#i really... started in august practically useless
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Dangerous desires
Pairing: August Walker x Male reader
Summary: August Walker is known for his dangerous tendencies. But a certain boy sparked a feeling of lust inside his dark soul, what's weird though, he just met the boy. Ultimately, it was up to him to do anything he could to make him his precious little boy. Besides, how bad could it be? (Answer: pretty bad)
Word count: 1.5k+
Warnings: 18+, SMUT, pet names "little boy, baby, etc", daddy kink, size difference (August is large and masculine, you're cute and petite, implications of sex toys, deep kissing, skin sucking/biting, slapping, nipple play, spanking, oral sex, face fucking, fingering, cum control, rimming, unprotected sex, August is very possessive, cuddling?
"What the hell?" you thought as you awakened from a deep slumber, feeling a throbbing pain on the side of your head. It's obvious what's going on as you observe your surroundings. You lay on an expensive linen couch noticing the ivory walls, adorned with elegant paintings and a surprising amount of, special toys.
It took a while for you to fully grasp the fact that you've been taken, not long before a daunting figure walks in. A large man, who looked to be around 6 feet tall, with rippling biceps, comically large shoulders, and a broad chest stood before you with a seemingly black expression, but what you noticed? The furry little mustache that lay beneath his nose made him look a little strange, but you couldn't help but blush at his masculine and chiseled features.
"Oh what a surprise! Mr. Walker didn't expect to see a cute little baby in his house!" His kind and gentle tone was a bit unsettling as his massive figure started getting closer to you, cornered in the couch. You tried to back away as August got really close to you. “Oh baby, why are you trying to avoid daddy? You know we need each other, come with me baby. Let me make us feel good” he said, rubbing your thigh. “W-who are you? Why are you doing this to me?” You said trying to pry the man off of your leg.
“Oh my sweet boy, you’re so adorable. You really don’t remember me? From the art expo?”
That’s when it all made sense.
You did go to the art expo and remembered accidentally bumping into August in a hurry, little did you know that very move put you in this place. All you did was stare into his dark blue eyes hoping that he would come to his senses. Did it work? No.
All of a sudden, a pair of chapstick tinted lips crashed onto yours, causing you to fall back onto the couch. His tongue racing in your mouth stealing every bit of submission out of your mouth. You moaned and whined loudly as August continued to kiss and lick your lips. “Oh you taste so fucking good baby, I’m gonna have a great time with you!” His words rushed and hasty as he started to suck on your neck making more unholy noises leave your mouth. His teeth sinking into your neck marking his territory. “You’re mine now baby, understand?” All you did was whimper in response to the man.
The kiss continued to deepen for about 5 minutes, by the time he pulled out you were a moaning and panting mess. “But a beautiful thing like you really should show off his beauty right?” He said as he started stripping you of your clothes. You watched as your favorite hoodie and shorts were ripped off your body and thrown onto the floor, leaving you completely naked except for a pair of white undies.
“My goodness baby! What a beautiful little thing you are! But daddy has something that’ll make his boy shine!” He said, patting your head, pulling out the smallest and most useless bra and thong set you’ve ever seen. Practically strings of fabric being held together. He handed it to you with an enthusiastic expression, hoping you wouldn’t have any resistance to this. Your response, however, did thoroughly disappoint him.
“August, I don’t really wanna wear this, it’s too tiny” you said trying to persuade him. “Oh? Does the little boy think he can boss around daddy? And don’t you dare call me August, I’m daddy not August! And you will wear the two piece if you don’t wanna get hurt, so I advise you do baby” he said gripping your shoulder. In a state of fear, you started changing into the two piece with a scarlet color on your face. Feeling exposed in front of August.
“There, happy?” You said in a fit of anger and attitude. *SLAP* “Don’t you dare talk to daddy like that! I’m doing this for you baby, don’t play that shit with me baby!” You held your face, surprised that August would hit you, thinking he was gentle. “Anyways” August said as he began to suck and bite your neck again, more moans leaving your mouth.
He moved down from your neck onto your chest. Forcing the bra off your torso and sucking and teasing your nipples. Moans and whines escaping your mouth as August licked and sucked on your sensitive nipples. “Fuck daddy! Uh!” You moaned as augusts tongue was sliding around your chest, your body quivering at Augusts aggressive touch. “Oh daddy loves what he hears kitten, you’re so good for me” he said as eventually let out, pinching your nipples leaving them red and wet.
“You’re such an obedient little boy aren’t you! Now, time for daddy’s present to his favorite boy. Kneel”. Absolutely desperate for more, you kneeled completely impatient for august to unleash his meat.
August unbuckled his trousers and, oh! Pops out the largest cock you’ve ever seen, albeit the first one you’ve ever seen. It looked to be 9 inches and really thick. “Suck” he demanded as you shoved his colossal dick down your throat. You could only take about 5 inches as drool spilled from your mouth while it was completely occupied with Augusts dick.
“F-fuck b-aby, you suck dick so f-fucking good!” Then came the thrusts, as august began fucking your face. You licked his tip, sending even more pleasure through the larger man’s body as he continued thrusting into your mouth.
“H-hey! W-who said you could do that y-you naughty b-boy! Uh fuck baby! Daddy n-needs to teach you a lesson” August said as he aggressively pulled out of you, putting his dick, soaked in pre-cum and drool, back in his boxers.
“Get on my lap, daddy needs to teach his naughty little boy a lesson!” August pointed to his crotch, motioning you to sit in it. Wanting to stir the pot, you tried to run out the door, still naked with nothing but tiny straps on your body. “Oh no you don’t! Get back here baby!” He grabbed you and forced you on his lap.
“Now baby, daddy hates to do this to his little baby but when daddy’s baby is acting up, discipline is required” he said as he violently swatted your right cheek. A scream escaped your mouth as his large hand left a red mark on your ass, the mix of pain and pleasure left you wanting more. “Oh no you don’t” he said as he cupped your mouth with his hand. “I need you to be on your best behavior, ok baby? I know it hurts but daddy is doing it so you don’t misbehave” continuing to spank you. At spank 30, your cheeks are red as a ripening tomato, tears staining your cheeks from the sting.
“Oh baby! Daddy is so sorry for hurting you, but since you’ve been a good boy, daddy’s gonna give you the best gift ever!” He said tying your arms together above your head. “Open up.” His fingers started slowly entering your hole, sliding in and out of them as the most sickening moans left your body. “Daddy!” you whined as August started inserting two, then three fingers into your hole. The amalgam of pleasure and pain completely consumed your body as he continued to finger fuck you.
“Daddy! I’m gonna cum! Please daddy, can I cum?” You begged the man, feeling extremely weak and fragile in the moment. “Oh no baby, let daddy go for a bit longer, you can do it baby! I’m sure of it” he said as he bit your nipple.
You lost it.
Ropes of cum shooting out from your cock, twitching and shaking as August continued to pleasure you. “Baby… Daddy is quite disappointed you couldn’t control yourself, but you’re still my good boy. Time for your reward!” he said as flipped you over, breaking your bonds, and grabbed your waist, ready to fuck you. He teased your tight and sensitive hole with his cock, leaving you whining and moaning, craving more from the man.
Then, *BAM* August started thrusting inside you, absolutely violating your hole. You moaned and screamed as his thrusts grew stronger by the second, ready to bust at any minute. “Daddy! Ugh daddy! I love when you fill me up daddy! Ugh! Fuck!” you moaned as he continued fucking you, your conscious slowly starting to dissipate at Augusts aggression. “Oh baby! I know you were the one! You’re better than any girl I’ve ever banged fuck baby!” “Daddy! I’m gonna cum! Please daddy let me cum!” you whined as Augusts dick started slamming up and down against your prostate.
You felt August starting to get sloppier and sloppier with each thrust, his brain completely wrapped with pleasure. You were both in heaven, hungry for what could come next. “C-cum with me baby” he whined as you both unleashed your loads, his cum painting your walls, leaving nothing untouched. He collapsed on top of you, body soaked in sweat and cum. The intimidating man suddenly wrapped his arms around you and teased your nipples.
“That was so much fun baby, you’re so perfect. Can daddy give you a kiss?” You nodded as the man gave you the most perfect kiss, one not like before, but a kiss of true love, something you felt for the man who had just fucked the shit out of you.
THE END
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(thanks to @mostlymaudlin for the template!) pls forgive my scrawl!!
i read soooo many good fics this year so to narrow it down i have limited myself to a) fics that were written in 2023 (i think) and b) F1 fics. i could’ve done a whole directory for each category tbh, and i’m sure i’ve forgotten something really obvious, but these were the ones that came to mind first. links and my commentary under the cut!
1. fic that made me laugh: adagio by debrief (lando/oscar, ballet AU. debrief is sooo good at these gorgeous, funny landoscar AUs, and the lando in this fic is so effervescent, camp and ridiculous. so many great laugh out loud bits.)
2. fic that made me cry: ode to a conversation stuck in your throat by prettyrotten @prettydangrotten (alex/george, miscommunication at its finest. so much incredible, layered emotion in this one, a real masterclass in how to use sex scenes to portray emotions instead of dialogue too.)
3. fic that gave me a story hangover: the fire is slowly dying by peachbellinis @strawberry-daiquiris (mark/oscar, oughhhh. never heard the term story hangover before today but that’s exactly what this fic gave me. eyewateringly sexy, leans into the age gap and the generally rancid vibes, evil temptress oscar rights. i was fucking useless for the rest of the day after reading it because it’s so vividly drawn and claustrophobic in the best possible way. ate my brain.)
4. fic i want to discuss book club style: grand theft august by chelem @chelemlem (lando/oscar, gorgeous canon compliant slowburn. the fic that gave me the landoscar brain rot for real. i basically only started writing ‘monday’ because i adored this so much; it’s essentially a tribute act. so many glorious little details that i would love to pick apart at a forensic level.)
5. fic that got me a lil flustered: side by side in orbit by glasscushion @glasscushion (lando/oscar/max f, spiky weird vibes cuckolding threesome. also a strong contender for category 1 because the max dialogue is deadly precise and hilarious, but lando all fucked out and high off being watched?? does me in every time i even think about it. insane.)
6. fic by one of my fave authors: practice makes perfect by charlotte_stant @boxboxlewis (alex/george, first time/practising sex. as always, insanely good, sharp dialogue; so elegant at sentence level, no wasted words. funny, sad, sexy. whenever i read her fics i’m taking notes because there’s always something to learn.)
7. fic i reread more than once: break my rules by venerat (lando/oscar, mile high club with crafty bastard lando and out of his depth but loving it oscar. i’ve read most of venerat’s fics multiple times this year tbh, but this was another formative landoscar fic for me so i’ve singled it out here.)
8. fic i sent to everyone i know: trade offer by chelem @chelemlem (girl!lando/oscar rule 63, they can’t fuck for semi-spurious reasons. SWELTERINGLY hot. entire lines from this fic live rent free in my head. i’ve said this before but this is one of my top, if not my favourite ever, rule 63 fic.)
9. fic that made me fall in love with an author: recreate the sun by glasscushion @glasscushion (lando/oscar with background mark/oscar, stoned sex. oughhh. such a sleazy, sexy fic. i kind of came to landoscar via mark/oscar fics and this one was a bit of a gateway drug (sorry). grotty spiritual teenager lando my beloved, horny sloth stoner oscar my beloved, viscerally hot descriptions of stoned sex my beloved. makes me want to take an edible to get the full effect.)
so so many i didn’t have room to mention argh. i bookmarked 10 pages this year!!
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Commandant, Thank You...
Noan Activation Letter || August 8
I never thought that what you and Commandant Simon were planning was to celebrate my Activation Day for me.
My body was assembled and upgraded with the remains of other constructs, I can't remember exactly when it was made... While yes, I was asked by the staff to choose the information I want, that I can fill in the birthday when I want to commemorate it... so I wrote the birthday date.
I am really surprised that the date I have registered would be allowed with so many regulations, or the fact that you remember it. Thank you again, thank you very much.
This is supposed to reach you when I send you back to Gray Raven's lounge, but I couldn't say anything at the time. Until now, I haven't realized that some things have passed for a long time, so long that I started to get used to forgetting my own or other people's birthdays. With your reminder, I will definitely never forget about it.
Thank you for not only remembering this day, but also rejoicing on the day a sinner was born.
is this considered as getting closer to you and being accepted by you?
According to the habit of traveling merchants, I should have given you something to express my gratitude for your time and effort. But after choosing the reward for Commandant Simon, Captain Paluma and Lillian, I realized that I don't know much about you and your preferences... so I don't know what to give you.
Although there is nothing wrong with giving some practical gifts, the seniors I knew would always say that the friendship that owes nothing to each other is nothing but false and fragile.
Between people, sometimes there is a need for appropriate debts. Good friends will always quarrel, and make up again and again after causing trouble to each other. Only this way, can let go of our guard and become true friends. I'm no longer a traveling merchant, I would rather stay here, so I'm not going to take this as a one off deal.
Can I see you again?
I want to know you, not from other people's mouth, but from your own presence.
At that time, I will definitely give you a better gift in return- a companion.
Of course, if you just want to save this kind of opportunity, it's fine if it's not this notebook or this picture of the starry sky. The reason I drew it is because I want to tell you that I still remember what you said that day.
PS. That being said, I feel a little sorry for just giving you a few useless paintings, so I went out and bought two multivitamin candies for now. Commandant Simon said that the Commandant often buys this to supplement nutrition. You have been very tired during this time, so vitamin supplements are also very important, don't push yourself too hard.
Goodnight Commandant.
From: Noan
Invitation Letter: Noan
Title: Commandant, are you free to come to the library today?
Good afternoon Commandant.
I have already found the book you mentioned where the protagonist only remembers fragments of their memories.
If you are free, you can come to the library to come pick it up, and I will help you keep it. In addition, Commandant Simon is also looking for you, and told me to take you there to find him today.
But if you are busy, I will still keep it for you, everything is based on your schedule. He refuses to contact you himself, but asks be to take you there, which means it's not an urgent matter, right? You go about your own business first, I'll be in the library all day today, and I'll come back when it's convenient for you.
From: Noan
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May i ask how you're learning coding for wepages? i wanna start learning it too but idk where TwT
heya anon! so, it's been almost two years since i've started my coding journey...
it's a really hard process, i must admit... i'm gonna say the most useless thing ever but it's what worked: practice!
details under the cut (trust me there's a lot)
TL DR; do whatever is fun and make sure to practice often!
i started by using sadgrl's layout builder and in 2-3 days my first iteration was born
this monstrocity was rescued from archive.org and dates back to august of 2022 since i have this awful habit of not keeping all website versions archived on github
i spent so many hours tinkering with the layout,, i didn't knew what things did so stack overflow and coding servers were my best friends
a few of my 2023 layouts were just lost to time... ah well... and we land onto the first iteration of catboo i coded from the ground up + it's graphics update a few months later. these are from march and september, respectively
it was not the best, but i really loved them... also nope, no layouts got lost inbetween,, i just barely updated in those months
there was a christmas layout that got lost to time too, but it was mostly me putting xmas hats on all the graphics
aaaand there were a lot of months inbetween the next layout, catboo v2. i spent roughly 4 months coding and making the graphics for catboo v2
it takes time and patience, anon
this is all my personal experience! it might be different for you...
wanna try to make a site? i recommend using vscode with the live server extension, this way you can see your updates in real time
watch youtube videos, use templates, do whatever you want!! have fun!!
as for website host, i recommend either neocities (where i host) or nekoweb (by dimden)
have fun, anon! i wish you luck (and patience. you'll need it)
#man this is nerdy stuff#nerd#infodump#webmaster elly#oughghg i hope u like it anon#elly's rambles#ask
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not me actually feeling good about my guitar progress for the last two days after having had some bad days in between (like the more i practiced the worse i got lmao) but all of a sudden it went better and cleaner and fluent and i was somewhat proud of myself for pulling through but then as if someone literally spies on me i all of a sudden just get girls younger than me playing guitar real good on my fyp?! making me feel like absolute useless shit :) i hate tt i honestly hate that you cant control your fyp and just unknowingly scroll into whatever (like I KNOW theres content on there that would leave me feelin good and inspired but i rarely get that) like i honestly agree that comparing yourself is no good in any way but i think everybody still struggles with it but then again i have to remember i literally just got my guitar on august 8th and am just doing this for fun and all by myself (thats at least what i intended i didnt wanna get caught up in feeling competitive i hate that) but ive learned quite a bit already and having been able to memorize all those song and album release years actually did turn out to be a beneficial skill now bc i somehow dont struggle much with remembering what frets and strings to play either but im honestly still overwhelmed and now feel the dumb need to learn something even harder (so far i learned one version of spanish romance then nothing else matters complete including solo before i knew it is frowned upon by guitar elitists like stairway to heaven is apparently lmao but srsly its a great song to learn bc it features a lot of different things that are good to practice? the second solo of maidens strange world the intro to to live is to die as well as the 2nd solo and the intro main riff and solo of whiskey in the jar by thin lizzy) but ive just been practicing all of these daily and guess i will keep doing that for a little while longer idk man i wish i had money for lessons bc especially the apparent need to know theory is pressuring me but these online things just end up aggravating and frustrating me like as soon as someone starts talking my brain shuts off and im also like do i REALLY need this? the only one to hear me play is literally well... ME MYSELF AND I i can do whatever i want??
