#and he sometimes just cuts it really short because hes still sad and soggy and thinks of fulj braiding his hair
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Lightning, water, and fire! Like forever before the plot starts. By the time the plot starts, the lightning and fire deities have been subjected to punishment by the two gods that picked them.
Oh (the fire deity) is first to be punished. They basically decide that since they're going to live for a long time, gotta set some long time goals! And they opt to be the wrath of the gods since most of the other deities are too 'soft' in their opinion. So Oh just. Smites humans. This isn't really a /good/ thing and in their defense mentally, they do it to help Ymber since he's the softest of them all. So their punishment by the gods is to be split in two, effectively halving the power of one into two. (Now they are in a male and a female body and use both male and female pronouns apart since they together make they but apart it feels weird to be they. But prior to the split they use they/them. Also the split bodies go by the names Ohiwe and Ohime.)
Fulj is the second to be punished. She falls in love with a mortal woman and that is a crime according to the gods. Mortals and immortals are not to be together and it will only bring suffering to both sides. So her punishment is her memories of the woman are stripped and her body basically broken to the point she can't remain physical all the time.
Ymber, unfortunately, is the one who blames himself for the discoveries and punishments. If he had only tried to restrain Oh more then maybe they would have chilled out and stopped before being punished. If he had only tried to persuade Fulj to not continue seeing the mortal woman so often perhaps she wouldn't have been punished. So he's just increasing the guilt on his shoulders every day that he remains unpunished since the elder gods have both laid down to rest. They can't enforce their laws anymore and none of the deities are keen on harming one another at this point. They just want to continue existing in peace.
#the daily life of a deity sucks#and then ymber falls in love with a human and is like welp this sucks and i understand fulj now#i also would have accepted the punishment for this#and fulj doesnt even remember the woman she was punished for and doesnt remember how she was before#so she is like hey ymber please just go and kiss the weird human i dont even like him but youre being mean by not kissing him#and ymber is just having the worst time of his life being encouraged by someone who used to be so happy#who he also encouraged to be happy once upon a time#also ohiwe and ohime pop up in the water city to bully ymber sometimes but its still in the way of#dude we like you please grow a spine its been a thousand years please grow a backbone and tell us to piss off#and he never tells them to piss off#also fulj has a long braid here but you cant really see it#and she loves to braid ymbers hair and he gets to braid hers when shes giggling and chatting about love#and a short while after the punishment fulj chops the braid off and ymber is like welp my friend is officially gone#and then he cuts his own hair and leaves to go develop his city alone in seclusion#and he sometimes just cuts it really short because hes still sad and soggy and thinks of fulj braiding his hair#and then she shows up one day when hes debating how long its getting and she smiles#and tells him he looks good with longer hair#so he kinda keeps it a messy short then it gets to be medium and he decides he can survive with medium but he couldnt do long again#but once again fulj is the reason for his life choices (and guilt)#also before anyone asks yes all the deities have a collar#its very important actually that they are collared its lore information thanks#and for what it matters - after oh is split both forms are just as tall#theres just two of them at half power but they are both tall
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I love my baby to death
Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader
Warnings: fluff, friends to lovers, tiniest bit of angst but really tiny I promise, 3.5k words, set after Endgame
Summary: “Say, hypothetically, there’s a 100 year old fossil who’s a bit confused most of the time but he’s got the spirit, right?, and he’s outside with a packed duffle bag, what would you do?”
You were supposed to enjoy a solo roadtrip after years of Avenging, but Bucky invites himself along and you can’t say no to his happy face.
A/N: I haven’t slept in a week because of nightmares and I just needed something to cheer me up, I guess. Reader took Steve’s side in CA:CW and spent two years with him as a nomad. You can choose to see her and Natasha as a platonic relationship or a romantic one, it’s up to you.
masterlist
Read the sequel to this here
“They’re just so fuckin’ gross I don’t understand how you can eat them.”
Bucky sends you his best death glare as he continues digging in his soggy cardboard In-N-Out fries.
“We could have literally stopped by Arby’s three miles west of here” you continue, “they have the best fries. We’re missing out, clearly.” you deadpan eyeing his food skeptically.
“The curly ones? God no, they’re so spicy. I don’t know why you like your food to hurt but I don’t.”
“Okay, first of all they’re not spicy at all, I don’t know where you got that from. And second, they have a taste at least, unlike these.” You reiterate your point by swinging one the fries in his face. Bucky just grabs your hand and bites the fry, almost biting your fingers off too.
“Yeah, like that god-awful spicy chicken you forced on me the other day? No thank you, ma’am, I’ll stand by my own food choices.”
You snort. “Not my fault your post-Depression ass can’t handle anything other than salt and black pepper. But sure, go ‘head and enjoy your sorry excuse of a meal, Buck.”
“People from your generation sure love complaining, huh? Back in my days you ate what your mama made you and never bitched about it, or else you went to bed hungry.”
God, he’s such a grampa. You make a show of rolling your eyes and huffing in annoyance. He likes his senior citizen card a bit too much. He tries to stifle a laugh when he sees the look on your face and just shakes his head at you.
California (and Bucky Barnes) has stolen your heart and you’ve loved this road trip so much you often wonder why it took you being snapped and facing the end of the world twice to retire from the avenging business.
Fresno is interesting, to say the least.
He wanted to stop by, saying something about wanting to see “an old pal from the war” ’s hometown for himself, and you’ve been dreaming about exploring Yosemite for as long as you can remember.
-
Online pictures of Yosemite National Park were stunning but the real thing is just breathtaking.
You never thought camping would become your thing and you never imagined you’d enjoy stargazing so much. In five months you’ve discovered how big of a nerd Bucky really is and he’s been trying to teach you the names of all the stars and constellations.
He sees Big Dipper, Orion, Ursa Major and Minor; you see pretty twinkling lights and the occasional shooting star. Nevertheless you sit through hours and hours of explanations, because when he speaks of the things he’s passionate about, Bucky is the most beautiful thing in the world.
“You know, the stars are one of the things I missed the most.” he says softy, furrowing his brows as he does when he remembers something from the past. “Stevie and I used to do that as kids sometimes. We’d sneak out of our houses and go on the roof of this abandoned building to watch the stars. Now there’s so much goddamn light everywhere, you can’t even see them anymore.”
Sometimes when you stop and think about it, really think, you can’t imagine how hard it must have been for them, having everything, even the night sky taken away from them.
“Steve never told me.”
“He probably missed the stars too.”
You eye him looking for clues on how he might feel, but you only see a sad smile on his face. “You miss him, don’t you?”
“Every damn day.” his voice cracks and you hold him closer.
“I know Buck, I miss him too. I miss him so much that sometimes I feel like my life has no direction without my Captain.” You’re barely holding back your own tears at this point, “But we’ve got Sam if we need orders, yes?” but you still try to make him smile. You’re always going to try for him.
Your attempt works and he snorts. Always bring Sam up to cheer Bucky.
“I hope he was happy, you know.” he says, “I hope he made the right choice and never regretted a thing. I hope that now he looks back and thinks he wouldn’t have had it any other way. His happiness is all I could ever ask for.”
You cling to each other that night and cry until the early morning. It feels good to let it all out, to let Steve go and look at the future. You’ve lost too much but tonight you only have hope.
-----
New York
Five months before
“Words on the street is you’re retiring your crusty old ass from the field.”
Sam is leaning on the door of your hotel room with his arms folded and a pleased look on his face.
“Rumors travel fast in this post-apocalyptic word, I see.” you say as you continue stuffing a duffle bag with all the clothes you have left.
“How are you?” Sam asks, with his newly found Captain voice. You wonder if it’s something in that damn shield that gives them that stern commanding tone.
“Tryina analize me, Sammy? I’m not one of your guys at the VA.”
It’s not like you’re pissed at Sam, you love him with all your heart, you’re just angry at the world and Sam’s the one standing in your way right now.
You hear him sigh, “I know what you’re feeling right now, I understand why you would think that-” “Don’t” you interrupt him, “Don’t give me that speech, Fury did that for you already. I’m not running away from my problems.”
“I’m not saying that-” you really don’t want him to talk today, so you stop him again “No but you’re thinking it.”
“I know what it’s like.” he says raising his voice “To lose who you care the most in the world. We all lost someone important but you lost Natasha and I know, trust me I know what you feel right now, because it’s what I felt when I lost Riley.”
You stop and swallow the tight lump in your throat.
Your eyes well up with tears as you turn to look at him. You’ve been so blinded by your own pain and anger you didn’t stop for a moment to think about others. “I’m sorry Sam, I shouldn’t have treated you like that.” you say sobbing.
Why did she have to leave you?
Stupid, stupid Natasha. Why did she have to sacrifice herself for the world?
Why her?
He hugs you tight and rocks you back and forth. “I understand why you’re leaving and I’m not here to stop you, I promise. Just keep in touch, yes? Text me everyday so I’m not tempted to track you down and fly wherever you are to see if you’re good.”
You smile for the first time in a long time.
“Don’t worry Sam, you’ll get tired of all the selfies I’ll send you, eventually.”
“You know I’ll never get tired of this pretty face.” he says raising his eyebrows suggestively, making you laugh. “Good, that’s my girl. I missed this laugh so much.”
You stay in his arms a while longer until it’s time for you to leave.
“This is not the only reason I’m here.” he says and clears his throat, “Say, hypothetically, there’s a 100 year old fossil who’s a bit confused most of the time but he’s got the spirit, right?, and he’s outside with a packed duffle bag, what would you do?”
“What?” you manage to stammer out. “Bucky just... wants to...tag along?”
You are now as confused as Bucky is most of the time.
Sam shrugs. “I guess? You know he’s weird like that.”
What he really means is he’s just like you, lost and confused and in desperate need to live a little, but he doesn’t say it out loud. There’s no need to.
“So, would you mind if he came too?”
You see Bucky standing outside, leaning on your SUV. He’s cut his hair short and he looks hotter than you would like to. He turns around and waves at you with a big smile on his face. Like Sam often says, you too like his energy.
“No, I wouldn’t mind at all.”
----
Denver, Colorado
It’s a long way from New York to Colorado and if you’re honest, you’ve loved every minute of it and you’re glad Bucky came along with you. He’s witty, laid back, snarky, smart and overall a fun guy for someone who was a prisoner to nazis for 70 years.
“Look all I’m saying is I think Edward is a fuckin’ creep. Would you like it if someone stood in your room and looked at you while you sleep?”
“But is that someone a hot vampire, Bucky?”
“It literally doesn’t even matter.”
“Stop saying literally Buck, you’re a 100 year old man, not a valley girl.”
-
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Lemme check a map.”
“Bucky it’s on the screen there, Google says we have 20 minutes left.”
“But can we trust this Google guy?”
-
“All I’m saying is if you made and enjoyed congealed salads you probably don’t deserve your right to vote for the future of this country.”
“I mean...fair enough?”
-
“Do we count blipped years or not?”
“At this point it, it barely makes a difference in my case, doll.”
“Honestly you’ve got a point, old man.”
-
“How are you so calm right now?”
“My standards are so low it’s practically impossible to piss me off.”
“But you aren’t even a little bothered?”
“Chill, it’s just a flat tire, it’s gonna take 10 minutes to fix.”
“Buck we talked about the things that are unacceptable. ‘Chill’ coming out of your mouth is one of those.”
It’s your second week in Denver already, and you’re having the time of your life.
Bucky is spooning you like he usually does. You think back to the first time you’ve shared a bed and you almost giggle at the memory.
“Uh, Buck?”
“Yes?”
“We might have a problem.”
He enters the room after you and his eyes widen when he sees it.
There’s a bed in the room.
A single bed.
You weren’t expecting much from this place that gives you ‘Bates Motel’ vibes, but you thought you’d have two beds, or at least a couch.
“I’ll just sleep on the floor, don’t worry about it.”
“What?” you shriek “Absolutely not, I’m not letting you suffer all night. We’re going to share.”
“But I-”
“No buts, you know how many times I slept with Steve? I’m used to you supersoldier men by now, I’m no longer affected by your kicks.”
He stays silent. “You and Steve used to…?”
Only then you realize you could have phrased it better.
“God no, I meant just, ya know, share bed.”
He smiles and nods. Why does he look relieved?
Now he clings to you every night, and most times he’s the little spoon because he likes to be held. You used to hate sleeping tangled with someone else until you woke up on top of Bucky, his hands caressing your back, and he told you he had the best night of sleep he’s had in decades.
There’s a lot of things you do just because they make him happy, actually.
But how could you not?
There’s no point in denying your feelings.
----
Salt Lake City, Utah
God, you love Utah.
You drive through immense stretches of red desert whilst Bucky blasts Nicki Minaj like his life depends on it; that’s how it always ends up when he rides shotgun.
He insisted on visiting Monument Valley despite it being out of your way, but you can never find it in yourself to refuse him anything, so you drove 9 hours straight from Denver to the southern border of Utah just so he could see a place that looks a lot like the ones in those Western cowboy movies from the 50s and 60s he loves so much.
“Yasha would have hated it here so much.” you say as you pull over the Airbnb you’ve rented for a couple of days in Salt Lake City.
He snorts, “Yeah, I bet she would have.”
You thought time would heal all wounds and that someday you might stop feeling the void in your life when you think of her, but now you know you’ll never stop hurting. She was such a big part of your life for so long that your heart will never stop aching for her.
Sometimes you think how she never got to see you again after you were snapped.
You wonder if she ever stopped missing you.
You know you’ll never not miss her.
-
You’ve driven for more than humanly possible in two days, but he’s a supersoldier and you’re really stubborn, and now you can’t wait to sleep in a nice bed for the first time in a long while. Usually you just make do with motels, but tonight you wanted to treat yourselves.
You enter the place and notice immediately the two queen size beds.
You should be relieved, and if it was 4 months ago when you first shared a bed you would probably be, but now you’re so used to his warm body next to yours, his flesh arm over you and his face resting in the crook of your neck that you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to fall asleep without him.
“I’ll go shower first if you don’t mind.” you say as you mentally berate yourself for your thoughts.
Your goal to not fall in love with Bucky Barnes flew out the window somewhere in the green fields of Western Iowa, but at this point you’re just treading a dangerous path and you know you’re going to get hurt.
There’s no way Bucky feels the same about you, right?
You get out the shower, put on a t-shirt you’ve stolen from Steve ages ago and get out of the bathroom, only to stop when you see Bucky on the bed you claimed as yours.
“Sorry, I hope you don’t mind but I feel better when I sleep with you.”
Maybe he does.
----
Nevada
Technically it takes roughly 43 hours to get from New York to Sacramento by car. It took you almost five months.
You’ve been covering Interstate 80, stopping and visiting towns, cities and parks along the way as you pleased, sleeping in seedy motels, your SUV or that fancy ass tent Bucky bought somewhere in Ohio. You’ve begged Bucky to drive from Salt Lake City straight to Sacramento, stopping only when it’s absolutely necessary; you’ll be visiting Nevada after California anyways, so for now you’re just enjoying the scenic drive, with the windows rolled down and the air messing up your hair.
“What’s that song called?” Bucky asks and raises the radio’s volume.
“That’s Dani California by Red Hot Chili Peppers.” you answer absentmindedly, distracted by the seemingly endless stretch of black asphalt and yellowish nothingness around it.
She’s lover, baby and a fighter
Shoulda seen it coming when I got a little brighter
Bucky sings along and smiles glancing your way.
“I like this.” he exclaims when the song ends “Can we listen to it again, please?”
You smile softly and play it again. If there’s one thing Bucky is capable of is listening to the same song on repeat multiple times until you’re so sick of it you don’t ever want to hear it again.
Who knew the other side of you
Who knew what others died to prove
You never thought Bucky would be like this, or that you’d be privileged enought to see this side of him.
There’s a big smile on his face and the orange hues of the sky reflect in his clear eyes. He’s got one hand on the steering wheel and the vibranium one resting on the car’s door and he looks so different from the man haunted by his past and loneliness you met in Budapest all those years ago. He looks so carefree and relaxed now, so happy.
You are proud of him.
California rest in peace
Simultaneous release
California show your teeth
She’s my priestess and I’m your priest
I love my baby to death
------
San Diego, California
You’ve hiked the hills of southern Cali and gone parapending in Torrey Pines. You landed on a breathtaking beach with beautiful dark sand and soon found out, much to Bucky’s dismay and utter disgust, that it was a nudist beach.
He grumbled something about ‘hygiene’ and ‘decor’ and you just laughed at his flustered state.
“First time seeing a naked woman, old man?” you asked in between fits of laughter.
You didn’t notice the sea lion swimming next to you in La Jolla and not even Thanos’ creepy gang could have scared you as much when you turned around and looked him dead in the eyes. Bucky got his revenge filming you as you shot out the ocean with a shrill, covered in algae and terrified.
You are loving the San Diego area so far. Minus the sea lions.
“Hey I- uh- do you mind if I take the car? I wanted to go do some shopping.” Bucky tells you.
He’s really embarrassed for some reason.
You shrug and mumble a ‘sure’ before going back to basking in the sun by the pool of the hotel you’re staying at.
“Okay, I-I guess I’ll g-go then, I’ll come pick you up at 5.30 for dinner.” he stutters out.
Weird, you think, but you don’t give it too much thought. Bucky is like that.
-
Dinner time rolls around and as promised Bucky comes pick you up on time.
You’re wearing a short green dress with white daisies printed on it and a pair of strappy white sandals. You look good and you know it; Bucky knows it too, judging from the glances he tries to sneak your way.
“So, uhm-” he clears his voice, “I know it’s going to sound weird but I promise it’s not. Can I- Can I blindfold you?”
Can he...what? You could split me in half and I’d be glad about it, you’d like to say.
“Kinky. You could at least buy me differ first, tho.” you settle for something safer instead.
He blushes three shades darker than his usual color and you take the black scarf he’s handing you, barely concealing a teasing smile.
He drives around for a while. When you get to your destination the first thing you hear is the waves beating on the shore and the smell of the ocean. He helps you get out and guides you somewhere.
“Wait here.”
You hear him park the car in reverse, open the trunk and fiddle with something. He comes up behind you and removes the blindfold. You feel his hot breath on your neck and it sends tingles down your spine straight to your pu- “You can look now.”
When you open your eyes you are stunned for a moment. You turn around with a big smile that turns even bigger when you notice the blankets and the little picnic he’s assembled in the trunk.
“Buck, this is- I can’t believe you remembered.”
Somewhere in Colorado you mentioned how romantic you thought Sunset Cliffs were, and how much you wished you could do something like this. It was a fleeting moment, a thought uttered out loud absentmindedly over a couple of drinks in some bar. You were tipsy and you were running your mouth about all the things you’d want in a partner to some random girl who became your best friends for the night.
You realize you’re tearing up when his fingers grace your cheeks.
It feels nice to be cared about so much. It’s been too long since someone took such good care of you.
“I thought I’d do something special for you.” he says with an adorable blush.
“Thank you Bucky, I love this.” you hug him tightly and bury your face in his chest, inhaling his scent.
“Anything for my girl.”
“When did I become your girl, huh?” you ask teasingly.
“Probably when I invited myself on this trip.”
You both laugh at that.
You swallow hard when you see the look on his face. God, how did you miss the signs? You were always a better sniper than a spy, Yasha always told you.
Your heart is beating out of your chest in anticipation as he leans down slowly and your lips brush lightly. His hands are on your waist and yours on his broad shoulders. He kisses you timidly at first, and more passionately as he gains confidence.
“I wanted to do this since Bucharest.” he confesses after your lips part.
“Took you long enough, Sarge.”
But it was worth the wait.
-
Tonight’s sunset will be burned in the back of your mind permanently.
You kiss and laugh some more, and feed eachother seedless grapes because they’re the only ones you eat. He’s brought strawberries, white wine because you don’t drink red, hummus and pita and an assortment of cheese and crackers.
You kiss and talk, cuddle, laugh and kiss some more all night.
You’ve accepted long ago that you’ll never fill the gaping hole in your lives, but that night when you make love to eachother the void in your hearts that Steve and Natasha left behind doesn’t seem as encompassing as it usually is.
---
Thank you for reading! If you liked it, please reblog and comment, feedback is always appreciated 🥺🤲 might fuck around and write Bucky’s POV too.
#bucky x reader#bucky barnes#bucky x you#bucky imagine#bucky fanfic#marvel fanfiction#sebastian stan x reader#james buchanan barnes#james bucky barnes#james barnes x reader#james barnes x you#james barnes x y/n
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Dipper’s Day Around the World
A/N: This is 21k written over the span of like 6 months, so buckle in folks.
ao3
_______________________________________________________________
December 4th, 5:58 AM EST
Dipper didn’t exactly sleep, anymore, but he was close enough to rest and unconcern with the matters of the rest of the world, sandwiched between Torako and Bentley in their bed, that the sting of the summons—friendly, from a personal circle, not from the standard one that strangers used—startled him into a disgruntled moan. Torako, a lighter sleeper in the morning, the early bird between them, twitched and then hummed an inquiry. “Izza…summons,” Dipper mumbled back before he turned and pressed his face into the crook of her neck.
“Mmm,” she said. After a while, she asked, “Someone you know?”
He could hear her voicebox buzzing under the skin at his lips, could feel it vibrating lightly into the cartilage (manifested cartilage, yes, but cartilage as long as he wanted it to be) of his nose. A very dim part of him strengthened by still-waking awareness wanted to open his mouth and bite down into the flesh a little, just to feel it echo more directly into the not-bones of his teeth. The rest of him knew that it was a bad idea and was a sure way to get the heel of her palm slamming into his nose hard enough to break and hurt. It wasn’t even omniscience that told him this, just unfortunate prior experience.
She still let him close, though, and so he nuzzled in. “Yeah,” he sighed, but he was mostly awake now. “It’s a friends and family circle. Even though it’s at—oh, look, it’s 6 AM,” he said.
Torako reached over and up and ruffled at his hair. He sat up and smoothed it flat, glowering down at her. The motion dislodged Bentley’s arm from his waist but the Bentley that lived in this house was a deeper sleeper than the Bentley that returned to the apartment he’d been kidnapped from, and so he did nothing but scrunch up his nose (adorable) and sleep-mumble unintelligible noises before relaxing back into deeper sleep. Dipper sighed and relaxed shoulders he hadn’t even realized were tense.
“Go gettem, Dips,” Torako whispered, eye cracked open in a half-awake smile. “We’re gonna have breakfast bout nine, ok? Ben’n I got busy days planned.”
“Okay,” Dipper said. He bent down and pressed a kiss to Torako’s forehead. “Let Bentley know where I’ve gone when he wakes up, okay?”
“Mmmkay,” Torako said, then yawned and snuggled back into the covers. “Later gater.”
The summons stung him again. Dipper hovered above the bed for a moment, wings spread, then melted from comfortable (but elegant!!) pajamas into a more formal (but somewhat casual) suit before focusing on tracing the summons back to its locus, and slipping from bedroom on the East Coast to elsewhere.
December 4th, 11:01 AM BST
Elsewhere turned out to be another bedroom, in front of somebody he knew (Soos, no—Olla, her name is Olla) in England. He also knew that her mother would destroy them if she found them together, and it was the middle of the day and wait, what was Olla doing home anyways?
He blinked down at her. “Why are you even in your dorm? Don’t you have classes?”
“Alcor,” Olla moaned. Her hair was a mass of messily plaited braids, ribbons bright but askew. “You gotta help me. You’re my only hope of passing this stupid chemistry class I decided to take with my friend but we’re both hopeless—not hopeless, but definitely for sure 100% in over our heads—and for some weird reason most of the people in class aren’t keen on talking to me long enough to do studying or they’re busy or they’re just pain rude, please save me.”
Dipper sat down on her bed, which was next to the desk she was sitting at. Olla Sussally twisted the chair around in place, leaned forward to heave something up off the floor, then turned back around. In her hands—fingernails painted vivid, somewhat chipped colors that shifted weakly from hue to hue—was a very large tub, and in that tub was the biggest horde of candy Dipper had seen anywhere other than a grocery store. His mouth, despite any efforts to the contrary, began to fill with saliva.
The memory of Olla’s mother was just terrifying enough to remind him that his skin was actually prickling with discharged magical energy. “Your mom changed the wards again, didn’t she? It’s a shame they didn’t work, but she’ll know you summoned me, she always does, and she’s always so pissed even if I didn’t technically approach you.”
Olla moaned and tipped her head back for a moment. “I know I know, it’s so dumb and I hate it yet my mum really is the best and I love her n’all, but like, I have got to get this chemistry in the brain space as fast and fully as possible so can we talk about mum later? I have a candy bag per concept and you’re, like, supposed to be super smart, right? You’re supposed to know everything.”
Dipper cocked his head at her. Olla wasn’t smiling, not even nervously. Well, Dipper thought to himself, Mrs. Sussally couldn’t be too mad if this meant Olla a) was less stressed, and b) passed chemistry.
“Okay,” he said, sticking his hand out. “Deal.”
“Oh gosh oh thank you you’re the best,” Olla breathed out, then reached out and shook his hand vigorously with both of hers. Blue fire bloomed, then sputtered when she whirled around and pulled a textbook towards her—which, considering the fact that Olla was one of the most laid-back and calm people he knew, was concerning. “Okay, so, let’s start with chemical formulas, because hoo my man—my demon? I’ll have to ask you later—but, like, there’s molecular formula, and then there’s empirical formula is sometimes the same but sometimes different, and it has to do with math which is fine but I still don’t get why.”
