LittleKuriboh’s being a virtue-signaling moron on Twitter and I’m just-

It’s the whole “Minorities should ALWAYS voice their respective races” argument and like... It’s the most shallow thing for him to say for ass-pats.

At least people are tearing his ass apart in the QRTs.

And he never heard from her again

▸ Jaehyun x reader ▸ Smut, Angst, Idol au

Summary: As you lay at the hospital bed unconscious, Jaehyun blames himself because of the accident and regrets the time when he took you for granted.

Word count: 4k

Warnings: Sex, sex, car accident, major character loss (that spoils everything but you’ve been warned), possessiveness, making of sex tape, mentions of multiple sex tapes, swearing, mentions of other idols, unprotected sex, mentions of alcohol, Jaehyun accidentally hurts the reader. Click away if any of the warnings makes you uncomfortable.  

A/N: PURE FICTION! Enjoy another idol au from me. 

Wet.

Minty.

Cold.

“Wake up sleepy head” your boyfriend spreads wet kisses around your exposed skin. Anything he could reach, your neck, your thighs, your lips. It feels good to be showered with love first thing in the morning but you shrug him off and pull the blanket over your head because you want to sleep more. “I’m sorry to disturb your sleep princess, but it’s time to go now” you smell his fresh breath near your face. And when you finally meet his eyes, your boyfriend is all dressed up, ready to start his schedules for today.

“Oh Jung Jaehyun, you have worn me out last night” you whine but you force yourself to wake up. Jaehyun is looking at your morning face and naked body, admiring the beauty of his girlfriend. “No shower sex today?” he gave you a good morning kiss and chuckled at your question.

“No, sleeping beauty. If only you got up a little early then, yeah we could have. But, you were sleeping so soundly I couldn’t wake you up. Now come on, have breakfast with me before the van arrives with my manager” he offers you his hand to help you get up, giving you his robe to cover yourself.

It was your second anniversary last night and you two had dinner in one of the fanciest restaurants in Seoul. The food was amazing as expected, Jaehyun picked a fine wine which made you two a little buzzed and ended up in his house and had crazy anniversary sex to end the night.

Dating a very famous kpop star like Jaehyun is not a walk in the park. But loving each other and giving the relationship a chance is always worth it. The busy schedule is something you and Jaehyun always fight about, but as you two keep on holding on you both managed your busy schedules and always meet each other halfway just so you can spend time with each other. Who would have thought that believing that your relationship could work brought you two deeper into loving each other?

After you had your shower, Jaehyun booked you a cab to make sure you get home safely. You see, even for Jaehyun, watching you leave every morning is something he really hates. “Call me when you’re home okay? I’ll pick up, I’m having my makeup done by that time” he kissed you deeply and passionately before he opens the door for you and watches you get inside the cab.

Soon, the white van appears in front of his house and Jaehyun said goodbye to his family thanking them once again for letting you and him crash for the night. His family always adored you, they love you even more because you take care of their dear Jaehyun and secretly hoping that it’s going to be the two of you in the end.

When Jaehyun is all settled and getting his make up done for NCT’s schedule for today, his phone rang and it was a call from you. Finally, he thought, his mood changed from quiet to giggly because you did not forget to call him. “I’m guessing you missed me already, that’s why you called?” he answers with a smile, the members beside him tease him continuously. He needed to gesture a ’shh’ sign because he can’t hear you.

“I’m sorry Mr. Jung but this is not Ms. Y/n. She got into a car accident this morning and we can’t reach anyone from her family. She is rushed to the Asan Medical Center. Your number is the only local number we could find if you could please-“

The shocking news made Jaehyun drop his phone and ran to his manager, asking him to please let him go to the hospital to see you. Jaehyun was desperate but the managers can’t let him go just like that. Spotting a kpop star inside a hospital can make a whole nation buzz, of course, they won’t let Jaehyun go to you. There are tears in his eyes as he imagines you alone and unconscious in a hospital bed while the members are trying to help him compose himself and tells him to be strong but Jaehyun was only quick to blame himself and cry some more. “This is all my fault”  

Twenty five months ago

Jung Jaehyun is mighty handsome.

The office is having an exclusive party at an open space rooftop bar. The party was not like any loud party, it's a party where people still talk about business and meet possible clients for the future. And meeting Jung Jaehyun and the other members of NCT 127 and their manager, is part of the purpose of this party.

And again, Jung Jaehyun is might handsome.

“How long have you been in the marketing industry?” he asks, leaning on the glass balcony with you. Looking at the wonderful view of Seoul.

“Long enough to be established?” you chuckled because you don’t want to sound so boastful with your life achievements.

For a minute it was an exchange of words, a decent conversation that’s in between being professional and being friends, but it soon turned to lowkey flirting and exchanging of glances. He tells you what’s on his mind, you listen and feel your heart skip a beat every time he look into your eyes and smile. “Can I be frank?” he licks his lips and drank from his bottle of beer, “I find you attractive and I want to keep talking to you and I want to know what you think about me- and don’t you dare lie, please”

You let out a scoff and smiled at him shyly, “Well, Jung Jaehyun you’re incredibly handsome. That has been going on through my head since I saw you earlier and you’ve been making my heart skip a beat for the last few minutes”

Satisfied with your answer, he came closer to you slowly. Like your bodies are magnets. You’re sure that the place isn’t quiet but this small space that you share with Jaehyun is dead silent. Only his breaths and yours are the only ones you can hear. Having this kind of moment with Jaehyun is kind of magical like you’re a princess who just met his destined prince in a ball.

The friendly and flirty conversation became something even more when Jaehyun became too bold with telling you how he wanted to end this night with you, when he pressed his cold bottle of beer just above your knee and when he starts caressing your shoulder like he’s not on a public place. You’re not stupid to see that he’s after having a one night stand with you. One thing led to another and the next thing you know is you’re back at your apartment, kissing Jaehyun on your couch with a long forgotten bottle of wine on the coffee table. It’s not right to sleep with your clients but nobody needs to know.

Jaehyun kissed you down on your couch, unbuttoning his dress shirt and revealing his abs to you. Your hands automatically roamed around his body and you feel him smile in between kissing you passionately. “You’re so handsome” you whisper, and guided his hand under your dress, he got the message and finger fucked you while you remove your clothes and bra, leaving your panties on to tease the handsome man kissing you.

“I’ll take you out on a date, I promise,” he says while unbuckling his belt, removing his pants and boxers brief.

Wow. He’s big. And he has a dick of a porn star, his pubic hair is so sexy and- “Oh-“ he devours your neck, biting and nibbling your ear making you giggle and laugh while your bodies grind on each other. “So this is not a one time thing?” you moan out and he stopped upon hearing your words. “What? No. Let’s see where this goes” his face was so close to yours and you can’t stop your smile because you couldn’t believe you scored Jung Jaehyun. Is this a dream?

“What’s that smile, hmm?” he nuzzles your neck and kisses it softly. You touch his dimples and lips but he’s quick to catch your hand with his mouth and kiss it. “I’m just a person who happens to be not immune by your charms. I’m not kissing you as a kpop star now, I’m kissing you as Jaehyun” he continues to spread kisses around your neck, down to your left boob, and suck it for some time.

“Can I remove your panties?” he asks oh so sweetly.

“Of course” you answer with a kiss and feel him remove your underwear without breaking the kiss. Once fully exposed, you feel his slender fingers play with your slit before he goes in finally, the tip of his cock making you jolt for a bit. You hear Jaehyun grunt and watch as his eyes close and part his lips as he pushes inside you slowly “Fuck” Jaehyun went straight to the point and fucks you deeply. Bodies to bodies while listening to each other’s breaths.  

You had sex for the first time on your couch on the night you two first met.

Present time

“Just sign here please, then your transaction is complete”

For the third time in the past two months, Jaehyun has been paying your hospital bills and has been taking care of you, while your family is finalizing some heavy paperwork before flying to Seoul. Not that he’s thankful for the awful accident, but the accident had become the way for Jaehyun to finally meet your family even if it’s through a video call. Jaehyun promised your parents to take care of everything while waiting for them and that he’ll gladly pay for the hospital bills and refuse to take your parent’s cash.

It’s been two months since the accident and every day without you is consistent torture for Jaehyun. As long as you’re not awake, he will never stop worrying for you. It doesn’t matter if he overworked himself to save money for the bills, as long it saves you he’s up for it.

Ever since the accident, Jaehyun and the other members help him look after you at the hospital. Of course, the members are worried about Jaehyun’s emotional state as they are worried about your condition. They made sure that you two get the emotional and physical support that you and Jaehyun need. SM managers were all nice and helped Jaehyun with everything they can just so your boyfriend can see you every day.  

It was not an easy fight for Jaehyun, but the people around him take care of him, while he takes care of you.

“The other two victims from the accident passed away this morning” Jaehyun informs Johnny as the two sit quietly near you. Watching his girlfriend on a hospital bed is a different kind of pain. He misses you a lot.

“Don’t overthink dude. She will be fine” to be honest Johnny doesn’t know how to comfort his friend.

As Jaehyun takes Johnny’s advice, he reminisces about the memories that he had with you. Everything, from happy memories to sad and awful ones. Regretting the times that he took you for granted and promised over and over again that if he’s given a second chance to love you, he will love you right this time.

“I wished for this accident to happen Johnny. It’s my fault” Jaehyun blurted out.

Johnny was shocked to the core and stopped what he’s doing with his phone, “What the fuck?”

Jaehyun told Johnny the story about the biggest fight you two had during the months when you were just a new couple. So new that your work schedules irritate the both of you and all you two did was have sex and forget the problem. The cycle went on and on until you had enough and you wanted to break up with him.

Five months of being together

In the middle of having dinner with Jaehyun in a private restaurant, you finally told him what you’ve been keeping inside your heart. “This will never work, Jae” he turned silent and pretends that he’s not hearing you and you find it disrespectful. He was smiling the whole time, asking you what do you want for dessert and pour you a glass of wine like there's nothing wrong.

“I’ll cut ties with you starting tonight Jae, and that’s my final decision” you wiped your lip with the table napkin and stand up from your seat.

“Wait- baby, okay I’m sorry” he stopped you from opening the door, pull you in an embrace and everything turned silent again. You still love him, but staying in this relationship is hurting both of you so you had to take the first step and leave. As usual, Jaehyun uses his charms to get away from the situation. He kisses your neck and tells you sweet things that will lead you to having sex with him in this room. But not anymore, you thought.

“Enough Jaehyun. Please stop” you begged him to stop kissing your neck. Slowly, you feel his embrace crushing you and hurting you. You try so hard to push him away but Jaehyun is naturally strong that whatever you do to push him away is nothing.

Eventually, he lets go and tell his sorry. “I’ll change, I swear”

“No-“

“Stop making it complicated!” he punched the door and the loud sound surrounds the small room making you scared of him. He was turning red and his eyes were full of anger like he’s about to hurt you.

“I want to leave-“

“Well, I hope you get into an accident” he opens the door for you, pushing you out of the room because he’s so angry he’s actually afraid he might hurt you.

The breakup did not push through because Jaehyun went to your apartment to ‘fix’ things, three days after the fight. He apologized with all his heart, telling you he’s sorry and that he won't do it again. He promised to change his ways and love you even more in exchange for taking him back to your life and give him a second chance. Apologies are nothing if a person will always do it again. It’s up to you if it’s still healthy to take him back into your life. And of course, you have a weak spot when it comes to Jaehyun. You love the man. And he loves you. He just sucks at showing it.

Now that Jaehyun is on his sixth chance, the change that you’ve been yearning for and the change that he promised is long forgotten. Days, weeks, and months passed by, you and Jaehyun still fight like crazy because of different reasons that piss you both. May it be jealousy, he stood you up on a date, you forgot that he’s going to visit you in your apartment, Jaehyun has no time for you, or you don’t want to have sex but he’s really horny.

“I had a company dinner tonight, baby I thought you understand that part?” you whine in frustration while you remove your watch and your earrings. Listening to Jaehyun as he shouts at you, telling you that he’s tired from practice but he still chose to visit you, only to find out that you’re not home. He kept on yelling his points and arguments, hurting you with words that you’ve heard him say before but still sounds like you’ve just heard them tonight.

“I waited for hours! If my career is ruined because of you, I swear!-“

“I can ruin your career in one click, Jaehyun. Do you want me to post all of our sex videos?” you finally bite back because you can't stand him already.

“Post all you want my fans will be happy seeing my dick but you, you will get all the hate in the world!”

“Fine then!” you threaten him of actually posting it, scrolling through your gallery to find your favorite video with him. “Ah! This!” you picked the video where Jaehyun was spitting on your boobs while two fingers are inside your mouth and his cock is inside you. He was wildly flirting with the camera like a porn star. His fans will not doubt that he is the guy from the video.

“Stop it. I mean it” he tried grabbing your phone but you’re quick to counter his move. For a minute, it became a violent push and pull that made him use his strength on you which is not fair. He threw your phone so hard on the nearest wall that it cracked and the screen got broken. He didn’t notice that he pushed you way too hard that you landed on the floor face first and made you bruise your face.

“Fuck- let's stop this, baby I’m sorry” he let out his frustration.  

“DON'T TOUCH ME! GET OUT!” you shouted so loud that you’re sure you hurt his ears. You slapped him so hard on the face when he came close to help you get up. He took it like a man, but it’s obvious that your slap hurt his pride. Thankfully, he did not pry and left your apartment quietly.

Present time

While Jaehyun was cleaning your face with a damped cloth, he noticed that your bruises are all healed. He remembered that one time when he had pushed you accidentally and you ended up having a cut just above your eyebrow. He also remembered how you slapped him so hard that it made him realize that all he’s ever done to you is hurt you. It was a wake up call for him.

“Slap me again. I don’t care just please wake up” he begs. Kissing your forehead before continuing to clean you up. It has been his routine to talk to you even though he gets nothing. Sometimes he plays you some music so you won't get bored in your sleep and also you would know that he’s inside the room with you. As he continues being like this, he never losses hope and always visit you with a cheerful aura, knowing all too well that being negative in this kind of situation will only make him go crazy.

“Maybe if I did let you break up with me the first time you said it, this wouldn’t happen to you. I’m sorry” he whispers again. Tucking you in your hospital bed and making sure that you won't get cold. He fixed the white sheet and smoothens it before laying beside you carefully.

“I just love you so much” he hugs you carefully, “That’s why I really can’t let you go. But look where my selfishness brought you” tears roll down on his cheeks, making your sleeves wet because of his continues crying.

When Jaehyun became busy with his career, he can’t visit you every day anymore but confident that you’re in good hands because your parents are with you now. Nonetheless, he never forgets to call the doctor to check up on you. Sometimes, he and Taeyong write lyrics in your room just so he can spend time with you while he’s still working on his music. To be honest, he produces great lyrics whenever he works beside you. It was too much for him that sometimes he cries while writing the lyrics and Taeyong is quick to bring him back to focus and comfort him.

First month of being together

The continuous ringing of your doorbell makes you panic for nothing and quickly ran to your door to open it. “Jaehyun, what are you doing here?” you look outside to check if it’s safe and that none of your neighbors is watching.

“I just miss you so much I’m itching to see you” he cupped your cheeks and kissed you passionately, closing your door shut and motioning your bodies straight to your bedroom. You two were quick to get naked and meet in the middle of your bed to kiss and fuck already.

“Can’t believe I’m letting you fuck me in the middle of the afternoon Jaehyun” you lay comfortably in bed as Jaehyun kiss you wherever he wants, however, he pleases. Kneading your boobs and sucking them from time to time, spreading spit all over your body, and licking your pussy. He surprised you by spreading your folds and spitting on your pussy, licking you good, and making you moan and whine.

“Still on the pill?” he asks, pumping his cock and sucking your right nipple as he waits for your answer. You nod your head. Jaehyun folds both of your legs and spread them wide until your hips are not touching the mattress giving Jaehyun a nice angle to fuck you deeply. He pushed in slowly while watching you beneath him, he watches you grab your boobs and moan a little too loud. “I want to do something fun, will you let me?” he asks in between fucking you deep and slow, you wonder what he has in mind.

“Whatever you want” you smile and watch him reach something on the side table. He opens your phone and put it in recording mode, taking a video of his cock going in and out of your pussy, switching the camera to selfie mode, and put it on the side of your bed. Telling you to smile while he continues to fuck you. “Clever,” you said, as you two look at the camera while having sex. You smiled and asked him to flirt with the camera so whenever you watch it, it will make your heart jump and you won't miss him that much when he’s away. And so he did. He flirts in the camera like how he flirts with you normally in bed, kissing you while he looks at the camera, putting his idol skills to good use in bed.

“Turn around for me please” you followed what he asked of you and lay on your stomach. Jaehyun put your phone in front of you and dragged you all the way down to your bed so you two can fit the screen. He puts your ass up in the air, lick your pussy from behind, and went back to fucking you. Jaehyun loves to fuck you hard from behind while his hand is on your nape, pushing your face on the mattress as he pounds you hard.

“FUCK” you cursed loudly when you feel his thumb go inside your asshole slowly, making your pussy clench and unclench. A tight feeling for Jaehyun’s cock which he loves. He lets go after a minute and put his fingers on your clit, making you let go and cum so good that your legs are shaking and your legs are giving on you. You feel Jaehyun slow down and feel him cum inside you, leaning down to kiss you and ask you if you’re alright.

He saved the video and put your phone back on the side table and went back to shower your body with kisses while you two calm down from your high. “Sorry if this is spontaneous” he lays beside you, tired and sweaty.

“It’s okay baby, I miss you too”

“Baby?” he smiled in disbelief.

“Yes,” you rolled your eyes and continue to catch your breath.

“Say it again? Please?” he asked oh so sweetly showing off his dimples. Your weakness.

“Baby-“ he devours your lips again after hearing you call him ‘baby’. A small gesture that makes his heart jump.

“That’s it, okay? We're together now and that’s official. Understand?” he kissed you deeply again before you could even say something else. You smile through the kiss amused at how happy Jaehyun is while he’s on top of you. You two stayed like that in bed talking about anything and everything, admiring each other while you’re skin to skin, asking for kisses here and there, laughing together whenever he tells you something funny.

From the moment Jaehyun left you that day, your life changed and Jaehyun is the reason behind it. Bittersweet. That’s the perfect word for your relationship. No relationship is perfect, you’re well aware of that. And dating a famous idol can be so complicated that it drives you both crazy. But still, it’s a relationship worth saving for because you love each deeply than you could have ever imagined.

Present time  

Waiting is long suffering. That is clear to Jaehyun, now that you’re already sleeping for a year and four months, slowly his hope is already running thin. Not only that he’s suffering emotionally these past few months, but he’s also suffering financially and has become a man full of debts. He loaned money from his company, the bank, even from his parents, just so your hospital bills can be covered. Accepting every kind of project and working from sun up to sun down just so he can provide your needs.

Your parents needed to go back home and entrust you to Jaehyun because they don’t have any other options.

Life is becoming harder than expected.

Now that he’s away for a tour, he became even more depressed because he can’t be by your side. He asked his parents to take care of you while he’s on tour, which they gladly accepted and made sure to call him every day to tell him your condition even though he hears exactly the same thing every day.

“Great job today everyone!”

The members and staffs congratulate each other as they finish another successful concert in the states. Hugs everywhere, and a lot of ‘thank yous’ are said, smiling through the day as Jaehyun ready himself to call his mother and ask about you.

“34 missed calls” he murmurs and went somewhere quiet to call his mother and ask about the 34 missed calls. They should know that he’s working.

“Hey, mom. W-why so many calls? I was doing a show- did she wake up already?” The other line was silent but he can hear his mom breathing, “Hello?” Jaehyun speaks again.

“She gave up son, she passed away, two hours ago”

Jaehyun’s world came crashing down as he reaches for the nearest wall to support himself because his knees gave up on him. Tears pool in his eyes as he cries quietly, holding his phone so tightly. He screamed and sobbed so loud it echoes to the empty hallway. Thankfully Mark saw him and called the others and his manager.

“I didn’t even get to say goodbye!” he yelled and push the other members away as he lets that sadness take him away.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry Y/n, please forgive me!”

Clandestine Meetings - One

Actor!Bucky x Reader | Word Count: 2488 | Warnings: None

A/N: Listen, I know I said this would be posted in "about an hour," but I have no self-control and it must be posted NOW.

Sorry for the delay in getting this out! I was having a bit of block. Thank you for reading and, if you feel so inclined, please let me know what you think!❤️ If you want to be tagged, please send me a message or enter your url here!

Dividers by the lovely @firefly-graphics

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It’s 10:30 by the time your boss stumbles into the office. Pepper Potts is usually the embodiment of poised and put together - sleek strawberry blonde hair either falling over her shoulders in beautiful waves or tied in a high ponytail; black pencil skirts and white blouses tucked neatly inside. But not today.

While the ponytail still sits high on her head, dark circles taint her usually smooth, pristine complexion. She’s fisting a to-go mug in one hand and her office mug in the other, already steaming with a fresh round of caffeine.

You hated days like these; mornings after Tony keeps her out late - either business or pleasure, you never know as you prefer not to pry into your bosses’ personal lives - were always interesting, to say the least. Pepper was never mean, and you were almost positive there wasn’t an unkind bone in her body. She was just off. And if she was off, it means you were off, resulting in your job being about one hundred times harder as you often had to play the roles of both assistant and editor.

“Good morning, Ms. Potts,” you finally greet as she sits down at her desk. She’s rummaging through her bag, growing more irritable as the seconds pass. She sighs before stopping to look up at you.

“Y/N, please. It’s been six months. Just call me Pepper.” You internally scoff at the insistence of being anything less than professional towards one of the smartest women you’ve ever encountered in your life, and she turns back to her treasure hunt. “Don’t tell me I left my laptop at home,” she whines to herself as she slumps down into her large executive chair.

You clear your throat as you shuffle forward, computer in hand. “You had me take down to IT to get your files backed up, remember?” you smile as you deposit the device on the cherry-oak desk.

Pepper returns the smile and shakes her head. “Honestly, I don’t understand how I functioned before you.” She slides the laptop across the desk and opens it. While she waits for the software to boot up, she starts her typical morning rapid-fire session. “Did I miss any calls before I came in?”

“No, it’s been pretty q-word this morning.” You vowed never to say “quiet” while in the office. It somehow always jinxed your days, resulting in everyone and their mother calling within twenty minutes.

“E-mails?”

“The chef you’ve been in contact with sent over his schedule for the next few months. It’s looking like the best time to meet is early next month if you want to get the feature done in time for the winter edition.” Pepper opens her mouth to fire another question, but you’re one step ahead of her. “I’ve already blocked out a date in your calendar and sent the invite to his team.”

A soft smile graces the woman’s face as she scribbles notes in her daybook. “And what does my schedule look like for today?”

You sort through the mental files that contain minute-to-minute information regarding your boss’s workday. “You’re pretty booked. You have that photoshop with James Barnes at noon, and after-”

“Shit,” Pepper mummers, cutting you off. Panic quickly settles into her features. “Why does Tony do this? Barnes is impossible to book for anything. I can’t miss this….”

“Uh, no, you can’t,” you practically screech as you fix your boss with a wild look. “This photoshoot has been on your schedule since before I even started. And the time you have set up with him next week doesn’t allow for a full interview, photoshoot, and get material for the short online feature.” You try not to let the panic come out in your voice, but this is precisely the kind of incident you were hired to prevent.

Pepper gently closes her laptop and sets her features in a serious look. “Listen, I think you’re doing a great job here, and you’ve grown so much within the few months you’ve been on the team.” You eye her suspiciously, wondering if this was your ‘you’re fired’ speech. If so, it was definitely coming out of left field. “Why don’t you take my place at the shoot today? If Tony hadn’t promised I’d be in attendance for this investor meeting today, I’d have you go to that instead. But,” the blonde sighs deeply before continuing, “Tony has no regard for anyone’s schedule, and this is an important meeting.”

Your stomach drops from the 44th floor you’re currently on down to ground level. You’d never been on a set before, let alone one with someone as big as James. Plus, you’d only been on a handful of mid-sized interviews. How did she expect you to do this by yourself?

“Pepper, I…”

“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to try and tell me that you’re not ready and that you can’t possibly clear your schedule for the afternoon. But if I didn’t think you were capable of holding your own, you wouldn’t even be sitting here with ‘assistant editor’ in front of your name. You have the skillset; you just need to show that you can use it. I know you don’t want to be an assistant forever.”

You anxiously bite your lip, feelings of inadequacy and anxiousness filling your senses.

“I don’t even know this James guy…” you say, defeated.

“Well, the car doesn’t arrive for another,” she looks down at her phone, “forty-five minutes. You better get reading.”

“We really need to bring you into the twenty-first century,” Natasha, Bucky’s manager, says as the first notes of My Funny Valentine start dancing through today’s set.

Following the too-bright flash of the camera, Bucky blinks the starbursts out of his eyes and tries to set the redhead with as stern of a look as possible. “Don’t you dare diss Mr. Sinatra. He’s a classic. A legend!” He watches as a stylist runs up and begins fussing with his hair.

Natasha just rolls her eyes and goes back to scrolling through her phone. As much as she acts annoyed with him - and his insistence of having at least two dozen 40’s songs on every photoshoot playlist - he knew she wouldn’t trade him for the world. They had a long history pre-dating the entertainment industry, and she was damn good at her job. If it wasn’t for Nat, Bucky’s not sure his current agency would have even signed him.

As the stylist finishes up her poking and prodding, the photographer - who Bucky has already forgotten the name of - begins shouting out directions from behind the camera. Pose this way. Turn that way. Make it look like you want to be here. It takes everything in Bucky not to grimace - both at the consistent reconfiguring he has to do to his body and the loud rumble that echoes through his stomach. The shirtless pictures they were shooting today caused him - against his better judgment - to forgo breakfast and, with nothing but too-weak black coffee in his system, Bucky couldn’t help but feel a little agitated.

“Just a few more shots, and then we can break for lunch,” he hears the man behind the camera shout before dragging the camera back up to his face.

Bucky contorts himself into a position that shows off the abs he’s worked incredibly hard to achieve and maintain and masks his face in the perfect moody smolder these magazines love so much. Three more pops of the shutter, some grumbling and direction by the photographer, and one more position change, and he’s finally free.

As he’s looking at the pictures and throwing a robe over his bare torso and boxer-clad bottom, Bucky’s attention is pulled from the camera’s tiny screen to the back of the spacious room by Natasha’s stern, Russian-lilted voice. The accent only came out when she was agitated, so the sound alone is often used as a warning sign to those closest to her to stay away.

“How did you even get up here? Is there no security in place? I swear-”

Bucky turns to find his manager - all five-foot-three inches of her - standing defensively in front of whomever she’s cornered by the elevator.

“As I said, I’m here in place of Ms. Potts.” Bucky perks up at the second voice; is almost positive he recognizes the sweet melody despite having only encountered it once several months before. “Here, look, I have my badge.”

Sure enough, as Bucky scurries over to the duo, he sees a familiar face anxiously looking at his manager. He might be terrible with names, but Bucky Barnes rarely forgets a face.

“Natasha, why do you insist on harassing every person who sets foot within a five-foot radius of me while on the job?” Bucky jokes as he approaches the women.

He watches as your attention shifts from the annoyed redhead to him; a look of shock and maybe a hint of mortification flashes across your face.

“I wasn’t harassing. This is a closed set, and randos from the street can’t just walk on up,” Natasha rolls her eyes. “And it’s not you I’m worried about. It’s...you. But you know what I mean!”

He does. After all, protecting his privacy and work is one of Bucky’s most significant concerns. That doesn't mean he isn’t going to tease Natasha any chance he gets. He playfully scoffs and turns his attention to you. “I see you got the job. I told you everything was going to work out.”

Bucky can’t help but preen at the way you anxiously tuck a non-existent stray hair behind your ear and bite your lip. “You were right. Mr. Stark isn’t as intimidating as I thought. Although,” you playfully roll your eyes, “he is a menace. He promised Pepper’s attendance at a meeting, so now you’re stuck with an inexperienced interviewer rather than the queen of journalism.”

“Bah!” Bucky exclaims. “I’m sure you’ll do great. Plus, you’re not the one half-naked in the situation. If anyone embarrasses themselves, it’ll be me.”

Natasha chortles at the comment, mumbling something the sounds a lot like, “ever the charmer,” before walking away. At the same time, Bucky doesn’t miss the way your gaze slowly skims down his cotton-clade body before snapping back up to his face.

“Come on. We just broke for lunch, and Stark spares no expense when it comes to the spreads.”

It’s well past six-thirty in the evening when you finally make it back to your building. Despite the exhaustion flowing through your veins and the grumble in your stomach reminding you every five minutes that you haven’t eaten since lunchtime, there’s a festive air to your being, a proverbial pep to your step that could only be the result of a successful first interview experience.

Yeah, you were a nervous wreck before and during the interview, but you walked away feeling amazing about yourself - and with three pages worth of phenomenal, touching, and personal quotes from the one and only Bucky Barnes.

You try to ignore the butterflies that erupt low in your belly at the thought of the blue-eyed god of a man. Despite having no other experience interviewing someone with as large of a celebrity as he, you’ve concluded that Bucky is an angel of an interviewee. He was polite, answered all of your questions, and flirted just a little. Or, at least that’s what you would call it if you were anyone but a lowly editorial assistant who still purchased from bargain bins because that’s all you could afford. In all reality, Bucky was a very smooth talker with the confidence to back it up. It explained the incomprehensible hype surrounding the man you had no idea was such a big deal less than twelve hours prior.

The rumble of your stomach pulls you back to reality as you unlock your apartment door. You push the thoughts of Bucky to the back of your mind, settle for finishing unpacking the day for when you’re unwinding for bed. Right now, all you want to focus on is fo-

“Uh, hello!” your roommate Wanda screeches as you push open the door. The redhead is standing, arms crossed, in your entry, a look of disdain on her face. “When were you going to tell me, your best friend and roommate, who pays half the rent and utilities, mind you, that Bucky Barnes followed you on Instagram. James Bucky Barnes, Y/N!”

You freeze at the mention of the man who has taken up every inch of your mind since you left the shoot earlier that day. You deposit your keys onto the small table next to the door and try to act as nonchalant as possible. “What are you talking about, Wanda?”

Your roommate starts wagging her phone in front of your face before pulling it back so she can read off her screen. “Well, I follow these gossip blogs - just for fun, of course. I like to stay up-to-date with all the celebrity goings-on.” You fix Wanda with an unamused look as you pass by on the way to the kitchen. “And I was scrolling through, catching up on today’s gossip, and all of a sudden, I see a screenshot of your Instagram account!”

