her sanity.

But what was any of that compared to having Catelyn and Robb back? Even the days felt brighter, somehow, without the constant fear nibbling at the edges of his sanity that he was going to lose everything he loved.

Catelyn had already left early that morning to meet up with the girls and get ready for the wedding. The guys hadn’t made much of a plan—all they had to do was throw on their suits and show up—but Ned still planned to get there early to get the ring back from Mace and make sure Robert didn’t need anything.

In the meantime, he was just as happy to catch up with his father, Benjen and Brandon, who was also staying with his family for the wedding. Naturally, the primary topic of conversation was Lyanna.

“I can’t believe she’s with Ashara,” Benjen shook his head over cereal that morning.

“Stop,” Ned rolled his eyes.

“Ashara Dayne,” Benjen repeated gleefully.

“Yes we get it,” Ned scowled, stabbing his spoon into the milk.

“YOUR Ashara!”

“For the love of the gods will you please stop?!” Ned glared.

“Oh, is it weird for you?” Brandon walked into the kitchen smirking. “Knowing that your younger sibling is fucking your ex?”

“Brandon!” Ned protested, finding himself suddenly outnumbered.

“Get it?” Benjen grinned, leaning back in his chair. “Because Brandon and Cat used to boink!”

“Yes, thank you, I get it!” Ned blushed.

“Only virgins call it boinking, Benjen,” Brandon rolled his eyes.

“I’ve had sex!” Benjen went red, suggesting the opposite.

“Oh don’t worry, what are you, fourteen?”

“I’m eighteen you dick!”

“Well don’t worry, you’ll get whomever Lyanna passes down to you,” Brandon said serenely.

“What?” Ned laughed.

“I’ve realized it’s our tradition. I passed Cat on to you, you passed Ashara on to Lyanna. Wonder who she’s going to give to Benjen. Better hope it’s not Robert!”

“Shut up!!” Benjen whined.

“Oooh are you going to stand up and object at the wedding?” Brandon teased. “Say the Lannister girl can’t marry him, he’s yours by Stark family law.”

“Stoooop!”

“As best man, I cannot condone such behavior,” Ned pretended to take Brandon’s suggestion seriously. “He’ll have to choose someone else.”

“Who else is there?” Brandon pretended to think. “Rhaegar’s dead, that wasteoid over in Essos is already married...”

“Howland Reed,” Ned provided triumphantly with a smirk. “They dated in third grade. She beat up some bullies who were teasing him and he gave her a ring pop.”

“Good family, the Reeds,” Brandon nodded seriously.

“I hate you guys,” Benjen slid down in his seat.

“And he’s a northerner. You’d still be in the neighborhood!”

“Where’s Barbrey,” Benjen asked, in a patently obvious attempt to change the conversation from his impending romance with Howland Reed.

“Barbrey is a delightful girl but I feel our time together has run its course,” Brandon began, a trifle pompously.

“She dumped you, didn’t she?” Benjen asked drily.

“Not in those words. Or any words really. But I assumed as much when she keyed ‘Brandon Stark has a tiny cock’ across the hood of my car,” Brandon admitted.

“Oh wow, Brandon, I’m so sorry,” Ned frowned. Cat had said there was a rumor going around that Jon was Ashara and Brandon’s. Competing against another rumor that Jon was his and Ashara’s.

“Was it because of the thing with Ashara?”

“No it was because I have a tiny cock,” Brandon rolled his eyes. “Of course it was. I could tell her the pictures were fake until I was blue in the face. I guess when you’re caught with your pants down as many times as I’ve been, it rings a little hollow.”

“Maybe if Lyanna called her to explain,” Ned began.

“Look, it’s really not a big deal. We were on our last legs and there’s a certain dramatic irony to her dumping me over the one girl I DIDN’T cheat on her with,” Brandon grinned. “You know I actually did have the girl they photoshopped Ashara’s head onto? Over my office desk.”

“Don’t tell father,” Ned wrinkled his nose in distaste.

“Why is it that everybody gets to have sex but me?” Benjen sulked. “It’s not like I’ve taken an oath of celibacy!”

