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#i don’t believe in New Years Resolutions but I do believe in having a million hobbies
bestworstcase · 11 months
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question: do you think Salem's immortality having an end condition is true? that is, when she was made immortal, it was so that she would 'understand the balance of life and death.' some people are treating it like a typical fairy tale virtue curse- i.e, she will die when she fulfills the condition of "understanding the balance of life and death." i personally believe that it's bullshit. she's just going to be alive, forever, and that's that. your interpretation of things seems to lend itself to this conclusion, cuz I'm pretty sure you've said something about how the gods made her immortal in a way they couldn't take back. as always, sending this just to hear your thoughts! (p.s - do you think she's capable of Ascension? I think she might be, but whether she would do it or not is another question entirely)
yeah i don’t think it’s really a curse in the typical sense. light threw her into the fountain of creation, she drowned, the water’s power revived her and bound to her forever. and then he got sanctimonious about how she needed to learn a lesson.
these two things are connected emotionally but not, i think, mechanically; if light ever intended to make her mortal again i’m certain that the end condition he has in mind was “salem learns her lesson and comes to him to grovel for forgiveness so he can judge whether she deserves to finally die.” look at the way he sets up the ultimatum for humankind! light very much sees himself as an adjudicator. he wants his judgment to be sought and obeyed.
likewise i don’t think “as long as this world turns, you shall walk its face” is a literally true statement (in the sense that salem cannot leave remnant)—first because if this were a truly literal curse then she wouldn’t be able to fly, and second because the verbiage is repeated later when light says that humankind will rise to “walk [the world’s] face” once more, so narratively this is tying salem to the resurrection of humanity itself and tying the ultimatum to salem because it’s ultimately about punishing her continued defiance. “as long as this world turns, you shall walk its face” is a poetic description meant to emphasize the weight of “you cannot die.”
it’s “you will outlive this planet and there is nothing you can do to escape that fate.”
and yeah i have major doubts that the brothers can take it back. like i said, it’s not a curse per se—the fountain of life and creation transformed her just as the pool of grimm did—and the god of light does it to her in a fit of pique. the god of darkness vaporizes her along with everyone else in the end and she just reconstitutes. at this point the god of light is either inventing whole new levels of sunk cost fallacy (it has been MILLIONS OF YEARS and she’s sworn to her defiance!) or he just can’t remove this thorn from his side.
pre-v9 my only real reservation about this line of thinking was that i’m quite sure that part of the narrative resolution will involve salem becoming mortal again, and if not the brothers then…? but as v9 delivered a cosmic force of change deeper and older than the brothers, the brothers being unable to undo it no longer poses a mechanical problem whatsoever.
which is to say that yes, i think if salem found the tree she would be just as capable of ascension as anyone else, and the more salient question is if she would choose to change and how.
as long as the ultimatum is in place, salem has a pressing reason to STAY IMMORTAL, because her immortality is what prevents ozma from immanentizing the eschaton (in which the best case scenario for her realistically is “everybody else is dead and the gods leave again”) and being immortal is the best—really, the only—weapon she has against the brothers. ozma projects his own suicidality onto her; whether salem actually IS suicidal is an open question.
though tbh i think, given the option of ascending, the real dilemma for salem would turn on her isolation and exile rather than her immortality. i’ve touched on this before but one of the main reasons i think she isn’t going to (and shouldn’t) be ‘purified’ as part of her villain -> hero arc is it’s been established pretty overtly that being grimm isn’t what made her evil, rejection and isolation made her desperate enough to embrace being the evil witch in the wilderness. so she needs to be treated like a person before she can be good, and if she has to be ‘purified’ before she can be treated like a person then it means her humanity is contingent on her looking a certain way.
(there’s uhm. a reason the story keeps using the grimm as a symbol for faunus persecution!)
and salem is old enough—and undoubtedly experienced enough persecution when she lived on the fringes of civilization—to grasp that as long as she looks grimm, people are going to see her as a grimm no matter what she does, and if she wants to be treated like a person she’s going to have to bend over backwards to prove her humanity and even that might not be enough. ozma—OZMA, who knew her and loved her before any of this nightmare began, who came back for her and chose to be with her and had children with her—even ozma would not see her as a person; he lied to her and manipulated her throughout their entire marriage and has since decided to pin the blame for all the evils in the world solely on her. is it any wonder that she’s given up?
but, like, the tree could fix that. the tree could take that away. she could be only human again. wouldn’t that be so much easier? to look like a person so she can be treated like one.
only that also really, really sucks for her, because if the only way to get even the possibility of being treated like a person is to ascend, then salem—who she is now, what she is now—fundamentally never had a chance at all and the best she can hope for is that the essence of her will find a new form that other people will judge to be deserving of kindness.
like this is what sets salem (& to an only slightly lesser extent, cinder) apart from most of the villainous cast; to a certain extent her monstrosity is socially enforced by the way other people perceive her, reinforced by thousands of years of ozma’s shadow campaign against her very existence. it’s not that she won’t change—it’s that she can’t change. she can’t make people believe that she’s a person. she can’t make them listen to her. she can’t make anyone care about her. and when she tried she was manipulated into serving the god who did this to her.
it’s blake’s “you could just be a human, or just a cat” trial with the volume dialed up to eleven. it’s “maybe you could be accepted as a person if you shed who you are now to become someone else.” is that an idea salem would ever accept? that she needs to sacrifice who she is in order to mold herself into something other people wouldn’t hate and fear on sight?
(and is that really an idea the tree, universally and unconditionally kind as it is, would let her accept?)
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hocusbogus · 1 year
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Regrets of Yesteryears
Saw my friends on Sunday, the group of friends that I spent most of my mid-twenties with, and I haven’t seen them since June 2022.
It’s been 6 months, and a lot did change but not really, somehow.
So instead of talking about new years resolutions, we talked about our biggest regret of the year.
Ayoi and I were the last one to come up with an answer, and I didn’t manage to even find any regret.
This is not to be obnoxious nor am I implying any sense of superiority over my lack of answers to the question. It is merely a difference in perspective. I was recalling “bad” moments in 2022 and trying to find that sense of regret over it but I just couldn’t attach the words to those unfortunate events that colored the beginning of my 2022.
Even when I’m on the verge of losing something dear to me I still didn’t find any regret, and I think it has to do with my definition of the word regret and how it shaped my life.
With that question triggering me into a spiral of overthinking, I tried recalling even further back than 2022, and I just can’t find any.
It happened to me, even the worst of the worst, it happened to me but those are decisions that I made given whatever situation that was presented to me with the mindset and information that I had then, I do not feel any sense of regret still.
I know people have different definitions of it but for me, regret means if I could go back and do it over, would I?
I would love to re-experience a lot of things knowing what I know now, but... that would just not be fair because the ‘me’ that ‘knows’ is the result of whatever it was that has happened in the past. Would I rather not experience traumatic events? Yes of course, but yet again it happened to me, and as much as I do not believe in destiny, I do believe in ‘path’ and ‘timelines’, it needed to happen to me and the alternative did also happen to another me living another timeline. I am experiencing all possible outcomes all at once, I just don’t ‘feel’ it all at once because the human brain can’t possibly handle that.
My friends’ answers were valid though, and I feel for them. It ranges from something playful and ‘oopsie’ to something heavy. I’m sure it was something that they had to live with and learn from as well. By them sharing that, I was grateful because I then learned something about them and what they value in life, and what will shape their decisions moving forward.
I brought up the same question to Diana yesterday and we somehow both arrived at the same conclusion of actually having no regrets, for the same reason. What struck me was how Diana worded it, “There’s probably nothing that had an irreversible consequence in your life”.
I realized, maybe she has a point. A lot of my decisions led to a consequence that is either positive or negative depending on how you view it but they’re merely consequences that I can move past and grow from. I can think of a million situations in my head right now in which a decision could lead to an irreversible consequence, like how Ayoi said he wished he would’ve made more time for people that are important in his life because he just lost a dear friend recently. Those are irreversible events.
That lesson just made me wanna live every day for a full 24 hours, the cliche would be to live every day like it is your last day, which is almost impossible. Us humans are just... a creature of habit and we forget easily.
We attached meanings to things and create our lil routine assuming tomorrow is there for us, we do that all the time.
So I don’t know if I can live every day as if it was my last but I promised that if I feel like doing something I should do it and I shouldn’t let fear, FOMO, or ‘laziness’ stand in the way.
Make time for myself, indulge in content, eat good food, see the world, write, vlog, laugh, judge, and sing. If I feel like doing it and I could, I would. As long as it is not harming others or the environment, hopefully.
I feel like this is going slightly off-topic, we were talking about regrets and irreversible consequences, I think my coping mechanism has always been suppression and it made me forget a lot of things. I would remember the feeling but I can’t seem to always recall memories anymore, is this also a sign of Alzheimer? I hope not, I’m still very good at remembering work stuff and languages.
I wish that we can grow healthily in 2023 both physically, spiritually and mentally, treating regrets like lessons and embracing the fucked up part of us as much as the beautiful part.
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reddancer1 · 19 days
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Heather Cox Richardson
March 7, 2024 (Thursday)
The Republican Party now belongs to Trump. On the heels of his wins on Super Tuesday, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his last serious rival for the Republican presidential nomination, suspended her campaign Wednesday morning. That afternoon, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who enabled Trump during his administration but apparently hoped to see him replaced at the top of the party, endorsed him.
Haley did not endorse former president Trump, suggesting he needed to earn the support of those Republicans who don’t back him. But Trump’s team has dismissed Haley supporters, saying he doesn’t need them.
In contrast, President Joe Biden continued to broaden the Democrats’ tent. Biden reached out in a statement, saying there was a place for Haley supporters in his campaign. “I know there is a lot we won’t agree on,” he said, “But on the fundamental issues of preserving American democracy, on standing up for the rule of law, on treating each other with decency and dignity and respect, on preserving NATO and standing up to America’s adversaries, I hope and believe we can find common ground.”
President Biden continued to outline the differences between MAGA Republicans and the rest of the country in tonight’s State of the Union address.
Biden launched the speech, a draft of which the White House made available in advance, by referring to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt in January 1941, about a year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, “to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that…[f]reedom and democracy were under assault in the world.” Biden identified the same crisis in the present. “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today,” he said.
Overseas, Russian president Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine and threatens Europe, Biden said, putting “the free world at risk.” He warned that those blocking aid to Ukraine are destroying “our leadership in the world” and blasted Trump for saying he would tell Putin to “do whatever the hell you want.” Biden urged Congress to “stand up to Putin. Send me the Bipartisan National Security Bill” that funds Ukraine.
Then he turned to the home front. Identifying those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as “insurrectionists” who “had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power and to overturn the will of the people,” Biden called “January 6th and the lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election…the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War.”
That threat remains, he said. He asked Republicans to “speak the truth and bury the lies.” He urged them to “[r]emember your oath of office to defend against all threats foreign and domestic. Respect free and fair elections. Restore trust in our institutions. And make clear—political violence has absolutely no place in America.”
As Democrats stood to applaud, Republicans remained resolutely in their seats.
Biden continued his study in contrasts. He urged Republicans to guarantee the right to in vitro fertilization, a popular measure that they killed in the Senate again this week. He called out Republicans for trying to pass a national abortion ban and declared, “If Americans send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you, I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.”
He touted the economic successes of his administration—15 million new jobs, unemployment at 50-year lows, 16 million new businesses, 800,000 new manufacturing jobs, more people with health insurance, rising wages, falling inflation—and described a nation with a thriving middle class. He reiterated his support for unions, noting that he was the first president to walk a picket line, and praised United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who responded by putting his fist in the air and mouthing, “Thank YOU!”
Biden then looked ahead to “a future where the days of trickle-down economics are over and the wealthy and biggest corporations no longer get all the breaks.” He promised to continue to fight unfair tax codes, price gouging, shrinkflation, and junk fees.
Biden called out the Republicans for bowing to Trump’s demand that they kill the bipartisan border bill, which would provide 1,500 more border security officers, 100 more immigration judges, 4,300 more asylum officers, and 100 more high-tech drug detection machines and give the president authority to shut down the border when the number of migrants reaches a certain level. As House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) shook his head in apparent disagreement, Senator James Lankford (R-OK), a staunch conservative who negotiated the bill, nodded, saying, “That’s true.”
Biden took on the two biggest controversies in his presidency directly. “I know the last five months have been gut-wrenching for so many people, for the Israeli people, the Palestinian people, and so many here in America,” he said.
He recounted the deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, continued to defend Israel’s right “to go after Hamas,” and promised to continue to negotiate for the remaining hostages. He also said that the war “has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed…. Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displaced. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine.”