You freeze mid-reach for a saucepan and turn to look at her. “What?”

“Yea, see,” Wanda holds her phone out so you can see the screen. Low and behold, there your account is; questionably composed landscape shots of the city and poorly-lit food pics in all their glory. “It started to circulate this afternoon after someone saw he followed you! Why did he follow you?”

You slowly resume your task of reheating last night’s spaghetti as you answer her. “I...I don’t know? I met him at work this afternoon. He probably just followed me because of Stark.” You shrug despite the thrill that runs through your body.

You halfheartedly listen as Wanda blabs on about the crush she’s apparently had for years despite never having once mentioned it to you, too focused on running through the day’s events to care much about how she’s seen every single one of his films at least a dozen times.

Maybe he had been flirting with you? His manager did mention he flirts with anything with a heartbeat, so it was most likely just part of his personality. Or at least the role he played in public. You weren’t naive enough to think that who Bucky presented himself as to the media, fans, and others not in his inner circle was the real Bucky. After all, he was likely just trying to win you over so you’d write something good about him.

Still, you can’t help the giddy smile that creeps across your face as, when you finally lie down for the night, you open the Instagram app to find Bucky’s name and verified status among the several notifications awaiting you.

@redbarn1995 @juenenfeu

An Offer Received - Part I

A Jaguar Villain Tom Hiddleston Character (Thomas Conrad) fanfic 

Pairing:Thomas Conrad x Fem!reader 

Summary: You were just doing your job. It wasn’t your fault you did it so well that your boss, Thomas Conrad, wanted to recruit you in his plan for world domination. And what Mr. Conrad wants, well…

Rating: Part I - an F-bomb or two (later parts heat up, but gotta start somewhere) 

A/N: This is rather the hopeless result of watching "High-Rise", "Crimson Peak", the British Villain Jaguar commercial series, and "The Night Manager" over the last few weeks...so, here goes nothing! Planned to be 5 or 6 parts when all’s said and done. 

GIF credit to the original poster via the Tumblr search! 

Part I - 5 Minutes 

You dropped to your office chair with a sigh, plugging in your laptop. Today’s department head meeting had passed uneventfully for once. Robert Stark, Head of R&D, and Chris Rogers, Head of Operations, constantly jockeyed for more allocation of your production resources. It was challenging, you’d admit – finding the balance act between supply and demand while planning for the future. But you were the youngest Head of Production for the largest tech giant in the world, Lok Industries – better known by the LOKI brand splashed on phones, watches, tablets, computers – for a reason.

While youngest as your particular department head, you were hardly the youngest on the senior staff. And that was to say nothing of the CEO himself. The youngest man in corporate history at the helm – an engineer with the aptitude for business strategy and the political savvy to chart a meteoric rise to the top. In fact, Thomas J. Conrad’s nomination for CEO five years ago passed unanimously in record time.  

You’d never met him, never even seen him around the office despite your department head position. Plenty of others had, though, with stories to tell and scars to prove it. You tried to stay above the office gossip – especially when it concerned your senior boss – but it was intriguing. For all the press release photos and official portraits you’d seen – Mr. Conrad looked pleasant enough. Intelligent, sky-blue eyes; well-coiffed, gold-brown hair that betrayed just a hint of natural curl; a dashing smile. But that’s all it was, according to the hearsay – just a well-crafted facade. No one should be fooled by those eyes that could cut men in half; by that clever mind operating with ruthless intent; or, by that sharp, cold tongue that knew no mercy.

It sounded like such a cliché. The handsome, suave boss who was secretly-not-so-secretly a heartless bastard. A vicious predator in a bespoke suit. Albeit, a gorgeous one.

That’s why you didn’t care for the gossip. It’d be far better to meet the man and form your own opinions – but you’d been sufficiently warned that you’d only be brought before Mr. Conrad when you royally fucked up. “Not if you royally fuck up,” Scarlett Romanov had helpfully clarified with a coy smile, “but when you royally fuck up.”

Well, four years in and it hadn’t happened yet. And today was no time to start.

Turning to your laptop, you tended to the business at hand – reviewing production data, answering emails, assigning resource allocation. All in a day’s work. At one point you glanced at the clock, realizing there was just an hour left in your day. Perfect.

Perhaps tonight, you’d break the stalemate with Sebastian Barnes, Head of IT, and text him. He was quite handsome in his own right, easy to converse with, and even easier to fall into bed with. Even morning coffee at his apartment had been pleasant. But work got in the way for both of you – between server upgrades and production outages, there always seemed to be some excuse recently.

The desk phone beeped twice, flashing red, followed by another set of two beeps. An internal caller. You glanced at the ID on the screen, brow furrowing as you hit the speaker button.“Afternoon, Mrs. Brunhilde.”

“Good afternoon.” The pleasant voice of Mrs. Willamina Brunhilde – a relic of the former CEO and still glorified secretary of the CEO’s office – suffused your name with warmth and professional detachment. “Mr. Conrad would like to see you. He has an opening for the next hour, and I’ve just reserved the time on your calendar. Are you in a position to come to his office in 5-10 minutes?”

You knew the question was largely a polite formality. When Mrs. Brunhilde called and Mr. Conrad wanted a meeting, there was no excuse to say no. Your heart rate accelerated as you swallowed. “Of course. I’ll be right there.”

With a few more perfunctory pleasantries, the call ended. You exhaled deep, fighting to reign in the sudden nervous energy that pooled in your gut. This was no different than any other meeting you’d attended – you were smart, you were capable. You were the Head of Production, and you didn’t get this job for being a pretty face. Brushing your slacks, adjusting your blazer, and smoothing your bangs, you exited your office for the trek across the sprawling building.

Mr. Conrad’s office suite overlooking the city harbor matched much of the building aesthetic – sharp lines, glass and chrome, a study in clean whites and crisp greys with hints of the company’s bold green signature color. Mrs. Brunhilde greeted you with a smile, ushering you forward to the dark, partially cracked double-doors. You rapped on the wood, exhaling deep.

“Enter.” His velvety, British drawl had always been appealing. 

You opened the door further, stepping inside. He glanced up from the slim folder in hand as he sat in the white, leather chair at his desk – the picture of perfection with straight posture, a black tie knotted tight at his throat, and the crisp white sleeves of his dress shirt on display.

He inclined his head ever so faintly, face devoid of a smile. “Thank you for coming.” Your name rolled off his tongue in the most pleasing way.

You tipped your head in return. “Of course. Thank you, sir, for taking the time.”

He reached to his laptop, pressing a button on the keyboard before looking back to the folder as audio started to play.

Your stomach sank to your feet as you recognized it.

Your voice carried clear. “Our control limits are holding – 23 defects per 1,000,000 units. Our department has set an improvement goal to drop that number from 23 to 5 in the next four years –.”

Robert’s voice interrupted. “Oh goody, but perhaps, more importantly, you can tell me when Lane 5 will be restored?”

“The investigation into Lane 5 is still ongoing,” you said, voice even, “the code has been scrubbed, and we’re looking at retooling options.”

“Retooling options?” Robert scoffed. “Need I remind you that it’s been 33 hours since you canned my primary production line? That’s 33 hours of lost time, to the tune of – oh, say a 9% drop of market share come holiday season if we don’t finish the dev on these new marine products.”

You didn’t miss a beat. “As opposed to a 21% loss in market share if we let our control limits slip and start producing a higher percentage of defective products? Consumers know the LOKI brand is reliable – the highest reliability of any of our competition – and reliability makes or breaks on the production floor. Sacrifice quality control limits and you might as well kiss your cushy retirement goodbye.”

“Then, scale back – temporarily – on Rogers’ orders. He’s meeting quota, check the box for market supply. And if it does get tight, well, a little more demand for less supply usually helps -”

“Robert,” you cut him off, voice tight, “this is my call. I’ve looked at the same numbers you have – with Lane 5 out of commission until we can bring it up to spec, it’s a hit to our bottom line. It’s my job to minimize that hit. While never desirable, we can weather a 9% loss without permanent damage to the brand. Even Mr. Conrad would agree to that. But, if you don’t like that answer – then, by all means, let’s do discuss with Mr. Conrad.” 

The room fell dead quiet, broken only by the faint squeak of a shifting chair.

“Well,” Robert started softly, “I don’t know that we need to go there just yet. What’s your projection on the investigation conclusion?”

“Retooling should complete in the next 21 hours, then we’ll move through start-up.”

Conrad’s hand floated back to his keyboard, pressing a button to cut off the recording. You didn’t dare speak as silence fell. If he was displeased, you would know soon enough. And if he was pleased, well…no one ever said they were called to Mr. Conrad’s office because he was pleased.

Your heart raced as he drew out the moment, but you wouldn’t let him see you sweat. You wouldn’t let him unnerve you.

Cold, crystalline eyes darted up to yours, pinning you in place. “You have absolutely no authority to speak for me. Making baseless statements about my assumed inclinations is not part of your job. Your job does include resolving those inter-department squabbles without leveraging my involvement as a threat. Now, if you’re incapable of standing behind your own decisions, incapable of defending the trajectory that you have set for your department and this corporation by extension – then, tell me now and spare me further disappointment.”

You responded on instinct, hiding the sting of his words.“No, sir. I’ve watched the company’s production numbers for almost four years now. Every metric is higher across the board than when I assumed the position -”

“Yes, including budget. Your department’s costs have increased, not exactly commensurate with your outputs. Diminishing returns often plague the pursuit for perfection as one approaches the pinnacle.” He glanced down idly to the file in his hand. “Your department walks that razor’s edge now. It would be well within my interest, perhaps, to cap you there.”

“Sir, the quality of our production is unparalleled –.”

“But you wanted to bring the discussion to Mr. Conrad, did you not? Well, here you are.” He closed the folder, tossing it idly to his desk before rising. Despite the late hour, he looked as pressed and polished as if the day had just started. He crossed around to the front of his desk, bracing against it as he rested his hands inside his trouser pockets. “There’s only one solution in this case.”

You debated asking but thought against it. Asking would be redundant. He wouldn’t have brought you here without a purpose, without something to gain.

He gestured at the nearest leather armchair opposite his desk. “Do have a seat.”

You paused, hesitating in consideration of his words. Sitting as he indicated would place you in a physically submissive position to his tall, lithe figure. Not that you were short in your heels – standing just over 5’9” – but you weren’t exactly keen to meet your senior boss on unequal footing.

His gaze hardened, mouth pinching with irritation. “If you’re stalling for time, my patience is not inexhaustible. And when I make an offer, I expect it to be received.”

Steeling yourself, moistening your lips, you crossed around to sit as indicated. You squared your shoulders and held your head high, refusing to fully angle back to look up at him as he spoke.

“Mrs. Brunhilde’s time at LOKI has come to an end. As you know, she was installed to her post by my predecessor who tailored the position to suit his needs. Needs that no longer align with my own or the corporation. The position is now evolving to meet the ever-evolving environment in which it must function.”

You nearly whiplashed from the change in conversation. Hadn’t he just questioned your ability to successfully do your job…?

He continued to speak softly yet there was no mistaking the hard, commanding edge. “The new terms for the CEO Administrative Executor now require someone with a working knowledge of the business and its trajectory; a willingness to stand in defense of that trajectory while keeping a clear head for the larger vision,” he pitched slightly forward, voice dropping with the barest hint of a tease, “and, of course, leveraging the power of one’s boss with explicit authority.”

It sure sounded like a tease, but you couldn’t be sure. You were too busy reeling from the implications. “Forgive me, sir,” you looked up at him, “but…it sounds like you’re suggesting….” You didn’t finish. Couldn’t finish. The thought of being removed as Head of Production and reassigned as his personal secretary, office administrative whatever repulsed you. Had he already judged you incapable? Was this punishment for one fucking meeting?

“I’m more than just suggesting.” He reached behind him for a loose sheet of paper. “Take the rest of this week as transition, and start in earnest on Monday.”

“The rest of this week?” You couldn’t stop the outburst. “I couldn’t possibly – you’re giving me just three days to transition out as Head of Production, and into the role of your office executor? Who’s my replacement? I need time to prepare the turnover, oversee the transition – and, surely, I should be involved in determining my replacement.”

A wolfish smile ghosted his face. “Welcome to your first objective in your new role. In addition to learning the expectations of this office and implementing goals for your redefined position, of course.” He held out the paper in your direction and you stared at it, wishing it would burst into flames.

The official notice of transfer with authority granted by the one and only Thomas J. Conrad.

Well, you wouldn’t be texting Sebastian tonight, after all. Not when your workload just quadrupled. You reached out for the paper, gripping it tight as you sighed.

“You needn’t look so glum about it,” he scolded lightly. “Consider it a promotion. If you hadn’t caught my eye – or ear, more accurately – you wouldn’t be here now. At least, you’ll find I’m rather adept at managing my own schedule; my valet manages my personal affairs; and, the café staff is well aware of my expectations for coffee and tea service.”

You quirked a brow. “Isn’t coffee delivery standard to every assistant position?”

He leveled you with a stern look in return. “If you ever bring me a cup of steaming liquid, you’ll find your pay docked by 60%. You’re in this position to be eyes, ears, and perspective on this company. Someone adept at managing the razor’s edge and surviving.” He straightened from his desk, extending a hand. “Are we understood on your priorities?”

Another challenge. Another opportunity. And if it didn’t pan out…well, how many others could say they worked directly for Thomas J. Conrad on their resume?

You rose, taking his hand. “Understood, sir.”

His answering smile, predatory and self-satisfied, sent shivers down your spine.

Up Next: Part II - 5 Weeks 

2- Jean Jacket ( Maxwell Lord x F!Reader )

( 

- Part 2 - Maxwell Lord x Reader

┃Previous Part ┃ -  ┃MasterList┃

Warnings : Mention of sex / Maxie is ... excited

Words : 2839

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« I am Maxwell Lord but I think you already knew that, didn't you ? » He tilts his head to the side with a little smirk.

« Oh uh- Yes indeed. » At first you thought he had it all figured out but you remember his smiling face and absolutely everywhere in this city, television, newspapers. It would be surprising not to know him if you were from here but you know him for other reasons - because your favorite actor plays him -, besides he is one of the characters who looks the least like Pedro Pascal when you think about it, he is closely shaved so no emblematic moustache or "beard" and no dark brown hair slightly curly and undisciplined. Everything about him exudes richness and without his smile he seems cold and intimidating. But you still follow him inside and the atmosphere in the elevator is strange, you are alone with Maxwell because apparently no one else had dared to get on the same elevator as him preferring instead to give you room with a compassionate look that you don't really understand, for the moment Maxwell was being rather exemplary which is surprising it's true, you would have expected him to be more condescending or something like that but since the few words exchanged in front of the Lord Industry building he hadn't said a word, just walking next to you and ignoring the shy greetings of his employees on the way.

Now your panic a little lower - although still present - you feel a little tired so you lean against the wall of the farthest elevator of Maxwell, a slight shiver runs through you when you feel his eyes resting on you and you nibble your lip nervously. When the doors open and Maxwell starts to move forward you take a deep breath as if you had just pulled your head out of the water and then follow him, the heels of your shoes making noise with each step and you sigh inside, you wanted to be as discreet as possible but apparently your pretty boots decided otherwise and so a few heads turn on your way judging you openly, it's the same kind of unpleasant feeling you get when you're new to a schoolyard but you're an adult now so it shouldn't affect you anymore even if it still makes you uncomfortable to be honest, so in a false air of confidence you keep your gaze fixed on Maxwell's broad shoulders as he walks in front of you with a confident step. He stops in front of a door and carelessly opens it letting you go first and then closes it once he goes in, he relies on in the front of his big dark wooden desk crossing his arms on his wide chest and then he looks at you with a touch of amusement when you look at the room you are in, it is much bigger than your whole apartment and you slowly realize that yes, you are in Maxwell Lord's office, just that.

You nervously begin to scratch your black varnish which is flaking a little as Maxwell watches you, a mean smile appears on his lips.

« Sit down, » he nodded to her in the seat right in front of him, « You seem completely lost, Miss ...? »

You tell him your name and then sit down with a little sigh of relief, you hadn't noticed how weak your legs were before you sat down, you would have liked to relax a little but it's quite complicated with Maxwell bending over a little and his eyes not leaving you for a second. He was obviously about to say something but someone knocks on the door, he sighs in annoyance and rubs his left hand on his closely shaved jaw.

 « Come in. » His voice sounds different than before, colder and more professional, but when his assistant enters with a coffee in her hand and a small white paper bag he doesn't hide his obvious displeasure at being interrupted, she approaches Maxwell with a sweet smile as she flutters her eyes with her long eyelashes in a false air of shyness, it's quite funny to see from the outside and your could almost let out a little laugh but you doubt the situation is really ready so you hold back. « Put everything on my desk and take out, Nicole. » Her authoritative voice leaves her assistant no choice. 

« My name is Charlie, Mr. Lord. » she says with pursed lips.

Maxwell makes a vague gesture with his hand as a sign of understanding but he doesn't seem at all interested in the young woman's name and you feel a little sorry for her, you give her a little apologetic look but she returns it with an irritated expression and quickly puts the coffee and the packet right next to her boss on the desk on which it is leaned negligently then she passes by you on her way to the door and her too flowery perfume stings your nose a little bit as you pass by.

« Mr. Lord, you have an interview with Mr. Beauchamp in 15 minutes. » Reminds Charlie in a small voice.

 Maxwell sighs a little and then nods his head and after that she comes out without another word, you sink a little more into your seat and wait for the next movement of the man visibly a little annoyed in front of you, it would be unwise to irritate him more when he was the only person in this fictitious parallel world to have paid attention to you but that doesn't change the fact that you are rather upset of how he treats his assistant, Even if she doesn't seem to carry you in her heart at all it doesn't stop you from feeling a little sorry for her if she suffers the wrath of her boss all the time in this way, even if Maxwell is handsome and charismatic it doesn't change the fact that he is despicable with her. 

This kind of problem of trivialized misogyny, even more present at this period.

You hear him take the paper bag, then he puts it on your lap, you raise an eyebrow in his direction, then you smile slightly at him, you open the bag and discover two cookies that still look warm and the smell seems divine. You don't know where Charlie found them in such a short time, but your stomach thanks her, you take one in your fingers and make sure that it stays halfway in the paper bag so that you don't get crumbs everywhere when you bite into it. But before, you look up at Maxwell sipping his coffee, he always seems to frown a little for some unknown reason.

You clear your throat a little and he looks at you again, you feel your cheeks getting a little warm and you take the second cookie out of the packet and hand it to him with a little smile.

« Maybe you could use a little “something with sugar” to get through this interview, Mr. Lord. »

His cup of coffee still against his lips and his shocked face makes you both anxious and amused, he puts his drink next to him and observes your outstretched hand, he seems really unsettled.

« They are for you. »

« One will be enough for me I have ... my stomach is a little tied, » tap your slightly exposed belly with your hand as if to strengthen your argument, it's true your belly is a little tied because of all the emotions you've been through in such a short time. You don't notice his gaze lingering more than necessary on the skin exposed by your short top.

 « It would be silly to throw away that delicious cookie, don't you think ? »You add, waving your hand a little as if you were coaxing an animal with a treat, the comparison of Maxwell and a frightened animal makes you smile a little, it makes you think of the meeting with Roucky your cat who was a stray cat that you managed to tame by bringing him every day a different treat in the alley where he had chosen to live, at first he didn't come close and ran away, then little by little he came to you and finally agreed to eat out of your hand, after that he became so affectionate and waited for you to come every day, and one day you decided to bring him to your house to see if he would agree to stay, which he did and now he has been living with you for 2 years.

You feel a twinge in your heart at the thought of your cat waiting for you at home, are you going to see him again one day?  « I guess you must be right. » He reaches out his hand to yours hesitantly as if you were suddenly going to run away with the cookie, when he grabs the cookie your fingers barely touch his, an indescribable feeling runs through your body and you freeze for a few moments and Maxwell too. Your eyes meet with the same incomprehension and you quickly withdraw your hand while Maxwell brings the cookie to his lips without taking your eyes off you, you look away and decide to bite into your own cookie to distract yourself.

« Call me Maxwell. » You feel his gaze on you and that again generates a strange and unknown sensation throughout your body, you almost start to suffocate in his spacious office and you wish you could take off your jean jacket that feels like it weighs a ton on your outstretched shoulders, but you know it's not a good idea, not in front of the almost predatory look Maxwell Lord has on you. You look at your feet and rush to eat your cookie and after you are going to pretend you have something to do, anything to get you out of here. Luck seems to be on your side this time as someone knocks on the door again and a sort of frustrated grunt comes out of Maxwell's throat.

« Mr. Lord, Mr. Beauchamp is here, waiting for you. » Charlie's high-pitched voice can be heard from behind the door and your get up quickly, the paper bag of cookies in your right hand, you squeeze it which creates a rustling noise and smile nervously at the man in front of you.

« I- »  You clear your throat looking everywhere except Maxwell's face, « I should go, thanks for... the cookies. » You quickly turn around to the door and once you put your hand on the wrist of the door you hear him approaching and feel his presence in your back, your blood almost boils in your veins at this new closeness. And when he whispers your name in a puzzled voice, you swallow your saliva.   « I could see you again ? »He seems disturbed too, but his voice is firm and resolute and you, you are certain that you couldn't line up two words without stuttering at this moment.

« Mr. Lord ? »Charlie asks again as she hasn't received a verbal answer from his boss.

You swear that you could kiss this a little hypocritical woman to give you a chance to get out of this awkward situation.

« I don't know... Goodbye Maxwell. » 

You open the door with your hand that has become sweaty and you rush out without a glance behind you, it's only when the elevator doors close that you allow yourself to close your eyes and relax a little but it's only for a short time because once you're back on the street you realize that you have absolutely nowhere to go and you don't know DC. 

You run one hand through your hair and you feel tears of frustration building up in your eyes. Yeah this situation is only cool in storys because then you swear you're one step away from having an anxiety attack and you don't even have your headphones and phone to listen to soft music to relax. Clenching your fist you realize that you still have the cookie paper bag, you observe it for a few moments even if there is nothing especially interesting about it, you should just throw it away but you put it in your jacket pocket and you start walking aimlessly in an unknown city at a period when you are not even supposed to have been born.

You don't belong here.

                                            ☆────────☆

You were just a young woman a little lost with clothes and a haircut a little avant-garde, you seemed rather pretty from afar he noted as he got out of the car driven by his driver but it is while approaching a little closer that he saw your face absolutely panicked while you were holding in your hand an object he had never seen before.

It intrigued him a bit so he just moved a little closer and ended up right in front of you and a subtle scent of pink pleasantly caressed his nostrils when he got close enough, your perfume was just present enough to be enticing but not enough to be heady like the perfume of his new assistant, a faded blonde with interesting curves, Maybe that's the only reason he hired him in the first place and it was nice the first week, but now that he fucked her a few times in his office when he was particularly tense she seemed to become much too intrusive believing surely that he had a special interest in her.

He has absolutely no remorse about using this shallow girl to whom he gave a pair of earrings expensive enough to make her lose her self-esteem completely, the power of money always wins.

But you, you seemed very little concerned by his presence so he subtly cleared his throat to make you look up at him so that he could fully observe your face and judge if you were as pretty as he thought he saw from afar.  But you don't react, always getting angry about the weird object in your hands, it was a fine object with a minimalist design and he couldn't really understand what it was for and why you were holding it with such panic and frantically pressing on the side of the object. Maxwell became more and more intrigued, he crossed his arms and cleared his throat again, this time a little louder and it seemed to work because you stopped pressing and shaking a little the object and raised your head with a little smile on your pulpy lips that he observed with an interest he didn't bother to conceal, and when your eyes met his you seemed absolutely in shock, but not the kind of shock he's used to seeing on the faces of the women he meets who look like they're about to hyperventilate when he inadvertently crosses their eyes.

He can't control his slight smile when he sees your pretty face twisting with several different emotions that he can't quite place in the moment, he raises an eyebrow and that's when he sees you looking down on your free hand with your palm open towards you and you look at length with a slight frown. Maxwell blinks several times when he realizes that you have just... ignored him? Normally the irritation would have overwhelmed him because nobody ignores Maxwell Lord and even less from a woman, but surprisingly he felt a kind of curiosity and a slight amusement towards you... Everything about you seemed to awaken something unknown in him and he frown when you suddenly left his office, he wanted to fire that assistant - Elly? Kylie? Anyway - for interrupting this moment and making you run away so quickly, you were incredibly intriguing and he found himself wanting to see you again. It was very surprising coming from him wanting to see a woman again and especially without having fucked her, not that he didn't want, you were attractive - really attractive - in your jeans pants that squeeze your thighs deliciously and it's certain that if your slightly too big jacket didn't hide your ass from his greedy eyes you would have driven him crazy if you had walked in front of him. But it was your top that almost made him go feral, you seemed completely indifferent to your obvious lack of bra, he could clearly discern your nipples through the thin fabric and when he noticed it his cock contracted in his pants and his throat became dry.

But this stupid interview has prevented him from enjoying your presence a little more and the frustration invades him when he realizes that he only knows your first name, he didn't even have time to give you his phone number to reach him directly, he serves his fists. But he is a stubborn man and he will find you somehow.

Sweet little thing that you were, you managed to get his attention and to his own amazement he wanted to see you again.

Salvation

Alfie Solomons X Reader

Part 1 | Part 2

“The walls came down as she watched, almost a little too loudly as he felt her breath against his face, the feeling of vulnerability and tenderness grasping his heart as she stared..”

The carriages moved one by one, soundly as they made their way downtown. There was much chatter and the sound of glass breaking around the concrete walls as men filled the space in. Workers from all around the place had come in to take part of the business after hearing about the pay and the bosses. The fading colours of black and grey all resided somewhere in their uniforms as they walked around, waiting patiently.

She was shaking her leg while reading the paper in her hand. She seemed a little restless, not because she had no time to rest but because her mind wouldn’t leave her alone. She was simply an overthinker. Her hair was down with two pins on either side, keeping her shorter hair in place as she made no movement to fix her coat. She was wearing a black dress today, it was the most comfortable one she owned but it was still work appropriate.

Alfie watched her movement as he waited for her to be done evaluating. He was worried about the tiresome attitude she seemed to carry today but didn’t ponder much on it as he walked around the place. He was wearing a white shirt as usual, a long black coat and his large hat to go with it. His jewels weren’t missing either. She sighed before putting down the papers and looking at Joe, her assistant.

There were four people in the room, two bosses and two assistants. Alfie didn’t like to call Ollie his assistant, he was his wing man for the most part. Joe, on the other hand, had been with Y/N for a long time and he’d known her through thick and thin so they were more likely to be acquaintances. Alfie looked at her patiently, waiting for her to talk.

He had visited her twice this week: one was about business and the other was about personal things. They had a drink or two before they started talking again and Alfie wanted the topic to come to a more personal one so that he could at least offer taking her out but there never seemed to a perfect time and the day was over like that, he had nerves around her.

“The man are outside?” she asked, fixing her coat and scarf, getting ready to talk to them as Alfie also got up.

Ollie nodded, murmuring a small yes before they proceeded with the next part of their deal. She was not worried about doing business with Alfie, she liked him far more than any other business partner she had and he was a sharp one. He also said whatever was on his mind which made Y/N’s job a lot more easier. She didn’t tell him how handsome she thought he was, although the thought had threatened to slip her tongue every now and then when he visited.

He had brought her flowers and some treats each time he visited. She made the decision to press the flowers so that they’d always be around, the treats were already eaten. The more she saw him, the more confused she became due to the feeling of her heart beating around him a little too fast. She wasn’t the one with all the experience and she’d never liked anyone, let alone have actual feelings for them so she kept pushing the feelings aside while waiting for them to fade away.

“You wanna talk, yeah?” Alfie spoke to her, in a tone only she could hear as they walked to talk to the new workers. “To the men..” he corrected when a look of panic and confusion took her face over.

“No, I don’t mind...really.” she said, wanting him to speak. 

They had to gather men to work at Alfie’s place, to carry things out in between the business as there were many things to be taken care of in between the businesses. She had heard Alfie shouting before so she knew how loud and cruel he could be to them. She knew he wouldn’t speak to her like that, ever but there were times when she got more curious about the life he had, when he was in the army and even before.

The minute they saw Alfie, the men straightened up and fixed themselves on their feet, looking at the pretty lady with a confused face. She sat on a barrel around the place as Alfie started shouting, getting louder each time. She started paying attention after a couple minutes later, rescuing herself from her own thoughts.

“.....you lot, yeah, fucking listen to your superior officers!”he was getting louder but it didn’t bother her as he shouted about not touching any of the rum or they’d get their faces cut.

“Now, the lady, right..” he said, dropping his tone as he explained about Y/N, how she was also the boss and carried on. “..no fucking looking at her. You, right, only fucking talk to her if she speaks first..” he kept shouting but she was confused as to why the men weren’t allowed to speak to her. She managed a business with over 300 men under her palm, she could handle 50 more. She waited until he was finished.

“You have anything to add, doll?” he spoke, only in a volume that she could hear and she nodded. She didn’t get up from the barrel as they could see Y/N clearly, she spoke loud and clear.

“Do no touch the piles of cotton in the corners, it’ll most likely explode.” she said as Alfie carefully watched her. She exhaled confidence now. “If you go out of orders, the protection promised for the families is off.” she said, getting up and taking a breath in before she got ready to speak again.

“Do not fuck it up.” she said with a soft smile, filled with mockery as she walked to his office again. Alfie told them to fuck off and followed her like a puppy as she walked alongside Joe. 

The first time Alfie had seen her, there was a confusion cast in his eyes about how she was able to run that business on her own. Now, he understood. She was smart, probably smarter than any man in the business at the moment. She also had an extreme control over the room, wherever she walked except when she was with Alfie, she dropped her guard at those times. The industry had shaped her to be quick-witted as well as practical and she was young so there was an energy around her that only made Alfie more interested.

More than a businesswoman, she was a lady. The blush on her cheeks due to how young she was never went away sometimes. She wanted things to be done quick and right, even more so than Alfie and she was also aware of the fact that if she wanted something to be done perfectly, she had to do it herself. 

But there was also this side of her that was darker in Alfie’s eyes. She could be calm at times, maybe too calm for Alfie’s liking. The distant look in her eyes made him stop at his tracks when they spoke, there was so much emotion in her eyes that Alfie was almost scared to open that door but he tried, because it was her and she took it easy with Alfie, spared details and only talked to him about things scarcely when she was asked about them.

