#but as it turns out we got a dog yesterday and integrating him into the house is A Lot
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one day left! i didn’t have time or energy to do anything else but here’s a sketch that i’ll treat like one of those “like and reblog to take their clothes off!!” gimmick posts except idk… get throndir to 45% and i’ll finish this like a normal person, if he wins this round i’ll render every stretch mark on his body or something
vote… for throndir! it’s the dawn of the final day!
#throndirsweep#friends at the table#bear poll#throndir#my scribbles#usually i can’t even consider trying one of these types of posts because i’ve got no self control#and can’t wait for a number goal to do something i’d do on my own anyway#but as it turns out we got a dog yesterday and integrating him into the house is A Lot#his name is fig and he’s 5-8 years old and suspiciously perfect….#and i’m not a dog person (my partner wanted a second dog but… i like him)#i’m so tired though#good luck throndir#goodnight#to be clear i’m not under any delusions that he’ll win but it’s worth a try
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THE GUY WHO DIDN'T LIKE MUSICALS LYRIC STARTERS
feel free to change phrasing/pronouns as you see fit
“Musicals tell the impossible (impossible) They evoke the philosophical”
“Should we kill him?”
“What an ass! What a bitch! What a cuck!”
“The apotheosis is upon us”
“Where the fuck is he?”
“You gotta believe in something, [name], you piece of shit”
“[Name] you piece of shit”
“Sometimes I just wanna shout on top of roof and mountain tops”
“Yesterday is retroactive Got myself a new perspective”
“What the fuck was that?”
“I may not have a home but that's way okay”
“The world is my house, The dogs are my food”
“Uh, what's going on here?! I'm very confused and concerned by all this”
“Do you wanna save the planet?”
“What do you want, [name]? Tell me what you desire to see”
“So, what do you want, Paul? What's that one concrete goal that motivates all your actions?”
“I don't know, I want what anyone wants? Money, a partner? Kids, someday, maybe?”
“A man so vague just can't be trusted”
“D'you know what I want for myself? I've waited for so long to tell somebody else.”
“You're my muse, my source of light”
“[name] my love. I want you to choke me out at night”
“I want you to choke me while I jerk off”
“I'm gonna go get some coffee, do you want anything?”
“Get your cup of roasted coffee”
“Get your cup of poisoned coffee”
“You better empty out all of them pockets but don't empty out all of them pockets”
“Check your mirror, you'll find hell has arrived”
“Do the things I say, I'm a cop”
“Put in your mouth and suck it!”
“Oh, [name], please stop! I'm your wife, just talk to me, baby!”
“God, we were young once. Innocent and fun once and free”
“You tied up my heart, You tied me down”
“Now break me open with your love and mercy”
“[name], baby! Apple of my eye! Don't you trust me?”
“I've effed up, [name], effed up with you”
“Will you ever forgive me? I'll crawl on my hands and knees”
“Oh fuck, I'm fading fast, I think you better come quick”
“I really don't wanna die alone in here. Time to say our goodbyes at the end of the road”
“This body's not gonna last, the air is cold and thick”
“You brought me back from the dead, [name]!”
“The time for chaos is long past overdue”
“Death isn't optional in fact it’s optimal”
“Join us and die”
“We're gonna kick your ass and then we're gonna Fucking kick your ass”
“I'm not your girl anymore”
“You left me out of your sight for one second and look what happens, nightmare time”
“No matter what you believe The apple's fallen far from the tree”
“It's not my fault anymore”
“Did you know that I wanted to live with you?
“Why does it hurt to love you? Why am I in pain?”
“If I turned my insides out, would you even know that I was there?”
“A show stoppin' number is something you die for”
“This song's pretty good, huh? I bet you didn't know I was also a composer”
“I've also been writing my own musical…Do you mind if I give you the pitch?”
“But those glory days, they're gone for good…Or are they?”
“Business calls, I'm up to my ass in shit. What is this business?”
“Last weekend feels like ages ago”
“I can't wait to get home to my boys”
“Come on, [name] We've got some catching up to do”
“There's only room for right and wrong”
“You can't run”
“You're staring down the gun 'Cause you're easily disposed”
“Did you hear the word?”
“Is your heart so damp and bleak that you won’t give us a peek of your soul?”
“There's a voice inside of you on the edge of coming through”
“Am I dead? I’m coming apart at the seams!”
“I’ve never been happy wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Is my integrity worth anything at all?”
“Am I crazy? Maybe I’ve always been”
“What if I told you I made it and this is the life that I chose?”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Don't you want to see me happy? Is it so tragically wrong?”
“We must go on with the show it's inevitable”
“I found my calling you can do the same now”
#roleplay meme#rp memes#rp starters#roleplay starter#roleplay prompts#sentence meme#sentence starter meme#sentence starters#lyric starters#rp prompt#musical starters#the hatchetfield series#starkid#the guy who didn't like musicals#if this gets enough traction I’ll do Black Friday and NPMD
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In all of our study are we actually learning of Jesus?
Are we developing a heart of Christ?
Below you'll find the heart that is full of the "Mind of Christ" displayed. Ask yourself, are we hearing a true Gospel or just a husk of Christ's glory?
Here is an inside look into Urban Mission work reported by my son Pastor Eric.
"Any man can cultivate having the heart of a father.
Reaching out and showing care and concern to kids that don’t have, or are separated from, a healthy father is critically important today.
I witness the power of purposeful attention and loving recognition of a child every time I step inside the Union Gospel Mission Crisis Shelter for Women and Children.
I saw this yesterday when we were transporting 7 moms and four kids from the Shelter to our Church on Sunday.
There’s a few different looks on a child’s face when I encounter them.
One is a hesitant distance in the eyes and body language.
It’s a skittish demeanor resulting from the lack of consistent contact with a safe, gentle and touchable man.
It’s part ignoring, part distaste and part ignorance.
It’s a difficult posture to overcome, but it slowly yields to proximity, opportunity and consistency.
The other is hunger, longing, memory and need.
It’s noticeable in the eyes first.
I walk in and many eyes turn to me.
Like little birds in a nest heart-mouths open.
Chatter begins. Faces then hands then hearts.
Closeness happens, smiles dawn, shadows flee and laughter sparks.
Sometimes it’s just calm, like a dog that turns over on its back revealing its belly in an act of surrendered vulnerability.
Sometimes it’s gentle confidences and trust exhibited by a willingness to talk or look you in the eyes.
Sometimes they will reach out to be held.
Yesterday one of these little boys got secured in a car seat in the van and the mom was making sure he was good.
She then grabbed her baby and was heading for the second car we had for transport.
I was surprised since this was their first ride to an unknown place and I thought he might be scared without mom close by him.
She assured me he wouldn’t and that he didn’t have separation anxiety because…they hadn’t been living together for awhile.
He was comfortable being alone and away from her.
I didn’t quite know how to process that quick explanation. It landed in my mind as an understandable explanation, but as it moved down into my heart it took on a sadness of realization.
Separation is a common reality in the chaos of life lived in these struggles and hardships.
I purposefully reassured him, gave him supportive compliments about his big-boyness and watched him as I facilitated moms, car seats, babies and all that comes with trying to get them all in a van.
As we travelled he was quiet, looking out the window. The only thing he said was “That’s my day care!” when we passed it on the way to our church.
We got there, he jumped out and reunited with mom and integrated into the kids program of the day easily and enthusiastically.
As I was dropping them off at the shelter after church I gave him a fist bump and told him I was amazed at how good he was.
His mom told me that he said he had fun and was coming back tomorrow.
My heart ached a bit realizing he thought it was going to be an every day joy.
Thankfully his mom has entered the long term program and our ability to continue our connections will grow.
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Hey, Little Songbird
Chapter 15 - AO3
If asked, Felix would deny it.
No one did, of course. His classmates rarely spoke to him, and the day after the spray pain incident, Marinette was still giving him the silent treatment. It did put a damper on his plans, and it wasn’t like he wasn’t used to silence.
So really, he didn’t need her at all.
Cesaire was the last one in before the morning bell rang, much to everyone’s surprise. The class gossips—not that he wanted to listen—had claimed that the girl was suspended for sure. She hesitated before sitting down, staring up at the back of the class over her shoulder with an expression of longing. But the final bell rang and Cesaire sat, sitting next to her boyfriend.
In full view of those above them, Rossi placed a hand on Cesaire’s shoulder, a calculated consolation, only for Cesaire to move before they could touch. Whatever Rossi said clearly set Cesaire off, the recent akuma snapping at the girl, though they were quiet enough that Felix couldn’t hear them.
At least, they were quiet until Rossi immitted a siren-like wail.
“Alya!” Rossi sobbed, drawing out Alya’s name into an irritatingly high pitch. Her face was dry. “How could you say that!?”
The Class’s attention was immediately drawn to the confrontation as they jumped to Rossi’s defence. Although, not everyone. The redheaded boy kept his head down, and the short blonde looked away.
“Alya, what did you do!?”
“Are you bullying Lila?”
“You should apologize!”
Cesaire’s eyes flickered around the room as the class berated her. They landed on the ack and Cesaire straightened. She spoke loud enough for the class to hear her. “I was willing to keep this between us, but since you want this to be public, Lila, that’s fine. The fact that you got out of your detentions by saying that you were volunteering after school all week is extremely manipulative and exactly like Chloe.”
There were gasps all around, some horrified that Rossi would do such a thing, others shocked that Cesaire would ever say anything bad about their precious Lila.
Rossi’s voice hitched. “H-How—” her voice warbled—“How could you say that, Alya? I had already made those plans before you stole Felix’s project!”
“Don’t act like I worked alone,” Alya said. “I may have been the one to steal the project—which I plan to apologize for doing—but you were the one to say it was made from your notes. Not only did you know I was going to steal it—”
“I didn’t know!” Rossi tried to protest.
“—But you encouraged me!”
I didn’t!” Rossi whined, her voice hitting a pitch only known to dogs. “B-Besides, after yesterday, everyone knows who’s really to blame. Since you painted Marinette’s locker.” Marinette froze beside him.
“Then why am I not suspended?” Alya shot back. “It wouldn’t be the first time this school gave me a hasty suspension, so why am I free?” Her eyes narrowed. “I had evidence that I wasn’t the culprit, so they couldn’t touch me. Where’s your evidence?”
Marinette looked startled, like the idea of asking for evidence was foreign to her. Or perhaps, it was the fact that Cesaire was the one asking for evidence. Together, they watched the back and forth until Mme. Bustier finally entered the room and broke the argument up. Pity, it was just starting to be amusing.
“Alright, that’s enough!” Bustier said. “Alya, since I clearly can’t trust you to be mature, I’m going to move you to the back of the class today. Hopefully you can behave tomorrow and earn your seat back.”
Felix cocked an eyebrow. Cesaire looked utterly betrayed by the teacher, but obeyed, moving to the bench next to his and Marinette’s with little fuss. Shockingly little, all things considered.
It became clear when Cesaire whispered in the middle of the first lecture of the day, “I’m sorry.” Felix could barely hear her from the other side of Marinette.
“What?” Marinette turned to her.
“I’m sorry I’ve been such a bad friend, girl.” Cesaire looked truly ashamed. “I… I should have seen that Lila was lying. I should have at least investigated when you told me something was up, but I just… didn’t. I was so invested in her lies and having an interview with ‘Ladybug’s best friend’ on my blog that I… I lost my integrity. And even worse, I dismissed you and how you felt because I thought I knew better. I’m sorry, Marinette.”
Marinette swallowed, her fists clenched. “Thank you, Alya. This really means a lot to me.” Cesaire perked up. “But… I don’t think I can forgive you right away. I believe you when you say you didn’t destroy my locker—” She glanced at Felix—“But that doesn’t mean you haven’t done things similarly horrible.”
Cesaire nodded, disappointed but understanding. “I know. And I’ll work hard to regain your trust in me. Which is why I’m going to expose Lila as the liar she is.”
Felix was surprised; he didn’t necessarily expect Cesaire to take Adrien’s ‘high road’ approach, but no hesitancy… And Marinette… nodded. “Yeah. Do you want to work on a plan after school today?”
“Y-Yeah. I’d really like that, Mari.”
Felix stifled a smile as the two friends—because they were on the track to recovering their friendship now, just try to stop them, Rossi—made up. He felt pretty good about himself until the lunch bell rang and Marinette dragged him out the door and out of school, a hard expression on her face.
They were at the side of the school, where there were no students. Felix tried not to let his nervousness show. “How rough, Dupain-Cheng. Whatever are you trying to do to me, away from prying eyes—"
“Shut up.” Felix shut up. “Felix, you… Did you keep Alya from getting in trouble?”
“What do you mean?”
“It was pretty much a given that Alya was going to get suspended because of your frame job. Yet she’s here, sending you glances all throughout class.”
“Perhaps she’s attracted to me? I’ve heard I have the face of a model.” He was not confessing this, no way. He had a reputation to keep.
“And what would Alya say? If I asked her next time we were in class.”
“She…” Damn her, she had him cornered. If she asked during class, at least some of the others would overhear, and then people would have expectations. “She would mention that there was an anonymous phone call from a potential donor for the school that reminded the principal that the locker room doesn’t have working cameras and that students have framed each other for crimes in the past. Wouldn’t it be so disappointing that the school board found out that the money that went to security cameras wasn’t used at this school?”
“The principal is embezzling funds?”
“I suspect he’s embezzling funds. But given that he immediately agreed with me and rescinded Cesaire’s suspension, my suspicion is right on the money.”
“That almost makes too much sense… No,” she shook her head. “That’s not what I wanted to talk about. Felix, have you ever had friends before?”
“Excuse me!?” What was she accusing him of!?
“Because you act like I’m the first person you’ve ever made friends with.”
“H-How dare you!? Accusing me of being some sort of… some sort of friendless wretch!” He huffed. “I might not be my cousin, but I’ve certainly had a friend before!”
“Adrien doesn’t count, Felix. He’s family, not a friend.”
“Well, I—” The nerve of this girl! “What does it matter anyway?”
“Well, I just figured… you wouldn’t have done that if you had more experience with friendships. Or experience with people your own age. Because what you did was not okay. However, you understand that now, right?”
“…I do.”
“And you tried to make up for it, right?”
“…I did.”
“Then it wouldn’t be too much to ask if you followed my plan for rehabilitation?”
Rehabilitation? What did she think he was, a dog? “And why,” he sneered, “Would I do that?”
She looked disappointed and his heart twinged. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. But Felix… I can’t be friends with someone who does cruel things for their own benefit. The world doesn’t need more than one Chloe.”
Had he… been acting like Bourgeois? Surely not, she’d never do her own dirty work. But… vandalizing a locker did seem like something she’d order, even if it wasn’t for the benevolent reasons Felix had. And… he really didn’t want to lose Marinette.
“Very well,” he said snidely in an effort to distract from his lightly flushed skin. “I’ll play along. Let’s be friends.”
Taglist: @graduatedmelon @novicevoice @dur55 @kris-pines04 @18-fandoms-unite-08 @moonlightstar64 @bee-a-garbage-shipper @sol-o-shade @kittyotakunoir666 @tinyterror333 @allieoftheenemy @marichat00 @xgxmxtx @two-faced-biatch @feliciakainzofspades @evil-cricket @emilytopaz @spicybelladonna @chocolateherringtacofan @user00000003 @wannajointhecrabcult @happymonster-pants @duquesapincarrasca @throneoffirebreathingbitchqueen @sxltinette @kittydemon9000 @thetrashypanda423
#hey little songbird#felinette#felix graham de vanily#marinette dupain cheng#alya sugar#alya cesaire#ml salt#lila salt#miraculous ladybug#mlb
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All The Things She Said
Pairing: Lana Winters x Reader
Part | 1 2
Thank you for all the love! Requests are open :D
Lana dropped her head in her hand and rubbed her temples and you felt your face go red. Your group of friends on the other side of the room, who you thankfully had not informed of the night before, laughed at your embarrassment.
Attempting to diffuse the tension, Lana approached the three of you with textbooks. "Take these," she said, her glare went straight through you. "And please don't be late to my class again."
You could feel the skin under your necklace burn as your hands made contact while she passed you the books. You could tell she felt something too when her face flinched slightly. There was something different about her.
She was wearing her wedding ring.
Lana noticed that you had seen it. "Stay behind after class."
The three of you took your seat at the back row, and you did your best not to look up during as much of the lesson as possible, resorting to taking notes from the book. Your face burned with the anticipation of Lana's confrontation. You had borderline lied to her about something that could risk the integrity of her career and her reputation. The guilt almost sickened you to your stomach and your friends could sense it.
"You gotta keep calm," Emmett whispered to you, knocking his knee against yours to tell you to stop bounding your leg. You peaked up for the first time in the lesson while the others were taking notes. Lana averted her glance as soon as you did so. "She's been looking up at you every time she gets a moment."
You rubbed your forehead with two fingers and peeled your necklace from under your shirt. It was white-hot. "What the fuck?" You muttered to yourself, getting Emmett's attention.
"I didn't know you had one of those," he said. "Maybe it means that its pair is close by-" Emmett stopped himself and looked from you to Lana.
The bell rang before he had a chance to finish himself. "We'll wait for you in the cafeteria."
The class filed themselves out as you remained in your chair, Heather gave you a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder as she left.
You watched Lana smile at your classmates as she crossed the room back to her desk. The suspense was killing you.
Finally, Lana stood up again and sat on her desk, folding her arms, and staring right at you. "Come over here, please," she said, darting her eyes to the floor.
You followed her instructions and sat at the desk opposite.
Lana played with a pendant on her necklace as she seemed to gather the words to use.
"Do you understand the severity of what happened last night, and why we can't go through with tonight's plan?" she asked after a moment of silence, her whiskey brown eyes finally meeting yours.
"Because you're married?" You replied, slightly meaner than you intended to sound. Lana's eyes look inflicted by your comment.
She took off her ring and laid it on the desk. "You lied to me. You told me you weren't younger than twenty-one and Jesus Christ, why did I want to believe you so bad?" She put her head in her hand and for a moment you were unaware if she was talking to you or herself.
"No, I didn't," you replied. Technically. "I told you that a lot of people think I'm younger than twenty-one. I'm eighteen."
Lana took a minute to regain her composure. "Y/N, I think you're an amazing, beautiful, incredibly funny and smart young lady and I would love to have gone on with whatever we had started. Though, at the end I am still your teacher and you're still my student. That's like fifty shades of illegal," she said. Her eyes were trained on the ground now as she straightened her back.
Your necklace was beginning to burn your fingers now and you could see Lana was rubbing her chest. You stepped closer to her as she backed against her table and put your hand under hers.
But I thought she didn't wear her necklace?
Her necklace was hot too. You pulled her necklace from under her blouse and inspected it. In that moment you finally felt like you were able to one-up even Aria Montgomery.
"Does that mean-?"
You rubbed your temples. "Good golly, this is going to cause the worst migraine ever."
Lana looked visibly stressed too. "Surely there's a mistake, right?"
You stared at her hard. "Soul necklaces have never made a mistake in the history of their goddamn existence, Lana!"
The teacher groaned. "The only reason I put this on was because last night you reminded me that I actually had one and I wanted to throw it in my husband's face that there's someone else better than him-" she stopped herself in her rant to inhale hard "-even though that's not too fucking hard. I did not. In a million years. Put this on to match with one of my students."
"How about the chick who tried to pick you up in a bar, then. Would you have wanted to match with her?"
Lana looked like she was about to strangle you, and you weren't necessarily opposed to that. "Y/N, please for the love of God don't make this harder for me. I've been thinking about you since I got home last night." You could see tears in her eyes and a pang of guilt hit you hard.
You walked to the door, peered down the hallway to make sure it was empty and closed the door.
"Lana-"
"Ms. Winters."
"Way to remove the power dynamic," you muttered sarcastically. Lana tried to hide a blushing smile. "I have six months left. I can pretend you're just my teacher and you can pretend I'm just your favourite student of all time."
Lana bit her lip. "You're still flirting with me? You looked like a deer in headlights when you walked in."
You felt your face glow red in embarrassment. "I thought I was gonna pass out."
That much was true. When it had finally hit you that Lana was your new French teacher you had felt a weight on your heart like never before.
"So, sixth months of pretending. I think I can cope with that," Lana said. She was less stressed now. Well, from whatever relief the conversation had provided.
You nodded and peeked through the window by the door. The hallway was clear. You turned back to face Lana and took a step towards her. The teacher could sense her apprehension as you laid a hand on her cheek and pulled her close to you.
You looked up into her eyes and waited for her cue. She nodded, her eyes locked with yours before they shut and lent in. Her lips pressed against yours and her hands curled in your hair as you worked to deepen the kiss. Lana backed right onto the desk until she was sitting right on it, one of your hands reached down to grab her thigh and pull it to your waist.
Her hands dropped to the back of your neck. You were bewildered. How could something be so wrong yet feel so right? This went against almost every moral code you had with your teachers. You were a model student and now here you between a teacher's legs.
