i wanna talk about iroh’s “four seasons” and why it’s used as the musical motif for sokka & yue

i’ve seen a few different videos/theories about why this song is used for sokka & yue, but none of them matched my personal thoughts, so i figure i’ll just share them. it’s a stretch in regards to what the writers were probably intending, i admit, but it’s how i’ve always interpreted it

winter, spring, summer and fall (x2)

four seasons, four loves

four seasons, for love

the lyrics have Always reminded me of the japanese idiom 一期一会 (ichi-go ichi-e), which is usually translated to something like “one season, one meeting” or “for this time only.” it’s like a reminder that every moment happens only once, and you should cherish the moment and the memory, for it cannot be repeated.

the analogy: four seasons is to one season as four loves is to one meeting

why have iroh sing the song first?

the idiom is heavily tied to japanese tea ceremonies; the fire nation is partially inspired by japanese culture, and iroh is characterized by tea. also it’s just the kind of sentiment iroh would appreciate.

and then we have sokka and yue, whose relationship is brief but unforgettable. within a span of what i assume is a few weeks, they meet, fall in love, and then tragically part

one could look at what happened to them as only a tragedy, and i imagine sokka probably does for a little while, but in time i feel he would learn to love and cherish the time he had with yue for what it was—that he would simply be glad for having met her and having gotten to know her. and of course he’ll always love the moon for its reminder of the time they had together.

it reminds me a lot of that post by @/starpeace:

the love was there. it didn’t change anything. it didn’t save anyone. there were just too many forces against it. but it still matters that the love was there

one season, one meeting—it doesn’t matter that it was just for a short period of time. this one of sokka’s many seasons will always have been for his love for yue

Tainted Apollo

Pairing: Kars x Reader

Warnings: mentions of gore, death of minor characters, slight allusion to dubcon.

Words: 3056.

Summary: Finding a peculiar sculpture in the ruins of an ancient temple, you realize you have stumbled upon a god set in stone.

P.S. I forgot to post this one here haha

____________

"Good morning, Sire." You welcomed him as you stretched in your improvised bed, an old metal container of some kind with a pile of blankets on top of it.

Rubbing your sleepy eyes, you slowly put your feet on the floor and adjusted the hem of your nightgown so he wouldn't see too much of your flesh. Kars always found this habit of yours ridiculous. He had been a piece of stone for God knew how long, and even after you found him he'd been confined to bed for no less than a year, barely moving and unable to speak. Kars was sure you didn't even understand what he was, but you still cared about covering your body in front of him. What a pathetic habit, he thought.

When you found him in the sands, somewhere in what appeared to be a long abandoned temple that had been in ruins even before he reached the Earth, you first thought he was some kind of sculpture, adoring his unusual but captivating form. He hated you watching him with your eyes wide, even touching a lock of his petrified hair - you were just a mortal human woman, one of those he had been determined to wipe out, but you had the audacity to act like his sole purpose was to lay in the sand for your entertainment. If he could move, he would definitely end your pathetic like there and then. But Kars couldn't.

It must have been ages, if not a millennium, since he had been banished from Earth. Drifting through darkness, his body had turned to stone, his limbs losing their ability to move - regardless of him finally becoming an ultimate form of life, it brought him nothing but eternal suffering and oblivion. Kars had stopped functioning like a living being almost completely. Almost. If he hadn't been returned back to Earth by some accident, he would continue his meaningless journey to the stars till the end of times because the darkness enveloping him had no limits. It felt like being thrown into a cold throat of some gigantic monstrous creature, but instead of reaching its stomach and finally dying he had been forced to circulate somewhere in between, neither dead nor alive. If silly humans thought the Hell was real, it had to be it.

He couldn't remember what force sent him back to Earth as he could think of no one doing it intentionally, but it didn't matter as long as he could reach Earth. Regardless of what would happen after, Kars knew he would survive and regain his power, finally giving humanity what it deserved for what they had done to him.

Funny, but when his mind had awoken from hibernation, Kars realized there was no one to take revenge on. Humanity had successfully wiped itself out.

Even after year and a half that passed, he still saw just you, a girl who had brought his petrified form to her home to take care of him knowing he was alive - by the time you met him Kars was able to open his eyes. Oh, he remembered well how horrified you were, stumbling upon an immensely beautiful statue that turned out to be a stone god, he heard you saying that for a few times. That day you ran away with such an expression Kars didn't expect you to ever come back, although you showed up a couple of days after, trying to talk to him in that odd new human language he had never heard before. As he kept silent, unable to even move his lips and make a sound, you realized the god you stared upon had been trapped in stone, and you could do nothing to free him. You went away, but came back with an odd machine that reminded him of Stroheim, and Kars thought of melting your bones when you dared to use to transport him. However, he had to admit how further did human technology evolved when even a small and timidly-looking machine like yours could lift and transport him to your home, a place inside another machine that had been definitely used for military purposes before being abandoned. It looked incredibly pathetic, as if you were a little rat that had to live in a pile of garbage out of pure need.

The world he once knew and wished to conquer had disappeared. All he saw while being driven away by your small machine had been a never-ending desert and ruins of other machines: he learnt lately those were enormous satellites, star ships, and other rusting remnants of an epoch that had been long gone. Watching gigantic sand stingrays crossing the desert as if it were a sea made him realize how far humans had gone - they had created monsters that were never meant to exist in the first place.

Of course, they paid for it. Judging from the stories you told him and what he observed himself, humanity had faced almost complete annihilation even without intervention of their outer space enemies, if there were any. The atomic war destroyed nearly everything humans had been creating since the beginning of their era. It affected even the natural course of life of every living being on Earth, forcing them to change and finally become a horrifying, mutilated, monstrous life form of something they had been once. Even the Moon had been gone, it's ugly half-destroyed form shining in the night sky and making it even more revolting. You had said something about unsuccessful colonization and the war over moon territories while Kars had to force himself to look down on the sand that was at least familiar to him.

Disgusting. He still had hard time believing how far humans had gone, destroying everything that existed long before they started ruling the planet. What would Jojo say now if he saw what a nightmare the world had become? Wasn't it better to let Kars wipe out the humanity before this had happened?

He had been fighting the urge to break your spine or melt your insides at least for a couple of months, blaming you for the crimes of your ancestors despite you obviously being too young to commit any of the atrocities that had happened. How come a human being had the audacity to survive in this post-Apocalyptic world while other life forms had mutated into monsters? When you were wiping any impurities off his cold stony skin, he was dreaming of the time when his body would come out of this odd hibernation period he couldn't control and then murder you in some rather painful way, prolonging your death till you felt all kinds of despair a human like you could. As he struggled to move even his fingers, he had finally decided not to harm an only being capable of taking care of him.

Each day you brought him to sunlight so he could observe what was outside of your pathetic shelter while you worked to grow anything in this lifeless place, several times a week departing to some place to fill the ugly rusted water tank, then watering your plants in a some kind of a nicely equipped greenhouse - funny, now you used it to protect the plants from the intense heat rather than trap it inside. Fruits and vegetables were what your diet was based on, including some synthetic supplements Kars refused to consume, disgusted by something made purely by humankind. Sometimes you would bring him fried meat, and while the thought of eating a mutilated animal had been revolting to him, Kars knew you could offer him nothing else. Even the meat you brought you offered only to him, rarely taking a piece for yourself: now it must have been a great privilege to consume meat. Besides, it truly sustained him better than fruits or vegetables, and he was dependent on what you were feeding him, slowly getting his strength back. After a year and a half he was now able to move his lips and fingertips, making you nearly ecstatic: it seemed you were doing everything right.

What did you think he was? A deity? A monster? A machine? Probably an immortal being who had existed long before the annihilation, that's what you said: you were talking to him from time to time either to pay your respects, tell him more about your world you thought he knew nothing about or voice what you were going to do right the next moment. One day as you brought several rectangular plates made with what looked like a blue metal to him, you read Kars about ancient Greek gods, wondering if he had been one of them - you saw him melting food with his skin, and for you it was the inherent symbol of his divinity. Kars had to give you some credit: you weren't as stupid he first thought you were. You weren't worshipping him as much as he deserved, but you probably did the best you could do, just a little desert rat having nothing but her plants and a decaying metal house.

"I won't come back till the sunset." You said once you finished washing your face and brushing your hair, tucking them under a faded scarf out of some light fabric and then reaching out to grab your mask. "I'll try being quick, Sire, but it's important I visit that place. If I'm lucky, I might bring something very useful to you."

Useful to him, huh? He would appreciate if you stopped humoring yourself: there was nothing useful you could bring him aside from a dozen people to devour. While he knew there were some people left on Earth still, he also knew you wouldn't master the strength to capture, less sacrifice them to him. Besides, Kars was still deciding whether it was worth devouring those creatures. While it certainly would make him return his powers faster, he could wait a couple of centuries - Kars doubted remaining humans could do something worse to Earth than what had already been done.

You didn't return after the sunset that day. It was the first time you hadn't keep your promise to him, and it made ill-tempered Kars bitter: oh, he would remember it and make sure you remembered it, too. He spent the night thinking what he was going to do to you, albeit not getting too violent in his thoughts. Something probably happened on your way, and you had to stop and spend the night in the desert before coming back.

The next day you didn't return either. He waited for you till the sunset but heard nothing but the sound of sand stingrays travelling to the other part of the desert. The complete silence troubled Kars more than he was able to admit: you had been somewhere around most of the time, taking to him or making some other irritating noise. While he found you just one more annoying creature inferior to him, your absence had a strange effect on Kars - it felt like something was crawling beneath his stony skin, making it harder to keep calm despite the fact the man had always been patient, unaffected by something so unworthy of his attention. However, your absence was a clear sign that something had happened, and it somehow bothered him.

Were you attacked by the monstrous creatures roaming the earth? Humans? Some other force he knew nothing about? Surely, it had something to do with the thing you attempted to bring, but you were vague about its nature, and Kars doubted it was really something decent. How come you had the audacity to risk your life when you were his one and only follower, sustaining and taking care of him while he was still in hibernation? Were you so unbearably stupid you decided you could leave him alone for long? Who had given you the right to bother Kars with your absence? It was inexcusable. The only reason why he didn't punish you was his petrified body, but he wouldn't stay in such state forever.

The lack of your presence was becoming more and more disturbing, and Kars questioned himself why did it matter. He had never needed someone's company - even though he had respect for both Esidisi and Wamuu, their closeness to him wasn't something essential. Not that your presence was either... and yet he found himself constantly thinking about the reasons why you were late. Although it irritated him, Kars decided that time he spent into space had its effects on his mind.

When you returned at last, the sun had already disappeared over the horizon. You were bleeding - he saw crimson stains on your face and your left arm, your faded scarf absent when you stormed inside your house, a small metal container in your hand as you flew to your stone god. Something had gone terribly wrong.

"I'm sorry, Apollo." You were running out of breath, but Kars heard you calling him by a Greek god's name. Was it the god of light? Your choice was rather peculiar. You were probably calling him like this in your mind since you brought those books home, but was afraid to voice your thoughts to him. "I wasn't as prepared I thought I was. The guards are still there even after all these years."

Leaving the container on the floor close to him, you took your bag and started your things there, searching for food and flasks. Somebody had been following you to your hideout.

"This is all I could find." You whispered, opening the container and taking out a small glass vial with a bright red liquid inside. "I can't tell how it will affect you, but I believe it would be of use to you, Apollo. Please, consume it."

You had carefully lifted the vial as if it were going to explode and then put it on his chest, awaiting for Kars to melt it onto his body. He had been suspicious about this, for some reason unable to detect what the liquid was as the vial seemed to block it, he consumed it, nonetheless - there was a chance it could speed up the end of his hibernation.

And it did. He felt the familiar heat, albeit Kars had never thought the stone could be turned into liquid, and yet it was it, something he had been chasing for so long once before becoming who Kars was now. How come it had been somewhere here all along? Was it fate to land here where it had all ended for him once? Kars had no answers. Not that it mattered now as his petrified body was rapidly recovering, his limbs finally able to move, his dark locks softening, the paralysis shattering while he stood up, showing you his perfect form in all its glory as you stared at him, either afraid or unable to move. He was the God you were waiting for, his large wings turning into flesh hands, a halo of light surrounding his perfectly proportioned, sculptured body and making you lose your eyesight for a couple of seconds. It happened so suddenly you were trembling on your knees in front of him, forgetting about those who had trailed you and the danger they could bring to your God and you, both fear and admiration engraved into your stare. Kars was much more than you had pictured him to be, undoubtedly.