“Doll, mind if I speak to you alone, yeah?” he asked, watching Joe and Ollie leave. They had become quite close over the weeks due to how similar their lives were.

“Is something the matter?” she asked, letting herself drop on his sofa she laid on sometimes. Instead of sitting on his chair, he sat on the sofa right in front of her. He needed to see her clearly.

“No, things are fine, right..” he said, looking at her eyes as she sat up properly this time, realising it was something important. “...but, there is this fucking thing, right, that’s been bugging me..” he said, finally. She stared at him, waiting for him to go on while he didn’t dare to look at her face.

“Alright.”she said, thinking about so many infinite possibilities of what he could say.

They waited for a while, Alfie was playing with the rings on his finger as she gave him the time he needed. Sometimes, Alfie could become very still. It was usually when he was thinking about something important or when he hadn’t gotten sleep last night but there was no sign of tiredness on his face so she waited for him to articulate the sentences before speaking.

“Alfie..” she said, sitting on the same sofa this time as she leaned in close. He could feel her warmth oozing from her body as she sat close, closer than they’d been most of the time. “..you can tell me..” she said, playing with the end of his sleeves, fixing them abruptly as he stared at her.

But how could he tell her?

How could he tell her that he’d been dreaming about her, a grown man who was an infamous gangster was dreaming about a business associate. How could he tell her that he always wanted her to be around and he didn’t care about the many little things she despised about herself? How could he tell her that he wanted her near, all the time and never apart from him, not even for one second? So he swallowed and spoke.

“Dove, we know each other, yeah?” he said, she was still playing with his sleeve, happy about the new pet name as she nodded.

“I happen to think, right, a great deal about you..” he said, his words were breathier, he wasn’t calm anymore as she stopped playing with his sleeve and instead just stared at him, waiting for him to be finished.

There were things that didn’t go unnoticed and she knew. She knew that when she touched his thigh, he would get red. She also knew how gentle he was with her, sometimes taking her hand when she was lost around his business place and he would show her the right way. She loved the pet names and a few times where Alfie had come so close to kissing her actually happened in her dreams.

But she said nothing.

There wasn’t a way in which she knew how to deal with the emotions inside. They were new, exciting and frankly, scary. She hadn’t known love, not like this. Family was different, there was love but it didn’t make her wonder how his lips would feel against her. She wanted to be with him but was afraid, afraid that he’d be too hesitant of professional and simply not make a move but there he was, trying to communicate his feelings. 

There was this distant feeling in her heart, that if things were to go right, he would most definitely disappear. He would leave like all the others did. She had been alone most of her life. Sure, there was her mum but she was mentally gone almost all her life. She thought that maybe, she was incapable of being loved. She was to be looked at, not touched.

“I also think, yeah, you’re the sweetest fucking thing to have around..” he said, he was sure she could hear his loud heartbeat under all that flesh. “So I was thinking..” she looked up at him for the first time as he struggled to finish his sentence.

“What if you’d be around all the time?” he whispered and he could swear, there were stars in her orbs as she looked at his face.

She didn’t say anything for a while, too excited to speak as her fingers shook. She wasn’t expecting him to be this sweet and frankly, neither did he but there they were, sitting next to each other as all they could see was the warm atmosphere around. He started playing with her hair while waiting for her to speak, it was killing him.

She was looking even more prettier than all the times he’d seen her up close now. Her hair framed her small face, she seemed to have an extra dash of pink along her cheeks now that he had spoken his mind. She looked around the room for a second, trying to savour the moment while it lasted. She could tell the man was starting to grow impatient.

She smiled softly, her face close to his more than it had ever been until that moment as her eyes sparkled, he held his breath as she spoke.

“Pick me up at 7.” she softly murmured, she knew he heard her by the way his features lit up. She got up quick, wearing her coat while leaving a confused yet excited Alfie behind. She walked back to where he stood and planted a kiss on his cheek, enjoying the way he blushed so aggressively under her delicate touch. One last glance was given by her and she was out.

And Alfie was the happiest man alive.

∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷∷

This has been sitting in my drafts FOR THE LONGEST TIME, I wanted to get it done. I’m in the middle of my finals now and I had a little bit of time so i wanted to send this out to you. I will get back on here after about 2 weeks. 

Remember to be kind to yourself and let me know what you think, please.

xx

Patch Up - A Jason Todd One-Shot

I talked to @jason-redhood​ about this one a while ago and just got it finished. Thank you so much, my friend! You’re awesome!

Warnings: violence, mentions of graphic violence and some blood but nothing terribly gory

JT/RH tag list: @welovegroot​ @jason-todd-squad​

“You are such an idiot.”

Not the best first thing to hear after waking up from being unconscious. I grunted. “Good morning to you too, Jason,” I mumbled.

“Y’know, we take pretty bad beatings in this life, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you get that royally thrashed,” Jason remarked. I peeled my eyes open to see a pair of blue eyes looking at me, a green ring around the pupils.

“Got jumped,” I mumbled.

Jason helped me sit up. “You look like death reheated.”

“I feel like death reheated.” I rubbed my temple. Flecks of red-brown flaked off. Dried blood. “What happened?”

Jason made a face. “Well...”

---

Two Days Ago...

---

I hung on to Jason’s elbow loosely, looking around the crowded room with idle curiosity. I could vaguely hear him introducing our aliases to important people in the room. “Good evening. My name is Maxwell and this is my girlfriend Victoria...” Truth be told I wasn’t paying much attention to him.

I was a simple girl from a simple world. I had incredible powers, but I grew up completely ordinary. The secrets of the upper class world of the rich and powerful were intriguing to me.

Even if the excess was a bit disgusting.

Jason tugged my hand. “Darling,” he said, trying to get my attention.

“Yeah, babe?” I replied.

“This is Thomas Owen, one of the kings of the pharmaceutical industry.”

I thanked past-me for deciding this formal event required over-the-elbow satin gloves, because they hid the fact that my knuckles went white around Jason’s elbow as my grip tightened fairly well. I put on the most false, forced smile I’d ever made. Nothing frustrated me more than jerks like this making bank on the suffering of others. “A pleasure to meet you. I’m Victoria.”

“Thomas. I assure you, the pleasure is mine,” the man said, beaming at me genuinely. He was in his fifties with quick eyes and salt-and-pepper hair.

Jason edged slightly into Thomas’ line-of-sight, cutting me off from his view. “My mother worked in pharmaceuticals for most of her career,” Jason said to Thomas.

I tuned out again. I knew exactly why Jason stepped between me and the older man. That man’s salacious grin was enough to make anyone protective of whoever the grin’s target was. Jason knew untoward behavior when he saw it. I’d never been brave enough to ask whether he knew from personal experience or just training with Batman. My best guess was possibly a little of both, but Jason had never been anything but respectful toward me. And every other woman I’d ever seen him interact with---superhero or not.

Maybe he just always assumed every woman he met could probably kick his butt.

A safe assumption, in my opinion.

Jason and Thomas spoke for a few more minutes while I observed the rest of the party. The person we were looking for would be heavily guarded---but if they were smart, the guards were dressed to blend in almost perfectly with the crowd.

That being said, targets of ours were never as smart as they could be. The guards were blatantly obvious. Men in tuxedoes---who most definitely didn’t pull them off as well as Jason did---standing around the perimeter.

Wires in full view, hands folded in front of them. It was like they really wanted to be seen and noticed. Maybe it was a power play. A display of intimidation.

It wasn’t working.

“Darling, would you care to dance?” Jason asked as the music turned from idle talking soundtrack to acceptable dance tune.

I smiled at him. “Of course, my love,” I said.

Jason and I shared a look that held a gag of irritation. Pretending to be dating was almost awkward after everything our relationship had been through.

We started to waltz around the dancefloor. Jason was remarkably elegant. Much better than I expected of a man of his stature and attitude. He held me so close our chests were touching. His head was bent low near mine. “Six o’clock. Wearing the grey bowtie.” He spun me under his arm slow enough that I caught sight of the target. “There’re too many people here. It’d be unwise to take out the target with this many eyes,” he whispered, lips blocked by my falling hair.

“I agree. We could take on the security guards but not the whole crowd,” I replied quietly, barely moving my lips like a ventriloquist.

“Wait till morning?” he asked.

“Good idea.”

He pulled back enough to look at my face. He gave me a grin---the kind that an outsider would think was lovestruck but I knew was just intensely good acting---and leaned down. I tilted up on my tiptoes to meet him and we shared a quick kiss.

Not long after that, we went to our room in the hotel, a few floors above the party. Jason was kind enough to let me shower and change first before he did the same. We’d agreed beforehand that sharing the bed for one night wasn’t going to kill us and we could be mature about it. So I was curled up on my side, back to the bathroom, when Jason returned.

“Starbeam?”

“Hmm?” I replied, his voice jolting me out of my reverie. I twisted to face him.

“Are we set on the plan for tomorrow morning?” He perched on the edge of the bed and glanced at me over his shoulder.

“Yup.” I nodded.

“One more question.”

“Shoot.”

“Do you mind if I sleep without a shirt on? They always get too twisted up.”

You are a mature and professional superhero. You are on a mission. Don’t be weird about it, I thought sharply. I shook my head. “I don’t care,” I said, forcing myself not to care.

I heard him strip off his shirt. “Thanks. G’night.”

“Night.”

He bedded down next to me. We weren’t forced to be close to each other by any means---it was a king-sized bed---but once he was under the covers I could feel his body heat. Holy cannoli the man was a space heater. I thought about removing my pajamas just so I wouldn’t overheat.

But I didn’t. I’d be fine.

I rolled so my back was to him again. I wasn’t terribly tired, all things considered, but I knew I’d need adequate rest to take down our target in the morning without being exhausted. Part of the vigilante lifestyle was perpetual exhaustion but sometimes I could mitigate just how badly I wanted to pass out at any given time.

Normally if I wasn’t tired, I wouldn’t go to sleep, but the background fatigue that accompanied my life lulled me to sleep pretty quickly.

If I dreamt, I don’t remember what I dreamt about. It was one of those nights where I blinked and it was morning.

Except morning came abruptly.

CRASH! The door was kicked open, the frame around the lock splintering.

Jason and I sat up and leapt out of the bed on pure instinct. Jason reached for his gun and I started to drum up my energy for my powers.

Before I could even begin to use my telekinesis for anything, one of the intruders---who, like the other four, was wearing all black with a ski mask over their head---shot me with something.

Electricity coursed through my body.

A taser.

A smart move. Overloading my body and mind with energy so I couldn’t focus on my powers or even move my muscles. Part of me was surprised that they didn’t just shoot me with proper bullets though.

I heard Jason shout---but couldn’t make out the words---as the one who shot me approached with a baton. It was wider and shorter than Nightwing’s escrima sticks but I knew what blunt force bludgeoning damage would be like from sparring with Nightwing.

Jason took on the other four on his own while I twitched on the floor, helpless, as the baton struck me again and again. I was aware of the pain, but incapable of doing anything about it. I couldn’t even scream. I got hit hard enough---several times---to split open my skin, blood warming my skin where it oozed from the cuts.

The grunts and flesh-on-flesh sounds from Jason’s fight got louder---and then softer.

Another strike of the baton made my vision blur.

I coughed weakly, not even sure how I was supposed to cry out for Jason. I couldn’t use his name---but did I dare call him Hood? I doubted there was a chance our cover was still intact; but could I risk that?

Heck, could I even move my mouth enough to cry out for him? The electricity was still making me twitch uncontrollably as I was struck.

“He---help!” I managed to gag out, not very loud.

I heard Jason’s grunt as one of the three he was facing went down.

The one with the baton raised it again. I squeezed my eyes shut.

But the blow never came.

Opening my eyes again---vision still blurry---I saw Jason, still missing his shirt, throwing the baton-wielder to the ground.

I blinked blearily, slowly regaining control of my muscles. They shook as I tried to get up.

“Star---Starbeam!” Jason shouted.

My vision swarmed with dots and everything went black.

---

Today...

---

I made a face. “Oh yeah. That sucked,” I muttered, trying to sit up.

Jason put his hand on my shoulder, holding my in place. “Oh no you don’t. You’re staying down. You took a bad beating.”

“But I---”

“Starbeam,” he interrupted, a serious expression on his face. Outside of The Work™, it was rare to see Jason quite so serious. He had a sarcastic, playful, nerdy sort of personality when he wasn’t bashing heads in and blowing brains out. “We’re in a safehouse. It’s okay. Just stay down.”

I groaned. The pain sweeping over me was acute.

Jason leaned over and pulled a washcloth out of a bowl, ringing it out in said bowl before dabbing the cloth over my head wounds. He was remarkably gentle, even though his hands were rough and callused when his skin brushed mine. I sighed, eyes fluttering closed, and leaned into his soft touch, searching for the comfort it provided.

“This is gonna hurt. I’m gonna reapply your bandages,” he warned.

“Mm,” I mumbled.

He disinfected the wounds he’d cleaned off, making me hiss in pain as it stung, but once the bandages were on, it wasn’t so bad.

“Jay?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. You’re the best,” I said.

He smiled---but there was a sarcasm to it.

“Nuh-uh,” I put in before he could say anything. “No self-loathing or insecurity allowed when I’m complimenting you, ya hear?” I sounded like an exhausted but enthusiastic friend. That was good, right?

He chuckled. “Okay, okay. I hear.” He set his hand on top of my head. I cringed away as he pressed against a bruise.

I reached up with a bruised, bandaged hand and grabbed his wrist. “Don’t,” I said. “There’s a sore there.”

“Oh. Sorry,” he replied, not removing his hand from my grip.

Impulsively and not entirely thinking straight, I brought his hand to my mouth and pressed my lips to his knuckles---which were just as bloody as mine. “Thank you, Jay.”

He gave me a soft smile. “You’re welcome,” he said. Leaning forward, he placed a careful kiss on my forehead. “Get some rest.” His whisper brushed my skin. “I’ll be right here. You’re safe with me, Death Reheated.”

I rolled my eyes but smiled. “Shut up,” I retorted half-heartedly, eyes fluttering closed.

Jason held my hand as I drifted back off, finding my relief from the pain in sleep.

DR. JOHN BIO

“All my sisters married doctors”, said Dorothy Cronin Rebennack, the mother of Mac Rebennack. “ But only I had a Dr. John”. Indeed, there can be only one Malcolm Rebennack, aka “ Doctor John Creaux, the Night Tripper”. There can only be one walking repository of the storied city of New Orleans’ thriving musical history. There can be only one author of such classic songs as “ Right Place, Wrong Time”, “ Such A Night”, “Litanie Des Saintes”, and “I Walk On Gilded Splinters”. There can be only one torchbearer for the Crescent City sound as it second-lines its way into its fourth century. So Mrs. Rebennack was right -- physicians are indeed a dime a dozen in this doctor-clogged country; but a musician of her son’s caliber comes along but once in a very blue moon. Malcolm John Rebennack Jr. was born in New Orleans a full month after term on Thanksgiving Day (November 20) 1942. Weighing a full ten pounds, Mac, as he came to be called, was born into a music-loving family in America’s most musical city. While still an infant, Rebennack starred as a model for various baby products, and showed remarkable musical ability in early childhood. By the age of three he was already hammering out melodies on the family piano, and soon exhausted the talents of the nun who was hired to give him lessons some years later. “If I play what his next lesson is going to be”, the sister complained, “he will play it right behind me, note for note”, His good-timing Aunt Andre, who it can be safe to assume had funkier taste than the nun, taught him the “Pinetop Boogie-Woogie”. My aunt was a groovy old broad”, Rebennack recalled in “Up from the Cradle of Jazz”. “I used to drive everybody mad playing it”. Malcolm Rebennack Sr. was an appliance store owner who, as is traditional in New Orleans, also stocked the latest hit records. Thus young Mac was privy from early childhood to almost any music he wanted. Some years later the Rebennack appliance store was forced to close, and Mac lost his pipeline to the goldmine. But soon his father found work in a line even better suited to those of musical bent: PA system repair. The two Rebennacks would often be seen trundling in tandem to various nightclubs around town, bloodbucket dives with names like the Pepper Pot and the Cadillac Club. Always forbidden to enter the clubs, Mac would wait for his father to repair the system, and then peer in and dissect the musicians. It was at the Pepper Pot, in fact, and in this manner that Mac first saw Professor Longhair’s magical keyboard frolics. At the age of seven Rebennack suffered through a bout of malaria. Even as a child, the over-modest Mac had decided that he could never cut it as a pianist in New Orleans. As he remembered wondering, “How was I going to complete with killer players like Tuts Washington? Salvador Doucette? Herbert Santina? Professor Longhair himself? And the list only began there”. He had, even before his illness, agitated to take up the guitar. His long convalescence enabled him to air his plea with such incessancy, such vehemence, that his beleaguered parents finally gave in. He was sent for instruction to Werlein’s Music Store on Canal Street, already at that time a New Orleans institution and still in business today. His teacher soon sussed that Mac was going to be a difficult, if talented student. The instructor delivered a verdict along the line of, “Good ear, will never learn to read music”. The fancy, store-bought lessons ceased forthwith; but Mac was still hard at it. He locked himself in his room for weeks on end, learning by ear the licks of his twin idols of the time: T-Bone Walker and Lightning Hopkins. “If I can’t make it as T-Bone, I’ll try Lightning, he told himself. His father, seeing that his son had a talent and drive, and being himself connected in the music scene, made a wonderful decision. He persuaded Walter “Papoose” Nelson to instruct his son. Papoose was Fats Domino’s lead guitarist (and the son of Louis Armstrong’s lead guitarist) and had long been a hero to Rebennack. As Mac recalled: “The first lesson, Papoose listened to my chops and said ‘Hey, man, you can’t play that shit and get a job. What are you, crazy? That outta-meter, foot-beater jive. You gotta play stuff like this’. Then he started playing legitimate blues, which I was on the trail of with T-Bone Walker. It was the Lightning shuffle that was off the wall as far as Papoose was concerned”. Papoose’s primary contributions to Mac’s musical education were twofold. First, it was Nelson who finally won Mac over to the benefits of learning to read music. Second, to impart musical discipline, Nelson would force Mac to play rhythm guitar for hours on end, never allowing him a solo. Mac’s next teacher, Roy Montrell, also imparted a valuable lesson. To his first lesson with this new teacher, Mac bounded in with his brand new guitar, “a cheap but flashy-looking green-and-black Harmony”. Roy took at the guitar and (said) ‘Why’d you bring this piece of shit over here?’ ‘It’s my guitar’, I said. ‘Give me that guitar’. He took it, walked outside into the backyard, laid it on the ground, picked up an axe, and split it right in half. Then he broke it in pieces and threw it in the neighbour’s yard”. That done, he called Malcolm Rebennack Sr. on the phone and arranged for Mac to come back next week with a second-hand Gibson, an axe that Mac found himself working overtime with his father to pay for. By the time Mac was on the cusp of his teens, he was a somewhat streetwise musician, hanging out in black clubs and scoring drugs in the projects for his older “junko partners”, or drug-buddies. Soon he was smoking pot himself, and in due course he progressed to pills, coke, and eventually junk. All the while, he was attending the south’s most prestigious Catholic high school, New Orleans Jesuit. In class, he daydreamed and wrote songs, which he would deliver to the offices at Specialty Records, and plotted gigs with several high school bands. Something had to give, and as one can imagine, it was school. He dropped out a year of graduation and later, while in prison, obtained a correspondence course diploma. Not that in his lines of work he needed any such qualification. Soon he was a fully-fledged constituent of the New Orleans underworld. In addition to his burgeoning songwriting work, his session playing, and road gigs both local and regional, Mac attempted half-hearted sidelines such as pimping, forgery, and as an auteur of pornographic movies. His running buddies included street characters with names like Opium Rose, Betty Boobs, Stalebread Charlie, Buckethead Billy, and Mr. Oaks and Herbs. Meanwhile, he entered into a star-crossed, drug-sodden marriage to Lydia Crow. Lydia, though no shrinking violet herself, did attempt to go straight from time to time. But Mac would hear nothing of it, and their marriage ended by 1961. His personal life a shambles, Mac’s professional life was faring better. He was kicking serious ass in the studio, and it is his guitar one still hears today on Professor Longhair’s, “Mardi Gras in New Orleans”. Mac-penned tunes like “Losing Battle” (a hit for Johnny Adams) and “Losing Battle” (recorded by Jerry Byrne) (the same song?) were just two of his fifty compositions recorded in New Orleans between 1955 and 1963. But (as is well-known today) the record companies of the 1950’s were not exactly ready coughers-up of royalties, so most of Mac’s compensation came from his sessions, gigs, and mostly ludicrous street tough sidelines. One such example of the corruption of the New Orleans music business of the ‘50s will suffice. Rebennack wrote a song entitled, “Try Not To Think About You” which languished unrecorded in the offices at Specialty Records for a while. Unrecorded, and more importantly, uncopyrighted. It eventually came to the attention of Lloyd Price, who changed the title to “Lady Luck”, switched record labels, and changed the composer’s name to - you guessed it - Lloyd Price. It would have been Rebennack’s biggest hit up to that date. After literally stalking Price, gun in hand (Mac planned on wasting him backstage after a show) for some time, he finally cooled off and chalked it up to bitter experience. An absurd coda ensured, when Rebennack’s parents unknowingly hired Price’s own attorney to sue Price for the royalties from “Lady Luck”. The lawyer, Mac related, “pocketed the change and did nothing. for a minute, I was afraid if I ever ran across that bastard, I’d kill him, too”. Such chicanery aside, New Orleans of the 1950s was a paradise for musicians. Always a wide-open town (by American standards), the Crescent City was never more raucous and hard-partying than it was then. Gigs abounded in the all-night bars, bordellos, tourist joints, society haunts, and neighborhood taverns. That Rebennack was far ahead of his time regarding race helped him find work, but also earned him some less-enlightened enemies on both sides of the color line. He began to run into flak from the two musician’s union (one black, one white) for having the temerity to play with opposite-hued musicians. Eventually these unions and the crusading, publicity-seeking New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison were to conspire to run Rebennack and most of the rest of the New Orleans music scene right out of town. The union began levying exorbitant fines on Rebennack (officially for playing scab sessions) and blacklisting record producers (like the legendary Cosimo Matassa) who dared to buy the latest equipment. Their short-sighted thinking was that new equipment would equal less studio time instead of more polished records and bigger hits. Garrison, for his part, launched a crusade on vice which closed down the thriving whorehouses and gambling dens, both important sources of income for both the music and tourist industries. Rebennack’s troubles were only beginning. A fracas with a Jacksonville, Florida hotelier resulted in Rebennack getting the ring finger shot nearly off his left hand. Doctors reconstructed the finger to a degree, but not to the point that would enable him to resume making a living with a guitar. He was forced into playing bass with the tourist-oriented French Quarter Dixieland bands, a gig that convulsed him with boredom. He sank deeper than ever into heroin, and it was then that his marriage ended. To top it all, he was busted by Garrison’s goons for heroin possession, a charge that was to send him eventually to a Federal prison hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. There he served as a guinea pig for the various and infamous rehabilitation experiments then -as now - rampant in the land. He was released embittered but not in the least rehabilitated. He returned briefly to New Orleans and was given some pointers on the organ from Crescent City keyboard maestro James Booker. However, he soon soured on Garrison’s Brave New Orleans and at the invitation of an old friend (saxophonist/arranger Harold Battiste) flew out to Los Angeles. A contingent of New Orleans musicians had already set up shop in the City of Angels, and Rebennack fell quickly to work doing studio odd jobs under the auspices of Battiste. Battiste was the brains (ahem) behind Sonny & Cher, and was a close associate of Phil Spector. Battiste mortared Rebennack in on some of Spector’s sessions, but Mac did not enjoy being just another brick in the ‘Wall of Sound’. He called it, “a monument to waste with echo all over the place! It was just padding the payroll, as far as I could see”. He held down a brief stint as Frank Zappa’s pianist, but found that stultifying as well. This gave him an entrée into the acid rock world, in his words, “all these little acid groups springing up like mutant fungus after a chemical spill”. He attempted to work with Iron Butterfly, whom he termed “Iron Butterfingers” and Buffalo Springfield to little if any effect. A frustrating term as in-house producer with Mercury Records followed, but Rebennack and his cohorts suspected that it was just a tax dodge. He was more musically frustrated than he had ever been in New Orleans, and his drug woes continued unabated. As a parolee, he was under the watchful eyes of a great many government agencies as well. But slowly, the concept was forming that was to take him to heights he wouldn’t have dared dreamt possible. Growing up in New Orleans, Rebennack had eagerly immersed himself in the City’s myriad native traditions and home-grown Afro-Latin religions. He himself was a half-hearted practitioner of gris-gris, New Orleans’ own unique branch of the voodoo tree. In his avid studies of the history and religion of the city, he had thrilled to the stories of John Montaigne aka Bayou John aka and most frequently, Dr.John. John was a Senegalese of self-proclaimed royal lineage who had been taken from Africa by slavers to Cuba. There he won his freedom, and shipped out as a sailor before eventually choosing to settle in New Orleans. He set up shop as a shaman, telling fortunes, healing, and selling a cornucopia of hexes. He was good at his job, and eventually prospered to the point where he even owned slaves himself. The kicker for Rebennack was coming across an account of a 19th Century vice bust in which John was arrested with one Pauline Rebennack for voodoo-related offences and suspicion of operating a whorehouse. For years, Mac had felt a spiritual kinship for Dr.John, and this account raised the quite possibility that one of his family had had the same feelings. Even so, the idea that Rebennack had been ruminating cast his friend Ronnie Barron in the roll of Dr. John. But when the project was finally greenlighted, Barron had other contractual duties and Rebennack reluctantly assumed the mantle himself. Between Sonny & Cher sessions, virtually on the sly, Rebennack recorded the “Gris Gris” album with a band of New Orleans natives. Atlantic executive Ahmet Ertegun was at first displeased with the move. “Why did you give me this shit”?, Rebennack remembers Ertegun bellowing. “How can we market this boogaloo crap”? Eventually the canny Ertegun sniffed something in the late-’60s zeitgeist that could enable an off-the-wall act like Dr.John to sell, and he (to Rebennack’s surprise) released the album. On “Gris Gris”, Rebennack played very little keyboard, contributing only organ parts on two tracks (“Mama Roux” and Danse Kalinda”). His aim was to introduce America to New Orleans’ mystical side, and also to “let us musicians get into a stretched-out New Orleans groove”. The album sold well enough to appease the suits, with very little backing, and meanwhile Rebennack’s fertile mind was cooking up a killer road show. Drawing on the venerable southern minstrel tradition and the pageantry of the Mardi Gras Indians, Dr.John and the Night Trippers’ road show boasted snake-festooned dancers, magic tricks, and costumes manufactured from the carcasses of virtually every living creature that ever crawled, slithered or flew in the bayou country. As Rebennack recalled, “When this stuff started coming apart in pieces, I had to start hanging around taxidermy shops big-time, scavenging new material.” He and his similarly attired band of New Orleans roughnecks unleashed this act the acid-drenched southern California of 1968 to no little astonishment. But by the time “Babylon”, the Night Tripper’s second album came out, the band began to dissolve. Rebennack (along with the most of the rest of America) felt the end time was at hand, as the title implies. The album reflects Rebennack’s chaotic personal life - his drug use and police persecution, his dissolving band -- and the state of American life in 1968, a year in which it seemed that violet revolution was at hand. It was a year in which both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King fell to assassins, riots consumed black ghettos in flames from Miami to Watts, and the Vietcong launched the ferocious TET offensive. The album features odd time signatures (11/4, 5/4,10/4), doom-laden lyrics, and hybrid Afro-Caribbean/avant-garde jazz feeling. As Rebennack later said, “ It was as if Hieronymus Bosch had cut an album”. Who better to chronicle those disorderly times? Things were about to get extremely untidy for Rebennack again, as well. While touring in support of “Gris-Gris”, the Night Trippers had been busted in St. Louis, and Rebennack as frontman shouldered the load. A lawyer arranged a deal in which Charlie Green (the manager of Sonny & Cher and Buffalo Springfield) was to pay off the St. Louis bail bondsman. The bondsman, unbeknownst to Rebennack, never collected. Green and partner Brian Stone then confronted Rebennack with the proverbial “Offer you can’t refuse”. Since he had gotten Rebennack sprung, Green put it to Mac, we get to manage you from now on. Rebennack, frazzled, saw no alternative. Green proved to be the worst of all managerial archetypes, the would-be star. Mac recalled, “He thought of himself as the star and me as the roadie of the operation. Even though I wasn’t on no kind of star trip or nothing, I didn’t want my manager hanging around, running some kind of Jumpin’ Jack Flash number and trying to upstage me. Beyond that was the basic problem: a drugged out band hooked up with a starry-eyed manager results in a chemically unbalanced situation and, in general, a fearsome sight to behold.” While at work on “Remedies”, the third of five of Rebennack’s Atlantic releases, Green and Stone persuaded Rebennack to check himself into a loony-bin, with an eye toward having him declared incompetent. This move would allow them to help themselves to a slightly higher percentage of Rebennack’s earnings than their current 25%, something more along the lines of 100%. Rebennack quickly wised up, escaped from the asylum, and exiled himself to Miami. Meanwhile, the managers had released the unfinished “Remedies” album. One of Rebennack’s chief aims for the album was to spread the news about Louisiana’s notorious Angola Farm, then as now America’s most deplorable and inhumane prison. Rebennack, incommunicado in Miami, was thus unable to put wise the Rolling Stone reviewer who took his lament Angola Anthem to be a protest song about the nation of Angola. A disastrous European tour followed, one in which was Mac was hamstrung by a third string band (most of the Night Trippers were unable to get visas). The tour was augured in by Mac from backstage the electrocution death of the Stone the Crows guitarist Les Harvey at a festival. At Montreux, his bass player without warning dropped his bass and brandished a trombone which he had concealed in the wings, and proceeded to (Rebennack related) “start dancing around the stage, playing Pied Piper to the audience’s mountain villagers”. At the end of this arduous road, Mac headed for London to round up session players for the album “The Sun, Moon, and Herbs”. Graham Bond, Eric Clapton, Ray Draper, Walter Davis Jr., Mick Jagger, Doris Troy, and a battery of drummers from virtually every West African and Caribbean country were on hand for a days-long, Opium and hash-fuelled epic of a session. He delivered the finished article to Green for post-production work a happy man. Some weeks later, Rebennack returned to find his beloved album chopped, diced, and filleted by Green. Material was added and deleted, more was overdubbed. Most of what Rebennack felt was the best music was simply gone. In addition, it came to his attention (when he was alerted to a pair of bounty hunters at his doorstep) that Green had not, in fact, bailed him out of anything. Green was summarily dismissed, and Rebennack and some engineers endeavored to salvage what they could of the “Sun, Moon, and Herbs” album. He signed next with manager Albert Grossman, of Joplin, Dylan, and The Band fame. He was the manager who “electrified” Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, which touched off a brawl between himself and folklorist Alan Lomax in front of several thousand bemused folkies. Lomax, though, was not the only one in the music scene who wanted a piece of Grossman. Soon enough, Grossman and Rebennack came nearly to blows. Grossman’s style was to play it cool with his artist, while his “bad-cop” flunkie Bennett Glotzer delivered such news as, “Thanks for signing with us. We now control 1/3 of your publishing”. Glotzer and Rebennack had two punch-outs, and things got so bad that Rebennack turned to his native gris-gris. He would each day leave a dead bird on Glotzer’s doorstep, surrounding by black candles and sprinkled with “goofer dust”. Eventually, this hell-broth boiled over when, in a tête-à-tête with Grossman, an enraged Rebennack snatched Grossman’s beloved peyote button, a pet psychedelic Grossman had been nurturing for three years, and devoured it, skin, pulp, stem and all, in front of his very eyes. The relationship dissolved into a maelstrom of threat and counter-threats, and now Rebennack had not one, but two oddball ex-managers scheming for his destruction. Somehow, Mac found the time to sit in the Rolling Stones’ “Exile On Main Street” sessions, and also to record one of his best albums ever. (While in the studio with the Stones, he discussed with them his and New Orleans songwriter Earl King’s idea for an album of dirty blues tunes. Back in the fifties, when he played the after hours joints, he had often played for an audience of street characters x-rated versions of old blues tunes. The Stones demurred, but later released “Cocksucker Blues” on their own, which irked Rebennack. He felt that since he had given them the idea, he should be compensated) His own effort produced “Gumbo”, an album steeped in the New Orleans of his youth. Featuring covers of songs by King, Professor Longhair, and several other lesser lights of that time and place, the album was his most direct tribute to his home turf to that date. To back the album, Mac ditched the voodoo shtick he had employed on the road since 1967 in favour of a revue format. As Mac termed it, he had “enough of the mighty-coo-de-fiyo hoodoo show”. The Gumbo tour, backed heavily by Atlantic, reached Carnegie Hall and other such bastions of the high life, and a single, ”Iko Iko”, cracked the top 40. The dark cloud to this silver lining was that hard on the heels of his chart success, several of his past employers saw fit to release albums of demos. Among them were Green, Huey Meaux (with whom Rebennack had worked as a session producer) and an unknown cast of characters. This very collection is one such unfinished product. Meanwhile, Rebennack had seen fit to employ yet another volatile, less than 10% straight forward manager. Phil Walden, who had hit the big-time managing Otis Redding was then cresting on the Allman Brothers doomed wave, and he also handled Rebennack’s New Orleans chums, The Meters. Clearly Rebennack thought, here at last was a manager with the Midas touch. In 1973, Rebennack and the Meters hit the studio together to record “In The Right Place”. At first, things with Walden and the album went swimmingly. Walden booked Mac and The Meters on some Allman tours, on which Rebennack enjoyed himself immensely, both professionally and personally. The album scored him both his biggest hit (the title track) and perhaps his most enduring composition. “Such a Night” is a stone-cold classic, a song that sounded as old and enduring as music itself from the very day it was waxed. This writer was astonished to learn that it was written by Rebennack in 1973, as I had always assumed it emanated from Cole Porter or some such. The relationship with Walden, which had been going so well, came to a screeching halt when Rebennack returned home road-weary to find his house bereft of furniture, furniture that had somehow found its way across town to Walden’s recording studio. It was this move that finally put an end to Rebennack’s reliance on anyone else to handle his business affairs. Since then he has managed himself. Later in 1973, a collaboration with white bluesman John Hammond Jr. and Mike Bloomfield brought forth the “Triumvirate” album. Meanwhile, Rebennack embarked on a tour of shows benefiting the Black Panthers, which, he recalled, “had the immediate effect of bringing serious federal heat down on our asses! I discovered that we’d jumped into a whole new level of criminality. We weren’t garden-variety dope fiends any more; now we’d become political activists, the most fouty-knuckled lames of them all”. The year ended with Rebennack attempting to aid a drink- and coke-addled John Lennon make the album “Rock ‘n’Roll” with Rebennack’s old boss Phil Spector. As active and fruitful as 1973 seemed (in addition to the above there were sessions with Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr), Rebennack was still broke and very bitter. He seriously pondered retirement, and had developed a reputation as a pain in the ass. The rest of the early seventies passed by in a blur of drug abuse and fallen sidemen. James Booker, the classically trained, extremely eccentric genius of the New Orleans keys, came and went from Rebennack’s band several times, before dying of a cocaine overdose in 1983. Ray Draper was whacked by New Jersey loan-sharks. Percussionist Albert ”Didimus” Washington was killed by a Cabbage-juice diet designed to heal his ulcers. As the seventies wore on, though, things very slowly began to turn around for Rebennack. A collaboration with legendary New York songwriter Doc Pomus (“Save The Last Dance For Me”, “Lonely Avenue”, “Suspicion”), produced the song “There Must Be A Better World Somewhere”, which B.B. King later picked up and won a Grammy. Tommy LiPuma persuaded Rebennack and Pomus to sign with his A&M-affiliated Horizon label. “City Lights”, the label’s second release, quickly followed. The album is something of a semi-autobiographical rock opera, co-written by Rebennack, Pomus, and Henry Glover (“ I Love You, Yes I Do”; “Drown in My Own Tears”) concerning the exploits of some ex-pat New Orleanians in the Big Apple. “Tango Palace”, another Mac-Pomus offering, came hard on the heels of “City Lights”, but not soon enough. The label foundered almost immediately after “Tango’s” release. Rebennack recalls the interlude with Horizon, during which he also gigged with 50’s R& B legends Hank Crawford and Fathead Newman, as being rewarding musically, if not commercially. In 1980, Rebennack began an association with Jack Heyrman’s Clean Cuts label. Heyrman persuaded Rebennack to confront a personal bugaboo and record two albums of solo piano and vocals. Rebennack had always had nightmarish visions of this being his end, that “I’d end up a solo-piano lounge act, staring at Holiday Inns or bowling alleys for the rest of my natural life”. Nevertheless, two Clean Cuts releases, “Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack” and “The Brightest Smile In Town”, ensued. On them, Rebennack erased the last vestiges of the Gris Gris act and tackled some more sophisticated and older forms of music. He wanted to appeal to “a spiritual awareness, not just that low-down meat level”, but hastened to add that, “The hardest thing to do is let the spirituality flow and turn the meat on. Doing that is creating art, radiating the 88’s”. Rebennack expanded on this with 1989’s “In A Sentimental Mood”, a collection of classics this time presented in a combo format. A duet with Rickie Lee Jones on Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson’s ”Makin’ Whoopee” took home the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Duet, and the album was one of the top-selling jazz albums of the year. Two more albums in a jazzy vein, “Bluesiana Triangle”, cut with Fathead Newman and the great Art Blakey; and “Bluesiana II”, cut again with Newman and others followed in the next two years. In 1989, Rebennack ended his 34-year relationship with heroin, and three years later released “Goin’ Back to New Orleans”, one of his most ambitious projects to date. Like “Gumbo”, “Goin’ Back” is solely a New Orleans affair, but it takes a much broader approach. Songs dating as far back as 1850 were recorded, with each of the ensuing cuts representing a stylistic breakthrough that has occurred since then. There’s a Mardi Gras Indian tune, homages to Jelly Roll Morton, Buddy Bolden, Louis Jordan, Professor Longhair, James Booker, and Fats Domino. The Neville Brothers, Wardell Quezergue, Al Hirt, and Pete Fountain, among a great many others turned out in support of the project. Any one volume CD that endeavors to cover 150 years of music from America’s most tuneful of cities is bound to fail, through as Rebennack says, “ the only thing that can beat a failure is a try”. Ultimately, the album ranks in the top 5% of all New Orleans releases, a too-brief primer lovingly and excitingly presented by the best musicians the city had to offer at that time. By turns wistful, violent, joyous and tragic, it never loses the twin hallmarks of the city that birthed it - a sense of humour at the absurdities of life (and death) and some of the world’s most pulsating rhythms. In 1994, Rebennack wrote with co-author Jack Rummel the excellent autobiography, “Under A Hoodoo Moon”. From it most of these notes were cribbed, and though this has proven to be by far my most verbose liner-note project, not one tenth of the story is yet told . Far from being a typical rock & roll, ghost-written autobiography, it is a hilarious, tragic, brutally honest, and inspirational tale of one erudite and talented man’s struggle to make some good music in a country in which this has become increasingly difficult. The chapter in which his reminiscences of Professor Longhair are recounted in side-splitting detail is alone worth the price of the book. The rest of the mid-nineties saw Rebennack’s voice become seemingly ubiquitous on American television, singing the praises of Wendy’s Hamburgers, among many another strange fruit from his American orchard. He has released several anthologies and two albums of new material - “Television” on GRP in 1994 and “Afterglow” on Blue Thumb in 1995. Any questions regarding this bizarre genius’ contemporary relevance were abolished in 1991 and 1993 when P.M. Dawn and Beck, respectively sampled his “I Walk On Gilded Splinters” for their own recordings, with utilising the Doctor’s tune in his breakthrough anthem, “Loser”. In 1997 he recorded a smoking duet with B.B. King on his collaboration with Doc Pomus, “There Must Be A Better World Somewhere”. He continues to tour and record, and still there is no bowling alley or Holiday Inn big enough to hold the audiences that pay to see him. Like the city he came from, Mac Rebennack is a survivor. So is the music that they share. That indefinable blend of French, African, Caribbean, Spanish, and American ingredients, that gumbo of a city and a sound, the certain je ne sais pocky way hollers out Crescent City, has no living acolyte truer or more faithful than Rebennack. Long may he ramble! ~John Nova Lomax, November 1998