#sry for that rant i'll probs delete this in the morning but that completely destroyed me#also HENDRIX didn’t even know how to read notes so…#i need to chill#i Act like im expected to play a solo concert at madison square garden in 1 yr from now lmao
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Apparantly Fate Grand Order is finally available in most european play stores since august! You have been playing that game since a while before, do you have some tips for new players?
IT IS INDEED! The NA server has gone global, they extended the number of supported countries - probably because of Google's new payment policy.
I have been playing for two years now, so I can hopefully give you tips to help you get started. As a disclaimer, I don't play other gacha games outside of FGO aside from a few short past experiences, so I'm not too sure how it compares to games like Arknights or Genshin in terms of unit management and such, but I'll do my best. It'll also probably definitely get long, so I'll stuff it under a Read More.
Here goes:
Follow your heart (or dick, or whatever else leads you), not tier lists. FGO is specifically designed so it can be cleared with f2p servants, and every single servant is viable. Source: I have a grailed Demon King Nobunaga, who always ends up at the very bottom of every tier list, and I've wrecked several bosses using her. Tier lists mean nothing, roll for your favorites.
On global, we're two years behind the JP server, meaning you can predict with decent accuracy (minus surprise banners) when you'll be able to roll for your favorite next. Exploit the hell out of this. The r/grandorder subreddit has a lot of useful resources that I encourage you to check out, like an event compendium and a list of upcoming banners for every servant in the game.
I mentioned it already, but low rarity servants (1* to 3*) are worth the investment and should be leveled. I believe low rarity units are often useless in other gacha games and only 4/5/6* (if applicable) units are really used - this isn't the case for FGO, and ignoring low rarities is a mistake a lot of people who are used to other gachas make. This is both because low rarities all have their own niche and use, and because FGO uses a party cost mechanic, meaning you can't have a full party of gold servants.
Similarly, there are no "must roll" servants, no matter how much hype you might see around them. FGO is single player: there's no PVP, no ranking system, and the only way you'll interact with others is through getting help from them by borrowing their servants.
Learn how class advantage works and exploit it. This is what will determine whether you win a fight or lose it, more than the rarity of your servants. It's fairly easy to learn and memorize, and you can check it in several spots on the game UI.
Don't neglect your servants' skills. I did back when I started, because I had no idea what the fuck I was doing, but these can also make or break a fight. Obviously don't stress yourself over them, but take the time to learn what they do.
Prioritize events, and catch up on the story when there's no event you can play. Most of them are only locked behind Fuyuki, the tutorial chapter, or Orléans, the first chapter. Events will reward you with grails, materials, and in some cases an entire free 4* servant, so they're really worth playing! Gamepress has walkthroughs for most of them as well. On that note, those free servants can only be max leveled using special materials that you can only obtain through their event, so make sure to grab these. There will always be 4, and they'll either be mission rewards or in the event shop.
Don't burn your dupes... Immediately. In FGO, duplicate copies of a servant are used to upgrade their noble phantasm, up to NP5 (one base copy and 4 dupes). Once they're NP5, you can start burning the new dupes, but try to avoid doing it before that.
Grail for love. Holy Grails are a rare resource you get for completing chapters or events, and they can be used to raise a servant's level cap up to 100, or up to 120 if you have the necessary servant coins. Because they're rare, it's best to use them on your favorites!
I don't know if it's a common practice in other gachas, but don't reroll. It's a waste of time, and you can make do with your tutorial roll and Friend Points rolls since as I mentioned earlier, lower rarities can and will get you through the game.
Supports can, and will carry you, so make sure to Follow or send Friend requests to other players! Following allows you to use their servants without them needing to do anything, and being friends means they can use yours in return. You have to use a support servant in your party no matter what, so make the most of it!
Set up your own support list, and split it (as in, make a separate set for normal and event support. people really appreciate that). Yes, even if the only servants you can set up for now are the one 4* you got from your tutorial roll, Mash, and a bunch of 1-3*. No, really, it won't annoy people that you have a baby lineup, because you are a baby. You can update it with stronger servants as you roll them.
The sooner you learn how Craft Essences work, the better. They're added bonuses you can equip to each servant in your party, and they also increase their stats (either attack, hp, or both). They can be a huge help in battle if you learn the synergy between them and your servants.
Look things up! FGO is a massive game, it's popular, and it's been running since 2015. There's a huge amount of resources available (though some a bit out of date) and they can help you set your party up for a difficult fight, learn how a specific servant works, and so on. My account is arguably late game by now, and I still regularly look up stuff when I roll a new servant or get stuck on a particularly frustrating boss.
Ask for help! You know the reputation reddit has? Well it's not exactly unwarranted, but the subreddit I mentioned earlier has a weekly help thread where anyone can come and ask for advice, and the people there are really just there to help and do their best to. Or you're free to DM me, turns out I love helping!
That was... A lot, but I think this is all stuff I wish I'd been told when I started myself because the game has a lot going on and it can be very confusing. Most of all though, have fun! And feel free to DM me if you want to send me a friend request, my support list is aimed towards helping new accounts ~
#anon#ask#answer#fgo#*scrolls up the immense amount of tips i gave* ah fuck i did it again#what being a regular helper on reddit will do to you#i'm so sorry if this is a lot to take anon#what else to add... i hear a lot of people say not to pay attention to the writing quality in early chapters#and it's true they aren't stellar but eh i personally enjoyed them#they were funny#from camelot on they start being seriously great but before that they're hilariously nonsensical#so yeah#i hope that helps!#go at your own pace spoil your faves and remember that it's through gacha salt that one becomes a seasoned account#(i am taken out and put down by the comedy police)
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The Third Thing
BY DONALD HALL
Jane Kenyon and I were married for twenty-three years. For two decades we inhabited the double solitude of my family farmhouse in New Hampshire, writing poems, loving the countryside. She was forty-seven when she died. If anyone had asked us, “Which year was the best, of your lives together?” we could have agreed on an answer: “the one we remember least.” There were sorrowful years—the death of her father, my cancers, her depressions—and there were also years of adventure: a trip to China and Japan, two trips to India; years when my children married; years when the grandchildren were born; years of triumph as Jane began her public life in poetry: her first book, her first poem in the New Yorker. The best moment of our lives was one quiet repeated day of work in our house. Not everyone understood. Visitors, especially from New York, would spend a weekend with us and say as they left: “It’s really pretty here” (“in Vermont,” many added) “with your house, the pond, the hills, but . . . but . . . but . . . what do you do?”
What we did: we got up early in the morning. I brought Jane coffee in bed. She walked the dog as I started writing, then climbed the stairs to work at her own desk on her own poems. We had lunch. We lay down together. We rose and worked at secondary things. I read aloud to Jane; we played scoreless ping-pong; we read the mail; we worked again. We ate supper, talked, read books sitting across from each other in the living room, and went to sleep. If we were lucky the phone didn’t ring all day. In January Jane dreamed of flowers, planning expansion and refinement of the garden. From late March into October she spent hours digging, applying fifty-year-old Holstein manure from under the barn, planting, transplanting, and weeding. Sometimes I went off for two nights to read my poems, essential to the economy, and Jane wrote a poem called “Alone for a Week.” Later Jane flew away for readings and I loathed being the one left behind. (I filled out coupons from magazines and ordered useless objects.) We traveled south sometimes in cold weather: to Key West in December, a February week in Barbados, to Florida during baseball’s spring training, to Bermuda. Rarely we flew to England or Italy for two weeks. Three hundred and thirty days a year we inhabited this old house and the same day’s adventurous routine.
What we did: love. We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly. For many couples, children are a third thing. Jane and I had no children of our own; we had our cats and dog to fuss and exclaim over—and later my five grandchildren from an earlier marriage. We had our summer afternoons at the pond, which for ten years made a third thing. After naps we loaded up books and blankets and walked across Route 4 and the old railroad to the steep slippery bank that led down to our private beach on Eagle Pond. Soft moss underfoot sent little red flowers up. Ghost birches leaned over water with wild strawberry plants growing under them. Over our heads white pines reared high, and oaks that warned us of summer’s end late in August by dropping green metallic acorns. Sometimes a mink scooted among ferns. After we acquired Gus he joined the pond ecstasy, chewing on stones. Jane dozed in the sun as I sat in the shade reading and occasionally taking a note in a blank book. From time to time we swam and dried in the heat. Then, one summer, leakage from the Danbury landfill turned the pond orange. It stank. The water was not hazardous but it was ruined. A few years later the pond came back but we seldom returned to our afternoons there. Sometimes you lose a third thing.
The South Danbury Christian Church became large in our lives. We were both deacons and Jane was treasurer for a dozen years, utter miscasting and a source of annual anxiety when the treasurer’s report was due. I collected the offering; Jane counted and banked it. Once a month she prepared communion and I distributed it. For the Church Fair we both cooked and I helped with the auction. Besides the Church itself, building and community, there was Christianity, the Gospels, and the work of theologians and mystics. Typically we divided our attentions: I read Meister Eckhart while Jane studied Julian of Norwich. I read the Old Testament aloud to her, and the New. If it wasn’t the Bible, I was reading aloud late Henry James or Mark Twain or Edith Wharton or Wordworth’s Prelude. Reading aloud was a daily connection. When I first pronounced The Ambassadors, Jane had never read it, and I peeked at her flabbergasted face as the boat bearing Chad and Mme. de Vionnet rounded the bend toward Lambert Strether. Three years later, when I had acquired a New York Edition of Henry James, she asked me to read her The Ambassadors again. Late James is the best prose for reading aloud. Saying one of his interminable sentences, the voice must drop pitch every time he interrupts his syntax with periphrasis, and drop again when periphrasis interrupts periphrasis, and again, and then step the pitch up, like climbing stairs in the dark, until the original tone concludes the sentence. One’s larynx could write a doctoral dissertation on James’s syntax.
Literature in general was a constant. Often at the end of the day Jane would speak about what she had been reading, her latest intense and obsessive absorption in an author: Keats for two years, Chekhov, Elizabeth Bishop. In reading and in everything else, we made clear boundaries, dividing our literary territories. I did not go back to Keats until she had done with him. By and large Jane read intensively while I read extensively. Like a male, I lusted to acquire all the great books of the world and add them to my life list. One day I would realize: I’ve never read Darwin! Adam Smith! Gibbon! Gibbon became an obsession with me, then his sources, then all ancient history, then all narrative history. For a few years I concentrated on Henry Adams, even reading six massive volumes of letters.
But there was also ping-pong. When we added a new bedroom, we extended the rootcellar enough to set a ping-pong table into it, and for years we played every afternoon. Jane was assiduous, determined, vicious, and her reach was not so wide as mine. When she couldn’t reach a shot I called her “Stubbsy,” and her next slam would smash me in the groin, rage combined with harmlessness. We rallied half an hour without keeping score. Another trait we shared was hating to lose. Through bouts of ping-pong and Henry James and the church, we kept to one innovation: with rare exceptions, we remained aware of each other’s feelings. It took me half my life, more than half, to discover with Jane’s guidance that two people could live together and remain kind. When one of us felt grumpy we both shut up until it went away. We did not give in to sarcasm. Once every three years we had a fight—the way some couples fight three times a day—and because fights were few the aftermath of a fight was a dreadful gloom. “We have done harm,” said Jane in a poem after a quarrel. What was that fight about? I wonder if she remembered, a month after writing the poem.
Of course: the third thing that brought us together, and shone at the center of our lives and our house, was poetry—both our love for the art and the passion and frustration of trying to write it. When we moved to the farm, away from teaching and Jane’s family, we threw ourselves into the life of writing poetry as if we jumped from a bridge and swam to survive. I kept the earliest hours of the day for poetry. Jane worked on poems virtually every day; there were dry spells. In the first years of our marriage, I sometimes feared that she would find the project of poetry intimidating, and withdraw or give up or diminish the intensity of her commitment. I remember talking with her one morning early in New Hampshire, maybe in 1976, when the burden felt too heavy. She talked of her singing with the Michigan Chorale, as if music were something she might turn to. She spoke of drawing as another art she could perform, and showed me an old pencil rendering she had made, acorns I think, meticulous and well-made and nothing more. She was saying, “I don’t have to give myself to poetry”—and I knew enough not to argue.
However, from year to year she gave more of herself to her art. When she studied Keats, she read all his poems, all his letters, the best three or four biographies; then she read and reread the poems and the letters again. No one will find in her poems clear fingerprints of John Keats, but Jane’s ear became more luscious with her love for Keats; her lines became more dense, rifts loaded with ore. Coming from a family for whom ambition was dangerous, in which work was best taken lightly, it was not easy for Jane to wager her life on one number. She lived with someone who had made that choice, but also with someone nineteen years older who wrote all day and published frequently. Her first book of poems came out as I published my fifth. I could have been an inhibitor as easily as I was an encourager—if she had not been brave and stubborn. I watched in gratified pleasure as her poems became better and better. From being promising she became accomplished and professional; then—with the later poems of The Boat of Quiet Hours, with “Twilight: After Haying,” with “Briefly It Enters,” with “Things,” she turned into the extraordinary and permanent poet of Otherwise.
People asked us—people still ask me—about competition between us. We never spoke of it, but it had to be there—and it remained benign. When Jane wrote a poem that dazzled me, I wanted to write a poem that would dazzle her. Boundaries helped. We belonged to different generations. Through Jane I got to be friends with poets of her generation, as she did with my friends born in the 1920s. We avoided situations which would subject us to comparison. During the first years of our marriage, when Jane was just beginning to publish, we were asked several times to read our poems together. The people who asked us knew and respected Jane’s poems, but the occasions turned ghastly. Once we were introduced by someone we had just met who was happy to welcome Joan Kenyon. Always someone, generally a male English professor, managed to let us know that it was sweet, that Jane wrote poems too. One head of a department asked her if she felt dwarfed. When Jane was condescended to she was furious, and it was only on these occasions that we felt anything unpleasant between us. Jane decided that we would no longer read together.
When places later asked us both to read, we agreed to come but stipulated that we read separately, maybe a day apart. As she published more widely we were more frequently approached. Late in the 1980s, after reading on different days at one university, we did a joint question-and-answer session with writing students. Three quarters of the questions addressed Jane, not me, and afterwards she said, “Perkins, I think we can read together now.” So, in our last years together, we did many joint readings. When two poets read on the same program, the first reader is the warm-up band, the second the featured act. We read in fifteen-minute segments, ABAB, and switched A and B positions with each reading. In 1993 we read on a Friday in Trivandrum, at the southern tip of India, and three days later in Hanover, New Hampshire. Exhausted as we were, we remembered who had gone first thousands of miles away.
There were days when each of us received word from the same magazine; the same editor had taken a poem by one of us just as he/she rejected the other of us. One of us felt constrained in pleasure. The need for boundaries even extended to style. As Jane’s work got better and better—and readers noticed—my language and structure departed from its old habits and veered away from the kind of lyric that Jane was writing, toward irony and an apothegmatic style. My diction became more Latinate and polysyllabic, as well as syntactically complex. I was reading Gibbon, learning to use a vocabulary and sentence structure as engines of discrimination. Unconsciously, I was choosing to be as unlike Jane as I could. Still, her poetry influenced and enhanced my own. Her stubborn and unflagging commitment turned its power upon me and exhorted me. My poems got better in this house. When my Old and New Poems came out in 1990, the positive reviews included something like this sentence: “Hall began publishing early . . . but it was not until he left his teaching job and returned to the family farm in New Hampshire with his second wife the poet Jane Kenyon that . . .” I published Kicking the Leaves in 1978 when Jane published From Room to Room. It was eight years before we published our next books: her The Boat of Quiet Hours, my The Happy Man. (When I told Jane my title her reaction was true Jane: “Sounds too depressed.”) I had also been working on drafts of The One Day, maybe my best book. Then Jane wrote Let Evening Come, Constance, and the twenty late poems that begin Otherwise. Two years after her death, a review of Jane began with a sentence I had been expecting. It was uttered in respect, without a sneer, and said that for years we had known of Jane Kenyon as Donald Hall’s wife but from now on we will know of Donald Hall as Jane Kenyon’s husband.
We did not show each other early drafts. (It’s a bad habit. The comments of another become attached to the words of a poem, steering it or preventing it from following its own way.) But when we had worked over a poem in solitude for a long time, our first reader was the other. I felt anxious about showing Jane new poems, and often invented reasons for delay. Usually, each of us saved up three or four poems before showing them to the other. One day I would say, “I left some stuff on your footstool,” or Jane would tell me, “Perkins, there are some things on your desk.” Waiting for a response, each of us already knew some of what the other would say. If ever I repeated a word—a habit acquired from Yeats—I knew that Jane would cross it out. Whenever she used verbal auxiliaries she knew I would simplify, and “it was raining” would become “it rained.” By and large we ignored the predicted advice, which we had already heard in our heads and dismissed. Jane kept her work clear of dead metaphor, knowing my crankiness on the subject, and she would exult when she found one in my drafts: “Perkins! Here’s a dead metaphor!” These encounters were important but not easy. Sometimes we turned polite with each other: “Oh, really! I thought that was the best part . . .” (False laugh.) Jane told others—people questioned us about how we worked together—that I approached her holding a sheaf of her new poems saying, “These are going to be good!” to which she would say, “Going to be, eh?” She told people that she would climb back to her study, carrying the poems covered with my illegible comments, thinking, “Perkins just doesn’t get it. And then,” she would continue, “I’d do everything he said.”