“Don’t tell me what?” Rickard Stark asked, as he walked in with Jon and Robb in each arm. “Ned help me, I think my back’s about to give out. I can’t believe I used to do this with you and Lyanna. What are you feeding these boys?!”

“I’ve got you,” Ned cooed as he took Robb, letting Rickard shift Jon off his hip and into both arms.

“Brandon was just telling us how he had his aide in his office—“ Benjen began.

“Going over the latest tax proposals from the city,” Brandon interjected hastily. “They’re outrageous father, the northern part of the city might me the biggest but it’s also the poorest and these rates are tyranny!”

“You don’t have to get me started,” Rickard shook his head, and that was all it took to send them spiraling down a rabbit hole of local politics. Ned took some comfort in the way that as much as his life changed, the people in it didn’t change at all. It was nice to know there were some people he could always count on.

“Want to do some work on the backyard porch?” Benjen asked Ned hopefully. Ned laughed. The backyard porch had been a construction project for as long as Ned could remember. Rickard always had a vision of what his backyard could look like, a vision that seemed to hover tantalizingly out of reach of reality. The number of weekends he and Robert had spent in high school trying not smash their thumbs in with hammers as they drank beers and Lyanna made fun of them from where she was suntanning on a beach towel nearby. And now that project had become Benjen’s. Someday it would be Robb and Jon’s.

“You shouldn’t let Brandon get to you,” Ned said, a little shyly, as they set out for the garage to get the toolbox. “The right girl is worth waiting for.”

“Says the guy who has insanely gorgeous girls chasing him without doing a thing,” Benjen growled. “I will have you know that the shy awkward thing only works for you and literally nobody else.”

“Good thing you’re not shy and awkward,” Ned pushed him.

They spent a companionable morning dismantling the steps down to the lawn, which Rickard had decided were the wrong height and width. It was with some surprise that Ned looked down at the time and realized he would have to make good time to get to the Sept an hour early.

“You won’t forget to give the babysitter my number?” Ned called over his shoulder as he frantically knotted and reknotted the hideous tie Cersei had provided him.

“Yes, stop worrying,” Brandon rolled his eyes. “And you can knot that as many times as you like, it won’t make it any less ugly.”

“You’re right,” Ned admitted, to which he wasn’t sure. “Be good,” he told the boys, kissing both on the crown of their head.

“No kiss for me?” Brandon pretended to pout. Ned gave him the middle finger and ran out.

He made good time to the sept, trying to smile as a valet hurried to assist him with his car. The place was huge, and he was a little bewildered as to where he should go. He shot a quick text to Robert as he walked in.

The entry hall was overrun with Lannisters. Ned felt his feet freeze as he stared at the scene in horror. How had they crammed so many blond-haired arrogant looking individuals into one place.

“Hullo,” Ned looked down as he felt a tug at his pants. A small skinny blond haired boy of about eight was looking up at him. “I’m Tyrek.”

“I’m Ned,” Ned said, swallowing a laugh. “Have you seen the bride or the groom by any chance?”

“Cersei is in the garden with Uncle Tywin,” Tyrek told him solemnly.

“Uh right,” Ned felt a shiver go down his spine. Cersei didn’t need to know he was here. “What about Robert? The groom?”

Tyrek shook his head.

“Okay,” Ned said uncertainly. “I’m just going to look for him...” he tried to pry Tyrek’s sticky hand off his suit pants.

Once disentangled, Ned set off to find the groom.

He thought he’d had some success when he spotted Robert’s father, waving a glass of red wine and laughing to someone.

“Mr. Baratheon!” Ned said hopefully.

“Ned Stark, as I live and breathe,” Steffon Baratheon grinned. “You’ve met Tywin Lannister haven’t you?”

Ned froze, as the man he was talking to turned around.

“I’m not sure we’ve had the pleasure,” Tywin drawled. “But of course I know you. You’re the boy from the police video.”

Ned stiffened, not sure what to say. If Steffon noticed something was amiss however, he did not let on.

