#writing an answer for chapter 95 and man it is long | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wonwoosthetic · 8 months

Note

Helloooo

Can you write about the NANA TOUR with minnie? plsss (can you also include the reaction of carats to her waking up and her closeness with wonwoo)

series masterlist

word count - 12k

a/n: thank you for the request!! I was very happy to write Minnie into these episodes/parts bc omg even just watching them was so much fun already! I had to change up a few things, for example like them not waking up Minnie but her already being up, I hope that's okay :) at the end of the chapter you can find a link to some Fan Twitter edits, I hope you like them too :) if there's anything else you'd like to see, please let me know! Love you all! <3

[everything in brackets like this was added by me]

everything in italics wasn’t caught on camera, but is just for you <3

Go Together NANA TOUR 🌷Minnie

EP1-1. Don't Let SEVENTEEN Know

Yeongseok was getting every piece of information about the other members out of S.Coups. What will they be doing at 5 in the morning? Which members are going to be drinking most likely? Who will be the most excited? The leader of the idol group was giving him every answer in detail, knowing the rest of the group like the back of his hand.

"Who will have the best reaction when they find out we're going?"

The question was thrown into the room, making the wheels in Seungcheol's head start turning right away. It didn't take him long to have the answers, remembering each time the members had excitedly talked about the Youth Over Flower program even before they had the luck of picking it out of the hat as a prize for their hard work.

The '95 Liner started listing off some of the brightest members of the group. At the, once again, mention of Mingyu, the producers couldn't help but chuckle, remarking that the leader had repeatedly talked about the taller member.

Amid their conversation and after a particular question from the producer, the two men realised that while Minghao would be definitely excited, he might also be possibly slightly disappointed in the trip. Seungcheol explained that it might surprise him that it would suddenly not only be him and Jun in Rome but he and the 12 other members. Na PD made sure to let the leader know he'd be looking out for the '97 Liner with an extra eye and keep him close.

A follow-up question from one of the producers behind the camera caught Cheol's attention.

"Other than Myungho-shi," he wondered, "are there any other members we need to take care of?"

For a second, 'Coups let himself think.

"Minnie."

"Minnie-shi?" The producer asked him again.

The '95 Liner nodded. "She... you'll see... she can get... how do I say this?" He wondered out loud. "She tends to look for a person for.. comfort? She wants to have someone right next to her that... she can trust and she can be comfortable with because... It's like... she gets like this and just wants to have someone that will... lead them well. She's just very careful sometimes," he explained. "Especially with this program because she won't trust you well at first," Cheol chuckled, "because of the past 'Youth Over Flowers' episodes."

[Leader who knows his members very well]

"Okay, okay... I see... So, Minnie will be clingy? Once she trusts us." Yeongseok questioned him further.

Cheol nodded. "Yeah, maybe... and it might seem cute, but don't let that fool you," he suddenly warned the older man, making him chuckle.

"W-What? What do you mean?" He laughed.

"She has a very strong personality," Coups smiled with wide eyes, embellishing his statement.

"Aaah," Na PD nodded his head. A memory made him chuckle again as he put his hand on the idol's shoulder. "She was already making deals with me during the first Game Caterer episode."

[Kids who like debating]

The comment made the leader laugh out loud and touch the older man's arm as he threw his head back in glee. Yeongseok joined him, chuckling along with the '95 Liner while some giggles could be also heard from behind the camera.

"That means she's comfortable with you, hyung. That's a good sign," S.Coups assured him with a nod. "If she puts up a fight with you, it means she likes you. Then she'll also be more fun."

Na PD took a deep breath in, "Aah, ok. That's good then, I guess... a bit confusing, but..." his eyes closed for a second as he chuckled before catching himself again. "Then I'll make sure to keep Minnie close to me as well. Along with Myungho and Mingyu."

"And anyone else?" The producer from behind the camera asked furthermore, clearly wanting to make sure that each member would be in good hands.

Cheol pressed his lips together before the next member's name rolled off his tongue. "Woozi?"

After knocking on the hotel door, S.Coups let himself in.

"You're so loud," he commented right as he entered, the camera not following him.

"Come in," Hoshi just ushered him inside. Followed by Joshua, who repeated it,

"Come in, come in."

"You're too loud," the leader told them again.

Minnie sighed softly, a smile evident through her voice, "I've been telling them that."

Mingyu interrupted her before she could say anything more. "But-" and suddenly started singing a random tune. The maknae was quick to join his hyung, coming up with lyrics that would fit the instrumentals the group was playing in the background.

"Did they wake you up?" The girl suddenly wondered.

Seungcheol shook his head, "I was already awake."

"Why are you awake at this hour?" She sounded clearly confused, maybe even slightly concerned, but the '95 Liner just brushed off her worry as he remembered the 'script'

"I think I lost my phone."

Dino was still in the middle of his written-on-the-spot song when he called the leader's phone as he asked him to do. Hoshi and Na PD were still in the hallway of the hotel floor when the phone rang. Unbeknownst to everyone but the '96 Liner, Yeongseok picked up the call and followed the idol back into the room, hot on his tracks.

After the two came in, the older man revealed himself to the six members who were in the room. Starting on the left side of the room, Seungcheol had taken a seat on one of the extra armchairs while Joshua and Seungkwan were occupying the couch and table right by the window. Mingyu had gotten comfortable laying on the bed, while Minnie was sitting up and the youngest decided to stand right next to the mattress.

Na PD barged in, still on the phone, "Coups-ya, how can you leave your phone just lying around?"

As soon as he came into view, the members jumped back in surprise. Joshua sat up straighter while Mingyu just continued to lounge off. Minnie's mouth was hanging open wide, gazing at the man in front of her with big eyes.

But he kept up his act, "How can you leave your phone lying around?"

Their leader had fallen into a fit of laughter, gripping his crunches tightly as he tried to collect himself again while the rest just looked around the room in a state of shock and surprise. With so many cameras on you all of a sudden, the expressions on each of their faces were understandable.

Hoshi joined Minnie on the side of the bed she had claimed, reaching out for the hand of the producer.

"Ah... wait a minute- we really... woah..." He kept on starting sentences and not finishing them.

"This can't be it," Joshua threw into the room, now also up and closer to the bed as all eyes were on Yeongseok, who held onto the '96 Liner's hands tightly as he talked.

"Hey!" He started, "This is what was promised."

Hoshi sighed out loud in frustration, "No, but our concert just ended yesterday-"

"Wait," Mingyu suddenly jumped in, scooching up further to the front of the mattress to stop right in front of Na PD. "Are we not going to Korea?"

The producer shook his head with a smile, "You can't go! That's not where you're going." Making the rapper's grin widen even more and eventually errupt into bright laughter as he threw his hands up and let himself fall back onto the bed. Even before his back hit the white sheets again, his arms wrapped around the girl who was still quietly in the background, hiding her mouth behind her hand that was covered by the black zip-up hoodie she was wearing.

"WOAH, that's so nice!" He called out happily, tightening his arms around her as if she was to thank rather than the man standing in front of the group.

Each member received a microphone to be clipped by the collar of their clothing and got to sit back down comfortably. Minnie decided to stay on the right side of the bed, her shoulder brushing against Hoshi's.

Everyone but the leader was still in somewhat of a bubble of the unknown, unsure of what would be happening next or where they would even be going even after they had started interrogating the producers and staff members about their schedule.

The performance unit's leader had another important question, "What's the thing where Myungho and Junnie are going to Italy, hyung?"

"Myungho and Junnie are going to Italy," Na PD simply answered, making the girl's eyebrows scrunch in confusion.

"Ah, so separate-" Hoshi started but was interrupted by Seungcheol, who chuckled at the disarray of his members.

"No," he smiled, "You're going together."

"We're going?" The '96 Liner looked up at the older man, who seemed to be also very much amused at the situation, but one member caught his attention.

"Minnie-ya," he turned to the girl with a smile, who met his eyes, "You've been so quiet."

She chuckled to herself, taking a deep breath in. "I... I'm still in shock," making the other producers smile as well. "Are we really going to Italy?" Her big eyes were fixed on him, not even daring to blink, too scared for it all to be a dream and blinking would wake her up.

Mingyu had fallen to his knees, clasping the producer's hands into his, practically begging him to not be lying to them. He desperately wanted the news of their apparent Italy journey to be true.

"Can I tell them that?" The older man asked his fellow producers who nodded with multiple chuckles. So, he turned back to the '97 Liners who were still gazing up at him with expecting eyes. "We're going to Italy." He assured them.

With big smiles and eyes, Minnie and Mingyu turned to each other, giggling before the rapper let his head into her lap, his cheek brushing against the white silk of her pyjama pants.

[Dream destination of the younger ones?]

Very quickly, Yeongseok explained the next few steps that would involve waking up the other members who were sleeping and gathering them all in one room to let the program officially start.

Only problem: some of the members were still drunk enough to most probably hardly remember anything about the events the following day.

"Right now, I-" Dino explained, "We're kind of drunk."

"We are drunk," Joshua agreed, his voice just underlying the statement he had just given.

"It's okay," Na PD assured them. "Everyone's drunk."

"Noona isn't," the youngest pointed at the girl who had stood up and was straightening out the hoodie she was wearing.

Yeongseok looked over at her. "Minnie, you're not drunk?"

The camera focused on the female idol who shook her head. "No," she chuckled, "I was sleeping, but my phone kept going off," she explained. "These idiots were texting me to come over."

[Interruption of her beauty sleep]

Her comment got a round of chuckles from the producers behind the cameras, making her smile and shake her head.

"So you haven't been here for long?" Shin Hyojung, one of the female producers, wondered.

"No," Minnie answered again. "I actually came like five minutes before you barged in."

"Woah," Na PD gasped, "So you could've caught us even before Hoshi..."

[Lucky timing]

"We really wanted her to drink with us," Hoshi walked over to the '97 Liner, linking his arm with hers.

"And I wanted to sleep," she added with a smile at the older member.

First on the list: Waking up Dokyeom.

The group, along with the producers exited the hotel room and rushed into the lobby, on their way to find the room of the other member. Minnie walked alongside the leader, Seungkwan was right in front of them, walking backwards so he could face the two.

"Pledis really does this?!" He continued to question the reality of the situation.

The girl shook her head, looking down at the floor before glancing forward again. "That can't be real. They can't just take us to Italy like that, right? Pledis wouldn't allow that."

"But they are," the leader stated, continuously laughing at the situation.

"That's crazy," she mumbled to herself, hugging her arms close to her torso

She had found the idea of barging into the other members' rooms entertaining, yet scary at first. She wasn't able to get the thought of them doing the exact same to her out of her head. 'Thank God, I was with the drunk part of the group...', Deep down, she knew she had to thank Dino and Hoshi for blowing up her phone and getting her out of bed because the situation could've gotten quite uncomfortable for quite a few people. These thoughts led to her staying in the background during their break-in into Dokyeom's room, choosing to laugh along with the members as they loudly shouted out for the '97 Liner to get up.

With his bloodshot eyes, he was still looking around the hallway on their way out towards the next victim's room. He tapped the girl's shoulder, making her turn to the right, immediately a giggle tumbling from her lips as she took in his dishevelled look.

"Minnie-ya..." Dokyeom gasped, "Is this real? Are we really going?"

The female idol patted his back with a smile, "Yes, we're really going right now."

"Woah..." he breathed out as they stopped right in front of the producer's room.

Seungkwan reached out to unlock the door with the master keycard, but his hand was slapped away by the '97 Liner rapper.

"Just go!" The leader, from the back of the line, called out, "Just go in with 'Woozi!'"

"What if he's not sleeping..." Seungkwan wondered out loud.

After a few more moments of debate, the members agreed to let Yeongseok walk in first to wake up the '96 Liner by pretending he was one of their managers. Waking him up softly like one of the staff members was definitely the better choice rather than barging in and screaming at his face like they did with the main vocalist right before.

Na PD didn't need much convincing before opening the door and stepping in. Everyone was surprised by the brightness of the room due to the lights that were still on - hardly anyone expected Woozi to be still up at this time. Well... he wasn't exactly. Walking further into the hotel room, the group of idols and producers found the singer lying on his bed, no sheets covering his body, still in the clothes he had worn before, spread out on top of the mattress.

One chuckle after the other fell with each step they took further into the room. All the while Yeongseok kept up his act of their road manager, trying to get Woozi out of bed.

Clearly confused, the '96 Liner pushed himself off the bed, the sound of each member's laughter echoing through the room as they started surrounding him. Mingyu's distinct laugh bounced off the walls specifically.

Minnie's eye drifted from the flustered member who had just been pulled out of his slumber, to the table right next to the bed. She immediately laughed even harder than before, walking up to Hoshi to show him.

After smacking his arm, she pointed forward, "Look at his protein powder!"

"Ah!" The performance unit's leader laughed out loud, "His protein! Look at the protein!" He caught the attention of the rest of the people in the room. Each member started laughing even more at the mention of the massive box of protein powder he had brought along for their, in relation, rather short Japan trip.

The producer was still too dishevelled to form proper sentences, just clearly wanting to get the group out of his room and onto the next one.

"Woozi-hyung, why are your sunglasses on the bed?" Dokyeom commented once his eyes found the accessory lying close to the pillows. Hoshi had reached out and grabbed them, handing them over to Mingyu, who put them on the older member's face and pushed them up to keep his hair looking somewhat sane.

Minnie chuckled with a shake of her head, "Woozi-hyung might just be the most fashionable sleeper I've ever seen." Then she turned to the producer. "But without them, you currently look like a crazy scientist." Getting a sarcastic grin from him in return, as Mingyu hit her arm with a chuckle.

"To which door are we going next?" Yeongseok wondered right away, as soon as Woozi was ready to go. He had gotten into the flow of the Seventeen members waking each other up. Each time, using their creativity and knowledge about one another to come up with fun ways to rip them out of their slumber and surprise them with the news.

"The room next door is-"

"Wonwoo," Minnie finished the sentence of the staff member quietly under her breath. Not enough for the rest to notice, but the camera right next to her had caught it.

Mingyu's voice suddenly rang through their ears. "But- I'm sorry. We'll skip Wonwoo-hyung."

The girl's eyebrows scrunched in confusion as she looked at her fellow '97 Liner, "Why?" Followed by Na PD who threw the same question into the room, sounding slightly more concerned than the girl, who just seemed confused by Mingyu's sudden comment.

"I just don't think it's going to be funny," he told the older man before meeting the eyes of the female member.

Minnie opened her mouth, still a slight scrunch in her eyebrows, but as soon as she closed her lips again her eyebrows returned to a neutral facial expression. Dino was quick to react.

"No, no, no, Wonwoo-hyung is fun," the youngest commented, already ready to make his way to the next room.

The girl was next. "Mm, it's gonna be okay," she assured the rapper, speaking softly as she walked up to him. "We'll make it fun."

Arrived at the next room, Seunkgwan and Dino were the first in line, right next to the door. The '98 Liner was already holding the keycard up, excited to wake up the next member.

"Wonwoo?" Na PD asked them again to make sure.

The main vocalist nodded, "Yes, we'll go with Wonwoo."

The producer of the show had caught up with the two youngest, standing next to them as the Seungkwan reached out to knock.

Minnie had come closer, stopping between Hoshi and Dino, waiting for the singer in front of them to finally open the door.

For a moment, the group waited after Seungkwan had knocked on the door three times. Only that Hoshi had already become too impatient,

"We can just go in." Not even wanting to wait another second, making the girl next to him chuckle.

"Let's go in," Dino whispered along with the older member, ushering Seungkwan to just open the door. With a soft push down on the handle, they opened it. Before they let themselves in, Hoshi had pushed Minnie forward, right past the maknae, who added another quick whisper of,

"Noona, go in first."

With quick, yet quiet steps, the female member pushed the door slightly more open and stepped into the room right after flicking on the lights.

"Oppa?" She greeted him at first.

Dino followed right behind her, with Seungkwan afterwards, who held the door open for the cameraman.

"Wonwoo-hyung, they say we need to go," he commented as soon as he walked in.

"Huh?" A raspy hum came from the other side of the room.

While all the other members were toddling inside in a line, one after the other, Minnie's voice was caught by the microphone.

"Oh- pull up the covers," she hastily stated. "Cover your body."

"Why-" Wonwoo was about to ask her a follow-up question when Na PD's voice echoed through the room.

"Wonwoo-ya!" He called out as he revealed himself from the hallway, appearing at the foot of the bed, on which Minnie had sat herself down, while the rapper was holding up the covers over his chest. "It's time to go!" The producer chuckled at the reaction of the '96 Liner as he let himself fall back against the mattress. "Wonwoo-ya... why are your shoulders so wide?" He laughed as he got closer to the bed, his hands finding his bare shoulders that had gotten famous ever since their Game Caterer episode.

The female idol laughed along with her members, holding onto the massive block of a power bank and his glasses as her eyes switched from watching the group in front of them to the man to her right, still hiding underneath the white hotel bedsheets.

"They're definitely wider than Mingyu's!" Cheol commented with a chuckle, making the girl divert her glance over to the '97 Liner, who continued to stand still with what could almost be considered a pout on his lips. She tilted her head with a tight smile decorating her face.

Yeongseok's laughter and voice filled the room, "I think we need to cover him up!" As he tried to do exactly that by tucking the sheets closer to Wonwoo's side. "Stay like this! Stay like this right now!" Pulling them even higher up to his neck.

Not able to hold back a smile, Minnie carefully opened his black frames and tried to place them onto his nose, knowing just how blurry everything must have been for him, making the situation even worse. As they happened to fall slightly crooked, she reached out again to fix them. "Wait," she chuckled, "You have to wear them properly."

"Oh," Na PD looked at him, "Yes, wear your glasses, please."

While Seungkwan's attention was now on the magazines that had been placed on the nightstand, the girl seemed to have noticed the redness shooting to the tips of the rapper's ears, making her smile even wider as she tried to cover them with his hair, running her hand over them and through each strand.

With a quick hand motion and moving lips towards the '98 Liner, he immediately knew what the girl had asked him to do.

"Ah- wait, wait, where are your clothes, hyung?"

"Oh, where are your clothes, Wonwoo-ya?" Yeongseok immediately engaged with them, looking around the room before the '96 Liner pointed towards the couch. He pushed himself up to sit up straight, the white blanket falling off his shoulders exposing just the very upper area of his torso.

"Oh? Hi, PD-nim." Wonwoo threw everyone off-guard at the sudden greeting. He had only now straightened his glasses properly and blinked enough times to get adjusted to the bright lights in his room.

Along with Yeongseok, who greeted him as well with a surprised tone lacing his voice as their hands interlocked, Minnie chuckled with the other members at the conversation happening in front of them. With laughter, the girl let herself fall forward, the palm of her right hand hitting Wonwoo's bare skin and shoulder muscles.

After being handed a shirt, the rapper turned to the two members that were closest to him - for one, Minnie on his left, sitting on the bed, and Seungkwan still standing to his right.

"What is this?" He asked them, the corners of his lips curling up into a tired smile.

"Hyung," the '98 Liner started, "We're going."

"Youth Over Flowers is starting," the girl explained further, giggling once again as the surprised eyes of the '96 Liner met hers.

"Going now?"

"Right now," she nodded, her hand still on his shoulder, only leaving it when he pulled the black shirt over his head and torso.

The quick comment, "That's my shirt," by Mingyu was met with a blank stare from the girl as she pressed her lips together, and quietness washed over the room. Wonwoo having to put on pants first, was the next big attention seeker.

While the rest of the group was debating who to wake up next, either Jun or Minghao, Na PD also admitted to his guilt of having to explain to the '97 Liner that he'd be going to Italy, not alone with his fellow Chinese member as he had thought, but with all the Seventeen members together. Minnie's hand was gripping the sheets, holding them up just slightly after she had noticed the struggle the rapper was having as he tried to put on pants without revealing himself to an entire camera crew and staff members.

They decided to go with Jun next. Apologising to him would be easier, or so Na PD thought before they barged into the '96 Liner's room, ripping him out of his slumber. Now, the producer was standing by the left side of the bed, his hands intertwined in front of him as he tried to find the right words.

"Jun," he spoke ever so softly, "I have something to tell you." The still dishevelled member looked to his right, trying to find the eyes of the older member while Dokyeom was trying to place the microphone onto the collar of Jun's shirt.

"I don't know from what point I need to start telling you," Yeongseok admitted, getting a round of laughter in return.

Minnie, who had taken her place next to the maknae, let her head fall onto his shoulder as the giggling shook both of their bodies.

"We lied about so many things," he admitted. "I don't know what to talk about first."

Jun let his eyes drift around the room, trying to find some explanation in the glances from his members, but they were all just smiling back at him in pure amusement. With a hand, he covered his mouth nervously.

"From what is it the truth?" He wondered, hoping to be able to figure out the starting point of what the producer kept on claiming to be 'a series of lies'.

"There's no truth," Minnie stated with a chuckle. "It's all lies."

"Hey!" Na PD turned to the girl, pointing at her with a smile, "Don't say it like that!"

"You have to be honest with him, hyung... He was so excited for the trip." She fought back, all while fighting her own giggles as Jun kept up his confused facial expression, switching between the two arguing parties.

"That..." He started once again, still flustered by having to admit to the fake schedule they had created for the idol group. "The... this program," Na PD finally let out. "That entire program."

Still slightly unsure of what exactly the man was talking about, the '96 Liner slowly nodded his head, "Aah... ah... okay..." Making the members around his bed chuckle.

The older man kept his stance with his intertwined hands, looking down at the performer with pure guilt written all over his face. He repeated his apology, explaining that the schedule wouldn't include the other two famous men, but the rest of his group instead. Trying to lift the mood by elaborating on how wonderful it is to be able to spend that time with the rest of his members was used to more so soothe him instead of the idol as Jun was still very much disoriented by the sudden intrusion.

"Do the members know too?" He wanted to know.

In chorus, they started explaining to him they had only just found out as well and weren't in on any 'plan' as he had thought.

Na PD placed a comforting hand on the '96 Liner's shoulder. "The people in front of your eyes right now," he started, "They didn't know anything 5 minutes ago." What he did leave out was the fact that not only were they unaware of the situation they'd be thrown into, but also unbelievably unprepared, as a rap battle seemed much more important.

The youngest of the group had another confession to make as he opened his mouth. "And hyung... I'm drunk right now." He suddenly revealed. The girl on his right wrapped her arm around his waist, patting his back as the room erupted in another round of laughter. Wonwoo was quick to jump into the situation, holding up his hand, showing four fingers that he moved around in front of Dino's face, a fond smile making his lips curl.

"Oh-" the maknae was surprised by the sudden action, "Three?" He called out, getting another chuckle from everyone in the room. Minnie's palm hit his chest with a giggle.

On their way out, onto the next room, the female member was interrupted in her conversation as the youngest called out for her.

"Noona!" He turned around to face her while she was walking a few steps behind them, next to Seungcheol.

She hummed in response, "Hm?"

"I really wasn't too weird, right?" He stopped in his tracks to let her catch up with him before he interlocked his arm with hers. "You were the only really sober one, so please tell me. I wasn't too weird, right?"