As much as he enjoyed that look on your face, devouring your fragile figure with his eyes, he could feel his enemies breathing down his neck. Of course, all of them were unworthy of seeing his true power, but even someone as miserable as them would do for a quick warm up after centuries of hibernation: once several disgustingly looking men with scars and mutilated limbs showed up in your hideout, all of them Ripple users just like Jojo had been, Kars let out a laugh, watching them demanding both him and you to surrender. Worthless little creatures, they thought they could give orders to him, the most perfect form of life on Earth. He had slashed all of them the next moment, pools of their blood dirtying the floor and spreading further to metal walls: apparently, despite them still being able to use Ripple, their power had deteriorated greatly to the point they only posed a threat to a fellow human being, someone as frail and delicate as you.

Turning to face you still on your knees, he saw your wide eyes, tears streaming down your cheeks while you covered your mouth with your hands: was your God more terrifying than you had imagined him to be? Did you think he would forgive those who made a mistake of challenging him, the most powerful being the Earth had ever hold? Silly little girl, there were so many things you had to learn about him, the God you were destined to worship and love with your whole being.

"Stand up, woman." He said, watching you tremble and trying to wipe away your tears, not knowing what you had to say to the God you finally saw in all his glory. "I demand you to leave with me before the sun rises. Gather whatever belongings you need for a long journey, we will depart soon."

You bowed to him deeply, afraid to open your mouth and say something your God would consider inappropriate, and hurried to take your bag, quickly putting everything you considered important in it while Kars stepped closer to the pathetic beings, consuming what was left of them and feeling the power coursing through his body, filling him with warmth he had craved for so long. That little vial you brought was truly worthy of him, and Kars felt satisfied it was you who found him in the sands in the middle of nowhere. He would take you with him while he would try to resurrect the Earth as he remembered it, bringing the balance to it and watching it flourish once again.

"Apollo, I have taken everything." You whispered to him timidly, forgetting you were using that fictional name you gave him.

Kars chuckled, marching through your hideout flooded with blood of his enemies. If you needed to compare him to some stupid Greek god so desperately, you should have chosen Hades.

132 Hours, Chapter 2:

“Say ‘please?’”

“Fuck off, Greenbriar.”

“Close enough.”

Previous

Read chapter 2 on AO3 or read below:

This is the shape of my nightmares:

My sister Taryn and I are thirteen years old, sick and miserable. We’ve just endured our first heats and stayed home from school for a week with doctor permission. Even now, we feel residual awfulness: headaches and sore muscles. Heats are painful when there’s no one to help you through them, and obviously we’re too young to mate. We sheltered in our rooms, and our adoptive father briefly hired an omega nurse to tend to our high temperatures and help us wrap up in blankets, so at least we felt safe and cocooned.

Everybody knows why we missed school, and they whisper about it behind our backs. Even before we presented, our designation was obvious. The rest of our class—the rest of the school—is alpha kids, and the ones in our year have all started growing out of their baby fat, shooting up like wheat stalks. Taryn and I are only barely taller than we were last year, our cheeks are still soft, and we are gaining weight in our hips and chests. Everything about this is awful. Nothing is fun.

We are outside for gym class. The alpha kids, growing into their bodies, have a lot of extra energy, so they need to spend time circling the track or tackling each other in games of capture the flag. Taryn and I will join them until we get tired, but if we show signs of flagging, we’re benched. Omegas aren’t as sturdy. Omegas break.

Today, the teacher is more generous. During our game of capture the flag, she simply mandates we play defense, guarding the precious flag, and abstain from running around with our classmates. It’s boring, but fine. We get to talk to each other while the alphas tussle among themselves upfield.

Except a few of them are “on defense” today too—the alpha elites, too lazy or too important for gym, who can slack off. As the only two omegas on school grounds who aren’t staff, Taryn and I are categorically beneath their notice, but we know every member of the clique by name: Locke, the son of a wealthy consultant who’s never home, always traveling; Nicasia, whose mom is a senator; Valerian—nobody knows what his family does so we all kind of assume it’s crime; Cardan, the youngest of six heirs to the most absurd family fortune this side of the Rockies.

Already, they are taller than us, stronger than us, looking unfairly sculpted in the autumn sun. Already I am aware of how we are different.

Then the wind blows past me, picking up my hair. And the scene changes.

The first thing I notice when Cardan unexpectedly strides toward me is that he smells amazing. He smells so incredible that I goggle at him for a second, baffled by how I somehow didn’t notice this about him before. I feel a clenching in my stomach and the urge to do something, although at the time I don’t know what. And then, while I am paralyzed by his scent, he gives me a hard shove for no reason, knocking me off-balance.

I land on my backside, an embarrassing but safe place to land, padded with muscle and fat. Our adoptive father always taught us that it’s better to land there than anywhere else, better to suffer a little humiliation than to crack your skull open or shatter your ankle or wrist. It still smarts, but at least the only thing bruised is my pride.

Then Valerian throws his head back and laughs. “That’s where she belongs,” he crows. “On her back, like a good little omega.”

Nicasia thinks that’s hilarious. Locke raises his eyebrows, blinking at us with large, tawny eyes. And Cardan, the instigator. Cardan just sneers.

That sneer has haunted me. I’ve seen it countless times since then. He starts holding his nose when he passes me in the hallway. Whenever I get complacent, he makes sure to whisper in my ear that I reek. He and his friends seem to find it more fun to bully the alphas smaller or weaker than them—omegas already know their place, after all—but that does not protect us when they’re bored, or when said alphas further down the food chain need to take out their own aggressions.

I think they thought it would break me.

They couldn’t know it would do the opposite.

---

“Jude?”

I open my eyes to a darkened room, and groan. I feel vaguely like I’ve been run over by a truck, then the truck stopped and someone picked me up and threw me in the back of it, and we proceeded to drive down a very bumpy road. In other words: like shit. My head throbs, and when I try to sit up, the world spins and I flop back over.

“What happened?” I mutter. Everything is greyish and blurry. Dim light seems to be filtering in from somewhere above my head and to the left, but there isn’t very much of it. I hold my hand up in front of my eyes and squint at it until I stop seeing double.

There’s a relieved sigh from somewhere past my hand. A male voice. “You’re okay.”

I make a second attempt at sitting up and am more successful this time. My shoulder scrapes against a wall to my right, so I lean into it. The light source I clocked before is a small window, longer than it is wide, set high up above me. And on the other side of the room, sitting across from me, sits the dark shape of a boy, or a man, or someone caught eternally in between those two things.

Cardan.

I blink at him. “You look like shit.”

“Yeah, you too.” Cardan rubs his eye. He isn’t sneering now. In fact, he looks worse than I’ve ever seen him. His hair is messy—which is nothing new, people are doubtless running their hands through it all the time with how perpetually tousled it seems—but there are circles under his eyes and he looks pale. He’s also bleary-eyed and squinting a little. He doesn’t seem to have any visible injuries, though, although jury’s out on whether that’s good or bad. I’ve often thought he could stand to get pushed around a little more, instead of always being the one to do the pushing.

“I gave you the mattress,” he says, gesturing at what I’m sitting on. “There was only one.”

I look down. I’m indeed sitting on a mattress. There’s no linens, but someone has thrown a slightly scratchy blanket over the lower half of my body. I peer around, dread sinking in as I begin to grasp the severity of our situation. “Oh, fuck.”

“I think it’s ransom,” Cardan volunteers. “I mean, I really can’t think of anything else it would be.”

I hug my arms to my chest and say the thing drilled into every omega’s brain since they’re old enough to wander off from their parents. “What about sex slavery?”

“Yeah, there’s not a huge demand for alpha men on the black market. Although…” He looks down at himself and smirks a little. He’s built like a classical sculpture and he is well aware of this fact. “Can’t blame them if they decided to make an exception.”

It’s impossible to think he’s making a joke about this, not when it’s actually a thing that could happen to me, a possibility that my stepmother Oriana warned us of ever since she married Madoc and inherited his adopted twins. Sex slavers looking to snatch up omega girls became our bogeymen.

But the odds are that Cardan’s right: it’s probably ransom. I imagine people would do and have done worse to get their hands on a fraction of the late Eldred Greenbriar’s billions.

But I say, “Maybe someone finally got tired of you being annoying as shit.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Feeling mouthy, are we?”

“Fuck off. This is your fault,” I accuse, wagging a finger at him. “You did this.”

Cardan blinks at me. “What, you think I kidnapped myself?”

“Not literally.” I slump back against the wall. “Although it seems like something you would do. You love attention.”

“Ah, yes. All of the attention I am getting from you in our cozy eight-by-ten cell. I’m just soaking it in.” He pantomimes splashing water on his face. “Great for the skin.”

“You’re in a playful mood.” But of course he’s feeling better than me. He would have needed a larger dose—of the chloroform? ether? they used on us to get us here—but he also would have bounced back quicker. Everything about alpha biology is kind of extra like that.

“I joke a lot when I’m nervous.” He sighs and runs his hands through his hair. “I am actually freaking the fuck out.”

“Oh, great.”

“I do have water, though. Thought that might interest you.”

I sit up a little straighter. “God, my head is killing me. Yes.”

“Say ‘please?’”

“Fuck off, Greenbriar.”

“Close enough.”

Instead of getting up, which I think for a moment he might, he rolls the half-empty bottle of water across the floor and over to me. It bumps against the edge of the mattress and I have to lean over to grab it, which nearly makes me hurl then and there. The water helps, though. It’s room temp, but even a mouthful makes me feel more like a person.

“It’s not drugged,” Cardan calls. “Surprised you didn’t ask in advance.”

I flip him off. After I’ve drained the last of the bottle, I let myself just breathe, counting backwards from ten in my head. There are many warring emotions vying to tip me over the edge of a panic attack, but I can’t let them. I have to get out of here.

Cardan flicks at a bit of dust on the floor. When I am on three, he interrupts my mindful breathing. “You realize that, technically, we have now swapped saliva?”

“Ew.” I throw the empty water bottle at him and am annoyed when he catches it effortlessly from the air. “Could you be, like, useful for once in your life?”

“Sure.” He leans forward and lowers his voice, like he’s afraid someone might overhear. “There are three of them. One’s a woman, I think the other two are men. The only one I’ve seen is tall and white and barely spoke a word to me. He dropped off the water when I was still groggy.”

That is useful. Dammit. I frown. “Designation?”

“Dunno. Couldn’t get a read on him. I think they might be using maskers for their scents.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I exhale. “Tall” doesn’t have to mean alpha—my sister Vivi, who’s shorter than me, is proof enough of that. But it doesn’t sound good. “Any idea where we are?”

“I don’t think we’ve left Long Island. I don’t know for sure, though. We could be in Jersey for all I know.”

“Right.” I sigh again and rub my temples. “Okay, so ransom. Ransom. You could technically pay the ransom yourself, right? You’re over eighteen—”

“I’m twenty.” When I blink at him, he clarifies, “Repeated sixth grade, remember? And I just had my birthday in July.”

How could I forget? My life wasn’t exactly blissful before he came along, but it definitely got worse when he got bumped down to my year. “Okay, you’re twenty, and your dad died last year. So you’ve got your own money now.”

Cardan raises his eyebrows. “Wow. Real considerate.”

Now is definitely not the time to quibble over manners, but I manage, “Sorry, I guess.”

“Don’t be. He was a dick.” I glare at him, but he ignores me, patting down the pockets of his skinny jeans. “Huh, you know, when they took my phone and my wallet, they must have also taken the special checkbook I keep on me just for hostage situations. Think they’d accept Venmo?”

“Very funny.”

“But the real issue here is that I can’t touch my trust until I turn twenty-one.”

I wish I could say that didn’t interest me, but it does. Sure, Madoc has money. He’s a ruthlessly efficient attorney with killer instincts, and, among other prominent clients, he’s represented Cardan’s dad and both of his older brothers at one point or another. But he’s not among the alpha ultra-rich. Private helicopter rich. Secluded island rich. And I’m nosy enough about how the point one percent of the one percent lives. Anyone would be. So I ask, “Why’s that?”

“Why did my dad do anything?” Cardan folds his hands behind his head. “To make my life difficult, I guess. It was probably to ensure I wouldn’t embarrass myself by buying and crashing seventeen Porsches in a row. Give that frontal lobe time to develop. He’s not here to say. Anyway, Balekin’s the trustee. Maybe there’s some clause about life-threatening emergencies.”