The U.S. has “been working non-stop to establish an immediate ceasefire that would last for at least six weeks,” Biden said. “It would get the hostages home, ease the intolerable humanitarian crisis, and build toward something more enduring.” The U.S. has “been leading international efforts to get more humanitarian assistance into Gaza” and is now building a temporary pier on the Gaza coast to “receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.”
Biden addressed Israel’s leaders directly: “As we look to the future, the only real solution is a two-state solution. I say this as a lifelong supporter of Israel and the only American president to visit Israel in wartime. There is no other path that guarantees Israel’s security and democracy. There is no other path that guarantees Palestinians can live with peace and dignity. There is no other path that guarantees peace between Israel and all of its Arab neighbors, including Saudi Arabia. Creating stability in the Middle East also means containing the threat posed by Iran.”
Biden then took on the issue of his 81 years. Age makes “certain things become clearer than ever before,” he said. “I know the American story.”
“Again and again I’ve seen the contest between competing forces in the battle for the soul of our nation. Between those who want to pull America back to the past and those who want to move America into the future. My lifetime has taught me to embrace freedom and democracy. A future based on the core values that have defined America. Honesty. Decency. Dignity. Equality. To respect everyone. To give everyone a fair shot. To give hate no safe harbor.
“Now some other people my age see a different story,” he said, in a reference to Trump, who will turn 78 in June. “An American story of resentment, revenge, and retribution.”
“[T]he issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are, it’s how old our ideas are,” Biden said. “Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are among the oldest of ideas, but you can’t lead America with…ideas that only take us back. To lead America, the land of possibilities, you need a vision for the future of what America can and should be…. I see a future where we defend democracy, not diminish it. I see a future where we restore the right to choose and protect other freedoms, not take them away. I see a future where the middle class finally has a fair shot and the wealthy finally have to pay their fair share in taxes. I see a future where we save the planet from the climate crisis and our country from gun violence. Above all, I see a future for all Americans…. So let’s build that future together.”
Biden spoke powerfully for an hour and a half, veering off script to make points stronger or respond to Republican heckling. He seemed to enjoy the scrapping (and might even have set it up), using the back and forth to get Republicans to reject tax cuts just as last year he forced them to reject cutting Social Security.
The Republicans tapped Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) to give their rebuttal to the speech, evidently hoping to contrast her youth—she’s 42—with Biden’s age. But while her team helpfully distributed talking points to Republican influencers before either Biden or Britt had spoken, suggesting they describe her as “America’s mom” and say that Biden’s speech was “tone deaf” while hers was “the perfect pitch,” the fact that the Republicans had a female senator give what could be the most important speech of her life in a kitchen seemed to tell its own, more powerful, story.
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nouies · 2 months
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hey hey, lou! 🩷
i keep asking you about movies/tv series and songs, but i just add them to my whatchlist, because i haven't been able to consume new things for a while. but soon i will watch/listen to what you have recommended me, so expect a feedback. 😝
thank you for the advice and for believing in me! i really appreciate it! and know whatever you decide to create for your giftee, it will turn out wonderful! 🎀
it's so amazing how one person can give so much comfort to millions of people around the world. louis is just so precious. the energy he has, the way he talks, the love he gives. just thinking about him and writing this, warms my heart. 🥺
i have been feeling the same way, like i'm not contributing to the fandom. that's the other reason i signed up for the event. i was thinking about making smau, but it's so hard and i don't have good ideas. but one day maybe. it's one of my new year's resolutions as well. i don't know if i will ever try to make gifs tho, but who knows... 🌷
this is actually a great question. i have read a lot of fics with tag actor louis, but i have never asked myself in what kind of movie i would have liked to see him. probably in crime series. louis as a detective. or in tv series about doctors, for example the grey's anatomy. louis as a doctor. i definitely don't see him in romcom, even tho if he plays as the business woman coming back to hometown and his boyfriend from high school. like the basic scenarios, but louis playing the woman's role. he is too soft to play the farmer or something like that. i don't know if i'm making sense or i'm just living in a fic at this point. i hope i managed to give you a reasonable answer. 🤐
my question for the day: if you had the opportunity to go back in time, what would you change and why? 🐽
hope you have a lovely day,
- your valentine 😙
hi lovely! how are you?
don’t feel obligated to watch those things hehehe even if you decide to watch other things, let me know bc i’m on the same boat. i forgot to mention that i’ve been watching k-dramas as well! the latest was “romance is a bonus book” and i loved it.
i know we both will create great things! i have faith in us <333 what i said abt feeling like i was not contributing was before i truly interacted with the fandom. if you reblog/retweet gifsets, photos, ART, or write comments under fics and talk abt them on your blog, or with smaus if you quote them with your reactions, that’s contributing! without those interactions, ppl wouldn’t know if you’re enjoying what they’re posting so feedback and promotion are a great contribution in the fandom. at least that’s how i see it.
i made a tiny smau last month and if you want, i can help you with that once you reveal to me who you are heheh.
abt louis being a comfort person you’re so right! he’s honestly (besides my friends) the main reason i’m still here and i love him so much 🤧
omg i would love to see him as a detective or a doctor! or like a spy maybe? idk if he will ever try his luck at acting, but i’d definitely love to see his work!
do you want a funny answer or a deep answer? heheh tbh i’m always making weird decisions, so even going back in time to last weekend to chance some of them would be fine with me. but if i truly think abt it, i would probably go back to my high school years to spend more time with my mum, and to socialise more, and maybe to change my career path. although if i wouldn’t have studied my degree, i wouldn’t have met my best friend and i wouldn’t have become a 1d fan so 🤷🏻‍♀️
what abt you? where would you go?
have a great day, my friend! it’s finally the weekend 🥳 take care
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thoughtsfornobody · 1 year
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1/31/2023
The first month of 2023 is over. It went by quick. Life has been really good, though slow, considering the winter. I miss walking around outside and sitting on the benches at the beach. I miss walking around late at night and seeing bunnies and foxes. I miss grabbing a mid-day coffee and sitting on the stoop by old town hall. I guess you have to say goodbye to those things so you can enjoy them more when they come back. I do like things about the winter- I like big socks, and sweaters. I like keeping to myself and my home for a while. I like the shiny new opportunity of a new year, though it seems most people are always bitter about resolutions now.  My resolutions are going good- I have lost about five pounds this month, give or take a couple ounces. Birth control made me gain 8 pounds, so I am glad it’s coming off. I have been doing the spin bike and eating 1400 calories a day. I started with 1200, but was getting too lightheaded in addition to workouts. If I want to exercise daily, I need to do atleast 1400. It feels a lot better. I try to imagine myself in 2 years, at 30. Not old, but more mature. More established. My hair will be long, and if I keep it up, my body will stay healthy. Maybe it’s vain, but I want to look good as I get older. I fear becoming one of the many that stop trying, that let themselves go, that start taking medications for things they could have prevented, that look at themselves and wish they would have started working out and eating better 10 years earlier. I know that sounds superior, or high and mighty, but I don’t want to get to that point when I’m older, I want to start now. It’s very difficult to not let this dip back into eating disorder territory.  In other news, Z has been very busy, balancing basically three jobs. Not because he needs the money, but because he’s trying to switch his career path ultimately, so he has hit foot in a couple different doors. I have faith in him, more and more everyday. I trust that he knows what he’s doing, even if I don’t always understand it. Sometimes my anxiety pops back up- another thing I have worked on is my drinking. I only drank twice this month, but each time seems to bring up feelings. I worry that he will choose a path that doesn’t involve me. I worry that he will find something better elsewhere. I worry that when he goes to Japan, he will see a light that he has never seen here, with me. I worry he will come back to me, and be disappointed with the life he chose. It’s overthinking, though. I can always shut it off, but when I am drinking, the fearful voice inside wins. We argue and I trip over whatever I was upset about in the first place. Drinking doesn’t fit into my health goals anyway, so that has helped me in cutting back.  I know my fears come from the things people have done to me in the past. It has been a pattern, and the pattern is being broken. You sometimes have to see it to believe it. I tell myself that hey, even if in some universe, Z did decide he wanted to leave.. That is just the way it would go. What would I do? I would pick up my pieces like I always do, and move on to the next path. I don’t like to think about it, but I know I would be ok. I have handled a million terrible things. I can handle anything. It sometimes frightens me how much I trust him. I wonder if I am naive, or I have been tricked into comfort, like so many tricked me before. I guess that is part of loving somebody, is being vulnerable to what terrible things could happen. You can’t know until it’s too late. I sometimes think about us being married. I think it’s a natural progression, we’ve joked and talked about it. Sometimes people ask if I am his wife, and we laugh. I am not in a hurry.. but I do hope the time comes someday, if it’s meant to be. I want a better apartment first. I want to go away and get married in a hidden place, and not tell anybody until after. I want it to just be about us. I don’t want people staring and taking photos and wedding invitations and ugly cakes. I want a pretty dress, and running through a back alley, and holding hands, and laughing and singing, where nobody knows us.  Daydreamy, anyways, talk to you later. x
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sciencespies · 1 year
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How Central Ohio Got People to Eat Their Leftovers
https://sciencespies.com/environment/how-central-ohio-got-people-to-eat-their-leftovers/
How Central Ohio Got People to Eat Their Leftovers
Jennifer Savage was scrambling to pull something together for dinner. Deep in the back of her fridge, she found a container of stuffed peppers. Very old stuffed peppers. She groaned, then did what millions of Americans do every day, without a second thought: She scraped the rotten food into the garbage.
Sitting nearby, her daughter, Riley, burst into tears.
Riley, then a fourth grader, had learned at school about people who don’t have enough food to eat. She’d also learned about the impact of food waste on the planet: When food rots in landfills, it generates methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. Seeing her mother toss one of her favorite meals in the trash brought these messages home.
The family resolved to do better. Riley began asking for smaller portions, knowing she could always go back for more. Her father started packing leftovers for lunch. Ms. Savage searched for recipes everybody would devour.
“If no one was watching me, I might be a little more wasteful,” Ms. Savage said. “But she’s watching and she’s asking questions that I can’t deny are really important.”
Pledging to throw less food in the trash, the Savage family began composting more rigorously.Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times
Riley Savage encouraged her family to waste less food.Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times
In a land of seemingly endless supermarket aisles, “don’t waste food” may sound more like an old-fashioned admonition than a New Year’s resolution. But to some people, especially those concerned about the environment, it’s a cause that​ deserves ​our attention. In the United States, food waste is responsible for twice as many greenhouse gas emissions as commercial aviation, leading some experts to believe that reducing food waste is one of our best shots at combating climate change.
With a warming planet in mind, a small but growing number of states and cities have enacted regulations aimed at keeping food out of landfills. Most require residents or businesses to compost, which releases much less methane than food dumped in landfills. California recently went even further, passing a law mandating that some businesses donate edible food they otherwise would have tossed out.
In the Columbus, Ohio, area where the Savage family lives, nearly a million pounds of food is thrown out every day, making it the single biggest item entering the landfill. (The same is true nationwide.) Households account for 39 percent of food waste in the United States, more than restaurants, grocery stores or farms. Change, then, means tackling the hard-wired habits of hundreds of millions of individuals, community by community, home by home.
This is no easy feat. Despite decades of haranguing, Americans are still terrible at recycling. And the reasons people waste food are much more complex than the reasons they throw water bottles in the wrong bin: They forget the spinach in the fridge and get more; they buy avocados that go bad before they get eaten; they cook a huge holiday spread to show love to friends and family and then can’t finish it all. As Dana Gunders, executive director of the nonprofit ReFED, points out, one-third of the food in this country goes unsold or uneaten — evidence of a culture that takes abundance for granted.
“Nobody wakes up wanting to waste food,” Ms. Gunders said. “It’s just that we’re not thinking about it. We’ve become really accustomed to it in our culture, and quite numb.”
As in most of the country, throwing food into the garbage in Ohio is perfectly legal. So, in an attempt to extend its landfill’s life span, the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, or SWACO, has had to try a different tactic: persuasion. While it is not the only agency in the country nudging people to waste less food, it is one of the few that has measured the effectiveness of its public awareness campaign. An early study shows promise, as does the fact that, in 2021, 51 percent of the region’s waste was diverted from the landfill through recycling and composting. It is a record for the agency and much better than the national diversion rate of 32 percent.
Keeping food out of the landfill
Nearly one million pounds of food is dumped every day in central Ohio’s landfill. Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times
Before Kyle O’Keefe joined SWACO as director of innovation and programs in 2015, he hadn’t had “office overlooking a landfill” on his bucket list. But when the agency came knocking, the chance to slow the flow of trash into one of the largest public landfills in the country was hard for Mr. O’Keefe, an ardent environmentalist, to turn down.