Lana pulled away abruptly. "I don't want to go further than kissing while you're still in school," she whispered.
You smirked. "Please. You didn't even plan on kissing back, did you?"
Lana shook her head as she shuffled off the desk and grabbed her bag from the chair.
You had never seen anyone jump as high as Lana Winters did when Emmett banged the door open.
"Mother of Jesus in a tank. Can't either of you be gentle with the doors in this school?!" She exclaimed. "You'll give me a heart attack one of these days."
"Sorry, Ms. Winters," Emmett muttered. He stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. "I won't stay for long. I also just wanted to say that you don't need to worry about Heather and I saying anything, because we won't. But Heather is also getting impatient and wants to know if you need a lift home."
You shook your head. "I'll be a few minutes. I can walk home but tell her I said thank you."
Emmett gave a thumbs up and left.
"It's raining cats and dogs outside," Lana said. "You'll catch your death of cold."
"I'm a fast runner, Ms. Winters."
Lana shook her head. "What kind of person would I be if I let my favourite student walk home in the rain, hm?" She held up her keys and headed to the door.
You walked behind her while she informed a superior that she was driving you home. Child protection policy and whatnot. Ironic.
Lana sat in the driver's seat and blasted the heat.
"What's your address?" She asked, booting up the sat nav. You recalled her saying that she had only recently moved to this city.
"Sixteen Eli Boulevard," you replied, checking a message from your mom. She was making Carbonara for dinner.
Lana stopped. "You're kidding, right?"
"Are you being serious right now? Why would I kid about where I live?"
Lana pursed her lips and laughed. "I just moved into that neighbourhood yesterday."
Well, that was convenient.
"So, I can be expecting a lot more car rides with you, Ms. Winters?"
Lana cocked her head at you and frowned as she began driving. "Can we establish some ground rules? Like no flirting on school grounds? We can't afford for that to happen again."
You nodded in slightly disappointed agreement.
"In school, at least."
You paused, turning to take in the view of the mountain that sat beside your small town. You never seized to be amazed at that view.
“Can we reschedule our date? I know a place outside of town,” you say. Lana squeezed her eyebrows hard in thought.
“How far out of town are we talking?”
“An hour or so on the train. Give or take.”
Lana stopped the car outside your drive. “I can do Saturday.”
Perfect.
You heaved yourself out of her car and gave her hand a squeeze. It was the closest thing to a kiss you could manage.
What on Earth am I doing to myself.
taglist: @its-soph-xx @delias-bitch-craft @sarahpaulsonsoftie @jumpoffabridge-t @coffee-is-below-my-standards @definitelynot-a-writer @bottom4delia
#lana winters#lana winters x reader#ahs#ahs imagines#sarah paulson#billie dean howard#billie dean howard x reader#sally mckenna#sally mckenna x reader#cordelia goode#cordelia goode x reader#foxxay#ahs murder house#ahs coven#ahs asylum
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Day 60:
Two month mark aaaayyyyyyy! I’m mentally 90% clear from my delightful trauma concerns which is very very nice. Feeling like more of a team with Sham. At this point my general consensus about him is that he’s a non-reactive pretty social dog. Can be nervous on first greetings, just slow moving and cautious, but as soon as he determines a person or dog is friendly he turns in to a chaotic social butterfly. With people his manners are pretty good at this point, doesn’t jump up on you unless you’re actively engaging him in that sort of play and he may jump up if you have a particularly smelly plate but he won’t touch you, just stand up a distance away. His prey drive is a little bit bonkers at the moment but is looking like he’ll be decently easy to work with in that regard once we get the foundations more settled. He bounces back from fearful experiences well but any desensitization and counter conditioning fear methods need to be taken extremely slow. Overall just a dopey puppy trying to figure out what’s safe about city living.
We’re on to full high protein kibble and adding a smidge bit of the freeze dried raw now. He’s LOVING it eating meals faster than I’ve ever seen him do. Morning routine is excellent with letting him out to pee and him bringing himself back inside, comfortable with the door closing, and getting breakfast afterwards.
Got a good look at this incision today and it’s looking perfectly healthy and starting to heal up. Not feeling too bad about having him jog around a little bit in the back yard. His last dose of pain meds was yesterday so we’ll see how much moving he actually wants to do once that wears off. We got most of the energy out before the meds should’ve worn off so he was passed out the rest of the evening.
Got a good round of coming back inside outside of meal times. Trying to break that connection where he thinks coming inside = play time over. So I stood on the porch and waited for him to come up the stairs, give a treat then throw a toy back to the yard. Gradually moving until we were coming inside and doing the same thing. Took a long while but he did start gaining enthusiasm for the game.
Did a tiny bit of recall outside just for the consistency and practice. He was very speedy and responsive even with a neighbour dog barking it’s head off. Very happy with that!
Did a tiny bit of fetch in the yard, slooooooowly understanding the concept 😂 he’s having fun though.
Integration going good. Yoshi got many smooches through the gate again and she didn’t seem to mind. She’s been so confident going nose to nose today! The only bit of fear I saw was when his cone got caught on the gate and made a massively loud sudden bang. Even with that she just looked at him, took a half step back to sniff the cone then went back to their sniff.
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Witches, Chapter 26: back in the courtroom, and everything’s coming up as a shitshow, which is honestly how it always goes. Welcome to hell, Athena.
The second trial day of Themis is one of my favorites because there’s both Blackquill being entirely done with everything, and him showing for the first time that he’s got a bit of a heart left. Good shit.
[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]
[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]
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Juniper sits on the lobby couch, her hands cradling a lone large sunflower that Athena brought her, watching Athena interrupt her pacing with jumping jacks. “Shouldn’t you take it easy, Thena?” she asks. She was rather green about ten minutes ago, but assured them that it was just the iron and stress of jail that left her that way, and that she would look properly human by the time she would stand before the judge and gallery. And in the elapsed time her skin has settled in its hue, if paler than she was yesterday, her fear still apparent.
Athena whirls around with a wild glint in her eyes. The tired bags beneath them accentuate her crazed appearance. “I’m taking it easy! I’m fine! I’ve gotta get - be - ready to go!” She jogs in place; she hasn’t had both feet on the floor since she arrived.
“Did you get enough sleep last night?” Apollo asks, knowing the answer is no.
“Sleep? Huh?” Athena finally stops moving. “Yeah, sleep! Yeah I totally sleep! I’m fine!”
She sounds like him on his worst days. “That’s not exactly what I asked,” he says. Juniper stares back down into the center of the sunflower. “Maybe let’s just drop it. We’re not inspiring much faith in our client.”
“No,” Juniper says. She looks up. “I have complete faith in you, Thena.”
“O-oh.” From Athena’s face, she’s wondering if that faith is warranted. Apollo will make sure that it is. For both the girls’ sakes.
“Guten Morgen.” All three of them jump. Klavier chuckles. “Ready to put on a show?”
“Do you have anything about the tape?” Apollo asks. Despite his best efforts, he had found himself wondering when this was all going to come crashing down - if somehow Prosecutor Blackquill would find out and put a stop to it, or if somehow it couldn’t even be proven that the tape was fabricated—
“And not even a ‘hello’ to start with!” Klavier says, still cheerily; he can’t really have expected anything else from Apollo, could he? There’s a trial starting in fifteen minutes and Apollo doesn’t know anymore who he thinks is the killer. “A bit rude, don’t you think? And nonetheless, I have a good-luck present to you both.”
“Guten Morgen, Prosecutor Gavin!” How did Apollo end up stuck with two people like this? Apollo’s probably more fluent in Khura’inese than they are in German (and for Athena, Spanish or Italian or French…), but he doesn’t go around flaunting it like he’s so worldly and cultured. (And he wouldn’t do that even if Khura’in wasn’t something he wishes he would forget.) “Do you have something for us?”
“Of course I do, Fräulein. I could hardly just leave one as lovely as yourself hanging, now could I?” Apollo rolls his eyes, hoping Klavier sees it. Klavier offers to Athena a small stack of papers. “There you are. A summary of the voiceprint analysis, proving that the voice in the tape is most assuredly, exactly the same clip as spoken in the mock trial.” Athena rifles through the pages. “You’ll also notice that there’s still analysis ongoing - hoping to discover what was originally on the tape before it was turned into fabricated evidence. It might give us some other clues, ja? But unfortunately we don’t know much more at this point than the length of the prior recording.”
“Well, maybe that could still help out, somehow,” Athena says. “Thank you! And—” She frowns. “Is this a second copy of the same thing? Wait, this one’s got more information about—”
“About the logistics of the analysis and who precisely down at the precinct was working it,” Klavier interrupts. “That packet is for Herr Samurai. I did not think you would appreciate me tipping your hand to him beforehand, but I imagined there might be more that Herr Prosecutor would like to know to be sure that you are not the ones inventing this wholecloth.”
Klavier made the same warning yesterday when they first discussed this. “Do you think he would?” Apollo asks. “Accuse us of that?”
“Hm.” Klavier considers the question for longer than Apollo would like, idly snapping his fingers. Athena retreats to the couch to discuss their new evidence with Juniper. “Truly, I do not imagine so. He plays a very threatening game, but when it comes to it he seems quite reasonable.”
Apollo thinks about Mayor Tenma’s trial, Blackquill’s dirty tricks that nearly forced the mayor into a false confession. “You and I have different standards of reasonable,” he says. Maybe he means relatively reasonable, that there’s so many other prosecutors who are even worse.
“Perhaps,” Klavier agrees, “but Herr Samurai could be the most reasonable man and I would nonetheless leave you with this document trail.” His eyes, stormy blue and unwavering in their hue this entire conversation, but Apollo doesn’t remember whether or not this color is the Sight, harden. “I would hate to see your integrity as a lawyer called into question, especially over evidence that I offered you as assistance.” His jaw tightens, thinking, no doubt, of what Apollo has continued to think about since he arrived at Themis. With Phoenix.
This also seems like the most emotionally honest Klavier has been all week. “Thanks,” Apollo says. “I—”
—appreciate it, the sentence means to end, but movement behind Klavier catches Apollo’s eye, and the doors that lead out into the hall thump suddenly shut. “Hey!” Apollo calls. “Who’s—”
“What’s going on?” Athena asks. “Who’s there, did you see?”
“I don’t know,” Apollo says. “It might have been Hugh.” He thinks he saw a bit of the dark blue of the Themis uniform there. “Eavesdropping to figure out our strategy, no doubt.”
“I would expect him not to be the only one,” Klavier says, glancing back over his shoulder. “The cardboard paparazzi and the prosecutor Fräulein are rather nosy themselves, wouldn’t you agree? I’ll go chase them down and make sure they cause no further trouble for you.” He flashes a casual grin, as light and easygoing as he ever tries to be, but it is undercut for Apollo, and Apollo alone; Vongole materializes from the air next to him, red ears pricked and nose pointed at the door, her head held level with her shoulders. A creature ready to stalk, ready to hunt, to pounce, and Klavier barely turns for the doors and she springs, plunging through the door like it’s just a projection. But Klavier, when he gets to the door, without much haste, has to open it, reminding Apollo that it’s Vongole who doesn’t adhere to the physical world, not the door.
What’s she going to do, herd the wayward Themis students back around toward Klavier? Can she even do that if they can’t see her? Can she make them see her? God, Apollo hopes that corralling them is all she’ll do; Klavier’s got control over that hellhound, right? He does, Apollo’s seen that. No need to worry about that. Focus on the case.
(Apollo’s still going to worry about that.)
“Apollo, you ready?” Athena asks.
“Yes!” Focus on the moment, the evidence, the trial. Forget Klavier and his haunted dog. “I’m Apollo Justice and I’m fine!” He feels better already, and a shaky grin draws across Athena’s face. “Okay, your turn. Ready?”
“I’m Athena Cykes! And I’m fine!”
-
“Ms Newman and Mr O’Conner have recanted their confessions made before yesterday’s adjournment, but you may expect, Your Baldness, to see them again in this courtroom, as I intend later to determine if they should be charged with perjury.”
Apollo has come to think that most of Blackquill’s lauded so-called psychological manipulations are really just brute intimidation that he pretends has more finesse than he actually does. Despite that, the question he finds himself with now is whether or not Blackquill is in as cheery of a mood as he is acting, grinning as he catches the court up on all that has progressed on the prosecution’s side of things. “Ms Woods likewise attempted to recant her confession, claiming it was made in the heat of the moment to” - he rolls his eyes, as if the disdain dripping through his voice wasn’t already making his opinion on the matter clear, and Athena’s expression hardens - “protect her friends, but given that she is already and continues to be the one on trial, that changes little of our situation.”
She did confess, didn’t she? In the midst of Robin yelling and Hugh interrupting, Juniper confessed too, trying to stop her friends from ruining their lives for her. And if he presumes Juniper is innocent, which he has to, because she’s their client, then that means when she confessed to murder, she lied; plainly and wholeheartedly, she lied. Which means that even someone half-fae can lie.
“Very well,” the judge says. “And the photograph submitted yesterday of the victim and the defendant together minutes before the—”
“Unfortunately, we will find that evidence no longer relevant,” Blackquill interrupts. He is still smirking, even while forced to refute the hand he played yesterday. If this is an act, to unnerve Apollo, it’s working. Or if he’s genuinely amused, then it’s probably because he’s got something new up his sleeve that makes him not concerned with all the ways his case collapsed yesterday. “The art room clock runs fast and will not give us an accurate measure of the time. ‘Tis a pity for our time to have been wasted as such, but the bungling oaf of a detective responsible for overlooking this fact will assuredly be paying for his failure.”
Athena winces. “Poor Fulbright,” she whispers.
Is Blackquill angry that he thinks Fulbright should have seen it - or is it misplaced anger, Blackquill sure that he would have noticed had he been on the scene investigating and angry that he has to rely on Fulbright, instead. (Is that why they keep spotting traces of Taka around? Blackquill thinking he can’t trust the observation skills of the detective? Taka didn’t notice the clock, either, for whatever that’s worth. Probably not easy for the bird to get into a building. How does it get out of jail?)
“Now,” Blackquill says sharply, and the flashes of mirth he showed a minute ago have vanished. “Today, I intend to prove to you that the accused is the only person who could have moved the body. And to that end, the prosecution calls its first witness.”
-
Hugh O’Conner did assure Athena that he would be testifying today, and true to that word, he takes the witness stand first. His claim is that he saw Juniper moving the high-jump mat that would’ve been needed to move the body without bruising it; he claims to have seen this from a vantage point that would have been impossible, until Blackquill obliquely reminds them of the crane that was present the night of the murder, as involved in the stage setup. This makes sense - the weird thing about it isn’t the statement itself, but Hugh’s reaction to it. He looks pained, clutching the side of his neck in a way Apollo has come to notice him doing each time he is stressed and struggling to regain his footing in an argument.
“That’s - you’ve said enough, Prosecutor Blackquill!” Is Hugh trying to plead with him or threaten him? Neither, Apollo thinks, is liable to work. “You promised!”
Blackquill laughs, a harsh sound from the back of his throat. “Did I?” he asks. “I recall nothing of the sort. What I do recall is that you came to me blubbering about making a deal that I would keep quiet in exchange for information, but you should have taken care to extract that promise for me before you went ahead and offered me your every secret like a blithering fool.”
Blackquill has a way with words that leaves Apollo incredibly worried about the fates of everyone who is in any way involved with him. Like he’s just waiting for the opportunity to snatch away the souls of anyone who isn’t careful who dares speak with him. Is that part of who he is - what he is - or is it one of his actual psychological manipulations? And is it the witness he means to scare with his phrasing, or the defense?
“Ah, well, if Golden Boy will not take the chance to lift the weight of truth from his shoulders, then I will tell you,” Blackquill says. Hugh, with his hand still clapped tight to his neck like he’s trying to staunch the flow from a wound, makes a kind of undignified whimpering sound. “He was up in that crane, and not simply mucking about there for fun. He does, rather, work part-time as a crane operator.”
“A high school student!” the judge exclaims. “Operating a crane!”
“No!” Hugh snaps. “The prosecution - there’s no proof that I was operating the crane! The prosecution might be lying!”
Blackquill laughs, and makes no move to argue. “I don’t know where this is going,” Athena says in a low voice, “because this is the point that Prosecutor Blackquill wants to make, but…” Louder, she adds, her voice ringing across the courtroom, “I bet we can prove it was you.”
Which they do, for whatever good it may or may not be about to do them, and the judge is still hung up on a high schooler operating a crane, rather than what Hugh would or wouldn’t be able to see from the vantage point of the crane, but Hugh splutters and protests about how brilliant and talented he is and that’s why. Blackquill watches him, smirking, waiting for his failure of an argument to trail away into nothingness. Hugh goes silent halfway through saying something about practicing archery one-handed, and Blackquill’s smirk splits open into a grin. “Dispense with this inane charade, Golden Boy.” He doesn’t wait for Hugh’s response and continues speaking over the witness’ begging. “Now, we will establish, for the sake of argument, that the age range of high school seniors ends at the upper limit of nineteen - still, legally, too young to operate heavy machinery. That, however, does not apply to Mr O’Conner, does it, now?”
“But he is a high school senior,” Athena says. “Are you saying he’s not around that age?”
Blackquill slams his palm on the bench. “Indeed, he is not. Golden Boy here is twenty-five.” The serious expression that he held on his face for a fraction of a second breaks down into raucous laughter, punctured by his further slapping the bench in uncontained amusement. Apollo really doesn’t like seeing him in a good mood. He’s only ever entertained by someone else’s bad fortune. “He took a seven year break from his schooling!”
They all had secrets - Juniper, Robin, Hugh. The courtroom is quiet; is it ever this quiet after a revelation, without a breath of murmured shock. “Eh?” Athena utters faintly. “Come again?”
“Twenty-five,” Blackquill repeats gleefully. He nods to Taka and the hawk snatches up a paper in its talons, launching itself into the air and making straight for the judge. “All in the school’s official paperwork, as you will find.”
“Twenty-five?” Apollo echoes, sure they’re all going to ask this in turn, a round-table of disbelief. “He’s - he’s older than me?” He’s not good at eyeballing ages, he knows that, and he knows that everyone always thinks him baby-faced and younger than he is, and Hugh could be like that. People in their twenties all look all over the place. How’s anyone to know? But on the other hand, what twenty-year-old, after taking a gap year for seven successive years out of high school, would want to go back to high school all over again? Apollo sure wouldn’t. But maybe instead of going to college to be a lawyer, Hugh went back to a lawyer high school because those teenagers are at his same maturity level.
(Solid burn. If he didn’t get heckled every time he was the slightest bit snide to a witness, he would say it out loud.)
“Seven years?” Athena asks. Blackquill might as well just go over the entire situation again, if they’re all going to ask for clarification on each and every tiny point. “But since you’re such a genius” - she does a remarkable job of not sounding wholly derisive when she says it - “wouldn’t taking a seven year vacation make you boring real quick?” She pauses, frowns, playing her words back in her head. “Make you bored.”
Her first one was probably correct, too. Does Hugh know how to have a conversation that isn’t about his own greatness?
“Heh.” Hugh’s recovery from his shock tips him back into the smugness he always seems to carry. “There’s the dull mindless vacations you ordinary plebians take, and then…” He falters, for a moment. “Even geniuses make mistakes,” he says, resuming with an entirely different thread of argument. “The ones I make just, you know, lost me seven years.”
Rising in Apollo’s stomach is the same kind of fear that Blackquill’s particulars of phrasing invoke. “Er, Mr O’Conner,” he begins, ignoring the shock that Athena sends his way, and bracing himself for the way everyone in the courtroom is going to respond to the utterly insane question he is about to ask, “are you actually, like, actually twenty-five, or just - you know, legally, that it’s been twenty-five years since you were first - you were born.”
He knows that at least half of the gallery is going to think he’s an idiot, have some perception of theirs confirmed about how lawyers are all schooling and no sense in their heads; even Athena stares like he’s just lost his mind. Hugh, though, blanches, his whole body tensing and his shoulders drawing inward. Blackquill’s cuffs clank as he hits the bench and Hugh flinches and nearly falls over with fright. Apollo jumps, too. He’d forgotten that Blackquill as much as anyone would hear this question and would get to respond to it in his typical magic-denying ways.
“What a question, Justice-dono,” he drawls. Apollo raises his chin defiantly. It’s a good question, because all the world around them is crazy. “No doubt a matter first brought to your attention by the rather unique situation of some other golden boy of our acquaintance.” His eyebrows raise and his mouth twists in amusement. Apollo’s heart skips and then stops. How does Blackquill know? It seems unlikely - though technically possible - that Klavier would have told him; the alternative is that Blackquill knows enough to know, to realize, when it took even Phoenix several strokes of luck and coincidence to piece it together. Blackquill shouldn’t be saying this. He shouldn’t know. And why of all times choose this as the moment to drop his pretense of disbelief? To psych Apollo out some more? To give Klavier, up in the gallery, a slap in the face for helping Apollo and Athena?