With a tight smile on her lips, their looks met. "Well..." she started, already making the maknae close his eyes and groan in embarrassment. "You weren't weird. You were just being you. But you did start a rap battle all of a sudden," she recalled with a giggle.

"Ah...," he sighed, letting his forehead rest against her shoulder, "Noona, why did I do that?"

Her lips formed a fond smile as she patted his back. "Don't worry about it. The people watching this will find it funny."

"Are you sure?" He asked her further, still with a slight sulk lacing his voice.

[Younger brother looking for affirmation]

She nodded, her hands brushing over his hair, making him smile.

The members had made their way into Vernon's room. Seungkwan had gone in first after the group was convinced that he the second youngest was actually still awake and not sleeping, like the rest had been. Inside, they were greeted with yet again the bright lights of the room, and, just like with Wonwoo, another two copies of their magazine cover on the table that Dino presented proudly to the camera.

The '98 Liner had himself fully covered by the white bedsheets, confirming the suspicion they had of him, like his fellow HHU member, not wearing anything to bed.

Mortified by the sudden amount of people invading his room, he had pulled the blanket up to his face. Even with Seungkwan's warning, nothing could've prepared him for this moment.

Minnie and Hoshi had joined him on the mattress, sitting down on the left side that was kept free while Na PD tried to get the younger member out of the comfort of the bed.

"I'm in such a dirty state right now," Vernon confessed, now hiding his entire face behind the safety of the sheets. "I'm only wearing this right now," he pointed to the thin piece of clothing working as a robe.

Yeongseok chuckled flustered. "Oh- you're only wearing that?"

Without a warning, Hoshi's hands suddenly travelled underneath the covers, getting a look of confusion from the girl in return. He patted around the mattress and body of the man underneath them when he suddenly nodded with a big grin.

"Ooh, he's really only wearing this," he told the rest of the room. The members and crew chuckled at his uncalled action. Shocked, but definitely not surprised.

Minnie, who kept her eyes on him, leaned closer to him, slapping his leg with an amused scoff, "You can't do that!"

Her fellow '97 Liner and rapper right next to them, hunched over in laughter, his hands falling to the shoulder of the performance unit leader, pushing him away.

They agreed to let him put on clothes first before they would move on to the next room. But the blanket still covering him turned out to be more of an obstacle than expected as he started squirming around, Na PD trying to lift the sheets to give him some more room to put on the pants that were handed to him. The movements seemed too funny for the group not to comment on them.

"Are you shedding?" Seungkwan was the first to comment.

Minnie smiled at his struggle. "You look like a transforming worm, Vernon," getting a round of chuckles from the members.

Getting Jeonghan out of bed was easy for the group. The '95 Liner was quick to play along and jumped into character almost instantly when Yeongseok was the first to walk into his room. He was up on his feet and ready to jump into action. You could've thought he hadn't even been sleeping.

"I don't know," Jeonghan mumbled, "I don't know how I am right now." While some of the other members were still focused on the magazines with his pictures on the cover. Somebody had placed a few copies of them on his table as well.

Na PD chuckled warmly, "You're very pretty right now. It's okay, it's okay." His assuring words made the vocalist nod and ready to go on to the next room.

Minnie sighed, "You could really wake up Jeonghan-hyung at any hour and he'll look pretty. That's so unfair." Followed by a slight sulk that was caught by the members. She was just about to turn around when Seungkwan's follow-up comment made her stop.

"Then you gotta work on your beauty sleep, noona." His words made her open her mouth but close it quickly, reminding herself of all of the cameras that were on them, so she just nodded. But a sarcastic smile was plastered on her face.

Woozi couldn't help but shake his head in amusement at the two. "Don't listen to him," he mumbled, patting her back before he turned around to leave them alone.

Next and final room: Minghao. The member Na PD was dreading to face, having to, once again, explain the situation and the lie they had come up with, making the '97 Liner believe he'd go on a trip to Italy with Jun alone, along with two other people from the entertainment industry. Well, now he'd get to enjoy the Italian flair with 12 of his members.

Standing in front of the last hotel room they'd break in, the debating started. How would they greet the member who was looking forward to the trip the most?

Seungkwan proposed that Yeongseok should go in first, clapping and congratulating Minghao on the trip. Jeonghan had the idea of letting the '98 Liner walk in first to wish him 'safe travels', but he stopped himself in the middle of the sentence, deciding that it would take too long to let one member after the other inside. Final decision: all of the barge in at the same time, clapping and celebrating. That would wake him up, for sure.

After one flick of the lights, the members rushed inside, their loud voices immediately filling the room as their claps bounced off the walls. Wide eyes welcomed them as Minghao looked around the room in surprise, taken aback by the sudden appearance of his members along with crew members he didn't recognize right away. Only after Seungkwan introduced Na PD, did the '97 Liner realise who was standing in front of him. He sat himself up to greet him.

Then it was time. The explanation.

Yeongseok started. "Oh, to be honest, Myungho-ya... there's something I need to apologise to you about."

As soon as the soft and delicate words, "What is it?" Left Minghao's lips, the producer stepped back. You would've thought he had to tell him Santa wasn't real by his reaction.

But after a moment of silence, he spilt the truth, explaining that Jun and his 'trip to Italy' was happening right at that moment, adding that the rest of the members were coming along too though. From her position next to S.Coups in the corner of the room, Minnie, along with the rest of the members burst into laughter when he started clapping and smiling almost painfully fake.

Minghao got dressed and the others got themselves comfortable around the room, spreading out onto the bed, and the couch, and some chose to stand up.

That's when Na PD spoke up again, "Okay, everyone's together, right?" A conversation easily followed. Hoshi started by explaining their fully packed schedule, which made the members realise that they would not even have the time to film 'Youth Over Flowers' at any point during that time, but the producer clarified the careful thought process that went into kidnapping the idol group and giving them a well-deserved break during such a busy time.

As the realisation of it happening right now hit Dino, he groaned and let his face fall into his hands, catching the attention of the girl. Minnie chuckled at the youngest antics, elbowing the leader on her right before she nodded towards the bed, where the maknae was contemplating all of his life choices.

"Look at Dino." Seungcheol joined her giggling, eyeing the youngest member carefully. "He's still drunk," she shook her head with a smile.

While Hoshi and Dokyeom discussed which month they had thought they'd get to film the program in, Shin Hyojung spoke up from behind the camera.

"Considering that, too," mentioning the packed schedule of the idol group. "we freed space for a week." Which caught the attention of each member.

Various gasps and hums echoed through the room.

"An entire week?!" Minnie wondered out loud in shock, getting a nod from the female producer in return.

"An entire week," she confirmed.

After she dropped the next lie, which had been the fake schedule they created for the entire week, another round of gasps could be heard from the singers. None of them could really believe the time and dedication the production crew had put into this - just for them.

"All fake," Seungcheol commented.

Minnie turned towards him. "Did you know about them being fake?!"

He was quick to shake his head, "I swear, I knew as much as you guys about this. I only found out a few hours before you."

"That's crazy..." the girl mumbled, her arms crossed in front of her chest, tightening the zip-up hoodie around her frame.

"I'm going to make some announcements," Na PD called out to get the attention back to the moment. "And we can talk about other things later!" Firstly, he let them know about their destination as only some of the members had caught onto where they were going - Rome, Italy. While sounds of surprise and happiness filled the room, Minnie stayed quiet and surprised Cheol when she suddenly wrapped her arm around his. The crutch made it slightly awkward, but it didn't stop her.

"Who has been to Italy?" Yeongseok wondered, getting a round of shaking heads in return.

"None," was repeatedly thrown into the room as different members answered him.

"No one?!" Na PD was well surprised by the answer. "Minnie," he caught the attention of the younger woman. "Not even you?" Expecting for at least her to have been to one of the most visited countries in Europe. But she shook her head as well,

"Not to Italy, no."

"That's why we picked it," another female producer explained from the other side of the room.

"We've never been to Europe," Seungkwan wined.

Woozi nodded in agreement, turning to Yeongseok, "We haven't been to Europe either."

Minnie's head dropped to Seungcheol's shoulder. He let go of his right crutch, using his now free hand to caress the arm she had interlocked with his.

Na PD's speech went on. "To be honest, Seventeen has had a really packed schedule up to now. I know that you had a really hard time." He got sounds of agreement and nodding heads in return. "You must've had no time to rest at all. So, the concept of this Italy vacation is different from our usual 'Youth Over Flowers'." He continued to explain the differences in the program the group would film. They wouldn't face any hardships, not suffer as they go along. It would be an 'all-inclusive package' for a real holiday.

"So, you just need to play. We searched and rented all places where we could play and enjoy. At breakfast, go visit stuff and eat delicious things. At dinner, we get together and play," he explained further. "We're going to spend a week like this." As expected, the members reacted in glee. Happy, surprised and yet still not fully believing things that good would happen to them.

Woozi was the first to question the sincerity. "We can believe this, right?" Which made Yeongseok turn to him in surprise,

"You can trust me! You can trust this!"

Minnie squinted her eyes jokingly. "I feel like that's exactly something that someone who'd try to trick us would say."

"No, ah-" He sighed and shook his head with a smile, "Really. Trust me with this." Turning to the other producers, he looked for help. "Tell them that this is right!"

After revealing the new name of the program 'NANA Tour', the group almost forgot it was too good to be true. But the following words from Na PD made them realise they may have started celebrating too early.

"Since our trip is an all-inclusive package," he stated, "there's nothing that you guys need to prepare."

"Huh?!"

The members started to look for each others' gazes, trying to find some sense in a moment of confusion.

"You don't need your bag or anything else," Yeongseok explained further. "The things you need are the clothes you're wearing and a cell phone. You don't need your wallet."

"Really?" Dokyeom asked out loud.

Minnie glanced at the man in confusion while mumbling to herself "But I'm wearing pyjamas." Her worried tone got a chuckle out of Seungcheol as he looked over to her, shaking his head.

But even with all the good news the group had gotten, bad news was about to follow as well.

"The problem is that we- our package's departure schedule is a bit early."

The girl opened her mouth to say something, but Woozi beat her to it as he pointed at the man on the bed.

"I'm saying that his eyes are scary!" Making the crew of producers and cameramen laugh wholeheartedly and zoom into Yeongseok's face.

"How could you let us leave us without anything on us?!" Minnie called out in frustration. "That's not right... You have something planned! Don't lie!"

Na PD couldn't help but chuckle, hunching over before holding himself up from the mattress by his hands. "No, I promise. We're going to go to Italy. But the problem is that we have to go kind of early!" He argued back.

A comforting hand found its way to Minnie's back as Cheol shrugged his arm out of her grasp to wrap it around her frame. Her eyebrows were back scrunched up in confusion as she whispered to the leader,

"I don't trust him." To which he chuckled.

"It's okay, you can trust him." But she just shook her head with a pout on her lips.

Her attention went back to listening to the producer as he spoke, "You guys are going to get dressed starting now and in three minutes-"

"What?!"

"In three minutes?!"

"Hyung!"

"This is so much fun," came from Jeonghan, who seemed to be the only one to enjoy the stress that was put on the group with that statement alone.

Na PD was quick to add, "Because you don't need a bag or wallet! We have all of your passports."

Right away, questions started coming from left and right.

"Can I still brush my teeth?"

"Can't I take a shower?"

"Is there underwear in the package?"

"Everything!" Yeongseok answered Dokyeom's question. "Just wear what you're wearing now-"

"I can't wear pyjamas to the airport," Minnie sighed out, running a hand through her hair with a deep breath.

Jeonghan grinned at her, "Don't worry, Minnie-ya. You make everything look fashionable."

With scrunched eyebrows, she glanced over at him, not able to hold back a smile once she came to sight with his.

As soon as Na PD gave the official 'ok' to split up and start getting ready, the members split up quickly. They rushed out of Minghao's room one after the other, trying to get to their own rooms as quickly as possible. Jeonghan didn't seem to be nearly as stressed as the others as he decided to stay back. Minnie was doing the same, standing still in her place next to the leader.

"Oh... oppa...," she sighed. Cheol immediately knew what she wanted to say, so he was quick to interrupt her, patting her back once again.

"No, go, go. Get ready. Change your clothes. I'll meet you downstairs," he assured her.

"Really? You'll still be here?" She asked further, getting a nod from him in response.

"Ok..." she mumbled. before she left, she hastily threw her arms around his shoulder, giving him a quick squeeze before exiting the room as well, thoughts of which clothes to take out of her suitcase already rushing through her mind.

She had already finished packing her luggage the evening before, right after the concert, wanting to spare herself the stress of packing it right before their flight back home. Therefore, Minnie's baby blue suitcase was already in the hallway, where she had to put it on the ground to open it.

"Ok," she thought out loud, "Rome is probably hot right now at this time of year... but I want to be comfortable on the plane. So... I'm not gonna wear shorts, but thin long pants. But a short shirt. That should be fine, right?" She looked up from her position on the floor, glancing at the cameraman, who just shrugged back.

The girl chuckled and nodded to herself. "It'll be fine," she stood back up after gathering everything from her suitcase, including a pair of sneakers. "More important is... what will I take in my small bag," with a hand on her chin, she contemplated. "Sunglasses... maybe tissues... I can't bring make-up, right?" The cameraman shook his head. "Ok... that's... ok... but suncream. I'll need suncream. OH- and chapstick- hold on. I also need to brush my teeth..."

After Wonwoo, Minnie was next to enter the meeting room, getting greeted by Na PD immediately, and the '96 Liner along with S.Coups, Hoshi and Minghao who had already taken a seat on the chairs and couch. She had changed into a pair of jeans along with a slightly cropped white shirt and a grey cropped cardigan on top. A black hat was on her head, but she had taken it off once she walked in.

"Minnie, come in and sit," the producer ushered her inside. But something caught his eye. "Ah- Minnie-ya," at the sound of her name, the girl stopped in her tracks.

Yeongseok reached out his open palm. "Give me your bag."

Her hands found the handle on her shoulder in an instant, clinging onto it tightly.

"But I need it," she fought back.

With a sigh, the producer continued looking at her. "I promise you, everything you need, you'll get from us. Come on, give me the bag."

Hesitantly, the female member let the leather brush off her shoulder, before slowly handing it over. But just before Yeongseok could get a hold of it, she pulled it back, "Wait! Can I take out what I need?"

A chuckle tumbled from his lips as she shook his head. Glancing over at the other members, he only found amused faces looking back at him. He took a deep breath, "What is it that you need so desperately?"

As an answer, Minnie placed the bag on the console table on the left side of the room and started rummaging. Picking out the important things, she counted them, "Chapstick, sunscreen, and... sunglasses!" She showed the things to the producer, who nodded after inspecting them.

"Ok, ok, you can take them. If they fit in your pockets. Now sit down." With a nod and a quick, "Thank you," she went after his orders.

Na PD, Cheol, Joshua, Wonwoo, Dokyeom, Vernon, and Minnie made their way downstairs with the elevator. Stopping in the garage, where a car was already waiting for them. Just as they were about to leave, the '96 and '98 Liner of the Hip-Hop-Unit walking towards the vehicle first, Yeonseok calling out for S.Coups caught their attention and made them turn around again, almost forgetting that their leader wasn't going with them.

One after the other, the members said goodbye to him, hugging him one last time before they'd be on their way. Minnie stood still between him and the producer.

"Aah, you're not coming with us!" Vernon suddenly realised.

The girl pouted, "How the heck is he supposed to come with us with his injury?!" Clearly frustrated by the situation.

"I totally forgot about that," the younger member nervously chuckled. After individually making sure they had said goodbye properly, wishing him a comfortable ride home, it was Minnie's turn to hug him. Without a word, she threw her arms around his shoulders as Joshua patted the head of their leader. With a sigh, she let him go again.

"I don't like this...."

"Don't be like that, Minnie-ya," he nudged her. "Have fun in Italy. Be careful."

She nodded hesitantly, "I guess we will."

"You guess?!" Na PD gasped next to her, making the girl chuckle. "You guess?! We'll make sure that you guys have fun."

"Ok, ok," she nodded again. One last time, Seungcheol opened his arms to pull her in. Just as she was about to let go of him, the '95 Liner whispered something into her ear, to which she frowned at first as soon as they separated, but then she assured him, she had understood him. With a last wave, she bid him her final goodbye before she'd get to see him again in about two weeks.

[they will reunite well]

EP1-2. Off to Italy

Minnie took her place by the window, with Minghao on her right. The bus had started its engine and was about to start driving away. The members looked outside to see their CEO, managers, and most importantly their leader standing on the side, waving them off.

[bye bye]

With a sad smile, the girl waved back, nodding at S.Coups after he had motioned something with his hands. Her gaze didn't leave the window until everyone was out of sight. Only then did she let herself fall back against the seat, looking down at her hands with a sigh. Her fellow '97 Liner noticed her quietness and placed a hand on top of hers, making her look up.

She was greeted with the kind smile of her best friend, making her grin in return. He gave her hand a little squeeze, which she copied, quickly developing into a battle of who could squeeze the other person's hand harder. Even if it was obvious who would win, Minnie still put up the fight, grinning down at their hands, and just taking a moment to be thankful for the person to her right.

Hoshi, Wonwoo, and Minghao were sitting together at Incheon Airport, waiting for the connecting flight with Na PD, who was behind the camera they had set up, engaging in a comfortable conversation.

Minnie suddenly appeared from the background, joining the group on the floor, her phone in her grip.

"Did you talk to your mum?" Yeongseok asked.

The girl nodded with a smile. "I told her we're going to Rome."

He chuckled, "What did she say?"

"'Why not closer to us?'" Minnie changed her voice into a slightly higher tone, impersonating her mother. "'I could've brought you guys something to eat.'"

[caring words of a mother <3]

The members around her started laughing, with Hao leaning onto her shoulder.

Na PD scoffed with a chuckle. "Does she think we won't feed you?"

Minnie shrugged, "I think she also thinks this will be more like 'Youth Over Flowers'." To which the producer laughed in return.

Deep in her slumber, the female idol was catching up on the few hours of sleep she had missed out on due to the intense rap battle her fellow members wanted her to witness.

[beauty sleep]

"Minnie-ya," a soft voice from the right spoke up. When she didn't react, a hand reached out to nudge her.

The camera angle expanded, to expose Wonwoo, who was trying to get her to wake up. With one more gentle shove to her arm and a repetition of her name, his voice ever so soft, Minnie's eyes fluttered open. For a second, there was clear confusion written on her face, but as she looked to her left, she found the rapper's eyes already on her, she smiled.

"Hm?"

"Eat something before we land," Wonwoo spoke quietly, not trying to distress her as she tried to adjust her eyes to the brightness. Minnie nodded and with a quick click of a button, she let her seat straighten back up.

"When do we land?"

"In like two hours."

"Ok," she answered, trying to hold back a yawn without any luck. Then she glanced at the clock. "Ah... I forgot about the time difference... it's evening now."

"Mm," Wonwoo looked away from his phone to glance over at her, "Are you still tired?"

For a second, the girl seemed to think about it. "A little bit. I hope I'll get to sleep."

EP1-3. First Step of the Travel

After landing and walking through the airport for a good bit, they arrived at the visa checkpoints. Jun and Minghao were separated from the group due to their Chinese passports, but what caught the members off-guard was when Minnie was directed towards a different line than them.

"Where are you going?" Mingyu asked the girl as he filmed himself.

"We took Minnie's EU passport, not her Korean one, so she has an easier way," one of the producers behind him explained to him. The '97 Liner nodded while watching her walk away.

The female member had gotten her own vlogging camera, filming the lower side of her face that was still covered by a mask. She didn't start talking until she came to a halt and pulled the mask down and the camera up to show her entire face.

"And now we'll wait. Because the members are gonna take a little bit longer than me." And ended her commentary with a smile.

Dino, Hoshi, and Wonwoo were the first to join her.

"Noona, you just walked through the gates!" The youngest called out as soon as they had caught up with her.

Minnie chuckled, "Yeah, it's like this within some countries in Europe. If you were born here."

"Aaah," he nodded. "Practical."

When she saw the vlogging camera Hoshi was holding up, the girl put her own one down, focusing more on her surroundings as they walked through the entrance/exit of the airport and out into the warm late summer air.

The rest of the members, besides Jun and Minghao, were already hot on their tracks as well and followed them to the bus that was waiting for them outside. Walking in, they greeted the driver before cramping together into the seats at the back. Vernon and Minnie decided to sit together with the younger member by the window and the girl by the aisle.

During their little gaming session, the girl decided to relax, mostly focused on her own phone, texting her mum about their arrival, sending a quick message to their leader and scrolling through Social Media.

When Minghao and Jun finally joined them on the bus, they were ready to leave. Right from the start, the producers could feel the energy coming from the group. Everyone was excited and most of them had slept enough on the flight, explaining their high energy levels.

"The name of the airport," a staff member suddenly spoke up, "is Leonardo Da Vinci Airport."

"Ooh, Vernonnie." Dokyeom's voice rang through the ears of the girl. Only a split second later, she started to laugh. The members quickly caught onto the comment by the '97 Liner.

"No, Leonardo da Vinci."

"Not that Leonardo, Dokyeom-ah," Minnie and Mingyu spoke at the same time, both smiling at the situation. It was only then that Vernon, the man in question, realised what was being said, making him chuckle as he ran a hand over his face.

During the rest of the drive, Na PD was in charge of entertainment. He started with the description of their accommodation, mentioning that it was an Airbnb they had booked. But before they would get to their housing, the crew had decided to make a quick stop by the Colosseum to take a group picture and let the idol group roam around a little bit.

The producer started them off with some facts.

"You all know what it looks like, right?"

The group agreed in union.

"Round and pretty," Minnie added with a bright face. At the sound of her voice, Wonwoo turned his head to glance over at her, a fond smile on his lips.

"Right," the producer answered, "Round and... yeah, pretty I guess too." Making the girl chuckle. "It's a building that was built about 2000 years ago. It's an ancient theatre. Simply put an amphitheatre. There's an audience, and what do you think they did in the centre?"

"Duel," Wonwoo and Minnie answered at the same time. With grins, they glanced at each other, chuckling when their eyes met. European history had always been a big interest of theirs.

"Exactly," Na PD pointed at the two. "Duel. Gladiators would fight each other or a tiger vs. human."

The girl suddenly gasped quietly, "Hoshi-hyung..." Which only seemed to have reached the ears of the two '96 Liners next to her, who had turned to smile at the other one, clearly amused by the comment of the female member.

After they arrived at the sight, the group quickly split up again into smaller portions, each member wanting to see and explore the ancient building for themselves.

Minnie stood still as her eye raked up and down the height of the Colosseum, astonished at what she was seeing with her own eyes.

"It's so much bigger than I expected for some reason," she commented out loud, catching the attention of Yeongseok, who had stopped to her left.

He nodded. "Mm, but you must be used to buildings like this, or not?"

The girl shook her head with a smile. "I don't think you can ever get used to this. Ancient buildings are always so shocking when get to see them in real life."

"The Eiffel Tower for you too? You must've seen that quite a few times already," he continued the conversation as the two made their way further around the arena.

