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hongsside · 3 years

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Finally Us :: ⅕

pairing :: kim hongjoong ✘ male reader ✘ yunho ( eventual poly relationship )

wc :: 3.9k

genre :: smut • romance •

tags :: doctor au , smut , doctor hongjoong, mlm, aftercare, implied forbidden relationship, implied long-distance relationship, implied cheating, sub! reader, hongjoong switch/vers you’ll see later :>

chapter tags :: implied cheating, token of love, office sex, doctor hongjoong, nurse siyeon, cock ring.

chapter title :: Promise

sws :: blow jobs , semi-public sex, riding, cum sharing, restraints, hickies, toys, orgasm denial, choking

tw :: addiction/drug overuse in a simile form?? no characters were doing drugs its just a simile??

tba :: next chapter →

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(o´ω`o)ﾉ⌒･*:.｡. .｡.:･゜ﾟ･ ❝ ˡᵉᵗ'ˢ ᵍᵒ~ᵎ ❞

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“dr. kim! d-dr. kim!”, panted a miniature figure, sputtering on her words as the dark-haired individual called beforehand spun on his heel to face the short-winded woman. the lady handed him a thin bundle of papers to the man as the staggering scent of her perfume lingered in the air, only cringing abhorrently in response. with a hand resting on her knee for essential support she continued to ramble about things ranging from dinner to the documents to a reoccurring patient whose name caught the doctor's attention.

“oh, did you say y/n? i presume these are his, correct?”, visibly nodding, dr. kim, as said previously, muttered a quiet 'perfect' under his breath and dismissed the large faction of uniformed-women, striding to his office at the end of the hall.

meet the doctor: dr. kim hongjoong; dr. kim was the youngest in his field, graduating from high school at barely 16 and completing college at 23. he was a young man in his early twenties, which caught the attention of many women from all ages, what intrigued them most, was the fact he was strangely single. you could easily tell why he was favored by the women, but to their disadvantage he was not interested in middle-aged wives. although, fortunately for him, he had his eye settled on someone else already.

“dr. kim! you have a patient waiting.”, called out a steady voice from the mob of nurses. he turned his head and nodded, waving off the woman with a smile as he proceeded to open the door. the sound of keys jangling at his hips filling the now silent atmosphere; there was faint tension evident as soon as he stepped inside. he looked down at the figure before him in mere awe, adoring the way his doe eyes wandered around the room, the way his bangs fell just above his eyes, the way he sat there anxious for his presence and the fact only they knew why.

hongjoong specifically loved one more thing, and that was nothing less than the way he looked so ruined when they played their blissful little games.

in fact, he was gonna play a game today-- his game, of course.

“mister y/n, i'm more than glad to have you back.”, the doctor mused humming in approval at the man, a shameless grin forming softly as he spoke to the man. the other man nodded in return scarcely meeting dr. kim's gaze. he swallowed thickly as dr. kim's cat-like aspect glared at him almost in a challenging manner.

the uniformed-man cleared his throat, adjusting his glasses as he glanced at the fragile frame, before looking down at his papers and chuckling.

“i-is something everything okay doctor?”, he stuttered, tugging at the collar of his sweater as he sweat profusely under hongjoong’s fiery stare. making sure the door was locked, the doctor smiled.

“of course.”

“you’re here for a regular check-up, am i correct?”, he continued nonchalantly, trying his best to appear professional despite internally, he was clouded by the lewd thoughts about his patient that pestered his mind.

“right--”, the slender man nodded, fidgeting with the hem of his sweater.

“alright then, let’s begin.”, the men stood up in unison, dr. kim leading the other man to the exam table but all he could see was the small figure under him, moaning for him, just like the other night and that was close enough to make him lose it right then and there.

“doctor kim?”, y/n repeated, holding back a stutter as he flailed his hand in front of dr. kim’s bewitched expression in attempt to snap him out of his seemingly never-ending trance.

clearing his throat, hongjoong smiled; a roguish smile. knowing exactly what routine game y/n was playing, and he knew exactly how to debunk the man.

“please sit still.”, hongjoong instructed, placing a hand on the other man’s back, palming soft circles that would gift anyone a sense of comfort— that’s not what y/n wanted. slowly dragging his painted nails against his back, the doctor chuckled once more, “knock it off my love, you aren’t fooling anyone”. he whispered as the other struggled to calm his unsteady breathing while the other man had reached the waist band of his awfully short shorts. frowning, the brunette man continued.

“come one sweetheart work with me here. strip”.

originally his plan was that he would play cold and professional unlike his usual approach of just fucking him senselessly on his office table. however, there was something different in store for the two men.

“i'm quite disappointed y/n..”, hongjoong whispered under his breath just loud enough for the smaller figure to hear. his hot breath fanned the back of his neck causing his patient's already blushed cheeks to turn 50 different shades of red.

“is that so..?”, the doll like man mused attempting to hold back the stutters and mumbles yet failing to his dismay as he slid his shirt off with the assistance of hongjoong. the doctor only chuckled in response, twirling his shorts like a flag with too much pride.

without another word hong's lips were latched onto his patient's, his tongue much too gracefully dancing with his. whimpers were revealed and soft whines let out and god knows what other filthy noises were created. tongues glided together, sucking and biting the other's lips as he ran out of breath. as much as they knew this was wrong, professionally, but his heart..and cock said differently.

he pulled away allowing them both to catch their breaths, leaving them panting in unison and the fun had just barely begun. by now the smaller man was undressed-- apart from his briefs that the slightly older man seemed to love teasing him with. his [y/n] ears had turned the same shade of red his cheeks had at this point, and hong could not help but notice. a low seductive giggle left his lips, “are you hungry yet?”. baffled even answer dr. kim continued. “i'm so damn hungry..”. his eyes overcome with lust, you realized what hunger he meant, and he surely seemed starved.

those briefs that were previously hugging the curves of the smaller man's lower body were now in his hands, he shuddered at the sudden exposure to the cold and couldn't help feel his cock twitch as it was hit by the air. he hurried to close his legs which were so beautifully displayed on hong's exam table but hongjoong was quick to stop him. the doctor had sunk down on his knees, head between y/n’s thighs which were bruised and bitten from last time. hongjoong examined his marks on his body with pride at his own creation. before he knew it his tongue was gliding across the purple works of art on the man's skin, he worked his way up higher and higher until he had reached the throbbing red tip of his cock.

god, he loved the way his flushed tip oozed out precum from just the slightest touch.

in awe, he began to lap at the underside of his cock, massaging his balls in the process causing choked up moans and grunts to leave y/n’s swollen lips-- the way his name combined with his needy moans rolled off histongue was plainly sinful but it was hong's not so guilty pleasure. his eyes never leaving y/n's, he stroked the base spreading his cum as he shifted from above in hope for more friction only to be halted by hongjoong's firm hand gripping at his hips. “m-more..”, he breathed in desire of something he wasn't quite sure of yet, luckily he knew just what.

taking him in whole, he wrapped his soft lips around his cock. the velvety walls of his mouth surrounding him-- tempting him to move as the heat of hongjoong’s tongue grazed the soft vein on the underside of his cock. truly, he wanted to mouth fuck the doctor but something told him he would pay for it later.

he hummed around him, sending vibrations of pleasure through his body still without moving.

this felt like hours, hongjoong’s lips hugging the curves of your cock: his eyes which were once commanding and powerful were now transformed into teasing eyes of playfulness and lust. waiting was unbearable and as time passed, y/n felt his cock twitch as dr. kim started to push him farther down his throat not gagging once, maintaining eye contact that could surely kill a man.

being fed up with his teasing, the man described as frail and shy had his hand now entangled in the roots of his hidden lover’s hair. loving the way the man on his knees looked up at him and started to bob his head, taking him in fully and groaning around him not caring about who saw their .

“y-your mouth feels so goo-- oh my god~ hongjoong!”, he breathed as he reached so closed to his climax that was until pulled away from his cock with a pop, his lips parted so beautifully in an a soft ‘o’. with drool dripping from his faint pout, he swirled his tongue around the tip as he left kitten licks along the way knowing the other man was so close to losing it.

“hongjoong- p-please just ..fuck me.”, said the man on the table spreading his legs wider before turning around leaving the blank canvas of his ass on display. hongjoong truly did enjoy this, it was like his own free art show and y/n was the main piece. as he scanned and palmed the soft globes of the mans ass cheeks, he raised him hand to leave a crimson mark on them. the stinging pain soon turned into pleasure and a groan left the lips of the men.

once again the younger man felt the sudden heat and firmness in his body this time somewhere different, it was hongjoong’s forsaken little tongue. the places it would go and no one would even know was sinful, but that made it better. y/n bit his lip at the feeling of the warm wetness pushing into his trembling hole--oh how he loved that shit.

y/n gripped at the sides of the table seemingly unable to contain the noises of pleasure from hongjoong just eating him out; the power the short man had was frankly formidable and he himself knew it so well. as dr. kim continued to speed up his pace, lapping at the man’s dripping hole; the doctor slipped on a cock ring from in between his legs spread so temptingly.

jerking back in surprise, the smaller man whined, “no..hongjoong please--”,

without warning hongjoong kissed his lips, shutting him up almost like on queue. he would be a liar if he said he didn't enjoy his kiss despite still being bitter over losing his orgasm for the second time that evening. y/n’s eyes narrowed in dissatisfaction and hong let out out a sound of amusement, pulling away panting softly.

somehow the room’s temperature grew hotter and the desire for each other grew with it-- moving away from the desk, hongjoong scooped up y/n, carrying his figure gently towards the couch located in the corner of the room.

“ride me.”, purred the older man as he fumbled with the hassle of his belt and the hem of his jeans. he laid down and y/n shuffled over, placing his knees at either side of the brunette’s torso. y/n gladly obliged with the command, quickly spreading his cheeks which were soaked with spit a littered with dark-red hickies revealing his hole once again and greedily taking hongjoong’s impatient cock.

with little time on their hands, they quickly got to work. the sound of skin clapping and the show of y/n's ass bouncing on dr. kim's cock was downright pornographic-- it truly didn't help that the glass panes on hongjoong's office walls were laminated with a special paper that allowed to see themselves in this state. beads of sweat rolled down his face as he clawed at the sides of the leather couch and thrusted upwards as y/n came back down on his cock.

“god- fuck, y/n you're so tight-.”, hongjoong whispered and y/n's eyes fluttered open as one of hong's thrusts curved slightly to the left reaching a place he had never imagined. tears started forming at the curves of y/n's eyes, loving the way his cock filled the smaller man's empty velvety walls..he made him [y/n] feel full-- and literally he was. but physically, sexually and romantically he was even fuller cause of hongjoong and that was something he would never get enough of.

dr. kim loved to see it-- the way his cock disappeared and reappeared from the other man's trembling little pucker; which took him in like a fucking champion., the way his ass jiggled every time he bounced, the way his thrusts met y/n's midway. He loved it so much, it was like a drug prescribed to him that he could never let go; in a way it was like an addiction.

as y/n's bounces grew sloppier and the dark-haired man grasped onto his lover's hips, it was evident that they were both near to their orgasms; although y/n quickly became aware of the situation, hissing at the realization that he would be missing his climax for the third time, and that's when hongjoong came. y/n's abused hole oozed out cum as hong's tip continued to shoot out strings of cum inside of the patient's ass. hongjoong pulled out stroking himself to completion as y/n turned around, bitter-sweet expression painting the curves of his flushed face. He took the initiative to clean up all the cum off hong's cock, displaying it to his lover as the liquid dripped down from his tongue.

hongjoong kissed him, tongues exchanging the lingering taste of the doctor's cum. groans came from both of them, hongjoong rewarding the younger man by stroking his neglected cock, pulsing between his shaking legs.

“your turn”, the man sighed still catching his breath from reaching his previous high. he was certainly euphoric and his head was in the clouds, the feelings of bliss and pleasure they brought each other was remarkable and that was undeniable to the both of them. but with the clock ticking and the appointment coming closer and closer to an end, they didn't have much time left to dawdle on the limited time they had to spend. without another word hongjoong got rid of his tie, wrapping it around wrists of his patient and pinning them above his head. y/n's bangs were stuck together by sweat, dripping from his temple to his exposed chest, suddenly hongjoong made his way to his desk not forgetting to teasingly drag his fingers across the other man's skin sending shivers down his spine.

once reaching his desk, he opened the top left drawer and retrieved a royal purple vibrator. just the sight of that toy gave him flashbacks, it was like a golden ticket for his climax-- the only thing in the way..was the cock ring. hongjoong stepped closer, kneeling just before him, admiring the way he sent back the gaze of overbearing lust and desire and the way hints of red adorned his naked body.

as the doctor slowly thrusted the vibrator, y/n bit back moans and rolled his hips in hopes of something more. hong turned up the intensity level while also picking up the pace making his lover grow louder by the minute. before he knew it a knot was forming in his stomach and a hiss left his lips as hongjoong feathered his fingers above his tense abdomen. the sight itself could've made him cum. while rolling his hips downwards, gradually fucking himself on the toy, y/n felt something else enter his pucker once more-- hongjoong's cock. now this was something that made him grow in desperation for his climax, knowing that once he did it would be memorable.

hongjoong gave his hips an experimental roll, testing the waters anew for a reaction; receiving just one when y/n's eyes rolled back and a broken moan left his swollen lips. he knew how much he loved his and he was more than willing to give it to him. his free hand much too useless on the sidelines, as he reached down for his throat grasping at the sides leaving y/n basking in the overwhelming pleasure he was obtaining.

“right there, please ah- god!”, he gasped, arching his back so hongjoong's thrusts met his prostate so nicely, releasing sounds he'd never made before. sweat dripping off him, cheeks blushed as hong took a grasp at his hips, creating a rhythm at a brutal pace that even his body was baffled by; feeling his cock pulsing inside the man indicating that he was so much closer than anticipated.

slipping the cock ring off with a subtle smile, and a loud trembling mewl from y/n; hongjoong gave him a few hard thrusts and turned up the vibrator's intesity to its highest level, leaving them both shaking in their final stage of completion, a hiss leaving hong's lips.

as he released his grip from the throat of his lover, hongjoong gave him a pleased giggle and as if on cue-- they came. their lips parted in soft 'o's and pearls of cum slipping out from y/n's slit and onto his stomach as well as his thighs while the rest was swallowed by his greedy hole which spilled some out occasionally. his thighs quivered from the stimulation and hongjoong rested his head on his lover's sweaty shoulder.

“you know i love you, right?”

a simple tired nod was the only response he got, he chuckled warmly in reply.. and no he wasn't a single bit upset by his response-- he always knew y/n never has such prevalent stamina. and with a quick glance at the clock hong sighed, carrying his sleepyhead to the private restroom. originally he would've just snuck him out the back door and bid their goodbyes until next visit (or at least until hongjoong got off work) like they've always done.

and i know that does make him seem like an asshole, but its not for the reasons one might think of. flicking his lover's head gently in an attempt to bring him back down from euphoria hongjoong smiled fondly, pecking his forehead affectionately. he showered him--although he only had 20 minutes left; once he finished, he clothed him in his extra pair of clothes consisting of one shirt much to big for the smaller figure and a pair of sweatpants that just barely hung onto his hips.

he glanced at the clock once again-- 12 minutes left. the uniformed brunette let out a sigh, he truly dreaded waking up his lover but for the sake of both of them he had to. as he muttered sweet nothings to his sleeping beauty the eyes of the smaller man fluttered open, their doe-like quality returning as if a button was pressed. the man sat up, looking at the clock suddenly an indescribable expression of sadness washed upon their faces and that's when they realized it was time to say goodbye.

10 minutes

9 minutes

8 minutes

7 minutes

6 minutes

and then suddenly it was 5..

would they really have to say goodbye now and not see each other for almost another four months? the clock's hands spun seemingly faster leaving the two men empty and numb to their surroundings. why was being together so hard? they asked, their faces communicating for them amongst the cold hard silence of the room, not needing to say a word.

“will i see you again..soon at least?..” the recently awaken man mumbled

no response

the men sighed, knowing it would have to end once again. a knock at the office door was heard causing y/n to jump, startled by the sudden intrusion-- their eyes met as hongjoong called out a firm ‘in a minute’ and they were in silence again. the duo quickly shuffled over to the back door, collecting their belongings and putting them in their corresponding places as they bid their goodbyes, exchanging soft pecks.

“you know.. your family doesn’t have to know..” the uniformed man murmured, spacing out in denial of the repetition of events. the other man simply nodded, opening his mouth to breath out another answer.

“they’ll still want me to be with him though, and besides its not like i don’t live on the other side of the stat--.”

“it doesn’t matter, don’t give up on us please, y/n--”, he sighed, the muffled sound of heels tapping filling the atmosphere, the faint smell of sex hinting at their noses.

“dr. kim, is everything alright in there?”, the steady voice spoke again.

“yes! just tidying up a bit--”, the brunette replied turning his head towards the door, but when he turned to the direction of the other man, he was already out the door, only leaving his ring on the small mahogany desk next to the door.

the uniformed man examined the ring, inside it read ‘promise’. hongjoong could’ve cried right there, placing the ring in the pocket of his coat with hesitance.

he scanned the room in hopes to still find him, despite knowing he wouldn't. the man had cleaned up earlier not being able to find a single trace of his lover in the empty square room. sighing in defeat, he patted his down his coat hoping to summon some professionalism by straightening the wrinkles near the pockets, opening the door plastering fake ass smile across his face in the process.

“kim fucking hongjoong, what the fuck took you so long, huh?”, she said in almost a whisper-- it was siyeon; hongjoong’s older sister, quite a prick on a rose isn’t she, huh?

“noona, i was cleaning up--.”

“whatever, not what i was here for-- did you do the basic checkup on mister y/n?”, he chuckled; his sister truly was a bit of a pain, he’d never admit it but it was true.

“i thought the nurses did that in room A, you guys did, right?”, the doctor questioned, it was honorable to mention that his lovely sister worked at the hospital as well; head nurse of course.

“no, i thought you were supposed to-- aish, you’re so reckless.”, he shook his head, waiting for her to finish as he continued formulating a response in his clouded head.

“--wait, where even is he? i was hoping we could do it quickly at the end of his visit.”, she tapped her foot, her heel making an obnoxious clicking noise once again. she peaked her head, attempting to see the room behind her brother’s figure in front of the door frame. the long-haired woman clicked her tongue in disappointment.

“i guess we’ll just have to arrange a follow up appointment with mister y/n”

“really? if you want, i’ll take it out of your hands and call him myself--”

“lookie here dr. kim, i don’t know what you’re up to, and frankly i don’t care; as long as its not double the work for me, do as you please”, he smiled bowing slightly as she strutted back to her office, sighing as she slowly disappeared out of his sight.

“guess we’ll be meeting again..”, he grinned as he clutched the ring in his pocket, talking to himself in the midst of his empty room. as if a child was given candy, he skipped over to the phone getting ready to dial his lover’s number as he slipped the ring on his finger.

“i promise.”

end of chapter

all work by hongsside

#hongjoong #kim hongjoong #hongjoong smut #ateez smut #doctor au #hongjoong x reader #hongjoong x y/n #fanfic #kpop smuts #poly #eventual polyamory #kpop mlm #mlm #mlm smut

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soundofseventeen · 4 years

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Cupid’s Chokehold (Kwon Soonyoung)

Hi, I’m excited for this one!!!! I haven’t written anything this good for Hoshi since 7 Things, so here we are!!! I hope y’all like it!!!!!

Inspo: Cupid’s Chokehold

Word count: 6910

Relationship fourteen: met at an amusement park where he hit on the person operating a ride; ended over Soonyoung being 10 minutes late to a date. Time together: Three days short of a four month relationship.

Relationship fifteen: met at one of the shopping malls when he was ordering a juice at the food court; ended over Soonyoung racing to keep you company when your date stood you up at a coffee shop. Time together: 24 days.

Relationship sixteen:

“Guys, guys, guys, meet my girlfriend!”

In the split second that you looked up from the Superstar Pledis game, you lost your momentum, missed one of the notes, and lost any hope that you could beat the high score challenge, so you just hoped that Soonyoung’s latest fling would be worth losing this. Okay you were exaggerating a little but in your defense you needed all the RP points to help upgrade one of your better cards. You let yourself fail the game and looked up again with a smile on your face.

“Hi!” Mingyu said brightly, beating you to the punchline and pushing your legs off his lap to stand up and introduce himself better. He took one of her hands in both of his and shook it eagerly. “Nice to meet you.”

“Pleasure’s all mine.”

You noted that while a little awkward, she didn’t look terrible. (Not that you were judging, but a lot of Soonyoung’s….past loves weren’t always the nicest.You’re looking at relationships three, six and seven here.)

“You must be Y/N. Soonie talks about you all the time.”

Soonie.

It took all your self control to not wrinkle your nose in disdain. Literally, every one of his exes called him that, so naturally you hated it. Okay not hated, but it made you wonder if the nickname held some kind of curse because not one relationship succeeded.

“The one and only.” You did however, squint your eyes at her, not recognizing her. “I’m sorry I don’t think we met.”

“I’m Aiko. I work at the vet where Soonie occasionally brings his dog in.”

Ah, no wonder he’s been bugging Seungcheol about his newest love and taking Kkooma out. You opted to stay quiet and not bust your best friend. Yet. He would eventually bust himself. But you had to admit that you were impressed with how often he changed parts of his persona...at least when you didn’t have to scold him how it wasn’t necessary and that the right person would adore him the way he was.

But, you still had to give her the credit where it was due. “Awww. Which is your favorite pet that’s been by?”

“Definitely the bunnies. We have some clients that own a rabbit farm so we see them a lot.”

“I love bunnies!” Your lips formed a pout, almost crying at the state of fluffy tails and funky teeth biting into the vegetables clouded your thoughts. You snuck a peek at Soonyoung who had hesitantly pulled a thumbs up sign and you gave him the smallest of nods which was the biggest sign for Soonyoung to start smiling widely and that little crack in your heart to split open again.

They didn’t stay much longer; Soonyoung literally just ran to his room to change clothes and grab his charger so no one really had the chance to talk to Aika other than the basics to avoid the awkward silence.

You had long ago stopped crying over Soonyoung seeing past you and going for another person but that didn’t mean the pain lessened. (thank you relationship number four.) You were always “my bestest friend in the entire world” or “my platonic soulmate who knows me better than anyone”, never more and you hated it. You just wanted to one day be someone he saw in a different light or at least find one who was like you. Maybe that would hurt less.

But maybe you were just happy that you didn’t lose sleep over him like you used to or wept into the armrest of your couch watching reruns of the shows you binged watched together.There was some normalcy back in your life but the pain still somehow managed to hit you as hard as it did the first time Soonyoung brought someone around you.

“No, you dumbass! She’s right there!” You angrily flicked your hand at your phone screen in front of you. Okay, maybe you figured that if you experienced this in real life (as you had many, many times) you realized that even if the person Hoshi ended up with someone who was exactly like you, it’d be a blow to your heart and you weren’t sure how you’d react to that.

“No, don’t go with her...don’t you dare take another….okay, fine ignore me. But don’t come crying to me when you fuck it up.” You really needed to stop watching these movies. Yes, you always knew how it ended, but that didn’t mean your anger wasn’t real. And you just kinda highkey wished it’d happen to you.

“Please stop yelling at your phone and get out of this car before I forcibly take it from you,” Soonyoung threatened.

“You were the one who wanted to come with me to wash my clothes so you’re doing everything at my pace and I swear if you break-”

“Slow down baby...you’re goin’ too fast baby!”

You smacked him. “Listen, if you don’t want all of South Korea to know you’re here, keep your voice down.”

He clicked a finger gun in your direction and slid out the driver’s side. “Gotcha. But seriously speaking, are you sure that you don’t mind that I invited Aika to hang out with us later?”

“I mean, I have to get to know her eventually, right?” You smiled a little at him. It had been a couple days since the initial introduction but you didn’t know anything else besides the obvious, and her lack of social media posts didn’t help. (You may have stalked her a little.) You finally unbuckled your seatbelt and slid your phone back into your pocket to bring two carts for your dirty laundry.

