jesus!! i never check this stuff but i was curious bc @setaflow had 100k over what? 9 years?? i have 300k+ in i think 8 years lmao

I know I ask alot but could you do a story about the reader getting kidnapped and being held hostage against the boys as black mail or something and the boys coming to save them.

Don't even worry about it! I don't want any of you to feel guilty about multiple asks, there are no limits! Ask as much as you want.

So this is a bit rough, but I will defend my portrayal of the Frog Brothers. Remember they were willing to stake Star and Laddie TWICE, even when they were helping them, just because they were half vampires. A girl and a little boy were still a threat. With that being said, I hope you still enjoy

Taken from Your Bed

Fem!Reader x Poly! Lost Boys

CONTENT WARNING: Blood, Gore, Offensive Language, Subjects of Torture

The idea of a polyamorous relationship was something you had never considered in 17 years of living. The whole idea sounded so complex, sharing someone you loved with multiple people, or multiple people sharing and loving you? It just sounded like a huge mess.

 But when it came down to it, you could never choose between the beautiful vampires that had become absolutely smitten with you. What had started as a summertime time fling with the youngest and most perfect glam rocker, Paul, had evolved into a blossoming romance with his brothers. Late summer nights of riding through wind-warped beach dunes and cool morning naps were your new life. Your house had never really felt like a home even before you were coaxed into the arms of your blood sucking princes, and soon you just stopped coming back. Honestly they didn't even look for you. You'd be eighteen soon, you had graduated early from high school, there wasn't exactly much else to be done. It wasn't a surprise that your family was indifferent, you always questioned whether or not your parents had even wanted children. So, in the dark of the night they swooped in, liberating them of your belongings, and your presence. No note, no farewell, just an empty room with empty drawers.

Some days it would depress you. The subtle rejection hurt, but those days never lasted long. Any signs of tears and they'd be piling on you with a plethora of love. Paul would always remind you it didn't matter. You were with them now! Anyone else can burn in hell. The old cove where Star had slept was made up for you. They were more than happy to trash anything belonging to that treacherous girl. Battery powered fairy lights were hung across worn wooden bed posts, streams of colorful curtains kept you well shielded from any intruders, a mountain of stuffed toys from various trips to the boardwalk decorated the floor and your bed. They even managed to dig up a dusty old dresser for you clothes, and amongst your glamourous new cave dwelling, more often than not at least one of the boys would share the bed with you. On special occasions they'd all fall asleep with you in the middle between piles of plushies and pillows. Each one loved to spend time with you on and off the boardwalk. 

Marko was up for absolutely anything as long as he could be with you. You'd read out chapters of The Outsiders while he burrowed in your lap, just entranced by your soothing voice. He'd beg you to sing to him, just to get a glimpse of what that entailed. You could sound like a dying seagull and he'd still call it a serenade. On lazy days he would let you practice painting his nails when you got bored, or brush his hair. That was his favorite. Paul would whine that he wants his hair brushed too, only for David to interject that it's his turn next. Yes, even David loves having your attention on him. When you aren't sitting pretty in his lap, he's laying lazily against you while you run your fingers through snowy blonde hair. If you get him relaxed enough he'll let out a low, growling hum. You started calling it a sleepy bear sound. Your time with David was often mellow, wrapped in his arms while he read. Eventually you'd grow curious and peek at the pages, asking him to read out loud. "Only for you kitten." He'd whisper.

Dwayne could braid your hair for hours, telling you old stories his granny would tell him passed on from centuries. Your favorite is the wendigo, the story of settlers driven to cannibalism after being trapped in a cruel winter, doomed to roam as superhuman beasts. It makes you wonder if what they had seen were ancient vampires? He'd chuckled, throwing in a casual "maybe" then ask if you wanted feathers woven in your hair as well. Uh, yes please! Dwayne always made sure you were taking care of yourself. If you hadn't eaten that day it was suddenly top priority. He'll remind you the importance of 7 cups of water a day, plenty of rest- until you point out he does none of that. He'd then argue he's undead, that doesn't count. 

When Paul had his turn he'd be ecstatic. You'd both head bang to blasting music off the rock box, fix each other's hair in wild teased messes, sneak in a bit of heavy petting. Watching tv became a staple thanks to some rusty generator you "found" on a fisherman's boat after he… disappeared under mysterious circumstances. With a bowl of popcorn he'll pop in a scary movie, savoring those jumps that made you hide in his chest. It was too adorable! As soon as the other boys saw you two watching a film they'd all join and Paul would huff about his private time being commandeered. 

Even with all of this, you had still decided to remain human much to their dismay. It wasn't that you didn't want to be a vampire. But after the Frog Brothers nearly wiped them out, the boys needed someone to be a daytime watch guard. You weren't supposed to fight anyone, just raise an alarm if there were trespassers. The thought of that made you pout. It's not like you couldn't handle yourself. Sure you weren't Bruce Li, but you had a few street brawl victories under your belt. You could certainly handle those Frog dorks.

 Or so you had thought. 

That night you were absolutely positive no one had seen you, you certainly weren't supposed to be seen. It was 4:35 am, almost the entire boardwalk was scattered by now with most of the families long gone home. The lights were being shut off, rides had been closed hours ago. Only a few party animal adults still lingered at the bars making last calls, lazily returning to their beds after a draining night. A dense fog had started to roll in, coating the moon and beach in a haze. The foreboding swoon promised possible rain the following day. Taking advantage of the ethereal beauty the night was, you had lured two absolutely wasted surfer guys that had been stumbling across the boardwalk now eagerly following you through the misty sands expecting a night of thrills once you reached the caves. Calmly humming, you dragged your toes over the damp sands while wisps of ocean waves tempted to reach your feet. At the last stretch you waded through the shallows, cautiously climbing up onto slick mossy rocks when you reached the mouth of the cave. "C'mon boys. My friends are just dying to meet you," you purred. 

The high fives and penis innuendos were short lived when a flurry of dark figures swooped them into the air. You simply say atop the wet rocks with your knees delicately held against your chest. The screams and gurgled cries were lost to the ocean, and soon a familiar face poked from above looking into the cave. 

"Peek-a-boo," Marko teased, hanging off the roof of the cave before swinging next to you. "Have I ever told you, you have awesome taste in meals for a human?"

"Is that you, or the boozey blood talking," you asked with a giggle, smearing the blood off his cheeks to steal a quick kiss.

"Bow don't go taking all of her, Marko." You looked up, watching David swoop in coated in bloody stains with Paul and Dwayne trailing behind. 

"Sorry I could only bring you five people tonight guys, the fog coming in scared off whatever was left on the boardwalk. I barely caught those last two leaving the bar."

"Don't even kitty-cat, you already brought us way more than we expected," Paul protested, hanging on your shoulders from behind. 

Dwayne nodded, still leaning up against the soggy cave. "Five is enough to keep us full, princess, you did plenty." 

So with another successful night of feeding the boys were left ready to rest as 5 am rolled around. The sun tempted to rise before they had reached the cave, the boys slipping away to their dark hovel after giving you a mess of good night, or rather, good morning kisses. Although you often went to bed shortly after a night out, this morning you felt a surge of energy keeping you up. Thankfully it was a gloomy grey sky, causing minimal sunlight to burst through the slivers and cracks leaving the possibility still open that one of them would come to sleep beside you. Until then you chiseled away the boredom with a pair of headphones and a pile of comic books, flipping through the pages with eager anticipation for the next scene. Two hours barely dragged by, leaving you rolling over your bed in misery. Staring at the ceiling you debated sneaking into the cave. Maybe drag a blanket and a pillow, cuddle up on the ledge.. and then David would give you an earful for not only sleeping where you could fall but climbing through the tunnels. Oh well. It was only- 7:30 am. Perhaps you should spend the day out? But, something felt off. 

You sat up, pulling off your headphones trying to listen for anything out of the ordinary. There was a disturbing still to the room, even the ocean sounded distant.

 Then without warning, a firm hand clamped over your mouth from behind. You tried to wildly thrash and scream, but the sounds were heavily muffled under the thick layers of a towel. There seemed to be another who was running in front of you to grab at your wild legs still getting in every possible hit you could. They were whisper-yelling, demanding you keep your voice down. To hell with that! You managed to kick one in the face! The struggle dragged out for easily five minutes by this point. It always seemed to work faster in fiction, instead it dragged out for what felt like forever. The scent burned your lungs, it was getting harder to breathe, your resistance wavered as the drag of exhaustion continued to claw at your eyes. Your violent thrashing became a few heavy swings of your shoulders, until you could barely move anymore. It was impossible to fight the monstrous sleep they forced you into. Your body dropped into unconsciousness, finally able to breathe as you slipped away in the darkness.

Marko stirred in his sleep, swearing he could hear you screaming just outside. It wasn't until he opened his eyes that he was able to relax. Quiet as the day is long. It must've been his imagination. 

Flutters of light faded in and out of your peripheral vision. The more you saw, the more you heard. Two grumbling voices bickering back and forth. 

"- I say we should just ice her now!"

"Not until we can smoke the rest of 'em out! A vampire rarely travels alone these days! The rest of them won't kill us as long as we have her!"

A verbal groan alerted their attention towards you as you shifted in place. It was still daytime, maybe mid afternoon? You honestly couldn't tell. When you tried to sit up you felt a sharp, worn resistance that kept your arms firmly in place. The rope rubbed your wrists raw. Your boots couldn't get any traction on the floor, it was covered in dust and old hay. Finally you were able to see those responsible for your capture. 

"Oh you have got to be kidding," you announced, glaring at the two camo-clad brothers posing like suburban commandos. This was some old dusty barn, and you were kidnapped by the self proclaimed vampire hunters of Santa Carla, the Frog Brothers, Edgar and Allan. Typical.

"So, you guys have gone from murder to kidnapping. Well, I guess that's progress."

"The only murderer here is you, blood sucker," Edgar gruffly retorted, pointing a freshly sharpened stake in your face.

"Vampire? I'm in the sun you idiot!"

"We all know about you half bloods being in sunlight, you can't fool us." You didn't even realize the tall one spoke. His sneering upper lip wouldn't cease to display the disgust he held against you. 

"You two must be sniffing too much old newsprint," you snorted. "There's no such thing as vampires."

That's when Edgar got close, tilting your chin up with the stake. "We saw you drawing those civilians to the cave for your little monster buddies." 

His words hit you heavily. You were certain you had been careful, utterly positive. Instead not only had you been tailed, you had exposed the boys to a group of radical nutcases ready to kill. Now it was personal. Steeling your resolve, you took in a deep breath. "So what?"

Allan yanked you by your shirt, looking back into your eyes with his own hate. "Where are the others," he hissed. 

With everything you had you tilted your head back and bashed your forehead against his. The force made your ears ring. They always did it in the movies, but no one ever said just how much it hurt. There was a dull sting where your skull had taken the brunt end of the attack while it traveled all the way to the back, a small trickle of what you could only assume was blood dripping off your forehead. Meanwhile the teen had fallen onto his back atop the filthy floor still grasping his forehead with a groan, Edgar jumping up over Allan ready to drive that stake into your heart. 

"No!" Allan grabbed his brother by his shirt, just before it came inches to your heart. "We need her alive… for now."

With a smirk you sloshed around the spit in your mouth. As soon as Edgar turned to face you, you sent the congealed saliva in a forceful blast across. Direct hit. Edgar wiped away the disgusting phlegm off his eyes and in his rage quickly uncapped a bottle of holy water. Yes, a full water bottle of it, and doused you in it. 

Great. Now you were tied up. bleeding, AND WET. You gave them a disinterested glare, cocking an eyebrow. "So, again, not a vampire. Believe me now?"

The two looked at each other and quickly huddled. They would mutter amongst themselves, occasionally peeking above to glare at you and your rolling eyes. Alright, so you were human. Even a head vampire couldn't be out in daylight, and half vampires couldn't handle holy water. But in a way that only made it worse! A living servant of the undead, a spy to lure helpless victims into their grasp, a caretaker of evil! A traitor to your own kind! That settled it then.

Groaning even grew tiresome by this point. You tried to wiggle out of your crude bonds, but you had to give them some semblance of credit, this was a damn good knot!

"Alright," Edgar boomed, catching you off guard. "You may be a human, but any ally of the undead is still an enemy, and we're not showing you an ounce of mercy!"

Allan nodded, and suddenly the atmosphere took a turn for gloomy. He watched with disinterest as you tried to wedge your heel into the ground to scoot away from them but it seemed to have no use. The struggle had you thrashing until you lost balance, flopping over on your side. He stomped over and wrenched you up by your shirt, this time keeping a cautious distance from your head.

 "If they're keeping you alive.. they must think you have some sort of value." Alan finally knelt down to your level with your shirt still clutched in his left hand, brandishing a hunting knife with the right. The glint of it shined in your eyes in a cruel afternoon glow. In its looming reflective surface you could see your own e/c eyes as wide as saucers. They didn't see you as human. You were an ally of their greatest enemy, just as "evil" as the vampires they were so determined to hunt. Being human was no longer a bargaining chip to prevent injury. "Call to them."

Your teeth ground until they hurt, jaw locked in place. "Go to fucking hell," you hiss. 

Before you could land another blow to Allan's smug face, Edgar had grabbed you from behind to keep you in place. The blade lightly caressed the flesh of your upper arm, catching the folds of your skin leaving tiny knicks. It tempted the surface to break beneath it's cruel will as Allan repeated his command through gritted teeth. "Call. Them."

Threats of torture weren't enough to break your silence. Fine, so be it. The tip dug into your arm, skin peeling away in a stream of ruby leaving a trail behind. You sucked in a sharp hiss, but bit on your tongue before you could yelp.There was no way you'd let them get to the boys. If you had to die so they could live, so be it. You wouldn't let out so much as a whimper. Do your worst.

Late afternoon dragged out, clinging tightly to every ticking second until the sun gave way under its own weary weight. The moment night lifted, crowing hoots echoed the cave. Freedom at last! Paul swung out of the cave brimming with excitement, Dwayne flying out behind him and crashing onto a couch leaving a cloud of dust for him to sneeze out. David was the last to waltz out, looking towards your corner. Odd. You were usually the first up to greet them. It'd become almost expected by this point. Sensing David's confusion along with his own, Marko gleefully jumped down from the rafters over debris to reach your bed. Someone was certainly sleeping in!

"Y/N? C'mon baby girl, wake up! Time for..," he paused, pulling away the curtains to find your bed a disheveled mess. Your cassette tape had been eaten to shreds by your portable player, magazines and books thrown on the floor, wads of sheets kicked off topped by discarded plushies. "Guys, c'mere!"

Dwayne quickly jumped up, expecting you to be snuggled in bed like a baby bird in its nest. Instead he stood beside Marko and looked past the curtains at the disarray your little corner had become.

 "Since when does Y/N go out this late at night," Paul questioned from behind the two. Whoa, did a tornado come through here? He hopped over, pulling the trashed tape from your player. 

"She doesn't," David said slowly, a flood of concern spilling into his head. Fully pushing the curtains away they all stepped in, looking for any sign of where you had gone.

Paul managed to wedge out the mess of black threading and plastic, getting a good look at what you had been listening to. Def Leppard's Hysteria Album. He had scrounged up some dough a few months ago for your birthday, you guys spent the whole weekend listening to it. For some reason you liked their gifts even more when they didn't just steal them. This was your favorite thing from him.. you'd never just leave it in the player to get trashed. "Dude what happened here?"

 David lifted your blankets, noticing an unfamiliar scent intruding over your delicate aroma. Someone else had been here. Someone who shouldn't have been here.

Marko was able to catch whiff of a gnarly chemical scent, bitter. Crouching down, it was almost missed. Amongst your belongings was an unfamiliar towel stained with some sort of fluid. Peeling the soggy rag off the ground he took a whiff and immediately scrunched up his nose. "Hey, David, man. Smell this. Is it familiar?"

David caught the drenched towel tossed his way and barely had to smell it to recognize the stench. Throwing it down he began storming out, standing in the center of the room trying to listen for your heartbeat. None. 

"What is it? Where is she," Paul demanded. This was getting to be too much. 

"This isn't a coincidence boys," David hissed, looking their way. "Someone took Y/N. That rag was drenched in some sort of concentrated chemical."

The boys grew solemn, David's words setting into each of them. Paul was enraged, already his red eyes seeping through. How dare anyone take you from him! He'll rip them apart!

Marko's silence held a cruel storm ready to burst, biting on his thumb to stifle any unsteady rage. All he could picture were horrid images of you being hurt. Fear and guilt overwhelmed him. That wasn't a dream, he really had heard you earlier crying for help. The shame of it made him clench his eyes shut. A cacophony of blame riddled his heart knowing you had been taken just beneath their noses. He shouldn't have left you alone, he should have checked on you the moment he thought something was wrong!

Dwayne stood in silence, slamming his fist against the wall. Crumbles of concrete dusted his busted knuckles that quickly healed in place. You were supposed to be theirs, and he failed to protect you! "We have to find her," he choked out, pushing a mess of black hair from his furrowed brow. The not knowing was killing him. It was killing all of them. You weren't just missing, you were stolen while they slept only feet away. 

Even David felt an internal rage unlike anything he'd felt before, not only at the perpetrators, but at himself. A beast among men, eternal life with a bounty of strength worth a thousand. What fucking good was it when while he slept you were torn from your bed? But another thought sat heavy in his heart. Their hearing was impeccable, damn near perfect. Why hadn't you called them? A scream, a cry would be enough! He began to march over to your bed again, but a new perspective had just granted him a moment of clarity. Hidden just under your blankets was a broken strip of red cloth one could only assume was a headband. Clasped tightly in vengeful fists, David's eyes turned bloodshot. He knew exactly who took you. 

You weren't even sure how many hours had gone by at this point. The brother's grew restless at your resolve. While they regrouped in the corner to reevaluate their plan, you had found a nail jutting out from the floorboards to scrape your ankles on, slowly sawing away the worn rope that kept your legs together. Any movement stung. Cuts decorated up your exposed thighs and arms. Fresh blood caked over dried wounds, dirt became mud by this point from the excessive wounds and had smeared up your legs. They had conflicting feelings about throwing any swings your way. You were surprised to hear Edgar verbally voice his hesitations regarding unleashing a blow on a girl. Allan stepped in, but came to the same conclusion that he couldn't hit you. Well, after four good catches to your face. Utterly moronic, a knife was far more painful. Perhaps it gave them some sort of distance from you, punching was just too personal. Still, your busted lip was not appreciative of the last minute sentiment. Part of you wanted to mock them. If you're going to kidnap and torture someone go all the way at least, don't puss out half way through. But, you had other plans. You rapidly ran the rope across the nail while they bickered back and forth, nearly there.. and then you heard a massive thud land on the roof. 

No. No not yet. You quickly dragged your feet as fast as you could while the brothers flew into a panic. But now your feet were free. Using your knees you hoisted yourself up to the nail, rapidly dragging your arms across to saw the straw away. Edgar and Allan began checking each other for weapons, and right as the rammed into the door again your wrists came free. Right!

You dashed for the brothers, snatching the bottles of water and dumping out every drop into the ground. They ran to grab you as you tried to bolt out the door, almost able to see Marko in the air above when suddenly someone had grabbed a fistful of your hair. That was enough to make you scream. A chunk was ripped from your scalp, the rest still tightly grasped in Edgar's fist. 

David watched you bolt out the rickety old barn, ready to fly down to you until they caught you in their grasp. Paul didn't even hesitate once they snatched you back, that is until he caught sight of a shimmering glare wedged tightly against your throat. 

"Get back," Edgar demanded, twisting your arm. The pain rang up through your back to the point you feared your shoulder was being pulled out of place. Your breathing began to become shallow when something cold slid on your throat, Edgar's free hand pressing the blade to your throat so tightly a thin line formed beneath it. 

"You're fucking dead, you little shit," Marko hissed, jumping off the tin roof. 

"M-Marko," you whimpered. You didn't dare move an inch. 

"Back off death breath! Or your little pet becomes your next meal!"

With that warning Edgar tilted the blade just beneath your chin. 

You tried to pull your head back to keep your distance from the foreboding piece, looking at Marko with fear. 

"I'm sorry…"

Marko took a step back, unsure of how to approach this. Any moves he made could result in you being taken. He could see the barrage of wounds coating your skin. It made his shoulders shake, just aching to rip this punk's head off. 

From inside the barn Dwayne hovered over the rafters, shattering the bulb that provided the only light in the room. Left in the dark, Allan grasped at the wooden stake in his hand. He could hear Dwayne rapidly flying through the barn, but he could never move fast enough to see him. "Come out you coward!" 

Allan's scream alerted Edgar to his brother, turning his head just soon enough to watch him bled dry. Dwayne pried his fangs from the limp teen with a disgusted snarl in the dark, chucking the corpse at his brother's feet.

"NOOOOO!"

You took the chaos as an opportunity to escape, knocking his hand off of you and trying to bolt forward. Paul flew to snatch you, his hands tightly wrapped around yours when he heard the most hideous sound. Flesh tearing, bones cracking under the pressure with squelches of blood pittering down into the ground. His fingers trembled watching your delicate face drop in horror.

Edgar stood behind, only seeing the red of his rage as he drive the knife further into the small of your back. "Die you witch bitch!"

Those were his last words as David jutted his hand through Edgar's chest. You screamed in horror watching Edgar barely have a reaction to his own heart being held outside his body, collapsing into a hollow husk of flesh. What air you had was rapidly escaping your lungs, falling in a cascade into Paul's arms. 

"No, no no! Y/N!" He dropped to his knees, holding you tightly against him. David knelt down beside you two, Marko running and skidding on his knees beside you while Dwayne leaned over you. They were all holding back tears, David's hand brushing over the hilt of the knife still jutting out. 

"I'm so sorry," you hiccups between tears, fingers tangled in Paul's jacket. "I co-couldn't… let them g-get you."

Marko shushed you, running his fingers through your hair. "Its okay baby girl, we know. Just hang on, okay?"

David wedged you into a sitting position onto his knees, looking at Paul. "As soon as I pull," he began, pushing your hair away from your neck ", you bite."

The suggestion sent chills through you. "B-but.."

"Y/N, kitten, it's right through your lumbar artery," David whispered softly, lightly tapping the hilt with his gloved hand sending a dull pain through your entire back. "This has gotta come out. But when I pull it out, you could bleed to death."

"Please don't leave us, baby girl." Marko held your hand, looking at you in fear. He wasn't ready to lose you. None of them were. If you had to turn to stay with them, they'd do it in a heartbeat. 

With a slow breath in, you hugged yourself against David and closed your eyes. Paul moved beside your neck as instructed, but Dwayne and Marko each took one of your wrists in their grasp. They all wanted to turn you. "O..okay.. d-do it.."

David kissed your cheek softly, clutching his hand around the knife. It hardly put up any resistance against his vampiric strength. You, on the other hand, couldn't help but cry out. Tears flooded your face, nails dragging against David's jacket. When they could see the tip of the blade surface, Paul dove his fangs into your shoulder. David bit into the left side of your neck, while Marko and Dwayne tore into your wrists. What should take hours only took moments. 

Marko held onto you, closing his eyes tightly trying to muscle through your agonized cries before pulling his mouth off. Tears spilled from Paul's eyes, tearing away before he lost control. The taste of your bittersweet blood lingered on his tongue. Dwayne and David held you in place, and finally you had felt your heart stall, then stop. 

You didn't need to catch your breath anymore, there was no longer any breath left to catch. "I'm sorry… I'm so so sorry,:" you whimpered, buried against David's chest. "Th-they had holy water, they were going to ambush you… I-I couldn't risk it.."

"No more, kitten," David shushed, holding your head on his chest. 

"Don't worry about it princess." Dwayne ran his hands over your hair, kissing the top of your head. "This won't happen again."

"We are never letting you out of our sight again," Marko cooed, nuzzling your hand against his face. Paul gently kissed your available cheek, looking up at the black sky shifting to grey. "Guys, the sun's comin' up."

"So it is." David lifted you bridal style into his arms, kissing you softly. "Let's get you home babygirl. Tonight we'll take you out for your first hunt, but for now, you need your rest."

A burst up wind carried you off into the air, holding on tightly to David as he flew you over the ocean, above the clouds, back to the safety of the hotel. Your home. Forever.

Chapter 5, Near-Death-Experience

Heyyy y’all! Sorry, I wanted to post earlier today (and with an update/warning so y’all could see it was coming) but a lot of... stuff(?) has happened this weekend. Hope you all enjoy regardless! ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*---~---~---~---~---~---~--- *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

“So,” you ask, leaning into the middle console, “What happened?” Bella purses her lips for a moment. 

“Um… a lot?” She starts, eyes still locked on the road, “He said ‘hi’ to me at the beginning of class, I guess, so that was new.” You nod, “He also called me Bella instead of Isabella, but no one else has done that? Like… he even corrected Mr. Banner when he called me Isabella.” You shrug, holding your head in your hand as you lean back against your door.

“Maybe since we’ve been here for a bit, he heard from everyone else you like being called Bella?” Bella nods, though her expression was disbelieving.

“Maybe,” she concedes, “But I don’t think so?” You shrug, making a movement with your other hand to queue her onwards. “He asked me a lot of questions, I guess. He tried to make small-talk about the snow at first, but I don’t like snow. He figured it was difficult for me to live here in Forks. Said I was ‘hard to read’ for some reason.” You shrug again, though she couldn’t see it. 

“Well, he doesn’t really know you, right? Just because Mom and I can read you doesn’t mean someone new can, I suppose.” She sighs, 

“That makes sense, I guess. But… there’s something else.” You lean away from your door to sit up straight. 

“Well?” you prompt after a short silence, “What is it?” Bella’s fingers tap against the wheel anxiously. 