Minnie chuckled, "Yeah, I guess so," she explained, "But it's a lot smaller than people expect."

"Oh, really?" To which she nodded.

"So, this," she pointed towards the building right in front of them, "Is... insanely beautiful. Especially now at night."

Once the idol group had gotten back together, the individual sightseeing coming to an end, they decided to try to give their leader a call, reminding themselves of the fact that the time in Korea was 6 a.m., so the chances of him picking up were slim. Explaining, why they were so surprised when Seungcheol did in fact pick up the call, revealing his tired face on the screen of Hoshi's phone.

"Oh, he picked up!" Dino called out, making the girl, who was still in awe of the arena, turn around.

"S.COUPS!" Jun shouted out in glee. Minnie chuckled, watching the screen, seeing how clearly tired the '95 Liner was, assuming they had ripped him out of his sleep and that ungodly hour.

"We came to the Colosseum," Hoshi explained to him.

"Is it fun?" The leader wondered, his voice laced with pure exhaustion and still deeper than usual.

"It would be more fun with you here," the girl smiled, getting a chuckle from him in return.

"Mh, I bet," he sarcastically answered.

The performance unit leader suddenly announced they'd be taking a picture, surprising Cheol over the phone, who did his best to do some kind of pose in his position on the bed. Even with his absence, a group picture with all of them together was necessary.

EP1-4. Something Happened in Their House

In groups, the members were ordered to leave the bus and start their seven-minute walk towards their Airbnb. Minnie was in the second group that got to exit the vehicle, along with Hoshi, Wonwoo, and Minghao. As soon as they stepped out and fell into their usual walking tempo, for comfort, the girl looped her right arm with Wonwoo's left - no reaction from him. The group easily fell into a natural conversation, commenting on what was around them, what they passed, and the warm weather they were lucky enough to catch during this time of year.

"I'm not normally sentimental," the '96 Liner from the Hip-Hop-unit suddenly stated. "But it's gonna become sentimental."

The female member nodded. "Because we're on our first real vacation as a group, minus Seungcheol-oppa. And in a really nice city as well." The three men agreed with nods.

When they finally arrived at their housing for the night, they got to walk through the apartment in the old building the crew had rented out for the group. Each room had its own charm and the members already knew it wouldn't be easy to choose. But then again, their individually designated rooms often get lost after nights of drinking and playing games, and suddenly four people are sleeping in a two-person bed. So the choices weren't all that important to the singers.

They decided to let faith decide and play a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. The winner would get to choose first, then the second, and so on until each member had a bed assigned to them.

One after the other, the singers walked around until they reached the room they had chosen to sleep in. Dino and Jun had decided on the three-beds room, leaving one still free. That's when Minnie appeared from around the corner to glance inside.

"Ooh," she commented with a smile as she came in. "I don't think we've ever shared a room together in this constellation, right?"

Jun agreed, "Yeah, I don't think so."

"Noona, stay, it's gonna be fun," the maknae, who had already made himself comfortable on one of the beds that had gotten pushed together.

Minnie chuckled, walking in to throw her cardigan and the pouch she had taken from the plane, onto the mattress. "Of course, I'm gonna stay with you guys."

"Yeyy," Dino looked up at the older member, who smiled down at him. He was quick to sit up straight once he noticed she had gotten comfortable on the other bed right next to him. "Do you want to sleep by the window?" The youngest asked her.

"Hm?" Minnie wondered, turning to her right to see the window being closest to her bed. "I don't mind it."

"Okay," he nodded before throwing himself onto the sheets.

Minnie and Jun had left their assigned rooms. He had joined the four beds Joshua, Hoshi, Mingyu and Dokyeom-room, engulfed in comfortable conversations as they settled into their housing, while Minnie paid a visit to Jeonghan, Woozi, Wonwoo, and Seunkgwan's room.

The girl was sitting on the bed with the '98 Liner when Na PD surprised them with a visit. "Please wait in the room for five to ten minutes!" He announced as he waltzed in.

"Okay," he got a reply in chorus back.

As soon as he left again, the group started talking.

"His eyes are weird, I keep on saying this," Woozi commented, getting a round of chuckles from the members in return.

"They're spun around," Seungkwan added.

Minnie sighed, "I'm telling you, we still can't trust them. What are we gonna sleep in? We don't have any extra clothes." Her question seemed to get the roommates to thinking, the wheels inside their heads visibly starting to turn.

"Maybe... maybe they'll give us something," the youngest of them answered her with a shrug.

"But we're definitely gonna have to work for them," the '96 Liner stated. "They're not just gonna give us everything."

"Yeah, I don't think so either," the girl agreed, letting herself sink into the mattress.

After a few minutes, the members were called to gather in the kitchen. Walking in, they could already see that something had been set up.

"Tax-free?" Minnie wondered out loud as soon as she had entered the room. Joshua, who was already sitting down, turned to where she was looking at - a poster on the wall.

Slightly confused, yet intrigued, the girl took a seat opposite Woozi and next to Jeonghan, waiting for the next steps as the two main songwriters of the group grinned at each other. Both were still carrying only a small amount of trust with them when it came to the program they were filming.

Yeongseok brought in a shopping trolly, that he placed on the table the two were sitting on, revealing it to be filled to the brim and explaining the meaning of it to the group. As they hadn't had time to pack anything, aka the crew didn't let them bring anything other than what they could carry on their body, the producing team would provide them with everything they could possibly need.

Ranging from toiletries to clothing or even electronics, the crew had thought of every single thing. The first thing they presented were T-shirts. But not just any shirts. Custom-made T-shirts for each member. The group gazed at the item of clothing with wide eyes. Every shirt had a different design, fitted to the member whose name was written across the chest. Cherries for S.Coups, dumbells for Woozi, and so on.

Next was underwear. A true essential.

"Hold on," Minnie suddenly stopped. She pointed to a pack of black underwear with a rim she only knew too well. "I have to work for the underwear I model for? I thought I'd get them for free." As they were Calvin Klein underwear the production team had packed for her, the girl was surprised.

"AH!" Seungkwan suddenly shouted out. "You don't have to remind us of that photoshoot!" Getting a round of chuckles from the members in return, and a sarcastic big grin from the girl.

"You're welcome!" To which the '98 Liner only glanced at her in disgust.

"I'm sorry, Minnie-ya," Na PD told her. "But you also had to work to become an ambassador, right?"

With a squint, she glared at the man to her left. "Touché," she mumbled loud enough for the other members to hear, who laughed at the conversation.

The show continued as he presented the rest of the containments of the bag: Kimchi (jongga, of course), dumbells for whoever would want to work out, cup ramyeon, shorts, shampoo, a NANA Tour guidebook, zip lock bags, fans, wet tissues, stir-fried gochujang, toothbrushes and toothpaste, a bag, merch, and even earphones.

Then, last, but most definitely not least, the producer pulled out an envelope, with a quick side-remark.

"Jeonghan-ah, you'll really need this. You're going to cry," he explained. "For all of you, filled with his heart S.Coups' letter." Without missing a beat, the vice leader of the group suddenly erupted in fake tears, his groans echoing through the room. The girl couldn't help but chuckle as she nudged him with her elbow. Once he returned back to his normal state and Na PD sat back, she leaned over to the '95 Liner.

"Cheol told me to choose the letter."

"When?" He looked down at her in slight confusion.

"When we said goodbye to him. He mentioned a letter, but I was so confused about what he meant. But it must be this." Jeonghan nodded, leaning apart again to avoid suspicion from the production crew.

After they were introduced to all of the items, the group was clearly intrigued by what they could get. They knew they could, but how? Well, definitely not for free, of course. Yeongseok explained they would have to play a game, earning item after item with each round they'd win. The game they had decided on was 'Human Zero'. A game Seventeen was somewhat familiar with, but since they hadn't played it in quite a while, the worries were accordingly high.

But as soon as the game started, every fear had made its way out of the window. The group was surprisingly good at the game Na PD had chosen. In each round, the members made the right decision with who decided they should and shouldn't stand up. They were very good. Too good in the producer's opinion. Suspicion rose.

Even when they asked Hoshi what number Yeongseok should shout out next, the idol group stood strong and won another round.

It went as far as that the members even individually promised to stand up, making him almost want to shout out '13!' but if there's one thing Seventeen was flawless at, it would be teamwork - and teamwork only worked amongst the team, individuals outside of the group wouldn't understand.

Even though the idol group won each round unexpectedly, even with repeated attempts to change the game's rules and make it less likely for them to win and to prove they weren't cheating, it was still as entertaining as everyone expected. The entire crew was laughing along with the singers, surprised by the unexpected win after win.

The planned five rounds quickly turned into fifteen with Seventeen winning each round and the production even adding products they could win. But just because it didn't turn out the way the crew had planned, didn't mean it was any less entertaining. If anything, it made it all that much more amusing. It was the living proof that Seventeen talked, slept and breathed a language only they could understand.

"Just take all of this," Na PD sighed in defeat as he pointed to the prices on the table.

With all the interesting things they had earned, there was one thing that was still a mystery to the group and they'd finally get to reveal.

Jeonghan got handed over the letter Seungcheol had written to his members. He opened the envelope and opened the piece of paper, a piece of plastic being the first thing to catch their eyes.

Minnie glanced at it. Her facial expression of confusion quickly changed into surprise as she realised what the '95 Liner had just picked up - Coups' credit card.

"Oh wow..." Jeonghan gasped out loud along with Dokyeom who looked at the letter with wide eyes.

"That's not a letter," the girl commented, leaning in to try and read the words that were written on the piece of paper the card had come in. He read it out loud.

"Thank you for picking my letter. I feel so sorry for you guys going without any preparation. You can use this card however you want. I will be waiting for you well in Korea. You can use this card however you want, okay? Have fun. I love you."

A round of claps and gasps in affection filled the room.

"It really is his personal card," Dokyeom pointed out.

"His personal card?!"

"Woah... he really is the best leader," Minnie commented. A round of heads nodded in agreement.

They decided on Dino to keep the card safe as he was already the manager of the pocket money they had received before their departure.

So after a long day of travels and finally also a game, the group was released.

"Since it's late, hurry up and wash up. Change into these clothes and let's rest well," he dismissed the members.

"Good night," Minnie's voice echoed through the room as some members clapped in appreciation

"Well done, guys."

"Great job."

Fan Twitter Reaction

Info

Taglist: @waosobii @chaebb @lunarxsun @hoe4wonwoo @kimhyejin3108 @soobzao @billboard-singer @cosmicwintr @zwiehe @alixnsuperstxr @angie-x3 @smooore @allthings-fandoms

#minnie 🌷#seventeen #seventeen oc #seventeen 14th member

302 notes · View notes

draconixiaa · 8 months

Text

tired but i'll do a bit of this (will be a bit rambly:D)

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

24,, wow not bad

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

165.5k wow thats a lot,, most of it comes from one tho; everything else are shortfics

3. What fandoms do you write for?

DSMP and ive just started a bit of genshin at the behest of my Tartaglia-obsessed irl and he's kinda cool but like for 95% of my other fics its all cdream ahahahhh(dies)

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

"Consequences" tops the charts obviously bc its my one and only longfic and it was written during the peak of dsmp and man id link it bc i love my storyline (cdream obviously gets messed up in prison but then gets a healing arc) there but at the same time i feel like the writing had too many grammar mistakes and could be better so nahh

"North Star to Freedom" is one im actually really proud of, like obviously the writing could be better bc ive improved, but i just like it and id deffo rewrite it too if i had time or steal it into an original fic (premise is that cdream escapes prison with the rebibe book and oh lord my lingo anyways (spoilers) he dies and he gives techno book)

"Persevere" is third, wow that's a long time ago, its alright, i like it in general, but it feels almost cheesy. idk. i like it, but i dont like it. its not mixed feelings, but eh. anyways, something about cdream getting captured by the egg which is about to take over the world but he sacrifices himself to cleanse it. the most acute thing i rember about it is that its a 3parter

"Coup de Grace" ok wth i didnt expect this to be on there it was a small little cdream suffering in prison and cphil comes over, sees him in pain, and cough relieves him of it, and i dont like the writing in a specific part of it, but i like it in some other parts, so eh

"turn the claret tides" whoops i forgot what this one was about ok i glanced through the doc its ctechno getting cdream out of prison wow that title was really vague but he gets the letter and things went on.. it was inspired by another fic and happened during the hype of the prison arc which is kinda cool

(man im looking at the amount of fics i want to rewrite but it aint happening sadge)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Sometimes, most of the times nowadays, if it particularly made my day or it has something deep and insightful or literally makes any observation on my fic. sometimes im just too tired to answer,, maybe laziness is a part of it too, but i stare and its like,, i cant generate a response . but nowadays, i do it most of the times bc i appreciate my commenters :D

6. What’s the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

my recent fics mostly have happy endings, but all my pre-like, mid 2023 fics were all sad sad sad. they all ended in cdream dying, one way or the other. so idk which ones the saddest now its been too long,, the one i personally think is the saddest is one that i like, was listening to sad music to, the song being 'sociopath,' an orchestral piece (or was it piano?)

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

consequences

8. Do you get hate on your fic?

once on consequences bc that was max cdream apologists vs inniters era

9. Do you write smut?

nop never ever ever

10. Do you write crossovers?

dream + tartaglia is one i wrote in fudging october that i am still trying to find time to continue

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

prob not, if there is, then i wouldnt know of it

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

nope, if there was, i also dont know of it

13. Have you ever co-written a fic?

wow thats crazy that i havent, but idk, teamwork and coordination just go meh when i only share my interests with online people

14. What‘s your all-time favorite ship?

idk i dont do ships but my fav friendship is dream + techno or dream + punz

15. What’s the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

all my chapter continuations except the tartaglia + dream one i Need to finish that. but also the palace of stone idea will Never Ever get written

16. What’s your writing strengths?

descriptions idk they go lengthy but ive practiced with them a lot so ive gotten kinda good

17. What’s your writing weaknesses?

dialogue, pacing, idk literally everything, i can prob improve on anything and every aspect of my writing rn, and i just need to practice more

19. First fandom you wrote for?

DSMP lmao

20. Favorite fic you’ve ever written?

consequences i love the storyline + ending of that one even if the writing couldve been better

uhh tagging? idk if theres anyone that doesnt overlap wiht people whove been tagged b4 les see: @milktearosethorn , @victoriacoffee , ,, oh theres only two ok well, have fun if u decide to do this!

#drac thinks #and im so sleepy and tired today was busyyyy

3 notes · View notes

kaxen · 2 years

Text

I posted 12,328 times in 2022

That's 3,684 more posts than 2021!

570 posts created (5%)

11,758 posts reblogged (95%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@kaleighbytheway

@beepiesheepie

@vinceaddams

@kaxenart

@skelayton-lord

I tagged 1,325 of my posts in 2022

#handsome hussars - 30 posts

#draner - 25 posts

#paul gavarni - 22 posts

#types militaires - 19 posts

#napoleonic - 16 posts

#louis francois lejeune - 15 posts

#cats - 13 posts

#our flag means death - 12 posts

#kaxen answers - 11 posts

#second french empire - 10 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#i am ace but i assumed reader/character fics don't appeal because i enjoy characters in a smashing toys together and i am their mad god way

My Top Posts in 2022:

More from Fighting for Napoleon - French Soldiers' Letters 1799-1815. Now contemplating guys sleeping.

To save money, the French army expected its soldiers to share a bed. This unexpected intimacy with another man was a practical way to keep warm but could seem initially unpleasant. General Marbot famously described the shock of his first night as a soldier. A smelly veteran jumped on the bed, stole most of the space, and immediately began to snore. However, Marbot was from a wealthy background and was used to luxury. Most men did not seem to mind and even sometimes developed strong friendships with their bedfellows. Dominique Rutten, already encountered in this chapter, described this relationship:

[...] Really, father, I have already seen a lot of countries. I stay mainly with Louis Joseph Longuehaye and Cloes Wecquemans [Nicolas Weckmans]. He is my friend and I go out with him. I still sleep with him and we always get along as two brothers [...].

Relations were not always as warm. Joseph-Clément Hamoir's bedfellow stole his money before deserting:

Amiens [northern France], 11 March 1805

My very dear mother,

[...] A great misfortune happened to me. My bedfellow deserted. The one who sleeps in my bed. He took most of my money with him. I need you to send three or four crowns if you can. I am in a difficult position. They keep my pay until I can give some money and my chief forced me to write this letter [...] I think we will not stay long in Amiens because we will go fight the Russians [. . .]

41 notes - Posted March 2, 2022

A commission from @barbaroux of my boy Parzival

53 notes - Posted June 30, 2022

I got my copy of Berezina 1. I got my mixed feelings about the writer due to The Battle, but this set of 3 has Murat and I'm hopelessly thirsty for Napoleonic graphic novels.

Also I have said it before and I will say it again. Why the everloving hell is there such a long delay between the UK and US release dates (April 30 for the UK and June 30 for the US). IT'S ALREADY IN ENGLISH FOR GOD'S SAKE.

64 notes - Posted May 4, 2022

Penny's Box came out with a new centaur series and these are the two super rare ones in the blind boxes and I swear to god I will kill a man for sprinkle centaur.

81 notes - Posted December 5, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

I shall collect a pile of horses making stupid faces for Potato to make in the comic.

If you would like to help me in the quest for reference images of horses making stupid faces, send me horses making stupid faces

140 notes - Posted August 20, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

3 notes · View notes

yostresswritinggirl · 4 years

Note

Hello, may I request for Albedo hcs for an s/o who is inattentive? For example, the reader has difficulty reading long sentences or paying attention for a short time span, and ends up zoning out a lot? (If you're comfortable with this request of course, since it comes from me having inattentive adhd, or if you aren't too busy...) (But other than that please take care of yourself (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.)) Thank you ( ╹▽╹ )

:DD

Somehow these requests are pulling out my Psychology teachings ahahha- this is honestly such a nice prompt cuz I miss my college roomie, I love her so much and she has adhd. I might be projecting but I'll be using her techniques in this too! This was so cute and fun to work on awwwwwwwwww thank you anon!

The Curious Case of S/O

Albedo with a Reader that has a hard time focusing

I saw someone hc Albedo as an autistic character and I actually agree with it, so some of that aspect will seep in to this answer eheh-

SO!

When it comes to things Albedo is passionate about, he keeps himself grounded and focused on it for an unhealthy period

So when Albedo found out about your curious case, safe to say he was intrigued too, and sometimes frustrated

You’re all over the place and it kind of irks him when you can’t stay put and just- keep moving to different stuff?

But Albedo knew this before you got together and he took it upon himself to make sure you’re taken care of whenever such episodes happen, he’s your lover and a genius, he can and will find a way

Reading: Albedo loves reading literature and will offer to read out the text for you if you get frustrated enough over it. He may not have all the time in the world, but if it’s important that you understand this text he will make sure you do so

His voice is really nice and calming, but sometimes- you get so lost in them that you ended up just focusing on his voice instead of uhhh paying attention to what he was saying

big sigh

If that approach doesn’t work then he’s got another trick up his sleeves!

Doodles, sketches, all that cute artistic stuff!

There’s a chance you already do this but he’s gonna make this 95% more effective!

When taking notes for big texts, he’s gonna draw little doodles to the side so you can get a good grasp of what it means just by looking over it.

If the text is especially long, he’ll give it a quick once over, and then rewrite it just to highlight the most important parts you need to remember

He’ll take it up a notch and use different colored pens to write over it so you would know what you need to read without going through the whole chapter

If he wills it, Albedo would find himself incorporating such techniques on his notes as well and he’ll just chuckle at his antics (smiling every time he remembers you through his lil notes)

Being inattentive also makes it so you forget or not take note of important stuff

Chief Alchemist also has a good remedy for this!

Given, this was established after numerous trials and errors of finding the best route

F I N G E R R I N G B A N D S

This boyo had this genius enlightenment of an idea one day and prepared the necessary materials

Ngl you actually thought he was gonna propose when he offered that golden ring, you were about to cry

until you see him bring out ten more rings, multi-colored

w h a t

And so he explains as he grasps your non-dominant hand:

“Your thumb represents the early morning, from when you wake up after the sun.

Your index finger signifies the period of 12PM, the moments the busy-ness starts, never forget to eat lunch always, darling.

Your middle finger is the longest and busiest hour, the middle of the afternoon where the sun is high up in the sky. You’ll find yourself running around a lot during this period, and I won’t always be there to remind you.

Your ring finger,” he pauses to give it a gentle kiss, “someday. But anyways, this is the period when the darkness starts to devour the sky in place of the sun. You should be cleaning up and finishing all other tasks at this period.

And finally your pinky finger, almost at the dead hours of the night, god knows what you’ll be doing at this time when you should be ready for rest. I don’t want to see a lot or any rings here, for you should be in my arms by this time.”

After that heart-warming, proposal-like dialogue, he’ll offer the rings and explain as best he can

The red ring represents deadlines; blue stands for commissions; white is for meet-ups; pink is for self-care or routines

He holds up the gold rings with a soft smile, placing one in each finger as he explains, “This one stands for me. Make sure that on every finger I am there, to remind you that I wish to know how you are, to accompany me so that I can remind you that I love you every day of the year.”

If you’re still alive after this, good for you

OTherwise I’m dead, this man is so cheesy and hnghhh-

After all that, Albedo wakes up with you and helps you organize your rings for the day <3

It looks nice and glamorous on your hand, and even if you get distracted by it, you’ll find yourself being reminded of what you need to do

Genuis boyo

But that’s not even 100% of his power

nononono he has another solution and this was something he picked up after spending time with you

His pretty t e a l eyes (just look at that damn banner)

You seem to stop everything when he focuses his eyes on you, eye contact, like you’re grounded or crystallized

Somehow when you see eye-to-eye it gives him enough time to remind you that you’re focusing on the wrong thing, go back to your notes

It’s just- so pretty :((

Works 99% of the time!

The rare 1% it doesn’t work tho, you get this very rare moment: before you can even move away from your task, finding yourself not caring about it again, he’ll just wrap his arms around you from behind. They’re comfortably tight, grounding your feet to the floor as he whines against your hair, scolding you and telling you to finish your stuff first

You couldn’t say no to a cute whiney Albedo

You can’t

//brings out knife// You better not-

Bonus: Albedo likes to focus on the important things, but he’s easily intrigued by curious things too

And with your tendency to lose focus and notice other things, this becomes a chaotic series of events

You’re both silently sitting in his laboratory, him sketching a diagram of his current research

You look up from the papers you were reading as you lose focus and the movement would easily catch Albedo’s attention, ready to move his lips to call you back-

“Oh, is that Crystalfly changing colors out there?”

“Huh?”

You’re both rushing to the window where you saw the phenomenon

And then you’re both running out to investigate further <3

All of Mond watches you two’s antics and finds you just to be the cutest couple in existence. Albedo has two Klee’s to take care of, is what it would look like sometimes.