If it had been up to you, you would’ve come to the laundromat by yourself just have some time for yourself. Being around Seventeen nearly 24/7 took a lot of energy from you, but not in a bad way; you just liked having peace and quiet sometimes. But Soonyoung took it upon himself to use one of his only days off to accompany you and spend the morning with you. He even went as far as bringing breakfast to wake you up.

He helped you with the detergent and softeners and other essentials because you would’ve been mortified at the thought of him taking your dirty clothes. You werent sure why but you didnt like the thought of him touching anything. He whistled some Shinee song as he walked inside, already knowing which spot you liked. But before you could actually start loading the washing machines, you needed to reload your card because this particular laundromat didn’t use coins anymore.

You could feel your phone calling out to you to resume your watching and you were tempted to but you needed to do all this first. You took your money out the wallet and topped up the balance and once the washing machines were ready to go, you sat down at one of the tables, your finger itching to hit the play button and proceeded to ignore the rest of the world.

You weren’t sure how much time had passed but you were vaguely aware of Soonyoung disappearing for a moment and returning with the bag of breakfast, sliding a disposable tray to you and setting down a carton of juice. Then he quietly brought out a notebook and doodled on it. Your favorite thing about Soonyoung? He knew when you didn’t wanna be bothered, so he often found ways to entertain himself. Sometimes he watched his own thing; sometimes he read one of Wonwoo’s recommendations; and sometimes he worked on choreo. When it got too silent for his liking, he FaceTimed Chan so he could see exactly what he was working with and any adjustments that could be made.

“Tell the future of kpop I said hey,” you said absently, taking one of the pre-sliced waffles and biting into it. The plot in front of you had progressed drastically, and you weren’t sure if you wanted to stop watching or keep it going because every move and every word hurt your heart.

“You tell him! Okay Dino, it looks good, but now try the spin counter clockwise. I wanna see how that looks.”

You stopped watching long enough to put it away and focus on Soonyoung as he went into choreographer mode. Though he was sitting, you watched the way his hands moved and if you stood up, you knew’d be seeing them trying to mirror each other’s actions.

“Hyung, what if we did this-” you could hear Chan’s heavy breathing with the way some nonexistent tempo increased and the way his sneakers squeaked on the floor. “-instead of..” More squeaking and you were pretty sure he had thrown himself on the floor. “This? And if we circle around I’m thinking maybe Mingyu hyung, it could work.”

Soonyoung clapped, bobbing...or probably counting in his head, most likely picturing whatever he saw Dino doing, and smiled brightly. “I like it! If we can saturate the movement a little more-” more hand movements and a couple of foot stomps, “- I think we can get him to pull it off.” He stood up, made sure he wasn’t disturbing anyone else and mimicked the younger boy’s action.

You nodded along, breaking out into your own smile at watching him. Your heart ached for him, but you knew you had to content yourself with how you were. You couldn’t risk losing him.

“I’m telling you Y/N, I think she could be the one,” Soonyoung sighed dreamily.

“So you’re telling me that because this woman makes you pancakes any time you visit her in the morning, she’s made for you?” you stared off into space, making a confused face as to how in the world that could add up. “You don’t even like breakfast foods.”

“But when she makes them...oh my god. I even told my mom about her.”

You didn’t have it in you to tell him that not only did his mom video call you and shake her head at the proclamation, but she also expressed her worry about him jumping into a new relationship every time he came home with a broken heart and how one day, he wouldn’t be able to go back to himself. You understood her; since Seventeen’s debut, he had been in 15 different relationships, more than all the boys put together, none of which lasted longer than eight months. (Needless to say, you kept track.)

“You believe me, right?”

“Eat your ice cream Soonie.”

“You know it doesn’t even sound cute when you say it.” He wrinkled his nose at you. “Just for that, you’re paying for our dessert.” He pulled out his wallet and slid it out to you. “Go.”

You pulled out his credit card, frowning a little.

“What?”

“Nothing...it’s just don’t you keep a picture of Aiko in here?”

“Nah, I’m new school.”

“Didn’t you steal one of the boys’ phones the other day to complain to the phone company that yours stopped working?”

“Hey, it wasn’t my fault that I forgot that it was still updating. Shut up.”

You threw your head back and laughed before going to pay the nice lady for some of the best homemade treats you ever tasted. You patted Soonyoung’s head fondly, resisting the urge to wrap your arms around his neck and just hugging him for being so funny. Good thing too, because when the little bell dinged announcing a new arrival, the Japanese beauty came in and Soonyoung was up so fast, he nearly dropped the chair. He spoke animatedly, doing some kind of handshake you knew was only for them and then pointed to you, which you waved politely and pushed her your way.

“Always hyperactive, isn’t he?” she laughed when she joined you. “I told him I just had lunch but he swears the muffins are the best here. What do you think?”

“They’re good if you have a sweet tooth, but I personally like the cookies.”

“I’ll have whatever you like then,” Aiko smiled at you. “I’m sorry if I’m awkward by the way. I’m nervous.”

“About? Hi, I’ll take some of those too, and then we’ll be ready to pay.”

“Soonie talks about you like you put the stars in the sky so I’m a little scared to say the wrong thing.” Not the first time you heard that, but you heard it with relationship number 10 (you think.)

“Honestly, just treat him right, and we’ll be okay.” She didn’t have to know how unlucky Soonyoung was...the cheaters, the manipulators, the insecure ones who swore you were stealing him away, the ones who wanted him for his fame and/or fortune and even a couple who only used him to get to you. Every single one ended up with him at your house in the middle of the night and the cheap takeout place that delivered at any hour seemed to be his only cure. Most of the time he didn’t go home and called the leader to say he wouldn’t be going to work the next day. Some days, he used the time to go to the beach or out of town, but sometimes he liked staying in and watching movies...both of which included you.

“Okay.” She received the bag of sweets from the old lady and skipped back to her boyfriend who placed his hand on her hair and kissed it and then gave you two thumbs up. That was your cue to leave, despite him insisting you stay but you really needed to put your laundry away before you decided to leave it by your entrance until it was time to wash again. (Or so you reasoned with yourself to not interrupt them.) Aiko seemed to be the best one for Soonyoung so far, and while it still killed you to see him with someone else, at least she was nice about things. You slipped out, noticed only by your best friend who looked betrayed at you leaving but you texted him your excuse.

It did, however, surprise you when you opened your front door and you cried all over again, the bitter tears stinging for feeling like a bad person for not wanting it to go as well as it was.

“Special delivery!” you cried out to the boys at Pledis in their practice room a month later. “I’ve got some things for my favorite boys.” Comeback season always proved to be more strenuous than the last and you hated how little you saw of them. In their earlier days, you would’ve seen at least one of them roaming Seoul, but alas.

“You’re a lifesaver!” Hansol took one of the plastic bags from you and dug through it, frowning when that one didn’t hold what he was looking for.

“I never said these were for you. I was talking about Nu’est.” (Dongho had taken your treats to his group mates though, but they didn’t need to know that.) However, you handed him the correct bag and he pulled out a small bag of M&Ms, yelling triumphantly and they took turns searching for their requested items.

“Where’s Tiger Brain?” you asked, looking around. He had originally asked you to bring him another pair of sweats because he had ripped them. Again. They currently hung over your arm while you picked the lint off of them.

“Recording studio.” Jihoon opened his can of Coke and somehow managed to drink the whole thing in a single chug. Impressive if not concerning.

“Why?” You counted 12 heads, three different times. No one else was missing.

“Aiko’s here and she looks pissed.” Junhui then stuffed his face with the lunch you brought for him, in case he had said too much.

“I haven’t done anything!” Your reflexive defense whenever things had gotten rocky for the lovebird in paradise. Always true, but no one ever seemed to believe you until they had seen that you did indeed mind your business. This time was no different.

“We never said you did. Chill.”

“Do I need to go in and clarify something?”

“That might make it worse.” Minghao looked around to see if anyone would hear them. “When she asked for him, it was because she wanted to talk to him about his dog...or rather Cheol’s dog.”

So she found out. “It isn’t something to be mad over.” You had known people who did that, but no one ever had to stop working in the middle of the day over it.

“When i went to ask him for the notebook with the new dance, she was telling him about the phone call he had with you.”

“Which one?” Now you could feel the annoyance tingling at your fingertips. You always called him and he you, none of which were ever important. The most recent one being him calling you at 2:33 last night (er this morning) when he asked if he should dye his hair red or green or maybe yellow….to which you yelled at him for waking you up. But how did she know about that one? For one moment you wondered if she found a way to bug your phone...it happened in relationship number five. Creepy and unsettling and the paranoia still hadn’t left you.

“I guess she saw you the other day shopping for groceries-”

“You know, sometimes my stomach likes to remind me that I need to be fed. Just a crazy thought.”

Minghao pointed at you dramatically. “This is my story time, peasant.” He waited for you to close your mouth again. “Now, I don’t know what the gist was but apparently you saw her and said something about going to the beach with him.”

Classic word twisting...relationships one through now apparently. “Yeah, we were thinking that after this comeback that we wanted to take everyone out because, you know, you all work hard and don’t take any breaks.” Originally, it had been just for you two, then Seungcheol and Jihoon had cut into the conversation, wanting Soonyoung’s opinion for something they wrote, and from there, Soonyoung said something about a leader line getaway with you, and then Wonwoo’s voice sounded and before you knew it, bam...beach day with OT13. You had a run in with her around that time and you talked about it, but she didn’t seem bothered by it. But you had felt sick now about it, so you smiled and handed the sweats over to one of the boys and decided to go home before you got caught here. On your way out, you picked up a few wrappers that they managed to throw on the floor and went to throw them away when you saw a stack of burned pancakes inside.

“Aiko brings him breakfast some mornings but when she’s in a bad mood, she burns them,” Joshua said quietly dumping his own trash in there. “It’s been happening a lot.”

You said nothing. The one thing about Soonyoung’s relationships you didn’t keep track of? How many of them felt threatened by you near the end. You had lost count.

The time on your phone displayed 12:46 am when someone knocked on your door and Soonyoung’s I’m outside text followed shortly after. You sighed a deep sigh, one that came from your tired soul because you knew this was coming and you could feel the beginning of end. The end being your patience hollowing before you expressed how tired you were of his stupidity and possibly ruined your friendship.

“Let’s go out tomorrow,” he said as his greeting. “I feel like we haven’t done anything together lately.”

“Comeback season, remember?” You wanted to shake your head at him, noticing the way he was wired up and in the way you wanted see him

“But that’s not really an excuse to ditch you. My treat.” He smiled at you hopefully, pleading for you to say yes so you nodded.

You picked up your phone, ready to place an order on the familiar app. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes! I thought you’d never ask!”

In the middle of his kimchi soup dinner, he spilled everything, not even looking at you as he told you everything you missed. You didn’t bring up being at Pledis or seeing the spoiled food, and you could tell he was grateful.

“Hey Y/N?”

“What?”

“Is there something wrong with me?”

You wanted to joke about the infinite number of things just to make him smile, but in his vulnerable state, you couldn’t, just because you knew how he’d take it to heart. (You’ve learned from that mistake.) You just shook your head. “You’re human.” He nodded slowly, trying to enjoy his dinner, but slurping but slurping the noodles so slowly. You sighed.

Relationship ended over: Jealousy and insecurity. Time together: two months, two weeks.

Relationship seventeen: Soonyoung accompanied Jeonghan to get a car fixed and flirted with the secretary; ended over the secretary accusing Jeonghan of trying to scam the company when you somehow got involved saying you had saved some receipts; time together: 43 days.

Relationship eighteen: attempted to rekindle something with your neighbor across the street; ended over the neighbor being engaged; time together: 0 days

Relationship nineteen: befriended a tourist and offered himself to show off the sites and best places to visit. (No mention of you, but details); ended when the tourist had to go back home but the pair promised to remain friends; time together 20 days

Relationship twenty:

“You’re in my seat.”

You looked up at the stranger confused, the fluorescents of Pledis lights blinding you momentarily. “I’m sorry, I always sit here. I’m waiting for my friends to get here-” You blinked, trying to adjust to the lighting.

“Bongcha, you’re here!” Though the voice was very familiar, you were very confused when Soonyoung dashed by you and ran to the stranger….Bongcha, you assumed her name was, and hugged her. “It’s so good to see you!” he turned to you. “Hey you! I wasn’t expecting to see you today!” He made this grand hand gesture to the person he was talking to, not even wondering why you were here this early. “This is Bongcha! She’s my girlfriend. Bongcha, this is the spectacular, marvelous, beautiful, wonderful, talented, amazing-”

“Are you gonna get to the point soon or are you just gonna waste your breath?” Mini tour season, you guessed? He was only ever this hyped up whenever someone told him they were going to sing their hearts out.

“Y/N,” he finished. “My best friend in the whole entire world that I adore to bits even when I’m treated like this.”

Bongcha nodded at you once she looked you over, but didn’t say much else. “I was waiting to see if you’re done with rehearsals so we can go have dinner.”

Okay, she wasn’t gonna acknowledge your presence, which you were fine with. You weren’t here to see her, or even Soonyoung, really. But dinner already? It was still somewhere between the breakfast/lunch area. Whatever though. “Do you know if Seokmin is done with whatever you’re doing?” you asked him instead.

His mouth formed an ‘o’. “You’re finally gonna take my advice and one of my friends? I like it.”

“Gross, no. He wanted to know if he could tag along with me to the eye doctor and I said I’d meet him here.”

“But you didn’t ask me?” He looked hurt, despite the fact his girlfriend was there, clinging to his arm, ready to pull away when she heard enough.

“Our appointments are literally back to back. You’re not missing much. I’ll see you later though?”

“Okay, yeah...ye-whoa. I’ll see you later then. You’re really strong Bongcha.”

As it turned out...you needed a stronger pair of glasses, but so did Seokmin so it wasn’t a complete loss. He treated you (after looking offended at the thought of you paying your meal) to a McDonald’s lunch, raving about the time he and Wonwoo accidentally broke one of the soda machines during their predebut days and then dove into a different topic how they were hitting the road again soon just to blow off some steam and he was excited but he was gonna miss you, because he always felt like he saw you the least, so you offered to go shopping for some friendship bracelets so he wouldn’t be alone and the big baby really broke out into his big grin at the thought and ushered you out the door before you request dessert. If only your heart could want Seokmin the way it wanted Soonyoung.

Bongcha, huh?

Seventeen being gone meant that you could catch up (and even get ahead in some cases) on everything you neglected during your free time. Sometimes you wondered how you still had a job because of how easily you dropped it for them, but some mysteries didn’t need to be solved.

You stocked up on groceries and snacks, and even bought yourself new bedsheets to change the theme in your room, nearly deciding to redecorate the entire place with a sudden burst of inspiration. You nulled the idea when you realized just how much effort it’d actually take, but you did compromise on silverware….and maybe even plates but nothing too crazy.

You managed to spy Bongcha at the post office once, but she deliberately looked away before you could wave, and normally you’d be hurt about it, but there was no way that whatever she had with Soonyoung could last. You could attest to all the rude ones but it wasn’t worth telling Soonyoung about it. It’s not that he wouldn’t believe you, but he’d confront her, and then take you both somewhere to “work out your differences” and he wouldn’t leave you alone until you swore you were friends now. No thank you.

Most of the time when he called you, he let you in on the details of the small tour like who messed up the lyrics (he was looking at Seungcheol here), or how Seungkwan deciding to play marco polo in the pool and accidentally scared one of the kids when Jun pulled his leg underwater. You loved their antics and sometimes you wished you could take them up on the offer and go on tour with them at least once, but you needed your space from them. And before you knew it, they were finally done and they’d be back.

“Y/N, it could be her. I can feel it.”

Even in your sleepy haze, you could hear the ridiculousness at how he sounded. You paused the FaceTime call, clock letting you know it was 3:17 am and Seventeen was just getting home from the home country tour but he wanted to stop by her house first to surprise her. He had been giving you shit about always going to the first and last concerts but never more unless you had the money for it, but nonetheless letting you know the basics that happened, but now he was letting you know that he was serious about Bongcha. “Oh god.”

“I mean it. Like I talked to my dad about her and I wanna take her to home so she can meet them once we can go on vacation. You should hear the way she says my name.”

“Oh Soonie, you’re so cute. Oh Soonie, you’re the best. Oh Soonie…” you actually had to stop yourself from gagging. That nickname would be the death of you.

“You know, it’s still not cute when you say it. I don’t know why, but I don’t like it. So just for that, you’re buying me lunch when I-” The phone clattered to the floor and you woke up finally at being dropped.

“Hosh?” Nothing. “Soonyoung?” And then you saw a brief flash of light, and then you could see the denim and you lost vision so you could assume Soonyoung threw you in his pants….or shorts….whatever.

“What is this?!” You could finally hear him. “Who the fuck is this?!”

Oh shit….that was gonna be awkward. “Soonyoung?” Not like he could hear you but still worth a shot. “Hey, are you okay?” A deeper, unfamiliar voice spoke up, probably answering his question but still sounding muffled. You pressed the speaker as close to your ear as possible, straining to hear anything. “Soonyoung, don’t do anything stupid.” You could hear his deep breaths.

“I...you...and this...you’re joking right? This...it hasn’t been happening right?” The way he struggled to keep his composure broke you and you just wished you could find the humor in how he spoke, so bright and so happy, the denial. “It has? Okay, well...have a nice life. Just delete my number. And you...I could so kick your ass right now. No, don’t get up.”

“SOONYOUNG!” you yelled when you heard something break and a door slam.

“Change of plans Y/N, I’m coming over.” He offered no other explanation and hung up on you.

“Is there something wrong with me?” The question you always hated to answer and with every heartbreak just made you wanna lock in his house somewhere and not leave until he didn’t have a rebound. He’s had cheating girlfriends before, but this was the first time he saw it with his own eyes, and it was different in a sense.

Nonetheless, you were honest. “It wasn’t your fault, you know. Some people can’t stay committed.” You wanted to reach over and take his hand in yours, seep out all his pain and carry it with you, but you stayed put. He stared at his bowl of soup, not even bothering to eat it. Your own food remained untouched too, no doubt more cold than warm already.

Soonyoung finally put his face in his hands. “What’s wrong with me Y/N? Why can’t I ever find someone who stays?”

“Do you ever think that maybe you jump into a relationship too fast without even thinking?”

“No...I always make sure I’m over someone.”

“Twenty relationships since debut isn’t normal Soonyoung.” He raised his head to look at you, tears ready to spill out in case you said something to push him over the edge, but didn’t say anything, listening, waiting. “I think that maybe after your breakup, you come to me and then you’re here with me, and then a couple days later, it’s like you bounce back and repeat the cycle.”

“Where the hell did you get 20?” he asked, but didn’t let you explain yourself. “Where did I meet 20 people that have somehow made me their boyfriend?”

“It’s just that...every time someone new comes into your life….you just go so into...and I don’t know...you swear they’ve become some part of your life and you look so happy….I don’t know. Twenty.”

“Do you really think that of me? Do you really think that I’m like that?”

“Soonyoung, it’s almost four in the morning; you literally came to me because your ex-girlfriend is cheating on you. You have done this every single time in the past. You just called Cheol to let him know you’re not going in tomorrow because you’re staying here. I’m sorry, but did you even ask?” you realized he never did; he just assumed you’d let him every time and you have. “Later this week, you’re gonna on your own doing who knows what because it’s all too much for you and you’re gonna meet someone. You’re gonna get to them, tell me about it and then it goes wrong.��

“It’s not 20. Hell, it’s not even 10. Am I that desperate to fill a void in my heart? But even if it was, why the hell are you counting who comes into my life?”

“Because I care! I hate seeing you like this. I can’t stand you-”

“Okay, I’m gone.” He stood up abruptly. “I won’t come back next time.” He pulled out his wallet, took out a few bills and tossed them on the couch. “Here. I’m so sorry I ruined dinner, but I hope this makes up for it.”

“Where are you going? Take your money; I don’t want it.”

“I’m going to my dorm because apparently no one cares how I feel when I’m there. Good night.”

Relationship twenty (not twenty?): ended over a cheater; time together: three months; additional comments: thank you Bongcha for this fight. You just lost your best friend.

Much like Soonyoung’s relationships, you counted the days since Soonyoung stopped speaking to you. It’s been 87 days. Your texts and calls went unanswered and the boys pretty much made excuses about Soonyoung not being able to come to the phone when you called them. It didn’t matter; it was fine. You loved being ignored anyways. You didn’t need him; that's why you had your kdramas to get you through the heartache. At least things could work out in a fictional universe.

Still you cursed yourself for ending up at Pledis and signing in at the front because apparently your pride wasn’t gonna let you have this. You waved to Hyerin who was discussing a possible collab with Beomju, but neither saw you, so you went on your way to find anyone of the 13 boys who could help you. Your first stop was the recording section with Jihoon playing producer and Jeonghan behind the mic. Joshua was in the corner showing Seokmin how to play the song he liked and Seungkwan occasionally sang the lyrics to “I HATE YOU” but everyone stopped everything when you opened the door. Although sudden, none of them seemed surprised to see you, but annoyed at being interrupted.

“Where’s Soonyoung? I need to talk to him. Please don’t tell me he isn’t here.” Your voice sounded tired, and if you heard any type of rejection, you were sure to cry.

“Practice room,” Jihoon said at last, lips pursed, ready to tell you more but thought against it. “It’s a unit day practice so he’s probably showing them a new routine.” He turned his attention back to Jeonghan. “Sorry Hyung. Take it from the top please.”

Seokmin flashed you a quick thumbs up before handing the guitar to Joshua and you just hoped he’d be there. You ran into Vernon on your way over, showing you some parts of the latest rap, and you just accepted the bad omen. Because really, what could be worse than him saying “goodbye”? At least he treated you as if it wasn’t the last time he was gonna see you, but you weren’t sure if that was a good thing and then he disappeared into the room with the vocal unit practiced.

You took a deep breath when you arrived, preparing for the worst, and you knocked gently. You waited a few seconds then you opened the door and were immediately greeted with loud music. Chan and Minghao were stretching on the floor, laughing at some joke and Junhui wiped the sweat from his face. They weren’t surprised to see you either, but now you wanted to know who spilled that you were here because it hadn’t even been five minutes, according to your phone, but man it felt longer than that. The three wordlessly pointed to the furthest corner where Soonyoung chugged a bottle of water in record time.

“Hyung?” Chan called out and he reflexively turned around. “You have a visitor.”

He nodded and the boys dispersed pretty quickly, leaving only the awkward silence, tension and more distance between you than you would’ve liked. You took his sweet time coming to you, making you more nervous by the second. He normally ran up to you as if you had been gone for years and he couldn’t wait to be at arm’s length. You just wanted him to return to normal, or even just run you out of his life already. You couldn’t handle this anymore. By the time he reached you, you wanted him to stay faraway from you. Your hands clammed up and the fight or flight response kicked.

“It hasn’t been 20 relationships,” he said quietly. “It hasn’t even been half, probably half of those at most.” he kicked at the floor. “God why would you even think that? Why couldn’t you ever think I missed you after a long day?”

“You were never at my door unless you wanted to forget someone.”

“Do you think it‘s easy to forget you? Did you ever think that there wasn’t anyone else I wanted to be with, relationship or not? Finding you in everyone was exhausting. Okay, maybe a few of them did get past the whole, ‘maybe-I-can-get-over-Y/N’ phase, but, it’s hard.”

“No, don’t do that.” you shook your head, not quite believing what you were hearing.

“You’re my best friend Y/N. I hate everything we’ve come to because I can’t think straight. Okay yeah, maybe every time something finishes, I think that maybe I can tell you, but then you’re here next to me, and I don’t wanna fuck it up. Did you know I had a dream one time where you had fallen in love with me but i didn’t notice because I was flirting with someone named Minseo and when you finally told me, i was already with her, but you told me in a letter and I told you to get out of my life?”

“Soonyoung, who would be stupid enough to do that? Of all things someone can do.” And then you smacked him. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner? Do you know much we could’ve avoided. I’ve kept track of all of them...everyone that hurt you, everyone you hurt, mutual fallouts, it’s all there. Why did you wait until all this happened?” You could feel yourself falling to the floor in relief.