“I keep saying Tywin, the only cure for a nervous breakdown is sex. Hot dirty sex in a semi-public place,” Steffon elbowed Tywin, who was busy incinerating Ned by death glare.

“So nice to see you both, I’m very happy for Cersei and Robert,” Ned stammered before excusing himself. He wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead, convinced he could still feel Tywin’s stare digging into his back.

Fortunately the next familiar face was a friendlier one.

“Mace!” Ned called, spotting the Tyrells as they entered.

Mace gave him a slightly harried smile, trying to balance as he was his mother’s handbag, a four year old child, and a wedding gift.

“If you’ll just excuse me, for a second,” Mace said to his wife and mother, neither of whom was paying him the slightest amount of attention.

“This must be Loras,” Ned smiled at the boy, an elfin looking creature with long honey brown curls. He seemed to have very little of his father in him, which was not necessarily a bad thing. “Here let me help you with that,” Ned took the gift from Mace’s other hand, allowing him to rebalance.

“Thanks. The sitter fell through,” Mace sighed. “This morning was a nightmare trying to get Loras into his little suit. Alerie has been in a panic that she’s offended Cersei somehow and went out and got the most ridiculously expensive crystal vase as a wedding present and my mother went through my credit card statements and found it and the two have been going at it hammer and tongs,” he looked dolefully at his son. “At this point I’m just hoping they kill each other.”

“Well I can put this down for you with the other gifts at least,” Ned offered. “Do you have the ring? I just don’t want to forget...”

He trailed off at the look of horror on Mace’s face.

“Mace Tyrell, you didn’t!” Ned growled.

“It’s back in Highgarden! Shit, I can picture exactly which drawer it’s in!”

“I don’t care which drawer it’s in! You literally had one job to do!!! I can’t tell Cersei we don’t have a ring, she’ll kill me! And then Jaime will kill me! And then Tywin will kill me!”

“Robert might also kill you,” Mace offered weakly.

“NOT HELPFUL!”

Robert wouldn’t really kill him, would he? Oh gods, he might. He was the best man, this was literally the only thing he had to take care of today. He was a terrible best man and a terrible friend and what in seven hells were they going to do?!

“Okay the pocket squares are terrible but you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Thoros ambled up to them. Somehow the outfit seemed even uglier on him, but Thoros wore it with a sort of cheerful indifference.

“Mace... forgot the ring,” Ned bit out.

“I didn’t mean to!” Mace wrung his hands.

“We have to tell Robert. Have you seen him?”

“I haven’t.”

“Well Steffon is here, so he must be somewhere,” Ned frowned.

The three of them proceeded to search every nook of the sept, a process that took some thirty minutes.

“It’s his wedding! Where the heck is he?” Ned fretted. Should he have called him this morning to make sure he was up? He thought Stannis would do that! Should he call him now? He felt his pants pocket for his phone, but it was nowhere to be found. Fuck, he couldn’t have lost it already, he had just gotten it replaced!

“Okay, we clearly need to find a substitute ring,” Thoros said slowly. “One that’s nice enough that Cersei won’t freak out about the wedding photos.”

“It’s going to have to be REALLY nice,” Ned frowned.

“So let’s see,” Thoros said, eyeing Mace. “Who on earth might possibly have an incredibly expensive ring that we can substitute?”

Mace shrugged.

“Like say a sixty thousand dragon ring?” Thoros prodded.

“I mean we can look around the wedding guests, but that’s super high end,” Mace scratched his head. “And we can’t ask anyone who might tell other guests.”

“Oh we should definitely borrow it without asking,” Thoros said bluntly.

“See when you take something that doesn’t belong to you without permission, it’s stealing. It doesn’t matter if you eventually intend to return it,” Ned scrunched his face. Thoros was a nice guy, but Ned felt like he had missed some basic ethics classes at some point in his life.

“Right, Mace. Who could we steal a very expensive ring from that you would be in a very good position to return it to after the wedding?” Thoros stared at Mace, ignoring Ned entirely.

“Oh no,” Mace’s face went ashen. “You can’t possibly mean...”

“Gam Gam!” Loras waved over Mace’s shoulder. “Look, Gam Gam!”