PS. This is not an Albedo Blog

#genshin impact #genshin impact x reader #genshin impact albedo #albedo #albedo x reader #genshin impact headcanons #genshin impact imagines #genshin impact scenarios #exile.goblet #exile.flower #followers special #hope you like it!#I enjoyed writing about Albedo even tho I'm very worried that im turning into an albedo blog sksksksk #next req is also albedo hngh #i hope you guys know i dont just write for albedo hhh #no hate tho #just curious why it's all ALBEDO #gender neutral

533 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 3 years

Text

Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable (Introduction and Part One)

An Examination of the Mass Arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front

INTRODUCTION

The title states my premise here: the breezy way My Hero Academia presents and resolves the mass arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front is ludicrous. If taken as presented and allowed to stand without being further addressed, it serves as a breaking point from which the series will be incredibly hard-pressed to recover. Why, you ask?

From a logistical standpoint, it strains credulity. From an ethical standpoint, it suggests deeply troubling problems with the state of Hero Society. From a thematic standpoint, it unravels whole portions of the narrative’s spine. I’ll be looking at each of these facets in turn to discuss the questions they raise which My Hero Academia has not yet seen fit to answer. Many in fandom don’t seem to be thinking about it too hard, so I’d like to lay out—in exhaustive detail—all the reasons I find this plot element so wildly out of touch with causal reality.

Please note that while they are discussed when relevant, this essay is not principally about the named characters in the League of Villains or the erstwhile high command of the Metahuman Liberation Army. The sorts of consequences Shigaraki Tomura or Re-Destro would and should be facing in a courtroom are orders of magnitude beyond what Random Liberation Warrior X would be, but it’s the mass numbers of Random Liberation Warrior Xs that this essay is most concerned with, as they are the ones most in danger of being swept under a rug and forgotten by the series in its current state.

Further, be advised that this essay in its full form is both very long (about 21K words excluding Sources and Further Reading) and will contain extensive discussion of real-life Japan—comparisons to historical events, minutiae of its legal and carceral systems, and general cultural views on criminality. This will include references to imprisonment, government oppression, and incidents of terrorism both real and in the context of My Hero Academia.

Being as it is about quite a recent event in the series, it will also contain heavy spoilers all the way up through the most recent chapter as of this writing, Chapter 310. It likewise contains spoilers for the spin-off series My Hero Academia: Vigilantes up through Chapter 95.

The essay will be posted in parts on tumblr and in full on AO3. For the tumblr posting, I will provide links to other tumblr posts as I reference them; however, as I would like this to actually show up in the tags, outside links containing my sources and further reading will be provided in a separate post following the conclusion of the essay.

Lastly, I spent an entire month writing this as a fan who is sympathetic to the villains in general and the MLA in particular. If your response to the very concept of this essay is anything to the tune of, “Who cares what happens to a bunch of disgusting quirk eugenicists?” know that you and I have radically different views on the MLA, and the role of the justice system in general. You are, of course, welcome to read the essay anyway, but, having said my piece about the MLA and their relationship with quirk supremacy elsewhere, I will not be engaging with arguments or gotchas on that subject here.

PART ONE: The Facts at Hand

Before we get too deep into things, let’s lay out the basic facts: how many people are actually involved in the arrest, as well as some comparisons to real-life events to contextualize that number and provide some referents for the issues the arrest raises.

Re-Destro gives the numbers of the Metahuman Liberation Army as 116,516. A lot of people go on to die in Deika, though we’re never given a solid count. The biggest batch we see killed in a single go are the press of sixty or so people Shigaraki decays, then the sixteen-ish Toga drops, though some of those might possibly have had quirks that allowed them to survive. Any number of people certainly died as well simply in the moments we didn’t see, and who even knows how many were caught in the radius of Shigaraki’s last attack.

Further, there may well have been a measure of organization bleed when the MLA became the PLF (though I imagine trying to leave was a very dangerous proposition, giving an additional reason to stick it out on top of the general cult-like mindset the MLA displays); likewise, I find it hard to believe that there wouldn’t have been some deaths at the Gunga Villa, be it from Gigantomachia’s departure, Geten cutting loose, or combatants—be they hero or comrade—overcompensating somewhat in the middle of a chaotic melee.

I suspect it’s overestimating the depletion, but for the purposes of simplicity, let us call it 115,000 remaining members at the time of the raid.[1]

We are told that, in all, 16,929 people were captured at the villa—just about 17,000. 132 escaped in the confusion; this is a fairly negligible number, save for the fact that it includes high-ranking advisors, but not Machia and those of the Front that were with him.

We are further told, and I quote, “Their bases scattered around the country were hit too, and the sympathizers rounded up.” Horikoshi did not provide any solid numbers for this,[2] but if we’re to assume that it is just the rest of the group (more on the logistics of that bit of spycraft later), “the sympathizers” would be 98,000 additional people.

However, 98,000 may be a significant underestimation. It’s based, after all, on a number Re-Destro cites to describe “warriors lying in wait, ready to rise to action.” This begs the question: is Re-Destro quoting the entire membership of the group, or only those who actually are ready to take action? In other words, does his number account for non-combatants? Is he counting young children? I tend to assume the MLA doesn't have a retirement age as such,[3] but if they do, does his number account for the elderly?

How many more people might be “sympathizers” to the PLF insomuch as they are e.g. the six-month-old infant daughter of an MLA couple? What about the ninety-year-old man in the retirement home whose only real act of war these days is tying up the phone line at City Hall to complain about repressive quirk use laws? How about the fired-up fifteen-year-old that was going to get their official code name next month, just in time to join the first wave of attacks? If he’s being literal in his usage of “warrior,” the actual count of the MLA could easily be twice as high as the number he actually gives.

But okay, maybe Re-Destro’s number does include absolutely everyone. Maybe he’s just being rhetorical—maybe, in his mind, even the six-month-old is waiting to rise to action; she’s just going to have to wait a bit longer than the rest, is all. For simplicity’s sake, let’s stick with the numbers we have: a low-end of 17,000, a high-end of 115,000, captured not merely in a single day, but allegedly in the span of a few hours.

I’m sure I don’t need to stress that that is a lot of people. But how many people is it, practically speaking? Is there a precedent? Anything we can look to for guidance on how this kind of thing would go in real life?

Comparative Analogues

The PLF is tricky to categorize for the purposes of real-life comparison, especially compared to how they’re treated in-universe. In some lights, they resemble a protest movement; in others, a terrorist group. Just looking at the way the government reacts to them—and certainly in terms of their combat capabilities—they might as well be an all-out insurrectionist uprising! Below, I’ll examine a handful of historical incidents that cover that spectrum; they will continue to provide useful reference points throughout the rest of this essay.

The March 15 Incident

In the first half of the 20th century, Japan saw a huge uptick in socialist and communist activity, much to the general dismay of the ruling powers. In response, they passed a series of laws commonly referred to as the Peace Preservation Laws, designed to better enable authorities to suppress political dissent and freedom of speech, particularly that of leftists and labor movements.

The Japanese Communist Party was founded in 1922, but outlawed in 1925. This merely drove members underground, however, from which position they pointed supporters towards the numerous other parties with more legally tolerated leftist policies that had cropped up in the wake of the JCP’s dissolution. Following the February 1928 General Election (the first in Japan held with universal male suffrage), those parties supported by the JCP saw enormous gains in representation in Japan’s National Diet. Alarmed, the Prime Minister declared the mass arrest of known communists and suspected communist sympathizers. Accordingly, on March 15, 1,600 people were arrested throughout Japan.

Over the course of twenty years, some 70,000 people would be arrested under the auspices of the Peace Preservation Laws, the majority of them in 1925 through 1936. The laws would eventually be repealed by American occupation forces after WWII, and the JCP allowed to operate openly once again.

The Rice Riots

In 1918, an inflation spiral had driven the price of rice out of control, exacerbating economic insecurity and hardship. Farmers were being paid a pittance of the market value of their crop by rice buyers and government agents, while urban consumers were being charged an exorbitant price for the staple food, as well as a great many other consumer goods, and their own rents. In response, a series of riots ripped across Japan in late July through September. Beginning with peaceful protesting in a small fishing town in Toyama Prefecture, the unrest escalated to involve riots, strikes, looting, even bombing in demonstrations that reached major cities like Tokyo and Osaka. The scope was and remains unprecedented in modern Japanese history, seeing some 25,000 people arrested.

The Sarin Gas Attacks

If you’ve heard of any of them, it’s probably this one. On March 20, 1995, members of the cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas on five different Tokyo Metro trains in the middle of morning rush hour. Thirteen people were killed and over 5500 injured, about a fifth of them moderately to severely so. If not for small errors in the production of the gas and the rudimentary distribution method thereof, loss of life might easily have been catastrophically higher.

Aum Shinrikyo was a doomsday cult, but the motives for that particular attack were much baser than bringing about the Apocalypse: at the time, the organization was under police investigation for its involvement in the kidnapping of a public official. Its leader, Asahara Shoukou, hoped that the attack would divert police’s attention from a planned raid.

It did not do so; police executed raids on numerous of the cult’s compounds, arresting many of its senior members both immediately and over the course of the following months as the investigation unfolded. In all, over 200 members were arrested of an organization that counted its membership prior to the attack as numbering 11,000 people in Japan.[4]

The February 26 Incident

There have been a significant number of uprisings and violent protests in Japan’s modern history; when looking for a representative example, I focused my attention on the military coups of the 1930s and 40s, largely because they took place in what was closest to the modern Japanese legal context.[5] Of that subset, I chose the February 26 Incident for the severity of the government response. The others disintegrated before they could be properly carried out or were met with sympathy for the dissidents despite the obvious illegality of their actions. The February 26 Incident, however, was when they finally became too troublesome to dismiss, and the Emperor himself ran out of patience.

In this period, the Japanese military had become drastically factionalized into two main groups—an ultra-nationalist group, largely powered by a group of young officers, which supported the Emperor and wanted to purge Japan of Western influences, and a more moderate group mainly defined by their opposition to the above faction.[6] Occurring in 1936, the February 26 Incident involved the young officers, believing that they had tacit approval from higher-ranked officers of their own faction, launching assassination attempts against the nationalists’ most prominent enemies in the government (six assorted Ministers and former Ministers in the Emperor’s Privy Council and the Diet) and a bid to seize control of the administrative center of the capital and the Imperial Palace, after which they planned to demand the dismissal of more officers and the selection of a new Cabinet.

The seven ringleaders had convinced eighteen other officers to lend their forces to the attempted coup, a total of around 1,500 men, calling themselves the Righteous Army. Several of their assassination attempts failed, however, and while they succeeded at taking the Prime Minister’s residence and the Ministry of War, they did not manage to secure the Palace. The outraged Cabinet demanded the Emperor take a hard line with the rebels, and by the 29th, the Righteous Army was surrounded by 20,000 government troops and 22 tanks. In this hopeless situation, the officers dismissed their troops; two committed suicide (a third attempted it unsuccessfully) and the remainder were arrested by military police.

International Examples

For obvious reasons, I prefer to limit my examples to events that happened in Japan. However, I will also be briefly referring to a few international incidents of mass arrest, taking place in India, the U.S., and Egypt, respectively.

In the following parts, I'll use these facts and comparative analogues to take a closer look at what readers were told became of the Paranormal Liberation Front.

Part Two

-----------------------------------------------------

Footnotes (Part One)—

[1] Over three months’ time, they likely gained some new blood also, simply in the course of their usual recruitment tactics. You don’t get an underground organization that size by sitting back and waiting for people to come to you, after all. I don’t know a practical way to calculate that, though, so just bear it in mind for when I talk about new members later.

[2] Possibly because he was aware that 17,000 people captured in one fell swoop was difficult enough to swallow without adding on more than five times that number.

[3] We do, after all, see some very aged people fighting in the streets of Deika.

[4] They were considerably more international than you may have heard. They had 50,000 members at the time, some 30,000 of them based in Russia.

[5] The Meiji Constitution was ratified in 1889; universal suffrage (for men) was granted in 1925. The modern constitution was enacted in 1947.

[6] More moderate, mind, in the context of the Imperial Japanese military. Neither of these factions had any time whatsoever for leftist movements, hence all those suppressive crackdowns.

#bnha analysis #bnha meta #paranormal liberation front #meta liberation army #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #bnha #bnha spoilers #my writing #plf arrests #stillness has salt

45 notes · View notes

foxanddragonbooks · 3 years

Text

Witchshadow Review and Rating

★★☆☆☆

I have thought about this rating for a long time. This was my most anticipated book of the year and my favorite series. It hurts my soul to rate it low, but anything else would be a lie. There were just so many things I did not like. Of course, there were things I liked, the writing was beautiful as always, Stix’s arc, but unfortunately the positive couldn't outweigh the negative. And I had a lot of negative feelings while reading this book.

The first thing that didn't work for me was the nonlinear timeline. The prolog takes place a few days after the last book ended. That was nice. Then the next chapter takes place one month after that event. That is already too big of a time jump for my liking. Characters were in certain places already, and you don't find out why, how, or when until later on. Usually in a flashback scene. It was so confusing. I want to know why someone is at this place now and how they get there when it happens, not through a flashback. This type of storytelling might work for movies and tv shows, but it's really difficult in books. The flashbacks also felt ill-placed. We already knew this plan went wrong because if it didn’t the character wouldn't be in the position they are in now. It could have just been described in a few sentences, instead of flashbacks that took up several pages.

Second of all, one of the MAIN characters was completely absent. This just doesn't make sense storytelling-wise. At all. He still has so much left to do and there is only one more book left. One 500 page book that is distributed into 6 povs. I really can't see how that's supposed to work. I can see how that character had to be gone for some time, given the events of the previous book, but that could have been solved with the usual 2 week time jump between books. Keeping the main character away for a whole book/movie/series just never works. Remember when Game of Thrones left out Bran for an entire season even though GRRM said that he is one of the key five? This is what this book felt like.

Another main character was barely in the book either. He was there, but he was not himself. He was literally possessed for 95% of the book, so in a way, two main characters were not part of the book.

That brings me right to my next point. Way too much focus on side characters I couldn't care less about. This was supposed to be Iseult's book but it felt more like a Hell Bard book. Again, I don't understand why. They are side characters but they felt so present in the book while other characters that are much more important to the story were absent. I wanted this to be a Nomatsi book. A book about the history of the Nomatsi. Why are they hated? How did they live before they came to the Witchlands? I was so sure that all those questions would be answered in this book but all we got were a few folktales and a history in hell bards. This was supposed to be Iseutls book, not theirs. They are not even that important to the plot and a big chunk of their plot could have been given to maybe the two missing main characters. That would have been pretty epic. The hell bard loom was never mentioned before, Midne, the first hell bard was never mentioned before, but they take up such a big plot in ISEULT’S book? Why? It felt so random. Esme’s loom was important to the story in the previous book, but it was barely mentioned in this one.

And Esme, oh God. This was supposed to be this super powerful, badass villain, and then she is turned into a weasel just like that. It felt so off and weird.

Furthermore, at this point, Safi has more development with the hell bards, SIDE CHARACTERS, than she has with any of the main characters. She had 1 book with Merik, her love interest, 1 with Iseult, her best friend, and 0 with Aeduan, Vivia, and Stix. This is the second to last book. I really don’t understand how she didn’t get to interact with all these important characters more or at all so far.

Things also didn't add up. It's implied that Safi is 18 in this book when she has been 19 for the last two books. Leopold suddenly becomes younger too. In the first book, Safi says he is the same age as Merik, who is 20, now he is 18. Or it is implied that he is. It’s confusing. It doesn't make sense.

There is a very weird scene that borders on romance and made me dread reading further. It's said in the beginning of the book that these characters are thread FAMILY. Thread SIBLINGS. Yet one thinks about the other as very handsome and they are only inches apart and holding hands in a scene. IT'S WEIRD. If they are supposed to be family then why was this scene written? If you consider someone your sister or brother from another mother you don't do this kind of stuff. The Vivia/Vaness romance came out of nowhere.

The Vivia/Stix being thread siblings came out of nowhere and made 0 sense. They were supposed to be the mutual pining childhood friends to lovers ship, now they are family. Vivia was jealous in Windwitch when she thought Stix had slept with someone. This is not sibling behavior! The set up for Vivia/Stix was right THERE and so present! Whereas Vivia/Vaness came out of nowhere. I don’t understand what’s going on anymore. Please don’t foreshadow things that you don’t mean to go through with. I hate this.

To quote Iseult: “Nothing felt real. Nothing made sense.” That sums up the entire book for me. The characters felt so off to me.

Safi comes up with this ridiculous plan to noose the Emperor while kissing him, and OF COURSE, it goes wrong. It was such a stupid plan, and Safi at this part of the story would have never done this. It felt like a step back for her and made zero sense. She is supposed to be smarter than that now.

Iseult felt so off at the beginning of the book, I didn’t even realize it was her at first. She was all ‘I kill people and regret nothing, I am the badass puppeteer, don’t fuck with me’ and then she went back to her old self in like a blink and never returned to her ‘dark self’.

There is a scene where Safi walks into the Emperor’s room while he has sex with his mistress, IT WAS SO WEIRD and uncomfortable. Literally, why was this scene necessary. Like she wanted to steal something from his rooms but she could have done this at night while he was sleeping. While everyone was sleeping.

Safi’s original plan was also to noose Henrick during their wedding night. That was so weird and made me so uncomfortable. He is 3 times Safi’s age, please. Like I get that she honestly believed she would be forced to consummate the marriage, so she thought hmm might as well get my revenge on this bitch then. But when Henrick said he had no intention of taking Safi to his bed, she was not relieved at all? She was like no, no, no, you have to take me to your bed. It felt so unrealistic. Safi is literally a teenager. Any teenage girl would be glad to not have to sleep with a man old enough to be her father. She should have been relieved that she wasn’t forced to sleep with an old man, and glad that that would mean she had more time to come up with a more fleshed-out plan to kill him. And Iseult would have never let Safi go through with her original plan. Never.

This book felt so, so different from the other books of the series that I love so much, and not in a good way. I don’t think I have been so disappointed and upset since the last season of Game of Thrones aired.

I want to go back in time when the main characters of this series were still main characters. At this point, I have so little hope for the last book. Maybe I am wrong, I would be glad to be wrong, but this book feels like a bullet hole in my chest and I am not sure it can be fixed.

#the witchlands #witchshadow #witchshadow spoilers #review #book review #books read in 2021

14 notes · View notes

thelovelyghostwriter · 3 years

Note

How many responses have you gotten so far, if I may ask?

Hello, thank you for your question. I open the Q&A if you guys want updates on the survey or any problems I'm facing.

Currently, there's 380 responses in total. [It was actually 362 last night, don’t know where I got the boost overnight, perhaps that Kurapika post]

tThere's actually 84 questions in total, but I coded it in such a way that certain questions don't appear when you indicated an option. For example, if you indicated that you are not up to date with the manga (indicating that you have read the post-Election arc AND read till Chapter 390), the questions regarding the Succession arc theories and predictions will not appear. This is why the manga readers' survey is actually longer.

Currently, 149 respondents indicated that they had read up to date, and therefore, they indicated

Another example is the shippings part. For example, if you indicated you don't ship anything, you won't see the list of ships. If you only indicated that you ship, let's say, het ships, you will only see the het ships. This is to make it easier for people to do the survey. The key is for others to not answer unnecessary questions.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to talk about certain issues/explanations that I need to address.

The reason why I'm always emphasising the goal of 385 responses and above (400 is a good number) because based on calculations. I checked on MAL and that there are over 1.2 million who have watched HxH. The "population" in this case is the total number of people who have watched/read the series. Since some people do not have MAL, the actual population number is higher (currently, we do not know what is this exact number).

At 5% margin of error and 95% confidence level*, the ideal sample size is 385 in populations above 100K, and it doesn't change after 100K.

*I do not really know how to explain this, but don't worry too much about it.

Alright, so I'm at 380, do I still need more than 5 people?

Yes, I need more people. Why? I have three concerns:

1) I said this before, but I need more men/boys to do the survey.

As mentioned, I did not put demographic questions because my country is strict with asking people for personal data. While this survey is casual, I do not want to encounter future complications. However, I can roughly guess the gender composition of respondents because of certain questions and the way the survey was distributed.

Firstly, this survey blew up mostly on Tumblr and there’s a lot of mixed statistics. This says that 47% are female in 2021 and this other article says 72% of women use Tumblr in 2014. Anyway, most of my online (majority from Tumblr) are women and they had actively helped me sent it out to other women who likes the show as well. This same thing happened to my friends in real life.

Actually, this is one of the biggest limitations of this survey - convenient sampling, which is giving the survey to only people that we know. Our friends who may have similar views/interest will get to do the survey, but people that we are not friends with who may have a different view/interest does not get to do the survey. Their thoughts/opinions are not recorded.

Secondly, there are certain questions that makes it easy to guess for me if the respondent is a woman/man.

For example, the “which character do you simp for” question.

“nil” means they don’t simp for anyone by the way. Also, note that this is just the word cloud diagram. I will chart them manually in bar charts later on.

Usually, when someone indicates a lot of male characters, they are normally women/girls. The ones who indicated Killua Zoldyck and Gon are usually young girls. Of course, I’m not saying men won’t indicate they simp for a male character or something, but yea know, common sense a bit here. The likelihood of someone placing Chrollo being a woman/girl is higher than the respondent being a man. That also same goes for the shipping questions.

The survey is posted on Reddit that consisted of 83.1% males in the HxH area, according to the 1K survey that they had. This helped me boost more people (and possibly guys who do survey). However, I think only about 20 to 30 people did it (based on the boost I got after the Reddit thread was posted). I also had help from a large hxh IG account that had slightly more guy followers to give me a shoutout. I also went to reach out to some accounts whom I know the admin are guys.

I still need a bit more help though, because currently the survey results... I’m sensing that there are more women/girls who did it from the way the results are turning out.

Why is this important?

It’s simple. I cannot just release the results that had an uneven ratio of the gender of the respondents and claim that this is the hxh fandom. It won’t be representative of the hxh fandom population as a whole when there are many cis-men who actually had watched/read the show, and absolutely loved it. I think it’s important to hear people’s opinions, be it men, women, young, old.

Currently, I’m trying to attract more men to do the survey by designing my hxh analyses posts from Tumblr and transporting them to IG, because I realise they like these kind of posts and they get to see my bio profile (with the survey link) + post about the hxh survey. I also get to befriend some of them in the process (and also because I have long been wanting to post my hxh analyses on IG, but it’s just a hassle to make it into pretty poster designs). So win-win.

Of course, anyone is welcomed to do the survey. I just need help with “balancing” it out, so please help me by sending it to your bros, guy friends, boyfriends, fathers etc. Or if you know any social media platforms where most guys dominate, then yeah please send them. Or if you’re a guy, then yea go ahead and try the survey.

2) While the responses are 380 in total, the number of people who have read up to date is 149.

Okay, I’m not saying I need to get people who had read up to date to be 385 as well. Realistically, not sure if I can do it. However, most of the questions pertaining the Succession arc are the most interesting ones and it takes a large chunk of them.

So yes, it will be great to have more people to do the survey especially if they had read the manga so that we can have more respondents in those questions.

3) The 385 response calculation is only assuming 5% confidence level and 5% margin of error.

