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#its been a bit of a break between much larger projects
g-r-a-y-p-h-i-c · 2 years
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“All Ears”
25 credits under the cut:
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1. "Untitled” is from Pxfuel; Modifications: colours adjusted, converted into a filter, cropped, filtered over, resized
2. "Obsidian" by Filter Forge is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: cropped, filtered over, resized
3. "空中庭園" by othree is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: cropped, filtered over, resized
4. "Snow On The Windshield: Major Solar Particle Storm Smacks Earth" by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: cropped, resized
5. "rotation" by kevin dooley is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: cropped, filtered over, resized
6. "Early Summer Morning" by Rebecca L. Daily is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: colours adjusted, cropped, resized
7. "Les degrés (1964) - Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992)" by pedrosimoes7 is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: cropped, resized
8. "old metal" by dj pettitt is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: colours adjusted, converted into a filter, cropped, filtered over, resized
9. "Solar Eruption and a Flare May 2010" by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: colours adjusted, cropped, resized
10. "Ickle Green Tiles" by Brett Jordan is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: cropped, resized
11. "aman_geld 24.08.07 (Honey Ony)" by Cea. is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: cropped, colours adjusted, converted into a filter, filtered over, resized, rotated
12. "Precious opal (Coober Pedy Opal Field, South Australia) 8" by James St. John is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: converted into a filter, cropped, filtered over, resized
13. "multicolored shell discs" by lisafree54 is marked with CC0 1.0; Modifications: converted into a filter, cropped, filtered over, resized
14. "OH.NO.SUMO - 街角小劇場 Stairway Cinema - Photo 0007" by 準建築人手札網站 Forgemind ArchiMedia is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: cropped, filtered over, resized
15. "Abstract Red Glitter" by shaire productions is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: colours adjusted, converted into a filter, cropped, filtered over, reflected, resized
16. "orange squircle" by liz west is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: colours adjusted, cropped, filtered over, reflected, resized
17. "Red (wall)" by jakerome is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: colours adjusted, converted into a filter, cropped, filtered over, resized, rotated
18. "Flower 1_Gazania" by ~Brenda-Starr~ is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: colours adjusted, cropped, filtered over, resized, rotated
19. "Apple Sari" by Brett Jordan is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: colours adjusted, converted into a filter, cropped, filtered over, resized
20. "Image" by jaja_1985 is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: cropped, filtered over, resized
21. "bubbles, bending" by woodleywonderworks is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: converted into a filter, cropped, filtered over, resized
22. "Blue (wide angle wall)" by jakerome is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: cropped, filtered over, resized
23. "Wall" by klik2travel is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: converted into a filter, cropped, filtered over, resized, rotated
24. "the purple hole" by Darwin Bell is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: cropped, colours adjusted, filtered over, reflected, resized
25. "Free texture: painted concrete, rich purplish blue" by Now and Here is marked with CC BY 2.0; Modifications: converted into a filter, cropped, filtered over, resized, rotated
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tarjapearce · 25 days
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The Immorality Of Love (Prologue)
Duke! Miguel O'Hara x Courtesan! Reader
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Synopsis: Pretty Woman but Victorian Era Inspired ~ jskjs.
A/N: So, watched Pretty Woman a bit ago and thanks to all of you that participated in the poll, you picked a Victorian Era Inspired! 🤭 And here is it, our new wee series :'). Hope you like! Thanks to my beta reader @oharasmommymilkers00 ❤️. Feedback is always appreciated ~
WARNINGS: MINORS DO NOT INTERACT. Mentions of death, character background, Angst, mentions of blood, implicit sexual activities, a bit of historical inaccuracy for the sake of the plot, Working and low class struggles, No use of Y/N, Violence, grief, social struggles.
Maybe it was the rain, the ever cold and gloomy weather that made Nueva York the antagonist of its neighbors states.
Bustling with the unceasing life through the day and night. The city never slept really, full of people chasing their dreams on a daily basis, despite dangers lurking around in every dark and forsaken corner.
Tall buildings and factories reached towards the sky in an attempt of growing larger than their competitors. The bigger the better, right?
Cause that would mean to have more employees to cover up the demand, right?
Wrong.
Despite the city flooding with rich and proud buildings, little were the amount of people that actually got to experience the decent living novelty.
Something surreal, a borderline utopia for those in the slums and west district as economy only seemed to thrive in the prettiest sectors of Nueva York, keeping the rich richer and the poor, poorer. Perpetuating the cycle of endless inequity among its gaunt and empty looking denizens.
Forsaking everything in the way of those that didn't have the luck of being born in a warm golden crib. The king had been having other project in mind, leaving his initials intentions of helping, behind.
But how long ago had he promised a change?
It didn't matter. Not when hunger, diseases, poverty and other horrors chased those excluded from privilege. They preyed on the weakest and sickest,��working like a self imposed reaper, specially in what was considered the live sewers of the city.
Raggedy and rickety walls extended at every turn of sight, filled with children and their parents, bathed in filth and ash coming from the polluting factories, whose machinery always reminded the poorest of how life was. Creaking, loud, cold and unforgivably unstoppable.
Clothes were either stolen from others or simply removed from the bodies that succumbed on life's hardscrabbles without much thought.
Bodies were often tossed to the river as a cemetery charged a small fee for receiving the dead. Not even a spot in the earth was allowed for the unfortunates as they barely had the enough money to eat, much less to afford for their perpetual rest.
Choosing between burying a friend or relative and eat at least one time a day for a couple of days, was the constant doubt many had.
And so, the tradition of tossing bodies at the river started. Only to be stopped a few years after as the river fed the livestock, making them sick. A shortage of food and other miscellaneous had started.
If poors already suffered, the water's scarcity walloped with all it's might the slums, pushing people into desperate ways to survive, even if it was prolonging the suffering for another day.
Overripe bodies, swarmed with flies were often found by the police in the already tattered homes, the rumor of miasma running rampant in the slums only made the west district of Paxton more susceptible to inhuman treatment by the rich.
Back breaking jobs were in every way. Laundry that had the women and even men folding over a wall at the end of the day because their back ache was too much. The factories with their ominously tall chimneys spilling the same dark filth their occupants inhaled daily; The coal mines that had turned into a living gravestone, costing lives in a weekly basis among them.
Yet, the spots for a job were the main reason there were many revolts.
The situation turned critical when some richer fellows forbidded people from the slums to work in their factories. As some stole the goods.
The Prince however came up with a temporary solution that provided some relief for the oppressed. He forced the owners to either sell their companies, or provide 50 spots for the people.
For the rich it was rather easier to hire people than giving away the fruition of hard work over decades, just cause the prince thought occasionally in others.
Many families were benefited from the initiative. Including yours. And by family it'd mean, your mother and you. Both  working class ladies renting a paltry room in the outer lands of the real slums. Your father had been long gone in a mine accident, or so you were told often. But in truth, your birth had been the outcome of an affair between a nobleman and your mother.
The man died in mysterious conditions a couple of months later. A heart attack apparently.
Your mother knew a bit of everything, earning a couple of favors here and there that slowly made you go to a community school.
"Just because we're poor must we remain ignorant and dirty."
Your education and hygiene always seemed her main concern, as she always talked about how you'd be a good society lady while she scrubbed the dirt off your childish fingers. How well you'd do on your own, and how you'd get a good husband to love you and cherish you.
But your youngling brain was only focused on working enough to get food. You'd understand her wishes later.
You worked in tandem with her in the factory. Children willing to work were given a relatively small payment depending on their labors.
Yours were daily food and occasionally clothes and other things, as grown-ups received money. Some saw it as an humiliation, others as help, since the parents wouldn't have to worry about their children being used as thieves, or worse, abused out there in the streets or being malnourished.
It worked well for a while, until death cut your mother's life thread in a vicious chop. The fumes in the factories often costed the health of so many, leaving children at the mercy of church or orphanages. Another problem that was addressed as soon as the upper class started to complain about the kid's gangs that snuck in the wealthy districts.
A police officer held you as you tried to reach for your mother's lifeless body. Imploring her to wake up from her forever rest as you were dragged away to an orphanage. You knew you wouldn't see her again, you knew they'd throw her to the river and feed the alligators and birds of prey with her flesh since she was mistaken as one from the slums.
The only memento you were allowed to keep from her in the orphanage was her golden chain. A trinket an officer gave to you before your mother was disposed off.
----
The first of the many nights in the orphanage were unforgivable cold. Girls of all ages remained within, the smaller ones cried for their mothers, others for her fathers. The eldest ones were either compassionate or bitter, there was no in between.
But you couldn't complain, you got food, a bath every day, clothes and soon established a little friendship with a girl named Aveline as you did your daily chores at the settlement. Daughter of a courtesan that was killed a couple months ago. She was fourteen, you were twelve.
At your sixteens you escaped with her, finding life in the orphanage too cruel and simply not good enough. She was eighteen, she was legally an adult and could take care of you. However, freedom didn't last much as she was arrested for disturbances and indecency, meaning being drunk on the streets as you were awaiting outside the bar.
You were dragged back to the authorities, but this time, instead of a orphanage they sent you to a convent. Trying to fix the rebel out of you, to leave a demure soul perfect for a working man.
But the solution only proved to worsen the problem. You escaped at your seventeens and to your surprise got reunited with Aveline, or Daisy as she went by on the streets.
She took you to her home, a room in the many brothels in Paxton. She had worked her way out of jail and met Madame Grevaille, that didn't hesitate into offering you a job.
"With a pretty girl like you, you'd have your own place soon!" The lady spoke, but neither her and Aveline pushed you into prostitution.
You helped around the brothel during busy nights, even after a long day at the factory. You caught the eye of a couple of noblemen as they visited Aveline, but politely, you rejected them. Mainly out of fear.
"I'm pretty sure that you'd get more money than I do. Just look at you! and look at me."
Aveline would slur sleepily as you caressed her hair. Your friend's health was slowly deteriorating thanks to an excessive lifestyle.
"You know I couldn't do it. I'm not as brave as you are."
"Imnot brave." She yawned, "I'm just a young woman that must work in the world's ancient labor to be able to eat and provide."
"I'm sorry. For being a burden." A tinge of shame washed over you upon knowing that Aveline was the one that basically carried the burden of rent in her shoulders. Even though you had a job, it didn't pay enough to help Avy, as you called her, the way you wanted to.
And Madame Grevaille was always willing to teach you the arts of seduction, to lure the right kind of gentlemen that paid more than enough to subsist for couple of weeks. Or. months if you knew how to properly play your cards.
"You're not. I know this is everything but what your mother would want for you, but... we've never been a priority to those with power unless we fill even more their pockets, my dear." She curled in your lap, relishing in your soft caresses. An appalling contrast of some of her rowdy client's treatment.
"I know. I know you don't do this cause you like it."
"The only thing I like is when they pay and leave. Except for Mr. Nimeux. That man can use me at his whims all he wants." She giggled sleepily as a fleeting memory of the man came into her head.
"Ugh, Avy, stop."
"Just saying, You'd make a whole lot of money with your virginity."
You gasped, faking offense, "Who says I'm a virgin?!"
"Oh, stop it. Jacob Billard doesn't count."
You both laughed. But deep down in your mind knew it was the only way a woman could get afloat. The new Duke seemed to be lax enough to approve a law to let women work in several other jobs. Construction included. There were revolts, as usual, but again, it proved to benefit the poor.
Your position towards royalty was everything but good, of course you acknowledged their attempts of improving the city since the king was currently busy with other royal things that couldn't wait.
But it also shaped your 'Deeds not words' mantra. You believed more in actions than fancy words.
Even though the years had passed by, there was little changes in the slums. Thankfully, you and Aveline had been able to move to the outer and west district's brothels with the help of another Madame called Susan Lewis, once you hit your eighteens.
Away from the true mess that walloped nonstop the people. You got a tattoo to celebrate it. A beautiful violet on your back.
But despite moving, people's mindset remained the same. Men's specially. And the man that accompanied Aveline for the night wasn't any better.
Her room was often visited by strangers, always perfumed with rich lavender incense around the room to conceal the smell of sex in the air. Some were gentle enough to leave Avy a tip, others made every penny worth by asking the most ridiculous of things. Or so Aveline told you.
But this one was definitely being not nice to her. Despite the many times you tried to intervene with her clientèle, Aveline always told you that she was alright, that it was all part of the fantasy.
Sometimes her client was angered by the intrusion and left. This would make Avy to remain angry with you for a couple of days. However, upon hearing her calling for help, flared your alarms right away.
"You must remain quiet!" The loud slap, a bottle breaking and Aveline's shriek was more than enough for you to bolt in the room without much thought.
The man was big, a bit burly, and was definitely manhandling your best friend way too rough for her and your likings.
Aveline fought, despite her being naked, you took the broom and broke it on the man's back, that grunted and staggered away in pain. Anger and fear pumped through your veins in equal parts as you grabbed the jagged bottle and pointed it at the man.
If you were both to die, at least you'd go fighting.
"Back the fuck off!" You yelled
The man snarled and tried to reach for you, but if mingling with prostitutes and thieves had taught you something, was to defend a friend, even if you were terrified to your very core.
"You whore!" 
You slashed with the sharp part of the bottle, wherever it landed. To your luck it went on the assailant man's face. Slicing flesh on his right cheek.
He roared in pain, but looked at you fascinated, angry and horrified. A chill ran down your spine.
"Get out! Now!"
Despite your limbs trembling, you sliced through the air with silent warnings, the man escaped when Aveline started to call for help through the window while you protected her.
You made sure the man had escaped and locked the door, just in case he decided to take a proper revenge on you both. Aveline's arms went immediately around you, crying with pained yelps and sobs.
"Hey" You mumbled as she wobbled,
"I'm here, it's over." You whispered while helping her to the bed, covering her bruised body with the sheets to spare her some dignity. Not that you were ignorant to a naked body, you helped Avy to get ready or draw her and the others at the brothel a bath after all.
"It hurts." She whined as you wiped the blood out of her cheekbone and nose.
"I'm sorry, Avy."
She grunted as she closed her eyes "D-Did he pay?"
Your heart sunk both in anger and sadness. This was exactly one of the reasons why you didn't become a courtesan. Too many risks, including the probability of getting beaten or killed by your clients, if not their wives.
"He didn't."
----
Madame Lewis and Grevaille were the first in appearing in the scene, they tended to Aveline's wounds and let her rest. You were in your room, racking your brain over the events, when Madame Lewis approached.
"You did a good job protecting Aveline."
"I was as scared as she was, Ma'am."
"Still, you did it well. May I sit?" You nodded as the lady sat a few inches of your bed.
"Have you... considered my proposal?"
"Against all odds. Yes. I wanted to avoid this as much as I could but... Avy is beaten, rent approaches, the factory doesn't pay me well enough and we have to eat."
"Being a courtesan is far from being honorable, dear-"
"With all due respect, ma'am, respect won't bring food to my table. I knew that sooner or later it would come to this."
"Need pushes us to do the unthinkable, dear. But fear not. If you work for me, I'll teach you the right kind of people to seek."
You heaved a defeated sigh, mentally asking your mother for forgiveness for the path you were about to take.
"Could you give me a couple of days more? I want to have enough money to buy all those things you told me I'd need."
"Of course, dear. Please let me know if you need something else."
----
"Even though I'm not that fond of you turning a courtesan, Im happy we'll finally get to leave this damned place. I was thinking in getting an apartment on Brasswood Avenue. Men in there are clean, and they're not animals like these fuckers."
Avy mumbled as you got ready to leave for work at the factory.
"I need you to help me pick some stuff, can you accompany me?"
"Of course! Will get you to this pretty store. I've befriended the owner. One of us, actually."
You stared at her for a moment.
"Have you picked your name yet?"
"My name? What's wrong with my name?"
"Well, it's pretty but you need like an alter ego, so in case police gets hungry with our money, you give them a fake name."
"I don't know. I didn't know I needed one."
"What about... Violet? Like your tattoo?" Aveline secured your apron on your back as you combed your hair.
"Hmm. Doesn't sound bad."
"Then Violet is it!."
You took your pouch of money and hid it.
"Remember as soon as you leave, come meet me at Millport's Avenue. We'll go shopping!"
Avy sung and you chuckled.
"Goodbye, Miss Daisy."
"Goodbye, Miss Violet."
You left, without knowing those words would turn into a bitter reality.
---
Four pm and still no signs of Aveline. Five soon arrived, and Millport's avenue was bustling as usual with people but today it seemed crowded.
"A woman was found dead. Dear god..."
You blinked at the overheard information. But soon the police's rushed steps alerted you as they turned into a familiar corner.
Heart pounded in your ears the more you approached. Breath hitched as you waded in the small crowd that gathered in an alley you crossed during the mornings.
"Back away! Leave the police work, dammit!" One of the police officers yelled at the journalist and curious that gathered to witness the macabre scene.
Tears couldn't help but flood your eyes upon your sight landed on the ever familiar blonde strands that you sometimes found in your hairbrush.
No...
Now stuck to her face, thanks to the bloody glue that stained not only her neck but the cobblestone floor too. A deep gash in her throat had been done. Your best friend had been murdered
"Aveline!!" You cried and rushed to her side. But the police prevented you from going further.
"Stop!"
"Avy! No! Let me go! She's my best friend!" You sobbed in between struggles against the officer's arms, that were everything but comforting to your aching soul.
Everyone watched in horror as Aveline's body was covered, her horrified eyes remained in your mind. Forever burnt into your memories. She died being afraid and not of an old age and rich as she had confessed you once.
The police interviewed you, but what was the point, knowing the investigation would turn into another cold case? Like the many before? None was really safe.
Madame Lewis and Grevaille visited you that night, but their comfort was little. There was no solace you could find in them. You had lived with Aveline for three years. Her short life had ended at twenty two, her mother's story resonatiin her own. And there was no signs of the culprit nor the police's intentions to find him.
But life kept going. The world wouldn't stop for a moment to give you truce to mourn.
Madame Lewis took you in since the rent on your place was too much on your own. It felt like receding big time. But what could be done?
Aveline shared your body size, but even so, you refused to steal from your freshly murdered friend. The only thing you did was to save her most important things in a bag. Papers, some books she loved despite them being intact.
It gave Avy a sense of importance, since she always adviced you to be as knowledgeable as possible. That some men loved that.
And the praying beads she stole from the sister that loved to spank the little girls back at the orphanage you both met in.
Madame Grevaille kept the jewels and dresses as a payment for what Aveline owed her. Despite the cold hearted action, she allowed you to keep one thing of each.
You kept a pearl necklace a nobleman had gifted Avy once and made you promise to keep it safe, and a black cashmere shawl she always put on when parading herself in the streets.
It was your own way to have her close.
Aveline was no more. Forever lost into a man's derangement. So many doubts plagued your mind, but one thing was certain, you were to leave Paxton's district. One way or another.
------
Night had just started, and you had just finished your makeup. A bit of powder on your cheeks, rouge on your lips in  subtle yet inviting way always did the trick, some violet perfume misted your skin, giving a delicate yet enhancing aroma.
Dress in a perfect blue and white with black frills, Black stockings and boots, Avy's shawl draped on your shoulders along a matching bonnet.
You took a bag and left your apartment. Located in Brasswood Avenue, a relatively middle class area in Tevinter's district. Just like Aveline always wanted.
Five years had gone by since her murdering, five years that had you working your way out of Paxton, to finally be comfortably living in the outskirts of Manhattan.
And still, the courtesan mantle never left you. Thanks to it you could afford what you had, your clients were middle and upper class men that paid you enough to not suffer hunger or insecurity.
Madame Lewis's advices had taken you this far. The carriage dropped you to your usual spot, only to walk for a few minutes before arriving at your clientèle's location.
Beautifully decored homes, and buildings  Aveline used to boast about, were now your daily route. Donning the streets with your presence and violet and citrus infused perfume. Five pm was a good hour to start, tonight's goal was to make at least enough to buy that rose perfume you saw at a shop in the Manhattan area.
A smell that would definitely attract royalty even.
Some men stared your way, discreet yet leering smirks hidden behind a polite facade. Some had their companions, whose disdainful and undignified stares were more than expected. Specially if their husbands stared for too long.
Others, despite the rich-looking clothes and apparent status, sent whistles your way. Those were the kind you avoided as they often either ended up paying half or got violent if something wasn't done their way.
Your type would be men, that barely glanced your way or gave a brief scrutinizing gaze, widows or recently divorced, cause one way or another you'd end up their contact list.
Some had been clients over the years, some stopped as they remarried or have kids, only for them contacting you again to have an outlet from their domestic life.
Even women had joined in your repertoire. But au contraire of men, they only called for talk. It was rare when they indulged you physically.
Thanks to that, you gained a bit of reputation within those inner circles that somehow shared a table at social gatherings. Everyone knew their role as pretenders, even you.
Getting attached to clients were out of the list. Thankfully none you shared your charms with had said intention, and it was perfect. It worked in immaculate harmony with your rules and profession.
Clock hit soon six pm and the streets seemed a bit less busy. Soon, the smile of a familiar face came your way
"Hey, Vi!"
Violet. The name had stayed for good. The persona you transformed yourself almost every night in had taken over to stay. Your own persona way too dormant and comfortable in a corner to wake up, letting life happen.
She stopped coming out to life's stages ever since Aveline's murder.
"Any news so far, Jeannie?"
Jeannie or Jeanette, your occasional roomie and new friend. A similar story of yours, with the only difference was that she never really knew her family and was too rebellious to be kept in the convent or orphanage.
She was tall, a ginger with the most adorable set of freckles you've seen so far. Beautiful green eyes and would easily pass as a noblewoman with the right set of clothes adorning her model like body. Jeanette was gorgeous.
You took her in after you found her in the streets of Millport, beaten, with a black eye. Her client had been too rough with his fantasy and her madame was everything but helpful.
You got her to Madame Lewis which gladly took her in. And now, after shooing away another intruder in your zone, she hugged you. Her cherry perfume tickled your nose, announcing it's presence to your demure floral scent.
"None. Been waiting here for quite a while. Just drunkards, until a gorgeous nobleman asked me to wait here for him."
"Oh? What did he look like?"
"None like the hunks you attract, thats for sure."
You chuckled.
"I've got a feeling tonight's gonna be a good night."
"I hope so. I need that new perfume and some new ribbons."
"Oh? You wanna go for the top dogs?!"
You giggled, and shook your head.
"No, well, yes. Maybe. I smelled it? And I went to heaven. Can you imagine the effect it could have in a man?"
"More money, obvious."
Jeanette giggled but quickly stopped upon looking at a carriage approaching.
"That's your cue, Violet."
"You think?"
Some people gasped upon the carriage suddenly hopping on the walk, startling some. Horses neighed, uneasy.
The carriage rider hopped off, muttering a flurry of Spanish gibberish while grabbing his luscious hair in an angered fit. Tall was a measly word to actually describe him.
His fancily dressed chest heaved as he backed away from a neighing horse. Defeated and irked.
You watched curiously as the man pulled out a map from his pocket and glared holes at it. Confusion was evident ad he turned the paper around
Jeanette elbowed you softly. Making her signaling less obvious as if saying 'Stop playing and go for him'
"Fine. If I get killed, you know who to blame."
You hushed before adjusting your corset and cleavage, Jeanette pinched your cheeks to give them a bit more of blush.
"Relax, it's gonna be a good night, remember?" Jeannie winked your way and pushed you on your way, gently.
With a deep breath, and your shawl secured, you approached to the man.
----
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armory-rasa · 2 months
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Bazubands part 1: A LESSON IN HUMILITY 🤣
So one of my projects for the winter break was to make a set of bazubands made for myself -- a middle eastern armor piece that provides all-in-one wrist/forearm/elbow protection, and the easiest way to get the coverage required for SCA fighting. (My garb is viking, but such are the exigencies of modern safety standards, that fighters usually wind up with a mix of armor types.)
Anyway, I packed up the necessary tools and materials and took them with me when I went to visit my parents, which is why the backdrop for these pictures isn't my usual workshop.
Found a pattern on google, cut it out of 10-12 oz veg tan, traced/carved/tooled it:
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(You can see why this is the easiest way to get elbow protection, it's WAY less fiddly than trying to do articulated plates around the joint.)
Soaked the elbow cop again (because it was starting to dry out by the time I was done tooling), rounded it out and stitched it up:
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Dyed it black, in my parents' backyard:
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(And if you use Angelus dyes, that's how you keep from spilling it -- the box has little perforations so that it can hold the bottle safely upright.)
WAX THAT MOTHERFUCKER:
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It doesn't show in that picture, but I have a metal bowl of wax (jeweler's casting wax) melting on the stovetop. I alternate between brushing it onto the leather, which looks like the picture above, and then putting the leather in the oven at ~200F, at 10-20 minute intervals, until the wax soaks in. Repeat until the leather is fully saturated and does not absorb more wax. (This often takes hours, so find something else to multitask with.)
But when you're done -- ta da!
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Your project will be thoroughly waterproof, very strong and hard, with a low lustre. It's functionally ABS plastic at this point.
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The next step was padding, so I got some sheepskin and and fitted it to the inside:
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(idk why it's so fucking orange, but the alternative was kind of a mint-mucus green. I think the orange is growing on me though.)
Time to pattern the other, simpler piece of the bazuband, because they're hinged to enclose your full arm:
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(I couldn't do this earlier, and therefore do both pieces concurrently, because I had no idea how much bulk the padding was going to add to my arm. I suppose you could wrap your arm in padding when you're measuring at the start.)
Slapped a quick design on it:
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(And carved & tooled it too, though I neglected to get pictures of that.)
And then--
DISASTER, MY FRIENDS.
I put it in the oven, and it lost its gd mind.
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WHAT.
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Seriously, just -- words do not do this abomination justice. o_O
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LOOK AT IT.
Coming so close on the heels of the Khorasan pouch, which had turned out absolutely perfect and has been more widely shared and lauded than anything else I've posted, this was a humbling experience. 🤣 Like, yes you're good, Gabriel, but you're not immune to fucking up.
So what happened here? Why did the same leather as the bazubands, undergoing the exact same steps and processes, turn out like THIS?
I'd have to repeat the experiment to 100% confirm my theory, but I'm pretty sure the critical difference is that I was speed-running this one, and I didn't wait for the dye to fully dry before I started waxing it. It wound up with, essentially, wet leather hermetically encased in wax, and since the water didn't have anywhere to go, it did weird things to the structure of the leather fibers when it started heating up. And because I don't often work with wax, I had somehow never run into this situation before, and thus already learned that lesson.
Ah well.
It wasn't a huge amount of leather, and it was only like two hours of work, so I'm not that fussed about it. (More embarrassed than anything else, at what feels like a very rookie mistake -- and conscious that it could have been SO MUCH WORSE if that had happened to the larger bazuband pieces, which had a lot more time and materials sunk into them.)
Anyway, I'm going to tweak the pattern a bit, make it narrower at the wrist and a bit longer, and change the design to something that matches the dragon better -- and let it fully dry this time. 😂
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The X-Men Project : Children of the Atom
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Uncanny X-Men 1-23 (1963-1966)
Collected in X-Men Epic Collections 1 : Children of the Atom
I’ve started this project a few times, and haven’t gotten too far -- but my main goal was to read through the main canon of X-Men comics chronologically for some time now.  I’m taking a new approach this time - reading them via trade paperback (and sometimes omnibus).  And of course in doing so, I’ve got to start at the beginning - which may be part of the reason this keeps slowing me down from getting too far.  