“Well… have you noticed his eyes? The color change, I mean.” You freeze. Edward’s eyes had changed too? You noticed Jasper’s since he sat next to you, but you hadn’t noticed his brother’s change from across the room during lunch. Bella glances at you, “What? What’s wrong?” You shuffle in your seat, leaning back against the door with your arm.

“Well… I just.. I noticed the same thing with his brother, Jasper. He sits next to me in Psych. His eyes used to be really dark. Like, really dark. Now they kind of match his hair, like a golden color. I didn’t say anything about it, but it’s kinda weird.” Bella is obviously surprised by your comment. 

You drive the short rest of the drive home in contemplative silence.

You’re able to get most of your homework done before dinner, and Bella helps you with the Algebra after dinner. Dinner, speaking of, was the usual silence you were now used to. You doodled for a while before you decided to go to bed. 

The next day, you woke up to a surprise. The overcast, green-tinted light you were used to waking up to had cleared into bright, filtered light. You got dressed before you looked out the window and walked back to your closet to get your boots. On the other side of the glass, there was a snowy and frozen wonderland. Fern-like designs of frost hugged the edges of the glass on your window, every needle was coated in crystalline ice. The driveway had become an ice-trail of possible future concussions and a trip to the ER.

You came downstairs to see Bella making a bowl of cereal. You gasped in horror when you saw her drink orange juice straight from the carton while making your own cereal when she finished her own bowl. Bella sat in her chair practically vibrating with nervous energy as she waited for you to be done with your breakfast. 

“What’s with you?” You ask, shoveling another spoonful of Cheerios into your mouth while Bella gathers her thoughts. 

“I guess I’m just, kind of excited?” You nearly choked on your cereal. Y/n Swan, the beloved sister, died by shocking news and breakfast. A little ball of dread reappeared in the pit of your stomach. 

“Excuse me,” you ask, still coughing a little bit, “But why on Earth?” You already knew the answer as soon as she nearly killed you with your own surprise and food, but you asked anyway. 

“I… Agh, I know it’s stupid!” Your sister admits sheepishly, “But… I guess to see him.” You scoffed, this time not nearly dying.

“Yup, sounds very, very stupid. You shouldn’t trust someone who lies about their eyes,” You note, raising your eyebrows at Bella. She nods her head, but you can tell her attitude hasn’t changed much. You sigh and finish off your milk before standing to rinse your bowl out in the sink. You and Bella grab your bags and prepare to leave, fearing the worst for the journey ahead. 

You guided Bella to the very front of the truck, holding onto each other as supports to make the short way to the truck. It was only when you and your sister parted to go to your respective sides of the vehicle when Bella nearly toppled. Luckily, she caught the mirror of the door on the way down to steady herself. You laughed, relieved when you both made it into the cab without injury. Bella wasn’t nearly as amused. 

Bella drove carefully through the icy streets without difficulty, but still slowly, which you were glad for. The last thing you needed was for your father to show up at the site of a crash after carving a path of destruction through town. Despite this, the little lump of dread on your stomach was growing bigger and heavier.

When you made it to school, you got out of the warm cab, you noticed Bella stop at the back of the truck. You make your way to her side curiously. Did she find something on the ground? Standing beside her, you see what she’s looking at. Thin, silver snow chains had been fixed to your tires. You realized, like Bella seemingly had, that Charlie had gotten up early and put them on the truck for the both of you. This small act stunned you. Your mother had never done anything like this to take care of you, in fact, Bella had always been the one to take safety measures and care for you. Bella leans up, tears welling up in her eyes. You lay a hand on her shoulder and try to smile through the mini-wave of emotions.

A loud noise abruptly tears through the quiet air of the parking lot. You turn your head to see behind you a large, dark blue van skidding on the icy blacktop, and it’s headed right towards you and Bella.

You knew you wouldn’t have any time to run, you wouldn’t even have time to push Bella out of the way.

 Nothing was in slow motion, but you were fast enough to manage one maybe final act. 

You turned to Bella, her brown eyes wide and looking off away from the van at the crowd, and wrapped your arms behind her. One arm reached up and held the top of her head, the other crossed from one shoulder to hold the other. You were already on the outside, Bella was between you and the corner of the truck. You knew you were going to die. The chances of being pinned between the truck and a van probably weren’t very high, but maybe you’d be enough of a barrier to at least get your sister out alive? You hoped so.

Right before you expected to be smashed by the oncoming Frisbee-ing vehicle, you were pushed. You felt your wrist, the one behind Bella’s head, hit the concrete with sharp pain. Something cold and hard was pinning your back down. You hadn’t even blinked when you realized you were on the ground next to a tan car Bella had parked next to. You barely had time to look up and see two white hands thrust forward to stop the van from hitting you, pushing into an already deep dent in the side of the body. Then, like a blur, one hand reached to hold under the van and the other pulling you away, your legs swinging and hitting the tire of the car beside you.

And then, it was over. For a moment, it was silent after the van settled and the glass popped. After that short silence, pandemonium.  Many voices started yelling at once, the most you could understand was several people yelling your names. That was when you realized there was someone else there. You looked back behind you to see none other than the bagel-hater himself, Edward Cullen, holding you against his side, you sandwiched between both him and yourself clutching Bella to you.

“Bella?” He repeats, “Are you alright?” Bella groans and tries to escape both of your grasps, but you held onto her, as did Edward.

“I’m fine,” she groans. She looks up to you and realizes who you were being held against and immediately struggles to sit up against you. You help her sit up gently with Edward’s white hand guiding her back.

“Be careful,” he warns her, “I think you hit your head.” Bella reaches a hand up to her head, placing her hands against a spot above her left ear. 

“Ow.” Bella mumbles, sounding surprised. You sat up as fully as you could and gently looked about Bella’s face, your hands holding her jaw as you searched for any more irritated spots of impact or scrapes. Thankfully, she seemed fine.

“That’s what I thought,” Edward hums, almost sounding amused? If you weren’t in the head space of just trying to make sure you and your sister were alright, you probably would have at least turned to glare at Edward, maybe even yell. Bella mumbles, still wincing as she held onto the side of her head, 

“How in the…?” She shakes her head and her voice trails off before looking back up, “How did you get over here so fast?” Edward makes an expression of what you knew to be feigned-confusion,

“I was right next to you, Bella,” he says, his voice no longer exhibiting a humorous inflection. You steady Bella as she begins to push away to sit up and Edward unwinds his arms from around your side and Bella’s and scoots as far as he can in the very limited space in between the far too-close vehicles. You turned your back to press against the side of the tan car behind you, one hand on your sister's shoulder as you both looked over to the boy beside you. The way he was looking at you and Bella was bizarrely off-putting. The way he almost looked to be sincerely confused, he truly wore the expression of authentic befuddlement, but not quite. You looked into the golden hues of his eyes and knew that couldn’t be right. His gaze was too hard, too much like he was pleading you to just stay quiet or just go with it. He wasn’t confused. He knew exactly what had happened and what Bella was asking. 

Edward shifts his gaze to you, his expression slightly harder in some way, guarded perhaps? 

You’re snapped out of your speculative train of thought by voices. Now that everything had stopped, you realized there was screaming. Different voices screaming Bella’s name, screaming your name. Funnily enough, you weren’t able to pick out anyone calling for the Cullen boy beside you in the noise.

A crowd rushes up to the vehicles, crying faces and yelling greet you as you look up to them all. 

“Stay put!” Someone instructs loudly, but you can’t see who. 

“Get Tyler out of the van!” Someone else shouted. There is a dizzying amount of movement around the vehicles as you look back to Bella as she tries to stand up. Both your hand and Edwards place themselves on opposite shoulders before she can elevate herself.

“Somebody said to stay put just now Bells,” You remind softly as she lowers back down the few centimetres.

“But it’s cooold,” she whines. Edward snickers behind you, but Bella cuts him off, “You were over there. You were by your car...” her voice trails off once again as she looks up into his eyes. Edward drops his smile and instead presses his lips into a hard and narrows his eyes, frowning ever-so slightly.

“No, I wasn’t.” 

“I saw you,” Bella insists. Over the argument you hear deeper voices, teachers, arriving to the scene. 

“Bella, I was standing with you, I pulled you out of the way.” It seemed he was trying with all his silent might to convince your sister other from the truth. Bella breaks her gaze from Edward’s and looks at you. You could practically see the vicious curiosity burning behind her brown eyes. You turn to look at Edward and realize he had been staring at you. His nearly pleading gaze making contact with your own vision causes a strange panic to stir in your chest.

“You… you couldn’t have been there.” You say, “You weren’t there even when I turned and grabbed Bella…” Edward, obviously displeased with your answer, looks between you and your sister with a guarded panic, 

“Bella, Y/n, please,” he pleads softly. For some reason, his gentle voice aggravates the panic already present in the back of our mind, though you can’t tell why it did.

“Why?” Bella almost glares at the boy across from her. Obviously, you were alone in your sudden feeling of alarm.

“Trust me,” you begs again, his forceful gaze shifting from Bella to you before returning back to your sister.

“Will you promise to explain everything to me later?” Edward lets out a sharp sigh at your sisters continued pressing,

“Fine,” he snaps.

“Fine,” Bella echoes with her own angry tone.

You look between the two teenagers with worry. The far off sirens were finally in the parking lot. You could see flashing red and blue lights reflecting off of the wet asphalt and snow and edges of the vehicles around you. Through the wailing sirens and abrupt feeling of panic, you have a feeling the rest of the day was going to be a disaster. Though, how much worse could it get from here?

Turns out, much worse.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*---~---~---~---~---~---~--- *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

Tags: @twilight-loveer, @rushiruby

Summary: Javi hasn't called...again, Isa tries to distract herself making a new friend, but she doesn't know that her intentions are far from innocent and are tied to Javi crossing paths again with someone from his past.

Warning: cursing, mention of violence, threats, anxiety, kidnapping. Very hateful characters from the show 👀

A/N: I'M SO SORRY THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN POSTED ALMOST A MONTH AGO. I will try to finish this before this month ends. I think I could wrap this in one chapter more and an epilogue probably.

Just a small warning. This is a work of fiction and the intention is merely to develop a little bit more of a character I adore, Javi Peña. There's mention of the drug cartel, the violence they inflected in Latinoamérica (and as a Latina it hurts me very deeply, believe me) and the political involvement of different governments and agencies but this is not a political statement or trying to do other thing than entertain.

Chapter VII: Smart Choices

Isabel had never been a very popular girl, always the shy one in high school and she made a very small group of friends in college. But as everything in her life, there was a before and after since her life changed and she had Elvira.

She could not go to the club with her friends, their conversations about their new graduate’s struggles hurt her since she had to drop out, their heartbreaks and adventures had nothing to do with her life surrounded by diapers, feeding bottles and sleepless nights and so one day the phone stopped ringing, their friendship was limited to birthday parties and Christmas postcards while she became a mum and a wife. And thus making her world a very small universe with her child at the center and Javi and her turning around her.

So when that lady at the supermarket, Judy, called her she didn’t think anything weird out of it. Instead she was happy, excited to have another struggling mum that needed some comforting from somebody that understands her as much as she did.

“I’m sorry I took the liberty to ask for your phone number, I have a friend that goes to your mum’s salon and I ask her for it” she had said the first time she called.

Judy is a funny and very quick and intelligent woman. When they got their first coffee together, Isa barely asks any question, Judy fills the conversations so Isabel never has the chance to ask when she is meeting her kid or who gave her her phone number since she knows every client of her mother’s salon by heart and nobody mentioned her ever. But Judy keeps the conversation flowing, sharing her tragic story about leaving Colombia out of a very tough situation with a guy and creating a new life for her and her kid in the USA.

“It must have been so tough” Isa pounders

“Colombia back then was a bloodbath, you had to navigate the streets in survival mode, always looking behind your back and praying to come back home safe” Judy explains

“My husband worked in Colombia for a few years”

“Oh really? When?”

“80’s early 90’s"

“Well, he must have known. So sad! it is a very beautiful country...”Judy’s gaze is fixed far away as if she’s remembering something

“I guess it’s difficult to talk about it, my husband never shares much”

“Mm” she hums, she opens a golden lighter and gets the flame close to the cigarette on her red lips “What did he do there?”

“He worked at the Embassy” she’s not lying but she prefers not to specify, and now that’s past, the details are not really important

“Oh! and that’s what he’s doing in Mexico now?” she asks exhaling a white cloud of smoke making a perfect o with her lips

“Not exactly”

“He must be careful; I heard things are following the same path we suffered back in Colombia”

“Yes...he’s...smart, I’m sure he will be fine” Isa answers more to convince herself than her new friend

“I saw in the news the other day how a few civilians died during a clash between two fronting cartels and then the police. Very, very horrible images" she smacks her lips

"I haven't watched the news…" the knot in Isa's stomach grows tighter, Javi haven't called back even if he promised he would

"They kill anyone that is on their way, civilians, gringos too, DEA agents…" the Colombian woman casually brings the coffee cup to her lips when Isa frowns at her

"What did you say?" She asks

"They kill civilians?" Judy smiles uncomfortably the corner of her lips stretching up

"No, the last part"

"Gringos...DEA agents" she repeats

"Why did you say that?" The knot gets tighter restringing her throat and her question is just a whisper

"I… assume Javier must be…"

"I haven't told you what he does"

Judy gasps and bats her long black lashes a few times before changing her face to a complete cold expression, her glossy lips now a tight red line

"Look, Isabel, I think you are a very smart woman…" she starts

"I'm leaving"

Isabel pushes her chair back to go but the other woman's hand holds her to the table, her perfect manicure claws making her stay

"Sit, don't do anything stupid" Judy spats, the brief confrontation has alerted the waiters and they look at them intently until Judy gives them a very warm apologetic smile

"Who are you? What do you want?" Isabel tries to hold herself but her instincts is crying for her tu run, to get her baby back and look for Javier

But Javi could be anywhere

"You know your husband and I met, many years ago" she continues smoking "we worked closely in the hunt of Escobar" she smirks "I admit I was surprised to find him married and with a kid. He used to be involved with a very different type of woman"

"What do you want from Javi? If you hurt him I swear…" Isa mutters

"You must have been really special. A magical pussy" she laughs "or are you that dumb and naive that he lied to you and believed it" she crosses her arms over her chest, looking with a smug face from the white cloud of smoke "do you know what he did in Colombia? Do you know what he's capable of?"

"Where is he? If you touch him I swear to God I kill you" Isa tries to contain the tears, to seem strong but fails which makes Judy smile wider

"Oh! So you are an idiot little girl. Better keep up, cielo, if you want your husband alive"

México

A constant, something that keeps on proving itself to be right: shit does follow him. He tries the breathing techniques that the doctor showed him but the bag on his head stinks like rotten meat and the heat inside the van is unbearable. He finds a little solace feeling Steve's tigh pressed against his. Both of them rocking back and forth with each bump on the road

"Connie is going to kill me" his friend says

" If they don't kill us first"

"Callense cabrones" one shouts and Javi hears the muttering insult Steve pronounces before receiving one hit himself

He feels the vomit running up his throat, the smell, the heat and the fear have mixed themselves on his stomach and he can no longer calm himself down. He’s about to die, he knows it. About time, my friend, I elude death for so long in Colombia, so many close calls and now I’m about to die in some unknown part of Mexico because of a fucking middle age crisis I couldn’t handle.

He tries so hard to close his lips and swallow, breath, Peña, breath. The only cold thing in this van is the thin silver chain and medallion he wears around his neck.

This would be a marvellous moment to do some magic, old man Javi says to himself and that old saint around his neck. What did Isa call the old man engraved in it? Saint Jude. Okay, Jude, show yourself, please. This is actually a lost cause, it’s your field of expertise, c’mon

“Andando” the sicario pushes him out of the van before he can even process they have stopped the vehicle. The man grabs him by the arm harshly and guides him forward, the sun pierces the black bag over his head but he can’t only perceive the light and the sound of the gravel under his boots.

Suddenly the light changes to a white light and he feels the temperature lowering: a house with air conditioner and there’s a soft murmur of water but otherwise the house is silent. Javi memorizes those tiny details, it’s the only thing that could eventually help him if they’re held hostage and not killed right away.

The sicario pushes him and for a few milliseconds Javier thinks he’s about to fall hard to the ground but ends up on a chair. Then they pull both his arms to the back without any care and handcuffs him there.

Javi jumps from his seat when he hears the loud thump of the door closing, still in the dark and without any sign of company, he calls:

“Steve…”

Nothing

“Your friend is in the other room”

He could recognize that fucking voice anywhere, is engravated in his brain, in that part of his head that is capable of the worst, that tiny espace where he keeps every hateful and the worst people he has met, Bill Stechner being the number one on that list.

“I was so happy thinking you were dead and crawling back to hell” Javi sighs before he’s hit by the clarity in the room. He blinks fast until his eyes are adjusted to it again. It’s a nice room, wide and scattered by a few pieces of furniture covered by white sheets, the dust in the air makes evident it has been closed for a long time.

“So was I thinking you were rotting old in your father’s little ranch but here we are”

His beard is greyer and the already receding hairline is back a few inches, but he looks exactly the same, tha smug stupid face is looking at him from above. That smirk of “I’m always five steps ahead from you” the same he had when he made him leave the Embassy before catching Escobar and the same he had when he tried to take down Cali. But now he’s here in Mexico, what the fuck is he doing here?

“And, do tell, please, why the fuck do are path cross again?” Javier spats

“Oh! I didn’t want to cross paths with you. I must admit I found it funny when I saw who was managing the account for our textile export, but you, being the noisy stupid man that you are “ Stechner approaches him, his smirk freezes in a tight line “had to call your friends. And you see, you��re mending on my business again”

“So you switched from the CIA to the Narcos?”

“Javier, javier…” he sighs “You are always focusing in the wrong things and not in the bigger picture”

“The bigger picture being…” Javier rolls his eyes at him

“You wouldn’t understand, I tried a few times in Colombia and you ended up fucking it all up” he shakes his head

“So what do you want from me now?”

“Well now that you are here fucking everything up again I’d prefer if the repercussions go to the right direction”

“Which is it not yours, I guess, or whomever you’re working for”

“Yeah” he laughs and points at him “you’re smart when you want”

“And wouldn’t it be better to kill us right away?”

“Oh, you see, my associetes want to do it” Stechner nods “The really don’t give a fuck. But I told them that you could be of service”

“You’re really delusional if you think…”

Stechner interrupts him “And if you weren’t willing to cooperate we could always resort to the good old ways” the man walks to a nearby table, over the white sheet there’s a manila folder. Bill opens it slowly, that stupid smirk back at again on his face, relishing on the desperation and fear in Javi’s eyes.

Please, not Isa, please not my child

“Your wife made a new friend, it’s a small world after all, isn’t it?” Stechner shows him a picture, he recognises the cafe, Isa is seated talking to another woman he hasn’t seen in years.

“Judy is very nice when she wants” he takes out another picture, this time Isa is on the backyard playing with Elvi “You have a very beautiful family”

“If you touch them, motherfucker” Javi tries to get out of the chair, he doesn’t even care if the metal from the cuff cuts his wrists. He just want to do what he has wanted to do since he started working in Colombia and crossed paths with the CIA

“They won’t, it is entirely upon you that this is just a simple anecdote. I promised I’ll try to control them...if you do what you have to do” Stechner shrugs and throws the pictures to the floor where they rest in front of Javi’s feet

“What do you want?” he murmurs, his gaze is fixed on those images trying to see something, when were they taken? how does he know if they already hurt them?

Please, please he begs and his vision is starting to blurry

“Well, my associates will appreciate it if the DEA will center its efforts on our common enemy. You see it right? it’s the same story all over again; the enemy of my enemy is my friend…”

“I’m not DEA anymore”

“Are you? I mean you’re here with your dear Steve in an ongoing investigation that mainly relies on your testimony so…”

Stechner roams around Javier’s chair “It’s not like you haven’t done it before, Javi, think about it as if you are involving yourself with the lesser evil, there will be a time to capture my associates, but not now”

“Just go back home and when the time comes you can assure the DEA that those terrible horrible people that are getting that poison in our beautiful country are involved with our common enemy. What is the difference between one Cartel and the other? It just a matter of time they both get caught” he continues

“Why are you involved in this?”

“We’ve done this many times, Peña, let it go. It’s better this way or do you want to end up like Kiki? or better yet, your beautiful wife or your kid?” Bill points to the pictures of the Peña’s family “think about it”

And he thinks about it, the hate and the fear burning in his chest. So many years protecting himself in covers of solitude, brief encounters to relieve the stress and alcohol, protecting his heart from this fear and pain of getting his family killed for his job.

You did this to them, you looked for it. Now what?

Isa (Laredo)

She drives fast, fast as she has never driven before. She has always been a very responsible person and even more when she became a mother. Elvira is seated on the back, her little hands holding the seat hard and she has called her a few times, her voice shaky and scared.

“Mami, where are we going?”

“To Grandpa’s, honey”

“You’re too fast”

“I know, but we need to get there now”

The screeching sound of the tires stopping abruptly on the road has alerted Chucho who now waits with the porch lights on when they get out of the car.

“Mija, what’s wrong?” he screams

“I think Javi is in the danger”

Sway Pt.7 - Danny Rayburn x Reader (Bloodline)

HAPPY 50th BIRTHDAY BEN MENDELSOHN! AND THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING!

It’s only appropriate for me to post this particular fic today...

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6  / Here / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10

Authors Note: ...I uhm... Hope that cover doesn’t look TOO much like a wedding... Despite the jokes in this...! I edited it several times! Having said that I did get to use another Dirty Dancing 2 image - THAT THIS ENTIRE FIC STARTED BASED ON WAY BACK WHEN!!! So I’m happy about that! I also had to take advantage of Danny in a suit! So... I essentially wanted to write this, then cut it, then wrote it to take Sway to 10 parts... and it’s ended up really long!

Gosh darn, I just read this back to edit and... There’s a few super significant paragraphs in here I forgot I ever wrote...

Disclaimer: As ever, I only own my OCs! 

Premise: As Danny’s departure for the Rayburn’s 45th Anniversary looms, you reminisce on Anniversaries of your own... However, deep down, you know you’re only wasting precious time...

Word Count: 8991

Warnings: DUI / Swearing / Sexual Amble (!!!)  / Another load of people talking trash about Danny. Oh god, and I promised we’d get LESS angsty didn’t I?! 

I believe, things happen for a reason Even though you might not see it at the time Cause now I know Every plan that came unravelled Every crooked path I travelled in my life Led me here to your side

Could it have been easier? Yeah A little smoother ride? Maybe so But lying here with you, would I change one thing ‘bout that road? No  --- Looking at you looking out the window right now, Those eyes, that dress, that smile, that laugh If I could hit pause I would somehow  But it don’t work like that --- There’s nothing I wouldn’t try  If I thought it would change your mind And I know as soon as you walk out that door… Pain’s a comin’, tears are runnin’ Yeah that’s kind of the way I’m feelin’ Trying to stop your leaving…

Present Day - Your Apartment, Late

You were standing on your balcony, tapping your fingers against a glass of water and watching the sun sink down over your favourite skyline. Another day gone, and you were fast running out of time… The Rayburn’s 45th Anniversary was in just 2 weeks… If you couldn’t stop Danny from leaving… You shook your head, not wanting to think on it, and let out a groan. He joined you, winding his arms around your waist, kissing your cheek and nuzzling his face into your neck; his hum was content… The Anniversary though, only made you think of your parents. You and Danny were fast approaching your 3 year mark. Which made you crack a smile, remembering your Dad’s jest in the middle of his toast. So much had changed over the past year… You entwined your fingers with Danny’s as you placed your hands on his; resting your head against him. AT LEAST during that time, you and him had been something consistent… ***

Previously… You realised, staring at the pile on your kitchen counter, that you might need more help than you thought. And certainly wouldn't be able to get all this in your car at once... 

You must have been staring at it for a good few minutes because you heard your balcony door slide across, and were greeted with a call of: "Need any help!?" Danny had gone out for one last cigarette before he put in a couple of hours in the restaurant ahead of tonight. The party would take all day to set up, so you'd offered to go down early to help your parents and friends. "No, no baby that's okay I...!" He threw his smoke down and hurried over, you sighed; "You need to get down to the restaurant." He hummed "Yeah, maybe, but you know I'm never late... C'mon, there's a lot here..." He stacked a few boxes, and held his hand out for what you were already carrying, you held it behind you defensively. "Uh uh! No! You don't get to see this yet!!" He laughed; "Why not!?” Mostly because whatever him, Javi, and Javi’s cousin had decided to dress Danny in remained a mystery - turns out Javi called in a fashion industry favour - and you wanted to be just as mysterious. But you also liked the way Danny would study every inch of you if you ever wore something he'd never seen before. You'd rather he saw this on than off... Well. Maybe off. Later. “Because...!” You didn't need a reason That only made him laugh harder “Don't tell me!! This wedding anniversary is going to turn into an actual wedding...” That made you gasp for effect, but laugh, "Will you stop...!!!" He joked about this way too often. But you only left him shaking his head as he collected the boxes and opened the door for you, "Which car?" "911..." "You’re NOT gonna fit all this in that car!” "It'll fit!” “Nah! We'll put some in mine and I'll follow you down.” “You don’t have to do that...” “I know I don't...” He leant across to catch your lips “But I'd sure like to...”