At the time, SWACO wasn’t paying much attention to food waste. But Mr. O’Keefe looked at the amount of food being dumped and knew it couldn’t be ignored. He also knew that just creating a composting system wouldn’t do the trick; people had to understand why buying and wasting less food was important.
“You’ve got to have the support of everyday folks, of your families, your residents,” Mr. O’Keefe said. “You’ve got to have them pulling from the bottom up.”
To that end, one of the agency’s first steps was rolling out a public awareness campaign and then measuring its impact in one city.
Several months after introducing its campaign, SWACO enlisted researchers from the Ohio State University to send surveys to residents of Upper Arlington, a wealthy Columbus suburb, asking how much food they had wasted in the past week. However, self-reported surveys aren’t always reliable, so the agency also hired GT Environmental, a local consulting company, to follow up with hard data. Very messy data.
Kyle O’Keefe, the director of innovation and programs for the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, made reducing food waste in the region’s landfill a priority.Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times
On a cool morning in early 2021, Dan Graeter, a senior manager with GT Environmental, drove to 200 houses around Upper Arlington. At each stop, he plunged into the 96-gallon garbage cans residents had dragged out for trash day, manually retrieving every bit of waste.
“It’s like jumping in the water,” Mr. Graeter said. “You take a deep breath and then you stick your whole body in there.”
Some of the carts were filled with neatly tied bags. Others were strewn with loose debris — diapers, cat litter, fistfuls of maggots — that Mr. Graeter had to scoop into trash bags himself. Mr. Graeter threw the waste into the back of a box truck and brought the load to a transfer station, where Tyvek-clad workers dumped each household’s trash onto folding tables and recorded the weight of items in nine different categories, like produce, leftovers and nonfood waste.
Once SWACO knew how much food Upper Arlington’s residents threw out, it began blanketing the city of 36,000 with targeted social media posts, email newsletters and postcards. The production and transportation of food that never gets eaten is a major piece of food waste’s carbon footprint, so the messaging had to go beyond composting, and also urged people to buy less in the first place. But to get the message across to the households the agency served, the hook couldn’t be as abstract as avoiding climate change.
“The way to really get people’s attention in the Midwest and Ohio is through pocketbook issues,” said Ty Marsh, who served as the agency’s executive director until last April. “We’ve got to convince people that this is good for them.” So the campaign emphasized hard costs: the $1,500 the average family in central Ohio spends each year on food they don’t eat, the 22 million gallons of gas used annually to transport food that’s thrown away.
SWACO also shared tips: Shop with a list, create meal plans, freeze leftovers. Some residents even received offers of free Bluapple pods, which help produce stay fresh for longer, and liners and bins to make composting easier.
Students learned different ways to manage waste at a tour of the SWACO landfill in Grove City, Ohio.Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times
Food in a compost pile at Price Farms Organics in Delaware, Ohio.Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times
Three months later, researchers once again surveyed residents, and Mr. Graeter once again dove into trash cans. Respondents reported wasting 23 percent less food than they had initially. Although there weren’t enough residents who let their trash be audited for a statistically significant sample, Mr. Graeter’s dirty data dump reinforced the campaign’s effectiveness: Food waste volume had declined by 21 percent.
Brian Roe, the study’s lead author, is a professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics and head of the Ohio State Food Waste Collaborative. He called the results of the study, which is undergoing peer review, an “encouraging first step” — though avoided drawing too many conclusions. “We know this campaign works, and works for this community,” he said, noting that the town’s residents tended to be affluent and highly educated, “but we don’t necessarily know how that’s going to translate to other communities.”
The few available studies of public awareness campaigns elsewhere suggest they can make a difference: In Toronto, food waste was reduced by 30 percent, and in Britain, by 18 percent.
But persuading adults to do things differently is hard. So, as SWACO spends hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on its public awareness campaign, it has also been making specific attempts to reach another population, one that has yet to cement its habits.
The herculean power of kids
A display in the lunchroom at Horizon Elementary School to help children learn what to throw away and what to recycle.Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times
Lunchtime at Riley’s school, Horizon Elementary, is what you might expect from a swarm of 6- and 7-year-olds corralled in a cafeteria — squeals, stories, sandwiches — with one big difference. Instead of nondescript trash cans lining the room, six sit in the center, an unavoidable focal point.
One Thursday, Tobias, a first grader with blond hair, glasses and a T-shirt emblazoned with jet planes, approached the six-bin command station. He removed a hot dog bun from his tray and eyed the aide standing above him.
“Where do you think that goes?” she asked. Tobias held the bun tentatively over the can labeled “LANDFILL.” The aide gave a slight shake of her head. He moved to the next one, “RECYCLING.” No dice. Finally, Tobias waved the bun over the last option: “COMPOST.”
“Yes!” the aide said enthusiastically. “It’s food, so it can go in the compost, remember?” Tobias just smiled and relinquished his bun.
Tray by tray, the process was repeated. Tiny hands squeezed the dregs of milk cartons and juice boxes into the compost bin, then tossed the empty containers into the recycling bin. The students deliberated over the placement of carrots and chicken nuggets (compost), yogurt lids (landfill) and napkins (a tricky one: compost). They put unopened cheese sticks and applesauce onto a “share table” for others to take.
At Horizon Elementary School, a six-bin command station directs students toward where to throw different kinds of waste.Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times
In the 2018-2019 school year, the Hilliard City Schools district diverted 100 tons of food waste from the landfill.Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times
Though the youngest students may not have understood why they were separating their waste, most would by the time they reached graduation. Much of that is thanks to Ekta Chabria, a special-education teacher who was one of the early proponents of Horizon’s composting program. Her efforts received a boost in 2018 when SWACO gave the Hilliard City Schools district a $25,000 composting grant. The following school year, Hilliard’s 14 elementary schools cut their trash pickups by 30 percent and recycling pickups by 50 percent, saving the district $22,000. They also diverted 100 tons of food, at least five school buses’ worth of waste, from the landfill.
The program’s greatest potential, however, may be in what students carry forward. Cameryn Gale, for instance, is a Horizon graduate who lobbied her middle school to compost (and her mom to eat leftovers more often).
Or take Nima Raychaudhuri. When her mother, Manisha Mahawar, was asked whether Nima influenced her, she laughed.
“What, you mean how I can’t take longer than a five-minute shower?” she said. “Or how I forgot a reusable bag at Kroger and had to carry things out in my hands?” Nima, a Hilliard ninth grader, also prodded her mother to compost their food scraps.
Changing the behavior of millions of households may be a herculean task. But changing the behavior of one household can be done with just a single Nima. Or Cameryn. Or Riley.
A study of a SWACO public awareness campaign in Upper Arlington found that residents reported wasting 23 percent less food.Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times
Later this year, Riley will graduate from Horizon. As a sixth grader, she said she’ll continue eating her leftovers and composting her scraps. Because to her, reducing food waste is “just what we’re supposed to do.”
“You take eggshells and whatever and throw them in a bin,” she said. “It shouldn’t have to be a big deal.”
What’s Your Relationship to Food Waste?
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
#Environment
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shoemakerstein · 1 year
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Minecraft will Join Microsoft
Mojang's team will join Microsoft Studios, which includes the studios that created global blockbuster franchises such as "Halo," "Forza," "Fable" and more. Microsoft's investments in mobile and cloud technologies will enable "Minecraft" players to enjoy more immersive and faster worlds, more powerful tools for development, and more opportunities to connect across the "Minecraft" community.
Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will acquire Mojang for $2.5 billion.
Mojang:
Minecraft has evolved from a simple game into a project of monumental significance. Though we're massively happy with the progress Minecraft has grown into It was never Notch's intention for it to get this big.
As you may already know, Notch is the creator of Minecraft and the majority shareholder of Mojang. He decided that he does not want to take on the responsibility of running a business with such a global reach. In the last few years, he's tried to tackle smaller projects, but the pressure of managing Minecraft became too for him to handle. The only alternative was to sell Mojang. However, he'll continue to make amazing things. Don't worry about that.
There are only a few buyers with the funds to expand Minecraft to the size it deserves. Since 2012, we've been working closely with Microsoft and were awed by their commitment to our game's development. We're sure that Minecraft will continue to grow in an awesome way.
Markus "Notch” Persson:
I don't consider myself to be a game developer. I create games for fun, and because I am a gamer and enjoy programming but I don't design games with the goal of them becoming massive hits and I don't attempt to change the world. Minecraft certainly became a huge success, and people are saying it's changed the way games are played. It didn't happen on accident. It's flatteringand fascinating to slowly be in the spotlight.
I don't know what to do with this.
Update (2014-09-19): Josh Centers:
Minecraft is the most mind-blowing game I've played. It's a blend of sandbox and exploration, world-building and role-playing. It has a "conclusion" of sorts (that you must discover on your own), but it doesn't end. Tecelana.com You can play by yourself or with others, and you can even manage your own Minecraft server and invite only your friends to play on it. It's not difficult to spend countless hours in Minecraft, and millions of players already have.
Acquisition Game Microsoft Minecraft
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It seems to me like a given. Microsoft has decided that it will not be able to compete with Apple if Apple adopts hi-res technology in their retina-based screens, or in their operating system, Microsoft cannot differentiate itself. Instead they will "bet the entire company on red" and move to loco-res.
Imagine Windows Explorer with folder icons with a resolution of 8x8.
:-)
"I don't know what to do with this."
Minecraft is the biggest thing that happened to games since Pokemon. Everyone plays the game, and if Minecraft is managed well, it can remain one of the most popular, widely played, influential franchises for at least another decade.
Games are crucial to Microsoft as they are one of the main drivers to sell new Windows PCs (and consequently Windows licenses), and because of the Xbox. Microsoft has tried to create games that were a bit like Minecraft in the past (Viva Pinata, Kodu, Project Spark) and have generally failed.
Sony already owns the Little Pig Planet franchise, and Nintendo is beginning to enter the "creative games where you make things instead of consuming things" field with Mario Maker for the Wii U. I think many companies believe that these types of games will be increasingly important. They're also right, I think.
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gaylordnantais · 2 years
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5 Tips To Help You Get Your Head And Brain Injury Settlement
Millions of people suffer from a head or brain damage each year, which might lead to an injury claim. Head injuries are not all the same, and the symptoms might differ dramatically depending on the degree of the injury. It's critical to know what type of head injury you (or someone close to you) have so you can figure out what to do next.
 Construction workers are well aware of the dangers of head injuries, but new statistics suggest that these mishaps are far more common than previously imagined. Each year, nearly 2 million people in the United States suffer from a head or brain injury, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
 According to some estimates, up to 40% of people who sustain a head injury will experience further trauma over the next five years. Due to their proximity to heavy gear and other risks associated with working in such a fast-paced environment, construction workers may be particularly vulnerable to head injuries. Companies should strive to provide safer working environments.
 Even if you don't believe your injury is significant, you should get medical help as soon as possible. It's preferable to be cautious than sorry, even if you don't think your injury will result in a head injury claim.
 Compensation for Brain Injuries
 Traumatic brain injury is one of the most prevalent types of injury, and it may be classified into two types (temporary damage and permanent damage) based on severity, each of which impacts different components such as:
 a) Resolution of the accident, concussion, and post-concussion repair expenditures, as well as compensation amounts.
b) What's available and how (and if) it's limited is determined by where you live and/or where the injury occurred.
 In a Head and Brain Injury case, you can be reimbursed for a variety of damages. Some of the damage is "economic," referring to concrete costs incurred as a result of the injury, whereas "non-economic" harm is more subjective.
 Understanding that you have some control over components of your case can help you get the most out of your Head and Brain Injury claim. While a lawsuit against the party responsible for your injuries will not get you back what you've lost, it will offer you with the financial resources you need to get the proper long-term treatment you need to get back on your feet. It may also assist to express the agony and anguish you and your family have experienced as a result of a serious injury and unjust death.
 How do I file a claim for a head or brain injury?
 In the event of a workplace injury, your first priority should always be to seek medical attention, followed by reporting the occurrence to your supervisor or employer. Your employer will send the required documentation to you in the form of a Workers’ Compensation form. It is recommended that you fill out the form with the help of a competent attorney and all relevant documents to support and prove your Head and Brain Injury.
 Five pointers to help you win your insurance claim
 1) Submit your claim as soon as possible.
 There are numerous sorts of head and brain injuries, and the time restriction for filing a claim for compensation varies depending on the type of claim.
 The law governing work injury claims is complicated, and the time limits vary greatly depending on the nature of the injuries sustained, making it critical to get legal counsel as soon as possible to ensure that you do not run out of time to file a claim.
 In California, the statute of limitations for employment injuries is two years. However, you should register your claim as soon as you obtain your medical report.