“But suffice to say, we will find that an irrelevant question,” Blackquill continues. “What matters is the legal age of the witness, that has so allowed him to work the discussed job as a crane operator. He was, therefore, up in the crane with the vantage point to see the accused dragging the mat in preparation to move the body. You must agree how clear this is, and that there is no need to deliberate this much any further.”
Oh. Right. Juniper. This is, after all, her trial, and the reason they have gone down this strange road still has to do with her case, and what she did or didn’t do, and Hugh did or didn’t see, on the morning that the body was discovered.
Back to the fight.
-
Hugh lied about ever seeing the body on stage.
It’s an utterly incomprehensible lie, in Apollo’s most just and honest opinion; it’s also one of a host of shady moves Hugh has made. Though the blood Juniper saw on his hands was his own, from trying to sneak a look at the mock trial script and instead finding Myriam’s spring-loaded razor blade-protected script envelope, and her suspicion against him in that regard can be discounted - well, there’s still his grades, and this, about the body.
If the body was moved during the mock trial - moved in fact at the moment Phoenix and Athena heard the shattering of the statues on stage that drew them outside to discover the body - then Hugh and Robin have airtight alibis, on the floor in front of a crowd for the whole mock trial. Apollo had his eyes on them the whole time. But Juniper, ever-multitasking Juniper, the conductor of her show, the only person alive at that time with all the secrets of her script, was not always down on the floor playing the defendant. She was up at the back of the hall in the sound booth, moving back and forth even during Professor Means’ speech. At any of those times, she could have slipped out to the art room, to send Courte’s body to the stage down the banner wire.
All they’ve done is help Blackquill build a more convincing case against Juniper, so convincing that Apollo can’t find within him a single point to dispute. They missed something; he knows it, he has to know it, he has to believe it to the end. But where? Can he object on the grounds that they need to know why Hugh lied about seeing the body? Would Blackquill let that stand?
Hugh starts to laugh. Hugh starts to laugh in the broken, hysterical way of a killer cornered, except he’s about to get away free with Juniper’s verdict. “Behold my brilliance!” he cries, his words breathless and interrupted by his own frantic, frenzied laughter. “Listen well as the rare genius of Hugh O’Conner reveals to the world the secrets of his perfect crime!”
Apollo looks at Athena. Athena glances back at Apollo. “Er,” she says. “What? Why’s this - why again?”
Because this, the wild confessions, happened yesterday too. To hell with this trial. Hugh appears feverish, his hair matting to his forehead and neck with sweat, his eyes darting all around the courtroom, jumping from Apollo and Athena to Blackquill to Juniper and never settling on any of them. “The murder, moving the body, the cover-up, all my works of genius! My great and perfect crime, bow in awe and stand to arrest me! I am confessing, am I not? You have your killer here!”
“Is he serious?” Apollo asks. He’s afraid he is. He’s seen too many other people unravel in this same manner, but the game was up for all of them. Hugh’s game - what the hell is his game?
“I think he’s serious,” Athena says. “Serious, and seriously suddenly cracked.”
“Enough!” Blackquill snarls. Taka shrieks in an angry echo. “You have a perfect alibi, not a perfect crime! And you dare to stand here and further act the mad fool to delay this trial from its inevitable outcome!” He fixes Hugh with his dark eyes, but this time, Hugh doesn’t shrink away. That is definitely stupidity, not bravery, on his part. “I will have no mercy for you should you not this instant stand down.”
“I will never!” Hugh shouts back. “I have testimony that will prove to you, the utter perfection with which I always act! You’ll doubt me, but in truth I used a body double at the mock trial! It wasn’t me at all, not about to lose and not with the alibi! I, the real me, slipped out and had the run of the campus! I moved the body, I’m the killer, and Juniper’s innocent!”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Athena says.
“I must ask of both the defense and prosecution,” the judge says. “Does this testimony make any sense at all, in the slightest?”
“No,” Apollo answers.
“Oh, good,” the judge says. “I thought I had just become suddenly, extremely confused.”
“The witness is the one suddenly, extremely confused,” Blackquill says. “And it would be charitable, to call him confused, instead of saying, for instance, that he is a bloody lunatic.”
“You’re a witch, aren’t you?” Hugh demands. As though to make the point for him, Blackquill’s eyes flash silver. “Don’t you know anything about doppelgangers? You know, changelings getting switched for people? You think creatures like that are not okay with being an accessory to crime?” A sour taste gathers in Apollo’s mouth. He thinks of Vera, of Kristoph, of Klavier in the gallery, that life-shaping trauma turned into Hugh’s latest desperate lie in the service of - what? To what end? “I had a—”
“Enough!” Blackquill roars, and it is, indeed, so much more of a bellow than his usual low snarling interruptions. Athena lets out a small scream and stumbles back into the wall behind them. Even Hugh shrinks toward the witness stand, seeming to recognize that he’s taken this impossible declaration a step too far. “That you know such words to use them does not mean you have the damndest understanding of what they truly entail!” He slams both fists in tandem on the bench, and Athena clasps both of her hands over Widget to muffle its surprised swearing.
“You claim familiarity with the concepts as part of your mad gambit, make a mockery of the gravity of such matters, and call me to my face a witch as though that would convince me of the veracity of your statements - yet you never pause to think that perhaps whatever I am, I also bear the ability to see through your pernicious bullshit.” Hugh’s mouth flaps open, and he shuts it without a word. “Spare this court your lies,” Blackquill continues. He has stopped yelling now, his voice merely as low and deadly as it ever is. “There is only one of you, as there ever has been - as is most fortuitous for us, as you the sole dunce as you are have made more than your share of trouble, and another of you would be far more than unbearable.”
Hugh’s mouth opens again like a fish deprived of water, but it seems to Apollo that Blackquill’s outburst has drawn to its close. “Shit,” Athena whispers, her and not Widget this time. “I’ve never heard him that angry.”
Have they? He has been furious at Fulbright, over stupid witnesses, over cases. Professional anger. This is different; this seems a personal chord, and a very disharmonious one, struck, and painfully enough to drop the game he’d made of it prior, denying right to Apollo’s face that monsters, yokai, and magic could ever exist. And is it painful to him the way it infuriates Apollo, on behalf of someone else, or is this another clue in the puzzle, the question, of what is Prosecutor Simon Blackquill?
“Now,” Blackquill says, his calm and his smirk returned, “Your Baldness, where we left off. The verdict.”
“But it’s - hey! Defense!” Hugh, gripping the witness stand, turns on them next. “You have that weird device, don’t you? For crazy testimonies like mine?”
“Widget isn’t weird!” Athena protests. Apollo could object to that. “And I’m not going to waste him on something this plainly ridiculous—”
“We don’t have any objections otherwise,” Apollo reminds her. “The only thing left otherwise is the verdict. There’s nothing worse that can happen from giving this a shot.”
“Oh,” Athena says, blanching as she realizes that she was about to let the trial reach its verdict and damn Juniper to prison. She clears her throat. “Well,” she says loudly, “against some of my better judgment, I would like to conduct a short psychoanalytic session with the witness.”
“As a judge, I feel this to be beyond my better sense as well, yet I also do not feel as though I should deny you.” The judge glances around the courtroom, pondering what must be yet another in the Wright Anything Agency’s long, long line of unprecedented incidents. “Well, then. Prosecutor Blackquill, I will ask your opinion. I trust you have no object… ah.”
The courtroom doors slam, seeming to rattle the whole room, and rattling Apollo even more is the empty prosecution’s bench. “Ah, Your Honor,” says one of the bailiffs by the doors, eyes still blankly fixated on where they closed. “The prosecution said, and I quote, ‘Rubbish! We will be out on a stroll’ and left, Detective Fulbright with him.”
At least he isn’t loose unsupervised, but holy hell, is there nothing that Blackquill can’t get away with? (Nothing short of murder, anyway.)
“I must suppose he would have lodged an objection in his parting words if he took issue with Ms Cykes’ plan.” The judge nods once, and decisively. “Very well. Ms Cykes, you may proceed with your therapy session-slash-cross-examination.”
“You’re up, Widget.” Athena draws up the emotional analysis screen and over her shoulder, Apollo watches it load. He can’t help but find the whole process fascinating, no matter that he’s seen it before, and he wonders how many times he’ll have to see it until he gets used to it. Knowing that Athena has the little gadget taking pictures almost constantly doesn’t change his amazement with the way she can compile it all into new mock-ups of scenes discussed in the testimony, or how seamlessly she does it. A large part of him still isn’t sure that there’s not magic involved, somehow woven into the technology. “Now, Mr O’Conner, please repeat your testimony!”
Hugh inhales deeply, his eyes still darting about, like he’s suddenly trying to remember the spur-of-the-moment co-called “testimony” he blurted. “All right,” he says. “I’ll say this simple enough that even mouth-breathers like you can understand. I used a body double! That wasn’t really me at the mock trial! And it wasn’t really me who was about to lose, of course. I slipped out while my doppelganger handled the mock trial, and I had full run of the campus. So it’s me who’s the killer, not Juniper. She’s innocent!”
“Well, he sure wasn’t kidding when he said it was crazy testimony,” Athena mutters, swiping through the pages on which she lists each sentence of Hugh’s testimony and the associated emotions. All of Widget’s projected screens flash bright green, as it blares out the alarm that warns it is overloaded by the emotional input. How Athena, with her sensitive hearing, tolerates that sound, Apollo will never know. “Right now, we’re getting an overflow reading on happiness, which is weird, considering he’s confessing to murder.”
“Maybe he’s just delighted by how the rest of us can’t understand his brilliance,” Apollo says. “But I’m guessing you think there’s something more going on.”
“Mhm.” He can’t tell if Athena was listening or is just mumbling to herself. She flips back and forth between two parts of the testimony, too fast to actually be reading over the sentences again; her eyes follow the images that she has placed with the words. Then she finally looks up. “So, Mr O’Conner, yesterday you told us that you didn’t care at all about Ms Woods anymore.”
Apollo glances to the defendant’s chair, where poor Juniper looks distraught, red-faced from crying and now wide-eyed with shock, staring at Hugh. “That’s right,” Hugh says, about as smoothly as he’s managing to say anything now. A silent sob shudders across Juniper’s thin shoulders. “She told Professor Courte my secret, and I know she wants nothing to do with me now.”
Juniper shakes her head, her mouth moving, whispering something Apollo can’t make out across the courtroom, but Athena probably could, were her attentions not rightly fixed on the witness. If he had to guess, had to bet on it, from the rest of her body language, she’s probably saying, that’s not true.
“So now I don’t care about her either.” Hugh laughs dismissively, but his eyes still move uneasily, and his hand clutches his neck. He’s still lying. “What, you think my confession has something to do with her? It doesn’t! It’s about one thing, and that’s the truth, the truth that everyone in this courtroom was too inferior to figure out!”
“No, objection!” Athena slaps her hand to the bench, through Widget’s hologram screen. “This whole testimony, you’ve felt great joy - so much that I can barely hear anything else! You’re happy that you could play a part in setting Juniper free.” She draws her hand back and props her hands on her hips. “People usually don’t feel like you do when they’re broken down enough to confess to murder.”
“So then, this is another confession trying to protect Juniper?” Apollo asks. Meaning it’s a false confession, meaning Hugh isn’t the killer after all. Like Phoenix thought, against all the evidence, on a hunch.
“It is,” Athena says. “He does care about her, without question.”
But if not Hugh, they still don’t have any evidence of anyone else, and they’ve looped back around to—
The courtroom doors slam again. “Figured it out, have you?” Blackquill asks. He whistles sharply and Taka returns to his shoulder from wherever it was hiding. Taka was still in the courtroom, then? Apollo glances around, wondering where it went, wondering if Blackquill’s dramatic timing is perfect because he was following the whole conversation via the hawk left behind. He makes his way back to the bench, without any great haste, and scratches Taka beneath the chin as he continues, “That testimony was naught but a great tangle of lies. May we agree now that the killer is the one person permitted to move freely out of sight in the lecture hall - that is, the accused herself. We need not waste more time deliberating this nonsense.”
“But you haven’t figured it out!” Hugh protests. Blackquill’s face darkens. “The trick behind my body-double stunt!”
“Would one even presume it to be true,” Blackquill says dryly, but lacking even an ounce of amusement in the hard line of his mouth and his shadowed eyes, “you did tell us in the beginning how it was that you claimed to have a doppelganger.”
“I think I’m gonna agree with Prosecutor Blackquill on this one,” Apollo says. A small kernel of doubt has dug its way through his prior certainty, and he wishes that Phoenix had been the one to watch the mock trial, instead. He could have noticed - if he’d thought to look, and he would have, right? He’s that cautious or paranoid, right? - whether or not Hugh was the same person, and human, the whole way through. Apollo just knows that the Hugh in the mock trial didn’t stray from the bench, didn’t seem to disappear or slough eyes off of him for even a brief moment - and still, still he doesn’t trust himself to be sure. Not when the fae could be involved. “But if we quit here, then Juniper is found guilty.”
“So the best of the bad options is to play along,” Athena says. She quickly taps out a few commands with her gloved hand on the screen. “Okay, let’s see here. What else can we find out?”
Hugh’s continues testimony is just as rambling and confused as before, tripping over itself and tangling itself up in knots that will only snare Juniper deeper. It’s pathetic to watch him falling apart as he is: certain that Juniper is innocent but too afraid of the corruption in the legal system to believe that the plain truth can ever win out, and desperate for some affirmation that despite his grades being bought (without his knowledge, which Apollo notes is definitely interesting) his friends could still possibly love him. This is not Apollo’s field of expertise, but he has Athena, Athena with her ears and Widget, and she manages beautifully. He’d tell her that he’s impressed, but Blackquill has been waiting to pounce, and with Hugh recanting his confession, pounce he does.
“This roundabout trial has returned us once again to the point I have been making: that the only person who lacks an alibi is the accused.” Blackquill folds his arms and taps a finger against his head. The chains rattle. “Consider that, Cykes-dono, and finally realize that your friend’s guilt is the truth you have so valiantly sought.”
“Did we really spend all that time getting nowhere?” Apollo asks. He casts his mind back over Hugh’s testimony. Doppelganger nonsense and more doppelganger nonsense; such useful information, all around. “This is exhausting.”
Athena isn’t listening. She frowns down at Widget’s Mood Matrix screen, which has updated to show that all of the emotions in Hugh’s voice have been cataloged and cleared, and it winks out of existence, only for Athena to immediately bring back up some of her case notes. “Hold on a minute, Your Honor, Prosecutor Blackquill.” She swipes the screen to display a floor plan of the lecture call, with the balcony seats for Courte and Means clearly marked. (Does the head of the prosecutions’ course not have enough seniority to join either of them in the balcony seating? Didn’t Phoenix say they all got fired a few years back?) “If we have someone else who doesn’t have an alibi, then we need to continue the trial, correct?”
“Of course,” the judge says. “But after so much thorough investigation and debate, can such a person even exist?”
“Where are we going with this?” Apollo asks Athena. He feels like someone scrambled his brains.
She rests her finger above the marked defense’s bench in the lecture hall diagram. “Remember how Hugh has been insistent on seeing this balcony seat empty?” She moves her finger diagonally to point to the seat noted to be Means’. “He thought that was because it was Courte’s, and she was dead at the time. But it isn’t.”
“So if Professor Means wasn’t where he was supposed to be—”
“Your Honor!” Athena calls. “However roundabout this testimony has been, we have arrived at one statement of truth. That balcony seat was empty, meaning that Professor Means wasn’t where he was supposed to be during the mock trial!”
“Oh please,” Blackquill sneers. “The whole of the lecture hall heard him give his speech!”
“It bored me half to death,” Apollo adds. He doesn’t remember what was actually said, just that it became a buzzing in his ears within about forty seconds, as some leftover instincts from college assured him that there would be nothing worth remembering.
“It could have been pre-recorded, right?” Athena says. “Then the professor could have given his speech, while he was wherever else on campus!”
“Wait!” Hugh interrupts. “You don’t - are you seriously accusing Professor Means? He’s been trying to help this whole time!” Apollo doesn’t believe that, but he can’t tell if Hugh believes it, or if his nervous habits are now simple shock at where Athena has taken this case. “It’s crazy to say that he - I mean, he was the one who gave me the tape recorder to take to the police!”
“The tape?”
Apollo asks at the same time Athena does, and they stare at each other; understanding and alarm start to dawn behind Athena’s eyes. “Athena,” Apollo says. “We have to get Professor Means on the witness stand.”
She purses her lips and nods decisively. “Mr O’Conner, did you just say that Professor Means gave you that phony tape?”
“Phony?” Hugh echoes. “No, I - he gave it to me and told me to go to the police and say I found it in the art room, but it’s not - what do you mean, phony—”
“And it didn’t seem suspicious for him to tell you to lie?” Apollo demands. This goddamn school, he swears - Hugh probably wouldn’t even have an issue with the lying, would have been sure that it meant instead that Professor Means had some kind of shady-but-ultimately-justified plan for Juniper’s defense, and who was he to question?
“Apollo, this isn’t the time,” Athena warns, her eyebrows drawing together. He follows her narrow-eyed gaze to watch Blackquill, his hand on his chin, smirking to himself, pondering something. Maybe whether he can add that to Hugh’s perjury charges.
“Defense, please refrain from hurling unsubstantiated accusations as you are by calling the evidence ‘phony’,” the judge says. “Unless you can—”
“We can prove it!” Athena interrupts, smacking her palms on the bench like she’s about to try and vault it. “This tape we discussed yesterday, the voice of our client shouting ‘You’re a goner!’, was faked by reusing audio from the mock trial video! We have evidence about the, um, about the evidence!”
Taka lands on the bench, its head twitching back and forth, expectantly waiting. “Hang on, which one of these is which - here!” Athena offers one of Klavier’s evidence packets to the hawk, which blinks at her in almost acknowledgement before it returns across the courtroom to Blackquill. He intently studies each page in turn, the seconds passing in excruciating slowness as they wait for his response. On reaching the end, he tosses back his head, hair falling in front of his eyes, and lets out a loud, sharp laugh.
“Is there an issue, Prosecutor Blackquill?” the judge asks.
“There is not,” Blackquill says. Could’ve fooled me, Apollo thinks. The prosecutor makes a dismissive flick of his fingers and Taka, still with the papers clutched in its beak, heads off to the judge. “I concede that, as asserted and evidenced by the” - he forces out a cough and then loudly clears his throat - “defense, that the evidence on the tape was falsified.” Apollo has to stop himself from turning his head to glance up toward the gallery, wondering where Klavier sits. “However, are not the odds greatest that our lying dullard of a witness merely overlooked the professor in the balcony?”
“We can’t know for sure until we ask him!” Athena fires back. “We can’t overlook any possibilities!”
The judge strikes his gavel twice. “My opinion on the matter,” he says, when they have both fallen to silence, Athena glaring furiously at Blackquill, and Blackquill unbothered, watching Taka preen its wing feathers, “is that it would be premature to pass a verdict without having properly examined a possible witness oversight. And to answer that question, I believe it would be best to ask Professor Means himself, and therefore to call him as a witness.”
Apollo lets out his breath, but the tightness in his chest remains. This is the one guiding piece of advice that Phoenix gave: if you see the opportunity to get him on the stand, take it.
Now they’re on their own.
-
“Good afternoon. I would like to thank you all for being here today. This mock trial, the crown event of…”
Means’ speech was ten minutes long.
Apollo forgot about that, honestly.
They’re searching for some sort of hint that the speech was pre-recorded, some kind of discrepancy between his words and what they know to be true of the day. Athena assured Means that they weren’t accusing him of anything now, just wanted to be sure of the truth of the matter of the speech and the balcony seating - and she said it with her face drawn solemnly across, her shoulders held stiff and her hands squeezing into fists at her sides. She lied. She suspects him. They’ll be accusing him later. And Means at the witness stand loses his trademark smile to glower at Athena whenever she looks away.
Blackquill pays no attention to anyone, his back to the court, his elbows propped up on the bench behind him, his head slumped forward. He had said - not really directed at anyone in particular - to wake him up when this was concluded. Apollo no longer thinks he’s joking, watching his shoulders rise and fall with the slow, steady breathing pattern of someone asleep. Taka, in imitation of its master, ducks its head beneath its wing.
Are neither of them actually going to listen? Blackquill not even try to assess the details for himself?
Apollo tears his eyes away from the opposite bench. The speech, focus on the speech. Athena’s hand flits over a blank Widget screen that she intended to use for notes, doodling flowers and swirls all across the edges. There’s a shape that Apollo presumes to be a bowling pin until she adds the beak to the penguin. She isn’t keyed in to the speech, either. It’s testimony, the worst kind of testimony, where they have to make it through an untold number of minutes of Means reminiscing about his own long-ago days as a Themis student, and how what he learned there became critical in his days as a real lawyer, before he returned again to Themis to instruct a new generation.