I don’t exactly know how to explain this, but I will try to quote for the margin of error:

“Company X surveys customers and finds that 50 percent of the respondents say its customer service is “very good.” The confidence level is cited as 95 percent plus or minus 3 percent margin of error. This information means that if the survey were conducted 100 times, the percentage who say service is “very good” will range between 47 and 53 percent most (95 percent) of the time.”

So if you put it in HxH context, with 95% confidence level, and 5% margin of error, it goes like this:

50% of respondents indicated that Bisky is their favourite HxH girl (this one is only one option). If this survey was conducted 100 times, the % of people who indicated Bisky as their favourite girl would be from 45% to 55%.

But if I actually key in 3% margin of error, the sample size goes up to 1056.

I’m willing to open the survey for 1.5 more weeks. Three reasons:

A) I will wait for more responses of course!

B) I am currently busy with my part-time student research assistant job during summer break till this week, and they are rushing to finish up the research paper. Therefore, it’ll be nice to just wait while I do my work.

C) I am planning to write up the theories that I had included in the survey. This means having a lot of time finding the links/threads to the theories and reading them, making sense of it. I plan to post it and also merge that in my report.

I’m closing the survey in 1.5 weeks because I need time to do up the charts and report by mid-August because I’m afraid I might be busy once the semester starts and I won’t have anytime to do this mini fun project.

Another thing I want to address:

Most of the time, certain options I created is based on technical reasons. The other reason is by mistake.

For mistakes, I went to fix them if someone highlights a mistake.

Now, for the technical reason. I did not appreciate this response in the NOTP section that says:

The reason why I listed out almost all ships in Hunterpedia, including the ones with a large age gap and the incest ones is simple - because it helps me chart easier when I put them into options. It also decreases the chances of nonsense answers like this one. It also places less fatigue on people doing the survey. Text boxes are only meant if the options aren’t clear or “others, please state” so that I can include people’s opinons.

The reason why I didn’t do that for the NOTP section is that I was unable to do a certain specific coding. That’s why it ended up as a text box. It’s also based on the assumption that if something is really your NOTP, you’d know and remember it.

Why do people online goes straight to trying to prove they are morally superior and whatnot, assuming that I listed the options because of my morality. You do not know me personally. It is based solely on technical reasons.

This is why I used this disclaimer:

Which part of this is not clear. You can leave, just like what I said in the beginning. Another thing is not following instructions and being rude about it.

I had also instructed clearly to list out the NOTP combinations. I even noted it clearly. Some people put “any incest/pedo ships”, which happened more than five times. What’s more, one response contained “don’t tell me what to do”.

Yes, I get it, you don’t like these type. But what you’re doing is making me guess everything, which is unproductive. If you don’t like certain ships that are common but a “taboo” like “HisoGon”, “Killumi”, then say that. If you say it generally, I’m just going to assume the ones on the Hunterpedia list.

Another thing is the “any toxic ships”. This is very vague. Often, some so-called “wholesome” common ships in hxh are toxic. Mind you, Killugon is also a toxic ship (let’s not be blind to the CA arc please, this pairing is unbalanced), yet almost everyone perceives it as wholesome. Most characters in hxh are toxic in their own ways, and for sure their canon dynamics if they are in a relationship are likely more toxic than what is often portrayed in the headcanon way. I am wondering what to do with this, I might put it as invalid or “no”.

This is why my instructions are to list them. I had already edited the question twice to make it even clearer yet there’s people who defy them. I’m not just doing the instructions out of fun or make people’s life harder. Those are instructions.

I do not understand why certain people have to feel offended/be rude at an anonymous survey.

I can understand if people don’t follow instructions because you might missed it out and I can help to chart it for you. It’s totally okay, everyone makes mistakes, but I do not appreciate the extra unsolicited comments about me because it implies that you have read them, you just chose not to follow it.

If you think there’s a better way to do it, then DM me. I will explain to you why I had done it so, or I might even change it based on your suggestion. For example, someone actually told me to add certain options and I did it. Another person suggested to add the non-romantic dynamics and I love that, though I think it’s a little too late to add that. Maybe in the next survey.

If you do not like the instructions, kindly exit the survey. Nobody is forcing you to do it. It won’t record your response if the survey is incomplete for one hour.

#hxh #hunterxhunter #gon freecss #kurapika #leorio #killua #killua zoldyck #kurapika kurta #leorio paladiknight

11 notes · View notes

lubdubsworld · 3 years

Note

So I opened the fic, stared at it for a solid 10 minute before reading it. The flashback and the present is so beautifully connected, it really felt like a scene being enacted in front of me and that's the beauty of Shyn's writing. She knows how to marry the emotion with the narrative. From Heejin's unhealthy coping mechanisms to her defending her sub gender to asserting her own individuality in the face of people who just view her as an object has been moulded as such real parts of her personality.

What really connected me this time was Jungkook's journey that went from 0-100, his grief, the ongoing turmoil of his emotions, his acceptence of what happened and will happen in the future if he travels the road laid out in front of him. Him finally moving on from Sooah and not referring to her to as his wife was a serious step up in the present context.

One of my personal favourite scenes is from their conversation in jail and Mina's nursery. I swear everything inside me fluttered and my eyes welled up.

Also Jungkook finally (FINALLYYYYY) defended Heejin in the face of humiliating and objectifying remarks. And that is such a glow up I WANT TO WHOOP WITH UNFILTERED JOY.

One of things that really struck me and was derived from Real experiences is that but about abusive relationships lending the aggrieved to justify and rationalise the actions of the accused (look at me whipping out legal terms😭) it's something we see in over 95 percent of the relationships of all kinds and it saddens me how less women think of their own suffering when attaching it to a partner who caused it. Therapist Tae is literally my most favourite character in this entire saga I'm ngl. His maturity, understanding, the way he helped these 2 and wasn't afraid to call them out. Most of his dialogues are a gold mine of wisdom and I'm very curious to ask you how did you write his dialogues?

The gaps on the puzzle of this plot were duly filled wrt Heejin's pregnancy, her father, her mother, jungkook and Sooah's history. I personally shuddered at Heejin's rape and pregnancy story, the understanding of why she was so accepting of her marriage finally dawning on me. It was incredibly heartbreaking and something i wish nobody would go through. However, her strong sense of autonomy over her body and feelings of distaste when strangers leer on her versus her acceptence of what Jungkook did to her is something that messes up my mind.

But this question was answered when Therapist Tae told her that she's not broken but only trying to survive and she needs to only change her coping mechanism of diving headlong into unhealthy choices to prove that she's okay. THAT MADE SO MUCH SENSE!

Her longing for emotional appeasement to counter someone's unavailability has been finally addressed and i feel so relieved 😩😩

Jungkook's journey is an uphill and downhill slope filled with talks of the past, apprehensions of the present. He felt caged and that scene where he talks to Sooah was a breakthrough. I felt liberated as a reader.

Also I have to mention that conversation in prison IT IS MY FAVOURITE SCENE, Laden with so many delicious emotions that have eaten me inside out as a reader.

We'll start with overwhelming, ulcer inducing guilt that Jungkook felt when he said he keeps fucking things up for Heejin, the truth about him being a terrible husband to her that was beyond the boundaries of abuse and violence to the raw real talk between them with everything laid out in the open.

I have so much more to tell you but I am afraid of not expressing my emotions in the correct way but tsot has touched my heart and i will always come back to it in good times and bad.

The part with Sooah's portrait still makes me cry and I've read the chapter 4 times and I'm a mess😭 how did you write it man?????

Also I know you said you cut a lot of scenes but will you ever post the ones that didn't make the cut? As snippets?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm still shaking from the chapter to be honest so I will answer specific questions for you :)

How did i write Taehyung?

Taehyung is just the sum total of all of life's lessons I have learned. Quotes I've stumbled across, epiphanies I've had when I stood under the shower and cried my heart out, comfort i found from a friend when I was too depressed to function, words whispered into my skin by my husband when life overwhelmed me too much. And of course a whole lot of research....and introspection .

How did i write this ?

With a lot of tears and a lot of breaks and a lot of staring at the mirror and wondering if it was way too real .

As for the cut scenes...

The work count of that is nearly 20k..... Its all over the place though....so I don't know.... :"(

5 notes · View notes

humanransome-note · 4 years

Text

So @pettyprocrastination has an Oberyn X Ellaria x OC X Reader fic universe. I’m not into GoT I’ve only read like 95% of the first book in eighth grade.

But by GOD, do I love the way she writes Oberyn and Ellaria. And I love the OC she made and the way she writes the Sentry (the reader character) and how she writes relationships as a whole. They’re so soft.

And in the first chapter of the fic, it is heavily implied that the Sentry killed Domntzia’s first husband.

And this began rattling in my noggin when I read through all of the available content.

So here’s some fanfic, of a fanfic.

No names are given, no real physical discripters either. So really you could put any Guard X Princess couple if you wanted.

TW: torture, implied spousal abuse (those are the big ones, is there’s smth else tell me and let me fix it)

There’s a lot of blood, but you were ready for it.

You’d planned for it.

This was not about efficiency. This was about pain, revenge, retribution.

You were making sure he’d never lay a hand on her again.

There’s a knock on the door. You don’t answer but it opens anyway.

There’s a sharp intake of breath, one small fracture in the Madame’s countenance before she’s back to business.

“This is,” her gaze floats across the room, “messier, than I expected.”

You grunt as you place your knives on the table.

“He was being difficult.”

You stride across the room towards the small en-suite, in it there is already a basin of hot water.

Filling a bucket and grab a rag before heading back.

The Madame has moved further into the room, lifting her skirts to keep any stray puddles of blood from staining the hems.

She’s pretending to asses the damage, but you can see her eyes flick back to what’s left of the corpse spread out on one of her beds.

“Apologies,” you drop the bucket unceremoniously onto the floor and she flinches. “I’ll pay for anything that needs to be fixed or replaced.”

She nods once before seeming to steel herself.

“Why?”

You don’t answer immediately, wetting the rag and squeezing out the excess in silence.

Contemplating your words, you begin wiping down the table.

“It’s my job.”

It’s your job to protect her, to keep her safe.

You did everything you could to get him in line, you gave him every chance you could think of, but he did not stop, and he did not apologize.

So as long as he was alive, you wouldn’t be doing your job.

“Does she know?”

There’s a small hitch in your movements, but you don’t really stop.

“Not the full extent of it.”

She’d never asked you to do anything, still somehow holding out hope that he would change. That he just needed time to adjust. That she was fine, really.

You haven’t been the head of her personal guard for long, but you already know she’s a terrible liar.

The sound of tentative steps draw your attention as you wring out the rag.

The Madame is staring down at what’s left of his face, seemingly fascinated and disturbed all at once.

“You were only here for one night,” there’s an almost, awe, in her tone, but what comes out the clearest is fear.

“I told you,” you walk to the the other side of the bed, “he was being difficult.”

———

You never start with the knives, to obvious and dangerous. Why scar someone when bruises and broken bones work just as well?

But either he was drunk, or arrogant, or both.

He seemed to be under the ridiculous assumption that he would walk out of this the same man he entered as.

If he walked out of it at all.

Every punch, every kick, every full weighted jab was met with defiance and the declaration that he could do what ever he want as she was his wife and it was his right.

So you broke his toes.

Easier to explain away than broken fingers, and more difficult to recover from. He’d need to relearn how to walk.

But he just kept talking.

So his ankles were next.

Not that difficult, especially with the restraints available and enough vicious ingenuity.

“I get it now,”

You were tying his legs down so you’d have the proper leverage.

“You want me, don’t you?”

You could have almost laughed at the sheer audacity.

“You think this is foreplay?” If he did, it might give a bit of an explanation, but certainly not an excuse.

“For you? Yes.”

You finished securing his leg and waited for him to elaborate.

“It’s gotta be, why else would you join the guard?” He snorts, “I mean besides it being the only way to get a man in your bed.”

It’s childish, something you’ve heard since you came of age, and you truly begin to wonder if there is even a brain between his ears.

He finally puts it together when you finish breaking seven of his fingers.

“You want her,” well, not entirely together.

You have his left ring finger in your hand as you stare down at him.

“That’s it? You want the whining bitch, don’t you?”

You tighten your grip.

“All you had to do was ask!” There’s a slight hysteria to his voice, the pain and situation is finally registering.

“Hell you don’t even have to do that! Just bend her over and make her-Aggh!”

That was much more satisfying than the others.

You don’t really wait to break the remaining digits.

By both tibias and fibulas, he’s threatening you.

By his remaining humorous he’s bribing you.

When you get to his ribs he’s begging for you to stop.

And you do.

Not because you’re done, no.

Because right now he can’t move, all he can do is whimper and plead for a mercy you’ve already decided he does not deserve.

So you give yourself a break, and make sure he can hear the sounds of you sharpening your knives.

When he seems to have fallen asleep, or maybe passed out, you slap him across the face.

He lets out a pathetic little noise.

You know this brothel has things hidden away in the cupboards to help keep clients and employees going, keep them awake and ready.

You’re almost tempted to step out and just ask for some when you hit the side of the closet too hard and hear a hollow thump.

The false back is easy to remove after that.

What you find is powdered, not a liquid like you were hoping but I’ll have to do.

It takes a few seconds after you administer it for him to jerk awake again. Exacerbating his current injuries in the process.

The, satisfaction, you feel as you press the knife through his already shattered wrists is not something you will think on after tonight.

The sensation of an almost, sated curiosity, as you slowly remove his eyes from his sockets is the same as when your local blacksmith showed you how to assemble a crossbow.

And when you finally crush his skull, it has less to do with mercy and more to do with boredom.

———

You had plan for how to get rid of the body, and executing it was almost frighteningly easy.

When it is found a week later, no one admits to last seeing him at a brothel for three days after that.

When someone finally comes forward, the Madame has already given all the girls and you a cover story.

(You think she looks more disappointed at hearing you were at a brothel than that her husband was dead, you try not to get your hopes up)

It’s concluded to have been an assassination, obviously. But as to who did it is still murky.

A rumor quickly spreads, then even more quickly dies, that she killed her husband. The belief that she ordered his death lasts a little longer, but that too, is quickly thrown away.

Your fellow guards know.

They look at you differently, with a cold understanding, after the funeral. But none of them say anything, not out of fear, but again from understanding.

They don’t know exactly what happened between her and her husband, but they know something happened. And they all know you would have only done it if you thought it was the only way.

Afterwords you’re ordered to stick to her like a shadow, and she demands you sleep in her chambers.

The two of you never talk about it. You’re pretty sure she knows you had something to do with his murder, but she never confronts you.

A few years later, her father announces that she is to be married off again, and when she looks at you, you know she knows.

You give her one definitive nod.

You will do whatever needs to be done.

It’s your job.

#nicky writes #princess x knight #cw: torture #did I imagine Hoo’s Madame Bouriseau?#yes

21 notes · View notes

blackswaneuroparedux · 4 years

Text

Treat Your S(h)elf: I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide To Wine, by Roger Scruton (2009)

You could say that wine is probably as old as civilisation; I prefer to say that it is civilisation, and that the distinction between civilised and uncivilised countries is the distinction between the places where it is drunk and the places where it isn’t.

- Sir Roger Scruton, I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide To Wine

When I first got talked into investing in the dreams of my two cousins and their French families to continue to manage an old French vineyard I thought of Roger Scruton’s book. I already had this book on my shelf alongside his other works. Re-reading it nudged me to take a risk and go for it.

For one I have always loved wine and have drunk it from a very early age. Secondly what could be more cultured or civilising than to marry body and mind through the palate of philosophy and wine?

And finally, and perhaps more importantly, the opportunity to escape the madness of modernity - as well as make peace from war as a British combat veteran of the Afghan war by not so much as coming home but finding a new one - by getting back into nature with hard honest graft on the land that Mother Nature blesses. All of this I found especially appealing.

Of all the things we eat or drink, wine is without question the most complex. So it should not be surprising that philosophers from Plato and Socrates onwards to our contemporary times have turned their attention to wine: complex phenomena can lend themselves to philosophical speculation.

Wine is complex not just in the variety of tastes it presents – ‘wine tastes of everything apart from grapes’, I once heard a crusty old French vintner say – but in its meaning. Only the most woodenly literal-minded would deny that wine has a meaning: in its history, its role in human social life, in religious and other ceremonies. Though they drink it copiously over dinner at High Tables in their Oxbridge colleges, academic analytic philosophers do not spend as much time as they might in this kind of investigation of meaning or significance of wine – what we might call a phenomenology or a hermeneutic investigation.

Of course, there are more narrowly phenomenological questions which wine raises.

How do vintners or winemakers manipulate the underlying biochemical material to create the kinds of taste which they intend their wine to have? Does the ‘terroir’ of a wine really make a difference to taste, and if so how? What is the basis of evaluative judgements about the quality of a wine?

Arguably only those who actually make the wine and those who are life long wine connoisseurs can conceivably answer that on some experiential and technical level. But these are not the only philosophical questions in this area: the hermeneutic questions have their place too, in an understanding of the phenomena.

Sir Roger Scruton’s 224 page book is about the hermeneutics of wine rather than its psychology or phenomenology more narrowly conceived. Scruton, the late great conservative philosopher, is that rare breed who comes closer than most to bridging the gap between the grass roots and the High Table in answering such mysteries. The result is an engaging, insightful, informative and (in parts) a very funny book. It is immensely readable, more in the anecdotal style of Scruton’s England: an Elegy (2000) or On Hunting (1998), than his more heavyweight philosophical works, such as The Aesthetics of Music (1997), Sexual Desire (2004), Beauty (2009), and his writings on Wagner and high culture. He does often come across as curmudgeonly, but his (written) relations with women, music and poetry are very delicate and tender. And so it is with his love affair with wine. It is indeed a very personal book and its is warmly personable, like the man himself, and it contains so much of Scruton’s distinctive wit and intellectual personality, it ought to be of interest not just to wine enthusiasts (whom Scruton likes to call ‘winos’) and philosophers but also anyone curious enough to understand the place of wine in our world civilisation.

The first and obvious thing to say about Scruton’s book is how the title of the book is of course a play on words. It’s a playful wink to Eric Idle’s “Philosophers’ Drinking Song,” in which the Monty Python cast, lightly disguised as a group of Australian philosophers all named Bruce, list the world’s thinkers from a drinking standpoint. This includes the couplet slightly amending Descartes’s proof of his existence: “And René Descartes was a drunken fart / ‘I drink therefore I am.’”

The pun on words is Roger Scruton’s way of taking the Monty Python couplet seriously. After all Descartes was a serious man and though he was born in Touraine, the rich French wine region, did probably not drink much. He treats all this as a paradox that G.K. Chesterton might well have toyed with - that is, as a truth standing on its head to attract attention - and examines the drinking of alcohol as a way in which human beings learn more about each other, fellowship, some of the deeper realities, God, and not least themselves.

In this Scruton is a wise philosopher who teaches us how wine cultivates our moral virtue and our civilisation. He encourages us to recognise that stream of liquid descending from our pursed lips into our throat as the red or golden chord that runs from heaven to earth, and binds everything in-between into a cosmic whole. Wine both reflects and helps constitute our participation in all strata of reality, and points the way to our redemption, divine or otherwise.

In Scruton’s Prelude (a musical term, of course) where he quotes Emerson “who commends the great wino Hafiz [a Persian poet] in the following words: “Hafiz praises wines, roses, maidens, boys, birds, mornings and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every form of beauty and joy.” This is echoed in Scruton’s terms that “by thinking with wine you can learn not merely to drink in thoughts, but think in draughts. Wine, drunk at the right time, in the right place and the right company, is the path to meditation, and the harbinger of peace.”

The book is divided into two parts, labelled ‘I drink’ and ‘therefore I am’ respectively. The second part of the book is more strictly philosophical - Scruton starts it with the nice conceit that ‘therefore I am’ contain the whole of philosophy, each word standing in turn for reason (therefore), consciousness (I) and being (am). But arguably wine and Scruton enthusiasts will probably get more out of the first part.

The first chapter is a nice description of his own discovery of wine as a young man. Warmly written, the chapter is devoted to his friends who made him “fall” for wine (or is it he who made them fall?) and his acquisition of a 1945 Château Lafite, “the greatest year from the greatest of clarets”. His first memories are happy ones of his mother’s home manufacture of elderberry wine in a post-war England where the French (and Spanish and Portuguese) grape had not yet “conquered the suburbs.”

“For three weeks the kitchen was filled with the yeasty scent of fermentation. Little clouds of fruit-flies hung above the jars and here and there wasps would cluster and shimmer on the spilled pools of juice.” Other Englishmen of Scruton’s generation will recognise and sigh at this description as many fathers - including my own - made his own beer and wine from motives of both fun and economy.

Thus ill-equipped, Scruton goes to university ignorant of the rich variety of wines available even then to an English wino. At Cambridge and, later, in Paris, a succession of tutors, patrons, and friends not only introduce him to a growing list of wines but also teach him how to drink them. Some of the wines he is given are complex and expensive Burgundies, others cheap French supermarket vin ordinaire.

But Scruton discovers that all have certain inherent qualities that an educated palate can discover by drinking them attentively and appreciatively. By learning their provenance and history, he enriches his knowledge of the locality that produced the wine — and he can imagine (I would like to believe this is so) that he can glimpse the character of the local people in the wine itself. He learns finally that certain wines go with certain things, not merely certain foods, but certain occasions, certain friends, certain thoughts, even certain topics of conversation. He becomes a wino.

When in his early middle years, Scruton buys a farm in southern England, he discovers to his delight an array of homemade-wine equipment, identical to that of his mother’s elderberry experiments, on the kitchen floor: “I listened to the bubbles as they danced in the valves, and studied the wasp-edged puddles on the tiles. I had come home.” Yet it is a different person who comes home. Scruton celebrates his good fortune not with elderberry wine but by opening and drinking in quiet happiness a treasured bottle of Château Lafite 1945 that had accompanied him in the long wanderings now ended. For, by this time in his life, Scruton is a confirmed Francophile in his drinking tastes.

The chapter ends on a remark concerned with the “new habit, associated with American wine critics like Robert Parker, of assigning points to each bottle” which should not only be “viewed with nothing but contempt” but also compared to “assigning points to symphonies, as though Beethoven’s 7th, Tchaikovsky’s 6th, Mozart’s 39th, Bruckner’s 8th all hovered between 90 and 95.

Perhaps his second chapter ‘A Tour de France’ is the best one. This is a very personal, but informative and interesting, guide to Scruton’s favourite French wine regions. starting in Burgundy, down to the Rhône Valley, the Pyrenees and ending in Bordeaux with T.S. Eliot’s description of a spiritual journey that applies equally to a journey through wine:

We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring

 Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

With much reason, Scruton does not think very highly of blind tasting: “To think that you can judge a wine from its taste and aroma alone is like thinking you can judge a Chinese poem by its sound, without knowing the language.” I let out a whoop of appreciation when I read this. In one clean swoop he casually casts aside the resultant snobbery that comes from the ritualising and self-importance of blind tasting events.