Neither of us did everything the other said. Reading Otherwise I find words I wanted her to change, and sometimes I still think I was right. But we helped each other greatly. She saved me a thousand gaffes, cut my wordiness and straightened out my syntax. She seldom told me that anything was good. “This is almost done,” she’d say, “but you’ve got to do this in two lines not three.” Or, “You’ve brought this a long way, Perkins”—without telling me if I had brought it to a good place. Sometimes her praise expressed its own limits. “You’ve taken this as far as the intellect can take it.” When she said, “It’s finished. Don’t change a word,” I would ask, “But is it any good ? Do you like it?” I pined for her praise, and seldom got it. I remember one evening in 1992 when we sat in the living room and she read through the manuscript of The Museum of Clear Ideas. Earlier she had seen only a few poems at a time, and she had not been enthusiastic. I watched her dark face as she turned the pages. Finally she looked over at me and tears started from her eyes. “Perkins, I don’t like it!” Tears came to my eyes too, and I said, rapidly, “That’s okay. That’s okay.” (That book was anti-Jane in its manner, or most of it was, dependant on syntax and irony, a little like Augustan poetry, more than on images.) When we looked over each other’s work, it was essential that we never lie to each other. Even when Jane was depressed, I never praised a poem unless I meant it; I never withheld blame. If either of us had felt that the other was pulling punches, it would have ruined what was so essential to our house.
We were each other’s readers but we could not be each other’s only readers. I mostly consulted friends and editors by mail, so many helpers that I will not try to list them, poets from my generation and poets Jane’s age and even younger. Jane worked regularly, the last dozen years of her life, with the poet Joyce Peseroff and the novelist Alice Mattison. The three of them worked wonderfully together, each supplying things that the other lacked. They fought, they laughed, they rewrote and cut and rearranged. Jane would return from a workshop exhausted yet unable to keep away from her desk, working with wild excitement to follow suggestions. The three women were not only being literary critics for each other. Each had grown up knowing that it was not permitted for females to be as aggressive as males, and all were ambitious in their art, and encouraged each other in their ambition. I felt close to Alice and Joyce, my friends as well as Jane’s, but I did not stick my nose into their deliberations. If I had tried to, I would have lost a nose. Even when they met at our house, I was careful to stay apart. They met often at Joyce’s in Massachusetts, because it was half way between Jane and Alice. They met in New Haven at Alice’s. When I was recovering from an operation, and Jane and I didn’t want to be separated, there were workshops at the Lord Jeffrey Inn in Amherst. We four ate together and made pilgrimages to Emily Dickinson’s house and grave, but while they worked together I wrote alone in an adjacent room. This three-part friendship was essential to Jane’s poetry.
Meantime we lived in the house of poetry, which was also the house of love and grief; the house of solitude and art; the house of Jane’s depression and my cancers and Jane’s leukemia. When someone died whom we loved, we went back to the poets of grief and outrage, as far back as Gilgamesh; often I read aloud Henry King’s “The Exequy,” written in the seventeenth century after the death of his young wife. Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the complexities of feeling at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears. As I sat beside Jane in her pain and weakness I wrote about pain and weakness. Once in a hospital I noticed that the leaves were turning. I realized that I had not noticed that they had come to the trees. It was a year without seasons, a year without punctuation. I began to write “Without” to embody the sensations of lives under dreary, monotonous assault. After I had drafted it many times I read it aloud to Jane. “That’s it, Perkins,” she said. “You’ve got it. That’s it.” Even in this poem written at her mortal bedside there was companionship.
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Remote Control (prod 121)
Original airdate: August 2, 2005
Story by Magnus Scheving
Written by Noah Zachary, Cole Louie, Magnus Scheving
Directed by Magnus Scheving, Raymond P. Le Gue
Executive producers - Magnus Scheving, Ragnheidur Melsted, Raymond P. Le Gue, Mark Read, Brown Johnson, Kay Wilson Stallings
Starring Magnus Scheving, Stefan Karl Steffanson, Julianna Rose Mauriello
Puppeteers - Ronald Binion, Gudmondor Thor Karason, Jodi Eichelberger, David Matthew Feldman, Julie Westwood, Sarah Burgess
There was a time in history where this was my favourite episode of the show. It was also my mother's. No, I totally wasn't agreeing with her just because she is my mom, hehehe!!!! There was ALSO a time where I made a crappy YTP of this episode, but we will get into that latur (or never!!).
So, anyways, the episode begins with, whaddya know, a recycled cold open. This is the fourth time in Season 1 I've seen this cold open. Frankly it's just getting annoying. It's not even worth noting.
Stephanie runs into Milford's house telling him that she is gonna play football with her friends, and she is eating breakfast while Milford is talking about how he was so good at football, they called him Maddog Meanswell. Classic 'cooler-when-younger' trope in almost every show I've watched. Stephanie is drinking some orange juice (the new Badland Chugs??!!).
Then she exits so fast we barely see her. To practice, she throws a ball around and is running, and Robbie is watching her in disgust. Sportacus is of course, cartwheeling around town and sees her, to his excitement.
Just look at this dude. How can't you like him? So, Sportacus flippity flops over to her, and she asks if he can teach him to play football. And Robbie gasps and gags.. in a reused shot.. from the first ever episode they filmed of the show "Sports Day".. what is going on?
This. Is. Not. What. They. Meant. By. Recycling. Reusing. Or. Reducing. So, Stephanie goes to get Ziggy and Pixel. They run over to him, and Pixel trips over his shoelaces. And Stephanie.. is annoyed. "Oh, you just fell flat on your face? Don't care, blue kangaroo wants to play sports with us." What a kind soul!
Sportacus explains how to play and Pixel has to run for the touchdown. When they start the game, it's going well until Pixel trips AGAIN. So the ball flies and hits Robbie's spying thing and he falls over the railing. XD LOL ROFL!!!!
So, it seems that in the span of .. however long that was, Pixel totally disappeared and went home.. and he suddenly has a shoe-tying gadget. The guy has a HOARD of electronic devices. He could've just searched up a video on how to tie them with your hands. This is 2004. (And YouTube was made in 2005, but you get my point..)
Then he returns, telling them he had to go tie his shoes. They say he could have done that on the field, but he says he'd have to bring his Shoe Tier 6000. Dude, I don't think this is the 6000th shoe tier you've made.. So they all leave Sportacus (the jerks!) without telling him (the even bigger jerks) all alone. But I don't think he really cared.
Meanwhile, Robbie is in his lair, demonstrating how much useless sports there are, basketball, baseball, football, and he cracks his posterior and arm bones in the process. Robbie wishes there was a way to control Sportacus. 4SHADOEEENGGUHHH!!
Everyone is impressed by his gagdet until Stephanie speaks up and says that it'd be easier to just learn how to tie them. But it wouldn't. But, then again, you'd have to bring it everywhere if your shoes untied. So she has a point. Pixel says that he doesn't have to memorize it this way because he already has a machine that does it for him, then he brings up the RIDICULOUS, STUPID idea to make a machine that does everything for him.
Stephanie doesn't like the idea, but the one time Lover Boy doesn't listen to Stephanie JUST has to be this one. So they perform Gizmo Guy, a new, updated down- I mean UPgrade from Easy Way, which was rejected by Nickelodeon because of the word 'thingy'.. sometimes.. I just don't even know. I think it'd have been cool if Easy Way was in 117 and Gizmo Guy stayed in this episode, like they did with 'No one's Lazy' & 'Take a Vacation'. By the end of the song, Pixel has finished crafting the one and only Remote Controller 6000.
This time the Remote Controller 6000 can tie your shoes (oh, so solution, use the remote control because it's more lightweight!), untie your shoes, reverse, turn off all TVs, turn ON all TVs, freeze, do your homework, basically anything! Ziggy drops the lollipop on the floor, and Pixel rewinds it. They do the trick another time.. and Ziggy LICKS the lollipop the second time, because of the three second rule. MY GUY, THAT WAS NOT THREE SECONDS. Even Steph is disgusted.
But she kinda looks like a vampire in the above screenshot for some reason. So, Stephanie decides to go tell Sportacus the news of Pixel's invention.. then runs away because the remote control is gonna do her homework. But Sportacus is doing some practice and warmups. So the gang are hanging out, and the remote control does Stephanie's homework in 4 seconds. HOMEWORK IN FOUR SECONDS WOULD BE HEAVENLY.
For a while, Pixel is totally obsessed with his remote control, and he even plays football, baseball and basketball using it. But Stephanie and Ziggy get bored. In fact, Steph is so bored she starts checking her nails. You have to be the most bored person on the universe to do that unironically.
So, they get mad at Pixel, and they go away to do something like a real game until Ziggy starts yapping. AND PIXEL TURNS HIS VOLUME DOWN. THAT IS SUCH A CRAPPY THING TO DO, REMOTE CONTROL OR NOT. So, then Stephanie tells him to put his volume up, but then we see Ziggy angry moment (!!!!!!!!!!) about how you can't do that to people.
So once they try to leave, Pixel.. freezes Ziggy solid like a popsicle (in his own words). What a little french fry hair boy. This just makes me mad, personally if I was ice cream hair boy I wouldn't take that kind of disrespect.. but they are too mad to talk to Pixel, but another problem has arised - Robbie heard it and saw it all.
He has the idea to remote control Sportacus FOREVER!! Meanwhile, Pixel gets kinda bored and he throws away the remote control. Unfortunately, Robbie has been busting his butt off finding this thing, and it lands in a bin he's carrying after riding a skateboard on accident.
REEMOOOTEEE CONTROOOOLLL!!! XD, Stefan was hilarious. RIP. So, anyways, he dances of happiness, and then Milford walks into town. Robbie makes the skateboard go forward and Milford steps onto it.
Depending on what he crashes into, he could be injured seriously hard if Sportacus wasn't in town. So Robbie is a really devious man. But Sportacus is on the rescue and he gets him off by spinning the puppet around which looks funnier then it is. Sportacus stops the skateboard by doing an astonishing flip and landing on it.
After Sportacus makes sure that Milford is okay, Robbie realizes that the problem is Sportacus, so Robbie freezes him mid frontflip. Genuinely surprised that he managed to do that.
So, anyways, Milford is asking him if he's sleeping, and he whispers that he likes taking naps too. XD! But Robbie isn't amused and he freezes Milford too. So, Stephanie and Ziggy see the freeze victims and ask themselves why Pixel did it, then Robbie reveals he did it (villians always lie but not this softie..) and mutes them.. then he freezes them while Stephanie proves she could have a career as a poser for YouTube clickbaiting thumbnails.
Meanwhile, Robbie decides to have a little fun with Sportacus. (This scene is exactly why my mum declares this her favourite episode.) He makes him run in fast forward, freezes him, makes him run backwards, and.. makes him do.. the cha cha cha. Cha cha, real sporty.
Then he makes him do a spinning flip.. for fifteen seconds. Then he throws a ball at him and freezes him as he catches it in mid-air. Frozeacus. XD. Pixel walks in and tries to run to save them, but trips over his shoelaces, and he TIES THEM HIMSELF. AFTER ALL THAT COMMOTION. MY. GOD. So, Robbie calls for a truck to run Sportacus over, but he clicks the Wildlife Channel instead.
XD. The truck is only like 2 seconds away from riding Sportacus over, but then Robbie fumbles it up. He tries pressing the fast forward button.. but he FACES IT AT HIMSELF. And he throws the control into the air, and Pixel catches it, playing Sportacus, when he shoulda been run over like 30 seconds ago..
So Sportacus kicks the ball away, uses the digger of the truck as a launching pad, frontflips into the driver's seat and stops the truck. Then Pixel unfreezes everyone, and he says he found a better gadget, his own body. Then they perform Bing Bang. Pixel plays with Robbie, then he unfreezes him and he falls into his lair, flopping on the floor.
He stands up and walks off camera then the episode ends.
It was kinda good, actually.
8/10
youtube
#youtube#lazytown#sportacus#nickelodeon#stephanie#robbie rotten#magnusscheving#magnus scheving#stefan karl#nick jr#nickelodeon jr#spongebob#comedy#humor#reviews#tv shows#stefankarl#juliannarose#juliannarosemauriello#latibaer#glanni glaepur#glanni glæpur í latabæ#afram latibaer#lazy town#latib��r
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Entry #1
Friday August 18th, 2023 4:10 pm
I am personally making my entries in the mature section so that not everyone can read them. I mean I am sure that people will still read them regardless but this is a way for me to be even more anonymous. Here are some things that happened: I lost both my grandparents from my mother's side, I lost my father recently (his anniversary date will be next week), and I don't have many friends. My mother is currently trying to pick my brother up from school (he started three days ago) and I am trying not to lose my mind.
I feel like I am always somewhat living under my mother's shadow. She was really popular, had fun twenties, and had perfect skin and body. What am I doing? Currently getting the most useless degree on this planet, gaining weight rapidly, and breaking out bad. With my dad's recent passing and my low self-esteem, I really feel like I am at my lowest. I still haven't seen my boyfriend after getting back from Japan and doing all the funeral stuff. I just don't want him to see me as I am right now. When my brother comes back I will ask him for help on working out and getting to the gym. If I have the opportunity to take action now and change I will do it.
I will also like to note that I am getting random jitters or tremors. This could be due to stress but it's been happening since April. After I came back from my Kansai trip to Japan, I was bitten by a Nara deer and scratched by an Arashiyama monkey and for months I would think I have rabies (even though Japan has practically eradicated rabies). I just have a very anxious mind and I don't know how to help myself. I always think of the worst-case scenario and when one part of my body hurts I think I have cancer or some sort of disease. I hope this will go away but I have a feeling it won't, and that's okay. I haven't talked to friends or seen them, but I would feel bad if I did so before my mom. I want her to be happy first before me. She has gone through a lot of shit and I would feel selfish and bad if I went out with friends. At the same time, I think seeing friends and hanging out with them might help with me mentally, especially with everything that has gone on.
My grandmother (father's side) is going to leave on Monday which I am sad about, but at least my grandpa will stay (father's side). I have to write my cover letters next week for my future field study internship (yuck). Oh well. Nothing else to write for now, if something else happens later I will make another entry.
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i’ve been watching Handsome Siblings on netflix only in chinese to just like. see where i’m at.
and now that i’m on ep 4 it would feel kind of weird to suddenly switch back to english subs ok, for one.
but anyway like general level-wise: i am pretty much at where i can follow a lot of the gist of scenes even if i don’t pause to translate - but then i’m going to be relying on visual context a lot more. which is fine, it means i can go watch a show with no english subs to rely on Ever and at least follow along.
i do notice that if i PAUSE, i can catch the specifics of a lot more scenes. There’s a scene where the two princess sisters are talking to their nephew (who is a spitting image of Jiang Feng), and then after he leaves - discussing telling him to go take a mission to kill Xiao Yu’er, and then when he leaves the two princesses discuss their plan. I paused over and over after EVERY line that episode, because I really wanted to know the specifics of what they were saying. A lot of lines I could read, and there were a lot of one-words-in-a-sentence i had to look up for a more precise understanding. Same with a scene later in the town said-nephew and his girl kickass companions go to - i could follow the gist, but paused after some lines (and looked up a couple words) for more specific details.
I will say that the more characters you learn, the easier life is. Really! The more characters I know, the easier my gist-guess is right, the easier remembering new words (made up of known characters) is, and looking up new words is VASTLY easier because I know their pinyin and can look them up faster than drawing.
If you’re going to do this: I’d still recommend using googletranslate to look up multiple characters you don’t know/phrases, since you can draw and easily get the correct result looked up. I’d recommend pleco if you know the pinyin, or if its a single word (because pleco’s definitions are more thorough and explanatory than googletranslate’s), or if it might be an idiom.
I would recommend that if you like watching stuff on the computer, to get the learn-with-netflix dual subtitle add on, and just click your subtitles for a definition on-the-video-itself instead of needing to open an app like me.
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I am immensely excited and happy that I can watch a chinese show with no english and follow the gist now. That is a huge amount of progress for me compared with August 2019 when I started (and only knew ‘ni hao/wo hen hao’ and the numbers ;w; ). I am so proud of where I’ve gotten to. I definitely think really focusing on increasing known frequent words helps a lot. (Also, reading a grammar guide - grammar is again becoming understandable, so idk my brain is just acclimating again i guess). I’m going to keep focusing on frequent words, and the 2,000 most common characters, for a while and hopefully eventually this payoff will translate to reading as well.
If you DO happen to want to try watching a chinese show without english and testing yourself/studying, I have some mild recommendations you might take into consideration.
1. If it’s too difficult, do it a little, then come back to it in a few weeks, repeat. This task really only gets enjoyable once you understand enough to be ‘comfortable’ with the remaining ambiguity you still don’t comprehend. That is going to be different for different people. I am comfortable with a pretty high amount of ambiguity/lack of understanding, so I can at least try to watch even stuff-i-barely-grasp at least a little for practice until my brain feels fried. But I’ve been trying this for months... its only NOW that my brain feels relatively okay just watching without pausing, without feeling Completely overwhelmed. And if you do intend to watch without pausing much, you’ll have some degree of not-understanding-everything. Likewise, if you plan to pause the show (and how much you plan to pause it) should be tolerable for you as well. If you have to pause everything, understand everything - do you know enough words to do that in a timely enough manner to get THROUGH an episode? If it takes you a long time, are you willing to intensively focus and look things up that entire time? Basically - what is your tradeoff between you being able to pause and focus intensively on looking things up, versus you being able to watch without pausing and interpret from the words you know/context only. Whatever balance is most enjoyable/bearable for you is when this will start being something that’s easier to do regularly, instead of only occasionally as practice. At least, that’s how it was for me. I’m only finally at a point where I can do this regularly - before I could only do this for maybe 10-20 minute chunks of time occasionally.