Was it in school that he learned that forging evidence worked, or was he like Phoenix, in a real trial back to the wall, nothing but that or losing? Are monsters born or made, and how are they made? What does it take to break an honest lawyer, if ever he began that way?
The video was to record the mock trial, not the speech before it; the camera in the lecture hall is fixed on the floor, the benches where Robin and Hugh stand, and the witness stand that Juniper travels back and forth from. They obviously can’t see the balconies - otherwise there would be an easy answer to this matter - but the audience is visible, students restless whispering to each other or leaning their heads in their hands or on their desks. Apollo wonders where he was sitting, if he can see himself.
The judge’s head droops and snaps back up, guiltily glancing around to assess whether anyone else noticed.
Professor Means, on the recording of the speech that may have been pre-recorded, interrupts himself to snap at the audience to wake up. The judge’s eyes pop open, and something clatters like he knocked his gavel to the floor; Athena’s arm jerks across her notes page, scribbling across her penguin drawing. “I’m awake, I’m awake!” she yelps, turning panicked to Apollo.
Blackquill doesn’t twitch.
This still isn’t even evidence that the speech wasn’t pre-recorded. If this is how Means always sounds, he would have known at this point, about eight minutes in, students would be nodding off. He easily could have scripted that for authenticity.
Athena adds angry eyebrows to her drawn penguin and adds what looks like a ball of lint next to it. Is that supposed to be a fluffy baby penguin?
The audio ends with a click. Apollo registers that the words that ended the speech were words that heralded the end of a speech, and already he doesn’t remember what. He shakes his head to clear out the static. He was supposed to find something useful in there. Something that meant it was pre-recorded. He glances at Athena. Her eyes are huge. So she didn’t hear anything, either.
“Listen well, Cykes-dono - if you subject us to this torturous tedium without due reason, I shall have your head.” Blackquill still hasn’t moved. He slowly tips his head back and turns to cast a cold stare onto Athena.
“Didn’t he nap the whole time?” Apollo mutters, but Athena doesn’t seem to be in the mood for humor. And Apollo shouldn’t be, either. They’re this close to a turnabout, and this close to a loss. Trucy calls it his “tightrope defense act”, and he hates the descriptor even if it isn’t wrong.
“Hey! Apollo!” someone hisses. He expects it to be Trucy, just thinking of her, but when he turns, and Athena with him, there’s Phoenix, hanging over the edge of the gallery. “Catch!”
“Wh—” Apollo fumbles with the object Phoenix just tossed at him, finding the magatama in his hands. “Why—”
“Mr Wright!” the judge scolds, whackling his gavel several times in swift succession. “I’m sure you must want to be behind the bench, but please, this court does not want any liability should you fall and crack your head!”
Yeah, liability for the ankle injury he’d probably incur from that. “Sorry, Your Honor!” Phoenix calls back with a sharp grin, but he only leans further down. “Listen to the end again, Apollo. The last minute or so.”
“But why—” The magatama is for glamours, and glamours are on people, and they’re listening to a recording of Means’ speech, not him speaking directly to them.
“Exactly why you think - I’ll explain the details later, when—” Phoenix jerks backwards as Taka dives, talons outstretched, for his face. Several gasps and shrieks arise from the gallery around him. “When this bird isn’t around! Good luck!” He scrambles away, Taka in pursuit.
“So,” Athena says. “What—”
“Listen to the ending again,” Apollo says. He squeezes his fingers tightly around the magatama. Please, please, he thinks, without any idea who he is appealing to, give me something—
The words hit his ears with a sharper clarity than before. He can think now, his brain no longer buzzing. Even in this little bit, Apollo understands that most of Means’ speech was all fluff and no substance, all inane and nothing meaningful. And then the sign-off: “Once again, our pure white Lady Justice will watch over all of you today. Pay attention now and one day, with the wisdom of our grand academy and your own experience, you may make a difference. Now, let the mock trial begin!"
What’s this Lady Justice that he’s referring to? That was the statue Athena put back together on-stage, with Klavier, but there’s a very similar statue standing very apparent in the center of the lecture hall floor, right in front of the mock-up judge’s bench. A statue that is, however, very much not white.
“Athena,” he says, and her head snaps around in a startled way that says he just knocked her out of another boring speech-induced reverie. “I’ve got something.”
-
Not enough on its own, but together with Klavier’s evidence, and that only breaks Means down into a new set of lies, and worse ones than ever.
“Fine, yes. I had pre-recorded my speech, but I assure you, the reason was not that which you think.” Athena’s eyebrows disappear beneath her hairline and she casts a doubtful side-eye Apollo’s way. Means peers over his glasses at them and continues, “Ms Woods came to me asking that I should do so - record my speech - and come speak with her in the audio room during the opening of the mock trial. There, she told me that she had committed murder and wished that I would defend her. She told me as well that this would happen - the suspicion you cast upon me - as I lose my alibi with the pre-recorded speech, and thus become an accomplice or suspect.” His stony features relax. “But when I said that I would defend Juniper as her attorney, I meant it, because it was the humane thing to do.”
“He can’t be serious,” Apollo says. “There’s no way. This is all too contrived. But he’s good at coming up with bullshit on the fly.” Unless he thought ahead far enough, to this eventuality, and pre-planned the best lies to cover his ass.
“Juniper would never!” Athena shouts. “There’s no way! This is all a bunch of shit.”
“Allow me to be perfectly frank.” Means lightly taps the end of his staff on the floor. “Juniper has taken my teachings to heart. That I would prove her and her two friends innocent was the result she sought, and two that end, she threatened and coerced me, her professor, to do her bidding.”
“And I may only imagine that you found such ruthless tactics to be impressive and admirable,” Blackquill says dryly. Shouldn’t those underhanded strategies be right up his alley; shouldn’t he himself be impressed? As far as Apollo knows, he’s drawn the line at falsifying evidence, but there’s a litany of shady shit that he’s toed the line of. And the murder, of course. The murder that he did and was convicted of.
“Oh, yes,” Means agrees. “What she did was most clever of her, which is why I agreed to defend her. Her capacity for deviousness surprised me, at first, though the more I think on it the more I understand that I should have seen this coming.”
Athena folds her arms, glaring daggers at Means, but she’s gone strangely quiet taking in the lies rather than yelling back. What’s she thinking? What’s she waiting for? Apollo isn’t sure what he’s waiting for - Means to keep digging his own grave talking about his corrupt methodologies, maybe. Get him brought up on additional corruption charges after they prove him a murderer.
“It’s really the hallmark of her kind, is it not?” Means continues, and Athena’s mouth presses even tighter together. Blackquill tilts his head just ever-so-slightly to the side, barely more than a twitch, studying Means, and waiting. “This sort of cunning self-serving cruelty, so typical of the actions of - well. We shall say that anyone may be cruel, but there is a particular and exemplary manner of it displayed here that you will also find to be quite… fae. And rather more than in half as one could first assume of this defendant.”
“Pardon?” The judge blinks in shock. “I am not sure I understand the relevance that this remark holds.”
Does he not realize? Does he know, or somehow have these things passed him by every trial? Juniper shrinks into herself, her hands covering her face. “It has none, Your Baldness,” Blackquill says, his disparaging gaze turning from Means to Juniper. “And before your protest I had been about to lodge my own objection, that the witness had best stick to discussing what it is that the defendant has done, and leave aside that which she is.”
Juniper lowers her hands, her eyes wide, but Blackquill isn’t looking at her anymore. Was it her honor that he was defending, or that of the fae in general? His responses to fae-related remarks have seemed - like he’s taking them personally.
“Objection sustained, then,” the judge says. “Defense, I believe it is time for your cross-examination.”
“You’ve been rather quiet now, haven’t you, Cykes-dono.” Blackquill can’t resist one last taunt. “Something the matter?”
Athena inhales deeply. She places her hands back down on the bench, her shoulders squared and her eyes flinty. “I’m not going to argue on principles,” she says. “Some long-winded idealistic speech. I’m going to let my evidence, and my victory, do the talking.” She lifts her hands and this time slams them down. “You claim that you were lying to cover for Junie, but that’s a load of hot shit!”
“That language, in our fair court of law!” Means interrupts indignantly. “Your Honor, it is an outrage!” Apollo personally finds Means’ guiding philosophies about the uselessness of the truth, and his forged evidence, a lot more of an outrage, but what does he know.
“Ms Cykes. Having adjudicated your mentor’s first case back, I understand where this unfortunate habit of yours was picked up, but please, do try to not make this such a frequent occurrence that I must penalize you for it.”
“Of course, Your Honor.” She takes that better than Apollo expected, though Widget still glows red. “Now, if the court would please recall the audio recording, presented as evidence yesterday, that today we have established to have been faked. It was Professor Means who gave that to Hugh and whispered to go take it to the police. If you had Junie’s best interests at heart, Professor, why would you fabricate evidence that uses her voice? That is, it’s an incredibly damaging piece of evidence that shouldn’t exist if you had wanted to defend Juniper - as it is, it seems like you’re trying to pin the crime on her instead!”
Means lowers his eyes. Apollo isn’t naive enough to think that means he’s chastened, or is going to do anything but dig in further. “You’ve done nothing but lie, and you’ve taught nothing but lies!” Athena shouts. “Your road to hell has no good intentions!”
“How dare you!” There it goes. Means’ head snaps back up. He grits his teeth in a snarl. “Themis Academy is an honorable institution with a proud name and how dare you slander it!” He grinds his staff against the ground. The sound sets Apollo’s teeth on edge, and Athena claps her hands over her ears.
“I’m not slandering the whole academy!” she protests. “Just your terrible teachings! You—” Means reaches into his pocket, producing a piece of chalk, which he flings at Athena. “Ow! What the helllleck, heck, was that!”
“Pay attention, Athena!” Means speaks like this is a lecture hall, like he’s the professor in charge of a classroom and not a witness on the stand, and she some wayward student of his and not a defense attorney on a cross-examination. “You’re disappointing me! The murder occurred on the twenty-third sometime between six and eight pm. I was already home at that time! How could I have killed her?”
“Can you prove you had gone home by then?” Athena asks.
Apollo knows what the answer will be before Means says it - the shifting burden of proof, always to the defense. “Can you prove that I was still at the school then?” he asks, a furious pointer finger waved in her direction.
Apollo casts about for any option, and he watches Athena slowly lose hope, her confident posture falling away, her hands sliding off of her hips and her shoulders slumping forward until she lets her elbows hit the bench and prop her head back up. “No,” she admits.
“Very good! I appreciate your honesty, even as it fails your case.” Means is still in teacher-mode, and now Apollo wonders if it’s some sort of mocking of them that he’s attempting to do. “But given that—”
“Hey! Hold on a second, man!”
Robin’s shriek could be an impressive rival to the Chords of Steel. She stands up in the front row of the gallery, leaning forward and peering down the drop to the floor, weighing whether she should just vault down, and deciding against it. She raises one hand and then rushes aside, leaving silence for several moments until she properly reaches the floor of the courtroom, where she places herself beside the defendant’s chair. Throwing her arm out in an imperious, pointed objection, directed at Means, she shouts, “I can’t believe I’ve let you lie to me all this time!” The Professor sputters indignantly, and Robin drowns him out with a roar. “I’ve got a confession to make! I can prove it!”
-
Of the statues on the stage, Klavier and Phoenix, Robin only had time to actually make the Klavier statue, the one that they put back together yesterday. Then the late bell rang, and Robin, without permission to stay on campus, asked Means if he could make the other statue for her. This puts him still at the school at the time of the murder, though he claims with the intensive work it would have taken to finish the artwork in an hour and a half, there’s no way he could have taken an instant to go to the art room and commit the crime. (Couldn’t there have been time after? Couldn’t the autopsy report’s window be off, have that wiggle room?)
Or there’s Athena’s objection, offered up without a thought, and then a few seconds after, she has invented a possibility. “What if we were all wrong about where the crime was committed?”
That’s one of Phoenix’s classic turnabout tactics. Apollo sees where she’s going; Means scoffs that she’s lost her mind, but Blackquill, glowering around the court at everyone in equal measure, very slowly says, “Continue.” When Means sounds about to protest, Taka alights from Blackquill’s shoulder and brings its fly-by so close that its talons rake through Means’ hair.
The murder took place on the stage, the blood spilling onto the banners lying there. The Gavineers banner soaked up most of the blood, was wiped on the art room floor to create the other crime scene, and then burned to hide the evidence. The white Lady Justice statue they repaired during yesterday’s investigation came from the art room, sent down the banner wire to make some noise and lead someone to the body. The body, therefore, was hidden on the stage somewhere.
How? At least a hundred people passed the stage on their way to the mock trial. What did it look like? Was there a crawl space under it that could be counted on no one to notice? What about behind it? Did they see it from other angles? Athena only has partial photographs, from up on the stage, nothing with the right angle, the wide shot. All of the pieces, these strange inconsistencies and bits of evidence collected, fit perfectly together with this theory.
There’s just no place for the body.
And that’s going to sink them.
They’re sinking, and Means just laughs. “Don’t you understand yet? There’s no killer other than Juniper Woods! There never was any other possibility, and there never will be!”
“But…” Athena falters. Apollo needs to help her, if he can just come up with somewhere, anywhere, that the body could have been. There were bruises on the victim’s wrists from being tied. Was she tied in some contorted position to allow her body to fit somewhere strange? Every second that he doesn’t say something, he’s failing their client, and he’s failing his friend.
“Poor Juniper must seriously regret asking for your help now - choosing you over me! And not just for herself, but for the way you nearly had Hugh wrongly convicted for murder! Surely you haven’t forgotten that big mistake of yours, too?”
“Don’t listen to him,” Apollo says. Though really, he’s not sure if Athena is listening to anyone, her face gone slack and her eyes glazed over, lost somewhere that isn’t here. “Athena?”
“You’ve not only failed to defend your client, but you brought false charges against her friend!” Means is positively gleeful tearing into her, a shark that’s scented blood and gone into a frenzy, and Apollo remembers what Phoenix said last night, about Athena, about accusing Hugh, wonders what he’s thinking now watching his best-laid plans to shelter her fall apart. “You don’t deserve to call yourself a lawyer!”
“No.” Athena hugs herself tightly, clutching her arms across her stomach like she’s sick, or trying to staunch the flow of blood from a wound, and doubling over herself. Her hair falls across her face, but not enough that Apollo can’t see her eyes, wide and hollow, and Widget’s screen, gone straight black. “No, I - wouldn’t let an innocent person be - I wouldn’t let him be convicted for - something he didn’t—”
“Athena! Hey, Athena, look at me.” Her shoulders start to shake. She doesn’t lift her head. Apollo reaches for her shoulder and stops; she flipped a mann larger than Apollo over her head the last time someone unexpectedly touched her, and if she’s already breaking, the last thing she’ll need is to hate herself more if she lashes out and injures Apollo. Means grins in satisfaction; Apollo glares at him and wishes, horribly, cruelly, for an instant, that he was fae, that he could kill with a look, literally, and then the wish turns his stomach over. Even if this man is a monster, even if he’s getting a laugh out of hurting Athena—
It’s not - it’s probably not a curse, is it? Some kind of spell Means put on her? It’s probably just - a regular mundane breakdown, right? Phoenix is up in the gallery watching, and if something had happened, he’d already be on his way down to let Apollo know. For Athena’s sake, surely, he’d break his habit of staying frustratingly silent on these matters.
“Breathe, breathe,” Athena hisses to herself. “Breathe in, breathe out—”
Blackquill crosses his arms over his chest. After watching him for three trials, Apollo still wouldn’t say he’s got a read on him at all, wouldn’t say he understands if the man has any tics - but maybe Apollo just hasn’t seen them yet. Because Blackquill’s mouth twists, his nose twitches; it might be disgust, and it might be barely disguised fury, and maybe it doesn’t have to be exclusive, one or the other, because those are related emotions. He doesn’t turn his glare from Means but closes his eyes instead, face slackening, like he’s trying to calm himself.
“Hey, shut the hell up, man!” Robin yells. She starts forward for the witness stand, her hands in fists, and Hugh grabs her by the upper arm. “Athena’s a great lawyer! She saved the friendship between Hugh and Juniper and me! And she figured out the secret I couldn’t tell, so I can live my life as a girl again! She is G-R-E-A-T and I don’t wanna hear another word against her, you lying meanie!”
“But I did,” Athena says. Her voice rings out clear and steady despite the way that her body trembles. “I did raise false charges against Hugh. And that - I could have - I could’ve done something unforgivable - I would have—”
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Hugh says with a shrug. He still hasn’t let go of Robin, and that’s probably the better choice. “It happens. There wouldn’t be defense attorneys if it didn’t. It’s not like I’m mad - it’s really more like you’ve given me a chance to reevaluate. You’re an honest lawyer and I didn’t think it was possible, for an honest lawyer to do all you’ve done.”
Athena blinks. Apollo hopes that’s a good sign, considering she hasn’t for the minute prior. “But I still haven’t done - what does it matter if I can’t save Juniper?”
“I believe in you, Thena!” Juniper stands from her chair, her hands clenched at her sides. “I haven’t given up! You can’t either! And I know you won’t! I know you can do this, Thena.”
A strangled sound emerges from Athena’s mouth, like a wheeze interrupting a hiccup or sob. “Athena, breathe,” Apollo says.
She tips forward and braces herself against the bench with one hand, the other arm still pressed tight against her stomach. “I c-can’t.” Her valiant attempt at inhaling breaks down into uneven, shuddering gasps. “I c-can’t. I—”
“Perhaps it would help you breathe if you were to cease this pathetic bleating of yours.”
Apollo is ready to yell at him, because someone has to and Robin has already laid into Means, but Athena finally slowly raises her head. “Prosecutor Blackquill?” she asks in a faint, broken whisper.
Blackquill shakes his head. “No more of such foolish words as you have just now spouted.” Is this - is this Blackquill’s attempt at reassurance? Has the world and the court finally gone mad? “You became a lawyer for a reason, did you not? What would come of it should you give up on all of the work that you have done thus far?” He slams his forearm on the bench and leans forward, his eyes sharp and his mouth pressed in a tight frown. “It would hardly do for you to quit now and disappoint a certain someone who has been waiting for you all this time!”
“I—” Athena stares at him, her mouth hanging open, but her breathing has begun to steady from moments ago, and she slowly straightens up, drawing her shoulders back from the way she curved in on herself.
“Ha!” Means’ laugh isn’t a very convincing one. “Isn’t this a precious little waste-of-time effort you’ve undertaken! But it is, I assure you, meaningless. You have nothing on me, and no plan to create anyone else’s guilt! Your case ends here.”
“Oh shut up,” Apollo says irritably, deciding that if Phoenix and Athena are going to be swearing in court on the regular now, he can definitely get away with that. Ignoring Means’ indignant sputtering, he turns back to Athena. “You okay?” She nods. “You’re doing fine, I promise. We’re still going to prove that the truth can win against people like him, all right?”
“But how?” Athena asks. “What am I supposed to do now, Apollo? He’s right, we don’t have any evidence against him!”
No evidence. That’s the problem that Phoenix kept running up against. What does it take to break an honest lawyer? For Phoenix, it was no evidence. But god damn it, Athena has only been a lawyer for six months and when Apollo had been a lawyer for six months, Phoenix gave him the Jurist System to solve that one particular issue. They don’t have the Jurist System now. They might never have it again. Evidence is everything now, and all Athena has is Apollo, and Apollo doesn’t even have a theory. If they can pull together a plausible theory, they can look for evidence in the places their theory maps out. But they need the theory.
“Take a deep breath,” he says - she’s started to look frantic again. Not on the cusp of breakdown, thankfully, but frantic, and that won’t help her think clearly. “And we’ll look back over the whole case. There’s still truth to be found, and I believe in you that you can find it.” The sickly expression remains on her face. Is there something he can do about that, too? “Hey, Athena. Remember what Mr Wright says?” That saying that she in particular so enthusiastically took to. “ ‘The worst of times—’”
“—‘force their biggest smiles’,” Athena finishes. Okay, so maybe they skipped a bit in the middle there. “Right. I’ve got it.” She shakes her head back, her ponytail swinging behind her shoulder, and props her hands on her hips. She doesn’t actually smile, which Apollo can’t blame her for, but even with Widget glowing bright fierce angry red, she appears more at ease than she has for a while. “Think it over.” She squeezes her eyes shut and her whole face scrunches in concentration.
The body was moved in the midst of the mock trial, but didn’t have to be moved far, because the murder took place on the stage and the body had to have been hidden on the stage. What was moved via the banner wire was the other statue, so that Means could draw attention to the body and have it discovered when he wanted it to be discovered. It had to have been on the stage, and it can’t have been suspicious. It’s possible that there could have been some other objects involved in stage-setup that would have been capable of storing a body, but if they weren’t on the stage when Phoenix and Athena got there, then Means had to move it away, and that would have increased the time he spent there and increased his chances of being caught. Seems unlikely that there was anything more. So then, what was on the stage when they got there? Apollo didn’t get much of a glimpse of the initial scene. The mockup benches on stage - what were those made of? Could they have hollowed-out insides, possible to be lifted and have a body dragged beneath? What did the rope bruises on Courte’s wrists mean?