 2) Notify your employee about the injury as soon as feasible.
 Reporting your injuries to your employer as soon as possible is critical to receiving compensation. If you fail to do so, your settlement may be jeopardized. You can use it as a workplace manager or employer to undermine their participation and your aims.
 3) Seek medical help as soon as possible.
 It's critical to get medical help after a serious head or brain injury. In truth, the degree of your injuries is determined by your medical report, which in turn affects the amount of your compensation. If you choose not to seek medical assistance after an accident and as a result, your injuries are more difficult to heal, your insurance company may limit your payment to reflect your failure to seek medical help right away. If you share fault for the accident, the amount of compensation you receive in a brain injury claim may differ.
 4) You have the right to seek compensation for mental and emotional harm.
 In order for you to file a claim, the accident and associated injuries must be the fault of your workplace or employer. The Brain and Burn Injury attorney will seek to have you compensated for medical expenditures, lost wages, and pain and suffering that may have resulted from your minor head injury and PTSD recovery.
 5) Seek expert assistance wherever possible.
 Head and brain injuries have the potential to be fatal. Speaking with an experienced attorney about your options for recovering compensation for medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering will help you understand your alternatives.
 It is critical to understand your legal rights and alternatives if you or a loved one has suffered a head injury. Our attorneys at Gaylord and Nantias Attorney are here to assist you with your legal matter. For additional information on submitting a Work injury claim, call us immediately at (805) 800-8799. We'll immediately link you with an experienced Workers' Compensation Lawyer so you can obtain the answers you need and get back to work.
https://gaylordnantais.com/
#workercompensationattorney
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hamletthedane · 2 years
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Want to learn something new in 2022??
Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)
40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)
Excellent basic crochet video series
Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)
Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)
How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)
Another drawing character faces video
Literally my favorite art pose hack
Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??
Introduction to flying small aircrafts
French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding
Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)
Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)
Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)
Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:
Calculus 1 (full semester class)
Learn basic statistics (free textbook)
Introduction to college physics (free textbook)
Introduction to accounting (free textbook)
Learn a language:
Ancient Greek
Latin
Spanish
German
Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)
French
Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)
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matan4il · 2 years
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Holocaust Memorial Day ‘22
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz and the attempt to exterminate every single Jew in the world, which resulted in the murder of millions. It was established at the United Nations in 2006, a resolution initiated and led by Israeli diplomats, who fashioned this day after the Israeli national Holocaust Remembrance Day, established back in 1951.
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When I was a kid, the Holocaust was this horrific thing that happened to my grandparents, their families, their friends, their generation, but... it was the horror of the past. The Holocaust was the shadows underneath my bed, and the shadows were real, but they were shadows. They were a part of the real darkness that exists in the world, but they couldn’t harm us, not in the here and now. I believed the world had learned from its past, I honestly thought the Holocaust couldn’t happen again. The Holocaust was sad, it was the profoundest of sadness, but it wasn’t scary.
Today, the Holocaust scares me.
Because I do believe it can happen again.
I think the world has learned to say the Holocaust was bad, but it hasn’t learned how to look its cause, antisemitism, in the eye and deal with that.
I hate going on Facebook, Twitter, Quora... I am almost never there for long before I see antisemitic content.
Tumblr is better, relatively speaking. It is selective enough in the viewing experience it provides that a big chunk of the time, antisemitism doesn’t burst my bubble here.
But it is a bubble. As I feel less free to use the internet, I know that’s a kind of win for antisemitism. And I know antisemitism is present on Tumblr too, even when I don’t see it. And every so often, it penetrates my bubble, too.
I have stumbled here across the white supremacy, neo-nazi content that I used to think of as banished to the darkest corners of the internet.
I have seen blogs with urls that use the name of a popular Jewish character (for example, Jake Peralta), and post content that includes death wishes upon the majority of Jews.
There have been times when I have posted Jewish content and subsequently lost followers. Not a lot, but enough that it’s noticeable.
Back in May, almost every Jewish blog I know, myself included, got harassed.
Three days ago, I heard the news about a Jewish activist against antisemitism who ended up dead due to antisemites piling on him relentlessly.
Two days ago, I had to explain to a Holocaust denier than no, there aren’t more Jews today in the world (about 14.5 million) than there were before the Holocaust (at least 18 million).
Yesterday, I got to hear that propaganda is being distributed claiming Jews are responsible for every aspect of the “covid agenda”.
Today I heard there’s never been Jewish self-rule that lasted for more than 100 years, another case of Jewish history erasure, since there have actually been three separate Jewish kingdoms that did.
Being Jewish and experiencing something related to antisemitism daily is hard to convey.
And quite recently, four Jews in a Texas synagogue were held hostage for 11 hours. Eleven hours of something that could have ended horrifically, unfolding live. CNN cut away at a certain point to talk about movie reviews. Tumblr was mostly silent, with a small number of posts being made in comparison with the numbers I’ve seen for other social justice issues/events, and those that were made were hardly being reblogged.
So today I don’t want to talk about the past or dead Jews.
I want to talk about the present and living, scared, worried, tired Jews. I want to talk about preventing a future repetition of the past. I want to say it is VITAL for people to speak up. There’s a lot less Jews left in the world than most people realize. Almost every time I've asked visitors to our museum how many Jews there are, almost every time they overestimate the number. 14.5 million people is just 0.2% of the global population. There are more antisemites out there than there are Jews in the entire world. Without non-Jewish allies amplifying Jewish voices, Jews will not be heard. Jews will continue to be targeted and left to fend for themselves.
Please.
PLEASE.
Look for sources combating antisemitism online, listen to them, learn from them and amplify their voices!
And to those of you that I did see reblogging posts about the recent hostage taking in Colleyville or about the fight against antisemitism:
Thank you. What you did matters more than you realize.
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damonalbarn · 3 years
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Hey I was wondering if you knew the article that Justine spoke about suzi in?!
It was in The Guardian in 2000. Here you go:
Sweet revenge
In the mid 90s, Justine Frischmann and Damon Albarn were the First Couple of Britpop. Then he used a Blur album to rake over their break-up, while she languished in obscurity amid rumours of heroin addiction. Now she's back with a new album, and it's her turn to exorcise her demons.
Caroline Sullivan
Friday March 24, 2000
As Alison Moyet once said, it's hard to write a decent song when you're happy. Rock bands thrive on romantic turmoil in their private lives, without which they would be reduced to padding out lyrics with football scores and the weather.
Thus it was for Blur's Damon Albarn in mid-1998 when he sat down to write what would become the 13 album. His eight-year relationship with Justine Frischmann of the chart-topping Elastica, whom he once described as **"the only person who's ever been completely necessary to me" **had just ended, at her instigation. Pained and humiliated, he decided to exact revenge by exposing their most intimate details to public scrutiny.
The outcome? Embarrassment for Frischmann, a number one album for Blur and a bit of a result for Albarn.
Break-up albums are by definition both embittered and yearning - in the case of Marvin Gaye's vindictive Here, My Dear, they're just plain nasty - but 13 got more up-close and personal than could be considered gentlemanly. Albarn portrayed his former partner as neurotic, even slipping apparent drug references into the single Tender: "Tender is the ghost, the ghost I love the most/Hiding from the sun, waiting for the night to come". Frischmann was the ghost, supposedly, who was on the verge of being consumed by what one music paper euphemistically called "the darkness at the heart of Elastica".
Frischmann's response can be found on a song called The Way I Like It, which appears on Elastica's first album in five years, The Menace (out next month): "Well, I'm living all right and I'm doing okay/Had a lover who was made of sand, and the wind blew him away".
This is unlikely to be her last word on the subject. As she ambivalently begins her first round of interviews since 1996, she's finding that everyone has the same three questions. Why did Elastica nearly sabotage a promising career by taking so long to follow up their million-selling debut? Had Frischmann taken leave of her senses when she walked out on Mr Britpop? And what about the drug rumours?
"One journalist said to me, 'Dahling, I heard you were on heroin - Mahvelous!' " she says with some amusement. "Drugs are around, but I'm not that interested and never have been, although there have been elements of party animal in my band. The rumours are a lot to do with rock'n'roll mythology, where people want to believe you're having a more exciting time than you are."
The only drugs on her person today, as she perches on the edge of an armchair in her publicist's north London living room, are Marlboro Lights. Her other indulgences are two cups of herbal tea and a Cadbury's Flake cupcake, which she nibbles with well-bred pleasure. Her dark eyes are clear, and her long, tanned body is a testament to the virtues of a daily swim in a pool near her Notting Hill home. Only Elastica know whether they really succumbed to heroin and hedonism after their self-titled debut made them more famous than they'd ever expected to be, but if they did, Frischmann, 30, seems little the worse for it.
Given the current predominance of damnable boy bands, the Britpop mid-90s are beginning to seem like a halcyon period for English music. It was a time when the underground went overground, and a self-described "little punk band" like Elastica could sell 80,000 albums in a week.
More than a few loser guitar groups saw Britpop as a licence to print money, but Elastica, led with cool elan by the androgynous Frischmann, were one of its gems. The Blur connection was a marketing godsend (Frischmann and Albarn met on the London indie circuit, she as guitarist in an early line-up of Suede and girlfriend of frontman Brett Anderson, he as a cherubic baggy hopeful), yet the spiky-haired Elastica LP embodied that euphoric time like nothing else.
Frischmann, guitarist Donna Matthews, drummer Justin Welch and bassist Annie Holland were unprepared for the album soaring to number one in its first week. When they signed their record deal, Frischmann, whose great-grandfather was a conductor of the Tsar's orchestra at the Summer Palace in Byelorussia, was five years into an architecture degree at London University. A liberal north London Jewish upbringing - her engineer father built the Oxford Street landmark Centrepoint - had instilled expectations of success, but the reality of being photographed in the supermarket and having her rubbish stolen was a shock. Fiercely independent, she also resented her unsought role as half of Britpop's First Couple.
There was more. Two of Frischmann's musical heroes, The Stranglers and Wire, decided that two Elastica songs were suspiciously similar to two of their own tracks, and won royalties. Meanwhile, there were malicious rumours that Albarn had done much of the work on the record. He hadn't, but he did find Justine's success in America, where she was substantially out-selling Blur, hard to endure.
"It was very hard for him to deal with and he's very confrontational," she says, with the flattering openness of someone who prefers interviews to be more like conversations. She admits she often says too much, but in an era of image control and spin, her honesty makes her a one-off. Not that she's likely to land herself in it too badly - she possesses the intellectual ammunition to look after herself, which must have been instrumental in attracting two of rock's more articulate stars, Albarn and Anderson.
She's been accused of being a professional rock girlfriend, though it was probably they who were lucky to get her. She spent the cab ride over reading the Sylvia Plath letters in Monday's Guardian, and muses on the irony of the poet's subjugating herself to Ted Hughes when she was the more gifted. (Her new boyfriend, by the way, is an unknown photographer, "though that'll probably change, because men seem to get famous when I go out with them".)
"I reacted the way a lot of women do, by being passive," she continues. "He put a lot of pressure on me to give up Elastica. He said, 'You don't want to be in a band, you want to settle down and have kids.' " In so many words? "In so many words. He kept putting on pressure till I started to believe him." She adds bemusedly: "I've met his new girlfriend, and one of the first things she said was that he wanted her to give up travelling with her work to stay home with the baby [Missy, born last autumn]. I'm surprised he's got away with being thought of as a nice person for so long."
After 18 months, during which they did seven American and three Japanese tours, Elastica came off the road to record company demands for an immediate second album. Annie Holland's response was to quit the group, while Donna Matthews became renowned for hard partying on the nocturnal west London scene. They lethargically recorded some demos, but their heart wasn't in it. By 1997, when a second album should have been ready to go, Frischmann and Matthews were barely speaking, and there was nothing useable down on tape.
Holland's replacement, Sheila Chipperfield (of the circus Chipperfields), was deemed not good enough and left by mutual consent. By 1998, their continued lack of productivity was being likened to the Stone Roses' lengthy and ultimately self-destructive holiday between their first and second LPs.
"I didn't think Elastica were going to continue at that point, and we did kinda split up," she says, absently stroking her publicist's cat. Frischmann is a cat person; she's owned a tabby called Benjamin since she was 10. "Unconditional love," she coos. The pet's place in her life is so assured that prospective boyfriends are subjected to his feline scrutiny before she'll go out with them.
On top of everything else, in early 1998 her relationship with Albarn was in trouble. Frischmann retains enough of the indie ethic to detest the phenomenon of celebrity couples, and was dismayed when they became one. "I really hated the tabloid interest, and I went out of my way not to be photographed with him. Only about three pictures of us together exist, I think. In many ways, I think the media interest broke us up, because it made me feel the relationship was quite ugly, and I had to get away from it. There were other factors, too, obviously, because we were together for eight years, and I finally felt it was better the devil you didn't know, really."