“You can’t possibly be serious,” Mace hissed.

“Where’s my favorite boy?” Olenna Tyrell approached and lifted Loras from Mace’s grasp. Ned took a second to covertly study her ring. It was really nice. Three rubies and two diamonds in an alternating pattern. One might even say the rubies were Lannister red.

“Now who isn’t serious boys? You look frightfully glum for a wedding,” Olenna eyed them suspiciously.

“Nothing mother, I was just explaining a joke I’d heard,” Mace shifted from foot to foot.

“See that’s your problem dear, you’re supposed to tell the joke not explain it,” Olenna rolled her eyes. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take my grandson back over to his birdbrain of a mother. Hopefully that will keep her occupied, I really don’t have time to babysit the two of you. I have my eye on bigger game.”

“Do NOT steal my mother’s ring,” Mace whispered angrily.

“Of course not,” Thoros said amiably, and Mace’s shoulders dropped in relief.

“You’ll steal her ring,” Thoros patted him on the back.

“What?! I don’t think you understand what my mother would do to me if...”

“Ned, tell Robert he will have a very lovely ring. We’re taking care of it,” Thoros slung a not entirely friendly arm over Mace’s shoulder.

“Thanks,” Ned gave Thoros a relieved smile. Now to find Robert... well he had looked in just about every room in this sept. He had to be outside in the grounds.

Ned walked into the gardens and looked around. Guests were mingling and he could hear the musical laugh of Cassana Baratheon from the center of a group of admirers. He edged a little closer to see if Robert was with his mother—was Cassana Baratheon wearing a white dress? Nope nope nope, Ned backtracked. He wanted no part of that.

“Pssst!” There was a whisper from a grove with a little shrine. Ned looked around but didn’t see anybody.

“PSSST!”

There it was again, louder! Hesitantly, Ned drifted toward the sound.

“Stark!” The voice was in an urgent undertone, and Ned took another step toward the trees. Only for someone to grab his arm and pull him behind the shrine.

“Hey! Who the hell—Hoster?” Ned blinked, to find his father-in-law staring at him.

“Stark, I need to speak to you,” Hoster Tully said formally and a little stiffly for someone who was lurking in the dark corners of a garden to spring out at people.

“I have repeatedly attempted to contact Cat. Phone calls, texts, an old fashioned letter... it’s not like her to ignore me like this!”

“I believe Catelyn made her feelings about your behavior quite clearly,” Ned said uncomfortably.

“Listen, I’m not... can you just arrange a meeting? I have to apologize.”

Ned had to stop his jaw from dropping. Hoster Tully, apologize?

“I can’t lose my daughter over this. And I don’t know when I’ll have another chance to see her in person, if this keeps up. Can you help me? Please?” Hoster Tully ground out the last word as though it were physically painful.

Ned shifted uncomfortably. Cat had been very clear about her disinclination to speak to her father for the next decade, at best. But he was her family. Just the thought of something coming between him and his own father and not being able to fix it gave Ned a lump in his throat. Cat would be annoyed with him, but didn’t Hoster deserve one more shot to make things right?

“Um I’ll see what I can do,” Ned said tentatively.

“I appreciate it. I do. I think you are a good man, Eddard. I am sorry if I overlook that. I want more for Catelyn than what you can give her, but I have always thought you were a good man,” Hoster said bluntly.

Ned rolled his eyes. On the other hand, maybe he could just say nothing and leave his obnoxious pill of an in-law to stew in dark corners.

He mulled the dilemma as he trudged back toward the sept. He wished he could tell Robert about the interaction he’d just had, maybe get his thoughts. Instead, he was nearly flattened by Jaime Lannister, running around a corner.

“Stark!”

Ned sighed. Why did he always run into Jaime when he was already severely rattled?

“Look, it’s not like a super big deal or anything, and you shouldn’t worry but the thing is Cersei is, um, missing,” Jaime coughed.

“Missing?” Ned stared.

“Temporarily,” Jaime hastened to add. “Totally fixable. Just don’t tell Robert. Keep him distracted, okay? We’ll find her and he doesn’t need to be any the wiser.”