Dipper blinked at her, then reached forward and pulled a bag of malted biscuits from Olla’s candy stash. She had swiped several worksheets and class notes up to hover in the air between them. “It’s easier to deal with some chemical equations that way,” he said. “Look—here, at this problem…”
_______________________________________________________________
Halfway through explaining the Gillespie-Nyholm theory in regards to double and triple molecular bonds, Olla’s phone rang. Dipper stopped, stared at it. Olla looked down. The display read: ‘Mum <3 <3 <3.’ The hearts twirled in circles and threw off little digital glittery sparks.
“Aw,” Olla groaned, tipping her head back. “It’s only been, like, an hour. Come on, mum!”
“Maybe she hasn’t noticed yet?” Dipper ventured. He stuck his fingers in his mouth to lick off the sour sugar particles and eyed the still mostly-full tub of candy. “If she hasn’t, we could definitely get through another few concepts. I’ve only had four bags.” He wanted at least another three. Maybe five. Ten would be best.
Olla stuck out her tongue at him, took a deep breath, and then answered the phone. “Hey, mum, what’s up, howsit going, what’s on, you at lunch or something, it’s so weird for you to call me now haha you know class just finished!”
There was a muffled noise, the sound of somebody talking just out of earshot. Dipper tipped his head to the side. Would eavesdropping even be worth it?
“Woah, that’s weird, the wards are juuuuust fine here!” Olla cast her eyes up at the ceiling. Dipper looked up as well, and winced a little at how almost soggy some of the wards looked, bent out of space from where he’d pushed his way through. Well, their cover was blown. He cast a longing look at the candy bags, and wished for a reality in which he could earn them. “I guess your alert app is just fritzing out again!”
Silence. Then, several garbled words, Olla’s eyes widening and cutting to him. She laughed a little nervously. “What do you mean, mum? Sure, I wasn’t in Mid-Millenium Literature class, but that’s just because chem is kicking my ass into a sad bit of lumpy dough and I needed to take time—no, no, no tutors, just me and my cute little—wait you’re right outside the building??”
Dipper froze again. He met Olla’s eyes. As Olla’s mother started talking again, Olla flapped her free hand at him frantically, mouthing go go go!! as she listened.
If he really wanted to, he could take Olla’s mom. But a) he respected her, b) Olla really loved her, and c) Olla’s mother actually kind of just a little bit intimidated him when he wasn’t hopped up on anxiety and possessiveness and fear for his Mizar’s safety. So Dipper grimaced, lifted a hand in farewell, and blipped out of Olla’s dorm room with the fleeting thought of the next place he could go on such short notice.
December 4th, 9:29 PM AEST
It was, perhaps, not the best idea to suddenly appear on the couch right next to Tommy and Filara Hangar—they were a little jumpy—but Dipper wasn’t anything if not dramatic. He slung one leg over the other, slipped into something a little more formal mid-blip, and set his hands on top of his knee so that the fingers were curled a little over the kneecap. “Hello,” he said, pitched just high enough to be heard over the evening news.
Next to him, Tommy Hangar screeched and nearly scrambled over the back of the couch. Filara Hangar seized a wineglass off the table and flung it at him with incredible accuracy. Taken off-guard, Dipper had only a split second to decide whether to let it land or whether to pluck it out of thin air. He hesitated, and the decision was made for him—the glass smacked into his nose and red wine splashed up and over his face. Blinking, liquid clinging to his eyelashes, Dipper said, “Well, that was rude but I get it, I guess.”
Tommy wheezed from behind the couch. “What the fuck, you feathering fuckwit,” she said. “Holy shit you can’t do that to us without giving a ring or tapping out a coupla knocks first. I hate it when you do that! It freaks me the fuck out.”
Filara, on her part, was staring at her outstretched hand, bewilderment blooming all over her aura like morning glories. “I threw a glass of wine at Alcor the Dreambender,” she said, a little faintly.
“And hit,” Dipper groused. He materialized a stylish handkerchief from out of his vest pocket, snapped it open, and dabbed at his face just to emphasize his point. “You’re lucky that this suit is literally materialized out of the power I possess and isn’t actual fabric, because that would be a bitch to clean.”
“Die mad about it,” Tommy said. Dipper opened his mouth to respond to that, but Tommy widened her eyes at him and he wisely shut his mouth. She hauled herself back up and over the couch to sit squarely between Dipper and her wife. “We wouldn’t pay for it anyways, it’s your own feckin fault for slipping in here out of thin air at—” she glanced at the news “—9:34 PM, what the hell and why are you even here?”
Dipper waved the concern aside as though it were a physical thing he could clear the air of. He finished dabbing the wine off his face and snapped the handkerchief again to disperse it from its momentary existence. At the same time, the wine was pulled out of the non-fabric of his clothes and vanished. “My last appointment was cut very abruptly short, and I’d been meaning to check in on you two so I figured that now was as good a time as any. How are you?”
Filara blinked at him. “I hit Alcor the Dreambender with a half-full glass of wine,” she said, a little glee in her voice and in her eyes.
“Yes you did, honey,” Tommy said. She patted her wife’s hand and smiled. “It was a hot damn moment of glory and I love you even more than I already did.”
“Didn’t you throw ice water on him a few months ago?” Filara cocked her head and looked Tommy up and down, lightning bright sparks of realization fading into soft ombre appreciation.
Dipper frowned. There was no need to rub it in, he totally could have stopped that from happening—both the wine and the water. “Yes she did, and we’ve already covered the wine stuff, how are you?”
“It’s 9:34 PM,” Tommy drawled, turning her attention away from her wife to glower. “What do you think??”
“Now, now,” Filara said, rubbing at Tommy’s shoulders from behind. “I know it’s late, but we haven’t seen him in a while and I threw wine on him, so I think that it would only be fair to entertain him with a little conversation, don’t you think? I’m sure he’s a little lonely, aren’t you?”
Filara smiled at him. She looked nothing like Lionel, but Dipper read him into the quirk at the corner of her mouth that said she was still smugly amused at her unintentional victory over him. The little heartache that came with the thought moved Dipper to look past it and the quite frankly presumptive opinion that he was lonely, he wasn’t lonely. He was fine.
“No,” he said, “but Bentley and Torako are busy sleeping right now, and I’m awake and out so I wanted to talk to you.” The more he thought about it, though, the more tempting the thought of blipping back home and crawling into bed for snuggles was. He absolutely was not lonely.
Tommy wrinkled her nose. “That’s right, it is stupid early over there still, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said, though stupid early was a relative term when it came to individualistic habits and sleep patterns. For some people in the same time zone, it was stupid late.
Filara leaned over and propped her elbow on Tommy’s shoulder. Her near-invisible lenses flashed a little, and she grinned. “So how are Ms. Gorgeous and Mr. Sigils?”
“Adjusting.” Dipper leaned back into the arm of the couch and twisted a saccharine drink out of nothing to sip at. “We just finished settling into the new house nine days ago. Torako or Bentley might have sent you pictures?”
Tommy had been frowning at Dipper ever since he pulled out his drink. “Dude,” she said, slowly, “I know you’re a demon and all, but that’s rude, man, just ask for a drink.”
“Oh, it’s quite all right,” Filara said, patting Tommy’s arm. “If he brings his own drink, that means that there’s more wine for me. And yes, Torako did send me pictures of the house. Bentley didn’t, but he made up for it by sending me updates on how things were going, and I very much appreciate it.”
With a sigh, Tommy leaned back into the couch and crossed her arms.
“Did she send you pictures of the tables?” Dipper drawled, swirling his drink around in its glass. “Mine was the best one.”
“That’s not what she said.” Filara raised her eyebrows. “In fact, she said that you all voted hers the best, and that’s the solid truth there.”
Dipper sniffed and took a sip of his not-beverage, mentally pulled together his arguments in favor of not Torako winning their unofficial competition, and launched into them with a passion that Bentley would have described as ‘overkill’ and Torako as ‘desperately in denial.’
_______________________________________________________________
December 4th, 8:39 PM PHT
Dipper only burned through an hour before Tommy had enough and kicked him out during a lull in conversation, citing that she actually wanted to spend time with her wife, not the dude who came around to pick her wife’s brain and engage in furious debate over the most mundane things before turning around and treating the most abstract concepts with the same fervor. He’d relented and accepted a couple drinks—overly sugary and laden with alcohol that couldn’t affect his non-existent metabolism—and found himself having made off with one of the Hangars’ drinking glasses on accident. He shrugged, sent it off to the Mindscape Shack, and figured it would make a good excuse for another visit.
In the meantime, it was time to visit somebody very new to their current life.
Dipper closed his eyes and followed one of the faint bonds inside of himself to a small apartment of Cebu—Grand Courtyard Bldg 5, apartment 607, nursery with the window facing north-east—in the evening, when its sole occupant was sleeping soundly, parents in the other room finishing dinner and relaxing before the baby woke up again. There was a personalized cam-monitor in the corner, anti-tamper sigils that reminded Dipper of Bentley (and when he looked at them for more than a split second, he saw Bentley working on them as part of a senior project for undergrad, and how strange, how incredible to think that they’d gone so far from that point, blooming into existence under his fingertips), and Dipper only spared a single thought to artificially looping the input past the anti-tamper sigils (they were Bentley’s, of course he knew how to get around them) before drifting closer to the crib.
Lloyd Remnit had not lasted long after their visit, after Dipper tore the information from his mind and Fantino had died as a result. Stan had always given everything for family, and it always hurt when he failed to protect them. (many Stans had summoned him over the years. Some paid the ultimate price for their loved ones. Some paid a different price, but it all fell to pieces around them anyways. Others, ones who hadn’t summoned him, had summoned others instead—one had given away her soul to be consumed. Dipper had torn that demon to pieces).
This time around, given how his last incarnation had ended up at odds with Alcor, he was determined to have Stan on his side. Which meant—this.
“Hey,” Dipper said softly, breathily. In her crib, María Elena ‘Inyang’ Dimayuga lay on her back, fingers curled into soft fists. He took a moment to take her in—a little on the large side, for a two-month-old, eyelashes dark and soft against her puffy cheeks, baby hair thin clouds across the crown of her skull. “Hey. I’m going to be your Uncle Dipper. Your parents don’t know yet, but they don’t know a lot of things about you yet either, do they? They’re still calling you Aweng. Don’t worry, they’ll figure it out eventually.”
Inyang shifted in her sleep and scrunched her nose. Dipper stilled, but her eyes didn’t open, and her barely-there, underdeveloped aura didn’t shift suddenly in that telltale breath between sleep and wake that infants tended towards. After a few moments, he slid from stillness into careful motion, chin propped in the heart of his palm, elbows on the edge of the crib, ankles-crossed mid-air. His wings fluttered once or twice. He sighed a little.
“It’s been a few years since I’ve interacted with somebody so young,” Dipper confessed. “Not since Lata, at least. Nobody’s been stupid enough to summon me with a newborn sacrifice recently, and the chances to meet babies like you are otherwise pretty slim in my line of work.” He laughed a little. Inyang let out a breathy sigh of an exhale. “But you’re family, you know? I should—I should stick around for you.”
Inyang’s fingers tightened into fists, then relaxed. He looked at her nails. She probably needed them trimmed, soon. Dipper remembered sharp baby nails, and they were a somewhat discordant experience when the rest of them was so soft, so malleable, so easy to swallow—
Dipper closed his eyes, breathed in and out, and chased the thought down into the deepest, most terrible part of him. Then he opened his eyes and looked back down at Inyang.
Inyang looked back, dark eyes large in her small face.
They stared at each other for a few seconds, Inyang frozen by the uncertainty of an unfamiliar face hovering over her, Dipper by the very human instinct of ‘maybe if I don’t move, this very small child will just go back to sleep instead of crying.’ Despite being a dream demon who didn’t need moist eyeballs, Dipper was the one who blinked first.
Inyang’s aura twisted. She let out the start of a choking cry. Galvanized by memories of caring for babies over the years, Dipper started shushing her, reaching into her crib on reflex. His sharp talons faded into stubby nubs, his gloves melted away to materialized skin. “Hey, hey, no, it’s all right—”
Footsteps outside the door. Moments before he managed to pick Inyang up, Dipper frantically twisted himself into the shadows under her crib. Seconds later, the door opened.
“Oh, that’s odd,” the parent said. Dipper blinked, and there it was—Alisha Dimayuga, journalist, wife to Jolan Dimayuga, owner of a small clothing boutique that custom-sized for all its customers. “The camera didn’t pick up on you waking up—hush, hush, sweet little Aweng, here I am, it’s okay. Why don’t we go see your Zaza, hmm? Zi would love to hold you, love to kiss your precious little nose and all the pain away.”
Dipper stared up at the bottom of the crib, seeing Alisha pick up Inyang and soothe her without physically seeing it. Alisha rocked from side to side with each step, murmuring about how hard it was to be a baby as she slowly made her way out the room, Inyang still crying pitifully in tired-sleepy-pain-overstimulation. She was going through one of her growth spells, Dipper knew suddenly, though he’d always known it. It hurt, to grow so much all at once and not understand anything, and thankfully it was knowledge that faded quickly. Dipper still remembered his second birth, how things changed and ached and felt like fire melting and reforging and melting his bones all at once. The pain of it, over and over, all at once after stretches of nothing.
He wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
Dipper considered revealing himself to Alisha and her partner. He thought about introducing himself, but the thought of Alisha’s fear and Jolan’s terror-courage and the rift that would possibly set between him and Inyang made him hesitate, caught between the soft shadows of the nursery and the light spilling in through the open door. He stayed for a few moments, listening to Alisha and Jolan’s soft voices in the other room, hearing Inyang’s cries get quieter and quieter until she was silent.
Maybe another time, Dipper told himself. He coalesced back into his humanoid form next to the crib, with its whale-patterned sheets and its pale linoliwood bars. He looked out the door, into the sliver of the hall he could see, and remembered other babies over the years that he had raised, or helped raise. Later, he told himself firmly. For sure.
Dipper closed his eyes, breathed in deep, and blipped—
December 4th, 8:54 AM EST
—into his designated seat at the dining table, aka the chair that Torako had snatched for her temporary bedside table and kept falling out of bed for. Dipper might have—in the previous months—maybe on occasion scooted it just far enough out of reach that she would tumble out of the sheets. Just maybe on occasion, though. Not every night. That would just be suspicious.
“Morning,” he chirped at Torako, who was sipping at a cup of coffee. He eyed it—hazelnut creamer, oof, she was anticipating a Day.
“Hey,” Torako said. Across the table, Bentley’s forehead was flush against the wood surface. He groaned out something that Dipper interpreted as a greeting.
“You never jump anymore,” Dipper complained. He crossed his arms and set them on the table, leaning forward. “It’s so disappointing.”
“Dude, we’ve lived together for, like, eight years, of course I don’t jump anymore,” Torako said. Dipper hummed in absentminded agreement in order to hide the fact that he was as of that moment making plan after plan to startle the snot out of her. “Besides, now I have a Dipper-sensor as long as Bentley’s around—he moaned out something a second before you popped up.”
Very kind of her to tell him what situation he needed to avoid in order to succeed. Torako really was her own worst enemy, because she should know by know that Dipper wasn’t nearly nice enough to not take advantage of such facts. “I had forgotten about that.” He actually almost had. “Bentley conscious yet?”
Bentley groaned again. Torako picked up her fork, stabbed a sausage on her plate, and shoved it in her mouth. Dipper squinted his eyes at the remaining sausages and wondered if he could get away with sneaking one off her plate.
“Kind of. I think he had a rough last hour of sleep; he was really groggy when I finally shook him awake.”
Half-formed schemes of how he was going to make Torako scream in surprise fell to the back burner as he cast a more appraising eye over Bentley and his aura. Bentley kept saying that he didn’t want them to treat him like something fragile, like those delectable sugar cubes that were 90% air, 9% sugar and 1% flavoring and were so thin they fell apart the moment they touched your tongue, but Bentley was also dealing with PTSD among a host of other problems so Dipper was going to worry. Especially since, you know, exhaustion crept and shifted slow through his aura in a way that Dipper hadn’t seen since last week.
“Hey, Ben. Looking tired there.”
Bentley didn’t make a noise. Instead, he lifted his head up just enough to glare at Dipper. Dipper winced, both at the animosity and at the tiredness strung at the corners of his eyes and in the crease of his forehead. Bentley glared even more.
Torako whistled. “I’m not sure, but it might have actually gotten worse?”
“Shut up,” Bentley groused. He reached out and nearly knocked his mug of coffee over (and if it weren’t bad enough that he was drinking coffee, it was worse because even all the way across the table, Dipper’s teeth could feel the half-cup of sugar Bentley had poured in) before tugging it close and sipping. It must have tasted awful. Bentley didn’t blink an eye.
Dipper looked at Torako. Torako glanced at him. They both decided that shuddering was probably not the wisest course of action, with Ben so grumpy. That being said, Torako still opened her mouth. Really, she was her own worst enemy.
“So you’re…still going to work today?”
Ben grunted and shifted his gaze to her, narrow-eyed. “I gotta,” he said. “There’s a new sigils company being built here, and there’s a…what’s the word…mandatory, right, there’s a mandatory meeting at 9:30 about it.”
“What about a teleconference?” Torako speared another sausage. Dipper, momentarily distracted, looked down at her plate and stretched nonchalantly. If his hand was a little closer to her plate than before, well, that was just coincidence.
Shaking his head, Bentley took another sip of his coffee before saying, “Confidential information. Gotta be in person.”
Dipper, after a blink and a quick rush of information, thought that it might be more that Bentley was being stubborn about ‘earning his keep’ and less about ‘having to go to the meeting in person.’ Dipper was actually pretty sure that Karl Svinhish would happily come to visit just in order to fill Bentley in on the details. He considered the pros and cons of actually saying that, and decided to keep his mouth shut. Instead, Torako distracted, he set his fingers right at the edge of her plate.
Torako snorted and pointed her fork at Bentley. “And Karl Svinhish wouldn’t bend over backwards for you, no, no he wouldn’t.”
Bentley actually hissed at her and bared his teeth. Torako’s face went—not pale, no, but she had the expression of somebody who has just realized that they’re treading right at the edge of too far and should really go back before they’re mauled. She stabbed down for her sausages.
Dipper, right on the edge of getting himself a tasty salty snack, howled as her fork stabbed right into the back of his hand.
“Oh fuck,” Torako said, jumping out of her chair. “Oh fuck, how the fuck did your hand get there, what even—”
Dipper felt torn between cackling and screaming. It really, really hurt in all the best and worst ways. “You stabbed me!”
Bentley, at some point, had half-pushed himself out of his chair. He lowered himself down into it, lifted his coffee mug, and raised his eyebrows as Torako pulled the fork back out of Dipper’s hand. He sipped.
“Shut up,” Dipper giggled at him, tears streaming down his face.
“I’m too tired to be nice,” Bentley muttered. “You were asking for it.”
Torako blinked. She looked down at her sausages. “Were you—trying to take my breakfast?”
“No,” Dipper lied. He licked at the puncture holes in the back of his hand, then willed them to go away. His blood tasted almost like copper, today. “Of course not.”
Torako glowered at him, and pointed the fork. “You were.”
“Never,” he said. There was a tug somewhere in his gut, and he recognized family—friend—Batoor a split second before he said, “and you can’t prove otherwise, Batoor’s calling, see you guys later bye!”
Torako threw her fork. He disappeared before it could reach him.
December 4th, 4:09 PM GMT
Dipper blipped back into physical space upside-down and in a pretty snazzy pair of electric blue ruffled slacks. He craned his neck back to look Batoor in the eye. “You called?”
“Someday, I hope you realize how old you sound when you say that,” Batoor complained. He was sitting on his desk, a textbook in his lap and a pencil stuck behind his ear. His curtains were open, the dorm courtyard below empty but for the few students taking advantage of a clear afternoon to get some much-needed sun. Dipper tilted his head and pointed.
“Is that kid stacking chips on her nose?”
“Undoubtedly,” Batoor said, not even looking. “It’s a new fad. You wouldn’t understand them, being an old geezer.”
Sometimes, Dipper regretted introducing Torako to Batoor. He extra regretted that Torako and Batoor had exchanged contact information, and that Batoor was picking up on some bad habits of Torakos, like bullying Dipper with no regard for how impressively powerful he was. No respect these days.
“I understand fads,” Dipper grumbled.
Outside, chip-stacking student made it to four chips high. Four chips wouldn’t be nearly so impressive if they weren’t being stacked corner to corner. Dipper was kind of jealous—he wasn’t sure he would be able to do that without taking advantage of his powers.
“You keep telling yourself that,” Batoor said. “Anyways—I need help with this history paper. You know about history, right?”
Dipper fancied that, if he’d never become a dream demon caught in the claws of near-eternity (he knew that he wouldn’t last forever, but it may as well be—it basically would be, as far as this universe was concerned, and more than that he couldn’t quite wrap even his demonically-altered brain around), he would have been a scientist, or a mathematician, or an over-qualified pizza store manager (which if it came with free pizza, wouldn’t be a half-bad gig.) At almost-thirteen, he hadn’t been as interested in history beyond conspiracy theories and supernatural stories. Now, though—“My middle name may as well be Historical Record,” Dipper said. He flipped over mid-air. His braid fell over his shoulder as well.
Batoor blinked at him. “Those pants are…new,” he said, in English. Dipper narrowed his eyes in suspicion.
“Not really,” he said. “What, you don’t like them?” Mabel had been the one who pestered him into conjuring them for himself in the first place. He’d gotten a whole cheesecake out of that deal, and the mortification of them had barely been enough for his young-demon ego to deal with. Now, though—they were ruffled, and bright, and Mabel’s, and that was enough.
“And the braid is different,” Batoor said.
Dipper looked down at it, pulling it further into view with his left hand. He flipped the end of it between his fingers. “ Yeah, I don’t usually go for this style. It’s fun, to change things up.”
Batoor blinked. The scales around his eyes shimmered. “Yes,” he said, thoughtfully, “I guess so. Anyways, I need help with the history paper. About history. In English. I am older so class is harder? It’s a high-level class.”
“Okay,” Dipper said, easily enough. It wasn’t like Torako or Bentley would be better company now, and they were going to be busy anyways. “What you got to pay me, then?”
Grinning, Batoor opened a desk drawer with his foot. Dipper perked up despite himself, shoulders dropping and eyebrows raising. “Candy,” Batoor said, “and snacks. From Kabul.”
Not as easily obtained as gummy peaches, here in Ireland. “Oh,” Dipper said. “I see what you’re doing. You’ve been talking to Torako.”
“Of course,” Batoor said, before switching back to Dashto. “She’s the only one that can handle you, other than Bentley, and she’s the one with the Demonology degree. She’s been very helpful in my studies.”
Dipper stilled. He narrowed his eyes. “I thought you were doing a degree in Community-Building and Inter-Species Relations,” he said, slowly.
“I am,” Batoor said. He reached inside the desk drawer and picked up a couple packages, one carefully-preserved mini gosh-e fil stuck in stasis, powdered sugar and chopped pistachios kept in place through the power of food-regulation preservation spells, and the other an assorted bag of koloocheh. A few of them were broken despite the spells, and Dipper knew they had to be good. Koloocheh were brittle cookies by nature, after all.
“Oh,” Dipper said. He couldn’t look away from the treats for a second, then made himself because he could get a major deal out of these if by some small chance Batoor didn’t know any better. “They’re pretty good, but for a whole paper?”
“And proofreading,” Batoor said. He smiled, as sweet as the sacrifice he was offering. “I know exactly how valuable these are. They’re not only delicious, they’re sentimental. My Oware bought them for my Transfer-Day. I haven’t had gosh-e fil since we left Afghanistan.”
Oh fuck, Dipper thought. He felt a trickle of unease down the back of his neck a second before the realization hit him and he sunk to standing on the floor like a dumbass. “Oh,” he said again. “You’re doing a specialization in community law and advocacy, aren’t you.”
Batoor grinned. “Demonology overlaps with law-writing classes a lot, you know. Anyways. For help finding relative articles about my history topic in both English and Dashto, assistance refining my arguments, and thorough proofreading of my English composition, I will give you both of these very valuable, sentimental treats, and maybe we can have some video game time together if my roommate doesn’t come back too early.”
“That’s a big if,” Dipper said. “Do you have the new Red Rider game? The one that’s set in a magicless urban wasteland that you have to carefully scavenge tools and make intelligent allegiances in order to strategically rise to the top of the crime syndicate that’s taken over the city and make the ultimate choice whether to rule over all with an iron fist or transition to a better societal system?”
Batoor stared for a moment. “Yes,” he said slowly. “You like that game?”
“Well,” Dipper said. “I suppose I kind of do, yes, but not too much.” Dipper carefully did not mention that the open-story ending that mimicked the rewards and consequences of living a high-stakes human life scratched the same itch he had tried to, over and over and over in human skins that lasted not long enough. He also didn’t mention that the mathematics that went into calculating story paths from individual choices was jaw-droppingly incredible and he needed to see it in play for himself.
Batoor nodded. Dipper narrowed his eyebrows in suspicion at the sparks of mirth and slowly unfurling anticipation in his aura.
“Stop being amused,” Dipper said, pointing his lace-gloved finger at Batoor and scowling. “I kind of like it.”
“Sure,” Batoor said with a perfectly straight face that was very at odds with the emotions that Dipper was reading. He held out his hand. “Anyways, I do have the game and we can play it if there is enough time. If there isn’t, we’ll play at the next opportunity feasible for both parties. Do we have a deal?”