“What do you mean why did I wait this long? I want to stay in your life even if you don’t feel that way about me.” He joined you on the floor. “I’m sorry for walking away the other night. But please tell me about shit like this because I can tell you how many girlfriends I’ve had. But that was my bad too…” he rambled off.

“I’m sorry for accusing you,” you stared at his shoes, your shoes. He wanted his shoe to nudge yours; you could see it; you wanted him to do it too. “You’re not exactly easy to forget either. I guess I forget that you’re a big part of my life and not having you around,” you took a deep breath, “it hurts. But I want you to be happy with your life choices and who you end up with, even if it isn’t with me.”

Soonyoung nodded, not really quite sure what to do with the information. He stayed quiet though, sliding closer to you until your shoulders were touching and he finally bumped his shoe with yours. He stared at his reflection, then yours, focusing on the way you stared at your feet bumping into each other. “Hey Y/N?”

You looked up at him shyly, and you could swear you heard his heartbeat picking up. “Yeah?” He caressed your cheek gingerly and tilted your chin up to meet his maze and pressed a soft kiss to your lips

“Are you still there?”

You waited a few seconds before you answered, a smile making its way across your face. “Yeah.”

“Okay, good. What are you doing right now?”

“Eww, I think I liked it better when you guys weren’t dating.” Wonwoo. “At least you spared us these conversations.”

“Nothing since the last time you asked. I’m in the living room right now. Are you coming over today?”

“If you want me to. How’s Tigger?” You could hear him say something to Wonwoo and the other person there, most likely asking him about some color schemes.

“Down for his nap. I guess the shot tired him out, but I can at least get more things done.”

“Yeah, we adopted a cat and we named him Tigger; we got him earlier this week and we just took him to the vet this morning. Yeah, we’re painting the bathroom tomorrow. How much is the total?”

“Damn, move in already. You guys are gross. Wait, is that...Y/N guess what?!”

“What?” You jumped at being acknowledged suddenly. “I don’t need to go take him my credit card, do I?”

“No.”

The warm fuzzy feeling crept up into your insides. Somehow it had all come together after his years of heartache. His parents had been thrilled when they found out when you got together, and it seemed that the boys breathed collective sighs of relief at seeing you two, but nothing compared to what Wonwoo said next.

“He has a picture of you in his wallet and he carries it with him everywhere.”

232 notes · View notes

theholycovenantrpg · 3 years

Photo

CONGRATULATIONS, PHOEBE! YOU’VE BEEN ACCEPTED FOR THE ROLE OF SALOME.

Admin Rosey: This was incredibly difficult. Both applications were stunning and shined in the limelight - but there were these small details, Phoebe, that you included that had us absolutely captivated. Salome, I think, is a difficult character to encompass so wholly while not overlooking the details. But you managed to do that, to tie her all together while not putting her in a package. The application was such a joy to read from beginning to end - the way that you tied so many different characters into her, into her future. It was an absolute thrill to read because I was able to see so much while still being tantalized by possibilities. I can’t wait to see how Salome shines on the dash! Please create and send in your account, review the information on our CHECKLIST, and follow everyone on the FOLLOW LIST. Welcome to the Holy Land!

OUT OF CHARACTER

Alias | Phoebe

Age | 22

Personal Pronouns | She/her

Activity Level | Pretty active (6/10?) due to a national lockdown, but I’m a postgrad student so some days are busier than others.

Timezone | GMT

Triggers | REMOVED

How did you find the group? | I check out the ‘new rpg’ tag a few times a year & your graphics and then everything drew me in

Current/Past RP Accounts | Masha Vetrova @ ProchnostRPG

IN CHARACTER

Character | SALOME

What drew you to this character? | Typically I tend to go for characters who have a fundamental moral alignment of ‘good’ (even if it’s been a bit corrupted) so at first I was really drawn to Gabriel/Abaddon/Isolde. I even brainstormed them a bit before moving onto the demon bios.

But then I read Salome’s bio, and I really couldn’t get her out of my mind. There is something so delicious about her, so dastardly poetic. In a way, she’s as pure of heart as many morally good characters - patient, steadfast, true to herself. It’s just that her heart is a blackened one. A nature so rotted that even eternal damnation in Hell’s Abyss was not enough. The only fitting destiny was a demonic one, and the wings tore out of her body as if they’d been there, dormant, all along.

I know the story of Salome (thanks Oscar Wilde) & I just adore the way in which the bio weaves the biblical story into this world and this character. Salome the Temptress, unflinching as she demands the head of John the Baptist and damns all around her to Hell. This one line in particular from Rosey really, really captured it all for me:

No, the minute her mortal heart stopped beating and she opened her eyes to the fires of Hell, there was only laughter to be heard – pouring from her lips as melodic as a lark’s song, a stark contrast to the wailing and grinding of teeth.

Salome feels young and charming and spoiled and light and warm and content and this image - her descending into Hell, disrupting it with her peals of laughter - sums it all up. She is arrogant and uninhibited with her sins plain for all to see. But she is also clever. She is a girl who dances with the dead; demon through and through. She lets them openly see it so that they do not think to look closer. For if they did, surely they would see Salome was more damned than they’d ever envisioned? See that the open delight she projects - the laughter and fevered dancing, - all distract from a mind capable of cold, calm strategy? See that her hands are beautiful because they are stained with the first blood of this new world?

…All of which is to say that Salome the Temptress has worked that tempting magic of hers on me too - hook, line and sinker.

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | If it serves your guys’ plotting vision then absolutely! I’d just ask to write the death scene/have some say in the way it went down. (The person killing her off better be prepared for the fight of their lives).

FUTURE PLOT IDEAS

• (small) PLEASURES •

Grand plans and power grabs are all very well, but day to day (on the dash lol) Salome is ruled by small pleasures and indulgences. What was the point of forging this new world if not to luxuriate in it?

01. I’m very curious to see how her relations with all the other demons play out. Salome is by and large a solitary creature - the natural result of her arrogance - but I think there are some demons she favours more than others. I could see a potential friendship (or the lesser version of that bond) with ORIAS, for one. There were those who saw something akin to witchcraft in Salome too. There had been envy, when Orias was hailed the Original Witch, but even Salome has come to recognise the ungodly power that resides in them. They are one of the only creatures that Salome has any real respect for. She understands that there is value to learn in what Orias can teach.They call them the false prophet - it seems poetic that Salome is drawn to her. (So ! Much ! Potential ! Witchy ! Power !)

02. So too can I imagine Salome having a particular curiosity towards MAMMON. Hungry and dark and empty, Mammon is probably Salome’s demonic ideal. With mortal origins herself, they represent a different kind of demon – one she thinks is utterly beautiful. Their future ambitions could align, both with a deep, aching appetites, but I can also see her purely enjoying the unique company of them. Salome does not treat her ability with any real respect or caution; she sees the dead as a game. think she’d genuinely delight in Mammon mimicking her gift and the amusements that could follow. (Ok not to say I’m suggesting deal body party games but it’s very that)

03. Salome gets equal pleasure (if not a great deal more) from less-than-friendly relations. She pushes purely because other people’s irritation amuses her. I think her relationship with AZAZEL in particular could be very, very fun. Of all the demons, I can see Salome having a particularly petty dislike / jealousy of Azazel for a few many reasons.. A) they are both products of indulgence, daughters of parents (literally and figuratively) who spoiled them rotten. Similarities repel and all that. B) Azazel is part of the de facto royal family, favoured by JUDAS.. and DAMIEN .. and ABADDON .. and Salome has not ever handled that well. She watched on as they, along with the rest of hell, fell for her and thus a time-old grudge was born. C) Azazel forms part of the Holy Land’s rulership. A land that was won because of Salome (in her mind) and one she feels has rights of ownership too. I imagine that Salome genuinely despises that the role was given to Azazel of all demons. I - I just sense so many great opportunities for both bickering and battling.

04. Salome draws great pleasure from her own magnetism. Devotion has followed her throughout the stages of her life, but it too has come to wax and wane. It is there in BASTIEN though, and it’s one of the connections I’m most excited for. He satisfies her addiction, and in return she is both doting and cruel. There is some value in him politically, bu it’i more of a .. personal connection. That could change though. Or, perhaps a genuine fondness might develop, in the same way that other celestial beings seem to be fond of their animal companions. A muted form of possessiveness over his gaze and his wonderment (which may well manifest in Salome having a particular resentment towards EVANGELINE) . If he were to share out his devotion, or if it was curtailed by any harm coming to Bastien himself, Salome would not be happy. Perhaps his attentions have come to somewhat satiate her appetite and tentatively restrains her darkest needs - a fact that neither of them have realised. (!!!!!)

• (medium) OPPORTUNITIES •

05. There are some things she keeps to herself - at least for now. There’s a lot of potential for self-paras or connections with the wider RP plot. To me, Salome has something akin to true addiction inside of her. It was there from the moment of her mortal birth, and it worsened with each hit. Essentially, I think an inescapable plot point is that Salome is a lil’ bit bloodthirsty. I think this would largely be developed through my own musings and mortals who are just ‘extras’ to this RP, but I’d love to deal with the intricacies of Salome having to cover this habit. Maybe she continues to use others as scapegoats; maybe she chooses her victims with careful attention so that they go unnoticed; maybe she does it in such a way that implies the presence of a beast or daemonium.

( In fact, the concept of the DAEMONIUM is verrrrrrrrrry intriguing. Creates who inhabit corpses and do nothing but feed their hunger? Sounds like a character I know. This is a potential plot point that relies on your guys’ vision and some collaborative world-building, but I think there is definitely exciting potential to explore these creatures through Salome. Imagine the carnage of her trying (successfully or unsuccessfully) to out-possess them.)

06. I think Salome would take any opportunity to poison Infernum’s highest-ranking. This isn’t so much be her political ‘end-goal’, but an opportunity for some real entertainment. It would be a game, try and crack the kinship that exists among AZAZEL, JUDAS, DAMIEN and ABADDON; injecting a few words here, a few doubts there, and see if their loyalty lasts.. She knows Judas from a past life and has watched him oh so carefully overtheir many entwined centuries - I imagine she is a gnat to him, pushing all the right (and thus wrong) buttons. It would a sport to try and make his familial dynasty crumble. Perhaps she might attempt this by throwing doubt on to Abaddon in particular, whose aura contains a flatness that Salome cannot read. Salome doesn’t know of the goodness that lies in her, but perhaps she might find out. Regardless, I think Salome’s worst imaginable fate would be being locked in the Black Cells, unable to dance and revel in the world, so she harbours dislike for Abaddon anyway…

07. EPHEMERA is an opportunity that Salome had not anticipated. And let me tell you, boy do I adore this connection. It strikes me as a true clashing of teeth and spirits, but not as simple as one born from pure malice or hatred. Salome feels many things towards Ephemera, but she certainly doesn’t hate her - even if the ferocity between them implies otherwise sometimes. There’s a thin line between love and hate, as they say, though perhaps neither of those terms sum up Salome an Ephemera. It seems to be pure passion and temptation. I can’t say where this could lead without the thoughts of a possible Ephemera writer, but I’m sure it will be nothing short of explosive. I think this connection is the most Salome has ever felt towards another being, and that in itself is curious to her.

• (great) AMBITIONS •

The possible destinies of Salome. The following are all ways in which her story could play out, and all of them are quite dramatic. Who’s afraid of the big, bad plots….

08. Infernum technically has no throne. In order to thus claim it, perhaps one first has to be built? Salome would have no qualms choosing a side in another demonic cvil war. Why, if DAMIEN were to stake the claim of his birthright against JUDAS, he could count on Salome for support. If Judas were to live up to his title and betray the antichrist, he could count on Salome for support - if he got there before the other. Salome will happily help them consolidate a throne through bloodshed and betrayal. In fact, it will be her pleasure.

For through it all, Salome will be the demon who has thought to use MICHAEL. They are insufferable and righteous and (quite literally) archangel incarnate - really, if she had the chance, she knows that their blood would be the most utterly divine to spill - but they are useful. Undeniably powerful. Salome knows she must be careful here, but she enjoys the undisguised exasperation on their face. As if they have not yet thought to recognise the ambition that lies in both of them. If they helped her ascend to the throne of Infurnem, she would be a far more acquiescent to Caelum’s interests than the current leadership. Why? Because Salome would not act - would not even pretend to act - on behalf of demonic interests. If the best chance of her claiming ownership of the world depended on sharing it with Michael, then perhaps she would be willing.

09. But power can manifest in more than one way. She could follow such dreams, or she could become the world’s nightmares. And wouldn’t that be more indulgent? Where others hold power or peace as their prime ambition, Salome would get equal pleasure from the simple decay of all things. The world could rot and she would laugh - the dead are often better company than the living. Ultimately Salome would start another war without hesitation; she would sacrifice everything and everyone for the beautiful carnage of utter destruction. It had been so easy with the War of the Last Rites, but she had been disappointed when it ended in peace. That will not happen again; she will be ready next time. When all factions are suitably engaged, she will raise her own force and strike them all down together. — Such are her thoughts anyway. Thoughts that started developing when she met RYUK. To her, the power Ryuk holds is breathtaking. There is no other ability she desires quite as much. For if she were to contain both of their powers within herself, she would have dominion over a force so great that no living creature - mortal or immortal - could ever hope to defeat. The dead. It is a delicate strategy, but she has the patience for it. And if there was any who would spill the blood of a horseman just to see what happened, then it would surely be Salome.

10. Where there are mortals, there is faith. The relationship between Salome and the faith of the HUNDRED-EYED GOD intrigues me. In her mortal life, faith was an amusement. Its believers has been her playthings - perhaps they are again in this world. ISOLDE is as all prophets are; tempting. I think that Salome could potentially decide to join the faith – or give the impression to do so. Such a deceit would be fun and far from difficult - already she joins in on their rituals, her feet unable to stay away from any form of rhythmic movement, even ones more gentle than her usual tastes. A demon of relative influence, perhaps her faith would be welcomed amongst those most holy, perceived as a positive development in the faith’s recruitment. Perhaps she finds a currently unknown fellowship in the form of ESTIENNE, whose manipulation of the shadows surely speaks of some rot in his heart.

And all for one simple reason. Where there is faith, there are the faithful. Where there is the faithful, there is the potential for bloodshed so rich - so intoxicating - that she would play this long, patient game just to taste a singular drop. She has never been able to recreate the electrification of that first diabolical deed, when she claimed a saint’s head as her prize. She had danced and damned and thirsted ever since; the blood of an ALL-SEEING PRIESTESS might just quench such a need.

• (potential) DOWNFALLS •

Ah, but all of the above are just potential ideas. It is just as likely that Salome would be subject to some downfalls and some .. rude awakenings. I adore the fact that both MICHAEL and RYUK have such different perceptions of their connections. They are both far smarter than she gives credit. Michael is, ultimately, more powerful than Salome on more ways than one - they will surely outplay her as they have everyone, though she might be of some use to them too. In Ryuk, Salome has started a war she might live to regret - one she hasn’t even realised she’s fighting. She has perhaps been a little naive here, and it will be quite something when she realises.

There are other possible connections that could prove Salome’s downfall – or at least a be a hindrance. In my mind, it is GABRIEL, ZADKIEL and CAPHRIEL that she is most weary of. They each have a light to them that she does not care for, along with the arrogance present in all angels. I say in the following section that Salome has no fears; they represent the closest thing she has to possible concerns. I don’t think she yet knows any of them particularly well outside of the War, but she has thought of their powers. The latter two in particular harbour gifts that could, potentially, expose Salome, and thus she has developed a specific distaste for them. And of course, she probably finds them particularly fun to antagonise.

IN DEPTH

Driving Character Motivation | [TW: Implied suicide in section I ]

I think a large part of my attraction to Salome is that she isn’t really driven by an external force. Partly she is driven by the deep appetite within her (which I’ve mentioned more in other parts of this application) but I also think her motivations stem from her own intrinsic nature; she is pushed by her own heart towards ambitions that are mere extensions of her character. I think there are three central aspects of her character that best explain her motivations and actions: a complete lack of fear, an overwhelming self-adoration and a deep, petulant intolerance of monotony. Together, they’ve created a woman - a demon - amply motivated to do any of the above listed plot ideas.. One who simply does as she wants for no reason other than want itself. Below I’ve given three early examples (set in BP) of these traits taking root (and rot):

I • For what use is fear to those who are damned?

It was said that Jesus’ tomb lay empty. Through the wind Salome heard whispers of women who’d gone to mourn and found nothing - only stone and airwhere a pierced and bloodied body should have lain. It seemed the proclaimed child of God had evaded corporeal death yet again; that the words of the old, tiresome preacher whose head she once cradled had proved true. Their claims and their preachings were not false as her father had accused - but really, had not Salome always known that? Was it not she who had delivered John’s salvation, cast him up to his venerated Heaven? And as it happened - as both the head and the soul of John his body - had not she felt her own moment of pure, divine bliss?

It brought clarity; there was no hesitation in her now. She stood alone, looking out upon the depths of the Galilee Sea with an unconfined grin spread wide upon her face. She had known, always known, that the boredom of this life was only temporary. The adoration she received on earth had grown dull, she sought new, greater opportunities for her talents. There had existed a deep craving inside for as long as she could remember, one that had become increasingly difficult to satiate. It told her that her destiny lay outside of Heaven, that both the prophet and her father the king had been right to look upon her with fear. For if John and Jesus had ascended upwards, could she not leap down into her own descent? The idea of it felt so simple, so natural, so potentially powerful. Neither death nor the the promise of damnation brought her anything but intrigue. She thought of the wicked and the cruel, of the infernal depths to which she was bound, and felt only satisfied.

Mortal though she was, Salome was not afraid. Why should she fear her own destiny? Why should she fear for those she left behind? Fear had no place in a heart without hope. With a simple step, she threw herself into the icy water and waited to reach the blackest depths below.

II • For what use is love to those who are satisfied?

Where there was Salome there was laughter - her own, that was - sharp, loud and melodic. When she first opened her mouth it had sliced through Hell and turned all of its eyes onto her. Rightly so, for she she had laughed as she’d evaded Abaddon’s grasp, clawing herself out of the Abyss of mortal souls and claiming a rightful place in the depths of Hell. The Morningstar, sat above all, had not yet even spoken when Salome had started to dance.

She could feel Hell’s eyes on her, and what better way to greet such attentions than with that she did best. She had reaped rich rewards for it before, and she would do so again. A fleeting glance at her naked body showed her this realm had not dulled her beauty but made magnified it, her skin aglow with the fiery light of hellfire. And so Salome danced, feverishly but deliberately, losing herself in the spirit of the moment. What could anyone do but simply bask in the splendor of her new existence? As she raised her arms above her head, a pair of wings cut through her flesh and slowly tore out of her. Iridescent, they unfurled as if they too had felt the call of her movement.

A feast of celebration had followed. Salome could only laugh in delight as she looked upon demonic faces of adoration, gazes more alike than different to those she had received on earth. Seated at the left-hand of Lucifer himself, she had slotted into the natural order of Hell as if it had been her descent that had been prophesied on earth. How many in Hell, with all its angelic origins, had the blood of a true holy man on their hands? Perhaps just herself – and, she supposed, the man sat to the right of the Prince. Judas Iscariot. The Great Betrayer. A man she had known of in her mortality, a follower who’d wrought a downfall more entertaining than any Salome had otherwise witnessed. He looked on at her with a hard glint in his eyes and she merely smiled back - for Salome understood why. Here she was, a fellow mortal in Hell with infernal wings protruding from her back where Judas had none. It all made such perfect sense; Salome was truly different. Truly transcendent. Made and marked by forces darker then most of Hell could stand. In that moment (and all moments thereafter), Salome was acutely aware of the true power that resided within her, spilling out through her beauty, allure and wretched talents. Why, she was utterly glorious.

III • For what use is peace to those who are bored?

Eternity stretched out in front of her; memories of the wouldn’t fade. Of all the differences between immortal and mortal existence, it was only the nature of time that had ever frustrated her. To Salome, the centuries had passed by in both unfathomable speed and agonising monotony, the linearity of earth dead and gone. It seemed that in the face of an infinite future, even Hell could drag. It operated in a stasis that had begun to suffocate her and, gradually, had awakened once again an appetite that had only been temporally satiated. Lucifer dictated balance and moderation where Salome saw no reason for restraint. He had given her duties like none earth had ever dared, and she didn’t care to fulfil them. She had even grown tired of her puppetry, tired of dancing amongst such frustratingly passive bodies. There was, in a place of corruption, nobody left to actually corrupt; no opportunity to taste innocent or holy blood.

Over time she came to sense the quiet seeds of unrest in Hell, and she was gladdened by them. Once again a wicked smile graced her face, once again she twirled around the pits of Hell in anticipation. There was no better cure for boredom than chaos, and once she’d caught the scent of it her hunt could not be stopped. It had proven easy to have the whispers diverted and delivered to her ears - so many were under her spell, either terrified or infatuated. So Salome came to learn of plans of razing Hell against its master, ripping through worldly divides and claiming the earth she once lived on. At last - she could have wept from delight. And most entertaining of all, Salome had snatched the dice into her her hands.

How easy it would be to join the dissenters, to war with them against the order of Hell that had shackled her. How tempting it was, to dash their plans by raising her own blade to the Morningstar and plunging the world into carnage without warning. How fun, the thought of taking all she knew to Lucifer and laughing as he rained down revenge on the demons he had been foolish enough to trust. Impatient with monotony; patient in the face of action. Salome did not yet know what she would do, and she found utter delight in the potential of it all.

PARA SAMPLE

The Holy Land was not suited to revelry. It lacked the vitalityand decadent excessthat a true celebration required. And really, wasn’t this her domain? Nobody got more unadulterated pleasure from a celebration than Salome - she doubted that even the festivities of the Stygian Moon would be of renown without her inputs. This particular affair was proving even more tiresome than she’d foreseen. Every year she stands under the Triune Moon and watches as solemn vows are sworn; every year she wonders why they could not just be done so in private, sparing them all this tedium. She had said as much to Damien before as they had departed the comforts of the Black Palace, and had received little more than a scowl in response. But she knows her point has more merit than they’d care to admit. How long before these promises of harmony are exposed as a farce? At least that year promises some true entertainment.

Salome thinks all this as she watches the stage in front of her, eyes lazily switching between the three figures who stand upon it. The Sun, the Moon, the Stars; every pair of eyes in the sweeping crowd are trained on them. Salome can feel them. Or rather, she can’t feel the usual warmth of infatuated gazes on her own skin. Here she stood amongst hoards of mortals and beings more lowly than herself, and none were paying her their usual bouts of attention. The only thing that prevented a quiet tantrum was the knowledge that she was far from alone in feeling this agitation. Her stare flickered from the stage towards the figures of both Michael and Judas, and she could not help but smile. To eyes that had repeatedly examined them over centuries, the rigidity of their bodies betrayed them. She was far from the only one who felt the absence of centrality, and that, at least, brought her some pleasure.

Still, she only has so much patience for ceremonies not directed at her. Yet no sooner did she shift to exit the crowd than did words delivered on the stage give her pause. Azazel’s voice, suitably haughty, repeating the typical sentiments of the Holy Land. This was the ‘Age of Peace’, Salome hears her say. Only the ‘cooperation of all factions and the formation of the tridium’ had rendered them ‘triumphant against the heretics who would cast all into darkness.’ This time she cannot hold in the delicate laugh that ripples through her. If only the annual repetition of such statements made them true. If only they knew of the true origins of the War that brought this so-called peace, of where the credit should rightfully lie. Though she knows it would be foolish - more than foolish - Salome can think of nothing but how simple it would be to stand above all and confess. She’d let them savour the details of her sins and her glories. She would laugh as they wilted under the weight of her revelations.

‘I’ve never seen you look so engrossed off of the battlefield.’

