I think being a lesbian must be the most isolating experience in the world.

Road to recovery (III/?)

Part 3 centers on Wolffe and Plo Koon

Ao3      Brothers-AU     Part II

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Plo Koon had always been reluctant, Wolffe couldn't remember ONE situation in which his Jedi General had lost his composure. But this was different. It wasn't his normal calm, it was pure isolation. „Did he even have a single bite today?“, Sinker asked, stuffing a bite of his ration into his mouth, watching as the Jedi was sitting at the edge of the hangar and looking down. Boost shrugged his shoulders uncertainly, giving Wolffe a concerned look.

Wolffe himself didn't quite know what to do with the situation. Plo didn't look like he was meditating. He looked downright lonely. Something that happened more often since they hadn't had any contact with Ahsoka. But he had an answer to Sinker's question. „He didn't.“, he muttered and leaned one shoulder against the gunship he was standing next to. He had already finished his meal, rations were no longer only consumed in the mess hall. Over the months he had found that he mostly found his brothers in the hangar, where they kept Warthog company during their meals. The pilot had sat down with Comet on a box in the LAAT. „He helped care for the cadets for 10 hours.“, Comet interjected and Warthog shook his head. „We can't let him get into a fighter anytime soon like this.“, he stated and there was general approval, Wolffe crossed his arms and frowned, the men were right. He himself knew very well that the General had not been in his private quarters for more than 24 hours. That meant he had neither eaten nor slept. Although... it looked like the Jedi could take a nice nap here in the hangar after all. Even if that couldn't be comfortable. „Tano would only have to look at him with her Tooka eyes and he would do whatever she asked him to do.“, Sinker muttered and Boost nodded with his mouth full, Wolffe had to agree with his men a second time. Ahsoka was one of the few who had some power over Plo Koon, although Wolffe wasn't sure how much of that power had been lost over the last months. He also kept in close contact with Rex since the Battle of the Temple, Ahsoka Tano had enough problems of her own at the time. And Wolffe wasn't even sure, if he could stand her presence himself. But before he would admitt that, he'd rather swallow his tongue! „I don't think that General Tano would be of great help to us at the moment.“, so he only contributed to the conversation and the others gave him looks full of concern. Oh the poor fools had no idea what was happening at the 332nd. Maybe it was better that way, it was enough for them to worry about their own General!

„She got about twice as many troopers back as we did, the girl has her hands full.“ That was excuse enough, hopefully. „Well Boost, then you should practice your Tooka eyes quickly.“, joked Sinker and Boost threw his empty tray at him. „We could ask one of the cadets.“, interjected Comet. „Oh come on.“, Warthog sighed and finished his ration, then he got up. „I don't care what you do, but he can't stay here in the hangar.“, the pilot said goodbye and went back to work. After all, someone had to organize the patrols. Even if they weren't expecting an attack. The others stared at Wolffe hopefully. Great. „I'll come up with something.“, he sighed and rubbed his thumb over his eyebrow, the others also got up. „Hope so, Commander.“, Sinker tried again with a grin. „Your humor has really suffered.“, Comet complained and when Wolffe gave them a sharp look, the three disappeared from the hangar. They would probably take care of the cadets again, maybe even take a little nap. Who knows, at the moment it was quiet enough to be pretty indifferent to Wolffe.

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Without his boys constantly behind him, he looked up and watched his General with his head cocked. The man who had never given up on all of them. It was only fair, if Wolffe didn't give up on him now either. But how should he go about it? Damn it, that had never been his forte. Compassion. Not that he didn't sympathize with the others. But how should you please convey that? How did Ahsoka always do it? He should have watched the child better back then... Well, pondering about it for a long time wouldn't get him any further. So let's go into battle. Sighing, he pushed himself off the LAAT and trotted over to the Jedi, even when he got closer he didn't move. Ha! So he slept after all. Does that make things easier or more difficult? Wolffe crouched cautiously, waking the Jedi seemed like a good first step. He gently placed a gloved hand on Plo Koon's shoulder and gave it a light squeeze. Immediatly the Jedi shot up wide awake and even if Wolffe could not see his eyes, the features around the mask seemed almost panicked to him. „Sir, maybe you shouldn't sleep here.“, he suggested and under his hand Plo Koon relaxed again. „Sorry Commander, I had no intention of nodding off.“, Plo Koon assured him and got up, Wollfe made room for him. With one hand Plo straightened his robe, with the other he massaged the skin on the edge of his mask. Seemed uncomfortable after so long. „So what did I miss?“ Was he serious? Wolffe raised his scarred eyebrow, his lips pressed together in a hard line. „Late meal, again.“, he growled and when Plo Koon started moving, he followed him. „Did the men get their rations?“ „Yes Sir.“ „Good ... And the children?“ „Yes Sir? And you?“, Wolffe fired the counter-question, they stopped in the middle of the corridor.

Plo Koon stared at him, Wolffe could practically feel it. Damn it, why was his General so difficult? Okay, take a deep breath Wolffe. Surely you were able to keep your buir alive, right? Maybe he should go to Cody for advice? Maybe not, Cody would never let him forget that. Never! Even while Wolffe was controlling the chaos in his head, Plo Koon seemed to take a deep breath. „I understand that your conflict is rather big. But as long as our situation is still so uncertain, a break is unacceptable.“, the Jedi explained. Was that supposed to be reassuring? It was all absurd! General Plo Koon had always been one of those Jedi who could very well keep themselves alive. On their own, without the men always having to run after them! „Gar shuk meh kyrayc!“, escaped it from Wolffe, when did he get that thought? Sure, he was one of the few men who had dealt more intensively with Mando’a and he had realized that this language gave him security when Basic did not help him. But he hadn't made a conscious decision to lean on it now! Was his temper getting the best of him now?

And what if, anyway, Plo Koon did not understand what he had said? Perhaps it was better that way... But when the Jedi tilted his head slightly to one side, Wolffe sensed that his General understood more Mando’a than he might have assumed. Again they just stood there for a few seconds and suddenly, completely unexpected, Plo Koon's proud posture collapsed and he put a hand on Wolffe's shoulder. „I understand son.“ Kriff. Wolffe stood there frozen. Didn't happen often, Plo could be proud of himself. Wolffe had thought that he wasn't projecting his thoughts outward so obviously! Not to mention the fact that that was totally inappropriate given his rank. And yet there was that warm glow, it was kind of... nice? Wolffe looked up a little and met the Jedi's covered eyes, he seemed to have relaxed. That was a good thing, wasn't it? That was his goal. „I assume you have everything under control and I can withdraw for a few minutes?“, Plo continued the thread of the conversation, Wolffe sensed a victory. Maybe he had learned something from Ahsoka after all? „Five hours and we're business Sir.“, Wolffe replied, Plo Koon's return to his calm demeanor gave him a bit of self-confidence. Maybe this was more of a step forward, towards something good, than a step in the wrong direction. And when Plo nodded with a sigh, Wolffe couldn't hide a small smirk. „Agreed. I will see you in five hours then.“, Plo said goodbye and Wolffe nodded satisfied. „In five hours, buir.“, he replied. It felt right.

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buir = father gar shuk meh kyrayc = You're no use dead. (not meant literally)

Adventures of Santal. Chapter 2: The first meeting.

Anything bad can happen will happen.

The changes begin! While the Sabur clan is enjoying a quiet life on Ryloth, something is about to happen in the galaxy that can change not only one planet, but the whole world. And in the life of young Santal Shan, irreversible metamorphosis will soon begin. As a result, she will have to change her lifestyle and take a new path. But for what, depends only on the girl herself.

Ryloth is a harsh, rocky planet, home to the Twi'lek. It is located in the outer Ring on the Corellian way and is the beginning of the death wind corridor. There is no day-night rotation on the planet, because the rotations around its axis and around the sun are synchronized, and the planet is constantly facing the sun with one side, while the other is in darkness. The illuminated side is called "Bright lands". However, the landscape also has jungles, plateaus, valleys, and volcanoes, and the atmosphere is breathable for both Twi'lek and humans. The equator covers a forest populated by dangerous predators. Given the diverse and dangerous landscape, Twi'leks live in underground caves.

Kala'uun is a large underground city on Ryloth, located among the Five lonely mountains, one of the two capitals of the planet. Like all cities on Ryloth, it is located on the twilight terminator that separates day from night. The city is home to a major spaceport, which is the center of interplanetary trade of the Twi'lek. To protect the city from heat storms and the Twi'leks who lived in the area, the only tunnel leading to the city is blocked by a massive stone block. It is there, between the upper and lowest levels, that the sabura clan resides. Nobi and Elina. For three years now, they have been raising their adopted child, Santal, who was very attached to them.

This family once lived in another settlement, which was very far from their current home. At the very edge of the Bright lands. But then, after saving up some money, they moved. And soon the daughter of Elina's friend, Adira Shan, appeared in their lives.

They met a long time ago, when Elina was still a very young girl. Then letanka studied at a dance school, and then wanted to get a job — to perform in the theater. But it so happened that she ran into scammers who decided to sell her to a familiar gangster-Hutt. As a result, Elina was trapped, forced to dance in a revealing outfit in front of criminals and other scum of society. It is inconceivable how humiliating it was for a letanka from a simple but decent family! Fortunately, it only lasted a few months. Then Adira and Bastian were on a mission for the Order, and by chance they crossed paths with that Hutt and saw Elina chained up. And then released, freeing the girl from slavery. So we became friends. After this incident, letanka became very careful, found a husband, Nobi, and started doing housework. I forgot about my career as a dancer.

When the sabura clan learned of their friends ' deaths, they were heartbroken. Young, talented and full of strength Jedi were defeated by some mercenaries. It's just not fair! That's why they were surprised when a newborn baby was found in the rescue capsule. By establishing the trajectory, they found out that this capsule was from the exploded ship "New hope". Elina realized that the Shang dynasty was not dead. And, fearing that the villains would find out, she and her husband moved to Kala'uun.

Santal grew up cheerful, curious and good-natured. By the time she was four years old, she was a pretty girl, with features more like her mother's than her father's. Her hair was a cold brown, and her eyes were brown and honey-colored. The future beauty is simple! Elina, looking at the growing up of the foster child, sometimes cried quietly in private, because she remembered.

                                                         ***

Santal couldn't sleep. Every five minutes she would jump up and look out the window at the sky, then walk around the room and lie down again. I can't sleep. She had been dreaming for two weeks. Very unusual dreams. And all terrible.

For example, how different creatures brandishing swords of different colors, mostly green and blue, were shot by some soldiers in white uniforms. Or I dreamed of her house. There was a terrible fire. My aunt and uncle are screaming for help. She tries to help and... at this moment wakes up, pulling herself out of the nightmare, not wanting to see the ending.

Once Santal tried to tell Elina, but she said it was just a nightmare, no need to worry. But she was uneasy. What if this dream is a harbinger of trouble? Adira had once mentioned the Concept of Seeing the force to her. Maybe her girl had it. But she's only three years old. Isn't it early? How could she, insensitive to The force, know that? Letanka did not fool the girl and therefore asked not to be taken seriously.

Two weeks after the first nightmare, Santal was still looking out the window, thinking. About everything. About parents, dreams and dreams. And also about how beautiful the world is. When she was older, Santal wanted to leave Ryloth and explore other planets and even make a discovery. It doesn't matter which one. In short, the plans were colossal.

Suddenly, she saw a strange white light in the distance. Santal immediately wondered what it might be. A fallen star? An asteroid? A signal for help? Or does someone just have a light on? Oh, there are even two of them. And they are declining. What is it, after all?

The girl was bursting with curiosity. Maybe we should take a look. Nothing terrible will happen if she goes out of the window at night and looks at the street. Just look. And then go home. Without stopping anywhere.

Santal climbed up on the windowsill and dropped to the ground quietly. Looking around, the girl found the lights and ran in a straight line. Especially since the lights are still on and are about to land. It was impossible to miss the chance. What if she opens something?

The white lights turned out to be the ordinary lights of a starship. But Santal didn't know that was what it was called. Having satisfied her curiosity, the girl was about to run home, when the above feeling came with a vengeance. This time, the ship itself aroused Santal's interest.

A more cautious or older child would have turned and run. But the girl really wanted to know what kind of unusual ship it was. And he seemed to her simply huge for his small stature.

Then suddenly the door opened, and out came a creature of an inhuman race with long legs and arms. Having never seen anything like it before, Santal felt both surprise, delight, and fear at the menacing appearance of the creature with its red, creepy eyes and blue skin. The man calmly walked down the ramp and closed the door. Ads: Hide

The girl moaned softly. She didn't know what to do. Follow the man or wait for him to return and explore the ship on the sly. Santal planned to do this: if the first option, then by sneaking and hiding, she would look a little and run home before they missed her. The second option: wait, and when the mysterious stranger returns, together with him, while he does not see, explore the ship. The main thing is to remain unnoticed. After a moment's thought, Santal decided to follow the man until he was completely out of sight.

For about half an hour, the girl, hiding behind objects, watched the unusual creature. I must admit, Santal really enjoyed playing spy. It was very exciting! Finally, the man brought the curious woman to the warehouse. Then she could see him better. Her skin looked more blue than blue in the light. Red eyes without pupils looked creepy. And a big hat that really fit his head without ears and nose. But what really struck Santal was the small hoses attached to her cheeks. Or pipes, it is unclear. Why would he want them? Maybe he has health problems? And I wonder how he wears it? Does it hurt? Isn't it hard? Probably not. Otherwise, I wouldn't wear it. And how does everything fit on it?

another guy with a hood on his head came up to the man in the hat. It's not even clear if it's a man or a woman.

"You're late." "Sounds like a man after all."

"I wanted to make sure I wasn't followed." Or you didn't bring your friends.

— Intelligently. Oh, well. Show me what you brought. But not here.

Inside, the ship seemed even more exciting. Long corridors, lots of rooms. The Hatter led them both into a dim room. Santal carefully hid behind the crate. Fortunately, the darkness accompanied the disguise.

"You didn't open it, did you?" "what is it?" asked the cowl — man, when the Hatter provided him with a small chest, slightly shorter than the girl, and green in color.

"I don't open anything unless I've been warned." I'm a professional! the blue — skinned man snapped.

Santal shivered and lifted her head, hoping to see what was in the box. The two began to discuss something unknown to the girl.

During the conversation, the customer opened it and fished out a rectangular object, poked with his fingers. There were some strange pictures, squiggles. The man with the big smile stared for a long time, and then laughed maliciously. Then, after examining the interior of the box, he said:

"You did a great job, bounty hunter. Any complications?

Santal did not understand: behind the heads? It turns out that someone lost their head, and this Hatter helped them find it. But this one's got a good head. And what does the pictures have to do with it? Anything else you want? Blue smiled helpfully.

— No. The money was transferred to your account. I'll contact you if I need you again. The hooded man turned and headed back.

Santal started to follow them, but suddenly she wanted to see what else was in the trunk. No time. The girl could barely keep up with the men on tiptoe. And then my eyes started to close. Sleep hunting. No! We must go home! She's already been up too long. Visiting is good, but at home is better. Wanting to get home as soon as possible, the girl revealed herself when the customer had already left. But she forgot about the Hatter! When I realized it, it was too late.

"You didn't know that, but when people spy on me, I take it personally.

Santal jumped in surprise. The blue man with the hat and the pipes was looking at her. The face might have shown some negative emotions, but the eyes... they made it seem like the man was always angry. The girl cringed in fright. Her gut told her not to look at him. The

Man sat down on his haunches, which made him seem smaller. Santal was a little emboldened and tried to justify herself:

— V-you… You are... from VIN-n-Ni-I-te. I won't tell anyone. I didn't understand him at all. The girl was on the point of bursting into tears, and she would have done so if it hadn't been for the stranger who had startled her with his appearance.

The Hunter reached out and lightly touched the girl's cheek.

She stood paralyzed with fear. I was afraid to move. A blue hand gently ran the pads of her fingers over the soft skin and lifted her chin slightly. After examining Santal, the man abruptly grabbed her by the scruff of the neck. The girl immediately began to struggle.

"What are you doing?" Let me go!

The Hatter did not react at first, but suddenly stopped abruptly and raised it at eye level.

"Did you think I was going to let you go, baby, after you found out something that didn't concern you?" You're a witness.

As the man dragged Santal down the corridor, She tried to bite him a couple of times. Going into a compartment, the hunter put the girl behind bars and locked her up. Santal tried to pull away, but where would she go? Exhausted, Santal slid to the floor and fell asleep.

She woke up, as it seemed to her, in half an hour. Then she found herself lying on a cold, hard floor. In some place in the shape of a rectangle with bars from the ceiling to the floor. The entire ceiling was streaked with the same long, cold lines. Well, she didn't know the words "cage" or "prison cell"at that time!

Santal began to slowly come to life. What happened to her? Oh Yes, she saw the lights, decided to look, the man in the hat, the conversation… Oh, my God! The girl raised her head and was horrified by what had happened overnight. This couldn't have happened! This is all unreal! She's only a three-year-old girl! She wouldn't have thought of that! This is a dream!

From fear, the girl even forgot for a while that she wanted to look at the lights. It seemed to her now that someone had been controlling her mind. But when the puzzle came together and the picture became clear, I was completely upset.

"Did you sleep well, child?" A familiar, deep, mechanical voice interrupted his thoughts.

Santal squinted in the dim light. That blue-skinned guy again.

— Not very. Look, uncle, I don't know why you brought me here, but this isn't a funny joke. Please let me go home.

The blueskin made a sympathetic face.

"I'm sorry, little girl, but you've been following me and my client. I don't like that. And you can easily tell your parents what you saw. And then they would quickly tell you where to go. He added to himself: "And I would have been put on the wanted list."

Santal shouted. "And I don't remember well!" I promise not to tell anyone! Forgive me and let me go. I won't tell anyone! There were tears in the girl's eyes.

"What's the difference?" the Hatter grinned. "You can tell it from memory, and the adults will understand.

— Yes, I... I'm a little girl! I still didn't understand. Please let me go! I want to go home! the Man took out a jar and opened it. An unpleasant smell reached the girl's nose. Santal grimaced. The man took a sip and only then answered:

— No problem. He smiled nastily. He moved closer to the girl, squatted down, and flicked her nose. "Now be a good boy and don't make any noise. It still won't help. He left, patting the child's cheek with a blue hand.

Santal was perplexed and upset at the same time. I even tried to take offense. Fail. Such an affectionate, but harmful uncle. But maybe he would let her go. I'm sure all his talk is just a joke. An adult uncle wanted to scare a little girl. But Santal sabura won't give in! She had exposed him! It won't be long before she's released. And if she gives the address, they'll take her home. Her aunt always told her to do this if she got lost: go to someone you thought you could trust and give her the address. That's it! And this blueskin didn't seem so scary to the girl anymore. Although the appearance of the baby was a little scary at first, but she quickly got used to it. The girl's spirits rose at the thought.

But at that moment, a slight shaking started. It was obvious that the ship was beginning to rise. Well, that's right! She's going home now! As soon as the uncle comes, she will give her address. And my aunt won't even know that her adopted niece was out at night. Although the girl was once warned not to go anywhere alone, not to talk to strangers, immediately run away. And don't turn your back. Except that Santal didn't remember exactly when it was. The words were somehow left in my memory. And anyway, when she saw the lights, she thought for a moment that nothing would happen if she just broke the rule once. So it happened.

And the ship rose higher and higher. Santal have sick feeling in my stomach. It became uneasy: a suspicion crept in that she would not get home. If it wasn't, the man would have already asked for her address or just dropped her off. Any minute now. And he hesitates. So... everything he said wasn't a joke! A terrible thought shot through the girl's mind. Oddly enough, in such situations, the brain of people begins to think smartly. Santal's brain was no exception: "What is it? What to do? What to do? We need to get out of here! Let me get hit, but only to get away! I'm the only one scared. Mom».

The girl curled up and wept bitterly. And why did she go? I'd be home and asleep right now. Sleeping? Sleeping?! Of course! What if she had managed to fall asleep at home and was having an amazing dream? But how do I check it? Idea! Santal closed her eyes tightly and froze for a few minutes. It is not known how much time passed, but when the girl opened her eyes, nothing changed. Same floor, iron bars.