Informal (and sorry, very long) review of ASSASSINS at Signature Theatre

ASSASSINS is famous for its provocative concept—telling the story of nine people who assassinated or attempted to assassinate US Presidents in a series of songs and vignettes—and it feels even more daring when staged only 15 minutes from the White House. But this musical isn’t a tasteless exercise in shock value for the sake of shock, nor is it a misguided attempt to portray assassins as ‘just misunderstood.’ These nine central figures are alternately pathetic, disturbing, funny, repulsive, charming, and eerie. Some are clearly delusional, others simply disillusioned. But together, they represent the dark side of the American Dream.

Americans are raised with a sense of exceptionalism, a belief that we deserve everything we want simply because we’re Americans. At some point, we realize that only a few people have the luck, money, skills, and connections to achieve their dreams. Most of us accept that it’s not really true that “anyone can become the President.” But some troubled people throughout the country’s history cling to a distorted corruption of this dream: anyone can kill a President.

That doesn’t mean we should agree with their horrifying choices. But it does let us examine what aspects of life in America make some people so desperate to be seen and remembered, by any means necessary. “Where’s my prize?” is the childish refrain these assassins sing over and over again as they wander through the grey purgatory they’ve been consigned to.

Historically, productions of ASSASSINS are set in a ghastly carnival where contestants are encouraged to ‘step right up’ and shoot a president! A wonderful community production at Dominion Stage created a masterpiece of vivid Americana in which an electric chair or hangman’s noose were reimagined as theme park rides. This production took the opposite route by setting the action in a grimy, industrialized, empty stage in which pieces of furniture like a bench, the steps to a gallows, or a sofa float on and off like ghosts. Through this strange empty world, assassins interact unbounded by time or space, cursed to constantly repeat their most famous actions and relive their frustrations. Garfield assassin Charles J. Guiteau instructs would-be Ford assassin Sara Jane Moore in the finer points of shooting. McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz reprimands attempted Reagan assassin John Hinckley for carelessly breaking a bottle.

The only set piece that remains throughout the show is a weathered and ghostly replica of the Presidential box at Ford’s Theatre, plunked onto the stage as though fallen from the sky. Here, the brooding spectre of John Wilkes Booth sits and watches the show unfold—and yes, he recreates his famous jump from the box. He serves as a kind of ringleader to the assassins, weaving through crowds, advising that everyone try their hand at assassination as a cure for all of their ills—even chronic stomach pain. After all, he was the first to pull off the historic act. We even see him convincing Lee Harvey Oswald to change the course of history by bringing assassination into the age of television.

As Booth, there’s a whiff of the rock star about Vincent Kempski—fitting, because Booth was a celebrity and even heartthrob in his day even before shooting Abraham Lincoln. Most of the time, he seems at ease, in control, erudite—we might even be seduced by his words until he explodes in fits of rage and reminds us how twisted and monstrous his views really are. Kempski only occasionally unleashes the full power of his singing voice, and when he does, it feels like a punch in the gut.

One minor gripe with his performance, though not limited to Kempski’s portrayal alone: his Booth, like most I’ve seen, delivers his lines with a thick Southern drawl. Not only did that occasionally make it difficult to understand his words, I doubt the real John Wilkes Booth would have spoken with such a heavy accent. For one, although he supported the Confederacy, he was from Maryland. For another, his father was British. And most importantly, he was a professional stage actor before the era of microphones and would have been well-trained in diction. Still, his charisma was palpable throughout the show. The moment he set foot on stage, a chill ran down my spine: it really was like seeing a ghost.

Lawrence Redmond plays the disgruntled worker Leon Czolgozs with gravitas and stoic desperation. He is perhaps the most sympathetic—or pathetic—of the assassins, and he gives us a sense of the loss of human potential. As the crass Sam Byck, attempted assassin of Richard Nixon, Christopher Bloch is horribly funny, spouting commercial catchphrases and leaving professional advice to Leonard Bernstein on an audiotape recording.

Some of the most enjoyable scenes of the evening were those between the two attempted assassins of Gerald Ford, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (Rachel Zampelli) and Sara Jane Moore (Tracy Lynn Olivera). These are two deeply kooky women—a ditzy Manson groupie and a frumpy mom who’s been married five times and is endlessly losing items in her oversized bag. Together, they shoot at a bucket of fried chicken and bond over an unexpected shared acquaintance in Manson himself.

Zampelli may not be the childlike pixie we’d expect as Squeaky Fromme, but she totally inhabits the character of a lost soul, a flower child whose brains, if she ever had them, are long-since fried and warped. Her voice isn’t a high-pitched girlish squeak but has a distinctive creaky vocal fry to it that makes her sound utterly deranged. She’s so intense in her devotion to Manson that she ranks among the most unsettling characters on the stage. She also shares a strangely beautiful duet, “Unworthy of Your Love,” with sad sack John Hinckley (Evan Casey), a failed songwriter who’s obsessed with Jodie Foster.

As Sara Jane Moore, Olivera is absolutely hysterical in both senses of the word. A chatty, scatterbrained housewife, she seems to represent the mundane and trivial compared to Squeaky’s revolutionary furor— but she can also burst into tears or pull a gun on you at any second. Her utter lack of self-awareness and deadpan one-liners like “I couldn’t hit William Howard Taft if he was sitting on my lap” made her an audience favorite. Ms. Olivera has a special talent for making dialogue sound totally natural, as if everything she says is an ad-lib. I’ll jump at the chance to see any show she’s in because she makes every character completely her own.

But the performer who truly stole the show, and my other favorite local actor, is Bobby Smith, as the lifelong loser, Charles Guiteau. Guiteau is a comically tragic figure, a man who failed at everything he did and still retained the grandiose belief that his actions were divinely inspired. He was so consumed with his delusional belief that President Garfield would make him the Ambassador to France that he shot him. As Guiteau, Smith does a jaunty dance up and down the steps of the gallows before he is to be hanged, singing a refrain of “Look on the bright side!”

Guiteau is a man of extremes, euphoric and despondent at the drop of a hat. Smith, whose appeal as a performer often lies in his unassuming, everyman demeanor, gives amazing nuance to those abrupt transitions. We see real tears shining in his eyes beyond his too-wide smile, a tremble of the lip or shaking of the hands that betray his instability. He’s incredibly entertaining to watch every moment he’s onstage, yet you’re always simultaneously concerned for and creeped out by him. There’s something so obviously ‘not right’ with Guiteau. The last character to make me feel that way was Gollum.

Tying the whole story together is Sam Ludwig as the Balladeer, who serves as a cheery narrator for the show, delivering songs that span the gamut of American music styles. These are some of the most toe-tapping tunes in Sondheim’s catalog, contrasted sharply with the discordant numbers that run between them. Ludwig also inhabits a second role, which may come as a surprise (and isn’t listed in the program). He embodies the saccharine spirit of an American narrative that sees assassination attempts as isolated incidents rather than a symptom of a deeper illness. I occasionally found his piercing tenor voice a little grating to my ears, but it suited his character well—and I was sitting very close to the stage. An increasingly mangled rendition of ‘Hail To The Chief’ ties the musical numbers together.

This show runs almost two hours with no intermission. It’s so immersive that it gives you the curious sense of waking up from a vivid dream as you leave the theatre. You almost feel that the assassins linger behind you, reliving their crimes and failures in the abandoned theatre once you’ve gone home to bed.

Assassins plays through September 29. Don’t miss this show. You’ll find yourself laughing at the most unexpected lines and thinking about the most minor moments long after the curtain call.

We’ve got Tonight

• Summary:  I'd known Felix since before he was born. My tiny preschool hand would often press flat against his mother’s round belly while I looked up at her with surprised innocent eyes as the baby inside kicked against my hand. Known him as a brother, a best friend and a rock to lean against through my whole life. But now, in just a month, he'd be going away to train with some of the best in the industry, and with time running out, perhaps there is more than just platonic feelings between us... something that would bring up more pain, jealousy and sorrow than we could ever imagine.

♥ Pairing: Bang Chan/Reader/Felix

♦ Chapter: 1/9

♣ Words: 5033

♠ Genre (in this one): Sweet, tooth-aching fluff. 

“Felix Lee. Dancer. Rapper. Singer. Owner of the sweetest smile in the entire world. Owner of the deepest voice in the entire world. Owner of-” I doubled over and burst out in laughter. The A5 paper was crinkled up after being folded too many times and the look on Felix face when he started to read from it was just priceless. “What’s this? You told me you were going to help me with my resumé”  The thick Aussie accent rolled off his tongue like smoke after you’ve put out a candle and I smiled softly while exhaling a slight snort through my nose in the chilly late September wind. It had been raining all day and the humidity that had hung low turned the air around us cold the minute the sun disappeared. It was close to 10:30 pm and the moon was up, joined by the stars that twinkled in the navy-blue sky. We were outside, sitting on a picnic table at an empty gas station, halfway between my day job and his campus.  Best friends for eight years. Known each other for another eleven and now here we sat, with my scribbled notes on a paper I ripped out from a notebook that I’d found in a shoebox in the furthest part of my closet. The notebook was old, and the paper that now threatened to be folded up for probably the 8th time had a coffee spot on it, but Felix didn’t seem to notice. He just looked so incredibly done that I stifled another giggle behind my hand. He tried; he really did but the smile he constantly wanted to chase away still tugged on his lips as I playfully hit his arm. “Continue” I urged and hid the grin on my mouth behind a sweater paw when Felix eyes traced the next sentence and read it silently before he looked up and met my eyes again, lips pressed into a thin line. “Owner of the best Aussie accent ever. Best friend ever. A baby” Gave me a look from underneath furrowed brows, added, “I’m not a baby” and though the dark, deep voice of his… and the sharp jawline… and his lean body, oh and those eyes that made everyone turn their heads to look after him when we walked down a street- was a sign that maybe it wasn’t as true as I tried to make it, it was still a nickname that I didn’t want to let go off.  He’d always had that aura of innocence about him, one that I saw less and less these days though- whenever he broke out in a smile that crinkled his eyes, showing off a row of pearly white rounded teeth, nose scrunching and cheeks puffing up. In that moment- he was still the cute boy I grew up. But now, when he stood there in front of me, paper dangling between his fingertips in one hand, an off-brand soda in the other, lilac hair poking out from underneath a cap and a body that was more of an adults than the younger boy I painted him out to be- he was just that; an adult. It didn't stop me from teasing him though and I sighed with a small smile on my lips, took a small sip from my own soda before I placed it on the picnic table I was leaning against, reached out, and placed both my hands on each side of his cheeks, puffed them up and said in my cutest voice. “Oh, but you are” I nodded and gave him a small smile while he rolled his eyes, ”You’re the cutest baby ever” He frowned. Knew that I was playing with him and huffed, even though the expression was more of fake annoyance than actual irritation. Watched me like he dared me to let him go, but I stood my ground and he didn’t try to escape the place between my open hands. He was taller than me, if only a few centimetres and constantly tried to use that against me but it didn’t stop the teasing or the way I played with the fact that he could grow until he was as tall as a giant and I would still be older. “I’m not a child anymore noona. I'll travel abroad soon” He muttered, and something shifted behind his eyes as the fake annoyance turned into a real frown. I let him go, frowning myself when I was reminded of the fact that we’d be separated soon.  In just a month he'd be going away, my best friend, who I’d never spend more than two miles away from, would travel across the world to pursue his dream. To train with some of the best for a whole six months. He was a professional, in more fields than one and I would be left were I was, in the town we grew from kids to adults in, surrounded by coffee beans and the heavy smell of sweets and pastries. “I’ll be ok” He said, as if he read my thoughts, like countless other times. I must’ve frowned harder than I thought as I got lost in my pondering. He met my eyes and damn… I was going to miss those eyes, and that cute little smile. “I’ll be ok” He reassured again, folded and placed the paper in the pocket of his hoodie. Reached out and the hand that suddenly held mine was warm, despite the cold wind biting through our way too light clothes. “I know” I answered shortly, and he squeezed my hand in response.  The smile on his lips as warm as his hand. Eyes turning into small crescents and I couldn’t help but smile back. “Besides you'll have Chris to keep you company until I get back, right?” He said and I rolled my eyes. Chris was my boyfriend since a few years back. We’d met through Felix when I came with him to one of his practises with the group he danced with and sort of clicked from the get-go. Bonded with our passion for writing, expression and need for adventure, the thrill of life and what it could offer.  I loved him.  I really did.  Even though Felix insisted later on that I only fell for him because Chris was a more polished and older version of himself. With the same passion for music, art and expression. Not to mention that same deep Aussie accent, and I had insisted that it wasn’t the case at all because I did not even wanted to ever imagine Felix being my boyfriend- because I’d known him for his entire life.  Known him even before he was born, with my tiny preschool hand pressed flat against his mother’s round belly. Looking up at her with surprised innocent eyes as the baby inside kicked against the palm of my hand at the same moment as the church bells rang to collect everyone for the sermon.  Our parents were friends since long, long before they had children. Going to the same high school when they were young and then the same church when they moved into the same neighbourhood. Inviting each other to celebrate the holidays and I couldn’t remember a Saturday where we didn’t eat dinner together, at my family home one week and his the next, rolling on a schedule that continued for years.  I was the oldest of our siblings and though I was best friends with his older sister for the most parts of our childhood, I’d never denied him if he wanted to play with us. When he was rounding the age of nine, I often babysat him and his little sister and during the following years, even though almost half a decade separated us in age, I started to hang out with him more and more. His sister unfortunately decided to hang out with the wrong people and even though time has healed the wounds we inflicted upon each other back then since we’ve both become adults, I still prefer the company of her little brother nowadays.  It was easy to understand why we had such a deep and profound bound. It had always been the two of us. We both moved away from our hometown at a young age. Going away because there was a better school in a few towns over. Our parents gave me the responsibility. Found us a place to stay, planted just a few hundred meters from the Catholic school they had chosen and then trusted me to make that two-bedroom apartment a home. I was eighteen, doing my last year in high school, and Felix was just thirteen, doing his last in middle school. It was tough, living two teens under one roof and we fought about anything and everything, from dishes to who was going to take out the garbage. I was forced to grow up faster, taking care of both myself, my homework, the place we lived in and making sure that we had dinner every day. That Felix was picked up after school, that he did his homework as well…  Our parents send us money for a monthly rent, bills that were connected to the apartment (water, electricity etc) food and a small allowance for us to spend on whatever we wanted, and it worked out… for a few months at least. I grew tired though when the water bills got too high because well, we were both teens and taking long showers was the only place where we were alone, and Felix was a bratty kid that demanded candy and games and “new cool stuff” because “all his other friends had that”  I got a job at a local café, a small cute hole-in-the-wall place with an owner that always had a smile on her lips, syrup on her forearms and coffee beans in the arms of her shirt. The years passed, I graduated high school, decided that I wanted to focus on work, met Chris, Felix started high school, graduated three years later on top of his class and my parents were crying with joy when they called me after he’d told his parents. Sent me virtual pats on the back for doing such a good job raising him because apparently taking a train to us to congratulate me, us, in person was too much of a fuss. He was going to university after summer and the talk when he, with a deep sigh, apologized because he wanted to get his own place, a room on campus, because it was closer (but probably also because he, secretly, was starting to get ashamed that we (me at age 22 and he at age 17) still lived together and were neither siblings or a couple. I’d only laughed at his worried expression and told him about the plans that me and Chris had of moving together. And the rest is history, basically. We grew up together, spend basically every waking moment with each other and I watched as a small uncertain boy grew up to be the young adult who currently held onto my hand. I didn’t regret it for a second though, even if there were times when I was so angry with him that I just wanted to leave him all alone in that apartment. It certainly made dating a living nightmare, and having a girls night with my friend without him ogling at them with big nervous eyes, and when he started to reach his late teens and I didn’t know if the sobs behind the closed door to his bedroom was because he needed to be comforted or because he was jerking off.  Yeah… thank goodness that time was over.  I couldn’t stop hanging out with him though even after we decided to go our separate ways. I still needed him. In a way that according to any psychologist ever probably wasn’t healthy at all. Like a drug that constantly had to be delivered to me. Just a small refill was needed, of his laugh, or his smile, or his humour, or that boyish nature, or the fact that anything he touched seemed to turn into gold the older he got- from the way he seemingly learned to dance over a night, to the way the music came to him just as naturally and I hated to admit that I felt left behind for the first time in our life when he moved away from me. I had poured so much into making his life as good as I could, to mould him into someone I knew his parents could be proud of that it felt empty when he waved goodbye to me, standing with his box of things and a big bag of clothes outside his dormitory.  It was like he didn’t need me anymore. Like the years I’d spent taking care of him was coming to an end, and in a sense, it was. But the fact that we didn’t live together didn’t change the fact that we saw each other at least once a week and I enjoyed, actually cherished those moments even more. He was growing up, passing his 18th birthday that autumn, and from there on, everything changed. He changed. Started to work out, spent hours upon hours of perfecting choreography, his own style of dancing and I watched, out of breath and sometimes in the small hours of the night, cheering him on and forcing him to go home when the sun started to paint the sky a soft grey. Putting him to bed with a small kiss on the crown of his head, and held back a small sigh every time he caught my wrist and begged me not to go because his feet hurt, and his back and his arms and he just wanted me to hold him and take the pain away. We both appreciated the art of creating. To make something and hear the sound of astonishment from our audience.  I knew how to make a perfect cup of coffee. I could make art with steamed milk and espresso that many said was good enough to compete with and I would blush and look away, not trusting myself to be able to win a prize, even though it was something that was as natural for me as breathing by now. I was always a bit uncertain, with a big lack on both self-esteem and self-confidence. Both with what I did, even if I did something good, and how I knew that I was just an average girl. Nothing special at all. Nothing like my best friend. I didn’t blame him, but it still made me jealous, like it didn’t seem like I was good at anything at all when compared to having people turn their heads, not because you. Absolutely not because of you, but because the person walking beside you looked god sent.  I huffed and buried my chin deeper into the hoodie I was wearing. “Do you want to go back?” Felix asked and the sound of his voice brought me back.  I nodded, slightly flushed from embarrassment because I’d probably been staring out into the darkness that surrounded the gas station for a few minutes too long. We jumped into my 12-year-old, silver coloured Volvo v70 and Felix placed his arms around himself in a self-hug as I started the ignition and turned up the heat on the AC to full. “You need to get a new car” He said, like he’d done pretty much every time we’d driven in it in the past year and a half. “Buy me a new one when you get famous and it’s a deal” I replied, like I’d done every time he stated those exact words.  He smiled again and I smiled back, his hand on mine as it rested on the manual gear and my heart broke in two again when I remember that I had to hold onto these kinds of memories because soon, the passenger seat next to me would be empty. - “What are you thinking about?” Chris asked me and leaned forward slightly to put a lock of hair behind my ear.  He sat upright in our sofa, feet on the table while I laid beside him with my legs thrown over his lap. I had mindlessly watched a programme on TV, not really interested but didn’t want to move from my place and do anything else since the time we spent together, even if we didn’t talk, was becoming less and less frequent as university grew more and more intense for him. We lived in a small two room apartment, connected to the campus and the rent was small enough that we could live well with the money I earned when working full time plus the income Chris got from working short hours whenever they needed him, in the convenience store a few hundred meters from our home.  “Nothing” I mumbled, which was the only truth I wanted to admit. Honestly, I hadn’t been thinking about anything specifically. Just letting my thoughts drift from how sleepy I was to what we were going to eat for dinner, how bad my feet hurt from standing at the cashier all day and how Felix whole face scrunched up in a bright smile when I waved goodbye to him as I dropped him off outside his dormitory yesterday.  “Don’t lie. I know you babe; we’ve been together for that long” Chris sighed and gave me a small smile that spoke off how much he didn’t believe me. I looked away, pouted and played with a lock of my hair, purposely avoiding his gaze. He placed the stack of lyrics and half-finished composed music pieces on the table before scooting down between me and the backrest of the sofa. His touch was soft as he interlaced our fingers, our legs tangled together and he pressed my knuckles to his lips in a chaste kiss, following a pattern of coordinated moves that always happened when we were close.  “I love you” He whispered and brushed his nose against mine, “He’s a big boy now, and even though you’ve taken care of him through his whole life, it’s time to let him spread his wings” I closed my eyes and hoped that Chris couldn’t feel how my heart picked up speed when he spoke about the person I was thinking about.  I knew that a small hidden part of him was happy that Felix would go. That he would finally have me without any sort of competition. Even though they considered each other their second-best friend. Not that it was ever in the air that Felix and me would ever fall in love. People close to us only thought that it was cute that we were still best friends and I guessed that we always seemed like brother and sister to people outside our group of friends.  But the thought of that always made me cringe a little. To say that nothing has ever happened between us was a lie. Nothing physical at all though, because the boy just had his 19th birthday, and even though I’d seen the way he looked at me sometimes from underneath long lashes after turning sixteen, from across our dinner table or while sitting a few meters apart on the sofa while I went over his homework at our old apartment, I wouldn’t dream of touching him in the way I could sense that he wanted me to.  It was just subtle, sweet and almost lethal- like that one time on New Year’s when he was seventeen and nervously stuttered out a “can you be my first kiss, noona?” over a glass of wine to many and I, obviously, flat out refused to. Or to that first time when I truly realized that he was an actual adult and nearly walked in on him fucking a, very, loud girl in his dorm room shortly after Christmas. My hand up and ready to knock and all but I thankfully stopped myself just as I heard the noises. Or that one time, this summer, when he jumped into the lake we’d been camping next to because he couldn’t take the heat and flies anymore and I couldn’t help but stare when he broke through the surface again, standing on the shallow bottom, wet hair combed back and the white shirt he wore helplessly clung to the abs that covered his stomach, clenching as he breathed hard from the sudden coldness that enveloped his body. Dark hard nipples dented the thin fabric and I swallowed hard, suddenly happy that Chris decided to stay at home and study for extra points that would be helpful once the next semester started, because it felt like everyone could see the way I quickly tore my gaze away again before throwing him a towel.  That’s all that it has ever been for me, a few butterflies in the stomach, a thankfulness that he still wanted to spend time with me, even though his popularity immediately shot through the roof  when he got back from summer break and started university last year and his appearance had changed. His jawline sharper, eyes more intense, and even though his face was still rounded and soft at his cheeks, there was just something about him and I- I promised myself that I didn’t want it to be anything else. I was happy with the life I was living, with Chris in our apartment. With Felix as my best friend and nothing else. The butterflies that fluttered happily whenever he touched me could fly up and clog in my throat, to suffocate me completely for all I cared, I wasn’t going to destroy either of the precious relationships I had.  “Babe, you sure you’re ok? You’re drifting away again” Chris leaned over me with pursed lips, just looking at me with that wrinkle between his brows that I hated, because it only appeared when he was really worried. “I’m fine… I just… I think I’m a bit tired” I answered, closed my eyes and buried my nose against his collarbone. “You’re not getting a fever, are you?” He placed a big, warm hand against my forehead, and I leaned into his touch, humming something incoherent as an answer, the familiar smell of his cologne made me sleepy and I used that familiarity, the love and trust he radiated as an eraser. Started at the top of the mental image I had of my best friend and swiped with large motions until the only thing that was left was his smile and the mental image of myself swallowed hard as it hesitated before it reached out and erased that too.  - “I feel like this is an unnecessary long hug”  “Don’t complain, I’m not the sweaty one at the moment”  Felix chuckled softly against me, a twinkle in his eyes from the words he uttered, voice breaking a little and he cleared his throat as I let him go, reached for the water bottle I handled to him and emptied almost half of it in one go. I opened my mouth and he rolled his eyes before I even said anything, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips, “I know, dehydration is bad, yada yada”  I smiled back, couldn’t help myself as I watched him, cheeks flushed and chest still heaving. Sweat in the roots of the baby hairs in his forehead, dripping down his template and collecting on his cupids bow and chin. It was afternoon, sometime after 4 and I’d just gotten off work when I decided to surprise him at dance practise. Knew his daily schedule as well as my own, where he was and what he was doing and stifled a giggle behind my mouth earlier, when he saw me come through the door to the arena they trained in, almost missed the beat and send me a dirty look when he did so. His familiar sweet smile still breaking through just seconds later though when I stuck out my tongue at him.  “Did you have anything in mind, or did you just want to see me?” He asked and combed back his hair from his forehead, and I know I zoned out for a second too much, watching him with awkward admiration, when he looked away,  “I’m gonna shower first, don’t worry. I know I look gross”  I opened my mouth to protest but quickly closed it again. Didn’t want to add fuel to the fire that burned bright in my heart when the freckles on his face came through even brighter as the flush from his face slowly disappeared.  Twenty minutes later and we’re walking out the door of the school arena. The weather was nice and warm for the season, enough to wear jeans and a sweater, but still almost chilly enough to have a jacket as well and I was thankful that I decided to bring one with me. Felix combed back his hair again as we walked towards the parking lot, still a bit wet from the shower, while he closed his eyes momentarily to enjoy the soft, cool breeze. My hand itched to hold his, to get as close as I possibly could within the limitations of our friendship. I gripped the jacket I had thrown over my arm tighter instead while digging through the pockets to find my car key. He threw his bag in the back seat and like he usually did, seemed to have read my mind, because he interlaced our hands the moment, I’d driven out of the school zone. A soft smile on his lips when I glanced over at him. He opened his mouth, a wrinkle between his brows and I answered before he asked, “I missed you, and I know that you’ve been busy, coming up with the choreography and then learning it but-” “It’s been empty without you too” He finished and squeezed my hand, “So you decided-” “To go out and get dinner. Nothing fancy-” “Or else you wouldn’t have picked me up just after practise” I nodded and focused back on the road, needing to pay full attention to the busy afternoon. A few minutes passed in silence as he looked out the window and I fought my way through the traffic. Some kind of indie pop music played on the radio and he hummed along with some songs he was familiar with before suddenly speaking up again, “Noona?”  I hummed to signal that I listed as he continued, and even though I couldn’t look at him at the moment, I could still hear how he talked with a pout on his lips, “Thank you, I have been-” “Working hard, and don’t you dare say anything else” I finished off and Felix just nodded, and didn’t say anything else, even though I felt how much he wanted to protest. I parked at our favourite restaurant with a soft sigh. It was a diamond in the rough, open 24/7, that we kept hidden from our friends and family. Just to have a secret place to ourselves that we could go to at any time of the day, without accidentally running into someone. The main chef and owner greeted us at the door, confirmed that we wanted the usual and we sat down at our regular place at the window while we waited. Felix fiddled with a napkin and I pursed my lips in thought, watched how his fingers folded the same paper plane over and over until I got tired of his restlessness and decided to just break the ice. “What’s wrong?” He paused for a second, didn’t look up and the furrow that rested on his brow send them deeper in thought over his eyes, before he continued with the same plane model and I sighed deep while leaning forward, placed my hand on his to stop his fiddling and he looked up to meet my eyes, “What if I’m not good enough?” There was pain hidden in the brown of them and I winced on the inside. Hated to see my overall happy best friend in such a bad mood. Hated that I understood exactly how he felt that he didn’t have to say another word when he slumped against the backrest, slipped down on the chair slightly and rubbed his face with a tired motion.  “You are, though. Even if you don’t think so yourself. You received the opportunity for a reason. It’s all paid for, a whole six months to train with the best in the industry. Do you really think that such an opportunity would be handled out to just about anyone?”  He looked out the window, crossed his arms over his chest and I wanted to reach out again. To hold him for hours and tell him over and over again that he was amazing. That he was more than enough.  “No but-” He mumbled under his breath. “No buts. I know that it’s easy to say, since I can’t dance to save my life, but you are perfect. Best in your school and probably in the district. No one can deny that. It’s your choreography everyone’s dancing to. You’re the one in lead. Didn’t you hear the applause from the gallery when you were finished? People were screaming” “I heard your applause from the gallery” He muttered, ears slightly reddened from my reassurance and I tugged on his arm to undo the crossing across his chest. He pursed his lips, inhaled deeply before letting go and let me place my hand in his to give him a small squeeze.  My heart hammered in my chest from the heavy but bright feeling that simmered in my stomach when he looked back at me from underneath his fringe. A silent exchange of- not words but what only could resemble that, between us. Seconds passed and he gave me a small smile. Of appreciation, of the love between two close friends and I smiled back, while his thumb stroked down over the knuckles on my hand. 