Her imaginings are cut off by quiet words from behind her. She needs not turn to identify the voice of Ephemera, familiar as it has come to be. Salome had, of course, seen her across the crowd - when did her eyes start to automatically seek her out so? - but marked her presence as an occupation for later. That Ephemera sought her out first is not necessarily unexpected, but certainly thrilling. There is no other presence that can so easily bring Salome out of a petulant mood, just as there is no other who can so easily put her in one. But she has found that where there is Ephemera, there is entertainment to be had.

“You have not seen me do many things,” she replies easily, as if they had long been having this conversation, “though I do believe I’ve offered.” And she has, more than once, tried to entice her with offers of dancing and hunting and enjoying all the vices of the world they fought for. She turns her head slowly to meet the watchful gaze of her once fighting-partner, a smirk on her lips as she widens her eyes in faux-innocence. They are two alike; mortals once but mortals no more, the first of their kinds. She knows Ephemera will not rise to her bait within the presence of other Angels, which only heightens her simpering expression. Salome has no such qualms about the thoughts of her own kin; their talk excites her, their gossip only confirms how many pay her heed. She has found no simpler joy than that of walking into the Black Palace and leaving excited whispers in her wake.

“I’m sure you’ll agree that celebrating won wars is less fun than waging them’, she continues, amusement ringing clear through her voice as she returned her gage purposefully to the stage. “I asked Azazel if she might add some zeal - perhapsmake those hounds do some tricks - but she seems to have ignored my good wishes”. Salome can feel the rolling of Angelic eyes next to her without even looking. It was so easy, so predictable, and yet anything but boring. That was the real curiosity of Ephemera, so easy to reel in and yet so resistant to truly jumping off the edge. She seemed halfway caught between accepting Salome’s allure and running from it, and the resistance only increased her desire. “Though your one is the more dull, I believe. So earnest - it’s quite exhausting.”

It is clear that Ephemera is acting advisor and strategist rather than - what? Friend? Enemy? Something in between? - whichraised the question as to why she had approached her in the first place. She thinks to ask, but when she opens her mouth to do so the crowd erupts in an applause more loud than she thinks the show was worthy of. Still, she brings her own hands together for the sheer relief that it is finally over. Her feet ache from standing bored for so long, her wings want to stretch open and wide. She wonders if a large enough quantity of alcohol might loosen Ephemera a little, but when she turns to declare this she finds that her companion has disappeared in the movement of so many people. A pity, but no real matter. She has never needed the company of others to create her own sport.

EXTRAS

[ My (WIP) pinterest for Salome can be found here. ]

Salome keeps no animal companion, for she has never felt much love for the nature of the earth. She finds it amusing that some Angels and Demons belittle themselves by keeping one. However, it is not an uncommon sight to see Salome walking with crows flying above her. Only on closer inspection would one realise those animals are but corpses, a puppetry Salome (alone) finds humorous.

Like all parts of herself, she harbours great love for her wings, and not only for the damnation that they represent. They are formed of what resembles a netting of fine, golden spider’s web. They seem to constantly change in the light, appearing to be more transparent than they are solid. Regal and beautiful, they are as Salome sees herself.

She is a fierce fighter and a connoisseur of bloodshed. Her weapon of choice is a trailing point blade, forged on the day of her arrival in Hell. She uses it exclusively for more.. intimate situations, and favours instead a simple longsword on the battlefield. She is however, proficient with most weaponry, as the corpses she can make fight use the same weapons they died wielding against her.

Though Infernum is the home she helped carve out, Salome spends a great deal of time in Sanctus Terra and travels to Caelum whenever the opportunity presents itself. Both locations amplify an itch deep within her soul, worsening her desire and thereby bringing greater satisfaction when she finally acts on the urge. She has not spilled any angelic blood in Caelum, though the temptation is strong, for she knows Michael has become astute to her presence. She has left a fair few victims in Sanctus Terra, a pursuit which has become less satisfying overtime. Still, Salome is careful. For all their talk of kinship, she is not sure that her fellow demons would refrain from locking her in the Black Cells if they had just cause.

[ aaaaaaand I leave you with the last verse of ‘Salome’, a poem by Mary Lamb. I honestly can’t describe it as anything over then *chef’s kiss*. I don’t know if Rosey read this when she was writing Salome’s bio, but I thought the writing style and tone and vibe and all beautifully mirrored each other?? Stunning. On that note, regardless of whether of not you think I’m right for Salome, thank you for the obvious amount of time/thought you’ve all put into this because it’s been really (really) fun to explore. ]

When painters would by art express Beauty in unloveliness, Thee, Herodias’ daughter, thee, They fittest subject take to be. They give thy form and features grace; But ever in they beauteous face They shew a steadfast cruel gaze, An eye unpitying; and amaze In all beholders deep they mark, That thou betrayest not one spark Of feeling for the ruthless deed, That did thy praiseful dance succeed. For on the head they make you look, As if a sullen joy you took, A cruel triumph, wicked pride, That for your sport a saint had died.

#accepted #accepted: salome

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lligkv · 5 years

Text

many are called, few are chosen

Until I picked up The Razor’s Edge on a sale rack at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, W. Somerset Maugham was an author I’d known only as a name. The book sat on my shelf for a few weeks after I bought it, too. I didn’t feel any particular pull to it, and the list of books I have to read always outstrips my capacity. But when I did finally start it, I read Maugham’s comment that “Even so subtle and careful an observer as Henry James, though he lived in England for forty years, never managed to create an Englishman who was through and through English,” and I knew I was in for something good.

The Razor’s Edge centers on a couple, Laurence Darrell and Isabel Bradley, who break their engagement over their entirely different visions of life. Isabel wants a conventionally wealthy one; Larry, a war veteran who watched a good friend die for his sake, aims to leave society to discover what’s truly meaningful. The narrator, also named Maugham, tracks them as they pass in and out of each other’s life trajectories in the years after. He also tracks others in Isabel and Larry’s orbit: Gray Maturin, son of the businessman Henry Maturin, who also loved Isabel and wins her when Isabel and Larry decide to part ways; and Elliott Templeton, Isabel’s uncle, the brother of her mother Louisa, a dilettante and social butterfly who’s also a friend of Maugham’s.

Elliott often comes off ridiculous or outright irritating for his sociality—say, his determination unto his death to be invited to all the gayest parties in Paris, London, and the French Riviera, far past the time others in his social circle are willing to grant him dignity—and the determination with which he cleaves to the mores of that circle, as when he continually steers Isabel toward Gray because Larry continues to refuse to get a job for reasons Elliott can’t discern, “loafing” and losing himself in books instead. Maugham nevertheless regards Elliott with real affection, because he recognizes that under Elliott’s trivial shell lies real kindness. One pleasure of The Razor’s Edge is just how perceptive Maugham as writer-narrator is, always seeing both sides of everything and everyone. Isabel often seeks Maugham’s counsel both before her split with Larry and after, when he returns from his long sojourns in Europe and India. And while Maugham’s ultimate judgment of her—as lacking tenderness—proves too much for her to take, she admits several times that what he thinks of her means a great deal to her.

Indeed, what to think of Isabel? Initially she’s young, loving, yet clear-eyed. She’s patient with Larry, gently pushing past Elliott and Louisa’s concern with the time he’s taking to commit to her, or to a job, or to anything. As it becomes clear that what Larry’s going through isn’t just a phase, and she won’t get the life she’s used to with him, she breaks the engagement. She’s not without ambivalence about it—as she tells Maugham, “I know that I’m not playing the star part in this.” She also knows she’s the one who’d suffer for Larry’s genius. What’s more, as Maugham points out, there’s no guarantee Larry’s desires will amount to anything:

Years ago, when I was young, I knew a man who was a doctor, and not a bad one either, but he didn’t practice. He spent years burrowing away at the library of the British Museum and at long intervals produced a huge pseudo-scientific, pseudo-philosophical book that nobody read and that he had to publish at his own expense. He wrote four or five of them before he died and they were absolutely worthless. He had a son who wanted to go into the army, but there was no money to send him to Sandhurst, so he had to enlist. He was killed in the war. He had a daughter too. She was very pretty and I was rather taken with her. She went on the stage, but she had no talent and she traipsed around the provinces paying small parts in second-rate companies at a miserable salary. His wife, after years of dreary, sordid drudgery, broke down in health and the girl had to come home and nurse her and take on the drudgery her mother no longer had the strength for. Wasted, thwarted lives and all to no purpose. It’s a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, but few are chosen.

That last line haunts me. As a writer, I feel like one of the called. I fear I’m not one of the chosen.

And next to that, wouldn’t it be wiser to be an Isabel. Who does get what she wants when she marries Gray Maturin: the chance to travel, the chance to enjoy herself, children and a stable life. At least until the depression hits and Gray loses everything.

The years pass. In time, the five—Maugham, Isabel, Gray, Larry, and Elliott—reconnect in Paris. Elliott lives there; Isabel and Gray join him for a time to rally their funds and health; Maugham and Larry arrive at their bachelors’ leisure. Once there, the group runs into Sophie Macdonald, a childhood friend of Isabel, Larry, and Gray who, having lost her husband and child, has become utterly dissipated. Larry becomes determined to save Sophie. Isabel feels nothing but contempt for her, and fear Larry will be ruined.

It’s as though as Sophie’s star rises in Larry’s universe, Isabel’s star in the novel falls. She’s become crude. When she originally rejected Larry, it was because she simply wanted a conventional life, not because she felt contempt for those who didn’t lead such lives—in fact, she knew then Larry was one to admire. As an adult, on the other hand, she goes so far as to set a bottle of Polish liquor Elliott’s gifted her out in the drawing room specifically to tempt Sophie into drinking and falling back into her old life, out of Larry’s. Conventional culture coarsens people. It takes away their ability to make their own choices and to let others make theirs. You go so far into the role you play, like high-society wife, that you lose all self-awareness. Indeed, you have to bury any awareness of the nobler life to subsist in your social one. And Isabel’s has been buried so far she can’t see the spiritual valence of Larry’s attachment to Sophie. She’s no longer willing to dignify his desire or his choice. She can see only the social ruin—never mind that Larry doesn’t really have any social capital to speak of at this point; there’s no ruin to defend against. Whatever tenderness was once in her—whatever human feeling and spiritual sensitivity—is gone.

The sensitivity remains in Larry. Who’s something of a saint figure, if less like Christ than the stereotype of the Eastern sage that you could write about in Maugham’s day. As Maugham puts it, he’s possessed of a passion for self-sacrifice that “whirls the victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality.”

He’s also, as you might expect, a figure of doubt. The question that occupies him is “a basic question, but an eternal one: “If an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did He create evil?” Why did God allow a war that took his friends’ lives; why did God create humans with spiritual voids that drive them as Larry himself is driven? And if God made humans to be capable of sin, like Sophie with her drinking, why does he fault them for demonstrating that capacity?

After the conclusion of the Sophie Macdonald affair, the drama of Larry and Isabel’s relationship falls away; the question of God becomes the novel’s most pressing. Maugham also tags the chapter in which he and Larry have their deepest conversation about God as nonessential—and indeed the novel could stand fine without it. But it’s Razor’s secret heart. Larry’s ultimate argument in that chapter, as he reveals to Maugham what happened during his five years in India, is:

In the West, the structures of faith are elaborate (e.g., the Catholic church) and faith itself is tortured and ambivalent. In the East—again, speaking broadly—faith is lived; its structures are woven into daily life. Essentially, history’s spiral spins, over and over, into all time; we’re caught up, we live and die, in its churn. We don’t contemplate the churn until something like war brings us face to face with its reality. When you’re confronted by the nature of life in this way, you can either fashion a philosophy in which there is a God in charge of it all and fear of this God and obedience to Him give you a door out of this world and into Heaven. Or you can live your life in such a way that you might be able to renounce earthly life and exit the spiral of reincarnation or repetition for all time.

It’s an age-old opposition, nothing new, and Larry’s foray into Hinduism does feel like an orientalist answer to the question of occidental faith. But I think it’s hard to deny the appeal that non-duality—the idea that the mind and the body, the self and the world that surrounds it, are not separate; that all that is is “awareness”—can have for philosophically dualist societies and belief systems predicated upon Cartesian conceptualizations of the mind and body: the materialist idea of a concrete, distinct self tied to each body, which interacts with a world outside of it, that persists despite it.

Larry’s contention seems to be that in non-dual traditions, questions like “why did God create evil, or make evil possible?” can be answered—the answer being that there is no God who creates this evil or can save you from an original sin that’s intrinsic to your being, and nor is there any such sin. There is simply an Absolute from which the stuff that is your eternal soul is descended, to live out temporal loops of incarnation—as many as it takes to live a life free of misdeeds. And it falls upon you, in your soul’s current manifestation, to live in such a way that you might earn an exit from these loops—a return to the Absolute.

How do I feel about Larry’s argument? I can imagine that the idea that no evil really exists is comforting when you’ve witnessed something that’s otherwise entirely aberrant, senseless, unconscionable, like a person you love being blown to bits in front of you. Even if the other possible answer—that evil exists, and you’ve just witnessed it—seems just as plausible to me.

And while I’m sympathetic to Larry’s desire for truth. I don’t know that non-duality is where I’d find it. Or traditional religion, for that matter. I don’t consider the question of sin in terms of the state of one’s soul pressing. I consider the question of sin in terms of wrongs and harm done to others pressing. And something about the former way of thought feels a little self-absorbed to me—as though you’re interested in spiritual truth because of what it might mean for you, as opposed to what it might help you do, how it might help you minimize the harm to others that you might commit if you didn’t think in terms of right or wrong and about what’s ethical and what’s not.

But I say all this as a product of my particular historical moment. As I read The Razor’s Edge, my own distance from essential questions of goodness and evil felt very clear. I don’t know that I could imagine a Larry Durrell type living in 2019. I came to wonder if living in late-capitalist liberal democracy, post-religion, has robbed me of a capacity for deep moral or spiritual investigation like Maugham’s (or Graham Greene’s, another very moral writer I’ve read quite a bit of lately). After all, I too live in interesting times, times whose questions are full of moral stakes. (E.g., you live in a world that’s capable of separating migrant children from their families, keeping people who are blameless for their own conditions penned in arbitrary borders and denying them the right to live where they please based on the contingent fact of their citizenship. Do you participate in this world? How?) But—and I realize how self-indulgent this sounds; what the times I live in mean for my art is hardly the most relevant question I ought to be asking about them—I don’t seem able to write anything of real depth about the times in which I live. Let alone come up with substantive answers to any of my moral questions.

After I finished this novel, I came to think: maybe religion gives you the terms for a moral understanding of the world. And when you’re shaped by conditions that don’t mandate a faith—when the structures of your world are entirely liberal-democratic, or commercial, and not moral in any way—and you live a pretty safely bourgeois life, and you are not driven through an experience, like the war that Larry Durrell survives, that sends cracks through those conditions and reveals how contingent they are and the depths of human suffering that their prosperity can obscure—you become complacent. No questions like the ones that inform this novel ever occur to you.

Or rather, by the time that the things you’ve gotten used to break down, revealing the questions that you thought the End of History had rendered moot, you’re left with no sense of what the answers to those questions might be, and only the most unfit tools to find them.

#literary #books #novels #w. somerset maugham #the end of history #religion vs. secularity

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light-and-darkness-equally-well · 6 years

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I Saw The Crimes of Grindelwald

And like any movie, there were things I loved.

Baby. Nifflers.

The freaking artistic departments and the COSTUMING were all very beautiful.

I liked Theseus Scamander more than I thought I would - maybe I was getting more realistic older sibling vibes, maybe his human moments just hit me. Idk.

OMG the cast performed so well??? I’d literally just list all their names if I wanted to point out anything specific. If you’ve seen the movie yell about the spoilery things in the comments with me?

SPOILERS BELOW

Okay, Leta was awesome and I had honestly expected her to follow Grindelwald? But they definitely broke expectations with this one. Really pulled a Last Jedi on us in that regard - the person we expect to be tempted to the dark gave her life for the right reasons, and one of our brightest, most hopeful and wholesome characters in the first movie goes dark.

BTW she made me want to cry when she screamed “Walk with me,” ugh. I really hope she doesn’t die still on Grindelwald’s side. The man must be a powerful occlumens to not reveal his actual endgame to a legilimens that just hears people without even trying. I’m glad it wasn’t just “for love”, though that is a driving factor for her - it’s for freedom to express that love, and being caught in a moment of vulnerability in the crowd, and Jacob finally calling her crazy out loud for that decision.

Also, like, can we talk about how her descent into darkness was definitely not unexpected? She enchanted Jacob to keep him compliant! I mean, I get it - but Jacob was the one who loved more in that scenario, because he cared more about her than about them being together. She could have campaigned for the right to marry him at the Ministry - but she went with mind control. There’s a clear difference in what she believed was right and wrong versus others.

IDK I just hope that if she does come to a breaking point it won’t take someone killing Jacob to bring her to the Light again.

Nagini was pretty cool even though she was just kind of along for the ride? I liked her companionship with Credence. Unfortunately we already know how her story ends.

Okay, gonna touch on Johnny Depp - I’m not extremely well read on the irl controversy and really based off of what I know I can’t personally condemn or acquit him just because I don’t have all the info.

But I’m able to separate a person’s actions from their work either way and - he was a goddamn good Grindelwald. Very charismatic and softspoken when he needed to be, cruel in turn to see where loyalties lie, and he knew how to push all the right buttons. The only part that just made me giggle at the absolute wrong moment for a movie to make me want to giggle (with death and destruction on the line, ugh) was the “I hate Paris”. It was too cheeky for me at that moment, idk.

ON TO HOGWARTS

Freaking Jude Law, ugh. He definitely was an amazing Dumbledore. I was all for his performance, and there were definitely images with the Mirror of Erised scene where I just was like wow, you two had such a profound bond. And Grindelwald used “The Greater Good” line, which was a thing between the two of them regarding their positions on this whole new world order thing. He’s enigmatic and friendly, especially in his interactions with Newt and Leta.

(OMG McGonagall was there for a hot second and it was perfection)

Theseus Scamander, my friends. He is SUCH an older brother around Newt. I am an older sister, and can confirm. My heart broke for him when Leta died, omg.

and Flamel was unexpectedly hilarious and simultaneously badass?

Tina was kind of following a trope that I expected of the spurned girlfriend, so meh on the storyline but A+++ with the “salamander” dialogue between her and Newt and the moment when she pulls out the little bell toy.

I don’t have much to say about Newt because he was very typical Newt. It worked well and I was glad he wasn’t the only main player in the movie, but I adored every bit of him.

AND OKAY THE NIFFLER BEING THE ONE TO STEAL THE THING FROM GRINDELWALD OMG

Okay, you’ve guessed that I’ve been holding back on the Credence bit because -

What the actual fuck?

Okay, the very first option is that Grindelwald is a lying liar that set it all up, and that would not be a surprise honestly.

(Gonna still call him Credence for a bit on account of that notion)

But these things tend to be important, these “phoenixes come to Dumbledores” type of things. So I’ll take it as truth for now.

And we have heard nothing about an Aurelius Dumbledore even existing until this point - and we know very little about Ariana and Aberforth. So I suppose it’s plausible that we never heard his name before. Still!

He has been pulled from every side for every reason to use him or destroy him, and that breaks my heart. Look at how freaking powerful he is at the end at Nurmengard (which we know later, of course, will be Grindelwald’s prison) - all he could do. And that of course worries me, because under Grindelwald he could do a ton of damage.

The one good thing Grindelwald does, imo: give Credence a freaking wand. Ezra Miller has been waiting too goddamn long for this moment, probably vibrating in his seat with excitement, let him be a proper wizard.

And how in Merlin’s name did he get where he is? I have a pretty interesting timeline.

Ariana Dumbledore, the youngest Dumbledore until now, was an Obscurial child because of muggle bullies. She died during a fight between Albus, Aberforth, and Grindelwald (who may have already witnessed her power and had ideas of how to use her? Albus hadn’t enjoyed the burden of caring for, essentially, a disabled sister. Maybe he had been wondering how to take her off his hands, and Aberforth had seen it coming and that’s how that mess occurred.)

Anyway, she died in the fight - no one knows who killed her out of the three. This was 1899.

Credence was born two years later.

Now, he doesn’t necessarily have to be a brother - he could be a cousin - but I’m super inclined to think that if he is indeed Aurelius Dumbledore, that he’s the youngest brother, or at least is symbolized as such if he is a cousin. (Wizards live a lot longer than average humans, so it’s totally plausible to have siblings that far apart I think) It would be a different mother, because Kendra Dumbledore (Albus’s mother) died some time the same year before Ariana did.

And Albus, upon finding out about Credence and perhaps guilty about his own treatment of Ariana, thinks I am not fit to care for a child keep away and offers to send Aurelius and his mother to America. Thus we have Credence.

NOW this is assuming we don’t get an entire retcon of the Dumbledore history. If we do that, then my mini-headcanon is a bit more disturbing.

We know very, very little about Ariana Dumbledore. We didn’t know she existed until the seventh book. Same for Aberforth. We learn a lot about Dumbledore all at once from some unreliable sources (Skeeter etc) through Harry, who finds certain information more important than other info.

I looked up the timelines earlier, so the first theory fits better with canon. If we throw timelines and whether Kendra Dumbledore died at a certain point out - if we assume that the little tidbits might be wrong -

What if Ariana wasn’t hidden away in the house? What if she was born later? What if she and her mother moved to America when it became clear that Albus wouldn’t support them?

And this is sort of fanfictiony, and very weird, but what if -

Aurelius was Ariana? I mean, Obscurials. Dumbledores. What if Dumbledore didn’t love his sister enough to keep her close, and supposedly lost her to a storm at sea?

What if, in a bout of childhood accidental magic, Credence changed their own body, uncomfortable as a little girl?

(This leads Mary Lou Barebone to scream about witchcraft for the rest of her days, but she still takes care of the cursed little boy. She feeds him, houses him, hopes his sins will be forgiven, punishes him because he’s a little curse on her too, and Lord if it happened to her-)

So Albus believes Ariana to be dead, but if he can save this Obscurial boy, just maybe -

Yeah. Okay. So. Tangent over, fanfiction to be written, this movie was great and weird and confusing and cool. Ta-da.

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seenashwrite · 6 years

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Walkthrough for “There But For The Grace”.

If interested - Go read it first before continuing on. This is about the plot point stuff (i/e - hints for the end, amongst other things) and the theological drops I sprinkled throughout.

I genuinely did not intend for this to cause brain freeze. Hoo-boy. Many sorry. There’s about a 40/60 split at this point of the “got its” vs. “didn’t quite got its”, so that’s on me. Not that it was incredibly necessary to catch the loop-di-loop in order to like it, though you might like it more once you know.

So I'll walk you through my thought process in the least disjointed manner I can manage. Which... hoo-boy, part deux. Tagging folks who commented on the story/to me directly, certainly no expectation on my part for you to read and/or reply. Seriously. Legit. Etc. And stuff.

This took longer to write than the story. #no lie

Okay, lotsa screencaps, so I don’t (a) end up c-p’ing the whole damn thing, and more the reason (b) so can underline.

And for ALL our brains’ sakes, I’ll call our dude Michael, and other world’s dude Mike from here on. Plotting stuff in red, theological stuff in blue, randoms (Nash Be Nashin’ and SPN canon stuff) in green.

The title is from that proverb “There but for the grace of God go I”, and as ye olde wiki explains....

....and then, there’s this:

Hopefully you picked up on something being “off” with how I was writing ol’ Mike as the story went on. I got slightly tricksy in some places on purpose regarding characterization, but hey - Mike and Michael are essentially the same angel in concept, just on different planes, right? And stuff apparently took a left turn when the apocalypse went through over yonder. So while they didn’t really re-tell the history of Apocaland beat-by-beat (thank Chuck), the inference I got is that the basic shit went down - he boots Luci after he rebels, etc. Blah blah blah, y’all know this.

Quote from Michael:

So maybe Mike came at it from the same angle when he killed his Luci. Who knows. Though I will say - if it was some sort of duty for him and not pleasure, I wouldn’t think there’d be boasting about pulling Luci apart, nor would the knee-jerk be to string him up and torture him, at least, if he’d suddenly re-appeared before me one day. YMMV.