He heard the steps. The girl started. The man with the hat came in.

"Aren't you hungry?" Almost morning.

Of course, the girl is used to having her aunt feed her Breakfast every morning. But in this situation, something told me that you can't take food from someone you just met. So she shook her head.

"I'd take another hour's NAP if I were you." We have a long way to go.

"Where to?"

The man didn't answer and started to leave. Santal felt very ill. A strange man is going to take her definitely not home, to a completely different place, and most importantly — it is unclear why.

— No! the girl screamed. "Don't! Bring me home! Please! — I wanted to cry, but for some reason I was afraid to become a laughing stock.

Her screams had no effect on her uncle, judging by the expression on his face. Instead he turned around and said with a smile:

"I'll sell it to the highest bidder, and good bye."

— No! Santal didn't know the meaning of the first word and wasn't going to find out. It was obvious that it was something evil.

And then something happened that had never happened to the girl before. Santal stretched out her arms, and some unknown force hurled the man against the wall. He slid to the floor. Sabura stared at her hands in shock. As she watched, either the blow was weak, or the blueskin was hardy, but he quickly stood up and looked at the girl strangely. She looked into his eyes and decided. Something's about to happen. Maybe he'll punish her.

"Looks like I'm getting more than I bargained for," the man said, more to himself than to Santal, who was terrified.

Three questions kept running through my mind: what would happen to her? What just happened? Suddenly , my vision began to blur, and the world around me began to turn into a mosaic. Santal felt stiff, unable to move. After a few seconds, everything was gone. The girl began to fall into an unknown abyss…

refuge

Black Widow joins the men formerly known as Captain America and the Winter Soldier in hiding after the events of “Civil War”.

(because I’m still in denial that “Endgame” has happened 😑)

[Oneshot ~2,000 words  |  Rated PG-13  |  Hurt, Comfort / Romance (Natasha x Steve)] [Revised from an early FFnet piece] 

[Part Two here]  [Optional companion piece “Into Infinity” here]

A little salt, a lot of pepper.  After another look at her notes, Natasha slid a minced onion into the bowl and cracked in an egg, followed by a sprinkle of flour. “The best way to do it is really to use your hands.”  His near-whisper teased the fine hairs at her neck.  Natasha instinctively tensed as his arm encircled her, but he merely guided her hands with his directly onto the meat mixture.  Calloused fingers entwined sensually through hers as she began to knead the ingredients together, hesitant in her inexperience. “Now you don’t wanna overwork it,” purred Bucky in her ear.  Natasha felt the heat radiating from his body as he stood directly behind her, all implacable, immovable muscle.  “You don’t want the meat to get tough.” Natasha smiled at the memory as she shaped the meat mixture between her hands.  The Winter Soldier, smelling of garlic and parsley, passing on to her his grandmother’s recipe.  Formerly shooting her through the kidney just to murder the asset under her watch.  How times changed.  Glancing at the clock, she set out a pan. “The carrots were my nonna’s secret, so you have to swear never to tell anybody else.”  His face was dangerously close to hers, his smile sly, his blue eyes mock-serious. “How in the world does James Buchanan Barnes have a nonna?" teased Natasha, acutely conscious of the scant inch of heated space between them as she stirred the sauce.  “And I still don’t see why I can’t just buy some at the supermarket...” “You’re killin’ me.”  His hand closed over hers, over the wooden spoon.  Natasha smothered a laugh as they began to stir together.  “Here I am entrusting to you the deepest, darkest secrets my grandma took with her to her very grave—she was my grandpa's second wife, I'll have you know, it was quite the scandal at the time—and now you’re saying you’d rather get storebought—” “Buck.” Natasha hid a grin as they both looked toward the figure suddenly looming in the doorway.  Steve pretended to lounge, but she easily read the taut lines along his jaw, down his neck, across his shoulders.  “Everything’s set up.  We fly out day after tomorrow.” Bucky’s smile was strained.  “Right.  Got it.” Smirking, Steve cocked an eyebrow at Nat.  “This guy bothering you?” “Not at all, soldier.”  And Bucky’s chuckle behind her raised goosebumps along her shoulder. They’d been like children, she mused, the two of them constantly joking and bickering so that she had to pointedly ignore them to get anything done.  Things hadn’t been quite so relaxed when she’d suddenly shown up on their doorstep that rainy night: Bucky had been wary and Steve had just smiled, utterly unsurprised.  She hadn’t been sure how to act or what to expect.  But Steve had invited her in, told her to make herself at home.  And despite herself, she had stayed. She hummed a little as she lifted the lid over the pot, let steam billow past.  The noodles she spun into the bubbling water, just as Bucky had taught her. She had simply watched that first evening when he wordlessly set about preparing dinner in the kitchen.  More curious than anything else, she had sat down at the table while he laid out some things he’d bought at the market earlier that day: sausages, vegetables, a dozen plums.  The man liked himself some plums.  Munching on a peanut butter sandwich, Nat had looked on as he picked out some more produce and found in a drawer the lone kitchen knife available in the sparsely furnished rental.  He’d begun to hone the kitchen knife, running it in slow, measured strokes across the bottom rim of a coffee mug, when he stopped and glanced up at her through long, inky lashes.  The blade glinted in his hand. “I’m not makin’ you nervous, am I?” After a moment, she’d met his smile with one of hers.  “Not at all.” If Steve trusted him, she would too. He still spoke with a Brooklyn drawl, she’d decided later that night, as Bucky’s spontaneous cooking demonstration led to conversation over glasses of cheap supermarket wine.  After Steve rejoined them from a meeting he’d had in the city, he and Bucky had competed to embarrass each other with increasingly lurid stories from their childhood and Natasha had laughed until she cried.   When Steve managed to drop his perfect diction, she remembered, he lapsed into that Brooklyn drawl too. She found herself smiling from the memory even as she glanced again at the clock.  Tucking a stray strand of newly blond hair out of the way, she hefted the pot over the sink to drain the pasta. She hadn’t had to come here.  She could have gone somewhere else.  She probably would have been better off somewhere else, too, on her own where she knew the terrain better, could access more resources to lie low.  She was, after all, now one of the world’s most wanted, just like them.  She hadn’t had to end up in this life, piecing together meals from printed-out recipes and Youtube tutorials, the reluctant picture of domesticity for lack of much else to do.  Yet here she was, frying up meatballs when she would have been perfectly content with another scrounged-up sandwich. The truth was, that night when she’d left the Avengers compound, she’d known exactly where she wanted to go. It wasn’t lust, she told herself.  And Steve would blush all over and jump out of a plane parachuteless before he seduced anyone.  Nat knew plenty of handsome men, as well as charming ones, sweet ones, dull ones, and smart ones like Tony Stark; men who knew their way around women and men who fell at her feet helpless.  By and large they were a blur to her, tried to use her, tried to keep her.  Even in the freedom she had gained when she defected, even when she could have opted for a new and normal life, she had found little in them to interest her.  They were all much the same, even Tony who was just a little smarter, worked just a little harder to stay on the side of the angels, for which reason she still more or less respected him.  Even though, like so many others, he still hadn’t been able to let go of his ego in the end. No, it wasn’t lust, even though she with her assassin’s eye could always appreciate the steel of a finely tuned muscle, the sleek lines of a well-developed body. But how else could she explain how she gravitated toward him?  The wordless, thoughtless, almost instinctual urge to be at his side, support him, protect him at all costs—she had given up trying to resist it, simply gave in to it, and the seamless rhythm of their combined fighting styles thrilled her every time.  But why she was here, now, toiling at a stove in the middle of nondescript suburbia and watching the clock like a... like a wife waiting for her husband to come home? He was, for that matter, increasingly late.  Natasha resisted the impulse to Google flight arrival times and instead began to fill the dishwasher.  She was just pouring herself a self-congratulatory glass of wine—she had only almost burned the garlic, after all—when she heard the telltale step on the sidewalk four floors down and pretended to ignore the sudden heat in her chest.  She was already pouring another glass of wine when the door swung open. “About damn time,” she called out as he shut and locked the door behind him.  “I hope you’re hungry.” “I probably am.”  He slumped into the couch and groaned, leaning his head back, stretching out his legs on top of the battered coffee table.  “Economy was terrible.” “Told you to try and borrow the jet.”  She slapped at his knees, one by one, and he obediently lowered his feet back to the floor.  She turned on some music.  “How was Wakanda?”  She placed a bowl of spaghetti in front of him. “It was good.  Beautiful country.  You should meet Shuri sometime.”  He paused, closing his eyes with a sigh.  “They put Bucky back under.” She longed to touch him.  Instead she sat back, curled her fingers around her wineglass.  She would miss hearing Bucky’s soft-spoken drawl.  “I’m sorry that had to happen.”  Her voice caught and she cleared her throat, then pushed his wineglass toward him in silent suggestion. “Well, I’m sure they’ll get him better soon.”  His tone was wistful, his expression clouded as he absent-mindedly took his first bite.  Halfway through chewing, he stopped and chuckled.  “I’m glad he got around to teaching you his grandma’s spaghetti first, though.” Natasha allowed herself a smile.  “He told me you used to love it, every time you came around.” “Yeah.”  Steve stared stoically down at nothing for a moment, and Nat knew he was battling tears.  “Yeah, I did.” He was too pure for her, she concluded, as Banner hadn’t been.  Banner, she’d wanted.  Somebody who felt damaged as she did, somebody who knew what it was like to fear and distrust and regret oneself, all at the same time.  In her loneliness she had been drawn to him, the man who was also unhappily the Hulk, a kindred spirit amidst her isolation; she’d craved what Banner had promised of understanding, of sympathy, of sameness. Banner she’d wanted.  But Rogers, she knew, she needed.  He was crystal clarity, certain and absolute.  He was, as he said, always honest.  More than that, he was unambivalent, unequivocal, uncompromising.  In this, as recent events had proved, he was even lonelier than her.  And although he had cut out the bright white star from the center of his uniform, uncomfortable about what it represented, for Natasha who had long since outgrown the need to believe in anything it had already taken on a different meaning.   Her pole star.  Her true north. Bruce had signified comfort.  But Steve gave her a direction, a purpose.  Even if, for now, it was only to make his favorite dinner on the night he came back alone, having left behind his best friend in all the world in a country twenty hours away by plane with not nearly enough legroom. He looked up as she refilled his glass without asking and left the bottle on the table.  Natasha smiled into shadowed blue eyes.  “I’ll clean up.” He protested less than usual.  Nat put away the food and dishes and came back to find his feet on the coffee table again and his head flopped backward in sleep.  The bottle on the table was empty. She brought him a blanket, not that he needed it.  She refused to admit that she had missed him.  She told herself he probably hadn’t missed her.  She tucked the blanket around him carefully, opting this time to leave his feet propped up on the table in peace. She glanced up to find him watching her, eyes dark, hair askew. She kissed him tentatively, telling herself it was the wine, knowing she wasn’t drunk, knowing he couldn’t be.  Even as she tasted the softness of his lips she cursed herself for what she’d dared to do, felt his hand on her wrist and braced herself— —but then he leaned up into her, his arm tightening around her waist and his mouth meeting hers with an urgency that flamed low in her belly.  He was tired, she reminded herself, tired and sad and so very alone, and she understood.  She had done more for far lesser men.  He kissed her so hard they both gasped for breath and then she laughed shakily, catching hold of his arm when he started to pull away. “Nat—”  Already he was apologetic. “You said once,” she interrupted, “you wanted me to be a friend.”  She resisted the longing to kiss him again just yet.  She would not seduce him.  “Will you let me?  Be a friend?” He exhaled.  His fingers splayed up her back, dug into her skin.  He could break her in a single movement.  “Nat...” She kissed him again.  She didn’t need to hear that he was sorry.  In the morning she could tell him she was, too. Part Two here

central pines [elodie davis x reader] {part one}

heyyy lovelies! i just watched trinkets (please please pretty pleeeease go watch it it’s beyond good) and am in love w elodie’s character. i hope you guys like this one!

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fic playlist: 

bon iver - hey, ma

dead girl in the pool. - girl in red

banana clip - miguel

let it happen - tame impala (song parts 6:15 to 6:38)

overlap - catfish and the bottlemen

this baby don’t cry - k.flay

alligator - of monsters and men

It had been two and a half months since you’d arrived at Central Pines.

The food was okay, and the air conditioning was subpar. Since you hadn’t been too keen on going there in the first place, and your dad’s incessant emails weren’t going to end until you left, your newfound safe haven wasn’t exactly going to be something you cared too much about.

It was nestled in the outskirts of Portland, surrounding by hulking pine trees and dense forest, hiking trails close to overpowering the tiny rehabilitation camp.

Rehab, right, you reminded yourself. I’m in rehab.

The people were the only reason why you hadn’t left yet. Well, that, and your “family issues”, which is what the counselors had so fondly filed you under in their massive stack of patients.

Everyone seemed to be remotely friendly, and the people that you’d met had honestly made a decent impression on you. You’d leave if you were willing to jeopardize it, but going home wasn’t an option. Leaving meant getting caught, and getting caught meant that you’d have to go home. Plus, police, which was something you weren’t too happy to think about again.

You got up and out of bed, shaking out your messy Y/H/C curls and slipping your feet into your sandals. After your bed had been made (a small progression of what your counselors thought was a “good stride”), you took sleepy steps over to the closet and got changed for the day, finishing off your look with an embroidered jean jacket and a pair of loose slacks. You’d seen Booksmart a few weeks ago, and despite the fact that you loved the characters for who they were, you really goddamn wanted Amy’s jacket.

You looked to the other side of the room, barren with nothing to reveal any inpatients. Probably because you didn’t have a roommate. When you’d first gotten there, a girl named Safi was moving out, so there was no overlap between the two of you. You’d taken over your side, she’d left hers, and while your side was filled with posters of bands, movies, and corkboards with your friends’ photos, the other side contained peeling wallpaper and a sad-looking twin bed.

You checked your phone and saw that it was almost nine, which meant that you had to check in with Counselor Adams (or Tracey, depending on who you’d ask) before you could get any sort of breakfast. It was fine, because you’d rather die than go without your beloved coffee that came from Adams’s office, but you were kind of hungry. Regardless, you started making your way down the long dormitory hallways, seeing your peripheral friends getting ready for the day ahead and leaving their dorm doors open.

Adams’s office wasn’t the sort of place that made you feel like you were in an actual rehab center, but more like a therapist’s office, which you actually had grown to like. There were little photos of her family everywhere, along with comfy chairs, glowing twinkly lights, and tiny ceramic animals adorning the chair that sat opposite your couch.  Well, not your couch, but you didn’t really have anything else in this facility besides your belongings, and damn it if that old, overstuffed linen didn’t feel somewhat like home.

“Ahh, Little Miss Caffeine,” Tracey groaned, flopping down in her Frankenstein’d athletic ball/old couch chair. “My espresso hasn’t hit yet, but we still have a couple minutes. Keurig’s up and running.”

“Thank God,” you sighed in relief, shutting the door behind the two of you and going to tap what you wanted into the machine. “You still have that almond milk creamer?”

“How could I not?” Tracey chuckled, taking another sip from her mug. “I use so much of the Folgers original creamer that I’m on the toilet for days with diarrhea. You suggesting an alternative was quite literally the only thing saving me from a life of bathroom hell.”

You giggled then, letting your hot mug sit for a second before splashing in the Splenda and the creamer. “Oh, so we’re blaming the milk for it now, huh?”

“I refuse to believe it’s the caffeine,” Tracey said strongly, wild hand movements indicating her opinion. “If it is, I might go crazy trying new methods of waking up so early.”

You looked up at the clock, seeing that it was exactly 9 on the dot, and sat down on the couch, ready to start your session.

Tracey leaned forward, pushing a piece of her curly brown hair back behind her ear and adjusting her blazer and her Central Pines t-shirt. “So. Let’s talk. Weekly update?”

“Sure!” you said, swatting your hand over your drink to make sure it wouldn’t destroy your tongue upon the first sip. “So, I’m doing okay. I do a lot of hiking, and I went into town last week on the free day. Which was nice.” “Ugh, free days are the absolute best,” Tracey said, crossing her legs over her chair. “I remember when I used to go on them. I was obsessed with the coffee place at the end of the street that gave you those little donut things. I mean, it’s gone now, but, fuck, they were so amazing! Oh, sorry, keep going.”

You laughed again at her habit of constantly interrupting you, and kept going. “Well, uh, it’s been different here. I mean, I know you guys pretty well, but friends-wise, I don’t really have too many here. I think a lot of people kind of just want to keep themselves going while they’re here. Not like, I want to speak for them or anything. I don’t know what’s going on with the others, and I really hope they’re all doing well, but I don’t really know how to you know, bridge that gap. You know?”

Tracey’s face took on a slightly sad and concerned expression, and she leaned back in her chair, nodding at your statement. “I understand. It’s hard enough trying to make sure you’re okay, while also trying to reach out to others. I’m sure that people will come around. Everyone has their personal demons, and when you’re here, we can’t always fully stop them from amplifying. But there’s always outlets. If anything, come here if you’re feeling lonely. You know that I have an armory of snacks and food and conversation, and I’m sure people not reaching out isn’t anything to do with you. I promise.”

You felt tears sparking up in your eyes then, and you looked up at the positive sticky notes on the ceiling, trying to enunciate them in your head to give the tears time to go away. Tracey gave you a moment before speaking up again, this time in a gentler tone of voice.

“Everything’s going to be fine. In fact, you have a new roommate coming at the end of the day today.”

You snapped your head back down to meet Tracey’s eyes, your fidgeting hands ceasing the incessant folding and unfolding and folding of the cuffs of your jacket. You couldn’t help but feel the rush of hope and excitement a new person brought, but quickly shut down the feeling. It was probably someone who didn’t want to be bothered with you, let alone be as furtive as you were to make friends. Squash the hope, you told yourself, taking a deep breath before speaking.

“Really?” you said, trying to keep your voice level and break-free. “Are you allowed to… Tell me about them?”

“Sure! A little bit, at least,” Tracey said, reaching over and pulling a manila folder from beside her coffee table. She opened the folder, sliding out a packet or so before speaking.

“Okay, so her name’s Elodie. She’s coming here from a few towns over from you, and she’s going to be with us for a little while. Apparently her father and some other family’s helping her to move in. I haven’t met her yet, but John in admissions did, and he seemed to get a somewhat okay feeling from her. You know, people leaving their hometown and friends and all that, it’s not easy,” Tracey said, sliding the packet back into the folder and replacing it on the table. “At least, she has people here who get what it’s like.”

You poked your tongue in on the side of your cheek and took a deep breath, flattening out your pants with your palms. She was right.

“If you need someone to show her around other than John, whose niche TV show reference I’m sure she loves hearing, I’ll do it.”

The words left your mouth before you could take them back, and you felt almost like you were going to slap your palm against your head. What the fuck! I don’t wanna do that? Do I? What if she’s cute? Fuck! Stop! She’s probably not interested. It doesn’t matter. Ugh, this whole internal guilt thing blows-

“Really?” Tracey squealed, clasping her hands together in excitement. “I mean, I was hoping I could find someone that could show her around that wouldn’t say ‘Bazinga!’ every three seconds.”

A grin took over your face, and you stood up, turning to put your shoes back on and leave the carpeted room. It was officially 9:30, and the next person to be counseled was going to come in any second. “What time are they getting here?”

“Noon!” Tracey said, scarfing down her drink before her next patient. “Thank you so much again, kiddo. I really appreciate it.”

“No problem, man!” you said, shooting finger guns at her before internally cringing and kicking yourself for the weird ass motion.

You said goodbye to Tracey and headed to the cafeteria, sitting down in one of the worn wooden chairs with a Clif bar in front of you.

Hello, Elodie, you thought to yourself. At least you’ll have a cool roommate.

Riku Nanase Birthday Photobook Rabbit Chat Part 5: All Their Gratitude. 