Dipper looked at the sweets. He tilted his head and thought about the promise of the game—which he was guaranteed to have a chance to play—and then about the difficulty of the task before him. He didn’t mind proofreading either, especially because English had cast off a bunch of the fiddly rules about punctuation that honestly Dipper thought were still needed. He could make sure that Batoor’s teachers weren’t teaching him too much that was wrong.
Grinning wide, Dipper reached out and took Batoor’s hand. “Deal,” he said. Blue fire licked up from between their palms briefly, and Dipper felt himself get—sharper, smarter, stronger—for a brief flash as the deal lanced through him. Then he let himself slide into that state of mind where he was—not compelled to do a task, no, but it was similar.
“Great,” Batoor said, grinning lazily. He leaned back against the desk and looked very self-satisfied. “Because my Red Rider game’s multiplayer option hasn’t been used since the time my roommate agreed to try it out with me.”
Dipper tipped his head. Something niggled at him. “How long ago was that?”
“Two months ago,” Batoor said. “The day I got the game.”
Anticipation tingled up and down Dipper’s arms. He felt himself lift back off the ground. “Oh? Why not? It’s an excellent game.”
“He said I was too intense.” Batoor picked under his fingernails at imaginary dirt, but Dipper could still see the grin on his face.
“Oh,” Dipper said again. Then, he said, “Well, we should finish that paper as quickly as possible, shouldn’t we? I doubt that you’re more intense than I can be.”
“We’ll have to see,” Batoor said, eyebrows raised.
________________________________________________________________
They did not, unfortunately, get a chance to see. Writing papers was harder than Dipper remembered, and Batoor had chosen to write about anti-preter sentiment in Ireland two hundred years ago and the impact of the laws enacted during that time had in the centuries following. There weren’t too many papers on the matter in Dashto, and any articles that they could find were harder to understand the further back they were, so Batoor was stuck with English and translated Gaelic sources.
Halfway into Presumption of Guilt: How Lawmakers Built a Sinister System in the Absence of Politically Powerful Preternatural Citizens that Resulted in the Summer Riots of 3784, Batoor’s dorm buzzed. They froze.
“Hey, Batoor!” Dipper heard. He swung his head around to look at Batoor, who met his gaze. “Why you lock the door? You got company?”
Batoor flushed. “No!” he yelled, voice cracking a little as he flapped his hand at Dipper. “I just was studying!”
Dipper snatched what remained of the delicious snacks that Batoor had traded and stopped just short of blipping out. “When are we going to play Red Rider?” he hissed quietly in Dashto.
Apparently Batoor’s roommate had very, very good ears. “Batoor?”
Batoor leveled the nastiest glare that Dipper had been subject to from him. Dipper threw up his hands in frustration and tried to communicate, with his eyes, that he was just asking, no need to get pissy about it! To which Batoor shook a finger at Dipper, waggled his eyebrows in I-told-you-we’d-get-to-it-when-we-get-to-it, and gestured for Dipper to stay quiet for good measure.
“I was only talking to myself!” Batoor yelled back. “Let me get the door for you—”
Dipper felt a tug in his gut. Thankfully, he let himself follow the summons, twisting out of existence from Batoor’s Irish University dormroom and—
December 4th, 9:44 PM EAT
—into a small bedroom with sparsely decorated walls, a pale tile floor worn right to the edge of minor neglect, and a small child sitting on a patterned rug right at the edge of his circle.
Dipper swallowed back his customary greeting and instead asked, “What’s up, kiddo?”
They hugged their knees closer to their chest, squashing what looked to be a very sentimental stuffed manticore. “Sshh,” they said, so quiet that Dipper had to readjust his hearing. “Aunty Adi is asleep.”
“Oh,” Dipper said. He sat cross-legged a half-inch above the wobbly chalk lines. After a moment, he whispered, “I like your scentless candles.”
The child ducked their face into their knees and the stuffed manticore’s fuzzy mane. “Thanks,” they said, but then said nothing else for a long time. Their aura shifted between embarrassment and hesitation and quick flashing bursts of smothered pride. Dipper made the decision to wait for them to speak, and instead cast out his senses more to assess his new surroundings. There was a small bed in the corner, third-hand but well maintained, a nice new desk bought at a bargain, temperature-regulated sheets, a little bookshelf that was crammed overfull, a tablet for children open to what seemed to be a digital copy of a centuries-old summoning how-to that had never been legally published but had found its way around anyways. Down the hall to one side there were three other signatures—two more children, one adult, each in separate rooms, and to the other seemed to be a living space complete with kitchen and a harmless little snake that curled up in a hole in the wall, sleeping off its latest meal. The night air was cool in such a way that suggested the previous day had been hot.
“Are you really a demon?” The kid asked.
“Yeah,” Dipper said, wiggling his claws at them. Their eyes were big and dark in the candlelight from right over their knees. “Alcor the Dreambender, at your service.”
Another very long pause. Dipper waited.
“The book said you were nice,” they said. Dipper tilted his head. The book had been distributed during one of his nicer, more mentally present phases. Fortunately for this child, he’d had over a decade of recent socialization with human beings, so he wasn’t super tempted to take advantage of what the kid thought.
“Right now I am,” he said. “What you want, then, kiddo? People usually don’t summon me unless they have a deal in mind.”
They looked away and buried themselves further into themselves. The minutes passed. Outside, bugs sang and small lizards rustled in pursuit. The candles flickered, burned wax into vapor that wafted away, slow and lazy but inevitable. Dipper kept himself breathing, steady.
“…Aunty Adi doesn’t like me,” they said.
Dipper blinked. “Oh?” he asked, and looked closer. No broken bones, a bruise on their knee (legitimately tripped and fell), short curly hair (useful for the heat), crooked fingers (an accident when they were two years old), missing tooth (their adult teeth were coming in). Whatever it was, it wasn’t overt physical abuse. Dipper narrowed his eyes. “What does she do? Where are your parents?”
They shifted one foot over the other. “I act funny,” they said instead. “Mom and Dad are busy working in Lilongwe, so they left me with Aunty Adi.”
There was a lengthy silence. Dipper had started getting that uneasy prickling along the back of his neck, the one he got when kids weren’t safe and happy, and he had to breathe in deep and out slow to stop himself from getting ‘intense,’ as Torako put it.
“Other kids don’t like me either,” said the kid. “I don’t get it, I laugh when they want me to and follow all the rules, the ones they don’t say but are there anyways, but they still don’t like me.”
Lonely crept over them like a purple shroud, heavy and dark and bruiselike. Dipper watched it settle and shift for a few moments, and turned the words over in his head. They waited.
“Do you want a friend?” Dipper asked, finally.
A heartbeat, two, and then a nod.
“Do you want me to be your friend, tonight?”
A double nod.
“I’ll need something in exchange,” Dipper said, because it was true (though not really, no, he could totally absorb the backlash that came with spending a night playing with a kid but this wasn’t Mabel) and the kid should know that, but also— “maybe some candy? Kids have candy, right?”
He’d really, really prefer the manticore. He almost asked for it. Then he thought of what Torako would say and do to him if she found out he’d taken a beloved stuffed animal from a lonely, friendless child and figured that stealing candy was a comparably minor offense.
Their wide dark eyes stared into his, and then they very slowly nodded, and even more slowly pointed in the direction of their desk. “In the drawer,” they said. “Milk drops.”
Dipper tilted his head over at the desk and blinked. “Okay,” he said and extended his hand. “Is it a deal?”
After a short moment, they nodded and extended their hand over the shaky, weak chalk lines of their summoning circle. “Deal,” they said, their hand in his, blue fire flaring up between them for a second before dying down.
Dipper tilted his head, blinked into something a little softer (more comfortable, something that would set the kid at ease) and asked, “So, kiddo, I’m yours to play with for a while. What you wanna do?”
The kid didn’t smile, but hesitant happiness spread like frail roots through the heavy purple lonely in their aura. “Well,” they said, quietly, “there’s this—card game, that I got to play once…”
_______________________________________________________________
It took several hours of very quiet playtime for the kid to finally get tired enough to fall asleep. Dipper tucked them—tucked Pili—into their bed, sang a slightly off-key lullaby until their tired eyes finally blinked shut and their chest rose and fell softly and their grip on their Manticore (Nadine) loosened. He thought for a moment, then summoned a Dream to curl up next to them and a Nightmare to stand guard until Pili woke in the morning.
“You keep an eye on them, alright?” Dipper said. The dream baa’d and snuggled in close to Pili, who relaxed further. Himmwichlint, the Nightmare, blinked its five eyes independently and huffed out a derisive what, you think I wouldn’t at Dipper. Dipper huffed back and rolled his eyes.
“I’m not saying you can’t or won’t,” Dipper complained, crossing his arms. He was wearing a very soft sweater that Pili had exclaimed quietly over before stroking for a solid five minutes. “I’m just saying what I want you to do.”
Himmwichlint rolled its eyes back at him. The effect it had was really similar like those plastic googly ones that Belle had once used to bedazzle a pair of sneakers into a constantly-rustling horror show. She had worn them every day for a month to class. Dipper had ended up making a deal with Lionel to have them disappear.
“No respect,” Dipper complained. “What is it with everybody in my life refusing to show me respect? I am a very powerful dream demon, you would think people would remember that more.”
The Nightmare chuffed low in its gizzard, and its wool shook in laughter. Then it turned itself around to lay on the ground at the side of the bed, very purposefully looking away from Dipper.
Dipper threw up his hands. “Unbelievable,” he whispered, turning around himself to leave the room. “Absolutely unbelievable.”
He very quietly swung the door open and then stepped into the quiet hallway. Another step, and he shifted from the soft sweater and comfortable sweatpants he’d put on for Pili into a sharp black suit, dark and imposing and shadowy. He didn’t need to close his eyes for more than a few seconds to know that he wanted the room at the very end of the hall. He walked forward on the thin air just a hair off the ground, passing by several pictures on the walls and a totem lodged in an inset shelf near the ceiling. It was supposed to protect the inhabitants, but the spirit that was supposed to be there was missing. It had been missing for years at this point.
Not that it could have done much of anything if it had been there, Dipper thought to himself with a little grin. It could not have stopped him from having a little chat with Auntie Adi. He doubted that it would have even tried.
In moments, he reached her door. The insects outside had fallen silent. He pushed the door open, soundless, and entered her room.
It was dark. A thin sliver of slightly-overcast moonlight drifted through the crack between the curtains. In the middle of the room was a wide bed, thin summer blankets draped over a sleeping figure. When he looked around, the room wasn’t overly different from Pili’s—the same well-cared-for furniture, clothing bought at a bargain and a few priceless treasures (gifts, or inheritances, or simply items loved to the point of powerfully tempting)—but there was something about it that cradled the sleeping figure. There had been a lot of love in this room. There was a lot of love, and care, and fondness. Pili’s room seemed so much emptier by comparison.
Alcor made his way to the edge of the bed. He flicked out his cane, threaded his hair back into a ribbon-tied ponytail, and then sat down.
Adi didn’t respond for several moments, still deep in sleep. No matter. He knew that the deep part of her responsible for living, for detecting danger and escaping from it was slowly waking up. With every breath, it was pulled closer and closer to the surface, a buoy rising to the surface of a wide dark sea, dragging consciousness up with it. Her brow started to furrow. The soft lines along the edges of her mouth began to deepen. Her eyes tensed. Inhale, exhale, and her eyes fluttered open.
It took two breathing cycles for her to register that there was a strange person in her room, sitting on her bed and looking down at her. She jerked into motion, opened her mouth, and screamed.
Alcor smiled into the silence. He had already borrowed—not stolen, he might still give it back—her voice. “Now, now,” he said, softly. “You shouldn’t disturb the children’s sleep. Let’s be quiet, all right?”
Her eyes are wide. The sclera is bright against the darkness of the room. Her hand feels at her throat, which is bobbing with fruitless effort to speak.
“I know this is frightening,” Alcor said. His grin widened. The fear shooting up from Adi in sparks set him on the most wonderful edge. It buzzed against him, just enough to turn his teeth a hair past sharp and blow his pupils a clawtip longer. “But really, this is quite important—can I trust you not to scream?”
She nodded. What a fool—he already knew he couldn’t. He knew she would scream as loud as she could, and then her children would come in, and then Alcor would have to figure out how to deal with them in non-lethal ways. What a mess that would be. Instead, he chuckled before reaching out and tracing a claw against the bottom of her jaw. Adi froze. Her chest barely moved, quick and light.
“Don’t worry,” he drawled, leaning in a little. Her eyes darted from his teeth to his eyes and then back down again to his teeth. “I already know I can’t. Anyways, this will be a far more productive conversation if you aren’t doing any of the talking.”
With a sharp inhale, she clenched her fingers in the blanket pooled at her waist. Alcor tapped her chin. She nodded again, this time short and jerky. Her fear really was quite exhilarating, Alcor thought to himself absentmindedly. He’d have to make sure to milk as much out of her without compromising his position, or Pili’s.
Ah, yes. Pili’s. A no-name soul that he hadn’t had any meaningful prior relationships with. But children were children, and no-name souls could earn names, couldn’t they? Lionel and Torako and Georgi were all excellent examples. He would have to keep an eye out for Pili—make sure that Adi didn’t do anything unfortunate.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here,” Alcor said, leaning back a little. Adi exhaled shakily, and nodded again. “Well, it has to do with your nibling. Did you know that they’ve managed to access quite the outdated collection of demonic academia? Their circle was a little wobbly, but it’s supposed to be simple enough for a child to draw with a bit of effort, if they’re desperate enough.”
Alcor noted the sudden tension in Adi’s shoulders, the sourness of jealousy that rose up among misplaced gangrene anger, the mist-like waft of dark guilt that drifted off as quick as it drifted in.
“You see,” Alcor said, crossing one leg over the other and wrapping his hands leisurely around his knees, “children have to be desperate enough to draw my circle. That’s not even taking into account the effort many go to in order to get the information needed to draw my circle, and say the incantation, and gather the necessary supplies. Children, you see, don’t often have the resources or freedom an adult does. Please, do me a favor and consider—how desperate must young Pili have been to go to the effort of all that?”
Adi’s anger flashed and deepened. She lifted her chin, eyes narrowed, and opened her mouth to retort before she tried to speak and remembered exactly who it was she was talking to. Fear drowned out the anger. She curled back in on herself, shifting back on the bedsheets with a near-silent rasp.
Yes. This was what he deserved. This was the respect he had earned, that he had been deprived of the last few hours. He breathed it in deep.
“I know you haven’t laid a hand on them,” Alcor drawled. His eyes crinkled in a smile. “Trust me, we would be having a—different conversation at that point. Perhaps off in the desert, where you could scream and I could enjoy it without having to worry about your spawn ruining everything. But that’s also the problem, because—you haven’t laid a hand on them in love, either.”
Silence. Her aura spoke volumes. He let it balloon up between them, bobbed his foot as she swallowed past a rabbit-quick heartbeat. The pale moonlight coming in through the crack in the curtains glinted off the shiny cap on the toe.
“Your nibling summoned me because they were desperate for a friend,” Dipper said, very very quietly. “They wanted somebody to play with. To love them, even if that love wasn’t as real as what they really needed. Even just for a night. You, as their guardian, have failed them. You have neglected them, for terrible, petty reasons that have nothing to do with who Pili is, and have everything to do with who somebody else is—one of their parents, I’m assuming.”
Adi bristled again, shoulders drawing up and back in indignation. Her sleeping cap shifted, exposing some of the kinked hair it was protecting. Alcor reached over. She stilled, heartrate jack-knifing as he pulled the cap back into place.
“You don’t have to be their friend,” Alcor said. He smiled. “But it would be such a shame if you didn’t learn how to be kind to them and how to be supportive of them. Such a shame indeed. There are always…repercussions, you see, for these kinds of actions.” He leaned over, resting his chin in one palm, fingers curled in a precisely calculated mimicry of danger. Adi trembled, swallowed. Sweat tricked down her brow and along the lines of her slender neck. Dipper watched it drip down, and felt her terror spike.
“What a shame indeed,” he said. He glanced up, still smiling, and caught her eye. The shallow inhale she was taking hitched. Her pupils shrunk despite the darkness. Alcor tilted his head to make sure the light glinted across his sharp teeth. Then, he drew back.
“But I suppose it would be better for Pili and your other children if I actually gave you the chance to learn,” he said offhandedly, and looked at his claws. The next exhale broke out of her, ragged and loud in the silence. “I’m trying to be a better person, you see, and I suppose you haven’t done anything egregiously worthy of…such harsh retribution.”
Alcor stood. He picked imaginary lint off his shoulder, pulled his eight-ball cane back into the physical realm, and leaned on it. “I don’t suppose I have to inform you that if things don’t get better, I will know,” he drawled. Adi’s hands were clutching at the fabric over her heart. “But, for the purpose of all transparency…if they don’t, I will know. I doubt you’ll enjoy what happens afterwards.”
With a grin that was satisfyingly wide, Alcor bowed and faded out of sight. A moment later, he released his hold on Adi. He watched her place trembling hands over her mouth and hyperventilate for several minutes. She eventually calmed enough to slide out of bed and stand on shaking legs, though it took her a few tries to be steady enough to walk on her own. She checked her eldest son’s room, then her daughter’s, and then finally –with no little hesitation—her nibling’s.
Alcor grinned as she stifled a gurgling scream at the sight of Himmwichlint curled up in front of Pili’s bed. Himmwichlint lifted its head, blinked its five eyes at Adi, and then yawned on purpose to show off its incomprehensible but terrifying teeth and its two whipcord tongues. Adi whimpered and stumbled back. Alcor, upside-down on the ceiling, hummed and grinned wider.
Himmwichlint tilted its head up, made eye contact with him, and huffed.
Alcor rolled his eyes back at Himmwichlint. He did not need to get out of here, not when this woman’s reactions were absolutely hilarious. He hadn’t been front-row seats to a horror show with so little blood in ages.
Himmwichlint snorted, looked back at the woman, and nestled itself back in. On the bed, Pili sighed and snuggled the dream closer. The dream obliged.
Aunt Adi dropped her fist, just a little. She stared at her nibling, eyebrows furrowing. Soft surprise echoed out in the spaces between her terror and horror. If he looked closely, he could see the beginnings of wonder peeking out from behind the residual film of jealousy and anger.
Oh, he thought. Maybe she would learn. What a disappointment, almost to the point he was the slightest bit mad about it. He’d been looking forward to eking out some more terror from her, maybe indulging in snacking on a finger or two, possibly a kidney, nothing life-threatening. Her actually cleaning her act up was going to ruin things for him.
Oh, he thought after another moment. Maybe—maybe he did need to go somewhere—else. Dipper closed his eyes and as quietly as possible, tessered into the mindscape, lay in the grass among his Nightmares and Dreams, and simply was.
________________________________________________________________
§¢ɷʘϠϰѬ ҈†‡₰ ʯ͚:ͼǂ Nightmare Realm
It was nice, for an indeterminable amount of time, to let the manic buzzing energy and self-righteous anger and the hunger for justice (revenge, the kind that benefited him and him alone) seep out of the front of his mind and down into the back. A couple Dreams nestled up to his sides, and one had decided that his chest was the best place to curl up on. It chewed on his lapel absentmindedly. Dipper would have minded more if it a) wasn’t easy to fix, being made of thought, and b) weren’t the case that the Dream was in the top tenth percentile of cute Dreams—which were altogether adorable as it was.
The Nightmare taking advantage of the situation to snuffle into his hair was another thing entirely.
“Erschie,” Dipper said, eyes closed but eyebrows furrowed down. “What are you doing.”
A pause, then Erschie snorted warm sulfuric air directly into Dippers mostly-made-up scalp. Dipper waited a few seconds for something else to happen, then opened his eyes. The moment he did, he felt Erschie’s fangs and sharp front teeth start to scrape at the top of his head.
“Gross,” Dipper said, even as he felt the skin slice open just a little. “Disgusting.”
Erschie paused, then withdrew. Dipper blinked. Erschie then licked at Dipper’s hair with all the gross slobber in Erschie’s dumb gross mouth.
Dipper bolted upright, the Dream on his chest now in his arms and the other two left to flop into the grass and baa irately over the sudden lack of support. “ERSCHIE!” Dipper screeched. His hair stood up on end. He could feel the slobber starting to trickle down the back of his neck. “WHAT THE FUCK.”
Erschie blinked up at him, closed its eyes, and then let out a wool-rustle throat-croak hoof-stomp that Dipper knew to indicate Erschie’s general amusement at being a nuisance in Dipper’s life. The Dream snuggled into Dipper’s arms. This, unfortunately, limited what response Dipper could take.
In order to demonstrate to Erschie that he was a dangerous, serious, terrifying dream demon, Dipper opened his mouth, displayed all his rows of teeth, and hissed at Erschie. For some reason, that just made the Nightmare express Amusement more exuberantly.
“You’ve been conniving with Himmie, haven’t you,” Dipper said. He resisted the urge to stamp his foot. “You’re both out to show me as much disrespect as possible.”
Erschie clacked its teeth together and flicked its ears.
“What do you mean it’s not hard?? I am Alcor the Dreambender, Devourer of Souls and Lord of Nightmares, King of Darkness, Destroyer of Light, the Infernal Star! I’m literally the Scourge of All Beings Living and Dead and you say it’s not hard to disrespect me??”
With an exaggerated snort, Erschie dipped its head down and up twice before flicking its ears in succession.
“I do not embarrass myself!!” Dipper howled, throwing his arms up in the air. The Dream previously occupying them fell to the grass with a disgruntled bleat, and glared up at him as ferociously as it could manage. Dipper looked down at the Dream and winced.
Erschie performed its most vigorous Amusement dance yet.
Dipper pointed at Erschie and glowered. “Shut up,” he said.
Predictably, but disappointingly, Erschie did not listen. Erschie continued to do its best to convey its Amusement at Dipper, adding insult to injury by throwing in a mirthful head-shake.
“Can’t get any respect around here,” Dipper grumbled, squatting down and papping the Dream to show his remorse as was only appropriate. “They’re all out to get me. But you won’t be like that if you ever become a Nightmare, will you? You’ll be appropriately respectful, unlike that ungrateful troll over there. Yes, I could eat it, but no, I am merciful and abstain like a good demon. And this is the thanks I get.”
The dream looked up at him and blinked. It turned its head to take in Erschie, who was now turning around in a circle as it continued to mock Dipper. Then the dream looked back up at Dipper and flicked its ears just like Erschie was.
Dipper stood and put his hands on his hips. “Wow,” he said. “The rebellion really does start early. I can see I’m not welcome here, in my own Realm.”
Erschie blew a raspberry. All three Dreams watched Erschie in clear curiosity, then turned around to Dipper and did the same.
“Rude,” Dipper growled, and pulled himself away into another place chosen on a whim.
________________________________________________________________
December 5th, 1:58 AM, AZT
Dipper found himself outside a small home with a bright blue door. The outer walls were made of corrugated metal that had also been painted blue, and a birdhouse had been set between two of the windows. It was cold. Dipper breathed out, then in, then suffused heat into his next exhale just to see the condensation rise and dissipate into the air.
He turned around, looked down the footpath that meandered down the slope the house was set into. There were more houses, roofs illuminated by moonlight, windows largely unlit. It was 2 AM in this small town of Laza, after all. There wasn’t very much to do, unless he really wanted to terrorize the inhabitants by tap-dancing on their ceilings or whispering traumatizing thoughts into their dreams. He thought maybe that might just possibly be a not great thing that Bentley would get quiet and frustrated with him over, though. Instead, maybe he could just eat some of the goats that one of the houses kept down below. Dipper hummed and tapped his finger on his chin.
Eating goats was probably something he would get in trouble for, on second thought. He could just terrorize the goats. That was still fun, but didn’t hurt any people. Actually, Torako would get a kick out of some selfies, he could do that. Tempt her into another passport-less road trip, for the fun of it. They could take Bentley too, this time. It would be much lower stakes. Yes, a picture would be good. Dipper took a step forward, absentmindedly casting his mind around to count the souls in the vicinity, and then froze.
He turned back around, looked at the blue house with the blue door and the birdhouse set into the side of it. A gust of wind blew through him, then around him as he made himself just a little more solid. In turn, he stared through the house and at the soul on a couch. The soul had dozed off while watching the news, which had turned off automatically an hour ago. Dipper stared, then—because he really didn’t have anything better to do—blipped from outside to just in the living room.
She had become an old, old man, this time, Dipper realized. A very well-groomed and well-dressed old man, even in sleep. She didn’t seem rich this time, he thought to himself, taking in the heirloom table and the rugs worn with age and use, but then again, Pacifica tended to bounce up and down the economic scale from life to life.
Dipper took a seat in the thin air above the table, on which there was a lone, empty cup that had held coffee at some point. He tilted his head at the old man, watched him breathe in (a little raspy) and then out (almost a snore) for several minutes. Dipper closed his eyes, and saw Pacifica’s death—
Tunar, in a hospital bed, age 146, seven weeks and two days before his birthday. He breathes in, and then out, and then in, slower and shallower each time. The heartbeat monitor chimes weakly, but steadily. His nephew holds his hand, an old man himself, and his great-great-grandniece is smoothing down the sparse hair on Tunar’s head.