 You managed to squeeze nearly everything into your car’s limited two-seater space, but Danny still insisted that he help you out. So, now he was following you down the seaway. When you pulled up Danny stayed in his car and just stared. "What?" You opened his car door “It's on a yacht!?” You looked back, it could probably be classed as a liner. Looking like a classier version of somewhere you might have a high school prom. “Yes.” “... Don't tell me your dad bought this.” “Noooo... His friend is letting us borrow it.” Danny shook his head. “His friend!?” *

“Where's papa!?” You embraced your mom “Oh. Called to some project. It’s okay... Men will only get in the way!!” You raised an eyebrow, there were plenty of males around helping! Also... “Oh! Danny!! You sweetheart! You didn't have to!” “What? No, my pleasure...” He put the boxes on the table your mother indicated and joined you, “See you later…!” “Yeah have a good day...” You embraced him He looked around “Well, I know you will...” Kissing your cheek he turned to accept your mom's hug, "Don't go day drinking too much!!" He walked backwards back towards the gangplank with a cheeky wink; only making your mom laugh. “God, I like him...” “I know.” “And so does your father…” She turned to you with a suggestive look. “Yeah, I know!' That much was obvious. Even though Danny was your boyfriend your dad treated him like the son he never had.

 ***

 Everything was ready and set up; except you. Still trying to get those finishing touches looking just right... You sighed, for some reason the place cards on this particular table just weren't playing ball. Your mother called you from across the deck, "Y/N!!!! Are you still not dressed!?" "Mama!! This just isn't working!!" She shook her head "Too much like me for your own good!" She took your arms and steered you away from the table: "Oh yeah... Because I certainly got the perfectionist thing from you with my work in progress..." It was the way she had described Danny as being like your father when she’d first met him. "Danny is a fine man. I'll deal with the table..." She pulled you down a deck and headed towards a large suite of rooms, “Absolutely he is fine..." You tried to hide your smirk, "Do you know what he's wearing?" "No..." "Has he seen your dress?" "No. Mama. I wasn't about to ruin the main event!" She laughed and ushered you into a dressing room; "Now get changed!! People will be arriving soon!!"

You shook your head as she closed the door behind you. You took a quick shower and dried your hair... You already knew it was going up tonight... You took care with your makeup. Going for a little of that classic movie star flawlessness from all those old films your parents loved to watch. Approaching your dress you ran the fabric through your fingers, white into powder blue; halter neck with a cut taken straight out of the 50s. Sporadic clusters of Swarovski crystals covered the skirt and the ribbon that tied it coloured the same blue the dress bled into. You studied it in the mirror for a second and twirled. The only thing that disappointed you was that the cut was modest; whilst the chain was visible the ‘D’ wasn't... You sat and began on your hair, when there was a knock at the door, you beckoned them in and heard your mother gasp. "Oh... My baby is so grown up...!!" She approached you, and taking the straighteners from you she helped finish your look.  "I can't wait to see his face." “Mom, this is your anniversary..." "I know I just..." She hummed, sliding pins into your hair "... You remind me so much of us..." You couldn’t stop the smile; but it felt strange, that your mom would compare you and Danny to her own relationship with your father. In your eyes the two were completely different… Maybe she saw something you couldn’t see… But that also meant, as Danny has teased so many times, she saw real longevity in this. For once, you were starting to believe that too. She finished with a pretty hair slide from another one of your favourite designers, leaving some of your hair to frame your face. "You are so perfect..." You almost beamed, but then pulled at the chain again: "Just this... You can't see it... " "Come here... We'll see if we can't make a change..." She took the fine chain in her fingers and uncoupled it, looping it around your neck again she pulled it to make more of a choker and linked the ends back together through the ring to hold it in place, "There... " "Why didn't I think of that!?!" She chuckled "Thinking too much! As always…" she presented you with a box, "But, I also want you to wear this..." You hesitated, looking to her, and opened it with a gasp; "Mama. No..! It's too much!! I can't!!" You knew the bracelet well. The amount of times your mom had worn it for dance competitions... It was the first thing your father had ever saved up and brought her. It held the same significance to your parents as your necklace did for your own relationship. "You can, and we want you too..." ***

Amanda and Evelyn were the first two people you really greeted with enthusiasm. You did, however, have to raise your eyebrows at Amanda’s outfit – never passing up the chance to take someone home (and her relationship with Javi more of a… *cough* summer fling *cough*) her dress was skin tight and verging on inappropriate. That was just like Amanda, though. Evie had gone full on floor length ballgown – never missing the opportunity to dress up. You were thankful they were here, to take your mind off waiting in anticipation for Danny to show. Suddenly there was a buzz around you, and Amanda had to catch someone to explain what was going on. “OH. Someone pulled up with a Zegna Maserati. God, Y/N, I thought your dad was the only one outside of Italy with a car like that!?” “Isn’t it his!?” “No. Different number plate – Your dad came in the Lambo anyway…” What-!? It MUST have been your fathers. “So who are they!?” “You mean the man who looks like YSL dressed him personally?” They jerked their thumb over their shoulder “Talking to your dad…” Now this you had to see. “…If he’s single…” Evie suggested, but you laughed; “I’ll put a word in…” You walked through the crowd, aware they were both following behind you, just as intent on finding out who was the new celebrity. “-Wait!?---Is that--!?” You hushed them in the event this was a mirage. Your dad tapped his arm and he turned. The air left the deck; for both of you. His blue eyes fell on yours and he swallowed hard. You felt like you couldn’t breathe. You could just about make out the look on your father’s face, but everything else melted. You bit your lip shyly, and made your way across the floor to him. The crowd parting for the daughter of the couple they were all here for. You noticed your friends hung back in order to let you have this moment. How many people here knew about you and Danny? It was clear none of them knew who he was – but the fact that putting him in a suit and a fancy car made them all want to know him was very telling of Miami high society. You swept your gaze over him and realised you’d be thanking Javi for a very long time. The suit was fitted; taking every advantage of Danny’s height and body shape – they had obviously tailored. It looked black and simple until you got closer; his jacket gave him smooth lines, the silk iridescence of his collar was bordered in a deep, rich navy which translated into the lining, shining ever so slightly against his shirt in the lighting. The shirt was crisp and bright white – but the stitching black in contrast - the fabric of high quality, to let you know if for any reason you might want to rip through those buttons, it wouldn’t be happening easily. As both of you were having difficultly finding words, your dad stepped in. Introducing you like Danny was a friend and potential suitor; “Mr. Daniel Rayburn, allow me to introduce you to my daughter, Miss. Y/N Ervin.” Danny at least managed a laugh; “It is a pleasure. Although I do believe I’ve seen you around…” “…I was just about to comment it’s lucky I’m not single Mr.Rayburn… Though I’m not sure looking at you tonight that would stop me…” He held out his hand, as if for you to shake and you realised that your dad had not only leant him the car; he was wearing a Cartier watch. And your breath caught again as you pulled his hand towards you. “…Oh my god! DAD!!” Your dad laughed, Danny only looked a little confused, “…You gave him…!?!” The bracelet that your mother had given to you was clearly all part of the plan. Stupidly it hit you that Danny probably hadn’t even gone to the Restaurant today; the cufflinks that he was sporting matched the bracelet perfectly. They had always been your parent’s lucky combination… The fact you and Danny were now wearing them at their 35th wedding anniversary was no mere coincidence. As Danny turned your wrist in his, the significance hit him also. “Oh…” He turned to your father; “…I…” Jack Ervin just laughed, harder than before; Danny at a loss for words was a rare event. Which meant it was much more than just obvious how grateful he was. “Think nothing of it.” You took the opportunity of Danny’s attempt to express his gratitude to study Javi’s fine work closer. The bow-tie had the same gleaming effect running through it that his suit jacket did; but his belt… His belt held the unmistakable Zegna ‘Z’. Was this a big Ervin-Viva Caputa colab that you had missed out on!?! With that expensive glass of champagne in his hand, he certainly looked the part. And everyone on that boat knew it. And he was here, talking to you! “Okay. What the HELL did Javier even do?!” That got their attention back on you, but Danny only held his hands up innocently “I dunno! Ask him!” You then rounded on your father; “You let him DRIVE the Maserati!?” Your father looked like he was about to cry laughing “YES.” “Danny!!! Danny!! Dios Mio just LOOK at you!!” Your mother had swept through the crowd almost as easily as you. Her red dress exquisitely beautiful and looking like something a Flamenco dancer would wear, she embraced her favourite Rayburn and looked him over. She turned to you, because nothing got past her, and gave you an approving nod and wink. Before turning back to him, taking his face in her hands; “How is my boy?!” He laughed and pink dusted his cheeks, “I’m… I’m good! Yeah!” He took her hands in his; “How are you? Oh my gosh – Yeah! Happy Anniversary! Both of you! Congratulations!” “Oh-! It’s nothing! It’ll go quick!” She beamed, but your father made sure to at least thank Danny. Before your mother took your hand and placed it in Danny’s “Enough from us!! This should be a celebration of everyone in our family!” She gave a wink to Danny, who gave another slightly embarrassed laugh “You look like the most important man in the room. This is good! It suits you! Muy muy guapo!” Then she took your fathers hand and dragged him away from you both.

Danny blinked a few times and turned to you, still watching them leave… And it took you a while to pull your eyes back to him, although you knew you weren’t the only one staring; Tonight his intense blue eyes were softer, they matched his demeanour rather than his sharp suit; “I can’t breathe you look SO good.” “I feel it…” He ran a hand over his chest, “But I can’t say it’s me…” You laughed “…I’d rather be on this boat with you in a T-Shirt over this too… I know what’s you. I love you because you are you.” “Still…” He scanned the party, “I think I’ve managed to make an impression on them… And you…” He tipped his expensive glass and whistled “A significant portion of people want to BE me. For once…” he couldn’t help laughing; “You are, as always, stunning…” “Stop…” You murmured it, pushing gently against him, which made him laugh again; “No way… Not tonight… I’m lucky to get to show you off…” “You!?” You shook your head as he wound his arm around you and pulled you in so that he could kiss your forehead “…Baby, no, tonight I get to show you off! I am the Lucky one.” Without your parents here you suddenly remembered the exactly reason you’d thought about inviting him in the first place. “AH!” You made him jump at your suddenly exclamation and the way you held his shoulders “…I asked you here to meet my friends; right!?” “Well, it’s not like I haven’t…” “Yeah, but…” You made a face that said not really “…And you do NOT have to answer all their questions…! In fact, please DON’T.” “Oh, What kinda conversation is this gonna be?” He raised an eyebrow suggestively; but that just made you agree with him. “Yeah. It’s gonna be exactly that.” You turned to Amanda and Evie, and then almost found yourself with a smug smirk at the way they were both staring at Danny. Caught up in that thought, it was him who waved to them both; making them give each other the same look and him stifle a laugh. “Do I have to fend these two off?” “…Hey. I saw you first.” You nudged him into quiet agreement as they came over at your beckon. “I know we’ve done drinks… Kinda… But, Amanda, Evie – Danny. Danny, my two best friends.” Then you added a warning; they all had great ammunition on you the other party could use, “The three of you collude on anything – Not kidding, you’re going overboard…!”

 They loved him, it wasn’t surprising to you that they did. Considering that you were pretty sure they also both wanted to date him. It was the impression you’d got that very first time. The impression didn’t change now. Your friends might have been from this world and have long strings of high-class toy boys. But they found it refreshing that Danny was a down to Earth, Southern working boy from the Keys. And older. The more he talked, the more impressive the looks they kept giving you were. He’d passed the best friends test; you knew he would. The two most important people on this ship to you loved him. And your parents loved him… More importantly than that, Danny had done all that hard work himself. Showed what the Rayburn’s really knew…

You introduced him to many members of your family. Danny even managed to stumble through some basic – if not broken, but incredibly polite – Spanish to your fathers’ mother. She had her husband and son to look out for her, so she’d never really had to learn English. Which means every time she turned to you to pay Danny another compliment, making you go bright red and laugh, she completely lost him. Which was great, because every time she did you could see him desperately wanting to ask you what she said. From your father’s father Danny figured where you’d both got your business head from. A retired self-made business man, and extremely proud of his son’s success – and that his son had surpassed him. Although, he had that American patriarchal air that demanded respect from everyone. In a different way from his own father, Danny noted quickly – he could see exactly where Jack had learned to be a man. All at once he was grateful for your family – at the acceptance he seemed to be receiving even from those on the extended side… Maybe he’d finally get the family he always wanted… Dinner was a little different and overly formal. Walking around a party hand in hand with you, and a glass of something strong to calm his nerves, worked on Danny like a charm. But here, sitting in a suit and surrounded by topical conversation of those living the high-life he had very little opinion on ,or stomach for, made Danny look uncomfortable. You noticed it straight away, so you moved your chair closer to his and spent a lot of time with your hand resting comfortingly on his thigh. When he could, his hand would find yours and you could almost feel the nerves. Every so often you’d whisper comforting phrases to him or give him context – because he would be expected to talk. He seemed to position himself as a say little but say something that sounds profound. And it was expertly done; although there was a little shake to his voice from time to time. You knew that would bother him – but he was so far out of his comfort zone now you couldn’t help but be proud. Of course, as ever your father and mother were on hand to help out and you would pick up pieces of his sentences to elaborate on. When they asked about his family, he got into his element because no word of that was stretched truth; he came from this – even if it was different in the Keys. Eventually though, he got back into his nervous ticks and the two of you drifted from the main table conversation into your own world; he held your hand even tighter and he tried not to look like he was getting the I need a cigarette jitters… You kept him steady until most of the table began to disperse. To which he breathed a sigh of relief and you gathered him gently in your arms. He wouldn’t have to suffer much longer… You hoped.

** Later that evening, as you still hadn’t left the table (Danny needed that quiet…), further family members began to wonder exactly who your man was. That left you sitting with Danny and your aunts. Your father was an only child, but your mother came from a family of 4 sisters. She was the youngest. They were all fussing over him and asking questions; at first they were the right kinds of questions, where he grew up, what he did before Miami, where he lived now, what he was doing now… and then they weren’t… where did he attend college… what car did he drive… what was his job… what was his salary..? At the point he said he was the chef, and not the owner/manager – although really Danny was both – and then they broke into the salary question Danny cleared his throat, you could tell that made him uncomfortable…  And you didn’t like that… Putting your hand on his knee again you pulled him back to you; “Baby… Do you mind getting me a drink?” He looked more than grateful; kissing your cheek gently, “Sure thing, I’ll be back…!” He took his leave politely and wandered off. You took a breath – and turned back to the table. They were also watching him walk away with some interest. Although as soon as he was out of earshot they all turned to look at you, and the conversation continued. In Spanish. “Isn’t he too old for you!?” That first shot hurt, but it didn’t hit as hard at the others; “There is no way he makes enough for you to both live comfortably on.” “…And he’s living in downtown…” “He must have borrowed that suit…” “Agreed, he looks so awkward in it… He can’t be from here…” “-And the car!” “Y/N, really… He didn’t even get a college degree?” You could hardly believe what you were hearing. SURELY, SURELY your family could not be as bad as the Rayburns!?! In fact, this was WORSE. Because the Rayburns didn’t say it out loud. “You can do better… Look at the men around here…! What about the men you work with!?” What hurt even more is that they actually tried to make themselves sound sympathetic towards you; like Danny was just a mistake you’d made. No – your mistake was clearly thinking this was a good idea, and forcing Danny to be here with you in the first place. You stood in one movement. Attempting to swallow the lump in your throat. “You’re right. I can do better. And so can he!” You left, but you didn’t get very far before you got upset and started crying. Unfortunately for you, Danny was just strolling back to your table. When he saw you, his face became instantly worried and he attempted to catch your arm; “Y/N… What’s wrong!?” But you didn’t want to make a scene here… It was your parents anniversary after all. You shook your head and ran quickly for the stairs to the lower level rooms. He wasn’t the only one to notice that you were clearly upset. As he called after you, Amanda and Evelyn rushed to him. “What happened?!” “…I dunno… She…!” He hesitated… Putting the glass he was holding down, he followed you “Y/N! Wait!” You locked yourself in one of the bathrooms and sat down. Just a few deep breaths. Just a few deep breaths… that’s all it would take. Hot tears stung your eyes as you tried your best not to ruin your makeup by having them stream all over your face. You were angry, at them for saying those things. At everyone else here for clearly thinking it – you’d seen the way some of them were looking at him like he wasn’t good enough for you… - At yourself, for not standing up for the man you loved SO much. You wanted to yell at all of them. Danny didn’t have to be here. He’d be having a better time anywhere else in the world right now than being in that suit on this ship. But he was here for YOU. He was dressed up for YOU. They weren’t worthy of his time or his presence here… Hell, they didn’t deserve to be in the same room as him. Danny loved you dearly, he had a better heart and mind than half those people on deck… His family couldn’t see that either; you didn’t know why you’d expected Miami socialites to be any different. You heard a knock at the door; “Y/N… C’mon… What’s wrong…” Now he sounded visibly upset, which didn’t help you. You found yourself holding back sobs. “…Baby…” his voice was soft “…Baby, I’m here… C’mon…” You heard other hushed voices, and he replied to them. They were both female. Of course Amanda and Evelyn would be just as concerned. He knocked again; “Y/N… Darlin’… Open the door… Let me in… Or… Let them in… I don’t know, just… Baby please don’t cry…” Saying that made you actually sob. And you heard the noise he made. “…Y/N… Please… I’m right here… Sweetheart… I’m here…” Only now you continued to sob. You heard a fourth set of footsteps and the hushed voices fell silent for a minute… Three sets of footsteps disappeared… Then there was another knock. “Danny? Girls? What happened?” “We don’t know… Y/N got upset and ran down here… Danny followed her, we wanted to support her too…” Danny moved away from the door and bit his lip, “She’s cryin’…” Jack noticed that Danny looked like he was about to tear up too… “Okay… Go back to the party all of you… It’ll be alright… I’ll get her out…” The two girls left, looking to him sympathetically. Danny was reluctant, but followed. Jack placed a hand on his shoulder; “Danny… I’m sorry…” “For what?” “...I know this isn’t easy for you…” “I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for her.” Jack nodded “I know. And you have no idea how much I appreciate all you do for her… I’m very proud that you are with my daughter…” “…Thank you?” Danny wasn’t exactly sure how he was supposed to react. Jack just smiled, like he understood how Danny was feeling; “Whatever they say… Hers will always be the only opinion that matters.” “I agree…” Danny said it softly, but then smiled “I… Kinda think that yours matters too…” Jack laughed. “You’re too good. Mr.Rayburn. Too good. Wait at the top of the stairs, I’ll have her back to you in 5…” With that, Danny headed back to the top deck, and your father tapped on the bathroom door. “Y/N.” Oh, great. Way to ruin your parents party by having your dad find you crying in a bathroom… “Open the door. I’m the only one here…” You reached up and unlocked it. He slid it open, shaking his head. It hurt him to see you like this as much as it did Danny and your friends. He shut the door behind him and locked it, sitting next to you he took you in his arms and handed you his pocket handkerchief. “Estrella… What’s wrong? What happened? Who said it?” “Who said what…?” You dabbed at your cheeks to stop your tears ruining any more of your makeup than they already had. “I’ve been watching all night, to know that you have been watching all night. I’ve seen the way they look at him too…” You didn’t answer, still sniffing away… “…You know. Your mothers’ sisters never liked me either. Hated me in fact. I was a nothing too. I could dance, great, but how was that going to make a good living?” He knew exactly what had happened. You wondered if your father was protecting Danny just as much as you were. He chuckled; “Better believe that all changed when I was able to get them into places like this…” He shook his head “…Why they act so high and mighty I don’t know… They’re not exactly from the echelons of Miami either…” He rubbed your arm affectionately. “Your mom’s father however… Now of course no man was ever good enough for his youngest… But… All he cared about was how I was going to treat her… He knew there was more value in love than money. Still, Jorge decided that maybe I ought to earn something if I wanted to raise a family…” “…You built the business… for mom?” He shrugged “For mom and you… When you came along. The point is, I value what her father values…” You raised an eyebrow; “So… He’s not good enough for me?” He laughed; “No one will ever be good enough for you, until one is. And… he IS.” He brushed some of your hair back into place; “I believe I’m right if I make the statement Danny is the best thing that ever happened to you…” “He is…” You didn’t hesitate. You knew that. Like fact. “Then, he is more than good enough for you. And I will let those hateful bitches know that myself.” You choked on something between a sniff and a laugh; “Papa. I probably wouldn’t say that to their faces!” “Watch me.” He smiled; “For the record. Danny is better than ¾ of the people out there.” “They’re your friends.” Weren’t they? People your parents liked? “…They’re friends we have to make. The society in which we live. We all know who the real friends are…” He fumbled around in his pocket; “…The whos-who… Probably not to be associated with after tonight…” “Because of how they are treating Danny!?” “…Something like that…” He twirled what looked like a pen, and held it out to you “I don’t want anyone I know, or invited tonight, to cause anything to happen between the two of you. You are happy. The happiest I’ve ever seen you, and I’ll be damned if I let some high-and-mighty socialite ruin that… For either of you.” You laughed, realising he was holding out liquid eyeliner, you took it with a grateful smile; “I thought you might be crying over something else, tonight… So… I thought I’d keep it just in case. You don’t look too bad. Touch it up, but hurry now, your man is waiting…” You dried your eyes one final time before he helped you stand up. You embraced him; “Gracias Papa!” “It’s nothing… Not for my little girl…” He exited the bathroom and then turned back “He looks good in YSL don’t you think?” You turned to the mirror, yeah; a little bit of a touch up and you’d be fine. “…He looks a bit awkward. He was carrying it well, then when we all sat he looked uncomfortable… Now he’s standing again he’ll…” You looked to your fathers face; “What?! I have to admit that! He’d rather be in a T-shirt, or chefs whites c’mon daddy…!” “…You noticed what he’s wearing didn’t you.” “He’s wearing your watch…” You let the eyeliner glide smoothly as you began touching up “…He’s wearing the cufflinks that match this bracelet, don’t think I don’t know what you and mom are up to…” you smiled. “…Yes. Mr. Daniel Rayburn looks fantastic. He really does. But it’s not him, and he knows it’s not him.” “…And so do you, so, tell him to be comfortable... He looks awkward because he’s trying to make that suit look natural. He is wearing it, it is not wearing him.” “Then YOU tell him that. He respects you.” “But he loves YOU. We both know he didn’t turn up to this party for your mother and I… He came because you didn’t want to turn up with anyone else…” When you reached the top of the stairs, Danny was indeed waiting for you, and you weren’t even on the top step before he’d gathered you in his arms again; “Are you Ok?” “Yeah… God, I’m sorry… I just…” You shook your head, “I know… This isn’t you… And you want to be anywhere else right now… I’m sorry I made you come here… and wear a suit and…” He shook his head, and his smile was brilliant. “Baby girl… I am here… with YOU… You look amazing, and I am proud to look at least half decent next to you… Darlin’… When you are here, make no mistake, there is no place on Earth I would rather be than right here with you in my arms…” “But they-” “I know. I’ve only been used to it my entire life…” He shrugged, and rolled his eyes “What is one more night.” “Tonight wasn’t meant to be one more night, though, it was meant to be your night off…” “Tonight is very much a night on…” He guided you through the crowd, his hand respectfully around your waist “…Overtime…! Tomorrow, we will have a lazy day… on the couch… watch movies… I might even consider ordering take out… God, what am I saying…!” You wrapped your arms around him as you continued to walk… Funny thing was, you knew that would be a better day than you would ever have hanging out with half the people here tonight. Guests had begun to gather around the bottom of the stairs with drinks. You guessed your parents were about to make their big toast… You both collected your own drinks and found Amanda and Evie. Both glad you were okay, even more glad you were back in Danny’s arms.

“…I want to give a toast to the best thing that ever happened to us over the past 35 – married – years… Our daughter-” oh God! You placed one hand to your forehead – Here we go! You weren’t surprised that Danny led the cheer on that one. Your father continued his speech, making increasingly embarrassing anecdotal comments about your first steps, first words, your first car and teaching you how to drive (the red tape mark and the boat thankfully remained buried and your Rayburn boys were sworn to absolute silence), college degree, graduation, first job… promotion… Everything part of a world Danny wasn’t from. But Danny, seeing the look on his face, was living all of those moments with your father… He couldn’t be prouder of the person Jack was talking about, even though he wasn’t a part of any of it. He couldn’t be any prouder of you. That he got to experience you. “But I didn’t want to make a toast just to our daughter, on an anniversary, right!?” Your father laughed and left a pause for emphasis; “I also wanted to make a toast to the best thing to ever happen in her life…” You felt Danny hold his breath as you looked to him; your father was really toasting him!? “So…” Your father raised his glass with a wink; “Mr.Danny Rayburn… I want to thank you for putting that smile back on me daughters face, I’m grateful for the way she talks about you… For you bringing her down to Earth, because you did that when she needed it most…” He laughed “I… Just hope I get to make many more of these!” You and Danny shared a significant look; doubtless your dad was thinking about Wedding speeches already. Your dad took a sip of his drink through the applause, with Amanda and Evelyn pushing Danny’s shoulders with a bit of pride of their own (they’d seen this through from the beginning, after all), and just when you thought he might switch subjects, he continued; “…I ALSO want to say a big thank you to Danny and his incredible team at Viva Caputa! Thank you for the catering tonight!” Another round of applause went up and you turned, quick; “What!?” Danny raised his glass to your father; you smacked his arm “WHAT?! Why didn’t you TELL ME!” “Mmmm… Mmmm…!” Danny shook his head like that one was remaining a secret. “Oh my god! I can’t believe it!” He laughed, murmuring; “It’s Ok… The guys have a well-deserved day off…” Danny had his arms around you for the duration of your parents’ speeches and toasts, every so often he would brush his fingers against your side gently, calming… Like he was never going to let you go... In a room full of people like this, you belonged here with him.