Jaime ran off. Ned continued to stare after him.

No ring. Missing bride. And where in the seven hells was Robert?!

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delwray-blog · 5 years ago

Text

THE SIN ENGRAVED HEART

What God is trying to show man, the real condition of his own heart?

Sin is engraved in the heart of every one of us!

Sin is engraved in all men both bond and free, the lost as well as the saint. The Prophet tells us that man's sinfulness is as much fixed in him as an inscription carved with an iron pen in granite. How is this fixedness proven? It is proven in two ways in the text, namely, that it is engraved upon the tablets of their heart, and secondly, upon the horns of their altar. It clearly proves how deeply evil is fixed in man when we reflect that sin is in the very heart of man. Jeremiah 17, “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of their heart and upon the horns of your altars;” Jer. 17:1; Jer. 17:9 must I quote it here? Man loves sin. Sin is not an accident to man, a ditch into which he falls because he cannot help it but sin is the subject of man's deliberate preference. Man selects evil and rejects good. If a man, for a while, falls into a habit and yet that habit yields him no satisfaction, you may very readily break him of it. But when a man finds his habit to be pleasant to his nature and even dear to him, you may rest assured that you are not likely to turn him from it. The Ethiopian cannot change his skin or the leopard his spots. When sin becomes interdicted with the roots of the affections, you cannot uproot it. When leprosy eats deep into the heart of humanity, who can expel it? It becomes, therefore, a hopeless case so far as human power is concerned. Since sin reigns and rules in man's affections, it is deeply ingrained, indeed. Man’s very nature is inherently ingrained with sin. To my unconverted Hearer, the sin of forgetting God is in your heart, you know it is. You do not like to think of Him. It is not your desire to be obedient to Him. Your pleasure lies in quite another direction. You know very well that when you take up the Bible in the evening and begin to read it, it is a dreadfully dry book. You have no interest in it. And when you go to a place of worship you find no pleasure in it. Your heart does not go after God's praise, you are like the mouse which crept into the Church and, finding hymn books very dry nibbling, was glad to get away again. The storeroom suited her better and so it does you. The music hall, the ballroom, and the theater are more to your taste because there you will not be worried about the things of God. God, holiness, Heaven, Hell, eternity and the Atonement, why these things are old and cheerless sounds to you! You have heard them many, many times but they ring no music into your ears, they rather beat like muffled drums in a funeral march! As soon expect a stream to flow uphill as look for a natural heart seeking after God! If it were right in this place to talk about certain sins, there are many that would blush and hide their face and say, "I pray that I may never fall into them," and yet they close not their ears when the evil is recited, but listen with evident interest!

When we read police reports and divorce reports, we should be deeply pained and made to shudder, were it not that our evil heart of unbelief is hardened towards evil. Everybody knows that the light literature of the day, which is pretty freely spiced with shameful sin, goes down readily and second and third editions are called for. You’re very decent and moral people like a precious mouthful of scandal or uncleanness to give a flavor to their reading. Yes, there is a love of sin in the heart, a love of everything that is contrary to God! And there is forgetfulness, distaste, even hatred to thoughts concerning the great Father of spirits! Oh, if you loved God you would not live without prayer as some of you do! If you loved God you would not repeat forms of prayer as some of you do! If you loved God you would talk to your Father without your book! My child never reads a book to me when he wants anything, but he comes with his mouth and his heart ready at once, without any teaching from his brother, to ask me for what he needs. If you loved God, you would not live day by day without speaking of Him, without meditating upon His glorious works, and without seeking after fellowship and communion with Him! But, inasmuch as you love Him not Who is so worthy and Who by such gentle ways woos your love, who shall deny that your lack of love to God is deeply engraved in the very center of your heart, and cut into your nature, itself? The second proof the Prophet gives of the fixedness of human sin is that it was written on the horns of their altars. When people are bad, at their best they must be very bad, and such were the men of Judah. They sinned in their very religion. These people sinned by setting up idols and departing from Jehovah, we sin in quite another way. When you get the unconverted man to be religious, which is a very easy thing, what form does the religion take? Frequently he prefers that which most gratifies his taste, his ears, or his sight. Yes, of course, he does not object to a religion which is produced and assisted by painted windows, praising machines, elegant tailoring, and fine music! Men's carnal appetites are pleased with these things, and it is gratifying to human nature to discover that such things may be called religion. The fact is that there is no more true religion in fine music than in discord, and no more genuine worship in a cathedral than in a hotel. Men might as well look at vestments, and windows, and carvings in the artificers' shops where they are made and there would be quite as much devotion as in looking at them in the place where they are fixed! Others think if their ears are pleased with listening to an eloquent discourse they are worshipping God. He who can speak well is, to them, as one who makes a goodly sound on a pleasant instrument. Their religion is to admire elocution, but there is no religion in that! There can be no more Divine Grace in listening to an eloquent minister than in listening to an eloquent parliamentary orator.