I think blind tasting whilst sincere is also an exercise in showing off. I’m not saying people don’t have a nose for wine or can tell certain elements but blind tasting is not the best way to truly appreciate the full complexity of wine. Indeed in my embryonic wine making experience (by watching my cousins and the managers on our vineyard) I would say terroir is perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of wine making and it determines the difference between good wine and a bad one.

It’s great to read that Scruton defines himself as a terroiriste. Not the French word for a terrorist! But a believer in the French word, terroir. It is derived from the Latin word terra meaning earth or land. It’s a word coined by the French to express a wine’s sense of place. There is no English equivalent for this word. It was originally used to distinguish the wine making practices of old world wine. In other words terroir is how a particular region’s climate, soils and aspect (terrain) affect the taste of wine alongside the traditions gone into producing the wine. Some regions are said to have more ‘terroir’ than others. Johan Joseph Krug (1800–1866), the famous champagne producer, once suggested that “a good wine comes from a good grape, good vats, a good cellar and a gentleman who is able to coordinate the various ingredients.” No trace of terroir.

But I think Krug is wrong and vintners as well as the wine industry as a whole have come to the same realisation of the importance of terroir. Back in the 1980’s, many of these ‘terroir-driven’ wines were actually affected by wine faults including cork taint and wild yeast growth (brettanomyces). Vines thrive in a range of soil compositions from highly draining granite and schist based soils to limestone and clay and vines, in turn, react to these different soils in different ways. And on top of the differing soils, certain areas of the world have such unique combinations of geology and topography that interact with specific sun exposures that the resulting wines have distinct characteristics that cannot be found anywhere else.

Nowadays terroir is used to describe practically every wine region. Because much of European wine (old world) is steeped in tradition it is easier to get a sense of terroir. It’s a bit harder in a place like Napa or Sonoma (new world) because of the looser laws that govern winemaking but younger winemakers are coming around to the idea of terroir and trying to express the land. But certainly in France today vintners - as they come to increase their geological knowledge and environmental understanding and find ways to marry that to their unique artistry and craft - have realised the unique role terroir plays in the wine making process.

The next chapter looks at wine from “elsewhere:” Here Scruton looks at the Middle-East where wine was born; Greece where Bacchus, Dionysos, and more importantly, Eros used to hover; the United States; Australia, New Zealand and their misspelling of Syrah as Shiraz, the Iranian city of poets, gardens, nightingales and last but not least, wine; a few lines on South Africa, then Italy, Romania and Spain. But “travel narrows the mind, and the further you go the narrower it gets. There is only one way to visit a place with an open mind, and that is in the glass”.

Scruton had already warned the reader in the previous chapter not to read the “elsewhere” chapter: “After punishing body and soul with Australian Shiraz, Argentine Tempranillo, Romanian Cabernet Sauvignon and Greek Retsina, we crawl home like the Prodigal Son and beg forgiveness for our folly. . . [Bordeaux] is the wine that made us and for which we were made, and it often astonishes me to discover that I drink anything else.” I rather fancy he is being tongue in cheek here.

This is for the “I drink” part of the book. Its author then moves to the “therefore I am” part which often needs much deeper philosophical knowledge than perhaps than even your average educated layman might have some difficulty having if they are not versed in a basic understanding of aesthetics as philosophical discussion. But here his aim is to rescue wine from the philosophers and the so-called wine experts.

To those who have never been captivated by the complexity of wine and the way it is bound up with western civilisation, a book on the philosophy of wine might be dismissed as the typical product of conservative snobbery and elitism. But this would be a mistake. Scruton is not a snob about wine (nor, for that matter, about anything else). On the contrary, one of the strongest themes in his writing is his deep love of the everyday, of the simple pleasures of society as he imagined it once to be, where people were at one with the land and with the traditions of their culture. According to Scruton, this is something that (although it probably never existed) should be open to all, but which is being destroyed by the march of modernity. (In a nice aside, he asks: ‘Who am I to stand against the tide of history? Come to think of it, I am the only person I know who does stand against the tide of history’.)

In passing, Scruton evokes the great philosopher Avicenna who lived in Isfahan (Persia) during Islam’s Golden Age (980–1037 AD); he was a wine aficionado who recommended drinking at work defying “the Koranic injunction against wine, citing it as an example of sloppy reasoning,” that does not take into account whether it is a small or a large amount. Scruton (p. 133) also points to the fact that “in surah xvi, verse 7 of the Koran wine is unreservedly praised as one of God’s gifts. As the prophet, burdened by the trials of his Medina exile, became more tetchy, so did his attitude to wine begin to sour, as in Surah v verses 91-92. Muslims believe that the later revelations cancel the earlier, whenever there is a conflict between them. I suspect, however, that God moves in a more mysterious way.”

Scruton is very quite skeptical that the vocabulary used by so-called experts to describe wine is of much help: “If I say of a wine that it has a flowery nose, lingers on the palate, with ripe berry flavours and a hint of chocolate and roasted almonds, then what I say conveys real information, from which someone might be able to construct a sensory image of the wine’s taste. But I have described the taste in terms of other tastes, and not attempted to attach a meaning, a content, or any kind of reference to it. The description I gave does not imply that the wine evokes, means, symbolises or presents the idea of chocolate; and somebody who didn’t hit on this word as a description of the wine’s flavour would not show that he had missed the meaning of what he drank or indeed missed anything important at all. Our experience of wine is bound up with its nature as a drink [which] endows wine with a particular inwardness [and] intimacy with the body [that is not] achieved by any smell, since smell makes no contact with the body at all, but merely enchants without touching, like the beautiful girl at the other end of the party. . . Nothing else that we eat or drink comes to us with such a halo of significance, and by refusing to drink it people send an important message —the message that they do not belong on this earth.”

Again, I found myself saying amen to that.

The good part of the second part is Scruton trying to make a case for the cultural uniqueness of wine. In one sense, Scruton is right to do this: it is undeniable in many parts of western culture, wine has played a unique role in religious and social rituals, which no other drink has. But he can push his point beyond plausibility when he attempts to argue that because of the qualities of wine itself – and what it is to drink it properly – nothing else could play this role (more on this later).

The argument starts well, with a very illuminating discussion of the distinction between the various ways in which a substance can intoxicate. There are those that merely stimulate without altering the mind (like tobacco, for example). Then there are those which have mind-altering effects, but whose consumption itself brings no plea- sure (e.g. heroin). The third category contains those things which alter your mind and bring pleasure in their consumption: cannabis and forms of alcohol other than wine are his examples. Wine, Scruton argues, is in a fourth category of its own: here the alteration of the mind is internally related to the experience of consuming it.

These distinctions are very useful, and the distinction between the third and the fourth category is subtle but certainly real. It relates to the question of what non-human animals can and cannot do. Scruton makes the nice observation that an animal cannot savour wine (or any- thing else). In being able to savour or relish the taste of wine, a person no more separates out the effect of the wine from its taste than they can separate the meaning of a piece of music from its sound. Although one would not realise this from reading the thousands of words that are written daily about wine, wine would not be the drink it is if it did not intoxicate.

The last two chapters deal respectively with wine and whine, and being and bingeing. Though Scruton has something to say in favour of Puritanism, he castigates the ease with which “puritan outrage [and in particular, prohibition, but also sexual behaviour] can be displaced from one topic to another, and the equal ease with which the thing formerly disapproved of can be overnight exonerated from all taint of sin.”

He vehemently protests against “the humourless mullahs,” and the misuse of drinking, but also rejects the idea that fermented drinks are just shots of alcohol, and insists on their social functions across civilisations and time: “The burden of my arguments is that we can defend the drinking of wine, only if we see that it is a culture, and that this culture has a social, outward-going, other-regarding meaning. . . When people sit down together sipping drinks, they rehearse in their souls the original act of settlement, the act that set our species on the path of civilisation, and which endowed us with the order of neighbourhood and the rule of law.” But he has not much against drinking alone, and ends with a few words from the Chinese poet Li Po (700 BC), the same poet whom Mahler used in his Lied von der Erde (though in a very approximate translation):

A cup of wine, under the flowering trees; I drink alone, for no friend is near. 

Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,

For he, with my shadow, will make three men.

Scruton points out in several brilliant passages, the prohibitionist, like the modern day Islamists and moral police in the West and the all too familiar binge-drinker are alike in their ignorance of the virtue of “temperance.” They can envisage no stopping place between abstention and alcoholism. Their absolutist logic, he argues, is like objecting to a first kiss on the grounds that it will one day lead to a divorce. And neither can really understand drinking for any reason other than to get drunk.

Scruton confirms the wider value of temperance in our lives: “Virtue should be cast in human form if it is to be humanly achievable. Saints, monks, and dervishes may practice total abstinence; but to believe that abstinence is the only way to virtue is to condemn the rest of mankind. Better to propose the way of moderation, and live thereby on friendly terms with your species.”

As it happens, the occasional bender may actually have therapeutic qualities in moderation (i.e., if indulged in infrequently). George Orwell, who can hardly be accused of lacking a puritanical streak, thought that people should get drunk every six months or so. The experience, he thought, shook one out of one’s regular complacency and could be compared in this to a weekend abroad. Certainly it very often produces a feeling of greater humility in those who can remember what happened. Yet getting drunk is something that most drinkers do very rarely, if at all.

Changing our mood and outlook is a very different matter. Under the influence of a moderate amount of alcohol, our inhibitions are loosened. Shy people become bold, the tongue-tied talkative, the dull lively, the unimaginative fanciful, and the isolated social. (Even “mean drunks” usually start the evening in festive and forgiving mood.)

That last loss of inhibition is the most important because it promotes the fellowship that is the basis of a decent society. Not all intoxicants perform this vital function. Cannabis and similar drugs tend, if anything, to imprison the taker within his own consciousness (however expanded it may seem to him in his dreams). Except for those who lose themselves in alcoholism (and consequently become asocial in their attempts to deceive others about their condition), however, alcohol is a profoundly social drug. At the same time, not all varieties of alcohol are equally social in their effect. This thought leads Scruton to narrow somewhat the scope of his enthusiasm. Having rejected teetotalism, he continues: “The real question, I suggest, is not whether intoxicants, but which. And - while all intoxicants disguise things - some (wine preeminently) also help us to confront them by presenting them in re-imagined and idealised forms.”

Scruton makes a fascinating and intriguing point related to our historical relationship with the vine to make wine the highest ideal form. He claims that wine derives from a crucial historical transition in our relation to the earth – when human beings settled, put down roots and stopped being mere hunter-gatherers. In a memorable phrase, Scruton claims that in this way wine celebrates ‘the earth itself, as the willing accomplice in our bid to stay put.’ But of course one could say similar things about distilled spirits and beer. Such drinks are not made in such an incredible variety as wine is, but Scruton’s point is not about variety but about the intrinsic and relational qualities of the drink itself.

In the end, one cannot help feeling that he is relying a little too much on the sheer panache of his writing to help his argument bounce along: ‘Wine is not simply a shot of alcohol, or a mixed drink. It is a transformation of the grape. The transformation of the soul under its influence is merely the continuation of another transformation that began maybe fifty years earlier when the grape was first plucked from the vine.’ Wine is a transformation of the grape, to be sure. And the mind or soul is transformed in its consumption. But these two transformations are so very different that it is hard to see what can literally be meant by the one being the continuation of the other.

In fact, Scruton’s view is not just that wine is unique as a stimulant, but that it has to be drunk in a particular way in order for the harmony of taste and intoxication to take hold. It is not hard to agree with Scruton’s argument that there are more or less civilised ways of drinking wine. And this part of his thesis is very plausible: ‘The burden of my argument is ... that we can defend the drinking of wine, only if we see that it is part of a culture, and that this culture has a social outward-going, other-regarding meaning. The new uses of wine point towards excess and addiction: they are moving away from the old way of drinking, in which wine was relished and savoured, to the form of drinking typified by Marmeladov, who clutches his bottle in a condition of need.’

However I still found all this a tad unconvincing in that he makes a case that only the savouring and relishing of wine can play a central cultural role as opposed to other spirits - think of Scotch whisky for the Scots and beer for much of Northern Europe or even tea(!) for the English. So my apologies to Roger Scruton but I remain sceptical of his argument that of all stimulants, wine is uniquely civilising, however much I want it to be true.

I think Scruton is also wrong to despise cocktails. A well-made cocktail is as complex a set of taste experiences as a good Bordeaux. A good-strength cocktail is the perfect prelude to the theatre, giving one exactly the right lift to help the play to entertain, but not suppressing one’s appetite long enough to spoil a post-theatre dinner. It can be the booster rocket that starts a convivial evening. But the cocktail has its limits. The alcoholic strength of most cocktails reduces their usefulness both as an aid to sustained fruitful conviviality and to the kind of imaginative introspection that Scruton thinks necessary for a happy life.

That aside, Scruton knows that the best (including Li Po’s poetry) should be kept for the very end. The bouquet (of the wine, but in French the word is also used for the finishing of a firework) comes with the Appendix: What to drink with what, though here the second what does not stand for food, but for philosophers. This part of the book I very nearly coughed up my wine as I found it terribly amusing to pair a suitable wine, as one would with food, to a philosopher one might be reading.

St Augustine: Drink a glass of Moroccan Cabernet Sauvignon, though “the City of God requires many sittings, and I regard it as one of the rare occasions when a drinking person might have legitimate recourse to a glass of lager [which I did in Odessa, while reading Scruton], putting the book to one side just as soon as the glass is finished” [which I did not do, since I had three glasses, each of which containing half a liter].

Francis Bacon: “Any discussion of his insights should, I think, proceed by the comparative method. I suggest opening six bottles of a single varietal—say Cabernet Franc- one from the Loire, one from California, one from Moravia, one from Hungary, and if you can find two other places where it is grown successfully you will already have given some proof of the inductive method—and then pretending to compare and contrast, taking notes in winespeak, while downing the lot.”

René Descartes: “As the thinker who came nearest, prior to the Monty Python, to stumbling on the title of [my] book, Descartes deserves a little recognition. . . He has ended up as the most overrated philosopher in history, famous for arguments that begin from nothing and go nowhere. I would suggest a deep dark Rhône wine [that] will compensate for the thinness of the Meditations.”

Baruch Spinoza: “The last time that I understood what Spinoza meant by an attribute it was with a glass of red Mercurey, Les Nauges 1999. Unfortunately, I took another glass before writing down my thoughts and have never been able to retrieve them.”

Immanuel Kant: “And when it comes to [his] Critique of the Judgment, I find myself trying out [several wines], without getting any close to Kant’s proof that the judgment is universal but subjective, or his derivation of the ‘antinomy of taste’— surely one of his most profound and troubling paradoxes, and one that must yield to the argument contained in wine if it yields to anything.”

Friedrich Nietzsche: “Although we should drink to the author of The Birth of the Tragedy, therefore, it should be with a thin, hypochondriac potion, maybe a finger of Beaujolais in a glass topped up with soda-water.”

Edmund Husserl: “I recommend three glasses of slivovitz from Husserl’s native Moravia, one to give courage, one to swallow down the jargon, and one to pour over the page.”

Jean-Paul Sartre: “Sartre’s great work of philosophy, L’être et le néant, introduces the Nothingness that haunts all that he wrote and said. . . If ever I were to read Sartre again, I would look for a 1964 Burgundy to wash the poison down. Small chance of finding one, however, so there is one great writer whom I shall never again revisit—and I thank God for it.”

Martin Heidegger: “What potion to complement the philosopher who told us that ‘nothing noths’? To raise an empty glass to one’s lips, and to feel it as it travels down—noth, noth, noth, the whole length of the tube: this surely is an experience to delight the real connoisseur.”

In conclusion I really enjoyed reading this book (again and again).

This is a wonderful book for anyone who loves wine and wants to try identify what, in all its complex connections with so much of what is valuable in civilisation, might be special about drinking it. I think he does a wonderful job in looking at the philosophical and religious questions related to wine, from the Koranic injunction against alcohol to the true nature of temperance. These questions take us far from the vineyard at times, making excursions into terroir as different as Wagnerian music dramas and the philosophical nature of smells. His arguments as well as his beautiful prose are fresh, original, teasingly provocative, but also joyous.

This book is only about 224 pages but fun to read either in one sitting or dipping in and out at pleasurable intervals.

There are pages of useful advice on what wine to buy that are also glimpses into what to look for in the wine. I think his recommendations are good ones even if he leans too heavily into French wines. As someone who co-owns a vineyard I can say with reasonable confidence that I know my French wines but also wine from South Africa but confess my ignorance of wines from the new world such as California or Chilean wines. But I see that as an opportunity to discover rather than stay in my comfort zone. Here Scruton gently prods you along to do just that.

As an aside Scruton, who never shies away from his staunchly conservative Tory beliefs, perhaps forget to mention one juicy vignette in that Karl Marx’s political and philosophical ideas were probably inspired by wine. Indeed Karl Marx’s family were the happy owners of a vineyard in Trier, a small affluent Rhineland city, on the rolling hills of the Mosel River Valley. The family sold it due to hard times. Then as now these vineyards of the Mosel Valley remain mostly small-scale, are still known for their fruity white wines, and especially their lemony Rieslings and agrotourism. It seems the politics of wine (tariffs and import taxes) played a larger role in the history of leftist thought than their quaint appearance might suggest. In the early 1840s, the economic struggles of these very vineyards inspired Marx to criticise the draconian Prussian government - and in the process, some historians argue, begin developing the theory of historical materialism for which he is best known. In fact there is a delightful book I can recommend written by Jens Baumeister called, ‘How Wine Made Karl Marx a Communist’ (2018) if anyone is interested in reading more about that.

Of course it’s always hard to know how seriously one is supposed to take Scruton in some of his more extravagant comments in the book, like many things he says in his other books: ‘you could say that wine is probably as old as civilisation; I prefer to say that it is civilisation, and that the distinction between civilised and uncivilised countries is the distinction between the places where it is drunk and the places where it isn’t.’ His desire to outrage and court controversy rises to the surface, and can result in some of the funniest moments in the book. But as with everything he writes, some of Scruton’s claims must be taken with a pinch of salt or more appropriately, with a glass of claret.

Indeed I prefer to picture his words as if he was one’s old and familiar drinking companion sitting on weather beaten leather chairs and making provocative but teasingly good natured remarks out of a desire to amuse rather than to be boorish or loutish. Indeed this book is best enjoyed with a glass of wine on hand whilst sitting on a comfy old worn out leather chair curled next to log burning fire as the light dims outside.

I would whole heartedly agree with Roger Scruton that wine is a “drink that causes you to smile at the world and the world to smile at you.” Instead of imprisoning you inside a solitary introspection, it takes you out of yourself - and your ideas with you - to mingle with others and their ideas. Wine is therefore a voyage of discovery - and rediscovery - in many senses. And for this I can happily raise my own glass and say amen to that.

But what glass of wine would I raise when reading Scruton’s own book?

Well, one bottle won’t do. So temperance is out of the window then - sorry Roger. You will need a good French Sauternes or Barsac (preferably 2014) with the nostalgic autobiography, a finely bodied Bordeaux wine (I would go with a more complex wine from Saint Emilion) with the philosophy section of the book, and a champagne (of course) to drink with the philosophical jokes towards the end of the book.

Oh go on then, finish off with a tipple of Cognac before bed time, I am sure Scruton wouldn’t begrudge anyone that pleasure.

55 notes · View notes

kieraswriting · 4 years

Text

Coffin Chapter Twenty-Eight

Masterpost

Roman ran into the living room when he heard Patton screech. “It’s what?!”

“What is?” Roman demanded.

Patton shushed him, gesturing emphatically at the tv screen.

“As according to even the lowest reports,” the lady was saying . “95% of the vampires have been rounded up now. There will still be people available to take your calls if you suspect you’ve seen a vampire, and we highly encourage you to keep turning them in. We will still be here to serve you, just in a less invasive manner.”

“What’s going on?” Roman whispered.

“She said the sweep is over.” Patton whispered back, his eyes fixed on the screen.

“It’s what?!”

“Shh!”

In the next weeks, we’ll be working on transitioning the vampires into controlled work environments. They will be in public, but carefully controlled. There is no reason for fear if you should see them. However, we would ask that you refrain from bothering the handlers, as that increases the risk, however slightly.

•^*^••

“They’re what?!” Dee said, turning the radio up.

“Yes, we can confirm that the sweep is over. The vampires of course will still be arrested if they are discovered, but there will be no more searching of homes without warrants.”

“Well, that’s good.” The other person on the radio program said. “As much as I’m glad to have the vampires gone, it’s very disconcerting to have people storming into your house.”

“Yes, that is a large part of why the sweep has officially ended. Individuals will have to take more responsibility to hand in the remaining hidden vampires, but this way we can have back our freedoms and privacy.”

Dee looked over at Thomas, who was just as wide-eyed. “Can we…?”

“Not home, they know us there. But we can make a new home.”

Dee was just as fine with a new home as with the old one. He nodded enthusiastically.

•^*^••

Liam searched the house. According to reports from the neighbors, Logan had been seen here, but no sign of Patton, and there were only three people staying in the house.

So Patton and the vampire that held him under thrall were somewhere else, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t clues. However, everything he saw was merely personal items. And they didn’t seem to match the supposed inhabitants. Perhaps they’d managed to kick out the original inhabitants. Some vampires did seem to have hypnotic powers.

He kept searching, letting out a slight growl under his breath in frustration, and ignoring the looks his men were giving each other.

•^*^••

Virgil hadn’t had a phone in ages. He had… not really friends, just some nice people online he used to talk to sometimes, and he wondered how they were doing.

Between the three of them, they had Roman’s phone and a burner phone that couldn’t do much other than call.

Part of it was that he was bored, part of it was that he was just thinking about old times, and part was just the relief of the sweep being over. But he wanted to try talking to his fr-- acquaintances, really, and it had been at least a year since he’d talked to any of them, they probably were even less than that now. But still.

“Um… Roman?”

“Hmm?” Roman looked up from the fire. That had been his way of not getting bored, keeping the fire going. Between cutting work and tending the fire almost constantly, it seemed to be working for him.

“Can I…” It felt weird… bad… asking for something as personal and valued as a phone. “CanIborrowyourphoneIswearI’lltakecareofit--”

“Woah, slow down, you want my phone?”

Virgil hesitated, but nodded.

“Yeah, sure. It’s plugged in on the kitchen counter. We’ll do the bonfire in an hour or so, but you can have it till then.”

Virgil was very surprised that Roman would just let him have it, without asking why or anything. “Thanks.”

“Oh, wait, you’ll need a password. Uh… I don’t, really want to tell you, it’s kinda personal, but if you bring it here I’ll type it in.”

Virgil was even more surprised, but the password was quickly typed in and Roman handed him the phone back, cracking a joke about not downloading any viruses.

Virgil waited a long few minutes, sitting up on the kitchen counter and just staring at the home screen. It had a picture of Roman, Patton, and Logan, with Roman and Patton squishing Logan into a group hug. He felt a pang of guilt that he was the one here with them, instead of Logan.

And then he got over his anxiety enough to sign in to tumblr. Yeah, yeah, he knew it was technically ‘dead’, but that didn’t matter. He could be strange there, and instead of picking at him or just leaving him alone, everyone else was pretty strange there too.