Fighting Dragons with You

After twelve years, I'm finally telling the internet why I love Taylor Swift🖤 

Hello, internet using world. I’d like to introduce myself to the few people who followed me. Hi! My name is Christa and I am a Taylor Swift fan with every fiber of my being. Full disclosure, this is a short novel so now is your chance to make an exit, but I hope you stay.

Taylor and my ridiculously furry cat, Lyle

(affectionately nicknamed “rent-free”), are the only two beings made of flesh and bone who have been consistent in my life for the last 12 years. With a close second being my son, Gauge, who just turned 10. I won’t get into the details (in this post) as to why that is, but let’s just say there were a lot of ups and downs growing up.

The last 12 years have been an evolution for Taylor,

and subsequently, for me. At (dare I say it) 

38 years old, I’ve found that a lot of things happen in a decade. Like, A LOT. Now, I don’t feel 38. I guess I owe that to humor, singing, dancing, sarcasm, and launching a successful career that didn’t exist 15 years ago —something that has made me always push harder to set new goals and stay humble. But one thing I didn’t do over these last 12 years that I deeply regret was starting a fan page for Taylor. I mean, ESPECIALLY since I’m a professional travel blogger who makes her full time living from digital content!

There’s been a lot of momentum over the last 12 years

—demands which left me with little to no free time. But I can’t blame my absence from the Swiftie family entirely on that. In fact, I’d have to say, I blame much of it on fear.

Fear,

of being misunderstood, fear of judgment or writing something lame. I’ve had over 2,000 articles published online and in print as well as countless social posts, but the thought of Taylor seeing something I wrote and thinking it’s totally weird (or cough, too long for the internet), well let’s just say I’d be less afraid of walking into a burning building.

Fear,

of being called a fake because the financial demands as a single mom left me little money to spend on myself or Taylor merchandise, much less tickets to a show. I’ve always placed my son’s needs before mine.

Fear,

that I was too old to be a Taylor Swift fan. I mean, I was 26 when she hit the music scene and she was what, 16? I’ve been afraid. Afraid I would be rejected by other Swifties who really are the only people who understand this love we have for her  —which is basically like being rejected by your own people. Also, it’s super weird to be following teens/young adults on social, much less engaging with them.

Fear.

Along with my fear, a perfect storm of entrepreneurial demands, single motherhood, failed relationships (one of which was a marriage), and family matters have served as a constant reminder that my dream of ever meeting Taylor takes residence on another planet. An actual trip to Mars seemed more attainable. 

I feel like there is a whole demographic of women, “Swiftie Moms” who echo my story,

having watched Taylor grow into the strong beautiful woman she's become. Women my age who love her from behind the wheel of their SUV, on the way to drop their kids off to school, on the way back from a milk run, in the dark hours of the mornings when they’re dancing in the kitchen with a full on hair bun singing into a coffee spoon. Unnoticed fans who haven’t had the time to dive head first into the Swiftie Universe. But here I am. After all the fear and all the years...

So, why?

This is a hard one to answer. I guess you can say that after many years of challenges, judgment from others, and doing the complete opposite of what logic and reason said I should  —divorce, single motherhood, a second degree in my late twenties... risking it all to start a blog (which by the way in 2013 wasn’t even considered a side job much less a career), I kind of got to a point where I became

fearless.

I had to be. I had this tiny living, breathing human being who was counting on me at the very least, to give him a life a notch above the shit show I had growing up. Not to mention parenting —which is basically wandless wizardry pulled directly from the asses of parents. It demands that your mini human grows up to be a better human than you.

Yeah, unpack that.

Take all your collective shit, figure it out, and then teach your mini to do it better —to BE better than you at love, kindness, respect for others (especially boys respecting girls), integrity, money, and to be fearless. All while giving them the comfort of knowing that you, mom, have it all figured out... even when that couldn't be farther from the truth.

Top that with the pressures of working in the public eye

—which, while on a microscopic level compared to a full-on celebrity such as Taylor, is still very much a juggling act with none of the entourage to lighten the workload. Add to it the demands of working with national brands, and the unwavering ability for other bloggers to tear you down at any opportunity, or even worse, try to get close to you so they can raid your success like a Black Friday sale.

I found myself at the peak of my blogging career

but I was consumed by fear, AGAIN! Fear of shady AF bloggers and publicists, and so much to lose. And fear that now, thousands of people would have an opinion of me formed by jealous bloggers, and they didn’t even know who I really was. 

That’s when letting go of toxic people in my life became essential

—when, no matter who they were, or how I was tied to them, I had to realize that surrounding myself with the ones who lifted me took precedence over the ones who dragged me down. 

After all that..... I learned to give zero f***s about what people thought, or what they said behind my back. 

And I had to start caring about what made my heart happy, what made my family and friends smile, and what inspired me to do better. BE BETTER. Be the example of fearless, with the hope that I was lucky enough to stay that way. But I'm a vulnerable human made of heart and soul and sometimes people can still take the best from me.

I had to be fearless.

In August of 2017 when "Look What You Made Me Do” blessed my ears for the first time, I felt it pierce my skin and course through my veins. And to the very bones of this young 38-year-old Swiftie mom, I was shook AF! I sang, I danced and I drowned out the haters in the blogging world. She had a very clear message,

She had zero f***s to give, Taylor broke the internet.

After watching the seemingly endless myriad of shade thrown at Taylor over the years, my heart erupted with happiness as her flawless first single from Reputation revealed one BADASS BITCH. And with every music video release of her new era, she became a mythical Goddess with bullshit evaporating superpowers. Like, I legit think she’s an actual unicorn. After all, she does ride a caticorn named Olivia.

She got harder, she got smarter in the nick of time

One single post on my Facebook page praising her new era and new single she brought with it attracted a slew of hate speech, white people bashing, claims of Taylor ripping off Beyonce... I couldn’t believe the things I was reading from fellow bloggers. I even had a GLOBAL BRAND threaten my business relationship in their ambassador program because I stood up for Taylor and spoke out about the hate speech which was placed on my own personal Facebook page. But I stood by my words.

Fearless.

Over the following months into early 2018, and to the tune of, “This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things”, I, along with a slew of about 20 other bloggers, ended up taking down said global brand’s publicist who was using his budget and power to demean and sexually harass female bloggers (which would later reveal that blacklisting me was more about not buying into that bullshit rather than my voice on hate speech).

Zero f***s given to those haters.

Mythical Goddess with bullshit evaporating superpowers level officially achieved for Taylor, and even for me. Although I wouldn’t call myself a Goddess. That's all Tay. 🖤

She found love through the noise

And so did I. In November of 2017, I had approached the year anniversary of the greatest love I'd ever known. My last stop. And as the tracks played on, my heart was full. We both found happiness through a seemingly endless sea of anguish.

Taylor is truly doing better than she ever was, and so am I.

Her resilience up against the media and the demands of the industry are perfectly fearless. And her decision to keep her beautifully growing relationship with Joe private is wise. I’ve spent the last year at home, which has been incredible. I’ve had a lot of time to think about what’s most important to me, what has shaped me into the mom, partner and entrepreneur that I am, and it all comes back to Taylor. That’s why it’s time for me to be fearless again and officially join the Swiftie universe.

I’ve spent 12 years fighting dragons with Taylor

and growing a canyon of respect and adoration for her charm, wit, business savvy, musical talent, feminism, compassion, tenacity, love for animals, and of course her lovely, lovely, words. I’ve raised my son from birth with her. There isn't a single day that is spent where Taylor doesn't exist in our lives. For 12 years straight.

That’s a long time to love someone who has no idea you exist.

I play her music videos and YouTube uploads just so I can feel like she’s with us. And so my son knows that she’s one of the finest examples of a human being in his lifetime. I use Taylor’s kindness to teach my son how to be considerate and give back to others while sharing her fearless story with him so she can be a positive role model in his life. Taylor has essentially been part of our family all along. 

My son Gauge has a running joke that Taylor is the only person that can make me cry

(which happens more than I'm willing to admit). And it’s not because I’m weak, or on the verge of a mental breakdown (although I challenge you to try parenting, you might argue that), it’s because I truly love her like a best friend. When I see her happy it makes me happy, when I feel her sadness, it makes me sad. It’s visceral.

I don't believe the human connection is meant to be one-sided.

I feel in my heart, as weird as this may sound, that we will meet Taylor one day, even against all odds. Existing in the same lifetime as Taylor without at least trying to meet her doesn't feel right. I won't look at my son and teach him to let fear and doubt win, or that defying the odds is an impossible task.

Over the years I’ve been a spectator to her outreach to fans. She’s invited them to sessions in her homes, sent them gifts, invited them backstage, surprised them in their homes, made hospital visits, and Lord knows what else she has up her sleeve. And it’s all been done with pure excitement and love for her Swifties. With each outreach she extends, tears of joy are shed for fellow Swifties, and a ray of hope inspires me.

So, I’m starting a personal blog

which tells a very personal story of all the dragons I’ve fought with Taylor over the years. From living in a car at 15 years old to getting invited to LA premieres for Walt Disney and Marvel films. And I'll have no apologies for the truths that will be told (but will change names for privacy). It will be very personal and some of it won’t be pretty. Because life isn’t always pretty.

Taylor is releasing another album this year... we hope,

and she’ll be on yet another tour in 2020. After 12 years I’m finally ready for it. I’ve given my son everything he could possibly want or need. I’ve bought him a beautiful home in Northern Georgia. He’s been able to travel the world and do things most adults haven’t even done. And I owe much of that to Taylor for giving me the strength to take major risks, the courage to face my demons, the balls to cut people out of my life who were toxic and the self-confidence to defy the odds and do things my way.

2019 is our year to show @taylorswift how much we love her.

I’ll let the universe do the rest. Till then, I’ll be fighting dragons with her as I always have and writing my journal for her and anyone else who wants to read the memoirs of an OG Swiftie mom who keeps it real AF, full-on hair bun and all.

Rewrite the Stars

Romeo et Juliette fanfic

Paris/Benvolio, Romeo/Juliet, Mercutio&Tybalt mentioned in the background

The Greatest Show au

Characters based on R&J French musical 2018 China tour

Translated from Chinese. Apologize for any grammar mistakes cause I suck at it.

Feel free to ask me anything

1

    It all started with Juliet's unreasonable little wish.

    Tired of high-end restaurants, classical music concerts and art exhibitions in museums, Paris's fiancée decided to go to the eastside of the city for a popular circus show on her next date.

    Can you imagine? circus! Only Juliet dared to make such a request to him. Paris, the youngest son of the Escalus, being a play actor more like a hobby than a job. And the kind of performance that only high-class families can afford to enjoy. After his marriage with Miss Capulet, he will have to inherit the huge industry of his family as his real living method.

    Considering of his status as well as his own occupation, he naturally put himself and the circus on the opposite side. Even if the performance of the now more than famous Circus has been discussed all over the streets, he has never thought of stepping into that low-level entertainment site. However, lady first, since his fiancée made such a request, Paris has no reason to refuse. It was just an innocuous circus show, he thought, just a date as usual.

    He likes Juliet. Miss Capulet is as sweet, kind and clever as people say. He certainly appreciates such kind of girls, but what outsiders don't know is that Juliet is far from the virtuous wife they need who can be pushed around by her man. So Paris won't treat her like his wife-to-be. Juliet doesn't love him. Paris knew that very well. He didn't care about spending the rest of his life with such a perfect girl, but Juliet herself obviously is waiting for a gentleman who she is willingly to give up everything for.

    Before that, they will just allow their parents to match a couple who certainly don't fit together. Anyway, their lives are already trapped like this, and there is no other bird in the cage to accompany them.

2

    Juliet didn't like holding Paris's arm. Except where she had to do this. She prefers to drag Paris through the crowd, and often when Paris turned around, the girl is nowhere to see. When she appeared again, Juliet shoved the propaganda poster she had bought after the ticket into Paris's arms, pointed to the black silhouette with excitement and said, "Look, it’s the trapeze!"

    Paris frowned and flattened the ink-rich poster. He checked his shirt to make sure there isn’t any ink trace. He saw the two little men pointed by his fiancée's finger. "It must be interesting." Paris nodded in concurrence.

    It turns out more than just fun.

    When the two trapeze actors made their final appearances, Juliet squeezed his hands. Paris is incompatible with the noisy surroundings. He embarrassedly lowered his head and played with his pocket watch all the time. He lifted his head feeling the pain caused by Juliet on his hand, and right at that moment, he saw the most breathtaking scene that he had seen in his short life. A brown-haired boy hung upside down on a swing and flew towards him with a gentle and confident smile. When Paris thought he could reach him with a hand, he fell back and accelerated. He doesn't have wings, right? Or is he actually an angel with beautiful wings on his back, and Paris as a stupid mortal has no right to see the white feather? He knew the circus were all freaks, but this was different from what he imagined.

    "Who is that?" He asked.

    Juliet let go of his hand and pulled out a poster sheet that had been folded into a small piece. In the dim light of the auditorium, she was struggling to identify the small line below the picture.

    His fiancée told him: "It's Montague brothers."

3

    Juliet showed extraordinary enthusiasm for the circus in the east of the city. The following month, she took Paris to the circus performance three times, and made an excuse to leave when the third performance was about to end. She told Paris: "The housekeeper will come to pick me up, I’m sorry you have to go back alone, sir. Forgive me."

    Even though it was an engaged relationship, Juliet still called him sir of Mister but not his name. Well, Paris doesn't care. He figured out the names of the trapeze brothers at the ticket seller today, the one who flew to Paris is the older brother Benvolio. He wonders if it was a coincidence that he and Juliet always buy the seat close to the trapeze show every time.

    Paris found that he had already begun to appreciate this critic's farce. The surrounding audience was infected with this pure happiness, they exclaimed, laughed loudly, and even stood up and danced at the final climax! He had never seen such a scene in his own performance before, and this wonderful experience made him overwhelmed. The most important thing is that every time the flying boy swayed in front of his eyes, Paris's heart seemed to stop beating, he held his breath unconsciously, catching the flashing light in the maroon pupils.

    The show is over, Juliet probably has already gone back, and Paris walked out of the theater somewhat dreamily. The carriage he had hired would arrive later, he thought he would go to the park after show with Juliet as usual, and he was left alone with nothing to do but wait. He lit a cigarette, standing against the wall and couldn't help recalling the trapeze actor named Benvolio. Paris hasn’t figure out what was special about that boy, he was a circus actor, Paris’ worst counterpart. But he smiled so nicely that he seemed to be the most free bird in his flying posture. Paris couldn't see the chains on his body, and Paris himself had always been with them.

    "Mr. Escalus?"

    The lighted cigarette was dyed because he didn't get two sips, the burning feeling on his fingertips brings him back and he turned his head. The face that had been seen on the stage several times reached his eyes.

    Paris did not expect that the person who had just disturbed his mind would suddenly appear beside him. He hesitated before responding and asked him, "Do you know me?"

    Benvolio tilted his head and looked at him with a funny look, and asked, "Can anyone in this city not know you? The most famous young actor, you can be on the newspaper just because of your engagement!"

    "I'm not saying that I want to be in the newspaper like this," Paris shrugged a little helplessly. "You know; the reporters just don't want to let me go."

    "Yeah, what a big piece of cake you are!" Benvolio said and patted Paris's arm with the back of his hand. Wow, he mumbled that it was quite strong.

    Paris took out a new cigarette and handed it to Benvolio. He pushed back with a smile: "I don't smoke, besides the flying performance, the circus also needs me to sing."

    Paris didn't notice, Benvolio also participated in the collective song and dance performance of the circus, but there were too many people at that time, and he couldn't tell which voice belonged to him.

    He knew that singers have to protect their throats, feeling embarrassed, Paris took the cigarette back, thinking about it and saying, "Your performance ... is very interesting, although I can’t actually get it from a professional perspective. Proper words to describe ... "

    "Are you happy?" Benvolio interrupted him.

    "Well," Paris agreed, "yes. I believe I am. Happy."

    "This is what we hope to achieve, Mr. Escalus," the boy smiled at him again. "We are a circus, which just need everyone to be happy, happiness is the most important thing."

    "Call me Paris." He raised an eyebrow. Why do people like to call him Mister that much, it sounds a bit of distanced?

    "Well, then my name is Benvolio," Benvolio reached out to him, Paris shook his hand, and felt several rough cocoons in the acrobat's palm. "Next time you come to the circus, try to find my sound will you?"

    In fact, every time he came to the circus, he thought it would be the last time, at least he believed so. Moreover, Juliet left the scene early today. The girl might have finally lost interest in this circus thing, and he would never come see the circus alone. Even so, Paris nodded.

4

    Romeo removed his bandages that help to protect his hands and feet in their small dormitory. Banvolio pushed the door open. His brother was lying on the bed, holding the bandage, apparently thoughts lost in somewhere else. Benvolio tugged him on his shoulder. With a bounce, Romeo patted his chest in guilty conscience, and asked, pretending to be okay, "Where have you just been, brother?"

    Benvolio sat down next to Romeo's bed and slipped off his shoes. "I ran into a big bug at the exit of the theater, and just talked to him by the way."

    "Which big bug?"

    "Oh, you won’t believe me," Benvolio sneered. "The famous drama actor Paris Escalus, never seems to be the one who come for circus."

    Romeo's expression seemed like he has just crewed a fly, he swallowed hard and asked: "Is that Mr. Escalus who recently engaged?"

    "Yeah, what's the name of his fiancée ..." Benvolio helped Romeo remove the bandages and put them away, then turned around to arrange the clothes they left at the end of the bed, while racking his brain he remember, "Juliet or something, right? I don't remember the last name."

    Romeo's face was even more pale. He is lucky that Benvolio just turned his back on him at the moment, and quickly adjusted his emotions before his brother can find out.

    "I want to take a leave form rehearsal tomorrow," Romeo grabbed Benvolio's hand, "please help me to tell the boss."

    "Just take your break then, what are you so nervous about?" Benvolio looked at him confused. "Our performances during this season are all current projects, and you are already very skilled, I’m sure there won’t be any problems for one day off."

    Romeo dropped his shoulders with relief: "That's good."

    Benvolio thought about it and realized there was something wrong. He asked again, "What do you need the break for? It’s not like you have other things to do anyway."

    His brother blushed.

    "Oh," Benvolio went to slap Romeo's arm until he howled. "My little boy finally grows up, now he knows to go out with the girl and entertain himself."

    "It's a date! It's serious!" Romeo explained anxiously.

    "Date it is, whatever you say." Benvolio grinned and couldn't stop grinning. He reached out and rubbed Romeo's face, and he was still happy when his brother managed to punch his stomach.

5

    Before Paris realized, he bought another ticket for the circus show. For the price of a few coins, he comforted himself, watching 10,000 shows like this was nothing to him. Though he also knew that this was not about money at all.

    This time he still smoked against the corner of the theater after leaving, and Benvolio actually did appear like last time.

    "Did you hear me singing?" The flying boy hasn’t changed his costume off, just added a coat over it. Paris noticed that he was just a lean acrobat without scary large muscles, when wearing normal clothe he still looked a little thin.

    As Benvolio approached, Paris stopped his smoke.

    "No," Paris told the truth. "There are too many people, forgive me for not hearing so well."

    "And now I know that well-educated people do speak differently. Even this thing can be expressed as an apology for you," Benvolio joked. "It doesn't matter; I can sing again if you want."

    So Benvolio sang their curtain call song. Paris listened very carefully. After all, he felt depressed for not recognizing Benvolio’s voice before. He has listened to too many well-known singers. He has been invited to the Golden Hall of Vienna. The golden voices that are proud of various countries have cooperated or communicated with him, but no one sings like Benvolio.

    What magic does he have that makes people so happy? Even his expression of singing was cute, and Paris can’t stop smiling.

    On the way back, Paris couldn't help but feel tangled. Juliet didn't mention to him the circus anymore. It is likely that he would not have chance to come with his fiancée, but he still wanted to see the show. God, Paris, what’s the matter with you, he asked himself in his mind. This is a circus! You are the most promising drama actor, but let yourself indulge in this stupid joy, you let yourself corrupt, Paris, which is not a good thing.

    But ... think about Benvolio, think about this magic boy.

    Paris covered his face and suddenly realized that it wasn't just about professional dignity. Fuck, he fell in love with the flying boy.

    It doesn't matter, Juliet doesn't love you either. He comforts himself, but couldn’t feel better. Damn, hell, he really can't go to the circus anymore.

6

    The last time always becomes the past time.

    It wasn't until he pressed Benvolio to kiss him on the wall of the alley behind the theater that Paris realized that there would never be the last time. Benvolio felt as good as he imagined. Long-term acrobatic training gifts him the perfect figure, and apart from those tight muscles, there were always some soft places that could surprise him.

    "This is not the usual service I would offer," Benvolio paused after Paris let go of his lips, "but ... it makes you happy, right?"

    Paris nodded.

    "Well," Benvolio seemed to have made a very important decision, "keep going then."

    Although Benvolio did not seem to disagree, Paris refused to have sex in such an inconsiderate place. He took Benvolio back to his home. Juliet never came, she would only wait for him at home and have date in public places. They huddled on the king size bed where Paris always sleeps alone.

    The boy is not particularly experienced, but he is enthusiastic enough, his soft body can be put into various poses, and Paris just have extraordinary patience. Their bodies fit perfectly. Sex is generally happy. But when your sex partner is Benvolio, Paris thinks of the sleeping person in his arms, then this happiness will exceed imagination.

    The next morning, when Paris opened his eyes, Benvolio was looking at him with a smile he was already familiar with, and he said, "How much would you pay me?"

    And Paris woke up completely. He bounced, for a moment has no idea what to say: "I don't, this is not ... you ..."

    "Not what?" Benvolio also sat up. "Paris, you are already engaged. There will be a new mistress in this bed six months later."

    "I don't want to," Paris rubbed his sleepy hair. "I won't think of you as ..."

    "It's okay," Benvolio sighed. He climbed out of the bed, with the body full of marks they made last night, picked up his clothes and put them on one by one. "I know you're a good gentleman. You don't do such indecent things. At least give me some money for the carriage?"

    Paris gave Benvolio a soaring amount of unnecessary carriage money, and he watched the boy wave at him on the carriage: "Anyway, you are welcome to come and enjoy our show."

    He watched the carriage go further and further, and his heart sinks into somewhere deep undersea. Well, there can’t be pure joy in real world, welcome back to reality, Paris, you should wake up.