Because I have to start with Silver Age comics.  
So… long comic book history story short - the Golden Age of comics started in the 30s with the advent of comic adventures and super heroes.  Batman, Superman, Captain America - all larger than life heroes that kids could fall in love with.  And kids did - until the war came and changed things and comics were on the decline for a while and then - bam!  The 60s happened, and both DC and Marvel flourished in brightly colored, campy glory.  
The thing about Silver Age comics, though, is that these stories, while iconic, sure; were written for 8-12-year-old boys growing up in the early sixties.  There’s kind of a simple, standardness to all of them.  And while I won’t argue that modern day superhero comics are the cutting edge of literature or anything, Silver Age comics feel antiquated in a charming albeit somewhat dull way.  
Here’s the thing though - I’ve only read X-Men Silver Age comics.  The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Avengers, and even Hulk were regarded in much higher standing.  And while Stan Lee’s idea to have superheroes naturally have powers -- unlike the plethora of humans being bombarded by radiation and getting their powers through increasingly more ridiculous ways - The X-Men were unique among superheroes.  But that didn’t make them all that interesting to read.  In fact - X-Men was the lowest read book for most of its original run.  
So… is it really that bad?  
Let’s break it down! 
The first trade paper I’m covering is part of the Epic Collections series - and covers the first 23 issues of Uncanny X-Men (the original run, which was just X-Men, I don’t think ‘Uncanny’ came until Chris Claremont).  It’s mostly written by Stan Lee (who leaves after issue 19 and is replaced by Roy Thomas) and drawn by the infamous Jack Kirby (who also leaves the book around 19, though other artists were helping with book many issues before).  
I feel like there’s a bit of novelty when you say Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.  But I think there’s a difference between nostalgia and quality.  Stan Lee is… fine as a writer.  I don’t think he does anything that special with the X-Men (while I haven’t read any other Silver Age - I’ve heard his work on other books was much better).  Jack Kirby’s art, though, is classic and clean and is the more interesting aspect to these comics.  
Each of the comics run a little bit in the same way.  We get an introduction (or reintroduction) to our heroes, the rise of some villainous conflict, the first fight in which our heroes lose and the second fight after a regrouping where our heroes win -- or on rare occasions things are postponed until the next issue.  Story arcs weren’t really a thing, neither was characterization.  Most of the comic is action based with the heroes using their powers to fight the bad guy.  And that’s, well, kind of it.  
The X-Men
The original line-up of X-Men might feel a little odd to people who are used to the movies or modern day comics.  Everyone knows that Charles Xavier founded the X-Men and runs a school in New York, but half the cast of the original movie hadn’t even been created yet.  
Charles Xavier - Mutant ability: Telepath and Telekinetic.  In a wheelchair.  The X-Men kind of all look up to him as a father like figure (especially Cyclops who is an orphan).  There are some aspects of his characterization that don’t necessarily hold up well -- such as his uncomfortable admiration of Jean Grey.  He also just has some odd unethical morals -- there are too many of these comics that end with Xavier literally just wiping out the bad guys’ and even civilians’ minds just to end the conflict.  He also had the tendency to fake his own illnesses to teach the X-Men a lesson. 
Scott Summers/Cyclops - The Leader - Mutant ability: shoots lasers out of his eyes.  Cyclops probably has the most distinct characterization right out of the gate.  He’s moody and broody and tormented about his mutation.  He’s interested in Jean Grey right from the start but can never tell her his true feelings.  (This is the closest we get to any kind of human interest drama in these comics - though it’s infrequent and never built upon.)  He takes life and his X-Men-ing very seriously. 
Warren Worthington III/Angel - The Playboy - Mutant Ability: Wings.  He can fly! He’s charming! And… that’s about it.  He’s rich and kind of has a flippant attitude about anything.  But it’s kind of hilarious at how lackluster he is.  He also sorta has eyes for Jean because you can’t have romantic drama without a love triangle. 
Hank McCoy/Beast - The Brainiac - Mutant Ability: Giant limbs and superhuman dexterity.  This was long before Beast was Blue! And it even takes a few issues for him to be defined as the smart one.  You can tell that whoever was writing Beast had a thesaurus next to them, as Beast cannot talk like a normal person.  He and Iceman are (kind of by default) bffs - though that isn’t developed as much in this first batch of issues.  
Bobby Drake/Iceman - The Jokester - Mutant Ability: Can freeze things, including himself.  He’s the youngest of the X-Men, and is always goofing around, never taking anything that seriously.  You can tell he’s supposed to be the comic relief, but I don’t think actual humor was Stan Lee’s strong point.  
Jean Gray/Marvel Girl - The Girl - Mutant Ability: Telekinetics.  Jean’s telepathy really isn’t developed until after the silver age.  Unfortunately, Jean isn’t written much beyond being a love interest for Cyclops and Angel - and checking off the obligatory woman box.  She doesn’t really even get a chance to shine (even though she clearly could be and will be the most powerful of them) -- every time she uses her powers she always grows tired really quickly and has to have one of the men save her.  It’s definitely eye roll-y how stuck in their time these comics are when it comes to gender, but it’s also not egregiously offensive.  
I have to point out that all of the X-Men at this point are supposed to be teenagers.  With the exception of Iceman, none of them really act like teenagers - and they’re all drawn like they’re in their mid-twenties.  It’s a little bit comical at how not good they were depicting teenagers.  
The Villains (worth mentioning) 
Every superhero team has their rogue’s gallery, and while the Silver Age is notable for having some hilariously ridiculous super villains, there are a handful that are worth mentioning, including some that become downright iconic in the X-Men world.  
Magneto - Master of Magnetism.  Long before his tragic WW2 history and his retconned BFF status with Xavier, Magneto was the original X-Men villain who definitely knew how to chew the scenery.  No seriously.  He might be over the top and ridiculous but he has the most distinct personality of any of these original villains, which does make him stand out.   Also, it’s kind of hilarious how much Magneto’s use of ‘magnetism’ breaks the laws of physics.  
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants! - let by Magneto.  Most of these guys are actually going to stick around for the long haul.  We have Toad (who is Magneto’s main lackey) and Mastermind (who will later become part of the Hellfire club) but most importantly Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch -- who, incidentally, were run out of Eastern Europe by an angry mob and rescued by Magneto himself, for whom they feel they owe a debt to.  They spend most of their time feeling torn about their decision until they eventually hop on over to join the Avengers later down the road.  
Namor - who is just hilariously sassy in his one appearance.  Magneto and Xavier astro project themselves to fight over which side he’s on, and he eventually tells both of them to screw off.  
Unus the  Untouchable - he doesn’t really make a big splash or anything, but I’m entertained that Beast was able to make a ray gun that amplifies this guy’s reflection power to the point where he can’t grab food.  Why he isn’t propelled from the Earth is beyond me if his power is pushing objects away from him, but hey, Silver Age Comics at their finest.  
The Stranger - I kind of love this guy and it’s a shame he never makes a reappearance - ever I believe.  He’s an alien checking out Earth and when Magneto annoys him too much, he whisks him away and abandons him on some desolate planet.  He’s also sassy.  
The Juggernaut - whom it’s set up from the beginning - was Xavier’s step brother.  Ngl, I was surprised when I read that.  But he’s as big and dumb as he always is.  
The Government & the Sentinels Project - they’re rather fully formed.  Another thing I was surprised about when I first read it.  
Mimic - Another character who doesn’t really come back all that often.  It’s a dude who can absorb everyone’s power at once.  He’s really kind of an ass about it, too, but he is the first official add on into the X-Men even if he leaves right away.  
Notable Things
Thematically, one of the big things about the X-Men is the fact that they are persecuted for being different.  Their minority status is kind of baked into the premise, and it’s something that’s going to permeate throughout the rest of the series.  It’s most notable when the government and sentinels come into play.  
It’s kind of fun to look at these as a time capsule of the 60s.  Everything has this 60s futuristic feel about it -- with all the ray guns and quirky costumes and reliance on nutty science.  It very much is a product of its time.  
Cerebro is a thing! I thought it came later - but Xavier came up with it very early on.  Kind of funny out of all the bonkers things they come up with in the Silver Age this one makes a lot of sense and sticks around.  
Favorite Issues
Issue #1 - It isn’t that ground breaking or even that memorable.  But it is the first issue and I think it is a pretty decent introduction to the characters.  I also want to note that I think the first X-Men movie was inspired by this first issue.  
Issue #4 - Not a favorite issue, actually, but a notable one.  The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants make their first appearance here.  I’d say the X-Men’s personalities kind of solidify here, too.  
Issue #6 - Namor makes his sassy appearance.  I think this is the issue where I found I could actually tolerate the ridiculousness of the Silver Age.  
Issue #11 - The Stranger appears and it is delightful.  
Issues #12-13 - Not only do we get Juggernaut’s first appearance, we also get a huge chunk of backstory for Xavier.  It’s actually a really tense couple of issues as Xavier tries to explain his path as this unknown entity slowly encroaches on the mansion.  It’s probably my favorite two issues of this particular run.  
Issue #18 - Everyone comes back from the whole sentinel saga that had taken up the previous three issues only to find that Magneto has been hiding out and capturing them all (Along with Angel’s parents).  Iceman is the only one left and has to rescue them all.  It’s kind of a clever concept.  
Least Favorite Issues 
Issue #10 - We get our first introduction to the Savage Land; this weird place in Antarctica that’s like the jungle with dinosaurs in it.  I’ve never been a fan of Savage Land stories as they usually bore me to tears.  
Issues #20-23 - This is just after Stan Lee leaves.  And while Roy Thomas is not doing a terrible job or anything, these villains are just dull and unmemorable, and at this point I want to just get on to the next volume.  
Final Thoughts
Once I get past some of this introductory stuff, I'll be able to make these reviews shorter. I feel like I've read a lot of these issues a hundred times because I haven't made it too far with this project. Glad to be finally moving forward.
Look - these aren't the best X-Men comics out there, but as someone who came into the Silver Age kicking and screaming, there is some charm to be found. But they aren't the comics that I'd normally read for fun.
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xtruss · 1 year
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Microplastics Are Polluting the Ocean at a Shocking Rate
Some 11 Billion Pounds of Plastic Particles are blanketing the surface alone. But a new study points to hope—if countries act now.
— March 08, 2023 | Wired
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Photograph: Philip Thurston/Getty Images
IF YOU THROW a polyester sweatshirt in the washing machine, it doesn’t emerge as quite its former self. All that agitation breaks loose plastic microfibers, which your machine flushes to a wastewater treatment facility. Any particles that aren't filtered out get pumped to sea. Like other forms of microplastic—broken-down bottles and bags, paint chips, and pellets known as nurdles—microfiber pollution in the oceans has mirrored the exponential growth of plastic production: Humanity now makes a trillion pounds of the stuff a year. According to the World Economic Forum, production could triple from 2016 levels by the year 2050.
A new analysis provides the most wide-ranging quantification yet of exactly how much of this stuff is tainting the ocean’s surface. An international team of researchers calculates that between 82 and 358 trillion plastic particles—a collective 2.4 to 10.8 billion pounds—are floating across the world … and that’s only in the top foot of seawater.
That’s also only counting the bits down to a third of a millimeter long, even though microplastics can get much, much smaller, and they grow much more numerous as they do so. (Microplastics are defined as particles smaller than 5 millimeters long.) Scientists are now able to detect nanoplastics in the environment, which are measured on the scale of millionths of a meter, small enough to penetrate cells—though it remains difficult and expensive to tally them. If this new study had considered the smallest of plastics, the numbers of oceanic particles would no longer be in the trillions. “We're talking about quintillions, probably, that's out there, if not more,” says Scott Coffin, a research scientist at the California State Water Resources Control Board and a coauthor of the study, which was published today in the Journal PLoS ONE.
“That’s the elephant in the room,” agrees Marcus Eriksen, cofounder of the 5 Gyres Institute and the study’s lead author. “If we're going to talk about the number of particles out there, we're not even looking at the nanoscale particles. And that really dovetails into all the research on human health impacts.” Scientists have only just begun to study these effects, but they are already finding that the smallest microplastics readily move through the body, showing up in our blood, guts, lungs, placentas, and even infants’ first feces.
Eriksen and Coffin did their quantification by gathering reams of previous data on plastic samples from across the world’s oceans. They combined this with data they collected during their own ocean expeditions. All told, the researchers used nearly 12,000 samples of plastic particle concentrations, stretching between the years 1979 and 2019. That allowed them to calculate not only how much may be out there, but how those concentrations have changed over time.
They found that between 1990 and 2005, particle counts fluctuated. That may have been due to the effectiveness of international agreements, like 1988 regulations limiting plastic pollution from ships. “That's the first time that we've ever had any sort of evidence that those international treaties in plastic pollution have actually been effective,” says Coffin.
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Courtesy of 5 Gyres
But that 1988 rule change wasn’t enough to stave off the effects of the astonishing increase in plastic production over the past few decades. The researchers found that beginning in the mid-2000s, the number of particles shot up dramatically, and it continues skyrocketing. They further project a 2.6-fold increase in plastic flowing into aquatic environments by 2040 unless there’s drastic action.
There may have also been a sort of time-delayed pollution bomb: Larger trash takes a while to fully degrade into little pieces. Another group of researchers has termed this the “global plastic toxicity debt”: Even if we were to stop all plastic pollution tomorrow, what’s already out there will keep breaking into ever smaller bits. “You've got these microplastic ‘factories’ in places where plastic is trapped on coastlines at the high tide line, that's just shedding constantly,” says Eriksen. “When the next storm happens, it's washed back to the ocean.”
Along the surface, these particles contaminate the very base of the food web: microscopic plants called phytoplankton, and the tiny animals that consume them, known as zooplankton. Scientists are finding that zooplankton regularly eat microplastics, reducing their appetite for actual food. And when predators like fish larvae eat the zooplankton, they take on toxic plastic particles.
More subtly, microplastics could be messing with the carbon cycle: Phytoplankton absorb carbon and are eaten by zooplankton, whose fecal pellets sink to the sea floor, sequestering greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. But fecal pellets loaded with microplastics sink differently, perhaps giving scavengers in the depths more time to consume them—and letting them intercept the carbon before it can sink to the bottom.
Seabirds, too, are suffering from eating plastic. A new paper from a separate team of researchers describes a novel affliction among flesh-footed shearwaters on Lord Howe Island, Australia: plasticosis. The scientists discovered that birds with more plastic pieces in their guts had more severe tissue damage in their stomachs. This, they write, shows “the ability of plastic to directly induce severe, organ-wide scar tissue formation or ‘plasticosis’ in wild, free-living animals, which is likely to be detrimental to individual health and survival.”
Coffin and Eriksen’s new quantification only counted plastics floating near the surface. But microplastics are in fact swirling throughout the sea and riding in currents across oceans. They’re settling in deep sea sediments and corrupting the Mariana Trench. Off the coast of Southern California, scientists were able to look through sediment layers going back nearly a century and found that deposition rates have doubled every 15 years since the 1940s, when plastics production began in earnest.
And microplastics in the ocean don't necessarily stay offshore. When a bubble ascends from the depths, it collects bacteria and organic matter, then flings them into the air when it pops. Now, bubbles are doing the same with microplastics. These blow back onto land in sea breezes, as described in a 2020 study. If more microplastics are gathering at the water’s surface, that means more are available to go atmospheric. “Even though we as scientists know that it's all very bad, you need this sort of qualification for the politicians and the policymakers—and often the general public—to get an idea of the true scale of what we've been doing,” says microplastics scientist Steve Allen, who coauthored the bubble paper but wasn’t involved in this new research. “It's one thing to show that it's here, it's over there. We need to show the ramp-up.”
In a separate study, Allen found such a ramp-up in peat, where more atmospheric microplastics were deposited over the decades as plastic production increased. But there was an exception: “What we could show with ours was a little drop during the economic downturn in 2009, and that was super interesting,” says Allen. As economic activity fell, so too did plastic production—at least briefly. “It means that you can have an almost immediate change in plastic by changing the way we use it. And that, I think, is what's showing in this oceanic paper, that things do have an impact.”
Eriksen and Coffin say it’s critical that United Nations negotiators agree on a global treaty to put limits on plastics production. (Talks began in November and are expected to continue for a few years.) “I'm convinced,” says Eriksen. “If we have a really strong treaty that caps production, reduces the single-use plastic output—and countries get good at waste management and capturing waste in their rivers and their streets, I bet you'll see a precipitous drop in the amount of trash that makes its way to the open ocean.”
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tc54random · 2 years
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Flying Arrow Design Ideas
I have come up with many ideas for what I can do with my project idea. I aim to implement a few of these ideas into my project but not all due to the time I have for this project. However, I might come back to the project after I have handed it in to try and implement most of these ideas.
I have broken up and ordered each of my ideas into different groups based on how much I want to implement it or not.
Most wanted:
- Charging the arrow up before firing. (There would be 4-5 levels of charge that could be reached, each stage increasing the damage and how fast the arrow will move. It will also change visually to show each level of charge.
The first level will have little to no movement of the arrow and it will start to produce a few sparks coming off it with a barely visible glow on only part of it, but enough to be noticed if paying attention.
The second level of charge will have a bit more movement with the arrow shaking/vibrating but not to violently. It will also have slightly more sparks and also a noticeable glow over half of it.
The third level of charge will continue to shake/vibrate with lots of movement but also not really violently and it will produce a lot of sparks while glowing completely.
The fourth level of charge will become really violent and start to shake/vibrate very aggressively and produce loads of sparks while glowing really intensely.
And finally the fifth level. However, I am not sure about this level yet but this level will be the breaking point where its been charging for too long and it can’t take any more charge causing it to break in half and the energy to disperse or explode away from it.)
- Different type of arrows. (I want to have at least two different types of arrows that the player could switch between depending on the situation. These different arrows would be effected by the charging differently which I will explain for each one.
The first type of arrow is the basic arrow that will have a larger supply compared to the others. The arrow will fly through up to three enemies that the player selects before firing. The damage of this arrow will increased on each level of charge and will do enough damage to instantly kill the enemies when it has reached the the fourth charge.
The second type of arrow is a split-shot that will have a very limited supply. This arrow will break into three parts when ready to fire at the three enemies the player has selected. Each part of the arrow will hit one of the targets dealing some damage and then they will hit the nearest enemy behind the one it just hit. When at the fourth level of charge each part of the arrow will deal damage to another two nearest enemies.
The third type of arrow is an explosive arrow. This will have the lowest supply because it will be very good at defeating a group of enemies. This arrow will unlike the previous arrows the player will only be able to select one player. When the arrow hits the selected enemy it will explode instantly killing in one hit and heavily damaging the ones around it. If at the fourth charge the arrow will eliminate any enemies in close proximity and heavily damage those near those.)
Somewhat wanted:
- Arrow cooldowns. (These would be activated depending on what arrow was fired and what level of charge it was at. The basic arrow will not have a cooldown as it is not a special arrow like the split-shot and the explosive arrow.)
- Traversing with the arrows. (The arrows could be used by the player to traverse the level. There could be a few different ways of using the arrows for traversing. This mechanic would allow for intricate level designs as it would allow for some vertical levels.
The first idea would be to give the player the ability to fly in any direction at any hight or with restrictions to the directions and hight.
The second idea would be to let the player get a speed boost by grabbing onto an arrow that would drag the player forwards but wouldn’t be flying as they wouldn’t be going up or down only forward.
The third idea is to let the player use the arrow to “jump” jump whilst in the air. This would basically be a double/triple jump or infinitely jump.
The player would be able to use the arrow as a form of travel by grabbing a hold of an arrow. The speed at which the player would be able to go with it is undecided but I think a good speed would be a bit faster than running. It could possibly have different speeds at which the player could go.
It could also let the player use it as a double/triple jump.)
Least wanted:
- Storing the arrows on the characters. (This would let the player visually see the number of arrows they have left as well as a number on the hud.)
Unsure:
- Different attack modes. (The player would be able to select which mode they want to fight in. There would be a ranged and melee mode.)
- Max range to the arrows. (This would mean the player would have to move around and get closer to the enemies if they are out of the range.)
----------------------
Note taking:
(Notebook: Page with the arrows)
Different stages
Builds up charge slowly
Faster with more damage when charged?
Max Range/Kills at a time
Trail effect
Different attack modes
Melee attack with it?
Select each enemy by looking at them while charging (randomize the path the arrow takes to kill each enemy.
Cooldown (Drains the energy of the player when used leaving them weak?)
Different type of arrows? (Stored on the back of the player and floats when summoned) (Lets me experiment more with the Niagara effects)
 - Multi shot (2-4 arrows fire at a time)
 - Explosive shot (doesn’t return)
 - Mixed shot (Fires a random selection of 3 at once)
Traversal? (grab the arrow (in left or right hand?) and lets you fly around at a fast speed)
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rengoku-loves-you · 3 years
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rengoku x reader (in which rengoku has a nightmare)
(hello again, sweets! this one is a bit angsty, sorry about that! i had a bit of a night terror and i needed to let some of those lingering feelings out in the form of projecting onto our beloved kyo, lol. its a modern-ish au (teacher rengoku maybe?) bc. why not? enjoy, lovelies!)
warnings: blood, self-harm (unintentional)
you wake to the sound of a crash. youre slow to react, sitting up and rubbing your eyes, and you cant see the time but you know its too early because of the exhausted drag in your bones. the other side of the bed is cold, and you sigh as you get up, stumbling to the door.
you yawn as you open it, peering down the hallway. you can see a shadow moving about in the kitchen, the lights off. if this didnt happen often, youd be afraid you were being robbed, but unfortunately the love of your life has the terrible habit of sneaking around in the dark at odd hours and you cant seem to convince him to stop.
"kyojuro?" you call, stepping out. the shadow pauses.
"ah, did i wake you?" immediately, you can tell something is wrong. his voice wobbles, and its much too soft. "i apologize, i meant to let you sleep in since its your day off."
"i dont care about that." you shuffle into the kitchen, looking around. you can see kyojuros outline, but its too dark to see much else. "are you okay? i heard a crash."
"yes, im fine! dont worry about me, go back to sleep." you hum, starting to make your way over to him, but kyojuro gives a sharp "ah!" that has you stopping again. "please stay over there, i dont want you stepping on the glass."
you inhale sharply.
"wha- glass?! kyojuro!" you hurry over to the light, slapping it on. you blink in the sudden brightness, stubbornly waiting until your eyes adjust. when they do, you hiss through your teeth.
kyojuro stands by the fridge, guiltily averting his eyes with a tight smile. his face is red; with a pang of worry, you realize hes been crying. theres colorful glass glittering on the floor around him, and he has a few larger shards in his hand. your concern for him skyrockets when you see blood, but you force yourself to stay calm.
right now, he needs you.
"dont move," you say firmly, searching for the broom. he nods quietly, and you feel your heart ache when he sniffles. you quickly sweep up the pieces around him, paying careful attention to the spaces between the tiles. once you finish and toss it all away, you finally approach him, slowly.
"did you try to clean it up in the dark?" you whisper, and he nods again, curling his bloodied fingers around the glass he holds. "oh, baby, dont do that." you wrap your hand around his, gently prying it open and ignoring the blood that stains your skin. you tip the pieces into your own hand, leaving him for just a moment to throw them away. when you turn back around, he has his arms tightly crossed, hugging himself.
"i didnt mean to wake you," he insists, not looking at you when you move closer. "i was trying to get some water and got... distracted. i broke the cup you got for me last year." and then, even softer, "that was my favorite cup."
"its okay," you say soothingly, cupping his cheek in your palm, and thats when you realize hes still crying, tears dripping onto your skin. he leans into your touch, his breathing shaky. "ill get you another one. lets get you cleaned up, okay?" he nods once, eyes falling shut.
you slide your hand down to his wrist, tugging until he unfolds. you lead him to the bathroom, sitting him down at the edge of the tub and dropping a kiss on top of his head.
you kneel before him and pick the glass shards out of his skin, frowning at how badly he shakes. it has to hurt, but kyojuro doesnt flinch as you clean and wrap them, wrist to fingertip.
"can you tell me what it was about?" you ask as you cut the extra gauze, taping the end down. he doesnt answer. you look up from his wounds, searching for his gaze, but his eyes are still closed. "kyojuro?" you tilt his chin upward. his lashes flutter, and he looks at you, finally. his golden eyes are bloodshot and raw, but at least the tears have stopped. you move your hand to his cheek, brushing away the lingering salt.
"i dont remember anymore," he says, turning his head to speak into your palm, hiding from your stare. you dont believe him (hes a terrible liar), but you dont push. he never did like to talk about his nightmares.
and you know thats what happened. a nightmare. hes had them for as long as youve known him, but hes never reacted this badly. hes never cried. it must have been a particularly bad one.
"alright," you say slowly. "okay, come here. lets go back to bed." you straighten, patiently waiting for him to stand as well. his hands are too heavily bandaged to hold properly, so you curl your fingers around his wrist again, guiding him back to bed.
he doesnt protest as you gently push him down onto the mattress, curling into himself in a way that breaks your heart. he looks so lonely that youre quick to crawl in behind him, wrapping your arms around his middle and covering his trembling hands with your own. hes warm, almost to the point of feverish, but youre used to it. you bury your face in his sleep-mussed hair and close your eyes.
"i wont let any more bad dreams get you," you whisper against the back of his neck, leaving a kiss on his spine. you feel him shiver and tighten your grip, tossing your legs over his. "ill keep you safe this time, kyo. i love you."
"thank you," he rasps, unmoving. you wait. "...i love you, too." you hold him until you fall asleep, rubbing your thumb over his knuckles.
when you wake again, the bed is warm, and hes smiling in his sleep.
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elizabethemerald · 3 years
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Fall Anniversary at the Soltryce Academy
Caleb walked into his classroom at the Soltryce Academy with the immediate instinct that something was wrong. He had been teaching Transmutation theory and application in this same class room for the past twenty years, so anything that seemed different set off alarms in his head. 
He mentally checked the wards on the class room and found them intact. There were a few students in their seats, a few more filtering into the lecture hall, by the second. None of them seemed alarmed. Whatever was different today did not appear to be an immediate threat. 
Still just to be safe he subtly cast Detect Magic as he set his bag down and took off his coat. Immediately a few points were highlighted in his mind. Of course his own magical items, the amber around his neck and the amulet beside it, the ring on his finger, the chalk he had enchanted to help him lecture. Nothing off there. 
There were a few points of magic around the rest of the room, each quickly analyzed and dismissed. Transmutation magic on a small pile of coins near the wall, a low level student’s practice project. Abjuration magic in the wards along the walls. Divination magic in a button, another spying device Astrid had tried to sneak into his class room to keep him from teaching against the school’s policies. 
It was the illusion spells that caught his attention. A few of the students were covered in the same, linked illusion. Their appearance normal enough to blend in, but also entirely too normal for a real student. And there, a student he didn’t recognize even with his keen mind, covered in an illusion spell. Several other magical objects of varying power, hidden under the spell. The Vestige appeared to be within its pocket dimension, so at least they hadn’t brought a weapon onto campus. 
After setting down his things and greeting his class he squeezed past a few of the students to grab Astrid’s enchanted button. He quickly dispelled it and slipped it into an envelope to return to her later. As he returned to the front he gave the cat sitting on his desk a brief scratch. 