2. Pick a genre of show/material you are going to engage in frequently. If you’re ALWAYS watching case-type shows, those words and those scenes will be more familiar to you and easier for you to interpret from context and with less looking things up. If you try this with a wildly different kind of show, you may know MANY less words and many scenes may be harder for you to comprehend the gist of. I watch a TON of case type shows so they’re very easy for me to see and pick up words I’m familiar with, single out the parts that are ‘important explanation’ versus ‘some crowd saying unimportant WOW oh No how Horrible’ type lines. So i can cherry pick important things to pause and look up words for, and guess at what kind of line i’m trying to interpret (i can guess if it’s about a case, an emotional discussion, a simple ‘lets do X’ statement etc - because i’m familiar with the plot type). In a similar vein - an easier show/material to do this with, may well be a show you’ve already watched in your native language/with your native language. For all the same reasons - you will be much more familiar with the context. I could in theory watch Guardian again (which i’ve rewatched... a lot) and I would probably follow the plot very easily. But I like a challenge too much apparently, and I’d rather practice with things I can’t fall-back on my existing knowledge for as much. A show I’ve never seen has much less I can rely on for context, BUT the trade off is I can really clearly test how well i’m comprehending the plot and lines - because they are all completely new to me, so I either comprehend or I clearly do not understand what’s going on/obviously misinterpret. So it’s a very quick way for me to see if I’m achieving anything or not. Whereas if I was watching a show I already saw, I might learn new words noticably, but I wouldn’t be able to tell if I’m getting better at understanding overall plot with no english to rely on (since I already saw it before with english).
3. If you’re like me - maybe pick a show either heavy on action, or heavy on daily life. While I am familiar with case-type shows... I generally think (for me) they’re harder to follow when your existing vocab knowledge isn’t high enough to follow it... They’re big on mysteries, on plots that are actually not what they appear, and surprises. They’re big on ‘strategies’ and I find for myself, strategies are kind of hard to follow when I know less words. In contrast: if you pick a daily-life type show, you’re more likely to either know the words or NEED to know the words at some point because they’ll be useful to you. And the scenes should be relatively easy to comprehend visually even when you don’t know the words. (My caveat being - if you want the language specifically FOR understanding certain genres, by all means go for the topics you’ll actually be using - if you’re gonna read a ton of wuxia, or case-stuff etc, then go for stuff you’ll Actually Use which might well be THEM). For me... my end goal is to be able to read creative fiction, so wuxia settings and fantastical settings and mystery-words and period-words are all things I better get used to. So I haven’t really watched much daily-life stuff (although there are daily-life scenes WITHIN a lot of dramas, and I do think they’re some of the easiest scenes to follow and comprehend).
Now, why might you pick an action-heavy show: easy to comprehend. Especially if you often watch action-oriented stuff already. The first chinese show I watched a whole episode of in only-chinese (it’s first episode, so that’s when i figured out the entire show’s set up) was The Shaw Eleven Lang (I really wanted more of Zhu Yilong’s acting in my life okay?). I DID in fact, manage to follow the plot. Without pausing much, because I was just watching it with dinner. What made it easier to follow was SO MUCH of the dialogue was really straightforward - stuff like ‘i want that sword’ or ‘i hate you’ or ‘lets eat and drink together to celebrate’ or ‘you need to go save/kill x’ or ‘do you think i’m pretty’ etc. So much of the dialogue was NOT schemes/plots/mysteries, it was really straightforward ‘we are doing X, we like Y, we hate Z’. Which for me are the sentence types I find the easiest to understand, and especially found the easiest at that point in time. In addition, because the show has so much action, often the dialogue is accompanied by action scenes that make it pretty freaking CLEAR what their objective is/what they just said. Yes, there are still plenty of unknown words to look up if you want to pause - but it should be obvious enough that you might have a decent guess at what they mean before you look them up (I had to look up words like sword, princess, clan leader, but those were pretty clear even beforehand from the context of the scenes). After I watched the first ep (which i don’t think i could even find english subs for), I watched the second ep with eng subs to see if i’d interpreted the plot correctly so far - i had. It felt pretty motivating to get through 40 minute episodes without much pausing, and know I’d followed along. I think, at least if you’re already an action-show/movie watcher, action series are going to be a relatively approachable thing to try watching in just your target language. (Another positive is a lot of verbs as commands lines, in context, so for me it’s easier to pick up new verbs, and those kind of lines are very easy to pick up in context - also lines like ‘xiao xin’ be careful, bubi, meiguanshi, danxin, ni fangxin, etc - all these short lines that are easy to understand in the context they often come up in).
(Also, do I recommend The Shaw Eleven Lang? Well... I need to go back to watching it but uh... it’s definitely AN EXPERIENCE... with wild fighter-game-tetsuya-nomura-would-be-proud kind of costume designs, wild af scenes so far, and uh as far as i can tell Zhu Yilong’s on point to play a pretty crazy bastard in it... also there’s a LOT of genuinely kickass girls and kickass main women, which i appreciate, i believe also the main women are all 30+ which is refreshing in general in any-show tbh. also just... everyone in the show is kickass... that’s the point... its a lot like to me, if a absolutely Wild fighting game got a budget for a full drama and just went wild on the plot - very fun to watch, very bizarre... not particularly deep but like, did you play Square enix’s The Bouncer on ps2 for a Good Plot or for an absolutely wild bizarre Time? This show is like the game The Bouncer... just freaking Wild conceptually).
And now, I am watching Handsome Siblings, and managing to get through episodes with only a little pausing for when I want to figure out specifics. It is also very action-scene heavy. At least for me, that’s been making it a lot easier to follow the gist of. There’s scenes where robbers attack - and even if I don’t know every line, its easy to figure out the gist of what’s being said. There’s scenes where people fight - again, very easy to follow. The parts I’ve been pausing the most on are the sisters plotting, because I feel that’s probably the most intensive-mystery in this plot so far, and because I want to make sure I interpret the details correctly when they’re mentioning them (since I think they’ll play out more in the plot later). I think the fact this show is Action-Heavy is making it tremendously easier for me to follow then like... me trying to watch Nirvana in Fire would be. The very straightforward action scenes are much easier to follow using visual context, at least for me, compared to dialogue heavy scenes where the vocabulary is not going to be emphazised with visuals nearly as much. (Another bonus of Handsome Siblings, at least so far, is the dialogue heavy scenes ARE accompanied by visual flashbacks to EXPLAIN the dialogue). Another bonus for Handsome Siblings: the writing seems very straightforward and decently paced. You don’t have to wait long for new scenes, for new developments, and that means a lot of dialogue and action is doing something right away and has a lot of context you immediately see result in something else. For me that just makes it... approachable and understandable in the kind of way like... movies like The Mummy were paced, or Indiana Jones, or Independence Day... do you know what I mean? It’s fun to watch even if you couldn’t understand, and the structure makes it quite comprehensible again even if you heard no dialogue at all. So for me, at least, it makes the balance of ‘ease of watching versus patience to look things up slowly’ much easier. Because its ease of watching is pretty high even for scenes where actual words-you-know isn’t high, so you can save looking-things-up for only when you WANT to, not necessarily as something you need to constantly do just to catch the gist.
---
I tried reading again - I tried reading the novel for the Sleuth of Ming Dynasty. It was BRUTAL because I apparently know NO dynasty-royalty-govt related words (which really explains why Men With Swords political scenes I know so few words lol). I got through 10 out of 39 ‘small’ pages on my phone for the first chapter. I think I managed to follow it, the grammar thankfully was really straightforward and I imagine the original author is quite talented. The difficulty was in the very common use of turns of phrase and idioms for so many parts of sentences, which were all new ‘words/phrases’ i’d never seen before.
#handsome siblings#chinese studyblr#rant#nts#watch progress#a lot of this is notes for myself but if anyone finds it useful thats cool#i am just. so happy about the progress#a few months ago watching a show in all chinese was a pipe dream#and in august that would have been completely unimaginable#i really... started in august practically useless
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♡ Becoming my dream girl ♡
Thank you @2pretty for your amazing guide ♡
My dream girl is an improved and elegant version of myself. She practices self care on her daily basis through every single attitude and decision. She isn't dramatic or exhagerated, she's perfectly balanced and thinks before speaking anything that could destroy her peace or others'. She manages to keep up with all her college activities and business tasks while looking put together, awake and beautiful. She's smart and studies every week day for both college and work but still taking weekends to rest and find balance. She has the ability to prep beautiful dishes, she's very body-active, learned Spanish in some months by herself and has a lot of money invested so she can get her family a house. She's full of an elegance that comes from within and she shows a bit of it through her social media by sharing a sneak peak into her lifestyle.
♡ 15 facts about my dream girl ♡
she studies at least 1:30h every week day.
she knows how to start the day and she takes the weekends to slow down, rest and to prepare for the coming week both mentally and by scheduling actitivies.
she never misses any appointment and she does everything in advance.
she is well spoken and has etiquette.
she's always put together, head to toe and a beautiful bright smile.
she knows how to keep her house clean, organized and beautiful.
she is fit and has a great body control because she gets active at least three times a week.
she speaks Portuguese, English and Spanish.
she has saved $20k and she has built up the best investments.
her wardrobe is full of versatile pretty items and she wear everything with grace always expressing her true self. She doesn't have any defective or useless item on her wardrobe.
she never puts herself in danger, she always takes the best decisions for her own comfort and safety.
she knows how to balance thoughts and she thinks twice before starting any discussion that may destroy her or others' peace.
she keeps in touch with her family calling them every Friday and visiting her mom every other weekend.
she knows how to make beautiful and delicious dishes.
her social media are clean and they only add up to her elegant manners.
♡ Becoming her ♡
♡ Every day habits
Always take an uber drive when you go to unknown or to unsafe places
Get the groceries mostly online so you don't come home with heavy bags
Face washing and shower every morning followed by a nice and healthy breakfast
Study at least 1h for school and 30 min for business
Schedule and set alarms for every appointment a day or hours before it's due
Daily teeth care
Think a lot before saying anything that could start fights or disagreements
Always practice making beautiful dishes, even for simple meals
♡ June (1, 2, 7)
I will focus on getting used to having classes and to study again. So I must study every week day and be consistent on my morning routine. I must keep balanced my work and my studies so I really need to schedule everything on my work. I must start getting my body active again. On the first 2 weeks I should save 2 days for either working out, dancing, stretching out or to do yoga. Then I must add one more day. I will take Mondays to clean my apartment.
♡ July (5, 6)
Time to focus on getting furnitures I still miss, especially for the living room and for my bedroom. I will save 1k in my currency for that. I must get decor items for both and to make a little comfort space in my bedroom. My hair always annoys me because I usually feel like it's not put together and it messes a lot with my overall look along with my nails, I get to change that. My teeth are quite yellow and I'm hating it, go back to a beautiful bright smile lady. I'm dying to get my nails done but I keep on saving it for later so I don't spend money on nails. This month will require a lot of money but I'm ashamed of my apartment's look and I don't want that anymore, I want to be proud of it.
♡ August (10)
I'm hoping now that I started to slowly get new clothes on June, along with makeup, but this is the time to make it more intense, to get more at once and to throw out every item that I feel ashamed about whether because it's old or because it's defective.
♡ September (8, 15)
My birthday month and break from college, so I expect using my free time in a productive yet relaxing way: improving my Spanish. I will already have built a nicer enviroment, willl be already using better clothes and looking put together all the time, so I can also start focusing on my instagram, start making tiktok videos and maybe a Youtube channel.
♡ October (4, 14)
Time to focus on good manners and to work on creating beautiful meals. I will learn these mostly from Youtube videos and blogs, but traditional books won't be left behind if I can have any.
♡ November (2, 3)
A month to work harder on scheduling and doing things in advance so I can exceed 9 and make it $40k instead.
♡ December (1, 3, 9)
The last college semester has come, time for the last exams of the year so it's important to study every day and to get things done days before due. A hard month for business so both schedules should be aligned and I will end the year with more than double the first goal.
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known sources: 3rd pic, food pic, 1st and 5th pics, 6th pic
my updates: click here
#dream girl#dgg#lifestyle#womeninbusiness#successful#successful woman#successful women#powerful women#business girl#business woman#luxury lifestyle#beauty#black women in luxury#romanticize#routine#morning routine#growth#personal growth#self improvement#self development#way to wealthy#wealth#wealthy women
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Time and Time Again - CHANGBIN
I cannot believe this is finished??? I feel like I say this every time but genuinely I didn’t think this would get done until maybe bin’s birthday in August but I somehow finished it the second day of January?? Anyway, I really loved this (the concept LITERALLY came to me in a dream), and I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it :)
(The idea that prompted this response to a @quillstarters challenge is the same one that inspired this story :D)
Pairing: Changbin x gender neutral!reader
Genre: fluff, angst, reincarnation!au, soulmate!au
Triggers: death, mentions of suicide, blood (nothing graphic)
Word Count: 10.8k
A vengeful god curses one hundred lifetimes of your love.
SKZ Masterlist
In your first life, the life that starts it all, your mother knows magic.
She’s a healer, one whose patients come from all walks of life, all over the world. From that first lifetime, you remember the heavy, comforting smell of dried herbs, the softness of her hair tickling your face, the shimmers of magic emanating from her practiced fingers into bubbling pots.
You sort of remember a father, hazy memories of a smiling man who wasn’t home very often but when he was, liked to pick you up and swing you around the room. He isn’t around by the time you’re six, maybe seven, though.
You know not to ask about it. The first time you did, your mother’s face just turned sad, an awful sort of sad that looked more like regret and repentance and anger and desolation. It takes a few more slip ups, but eventually you learn to ignore your curiosities. For though your mother never outright dismisses them, they upset her, and you never get a straight response.
Until the god arrives.
They appear in a shower of blinding light. Cold, white sparks burst into brilliant rainbows that fade in the air. You watch, mesmerized, even as your mother drags you away.
The god is beautiful. Fine, androgynous features, red eyes as soulful as song, lush locks of hair that tumble around their shoulders. But it is the severity in their face, as well as the bloodred bow and the bone-tipped arrow nocked in their hands that tell you who they are.
“You hid yourself well, disciple of Hekate.” Cupid’s beautiful lips curl in a mocking smile that doesn’t even attempt to disguise the anger in their eyes. “Eight years. I applaud you.”
Three slow, ominous claps echo loudly in the room.
You look up at your mother, heart about to leap out of your chest. Her face has gone pale, devoid of color. It only scares you more.
Cupid’s eyes flicker to you, clutching your mother’s skirts like a toddler. They freeze you in place. “So she never told you.”
Told me what?
“You never wondered where your father was, child?”
All the breath stops in your throat.
My father?
The god shakes his head disapprovingly. “It’s the least you could have done, sorceress.”
“What would you have me do?” Your mother’s voice brims with desperation and anger – though aimed at whom, you aren’t sure. “How could a child ever understand?”
“You should never have made the mistake in the first place.”
Understood what? Your eyes flit between the god and your mother. “Mother?” you whisper, tugging at her sleeve. “Mother, what do they mean?”
The story spills out in broken fragments. Your father had a liaison with your mother and she found she was pregnant with you. She loved him, but he didn’t want to stay. So she dabbled in forbidden magic. Gave a love potion to a man who did not care for her.
You were born. He realized, eventually, what she had done. Then he left, leaving you without a father.
You can’t even try to speak when the story is over. It feels as though you can’t breathe, can’t feel, can’t see anything beyond the god’s blood red eyes. Fingers cling to your mother’s skirts numbly as you attempt to process the flow of words that just passed through your ears.
Dimly, you register your mother pulling free from your hands to kneel on the floor. “Do with me as you see fit,” she whispers.
“With you?” Cupid laughs. The sound tears at the silence in the room. “What use would that be? No, I think your child will pay for your crimes.” They pin you under their gaze. “Yes, I see many lifetimes of pain in these eyes that would suffice.”
You don’t understand. You can’t understand. What does the god want with you? What have you done to anger them? It was your mother who committed the error, not you. Why must you pay for it? Your heart pounds faster and faster as their eyes refuse to waver.
“Yes.” They nod, finally satisfied. “A heart broken one hundred times will pay for your crime.” Cupid lifts their bow and arrow, aiming at your heart.
Your mother’s head snaps up. “You would condemn my child’s love to centuries of turmoil?” Her voice shakes with barely controlled anger. “You would punish my child for my mistakes? Take me instead!”
Cupid’s cruel eyes flicker between you and her. “Love is hardly fair, as you should well know,” they snarl. “By meddling in my affairs, you have secured your child’s fate.”
Their gaze fixes on you with the intensity of a thousand suns. You shrink under their glare, even as their eyes gain some semblance of softness. For a moment, it seems as though the god will take pity on you.
Then the arrow sinks into your chest, exploding into a shower of the god’s cold sparks. No blood flows but your chest throbs.
Through a dim haze of pain, as though they speak through water, you hear the god speak their final words.
“A hundred lifetimes will pass before I will allow your love to rest.”
. . . . .