Tunar does not open his eyes. He has already said goodbye, said it in the hour he was awake before he slept, said goodbye the same way he always did before falling asleep—with a soft ‘I love you,’ a kiss on the forehead or on the hand or on the cheek, and a small little sigh as he set his head into the pillows and closed his eyes again. His other grandnibling has gone with the rest of their family to get something to eat and bring food back for the two who stayed behind. This is probably for the best—there are nineteen of them, you see, because Tunar had loved well and was well-loved in turn.
His death is slow, as easy as death is capable of being. Medicine has brought the human body far, but there will never be immortality. There never is immortality, not for humankind, not for the dayflies who are born at dawn and die at dusk, not for the oldest of vampires or the fairest of dragons or the coldest of yukionna. All things die, eventually. All things pass.
Tunar takes a slow, slow breath in, lets it out, and does not inhale again.
—and opened them only to see that the old man had woken up, 137, still nine years left to him, and was looking right at Dipper.
Dipper startled a little, but didn’t move. The old man did not startle, but instead stretched after a moment in the way that old people do to get stiff muscles to cooperate again.
“Ah, I fell asleep on the couch again,” Tunar muttered. His hands shook a little as he clapped them once. The lights came on, dim. “I really should stop doing that, it’s very bad for my back and for my sleeping schedule. This face isn’t getting any younger, you know.”
Dipper cocked his head. “Do you want it to?” he asked.
Tunar scoffed and pushed himself to sit up straight before reaching for an elegant white cane. His hands, wrinkled and adorned with liver spots, wrapped thin fingers around the gently curved top of the cane. “You think you’re so smooth,” he said, narrowing thick eyebrows at Dipper. “I know better than to make a deal with you, Soul-Devourer.”
After a brief pause that stretched on to the edge between acceptable and too long, Dipper said, “Actually, it was mostly curiosity.”
“Mostly,” Tunar drawled, leaning back into the cushions and looking down his nose at Dipper. Dipper was reminded almost viciously of Pacifica and how she would stare at him, unimpressed, after whatever shenanigan he’d pulled recently that pissed her off. It froze Dipper for several long seconds, his heart in his throat as he couldn’t stop seeing her face over Tunar’s. Then Tunar sighed, and the spell was broken.
“I suppose you’re not actually here to reap my soul for whatever reason, though.” Tunar tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. “I know you caused a big hullabaloo a few countries over several months ago, but they’re saying that the river is purified and that there were minimal casualties, which really is quite surprising.”
“Well, old man,” Dipper drawled, leaning over, “what makes you think that would stop me from taking what I want?”
Tunar blinked, looked closely at Dipper, and said nothing for a long time. His eyes were dark, if a little clouded, but piercing in a way that had Dipper twitching his foot. The light buzzed overhead. The clock in the other room slid nearly-silently to the next minute. Outside, Dipper could hear grass rustling in the wind if he concentrated enough, or too little.
A hum brought his attention back to the Pacifica in front of him. Tunar had leaned forward, placing his face and throat closer to Dipper, close enough he could reach out or lunge if he really wanted to.
“Well then,” Tunar said, smiling, his prosthetic teeth shining somewhat brighter than the few natural ones he had left, “seems to me that you don’t want to eat me.”
That wasn’t completely accurate—it never was—but it was accurate enough that Dipper found himself flushing. He withdrew and hunched his shoulders, looking at the pictures set into the wall as though he’d never seen anything like them before. Fingers wrapped around his knee, he managed to respond, “Says who?”
Torako would have gleefully needled the truth out of him. Bentley would have stared at him, arched an eyebrow, and said “Says me,” with the slyest little grin on his face. Pacifica would have lifted fingers to her mouth and chuckled, eyes half-lowered in a kind of superiority-fueled amusement.
Tunar snorted, eyebrows shooting up higher, and leaned back. “Can’t believe I thought you were some kind of suave, smooth-talking master-villain,” he said. “You’re a dumbass.”
Dipper scowled at Tunar. Tunar grinned unapologetically, sharp at the edges. “You suck,” Dipper said, finally.
With a cackle, Tunar finally lay his cane across the top of his legs. “I’m thirsty,” he said, finally. “Make me some coffee.”
“Make—you have a demon in your living room, and you’re telling him to make coffee??” Dipper said, voice momentarily going shrill.
“That’s right,” Tunar said, eyes creased in a self-satisfied smile.
“I could—I’ve manufactured deaths for less offense,” Dipper said, even though it wasn’t much of an offense.
“I’m a hundred and thirty seven years old,” Tunar said, archly. “Even if I thought you would do that, I wouldn’t be frightened. I’ve lived a long time.”
Dipper stared. “Unbelievable,” he finally said. “I can’t believe it. I’ve been dealing with this kind of disrespect all day. You don’t even know me.”
“You just have that kind of face.” Tunar reached out with his cane and poked Dipper in the arm. Dipper’s jaw fell open. “Now. Coffee. I like mine with heavy cream and a scant spoonful of cane sugar. Get to it.”
It took Dipper several moments to get his jaw closed. Then, he stood up, feet firmly on the rug below the coffee table, and walked into the kitchen to do as Tunar said. He was never, he thought to himself, introducing Tunar to Torako or Bentley. Never.
________________________________________________________________
In the middle of a story about the time that an acquaintance, unaware of the fact that Tunar wasn’t particularly interested in romantic or sexual entanglements, tried to set Tunar up with xir grandchild ten years Tunar’s senior when Tunar was 23, Dipper’s phone rang. The lyrics to Dancing Queen blared in the air between them before Dipper could answer it.
Tunar tilted his head. “You have a phone?”
Dipper sent a glower at Tunar, then answered the phone. “Yes?” he asked, in an approximation of what passed for English these days.
“Oh, thank goodness you answered,” the voice on the other end of the line said. Dipper blinked and took a second to place the voice—Reynash, right. “Listen, Lata’s sitter dropped out on us again, he was supposed to pick him up from school today but we just got the call that he didn’t, could you—”
“Yeah, yeah, no, give me five, ten minutes,” Dipper said, tipping his head and calculating the closest point to Lata’s new school that he could feasibly tesser to and remain anonymous. “I’d teleport right to him but that might be a bit—”
Reynash laughed, a little too tight to be completely sincere. “Ahaha, yeah, no, we would appreciate—no, thank you, I’ll let the school know that Lata’s Uncle Tyrone will be coming to get him.”
“Sounds good,” Dipper said. “I’ll message when I pick him up, okay?”
“Thank you again,” Reynash said. “I’ll be home after five, maybe five-thirty, so if you could keep him company until then—”
“Yeah, no problem at all!”
“You’re a lifesaver,” Reynash said. “Thanks again, see you.”
“See—” Dipper only managed to get out one word before the dial tone sounded. He looked down at the phone, and then said, “Well then, he really is busy I guess.”
�� “Alcor the Dreambender has a mundane social life?” Tunar said, droll. Dipper relaxed, purposefully, then tilted his head at Pacifica’s latest incarnation. He looked at Tunar through half-lidded eyes, Stan held in the back of his mind—Pacifica did like her fame, he remembered absently. She liked being the center of attention, and what better way to be the center of attention than to have a juicy news scoop to sell to the highest bidding news agency?
Tunar took one look at Dipper, humphed, and then smacked Dipper in the knee with his cane.
“Hey!” Dipper protested. “What the fuck?”
“Don’t you get snippy at me,” Tunar said, wagging a finger in Dipper’s face. Dipper was seized by the childish urge to snap his teeth at it. “I could see you getting all paranoid on me. On me! After I’ve spent the last unbelievable amount of time talking to you about my life and all the personal details in it. I even let you slide on reciprocating. The least you could do is let me have this.”
Dipper narrowed his eyes at Tunar. “You going to tell anybody?”
Tunar snorted. “Tell people that Alcor the Dreambender came by for coffee and a chat and ended up taking a phone call in my presence? I’d either end up with terrified Demonologists tearing up my house or being prescribed a variety of medication for hallucinations and fits of fantasy. Perhaps I would have been tempted in my youth, but these old bones are done with all that drama.”
He watched Tunar’s aura, saw it peppered with the lightest of lies—Tunar was plenty tempted now—but it was enough that Dipper leaned back into the couch and took a final sip of his coffee. “Okay,” he said.
There was a beat of silence. “So,” Tunar said, “you have to leave, I’m supposing.”
“Yes,” Dipper said. He leaned forward, set the cup in its saucer with a light a clink as he could manage, and stood up. “My apologies for intruding.”
With rolled eyes, Tunar set his cup on its saucer as well with far less care than Dipper had taken. “Bah, you’re not sorry. I expect to see you here next week—though possibly at a more reasonable hour. My Doctor says that I really need to keep myself on a better sleep pattern.”
Dipper’s hands stuttered over where they were needlessly straightening out his collar. “Next…week?”
“Of course,” Tunar said. He stood with the help of his cane and grunted with the effort. “What, you think I started that story with the intention of leaving it unfinished? No, you will be back next week. And—you have a phone. Call me before you come so that I am ready for company.”
Dipper could only blink. “But I don’t know—”
“It’s written on the stasis fridge, top left corner. Take a look at it when you bring the cups in to the dishwasher.”
Spluttering, Dipper said, “I—you expect me to wash the cups?!”
“And you can let yourself out, I assume,” Tunar said. He turned a genial grin on Dipper, but Dipper was savvy enough to see the slyness in the corners of it. Also, the amusement in his aura helped matters a lot. “Seeing as you let yourself in.”
“...I am an all powerful demon, and you expect me to wash your cups for—”
“That just means I am all the more assured you are capable of such a simple task,” Tunar said. He reached out a slightly shaking hand, patted Dipper on the shoulder, and then said, “Well, I am off to bed. Again, I expect you next week. Do try not to show up in the middle of the night again, it’s not good for my heart.”
With that, Dipper watched Tunar shuffle off around the coffee table and down the hall beyond the other side of the television screen. He blinked a little, completely blindsided—though he probably shouldn’t be. Pacifica also had a tendency of bulldozing through most of her social interactions.
Sighing, Dipper reached down, gathered up the teacups, gave them a little rinse with the sink tap before setting them in the washer, and entered Tunar’s number into his phone. He looked down at it, displaying up at him with deceptive innocence, and furrowed his eyebrows. Then, he saw the time, said, “Oh, crap,” and blipped out of the darkened kitchen.
December 4th, 4:13 pm, PDT
Lata screeched with joy as he barreled into Dipper with all the force of an exuberant six year old, face pressed into Dipper’s waist and arms flung around Dipper’s legs. Dipper, dressed up in his nicest, most disarming and charming human persona, grinned down at Lata.
“Hey buddy,” he said. “How are you doing?”
“I was so bored,” Lata said, nearly yelling the last two words. “But now you’re here so I’m not! Can we go get ice cream?”
“Ah,” Dipper said, before deciding fuck it and nodding his head. “Yeah, sure, but I have to sign you out first and let your dad know we got you, okay?”
Lata appeared to have stopped listening after ‘sure,’ and released Dipper to go have a good old jump-and-punch-the-air-in-victory dance. Dipper re-evaluated the intelligence of giving this already hyper child more sugar, then shrugged because he wouldn’t have to deal with the fallout, would he?
“Uncle Tyrone, I presume,” the secretary said, grinning a little. At first glance, she looked like an older middle-aged woman, but Dipper saw the fangs and the sunglasses and thought vampire. She tapped a few buttons, and a screen lit up in front of her window for Dipper. “Please verify your identity with this security question chosen by the child’s guardians and then sign.”
Dipper peered down at the question. What did you suddenly yell at Reynash Pines that one time that had him scream, launch a full package of Choco Piecies into the air, and tumble back over his home office chair which meant he had to go to the hospital and get three stitches behind his right ear?
He blinked, then toggled the keyboard to input, What U Cravin. The system thought for a moment, then blinked green before showing him the field to write in his signature. Dipper took hold of the stylus it materialized for him, signed, and then said goodbye to the secretary.
Lata had, in the meantime, decided that he needed to be crawling around on his feet and hands like some kind of humpbacked bear cub. “Are you done?” Lata asked, turning around in a circle, still not standing. There was dirt on his hands. Dipper resolved to get Lata to wash them as soon as they could find a public restroom.
“Yes, I’m done,” Dipper said. “You wanna ditch this lame joint?”
“It’s not lame,” Lata said, twisting his head to look at Dipper in such a way that Dipper wondered how he wasn’t snapping his own neck. “School is really really awesome, it’s just that everybody’s already gone home and I could only just wait for people to come pick me up, and waiting is boring.”
“That tracks,” Dipper said after a pause. Lata looked back down at the ground and then started walking forward, down to where the entryway doors were. “You gonna keep walking like that buddy?”
“Yeah,” Lata said. “This is the bear walk! We learned it today in Activities. We also learned the frog leap –though I already knew it—and the lizard crawl, and the earthworm, and the kangaroo hop. Nobody believed me when I said I went to Australia to see the kangaroos, though. They said that you can’t just go to Australia, because there are big spiders.”
Dipper paused a moment to take in that information. He opened the door for Lata, watched him crawl down the front step and onto the rougher—colder—pavement. Lata frowned at the ground, but kept going. “Your…teacher said this?”
“No,” Lata said in his best are you stupid voice. Dipper felt affronted that he was turning it on Dipper, his most favorite Uncle Tyrone. “You and Mom and Dad all said not to tell any adults, so I didn’t! But kids don’t count, so I told them. And they didn’t even believe me!”
Letting the door close behind him, Dipper politely ignored the person walking their dog that stopped in their tracks to first stare at Lata, then turn away with their hand over their mouth and their aura splashed all over with viridian amusement. “Well, maybe that’s a good thing,” Dipper said. “You don’t even have a passport yet.”
“What’s a passport?” Lata asked. His steps forward were far more ginger than they were earlier, inside on the tile flooring of the hallway.
“It’s, uh,” Dipper said, looking down at Lata’s animal-print backpack. It had shifted over entirely to one side of Lata’s back, unbalancing him a little. He reached down, adjusted it, and continued. “Well, it’s a special document—like a little book, I think, though maybe that’s changed—that they scan at Ports when you go from one country to another country.”
“Huh,” Lata said. He took another step, stopped, and then stood up. At the sight of his hands, Dipper moved hand-washing even further up the list of priorities. If he’d thought inside was bad, it was nothing compared to the brief jaunt down the path up to the school. “Do you have a passport?”
“No,” Dipper said.
Lata looked up at him, tilted his head so that the leaves on his antlers bobbed a little. “But you have to, to go to another country, right?”
“Most people have to,” Dipper amended. “It’s expected.”
They passed by a couple arm-in-arm, a single long scarf wrapped across both their necks. Dipper looked down at Lata. “Where’s your scarf?”
“In my bag,” Lata said, like that was the best place for it on a chilly December afternoon.
“And your gloves?”
“In my bag, duh,” Lata said, rolling his eyes.
“Hey,” Dipper said. “You really want to pull an attitude with somebody who said they’d get you ice cream in such cold weather?”
Lata hummed, his finger on his chin in thought. A cold breeze had him shivering a little before he answered, “Maybe?”
Dipper sighed. “Well,” he said, really elongating the word in a way that immediately caught Lata’s attention. “Maybe we don’t need ice cream after all. It’s about 3 degrees Celcius right now, after all.”
Lata gasped. “No, you can’t take it back! No take-backs! You said we’d go for ice cream!”
They were now by the public bathroom that Dipper had initially blipped into. “Let’s wash our hands then,” he said, pointing, “in preparation for ice cream.”
Lata screeched in victory, did a little dance, and then started running towards the bathroom. “First one there gets to eat as much as they want!”
Reynash would demolish him if Dipper let Lata eat as much ice cream as he wanted. Dipper burst into a very graceless, very hasty run, and didn’t really consider that he wasn’t beholden to any deal he hadn’t verbally agreed to.
________________________________________________________________
“I cannot believe I let you get all that ice cream,” Dipper said, having blipped them to a nice ice cream place down in New California before bringing Lata and their spoils to the Pines home.
Lata giggled and stuck his spoon into his Custom Mouse Sundae, complete with five scoops of ice cream molded into the shape of a mouse and topped off with two round waffle cookies that made the mouse’s ears. He dug out the piece of chocolate that made up the eye and stuck it in his mouth, kicking his legs.
“I would’ve beat you if you hadn’t used your superpowers,” Lata said, trying to pout but failing in the face of the massive, self-satisfied grin that kept breaking through. “You had to be nice to me. It’s only fair.”
“Your parents would hate it if I had let you eat the Turtle Family Sundae, the Spaghetti Ice Cream Set, and the Mouse Sundae,” Dipper said, pointing his spoon at Lata from across the table. He had gotten a custom ice cream Mega Bowl, and had filled it with a variety of ice creams and toppings. Lata kept glancing at it with unashamed interest.
Lata leaned back in his seat—Dipper reached across and pulled the chair back onto all four legs with his foot—and groaned. “But it would have been so delicious,” he said. “So worth it. It’s not like they can do anything to you! They can’t ground you, or take away TV privileges, or game privileges, or have you write letters of Recon-ciliation to exchange with each other.”
Dipper blinked. “Letters of Reconciliation?”
Lata carefully carved the tip of the mouse’s nose, cherry and all, off from the rest of the ice cream. “Yeah,” he said, before taking a break to stuff his mouth.
“What’s that?”
“It’s when we have a disagreement, and I write a letter saying what I thought and how I felt about the thing, and Mom and Dad write a letter saying what they thought and felt about the thing, and we give them to each other and read them and then talk about it. It’s so boring.”
Rain tapped against the roof and windows—rain might be a bit of a misnomer for the half-rain, half-ice slush that was falling from the sky, but nevertheless Dipper was glad they hadn’t been caught out in it before heading down to NewCal. That would have been super messy, and cold, and gross. Dipper scooped up a bit of ice cream, swallowed it almost immediately, and then responded. “That doesn’t sound so bad,” he said.
“Ugh, you’re such an adult,” Lata whined. He leaned down and pulled one of the cookie ears out of the mouse with his mouth. When he bit down, the part of the cookie that wasn’t in his mouth fell onto the ice cream below, which was starting to melt a bit.
“You’ve gotten sassy since entering Kindergarten,” Dipper said, narrowing his eyes at Lata. “Where’s the little monster that kept saying things like ‘rawr’ and ‘I’m a nibble monster’ and all? Also, I’ll have you know that I am essentially eternally twelve. That’s not an adult.”
“But it’s still old!” Lata yelled, suddenly. He leaned back on the rear legs of his chair. Dipper reached out with his foot and pulled his chair back down with an ease that was somewhat frightening after so many years of not parenting. “You’re old! I asked Dad how old you were and he said you were thousands of years old! That’s so many years. I watched him write out all the zeros, and then we counted out rice and it was so much rice and took so long.”
Dipper scowled and crossed his arms. “I bought you ice cream, and this is how you repay me?”
“I’m just saying the truth,” Lata retorted. “It’s the truth, so you can’t be mad about it.”
Dipper snorted. “Now that’s not how things work,” he said. “Plenty of people get mad about the truth. They do it all the time.”
Lata blinked at him. “But why? It’s the truth. You can’t get mad at something that’s true. Hans told me so.”
As Lata began licking the ice cream, hands fisted on either side of his take-out bowl, Dipper hummed and tapped the flat of his spoon against his own ice cream. He cycled through the examples in his head—everything died, but plenty of people sought immortality—it was true that if you caught a knife to the throat, you would not last long but people got so upset about that—people worshipped or didn’t worship in many ways, and yet there were those who decided that those ways were wrong and got mad—kids grew up, and there were some dumbasses who resented how those children grew up into their own skins with their own experiences and opinions instead of staying malleable, agreeable, naïve—preternatural citizens existed, and yet—governments weren’t perfect, but—and finally hit upon one he thought Lata would understand.
“Well,” he said, slowly, “have you ever watched something on TV and gotten mad about it?”
Lata maintained eye-contact while licking across the ice-cream-mouse’s head. Savage. “Mom says that we have to look up stuff that they put on the TV sometimes, because it’s not always right, and when it’s not right then of course I’m allowed to be mad about it. Because it’s not right.”
Right then, maybe not that. Perhaps he ought to take a different approach here, let Lata provide the basic scenario. “Okay, buddy, how about you tell me all the things that make you mad.”
With a hum, Lata took a huge bite right out of the scoop of Fudge Mountain Caramel Surprise in front of his mouth. Dipper watched and wondered how effective that technique actually could be. “Um,” he said, completely ignorant of the melted ice cream smeared over his nose and lips and even chin, “well, I guess I get mad whenever Ri-Ri lies to me about the places she goes with her parents. And when Toma writes on my papers when I tell zir not to. Or when the lady on International Animal Discovery Channel is absent and her coworker comes in and covers for her, because he’s stupid and gets stuff wrong all the time. And when I have to go to bed at eight thirty, even though all my friends get to go to bed later. It’s so stupid! Why do I have to go to bed earlier? It can’t just be because it’s good for me because I’m a kid, because if it was my friends would go to bed earlier too! And also when Mom says she can’t come pick me up at school because she has an emergency meeting, like today, because she goes to work before I go to school and I don’t get to see her until I get out of school. And—”
Dipper swallowed the entire scoop of classic mint before holding up his hand and waving it. “Okay, okay, I think I have enough to work with there, thank you. Let’s talk about bedtime, okay? You’re mad because you have to go to bed earlier than your friends, right?”
Lata slumped and poked his ice cream with his index finger. “Yeah,” he mumbled, before sticking his finger in his mouth and sucking the melted ice cream off of it. “I guess.”
“Right,” Dipper said. He paused, suddenly doubting that he was the right person to tell Lata about this part of life. This seemed like a very—very parent-to-child conversation, not an Uncle-to-nibling conversation. It was kind of heavy.
He paused too long. “So?” Lata said. Dipper looked up to see that Lata had resorted to grabbing the ice cream with his full hand and was licking it out of his palm. What a mood, Dipper thought, but instead narrowed his eyes at Lata.
“Hey, use your spoon, not your hands,” he said. “And actually—here, use this napkin to clean your hand off. If you put your hands on something, it’ll get dirty and then we’ll both have to deal with the consequences, aka your parents.”
“Okay,” Lata said, reaching with his dirty hand to take the napkin Dipper had pulled out from the 100% biodegradable takeout bag he’d gotten at the ice cream shop.
“Probably should get the ice cream on your nose and chin while you’re at it,” Dipper said absentmindedly, watching Lata scrub at his hand with the paper napkin. Lata was a good kid, Dipper thought to himself. Lata would understand what Dipper was trying to say. This wouldn’t be too hard.
Lata wrinkled his nose, but got most of the ice cream off his face. Good enough, Dipper thought, and then he launched into his little speech.
“Right, so, it is true the kids need a lot of sleep, because they’re still developing their brains and bodies. The reason that babies sleep so much is that they’re growing and learning so much, and everything is new, so it’s exhausting. You’re still learning a lot of new stuff, and your brain is,” Dipper squinted at Lata and tilted his head, “currently, it’s learning how to handle complex and somewhat abstract concepts such as time, numbers, is expanding its capacity for vocabulary, and is beginning to develop the pathways needed to understand things such as life and death and your place in the cycle. You already have a very good grasp on concentration and a decent awareness of places existing outside of your home and school, though, that’s pretty impressive at your age.”
Lata’s eyes went a little unfocused. Dipper dialed it back. “Point is, your brain is working hard, and it needs that sleep to recharge, refresh, and retain—keep—all the information that you’ve been learning. Your friends should probably be going to sleep around the same time you are if they’re waking up when you are, though every kid is different and every family is different.”
Slowly, Lata tilted his head at Dipper. “What?”
“Your parents are right,” Dipper said after a short but deep inhale, “that you should go to bed at 8:30. Your friends also need the amount of sleep that you do. It’s the truth. Are you still mad at it?”
Lata thought for a moment. “Kind of,” he mumbled.
“Why?”
Lata grumbled, “This is worse than Reconciliation Letters.”
“Why thank you,” Dipper said, grinning a little, “So? What’s got you so mad then? It can’t be that your friends are right and your parents are wrong for sending you to bed early, right?”
“I think you’re like all the wrong people on the TV,” Lata said, frowning, not meeting Dippers’s eyes. “I think if I look it up you’re going to be wrong.”
“I’m an all-powerful omni—I mean, all-knowing demon,” Dipper drawled, quirking an eyebrow at Lata. “I know things that Ping never would, and I know all the things that Ping is wrong about. Wanna try again?”
For a long time, Lata stayed quiet. He kicked his legs under the table and glowered at his ice cream. Resentment breathed slow, auburn in his aura, and frustration sparkled at the edges like dew on stinging nettle. Dipper sat on the urge to interject what he wanted Lata to learn, and waited.
After a whole six minutes, twenty-three seconds and four-hundred ninety-eights of a millisecond, Lata said, “’Cause I wanna watch Seawitch Adventures like Ri-Ri and all the others get to.”
Dipper had not known about Seawitch Adventures, but it made sense. He translated, “Because you don’t like it. It goes against what you want the world to be like.”
Lata tilted their head in a shrug and papped at the dining table surface with their hands. There was still a residue of ice cream lingering on the one hand, but Dipper decided that was whatever and Reynash or Kanti could deal with it later. He was doing awesome at this conversation thing.
“People don’t get mad when things are factually wrong. They get mad when things aren’t the way they want them to be. And that’s okay!” Dipper said, after a length of time. “Everybody does it. The problem is when you choose to take that anger out on other people, people who don’t deserve it.”
Lata paused, and looked up. “Do you do it? Take it out on other people.”
Dipper felt his heart stutter in his chest. “…Sometimes.”