Albarn's ego seems to have been severely undermined by having a girlfriend who was nearly as successful as he was, and something of a sex symbol to boot. Despite adopting a resolutely boyish T-shirt-and-jeans uniform, she's thoroughly feminine, a mix that got her voted fifth most fanciable woman in a lesbian magazine.
"I'm completely heterosexual, so I didn't know how to take that. It scares the shit out of me, the idea of being with a girl. I'm glad I've narrowed it down to half the people in the world."
She seems to view Albarn with indulgent exasperation these days, simultaneously praising his intelligence ("The Gallaghers just couldn't compete") and ticking off his flaws. "Damon adores being in the press, and sees all press as good press. He orchestrated that rivalry thing with Oasis. He really wanted kids, and I didn't feel our relationship was stable enough. He was a naughty boy, and he wasn't the right person to have kids with. I had this cathartic moment..."
At which point they split up. Albarn wrote 13 and then met Suzi Winstanley, an artist. "She was pregnant within three months," Justine observes wickedly.
Of the acclaimed 13, she's tactful, describing several songs as "really lovely". She studies her cigarette for a while before adding, "but I'm cynical about selling a record on the back of our relationship". But you're doing the same now. "It's true, but at the time I had no right of reply."
Elastica finally pulled themselves together last year, just as the music industry was about to write them off (their American label had already "very kindly let us go", as she puts it). Holland rejoined, Matthews went to Wales to sort out her life and the band banged out an EP and played the Reading Festival. Things came together quickly after that. They spent the last £10,000 of the recording budget on re-recording a dozen tracks, finishing the album, after years of procrastinating, in six weeks. They've called it The Menace "because that's what it was like to make".
It's dark and resolutely uncommercial - all wrong for 2000's pop-oriented climate. It's unlikely to match the success of the first one, which is fine with them. Call it (though Justine doesn't) their White Album. Its 70s punk aesthetic brings to mind angry girls such as the Slits and the Au Pairs, although the defining mood isn't anger so much as catharsis. None of the songs is specifically about Albarn, she claims. "The dark feeling is due to the sense of isolation, tasting success and getting frightened by it. I was questioning whether I wanted to be in a band any more, and there was no one I could ask for advice. Getting success and everything you ever dreamed about is hard to handle, and makes you question everything."
She's better prepared for success, if it comes again, this time. Already the privacy-preserving barriers are in place. The next interview of the day is with Time Out magazine, which wants a list of her favourite restaurants. "I'm not telling them where I eat," she says reflexively. "I'm gonna lie."
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forzalando · 3 years
Text
Flustered | Fred Weasley
Pairing: Fred Weasley x F!Reader Word Count: 2.5k Warnings: mentions of underage drinking and alcohol, tickling, making out Summary: Your flirty friendship with Fred Weasley comes to a resolution after an argument surrounding the Yule Ball that took place all those years ago. 
A/N: hi friends! this is a Fred Weasley fic based on a tik tok i saw last night (all credit for the bolded line goes to the creator of the tik tok). also thank you to @gcdric for discussing this with me very late last night, i hope it turned out well omg i’m NERVOUS. anyway! off we go. please let me know if you’d like to be added to my taglist! i’m updating it since i was on hiatus for awhile! love you guys!
As you sat on the couch of the Burrow, your eyes fixated on the many pictures in the Weasley’s living room, your mind began to drift off with thoughts of the freckled, red-headed boy sat in front of you giggling with his siblings.
There was something extraordinarily special about your friendship with Fred Weasley. After ten plus years of him being the most important person in your life, ever since your first day at Hogwarts when he tripped over your robes as you and your fellow first years hurried into the Sorting Ceremony, you couldn’t imagine life without him.
You had been through so much together; every Hogwarts experience there was to be had, first kisses, first heartbreaks, the Second Great Wizarding War, he was by your side through everything.
“What’s on your mind, Y/N? You look to be thinking entirely too hard for my liking,” Fred sassed, breaking you out of your trance.
“Too hard for your liking?” you retaliated. “What do you care what I’m thinking about?”
“It’s supposed to be a relaxing weekend! You’re much too deep in thought to be relaxing, so of course I care.”
“Well, if you must know, I was thinking about you, Freddie.”
“Carry on then, love. I’ve always wished for your thoughts to be consumed by me.”
With a cheeky wink, Fred went back to a game of exploding snap and you didn’t need to watch to know that Ginny was absolutely kicking his arse. However, you didn’t miss the sly smile that George gave you when Fred’s attention was diverted from you.
It wasn’t uncommon for the two of you to flirt with one another. In fact, you would dare to say it was the most predominant form of communication between the two of you. There was the occasional time or two where you thought that maybe, just maybe, he felt the same, but he’d always look away quickly or press a kiss to your cheeks instead of your lips, laughing it off as the two of you caught up in a moment that would cross a line that could never be crossed, though you so desperately wanted to.
After another round of exploding snap, Ginny said her goodbyes and apparated back to her flat, but not before promising that she wouldn’t miss anymore family dinners for quidditch practice, which you knew would happen inevitably but smiled nonetheless at her enthusiasm. You’d been a regular appearance at the weekly get-together for as long as you could remember, you were practically part of the family so you could say with appropriate accuracy that Ginny definitely missed dinner more than all of her siblings combined due to her busy schedule.
“Well, I suppose it’s time for us to head back as well,” George mused, eyeing the leftover pies in the kitchen. “Are you staying at ours tonight, Y/N?”
“I’d love nothing more. Besides, I didn’t get to play Fred in exploding snap and I want to knock his ego down just a little bit more.”
George linked arms with you and Fred, laughing about his brother’s awful skills as you apparated to their flat above the shop.
You’d spent many a nights at the twins’ flat over the past couple of years. After the war, you had moved in for a while until you found a job and managed to rent your own place. But, they never got rid of your bed that took up a large corner of their living room, which came in handy after weekly Weasley dinners when you just wanted to spend a bit more time with your favorite boys.
“I’m absolutely knackered,” George said once the three of you had settled on the couch. “I think I might go to bed now, if I’m honest. Besides, I want to be up early to work on those new design sketches for the storefront.”
“George Weasley, you have never gotten up before 10 o’clock on a Sunday in your entire life,” you scoffed.
“There’s a first for everything, Y/N. Goodnight to you and Freddie!”
As George turned away from you both, he faked a yawn and when he was sure Fred wasn’t looking, winked back at you to further confirm your suspicion that he wanted you to be alone with Fred.
He had just about had enough of the tension between you both and took every chance he got to get the two of you alone, by any means necessary.
When you heard George’s bedroom door close, you noticed Fred scoot closer to you on the couch until your legs were touching. He slung his arm over your shoulders and you swung your legs up to lay across his lap.
“What were you thinking about earlier? While Gin and I were playing by the fireplace?” Fred wondered aloud.
“Oh, I was looking at all the pictures on the walls at your Mum and Dad’s. I saw one from you and George’s first day at Hogwarts and I was thinking about how we first met.”
“Hmm, so you were thinking about one of the most embarrassing moments in my life?”
“Please, you’ve done much, much worse. Remember that time in our sixth year when you tried to outdrink George after we won the Slytherin match and you – ”
“Ah, ah, ah, I thought we agreed to never speak of that incident again,” Fred said as he visibly shuddered.
“I was just pointing out that I can think of quite a few moments that were far more embarrassing than tripping on my robes.”
“You’re one to talk! Don’t you remember our fifth year when you and George were running from Filch and you knocked Wood to the ground? Bloody broke his arm, you were so lucky Madame Pomfrey had him fixed up before our next match or he would’ve had a heart attack.”
A loud laugh escaped your lips as you covered your face in embarrassment; that was the year you had followed Oliver around like a lost puppy, although your schoolgirl crush paled in comparison to how you’d felt for Fred back then and now as well but neither twin would ever let you live it down.
“Do you remember the Yule Ball? When Flitwick caught you trying to spike the punch and you slipped and fell in the middle of the dance floor?” You chuckled at the memory, even if the Yule Ball was an event you had tried to forget.
“You were so mad at me that night and the whole week before, I was terribly distracted. If we had been on good terms I would’ve gotten away with it and the slipping never would have happened.”
“Well, it’s your own fault we were fighting! I still can’t believe you didn’t ask me to go with you.”
“Oi, it’s not my fault when you never said you wanted me to ask you.”
“I thought I had made it painfully obvious when I asked you every morning at breakfast if you’d found a date yet and told you that I didn’t have one either.”
Fred threw his head back and laughed, the thought of your shocked face when he had asked Angelina was too priceless a memory to ever forget.
“You were so jealous,” Fred mumbled.
“Jealous?!” you screeched. “I wasn’t jealous, I was annoyed that I had to spend all night with some Durmstrang tosser stepping on my toes. We’ve had this argument literally a million times.”
“No, you were definitely jealous. You shot poor Angie daggers the whole night and she’s such a lovely girl.”
“I shot her daggers because she hogged you and I didn’t get to dance with my best friend a single time at the only Ball we ever had at school.”
“I would’ve asked you to dance if you weren’t mad at me, and you know she was only dancing with me to make George jealous, even if he was oblivious.”
You smiled at that; you knew Angelina only had eyes for George and that going with Fred was some elaborate ruse. Shockingly, it ended up working, and he and Angelina have been together ever since.
“Still think you were jealous,” Fred challenged, poking you in the exact spot on your abdomen that he knew you were ticklish.
“Fred Weasley, for the last time, I was not jealous,” you emphasized as you poked him back.
“Don’t start something you can’t finish, love,” he said lowly, a daring glint in his eye.
Never one to heed warnings or follow directions, you poked him again and within seconds he had you pinned underneath him on the couch, his fingers trailing up and down your sides as you couldn’t help but laugh boisterously beneath him.
“Fred – ” you gasped. “Freddie, please, I actually think I might pee on your couch.”
“Not until you admit you were jealous that I asked Angelina!”
You shook your head, the combination of laughter and trying to catch your breath kept you from firing back a witty remark.
After a few moments, you simply couldn’t take anymore and shouted out, “FINE. Fine, you win.”
“What was that, lovey? I couldn’t quite hear you.”
“I said, fine, I admit it. I was jealous that you asked Angelina when I wanted you to ask me,” you grumbled, struggling to catch your breath in between words.
“See, now that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
You glared up at him and moved to push him off of you when you realized just how close his face was to yours. If you concentrated hard enough, you could count each individual freckle splattered across his nose and cheeks. Almost instinctually, your eyes flickered down to his lips, but you wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of staring, so you quickly looked away.
Fred noticed that you couldn’t take your eyes off of him and, in true Fred Weasley fashion, couldn’t resist a flirty joke.
“You really want to kiss me right now, don’t you?” Fred chuckled.
“Yeah,” you sighed, “yeah, I do.”
Surging forward, you pressed your lips to his and immediately wove your fingers through the hair at the base of his neck. You were so tired; tired of the constant flirting and feeling as if you would forever have to love him from afar while he lived his life blissfully unaware of how much it hurt you to hide how you felt.
His arms wrapped around your waist and pulled you closer to him; the raw emotion in the way he desperately kissed you left little doubt in your mind that he had wanted this for as long as you had. His hands slipped under your shirt and his fingers blazed a trail of fire up your spine; a breathy moan escaped your lips but Fred swallowed the sound with his mouth, deepening the kiss and pulling you even closer.
A scream from behind the couch caused you to jump apart, chests heaving and hair sticking up every possible way. You sat up to look over the back of the couch to see George Weasley, looking visibly shaken and guilty, with his hands covering his eyes.
“Oh my god, I leave you alone for thirty minutes and you’re about to shag on my bloody couch. Jesus, ok, let me just, uh, well, I’ve probably ruined the mood, haven’t I?”
“George,” you hissed. “What are you doing sneaking around, I thought you were going to bed?!”
“Yeah, I said I was,” he said sheepishly as he uncovered his eyes, “but I might have been eavesdropping on your conversation. When I heard it go all quiet, I thought I’d come out and see if you two fools had fallen asleep, but clearly, that was not the case.”
“Eavesdropping? I swear to Merlin, George, you’re a ten year old boy. I can’t believe you! Of all the immature and invasive things to do, my God.”
“Well, pardon me, I just wanted to see if my idiot brother would finally grow some balls and tell you he’s in love with you!”
“I’m not sure what you’re on about but that doesn’t mean you can just sneak up on people,” you chided.  “Fred, would you please back me up here, what is wrong with you – ”
You turned around to pull Fred into the argument only to find him sitting on top of the coffee table with a dazed look in his eyes and flushed cheeks.