7

    He didn’t know how Romeo and his mysterious girlfriend is going. Sitting in the carriage heading east, Benvolio thought so. His body is still a bit sour. If Romeo has a "dating day" today, he can practice less without cooperating with him, which is a good thing. Benvolio just hope that Romeo doesn't fall in love with some rich young lady. Benvolio laughed out, his silly little brother, how can any rich young lady fancy him? However, it reminded him of Paris. No, Paris is different.

    Paris appears unlike what he should be at all, which annoyed Benvolio. If he was just an aristocratic master with only sperm in his head, it would be much easy to deal with. The problem is that not only is he not, but he even actually knows how to be general and kind. And probably, know how to love another soul. Benvolio finds out for the first time, that he may be unable to handle him.

    Benvolio, stop dreaming. He rubbed his arm. Who do you think Paris is? The promising young actor, the cover character of newspapers and magazines, with a fiancée who is in the perfect matched status. The only thing you can get from him is money, nothing more.

    This thought did not make him feel better. The gentle touch seemed to remain on his body. The skin he had been kissed on shoulder and neck still feels on fire at this moment. Benvolio sighed and leaned back into the seat. It's best that Romeo doesn't have a "dating day" today. He doesn't want to think about something he shouldn't think because he has too much spare time to waste.

8

    Before any of them came up with a solution to current situation, Mercutio makes his move. Paris was surprised to be visited by the head of the circus. He couldn't think of any reason to let the freak come to see him.

    "Oh, I'm feel my heart broken," Mercutio pouted. "Don't you remember me ... my dear nephew?"

    Nephew?

    The head of the circus is the one who ran away from the Escalus family?

    Paris didn't expect this. He only knew that there was a rebellious relative in his family. He had abandon his family name for a long time because of disagreement. It’s been years, and Paris barely had any impression of that guy. He only remembered that he had exaggerated black long curls and swagger through the street with no shame at all.

    Alright, Paris accepted that the head of the circus was his uncle who ran away from home. And his so called uncle is actually as young as him.

    "I'm here to offer you an opportunity," Mercutio looked at him confidently. "Look what a shit you live right now! Champagne, daydreams, messy parties ... Paris, we all come from the upper class, I bet you understand how boring and disgusting that circle is more than I do. I know you came to my circus, and you have been there several times. What do you think, interested? "

    He was right. Paris's life now is totally full of shit. He has a fiancée who doesn't love him and will never love him in the future. He has a job to please those peerages. He has a family property waiting to be taken over. He also has a little trapeze in his heart. Shit's fine. Definitely a huge bag of shit.

    "Join us, maybe you can make your life more miserable, who knows," Mercutio is really not a lobbyist, "but maybe you will get some happiness, happy is the product we yield."

    Paris took over the olive branch Mercutio offered, he became a member of the circus, he knows how to pack and promote, therefore the performance became more popular, he managed to attract more audiences, who sat below watching Benvolio flying in the air.

9

    Paris waited for Benvolio at the back door of the theater.

    He still went to bed with Benvolio, they also talked and did some causal things together. But Paris just couldn't talk about feelings in a serious way. After all, he didn't have the qualification. Fortunately, as long as he didn't bring it up, Benvolio won’t. He used to think that he would spent the rest of his life with Juliet. If the girl doesn’t like him, it’s fine. Given that they became married as the Escalus couple by name, it didn't matter what their real life is behind that reputation. He won’t mind Juliet falling in love with any other man, he was saying, this is the freedom she had, right? All they need is a paper confirmed engagement, a pair of rings, and they can continue their own lives afterwards.

    But now, he met Benvolio. Benvolio became the biggest change in life. The boy flew into his life and shone so bright that he failed to move away his eyes. Paris couldn't help thinking about what a whole different life he will live if having Benvolio by his side ... happiness, joyful, just like the best life in the world would be.

    The stage door of the theater was in an inconspicuous corner. There were no people passing by. A few of stinky trash cans standing in the night silently not far away. Paris walks as usual, and stood still, froze. He saw someone he never thought he would meet here.

    Juliet changed her usual luxurious dress and wrapped herself in a humble dark shawl. She waited there with a light smile, her blond hair fell out of her hood and hung on the girl's red fluttering face.

    "Juliet?" Paris tentatively called his fiancée's name.

    The girl was jumped by his voice. She saw Paris, and her face was completely bloodless. She opened her mouth for a long time without saying a word, and finally whispered to him: "Mr. Escalus."

    Paris could tell that Juliet was waiting for someone, she was holding a rose in her hand. He found it hidden under her shawl subconsciously. Well, Paris understood most of it. His lovely fiancée didn't lose interest in the circus, it’s just they are not appropriate to enjoy it together anymore. Like he said, Paris didn't mind this, he calmly asked: "Are you waiting for someone?"

    Seeing no sign of angry, Juliet gave her a sigh of relief and added: "the trapeze."

    Paris froze again. "Me too," he said.

    "Pardon?" Juliet looked at him puzzled.

    "The trapeze." Paris tried to smile at her.

    Well, things are getting awkward now. Paris recalled seeing the circus for the first time, and Juliet clenched his hands unconsciously at the beginning of the trapeze show. How likely is he and his fiancée to fell in love with the same person at the same time? There was the figure of Benvolio in his mind again, remembering that he smiled mildly and asked how much he could pay him ... his thoughts began to slide away in some unclear directions, and Paris clenched his fists. He did not want to speculate maliciously others, but, but. Even if Benvolio is Benvolio, he is still a low-ranking acrobat, how he grew up, if he will fall to his knees just to survive his life, and how much loyalty had left for people at the bottom of the society like him? Paris knew nothing.

    His fiancée looks no better than him. Paris didn't know if he should comfort him or not, poor girl.

    The door opened, and the two came out laughing and joking, then both stopped.

    "Romeo?" Juliet called Romeo's name carefully, as if asking for proof.

    Benvolio looked at his younger brother, Miss Capulet, who was still conspicuous even when dressed like this, and finally Paris.

   "Fuck," he groans, "fuck."

10

    Romeo and Juliet no longer have their love life underground.

    After the embarrassing showdown night at the back door of the theater, the little couple seemed to be finally freed from prison, and they started their sweet and bright dates. Romeo smiled even more often, and Benvolio didn’t know this can be possible for Romeo, who already wear a silly happy face most of the time.

    The boy writes poems, draws small greeting cards on his own, and picks up his old skill in childhood for handicrafts to make various gadgets for Juliet. Benvolio is wrapped in a quilt and shrunk on the bed to see his brother sitting on the floor ambitiously making gifts, with a slight headache . Romeo, like every young man out there who fell in love, went blind and hold his heart in his hands. Benvolio couldn't help worrying about him. It’s Juliet they are talking about, the well-known young lady who got the pure blue blood. The aristocratic stratum Romeo can never climb in all his life, let alone that she was half Step into the grave of marriage.

    "Romeo, you get yourself too involved," Benvolio frowned at him, "this is not a good thing."

    "I love her, she loves me," Romeo didn't look up. "I don't think there is anything wrong. You should see how happy Juliet is with me. She is my rose, my star. I will marry her someday. "

    He raised the newly folded paper rose to his brother, and with a dreamy sweet smile on his face, Benvolio was stabbed in his heart, he grabbed the flower: "She won't marry your."

    "Why not?" Romeo was a little angry. "You don't know her. You don't get to say what kind of girl she is. Give the flower back."

    "It’s true I don’t know her," Benvolio wrinkled the paper rose in his hands without knowing it. "But I know what her family name is, and I know she has a fiancé that you absolutely can't compete with. I know what is waiting for them at the end of the year. A church wedding. Romeo, she may love you, but she won't marry you, even if she wants. "

    "I'll ask her myself, you don't speak for Juliet," Romeo snatched the paper flowers back, carefully flattening the folds. "And Paris loves you, why should I compete with him?"

    "Paris doesn't love me," Benvolio retorted without thinking. "We are just business, not love."

    "How can you think so?" Romeo looked at him in shock. "He loves you, and I can see that, you are so cruel!"

    It's not cruel or ruthless. Benvolio sighed in his heart. He began to reflect on whether he had protected Romeo so well in the years when the two brothers depended on each other, now that he became like this—simply ridiculous, unreserved, and too easy to be broken.

    Take a thousand steps back, even if Juliet really loves Romeo, and take another thousand steps ... even if Paris really loves him, this is impossible. They are trapeze, even if they are stars in the circus, even if they bring people joy and laughter, they are still the lowest entertainment practitioners when walking on the street. The job of trapeze performance is for the young. They can’t make a live by that for a lifetime. What will happen after they can no longer fly? How can they struggle to afford a roof and bread? They don’t have a future to be looking for. Mercutio gave them this home, but Benvolio knows that the good time is mean to be end. Moreover, the two trapeze brothers and Paris or Juliet, they were originally from two separate worlds.

    "She'll marry me," Romeo waved his fist violently at Banvolio. "You wait and see."

11

    Paris and Juliet's engagement was like a fishbone stuck in Benvolio's throat. Now he not only has to find a way to deal with his feelings for Paris, but also spread half his mind to worry about his little fool-like brother.

    The Mr. Escalus was not satisfied with just having sex with him. He invited Benvolio to see his drama performances. He took Benvolio to dinner with so much folks and knives that he couldn't figure out how to use. At least the food was delicious, Benvolio thought. He watched Paris's performance on the stage. He is another kind of star. He raised his hands and pitched his feet in an elegant and decent manner. Sometimes, Benvolio couldn't understand what he was saying. They were all in a state of contemplation. He was sleepy, and felt that it was unreasonable to fall asleep in the Grand Theater. After several too obvious yawns, the gentleman sitting beside him shoots him a glare.

    Even though he was uncomfortable staying in such a place, Benvolio persisted until the end of the show. Paris ran over to him and asked with anticipation how he performed. Benvolio smiled awkwardly, saying, "You look great."

    "This script is probably too rigid," Paris scratched Benvolio's shoulder indifferently. "After becoming a partner of the circus, I increasingly feel that such a drama is not interesting at all, your performance is the best. I’d like to see the audience laugh. You are the professor. I have tried to learn your skill for a long time and yet still making no progress at all. "

    Benvolio hums absent-minded. He followed Paris and walked out, feeling tired and sleepy as hell, worried that he would not have the strength to deal with the bedroom thing later tonight.

    However, the carriage called by Paris did not drive back to the man’s house, but instead it returned Benvolio to the dormitory where the circus lived. When the carriage stopped, he was awakened by Paris, not knowing where he is for a second. Paris walked him to the gate. Benvolio asked why he didn't return to his home.

    "I didn't really expect that you would come to see my show today," Paris hugged him. "This is a wonderful date, thank you. You have to be on stage tomorrow. Take a good rest."

    Before he could react, Paris kissed him with his face in his hands, his fingers brushed through Benvolio’s soft brown hair. Benvolio watched him leave blankly, pushing open the door of his dormitory. Romeo was doing his daily stretch before going to bed, and shocked to see him wearing the emotionless face. He ran over to support him and asked worryingly, "what happened?"

    "He said, this is a wonderful date," said Benvolio.

    Romeo didn't know where the problem was, and he asked with confusion, "Yeah, haven't you had a good date?"

    "We're not dating," Benvolio wide his eyes, "Romeo, that's the problem. We're not dating."

    "God," Romeo frowned his hair, "Benvolio Montague, don't you understand what is happening right now? You love him, he loves you, it's that simple! Bro, not I said, can’t you live even a tiny bit happier? I got tired just by looking you struggling. "

    "I do not……"

    "Don't you try to quibble with me," Romeo interrupted. "Is it that hard to follow your heart? It's just a matter of simple admission that you love him."

    Benvolio thrust his palm into his eye socket. The farce should have stopped, otherwise no matter he or Paris, no one will be able to retreat. He didn't want to end up like that. Too good memories are poison for people like him, and Paris's life can't bear such a stain.

12

     Critical comments appeared in the newspaper, and more and more people gathered to resist the circus performance, no matter how they shouted freaks, bullshit or social maggots, Benvolio tried to calm things down, but failed every time. From time to time, wounds appeared on Romeo’s body. Benvolio knew that they were not caused by the training. His righteous young brother always fearlessly rushed to the front of the theater to argue and protest, never really pay attention to what Benvolio used to warn him. When Benvolio is warping his wounds, the boy who used to be loud and sorrowful didn't say a word, just gnashed his teeth and let the anger grows in his heart silently.

    There is nothing Benvolio can help, and all he could do was telling Romeo to make sure he protects himself. Because of the frequent conflicts, everyone in the troupe has recently got bruises and cuts on them. Benvolio went to purchase medicines, and finally gave his mind a little time to think about Paris.

    He refused several dates to Paris for the passing weeks. But being a formal member of the circus, Paris came to the show as usual. Benvolio had already remembered where Paris was always sitting. He flew in the prescribed direction and Paris reached out to him.

I must tell him, Benvolio thought. With only two months left between Paris and Juliet's wedding, Benvolio knows that the two have begun to prepare. Juliet had complained to Romeo that there are too many cakes to taste, and the wedding invitation has been sent all over the world.

They have to stop.

    He walked back with a pack of pills and saw ominous black smoke coming out of the street. Benvolio hurried with fear, their flaming theater gradually became clear in his eyes. His friends stumbled out of it, panting awkwardly, and Romeo stood outside holding the elephant dragged by him coughing. Benvolio grabbed his arm and shouted in a mess: "Where is Paris? Where is Paris!"

    "I didn't, I didn't see him," Romeo said intermittently, shaking his head. "Mercutio, said he came to discuss the loan today."

    Benvolio looked around in a panic, and Mercutio was outside, hands supporting on the animal trainer girl to keep her from tremble--Paris was not with him.

    "Romeo!" Juliet didn't know when she came over, the girl cried and rushed into Romeo's arms, and the two clasped together, starting to control the sobbing voice. "God, gosh, you're fine, you're alive. "

    Benvolio dropped his bag and stormed into the sea of ​​fire.

    "Benvolio, come back!" Mercutio cought sight of the boy running toward the theater, and was about to pull him out. The fragile door finally collapsed after it’s long struggle in the fire, "Benvolio! "

    Romeo stood up in shock. He glanced at Juliet. Tears and sweat are all over her cheeks, but she firmly grasped Romeo's hand and nodded. However, Mercutio held him down and shouted: "You stay here."

    Their boss wrapped himself in a soaked curtain, breaking in the building through the side window.

    

13

    The fire made Benvolio's familiar theater strange. He couldn't see the path clearly and could only fumble forward with his impressions. Collapsed prop structures everywhere now became his roadblock. The thick smoke ran into his throat and he couldn't breathe. He was hurt and felt a burning pain in his body, but he kept walking inside.

    The wooden beam fell and rubbed his shoulder, Benvolio hissed in pain. He was smashed to his knees and climbed up on the hot ground. He called Paris' name, but his voice was hoarse enough that can’t make a sound. Since Paris was here to find Mercutio, he should be in the studio on the second floor ... Benvolio quickly ran towards the stairs and was hugged from behind when he stepped onto the first step.

    "Benvolio!" It was Mercutio calling him, "Get out with me!"

    "Let me go ..." Benvolio tried his best to push away Mercutio's arms around his waist, but he couldn't shake it, "Paris ..."

    "Paris is not here. He's gone to the bank!" Mercutio carried him to his shoulders without further explaining, and Benvolio struggled restlessly. Mercutio shouted at him, "I won't lie to you!"

    Mercutio ran out with him and fell out of the window at the last moment of the theatre dump. He didn’t see it when in the firing theatre, but now his vision became clear. Benvolio's shoulder and neck were burnt with flesh and blood, he carefully lowered the person, and Benvolio tried hard to open his eyes. He saw a white figure running towards him. Paris knelt beside him. For a while, his didn’t know where to place his hands. He wanted to hold the boy in his arms, but he dared not touch him anywhere. Benvolio pinched and reach out to hold his fingers, the stone in Paris’ heart finally fall. Benvolio smiled at Paris and lost consciousness.

    The rescue team called by Mercutio had arrived. They carried Benvolio on the stretcher, and the wound was urgently bandaged. Scarlet blood was still seeping through the thick gauze. Paris followed the way and they rushed to the hospital. only was left outside the operating room. Romeo and Juliet were sitting with him. Juliet grabbed Paris's hand. Romeo's eyes were terribly red. He whispered: "My brother rushed in because he can’t find you outside anywhere... I can't stop him."

    Paris closed his mouth and took a deep breath, he didn't know what to say, damn it, Paris, you're a lucky bastard, what the fuck are you still struggling with? You know he just doesn't say it.

    "I shouldn't say that, but," Romeo paused. "He loves you."

    he knows. Paris lost his words under the huge impact. He couldn't speak, then Juliet turned and hugged him.

    Suddenly something coming to his head, Paris took Juliet's arm and asked her in a pleasurable tone: "Miss Juliet Capulet, I'm sorry, I beg you to cancel our engagement."

    "I will, I will," Juliet said with tears. "I'll tell my parents tomorrow."

    "No, you don't have to," Paris interrupted her. "It was me who broke the engagement, you didn't do anything, you know what I mean. You did nothing."

    Juliet knew she needs to play the role of a victim, and even if she didn't want Paris to take all the responsibility, the man didn't care about anything now. She nodded: "I understand."

    "Thank you." Romeo also took his hand.

14

    Benvolio fell into a long coma, during which he had many unreasonable dreams. However, these dreams had a strange similarity. His palms were always wrapped in something warm. He was unable to lift from the swing because of his weak arms. When he fell down, there would always be some invisible force grabbed him tightly to prevent him from falling, strong and eager.

    Until one day, the warm he feels disappeared, Benvolio fell to the floor of the stage, and woke up in severe pain. The nurse told him that during his unconscious days, someone came to see him every day, held his hand and said something bland. Benvolio opened his mouth and asked when he came, only to find his voice hoarse. He reached out to rub his itchy throat, accidentally touched a pothole in the side of his neck.

    That day he saw for the first time what he looks like now. The left shoulder and neck were covered with burn scars on his arm. He had recovered more after a few weeks of treatment, but still, he trembled in the mirror and touched it. He still felt the sharp pain of being licked by the fire. Which should be a psychological effect. The muscle was inevitably injured. At first, his left hand couldn’t even hold up a cup, in the future he can only recover to a normal life under rehabilitation training. Benvolio knew he couldn't return to the stage.

    He was already asleep when Paris came to see him later, but after he woke up, Paris never showed up again. Romeo came to see him and mentioned Paris, Benvolio just avoided the topic: "I don't want to talk about this."

    Benvolio had been in a coma for too long, weeks passing by, it was time for Paris and Juliet's wedding. He was probably so busy now that he didn't have much time to see himself ... not that Benvolio wanted him to come. He had better not come. It's better not to come now for everyone, not even Romeo.

    He didn't dare to look at himself now. After confirming with the doctor that he would not be infected, Benvolio covered himself with a high-necked coat and scarf. He decided to get discharged on a cold day, and predicted to leave alone, but ran into Mercutio who is waiting at the hospital door.

    When he was hospitalized, he read the newspaper and knew that the troupe had abandoned the reconstruction of the theater. They set up a tent. As usual, Mercutio quarreled with the critic named Tybalt on the media. They won’t get up on persuading each other.

    "The contract hasn't expired yet," said Mercutio, "I'm not about to fire you."

    When found by Mercutio, the desperate Montague brothers almost signed the longest contract allowed in their careers so they could play in the circus until their retirement.

    Benvolio shook his head: "I can't fly now, can't sing, can't move the props, what do you pay for my salary? I can't even sit in the ticket office ... people will be scared away."

    "In the beginning, everyone thought that others would be scared away by themselves," Mercutio laughed. "Isn't that why I start looking for all of you in the beginning?"

    "Everyone is waiting for you to come home."

15

    Benvolio finally determined to leave.

    He really didn't know what else he could do, and while there was still a little deposit, most of which was he saved from Paris's carriage money, he had the opportunity to start a new life elsewhere. He knows that no one has given up on him, he just, he just doesn't know how to face these familiar people, and Paris. Fortunately, Paris will not appear in the theater now.

    Romeo respected his decision, so there was nothing else to say. Benvolio said goodbye to everyone. He packed up his few luggage, bought the midnight train ticket, and received everyone's hug.

    Paris's residence was empty at the moment. Juliet knew that he had been taken away from his house by the elders of the family. Romeo ran on the wide street with Juliet. The girl stepped on Romeo's shoulder and climbed over the wall. Romeo was outside the wall. Anxiously waiting, Juliet picked up a stone and smashed it at Paris's window.

    Dissolution of the marriage was undoubtedly a scandal. The reason why there was no news yet was because Paris was under house arrest. He cheated, had an affair, deceived his fiancée, and broke the heart of a good girl. Juliet was at Capulet's house. That two lines of tears are the best proof. The Escalus insisted on keeping their marriage relationship. They came up the solution of keeping detain Paris before the wedding, and then forced him into the church until the raw rice was cooked.

    Paris opened the window, leaned forward and asked expectantly, "Has he been discharged?"

    "Benvolio is leaving!" Juliet jumped under the windowsill anxiously. "It's the train tonight!"

    Paris then noticed that Juliet was carrying a thin bundle of rope. The girl tried it several times, and finally threw the end with the heavy weight into Paris's room. Paris fixed it and flipped out of the window. He slipped too fast, wiped his palms with two bloodstains.

    The cloak with the big hood covered him with only one face exposed. Benvolio was sitting on the platform holding the box, and he kept looking up to see the clock in the hall. Passengers passed one by one, his tickets were tucked in his pockets and soaked with sweat. Benvolio couldn't tell what he was waiting for. Benvolio thought, maybe, just a little possible, that Paris would come to him. But it was Benvolio who chose not to tell him, how could Paris know? Even if he knew, he was about to get married in a week, this was probably a sensitive time.

    Benvolio waited quietly until his train enter the station, waited until he got on, and Paris didn't show up until his train set off. He had been out of the platform for a long time, with his luggage kept between his feet. He lowered his head to study the signature that everyone wrote to him, his nose started to feel sore. The circus no longer has its own theater. They are performing in tents. They will go to perform all over the world. They will meet again, Benvolio thought. He was worried what Romeo would become of after Juliet got married. How could his brother learn to accept the reality when his elder brother left him?

    There was a gentleman coming in this deck, it seemed that he had gone the wrong way before. From the perspective of Benvolio, he could only see one leg passing by him, and then stopped and sat down opposite him. He looked at the familiar white leather shoes, felt a stinging stab in his eyes, and turned to look out of the window. The reflection from the windowpane reflected the image of the person opposite him, it’s Paris waved to him in the window: "Hi, Peter Pan."

    Benvolio turned his head in shock, and Paris smiled at him.

    "I finally caught up with you."

16

    You may afraid that I will sacrifice other options for this choice. But I only want to give you the second half of my life.

    You are willing to do it for me, and I am willing to do it for you.

Little Did You Know: Part 2

Summary: You thought your upbringing in a mafia home was a difficult time in your life, fighting for the love of Bucky Barnes who didn’t meet your father’s standards. But even when you’ve both stayed away from that chaotic life, the past returns and things get out of hand. The home you both built tumbled harsher as your reality flew out the window and so did your heart.  (Modern AU) Pairing: Ex-Mafia!Bucky Barnes x Reader Word Count: 2106 Warnings: More angst, mentions of: death, gang business, abuse, violence?   A/N: If I’ve missed any warnings pls let me knooow Feedback is welcomed 💜

Part 1

(The night of)

“Yeah, he called me this mornin’. I got the shipment ready for him, all he’s gotta do is sign the damn papers and have them mailed to my office.”  Bucky informed his client over the phone as he rubbed his temples whilst looking over the illuminating city in the dark sky from his suite. The stress of handling a business all on his own was getting to him but he enlisted Steve, a well- trusted childhood friend, to assist with his work and finances. He was the only one Bucky could depend on, having the same upbringing environment and well, having the brains for the math that went into selling car parts to vehicle industries.

“I’ll see ya in a week or so. It’s getting late. Bye.” Bucky sighed, tossing his phone on the table that was blanketed with papers for work. With slumped shoulders, he shuffled them together before stuffing them into his burgundy, leather coated briefcase.

Just another week in this city and he’d be in your loving arms with his son nestled against your bosom. A light smile carved on his face at the thought before a knock on the door dragged him away. “Who’s there?”

“Steve, your accountant. Ya know, the guy who you used to walk to school so that he wouldn’t get into any fights with assholes who stole my lunch money?” Steve chuckled as Bucky blew out a laugh.

“Oh yes, Steve. How could I forget?” Bucky grinned and opened the door, smiling wider at the sight of Steve before stepping aside and allowing him in. Bucky patted Steve on the shoulder, entering his elegant suite and stood in the living room.

“Me and the guys are going out for drinks. You wanna join?”

Bucky shut the door before looking at his Rolex watch that was fitted around his wrist. “Nah man, I can’t this time. I got some lady comin’ up to sign some papers for her boss. She picked an odd fucken time too but what can ya say. Business is business.”

Steve flashed Bucky a smirk. “You sure it ain’t some hooker?”

“I’m happily married and have a loving son, you prick. Get outta here!” Bucky grabbed Steve by the shoulder before playfully kicking his rear. “I’m gonna tell Y/N you said that the next time I talk to her.”

“Don’t you fucken dare. She’ll cut off my balls and have me wear it around my neck.” Steve smirked as Buck pushed him out the door and into the hallway.

“Probably shouldn’t have said that, punk.”

“Jerk,” Steve responded with a cheeky grin before biding Bucky a farewell. Shaking his head in amusement, Bucky closed the door once again and took a seat near the fireplace that lit the room with orange and red hues. The warmness brought comfort to him, but not the kind he craved for.

To kill some time, Bucky decided to pour himself a glass of scotch, watching the amber fluid fill the glass and coat the ice. He swirled the content in his glass before leaning against the fireplace and taking a swig, letting the alcohol rest on his tongue before it burned going down his throat.

After about two glasses of scotch, Bucky laid flat on the white couch that settled in the middle of the room in front of the fireplace. Rubbing his eyes with fatigue, he rolled off the sofa deciding the lady wasn’t coming and he should get some sleep. Yet again, a delicate knock was echoed around the room, causing Bucky to groan with frustration. He eyed his watch again, reading 10: 38 p.m. “Fucking Christ.”

The knock was heard again and Bucky quickly fixed himself to a professional matter before grabbing his briefcase from his room. Rushing out, he slicked back his hair and adjusted his collared shirt and tie. He took a deep breath and opened the door with a large smile that quickly faded away.

“Hey there, Bucky.”

“Dolores…” His eyes widened seeing an old flame standing in the hallway with her perfect make-up and revealing dress that displayed more than he wanted to see. She smirked bashfully, biting her lip as she stepped through the threshold, her red fiery pumps gliding with her confidant steps.

“Surprised to see me?” She mockingly grinned.

Bucky stood there in shock before getting a hold of himself.

“How the hell did you find me? I told you I never wanted to see your revolting face ever again.” He growled, stepping forward with his jaw and fists clenched, hoping she’d back out of his suite.

Never did he once put his hands on a woman, and he didn’t want to start now. Memories with Delores flooded his mind. He was stupidly young at the time and miserable, craving for anyone’s attention. She was a cheater who kept him on a leash and was violent. He was sure he’d ever find true love until he met you.

However, Dolores didn’t move a muscle. Not even a flinch, just that bitch resting face that he grew to hate.

“There’s no need to be rude, baby. I came here to sign those papers for my boss. Ya know, that big deal you got outta nowhere. Tell me, how does it feel partnering up with the world’s second-largest dealership company?”

Bucky furrowed his brows in confusion, hearing her bouncy tone as a threat. He cocked his head to the side before chuckling bitterly to himself. It all came together. “You… you had somethin’ to do with this, didn’t you?”

Dolores shrugged her shoulders, making her way to the couch and sat down. “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. But you should always do your research on your clients before makin’ a deal with them Bucky.” She purred with attitude, leaning down to grab her bag off the floor.

“Not to mention, you should clean up your dirty work thoroughly and get rid of any evidence. Does Y/N know you’re still working for her father? Getting’ your hands dirty again?” She hummed and raised a knowingly brow before pulling out photographs and documents of paper, laying them flat on the glass coffee table for Bucky to see. His phone was tapped, car was wired and was followed by people who took an abundant of photos of Bucky working with your father. Some were even stills of Bucky shooting and disposing bodies into lakes or burning them in the desert.

His eyes grew wide enough to pop out of his skull, fear and guilt rising inside him. He told you he stopped the day you two got engaged, but months later when Bucky didn’t have enough cash, he came back to your father and asked for his job again. They both kept this as a secret from you and agreed to stop if you ever got pregnant.

“I stopped after James was born. Her dad didn’t want to risk my life anymore, so we agreed to stop and put that life behind us… We didn’t want anyone’s life at risk especially with the fact that I am not only the love of his daughter but the father of her child, his grandson, too.” Bucky snarled.  

“I hate to break it to ya Bucky, but your cover-up didn’t work so well for Tony Stark. He’s been on your ass since the day you killed his old man. A vengeful fella and he ain’t gonna stop ‘til you’re down, six feet under. That’s where Mr. Clint Barton has a deal for you.”

“Stark? What the fuck does he have to do with this?” Bucky questioned, his eyes filled with rage, glaring at Dolores.

Rolling her eyes, she strolled over to the bar and poured herself a drink as she spoke, “He’s crazed with taking you down and tried getting Clint to work with you so that he’d take all your money from the profit shares before snatching away every element that makes up your happy life until you’re no more. That includes your little family too.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bucky murmured to himself, rubbing his forehead before dragging his hand down his face. He’s lead himself into the biggest shithole and couldn’t think of a way to get out of it without you finding out. It looked like he didn’t have a choice because either way, he’d be screwed no matter what.

Not only losing your trust but your love for him too.

Dolores eagerly watched Bucky slump into the chair with his arms resting on his thighs, keeping his eyes to the ground. Stress and frustration swayed inside him. It was sickening, but he brought it upon himself if he just listened to you and leave the life you and he hated forever.

“What should I do Dot?” Bucky whispered with sadness, peering at Dolores, his blue lively eyes drained of life and confidence.  Now what was left was pure downfall and regret.

The corners of her mouth curved into a small grin as she tried her best to hide her enthusiasm. Maybe she still had power over Bucky after all the years they’ve been apart. Pouring him a glass of whiskey, she gracefully walked to Bucky, handing him the drink that would affect him in more ways than one before taking a seat on the armrest.