“Is that why Daddy and Mommy were afraid of you?”
Dipper held a desperate lie against the back of his many teeth before closing his eyes and letting it melt away, unheard. “…yes.”
“Don’t you know it’s a problem, though?” Lata asked.
Dipper shies away from that truth. He gives a not-quite-lie. “I forget, sometimes.”
Rain splashed against the roof, the windows. The stasis fridge hummed in the kitchen. Lata had stopped drumming against the table. Dipper felt almost compelled to pick it up in his stead.
“…what did you do?”
“A lot of things,” Dipper said, quietly. He opened his eyes. “A lot of very bad things that I forgot were bad.”
Lata stared at him. His dik-dik horns, so much smaller than Henry’s, than Paloma’s, seemed to embody all of Dipper’s regrets and failures for a brief moment. Dipper felt the phantom slide of a soul down his throat. He swallowed, met Lata’s gaze and tried to push the feeling away. Lata’s eyes looked right into Dipper’s until Dipper looked away, a little scared of what Lata was reading in them. Scared, maybe, that Lata might just see his own soul between Dipper’s teeth, even though that was impossible. Anyways, the only soul Dipper had between his metaphorical teeth was—
“Even now?” Lata asked, again.
“No, no, now is better. I forget…less,” Dipper said after a beat. Thoughts of souls faded to the back of his mind. They never really left, though. The temptation was always there, like the background hum of a generator, or the near silent slide of the second hand of an analogue clock. “Now is—I can control how mad I am. I remember that it’s not right to take my anger out on innocent people. I understand that sometimes I’m mad at the wrong thing. Usually I can pull myself back. I never remember to pull myself back when I’m…when I’m like what your parents learned about.”
“Oh,” Lata said. They were quiet for a long time, the two of them. The ice cream in their bowls continued to melt. Dipper stared at his, watched the strawzzleberry cheesecake ooze into the peanut butter fudge scoop.
“I yelled at Mama when she made me go to bed,” Lata said, in a quiet voice. “I said I hated her.”
Dipper winced. That had always hurt—his children, his sister, his niblings saying they hated him in fits of anger. He’d known they didn’t mean it, usually, but it still hurt. Sometimes it hurt more than others. Sometimes he’d lashed out in response. And sometimes, a very few sometimes, he had hurt them far more than they had.
He shied away from the thought. “How—what did your Mama think of that?”
Lata shrugged, poked his ice-cream soup with his spoon. “She frowned at me and said I was going to bed no matter that I hated her.”
Dipper remembered putting on a strong front. He worried lightly on his bottom lip. “Ah,” he said.
After a few moments, Lata looked up at him. “Do you think I hurt her?” he asked. He shifted in his seat, but kept looking Dipper right in the eye.
Dipper opened his mouth to say yes, because he’d always been hurt (even if just a little bit), but Lata looked so small and worried, undertones of dark guilt hovering around his shoulders. He swallowed the yes, then said, “Maybe. Maybe not. You—you have to ask her.”
“Oh. Okay,” Lata said.
They sat in silence. Rain hit the window, the roof. Dipper stared at his own ice cream soup for a while, colors having swirled into a muddy mess. He passed his spoon through it once, twice, a few more times, before sticking it in his mouth with a sigh. In his periphery, he saw Lata blink at him. Incredulity lanced over his head. Dipper stifled a grin and set down the spoon on the table with a light clack. Hyperaware of Lata staring at him, he sighed in exaggeration before picking up the ice cream cup and pouring the contents down his throat.
“Ew, gross,” said Lata.
Dipper swallowed and licked his lips, glancing up at Lata. “What? It’d be a waste to throw it out. You don’t want your own sugar soup? I’ll drink it for you.”
Lata screwed up his nose at Dipper, then pushed the cup at him. His guilt was still present, but disgust and also amusement were sliding over it, burying it from the moment. Soon it would be nothing more than an aftertaste, something Dipper would have to concentrate to be able to sense. “All the flavors are mixed now, it’s so gross.”
“Excellent,” Dipper said, before taking the ice cream and swallowing that, too. There are soggy chunks of cookie in it. It’s not particularly appetizing, but it’s also not a rule breaker, and the mixed flavor is a mystery on his tongue. He closes his eyes and tilts his head, swishing the last of the mixture around in his mouth to try to figure out what was in it.
“Ewwww, what are you doing,” Lata said, giggling. “It’s not mouthwash!”
Dipper swallowed. “Definitely Raspberry Crunch and Honeyed Alfalfa,” he said. “You got something chocolaty in there, right? Some kind of—fudge, fudge something, oh! Fudge Mountain Caramel Surprise, right?”
“You can’t taste everything,” Lata accused.
“If I work hard enough I can,” Dipper said, opening his eyes and smirking. There’s a tug at his navel that means summons, but honestly this is more important (and probably more fun). “Five scoops, right? And I’ve already figured out three of them.”
Lata pushed himself to kneel on the seat of his chair, semi-sticky hands flat on the table and eyes wide. “You can’t,” he breathed.
“Can so.” Dipper hummed and thought to himself. “There was a nutty kind of flavor in there, nutty and a little salty, but it wasn’t cashew, it was a little less fatty, it was—right, I remember you pointing to the Wonderful Salted Walnut.”
“Noooo!” Lata leaned forward even further. Dipper cast an absentminded eye at the pressure that was placing on the front legs of the chair and whether they were likely to tip and smash Lata’s face into the table. It was pretty low, only 28%, so he let it be. “That’s still not all! There’s still one left!”
Dipper cackled and spun the empty ice cream carton on one talon. With a nudge from his mind, it balanced perfectly and continued to spin unnaturally fast. The summons tugged again at his stomach, but he smothered it. It wasn’t anybody he knew. It wasn’t important. “I think you mean only one.”
He closed his eyes to focus on the last flavor, and that can be the only reason that he only realized they weren’t alone when he heard, “And what are—did you have ice cream??”
“Oh shit,” Dipper said without thinking, eyes flying open.
Lata said, with the absolute worst timing known only to children under the age of ten, “Oh shit! Welcome home, Papa!”
Reynash Pines leveled him with the most incredulous glare he’d seen in a while. “Ice cream and swearing?”
Suddenly, the importance of the summons skyrocketed from rock bottom to very near the top of his priority list. Dipper dropped the carton on the floor. “Oh, hey, Reynash, buddy, how’s it hanging, uh, sorry to skip out but I actually just got a summons, you know how they are haha, can’t help that work life, on call twenty-four-seven, see you later hope you’re not mad byeeeee!”
Reynash spluttered. Water dripped off his bangs and onto his forehead. “No, you can’t just bail on—Dipper!”
But Dipper had already clenched the connection to the summons in one metaphorical hand, had tugged, and was gone.
_______________________________________________________________
December 4th, 9:39 PM BRL
The first thing Dipper noticed was that the candles were scentless. He billowed up from nothing in the most dramatic smoke he could think of, pulled the reverb in his throat to mild extremes, and said, “Who presumes to call upon Alcor the Dreambender?” into the dark of the blue-lit room.
The second thing Dipper noticed were the chalk lines—exact angles, minimal differences in stroke width, painstakingly duplicated symbols. Its perfection was mathematically precise, and there were even three layers of binding spells woven into the circle. Dipper casually pulled his cane out of thin air, coalesced his top hat from residual smoke curling into the space above his head, and smiled to himself. Binding spells weren’t much more than a nuisance to deal with.
The third thing Dipper noticed were the people in the room—elegantly dressed adults in formal suits and skirts, beautifully crafted silver masks over their faces, hair coiffed and pressed and sprayed. Their arms were uplifted, frozen in the moment they’d succeeded in summoning him. There were nine of them. Dipper glanced over them, saw their determination and hard-edged stubbornness and solid righteousness in their auras, the colors subtly different for each person.
“Lord Alcor,” one of them said. Dipper blinked, and knew they were he. “We come to offer you an exchange: a solution to our troubles for a worthy sacrifice.”
Dipper hummed, leaned on his cane, and didn’t let them in on the fact that he’d already surreptitiously snapped one of the binding circles. “Oh?” he drawled, a lazy little grin curled into the corners of his lips. “Tell me, what are your troubles?”
“Our beloved country,” the Speaker said, “is being cast into ruin and shadows by those currently in charge. We seek only to remove the…obstacles facing our country’s future.”
“I see,” said Dipper, and then he really did. He was in Brazil, in New Fortaleza, and the government was currently making social reforms that benefited those in the lowest economic tier. There were many people pushing for those reforms from places of influence—born into and risen up to alike. He raised his eyebrows. “And…what would your idea of a fair exchange be?”
The Speaker turned his head and nodded to the woman next to him. She nodded back, then turned around to head away from the circle and towards the stairs at the edge of the wide space they had chosen for his summoning. Dipper watched her go, and did not blink. Absentmindedly, he slid his power around and under the second barrier spell. This one would be a little trickier—raw power would only alert them to its failure, so he would have to play a subtler hand.
One of the summoning group shifted xir weight almost imperceptibly. Dipper blinked to look xir way. Xi made eye contact through the mask and flinched.
“Be steady,” the Speaker said. “Lord Alcor, it would not go unappreciated were you to…refrain from any posturing or intimidation tactics.”
Dipper chuckled, refocused back on the Speaker. “Condolences,” he murmured, pitching the tone so that it echoed off the far walls regardless of the volume. “I cannot control how much terror your…acquaintances feel. I am a demon. Instilling fear in those who look upon us is an unavoidable part and parcel of this existence, you understand.”
The Speaker said nothing, but swallowed. Dipper counted that as a victory in and of himself—he was getting the sense that this man enjoyed talking, and enjoyed even more than that the chance to hear himself talk.
The soft whir-click-swoosh of a door being unlocked and opened echoed through the empty room. It whispered off the walls. Dipper watched the Speaker’s aura twist in uncertainty before determination smoothed it out, hot shmellow oozing over dirty blue-green until it was smothered. He held the Speaker’s gaze until the footsteps started echoing around the room too—the steady tread of the woman’s shoes, followed by a hesitant, uneven, sometimes scraping cacophony of quiet noise. The breath halted in Dipper’s useless lungs. Nobody seemed to notice; his chest had hardly been rising and falling anyways.
Nine children followed the woman. He could hear their shallow breaths, their hitching hiccups, barely restrained tears. He could smell the acrid-sweet scent of fear, the way it spiked and swelled when he leaned back on thin air. The second barrier snapped, and he was just barely aware enough to stop it from flickering with bright thunder. He wanted this. He hated this.
The Speaker waited for Alcor’s attention to shift to the children, but when he didn’t comply, he swept an arm out to call attention to the newcomers. “Nine lives, from nine of us, for nine whose lives must be cut short to prevent ruin to our country. We have learned that you…like…children, and their lives would be yours to do what you see fit with.”
It was strange that these types always learned all the wrong lessons about children, he thought absentmindedly, almost vapidly. It was strange that they always dismissed the possibility of more ethical sacrifices, like candy or sentimental items or factories worth of ice cream. Dipper cast his gaze over the children, his face frozen in that way it was when he felt like he was on the cusp of something terrible. They were cleaned—recently, from the faint hint of chemically-recreated pomegranate on the air—but some of them had clearly had better care than others. He skipped from terrified face to terrified face. The youngest of them was—six, dark curly hair, bought from desperate parents like human lives were commodities, teeth digging into a bottom lip and eyes welling with tears. Then there was—seven and petit, ten and too tall for her age, eleven and barely scared enough the fear drowned out the anger, two eight-year-old twins with vitiligo on their palms (and no, Bentley didn’t have vitiligo, but the splotchy color difference was enough to make him burn colder, right in his chest), nine and born blind, six-and-a-half and missing a finger, and a twelve year old on the cusp of turning thirteen. Tomorrow was xir birthday.
The Speaker’s voice turned soft. “Jamilla, come.”
The twelve year old inhaled sharp and quiet, but went. Xir hands twisted in xir gold shift. Blue fingernail polish flashed in the light, like all the other children’s. Dressed up pretty, their individualism smoothed away as best as possible, for the very ends of their lives. “Papa?”
The Speaker waited for Jamilla to come to him. Alcor kept his eyes on Jamilla every step of the way. He watched how xi quivered, how xi glanced over at him over and over. He thought about thirteenth birthdays and never reaching them, thought about his puffy blue vest and that stupid pine-tree hat that he had loved with all his heart, and how it was hard to even think about wearing things that casual for very long. His power rolled over to the third barrier and began to eat at it.
“This is my own child,” the Speaker said, setting his hands on Jamilla’s shoulders. “Xi knows how important the future of our country is, and was willing to sacrifice xirself for it. While most of the children here are orphans, or as good as, this is a token of my dedication, of my seriousness.”
“…I see,” said Dipper. He tilted his head. Jamilla shivered and averted xir gaze, but did not move otherwise. “Dedicated indeed, to sacrifice somebody you love. Very powerful.”
He cast his eye, slowly and deliberately, over the other children. He tried to catch their gazes where he could. Everything around him felt—slow, almost. He stared into the eyes of the angry-scared eleven year old, whose name was Leilani and whose ambition was to become a child caretaker because children deserved people who protected them and nurtured them and loved them, whose anger had left silvery scars between her knuckles from how many times she’d split them over on somebody else’s face or gut or kidney, whose eyes were dark, furious brown and who could have lived to forty-one, dying young and tragic but not as young and tragic as this.
“Indeed,” the Speaker said. “Now, do you agree to the terms laid out?”
Dipper held Leilani’s gaze a moment longer, before breaking away to fix his attention on the Speaker and his child, his poor, youngest child (who had been loved and cherished but raised with the knowledge that this may happen someday, who had been prepared and taught to step into xir own death of xir own fledgling, undeveloped will). Dipper smiled.
“Nine lives, from the nine of you, for nine whose lives must be cut short to prevent ruin to your beloved country, correct?” Alcor passed a whisper of blue flame between his fingers as he spoke.
The Speaker waited a moment. His hands tensed over his child’s shoulders as he thought the words over. “The nine lives we offer you, to do with as you please, for the lives of those on this list.”
Alcor looked down on the list. Two career politicians who had slowly turned over new leaves, a charismatic rabble-rouser, three underpaid and overworked lawyers with a talent for defending their wrongly-accused clients, a university professor whose lectures were widely distributed and widely influential, an old farmer with a penchant for speaking up loud and proud in defense of reforestation and traditional farming methods, and a janitor who had convinced their coworkers to unionize and strike for better wages. Influential in all the ways the Speaker and his cohorts disapproved of.
As few as twenty years ago, Alcor would have taken advantage of the situation to cause as much carnage as possible while keeping the children safe. He would have gotten 18 souls and probably an additional nine life-debts from the children, to cash in as he pleased, when he pleased. Ten years ago, he would have settled for 9 souls, 9 bodies, and 9 traumatized children placed at the nearest orphanage.
Today, Alcor remembered being angry, and terrified, and determined in the face of the world ending. He remembered the terror of being watched, the nightmares about rearranged faces and deer teeth. He remembered dying.
“Like I said,” Alcor drawled, eyebrow raised. “Nine lives, from the nine of you, for nine whose lives must be cut short to prevent ruin to your beloved country. Or, if you want me to be a little more transparent, nine souls in here for nine lives out there and a whole lot of chaos thrown in.”
The Speaker hesitated. “Chaos?”
Alcor laughed, leaned on his cane a little more. The third barrier dissolved under his power at last with a flicker that he disguised by flaring his flames just a bit higher. Fury burned colder and deeper in his chest, at the very core of him. “What do you think nine people dying suddenly is going to cause?! Especially nine people as influential and high-profile as the ones on your list, and all at the same time! It’s going to be unbelievably chaotic. You might have a little trouble controlling the investigation that follows, but I’m sure you can squash things like freedom of the press and the people’s right to assemble in a jiffy, what with your very powerful positions. I’m all here for that, props to you!”
“You’re taking their souls?” One of the other politicians said, a quiver of trepidation in their voice. Hesitation and guilt began to seep through their aura, dark and damp and almost physically heavy. “But I thought…”
“Young souls are the best,” Alcor said. He had—he shied away from the thought, comforted himself with the many many times that other demons had spouted the same things he was now. “They’re very soft, not nearly as entrenched in their fleshvessels. Absolutely delicious.” He swallowed the drool that had begun to pool at the back corners of his mouth.
“I…”
“Enough,” the Speaker snapped, hands tightening on his child’s shoulders again. Xi was beginning to have terrified second thoughts. The only thing keeping xir where xi stood was xir father’s presence behind xir and years of conditioning convincing xir that this was the right thing to do. “Alcor the Dreambender, do we have a deal?”
Alcor grinned, extended a hand that arched in a graceful, almost indolent line in the air. “I thought you’d never ask,” he purred.
The Speaker flushed with a victorious, vicious kind of pride, then reached out to shake Alcor’s hand. The flames licked up between their palms, and Alcor grinned even wider.
“It’s a deal,” Dipper said, before he took a step forward and plunged his hand down the Speaker’s throat and hooked his claws into the soul nestled at the base of the man’s neck, cradled in the hollow of his clavicle. As the others in the room started screaming, as fear saturated the air around them within seconds, Dipper looked into the Speaker’s confused and angry and terrified, determined eyes, lifted the soul up to his lips, and sunk his teeth into it.
The Speaker screamed, physically, metaphysically, and collapsed as though suddenly boneless. His child screamed and went down with him, panic and terror readily apparent even if Dipper had been unable to see xir aura. The other children stumbled back, one twin tripping and scraping his palms against the ground, the eleven year old stepping in front of the seven year old with an angry snarl on her face. Dipper paid them no mind. He was too busy licking his fingers to catch any residual soul energy that had leaked out when he had bit down. After he had finished cleaning them off, he looked up to see that some of the summoners were making for the opposite door. He cocked his head. Energy thrummed through him. He laughed, high and maybe a little unhinged, before following.
He had eight more souls to collect here before he could get to work, after all, and they’d gone to all the trouble of summoning him to fix their country in the first place! It would be—disrespectful, he considered as he tore open the ribcage of the closest summoner for no other reason than he could, if he wasn’t as diligent as possible.
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December 4th, 11:12 PM EST
Dipper blipped into bed and shifted into elegant pajamas in one smooth motion, still a little buzzed from all the souls he had eaten and all the life debts he had collected over the past hour and a half. Finding the children suitable homes had been—difficult enough that he had burned off a lot of the energy gained from the deal, but he was still twitchy and half-guilty over how he had acted in the basement. Right after he had lectured Lata about acting out of anger! Lata was never finding out about what happened.
Next to him, Bentley shifted from half-asleep to half-awake. “Huh? Dipper?”
Dipper hummed. He wiggled so that he was curled up against Bentley, set a still-clawed hand against Bentley’s sleep sweater (he wore sleep sweaters now, it was terrifying that he kept being so cold even when he should be warm) and curled it so that the fabric was in his loose grasp. He had to fight to keep it loose. Everything was—too bright, too sharp, and he felt like he was balancing on the edge of that precipice again, that if he fell it would be too easy to go back to him half a century ago.
“Dipper, you okay?”
He felt an arm reach over him, a hand rub at his back. On Bentley’s other side, Torako snuffled in her sleep, snorted, but didn’t wake up. Dipper pressed his face into Bentley’s chest and nuzzled the fabric without giving a solid answer. The world dulled down to something almost manageable.
Bentley’s chest expanded and then contracted with a sigh. He wiggled down just enough that Dipper’s head fit under his chin. Something seemed—off, in that moment, because Dipper could swear that his feet should be below Bentley’s in this position, but when he reached out with his toes they brushed Bentley’s shins.
“All right,” Bentley said, the sound of his voice reverberating against Dipper’s forehead. “All right, not tonight. It’s—it’s late anyways. You can tell me what happened tomorrow, okay?”
Several moments passed before Dipper felt relaxed enough to nod. All the while, Bentley’s hand rubbed up and down his back.
“Okay,” Bentley breathed out. Dipper didn’t want to see the relief in his aura, so he kept his eyes shut and just focused on the warmth surrounding him. Then, Bentley said, “You wanna sleep between me and Torako tonight? I can move you if it’s too much trouble.”
There was something weird about that statement too, because Bentley was strong but it could be awkward for him to haul something larger over his own body, but Dipper thought about how nice it would be to be sandwiched between two souls he loved (one was his, the other may as well have been but he would never, ever, ever take it, because look at what happened to Henry even though he loved Henry?) and the weirdness of the situation melted away. He nodded again.
“Right then,” Bentley murmured. Dipper felt him wriggle his left arm under Dipper’s chest to wrap around his back. There was a pressure at the spot right above the space between his wings, and then they were turning over, Dipper’s legs pinned lightly between Bentley’s. Seconds later, Dipper’s back was to Torako’s front, and his face was still smooshed up against Bentley’s chest. Dipper hadn’t even had to open his eyes. He let out a soft breath. His hand unclenched from Bentley’s sweater to curl up against it instead, knuckles brushing wool.
“There we go,” Bentley said. He pressed a kiss to the top of Dipper’s head. There was a rustle, Bentley’s body shifting against his, and then he heard Torako groan a little before she was flush up against his back, breath fanning the back of his head. She was snoring lightly, and Dipper couldn’t help but smile a little.
“There we go,” Bentley said again, a little quieter. He rubbed his hand up and down Dipper’s back for a long time before he finally fell asleep.
Dipper listened to them. He took in a deep breath, let it out, and let himself be home.
#fic#tau fic#my fic#dipper pines#transcendence au#alcor the dreambender#lata pines#reynash pines#bentley farkas#torako lam#olla sussally#tommy hangar#filara hangar#plus more#reincarnations#so many reincarnations#batoor el-amin
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Feel Good. | Yuta
Request: Nope. I just think Yuta would be good at parties and being a good friend, so I just had to channel it somehow.
Author’s Note: A little feel-good piece for everyone out there (especially going through a break up)! Very light hearted. Hope it makes you smile or just.. POSITIVITY I hope you all feel positive reading this! My requests are open by the way, so if you like this please send me some!
Warnings: Swearing, mentions of a break-up, and I think that’s it. English is my second language so there might be errors!
Word Count: 2445 small little piece
Genre: Fluff all around, angst if you squint, nonidol!au, roommate!au, platonicfriends!au
I hope you all enjoy this little piece!
“Woah, you still exist?”
The sarcastic question makes you stop dead on your way to the kitchen, blanket thrown over your shoulders, trailing behind you. Sun shines through the windows of the living room where your roommate Yuta is seated on a couch with a few buttons of his shirt undone with iced coffee in his hand. The rays make their way to the hallway where you are stood looking at him, and his brows scrunch together when he notices the whole look you have going on. “Aren’t you a bit hot since, you know, it feels like hellfire itself came down on this city?”
“I’m going through a break up. I think I have the right to take the comfort of my bed anywhere with me.” You sniffle a bit as the bitter protest makes its way out. He just chuckles back in what you know is annoyance. “The fucker dumped you over a text,” The emphasis on your embarrassment is strong as he swears. “If anything you should be grateful of not having to put up with his shit anymore.”
“Wow, that gives me so much confidence, thank you.” Yuta huffs and places his coffee on the table in front of the couch before standing up and walking towards you. He attempts to pull the blanket off your shoulders and you do not let him, but he throws you a look stern enough that you hold yourself back from fighting when he tugs it off of your back. He gives you the slightest sniff before humming, a bit disapproving of your state, but he does not say a word about it so as not to hurt your already fragile heart. “Go take a shower and get into some fresh, nice clothes— not pajamas. We’ll have fun today.”
“I don’t wanna go anywhere or do anything, Yuta.” Upon that his eyes roll back, but he pushes himself to laugh. “Who said we were going anywhere? And taking a shower is really just out of self respect at this point.” His hands find their place on your shoulders. Yuta turns you back and accompanies you to the bathroom door (more like pushes you until you are stood in front of the bathroom door) and pats them rather firmly in what you guess must be an attempt to give you some energy. It kind of hurts you. “There you go. Don’t take too long or I might really forget I have a roommate.”
Taking a shower definitely feels good, it is the preparations that come after doing so that are difficult. Blowing your hair dry seems to take so much longer when you do not want to do it in the first place, brushing your teeth— although essential— gets boring and torturous immediately. Putting lotion on your body and doing your skincare feels like it takes actually forever. But in the end, your dirty clothes of who knows how many days end up in your laundry basket and the riddance feels quite good.
Walking out of the bathroom and going back to your messy room that you know you should clean at some point makes you realize the lack of oxygen in the space, and you open the windows even though the scorching heat is not much of a help. Then comes picking an outfit, and you get inspired by Yuta at that, because a soft, colorful, somewhat oversized shirt is comfortable yet presentable. Yet, even that cannot save you from having to put on proper shorts or pants and it gives you pain when the realization dawns.
But you instantly feel better when Yuta spots you and puts a big smile on his face. The smile that he has, that makes everybody happy and giddy inside just by seeing. “Look at you, much better.”
“Whatever you say.” But you smile despite yourself, before heading into the kitchen. His steps follow you and stop somewhere around the entrance to the kitchen. The need to question his antic arises when you spot him leaning against the doorway with his arm crossed from the side of your eye. “What are you doing?”
“Just making sure you don’t eat ice cream for breakfast or something like that,” You look at him as to ask what exactly is wrong with that, to which he smiles with his mouth closed. “You have to eat healthy to feel better.”