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Iori: It's midnight. 

Tamaki: Hbd, Rikkun

Mitsuki: Riku! Congrats!!! 

Yamato: Congrats. We're going to spoil our center again this month. 

Nagi: Congratulations, Riku!!! Now that you have graciously accepted the baton from me, you will surely have a HAPPY birthday. 

Sogo: Happy birthday, Riku-kun. I hope you have a great day. 

Riku: Wow!!! Thank you, everyone!! I'm so happy!! 

Tsumugi: Congratulations again from me, as well! I hope you have a lovely day..! 

Riku: Hey, manager! Everyone's dressed up as Tenn-nii! lol

Tsumugi: Kujo-san!? 

Iori: We weren't sure of what to do at first, but if there's anything Nanase-san loves, it's Kujo-san... 

Mitsuki: Some of us   put in no effort. 

Tamaki: Tenten doesn't wear glasses, Yama-san. 

Yamato: Don't rob me of my identity. 

Sogo: I can't let TRIGGER see me like this... 

Nagi: I just took a great picture of you. Shall I send it to Kujo-shi? 

Sogo: Don't!!! 

Riku: I'm sure it'll make Tenn-nii laugh, Sogo-san! 

Sogo: I feel like Kujo-san will just make fun of me... 

Mitsuki: At least you sorta look like him, I think it suits you. 

Yamato: Why did you type that while looking at me, Mitsu? 

Iori: Wasn't there anything we could've done about Nikaido-san's low quality cosplay? 

Yamato: My face looks nothing like his to begin with. 

Riku: Oh yeah! Since you're all dressed up as Tenn-nii, you should try acting like him! 

Nagi: What!? 

Iori: Ah... The patron demon of unreasonable requests rears his head once again. 

Tsumugi: I'd like to see you all impersonate him! lol

Tamaki: Ask Ban-chan. He's good at that stuff. 

Riku: Please just do what I say! lol

Sogo: Right, this is Riku-kun's birthday, after all... We should at least try. If it'll make  you happy, then I'll do my best. 

Yamato: Sou's getting as shaky as the pictures Tsunashi-san always takes. 

Riku: Now, start by saying: "Do you want to become a fallen angel with me?"

Mitsuki: Say what!?  lololololol

Nagi: Spoken like a true middle schooler. 

Riku: Hurry up! 

Iori: Good grief, let's just get this over and done with! 

Tsumugi: I'm so excited..! 

Riku: I'm evaluating their performances... 

Riku: Hmmm

Riku: Now I'm picking the best one... 

Riku: The winner is... 

Tsumugi: The winner is!? 

Riku: Sogo-san!! Congratulations! 

Tamaki: Huuuuh, why So-chan? 

Riku: Because he looks the most like Tenn-nii!!! 

Mitsuki: lololololol What was the point of making us act like him then, lolololololol

Iori: You really are a demon. 

Riku: What the heck, Iori!? I'll make you say the line again! 

Iori: Ugh... 

Yamato: What are you doing, Sou? 

Sogo: Nagi-kun  appears to have filmed  our impersonations so  he could send them to Kujo-san, so I'm deleting the data. 

Nagi: NOOOOOOO!! My precious data!! 

Tamaki: So-chan just protected the world from chaos

Mitsuki: Oh yeah, Iori started looking at the clock every five minutes about three hours before this, lol

Tamaki: Why? Was he measuring time? 

Nagi: He must have been anticipating Riku's birthday. 

Riku: Really!? 

Iori: You're imagining things. I was just counting the tiles on the wall. 

Yamato: What a lame excuse (lol)

Iori: You're the one who kept fixing his wig constantly, Nikaido-san! 

Mitsuki: Old man, lololol

Yamato: But Mitsu and Sou were fussing around asking people if they needed more tea, too (lol)

Tamaki: Lmao @ Mikki & So-chan Was I the only one who kept his cool? 

Sogo: Didn't you sleep with Riku-kun in his room last night, Tamaki-kun? 

Riku: I thought it was because you had a bad dream and were feeling lonely, but was  it actually because of  my birthday!? 

Nagi: How cute, Tamaki. The two of you  remind me of an afterschool afterschool special. 

Tamaki: You came over to sleep in Rikkun's room later, too!!! 

Nagi: *evil grin*

Tsumugi: All of you couldn't help looking forward to Riku-san's birthday, then! 

Riku: I'm so happy, you guys..! 

Iori: While I am glad all this has made you happy, continuing this conversation while all of us are still dressed up as Kujo-san feels awfully surreal, so I'd like to get changed already... 

Mitsuki: True, lolol And we've prepared a lot of other stuff for you, too! 

Nagi: It is about time to show you what we are made of. 

Riku: What is it!? I'm pretty satisfied with just seeing you all cosplay  Tenn-nii, though! lol

Yamato: That would be too anticlimactic (lol)

Sogo: We've got a present for you. 

Riku: Don't tell me it's tabasco!? 

Sogo: Huh!? No, it's something that'll make you happy. 

Tamaki: At least you realize that tabasco wouldn't make Rikkun happy. 

Tsumugi: Now, Riku-san, it's about time you get ready! 

Riku: Ah, you mean for the usual!! 

Choices/outcomes:

1. I'm sure that costume will suit you!

Riku: Really!? I'm a little worried! 

2. Are you ready, Riku-san?

Riku: To tell you the truth, my heart's racing, but I'm okay! lol

3. Time to get changed!

Riku: I was really excited to see what kind of glasses I'd get! 

Tsumugi: Everyone, are you finished with the preparations? 

Mitsuki: We're good! Looks like Riku's gonna have the glasses propped up on top of his head! 

Riku: Let me act cool just this once! 

Yamato: What's so cool about wearing glasses on top of your head? 

Riku: I thought it'd make me look like Yaotome-san..! 

Iori: Are you trying to become Yaotome-san? 

Riku: He's such an adult man, I think he's cool! 

Sogo: I know what you mean, Riku-kun. Few men would look as good with a pair of sunglasses and some champagne as he does. 

Mitsuki: As much as I'd love to keep talking about him, let's bring out the cake before this becomes all about Yaotome! 

Tamaki: I'll help

Nagi: Behold, the cake that I, Mitsuki, and Tamaki have made. 

Yamato: All you did was taste test it, Nagi. 

Nagi: That is an important task X-P

Iori: And all Yotsuba-san did was put the candles on top. 

Sogo: But they have been set up very artistically. 

Iori: Artistically..? 

Mitsuki: Ta-dah! Here's your special cake! 

Riku: Wow! It's huge! There's so many fruits! 

Riku: Let's all eat it together! 

Nagi: It is best for us to do everything as a group. 

Riku: So let's do exactly that, Nagi! 

Nagi: Yes. 

Tsumugi: How wonderful..! 

Riku: Ehehe! 

Riku: Speaking of wonderful, please do that thing now! 

Riku: Where you tell me you love me! 

Iori: I thought you wouldn't remember that... 

Riku: Of course I do! You have to be especially sincere, Iori! 

Yamato: Our birthday boy's cocky as usual (lol)

Mitsuki: Iori, show him you're a man! 

Tamaki: Fight. 

Iori: Arent you all going to be saying it too!? 

Tsumugi: Everyone, please tell Riku-san you love him! 

Riku: Pretty please! 

Mitsuki: Alright, time to man up! 

Nagi: YES!

Sogo: Here we go

Riku: !!!!!! 

Riku: I really love you guys, too!!! 

Riku: And Iori, your face is all red!! Like a tomato, lol

Tsumugi: You finally got to hear it, Riku-san! 

Riku: Yeah! 

Riku: Even Iori said it properly, so I'm all satisfied now! lol

Iori: I won't do that again. 

Tsumugi: I'm glad you had a fun time today. Please let us celebrate you again next year! 

Yamato: Riku's trying to get Ichi to feed him strawberries right now (lol) 

Tsumugi: Huh!? lol

Sogo: Riku-kun and Iori-kun really are good friends. 

Nagi: I think MEZZO" is on par with them, though? 

Sogo: R-really..? 

Riku: I got to see Iori looking all embarrassed, so this was a great birthday! lol

Mitsuki: The things people do for birthdays... 

Tsumugi: Well then, it's about time for your  birthday messages to Riku-san! 

Nagi: I shall begin. I am grateful to be able to celebrate your birth with everyone once again. Please, let me stay by your side and watch as your smile grants happiness to the people of the world. 

Mitsuki: Happy birthday, Riku! We can only be ourselves because you're pushing us forward as the center! Keep showing us just how incredibly cool you can be, Riku Nanase! 

Yamato: Congrats, Riku. Even when I can't help doting on you, it surprises me how mature you can act. You've been really cool lately. 

Tamaki: 'Grats, Rikkun! Let's keep playing games and hanging out. Sometimes it's like you're my little bro,  but sometimes you act like the older one. Let's stay healthy. 

Sogo: Happy birthday, Riku-kun. Reading the Riku Photobook made me remember how charming you are. We're so proud of how  kind and strong you are.  I hope to keep working  with you. 

Iori: Nanase-san, happy birthday. I wasn't sure if I should tell you this when you're acting so cocky, but I'll do it anyways. 

Iori: Just by standing at our forefront, you've taken us so far. While you usually act spoiled, on stage you are more brilliant, strong, and dignified than anyone else. Please, continue to show us your strength. 

Yamato: Ah, Riku's about to cry

Tamaki: You made him cry again, Iorin

Iori: How is this my fault!? 

Sogo: Riku-kun, do you have a hankerchief? 

Nagi: "I, I dooooon't", he says. 

Tsumugi: Riku-san, are you alright!? ><

Riku: I'm fine

Riku: It's been rough sometimes

Riku: I've thought about quitting, too

Riku: But you guys were right behind me, giving me support and strength with your voices. Letting me know that I belong here.

Riku: I'm glad I became an idol

Iori: We couldn't do this without you. 

Yamato: You were pretty much born to be an idol, Riku. 

Mitsuki: Wow! Even the old man's getting sentimental. 

Nagi: Even the old man is getting sentimental. 

Yamato: S-shut up... 

Sogo: Yamato-san's face is turning just as red as Iori-kun's was earlier. 

Tamaki: Tomato: glasses edition 

Tsumugi: Riku-san, you're also being celebrated on social media..! I was wondering if you could say a few words for them ><

Riku: Yes!! 

Riku: This is the second time you've all celebrated me. I'm very happy to spend this day with the members that I've fought with, cried with, and laughed with! 

Riku: The last time, I thought I might be the happiest person on Earth, but now I think I might be the happiest person in the universe. I want to share this feeling with you, even if it's just a little fragment of it. 

Riku: Usually it's embarrassing when people tell me they love me, but now I can say this! I really love all of you, too!! I'm really glad I got to meet you! 

Translator’s notes..? 

next up: banri’s birthday rabbit tvs! 

early bird dinner [erotica]

I bat my eyelashes at the diner busboy in the hope that he’ll give me a booth to myself. I forego a menu in favor coffee and smile as he roughly slides a lukewarm dark roast across the warped wooden tabletop. The walls are painted different shades of mustard yellow: Dijon, Honey, Grey Poupon. I sip my brown water and look out the window advertising “BreakFast ALL DAY!!!” to the tune of a tinny 80s playlist, the effeminate male singers sounding constantly on the brink of orgasm.

I reach to pull a curl behind my ear and catch the unmistakable scent of myself on my fingers. I smile, Eve straight out of the Garden, and wonder who can make out the snakes in my windswept hair. The stooped, scowling man and woman here for early bird dinner? The pierced teen threesome eating Belgian waffles? The busboy himself, watching me from the corner of his eye and busying himself re-folding the napkins, re-stacking the menus?

Billie Jean comes on. I dream of splattering my sexuality across the canvas of this bleak, whitewashed town like a fistful of green fingerpaint.

I’ll talk about sex over scrambled eggs, but I want the act of sex to be sacred. Pull my hair until I crick my neck, slap my ass and leave a deep red welt, but trace my face with the tip of your finger as if I were porcelain. And don’t you dare call it role play. This is divine. The beast of prey inside of you howls at the wolfess inside of me. You split me from the inside out and dip your wet tongue inside my raw, pink places. You thrust between my soft red lips and fill my mouth with you.

Midday, when I’m hungry, I fold my body over my bureau and slip a finger inside of myself. I gaze empty-eyed at my delicate perfume bottles as I frantically stroke my g-spot. My face contorts, I arch my back and moan for you, “Please.” Sometimes after I come, I imagine you wiping wet strands of hair from my sweat-streaked face and pulling them back in a firm fist, covering my panting mouth with your open lips. “Again,” you growl, and force my eyes to meet yours as you roughly shove your fingers inside of my swollen pussy, loud and wet. My juices drip down your wrist.

The bartender coughs phlegm into a paper napkin as the TV news anchor warns against a batch of tainted vaccinations. “Superman, where are you now?” whines Genesis. The sun has gone down and I’m the only patron left. I order a Deluxe Egg and Cheese for $4.99. It arrives hot and dripping, strands of sautéed purple onion dangling over the sides like spider legs. I will eat this sandwich, wipe my oily fingers, pay in small bills, and shrug on my winter coat, exiting into the cold as an ambulance speeds by. 

---

Submission is as intrinsic to me as being a woman, as being attracted to men. It’s not a flavor of my sexuality; it’s my total sexuality. Submission is all 24 tubs at Häagen-Dazs, not just the butter pecan. Every glance, every touch is a wave in this invisible tide. Ebb, surrender. Flow, possess. 

But I’ve been swimming in shallow pools. I’ve given myself to men who can’t receive me. Men who nudge me against bedroom walls and cough up commands that sound like questions. Men who shove themselves to the back of my throat but avoid my gaze as I choke for air. Men who spank my ass with limp wrists to test its buoyancy, not to remind me that I am theirs. 

I’m not sure who these men are performing for. Me, in some desperate attempt to satisfy? More likely their own idea of who they ought to be - the looming shadow that polices their masculinity. I imagine a darkly lit auditorium, a hogtied woman spread center-stage, a hairy, naked man nervously stepping from the wings, sweating. “Well?” bellows the lone audience member, the tall shadow, tapping his gleaming black dress shoe on the linoleum floor. “You like this, don’t you?”

Perhaps in the way women are quick to fake orgasm, men are quick to fake dominance. They believe it should come naturally to them. When it doesn’t, they risk falling out of an unspoken natural order, an order that persists in spite of our attempts to revise cultural narrative over the past century. Behind closed doors, we still expect men to have a glint of unrestrained savagery in their eyes. And most women are still not prepared to hear: “Actually, dear, I was hoping you could handcuff me to the four-poster and call me a filthy slut.”

So non-dominant men who find themselves in bed with submissive women narrow their eyes, inflate their chests, and experiment with dirty words, blushing all the while. But these performances are in vain. Dominance is a presence: it is either there, or it is not there, the way Susan is either in the room, or not in the room. There is no wondering. Dominance is a holistic way of being hinted at by language, movement, and the color behind one’s eyes. The series of actions, the methods of touch - that’s just the butter pecan.

I know this because the same is true of my submission. Girlish deference is my second skin. I tried to outrun her once, the hot tongues of feminism licking at my ankles, but she remains inseparable from me. I’ve come to enjoy her, this self who tilts her chin and volunteers the delicate skin of her neck to her lovers in the dark. She is deftly compliant. She is wickedly unrestrained. 

Many forget that, in spite of our docility, submissives are pleasure seekers. Perhaps the hungriest of all. Our submission is misconstrued for passivity. In reality, surrender is actionable and opportunities for pleasure are boundless. When a lover’s stare lingers on my body, I acquiesce to the power in his gaze. I’m wet before he lifts a finger. The simplest phrases, even when spoken benignly, electrify: “Come here.” “Look at me.” 

There are infinite ways to be taken, so many more than there are ways to be touched. Impatiently, I wait for a man who understands the eroticism of subtle ownership - whose posture and gaze bind me as aggressively to him as nylon rope binds my wrists to wooden bedposts. I wait for a man who is unafraid of the sacred intimacy of utter surrender and control. 

--

My body sinks into the living room couch, a soft vee from head to toe. I honored November’s arrival by wearing oversized everything: woolen socks, argyle sweaters, men’s sweatpants. I spend my evenings swimming in fabric. Four months single, I am haunted by the manic-depressive phantom that is my long-term partner’s absence. As the nights grow colder and the pain of our separation hardens and shrinks in tightening concentric circles, I take comfort in these fabric silhouettes. 

Cold rain streaks down the window. I dip a silver tablespoon into a jar of peanut butter and peer halfheartedly at the book sitting tent-folded on the table. Proud of my good intentions, I sit the spoon on my tongue and defer to my phone. I open a kinky dating app and peruse a parade of strangers’ faces. Simultaneously intrigued and mindless, I meet Mr. Buttons (long-haired, snaggle-toothed teddy bear), Daddy Dom (bearded, tattooed weightlifter), and M&M (gothic couple with matching apathetic gazes). I’m quickly bored. Dating apps have proliferated so widely that not even the social experiment holds my attention anymore.

Bored, feeling anonymous and emboldened, I send messages to two men. Their interests range from “rough sex” to “spanking, gagging, and orgasm control.” I muster all of the sex positivity I can recall from Bitch Magazine and Advanced Gender Theory to form a protective shield against the jarring sensation of talking about sex with strangers online. Our conversations begin with pleasantries, comedy and anecdote serving as dry cobblestones between deep puddles of lust and craving. I spend a few hours this way, eating peanut butter by the tablespoonful and tiptoeing, then stomping, through puddles without galoshes. When I pull myself from the couch, my heart is beating and I am drenched in rainwater. 

My pupils dilate and replace the glimmer of pixels with the dim outline of the couch, the windowsill. Disoriented, I turn off the light and make my way to bed. 

---

The city bus wheezes down the street, the driver cursing fluently under his breath at rogue pedestrians. It’s Monday afternoon and I’m on my way to a date. I peer at my translucent reflection in the bus window, self-conscious of my body, of the way I’m presenting my body to this stranger. Blue sweater and blue jeans veiling a living, hungry woman. I am a character in a movie called Social Convention. I am performing.

The cafe is crowded, overrun with bright-eyed academics and conventionally unconventional twenty-two year olds. To my right, two women lean forward in their high-top stools. They talk at a breakneck pace and gesture with manicured hands, aggressively inspired. Behind me, two male students argue unironically about the elitism of modern university education, spouting vocabulary words as if their professor were sitting idly by. I never knew sentences could contain so many clauses. Surrounded by Hamlet, Willy Loman, and Lady Macbeth, I am suddenly complacent in my role as an understudy. 

Visibly bored, the pierced barista hands me an overpriced coffee in a mason jar. I weave through the herd of black coats, nondescript faces buried in their devices, impatiently awaiting their froth and foam. I promptly douse my drink in cream and sugar. One, two, three heaping teaspoons. As I reach for a stirrer, the man I recognize as my date comes in from the cold. 

I’m flooded with observation. He is a person, and somehow this surprises and disappoints me. He is slightly taller than I am. Lively green eyes and expansive, curly hair that reaches from scalp to ceiling, a few grey hairs mixed casually with brown. He looks pleasantly electrocuted. I’m not used to men with this much hair. I imagine what it would feel like to have his beard between my legs.

I smile in greeting as we exchange a warm hug. His smile is unassuming and he smells vaguely of lavender. We sit and open our mouths to recite our scripts. To my surprise, he brings out a particular color in me; my script begins to feel less like a script and more like a blurry afterthought. I forget what character I’m playing. He is easy to talk with. Our conversation dances intelligently between topics, sewing tiny stitches of tentative connection between us.

He holds a Ginger Steamer loosely in his hand: ground ginger, sugar, hot water. He lives in a cabin in Vermont without running water. He is here for a month-long musical engagement. 

I pull a curl behind my ear and watch his eyes follow my fingers. I watch his lips as he tells me about his travels to Turkey. He asks me how I take my coffee.

“Heavily creamed, heavily sugared,” I reply, unabashed. 

I ask him how he takes his coffee.

“Black,” he replies, unabashed. 