Balekin is Cardan’s oldest brother, but thinking about siblings makes me wonder, with a pang in my chest, about Taryn. What had she done when she and Locke couldn’t find me at the party? Had she panicked? Had she gotten home safe? I don’t want to think about Madoc because he’s probably freaking out in a big way, a side of him I have only seen once before, the last time someone threatened me. It’s more likely that he’ll tear the kidnappers limb from limb than give into anybody’s demands. I hope Balekin has a more level head, although given his reputation for throwing massive parties, I am not counting on it.

“Right,” I say. “So they’ll hit up Balekin for the money?”

“Dude, I don’t know. Honestly? He might have staged this himself to get at the trust, or more likely my stake in the corporation. In some ways, I think it’s better for my family if I disappear.”

It surprises me to hear him say that. “Wouldn’t—that would be a huge scandal, though?”

I don’t say what I think, which is Don’t they love you? But there’s a pretty big age gap between Cardan and his oldest siblings. They could be practically strangers for all I know.

Cardan just shrugs and looks gloomy.

“I don’t think they planned on getting me, too,” I say quietly. There’s only one mattress in the room. One bottle of water on hand for when Cardan woke up. And anyone who thinks they can extort “Mad Dog” Madoc is definitely biting off more than they can chew. But that curdles my stomach, because if Cardan hadn’t chased me down the beach, I probably would have woken up in my lavender canopied bed, safe. Probably with a killer headache from overstimulation, but safe. As safe as I can ever be.

“Yeah,” Cardan agrees, which doesn’t help me feel any better. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

I blow out a breath. “Well, Balekin better pay up in the next forty-eight hours, or we need to figure out how to get out of here. Otherwise we’re going to have problems.”

“We are?”

I swallow. I hate that I have to spell it out for him. But I keep my voice even, casual. “Unless you’ve got spare heat suppressants on you.”

Cardan looks dumbstruck. “Oh,” he says after a moment. “Shit, no. I must have left them in my other jeans with my hostage checkbook.”

I feel myself blush, which is ridiculous. Unregulated heat cycles, messy and inconvenient as they are, are nothing to be ashamed of, as everyone says. Just a quirk of biology. Just the way I am. There’s even a group of pretty radical omega activists out there fighting to destigmatize unregulated cycles, citing the damage that suppressants can wreak on the body. Except my designation is going to be pretty problematic if I’m locked in this room with Cardan for reasons other than societal stigma.

To be honest, it’s already a problem. The room is probably ten feet long, not long enough for us both to lie down across from each other without curling up to avoid touching. I am already hyper-aware of his presence, the nervous drumming of his long fingers, the terrible urge I have to run my fingers through his already messy curls. It’s just chemistry, but if it’s bad now, it’ll be about eighty times worse for both of us if I go into heat.

And if any of our captors are also alphas…

I shake myself all over. I can’t go down that road. I’ll never pull myself back. I’ll just curl up in a little ball and then it’ll be up to Cardan to save us, which, no thank you. “Yeah. So, one way or another we have to get out of here.”

Cardan goes pale. “Jude, I—”

“So we assume nobody’s coming,” I continue. “Use the next twenty-four hours to figure out as much as we can about the people who’ve taken us and where we’re being held, and the next twenty-four to escape. That’s the plan.”

“That’s a reasonable plan,” he says, vaguely startled.

“You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

“I’m not. You were valedictorian, of course you have a plan. Just, uh, my mind went totally blank when you pointed out you’d—”

“We don’t have to talk about it, okay?” I snap. “I assume you want that just as much as I do.” Which is not at all.

The way he pales further tells me I’m not far from wrong. I mean, he’s always made it clear how much he’s hated my scent, the way I look, the fact that I get better grades than him. He hates pretty much everything about me, because I am an omega and he is an alpha, and that means he should be on top of the world and I should know my place.

I massage my temples, trying to clear my head. “No, we’re going to get out of here before that happens.”

For reasons I can’t pretend to understand, that seems to reassure Cardan. He nods and unfolds his arms, letting his head fall back against the wall. His eyes close. “Okay.”

I am surprised that he seems at all willing to trust me, but I suppose he is pretty low on options. That’s his mistake. Already I am thinking of what a relief it will be to leave him behind, even though I know that, morally speaking, I should be formulating an escape plan for the both of us. Besides, abandoning Cardan to his fate wouldn’t really solve any of my problems. But I wouldn’t have to face his sneer anymore, wouldn’t have to wonder what it would take to convince him I have earned my place when the answer is clearly “Nothing, ever.”

“I just have to figure out how,” I mutter under my breath.

Cardan cracks one dark eye open to look at me, but I ignore him, staring up at the little window. There has to be a way to crack this place open like a nut, and if there is, I’ll find it. There is no other option but this, no other way but out.

I refuse to believe otherwise.

Next

Day 29: Secret Admirer

For the @ineffable-valentines prompt list!

Boy oh boy. I cannot believe I was able to post a fic for this prompt list, on time, every day for an entire month. For me, that’s huge. I tend to be a slow writer and I rarely finish the stuff I start. Not every fic was amazing, or very long, but by gosh, I sure did finish them, and I had so much fun doing it! Huge thanks to @mielpetite for making this list and reblogging all the entries throughout the month, they’ve been amazing. Thank you also to all the lovely folks who commented/reblogged/liked my fics, you gave me the motivation to sit down every day and write something, even when I wasn’t feeling it. Much love to all y’all.

If you go to the #ineffablevalentines tag on tumblr, you’ll see the other entries, and if you go here on my blog you’ll see all of mine. Okay, enough chat, please enjoy my final fic of the month, wherein to no one’s surprise, there is more letter writing.

__________

To the proprietor of A.Z. Fell & Co Booksellers, Downtown Soho, in case there’s another one knocking about somewhere—

I saw you in the shop the other day and couldn’t help but stare. You were gently ushering someone out the door without a single book in their hands, and I couldn’t help but find your tenacity admirable. I myself was careful not to remove any item from the store when I left, but I’m afraid I may have left one behind. I was wondering if you might have seen it, so I can come back to fetch it. You see, it’s terribly important to me. It’s my heart.

Love,

Your Secret Admirer

Aziraphale chuckled through an unseemly blush as he refolded the letter and placed it on the top of the stack that had been slowly growing on his desk for the past month. Every day of that cold, miserable February, a letter had arrived at his doorstep, with no return address and no name of sender. They were—and there was no beating around the bush about it, really—love letters, very obviously meant for him, from an anonymous so-called secret admirer.

At first, Aziraphale had been rather confused, but had kept the letters anyway, intending to show them to Crowley and have a good laugh. However, as each day passed and each new letter arrived, Aziraphale found himself quite charmed by this secretive writer. Clearly, they were a regular customer of some kind to know Aziraphale so well. They made all the right jokes, said all the right things, made references to all the right literary figures; either they had discerned Aziraphale’s tastes with perfect accuracy, or they had much in common with him.

Some of the letters were extremely lengthy; others, like today’s, were only a short paragraph or two, recounting the admirer’s feelings for him. Some were maudlin and prose-laden; some were humorous and sweet; others still were almost salacious in tone, never saying anything too outlandish but bordering on the cusp of it, hinting at things and implying things that made Aziraphale blush absolutely scarlet. All of them were quite flattering, and left Aziraphale’s mood brighter for the rest of the day.

Aziraphale had been charmed by humans before, and even been romantically pursued by some of them, but never before had one so captivated him with the written word. (This, of course, did not include works of literature. That was a very different kind of captivation that involved less blushing.) He’d never had a secret admirer before. It was all very thrilling and romantic.

Not being able to write back was a bit frustrating, but Aziraphale supposed it was for the best. Though he was quite flattered, and had reread some of the letters more times than he’d like to admit, at the end of the day, his admirer was only a human who only knew him as a bookseller.

Besides, Aziraphale was already taken. Speaking of which, he ought to get himself ready to meet Crowley for dinner; their reservation was at eight.

I ought to tell him about the letters, he thought as he went about selecting a bowtie. Crowley ought to know, after all, that he had some competition. Aziraphale laughed aloud at the thought. After dinner, he decided, he’d bring Crowley back to the shop and show him the pile of letters.

And so he did. Aziraphale poured them both a glass of wine and brought Crowley into his study, presenting the pile of papers as though it were an ice sculpture.

“Terribly sorry I didn’t mention these to you earlier,” said Aziraphale cheerily. “I suppose I didn’t want you getting jealous that I had a secret admirer.”

“Jealous? Me?” said Crowley wryly. “Never.”

“Well?” said Aziraphale, when Crowley didn’t make a move towards the desk. “Go ahead, read some of them. You have my full permission.”

“Hmm. I dunno,” said Crowley, making himself comfortable on one of the armchairs on the opposite side of the room. “Seems like your private affair, to me.”

“Nonsense! Here, I’ll read one to you.” Aziraphale selected one at random from the middle of the pile, unfolded it and cleared his throat. “Oh, this is rather a good one.

“My dear bookseller—

“I’ve read every Wilde I can get my hands on, but apparently even your shop doesn’t hold the book which may contain a description vivid enough to capture you. In my experience, none do; not Whitman, not Keats, not Dickenson. The most complimentary of love poems do not contain a subject more appealing to me than you are. I’m afraid there may not be words in the English language or any other to describe your radiance. Compared to all the other authors and poets, who am I to attempt such a feat?

“I must try anyway. You, of all the beings of the Earth and Heaven above and Hell below, deserve to know your own wonder. Compared to you, my perspective is lowly, to be sure. Still, was it not Wilde who once said that we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars?

“Endlessly Yours,

“Your Secret Admirer.”

Aziraphale had to pause to surreptitiously wipe at his eyes. That one had been particularly moving when he’d first read it. “Now, wasn’t that just lovely?” he said after a moment. “They know my tastes so well.”

Aziraphale glanced over at Crowley to see his reaction, but to his surprise, Crowley was smiling. A small, rather sweet smile, not at all jealous or mischievous. “Yeah,” Crowley said, “it was alright.” He put out his hand. “Can I have a look?”

Aziraphale handed him the letter and Crowley perused it, his expression much more pensive than Azirapahle would have expected. After a minute or two, Crowley said, “Yeah, not too bad, really. Not much I’d change, on this one. Just that the references to Heaven and Hell were probably a little too on the nose. And I’m pretty sure I used ‘complimentary’ incorrectly there.”

“Oh, really?” said Aziraphale, taking the letter as Crowley passed it back to him. He gave it another quick once-over. “No, I think ‘complimentary’ with an ‘i’ is correct. If it was an ‘e’ then it would be wrong, as in ‘complementary’—wait a moment.”

Aziraphale looked back up at Crowley so quickly he could have given himself whiplash. “You said I. ‘I used it incorrectly.’ Crowley. Did you—”

Crowley grinned, and crossed the room to press a kiss to Aziraphale’s brow. “Happy Valentine’s, Angel,” he said. “Well, happy February. The fourteenth went by and I had more I wanted to say, so I just sort of kept going.”

And suddenly, it all made sense. Who else, after all, could know Aziraphale so well? A human, with limited time on the planet, observing Aziraphale from afar, could never reach such an intimate understanding of him, and what he loved.

“Oh, my dear,” said Aziraphale. He glanced over at the pile. He was already planning a late night of reading through them all again, this time with the proper demon in mind. “Do I even have to say it?”

Crowley stuck his hands in his pockets and bobbed his head from side to side in a pantomime of thinking. “Well, considering it look me bloody ages to draft these all up, and write them by hand, and train the mice to deliver them, and stop myself from bragging about them to you every day for the last month—”

Aziraphale interrupted him with a kiss. “All right then,” he said, laughing. “Thank you, secret admirer.”

Crowley beamed. “Ah, it was no big deal, Angel.”

***

On February first of the following year, Crowley woke up to find an envelope sitting on his bedroom windowsill, outside his flat. It was addressed to “The handsome gentleman on the fifth floor,” and there was no return address. Inside was a letter, written on very old parchment and with very expensive ink, which read:

My dear,

Forgive me for my boldness, but I happened to see you in the Ritz the other day (you were with a rather good-looking gentleman in white, a very lucky man, if he had the privilege of being your dining companion), and you seemed to me to be the most dashing person in the room. Nay, in all of London. I found myself thinking about you for the rest of the evening, and I just had to draft up this letter to tell you exactly how lovely you looked that night. Though you wore dark glasses, I could occasionally catch a glimpse of your eyes behind them, and their beautiful golden color, and I found myself nearly speechless every time.