He wasn’t terribly surprised to see 99+ notifications, since he hadn’t checked it in a year or two, but he was surprised to see that so many of them were mentions and direct messages. He nearly broke down in tears seeing how concerned people had been for him. They’d left kind messages, ‘for whenever he came back’, and they’d started chains of ‘loving V hours’. One of his old friends had sent him a message every week, even if it was something like ‘hey, come back, idiot, we miss you’.

So he messaged them first.

Ummm….. I’m back?

They didn’t respond immediately, probably didn’t have notifications on, or busy or something, and Virgil started scrolling through his dash. The tears swimming around in his eyes fell when he saw the post. It was someone advocating for the vampires. Saying that, no matter what they’d done, they didn’t deserve to be massacred. Virgil went to the blog, and saw that she was getting a lot of hate, but was making and reblogging things supporting the vampires, and ‘conspiracy theories’ about how they were treated that he knew to be true. He followed immediately. He kept scrolling, and found a few people agreeing with her, a very few supporting and sharing information around.

He’d always been interested in conspiracy theories, in cryptids, he wouldn’t be giving himself away to reblog some of these.

A fwip sound made him jump and then smile.

V!!!!!!!!! Where’ve you been!!!!!!????????

Virgil smiled wide. Lost my phone, kicked out of home, you know, all the stuff you warned me about. It’s really nice to hear from you.

Nice to hear from me???? Do you have any IDEA how nice it is to hear from YOU??????!!!!

XD I’m fine.

Did you really get kicked out of your home?!?

Lol, kinda. I’m staying with some nice people though. They’re even letting me use their phone.

That’s good, but what happened????!!!

Virgil thought about it. How much could he say? They didn’t know where he lived, and he didn’t even live there anymore. They knew his full first name, but not his last name. He’d… probably be safe talking to them. He always had been, when he told them about other things.

I saw the things you’ve been reblogging. Man, things are crazy. Are you doing alright with it all?? You didn’t have police bothering you or anything, right?

It’s a long story.

You think after this whole time that I’m not dying to hear long stories????!!!! I haven’t heard from you in ages! I want to know everything!

Well, you know about my dad, and all that….

He’s an abusive douchebag, yes.

Virgil had to give a small smile at that. They’d been the first person to call his dad abusive, and they’d helped him realize it too.

So… Dad was also a vampire…

Not surprising, all things considered. Did he hurt you?????

You remember that one lady I told you about?

The creepy fae lady? Did. Your Dad. Hurt you? I will find you and bust his face in, V, I swear.

I mean… kinda? Well, I guess I can’t say kinda. So he’s been drinking from me my whole life, and he went… way too far one time. The lady found me, oh, and she’s a vampire too, and she turned me to try and save my life. I went to live with her for a long time.

There was a long wait, and then a meme of John Mulaney, “Now we don’t have time to unpack all of that.”

So… you’re a vampire now?

Yeah.

And you’re safe. No police?

At the moment.

Ok, I’m gonna need a bit to adjust to the whole you’re a vampire thing, but before that-- At. The. Moment???? Who hurt you now????!!!?

There came the tears again. It was far too easy to cry right now. But to have his friend accept him so readily… and still ready to rail at people who would hurt him?! It was just a lot. More than a lot, and it made him so happy.

And don’t you dare say long story! Tell me what happened!

I got caught by hunters, before the sweep.

Another meme, “Now we aren’t just gonna skim past this like you didn’t just say what you just said.”

Please. Slow down and tell me what actually happened. You’re hitting me with some big revelations, and I need some details in between those.

Virgil went back to the beginning, writing out his story, and just avoiding names and places, just in case. It wasn’t easy, and by the end he was fighting back tears again. His friend wasn’t, they kept sending sobbing faces, and alternately saying how sorry they were that something like this would happen and raging against the people that had done it.

V, you don’t have to do this, but I think you should write that down. Make a post of it. I’ve seen the theories I don’t even know how many times, but I never got close to guessing how true they were. You… you really, really, don’t have to, and definitely don’t put your face in them, but taking pictures of the scars would really make it a lot more real to people.

Would it do any good?

I think it could do worlds of good. I’ve never heard things like this. NEVER. I absolutely believe you, and I think other people would too. Use a fake name, make a new blog, heck, make a whole new account, you don’t want people tracing this. But I really think you should do it.

Virgil hesitated again. He didn’t think he could take hate online.

I’ll help you, and I’ll get some other people too, if you don’t mind me telling them your story. I won’t tell them your name or anything.

You think… an ask blog? In case people have questions?

Yes. That’s a brilliant idea.

I won’t have a phone all the time…

I’ll help run it, and answer as best as I can.

It’s… It’s so nice to have you here, and here for me.

Always, V.

•^*^••

Virgil was quiet during the bonfire, but it was the thinking kind of quiet, not the anxious kind, which helped Patton feel better about it. They’d managed to get marshmallows, and to roast them. Virgil had hoped he could eat just one without problems, which, well, didn’t work out, but after that he ate a whole lot of them, ‘just to spite his body’.

They ended up laying on blankets near the fire, looking up through the leaves at the few stars they could see.

“Thanks for keeping me with you,” Virgil said. “I’ve… I’ve been thinking about the past, and if you’d sent me back, or…” his voice strangled a bit. “Or kept me in that coffin…”

“Virgil, I’m so, so glad that you’re here with us now.” Patton said. “I wouldn’t be the same person I am without you. If… Looking back on it, the very idea of leaving you there makes me sick.”

“You’re an important kid, and I’m glad we have you,” Roman said.

Virgil just nodded silently, curling in on himself a little.

Patton locked eyes with Roman, and they each had the same idea, moving to Virgil’s blanket and sandwiching him between them. There was no protest from Virgil, and he even grabbed their hands, squeezing silently.

Patton gave a soft squeeze back. “We’re here now, and we have you, and we won’t let go.”

“No, we won’t.” Roman echoed.

“Thank you,” Virgil said, his voice rather choked up, but a watery smile on his face.

#sanders sides #vampire au #vampires #blood #virgil sanders #roman sanders #logan sanders #patton sanders #janus sanders #remus sanders #emile picani #remy sleep #my own work #coffin #violence #speciesism #vampire virgil #platonic moxiety

23 notes · View notes

slut-for-fandoms · 4 years

Text

Paint me yours || Part 2

Pairings: Artist!Taehyung x reader

Word count: 2k

Genre: smut, fluff, angst (in the following chapters)

Summary: You are an art college student who struggles with finances. Until one day, on an exhibition of the arising artist Kim Taehyung, when the same boy offers you a job as his model. Would it be just a simple job or would it complicate your life in ways you have never thought it would?

Warnings: None in this one

PART 1

A/N: I know, I know. Its been ages since I first posted part 1, but I was struggling with a lot of things and lack of inspiration of what and how to write it. Honestly, I am not even sure how this one turned out to be, at one point I was thinking of just posting the smut part, but part of me really wants to try and build this up with all the emotions I could put into the story. I hope you like it and please leave a comment as it will mean a lot to me :) Sorry for the mistakes you are gonna face!

Thrill. Surprise. Excitement. Nervousness. And all thanks to a small piece of paper.

“I will be looking forward to your answer, darling. ;)”

-K.T. Number: ********95

I’ve been playing with it for the last 5 days, 17 hours and… 39 minutes ruminating whether I should call him or not. Groaning in annoyance I throw it on the bed, next to me. Running my hands through my face and hair, I close my eyes in attempt to recall the events from that night.

‘I- um what?’ my brain was so slow in processing the information, that I didn’t even realize I had spoken out loud. He only chuckled. His hand disappeared in the inside pocket of his golden coat searching for something. My confused and taken-aback self was following his movements with the hope to grasp what was happening. His long and soft fingers soon showed, holding a small piece of paper. His other hand was already holding a pen and he scrabbled something on it.

‘I’d like to work with you dear.’ he announced while handing me the paper. My eyes were moving from his aristocratic hands to his soft hazel eyes as my mouth was opened slightly making me look like a fish out of the ocean.

He licked his lower lip, then bit it trying to prevent his smile when my body somehow decided to react at take the paper.

‘You are indeed an interesting person Ms. (Y/N). Unfortunately, I need to leave but I truly hope we meet soon.’ winking he turned around and slowly excited the room. This gave me the opportunity to observe him more. Even his walk was showing gracefulness and elegance. His head was held high, showing the confidence he had and to show the respect to the people who came to ‘contemplate’ his works. He was smiling, thanking to his guests, shaking hands with them. Once he disappeared I glanced at the slip of paper in my hands.

‘(Y/N)!’ the screaming and banging on my door brought me back in the reality. Although all of this happened almost a week ago my body still reacts to any memory of him. The thought of him smiling, makes me smile too, the way his piercing eyes were looking at me causes my heart to skip a beat, his laugh…oh god his laugh. Every single fucking time I recall that boxy and cute shape of his mouth when he laughs and the sparkles that reach his eyes… ‘(Y/N)!’

‘Stop banging on the damn door, I can hear you!’ I shout back angrily.

‘Then fucking answer.’ groaning I get up from the bed and go to open the door for my roommate.

‘What?’ crossing my arms in front of my chest I lean on the door frame.

‘Dear, why the attitude?’ she looks at me concerned, ‘Are you on your period?’

‘What? No! I-‘, inhaling I try to gather myself, ‘I just have a lot of projects to finish. Don’t worry. Why were you trying to knock my door off some seconds ago?’ her face changes from worry to sympathy and then to a big smile.

‘Oh yeah, about that…’ all of a sudden the smile disappears which confuses me.

‘Come on, spill the beans.’ I wasn’t really in the mood to deal with people.

‘I need you to leave for the night?’

‘Excuse you, I what?’ I really hope she is joking with me right now.

‘Look. I do not want to do it but Jackson is crashing here tonight and I-’, she stutters as she’s trying to explain me everything.

‘You want some time alone and blah blah blah. I get it Rose but I have nowhere to go, you do know that.’ I wanted to be angry, I really wanted but I just couldn’t.

Being an art student with almost no financial support is really hard. The money my mum sends me is never enough due to fact we both come from a poor country. She works her ass off every damn day to support my dreams. Some months ago I was kicked out of my old flat because I wasn’t able to pay the rent. Thank god I had Rose as one of my really close friends to offer me her place to crash for some time until I find a place. I was feeling bad enough that I wasn’t paying anything to her and god knows how many times the fact I’ve been living with her have ruined her plans. I even started working two jobs but balancing them with my projects is almost impossible, that’s why I had to quit one of them two weeks ago.

‘I know (Y/N) but it is Jackson’s birthday. I have planned everything. I really want it to be the best evening if you know what I mean.’

Taking a deep breath I answer her.

‘I will see what I can do.’, suddenly her face was beaming with happiness.

‘Gosh, you are the best (Y/N)!’ Rose hurried to hug me with the smile never leaving her face ‘I am gonna treat you with pancakes tomorrow. I know they are your favourite.’

After that she goes to her room, probably to start preparing for tonight. Sighing, I hold my head against the door the second I close it. I turned around and looked at my phone. 11:23 am. Good. Today is Friday, my day off of one of the jobs. Maybe I can call to get a night shift? It that way I will be out almost the whole night and come back in the morning when everything is finished. Perfect! Jumping with excitement I open my phone and search for my boss’ number.

‘Hello, Mr. Kim! It’s (Y/N)!’, I speak as soon as my boss picks up.

‘Oh, Hello there (Y/N)!’, his raspy voice greets me back. I am not gonna lie, I might have or might have not had a massive crush on him when I started working. What can I say? That man is quite a walking sex on legs and nobody can resist him, ‘It is strange, I was about to call you in an hour.’, he laughs drily which makes me uncomfortable immediately. I may have not worked there for a long time but I learned how to sense his mood as it is a fast changing one.

‘Is something wrong, sir? I wanted to ask if there is a chance about taking a night shift today. I know it is my free day but I kinda need it if-’

‘About that, dear…’, he cuts me off. There is a moment of silence on the phone before he speaks, ‘I think we might not need you anymore. Do not get me wrong, dear. You have been doing more than a great job, but at this point, with Jiso coming back after he accident, we are too many people and I cannot pay everyone the deserved salary or even separate the amount of work equally between everybody.’

‘And I was the last one to join, yeah… I get it why it is me.’, I sit down on my bed, trying to compose myself and not start crying on the phone with my fucking boss. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

‘I am really sorry, (Y/N)! You are amazing, but I can’t fire the others, most of them depend on it more’, yeah because I don’t, but decided to not state it out in anger, ‘I wanted to tell you weeks before this actually happens but I just couldn’t. You can come tomorrow to get your weekly salary with some compensation from us for the situation I put you in. I will try to contact some of my business friends and allies and see if they search for somebody and recommend you.’

‘That would be very nice, thank you, sir.’

‘Again, Sorry dear! I hope you have a nice day.’

‘Yeah…’, my first were clenched and I was ready to go and storm into his office and beat the hell out of him, ‘Have a nice day, too, sir!’, I did my best to fake the nicest tone I could before hanging up.

How the hell did this happen? My anger soon turned into panic and desperation. I cannot lose my job just like that. It is completely out of the blue. I need the money. I barely pull the two ends together, and I am not even paying for a place to stay. That is horrible. That is horrible. What am I supposed to do now? I can’t tell my mum that. She will make me go back and we are already deep in debt.

Inhale! Exhale! Inhale! Exhale! Deep breaths. Everything is going to be fine! Just breathe and think. Think (Y/N)! It is mid-term, almost every possible job has already been taken by the students. I struggles so much with finding this one and the money were so good. It was pure luck. I should not have quitted being a waitress. Oh, god I am so stupid!

In frustration I lay back on the bed with my hands covering my face. But as soon as I lay down something tickles my cheek. One of hands traces the spot in order to find what the hell is on my face. I turn around to see it when my fingers wrap around it. It is the small note from Taehyung. I smile a little bit at it. It was literally the only good thing that has happened to me in the past week…wait.

I sit up abruptly and stare at the note unbelievingly. Should I? I take my phone. What if he was just joking with you? I leave the phone. Why would he? He must have given me the note with a reason? Right? Right?! My insecurities and lack of common sense fight for the next seconds.

Jesus Christ, why is it so hard to decide?

Okay, let’s see. I can text him that I am considering the offer and that it will be temporary until I find a stable job. I heard models earn a lot for such sessions. Maybe It will be enough to keep me going for now? Gosh, I hope so.

My heart is ready to leave my chest when I unlock my phone and open the contacts to dial his number. My hands are shaking while trying to write it down.

Okay, now what? What should I text him?

Hello! It is (Y/N), the desperate broke girl you offer to model for you 5 days ago.

Okay, too much info! Come on, (Y/N)! Be professional. I try to delete it but, because I am (Y/N) and luck is never on my side, I click on the send button.

Shit! Fuck! The hell! Stupid bitch! I guess I just lost the job before even being able to get it. Great. Just fucking great. Should I at least try to somehow improve the situation? To make myself not look like a fucking loser? As if the last one is possible.

All of a sudden my phone starts ringing which put me in panic mode. It’s him. What do I do? What do I do?

‘Hello?’, I curse at myself how shaky and high-pitched my voice sounded.

‘Hello, dear!’, oh my sweet gosh, his voice sounded so much better than in the memories I had from that night. It was deep, smooth, feeling as though honey was running through my veins, ‘I did not think you would ever call.’, I can sense the smile in his voice.

‘Well, my schedule is kind of full’, I wish there was somebody there to slap me and pour some sense into me.

‘I am glad you found time for me then.’, he laughs and at this point I had the feeling my heart will just give up and stop beating, ‘Have you considered my offer?’

‘I- I kind of have some questions before we start a-’

‘Before we start?’, chuckling he continues, ‘I take that as a yes. When are you free to start my dear?’

‘Um, I guess today? But I want to know wh-’

‘That’s the best news I could hear today! How about you come tonight and we start? I will answer your questions and you will see what you should do and eventually if you want to stop, I will respect your decision.’

‘Well?’, he asks after some moments of silence which I didn’t even realize have slipped.

‘What time do you want me tonight?’

If you want to be tagged in the next parts, please let me know :) <3

97 notes · View notes

tarontherocketman · 4 years

Text

Mr Madden | Madderton Teacher AU | Chapter 1

Ok SO, here’s the first chapter, I know it’s boring and short but just bear with me I didn’t want to jump straight into the action and drama because I genuinely haven’t written fanfiction since I was a teenager (I’m 22!) so I needed to familiarise myself with writing again and re-establish my writing style it’s a little bit choppy right now but I’ll get there over the next few chapters! Anyway, here goes! lowkey nervous that it’s been too long since I wrote and everyone will hate it

Taron sat in an empty classroom chewing mindlessly on the end of a pen, a stack of unmarked homework in front of him that he was already 95% sure he would be taking home with him tonight if this day didn’t get any better. Why did Drama students even need to do homework like this? They have enough homework from all the other classes, Drama should be their slice of freedom and self expression for the week, that’s how Taron saw it anyway. Of course, he could never say this aloud, he had to follow the system regardless of whether he liked it or not. After a small argument in his head about staying focused, Taron finally put pen to paper and began to write, not even writing one single letter before-

“For fuck sake,” he groaned quietly, forcing himself out of the chair and kicking it back behind him as he got up and walked to the door and around the building to the window he had just spotted it out of, another fight.

“Ok break it up lads come on,” he said sternly, not even needing to fully intervene with the wannabe hard nut year 7s. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked with an eyebrow raised.

“Sorry Sir!” they both said hurriedly as they scuttled off around the corner, afraid of receiving a detention. Taron rolled his eyes and sauntered back to his classroom, not even reaching the door before deciding he needs a coffee before he can even think of marking more homework. At this thought, he veers away from the door to the drama block to head toward the main building to the teachers lounge, muttering a polite “alright” accompanied with a small nod to the students greeting him as he walked down the hallway. Said students, of course, being girls. The girls all had a thing for him and he knew it, he saw the way they all gushed at him. Little did they know.

“Have you seen the new History teacher?” a girl in the hallway squealed to her friend as she stood leaning against the wall, phone in one hand, bright pink bedazzled water bottle in the other. Taron’s ears pricked up, new History teacher? he thought, picking up the pace to the staff room to find out what was going on. Once he arrived, he pushed the door handle and poked his head round the door before fully entering. That’s when he saw him.

New History teacher, indeed..

In front of his eyes was the most gorgeous blue eyed man he had ever seen, thick lush brown hair with just the right amount of curl, perfect body, nice legs-

“Ah, Mr Egerton! Meet Mr Madden, he’s just joined today to replace Mr Little in the History department!” the excessively perky Head Teacher exclaimed, waving rather over enthusiastically towards the blue eyed beauty.

“Richard,” he introduced, extending his hand to Taron.

Scottish, as if he wasn’t dreamy enough.

“I- nice to meet you, I’m Taron, Drama,” Taron just about spluttered out, going in for the handshake offered, looking to the floor for lack of a better place to look without dying inside a little. Taron mentally pinched himself, he knew he needed to stop feeling like this. He vowed to himself as soon as he got this job that he’d keep out of anything of this sort, the last thing he needs is the entire school finding out he’s gay, so with this in mind he generally keeps his head down and lays low. Does his job, goes home. He can’t get soft for a teacher now after he’s come this far without screwing up and letting his guard down.

“Drama? I admire your confidence,” Richard commented with a smile. Taron chuckled softly.

“Not your thing?” he asked.

“Nah, just getting in to teaching was far enough out of my confidence zone! It’s done me a lot of good though- sorry I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this,” Richard stopped himself suddenly, a bit flustered.

“No no don’t worry,” Taron assured, “coffee?” he offered, gesturing as he walked over to the small staff coffee machine to make his own.

“Yeah would love one, thanks” Richard replied. Taron grabbed an extra mug for Richard, pouring two coffees from the pot that had already been prepared by the other staff who were coming and going from the cosy staff room. Taron handed Richard a coffee and the two naturally gravitated to a pair of chairs sat by the window.

“So, History?” Taron sparked up a conversation.

“Yeah!” Richard laughed softly, habitually rubbing the back of his neck. “I just got interested in it I guess, not sure I remember how..” he began to trail off, taking a long sip of coffee, “I actually used to be interested in acting.”

“Ahh my speciality,” Taron smirked, “what happened to that?” Richard sighed heavily, taking another sip of coffee.

“Ah I just don’t have the confidence,” he admitted.

“That’s fair enough mate, takes a lot of that I have to admit,” Taron nodded slowly, “never know, maybe one day!” Richard looked down and made a small ‘hmm’ sound with a smile. The pair sat in peace finishing their coffee before Richard placed his hands on his legs and sighed, signalling that it was time for him to get going.

“First class?” Taron asked gently.

“Yeah..I’m really nervous not gonna lie,” Richard confessed, feeling his cheeks go slightly pink.

“Aw don’t worry mate you’ll be absolutely fine, first one’s the worst. Do you have another teacher there observing you?”

“I do, and I’m not sure if that’s making me feel better or worse,” Richard replied, Taron laughed and nodded in agreement.

“I’ll walk you there if you like?” he offered.

“I would actually love that I’m still finding my way around,” Richard replied gratefully, standing up to put his coffee cup in the sink and walk to his new classroom with Taron, making small talk on the way there such as ‘what are the students like?’ or ‘are the other teachers nice?’ questions which Taron had elaborate answers for but not enough time to tell all his stories about, which resulted in him awkwardly asking Richard if he would maybe want to meet up for a drink at some point so he can “tell him his many stories”. Richard quickly agreed, which actually surprised Taron.

“Great, yeah, cool, I’ll talk to you soon then and we can..you know, arrange..something,” Taron stumbled very ungracefully and not near as smoothly as he thought that would sound in his head before he said it, inwardly facepalming.

“Yeah yeah good shout, see you later,” Richard smiled warmly, disappearing into his new classroom, pretending not to be trembling ever so slightly.

Later that night

Taron was curled up at the end of his sofa, iPad in his lap ready to open Facebook to try and find Richard and have a small social media stalk just to see his face again, those big blue eyes were calling him. He racked his brain for his surname, what was he introduced as? It definitely began with an M. He began typing ‘Richard M’ hoping facebook would magically know who he was searching for, but Richard was too common of a name.

“Mm…M…Mmm, ma?” he thought aloud before pausing suddenly, “Madden!” he sighed, rolling his eyes at his own forgetfulness. He typed in the name and found him pretty easily. Excitedly clicking on his profile and doing the obligatory flick through the profile pictures, short scroll down the feed, clicking on some pictures he’d been tagged in, asking himself if this was creepy or if everyone did it. Or both. He also mentally noted to himself to remind Richard that now he’s a teacher, changing his privacy settings would be a very smart idea, some of those students are crazy, especially for young male teachers like Richard and Taron.