It takes years, really, for the information to sink in. You don’t fault your mother entirely for her actions – raising a child alone is hard, you come to know as you grow older. But at the same time, you can’t find respect for a man who would abandon a woman he had a relationship with over the birth of a child. You can’t understand why your mother would love such a person, can’t quite understand love in general. You know you love your mother, of course, but what does such an emotion really mean?
You learn the meaning at age twenty in your first life when you meet Seo Changbin.
Your mother rushes into the house that day, almost collapsing under his unconscious weight. You immediately zero in on the huge gash on his leg that’s still leaking blood, despite the makeshift bandage, and start pulling down the necessary salves and potions.
He doesn’t wake up for a week. Other patients filter in and out of the little hut as the days go by and you dutifully do your best to treat them all, gently treating scrapes and brewing tonics. There’s something about the man lying unconscious and feverish at the back of the hut, though, that draws you in like a moth to a flame. Day by day, you sit by him when you can, wiping the sweat off of his forehead with cool cloths, forcing brews down his throat and dabbing creams onto his leg to fight the infection.
He doesn’t look like one of the gentlemen that sometimes come to town. He doesn’t seem like he has the stately grace of Hwang Hyunjin, the lord’s heir, nor does he exude the cold elegance of Choi Chanhee, the magistrate’s son.
So this man is probably a commoner, if your deductions are correct. But you know almost everyone in the village – they’ve all come to the healer’s hut at some point and met you – and this boy’s face is new. You don’t recognize him, not at all.
You wake up to a soft crash in the middle of the night, then the sound of a loud curse. For a moment, you lie back down on your pillow. Probably Mother.
Then you sit bolt upright. That was a man’s voice. Not your mother’s.
Thieves?
Then you realize.
He’s woken up!
Large, terrified eyes glow in the flickering light of your candle when you enter the healing ward, carefully holding your hands in a purposeful gesture of surrender. “Hello,” you say, trying not to fixate on the beauty of the boy’s eyes. “My name is Y/N. My mother found you in the forest with an infected wound and brought you to our home for treatment.”
He glares at you, still distrustful, but speaks. “How long have I been here?”
“Almost a week.”
The boy visibly tenses. “One week?”
“Yes.” You step forward. “And I would advise you not to leave for at least another two, given the condition of your leg. Wherever you’re going, if you go now, the infection will kill you before you get far.”
“How long will I have?” he asks.
You raise an eyebrow. “Are you suicidal?”
For several tense seconds, you stare at each other, neither backing down. Finally, the boy lowers his gaze. “Fine,” he says, the fight leaving his voice. He smiles a little, apologetically. “I’ll stay. Thank you for treating me.”
“You’re welcome.” You help him back onto the cot. “Now try to sleep. I’ll come back to check on you in the morning.”
Just before you fall asleep, you think of large, brown eyes and petulant lips. For some reason, they make you smile.
. . .
His name is Changbin, you come to learn after several days of pained grunts, spilled salve, and muted conversation. He won’t tell you where he comes from, but a name is far better than nothing. At least you have confirmation that he isn’t a local, and he smiles too much for you to suspect him as a murderer.
That would be unpleasant.
And Changbin is the opposite of unpleasant. He has this smile, a smile that no matter how small, is bright enough to light up the room. He’s so smart when it comes to life but he’s also a little dumb, really, telling bad jokes that make you roll your eyes but laugh anyway. He snorts when you tell your own stupid stories and insulting jokes and as a result, you think of more and more for him, more tall tales and bad puns just so you can hear that beautiful laugh that sounds like a cross between wedding bells and a pig’s snort.
He stays for your recommended two weeks, then another, and another. Your mother doesn’t mind, only smiles at him like he was her own son. Changbin isn’t useless, after all – he helps you tend to the herb garden, chops wood for the fire, and is receptive to the eventual lessons you give him on the basics of healing.
(And if you stare at his muscles when he lifts heavy pots over the fire, what of it?)
The boy your mother found so many weeks ago in the woods lights up your life in a way you’ve never experienced before. Even though it makes you feel guilty, sometimes you’re glad that Changbin injured himself in the forest. Otherwise, you might never have met the boy who sits with you shoulder to shoulder on the bank of the river that runs through the woods, laughs ringing through the trees.
“Y/N,” he says on one of those quiet days by the river. When you look up from your feet dangling feet in the swift current and when you look up, you find Changbin staring at you with something so soft, so deep in his gaze that you can’t decipher it.
(It makes your heart thump.)
“Hm?” You pull your feet out of the water, feeling almost shy as you meet his eyes.
“Have you ever been kissed?”
When Changbin kisses you that afternoon under a green canopy of leaves, golden light showering his dark hair and tanned skin, you can’t think. There are no thoughts of anything in your head (and certainly none of Cupid’s curse) except the euphoria of his lips against yours. With his mouth pressed softly to yours, you feel like you’re flying, drifting on the breeze without a care in the world. It’s bliss, pure bliss.
Your mother knows when you walk back into the hut, suppressing an uncontrollable smile. Her gaze remains carefully neutral for the rest of the day, but when Changbin has gone outside to chop wood, she speaks. “You know about the curse.”
Dread mixes with the bliss in your heart. Your head hangs over the herbs you’re grinding. “Yes, Mother.”
“Darling, look at me.” She turns you around, and you see the tears building in the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
There’s bitterness in your chest and mouth, tingeing the tip of your tongue, but this is your mother, the woman who bore you and cared for you alone for so much of your life. Though angry words rise in your throat, they never make it past your lips.
“It’s okay, Mother.” You brush the tears away, valiantly holding your own back. “I can’t blame you for a mistake you made in the name of love.” Blind, blind hope rises in your chest. “Maybe the god forgot. Maybe they will have mercy.”
Your mother just looks at you with dreadful eyes, eyes haunted by the knowledge that your words will prove false. But Changbin’s already coming back inside and the fluttering happiness in your heart from seeing him expels all negative thoughts from your mind.
One year passes in domestic bliss. Your mother never brings up the curse again, and you push any thought of it to the back of your mind. Changbin’s kisses do much to dispel any worries of yours, anyway.
Late one night, curled in a blanket next to the fire, Changbin tells you the reason he came. “I left because of a family dispute,” he says, almost ashamedly, staring into the flickering flames. “I had a falling out with my father, and he told me to leave. Even though I knew he really didn’t mean it, even though my mother pleaded with me to stay, I… I left anyway.”
You hold him closer under the blanket, comforting him with your warmth. In the light of the fire, his eyes look ghostly against the dark.
“I’m telling you this now because I want to go back.”
Your heart freezes.
Back? He wants to go back to his village, go back home… and leave you behind?
But Changbin’s smiling now, slightly. It settles your heart a little – he couldn’t speak of leaving you forever and smile in the same sentence, could he? You look at him, eyes pleading with him to continue.
“I want to go back to apologize,” he says, squeezing your hand. “I want to go back to make amends. But I’ll come back to the home I have here.”
“Can I come with you?” you can’t help but ask, even though you’re sure you know the answer.
He shakes his head, and your heart sinks. “No, I think this is something I have to do myself. But I won’t stay, I promise you that. I’ll come back home.”
“Promise?” you ask, voice barely a whisper over the crackling flames. Your fingers clutch his desperately. He has to come back, or you’ll go with him.
“I promise.” He lifts a thin silver chain from his neck, a necklace he’s never taken off since he arrived, and loops it around your throat. “That’s my promise, all right? I’m leaving this with you because I know I’ll return. And when I do…” He sweeps one of your hands out of the blanket and places a gentle kiss on it. “I’m going to marry you.” A note of uncertainty enters his gaze. “Unless you… uh, unless you don’t want to?”
You tug your hand out of his and punch him in the arm. “Are you stupid, Seo Changbin?” you ask over his yelps of mock pain. Eyes turning shy, you smile. “Of course I do.”
Your heart explodes in bliss when he kisses you, the fire’s warmth dancing on his lips.
. . .
“No more than two months,” he promises you the day he leaves. “I’ll come home.”
He keeps looking back and you keep waving as he starts out into the forest, green leaves beginning to shroud his path. The last you see of him is his bright smile as he disappears between the trees, the gentle pressure of his lips still a memory against yours.
One month passes, then two. You wait outside the hut eagerly every day, waiting for a sign of his returns.
Then another month goes by. And another. Winter settles in, heavy snow coating the forest in cold, white blankets.
“Perhaps he was held up,” your mother says, guiding your shivering body back inside the house. “He couldn’t travel in the winter, so he’s probably staying somewhere for the time being.”
You want to believe her. You really do, with all your heart and soul. But Cupid’s curse remains in the back of your mind, twisting and turning in its depths, whispering to you that Changbin is gone, that he will never return.
Winter has passed and a month of spring gone by before you decide to find Changbin’s family yourself. It takes several months because really, you don’t have any guide other than the name of his old village, but eventually, exhausted and almost losing hope, you find them.
A stooped woman answers the door with a confused smile on her lips. “Hello.”
“Um, hello.” You swallow. “Is this the Seo residence?”
“Yes, can I help you with anything?”
You pull the necklace from under the collar of your shirt. “Did Changbin come visit some months ago?”
For a single moment charged with hope, you see the widening of the woman’s eyes and believe that she will say yes, that Changbin came and is just having a hard time returning.
Then she shakes her head, and the world begins to crumble at the edges.
. . .
You stay just long enough to tell Changbin’s family who you are and what he set out to do, then flee back home as fast as you can. Tears stain the forest floor and when your mother opens the door to the hut so many months later, it only takes one look for her to fold you into her arms as you begin to cry on her shoulder.
He could be alive, you desperately hope. He could be somewhere, lost, unable to find his way back home. You know your Changbin would never break a promise to you, not if he could help it.
One year. Two years. Then three. The months pass with no sign of his return.
And you know, dead or not, he isn’t coming back.
It hurts. Everything reminds you of him, of Changbin, of what could have been and what should have been. You curse Cupid, cry for the god to come down so you can scream obscenities at them face to face, but they never answer your pleas.
The silver chain Changbin left you burns around your neck, but you can’t bring yourself to take it off. It’s the last thing you have of him, the only thing you have of him. You clutch it on your worst days, imprinting the tiny chain links into your palm when you fall sick, wasting away without a desire to live.
This is what it feels like, you think, delirious with fever, to have lost your entire world.
Your crying mother stays by your side as you wither, sponging your forehead, feeding you soup, whispering apologies into the blankets she covers you with. In moments of lucidity, you clutch her hand and tell her it’s not her fault. That you understand, now, what it means to love someone with the force of the universe.
Weeks pass in a feverish daze until winter seizes control of the earth. Numb with cold and sweating with warmth, you pray to the heavens above to release you from this pain.
The day you drift away is bitterly cold. You’re wrapped in at least five blankets, your mother shivering beside you as she grips your hands, trying desperately to warm them.
There is one brief moment of absolute clarity. You sit up, eyes wide, and cup your mother’s cheeks between cold, cold hands. “I love you, Mother.”
She kisses your forehead. “I love you too, my darling child.”
Her tears drip onto your cheeks. You don’t remember anything more.
In your first life, in the dead of winter, you die of a broken heart.
. . . . .
Your second life begins in a poor family, though happy. Sixteen years of life pass in ignorant bliss, with no knowledge of soulmates or vengeful gods. A week after your birthday, hope filling every step, you set off for the nearby village to try your skills at sewing. Luck paves your path and you find a kind mistress who values your quick fingers and eye for color. The village is bright and cheerful, you’re making money to send back to your family, and life is peaceful.
Then the dreams come.
The first vision is barely there, just a quick glimpse of green trees and a disappearing smile wedged between the scenes of your mind’s musings. You wake up, an uneasy feeling in your chest, but the image is already fading. You shake the discomfort away and get to work.
The second dream is longer, more vivid. You hear a voice, feel a gentle touch, see a mop of dark hair and a pair of gleaming eyes. In the moment, you feel happy, so happy in a way you’ve never felt before. It’s pure, this happiness, something so deep that your entire body feels warm when you wake, even as a chilling breeze seeps in through a crack in the window.
The dreams continue for several days, and each morning, you only grow more curious about the strange man who keeps wandering into your mind. Who is this man? you wonder as you sew, poking your fingers with the needle more times than you’d like to admit. Who is he, and why does he make me so happy?
Why does it feel like I should know him?
After a week of lovely, warm, but deeply unsettling dreams, it hits you all at once.
Needle in hand, you’re about to push the sliver of metal through a silk shirt, ready to begin embroidering the next leaf on a flowering vine. Taking a second glance at the embroidery you’ve already done, you blink in confusion.
This kind of vine doesn’t exist in your little village. In fact, you’ve never seen it before. But each leaf, each flower is so perfectly stitched that it doesn’t seem possible that you just made this up on the spot.
Oh.
Green leaves, sturdy trunks, water rushing down a river. Firm muscle, a flowering vine curled into a crown, fingers placing the circlet upon your head. A brilliant smile, bright as the sun, and a peal of snorting laughter that sounds like wedding bells.
One name hurtles through your mind, the name of the dark-haired, lovely-eyed boy who, by now, is a frequent visitor in your dreams.
Seo Changbin.
The needle embeds itself in your palm.
. . .
It’s hard to explain away your frazzled state when your mistress comes into the room to see you staring at the embroidered silk, palm dripping blood onto your clothes. Voice trembling only slightly (and you’re proud of yourself for that), you tell her that you just made a mistake, really.
Never mind the fact that the needle stuck itself far enough into your hand that you really have to pull it out, releasing a small spurt of blood that raises your mistress’s eyebrows so far they look like they’re about to jump off her forehead.
Shakily, you get back to work. Years of practice have steadied your fingers so that the stitches remain even, but as you sew, your mind races with memories. Memories of a trembling mother, a red-eyed god, a gaping leg wound festering on an apothecary table. Memories of boys you’ve never met in this life, a Hwang Hyunjin and a Choi Chanhee, but most importantly, a strong young man with sweet lips and a raspy, whining voice named Seo Changbin.
“Seo Changbin,” you murmur, testing the words between your lips. Just saying his name sends a rush of warmth through your chest and brings a small smile to your face.
The smile disappears, though, when you remember how the story ends.
Night brings dreams again, full, vivid scenes that begin with joy and happiness and warmth. You see your mother from another life, smell the comforting scent of herbs wafting through the air in the hut. You see your love, Changbin, feel his arms wrapped around your body, see the flush in his cheeks when you press your lips to his in a kiss.
The day he leaves is vivid, too. Sharp greens against a bright blue sky devoid of clouds, his smile disappearing into the forest as he begins his journey home.
A journey that you know he will never finish.
You know what will happen next and you don’t want to see it. You beg yourself to wake up, to stop these visions before your heart breaks, but sleep pins down your limbs and forces you to watch, to experience, to live the turmoil of emotions that flooded your heart those last few years of your life.
The next morning, you look so ill that your mistress forces you to take the day off, despite your pleas that you can work, you really can. The last thing you need is more sleep, after all, more time for vengeful gods to replay past lives for their leisure.
So after sixteen years of blissful ignorance, you know. You know of your love, you know of the curse, you know of the life that began it all. Sick emotions mix in your heart, syrupy and viscous and heavy, hope for a love as deep as your life before and terror for the heartbreak that will inevitably come.
And this time, you don’t have a loving mother who knows of your predicament.
You imagine Cupid laughing in the heavens as you face his wrath once more.
. . .
It happens by chance, purely by chance. On your days off, you sometimes like to visit the marketplace, see if you can find some fun trinket to send back to your family or to keep for yourself. Today is no exception.
Something makes you pause in front of a jewelry stand, a stand you don’t usually visit because your apprentice’s pay, though enough to support your family, doesn’t allow for expenses on jewels. However, a thin chain necklace catches your eye as you walk past.
It’s silver, shiny, not a hint of rust on the metal. A small black stone hangs as a pendant and you’ve never seen it before, but you can’t shake the suspicion that this is a necklace you wore in a past life.
A necklace Changbin gave you in a past life.
Uneasiness grows in your mind the longer you look at the chain. How did the jeweler even get this chain? Who took it away? You’re pretty sure you wore it until your death, and you don’t believe your previous mother, based on your dreams, would have taken it away.
You think you want it back.
Pointing at the chain, you look up at the jeweler. “How much is this?”
“Eight gold pieces.”
Your heart sinks. A day’s work gives you five silver pieces, and there are twenty silvers to a gold. Most of your money goes back home, leaving you with only a little pocket money of your own – certainly not enough for a piece of jewelry worth eight golds. Lips pressed thinly together, you nod before beginning to walk away.
A voice stops you, a familiar voice you’ve never heard before. Not in this life, at least.
“Wait!”
You turn around, slowly, slowly, as Changbin’s voice asks the jeweler, “Eight gold pieces, you said?”
It’s him, you think faintly. It’s really him. Different hair, skin a shade lighter, but his eyes… his eyes are the same. The absolute same.
He doesn’t look at you with any recognition, though, and he’s dressed in silk, indicating high status – at least, higher than yours. So you politely avert your gaze, trying to calm the pounding in your heart.
Eight golds appear on the counter, exchanged for a small silk pouch with the necklace inside. You’re about to walk away – why did Changbin stop you, anyway? There’s not a single chance he would give it to you – when the pouch appears in your line of vision, held by a familiar hand.
You blink once, twice, then look up from the pouch to the man holding it in his palm.
Only one thought runs through your mind.
There is no way, in two consecutive lives, that Seo Changbin would offer me the same necklace.