Athena’s eyes snap open. “I’ve got it!” she says. “Apollo, you remember how when we were repairing the statues” - more like when she and Klavier were and Apollo was just kind of there, but sure - “and we couldn’t find any chunks of the boss’ statue large enough to put it back together?” He nods, with no idea where she’s going with this. “And the court will recall how remarkable a feat it seemed that Professor Means could finish the statue of Mr Wright so quickly, when it took Robin so much longer on the other statue. And I can tell you why that is!”
Yep, Apollo has no idea where this is going. “He never built the statue!” Athena continues triumphantly. “It was all an illusion - he hid the body by making it look like the statue of Mr Wright! And with the statues covered by cloth, no one would know what was actually beneath!”
“Wait, what?” Apollo asks.
“Now this will be interesting,” Blackquill says.
-
What Apollo has come to realize is that he could not be a prosecutor. Not for any reason of principles - arrests have to be made, people are guilty of crimes, and an honest prosecutor is as important to the pursuit of justice as an honest defense attorney, even if both seem in unfortunately short supply these days - but because the prosecution don’t seem to be able to operate with a co-counsel. The closest they get is working as a team with the same detective, and that wouldn’t suit Apollo. What he needs is someone at the bench with him who can come up with utterly batshit theories that escaped his brain because they were, as stated, utterly batshit.
This is going in his journal as the weirdest thing he’s done in a trial. Because certainly weirder things have happened in trials - Kristoph’s shimmering, flickering glamour as it broke, or Blackquill starting to transform to a nine-tailed fox - but Apollo did not hold an active part in those incidents. Apollo is taking a very active role in helping to turn Athena into a sheet-covered statue mockup of the corpse at the crime scene.
Apollo is actively facilitating Athena’s outlandish theory - and less outlandish every second judging from Means’ face, furious instead of laughing it off. The trial takes a ten minute recess to hunt down the props that Athena will need to display her theory: a large sheet, a chair, some rope, and just in case, some duct tape. It feels like preparation for one of Trucy's tricks but if she were here it would be easy, and the Magic Panties would provide, but instead Apollo breathlessly rushes back into the courtroom at the end of ten minutes with a large pink sheet that’s going to have to work one way or another.
What is a co-counsel for but to help you fill in the gaps of your mad ventures? Athena figures out why the professor’s hands were tied and how they were positioned behind her head; Apollo reminds her that Courte had an arrow sticking out of her body and duct-tapes it to her side; they test those two facts together and find that the arrow isn’t long enough to make a convincing statue arm, but Athena notices that Means’ staff certainly could have. Reluctantly, Means hands it over; Athena holds it in place and Apollo shakes out the sheet to toss over her head again. Somehow even that is an ordeal. She got stuck in it last time she removed it, to swap the arrow for the staff, and now Apollo can barely get it tossed up over her head. Fabric doesn’t throw very well. He shakes it out and tries again and this time a cold gust of wind catches beneath it, billowing it upward spread like a parachute to drape neatly over Athena’s head.
Apollo glances at Blackquill. He has stood silent watching - it seems promising that he hadn’t been heckling them - and his arms are crossed, but he slowly lowers the hand he had just slightly raised up off from where it rested on his upper arm, like he made a little wave to direct the wind. Seeing Apollo watching him, he raises an eyebrow.
The courthouse has time and again seen manic laughter within its walls. Athena’s at least is different, triumphant, from underneath the pink sheet where her hands behind her head make the form of a large spiky head of hair, and the staff an extended pointing objection arm. All they’ll need to do now is test the staff for traces of blood, and Means’ guilt will be ascertained.
The proud, proud professor falls apart the way criminals all do, begging and pleading and wheedling for a way out, any loophole or last desperate reason that it isn’t them; cursing the names of everyone involved in their downfalls, everyone but themselves. And Means falls apart, literally, his words becoming more incoherent in his desperation, until they don’t sound like any words of any language Apollo has ever heard. They’re just noises from a man who has finally lost at every game he has played for years, and his voice grows softer and the clack of his teeth together, a horrid sound that makes Apollo acutely aware of all of the nerves in his own teeth that would be giving him pain if he were the one doing that.
He should just steel himself for what Clay calls “Fair Folk fuckery” at the end of every trial. He should expect it by now. And maybe he does, but with the myriad possibilities of their curses and consequences playing out, how does he brace himself when he doesn’t know what’s coming?
He assumes this is fae. What else could it be? Maybe an accident, the first time that Means’ mouth snaps shut and then he opens it and there is blood on his teeth and a chipped white piece of one falling into his hand. Maybe he just spent most of his life putting too much stress on those bones and one of them was already breaking apart before today. But without catalyst a second tooth cracks apart and drops from his open mouth, and another, and Apollo glances away from the spectacle, can’t close out of his mind the blood streaming down Means’ teeth.
“Ugh,” Widget groans, and Athena presses a hand over her mouth. Juniper, sickly green, covers her eyes with her hands. Only Blackquill has the stomach to not turn away, his narrowed eyes fixed on the witness stand and gleaming silver, equally cold and piercing as the yellow glare of the hawk on his shoulder.
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♡ summary: Reader is traded to a band of pirates in return for the safety of her village because of her plant magic. They are not like she expected, much more like her than she could even imagine in fact. This is a journey through their relationships and the high seas they sail on.
♡ pairing: superm x fem!reader, superm x eachother
♡ chapter: 1 | 2 | 3 | ? |
♡ series warnings: blood mention, injury mention, swearing, anxiety, death mention, depression, weapons, mxm
♡ series genre: romance, smut, angst
♡ series rating: Mature
♡ word count: 2364
♡ posted on: AO3
♡ chapter two: on board
You woke with a start when the boat lurched in some rough waves and were quickly reminded where you were. You sat up in the bed and surveyed the cabin. It was dark now, your eyes adjusted to the lack of light and you could make out the shapes of bodies on the beds. The rest of the crew must have come to bed once they finished their duties. You couldn’t fall back asleep, feeling restless in the bed. No one else seemed to be awake, so you carefully lowered yourself off the bunk, cringing when you landed harder than you meant to. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to wake anyone so you crept over to the door and opened it slowly before slipping out.
Walking through the maze of the hallways, you eventually managed to surface on the deck. There were a few crew members around who gave you looks but ultimately stayed away. It was odd, but so was the Captain so it didn’t surprise you much. You wandered to the edge of the ship watching the waves crash against the sides. The moon and stars were bright so it was easier to see then inside the ship. You were in the middle of the ocean now, no land in sight. It made you shiver. You had never been out this far before and it was nerve-wracking. The air tasted salty and there was a breeze in the cool night. You sighed lightly as you watched the reflection of the sky in the open sea.
You felt a presence behind you and turned to find the dark red-haired man, Ten if you remembered correctly, standing there. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be out here, hm?” He asked, a smile playing across his lips. “It’s not like I can go anywhere anyway. I couldn’t sleep so I came for some air.” You turned away from him again and leaned against the side of the boat with your arms resting on the edge. Ten leaned his back against the boat beside you and studied your face. You huffed, “Do you need something?” -- “Not particularly.” -- “Then stop staring at me, it’s annoying.” These men were so strange, it was frustrating the way they all seemed to know something you didn’t.
“You’re a strange woman, Y/N. You have plant magic correct? Show me.” You glared at him and grew a small yellow carnation in your palm. His eyes twinkled at your show and he extended an open palm to ask for the plant. Handing him the flower you returned your eyes to the sea. “Beautiful isn’t it? I love watching the night sea, that’s why I never mind when I get charged with steering at night.” You turned to him quickly, “Who’s steering now then?” Ten chuckled at the panic in your voice. “Don’t worry I put someone else on it to cover for me. It can be left for a little anyway, we aren’t in any hurry.” Slowly, you relaxed back into your previous position, feeling your eyes begin to droop.
“Let’s get you back to bed little one.” Ten said softly, standing up straight and walking towards the entrance to the lower levels of the ship. You followed after him, entering the room he opened the door to. Ten didn’t come in so you assumed he was returning to his post. You attempted to get on the bed again but found yourself unsuccessful just like you were earlier. Letting out a frustrated sigh you laid down on the wooden floor beside Taemin and your bunk, closing your eyes and letting the rocking ship lull you back to sleep.
When you woke up again it was when Taemin fell on top of you. “Ack, what the fuck?” He cried landing half on you and half on the floor. You groaned and tried to shove him off of yourself as he scrambled to get off you himself. Taemin offered a hand once he got up which you accepted with a huff. “Why were you on the floor?” Taemin asked letting go of your hand. You felt nervous suddenly, feeling the other men in the room looking at you. They all seemed to have changed into looser garb for sleeping, you noticed as you looked around at each of them. Ten was missing from the group as was Lucas and the Captain of course. You didn’t like being stared at, especially by these pirates.
“I couldn’t get back up on the bed, ok?” You admitted, looking at your bare feet. “Why’d you get down then?” Mark asked, raising his brow. You blushed, you honestly hadn’t even thought about it when you’d gotten out of bed originally. “How stupid.” Mark said, shaking his head at you, making you clench your teeth. You were learning that this Mark was extremely frustrating. You glared at him before pushing past Taemin and heading towards the door. Taeyong grabbed your arm, “And where exactly do you think you’re going?” -- “Anywhere but here.” -- “Too bad you’re confined to quarters until Captain says otherwise.” Narrowing your eyes at the purple-haired man, you shook yourself free of his grip and stomped over to Taemins bed and sat down.
“Baekhyun, stay with her while we check with the Captain.” Taemin said as he turned and exited the room with Mark and Taeyong in tow. Baekhyun sat on the bunk across from you, watching your eyes closely. “They mean well, they just like to follow Captains orders.” He said softly. Him and Taemin spoke to you as if you might break if they were to speak harshly. “I don’t care, I just hate being trapped, and I hate this ship.” You grumbled, turning away from his intense gaze. “Fair enough, I understand.” -- “No you don’t! You kidnapped me from my home and are keeping me hostage on this ship. I’ve never left my home before! This is terrifying, and you’re all acting like I'm overreacting to this.”
The room was silent after your outburst. “I’m sorry. I can’t change it and I’m not allowed to explain why we took you. All I can offer is my comradery.” His words sounded sincere but you weren’t sure if you should really trust him. He felt similar to the way Taemin did, somehow comforting and trustworthy despite the fact that they were pirates and had kidnapped you. You sighed, which you had done way too many times already since being taken, and gave a weak smile. “Ok, then can we get out of this room?” You asked with puppy dog eyes, which seemed to work because Baekhyun stood up and went to the door.
Following after him, you shut the door behind you. From what you remembered of the ship Baekhyun seemed to be leading you down to the galley again. Your guess was correct, you saw Lucas and Ten sitting at the same table from yesterday, which Baekhyun led you over to. He sat you beside Lucas and went to grab some food, which turned out to be some kind of porridge, then sat across from you beside Ten. “Eat, you didn’t have dinner last night.” Baekhyun said as he handed you a spoon. You accepted and took a tentative bite, surprised when the porridge was actually pretty tasty.
You didn’t like the fact that you could feel the three men watching you eat so you put your spoon down and just waited until they fell into their own conversation before continuing to eat. A shout pulled your attention and you lifted your head to see your roommates from earlier marching towards you with the Captain. “Baekhyun, she was supposed to be kept in the room.” Taeyong said, glaring at you and Baekhyun. “It’s breakfast Yong, everyone’s gotta eat, sit down.” Baekhyun said nonchalantly, eating another spoonful.
You saw the Taemin hiding a smile behind the Captain when he made eye contact with you. “But the Captain said-” Mark was interrupted by said man, “It’s fine, he was just doing what he thought was right.” Jongin said, making Baekhyun smile mockingly at Mark. The four men sat down after getting their own food. Taeyong slid in beside you and Mark beside him while Taemin sat beside Baekhyun and Jongin sat at the head of the table again.
Once everyone had begun eating Jongin looked at you, “So, Y/N, today you will be assigned to working with Taeyong while he does his rounds, then in the evening you will be with Mark.” You saw both men make a face at his announcement but hide it quickly and give him a nod. Staying silent, you groaned internally, the two who you dislike the most just had to be the ones he chose. Maybe it would have been better to be a prisoner left alone all day instead of integrated into the crew or whatever the Captain was doing.
When your table had finished eating everyone stood up, “Taeyong, once you’re changed come and get the Holder from my room.” Jongin ordered, then began to leave the room, making you scramble to follow after at his quick pace. He didn’t say anything to you as you followed after him, just continued walking to his quarters. You just followed, watching his broad back move through the hallways. Why did he even tell you to come with him anyway?
Reaching his room the two of you entered, Jongin shutting the door behind you. He gestured to a chair, which you sat in, watching as the Captain paced the room. “Would you show me your gift again?” He asked, looking at you expectantly. “Gift huh.” You scoffed under your breath, making Jongin raise a brow. Growing a yellow carnation and handing it to the Captain as he walked by and he studied it in his hands. “Is this all you can do?” He asked sitting against his desk across from you, “No, but this is the easiest display. What do you want me to do?” You questioned him, playing with your hands in your lap.
It was silent for a moment, you could feel Jongins eyes on you, making you anxious. “Can you make fruits? Vegetables?” Food. He wanted to know if you could make food. Well, you supposed that made sense. You grew a strawberry in your palm, “I can, yes. It takes more energy though, especially for larger things.” Jongin stared at you, unmoving. You ate the strawberry, letting the sweet taste take you back to your garden. You grew strawberries there year-round, it took less energy to grow things in the actual place they would naturally grow. Again you wished to be back there instead of on this wretched ship.
A knock on the door broke the silence, “Come in.” The Captain called, standing straight again. Taeyong entered the room dressed in some tight brown pants and a loose white button-up that was belted at the waist. Jongin waved his hand and Taeyong nodded, grabbing your arm and pulling you with him out the door. Stumbling after him, you tried to pull yourself out of his grip, “I'm coming, let go!” You growled at the purple-haired man, but you were completely ignored. Taeyong finally released you when you both reached the deck where a few crew members were mopping.
“Get to work.” He said monotonously, handing you a mop. You stared at him but decided a fight wasn’t worth it. You were still not sure if they would get violent with you, so you just settled with mopping whilst grumbling to yourself. This was all kinds of annoying, cleaning whilst being under the eye of an enemy and on a pirate ship at that. It was like doing the work you had to do at home minus the small bits of happiness you had found. Great. Someone kicked your knees from behind, causing you to fall onto your knees and drop the broom.
“Take a closer look, does that look clean to you?” You scowled up at Taeyong, the culprit behind your sudden greeting with the wooden deck. Standing up, you continued mopping, this time with extra vigor and a purposeful look sent to Taeyong. Fucking pirates. You continued to work for a while longer as Taeyong paced the deck observing your and the other people cleaning the decks work ethic. A soft voice made its way to your ears as you scrubbed the salt and grime from the boards, and you were surprised to find the source to be your watchman himself. Taeyong was singing softly as he leaned against the edge of the boat, watching the sea move by. How curious.
Eventually, Mark came along to collect you, thankfully he let you walk on your own, unlike some people who act like complete brutes. He didn’t speak to you at all, simply led you around the ship while he spoke with various crew members about the ships condition and various supplies that would be needed next time the boat was docked. It was mind-numbingly boring, you were tired of walking around being stared at by crew members and ignored by Mark. Why were you even following him anymore? Maybe you should just go back to the room or go explore the boat?
You stopped walking and watched Mark continue on his way for a few feet before he stopped as well. He turned to face you, “Why did you stop?” He asked, frustration lacing his voice. “You aren’t even speaking to me, why must I follow you around for nothing?” You countered, crossing your arms. “Captain asked me to show you what I do, this is it. My job as the boatswain is to make sure everything that makes the ship stay afloat is working and to find out what supplies we need when we get to land. I don’t want to have you following me around anymore then you do, but this is Captains orders and I will follow them as will you.” Mark said walking closer to you until he was barely an inch away, “Got it?” You nodded and he backed away, turned and continued walking. You begrudgingly followed after him, a scowl prominent on your face.
#superm#superm x reader#lee taeyong#byun baekhyun#kim jongin#lee taemin#mark lee#lucas wong#ten#high seas
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here’s chapter 4!!! it’s been about a week and a half, two weeks since John Seed reappeared, and now nick is ready to take his vengence! by... having john do basic tasks to repair the homestead. hey, this isn’t eden’s gate -- what do you expect, skin flaying and long-winded religious diatribes? (weird, that’s exactly what john expects, all the time, from everyone!)
i really love this story and am so thrilled that other people seem to enjoy it too!!! it’s fun to write, and since i know it’s just full on self-indulgent bullshit, i don’t feel guilty for not being ~~realistic~~ about the whole thing. fuck it! nick is a pacifist now!!!
i’ve included today’s chapter under the cut so you don’t have to leave tumblr if you don’t want to. if you’re enjoying this story, please consider reblogging so your friends can also enjoy my hellscape! or, you know, do what makes you happy, it’s not like i can force you to ruin your aesthetics blog on my behalf. stay frosty my dudes, i’ll see you in 2 weeks!
Well, John doesn't die. Despite that being the only good thing the man could possibly do, he manages to hang on through the first night, looking better before the week is out. It's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, Nick no longer feels like he's serving a skeleton its last meal; on the other, it means that John is more than likely here to stay. Every time Nick goes to give him food, he finds the room just a little bit more lived in, the tarp turning into a makeshift bed as John struggles to settle in. Just yesterday, Nick had noticed a short series of tally lines scratched in the wall, marking each day of his sentence as though he were confined to solitary.
Nick should probably be happy with how smoothly things are going. He should probably be glad that John is keeping quiet and politely recuperating without so much as a snide remark. It's what he wanted, after all — for John to wave a white flag and agree to an unconditional surrender. And yet Nick can't help but feel short-changed, as if John owes him at least one opportunity to punch him in the face for being an asshole. It used to be something Nick dreamed about doing; he'd fantasized about beating him to a bloody pulp even as John had ripped his skin from his chest. Now, he's not willing to deal with the guilt that would undoubtedly follow.
Nick wishes he could go back to his "fight everyone" thirties. Being a mature adult sucks.
It's bright and early one morning when Nick decides it's past time to do something about the ceiling, which is warped and sagging beneath the nursery. Nick suspects it's a cracked joist, but considering his lack of carpentry skills, he doubts he can do anything to repair it. Right now, all he can do is try to support the weight of the second floor with something other than a wish and a prayer. Thankfully, he saved some of the posts when he dismantled the back porch — now if only Kim weren't going to be busy all day with Carmina, they could actually get some work done.
Except, maybe not!
John has been looking a lot better these past two days, since all he's been doing is resting and regaining his strength. Nick's heard him rummaging around at night, and he's been making himself something of a nest out of the crap left with him. Nick's even heard him talking, although it's anyone's guess who he thinks is listening. Considering how quiet and withdrawn he is when Nick brings him his meals, he doesn't seem interested in what real people have to say.
Honestly, if Nick hadn't been an integral part of John's survival for the past week, he'd think the whole thing was some kind of ploy. Nick's not sure what John would be planning with this act for sympathy, but he isn't going to make the same mistake he did all those years ago and write him off as some rich, coked-out jackass with no thoughts to his name. He's not going to let John sit around and finalize whatever evil machinations he's got brewing in his mind. He's gonna work that sad-sack until the only thing John's thinking about is collapsing from exhaustion.
Nick doesn't reveal his plans until after breakfast. He doesn't want to ruin his favorite meal of the day, not when he can rest aimlessly beside his family around the table, eating ham and eggs while Kim brews coffee. It's the closest they'll ever get to the way life used to be, and Nick can pretend that everything is back to normal as long as he has a cup of coffee in hand. Hell, it's not like watching his eight-year-old daughter methodically clean the family rifle during breakfast is all that weird for Hope County, with or without the apocalypse.
It's probably a good thing that Carmina is distracted. If she realized today was the day John would be seeing sunlight, she'd refuse to go anywhere until her curiosity was satisfied. They've told her as little as they can get away with, given that they're keeping a man prisoner across the hall from them. Mostly that he's a very sick stranger who could make little girls very sick too. She'd bought it for the most part, but Nick's afraid that she won't be able to contain her curiosity for much longer.
"Think I'm gonna get some stuff done while you're gone," he tells Kim, glancing significantly towards the stairs while Carmina isn't looking. "We need to deal with the second floor sooner rather than later."
"Are you sure?" she asks, raising her eyebrows meaningfully back at him. "Is this something you can do on your own?"
"Better to not put it off anymore," Nick replies. "It'll be easier if I have the place to myself, anyway. Less, uh, confusion."