“Hello Jester.” He said. Of course he didn’t need Detect Magic telling him of the cat’s aura of Transmutation to know his friend. She was bright blue after all and staring at him far more smugly than even a magic fey cat would. 
“Now class, I know we were discussing transmutation principles as applied to effecting the elements around you, but I am afraid that lesson will have to be postponed. It would seem that it is the anniversary of the Mighty Nein getting together and they have decided to invite themselves to my class.”
There was a muttering around the class room as the students looked at each other, before one of them near the front stood up, the illusion dropping off her form as she did so. 
“I told you he wouldn’t fall for it!” Veth said in her high voice, She looked mostly unchanged from when they first brought her back to her proper body. A few more laugh lines, but nothing more to show the passing two decades. “Lebby, is an amazing wizard, he wouldn’t fall for something simple like that. You students better appreciate the skill of your teacher.”
Caleb smiled fondly as Veth walked up to the front to give him a hug. Interspersed through the seats a few more illusion spells dropped. A half elven man walked up from the front row and kissed him on the cheek. Essek’s own illusion lasting even as he dismissed the Seeming on Kingsley and Yasha. 
“How did they rope you into this?” Caleb whispered to Essek. 
“Oh you know I can’t resist a practical joke.” Essek maintained his deadpan delivery for only a few seconds before a small smile graced his lips. Caleb knew quite well that Essek looked as ageless as ever, under his illusion. His elven blood would keep him looking much the same for the next few centuries. Caleb returned the kiss, to the muttering of his students. They weren’t ever a 100% sure who Caleb’s rotating cast of elven boyfriends were, and Caleb was more than happy to keep them in the dark. 
“Well you can’t fault us for trying!” Kingsley said. They were wearing a scandalously low cut shirt, a pair of plain black pants, and a pair of thigh high boots. His purple hair was fading to a less vibrant shade just a bit near his ears and he had a larger collection of scars, as one would expect from years of piracy and being a bloodhunter. They were also wearing their sword much to Caleb’s disapproval, which was apparently not magical. 
“You can’t expect me to hide this glorious look without magic though can you?” He said, sliding his hands down to his hips then back up his torso. Then he grabbed Caleb’s chin and kissed him full on the mouth, with tongue for several seconds, while his students lost their collective minds. Caleb smiled against Kingsley’s lips right before the tiefling stepped back. He was sure the rumor mill of the school would go wild about that for a few weeks. He wished he could see the look on Master Beck’s face when the news came across her desk. “Here’s to another twenty years, magic man.”
Yasha and Caduceus walked up next, each giving Caleb a tight hug. These two showed their age the least of the non elven members of the Nine. Cad could have been just stepping out of the temple doors in the Blooming Grove, saying that he had only three cups, if it weren’t for the increased presence of lichens and mosses of all kinds on his clothes and armor. Caleb was fairly certain there was an actual bird’s nest in his pink hair. Yasha of course looked as badass and muscular as she had when they first found her. Her hair was completely white, done up in an ornate braid. Home life seemed to suit her well, she looked genuinely happy and relaxed like she certainly hadn’t when they had first gotten together. 
Fjord’s spell dropped as well. The half orc’s hair had large stripes of gray in it, he had crows feet at the corners of his eyes, and his salt and pepper beard had significantly more salt to it now. He still looked good, life at sea, despite its hardships, keeping him fit. He laughed at something over Caleb’s shoulder as he approached and he found himself lifted bodily into the air by a pair of muscular blue arms. 
Jester having dropped her polymorph spun him around briefly in the hug before setting him back on his feet. She would never fail to look divine. Her horns now curling in on themselves, almost like her mother’s had when they first met her. Her hair is pulled back into a pony tail, poofing out behind her head from the salt air. Her sailing days were certainly not hurting her in anyway. Her smile was still just as wide, her eyes just as sharp, and her arms just as strong, if not more so. 
“Happy anniversary Caleb! Twenty years ago you were a stinky wizard. Now you are here teaching!” Jester’s happiness in her voice carried to every corner of the lecture hall. 
“What happened to our plan of drinks in Nicodranas this evening?”
“I just couldn’t wait Cay-leb.” She pouted. “Fjord and I got into port early, and I was so bored.”
Caleb smiled at her, then looked around at the rest of the Nein, pretending to count. 
“We appear to be one short. Where is my sister? Couldn’t drag her away from the Cobalt training pit? Or did she get lost in a book like some kind of nerd?” Caleb said with a smirk.
“Mother fucker!” 
He looked up towards the voice above him, just in time to watch Beauregard drop from the ceiling, to land on his desk with a perfect three point landing. She hopped off the desk and punched his arm, before also grabbing him in a tight hug. 
“I am not a nerd, Widogast!” She snapped, a wide grin on her face. 
“Beauregard, please do not land on my desk. It was a gift and I don’t think it could bare too many impacts like that.” He stopped to look up at the vaulted ceilings of the class room. “Also, how did you get up there?”
If she had been invisible she would have tripped the wards on the class room. And if she had gone in the brief break between classes one of the early students would have noticed her and caused a stir. 
Beau took her turn to smirk. 
“I have been waiting up there for four hours so we could surprise you. It’s surprisingly comfortable. I could have gone another couple of hours without breaking a sweat.” She paused to flex, causing several students, and Yasha to blush at her muscles. 
Beauregard’s monk training meant that she looked like she hadn’t aged a day since Aeor. And she could still easily out fight everyone else in the room if she wanted to. She was also the one member of the Nein that Caleb saw the most frequently. Their work to root out corruption among the Cerberus Assembly, and other bodies of power in the Empire often kept them up together late into the night, until Yasha would intervene and throw her wife over her shoulder to carry her to bed. 
“Can I finish the lesson, or should we depart immediately?” Caleb asked, already guessing the answer. 
“Cayyyllleeeb.” Jester groaned, pulling at her face. “I’m sooooo bored. I want to drink and party already!”
Caleb turned back to his class of students. He was sure most of them had heard rumors about Professor Widogast and the wild adventures he got up to with the Mighty Nein back when they first got together. He wasn’t sure how much they actually believed, but he was sure that even the most widely blown out of proportion tale didn’t even begin to cover the truth of what they had done together. 
“In honor of the anniversary of this group of arschlochs finding each other, consider this to be a free day. Keep up on your readings, and if you have any questions I will be at my regular office hours tomorrow morning.” 
The students immediately started buzzing as they stood and packed. No doubt during tomorrow’s class he would have to field a whole host of questions about the Nein, and that was just the way he liked it. The day after the anniversary was the one day he would talk about what his family had done. As the class filtered out, with many a lingering glance thrown at the colorful group at the front, Caleb turned to Essek, setting the envelope with Astrid’s button in it on the table top to deal with later. 
“Would you like to teleport us to the beach, or shall I?”
Essek put up both hands. 
“I already used my spell slots getting us all back together again. You can bring us to the coast.” Essek said, his smile a mix between smug and fond. 
Caleb rolled his eyes before pulling him into a soft kiss. Then he turned to address the rest of the Nein. The family he had made for himself. 
“Are we ready?” After a series of nods, he pulled an ancient clay turtle from his pocket and gave it a squeeze. “Then let’s go!”
And they were off, to a night of drinks and celebration and stories told, and memories shared. And of course many toasts, “To another twenty years.”
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nightingaelic · 3 years
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could you do Fallout New Vegas companion’s reactions to a Courier Six who is also the Lone Wanderer telling their stories from their time in DC? (bonus points for Arcade’s reaction to them hating the enclave, and if that would make him decide to keep his past hidden even longer, or if he would still tell them?)
The logistics and implications of this make my head spin. This is also super long, honestly I should just quit writing reacts and start writing fics OH WAIT
Getting the courier talking was a tough thing to do, but on nights where the moon was full and the coyotes' howls were miles away or at least behind some stout walls, on nights where they were a few beers in and they hadn't seen another living soul in a few days, that Mojave Express deliverer started to reminisce. That wasn't really the surprising part, though. No, the surprising part was what they would remember, fondly or not-so-fondly: A world apart from the desert, a continent away on another coast, and stories of life in a vault, a missing father, pure water and a Brotherhood divided.
Arcade Gannon: Arcade didn't mind these moods, at least when they first cropped up. He nodded along as the courier talked about living in their father's shadow, about feeling cornered by their own family's legacy. He hung on their words about living in the cradle of America's history, about Project Purity, all of the gritty details of modifying a GECK to bring water to a devastated wasteland.
Eventually though, the courier's memories soured, with the arrival of Enclave remnants in their life. Arcade folded into himself with every harsh word, every jolt of plasma that had disrupted his friend's world relived in horrific detail. They gestured angrily as they described their newfound purpose, their battle for power with the fractured Brotherhood of Steel at their back, and their smug satisfaction at the moments they were able to crack open Raven Rock and the Enclave's mobile base crawler and lay waste to their tormentors.
It took a few rounds of these stories before the courier noticed he shrank and grew quiet whenever they neared the end of their story about breaking into another vault to find the GECK. They stopped abruptly one night. "What's up with you?"
"Um..." Arcade scratched the back of his neck and looked away. "Nothing. Nothing, I just... have some personal experience with the Enclave, myself."
The courier sighed. "Yeah, there's a few people walking around the West Coast that have similar stories to mine. Arroyo's full of them, for one. Is it something like that?"
Arcade took a deep breath. "I feel... well, it's a lot closer to home, for me. Close enough to raise questions, so I don't talk about it much."
"Close enough to..." The courier twisted their face up in confusion for a moment, before realization set in and their eyes grew large. "You were... your... oh."
"Mmm-hm."
"Well, fuck me." The courier smiled and popped a cap off of another beer. "I've been doing all the talking, haven't I? Let's hear your story about working with the guys in power armor who ruined my life, right after dad did."
Craig Boone: Whenever the courier started up like this, Boone couldn't help but notice a familiar twinge of regret and self-doubt in their voice. It shone through most clearly when they spoke about their time with the Brotherhood of Steel, the men and women they'd fought alongside and lost during their struggle against the remnants of the Enclave. It was there, too, in their story about returning to the vault they grew up in, setting the chaos that had arisen in their wake to rest, but not being able to go back to the way things were.
Boone didn't pry. He knew that feeling well. Instead, he cracked open bottles of beer, liquor, soda, whatever they had on hand during their nights in the desert, and just listened. He'd done the same for Carla, when they were younger and new to each other and he couldn't get enough of her voice and how it flowed endlessly, easily, the way his never could. He absorbed it all now as he did then: The joy, the pain, the loss, the fear, the triumphs and falls and abandoned dreams that filled the courier up and drove them to travel west, beyond anything they had ever known.
That last part stumped Boone a bit, though. "Why didn't you stay?" he finally asked one night.
They looked surprised. "Stay? Stay where? I didn't have a home anymore."
Boone shook his head. "With the Brotherhood. Or some other settlement."
"Like Megaton?" The courier sighed. "I thought about it. Close to the vault, friendly people, easy work... I guess I just didn't want to wind up... stuck."
They flushed red and looked away from him. Boone knew why they were embarrassed, but he also knew the truth in their words.
Sometimes the courier cried after they had finished, though they did their best to hide it. Boone pretended not to notice. He was pretty sure they knew he was pretending, but he was also pretty sure that pointing it out would be worse than just letting it be an open secret between them. The silence between them endured, but something grew inside it and flourished. Some kind of deeper understanding.
Lily Bowen: The more the courier spoke, the more Lily made connections in her muddled mind. Of course they knew the basic layout of most vaults, they had grown up in one. Of course they were extra-sensitive to the Mojave heat, they had come to the desert from the cooler of the two coasts. Of course they'd been extra-wary around the super mutants or nightkin of Jacobstown, they had only known angry super mutants looking to grow their own numbers through any means necessary.
Their shared experience of growing up inside a vault reminded Lily of happier days, and she often asked questions about Vault 101 during the courier's stories. "Were you sweet on anyone inside your old home?" she asked, with a big smile befitting a proud grandma.
The courier blushed. "That's not very polite, Lily."
"Oh, I'm sorry, dearie."
"No, no it's okay." The courier smiled. "There was a boy who picked on me a lot, but I never figured out whether he did it because he hated me or liked me. His name was Butch. And there was Amata, my childhood friend. She was the daughter of the Overseer."
"Daughter of the Overseer?" Lily grinned. "I'm sure she was a lovely young woman."
The courier looked a little misty. "Yeah. She was. Probably still is."
Lily pulled a handkerchief that used to be a small tablecloth from inside her overalls and handed it over. "Maybe we can go back there together, pumpkin," she offered. "I always wanted to travel to the capital. We can visit your friends, see the sights."
"Yeah, maybe someday." The courier accepted the gift and blew their nose. "I've got some things I need to finish up here before I even think about wandering back east, though."
"Then let's make a list and do our chores," Lily said happily. "Number one?"
"Ohhhh, man." The courier smiled up at her. "I wouldn't even know where to start."
Raul Alfonso Tejada: Raul got a faint smile on his face whenever the courier started up like this, as if their memories reminded him of another place he had come from, another time. While they couldn't have more different backgrounds, pasts- hell, he had several hundred years on the courier, even if they shared the same road today- there was something in the description of the other roads they had walked that made him feel warm on a cold night.
"What's on your mind?" The courier asked him one night, when Raul's smile grew larger than usual.
"Nada, boss," he reassured them. "You're just a good reminder that I can change my mind about the future anytime I'd like. Tell me the one about that radio DJ again."
"Again?" The courier rolled their eyes. "Why? I could tell you a million stories about Underworld and all the ghouls that lived there, but all you want to hear about is Three Dog. You'd probably have more in common with the Underworld folks, honestly."
Raul nodded noncommittally. "Sí, but my favorite stories are about people who had to rise above bad situations and become someone uncommon. Anyone who's able to do that is either fighting for something great or running from something terrible. Sometimes both."
The courier shot him a skeptical look. "Three Dog's holed up in his radio station 24/7, he's not running from anything or out fighting for anything. All that stuff about 'the good fight' is a load of bull."
"Now, now, Six," Raul chastised. "Just because he looks like your average pendejo doesn't mean he isn't doing his part. You even told me his radio show is inspirational for the Capital Wasteland folks."
The courier held their hands up in the air and bobbled them, as if balancing an invisible scale. "The duality of man. Being an average pendejo, or convincing everyone around you that you aren't actually an average pendejo and can pull off miracles."
Raul laughed. "And which one are you, boss?"
"Eh, I'm still figuring it out."
Rose of Sharon Cassidy: Cass was never one for fixating on her own past, but she couldn't help but sympathize with the courier whenever they deigned to add onto their unbelievable story. It was hard enough for her to navigate her own damn life: She couldn't imagine being called upon to steer an entire area's destiny.
After another night of recalling their life inside a vault with their dad, then their unexpected loss of him right after being reunited on the surface, the courier stopped suddenly. "I'm sorry," they said.
Cass paused her swig of precious whiskey. "What?"
"I keep going on and on about my dad, and here you are not knowing what happened to yours."
"Eh." Cass took her drink and waved her hand around until the burning swallow made its way down. "S'loads of people in the wasteland without a clue what happened to their pops. I'm not special. In fact, I'd say it probably hurts a bit more, what happened with yours."
"Well, all the same." The courier sank deeper into their seat and examined their own bottle of spirits. "I feel like an open book, tonight. Anything you want to know about where I came from that I haven't already spilled?"
Cass thought for a moment. "Tribals."
"What about them?"
"Does the East Coast have them? You're not the first traveler I've met from there, but none of you have so much as mentioned any tribals out east."
"Mmm." The courier looked thoughtful. "I guess we do have them, though maybe not in the traditional sense. There's a mess of them in Point Lookout for sure, and at least one tribal group in the Capital Wasteland outright, but beyond that things are more... loose. Fewer intact families, fewer intact homes."
"Huh." Cass took another drink. "Maybe that's where my dad went."
She let the courier stew in the awkward silence for a bit before she grinned and reached out to smack them. "Just kidding. Keep going. I want to hear about that giant robot again."
Veronica Santangelo: Veronica usually sat and listened, spellbound, picturing a chapter of her order that had realized the very thing she kept trying to tell the Elders and made the ultimate sacrifice to follow their hearts anyway.
Well, maybe Elder Owyn Lyons hadn't come to the same realization as her, but he had had a change of heart that split his company and cut them off from almost everyone they had ever known. It had been five years since the High Elders had instituted radio silence toward their East Coast chapter, and so far there had been no attempts to re-establish contact.
Veronica prodded the courier for any info she could get about the Capital Wasteland Brotherhood of Steel. The courier let slip pretty early in their friendship that Elder Owyn Lyons had passed away, which wasn't unexpected. The man was 76 years old, after all. She learned on one particularly emotional night that his daughter, Elder Sarah Lyons, was also dead, something she wasn't sure even the Western Elders were aware of. That memory was clearly painful for the courier though, so Veronica didn't press for details.
"And the Enclave?" the Scribe asked one night, arms wrapped around her knees. "Are they completely gone?"
The courier grew cold. "Yes. I made sure of it."
"Right." Veronica nodded. "So the Brotherhood took over the air force base they were at. It must have been chock-full of tech and resources, if it was the Enclave's last stand."
"It was." The courier sighed and shifted in their seat. "And it woke up some of our brothers and sisters to their original mission in the Capital Wasteland. I thought maybe that selfishness had died with Liberty Prime, but... well, I didn't like it, so I left."
"Mmm, yeah." Veronica nodded again, sympathetically this time. "I know how you feel. Felt."
"Feel," the courier agreed. "I just wish there was more I could've done. Maybe there wasn't anything else, short of seizing power."
"You'd definitely get pushback for that in the Brotherhood," Veronica agreed. "But you might get that chance out here in the broader Mojave."
ED-E: At first, ED-E enjoyed the stories, trumpeting and cooing various beeps at the appropriate moments for emphasis. The one time the courier began badmouthing the Enclave, however, the eyebot waited until they had finished before playing back the first tape that Dr. Whitley had recorded before its trip.
The courier listened to the scientist's words from years ago, deflating slightly as it played out. When the tape had finished, they stood up and checked the eyebot over. "He sent you toward Navarro, huh?"
ED-E beeped affirmation, and the courier sighed. "But Navarro was already gone. I'm sorry. I guess I'm... well, me and the Brotherhood of Steel back east are responsible for your previous master's decision to send you away. Might be responsible for more, too."
ED-E beeped sadly. The courier pressed their forehead against the eyebot's metal dome in apology.
Rex: Well, surprising for most. Rex was not most. As soon as the courier got really into their recollections, Rex usually yawned and went to sleep. He stirred when he felt their hand reach down to scratch the ruff of his neck, or pat the glass dome that held his brain.
"Good dog," the courier said, through the veil of sleep. "You remind me of another pup that used to follow me around."
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the-scandalorian · 3 years
Text
Tempered Glass: Chapter 6
Pairing: Din Djarin x Female Reader Rating: M (will become explicit) Word Count: 4k Warnings: slow burn, sad feels/angst, canon-typical violence, cursing, sexy thoughts, pining Summary: When Fennec Shand reveals your true identity to the Mandalorian, you do your best to pick up the pieces. Notes: I’m sorry this took me so long!! I rewrote it like six times because I couldn’t get it to feel right. Next chapter should be much faster. Taglist: @bbdoyouloveme​​ @beskarhearts​​ @dincrypt​ @dunderr​ @honey-hi​ @just-me-and-my-obsessions00​ @mbpokemonrulez​  @oloreaa​ @red-leaders​ @speakerforthedead0​ @spideysimpossiblegirl​​ @theflightytemptressadventure​ @ubri812​ @zoemariefit​​
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Image from The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian
Fuck. Panic coursed through your veins and paralyzed you. Your brain moved infuriatingly slowly as you tried to think of a way to stop the disaster that was unfolding before your eyes.
And yet...despite your fear and despite the fact that this terrifying, high-level bounty hunter had once tracked you, hearing Fennec call you sweetheart made your stomach drop—in a pleasant way, not at all like when Toro had done the same. She was beautiful, strong, mysterious, intimidating. What little you saw of her fighting style confirmed that she was lithe and exacting—catlike in her grace and prowess. A sexy armored bounty hunter.
I have a type.
You shunted that wildly unhelpful train of thought out of your head to refocus on the crisis at hand.
You looked at Mando. “I—”
“What’s she talking about?” he prompted. You couldn’t tell if you were projecting because you felt guilty or if he really did sound a little hurt.
You opened your mouth again to respond, but Fennec beat you to it.
“Oh, you don’t know?” Even in the dark, you could see Fennec’s eyes sparkle in delight as she addressed Mando. “I don’t know how this one stayed off your radar,” she explained. “She was wanted by the Empire for years. Huge bounty... She looks a little different now—check her chest for a scar to make sure, but I’d bet her bounty it’s there.”
Mando had already seen the scar. He knew Fennec was right.
You caught the hungry look on Toro’s face as he drank in everything Fennec was saying. His eyes trailed down your face and landed shamelessly on your chest. You could practically hear the wheels turning in his head as he tried to think up a way to confirm your identity and claim the reward for both you and Fennec. This little fucker.
Fennec looked at you, and you took a step back involuntarily. “You’ve gotten sloppy, baby. There’s been chatter for weeks that you resurfaced on Nevarro. If I hadn’t been pinned down here, I’d have come for you myself.”
Her words felt like ice sliding down your throat and settling in your stomach. You’d figured that news of your sighting would probably get out, but you had hoped against hope that the blue-haired bounty hunter had been taken out before she’d been able to spread the word.
Mando was silent, fists clenched tightly at his sides, visor glued on Fennec. Pulling yourself together, you grabbed his arm and dragged him a safe distance away.
“I was going to tell you. I’m sorry,” you blurted, once you were out of earshot.
“It’s fine,” he replied stiffly, his gaze trained decidedly to your right.
Somewhere in the back of your mind you registered that even though it was just the two of you, his voice retained its icy, detached quality, all the tender familiarity gone.
“No, it’s not. I should have told you sooner. I-I wanted to—believe me—but I didn’t know if I could trust you. You were—you’ve been worried that I might turn you or the kid in, haven’t you? I was worried that you’d do the same to me if you found out. The longer I spent with you, the more I felt like you wouldn’t, but I had to be completely, totally sure. I couldn’t take the risk. You can understand that, right?”
He said nothing.
“Look—I really want to be able to trust you. I want you to be able to trust me. I just didn’t know where to start. It’s not easy for people like us to trust blindly, you know?” You hated that your voice sounded almost pleading.
Still, he said nothing, a blank beskar wall. The comfortable warmth that had developed—slowly, painstakingly—between you two over the past weeks had dissolved in an instant.
“Mando. Talk to me, please.” You reached out for his arm, but he stepped back. He still wouldn’t meet your gaze.
“Not now. Not here.”
“But—”
Your heart sank when he turned abruptly and walked back to the others.
You watched as he grabbed Fennec’s arm roughly, hauling her to her feet, and you trailed behind as he lead your party back down to the foot of the cliff. When you reached the bottom, Mando threw Fennec to the ground.
“Uh oh, looks like two of us have to walk,” Fennec taunted, eyeing the lone bike.
Mando jerked his head, motioning you and Toro to follow him.
“Alright, so what is the plan?” Toro asked Mando.
Reluctantly, you refrained from asking him if he could contribute for once instead of letting Mando do literally all the work; instead, you turned to Mando and supplied, “That dewback isn’t far.”
Mando didn’t look at you. To Toro, he said, “I need you to go find it.”
“And leave you here with my bounty and my ride?” Toro asked incredulously. “Yeah, I don’t think so, Mando. I’ll only go if she comes with me, so I have a guarantee that you won’t leave.” Toro gestured toward you.
You and Mando spoke at the same time: “No.”
“Either she comes, or I don’t go.” Toro was obviously pleased with himself for thinking of this plan, a smirk painted on his face. 
You shot him a scathing look before turning to Mando to offer, “I’ll go get it alone.”
You’d love to put some distance between you and Toro, between you and Fennec, and honestly even between you and Mando at the moment.
“Suit yourself,” shrugged Toro. “Less work for me.”
You ignored Toro. “I remember vaguely where it was.” You pointed.
Mando pressed a button on the side of his helmet and scanned the horizon, stopping vaguely where you’d pointed. Finally, he trained his visor on you. He looked from you to Toro to where Fennec was seated and to you again, deliberating. You could tell he didn’t want you to go alone, but he also didn’t want to leave you here with Toro and Fennec. “We’ll go together.”
You nodded, knowing you were in no position to complain. Now that your secret was out, it was evident that both Toro and Fennec would capitalize on your value at the first chance. And, even now, when your dishonesty had been revealed to him, Mando still felt compelled to protect you, his generous heart winning out over whatever malice he felt toward you.
A small part of you resented him for that; it didn’t rub you the right way that he didn’t think you could take care of yourself. A larger part of you knew it was exactly why you liked him so much.
It would be convenient if he were a selfish ass. You could convince yourself you didn’t owe him anything, that you’d done nothing wrong. But no. 
This is why it’s easier to be alone.
You felt both angry and guilty, an awful combination that manifested in the urge to hit something—a deep yearning to break Toro’s nose flashed through your mind when you caught the smug expression on his face as he looked from you to Mando. He was enjoying the palpable tension that had materialized between you a little too much.
“Watch her,” Mando reminded Toro, gesturing to Fennec. “And don’t let her get near the bike. She’s no good to us dead.”
Without a look or a word to you, he turned and started toward the dewback. 
***
You walked in awkward silence, knowing you’d have to be the one to break it, but you delayed the inevitable, admiring the array of stars spread out above you. Mando stomped up and down the swells of sand, staying several paces ahead.
You meandered your way through a storm conflicting emotions: anger at yourself for getting into this situation (rightful), anger at Mando for being infuriatingly honorable (misplaced), guilt that you’d hurt Mando (well-founded), fear about your safety (appropriate), fear that Mando was about to break your heart a little bit (honest), irritation that you were trekking through a damn desert and there was an aggressive amount of sand in your boots (fair but trivial)... and a myriad of others that were too nuanced to unpack.
After deliberating for a long time, you decided to take an offensive position and offer to leave preemptively to save Mando the trouble (and to save yourself from having to hear that from him). You steeled yourself with a deep breath and interrupted the oppressive quietude of the night, jogging for a moment to catch up with him.
“We can go our separate ways when we get back to Mos Eisley. I know I’m too much of a liability to keep around, especially with the kid.”
He turned his head to look at you, the night sky reflected in his visor.
“I have enough credits to get off world some other way.”
“If that’s what you want.”
It killed you a little just how much it wasn’t what you wanted. You were supposed to be totally independent—you’d chosen this life when you joined the Rebel Alliance, knowing that if by some miracle you managed to survive, you’d be hunted for years. The call for your blood wouldn’t—and didn’t—end with the Battle of Endor, especially when Imperial remnants remained strong. And years ago, condemning yourself to this life for a just cause had seemed brave and romantic. Now, here you were, desperate to build a connection with someone else, despite the risk. And you were starting to think that truly being brave would mean accepting that risk.
At what point is it worth giving up ease for happiness, for something more?
You gathered up what nerve you could muster and took a leap.
“It’s not what I want, but I know you feel betrayed. I really am sorry I didn’t tell you—I was planning to, but I was scared. Scared that you’d take advantage of that... scared that you’d take back your offer to stick together. And the longer I waited, the harder it got to come clean.”
“I understand.”
The frostiness of his voice had given way to something a shade softer, but it still hadn’t returned to its former warmth.