“I suggest you take Clint’s deal and become as powerful and as wealthy as he is. You’ll have all the richest and wouldn’t have to worry about your past anymore. Clint will make sure all the evidence is burned and destroyed. Even paying Stark a visit with connections from your gal’s old man and putting Stark in his place like his father.” She purred in a haunting tone, brushing strands of Bucky’s hair out from his face.  

Bucky tensed from her sudden touch, her affection sending an undesirable chill throughout him. He gawked at the alcohol that rested itself in the crystal glass before downing it all in one gulp. He knew this wasn’t the smartest decision, but he just needed to drown in alcohol. He couldn’t bare his failure.

“Deal… And give me another.”

Dolores smirked, happiness erupting inside her as she slid off the armrest and poured Bucky yet another drink. If she played her cards right, she’d gain Bucky’s trust.  Her malevolent plan was coming to life and all Dolores needed now was Bucky at his lowest. She didn’t want his guard too high up.

She needed him vulnerable.

After some time, Bucky couldn’t think anymore, his mind clouded with illogical thoughts and utter nonsense. He couldn’t even sit up, slouching and going slump against the chair. He reeked of his cologne and alcohol, a stench that wasn’t pleasant at all. The room felt like it was spinning but it gave him the buzz he craved for. Almost like a drug if he said so himself.

“Shit, what time is it?” Bucky’s voice was scratchy as he rubbed his eyes before trying to focus his vision on Dolores’ form as she strolled over to Bucky’s lap.

“It’s pretty late, Buck. You should take me to bed.” She whispered, leaving kisses along his neck and jaw.

“Dot… Stop it. Now.” Bucky said in a stern tone that only made her let out a soft moan.

“Fuck, I forgot how you sounded. It got my panties so wet.”

His cheeks burned red with embarrassment as he tried pushing her off but her delicate touches made him tingly inside, the heavy buzz inside him not helping so much. He could feel his blood rushing throughout his body and every nerve in him told him to stop.

They screamed it.

Your face flashed in front of his eyes, his mind giving him the biggest warning. He could feel his heart aching as his body betrayed him, giving in to lust. Before he could say anything, Dot pushed her straps to her dress and connected her lips with Bucks’. It felt all sorts of wrong yet here he was indulging into something he shouldn’t.

“S-stop. I c-can’t.” Bucky desperately said but it was no use. He grabbed her head, slamming his lips against hers as Dot grind against his bulge. Dolores moaned in response before gasping in shock as Buck hoisted her up and carried her into his room.

Your voice echoed in the back of Bucky’s head, but the alcohol coursing through his veins was more powerful than his gut feeling. No matter what he did now, it didn’t matter. He betrayed you.

He believed in that saying where you’d do anything for the one you loved.

And this was it.

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Destiny | WMatsui - Chapter 32

2.55 PM.

Jurina wore a sleeveless yellow cardigan over a white long-sleeved blouse, a red bow around her neck, and a short, red and white pleated plaid skirt. She slowly walked in from the right side of the main stage, her feet only pausing once she found herself at the center of the stage. With her back turned to the audience, Jurina ignored the screams of the fans who had enthusiastically begun to call her name upon her arrival; she gazed instead at the majestic, high staircase looming in front of her.

The camera zoomed in on her intense, focused expression; Jurina taking a deep breath at the daunting task awaiting her, before beginning her ascension of the stairs decidedly. The idol’s determination never once wavered as she progressed and climbed the stairs one by one, the whole time scrupulously keeping her eyes fixed on the top. It was her ultimate goal, and under no circumstances would she let anything or anyone prevent her from reaching it.

Only a couple of stairs were left now and Jurina ignored the growing pain in her legs, acutely conscious that she could not afford to give up right now that she was so close to her objective. With renewed determination, she continued her ascension valiantly, until her feet paused abruptly on the penultimate stair. Stupefied, she saw a silhouette emerging from the shadows at the top of the staircase.

Jurina’s mouth dropped open, watching with unconcealed admiration the twenty-nine-year-old girl, her brown hair tied back in a ponytail and dressed in an elegant long black dress, slowly approaching the edge of the staircase. As her attention fell upon the younger girl below her, a gentle smile plastered the older girl’s features. This unexpected arrival had been observed and received by the audience with exclamations and gasps of surprise, yet neither of the two girls paid attention to any of it, seemingly wrapped up in their own little world as their gazes silently lingered.

“Acchan,” Jurina murmured in awe.

Atsuko Maeda raised her arm and extended her hand in invitation. Jurina forced her legs to move and climbed the last stairs separating her from the former and legendary first ace of AKB48. As they were finally standing on the same level, Jurina looked back and glanced down nostalgically to the path she had taken, before setting her eyes on the older girl before her and placing her fingers inside Acchan’s outstretched hand.

“Congratulations, Jurina,” Atsuko said solemnly. “You made it to the top.”

As soon as those significant words escaped Acchan’s lips, the music of Oogoe Diamond began to resonate, filling the packed stadium with its distinctive upbeat melody. Both girls immediately dropped the rehearsed little act to exchange a casual smile, eager and alive with delight, their hands still linked when they turned their attention towards the attentive audience.

Hashiridasu basu oikakete  Chasing after the bus as it started to leave

Boku wa kimi ni  I wanted

Tsutaetakatta To tell you

Kokoro no moyamoya ga kiete  The fog has lifted from my heart

Taisetsu na mono ga mietan da  And I’ve seen what’s important to me

The lyrics of the song left their lips as they began to descend the staircase together, this duet marking the opening of Jurina Matsui’s 2020 graduation concert.

  The last notes of the 2009 AKB48’s hit song faded in the air, and the two aces disappeared along with it from the main stage. The audience of the Nagoya Dome directed its attention in curiosity towards the message written in large, black letters that appeared on the main white screen. The message was accompanied by the sound of a plane taking off echoing loudly through the speakers of the Japanese stadium.  

Twelve years ago, a young girl started her journey towards her destiny.

The message remained on the screen for a few, long seconds, enabling each fan to grasp the deep meaning of the words, until disappearing gradually from the screen as the two majestic doors of the main stage slid open. A group of fifteen girls could be seen aligned behind the door, but it was only when the lights and cameras fell upon them, that the audience was at last able to discover their identity.

The reaction was instantaneous: it was impossible for the fans not to manifest their great surprise, mingled with evident joy and pleasure. Despite being very familiar with every one of those faces, most of those girls had retired from the idol industry, and as such not participated in a SKE concert since countless years.

Each girl wore a white short-sleeved blouse with a panel down the middle decorated with braid, completed with a sailor's collar. Their short pleated plaid skirt was several shades of brown; some of the girls had a short tie around the collar, whilst others had a bow tie. Finally, black knee-high stockings and simple black shoes finished the traditional costume. As the first notes of Tsuyokimono yo played in the air and the girls began singing, the audience, whilst still having a hard time believing their eyes, was becoming progressively conscious that they were extremely privileged. They were witnessing a scene they had not seen in almost a decade.

The entire first generation of the Team S: Rena Matsui, Kumi Kagami, Oya Masana, Yuka Nakanishi, Aki Deguchi and all the other girls who had shot this low budget videoclip in the small aircraft hangar of Nagoya were all present, exceptionally reunited on stage on this very special occasion.

Tsuyokimono yo  Be the strong person      

Shin no yuusha  Be the true hero

Tatakai oeta ato  After you’ve finished fighting

Dare no tame  For whom

Nagasu no  Do you shed

Sono namida  Those tears?

Emotion could be seen shimmering in a few girls’ eyes as their names were being called by a crowd of enthusiastic fans, whilst others tried not to be too destabilized by the general euphoria, attempting to remain professional and stay focused on the lyrics and the choreography of the song. As the first verse progressively came to an end, it didn’t escape the audience’s attention that all the girls were now standing at the front of the stage, except for one crucial member.

Jurina Matsui.

The doors began to progressively slide close, but not before the last missing first-generation member made her entrance, joining the other girls already dancing energetically on the emblematic, upbeat music. Jurina stopped her progression once she arrived at the front of the stage and, positioning herself at Rena Matsui’s left side, began to sing the second verse along with the other girls who had marked the beginning of SKE48’s story.

  Akane, who was about to complete her Cross outfit and put the black hat on her head, was easily distracted once again as she listened to the music of Tsuyokimono yo resonating loudly in the Nagoya Dome. To be honest, she was still impressed by the prowess Jurina managed to demonstrate. A few weeks ago, when Jurina informed her of her desire to invite as many graduated members as possible on stage, Akane found herself naturally thrilled by the idea.

Jurina had certainly succeeded: not only had she brought the entire Team S first generation back, for the fans’ greatest pleasure, but also many other graduated members were scheduled to appear throughout her graduation concert. Regarding the song Akane would be performing in a couple of minutes now, the former idol was feeling quite impatient, and admittedly also a little nervous, to be reforming the original trio on stage.

Chancing a glance through the mirror of her makeup booth, Akane could see Tomoka Wakabashi and Rina Matsumoto who were finishing adjusting their black and pink satin costumes. While Tomoka was already wearing her jacket over her white blouse, Rina had just finished putting on her pink tiered skirt and was now taking a seat to complete her costume with the usual knee-high patent boots.

Akane let out a small sigh, a wave of nostalgia sweeping over her.

In a few short minutes now, a staff member would enter the dressing room and ask them to join the main stage. Akane was acutely conscious that, once on stage, time would fly by, and the performance would be over in no time. That’s why she was determined to take advantage of the incredible opportunity to savor this magical moment, conscious that she would likely never relive it in her life again.

When Akane heard her cellphone beeping, she diverted her attention from the two other girls and looked down to the device placed on the table in front of her. After checking the time, and discovering she still had a little time left before the beginning of her performance, Akane grabbed her phone in curiosity, discovering she had received a text from Airi.

“Hi Churi,

I heard that Jurina’s graduation concert has begun. I don’t know if you’ve already performed on stage yet, but I really hope you’ll enjoy yourself today!

When I arrived at Junkudo thirty minutes ago, there was already a long queue waiting outside, so I’m guessing the sign session will last a little longer than planned. By the way, a fan asked about you. He was wondering if you would make a surprise appearance during my sign session, like you did in February for my previous book. He looked a little disappointed when I told him it wasn’t going to happen, as you’re on stage today for Jurina’s graduation concert…

Say hi to the other girls for me!

Airi.”

Akane’s mouth tugged into a smile as she read the message, quickly typing a reply back to her friend. She barely had time to press the Send button, when the door of the dressing room opened and a staff member told them they were now awaited on stage. Akane immediately muted her phone and put it away in her bag, before checking her appearance in the mirror one last time.

Putting on her leather gloves, she carefully made sure her black, cross-shaped earrings were well attached, before grabbing her black hat from the table and adjusting it on her head. Over her shoulder, she heard Tomoka Wakabashi asking if she was ready and, once she was sure her outfit was complete, Akane followed the two other girls out of the dressing room in the direction of the main stage.

  Rena grabbed her iPod from her backpack and placed each earphone inside her ears; her fingers slid over the screen of the device as she searched for one particular song. Once she found it amongst her tracklist, she pressed Play and adjusted the volume, closing her eyes to concentrate better and not be distracted by the agitation of the dressing room. As an upbeat piano melody began filling her ears, Rena’s lips silently moved in synchronization with the lyrics of the SKE song.

Ame no pianist ga  The pianist of the rain

Ai wo hiite iru wa  Playing with my love

Building no machi ni  From a building in the city

Kanaderu kanashii melody  There's a sad song playing            

Mado no kenban wo  The keyboard made of windows

Tataku shizuku no yubi  Struck by the fingers made of rain

Watashi dake no concerto  Plays concerto just for me

Earlier on, Rena had studiously rehearsed in the dancing room the choreography of each and single song she was going to perform today, but she also wanted to make sure her memory wouldn’t fail her accidently when it came to the lyrics. Rena couldn’t be more familiar with Ame no Pianist, a 2010 song she had performed plenty of times in the past, yet she was determined not to leave anything to chance.

Feeling a sudden, small tap on her shoulder, Rena fluttered her eyes open and removed her earphones when she saw Yui Matsushita addressing her. “Rena-san, we’re leaving ahead in the direction of the stage.”

“Alright,” Rena replied, watching as she and Moe Yamashita - the two girls with whom she was going to perform that song – left and walked out of the dressing room.

The trio wasn’t due to sing until fifteen more minutes: there were two other songs coming up after Sansei Kawaii, the song the young SKE’s kenkyuusei were currently performing on the main stage of the Nagoya Dome. That’s why Rena knew she had sufficient time to go over the song once again. Placing the earphones back inside her ears, Rena resumed the music and focused her attention on the lyrics once more.

A few minutes later, when the music came to an end, Rena was now certain she knew the lyrics by heart. She put her iPod away, before carefully studying her dark and red outfit in the mirror. If there was one important thing that her career as an idol had taught her, it’s that you were never safe from an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction.

Rena raised her hand to her hair, checking that the large, red rose pinned on the right side of her head was well attached. Once she felt confident enough that the accessory wouldn’t fall, her gaze fell down to the red sleeveless top, then to the black cumberband that she was wearing. At last, her eyes landed on her red skirt, making sure that it was properly clipped around her waist.

Alright, I think I’m all good.

Now that she was all set for her next performance, Rena wondered whether she should use the time left to rest and relax. Soon, the music of Sansei Kawaii grabbed her attention again, and she chose instead to make her way towards the stage. Somehow, she was a little curious to see how well the kenkyuusei were doing with that energetic song. Despite having left SKE a long time ago, Rena followed the group’s activities from afar.  

And if there was one certitude she had anchored deep within her - and this even when she was still a prominent member of SKE – it was that the group’s future lied with the new, young generations.

“Rena-san! Rena-san!”

Rena had barely stepped out of the dressing room when her feet paused on the floor; her eyes widened in surprise as she heard someone call her name. It must have been years since she heard that voice, she would recognize its distinctive feminine, cheerful tone anywhere. Pleasure softened Rena’s face and she turned around, facing the familiar twenty-nine-year-old, former AKB48 member who was approaching her.

“Yuki-san,” Rena threw her a smile. “How have you been? It’s been a while. Aren’t you a little early for your performance?”

“Ah yes,” Yuki conceded willingly. “But I don’t mind waiting. Mayuyu’s duet starts in less than half an hour, so I figured we could arrive together.”

Rena followed Yuki’s gaze as she inclined her head and glanced over her shoulder, noticing Mayu and Jurina chatting together a bit further down the corridor. Even though Rena was too far to catch what the two other girls were saying, Jurina’s whole body language spoke for itself. Her radiant smile grew broader at every word exchanged; a genuine, small laugh occasionally left her lips.

Jurina’s happiness was nothing but manifest.

Rena’s mouth curved with affection; she hadn’t witnessed this kind of scene in years. It was all so familiar, that it brought back many, fond memories. Despite their often, conflicting agendas, she had never seen a friendship more solid and stable than the one uniting Jurina and Mayu Watanabe. The fact that they managed to remain friends throughout the years - even after Mayu’s graduation - didn’t come as a real surprise.

When it came to the friendships she forged, no one was more loyal, reliable and constant than Jurina Matsui. Despite this acknowledgement of Jurina’s personality, it didn’t prevent the moment from being any less touching in Rena’s eyes.

“I see your solo career is going extremely well,” Rena said, bringing her attention back to Yuki. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you very much.” Yuki’s cheeks flushed at the compliment. “There are so many talented artists; I wasn’t expecting my new album to sell so well. I’m going back on tour next month; a few dates have just been added. It might be a little tiring sometimes, but there’s nothing more gratifying and motivating than to do something you love.”

“That’s true,” Rena murmured. How could she object to such a statement, when she herself had embraced an acting career, thereupon fulfilling her ultimate, childhood dream? “I’m sorry, but I think I’d better get going. I was on my way to the stage; I’m expected in less than ten minutes.”

“Oh, sure. I’ll see if those two are done chatting,” Yuki said, swinging her head around to look at Mayu and Jurina. “I guess not,” she let out a small chuckle after discovering the two friends still profoundly immerged in a passionate conversation. “When those two are in their own little world…”

“It’s hard to get them out of it?” Rena offered, a warm note of amusement in her tone. From her peripheral vision, she noticed a staff member approaching her: she knew it was her cue to leave. “It was really nice talking to you. See you later?”

“Of course! I won’t hold you up any longer, I just wanted to say that…” Yuki’s friendly, cheerful voice took on an unexpected, serious tone. “I really miss this. I know it was a long time ago, but I sometimes remember the Summer the four of us spent at Mayuyu’s beach house. We had so much fun together, didn’t we?”

Rena blinked in astonished silence, a little taken aback by the abrupt change of subject. Even though she couldn’t really fathom why Yuki was bringing it up – nor the reason behind the strange, expectant look the other girl was giving her – casting her mind back to that particular week in July 2015 inevitably brought back a sense of nostalgia.

“Yes, we did. Everything about that week…” Rena smiled reminiscently. “Everything was perfect. We really had a great time.”

“Yes, and maybe one day…” Yuki’s voice trailed away.

Rena didn’t need her to finish. She knew perfectly well what Yuki was implying and could even hear the touch of hopefulness in her tone. Rena found herself momentarily distracted when the staff member addressed her, warning her it was time to leave. Rena absently nodded back in return and, after giving Yuki a small, apologetic look, couldn’t resist one, last glance in Jurina’s direction.

Rena was startled to find out the two friends were done talking, and now looking in their direction. Despite being acutely aware of the male staff member’s presence by her side, Rena was unable to turn away when she saw Jurina staring at her across the distance, the young girl making no attempt to hide the fact that she was watching her.

For a moment, they held one another’s gaze and, as Rena let the meaning of Yuki’s previous words sink in, found herself secretly wishing she could one day relive those carefree days of happiness.  

  4.20 PM.

Jurina’s 2020 graduation concert was now halfway through. Unexpected guests, exceptional performances. On this day in late September, the lucky audience at the Nagoya Dome was definitely in for a treat. After such a memorable opening and an impeccable first part, it was hard to see how the second part would manage to surpass such a level of perfection. If the fans believed they had already seen it all, then they were definitely not at the end of their surprises.

The team KII had just cleared the stage after Kodoku no na Ballerina; Airi Mizuno rightfully owed herself the cheers of the public with her flawless technic in the title role of the graceful ballerina. A videoclip was now projected on the main screen, showing a short feminine silhouette - dressed in a black, masculine military outfit - energetically running in the woods. Her slightly inconstant breathing, heard distinctly through the speakers, was the evident proof that this little chase had been going on for a while.

“Dammit,” the complaint escaped her gritted teeth when she realized she was having a hard time keeping up the distance with the incredibly athletic, feminine silhouette she was chasing.

Suddenly diverging from her course, she hid and pressed her back to a tree, quickly pondering over her options. The camera - which had until now carefully avoided revealing her identity to the spectator – progressively moved upwards from her black boots to her combat fatigues, pausing and zooming in on her face. The image of a determined Mayu Watanabe flashed on the main screen of the Nagoya Dome.

“Mouse to Team B,” Mayu tried to keep her voice calm and steady when she opened the communication. “Nobunaga is approaching an inhabited area. Do you copy?”

“Team B to Mouse,” a feminine, slightly crackled voice replied in her earpiece. “We’re five minutes away from your location. Please don’t engage the target before our arrival.”

“It will be too late,” Mayu argued. “She will have escaped by the time you arrive. I can’t let that happen. I’m going after her.”

“No, it’s too dangerous,” her interlocutor protested in alarm. “Mouse, I repeat. Do not engage the targ-”

Mayu abruptly cut the communication with the rest of her team, her eyes fired with anger as she stared back at the agile, feminine figure quickly disappearing out of the woods. “Oh no, I’m not letting you escape,” Mayu grumbled, her fingers tightly gripping the pistol attached to her belt. “Not this time.”

The videoclip paused, the image froze and lingered on Mayu’s intense, focused expression, until her features gradually faded as the screen turned black. The audience waited in anticipation, an upbeat pop music filling the silence the moment after. Instantly, everyone’s attention flew to the main screen: large, white letters flashed on the surface, announcing the imminence of the next song.

R I V A L R Y  

From a trapdoor carefully hidden underneath the stage, two feminine silhouettes appeared, the lights shining upon them immediately. Gasps of surprise echoed in the stadium as Jurina and Mayu Watanabe, both dressed in the black military outfits taken from the videoclip, were standing back to back at the center of the stage.

Anata wa watashi no raibaruda  You’re my rival

Watashi no eien no raibaru  My eternal rival

Watashitachi wa dochira mo  We both want

Toppu ni tōtatsu shitai  To reach the top

Watashitachi hitori no tame  But there is only place

Dake no basho ga arimasu  For one of us

Kore wa mujihina sekaidesu  This is a merciless world

Dare ga ikinokoru nodesu ka?  Who will survive?

As the pair began singing together the first verse of the 2015 AKB song - their first and unique duet in the history of the 48group – the unexpected appearance of the graduated and emblematic member Mayu Watanabe caused waves of euphoria among the already misty-eyed spectators of the Nagoya stadium.

  Jurina tried her best to clear her head and control her agitation, somewhat frightened by the sound of her own heart beating wildly inside her chest. From the minute the concert had begun and she had stepped on stage in front of a packed stadium for her duet with Acchan on Oogoe Diamond, she had felt a shot of adrenaline course her veins. Her excitement was at its highest level and - as the first part of the concert went smoothly without a single incident to deplore - the electrifying sensation hadn’t left her since.

A few songs ago, they had officially entered the last third of the concert, and a completely different feeling monopolized her senses. Despite her best efforts, the muscles in her stomach wouldn’t stop clenching nervously at the imminence of her next duet. It was true that other SKE members sang that song occasionally in the past - mostly during theater performances - it hadn’t been her case in many years.

Yes, the possibility sometimes presented itself to her, but Jurina had a hard time imagining herself singing that particular duet with someone else than her original partner. Back in 2010, when she listened to the lyrics of Two Roses for the first time, she couldn’t break free from the feeling that song had been written specifically with both she and Rena in mind. Two Roses had always been a significant, special song; one that required detailed, careful preparation before going on stage.

When Jurina finally became fully conscious of her romantic feelings for her WCenter, this song only grew to be even more meaningful.

“Let me help you.”

Jurina came back to her senses when she heard a feminine voice softly addressing her, noticing through the mirror Rena - already elegantly dressed in a red, long dress - approaching her from behind. For a split second, Jurina wondered what the older girl could possibly want to assist her with, until feeling Rena’s fingers on her back, prudently pulling the zipper of her blue dress up to the top.

“Thank you,” Jurina voiced her gratitude, until her smile vanished when she noticed Rena’s slightly troubled expression in the mirror. It was true they hadn’t had the opportunity to exchange more than a few words since the beginning of the concert, not that she expected any less. The first twenty-five songs followed one after another at breakneck speed, even sometimes obliging her to sing a few songs in a row without a single interlude.

Even so, Jurina never missed the opportunity to steal a glance at Rena when she had the chance. When they crossed paths in the dressing room or happened to share the stage together: each and single time, Jurina was struck by Rena’s serious, intense focused expression. Despite the general restlessness and noisy environment surrounding her, Rena’s impeccable professionalism always seemed to take the upper hand: she never let herself get distracted unnecessarily.

“What is it?” Jurina asked in concern, turning around to face her once Rena was fully done adjusting her dress. “Is something wrong?”

“I just…” Rena hesitated. “I was just asking myself if it’s really a good idea to do that song together.”

Jurina frowned, bewildered. “I don’t understand. When I suggested we sing that duet together, you accepted. You don’t want to do it anymore?”

“That’s not it,” Rena nodded negatively. “I want to sing this song with you; I really do. But I also know what this song means to you: how very emotional you can get sometimes when you sing it. Believe me when I say I want nothing more but to please you and make you happy on this special day but when I accepted to come, I promised myself not to do anything to cause you pain or sadness. And this song…”

“I…” Emotion closed Jurina’s throat, trapping the rest of her words.

Unable to speak, Jurina stared back at her wordlessly, struck by the range of different emotions conveyed through Rena’s eyes. Hesitation. Apprehension. Concern. But it wasn’t everything Jurina realized as she desperately tried to maneuver her thoughts and studied Rena’s expression at length. If she wasn’t mistaken, there was also a perceptible note of genuine caring and affection in those brown eyes fixed on her.  

“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Rena sadly murmured. “The performance hasn’t even started yet and you’re already crying.”

Jurina widened her eyes, startled when Rena delicately brushed away a tear from her cheek: she hadn’t even felt it rolling down. When Rena was about to pull her hand away again, she quickly trapped Rena’s fingers inside hers, keeping them closely pressed to her cheek. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe emotion will get the best of me and I won’t be able to hold my tears back on stage. I don’t care; it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to live with regrets.”

   As Akane was pensively removing her Kiss Datte Hidarikiki black and red outfit, she couldn’t help but steal another discreet peek at Jurina who was by her side getting changed, still feeling a little disturbed by what had happened at the end of the song. She and Jurina hadn’t shared a word since they left the stage a couple of minutes ago yet, the more Akane looked back on this strange final spin and the unusual way in which Jurina behaved, the more she was convinced it hadn’t ended exactly as the younger girl originally planned.

A few weeks ago, when Jurina suggested centering this particular song with her, Akane hadn’t seen any valid reason to object and had gladly accepted her invitation. Teasing her friend about the infamous kiss, crucial part of the choreography, was way too easy. When she had confronted Jurina and the latter had proclaimed loud and clear she had nothing to worry about - advancing the fact that she didn’t kiss other members on the lips anymore - Akane had suppressed a knowing smile.

It was indeed true that the kissing monster’s ardors had considerably calmed down over the years, but Akane wasn’t naïve. Jurina’s flirtatious, mischievous behavior was an inseparable part of her personality. No matter her level of maturity, it would never entirely disappear. Moreover, Akane couldn’t ignore the great temptation this particular song always represented throughout the years for a girl as playful as Jurina.

That was why, as innocent, casual and sincere as Jurina tried to appear on the subject, Akane was practically certain her friend would never let such an opportunity pass. It was her graduation concert: the very last time she would ever be performing that song as a SKE48 member.

Kiss Datte Hidarikiki  You even kiss left-handed

Watashi me wo tojite kizuita yo  I noticed while my eyes were closed

Anata sukoshi hidari ue kara  You start a little from the left

Hora ne kuchibiru kasaneru  And there, our lips meet              

Yume wa anata no kikiude  My dream is your dominant arm

When Jurina seized Akane’s hand to make her spin, the latter clearly saw Jurina’s lips quickly approaching hers. Despite being fully conscious of the bad deed Jurina was about to commit, Akane didn’t try to avoid the imminent kiss. Somehow, she couldn’t find it in her to be upset at Jurina’s action, deciding to grant her that last little moment of pleasure.

As Akane was preparing herself to receive Jurina’s lips on hers, she was startled when the contact didn’t happen. Instead of following through with the kiss, Jurina changed direction at the last instant, pressing a chaste kiss to Akane’s cheek. Under normal circumstances, Akane wouldn’t have thought too much about it after seeing Jurina’s mischievous expression, understanding she had been played, and Jurina never had any intention of intimately kissing her.

Today, Jurina’s eyes reflected no sign of mischief, but an unusual flash of hesitation mixed with unease. It only lasted a few seconds: Jurina quickly regaining her composure when the lights went off and the music stopped. Yet, Jurina’s strange expression had spoken for itself: it was enough information to tell Akane that something had happened inside her friend’s head, making her change her mind at the last minute.

When they moved backstage, Akane absent-mindedly noticed the Team E – with the graduated member Rena Matsui at their head – patiently waiting at the entrance of the stage for their turn to perform. She didn’t miss either – although it was quite brief - the visual exchange between both Matsui, as Jurina shyly returned the gentle smile the older girl was sending her way.

Back then, Akane hadn’t thought much of the interaction between the two girls.

In retrospective, and in the light of all those elements, Akane wondered if Jurina’s unexpected change of heart during the final spin of the performance might be linked to a certain, twenty-nine-year-old, brown-haired girl. A girl who shared the same surname as Jurina’s, and who was currently performing Team E’s song Dareka no Sei ni ha Shinai on the main stage of the Nagoya Dome.

Akane couldn’t hold it any longer: she had to know if her intuition was correct. “You were planning on kissing me during the final spin, weren’t you? Why did you hesitate? How come you changed your mind?”

Jurina turned to look at her. “Are you saying you wanted me to really kiss you? I thought you would feel too embarrassed about it, so I changed my mind.”

Akane wasn’t in the least fooled by Jurina’s apparent relaxed attitude, even less by the playfulness in her tone. After more than a decade by Jurina’s side, she was capable of analyzing her reactions: the slight moment of hesitation in Jurina’s voice before she replied was the evident proof that her question managed to destabilize her.

“I don’t think it had anything to with me,” Akane said carefully. “I think you changed your mind for another reason: because you knew Rena was watching.”

“W-What? Why wouldn’t I want to kiss you because of Rena? It doesn’t… You’re not making any sense now.”

No, it doesn’t make any sense, Akane almost replied, but kept her thoughts to herself when Jurina turned her back on her and continued undressing as if nothing happened. Akane remained quiet, beginning to feel slightly concerned by her friend’s defensive tone and embarrassed answers. She was never one to jump to conclusions, yet one thing was for certain: she didn’t like at all how this whole thing was starting to look.  

  Jurina hung up after her video call with Mariko, a smile of pleasure spread over her face as their conversation lingered in her memory. Of course, a part of her remained sad that her thirty-four-year-old friend wasn’t present today for her graduation concert. Unfortunately, Mariko had work commitments requiring her to be in Madrid, and she wouldn’t be back in Tokyo until the end of the month. Despite her absence, Jurina was extremely happy they were able to get in touch and exchange a few words on this special day.

Jurina put her tablet away, a small laugh inadvertently escaping her lips when she remembered the funny way her older friend appeared on the screen earlier on, wearing a ‘I love Spain’ tee-shirt, together with a wide-brimmed black Cordobes hat. If it wasn’t for her friend’s noticeably drawn features, Mariko’s goofiness would have easily made her forget about the difference in time zones, and it was barely past 9 am in the Spanish capital.

Distractedly, Jurina listened to the cheerful, KII’s pop song Disco hokenshitsu resounding loudly in the baseball stadium, before setting her eyes on the familiar hat laying on the table in front of her. Reaching out for it, Jurina’s fingers played with the white accessory for a short while, until raising her eyes and checking her matching white outfit in the mirror. In less than ten minutes, she would be stepping on stage for her solo, CENTER.