That said, he puts the chore off for almost half an hour after Kim and Carmina head out. He tries to prepare, but there's not much he can do to close off the exits, and it only takes a few minutes to drag all the necessary supplies into place. All he can do at this point is hope that John is only strong enough to help, and not strong enough to run at the first chance he gets. If he does that, Nick's going to have no choice but to shoot him.
Nick does his best to hide his nerves as he unlocks the door. It feels weird to knock so he doesn't, pushing the door open slowly enough for the hinges to creak. John should just be thankful Nick bothers to try giving him any sort of head's up.
John, ungrateful bastard that he is, sleeps through Nick's entrance. He's found the cheap wool guest blanket that Nick would never dream of actually offering to guests, which seems fitting. His shirt is crumpled next to him, leaving Nick with the unfortunate view of his bare torso.
Nick's seen John shirtless a few times now, but that doesn't make it any easier to stomach. His skin is stretched over his jutting shoulder blades, clinging to every sharp, bony angle of his spine. Nick knows there's not much else for it to cling to - he's seen the way John's stomach sags, too much skin with not enough meat to hang on to. It's all been eaten away from months, maybe even years , of malnutrition and inactivity. The only thing left of the man Nick remembers is a goddamn shadow. Looking down at John, Nick's left to wonder how he had survived at all.
Nick nudges John unkindly with his boot, ignoring the grunt of discomfort he gets in return. "Come on," he snaps, "It's morning. If the sun's up, you're up — this isn't the goddamn Hope County Hilton."
John groans, biting his tongue against whatever snide comment might come to mind. That's too bad — Nick would love to start today off with an ethically-sourced beat-down.
Even though he wants to, Nick refuses to look away as John sits up, revealing all of his tattoos and scars. The tattoos are nothing new, and some of the scars look pre-Collapse old, but John obviously didn't let the bunker curb his self-mutilating tendencies. Some of the tattoos have been ritualistically carved out, leaving flat slabs of scar tissue behind. Others have been scratched out less completely, seemingly at random. The worst part is seeing the ten deep, half-moon gouges in his shoulders, leaving behind raw, fresh scars. Nick can only imagine what led to their creation, but he would really rather not.
"Put your shirt on and eat quick," Nick tells him, setting the plate near enough to John before retreating to wait by the door. The more space he has between them, the better. If John is going to pull something, Nick wants to have room to grab his gun, or at least to brace for a fight. And anyway, John still eats like a mongrel and it's uncomfortable to watch.
"Time to put me to work?" John asks skeptically as he drags his shirt over his torso.
"You bet," Nick replies. Should he be a cagey dick about it? Part of him thinks so, out of spite, but realistically he should temper John's expectations. Nick isn't going to be capable of putting John through the kind of torture he's probably expecting. So, he points out the dipping corner and says, "This whole floor is gonna give out if we don't do something about it. Well, I say we , but I mean you ."
John regards the spot with more skepticism. "That's it?"
"You haven't even seen how much of the house you're going to be digging out of the dirt," Nick points out. "Come on, hurry up already, I don't have all day."
——
Despite being sick as a dog, John's strength is still something to be reckoned with. Nick watches uneasily at first as John makes short work of clearing space for the beam to stand, heaving shovelfuls of dirt out the open window without regard to his wasted muscles. If John decides to come at him with that shovel, it's going to be Nick's reflexes that save him, not his brute strength. Nick's reflexes aren't exactly the best these days, so Nick hopes it doesn't come to that.
It doesn't seem like John is interested in fighting, though. Nick sets him to work with the shovel and he takes it up without so much as a snide comment about Nick trying to order him around. He slings dirt silently, practically zoning out over the manual labor as Nick watches from his side of the room. It's almost like he's in a trance or something, and it's only broken when the shovel scrapes against the wooden floorboards. He comes to a sudden stop, staring at the floor in surprise. He looks up and around, fixing a sour glare at the wide-open back porch that Nick is standing guard in front of before finally looking at Nick himself.
"That's it?"
"Hell no, it isn't," Nick sighs, gesturing towards the beam that he'd dragged in from the woodpile outside. It doesn't rain much nowadays, so it hasn't gone to rot, and it should be just about level with the supports in the ceiling. Plus, it's already got the right hardware attached, and most of it even survived the nuclear blast.
"Come on," he tells John, "You're putting this up."
Still no backtalk, not even as Nick gets his own hands dirty and helps John prop the beam up. He remains silent as Nick fastens it in place with the only three-inch bolts left in America. It's a temporary solution, but Nick's proud of it anyway, and he steps back to admire the work. He has to admit, even if John is planning something, at least his plan involves actually being useful.
"That should work for now," he says. He scratches the back of his head as he regards John — what does he do with the guy now? It seems like a waste to just... jam him back up there. He's obviously capable of working, and that's what Nick said he'd do — break his back with manual labor, right?
"Well, now that we're done with that... I guess you can get to work shoveling the rest of this dirt outta here. It's been pretty low on the list, but it's not like you've got anything better to do."
"No, I suppose not."
"Hey now, what happened to just saying yes ?" Nick grins, feeling mean but still pretty funny for it. John scowls, but he's just not the right audience for the joke, so his opinion doesn't count.
" Yes, sir ," John replies. He's probably just being a dick, but the way he says it roils Nick's stomach on impact.
"Hey, none of that shit," Nick snaps, even though he probably should lean into the boss role while he can. "Just — don't be a fucking weirdo about this, okay?"
John frowns and doesn't respond. He doesn't need Nick to instruct him any further, returning to work with the shovel as though he's forgotten he ever stopped. Nick keeps an eye on him as he has lunch, waiting for John to drop the weird, quiet obedience act that he's been putting on. It has to be an act. John's just using their mercy for his own ends, using them for shelter and food while waiting for the opportunity to strike. To take the house and the guns, to take control of everything that he'd felt so obligated to eight years ago.
An hour goes by in silence. John works steadily, almost meditatively shoveling down to the floorboards, dumping shovelfuls of dirt out the nearest window to him. He's lost in his thoughts, so much so that he doesn't seem to notice as he clears out nearly half of the living room, the shovel scraping against wood like the beat of the drum that's distracting the poor motherfucker.
Eventually, Nick can't help but point out, "You don't talk as much as you used to."
John doesn't so much as look at him, which is more irritating than Nick wants to let on. What, is he supposed to shut up now, too? Forget that !
"I mean, you used to never shut the fuck up. Guess even you couldn't stand listening to yourself for eight years solid, huh?"
John grunts in response. He doesn't look so hot; his face is pale and drenched in sweat, and he seems to be relying on the shovel to steady himself. Nick squints, trying to figure out whether or not the guy is trying to pull a fast one on him — it's exactly the kind of thing Nick would do, if he were being held captive — but John doesn't seem to notice Nick's scrutiny at all. He seems miles away from the house, from himself.
Goddamn it. The more Nick watches, the less comfortable he becomes. "Alright, come on," Nick sighs, exasperation masking his discomfort at seeing John near-fainting. "That's enough for one day, now sit down before you fall down."
It's a toss-up which of those options John takes, but moments later he's flopped backward into the mound of dirt. He leaves streaks of mud across his face where he wipes away the sweat. Nick watches, waiting for the asshole to spring his trap, but John looks sincerely too beat up to try wrestling the gun away or making a break for it. His hair, thick with dust, clumps over his face, dropping into his eyes no matter how many times he tries to smooth it back.
To his personal horror, he finds himself offering John his canteen. He should leave John to drink his own spit with their fresh water supply as low as it is. It's what the man deserves. But they've wasted too much time and supplies on John to be stingy with the water now.
"Don't get too comfortable lying in the dirt," Nick points out, "I'm gonna put you back before Kim and Carmina get home."
John nods without complaint. He takes careful sips of water, like he's trying to mind how much he's taking, which is a fucking riot coming from the guy who did nothing but take, take, take for years.
"It's the nursery, isn't it?"
Nick stares down at the dirty bastard in confusion. "What?"
"The room," John repeats with a suspicious lack of irritation. "It was going to be the nursery."
Nick scowls. "Yeah," he says. "Not that it ever panned out."
John holds the canteen out for Nick to take back, which he does. "No," he admits, "It certainly did not."
"No thanks to you." Nick takes a thirsty swig of water. "None of you got a chance to raid our bunker, but there were a lot of other people who weren't so lucky. Lots of people didn't even have a house to hide in."
"Yes," John sighs, "I know."
The nerve John has to brush aside the damage he's done momentarily overwhelms Nick, and before he realizes what he's doing, he's chucking the canteen at John's head in a vicious game of dodge-ball that John just barely wins. "No, you don't know. You managed to find somewhere to survive for eight years, while good, honest people were left to rot away on the surface and suffer through nuclear winter because you burned down their houses, you stole their supplies, you ruined their lives! You destroyed everything before the police ever showed up! You sorry assholes kept talking about the Collapse while all of us were already living through it! Because of you ! You know ? Fuck you!"
Nick reaches his hand out to grab John, to — to strangle him, to shake him , anything to stop him from sitting there and staring cow-eyed up at him. Waiting for Nick to exact a physical price for all the anguish that he's caused, waiting for the inevitable retribution that he deserves.
But eight years is a long time to carry so much righteous anger. Nick must've set it down somewhere along the way; now that it's time to resume that bitter loathing, he finds himself coming up short. Honestly, he's too goddamn old for it. He's too tired. Eight years of fatherhood and living past the end of mankind has run the rage right out of him. The idea of expending that much effort just exhausts him. What would even be the point? John isn't even worth it.
"Just — get up," Nick sighs at last. "Kim'll be back in a while and I... don't want to look at you anymore."
John slumps into himself as he stands, shoulders caving in as he avoids looking higher than Nick's boots. He proceeds without complaint or comment up the stairs; despite that, Nick still braces himself for a surprise attack, his hand clinging to the holster. He stops at the doorway behind John, waiting for some trap to spring and feeling oddly put out when nothing happens.
"I'll bring you dinner later," Nick tells him. "From now on, you're only getting a second meal on days you work."
John nods in response, falling into his makeshift bed with as much grace as he had the dirt pile downstairs. Nick's not sure he's gonna be awake the next time he checks in, but that's probably for the best. Nick doesn't like watching the guy eat, and he hates having to interact with him.
When John fails to say anything, Nick uses his silence as an exit and quickly locks John away. He'll probably sleep until dinner, which means he'll spend all night muttering to himself again. That's just what Nick needs.
There's still time before Kim gets back with Carmina. Nick drags the dining table into the living room, taking a minute to marvel at the amount of dirt John managed to clear out. Maybe tomorrow, Kim can take Carmina on a hike or something so that he can have John do the rest of the room. Once the dirt's all cleared out, they'll be able to build proper doors for the back porch, instead of leaving it open to the elements and potential prison breaks. After that, who knows? Maybe they'll be able to string lights up in here like they did back at the Spread Eagle. They could actually find a use for the generator. Hurk was on the radio recently, boasting about party liquor and gasoline — maybe they could barter for fuel?
Thinking more than a year ahead is jumping the gun a little, especially considering they have to get through another winter without heat, but this is the first time Nick's let himself imagine that far. Kim is already prepping for next year, of course, but Nick's still a little stuck on bunker time, where everything felt like a tightrope walk to survive and keep sane. But now, well — there's floor space, and Nick's even stacked plates and silverware on the kitchen counter for dinner. It's progress that he can't miss, and for once he breathes a sigh of relief and actually feels relieved.
Kim and Carmina come back before dusk with three rabbits and, in Carmina's case, a turkey so big that it nearly drags on the ground as she carries it on her back. "Shot it herself," Kim tells him, dropping the rabbits on the table. She does it almost without a second thought, wrapping her arms around Nick before realizing, "Oh, the table's back!"
Nick grins. "Figured we could use the extra space. Look at you, kiddo!" Nick turns his attention to Carmina, who still has the turkey slung triumphantly over her shoulder. "That is one big bird."
"Yeah," she says, trying to look as casually confident as her mom. She can't help but brag, "It was coming right at us. I had to do something. "
"That's my girl," Nick says, "I need somebody to protect your mom whenever I'm not around."
"Hey," Kim protests, playfully shoving out of her supposedly loving husband's grasp, "I can protect myself, you two. Carmina, take that thing into the kitchen and start plucking."
Heaving a very exasperated sigh she must have lifted off of her dad, Carmina drags the limp poultry away. Kim watches her go with a satisfied smile, telling Nick, "She's got great eyesight. I didn't even notice it in the grass."
"Thank God. Can you imagine if she needed glasses out here? We would be royally screwed. So! What do you think?"
Kim looks back at the clear floor and the table with four legs on solid ground. "I admit, I'm impressed," she says. "I expected to come back to a funeral pyre. But look, you even got the support in!" She furrows her brows at him. "Did you have any trouble?"
"Nah. Actually, it was... uh, painfully easy. He didn't put up a fight or anything."
"Hmm."
Nick's not sure what Kim's thinking as she eyes the progress that's been made. Maybe she's wondering what John's endgame is, the same way Nick wonders. She's probably worrying about how to explain it to anyone who might ask about it — Grace, mostly, maybe Jerome, if he'd ever come out this way. Nick's sure he can just take credit and leave it at that, but maybe she's seeing some hidden angle that he hasn't caught on to yet?
"If we string some lights up in here," Kim points out thoughtfully, "We might actually be able to use the bottom floor, instead of camping outside all day."
"Hey," Nick laughs, "That's exactly what I was thinking."
"Am I supposed to pluck this whole thing myself ?" Carmina exclaims in horror from the kitchen.
"I'll be right there, honey," Nick calls, offering Kim a chair at the table. She takes it with a grateful smile, leaning into his hand as he briefly strokes her hair. "Not bad for a day's worth of work, huh?"
"Not bad," Kim agrees. Nick heads for the kitchen, unable to keep from humming some old-world song he can't remember the words to, happy to put aside his doubts about John for a couple of hours yet.
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attempting to write again...
sunday, 7 june at 10 am
The truth is I haven’t posted in God knows how long because with every attempt I’ve made to write, it would just get cut short by this nagging need for every sentence to be grammatically perfect and equally profound. For it to be coherent and concise. But that’s not how my mind works at all. What initially was supposed to be a safe and healthy space (and way) for Alyssa and I to express ourselves had turned into something more regulated, for me at least. I had slept with my social editor (credits to Welby Ings for coining this term) which extended beyond a one night stand and now I need to break up with him. So please bear with me as I now proceed to do exactly that, by trying to write after many previous failed attempts. Only this time with less judgment and resistance.
I guess another truth worth mentioning as to why I haven’t returned from my writing hiatus, if we want to call it that, was because I was wrestling with a lot of thoughts and ideas. Both internal and external, ever since coming out of lockdown and back into society. Almost like an ex-convict freed from jail. Only I didn’t see iso as anything closely resembling imprisonment but rather a time for rest and retreat. It’s funny because the book I spent almost all of quarantine in the company of (I consider books as my friends at this point) was about house arrest too. I learned a lot from that book. I’ll quote a handful of lines that stood out to me throughout this blogpost.
Right now I’m sitting here reflecting again on what lockdown entailed for me. I know I’m not alone in saying that it was actually a really positive experience. Although difficult in the beginning, I allowed myself to relax for once. Yes I still felt on edge, anxious and frantic at times but most of my mornings were sacred and something to look back fondly on.
I’m going to be honest again and say that I’m finding it hard to continue writing right now. Before creating this Note entry, everything was coming so clearly and naturally to me but now that I’m trying to articulate my thoughts, I can’t seem to get past this huge boulder blocking my way. And it’s really fucking annoying, to say the least. But I’ll keep trying.
Let me use some of the stuff I’ve been writing in my journal as prompts… In it I wrote a few days ago that one of my biggest fears, if not my worst one, is to lose (connection with) myself. Now I’ve put those two words in brackets because at its core, I think I’m generally just scared of losing myself. Which has a lot of other things attached to it. I’m scared of losing for even a moment what I’ve recently perceived as this heightened self-awareness I’ve somehow gained during lockdown. I’m scared of the thought of not progressing in my personal, career and spiritual growth. Of plateauing in even one of these departments.
When level 2 started and I was able to be in the presence of another being in close proximity again, I kind of felt weird. I missed solitude which I forget was always something I craved as an introvert wherever I can squeeze it in each day. Given that I had more moments of solitude than I’ve ever had in my whole life in the two months we were all forced to stay inside our homes, I got too comfortable with this new way of living. I woke up, checked my sleep quality, meditated, walked the dogs, made coffee, read Scriptures, did deep work for at least two hours (which was made possible by putting my phone on airplane mode), had proper sit-down lunches with my family, read for leisure and ran regularly. In retrospect, it was the best retreat I could’ve asked for. To top it all off, there was no real pressure coming from my manager on the project I was working on. All in all, it was a great time and I can’t express enough how grateful I am to have had that privilege. To actually experience work-life balance in its rawest form.
Hence why I think it was so fitting that I stumbled upon the novel A Gentleman in Moscow which centred around an excellent example of a man who lives an intentional and purposely unrushed life while under house arrest. Someone who genuinely enjoys life’s simple pleasures. “When all was said and done,” he argues, “the endeavours that most modern men saw as urgent . . . probably could have waited, while those they deemed frivolous (such as cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention.”
But after a fulfilling day of experiencing the latter with Alyssa and Cullen, I got home and was suddenly hit by this familiar wave of guilt for not “working on something” at the moment. Although this growth mindset has served me well all my life, it has also impeded my ability to tune into the Now. In saying that, I feel like quarantine primed me for what's next. And I do feel like something new is coming. Not just for me but for all of us. Cullen felt and pointed it out too. While there have been a lot of challenging events that happened through the course of the year so far, the optimist in me can’t help but feel like something good can still come out of all of this. Of course there are also a lot of other layers to this feeling. Anxiety, dread, boldness, excitement, intimidation, glee, hope, determination, faith, fear, love, doubt. And it doesn’t just end there. It’s perpetual. Cyclical. Contradictory. Which is part of the human condition and brings me to this line in the aforementioned book:
“By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”
There’s a lot to learn and more importantly relearn. About humanity and society at large. The past and how we want to move forward and change for the better. Which is going to take a hell of a lot of work that doesn’t occur overnight. In the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, I’ve been seeing a lot of inspiring statements about showing up however we can and how being an ally to the oppressed can manifest in various ways. And if we think about it there is no point in fighting when the very goal is to support, respect and love each other. So I guess what I’m trying to do is echo Alyssa’s words on checking within ourselves first before we take action or impose anything on anyone else. To withhold judgment aimed towards another being since at the end of the day we’re all just One Body aren’t we? (Thanks to Alyssa and Cullz for bringing up this term yesterday)
I feel like I could say so much more but I’m no expert in social studies or anything for that matter so I’ve refrained from publicly speaking up. Alas, admitting ignorance is often the first and important step to gaining knowledge. Conversely, listening closely before speaking is integral to understanding. Two truths that I’m currently living by and trying to improve on.
with tender love and respect,
- p
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Had to know (2011)
Stevie's one of those kids that spits on the sidewalk for no reason. He tips a little bit of his soda out of the can and into the street between sips and he reaches up to touch the top panel of door frames as he walks through them. He talks with his mouth full and wears his backpack with one strap crossed over his chest (the other cut off to keep it out of the way) as a stylistic choice. Stevie makes fun of people in the street after a long day of getting tormented by the other kids at school. He's Spencer's least favourite kind of person.
All Spencer can think about is sucking his dick.
See, he's been grounded for the past week (that’s what missing mass twice in five days does for you – made worse by the lack of valid excuses) and Spencer's only gotten laid three times in the past two weeks - once after school with some girl from English Lit and twice with Oliver. He's only with Stevie now because he lied about a project. In reality, they’d been sat on the kid’s bed whilst Spencer moaned about his dire need to get laid, up until around thirty minutes ago when Stevie left with no explanation aside from ‘I’ve gotta… I’ll be right back.’
As Stevie showers next door, Spencer picks at the clutter littering the boy’s room. Cut-outs are stuck to the walls with tape, books and CDs are piled hazardously on his shelves, and a few empty vodka bottles lined up for decoration. Spencer remembers that Stevie had said they were his brother’s. It’s a knock-off replica of Jordan’s apartment.
There’s a picture of Stevie and Richie on his windowsill, unframed and curled up at the corners. It’s Christmas time and they’re wearing novelty aprons; Stevie’s depicts a woman’s slim body in a red bikini, whereas Richie’s gives the illusion of a toned male stomach and a speedo. He huffs a laugh as he takes in the older brother’s animated shrug, wooden spoon in one hand.
He hasn’t seen him in two weeks, since just before New Year. He’d hoped the man would be home today. Spencer reaches for his phone with the intention of taking a photograph, for future blackmail, when the bedroom door creaks open.
He places the picture back down and turns back towards the room as the boy enters. “You took your time.”
He’s about to make a dig but…
Stevie’s stood with his arms crossed over his chest, one hanging a little looser than the other to cover his belly as he shifts from one foot to the other. He has a towel around his waist and he’s shivering slightly, although he’s visibly tensing, and Spencer guesses he’s trying to hold back the minuscule convulsions.