If your heart is touched, that is the worship of God! If your heart is drawn to God, that is the service of God but if it is the mere ringing of the words, and the falling of the periods, and the cadence of the voice that you regard, why, Sirs, you do not worship God, and on the very horns of your altars are your sins! You are bringing a delight of your own sensuous faculties and putting that in the place of true faith and love, and then saying to your soul, "I have pleased God," whereas you have only pleased yourself. When men become serious in religion, and look somewhat to the inward, they then defile the Lord's altar by relying upon their own righteousness. Nothing is more pleasing to human nature than the attempt to do something by which it may merit salvation at the hand of God. God thunders out, "By the works of the Law there shall no flesh living be justified," and in the teeth of that, millions of men say, "We will be justified by the works of the Law"! So, coming to God with the pretense of worshipping Him, they offer Him that which He abhors and give the lie to Him in all His solemn declarations. If God says that by the works of the Law no flesh shall be justified, and man declares, "But I will be so justified," he makes God a liar, whether he knows it or not his sin has that within it. Man is much like a silkworm; he is a spinner and weaver by nature. A robe of righteousness is worked out for him but he will not have it, he will spin for himself and like the silkworm, he spins and spins and he only spins himself a shroud. All the righteousness that a sinner can make will only be a shroud in which to wrap up his soul, his destroyed soul, for God will cast him away who relies upon the works of the Law. In other ways, men stain the horns of their altars. Some do it by carelessness. Some of you who are reading here are filled with vain thoughts. I thank God that I have not to complain of inattentive readers, serious readers but still, how often during prayer your hearts are anywhere but at the Throne of God? And when the sacred song is rising up to the Majesty of Heaven your lips are moving, but your hearts are not praising God! Ah, my Friends, if secret things were testified abroad how many times it would be seen that the horns of your altar have been stained by irreverence and carelessness! Those lips must be depraved, indeed, which even in prayer and praise still continue to sin! The horns of our altars are defiled by hypocrisy. Into our Churches there will come men who, like Demas and Judas intrude themselves, uncalled, sitting at the Master's Table. They are baptized into His name and yet for all that they are hollow and rotten, deceivers and deceived. You may have seen two fencers practicing their art and noticed how they seem to be seeking each other's death, how they strike and thrust as though they were earnestly contending for life but after the show is over they sit down and shake hands and are good friends. Often so it is in your prayers and confessions, you will acknowledge your sins and profess to hate them and make resolutions against them but it is all outward show-fencing, not real fighting! And when the fencing is over, the soul shakes hands with its old enemy and returns to its former ways of sin. Oh, this foul hypocrisy is a staining of the horns of the altar with a vengeance! The fact is clear that men do this and the inference is also logical that if men love sin in their hearts, and if even in their religion they still perpetuate sin, then it must be deeply engraved in them as with the point of a diamond. Sin is indeed engraved in every one of us and it seems like the point of a diamond. We all are guilty and Jesus knew it and that is the very purpose for which He came into this world “to seek and save sinners.”

Are you willing from the depths of your heart to admit that you are a sinner, and that sin is engraved, ingrained in your heart and that there is nothing you can do about it or nothing you can do to save yourself, well then, God is ready to save you!

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