Your confusion must show, because he laughs. “It’s for you,” he says (and oh, gods, his voice makes you want to just sit and listen to it forever). “It looked like you wanted it, no?”
Thankfully, your vocal cords remember how to speak, even if your mind doesn’t. “I couldn’t possibly take such a gift, sir,” you say, stepping backward slightly. “You paid for it – it’s yours.”
“Then it is also mine to give. And I believe you would appreciate this much more than I.” He unstrings the pouch, slips the chain into his fingers. “May I?”
For any other person, you would have said a polite no before speed walking into the crowd, hoping to disappear between the stalls. Now, though, you stay in place, rooted to the ground under Changbin’s steady gaze.
You nod.
His hands are gentle in their feather-light touch against your skin, clasping the chain around your neck. The pendant hangs at the base of your throat, cold at first, but slowly warming with the afternoon sun.
It feels right.
“Thank you,” you whisper when he’s finished, sinking into a low bow. “Thank you so much.”
Changbin smiles, loosely taking your hand. He drops a butterfly kiss to your knuckles and you physically have to restrain yourself from gasping too loudly, because – oh, because –
The spot where his lips touch your skin sends warmth spreading throughout your body.
“It was my pleasure,” he says, still smiling. “My name is Changbin.”
I know.
“May I know yours?”
“Oh.” You smile, hoping your lips don’t tremble too much. “I’m Y/N.”
His smile widens at your words, making your heart flutter in shy embarrassment. “I hope to see you around once more, Y/N,” he says.
A sudden burst of courage turns your smile a little teasing. “Just once?”
Changbin’s laugh – it’s shy, it’s a shy laugh, your heart can’t take it – makes you want to melt into the ground. “Maybe not,” he finally says, ears red. “Maybe many times more.”
. . .
He keeps his promise of many times more, appearing again on your next day off, then again, and again. If possible, you seem to fall in love with him even more than you did in your previous life, his laughs tickling your heart, his smiles like sunshine against your skin.
Deep down, you know this won’t last. If Cupid took your love away so harshly in your last life, he won’t hesitate to do it again, possibly with even more malice. But Changbin is intoxicating, pulling you toward him like a leaf on the wind, forever fluttering in the breeze, only resting when the air does.
It’s not even just Cupid. At least before, you and Changbin were on equal footing – one a healer, the other a poor runaway. There was no status difference. Now, though, Changbin wears silk while you clothe yourself in homespun fabric, finer perhaps than a peasant’s, but homespun nonetheless. No matter how daintily you embroider the cloth with leftover threads from your work, it will never match up to the rich, gorgeous clothing of the nobles with whom Changbin must walk.
Such differences inevitably drive a wedge into a love that could have been.
It starts after you go to the market once, twice, three times, and Changbin doesn’t meet you at any of the stalls. It feels empty, walking around with no one by your side, and you’re just wondering if something’s happened when you receive a note written in your love’s handwriting, asking you to meet him at midnight where you first met.
He arrives a bit later than you, footsteps softly padding across the empty market. For a moment, you only stare at each other, faces lit just barely by the light of the moon.
Changbin breaks the silence. “I’m getting married.”
The words send a knife into your heart, but you try to ignore the pain. It was expected, you tell yourself, expected of someone with Changbin’s high status. The two of you could never end up together, not a sewing apprentice and a member of nobility. “I see,” is all you say.
For the first time since you’ve met, Changbin looks broken. It hurts your heart and you want nothing more than to hold him close until that expression disappears, but you can’t. You’ve barely even touched – you don’t have a right to hold him the way you’d like.
“I don’t want to be,” he says.
Your hands shake slightly with your reply. “Why?”
“Because…” Changbin’s voice almost fades into the silence. “I think I love you.”
His words should make you feel happy, should make fireworks burst in your heart the way they did when Changbin kissed you in your past life. And yes, a small part of you jumps for joy. But a larger part withers with disappointment, with pain, with the knowledge that none of this will come to good.
“Y/N.” His voice turns insistent. “Don’t you… don’t you feel the same?”
You swallow. Take a breath. “I do.”
A lovely brightness enters Changbin’s eyes, hope filling his face. You hate yourself for having to crush it. “But you have a duty to your family.”
“We can run away,” Changbin says, taking your hand. You want to melt yourself into his touch, rest in his warmth forever. “We can run, Y/N. We don’t have to stay.”
Only the greatest force of will allows you to pull your hand away. “I have a family, Changbin,” you say, trying not to focus on the light that’s fading out of his face with every second. “I have to support them. And you… you have a duty to the village.” You swallow. “We can’t run. It’s too selfish.”
He doesn’t blame you, you know. He understands what you’re saying, has probably already thought of it himself. Still, it doesn’t stop pain from breaking the glass in his eyes, gaze becoming fragmented as he nods once, twice. “I know. I just thought…”
Changbin never finishes his sentence. In fact, you never speak again. He walks you back to your mistress’s house that night, squeezes your hand once under the moonlight, then disappears back into the darkness.
And with that disappearance, he leaves your life forever.
Over the years, you hear stories of Changbin’s lovely partner, her flowing hair and vibrant face and pretty smile. You hear stories of how much they love each other, the children they have, how well they watch over the village together.
It doesn’t matter how much your heart hurts, you tell yourself every time you hear one of those stories. It doesn’t matter at all, not even when his wife commissions a dress from the shop you now own, years later. It doesn’t matter when Changbin comes with her and stands in the main room silently as you take her for fitting, and it doesn’t matter when his eyes linger slightly on you when you lead her back out.
You exchange no words that day, but you’re certain Changbin sees the black gemstone still resting at the base of your throat. He makes no obvious expression, but when his eyes flicker over it, their light dims the slightest bit.
In this life, there are no kisses, no hugs, none of the passion you shared in your first life. Instead, you love through vivid conversations, knowing smiles, and in the end, the barest brush of his hand against yours before he leads his wife out of your shop.
In the end, you never marry. Instead, you spend the rest of your life sewing until your eyes go blind, leaving you all too much time to contemplate everything you’ve lost.
Which is worse, you wonder, losing your love to death or to societal pressures and another woman? Which is worse, never knowing how Changbin suffered as he died, or knowing that he’s doing well without you?
Which is worse, having your love die in a land unknown, or having him live so close, yet so far away?
. . . . .
It continues, over and over again, endless cycles of living, remembering, loving. He’s a thief and you’re a merchant. You’re a shop owner and he’s a soldier. Both of you are orphans, living on the street. None of it matters, not gender, not occupation, not social status – no matter what, you end up apart.
With every lifetime, the dreams grow more vivid, as though to make sure you don’t forget a single instant of the love you experienced, the love you could never see to the end. You’d think that the lines between each life would grow blurred as each one passes, but they only grow sharper, more defined. It’s impossible to forget how many lives you’ve lived, not when Cupid forces each one to remain in your mind, endlessly playing in your dreams time and time again.
On your twenty-ninth reincarnation, you experience a month’s worth of dreams in your silken bed, the bed of a noble heir who can have nothing to do with the boy who stays by their side day and night as a bodyguard and nothing more. You wake up every night stifling screams resulting from twenty-eight lifetimes of broken hearts, muffled cries and tears that bring Changbin running into your room, asking if you’re all right, reminding you that you’re safe.
Physically, you agree. You trust Changbin entirely – he’s proven more than capable of protecting you after multiple attempts on your life – but mentally? Emotionally?
How can he protect you from a god’s wrath, a wrath he doesn’t know of, when you can’t even protect yourself from that same wrath you’ve known of for twenty-eight, soon to be twenty-nine lifetimes?
You try to harden your heart, speak to Changbin a little less, spend more time focused on your lesson books and less on Changbin’s lovely face, but it’s impossible, you find after several months of this forced silence. It’s impossible to ignore the allure of your guard’s lips, his entrancing eyes, impossible to ignore the gentleness of his strong, roughened hands guiding you through life.
But with every chaste kiss, with every stolen hug or brush of skin, you know, deep in your heart, that something will befall your love. Something will tear you two apart.
When he dies, stabbed in the chest by a traitor to your family, rage drives you to take the knife that fell out of your love’s hand and shove the blade into the attacker’s heart. It drives you to cry, to weep, to wail to the sky as Changbin’s skin grows cold, the remnants of his last “I love you” still hanging on his lips.
Watching your love die in front of you, you decide, is the worst punishment of all. Nothing, absolutely nothing could be worse than this, knowing that Changbin died because of you, for you, without a singular doubt in his mind as he did it because he knew you would do the same for him.
Moonlight streams through the windows, illuminating Changbin’s blank face and the blood on his chest. As people begin entering the room, pausing at the carnage next to your bed, you raise your head, tears still flowing down your face.
“YOU SELFISH GOD!” you scream at the cold moon, resisting the arms tugging you away from the body of your love. “YOU SELFISH GOD! I GAVE YOU TWENTY-EIGHT LIFETIMES OF MY LOVE, AND YOU WANT MORE?”
Someone’s speaking, trying to make you hear their words over the raging of your voice. You don’t care, violently wrenching yourself out of their grip to stay thrown over Changbin’s body, tears mixing with his blood. “COME DOWN AND FACE ME!” you gasp. “COME DOWN AND TAKE MY LIFE, DO ANYTHING, I DON'T CARE! FACE ME, YOU COWARD!”
Strong hands, too strong, containing none of the gentility Changbin used to show you, begin pulling you away. You thrash in their grip, still staring at the moon. “I WISH HE NEVER MET ME!” you scream as they drag you out of the room. Blood stains your nightclothes, sticky against your skin. “I WISH HE NEVER MET ME, NEVER DIED FOR ME, DO YOU HEAR?”
. . . . .
The god grants your wish.
. . .
You regret it more than anything in all of your now-thirty lives.
. . .
To know of your love, but to never experience any semblance of it in your entire life? To know of a certain Seo Changbin, but to never meet him, never know how he is, never see him once in over fifty years of living?
Torture.
. . .
From your sixteenth birthday, when you begin having the dreams, until your death well into your fifties, there’s only pain, endless pain, marred by a piece of disgusting hope that rests in your chest, a piece of hope that keeps you praying that you will see him just once in this lifetime, that you’ll know his face and he’ll know yours.
. . .
It becomes so clear as you grow older that you will never know the Changbin of this lifetime, if he even exists. You will never touch his skin, see his smile, bathe in the glory of his laugh. You’ll never kiss, never experience even the briefest joy of seeing his face.
But your heart hopes, anyway, even though your mind sees reason. It prays, refuses to accept the truth.
. . .
Hope, you decide, is a weapon. A weapon far deadlier than the sharpest sword or the heaviest club, a weapon wielded by only the most intelligent of tyrants.
. . .
Apparently, you go mad towards the end of this life. You can’t blame those who eventually put you in an institution, over fifty years old and withering away. They don’t know who Changbin is. They never will.
You never will.
. . .
You blame the dreams. If you didn’t know of your previous lives, if you didn’t know Changbin existed, you might have lived happily – well, maybe not happily, but you’d be content, at least. You wouldn’t be wishing you were dead every minute of your existence.
. . .
You die in that institution, supposedly of a wasting disease, but more accurately of a broken heart, a heart even more broken than the one Changbin left behind that first life when he never came back.
. . . . .
Your forty-sixth life is first one in which you end the love with death, not Changbin. Looking back, it was probably better for you, you suppose, because you didn’t have to feel the pain of losing your love. Maybe this was Cupid’s laughable attempt at some sort of mercy.
You loathe it anyway, loathe it almost as much as the lives – yes, plural by now, which automatically cancel anything Cupid tries to do to make up for it (if the god is even trying) – where you dreamt of certain sparkling eyes and a lovely smile but never met them face to face. It’s not quite as horrible, but nearly.
To know that your love had to deal with any measure of the pain you’ve felt for so long, the pain you wouldn’t impart on even your worst enemy, is unimaginable.
It’s ironic, too, considering your occupations in life. You’re a healer on the battlefield, wearing the strip of blue silk on your arm that denotes your immunity to the opposite forces. He’s a soldier on the same side, though he has no protection other than his skill from enemy swords.
You are sworn to heal. He is sworn to kill.
Isn’t it strange, then, that fate wills you to die first while forcing Changbin to live?
You weren’t supposed to be killed in war. Your healer status, that piece of blue silk tied around your arm, was supposed to protect you from enemy blades. But some unsuspecting enemy soldier, perhaps not seeing the blue amidst the dust of the battlefield or genuinely just not caring for the rules of war, drove their blade into your back as you knelt over a fallen man of your side.
Within minutes, you had succumbed to darkness. The pain of dying, the blade in your back wasn’t even the worst part.
All you could think, after all, as you lay there gasping, was that he would have to learn of your death from finding your body, that you wouldn’t even get to say a proper goodbye.
. . . . .
It’s a pitiful, desolate figure who sits on a clifftop fifteen lifetimes later, blankly staring at an expanse of open ocean, waves crashing against the rocks below, contemplating every single one of the sixty-one lives you’ve lived so far.
You married Changbin in this one, this sixty-first life. You married him for the first time in sixty-one lives, made your vows with him, kissed him under a shower of flower petals.
It didn’t change your fate, not even when, unable to have a baby of your own, you adopted your first, then your second child. It didn’t change anything, not when Changbin had a duty to this village that you couldn’t interfere with. It didn’t change anything, not when pirates came ashore and massacred the village population, killing your two children and half of the rest of your family.
Changbin threw himself from this very cliff, you remember, threw himself to a watery death rather than die at the hands of the pirates who came to raid the town so many years ago. He was brave to the last, fending off invaders even when countless others had thrown down their swords, and he never lived to see the defeat of the pirates whom he died fighting.
You hug your shoulders tightly, staring down at the waves crashing against the rocks. With all that’s happened to you over sixty-one lifetimes, who would blame you for tipping off the edge the same way Changbin died, albeit much less heroically? Who would blame you for giving up in this life, giving up in every life if you knew just how badly it would end every time?
“You’re right,” a rich voice sounds behind you, a voice that you once heard in person, many centuries ago. “Who would blame you? Not even I would.”
Your eyes slam shut, refusing to gaze into blood red. You don’t speak.
A sigh passes from the god’s lips, breath puffing softly. Where the air hits your neck, you feel your skin curdle with disgust.
“It’s no use not speaking,” he continues, a hint of amusement tinging his voice that makes your hands curl into fists. “I can hear your thoughts.”
A snarl twists your lips. “They must be very loud,” you snap, words dripping acid.
More silence.
“You hate me,” he finally says.
You breathe in, out, in, out. Calm, you tell yourself.
“Why wouldn’t I.”
A pause.
“Perhaps you can elaborate.”
For the first time since they appeared, you turn around, eyes blazing, to stare into the red gaze of the wrathful god who cursed you. “I would rather throw myself off this cliff,” you seethe, “than relive my lifetimes in front of you.”
Is it remorse that glitters in ruby eyes, pity that rests in their shadows? Whatever it is, it makes you smirk without mirth, lips curling without cheer as you turn back around to watch gray waves crash against the cliff. It doesn’t matter how a vengeful god feels after lifetimes of revenge. Apologies from the curser mean nothing to the spite of the cursed.
“I made mistakes,” the god says simply. “I acted rashly. I should not have taken my anger out on you, and certainly not with so harsh a punishment.”
You want to snort. “I am ever grateful you realize after sixty-one lifetimes of wrath,” you say, acid practically burning a hole in your tongue. “Now quit with the blather.” You don’t care that you’re staring at a god who could smite you down a thousand times over with a single flick of their finger – they’ve already hurt you too much for it to matter anymore. “After so many years of never answering my calls, you finally come, unbidden. Tell me why you’re here, or I will jump off this cliff.”
“I’ve come to offer an exchange,” they say. “It is impossible to erase a curse, but I can impart it on someone else.”
In a flash, you’re standing, staring the god dead in the center of their bright red eyes. “You said you could read my thoughts,” you snarl. “Tell me, God of Love, what I’m thinking right now.”
They raise an eyebrow. “You don’t want it,” they say calmly, though surprise coats their words. “You have no one, then, on whom you would impart this curse?”
“When I tell you,” you snap, “that I would not wish this curse on my worst enemy in all of my sixty-one lives, I do not lie. That –” you take a breath – “that is how much you have hurt me.”
Astonishment shows itself in the god’s gaze. “I don’t understand,” they say, for the first time looking bemused. “I have given you everything, dying first, dying last, watching him die in front of you, never seeing him in a lifetime –”
“You don’t need to remind me,” you cut him off. “I know it very well.”
“Then you would not even give this curse to me?” they ask. “Not to the god who has shown you so much pain?”
That almost gets you, almost. The desire for revenge claws its way through your chest, begging to be released in a monstrous cry of pain, but you rein it in with a scoff. “For a god of love,” you say, turning back around, “you really understand nothing of it.”
More silence.
“I will leave you with two gifts,” the god finally says. “Two gifts to try and make up for what you have lost.”
You suppress another snort.
“Your love will remember you on your one hundred and first lifetime,” they continue. “When the curse is over, your love will remember you, will know how you have lived one hundred lifetimes without him.”
The words, acerbic with derision, fall from your lips without missing a beat. “Will I remember him, then, or will you take that away from me too?”
A short pause. The air seems to grow slightly warmer, as though the god has been angered, but it cools quickly. “You will remember him,” they reply, voice thinner with a tinge of frustration.
You smirk.
They clear their throat. “The second gift you will find when you return home.”