We smile and look down at our drinks. I wonder, are we always having two conversations at once, all of us?

---

I try to quiet my mind before therapy but the minutes bend and morph defiantly. Every mundane distraction is tempting. The year-round air conditioner sits unplugged in the foggy window. Last month’s faded issue of Time whispers my name from the chipped glass tabletop. I tap my feet impatiently on the carpet, battling my restlessness.

Patrice opens her office door and ushers me inside. Four feet and eleven inches, she is a powerful force, a no-bullshit woman. But Patrice stalks her prey. Every session begins with identical small talk: a comment on the weather followed by a short eulogy to the broken radiator. I wonder what we’ll discuss when spring arrives. We sit.

“I went on a date today,” I begin. 

She is a falcon, feather to talon, and dips through the sky, biding her time.

“Really?” she asks, widening her eyes. This is news. I’ve been mourning my breakup dedicatedly for months. I kick my feet up on the scuffed grey ottoman and tell the tale, smiling. As often happens in therapy, my story resists the grasp of convention - a floundering fish -  before landing squarely on my kinks. I reveal that this date represents a side of my sexuality I’ve been desperate to explore.

Patrice nods in an attempt to reserve judgment. Visually, anyway.

“So you’re… submissive.” She draws the words out slowly, testing their flavor. I nod.

“So what does that mean for you?” she asks, her eyes narrowing. “Do you like chains? Do you like to be whipped? Beaten up?” 

As she edges closer to hyperbole, her tone reveals the movie reel flickering behind her eyes: crackly images of dirty basements, rusty handcuffs, meek women crying and men with bulging forehead veins. 

I pause. Swallow. I attempt to provide a description using affirmative language, speaking conversationally as if to say, “I’m alright with this, and you should be, too.” I’m a virgin to this world, I explain, but even virgins dream of sex. Our lizard brains know the ancient temptation of forbidden fruit. We know we will enjoy it before sucking the juice from its folds.

I can tell by her face that Patrice doesn’t like this. She doesn’t like that I want my hair pulled, my lips used, my surrender offered. She wants to talk about my meditation habit and the boundaries I’ve set this week. 

She sighs. “Why do you think you enjoy this sort of thing?” she probes. “Most of my clients who are into submission have terrible self-esteem.” 

The space heater wheezes on. I point my toes, relax my toes. Cliche loves this conversation, devours it greedily, but arguing with a therapist is more complicated than arguing with the misogynistic comment section. Patrice sits silently, waiting to see whether I’ll drop my golden token into “Daddy Issues” or “Codependency.” Or perhaps, in a moment of profound insight, both. 

Instead, I explain that my submission is intrinsic, simply a variety of sexuality. It’s not a personality defect, I assert.

But I wonder. 

“Well,” she honks, “it sounds like you’re asking to be raped.” She throws her hands up with an unapologetic shrug and a heavy metal grate falls between us, landing certainly with a clatter and a thud. I peer at her from between the rusty slats. I wonder what she sees when she looks back at me.

---

10:30pm. A bitter wind whips against my shoulders as I stand beneath the awning of a busy Mass Ave bar. Sparkling in the thin air, the full moon looms wide above the street. I lean against the brick siding. Skateboarders speed by and pink-nosed couples pass, mittens holding mittens. In front of the bar entrance a group of hefty, bearded men in black hoodies pass a cigarette, barking laughter, their gravelly voices moistened with beer.

I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn to face him. His hair is pulled thickly into a curly bun atop his forehead. In the bright light of the passing cars he is more attractive than I remember. His reflective green eyes are stunning, still. 

“Hi,” I say, smiling. We hug, plush coat to plush coat. I feel a calm, stirring anticipation as our shadows join and separate on the sidewalk. Our words are genuine but easy. They veil the busy work of our eyes, dancing over each other in the streetlight glow. We begin to walk, destination-less, down the sidewalk. 

“Where to?” he asks. We scour the quieting street for a place to nest. A nearby creamery, five minutes from closing, catches our eye. The unspoken implication of a late-night date is gently postponed in favor of Brown Butter Brownie and Cardamom Vanilla. We place our orders to the tune of rags wiping plastic tables and chairs scraping across the linoleum floor. 

We sit in the warm dark of his car spooning sweetness onto our tongues. To my surprise, my words make the journey from heart to mouth without interception. We exchange the details of our lives. He tells me his parents raised him in a cabin without television. They divorced when he was 28. I tell him that I used to work in politics, that sometimes my family feels like a constellation of disconnected satellites in space. We both separated from long-term lovers this past summer - him in June, me in August - and we trade stories of that brand of black pain reserved exclusively for heartbreak.

Mid-conversation, I imagine that I’m a spectator to our exchange. I realize that this moment is a precious moment: this initial sharing, this first discovery. These are the details of a person’s life that, by repeated exposure, become your own, taken for granted over time. But upon first hearing, these details are golden groundwork - the continents on the maps of our lives. Later come the countries, states, and cities. But there is such pleasure in glimpsing that landscape for the first time.

An hour later finds us sitting in warm silence, our cups long empty and the dashboard flashing 12:03. The sidewalks are barren. Stoplights dance between green and red.

“Would you like to come over for tea?” he asks.

I feel my cheeks heat in the dark. 

“I’d love to,” I say. He turns to face me. 

“I have no expectations about tonight,” he offers, smiling. He shifts the car into gear and begins the short journey back to the guest house where he’s staying this month, quarters traditionally reserved for travelling faculty and distinguished alumni. Gingerly, we enter the front hall and climb the eighteenth-century staircase to the second floor. When he opens the door to his room, I can see it’s a humble space - barely larger than a hotel room - but in the short time he’s been here, he’s made it his own. A sprawling potted plant sits on the mahogany desk beside a leather journal and a short stack of books, most of which I’ve read. Boxes of teas adorn the counter. A window beside the bed peers out onto the quiet residential street. 

I take off my boots and climb enthusiastically onto the bed. 

“Comfy,” I say. He smiles and hangs our coats in the miniature closet. 

“It is,” he agrees. He faces the counter and prepares the electric kettle. Voyeuristically, I watch his shoulders tug his sweater as he reaches for a pair of mugs. Strong, lean, certain. His movements lack any trace of ego. My steady heartbeat echoes in my chest. Despite the unmistakable sexual tension, I feel at ease, like we could be old friends preparing for afternoon tea on the terrace. This space feels free, creative - like anything could happen here. 

He hands me a mug boasting the scent of lavender and thick clouds of steam.

“For you,” he says. We sit cross-legged on the beige duvet, kneecap to kneecap. Our conversation leapfrogs from the personal to the spiritual, the political to the sexual. An hour later we are lying upside down, our socked feet splayed messily over the pillows, our heads resting at the foot of the bed. Shoulder to shoulder, our curly hair frames our faces like Chinese fans. In a moment of silence, he lifts himself to rest on his elbow and looks into my eyes. 

Instantaneously, the question is is asked and answered. He lowers his face to meet mine and our lips graze tentatively, then certainly. His mouth is warm and inviting, his presence embodied. We trace each other’s upper and lower lips with our tongues, sucking softly, and when our mouths open and our tongues meet, I feel a fierce stirring in my stomach. Every sensation feels amplified in my awareness.

As his mouth covers mine, he reaches his hand into my head of curls, grasping tightly at the root, and pulls my hair firmly to the side. I moan softly, involuntarily, feeling a roiling cascade stampede through my stomach. The small act of dominance intoxicates me, a swift hit of pleasure to a first-time user. I’m momentarily lost in the sensation of certain arousal coursing through me.

 He releases his grip and I exhale, returning to my body. He kisses me softly, and then suddenly tugs my hair again, exploring my reaction as I shut my eyes and wince, moaning. He leaves his hand grasping my hair as he runs his tongue along the delicate skin of my neck that has been exposed to him. 

I am dripping.

He reaches for my body, moving his hand from my waist to my thigh. His hand is hot through my jeans and my skin tingles beneath his touch. His body is lean but muscular. Exploring, ignited, I run my hands over his shoulders as we kiss. Coils of heat rise up through the fabric of his t-shirt. He tugs my blouse up an inch to reveal the pale skin of my stomach. With his hand pressed to the small of my back, he leans and kisses the small constellation of freckles there, traveling slowly upwards. When he has tired of the game, he uses both hands to pull my shirt effortlessly over my head and tosses it to the floor, lost.

He moves to lie fully on top of me. I feel protected, safe, my body small and warm beneath the firmness of his form. His lips move down the steep tilt of my jawbone. As if I were an exotic delicacy, he tastes me, running his tongue teasingly along my skin and then returning to kiss the same spot with care. Barely audible, my half-moans intermingle with my breath. At once, he pulls my hair back, hard, until the whole of my neck is exposed up to him, my head pushed down into the duvet. My moan is full-bodied, audible now. He devours my neck and collarbone without hesitation as his hand reaches down to my jeans, tracing up from my inner knee to the apex of my thighs. He lets out a soft chuckle of appreciation as he feels my heat. I'm warm and wet through the denim. Already I'm overwhelmed by sensation, his hand in my hair, his lips at my chest, his hands between my legs.

He runs his hand from my ass to my clit through my pants. His touch is void of the tentativeness so commonly found among men of my age. He has touched women before, he knows what to do, and I know he knows, and this arouses me intensely, this partner who knows, this partner who can solicit the reaction he wants.

I moan, opening my eyes in my pleasure as he rubs me. He is watching my face, watching the formless vowels escaping my open lips, taking in the tightness in my temples as my face contorts. He is worlds apart from the men who are too focused on their own pleasure to delight in someone else's. He delights in my pleasure because his hands coax it from me, demand it from me, and the moans escaping my lips and tightness contorting my face are his; my body is his canvas, my pleasure his painting.

It's not long before I'm left in just my knee socks and underwear. He removes his own shirt, his pants. I reach to pull my socks off, but his hands hold mine. "I kind of like them. They're cute," he smiles, shrugging. I leave them on.

He pulls me down beneath him and kisses me again. Our skins touch for the first time. He is warm on my cool skin. I feel my breasts pressed against the firmness of his chest. We explore each other slowly. He runs his hands softly but confidently up my sides; I bring my palms flat against his stomach, run my fingers through the hair on his chest, kiss his collarbone gently. He brings his lips to my shoulder, raising goosebumps on my arms. His tongue finds my earlobe and he licks, softly, before tracing my ear completely with his tongue. He brings his lips to lick, then suck, my nipple. He is gentle, and I arch my back and run my hands through his hair, thick and curly between my fingers.

He reaches beneath my underwear and traces me slowly with his finger as he kisses me. His hand feels shocking on my skin. I haven't received a touch this intimate, this intentional and present, in so long. I am positively wet, dripping for him, and he kisses me as he slowly enters me with his finger. I moan softly, feeling every centimeter of him moving inside of me, feeling my tightness around him. He breathes out, moderating his pleasure, and slowly removes and inserts himself again, this time deeply, until his finger is fully inside of me, his hand pressed to me. From within me he pushes firmly and moves his finger back and forth, exploring me and triggering twinges of pleasure and intimate sensation; he is reminding me that my body, my most intimate places, belong to him. I moan and breath into his mouth as his lips cover mine; we share the same breath, the same air.

As I pant, his finger deep inside of me, he brings his other hand to my hair and reaches to the root. He pulls my hair back as his finger moves inside of me and deep, primal shivers exit my spine, up through my sides, my arms. I feel my face contort with pleasure and when I open my eyes, he is watching me, his eyes hungry. He knows his hold on me is complete.

"Your pleasure is beautiful," he says richly in my ear. I feel exquisite, being watched this way - it feels too good to be true, that my pleasure - this simple expression - is enough to arouse him, to please him. These moans come from the core of me. I have never felt more authentic in bed with a man.

He removes his finger from inside of me and brings it, dripping to my lips. I smell the musk on his fingers, Eve liberated from the Garden at last, and keep my wide eyes fixed on his as I open my lips obediently. I welcome his finger into my soft mouth, and he exhales slowly, his eyes nearly golden in the dim light, watching my every move. I wrap my tongue around my own wetness and hold his gaze as I savor every drop, sucking his finger fully until it is buried in my mouth to the hilt.

When he is clean, he pulls his finger gently from between my lips and pulls me toward the pillows. He lies on his back, an invitation, and I climb on top of him, straddle his waist and bend over to kiss his lips, enjoying the gentle trace of my breasts on his chest. I pull his hair gently, submissively, and bring my soft lips to his neck, his chest, his stomach, fluttering kisses along his body. I take my time discovering him. I ask to remove his boxers and he lifts himself from the bed and he is lying, finally naked, before me. His hair is dark, black, against his skin.

I lean up to kiss his lips, meet his eyes with a smile, before returning my lips to him, kissing again down his side to the softness of his skin on his uppermost thigh. He is hard before my mouth but I wait, kissing either thigh, holding his hips in my hands and tracing the skin there. I kiss his pelvic bone and his hair skims my lips. I reach for him with my hand and feel the warmth and hardness of him throbbing against my fingertips.

I want to tease him. I want to pleasure him. I hold his cock to my cheek and tease his shaft with the tip of my tongue, savoring his warmth. I lick the head of his cock softly, once, with only the tip of my tongue, and he exhales deeply as I bring my tongue to tease the other side of his shaft. My mouth is screaming for his cock, but I try to have patience as I savor this part of him, taking my time and teasing his body.

His breathing quickens and he reaches down to encircle his hands around my hair, pulling it atop my head so he can my eyes, see my mouth pleasuring him. I look up to meet his gaze and our eyes lock - his stunning green to my deep blue - before I kneel between his open legs and open my mouth to him. He lets out a full-bodied moan as I take him slowly, fully, coating him with me, and slide my tongue up his shaft, circling the head of his cock fully with my flat tongue. I moan with him in my mouth as I run my mouth up and down his shaft in full, over and over, grazing the head of his cock with my tongue every time.

I pull him from my mouth, coated in my saliva, and bring both hands to encircle his shaft. I knead him slowly, covering his cock completely with my hands, tonguing the tip of his cock with my tongue. My palms are covered in saliva; he is rock hard beneath my hands. With a slow, tender motion, I knead him and lick the head of his cock rhythmically. He allows me free reign for only a few moments before he reaches for my hair and pulls my mouth down to cover him entirely. He directs my movements firmly, surely, pulling my mouth down to cover his cock in firm, rhythmic motion. When he releases me, he pulls me up to his face. I rub my hand across my lips before he pulls me down roughly and kisses he hard on the mouth. His energy is tangible, aroused, and he whispers into my ear, "I want to be inside of you."

Goosebumps spread across my arms instantly. I nod.

I hop from the bed ungracefully, aware of my nakedness and his eyes on me, as I bend over and reach for my wallet. The light blue Trojan condom that has sitting silently for a few weeks, awaiting a moment like this. It is slightly tattered around the edges after cohabitating with my debit card and cash. 

I crawl back onto the bed and rip open the wrapper. He pulls me beneath him with one arm, and puts the condom on swiftly. In a moment he is resting in a bowed plank above me, the skin of his chest grazing my hardened nipples, his eyes looking into mine from above. I spread my legs beneath him, my thighs coming apart with the sound of a gentle wetness unfolding; they are already coated with me. He holds my gaze as he reaches down with one hand and guides himself to my pussy. He traces the head of his cock back and forth across my wetness deliberately, watching my eyes grow desperate and pleading beneath him, and in a moment he pushes the head of his cock inside of me. I feel the wide head of his cock splitting open my folds, entering my tightness. I close my eyes and tip my head back with a cry, a fierce fusion of pleasure and pain, and he reaches for my hair and pulls, facing him, eyes locked with his, again.

"Look at me," he commands, pushing fully to the hilt inside of me, holding himself there in ownership, and slowly, tantalizingly, pulling out. My tightness grips him like a glove but I am leaking around him; I feel my juices dripping out of me, down my thighs, my ass. Faint, breathless moans escape my lips as he fucks me with the greatest restraint. I feel my face contorting in pleasure, my eyes closing to protect myself from the overwhelming ownership of his gaze, but every time he tugs me back to face him, and our eyes lock in an unbearable intimacy. I am swollen and throbbing around him.

The pace is too slow to bring me to orgasm and all the more torturous for it. I can't endure much more for fear of splintering, or breaking into color, or forgetting where I am. Suddenly he pulls me to him and flips us over so he is lying on the bed, his hard cock still pressed to the hilt inside of me as I straddle him in the lamplight. It takes me a moment to remember my surroundings in the stillness, but when our eyes meet, a furious hunger seizes me and I begin to move slowly atop him. His hands encircle my waist, directing my movements.

Every inch of my body is electric; I am tingling from within. Our bodies are shadow and muted yellow light. I arch my back and lean, farther, riding him, seized by a primal energy. Goosebumps flare on either arm. For seconds at a time, I return to myself long enough to realize the moans floating through the air are my own, and then I'm lost again, captive to his right hand around my waist, his left hand that reaches behind me and slaps my ass with a hard smack, urging me on as I ride him harder, obediently. I can't tell whether we've been in this position for 30 seconds or 30 minutes; the frenzy of our pace clouds my mind with sensation, color, and the occasional sound of his low, steady "Good girl" as he reaches up to tug my hair and fuck me from below.

After a while I feel myself tiring, growing lightheaded, and without saying a word he grabs and moves me so we are side by side, him behind me, holding me. He moves in and out of me from behind, and with every slow thrust, I hear the sound of my wetness tightening around him and releasing him. I feel the heat of him behind me as my left hand drifts above my head, entangled with his right. 

Book 21/2017 - The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Unfortunately it’s already been 3 weeks since I finished this book, so my memory is starting to get fuzzy, but... Oh my God. I definitely do remember staring at the pages wide-eyed, a big neon glittering WTF all over my face because men are so despicable. The ones in the book anyway, but... let’s stop that thought here. Anyway, I loved it, and I can’t wait to watch the show, which is probably a bad sign because I obviously have high expectations and that’s never good going into a movie adaptation, but oh well. Too late, I crave more.

I think at some point I’ll have to read this book again because there’s so much to take in. I love worldbuilding and fictional history, so while reading I was constantly trying to figure out how the society of this future country called Gilead (ex-US) works and how it got that way, and therefore got distracted a lot. Which is a shame because the inner monologue and the backflashes of the protagonist that pretty much make up the book are fascinating and insightful and philosophical and honest and so, so sad. If I ever get back to my growing To Be Read Again pile, this one is among the top 3 easily.

So, for future reference, here’s the Gilead 101: At some point in the future the US president gets shot, and after that everything goes to hell (Just in the US, as far as I could figure out, Canada still exists, and more importantly stays decent). Before that, society has already destabilised somewhat because of widespread infertility and an uprise of genetic defects due to damage to the environment, and after the political system falls apart, some sort of-Christian religious fanatics take over and turn the whole thing into a theocracy. And while life doesn’t change that much for men, it sure does for women because of this old curse of ours that we’re the ones to produce the babies. Women get sorted into into five categories (this is where it gets fuzzy, so mistakes may be made) according to marital/social status and ability to produce healthy children: There’s the econowives, those who were legally/religiously married before the fanatics took over, but are not particularly rich and/or important. They are poor, work hard and have no standing in society or in family whatsoever, and no chance of ever improving their situation, even if they’re fertile. There’s the Unwomen who are shipped off to the toxic waste piles to clean up society’s mess and conveniently die soon. They’re called that because they can’t have healthy children, so of course they’re not real women because a working womb is the one and only thing that defines women, the only thing that matters, and there it is, I’m getting all worked up again. There’s another category of women who can’t have children called Marthas who serve as maids to high-ranking households. I think the main difference between them is that Unwomen offended the regime in some way, either by illegal actions committed after the regime took over or by their unsuitable lifestyle before, and Marthas didn’t, so they “get to” clean and wash and cook. They’re also mostly women of colour, so yay, double discrimination. Then there’s the wives who are married to the new elite because they did something of merit before, or their husbands did. They live in a gilded, very little cage with nothing to do and are mostly infertile, so their households are assigned handmaids to produce babies for them. Their sole task is to get pregnant by the male head of the household they are assigned to and generally act as an outsourced womb for the wives. Because of their important role, they’re very closely guarded and receive a lot of training/indoctrination before an assignment. Every category of women’s lives in this universe is a different kind of hell (except maybe the Aunts, the few women who are tasked with indoctrinating the handmaids because their belief in the new system is ardent enough), but the protagonist is a handmaid, so that’s the one we get to know about most.