In all of creation, I have never found a being so wonderful to gaze upon. I imagine that if I were to, hypothetically, take the place of your ever-so-fortunate dining companion, and have a conversation and a drink with you, I would also never find someone so fascinating, so caring, so clever as you. I imagine if I were lucky enough to know you so well, your wit would be as dazzling as your eyes.

With the Greatest Affection,

Your Secret Admirer

Scrawled at the bottom of the page, in a much hastier hand, was a postscript. Crowley read it, cackled uproariously (which helped to hide his blushing), and went immediately to phone Aziraphale, intending to explain to him the point of having a secret admirer.

P.S.: Please do let me know if you received this! The doves are not very good with street directions, unfortunately. I am working on it with them. Much love! —A

Crowley also intended to tell him that he bloody well loved him, too.

Frostbitten (Chapter Two)

Y/N L/N is a child of a Jotun and an Asgardian. She spends her life hidden in the dungeons of Asgard, with no one to talk to other than one of the princes- a man who seems completely incapable of leaving her alone and entirely unable to give up on helping her. Y/N and Loki Odinson have always been inseparable, it seems- even when there is a cell wall, or a village, or an entire kingdom between them.

Even when he disappears, even when you run away, and even when his world falls apart; you are inseparable.

Previous Part

Heads up!! You may look at some things in this chapter and be like: what the heckity sheckidy how is that even possible, or you may think it’s perfectly normal. Just know that if you do see something strange, it’s probably something I did intentionally. Maybe it’s not. When this series is over, if I’ve yet to answer a question you have, message me.

"Your magic is so beautiful," you murmur, watching as the illusion of a dove soars overhead before coming to a swift stop on your shoulder, batting its wings at the air to slow down. "It's so real."

You reach a hand out to touch the bird, and it fades to nothingness in a flash of green light. Loki smiles at your compliment, gazing softly at you through tired eyes. "You don't seem like one to think that reality is beautiful," he murmurs, tilting his head. "Your reality is pretty awful."

"I'd like to think I won't be here forever." There's no ice beneath you. No frost at your hands and no damp cold on your clothes. In this place, with this man, this sort of calamity takes over you, and all the ice inside you stays where it should, awaiting command. "They locked me up because I couldn't control myself, right? You help with that." In a demonstration, you clasp your hands together, building up a small shape in your palms with the ice. When you remove your hands and set the ice piece on the ground, it's a semi-accurate ice sculpture of the very same dove Loki had created seconds earlier. He looks over it, sighs happily, and then returns his gentle eyes to you.

"Your magic is a reflection of who you are. Mine showcases my ability to lie- to convince anyone of the absolutely impossible. It's flashy, flexible, and absolutely fake. Yours...” he contemplates, then smiles again. “Yours changes with your emotions- it can be completely under control or can buzz around with the strength of an anxious lion. It’s powerful, disguised, almost, and, well,” he leans forward, reaching out to touch the sculpture, his hand pausing just before the energy barrier, as if he thought for a minute that the world didn't separate the two of you, that there would always be a wall of energy or a cage of ice between you, “beautiful.”

Your lips curve upward as you watch him, his body relaxed and oddly soft compared to how sharp and sleek he usually dresses. He must have been too tired to change.

"Other than complimenting me, what brings you to the dungeons so late at night?" You ask, capturing his eyes in yours and reveling in the little burst of fluffiness that grows in your chest at his comments. "It's awful late. You look exhausted."

He rubs his eyes. "I've just been a bit restless lately. Besides, it's always good to see you.” The genuine care in his words lightens the weight of your heart. “Have you been reading lately?”

“Only every minute you’re away,” you respond nonchalantly, shrugging. “I feel better after each book you bring. Smarter. Like my eyes open a bit further.”

He nods. “That’s why-”

He’s cut off by a sharp blow to your ribs that knocks you off your bed and out of your head, onto the floor.

“Damn- thing-!” Someone swears as you open your eyes, bracing yourself on your arms and lifting yourself to your knees. The man yelling, a bald, bearded, armored man, has a dark blue, swelling wound on his hand- assumingly where he grabbed you. You have just enough time to process what’s happening that you plunge out of the way when he charges, shooting to your feet and swaying clumsily toward the back of your cell.

“What are you doing?!” You manage through weak vocal cords, hands trembling from the adrenaline. Your head is whirling from the sudden wake-up. Everything looks a bit blurry and everything feels a bit heavy. “I didn’t- you can’t touch me!”

“You’re being relocated, and I sure as hell can.” He commences toward you again, and you carefully put your hands up in surrender.

“I’m not trying to fight,” you say shakily. The spot on your ribs where he hit has already begun to ache, but you disregard it for the sake of the circumstance. “I’m a frost giant. My skin will burn you if you touch me directly.”

“Make it not!” he commands. “I’m not thick-skulled, I know that Jotuns can control that ability.”

Before you can counter that, another man strolls into the chamber, looking troubled. “What’s taking so long?” Thor grunts, gazing between you and the man impatiently. “Is she being hostile?”

You note the sword at Thor’s belt, and try to keep your breaths uniform and steady. “I’m not-”

“See what she did to my hand?” the man answers first, holding up his evidence. “She burned me, your majesty.”

“I can’t control the temperature of my skin!” You assert loudly, earning a raised eyebrow from Thor. “Most Frost Giants can, but I’ve been locked up in this cell for most of my life, and for that reason, it can be difficult for me to control. I’m not trying to be hostile!”

Thor stares at you and then holds his hand out to the other man in the cell. “Give me the cuffs,” he grumbles quietly. The man does at once, and then Thor fords the room to you. He seizes the bedsheet off your bed and wraps one hand in it several times over before grabbing your wrist and closing the first cuff around it, repeating the process with the second. He looks to the other man, almost scowling at him when he says: “I realize this is unfamiliar ground for you, Hogun, but we’re on a schedule. My father will have us all beheaded if we don’t keep up.”

Hogun looks at you, then at Thor, and then sighs, nodding. “Yes, of course.”

He drops the bedsheet, now layered in frost, to the ground, looking to you. “If you try to run, I’ll kill you,” he states simply, and he’s not lying. You offer a simple shrug, and he turns around, walking straight through the barrier. Hogun follows, and when you see that they’re clearly waiting for you to follow, you walk into the yellow film- and for the first time, come out in one piece on the other side. It’s a pity that you’re too busy wondering what in Hel is going on to appreciate your “freedom.”

They start up the stairs, and you follow in their wake, trying not to think about the fact that this is the first time you’ve climbed up stairs in fourteen years. You keep a steady pace with Thor and peer over at him while you’re walking, clearing your throat.

“Where am I being moved?” You ask him, and he responds with an uninterested sideways glance. “Or, don’t even tell me that. Just tell me why.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” he returns, scoffing.

“You don’t have to,” you confirm, and he raises an eyebrow, “and if you’re not going to answer, why don’t you tell me...” You purse your lips. “Oh! How’s your brother? The greasy, green one? Loki?”

The three of you appear over the edge of the stairway, stepping through a doorway with guards on either side. The room you walk into from there is mostly marble, with large, towering columns looming above you and murals displaying the kingdom’s history on the ceilings. It’s beautiful, and maybe even tear-jerking. You’d be sobbing if you weren’t too busy trying not to freeze the ground under your bare feet. Instead of marveling at the beauty of the castle, you lower your eyes and continue walking, listening carefully to your breath. You can’t afford to go into sensory overload. The Royals never “relocate” prisoners, so you have a feeling this is a high-stakes situation.

“Loki is...” Thor studies you, confused at the question, like he’s surprised you even know who his brother is. “Loki is fine.” He takes a slightly wider step than you, pushing ahead, a subtle assertion of dominance. “Sleeping, probably.”

“Actually,” says a familiar, comforting, unbelievably beautiful voice from behind you. You spin around, maybe a bit too fast, and that’s the thing to really push you over the edge. You have to bite down on your tongue to keep from crying out with joy, and you have to lock your knees to stop from sprinting over to him and tackling him to the ground. “I’m wide awake.”

Loki is wearing battle armor instead of more casual attire, missing only his helmet to complete the ensemble. It’s a complicated assembly of green, black and gold, fit with metal in all the right places and leather in all the right places, if you want to think that way. For what is not the first time, you wish to touch him. To shake his hand, or kiss his cheek, or try that thing that the Asgardians call “hugging.” You have a strong, almost killing urge to seal the gap that has kept you apart for all this time, and you’re so close. No barrier. No guards- other than his clueless brother and that Hogun guy.

It’s a shame the ice is still there to keep you back.

He gives Thor a polite but obviously condescending smile, not looking even for a moment at you, to avoid speculation. Thor tenses, looking his brother top to bottom, and then steps in front of you.

“Brother.”

“Yes, Thor?”

“I wasn’t expecting you to be here.”

“That’s funny. I knew full well that you’d be here.” Loki nods to Hogun, earning a terrified wave in return. “Hogun,” he greets, and then finally, finally looks to you, “Y/N.”

“Your Highness,” you respond, and he comes way too close to smirking. Your heart gives a friendly little tug.

Thor looks very confused and very threatened. “You know the prisoner?”

“Of course I know Y/N. Don’t you?” he frowns sarcastically, tilting his head. “We visit the dungeons at least once a year.” Then Loki takes a stride to his brother’s side, sending you a quick wink when no one is watching. “Where are we going?”

“I believe there’s a bit of a misunderstanding, brother. You’re not going with us. Father said-”

“Oh, I’m not?” he gives the fakest, most mocking look of disappointment ever,  and you stifle a laugh with a fake cough into your arm. “Damn. Alright, then. I was really looking forward to going with you to...” he looks over the group, sizing everyone up, “...march into war?”

This is a really good way for Loki to figure out where Thor is going, you realize. Lokis coming on this trip, one way or another.

Thor straightens his armor’s chest plate. “No, we’re going to Jotunheim. Please move out of the way, Loki.”

You, Loki, and Hogun all do a double-take at once, and both of the men say, in unison:

“Jotunheim?”

“That’s incredible,” Loki says, but you see something in his face that lets you know he does not find this situation incredible. You certainly don’t find the fact incredible. Your blue goes suddenly a shade paler. “Does this have something to do with Laufey’s belief that she is his child?”

This is a really good way to figure out why Thor is going where he’s going, you realize. Again, a genius move by Loki. God, he’s good.

Wait, what did he say?!

“Come again?” You say out loud, probably a bit too loud, staring wide-eyed between the two princes. “My father was a war prisoner.”

“That’s enough!” Thor yells, taking a large step toward Loki and staring him down. “Know your place, brother. Leave us.”

Loki pauses before leaving, giving Thor his signature oh, I’ll be back smile and turning swiftly down the corridor, sparing you a short glance as he walks off. It gets very quiet. Hogun clears his throat, shuffling between his feet.

“Are we really going to Jotunheim?” asks Hogun, sounding borderline terrified.

“We are,” says Thor, signaling to you, then himself. “You’re staying here. Let’s keep moving.”

He heaves a sigh of relief, and you continue walking. You don’t even try to stop the trail of ice that follows you. It’s useless. Your thoughts fly and spin and bounce off the walls of your head, sending tremors down to your hands, which clench tightly into fists to stop the shaking.

You turn out into a palace courtyard, and the two men stop at the stables. Thor knocks twice, and out come three horses, one of the three unmounted- the other two occupied by Lady Sif and a man in armor of blue and silver. His eyes, a light shade of brown that nearly match the hue of his hair, scan quickly over you, then go to Thor, who is mounting the unused horse.

“Did any of you put any thought as to where our cargo will reside on the journey?” he asks, and his voice is deep- just a bit gravelly. “Because, judging simply by the trail of ice that seems to be following her, there weren’t any other frost giants to teach her how to control her emotions.”

He knows that the ability is linked to emotions? Then he must be a scientist. A researcher. That’s good, because Hogun and Thor clearly are lacking in this field of expertise.

“Oh. No, not really,” says Thor, as if it’s just now occurring to him that this is a problem. “Won’t she kill the horse?”

The man dressed in blue grunts, rolling his eyes, and then sweeps himself off of the horse. “Hogun, fetch a clean blanket from the horses’ stables, would you?” He approaches you, his eyes lingering on the ice beneath your feet for a moment. “Oh, and some boots, while you’re at it.”

Hogun rushes off.

“Arvid Eirikson,” he says, and you stare at him with blank eyes for a moment before realizing that he’s introducing himself. His hand is outstretched to you. He’s wearing gloves. “I’ll be leading this entourage. And while it won’t be a particularly long one, I feel you should at least know whose hands your life is in.”