“Fred, are you alright?” you asked worriedly.
He slowly lifted his head and looked into your eyes; you could see just how flushed his face was now that he wasn’t staring at the floor and good Godric, he was as red as the hair on his head.
“I…I…You,” he stammered. “You kissed me?”
“Yes, I suppose that is what happened,” you muttered sheepishly.
“Y/N Y/L/N…you…you kissed me?”
“Freddie, what the hell is the matter with you?”
George burst into laughter and you whirled back around to glare at him, however, this time, he didn’t hush up like he usually did.
“Like I said before, he’s in love with you, and now he can’t even form a coherent sentence because you kissed him, this is golden. Ol’ cock sure Freddie, a pile of mush because of a little makeout sesh, I’ve got to send an owl to Lee…” George trailed off as he turned and rushed back towards his bedroom.
You took another look at Freddie and smiled at the lovestruck look on his face. He was shaking his head in his hands and you saw the redness on his neck as well, which only happened when he was well and truly flustered.
“This is so humiliating,” he groaned as you sat down next to him.
“I think it’s rather cute, if that makes you feel any better,” you said as you chuckled and placed a hand on his thigh.
He removed his head from his hands and looked at you adoringly, the giddy smile on his face ignited butterflies in your stomach and your heart beat wildly in your chest.  
“All the times I imagined how this would pan out…it definitely wasn’t supposed to happen this way. I mean, not that I’m mad about it, it was incredibly sexy how you just grabbed me and kissed me, but I wasn’t supposed to be a bumbling fool afterwards.”
A moment of silence washed over the both of you as Fred intertwined your hands and steadily held your gaze.
“George was right, you know. I am in love with you. Have been for quite a long time, if I’m being honest.”
“Well, in the spirit of honesty, I guess I should say that I’m in love with you too.”
“Bloody brilliant,” he sighed as he leaned in to kiss you again, but you stopped him just before your lips touched.
“You’re not going to pass out or anything if we kiss again, are you?”
“No promises, love, but I’ll try my best.”
taglist: @theweasleysredhair @hufflepuffbaby9 @theboywhocriedlupin @swellwriting @fortisfiliae @thoseofgreatambition @wildfire-whizbangs @woakiees 
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the-bau-quinjet · 3 years
Text
Blessing
Steve x Barnes!reader, Bucky x platonic!reader
Sequel to Plum Cobbler
Summary: Steve has a question for you, but he has one for Bucky first.
Warnings: none!
Word Count: 1437
a/n: Thank you to @sourpatchspinster for this idea! It was just too cute for me not to write.
Series Masterlist
Masterlist
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You couldn't believe it had already been three years since you met Steve and Bucky. So much has happened since then that has changed your life for the better.
You formed relationships with all of the Avengers, gaining so many new friends.
You spent countless hours talking to Bucky about your parents and grandparents, helping him feel closer to his family. He even went with you to visit your parents graves.
Plus, you moved into the compound with Steve. After that first night talking to Bucky, Steve asked out out to dinner. Everything since then has been bliss.
While almost everything. You could do without the constant worrying when either one of them is on a mission, but it comes with the territory of knowing the Avengers.
Of course, the two of you had fought but nothing serious. That is, until now.
"I'm seriously freaking out. Steve is acting so weird, and I have no idea why." You burst into Nat's room for girls night, not even bothering to wait for a greeting.
"Why, hello to you to Y/N. How as your day?" Wanda joked with you, but immediately sat up at the look on your face.
"Weird how?" Nat questioned, needing more information.
"He's been all fidgety lately. He never sits still. He won't look me in the eye unless I force him to. I think he's even avoiding Bucky, which is really not helping." You were nervously pacing back and forth until Nat stopped you, one hand on each shoulder.
"First of all, that man is so in love with you. He wouldn't do anything to hurt you. Second of all, have you asked him about it." Nat, ever the voice of reason, questioned you.
"I have." You held your breath, trying not to start rambling again.
"And?" The two women looked at you expectantly.
"He said he was just tired. I don't know. It started after that mission in London. He came back really late, so I figured he just needed to sleep. But then yesterday and today, it's been the same things!"
Nat and Wanda shared a look, unsure of what was going on.
"Look, maybe him and Bucky fought on the mission. It used to happen from time to time, so why not now?" Wanda suggested, trying to reassure you.
"Wanda's probably right. Steve wouldn't want to put you in the middle of a fight with Bucky." Nat nodded resolutely. "I'll talk to Bucky tomorrow, see what I can find out. Until then, let's just enjoy girl's night."
"What did I do to deserve you both?" You chuckled to yourself, already feeling less anxious.
"You sat outside like a creepy stalker for 5 weeks." Nat quipped, causing all three of you to burst out laughing.
-
Meanwhile, Steve took your presence at girl's night as the perfect opportunity to talk to Bucky.
He was pacing outside of his door for nearly an hour before he worked up the courage to knock.
Bucky swung the door open, slightly surprised to see Steve. "Honestly, I thought you were avoiding me." He stepped back, gesturing for Steve to come in.
Steve sighed, deciding to just reply truthfully. "I was."
Bucky narrowed his eyes, unsure as to what he did. "Care to share why?"
"That's why I'm here." He took a deep breath, preparing himself for his little speech. "I did something impulsive in London."
Immediately, Bucky was on edge. Steve was a reliable person. He didn't do impulsive well.
"The more I think about it, the more I know it was the right decision. I just, I know what I want out of my life now, and I know who I want to be there with me."
"I swear to every god out there, if you break her heart I still reserve the right to kill you." Bucky was staring daggers at his friend, waiting for him to continue.
"No! No, Buck, I love her so much. I love waking up with her every day. I love the way she scrunches her nose when she doesn't like something. I love the way she laughs, even when it's not funny. I love how she spent months trying to find you to connect with family. I love every single thing about her, and I want to spend the rest of my life with her."
Steve took a dark green velvet box out of his pocket, handing it Bucky. Bucky, admittedly surprised, opened the box to confirm it was indeed an engagement ring.
"Why didn't you tell me you were planning this?" Bucky questioned, elated at the idea of the two of you getting married.
"Honestly, I didn't plan it. I was walking down the street in London, and I passed a jewelry store. Before I knew it, I was walking out with the ring in my pocket." Steve smiled fondly, thinking about you.
"Why have you been so nervous then?" Bucky continued questioning him.
"Honestly?" Bucky nodded. "Because I hadn't told you. You're the only family she has, and I know it's old fashioned but I wanted to ask you-"
“For my permission?” Bucky balked, eyes going wide.
“No! Not really, I know enough about modern proposals to know permission is a sexist concept. I just... want your blessing.” Steve blushed, feeling a bit odd at asking his life long friend such a question.
Bucky ran a hand through his hair, this conversation I not something he imagined having before he had any kids, and especially it with Steve. "Steve, you're my best friend. It would be an honor for you to officially join the family."
The two men were close to tears. Having been through so many hardships together, dating all the way back to fighting in the war, it was refreshingly happy to add such a joyous memory.
"Now I just have to ask her." Steve chuckled, already feeling less nervous.
"Don't worry, punk. She'll say yes."
-
After girl's night, Steve's behavior was back to normal. Maybe he really had just had a fight with Bucky. Either way, you were relieved to have him back to being his regular goofy self.
"Y/N, do you want to go out tonight?" Steve smiled at you from the other side of the room.
"I would love to. What's the occasion?" You made you way over to him, eagerly burying your head in his chest.
"I just think you deserve a nice night out." Steve grinned as you hugged him tighter.
"You're perfect." You released the words with a sigh, snuggling closer to the love of your life, wondering how you got so lucky.
-
Dinner was as perfect as you expected. Dessert was even better.
"Let's go for a walk?" Steve asked when you got out of the car back at the compound.
"Yeah? Where to?" You took his hand, ready to follow him anywhere.
"The lake?" Steve knew you would never turn down a walk around the lake.
"Wow, a man after my own heart." You squeezed his hand, laughing together.
Steve couldn't help but think, "you have no idea."
You made your way toward the lake, stopping every few feet just to look up at the stars.
Steve tugged you along until you were both standing at your favorite tree.
"My favorite tree!" You squealed, looking up at the maze of branches. When you turned around again, Steve was on one knee.
"Y/N, I have known you for three years, and I have loved you for every single one of them. Since the moment you told me why you wanted to talk to Bucky, I knew you were special. You were so determined, and although you thought it was selfish, I knew you thought he deserved to know just as much as you. Every moment since then, I have been thankful for you entering my life. I don't know where I would be if you weren't with me. Everyday I wake up and see your face is a perfect day. Will you do me the honor of waking up with you as my wife?"
Silent tears fell down your cheeks as you threw yourself at him. "Steve, I love you so much. When I first found out about Bucky, I never in a million years would have thought it would lead me here. I would love to marry you." You cried as you hugged him, separating only long enough for him to put the ring on your finger.
"I love you." He whispered, kissing you between every word.
"I love you too." You whispered back, looking forward to the rest of your life with him.
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hippohead · 3 years
Note
Okay, here goes for the prompts: number 4 on friends to lovers!
I hope you're doing well :)
thank you so much! sorry it took a little while also i’m feeling a little rusty but here’s a little something-something. 
4. “you deserve better. it doesn’t have to be me, but you deserve better.”
Blaine went through a superhero phase when they were seven years old.
Kurt went along with it because he liked the capes and he thought it was cute when Blaine lifted his fist into the air and pretended to fly. The only part of it that was tedious was The Question, every day:
“What would your superpower be?”
The first time he asked it, Kurt answered honestly: “I want to be like Matilda. Move things with my mind and stuff.”
Blaine nodded and then picked super speed for himself. He ran around his backyard in loops until even Kurt felt dizzy, and they decided to just be superheroes who lay on the grass for the rest of the evening.
But then he asked it the next day, and the next, and the one after that. Over and over for almost a year. He wasn’t allowed to say the same one twice. Kurt ran out of superpowers to want.  
When he finally moved on to his next obsession, Kurt was relieved, but right now he’d give anything for Blaine to ask him that question.
He’s not sure why Blaine would, though, considering it’s been over twenty years since the last time he did and they’re both wearing suits, not capes. But he’s got a new answer.
Time travel.
In fact, he’d do just about anything to flick a switch or drive a car past 88 or hop into a telephone box and end up thirty seconds earlier, before he said The Words.
The words. The ones that weren’t meant to come out. The one’s he’d vowed to keep stuck inside of his throat, even if it made it hard to breathe sometimes.
“You deserve better. It doesn’t have to be me, but you deserve better.”
Most of the sentence was fine and allowed. Most of it.
“What- what did you say?”
Shit. “I said you deserve better.”
God, he can see a million different things on Blaine’s face right now. He’s read those lines so many times; deciphered them, understood them, figured them out. He can still see all of the lingering pain about Tom not showing up, and the anger at himself for letting that be okay, and the tiredness of fighting for a relationship that neither person really wants. He can see the comfort that Kurt’s giving him, his best friend, in this tiny little restaurant cloak room, and the confusion, too.
“Look, I know you don’t like Tom-”
“It’s your thirtieth birthday. He should be here,” and it comes out like grit in Kurt’s teeth.
Blaine doesn’t say anything. If he did, he’d have to admit that this is actually pretty low on the list of Tom let-downs. There’s been worse - this one just looks bad.
“We should get back out there,” Kurt says, just to say something. The air is starting to feel too stuffy in here. He starts to leave, aware that Blaine’s parents and their mutual friends and a couple of Blaine’s coworkers are sitting at their table, probably wondering where on earth they’d disappeared to.
"Kurt?”
He stops halfway through the door, bracing himself - there’s no way Blaine would let Kurt just breeze over a slip-up like that. It’s not the first slip-up, either. There have been others in the past, from both of them. And it always goes the same way; the one who slipped up deflects and ignores, and the one who heard the slip-up pushes a little bit, desperate to see if the other will be brave this time.
Neither of them are ever brave.  
“Yeah?” he says, resigned to the inevitable.
There’s plead in Blaine’s eyes – so much so that it makes Kurt kind of want to be brave this time, even though Blaine hasn’t questioned him yet. He’s gotten stuck, just sort of halted and trying to find the words.  
And then the soft sound of a Billy Joel song starts to play from Blaine’s pocket – his ringtone.  
Blaine holds his gaze for a second and then checks his phone, sighing, with a little puff of exasperation once he registers who’s calling. “It’s Tom.”
Kurt nods, drained of any bravery, and heads back to the table.  
- - - - -
Kurt drops Blaine home after the dinner because even after the phone call, Tom still didn’t turn up.