You give no response to that, only stare resolutely at gray waves, feeling the ocean spray tickle your skin. The god must disappear at some point, because when you finally turn around to return home, they’re gone. But once you enter your empty house, there’s something on your table, something that sparkles in the last glimmers of sunlight peeking through the window.
You pick it up, eyes narrowed, and almost immediately drop it.
A thin silver necklace, polished to shine, with a small black gem as the pendant.
Though there’s no way to prove it, you’re sure this is the very same piece of jewelry that Changbin gifted you so many centuries ago, two lifetimes in a row.
The chain trembles on your shaking fingers as you place it back down, carefully, so carefully, like it’ll explode any second. You go to bed that night wondering if the necklace will have disappeared by morning, but when you wake up after a fitful rest, it’s still there, glittering on the table.
You wear it for the rest of this lifetime, hiding it beneath your clothing so no questions are asked. And when you feel you will die soon, you carefully place the chain in a small box and bury it just outside your home.
You’ll find it in your next life. You’ll find it in the next, then the next, time and time again until the end of your hundred-lifetime punishment.
It’s a small comfort, that simple silver chain with the little black jewel, but it’s a comfort nonetheless, a piece of your love to carry with you until the end of your times. Even if it was given back by the god who cursed you.
. . . . .
Years trudge along, years of waiting and waiting and more waiting for the torture to end. More death, more illness, more societal pressure to drive you two apart. In five lifetimes, you die first. In the others, Changbin either leaves you to face the world on your own, or you never know him at all.
It seems that even though Cupid may have felt some remorse for your curse, that didn’t stop the god from finding new ways to hurt you.
At some point, the lives finally begin to blur together. There have just been too many. If you tried, you could probably piece them all together, work out the details of how the two of you lived and how you were ripped apart, but after seventy, then eighty, then finally ninety lifetimes of broken hearts, it becomes too painful to relive.
(As you near the ninetieth lifetime, if you’re lucky enough to be born to a family who cares, someone always comes running in for months to the tears that stain your cheeks through dream-filled nights. You must have helped send so many people to an early grave with the endless screaming they would wake up to on the nights you dreamed of particularly painful lives.)
There are two saving graces to this pain, and as much as you hate to admit it, they came from Cupid. The god never deigns to meet you again (something you’re grateful for), but their gifts keep you from losing all hope as you near the end, the blissful end of your punishment.
One, the necklace. In every lifetime, no matter how painful, no matter whether or not you find Changbin, you find the thin silver necklace from your previous life. And no matter how rusty the chain gets, how dull the jewel becomes after years of wear, it shows up shiny and polished the next time you find it.
Two, the knowledge that Changbin will recognize you that first lifetime your punishment is over. You don’t have to keep track of your lifetimes, don’t have to count them until the hundredth has come and gone, don’t have to live any unnecessary lives with the fear that Changbin will be taken away from you suddenly and horribly.
As much as you loathe saying it, these gifts give you the slightest bit of hope that keeps you going.
So you trudge through lives, living as a tailor falling for a shoemaker, a nurse who comes to love a bedridden patient, a rich socialite who wants to marry the son of your family’s sworn enemy (this one’s interesting, quite like Romeo and Juliet, really. In your next life, when you dream of it, you wonder if Cupid met Shakespeare after the playwright’s death and decided to have a sick laugh at your expense). Seventy passes at some point, then eighty, then ninety.
By your hundredth life, you aren’t entirely sure what number you’re on. You think it must be ending soon, what with all the dreams your seventeen-year-old self had to suffer through, but it hurts too much to pick them apart and count. When Changbin doesn’t recognize you, though, a student at the same university as you, you resign yourself to several more lifetimes of heartbreak. It’s too much to hope for at this point, too much to hope that you’re on your last cycle of punishment, that the next time you live, you will be able to love Changbin wildly, freely, without a care in the world.
The dreams come once more in your hundredth and first life. It makes you despair that your punishment isn’t over, not even now (because though you don’t dare to freely pray, hope still buries itself deep in your chest, allowing Cupid to wield it like the monster he is).
Cupid assured you on his second and last visit that you would remember Changbin when you met him, though. You don’t like it, but hope only grows when you recall his words. Blind, blind hope.
It’s a cold morning, bitterly cold, when you roll out of bed to go to work. Eyes blinking blearily, you fumble around the cabinets for a package of coffee before remembering you ran out yesterday.
Just my luck, you think, scribbling “coffee” onto the grocery list on your refrigerator. You shove the piece of paper into your pocket, hoping you remember to go shopping later for whatever’s on the list. Your roommates are out of town, so you can’t rely on them to get anything this time.
Bitter wind slashes at your face as you walk to the small café just down the street for your daily fix of caffeine. By the time you’ve reached the shop, your nose is already stiff with cold, and the steaming cup of coffee the barista presses into your chilled hands only briefly warms your skin before you have to step back into the cold.
The bus will be coming soon, you note, checking your phone for the time. Steps quickening, you bend your head into the wind and set off for the stop.
So focused on your destination are you that you don’t notice the person until it’s too late. You smack right into them, sending them lurching into a nearby pole. They fall to the sidewalk as you spew apologies from freezing lips, holding out a hand to help them up.
They take your hand, squeezing with a grip that seems a little too familiar to be coincidental. A familiar sensation of warmth, a lovely, dreadful warmth, spreads through your body, emanating from where the stranger’s hand touches yours.
You freeze, eyes hardly daring to look up and gaze into someone who might be Changbin, who might be the love of one hundred of your lifetimes. You don’t even know whether to hope it is him, because if it is, will he finally recognize you after so many cycles of pain? Or will this just be another love that ends in heartbreak?
Slowly, slowly, your gazes meet.
It’s him.
It’s him.
It’s him.
Lovely brown eyes, eyes that throughout twenty, fifty, ninety years of pain, have remain unchanged in their depth and gentleness, stare into yours. Your breath catches. The coffee in your hand drops to the ground.
It’s really him.
Belatedly, you realize he’s still on the ground and give a quick yank to pull him up. You try to apologize, both for hitting him and for the coffee that’s spattered onto his shoes, but your vocal cords won’t work. All you can do right now is stare.
He doesn’t recognize you. He hasn’t reacted to your touch, hasn’t given any indication that this is anything more than a chance meeting, an everyday occurrence where a stranger bumps into him (albeit a little harder than normal). You’re about to retract your hand, to force your vocal cords into giving an apology for smacking into him, but then he opens his mouth and speaks words you never dared to believe you would hear.
“It’s you,” he breathes, gripping your hand even more tightly, almost involuntarily, like he’s trying to keep himself grounded to the earth. His eyes, now wide with confusion and awe, search your face greedily. For what, you don’t know, but you’re doing the same, even though you’ve seen his face millions of times by now over a hundred lifetimes.
“It’s you,” he repeats once more, raspy voice breathless with emotion. “It’s really you.”
Finally, your throat manages to choke something out. “Changbin?” you try, words small and soft, conveying all of your disbelief in that one single word, that one single name. “Changbin?”
He says your name, then, says it once, twice, as he keeps staring into your eyes. It sounds like honey on his lips, sweet in a way that makes you heady with bliss, and only the biting wind keeps you rooted to the present, reminding you that this is real, this is not a dream, that this is real, completely real.
Slowly, naturally, one of your arms curls around his waist, just as his hands rise to cup your cheek. His fingers are cold against your bare skin but you lean into his touch, pulling him closer, closer, until your faces are only inches apart.
“It’s you,” Changbin murmurs, still as though he can barely believe it. “It’s really you.”
A strangled sound escapes your throat, something between a sob and a laugh all at once. “You remember,” you choke, eyes beginning to fill with warm, salty tears. “You remember, Changbin.”
He cups your cheek with an ungloved hand, cold skin brushing against yours with a gentleness that makes you want to melt. “I do,” he replies, voice almost cracking with emotion. “I’m only sorry I didn’t remember before.”
In your previous lives, time and time again, you kissed Changbin’s lips. It was always lovely, absolutely lovely, lovely in a way that made it feel like a field of flowers blooming in your chest, butterflies fluttering in your stomach. But there was always a lingering desolation on your part, a despair born of the knowledge that this love would not last, that Cupid would not allow you to see it to its natural end.
Today, Changbin’s lips taste of sunshine and honey, dew on green grass on a summer morning, the excitement of a first snow, nothing reminding you of a lingering heartbreak to come. You can’t even feel the bitter wind with him pressed so closely to you, lips molding against yours as his hands cup your cheeks.
The last walls on your heart crack down, walls formed with the knowledge of your hundred lifetimes of punishment. From the broken walls springs a new warmth, a sparkling warmth that you can’t even find the words to explain, a warmth that spills through your body and makes you feel full, happy, joyous in a way you’ve never felt, not once before in your hundred lifetimes of heartbroken love.
When you break away, tears are streaking down your cheeks. Changbin’s eyes glitter, too, but the smile on his face is radiant as he gazes at you.
Cupid’s punishment was cruel, you know, crueler than it had to be. It was harsh, evil, almost wicked in the pain he inflicted on you. But even though the vestiges of that pain still line the edges of your heart, it’s easy to ignore it in favor of staring at your love standing in front of you as a wobbly smile of the purest joy finally begins to curve your lips.
Is this real? you wonder to yourself. Is this truly real, your punishment finally ending, Changbin remembering who you are and the lifetimes you’ve shared? This bliss, this love, this warmth… it all seems too good to be true.
As though he can read your thoughts (and perhaps he can – a hundred lifetimes of love have probably given him a window into your soul, the same way it’s given you one into his), Changbin grins, vibrant, radiant, warm even in the bitter cold. “This is real,” he says, lovely lips curved into a brilliant smile.
“It is?” you ask, soft, wondrous, childlike, hardly daring to believe.
He brushes away a tear on your face, his thumb stroking your cheek with the gentlest touch. “It is,” he whispers. “As real as your love for me, and mine for you.”
Time and time again, you burned your heart for Changbin, burned it with the love you felt for him over one hundred lifetimes of a curse. Time and time again, you swore at love, swore at the god who inflicted the curse on you without so much as an afterthought until sixty-one lives had passed.
But now, as you crush Changbin close, fitting your lips to his once more, you push those thoughts to the back of your mind and lose yourself in a kiss finally free of pain.
If you enjoyed, please don’t forget to reblog and leave a comment to tell me what you thought! Thank you for reading and have a lovely day <3
(1 reblog = 1 slap in the face for Cupid fuck them)
#inkidz#destinyverse#districtninewriters#kpopscape#skz#stray kids#stray kids changbin#skz changbin#stray kids scenarios#skz scenarios#stray kids oneshots#stray kids imagines#stray kids changbin scenarios#skz changbin scenarios#stray kids x reader#skz x reader#stray kids changbin x reader#skz changbin x reader#seo changbin x reader#fluff#angst#tw death#tw blood#tw suicide#reincarnation!au#soulmate!au#time and time again#scriptura-delirus
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Finished project: Rosemary (for in-progress pictures check out my "rosemary" tag)
Honestly I am not sure what exactly this is supposed to be or be used for as it appears to be an entirely useless item, but I sure learned a lot about honeycomb rings! Started September 2020, finished August 2021. Quite the runtime although I was not actively working on it for most of that time - I didn't do any bobbin lace at all between February and August in fact! and I took a couple of other breaks before then as well. I frequently became frustrated with this project because of all the broken threads - I lost track of how many times a thread broke in this dang thing, it was truly just constant. I have to wonder if I got a bad batch of thread or something, because really, my god. total insanity. at least I got a lot of practice fixing them...
I'd like to maybe mount this to some fabric to make it look a little more like an actual Thing instead of a weird random scrap of whatever, but... I've never mounted lace before and I'm a little scared because I don't really know how to sew, lol. we'll see!
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Strawberry Madeleine
Tsurugi used to use Mikuni’s old uniform as pajamas.
He’s aware of how pathetic it is. How it sounds. How it probably would have been more subtle to shout that he missed him through a megaphone, for all of Tokyo to hear.
Of course, it doesn’t smell like his old roommate anymore. It hasn’t for a long time, especially not after having been washed and given to Mahiru to run around in for a whole week, over a year ago now. Especially not after it needed to be bleached, and deep cleaned, because of all the blood and dirt and dust that had been practically ground into the white fibers.
Frankly, it’s a miracle that old thing is still around.
He never expected to get it back, but he did, and he’s only a little ashamed to admit that he held it the same way someone would hold a cherished stuffed toy, inhaling the smell of fabric softener chosen with Kuro’s delicate skin in mind. He had called himself creepy, and Yumikage… Had flicked his forehead. Called him an idiot.
The way he had explained it, it made such perfect sense.
Mikuni... Was a familiar pain, like a bruise that never quite faded and you press your fingers to it just to remind yourself you’ve been hurt.
Yumikage, Junichiro, Freya, Mahiru, and Kuro are a comfort he never thought he deserved, and that old uniform, one of the only few possessions of his that had survived, the new softness of it and the new smell, are proof that whether he deserves them or not… They are his.
Anyone would cherish that, wouldn’t they?
***
One day his phone lights up in the evening twilight.
“I made too much. That offer to join us for dinner is still valid ☀︎”
Attached is a picture of a simmering pot of curry that makes his mouth water so much he nearly drools all down his front. There’s something familiar about it he can’t quite place, but it’s easily ignored and Tsurugi wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, thumbs flying eagerly over the screen.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes ☆” he replies, then, after adjusting his course accordingly, practically skips off down the sidewalk.
Two minutes from his destination, his phone buzzes again.
“I left the door unlocked for you. Come right in!”
Tsurugi... Tries really hard not to cry in the middle of the street as words half remembered while his soul was tangled with Mahiru’s filter back to him.
If the window is shut, we'll just go through the door.
***
Sometimes Tsurugi goes to Mahiru’s house to play.
It’s a childish way to put it, like they’re both in elementary school and he’s showing up at the front door to ask his friend’s uncle if Mahiru is home, but it’s also the only proper way to describe it, because he is playing.
He’s free now, or about as free as he can be with those debts looming over his head, and he wants to play. Kuro, meanwhile, wants to show him lots of different games, so if he has a day off, and the both of them are available… To the Shirota apartment he goes.
It’s always a mess.
Not the apartment, no, never the apartment. He doesn’t think even C3, with its white walls and white floors and white sheets and everything, everything, white, was even half so clean as that little apartment where three people lived.
What’s always a mess is himself.
This time, though… It’s Mahiru.
***
Tsurugi knows he’s a messy person. Tsurugi knows he’s not very good at cleaning up, though he often tries. It’s overwhelming though, sometimes, looking at it all, all the trash and garbage that had accumulated, all the things he didn’t need anymore, didn’t want, and maybe part of the problem was that his mind hardly ever stayed “adult” long enough to make any real headway.
It’s not like anyone went into his room to begin with, anyway, so why bother?
Mahiru, though, is different from him. Mahiru likes to clean up as he goes, so he supposes it shouldn’t be a shock that he gets frustrated with him and with Kuro, who have their little area in front of the TV set up with snacks, and drinks, and piles and piles of games to try out, and a third controller for Mahiru because sometimes instead of watching, Mahiru will join them, tempted by their cajoling and whining and Tsurugi’s bright, high pitched yelps.
This is not one of those times.
This is a time when Mahiru got frustrated and stormed off, and… Well, Tsurugi isn’t quite sure what to do.
A single look at Kuro shows he doesn’t either, wide eyes watching the hall his Eve disappeared down and slowly the umaibo he had been munching on disappears into his mouth.
“Should we… Clean up?” Tsurugi asks, hesitant. Their characters on screen continue to idle, the timer ticking down. Kuro hits pause. Stands, stretches, cracks his back and Tsurugi can’t help but wince because that can’t be healthy…
“...Yeah,” the Servamp finally says, and bends down with a muffled groan to start gathering chip bags and drink containers. “It’ll give him time to cool down.”
“Does this happen often?” Tsurugi stands, too, and casts his eyes about for something to pick up, but there really wasn’t much. Kuro’s already got it handled.
It makes him feel just a little useless.
He was a grown up, wasn’t he? … Wasn’t he?
***
Giving Mahiru space to calm down seems to have been the right choice, because when they find him, curled up on his bed and looking just the slightest bit ashamed of his outburst, he looks ready to apologize at any moment.
But Tsurugi doesn’t want an apology.
He wants Mahiru to come play with them.
So he speaks first, apologizes, sincerely, and promises that he and Kuro will clean up after themselves properly, but when they are done.
“You don’t need to keep everything nice and neat all the time, y’know. Part of being a grown up is knowing when it’s time to play and when it’s time to put your toys up.”
Mahiru makes a face at him, buries his chin deeper into his knees. “Tsurugi-san, no offense, but I don’t wanna hear that from you of all people.”
“Ouch, haha.” He sits, plopping down gracelessly next to the still pouting teen, making him bounce and emit a startled noise, and Kuro shuffles forward, slides down on Mahiru’s other side. “...You’re right, though. I never really learned how to clean up and put my things away all nice and neat like you do. No one ever taught me.”
Mahiru shifts, glances at him curiously. Having seen Tsurugi’s room at C3, he definitely believes it.
“...I guess,” he starts, slow and picking his words carefully. Kuro makes an encouraging noise beside him. “Because I never really felt like the apartment was ‘mine,’ I always ended up cleaning after every little activity. Because having it be messy... Made it feel more lived in than it was.”