Handmaids have/are allowed very little to do, so the protagonist and POV Offred (named that because her Commander is called Fred) spends a lot of time lost in thought and reliving or unsuccessfully trying to ignore memories. There’s not much action in the book because Offred rarely goes anywhere or does anything, and there’s even less direct dialogue. Mostly conversations are rendered in indirect speech and without quotation marks, the only exception being those rare, meaningful conversations she has with people who talk to the real her and not this ethereal, uniform creature behind the veil that has a position instead of a personality. This distinction between the two types of conversation, and the rarity of action or dialogue in general, show how lonely and isolated a “life” Offred leads, all interaction with other people who could act as a mirror for her to see herself in stripped away, in order to leave no trace of individuality whatsoever that could distract her or make her unsuitable for her sole purpose in life and in society. Superficially, at least. Because despite the rigorous indoctrination and the continuous state of utter despair she lives in, combined with the threat of being declared an Unwoman if she ever oversteps, there’s a whole world inside her head, sustained purely by memory and longing, and it’s fascinating.

And there’s more. There’s the little gestures of rebellion she affords herself, like when she “accidentally” shows a guard her ankle during a check and feels a little bit of satisfaction for probably having given him wet dreams, or when she forms the beginning of a friendship with her shopping partner Ofglen who is supposed to be controlling her. There’s how she uses all the means available to her (her body, basically) to improve her position - indulging her commander’s wish for some meaningful human contact in order to get her hands on something to read, which is forbidden for all women, and making him care about her, or using the wive’s permission for a one night stand with some other guy (to get her pregnant) to start an affair and finally feel something again. She says of herself that she made the choice to become a handmaid and now has to live with it (the other choice being to be declared an Unwoman, so... no real choice at all), and it’s clear that she lays her priority on staying alive, almost regardless what it costs her, but I don’t blame her for that. She tried to escape once, in the beginning, and it didn’t work out and it cost her everything dear to her, so she’s had her share of open rebellion and doesn’t want to be a martyr for anything. She’s not a rebel leader, and fairly suspicious towards all signs of resistance, tiny as they may be, not some hero or some Jeanne d’Arc rising up against injustice and oppression and coming out on top, but a human being with a sruvival instinct and conflicting desires, navigating a world she doesn’t know anymore. She’s so very relatable exactly because she’s not a typical hero who picks up a sword when things go bad, but she’s also not a victim because in her mind, she’s still her. A changed version of her for sure, adapted to the conditions she has to live in, but still a person. That’s why she resisted the regime in the one sphere where it mattered most - erasing her personality - and because that takes considerable strength as well as an intact sense of right and wrong and a lot of willpower, she’s a great character, and a rebel in her own way.

The ideology of Gilead is an extreme form of Christianity, and there’s a lot of symbolism and names taken from that direction - the whole wife-handmaid-thing for example is taken from a biblical story about a woman named Rachel, who couldn’t have children, and her servant Leah who acts as a surrogate for Rachel and her husband. There’s a similar thing going on with the Marthas, who are named after another biblical character who is busy doing household chores while Jesus comes to visit, or the blue dresses the wives are assigned to associate them with the Virgin Mary. This whole cult is very interesting because in some ways, while of course being incredibly misogynistic, it does place women at the center of society, or at least claims it does. It’s just that in their minds, women are a womb, boobs, and not much else. Certainly not a human being. So while they do everything to boost child-bearing capacity and make sure that the relevant parts are well taken care of, they neglect at best and actively suppress at worst all the other characteristics, needs, desires etc. that make a person a person. At the same time, it’s obvious that the great majority of characters, even those in power, don’t believe Gilead’s ideology themselves, at least not anymore. Religion in The Handmaid’s Tale has nothing to do with spirituality and a personal relationship with God and everything with a facade you put on to show your loyalty to a regime that happened to pick Christianity as a way to frame its ideology. It’s entirely replaceable - it could be any other religion and would also be easily adaptable to accomodate some kind of personality cult or even an atheist ideology like communism. I suspect that Margaret Atwood might have picked a religion as a framework because of the Islamic revolution and establishment of the Islamic republic of Iran a few years before the book was first published since some passages reminded me a lot of Iran, but I might be wrong. I’m pretty sure though that it’s not meant to specifically criticise one religion in particular, or even religion in general, but any kind of authoritarian ideology that murders, suppresses and constrains people and especially targets women for the sole reason of them being able to have children - or not.

It’s been a while since I was last so relieved to read an epilogue. It takes place 100-150 years (I think) after the main story and consists of a lecture held by a Historian about the authenticity of Offred’s story. While he talks, it becomes clear that at some point there was a regime change and at the time of the epilogue things have improved a lot. This regime change didn’t happen at a time when any of the main characters could still have been alive, so I know it didn’t help them, but it still gives a slightly optimistic last note to this generally very depressing book. It signalizes that everything ends eventually - even the cruelest of regimes goes away at some point, either by reform or by revolution. It might not be much comfort to people living under circumstances such as those, but it’s still something worth remembering. Nothing lasts forever - not even a regime that is trying to turn back time to the darkest of Dark Ages.

Beauty and the Beast Modern AU Ideas

Just some ideas I think would work for the characters

Location: New York City

-Adam is the kind of guy who has a great time in high school. He’s attractive, charming, sarcastic, and amazingly talented at whatever he tries. He can be a real asshole, but in a very endearing kind of way. Adam uses his dark humor to cover up his insecurities.

-Adam has a ton of problems with his father, who emotionally abuses him. His father is a man’s man, believing that all men must be strong and learn to assert their dominance early in life. He believes Adam is too sensitive and tries to toughen him up. They have a falling out right before Adam moves away to college.

-When Adam goes off to the city for school, he is completely isolated. He is cut off from his high school friends, he no longer speaks to his father, and his mother died long ago when he was a boy. He finds that all the things he was once naturally good at, he now has to actively strive for. He now doesn’t think he is as smart and talented as he once was. This all culminates into Adam slipping into a depression.

-Belle, a few years behind Adam, is a small-town girl who was the odd one out in high school. She spends most of her time writing and reading fan fiction online, editing fan videos, creating fan art, you name it. She is a huge nerd. She excels in school, both in the sciences and English (She hates it when people say that you have to like one or the other).

-Belle goes off to school, excited for the possibility of making new friends who share her interests. At first, Belle loves her classes and her professors. But she takes one too many courses in her first semester, and finds that she can’t handle them all. It’s a bit of a blow to her ego. She also starts to miss her home and her dad, who is her best friend.

-Belle and Adam are both English majors (belle is also double-majoring in mechanical engineering as she can’t make up her mind for what she would like to do). One of her professors, believing that she can persuade Belle into dropping her engineering major and focus on English, suggests Belle take her advance course on Shakespeare. This class is where she meets Adam for the first time.

-They fucking hate each other. They constantly get into arguments on the subtexts of their readings, Belle having more modern, feminist views, and Adam seeing things from a more traditional perspective. “Just because you’re a feminist doesn’t mean Shakespeare was!” “Just because he didn’t write it to be that way, doesn’t mean the meaning isn’t there at all!” The professor has to stop them before things get ugly.

-Even though Adam claims that he can’t stand Belle, their arguments have started to help lead him out of his depressed state. He had started to give up on school, but now his passions were rising again.

-The Gaston character is a guy from Belle’s high school who never used to give her the time of day. But when Belle comes back for summer vacation, he notices how much she has “bloomed” (eww, I know). He tries to hook up with her, she says no, and now he sees her as something to conquer. He spends the whole summer invading her personal space. Even though Belle was lonely while away at college, she is starting to miss it. Or rather her intense debates with Adam.

-When she goes back for her second year, Belle and Adam run into each other in the library. There is a lot of hate flirting. And then he offers to buy her a coffee. She says she can pay for it herself (the feminist that she is) to which Adam rolls his eyes. They walk and talk. Upon which, they both find out just how lonely the other one is.

-They start to text each other. Again, lots of hate flirting. Belle is having some difficulty balancing her double-major, and Adam offers to help her study in the library. At first he teases her for being an engineering major, but soon finds out that it makes her a total badass. They start to become really close friends.

-Adam tells her about his depression, and she tells him how much she wants to help. She walks him over to the counseling center and helps him make his first appointment.

-Adam starts seeing a therapist, who tells him that he needs to be focusing on himself right now. Even though he has feelings for Belle, he wants her to be happy, and knows they shouldn’t be together until he can get some of his shit together. He starts to pull away from her, and she doesn’t know why. She misses him.

-Gaston won’t stop harassing Belle, asking her when she’s coming home for break. Sending her messages like, “Just got out of the shower, thinking of you ;-)” She ignores them. Until one day, Gaston shows up to her dorm room, asking why she hasn’t answered his messages. She tells him that she’s not interested in hooking up with him. Gaston says that they don’t have to hook up, that he just wants to spend time with her. Belle and Adam had plans to see a movie tonight, but he canceled on her. Feeling hurt and a little lonely, Belle says that Gaston can stay and they can hang out. 

-They go to a cafe and make awkward conversation. Gaston rags on school, saying that you learn more in “real life” than from a book. Belle is having the worst time ever. But it feels good having someone pay attention to her, and she can’t bring herself to leave.

-Gaston offers to walk her back to her dorm room, where she tries to say goodbye. He asks if he can come in, she says no. He doesn’t let her close the door. He says she was being so nice to him tonight, that she must like him in some way. This is where things start to turn and get a little scary. I’m not gonna go into detail at this part, but I think most people can see where this is going.

-Adam shows up to Belle’s dorm, wanting to apologize for canceling on her, when he finds Gaston forcing himself on her. Adam intervenes, kicks Gaston out, and tries to comfort Belle. She asks him not to touch her, and he respects her not to do so.

-Adam helps Belle by going with her to make an appointment with a counselor, just as she had done with him. He hasn’t touched her at all since she asked him not to. Both Adam and Belle deal with their issues, and support each other along the way. Their friendship grows stronger, until finally one day....

-Adam is in the library studying for finals, and Belle comes running in. Spilled coffee in her hand, hair a mess, and heart pounding. She runs up to Adam, who is alarmed at her appearance. He starts to ask her what’s wrong, She interrupts him “I love you.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I love you. I know we both said that we need to focus on our own issues, but we’ve both been doing really well, and I can’t pretend like I don’t have feelings for you any more.”

“Oh thank god.”

She smiles and kisses him. Everyone tells them to shut the fuck up and goes back to studying.

The End.

(Sorry, this originally was going to be a few head canons I had and it turned into a whole story. My bad)

Calyss Watches the Clone Wars -29

Hello, fancy meeting you here *wiggle eyebrows* .

So anyway, tonight I’m watching 02x04 - Senate Spy (32CO) and this title let me think that there is good stuff ahead.

"The Jedi council suspects that Senator Rush Clovis is secretly taking part in a separatist conspiracy."

Rush Clovis? Isn't he Padmé's ex or something?

"But to find out what the Senator from Scipio is up to, the council will need a spy of its own. Meanwhile, Jedi Anakin Skywalker has been away from Coruscant on a lengthy tour of duty leading the clone army."

Intro Dude knows waaay to much:

"Now Anakin returns for a long-awaited reunion with his wife, Padmé Amidala."

IT WAS A SECRETE WEDDING DAMMIT!

Hey wait!

See those subtitles? Well they’re probably the best translation possible for that sentence. But the meaning isn’t exactly the same. At least I don’t think so. If I only had the subtitles and had to guess what was the original version I would say "A faithful heart should never be doubted.” When I read "true heart", do you know what I think about? I think about a hero. "Only the true of heart can do this". I think of a personality as a whole. But this translation and the 40 seconds that follow and that maybe wrong memory I have of having read on Wookipedia that Clovis and Padmé used to date (or something) make me think that Anakin will suspect Padmé is cheating on him and she's gonna be like "dude I've got the truest heart in the Galaxy how dare you doubt me?!"

Okay he actually said “I brought dinner” but  we can see Padmé’s ribcage so whatever they plan to eat, girl probably needs pizza more than anything else.

Anakin: "I had to hitch a ride on a cargo freighter." Padmé: "What happened to your military transport?" Anakin: "It blew up."

Has anyone ever counted how many of the ships Anakin was in (or about to go in) did blow up? Should I start counting? I think I’m gonna do that and come back later to the episodes I’ve already seen.

Ow they’re cute.

Meanwhile Obi-Wan:

“HE’S NOT ANSWERING MY TEXTS!!!”

Plot twist: 

Obi-Wan will suspect Anakin is cheating on him and he's gonna be like "dude I've got the truest heart in the Galaxy how dare you doubt me?!"

Lmao Anakin saying to Padmé that duty comes first. Wasn’t he the one to tell her “screw duty let’s marry”?

Windu: "We chose Senator Amidala because she and Clovis entered the Senate in the same year. They served on the same committees. They were good friends." Anakin: "I didn't know that." Obi-Wan:

Yoda: "Personal matters for the Senator, these are. Know them, why would you?"

Anakin is so bad at the whole secrete relationship thing, no wonder even Intro Dude knows about it.

She’s still pissed he had to go to the Council after ignoring them for super long??? You gotta chill girl you are in a secrete relationship with the Chosen One you are at war and dude’s got responsibilities god dammit.

I’m... Confused. By this conversation:

Padmé: I don't want to spy on a colleague and an old friend. Anakin: "Old friend". How well do you know Clovis? Padmé: Why does that matter? That was before we were together. Anakin: I am just trying to get a sense of who this guy is. I'll need to brief whoever does end up spying on him. Padmé: I thought you were here to talk me into becoming an agent for the Jedi. Anakin: That is not a job for you. I don't agree with the council on this. If Clovis is involved in a separatist conspiracy the last place you should be is anywhere near him. Padmé: Clovis is conspiring with the Separatists? Yoda didn't tell me that. I can't believe Clovis would do that. This is terrible.I never expected that from him. Someone has to find out the truth. Anakin: Someone does. Just not you. Padmé: Why not me? Anakin: Because it's going to be dangerous. Whoever takes this mission will be putting their life at risk. Padmé: I've been in many tough situations before. It never seemed to bother you. I never stopped you from facing danger. You're constantly getting shot at. Anakin: I've been trained for that. It's very different from spying on a traitor. Padmé: You mean I can't handle the mission. Anakin: I mean I'm not gonna let you do it. Padmé: You're not going to let me? It's not your decision to make. It's mine. Anakin: Lucky for us, you've already decided to refuse. Padmé: Actually, I just changed my mind. You've convinced me that it's vital to learn what Clovis is doing. I accept the mission to spy on him. Anakin: Even though I'm telling you not to? Padmé: Don't take it personally, Anakin. Duty comes first, especially in wartime.

I thought at first he was trying to get her to agree but he really doesn’t seem happy about it by the end? I mean he’s just antagonizing her by saying she can’t handle it and telling her what to (not) do. And maybe he’s jealous and worried but he also knows her? He knows she probably is really the best suited  for the job and she dislike being ordered around. So really it would have made sense if it was to convince her to accept but then he does this face:

And it seems that he’s really in an assholish jealous controlling mood? (aka RotS!Anakin) Because if he had had what he wanted (even if that means his wife is gonna be in prolonged contact with that dude) he would have just rolled his eyes at her using his words about him and would have gone his merry way like, “mission accomplish, see you when you're in a better mood”.

Moving on.

I know the Masters on the Councils have their designated chair but that is a bit ridiculous.

So he is her ex!

This is kinda funny to watch when you have shipper goggles on because Obi-Wan's like "Good. The closer you can get to him, the better," (Actually, not "like". Those are his exact words.) and I automatically translate it to: “Good. Go back to your ex.”

Plot twist:

R2-D2 will suspect C3-PO is cheating on him (with this droid in pink) and he's gonna be like "dude I've got the truest heart in the Galaxy how dare you doubt me?!"

Padmé: "It's been good to see you again, Clovis. I didn't realize how lonely I was until tonight."

THIS IS NOT WHAT I CALL “REKINDLING A FRIENDSHIP” PADME THIS IS STRAIGHT UP FLIRTING.

And I know, I know, she has to get close to him but goddamm did she ever heard about subtlety? Do I have to once again breach the barriers of reality to go teach the art of keeping men at arms length to Padmé Amidala? (I’m not particularly proud of it but it’s something I did a few time because... I’m not a good person? I suppose? And, really, it’s not that complicated?) If she doesn’t want him to make a move on her too soon she’s got to make him doubt. If he’s too sure of himself and does make a move she’s gonna have to reject him (because she won’t really cheat on Anakin, even for the mission). And if she rejects him, this is over.

After all this was a terrible idea. She’s gonna fuck up, because her only experiences are with that guy and Anakin and we all know how it went down with Anakin.

OH. MY. GODS. THIS IS HILARIOUS.

ANAKIN UNDER COVER AND SUPER JEALOUS WHY FUCKWIT SENATOR KISSES HIS WIFE ON THE CHEEKS IN SLOW MO AND “ALLOW ME MY LADY” AND “NO FUCKING WAY YOU’RE SITTING NEXT TO HER” AND SHE LOOKS HALF PISSED HALF PLEASED.

WHAT DID I SAID PADME IT WOULDN’T ALREADY BE A PROBLEM IF YOU HAD BEEN A BIT COLDER.

Also how many time has passed since the beginning of the episode? She’s still wearing the same clothes. I thought she had unlimited wardrobe or something?

Clovis: “Now let me take you back to your room so you can get dressed for dinner.”

See? Even him think you should change.

But she could have chosen something a bit more credible than that gravity defying dress:

Sceds above, his password is “Padmé”. Creep alert on!

Why is C3-PO so self centered?

So actually she didn’t really fucked up because she passed out before she could but one minute more and she would either had made out with him or hit him.

And apparently Anakin “never” doubted her but the fact that she thought he would tells a lot about their relationship.

 Wow I thought it would be politics and spy stuff but it was actually just about Anakin and Padmé and the question of trust in a couple. What a fucking misleading title.

Prev/Next

Five Seconds (Jimin Mind Control AU)

Character:Jimin

Genre: Mind Control AU, Body Guard AU, Fluff Angst

Author’s Note: Ahh I finally post something I’m so sorry we took so long! We plan to post a story for each BTS member before we post for each Seventeen member so do anticipate it!

~Admin Butterfly

Five seconds.

That was all it took for you to process and manipulate.

Process what people were thinking. Control how they acted. Process a person and manipulate their actions. It had been something you had been able to do since you emerged into your power at thirteen.

Success is compulsory. You would have never imagined being defeated before. 

In fact, you were so good at it that you had been hired to use it in your work, and you were the best at it.

No one was invulnerable to your ability, and thanks to you, your boss’s company was untouchable.

So untouchable that you had many assassination attempts made on you, mostly after when you rejected offers made from representatives of other companies. All of which you survived, though you couldn't say the same for those who had carried out the attempts, since you could defend yourself other than just depending on your superpower, which was really crucial since you never know when you would be in too much trouble to just use it.

Because in a world where superpowers existed and people earned money by making use of the ones they had, nothing much was illegal. If you were strong, you climbed to the top. If you were useful to someone, they gave you a job.

And since making money was one of the biggest priorities of those who owned businesses, the competition between the owners was really tight. Which also meant that they saw the powerful employees of their rivals as competition.

So your boss was like the top dog of the industry, thanks to you. And he gave you the title of his personal bodyguard, in which offered much riches that was more than satisfactory for you.

Since being top dog meant being rich, it meant that you had to attend all those one thousand and one boring parties and functions which he threw every few weeks, to keep an eye on your mortal boss who always seem to get in trouble when he’s drunk.

Because just because the business owners detested each other didn't mean that they didn't need to put up fronts in order to sign deals with each other.