Feeling the white hat slowly moving between her fingers made everything rush back with vivid clarity. It might have been already five years ago, she would never forget the first time she sung that song in front of a crowd. Between the release of SKE’s new single, her first solo and the shocking announcement of Airi’s graduation, that specific Handshake Day in December 2015 had definitely been emotionally charged.

That time in the dressing room when Rena had gently chastised her as she was playing with her hat nervously. That other moment too, when Rena had noticed her crooked knot and carefully adjusted it, while playfully teasing her about her supposedly legendary issue with ties. But most of all, Rena’s last-minute encouraging, reassuring words after she had confessed to her how terribly anxious she felt about the idea of missing a single step during such an important song.

Even if you make a few minor mistakes, I won’t love you any less.

If there was one person who had demonstrated her unconditional support and successfully helped her get through this stressful day, it was the girl whose angelic face still haunted her days when she cast her mind back to the past and delved into her memories. It was the girl whose soft, lovely voice was currently filling the air of the Nagoya Dome with the first verse of the melancholic ballad Kareha no Station.

  As the impressive doors of the main stage closed on her gradually, Jurina let her gaze wander around the Nagoya Dome, taking time to admire the amazing view of forty thousand green light sticks beautifully illuminating the stadium in her honor. As the fans kept chanting her name vigorously, aware of the imminent departure of their favorite idol, Jurina flashed one last smile and mouthed a ‘thank you’ of eternal gratitude to the audience, emotion shimmering in her eyes. The moment after, her face vanished from the screen entirely, the doors shutting once and for all in front of the first and emblematic ace of SKE48.

Jurina remained standing in front of the closed doors, silent, her heart beating wildly inside her chest as she listened to the cheers and the fans still calling her name from the other side. It was almost as if they didn’t want the concert to end quite yet and wished she would come back, surprising them with a couple more songs. But Jurina was perfectly conscious that - even though she would have loved to step back on stage and sing for them again - it was not going to happen.

Her graduation song, the one she had performed a few minutes ago, had marked the end of her 2020 graduation concert irrevocably.

Feeling incredibly moved by this vibrant testimony of their love for her, an unlimited affection that had motivated her to dedicate twelve years of her life to the idol group and to surpass herself at every occasion, it took Jurina a few seconds to capture a male voice addressing her behind her back. When she finally tore her eyes away from the stage she had just left and turned around, she discovered two staff members patiently waiting for her.

Mustering her most polite smile, Jurina was especially cautious not to trip up on her long, satin white dress as she slowly descended the few stairs - clearly appreciating the staff members’ help in the process - and following them when they guided her backstage. After more than two hours and thirty-five songs, numerous guests’ appearances, an impressive mix of AKB and SKE big names on Majijo Teppen Blues and an emotional, final reunion of the Team S first generation on Tooku ni ite mo to complete the picture, Jurina’s 2020 graduation concert had finally come to an end.

On her way backstage, Jurina was approached on many occasions by group members wanting to congratulate her; still she remained in such a daze after such a unique experience, that her voice was locked within her, barely managing to nod and smile back in return to every one of them. As Jurina reached the dressing room, the two staff members accompanying her left her side, Jurina’s steps soon pausing on the floor as she felt her eyes watering.

Startled, she raised her hand to touch the moistening sensation on her skin, wiping away the tear that had slowly found its way down her cheek. She had done her very best not to cry too much during the concert, especially during the last songs. So why were emotions getting the best of her now of all times? When Jurina sensed someone approaching, she tried to conceal her emotional state behind a fake smile yet was immediately caught off guard when she discovered the person’s identity.

Rena was standing by the door of the dressing room, giving her a look of mingled surprise, confusion and concern. “Jurina… what’s wrong? It was such a beautiful concert; you should be so happy and proud of yourself.”

The ghost of a smile flitted across Jurina’s sad features; Rena was entirely right. Everything did indeed go mostly as planned and without any major incident to deplore. Yet, she found herself incapable to answer Rena’s question. How could she give her a semblance of an explanation, when she ignored herself the reason behind her tears? Those inexplicable tears she had quickly attempted to hide, but which had unfortunately not escaped Rena’s keen attention?

And what about this strange, unpleasant sensation of emptiness filling her?

Jurina felt the tears rising unbidden behind her lids, threatening to trickle down her face. In the past, she always felt a tinge of frustration when a SKE concert reached its end, not wanting to leave the stage quite yet and instead sing a few more songs to please the audience. But this sudden aching hollow void inside her wasn’t like anything she had ever experienced before. It was disconcerting and disturbing, even beginning to frighten her.

“Jurina…?”

At the sound of Rena’s hesitant voice calling her name, she stepped forward and reduced the short distance separating them, leaning forward to bury her face against Rena’s shoulder. Tears began falling remorselessly down her cheeks and Jurina fought hard not to weep openly, until her breath caught in her lungs, shocked by her own actions when she realized what she had done.

What on earth was she doing?

Rena was only being nice and considerate; yet she was selfishly taking advantage of it for her own benefit, without thinking about the consequences. A feeling of profound unease mixed with guilt swept through Jurina’s chest, realizing she had completely let herself guide by her emotions and overstepped her boundaries with Rena. She and Rena weren’t that close anymore; she had no right to throw herself into her arms in such a shameful, casual way.

“I…” Jurina’s voice trembled, as she began to pull back. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-”

Jurina was taken by surprise when Rena refused to let go, instead sliding an arm around her back and keeping her close. “It’s alright, I’m here. Talk to me.”

Jurina shuddered when Rena’s soft fingers caressed her back delicately through the fabric of her dress, her eyes fluttering close as she couldn’t help despite herself but relax in Rena’s protective, warm embrace. “Is this… Is this how you felt when you graduated?” Jurina finally managed to ask, still somewhat distressed by the multitude of conflicted emotions overwhelming her. “This immense happiness when you were singing on stage, then a terrible void inside you when it all… stopped?”

“Ah, I see,” Rena quietly murmured. “This bittersweet sensation you’re having right now; I think every girl who graduated went through the same. But, it won’t last. In a few weeks, maybe months, it will have passed. I promise you that.”

Jurina didn’t say anything, relishing instead the sensation of Rena’s fingers beginning to caress her hair slowly and tenderly. To be honest, Jurina was having a really hard time understanding the reason behind Rena’s patience and incredible gentleness. By now, Jurina would have expected the older girl to release herself from her hold, and make sure she didn’t try to invade her personal space again.

Fearing that another word from her might ruin this incredibly pleasant moment between them, Jurina kept her mouth closed, while desperately attempting to make sense of the situation. Rena was only trying to bring her comfort and ease her worries: it didn’t mean anymore than that, Jurina tried to convince herself. Yet, as Jurina was careful not to jump to conclusions and falsely misinterpret Rena’s actions as more than a simple act of friendliness, she couldn’t deny how happy she had felt all day to have Rena by her side during such a crucial moment of her life.

As the seconds flew by, and Jurina was more than conscious she would at some point have no choice but to extricate herself from Rena’s arms, realization dawned on her that she didn’t want this reunion to be the last. Jurina swallowed a nervous lump in her throat, uncapable of keeping to herself any longer the question burning her lips. She needed to ask. She needed to know.  

“Will I… see you again?” The question left Jurina’s lips in a whisper. In fact, she had uttered those words in such a feeble voice, she wasn’t even sure Rena had heard her at all. A glimmer of doubt that grew and developed within her as she waited and waited for a reply but didn’t receive a single one in return. But she didn’t want to let this opportunity pass, Jurina was sure of herself when she slowly disentangled herself from Rena’s embrace to look at her.

The great surprise plastered on Rena’s face told Jurina she had definitely heard her before, contrary to her initial belief. And Rena’s reaction, coupled with her lack of answer, made her fear she might have been somewhat presumptuous by believing there was a chance Rena would accept to meet her again. Maybe for Rena, this day was a one-time thing; an exception she had agreed to make only because it was her graduation concert.

“I know it’s already been three years and maybe today didn’t mean anything to you but…” Jurina paused, her voice trailing away uncertainly. “But after seeing you today, I realized how much I missed you and I didn’t want this moment to be the last of us. So, can we… can we see each other again? It could be for anything you want: Dinner, lunch, or even a simple coffee.”

Jurina watched Rena’s lips parting, yet she didn’t have time to speak that a staff member interrupted them, informing Jurina she was expected for a short, exclusive interview with Nikkan Sports. Jurina silently nodded back to the male staff member and began to follow him obediently, before abruptly halting when she realized she had no assurance the other girl wouldn’t have already left by the time her interview ended.

Decidedly turning on her heels, Jurina asked politely for the staff member to wait a little longer, before glancing back at Rena in apprehension. She couldn’t wait: she needed to hear her reply at once. She had to know if they still had a chance to mean something to each other. If Rena refused her offer and preferred to keep her distance with her, then she wouldn’t insist and accept Rena’s decision.

But what if she said yes?

What if they had an opportunity to reconnect?

Jurina mustered the courage to speak up. “Rena, can I…” She tried to steady the shakiness in her voice. “Will I see you again?”

Rena’s mouth curved into a smile and gave her a small nod in return; it was all Jurina needed to have her hopes rekindled and feel the tension in her body dissipating. Jurina’s heart leaped inside her chest; joy warmed her from within. On this particular day of September 2020, she had unquestionably turned an important page of her life.

It was now up to her to begin a new chapter.   

Video Games Might be a Little Satanic

Susan Brinkmann of Philadelphia’s The Bulletin would like you to know that video games are, more and more, skewing towards the satanic and are waging a war against God… or… something. According to Brinkmann, even the “hardcore” crowd is starting to become concerned by the increasing levels of anti-religious sentiment in modern video games.

Even the most hard-core gamers are sounding the alarm about the rise in the number of satanically-themed video games that target God and Christianity, invite players to make pacts with the devil, and elevate Satan to hero status.

“This has been going on for the last 10 years, but especially in the most recent games,” said Lance Christian, 32, of Alton, Illinois who has been an avid gamer for most of his life.

Basically Mr. Christian and, by extension, Mrs. Brinkmann are arguing that the video game industry has become increasingly friendly towards Mr. Beelz.

Brinkmann cites several games to support her argument (and provided by Mr. Christian), including Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, Darksiders, Devil Summoner and Tecmo’s Deception: Invitation to Darkness. But the brunt of Brinkmann’s article is aimed squarely at EA’s Dante’s Inferno and it’s apparent outward showing of anti-religious sentiment. Sadly this argument falls apart when you actually look at the game and not just some questionable advertisements. Best Twitch streaming equipment.

Without getting into too much detail, Dante’s Inferno puts you in the shoes of Dante, a soldier from the Third Crusade who has embarked on a journey into the afterlife to rescue his wife from Lucifer before he can use her soul to break free from Hell and try to overthrow God and Heaven. In the process of doing this Dante must fight his way through demons of all shapes and sizes while using a big ass scythe… so in reality, it’s almost 100% faithful to the Divine Comedy if scribe Dante Alighieri had watched “What Dreams May Come”.

And dropped blotter acid.

Let’s look at Dante’s Inferno objectively for a moment. Yes, the game is very brutal and definitely deals heavily in the macabre. But once you look beyond what’s on the surface what you find is a rather righteous tale of redemption as this man travels to the furthest corners of hell in order to save the woman he loves from the devil himself and in the process protecting Heaven and possibly saving God’s ass. I don’t know about you guys, but that’s pretty damn angelic to me, regardless of the methods used.

Cultural Differences The fair majority of games listed in Brinkmann’s article are Japanese in origin. In Japan, religion is not a particularly taboo issue and many forms of Japanese media, from manga to films and games, include some form of religious or spiritual content that is used as a mechanism to further the plot. That’s it and, more often than not, that’s all. No condemnation. No outrage. Best gaming chair models for 2021.

This issue doesn’t spark until news of the ‘evil anti-Christian Satan sim’ reaches the American Bible Belt or, God forbid, the mainstream news.

You see, the United States has something of a hard on for Jesus and whenever something that dares to paint Christianity as anything but a bright white beacon of hope for all humanity, a small but loud sect of the American population cries foul. This is due in large part to two things: 1.) Ignorance of the culture the game was created in and for, and B.) Arrogance. Pure, simple arrogance. Specifically the arrogance that any mention of “God” automatically means that it’s referring to your god.

As a matter of fact, most video games are very careful to avoid mentioning any religions outright. Sometimes, as is the case with games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, elements of existing religions are used to enhance the mythos. In Oblivion, the Knights of the Nine are strikingly similar to the Knights Templar. Anyone who takes the time to read the countless books in Oblivion will find many more nods to real-world religions and beliefs worked in.

Games like Oblivion, which feature religion outright, are a rare breed. The majority of games that use religious symbolism do so in a more subtle or restrained way. Bayonetta (one of the games listed by Mrs. Brinkmann), for instance, is basically about a witch who is out to kill angels. While this works to set the story up, it doesn’t actually come up very often as you play and when it does, it’s not pushed on you very strongly. Of course, Bayonetta isn’t exactly what you would consider a serious game – most gamers were quick to realize that Bayonetta is little more than breastakaboobical, chestakamammical, pendular globular fun. Unless you actively pay attention, you won’t even notice it’s there.

The Dragon Age Effect Dragon Age: Origins is a shining example of how religion and religious belief can be conveyed in games. For those of you who have yet to play it, Dragon Age: Origins includes an religious group known as the Chantry of Andraste, which is heavily based on Christianity. Unlike games like Oblivion, which treat spirituality and religious faith as absolute fact, Dragon Age: Origins keeps the entire discussion rather. At no point during the game are you led by the narrative to believe that the story of Andraste is either right or wrong. To further gray the area of religious belief, there are several points in the game you can overhear NPCs and members of your party debating the merits of religious belief and faith.

The true beauty of how religion is portrayed within Dragon Age: Origins is that at no point during the game are you given the answers. It treats religion as a characteristic of a larger world and the overall narrative is such that depending on how one looks at it one can decide whether they were taking part in a holy war or simply defending their homeland from an invading army. The Gamer Collective’s list of best corner gaming desks.

But of course, Blankmann and Mr. Christian (who provided the list) have taken Dragon Age: Origins and boiled it down to its most base elements — and somehow still managed to get those wrong:

Game revolves around the story of God going mad and cursing the world. A witch attacks believers and players can “have sex” with her in a pagan act called “blood magic” so she can “give birth to a god.” Another scenario allows player to have sex with a demon in exchange for a boy’s soul.

I have to admit that I’ve yet to finish Dragon Age: Origins so I turned to resident Dragon Age expert, friend of Binge Gamer and all around connoisseur of awesomesauce Raychul Moore to see just how accurate the above statement was.

Suffice to say, not very NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD:

HA! That is all wrong. You have sex with a Mage so that the demon will not kill and take the soul of one of the Grey Wardens (they are the only ones that can kill the Archdemon). You never can have sex with someone to save a demon.

[Before that] a boy is possessed, but you can’t sleep with someone to save him, you have to decide whether to kill the boy or have someone go into the “Fade” to fight the demon and save the boy. “God going mad”? Yeah, they never played the game, obviously. There is no reference at all to such a thing.

…I have nothing to add, I simply wanted to clarify that Mrs. Brinkmann’s article was wrong.

The Other Extreme If games like Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne are the extreme of demonic imagery in games, the other extreme is best seen in Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a real-time strategy based on the series of books that have also spawned a series of movies starring Kirk Cameron as Himself*. The basic premise of Eternal Forces is that the world has ended and you’re on a mission to convert as many people to Christianity as possible.

And if they don’t convert, you kill them.

Apart from that Left Behind: Eternal Forces is the single most intentionally racist game I’ve ever played. Those fighting for the “Antichrist” have African and Arabic names whilst the majority of those fighting for the Lord are whiter than Ward Cleaver. Furthermore the game carries a 1950s-esque sense of gender role as many unit classes are “men only” while women must carry around arbitrary titles like “Medic Woman”.

For what its worth many Christian organizations decried the game as being the misogynistic, bigoted tripe that it was. What few of these groups realized was that the game itself also sucked, for which there is no forgiveness.

No More Backpedaling But you know what? For as much as I find Left Behind: Eternal Forces to be a vile disgrace on the video game industry, I would not call for it to be censored. I wouldn’t call for it to be pulled from store shelves, and in fact I would like to see Left Behind: Eternal Forces and other games like it sitting on store shelves right next to Devil May Cry and Shadow Hearts. As gaming grows, the industry needs more games to address these supposedly taboo topics. And when the blowback comes (and it will come), the gaming industry must stand its ground.

No more backpedaling.

Every time a group of people cry foul over the content of a particular title, the games industry goes absolutely insane. Developers and publishers have PR firms draft ultra-professional retorts to these wild-eyed complaints while game bloggers (schmucks like me) circle the wagon and say anything they can to try and discredit the source while rarely, if ever, addressing the core issue.

This needs to stop.

The video game industry, as a whole, needs to stand up and say two simple words:

So what? Until the gaming industry stops trying to apologize every time a title offends someone, that aura of “legitimacy” that so many gamers want in order for this medium to be taken seriously as an art form will continue to elude them. If you want this thirty year-old misconception that video games are strictly a children’s toy to finally be done away with, we’re going to have to own up to and defend all the content in these games instead of apologizing for it.

So as the title says: Yes, some games are satanic. Some games are sexist. Some games are racially or culturally insensitive, though rarely is it out of maliciousness. Some games have content that you or I will not agree with. But if gaming is to truly become accepted in the public consciousness as an art form and a true entertainment medium, people are simply going to have to accept that there is some content that they simply will not like. Just like they do with film and music and television.

Gaming is not just for children anymore, and to break that mindset you may have to drag a few people to that realization kicking and screaming. But before the gaming industry can do that, it has to stop being afraid of stepping on a few toes.

*Correction: Kirk Cameron’s character of Buck Williams may actually be slightly less insane than Kirk Cameron himself.

Oh, One More Thing…a lifelong gamer with intricate knowledge of several “anti-Christian,” “anti-religious” games who lives in Alton, Illinois (home to one of the oldest Catholic Churches in the United States) who just happens to be named “Lance Christian”? … something smells about that. I think Mrs. Brinkmann has been had.

masters of the scene

This has been on my drafts since June yet I’m only writing (and posting it ofc) now. The idea came out in the middle of the night, and somehow I managed to wake up and tell Pau before it erased from my mind completely. 

Shout out to cupcake and my baked goods bc without them I’ll probs would’ve have never managed to do it, and probs would never written it lol 

It’s an au i think you’d like so I really hope you do <3 

AU: Matteo Balsano is a famous singer who has been crushing on this one girl he saw every day behind a window many years ago, back when he first started recording his debut album and inspired his first big hit, “Princesa”. Luna Valente, professional Olympic skater turned actress is at a local (and very popular) talk show to promote her breakout movie. This is where it all starts. 

ITALIAN POP PRINCE OFF THE MARKET?

RUMOR HAS IT MATTEO BALSANO, ARGENTINA’S FAVORITE ITALIAN BOY HAS FOUND HIMSELF A NEW GIRLFRIEND. SEEN LAST NIGHT AT A POPULAR CLUB IN BUENOS AIRES, WITNESSES AFFIRM STRANGER’S SINGER WAS ACCOMPANIED BY A ‘BEAUTIFUL BLACK-HAIRED BEAUTY’ AND THE COUPLE COULDN’T KEEP THEIR HANDS OFF EACH OTHER.

IS THIS THE END OF HIS PLAYBOY ERA? READ MORE ON PAGE 26!

“Why do you even bother reading that bullshit, bro?”

“It’s amusing how they’re so sure you’re dating your cousin.” His best friend told him, sipping on his coffee while flipping over the pages of the tween magazine that had been delivered that morning on his doorstep.

He groaned, disgusted. “It’s not amusing, it’s fucking gross.”

“If you had let me clarify since day one who Flor was to you, this wouldn’t be happening.” Gastón reminded him, taking another small sip of his cup. He resumed his reading once he found the page with that article; “hey look, they say her name is Clara and that you’ve been dating for over two months; ‘a whole new record for our Italian Casanova Balsano!’” Matteo flipped him off.

“First of all, ‘day one’ would mean you were my lawyer at 19, without even finishing one year in Law School, you dumbass. And second, it was you who gave me the idea of protecting Flor’s privacy.”

“I was very smart at 19, thank you very much.” Gastón threw the magazine at him, which he dodged easily and got into the kitchen and prepare himself an espresso, but smiled fondly at his friend anyway.

It was hard to believe so much time had passed since he was discovered in that small bar years ago, when all he had left were his songs, his guitar, and the support of his best friend for over fifteen years. Going against his father’s wish of a diplomatic future for him hadn’t been easy, especially when you’re an eighteen-year-old boy with no working experience or a survival plan. Having had his parents’ back his whole life, the abrupt change of living alone and financially supporting himself was a challenge he hadn’t foreseen for at least another four years; but it had been an experience so groundbreaking, and so eye-opening that he wouldn’t dare to have it any other way, at all. Gastón had helping him a lot by letting him crash in his room multiple times, as well as approving and correcting his songwriting before he even presented it to a crowd.

His way of repaying had been hiring him as his lawyer as soon as he was out of law school, even if it went against his management’s ideals. Matteo would rather have someone he trusted 100% and minded his interests first, than a stranger whose decisions would favor anyone but him. Call him stupid, or naïve, but he had blind faith in Gastón, and knew it had been for the best. His friend hadn’t been first in his class for nothing. (He did like to joke it had been because of his pretty face and good hair, though).

"At least now they'll drop that 'Mambar' crap, since I'm 'off the market' and whatnot."  

"I don't know, bro;" Gastón laughed, "they're capable of saying you're cheating on Flor with your ex." 

Matteo groaned again when he realized Périda was right. Dating Ámbar back in the day had been proved to be a mistake, even when they'd never confirmed their relationship to the media (or anyone outside their circle of friends); because the rumor hill and theories didn't disappear to this day. Gastón liked to joke that he could get married and have ten kids, and even then Ámbar would get mentioned as the mistress at least once. It certainly didn't help that he shared management with her, since they always made sure they were photographed at any event they happened to be at the same time. They were lucky they didn't hate each other or were dating anyone else yet, because it'd make everything more annoying. 

"She still in town?" Gastón passed him his cup, and he dropped it in the sink for them to clean later. He nodded. 

"Yeah, she's got a promo interview for her movie with Jazmín tonight, then she leaves for promo tour past-tomorrow morning. She invited us to the show, by the way." 

His friend arched his brows, questioning, "to Ja Jazmín? She's not trying to set me up with Delfi again, is she?" 

Matteo smirked, "how did you know?" He laughed when his friend's face turned white, "don't worry, stud, I heard she's seeing Pedro now; you lost your chance with her. Ámbar just said she wanted to say her goodbye's since they're leaving right after the premiere tomorrow night, and will be out of the country for a month and a half." 

"That's never stopped her from disappearing before without telling you, though. Not even when you dated." The italian shrugged. It wouldn't be the first time Ámbar planned something for her convenience without explaining it to him first; and he trusted her enough to be sure it wouldn't put him in a bad place to the public. She could be a mean bitch, but she wasn't one to hit that low. 

"Beats me. Maybe she just wants more promo, since the RB guys will be there, too." 

"Her name isn't enough, now?" Gastón joked, grabbing his portfolio from the couch, arranging his tie with his free hand. It was almost nine, and he didn't doubt his friend was late already. Frankly, he didn't even need to work at his dad's firm, since he paid him more than enough to be his only client; but his best friend wouldn't dare to leave his family's business to a stranger once his dad retired. 

Matteo shook his head, "more like, her name's the only recognizable one. The protagonist and her co-protagonists are all professional skaters; Ámbar's the only professional actress turned skater for the film." 

Gastón whistled lowly, "blondie really knows how to pick challenges, doesn't she." 

"She did date me, y'know." 

"Sure thing, casanova. I'm leaving now, don't miss me too much, darling." Jokingly, he blew him a kiss, which his friend caught in the air and, with a wink, left him to go to work - already late. 

Since he'd finished his latest tour a month ago, and was procrastinating songwriting, Matteo decided he'd spend the morning sleeping. He'd order pizza in the afternoon, maybe sleep some more and then shower so Gastón and he could leave some time after dinner. 

For now, though, his bed was calling to him. 

“Luna, we’re on in twenty.”  

She nodded, smiling as nicely as she could with her nerves doing flip backs in her belly. Ámbar had reassured her Jazmín was nothing but nice, but there was a little voice in the back of her head that was screaming with excitement. She was not only going to be in national TV, but also in one of the most popular (if not the most popular) talk shows in the last decade. Ja Jazmín was it when you wanted your name to be out there. Her background wasn’t in the film industry by any means, but she knew very well what this opportunity meant for her and her career.

Even if she didn’t plan to leave skating like, ever, her dream was opening her own rink and teaching people her passion, and she was working very hard to achieve the recognition she needed to make it happen one day.

Her parents laughed that with two Olympic Medals in her bag, she still chose to go out of her comfort zone and pursue an acting career; but how could she not, when the Marissa Mint, the three times gold medalist asked her personally to play her in her autobiographical movie? Her idol, the one person she had looked up to in her professional life, asked her to play her, a legend in the skating community. Luna couldn’t say yes fast enough.

And so it began; after winning her first gold in the 2020 Olympics, she took a break to start her new career move. She spent a whole year with Juliana (as she had asked to be called), learning and practicing all the moves, steps and choreographies that had made her what she was to date; the best female skater known. And even then, she still didn’t feel like one year had been enough to learn everything she had to offer, but rehearsals and filming schedules were approaching, and her one-on-one had to end.

Soon she was joined by Ramiro Ponce, a silver-medalist male skater that was to play her love interest; Jim Medina, bronze medalist that had been only decimals away from silver, and a close friend she’d made since they were both in the 2016 Olympics, and who played one of her team mates. Then there was the only professional actress turned skater in the movie, Argentina’s princess, Ámbar Smith. Luna had to admit she’d been intimidated by her in the beginning, her icy attitude and proud personality made her a little hard to get to know her, but the girl took a challenge and surpassed it. By the end of her training, if Luna hadn’t known she had never skated before in her life, she wouldn’t have guessed it. After all, she had had to learn how to skate Olympic-worthy, not just professionally. She played the rival’s team’s captain, and she was splendid. Luna admired her a lot for that, since Olympic skating was very hard to achieve after just one year of training.

Once group training started, the small group formed a nice relationship. She could say, honestly, that these people were her friends and she appreciated them a lot.

A year later, months after filming had ended, it was time to start promoting the movie all around the world, sharing with the public what Luna liked to call ‘a new side of a legend’, since the movie itself wasn’t just skating, but also the aftermath of one of the most heartbreaking falls in sport’s community.

“Earth to Luna?” her best friend’s sweet voice called, gaining Luna’s attention to the real world again.

“Is it time already, Nina?” She asked, shaking her hands, wishing it were that easy to calm herself and get rid of her nerves. Her friend smiled, but shook her head in negative.

“Jazmín’s team came to say Ámbar wanted to introduce you to some of her friends before the show started, since they’re making a brief appearance to show you and the movie support.”

“Her friends?” She repeated, trying to remember if the blonde girl had told her about it before. Her mind answered with silence. She knew Ámbar had asked her to invite the Rollerband, since Simón was her best friend and she knew it, but beside that, Ámbar hadn’t spoken about inviting more famous people with her.

Nina shrugged, “I heard she invited Matteo Balsano and Delfina Alzamendi, but you already know Delfi. Maybe Matteo invited someone else, too?”

“She knows Matteo Balsano?”

Nina laughed, most likely at her lack of knowledge in popular culture. “He sang with her in that musical years ago, ‘Prófugos’, I think.”

“Oh, the one where she played an Asylum escapee, right?” Nina nodded, extending her hand to help her stand up from her chair, “I didn’t know Matteo starred there, too.”

“He didn’t, he just sang the promotional song with her.”

Luna nodded, flattening the skirt of her dress while she stood up, stumbling a little thanks to the height of her heels. She loved Yam to death, but her choosing on heels could be her death. Besides, she wasn’t that little, she really didn’t need that much additional height.

“Well, my dear Watson, shall we go meet Princess’s friends?”

“We shall, my dear Sherlock.”

“You finish my cupcakes and I swear to anything you find holy, Balsano, your balls will be decorations for my car’s mirror.”

Matteo gulped his last bite of a strawberry cupcake, not out of fear but because if he didn’t, he’d probably choke on laughter. Gastón, sitting beside him, wasn’t as thoughtful and choked on his chocolate cupcake.

“You say the most endearing things to me, Ámbar. Why did I let you go, again?”

“I let you go.”

“To-may-to, to-mah-to.”

His friend scoffed from her make up chair, “I didn’t invite you to eat my food, you ass.” Matteo rolled his eyes, grabbing another cupcake from the food table, and licked the top of the icing.

“Then why did you? We both know it’s not because you’re leaving after tomorrow, as I’m going to the premiere tomorrow.”

Ámbar smirked, turning away from the mirror to look at him, “I have a surprise for you.”

He was immediately suspicious, “it’s not another song about mirrors, is it?” Her smirk turned into a scowl.

“You know what? I changed my mind. You can choke on that cupcake and die, Matteo Bastardo.”

Gastón, who had finished choking by now, gave her a thumbs-up. “Nice one, blondie.”    

“Eh, I give it a seven. Not very original.” A voice called from the door, taking them by surprise. Jazmín winked at them, leaving the door open as she walked into the dressing room. She kissed everyone on the cheek as a greeting before she spoke again, “why do we want Balsanito to die?”

“Isn’t existing a good enough one?” Ámbar said, gaining Matteo’s middle finger in response.

“Is this the way you greet your hostess? I came here to greet you, and this is what I get. Shame on you, I should just say a monologue on how much you suck.” Jazmín joked, and put her hands on her hips in mockery. Her words, of course, fell on deaf ears.

Matteo was about to respond when a knock on the door interrupted them. The first one to turn was Ámbar, and when she saw who it was, smirked again in his direction.

“Surprise.” She mouthed at him, standing up. Matteo frowned, confused as he wasn’t sure what she was talking about; then, he turned to look over where she was looking, too.

He froze.

In a couple seconds, he was taken back to six years ago, outside a recording studio; watching her smile, laugh, beaming at a person who wasn’t him.

“It’s you.” An affirmation in a mere whisper. Green eyes blinked at him once, twice, confused.

“I beg your pardon?” A question in a polite, yet stunned squeak.

Matteo could barely make out Jazmín’s amused call.

“Well, well, well… Isn’t this interesting?”