“You eat instant ramen like every single day!” Looking at him in disbelief, you chuckle breathily and make your way to get some cereal. He speaks up as you get the milk out of the fridge. “Yeah but unlike one of us I move, you get me? I don’t remember the last time you were out of your room.” As a response, and mostly to shut him up, you grab a banana from the holder, holding it up in the air to make your point. “Is it healthy now?”
Yuta chuckles and shakes his head. “It’s not,” A shrug. “But I’m gonna cut you some slack on this one. You’ll need the energy, anyway.”
You stand to look at him because what exactly is he meaning, since in all seriousness you really do not want to bother with doing anything. The burn in your heart is still too fresh to pretend you are really back on track. Although a badly handled relationship you would still consider it a good one even if you would not like to admit it, as the sweet memories that rush to your mind only make you miss it more.
It was young love, after all. The excitement of having a person dedicated to loving you romantically was a special feeling, knowing they would adore you and care about you and would want to make you the happiest person on earth would make just about anyone get head over heels. But since you were young, and seeing as adulthood did not really mean you would stay as the same people you had been when you two first met, dreams and personalities did not really go together after some point. Which you really thought was fine, as you kept putting more work into the relationship and genuinely tried your hardest to keep it alive.
But sometimes young love dies like a fire that burns, and leaves all the damage behind. Which was what happened to you, really. No need to deny it.
“Your cereal’s getting soggy.” Yuta’s voice fills your ears and cuts through your thoughts, which you are grateful for. Somewhere along the line you had both gotten in the living room and sat down and you had not realized it at all. All the better, he is also right about the cereal.
The spoon you had been holding in your hand plays with the sad looking cereal. His eyes are on you, you can tell, because they burn. “Can you not?”
“I will when you stop looking so sad about it,” His voice is a little more heated than how it had been for the past hour or so. “Honestly, the fucker wasn’t even a good kisser let alone a good significant other. Even I probably would have done a better job at it, and that is considering the obvious awkwardness of being roommates.”
“Can you stop calling my ex the fucker and not talk about how much of a better kisser you are? It doesn’t help.” He only mutters something along the lines of sure, whatever and stops talking. You finish your soggy but sweet cereal, and he finishes his watered down coffee in your shared silence. It takes a good half an hour of eating and drinking and mindlessly surfing through TV channels until the silence and Yuta’s signature ‘I’m pissed off’ look starts feeling more unnerving than it already had, so you do what you hope to be a hysterical move. You throw the banana peel at him.
Luckily it works, because he mindlessly shields himself from it and laughs. “Ew, take your sad banana peel off of me, I don’t wanna get infected.”
You only laugh lightly and stand up from where you are sitting to sit beside him. With a smile on your face you jokingly hit his chest, which is covered with a light layer of sweat, so you pretend to be disgusted and wipe your hand off on his shirt. Still, you throw your arms around him at an attempt of cuddling, which he accepts. Your head lands itself on his side just a bit under his chest, and to be all too honest— your back hurts a little because of the way you are slouched.
But it is okay, because somehow he makes you feel better just by being himself. There is something about his weirdness that is captivating.
There has been a couple of instances where you called him out saying he is weird. Of course you had meant it lightheartedly and not like he was some sort of a creep, but in all those instances he had just giggled like he had owned it, and said it was just him.
There was something warm about him that cancelled out all the negativity in and around him. Sometimes he acted childish, sometimes like a proper adult— most times like a seemingly irresponsible young adult who in reality has their shit together. He was really both the life of the party and the person that made sure everyone got home safe, and you really admired that he had both personalities engraved in him while managing to be one of the most upbeat people you have ever met.
He lets you cuddle him for a longer while than the usual, reminding you to hydrate yourself every now and then. The two of you watch a movie because he insists that he cannot not do anything or else he will go insane, which you know he will, so you ask to watch something together with the sweetest smile you can render. Yuta does not like the idea much at first as he insists that it is basically doing nothing but with a bit more finesse, but you promise to do whatever he asks you to do after that, which ends up being what makes him agree.
In all seriousness you expect him to make you do his laundry for him or something.
But he just blasts some music that is not too respectful for your neighbors, and urges you to stand up with his hand. “Come on, let’s dance.”
When you look at him with a gaze that is too meaningless and bored for his liking, he takes your hands in his and pulls you up. “Just jump around if you don’t want to, I swear it will make you feel better.”
He himself starts jumping around the room as if to demonstrate how to do it with a bright smile on his face. His bleached and messy mullet jumps around with him, which is too cute of an image, and after some time he notices that you will not move unless he interjects. So he looks around, spotting his sunglasses sitting on top of the coffee table, and puts them on.
Which alarms you. Because if you have learned anything from partying with Yuta, it is that sunglasses are bad. If he is putting his sunglasses on, the party Yuta is coming out. And if his party self is coming out, there will not be anybody that has the luxury of not dancing. Considering you are the only person in the room, you are surely going to dance until you cannot feel your legs.
He puts his sunglasses on his face, just low enough on his nose to be able to look into your eyes with amusement written all over his face, before pushing them up all the way. Yuta then proceeds to shout the lyrics of the song that is blasting through the speaker of your living room, before starting to jump around again and swiftly capturing your hands in his and dragging you with him to do the same.
“The neighbors will complain!” You shout loud enough for him to hear, to which he only points at his ear as if he is not hearing you, still singing the song— even though you are less than a feet apart and you know for a fact he hears you. So you give up.
The songs change and so do your dances. Jumping around leaves you both breathless after a while, so you resort to much smoother dancing to just have fun. Yuta keeps pulling faces and mocking the way artists sing their songs, which is all too funny as if him dancing was not funny enough already. At one point a much slower song comes on, which makes him stop immediately. He covers his mouth in disbelief that there is such a song on this playlist that seemed to have all songs upbeat, giggling “Uh, this is intimate, that’s awkward.” as he moves to skip the song.
You could do without the information, to be honest. But it still makes you laugh, which is a win on his side.
He cheers for you in the rare instance that you get too in your zone, which pulls you out of those said zones way too fast, but he encourages you to do it more.
Both of you dance around for hours on end until both of you are absolutely spent.
Yuta is not the first one to stop but he definitely does not protest when you pull him down to fall on the couch with you. You both let out content sighs, laughing a bit as your hearts race. He takes his sunglasses off and throws them away somewhere, and turns his face to you. “Feeling better?”
He had managed to make you forget for a while, but his question still makes your heart twinge. Inarguably less than before, however. “Yeah, thanks.”
He shakes his head in return. “Just don’t let people who only pretend to care about you and then throw you away like a used tissue get you feeling all down. Don’t let them use you like a tissue in the first place, actually.”
Yuta’s hand reaches out for yours. He slips his fingers through yours, and moves your hand to place a kiss on its back. “They don’t deserve your help. You’re too precious for that.”
You try to hold yourself back, but you snort at his words. “You’re the worst at analogies.” Then, you pat his shoulder lightly with your hand that is not held in his. “But don’t worry. It works. Just gotta work harder.”
He giggles.
#nct scenarios#nct imagines#nct yuta#yuta imagines#yuta#i want him as my roommate#he would be so fun and no one can convince me otherwise#i hope you all enjoy it loves
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Happy Halloween, Mao Mao!
Hello! This is for a Halloween writing exchange run by @maomaosmother ! You should check them out if you’re a fan of the show Mao Mao!
This story was written for @Fireinthered
I also want to tag @shapeshiftinterest on an unrelated note.
Request details: King Snugglemane hosting a haunted house for the sweeties and Mao Mao not believing anything there would be scary but being proved wrong. (The sky pirates should definitely be invited, they don’t even have to be main or relevant characters)
Please enjoy! I hope you like it!
10/24/19
Word count: 2554
The giant, foreboding house looms over the surrounding trees, which pale in comparison despite dwarfing the shack in height. The great trees of the forest outside the town of Pureheart are possibly generations old, yet the structure nestled beside them seems to have surpassed them in age. The wooden body of what once was a dwelling place are rotted and blackened, long abandoned by termites and the like. The old bones of the house creak and moan with every slight breeze that rushes past. The house even sounds like it’s haunted. The window frames don’t even have a trace of glass left in them, not even a shard protruding from the wood. A rotting, ancient looking door, or what’s left of it, stands between the forest and whatever lies in wait inside; it almost looks to be disintegrating, falling apart with every moment that passes. The roof is slanted, filthy and soggy, almost caving into itself with every sagging shingle, several of which are simply missing, gone with time. The sad remnants of a chimney poke out through what remains of the roof, missing most of its stones.
It’s almost hard to imagine that something like this resides so close to Pureheart, a place bustling with life and smiling faces; it’s even harder to imagine how this place is still standing, albeit barely.
And this is where the king has made his haunted house?
“Admit it, dude, this is insanely cool.”
Badgerclops nods in approval, smiling down at Mao Mao, who is clearly not as enthused about all this as he is. Mao Mao seems to be a little more uptight than usual tonight. Maybe because it’s late, or maybe because he’s secretly impressed. Whatever the reason may be, he keeps his eyes forward, glowering at the king’s handiwork.
“-Hah! You think this is scary? Pathetic. Something as cheesy as this could never scare a brave hero, such as myself. King Snugglemane should have spent less time galavanting around and more time putting together something really scary. Isn’t that right, Adorabat?”
...Adorabat doesn’t answer.
“Adorabat…?”
Badgerclops and Mao Mao turn around to find Adorabat trembling with… excitement? Her eyes are like stars as she gapes at the decrepit shack. Mao Mao can tell with just a glance that this isn’t going to be a simple patrol after all.
“This… Looks… SO COOL!”
“I know, right? I literally just said that.”
“Now, hold on, Adorabat-”
“Can we go in?! Can we, can we? I wanna see the zombies and ghosts and chainsaws and blood and dentists and-”
Adorabat’s rapid, excitement filled begging are cut short by Mao Mao, hushing her in an attempt to keep the trio on track that night.
“Adorabat, no. We’re on duty, remember? The king just had to build his haunted house in the middle of the forest, which is home to monsters, like a ridiculous amount of monsters. Stay focused.”
Adorabat frowns, most of her excitement wavering with every word that Mao Mao speaks. She wants to see the haunted house, she just can’t help it. Her little heart is set on enjoying herself tonight.
“Come on, Mao, it’s Halloween, let her have some fun. I can’t think of a better place for a five year old than a disgusting house in the middle of the woods. Look at her, she wants it so bad.”
At this point, Adorabat breaks out her secret weapon, which also happens to be Mao Mao’s greatest weakness: The puppy-eyes. Her giant eyes sparkle with faint tears in the moonlight. Badgerclops and Mao Mao both feel like they’ve been punched in the gut with cuteness. It’s super effective. Mao Mao has lost the will to resist her any more.
Mao Mao pinches the bridge of his nose, shutting his eyes tight as he prepares to make a decision he knows he’ll regret. After a long, exasperated sigh, he finally caves. The battle has been won.
“...Fine, fine. You can go through the king’s haunted house.”
Adorabat almost explodes with happiness as all of her previously lost excitement returns to her. She takes flight, squealing her thanks to Mao Mao and Badgerclops as her little wings carry her to the entrance. She quickly disappears into the darkness.
Badgerclops’ triumphant smile wavers as he glances at Mao Mao, noticing the worry written all over his face. Mao Mao is pretty good at hiding his worry or fear, but Badgerclops is even better at seeing through his facade. To Badgerclops, Mao Mao is like an open book. Besides, he isn’t as good at looking brave as he thinks he is.
“...I wouldn’t worry about it, man. All the monsters sleep at night anyways.”
“We still have to be vigilant, Badgerclops. We go to sleep at night too, and look at us now, still awake and wandering through the forest at an ungodly hour... I don’t want Adorabat to be scared either. Plus it’s way past her bedtime.”
“That’s what you’re worried about? Mao, she’s tough. Adorabat will probably scare whatever’s in that gross shack. She scares me sometimes.”
Mao Mao chuckles slightly, silently relenting to Badgerclops’ attempts to put him at ease. Maybe this whole ordeal won’t be so bad after all. Despite the fact that Mao Mao would rather be asleep right now, he’s glad that Adorabat is enjoying herself.
“Ah, Sheriff, there you are! What do you think of my beautiful creation? It’s a great success with the Sweetypies! I’m assuming they all love it by all the screaming and crying.”
King Snugglemane giddily approaches Mao Mao and Badgerclops, his luxurious fur blowing gently in the cold October breeze. His cape billows behind him with every step towards the duo. If nothing else, the king certainly knows how to make an entrance (and a haunted house).
“It certainly is something, my liege,” Mao Mao cheesily bows towards the king as he greets him.
“Adorabat went inside a little while ago. I’m sure she’s loving it.”
“Yes, that little one would like something like this, wouldn’t she? Strange one. Anyhow, I’m glad she’s enjoying herself, as she should. I’m glad I happened upon this wretched little place, it’s made the perfect haunted house.”
Mao Mao’s focus on the conversation is broken slightly as Ol’ Blue, accompanied by Penny and Benny, happily walk by. A glimpse of their conversation can be heard from where the three are standing. “I’m so impressed!” Blue merrily states, cueing Penny and Benny to nod vigorously in agreement, still holding hands. Mao Mao’s mood sours considerably after hearing that, following Blue with his piercing eyes until his focus is brought back by Badgerclops’ voice.
“It must have taken sooooooo much work to make your haunted house look this nasty, I could never. Manual labor is the spookiest thing I can think of.”
Badgerclops’ trademark laughter is somewhat interrupted by Snugglemane’s disgust filled sputtering, confusing the two as the king waves his hands dramatically back and forth at them.
“Ew, no. Good heavens, I think not. You two honestly think that I could make something that horrid? Honestly, what do you take me for? I found the house in this condition, of course. How absurd of you.”
Now this intrigues Mao Mao, but mostly concerns him. That can’t possibly be right. He stares in disbelief at the king as a sickening feeling of dread rises in his stomach.
“Wait, you found this place, just like this? That doesn’t make any sense. What is this place? Did somebody live here?”
“Goodness, I don’t know! I was doing my bi-weekly frollicking through the deep dark woods when I stumbled upon this place. It was disgusting and absolutely pitiable, so naturally, it reminded me of you peasants. You folk enjoy romping around in garbage, yes? Anyway, I have no idea where it came from or who it belonged to, though I suppose now it’s mine.”
With a haughty shrug, the king utters a quick goodbye and obliviously goes on his merry way, leaving Mao Mao and Badgerclops in his royal wake. Could Snugglemane really be that stupid? He stumbles on a horrible, broken, abandoned house, and the first thing he does is make it into a tourist attraction, bringing all the Sweetypies to play in it.
Mao Mao can feel his eyes twitch manically, his temper rising with every moment that passes. He was fine with staying out this late at night to ensure everyone’s safety, but that was under the assumption that the king’s haunted house wasn’t a rickety, sagging death trap. It could collapse at any moment!
Mao Mao’s face is now as red as his cape, and his gloved paws are clenched tightly into fists. Badgerclops soon takes notice, a fair amount of worry on his face as well. The two of them seem to be kicked into high gear as a certain realization dawns on both of them at once:
Adorabat is still in that disgusting house.
A loud, droning creak erupts from the building, instantly grabbing Mao Mao and Badgerclops’ attention. They have to get the Sweetypies out of that house.
“Badgerclops, we have to evacuate the haunted house. Those Sweetypies don’t stand a chance.”
“That’s a little intense, but you’re totally right, dude. They’re so clumsy and dumb, they might bring the house down, especially if Pinky’s in there.”
Without another word, Badgerclops’ metal arm transforms into arguably his favorite tool, the megaphone. He takes a deep breath, and then loudly shouts into the megaphone, grabbing the attention of everyone outside of the house.
“Attention! The king’s haunted house is unstable as heck, and you should definitely not go inside anymore, gosh. -Hey, I’m talking to you too, Chubbum, get outta here. It’s past your bedtime, I’m tired and I’m going home.”
The Sweetypies all look pretty disappointed, but begin to disperse and make their way back to town. Badgerclops’ arm hesitantly reverts back to normal as he turns to face Mao Mao, who’s doing a quick head count of the retreating citizens.
“There are still a couple of them inside of the house. Dang it, didn’t they hear the megaphone?!”
Mao Mao’s voice is fast and annoyed, as well as concerned, reflecting his mood incredibly well. He begins stomping towards the building in a huff and Badgerclops wordlessly follows, ducking under the broken door frame as they enter. The two of them immediately start trying to round up more people, but doing so is suddenly much harder.
Compared to the inside of the house, the forest outside is extremely well lit. Even Mao Mao’s cat eyes are having trouble adjusting to the thick darkness that surrounds them, finding it challenging to look ahead more than a couple of feet. The only source of light in the house are the beams of moonlight that shine through the various cracks and holes in the roof.
“Adorabat? It’s time to leave! Adorabat!”
Mao Mao tries calling out to Adorabat, but to no avail. Somehow their voices aren’t carrying through the house, despite being able to hear a pin drop, not to mention the fact that the house has more holes than swiss cheese. Nothing about this house is soundproof, in fact it’s a miracle the walls are still standing.
“Hey, Pinky! Get back here, the haunted house is closed!”
Pinky’s cackling laughter echoes throughout the house as Badgerclops sighs dramatically before chasing after him. A few other giggles are able to be heard along with Pinky’s. Badgerclops is almost completely out of sight as his voice rings through a side hallway leading to the voices.
“I’ll get them, dude. Just find Adorabat so we can get out of here. I’m so tired!”
Before Mao Mao can even protest, Badgerclops is gone, leaving him all along in the darkness. Thankfully, his eyes are starting to adjust, allowing him to see a dark, foreboding hallway just a few feet in front of him. Gulping down his fear, Mao Mao begins to make his way down the hall, further into the inky blackness despite his brain telling him not to. Even so, he carries on, setting aside his uncertainty for Adorabat’s sake.
Mao Mao’s arm hovers over the sword at his side without really knowing why, feeling more and more anxious with every step that he takes. His ears ring with the sound of echoing creaks and groans of the building, making him even more uneasy. His heartbeat pounds against his ribcage as his eyes scan what lies ahead, not that he can see very much of it. He wouldn’t be surprised if this hall turned out to be a dead end. Judging from the state of the rest of the house, rubble or debris could easily be blocking his path.
“Adorabat...! Come on, it isn’t safe in here!”
Mao Mao’s voice comes out sounding kind of pathetic, wavering a bit at the end of his shout, causing his face to contort into a cringe. This silly fear is so unlike him, but whether he likes it or not, an icy dread has filled his body. He doesn’t know what’s come over him, but he does his best to push his cowardice away, straightening up and holding his head up high.
His body almost has trouble moving forward, yet he continues to walk further in, arms gently sliding against the walls to guide him through. He can almost see the end of the hallway, just barely able to make out a different area. A little bit of relief floods his senses; maybe this isn’t so bad. In fact, he’s almost sure now that he’ll stumble upon Adorabat any second now. There’s absolutely nothing to fear, right?
“BOO!”
Terror.
Pure, unfiltered terror fills Mao Mao to the brim as Adorabat jumps out from god knows where, almost causing him to fall to the ground from the surprise. His fur instantly poofs out (more than you’d think was possible) and his pupils shrink into thin black slits, darting from place to place at a ridiculous speed, trying to figure out what’s going on.
Mao Mao slowly regains his composure and bearing on the situation, but not before taking out his sword out of habit and swinging it around haphazardly, screaming in a surprisingly high pitch the whole time, narrowly missing Adorabat with his wild slices. There’s almost no hallway left by the time Mao Mao is done with it, most likely about to collapse from the damage to the structure.
A couple of moments go by, void of any sound or movement whatsoever.
Adorabat doesn’t move.
Mao Mao doesn’t move.
The house even stops creaking for a couple of seconds as the two of them stare at each other.
“...Gotcha?”
“ADORABAT.”
Bonus:
The sky pirates’ mouths almost hit the forest floor when they see what’s happened to the building they’ve been squatting at. It somehow looks even worse than it did before they left for the night to go scavenging. At least it looked vaguely like a house before! Now it just looks like a heap of gross old wood on the ground, totally irredeemable and inhabitable. It only takes a couple of moments for them to all notice how much trash has been left on the ground as well. Whoever came and trashed their shelter did not care about the environment.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
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Good old fashioned theatre boy (chpt 4)
Deep down, Armin would be completely lying to himself if he said he wasn’t scared to meet Levi’s Mother.
Levi is Eren’s boyfriend of a year and a half, and his mother is playing Mother Gothel in the production. She called up Armin’s grandfather and to say she was having a cookout for some of the actors and stage crew, apparently it’s a tradition of hers that she does with all the productions she gets into.
She sounds sweet and lovely from what the silent teen as told Armin, but Levi has also told him not to trust her too quickly, and that she actually has a quick temper. The fact she raised Levi when she was merely 16 and her brother was only 13 on her own, means she grew a tough skin and a “my way or the highway” kind of personality. If she’s anything like her son, Armin going to be silent the entire time.
The young blonde finished his last class, having a few hours of free time before he had to go over to Levi’s place, deciding to ring up Eren and see if he’s doing anything. After a few minutes of talking, Turns out both him and Mikasa are helping Levi set up for later this afternoon, so he hung up and decided to text Bertholdt, maybe he wasn’t too busy and wanted to hang out for a bit.
Armin: “Hey Bertl, are you doing anything this afternoon? I have a few hours until I have to go over to Levi’s place, maybe we can hang out for a bit? Text me when you can.”
It took no time for Armin’s phone to buzz again, Bertholdt was always one to respond quickly to text.
Bertl: “I’m in the cheerleaders room in the dance portable, come on over! Someone here is dying to meet you!”
Bert: “OH! And if you want her to really like you, if you have any leftovers from lunch, she’ll take them.”
Of course Armin was quite happy to meet someone new, and he felt even better knowing he did in fact have some lunch left over from today. He whipped his backpack around and got out his lunch box, pulling out a leftover brownie he didn’t feel like eating. Hopefully the young girl liked sugar, he thought.
He put the brownie bag in his pocket and zipped up his bookbag, running out the door on his way to the dance building by the football field. The day was beautiful, the sky was cluttered in puffy clouds and the sun is finally out of it’s depressing low and is shining it’s bright rays all over. It’s been three days since Jean and Armin had officially ‘met’ and they’ve been texting once and a while ever since. He and Armin figured out their outlash and sudden change of emotions and actions were all because of stress, the fact Jean would be seeing his dad again and that Armin is a boy-princess and that everyone knows.
He finally made it to the dance studio and walked to the dance room where he met Bertholdt the first time. Walking in, all heads turned to look at him, and Armin saw many familiar faces. Bertholdt grinned at the young blonde while his partner Reiner followed and smiled as well. Armin noticed Jean, Connie, and a cute brunette standing by the tall floor to ceiling mirrors.
“Ah there he is! Hey Blondie!” Connie shouted, waving his hand up in a gesture of friendship. Armin of course ran over to meet the new girl, seeing her beam at the blonde.
Armin slowed in his steps as he also saw another brunette, well, more of a red-head than a brunette. The young lady was wearing a yellow shirt with blue hearts littered all over it and some green overalls. The young man was wearing an open jean jacket with the sleeves rolled up and a white capsule tee. He was also wearing medium length khaki shorts and his hair was swept to the side smoothly. Armin first stuck his hand out to the young lady, fixing his glasses as to look less messy than he already looked from running.
“Hello! I’m Armin Arlert of class A-1.” He introduced, the young teen shaking his hand with enthusiasm. “Sasha Braus of class B-3! Nice to meet ya! I’m super excited I got to meet you, you’re all over the news…maybe later I can take a picture with you later to have proof I knew you when you become famous!”
Armin blushed at the compliment, chuckling and nodding his head. “O-Of course! Sorry I don’t look the best, otherwise i’d get ready for a picture with someone new…”
Sasha about choked, she couldn’t believe her ears at what the blonde just said. “E-Excuse me!?” She stammered. “For a young adult male you’re astonishing! I’ve never seen a boy with prettier skin and hair before! You have the best physique for a dancer and the prettiest blue eyes!”
At this point, Armin was a mess, he couldn’t believe his ears. Not even Eren has said some of those things about him.
Suddenly, a hand was being pushed out at him from the redhead.
“Floch Forster of class B-1, you’re Jean’s new friend right?”
Armin shook the young teens hand as well, nodding in comfirment.
“Yeah, well, I guess I wouldn’t say we were friends, more like acquaintances. We’ve talked a few time but we’re not friends yet.” Armin states pulling away from Floch. He nods and crosses his arms, standing slightly taller and more bold than Armin.
“Ah, i’m sure it won’t take you two long to get up to friends status, Jean is pretty friendly, especially to new ladies.” Floch says, looking over at Jean, who was talking football with Reiner and Bertholdt about next week’s game.
Connie starts to chuckle at the redhead, “you say he’s overly friendly to the ladies, then explain how he lost his first soccer ball game at age 6 cause he felt bad the kid on the other team was crying? Did he think you were a lady? Cause sometimes you sure as hell act like one!”
Floch laughs back, remembering his little fit on the soccer field where he met Jean for the first time. They’ve been childhood friends ever since that day and still talk and hangout ever week. Armin was a bit jealous of his lack of past with Jean and wishes he had a better first talk with the brunette instead of an awkward boner/anger management hissy fit.
“Oh I remember it like it was yesterday, he saw a kind, young, handsome young man out of the wet and soggy ground, covered in bruises and scratches!” Floch began, exaggerating this flashback with motions of his arms and a loud, booming voice that got deeper as he spoke. “In an act of true heroism, Jean stepped up and purposefully missed his teams winning shot so my pain wasn’t for nothing! He was a prince is shining armor to me that day!”