You nodded.  
As it became clear that he wasn’t going to say anything else, the disappointment started to settle in, trickling into the hollow of your chest. He understood, but it evidently didn’t change the fact that the fragile trust that had evolved between you was shattered.
Well, fuck.
You suppressed the wave of emotions that threatened to overtake you, focusing instead on making a new plan for yourself. There would be time to work through the feelings later, alone. Your thoughts wandered to where you might go next, running through a mental list of options. Nothing sounded appealing. 
None of the places that came to mind would be stocked with a shiny, withholding Mandalorian and an ancient green toddler.
You walked for another twenty minutes before Mando spoke again.
“I want to trust you too.”
You stopped. “What?”
He halted too, turning to face you. The dark sky painted his beskar deep shades of liquid indigo, speckled with pinpricks of starlight, that moved as he shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “I wish you... uh... had felt safe enough to tell me that, but I understand why you didn’t.”
You knitted your eyebrows together. “Wait. You’re not mad?”
“I haven’t given you any reason to be open with me. And I guessed you were running from something.”
“Oh.”
“The Empire part caught me off guard—but I knew there was something.”
Of course he’d figured it out...that seemed so obvious now. He’d be able to spot that from a mile away. Plus, he knew you. You spent the last month or so learning his tells and quirks, but you hadn’t stopped to think that he was doing the same with you.
He continued: “But the kid and I are also wanted by the Empire. We’d have the same problem even if you weren’t here.”
“True...” You were struggling to recover from the whiplash.
“What are you wanted for?”
“I was an Intelligence Officer in the Alliance.” It had been years since you’d shared this information with anyone, but the words fell from your lips as naturally as if you said them every day, like you’d been ready to tell him all along and your mouth had finally caught up with your heart.
“Yeah, that makes more sense,” he said. “Explains a lot of your skills.”
You scoffed. “Fair.”
Mando cleared his throat and hooked his thumbs in his belt. “But... it’s...uh, nice to not always be alone.” He punctuated the end of his sentence with a shrug, a little embarrassed.
Relief washed over you.
You smiled. “For me too.”
“Good,” he agreed, nodding decisively.
“Shit, you really let me think you were furious,” you laughed, feeling infinitely lighter but still trying to wrap your mind around this abrupt turn.
“Sorry,” he apologized, “I was... trying to figure some things out.”
You shook your head in exasperation and started walking again, but you froze when he said your real name. You’d known your name would sound good in his voice—everything did—but the way it rumbled and rasped through the modulator was borderline sinful, agonizingly personal.
File that away for later.
You looked back at him, and he cocked his head: “So you’ll stay?” 
“Yeah, I’ll stay,” you agreed, a broad grin on your face.
You both started walking again, and suddenly, trudging through the sandy desert in the middle of the night didn’t seem so bad. The dewback came back into view as you crested another sand dune.
Mando looked over at you. “Din,” he offered. “My name is Din.”
You glanced up at him, surprised. “Din,” you repeated back to him, feeling it out.
Despite the contradictory definition of the word, it suited him. He was the opposite of a cacophony, a man of few words—though to be fair, he did often cause a commotion. But as a name... Din was short, to the point. It evoked a lot of feeling for just three letters, and that felt right.
“I know your real name now. I thought it was only fair that you know mine too, but only use it when it’s just me and you and the kid,” he explained.
Your throat was unexpectedly tight.
You reached over to squeeze his arm at the elbow, where there was a gap in the beskar. He didn’t pull away.
“Thanks,” you answered, looking up into his visor. 
You hoped he understood that you were thanking him for more than just his name—for his understanding, for his trust, for his protection, for his vulnerability. You couldn’t say that all out loud at the moment, but you hoped he knew.
He dipped his helmet in acknowledgement, and you dropped your hand. 
When you finally reached the dewback, Din approached slowly, speaking to it in a calm, lilting voice. It warmed to him slowly, and he grabbed the reins.
He hauled himself up onto its back and then extended a hand down to you. You took it, and he pulled you up easily to sit behind him. You wrapped your arms around his middle.
“Is this okay?” You weren’t really sure why you asked this time. Things had shifted between the two of you, so you were compelled to check that the casual contact was still welcome.
He cleared his throat: “Yeah, fine,” he confirmed.
It had been a long time since you’d been physically affectionate with anyone, besides the occasional casual, short-lived tryst. It was nice to wrap your arms around someone familiar and comfortable, someone who knew you.
The dewback started forward. Din directed it back toward the cliffs with the reins in his fist. It wasn’t a huge distance, but the dewback was a slow means of transportation.
You had little idea what all this meant for your daily reality with Din. You had both shared that you wanted companionship, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was interested in anything more than that. However, for you at least, this was undeniably no longer a superficial interest that you harbored; you had real affection for him. And it seemed like he maybe was starting to feel same way about you? Or maybe he was just getting comfortable with having companionship? The man was starved for human interaction, so it was hard to know if he was warming up to you or warming up to companionship in general.
One step at a time.
Time slipped by as the dewback lumbered on. You rested your cheek against the scratchy fabric of his cape and closed your eyes. The rhythmic movement, the darkness, and comfort of the position lulled you into a light sleep.
You weren’t sure how long you’d been asleep when Din woke you, squeezing your now limp arm that was resting on his thigh above his beskar plate.
“Alive back there?” he asked in a low voice.
Leaned against him, still groggy with sleep, you felt the question rumble through his chest.
You sat up straight, pulling your arms back to your sides. “Shit, sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
He chuckled. “It’s fine. We’re close.”
The two suns had risen, bathing the landscape in the golden glow of early morning. You looked around and saw that you were a short distance from where you’d left Toro and Fennec. You couldn’t see them yet, but you figured they were hidden behind one of the many large boulders strewn across the landscape.
As you drew nearer, though, you could tell something was wrong. Only one figure came into view—and it was crumpled on the ground. Din registered this as well: his shoulders stiffened, and he pulled the reins tight to halt the dewback’s slow advance.
It was Fennec’s body on the ground. Toro was nowhere to be seen.
“Fuck,” you breathed.
“You were right about him,” said Din. “Stay here.”
Din dismounted and approached Fennec’s body. She looked dead, but he crouched to check. He tried to find a pulse, and after a moment, he stood back up and shook his head.
As Din walked back toward you, the realization dawned on you both at the same time.
“He didn’t—”
“The kid—”
“She must have—”
“We have to—”
Din hurried back onto the dewback and directed it toward Mos Eisley, doing his best to make the lumbering creature pick up its pace. It didn’t help much.
The ride back was interminable. You definitely didn’t fall asleep this time, adrenaline keeping you on edge as the hours passed. Both you and Din were incredibly tense, speaking very little, thinking only of the child.
***
Night had fallen again by the time you reached Mos Eisley. The speeder bike that Toro had been riding was parked outside Peli’s. Fury and fear spidered through your veins at the thought of him with the kid.
Din jumped off the side of the dewback and looked up at you expectantly, his arms outstretched. You maneuvered your leg over the side and slid down a bit until his hands gripped your hips, and he lowered you until your feet hit the sand. You could have easily jumped down on your own. He knew that. You knew that. You’d let him help you anyways.
You paused outside the bay to draw your blasters.
“Here,” Din offered you the flash charge.
You slipped it into your jacket sleeve, where it stayed tight against your wrist. Together, you crept through the door and down the stairway that opened up to where the Razor Crest was parked. It was eerily quiet.
You scanned the space, jumping slightly when one of Peli’s pit droids scurried past.
“Took you guys long enough.”
Toro walked slowly down the open ramp of the Crest, the barrel of the blaster in his hand pressed to Peli’s back. The child was held in his other arm.
“Looks like I’m calling the shots now. Huh?” he sneered.
The urge to hit him flared up so acutely that you clenched your fists. You hissed at him: “Don’t you da—”
“Drop your blasters and raise ‘em,” he ordered, cutting you off.
You and Din exchanged a look before throwing your blasters to the ground. In a subtle movement, you shifted the charge from your sleeve to your fist as you placed your hands behind your head.
“Cuff ‘em,” commanded Toro, nudging Peli forward and throwing two sets of cuffs to the ground.
She moved toward Din.
“No, start with her,” Toro drawled, jutting his chin toward you. “To think I almost cut Mando out of this deal,” he laughed. “I would have gotten you and Fennec, but this is so much better. I get to collect the bounty on you and this target here that Mando helped escape,” he pointed his gun at the baby and all your muscles tensed in protective rage, “...and I get to turn in the legendary Mandalorian himself—a Guild traitor.”
Peli walked behind you. You grasped the charge in your fist so that she would be able to see the top of it. You heard her quiet, sharp intake of breath.
“Fennec was right,” Toro continued smugly. “Bringing you three in won’t just make me a member of the Guild—it’ll make me legendary. Three high-value targets on my first try. Wow, I should really thank you guys.”
Peli was fumbling with the cuffs behind you, taking longer than necessary on purpose.
You hoped she was ready to duck because you’d heard enough of Toro’s self-congratulatory monologue. You released the charge.
In the split second of blinding light, you, Din, and Peli sprinted in opposite directions, taking cover. Toro groaned and attempted to cover his eyes, shooting blindly at the empty space where you had been standing.
Din took Toro out in one shot.
You were closest to where he fell, so you charged forward with your blaster trained on his body. The baby wiggled out of Toro’s arms and ran toward you. His big eyes were watery and his arms stretched toward you, his fingers making little grabby motions. He chittered nervously as you scooped him up with your free arm, and he buried his head in your shoulder.
You kicked Toro’s blaster away from his body as Din approached to make sure he was dead. After he checked his pulse, Din tugged the pouch of credits from Toro’s belt and tossed it to Peli. “Here,” he said.
With a gasp, she caught it and emptied the pouch in her hands. Credits tumbled out, a few falling to the ground.
“That cover us?” Din asked.
Peli looked shocked, scrambling to pick them all up. “Yeah... uh, yes. This is gonna cover you.” It was clearly far more than she was expecting.
You passed the child over to Din, and he looked down at the baby, tilting his helmet in...what? Affection? Relief? This was a head tilt you hadn’t defined yet.
Peli approached him and looked down at the child. “You take care of him, you hear?”
Din nodded.
“Thank you for watching him,” you said to Peli, genuinely grateful that she had turned out to be trustworthy.
“Besides getting held at gunpoint... I guess it wasn’t too bad,” she replied, smiling down at the baby. She’d clearly grown fond of him, and you couldn’t blame her. After a moment, Peli mumbled a goodbye and walked away, eagerly counting the credits in her hands, her pit droids skittering after her.
You stood there, finger caught between three tiny green ones, as the kid babbled and cooed up at you. When you looked up, Din’s helmet was trained on your face.
He tipped his head toward the open ramp of the Crest in a wordless invitation.
You smiled at him, a comforting warmth settling in your chest, and he followed you into the hull.
***
Chapter 7
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alastanor · 3 years
Text
In less than a week my feed has been plagued by the "hot takes" of entitled fans of the Hazbin and Helluva universe.
As a result, I know I promised some analytical information regarding what we know of Hazbin's version of hell thus far, which will be included in this post. But there will be some other things added as well to address some of the more frequently expressed "concerns" I have seen being (rather rudely) expressed in posts.
Some of the things I will be talking about in these posts, so while I will be utilizing quotes or things said in @total-mal 's very well articulated response post, I recommend going to read that response post in it's entirety. Like... now.
The complaints I tend to see typically fall along these lines.
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So in this post I will be addressing these things and other things I typically see.
Story
As was very well put in the aforementioned post, the series of Hazbin barely has an hour of content. Yet for some reason people complain that it's a mess. How?
The Pilot itself is meant to establish the setting, who the characters are, what their relationships to each other are, establishing dynamic, and establish the premise of future story that is meant to follow. All of these things the pilot did exceedingly well. A pilot is NOT meant to drop dozens of hours worth of world lore and future plot points in one half hour segment. It is supposed to hook people into being interested in and watching the follow up episodes. Which, considering the rather quick cult following that preceded the pilot debut, I would say it did that and more even without the world lore dump people are demanding.
No story is going to give you every facet of the characters and the world they inhabit in the first episode or the first novel. No story worth it's weight in salt, that is. Any good story teller will tell you that content needs to be put on an IV drip as the story progresses, or else you will lose the majority of your audience's interest.
Helluva Boss is it's own standalone project set in the same universe as Hazbin, but it's job is not to provide lore for Hazbin. The kernel of lore we got from episode two was great. But that is very likely not going to be the norm every episode. Nor should anyone expect otherwise.
The comics were also their own projects, meant to strengthen an already existing narrative with Hazbin and establish both Angel and Alastor's motives for joining the Hotel. They are not meant to expand on the lore. Their existence could also very likely be overlooked by fans who only pay attention to what is popping up on Youtube or on their Twitter feed.
As for Addict, that began as a fan-created song Vivzie liked enough to animate into a music video which expanded on Angel and Cherri's relationship. It was not meant to be an entry to any Vivziepop Hell lore.
Hazbin is a story driven by its characters. This is why the characters are the focus and take up the majority of any screen time given to any entry of Hazbin. Mal puts it very well:
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World
So this is where we will be getting into what we know so far about the world of Vivzie's hell.
So Vivzie's hell is, from what we understand, loosely based on Dante's inferno with other inspirations and deviations mixed in. For example, there are only seven circles of hell as opposed to 9.
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In Dante's inferno only circle two through five are after the Seven Deadly Sins. Whereas in Vivziepop's version of hell, every circle is for one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
From what we understand so far, Pride is the top circle, or Ring. Sinners, AKA those who were alive prior to becoming demons, are only allowed to exist in Pride.
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We do not know what "can only exist" means. As this doesn't imply that sinners can't leave Pride. Simply that they cannot exist anywhere else.
And also from what we understand, the big marker that differentiates each of the circles is the colors of the sky.
Pride, from what we have seen thus far, has a red sky.
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While Greed has a green sky.
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This is further confirmed on Twitter, however whether it was confirmed by Vivzie or one of the other official Twitters, I cannot recall.
Now, I know there are quite a few who keep asking this question.
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And there are many who seem to think that this little detail means that the fact dump from official Twitters means the story and lore are ruined. This is actually false. Especially when you consider that Sinners are not a finite population. Nor is their influx a small trickle. So expanding Sinners into other parts of hell is only a temporary solution to a more overarching problem. It may slow down the necessity for purges, but it would also increase the number needed to be purged each time a purge was necessary. Further, it is doubtful that Lucifer would be keen on the idea of angels traveling deeper into Hell just as it is doubtful that he sees a reason to be exceedingly merciful to sinners- the creation he detests and is more or less what brought him to Hell to begin with. It also would erase any place to escape for Hell-born demons.
So in this regard, no. Nothing is ruined. People just aren't paying attention. The devil is in the details, after all.
As for what the difference is between circles and rings, perhaps this will shed some light.
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Rings seem to be segments of a circle that separate sinners by the subcategory of their sin in each circle. Whether or not Vivziepop's version of hell follows this, I personally doubt it. Ring and Circle, from observation, seem to be used interchangeably. So the two could very well be the same thing.
The other bits we know are lore facts Vivzie has given previously that may no longer be true as the world exists now. For example, previously Alastor was scared of dogs. But more recently, Vivzie said that is no longer true and Alastor simply just does not like them. So any older facts should be taken with a grain of salt until they are reconfirmed.
Switching gears on the world, there have been complaints popping up that Vivziepop's hell is not "hell-y" enough because there is not enough fire and brimstone.
To take a phrase from total-mal once more, there are countless alternate depictions of hell as hell being other people instead of the place itself. The phrase exists from Sartre's No Exit, but has been revisited numerous times in other media depictions of hell to display that the definition of "punishment" can be broadened to a much larger spectrum than originally imagined.
In the Hazbin universe of Hell, punishment is the constant threat of physical and emotional harm from those around you, not unlike being in prison or living in a ghetto. You have the increased potential to be abused or taken advantage of if you show a moment's weakness.
And while some in the demon hierarchy might have it better than others, there is still the constant threat of being killed or overthrown by someone stronger or someone just wanting to prove themselves.
In the Hazbin universe of hell, you wear clues to your life, your sins, and your death on the outside for all to see (and in some cases, manipulate). You are thrust into a demon hierarchy one wrung up from the lowest class, unless you are lucky and strong enough to become an overlord. In which case, then you are two wrungs up from the lowest class. And your punishment is living every day with the constant threat of those around you. Of always needing to have your guard up because someone will take advantage of you or worse. That isn't even mentioning the annual threat of the purge.
Livestreams
This is another one that I see get mentioned and awful fucking lot in the complaint/concern/hot take posts.
There are always complaints about how the livestreams are useless, serve no purpose, or are just "jerkoff sessions." Mind, these same complaints almost always seem to come from the same people complaining about having no information about the show or having no lore surrounding the universe or the story.
Nevermind that Vivzie and the cast are all under NDA and cannot disclose much that isn't already known about the show and, where VAs are concerned, cannot do any voice lines that go beyond what has already been said in the pilot lines.
The Livestreams serve SEVERAL purposes, however. One of those purposes is to drum up interest surrounding Hazbin and Helluva, as well as to advertise and to disclose any lore that they have permission to disclose to the audience. Something to whet their appetites as they wait for the small Indie studio A24 to finish production of Hazbin's first season in the middle of a pandemic. Because that last bit people seem to forget is still ongoing.
Without those livestreams done by Viv and the cast, many of the impatient fans in this fandom would be practically breaking down the door on Vivzie's DMs demanding to know where Hazbin is or why she seems to have given up on it. Or at least, more than what is currently going on now anyway.
People need to calm down, let the Devs do their job, and pay more attention to the details given in what we have thus far. Vivzie has done a GREAT job at eluding to the bigger picture in her details. Particularly where her characters are concerned. And I for one am here for it.
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rotshop · 3 years
Text
get prankt this isn't an angst fic lol ,,
ANYWAY ,, i realized earlier that i could've just been calling 'auditor reader' employer reader this whole time and then i had a funny silly goofy little idea and now we r here,,,lol,,, ill proof read this later but i did this in one go no breaks so . help.
I might continue this later so!! consider this a sort of 'introduction' if u will,,
note ; auditor uses he / she / they pronouns in this bc ive decided im just going to push my propaganda onto all of you <333 also Hank uses he / they / xe
tw ; dissociation, dereality, some light body horror
Bloody Management
"This is out of your jurisdiction. You've wasted enough time here," you seethed dryly, staring down at the shorter being. "You've made no progress and have only proved your operation to be a strain on our relations and resources."
"Out of MY jurisdiction? YOU'VE never even been there before! You think you can just storm in and suddenly kick me out of my own work?" Auditor shot back, hands slamming down on the mahogany desk in front of her.
"Yes, actually, I do," you snapped, eyes narrowing. "I think you're forgetting just who you're speaking to. You've let this drag on for far too long and your ego has grown in tandem with its pointlessness."
Sighing, you leaned back in your chair, pinching the bridge of your nose as you continued. "Look, I understand. You put effort and thought into this little pet project of yours, but the results have all proven zilch. You fucked up, that's fine, but you can't keep meddling with this reality in hopes something will suddenly work again! All you're doing is tearing and poking holes the rest of us will have to deal with later."
"If you just gave me a little more time I could-"
"We've been giving you time. We've given you more time than we've ever given any project like yours," you gave a desperate look, "It's over. You tried and we tried, there's nothing that can be done. If you just worked with us then we could help you."
There was a long silence as they faltered, hands falling into their lap as their gaze followed, landing on the floor.
"And what happens to my Nevada?"
"We'll try and clean it up again. Return it to..some sort of normalcy," you hummed, "Though, with some of those tears in the fabric it'll take a bit longer than anticipated. That..clown, is proving to be rather difficult."
You paused, grin finding it's way onto your face.
"It's been tricky, if you will."
"Not the time."
You gave a 'tsk' in response, shrugging lightly, "I don't regret it."
"You'll be going back to our depths, effective immediately. While this project was a failure, we're still curious to see if there's anything else that can be done in a different time and place."
"And what about you? Are you going to sit all pretty in this fake office for the rest of eternity?" She questioned sarcastically, eyes dragging up to meet yours.
"God, I wish. I mean, seriously, you have no idea how nice it is to have some peace and quiet after dealing with that fuckin' office."
With a dry snicker and -presumably- an eye roll, they finally stood accepting their defeat.
"I presume I'll be seeing you?"
"If your little posse doesn't cause me too much trouble, yes."
"Have fun with that, I do hope it's as grueling as possible," he hummed, turning and striding towards the door to nothing.
"Thanks, was nice seeing you too."
The door peering to the void shuts soundlessly.
.
.
.
"Was the pun really that bad?.."
---
"What do you mean they're just neutral suddenly? It's not like they all just suddenly unionized or sum' shit! There's gotta be something going on," Deimos groaned, irritation dragging onto him and clinging desperately.
"Well- What do you want me to say! I'm just as confused as you are," Sanford huffed back over comms, making a vague gesture with no audience.
Hank stood in the other room, staring down at the few agents that were on their knees with their hands held tight behind their heads. They'd made no attempt to attack Sanford and xem, simply staring in a bit of surprise when the two'd busted in. It'd completely thrown the raid off, leaving them both in a state of stunned confusion. The agent that they'd asked about the sudden change in demeanor just gave some shaky shrug, stammering out that they'd all received an order to not attack under any circumstances from some unknown contact. 'They really just listen to anyone then?..'
It was hard to believe, hard to find any reason or meaning in that lead to any conclusive endings. Which, had lead to a small dispute going nowhere and fast. Hank only picked up on little parts of it, the words being muffled and distorted through the wall. Xe didn't really have much interest in getting a clearer reading of it though, it didn't sound like it meant much.
"Look, I'm just going to try and look for any documents or actual recordings of this apparent 'ghost order,' alright?..." A pause. "Deimos? Are you there? Shit- Of course the line dies now of all times."
The line wasn't dead. It was somewhere else, some-when else.
---
The ground felt cold.
.
.
No, was it warm?
Wait- No no no, it wasn't warm..
.
.
.
Was it even the ground?
.
.
Did it even matter?
.
Deimos could fuzzily recall it. Arguing with Sanford over the line. The points he made exactly didn't seem to ring through the fog of confusion and numb in his mind. Something about the Auditor, the agents, blah bla..something.
He'd been making to say something else when he'd seen it, something off in the corner of his eye. It wasn't anything huge, if you asked him he wouldn't even be able to tell you what it was. There was something wrong, but there wasn't. The ground was cold, but it was warm.
Something was wrong.
Everything is fine.
He'd turned around, looking around for whatever in his vision wasn't right.
That's rude to say, you know.
He'd never found it, something reaching from the depths to grab him.
You're making me sound awfully cruel.
With a groan, he picked himself up off the ground to observe his surroundings. White and black stretched infinitely around him, the 'ground' underneath him was the deepest of not-color while the 'sky' was its blinding twin. A building stood in front of him, a mix of ivory and ink twisted to form its structure. The door faced him, standing tall and straight as a soldier in spite of how tilted and off the world felt.
Before he could even really register it, something was pulling him up off the floor. There were no hands or strings physically attached, nothing sticking from him to drag into the infinite beyond his comprehension, no no. It was something quiet, a ghost or a whisper in his mind that pulled him through the ocean and to shore. The door grew larger- closer. His mind grew blanker. His hand twisted the knob.
Color flooded into his vision finally, the room in front of him coated in it graciously. The floors were a velvet carpeting, a wine red that felt of lavish and glitzy. The walls were lined in bookshelves, each filled to the brim with titles somewhere between poetry and latin white noise where imagination fell. At the head of the room stood a desk, polished mahogany standing tall and still, frozen indefinitely in time. Behind it, you.
Me.
Once again, he was pulled forward. Each step fell in front of the other, unsure of weight behind them and noise that followed suite. He felt half there. Half of a man and half of a void. It was..something.
Not pleasant, not bad.
The ground wasn't cold, wasn't warm.
It just was.
He finds himself meeting your gaze as he plops down into one of the seats in front of you. He finds his neck straining and bowing under phantom limbs that aren't there. He finds his eyes training on yours which stare back pointedly, finds himself between hot and cold. He finds himself sitting down before you as he watches from the window.
There's no window in the room.
"You must be so confused."
Your voice is in front of him, right? That's where you are, so your voice should be coming from there. It isn't though. It's around him somewhere. Even as you tilt your head to the side the noise of your own voice doesn't seem to follow it.
"Don't think too much on this all, alright?"
You mutter something. 'These grunts really weren't made for this- to be here. I'm surprised he even woke up.'
Someone nods in agreement.
"Wh..who are you?"
Is that his voice? It is. It has to be, it fell from his own mouth. He barely even felt it move. Is it his mouth? It has to be.
You pause for a moment, seemingly caught off guard. He doesn't know if its because he spoke or because of what he asked. Nobody clarifies.
"Why don't you call me [name]? That'll be easiest for you. I do apologize for dragging you here rather than appearing there," you hum, leaning forward on your desk. "I just wanted to make sure we had the utmost privacy."
I wanted to make sure you wouldn't be able to forget.
"Now, Deimos," is that his name? "I need to tell you something, I have to work on restoring things for you, so I can't deliver this message to everyone myself in the most..effective of ways. You won't mind filling your friends in for me, right?"
He doesn't answer. He can't. His tongue is lead and his mouth is stuck shut, if he opens it will surely be left that way for the rest of infinity- for the rest of this place, this time. Someone says yes in his voice.
"Good. Now, try to listen carefully..."
---
He wakes up on sand. He's sitting up quickly, stilted as his mind finds his body. His tongue is lighter, teeth separated once more as his jaws are their own entities again. The cliff is still under him, wind passing by him peacefully. The horizon stretches infinite.
The ground is warm, there's no mistaking it.
"Deimos? Are you there?"
He pauses briefly.
"I need to tell you guys something."
100 notes · View notes
alderaani · 3 years
Text
more than gold
summary:  A lost Jedi Temple, a riddle, some literature, and feelings that Cody isn't ready to speak out loud. | AO3
note: written for @codywanweek and the alt day 5 prompt Sith/Jedi Artefact Shenanigans! sliding in on the last day with one more thing written than expected, so i’m happy with that! i’m pretty ill today so i hope it actually makes some coherent sense 😂 also if the riddle was super obvious, soz, never written one before and turns out it’s really hard.
-
“You know, I could have sworn I told you not to touch that,” Cody says conversationally, from where he’s splayed out on his back.
“Really? I’m sure I didn’t hear you,” Obi-Wan says, cheerful despite being crumpled in a heap. His elbow is in Cody’s gut. Cody glares at him.
The room they’re lying in is circular, stone, carved out of some Forced-damned mountain and according to Obi-wan, practically thrumming with power. The ceiling is high and vaulted, letting in slivers of light where intricate mirror systems catch the sunlight of double suns and project it deep underground. It takes on a slightly blue cast, reflecting off the huge pool of water they were lucky to not fall into. Four walkways at each cardinal point lead to a central platform, and interspersed between them are four waterfalls.
It should be serene. Except now the waterfalls are travelling backwards, and all the doors, including the one they came in by, are blocked. Cody scrambles up onto his elbows, dislodging Obi-Wan with a grunt.
“What did you do?”
Obi-Wan follows his gaze and gasps, delighted. “Now, will you look at that?”