You hesitate, lifting your cuffed hands toward his, and he shakes it before you can decide to back away. Frost sparkles on the outside of his glove when he pulls his hand back, but it melts in an instant. “Y/N,” you speak in return. “I’m not Laufey’s child,” you add for good measure, and he laughs aloud.

“Yeah, no shit.”

“Shit?” says Thor from atop his horse, raising an eyebrow. “I am unfamiliar with this term.”

“It’s-” Arvid makes a face, then stops speaking, shaking his head. “Odinson, have you not taken Midgardian Culture lessons?” Thor blinks, then tilts his head. “How can you not be educated on a planet you’re one day to watch over? Midgardian culture is fascinating.” More awkward silence."It’s a deprecatory term. A curse word.”

Thor then understands. “You’ve cursed the prisoner?” Or not.

Arvid rolls his eyes, looking to you and quietly muttering: “For the record, he and Lady Sif are only here so it looks like we care about this ordeal. I’m here to keep everyone alive. If either of them takes the lead, ignore them, and follow me. Me only. Understand?”

You blink twice, glancing at Thor, who looks actually terrified, and then back at Arvid. You straighten your back, glaring at him. “If you thought I was going to follow him into battle before, you’ve underestimated my intelligence.”

To your surprise, he grins instead of cutting your hands off. Then Hogun appears again, striding out of the stables with a blanket and a pair of oversized boots. He hands them to Arvid, who drops the boots at your feet and tosses the blanket over your shoulder. “Cover as much of your skin as you can. If you kill Orpheus, I’ll have you hung.”

“Orpheus?” Thor questions, once again confused by the man’s language. “Of what origin is this name?”

“Greek,” he says, and when Thor continues to act confused, he adds: “Midgardian. It is the name of a mythological being.”

“Ah,” he nods, grinning at the prospect. “I see. So you named your horse after the god Orpheus, who I assume is a very powerful being, to put on display his great strength and nobility.”

Arvid laughs at this. “No. I named him Orpheus because Orpheus was a dumbass, and my horse is a dumbass.”

Orpheus snorts as if offended by this remark, and tosses his head.

You slip into the much-too-large boots and, with quite a bit of effort considering your hands were cuffed, throw the blanket over your shoulders, surrounding your upper body and much of your legs. The little skin which the blanket and boots do not cover is on your knees, which stand out starkly against the black material of the cloths. Arvid doesn’t hesitate to sweep you up as soon as you’re done, ignoring the quiet yelp you release at the sudden contact. He carries you bridal-style over to Orpheus before beginning to mount you onto his back. You expect him to climb on along with you, but instead, he strides over to Thor’s horse, lifting himself onto the steed. Thor, puzzled and quite alarmed, begins to shuffle and stir in the front of the saddle. “Arvid, I’m not sure I understand what you’re doing-”

“I’m mounting your horse, obviously,” he responds briskly, swinging his leg over the horse and giving you a strange hand symbol from afar, which involves him making a fist and leaving the thumb straight upward. “Is everyone ready?”

“If you don’t mind me asking, why are you on Thor’s horse?” asks Sif, who has been mostly silent so far. “Does the prisoner even know how to ride a horse?”

“Those two questions come to- uh- come to mind for me, as well,” agrees Thor, who looks equally panicked at the fact that you’re on your own horse and Arvid’s on his horse. “I hardly think I’m the one who needs help riding-”

“She’s supposed to be royalty, is she not?” Arvid looks at you, and for a moment you consider the idea that he may be Loki in disguise, but that possibility exits as quickly as it comes. Loki always complained about Midgardian studies. He’d be completely uninterested in their curses or cultures. “And I’m supposed to be a weak old man. We have to play the part.”

“Prisoner, can you ride a horse?” asks Sif, still concerned.

“Anyone can do anything if they believe in themselves," you answer with a wink, lightly digging your heel into the horse's side. This was a mistake, because now the horse is galloping at full speed toward the forest. "I LIED," you yell as Orpheus jumps over a rock. "PLEASE HELP."

"Orpheus, you son of a bitch, get back here!" Arvid yells through strangled laughter, watching the horse whip angrily around and stomp back toward the group. You hold stiffly onto the horse’s reigns as he stops beside the other horses, seemingly glaring at his owner. “Follow,” says Arvid, meeting the eyes of the horse, before looking back to Thor and Sif. “Alright, kids. You know where we’re headed.”

And with that, Thor makes a strange sound of aggression, flicking the reigns and sending his horse into a quick, swift gallop. Sif does the same, falling in behind them, and Orpheus follows after, hooves tossing dust on either side of the dirt road you travel on. The movement of the horse jostles you and you find yourself being tossed repetitively up and down with each bound. It’s uncomfortable, but not enough to make you move.

“Arvid, you locked my brother’s stable, correct?” Thor calls over the clopping hooves, staring straight ahead.

“Of course. I also locked every other stable, plus the main exit. Why? Does he seem to be considering escape?”

“He’s going to try,” Thor says. You try not to smile at the fact. “I fear he may succeed.”

“Loki can’t go anywhere without a horse,” Sif calls, her horse galloping up beside theirs. “I wouldn’t worry. He hasn’t the key.” Then she adds: “Why isn’t he allowed to come, anyway?”

“Father wouldn’t say.”

The horses make a smooth transition from the dust onto the hard ground of the Bifrost, the gentle clopping escalating into rough, clacking sounds. Orpheus accelerates slightly, falling into line beside the others as you near the end of the Bifrost, a golden dome-shaped structure with doorways on every side. The horses slow, then stop completely, halting at the center of the room. A dark-skinned, golden-eyed man turns to face us, looking over each face and each animal before giving a stiff nod.

“Hello,” he says. “I see that the Allfather and Allmother sent the five of you?”

“That is true,” says Thor proudly, puffing out his chest. “We’d like a safe passage to Jotunheim, Heimdal.”

“Of course,” he says, and then draws a sword from his belt, shoving it into a contraption beside him. “Be aware that I will only reopen the Bifrost if it does not put our homeland in imminent danger, or if the Allfather says otherwise. I will not leave the Bifrost open, as it will destroy the realm it is left open into. Is that clear?”

“It is,” says Thor, and Arvid rolls his eyes. “We will not disobey.”

Heimdal nods, thrusts the sword sideways, and steps back. A gateway on the far end of the room whirs, then opens, revealing a glowing, spiraling circle of.. uh, death. You assume it leads to Jotunheim.

Holy mother of all realms, you're going to Jotunheimen.

"Alright. Dismount." Arvid slides of Thor's horse and Thor follows after, Sif close behind. You swing your leg over Orpheus and fall clumsily to the ground, quickly picking yourself up after. Arvid grabs hold of your arm and takes the blanket from you, dragging you toward the portal with said blanket tucked under his arm. “Is everyone ready?”

“Yes,” says Thor, grinning widely, clearly looking forward to whatever is on the other side.

“Yes, sir,” says Sif, nodding stiffly and taking a deep breath.

“My opinion is likely not relevant, but no, I’m not ready at all,” you say, terrified.

Thor ignores you and steps into the glowing death spiral. Sif follows behind, squeezing her eyes shut. You look to Arvid, who stares patiently down at you.

“Go,” he says. “I’ll follow shortly.”

You’re not waiting for him, you’re waiting for Loki.

Still, you stare forward, close your eyes, and step in after the others. The trip is short, but like falling upward. You shoot through space in a tunnel that appears to be made of crystal- strong, but seemingly fragile. Your boots fly off your feet in the journey, and your hair whips around your face, all the way until your not-very-smooth landing on the cold, hard terrain of Jotunheim.

Before you get up and look around, you feel a gentle tap on your shoulder.

“I got the stable key,” Loki murmurs smugly, just before Thor catches sight of him.

You can’t help it. Your face splits into a grin.

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Wordtober Day 14: Overgrown

I was a girl when I first developed my passion for painting.

Papa would take me to the Salon and I would marvel at the stacks of canvases hung on every wall, as high as the ceilings went. Though I tended to pay no mind to the classical portraits of ladies or the massive sculptures from the Académie, I became enthralled by the revolutionaries. The naturalists, that is. The men who left the city by train, taking their pochades to paint the natural elements, who captured the forests of Barbizon for posteriority with a curious, famished eye.

I wondered deeply about these matters until it was all I thought about. How does one develop the ability to capture something within just a small frame of time, only to compose it in timelessness and thus devote it to posteriority? And what frame of time could that be? In a passing moment, as we gaze upon nature, what instant, between every flicker of existence, will we decide to depict? Is it possible to freeze one single second and represent it in several instances of daylight, to pour onto a canvas all the beauty we see unravel before a simple leaf, a dense forest, the still waters of a lake, or even the skies?

The artist opens his pochade, sets up his easel, and looks up at the sky. And there, he sees it: one cloud hovering above hues of blue, dancing slowly to the wind’s cadence, cast in heavenly shadows of grey and white and yellow. Then, he picks up his brush and begins to paint, but time has already moved on—and he rushes to capture all those passing moments and lock them into the surface of the canvas.

That is probably why I was always more inclined to paintings of storms. There’s something daunting to de la Peña’s canvases, in the way he paints one vivid golden arm reaching out between the thick clouds to set the brown rocks alight, like hope cast onto something hopeless to come. And probably why I enjoy the desolation of Daubigny’s depiction of Les Sables-d’Olonne. In either of them, there’s something massive, something imposing. It seems that, instead of painting the present, with bits of the past scattered behind, they focused on the future instead. A storm to come; a confusion of grey and yellow hues that announce the incoming night.

There’s one particular painter that has fascinated me for long, though I’ve only ever seen reproductions on bulletins owned by collectors, and on one occasion, one poor copy by some petulant little student of some small studio. It’s called A Monk by the Sea and it’s by this widely ignored little painter from Prussia called Caspar David Friedrich. It’s a massive canvas, from what I’m told, containing just three things: the sea, the shore, and a monk.

If you look at the skies, you’ll see that, much like Daubigny’s, there’s a combination of darker hues with lighter ones, and though the brushwork is far more formal and even academic, you can outline the very rim of the clouds that hover above the horizon. But they contrast greatly with the darkness below, and it gives us the sense of a looming future, a daunting and terrifying one. A storm is coming. And on this bland, sandy-like shoreline, a solitary monk stands alone. He wears simple vestments, long and crisp, and he stares. He just stares at this storm that is slowly forming in the far horizon, at these gigantic clouds that announce nature’s violence, and he is… unafraid.

Burke called it the Sublime. That which is so daunting, so terrifying, it is, at the same time, beautiful. Something able to make us quiver on our legs in trepidation, yet we cannot but reach forth and touch it.

I always did have an inclination for the more mystical of paintings. Friedrich’s in particular touched me differently. It was, obviously, that element of the sublime, but something else. Like in Constable’s landscapes, and even some of Corot’s, it’s nature’s double meaning behind every piece of beauty we admire. Have a look at Couple Contemplating the Moon and see for yourself how those beautiful branches twist like tendrils in the backlight of the incoming night, and wonder: what will happen to this couple once night settles and they are left alone with this disfigured tree, in the complete darkness? Or why is the spectral image of the Abbey in the Oakwood so enticing we almost want to wait for night to settle and the soul of nature to dance in ghostly shapes before us—even when we’re terrified of it?

Yes, I have always loved the art of painting. But there was one problem to my passion, which is my gender.

Of course, I was not exactly barred from painting, I was just left with little options, and watercolours bored me to death. Even less the motifs my family insisted I painted, those proper of a lady: boring landscapes of sunshine over green grass and still lakes and swans and other birds of sorts—I despised it all.

I knew I had a talent, of course. And I knew how to use it, I just needed the right outlet. Watercolours certainly weren’t it—I wanted proper oils, and I wanted to wear long gowns and cover myself in paint, forgetting the entirety of this world who said painting outside, like the men who took the train to Barbizon, was improper.

In truth, my father minded little of it, and it was my sister who raised much a scandal, though it seems obvious today she was also quite envious. For she married none other than an artist.

She always was quite the uptight lady, however. Proper in every aspect, yes, but incredibly dull. Composed in her folded skirts and wearing hats in the summer, carefully adjusting her little laced glove as she opened her umbrella while her husband paddled a boat on the lake. She always did think of me as far too scandalous, but I minded little so long as I could paint—and it just so happened she married a painter.