And so that was how you found yourself leaning in a corner of an elegantly decorated room, a glass filled with red wine in one hand, the other twirling the hem of your itchy red sleeveless dress.

Hopefully he can’t handle his liquor today, you needed something to do.

Taking a sip, you scanned the room, watching as people mingled. Men in suits were gathered around your boss in the center, some had their hands around the waist of other women, there were snippets of conversation all around, sights which were familiar to you. Fake smiles and words covering up the real thoughts which they were harbouring towards each other, thoughts which you could pick up if you chose to, but had no desire to do so. Though maybe it would be interesting to know what type of powers they had.

You’d rather be at home watching a movie or at a park playing with the dogs that the owners had brought out for a walk. Fancy parties weren't your thing.

Bored to the point that you were considering controlling different people into doing stupid actions that would surely entertain you, except for the fact that your boss, Mr Kim Namjoon, wouldn't exactly approve, of that you were sure.

So that left leaning against the wall with a glass of wine, hoping that your role as wall decoration would be enough for the whole night.

Or so you thought.

You were interrupted from being a lonely ass by someone who leaned next to the wall against you. You looked up as he cleared his throat.

“Wonderful event, isn't it?” He said, before he rolled his eyes. “Except for the fact this place is really not my cup of tea.

You raised an eyebrow at him as he gave you a toast with a glass of wine, before drinking from it.

He had silvery gray hair, gray eyes and a sharp jaw, with plump red lips that smiled at you from behind his glass. He was dressed in a blue suit with a matching tie. Boy was he handsome.

“Park Jimin.” He introduced himself.

“Y/N, Y/L/N.” You told him, looking at him warily. Why was he talking to you?

As if he knew what you were thinking, he gave you another smile. “I was lonely, and I saw you here, so I thought maybe you'd be up for a chat.”

You narrowed your eyes at him. “I don't exactly do chit chat. Which company are you from, Mr Park Jimin?”

He gave you a small smirk. “Well, I don't know which company you are from. So I don't think I'll tell you mine.”

You looked at him suspiciously, before you relaxed yourself and peered at his face, trying to get into his mind, to find out what he was thinking, and who he worked for.

Five.

You ignored the crinkles in his face as he smiled at you.

Four.

You probed and went one full round in a wild goose chase.

Three.

You went up and down like a rollercoaster but no thoughts came to you.

Two.

Left and right but no words reached you.

One.

You hit an invisible wall.

You were met with a blank wall of nothingness. Frowning, you tried again but ten seconds later, and you were still met with the same result.

“You shouldn't try to barge into other people’ minds too often, you know?” You looked up at him, startled.

“How did you--?”

“I know a few other people with the same type of powers as you, if my conclusion on what your powers are is correct. And all of them can't read my mind, or manipulate my actions. They always have the same expression as yours when they try to do that for the first time and failed.” He told you as he gave you a slightly smug smile. Why he-

You stared at him, before you felt yourself relaxing and you tilted your head at him.

“I see. I’m from Mr Kim Namjoon’s company. What's your superpower then, Mr Park?”

He never told you that, somehow, you had never managed to ask him that question. It was like you weren't anxious enough to do so. It was the same as when you tried to ask him about the company he worked for.

Park Jimin was one person who you met constantly despite the fact that you didn't plan for it in your twenty years of existence.

You two had not met up intentionally after that evening had passed. But you did meet. You were drinking a martini at the bar when you felt someone slide into the seat next to you.

“How was your day, Miss Y/L/N?”

You looked beside you to see Park Jimin twirling a pen in his hand as he waved to the bartender and ordered a drink.

What the hell was he doing here?

You felt like ignoring him, but you instead turned to him and sighed.

“Exhausting, but alright.” You felt your tense shoulders relax. “The boss signed a big deal with a rival company. It was Mr Kim Taehyung’s company. Paperwork is tiring.”

You pursed your lips as you thought about Kim Taehyung’s company. They were the next richest and biggest company in the industry after yours and even if he and your boss were constantly signing deals with each other, it was just for the benefits each company gave to the other. You knew that the moment there was a chance, either company would try to throw the other off their footing. And you had been scouted by Kim Taehyung’s company before. Though surprisingly, he had not sent anyone to make an attempt on your life yet.

You looked at Jimin. “You never told me what your company was.”

He hummed. “Does it really matter?”

“Well, it does.” You said.

The bartender arrived with his drink and Park Jimin gave you a small smirk, his eye smile warming you up slightly.

“Well, I don't know about that. Bottoms up, Y/N.”

You don't know why you didn't bother correcting him when he addressed you by your first name, but you didn't.

It wasn't everyday you could meet someone whose mind you couldn't read. He's an interesting one.

The weeks passed and you constantly bumped into Park Jimin, whom you had at some point of time began to address at Jimin, and soon, you two met up when you could. As to why, you weren't really sure. Maybe you just felt like it.

“Why do I even call you Jimin?” You mused once when you two had bumped into each other and the park. You were feeding the ducks there when he had tapped your shoulder from behind.

“Why, what would you call me instead?” He turned to look at you.

“I don't know, Park? Since we are at a park?” You wondered as you looked at him, only to see him letting out a soft chuckle and smiling brightly at you. You found yourself staring at him since his smile lit up his whole face.

Beautiful.

“Punny. But no.” He told you.

“Actually,” you began. “Since it's a sunny day, and you've got such a bright smile, I'll call you sunshine.”

It would be like dates at cafes or maybe dinner after work. Or even once, when you were too tired to go out for food after a particularly exhausting day, he would bring dinner over and watch you eat in your pajamas and sit down to watch a movie with you.

“Nice PJs.” He would snicker when he saw your train patterned pajamas.

“Shut up.” You told him as you snatched the packet of chips from his hand.

“You know, for someone like you, isn't Barbie a bit too childish?”

“The movie’s nicer than your personality, sunshine.” You yawned as you shoved him towards the sofa. “Pass me the remote control.”

A few weeks later and after more progress between the two of you, you found yourself leaning against the wall at yet another similar event to the one which you had first met Jimin at. You scanned the room, Jimin had said that he would be at the event too. Maybe it would be a good time to find out which company he worked for again.

Not that you hadn't tried during all the times you had met each other, your powers never ever worked and you had never been to worried about it, though.

But maybe you should be.

He leaned against the wall next to you and whispered in your ear.

“You look beautiful.”

You rolled your eyes as you turned to look at him. “If you were hoping that I would drop my glass, then you hoped in vain.”

“This feels familiar, doesn't it?” He said. “Like how we first met. And I'm not kidding, you do look good in red, Y/N.” He said as he gestured to your dress. It was red again, but of a different design. Jimin was wearing a black suit with a gray tie this time, the tie bringing out his eyes. You scoffed.

“You don't look too bad yourself.”

You walked to where people were serving drinks to refill your glass, when a middle aged lady in a long dress accidentally tripped and fell near you, the wine in her glass splashing onto your dress, staining the top half of it.

“Oh!” You gasped.

“I'm so sorry!” The lady told you, giving you an apologetic look.

You shook your head. “It's alright.” Ignoring the looks from those surrounding you, you hurried out of the room after a nod from your boss, who was standing beside Mr Kim Taehyung. The latter gave you a long look before turning back to your boss.

You headed towards the washroom to clean up the stain on your dress to the best you could, until it was barely visible, before walking out of the door.

Only to find Park Jimin leaning against the wall in the empty hallway.

“Are you okay, Y/N?”

You nodded. “Yeah, what are you doing here? Shouldn't you be inside?”

“I wanted to save this for another time, but then now would be a perfect time to do it.”

He glanced around before giving you an intense stare, which caused you to squirm a little bit, not noticing how he walked towards you and pinned you to the wall.

You two were so close to each other now, your noses barely touching.

“I came here, because I've got something to tell you.”

And his lips were on yours.

It felt heavenly when his lips were molding into yours, your tongues intertwined. Jimin grabbed your waist as he tilted his head while you grabbed his hair, both fighting for dominance.

You felt something bloom in your chest.

It felt so right, but you couldn't help the nagging feeling in the back of your mind as he pulled away.

He gave you a small smirk.

“If you were expecting a love confession, then you are sadly wrong.”

You were confused as he connected his lips with yours again before he leaned in to whisper something in your ear, just as you felt something cut your chest.

“Who I work for? Kim Taehyung.”

You stared at him in shock as he pulled away, your mouth open wide as he gave you a smug smile, while you stood frozen and unable to do anything as he drove a knife into your chest.

“You've been a really big pain in his neck, Y/N. Thanks to you he's been unable to rise to the top above your boss, you know. All this time we accidentally bumped into each other, I planned it, all to get your trust since you were so hard to kill, even without your special power. I've heard about how all the other assassins ended up like.”  

Pain, like fire,  blazed through your whole body and your breathing started becoming irregular, as you gasped for air and tried to ignore the piercing sting in your chest each time you inhaled. You pressed one hand on his, and the other on his chest to push him away, but he was much stronger than you.

“Aww don't look so betrayed. There's no one here to save you.” He smirked at you. “I haven't even told you what my power is yet. Though I must say that I thought avoiding the question would be kind of hard at first.” He said as he looked at the blood flowing from your body down your dress. “Red really looks good on you.”

“My power? I control feelings, and I controlled you to open up to me.” He caressed your cheek. “Wanna know why you couldn't read my mind or manipulate me? And why you are seemingly relaxed with me and were never anxious to ask me questions about my identity?”

He drove the knife deeper through your heart.

“Because when it comes to the heart, the mind renders useless. That's why there's the saying follow your heart. Your heart is like your instinct, no amount of rationality will overcome it.” He sighed. “Pity though, I did like you for company.”

He looked at his watch.

“It'll probably take another five more seconds before your heart stops beating.”

He bent down to press a kiss to your forehead as you slumped to the floor, eyes forever wide on your face, just like a rag doll.

“Sweet dreams, Y/N.”

"But the problem with me was that as soon as I started thinking about getting it together, I got this mad craving desire to fuck it up." Rebecca Godfrey“I am an over-thinker and an over-feeler. Over-lover. Over- needer. I would flood you. I would drown your respectable standoffishness. I don’t get over things, but I get under them well. I’d love you and you’d soak me through. You couldn’t handle me even if you wanted to.” Rebeka Anne, some people think I’m too much "I just want to pour my soul out onto someone and not have to worry about the mess I've made" "Sometimes I’m certain  those who are happy  know one thing more than us…  or one thing less."  - Anne Michaels “The Weight of Oranges” “I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.” Haruki Murakami “Find something that you’re passionate about, devote your time and energy to it. But make sure what you’re passionate about is not a person, but a thing.”“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.” Anaïs Nin“You have to accept that some people are not made for deep conversations, or for holding you together when you’re about to fall apart, or for keeping you from unzipping your skin, or for talking you out of suicide, or to love you through the worst moments of your life. Some people are made for shallow exchanges, and ridiculous banter, and nothing more. And that’s okay. That doesn’t make them horrible people because they simply aren’t able to handle a storm like you. It doesn’t make you a bad person because you won’t divulge all the gritty details of your horror show. It makes you smart. You have to accept that there will be people that cannot give you what you need. It doesn’t mean they are not worth keeping in your life. You just have to figure out who these ones are before you’re disappointed. And you have to keep them at arm’s length. You cannot expect everyone in your life to understand, to be nonjudgmental, to get it. But that’s okay, because not everyone was made to impart wisdom, or wax-poetic, or speak on politics and the depravity of society, or discuss how crucial it is that the stigma of mental illness be abolished. There are times when you have to get away from all that heaviness. You have to. And you will need superficial conversation about Kim Kardashian’s arse, or a debate on the colour of The Dress. You will need those ones. So don’t go round cutting people off and dropping your friends. You need people for all your seasons. You need people or you won’t survive this.” What my therapist told me this morning“Sometimes I wish I wasn’t as conscious as I am. It would be so much easier.” River Phoenix “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”  Sylvia Plath “I’m tired" “Sleep” “No you don’t understand” Do you understand?“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours–that is what you must be able to attain.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll “Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives.” Anna Quindle“It would be that time - late at night - when your ears reach for any sound. When you can see more with your eyes closed than open.” Diary - Chuck Palahniuk“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut “I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.” Andrei Tarkovsky “I’m one of those people who believe that words are some of the last forms of magic that exist” Lana Del Rey “She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, “I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”” Haruki Murakami,  Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman “… we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water? Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.” East of Eden - John Steinbeck “I crave so much more than just a physical connection. I crave words and depth. I crave who you are and where you came from, your desires and fears. I yearn to know every inch of you beyond the surface.”“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the…man who walks past [you]…at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…” Timothy Leary  http://ift.tt/2l1RShO have very intense conversations with friends, people I really interconnect with. We talk about politics, important things. I like to talk about ideas and get people to be specific.” Jacqueline Bisset “Date someone who is interested in you. I don’t mean someone who thinks you’re cute or funny. I mean someone who wants to know every insignificant detail about you. Someone who wants to read every word you write. Someone who wants hear every note of your favourite song, and watch every scene of your favourite movie. Someone wants to find every scar upon your body, and learn where each one came from. Someone who wants to know your favourite brand of toothpaste, and which quotes resonate deep inside your bones when you hear them. There is a difference between attraction and interest. Find the person who wants to learn every aspect of who you are, and hold onto them.”I stopped explaining myself when I realized, People only understand from their level of perception“She’s never where she is. She’s only inside her head.” White Oleander by Janet Fitch“What I hate is ignorance, smallness of imagination, the eye that sees no farther than its own lashes. All things are possible. Who you are is limited only by who you think you are.” Egyptian Book of the Dead“I am homesick for a place I am not sure even exists. One where my heart is full. My body loved. And my soul understood.” Unknown you find a woman with a wild heart do not try to tame her. You must adore her recklessly, the way she is meant to be loved. Do not try to quiet her, for her roars will reach far and wide. She has something important to say. Help her say it. Do not get in her way. She stops for no one. Do not try to change the path she has chosen. Learn also to love the wind and let it change you.” C.B. Wild-Hearted Woman “I am not a puzzle to be solved. I am someone to be experienced- a soul to be tasted” jenn satsun“To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground "Never have I dealt with anything more difficult than my own soul."“Sometimes words come out of me and I don’t know where they come from or why. They’re like falling stars tumbling through the universe; bright, burning things that can’t be stopped.” Glenda Millard, A Small Free Kiss in the Dark “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”“My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.” Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals & Notebooks “We’re all kind of weird and twisted and drowning.” Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood“I remained to much inside my head and ended up losing my mind.” Edgar Allen Poe “Protect yourself from your own thoughts.” Rumi I try to maintain a healthy dose of daydreaming to remain sane.” Florence Welch “I’m self-sufficient. I spend a lot of time on my own and I shut off quite easily. When I communicate, I communicate 900%, then I shut off, which scares people sometimes.” Björk "Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again." Bernhard Schlink“I’ve always believed one could live many lives…even if just in our imagination. The world is open to us, and each day is an occasion to reinvent ourselves.” Ralph Lauren"I hunger for intensity. For love, affection, for tangible. For ineffable. For infinity. For discovery.  I hunger for knowledge. Life is filled with wanders and wonders. Die knowing something. Die loving something."“I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.” To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father, Donald Miller “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer“I am a jumble of passions, misgivings, and wants. It seems that I am always in a state of wishing and rarely in a state of contentment.” The Sweet Far Thing, Libba Bray “All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.” Julio Cortazar“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your soul. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” Franz Kafka“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music— the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” Henry Miller Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.” Anthony Bourdain “Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning.” Elie Wiesel, Dawn “And like the sea, I’m constantly changing from calm to hell.” Dallas Green “Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.” Christopher Morley“I feel so shut out, I’m always homesick. But when I get home. I find it’s something else I’m longing for.” Autumn Sonata “Without deep conversation, my mind becomes restless. I need passion and intellect, it’s a shame that a person often lacks one or the other.”“I didn’t say I liked it. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.” Oscar Wilde, adapted from The Picture of Dorian Gray “I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night”“Loneliness is dangerous. It’s addicting. Once you see how peaceful it is, you don’t wanna deal with people.” Hedonist Poet“I want to be loved and to be left alone.” David Swanger, “My Mother’s Nudes"“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” Emily Dickinson“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things which I dare not confess to my own soul.” Bram Stoker, Dracula“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” Virginia Woolf, The Waves“Not everyone can feel things as deeply as you. Most people, their feelings are … bland, tasteless. They’ll never understand what it’s like to read a poem and feel almost like they’re flying, or to see a bleeding fish and feel grief that shatters their heart…” Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See “And never have I felt so deeply at one and, at the same time, so detached from myself, and so present in the world.” Albert Camus“My human capabilities aren’t sufficient enough to help translate what my soul wants to express.” JMC“Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.” Jean Baudrillard “We approach the void…but not to fall into it. We want to become intoxicated with dizziness and the image of the fall is sufficient.” Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality“If you’re ever lucky enough to find a girl who is a hopeless romantic with a dirty mind, you should hold onto that. Because she’ll be yours at two in the morning and at two in the afternoon the following day. She’ll kiss you where it hurts and until it hurts. And that’s important. Someone who not only knows how to turn you on but also knows how to treat you right is someone worth a little something… and a little more than usual.”“I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive. Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.” Paul Auster“I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know–unless it be to share our laughter. We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.” James Kavanaugh“Does she scare you a little? Good. She should make you fear her love, so that when she lets you be apart of it, you won’t take it lightly. She should remind you of the power that beauty brings, that storms reside in her veins, and that she still wants you in the middle of it all. Do not take this soul for granted, for she is fierce, and she can take you places that you never thought you could go; but she is still loving in the midst of it all, like the calm rain after a storm, she can bring life. Learn her, and cherish her, respect her, and love her; for she is so much more than a pretty face, she is a soul on fire.” T.B. LaBerge // Things I’m still learning at 25“Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small.” The Waves, Virginia Woolf"We are meant to discover our authentic nature-- the state of being in which we are inspired by ourselves, turned on, lit up, and excited about who we are."  Debbie Ford“Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.” Charles Bukowski “All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life — where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.” Miranda July, from It Chooses You “I want to meet people with fire in them, burning through life like a forest fire, too many people die out and survive on embers.” Adam Zucconi “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.” Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, Adrienne Rich“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky.” Jack Kerouac “The hardest period in life is one’s twenties. It’s a shame because you’re your most gorgeous, and you’re physically in peak condition. But it’s actually when you’re most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s frightening.” Helen Mirren “I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me…I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person.” Sylvia Plath“I just want to think deeply about things. Contemplate ideas in a pure, free sort of way. That’s all.” Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage “Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.” Charles Baudelaire “You have to be interested. If you’re not interested, you can’t be interesting.” Iris Apfel “I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.” The Help, Kathryn Stockett “Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.” Haruki Murakami,The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle“Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.” Charles Bukowski (from Ham On Rye)“Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep.” Haruki Murakami, 1Q84“Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.” High Fidelity - Nick Hornby “For every devious scream in my head there is a divine whisper and it saves me every time.” VàZaki Nada“In man’s memories there are those things that he doesn’t reveal to all, but perhaps only to his friends. And then there are those he won’t reveal even to his friends, but perhaps only to himself, and even then in confidence. But then, finally, there are those that a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and any decent man accumulates quite enough of those things.” Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky“I feel too much. That’s what’s going on. Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel the wrong ways? My insides don’t match up with my outsides. Do anyone’s inside and outsides match up? I don’t know. I’m only me. Maybe that’s what a person’s personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside. But it’s worse for me. I wonder if everyone thinks it’s worse for him. Probably. But it really is worse for me.” Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.” Aldous Huxley“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.”“People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.” Benjamin Alire Sáenz“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that’s ok with them.” Alain de Botton“Let’s clear one thing up: Introverts do not hate small talk because we dislike people. We hate small talk because we hate the barrier it creates between people.” Laurie Helgoe“Remember that the world began in a manic episode, too. God likes to hoard sharp  things, just like you. We are saving you. And we need to hear it one more time: Who knows best?” Lydia Havens, From the Voices, published in “Pouch” “Keep interested in others; keep interested in the wide and wonderful world. Then in a spiritual sense you will always be young.” Fredric March“fernweh [feyrn-vey]” (noun) This wonderful, untranslatable German word describes the feeling of homesickness for a far away land, a place you have never visited. Do not confuse this with the english word, wanderlust; Fernweh is much more profound, it is the feeling of an unsatisfied urge to escape and discover new places, almost a sort of sadness. You miss a place you have never experienced, as opposed to lusting over it or desiring it like wanderlust. You are seeking freedom and self-discovery, but not a particular home.“Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.” Rebecca Solnit“Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.”“I’m very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.” Antonia Fraser“I stay up just late enough until I am just exhausted enough that I can fall into my bed and sink into immediate slumber. Because I can’t stand lying in a bed in a dark room alone with just my thoughts for so many hours and hours.”“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift.” Mary Oliver“I crave space. It charges my batteries. It helps me breathe. Being around people can be so exhausting, because most of them love to take and barely know how to give. Except for a rare few.” Unknown“The ability to sit down with another person and talk for hours, about anything and everything, is more attractive to me than anything else.” Koi Fresco“The power to bring me out of solitude – or to push me back into it – had never belonged to another person. It was mine and only mine.” Martha Beck“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.” The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” bell hooks“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplace of existence.” Sherlock Holmes from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle “Suffering and pain are always obligatory for a broad consciousness and a deep heart. Truly great men, I think, must feel great sorrow in this world.” Fyodor Dostoevsky (from Crime and Punishment)“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” Rainer Maria Rilke"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights“I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin” Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl“He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.” Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights“I’m not totally mad at you. I’m just sad. You’re all locked up in that little world of yours, and when I try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside.” Haruki Murakami “I cannot stand small talk, because I feel like there’s an elephant standing in the room shitting all over everything and nobody is saying anything. I’m just dying to say, ‘Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?’ or ‘Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?’ But you can’t say that at a…party.” Paul Gilmartin, The Mental Illness Happy Hour“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive. It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human. It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy. I want to know if you can see beauty even when it’s not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!” It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children. It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back. It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.” Oriah Mountain Dreamer“I’m half child half ancient.”I am fucking insane but my intentions are gold and my heart is pure“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?” Don DeLillo“Everyone has a 2 AM and a 2 PM personality.”“My problem is that I fall in love with words, rather than actions. I fall in love with ideas and thoughts, instead of reality. And it will be the death of me.” “My nights are for overthinking, my mornings are for oversleeping.”“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood"George Orwell, 1984“‘I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless, it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.’” Louis C.K.“I’m not the same everyday. There are times where I’m loud and chatty, and there are times when I’m really quiet. I don’t think I can define myself.”“Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole.” Richard Siken, Spork Editor’s Pages: Black Telephone“There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought.” Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortal from Labyrinths, “Pick my brain. Ask me about my views on something. Dig deeper than the obvious. Let’s make each other think. Show me a different perspective.”“I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good.” Roal Dahl "I have the deepest affection for intellectual conversations. The ability to just sit and talk. About love, about life, about anything, about everything. To sit under the moon with all the time in the world, the full-speed train that is our lives slowing to a crawl. Bound by no obligations, barred by no human limitations. To speak without regret or fear of consequence. To talk for hours and about what's really important in life."“Human beings are made of water, we were not designed to hold ourselves together; rather run freely like oceans like rivers” Beau Taplin "You're under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.""How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?"I am no longer afraid of becoming lost, because the journey back always reveals something new and that is ultimately good for the soul. “Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.” Janet Fitch, White Oleander“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” AristotleIt was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.“I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.” Michael Faudet My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover. ~ Falsely yours“I don’t like small talk. Talk to me about life. Talk to me about your scars and the concealer you call your smile. Talk to me about the story behind your favorite song. Tell me about your dreams that sometimes seem too big for the Earth to contain. Tell me what wakes you up in the morning before your alarm clock does. Tell me about what makes shivers run down your spine. Tell me about what makes your eyes light up like the stars I can’t see in New York City. Tell me your story.”“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?” Clarice Lispector, A Hora Da Estrela “I appreciate the people who take time to look at the world a little deeper”Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Be curious.” Stephen Hawking"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world. But then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me, who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there, thinking of me too. Well, I hope, that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes it's true. I'm here and I'm just as strange as you.""There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself"