It’s a quiet ride. Blaine had managed to do what Blaine does best which is to put on a cheerful face and convince a room full of loved ones that he’s fine, but he doesn’t have to do that in this car. Not in Kurt’s presence.  
There’s a free spot right by Blaine’s apartment building so he pulls into it and turns the car off. It’s even more quiet now; the hum of the engine had been giving them some kind of music and it’s confronting now that it’s gone. He waits. Blaine seems settled in his seat. He’s staring at the sidewalk, curved in on himself but grounded, grounded to the space next to Kurt.  
“Are you okay?”
Blaine’s shoulders lift, “I’ve had better birthdays.”
Kurt thinks that’s all he’s going to say but then he keeps going, his tone lightening a little bit.
“Do you remember that time you paid for all of the Warblers to fly into the city to surprise me?”
Kurt laughs, melodic and sweet at the memory, “I overshot my budget a lot that year.”
“I couldn’t understand why you wanted to go to the top of the Empire State so badly on my birthday,” Blaine laughs too.  
“God, it was so stressful. Rachel was helping me co-ordinate it all but there was no service in the subway, and I had no idea if they were all in position and ready, and you were being... difficult, to say the least.”
“I wanted to go to Benny’s.”
That makes Kurt smile. It had been for Blaine’s twenty-first birthday. It was a big deal. And all Blaine wanted to do was get a milkshake from their favourite diner. Maybe share a plate of fries. Nothing big or fancy – just dinner in a place they discovered together. “If I remember correctly, I took you to Benny’s afterwards.”
“You did,” Blaine confirms. And then, with an odd mixture of wist and sadness, “I can’t believe you did all of that for me.”
“Is this your way of telling me you hate the watch?” and it’s an attempt to lighten the mood back up. He reaches for Blaine’s wrist and picks it up, admiring the new silver and ignoring the way it makes him feel to have Blaine’s skin under his palm.  
“I love the watch.”
They catch each other’s eyes and oh, here it is. He almost got away with it.  
“What did you mean tonight?”
Kurt drops his wrist.  
“When you said it didn’t have to be you, but I deserved better?”
He looks straight ahead, the heat from Blaine’s stare burning into his cheek. He doesn’t know how to tell this lie again.  
“Kurt?”
“Do you want me to be brave?” he asks, almost wanting permission to be.
Blaine nods, resolute. “I want you to be honest.”
Okay. There’s the permission. And he keeps it simple. “It doesn’t have to be me, but I want it to be.”
Blaine nods again, barely surprised. “Why didn’t you tell me this when we were seven?”
“Seven-year-olds aren’t in love yet.”
“We were.”  
And maybe they were, or maybe they fell into it somewhere along the way, but one thing is for sure.  
They definitely are now.  
Blaine looks like he wants to kiss Kurt but doesn’t, mumbles a little incoherently about needing to sort some things out first which they both know means breaking up with his useless boyfriend, and then he squeezes Kurt’s hand.  
Just as Blaine’s reaching for the door handle, Kurt can’t help but ask him something.  
“Blaine?”
“Yeah?”
“What would your superpower be?”
Blaine looks a little confused, and then the context of his old obsession sinks in and his eyes crinkle as he laughs. And once his laughter settles, he thinks about it. “Time travel.”
He means: I wish I could go back to that day in Eighth Grade when we came out to each other and explain that you were the reason I knew, or, I wish I could go back to that party we went to when we were 17 and instead of getting horrendously drunk, kiss you instead, or, I wish I could go back to that night at your first apartment in New York when we argued and hold your hand instead. And Kurt knows that’s what he means.  
“What about you?”
Kurt sets him with a look that is love, and adoration, and hope, and says, “I’m gonna go back to my original answer.”
“The Matilda thing?”
And he remembers. Of course he remembers. 
“Yeah. The Matilda thing.”
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Text
your eyes look like coming home
The five times Patton asks Janus to marry him. 
Moceit, childhood best friends to lovers💙💛
Content Warnings: alcohol, light angst
Aaa this is my first fic in a million years or something. It’s kind of short and maybe not my best work, but I’m honestly just happy to have written something lol - hope you enjoy!
AO3 Link
The first time Patton asks Janus to marry him, it’s a dare.
“Hi! Do you wanna be married?”
Janus stares blankly at the nervous-looking kid in front of him, fiddling with the sleeves of his grubby school cardigan as he stared back at Janus, through large, almost owlish glasses.
He’s confused for a second, then he looks over the kid’s shoulder, and sees the familiarly smug faces in the background, smirking and whispering like they’ve just seen something very funny.
He looks back at the kid – he’s new, just joined last week. Named Patrick or something. He didn’t seem like he’d be involved with the mean kids, with his big, nervous brown eyes and fidgety behaviour. His soft, round face holds a nervous grin as he looks earnestly back at Janus, who’s now glaring exclusively back at the ones watching them
“Why?” he finds himself saying, instead of no.
The boy – Peter? – flushes a little, looking at his feet.
“Um – well -I it’s er, it’s the game.” He gives the explanation like he’s asking a question, prodding the playground floor with his scuffed trainers. “We’re playing, they said – er, I need to find someone to say yes and marry me – but it’s just pretend though – and um, so…”
Ah, so they were both being made fun of.
“They don’t want to play with me.”
The boy’s face falls instantly. “Why not?” he asks, tilting his head to one side. Janus glances at the group, still smirking superiorly at him and – Paul?
“Because.” He snaps, not entirely unkindly, “Go find someone else to ask, or they won’t want to play with you either.”
The boy looks crestfallen for a second, but a look of determination overtakes his face, small mouth forming into a thin, angry line.
“Then I don’t want to play with them.” He declares with a toss of his curly head, sitting himself down next to Janus on the playground floor.
The flock immediately stops smirking, muttering furiously to one another.
“That’s not a good idea…”
“Don’t care.” The boy thrusts a small, chubby hand out at him. “I’m Patton.”
 ---
 The second time, it’s a joke, but also a promise.
They’re sitting on opposite ends of Patton’s cramped twin bed, doing everything but the homework they wanted to meet up to solve, and Janus is pretending he’s not all too aware of their feet just barely touching each other.
“Hey, do you remember that time I asked if you would marry me?” Patton giggles, a sudden mischievous look taking over his face, dimples popping in and out as he looks back at Janus.
“Oh, you mean the first thing you ever said to me?” Janus replies airily, swelling with pride as Patton laughs even harder, scrunching his nose up in delight.
“You know, you never gave me an answer.”
Janus’s heart skips a beat. No it doesn’t, shut up .
His laugh is carefully nonchalant as he replies, “What do you mean?”
“Well, you never said! Would you marry me or not?” Patton laughs, “You’ve kinda left me hanging for years, if you think about it.”
He’s joking. This is a bit, Janus knows that. it doesn’t stop his traitorous heart from beating just that much faster as he smirks back.
“Sure, why not?”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Certainly, in like fifty years when we’re both old and lonely and we’re the only ones who can stand each other.”
He doesn’t believe it, obviously. He knows that he and Patton will always be together, but he doesn’t believe for a second that Patton won’t find someone, with his unbearable kind heart and his wide, honest eyes, and whoever it was would be damn lucky.
Patton laughs in delight at his response. “Ha! Sounds like a plan! Ooh – hold on!”
And then he’s jumping off the bed, going to rummage in his desk drawers.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Celebrating our engagement properly! Be patient!”
And then he’s kneeling next to the bed, smiling cheekily up at Janus, a length of pale blue ribbon in his hand.
“What is that?”
“Shut up, I don’t have a ring.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Hand!”
So, Patton ties the ribbon in a neat bow on Janus’ ring finger and kisses it quick before leaning back to gaze at him in satisfaction.
“There. Now you’re stuck with me no matter what.”
Janus doesn’t tell him that was going to happen regardless.
  ---
 Neither of them likes to talk about the third time.
Janus shoves his way past the teeming crowd of drunk dancers, craning his neck to spot a crop of dark curls or a pastel jumper. Goddamnit .
He wasn’t supposed to leave Patton’s side, he had suggested coming out here tonight as a way of cheering Patton up, and it had been working, until he had walked in, complete with brand new attractive arm candy, and…
Fuck.
He finally finds him out in the empty garden, clutching a beer can that looks to be mostly empty, staring blankly at the sky. He’s not actively crying, but as Janus walks over, he can make out the tear tracks on his face even in the dark.
So he’s definitely seen them.
“Patton?”
“Hey, Janus.” His voice is subdued, and there’s a slight slur to the words.
“I’m so sorry, Pat,” He starts, “If I’d known he’d be here...”
“It’s ‘kay Jan, ‘m fine,” Patton reassures in a way that is not reassuring at all. His smile doesn’t reach his eyes and it’s painfully brittle, like it might shatter into a thousand pieces any minute. Recently, Janus has seen that smile a few too many times for his liking.
“Patton, no.” he replies firmly, but gently, “You’re drunk and heartbroken, and I’m at least partially responsible for that. I’m going to take you home.”
But drunk Patton is somehow even more stubborn than sober Patton can be at times, and he shakes his head resolutely.
“Janus, no.” he pouts, “ ‘m not that drunk, an’ ‘m not…not sad, an’ I don’t wanna go home.” He nods clumsily, having made his point, and then proceeds to stare blankly at the sky again.
Janus sighs.
“Well, then I’m drunk. And sad. And I need someone to take me home.”
Ever more attentive to other’s needs than his own, that gets Patton’s attention, the beautiful idiot that he is. Slowly, he nods and clambers to his feet, gripping Janus’ hand.
Neither of them drives, and Patton’s place is closer, so Janus walks them there, Patton clinging firmly to his side every step of the way. Janus can’t tell if it’s for balance or comfort.
When he gets them both inside the flat, Patton’s first words are, “Don’t leave.”
He gazes up at Janus with red-rimmed eyes, “I don’t like bein’ here alone.”
Janus’s heart aches at that, and he nods. He’d always found it hard to say know to Patton, especially when he’s like this, and especially when he asks for so little as it is.
Similarly, he can’t bring himself to refuse Patton’s beseeching gaze when he tucks him in and moves to sleep on the couch. So, a few moments later finds them in bed together, Janus staring at the ceiling and wondering how Patton can’t hear his heartbeat. They’ve shared a bed before, of course. But not in a long time. Certainly not since Patton started seeing him .
“I saw them, you know.”
He does know. “Really?”
“Mm. D’you think he loves him?”
Janus sighs, “I don’t know, Patton.”
“D’you think he loved me?” Patton’s voice is so soft, so resigned, so plaintive that Janus damn near breaks.
“You know I can’t answer that, Patton.”
“Sometimes I think he didn’t.” Patton admits matter-of-factly, “I tried so, so, hard, but he just didn’t. Ever. I wonder if anyone ever really will.”
There’s a scrap of faded blue ribbon tied on the end of Janus’ keyring that answers that question, but Janus doesn’t bring it up. He doesn’t have to.
“You know I know you’re not really drunk. Or sad.” Patton turns to look at him, his eyes gentle and frank.
“Yeah?”
“You’re jus’ lookin’ out for me. Like you always do. D’you remember that time I said we should get married when we’re all old an’ stuff?”
He doesn’t trust himself to speak. “Hmm.”
Patton smiles wanly. “I wish we could jus’ do that now. We’d jus’ have each other an’ it wouldn’ matter if no one loves me ‘cause I’ve got you.”
Their faces are inches apart and Janus has never wanted anything more than he wants to kiss Patton right now, to kiss his tears away and tell him he’d never be alone, because Janus wouldn’t let him – but he can’t. For a variety of reasons.
“Go to sleep, Patton.”
  ---
 The fourth time, it comes out of nowhere.
It’s two – three? Some godforsaken hour of the morning and Janus has work tomorrow.
And for some reason, his delightful boyfriend has decided that it is a perfect time to be awake and shuffling around to sit up in bed, and turn his bedside lamp on.
“Janus?” he whispers his name like he thinks it might break in his mouth, and God, Janus loves him, but he needs him to shut up and go to sleep right the hell now. He doesn’t move or open his eyes, lying with his face half buried in his pillow despite feeling Patton’s gaze on his back.
“Janus, sweetie?” he whispers again, “Are you awake?”
“… No. ”
“I’m sleeping. Can’t hear you. Zzzzz…”
Patton huffs out  a soft laugh. “I think we should get married.”
Janus stiffens. What? They’d barely been dating two months, they hadn’t even talked about marriage – at least, since they’d been dating. He had no idea it was on Patton’s mind, how long had he…
And more importantly, why was he bringing it up now?
Apparently taking his stunned silence to be outright rejection, Patton tries to backtrack quickly.