Gustave wasn’t so much a master as he was an excuse. He proposed to tutor me and for a while Adolphine was eased by the thought that it was her husband the one to guide me, perhaps considering he’d steer me towards those boring watercolours she adored in order to tame my character. But I was better than Gustave. Though he dominated the technique, of course—for a classicist. For him, it mattered only that I copied the masters and understand a composition, study drawing, that mark of intellectualism of a true artist, and the colour comes after, for it is line that is truly scientific—I cared not for any of that! Colour is the true science, I told him! And screw what Adolphine deemed proper, have a look—I screamed at him—at Delacroix or Gros instead, and dare tell me colour is not scientific! How dare he, when even Vasari praised the science of colour for Titian and the Venetians!

Eventually, he gave in, as my condition—as he put it—appeared to his eyes as none but a whim, and perhaps the best thing to do was to simply answer to my fits of rage before they could develop into something… far worse.

I began to suspect at this point that my family saw me as ill and mad, and it would be no time until they threw me into a hospice. It was common of me to hear them muttering behind closed doors, whimpering like dogs, particularly Adolphone, who wailed: oh, my sister will be the disgrace of us, what shall I do?, she will not leave those paintings alone, and what things does she paint?, she never even shows me!

No, Adolphine, I never showed them to you. 

My sister couldn’t possibly bear with my creations, considering my inclination for the grotesque. I remember staring at a Fuseli once and thinking how beautiful his nightmares were. The little goblin-like creature that sat on that fair lady, slouched over her bed in slumber was, to my eyes, not her tormentor but her guardian. And I pondered about it—imagine having a guardian, a protector who watched over your dreams as you slept. So I began to experiment with these pictures that suddenly appeared in my mind at night—just twisting shapes of humanoid presences that always seemed non-threatening to me, and they danced to my will and bowed before me. Once awoken, I would run up to the attic without eating, open my pochade and begin to paint; I would lock the door as to not be interrupted and be cast into this strange world of oils and shapes that composed themselves before my eyes, and time would pass completely indistinct.

Every time I painted, time ceased to exist—or maybe I did. But whatever the truth, I existed outside of this world, and whatever there was to the streets outside my window, it was entirely gone. It was far more than a deep trance—I could feel an intense compulsion I had to answer, or else I’d grow mad! I had to rush up the stairs and begin to paint immediately—and I did. The moment my fingers touched the hardened wood of my brush or the easel, I would cease to exist and transform into something else.

On my canvases, shapes gained form under the dark hues of my nightly landscapes. Explosions of light in the skies, in gold and dull yellow, made way to something lingering in the corner, something large and imposing with wide jutting horns and claws raising above a prey below; and sometimes, the setting sun on a pasture cast an arm of pink and purple onto the skies, enough to illuminate an anthropomorphic silhouette that danced before a farmer, who prayed the Angelus alone; and then, the same creature could be seen upon the corner of a street of Paris as a flaneur tipped his hat back and looked up, right into its big, bulbous, bright white eyes.

There was another thing present in all: the creature, as it appeared, did not hide; it stood right in front of its prey and it gazed upon them in a moment of not doubt, but profound contemplation. And below the enormous hunter, the prey would look up in peace and silence, accepting of their fate, with not a hint of fright nor a bellow of horror. Much like the monk staring longingly at the incoming storm, alone, like a castaway, on an unknown sandy shore—contemplative, silent, peaceful.

When Gustave first saw my canvases he was shaken. I saw sweat pouring from his forehead and laughed in amusement as he moved frantically about the studio, and I could see how much he longed to grab hold of my paintings and destroy them but would not dare to do so. More: how much they frightened him. How he would draw near gently but there was a line he never crossed, invisibly traced on the floors, as he’d freeze on his quivering legs, eyes locked on the monster’s eyes, my monster, cold sweat pouring still as he breathed deep and heavy, and stuttered a compliment that never really came.

I knew he thought my paintings to be outstanding in technique and composition, it was the creature that terrified him, but that only made me feel more confident in my work. That was my creature, my creation, and it stared back at me as if I was its very own God.

It was around this time that I first heard about the disappearances, though I minded them not. Men and women snatched off the streets, to never be seen again, and mere rags from their clothes left behind.

Eventually, Gustave learned to be more at ease with my paintings, though he still would not dare to cross that invisible line he had placed between him and the paintings. Except one time.

He drew near very slowly, quivering at every step, and gazed deeply upon a small figure in the corner, a small man illuminated by a single strand of light coming from a street lamp as he looked up at the creature that stood tall on the left side of the painting, firm and steady on its legs. Something about him lured Gustave, and I watched curiously as his eyes drew away from the ambience of the painting to focus on that one lonely man.

And then, he said: “This man looks eerily similar to Hubert Leblanc.”

I learned later that Huber Leblanc was a frequenter of the Salon and an avid art collector known for being the major buyer of Gustave’s paintings, who seemed entirely disinterested in the revolutionaries of the Beux Arts and instead preferred the boring artworks of a much classical tone. He had even been gifted one of Adolphine’s terrible watercolours, which he treasured delightedly. But at the time, I thought nothing of it. I had never met this Monsieur Leblanc, had no interest in meeting him, merely heard my brother-in-law’s mention of his name and my sister’s adulation of his character, and sincerely cared not for him.

So I kept on painting. I locked the door of my studio and let the word fall into its own insignificance as I painted more and more of my beloved creature in all sorts of different settings: sneaking between the columns of the Palais de Tokyo as a woman gazed up in plenitude to accept her fate; lurking at the edges of the Île de la Cité, obfuscating the Notre Dame de Paris entirely, as an onlooker accepted his fate, stood frozen on the Pont de Saint Michel; standing on the roof of Les Halles, gazing down at an unsuspecting woman who raised her head with a basket of fish on her hand, her eyes meeting the creature’s, waiting placidly; a passer-by exiting the Théatre de L’Odéon, stood frozen in the middle of the Rue Monsieur-Le-Prince, as the monster awaited his arrival at the end of the intersection, an umbrella fallen from the victim’s hand as he watched the creature’s eyes and awaited his ending.

I was ravenous in my dedication. I ate little, for time passed and I saw nor heard a thing, and outside my door, the servants would leave trays of food that would go foul. My sister would knock on my door insistently, but I heard nothing. Whenever we did sit at the table for supper, she’d complain about my behaviour and leave a hint that perhaps I needed some assistance, but her implications angered me and I was driven into a fit of rage.

One afternoon, I heard my sister gasp and turned to find her pale and frozen on her chair as she folded a newspaper and threw it aside with a gesture of disgust. She placed the back of her hand carefully against her sweating forehead and closed her eyes as if she were about to faint, wailing between her heavy pants, as if stricken with a case of consumption—horrible, horrible!, she chanted; such a horrible thing this is, God have mercy on us all!

I picked up the newspaper and read the headline. Seven people had gone missing from the streets of Paris, and at last they had uncovered the body of two: torn to shreds, nothing but gnawed bone, their flesh gone, limbs scattered across the construction site of the Ópera Garnier, abandoned into a rush—a sight so gruesome it had caused several people to faint and be rushed to the doctor.

What struck me as odd, however, was the locations upon which these people had disappeared. A woman vanished from the Palais de Tokyo. A man snatched from the Pont de Saint Michel. An angler caught and taken from Les Halles, leaving behind a basket of fish. An umbrella left behind by an unsuspecting man gone from the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince.

I rolled up the paper and rushed up the stairs. When I opened the door, I saw them: those same locations, painted in hues of black and blue, and sometimes gold, as they told a tale of a person about to go missing, devoured by an enormous black creature that stalked them patiently through several Parisian landmarks. The umbrella left behind was there, fallen on the cobblestones to his side, as was the basket of fish on the angler’s hand.

So I wondered: could my creation be so spectacular it existed beyond my canvases?

It was at this moment that my door swung open and Gustave came running inside, cast into pallor and dabbing his trickling sweat with a white handkerchief he then placed inside his pocket. He ignored me, went straight to my paintings, and gazed upon the figures that lay there, waiting to be devoured alive by this beast, with peace and serenity—and again focused on the tiny little man who stood—I finally recognized—in the middle of the Place Dauphine.

He turned to me with eyes bulging in terror. “That is Hubert Leblanc,” he said. “He disappeared from the Place Dauphine two weeks ago.”

I laughed, unsure what other reaction to have, as he stood in frozen dread before me, unable still to face the monster in my paintings, and said nothing. He turned around then and grabbed the canvas off the easel, with—I knew—the intention to have it destroyed. It burned my insides in horror just to think of it, so I lurched myself at him, and we got into a tussle. Gustave was strong, gripping the canvas until his fingers made dents on my painting, and I shoved him against a wall as I screamed to let go of the painting, but he shouted back in madness: “You did this! You are responsible for this! You are cursed, and have cursed us all!”

Adolphine appeared at my door, screeching in horror at the sight, and began to scream for the servants to come to her aid as Gustave and I tussled still. Finally, he dropped the canvas and I shoved him out of my door, past Adolphine who nearly tumbled onto the ground, and as he tripped on his feet, he fell back onto the stairs and down he went.

I watched from the top of the stairs as he groaned in pain down below, gazing at me in horror. The painting was salvaged, carefully placed against a wall, and Adolphine covered her mouth with a hand, again nearly about to faint. The newspaper was fallen on the floor of my studio, and she picked it up slowly to read its cover. Then, she glanced at the paintings on my studio, the same ones she had never seen, and her pallor turned her into a living ghost. Out of strength, she sought a chair to sit on and fell to it with a tumble of weakness, barely breathing, but her eyes glared only at me.

The servants assisted Gustave, and the doctor was called in as I screamed one last warning: stay away from my paintings. Adolphine, once recovered from her affliction, cursed me and expelled me from her house, saying I had but three days to pack my belongings and leave, lest I wanted to be put into a hospice for the rest of my days.

And throughout it all, I felt… calm.

At night, with Gustave laid in bed, bandaged and tended to by the doctor and his wife, and Adolphine weeping in her privacy words that fluttered back to my ear—oh, she always was such an insolent one, I do not know what to do with her, I don’t want to kick her out, but what else am I to do, Gustave?—I locked myself in my studio and watched my paintings. It was only then that I took notice of the transformation that had occurred in my style: the creature grew in size, becoming bigger and bigger with every new one, sometimes so big I had to relegate it to the background—and as a consequence, so did my canvases, which had grown several meters wide.

Then, an idea occurred to me.

With but one lantern shedding light on the space around me, I grabbed my brushes and began to paint. Though I was in a state of trance still, I was in enough control of my being that, this time, I knew what I would paint. It was my own studio, in a small canvas, and the victim was, this time, me. I drew the shape of the creature in black blotches countered by the flimsy yellow light of my lantern, put the brush down and waited.

I was blinking my eyes wearily, about to fall asleep, when I heard the faintest growl emerging from the corner. As I stood, I saw it then: two big white eyes staring back at me, from a big gaping mouth, fangs began to glisten in yellow and white. I stood, yet I did not tremble. I looked at the creature, at my creation, and smiled as my heart thumped strongly against my chest.

Truly, I was the most exquisite painter alive in Paris, for how many could say their creations had come to life?

The monster stood silently before me, and I felt its heavy, thick breath slapping my face, though it smelled of nothing but emptiness. Its long arms swayed freely, the sharp claws touching the floors enough that scratches were left on the wooden boards, and its legs bent at the knees to fit his jutting horns inside the tight space of my attic, though they too scratched the ceilings. I suppose to any an onlooker it would have appeared as terrifying, yet to me it was… a beautiful sight. For it was my creation, and I was its God.

For a moment, we just stared at one another, and time passed by us unnoticed.

Then, the monster tilted its head slightly and in a guttural yet smoothing low tone of his voice, it spoke: “You are my mistress.”

“What are you?” I asked.

It took a long time to answer. “I am what exists in the corner of the eye. I am the drips of paint left at the bottom of the easel. I am what has been in your mind for very long, set free by a movement of your brush. But I must be fed.”

“You must be fed?”

I felt trapped inside my own canvas, locked in my own creation, my own world, and swore then I’d never leave it.

“I must be fed, mistress,” it muttered. “The day I die shall be the day your painting ends. You might lose your hands, you might lose your fingers, you might go insane enough that painting will bring nought but horrid pain to you. But if I die, you cease to become an artist. Thus, I must be fed to exist.”