**

 Your parents took centre stage and held each other. Barely a breath was taken over the hushed crowd as they recognised the stance instantly. The way your heart skipped as the music swelled. They were about to perform the dance that had won them state… AND nationals, and had put your parents on the map. Everyone in the dance world knew them because of these very moves. It was your favourite; because of the story it told. Every time they performed it they added a slightly different element, because it was about them. About their relationship; and of course, in 35 years plus of performing this that relationship had grown and changed…

Danny nudged you, making you look at him; “What?” “We should…” he tilted his head to the dancefloor, you looked back to your parents, the next graceful turn they made. It was all so natural to them… Look at the way they looked at each other… Was that how you looked at Danny when you were in his arms like that? “No… This is them… It’s all them…” “Trust me… We should…” “Danny..?!” He took your hand, with confidence and pulled you out. He was crazy, this was THE dance, this was your parents dance.  If you were going to go onto the dancefloor at all, it wouldn’t be this early! You did trust him, though, implicitly. You took a breath and watched him pick up the next bar of music, the way he moved. Then you realised, he wasn’t just matching the music… He was matching your dads’ movements. OH MY GOD--!? No way, your parents--- Did your parents teach HIM this!? He held out his hand, and you took it, instinctively. You knew this dance off by heart, you couldn’t believe that your parents would be this sneaky… But your heart… You couldn’t have loved any of them any more than you did right then…

 *** You approached him again. You'd been trying to help your parents usher people off the ship or get them home safe. This left Danny to his thoughts... Something you weren't always sure was good... He hadn't touched his shoulder all evening, which was a good start. But it also wasn't like you hadn't noticed him sneaking his painkillers every so often either. "Darlin'..." He turned back to you from looking at the city lights, as you wound your arms around him, he had a cigarette in his hand and you were glad he was unwinding... He'd lost his tie; his top shirt buttons were undone and all at once you knew he was more comfortable. "You ready to go?" "Mmmhn?" He looked around at the remaining guests. "It's not over yet?" You shrugged "It is for me..." He looked to his half-finished glass and gave his own shrug, placing it on the nearest table he took your hand in his; "Better say goodbye to your parents. Is there anything we need to take back?" "Don't think so... We can always head down tomorrow... It’s not like this liner is GOING anywhere..."

Danny called your dad over; "Thanks, again, it’s been great." "Come now, Danny, it’s always my pleasure. I'm glad you came." He nodded to you "She's even more so... It'll be smaller next year!" He made the promise like Danny's presence would be concrete. You liked that. Your dad embraced you. "Estrellita... You have yourself one hell of a man... You are lucky." "I know papa..." "With any luck, one day you'll get your own one of these... Then you can learn from my mistakes..." "Oh. Y’know... Only around 34 years to go... Then..." He looked to Danny, then continued in Spanish "Don't let this one go...!" "I don't intend to..."

Your mother hurried over upon realising you were both leaving "Oh...!!! No!! Not my favourite daughter and her other half!" "Mom I'm your only daughter!" "Yes, well, I'm more concerned over our Danny here...! You won't stay?" “If she calls it I'm following her, M'am!" Maria was obviously disappointed as she embraced him "You really outdid yourself tonight Danny, in every capacity. You should be really proud of yourself." "Ah! It was nothing...!" His smile was shy and you could swear that red was crossing his cheeks for once. "No. It was everything!!" She smiled, then turned to you, as your dad also embraced Danny tight. "My darling girl... My sisters they..." "Mama I know..." She gave you a look that let you know there was possibly a world of hell coming "... You will look after him?" "Always." "He will certainly look after you." She smiled "... I could not have wished for better for you..." Honestly what was with your parents!? It was like he had gotten down on one knee already. They were almost definitely hoping for it. Geez... They were probably planning it all in their heads already. But you were sure neither of you were ready for that. "Oh!" Danny held out the Maserati keys "Better give these back..." Your dad didn't hold his hand out, rather backed away; "What? It's not like anyone else will be driving her tonight." Danny froze and looked at him like he was insane "No! Jack-! I can’t-!" Your father winked, patting him on the shoulder "Go on. Take her out. You deserve it!"

*

Danny stared hard at the car as he unlocked it; "Is this a good idea?" "How many have you had?!" "Like... More than should be allowed, but I'm lucid, is this legal?!" You noticed that someone, somewhere had changed the number plates back to your dads. "...Either my dad has a city agreement..." it wouldn’t surprise you "Or its going to be one of those legal for rich people fines..." Danny raised a questioning eyebrow, but now wasn't the time to get into those details. You both entered the sleek, stylish Maserati and he turned the key in the ignition. Making the "oh." sound that turned him into another boy-with-a-toy at the hum of the engine. You could hardly believe your dad was about to let him take you on a thrill ride in THIS car. "You ever actually driven a supercar before!?" He noticed the way you checked your belt more than once. "...Yeah, I drove this down here didn't I?" "Carefully, like your life depended on it, I bet!!" "My life DOES depend on it.” He looked to the dashboard "Sorry this can go HOW fast!?" "Don't you DARE!" "Oh God! How many of these are there, 100?" He put the car in gear and laughed nervously, checking around he reversed smoothly out of the parking space "...There'll be 99 after tonight!" "Don't say that!" Your voice practically pitched, and he took a deep breath. "I made a promise to get her back in one piece. I have a feeling your dad didn't mean the car...." You were watching him very carefully. Although he looked a little jumpy, and his eyes held all the excitement he wasn’t allowing to show on his face, he was checking and double checking every road and mirror as he pulled out of the Marina. He tapped the screen and the SatNav flickered into life; "Ah ha..." "Daniel. Eyes on the road..." He rolled his eyes "Back to Daniel, am I?" He took your hand "Darling." He emphasised the G like he was trying to be sophisticated "Would you please zoom out the navigation system so I can see the appropriate stretch of road." You were staring at him like he was crazy "I certainly will... On one condition." "Which is?" He leant over towards you, but kept his eyes on the road "Drive with two hands, and STOP talking like that." Danny laughed hard; "I’m trying to be the kind of man that owns one of these.” "Then you missed the point! My dad just wants you to be YOU." "And what do you want…?" He glanced at the screen to watch the road that headed up the coast line and onto the interstate, where he would really let this car fly... You smiled across at him "...Well. I know who I fell in love with. That's all I ever asked for.” "...I don't think he exists anymore..." "Hmm!?"             "... You already made him a better man..." He paid attention to his mirrors again and blatantly didn't look at you "...So he just hopes you’re still in love with him." You shook your head, what was with Danny tonight? Did it had something to do with your dumb crying episode, which you were now SO over. "You tell him not to worry...." You looked out to sea, dark, the waves every so often lit by street lamps "...I'm not sure I've ever loved anyone more than I do him..."

You continued to stare out of the window as he brought the car up to the increasing speed limit – affording him to look back to you. Every moment he spent with you he tried to savour, if only life had a pause button he knew he’d find himself pressing it often. He’d always thought this was way too good to last… But he was also quick to realise that he could probably put you through anything, not that he would want to, but your versatility would allow him to – AND let him find you still holding onto his hand at the end of it all. Somehow this was working out for him; you, Nolan, the restaurant. Suddenly he stopped looking for all the things that could go wrong – and was starting to allow himself to enjoy everything that was going right… You wound the window down as the engine revved at the gaining speed, allowing the cool evening air that rushed past you to fill the car. Danny continued to carefully push the car into the next set of numbers – when they started to turn red at the top end of the speedometer he held his hand out for yours. “I’m scared of what you’re about to do…” He laughed, “You just gotta trust me.” You took his hand in answer and the next thing you knew the car was more than flying as he broke into triple figures. You found yourself getting that shot of adrenalin as the world passed you by in a blur, flashes of colour every so often melding into the dark of the evening. “Oh My God!!” You couldn’t help but let out something akin to a scream, which only made him laugh harder as he continued to let the speed climb. Even with just one hand on the wheel; he managed to hold the car steady. And even with his hand in yours his eyes were focused on nothing but the road.

He took it back down in notches, almost letting the car coast until the dash started to read something more sensible. Both of you were near breathless and he let your hand go; looking across to you. “Guess there’s still 100 of these!” You put a hand to your heart; “I think my heart is going at the number of miles an hour you were just at.” He chuckled; “That was good fun!” “Don’t be getting ideas.” “Aw, and here I was thinking about taking the Porsche out…” “Hands off the 911 Mr!!” “MMM… Careful…” He produced the keys from his pocket; spinning the keychain around his index finger; “Wait WHAT!?” “You forgot about it. I didn’t.” “Danny you are NOT driving that car.” He looked across to you almost disbelieving; “C’mon! What is one more joyride?” You tipped your head; thinking that phrase was a double entendre “Take me home and I’ll consider it.” “Hm.” He acted like it was a hard choice “Ok… Home…” He looked to the time on the illuminated clock; “Yeah… let’s… go home…” Then he looked across to you like he was about to say something impressive; “Our home.”

 * The Anniversary the year after had been a smaller affair with closer friends and family. As had happened with your surprise birthday party (you still weren’t forgiving anyone for that!) and Nolan’s birthday, Danny had closed down his restaurant for the evening. That also meant your parents got to invite his whole team (And Nolan, but that was given.) – especially after the efforts for their 35th. “Well, Danny… Team… You’ve all outdone yourselves once again!” Danny wasn’t one to be shy, but this time when he smiled to your dad’s compliment, he looked to the table… “Aw… It was nothin’…” He laughed “We’re happy to. You guys have given me the best time of my life. Honestly, I can’t thank you enough!” He had his arm over the back of your chair, barely moving from touching you or being that close all evening… You loved and trusted this whole group. None of them were judgemental. With time, and it wouldn’t be much longer, Danny would love them all too and accept that he was somewhere he finally belonged. It wasn’t a class, or a title, not even a name… But friends and family, real family. Sometimes family didn’t have to be blood relatives, after all. “To Y/N, and Danny. Thank you for everything, and I truly mean everything, over the past 2 and a half years….” Then he laughed again “2 and a half! Wait until it’s 35!”

*

Present Day – Your Apartment, PM

Even with the AC on nearly as high as it would go, with Danny all over you it was still SO hot in your apartment. Not that in the literal heat of the moment you particularly cared but hell… It was making your short breaths even shorter. Wrapped up in your white sheets on one such Sunday morning was where you found yourself today. “Danny… it’s… too hot…” You were breathless as much as you were laughing as he kept kissing you. The man was nothing if not persistent. Your bedroom window was open, as was the balcony door and you still had the AC cranked and you were still falling victim to the Miami sun. “Baby girl, trust me, there is NOTHING as hot as you…” Aw Geez… How the hell was this not affecting him too? Was he just so used to working out in it at the Keys? Or in a hot kitchen day-in-day-out in the middle of summer? Both. You guessed. Your office was air conditioned, your car was air conditioned... You only had to face the heat on the short walk from one to the other or when you wanted to face it on a beach. This was neither of those things. You laughed again as he kissed the base of your neck; “Alright, quit it!” “Nah…” He bit your collar bone harder than he perhaps meant to, judging by the resulting gasp from you. “…You need to know…” He kissed up your neck and then your jaw line to your lips; “…You’re so fucking hot.” “Yeah, that’d be the weather…!” You giggled again. “Or you?” “Mmm…” He gave you a playful smirk; “Well, hell, I know exactly how I make you feel…” There was no better feeling than being one with Danny. Now in a different way to how you were one and the same on the dance floor, but it gave you the same sensation none the less. Tangled up with him like this, even with it being too damn hot, made you feel like there was no place on Earth worth being than here. Oh-! “…That was…” “What?” You said it under your breath, but Danny Rayburn thought he caught on anyway… His blue eyes were alert, bright and intelligent and cool as the Miami water. “Sorry. Did you just say, sexy?”

Your problem now was… How many more times were you going to get to do this? Fast running out of lazy days where you could just DO this. I mean, in his parent’s house in the Keys!?!? Was Danny thinking straight?? Did he really know what he was doing…? Did he honestly think it was best for everyone for him to be heading there…?

@stcphstrange - I read a good portion of these paragraphs whilst editing and immediately thought of you... ☺❤😚

I use these GIFs you keep seeing because when I see them I think of the way I think of him looking at Reader... And I have a lot of feelings...!

*AFTER EDIT - 8/6/19* OKAY. So, those of you that have read this before now... I’m so so sorry you’re likely to miss this. But. The gorgeous Amanda (my Amanda, not readers Amanda... but if she wants to date Javi that’s fine by me!) presented me with this GIF of Mr.Mendelsohn. and HOLY SHIT If it isn’t Danny (and what he’s WEARING!) in this part!!!

HEY  EVERYONE,  i’m  admin  birdy  &  i’m  so  excited  to  have  you  all  here  !  and  also  i’d  like  to  introduce  my  baby  to  you  guys  !  and  let  know  that  i  only  have  a  few  wcs  for  this  one  because  idk,  he’s  new  in  town  and  also  i’m  both  lazy  &  without  ideas  !  but  i’m  up  to  everything  you  guys  want,  so  hmu  or  like  this  post  that  i’ll,  eventually,  crash  into  your  IMs  and  we  can  brainstorm  together  !  

*  ♡ ˙ ˖    /  matthew daddario  +  cis male  +  he/him.  —  did  you  know  idris’s  real  name  is  idris  henderson?  oh  yeah,  they  are  a  thirty  year  old  football  player  known  as  the  reveller  that  has  been  in  town  for  four  days.  this  pansexual  leo  can  be  sociable  +  confident,  as  well  as  careless  +  sarcastic.  i  hear  their  soulmark  is  the  big  dipper  constellation  on  the  back  of  his  neck,  and  their  soulmate  looks  like  dominic  sherwood.  muscles  stretching,  empty  alcohol  bottles,  thunderstorms  in  the  middle  of  the  night.

(  suicide  tw  )  ;  (  drug  tw  -  ish  )  !!!

it  is  safe  to  say  that  idris’  life  started  in  a  hard  way.  he  was  born  and  raised  in  denver,  colorado ,  alongside  a  younger  brother  and  their  mother,  a  woman  long  ago  consumed  by  a  hard  life.  his  father  was  never  around  and  from  an  early  age  he  had  to  understand  the  challenges  life  would  bring.  his  mother  had  come  from  the  same  humble  origins  and  never  had  a  chance  to  grow  in  life,  leaving  her  limited  to  a  small  job  with  an  even  smaller  salary  ―  far  from  being  enough  to  support  her  and  two  children.  idris  constantly  watched  the  woman  stop  eating  for  two  or  three  days,  so  he  and  his  brother  could  have  three  full  meals  over  the  same  period.

over  the  course  of  a  few  years,  the  situation  only  worsened  for  the  family.  his  mother  lost  her  job  and,  already  tired  of  her  life,  couldn’t  stay  in  any  other  for  long.  at  the  age  of  sixteen  idris  even  tried  to  help  and  break  his  time  between  school,  a  job  and  the  only  privilege  that  allowed  to  have  in  his  life;  football  was  his  sweet  scape.  while  in  the  field  he  was  able  to  forget  about  all  his  problems,  his  poor  family  and  the  prospects  of  a  broken  future  with  little  to  no  opportunities  ahead  of  him.  maybe  because  of  talent  or  even  effort  that  idris  used  to  dedicate  to  the  sport,  he  eventually  stood  out.

idris  was  eighteen  and  in  the  final  days  of  high  school  when  he  received  the  news  that  synthesized  the  only  chance  he  would  get  to  not  only  follow  his  dream,  but  also  help  his  mother  and  brother  to  lead  a  better  life;  he  had,  somehow,  managed  to  qualify  for  the  university  of  colorado’s  football  program,  with  a  full  scholarship.  his  mother,  however,  would  never  know  about  that.  already  tired  of  an  existence  that  bordered  the  misery,  she  chose  to  take  her  own  life  and  finally  be  able  to  rest.  shock  and  sadness  almost  made  him  give  up  on  his  own  dreams,  but  idris's  brother,  who  had  displayed  a  strength  he  did  not  know  it  even  existed,  made  him  move  on  with  the  scholarship.

for  the  next  few  years,  idris  tried  his  best  to  keep  himself  into  his  college  &  football  routine  and  also  be  a  good  brother,  since  both  boys  were  all  what  was  left  of  the  impaired  family.  he  never  came  to  graduate  from  college  since,  after  four  years  of  hard  study  and  frequent  participation  in  the  college  football  league,  idris  made  the  official  petition  to  enter  the  nfl  drafts  early.  for  his  surprise  the  petition  was  accepted  and  he  was  drafted  by  a  big  team  who  had  him  on  their  radar  for  a  while  already.  trying  his  best  as  never  before,  he  proved  to  be  both  talented  &  hardworking  and  it  was  just  a  matter  of  time  until  he  started  to  stand  out  in  the  field.

fame  and  money  came  fast  for  the  young  player;  his  life  now  seemed  to  be  stable  and  promising.  his  only  concerns  were  to  stand  out  more  &  more,  and  to  attend  most  of  the  great  parties  for  which  he  was  invited.  everything  was  finally  easy  ―  but  it  wouldn’t  stay  that  way  for  long.  years  after  he  had  finally  become  a  professional  football  player,  the  disaster  hit  idris  in  the  form  of  two  men  from  the  opposing  team,  in  one  of  the  first  games  of  the  season.  he  suffered  gruesome  injuries  to  his  knee  and  ankle,  leaving  him  out  for  the  rest  of  the  games  and  undergoing  two  surgeries  to  try  to  fix  what  had  been  broken  by  the  accident  while  no  one  knew  if  idris  would  ever  return  to  the  fields.

idris  was  really  shaken  by  everything  that  happened,  afraid  of  losing  everything  he  had  conquered  over  the  years.  the  treatments  were  difficult  physically  &  mentally,  and  the  physiotherapy  was  painful,  but  the  biggest  problem  he  faced  came  in  another  form;  the  small  pills  designed  to  lessen  his  pain  created  a  dangerous  dependence,  that  threatened  his  career  much  more  than  the  injuries.  it  took  a  few  months  until  someone  finally  noticed  idris'  addiction  and  he  was  officially  temporarily  removed  from  the  next  season  not  only  because  of  his  knee  or  ankle,  but  in  order  to  treat  himself  and  get  back  to  what  he  was  before  everything. 

 however,  a  strange  supplicating  pressure  caused  him  to  drop  every  kind  of  new  treatment  for  his  addiction  before  it  even  started.  it  was  a  weird,  uncontrollable  feeling  that  wouldn’t  go  away,  no  matter  how  hard  he  tried  ―  and  he  tried  hard.  the  strange  sensation  consumed  all  his  thoughts  and  even  his  dreams,  until  idris  found  himself  in  the  middle  of  the  night  driving  for  hours  on  end  ‘till  he  finally  reached  jericho,  where  he  knew  nothing  and  no  one;  nor  what  had  brought  him  to  the  tiny  town. 

HOLY  SHIT,  this  ended  up  to  be  huge,  so  long  story  short:  idris  was  born  very  poor,  had  a  shitty  childhood.  has  one  younger  brother  and  loves  him  dearly.  had  a  hardworking  mother  that  took  her  own  life  when  he  was  eighteen.  got  a  footbal l scholarship,  managed  to  become  a  professional  football  player  and  never  graduated  from  college  because  of  that.  he  suffered  an  injury  to  the  knee  and  ankle  that  took  him  out  of  the  season  and  left  him  addicted  to  pain  medication.  he  never  got  to  start  rehab,  though,  because  he  felt  the  strange  need  to  go  to  jericho,  where  he's  been  for  four  days.  and  this  is  where  our  story  begins  ! 

idris'  personality  is  very  expansive  and  confident.  he  is  rarely  insecure  about  something  and,  when  it  happens,  he  tries  to  hide  behind  several  layers  of  his  other  traits.  idris  is  a  very  intense  (  and  ends  up  being  careless  about  himself  because  of  it  )  man  and  he  normally  tends  to  devote  himself  to  things  &  people  with  impressive  ease  ―  but  he  is  also  known  for  quickly  getting  tired  and  bored  of  both  things  just  as  easily.  he  constantly  varies  between  the  arrogance  acquired  by  the  past  years  surrounded  by  money  &  fame,  and  humility  typical  of  those  who  grew  up  knowing  the  meaning  of  necessity  &  poverty.  idris  rarely  is  aggressive  or  hostile  toward  others  and  often  silently  directs  these  feelings  to  himself;  he  frequently  overcharges  himself  and  becomes  undeniably  frustrated  when  he  fails  to  achieve  his  goals.  the  football  player  is  a  very  sociable  man  and  makes  friends  with  ease.  he  doesn’t  like  to  stay  home,  doing  nothing,  although  the  accident  has  made  him  (  almost  )  used  to  the  stillness.

to gold be the gory

How Golden Kamuy Outshines Competition

A Review

-

“GORUDEEEEEEN KAMUUUUUUY!”

That’s how I first heard of Golden Kamuy – a male voice screaming its title in around 2-minute intervals. I was busy slurping ramen in the communal eating tent in Odori Park when it blared in my ear. All through the day, they played its trailer on the tent TVs over and over again. It seemed interesting, and it was quite apt to see it being promoted there - after all, we were surrounded by snow, in Hokkaido, where the story was set. I kept seeing it in bookstores and its artwas eye-catching. But as soon as I was back on home soil, my interest was gone.

Life caught right back up with me, so I forgot about Golden Kamuy completely. Not until I saw some artists I follow post amazing fan art of it on Twitter. They were all singing it praises and the official art was beautiful, so I thought, ‘aw heck, why not?’

Let me tell you: there are no reasons not to.  

SUGIMOTO, THIS ISN’T SHOUNEN ANYMORE

I’m what you call a…sporadic manga reader. I’m not up to speed with manga trends and it can take me a while to catch up. I read stuff that get my attention and when they’re recommended by my friends (I still haven’t touched Boku no Hero Academia or Shokugeki no Soma, though). I also don’t limit myself to just one genre. There are months that I devour shoujo/josei manga, like Hana Nochi Hare and Dame na Watashi ni Koi wo Kudasai. Then I’d switch over to read through volumes upon volumes of shounen manga (hi, Gintama, Haikyuu). Then there are periods wherein I just don’t read at all, devoting my time to other activities instead.  

Golden Kamuy, brainchild of artist Noda Satoru, is probably my first real foray into the seinen manga territory. The art, the storyline, the comedy, the stakes – every page told me that I wasn’t reading shounen anymore. Dick jokes weren’t dealt with caution. Gore was done with no shame. Raw Japanese scans didn’t have the hiragana reading aids. Strangely enough, it brought me back to all the titles I used to read when I was young. It made me realize all the stuff I was reading back then were very edgelord-esque and middle-school-syndrome-ish - the stuff of nightmares. Body horror, violence, gore, debauchery – CLAMP and Kaori Yuuki had primed my teenage self for all of them.

But at least, now, the edginess was dealt with a more mature hand.  

Hence it was no surprise that Kamuy ignited a sense of familiarity. I had mellowed down when I grew up (it saddens me that I really am quite a grown-up now) and, in turn, settled for fun, cheerful, romantic manga (to keep the dreariness of everyday life away, I guess haha). I got used to leisurely pacing and lighthearted comedy. Reading Golden Kamuy felt like I skydived into the unforgiving arena I had left – an arena that had been made fresher, better.  

SO FRESH, YOU’RE EATING IT RAW

What makes Kamuy an instant hit is its interesting combination of rarely-used elements. Post-War, Meiji-Era historical, early 1900s, hunting, Hokkaido, Ainu culture: can you really find another title that uses said mix? It’s no wonder people are attracted to the series.  

It also helps that the art is just spectacular. Noda’s artistic skill shines through every page, chapter, and volume cover. His poses are dynamic, his coloring brave. Sometimes the color combinations he uses just scream modern, serving as nice contrasts to the story’s historical, traditional setting. His character designs are unique and fresh – more so their personalities. Sugimoto’s facial scars are refreshing to the eye; Tsurumi’s half-corrupted face paired with a metal plate is a design I’ve never seen before. His art style brings out his designs to life in a way only he can – we’ve all seen cross-dressing men and shaved-bald convicts before, but still he was able to make Ienaga and Shiraishi look striking.

The research that he has done to make the story believable is commendable. He even has his own Ainu and Russian language consultants. Each detail he adds in shows that every page is a product of hard work. He even features real buildings in Hokkaido and Otaru (I’ve also been to Otaru and it was nice to see it in the manga!). The information we learn from Noda’s usage of the Ainu culture, hunting practices, and military details – all of this, weaved in with an intricate, explosive plot, give us a series that feels…whole. Complete.

Kamuy also spreads word about the Ainu culture in a fun and entertaining way. I haven’t heard a lot about them in the series I’ve encountered – I’ve only heard of them through Rurouni Kenshin. Nothing since then. To see them in the spotlight is a breath of fresh air. Even the Ainu themselves feel the same way – apparently they told Noda that they didn’t want to be portrayed as discriminated anymore. They wanted strong Ainu characters, and boy, did Noda deliver.

NO-PARDON PLOTTING

Because of its seinen status, you can tell that Noda has no qualms about plotting and story structure. We’re given heavy-hitting story elements right off the bat: war vet undertakes a legendary treasure hunt to help the (stolen-by-his-friend) love of his life, requiring him to track down 24 of the most dangerous insane criminals to have ever walked Japan. It’s throwing punches right from the get-go. Kamuy doesn’t baby anyone (except for bear cubs). With its pacing, convoluted plot and bevy of interesting characters, it challenges the reader to not just enjoy, but to keep up. It’s unapologetic in everything that it does – character, story, and art.  

CHARACTERS

Immortal War Vet, Morality Pet Minority Action Girl, Escape Sweet-tooth King, and so forth. They somehow fulfill stereotypes but at the same time, Noda manages to twist things to a whole new light. His milieu, too, aids in solidifying the characters he writes – the setting itself makes them unforgettable.  

It is also in his cast that we see how unapologetic Noda is. Considering that Sugimoto is to track 24 of the most dangerous criminals in the country, Noda doesn’t shy away from showcasing every kind of evil that can exist within humans. We tackle lust, greed, wrath, and avarice with a dash more reality compared to the caricatures we often see in shounen manga. Those faint of heart and innocent countenance will have a hard time stomaching Noda’s cast as it unfolds. The more I read, the more I believe Noda probably has a subscription to the Crime Investigation channel (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). Truth be told, humans are very much capable of evil, and I’m not surprised that some of his villains are actually modeled after real-life criminals.