He’s about to ask what’s wrong but then swallows his first instinct when Stevie wills himself to remove one arm from his waist in favour of closing the door behind himself, although it still remains just slightly open as he refuses to turn his body from Spencer’s direction. He looks terrified and mortified at the same time.
Oh.
“So,” Spencer takes a few steps towards him, and the boy remains unmoving, both arms now at his sides but ever so slightly bent at the elbows, as if ready to recoil at any second. He stops at around a foot away, slipping his right hand into his back pocket and holding his left palm against the side of his thigh, simply to will away any temptation to keep his hands anywhere but to himself.
Spencer has a bad habit of misreading signals but— “You showered,” he finally finishes, his skin itches where he stands at arm’s length from his friend and, for the first time in a long time, Spencer is a little nervous. Perhaps just wary of scaring the boy away, since right now he’s looking at Spencer like a lost dog – scared to leave and scared to approach.
Spencer takes his next few steps with caution and, as if by instinct, Stevie takes one back. His back presses against the wall and, once Spencer is close enough, he reaches to the side to press the door shut until it clicks, then leaves his hand there, arm caging the boy against the wall.
A smile creeps its way onto Spencer’s face before it integrates into a darker expression, lips still curled at the corners as his eyes lock the boy where he stands, pupils dark and dilated. “Why?”
The boy flinches as if expecting to be hit. He knows that Stevie’s not kissed anybody before because the kid tells Spencer everything. He also knows that once it gets down to it, the boy won’t say yes (too much weight in taking ownership), which is why Spencer doesn’t ask for permission before he leans in and presses their lips together - because he knows he won’t say no, either.
He tells himself that the way Stevie's shoulder's drop and as he sighs in relief is more to do with his friend kissing him and less to do with not being punched in the face.
He's brushed his teeth.
Stevie doesn't move, just slumps against the wall as Spencer does all the work - presses lips against and between lips, his hips flush with the other's, hand in his hair now with the other still against the door. It takes a minute before he does respond, moving his lips against Spencer's ever so slightly.
The younger boy returns the kiss nervously and unsurely and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, spencer notes, he’s more pliant like this; less messy than most first kisses. His hips remain still and pressed back against the wall, even as Spencer presses a thigh between his legs and moves his own hips in small motions. He seems to get it right at some point though because Stevie sucks in a breath, lips parting and inviting as Spencer slides his tongue into his mouth.
Stevie doesn’t touch him; palms resting somewhere that he can’t see or feel as he allows his hips to move a fraction from the wall, which was why it’s so hard to ignore when Stevie presses two hands to his chest and shoves him halfway across the box room.
"My brother's here." And then the bedroom door is open again before the front door even slams shut, and Stevie is out of the room.
He doesn’t follow. He backs up into the room again and sits on the edge of the boy’s bed. He can barely hear Stevie’s voice, but Richie’s is lower and carries right through the house. Something about ‘just too much’ and ‘taking a break’. Spencer reaches across to pluck the small picture from the window, the one of the brothers in the kitchen, barefoot and grinning.
He doesn’t miss Richie, not really. Just misses the ease of it all.
This time he notices that, in the picture, Richie doesn’t have his tattoo. It must be an older photograph than Spencer had thought. Stevie’s hair is shorter too, but still not even close to tame. He slips it into his pocket just as the door opens again and Stevie says, “Richie isn’t feeling… He’s not— I mean, maybe you should head home. Before it gets dark,” grabs the shirt at the end of his bed and leaves before Spencer responds, locking the bathroom door behind him down the hall.
He contemplates sticking around anyway, trying again from the beginning when Stevie returns. Make sure Richie hears every second.
Whether it was the sound of shuffling downstairs or the slicing silence beyond the bathroom door, Spencer finds himself descending the stairs.
He shrugs on his coat and grabs his scarf, wrapping it around his neck as he opens the front door as Richie calls after him. He looks hopeful as he offers “I’ll drive you home,” dragging a hand over his face.
He looks tired – no, exhausted. Like he’s been screaming for hours. His hair’s not sitting right, like he’s pulled it until it hurt, leaving it untamed and loose, and then pulled some more. He’s not got circles under his eyes, but his eyes themselves are bloodshot and glassy and wider, if anything, than usual. Exhausted, but not tired.
Spencer makes sure to shut the door behind himself when he leaves.
—
“Oh, I think I found it.”
He picks a glass beaker up off the shelf, his voice echoing a little in the old room as he tries to find some kind of label.
“That one’s two-fifty mil. We need one-hundred.”
Stevie’s stood at the door and the sound of his shoes scuffing the floor as he fidgets goes right through Spencer, but he bites his tongue because he knows why he’s so uneasy and knows it’s all his fault.
“Right,” he mumbles, continuing to search.
They’ve not really talked all day (Stevie didn’t even come into school yesterday) but, in chemistry, they’re sat next to each other and found themselves one beaker short, so, here they are. Stevie’s not trying to give him the silent treatment; if anything, Spencer thinks he’s trying his best to act normal, but it’s not really working out for him.
“Shit, can’t we just use two of these fifty—“
“Spencer.”
He’s cut off and it makes his whole body seize up, but he tries to appear neutral as he turns. “Mhm?”
His friend’s got his hands in his blazer pockets, shoulders drawn up like he’s cold as his feet continue to shift from one to the other. He stutters a little, then stalls and stops altogether and Spencer gets the impression that the kid wants him to help him alone, but he doesn’t. Just waits.
“Sorry I… kissed you,” he finally says, and it’s surprisingly clear; no mumbling, just a little stalling before he manages to get ‘the K-word’ out.
Shrugging, Spencer places the two beakers back down and closes half of the space between them. It feels familiar – a little too fresh – so he crosses his arms over his chest as an extra boundary as he tells him, “I kissed you. Got the wrong idea, I guess,” but then he can’t help but add, “I don’t know why I… I mean you’re my friend - that’s all. I never usually—“
“Yeah, no, I know. Me neither.” They fall silent again, but Spencer doesn’t budge again. Knows Stevie’s got more to say as the kid’s mouth stays parted whilst his eyes scan over the room. “It’s just that you kept saying all this stuff that day about…” About how he was horny and bored and wanted to come over. He knows. “And I didn’t know if I was…”
“Into it? Supposed to be?” He helps him this time because he’s put the kid through enough. “You weren’t.”
“It’s not that, it’s—“
Spencer cuts in again; says, “no, it is. I got it into your head. I could tell as soon as we started that you were doubting… It. I played dumb. I’m sorry.”
Stevie just nods at first, trying to smile before he says, “my brother’s going through some stuff. Just got me thinking.”
It has Spencer’s attention immediately, and he doesn’t have time to tell himself not to seem too interested before he’s asking, “oh yeah? What stuff?”
Stevie’s frowning as he speaks like he still doesn’t quite get it. “He’s been seeing some guy. He— He thinks he might be…”
“Gay?” Holy shit. Spencer doesn’t smile but fuck, does he want to as Stevie nods.
The boy continues, “it just got me thinking. Overthinking, I mean. About how girls aren’t really… And I thought maybe guys were… For me… But…” He shrugs. “Anyway. Sorry. I was wrong. It was weird. This is…”
“Weird.”
They both chuckle, Stevie nodding as he replies, “right.”
As he offers a hand, Spencer asks, “friends?”
“Yep. Friends.” They shake on it.
“Friends that kiss?”
“Spencer—“
“I’m joking.”
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Fic: The Real Housewives of Storybrooke (10/?)
A fic based on this premise here, following the lives of Storybrooke’s elite wives, with all the scandal, bitching and backstabbing that goes on behind the scenes of high society…
This verse is open for prompts!
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Previously on the Real Housewives of Storybrooke:
Belle had a heart to heart with Bae about possible future half-siblings for him, and Mary Margaret and Ariel began to plot how to help Regina stop Belfrey Developments from building on Storybrooke’s green spaces.
[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [Seven] [Eight] [Nine] [AO3]
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MARY MARGARET
“This is mad, Mary.”
“I know.”
“Is it even legal?”
“I don’t know, that’s why I called Ariel.”
“And what did she say?”
“She didn’t know either. She told me to speak to Cameron Gold or Carella de Ville. Which I did, and to be honest, I’m still in the dark, but at least I’ve got Gold on side.”
“Have you asked Regina about it?”
Mary Margaret paused in her hunt for her keys and gave David a look. “Yes, of course I have. Why else do you think I’m done up like a dog’s dinner if I hadn’t had the go-ahead from her?”
Truth be told, it was actually nice to be wearing a suit again, even if it was somewhat sooner than she’d planned. Especially because she was going into this with the firm conviction that she knew what she was doing, even if she didn’t quite know how she was going to go about it, or if it would even work.
Since inheriting the Blanchard Group, Mary Margaret had always worked on the principle of ‘fake it till you make it’, hoping that if she looked like she knew what she was doing, she could convince all the board members that she was worthy of following in her father’s footsteps. Sidney Glass, who had been her father’s right-hand man back in the day, had always backed her up on paper, but she had never quite trusted him fully, and so she had taken to asking sources outside her company for advice on business matters that were particularly close to her heart.
Yesterday she had done just that, and today she was presenting her proposal to the board. Since most of Storybrooke’s town council seemed to be in Belfrey Development’s pockets already, time was of the essence.
The idea had come to her out of the blue whilst Regina had been lamenting her inability to block Belfrey’s bid for building rights on the land. What if there was another bid? What if another development company took a shot at the same land, with a view to putting it to use a different way? Say, a protected nature reserve, rather than more housing?
With the full backing of the Blanchard Group, Blanchard Holdings would be able to snap up the area in a cinch, and Mary Margaret could ensure that Belfrey stayed out of town. Ariel had been all for the proposal when Mary had mooted it to her, and Gold had agreed to help her with the legal side.
They were going to hash it all out with the board and then with the council, and whilst Mary Margaret had at first declared that she wouldn’t come home again until it was all sorted, she accepted that these things took time.
“I’ve found your keys.” David fished them out of the fruit bowl and tossed them to her. “Now, go and knock ‘em dead.”
“Says the man who thinks I’m mad.”
“I still think that you’re mad, but I haven’t got any better ideas myself, so, you go for it.” He came over and kissed her. “You’ll be fine. And remember that I’ll support my mad wife over those witches Fiona Ebony and Victoria Belfrey any time.”
Mary Margaret was glad of his faith in her, however pessimistic he might be about the idea in general, and she left the house. At least she had the drive to the office to get out of mom mode and back into successful businesswoman mode.
She wondered what it would be like when she got there. The board had been surprised when she’d called the meeting with them and Mary Margaret couldn’t really say that she blamed them. Lacking confidence in herself and constantly feeling out of her depth, she’d always been a hands-off executive in the past, and this change of approach would have startled them.
Mary Margaret didn’t like to think of what that might mean for the company. It would be just her luck if she got there to find Sidney and the board had run the place into the ground in her absence and her idea would all come to nought anyway.
Gold was waiting for her outside the plush office building when she arrived, giving a polite nod as she parked in her space – still reserved despite months of maternity leave. There were some definite perks to owning the majority share.
“Ms Blanchard.”
“Mr Gold. Thanks for coming. I know that this isn’t your normal line anymore.”
“Always happy to help a friend. Now, shall we perfect this pitch before you have to go up in front of a bunch of stuffy old men wearing suits? Well, the ones that aren’t me.”
Mary Margaret just laughed, and they made their way into the building and towards her office. The receptionists squealed in surprise at her entry and hastened to warn everyone upstairs that she was on her way. Sidney met them halfway.
“It’s an unexpected pleasure, Ms Blanchard.” He gave a little bow and as he straightened up, Mary Margaret caught the somewhat guilty look in his eye.
“Oh, you know. Just dropping in. I don’t want to remain completely out of touch with what’s been going on whilst I’ve been away. I take it that you read the proposal that I sent to the board last night?”
“Yes, yes, but I must say that it is highly unorthodox…”
He continued to talk, keeping pace with Mary Margaret as she strode down the corridor towards her office with a confidence that she was not really feeling anymore. Gold followed a few steps behind, not even trying to hide his amusement at Sidney’s obsequiousness.
They eventually made it to the office. Sidney had not stopped talking for the entire trip down the corridor and Mary Margaret didn’t think that he’d said a single word that had any real meaning other than beating around the bush to stall for time. Johanna, her faithful secretary since before her father had died, jumped up to greet her with an exuberant hug that Mary Margaret was all too happen to return despite time being of the essence. Once pleasantries had been exchanged with Johanna, they entered the room.
“Do sit down, Sidney. Now, you’ve seen my proposal.”
“Yes, but as I was saying…”
“No, I’m the one saying.” Mary Margaret sat down behind her desk and wished that the action had given her all the confidence that she thought it ought to have done. “Belfrey Developments have bid for certain plots of land in Storybrooke. There are currently no other bidders. I intend for Blanchard Holdings to enter the race.”
“Yes, yes, I understand what you’re proposing, I just don’t understand what you propose to do with the land once it’s in Blanchard’s hands.”
“I made it quite clear in my brief that I don’t intend to do anything with the land, Sidney.”
“Yes, that’s the part I’m having trouble with.” Sidney gave her his best ingratiating smile. “You see, you would hardly be turning a profit by purchasing land and then not doing anything with it. That is the whole point of business after all.”
“There’s no need to be condescending, Sidney, I did economics at college.” She’d hated every minute of it, but Sidney didn’t need to know that. “I am not intending to make a profit from the land. I am intending for future generations, including my own children, to profit from the retention of Storybrooke’s green spaces. I’m sure that you and the board would agree, Sidney, that in an era of an increasing call for corporate accountability, especially in environmental concerns, it would do very well for the Blanchard Group to be seen to be proactively taking an interest in protecting areas of natural beauty and special scientific interest.”
It was quite possibly the longest speech that she had ever delivered to Sidney and she was so amazed at having been able to get through it that she almost forgot where she was and what she was doing there.
Sidney opened his mouth to say something, but Mary Margaret cut him off. She couldn’t be put off her stride now, not when she was so close to the end of her pitch.
She had no idea if she was making her father proud or if he was spinning in his grave as a result of her plans, but she knew that her mother would have supported her. Integrity had been in Eva Blanchard’s soul.
“You can see all the details of the charitable trust that I am proposing to set up to maintain the parkland once it is in Blanchard’s possession. Mr Gold has helped me with the paperwork and he’s here to answer any questions you might have.”
“Ms Blanchard. Mary Margaret. Please, you have to slow down.” Sidney was definitely pleading with her now. “There are so many things to be considered.”
“I’m well aware of that, which is why I’m getting started now. I know these things take time, but time is a precious thing and given the speed with which Belfrey Developments are moving, it’s not something we have a lot of, so I suggest that we speak to the board as soon as possible.”
“Yes, but…” Sidney sighed, and Mary Margaret knew that she’d worn him down with sheer tenacity if nothing else. “Very well.”
She smiled, pleased at having asserted herself so well and not daring to bring up her further plans to eventually return the land to Storybrooke Council’s hands whilst leaving the trust in place to protect it from future developments.
From his position behind Sidney, Gold winked at her.
“Well, I shall go and brief the other board members.” Sidney got up, trying very hard to look like he had the situation entirely under his control and failing miserably.
“Thank you, Sidney. I knew that you’d see my side of things. There’s just one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“You might want to start reading the minutes of the board meetings that I’m copied in on when Johanna sends them out. I may be on leave, but I do still read them occasionally. I’m sure that you can inform Mr Keller that the remark ‘I’ll never forgive Leo for not having a son’ is highly inappropriate in business correspondence. It was most insightful, though.”
Sidney fled, and Mary Margaret sagged. She’d need about a week to recover from this and it was nowhere near over, but the first hurdle had been jumped. They were on their way.
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I Don’t Know What I’m Searching For
Summary: In which Logan is a Liar, Roman is Aggressive, and Virgil has a Breakdown
Notes: Brought to you by: Calculus. Because when I should be learning how to take integrals, I'm writing instead because it calms me down.
Chapter II: But I Can’t Leave Now
Virgil shot awake, the feeling of Something Being Wrong curdling in his stomach and making it impossible to sleep. He could not tell what could possibly be wrong. Patton had been happily playing with dogs yesterday, Roman had just finished a script for a new episode, and Virgil’s own anxiety had been well under control. Thomas had hung out with his friends yesterday and had even flirted with the cute barista a bit, and he had flirted back. Everything was fine, so why was Virgil so on-edge?
Screeching from right next to his room broke through his thoughts and shot into his muscles, causing him to vault out of bed and dash towards the source of the noise. He skidded to a stop in front of a brand-new, dark blue door, confusion and fear swirling in his brain. That door was new, what was going on, why was there screaming, was that crying inside?
“You have five seconds to answer, demon!” Roman’s voice screeched out from within, and that got Virgil moving again. He threw himself into the door, bursting into the room ready to come to Roman’s defense, yet he froze as his eyes registered the situation. Roman’s sword was out and he was glaring, eyes wild and blazing with the force of a thousand suns, at a trembling Logan who looked to be on the verge of tears. His pale neck was already lightly stained with blood, most likely from the point of Roman’s sword under his chin. The lenses of his glasses were cracked, a bruise was blossoming on his cheek, and Virgil could practically see his ribs from where he was standing. Overall, he looked like shit. He looked absolutely terrified of the murderous Prince in front of him.
“Roman! Calm down, back off, he’s not going to hurt you!” Virgil yelped, flying across the room to pull Roman back. Roman looked skeptical but backed off, lowering his sword but not ceasing his glare. Logan still stood, shocked, still as a statue, shaking like a kitten doused in water.
“He’s a Dark Side, Virgil. Of course he’s going to hurt someone,” Roman replied, voice calm and even. He believed this, Virgil knew, even after having met another Dark Side who only wanted to help.
“I have absolutely no idea why I am here or what is going on or why you wish to end my life, but could you please back up and listen to V-Anxiety?” Logan’s voice cut through, outwardly icy and perfectly unemotional. Virgil, however, knew him too well for that. Logan was terrified and in pain and on the verge of tears. His voice had wobbled slightly on every syllable, he had had to work to not stutter, and it was clear all he wanted to do was curl into a ball with his plushie and cry until the pain went away. And that was not something Virgil was going to let slide right now.
“Roman, back the fuck up. He’s not going to hurt you, or anyone. Do you trust me?” Virgil shot back at Roman, subtly inching closer to Logan. He needed to be there in case anything happened, he needed to make sure Logan was okay, he had to protect him-
“I trust you, but I don’t trust him,” Roman growled out.
“Then trust me because I think I know him a little better than you do!” Virgil yelled. A slight whimper left the Side behind him and he instantly lowered his volume, still glaring at Roman. “Trust me, Logan isn’t going to hurt anyone.”
“Kiddos? What’s going on here?” Patton’s voice floated in from the doorway. Everyone froze and slowly turned to stare at Patton like deer in the headlights. The paternal side stood, head cocked to the side like a confused puppy, as his eyes took in the scene in front of him. Roman was the first to move, lowering and stowing his sword away as he winced under Patton’s concerned gaze.
“Sorry, Padre, just startled. A Dark Side popped up and I was trying to figure out why, but Virgil stopped me.” Patton looked so betrayed at that, staring at Virgil with wide, sad eyes.
“Virgil? Why did you stop Roman?” Virgil gritted his teeth and crossed his arms, feeling someone’s anxiety spike. It was a familiar anxiety, one he knew well from years of experience and cohabitation.
“Because Logan’s not a threat, alright? I have no idea how he got here, but he’s here, and you need to start treating him like a person with feelings.”
“He’s Apathy, Virgil!” Roman yelled, the dam breaking as he allowed his angers and frustration to pour out. Logan flinched back and Virgil glared at Roman even harder. “He doesn’t have any feelings!”
“He is correct, Virgil. I have no emotions,” Logan broke in, voice outwardly perfectly flat. Again, Virgil knew better. Patton and Roman seemed to buy Logan’s obvious lies and looked at each other while Virgil gritted his teeth in frustration. He was about five seconds away from strangling the two extroverts at this point, and their deliberation was not helping.
“Okay, um… so, we’re going to have to keep an eye on him, and make sure he can’t escape… and we’ll talk to Thomas about this?” Patton suggested. Virgil relaxed at that. He’d honestly been expecting worse. Logan clearly had been as well and also relaxed, almost all of the tension leaking out of his body along with Virgil.
Well. Until Roman swung a baseball bat at Logan’s skull. Logan went down in a heap, unconscious the second Roman’s forceful swing contacted his temple, and Virgil screamed and dove to catch him. He managed to prevent Logan’s head from smacking into the floor at least, and he cradled him closer, heart pounding out of his chest. Logan remained a lifeless ragdoll, and Virgil began to cry. Oh stars, Logan was dead, Roman had killed him, this was all Virgil’s fault, he shouldn’t have dropped his guard-
“Relax, Virge. We’re just going to tie him up and question him a bit. He’s fine, he’ll be okay, he’ll wake up in a couple hours, now hand him over-” Patton soothed, reaching out for Virgil. Virgil simply screeched and scrambled back, clutching Logan closer to his chest.