I did ponder on it for a moment, on whether or not it was worth to be labelled the most talented painter of Paris if it meant innocents gone and mauled by some mysterious creature. But I knew I would never achieve that status, for I was still a woman who refused mere watercolours, and not even an aristocrat, but someone living in her sister’s attic, who had been lucky enough to marry a successful mediocre painter. No matter how talented I truly was, the city would forever cast its eyes on the men, like Rousseau and Daubigny and Cabanel. But me, I would forever be master Gustave’s apprentice, with no one sparing a second to think of my talents as mine alone, but certainly passed on to me by some man, like charity.

It was either that or becoming some skinflint painter’s muse, bound to be labelled a whore only to die of syphilis. 

No, Paris would never chant for my name as they chanted for the other artists. So I wondered then if it was worth quitting my passion, the one thing that made me feel so alive, while this unsuspecting city slept in terror before these mysterious disappearances, unknown that they happened at the hands of the most masterful artist Paris had ever seen—and a woman at that.

“All you have to do is paint,” the monster said. “Paint my food, and eat I shall.”

“How?” I asked.

“How have you been doing it so far?” It drew near, and there I felt the pulsating definition of the Sublime: how beautiful it was, yet what dread it caused me, something intricate to itself that made my body shudder in cold fear—yet all I wanted was to draw nearer and nearer, to feel its shape closer to mine.

It was an instinct, I learned at last. My talent surpassed that of the easel and the brush, it was something deep into the occult. I had a link with this beautiful creation that was my pet, and in my ravenous hours of work, I could see the present and the future all the same and paint it into a storm to come that would end the lives of those who became nothing but food for my beautiful creation.

I thought about Gustave, and I thought about my sister wanting to put me in a hospice.

So without saying a word, I picked up my brush and began to paint. The monster stood quietly in a corner, watching me in my creation, but in no time I forgot about its presence. Instead, with a smile of delight upon what I considered already to be my magnum opus, I painted my largest canvas yet, locked inside my attic, where the shape of a bed appeared, and by a trembling candlelight, a sleeping man lay, bandaged and bruised from a fall down the stairs, his wife weeping silently by his side, her hand holding his.

It was morning when I was finished. The monster hadn’t moved. He looked at the canvas and its slit of a mouth widened into a smile.

“Eat I shall,” it said.

I did not see it leave. I was so tired I did not retire to my chambers, buy lay on the floor to rest. 

I suppose I was already asleep when it happened, for I did not hear the screams.

___

Past Challenges:

Wordtober Day 1: Ring

Wordtober Day 2: Mindless

Wordtober Day 3: Bait

Wordtober Day 4: Freeze

Wordtober Day 5: Build I

Wordtober Day 6: Build II

Wordtober Day 7: Enchanted (Encantada)

Wordtober Day 8: Frail

Wordtober Day 9: Swing

Wordtober Day 10: Pattern

Wordtober Day 11: Snow

(Skipped Day 12)

Wodrtober Day 13: Ash

Tell a bedtime story

Ahem

Once upon a time

“I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time.

When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my surroundings. Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude I knew nothing, and no island or coast-line was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for uncounted days I drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable land. But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon the heaving vastnesses of unbroken blue.The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my position. Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths. So great was the extent of the new land which had risen beneath me, that I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears as I might. Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myself a pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanished sea and possible rescue.On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day I forged steadily westward, guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher than any other elevation on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled toward the hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the fourth evening I attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher than it had appeared from a distance; an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the hill.I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure again. And in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up my pack, I started for the crest of the eminence.I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of vague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the mound and looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to illumine. I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan’s hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness.As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of rock afforded fairly easy foot-holds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity became very gradual. Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps where no light had yet penetrated.All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the opposite slope, which rose steeply about an hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct impression that its contour and position were not altogether the work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist’s or archaeologist’s delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith; on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books; consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like. Several characters obviously represented marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen plain.It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size, were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Doré. I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shewn disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I reached the boat; at any rate, I know that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been given scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries.It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm—a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!“

The end

Intruder 2 (Werewolf! Seokjin x Werewolf! Reader)

Word Count: 15,5k

Genre: Fluff, Angst, Romance, Smut

Pairing: Werewolf! Jin x Werewolf! Reader

Warnings: Cursing/ Mistreatment / Violence / Gore / Blood // Blowjob / Sexy times/

Summary: A life of a wolf is never boring, let alone for the female alpha of one of the biggest packs in the world. When a new treat arises will she act wisely, or make rash decisions for the sake of protecting what she loves the most?

Author’s note: 늑대 (neukddae) wolf (noun) Words in italics are flashback or in this case a dream

Part 1 / Part 2(End)

‘’These humans aren’t very smart.’’

‘’No, they aren’t.’’ I sigh stepping around the marked-up trees, that were used for target practice, or were harmed out of boredom. I walk up to the most harmed one out of the 9 which I’ve counted so far. Gently I knock onto the trunk, glancing around expecting with a heavy heart for a nymph to pop out, or to have another yell and shoo me off, but nothing happens, which is lucky because I wouldn’t wish any nymph to experience pain like this.

‘’Their scent is picking up.’’ my second in command growls making me glance at him past the tree I’m standing next to. He’s crouched down glare fixated straight ahead, while his nostrils are flaring. I nod silently glancing back at the rest of our scout group which consists of 5 of us ‘’What’s the next step?’’

I open my mouth ready to reply a plan forming in my mind, but a branch cracking captures our attention, my head snapping immediately towards the sound. Tilting my head backwards I catch movement between trees which spurs me to round the tree, and hide myself behind it, as do the other 4 wolves either crouching down or hiding more successfully with the environment, my second in command and best friend remains in his position successfully hidden behind a small bush and some shrubs.

‘’What is it?’’ Jimin whispers harshly but keeps quiet as I peek back daringly to what the danger ahead is. The wolves remain still and silent, hearts pounding but steadily not out of fear but ready for my command.

‘’Recon.’’ I state frowning as the human man isn’t paying attention to his surroundings at all and ducks behind a tree to take a piss. Keeping my mouth shut and my lack or reply causes a mewl to leave from Ji-Woo’s closed snout. I immediately straighten up hiding again sending her an incredulous glare as she lowers her head to the ground completely regretting the noise she let out. She’s one of my best fighters and I take her with me whenever we’re traveling anywhere outside the pack territory. She’s kinda my bodyguard in a way, even though obviously I don’t need one. Jimin hisses in return while I crouch, glaring at the man who glances around still oblivious to his surroundings.

‘’…should have waited for orders and not-’’ the now dirty blonde-haired boy cuts himself off, as we all glance into the direction from where paws are lightly trudging across the grounds. I shake my head trying to hold back the heavy breath from leaving my lungs which would alert the 6 wolves that they’ve angered me in the matter of a second. They act reclessly when they know I’m upset. One of them called for backup, or said something over the telepathic bond which prompted someone to come charging. And the excuse is going to be ‘Backup never hurt anyone before.’ but the thing is I can handle this situation perfectly fine on my own. Obviously someone doesn’t think so and it irks me that they don’t have faith in me. My knees start to ache so I drop to sit on the ground, still sheltered by the tree. I lean to the left though to keep an eye out for the human male that’s lighting up a cigarette only a few meters ahead still oblivious to real danger that’s literally lurking behind trees.

The restlessness of my pack which I can feel as well as hear the shifting has me shushing them out loud, hiding behind the tree glaring down where the trees roots which are peeking above the earth. The silence of my best friend has me glancing up at him. He’s still in the same position, holding his left leg up to cover himself up at least a bit, despite him being the least shameless of them all. He even proudly struts around showing off his body whenever the moon is full. Which isn’t bad, I mean I’m a simple female wolf alright and he’s an attractive and sculptured wolf himself. But unlucky for him because my mate beats him, in good looks, body wise, and behaviour and the way of thinking and everything else obviously. My mate is simply perfect.

But back to my best friend, who recently got a haircut besides the dirty blonde coloured locks…his profile looks sharper than usual as he’s clenching his teeth toghether. He has this look of concentration on as he glares straight ahead having most likely found the perfect angle to observe the hunter ahead of us. At leaves crunching I lean to the right to watch the human turn his back to us and starts to walk away.

Well what’s important right now is that we know exactly who and what the threat is. It makes it easier not having to figure out the creatures or well in todays’ case human’s weaknesses. They have plenty of them. But because of that they can be all the more difficult to take down.

The sound of paws quiets down into trutts as the group of wolves start to approach us cautiously. I’m proud of them, the training really paid off. I made them build a course actually last winter like they have in military and made us all run through it all winter and spring so we’d get more agile and stealthy too. Of course, back then it was a total bluff I saw the course on the TV from an American movie and went ‘Hey, why not try it’ and the effort (and bluff) paid off brilliantly. Jimin turns his head to look at me, his fingers curled into the soil underneath him. We don’t even need to speak for him to understand what I want from him, or in this case he from me. I simply nod giving him approval and then he’s off changing into his wolf form and disappearing between trees, rushing away from us.

I focus on listening to the newly joined wolves as they walk around with careful steps spreading out remaining hidden behind shrubs, bushes and trees, all the while the smell of wet dirt, gets replaced with the smell of different spices and herbs, which fill my nose followed by the undertone of muskiness that’s mixed with the scent of a vanilla body wash which belongs to none other than my better half.

Automatically I perk up my wolf getting distracted by the scent alone. I smirk as a slightly wet nose touches along my shoulder blade raising up, causing my lips to twitch and spread into a grin. The touch disappears but gets replaced by something soft and bigger brushing over my back and shoulder making me lean to the side and glance backwards. Something red flashes before my eyes and gets dumped onto my lap. I stare down at the clothing, as something soft covers my back, the tall wolf caging me in between himself and the tree, practically hiding me away, his fur offering warmth besides his body head that’s practically radiating from him. And then the soft grumble raises from his chest which vibrates directly behind me.

‘’Hey lov…’’ before I can finish and try to suck up because I went ahead without him to scout the borders of territory his tongue flickers over the side of my face making me grimace at the extra saliva which remains all over my cheek, the huff from him forcing me to directly smell his breath which smells of raw beef for some reason ‘’Ah so nice.’’ I say with a normal tone, trying to wipe away the saliva with the back of my hand but it isn’t doing much, while someone yips on my right. I spare the wolf that’s approaching us a glance before turning back to the task of cleaning myself as best as I can. Jin on the other hand growls low in the back of his throat, but isn’t not meant towards me which perks my curiosity.

I shift upon the sound of bone cracking, my packmates remaining all in their wolf form, except the now panting man. Namjoon’s tone is gruff at the moment as he kneels down naked as the day he was born ‘’Alpha.’’ He greets me respectfully bowing his head down, to which I nod in return and lean left once more narrowing my eyes letting my eyesight sharpen to see better in the distance. I spot something flickering; a fire. So, they’ve made themselves a camp after all, but for being hunters and all they aren’t experienced campers obviously. They picked out the worst possible place to set camp, as it’s out in the open even if the trees are thicker around this area the ground isn’t hilled so it’s not that great for camps if we are speaking strategically wise ‘’What’s the plan. We need to act now.’’ Namjoon asks almost growling out the words after a brief moment of silence, eyes already rimmed with red colour.

He’s already trying to hold his anger at bay and knowing that it makes me frown because he hasn’t been here not even 5 minutes. Years ago, when he was in charge of the pack while we were gone fighting in the war he had an encounter with hunters. They surrounded the heart of the pack and got them one by one, but killed off the families rather than the individuals. That experience scarred him for life, and he’s been subconsciously terrified of any type of hunters since then. It’s also one of the reasons why he refused the leader role, which I’ve offered many times to him when I started out. I was and still am happy being a second in command or a simple fighter in the pack I’ve never wanted to be in charge I mean not really. I’ve lacked the ambition because I was always satisfied with what we’ve had. Well until the war. But that’s a story for another time.

Jin presses his head against my back, which i smirk wanting to tease him about being clingy as he’s trying to dislodge me and make me pay attention to him but before any word can leave my mouth it clicks, the reason why he’s impatient and fidgety (besides the threat at hand) ‘’Ooohh my bad I’m getting dressed I got it.’’ I whisper in return reaching for the clothing raising up the shirt upside-down.

‘’So, the plan???’’ Joon urges on stepping closer to the two of us. Only now I realize I’m settled the closest to the enemy, while everyone is keeping back. A distraction comes in a form of Jimin, as he fast walks from my left meaning he finally completed the circle around the perimeter.