“... Mm. That’s exactly it. The illusion of company...” A self deprecating little chuckle. “Guess we both learned to handle that feeling in different ways. If Kuro-chan and I make a mess, we... Might need your help to clean it up properly. But... Can you trust us to clean up when we’re done?”
“... I can try.”
“Good!”
Kuro finally speaks up, because this was a conversation for them, not him. But the moment has passed, and it feels safe to say something a little stupid, a little funny. “We’re serious about the needing your help on how it’s done, thing.”
“Ugh, I believe you. Tsurugi-san, one time I put this guy in charge of loading up the washing machine and you know what happened?”
“Wait, Mahi, no—“
“Ohh, do tell~!”
“Bubbles. Bubbles, everywhere. My downstairs neighbor had no idea where all the suds dripping onto her balcony were coming from!”
“Pfffhahaha! Kuro-chan, seriously?! There are directions on the box!”
“And I followed them. Our washer is small, though, so it was too much...”
Kamiya Tsurugi was an adult.
Shirota Mahiru was a kid.
But, if they could teach each other the things they had missed out on…
Perhaps it was all for that reason, huh...
Tsurugi wonders if Mahiru will be able to make good on that promise for a cake this year.
***
The end of August comes again, and, just like he had hoped, Mahiru bakes him a cake. Covered in glistening, sweet strawberries, with loads of white, sweet cream, it’s almost too much, especially when paired with how Freya and Iduna had come by, are each sitting in Yumikage’s living room while Freya’s subclass play some noisy game with Takuto.
Some part of him didn’t think Mahiru would really do it. But not only did he keep his promise, he’s pressing a wrapped gift into his hand, a small one that rattles when it moves, this grin on his face as Tsurugi turns it over in his hands, this perfectly wrapped gift with yellow paper and citrus themed washi tape keeping it together. Mahiru’s Servamp lingers back, a noisemaker hanging unenthusiastically from between his lips. And yet, despite his carefully practiced indifference, there’s no denying that Kuro is also eager, just as eager as his Eve.
“Go on. Open it.”
So he does. It’s... A cellphone charm. “...Cinnamoroll...?”
Mahiru beams at him and shows off his own phone. Tsurugi snorts, a smile cracking at the sight of the Pompompurin character charm that dangles merrily from it.
“How’d you know my favorite~?”
“I asked around~”
“Thank you, Mahiru-kun,” Tsurugi answers him, feeling his throat close up, just the slightest bit. His eyes sting, and he holds that little charm close to his chest. “I love it.���
It's such a small gift. A tiny one, one perfectly suited to a high schooler’s budget, but it means so much.
Because it didn't have to be given.
Mahiru takes his wrist and leads him back to the core of the party, where they are all immediately mobbed by Tsurugi’s own homegrown family.
Vampires, magicians, humans. Adults, children, immortals.
People his own age. People who aren’t.
Tsurugi is loved.
He’s happy he was born.
#kat's katerwauling#servamp#pawprints#tsurugi kamiya#mahiru shirota#happy birthday tsurugi!!!#ao3 version will be up tomorrow
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Mine [Oliver Wood x Reader]
Title: Mine
Pairing: Oliver Wood x Female!Reader
Word count: 1.8k
Published: 27 August, 2020
Author: Heloise Daphne Brightmore
Notes: I am sorry, I just can't get enough of Oliver Wood, my adorable Scottish man. So much fluff fluff fluff that you will need a dentist!
Summary: Oliver is wrapped around your finger, but he doesn’t mind. He just wants to hold you and he isn’t afraid of showing it even when your friend is angrily rumbling about her crush on a boy, but even more when you try on his jersey.
Harry Potter Characters Masterlist | Masterlists
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Oliver Wood was the handsome captain of Gryffindor's quidditch team and your boyfriend. The boy was crushing on you for months, before he finally confessed his feelings for you, after months of nagging from Fred and George Weasley.
You had liked him before, he was attractive after all, not to mention funny. You loved how passionately he talked about Quidditch, even when it was already clear that noone wanted to hear another word. You smiled at his behaviour from afar, but dared to make no steps further.
When he finally got the courage, you thought he was having a laugh and you did tell him to go and humour someone else, but he didn't give up convincing you. When you finally realised that he meant every word of his confession, you simply threw your arms around him and kissed him happily.
Since then you have been a power couple and you loved every moment of it. He was your man and he loved to remind you of that. One way or another.
You were sitting in the Gryffindor common room, your legs thrown over Oliver's lap, one of his arms wrapped around your waist, the other laying on top of your thigh, whilst he was hiding his face in your neck. You were quietly listening as your friend was complaining about the boy she has been interested in. You tried to give your complete attention to her, but it was a very hard task as your boyfriend attempted to sabotage you.
"You smell so sweet." He murmured into your neck, his warm breath sending shivers down your body, goosebumps appearing on your skin as he bit into a sensitive spot.
"Oliver!" You scolded him in a whisper as you tried to concentrate on your friend's rumbling, but as soon as you felt his hand wander upwards your thigh, your breath hitched.
"I love the school uniform. But you know what I love even more? When you take it off." He chuckled, his low tone making your heart beat faster.
"Oliver!" You growled lightly, not wanting your friend to notice your boyfriend's affectionate behaviour. "Can you stop?" You asked, concentration long gone from the conversation you were having with your friend.
"You promised to be with me today. Only with me. But here we are, listening to whatever your friend is saying. I haven't been listening to tell you the truth." He shrugged, but you couldn't stop the silent giggle to leave your lungs.
"I know, babe. But she needs me." You tried in a soft tone, but he just growled.
"I need you too." He hinted a small kiss on your neck, making you squirm in your place.
"I promised to sleep in your room tonight. Is that not good enough?" You raised a brow as you pulled his face out of your neck and looked into his eyes. "I promise you, all my attention will be yours when you come back from practice. How does that sound?" You offered and you could see a tiny mischievous smile hiding in the corner of his pouting lips.
"Hey, are you listening to me?" Your friend asked in a sharp tone, making you squint.
"Yes, yes, Oliver is just going." You attempted to save the situation.
"Aye, just get rid of me." He scoffed, but you knew he was just playfully sulking.
"I would never. I love you." You kissed him as you took your legs from his lap and let him stand up. "I will see you later, babe." You pulled him down once again and kissed him longer, sweeter.
"Kiss me like that again and I will not even go to practice." He spoke as his eyes remained closed, still under the affects of your kiss.
"You wouldn't do that." You chuckled. "Just go. You will get loads of my kisses when you come back." You winked and by the look on his face, you knew he was debating to pick you up and run upstairs with you or to leave and attend his quidditch practice. He let out a loud sigh, before turning around, shaking his head to go upstairs, collecting his quidditch uniform.
"So where was I?" Your friend asked as she started off on another rant about how the boy was useless and gave her mixed signals. You wanted to feel sorry and wanted to comfort her, but you couldn't. You loved your boyfriend more than you thought you ever would and it made it really hard to feel empathetic especially when you were so happy, you were almost walking above the ground on little pink clouds.
You were listening to your friend for another hour, before you went to your room to take a shower, get into your pyjamas and pack some of your most necessary items into your small bag. You walked over to the male dormitory, heading up to Oliver's room. You knew his roommates were gone, for some reason, it never caused an issue for him to send them away as if he had some kind of a power over them. You didn't mind though. You had more time to spend with him, alone, your bodies tangled up under the heavy duvet.
As you walked into his room, you threw your bag beside his bed and jumped on the soft mattress. You took out your book and laid across the bed, body parts thrown across each corner of the bed. Then your attention deterred from the book as you recognised the piece of clothing hanging on the side of the bed. His quidditch jersey. A playful smile appeared across your face as you placed your book back into your bad and stood up to reach for the clothing.
You pulled his jersey closer to you, hugging it around your body, his scent involuntarily finding its way into your nostrils. You heaved a deep, satisfied sigh as an idea popped into your head, making you smile.
You quickly took off your pyjamas and pulled his jersey over your body, its bottom reaching just below your butt. You snickered as you pulled the neck of the clothing to your nose, inhaling his scent happily.
You were about to head to the bathroom to check how you looked when the door flew open, a groaning quidditch captain throwing his bag down beside the entrance as he shut the door loudly, before his eyes met yours.
He raised his brow questioningly as his brown irises wandered down your body, taking in each and every exposed inch he has found.
"What did I do to deserve such a beautiful sight?" He asked as his tongue darted out of his mouth, wetting his lips, his lustful dark brown eyes finally meeting yours.
"I just thought I would try it on." You chuckled with a shrug, the clothing rolling up slightly as your shoulders moved upwards. You have seen Oliver forgetting his eyes on you before, you have seen his lustful gaze more often than ever, but this time his expression felt more dominant, more possessive.
"Well, you are gorgeous." He breathed, stepping closer, wrapping his arms around your waist as he pulled you against his chest. "What made you put it on?" He asked as he nuzzled into the crook of your neck, hinting tiny kisses on the surface of your skin.
"It smelled like you and I missed you. It made me feel closer to you." You spoke with a slight blush across your cheeks, feeling your ears heat up at your straightforward confession.
"I told you I should have stayed with you." He sighed as he pulled back enough to look into your eyes, his mischievous gaze attached to yours. "But if I recall correctly, you promised me your complete attention and loads of your kisses, am I right?" A cocky smirk taking over his lips as he heard your light giggles.
"When have I ever declined a kiss from you?" You asked as you threw your arms around his neck, crossing them behind him.
"Never. You wouldn't be able to do that." He grinned as he bit into his bottom lip, his eyes focused on your pink ones. He leaned closer, his mouth grazing yours, the distance between you almost painful as you felt his breathing against your skin, making you slightly shiver.
"I would." You breathed, but your head felt dizzy, your breathing shaky under his intense stare and closeness. "No, I wouldn't." You confessed as you closed the space between you, pulling him closer, melting your lips together with his. Each time you kissed him, you felt like falling in love with him over and over again.
You didn't understand how he did it, but his simple presence made you feel giddy and just plain happy. You could have just watched him all day and you knew you wouldn't be able to remove the smile from your face. He just made you happy even by simply existing.
As you parted you hid your face in his neck, covering the heavy blush on your cheeks.
"I am now certain you wouldn't." He chuckled happily, kissing your temple. "But if it's any consolation, I would never be able to keep myself away from you." He smiled sweetly as you unhid yourself, looking up into his big brown eyes.
"You wouldn't?" You asked, a cheeky grin spreading across your face.
"I almost missed Quidditch because of you today." He raised a brow, proving his point.
"I'm glad then, but I would never ask you to miss Quidditch." You smiled sweetly, caressing his cheek with your thumb.
"And I would never decline a kiss from you." He chuckled confidently as you hit him across the chest.
"Oh hush, Wood." You giggled and pulled him down for another kiss, feeling his hands wondering under his spare quidditch jersey, feeling your warm skin under his touch.
"You should wear this more often, love." He breathed into the kiss.
"I definitely will." You replied quickly, capturing his lips again.
Although it was your first time putting on his jersey, it wasn't the last. His jersey on you made him feel as if you have completely belonged to him and he voiced it on many occasions, whispering into your ears "Mine", enjoying as his words made you blush harder under his intense gaze.
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Text
october 1868.
it’s a fine line between fear and respect.
pairing: joseon king!yoongi x reader
genre: historical au, angst
words: 1.3k
warnings: talk of death.
moonlit throne index. this is drabble seven. start from the beginning?
“Yet another execution? Are you certain?”
“Yes, another has been planned for two days from now.”
“How many is it this time?”
“Three men. All only suspected to be Japanese spies because they spoke a few words in the language.”
From your corner in the kitchen, investigating the medicinal properties of certain vegetables when made into a paste, you pretend like you’re not listening to the two women as intently as you can.
“But that’s the fourth in a month!” The young maid’s voice is too loud, ringing out across the kitchen. “Has he truly gone insane?”
“Shh!” The head cook, an older woman you’ve known since you were but a child, shakes her head furiously with her finger pressed over her lips. “Don’t let anyone catch you saying things like that. Now you’d better hurry and bring the king his dinner or he’ll cut your head off too.” Where these words would once have been said in jest, they now carry the heavy weight of a frightening reality as the maid nods. She soon speeds off with tray in hand to avoid such a fate.
The cook, Jin-young-nim, presses her pale lips together, staring blankly at the rice porridge that bubbles away in the pot. Then, she calls your name in a soft tone.
You raise your head. “Yes?”
“Please, tell me if you can.” She hesitates. “Were you there at Minister Choi’s execution?”
At the mention of the name, you suck in an involuntary breath. You’ve tried not to think about that day for the past three weeks since it happened, but perhaps it was inevitable that all your efforts would be undone. “Yes. I… I was.”
“Is it true then? The rumors of jeonha’s…”
What can you do but nod?
The unwanted images flood your mind before you can even try to stop them.
That day in mid-September had been clear skies. You’d gathered in the public execution square, which in the past few months has seen so much spilled blood at King Yoongi’s commands that it sickens you to even think of it. Spies, rebels, and thieves alike now lost their lives every week, in addition to those behaving “suspiciously.” And if that wasn’t enough, the king had turned his bloodlust on his own court.
It was suddenly, on an inconspicuous day, that he began to hurl accusations of treason at Minister Choi. It was no secret that the king hated the man for all the oppositions to his decisions and his obsession with how things had been under the former king’s rule. That just made it all the more suspicious when a booklet of evidence appeared in the king’s possession out of nowhere, with just enough to sentence the Minister to execution.
You shouldn’t have gone to watch, but you couldn’t believe what they were saying. The king you knew would never have done such a thing, just to get rid of an annoyance. He couldn’t have fallen that far in so little time… right?
“Jeonha, I have never betrayed you!” Minister Choi, arms bound behind him like a common prisoner, had been dragged before the execution block. The king stood on the raised viewing platform, leaning against the wooden balcony with chilling ice in his stare. “You are making a mistake!”
“Please reconsider, jeonha!” Advisor Ra cried out in support of Choi. But he shut his mouth instantly when King Yoongi’s gaze flicked to him.
“Advisor Ra. Would you like to join him?”
Ra backed off, stepping back hurriedly in a bow but the threat lingered in the air. It hung over everyone in attendance like a chokehold, a feeling that was becoming too common these days. Standing in the shadows of a nearby building, you trembled at the foreignness of that blank look on his face, at the ease with which he now offered death to those who were meant to aid him. He didn’t so much as flinch when the executioner stepped up with his freshly sharpened weapon.
It was over in a second.
Most had been watching Choi’s last moments but you were still searching the king’s face for any semblance of the man he used to be. But as the sword swung down, his lips curled into a smile that was maniacal, almost crazed. His serrated scar had seemed so much redder in that light, stretched across his cheek as he held the wild grin for a moment more before he disappeared into the room, leaving his carnage and the tattered shreds of your hope behind.
Your mind does not allow you to forget it -- that terrifying look. You’re afraid it’ll replace the other memories you have of him, the ones you hold so dear that slip more and more from you as the days pass.
“He really… smiled.” Jin-young exhales at the end of your retelling, a long and tired sound.
You nod, wishing you could tell her otherwise. But you both know the changes are undeniable.
The citizens that formerly deemed him weak and useless now dread drawing his attention at all, lest they find themselves on the execution square. However, most of the rebellions across the land have ceased. Crime has been less rampant, though present still, and foreign invasion is less of a possibility with the spies (and those merely suspected of being such) taken care of. Objectively, the king carries out his proper duties and protects the land. But at what cost?
The kitchen door slams open.
It’s the same maid as before, looking absolutely frantic.
“I forgot! I forgot the rice!” Her eyes are wide in dread, hair flying loose from her up-do as she must have run all the way here. She finds the silver bowl on the counter, left behind in her haste. “Jeonha is going to kill me. He’s going to have me beheaded, or at the very least tortured and—”
“Don’t worry.” You put both hands on her shoulders, feel her entire body shudder violently beneath you. “I will bring it to him.”
“Uinyeo-nim, a-are you sure? What if he…”
You shake your head, grab the container and just go. You can’t believe he would do such a thing for such a tiny mistake, but the fresh horror in the maid’s eyes burrows right into your heart.
See, you hadn’t told Jin-young everything. You left out all the excuses you’ve made in these past months to the guards to gain access to the gardens while the list of executions piled higher, matching the number of disheveled prisoners thrown in the cells. You spent practically every hour you could spare among the trees, waiting for the chance that the king would show and reveal some tiny sign of lingering humanity like he did that humid August day. But he never once came. This time, you’re going right to him.
When you reach his expansive chambers, walk through the corridors, the area is noticeably devoid of people, save for a few necessary guards. Very few dare to venture out here unless they absolutely need to now. You were expecting this, though it still makes you uncomfortable to witness. The door to the king’s dining room is firmly closed, with the low table of food already brought inside.
“Jeonha, I have brought your rice. Forgive me for forgetting it,” you say, wondering if he would even recognize your voice after all this time.
There’s no sign of acknowledgment, or even that he hears you in the first place, but you insist on waiting a long, pensive minute.
In the end, you’re only left with nothing yet again, feeling silly for having expected anything else. Silly, for letting yourself be in this position again and again for him.
“I’ll place the bowl outside. Let me know if there is anything else you require.” Your voice sounds weak, having lost most of its fight. Then you turn on your heel, and leave him.
#ficswithluv#bts angst#bts imagines#bts scenarios#yoongi x reader#yoongi angst#min yoongi#agust d#moonlit throne#rain writes#did you think that it would be easy to talk to him? haha........ nope
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