Sasha and Connie couldn’t breath anymore from how hard they were laughing, they’ve heard this story multiple times, but this was the first time Floch has gone full blown dramatic love story.
Armin was giggling as well, turning around quickly to see Jean staring at the small group with a confused, but am using glare. Jean excuses himself from the football chatter to walk over to Floch, wrapping his arm around the teen as if he were about to choke him.
“Oh c'mon Floch, Y'know I just pitied you like a sad lonely cat. No need to be all dramatic about it!” Jean laughs, quickly rubbing Floch’s hair, messing the red locks up.
“I can be dramatic about your first ever time playing a knight in shining armor, I mean, that’s your role now correct? Just remember who your original princess was.”
Jean snickered. “Yeah, Annie was a princess, wasn’t she?”
Everyone turned to hear bold laughing from the two behind us, seeing Bertholdt wipe his eyes as if he were crying from his laughter. “If you called Annie a princess now she’d slap you so hard your mother would feel it.” The dark brunette chuckled while Armin, Connie and Sasha were all confused before Reiner noticed their expressions and explained.
“Jean had a thing for Annie forever ago and it was pitiful to watch. I believe you tried the same with Jaeger’s sister Mikasa, right?”
The conversation went on with Armin only paying slight attention to what was being exchanged by the other men. Apparently Jean has had a crush on a lot of girl’s, though from what Jean’s earlier behavior and actions have taut Armin is that boys aren’t out for the count either. The conversation that now Sasha was in, asking Jean is he ever had a thing for her or Connie is when armin started to day dream and doze out. His eyes locked on Jean’s eyes, the golden embers looked sharp and cleanly cut. The small light of color in his eyes caused Armin’s heart skip a beat, they showed confidence, but also a hint of kindness and love, something of course Armin had a liking for.
The blonde started to glance over to the man’s ears, seeing the silver piercings line up and down the outside of his shell. Armin had half the heart to ask Jean to lean over real quick so Armin can nibble on one of the rings. He also had a small ball piercing on the tip of his tongue that Armin refuses to let slip out of his mind.
Though someone caught Armin staring and cleared their throat, catching the blonde off guard.
“D-Do you-” Sasha leaned in closely to Armin, whispering in his ear using her hand to keep others from hearing. “Do you want that?”
Armin looked where she shyly pointed right at her pocket, the brownie from his lunch peaking out. Armin chuckled and handed her the brownie. “All yours.” He grinned. The brunette launched at his hands and stole the treat from his hand, basically ripping the bag open. “I LOVE YOU!” Sasha splurged out while hugging Armin. Armin paniced a little, not knowing what to do with the brunette attached to him. Everyone in the room let out a roar of laughter.
******
Armin turned on his turn signals to move into the right lane, his grandfather in the pasenger seat. Armin let out a long sigh before seeing the house in the distant. “Everything is going to be alright Armin, they’re just people.” His grandfather said, patting Armin’s shoulder.
“Papap their whole family is extreamly talented and have huge jobs. I mean, Levi’s mom is the one who’s playing mother Gothel and she’s a well known actress along with her brother. She invited me, a theatre boy to her house and the others working on the set.”
Armin, she didn’t just invite you cause you’re on the set,” the older man spoke, pointing where Armin has to turn at the light. “You’re the name on everyone’s lips, believe it or not. The comitee for this musical loved you so much, they were willing to look past the fact you were a male to play a disney princess.”
Armin sighed. “It’s still hard to believe, i’ve been doing theatre all my life and here I am, an actual topic on the news…people know me now.”
Armin saw the house’s driveway and a sign showing people where to park. Armin pulled into an empty spot and turned off the car. Armin didn’t want to get out of the car, but his grandfather was already out and calling for his name.
Walking up to the front door and knocking, Armin felt his gut turn and knot, he didn’t have the courage today to talk, and oh so despretly wanted to turn into a ball and dissapear.
The door opened sofly, and Armin was expecting one of the Ackermans to show up, but instead they were greated with a smaller, platium blonde man. He wasn’t tall, infact he was shorter than Armin, wearing a very religious garmet. “Beg your pardon, but are you Armin Alert?” The young man said, opening the door a bit wider.
“Y-Yeah, I mean yes! Yes that’s me! A-Are you uh, Kenny Ackerman?” Armin asked. The man chuckled and invited the two in. “No, i’m not Kenny, nor am I an Ackerman yet. I’m Uri Riess.”
Armin and his grandfather stepped inside, wiping their feet on the doormat and looking around the room. It was a room with two staircases leading up to the second floor, and straight ahead was a room where Armin saw people talking and setting up. “Uri Riess? As in-” The elder man didn’t even get to finish before he stuck out his hand to shake.
“Yes, my brother is running for office this next election, Rod Reiss. I’m his younger brother.” Uri said shaking the mans hand with a smile. Uri looked over at Armin and smiled. “You are a very handsome young man up close, Kuchel is very excited to meet you, you haven’t left her lips since the day they called your name.”
Armin blushed and his heart began to speed up, he wasn’t used to compliments, especially from someone from the Reiss family. “T-Thank you sir! I’m uh, very happy to-”
“URI~!” Someone yelled from upstairs. We all looked up to see a beautiful young woman with long black hair and pale skin. She was wearing a tight black dress with long sleeves and heeled boots. Her eyes lit up when she locked eyes with Armin, her mouth falling open in awe and shock.
“Well if it ain’t- Oh my lands it’s you!” She practically yells, quickly dashing down the stairs in her boots, her makeup dark and bold. Armin felt a twinge of envy for the older lady, she was so beautiful and lovely, someone who easily could have taken his whole role as Rapunzel. She ran over and took Armin’s hand into hers.
“It’s an absolute honor to meet you! Every year when I do these parties, you are probably the first person i’ve been this excited about meeting, you’ve been on everyone’s minds these past few days.” She said, Armin’s face getting redder and redder. He felt so…shabby next to this famous actress. Armin was in a purple dress shirt and skinny jeans while Kuchel was all dolled up in beautiful silk dress, he felt…unworthy of being here.
“I-It’s an honor to meet you too Mrs. Kuchel, i’m very glad to-”
Kuchel let out a bowing laugh, almost crying and coughing after she was done. “Oh sweety, oh baby doll, you’re the sweetest little thing,” she reached her hands to Armin, holding his face in her hands. “Sweety please, call me Kuchel, we’re both adults and we both are going to be great friends after this musical. Besides, it makes things much easier to be friends with the person you’re interacting with in the shoot.”
“Alright then, thank you for having me hear Kuchel, this is my grandfather.” Armin gestured towards his grandfather, who held out his hand to shake. Kuchel looked back over at Armin and smiled.
“Please, come with me into the main hall, I would like you to meet my brother!” Kuchel started with a twinkle in her eyes. Armin had honestly expected Levi’s mom to be more…like Levi, but she seems oddly sweet to be an Ackerman. He followed her, seeing Uri say something to Kuchel before heading off into the room. Not too many people were there, Armin and his Grandfather did leave earlier so it’s no surprised they got here sooner than most would. The room was large, bigger than most living rooms, but it still had a homey feel to it. Modern, but old fashioned all at once.
Armin looked around for a certain brunette-blonde, but his eyes were quickly torn away when he heard his name being called out by Kuchel, who was standing next to Uri while Uri had his arm wrapped around a much taller looking man. He was wearing a black dress shirt and dress pants, his hair slicked back into dark brown locks.
“Armin, this is Kenny Ackerman, my odd brother who will be working on costumes and the backstage tech, he’s kinda rude at first-”
Kenny scoffed before Kuchel could finish, causing the older woman to laugh.
“Oh shut it! I can introduce myself ya hag!” Kenny almost yelled out, his face not so angry as he just was annoyed at his sister. The older man looked over at me, scoffing and pushing his hair back.
“Nice to meet ya kid, i’ll be workin’ with ya guys behind set mosta’ the time. This here is Uri, he’ll also be behind set, he also makes mosta the costumes, so comin’ up soon you’ll have to make a day with ‘em and have him take your measurements.”
Armin stretched out his hand to shake the man’s, which he also reaches out and they shake, Armin trying not to wince at the pain of the older man’s grip.
“So if I can ask…have you actually looked up yer name and seen what people are chattin’ about?” Kenny asked, shifting his gaze to his sister, who was probably about to ask the same thing to the blonde. Armin shrugged.
“No, I haven’t. I tend to stay away from the internet…that and…I guess you could say I’m a coward, I don’t want to see all the hate i’m probably getting.” Armin admitted, tucking some of his hair behind his ear, shifting his gaze away from the two Ackermans.
“Well y’know, that’s not how you avoid it bud, yer a name people know now, it’s unavoidable, just accept not everyone’s gonna be happy with a guy playing a princess.” Kenny spat, Armin’s stomach turning with each word that came out of his mouth. He was right, but Armin didn’t want to admit it, or even think about it. He doesn’t want to know how the people see him now-
His parents…
What are they thinking?
_____
Rain. That’s all Armin heard for the next few days while his parents packed up his things in his room. Clothes, sheets, a few toys, everything they believed the blonde would need.
“Mommy-” Armin called out, reaching for his mothers hand, though before he could finish calling out her name, his mother snatched her hand away and took a few steps back. “Armin! Don’t sneak up on mommy like that!” She yelled, taking Armin’s hand and slapping it with full force. Armin winced and backed away, tears starting to form in his eyes. “I’m sorry…” he muttered to her, looking back up at her with red cheeks.
“Where are we going?” Armin asked, running over to his window to stare out into the rain. The droplets decorating the window like glitter. Armin’s father sighed, throwing one last stuffed animal in Armin’s bag…it was a rabbit, a beautiful, soft white rabbit his parents got him when he was born. Armin never let it go since.
“You’re going over to visit Grandpa for a while.” His father said, a sad, lonely tone in his voice. Armin smiled, never meeting his grandpa before. He was quite excited to meet him.
Armin grabbed his bag and his suitcases before running to the car, his parents in toe. Just before Armin shut the door of the car, he could hear his parent’s judging whispers.
“I told you, if you weren’t a coward, we wouldn’t have to do this.”
___
Armin was startled from his day dream by Levi, who was pulling him off to the side of the room.
“L-Levi, what are you-”
“Is everything alright?’ Levi asked, brushing his hands off on his pants. Armin nodded, yawning quickly before scratching his head.
“I kinda…zoned out there for a second. I didn’t know what came over me… “ Armin paused before looking around levi for a familiar brunette. “I thought Eren was here with you?”
Levi nodded. “He’s here, he’s up in my room playing video games with me…I don’t like my mom’s social gatherings too much, so I invited Eren over to keep my company. I came down to grab a drink and I saw you talking with my uncle…you looked-” Levi stopped, looking Armin in the eyes before continuing. “You looked so empty.”
Armin frowned. He was of course thinking of his parents, wondering what they thought about him now…maybe they might come home now that he’s made a name for their family. Armin missed them so much…he wish they were right here with him…
“Well…my room is upstairs on the left, third door down, has my name on the door…knock before you enter, Eren and I will be in there if you need to be alone for a bit.” Levi offered, patting Armin on the shoulder before heading off into a crowd of people.
Armin spent most of his time talking with other members of the program. He met the young girl who would be playing younger rapunzel, He met the some of the stage crew, and talked with Marco about his role. Instead of having Maximus be a horse, he’s a mute human who behaves similarly to the original cartoon horse. Marco was the one rewarded for that role, and he’s pumped to play the character. He’s kinda bummed he doesn’t speak, but that just means he has to move more to suit his actions into words.
Everyone wanted to talk to Armin though, he was on everyone’s lips. A lot of the questions were the same. “How do you feel about playing a princess?”, “Are you nervous after seeing the news?”, “Are you actually gay?” Armin could go on all night at the questions he got. Though once Jean showed up, they got even stranger.
“Hey Armin!” Jean called out for him while armin was grabbing a drink. Armin smiled upon seeing the brunette and walked over.
“Hey Jean! Finally you’re here, i’ve been bombarded with odd questions that it’s taking it out of me…”
Jean chuckled. “Yeah, i’ve been asked some weird things to…most of them being ‘am i being forced to kiss a guy even though i’m straight’. Then I have to tell them i’m Bisexual, then it gets weirder from there…i’m done.” Jean sighed, taking his hand and running it softly through Armin’s hair like a cat. “Though, on the subject, I guess we should start acting like we’re together now huh? Makes acting easier that way…”
Armin blushed, his blood quickly rushing up to his cheeks. “Y-Yeah, sure. Kuchel is already treating me like a son…” Armin said, leaning into Jean’s hand by accident. Jean doesn’t mind as he smiles once more before removing his hand away. “So i’ve read the script and written down some improve lines and what do do for which line already…so how about you and I after class go to Bertholdt’s dance studio and practice there before rehearsal starts so you’re not wondering around. I already talked with Bertholdt about it, he’s getting me a second key.”
“I’d like that.” Armin said, finally feeling a little twinkle in his heart from Jean’s words.
So this is love.
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Thoughts on Grasses of Remembrance (The Tale of Genji through its poetry)
Finally had some time this weekend to sit down with A Waka Anthology, Volume 2: Grasses of Remembrance Part B by Edwin A. Cranston. This book is the last in an impressive and intimidating collection translating a number of major classical poetry anthologies. It’s basically a speedrun through Tale of Genji (if such a thing were possible) filtered through all 795 waka poems written or uttered by the characters over the course of the novel.
Poetry was a Really Big Deal during the Heian era. If you were an aristocrat, not only were you expected to compose decent poetry, you had to be able to do it off-the-cuff appropriate to the occasion. AND to do this properly, you were expected to be able to recognize and respond cleverly to references to a ton of other existing classic poems from memory that people would just mention casually in conversation or writing (kinda like how people quote the Simpsons today lol). This was a prime marker of how intelligent/competent and - no joke - how sexy you were. So not surprisingly, these poems are extremely important to the development of character interactions and themes in the Tale of Genji which has a lot of romance and relationship plotlines.
However. Translating Heian era Japanese into modern Japanese is already challenging. Rendering Heian era Japanese waka poetry into modern English is, as you might imagine, harder for a bunch of reasons. Considering how dense the actual novel already is, it’s super easy to gloss over the poetry, and some modern translations simply integrate the basic intent of the poems right into the main text/dialogue.
I was really interested in finding something specifically focusing on and analyzing the poetry, and this book appeared to fit the bill.
Short review: IT TOTALLY DOES. If you’re into Tale of Genji, Heian era, classical Japanese history, classical Japanese literature, Japanese poetry, or just love reading translators articulating eloquently while sassing characters or flailing through linguistic complexities, I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK
Long review: blah blah blah thoughts follows, including some quotes/poem for reference.
The book starts with a quick 2 page intro setting the context of the Tale of Genji, then goes straight into the poems. TBH I personally found it more flowery and redundant than necessary (it repeats a few poems that are then explained later). But it’s only 2 pages, we’ll live.
Then, the poems. For every poem (or poems, in the case of an exchange - sometimes a flurry of them with multiple characters speaking or dashing letters off to each other) there’s an intro and summary of context followed by an analysis, including notes on meaning, narrator and character intent, structure, symbols and wordplay. The original Japanese is included in romaji alongside the English translation. The commentary also flags known references to other classic poems (WITH those poems in-line! This is awesome because I don’t have the rest of these books!), and even mentions poem and folk song quotations from the rest of the novel where the characters have not composed new poetry, but are reciting other existing known pieces.
Overall, I have only three real “warnings” about Grasses of Remembrance Vol 2b:
1) It’s very academic and flowery in tone. If you’re not used to it, it can be hard to read. But then again, if you’re not willing to get past that, how are you reading Tale of Genji? lol. In any case, I personally thought the commentary was a lot of fun. Cranston definitely has opinions and can get pretty sarcastic in places, which I found hilarious. Here are a few sample quotes:
“Tamakazura has remarked to herself how superior the Emperor [Reizei] was in looks to all the courtiers in his train (It is a principle with this author that superior people be dashingly handsome or ravishingly beautiful).”
“The ruefully witty poems exchanged between Yugiri and To no Naishi [Koremitsu’s daughter, the Gosechi Dancer] are rather more to my taste than the soggy ones Yugiri and Kumoi no Kari exchanged on their wedding night. Might it be the case that a totally sanctioned relationship is literarily uninspiring?”
“The old lady reaches for the melodramatic ultimate and dies just as Yugiri’s letter arrives.”
The overall effect is like an exceedingly well-educated, gossipy and sassy ride through the entire novel hahaha.
2) Minor typos. I noticed some speckled throughout the text every so often (e.g., Tamakazura being rendered Takakazura, Akashi as Asashi, instances of accidental extra letters, etc.). It was pretty clear what the correct spelling was supposed to be, and TBH considering this is the last of a huge-ass series of over 1300 pages I think it’s forgiveable. Maybe a few that spell-check should have caught, but oh well.
3) This book is NOT CHEAP. As I mentioned in a previous post, not only did I not buy the entire collection, I didn’t even buy a complete Volume 2 - I only bought the last half of the second volume lmao. And the Tale of Genji translations are only HALF of this half of a book. The rest is actually the footnotes, appendices, notes to poems, glossary, bibliography and indices (including indices for every poem by author and by first line) for this beast of a translation/compilation project. This includes a lot of additional commentary and other poems and makes for pretty interesting reading itself, even without the rest of the volumes/parts. The price can definitely be scary and an issue for a lot of people, so if you’re interested in it, I suggest try checking it out at your library or on Google Books first. (In fact, Google Books is how I learned of this book in the first place.)
For me, the depth of insight for the poems was fantastic. It gave me a lot more appreciation for the scenes, including the mental state of the characters, plus a million more symbols, metaphors and ideas for my own creative works like the Genjimonogatari illustration series, North Bound and other original stuff.
It also clarified several fuzzy translation questions I had that relied on specific knowledge of Heian culture and history/evolution of the use of the language and wasn’t easily found in Google searches or online language resources. And even if you’re already familiar with common allusions, metaphors and puns/homophones in Japanese poetry, it’s still helpful to see them all summarized. And sometimes lamented by the book’s author too. SO MANY PONIES EATING GRASS. SO MANY PINES. Especially the pines. (It IS an amazing pun though, especially because it works in both English and Japanese. Pine [tree] -> to pine, matsu/pine tree -> matsu/to wait)
In term of the actual translations themselves, you may still find them coming off a bit roundabout in some cases when comparing to the original Japanese. But overall I find Cranston’s translations more direct/flavourful than how they were rendered in the Tyler translation, partly because of how Tyler chose to juggle his set of translator’s challenges for rendering not only meaning but also more technical aspects of the poetic form. So the imagery ends up being, to me, a lot more vivid. The overall effect usually ends up more colourful, more emotional, more erotic, more cutting, more entertaining, and whatnot.
For example, Kashiwagi’s suitor’s poem in the Kocho/Butterflies chapter. When reading the novel, I was like, uh-huh, yah, OK. When I read it here, I was like whoa, dude, that’s a little intense lol. Cranston’s translation amps up the connotation of the heat of the water based on the rest of the line. For comparison:
(The original non-romaji Japanese in the samples following are thanks to the Japanese Text Initiative from the University of Virginia Library Etext Centre and the University of Pittsburgh East Asian Library. Their Tale of Genji page has a FREAKING AMAZING side-by-side comparison of the novel in original Japanese, modern Japanese and romaji. Bless them and the people who had to organize and wrangle that text together.)
Original Japanese:
思ふとも君は知らじなわきかへり
岩漏る水に色し見えねば
Omou to mo / Kimi wa shiraji na / Wakikaeri
Iwa moru misu ni / Iro shi mieneba
Tyler version: You can hardly know that my thoughts are all of you, for the stealthy spring welling from the rocks leaves no colour to be seen.
Cranston version: Hardly can you know / Of the longing that I feel, / For the boiling wave / Is merely colorless water / As it drains away from the rock.
Here’s another example. Oigimi (Agemaki in the book, as Cranston used Wayley’s names for the sisters) telling Kaoru that he’s the only one who’s been actually visiting them and Kaoru is like all riiiight :Db! From Shii ga Moto / Beneath the Oak chapter:
Oigimi’s poem
雪深き山のかけはし君ならで
またふみかよふ跡を見ぬかな
Yuki fukaki / Yama no kakehashi / Kimi narade
Mata fumikayou / Ato o minu kana
Tyler: No brush but your own has marked the steep mountain trails buried deep in snow / with footprints, while back and forth letters go across the hills.
Cranston: Over the bridges / Clinging to the cliffs along / Our deep-snow mountains / No letter-bearer leaves his trace: / Those footprints are yours alone.
Kaoru’s reply
つららとぢ駒ふみしだく山川を
しるべしがてらまづや渡らむ
Tsurara toji / Koma fumishidaku / Yamakawa o
Shirube shigatera / Mazu ya wataramu
Tyler: Then let it be I who firsts ride across these hills, though on his mission, / where ice under my horse’s hooves crackles along frozen streams.
Cranston: In the sheets of ice / Covering the mountain streams / My steed crushes / Such letters as form my reason, / My first, to cross as a guide.
In other examples, Genji’s “*throws hands in the air* I give up” poetic reply to Suetsumuhana about how she keeps using Robes of Cathay/Chinese cloak imagery in her poems in the original Japanese alongside the translation cracked me up even more. And one of my favourites is a pair of poems between the future Akashi Empress (as a child) and her birth-mother the Akashi lady. It’s really sad, sweet and cute all at the same time and completely flew under my radar when I read the novel originally.
The poetry analysis for the Uji chapters is especially intriguing. The plot pointedly pits Niou against Kaoru as opposing personalities with particular similarities and contrasts that drive their relationship with each other and with the woman they’re competing for. Especially in the latter half of the story, a lot of their poems, even ones written independently (i.e., to Ukifune), are specifically composed to highlight those attributes and play off of each other.
Finally, it’s also super interesting to see my experience with the narrative changes through the lens of the poems. Obviously, as I mentioned, some things I easily missed without paying as much attention to the poems in between the rest of the story. But also, some prominent characters have very few poems, so the narrative shifts away from them. Meanwhile, a number of otherwise very minor or usually overlooked characters stand out even more, thanks to the fineness, loveliness, resonance, and sometimes just sheer consistent presence of their poetry. This book definitely gave me a lot of additional perspective on the Tale of Genji, and enhanced my appreciation of the novel and the skill behind its crafting!
#tale of genji#genji monogatary#waka poetry#a waka anthology#grasses of remembrance#edwin a. cranston#royall tyler#japanese#translation#japanese tranlation#heian period#kaoru chujo#oigimi#agemaki#kashiwagi
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First Day Flirtations (Aleks x Reader)
(A/N: I am back from the dead!! By dead I mean school. So this is a very late secret santa gift for @einhd !! Sorry it took so long! I had the flu for a week and I haven’t been on tumblr much. Hope you like this long ass fic because I can’t write anything short.)
Today’s the day. The big ol’ day. The day I’ve been waiting for the whole summer and it’s finally here.
I feel like I’m going to vomit.
The night before I packed my backpack and made a lunch so I didn’t have to worry about getting anything ready today, because of course I’d pick out a CowChop shirt for my first day interning if I was rushing. And I don’t want to be that person.
So, I packed the usual phone chargers and lunch that I probably won’t eat since I’ll be too nervous. I also packed some extra clothes because I have no idea what’s going to happen when I get there, and a notebook in case I wanted to seem like an overachiever and take notes. I have no idea what I’m supposed to bring but I’ll bring everything just in case. I’m ready for the disaster that is CowChop and myself.
“You excited, Y/N?” My roommate asks, walking out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel.
“Hm?” I shove a granola bar in my mouth as I google directions to the warehouse.
“For your internship, your first day dude”
“Oh” my roommate notices my nervousness and comes over to pat my back.
“You’ll do great man, I know you’ve been looking forward to this forever” I nod, “maybe you could show them the fanfic you’ve wr-“
“TAYLOR!” I throw on my backpack and spin around, “I’ll die before they find out about that”
She giggles and throws me my jackets that was on the bed.
“Y/N you have 30 minutes to get to the warehouse”
I check my phone and begin to panic as 9:30AM lights up on the screen.
“Have fun! Don’t worry too much!” Taylor yells as I run out the room.
“If I timed this right I would be 5 minutes early not 2” I mumble to myself, “maybe I’ll skip breakfast to save time”
It’s almost 10am, the time Brett told me to show up. If I hadn’t run I would’ve missed the bus and would’ve been late. I can’t be late on my first day, I’d have to quit immediately and never return.
After walking a few minutes from the bus stop I arrive at the feeble gate protecting the Cow Chop warehouse. Through the gaps I can see the familiar parking lot, filled with cars and set pieces that were destroyed; I wonder if I should’ve brought some bandaids.
“Y/N?” To my left I hear a crackle and see a small intercom.
“Y/N? Is that you?” I walk over and look into the tiny camera, awkwardly.
“Y-yeah! It’s Y/N, the new intern!” I stutter, trying my best to sound enthusiastic.
“Welcome to hell, kiddo”
The gate jolts open and I slowly walk inside, excited but terrified at the same time. Brett stands in the doorway, looking more muscular than in the videos but also less scary.
“Nice to meet you Y/N” He shakes my shaky hand with more force than I was expecting, “Thanks for being on time, fucking no one else takes this job seriously enough”.
I chuckle, unsure of what to say.