This is good summary from the wiki, whoever wrote it did a bang up job:

Michael is meticulous. He slow-plays things. It’s not about being power-hungry; he had power. He was essentially God. For him, this is tied up in honor and loyalty and righting wrongs and all that jazz.

Again - that hesitation. He never stopped loving Lucifer - and Lucifer never stopped loving any of them, we see this big time in the Elysium ep when he “killed” Gabriel. Much internal conflict with these folks. And then there’s Mike, who iced (our) Gabriel and tortured (our) Lucifer in the blink of an eye.

There’s my characterization base of operations.

---> Could be interpreted as Michael or Mike - applies to both. Mike would find pleasure in taking inventory of what he planned to rule, how we aren’t worthy of anything but being subjects; Michael is perhaps glad to see plenty of justifications for what he feels he’s still destined to do.

---> “Learned” for Mike = the observing we saw in the finale, comparing-and-contrasting to his world; “learned” for Michael could be (a) via Dean’s mind, and / or (b) what he could’ve seen from Mike’s mind when he whooped his ass, a.k.a. Nash’s Sneaky Twisty Thing, re: Michael is now in Dean’s body.

So, how is that, Nash? you may ask.

Dunno.

Perhaps the distraction of Mike getting wailed on by Michael allowed Dean the opportunity to eject him, maybe Dean’s been wearing Mike down mentally. And though Dean/Sam - being the ideal hosts - have greater tolerance than us regulars, it’s gonna leave them weakened, it’s just got to. Hell, just being possessed by fill-in-the-blank leaves ya with the weeble-wobbles for a bit. Primo chance for Michael to set up shop in Dean.

Then, Nash, since angels need permission, how’d Michael do that? you may ask.

Occam’s razor --> Dean gave Michael “the soul”/”the entity”/whatever permission, and that goes across the realm, alt timelines/dimensions/whatnots. Or, maybe Dean chose the lesser of the two evils, so to speak - he’s boned at this interval anyhow, so if the opportunity arose, if it’s me, I’m choosing the frying pan over the fire - at least I’ve bought myself (and my loved ones, and the world) some time. Either of those work for what I intimated in the story.

Bottom line: however it went down, that’s for your imagination to choose.

A point that’s called back to later, as well as Nash Be Nashin’, RE: I’ve no idea why they opted to dress him in that style. There’s other stylings that are stark contrasts to Dean’s without going full-court-press cosplay, but whatevs. In any event, assuming my premise is taken - that the worlds played out the same for the most part and the ‘20s were a fave and would explain the wardrobe - this can apply to both Mike and Michael.

For those of you fortunate enough to have missed slogging through Sunday school, allow me: S&G was apparently a hotbed of sin, and they were gonna get the fire-and-brimstone treatment. Abraham asked angels who visited him if they’d spare the righteous, because there was at least one group there who was: his nephew Lot’s family. Two more angels were sent to investigate, Lot was awesome to them, welcomed them in without knowing they were angels, etc. So when time came to fire things up, the angels fessed up about who they were and why they were there, and told them (Lot and his crew) that they needed to just leave and not look back. And whoopsie, Lot’s wife found out that wasn’t metaphorical, as when she turned to get one last look at her home going up in flames, wha-BAM! She got turned into a pillar of salt.

So here might be the first subconscious “Hmmm” from your mind - that doesn’t really sync up with what we know of Mike. I don’t think he gives a shit about how much he sins to get what he wants. I bet he can’t even spell benevolence. Read this in Michael’s voice, though, and I hear that whole justifying thing again, the “don’t really want to, but got to” mindset.

See above, RE: “...but I labored more abundantly than them all”. Plus, speaks to arrogance, applicable to both Michael and Mike.

---> “The” earth, eh? ;)

---> Theology-wise, Michael’s only named a couple times, if memory serves... actually most of them are name dropped just a handful of times... did they namedrop Gabe as the one who told Mary she was preggers? I’m not looking it up.

Anyway, theologians have assigned certain “messages” delivered and punishments as being enacted by specific angels, I won’t go down that road here, I’ve no clue how they managed to arrive at those conclusions. Point is that Michael was a guardian, of heaven and of certain places/people on earth, depending on where God assigned. I wanna say Daniel and the lion’s den was one of them. Not looking that up, either.

---> "Temporarily”, hmmm.... that other world looked plenty definitively apoca-sized to me. In any event, floods is a ref to the Noah story, and if memory serves, Michael is thought by some to have been the “angel of death” that struck down the firstborn sons during the plagues of Egypt.

Also also - I’d speculate he’s taken on some self-imposed blame for Lucifer sneaking into the garden and tempting Adam & Eve, as he is so convicted in SPN land about righting the wrongs Lucifer brought upon the world, and that’s the event that kicked shit off.

---> O.T. (old testament) God took no shit, got smitey on a dime. New Testament God (a.k.a. - post-Jesus time) flipped a switch to a more fatherly figure.

---> The absence thing is SPN canon.

---> The differing legends is me thumbing my nose at their neglect of both their own canon and theology. #dammit Dabb

---> So, again, choose your poison - Luci getting into the garden, then Michael having to wage battle in heaven to boot him (and, let’s be real, he likely had followers that got nailed, too), etc. etc. etc.

---> The plans refer to the stuff up there from the wiki - that was an intricate damn plan. Deceptive, sure, but again that whole “bigger picture” mentality.

---> RE: beloved - yeah, that’s not sounding like the Mike we’ve been presented with.

Now that’s a pretty detailed thing to know about a random coffee joint in a random town in a random state in a strange world, wouldn’t you say? ;)

---> Trinities, trifectas, triples - threes are trendy numbers in stories and legends and oral tradition, so it comes up here multiple times, as well. And he’s talking about Jesus, of course, and the green Nashy line is me thinking “Wonder what he thought about Amara?”

(’Cause I’m of the thought that Amara + Chuck = God, yin-yang and all, but from the very black-and-white Michael’s perspective, I could see him playing nice but not buying into it, and I mean, he was part of the crew that banished her on Chuck’s orders, so there you go. He may not have even been privy to the scoop that they were the corporeal forms of light/dark, maybe just of the understanding that she was his meddling aunt, and of course he was gonna do whatever his dad told him to do. Anyhow, I think that adds additional texture to why it frustrates him so much that Luci couldn’t fall in line, why Luci always had to ask questions. ---> and that’s just me, there’s no way y’all could’ve inferred it from just that, you’re not psychic, I’m just sharing. I digress. I’m good for some heavy digressin’.)

There is a specific things-come-in-threes story that’s my baseline, but I’ll tell you further down after #3 hits.

On we go...

The chick we come to know as Grace does not catch his eye because she is pretty or sweet or in need of assistance or pouty or flirty or super-smart, or even beautiful or too shy and bookish, but if she’d just take off those damn glasses and let her hair out of that ponytail she might be, whatever trope you wanna throw on her - she’s a sinner, another hopeless sinner in a long line of humans who were/are fucking this joint up.

---> There’s several feet-washing stories in the Bible. I hate feet. That’s not in the Bible, and has no bearing here. Add it to your Nash factoids. Moving on.

The one I had in mind is below, and Imma c/p the pertinent parts because lazy. Bolding is mine, natch. In Luke 7....

36 One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, so Jesus went into the Pharisee’s house and sat at the table. 37 A sinful woman in the town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house. So she brought an alabaster jar of perfume 38 and stood behind Jesus at his feet, crying. She began to wash his feet with her tears, and she dried them with her hair, kissing them many times and rubbing them with the perfume. 39 When the Pharisee who asked Jesus to come to his house saw this, he thought to himself, “If Jesus were a prophet, he would know that the woman touching him is a sinner!”

40 Jesus said to the Pharisee, “Simon, I have something to say to you.”

Simon said, “Teacher, tell me.”

[parable]

44 Then Jesus turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? When I came into your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she washed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. 45 You gave me no kiss of greeting, but she has been kissing my feet since I came in. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she poured perfume on my feet. 47 I tell you that her many sins are forgiven, so she showed great love. But the person who is forgiven only a little will love only a little.”

48 Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” [...] “Because you believed, you are saved from your sins. Go in peace.”

The other 4 gospels - Matthew, Mark & John - tell a similar story. (But in John’s the woman isn’t a random - it’s one of the sisters of Lazarus, the guy Jesus raised from the dead. #cool trivia digression)

--> “Hot as hell” and “thank God” is just Nash Be Nashin’.

--> Start of the main trinity (1A)

--> Again, he’s not digging on her because she’s so awesomesauce in some typical way; she’s a dichotomy to him, sin with sweet. He’s a black-and-white kind of guy (and pretty much every angel we’ve met). It’s interesting to him, that seeming heel-turn. We’ll call back to those verses above here in a bit, with respect to how he feels about her as he spends more time with her.

Quickie trinity.

Nash Be Nashin’.

Recurring theme, forgiveness; also - that sound like Mike to you? At least, at this point? Eh. Maybe. If he’s trying to manipulate. But on the other hand - if this were Mike - has she got something he wants/needs? Manipulate Dean, sure; manipulate rando server chick? Possible. But nah.

---> Would Mike ask that? Why would he care? But Michael might, trying to get a bead on this human. ‘Cause remember, this is an angel who has had sparing contact with humans since he’s been in charge, he’s been dispatching angels for the heavy lifting, he’s not been boots on the ground takin’ care of business for quite awhile. His only in-depth contact has been the Winchesters, and that was only when he had to step in.

---> Also, close siblings recurring theme (close because able to joke around as well as later, when she mentions he’d vent to her about his time in war but not to the same degree as he did the rest of their family)

---> the main trinity of this story, part deux (and don’t get ahead of me; fine, I’ll do it for you: no, Michael having the nickname I mention later isn’t Biblical)

---> Lucifer was called The Morning Star (see also dictionary, re: “luciferous”)

---> Now that would be a really pretty damn specific thing for Mike to know.

---> The keep an eye out - again, reinforcing the theme that Michael whiffed not seeing the Lucifer thing coming; also lawbreakers looking out for the authorities, a contrast with an authority - God/Michael/et al - looking out for wrongdoers.

---> Park with a sandbox, Nash Be Nashin’

---> Bit tricksy; could go to Mike coming from his world to here, could be Michael feeling like this is a world he doesn’t know anymore after all his time in the cage; regardless, sets a tone of “She gets me”

Whether you cotton to my assertion that Michael may feel guilt for not seeing the Lucifer stuff coming and preventing his initial ingress (Eden), it’s theology 101 that Lucifer brought all things evil and sin and demon and hell and blah blah blah to humankind. And Michael beat him in heaven, but it’s been less offense and more defense ever since; reacting to Luci vs. bringing the game to him. Which is what Michael was finally doing, when the Winchesters didn’t agree to be vessels and let it play out like he’d planned.

So, Saint Michael on the theology end, ruling heaven in Chuck’s absence on the SPN canon end, and Michael’s arrogant, to be sure. He assumed his plan would go off without a hitch, and maybe if it’d been the Hardy Boys instead of the Winchesters, it would’ve [shrugs]

---> Nash Be Nashin’ - trying to poke your subconscious to think about that shot of them falling into the hole, to the cage

---> Could we describe Mike as “broken”? I couldn’t. More to the point, does he behave as if he might consider himself “broken”? Hmmm.

---> I guess that last bit could go either way; for me, I’m thinking of how Lucifer must’ve behaved in the cage, which we got a taste of via Sam’s hallucinations, and perhaps it being too quiet once he was gone. Sometimes being left alone with your thoughts is a bad time.

Again, canon - Lucifer never met a quiet moment he didn’t wanna fill.

So this is just me doing a second sin in the sin trilogy for Michael, as well as adding another piece of common ground between him and Grace with the nickname thing. The only Biblical truth there is the whole “Mark of the Beast” thing. Next time you get drunk or lit on whatever, read you some Revelations, it’ll either knock you out the rest of the way or give you fantastic nightmares.

What I just said, RE: second part of the Michael Lies Super Easy When It Comes To This Chick trilogy. I mean, not really - it’s coming from a good place, he doesn’t want to scare her, and if he told her the truth, where would he even start? Especially with her not being religious. He’s so far behind the eight ball, he’s under the pool table.

---> So here’s the trinity tale that’s the base for why I put this in the story. It’s in all four gospels (Matthew/Mark/Luke/John), and it’s about how at the Last Supper (which happens right before the crucifixion of Jesus goes down), they’re talking about how one of them would betray Jesus (re: Judas), and an apostle named Peter speaks up.

(Oh! Speaking of, there’s another triple play for ya - Jesus ends up on a cross between two criminals. Okay, back to the passages)

Matthew:

Peter replied, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.”

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”

But Peter declared, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.”

Mark:

Peter declared, “Even if all fall away, I will not.”

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “today—yes, tonight—before the rooster crows twice you yourself will disown me three times.”

But Peter insisted emphatically, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.”

Luke:

But he replied, “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.”

Jesus answered, “I tell you, Peter, before the rooster crows today, you will deny three times that you know me.”

John:

Peter asked him, “Lord, where are you going?”

Jesus replied, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

Peter asked, “Lord, why can’t I follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.”

Then Jesus answered, “Will you really lay down your life for me? Very truly I tell you, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”

---> Grace be shinin’, Nash Be Nashin’

---> What made him kiss her / risk the “sin”? She walked with him. (”Lord I am ready to go with you...”). She listened. She comforted him. She forgave him when he asked for it (re: for scaring her). She believed he wasn’t a horrible “person”. Prompted him to consider there might be a place/time where he wasn’t (see below, RE: “perhaps”).

A la....

But the person who is forgiven only a little will love only a little.” Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” [...] “Because you believed, you are saved from your sins. Go in peace.”

---> You may’ve noticed I didn’t call him Michael until Dean was gone during the kiss - that was on purpose. Because that was him making that decision, no (potential) Dean influence on board. And I didn’t have him call Dean by his name, being very distant throughout, until they talked about brothers, their common ground. He’s finding common ground with humans - a new kind of hallowed ground - versus being solely their guardian or their punisher, depending. This is (likely, hopefully) a good thing.

---> RE: sin - see below

---> This is your call to make - was it actually apple-flavored lip balm? Or was it strawberry/random fruity-flavored lip balm like Dean thought, and it just tasted like apples to Michael?

In any event, RE: “tasted like sin” - apples have been commonly used in art/stories as representing the fruit Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil back in the garden, a.k.a. - the original sin

HOME STRETCH!

[Full disclosure: based on early feedback, from here on out - if you were an early reader - you may notice there’s been a few tweaked lines since original publish, so I may be about to clarify things that are now - with the tweaks - obvious to you. I’m just sayin’.]

By this point, I’d hope you’d been kinda thinking, “I appreciate Nash’s effort to make Mike be not a complete asshole, but holy moly I have been suspending my disbelief like a mo-fo as this went on, why does he give a shit about this chick or about chatting with Dean all friendly, etc.”

---> That “Why didn’t we....” part should scream “THIS ISN’T MIKE”. I hope.

---> It’s been about 10 yrs. since Stull / when Michael took the dive

---> “Is there...” / “Perhaps” -- and maybe it’s this one. Maybe it’s the world he’s always known, but not been part of; remains to be seen. He’s a different dude. This ain’t the same angel that went into that cage. Like Chuck said - he’s a mess. Or maybe, now, could we say... was a mess? Hmmm. Different, though. Definitely different. Not terribly un-canon, not a huge jump to make, in my mind.

And, you know, The Cage was Luci’s big punishment, right? And he’s fine. Anytime we saw him, in the caboose version or just-been-sprung, he’s been same-ol’, same-ol’. So maybe it’s simply an isolation room, and it’s only been BAD-bad for Sam and Adam and Michael, because Luci was there messing with them, because he’s bored off his ass. That’s why I posit The Cage may not be anything beyond blank space, as it were, if Luci’s not present.

What Mike would “likely” bring? Nah. Mike’s on the express train to domination. He’s not messing around.

Nash Be Nashin’. I am, on occasion, poetic. “His” is a callback to “my Michael”, and the “g” in “grace” is lower case on purpose. [clears throat, c/ps from up yonder....]

Grace don’t come in just one form, yo. There’s lots floating out there. Just gotta pay attention. Know what to watch for.

And here’s the hammer:

Hmmmm....

---> Dean knows Mike’s been thinking of it; to quote Black Widow, that’s not a question that needs answering.

---> “Still”? “Do-over?” - Mike’s had his apocalypse. Do-over of what? That implies Mike’s tried to pull off Apocaworld, Part Deux here, and... he hasn’t tried at this point. He’d said they were already looking into what all other worlds they could get to before Jack’s birth caused our rift and they saw an opportunity for a better way, but Mike’s not taken a run at our world; Michael has. (Bit of a misleading, open-to-interpretation / could apply to Mike line, though, I grant you.)

---> “over there” - already mentioned “head to the cage”, ergo “there” is “cage”

---> “act” / “figure it out” - thaaaat’s nooot Miiiike, your subconscious sings!

---> Say I’m Mike.

I’m a tactical mofo. I know how to spot an enemy, it’s why I was gonna take out Jack emotionally if I couldn’t cripple him or kill him. I hit this new world. I’m inside a very handsome I MEAN powerful bod. I am locked and loaded. What’s first on the agenda now that I’ve got the ammo?

I take out potential threats. Dean’s an obstacle, true, but he’ll be tucked away going night-night for at least a bit, and I can likely wash-rinse-repeat as needed. Obstacle, though - he’s not an inherent threat to me. Lucifer’s out of the way. Raphael’s out of the way. Gabriel’s out of the way.

Oh. Oh noooes, FML: I’m not out of the way.

And holy shit - the holiest of all the shits - I could take myself out. Isn’t he in the Fort Knox of binding-thingy-traps-whatever?

But wait. Waaaaait, wait - that cage must be made of aluminum foil, I can see Dean’s memories. Some tacky decoder rings opened it up, his brother Sam got pulled from it, then the angel of death got Sam’s soul out of it, rando witch called up the caboose of it like it was Uber, Lucifer popped Dean and his crew in-and-out of it, and didn’t that demon Crowley use parts of it for some ill-explained ingredient to hold Lucifer hostage like it was melty MacGuffin cheese? Is there not a doorman or something?! Can they get pizza delivered down there, too, I mean TF?

Ooooh, now this is interesting. Chuckie told Dean Michael’s beyond his repair. Lucifer said Michael’s a mess... well. Consider that source. But still. Risk not too high, reward could be very high.

Yeah. I’m totes arrogant enough. This is gonna be a cake-walk.

---> Except... time moves differently in the cage, we know that. So Lucifer’s been gone for... hell, who knows how long. What state Michael might be in now is a mystery. He’s had time to regroup, at the very least, without his chief antagonist lording over him. So is it implausible that Michael could be the key to nailing Mike’s ass to the wall? Might it even be probable?

The board of directors at NashHole, Inc. voted “Yeeeeessss”.

Again, bro-love, evergreen recurring theme. So, here it is:

If I’m Michael, my perspective would be that Mike can handle his world how he pleases, and he did. But now he’s on my turf. I’m taking great umbrage with this power-hungry twin of mine coming over here and having the audacity to make decisions, take over my destiny, etc.

And then another part of it - Michael’s not only had a lot of time in the cage to get his mojo back, he’s also had time to process the whole situation, what led him to this place, the part he played. I’d imagine a part of him is still gripping onto his convictions, while on the other hand starting to realize that there are parts of this world - and people in this world - that already make it a paradise despite all that Lucifer/demons/the supernaturals have done.

Maybe an apocalypse isn’t the answer. Maybe Lucifer doesn’t have to die. Bottom line, that ain’t Mike’s call to make; it’s Michael’s.

Last thing!

Handful of you asked about how Mike would’ve opened the cage, how a fight would’ve gone down if Michael’s still in Adam, what about Adam, and my answer is - does it matter? I know, I know, that sounds snotty; it matters in the sense that you asked, so it matters to you. Where I’m coming from is that this isn’t what the story is about, not for me. But hey - you fill in those blanks however your heart desires, truly. Or pretend that twist at the end never happened, and think of this as Mike the whole way through. :)

.....

That cage is made of chewed gum and pipe cleaners, a hamster could get in there, I’m done, I’m DONE, okay bye.

@ellen-reincarnated1967 @waywardjoy @copperseraphim @bumbleball13 @inlovewith2dcharacters @impandagrl @theoriginalvicki @mrswhozeewhatsis @littlegreenplasticsoldier @butiaintgonnaloveem @salt-n-burn-em-all @sixtysevenandwhiskey @anticipate1003 @juppschmitz @smi727 @casismybae @jalove-wecallhimdean @salvachester

#Nash Responds #Nash Elaborates #and all over your faces #it's long #but interesting I hope #on god I didn't mean to make this complex #I wrote it over a few days #like maybe three hours #quick for me is my point #the graphic was more time consuming #so I assure you #'twas not intended #as a deep dive #oof #I'm so apologizing #Queueby Dooby Doo #Dad's on a blog post and #he hasn't been queued in a few days

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karinakamichi · 7 years

Text

(I copied and pasted this from a comment at X) 1. FMA 2003 gave its male leads (Ed and Roy) emotional vulnerability. Since Brotherhood worked the positive angle, the misery moments guys like Ed and Roy went through were infrequent and toned down. (i.e. they didn’t complain a lot about their circumstances.) The positive angle’s great, but what FMA1 did was give a human voice to very human characters. Ed and Roy and other characters take time to grieve over what’s happening to them. “Move forward” they indeed still say, but they also have a human balance of getting caught up in their own pain. Sometimes it’s hard to move forward even when you want to.

2. FMA 2003 dares to ask whether equivalent exchange is the way of the world. In Brotherhood/manga, it’s pretty clear that it is. What happens here is that because of all the horrible things that sometimes happen to the characters, fate looks cruel in both versions. But in the end, FMA:B’s/manga’s characters earn back for what they put in. Roy getting his eyesight back? Roy loses an eye and gets demoted at the end of the 03. Once again, talk all you want about the positive angle, but this is the real angle. Yes, maybe fate was at the other extreme and was overly cruel. But FMA1 tries to depict a world in which things aren’t fair. And with extraordinary circumstances comes extraordinary unfairness.

3. FMA 2003 created Homunculi in a way that ties them to alchemists. FMA1 hit harder on various themes, including horrible things alchemy is capable of, and the fact that no matter what everyone’s intentions are, if destruction follows, it’s still an evil deed. The Homunculi were created with the best of intentions and they still caused such evil. It’s easy to blame them, or only blame Dante, but Homunculi were used in the 03 to illustrate that everyone was to blame for the terrible things that were happening. FMA:B had its reasons for having the villain it did (I’ll rant on that later), but FMA1 didn’t blame something supernatural for what humans are capable of doing themselves: genocide and widespread destruction and bloodshed.

4. Religion is adequately blamed while alchemy is also viewed as a religion. I don’t know…FMA:B viewed alchemy positively in general, like a gift. That’s why we have Ling’s quote about how Ed looks like he’s praying when he transmutes. It’s like alchemy’s another gift from God, and alchemy and religion aren’t that far apart. What FMA:B does is highlight how alchemy can be used for good more than the terrible things it can do; FMA 2003 takes the other road and emphasizes that religion—or alchemy, as that’s the subject of the series—can be used for great evil.

5. It took just a few volumes of FMA’s manga and created an entire story from what little material and themes it had to explore. FMA1 delved deep into equivalent exchange, religion, the emotional wreck you could become if you experienced what any one of these characters did, the Homunculi having human traits—a theme FMA:B later explored—while emphasizing their desire to become human because they weren’t that far off anyway, etc. This anime has been called a fanfic in a negative connotation, but I think it’s a fanfic in a positive connotation. How hard is it to write something based on only a little information? The 03 was never trying to guess where Arakawa would go; it was trying to go somewhere else. And it did.

6. It takes characters that end up playing minor roles in FMA:B/manga and expounds on them. Sheska, Rose—hell, even Hughes lasted longer. All three of these characters have pretty large roles in the plot, giving them some of what the manga did not. It’s like those fanfics that want to explore minor characters BECAUSE they were never big. This is the same thing.