Cute Taron thought to himself, zooming in on a group photo when he spotted Richard chilling in the far left of it. He came out of the picture and hovered his finger over the ‘add friend’ button, wondering if it was too soon. At that moment, as if in some sort of cartoon or movie, the bread he had put in the toaster a few minutes ago suddenly popped up, making him jump and press the button by accident. How does that even happen? He definitely looked too eager adding him already but it was done now, no point cancelling the request in case Richard already had his phone in his hand, that would be even more weird. Taron put his iPad to the side to grab his toast, buttering it and bringing it back to the sofa, noticing his iPad light up with a message. He hurriedly sat down and ignored the toast he had just made, picking the iPad up hastily and opening the message.

1 new message: Richard Madden Richard: hey, again x

“Heh,” Taron chuckled, loving a guy that puts a single kiss at the end of a message, deciding he should reflect his message the same way.

Taron: hey you x

Taron flinched after hitting send, realising suddenly how weird that sounded.

Richard: ha, ‘you’ love that x

Taron: yea sorry wasn’t thinking haha x

Richard: no you’re fine it’s sweet! when are we going for that drink then? x

Taron: well when are you free?x

Richard’s typing bubble appeared, disappeared and reappeared quite a few times suggesting he was on the fence about his answer, a quirk which Taron found quite cute.

Richard: ...tomorrow night?x

Taron: yep definitely up for that! How did your first day go by the way? Didn’t end up seeing you for the rest of the day x

Richard: yeah was all good definitely didn’t need to be as nervous as I was x

Taron: nice one knew you’d smash it mate! Anyway I better eat the toast that I forgot about and get to bed, bright and early for school tomorrow!x

Richard: I know right feels weird saying school tomorrow again but as a teacher now not a student, sure I’ll get used to it, night T x

“T, I like that..” Taron thought, should he nickname Richard too? It only seemed fair..

Taron: night Rich x

Taron lay his iPad down on the table for the last time that day, shovelling toast in his mouth before taking his plate to the kitchen to wash up and get settled for bed, trying to ignore the slight feeling of butterflies in his stomach every time he thought about his drink with Rich the following night, this might be a doorway into the exact thing he promised himself not to do when he started this job, but he couldn’t resist.

________________________________________________________

Tag list: @taron-eggmcmuffin

#madderton #madderton fanfiction #richard madden #taron egerton #taron x richard #richard x taron #fanfiction #teacher #madderton teacher au #alternate universe #teacher au #rocketman

87 notes · View notes

ozkamal · 3 years

Quote

Wisdom notes1. It’s not who you are underneath it’s what you do that defines you 2. Stop living other people’s stories and start writing your own 3. We are all gonna die, not all of us get to make a difference 4. Just cause you know you are capable of something doesn’t mean it has to happen again 5. Every weakness contains within itself a strength 6. Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up. 7. In order to be what we are, we have to come out of what we are not 8. It’s not the size of a soldier in a fight, it’s the size of the fight in a soldier 9. some of the best things in life are by accident 10. you can lose to your enemy, but you must not lose to fear 11. if your looking for revenge, you should start by digging two graves 12. sometimes the scars you can’t see are the ones that hurt the most 13. sometimes the rain must fall for us to appreciate the sun 14. train yourself to let go, of everything you fear to lose 15. a man does not cry because he is weak, he cries because he has been strong for too long 16. not everyone can be trusted, even your shadow leaves when your in the dark 17. don’t trust anyone too much, remember the devil was once an angel 18. you didn’t fail, you just found out, eg:100 ways how not to make a light bulb 19. I failed over and over, that’s why i’m successful. 20. it isn’t what you got in life it’s what you make of it 21. people do not despise the thief who steals to satisfy himself when he is starving 22. a mans loyalty is tested when he has everything. a woman’s is tested when he has nothing 23. you have to be odd to be number one 24. trust takes years to build and yet only seconds to break 25. never regret a single thing that made you happy 26. make the plan, execute the plan, expect the plan to go off the rails, throw away the plan. 27. don’t be afraid of losing people, be afraid of losing yourself trying to please everyone around you 28. when we stop checking the monsters under the bed that’s when we realise they were inside us 29. sometimes she’ll keep you down but also somehow be the one to keep you up 30. From strangers. to friends. to being together but then back strangers but with memories 31. it hurts a lot when she breaks up with you. and gets together with someone else really quick... it just don’t feel like she cared, but sometimes you gotta let fate take you by the hand 32. you lost interest so fast.. my world ended before it even started 33. you can love somebody just by being attached. see loyalty is a action u can love or hate me but u still have my back 34. as dr seuss said, “i always knew looking back on the tears would make me laugh. but i never knew looking back on the laughs would make me cry 35. sometimes it’s hard to know what haunts you more, the memories of her, or the memories of how happy you used to be 36. it’s not that your life sucks, it’s just you done want to think that it doesn’t 37. love never ends, it’s the strength to try that does 38. silence can be just another word for pain 39. not everything lasts forever, people change, people grow apart. don’t force anything 40. absence makes the heart grow stronger 41. it ain’t about how hard you can hit.. it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward, that’s how winning is done 42. tomorrow is never promised 43. the most painful thing isn’t a cut or a broken bone, it’s seeing memories slowly become memories 44. better to have a short life doing what you love, than a long life living miserably 45. when a man loves a woman she becomes his strength 46. pay close attention to the people who don’t clap when you win 47. if your the smartest person in the room then your in the wrong room 48. a great future never requires a great past 49. everyone is the hero of their own story 50. the only time you should look back is to see how far you’ve come 51. there’s four things you can never get back, the word after it’s said, the moment after its missed, time after it’s gone and trust after it’s lost 52. they say you never knew what you had until it’s gone.... truth is, you just never thought you’d lose it 53. think of it like this, it hurts to let go... but sometimes it hurts more to hold on 54. out of all the things we learn in school, no one teaches us how to love ourselves 55. there comes a time in life, where you realise that nothing will ever be the same. And you realise that from now on, time will be divided in two parts, before this.. and after this 56. it takes absence to value presence 57. it’s not about the happy ending, maybe it’s about the story 58. it’s crazy how after so much, you become strangers again 59. words may sting, but silence is what breaks the heart 60. sometimes it’s not the person you miss, it’s the feeling you had when you were with them.. 61. in life there’s the people that tear you down, and the ones that build you up. but in the end, you’ll thank them both 62. you know a million words won’t bring them back, and you’ll know because you tried, neither would a million tears, and you’ll know... because you cried 63. the worst feeling is never being lonely, it’s being forgotten by someone, you’d never forget 64. you’ll realise how you waste so much time on certain people, but in the end sometimes they weren’t worth a second of it 65. there is always going to be some truth behind every “just kidding”. some knowledge behind every “i don’t know” emotion behind every “i don’t care” and pain behind every “it’s okay” 66. being happy is a very personal thing and it really has nothing to do with anybody else 67. don’t let something that’s long gone, control you. it’s time to let go 68. it’s amazing how one day someone walks into the life, and suddenly you don’t know how you every lived without them 69. someone once asked me if i knew you a million and one memories flashed through my mind.. but i just said i used to 70. at the end of the day, your not always gonna say and do the right things. and that’s fine, your not here to be perfect, your here to be real 71. going back to a relationship is like rewatching a movie, and hoping for a different ending 72. the worst kind of sad, is not being able to explain why 73. Life is the most difficult exam. Many people fail because they try to copy others. Not realizing that everyone has a different question on their paper 74. the difference between, like, love and in love is the same difference between, for now, for a while.. and forever 75. everyone can make you smile, but not everyone can make you happy 76. the most difficult part of moving on, is accepting the other person already did 77. it’s sad how the people you were once so close with. can become just another person you don’t know, not their just a stranger with your secrets 78. one day someone will break you so bad.. you will become unbreakable 79. you can close your eyes to things you don’t want to see, but you can never close your heart to things you don’t want to feel 80. if you think photos aren’t so important, wait until they’re all you have left 81. giving someone another chance, is like giving them another bullet, because the first one missed 82. the truth is.. we don’t mature with years, we mature with damage 83. consider how hard it is to change yourself, then you’ll realise what little chance you had in changing others. 84. everyone has a story, and everyone has something that changed them. so never judge someone by the chapter you walked in on 85. in life sometimes there is no next time. No timeouts, no second chances. sometimes it is now or never, things change, friends leave. and life doesn’t stop for anybody 86. can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be? 87. it’s sad how you can go from speaking to someone non-stop, to never speaking to them again, in an instant, it’s like you could have just stayed strangers 88. it’s important to realise you can miss something, but not want it back 89. your current situation, is not your final destination 90. it’s never to late to be what you might’ve been 91. you start with such a simple hello, but end with such a complicated good bye 92. in order to move on, you need to understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it 93. telling the truth and making someone cry, is better than telling a lie.. and making someone smile 94. it’s not the goodbyes that hurt, but the flashbacks that follow 95. some would say people who say it is what it is are dangerous, i say those people have just been hurt to the point where they no longer care 96. if you don’t go after what you want. you’ll never have it. if you don’t ask, the answer is always no and if you don’t step forward, your always in the same place 97. live today the way you want because nothing else is more real than the moment you have in your hands 98. people come and go, but life is simply about... seeing who cares enough to stay 99. one of the most messed up things the world will ever do to you, is let you meet the right person. at the wrong time 100. apologise for your mistakes not your feelings

https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/n0o67m/i_have_made_a_list_of_quotes_from_movies_and_from/?utm_source=ifttt

#IFTTT #reddit

3 notes · View notes

all1e23 · 5 years

Text

Swallow [Pt.13]

Chapter: Goodbye is All We Have

Pairings: Bucky x Reader

Summary: Goodbyes are not forever.

Warnings: Adulty themes. Yes, I’m a grown-up, and I said adulty themes. Sweet, soft, protective Bucky. (Yes, that’s a warning. That could kill you!) ANGSTY. A lot of Angst. I’m so sorry.

A/N: It’s the end babies! Well, sorta. Pretty important epilogue still to come and depending on how badly y’all cry over this I might release the epilogue tomorrow morning instead of Sunday. All of this has a purpose. Just remember the whole point of this story is about how they continue to lose each other over and over only to find their way back to each other time and time again. Send me love because I’m needy. No beta so read at your own risk. ;-)

***My fics are not to be saved or posted on any other sites without my written permission. Reblogs are my jam though! Thanks!*

“I want to see Y/n one more time before I sign anything. I need to explain why all of this is happening, and I owe her a real goodbye. I’m only askin’ for a few minutes alone with my girl before I lose her. No cameras and no cuffs.” Bucky raised his arms and made the chains jingle against the metal leg of the table he was shackled to. “You’ll have the confession and me soon enough.”

Eddie had been quiet the entire drive and stayed that way. Bucky assumed he was processing Bucky’s conditions. The second they made it to the station he was whisked off to an interrogation room where he was chained to a metal table that was bolted into the cement floor. A little unnecessary if you asked Bucky. No one was really asking him much of anything anymore. He didn’t have anything else to offer or barter with now that it was done.

Still, he hoped, Eddie wouldn’t screw him over. Not after everything, Bucky was handing him.

“You know you don’t call the shots right? That’s not how this works. You calling the shots is how you ended up here.”

Bucky leaned back letting the metal legs of the chair scrape against the floor and eyes Eddie. He was certainly more confident now that they were on his turf, but Bucky still saw him for what he was. A cheap excuse for a good man.

“You know what? I think the trauma from today rattled my brain a little and I’m havin’ trouble remembering. Was it Red Hook Drive? I can’t remember the street name. In fact, I don’t recall hardly any of the details from that day–”

“Fine,” Eddie snapped as he paced back and forth a few times, gnawing his lip. He wouldn’t have time to clear it. Without a doubt, Steve had gone straight back to the clubhouse to grab Y/n and Fury. He couldn’t risk Bucky going back on his confession. They needed him for the trial against Schmidt, and yeah, he wanted Bucky. Maybe he was petty and childish, but he wanted to know Bucky was finally getting what he deserved. Eddie stalked towards the door and conceded to Bucky’s request, “Give me an hour, and you can have twenty minutes with her. After that, you’re signing the confession, or I’m going after every single member of your club.”

It took closer two hours before there was any hint that Eddie was going to follow through on his word, and in those excruciating one hundred and twenty minutes, Bucky had a hard time keeping his cool. He felt like a raw nerve, exposed, and unstable. The walls were closing in on him, and the tension in the air burned. He just wanted to see you, touch you one more time. Bucky was near losing control when the metal door swung open and hit the wall behind it, an officer strolled up to Bucky and uncuffed him without a word. He was gone, the door shut before Bucky could ask what was happening.

He rubbed his wrists where the metal had begun to rub, and he wondered if they were bringing in someone to sign his confession or if you were actually here. His curiosity was answered when the door opened once more, and Eddie ushed you through the door.

The snap of the door shutting echoed through the room, and you threw yourself into Bucky’s open arms once you were sure you were alone. You buried your face against his neck, breathing him in for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours. It was far too long. The way your skin turned cold when he was gone made you hate any moment you had to spend apart. Bucky felt the same icy dread every time you were out of reach, and it seemed unfair he had to return to the ice right when he was beginning to warm. Bucky enveloped you in his arms and simply held you. He held you in silence for a long, long time. He wasn’t sure for how long you lingered there like that, but he wasn’t going to rush.

He would never get the chance again.

“Bucky, what’s going on? Why are you in here?” You asked against the soft skin of his neck where you had your face hidden – Bucky assumed it was to keep your tears hidden, he felt them on his skin but didn’t call attention to them. If you wanted it to go unnoticed, he would respect that.

“Is everything okay?” He hated how small and broken your voice sounded, and knowing it was his fault only made his decision easier.

“It will be soon. I took care of the problem. You and the club are going to be fine.” At that, you pulled back, no longer caring if Bucky saw the tears catching in your lashes, not quite ready to fall.

“What does that mean? Does it have anything to do with Johann Schidmt sitting in a holding cell?”

Bucky brushed your hair out of your face and nodded solemnly, “I made a deal with Eddie and the D.A. I gave them some dirt on the club for an open case from a few years ago and Schidmt if they agreed to leave you and the club alone. With my record, I got fifteen years for possession of illegal guns.”

Fifteen years was a long time, and he deserved every year for the things he has done. Fury had somehow managed to get them to agree to the seven years he asked for. Bucky wasn’t going to question how he did it, but he wasn’t going to let you waste the next seven years with weekend visits and prison phone calls on a man that will never be good enough for you.

He’s known how this was going to end from the first time he told you he loved you. Bucky has never deserved you, and it was time you found someone who did.

You frowned and shook your head in confusion, “That wasn’t you or the club.”

“I know, but they needed something big, and it’s not like I don’t deserve it. The club isn’t innocent, and my hands aren’t exactly clean.”

It didn’t hurt that he could keep an eye on Schmidt while he was locked up.

Bucky could see all of it in your eyes, and you processed what he was telling you. Your thoughts were so loud they were screaming at him – you were desperately trying to figure out how to fix this, stop all of this from happening and right then, he knew he had made the right choice in lying to you. You would never move on if you thought there was a chance for you to be together, “Okay. Okay, I bet Clint can be ordained online or Sam. Sam would love to say he married us and we can do a small ceremony after you get booked–”

No. That unquestionably was not happening.

“Stop, baby. Stop.” He clasped your hands to calm your panic and brought them to his lips where he placed several gentle kisses to trembling fingertips. He didn’t bring you here for this, and you didn’t have time to argue.

“I’m not having a wedding here with you. You are so much more than a felon and a jailhouse wedding.”

“I just want you. I don’t care about the rest.” And he loves you for that, but he refuses to give you that life – his mother’s life. He wasn’t going to leave you at home, living on pause, waiting for him to come back just to turn everything upside down again when he finally showed up. You could see in his eyes it wasn’t happening. He wasn’t going to give in to you like he usually would, and it was pointless to fight with time running out.

“Fine, then I can wait. I can visit you on weekends. We can write letters. There’s a bit of romance in that, right? And, you can always get out early–”

“No, baby,” He smiles despite the lump in throat and chains tightening around his heart. “No waiting for me this time. You’re going to go start the life you always wanted. Get married in that little white chapel out on 95. Have a ton of babies or don’t if you don’t want to. Finally, start your career. Fall in love with someone who can give you all the things I never could.

“I should have left with you when you asked all those years ago. I was young and stupid and thought I had to prove somethin’ to my dad and maybe to myself. I thought if we left together and it was only you and me, you would see I’m not really worth much of anything. I want– I need you to know, I wanted to go that night. Every part of me wanted to run away with you, and I’ve regretted my choice every day since you left.”

You didn’t need to know he came back for you for that morning, that he was ready to leave with you then and never look back. It would only hurt you, and he’s hurt you enough. Bucky just had to make sure you knew it was never your fault, every failure in your relationship was on him no matter how you spun it. If he had only trusted in you and left when you asked, he wouldn’t be standing before you, breaking your heart.

“We can still figure it out…” You hiccuped through the tears that had finally fallen. You hadn’t realized they had spilled onto your cheeks until you tasted them on your lips. Bucky smiled wistfully and wiped away the freshly spilled tears with his thumbs.

“No, Y/n, we can’t. This is it, pretty girl, but you can start something new and good without me.” He let go of you long enough to pull the chain from around his neck and held it out for you to take, but you didn’t want it back. Not like this and not then. You frantically shook your head and gripped his biceps as if you could sense your time was drawing near its end.

“I don’t want it this way.” You heard yourself whisper.

“It was always meant to be yours, baby. I knew it the second I saw it.” He slipped the chain over your head and touched your cheeks, cupping your face in his hands. You leaned into his touch and Bucky kissed you, swift and deeply. It was salty from your tears, but sweet like all your kisses are. There wasn’t time for all the kisses he wanted to give, but he needed it to be one you would both remember. He was going to miss the way you leaned into him to tug on the chain around his neck, the softness of your lips and the whimper that slipped out when he tried to pull away.

He was going to miss you.

“I’ve failed you a lot over the years, in every way imaginable, but I’ve loved you from the very first day we met, and I’ll love you till my last.”

The door creaked, and a gust of cold wind hit them. Bucky peered over his shoulder, he knew it was Eddie but seeing him standing there made it real. Their time was officially up. Their tale has reached its last page. He had asked they wait to cuff him until he was out of your sight. That would explain the seven officers, but by the smirk on Eddie’s face, he was not going to follow through with that promise. He looked back at you and pressed a lingering kiss to your forehead.

“Don’t forget what I said, baby. You’ll always be my swallow,” Bucky whispered and slowly stepped back from you, putting his hands behind his back. The cold metal on his wrists stung – not for the reasons Eddie hoped.

Losing his freedom was not the loss that would break him in the end.

There were a thousand things you could say but none that would come close to one last I love you. “ Al-ways, Buck. I-I love y-you.”

Bucky smirked, “I love you, too, pretty girl. Always.”

Being yanked and dragged down the hallway, Bucky felt empty. His chest hallow, heart removed and left there in the room with you. There was no light at the end of the tunnel for the path he chose, and you would never find your way back to him.

Not this time.

“Rogers and your brother are waiting for you. I’m sorry things had to go this way–” Eddie was still talking, but you had stopped listening. You quickly wiped away any signs of tears as you waited for him to finish up whatever bullshit speech he was giving you. You’ve heard it all before. They were all the same – It was for the best, and you would move on to something better.

It wasn’t, and you wouldn’t.

“You never had anything, did you?” You asked, staring at the vacant hallway Bucky was just standing in only seconds earlier. “On the club I mean. You used me. You used my love for my brother and Bucky against me. You tricked me into thinking I had no other choice but to meet with you because you knew it would get back to the club and lead to this.”

“I didn’t have the information I led you to believe I had, no, but this was important. That club has been poisoning everyone around them for decades–” You turned to face him, and the hardened look in your eyes had his tongue twisted, and the words he had rehearsed for you faded away as if they never existed.

“And all you had to do was wait for me to come home. You knew Bucky would do whatever it took to keep me out of it and the second I came home, you jumped at the chance. You pretended to care what happened to me. You told me I deserved more than Bucky and his life, but you don’t care what I deserve, do you? You wanted this bust and used me to get it.”

“Y/n…”

You stepped towards Eddie, crowding his space but raised your voice enough for the officers around the two of you to hear as you scolded him, “You think you’re the better man because you’re wearing a badge? That piece of metal doesn’t make you a good man. You’re not even a tenth of the man he is. You can spend the rest of your life trying, but you are always going to fall short.”

You brushed passed Eddie and ran straight for Clint who was waiting just outside the door. “He’s gone, Clint. It’s done.” You babbled.

Clint bound you in his arms, secured you in a tight embrace, and shielded you from the eyes of those around you. He guided towards the doors and whispered against the shell of your ear, It’s okay, bug. We will figure it out. Deep breaths. I’ve got ya. Eddie came racing down the hall, chasing after you, intent on apologizing or at least saying something to help you move forward and maybe ease a bit of his own guilt but he was met with a hard wall of muscle, blocking him from getting any closer to you or any other member of Steve’s family.

Steve crossed his arms over his chest and glared down at Eddie. A distorted, angry laugh rumbled from Eddie’s chest, and he stepped back, holding up his hands. “You want to tell me Bucky is the better man? Just because he’s a felon doesn’t mean he’s a bad man? Save it. His little lady beat you to the punch.”

Steve laughed, hollow and full of resentment. “Nope. I don’t need to rub it in your face when it looks as though you got the message, but you should be careful, detective. I had a chat with some of our friends, and it looks like they also had a new prospect sniffing around. A lot of clubs don’t take well to rats within their ranks. All that sneaking around might come back to bite you in the ass.”

Steve grinned and patted Eddie on the shoulder on his way out, following close behind you and Clint. Eddie took in the officers standing around him and rapt in their stares and whispers. Steve Rogers would never let him get away with taking Bucky in like this and Eddie had a suspicion Steve wouldn’t stop until retribution was obtained. He collapsed into the chair with a huff and tore his shield from his chest dropping onto his desk.

Maybe he didn’t deserve it after all.

You sat in the back of Steve and Peggy’s SUV where your brother had put you, and Peggy’s arms were settled around you where they had no intention of moving from. You watched the stone walls and gates as they faded into the distance behind you— your heart seized, your skin burned and the air in your lungs turned to smoke with the loss.

“We will figure it out. I promise, darling.” Peggy assured you. She continued on, but you had no idea what she was saying, her voice was soothing to listen to despite it though.

Peggy continued to hold onto you and let you sag against her as she prattled on about your next step, this new part of your life. You didn’t know how to tell her there was no new part of your life. How could you move and start a new life? You’ve loved him for way too long to simply love someone else. You didn’t know how to not love Bucky. For more than half your life you’ve loved Bucky, and now you were left with half a heart – half gone or half still holding on, it didn’t matter, half of you was gone forever either way you spun. You didn’t want to admit it out loud just yet. Maybe you would be able to tomorrow, but for tonight you were holding on.

No matter how far you were pulled apart, you will always find your way back to each other. You just had to have faith and trust that you will find each other again one day.

Previous // Epilogue

#biker!bucky x reader #biker!bucky #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes x y/n #bucky x you #bucky x reader #bucky x y/n #biker!AU #MC!AU #mc!bucky #james buchanan barnes #james bucky barnes

923 notes · View notes