“Well we might as well get started” Brett holds the door as I walk inside, “I guess I can give you a tour and then we’ll talk about the other crap like rules and what not. Basically, point the camera at someone when they’re speaking and don’t burn the place down”
For the next 20 minutes or so, Brett gives me a tour of the warehouse; only 5 minutes involved showing me the office and the rest of the tour was sidetracked by Lindsey who wanted to meet me and wouldn’t stop talking.
“Here’s your desk” Brett walks over to one of the many plain black desks, “if you need anything, don’t ask me, I don’t edit shit”
He laughs to himself, “no, but really, ask Lindsey or Anna, they’re the most helpful here, obviously’
I set my stuff down and take a seat, getting ready for whatever they throw at me.
“Someone will come over and teach you about editing stuff, maybe Asher. I don’t know. Anyways, welcome again, you’ll do fine.”
As Brett walks away I glance around the office and see a handful of the Cow Chop crew: Anna, Lindsey, and James; I wasn’t surprised that Asher and Aleks were late. I spend the next hour watching the other trickle in and introduce themselves, although I already know who each of them are. Anna teaches me the Cow Chop style of editing and shares her expertise on what works for each video. Asher gives me some tips too but mainly jokes around, which helps alleviate some of my stress and take my mind off of my anxiety.
“Well look who finally decided to show up”
I look up from my desk and see Brett berating a tired Aleks.
“Maybe if you didn’t stream till 5am you’d show up on time and we could make videos for our fucking channel!” Aleks shrugs him off and goes to sit at his desk, but stops when he sees me.
“Who’s this?” Aleks looks at me confused, “Brett who’s this?”
“It’s Y/N, the new intern” Brett yells back, “Don’t you ever fucking pay attention?”
“I have ADHD Brett, don’t bully me”
Brett huffs and slams his office door behind him; I definitely won’t be asking him any questions anytime soon.
Aleks walks over to me and put his hand on my desk.
“So you’re the new intern,” he smirks, “I’m Aleks, but I assume you’re a fan because who would actually want to work here”
I smile back, feeling like I look like an idiot.
“If you need anything just let me know. I sit over there” He points to a desk a little in front of me, “I can’t really help with editing or anything but whatever”
Before he walks to his desk he squeezes me shoulder. I don’t know if that’s a softball coach squeeze or a guy having a crush on me squeeze. I try not to think about Aleks in a softball uniform and get to editing my first video.
I finally have time to eat my lunch after filming some content and editing the one video I was given. I still feel like a nervous wreck but now a more competent wreck. As I go through the video, cutting clips and adding effects, I eat my sad sandwich, which was a bit soggy because I made it the night before. Nevertheless, I continued eating it because I was too afraid to order anything to the warehouse; maybe in a few weeks I’ll have that confidence, or maybe never and I’ll just suffer.
“Y/N, what the fuck are you eating?”
I look up to see Aleks standing by his desk, a microwavable meal in one hand.
“Uh, it’s just a sandwich”
“That looks pretty shit,” Aleks says as I chuckle, “Do you want me to order you anything?”
“What? N-No, I’m fine, really”
“Well can I at least sit next to you while you edit so you don’t look so sad”
I look around to see if anyone else was here, but I guess everyone went out to lunch; I don’t know if I should be happy or nervous, maybe both.
“Yeah, sure”
Aleks pulls up a chair next to me and begins eating what seems to be leftover Chinese food.
“Oh I remember this” he says with his mouth full, “I was really bad at this game”
“Yeah” I giggle, “I can’t really see a way to edit it to make you look better”
“That’s my aesthetic though, terrible at games that aren’t FPSs”
I don’t say anything even though I know he’s lying; I’ve watched enough of his videos to know he’s not very good at any game.
As we eat we go through the video; I mark down parts to edit as Aleks suggests them. But after awhile we get distracted from the video and just…talk. It’s nice. For the first time in awhile I’m happy having a conversation with someone and I’m actually interested. I don’t know if it’s our mutual dislike of LA or that Aleks has pretty blonde hair and brown eyes that sparkle when he grins, but it’s nice.
“Y/N wait”
I stop laughing and freeze, worried I did something wrong, but Aleks leans over and brushes a strand of hair out of my face.
“Oh, thanks” I blush.
“No it’s, I-” Aleks stutters, “It was distracting. It’s just my ADHD, ya know.”
We sit in silence for a couple seconds, unsure of what to do.
“I, uh, I got to go do some work and stuff” Aleks mutters.
“Yeah, I should keep working on this video” I turn back to the monitor as Aleks stands up.
“We should do this again sometime, Y/N” Aleks puts his hand on my shoulder, “Welcome to Cow Chop, happy you’re here.”
Aleks eyes look soft, like his bleach blonde hair and his tired face. There’s a warmth to him, something that’s inviting and calming. I feel safe.
“Thanks Aleks. I’m happy I’m here too.”
#aleks#cc#cow chop x reader#cowchop#cow chop#cowchop fanfic#cow chop fanfic#aleks x reader#cowchopsecretsanta#fanfic#fan fic#cc fan fic#secret santa
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Summer Boy ≽ IV.
jungkook x reader- Summer au
Genre- smut and a little angst
Word Count- 4,700
≽ Links to previous chapters can be found on my masterlist in my bio because Tumblr sucks now! You can also click on the ‘Summer Boy’ tag!
Hey, there summer boy. I’m a busy girl who doesn’t have too much time for fun. Maybe just for this time, I’ll be yours and you’ll be mine. Don’ t be sad when the sun comes up and you wake up to find me not around, I had to go. But you promised to pay me back for last night and we still have all summer after all.
Three weeks had gone by since my friends and I arrived at our summer home. We had grown close to the boys next door and to each other. I’ve tried to enjoy the times and memories we’re making. It was painful to think how quick the summer was going and if our friendships would last any longer.
Jungkook seemed to be the least one I’ve bonded with, oddly enough. It was ironic but it made sense; we still snuck around behind everyone’s back. When we greeted each other with a quick hug, his hand would wander just a bit too low. He occasionally brushed against my lower back when walking by. He would text me from across the room at random times to let me know how much he wanted me. And the times his hand snuck up my thigh, rubbing at it when he thought no one was watching during dinner or a movie. But we never actually sat down and talked between the two of us.
I felt closer to Taehyung; who I ran into crying one night I was looking for Jungkook. Even though he tried to play off the ‘I’m fine’ card, my neutering instincts kicked in immediately. He found comfort in my way of speaking and understanding, sooner than expected, he opened up to me about what was bothering him. We sat there and talked for a couple of hours before Jungkook came into the room, after falling having been asleep on the couch.
I enjoyed Jungkook’s company but anytime it became more than flirting, I was the one to cut it off. It bothered him to a certain point, usually just shaking it off, but he never said anything on the contrary. He never questioned me why and that’s the way I wanted it to be.
-
It was early in the morning, the sun was nowhere near up, and I was tossing and turning in my bed. I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t hungry, and I could not fall asleep. Kicking the covers to the foot of my bed, I walked quietly into the kitchen. My feet were cold against the tile floor and my eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lights. I picked at the bread on the counter while looking at the clock over the stove.
2:36am
I was definitely not getting any sleep; If I went back to bed now my sleeping schedule would be messed up for the summer. I turned off the light of the kitchen and walked to the back door. On the patio, I kicked off my sandals and grabbed a blanket by the fire pit, and walking down the steps to reach the sand of the beach. The moon was almost full and displayed high in the sky; the tides were coming in strong but at a steady pace.
I took a seat just before where the water came to its highest, with the blanket laid underneath me. The sound of the waves was relaxing and the water looked so pretty shining under the illuminating moon. The breeze carried the smell of the salt water throughout the shoreline and brought a small chill over my arms. I had my phone face down playing slow and gentle songs at my side. The tides came up and the water tickled my toes as I sat with my knees together and hands resting back. I was only wearing a thin sweater and some shorts because the night wasn’t cold but the wind was constant.
“(Y/n)?” My heart stopped at the unexpected call of my name. I moved off my hands and turned behind me; a figure made itself towards me. Despite the darkness, I could make Jungkook’s figure walking over to me. He had a way of walking I could recognize and when he stepped close enough for me to see his face; he looked dream-like under the moonlight.
It was not until he stood next to me when I realized I was staring at him without saying a word. He was wearing a dark tee shirt and light colored joggers, barefoot with his hands in both pockets. I licked my lips and looked away back to the water that washed up.
“What are you doing up? It’s like two in the morning…” I mumbled at him. Jungkook took a deep breath, sounding like he was stretching, and sighed.
“Actually, it’s three already.” He said cheerfully, plopping down next to me on the blanket. He sat crossed legged beside me; his knee was brushing against my outer thigh as I stretched my legs down into the sand.
I solely replied with a slight hum while I leaned in and rubbed at my cool legs. With my legs stretched out, the water washed over them and made it almost to my ankle. I stare at my wet feet as the tide went back down and caught a glimpse of Jungkook looking as well. I dug my toes into the soggy sand, watching its compact structure crumble from my feet.
“It’s a nice night,” Jungkook spoke again. I ran my hand up to my knee, flicking off the spots of sand stuck to my skin. “It’s usually a lot colder during this time.”
“You come out here often?” I brought my knees back to my chest and laid my head sideways on them to look at him. He was playing with something in his hands, looked like he was picking it apart, before meeting my gaze.
“Sometimes.” He shrugged, tossing away whatever it was he had in his fingertips. “I have trouble sleeping from time to time.”
The lack of conversation between us wasn’t awkward but it wasn’t very pleasant either. He wanted to talk but my strange insecurities and paranoia were beginning to scratch at the back of my head. Jungkook was hesitating; he wanted to see what I would do in response. I watched him lick his lips repeatedly, as he did when he was nervous, and his lips parted slightly every couple of seconds as if to speak.
“I should probably go inside.” The words just left my mouth in a rush and I was up on my feet before I even had time to process them. Jungkook sighed at my words but didn’t make any movements to look at me on my feet. I was going to wait for a minute to see if he would but my anxiety decided against it. I bit my thumb and took a step to leave but Jungkook was quick to grab my arm and stop me. He held onto my wrist and looked up at me; he wore a stoical look on his face.
“Stay with me.” My face felt warm and my arm tensed in his soft grip. “I wanna talk with you for once.”
He smiled at me slightly and with a cute pleading look in his dark eyes. I pressed my lips together and removed myself from his hold. He stayed seated, giving me space so that I could make a choice.
“You won’t get much out of me Jungkook,” I warned him. He was willing to take anything he could from me so he nodded vigorously and excited. I was worried of what he wanted to talk about; what he would ask and what I would respond with.
“I’ll make it easy for you,” He said turning himself to sit facing me, still with his legs crossed. “I’ll only ask you five questions.”
“Three.” He pouted and I crossed my arms at him. He squinted his eyes seeing if there was anything he could come up with.
“Four.” He tried once again. He wanted me to agree to something and I was too tired to fight him on fewer questions.
“Fine four but I have the right to refuse to respond to any of the questions,” I said and he agreed, as long as I answered four questions before sunrise. “And you have to answer your own questions too.”
I sat down beside him once again, facing him like he was me, with our legs crossed and a bit of space between us. I ran my hands over the goosebumps on my arms and watched as Jungkook thought for his first question. His eyes quickly lit up and he looked back over to me with a smile on his face.
“What type of alcohol do you like to drink?” I laughed a bit and shook my head. That was a random question and not the kind I expected.
“Well, I drink on really rare occasions…” I started biting my lip while thinking back to the few times I have drunk any liquor. “I never drink anything without mixing it; I guess whiskey and coke.”
“Jack Daniels?” Jungkook asked and I simply nodded. He smiled a bit shyly as if he approve my answer. “I’m more of a gin type of drinker… Japanese gin is really good.”
I knew close to nothing about Jungkook. All of his friends were very different from each other and I didn’t know where he fit; he could be a straight A student or a complete blow off from school. He was difficult for me to read because he was like many people all at once. Every time I expect him to do one thing, he did the other.
“That’s one,” I said keeping count. He looked around us, towards the house, and back at me with the next question.
“In your last relationship, did y-”
“No.” I cut him off admittedly after hearing that first line. “Nothing about past relationships; I won’t answer those.”
He was a bit surprised by how serious my tone had changed. He stared me in the eyes, trying to see why I was so against it but he would get no answers.
“Okay. How about this?” He accepted but was to reword his question to fit my new rule. “How many people have you slept with, not including me?”
I hesitated to answer this question simply because it was a bit embarrassing and uncomfortable. Though, the idea of Jungkook answering it as well had me curious. “Not counting you: two.”
“Wow. Really?” I nodded and shifted uneasily. He stared at me like he didn’t believe me and I grew angry at the flustering I felt build on my cheeks.
“What?!” I bit at him when he wouldn’t quit eyeing me like an idiot.
“No, nothing.” He said quickly and chuckled. “I just thought the number would be larger.”
“Are you calling me a slut?!”
“No! No!” Jungkook put his hands up in defense. “It just seems like you’ve had a lot of experience. You’re really good in bed (Y/n)….”
He scratched the back of his neck and ruffled his hair awkwardly. My face was surely a shade of bright pink but thank god it was still too dark to fully notice.
“What about you?” I took in a deep breath, still refusing to make full eye contact with him. He grew a bit blushful as well, though I couldn’t see the color, I could tell by the way he looked down at the blanket and smiled away.
“Um…not including you,” Jungkook licked his lips and threw a glance my way. “Maybe 4 or 5 girls.”
I actually expected the number to be larger as well. Though this was the number of partners and not the number of times having sex. Regardless I hated this question and was glad it was done with.
“Next?”
“Would you sleep with any of my friends if you weren’t with me already?” Jungkook didn’t even take the time to come up with this one, and also seemed strangely serious while asking.
I would be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it. Of course, I would never do it but I did have a surprising dream about Jimin a couple nights back. But it was only because Bitsy had got into painfully great detail about his skills in bed. The rest of the boys were handsome but Jungkook was the only one I could see myself sleeping with at the end of the day. Jungkook would have to answer the same question about my friends. How would it look for me to no and for him to say yes?
“I mean, I wouldn’t cause of you but, they all are pretty good looking,” I said casually, hoping to not come off clingy to only him. I knew me saying no would do wonders to his ego regardless.
“Would you, though, if I weren’t here?” His voice had grown a bit lower and still weighty. “If I chose to not come with them this summer and you never met me?”
“Is that your fourth question?” I furrowed my eyebrows at him, he was obviously upset but why? He was pressing on his question for a full answer. “What are you really trying to ask me Jungkook?”
He looked away from me and his hands tensed up on his lap. I could see him gulp at his throat and things began to make sense.
“You want to know if I would do this with anyone else?” He wanted to know if he was different to me. If there was something more than just fucking for us. That was exactly what I wanted to stay away from.
I pushed myself off the ground and he followed. Jungkook looked angry like he was going to lunge at me. I turned away and he grabbed my arm keeping me in place.
“Where are you going?” He said holding me tightly.
“You’re out of questions.” I shook my arm from his grip and continued to walk away again.
Though, he grabbed my arm again, this time actually pulling me back.
“You didn’t answer.” He said through his teeth. He was holding me close and managed to put his other hand on me. “I have one more left.”
“Let go of me.” I hissed under my breath since he was so close to me now. Jungkook looked me straight in the eyes, the moon was hitting the side of his face making his eyes shine.
“Why are so scared to get so close to me?” I tried to release myself from his grip but he wouldn’t budge. His restraints made me irritated and weak in his arms.
“Who said I was scared?” His hands moved from my arms to my waist.
“Your body is,” Jungkook bit his lip, eyes studying down my body. “look how you squirm in my hands.”
My breath hitched in my throat, as he moved his face closer to me and smirked. His entire nature changed when he wanted it from me. His aura affected me deeply and made me become someone I didn’t recognize; someone needy, weak, and submissive. My heart started beating harder as his fingers dug into my waist. Jungkook’s eyes shuffled from my eyes down to my lips, wondering if he should dare close the gap between us. I wanted to kiss him so badly; I wanted him to kiss me like he did when he wanted to eat me up.
Before I opened my mouth to provoked him any further, he shut my lips with his. I shut my eyes tightly, hating to admit that his mouth captivated me to the point in which I could not break away from. His lips kissed me passionately and tasted of longing lust. His warm large hand cupped my cheek and the hand on my waist pulled me with him as we stepped back onto the blanket.
My music was still playing in my side pocket of my shorts. A Lonely Night by The Weeknd was playing softly in the background, along with the waves of the water and our panting breaths.
“I want you (Y/n).” Jungkook pulled my thighs on either side of his hips. He lowered himself onto the blanket with me straddling his lap. I gave in because I wanted to forget our previous conversation. So I quickly nodded and pulled his shirt over his head. I attached myself to his neck, running my tongue over the spots that made him groan. His hand was eager to slip into the front of my shorts; through the thin material of my underwear, he rubbed my core. His hand made me shudder as I pulled away from his neck to remove my sweater with no top under. The hand that wasn’t between my thighs ran up the back my leg to cup my ass and bring me closer to his crotch. He was quickly growing hard from under me and that stiffness was driving him crazy. The friction between our bodies was creating a lusting heat that ran through our blood and kept our hands on each other. Jungkook leaned me back to give himself more room to mess around with my clit. His two fingers dug into my folds and toyed with my sensitive skin to build up the wetness at my entrance. I moaned his name in a whiny tone as I fondled my own breasts through my bra. My nipples had gotten hard and sensitive while they brushed against the supporting cups. I could barely function with Jungkook touching me like this.
Though, I was becoming just as impatient as always. My hand ran down between us so that I could find the bulge growing in his joggers. I stroked him and felt him become hard as could be in my hand. I could feel the tip of his cock through the thin fabric and he wasn’t wearing any boxers. Jungkook struggled to move his fingers while I grabbed him; he grabbed my hand and brought it away from his crotch. I smirked at him but he covered it up by kissing me once again. I began to pant and whine against his lips as his fingers rubbed me at an incredible pace. My core began to miss the feeling of his skin rammed against mine. I bit his lips to stop the kiss and he opened his eyes at me; I begged him to hurry up before I lost my sanity. He grabbed my hands by the wrists and suddenly had me falling back onto the blanket. My hands were pinned above my head while Jungkook trailed wet kiss throughout my neck; his hips were grinding into my core making me lose my breath.
“Stop rushing into it.” Jungkook’s voice was breathy and deep and he continued to suck on the thin skin of my throat. His hips rocked into mine at an almost musical rhythm and made me groan each time I felt his dick pressing against my folds. “Let me be good to you.”
I whined because I could feel his hardness through our clothes and I swear I was dripping through my panties already. Jungkook moved up, giving me a small warning before letting go of my hands. He took his lips in mine and allowed his hands to roam the upper half of my body. The straps of my bra were pulled off my shoulders by his hands, slowly exploring the skin it landed over. His hot tongue brushed against mine in a calm manner, he wasn’t trying to dominate or challenge me. His soft hands ran up my sides and cupped my breasts through the bra he didn’t feel the need to take off just yet. I found myself giving in to his wishes and taking it at a slower pace. I let him warm up my body while I played with his hair like he loved so much. The dark locks were thin and soft in my touch and I gently dug my fingers into his scalp. Jungkook hummed in approval as he slowly kissed at my lips; I opened my eyes to find his flutter closed with his lips pouted pink. He noticed my lack of response and opened his eyes to find me looking at him puzzled. Something felt different about the way he kissed me and touched me. Jungkook merely gave me a small smile, his eyes shining brightly instead of being washed dark before moving his lips to my jaw.
Jungkook managed to undress us completely after a while of touching; by that time our bodies more than ready to start. The long waiting and exploring made every touch the more sensual and pleasurable. We hadn’t spoken much throughout our session but I feel like he had told me a lot more than I could understand just by his movements.
He had me sitting up, with my hand wrapped around his aching cock; I watched his breath shake and lips create groans while I stroked him. I grew to really enjoy and appreciate the way he reacted whenever I did something he liked. Jungkook caught me gawking and smiled shyly before leaning down to peck my lips. He groaned once again with his forehead pressed against mine as we both looked down at my working hand. His cock stood tall and my hand brushed against his abs every time I brought it up to his swollen tip. He was leaking pre-come like I was dripping arousal.
“Can I sit on it?” We both looked up at each other at the same time; his expression mirroring mine. A smile curled onto Jungkook’s lip before he bit down on it.
“Anything you want princess.”
His hands gripped my outer thighs as I moved over his lap; my hands ran over his shoulders, bringing myself closer to his figure. My core hovered over him and my legs shook in suspense as I could feel my wetness dripping down. He eased me down onto his cock, his tip pushed apart my tightening walls and made our bodies tense. My eyes were kept down below, my mouth watering as he disappeared inside me. My mouth gasped open when Jungkook suddenly pushed me down all the way. He groaned as I sat on his lap and my walls throbbed around him.
“Uhh… you’re so tight.” Jungkook whimpered under his breath. I pushed my hair away from my eyes to look up at him.
Just as I did, he leaned in to kiss me and pushed my waist into his torso. Grinding myself against him, slowly moving my hips in small figures. I shut my eyes as he hummed into our kiss and held me tightly.
I leaned up on my knees, bringing myself down on his length at a slower pace. Enjoying the way he spread my entrance and filled me up.
“You’re so big.” the words fell from my mouth as a small whine but I could feel his lips smiling on my cheek.
He rocked my hips and kiss down my neck, guiding me to take our time and savor the feeling. With every thrust, my core grew hotter and he was slipping in so easily.
“You don’t have to rush when you’re with me (Y/n).” He kissed my neck and looked up at me.
The words caught me off guard and had me feeling something less than comfort. My eyes closed when they began to water and I leaned my head over his shoulder so that he wouldn’t see me. I gripped onto his shoulders and quickened my pace. There was an ache that was distracting me from the pleasure and I just wanted to get it back. Jungkook gripped on my hips since I began to grow rougher. My chest pressed against his and my head leaned back.
“(Y/n) w-wait-” Jungkook struggled to speak because groans were escaping his mouth. We were both losing our breaths and the sound of our skin was filling the sky.
I felt him try to pull away so that he could look at me but I clung onto him not allowing it.
His body was hot and sticking against my skin. Cries were leaving my mouth as the pleasure began to numb any other thoughts in my head. Jungkook’s own drive began to control him as well and he no longer tried to slow me down. His breath was heating my skin and my body began trembled over him. My fingers were digging into the muscular skin of his back, making Jungkook hiss loudly. My stomach was turning like a fire was building up and wanted to break free. Jungkook’s own hips were bucking up to meet mine, adding to the satisfaction. Jungkook must have been getting close because he was trying to slow himself down. My lust was controlling me and had me yearning impatiently.
With all my strength I push Jungkook by his shoulders onto the blanket. He was caught off guard seeing me so dominating. I palmed his chest to pick up a steadier balance for my increased pace. Jungkook’s jaw was clenching, keeping in the grunts, and he could not keep his eyes off me. My name left his lips and his hands found mine on his chest. I leaned up, moving away from his intimate touch and leaving only our cores connected. My walls were becoming tight and juices were flowing out of my cunt. I rested my hands on my breasts and grinding my hips into him. His pelvic bone was rubbing my clit, making me cry out into the ocean night. I leaned my head back and gazed at the stars for a moment, watching them watch us. Jungkook’s hands ran up my thighs to grabbed my hips pounding into me from below. He was sending me so close to the edge and I began to shake from the inside out. He swiftly began to thumb my clit, lightly grazing figures against it. My body shook and curled over him, my nails drawing lines down his torso. My orgasm hit me hard, had me breathlessly trembling and bucking my hips. My throat had grown sore from all my yelling and all that came out were whines.
Jungkook was still slowly thrusting in out of me, he was holding my hips in place as he tried to reach his own climax. I pushed him away from me and kneeled between his open legs. He was startled as I took him into my hands to finish him off. I kept my eyes fixed on only his dick, watching how it was ready to release at any moment. Jungkook was stuttering words at me but I wasn’t listening. His abs tensed and flexed while he let out a deep groan, coming all over himself and my hand.
“Holy-fuck.” Jungkook’s hand wiped the sweat that dripped down his temples as he came down. “That was…different.”
I wiped my hand on the blanket we sat on; reaching behind me to find my clothes from before. I slipped my sweater over my head while Jungkook was trying to catch his breath. We glanced at each other, knowing the words he wanted to say. He watched me slip on my shorts and hold the rest of my belongings. I hated the way he looked at me after sex; he looked at me like I was breaking his bones.
“Isn’t this what you came for?” I spat at him and tossed my underwear to his lap; he laced his fingers around it, clenching it in his hand. “Only thing left is the sex now.”
I left him there on the beach; he was calling for me, but I continued walking to the house with the sun rising behind me. I slammed the door to my room, not caring if it woke anyone up; tears flowed down my cheeks and my hands pulled at my hair from the roots. The way he looked at me would not leave my head, the way he spoke and touched me. How could I have been such an idiot to not see what was forming in his eyes? I didn’t want to see that things were all beginning to go wrong. I wish he never looked at me that way. Jungkook had just destroyed any chance of us becoming anything less or anything more. Now flirts and fucks weren’t enough to feed what he was craving.
#bts#bts scenarios#bangtan#bangtan sonyeondan#bts fanfic#bts smut#bts jungkook#jeon jungkook#jungkook smut#bangtan smut#bangtan scenarios#bts v#bts jin#bts rap monster#bts jimin#bts j hope#bts suga#kpop#kpop scenarios#kpop smut#Summer Boy
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