7. It takes the FMA universe and essentially makes it godless. That’s what I got from it, anyway. It’s not called “Truth” in FMA 03. It’s called “The Gate”, this thing that’s so indifferent and unfair that it doesn’t even bother to communicate with humans. It just takes and humans keep giving to the void. That might not be the FMA manga fans know, but it IS a pretty relevant theme for the how many millions of miserable people out there?

8. It more directly parallels the relationship of Ed and Al with Scar and his brother. Of course, FMA:B did this too, so no shots taken. However, the parallel Scar himself drew ended up being his motivation. Granted that his motivation killed a lot of people—motivation doesn’t automatically equal GOOD THING. Just means that Scar emotionally connected to the bond the Elric brothers shared, and that was the only thing in the world that gave him hope and happiness.

9. It uses the Philosopher’s Stone as a way of illustrating mankind’s selfishness. I’m still working on what FMA:B used it for, but I’m sure there are plenty of people who analyze that. I do know the Stone is partly thematic material though. And the Stone bypasses equivalent exchange; Ed and Al’s continued pursuit of it, even after they know how it’s made, displays the selfish tendencies of human beings. And until Ed realized that using that Stone only resulted in evil, he WAS giving to the void. Ed and Al thought their pursuit of the Stone was enough work for equivalent exchange to be fair and get their bodies back. But the Stone itself is a symbol of getting without giving, taking without earning, and hurting other people for personal gain. Until Ed offered himself instead, he had no reward in his pursuit.

10. Another point on the Stone: Ed is more morally ambiguous about it in this version. He’s as tempted by its promise as he is horrified by its origins. Even Al is drawn to it eventually. People—even people who try to live up to being noble, upright people, like Ed—aren’t inherently unselfish, and FMA1 forces them to weigh their human nature against what is right.

11. The music. Okay, this is getting almost too close to the art argument…while I can’t talk about music like an expert, I can talk about how it affected my experience personally. FMA:B’s music is powerful and plot/action-driven. It has emotional pieces, and overall its music fits the anime it was made for. So does FMA1’s music, and in my opinion FMA1’s music draws you towards the characters more than towards the events. It takes more time to dwell on the grief and sad moments of the characters, and when there’s a dark shroud settling over the lives of these characters, the music REMAINS dark/sad/ominous. It doesn’t offer this ray of light until there actually IS a ray of light coming. And all of this is a nonexpert opinion, but it’s wholly my experience with FMA1.

12. Embarking on a different route, FMA1 explores the dark side of human imperfection. I’ll get to the part about humans being human being a good thing, but it’s also got a lot of nasty stuff to it. Sins are actually shown for what they are because FMA1 isn’t trying to emphasize that imperfection makes us human; it’s only emphasizing what some of that imperfection is running around and doing—namely, killing thousands of people and hurting scores more.

13. FMA 03 gives Lust character development. Other than Sloth and Gluttony, Lust is the only intelligent Homunculus in FMA:B/manga who is not given any sympathy. FMA1 says thank you very much and gives her a storyline anyway.

14. Roy is exposed for being a dick. You HAVE to be a pretty big dick to kill so many people. You have to let go of a lot of your sympathy to do something like that. I’d guess this is the part of FMA1 that manga fans despise most. Well, in the manga, Roy STILL killed thousands of people. And I did read the Ishval volume—he’s not whining and barely able to look at somebody when he kills them. He’s cold. What FMA 2003 does is continue that character he showed in Ishval—he wants to redeem himself, and YES, that’s a HUGE reason why he’s trying to reach the top. I know we like to believe in heroes who have no selfish motivations, but this hero DID have selfish motivations. FMA1 brings that out, and if it’s not pretty? A mass murderer isn’t a role model and even if Roy chose the right path in FMA:B, it was redemption. Not an example to follow. Do I love the concept of his character? Absolutely. Do I think he’s a normal guy who is a victim of that war? Hell no. Believing in Roy as a completely unselfish and wholesome individual is almost the same to me as believing that Bush was one—as he sent people into a war based on pride. Bush had good intentions too. Just sayin’.

15. The parallel world allows FMA to parallel even further some of the European history it is based off of. Nuff said.

16. The relationship between Izumi and the boys is explored more. Just saying; I fell in love with that relationship in the 03 because they just had more scenes together. HEARTSTRINGS.

17. The relationship between Ed and Al is deepened. Two brothers who would die for each other in a heartbeat. Story’s been done before (and wherever it has been done I am likely to watch or read it). But the circumstances have probably never been so drastic, where they share a bond deeper than blood because they’ve been through hell—almost literally. The first anime focuses more on Ed and Al’s relationship.

18. I love my canon pairings, but FMA 2003 explores the idea of several non-canon pairings, if only in hints and subtext. Once again, enough said. It’s kind of nice when those ships the fans might’ve liked even from the beginning of the manga get some coverage. How much fiction actually gets a second chance to look at alternate pairings? FMA1 is a rare opportunity for non-canon fans.

19. I am quite convinced Arakawa incorporated a twisted version of a lot of the things FMA1 did into the manga. Roy loses an eye in the 03…Roy goes blind in FMA:B. Ed dies by being stabbed in the gut in the 03…Ed nearly dies by having his abdomen punctured with a pole in FMA:B. Winry ends up traveling with Ed and Al, south in FMA1, and north in FMA:B. Riza nearly loses her mind when she thinks Roy is dead after Roy kills Bradley; Riza breaks down when Lust indicates Roy is dead in FMA:B.

20. FMA1 explores automail just a bit in “Her Reason”. Winry wants Ed to appreciate automail and later explains it’s an extension of him. I don’t say that BECAUSE I’m an EdWin fan. Looking back, things like this helped make me a Winry AND an EdWin fan. Winry is so passionate about her craft that she wants to make an arm that is so good, it becomes a part of Ed…where he doesn’t even miss his old arm. Alright, give Winry flak all you want. But the boys’ quest looked about as impossible as Zuko looking for the Avatar (sorry if you don’t understand that reference). And she just wanted to help them any way she could. Funny how Winry’s storyline is smaller in the 03 and they still gave her little things like this.

21. In some ways, the military’s cruelty is explored more. I already mentioned that Roy is exemplified as a coldhearted bastard, but the military’s continuing abuse of the Ishvalans is emphasized as well. Not even to mention the storyline where Rose is raped and has the child of an Amestrian soldier.

22. The past literally haunts people. Mentioned this before because it’s about the Homunculi, but what better way to bring out the grief the 2003 intended to emphasize than to have mistakes literally following you? This really isn’t even worth a comparison to FMA1’s counterpart and inspiration. When I’d only seen the 2003, I thought this was just such a brilliant plot device. I still think so.

23. It emphasizes Ed and Roy’s relationship. Two disclaimers: That relationship can be interpreted any way you want in either version, and secondly, I do in fact love the trust they had between them in FMA:B/manga. That pulled at my heartstrings. But what the 03 did was bring out some of Ed’s inherent distrust in the military and in Roy. Roy, bastard I think he is, did have good intentions..but sometimes it was hard for him to manifest those good intentions because he had goals of his own. Goals that would help people eventually, but another discussion, that. The distrust, the fact that Roy was so willing to sacrifice to help Ed—and in the manga he was too, but this fact is made clear by FMA1—Ed looking to Roy as an example (for better or worse), maybe as a father figure…I just loved some of the moments they had.

..And honestly? Once people get over themselves and realize that someone who commits mass murder might just be a bit of a jerk, I’m just saying, they’d see the brilliance in either interpretation of his character.

24. It took more time to bring out the fatherly role Hughes had in Ed and Al’s life. This has more to do with how much time Hughes was allotted in each series than it does with what actually happened. They had time to insert more moments between the two.

25. Following up on Hughes, it makes you look at Hughes for being a good person rather than a good soldier. Hughes never fought in the Ishval war. He stayed at home. Good fighter? Well yes. He fought Homunculi. But even better is the emphasis placed on his relationships and his loyalty to what is right.

26. It emphasizes Scar’s guilt. “A mind who inflicts suffering cannot rest.” Again, one theme that severely diverges from FMA:B/manga is the idea that redemption isn’t possible sometimes. It DOES become possible for some characters, but not all of them, and not in a very picture-perfect way. I understand what the manga was trying to do and I fangirl over it as much as I do the 2003, but sometimes, redemption doesn’t happen.

27. Winry’s mini-speech on what happened to her parents. “I’d imagine the people who killed my parents as demons…but now I know the man who did it and I respect him somehow.” Besides emphasizing a depth I think the manga/FMA:B implied in Winry (she sees horrible things and is able to know the gray area and see past her own feelings to understand greater things), this speech brings out the gray area when it comes to interpreting people and actions. And…what greater controversy among the fandom is there than how we interpret Roy and his actions?

28. It is character-driven. That’s not to say that FMA:B/manga’s characters were bad in any way, but they were shaped by the circumstances around them. In FMA1, it’s more like the other way around: FMA’s characters, with all their sins and some of their nobility and selfishness and sacrifices (oh no here come the feelings)…they shaped the plot themselves for the most part. And because the plot moved more slowly, we got to look at these characters in slow-motion, frame by frame, emotion by emotion, action by action.

29. Ed and Al’s fight over Al possibly being fake is dragged out longer. Once again, premise is important here: FMA:B/manga was emphasizing that unselfish people resolve conflict and grief quickly. FMA1 takes almost the opposite stance; people who are in that much pain will have a harder time getting past that and any conflict that comes up. Ed and Al’s argument is a good example of this.

30. Ed actually gets a chance to make the Philosopher’s Stone. This is one temptation Ed never faced in FMA:B/manga, so it was an interesting exploration of human selfishness and human nature. What would Ed do if he had the chance? Especially when circumstances seem hazy and we’ve got condemned prisoners as ingredients? (Hey, if Roy isn’t deserving of death just because he did good things after doing bad things then this is also a moral gray area.)

31. Al is used against Ed. We know Ed and Al’s bond is deep, and we know the military liked to use Ed’s ties to family/friends against him. So why does that never happen in the manga? Well, I suppose Al isn’t a pacifist in the manga. That’s one reason. Another is that Ed was deemed more important to the villain’s devices in FMA1 than Al was (both of them were critical to Father’s plan in FMAB/manga by contrast). But it sure made for a heartwrenching storyline because Ed’s closest bond is used against him.

32. Following on that, Al’s blood seal is vulnerable. Okay, okay, reason with me however you want here. I don’t quite understand how that seal could be invincible when Al gets buried in snow, etc. in the manga/Brotherhood. (I could use some guidebooks to how alchemy is supposed to work before I make an absolute determination here.) But it does seem entirely possible that Al’s blood seal would be his kryptonite.

33. Ed’s attitude toward the rest of the world is revealed clearly. Early on in the manga and Brotherhood, Ed, of course, had this attitude where he didn’t like accepting help and he really didn’t have a lot of trust in anyone but he and Al. Ed later changes his mind, but the 2003 continues the idea that Ed only fully trusts Al. “We’re all we’ve got”, he says after dealing with a serial killer. Time and again, when Ed encounters the things he does in FMA, he has two choices: move forward and accept that evil can happen while people are still good, or become jaded and cynical toward the world. In FMA:B/manga, he did the former. In the 03, he does the latter.

34. Winry being captured by Barry the Chopper heightens the feeling Ed has—that his loved ones will be used against him if he is too close to them. This continues throughout the series, such as when Ed keeps Hughes and Roy/gang out of the loop to protect them. Winry is used as a hostage in the manga/Brotherhood, so I think this is especially relevant that she is nearly killed. Even though EdWin is far from canon in FMA1, there are still things like this that emphasize how close Ed is/was to her—and why he thought he had to sever his ties.

35. PURELY referring to what the characters look like…Al resembles his mom. I mean, Trisha was only the impetus for all the boys’ struggles in the first place. One of her sons looking like her isn’t so bad, is it?

36. Nina Tucker is referenced more throughout the series. For something that affected Ed and Al so much, I’m just glad that they’re so emotionally tied that they hammer Nina’s story home time and again.

37. Hughes’s funeral scene and the aftermath. I’ll grant this might be preference, but I liked several things about the way it was done in FMA1: the music being played hints at cruel fate (once again a theme unique to the 03 and not anything the manga was obligated to do)…and for all the criticisms I do have (gasp—I have criticisms for this series? I’m an objective being? NO WAY!) for Hawkeye’s character in it…speaking from a Royai perspective, I love that Riza automatically understood what Roy meant about rain. She didn’t even hesitate. She just knew to acknowledge rain, and that might be one of the only moments I liked Hawkeye in the 03. (Hawkeye in general was better in Brotherhood, IMO. But again, that’s still based on premises that don’t have to start a war…)

38. Following up on Nina’s story, I thought the confrontation between Ed and Shou Tucker was more emotional. From the music used to the way Nina confronted Ed to, hell, even maybe the lighting in the room, I just got more feels from that version. Not saying the confrontation isn’t feel-worthy no matter which you watch, but I think it’s fairly agreeable that FMA1 heightened the grief in that scene.

39. Ed and Roy go back and forth on the principle of vengeance. This is human nature. We might know what’s right and want to do it, but that which we hate, we do. That which we want to do…we don’t do it. Because desires and pain get in the way, and Ed and Roy certainly had their fair share of desires and pain (and guilt).

40. It epitomizes humanity without downplaying humanity’s faults. I understand that FMA:B was trying to say that sometimes your faults are a good thing (i.e. Greed is also hope, wrath is understandable, etc.). But once again, sometimes those faults are very, very bad. As in causes destruction and takes from innocents bad.

41. Ed’s speech about how “We’re only human”. “We couldn’t even save a little girl!”—enough said. Emotional moment that brings out Nina’s death and brings out just how horrible the Elrics’ circumstances are. Ed also says “we’re only human” in the manga/Brotherhood, but this is fleshed out more.

42. Tucker brings out that Ed’s obsession with alchemy is about more than redemption or bringing someone back/restoring their body. Ed wants to put his mind to use—even doing sickening things. And alchemy is a science that can—and did, even in the manga—drive people insane. So FMA1 brings out Ed’s insanity with scenes like the one where he contemplated making the Stone.

43. FMA1 treats alchemy like a religion. Alchemists worship this science like it can do anything, and they justify themselves by saying they worked and equivalent exchange takes effect. But sometimes alchemy ends up being this craft to work miracles when someone doesn’t want to do things the hard way. FMA1 strives to bring out that side of alchemy—the side that makes it an idol that PREVENTS you from moving forward rather than allowing it. (Some themes I’m going on about are present to some degree in both versions, but depending on what you’re talking about, generally one version expounds and the other limits said theme.)

44. FMA1 leaves the serious moments alone. FMA 2003 had plenty of comedy, and although a lot of people say it downplayed what comedy it did have to be depressing, I must disagree. FMA 2003 never interrupted serious, sober moments with something funny. Now I’m not saying that’s always a bad idea to do it—a lot of anime/manga does the same thing. Puts anything positive on that negative spot to erase it. But I’m just saying…some people prefer to contemplate those sad/angry/serious moments without a gag interrupting.

45. Ed is confronted with the idea of killing and actually has to do it. He is in both versions, but the difference is that clearly evil people were asking him to do it in the manga/Brotherhood. It’s slightly more ambiguous when he has to confront Greed or do things that any ordinary soldier would be called upon to do—without a corrupt government run by hideous immortal beings.

46. Continuing the emphasis on parallels between religion and alchemy, Cornello is dead serious when he confronts Ed about his mistakes. Whatever Cornello is doing, it appears that he genuinely believes Ed has insulted God, and this sets the stage for a comparison and clash of science vs faith and the point where alchemy makes the two collide.

47. It uses equivalent exchange to justify vengeance. Sounds ridiculous until you realize that a murderer is punished with death in most cases in our system…why couldn’t it be extended the way Scar used it?

48. It made Al’s pleas to Ed—after Ed was ready to let Scar kill him—more serious. They were pretty serious in both versions, once again. But the way the dialogue is phrased and the downsizing of funny expressions makes this scene very poignant to me. (Remember, I’m attached to all of this. This is not a debate I’m trying to score points in just because I might be able to.)

49. Izumi wisely asks the Elrics whether their pursuit of restoration is the attempt to fix one mistake with another. For a long time in both series, Ed and Al were still after human transmutation. FMA1 does ask some logical questions about their journey and what they find on it.

50. Izumi’s relationship with her son is explored. Obviously this is impossible in FMA:B/manga, so no fault to it. But quite a moving storyline, especially considering the Homunculus she created is Wrath. He acts like her in temperament, only to a bigger extreme, and he has alternating moments of wishing to acknowledge her as his mother and shunning her.

51. It shows flashbacks of the military’s chimera experiments. This adds to the ghastly horror that is 1. the military’s cruelty and lack of morals, even among humans as much as among Homunculi, 2. the plight of the hybrid human-animal species that are introduced in FMA.

52. Following on that, FMA1 makes Shou Tucker a chimera. Besides that it makes you question equivalent exchange and whether that’s fair trade, what irony.

53. Immortality is the endgame for the villains. I think that’s interesting because Ed and Al were trying to defy the natural order of things by reversing Trisha’s death. This is only an extension of that idea, and immortality is a subject I love to see covered when resurrection and supernatural beings are being introduced into the story.

54. It lets Sheska and Winry use some logic. Besides that I like someone as smart as Sheska having a bigger role, she and Winry figure out a huge military secret all on their own. That suits what is supposed to be above-average intelligence for both of them.

55. Hohenheim is brought down to the level of a human. He makes the same mistake in both versions, but in FMA:B/manga that mistake is almost this deal where his absence allowed his boys to grow and save Amestris. In FMA1, Hohenheim is shown to love his boys while being a sinner who is as prone to mistakes as the next man.

56. For people who really hate the downplaying of Royai, they sure had some cute moments in the 2003 together. Roy putting glasses on Hawkeye and noting how nice she looks, for example. Little things FMA1 indulged.

57. Speaking of little things, how about the smile newly christened state alchemist Edward gives Winry when she asks if she can buy things? FMA:B/manga did have moments where they made it clear Ed cares for Winry, but sometimes it’s the moments that come when nothing bad is happening and things look kind of peachy.

58. Ed’s “Even when our eyes are closed, there’s a whole world out there that lives outside ourselves and our dreams” line. Ed emphasizes a lesson he learns in both versions to some extent: The world is bigger than his desires, and until he realizes that and acts that way, he’ll never truly earn anything.

59. “Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy’s first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world’s one, and only, truth. But the world isn’t perfect, and the law is incomplete. Equivalent Exchange doesn’t encompass everything that goes on here, but I still choose to believe in its principle, that all things do come at a price, that there’s an ebb and a flow, a cycle, that the pain we went through, did have a reward, and that anyone who’s determined and perseveres, will get something of value in return, even if it’s not what they expected.”

Okay, so this is a quote from 03, but has much meaning that Brotherhood FAILS to keep consistent within itself. So what if this last point is based on sentimental value? Tell me how that’s not positive as a sharp contrast to all the grief in the series. Tell me how that’s not deep when people realize that the way of the world might not be input equals output but that hard work and blood, sweat and tears DOES amount to something. After all the HELL they went through and they can still say that? That’s remarkable and if you think about it, it’s only a deeper expansion of Ed’s “Fullmetal heart” quote. (Or I suppose vice versa since I don’t think it’s ridiculous that Arakawa might’ve taken inspiration from the above quote.)So…if we just like the 03 for sentimental value, I just wrote 59 paragraphs more or less on that. So if it’s sentimental, it’s not shallow.

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(My input): Lastly, Winry, despite not being about to fight, uses her head, along with Sheska, to research into Huhges’ death. The females are actually pretty great. We also get Black Hayate’s origins.

#fma 2003 #fullmetal alchemist #fma 03 #03 vs brotherhood

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dfroza · 3 years

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True patience.

this is illuminated in Today’s reading with the beginning of the Letter of James:

James, a servant of God and the Lord Jesus, the Anointed One, to the twelve tribes of Israel who are spread across the earth: I send you my warmest welcome!

Don’t run from tests and hardships, brothers and sisters. As difficult as they are, you will ultimately find joy in them; if you embrace them, your faith will blossom under pressure and teach you true patience as you endure. And true patience brought on by endurance will equip you to complete the long journey and cross the finish line—mature, complete, and wanting nothing. If you don’t have all the wisdom needed for this journey, then all you have to do is ask God for it; and God will grant all that you need. He gives lavishly and never scolds you for asking.

The key is that your request be anchored by your single-minded commitment to God. Those who depend only on their own judgment are like those lost on the seas, carried away by any wave or picked up by any wind. Those adrift on their own wisdom shouldn’t assume the Lord will rescue them or bring them anything. The splinter of divided loyalty shatters your compass and leaves you dizzy and confused.

If you are a brother of humble means, celebrate the fact that God has raised you up. If you are rich and seemingly invincible, savor the humble reality that you are a mere mortal who will vanish like a flower that withers in the field. The sun rises with a blazing heat that dries the earth and causes the flower to wither and fall to the ground and its beauty to fade and die. In the same way, the rich will fall and die in the midst of their busy lives.

Happy is the person who can hold up under the trials of life. At the right time, he’ll know God’s sweet approval and will be crowned with life. As God has promised, the crown awaits all who love Him.

No one who is tempted should ever be confused and say that God is testing him. The One who created us is free from evil and can’t be tempted, so He doesn’t tempt anyone. When a person is carried away with desire, lured by lust, and when desire becomes the focus and takes control, it gives birth to sin. When sin becomes fully grown, it produces death.

My dearly loved brothers and sisters, don’t be misled. Every good gift bestowed, every perfect gift received comes to us from above, courtesy of the Father of lights. He is consistent. He won’t change His mind or play tricks in the shadows. We have a special role in His plan. He calls us to life by His message of truth so that we will show the rest of His creatures His goodness and love.

Listen, open your ears, harness your desire to speak, and don’t get worked up into a rage so easily, my brothers and sisters. Human anger is a futile exercise that will never produce God’s kind of justice in this world. So walk out on your corrupt liaison with smut and depraved living, and humbly welcome the word of truth that will blossom like the seed of salvation planted in your souls.

Put the word into action. If you think hearing is what matters most, you are going to find you have been deceived.

If some fail to do what God requires, it’s as if they forget the word as soon as they hear it. One minute they look in the mirror, and the next they forget who they are and what they look like. However, it is possible to open your eyes and take in the beautiful, perfect truth found in God’s law of liberty and live by it. If you pursue that path and actually do what God has commanded, then you will avoid the many distractions that lead to an amnesia of all true things and you will be blessed.

If you put yourself on a pedestal, thinking you have become a role model in all things religious, but you can’t control your mouth, then think again. Your mouth exposes your heart, and your religion is useless. Real, true religion from God the Father’s perspective is about caring for the orphans and widows who suffer needlessly and resisting the evil influence of the world.

The Letter of James, Chapter 1 (The Voice)

do we think that God is not absolutely pure True nature?

and we are all made in the image of our Creator, but we’re not all children of God our heavenly Father

we have to choose to be.

and the Scriptures are a wake-up call to the heart to awaken to the eternal, to be open to welcome the entrance of the Spirit as a guarantee of sacred promises to come as seen in the True illumination of the Son

Today’s paired chapter of the Testaments is the 20th chapter of First Chronicles that documents ancient wartime in Israel:

That spring, the time when kings usually go off to war, Joab led the army out and ravaged the Ammonites. He then set siege to Rabbah. David meanwhile was back in Jerusalem. Joab hit Rabbah hard and left it in ruins. David took the crown off the head of their king. Its weight was found to be a talent of gold and set with a precious stone. It was placed on David’s head. He hauled great quantities of loot from the city and put the people to hard labor with saws and picks and axes. This is what he did to all the Ammonites. Then David and his army returned to Jerusalem.

Later war broke out with the Philistines at Gezer. That was the time Sibbecai the Hushathite killed Sippai of the clan of giants. The Philistines had to eat crow. In another war with the Philistines, Elhanan son of Jair killed Lahmi, the brother of Goliath the Gittite whose spear was like a ship’s boom. And then there was the war at Gath that featured a hulking giant who had twenty-four fingers and toes, six on each hand and foot—yet another from the clan of giants. When he mocked Israel, Jonathan son of Shimea, David’s brother, killed him. These came from the clan of giants and were killed by David and his men.