https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/5v96c6/extensionalism/?utm_source=ifttt

Playgirl: An intimate conversation with pop’s preeminent pair. (February, 1985)

(Note: This post is dedicated to @thecutteralicia, who originally requested it. I’m so sorry it took so long to type it up and post it on the blog. 😥 I hope you enjoy the article – subjects include Paul and Linda’s courtship, their household and attitude towards family life, and John’s upbringing in comparison to Paul’s.)

–

by Diane de Dubovay

They are a most extraordinary pair. Rich: They control a fortune rumoured to be in excess of one-half billion dollars. Famous: They are heirs to the golden legend of the Beatles. Yet Paul and Linda McCartney, married now for 15 years, seem determined to be nothing other than ordinary people. In many aspects of their life, they cling ferociously to their working roots and attitudes.

Says 42-year-old Paul: “I don’t want to be lonely guy on the hill—like J. Paul Getty.” Although Paul was knighted by the queen of England, the McCartneys do not mix with the high society. “We live and work with ordinary people,” he says. “We don’t stray much into the upper classes. We don’t go to hunt balls. Our children aren’t debs.”

“Rich people’s big homes usually feel so empty,” Linda observes. Instead, the McCartneys and their four children live in the Sussex countryside in a modest, five-bedroom home of Paul’s own design, overrun with animals and children, where the center of family life is the kitchen. There are no servants—just Rose, a cockney cleaning lady who comes in once a week “to do the heavy work” and some occasional baby-sitting. Linda, who was born into the affluence of maids, country clubs and East Coast American-establishment life, does all the housework and child-rearing herself. And she has the dark circles under her eyes and the dishpan hands to prove it.

“I consider myself a peasant,” she says. “I guess I rebelled against the privilege I was born into. To tell you the truth, I never had a friend in my life until I moved to Arizona, except one girlfriend from high school. I’m not a girly, gossipy person. I always got along very nicely with animals. My kids are my best friends.”

“There’s nothing wrong with living in the grand manner, but I was never comfortable with it. I found it pretentious and shallow. I never liked having servants around. It’s not just an invasion of your privacy—after a while, you been to feel like they own you.”

As they talk, Paul constantly squeezes Linda’s arm reassuringly, strokes her hand or looks to her for approval or agreement whenever he makes a point. The two are inclined to talk at once or to finish each other’s sentences. At times, the link is so tight, they seem almost like different aspects of one person.

Linda has been attacked by the British press, viciously at times, for her lack of artifice and style. On the day of this interview, she is wearing a simple wool pullover sweater, plain flannel skirt, Mickey Mouse ankle socks and worn walking shoes. Yet the tousled blond hair, lack of makeup, unshaven legs and serviceable clothes seem to be her way of saying, “Look, I’m too busy living to bother with being a glamour girl.” And, in person, it is this naturalness and modesty that make Linda so appealing.

Says Paul: “I value common sense, earthiness, no bull, kindness, no airs and graces. I hate people who don’t have any earth to them. I hate to be around people who just crumble in a crisis—or with whom you can’t have a good laugh.

“What do I like best about Linda? She’s loving, emotional, practical—and sexy. Yes, I like a bit of emotion. We have our rows and disagreements. People have this image of us—‘Oh, isn’t it wonderful; the perfect marriage.’ But our marriage isn’t an idyll. We had a row the day before we got married and nearly called off the wedding.

“I’d characterize our relationship as rather volatile. But we’re not bored. We’re still interested in each other. It’s lusty. We have wonderful children and a lovely marriage. And yes, I expect it to go on forever.”

How do they resolve their rows? “You don’t speak to each other for about three years,” Linda quips half-jokingly. “One of us finally gives in,” she adds seriously. “Usually me.”

“Ah now, wait a minute,” Paul teases. “If you’re not careful, we may end up having a row.” And then he adds, “We may separate for a moment, get in separate rooms… while we calm down.”

The McCartneys met in a London rock club called Bag O’Nails back in the sixties. “It sounds silly,” says Linda, “but our eyes met and something just clicked. It was like a cartoon.”

“We were both with other friends,” Paul recalls. “I saw this blond across the room and I fancied her. So when she passed my table, I said something stupid like, ‘Hello, how are you? Let me take you away from all this.’ Linda happened to know one of the friends I was with. So after chatting for a bit, we left and went to another club. Linda had come over from America to do photographs for a book on rock stars.”

Stories about how Linda “chased” Paul have been rampant ever since. But, in reality, it was the other way around. Theirs was an on-and-off courtship—or, as Paul puts it, “an on and on-hold relationship,” due to the fact that they were usually separated by continents and oceans. Linda had been married before—unhappily—and was raising a daughter from that marriage, Heather, on her own while working as a struggling free-lance photographer in New York.

The first time Paul proposed, they were in Chinatown. He had spotted a Buddhist temple. “Buddhist-Shmuddist,” he said. “Let’s get married. We’ll be done in half an hour.”

“No way,” said Linda.

“Fair enough,” said Paul, and they went out for a Chinese dinner.

“I come from a very academic family,” Linda explains. “My father was brilliant. My brother was brilliant. They both went to Harvard Law School and did very well. I was not a good student. All I ever cared about were animals, rock music and photography. I was a great disappointment to my family When I got married [to a geologist] and moved to Arizona, it was crazy. I had been pressured by men all my life. I rather liked being on my own, making my own decisions. I had actually sworn to myself that I would never get married again.”

Back in London, a slight obstacle to their romance was Paul’s well-publicised live-in affair with British actress Jane Asher. “It’s funny,” observes Paul. “Before I met Linda, I had been to a clairvoyant in Brighton and she told me, ‘You’re going to marry a blond and have four children.’ ‘A blond? My girlfriend’s a redhead, and we surely don’t intend to have four children.’ Most people thought I was due to marry Jane Asher—I rather thought I was, too. But I just kept remembering Linda, this nice blond American girl.

“Both Linda and I were ravers back then,” Paul admits. “But that’s one of the reasons our marriage has worked. We had both sown our wild oats and gotten it out of our system. We got it all out before we were married.

“I persuaded Linda to come to London for a visit. Then I rang Heather in New York and said, ‘Heather, will you marry me?’ She was five. ‘No, don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I’m too young.’ ‘Well, I can wait,’ I said. So we went to New York and brought her back to London to live with us, and I twisted Linda’s arm and finally she agreed to marry me. Linda was afraid it wouldn’t work out. And I kept telling her, ‘Aw, come on, it will be fine. Don’t worry.’ I’m still telling her that.”

It was Linda’s influence, apparently, that brought the boozing, pub-crawling Paul back to his family and roots and that probably helped him survive the wealth, violence and dissipation that tainted so many others on the pop-music scene. Of the show-biz cronies he hung out with in that period, Paul recalls, “We were crazy—and openly crazy. Living the artist’s life in London.

“Around about that time, in the sixties, people started to say that family life was finished, that family as a unit was gone. We saw all that talk come and go: ‘People don’t want to get married anymore; women are asserting themselves.’ We just didn’t go for it. We knew that was supposed to be the fashion. Many of our friends were not getting married but were having common-law marriages and calling their kids funny names like Zowie or Wow or Moondust. Can you imagine a kid at 10 with a name like Zowie? All the other kids in school would make fun of him.

“It was a media trip. Maybe some journalists or some artist friends of mine in London weren’t getting married, but everyone I knew in Liverpool was. And I’m sure Philadelphia steel workers were still getting married. They didn’t listen to all that rubbish.

“I remember announcing to the other Beatles that we’d called our first daughter Mary. And they said, ‘Mary? Really?’ ‘Yeah,’ I said. It’s a nice, sweet, traditional name. Lovely. My mum was called Mary. And Stella, another daughter, is named after my grandma. It just seemed depressingly ordinary to them.”

Although the McCartneys have made a few close friends among their neighbours and among musicians and artists with whom they have worked, their social life has always revolved around the family. “My mum and dad didn’t have friends,” recalls Paul, who holds up his working-class parents as the ideal against which he had always measured his own personal life. “They had relatives—aunties, uncles and cousins. As I was growing up, I was always having babies thrust at me. It was like a big Italian family.

“Lind and I went to visit John and Yoko after they had their baby, and they said, ‘Don’t touch the baby—he doesn’t know you.’ That just shows the difference between us. Just this morning, Linda and I were in a restaurant and I picked up a lady’s baby and was saying, ‘Coochie, coochie.’”

At the mention of John Lennon, whom Paul regarded as a brother, his nerves still go raw. During the tortured, acrimonious breakup of the Beatles, John used his songs to publicly insult Paul. One particularly cruel reference to Paul’s musical abilities was a line which went: “Your songs are like Muzak to my ears.”

“Obviously, I was hurt by that stuff,” admits Paul. “But you have to understand about John. If you actually look at John’s life, in a nutshell, you find a kid whose father had run away from home when he was three. So he’s got to have felt a little deflated by that. Then he lived with his aunt and uncle, not with his mother. Then the uncle died, and he was brought up by his aunt. Then when he was 16, his mother came to visit and was killed—knocked down outside his house by a police car. And then he got married and that didn’t work. He didn’t get on with his first son because, due to his background, he didn’t know how to be with kids. Not to be big-headed, but I always got on with babies.

“John idolised his mother. But she was living with this guy we didn’t like too much. I remember her well. We both used to really like her because she played a bit of banjo, and she got John into guitar. She used to sing, ‘Girl of My Dreams,’ and that was always his favourite song. So what I’m saying about John is, he didn’t have too much luck until he met Yoko.

“It was a weird time. The people who were managing us were whispering in our ears and trying to turn us against each other and it became like a feuding family. In the end, I think John had some tough breaks. He used to say, ‘Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon.’ He wrote ‘I’m Just A Jealous Guy’, and he said that the song was about me. So I think it was just some kind of jealousy. I had to try and forgive John because I sort of knew where he was coming from. I knew that he was trying to get rid of the Beatles in order to say to Yoko, ‘Look, I’ve even given that up for you. I’m ready to devote myself to you and to the avant-garde.’ I don’t know if it’s true. One thing I’m really glad about is that I didn’t answer him back. It’s very difficult to do that when someone is attacking you. But I would have felt sick as a dog now if I had.”

Paul and Linda say they created their band Wings so that Paul could stay in training as a musician and get back to his musical roots by performing in small halls, which provide close give-and-take between audience and artist.

But the McCartneys came under savage attack for having the audacity to present Linda, an untrained musician, onstage. “At Paul’s age,” says David Thorpe, a London photographer who worked with Paul for years, “Cole Porter was writing his greatest music. Paul needs the stimulus of great artists around him—because he really is a wonderful musician. What people object to is that by keeping Linda around, and including her in his act, he is making children’s music instead of stretching and reaching his full potential.”

In retrospect, Paul says, “Linda’s inclusion in the band was like saying, ‘Would you like to play tennis with Bjorn Borg?’ We can see that now. We couldn’t see it then. It might have been wise to insist that Linda take a lot of lessons, or for both of us to go on a big TV talk show to explain ourselves. I just basically wanted Linda with me—instead of her staying at home while I was out on tour somewhere.”

In recent years, at Paul’s urging, Linda has put the instruments aside to devote herself full time to homemaking as an art. “Linda really doesn’t like housework,” Paul explains, “because when she grew up, her family had maids and she wasn’t taught to do anything. But it’s something I’ve tried to tell Linda about because in the kind of family I’m from, housework is considered a pleasure—the smell of ironing and the laundry. Where I’m from, once a week, the women would sort of get the laundry out and smell the washing and feel it and see it and iron it all, and they’d be chatting or listening to the radio. It was like a peasant thing. It was an event, like treading on the grapes.

“I know it sounds a bit chauvinistic,” says Paul, slightly embarrassed, “but it’s how I was brought up.”

The McCartney family schedule is late to bed (“after the last program on the telly goes off”) and early to rise. Linda is up and preparing breakfast by 7 A.M. There is no nightclubbing. “We’ve done all that,” says Paul, “and we’re bored with it.”

The question is, with all their money, how will Paul and Linda ease their children into the kind of normal adult life they value? “We’re going to spend it all, then they won’t have a problem,” says Linda.

“Actually,” says Paul, “we’ve taken a very conscious approach. Our kids have been brought up in the state school system. They don’t go to private schools. It’s not that we’re against people having privilege. But I figure i we did that with our kids, they’d have privilege and then more privilege.

“So what we’ve tried to do is bring them up like they’re not going to inherit anything—ever. Like we’ve spent it all. They’re being brought up just like ordinary kids. They go to ordinary schools; they do exams, just like everyone else. They go to discos. They do everything ordinary. We’ve got arrangements that if we die, they’ll get whatever money is left, just like in any normal family. But there are no trust funds.

“The idea is,” says Paul, “if we can get their feet on the ground and see that they grow up as normal people, then they won’t hate someone just because he’s a bus conductor—or because he’s big or small. You know, they can actually talk to a street cleaner and not think, ‘Oh, this man’s beneath me.’ My kids don’t behave like that.”

“I don’t know how much money I have,” says Paul, who recently wrote and starred in the $10 million Give My Regards to Broad Street. “My dad never told my mum how much he earned. Linda still doesn’t know. You could never convince me that I had earned enough.” Strange as it seems, Paul retains his working-class mentality about money and is convinced that if he stops working, he might lose it all. Already taxed 80 to 90 per cent of his income, he worries about a communist takeover in socialist England.

“I dragged myself up off a Liverpool back street,” he says, “with all that touring and hard work, and a friend of mine explained to me that if there were a communist takeover they might take it all away.” At this, Linda becomes alarmed. “Don’t worry Lin,” he says reassuringly. “I’ve checked it out. They can’t.”

“Paul can’t be earning what they say,” says Linda. “It’s mad. My philosophy about money is that as long as we have enough to live on, with a little extra in the bank, we don’t need any more. I live as if I don’t have a lot of money. I don’t wear jewelry, for example. As far as food goes, we’re vegetarian, so that’s very cheap. I don’t do it for health reasons, but because I love animals.”

“I’m ambitious,” says Paul. “I’m a fighter, a builder, a go-getter. And I wouldn’t want to switch that ambition off. Linda is more content than I am. She’s not as ambitious, which I think is good. If I said to her, ‘You’ve got your house, your animals, your kids, that will do you,’ she’d say, ‘Fine.’

“I’ve got all these contingency plans. I tend to look at the worst side of things. I’ll say, ‘If they turn us down, we’re going to do this.’ If anything hurts me, I want to fight it—so it doesn’t hurt me again.”

Not surprisingly, luxury to Linda is “a noncook holiday,” such as the one the McCartneys enjoyed last winter in Gstaad, Switzerland. “We rented a chalet and hired a cook and a cleaning lady so I got to go out skiing all day,” says Linda. “It was heaven.”

“That is luxury,” Paul agrees. “But to actually live like that all the time would get on your nerves, I think. You appreciate a holiday like that because you don’t have it all the time. At home, we all end up in the kitchen. I think that’s universal. There’s a big table there, and everybody always sits around the table. That’s where the food is—where the action is: sitting down to a meal with children in an atmosphere of warmth, mutual trust and family harmony. Being able to discuss your problems with people you love—there’s not a lot better than that in life.

“Growing up in Liverpool, that was always there for me. Even after my mum died, my aunties came around religiously every week and cooked and cleaned the house and did the laundry and provided that kind of atmosphere for us.”

“My parents were married for 25 years and they were like young lovers,” says Linda. “Paul’s parents were the same. If you’re lucky, you get that in life. You see, those are the kinds of things that matter to me—not the diamond necklace.”

Where Will Allforshow93 StripCamFun Be 1 Year From Now?

Greater than a decade in the past, Once i was increasing up in Finland, my product of an attractive female was Pamela Anderson from “Baywatch.” She was my father’s preferred. Every time the boys at school questioned me who I Googled when my mother and father weren’t property, I stated, “Pamela,” and also the identify was greeted by using a unanimous nodding of heads.