“I know, I know, it’s not been very long and I totally understand if you don’t want to because it’s too soon.” Janus feels a gentle hand rest itself on the blanket right above his shoulder, “I wasn’t really thinking of it either, but I couldn’t sleep just now and I couldn’t stop thinking, you know, about us, and you remember when we were kids, and all that stuff we always joked about, and how even though we’ve not been dating that long we’ve been together basically forever.”
He trails off, giggling self-consciously.
“And then you did something really cute in your sleep, you like, cuddled up to me and it hit me now I don’t think I ever want this to end.”
Janus finally sits up and faces the love of his life, who is looking back at him with a gaze that can only be described as besotted.
“I really love you, Janus. I want to be married to you.”
With a small, knowing smile, Janus leans forward and cups Patton’s face in his hands.
“Patton. Angel. Darling. Light of my life. I love you too.”
“I…”
“…And that is why I categorically refuse to let you propose to me while you’re wearing your Winnie the Pooh pyjamas. Please let me sleep now, and I promise I will say yes no matter how you ask me next.” And with that, Janus places a kiss on the end of his boyfriend’s nose, turns around, and falls asleep.
  ---
 The fifth time is more or less perfect.
Well, he says more or less. Patton is perfect, in a neatly pressed pastel button-down, his curls bouncing in the gentle spring breeze despite all his valiant efforts to tame it.
Janus has made an effort to look his best as well, having had a feeling something special was coming. He hadn’t mentioned it of course, but with the way Patton had been jumping up and down in his seat as he drove them here, the way he had insisted on planning every aspect of this date himself – well.
Suffice to say his future husband had never been the best at keeping secrets.
The location Patton’s picked had certainly been perfect, atop a lush green hill with the kind of majestic cherry blossom tree you only see in romantic movies, pink blossoms practically dripping off its branches as they swayed in the wind, and beautiful rolling hills all around.
What isn’t perfect is when the two of them finally get comfortable on the hilltop, and Janus leaning against the wide tree trunk while Patton gets to unpacking the picnic he’s put together so meticulously, and it starts raining, almost instantaneously.
“I checked the forecast like three times, it was supposed to be clear skies!” Patton whines back in the car once they’ve finished packing up their things and run to safety, watching the light drips of rain get slowly heavier.
“I’m sorry dearest, I suppose the universe just doesn’t want this date to be.” Janus chuckles wryly, as he hands Patton’s dried glasses back to him.
“Eff the universe,” Patton grumbles, glaring adorably at the raindrop speckled windshield.
So, they play old love songs on the car music player and drink champagne and tuck into entirely too cute bite-sized picnic foods and talk and laugh and playfully flirt and point out constellations formed by the raindrops on the glass, and eventually, Patton stops pouting.
The conversation has slowly wound down and they’re quietly enjoying each other's company when he turns to Janus, taking a deep breath.
“God knows I’ve never been able to keep anything from you.”
“Why, whatever could you be talking about, my dearest?”
“…So, this probably isn’t a surprise to you in the least.”
Patton reaches into the picnic basket and pulls out a small box. It’s a pale yellow, tied in in blue ribbon.
“You’re my best friend, Janus,” his hands are steady, but his voice is already wavering, “You’ve always been here, my whole life, whether I need someone to help, or to talk to, or even just to cry at. I’ve loved you in so many different ways.”
Janus feels tears pricking at his eyes and blinks them away quickly; he refuses to miss a second of this, he wants the image of Patton’s earnest, loving face to be clear as day in his mind when he looks back on this whenever.
“..And I don’t ever want us to stop loving each other, so, hopefully for the last time ever, will you marry me?”
He laughs breathlessly and takes the box, delicately undoing the ribbon. It’s a cupcake.
A tiny, perfect cupcake with frilly blue icing, a golden ring in the shape of the tiniest coiled snake in the world, embedded in the icing.
“Do you like it?” Patton asks hopefully.
Janus surges forward to kiss his fiancé for the very first time.
Taglist: @ent-is-undecisive @disney-princess-patton
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memxntomxri · 3 years
Text
lonely together
ꜱᴇʀɪᴇꜱ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ | ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ | ʜᴏᴍᴇ
𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 - kuroo tetsurou x kozume kenma
𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘳𝘦 - fluff, comfort
𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤 - kenma has a breakdown over haters on the internet. kuroo comforts him.
𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵 - 1.4k
𝘵𝘸 - online people being assholes, panic attacks, referenced stalker-ish behaviors
𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘴 - fluff to make up for day 1's fic. thank you for discord server friends (LouEve_094, Lena) who listened to me screech while writing this.
。o°✥✤✣    ✣✤✥°o。
Kuroo’s assistant, Takahashi, tentatively stuck his head into the conference room, where Kuroo was currently listening to a pitch about doing a joint press venture with the baseball league. It was interesting, but not enough that he didn’t notice his assistant’s frantic finger-pointing and beckoning.
Kuroo murmured a quiet “Sorry” and excused himself from the table, stepping out to converse with Takahashi. Takahashi wouldn’t bother Kuroo unless it wasn’t urgent.
“Sorry, sir, but I’m so glad Suzuki-san informed me about the situation, I—” he began. Kuroo held up a hand. Takahashi was trustworthy and brilliant with a spreadsheet program, but he could also run on for hours if one didn’t force him to cut to the chase.
“Takahashi, what exactly happened?” Kuroo said. Takahashi shot him a confused look, then his eyes widened almost comically.
“Kuroo-san, did you not see your ring?” he asked. In their world, because of some god’s whim or something, everyone was born with a ring tattoo on their right ring finger. It acted like some sort of mood ring… for your soulmate. Blue meant sadness, red meant anger, green meant disgust or jealousy, yellow happiness, gold pride, so on, so forth. When you met them, the ring would flare a bright, distinctive color. Kuroo had been fortunate enough to witness his flare as a measly 8-year-old, and Kenma had been stuck with him ever since.
Kuroo automatically glanced down at his right hand. Shit, he cursed. It was black all the way through—that was not good. That meant that something had set off Kenma’s panic attacks—a bad one, because Kuroo couldn’t see the swirls of grey that meant that his fiancée wasn’t completely lost yet—and Kuroo felt horrible for not noticing.
Takahashi gulped. Kuroo had momentarily forgotten that his assistant existed. “There’s more, Kuroo-san.” he said warily, as if approaching a wild animal.
“What?” Kuroo snapped, then shook his head quickly. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.” Takahashi smiled gently, a reassuring one meant to placate Kuroo’s wild emotions. “It’s okay, Kuroo-san. Um… are you sure you want to know what’s going on with Kozume-san?” he grimaced. It must be bad for Takahashi, of all people, to be making negative facial expressions. “Just tell me.” Kuroo barked. He winced. “Sorry, didn’t mean that either.”
Takahashi replied, “It’s alright. Anyways, it seems that when Kozume-san beat out that beauty youtuber, Alice007, for the first Japanese Youtuber to get 10 million subscribers today, she went on a tangent on Twitter and caused a lot of her fans to start attacking Kozume-san. They… also mentioned you.”
Kuroo’s head whipped up. “What?”
“Apparently, Alice-san’s sister went to Nekoma High too and believed that she was your soulmate. If the tweets are any indication, both of them are a little, forgive me for saying this in a professional setting, delusional.” he said apologetically. Kuroo wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. On one hand, the love of his life was being torn down online. On the other hand, Takahashi was finally saying something negative about a human being.
Kuroo tipped his head back.
“Well, I’m heading home. Sorry for flaking out on the meeting, but can you please tell them a brief summary of what’s going on? Don’t go into too much detail though, Kenma values his privacy.” he requested. Takahashi nodded. God, Kuroo was lucky to have his assistant. “Thanks, Takahashi, you’re a lifesaver. Why don’t you take Friday night out and take Mizuki-san,” Takahashi’s 158cm tall spitfire soulmate who always seemed to have an infinite supply of dirty jokes, “out on a date?”
Takahashi allowed a small smile to break his professional face. “That would be very nice, Kuroo-san. Thank you. Now go, Kozume-san needs you.” he said, shooing Kuroo down the hall towards the elevators.
For someone who acted so demure while working, Takahashi sure could be forceful when he wanted to.
。ₓ ू ₒ ु ˚ ू ₒ ु ₓ。
Kuroo nudged the door to his and Kenma’s two-bedroom (one was Kenma’s streaming room) open. His arms were laden with bags from the nearby grocery store, filled with Kenma’s favorite comfort foods, a few new video games, and a box of prescription meds for his anxiety that Kenma had slowly moved on from.
“Kenma?” he called down the hallway. No response, except for sounds of muffled sobbing coming from their bedroom. Kuroo kicked off his shoes and set the bags down, heading down the hall to investigate.
He cracked open the door a few centimeters, and there Kenma was, curled up in a ball on the king-sized mattress, phone an arm’s length away, screen cracked. Kuroo tracked his eyes to the correspondingly-sized dent in the wall. He walked in, sitting down next to Kenma’s prone form, but not touching him.
“Hey, kitten.” he greeted quietly. Kenma reached for his sleeve, rubbing his hand twice, up, down, on Kuroo’s wrist. Ah. That was the signal for when he had gone nonverbal but wanted Kuroo to give him physical and verbal affection.
Kuroo scooped Kenma up into his arms, tucking him into his lap as he rested his chin on top of Kenma’s head. “I’m sorry people are being assholes, Kenma. I hope you don’t believe them, because they sure as hell aren’t true.” Small hiccups as more tears ran down Kenma’s face.
That was alright. Sometimes, Kenma just needed someone to hold him and tell him that he was alright.
“I bought that game you wanted. Overcooked? Yeah, that was its name. We can try it out when you feel up to it. Maybe invite Akaashi and Bokuto over. Chibi-chan and Kageyama too, if they’re in Tokyo.” Kuroo continued.
“You know, all these people love you, Kenma. It doesn’t matter what people online think, especially when they’re just following a deranged leader.” Kuroo reassured him.
Kenma looked up at him questioningly. Kuroo sighed. “Yeah, I heard. I have no idea who Alice-san’s sister is,” he said in response to Kenma’s silent question, “besides, I trust our parents and our own memories more than some beauty guru who can’t take being beaten.” he scoffed.
Kenma took a few deep breaths, a sign that he was slowly calming down. Kuroo rubbed comforting circles down his back. “T-Tetsu.” he murmured. “Am I a bad soulmate because I’m not that affectionate?”
Kuroo jolted, then cupped his hands gently around Kenma’s face, leaning down to press a light kiss to his lips. “No, Kenma, never. I know you love me, and you know I wouldn’t have you any other way. You’re my kitten, remember?” he reminded. Kenma nodded slowly. Good. Kuroo breathed a slight sigh of relief in his mind. It had been months since he had needed to do this.
Kenma continued, speaking even quieter. “Will everyone leave me? Am I going to be lonely in the end?” he asked. Kuroo’s heart ached. He knew that that had always been one of Kenma’s insecurities—that his aloofness would drive people away from him. “Kenma, if you’re alone, then I’ll be alone with you.” Kuroo said resolutely.
Kenma broke down into a few sobs, hopefully getting it out of his system. “T-Tetsu, they found our address.” Kuroo froze. “What?” Kenma nodded. “Yeah. S-someone sent me a red paint-stained picture of me with a knife stabbed through my f-forehead.” he struggled to get out.
“Shh, shh, Kenma, I’m here now. Don’t force yourself if you don’t want to talk.” Kuroo reassured.
Shit. They had both known that this could become a probability when Kenma had started getting famous, and they had been lucky for a few years, but someone finding out at this moment was just bad luck.
Kuroo wrapped his arms tighter around Kenma’s smaller frame. “Don’t worry, kitten, I’ll protect you. Always and forever, remember?” he said with a cheeky smile, pointing at the band (the metal one) around Kenma’s left ring finger.
Kenma’s quiet, melodic chuckle filled the air.
Kuroo chanced a glance down at his right ring finger. It was still dark and murky, but there were traces of pink and a pale color that he hoped was yellow. It wasn’t back to usual, but they were getting there.
。ₓ ू ₒ ु ˚ ू ₒ ु ₓ。
A few hours later…
Curled up on the couch, Kenma fiddled away at his PSP. Kuroo plopped down next to him, holding two steaming cups of chamomile tea. “Tetsu, I placed an order for a new phone.” Kenma said, not looking up from the phone.
“Oh also, you’re still going to have to pay half the rent for our new apartment. I’m not going to be your sugar daddy, no matter how much you beg.” Kenma deadpanned.
Kuroo snorted. Nothing ever really changed with his Kenma.
。o°✥✤✣    ✣✤✥°o。
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