Cody is looking. Frankly, he doesn’t trust this place enough to not keep his eye on it at all times. Obi-Wan keeps saying that this temple was built long ago, by ancient, peaceful Jedi as a place of learning, and that it won’t hurt them. After they got cut off from the rest of their men at the entrance, however, Cody thinks he could be forgiven for having his doubts.
As Obi-Wan himself proves, peace-keeping hardly rules out danger.
“Amazing,” Obi-Wan breathes, hoisting himself to his feet without a second glance, to walk back up to the plinth and stalk round it, examining the incomprehensible runes engraved there.
Cody is left to peel himself off the floor, and instead goes to prod at the barriers now sealing the exits with the end of his blaster. He tries not to look too much at Obi-Wan, at the soft sweep of his hair and the span of his shoulders. Being on their own like this is something he’s avoided, of late - not because he doesn’t enjoy it, but because he’s starting to enjoy it all too much.
He doesn’t trust the way his heart leaps when Obi-Wan smiles, when he asks him to call him ‘Obi-Wan’, when the cycle draws on and they’re up late again, companionably finishing reports and debating strategy. Or, as they had been doing until Cody got cold feet and started finding excuses, debating novels, which Obi-Wan checked out of the Temple archives and read aloud, one chapter at a time, before they turned in for the night.
He doesn’t trust himself not to ruin this by overstepping. There’s something about his general that makes him lose all control of his tongue, and puts him in danger of voicing thoughts that really he should not be having at all.
It’s agony. It’s bliss. It’s stretching him to breaking point, and this is possibly the worst situation they could have ended up in, really.
“These are made out of water,” he says over his shoulder, grunting as he tries to push his blaster through. He is, of course, unsuccessful.
“Ingenious,” Obi-Wan says. “How did they manage that, I wonder?”
Cody cuts a glance back at him, and grins, despite his exasperation.
“You’re not more worried about how we’re going to get out?”
Obi-Wan waves a hand. “I’m sure the path will reveal itself, in time. Oh, look - Cody, I think this is a puzzle!”
Cody bites back a groan. They do not have time for this. They never really had time for it, but Obi-Wan promised it would be a brief detour on their way to the capital for hyperspace lane access negotiations. He’d looked so excited by recon reports of a lost temple that Cody just hadn’t been able to say no. He’s never able to say no to Obi-Wan, even when he isn’t following orders. It’s probably his fatal flaw.
“I don’t suppose there’s an off switch? A back button?” He asks hopelessly. The Force, at least the Jedi sort, very rarely seems to work that way. Obi-Wan is always talking about moving through problems, about seeking balance and adapting to what’s around you, rather than manipulating it. It’s not Cody’s favoured approach; he was trained to leverage his environment to its maximum advantage, and finds he has little patience for anything else.
Obi-Wan snorts. “This is a defensive mechanism, I’m afraid. Judging by the architecture this was built at the height of the Sith Wars. This artefact is designed to trap us here until we understand the mechanism and progress, or until, back when the temple was occupied, someone would come and deal with the intruder.”
“That doesn’t sound very peaceful,” Cody says.
Obi-Wan shoots him an amused look, the warm, soft kind that makes heat rise from the pit of Cody’s belly right up to his ears.
“Even a pacifist may defend himself,” he says, then leans over the pedestal. “Now, how about you stop grousing and come help me with this?”
Cody rolls his eyes, but goes, slinging his blaster across his back and crossing his arms.
“And stop looming,” Obi-Wan laughs, catching one of Cody’s gloved hands and pulling it down to rest at his side. The simple touch makes Cody’s cheeks burn.
“Don’t see what help I can give you, Sir,” he says, frowning down at the characters surrounding the bright blue artefact. “I was never any good at Ithorian.”
Obi-Wan pauses, then tilts his head up. “Ah. Is that what it is?”
“I - I think so?” Cody was never any good at his language flashtraining; he never had the proper patience for it, but he can usually figure out the basics.
“No, no,” Obi-Wan muses, stroking at his beard with his free hand. “You’re quite right. Goodness me, it's been a long time since I last saw this dialect. Let’s see now…”
Cody steps back and waits, keeping his attention firmly split between their blocked exit points while Obi-Wan ponders. The slow upward movement of the waterfalls is eerie - it still makes noise, but none of it is right. Instead of the gentle patter he expects of water joining a larger pool, there’s a faint gurgling as they move further into each grate, travelling somewhere he cannot see.
Obi-Wan finishes his fifth circle round the platform, and the hand at his chin goes still. Cody stands at attention, expectant.
“It’s a riddle,” Obi-Wan says, and if possible, his delight grows. “Yes - the language is coming back to me now. Do you know, I haven’t looked at Ithorian in maybe 12 years?”
“Sir?” Cody says, tilting his head to look at the characters more closely. He doesn’t have even a passing proficiency at modern Ithorian, and presumably it’s changed a bit over the millennia. His training was focused on the basics, and only the useful bits, at that. He thinks he can make out the words for ‘ water ’, and ‘ enemy’ , both of which are either unhelpfully descriptive or frankly discouraging, but that’s about the extent of it.
“My old master - he loved prophecies. When I was a teenager I could never see the point of it, but it meant I spent a lot of time learning the old Ithorian dialects. They’re known as the most peaceful species, did you know?” Obi-Wan shakes his head. “They’ll exile anyone violent, it’s quite remarkable, really. I suppose in some sort of idealistic emulation, a lot of the early Jedi texts are written in their dialect.”
His blue eyes are keen, his laser sharp focus firmly on the podium. It gives Cody a moment to observe his clever fingers, the long line of his neck, the open delight with which he tackles this new problem. It’s a rare thing, to see him so relaxed, and Cody can’t help the fond smile that creeps up on him despite the circumstances. This almost makes it worth it, and on reflection, he’d rather an ancient temple than the last thing that had made Obi-Wan so happy; a wretched, bioluminescent fungus, which had infected half the battalion and given them hives. Their general had studied it for weeks.
Obi-Wan’s lips quirk up. Cody barely trusts himself to speak.
“I didn’t know, Sir,” Cody croaks, then pauses, fishing for something normal to say. “Didn’t we have to defend the governor’s daughter from an Ithorian bounty hunter on Ganaris-IV?”
“Well,” Obi-Wan grins. “Those exiles have to go somewhere, don’t they?”
Cody huffs a laugh and reaches up to scratch his neck at the seam of his bucket.
“Let’s just hope they didn’t all come here. What’s this riddle, then?”
Obi-Wan shifts to the side, then points at a spot on the podium. “As I said, it’s been a long time, but I think it starts here, and goes something like:
A thing to be forged, where water is thicker,
Worth more than gold, unless it’s pyrite that glitters.
An enemy of my enemy, or in hard times, in need,
Sometimes fair-weather, or in high places indeed.
What are you, traveller? ”
All of Cody’s hopes that it would be something nice and obvious, like “lightsaber” or, given what’s going on around them, “gravity”, escape from him like smoke. Jedi and their metaphors. It’s not just a quirk of Obi-Wan’s, clearly.
“Does that mean anything to you, Sir?” he asks, turning the words over in his head once, twice, then frowning when nothing comes immediately.
Obi-Wan’s brow is also furrowed, but in a leisurely, meditative manner.
“...I have some ideas, I think,” he says. “How about you, my friend?”
What does he think? He thinks that there are other sorts of puzzles he is much better suited to. Word play and idioms...what does a clone have to offer that?
Still, Obi-Wan is watching him, expectant and gentle, and he sifts back through the lines, a little more seriously this time.
“Ice, maybe?”
Obi-Wan nods, slowly. “Perhaps. Walk me through it.”
Cody swallows. “Ice is something that can be made, right? It’s not exactly forged, but…”
He trails off in uncertainty.
“Go on,” Obi-Wan says with another one of those soft, devastating smiles. It fractures all the thoughts in Cody’s head, and he has to stop, clear his throat and gather up all the pieces.
“I suppose...it’s just thicker water, isn’t it? On warm planets it’s a valuable commodity, it’s found in high places, and I suppose if you wanted snow, a freeze would be fair weather.”
Obi-Wan is rubbing his beard again, and he’s still smiling. “Fascinating. I would never have thought of that...only, I don’t think it’s quite there. That mention of pyrite is troublesome, and the ‘enemy of my enemy’, where does that fit in?”
Cody shrugs his shoulders, frustrated, and feels a hot flush creep up his neck. “Don’t know why you’re asking me, to be honest, Sir. Kamino hardly covered poetry.”
There’s a slight pause, then Obi-Wan’s hand is on his again, tugging it slowly down from where he’s crossed his arms.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he says, soft.
“Do what?” Cody’s voice is gruff.
“Dismiss yourself. You do it sometimes when we’re reading together. There is often no right and wrong answer to these things, no secret. There is only perspective, and you see things I never would, if only you would trust yourself.”
Cody looks down and away, back towards the waterfalls and their slow, glacial climb. He isn’t sure that’s true. He enjoys what Obi-Wan shares with him, what other lives he gets to touch in their books, but more than anything they convince him that, beyond war, he knows very little of anything at all. He would like to, someday.
His eyes land on Obi-Wan’s lips briefly, before he tears them away. Particular experiences he would like to know more than others.
There was one book that Obi-Wan had read early on, back when this infatuation was just setting its first tendrils into him, about a forbidden romance at the heart of the old Mandalorian court. Two heirs of rival clans battling to be together against the good approval of their noble relatives. It had been torrid, ridiculous and entirely unexpected when Obi-Wan had suggested they break up their reports with some literature.
But what it had done was give him the words to express the crawling heat in his stomach, the urge he has to reach out, to touch, to soothe, to care for. He’d known what he wanted before that, of course, in a more rudimentary manner, but it had gifted him the language of yearning.
Suddenly, a particular passage springs into his mind and he straightens.
“You don’t think it could mean ally, do you? In Beneath the Armour, Mata threatens Clan Riza by saying he has ‘allies in high places’.”
Obi-Wan pauses, and then a brilliant smile spreads over his face. “Yes, that’s it! Pyrite - Fool’s Gold; a false friend! Brilliant Cody, whatever made you think of that?”
Cody grins, even though Obi-Wan can’t see it, and doesn’t answer.
“Is that really it?”
“I think you’re very close,” Obi-Wan says. “The characters engraved into the platform...yes! Stand close to me, Commander.”
Cody does, watching curiously as Obi-Wan lifts his hands, shuts his eyes, frowns, and pushes . Six blocks that make up the platform lift, the characters on each glowing bright, lurid blue. Under their feet, something scrapes, shifts and clunks, before the platform lurches upwards, spinning gently.
There’s a thunderous gurgling sound, before all of the pool beneath drains away.
“The answer,” Obi-Wan says, slightly breathless, his hair a little out of place. “Was friend.”
“The doorways are still blocked,” Cody notes drily. The plinth with the blue orb that started this whole mess has also risen, and underneath it are a set of very wet, slimy looking steps. “I don’t suppose it’s as simple as just walking down these and getting in?”
“Likely not,” Obi-Wan agrees, then inexplicably shifts a little closer, so that they are sharing space. Cody’s heart skips a beat. “But it’s like I told you, Cody. You are far greater than what you have been given.”
Cody coughs and looks at his feet, at their boots almost toe to toe, pleasure at the praise singing low through his body.
“Now,” Obi-Wan says, too close and not close enough. “How do you feel about another puzzle?”
Cody groans, laughing, and after a moment, follows his General into the dark.
124 notes · View notes
baepsaetan · 3 years
Text
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) - Jungkook
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Summary: You miss him so much, but it seems like getting to spend time with Jungkook is going to take a Christmas miracle.
Ao3 Link: here 
Pairing: Jungkook x Reader, side Namgi
Length: 17.6k
Rating: Mature
Genre: Angst, fluff, hurt/comfort
Warnings: Suspicions of cheating, misunderstandings, panic attack, suggestive content, swearing
A/N: Oooof I am finally done my Secret Santa fic for @thebtswritersclub​ and only - *checks calendar* - too late. So sorry this is so late @jjeongukkie​! It got so much longer than I had planned, and while I had a lot of fun writing it, I did not plan it quite well enough to finish in a timely fashion. Still, I hope you’re able to enjoy a last blast of Christmas vibes and fluff and angst as you slide into 2021! Thank you for your patience, and I hope you have an awesome new year! 
I always appreciate all likes, reblogs and comments! If you enjoy reading this, send me an ask! Happy belated New Year to everyone! 
---
“You’re not coming home now?”
Even as you say it, you’re vaguely surprised you manage to get the words out. Your lips are numb with shock and disappointment, and Jungkook’s wince on the screen of your phone just makes the feeling even more jarring. More painful.
“I’m sorry,” he says, half pleading and half desperate. “It’s just, this project is so important, and we need to have it ready for rollout…”
Throat tight, the fingers of your free hand pushing into your thigh, you adjust the phone with your other before saying thickly, “You said it would be a few hours in the morning, Jungkook. It’s – it’s Christmas."
"I know, I know, I just..."
He’s still speaking, quick and anxious words about necessity and pressure, and while you’re listening, you’re thinking about the cute lingerie sitting next to you on the bed. You'd been planning a little gift for him when he got home, and when he'd surprised you with a Facetime request, you'd pulled them out of the drawer, thinking it might be a fun little tease to give him a flash of the red and black set. Now, though...
"Hey, Y/N, I'm sorry. Really." Biting at his lip, Jungkook somehow manages to look a bit pitiful, even with the dress shirt he's wearing, ironed to sharp definition. The collar of the black shirt is open, sans a tie – he’d mentioned this morning no one cared about perfect business attire while working over Christmas – and the bare curve of his collarbone just adds to the disjointed clash of his clean outfit compared to his dejected expression.
The look has your throat closing even more, and you try to force a smile. You're well aware of how stressful the new position has been for your long time boyfriend, seen the casualties of the job; late night arrivals at the apartment, distracted eyes while making and eating dinner, forehead creased with frustration every time his phone vibrates, fatigue that throws him into sleep before you and he have really even had any time to talk together. He's also been hitting the gym almost religiously lately, another outlet for stress, and while you love Jungkook's enthusiasm for staying active, two sessions a day, every day, is excessive for him. It also eats into what little opportunity is left for you two to spend time with each other.
But he's doing his best. You know that. You're sure of it. And he promised it would get better, soon.
Soon. So, you swallow the disappointment, and the thing that’s more dangerous, simmering below it and too perilously close to anger. You hitch on a smile, and hope it doesn't look quite as forced as it feels. "I get it, Kookie. I'm just sorry you have to work for so long. Will you be back in time for dinner?"
He hesitates, teeth still sawing into his lower lip as he jiggles his head indecisively and the camera frame shifts a bit. "I'm not sure but – probably?" Your expression must sink just as much as your stomach does, despite your best efforts, because Jungkook immediately grimaces, his hands making desperate little waves of abortive denial. "I mean, I will. For sure. I'll be home, okay?"
When he flashes a thumbs up, deliberately and extravagantly enthusiastic, you can't help but smile, just a tentative lift of your lips. "Just – I love you, Kookie. I hope we get to spend some of Christmas together."
"We will! Promise." Both hands are up now, clenched into eager fists under his chin, and he really couldn't look more earnest if he tried.
The smile comes a bit easier now, and you nod, feeling some of that enthusiasm reaching through the screen. "Okay." Taking a deep breath, you try to redirect the conversation, too painfully aware that sulking isn't going to help at all. "Have you eaten lunch yet? Don't miss it just for your stupid boss!"
His grin is a small, toothy thing. "Nah, I haven't. I –"
"Jungkook!"
"I was saving room for when I got home!"
"Hah! You think there's going to be food on the table for you?" This bickering is so much easier than anything else that you might say, and you fall into it with something like relief.
His eyebrows fall, nose scrunching dramatically. "On the table? Y/N, that's so unsanitary."
"So unsanitary...?"
At your puzzled look, the grossed out expression whirls away, replaced with a smirk that's so abruptly suggestive that you find your breath catching. The way his voice drops, becoming a low hum, just concentrates the effect. "I was saving room for you, of course. But I'm not gonna eat you out on the table, baby."
You huff in scornful incredulity, but it can't take back the fact that you almost choked a second ago. It also doesn't really hide the way your cheeks have heated up into a patchy red, and besides, Jungkook knows you too well. If anything, his smirk just gets even sharper, and he adds playfully, "Unless you have it on your wish list. Then I might consider it."
Fucking around with Jungkook on any surface is absolutely on your wish list, but you're too proud and currently too annoyed to tell him that. "With my luck, it would break trying to hold up your inflated ego."
"My inflated muscles, you mean," he says, and flexes. Which is just so obnoxious, and also the long sleeve hides his arms too well to be truly impressive.
"Do that again when you get home," you order imperiously, and immediately he bows his head.
"You got it, boss," he agrees, and it's that easy, sudden switch, that flexibility, that's at least part of the reason you love him so much. Jungkook is what you need him to be; he's always been comfortable with that role, and your flighty ass needs him in so many different ways. He's never failed you in that respect. Well – not much. You need him with you right now, after all.
Want, you remind yourself sternly. You want him, that's all.
Abruptly he stiffens, turns slightly. You hear someone speaking off camera, high and strained, and Jungkook replies in a confident voice, talking about something you don't have enough information on to fully understand. They have a short conversation before Jungkook says, "I'll be over in a moment, okay?"
Then he's turning back to you, the by now familiar crease back between his eyes. "I've got to go now, Y/N. I'll get out of here as quickly as I can, okay?"
"Okay. Love you, Kookie. And try to eat something."
He nods, curter now, already turning away from the camera. "See you soon."
And you're left with a call ended screen and no reciprocal "love you". The flicker of warmth that had been blooming in your stomach wilts until there's nothing but a cold tightness left. For a few minutes you scroll aimlessly through your apps and messages, fingers restless for something the phone can't give. There are too many Merry Christmas posts, too many pics of friends and family having a good time together with gifts and food, and it grows the hurt in your gut. You and Jungkook had decided not to travel to any of your families' gatherings, to save some money this year after a big and expensive move, but that had been with the assumption that you would be able to take comfort in each other. Now...
Before too long, you give up, toss the phone aside. It lands next to the lingerie, and for the time being you leave them both alone, suddenly anxious to get away from the remote device and the painful reminder both. Your apartment isn't large, and it only takes you a few steps to leave the bedroom and head to the kitchen. You spend several moments milling around there, but you've already prepped everything for dinner tonight; the only thing left to do is the dishes from this morning's simple breakfast, eaten long after Jungkook had already bolted his and left. You clean them with desultory effort, trying not to remember that you and your boyfriend had planned to make something fancy together. The restless feeling doesn't leave with the dishes done, and you check, doublecheck and triplecheck everything before you're even halfway to feeling like this part of the apartment might not need anything else.
The living room, attached to the kitchen, has been decorated with reckless abandon. You've got at least an ounce of beauty aesthetic in your bones, and so does Jungkook, but for some reason when put together it equals a pound of ugly. The tinsel – red, gold, silver, and green – is flung about the room over pretty much any surface that will support it, along with red and green lights. The Christmas decorations are a hideous mash up of whatever you and Kookie have scrounged together from your families or garage sales or cheap outlet malls, plus a few modest clay additions of your own making. Several of the larger succulents and other plants are bowed morosely under the weight of ambitious ornaments, and the cactus on the windowsill looks positively garish with a star perched jauntily on its crown.
And you love it all so much.
Remembering the absolutely wild hour or so that you and Jungkook spent together decorating the apartment – such a rare and precious moment, since you moved here – makes your eyes start prickling with unbidden tears. Jungkook's staggering workload hadn't been so bad, while you were working; acting as a long distance design consultant for a large collection of homegrown companies tended to keep you busy, and you hadn't noticed his absence in a way that demanded you address it. Now, though, with Christmas an enforced break, since none of your suppliers or other contacts will reply to emails, your loneliness curls itself up in your chest, all barbs and agitation. You’re beginning to suspect that maybe the long absences have hurt you more than you thought.
One of your projects is on the coffee table, the spread of files and print outs of possible designs covering the worn surface. You've always preferred working with physical copies for the initial stages, moving to a tablet for more detailed work. You fling yourself onto the couch, telling yourself you might as well do something productive and hoping it might provide a distraction. That lasts for about half an hour, but it's a constant fight to keep your thoughts on the papers in front of you. The unhappiness is curdling your concentration, and more and more you're aware of a simmering resentment, sharp and insistent under your sadness.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. There'd been so little conflict about moving when Jungkook got the job offer. You were already working remotely, and while the pay increase at Jungkook's new company wasn't that much, it was the promise of what could come that made it nearly impossible to turn down. Saying goodbye to your family hadn't been an issue; you were already living in a different city than them, settled there after university. It had been harder for your boyfriend, but not impossible, and despite both of you leaving friends behind, you'd left with excitement. Hope. The future opening up before you two, together.
With a sigh, you shove the papers away. Leave the living room and take shelter on your bed. Send and reply to some Christmas messages. Make a face at the snap Jin sends you, a little blurry, his flushed cheeks matching the red reindeer antler headband he's wearing. He's holding the gifts you sent several weeks ago, an adorable pair of windup salt and pepper shakers shaped like teddy bears that can walk across the table, along with a few duck-shaped strainers. The caption makes you snort. I'm bearly making it without you, sis. I'm like a duck out of water. The next snap is clearer, of him and his two roommates, Jimin and Hoseok, all making heart signs. Thanks for the gifts! Hope you have a Merry Christmas!
He's in the same city as your parents, and you know he spent yesterday with them. Looks like he's having a great time with his roommates, too. Before the affection can sour, you save the photo and put your phone down again.
Kitchen, living room, bedroom. A discontented circuit you don't know how to break yourself out of. It feels so dumb to be making yourself even more miserable like this. You should phone one of the few friends who aren't with their families, or maybe your parents – hell, you could even phone Jin, he and his roommates would be sure to talk with you for an hour or two. But the thought of admitting you're alone, Jungkook having chosen work over spending the holiday with you, has your shame rising to scalding levels. The mere prospect of hearing and seeing everyone happy while you’re alone is another hurt, one that makes you curl up more tightly on the bed, clutching his pillow to your chest like it could fill up the hollowness settled in your lungs. Just like all of the sheets, it has his scent, light and flowery and soft, and it inspires an aching, cloying feeling that isn't really close enough to comfort, but you hold it tighter anyways.
The day drags on like that, swamps of self-pity drained by bursts of frantic activity. You clean up a bit more, work on a project, watch some TV. And then the rush of drowning loneliness fills up your lungs again and you're reduced to more aimless pining.
By three, with no texts from Jungkook and the need to start cooking soon looming large on the horizon, you send him a message. Hey. Gonna be home soon?
About half an hour later, you add a ? that still gets no immediate reply, and agitated tension has you wondering if you should call him. But what if you interrupt something? Get him in trouble? Worrying the thoughts ragged in your head, you resolve to give it just a little more time. Hell, for all you know, maybe he’s on his way home now.
At around four, your phone starts vibrating. Not a Facetime request, this time, but the name that pops up is welcome all the same. You answer almost breathlessly. "Hey Kookie!"
"Hey Y/N."
Right away you know this isn't the kind of phone call you were hoping for. Jungkook's voice is gravelly and tired, more like a bruise than a sound. Your shoulders slump, and you can't find it in yourself to say anything.
Your boyfriend tentatively breaks the silence a moment later. "Y/N, I'm sorry. Things are spilling over and I'm not going to be able to leave for awhile longer."
"..."
"Y/N? Are you -"
"How much longer?"
You can practically hear the wince. "I'm not sure yet."
"Jungkook..." But once again, the words catch in your throat, trapped by just how ungrateful and immature you feel.
"Look, Y/N, I was thinking. Maybe, if I come home too late, we can move dinner to tomorrow? I'm definitely going to be home all day, so we can have a nice breakfast and dinner and maybe open our presents and..." There's nothing in the quiet between you two. Certainly not your agreement. "I know I messed up and that this isn't fair to you, Y/N, and I'm sorry. Maybe – couldn't we just... reset? Start Christmas for real tomorrow?"
"Reset?" you repeat. "Like – what, like one of your video games?" The swampy depression is bubbling now, surging with the outrage that's been building all day.
"No, that's not -"
"We can't just reset, Jungkook. This isn't a level you get to just do over!"
"I know that, that isn't what I meant, you're -"
"I've been waiting here all day, Jungkook! By myself! Just waiting here for you! Do you get how bad that makes me feel?"
Jungkook sounds choked when he replies, though it's hard to tell if it's from guilt or anger. "I know I've made you wait, and I'm sorry. But the project -"
"I don't care about the fucking project! You should have told them to fuck off when they asked you to work!" You're full on shouting now, eyes stinging with tears, the sound tearing from your throat. "This has been the worst Christmas I've ever had, and you just want me to forget about it?"
His voice doesn't get louder. If anything, it gets quieter, smaller, coiling in on itself into a tight mass. "Do you think I'm having a good time? I've been working since 8:00 on Christmas day! It's not like I asked to come in, and they barely gave me a choice! I'm the junior here, do you think they would have been okay with me shrugging today off?"
"Today? Today?" Your laugh sounds too cruel, even to your own ears. "It hasn't just been today, Jungkook! This is just – more of the same! More ditching me – ditching us – for work. For some stupid reason I thought that you might consider Christmas an important enough day to knock it off for just one fucking second. But I guess not."
"I'm doing this for us! For – I told you how much work it was going to be! I thought you'd be okay with it!"
"And I thought there might be a tiny little exception made for Christmas. I guess we were both wrong!" you spit furiously.
There's a pause, heavy with the sound of both of your staggered breathing. You're too angry to regret what you've said – or at least, to acknowledge how much you regret it – and the bewildered hurt is travelling straight to your head, leaving you dazed and disconnected. Could Jungkook really have thought you were okay with what's been happening? Okay with being left alone for what feels like months now? How can you be listening to his tense exhales and still not understand the person on the other end of this call?
"I'm sorry, Y/N." Too polite, too gentle by far. Where the hell did he get off sounding like that? You know that's Jungkook – that he's far more likely to shutdown during an argument, to close off – but it leaves you clashing against air. No opposing force to clamp down on your own anger.
Heaving in a sharp exhale, shaking your head even though he can't see it, you say, "Do what you want, Jungkook. I'm not making the dinner if you're not leaving right now."
"Y/N..."
"Merry Christmas." You hang up.
It feels horrible. The phone is a dead weight in your hand, the anger an even heavier weight in your heart. You make a fractured noise, a frustrated scream that quickly trails into a barely checked sob. If you felt bad before talking to Jungkook, it's nothing compared to the mix of self-recriminations and resentment assaulting you now. He was just - why did he have to - why couldn't he -
Why did I have to say that to him?
You know Jungkook. How hard working he is, how dedicated, how keenly he wants to do well in front of and for others. He isn't working late because he doesn't want to see you; you're sure of that. It's just an inability to say no to his superiors. And... and you really haven't told him how unhappy you are with how often he's away.
But still. Couldn't he figure it out? Did you need to spell out your misery for him to get it? Is that really what your relationship amounts to?
Another aggravated exhale parts your lips, and you start pacing faster, needing the release. The next few hours stretch in front of you with wretched promise. What do you do now? Just wait by yourself until he gets home? Have to see his ashamed, hurt, averted eyes, the way he would creep into the apartment with a shield set between you and him? And then what? Go to bed with that block between you two, wake up and somehow try to pretend it doesn't exist tomorrow?