The Book of 1st Chronicles, Chapter 20 (The Message)

my personal reading of the Scriptures for Tuesday, january 19 of 2021 with a paired chapter from each Testament of the Bible, along with Today’s Psalms and Proverbs

A post by John Parsons about knowing:

You may feel anxious about knowing God, about how to relate to him or how to understand or interpret the Scriptures, though the heart can only know the essential meaning of God in the state of its need, as its ultimate concern, and therefore unless you cry out “from the depths” of your being, you are merely intellectualizing or playing games... After all, the inner heart asks "How can I find God?" "How can I relate to God?" "How can I find hope and life?" but the answers to such questions are found by personal encounter with the reality of the Spirit of God, not by theological rationalizations.

It is one thing to say "Lord" or "Master" but quite another to say "my Lord," or "my Master..." The Torah teaches that name of God refers to that which God alone is, namely, the "I am that I am"(אהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה) which is unknowable apart from the miracle of disclosure within the heart. That is why we find so many different names and titles for God in Scripture, for these are disclosures to the heart in a time of its need. For instance, to know God's name as "Savior" (מוֹשִׁיעַ) means experiencing deliverance from your struggles, pains, and fears by the agency of God’s victory, comfort, and consolation as given in Yeshua. However, unlike the experience of worldly education that might enable you accomplish certain tasks, spiritual education leads to a “dark clouds of unknowing” where you must regularly confess your weakness and your need for divine connection. God's name is therefore bound up with the basic quest within the heart for meaning, healing, and the desire of unconditional love. Knowing the name of God is an ongoing process as you struggle to accept and trust your life to be a blessing, and as you are enabled by the Holy Spirit to say "yes" and "amen" to life despite your failures, pains, fears, sorrows, and even your unanswered questions... It means opening your heart to life and believing that you are loved, that you are accepted, that you will be okay, and that God is holding you in his everlasting arms. [Hebrew for Christians]

https://hebrew4christians.com/

1.18.21 • Facebook

Today’s message from the Institute for Creation Research

January 19, 2021

The Blindness of Israel

“What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for; but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded.” (Romans 11:7)

One of the saddest aspects of our world is the blindness of Israel. Even the Orthodox Jews, who strongly affirm their belief in the Old Testament Scriptures, seem unable to see what the Scriptures clearly show, that their Messiah has come and gone. In the first book of the Torah, we read: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Genesis 49:10). Ancient Jewish commentators agreed that Shiloh was another name for Messiah, but this very fact should prove to modern Jewish expositors that Messiah has already come, for the scepter (the symbol of national leadership) did depart from Judah, very soon after Jesus was crucified.

King David was the first descendant of Judah to attain the scepter of leadership among the tribes of Israel, and the divine promises were clear that Messiah would be in David’s lineage. That Jesus’ legal father, Joseph, and human mother, Mary, were both in that lineage was shown in the genealogies of Matthew 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-38, respectively, both of which were written when the genealogical records in the Temple were still intact. No one at that time ever questioned their validity, in spite of intense opposition by the Jews to the claims of Jesus and His disciples that He was the Messiah. In 70 AD, the records and the Temple were destroyed so that no later claimant to the title could ever prove his right to the throne. Messiah had come, and was slain, so the scepter departed from Judah until He comes again. It is certain that Jesus was, indeed, the Jews’ promised Messiah, and we should pray that God will soon open their eyes to see and believe. HMM

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kingdomstroops · 4 years

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Understanding The Helmet Of Salvation

UNDERSTANDING THE HELMET OF SALVATION

Before we dig into the helmet of salvation, we need to understand the purpose of the armor of God. Every day you encounter temptations, trials, situations, and circumstances that test your faith in God. The good news is that God never asked you to face these battles alone. In Ephesians 6:10-18, the “armor of God” is presented as one of the keys to victorious Christian living. There are six pieces of spiritual armor that we can wear to withstand and overcome the attacks of the enemy.A Quick Look at the Armor of God Belt of Truth: The belt holds all of the pieces of armor in place. The truth of God’s Word serves as the foundation of faith in Jesus Christ. Because the Bible is true and never changes, we can depend on what it says. Breastplate of Righteousness: The armored breastplate protects some of the most vital organs in your body, including the heart. In your walk with the Lord, being righteous, or living a God-honoring life, is only possible with God’s help. You can only be righteous because of what Jesus accomplished on the cross. That righteousness protects your heart from sin and helps you to live for God from the very core of your being. Shoes of the Gospel: The good news of Jesus and His gift of salvation is referred to as the “Gospel.” As believers, God’s Word directs your steps and leads you to live a holy life, as Jesus lived. We are commanded and compelled to share the Gospel everywhere we go. (Mark 16:15) Shield of Faith: In Roman times, a shield was used to deflect anything that was used to attack a soldier. It was held out in front of their bodies and protected them from whatever was intended to cause them harm. Whenever a soldier dropped their shield, they became vulnerable to attacks. Strong faith in God can protect you from fear and doubt that can make you vulnerable to attacks from the enemy, the devil. Sword of the Spirit: A sharp sword can pierce just about any object. The Word of God is powerful and can cut through even to the hardest of hearts and keep the enemy at a distance. Let's take a more in-depth look at the final piece of armor mentioned in Ephesians 6 – The Helmet of Salvation.What is the Helmet of Salvation? And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. ~ Ephesians 6:17 The function of a helmet is to protect the head and, more importantly, your brain from injury. The human brain controls movement, the function of vital organs, and memory and speech. It also controls your thoughts. If your brain is damaged, it affects your entire body. Severe injury to your brain can impact your mobility, stop organ function or even lead to death. Helmets are a priority for construction workers, cyclists, and athletes because they drastically decrease impact injuries to the head and brain. In battle, a soldier would be at a severe disadvantage without a helmet. In Roman times, the enemy would first attack a soldier’s head. Because the brain controls decision making and reaction time, they could gain an advantage if they were able to injure the soldier’s head and cause them to enter a state of confusion. The devil operates similarly in your life. If you are confused or feel unstable in your relationship with God, then you are more vulnerable to his attacks.The Purpose of the Helmet of Salvation But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation ~ 1 Thessalonians 5:8 This verse reminds you to "be sober" or sensible in putting on your spiritual armor. When you wear the helmet of salvation, you are making a conscious effort to ward off fear and doubt, by allowing God to protect your minds. You are putting your hope in the confidence you have gained from accepting Jesus as the Lord of your life. No longer are you left utterly vulnerable to attacks. Instead, God provides all of the protection you need to feel secure in times of spiritual battle.Believers and the Helmet of Salvation The helmet of salvation is only available to believers. Why? Because someone who does not trust in the saving grace of Jesus, would not want God to protect them from anything. Unbelievers inadvertently, or purposefully, decide to face life's battles on their own. As a believer, you can have complete confidence in the eternal salvation you have received from the effects of sin and death. It’s not dependent on what you do or say, but on God’s perfect grace. You might fail, but God never will. When you face tough situations, you can put your hope in God and be at peace in your mind. It’s not uncommon for attacks from the devil to hit you at times when you should be at peace. If you lay down at night and your mind races with thoughts of worry and dismay, you need to rest in the fact that God is always with you. He can handle anything that comes your way. If you are in the midst of celebration and joy, but suddenly feel scared and troubled, remind yourself that God is guarding your mind. In order for fear to affect you, it has to pass by God first. Allow yourself to rest in God’s infinite love for you.Wearing the Helmet of Salvation In the Book of Isaiah, we read about a time when the Lord Himself fought against His enemies to protect His people and gain victory. He put on righteousness like a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation on His head; and He put on garments of vengeance for clothing and wrapped Himself with zeal as a mantle. ~ Isaiah 59:17 God had given the Israelites numerous opportunities to turn from their sin and turn back to Him. But when asked, not one person offered to step forward for the Lord. So, God Himself stepped forward. This scripture says God “put on” the pieces of armor, including the helmet of salvation. There is a direct correlation between the armor of God you read about in Ephesians 6 and the armor mentioned here in Isaiah. When Paul refers to the whole armor of God, he is referring to God’s actual armor – it’s belongs to God. As a believer, you have permission to wear His armor. This passage in Isaiah is also a reminder that God is not dependent on man. He always desires to work through the life of a believer, but if you don't step up, then He will step in.Protecting Your Mind from the Enemy God knows every thought you have ever had or will ever have. Sometimes your thoughts lead you away from God, and other times they draw you closer to Him. It's always your choice. No one, including the enemy, can make you think anything. The helmet of salvation protects your mind from the attacks of the enemy and helps you live victoriously every day. The battle always begins in your mind before it becomes an action. In 2 Corinthians 10:5, we read, “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ…” When you focus your mind and heart on holy things, you are putting them under the Lordship of Christ. As a follower of Jesus, your goal is to become more like Christ. Every action reflects whether you are modeling His character or following your own will. When you surrender your life to Christ, you allow Him to be in control instead of choosing your own ways. The goal is to honor God in your mind, as well as in your actions. You can't control whether or not you have an individual thought, but you can choose to quash it and keep it from moving into your heart. In that way, you are “taking every thought captive.” It’s the difference between being ruled by your thoughts, or causing them to submit to the Ruler of your life.Examining the Motives of Your Thoughts For as he thinks within himself, so he is.(Proverbs 23:7) Every thought has value. As a human being, you are not smart enough to control your mind. You need the help of the Holy Spirit. He can provide the strength and power you need to run every thought through the filter of God’s holiness. The Holy Spirit can also reveal what is at the root of your thoughts. Here are a few questions to help you determine whether your thoughts are affecting your walk with God in a positive or negative way. Are these thoughts godly? Are they influenced by the world? Do these thoughts lead me closer or further away from God? Does the surrender of these thoughts provide an opportunity to grow in my relationship with God? As a follower of Jesus, you are called to live separate from worldly desires that pull you away from God. You should continuously be in the process of developing the mind of Christ. (Philippians 2:5) In times of battle, the enemy doesn't want to hurt a soldier; he wants to destroy them. The enemy of your heart wants you to doubt your salvation and tempt you to live in your own strength. Until you completely surrender your mind to God, you will continue to struggle in your thought life.

The Hope of Salvation

Romans 6:14 says, For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace. A helmet only protects your head; that's why it's essential to put on the entire armor of God. Your mind is protected by the assurance that God's grace has saved you. No longer will you face God's judgment for your sin, but instead, you will receive mercy because of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross. You have the opportunity to put on the whole armor of God and rest in the hope of salvation that protects your mind and helps you live a godly life. Read the full article

#helmetofsalvation #armorofgod #godsword

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amarmeme · 7 years

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Diplomatic Negotiations (SebHawke)

Marian Hawke X Sebastian Vael 4915 words, explicit Hawke is made Viscount and the soon-to-be Prince of Starkhaven wants to come to terms with the meaning of their relationship before taking that important next step. Essentially, Hawke and Sebastian talk about sex for once. Read on the AO3

Somehow, I never posted this one. If you like sebhawke and wish there was a little frisky time in the credits, you may enjoy. I attest this certainly happened.

Hawke collapsed dramatically, stretching across a patch of thirsty grass in her courtyard. The collar of her jacket had been stiff and suffocating all day, and after a few moments fumbling with clasps, the fabric squeezing her neck loosened. With a great appreciative sigh, Hawke rested her head back against folded arms and watched the sun disappear behind the Hightown rooftops.

“You’re home at last.”

The rich brogue was unmistakable and Hawke tipped her head to grin at Sebastian. “Some of us have a job to do.” He stood in the doorway to the courtyard, a sly smile on his handsome face.

“Aye, and an important one at that.”

Little over a month had passed since the Chantry fell. For the last five weeks, Hawke found herself behind a grand wooden desk instead of running through the city delivering her brand of vigilante justice. Granted, as far as desks went it was a damn fine one, as Varric had assured. Still, a desk for her sword was a tough concession to make. Kirkwall had desperately needed a leader though, and Hawke always had a weakness for the destitute.

Sebastian carried her greatsword across the yard to where she lounged, his bow strapped across his back. The prince’s attire was less formal than Hawke’s stuffy viscount jacket. He wore simple breeches and a loose shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. She eyed him hungrily, wanting to pull Sebastian down on top of her. And not just for the sake of sinning. She contemplated never getting up again.

“You think Aveline would mind if I dictated relief efforts from here?” Sebastian loomed above, leaning on the greatsword. She reached up and he took her outstretched hand, squeezing her fingers as she lazily attempted to pull him down. “This is a very respectable corner of dirt.”

“I’m sure they could hear you shouting orders from here all the way in Lowtown, but I have a feeling the guard captain would prefer you at least pretend to stand on ceremony.”

“Rules are meant to be broken.” She raised an eyebrow and he shook his head at her.

“I can only imagine how difficult your duties are Hawke, but the people of Kirkwall will benefit tremendously under your leadership. Let them see it.” Without warning, Sebastian yanked her off the ground by the hand. Hawke stumbled into his hold, perhaps not entirely on accident. She nuzzled into his neck, and Sebastian whispered into her hair. “And though I need to return to Starkhaven, it would give me peace to see you settled before I go.”

“Oh, don't talk about that yet,” she whined. “I can't get enough of you. And who will carry my sword for me?” She squeezed him tightly, knowing how fleeting happiness was.

Sebastian surprised her with a kiss on the cheek, then pushed the weapon in question into her hands. He darted away and then readied his bow, quick fingers notching an arrow before she could blink.

“When did we start fighting?”

“It's been far too long since you trained, Hawke. I can see the tension in you.”

She couldn’t disagree; being viscount required a different kind of strength that Hawke was still working on. In theory, all the paperwork and negotiations would be easier than being Champion. So far though, Hawke’s head was reeling at the end of each day. As much as she hated to admit, she was ill prepared for the sheer onslaught of laws, diplomatic details and political nuances to keep straight. A little exertion would do her good.

Hawke loosened a few more clasps to free her motions. She fell into stance easily, as if she’d never set her sword down. Sebastian cocked a practice arrow, blunted so as not to pierce his Champion as she came at him with her very real weapon.

“Wait,” he said. “I almost forgot.” Sebastian pulled a small pouch from his pocket, then held it in one hand as he dipped his arrow within. It emerged with a blue tip, covered in a colored chalk. After coating the ends of each arrow, he pulled the pouch strings tight and tossed it to Hawke. “Not that I think you'll be able to land any hits, but in case I let you we can keep tally.”

“Cocky prince.” She grinned, catching the bag. It was awkward, running the edges of her large blade through the blue dust, but Hawke managed it without marking herself. She cinched the pouch and tossed it aside, resuming her fighting stance.

They needed no official signal to start; the game was an old one, though chalking their strikes was new. Hawke bolted forward with confidence, thinking to catch Sebastian across the knee. He was too quick, pivoting out of her reach as she ambled past, her modified swing catching only air. In retaliation he fired a swift arrow. Hawke jerked aside ungracefully, the arrow swishing past her ear and smacking against the stone wall behind her. A jest on the tip of her tongue was stolen away as another arrow flew beside her head. It was a warning shot, made clear by Sebastian’s raised eyebrow.

“Focus, Champion,” he teased.

Hawke shifted her grip and studied the archer’s body. If she feinted to his right, he’d naturally move to protect the arm. Sebastian drew his bow again, the fine line of his arm steady. She bridged the space between them, angling towards her left. As expected, the prince shifted to bring what normally was his protected side in her path. He had to readjust quickly, but Hawke used the brief moment to flank him. She was in his space, close enough to poke him with her blade. And poke him she did, in the center of his back underneath where the shining white armor would normally cover. The action left a blue streak on his shirt, and Hawke let out a mighty “a-ha!”

Before she could continue gloating, Sebastian spun out of her reach. Instead of nocking his arrow, he held it in a fist. He grinned before moving towards her, faster than she could step with her heavy sword. The prince feinted himself, somehow maneuvering to her backside as she had just done. Expecting to feel an arrow thudding between her shoulders, she was surprised as he wrapped his right arm over and tapped her neck on the opposite side with the arrow tip. A small cloud of blue chalk formed and Hawke coughed. She released the sword grip with her left and brought that elbow forward in order to cast it back into his gut. He pulled backwards, his arm still wrapped around her chest and caging her right arm. She was forced to step back too and as soon as her foot left the ground she was tripped up with his bow and knocked flat to her ass.

Hawke fell, dropping her sword in order to catch herself in the dirt. Sebastian twisted and sank over her, pulling another arrow from his back as she attempted to scramble away. He sat on her, knees on either side of her hips, forcing her hands next to her sides. With a terrible smirk she vowed to wipe away later, Sebastian knocked the arrow and aimed at her. Before she could argue, the arrow thumped between her eyes and she coughed on the poof of chalk. As soon as the air cleared, the prince started laughing.

“Ah, I’m sorry, Hawke.” He set the bow aside and leaned forward. “It didn’t hurt much?”

Sebastian wiped the chalk marking between her eyebrows slowly, as if reticent to stop touching her. His other hand rested near her head, palm flat on the earth. Hawke resisted the urge to squirm, and was rewarded when he closed the distance to kiss her where the arrow had landed. Despite her annoyance at being bested so easily, Hawke’s heart filled up at the soft sign of affection. The prince of Starkhaven pulled back, checking the emotion in her eyes.

Yearning, she tried to convey. Just kiss me again.

Instead of saying anything stupid, Hawke raised her brows and barely parted her lips. His gaze shifted to her mouth. Hawke’s chest rose quickly as she let her accelerated pulse do the speaking for her. Sebastian may have been chaste for some time, but he was no innocent. Taking her cues, her prince captured her lips in a searing kiss, his free hand cupping her face.

While they’d kissed before, and been quite free with affectionate touch, this was a whole new facet to their relationship. She didn’t want to push, afraid he still didn’t want the same thing she did. This though, Sebastian on top of her with her hands trapped, was maddening and frustrating in the worst way. Hawke wanted to trace his strong thighs, smoothing up towards more tempting territory. As if he knew, Sebastian pressed his hips downwards, igniting her core. She gasped as he kissed harder, opening her mouth and sliding a sly tongue inside.

His shifted, loosening his stance and allowing her hands free. She did exactly as she wanted to do, greedily running her palms against his legs, hesitating only at the crux of it all. Instead of clutching him there, Hawke slid her hands under his shirt, tracing his lean muscled back. The heat inside her was unbearable. If she’d been born a mage, Hawke would have burned the clothes of their bodies by now.

“Sebastian,” she gasped. He sucked on her lower lip, and she groaned, arching her hips in response. Hawke was relieved, assured they were on the same page after all the years of her teasing. “Please,” she whined.

“What?” He dragged his hand down her neck, to her gaping jacket. He mimicked her own movements from moments ago, slipping a hand under the fabric. She wore only her breast band beneath, a necessity in the Kirkwall heat. Sebastian cupped a breast, flicking his thumb over where her nipple was trapped. It still sent a shock of lust through her, deep to the center of her. A garbled groan ripped from her mouth and he chuckled against her.

And then he pulled away, Hawke’s hands forced down to his waist. “What... are you... doing?” She tried to catch her breath.

“Hawke,” he said evenly, hardly bothered at all. “We need to talk about this.” He sat on his heels, letting her slide out from beneath him.

“I don’t think we need to talk so much as we need to go finish in my bed.” She was sticky, flushed and bothered. Hawke undid her jacket completely and tossed it beside her. The bit of airflow helped her brain return to normal functionality. Sebastian sat with his hands clasped, forearms resting on his knees. It was reasonable that after all this time, he just wasn’t ready for what comes after groping wildly like teenagers. Hawke sighed a little, then wiped the dust from the back of her legs. “Unless you’re saying this isn’t what you want.”

He snorted, standing upright. “Maybe I merely hoped to help you put those newly honed diplomatic skills to use.” He picked up his bow, then brushed back the hair that fell in front of his eyes. “Come inside with me, Hawke.”

Grumbling, Hawke got herself up and swiped her sword and jacket from the ground. It was almost dark out now, the sun no longer visible from her vantage.

He’d told her to pick the setting, so it was no surprise they ended up in her bedroom. Hawke threw her jacket on a chair and huffed as she fell into it. The clasp on her pants was undone and she sprawled, one leg over a chair arm, without a shirt. Sebastian tried to keep his expression straight as she acted like a child whose toy was taken away.

He sat tactfully on the edge of her bed.

“If this is how you greet all your guests, should I be worried about our alliance?” She rolled her head over and shot him a cutting glare. After blowing the hair out of her eyes away, Hawke sat up.

She was quite beautiful, the Viscount of Kirkwall. With dark hair, gleaming eyes and a perfect mouth, Marian Hawke was everything the old Sebastian would have lusted after. He still did of course, his balls aching for the halt he’d forced on them. But much unlike his younger self, Sebastian wanted to make his intentions perfectly clear before proceeding any further. He owed it to Hawke, for what she’d done for him, not only in avenging his family and giving him support all those years, but also providing a place to live after the Chantry was destroyed. And he loved her, every single part of her, even when she was petulant.

“We’ve talked about an alliance,” she said, “but I’ve yet to see any benefit from it.” Her eyes narrowed and Sebastian bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.

“I’m not yet in power. There’s not much I can do for you from your bedroom.”

“Oh, you underestimate yourself there.” She shook her head, rose regally and came to him, hands on her hips. “Sebastian, as much as I love innuendos, I just want to speak honestly with you.”

Hawke actually seemed nervous, shifting slightly and worrying her lower lip. He wanted to hold her, smooth the lines between her brows, but that would be a move that would place them exactly in the position as they’d just been in. He knew he did not posses the ability to hold back twice. He hadn’t exactly meant to grope her in the courtyard either. It seemed with his path set clearly before him, Sebastian couldn’t deny the temptation that was Hawke any longer.

“Then speak honestly with me, please.”

She nodded, then sat on the bed, crossing a leg beneath her. She folder her hands in her lap, then unfolded them. Sebastian could appreciate how she was feeling. Hawke had flustered him for years. Sympathetic to her struggle, and just wanting to touch her again, he took one of her hands in his own. Hawke smiled at the gesture.

“Sebastian,” she said, her voice unusually soft and sweet. “I can’t help but feel we’re at an odd impasse.”

He laughed and smoothed her palm with a thumb. “What gave it away?”

She soldiered on without pause. “I think you’ve always know how I felt about this, between us.” She gestured back and forth with their joined hands. “And we’ve agreed that we’d marry once you’re back on your throne, but I don’t want to wait until then to, well, make it official . Ugh, there I go, innuendo.”

“I may have been chaste the last fifteen years, but I still know what you mean.”

“Of course you do,” she replied. “But how can I expect it of you if I can’t even say it? Andraste, I want to rip those clothes off of you, Sebastian, but I’m kind of worried about messing this up.”

“Because you don’t think I would want that too?”

Hawke opened her mouth, then changed her mind for a second. The silence did not last long, given present company. “Look, I want to have sex with you, right now if you’d let me. But, if that’s not what you want, given everything, I’ll wait. I want this, Sebastian, a relationship and everything that entails. I’d ask for some compromises, a little negotiation, but I would not push where you wouldn’t want to go.”

He was taken a bit aback by the amount of thinking she’d clearly put into it. “Compromises?”

The bridge of her nose and her cheeks flushed, pink with embarrassment; a rare sight. “I want intimacy.” She shrugged, as if to downplay her request. The straightforward Champion of Kirkwall wasn’t looking at him any more.

Sebastian felt like his heart was being dragged to the pit of his stomach, watching her shy away so suddenly. He wanted her to say it first, draw everything out for him, but now this felt a little unfair. Despite his past, he wasn’t going to suddenly leave her once they had sex. An irrational part of his brain had suggested it, whispered it every time he thought of taking her to bed, but Sebastian loved her far too much for that to ever be a problem. He knew that now, watching her gather courage to say exactly what intimacy entailed.