“Not another step, either of you!” Virgil screeched. “You hurt him, get away!” Both Roman and Patton put their hands up in surrender and Virgil began to concentrate on getting Logan back to the Dark Sides. They could fix him, they would keep him safe, he’d be happier there, everything would be okay there-
But he hit a wall. He hit a wall that wouldn’t budge or crack or leave and Virgil began to panic. He needed to get Logan back home, but he couldn’t get past this stupid wall-
“Virgil! Kiddo, calm down, breathe with me honey!” Patton pleaded, appearing in front of Virgil and reaching for him, reaching to grab Logan and hurt him again-
“No! Stay back!” Virgil screeched, shooting back into the wall with Logan. He barely registered Logan’s legs hitting the wall with a dull thud or the way Logan’s head lolled into Virgil’s stomach, focused solely on protecting his person with all his being. Patton sighed and scooted back, allowing Virgil to calm himself down, still hugging Logan to his chest as if he were afraid the other Side would vanish if he let him go for even a second. As much as it hurt Patton and Roman, they had caused this, and they had to let Virgil fix it his own way. And if that meant sitting back and watching him cry into an unconscious Dark Side while hugging him like a ragdoll, they would. It was what was best for Virgil right now, and Patton and Roman had agreed long ago that what was best for Virgil came first.
“... are you sure that was a good idea, Dee?”
“No, it wasn’t a good idea. But it’s what they need right now, Pierre.”
“You know Logan’s going to be devastated. He’s going to think we abandoned him.”
“... he can think that. But this is what he needs.”
“Is it a good idea to make those decisions for him?”
“Again, no. But this is the only way, Ezra.”
“Dexter’s not doing so well. Logan was always the one who knew how to help him best.”
“I… I know. But… I need to think about what’s best for Logan right now, and what’s best for Virgil as well. And… they need this.”
“Why is that, Dee?”
“... I love him, and I just want to see him happy…”
“Oh, Dee, no, don’t cry, it’s okay, come here. Everything will be okay, alright? Things will be perfect and back to normal soon, you’ll see.”
#sanders sides#logan sanders#dark side logan#virgil sanders#patton sanders#roman sanders#sympathetic deceit sanders#dark side ocs#angst#all the angst#hurt/comfort#fluff#crying#some minor violence#but no blood#family#friendship#hugging#logan needs a hug#platonic loceit#or is it
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“The Question” - Simbar OneShot
“Have you ever thought about having kids?”
The question came out on a Saturday afternoon. Simón, the one who asked, had been hanging out with Ámbar in the new apartment Luna and she had bought for him and the guys.
They had almost had a heart attack when they first saw the new place about four months ago. It was fully furnished with one bedroom for each of them, two bathrooms, close to the Roller, and with walls thick enough not to get complains about loud music from their neighbors. Overall, it was perfect, which is why they refused it at first. They couldn’t have the girls spending that much on them, it wouldn’t be right.
Ámbar and Luna argued that they had the Benson fortune so it wasn’t a big deal and that it was already under their names so if they really didn’t want it, they’d have to sell it to someone else. The guys finally accepted the place (because seriously, it was amazing) with the promise that they would pay the girls back each cent in due time.
“Feel free to not”, they had said. The guys still planned to do so.
Anyway, that day Matteo was hanging out with Luna and Pedro was hanging out with Delfi so Simón had invited Ámbar over to watch some movies or something. You know, the usual stuff you do when you’re dating.
Simón was cooking lunch for them in the kitchen, just rice and meat, nothing fancy.
While he stirred the beef with the vegetables in the frying pan, he remembered how he used to hate green bell pepper when he was a kid but at some point got used to it. His mind drifted and he wondered what he would do if his future kids didn’t like some food. On one side, he could make them eat them since kids need nutrients and it’d be his responsibility that they acquired them, but on the other side, he used to hate stuff when he was a kid but now could eat them just fine so maybe it wasn’t necessary to force them…
It was while he was immersed in that train of thought that the question slipped out of his mouth.
Ámbar looked up from what she had been doing on her phone and stared at him.
She was sitting on a couch in the living room next to the kitchen area. Slowly, her hands descended with her phone to her lap, her slightly wide eyes fixed on him, watching him in silence.
It was the look on her face what made Simón finally realize just what he had asked her out of nowhere.
His whole body went rigid.
Oh god, they had only been dating for six months, why would he ask her that?!?! Did he want to scare her away or what?!
The subject hadn’t even come up in conversation or anything, he just dropped it out of the freaking blue.
Damn green bell peppers, I hate you again!
“Um, it’s not like I’m asking for—not at all”, he instantly back-tracked in panic. “Not now, clearly not now, I mean, we’re not even married—Not like you have to be married to have kids, of course,— which doesn’t mean that we won’t get married— I mean, someday, if you want—But I’m not asking that right now either! I just—”
Good job, Álvarez. Please, keep talking like a crazy person, I’m sure that won’t freak her out!
Giving up on salvaging himself, he shut his eyes closed and sighed.
“You know what? You’re right, it’s too soon to be talking about this, forget it. How was your outing with the girls yesterday? Good?”, he asked, totally changing the subject as his gaze moved back to the frying pan.
The sound of the oil sizzling around the food filled the room for a couple seconds before Ámbar’s voice came out.
“… I have mixed up feelings.”
“Why? Did something happen?”, he asked, his gaze still on the frying pan. He thought he would’ve noticed if something went wrong but maybe he hadn’t paid enough attention.
“My godm—", Ámbar started, only to stop and rephrase. “My mother, Sharon —I’m still not sure how to call her— She… well, you know she wasn’t the warmest person. Most only children, from what I know of, always dream of having a brother or sister to play with or dream of having their own big family someday to compensate for their loneliness. But with Sharon I… I always kinda felt like I was a burden.”
Realizing she was still talking about it, Simón lowered the fire to a minimum and focused his attention fully on her. Ámbar was opening up more to him lately, but he still appreciated every moment that she did because he knew it wasn’t easy for her. So, even if he was a little nervous about what she’d say, he listened attentively.
“I was already fighting to gain a speck of her attention, so of course I wouldn’t even think about sharing said attention with someone else. On the contrary, I hated the idea. Overall, I grew up thinking that kids and pets were a pest, nothing more than a bother.”
Ouch. That punched him right in his plan of kids and a dog.
He was about to say that they really didn’t need to talk about it right then (he’d wait for a couple of years before bringing up the subject again) but she continued talking before he could.
“But… recently I started realizing just how much I changed myself to please her. How I integrated her beliefs as my own and, at some point, lost myself. This last year has been a period of self-discovery for me: what I like, what I don’t like, what things do I want for my future… The only thing that’s remained a constant is you.”
Her eyes that had been traveling fell on his and his heart skipped a beat. She gave him a little smile. “I love you, and I want you to be part of said future, of that much I’m sure.”
All the nervousness flew out of Simón’s body and he smiled to her as well. That was all he wanted, a future with her.
“I haven’t dealt a lot with kids in my life, only in the Roller when some go skating or in the street. I think it’s cute how they look up in amazement when we make pirouettes, and the other day when you were helping that little boy out, I thought it was adorable”, she recalled, her smile still on. “I’ve been thinking, recently, that maybe it’d be nice, being able to give a little person the kind of love and support I wished I had growing up… I’m not confident that I’d be a good mom though, all things considered.”
“Nonsense”, he asserted, leaving the kitchen to sit next to her on the couch. “You’d be the best mom out there, precisely because of what you just said. You have so much love to give, Ámbar, and I’ve never seen you fail at anything you tried, why would that be any different?”
She shrugged. “It’s different studying for a test or practicing a move until you master it than taking care of a living human being.”
“You wouldn’t be alone. I—"
He stopped himself from finishing that. He probably shouldn’t bluntly call himself the father in this scenario… even if he pretty much would like to be.
“…You wouldn’t be a single mom, I’m sure of it. Put the guy to good use and enjoy as he distresses”, he teasingly suggested, making her laugh.
She took his hand and gave him a teasing look.
“Well, if it happens, I’ll hold you to your word”, she said, and Simón felt his heart soar. A wide grin invaded his face.
He couldn’t really put into words how happy he was that she was thinking about him as part of her future, so he tried to express it by holding her face with his free hand and leaning in to kiss her.
The first few kisses were a little sloppy at the beginning because of all their smiling, but it slowly got more passionate as he thought about how much he loved her and how he never wanted to let her go.
“Simón?”, she murmured against his lips, having used her grip on his hair to pull him back slightly. Simón took the chance to trail kisses down her jaw and neck, his arms around her.
“Mhm?”, he asked, lost in her scent and the taste of her skin.
“I think the meat is burning.”
Simón’s eyes shot open.
“Oh, shoot!”, he exclaimed, rapidly untangling himself from his girlfriend to go save their food.
Ámbar laughed as he rapidly turned the meat around, assuring her that it had only gotten a little roasted on one side, and then laughed again when he served the food and saw that it was more than a little roasted.
“Maybe I should learn to cook before we get married”, she joked while they ate.
Simón made them skip directly to dessert after he heard that.
#simbar fic#simbar fanfic#post end of Soy Luna#simbar fanfiction#simbar#Sorry for the wait but here it is!!!#I bring to you: freak out fluff hahaha#My Writing#short writings
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I'm always told to keep my mouth shut about these things but
It's really interesting how the world is becoming nowadays.
Those of you that may have not heard, Syria is being bombed because of "proof" of chemical attacks. I'm looking at sources and there is no evidence at all?? No pictures, no documents, no details, just "yes we have proof that Syria did it. France has analyzed it. U.K. has analyzed it. US has analyzed it. Three countries." (Source from abcnews, written by Justin Fishel, April 13, 2018)
Here’s some more sources that I read through:
BBC NEWS (has no author???)
CNN NEWS (Zachary Cohen and Kevin Litpak)
Some quotes that really brought my attention:
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the US strikes had hit the Syrian capital when the country "finally" had a chance at peace. -CNN, Zachary Cohen and Kevin Litpak
Iran's Foreign Ministry condemned the strikes. "The attack is the blatant violation of international laws, as well as ignoring the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria," -CNN, Zachary Cohen and Kevin Litpak
At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council called by Russia, the Russian envoy to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, read out a quote from President Putin saying the action of the US and its allies had made a "catastrophic situation in Syria even worse". -BBC
My question is, how come Congress isn’t being involved? From what we’ve been taught, Congress has the final say (ok, really, it’s just oversight over the president (just a mom telling her child not to eat so many cookies, basically)). To declare war, the President needs permission from them before doing so (The War Powers Resolution; and Congress’ power of being the Executive Power (but then, the president can veto their law and then it just...becomes a mess)).
But the fact that I have not seen a shred of Congress doing anything for Orange Guy says something. That’s says too much. And that says something about Orange Guy’s office, and that they’re basically turning a blind eye to everything, or see nothing wrong with him destroying the world just for more money. There’s no way in hell you can’t miss that bullshit he’s doing (BUT!! By law, he isn’t doing anything wrong, so therefore, he’s untouchable.)
Impeachment from Office (Article 2, Section 4, of the Constitution)
NEWSWEEK (Tom O’Connor)
FOREIGN POLICY (Joshua Keating)
CNN (Jeremy Herb)
Some more quotes:
"This is a conversation that needs to take place. The authority of congress should be asserted, particularly in the case of this president where he seems to be somewhat erratic when it comes to what he suggests is American foreign policy," Kildee said. -CNN, Jeremy Herb
"The Constitution gives tremendous authority for the president of United States to act on his own," said Roger Zakheim, a former House Armed Services Committee aide. -CNN, Jeremy Herb
Adler argues that in all these conflicts, Congress — if involved at all — generally simply delegated warmaking powers to the executive branch and only excercised oversight after the fact. -Foreign Policy, Joshua Keating
He added, "The Constitution says Congress shall declare war. It doesn't say the president can go to war anywhere, anytime around the globe." -Newsweek, Tom O’Connor
What some common average people of the American public doesn’t know is that the U.S. started all of this (Still don’t know how 9/11 happened, just only, the Middle East was blamed for it, no names or anything, but what am I to say?). Ever since the 1900s, and way into the 2000s. They send in military, and cause a commotion. Then, when it gets out of hand, then they’ll pull out their people and leave the rest to defend themselves. Dogs eat Dogs. Literally.
Which is really wild, because, none of this had no reason to be started. None of this should have happened, because sometimes, the US just doesn’t know how to stay out of other people’s business (i.e. the Vietnam War, and the Korean War, and WWII, and now the Middle East because of some oil scandal).
A lot of people are scared because not only is there war going on (rumors about WWIII about to start), there’s civil war everywhere. Civil war in the U.S. and the Middle East (I’m not sure about Europe, but I hear there are wildfires all over the world (which is uncommon for me to hear, but then again, the US is limited to only war, so :/ )). We’re struggling with discrimination of race, gender, and sexuality and gun violence (i.e. gay marriages, LGBTAQ+ lives, or PoC/Blacks lives matter, and school shootings).
Don’t get me started on the fucking medical care in the U.S. It’s honest bullshit (my xray in December? it was $829. Eight hundred dollars for a 5 minute x-ray. Ambulance rides cost $400. Nightingale (helicopter rides) cost you $1000 and up. All of that? Comes out your pocket, from what I hear. Insurance might be lucky to cover even part of that. So, if you’re bleeding to death from a knife wound to your gut, damn right someone’s going to pay for that $600 ride that took 2 minutes to get you to the hospital. And the waiting line in the hospitals are the worst. They take HOURS to look at you, so if you’re bleeding out, or dying in some way, shape, or form, yeah, you’re not going to be seen for some time, even if it’s an emergency (average wait is about 2 hours, and for my x-ray, we got there at 5 am, and I didn’t get seen til 9am). Welcome to America, where everything is paid for, even a cup of water costs you a dollar.
{Yesterday, we got the wrong mail that was suppose to go a street behind us, and my brother walked outside by himself to go deliver it. I ended up riding my bike out there because--even though this neighborhood is safe--I was afraid he wouldn’t even come back home and he was ok when I went out there to meet him, but that still doesn’t relieve my unease because he walks to and from school everyday and if he doesn’t come home a certain time, we start panicking (he’s also scared of going to school too because of that one scare that his school was going to get shot up (but it was some kids being really dumb and they considered it a prank but they got arrested))}
I’m also afraid of coming out to people about my sexuality, because I’m a PoC, and I have a minor disability (idk if it’s considered a serious one, so I’m gonna research that). With me going into a predominated white male working field (and being a PoC woman), chances are I would probably get paid a LOT lower than my workers, because I’m a woman, even though I did the job better. IDK how my field would turn out, because I’ve been hearing that women welders are the most sought out people, especially PoC welders. I mean, the average pay is like, 20, 25 bucks an hour? Which is super rare for anyone to get working at a job in the U.S. (average pay is about 15 to 18 dollars an hour at maximum for most jobs).
NASA Footage of wildfires
At the rate we’re going, there won’t be no 2020. I probably won’t even turn 25 and get to see the world. I probably won’t have a career. There’s going to be nothing but dead bodies and barren wasteland by that time.
Honestly, we’re better off being cavemen at this point.
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Please read all/lots of important stuff: NOTE: All awards & Scholarships offered/given to me (UNR Post College Grad 2016) & my older sister Catherine Van Schwartz (Former KOLO 8 News Reporter/Oregon News reporter, 7 years, Gonzaga University Post Graduate 2012) in the past were rightfully EARNED & NOT given; it’s not for participation. It was not easy to earn these scholarships & awards! We deserve it. Hard work & having TRUE actual brains (being TOP students) pays off.
Anyway, ran 5 miles in the rain yesterday morning with both my adorable dogs. It was extra awesome & refreshing. Then I went biking outdoors for a bit in the puddles yesterday while it was still raining. Feeling like a little kid again. Miss my childhood days haha. Reminiscing all my hard work accomplishments in life EARNED NOT GIVEN.
Again, I hope people can donate to Israel in anyway. Save the Palestinians. I feel them very deeply, eventhough Me & my older sister Catherine Van Schwartz was born in Northern Nevada & family has lived in Nevada since 1979 (42) forty-two years, immediate family & 1 of my aunts lived same house since 1990 since house were built before I was born, my father & his family were refugees.
So helping refugees truly means a lot to me. People who had to flee from their country because of unsafe/dangerous war in Vietnam in 1979. Their village/houses literally exploded by Nape Bombs. The French soldiers also helped my Father’s family in Vietnam. My mom was from China until 1989 moved to Nevada & got married to my father. I will always support all refugees & rightfully here immigrants.
They were NOT kicked out from their country, it was my grandma on Father’s side who made the decision to save her family & move to America. 💙❤️
So the people I’ve known who have lossed almost everything in their life besides some family pictures/ clothes they saved is my father, his siblings, & his family in 1979 (42 years ago). They know what true loss is.
Eventhough there is a gap age difference between my mom & father, they know what true love is & what true sacrifice & loyalty is.
I’m going to be honest my father retired last year in 2020 after 41 (forty one) awesome years after being an engineer at Grand Sierra Resort when it used to be called Hilton, MGM, Balleys, etc, before I was even born in the past.
My father was a former licensed medical acupuncturist for about a decade before he was an engineer. The kindest & most hard working person I know is my father. I’m glad I get to hangout with him after work & when I have free time. I’m so grateful for him.
He & my mom are the most hard working people I know who gave & still gives my older sister & me the best life because of my parents being smart & saving so much money literally for decades as we are not the richest & not the poorest people.
He still does acupuncture for my mom & my grandma when my grandma was still alive & died at my same house in January 4, 2002 when I just turned 9 in November 4th (2 months after my birthday).
Anyway, my dad retired from work last year in 2020, but he is not in his 60’s or 70’s he is 82 years old & I’m going to live with my parents for a long time. My father look way younger than he is. 😭Wish my dad was younger because he is one of my best friends. Wish there wasn’t a huge age gap between my mom & dad. I’ll always love them & support them in every way I can. As we get older, parents get slower & I miss doing activities with my family so quickly. So sad these years are going by so quickly. Another year older, another year slower. My mom & dad knows how to speak 5 different languages fluently, & they are very smart in so many ways & very cultured people. I’ll always love my family members even when we get into the worst arguments. Living the best life with my family.
Again, proud of our nationality- Chinese, SMALL portions of mixed European descents (French,German,Irish,British,Italian) Native American, Ashkenazi Jewish descent, small portion of Portuguese/Spanish descent, small portions of Vietnamese, some other Asian Descents & even 2% African American in our blood thanks to DNA Ancestry & 23 & Me for the specific results (if you want to find out your true roots).
*Nevada BORN & Raised & some of my big families living in Nevada for 42 (forty two) years now with mixed family of Asians/ Caucasians with American Veterans🇺🇸, Doctors, News Reporter, Nurses in our- blood-related family & family in-laws, dentists, teachers, & mixed Asian/small portions of European Descents,etc., Also some of my family members who have been living in the same house for literally 31 years since our house was built. Still love our home. Forever will.
I’m so thankful for our longterm, forever friends who were also my Father’s family’s Sponsors: Eva Kathryn Satterberg Heap ❤️& Charles Wessels (Charlie) 💙who passed away in 2003 & 2011 which we were all invited to their celebration of life at their church years ago. Thank you so much for taking care of my family when they moved to America. Thank you both for coming to our family parties/family weddings/& coming to our houses for parties. Love you both. 💕
Also Both my grandmothers & grandfathers were born in China my father’s sides parents moved to Vietnam & my father & siblings were born & oldest aunt’s 8 children (my cousins) born there then Vietnam War happened & my family were refugees moved to America (Nevada) in 1979 because Vietnam was in unsafe/dangerous conditions. My grandma on my mom’s side had 9 children then each of them have 1-3 children(my cousins). I have a bunch of aunts, uncles, cousins. Grandma on my father’s side had 7 children total, only 2 of my dad’s siblings made it to America with my Grandma & my oldest aunt’s 8 children to America (Nevada).
# Selfie # NativeNevadan # StandWithPalestinians # SupportRefugees # SupportImmigrants # Donate # Nurse # Coach # Healthcare # Running 🏃🏻♀️ # PositiveVibes # StopAsianHate # LoveDrivesOutFear # NevadaBornAndRaised # NevadaNative # athletic 🐾🏃🏻♀️💪🏼# RenoNevadaBornSparksRaised # HomeMeansNevada # Nevada # UNRnevadaAlumnaMay2016🎓 🐾 # PostUniversityGraduate 🎓 # Overachiever # WolfPackAlumna 🐾 # BachelorsHealthSciences # PublicHealth 🐺 # 2CollegeDegrees # 2ExtraMedicalLicenses # AlreadyAllAchieved # TrueAccomplishments # integrity # RenoBornSparksNative 🐾🐶 🤙🏼 ✨🌻
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