Notable characters:

IENAGA  - a cross between Erszebet Bathory (a countess who was known to kill virgins and bathed in their blood to remain beautiful) and of H.H. Holmes, a real-life owner of an actual murder hotel in the US during the 19th century. Ienaga’s first dungeon appearance made me flashback to some of mangaka Kaori Yuki’s ornate gorefests such as Count Cain, Angel Sanctuary, and Ludwig Revolution. Noda felt no shame when he drew each and every one of Ienaga’s murderscapes. 

HENMI KAZUO – this one really made me blink when I was reading it. Serial killer Henmi Kazuo is an exploration of the depths of human depravity. Imagine, being stimulated by gore and the act of clinging to life the same way his brother did when a bear ate him. Damn, writing that sentence made me realize Noda just straight up doesn’t baby his audience. This is the stuff Netflix series Mindhunter would kill to have. This also would really need some real guts (pardon the pun) to execute.

SHITON – he also made me stop in my tracks. Shiton, a full-on bestiality-practicing scientist, was something I’ve never read about in any other manga at all. I’ve read about murderers and criminals and incestuous personalities (Kaori Yuki and George RR Martin weren’t shy about it at all), but this character was just sick. He’s a special type of crazy (although to be perfectly honest I am sure that somewhere in the world some sick human is partaking in stuff like this), and for Noda to actually use him in his manga just takes courage. He just has the balls to make you think twice, but hey, when you’re in seinen territory, everything seems to be a free-for-all. And let’s be real frank here – there’s just another level of human debauchery in real life that most people won’t even be able to stomach hearing about.  

TSURUMI – Tsurumi is the stuff of legend. He reminds me the most of Col. Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, but with his insanity turned up into eleven. He also has shades of Leonardo’s character in Django Unchained, as well as other manic-type ‘villains’ that we’ve seen in other series. But his impulsiveness and flamboyant nature places him a cut above the rest. Noda also draws him so dynamically (seriously!) that whenever he appears, your eyes are just drawn to him.  

Plus, I have to say that I’m really impressed with the level of real-world research that Noda uses in developing his characters. Tsurumi says that he has lost a part of his frontal lobe, which in turn affects his temper and his violent tendencies. This is actually true in real life, and has been seen in a high-profile murder case involving a famous football player in the United States. Because of the repetitive head injuries that the player received playing the sport, his own personality/temper had changed, and resulted him in killing his girlfriend in cold blood.

Of course we have the holy trinity of Sugimoto (classic lovable romantic badass war vet protagonist), Asirpa (butt-kicking girl-child) and Shiraishi (adorable slinky/comic relief), all gems in their own right. Noda has endeared them to us with the heartwarming dynamic between Sugimoto + Asirpa, plus Shiraishi’s antics. Character-wise, they seem to follow a specific trio formula that works in almost anything. Harry-Hermione-Ron, Gintoki-Kagura-Shinpachi, Naruto-Sakura-Sasuke. While his main character trio wins people over, his supporting cast can also shine bright on their own. Some great examples that come to mind are Ogata, Tanigaki, and Monkey-Scream Guy Otonoshin (even Tsukishima is memorable! He even has the Voldemort nose, doesn't he?).

Noda’s principle of mixing reality with caricature is also evident in his character designs. With every cast member we meet, it’s clear that Noda is far from being a sufferer of the six-faces-only syndrome. His designs do sometimes border on the impossible (Monkey-Scream guy’s eyebrows, really?), but it’s not a bad thing. If anything, it makes the visual experience of reading the comic even more worthwhile.  

THE ART

Noda is a great manga artist. Let’s start with that.  

Just look at these covers!

This coloring + color schemes!

This character design!!

I’ve been raving about his character designs for a few paragraphs now but it’s just really that good. I love his eye for composition and his impeccable framing for action and comedy. I’ve always thought that framing comics need special planning – especially action + comedy ones. You have to ensure that the first thing the reader sees in the next panel will make the action/joke understandable and clear. It takes great skill to decide what the reader sees and doesn’t see. Through Golden Kamuy’s 158 chapters, he makes use of this skill to make us laugh whenever Asirpa’s badgering them to make citatap, or when there’s a new animal part to eat, or when Tanigaki’s out showing nudes of himself to people. If the pages weren’t framed well, the jokes would’ve fallen flat. Let’s also not forget his adeptness in drawing facial expressions. This manga just does faces so well.  

(Just look at Asirpa! collage c/o the Golden Kamuy reddit)

His fight scenes are also top-notch. You just know that Noda, as a mangaka, isn’t knocking about. The flow of action in every page is just downright superb. It also shows his mastery of human anatomy – and his courage when it comes to gore. His use of crisp blacks and whites, solid lineart, thick, expressive color give us pages that are fresh and clean...I’d be a fool to dismiss his technique, because his (and his studio’s, I guess?) skill just shines through every page.

He’s also not shy when it comes to details – which is admirable. After all, it takes some great dedication for someone to give his main character distinct facial scars that will require repeated drawings in almost every single page (and give his heroine a detailed headband). It makes me wonder just how he does it with a weekly schedule. His color pages look like they were done digitally, but I still have doubts whether or not he does his chapters by hand.  

THE HEART

It took me just a few days to wolf down Kamuy. It was a romp right from the start – nail-biting, stomach-clutching, hair-raising. A truly entertaining piece, if you will. But if there’s one thing I’ve noticed with Kamuy, it’s that it somehow lacks heart.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s great! I love it. It’s superbly crafted, beautifully drawn, amazingly detailed. It’s one of the rare titles that I’m actually thinking of collecting. But it’s also a title that seems to drip technique. Like the author made it for the sake of drawing an intense, gripping title, but somehow solely for that purpose. It’s a career-conscious showcase of ability, a manufactured adventure in the truest sense. I couldn’t see the earnestness I found in Sorachi Hideaki’s Gintama, or the relatability of Nakahara Aya’s  Dame na Watashi wo Koishite Kudasai. Full Metal Alchemist showed Arakawa Hiromu’s passion for muscled men, her interest in alchemy, and views on family, while Haruichi Furudate’s love for volleyball, sportsmanship and camaraderie is undeniable in Haikyuu!!. While I do like the backstory that Sugimoto is somehow based on his real-life war-vet grandfather, I find it a bit sad that it seems to lack that personal touch I’ve always liked seeing in other manga.

But it doesn’t mean that it’s not great. I will still recommend it to everyone I know. Awesome story, great art, refreshing comedy. By all means, read it! (Not sure about the anime, but I keep hearing reviews that we’re better off with the manga). Golden Kamuy is a title of both style and substance – whether it’s about the gore or the gold, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.  

Then let me know if you agree with my upcoming post, an analysis of Sugimoto and Asirpa.

Photos c/o reddit + our lovely scanlators + Satoru Noda

Finding a millionaire money mentor

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

You've probably heard that saying before. It's from motivational speaker Jim Rohn. He used it as a way to encourage people to learn and grow from others' experiences, habits, attitudes, and so forth. He wanted folks to seek out and spend time with people of high quality.

Unfortunately for most people, this advice can be difficult (if not impossible) to implement.

That's because we tend to group with like-minded people, which includes hanging out with friends with similar levels of success. Those who are unmotivated often spend time with others who are unmotivated. And those who are motivated by achievement tend to associate with others at a similar level.

When you resolve to improve yourself — to become smarter or fitter or wealthier — it can be tough to find new friends with a similar desire. It can be difficult to change the five people you spend the most time with.

Today, I want to talk about finding a money mentor.

Seeking a Money Mentor

Let's say you're a new business owner and you want to hang out with successful business people to learn their secrets. Do they want to hang with you? Probably not.

Even if you knew five successful business owners, it might be tough to get them to share their experience. That's because — you guessed it — they're probably hanging out with other successful business people.

Or let's say you want to learn podcasting. What are the chances you'll create a mastermind with Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, and three other high-flying audio experts? Your odds are slim. Honestly, your odds are zero. These folks are out there being friendly with each other in the stratosphere. They're not likely to spend their time with a new podcaster who is just starting out.

Or say you want to date a lovely, fit, out-going, friendly, charismatic lady or man but you're awkward, out of shape, disagreeable, and surly. You aren't going to connect with a single person (pun intended) like this — much less five of them!

I even see this principle at work in the pickleball world. [J.D.'s note: John is a pickelball fanatic. When I had lunch with him in July, we had to schedule around his multiple pickelball matches that day haha.] New and inexperienced players want to play with much better players so they can get better. But the better players want to play with each other (for the challenge).

Unfortunately it's the same way with money. And no one knows this better than me.

I was young when I first heard Jim Rohn's adage about being the average of the people you spend the most time with. At the time, I was interested in growing my wealth. “I need to find some friends who know something about money!” I thought. “I need to find a money mentor — or five.”

I started paying attention to people in my life who fit that description.

First, I looked to my family but there was no one who made the cut. We were lower middle-class most of my life and generally lived paycheck to paycheck.

Next, I turned to my friends and saw a group just like me — a bunch of people who were clueless with money.

Finally, I considered work acquaintances. But again, I couldn't find anyone I thought I could confide in who was good with money. Most of my co-workers had high salaries, but they didn't know how to manage the money they earned.

Ultimately, I decided I'd dig deep into my “network” (which was razor thin to begin with). I wanted to make a list of people I knew even slightly who were wealthy and/or good with money.

I still remember everyone on that list to this day. Here it is:

__________________

That's right: No one. My list was blank.

And how was I even supposed to know a wealthy person? I was a fresh-out-of-graduate-school executive who was fresh-out-of-small-town-Iowa a few years earlier. If it was possible to have a negative number of network connections, I was there. If it was possible to be greener than green, that was me.

Five Wealthy Friends

I had to create my own group of five wealthy “friends”. (I put that in quotes for a reason which will become clear in a moment.) Here's where I found them.

Books

My first wealthy “friends” were money manuals. I started to devour and apply almost any money-related book I could find. My “best friend” happened to be Thomas Stanley, who wrote The Millionaire Next Door. I read his book, applied what he said, and my wealth grew.

I found other friends in books, as well. I read everything I could from every type of author.

Of course, I had to plow through a lot of junk to mine the gold nuggets. Even as a newbie, I could tell what was trash (like “no money down” real estate books). In time, the good stuff stuck with me.

Magazines

Remember magazines? They were like mini-books you could have mailed to your house each month. (Oh, the good old days. Ha!)

This was in the olden days before the internet, so magazines were my only option for money articles. I subscribed to three money magazines for many years: Money, Kiplinger's, and Smart Money.

Again, there was lots of junk (e.g., each month there was another “Seven Great Stocks to Own Now” sort of article) but I navigated my way through the crap and kept some good stuff.

Other Money Novices

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, right?

Well, believe it or not, my wife and I started coaching people at our church early in our marriage. We didn't know much, but we knew more than most. We did budget coaching: how to set up a budget, how to track spending, how to balance the budget, etc.

My wife and I actually got pretty good at this. We could take a family with minimal income and wild spending, then steer them to a balanced budget within two or three hours. Of course, there were hard choices for them to get to that point…

We saw some hideous spending practices, and we had multiple discussions with people trying to communicate Needs versus Wants versus Desires. (So many would try to justify Wants and Desires as Needs — like getting your nails done once a week was a Need. Yikes!)

Anyway, these people taught us…but in the opposite way of what we expected. They showed us what not to do with real life examples.

Writing

Over time, as our little bits of money knowledge accumulated, I developed a side hustle as a personal-finance writer.

You see the irony in this, right?

I held myself out as an expert — as did the magazines I wrote for. It works the same way with journalists these days. Perception is reality, right?

I did know more than most about money, and the publications I wrote for were more general interest versus hardcore money magazines, so it wasn't like I was giving advice on complex tax subjects.

Despite my shortcomings, I happened to be a great marketer (which is what I did for a living) and a decent enough writer (my wife was a brutal editor and made my stuff better, though I fought her changes most of the time) to keep myself pretty busy.

The financial writing became a side hustle. We did this for a few years, using all the money we earned to pay off our mortgage. (In those days, the rates were 8% or so, which made paying off your mortgage much more of a no brainer than today.)

While I wrote, I also researched and started to develop my own philosophy of managing money. My money knowledge and financial habits grew and developed.

After several years, we had our home paid off. This led to a 20+ year run of no debt. So I guess we were better off than most.

Blogging

Many years later, blogging became a thing. I started writing on the web in 2005.

This took my writing and money skills to a whole new level. Now people could comment on what I posted. They could (and did) ask me pointed questions about what I wrote.

This forced me to whittle down what I believed and what I didn't. If I got off track even a bit, my readers let me know it.

This also set the stage for my current site, ESI Money. After so many years of refining my message, I was able to focus my writing on what really mattered and throw away much of the rest.

Of course, these days there are a gazillion blogs and many financial sites, and I read several of them. That's how many people get their financial information. Unfortunately, a large portion of these are written by people with limited financial knowledge and experience.

Nowadays, anyone looking to grow in financial wisdom can hit the web as well as partake in any of the methods I employed. There's a wealth of information out there if you have the time to sort the wheat from the chaff.

But doing so is still a far cry from having five actual friends who are experienced with money — people you can talk to, ask questions of, get responses from, etc. Reading about money isn't the same as having a real-life money mentor.

Besides, people crave person-to-person mentorship in their lives. I know this because they tell me. I hear about it day in and day out.

Connecting with Millionaires

Several years ago, I started interviewing millionaires.

I didn't do it because I wondered what they did to make themselves wealthy. By this time, I understood the keys to wealth.

Instead, I wanted to hear these millionaires tell their stories in their own words. And I wanted to share a new story at my website every week. My hope was that these wealthy men and women would re-iterate that the keys to wealth boil down to a few basic principles. And they did!

To this date, I've published 202 interviews with millionaires at my website.

J.D.'s Note After I sold Get Rich Slowly (and before I bought it back), I wanted to create what I called “The Millionaire Project”. My idea was simple. I would travel the country to film interviews with wealthy people. I'd ask them how they made their money — and how they managed to keep it.

I never followed through on my project, obviously. So, I was excited when I learned that John had begun his own series of millionaire interviews. It's not exactly what I had envisioned, but it's close. (And honestly? In some ways, it's better.)

Shortly after I started publishing these stories, the requests began coming in.

People wanted to connect with millionaires (me and others) for feedback on money issues. They had questions. They wanted advice. In essence, people were seeking to add a millionaire money mentor to the group of friends they spent time with.

Here are some typical comments I received:

“Can you give me your thoughts on this?”

“Can I get more specifics on how you invest in real estate/dividend stocks/etc.?”

“How can I find someone to review my financial situation? I don't know anyone good with money. Will you do it?”

“Hi Millionaire 192, I loved reading your story. It’s inspiring and where I would love to end up eventually with my real estate investments. Would you be willing to talk over the phone about your real estate strategy? I’m happy to pay for your time.”

“I have read, and re-read your story and am very inspired. I wish I was friends with you so we could talk finances on a regular basis. lol.”

At the same time, millionaires were sending me notes wanting to “connect down”. Some of these folks were eager to “pay it forward”. They were willing to be one of the five wealthy friends that people need.

That's when I knew I had to connect the two groups.

The Millionaire Money Mentors

After months of thought and planning, I created the Millionaire Money Mentors program.

People kept telling me they had NO ONE in their lives that they could talk to regarding finances. Now they do. 😉

The Millionaire Money Mentors program is exactly what it sounds like: a way to connect with (and ask questions of) millionaires — and other members of this program. It's an online community dedicated to wealth building.

Members currently have the ability to connect with over 60 millionaires. These money mentors are willing to share their experiences in how to earn more, save more, invest better, and save time doing the right (and avoiding the wrong) money moves.

I hope that you already have a group of wealthy people you can meet with to share your plans and ask for feedback. Even one such money mentor would be amazing!

But if you don't have any wealthy friends, perhaps the Millionaire Money Mentors program is worth a try.

There are several additional benefits to membership in addition to the millionaire-to-member connection. There are expert Ask Me Anything sessions every other week (Sarah Fallaw — Thomas Stanley's daughter — and Wes Moss are just two of our upcoming guests), a Millionaire Book Club, and more! (Not to mention we have a long list of potential future add-ons).

If you think you're interested, I invite you to try it. There's a 7-day money back guarantee so there's really nothing to lose. Plus, membership is affordable (GRS readers have a special price for the next few days) and includes bonuses worth more than the annual cost. I tried to make joining as much of a no-brainer as possible from a value proposition standpoint.

And FYI, it's not just me who loves the site. Here are some comments after our first full week of being open:

“The value of the site is amazing! I have learned so much. I only wish I had more time to read everything!”

“I believe the price of admission to this site is already undervalued! The value of the content more than covers the cost and then factor in the ability to ask questions.”

“Super excited for every one of these (AMA discussions). Thanks and great work putting together this list of incredible people. Well worth the price of admission.”

I hope you stop by and give us a try. But if not, I do suggest you find and connect with a money mentor in Real Life. I took the long and winding road to find my five money “friends” — and even that tough journey was very much worth the effort for me.

from Finance https://www.getrichslowly.org/finding-a-millionaire-money-mentor/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

New interview with Mikey and David!

“Way and Debiak's synth-rock band also shares 'You Got It Wrong,' a track previously only available on limited edition CD.

Four years ago, My Chemical Romance disbanded. Since then, each of its members have pursued solo music endeavors in some capacity: Frontman Gerard Way and lead guitarist Ray Toro have unveiled solo LPs, and rhythm guitarist Frank Iero released two -- under frnkiero and the cellebration, later adopting his current moniker, Frank Iero and the Patience.

The odd man out is bassist Mikey Way (Gerard's brother), who, right after MCR’s dissolution, actually seemed to be the the most active musician. He quickly announced a new project, Electric Century, with longtime friend David Debiak (Sleep Station, New London Fire) and in Feb. 2014, released a debut single, “I Lied.” Almost as quickly as they began, things went south for the band, or so it seemed: when Way thought he was meeting his pal to finish their debut album that same month, Debiak had other plans, and drove Way to a rehab facility where he received long-needed treatment.

Electric Century’s journey has been a complicated one of personal growth, loss and addiction. They released their debut LP, For The Night to Control as a freebie in a 2016 issue of U.K. magazine Kerrang! The album will get an official release for the first time ever July 14 via New Jersey indie label Panic State Records. It's an unusual approach to introducing a new band to the world -- while Electric Century has been around since the end of My Chemical Romance, they've actually just begun.  

Confused? We were too, so we asked Way (EC's multi-instrumentalist and backing vocalist) and Debiak (lead singer and also, player of several instruments) to break it down for us. Below, listen to the band’s New Order-channeling single “You Got It All Wrong” and read their first in-depth chat in years:

You guys have known each other for a long time now. How did you meet?

Mikey Way: We’ve known each other for 15, 20 years. Dave’s brother works at Eyeball Records [My Chemical Romance's label] and we immediately hit it off.

David Debiak: We shared a rehearsal space. The first conversation I ever had with Mikey, we were talking about music and I said, “Dude, want to play some bass?” He said, “Last week my brother asked me to start playing with him, so I think I’m going to give that a shot.”

The course of history could’ve changed!

Way: New Jersey, like every scene, is incestuous. A bunch of my friends who went on to start bands that are still playing asked me to play something in their band. I was always like “Me and my brother, we’ve got this plan.” There are so many instances of like, “Wow, what would’ve happened?”

When did Electric Century officially start? Was it right after My Chemical Romance called it quits?

Way: It did. I was doing a lot of soul-searching at that time. I still had a lot to say, musically. I had a lot of riffs and vocal melodies lying around. It was pretty seamless jump. There was no time between.

Debiak: We started talking about doing something together when Mikey was on the last leg of the last My Chemical Romance tour.

At that time, were you aware My Chemical Romance was breaking up?

Way: If anything, I thought we were taking break. I thought, “Now is the time because we’re taking a break.” Eventually we all decided it should be more than a break. We initially thought it was going to be a break, then we all did some soul-searching and decided, “No, this is definitely the end.”

When you started writing together, did you know that this is the sound you were going to pursue? It’s different from My Chem -- pretty goth-y, '80s, English…

Way: Yeah! Britpop, new wave. I always wanted to scratch that New Order itch. Since I was a teenager, I wanted to do my version of New Order. I was in middle school when I came up with the name Electric Century. I was in science class, I remember. I used to write band names on my notebook. I came up with Electric Century and was like, “Whoa, I like that, I’m going to remember that one!”

Did you immediately consider Electric Century a serious endeavor to pursue?

Way: Oh yeah. There was a ton of label interest. It got very serious very fast. We started getting attention that I didn’t see very often. Alternative Press had given us a cover at some point and we hadn’t ever played a show. MTV was talking to us as it was unfolding. People were excited.

“I Lied” is the first Electric Century song you released, back in Feb. 2014. That’s also when you conducted the MTV interview where Mikey told them, “I’m a drug addict, I’ve been a drug addict my whole life.” Lyrics aren’t always transparent but in that song you mention darkness, filling veins, lying -- I think lying is a dead giveaway with addiction. Was it meant to be autobiographical?

Way: When we were writing that song, Dave saw what was happening. Drug addicts are notorious liars and at the time, I was a notorious liar about my addiction, that I didn’t have a problem. I was in denial for decades. It was fitting that it was the first song anyone could listen to and that it was released while I was getting admitted into rehab. All of it was this weird cosmic joke -- art imitating life imitating art.

Electric Century spent most of that year in the dark. Later, Mikey, you revealed that it was because you went into rehab.

Way: I came home [to New Jersey in February] but I wasn’t there to record. [Dave] was going to take me to a facility. I thought we were going to finish the album. I woke up at Dave’s house, we went for coffee and I said, “When are we starting?” and he said, “You’re not here to record.”

Debiak: I lured you out here with the thought process that we were going to record and on your way out I researched what facilities were available and who had room. I drove you that day and not for a second did you put up a fight. It was more important for you to get help than for us to finish the album.

Way: It was a relief. It was something I put off for a very long time. That’s the thing about Dave, he cares about me like we’re from the same parent. You don’t run into many people like that in life.

​Mikey, do you think the end of My Chemical Romance, something so tied to your identity, acted as a catalyst for your self-destructive behavior?

Way: 100 percent. The band ended, and I was going through a divorce at the same time. I do the most stressful things in clumps. The way I knew how to deal with that, through life, was to self-medicate so that’s what I did. The tail end of My Chem was so dark for me -- I was in a fog. Life caught up with me at that point, and I was getting by. I was in the ocean with the water by my lips. I was trying to stay up and I was failing. I had always self-soothed through narcotics from an early age.

When you get out of rehab, especially as much damage as I had done to myself, you’re basically starting over. You’re standing outside of this house that you built, you’re lighting it on fire and you have to start over again. You have to learn how to get back what you had without being high. For me to be me, sober, that was the true journey afterwards. When you get out of rehab, that’s when the real s--t starts.

Debiak: I came up to visit you in rehab and we did “Let You Get Away.” We borrowed someone’s old school boom box to play music on and we talked about that song a lot.

That song is the next one you shared, in 2015. Then you released a self-titled EP for Record Store Day -- it reads like you were easing back into the project post-rehab. Were you testing the waters, gauging interest, or is that how you work -- you release things when you have songs to release?

Debiak: Both. Watching Mikey come back together again -- he had to rebuild his life -- I was in no rush to make him do that faster than he needed to. As he started feeling better, we starting talking more Electric Century. There was a period were we didn’t talk at all because he was going through the pains of growing and learning how to be sober. That was more important than Electric Century.

Last year you released your debut LP, For the Night to Control, through U.K. rock publication Kerrang! It seemed like you wanted to make something temporary because it’s limited edition and only a few people would ever hear it.

Way: I was trying to emulate the excitement of when we were teenagers. Like, “Ok Computer comes out at this time, let’s go to the city and wait in front of HMV and we can buy it at midnight.” The only way to do that is to couple it with something. I wanted to give it away. The money thing isn’t a factor. I thought it was more of a statement. We’re releasing it to one part of the world. It’s still not out yet, technically. If you bought the magazine, you have a copy, but it’s not out.

Why give it an official release now?

Way: I was waiting until my life finally made sense again. I woke up one day last summer and it was like, “Yo, there he is!” I had finally gotten myself back 100 percent. Prior to that, I started to creep back into it. I did the Alternative Press Music Awards where I played bass with [Black Veil Brides’] Andy Black. Over the summer I had secretly gone out and played bass with Waterparks on their U.K. tour. I was doing things again. I was re-establishing myself with music again. We didn’t immediately jump back into the machine, which would’ve been a mistake. It’s purely for the joy of it.

What’s in store for the future?

Way: Me and Dave are working on the second Electric Century record. We’re planning two shows: one in New Jersey and one in L.A. It’s a matter of when. I think, down the line, I would love to play the U.K. and Japan with this. I could see us touring this, but I don’t want to jinx it. The project has been around so long, but it’s still new to us.

For The Night to Control is available for pre-order here. “ - Billboard

I See the World Keep Moving as I Stumble

This post has been on my mind for a while. This is kind of what got this whole “starting a blog again” idea in my head in the first place, and it’s been something that I’ve gone back and forth about. 

It’s kind of an intense topic to start out with, but hey, we’re getting to know each other on a deeper level, right? 

I started an instagram account (@koriinketosis)  that I am using to share about my weight loss journey, and this was something that I was originally going to post there but I couldn’t seem to sum up the entire post into the character limit. I know that I tend to ramble on a little too long sometimes, but I honestly feel that this topic deserves more space. 

So, here goes... 