The tears flow down your cheeks despite your hands’ furious attempts to press them away and there's no way to stop them once they've begun. You cry, the way people often cry when they’re lonely, like silence is their only companion and they're afraid of scaring even that friend away. Quietly, then, no longer trying to hold the tears back but unable to give voice to the magnitude of your pain, either. The wet, soft sobbing quickly sends you back to bed, where you curl up once again, struggling for some kind of self-control.
God, you just miss him so much. Not today, not now, not – it's a void of the little things. The snicker when you berate him for being messy. His warm, gentle hands on your neck after a day hunched over a project, massaging out the pain. A little giggle as you watch a Ghibli film together. The shoving matches when you're out shopping and competing for who can get the most stuff on the list. The quick kisses and the slow kisses and the deep, hungry kisses that always lead to you waking up in his arms the next day, far later into the morning than usual.
You miss him so much, and you just pushed him away even more.
With a muffled sob you push your face further into the pillow, hating how pitiful this is, how much you're struggling to get your emotions under control. This is so – it's ridiculous, that's what it is. Childish. It's not as if you've lost Jungkook forever, and you haven't lost all of the things you love about him, either. It's not like you never goof off anymore, or cuddle, or talk. It's just – it's just that everything has been so much more frantic, hurried, and stressful since the move. It seems like there's never a moment where you can just sit together and love each other and think of nothing else.
The anger, remorse and dejection feed off each other, first growing and prolonging the wrenching feeling choking your throat, and you cry until time doesn’t mean much anymore. The grief is so horribly thick it’s like you can’t even breathe through it, let alone do anything but lie in bed. It goes on and on and – and then exhaustion overtakes your convulsive crying. Eventually, without ever actually being filled, the hollow ache contracts into a hard pit, the tears all forced out. Nothing else, though. The guilt and resentment and sadness are still there, dulled to a grey, insubstantial mass.
But at least you can think a bit. Listlessly, with all the colours drained out of it, but you can do more than sob. Wiping at your clogged nose and tear-streaked face, you find you can actually breathe, something of an improvement. You sit up, gently set the pillow back on Jungkook's side of the bed, giving the soft material one last swipe, trying to rid it of the wet evidence of your meltdown. No luck there, but it'll probably be dry before your boyfriend gets home.
If he gets home.
The bitterness of that thought is too tired to summon more tears from the hole in your heart or your head. You shake it away, more because you're just too drained to cling to the heavy emotion than because of some angelic impulse to forgive.
You know you have to do something. Anything. Literally anything will be better than just sitting here, waiting for Jungkook to come in, getting pricklier with each passing minute. With the Christmas dinner off the table, you suppose you could just pick up something to eat. Fast-food or something... have it ready for him to heat up when he was done work... like you're some trophy girlfriend.
Once again you need to stop yourself, biting back the wave of resentment. God, this isn't doing you any good, and it's so, so unfair to Jungkook. Yeah, maybe he shouldn't have agreed to work on Christmas. Maybe he should have been more sensitive to how far you've been drifting apart because of his long work hours. But at the same time, yelling at him over the phone wasn't the answer, either. He's probably having as bad of a time as you are, and with no private room to cry in, either. He'll be totally repressing the argument now, shoving it into a locker and subconsciously telling himself he's to blame, that he's a horrible boyfriend. Trying to listen to his coworkers and do his work with those harsh criticisms running low and dark through his head. That's how Jungkook is. He takes everything onto himself, especially if you give it to him.
Running your hands through your hair at the thought, pity clenching your chest, you abruptly get up. You and Jungkook definitely need to talk, and soon. But – but there's no reason to close out this shitty day with an even more horrible evening of strained silence and brittle rebuttals. Neither of you are particularly good at apologizing, even though you're both great at feeling guilty. You just don't have the words for it. So, unless you do something – make some gesture – this is just going to stretch into an awful, prolonged fight that isn't a fight at all, both of you retreating from each other.
It's unbearable. You can't stand it. So… you're going to do something about it.
Resolved, as resolved as you can be, you change out of your PJs. The weather's been quite warm, with no snow to speak of, so it's not like you need to bundle up much. After a moment of hesitation, you choose to snag the ugly Christmas sweater. It's got a comically drawn pink bunny on the front, absurdly muscular, with a red Santa hat settled firmly between its ears, and a myriad of red and green patterns crammed into the background. It was the rabbit's expression and the accompanying phrase that had got Jungkook to laughing until he was doubled over when he'd seen it at the mall last year. A challenging, almost intimidating grin is plastered on the rabbit's face, with the words This Bun Don't Want None in cheerfully bedazzled white underneath. Your boyfriend had quite literally begged to get two and wear them to the upcoming Christmas party, and he'd been too imploring for you to say no.
Slipping it on, with the accompanying memory of his hysterical amusement, crinkled nose, and bunny grin every time he caught a glimpse of you at the party, is the closest you've felt to peace in the last few hours.
You throw on some dark jeans and apply your makeup with a thoroughness that's a little much, given that you're not going anywhere for long. You don't care; it feels good to dim the red-rimmed eyes and splotchy cheeks your breakdown has gifted you, to cover it over with something prettier. Finishing with the last of the mascara, you grab your transit pass and head out, closing the door behind you with a finality that could almost be a goodbye.
The air outside is cool, a relief compared to the stuffy apartment, at least for now. You inhale deeply, the mild cold burning your sinuses and clearing your clogged head a bit. In a while, you might regret not having a warmer layer on, but for now it’s a relief to begin to walk, to stretch both your legs and your mind from the cramped defensiveness the apartment had been inspiring. This is – this is a good idea. You’re positive about it now, and can feel your shoulders loosening, steps becoming brisker.
If Jungkook can’t come to you – well, you’ll just go to him. At least for now.
Your building isn't too far from Jungkook's work; you only have a short train ride and a shorter bus ahead of you, according to your phone. You’ve been to his work three times before, but always in your shared car, and you walk with eyes fixed on your screen, calculating the time schedules. Part of you wants to text him, send a little olive branch to smooth the way and let him know you’re coming, but a larger part longs for something romantic and cute to happen today. Fast-food might not quite cut it, but surely a surprise visit might? You won’t stay long, won’t interrupt his work, but just to see his face, confused and then quietly grateful and loudly gleeful when he realizes why you’ve come –
It seems like that shouldn’t be too much to ask.
The trip flies by; you're too anxious in your own head to notice much outside of it, and besides, there aren't many people out and about today. Probably busy celebrating with their families.
You bite your lip at the thought, and violently yank your attention away.
At this rate, you should sign up for a game of Olympic tag. Surely nothing can run as agilely as you've been doing, avoiding every uncomfortable idea.
Jungkook's work is downtown, and there are tons of fast-food options nearby. You pick a smaller chain, KTown Fried Chicken, that both you and Jungkook enjoy. It's hard to convince yourself the cashier isn't judging you at least a little bit for your weird presence on Christmas night. Or maybe she's just eyeing the sweater. That’s another possibility.
With only one other person in line, the food comes quickly, and then you're on your way. Somewhere between stepping off the bus and smiling awkwardly at the girl behind the counter, it occurred to you that you didn't know when Jungkook was actually leaving work. He obviously didn't pack up right away after your argument – he would have made it home before you left – but that doesn't mean he isn't going to be heading home some time soon.
What if you show up and he's not there? What if he shows up and you're not there? What would he think? It is entirely too much to ask your wrung out brain to decide if it would be hilarious, infuriating, or some kind of karmic justice, but you do know that you'd rather just catch him at work with this peace offering. Much simpler that way, so you hurry your steps, snugging your sweater a little tighter around your frame as you do so.
You make it to the imposing office building of Projeck at around six, which is, as it happens, when two of Jungkook’s coworkers are leaving the building. Jungkook talks about them quite a bit – actually, gushes might be a better word – and you’d met them at the office Christmas party a couple of weeks ago. Namjoon, a tall, elegant man with blonde hair currently dressed in a black turtleneck, is one of the lead game designers, and he holds the door open for Yoongi, an audio engineer. The older of the two, in an oversized, comfy hoodie markedly at odds with his companion’s attire, slouches through with a tired smile of thanks.
Both had made a good impression on you at the party (it helped that they were obviously fond of Jungkook and appreciative of his talents) and you’re a little relieved to see them. Solved the awkwardness of trying to get into the building without letting Jungkook know you were here. Both pause at the sight of you, confusion creasing their features, before a grin flashes across Namjoon’s face.
“Hey, Y/N! Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas,” offers Yoongi as well, shoving his hands into the pockets of the hoodie he’s wearing. His eyes are on your chest, a little furrow across his brow, and it takes you a second to realize it’s the bunny again. After a moment his lips quirk, quiet amusement in the expression, and it makes it easier for you to reply brightly.
“Hey Namjoon, Yoongi. Merry Christmas! Are you heading home?” The prospect makes you a little excited. If they’re leaving, surely Jungkook won’t be far behind?
“Yup,” Namjoon agrees easily. His head tilts a little, scouring over you quizzically, before his gaze finds the bag in your hand. “Are you bringing something for Kookie?”
“Yeah… He, uh, was working so late I thought it might be nice to surprise him with some food.” You say it more like a confession, shoulders tight with the knowledge that this is making you sound way better than you actually are.
Namjoon whistles, eyes widening. “Wow, that’s really nice of you.”
“I mean, I haven’t done much today so –”
“He’s not here.” Yoongi states it so bluntly that it takes you a second to process what he said.
“…not here?” you ask, dismayed.
“Nah.” As your stunned eyes fall on him, giving him your full attention, he shrugs uncomfortably. “I’m sorry. He left like… twenty minutes ago?”
“He did?” Namjoon demands, and Yoongi just shrugs again.
Clutching at the paper bag that suddenly feels pathetic and cheap, a stupid idea, you say weakly, “Oh.” You don’t know what else to say, and both of the men’s expressions are soft with a sympathy that doesn’t make you feel any less stupid. “I guess… I’ll go home, then.”
Shifting again, a movement that has him brushing briefly against Namjoon, Yoongi trails a hand up to his ear. “Uh, I don’t think he was going home? Or at least, not right away?”
"What do you mean?" Maybe he'd mentioned he was stopping to pick up dinner, too? Maybe the fast-food you're lugging around is even more useless than you'd thought? Why hadn't you texted him? Why hadn't you -
"He was asking me about the fastest way to get to, uh, the Golden Closet Gallery. I think he was dropping by there first."
"Did - did he say why?"
"Meeting someone? Maybe? I dunno, he's been quiet almost all day, and he rushed away pretty quick."
You stare at him, tired and confused and more than a little guilty at the mention of Jungkook’s withdrawn state. What are you supposed to make of all this? You know about the Golden Closet Gallery – of course you do. You and he went a couple times, early on after your move here, both of you taking a lot of enjoyment from the art displays. But – it couldn't be open now, could it? And even if it were, why would he be going? Who could he possibly be meeting? Was he trying to take a late tour to calm down? Something else entirely? And – it didn't even matter. It wasn't as though you could reach him in a timely manner.
You were just going to have to go back home, and – you weren’t sure. Certainly not eat. The thought of trying to swallow any food right now, with your stomach tearing itself into pieces of shivering disappointment, is too much. Maybe Jungkook would already be at the apartment by the time you got there. Maybe you two could just – sit together. Just be together.
You’re not sure what’s sadder; how much happiness that simple picture gives you, or how sad you are that it makes you happy.
Trying to straighten your crumpled expression, you smile. "Well – thank you for letting me know. Guess I get all of this for myself." Your laugh as you heft the fast-food bag is a small and lost thing. "Sorry to keep you guys. I hope you have a good night!"
You've just begun to turn away, aching to end the conversation before you start bawling in front of these two men, when Namjoon clears his throat, his gaze shifting to Yoongi for a moment. The other man jerks a shoulder, bobs his head, and Namjoon looks back at you. You shuffle a little, desperate to be away but not wanting to be rude to two of the few people at this company who actually seem to be lessening Jungkook's stress.
"Did you take the bus to get here? We could give you a ride if you wanted."
Your throat tightens, and you're already shaking your head before you've even thoroughly processed the offer. "No, thanks, I don't want to take you out of your way."
"Well, if you wanted to drop by the Gallery and see if Kookie is there, it wouldn't be out of our way at all. We live pretty close by." Yoongi nods in agreement, his round face scrunching reassuringly with something that's not – quite – a smile.
When you waver, Namjoon says with studied nonchalance, "Even if he's not there, Yoongi and I don't have any plans for tonight. We don't mind dropping you off."
Still, the thought of inconveniencing them because of your stupid planning – not to mention that you don't know them that well – makes awkward turmoil roil in your stomach. Reading your reluctant expression and apparently hesitant to press you, Namjoon relents. “Well, if you’re sure…”
“Y/N. Come on. We’ll save you a lot of time, and I’m sure Jungkookie would be mad if we didn’t give you the ride. He already throws stuff at me when he thinks I’m not looking; I don’t want him to start chucking shit that actually hurts.” Yoongi’s eyebrow is lifted, an inviting gesture accompanied by a smile with just a hint of gums, and you can’t help but respond, a rueful chuckle that slips out at the picture his comment puts in your head.
Jungkook had mentioned there were a few people he liked to mess around with at work, but somehow it hadn’t crossed your mind that the quiet and slightly intimidating man would be one of his targets.
It decides you.
With a sharp dip of your head, you assent. "Okay, okay. Yeah, sure, and thank you guys. It means a lot to me, and, umm, if you need gas money or something..."
Namjoon throws back his head and utters a loud, barking laugh while Yoongi chuckles. "The company doesn't pay us enough, sure, but I think we can afford to cover this trip, Y/N. Besides, Jungkook's been working overtime so often, I feel like we practically owe you for stealing him so much."
That leaves a sour taste in your mouth that you're quick to swallow. Grinning weakly, you follow the two to their car, a compact grey Honda that's seen better days. Namjoon tries to insist you take shotgun next to Yoongi, but you're far too flustered at the thought of taking his spot and practically dive into the backseat. The first few minutes are a little strained, the fast-food bag on your lap rustling every time you move. Namjoon shuffles through a bunch of Christmas songs on his phone and Yoongi hums to them under his breath, seemingly unperturbed every time his companion switches mid-note.
Eventually, though, Namjoon finds a song he likes enough to leave on, and you find yourself drawn into a relaxed talk with them. Yoongi throws in a comment here and there, and together the two of them are so – easy. They add teasing remarks about each other without pausing for breath, Yoongi praises an arching plotline Namjoon had finished storyboarding today, and when a particularly loud Christmas jangle comes on, Namjoon's already changing it before Yoongi has time to huff in displeasure. You know they're roommates – more than that Jungkook hasn't said – and there's something uplifting about listening to their comfortable conversation.
They don't leave you out of it, either. You talk about your home city. You talk about how you met Jungkook in university, when you both arrived late to a morning Intro to Computer Animation course and were locked out of the classroom as a result. (You'd whispered furiously at each other about who should knock first until another hectic student had come charging up, bleary with sleep, and literally ran into the door when it failed to open. That had pretty much dissolved the tension between you two.) On a wave of laughter from that story, you tentatively ask how the job has been for Jungkook so far.
He's always so keen to hide his stress, so anxious not to talk about it and burden you. It seems like these two coworkers might be a good way to get a better picture, rather than the stitched together portrait you've gotten from the late nights and short, hesitant answers he gives you. At the thought, you pull out your phone to see if he’s sent you anything, but you have no texts.
The laughter dwindles, and you hear Yoongi rattling the spit in his mouth loudly enough to be heard over the music as he makes a lane change. In the other seat, Namjoon runs a hand through his blonde hair. Their silence immediately winds you up, and your hand, holding the phone, falls to the side. Had Jungkook not been telling you something? Was it worse than the late hours? Was –
"This isn't a great company," Yoongi states flatly, when it becomes obvious Namjoon is still groping for something more tactful to say. "They make you feel like you owe them your finger bones just because they pay a bit above average, and if those aren't showing from hitting the keyboards enough, you're some kind of failure."
"Yeah..." Namjoon sighs. "They tried that with me, but Yoongi's been there for several years, he's the best they've got in the audio department, and he made it clear that if I left, he would too. So they pulled back a little. Jungkook, though..."
"He doesn't say no. I've told him to – told him I'll throw in for him – but he's really afraid he's gonna get tossed. Can't blame him. People get fired too easily at Projeck." His voice is disinterested, but Yoongi makes another lane change, too abruptly this time, and that, plus his tight grip on the steering wheel, is a hint that he’s not quite as untouched as he sounds.
You press your back into the seat, trying to give yourself a semblance of a spine as your whole body threatens to fold. You'd had an inkling that Jungkook was maybe conceding too easily to upper management, but it sounds like he's having way more than a little pressure to work late put on him. This – actually this sounds toxic. Crippling. And Jungkook hadn't said anything about it.
And you barely asked.
Gnawing on your cheek, you lapse into silence, struggling for something to say.
Namjoon looks back, brows pulling together at whatever he sees on your face. "He's trying to get ahead of his workload, Y/N," he says gently. "I know after today he doesn't plan on going in until after New Years. He said he really wants to spend time with you."
"He was literally moping all over the office today," Yoongi adds. "Was surprised he didn't break his computer screen, he was sighing on it so much."
They're trying to make you feel better, reassure you that Jungkook had missed you and hated being separated on today of all days. They are accomplishing the exact opposite of what they intend, but that's not their fault. After all, they don't know what you'd said to Jungkook over the phone. Part of you wonders if they'd even have been willing to give you a ride if they did know. You're pretty sure you wouldn't have been if you were them.
You might also have tried to run yourself over on the way out of the parking lot, if you were them.
Before you can pull anything resembling words from the mire of rabid guilt curdling in your throat, the car pulls into the Gallery's small parking lot. It's almost surprising to find that there are two other vehicles already parked, and with the way the night is going, it's even more surprising that you recognize one of them as Jungkook's.
"He's here!" you cry out, relief and something heavier saturating your voice.
With a pleased exclamation, Namjoon gestures excitedly, smashing his hand into the roof of the car with a loud thud in the process.
"If you fucking dent my car..." Yoongi begins, but their mild bickering slips by you.
Your eyes are straining for some sign of Jungkook. The parking lot is empty of people, and the big sign above the building isn't lit up. However, it looks like there are some lights on in the Gallery, spilling out into the dimly lit lot, and as you fix your anxious gaze on the interior through the wide glass windows, you think you see the dim form of at least one person moving inside.
He’s here. You’re literally lightheaded with the joy of that certainty. This day has stretched out with excruciating discord, but now, everything is drawing tighter, shorter, focusing into a promise of reprieve. Finally, finally, something’s going right. The blissful expectation of getting to see Jungkook is almost enough for you to forget about everything else. For this moment, you think you’d forego everything Christmas – the gifts, the dinner, the decorations, everything – just to press your face against his chest and feel him holding you.
Hand on the door handle, you keep yourself from leaping out and dashing to the building only with difficulty. “Thank you so much for driving me. I almost can’t believe we caught him.”
“It’s Christmas, isn’t it?” Namjoon replies. “Escaping from Projeck before eight was our miracle – looks like this gets to be yours.”
The three of you chuckle at that, and then you’re opening the door. “I’ll let Jungkook know you helped me. Maybe he’ll stop throwing things.”
“And maybe Santa exists,” Yoongi grumbles, but there’s no annoyance in his rasping voice. “’Sides, that’s not what I want from him. Tell him to think about what we’ve said, ‘kay?”
Assuming he means saying no to the boss more, you nod, emotional with how lucky both you and Jungkook are to have run into such kind people. ‘Thank you’ doesn’t really cover the gratitude their thoughtfulness has inspired in you, and on top of everything else you’ve been through today, it’s almost enough to set you to crying again.
Namjoon seems to sense you’re at a loss for words; at any rate, he fills in the space. “If things change for the better in the new year, we’ll see more of you, Y/N. In the meantime, take care! I hope you and Jungkook have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!”
Your voice comes out husky with gratitude. “Thank you. Thank you. I – Hope you both have a Merry Christmas, too! And a Happy New Year!”
Then you’re out of the car, shutting the door carefully behind you, your jaw tight to keep back the ridiculous tears. Yoongi and Namjoon wave, you wave back, and then Yoongi pulls away, leaving you standing and waving in the parking lot until the car turns and is gone. You take a couple of deep breaths, a smile easing the urge to cry. The excitement hasn’t dimmed at all, and, clutching the fast-food bag tightly, you pivot towards the Gallery, little shivers of anticipation darting under your skin.    
You practically run to the doors, and nearly commit the same mistake that student had, years ago, when they don’t open at your touch. The thought of smacking into them and announcing your presence to Jungkook that way has a low laugh bubbling in your throat. Yanking yourself to a halt, you try pulling and pushing on the doors, to no avail; they’re locked. You give them one last jerk, just to be sure, but they remain stubbornly shut. It’s not enough of a deterrent to dampen your spirits, though you find yourself bouncing impatiently on the soles of your feet, unable to get rid of the fizzy energy coursing through your veins.
You’re okay to wait outside until Jungkook comes out – it’s still not that cold out, and how much longer could he really be? – but nonetheless you start heading to the right, circling around the building, peering into the windows on the off-chance you can catch sight of your boyfriend and get his attention. The lights are off in some of the areas, but a few are flooded in a soft glow, and you skim your eyes over all that you can see. The more you look, the more confused you are about why Jungkook would be here. There are no other customers that you can see, so clearly, it’s not some sort of special Christmas showing. You literally can’t think of another reason he might be here. And hadn’t Yoongi said he was meeting someone?
It’s a mystery you can’t solve yourself, and you keep up your roaming examination. Most of the building has glass walls, except for an area near the back, and you can see inside fairly easily, where the lights are on. The Gallery is pretty typical, all open spaces and white, dismantlable walls, the better to more starkly exhibit the art pieces scattered across the wooden floors. There are paintings and sculptures, a few more abstract works, little plaques beside most of them –
But no Jungkook.
Lips pursued, you make your way further around, until you’re on the other side of the building, ears keen for any sound of a door opening. Wouldn’t that just be typical? While you’re wandering around out here, he comes out and leaves…
You should text him. A surprise visit is one thing, but at this point you being outside is going to be surprise enough. With that thought in mind, you begin fumbling in your pockets, awkwardly cradling the fast-food in one hand as you search for your phone. Not in your back jean pockets. A horrified panic starts building, and by the time you’ve clawed all the lint out of your sweater’s pockets, you’re certain. You don’t have it.
A memory, stilted and strained, of your hand falling to your side when you’d been talking about Jungkook’s stress in Yoongi’s car. In your anguish, it suddenly becomes clear to you; you’d dropped it. Forgotten to pick it up again. It was in the car!
For a second, you think that’s going to be the breaking point. The straw on the camel’s back. Your frustration peaks, eyes stinging, hands balled into fists as your excitement is drowned in self-reproach and an overwhelming sense of despair. Why were you so stupid? Fighting with Jungkook, sulking around the apartment, this dumb idea to get fast-food that’s definitely cold by now, and now – now this. You start walking again, barely looking, just planning to get to the front of the building and maybe collapse on the pavement. The crushing unhappiness doesn’t let up. Were you cursed? Was the world out to get you? Had you kicked a puppy in a past life? Why did you end up –
Your raging internal soliloquy is interrupted by movement within the Gallery. Someone is moving inside. Someone tall and muscular, with his black shirt rolled up to the elbows, long, shaggy black hair tucked behind his ears as he lounges against one of the white walls. He’s partially turned; you can only see half of his face, and even that not perfectly because of the narrow angle, but the sharp definition of his jaw is obvious, even from here. There’s something rectangular leaning against the wall next to him, wrapped in brown packaging paper, but you barely notice it. He’s talking to someone equally as tall, their back turned to you, but you barely register them.
Jungkook. It’s Jungkook!
It is not an exaggeration to say that for a second you doubt your eyes. Everything has just been so, so shitty today that you’d almost believe he’s a hologram or a figment of your imagination before buying that your flesh and blood boyfriend is standing some twenty feet away and that all it will take to end this horrible experience will be to catch his attention.
The person he’s talking to must say something funny, because his nose crinkles, lips rising as he tilts his head back and laughs. It’s just a giggle, quickly stifled, but it’s also a needle; the second you see that laugh, your bubble of disbelief pops with a force that’s almost audible. You can’t hear him, but at the same time, you can, fully aware of the way his snicker of amusement started out low and then pitched higher in tandem with his head being thrown back. The sound that isn’t a sound but a memory and a gift and a promise altogether gives rise to something hot and aching in your chest.
“Jungkook,” you say, barely aware of the name slipping between your tingling lips. There’s a rushing sensation in your ears, through your veins, like your blood has just remembered that it’s alive and is eager to prove it. The misery of moments and minutes and hours ago doesn’t disappear, but the sight of your boyfriend is enough to lift you out of it, to buoy you above the churning waves and set you, heart alight, in the clouds.    
“Jungkook!” you call, a shout this time, and start waving. He doesn’t hear or notice you, attention fixed on the man he’s with. You still don’t recognize whoever it is, but then again, with his back to you all you can see is the vibrantly patterned orange shirt stretching over his shoulders and a fluffy bit of brown hair. However, whatever he’s saying has sobered Jungkook; from what you can see of his face, his lips have tightened, and he shakes his head now and again.  
Who the hell is that, anyways? More vigorous gestures still don’t pull Jungkook’s gaze away from the other person. You know that any second now he’s going to look over and see you, break into a silly, bemused grin, rush over to the window, if only you could just– You’re about to tap on the glass when whoever it is abruptly steps closer to Jungkook. From what you can see, the guy’s large hands are moving passionately, persuasively, and a moment later he grabs Jungkook’s wrist, other hand rising up towards his face. You can’t quite tell what’s happening, except that Jungkook doesn’t shake him off or push him away. Doesn’t push him away, even when he leans closer, their faces inches apart, and the way they’re standing, you still don’t know who it is.  
Jungkook doesn’t seem to mind that his personal space is being invaded. There’s an attempt at a scowl on his lips, but you can tell it’s fake, a laugh on the verge of breaking through. You realize your hand is still raised to knock on the window, and let it fall. Brows pulling together, you try to make sense of what you’re seeing. The other man leans in even more, and when their lips are about to touch you wrench your eyes away.
For a long moment you stare at the pavement at your feet, mouth moving silently, like you’re searching for a word that fits what you just saw happen. It couldn’t be what you thought. Any second now, a reasonable explanation is going to come to mind. You’re going to find some frame of reference that makes this understandable. There’s going to be something that changes your point of view, makes reality into fiction. Because this can’t be true. This can’t be happening.
Jungkook could not have just kissed someone else in an empty art gallery while he thought you were waiting for him at home.  
Except that’s exactly what happened. You feel yourself change. You’re not a person anymore, not a human; you’re a wound, red and open and weeping. With a strangled sob, you suddenly find your feet moving to match your reeling thoughts, and you stagger away from the warmly lit building. The disbelief is like novocaine, numbing the screaming pain of the betrayal, but it’s not strong enough to force your gaze back through the window. Back to your boyfriend and whoever he’s with. Who knows what they’re doing now?  
Stopping yourself from crumpling to your knees and curling into a ball takes almost all of your strength, and you can’t keep yourself from doubling over slightly, one hand across your middle as you stumble blindly down the sidewalk and away from the Gallery. You press on your eyes to keep back the tears, cover your mouth to stifle the high, anguished gasps you’re making, but it does little to fool anyone, least of all yourself. Each sob rips from somewhere deep inside you, opens up the injury even further, until it feels like you might very well be tearing your chest apart.