I didn’t treatment much for her nude photographs, but I preferred that she was of Finnish heritage.

My nonsexual inner thoughts for Pamela were just one of several things which produced me an outcast. Yet another was that I most popular personal computers to persons. And so, as a youngster who cherished participating in board video games, I quickly discovered I could Enjoy them on the web with strangers with a Finnish gaming Web site.

To obtain the internet site, you typed your user title while in the blank discipline, waited for any slot to open and afterwards uncovered you in the principle chat space, where you could problem folks to your spherical of blackjack, keno or billiards. Other than it appeared not one person else was there to Perform Those people video games critically. The screen was a continuing stream of filthy messages.

I noticed not one person needed http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=Allforshow93 to message using a boy in his early adolescence, but a lot of were being clamoring to talk with a sexy woman. And that’s wherever Pamela came in. To desire fellow gamers, I necessary to turn into a woman.

Utilizing Pamela’s age and several of her defining capabilities to create my new persona, I logged in towards the chat home as “CharlottaDD35.” Then the messages arrived pouring in.

I accepted an invite to Engage in billiards from Jarkko25. A screen popped up, and we were being escorted to A non-public area, where by an issue from him appeared inside the message box: “Are you experience frisky?”

“Why do you check with?” I typed.

“Could it be limited?” he requested.

I didn’t fully realize what he intended, but I understood it absolutely was dirty.

I waited a second after which wrote, “Yes.”

“Awesome,” he replied. “Age?”

“35,” I wrote. “But I love younger Adult men.”

“That’s sizzling. What do you seem like?”

I quickly Googled “Pamela+Anderson” and described what I noticed from the search results: “179 cm, blonde. I love to don heels and limited attire.”

“Mmmh. Do you've big breasts?”

“Indeed.”

“D-cups?”

“Yes.” I was firm to provide him everything he wanted.

“What kind of Gentlemen do you prefer?” he questioned.

Considering James Bond motion pictures, I stated: “Another person like Pierce Brosnan. Somebody who requires cost. Anyone trendy.”

“I am able to absolutely take cost,” he said.

I took a sip of my Kool-Assist. “6-pack?” I questioned. Now was time for me to be demanding; usually it wouldn’t seem real. Using a six-pack was a matter I’d listened to was desirable.

“Probably not,” he reported. “But I have one from the fridge.”

I laughed. Probably this man was wonderful.

What followed was my initial-at any time cybersex session, with him typing suggestive remarks and me typing, “Mmmh,” which looked as if it would perform for him.

My masquerade went on for months. I became a learn of giving Gentlemen the things they wished. The sheer amount of fascinated Adult men meant I might be picky, as well. I wished a conventionally handsome and pretty youthful gentleman. And considering the fact that I was a woman of these types of higher caliber, I didn’t Believe it absolutely was an excessive amount of to question.

I personalized my story to suit the opposite participants’ passions. I had been married with two young children. I'd a prosperous husband who couldn’t fulfill me sexually. We lived in a massive glass household with a private Seashore in one of Helsinki’s most distinctive suburbs. And due to the fact I had been a bored, lonely housewife, I normally required anyone to come back around and care for issues.

I discovered newbie pictures of naked women on line to send on the men and patched up regardless of what incongruities emerged: “The picture doesn’t Use a experience simply because I don’t want my partner to understand I’ve been submitting my shots on the net” or “I never give my quantity to strangers right until I’ve gotten to understand them very well ample.”

The back story also authorized me an escape just in case my dad and mom obtained household. “My partner just walked in, so I need to go now,” I would say. “Can’t wait around to talk to you quickly.”

I preferred this online seduction A great deal greater than I imagined I would. I explained to myself it was the Risk: of obtaining caught, of fooling the Gentlemen, of breaking rules. Whatever the scenario, I’d grow to be addicted. Each day right after school, I'd personally keep on my quest for the ideal gentleman.

That’s After i stumbled on Jussi. He described himself as a person who was 23, beloved the gym and had a 6-pack. He played ice hockey and basketball, masculine sports I’d usually wished to be superior at. But he was emotive much too. He despatched me messages such as, “You sound like an unbelievable lady” and “I'm able to feeling these types of heat in these messages of yours.”

He questioned me the usual thoughts: What are you donning? Exactly where do you like to do it? How do you like it?

I provided my standard answers: I used to be donning absolutely nothing (“I just acquired out of your shower and love to cool my body In a natural way”). I preferred executing it on just about every floor of the home and especially in public sites. All of the yoga I did designed me very adaptable, And that i beloved staying lifted up and twisted into adventurous sexual positions.

But then he started to look at what he hoped to uncover on the positioning: specifically, a romantic relationship that was actual and significant. I agreed I had been tired of sleeping all around far too. Typically I blocked a man at the time he began to insist on Conference in person, but Jussi was affected individual and sweet. I desired to continue conversing with him.

We logged in at the same time, day following day. I altered the routine around my school days by expressing, “I’ll ought to fall off the kids initially, so I gained’t be home right until three p.m. tomorrow.” He worked night time shifts for allforshow93 cam a safety guard, so he was constantly on-line Once i desired him being.

After a few weeks, he reported: “Can we meet presently? Please Charlotta.” He explained to me that he was Sick and tired of chatting Which if I didn’t say Sure, he wouldn’t think I was a true man or woman.

What we experienced was serious to me, and I didn’t desire to disappoint him. So I agreed.

We set a date for seven p.m. each week later. We agreed to meet on a street corner in the center of Helsinki, mere blocks from the place I lived. I hoped we'd figure out one another just because we had been chatting for therefore very long and experienced this sort of a powerful relationship.

As the times passed, nevertheless, the impossibility of it started to dawn on me. Even though I were to go meet him and have previous the First explanations, I could never come to be what he imagined me to get. And another thing dawned on me at the same time: I was starting to know I might be gay, and that’s why I was various from everyone else.

At seven p.m. that evening, my mother set sausages and French fries on the desk for dinner. I sat in silence, answering her questions having an absent-minded yes or no. Taking a look at the clock, it strike me: Jussi was now standing out while in the chilly evening, by yourself.

I wondered how long he would wait: Twenty minutes? 30? An entire hour? Would he camp out at a nearby cafe although wistfully on the lookout out of the window, hunting the passing group for Charlotta’s face?

I imagined him sitting around the bus on his way dwelling for the suburbs, hoping there’d been a mix-up: I’d both overlooked the day or mistaken time. I imagined him logging on to the chat room and scanning the checklist for my consumer name, only to return up empty: I’d blocked him to verify I didn’t have to read through by any excruciating messages.

A few several hours just after dinner, my mother came to knock on my doorway to tell me it absolutely was bedtime. As I lay by itself in the dark, I felt a similar loneliness Jussi have to have been sensation.

I would like there had been a way for me to inform him what his on-line companionship intended to me: That he had designed it possible for me to generally be myself inside of a strictly gendered world of Pamela Andersons and James Bonds. That he experienced helped me believe I had been funny, fascinating and price speaking to. That he had, if only by his presence, built it feasible for me to start to approach my sexuality.

By pretending for being somebody I was not, I'd shown him my genuine self, one particular I were too worried to expose to any person else. And in the end, I had been in the position to embrace that true self, an acceptance that may allow me — many years later on, as an Grownup in Ny city — to find real appreciate as an actual individual.

The Philosophical Fascists of the Gay Alt-Right

Jack Donovan — a 42-year-old skinhead icon and right-wing extremist — lived the gay life once. It was in the 1990s, after he left his parents’ blue-collar home in rural Pennsylvania to study fine art in New York, when he danced go-go in gay clubs hung out with drag queens and marched for gay pride. But then he dropped out, learned how to use tools and work as a manual laborer, studied MMA, and decided he wasn’t gay — just “an unrepentant masculinist.”

“I am not gay because the word gay connotes so much more than same-sex desire,” Donovan announced, under a pseudonym, on the first page of 2006’s Androphilia: A Manifesto: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity (echoing, probably unintentionally, the speech Tony Kushner wrote for Roy Cohn in Angels in America). “The word gay describes a whole cultural and political movement that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics.” He appropriated a new term, androphile, to describe a man whose love of masculinity includes sex with other men.

Gay men are remarkably prominent — if not exactly abundant — in the alt-right universe. Take the infamous Milo Yiannopoulos, who powered a meteoric rise and fall on the sheer cognitive dissonance between his flamboyant self-presentation and callous politics. (When Out magazine profiled Milo, the story’s writer Chadwick Moore “came out as a conservative.”) Or artist turned reporter Lucian Wintrich, who joined the White House press corps when Trump-cheering blog Gateway Pundit (edited by a gay man) received its first credential. But even those men seem relatively mainstream when you compare them with Donovan, who has contributed to “dapper white nationalist” (and friend) Richard Spencer’s journal, advocates for a form of “anarcho-fascism,” and founded a chapter of a masculinist “tribe” called the Wolves of Vinland, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. (One member recently served time for burning down a historically black church.) Which makes sense when he shows me photos from their neopagan fight-club rituals, which sometimes involve nooses.

To hear Donovan tell it, his sexuality is a nonissue. It’s a point echoed by several of his peers, who don’t see their political views and sexual identities as contradictory but complementary. “Masculinity is a religion, and I see potential for androphiles to become its priests,” Donovan wrote in Androphilia, “to devote themselves to it” in a way that men who understand their manliness through women — in quantifying the number they’ve slept with or measuring “men’s rights” against “women’s rights” — can’t. And so androphiles like Donovan have found common ground with the gender-traditionalists and male-advocacy groups elsewhere in the messy carnival of the new right, where reactions to women range from outright hostility to benign disinterest.

And they’re not interested in queer solidarity, either. “Apart from Camille Paglia, of course, I can’t think of any interesting lesbians,” gay white nationalist James O’Meara told me in an interview. Or as Donovan said, “I think most of them are so married to feminism that I don’t think that’s even an option.” To say nothing of trans issues, which most gay alt-righters rejected (“I know three transgender people in our movement,” Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson offered, before arguing against the designation. “White nationalism should be straight but not narrow,” he said, inadvertently repeating a slogan popularized by an anti-bullying LGBT nonprofit.) Donovan sees himself as a member of the earliest generation of gay men who could be free to ditch the “victim mentality” of queer politics. In Androphilia, he praises activists who fought to decriminalize gay sex and to combat institutional indifference to AIDS “It would be remiss not to credit the Gay Rights Movement for fighting against this sort of oppression, intolerance, and intentional negligence,” he writes, but “having achieved relative tolerance for same-sex-oriented people in mainstream culture, and having brought an end to police harassment and widespread discrimination, the Gay Rights Movement has turned to nitpicking.” He isn’t against identity politics. He’s loud and proud about his race and his gender — traits that, unlike his sexuality, do not make him a minority. “Ten out of ten minorities agree that being a minority can really blow,” he explains in “Mighty White,” an essay defending white nationalism in those who fear losing, or in some contexts have already lost, majority racial status.

Donovan — whose partner of 20 years is a Trump supporter of Mexican descent — supports white nationalists, but denies belonging in their ranks. “I just think that’s a silly goal,” he says of the so-called white ethnostate. Whiteness, he points out, “is an American approximation of nationality,” which doesn’t make as much sense as, say, German nationalism — which he became familiar with when he delivered a speech praising masculine violence at a far-right German nationalist convention near Leipzig in February. Violence is a component of Donovan’s “gang theory of masculinity,” an idea he became so enamored of that he felt he could not actualize as a man until he had a gang of his own. Enter the Wolves of Vinland, a club started near Lynchburg, Virginia, by brothers Paul and Matthias Waggener, a pair of avid bodybuilders who love blackmetal bands (a.k.a. National Socialist Black Metal bands). The sons of an Orthodox priest, the Waggeners have said in interviews that they experimented with drugs, satanism, and “gangster shit” before discovering neopaganism, also known as “heathenism,” which became the foundation of their club.

“The rest of the Wolves are not homos, and we don’t consider ourselves a white-nationalist or alt-right group,” Donovan clarifies by email. White nationalists and the alt-right do, however, seem to consider them kin, judging by the frequency of pro-Vinland programming in white-nationalist and alt-right media. One thing those groups share is an intellectual foundation of gender and race essentialism: “Our women are females, they’re females, and our males are masculine, and we don’t look for sameness between sexes,” Paul Waggener told Greg Johnson in an interview. To be masculine, a man doesn’t need to have sex with women — although he should probably be stronger than women, and hold his own in brawls, and have tactical skills, and provide. And he should be brave, which is why Donovan gets so irritated when he’s accused of homophobia. “That’s a construction. That’s a silencing word and it’s meant to emasculate,” he says. “When you say someone’s phobic, you’re saying that they’re afraid. That’s why they call men phobic constantly — they’re transphobic, they’re homophobic, they’re afraid of women.” Political correctness “is just a way of calling a man a coward.” (When it comes to language, Jack is more sensitive about ideology than sexuality. He still doesn’t like the word gay but occasionally uses it for conversational expediency and punch lines about “being gay” with his boyfriend about their new pet dog.)

Who feels fear, and why, and whether their fear is rational, seems to be at the heart of the mainstream’s tension with the alt-right. If a man gives a speech called “Violence Is Golden,” is that scary? What if his audience includes white nationalists? And if he’s gay, does that change, well, anything? Not really, says historian Jim Downs, author of Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation. “If you look at every movement, you’re going to find these moments” of unexpected orientations and identities that seem anomalous within a movement. But if enough people join a club, inevitably, some won’t be straight. “There were gay Nazis,” Downs points out. “But follow where the story leads you: They get massacred.” What seems safe at one moment can be taboo a moment later, and traits that are liabilities in one context can be elsewhere. As recently as 2004, Republicans bragged about opposing gay rights to rally the base, while supporters like John Kerry avoided the topic. Today, longstanding opponents of gay rights are the ones who avoid the question — or set aside long-held beliefs in the name of pragmatism.

“I think gays can be particularly useful to the alt-right,” Alternative Right editor Colin Liddell told me. “Our movement is a revolutionary and taboo-busting movement, and gays have the right ‘psychological equipment’ for that. And, because of their lack of immediate family, gays often have a stronger feeling for their ‘wider family.’ The left has successfully displaced this sentiment to the fake ‘gay community’ or to leftist causes in general, but the true wider family for gays is their particular tribal or ethnic group.”

Donovan seems to be living proof of that theory — but not, perhaps, by choice. When I ask if he’d like to have children, he replies, “If I did, it would be with a woman.” He’s jealous of the “multigenerational experience” that straight couples can have just by fucking. Their DNA becomes entwined, playing out together for generations, even after they’re dead. The tribe lives on. “I’ve been really lucky,” he continues. “The guy I’m with, he’s my family. We just got a dog together, and we’re being gay for the dog.” He laughs. “I’m very lucky and, I think, very unusual in that sense. I think a lot of homosexual men end up being alone. I think it’s very unstable and very lonely. It’s not something that’s — like — if I met a young man who would say, ‘Hey, you know, I’m questioning,’ I’d say, ‘Don’t.’ I would advise them, unless there is no other way, I would say, ‘If you have the choice between men and women, be straight.’”

http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/04/jack-donovan-philosophical-fascists-of-the-gay-alt-right.html

El Ahwa

 An "Ahwa" is an oriental Egyptian Cafe usually the place where the average Egyptian man Spends his leisure time. Growing up the Ahwa was associated with the unemployed men that served as a burden to the economy. An Ahwa was viewed as a place where men would go kill time while smoking Shisha, play backgammon and talk about non-sense. Having that thought as I grew-up I always despised men who spent too  much time in such a place that is of no use to society.                Time has past, I graduated school and have become holder of a bachelors degree with honors. Prepared to face the world and hoping to be a part of great changes for my country. Soon you realize that it isn't going to be that easy. I had put all plans on pause until my military situation was clarified that alone took 5 months minimum. During that time I was unemployed and that gave me license to behave like one. For me I just needed a proper break between major milestones of life and trust me 6 months wasn't enough.               Experiences that I have been through during my still relatively short life have taught me many things. The one thing I'm glad I learned was not to judge anything until I experience it first hand and to avoid judging someone just by what I see of them, because I truly believe that what we can't see is far more elaborate than what one lets us see. Having that said I stopped judging the Ahwa culture with such hasty generalization.               When one of my dearest friends suggested we go sit in an Ahwa I hesitated for a second than I remembered that if I don't have that experience I can never judge it with justice. At that moment I agreed immediately. The first time I went I was too busy talking to that friend that I barely grasped the name of the place. But as time passed and sitting in El-Ahwa became a habit I was able to observe such a culture up-close.               For starters the person whom we call the "waiter" in a modern cafe is usually high on something and half of what he will be saying makes no sense. As part of the fun its always nice to be seated on chairs that has an upfront street view, so basically you would be sitting on the pavement. If you want to  make an order to scream at the guy and say "Ya Rayes .... then u list ur order" other than that you would probably wait for a while. Its common to have two kinds of tables, a small metal high-table where the drinks are served and another big one that comes upon request if you ask to play backgammon. Chaos certainly has a system.               In the few times I have been to el-ahwa and after loosing to a game of backgammon and while having to wait for the other two that I went with to finish their game, I would always sit and observe the explicit diversity in the customers of el-ahwa. Even though the place has a shockingly wide range of different people from different social standards and backgrounds, it seems like every Ahwa has almost that same mix of customers regardless of where it is.               If you go after working hours it is definite that you would have multiple tables around you where middle aged men are seated in their formal attire usually discussing political, economic or social issues as they keep their hands busy with a game of backgammon and a cup or tea *shai Koshary*. I have realized that in every Ahwa there is a lonely guy who has a favorite seating spot in the place and would usually sit there alone while he firmly grabs on to his Shisha and slowly releases its smoke. If you decide to lean over an pickup a few lines of you neighboring tables conversation you would probably have the entertainment of your life. And with the generally Egyptian habit of being loud it won't need much effort.              Some men go to El-ahwa because they need a break from their spouse, some go because they want to meet their friends and spending so much to see a guy friend isn't worth it, some feel comfortable to the absence of the female element since there will be no need to impress, and some even go because its the one place thats a mood changer. I personally go their to order my 1 pound worth cup of tea or my all time favorite pomegranate and most importantly to play backgammon.             In the way an Ahwa works its necessary to build a friendly relationship with the person serving you if you plan on being a regular customer. Being part of the Ahwa experience made me realize that its a place where people exchange valuable knowledge, enhance their gaming skills, catch up on each others lives or even sit silently and think. Its a place for everyone and anyone.             Now Finally ill briefly explain the scenery from my last visit to an Ahwa. After work a friend suggested we go sit in an Ahwa not very far from work and so we went. This was the second time i sit in that specific place. After sitting for a while and after again losing in a game of backgammon I paid attention to the scenery. We were seated in the last table inside close the the wall so everything was visible. Beside us were 4 past 50 men that have met up after work and were constantly teasing each other like teens as they also played a round of backgammon. on my left was that lonely guy who also came back after work to sit there, but surprisingly he doesn't smoke shisha. However, he dragged the chair until it was perfectly centered in-front of the TV and hugged his folded newspaper and watched. Every once in a while he would lean forward and spit under his feet then wipe it with by stepping on it. I don't know if that was some kind of mechanism to clean the bottom of his shoe but I don't think it was working. Shortly, he got up and went to the nearest kiosk, bought a bag of chips, came back in dragged the chair again and said silently while he crunched on every bit of his valuable chips. After a while another lonely guy who appeared abnormal walked in, sat in one of the corners, and ordered his shisha. As he smokes his cigarette and Shisha simultaneously you could see him talk to himself without any consideration to the presence of others around. Others around were mostly teenagers gathering to challenge each other in a game of backgammon.                      This experience taught me not to take what society tells me for granted and to explore things myself before I take a stand. It also showed me that there can be beauty in almost everything. I hope having a glimpse of El-Ahwa has inspired you to do the same. *Challenging Conventional Wisdom* *The Ahwa Culture*