In the spirit of being honest and open and forthcoming, I feel the need to talk about a major event in my life that has had an affect on every aspect of my life, from my physical health and weight to my mental health and everything in between. 

On May 17, 2011, my mother passed away from ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). I was 17, and it was two weeks before I graduated from high school. She died in the middle of the night, early Tuesday morning. She was at home. She had been sick for a while. If you aren’t familiar with ALS, it isn’t pretty. My mother had become quadriplegic. She was unable to to eat, swallow, talk or communicate in general. She had a feeding tube. Her muscles had deteriorated and she was skin and bones and in constant pain and discomfort. She was confined to a power wheelchair, where she slept at night because she couldn’t breathe if she was leaning too far back. However, during all of this, her brain was fully functional. She was trapped inside a body that didn’t work. 

Her symptoms started at the end of my freshman year, so my high school experience was spent at doctors offices and hospitals and physical therapy appointments and traveling for treatments. I took care of my mom as I watched her body fail. I prayed and prayed and cried and cried and watched helplessly as my favorite person in the entire world was slowly taken away from me. 

During this time, I was a teenager. An annoying teenager dealing with all of the normal teenage bullshit while also having to grow up too fast but not quite knowing how to handle life. This meant that there were times I would get frustrated with my mom for things she couldn’t help. And to this day, I have not forgiven myself for that. 

I talk about my mom, and I’m honest with people if they ask about her or her illness or her death. I don’t go into much detail. They don’t ask for much. My language is very matter-of-fact and emotionless. 

There’s a certain level of surprise when someone hears that you’re young and you’ve lost a parent. 

What I don’t tell people is how it feels. Maybe it’s because I don’t think they care, or maybe it’s because I don’t know how to put it into words. 

I was watching Season 3 of Queer Eye, and Jonathan was discussing the loss of his step father and he made a comment that really resonated with me. He said that as human beings, we like to put things in boxes and move on. We want to take our grief and stick it in a box and put a bow on it and call it done, but grief doesn’t fit in a box. And he’s absolutely right. It seeps into everything. Every ounce of your being and every facet of your life. It pops up when you least expect it. It’s in certain songs, it’s in certain colors, it’s in your dreams. You can push it aside and you can act like it isn’t there, but it’s always lingering and finding subtle ways to gnaw at your insides without you noticing until theres a gaping hole that you need to find a way to fill. 

The expression “time heals all wounds” is a lie. If you didn’t know that already, I hate to be the one to break it to you. It’s been nearly eight years since I lost my mom, and sometimes I think it hurts more now than it did back then. It just hurts in a different way. I feel like the pain never goes away, just changes form. 

It’s affected me in different ways over the last seven, almost eight years. 

I entered an unhealthy relationship that lasted too long where I went from taking care of my mom to taking care of a boy who took advantage of me in more ways than one. 

I lost all motivation for school while taking classes at community college and failed a lot of classes and ruined my GPA.  I ended up adding an extra two years to my time in college due to retaking courses and trying to raise my GPA in order to get into the education program at UNT. 

I ate my feelings. I gained a lot of weight. At least 50 pounds of feelings. (Down about 35 of it thanks to keto) 

I dream about my mom a lot. When that happens, its difficult for me to get out of bed in the morning. I don’t want to enter the reality where my mom is gone. I’ve spent entire weekends in bed trying to go back to sleep in hopes of dreaming of her again. It never works. 

My self confidence hit an all time low (not that it was ever that high to begin with, let’s be real) and I developed social anxiety that left me too afraid to leave my apartment for anything other than work and class for an entire year. 

I’ve overcome a lot of those things. I have graduated from college and I am now almost finished with my second year of teaching. I am working on losing the weight that I gained and am eating healthier and exercising. My social anxiety is manageable and I am stepping out of my comfort zone more and more. 

But the grief is still there. Gnawing at my insides. I’m just waiting for it to make a new hole. When it does, I’ll find a way to fill it. I’ll overcome that one, too. 

But I just want people to know that if they’re grieving, they’re not alone. There is no timeline. There’s no end date. And that’s okay. 

It’s messy and it’s hard and it’s something that people don’t understand until they’ve felt it. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Don’t be embarrassed. 

It’s okay to not always be okay. You’ll get there. 

Side note: when I blogged in high school, each post was titled with a song lyric from a song that I felt matched the theme of the post. Today’s title comes from “The Feel Again (Stay)” by Blue October. 

Nostalgia 💡

0- I wonder what was going through my mothers mind as she pushed my enormous head out I mean I'm sure she was thinking the same thing she wants me to be just like my dad when I grow up. 4- man oh man me and my 2 best friends I'm not gonna lie we made that pre k playground excuse my language but our BITCH I mean yeah after we argued over who got to be the red ranger...I was the black ranger I don't know why but whatever and these three girls with the cooties chased us all around. They even kissed us on the cheek...THE CHEEK I scrubbed my face for about 1 or 2 WHOLE SECONDS before I went back out, I fell running out though and I got my first knot on my head so my mom picked me up early and she let me play brick breaker on her blackberry when I got home so it was worth it. 5- This was officially the best Christmas ever, I woke up and after opening all of my presents, of course Bobb wouldn't let me open the big one first, I saw, it was a gameboy, A FREAKING GAMEBOY but there weren't any games so I opened another box and then I got the biggest smile ever YOU GOT ME POKEMON FIRE RED AND LEAFGREEN I finally get to become a Pokemon trainer but before I could play I had to leave it there, mom picked me up so we went home she got me a bunch of clothes. 7- for some weird reason mom took me out of parent, I'm leaving all my friends Cornell, jaelyn for what? some weird school in culver city I can't even pronounce. I've been here for a while though and I've learned maybe it's not half bad and dad came to pick me up I haven't seen him in almost a month so I hopped in and the best part about it was I didn't go to school for a week we just hung out, then like always mom was really really mad this time she yelled at dad, his girlfriend, Bobb, meme and even me when I got in the car I cried but played sonic on the dreamcast and forgot all about it while I ate her macaroni and cheese. 8- so mom told me that I have to talk to a lawyer? I don't know why but he's been asking me weird questions like, who do I want to live with who makes me happy between mommy and dad. My aunts and dad have been buying a lot of gift baskets too, but mommy and dad were yelling in front of dad's house and the police came to get dad and mom I overheard the police talking about putting me in some far away place called a foster home but my aunts said that isn't necessary and they would watch me for the time being. I guess I'll just keep playing my PS2 and beat psychonauts and kingdom hearts while I wait for them to come back. 9- mom was really mad today, she's mad because apparently dad won me I guess so now I don't get to see her except for Tuesday's and every other weekend, she kept hitting my hand on our way home and yelling while we cried. Apparently I've made a grave mistake but how was I supposed to know, after a while we played ratchet and clank together all night until I went back home or my new home or I don't know it's hard to describe. We look through the past because times going way too fast we just wish these moments would last and we can just forget the bad. We look through the past because times going way too fast we just wish these moments would last and we can just forget the bad. We look through the past because times going way too fast- 12- I think I've met the love of my life. She so pale but I love the way our hands look when they're clasped together. I think she catches my eye because she looks nothing like everyone else at this school. She sticks out like a sore thumb, yet she wishes to blend in with the crowd. But I sit next to her and she doesn't blend in to me, I wish she was into me. she's always writing and when I asked her about it she actually showed me, that took like 3 months for me to even pull off. And I want something to talk about her with so I'm going to start writing, maybe we can write together, maybe we can actually be more than friends. Maybe be more than friends, maybe she'll leave her boyfriend that doesn't value her enough. I think I love her more than my parents and she doesn't even know it. 6th grade is confusing. 13- She doesn't have a boyfriend anymore. She has a girlfriend. One of my friends who knew I liked her is dating her. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME I WAITED MONTHS FOR THIS JUST TO LOSE MY CHANCE TO SOMEONE ELSE. We like the same music together I opened her up to more rap like she's never heard of Kid Cudi so you know I had to help her with that it'll get us through our hard times. The soundtrack of our lives. And she showed me some cool rock that's really insightful thanks to MCR and the Beatles. We shared writing with each other, the other girl doesn't even write like me and her did. We spoke day and night, Me, Alexis, Jonathan and Sheury. The best 4 friends together and I just wanted Sheury, but I don't think she'll ever realize it. At this point I don't know what's worse girl problems or family problems. Also learned the word priority today, maybe I need to get those in check. 13- Talk about a love triangle. I would love to catch you up to speed but I have a limited amount of paper and time on this world. My outlook on life since I met her has been.. hazy to say the least basically I feel like life is brighter around her and I love to brighten her day up when she feels beat down, she's always beat down but when I'm without her or feel like me being able to grasp her hand, to hug her, to hold her, it hurts, too much. 13- why is this year going by so slow, I can't tell if I'm just savoring it too long now. I finally got the courage after much much counseling with Jon to go for it. As I told her my stomach turned more and more. It was like gambino when he told the girl on the bus that he loved her as I used the same word, destiny. All you did was smile as well and said okay, you liked me too but you couldn't do that to Alexis, so we just kept it to ourselves, not much changed for a while. Until one day. One day, we held hands, the next day we hugged a long time before you left, the next day you broke up with Alexis, the next two weeks, we began dating, the next two months, we beggar to say we love each other. 6 months and we still haven't kissed let's just hope I do it right. 14- We don't argue, never fight, talk day and night, I could see nothing wrong. I would only want us to be together forever. Seeing you everyday I guess made me spoiled. Because one day you told me that you were leaving the school. I mean like it shouldn't be that bad but at the time it was devastating. But I knew that we could last right? But then my mom went through my phone, didn't exactly approve of you. Of how we spoke. Man we were nasty back then haha. But I told her we broke up even when we didn't. Fourteen. 14. I thought we could last. I hate Facebook. As I scrolled down I saw a picture you posted, clearly of you, kissing another guy. Who cheats in middle school what the hell. All I remember is asking you, and you confirmed it, then crying. I remember tears to the Beatles, oh the irony shedding tears to Hey Jude. Goodbye Jude. 14- honestly I forget how old I was when I graduated 8th grade I lose track I just know that I didn't skip a grade and didn't get held back. I remember missing grad night with all my friends that I wouldn't see again besides a handful because my mom didn't want to take me to school. I remember holding my aunt in my arms for a picture I still have in my phone, your smile was as pure as your intentions for me. At least you made it to one of my graduations before you left. I believe that your spirit is still in the house. I remember reading the Alchemist in 2 days because I had to read it for high school but it also spoke to me. Something about the ambiguity. Was beautiful. Then, before high school mom you decided to leave with my brother to New York. How could you leave me. Do you even love me? We look through the past because times going way too fast we just wish these moments would last and we can just forget the bad. We look through the past because times going way too fast we just wish these moments would last and we can just forget the bad. We look through the past because times going way too- 14- and then poof. One day during freshman year, you were gone. You can't just pass away. Who's going to make me lemon cake? All I remember is somber moods. Crying for weeks in a small room where it felt like the walls were closing in. This might be the shortest because you left me speechless. 16-first high school girlfriend. And you didn't exactly make me hate them but you made them feel dull. At least my friends didn't hate you so that was a plus. We dated for 9 months and you made me just feel stagnant. I wanted growth from one another that we couldn't get. You helped me realize how I avoid everything. I didn't want to break up and prolonged it for 2 months because I was just avoiding it. You got me socks for my birthday like come on. So I'll just keep drifting through life with my friends. I love my friends. 17- I've dated this new girl for over a year now. And you know maybe I'm an bad guy. Maybe we're had people together. We're toxic together you cut me off from society. We aren't all against you, I have to hide everything from you, I have to hide my poetry from you. But I can't just leave I just don't know what to do. It feels like we're just dragging along. Why do we have to do that to ourselves. Just leave me alone. Let me be. Leave me alone. Let me be. You get happiness that you always whine for. I don't feel happy either. So what is the point. I've been reading the Prophet. It helps me realize everything that you've done. You've held me back from growing, I hate stagnation. How about we grow alone and find our ambition together. 18- One word. Rebirth.

tfw i meant to post this late night but i put it in my queue by accident

ao3 link here

have some garrison trio for hunk’s birthday because B O N D I N G and also i was riding a big sugar high so it isn’t as Epic as i wanted it to be

but it was fun!

It was early morning. Or late night?

It was 4 a.m., about.

Target: Asleep. Probably having a good dream by the looks of those drool stains. His covers half thrown off the bed, and he was near suffocating in his snores.

Perfect.

Lance launched himself from his balcony to Hunk’s, nearly slipping on a clump of ice.

“Toss the goods, Eagle Two!”

Pidge rolled her eyes, but threw the ‘goods’ (an old backpack, stuffed to the brim with… secrets) at him nonetheless.

“Do you even remember how to pick a lock?”

“Uh duh. I’ve watched like… a million spy movies.”

Pidge shook her head exasperatedly. “Your funeral when you set off every alarm in the house.”

Lance flipped her off as she hopped over the banister, joining him on the other side.

Alright. Bobby pin? Check.

Credit Card? Expired, but that didn’t matter.

Spare key to the front door in case he couldn’t pick the lock? Back pocket.

“Let’s do this.” He grinned, cracking his knuckles. The bobby pin was then unceremoniously shoved into the keyhole.

And the door creaked open with the motion. No fiddling with locks needed.

“Huh.”

Pidge just barely resisted smacking her forehead. “You dingus. Rule one of anything ever is to always check if the door’s locked.” She climbed over him, and nearly face-planted into Hunk’s dresser as Lance tripped her.

“Oops.” He feigned innocence, fluttering his lashes at her as she rounded on him.

They began to loudly whisper out an argument. Pidge’s arms crossed, and then she flicked him. Lance gasped, offended.

They were just about to resort to a slap-fight when a loud groan interrupted them.

“What are you guys doing?” Hunk asked, sitting up to rub sleep from his eyes. His bedhead was a thing of beauty, hair framing his forehead like a crown. Or a halo.

“Oh, you’re awake! Good, good.” Lance didn’t bother with keeping his voice down any longer. Instead, he jumped on the bed (shoes and all) and began to bounce up and down excitedly. “Hurry up and get dressed, dude! It’s time!”

Hunk curled up in his fluffy comforter as his eyes drifted shut again. “Time for what?”

“Summertime.”

Pidge pulled on the back of Lance’s shirt, tugging him from his perch. “Don’t you dare quote High School Musical.”

“Pidge, you’re the one who showed it to me.”

“And that was a mistake.”

“Yeah, well - Hunk! Don’t fall back asleep, ya party-pooper. Sun’s shinin’!”

“No it’s not.” Hunk whined, but sat up again as requested. “What are we doing this early, anyway?”

Lance dug into his backpack and pulled out a badly drawn map. “We’re going on an adventure!”

“I swear, Lance, if you don’t stop with the movie quotes I will find every DVD you own and-”

He interrupted Pidge. “Hey, see, I wasn’t even trying to quote anything that time. You nerd.” Lance rolled up his map. “Now, help me get him out of bed.”

The two rounded on either side of Hunk’s bed and flipped the covers off.

Lance shrieked.

“Dude, where are your pants?” He cried, covering his eyes.

Pidge rolled her own again. “He’s wearing underwear, Lance. It’s not like you haven’t seen him naked, anyway.”

Hunk grumbled as he rolled out from under his covers, finally.

“Yeah, well… I know you are but what am I?” Lance stuck his tongue out.

Pidge didn’t grace that with a response. Instead, she jumped on the bed behind Hunk and shoved her phone under his face. “Get up, Oh Yellow One. If we’re gonna beat traffic, we have to leave in five.”

“Where are we going?” Hunk yawned, ambling to the bathroom.

Lance stopped his feet exasperatedly. “I already told you. Road trip!”

“But- why?”

“It’s a secret.”

Pidge tapped idly at her phone. “It’s your birthday, dude. We’re taking you to the beach. You and Lance can spend your day being burnt by U.V. rays and swallowing dirty, salty water all you want.”

“Aw, Pidge. You know I’m gonna drag you along to do all of that with us.” Lance cooed, peeking over her shoulder. “But also, we are a little behind schedule. Our first plan was to kidnap you and shove you in a truck, which would have been a lot faster.”

“Thanks for not doing that.” Hunk said behind his toothbrush. “I’d rather not pee myself on my birthday.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now hurry up!”

---

They were stuffed into Pidge’s tiny Punch Buggy and were soon holding on for dear life as she barely kept within the speed limit.

“Hunk, if we die I want you to know I love you!” Lance squealed as Pidge cut between two cars in the left lane, only to swerve in front of another as she overtook it.

“You babies. I’m barely going that fast. Besides, we have to get onto the main highway by 5 in order to really beat rush hour. So hold onto your toes!”

Hunk screamed as it looked like they were about to rear-end someone. Then, Pidge turned at the last second to an empty H.O.V. lane.

“There we go. Smooth sailing from here, probably!”

With a groan, Hunk covered his eyes, shoving his head between his knees. “Oh, no.”

“Projectile, incoming!” Lance cried, flying from the front seat to the back to give him something to throw up in.

---

Hunk did not throw up, but Lance took over as driver as soon as Pidge pulled off at the next exit. She pouted as she climbed into the back. “We were making good time.”

“Yeah, but we’d rather get their late with our lives than on time without any bones.”

“Lame.”

---

Lance, unfortunately, was just as good a driver as Pidge.

“You son of a mother- USE YOUR BLINKER!” He pushed his hand on the horn and held it for a solid five seconds.

Hunk was going to die. He was definitely going to die on this, the day of his birth.

“I swear to all that is holy in heaven… GO! The light is green!” Lance revved the engine. The car in front of him flipped them off and Lance-

“Lance, no.”

Lance hunkered down, shoulder up to his ears as he squinted at the car. Target: sighted.

“Lance, yes.”

The car took off and Lance was hot behind it in pursuit.

They hadn’t even made it back on the highway yet.

---

Hunk sighed, apologizing once again to the police officer as they made their way back to their car. Lance had his arms crossed as he sat shotgun, and Pidge was barely holding in her mirthful laugh at his expense.

Looks like it was up to the birthday boy to actually get them where they needed to go.

“You guys are ridiculous.” He sighed, clipping in his seatbelt. “I’m gonna have a heart attack.”

Pidge burst out laughing, holding her stomach as she rolled around in the backseat. “Did you see his face? And the cop, and-” Her laugh evolved to breathless squeaks, and soon the other two were laughing along with her.

“Sorry, dude.” Lance nudged Hunk in the arm.

“No problem. Just remind me to never leave my balcony unlocked again, yeah?”

“Mm… I’ll see what I can do.”

---

Eventually, the other two passed out. Pidge, probably because she hadn’t gotten any sleep that night. Lance, most likely from the amount of food he’d stuffed into himself from the gas station. Seriously, a chilli dog, chilli cheese fries, a bowl of chili, three kinds of potato chips, and a slushie?

Hunk gagged thinking about it. But whatever made him happy?

He was given time to think, though, about his friends.

This was his first real semester away from his family back in Hawaii. Of course he couldn’t just drop money to buy a ticket to visit for one weekend, not when he was drowning in that much debt. But, they’d sent him well wishes through various phone calls and texts, so he knew they didn’t forget. They’d never forget.

But he knew that if he’d been left alone that weekend, he’d probably have fallen into a depression. Lance and Pidge probably knew that, too.

He needed to remember to thank them for thinking about him, later.

---

Rush hour came and went, and they passed numerous car accidents, construction workers, and hitch-hikers.

Pidge slept through most of it. Lance, however, woke almost as soon as Hunk reached a comfortable cruising speed about two miles under the speed limit.

“How’s the time?” His lanky friend yawned, curling his legs up to his chin. How he did that in such a tiny seat, Hunk would probably never know.

“We’ll be there in like an hour.” Hunk hummed, turning down the radio. “Maybe a little over. Looks like some traffic ahead.”

“Gross.”

Hunk smiled. “Yeah. You can go back to sleep though. I’ll wake you up when we get there.”

“Nah… I feel bad making the birthday boy drive, anyway.” Lance fiddled with the radio stations, boredly rolling his eyes as they were stuck on commercial for every single channel.

“Let’s play a game. I Spy? Never Have I Ever?”

“I Spy doesn’t seem like a lot of fun when there are only cars, trees, and you know… highway stuff sitting around us. And don’t you need to drink something for Never Have I Ever?”

Lance threw his hands up exasperatedly. “Details!”

---

They ended up just singing karaoke.

Then some upbeat electronica popped on and Pidge gasped, throwing herself over the middle armrest to turn it up. “I love this song!”

“Pidge, seatbelt!” Hunk shrieked, narrowly avoiding a collision. She blew a raspberry directly into his ear before she plopped back into her seat, loudly clicking her seatbelt.

“I thought you only listened to country music.” Lance says, as if the words physically repulse him.

“Don’t make me bring up your song choices, Mister ‘Naruto Opening 7 Is In My Playlist Eight Times In A Row’.” She huffed.

Lance turned around in his seat, nose high in the air. “I’m blocking you.”

Pidge flicked him. “You love me.”

---

Their impromptu argument ended when Hunk accidentally flipped stations, and his favorite song was on.

This began the karaoke battle to end all karaoke. If they started a band, they would’ve risen to the top mere seconds after their first album dropped.

Traffic was at a stand-still, so Hunk was free to drum his hands across the dashboard. And so he did, not only hitting every single beat, but also able to find the right notes. Or, as close as he could get, on the plastic interior.

Lance was a master of air guitar. And head-banging. But the fact that he actually knew how to play the instrument made it that much more interesting to watch. Especially the way his fingers curled and flicked over the imaginary strings? It was captivating. Lance just had that kind of aura, though.

Pidge was… not as into it as the boys. But she was an amazing singer. Her voice was loud, unafraid, and boy could she hold a note. Hunk whooped every time she reached a high note, and whenever she sped through a rap, the other two went crazy.

It was a hell of a show, and Lance commented as much once they’d slumped back in their seats, voices dead and energy palpable.

“We should do this more often.”

“Only if you pay for my gas.” Pidge griped, rubbing at her throat.

---

They made it within 45 minutes instead of the assumed hour, despite the strange influx of traffic. And the beach was surprisingly empty, despite it being a weekend.

Lance just tugged a bundle of beach towels over his shoulders and raced off into the sand. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!”

Hunk and Pidge shared a look, but they followed suit. Hunk grabbed the cooler, and Pidge grabbed the umbrella and backpack.

It was only about midday, but it was the perfect time to snack and sunbathe.

---

Lance had already flipped out of his clothes, revealing his bathing suit underneath.

“You’ve been wearing that the entire time??” Pidge’s eyebrows shot up beneath her bangs as she pulled her short hair into a tiny ponytail. “Wasn’t it uncomfortable?”

“Nah, it was just like plastic boxers.”

Pidge grimaced, but decided not to comment. Instead, she pulled her bag over her shoulder and left to look for somewhere to change.

Hunk had not brought a swimsuit (since he didn’t really have prior warning). But he didn’t really mind, since he didn’t plan on swimming much anyway. He always preferred building sandcastles to riding waves, anyway.

Lance, however, was probably born for the ocean. It showed, when he dove in and reappeared like a million miles away from where he started in the span of three seconds. Hunk shot him a thumbs-up as he began to fill in a moat for his sand-tower.

There was a quiet peacefulness between them for a long while. Mostly because they couldn’t really talk while Lance was neck-deep in the water, and Hunk shoulder deep in sand. But it was good. Relaxing.

Er, rather… it was, until Pidge rushed back to Hunk on the beach, flipping the beach towel from underneath him and nearly crumbling his sandcastle.

“Woah, woah. See a ghost, Pidge?”

“We have to go now.” She shrieked, face aflame. Hunk shot up, reaching out to place a worried hand on her shoulder.

“What happened?”

Pidge mumbled something into her hands as Lance dashed to meet them, saltwater dripping from him in every direction.  

“What’s going on?”

Hunk shrugged. “Something happened to Pidge.”

She made a frustrated noise and covered her eyes. “I can’t believe I didn’t research this.”

Lance and Hunk shot each other a frightened look. “Research what, Pidgeon?” Lance spoke up.

“This is, uh…” Pidge couldn’t seem to stop fidgeting. “A nude beach. As in… full-on… penile action.”

“Oh.” The two pulled back. “Ohh…”

Pidge looked absolutely mortified, and Lance couldn’t stop himself from laughing at her misery. “Aw, Pidge! I already knew this was a nude beach!”

“You what.” Hunk deadpanned.

“Yeah, dude. This part isn’t really used, but yeah. It’s technically all a nude beach.”

Pidge shouted indignantly as she began to slap his arm with her tote bag. “You didn’t think to tell us that?”   

“Ow.” Lance whined, hiding behind Hunk, who had honestly given up on them already. “Sorry, Piggy Wiggy. I forgot.”

“Tell that to my retinas. I’ll never unsee that taint.”

Hunk made a disgusted noise at the back of his throat.

---

Despite the… slight disruption, the trio did end up having the time of their lives. Lance was 100% correct when he said that the part of the beach they were on wasn’t used. Throughout the entire five or so hours they loitered around, they saw maybe five other people tops.

Hunk and Pidge joined forces to create the grandaddy of all sandcastles. Complete with a miniature dragon that circled a tower. Pidge mostly did the structural engineering, but Hunk did the design.

Once Lance had had enough of tiny fish swimming up his trunks, he let out a low whistle as he took in the sight.

“Remind me to bring you guys in when Keith needs help with his art projects. This is amazing.”

Hunk grinned. “Thanks. I’m probably never gonna get sand from under my nails, though.”

Pidge put the finishing touch on the bridge over their moat and stood with a victorious dusting off of her hands. “Worth it.”

It truly was, though. Four identical towers (with one dragon) circled a large castle that tapered at the top. The moat took most of the eye, and was in a flowing, intricate design that probably should have been researched by professionals with how smoothly it stuck together.

“Looks like a spaceship, though.”