He couldn’t have. He just– he couldn’t have. You can’t reconcile what you saw with what you know, but how can they be two different things? How can your boyfriend – loving, loyal, protective – exist in the same place as that man who hadn’t mentioned he was meeting anyone, who snuck around on Christmas day to see someone else? How can Jungkook be a cheater? How? How?
How could I not have known?
Bewildered, you scrabble through your memories like they’re a pack of spilled cards, struggling to piece them together, to pick them up and put them in order after they’ve fluttered to the ground in a chaos of white and black and red. At first you can’t find a hint. Can’t find a reason. There’s warmth and laughter and closeness in your memories together, with only spots of friction and hurt. What could the memory of you throwing tinsel around Jungkook’s neck and him parading around the living room teach you about this moment? What could the recollection of Jungkook’s arms wrapped around your shaking form when you’d received news of your grandmother’s passing tell you that you should have already known? What could the shadow of his quiet admiration as you showed him your most recent design reveal to your befuddled mind?
Was the staying late the only clue? The only ace card that trumped every other moment together? Or had there been others? Did you confuse his withdrawal from you as stress when it was really guilt? Had the silence been resentment? Boredom? Was he really going to the gym? Or into someone else’s arms? Did you do something wrong? Say something wrong?
Is this your fault?
You don’t know what to do, and as your steps slow, tears still going strong, you realize you barely know where you are. It’s fully dark now, and people are passing infrequently, with the streetlights only vaguely reassuring as they spill over faces. You haven’t taken any side streets, just followed this main road passed gas stations and boutiques, offices and fast-food joints, so you’re not lost, exactly. But you don’t have your phone. How are you supposed to get home?
Home. Suddenly the ache is more real. Present. Demanding. How are you supposed to go home when you thought home was Jungkook?
What do you say to him? What can you say? The thought of facing him has you trembling with something approaching nausea. Or maybe it’s the cold. It’s late enough now that the temperature is dropping, your heaving breath misting from your mouth, and you hadn’t planned to be out so late. The sweater is doing nothing to keep you warm. The sweater…
“Oh, God…” you mumble, your fingers digging into the tacky material, creasing the bunny that had made Jungkook so happy. “What do I do?”
What do I do?
---
With a grunt, Jungkook shoves Taehyung away using a hand against his stomach, the other man’s breath spilling across his face as he huffs in surprise. The push is strong enough to send Taehyung staggering back several paces, and he nearly trips and falls. Even as he catches himself, Jungkook is regretting the violence of the motion. It’s just – he’s feeling so vulnerable right now, so strained, and his friend acting like a clown doesn’t help matters.
Rubbing at his stomach, the other man complains reproachfully, “I was just trying to show you what to do!”
Jungkook sighs, rubbing at his face. “I don’t remember saying I needed help with how to make out,” he points out.
Taehyung throws up his hands. “You’ve missed the point!” he exclaims in disgust. “Didn’t you see the concern in my eyes? The tenderness? Dude, I was stroking your face. That’s how it’s done!”  
He snorts but the irritation is already fading, replaced by the amusement he’d had when Tae first started his shenanigans. Jungkook shakes his head, clearing his hair from his eyes, and relents a little. “Do you really think I should do it like that?” A beat. “Well, I mean, not like that. Better.”
With a grand gesture at their surroundings, Taehyung ignores the insult (or misses it, it’s hard to tell with Tae sometimes) and tells him, “You’re already doing better. You’ve got her a painting from an artist she loves.” He stops, points to himself. “Courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood art dealer, who sacrificed his Christmas night and drove all this way to make sure you got it. Plus, there’s the big news – she’s going to lose her mind when you tell her. Anyways, yeah, Koo, I’m pretty sure she’s gonna forgive you, even if you don’t use my sweet moves.”
“But I still don’t know what to say.” Jungkook hates how whiny his voice sounds, how uncertain. At the same time, it feels… good, to admit how he hasn’t got a clue how to make up with you. Or– That isn’t quite right. He does know, somewhere in his gut, in the palms of his hands, in the way his lips ache to skim along your skin. It’s just turning that feeling into words that’s struck him dumb.
“Dude, say what’s in your heart.” There is no one in the world but Taehyung who could say that earnestly and not sound like a weirdo, yet there the other man is, mouth set solemnly, somehow almost making sense. “You love her, you’re sorry for what’s happened, you want to hear her opinion, you’re working to make it better… Koo, you’ve told me all of that in the last half an hour. Now you just need to say it to her.”
“But what if…” He can’t even put it into words, the fear and uncertainty and guilt. Is he asking too much of you? Does he even deserve to ask anything? And what if… what if…
Reading him like a book, Taehyung smiles, simple and brilliant. “She’s going to forgive you. You’ve already forgiven her, so what else is there? Just the getting it done.” Still Jungkook hesitates, and his childhood friend says, a little more gently, “You’re a good person, Koo. I know that, and she does too. Talk to her. You won’t regret it.”
He hangs his head, slowly running his fingers against each other, exploring their lines like they might lead him to the courage he’s searching for. The call with you this afternoon had – shaken him. Although Jungkook had been aware – painfully so – that the two of you weren’t spending enough time together, he hadn’t realized how much it was harming you, and your anger had been both shocking and hurtful. Work had just sucked, so much, and to have you yelling at him…
But after the initial defensive reaction, he couldn’t get the thought of you sitting alone out of his head. It was never his intention to leave you for the whole day, but when he broached the subject of leaving with the boss, the look he got on his face, the way he said, “Well, of course, since I assume you’re done everything you were assigned,” had just been…
You still shouldn’t have left her. Jungkook knows that, knows equally that he didn’t have all that much of a choice if he didn’t want to get fired. It was the balancing act between those understandings that had his shoulders hunched, his cheek fair game to be chewed on. He was working on changing the situation – Namjoon and Yoongi were helping – but what if you thought it wasn’t fast enough? What if you decided you had enough? How can he bear to face you with that possibility on the horizon?
Taehyung gives him space, just hums under his breath and wanders a little, examining the various pieces on display. The Golden Closet Gallery isn’t one of his usual haunts – he tends to deal with artists further up north – but he’d come at Jungkook’s hesitant request, with an alacrity that still has Jungkook wondering what he’d done to deserve such a friend.  
He’d had his eye on your favourite local artist’s website, and when the painting went on sale, he’d known he had to get it. However, Projeck employees didn’t get paid until the 20th, and by the time he had enough money to comfortably purchase it, the artist wasn’t available on short notice and wouldn’t have been around to give it to him until after New Year’s Eve. Taehyung is well known in the community, though, and the painter had had no qualms letting him deal with establishing the price and then handing the piece over. It was practically a miracle, even if Tae had only been able to slip away from his family on Christmas afternoon.
Eventually, with Taehyung’s deep baritone hum a soothing presence, Jungkook tamps his fear down. Gets it to a manageable level. At the end of the day – Taehyung is right. He loves you, more than anything, more than he thought he could love anyone. That’s enough. It has to be enough.
He looks up, clears his throat. “Thanks, TaeTae,” Jungkook says quietly. “I really couldn’t have done this without you.”
His friend beams. “Nah, you couldn’t have. But what else are friends for, right?”
“I’ll get you an early release copy of Urban Anonymous. I think you’ll like it,” he promises. “But in the meantime… I think I’ve got someone to, uh, speak my heart to.” For half a second Jungkook thinks he’s about to die from the sheer cringe of saying that, a blush flooding across his cheeks, but at the same time – it feels kinda good to say. Goofily so, and very embarrassing, but still.
If anything, Taehyung’s beam intensifies. “Then my job here is done! I should hit the road anyways, I wanna get back home. I promised my parents I’d make them something nice for breakfast tomorrow.”
“Sure you don’t wanna stay over?” Glancing out the window, taking in how dark it is, Jungkook feels bad to be sending Taehyung out on the road at this time.
The other man snickers. “And get in the way of a beautiful thing? Nah. Besides, you know I like driving at night, and it’s only a little over three hours. I’ll be fine.”
“If you say so…” Jungkook snags the painting off of the floor, and together they walk through the Gallery, to the doors Taehyung had locked behind them when they entered. He unlocks them now, and they leave the aesthetically pleasing space, spilling out into the chilly night air. As Taehyung locks up, Jungkook glances around, breathing in deeply. Now that he’s resolved himself, he actually feels – a little better. Steadier, as though his world isn’t about to jerk out from underneath his feet.
Their cars are parked together, and once there Taehyung flings himself at Jungkook – scrupulously avoiding hitting into the painting, of course – and they hug, Jungkook staggering under the weight of his friend. The fond affection is a fluffy, sleepy thing, and, with one hand wrapped around Taehyung’s shoulders, Jungkook repeats, “Thank you, TaeTae.” It’s not eloquent, but with Taehyung, it’s enough.
They break apart, and Taehyung is grinning, a wide, boxy affair that has the nostalgia and warmth growing. “I’ve missed you, Koo. I’m glad we got to meet up. Tell Y/N that I miss her too, okay? And that I wish her a Merry Christmas.”
“We’ll have to get together again soon; Y/N will be disappointed she missed you. Although I know she loved your blue hair, so she’ll probably be sad you changed it.” It had even surprised Jungkook a bit when Tae had first ducked out of his car. The blue had just been so… riveting, and compared to that, the darker tone really changes how he looks. Not to mention that Tae went with a curlier style this time around.
Taehyung runs a hand through his fluffy brown locks before shrugging. “I got bored. Besides, I haven’t had brown in, what? Five years? It was a nice change.”
“It’s a good look. Almost as good as mine,” Jungkook teases, and Taehyung laughs in his deep, rolling way. “Okay. Merry Christmas, TaeTae. And have a Happy New Year! Don’t drive into a ditch, but if you do, call me.”
“I’ll get you to drag the car out by yourself,” Taehyung agrees amiably. “You look like you could manage it these days, and it’d save me the cost of the tow-truck.”
He gives Jungkook’s upper arm a cheerful poke, whistles in exaggerated admiration and then dodges Jungkook’s swipe at him. “See you soon, Koo! I’ll send you a text when I get home. Hopefully you’ll be too busy to read it until tomorrow.” And with a wicked little giggle, he gets into his car.
“Bye, Tae! See you! Thank you!” Jungkook waves until the other man has pulled away, blasting an R&B version of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and then he gets into his own car. Being with Tae is like inhaling a warmer version of helium, all uplift and expansion. It suddenly occurs to Jungkook, with a little jolt, that he’s excited to get home.
No matter how scared he is, scared of the future and scared of the conversation ahead, picturing you, thinking of walking into the apartment and seeing your face, is enough to drive a sharp spike of joy through his trepidation. You are the best thing in his life, and even with this fight, even with the hurt still nestled against his ribs, he wouldn’t have drawn it any other way.
It’s as he’s starting the car that he realizes he got a text from Namjoon and didn’t notice. Hey Jungkookie. Can you let Y/N know we have her phone? She left it in the car.
He stares at the words, waiting for the moment when they’ll make sense. When sense is not forthcoming despite scrambling his brains for what it could mean, Jungkook types out a reply, his fingers sweaty with sudden anxiety.  
what car? you saw Y/N today?
…Yeah? We dropped her off at the Gallery. Did she not mention it?
at the gallery?? when?
His heart is in his throat, the unease ricocheting to unprecedented levels, and Jungkook shoves open the car door, begins looking desperately around like you two could have possibly missed each other in the empty lot. When his phone vibrates thirty seconds later, he almost drops it in his haste to unlock it.
Thirty minutes ago. Around there. Is she not there? Is everything okay?
Jungkook rips his eyes from the screen to the empty parking lot and back to the screen, a bewildered trek that gives him no hints, and he doesn’t know the answer.
---
When you finally get back to the apartment, your hurt has become a cramped, flattened pressure at the back of your throat, and every breath scrapes painfully on the way out. It’s taken you close to two hours to get back. The first person you’d asked for directions had given you the wrong bus number, and while you’d realized it eventually, you’d been going the wrong way for a significant period of time.
Usually, you and Jungkook laugh at how bad your sense of direction is, but this is just more humiliation to stoke an already raging fire of shame. Your steps literally drag – you almost trip on your way up the stairs – and your fingers are tingling, almost numb. It’s gotten progressively colder as the night wore on, and by now the icy feeling has sunk deep into your bones, passed the hard exterior until its wrapped around the marrow.
You’d thought about checking into a hotel. You at least hadn’t forgotten or lost your credit card. There was something tempting about postponing the moment when you had to see Jungkook. But at the same time… If you didn’t answer your phone and didn’t come back, he might worry (would he worry?) and worse, he might get other people involved. What if he talked to Namjoon and Yoongi? Or phoned your parents or brother? You can’t stand the thought of having to explain to them what happened without any preparation – without even knowing what happened yourself.
So here you are, facing the door, empty-handed. You’d thrown out the fast-food at the first trashcan you’d come to after deciding to return. Would Jungkook be home by now? Had he finished with – was he done? Or was he still out there, still… You have to say it eventually, you try to tell yourself firmly, but your whole being cringes from making that acknowledgement, from putting it into syllables that might somehow trap it in reality. It’s not something you can manage tonight. You really don’t know what will be worse, him being inside or not, but you can’t just stand outside forever.
Forcing the key to the lock is no harder than flinging yourself off a cliff, and you approach it with the same amount of dry-mouth apprehension. Your hands are shaking so bad it’s hard to get them to align, but when you finally do, the click of the key sliding in is too loud, like its announcing that you’ve slunk back in shame to all of the apartment building inhabitants. A ridiculous notion, but you flinch anyways, heart seizing as your stiff fingers fumble with the little jiggle required to get the door to open. It takes you three attempts, your anxiety growing, and when you finally manage it, you’re so strung out with tension that you don’t hesitate. You just fling the door open and stumble through.
Straight into Jungkook.
For just a second, it feels like the magnetism you learned about in school. For just a second you fall into him like there’s nothing else in the world more natural than falling, and for just a second you press against his chest and feel dizzy with the light, clean scent that surrounds you. For just a second, as he catches your weight and closes his arms around you, calling your name with a voice of choked relief, you let yourself forget.
For just a second.
And then reality floods back in, a tainted torrent of regret and grief, strewn with rage and humiliation that drifts just below the surface. Though you’re so unsteady you can barely see, your lungs blocked and battling to heave in enough air just to keep breathing, you struggle to get away from him.
“Let go of me,” you say, dry and curt, and when his arms only tighten – more, you suspect, to keep you from pitching over than in denial of your demand – your efforts become harsher, more violent. Without room you can’t get any momentum to really push away from him, but your motions are frantic with the desire to do just that. There’s a panicked, screaming need to get away from him, to get enough space, like he’s the reason your lungs are crumpling in on themselves. “Let go, Jungkook!” you cry, your voice spiking up into shrillness, shattering the syllables of his name.
Like he’s been electrified, Jungkook jerks, his arms flying open. Instantly, let loose, you scramble away, down the entrance hallway. Just as off balance as he’d feared, you nearly trip over something long and cumbersome leaning against the wall that you’re too distraught to look at, and you have to windmill to catch your balance. A moment later you slam your shoulder into the corner of the wall as you try to take the turn too sharply. “Y/N, please, stop!” you hear, and wish you hadn’t. Barely registering the sharp throb in your shoulder, you catch yourself and keep going. Seconds later you’re in the bedroom, and you slam the door shut.
It doesn’t have a lock. Putting your back to the door, your air rattling hollowly out of your mouth – too fast, too shallow, but you can’t seem to calm down – you slide down the solid surface. Pulling your knees to your chest, you rest your forehead against them, eyes tightly closed, still gasping. Your eyes are aching, but you can’t cry against the immense pressure of overwhelming panic. There’s just a stinging sensation and a pulsing rigidity in your face, like each and every muscle there has chosen to stage a personal rebellion at the exact same time.
I can’t, I can’t, oh God, please, I can’t do this I can’t look at him I can’t I –
“Y/N?” Jungkook sounds like he’s directly on the other side of the door, but he makes no attempt to open it. “Baby, please, are you okay?”
His voice is so raw with worry that it’s red. The colour blooms across your closed eyelids, swathes of crimson and scarlet, and you imagine that it’s blood, trickling from the wound inside of you. You can barely tell where your back ends and the door begins, like any moment you might slide through it, or maybe through the floor, or through the ground, or maybe you’re already there, floating in nothing, and the red breaks into jagged pieces of black and orange and you still can’t breathe.
“Y/N? Can you talk to me? Just – say something, okay? Just so I know you’re okay.”
You can’t even manage that. Even if you wanted to. Even if he deserved to know. Throat moving convulsively, you choke out a sob but nothing else comes after. Just wheezing breaths, and you think you’re shaking but you’re somewhere outside of your skin so it’s hard to tell.
“Okay, okay. I’m – I’m gonna be here, okay? Right here. If you need me, I’m here.” Even through the hazy distortion swamping you, Jungkook’s clear, resonant voice comes through. Maybe it’s the concern, too heavy to be swept away by the raging panic. Maybe it’s the compassion, too anchored in you to be broken away by the tremendous pressure.
Or maybe you just know Jungkook’s voice so well that even your disassociation can’t make it unfamiliar to you.
“You’re doing good, Y/N. I’m still here. Just on the other side of this door.” A pause, a deep chasm of silence, and then he continues. “I think it’s a panic attack. I know it’s scary, but it’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”  
Later, you will be both annoyed and touched that Jungkook realized you were having a panic attack before you did. You’ve had a few throughout university, but none within the past year or two, and in the moment, you’d been too overwhelmed to identify what’s going on. The insight is helpful though, something to cling to and repeat to yourself. A grounding. It’s a panic attack. You’re going to be okay.  
Jungkook keeps talking, slow and steady. Nothing serious. Just words. You lean on his voice just as hard as you’re leaning on the door, and, slowly but surely, in a stretch of time that doesn’t mean anything to you, the constrictive bands across your chest loosen. You sink back into yourself. The tips of your fingers make sense again.
And you start crying.
“Y/N? How’re you feeling?”
Funny. Now, with your throat something other than a fist and pain, you still struggle to say anything. This is a softer kind of crying, not quite quiet, with little, hiccupping gasps as the tears run down your face. Possible to speak through. You just don’t know what to say to the man who just talked you, with kindness and compassion, through a panic attack. Who cheated on you. Your fingertips might make sense, but nothing else does.
“I – Y/N, baby, I get that you’re upset, but I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.” So anguished. Why did he have to sound like that? What right did he have?
You don’t know if it’s outrage or bewilderment or grief or pity that has you answering. Is it possible to have all of them in your mouth, gritty across your tongue? At any rate, your tone is as washed out as you feel, fatigued and grey. “I saw, Jungkook,” you whisper to your knees.
There’s silence on the other side of the door. Denial? Guilt? His reply is sluggish, thick with confusion. “You saw what?”
That makes you laugh – or not really, though the tortured sound was supposed to be one. “I was there. At the Golden Closet Gallery.” Will he really keep pretending after he knows you were there? Could he really be that brazen? The Jungkook you know couldn’t. There’s no way he could carry a lie like that, holding it effortlessly in the face of the truth. The Jungkook you know would blush, shuffle, collapse like a house of cards. He’s really not good at lying.
The answer isn’t a lie, but it confuses you all the same. “I know you were. Namjoon texted me to say he’d dropped you off, but – Where did you go? I – I drove around for like an hour trying to find you, and I couldn’t and when I got home you weren’t here…” The stream of words dies out like Jungkook can’t quite find any more to say, or maybe he’s embarrassed to say them.
When your reply isn’t forthcoming, confusion churning up anything you might spit out, he continues, more subdued. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to push you after what you just went through, I just– Are– How are you feeling? Was it – did something happen while you were getting here? Is that what took so long?” Another pause that you can’t fill, that stretches on and on as you try to understand what he’s talking about. How he can apologize for that and not the actual offense.  
Abruptly his voice bursts out. “Why won’t you talk to me!?” Tighter and more uncertain than you’ve heard tonight. Maybe more afraid than you’ve ever heard him.
It rips at your heart, and you realize in a swell of furious sorrow that you can’t stand to hear him sound like that. With a sudden, unstable surge, you get to your feet. Immediately your vision falters a bit, and you stagger, but catch yourself before you fall, clinging to the doorknob. You take a deep breath, fighting away the residual nausea and light-headedness. It clears within a few seconds, and your hand tightens on the knob as you take a deep breath. You can’t just leave him standing out there. You can’t just leave this incomprehensible thing hanging in the frame between your two lives.
You open the door. Slowly. Reluctantly. But you open it.
His long black hair is a wild mess, pushed back from his forehead, strands sticking up here and there. Even as you inch the door open, he runs his hand through it, ruffling it even further. His shirt is wrinkled, only partially tucked in, one sleeve rolled to bare his forearm, the other slipped down almost all the way. With his jaw so tense it’s a wonder he’s not cracking his teeth, Jungkook stares at you, lips set and pale. He doesn’t look like someone who committed a betrayal only hours before; if anything, the anguished panes of his face speak to a betrayal committed against him.
You’re so, so tired. Too tired to grasp at the outrage that wisps at the edge of your consciousness. Sniffling to clear your throat, you wipe at your face, trying make yourself a little less pitiful. “I was at the Gallery, Jungkook. I saw you,” you repeat because it’s still so hard to think of anything to say. When his expression doesn’t change – unless his eyebrows furrow, just a little, in innocent perplexity – you exhale. “I saw you with that guy. I saw you…”
“That guy? Who do you–” Jungkook breaks off, examines you more closely, like you’ve given him something to be concerned about. “Are you talking about Taehyung?”
The name is startling in its sheer unexpectedness. What the hell did Jungkook’s best friend have to do with any of this? “Taehyung? No, I’m not talking about Taehyung. I’m talking about that guy you were with tonight, in the Gallery. The guy you–” The words catch, but only for a second. You push them through with a surge of vehement exasperation for the blank expression he’s wearing. “The guy you kissed!”
In another place, the nonplused spasm across his face would have been hilarious. As it is, it just heightens your frustration, and the way he starts sputtering does absolutely nothing to reduce it. Even when he finally gets himself together and manages to talk, your aggravation is here to stay.
Right next to your mortification, as it happens.
“I didn’t– Y/N, that guy at the Gallery was Tae! Could you not tell it was him? I know he has brown hair now, but…” Jungkook shakes his head, flipping his own hair back. The tension seems to have slipped from his jaw, at least a little, and it might very well have crept into yours. “Is that– Is that what this whole thing has been about? You thought I did something with some random guy?” His lips twitch, and it doesn’t seem like he can decide if he wants to smile or scowl, and you feel the beginning of a flush heating up your face.
“It was Taehyung! And I didn’t kiss him. I mean, he tried to kiss me but it was just to–” Abruptly there’s a wash of faint scarlet crawling up his cheeks – cheeks that are rounder than they were a second ago, as he looks down and away, gaze slipping from you for the first time since you opened the door.
“Just to what?” you demand, the challenge extra belligerent to make up for the belated shock of suspended relief that hangs like smoke over your head. Too intangible for you to catch with your hands right now, though present enough to burn your throat with its sooty possibility.
He’s still looking at the ground, the blush becoming more prominent, and he begins to shift, the rustle of his dress pants loud in the fraught silence. “Um,” Jungkook begins awkwardly, head ticking to the side the way it always does when he regrets saying something or doubts his ability to do something. “It’s just, uh… he was helping me.”
“Helping you.”
Jungkook winces at your deadpan echo. “Yeah. I, um, asked him to…” Hands drumming on his thighs, drawing your attention for a second before you snap back to his flushed face, Jungkook bounces on the balls of his feet. “Uh… This is totally not how I planned this,” he mumbles, before hauling his gaze up to meet your own. “Hold on for a sec, okay? I just want to grab something.” For all that he’s definitely lightened a bit, the request is tinged with urgent appeal, his eyes scouring your face hesitantly like he’s afraid you’re going to retreat back to the room the moment he loses sight of you.
You’re not entirely sure that isn’t going to happen, but there have been so many emotional upheavals today you’ve just about exhausted your ability to feel more defensiveness. The more Jungkook speaks – the longer you’re in his presence – the more the sheer impossibility of what you’d believed is sinking in. He’s just – he’s Jungkook. Such a focal point of light and energy, such a reserve of easily offered comfort in a form so much more substantial than words. Somehow – maybe because of his prolonged absences, maybe because of your staggeringly challenging day – you’d managed to forget just what he is, but it’s in front of you now, demanding to be seen and acknowledged against the backdrop of what you’d thought. What had seemed so possible, even an hour ago, suddenly seems ridiculous when set next to the quiet solidity of him, of everything he is.
Wiping again at eyes that haven’t ceased watering yet, you nod.
He hurries away, down the short hallway and back towards the front entrance. You hear a thump, a muttered curse, a short dragging noise, and then Jungkook rounds the corner, hefting a rectangular object covered in brown paper. When you examine it more closely, you’re pretty sure it’s what you almost fell over when you ran inside. By the time he’s standing in front of you, the unwieldy item put on the ground and balanced against his knee, you’re pretty sure you know what it is by the shape and packaging alone.
And somewhere, in the back of your mind, you’re beginning to make connections. About Taehyung and the art gallery and the thing on the ground in front of you.
Jungkook just speeds up the process. “I was gonna wrap it in something nicer,” he offers apologetically, “but I was… Baby, I was so scared when Namjoon said you should have been at the gallery and I couldn’t find you and you weren’t at home. I thought – hell, I didn’t know what to think. That you got kidnapped or something.” He laughs, that shaky sound of amusement reserved for disasters that are absurd to imagine until they actually happen, and you shift, the heat crowding your face growing.
With a slight roll of his shoulders, he nudges the brown-wrapped object. “Anyways… Tae was helping me get this. For, um, you. Because I thought you might like it.” When you make no move to grab it, his eyebrows knit together. “Y/N? I swear, I didn’t do anything with anyone else. I wouldn’t do anything with–”
“I know.” You cut him off, unable to bear the imploring tone. It’s impossible to meet his beseeching gaze with the burden of your stupidity weighing on you, and you keep your eyes on your fingers. “I know you didn’t. Jungkook, I’m…” The winded feeling is still lingering, a hollowness in your lungs, and you have to inhale deeply just to remind yourself you can. Your anger at being abandoned by Jungkook for work died out so long ago it might as well be a relic, and with the betrayed grief swept so thoroughly out of your stomach, you’re left feeling strangely empty of anything but guilt.
“I’m so sorry. I – God, I’m so stupid. I saw you two and I thought – I assumed…” All of the logic that had founded your incorrect assumption is trickling through your grasping fingers, and you don’t know how to explain in a way that makes sense. In a way that justifies how you’d leapt to conclusions.
“I’m sorry,” you continue unevenly. “I just…”
“It’s okay.” When you keep staring down, Jungkook moves closer, reaches out, tentatively puts his arm around you. Light enough that you could break away if you wanted to. You don’t. You absolutely don’t.
The contact feels like an anchor, pulling you ever closer to reality. Making the trembling relief that much more real. The embarrassment, too. “Really Y/N, it’s – I know today has been…” After a moment he sighs, faint and low, shaking his head. “Today has sucked so bad, and Christmas isn’t supposed to be like this. I get why you thought what you did. After everything that’s been happening, after I’ve – I haven’t been around.”