“Marian.” He lowered his voice, putting the accent on thickly. “I don’t want to compromise.” She tilted her head, glancing at him from the corner of her eyes. “I want everything.”

She squeezed his hand, then punched him in the shoulder with the other one. “You were messing with me!” She shoved him, hard, and he let himself fall against the bed. Hawke’s grip remained entangled in his shirt, and she leaned over him, a troublesome grin breaking across her face. “We could have just stayed in the courtyard, you know. I wouldn’t have minded.”

“This is more than just a fling, and so it deserves more than a shuffle in the dirt. I wanted to know you felt the same way about me that I do for you.”

She relaxed, sinking against his side and moving a hand to trace his jaw. He’d learned in the last few weeks that Hawke could be unexpectedly soft, for all the chaos that usually came with her. It was another quality he loved, and felt a bit proud thinking she didn’t share that side with just anyone.

“I can’t promise this will be as good as you’ve been waiting for.” He stilled the fingers at his jaw. He didn’t doubt he’d be able to please her eventually, but sex was not going to do it. It had been far too long for any hope of that.

“Oh, Sebastian,” she murmured. “I don’t care -- we’ve plenty of time to practice before you leave. Besides, it’s been a long time for me too, remember?”

He’d hardly believed it the first time -- Hawke hadn’t slept with anyone since he’d joined her group of misfits. She’d actually been pining for him, just as he had her. He fervently wished something other than the explosion of the Chantry would have set him on this path with her. He’d made the decision to go to Starkhaven beforehand, but would have left without even kissing her. Sebastian was admittedly an idiot sometimes.

“It's going to be awkward, but I trust you,” she confessed. Her eyes were bright with anticipation, her pulse beating wildly at the base of her delicious, smooth throat. He wanted to lick her there. “You trust me, right?”

“Maker -- I’d trust you with my life. And I think I already have.”

She chuckled, recognizing it to be true, and Sebastian took the opportunity to catch her off guard. He shot up, and kissed her again, this time with no doubt about intentions. He grabbed her tightly with one arm around her waist, then pulled her on top of his lap. She rubbed against him like a cat, begging for attention, as his tongue entered her mouth, teasing. She kissed him back, just as passionately, and ran her hands through his hair, tousling it. Soon enough, she tugged on the edge of his shirt instead, and he pulled regretfully away from her mouth so she could unclothe him. Hawke’s hands ran up his side, sending shivers up his skin. He helped her get it off, and she halted his progress when he’d attempted to remove her breast band.

“Let me appreciate you for a moment,” she teased, leaning away in his lap.

Hawke eyed him hungrily, biting her lip before acceding to his demands and removing the band herself. Sebastian couldn’t help himself, and groaned at the sight of her. His body moved on autopilot, not needing his brain to remember what to do next. He captured a pink nipple in his mouth, flicking his tongue lightly against the spot until it hardened and she wiggled against him. He traded one for the other, then slipped a hand down the back of her pants. She’d loosened them earlier, so it was easy to cup her behind. Hawke dipped her head back, moaned and arched into his touch. Once he entered her, it would be quickly over. Sebastian wanted to make it as pleasurable for her as he could in the meantime.

Hawke tried to strip down, ineffectually pushing her pants down her thighs. Sebastian kissed her neck, moving to the spot he wanted to caress earlier. Her pulse danced beneath his tongue, and she shivered as he blew lightly on the spot.

“I'm happy to help you with those,” he said. His voice was deeper than usual, and he could tell how much she enjoyed it, closing her eyes and smiling wickedly. That was vital information to keep for later.

He picked her up and sat her back on her heels next to the bed. Hawke’s eyes were wide -- surprised he could do such a thing. Sebastian helped her undress fully, peeling off her boots, stripping away her socks and pants. Only her smallclothes remained, and he was without words. Unbidden, the Chant came to mind, and blasphemous as it was, he wanted to kneel down and pray before her. His mouth was dry, he was parched for her touch, her embrace. How he’d resisted to her up until then, it was unimaginable -- as far from possible as a nug flying across the sky.

“My turn I guess,” she said. He kicked off his boots, and tugged open his breeches before she could. Her expression was a little piqued, hoping to do it herself, but he was afraid of combusting by the mere brush of her hand against him. “Okay, that’s as eager as I’ve seen you yet,” she laughed.

He stood up, letting his breeches fall to the ground. Hawke was frozen, mouth slack at the sight of his arousal, for Sebastian never wore anything beneath. He didn’t give her a chance to gawk, though it pleased him a little bit to see her silenced so easily. Grabbing her around the waist, he pulled her against him, kissing her shocked little expression. “Should we?” He walked backwards as she nodded yes, and in a swift movement, spun around and tossed her down onto the bedclothes. She peeled away her own smallclothes, revealing a tidy line of dark hair that promised a path to happiness.

“Maker,” he managed.

“Isabela had a lot to say about proper maintenance,” she laughed.

“I’ll have to thank her that.” He swallowed, eager to part her thighs.

Hawke tugged Sebastian over her. He was nervous, probably more than her, but as Hawke parted her legs the only thought that came to mind was seating himself inside her. Sense returned, and he pledged to kiss her there -- later. Sebastian positioned between her thighs, cock resting against the warmth of her center. “I’m sorry in advance.”

“Shush, you.”

He kissed her as he entered her, stuttering breath revealing how wonderful it felt. Hawke hissed between her teeth in a completely good way, fingertips pressing into his shoulders. Sebastian didn’t dare move, to ruin it so quickly, but she wasn’t going to sit still. Hawke canted her hips, forcing him to react. He dropped his head against her shoulder, embarrassed about just how soon he was going to come. It was overwhelming, the build up so swift, just being inside of this beautiful, eager woman. He thrusted once, twice, holding up one of her legs as he bent over her, kissing her neck as she murmured appreciatively. She gasped as he thrust deeply once more, knowing it would be the last. For a moment, as his orgasm paced quickly through him, nothing in the world mattered more than the connection between them. He felt humbled; this amazing creature choosing him above all others.

And then it was done, Sebastian sinking back into reality. He felt his cheeks flush, not with exertion, but shame. It was entirely expected, but still he wished their first moment together could have been more noteworthy. He sighed and began to withdraw. The moment after coming had always been the worst, knowing he’d have to get out of the room quickly, before the woman had any ideas about him staying. Now though, he thankfully wasn’t going anywhere. He still had his love to please.

Hawke whimpered softly as he pulled out and collapsed next to her, hating the separation. She wound against him, trying to fill the void without even realizing. Sebastian smoothed her hair back, kissed her forehead and let the hand that lingered behind her back dip down. She mewled appreciatively as he gripped her behind.

“What is it you want?” She gasped as his other hand travelled down to trace the neat little trail on her mound.

“Mmmmm,” she moaned. “Just slip your hand down here..."

Her voice trailed off, but she guided his hand, parting her. She was still hot, and wet, and waiting for him to make her feel bliss. Sebastian found where she was wanting, and circled her there until she squirmed in his grasp. He bowed his head to take a nipple in his mouth, enjoying her breathy pleas as he did so. Feeling her squirm, it was almost as enjoyable as entering her had been. Sebastian stopped circling, only to thrust his middle fingers inside her. She swore under her breath, and rocked into his hand, the heel of it pressure against her sensitive spot. He let go of her breast, not before tweaking the nipple gently with his teeth. She swore again, louder, and he nibbled her shoulder, then neck. Making his way to her ear, he licked the edge before whispering with a thick Starkhaven brogue she’d appreciate.

“I cannot wait to be inside you again, Marian.” She was panting, rocking, entirely in the thralls of an orgasm. He felt her tighten around his fingers, then continued to confess to her as she cried out. “You’re so beautiful, I love watching you come for me. Beautiful, beautiful lass.”

As the last ripples passed through her, Hawke caught him by the chin and kissed him softly, whimpering into his mouth. It was the single greatest feeling of his life thus far.

She collapsed, and he was now the one to mold around her, resting his head on her wildly beating chest. Her fingers found his hair again, and she played with it.

“I love your hair,” she admitted. “It sounds silly, but I always thought you were so dashing. This hidden prince with his slicked back hair and breathtaking eyes. I can’t tell you how many times I thought about this.”

“And,” he hesitated, not sure if he wanted to know how it turned out. Damn, he was but a man and of course wanted to know. “Did it meet your expectations?” He held impossibly still waiting for her response.

Hawke extricated herself and rolled to a side, facing him. “You really have to ask? It was better of course, because instead of screwing in a confessional or getting sand all over our parts at the Wounded Coast, this is real. And you are mine, not some conjured version of you that disappears as soon as I open my eyes.” She wound one of their hands together, palms still slick with exertion. “What about me? Is this as good as your imagination?”

“Hawke, I didn’t dare imagine you and I.” She pouted, about to argue, but allowed him to finish. “Oh I took it just to the limit,” he laughed. “I don’t think I could have managed to pray away the temptation otherwise, even if it was just in my head.”

He pushed aside the hair that always fell into her eyes. “Sebastian?”

“Yes, Hawke?”

“I don’t want you to leave.” Her voice was thick with emotion. If there was any possible way to take back Starkhaven from her side, he would do it. There was no other choice for him though. He had to go home.

“Aye, and I don’t want to leave you.” He kissed her briefly, tenderly. Her eyes were full of unshed tears, and it broke him a little to think about how soon they’d be leagues apart, separated by mountains.

“Promise me you’ll do it? That all this tragedy was for something in the end? And not just for Varric to get another book deal.” She laughed, despite how worried she looked before.

“I will,” he vowed. “I know you’ll be busy in the meantime too, so don’t forget about me in light of all your suitors. I still contend that Starkhaven is the most sound alliance for Kirkwall in the Free Marches.”

Hawke shook her head, and blew an exasperated breath between her lips. “I’ve waited about seven years for this, I’m not letting you go that easily. Plus, I never thought about being a princess before, but now I want it very badly.”

Suddenly, she maneuvered on top of him, trapping his arms at his side as he’d done to her earlier that night. Unable to stop himself, his cock thickened beneath her, ready for another shot. Hawke threw her head back, cackling in delight. “I have a feeling I’ll hold all the weight in any negotiations between our cities,” she teased.

“You know Hawke, I’ve no doubt that’s the case.”

I hope you enjoyed. Who doesn’t love a little prince action?

#sebhawke #sebastian vael #hawke x sebastian #marian hawke #dragon age 2 #dragon age fanfiction #my writing #hmm should I write more sebhawke?#i think so

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seekfirstme · 4 years

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Meditation: If someone insults you or tries to take advantage of you, how do you respond? Do you repay in kind? Jesus approached the question of just retribution with a surprising revelation of God's intention for how we should treat others, especially those who mistreat us. When Jesus spoke about God's law, he did something no one had done before. He gave a new standard based not just on the requirements of justice - giving each their due - but based on the law of grace, love, and freedom.

Law of grace and love

Jesus knew the moral law and its intention better than any jurist or legal expert could imagine. He quoted from the oldest recorded law in the world: If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe (Exodus 21:23-25). Such a law today seems cruel, but it was meant to limit vengeance as a first step towards mercy. This law was not normally taken literally but served as a guide for a judge in a law court for assessing punishment and penalty (see Deuteronomy 19:18).

The Old Testament is full of references to the command that we must be merciful: You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD (Leviticus 19:18). If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink (Proverbs 25:21). Do not say, "I will do to him as he has done to me; I will pay the man back for what he has done" (Proverbs 24:29). Let him give his cheek to the smiter, and be filled with insults (Lamentations 3:30).

Jesus does something quite remarkable and unheard of. He transforms the law of mercy with grace, forbearance, and loving-kindness. Jesus also makes clear that there is no room for retaliation. We must not only avoid returning evil for evil, but we must seek the good of those who wish us ill. Do you accept insults, as Jesus did, with no resentment or malice? When you are compelled by others to do more than you think you deserve, do you insist on your rights, or do you respond with grace and cheerfulness?

Grace of the Holy Spirit

What makes a disciple of Jesus Christ different from everyone else? What makes Christianity distinct from any other religion? It is grace - treating others, not as they deserve, but as God wishes them to be treated - with loving-kindness and mercy. Only the cross of Jesus Christ can free us from the tyranny of malice, hatred, revenge, and resentment and gives us the courage to return evil with good. Such love and grace has power to heal and to save from destruction. The Lord Jesus suffered insult, abuse, injustice, and death on a cross for our sake. Scripture tells us that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin and guilt (Matthew 26:28; Ephesians 1:7, I John 1:7, Revelation 1:5). Since God has been merciful towards us through the offering of his Son, Jesus Christ, we in turn are called to be merciful towards our neighbor, even those who cause us grief and harm.

How can we possibly love those who cause us harm or ill-will? With God all things are possible. He gives power and grace to those who believe and accept the gift of the Holy Spirit. His love conquers all, even our hurts, fears, prejudices and griefs. Only the cross of Jesus Christ can free us from the tyranny of malice, hatred, revenge, and resentment and gives us the courage to return evil with good. Such love and grace has power to heal and to save from destruction. Do you know the power and freedom of Christ's redeeming love and mercy?

Perfect - made whole

Was Jesus exaggerating when he said we must be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48)? Jesus' command seems to parallel two passages from the Old Testament Scriptures. The first is where God instructed Abraham to "be perfect/blameless" before God (Genesis 17:1). The original meaning of "perfect" in Hebrew and the Aramaic dialect which Jesus spoke is"completeness" or"wholeness" - "not lacking in what is essential."

The second passage that seems to parallel Jesus' expression - "be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect"- is the command that God gave to Moses and the people of Israel to "be holy, for I am holy" (Leviticus 11:44,45; 19:2). God created each one of us in his own image and likeness (Genesis 1:26,27). That is why he calls us to grow in maturity and wholeness so we can truly be like him - a people who loves as he loves and who chooses to do what is good and to reject what is evil (Ephesians 4:13-16).

Freedom and power to love as God loves

God knows our sinfulness and weaknesses better than we do - and he assures us of his love, mercy, and help. That is why he freely gives us his power, strength, and gifts so that we may not lack anything we need to do his will and to live as his sons and daughters (2 Peter 1:3). Do you want to grow in your love for God and for your neighbor? Ask the Holy Spirit to purify and transform you in the image of the Father that you may know and live in the joy and freedom of the Gospel.

"Lord Jesus, your love brings freedom and pardon. Fill me with your Holy Spirit and set my heart ablaze with your love that nothing may make me lose my temper, ruffle my peace, take away my joy, nor make me bitter towards anyone."

TURN THE OTHER CHEEK

"But what I say to you is: offer no resistance to injury." Matthew 5:39

Jesus sounds so naive. Everybody knows we must resist injury. Jesus says that after we've been hit on one cheek, we should turn the other. We'll seemingly get killed if we take His advice. However, the Sermon on the Mount is not "advice"; it is the Lord's command. Nonetheless, we rationalize that Jesus' message in the Sermon on the Mount is poetic, symbolic, anything but literal.

Sometimes Jesus does not speak literally, as when He said to gouge out our eye (Mt 5:29). So we're tempted to assume the Sermon on the Mount, especially this part of it, must not be literal. Yet Jesus did literally turn the other cheek, hand over His garments and walk the extra mile, even up Mount Calvary to be crucified (Mt 5:39-41). If we deny that the Sermon on the Mount is literal, we may be denying that we must imitate the crucified Christ. Jesus is literally calling us to make a U-turn and live a radically different lifestyle. Following Jesus is not just a modification of a worldly life, but an utterly new way to live.

Will you decide to be a Christian on Jesus' terms not as other people are, not as you want, but as He wills? Accept the Preacher and the preaching of the Sermon on the Mount.

Prayer: Jesus, it's impossible to be a Christian without Your constant amazing grace. Pour out the Holy Spirit in my life. Promise: "For the wisdom of this world is absurdity with God." —1 Cor 3:19 Praise: Risen Lord Jesus, how can we thank You enough? You are our older Brother, having gone before us as "the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep" (see 1 Cor 15:20). We adore You. (For a related teaching on Meeting the Risen Christ, order, listen to, or download our or on our website.)

Rescript: In accord with the Code of Canon Law, I hereby grant the Nihil Obstat ("Permission to Publish") for One Bread, One Body covering the period from February 1, 2020 through March 31, 2020.

Most Reverend Joseph R. Binzer, Auxiliary Bishop, Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, July 8, 2019.

The Nihil Obstat ("Permission to Publish") is a declaration that a book or pamphlet is considered to be free of doctrinal or moral error. It is not implied that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat agree with the contents, opinions, or statements

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princeoftheapostles · 6 years

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The Life of St. Peter

(photo from Catholic News World)

Peter lived a simple life until the day he met the Son of God, Jesus Christ. In meeting Jesus and choosing to follow Him, his life will be changed forever. He will become one of the 12 apostles of the Lord, the first ever pope of the Church, and the Prince of the Apostles. Although equipped with “little faith”, he represents most of us-- his doubts and shortcomings reflect our very own relationship with God and our personal faith journey.

While Peter and Andrew are fishing at the Sea of Galilee, Jesus sees them and asks them to follow Him. – Matthew 4:18

An important lesson can be learned here. We need to be open to the call of God. An important story could be beneficial in order to understand this lesson on a deeper level. One day God played hide and seek with man, 3 angels helped him choose where to hide. The first suggested the highest mountain, man will not be able to reach it. The second angel suggested the deepest ocean, for man will not be able to reach it. The last however, suggested God hide in man’s heart, for that would be the last place they would check.

(photo from Stories of the Kingdom)

Peter casts his net in the deep ocean after being told by Jesus to do so. He tells Jesus that they have tried all night to do so and without success. When he did as he was told, they caught a great number of fish. – Luke 5:6-11

In here, we see Peter’s response to Jesus’ miracle. He fell on his knees and confessed he is a sinner and that Jesus should stay away from him. He has committed no sin and yet what he said is the truth. He realises that Jesus is holy and in that very moment, in the presence of the Son of God, he kneels down before Him and acknowledges his sinfulness.

Jesus reassured him and told him that he will take on a new life with Christ, to serve and be with the people of God. He has no idea what lies ahead of him but he follows the Son of God and this will be the start of his journey as an apostle of Christ, and soon enough, the first pope of the Church.

(photo from PixShark)

Peter becomes one of the witnesses to a miracle Jesus performed, raising a little girl back from the dead. – Matthew 9:23-26

As believers, we need to remember that God is bigger than our problems. There is nothing that you and God together, cannot handle. He will heal our deepest wounds and bring us out of our deepest wells.

Peter was a witness to God’s saving grace and mercy. Much like in our lives, we are given a chance to see God’s love for us in almost everything and everywhere around us. Although miracles like this seem impossible in the modern context of our world, God’s saving grace and mercy can still be felt up to this day.

(photo from Catholic for Life)

The apostles and Simon Peter see Jesus walking on water, Peter asks Jesus to command him to walk to Him. Peter tries to walk on water, but he failed. – Matthew 14:28-29

The journey to follow God will be difficult. We need to remain strong and steadfast amidst the problems we come along. Problems are part of the journey, however we need to remember that we are not alone when we face them.

The moment Peter fell on the water is the moment he took his focus off of Christ and let fear and doubt into his mind. We often doubt God’s ability to be there for us but if we strongly believe in him, we will never drown in our worries and we will be able to reach for his hand as we face the massive waves life throws at us.

(photo from PixShark)

Jesus tell Peter that he will build his church on him. – Matthew 16:18

All of us are foundations of God’s kingdom here on earth. We are embodiments of a kingdom in process, we need to work together in order to successfully establish what Jesus has started. We cannot be idle and apathetic, we all have roles to fulfil.

(photo from The Black Cordelias)

After Jesus proclaims that He will be killed and then rise on the third day, Peter rebukes Him. – Matthew 16:21-23

We are reminded that we cannot fully comprehend God. His intentions, His plans, His goodness. We shouldn’t completely force to grasp the fullness of God, it is impossible - yet we are challenged to believe beyond our reason and logic. Faith that precedes understanding.

(photo from St. Peter, The First Pope)

Peter, along with James and John, witness the transfiguration of Jesus and the appearance of Moses and Elijah on a mountain. – Matthew 17:1-3

This instance further proves the divinity of God. This proves that he is greater than our worldly problems and endeavors. The fullness of his greatness cannot be comprehended by our imagination. Thus, when God the Father told us to listen to his Son, it is a reminder of the commitment we are part of. To trust God with all our being.

(photo from The Sophia Center for Spirituality)

Jesus makes a prediction that Peter will deny Him three times before a rooster crows. – Matthew 26:34

All of us are bound to hit a speed bump at some point in our journey of faith. These are due to the limits and faults of our humanity. An important aspect to this story is that we need to be aware of our limits and faults in order to address them. We must not see ourselves in a perfect light, all humans have limits, it is normal - how we address these problems and what we do is what matters.

(photo from JesusWLL )

Peter and the others were sleeping while Jesus was praying in The Garden of Gethsemane. – Matthew 26:40-46

Our faith is tested especially during times of great distress. We will be tempted to give up, and sleep, temporarily debilitating our relationship with God. We must remain strong and remember that God is suffering with us. He is with us in all our pains and problems. We are comforted by the fact that when we are in pain, we are not alone.

(photo from Fine Art America)

The prediction of Jesus comes true when Peter denies Him three times. – Matthew 26:69-75

How Peter reacted and repented for his sins should be emanated. As humans, we cannot avoid sin. However, to truly make up for them, we need to be genuinely sorry for them, and be committed to change. Transforming for the better is a difficult task, but we need not be intimidated. Jesus will always steer us into the right path whenever we stray away from what is just. It is up to us if we accept his invitation or not.

(photo from Redemption Ministry)

Jesus appears to Peter before appearing to the other apostles. – Luke 24:34

In this event, Jesus emphasizes his forgiveness to Peter. Amidst Peter’s blatant denial of Jesus, he stills appears to Peter first. In this action, Jesus concretely shows his love. He shows that he loved us first, and that his love knows no limits.

(photo from Urantia Association International)

Jesus gives Peter and the other apostles the gift of the Holy Spirit. – Luke 24:49

The holy spirit enables the apostles of Christ to carry out their mission. In this event we see that God gives us all the tools we need in order to fulfill our roles in establishing the Church. Since our mission of faith, transcends us, since it is bigger than us, God helps us accomplish the mission through His Spirit. Again we see God’s helping hand in our journey of faith.

(photo from God’s Hotspot Blog)

Peter makes a confession of love towards the risen Jesus three times after meeting him on the shores of Galilee. – John 21:15-19

Here we see God’s eternal forgiveness. He mended His relationship with Peter through love and not hate. He used love, kindness, and understanding as tools to reconcile with Peter. In our context today of spreading the culture of hate and forgiveness with a cost, it is essential to look at Jesus’ example to find out what true forgiveness is.

(photo from The River Of Life)

Now filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, Peter gives a message to the people in Jerusalem. – Acts 2:14-36

Knowing that the Holy Spirit is within our disposal, we need to make the most out of it. We need its fruits and gifts in order to guide us in establishing God’s Kingdom, as well as doing it in a just and sincere manner. Especially today wherein we carry out our tasks in such a pragmatic way, we need to keep the Holy Spirit close to our hearts, in order to remain true to our mission of love and faith.

(photo from Lempertz 1845)

Peter travels to different places to teach and to encourage other believers in Jesus Christ. – Acts 9:32

We see more in this story how our mission of establishing God’s Kingdom transcends us. We need to go out of our comfort zone, we need to tread new waters. The journey of faith was never made to be easy, it was never made to be trivial. It is a constant commitment to struggle. A struggle filled with meaning and hope in the manifestation of God’s return.

(photo from Crisis Magazine)

Peter’s life is a story of forgiveness, reconciliation, and redemption. He was forgiven by God, he restored his faith and relationship with God, and he was able to redeem himself even after all the failures and shortcomings he had done. His life gives us hope and inspiration that as long as we believe and continue to work on ourselves, there is still hope for us. We have a God who always forgives and to whom we can always come home to.

Peter was never a perfect man, he had his own fair share of doubts and shortcomings, he fell down, but he rose back up again and kept his faith alive to proclaim the Word of God.

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