“A space-castle.” Hunk amended. “Sounds like a dream to me.”

Pidge turned up her nose. “Sounds like a hassle to clean. Who knows what kind of gunk gets stuck in a “space-castle” engine. And where does the waste go?”

“Hush, hush.” Lance checked an imaginary watch on his wrist. “We have to get going, so pack up your bags, little children. We’re already gonna get stuck in traffic.”

Pidge snapped a picture of their piece of art, and Lance instantly struck a pose behind it. Then, she took a few more of all three of them together, if only for Lance to post on his social media.

“Rest in pieces, space-sandcastle.” Pidge mourned, before shoving her foot directly through the middle of it. Hunk clutched his heart dramatically, and Lance clapped his hands together, holding them up to his mouth.

“It lived well.”

“May it find peace.”

---

“Did you have fun, though? Birthday boy? Light of my life? Hunky-hunkster?”

Hunk grinned, stretching his arms above his head before he closed the car door. “I did. A lot.”

Lance let out a cheer that Pidge weakly mimicked from her sprawled out position. She’d taken shotgun this time, and her feet were smudging the windshield as she spread them across the dashboard.

“I really appreciate it, you guys.” Hunk shyly spoke up, “I know we didn’t do much but… It means a lot that you spent all day with me.”

“Ohoh, Hunk… don’t think this is the end of it. We have a whole dinner-show combo planned out!” Lance reached up to hook his arm around Hunk’s shoulders. “We may have finagled the dining hall for private use for an hour or so.”

“You did not.”

“Never question what Pidge can achieve.” Lance said sagely, and Pidge shrugged as she nodded along with him. Hunk was inclined to agree.

“Wait, so…”

“Yep! Prepare your butt, birthday boy. The activities have only just begun!” Lance dropped back into his seat. “So, let’s hit the road! I convinced Shiro to put on a malo and do that dance you taught us a while ago.”

Hunk probably would have choked if he’d been drinking something.

“There is no way. Shiro??”

Lance grinned, and Pidge snickered at him.

“Guess you’ll just have to see, yeah?”

Hunk shook his head. “I have the most amazing friends in the world.” Seriously. Hunk probably would have started to cry, if he wasn’t trying to focus on the road.

His two best friends shared a meaningful look, and they winked.

“And don’t you forget it!”

Mission accomplished.

A Bike Ride Across America

  [NOTE: 2020 is the tenth year of my blog at Semi-Rad.com, and since I started it, I’ve been fortunate to get to do some pretty wonderful adventures. Throughout this year, I’ll be writing about 12 favorite adventures I’ve had since I started writing about the outdoors, one per month. This is the second in the series. The other stories in the series are here.]

As we looked over our menus, we began to sense that the Waffle House staff was nearing a complete meltdown. It was evening, Day 39 of our 49-day bicycle ride across America, March 15, 2010, and Tony and I had finished our day of riding, pushed our bikes and trailers into a hotel room a block away, showered, and walked to the nearest restaurant, which was a Waffle House. Tony and I were tired and ready to eat. Almost six weeks into our trip, our bodies had basically turned into machines that pedaled fully-loaded bicycles all day, burning 4,000 to 8,000 calories every day. We had taken only three rest days so far, and we would only take one more the rest of the 3,000-mile trip, so our average mileage for a day of riding was 66.67 miles. The day we arrived in Bayou La Batre, we had pedaled 105 miles, from Rogers Lake, Mississippi. It was my first-ever century ride, and although Waffle House might not be many people’s first choice after a ride like that, I was more than fine with it.

My back was to the open kitchen, so I could only eavesdrop, but Tony could see everything. From what we gathered, a rather large carryout order had come in, and the cook had basically totally fucked it up, causing delays in not only the large carryout order, but all the orders for customers sitting in the dining area as well. Not to mention the the staff, arguing amongst themselves in full view, enough to convince even the most die-hard Waffle House fan to eat elsewhere that night. Despite pleas from the waitstaff to call a manager in to help, the cook adamantly refused, making things awkward for literally everyone within earshot, which is to say the entire restaurant. It was the kind of thing that nowadays someone would record on a smartphone and post to Twitter in hopes that it would go viral. Since I couldn’t see, Tony narrated for me, as we tried to calculate how much food to order to replace 105 miles’ worth of calories:

“This is total mayhem.”

“The cook just threw something.”

“Okay, now the younger waitress is in the back crying.”

Were we not touring cyclists, we might have just decided to leave. But: It was evening, and we just wanted to eat and go to bed so we could get up early and pedal 60-some miles the next day, and our dining options in a small town were pretty limited, and further limited by the fact that if we wanted to go to a different restaurant, we’d have to walk to get to wherever it was. And, you know, you sort of have to ask yourself: If I want to go see America, is America things like the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, and the Hollywood sign? Or is it a Waffle House in a small town, hoping that the staff doesn’t mutiny, so we can get some hash browns? That’s a rhetorical question, but I’d argue for the Waffle House, open 24 hours, 365 days a year, a completely different scene at 2 a.m. than at 7:30 a.m., affordable to anyone who can scrounge up five bucks and thus open to people of all income levels but mostly patronized by those of us not in the 1 percent, potential for brief moments of public theater, but mostly just chugging along, making eggs and waffles. I mean, I love the Grand Canyon, but I think you can learn more about America at a diner.

We eventually were able to place our order, our food eventually came to the table, we eventually ate everything, and the Waffle House was still standing the next morning when we returned for breakfast, like nothing happened. We ate pretty much the same thing as the night before, and a local sitting at the counter chatted us up, reminding us that part of Forrest Gump was set here, in Bayou La Batre, Benjamin Buford “Bubba” Blue’s hometown, and where Forrest buys a boat to start the Bubba Gump shrimp company.

Tony and I went to high school in a town not much bigger than Bayou La Batre, and we spent many Friday and Saturday nights working together in a restaurant, washing dishes and busing tables. Tony shot up to 6 feet, 10 inches tall mid-high school, and everyone expected him to play basketball, but he had other ideas. He topped out at 7 feet tall, went to college, became a chiropractor in Chicago, and an entrepreneur.

When he asked me in 2009 if I’d like to bicycle across the country with him the next year, I said of course I would. He said he’d pay for it, which was an ideal situation for me, since I was making $26,000 a year working at a nonprofit. I had been riding my steel road bike to and from work daily in Denver for three and a half years, while trying to become an “adventure writer” in my spare time. In Chicago, Tony had been getting into triathlons and road rides. The last time we’d ridden our bikes any distance together was the last time I did RAGBRAI, the bike ride across Iowa, in 2000, and that was more of a party than a bike tour for us, if I’m honest.

Having not spent much time together in the past eight years, but hoping we could make it across the country on bikes and remain friends, we dipped our tires in the Pacific at Ocean Beach in San Diego on February 5, 2010, pushed them to the pavement, and started pedaling. Our final intended destination was St. Augustine, Florida, the opposite end of the Adventure Cycling Association’s Southern Tier Route, the flattest, shortest route across the country. Our first day, we climbed out of San Diego, managing 34.5 miles to Alpine, California.

Before I left for the trip, my wise friend Mick gave me two pieces of advice about long bike tours: 1) “You’re going to have some high highs and some low lows out there,” and 2) “Don’t try to muscle through anything—just keep spinning.” And my friend Maynard half-joked: “I hope you like riding eight miles per hour into a headwind.” All those things would ring true in the span of about 24 hours, much later in the trip.

I didn’t have any grand ideas about the trip, besides maybe being able to write about it, a magazine article, maybe even a book? I knew bicycling across America wasn’t the most unique thing, but maybe something would happen that would sustain a narrative. I bought a url and put up a blog to keep our friends and families up to date on our progress, and to help raise money for the nonprofit I worked for. I packed a $250 Asus laptop to try to keep the blog updated, and added wifi service to my Verizon plan, so I could turn my flip phone into a hotspot when we weren’t staying in a hotel with wifi.

I updated the blog every day, downloading photos from our digital cameras, writing a few sentences about our progress, sometimes a quote from a conversation with a stranger. Most days, though, in the “no shit, there I was …” sense of adventure writing, nothing really happened. What did happen is we plugged away, every day. We got up, ate as much food as we could stomach, got dressed, filled our water bottles, wheeled our bikes out to the road, swung a leg over the saddle, and started pedaling. We’d ride together for a few minutes, and Tony would get warmed up, and start to pull away, riding a half-mile, or a mile, or two miles ahead of me the entire day, stopping every couple hours to check in, or to stop at a cafe to eat lunch, or to pop into a convenience store to buy cans of Coke, Snickers bars, and whatever other calories looked good. Somewhere between 40 and 105 miles, we’d stop, find a hotel, shower, and eat at a restaurant somewhere. Tony wasn’t that excited to camp, although we’d brought camping gear (including a tent that could fit a 7-foot-tall person). I protested at first, saying I thought it would be “more legit” if we camped more. Tony said, “Riding your bike across America is legit,” and I could not argue with that point.

We rode across the bottom of California, occasionally looking to the U.S.-Mexico border fence to our right. We rode into Phoenix from the northwest, and out the southeast side, almost 60 miles of pedaling to get across the entire urban spread, and pedaled through the desert, away from angry dogs (I eventually developed a technique of explosively yelling at them, which stopped them in their tracks, surprised—except for the rottweilers) and into New Mexico, where we hit the highest elevation of the trip, 8,228-foot Emory Pass, on Day 15. We started to meet other cyclists on the same route, either headed the same direction or the opposite way, and realized there was really no “typical” cross-country rider: some were pedaling 50 or more miles a day, unsupported and stealth camping, others were riding solo 20 or 30 miles a day with a friend driving a minivan somewhere behind them, some had a schedule, some were taking their time.

On Day 20, we adjusted our route to take a less hilly path, avoiding the Davis Mountains in west Texas and heading to the town of Marfa on US 90. My memory of the day is the flattest, straightest road I’ve ever ridden on, with a few barely noticeable adjustments to the left, a slight uphill grade the entire way, and wide-open ranch land along both sides of the road. In the morning, we caught up with a couple named Bruce and Dana, a pair of retired teachers from Tacoma, and rode with them a good part of the day. The chipseal road was so rough that we tried to keep our wheels on the painted white line on the side of the road because it was that much smoother. Tony said he watched his bike computer slow from 12-14 mph to 9 mph several times when he rolled off the white line. In 75 miles of riding, the only town we’d go through on our map was Valentine, Texas, population 184, with no businesses to speak of besides the post office. A few miles before Valentine, however, is the art installation Prada Marfa, a fake Prada store in the middle of nowhere. I was riding with Bruce and Dana, and Tony was ahead of us somewhere. We stopped, took some photos, and pedaled on, catching Tony in Valentine a few miles later. He hadn’t stopped at the Prada store, because he hadn’t even noticed it on the side of the road as he rolled past—which is either almost unbelievable because the ride was so straight-ahead monotonous, or completely expected because the ride was so straight-ahead monotonous.

A few days later, I got the high highs and low lows Mick had promised. I did a lot of things to pass the time out there, pedaling six to eight hours a day, all the time in my own head while Tony rode a ways ahead. Tony had a little speaker on his bike to play music while he rode—I didn’t want to listen to music because I thought it would ruin my favorite music for me, spending all day listening to the same playlists, for 300+ hours total by the end of the trip. So I chose silence, talking to cows as I passed, making up lyrics to songs, sometimes talking to myself a bit. I didn’t have a bike computer or smartphone map, so I just pedaled, watching the horizon for signs of the next town. It was fantastically boring, and a decade later, when I spend all my waking hours checking my phone every few minutes, I look back on it with incredible nostalgia. I suppose we always look at the past as “a simpler time,” no matter what, because we remember the images in our minds and the general tone of a memory, but forget all the other things we were thinking about at the time. But it really did seem simple: wake up, eat, pedal, eat, pedal, eat, go to sleep. Repeat until you hit an ocean.

On Day 23, a few miles outside of Langtry, Texas, unincorporated, population 12, home to a museum and almost nothing else, I was pedaling by myself as the wind picked up, right in my face. I had read somewhere on the internet that you could camp in Langtry, but if you didn’t arrive by 5 p.m., the water was shut off. So I was a little anxious to get there as the wind started pushing into my face, then getting worried, because I had almost no water to drink, let alone to cook our food with when we camped that night. Then I got a flat tire. And the wind picked up. Then I got another flat tire. I got very frustrated, and then just kind of lost it for a few seconds. I screamed at the top of my lungs, while pedaling by myself, into the wind, alone on a highway, for a couple minutes, cranking my metaphorical steam valve wide open, and then, catching my breath, closed it again. Low low, check.

When I arrived in Langtry, the rumor about water turned out to be false, and I bought and ate a couple ice cream sandwiches at the corner store. We set up the tent, ate dinner, crashed, and during the night, the wind picked up to a steady 30 mph, coming from the east. The next morning, we headed out, with a handful of candy bars from the museum store to sustain us to Del Rio, 55 miles away. We pedaled, looking like two cartoon characters leaning into the wind, granny gear on the uphills, and granny gear on the downhills too. I just laughed, and kept spinning. The wind wouldn’t let up, or even change direction. If we had more food with us, we might have stopped for the night, but we didn’t, so our only hope was to reach Del Rio. We pedaled for 11 hours, stopping once at a small bar to grab a couple bags of potato chips and a few candy bars. We averaged 5 miles per hour the entire way, the wind never relenting until our last five miles into Del Rio, in the dark. Pedaling 8 miles per hour into a headwind, as Maynard had said, would have been a dream.

We rolled our bikes into a hotel room in Del Rio, ordered three large pizzas from Domino’s, ate them, and went to bed. Later that year, Tony would finish his first Ironman Triathlon, and when I texted him to congratulate him, he texted back that it wasn’t nearly as bad as “that day in Texas with the headwind.”

One of the things I believe many people will tell you about a long trip, whether it’s thru-hiking a long-distance trail, backpacking a hostel circuit for a month and a half, or pedaling a bicycle for weeks at a time, is that it’s as much about the people you meet as it is about the places you see. You meet people on a bike tour because you are on a bike, and the bicycle is a conversation starter. People see you as somewhere between a little crazy and complete idiots because you choose to travel by bicycle in the 21st century, but also because of the bicycle probably harmless enough that you won’t mind a little chit chat. If they see you and your fully-loaded bicycle outside a restaurant, convenience store, or hotel somewhere, they will ask you some, if not all, of these four questions:

Where are you headed?

Where did you start?

How many miles do you ride every day?

What do you eat?

At some point in the conversation, you will get a chance to ask them, “Are you from around here?” or something similar, and in that way, you get to meet a few people. Which is something that happens way less when you’re traveling inside a gas-powered, climate-controlled vehicle, in my experience. On my bike, I had brief conversations with Wal-Mart greeters, waitstaff, ferry employees, convenience store clerks, and fellow restaurant patrons, and it helped new, strange places feel welcoming, wherever we were.

The thing I started to feel as we racked up the miles, and that we both agreed on years later, is that we were going a little too fast, and that maybe it would have been nice to take a little more time and do a little more exploring, and talking to people. At the time, though, Tony’s business was young, and he was definitely motivated to get back to work instead of trying to keep things moving forward from the road with spotty cell service. And I was really just grateful to have two months off work (even unpaid), something that hasn’t happened since and may not happen again in my life. As we made our way across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and finally, Florida, we ran into more and more people bicycling the Southern Tier, and even one lady, Robin, riding the Southern Tier as just one leg of a giant rectangle around the perimeter of the United States, ensuring she’d still be pedaling her bike after I’d been back in the office for six months.

We had friends join us for sections, including our pal Nick, from high school, who rode the last 210 miles with us from Tallahassee to St. Augustine, slipping in as seamlessly as if he’d ridden the previous 2800 miles with us. As we got closer to the final miles, I started to think about what we’d done, and how I framed it in my life. I couldn’t really nail it down. It felt like a big adventure, but in the Yvon Chouinard “when everything goes wrong, that’s when adventure starts” sense, well, we made it through pretty unscathed and according to plan, aside from a bunch of flat tires and a couple of worn-out bike chains. It went really well—basically the opposite of a book like Into Thin Air, when everything did go wrong, to the point where it became a disaster and a bunch of people died. In 49 days together, we didn’t even have enough disagreements to fill half of an episode of Real Housewives of New Jersey.

In the ten years since Tony and I started pedaling east from San Diego, I’ve been lucky to spend lots of time in the outdoors, doing a bunch of different things that fall under the idea of “adventure.” Whether it’s backpacking, rock climbing, mountaineering, backcountry skiing, trail running, kayaking, whitewater rafting, or bikepacking, I think about all of it as travel, and trying to understand something through a mode of travel. Because whether it’s a boulder problem or a 2,200-mile thru-hike, you define it by traveling from one place to another by human-powered means, crimping through a 12-foot tall V11 or walking at 3 mph for 250 miles, starting line to finish line or put-in to take-out. On our bike ride across America, I realized that traveling by bicycle is just about my favorite way to see a place: slow enough to take in scenery, but with the ability to coast, carrying everything I need with me, but not on my back, and burning enough calories to eat a large pizza every evening if I want to.

I’ve since become friends with a couple of people who also bicycled across the U.S., but aren’t from here, one Chinese and the other English. I sometimes wonder how different their trips were from mine, and how different their perspective was on it. And if any of us, or anyone really, can say they’ve actually “seen America,” because America is a story, or an idea, and it’s much different now than when I pedaled across it in 2010. I guess all I know is that if you want to put in the effort and you want to feel like you’ve seen it, I don’t know a better way than on a two-wheeled machine that runs on Snickers bars and diner coffee. I can’t say exactly where you should go to look for America; I can just say I’d look somewhere besides the internet.

I never did try to write a book about our trip. I did manage a couple magazine articles, and a few blogs about bike touring, and I left our blog up on the internet for a decade before I finally made it private. But as the 10-year mark approached, I wanted to do something to thank Tony for the trip. So I started copying and pasting all the text from all those blogs, and tracking down all the photos, cringing at some of my writing (and fashion choices) at the time.

I spent probably 25 or 30 hours formatting them into a hardcover book. I printed a total of three copies—one for Tony, one for me, and one for my parents (my Dad had printed off and kept all the blog posts in a file this whole time). The photography isn’t amazing, and I’m not particularly proud of the writing, but it’s a book.

I finally finished it and had it ready to ship to Tony a few days late for the 10th anniversary of the start of our trip, and wrote a few sentences on a card to stick in the package. Now I can’t remember the exact words I wrote, except for two things: “Thanks,” and “still one of the biggest and best adventures of my life.”

—Brendan

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A Bike Ride Across America

  [NOTE: 2020 is the tenth year of my blog at Semi-Rad.com, and since I started it, I’ve been fortunate to get to do some pretty wonderful adventures. Throughout this year, I’ll be writing about 12 favorite adventures I’ve had since I started writing about the outdoors, one per month. This is the second in the series. The other stories in the series are here.]

As we looked over our menus, we began to sense that the Waffle House staff was nearing a complete meltdown. It was evening, Day 39 of our 49-day bicycle ride across America, March 15, 2010, and Tony and I had finished our day of riding, pushed our bikes and trailers into a hotel room a block away, showered, and walked to the nearest restaurant, which was a Waffle House. Tony and I were tired and ready to eat. Almost six weeks into our trip, our bodies had basically turned into machines that pedaled fully-loaded bicycles all day, burning 4,000 to 8,000 calories every day. We had taken only three rest days so far, and we would only take one more the rest of the 3,000-mile trip, so our average mileage for a day of riding was 66.67 miles. The day we arrived in Bayou La Batre, we had pedaled 105 miles, from Rogers Lake, Mississippi. It was my first-ever century ride, and although Waffle House might not be many people’s first choice after a ride like that, I was more than fine with it.

My back was to the open kitchen, so I could only eavesdrop, but Tony could see everything. From what we gathered, a rather large carryout order had come in, and the cook had basically totally fucked it up, causing delays in not only the large carryout order, but all the orders for customers sitting in the dining area as well. Not to mention the the staff, arguing amongst themselves in full view, enough to convince even the most die-hard Waffle House fan to eat elsewhere that night. Despite pleas from the waitstaff to call a manager in to help, the cook adamantly refused, making things awkward for literally everyone within earshot, which is to say the entire restaurant. It was the kind of thing that nowadays someone would record on a smartphone and post to Twitter in hopes that it would go viral. Since I couldn’t see, Tony narrated for me, as we tried to calculate how much food to order to replace 105 miles’ worth of calories:

“This is total mayhem.”

“The cook just threw something.”

“Okay, now the younger waitress is in the back crying.”

Were we not touring cyclists, we might have just decided to leave. But: It was evening, and we just wanted to eat and go to bed so we could get up early and pedal 60-some miles the next day, and our dining options in a small town were pretty limited, and further limited by the fact that if we wanted to go to a different restaurant, we’d have to walk to get to wherever it was. And, you know, you sort of have to ask yourself: If I want to go see America, is America things like the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, and the Hollywood sign? Or is it a Waffle House in a small town, hoping that the staff doesn’t mutiny, so we can get some hash browns? That’s a rhetorical question, but I’d argue for the Waffle House, open 24 hours, 365 days a year, a completely different scene at 2 a.m. than at 7:30 a.m., affordable to anyone who can scrounge up five bucks and thus open to people of all income levels but mostly patronized by those of us not in the 1 percent, potential for brief moments of public theater, but mostly just chugging along, making eggs and waffles. I mean, I love the Grand Canyon, but I think you can learn more about America at a diner.

We eventually were able to place our order, our food eventually came to the table, we eventually ate everything, and the Waffle House was still standing the next morning when we returned for breakfast, like nothing happened. We ate pretty much the same thing as the night before, and a local sitting at the counter chatted us up, reminding us that part of Forrest Gump was set here, in Bayou La Batre, Benjamin Buford “Bubba” Blue’s hometown, and where Forrest buys a boat to start the Bubba Gump shrimp company.

Tony and I went to high school in a town not much bigger than Bayou La Batre, and we spent many Friday and Saturday nights working together in a restaurant, washing dishes and busing tables. Tony shot up to 6 feet, 10 inches tall mid-high school, and everyone expected him to play basketball, but he had other ideas. He topped out at 7 feet tall, went to college, became a chiropractor in Chicago, and an entrepreneur.

When he asked me in 2009 if I’d like to bicycle across the country with him the next year, I said of course I would. He said he’d pay for it, which was an ideal situation for me, since I was making $26,000 a year working at a nonprofit. I had been riding my steel road bike to and from work daily in Denver for three and a half years, while trying to become an “adventure writer” in my spare time. In Chicago, Tony had been getting into triathlons and road rides. The last time we’d ridden our bikes any distance together was the last time I did RAGBRAI, the bike ride across Iowa, in 2000, and that was more of a party than a bike tour for us, if I’m honest.

Having not spent much time together in the past eight years, but hoping we could make it across the country on bikes and remain friends, we dipped our tires in the Pacific at Ocean Beach in San Diego on February 5, 2010, pushed them to the pavement, and started pedaling. Our final intended destination was St. Augustine, Florida, the opposite end of the Adventure Cycling Association’s Southern Tier Route, the flattest, shortest route across the country. Our first day, we climbed out of San Diego, managing 34.5 miles to Alpine, California.

Before I left for the trip, my wise friend Mick gave me two pieces of advice about long bike tours: 1) “You’re going to have some high highs and some low lows out there,” and 2) “Don’t try to muscle through anything—just keep spinning.” And my friend Maynard half-joked: “I hope you like riding eight miles per hour into a headwind.” All those things would ring true in the span of about 24 hours, much later in the trip.

I didn’t have any grand ideas about the trip, besides maybe being able to write about it, a magazine article, maybe even a book? I knew bicycling across America wasn’t the most unique thing, but maybe something would happen that would sustain a narrative. I bought a url and put up a blog to keep our friends and families up to date on our progress, and to help raise money for the nonprofit I worked for. I packed a $250 Asus laptop to try to keep the blog updated, and added wifi service to my Verizon plan, so I could turn my flip phone into a hotspot when we weren’t staying in a hotel with wifi.

I updated the blog every day, downloading photos from our digital cameras, writing a few sentences about our progress, sometimes a quote from a conversation with a stranger. Most days, though, in the “no shit, there I was …” sense of adventure writing, nothing really happened. What did happen is we plugged away, every day. We got up, ate as much food as we could stomach, got dressed, filled our water bottles, wheeled our bikes out to the road, swung a leg over the saddle, and started pedaling. We’d ride together for a few minutes, and Tony would get warmed up, and start to pull away, riding a half-mile, or a mile, or two miles ahead of me the entire day, stopping every couple hours to check in, or to stop at a cafe to eat lunch, or to pop into a convenience store to buy cans of Coke, Snickers bars, and whatever other calories looked good. Somewhere between 40 and 105 miles, we’d stop, find a hotel, shower, and eat at a restaurant somewhere. Tony wasn’t that excited to camp, although we’d brought camping gear (including a tent that could fit a 7-foot-tall person). I protested at first, saying I thought it would be “more legit” if we camped more. Tony said, “Riding your bike across America is legit,” and I could not argue with that point.

We rode across the bottom of California, occasionally looking to the U.S.-Mexico border fence to our right. We rode into Phoenix from the northwest, and out the southeast side, almost 60 miles of pedaling to get across the entire urban spread, and pedaled through the desert, away from angry dogs (I eventually developed a technique of explosively yelling at them, which stopped them in their tracks, surprised—except for the rottweilers) and into New Mexico, where we hit the highest elevation of the trip, 8,228-foot Emory Pass, on Day 15. We started to meet other cyclists on the same route, either headed the same direction or the opposite way, and realized there was really no “typical” cross-country rider: some were pedaling 50 or more miles a day, unsupported and stealth camping, others were riding solo 20 or 30 miles a day with a friend driving a minivan somewhere behind them, some had a schedule, some were taking their time.