“That doesn’t make it okay,” is your whispered protest, still unable to look at him. “I should have just talked to you.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that would have saved us both a bit of panic. But Y/N…” He waits, waits longer, until you’re forced to bring your eyes up. Meeting the dark softness of his gaze summons up more guilt, more regret – but also a clear, undeniable relief. Light at the end of a pitch black tunnel. You’re not out of the darkness, but with those sympathetic eyes on you, you have a sense of striving. Like taking a step, and then another, is possible. And might just be worth it.
“Y/N, baby, it’s not all your fault. It’s on me too.” His arms are resting lightly on your shoulders, fingers gently rubbing across the nape of your neck. “I haven’t talked with you enough. Kept just pushing it off, pretending it’s okay.” When he laughs softly, his breath tickles your face. “Not quite okay, hey?”
Your strained giggle isn’t heartfelt, and it fades quickly. “In the car, when Namjoon and Yoongi gave me a ride, they said – It seems like work has really, really sucked. More than I thought it did.” You lean back, just a bit, his arms a steady support against your back, and search his face. He’s biting his cheek, little lines skittering across his forehead. This close, the dark circles under his eyes are more pronounced, his skin sallower than it should be. He looks tired, but he doesn’t look away from you.
“Jungkook,” you say quietly. “How bad is it?”
Something flickers behind his eyes, a shadow of his normal reserve. You can feel the tightness in his body, the slight tremor that suggests he’s about to move away. The protective distance he clings to when he doesn’t want to worry you rears up – and you kill it with your hand, trembling only slightly as you tenderly trace your fingers along his temple, down his cheekbone, to cup the strong lines of his jaw. “Please, Jungkook. Tell me.”
The admission comes, fast and breathless, like he needs to get the words out before his teeth clench over them. “Bad. It’s bad. I hate it there.”
“Oh. I–” This is a different kind of pain from most of what you’ve been feeling today. More selfless, an anguish that extends and expands outward instead of curling up. “I’m so sorry. Kookie, I didn’t know. I should have but–”
“I didn’t tell you. How could you know?”
“I should have,” you insist.
His mouth quirks, a flash of teeth showing in mild amusement. “You can’t expect me to know you’re upset, but you should know when I am? I don’t think it works that way, babe.” When your mouth opens to object, Jungkook pulls you to his chest, cutting off your protest. You sink into his embrace, boneless and aching and grateful for the support, and if the gift’s hard frame weren’t digging into your leg, it would almost be perfect.
Perfect enough.
Pressing your face against his shirt, you feel him kiss the top of your head, arms still wrapped firmly around your shoulders. “I’m glad you’re safe,” he whispers.
“I’m glad you told me about work,” you mumble into his chest, reluctant to draw away. “If I told you to quit today, would you?” You’re not really joking, even though you know what the immediate answer has to be. You don’t have enough savings for one of you to quit without any other prospects lined up.
“Actually…” There’s something restrained in his voice, teetering on the edge of anxiety, or maybe excitement.
Shock has you looking up, resisting the comforting pull of his warmth for a moment. “You did!?”
“Oh, uh, no,” Jungkook says hurriedly, biting at his lower lip. Far from pleasure, the reassurance has disappointment funneling into your heart, funds be damned. To say that Jungkook’s job was the mother of all evils would probably be both unfair and exaggerated, but if it’s making him (and you) as miserable as he says...
“It sounds really bad, Jungkook. Killing yourself trying to please a bunch of jerks isn’t worth it.”
“You’re right.” He’s smiling now, smiling completely, showing off his teeth. “I don’t know if I can keep working for them for much longer, but… Ah, I was so scared to talk about this, and here you are, making it easy!” In his excitement, he’s playing with your hair, hands restless as they dance around. For once, the mystery isn’t extended. “Namjoon wants to break off. Start a new company, one that’s not an absolute dumpster fire to work for. He’s got several other people lined up who are happy to go, and Yoongi, obviously, and he asked me if I would join, too!”
“Is that why they gave me a ride?” Even as you demand it, you can feel yourself picking up on Jungkook’s energy. Not too much – the exhaustion sucking at your bones won’t allow it – but still, the lightness in your chest is a far cry from the sodden despair that’s taken up space there for most of the day.
Your boyfriend jiggles his head back and forth. “I dunno. Maybe. But I think mostly they did it because they’re pretty nice people.” He sounds a bit awed as he continues. “We can’t start for a couple more months – Namjoon said something about getting funding from some rich guy, Bang Sihyuk – but I still can’t believe they want me to come along. I mean, some of the people are, like, the best there are, Y/N.” You can almost see stars shining in his eyes.
Your response is firm, albeit playful. “So, it makes perfect sense that they’re having you join! Kookie, you’re gonna fit in so well, because you’re one of the best, too.” And honestly, you’re not even just shovelling empty praise; Jungkook is a truly talented artist in his medium.
His smile grows, eyes thinning with happiness. “And – you’re okay with it? There aren’t any guarantees that it will work out, with it being a new company.”
The trials of the day – mostly made from your own mind, though no less difficult for all of that – pass through your head. The loneliness and anger and sadness. All of it dimmed if not gone entirely, simply because here you are in his arms, speaking to each other instead of covering your hurt up. “Jungkook, one of the few guarantees I have of anything is that I love you, and you love me. If you’ll be happy working with Namjoon, with moving companies, then that’s all I need to hear.”
With a low hum, Jungkook sweeps you into another hug, and you’re glad to give up what space is between you two. Enfolded in his arms, listening to his steady heartbeat, is about the securest place you can imagine being. “I love you,” he says, voice thick with the truth of what he’s saying.
“I love you, too. Thank you. Thank you so much for everything.”
“I haven’t even given you your presents yet. Here –” And you’re breaking apart again – although not really, because you can still feel the connection as a thin warmth snuggled beneath your ribs – and Jungkook bends down, picks up the item sandwiched between you two. “Feel up to opening it?”
“The mystery gift that almost broke our relationship? Yeah, I’m up to it.”
Nose scrunching, he hands it over, and in your haste to see what’s inside, you make short work of the brown packaging. You can’t honestly say you’re surprised with the first glimpse of the mahogany frame – you expected a painting – but as more of the brown rips away, you feel shivery awe cascading down your spine. Once the painting is completely uncovered, you clutch it with sweaty palms, well aware of how precious a gift you’ve been given. You’d recognize the style anywhere.
“Jungkook,” you breathe, “oh my God, Jungkook, this is one of Ayeong’s, isn’t it? You – you actually got one of her paintings!?”
The quality is unmistakable. It’s a detailed piece, zoomed in on a small, dilapidated house. Almost everything about the house is bleak; the colours are all dull greys, blacks and browns, the porch is crumbling, and the shutters over the windows are chipped and cracked in places. However, right in the center of the house, taking up a good portion of the painting, is a door flung wide open, and the inside is flooded with warm colours and details in stark contrast with the exterior. There are people inside, crowded around the entrance, laughing and vibrant, and they dominate the doorway with their collective presence. One person, the only one who is looking outward, has her hand raised in greeting, as though inviting the viewers in.
“It’s called Homecoming.”
Soft and reverent, the name feels like an echo, a reverberation of your hopes and fears, and against a suddenly blurry vision, you smile. “It’s beautiful! It’s so, so beautiful. Thank you, Jungkook.”
“Do you feel like opening the rest of our presents? Or should we wait until tomorrow? We can grab your phone in the morning, too.”
Your fatigue drags at you, overwhelming even your hunger, but you try to rally, lifting your chin up. “What do you want to do? Do you want to open a present?”
His head tilts as he looks you over, a quick assessment. “I don’t have to. It’ll be nice to look forward to it later.” You’re absolutely positive he’s saying that for your sake, and it makes you just that closer to crying in gratitude for what’s in front of you.
Swallowing hard, you suggest, “How about tomorrow, then? We can…” You pause, scrambling for the memory, and then grin tiredly. “We can reset. Start over tomorrow.”
Jungkook’s laugh washes over you in cozy tides of amusement. “Now there’s a great idea. Whoever thought of it is a genius.”
With a chuckle, you carefully set the painting to the side, planning on figuring out where to put it tomorrow. As soon as it leaves your hands, Jungkook is there again, claiming the free territory. His grip firm and warm, he asks you, “Do you wanna eat? Or maybe nap for a bit?”
Your panic attacks always leave you drained, and the fact that Jungkook remembers is just another fond ache to add to the collection in your chest. “Nap,” you reply gratefully. “But… do you wanna lie down with me? Just for a bit?”
He couldn’t have looked any more solemn, or any more beautiful, if he’d tried. Squeezing your hand, he says, “I’d lie with you forever, if I could get away with it.” A second later the somber façade breaks apart, leaving a blush and a squirming, quietly giggly Jungkook.
With a snort, you pull him along with you, into the bedroom, a tightness across your chest that has everything to do with just how much you love the man next to you. “Now I know you were with Taehyung.” That makes you remember, and as you both walk to the bed, you glance at him, narrowing your eyes. “Are you going to tell me what Taehyung almost kissing you had to do with helping you out?”
As expected, his blush grows, painting his cheeks with a pale pink, but he surprises you by pulling you closer. With a hand under your chin, the other arm wrapped around your waist, he tilts your head up. Meeting your eyes with a tenderness that floods you with reassurance, he brushes a thumb along your lips, leaving a tingling trail. When it comes, his voice is hoarser than before, firmer. “He was trying to teach me something I already know.”
And then his mouth is on yours, steady and certain. Your lips soften against him, and time becomes languid, moving by the count of each breath that flutters against your lips. Jungkook isn’t demanding, not tonight; he kisses you sweetly, gently, conveying everything that he hasn’t managed to put into words. His body has a gravitational pull all its own, drawing you closer, and you skim your hands against his back, relishing the powerful certainty of his shoulders and the intimate confidence of his mouth on yours.
A second later, he sweeps you off your feet, and you gasp in surprise, breaking off the kiss. Jungkook places you on the bed, stands looking down at you with unmasked adoration. You open your arms, a wordless invitation that unwittingly bares the front of your top. His eyes fix on it, and if anything, they soften.
“I like your sweater,” he comments quietly, and as you laugh, he climbs onto the bed with you.
You take off the sweater in question, and your jeans and bra, easy and unhesitant in his presence. He follows suit, and then grabs your pajamas, placed as they always are at the foot of the bed. You wiggle into them, and for his part, Jungkook just throws on a pair of loose pants. The feeling of familiarity sinks into your system like a sigh of contentment, and when he pulls you against his chest, you snuggle into the embrace.
Wrapped in his arms, the smooth warmth of his skin pressed against your cheek, you let the drowsy bliss sweep over your body, and you relax, sinking against the sheets even as you curl closer to him.
Jungkook’s voice ripples against your mind, a soothing undercurrent taking you closer to sleep. “Merry Christmas, baby.”
“Merry Christmas,” you mumble. With one last faltering effort, you say, “Jungkook?”
“Hmm?” You feel the inquiring murmur just as much as you hear it, a smooth hum on your cheek.    
“Thank you for coming home.”
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baelpenrose · 3 years
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Fallout and Raiding
So after This post by my friend @adifferenttime I decided to do this post. A little bit about raiding and the historical contexts it happens in and the kinds of people who do it. Edit: @lost-in-interwebs has noted to me that they are the one who made the initial post, and should be credited. @adifferenttime's crediting will not be removed as they are the reason I saw it and added some really cool shit, but the OP deserves credit. Additionally, OP gave me some good news: I am, apparently, no longer "villified by the fallout community" for some shit I said in this blog's early days. HA!
I am a very, very excited historian today. So Fallout combines imagery from 4 different historical contexts that are relevant to raiding that you need to understand, that get combined in fiction and really, really shouldn't be. To get why this is important, let's define them:
Context of Raiding: Frontier Context: The outer edge of an imperial or hegemonic power that is expanding into the territory of otherwise far less powerful nations, OR into areas that are genuinely unoccupied at the time of occupation. (That does happen, see footnote before you decide you want to @ me please) In this context, lawlessness is the result of limited reach of law and infrastructure, as well as limited judicial power. In addition, many of the indigenous peoples interacting with a frontier context are going to have different laws, ones not recognized by the imperial power, and vice versa. Outlaws from the settled power will often see this lack of infrastructure as advantageous to them.
Borderlands Context: Disputed territory between two or more imperial or hegemonic powers in which neither has a decisive upper hand which is occupied predominantly by people who are not actually affiliated with either of them, though most of the actual residents will often have preferences for one or the other if pressed, many or most will prefer to retain independence (though not always! depending on circumstance a majority will sometimes favor annexation, especially if the borderlands region is in particularly dire straights and one or more imperial powers is doing a particularly good job of soft power projection and looking like it has its shit together). Lawlessness here is the result of uncooperative locals who may resent one or both powers, people who favor opposite powers, jurisdictional issues, cross-border raids, fear of retaliation by locals if they aid soldiers of one side to help apprehend a sympathizer of the other, or deserters from either side simply growing sick of conflict and going outside the law to escape.
Civilizational Collapse: In the aftermath of a collapse of a civilization - or even the collapse of infrastructure - riots, thefts, murders, rapes, all become more common. Not for long, but for a time. Usually, these things happen in the aftermath of society with fundamentally unequal power and a lot of grudges to be settled - close-knit societies rarely see much violence. I'm not going to go murder the lovely Jewish couple next door for baked beans, but the jackass down the road who's tried to have my dog put down twice for barking is getting his head curb-stomped in if the purge ever happens. But in the context of civilizational collapse, violence and raiding is the result of rage, desperation, and the corruption of a society finally come home to roost after being allowed to fester too long. As Carol of fallout 3 puts it when describing the madness after the war: "It was like every foul thing inside them finally came out." This is violence as the result of lack of law because law has VANISHED and otherwise "normal" people are allowed to let their worst aspects out to play, a frontier is lack of law because law isn't yet established so the worst people are going to the frontier to have an easier time operating. In this context, the belief is that things will NEVER go back to normal, so people behave in the ways that are utterly depraved because they can get away with it - or altruistic because obnoxious institutions don't interfere with them.
Scarcity: Similar to civilizational collapse, but a little different. This is a circumstance where violence is the result of lack of resources, plain and simple. After a famine, a hurricane, a natural disaster, many people are driven to banditry. The Ming Period of Fuedal China saw a huge number of peasants turn to banditry and return to agriculture after a series of crop failures, for instance. In this circumstance, desperation and desperation alone drives violence, HOWEVER the issue here is that in this case, the violence actually exacerbates the desperation - destroying or spreading resources even thinner, thus creating more refugees driven to violence to survive.
Fallout melds all four of these, despite the "civilizational collapse" phase HAVING BEEN OVER FOR OVER 200 FUCKING YEARS BY THE TIME OF NEW VEGAS. There's also, roughly, five different types of "raider" that generally exist in history: Types of Raider: Nihilistic Asshole Raiders: These are the "Rape pillage and burn" dickheads you see in every post-apoc who are desperate to prove Hobbes right. I do not have the patience or charity towards mankind as a species to pretend to the contrary: these actually DO exist in every society, and under law and order they are the ones who are either killer cops if they're high functioning enough and privileged to get through police academy training and hardcore recidivist criminals if they aren't. These are abusers, and just general scum who fundamentally see the world as being divided into predator and prey, and given a lack of law will nigh inevitably contribute absolutely nothing to any community and literally prey on everyone and everything around them given the opportunity, perhaps forming loose bands with hierarchies based on cults of personality or pecking order of strength and charisma to be more effective at terrorizing other communities. There are not, fundamentally, enough of these people to actually keep a place terminally unstable for 200 years, BETHESDA. You'll never fully stamp this out - these people are basically like herpes - they'll never truly destroy humanity as a species or even bring down a civilization but we'll never fully be rid of them and they will always manage to make the world worse for being in it, and in a lack of law and order they pretty much will behave like Fiends, or Bethesda Raiders. They will, on a long enough timeline, either sink back into larger communities, bending the knee as they cave to something stronger, their gangs will be wiped out, or they'll become larger groups of warlord-led problems. These should exist in VERY SMALL NUMBERS in every fallout game, here and there. Instead they're approximately half of all wastelanders in 3 and 4. Dissident Outlaw: This is a group of people who have broken away from a state and is using violence to maintain independence, likely using hit-and-run tactics to do so, which, given that "bandit" is always going to sound better than "freedom fighter" are going to be tagged as bandits or raiders. People who want to leave oppressive systems will often be drawn to borderlands, frontiers, or similar, especially in scarcity environments. There's a reason so many old west outlaws were bitterly opposed to industrialists - this is how they started. On a long enough timeline, these may form some form of secessionist group if they gather enough people to them, or they will face infighting and collapse if not destroyed by the group they attempt to break away from. (Most anti-incorporation gunfighters of the old west qualify, including but not limited to Butch Cassidy's gang. At his best, Samuel Cooke could have been like this in Fallout.) Powder Gangers, written well, should have been this. These appear in all scenarios, but are not the most numerous or well-organized, and generally have some reason - though not always a good one - for doing what they do. Rarely, if ever, is it "I want to not work and be a drunk, violent dickhead." "Broken Man Phenomenon" Raiders: This is almost exclusive to a borderlands context but effectively, it is a well known phenomenon that in a drawn out war in which soldiers are not rotated home there will be a certain percentage who simply snap, desert, and decide they are not going back. It isn't...super well understood why some people do this and others don't, or why any given person goes this why exactly, but it is known that if there is no homeward rotation until the war ends, there will be a certain percentage of soldiers that just do...this. These guys are pretty much burned out, PTSD-riddled wrecks who are so far past the "red line" that they'll at best form tight bands of roving deserters trying to survive and attacking anything that gets too close. These are extremely
dangerous but they also tend to avoid other people where possible - they're more scared of you than you are of them, but will absolutely kill you if you get close. They'd rather steal than kill, and that only out of fear of being forced to go back if they slow down. (War of the Roses, Thirty Years war had a lot of these - I think there's a few in NV as well). This should honestly be a common problem in NV but they should also be super prone to fleeing, and should not appear in 3 or 4. You could make some of the fiends this, I guess? These are the most common criminals in Borderlands scenarios, or among them. "Steal to survive" - Exactly what you think - these are the result of a scarcity context. These are people who will pretty much go back to being normal, reasonable people once things are settled again. The problem is that as they go, they tend to worsen the situation, meaning that more people tend to get desperate enough to become bandits for the same reason. This is a problem in this circumstance NOW - in the fallout setting it would be much, much worse. The thing is though, like the previous group, these guys would rather steal than kill - and unlike the previous group they have no combat training and any combat experience they have is mostly something they've gained with quick and dirty fighting for food or resources. They would be little to no threat and they should honestly try to run against anyone who puts up a fight. (Historical Example: Ming period Banditry, Holy Roman Empire had a bunch every time they had a famine, too.) These should be...reasonably common but again, probably run away immediately past a certain level, or give you the option to try to speech check them down. This is actually the most common kind of raider in any of the above contexts that is NOT frontier. Tribal Raiding: This is the result of essentially either a nomadic people being deemed "raiders" by a settled people because of a different military tradition. Instead of attempting to occupy or take territory, this is a tribal people who's military doctrine is a hash of light infantry, cavalry, and ranged tactics built around hit-and-run tactics to draw out soldiery of settled peoples, secure resources, and cause trouble to eliminate garrisons of enemies or draw them out of fortifications and into the open where they can be hit in concentration (See Little Bighorn for the end phase of this process if curious). Widely, however, this is a military doctrine - not a mindless pattern of lawlessness. The historical in-joke about the difference between a proper army and a barbarian warband being "do you have a battle flag" comes to mind. Societies that wage war through raids often don't survive through it - merely wage war through it while herding, hunting, and gathering as their primary means of sustenance. Claims to the contrary are consistenly propaganda - wide scale societies cannot sustain themselves through raiding, full stop. White Legs, Khans, and debatably Vipers and Jackals qualify as this in Fallout. Historically, this is the overwhelming majority of people deemed "raiders."
The issue with fallout's presentation of raiding is that by combining all of the four contexts raiding happens in the way it does, and then acting as though all five types of raider are the same, it feeds into a lot of colonialist propaganda, because there is a big difference between the various types of raiding and the contexts they happen in.
Footnote: For information about an example of a case of "unoccupied" frontierlands, know that there was a region of the American Southwest that was actually occupied with little to no anti-native violence committed by United States forces, though the reason is that the area had already been depopulated by both centuries of Spanish missions and followed by, ironically, a Borderlands scenario war between Mexico and the Comanche Empire, during which endemic warfare between Mexico's settler soldier's and the Comanche raiding warriors had effectively depopulated the area entirely, laying waste to the villages and forcing the people to either die or move elsewhere. Because the natives in question were among the few who actually knew how to take care of the land in the region, desertification actually worsened in the region, and the environmental impacts of the war are felt to this day. For more information, read Brian DeLay's Battle of a Thousand Deserts.
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catzula · 3 years
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Focus (on me)
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Request (by anon): Congratulations on 400 followers! Can I get Oikawa with 34 from your prompt list? As fluffly as possibe and maybe lil suggestive please :)) THANK YOU!
A/N: Of course, and thank you sm for participating in the event! This was so much fun to write ngl since I’m in love with this dude, like I can’t even explain. I hope you like this!
Warnings: one curse word, is it suggestive? jelaous Oikawa beware / first time I wrote something this short, it’s 1.3k
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Synopsis: Your boyfriend isn’t very happy about you spending so much time on a school project with this guy, and he is determined to get your attention somehow
( [F/N] stands for friend/name! )
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You didn't know why your teachers were suddenly obsessed with making break-out rooms or group projects, but it was getting frustrating at this point. 
You had at least two projects from almost every subject, and you never even found the idea amusing or rational. Group projects were time-consuming, annoying, and especially hard for socially anxious people. 
You were at least glad that you were paired with someone you knew this time, unlike your past two experiences of being paired with people you only knew by name and nothing else. So it might've been true that you were a little more enthusiastic about working with [F/N] since you always liked him a bit more than you did others.
You both got along perfectly, had much in common, and you often found yourself bursting into laughter at something he said, laughing till your stomach ached. 
Of course, none of this went missing from your boyfriend, Oikawa. 
At first, he was also glad you finally got to do a project with someone you liked. He laughed when you laughed, watching you with a warm gaze as he sat in the corner of the room till you finished the project or said it was enough for the day so you could go cuddle watch a movie with your boyfriend after.
But then he noticed your meetings started to get longer and longer, well aware of how you often swayed from work and had a conversation instead. And when you weren't on a zoom meeting with him, Oikawa found you texting each other. Of course, it was nothing serious, harmless, friendly texts and memes (he had to admit the guy had taste... the memes were hilarious), and it was mostly about school or how you were doing. And even though knowing all that couldn't stop him from getting jealous, he couldn't simply go and tell you he was jealous, could he? 
So he decided to solve this his way.
"Hey babe," Oikawa entered your room, his voice loud and the word 'babe'  emphasized so the guy could hear clearly. "Oh, hey, Tooru." You answered back. You were sitting on your bed as you took notes to the notebook next to you. The guy was also doing the same on the other side of the screen.
Even though you didn't greet him back with 'babe' like he hoped you would, he was still grateful for the smile you offered him. "Are you still working on the project? The one about that book you read? What was its name again... Brother's something?"
"Brother's Karamazov." The guy corrected Oikawa, causing him to make a face as he wrinkled his nose in distaste. "Yeah, that." Oikawa muttered as he settled beside you on the bed.
"Tooru? Did something happen?" You couldn't help but finally ask when he stood quiet and watched you and your friend work, pouting or huffing whenever he talked. 
"No? Does something needs to happen when I visit my girlfriend?" Your boyfriend protested (once again emphasizing the girlfriend part), taking your free hand between his larger ones as he played with your fingers. "Well, no, but I've never seen you so interested in my projects." You told him with a giggle, smiling softly when he started to draw hearts on your hand with his fingers.
"Well, maybe not your projects, but I'm interested in you." He muttered to you with that look that sent shivers down your spine. "Tooru!" You told him with widened eyes, your gaze flicking to your screen in embarrassment. 
"What are you doing?" You hissed between your teeth when he leaned even more towards you, causing your friend to fake a cough in awkwardness. "I'm just showing what's mine." Your boyfriend growled back, only then making you realize what this sudden possessive behavior was.
"Tooru?" You snickered, not able to suppress your mischievous smile, "are you, perhaps, jelaous?"
"Do I look jealous?" He asked, but the angry look in his eyes had already answered for him. "I'm sure he got it." You whispered, "Just let us do the project, 'kay?"
Even though a pout formed on your boyfriend's lips to your answer, he still shook his head and retracted a bit further away from you, not, however, dropping your hand.
"Um, where were we again?" You asked embarrassedly, since, even though you acted like it didn't, your boyfriend had affected you a lot. "We were talking about (...)"
"Oh, yeah. So as an argument to that, we could say-" You hitched a breath in when you felt something soft and warm on the tip of your fingers, something that oddly reminded you of Tooru's lips. You sent a glance at him, only to meet with his dark brown eyes, looking at you sneakily despite the innocent smile on his lips your fingers were tracing, and knowing damn well what he was doing.
"What?" He asked innocently. "You should concentrate, baby."
You cleared your throat, "Y-yeah, um, as I said, we can argue about how in Dimitri's trial, Foyodor... Um, I- I mean-" You gritted your teeth at the soft lips tracing your fingers, leaving trails of kisses on your palm and wrist, climbing it's way up.
This was torture. Pure torture, how you didn't know where the next kiss was going to be, how slow and soft he was kissing you, how you needed to focus but couldn't, and that was exactly what Tooru wanted.
"Tooru!" You whined, turning your microphone off, when his lips climbed up your arm, getting closer and closer to your neck. "What? I'm not doing anything!" He protested. "And you should be focusing." He emphasized the word focus. 
Yes, focus. Focus on me. Oikawa thought as he smiled slyly and kept climbing your arm with kisses that drew you mad. 
"Hey, Y/N- are you okay? You sound a little... flustered. We can do this later, too." Your friend told you, of course, Oikawa purposefully stood out of the frame, so your friend only saw you.
"Yeah, Y/N, are you okay?" Oikawa asked, looking at you from underneath his lashes, his lips now almost on your shoulder. 
"I'm- I'm okay, let's continue." You gritted your teeth as you turned your microphone on, hoping Oikawa would stop before he moved even further since if he even moved an inch, your friend would be able to see him and his mischievous smile, something Oikawa had wanted from the start.
You held your breath when Oikawa's lips traced your shoulder, making you shudder under his touch, his now a few shades darker eyes locked on your computer screen, at your friend who was watching him with widened eyes and a red face.
"I- um, this is probably not a right time, so maybe we should postpone..." your friend muttered, making the lips that were now on your neck thug upwards.
"I'm- you're right, I'm sorry about this- hey!" You warned your boyfriend when he bit the soft skin of your neck, but you heard him giggle in answer. 
"I'm gonna get back at you for this, asshole." You told him just before his lips closed on yours and made you gasp under his touch. Eyes automatically closing and arms wrapping his neck as you pulled him closer, you had already forgotten your friend's presence, melting into the kiss. But Oikawa was more than aware of him watching you with widened eyes, and even though he loved to see the defeated look in his eyes, this cute, flustered face of yours was only for him to see. 
So without breaking your lips apart, Oikawa averted his eyes to the screen, a snicker making him smile into the kiss as he clicked the red button, finally able to give you his full attention.
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