On Day 20, we adjusted our route to take a less hilly path, avoiding the Davis Mountains in west Texas and heading to the town of Marfa on US 90. My memory of the day is the flattest, straightest road I’ve ever ridden on, with a few barely noticeable adjustments to the left, a slight uphill grade the entire way, and wide-open ranch land along both sides of the road. In the morning, we caught up with a couple named Bruce and Dana, a pair of retired teachers from Tacoma, and rode with them a good part of the day. The chipseal road was so rough that we tried to keep our wheels on the painted white line on the side of the road because it was that much smoother. Tony said he watched his bike computer slow from 12-14 mph to 9 mph several times when he rolled off the white line. In 75 miles of riding, the only town we’d go through on our map was Valentine, Texas, population 184, with no businesses to speak of besides the post office. A few miles before Valentine, however, is the art installation Prada Marfa, a fake Prada store in the middle of nowhere. I was riding with Bruce and Dana, and Tony was ahead of us somewhere. We stopped, took some photos, and pedaled on, catching Tony in Valentine a few miles later. He hadn’t stopped at the Prada store, because he hadn’t even noticed it on the side of the road as he rolled past—which is either almost unbelievable because the ride was so straight-ahead monotonous, or completely expected because the ride was so straight-ahead monotonous.

A few days later, I got the high highs and low lows Mick had promised. I did a lot of things to pass the time out there, pedaling six to eight hours a day, all the time in my own head while Tony rode a ways ahead. Tony had a little speaker on his bike to play music while he rode—I didn’t want to listen to music because I thought it would ruin my favorite music for me, spending all day listening to the same playlists, for 300+ hours total by the end of the trip. So I chose silence, talking to cows as I passed, making up lyrics to songs, sometimes talking to myself a bit. I didn’t have a bike computer or smartphone map, so I just pedaled, watching the horizon for signs of the next town. It was fantastically boring, and a decade later, when I spend all my waking hours checking my phone every few minutes, I look back on it with incredible nostalgia. I suppose we always look at the past as “a simpler time,” no matter what, because we remember the images in our minds and the general tone of a memory, but forget all the other things we were thinking about at the time. But it really did seem simple: wake up, eat, pedal, eat, pedal, eat, go to sleep. Repeat until you hit an ocean.

On Day 23, a few miles outside of Langtry, Texas, unincorporated, population 12, home to a museum and almost nothing else, I was pedaling by myself as the wind picked up, right in my face. I had read somewhere on the internet that you could camp in Langtry, but if you didn’t arrive by 5 p.m., the water was shut off. So I was a little anxious to get there as the wind started pushing into my face, then getting worried, because I had almost no water to drink, let alone to cook our food with when we camped that night. Then I got a flat tire. And the wind picked up. Then I got another flat tire. I got very frustrated, and then just kind of lost it for a few seconds. I screamed at the top of my lungs, while pedaling by myself, into the wind, alone on a highway, for a couple minutes, cranking my metaphorical steam valve wide open, and then, catching my breath, closed it again. Low low, check.

When I arrived in Langtry, the rumor about water turned out to be false, and I bought and ate a couple ice cream sandwiches at the corner store. We set up the tent, ate dinner, crashed, and during the night, the wind picked up to a steady 30 mph, coming from the east. The next morning, we headed out, with a handful of candy bars from the museum store to sustain us to Del Rio, 55 miles away. We pedaled, looking like two cartoon characters leaning into the wind, granny gear on the uphills, and granny gear on the downhills too. I just laughed, and kept spinning. The wind wouldn’t let up, or even change direction. If we had more food with us, we might have stopped for the night, but we didn’t, so our only hope was to reach Del Rio. We pedaled for 11 hours, stopping once at a small bar to grab a couple bags of potato chips and a few candy bars. We averaged 5 miles per hour the entire way, the wind never relenting until our last five miles into Del Rio, in the dark. Pedaling 8 miles per hour into a headwind, as Maynard had said, would have been a dream.

We rolled our bikes into a hotel room in Del Rio, ordered three large pizzas from Domino’s, ate them, and went to bed. Later that year, Tony would finish his first Ironman Triathlon, and when I texted him to congratulate him, he texted back that it wasn’t nearly as bad as “that day in Texas with the headwind.”

One of the things I believe many people will tell you about a long trip, whether it’s thru-hiking a long-distance trail, backpacking a hostel circuit for a month and a half, or pedaling a bicycle for weeks at a time, is that it’s as much about the people you meet as it is about the places you see. You meet people on a bike tour because you are on a bike, and the bicycle is a conversation starter. People see you as somewhere between a little crazy and complete idiots because you choose to travel by bicycle in the 21st century, but also because of the bicycle probably harmless enough that you won’t mind a little chit chat. If they see you and your fully-loaded bicycle outside a restaurant, convenience store, or hotel somewhere, they will ask you some, if not all, of these four questions:

Where are you headed?

Where did you start?

How many miles do you ride every day?

What do you eat?

At some point in the conversation, you will get a chance to ask them, “Are you from around here?” or something similar, and in that way, you get to meet a few people. Which is something that happens way less when you’re traveling inside a gas-powered, climate-controlled vehicle, in my experience. On my bike, I had brief conversations with Wal-Mart greeters, waitstaff, ferry employees, convenience store clerks, and fellow restaurant patrons, and it helped new, strange places feel welcoming, wherever we were.

The thing I started to feel as we racked up the miles, and that we both agreed on years later, is that we were going a little too fast, and that maybe it would have been nice to take a little more time and do a little more exploring, and talking to people. At the time, though, Tony’s business was young, and he was definitely motivated to get back to work instead of trying to keep things moving forward from the road with spotty cell service. And I was really just grateful to have two months off work (even unpaid), something that hasn’t happened since and may not happen again in my life. As we made our way across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and finally, Florida, we ran into more and more people bicycling the Southern Tier, and even one lady, Robin, riding the Southern Tier as just one leg of a giant rectangle around the perimeter of the United States, ensuring she’d still be pedaling her bike after I’d been back in the office for six months.

We had friends join us for sections, including our pal Nick, from high school, who rode the last 210 miles with us from Tallahassee to St. Augustine, slipping in as seamlessly as if he’d ridden the previous 2800 miles with us. As we got closer to the final miles, I started to think about what we’d done, and how I framed it in my life. I couldn’t really nail it down. It felt like a big adventure, but in the Yvon Chouinard “when everything goes wrong, that’s when adventure starts” sense, well, we made it through pretty unscathed and according to plan, aside from a bunch of flat tires and a couple of worn-out bike chains. It went really well—basically the opposite of a book like Into Thin Air, when everything did go wrong, to the point where it became a disaster and a bunch of people died. In 49 days together, we didn’t even have enough disagreements to fill half of an episode of Real Housewives of New Jersey.

In the ten years since Tony and I started pedaling east from San Diego, I’ve been lucky to spend lots of time in the outdoors, doing a bunch of different things that fall under the idea of “adventure.” Whether it’s backpacking, rock climbing, mountaineering, backcountry skiing, trail running, kayaking, whitewater rafting, or bikepacking, I think about all of it as travel, and trying to understand something through a mode of travel. Because whether it’s a boulder problem or a 2,200-mile thru-hike, you define it by traveling from one place to another by human-powered means, crimping through a 12-foot tall V11 or walking at 3 mph for 250 miles, starting line to finish line or put-in to take-out. On our bike ride across America, I realized that traveling by bicycle is just about my favorite way to see a place: slow enough to take in scenery, but with the ability to coast, carrying everything I need with me, but not on my back, and burning enough calories to eat a large pizza every evening if I want to.

I’ve since become friends with a couple of people who also bicycled across the U.S., but aren’t from here, one Chinese and the other English. I sometimes wonder how different their trips were from mine, and how different their perspective was on it. And if any of us, or anyone really, can say they’ve actually “seen America,” because America is a story, or an idea, and it’s much different now than when I pedaled across it in 2010. I guess all I know is that if you want to put in the effort and you want to feel like you’ve seen it, I don’t know a better way than on a two-wheeled machine that runs on Snickers bars and diner coffee. I can’t say exactly where you should go to look for America; I can just say I’d look somewhere besides the internet.

I never did try to write a book about our trip. I did manage a couple magazine articles, and a few blogs about bike touring, and I left our blog up on the internet for a decade before I finally made it private. But as the 10-year mark approached, I wanted to do something to thank Tony for the trip. So I started copying and pasting all the text from all those blogs, and tracking down all the photos, cringing at some of my writing (and fashion choices) at the time.

I spent probably 25 or 30 hours formatting them into a hardcover book. I printed a total of three copies—one for Tony, one for me, and one for my parents (my Dad had printed off and kept all the blog posts in a file this whole time). The photography isn’t amazing, and I’m not particularly proud of the writing, but it’s a book.

I finally finished it and had it ready to ship to Tony a few days late for the 10th anniversary of the start of our trip, and wrote a few sentences on a card to stick in the package. Now I can’t remember the exact words I wrote, except for two things: “Thanks,” and “still one of the biggest and best adventures of my life.”

—Brendan

The post A Bike Ride Across America appeared first on semi-rad.com.

Swedish Acne Influencer Showing Self Love Through Imperfect Selfies

Your voice cracks in the middle of a big presentation. Your body starts producing hair and odors from previously smooth regions. And the night of the big the dance you notice that annoying red spot right in the middle of your forehead… Puberty sucks.

And the worst part of it all? Acne. Whiteheads. Red dots. One or a hundred. In whatever form it took for you, we’ve all suffered from that acne affliction at some point.

Now, in my 30s, I count myself among the lucky ones that have the good fortune of only suffering minor breakouts from time to time.

But it wasn’t always clear skin and rainbows.

I graduated high school with an almost blemish-free record and it seemed I had finished that transition from boy to man we call puberty. Kids in high school could be so cruel, especially to the kid with zits…I counted my blessings that I wasn’t that kid. I thought I made it out free and clear…

I was wrong.

I was lucky enough to get hit by late teen/ early adult acne….and it sucked. For my 19th birthday, the only present I got was f’cking acne. I can’t necessarily remember graduation (I was high), or the finer details of losing my virginity….but I can remember this experience so clearly. Maybe that’s due to my extreme vanity, or the lasting years of trauma that resulted, but the memory – unlike my skin at the time – is clear as day.

I woke up with a zit. OK, I thought…I could get through this. So, like any 19-year old guy naïve to serious skin issues I popped that sucker using my dirty, grimy teenage thumb and index fingers as medical instruments and went along my merry day.

Little did I know then that this experience would prove to be just the beginning of my battle with acne. And I’m not talking about a pimple here and there…I’m talking about real acne.  Sit in your room and cry because you’re too embarrassed to be seen in public acne.

In what seemed like the span of a week, that one zit became many zits and they didn’t go away for over 1.5 years. So, what changed besides skin tone, texture, confidence, and diminished self-worth? I managed to pull myself up from the floor, go outside and visit yet another dermatologist that actually listened to me and subsequently prescribed benzoyl peroxide. This changed everything.

Fortunately, I discovered ‘Acne Free’ – a more economical and stronger version of the $300 cream the Doc prescribed very soon after, which resulted in clearer skin and $1,000’s in savings. That’s the short version of my story, which has omitted anecdotal stories chronicling what would sometimes be weeks of my life spent living in acne treatment masks and dark rooms alone, refusing to go outside or look in the mirror. Then deciding to look in the mirror for hours upon hours, criticizing each and every inch of my skin. I was so unkind to myself and going crazy.

(For transparency, I’d like to make it very clear that this was not just a one and done appointment that lead to clear skin. I saw several dermatologists, tried laser treatments, detoxes, Cetaphil, Accutane, etc.)

The most damaging thing I can recall was the long days and nights I spent hiding out in my room, face inches away from the desktop computer screen, carefully looking over celebrity skin, male and female actors and models, etc.  I would question how they had such flawless skin with microscopic pores. I didn’t know how it was possible.

In hindsight, I don’t know what I would do if I was this same 19-year-old today. I scroll through my social media accounts and see nothing but perfect skin and bright white teeth. With social media of today, we put so much more of ourselves out in public – and be honest – we’re all judging every. Single. Image. We see. I may not be a model, but you better believe I have one or two tricks up my sleeve to make my skin appear a bit smoother on my Instagram account than it is in real life, a trick to hide that stray hair…we all do, and you’re either lying or in the minority if you don’t.

We’ve become so scared as to how people view us, that it has become so rare to see people celebrate themselves for who they are, as they are.

That’s why I love Sofia Grahn. Once I discovered Sofia’s Insta account, my 19-year-old-self jumped for joy (but, in truth, only after a moment of silence in recognition of the years of pain I endured suffering in silence in my room and head).

When I saw Sofia’s blemished skin, unedited, free from layers of makeup and multiple filters, it was a breath of fresh air. Rarely have I actually found someone online that I identified with and admired. It’s hard these days to find someone that really puts it all out there in this authentic fashion, showing all faces to life, not just the pixel-perfect version of ourselves.

And bravo to her. We’re the social media generation that put our lives out there for strangers to view, comment, judge….

Life is not perfect. And neither is your skin. So, when you need to find strength, bravery, and beauty look no further than Sofia.

With Instagram’s latest move to censor and limit the viability of photoshopped images, we hope to see many more REAL influencers like Sofia on The Gram.. and other platforms.

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 Feeling that POWER of letting go of perfection and defying societal skin expectations🦹⚡️ . #skinpositivity #acnepositivity #acne #makeup #makeuplook #skinneutrality #effyourbeautystandards

A post shared by SOFIA GRAHN⚡️ (@isotretinoinwiths) on Jan 23, 2020 at 9:12am PST

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 Me N my strawberry cheeks🍓 . I’m clearly delusional wearing sneakers and a dress in the midst of January. I’m archiving this look for spring though🍒Hope you all had a lovely start to your week. I’ve really been trying to get my inspiration, motivation and drive to be creative recently and today I finally felt like I took a step out of that pit of feeling “meh” about everything. I really really want to branch out, so I guess this is it! . And another question for you if you made it this far: What other platform(s) would you like to see me on?📱I really want to expand my presence on the World Wide Web, so please let me know🤍 . #skinpositivity #acnepositivity #acnepositive #skinpositive #skinneutrality #acne #ootd #fashion #makeuplook

A post shared by SOFIA GRAHN⚡️ (@isotretinoinwiths) on Jan 14, 2020 at 8:44am PST

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 ✨In this fun festive lookbook I’m wearing three differents looks that may be suitable for any festive occasion. Of course I’m flaunting my skin, solely focusing on a good eye look or a bright lip as far as makeup goes. In this entire video I’m wearing a @zitsticka patch💕 Really hope you enjoy this video and that this brings you some inspiration. I hope that you have FUN if you have any upcoming celebrations🖤 #zittycommittee #zitsticka

A post shared by SOFIA GRAHN⚡️ (@isotretinoinwiths) on Dec 28, 2019 at 9:38am PST

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 Christmas time. My skin and I, one year apart🎁 . These throwbacks always makes me feel some type of way. Christmas time is wonderful, but it can also be difficult for a lot of reasons. It can be a harsh reminder of loneliness. It can be something that makes you compare your position in life with people from your that you’re suddenly making small talk with. For someone with acne you might have a lump in your chest knowing that you’ll meet people that you haven’t met since your skin flared up again. You might be going over worst case scenarios of having to have conversations surrounding your skin. . Unsolicited advise . Hearing about that diet your relatives daughter tried that you simply just “have to try yourself” because “sugar and dairy really is the devil” . You might be dreading to simply leave your comfort zone of your home . You might wonder if this full coverage foundation will ensure not having your skin being a topic of conversation . Christmas time is wonderful, but it can also be a struggle to get through when you’re coping with hardship, whether that hardship actually manifests itself on your skin or simply something that’s going on within. . Whatever you feel serves you best this holiday, do it. There’s a time to push, and there’s a time to rest. Does it feel better to nod and try to change the conversation? I say do it. Does it feel better to put on that makeup? I say do it. Do you have the power to speak up? I say do it. . Last Christmas I put on a full face of makeup, this Christmas I might just not cover my acne at all. Simple because I’ve found so much empowerment in flaunting my skin – acne and all. But that does NOT mean that I’m any better this year around, it just means that I’m doing whatever feels best in the moment. And as for how to handle those conversations surrounding my skin, I really haven’t found one singular way to respond. But I wish for you to have some peace of mind this Christmas, not having to deal with those kinds of situations. And if not, just know that this holiday will pass, too❤️ . #skinpositivity #acnepositivity #acne #acnescars #skinpositive #acnepositive #normalizeskintexture #normalizeacne #acneawareness

A post shared by SOFIA GRAHN⚡️ (@isotretinoinwiths) on Dec 21, 2019 at 10:02am PST

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 #AD🖤 I decorate my face with red dots and @zitsticka killa patches nowadays💥 You already know that these patches are my favorite for treating those pesky underground zits. By applying a @zitsticka in those early stages I find that I can combat the redness and the size of my zit. If you’re intrigued to try them out then you can use my code SOFIA20 for 20% off on @zitsticka⚡️ #zitsticka #zittycommittee

A post shared by SOFIA GRAHN⚡️ (@isotretinoinwiths) on Dec 3, 2019 at 6:20am PST

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 🦋Dear body, thank your for letting me stretch and bend when I needed more space🦋 . Bodies change and sometimes the costume that encapsulates our being can’t quite keep up with the changes, like seams loosening, revealing what’s underneath. It is a necessity for living that our bodies are able to shift and stretch through our lives. Though we are taught through society that our body should be something that is stagnant, forever young, forever free of any signs of living. For reasons that I’m not yet ready to share as of yet, I have fluctuated a lot in weight throughout my teenage and early adult years. My physical body have seen varieties of shapes and sizes and my skin stretched when it needed to, as simple as that. . A lot of the time I fall back on the thought that my body took the shape that it needed to when what I dealt with internally was larger than myself. They have a history, the marks that run up and down my thighs, they mark what I trudged myself through. I have stretch marks on my legs, calves, my hips, my inner thighs, my bum and my breasts. The marks on my legs decorate my muscles, the physical and mental strength that carried me up and down the hills of my life. Through these marks I know that what I am now does not have to be forever. So, all in all what does a few marks and scuffs matter when it means that I am able to stretch both physically and mentally? I am determined to live in my body, so if it looks well used after my time here, that’s more than okay with me🌍 . #stretchmarks #bodyneutrality #bodyneutral #effyourbeautystandards

A post shared by SOFIA GRAHN⚡️ (@isotretinoinwiths) on Oct 9, 2019 at 1:31pm PDT

The post Swedish Acne Influencer Showing Self Love Through Imperfect Selfies appeared first on HEYO Mag.

from HEYO Mag https://heyomag.com/swedish-acne-influencer-showing-self-love-through-imperfect-selfies/

Life Isn’t Perfect, But ‘PEN15’ Is

This post was originally published on this site

It’s hard to believe it has been nearly two decades since 2000, but watching “PEN15�� makes that year seem like a long-lost relic. The new Hulu show, which follows two best friends navigating junior high, brings back dial-up internet, landlines, locker mirrors and nascent AIM relationships. Happily, it has more to offer than easy nostalgia.

What keeps it fresh is the twist in its casting: Adult women Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, who created the show with “Take My Wife” director Sam Zvibleman, play the two main characters (also named Maya and Anna), setting an off-kilter tone for everything that follows. If watching teens freak out over a furtively passed note from a love interest is funny, it’s even more hilarious to see 30-somethings do it. 

Maya and Anna are social outcasts determined to make seventh grade their best year yet. It begins on a rocky foot, with Maya being labeled that year’s UGIS, or “ugliest girl in school.” It only gets wobblier as the duo face intimidating cool girls, young love, periods, masturbation, family drama and their diverging identities.

From “Big Mouth” to “Everything Sucks!” to “Sex Education,” there’s plenty of teen fare out there. So what makes “PEN15” worth your precious bingeing time? The specificity of the early ’00s references provides instant gratification for elder millennials, while the perspective that Erskine and Konkle bring to their characters elevates it beyond a simple “Remember when?” kind of show.

HuffPost writers Matt Jacobs and Jill Capewell gushingly address the question everyone has on their minds: Should you watch it?

Matt: I haven’t loved a comedy as much as I love “PEN15” since … I don’t know when. Maybe the first season of “Orange Is the New Black”? The time Selina Meyer walked through glass? Our first glimpse of swole Chidi on “The Good Place”? Anyway, it’s been a while. How much do you love it, Jill?

Jill: Matt, I love it so much! The promise of gel pen references drew me in, but the love Anna and Maya have for each other — and the hilarious ways they show it — kept me there. Plus, I was in seventh grade as AIM was coming out and cargo skirts from Delia*s were cool, so I am probably the exact target demo for the show. I had major flashbacks when I saw Anna’s two face-framing wispy strands of hair.

There were so many perfect references to that time period in the early aughts, when the internet was new and clunky and the best thing we knew to do with it was ask each other “a/s/l?” in chat rooms. Maya’s “diper911” screen name, for example, nails the freewheeling, random nature of how we saw the World Wide Web back then and how we presented ourselves on it in turn. We didn’t yet view our social media personas as “personal brands.” Plus, lol, diaper emergency. How did it feel to see the awkward early teen years (let’s face it, we were all awkward) played back for you in such exacting detail?

Hulu

Matt: Such excruciation, but even more than that, it felt like a real swoon, honestly. Maybe it’s because I’ve had such existential dread about social media lately, but revisiting a world where AIM is the nearest source of anxiety was comforting in a way that transcends easy nostalgia.

“PEN15” is a show built on gimmicks, and it rises above every one. The off-kilter casting, the 2000 setting that requires clichéd Y2K-era signifiers, the whole “let’s revisit how awful middle school is” ethos that “Eighth Grade” did as recently as last year. Magically, it all works.

I think casting Erskine and Konkle gives the central characters a nuance the show otherwise couldn’t hope for; they bring a perspective to the roles that teenagers wouldn’t. What’d you make of them playing 13-year-olds opposite actual 13-year-olds?

Jill: I was also thinking that “PEN15” is able to stand out among the many “awkward teen years” offerings out there, and I think it is helped in part by having adults play the two main characters. For one, it’s delightfully absurd to see — I cackled when Maya and Anna were trying to cuss out an actual teen on their first day of seventh grade. Seeing adults posturing as brace-faced and bowl-cut adolescents never gets old.

And another component is that crucial perspective you mentioned. The audience is constantly reminded that this will end up just being a phase in these girls’ lives. Having Erskine and Konkle playing teenagers lends an odd believability to the series, as wild as the optics are: You know they lived as the outcasts they play on screen, so I can trust the foibles and emotional roller coasters the characters go through. Plus, it speaks to the fact that we never truly outgrow our weird teenage selves.

I was concerned about how they were going to pull off Anna’s first kiss — but some camera-angle magic took care of that.

One thing that really surprised me as I got further into the series was how much heart it has. The show is able to segue from pure nostalgic joy to resonant truths about growing up without feeling like an after-school special. The arc of Anna’s parents fighting more and eventually getting divorced reminded me how crushing that can feel when your parents are your whole world. What did you think of the show striking a balance between pure fun and these bald truths about getting older?

Hulu

Matt: “PEN15” does get bittersweet by the end, but I also love the touch of sadness that’s nestled into its humor. Its physical comedy ― Maya’s timpani solo, for example, or the girls’ hallway catwalk on the thong episode ― is “I Love Lucy”-level good. But even within those moments, I felt pangs of melancholy, in part because it reminds us of the intimacy inherent in adolescence. Even a great adult friendship lacks the connectedness of a bond based on youth, when you get to learn about the world alongside classmates and neighbors who are just as uncertain (even the ones who mask that uncertainty in bullying tactics). We don’t realize what our teenage kinships mean until it’s too late, and that’s something Erskine and Konkle tap into without ever saying as much.

Jill: I think you hit the nail on the head, Matt. It’s easy to brush off your teen years as a wasted time of being young and dumb, but it’s really when we start to become who we eventually are. What I think makes this show feel so revelatory is the respect it gives to aspects of teendom that don’t often get treated with importance. No stray feeling is too inconsequential, because it didn’t feel inconsequential then.

Hulu

Matt: That’s right. Things are only ridiculous with hindsight. An internet romance is serious business, and so is your first cigarette or your terrible haircut or your shared thong. A middle-school relationship can be almost entirely silent and avoidant and still feel like the most meaningful thing you’ve experienced, like Anna and her band boyfriend Brendan, who scribbles notes but can barely sustain a conversation.

The last few years have been a golden age for popular culture about teens who feel isolated from the world around them. But most of the genre has been character studies built around one protagonist (“The Edge of Seventeen,” “Lady Bird,” “Eighth Grade,” “Skate Kitchen”). Here we get to see how two girls’ lives intersect and diverge, and the way they vow to share every moment along the way. (“Broad City” is probably the aptest comparison, but that show has faced narrative limits that “PEN15” can more easily avoid.) It’s in that very togetherness that we see them as individuals just starting to figure out what sets them apart. The beauty, for us, is knowing how long and fruitful that journey will be. I almost don’t even want a second season because I’d rather imagine it for myself; the limitlessness is poetic, ya know?

Jill: I understand what you mean — on one hand, I want more of this great show, but on the other, I just want to imagine Maya and Anna side-by-side learning how to shave in the tub before the school dance forever. I don’t want them to age, even if they’re 31 in real life. We can’t go back to 2000 and, honestly, I’m not sure I’m ready to, but with “PEN15,” we can always pay a quick visit. That is, if our mom gets off the phone so we can use the dial-up.

This has been “Should You Watch It?” a weekly examination of movies and TV worth ― or not worth! ― your time.

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The post Life Isn’t Perfect, But ‘PEN15’ Is appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://thechestnutpost.com/news/life-isnt-perfect-but-pen15-is/