‘’Jimin-ah will give us some info so we know how to approach this better.’’ I reply back as the familiar sound of bones cracking fills the air again, the beautiful dark brown coloured wolf morphs back into my tiny but muscular and very capable best friend who crouches down next to Namjoon using a tree trunk to keep himself hidden. His hair is messed up, and he is still catching his breath but Namjoon growls upon the smell of humans that the beta has brought along. I simply glance at the alpha assessing the whole situation in my mind while my mate’s nose skims over my shoulders again. He’s way into this to think rationally or a strategy that would not be influenced irrationally, even though he is even better at strategy than I am almost always.

‘’They’ve properly set up the camp, they’ve just lit a fire and there are humans not far from here walking around in pairs. They will get closer to us soon.’’ Jimin explains eyes focused onto me as he remains serious and still focused heart pounding in his chest. I nod curtly tugging on the rolling stones t-shirt on first, before untangling the red hoodie from the pants Jin brought. He’s still pressed against my back as much as he can be to ‘shield me away from wandering eyes’ his words exactly, more than to keep me warm in the cool weather. But he remains silent and calm in the situation, not provoking anyone or saying anything, giving me support simple as that.

‘’What do you suggest we do, alpha?’’ Namjoon asks words getting everyone’s attention onto us, the restlessness of the pack getting more intense. I can feel it in the air, and hear by the way most wolves who are hidden further in the back are pacing around, and behaving irresponsibily almost starting petty fights between one another. It’s the waiting around that’s always the problem for anyone even for myself. I understand them completely, because I wish we could just charge in get rid of the pest and return home, but unfortunately this isn’t a light matter.

‘’Ambush.’’ Jimin states with a hard tone ‘’Take the walking humans out first, and then draw those in camp and make them spread out. We will hide under the dead leaves on the ground, the terrain is uneven so we can use it to our advantage…’’

‘’I’m going to talk to them.’’ I state tugging up the jeans cutting him off completely. Why the hell did Jin get me these pair of jeans?! He picked out one of the tightest ones, that make my ass look amazing but not wearing underwear is a whole another deal, and thing which note to self we need to discus about later on the way back home. So much about his modesty huh?!

And que the growling. The moment I state what I just did, Jin starts to growl in protests making me shush him gently and pat the side of his head, as he lowers it down, revealing his teeth ‘’Calm down jagi.’’

‘’What?’’ Namjoon snaps flabbergasted as well as the rest of the pack. Nobody is pacing anymore and the ones who entertained themselves with the leaves have stopped moving all together. I can feel their gazes trained onto us, as I push myself up onto my feet, but Jin doesn’t move away an inch still crowding my personal space completely ‘’Are you crazy?’’

I snort smirking as he stands up too ‘’I’m just going to talk to them. Negotiate, try and lure them away.’’ I explain turning around to look at Jin raising my hands up to run my fingers through his fur, sliding my fingers behind his ears to scratch him there as that’s where he likes to be petted the most, all the while with a look I try to reassure him too that its all going to be alright. My eyes glance around to take in my packmates that are lying around still hidden and patient. Two wolves are stationed on either side of the first and second line of both groups of wolves that are here with us, so they’re keeping a lookout just in case.

‘’Y/N-ah…’’ Namjoon starts and it has suddenly Jin growling and turning to the alpha with flaring golden eyes while Namjoon’s flash bright red. Jimin is quick to move still in his human form, stepping in front of Namjoon while I wrap my arms around Jin tugging him a few steps backwards. My mate despite being the best thing that has ever happened in my life he’s a cheeky one. He unnecessarily complicated things quite a few times.

‘’Enough.’’ I state in a normal tone but use my alpha voice because I don’t want this to blow out into a fight. Not here ‘’Jin, calm down.’’ I turn to him patting over his side, feeling him trembling with the effort of holding himself back. He shifts around me sidestepping, just as I place my hand onto his head, and stands in a way as if he’s blocking me from going anywhere while a beta growls louder the others up on their feet now too ‘’Jinnie, whatever you are thinking stop.’’ I warn him, raising an eyebrow when I met his eyes that are now giving me daggers.

‘’Alpha are you sure?! I think you should rethink this.’’ Jimin approaches me still keeping the other alpha behind him, his words cautious and properly pronounced. Oh, he’s worried. What a vote of confidence for my plan hurray.

‘’You need to trust me on this.’’ I start carefully making sure I’m addressing the pack and look into their eyes ‘’They are only humans.’’

‘’Pests with weapons and skills to end lives.’’ Namjoon comments clearly angry. Probably angry at me now too. But he’s wise enough to keep quiet and his thoughts to himself for now, having not yet shifted. The death glare he’s giving me is enough to provoke my wolf but I have enough self-control not to react as some would in this case.

‘’Not helping.’’ I hiss under my breath turning my back to everyone to face my mate that’s silently whining, bond overflowing with worry ‘’Hey, I’ll be fine c’mon. Have a little bit of faith in me.’’ I try offering a smile as I run my hands over his fur, trailing over his wolf features gently eyes not moving away from the beautiful molten gold ones that are staring right at me ‘’Plus, I’ll signal if anything even remotely feels off okay? I’m not going to get hurt, that’s not in todays plan. Or any long term one.’’ I add the last part as he pushes his head forward making me step back to hold him ‘’Ah none of that, c’mon. I’m the big bad alpha remember?’’ I end up whispering with a small smile. He huffs in the beginning but ends up whining, a tongue darting out to lick over my face, causing me to chuckle and again scrunch up my face as I stare at him.

‘’So unnecessary.’’ I use the underside of the sleeve, to wipe my face. Try my best too. Meanwhile my mate settles on running his nose over my back as I turn to face my second in command, eyes trained onto me the serious demander still present. Back at the heart he’d be teasing me restlessly but he’s tense as my mate is. Nobody is taking this situation lightly.

But I still offer a smile of reassurance and confidence ‘’Let someone know I’ll need my gear for this. And shoes.’’

Game on.

*15 minutes later*

The chatting is getting clearer the closer I get. I count easily 9 men outside roaming over the small camp doing whatever they were either ordered to do or just mindlessly wasting time. The last one is hiding in one of the tents, metallic sounds coming besides the song he’s singing under his breath. There are 4 more men around the camp on patrol. But I’ve put the responsibility onto Jimin to get rid of them quietly. I still can’t wrap my head around why did they decide to build the camp in such a spot. Its to big of a bold move to do from a strategical point, and too stupid to be simply from stupidity. I try listening in on the conversations going around. They are mostly talking in Russian but English gets mixed into their speech too. Bless my mom and dad rest their souls to have insisted on me learning languages when I was younger. (Plus watching ‘Friends’ and other shows with Namjoon helped) My parents hoped I’d find a good powerful mate but at the same time not to just be a trophy for him, but to actually have a say in things and some power on my own. They wanted me to be taken care of just in case so being able to communicate in different languages was a skill high up there in my education.

Rolling my shoulders, I readjust the string of the bow which I’ve just tugged over myself, letting my left-hand rest on top of the arrows, that are all stacked neatly in the silver quiver I got strapped onto a belt around my waist. The boots Ihave on, crunch the leaves underneath me rather loudly and obviously, which is unusual as I’m used to being quiet to sneak upon either prey animals or anyone back at home to scare them. Now I’m just loud and its annoying, not to be free and feel the dirt between my toes.

The red hoodie is a bit to warm, as it’s padded. But it’s the end of the winter, and the temperatures are still low. Up on the north of my territory the snow is still sticking to the ground after all. So, the hoodie, and long jeans, and the boots are very much so needed for the image. Plus, the bow and arrows are a nice touch both adorned in silver colours and crafted by my old man himself. He was not only a skilled alpha and very in tune with his wolf, but he was good at everything he did basically, even creating weapons the few times he did. And it’s a shame I don’t practice enough archery, I used to like hunting like humans do, but I almost always choose the chase.

I lick over my lips before biting onto the inside of my cheek to prevent myself from smiling. I’m out here in the open, loud for anyone to easily hear me miles away, and yet none of the men have noticed me yet. I don’t understand how oblivious they can be for hunters of supernatural beings. Or only werewolves I’m not sure. I still keep my steps heavy eyes trained onto the only older man that’s holding onto a paper map actually which is impressive as everything these days is digital. Even my own pack prefers phones and technology in general. Back to the older human he has long silvery hair, slicked back into a ponytail and beard that would make the modern men cry as it’s neatly trimmed and bushy. He looks fit enough for his age, bulky probably 6ft tall, and has a bulletproof vest on unlike some of the men that took theirs off. It’s like he is expecting something, someone. Us. Huh interesting.

Suddenly a shout goes off my eyes snapping to a man near the edge pointing at me as I still continue to approach them despite the guns that are being raised and pointed at me, lasers shining across my chest. Seriously they got lasers on the guns? Are they novices? They shout in Russian which sounds very aggressive the way they’re all glaring at me. I slowly raise my hands up remaining nonchalant.

‘’What a warm welcome.’’ I comment in english unimpressed glancing around, taking in the camp now closely keeping on a bored look. On my right they have crates with ammo, near a tent which my guess contains guns or other weapons and equipment plus that guy that kept muttering Abba songs under his breath has stopped. Humans can be easily predictable as rabbits sometimes. The tent in the centre belongs to the leader of the group who is the silver haired fella. Not hard to put two and two together as the younger men jumped into action immediately meanwhile he remained and even now is comfortably seated on his chair assessing me.

Also, panic is fairly reasonable, I would question very much if a girl out of nowhere would just walk up to us in the middle of the woods, armed with a single bow and arrows, and rather casual clothing definitely not meant for hiking. Its clearly danger written all over the situation. Or well, a death wish. Slowing my steps, I glance at the guy that’s now the closes to me frantically yelling something. Just gotta point out I didn’t learn Russian. I chose Japanese as there is neighbour pack across the sea and they are our allys. I only raise an eyebrow at the guy who moves his gun in a way that will guarantee him shooting me but by accident not purpose.

*’’I came to return something that you lost.’’* I speak up in broken Latin. The old man quirks an eyebrow but remains glaring at me while the men hesitate now and glance between the two of us guns still raised and loaded to go. Aggressive. I twist my hand downwards slowly watching him, waiting for a signal or anything. He then finally nods to which I carefully lower my hand into the quiver to tug out the only black feathered and plastic arrow with a sharp tip, meanwhile my own arrows are adorned with white feathers, and different shaped tips still deadly and sharp as the black ones.

But as I grip onto the plastic part fingers hidden the shouting picks up making me smirk ‘’Easy there boys.’’ I say calmly in English glancing between the two boys (I can’t call them men because they aren’t by the way they are reacting) who look the most nervous meaning they are the easiest to trigger. My calm falters as a wave of restlessness washes through the bond and it isn’t only from my mate but from the whole pack who are observing listening and watching my every move, every breath I take.

I glance pointedly at the leader who grunts something, and straightens up steely blue eyes fixated onto me. So, I tug out the arrow properly showing it for all of them to see. The guys fall silent still glaring at me and still carefully aiming theire toys either at my heart or head. To be honest I didn’t expect or anticipate that they would bring and have so many guns with them, so if it comes down to it, I better make sure to take the guns out of play first. Werewolf hunters are traditional as any other hunters usually, with old methods and weapons that they do upgrade of course. But I think this is only a test group. Novices.

My comment gets the older man to smirk ‘’So what are you supposed to be? Little red riding hood?’’ the man speaks with a low gruff voice his Russian accent very thick over the English words he speaks. I return the smirk and roll the arrow between my fingers sparing a glance down at the red fabric I’m wearing.

‘’Hm I kind of like the sound of that actually.’’ I wonder out loud ‘’But without the grandma or hunter part.’’

At the statement he raises an eyebrow ‘’And what about the big bad wolf part?’’ he grins licking his lower lip running a hand over his beard. (Ew nope)

‘’I lost him.’’ I shrug keeping on a playfully demander. The man chuckles deeply and pushes himself slowly to stand up map properly folded. He’s keeping it in a way that provides me from seeing anything, but I can see something red meaning it’s marked.

‘’Did you now?’’ he goes on ‘’Then where did you get that arrow from?’’ he gets this dangerous kind of glint in his eyes, like he wants me to give him the wrong answer. He’s counting on it. But I know he’s also curious about me it’s why I haven’t been shot on sight.

‘’Found it.’’ quick reply ‘’My guess it was your hit and kill. Shoot the leg so the creature doesn’t get far but long enough to lead you to the pack. But it died not far away from here.’’ I ramble on narrowing my eyes and keep my confident demander on despite the casual remark which stings at my heart. They actually managed to gang up on one of my trusted friends who went to patrol this part of the land. It’s why Taehyung is now bed ridden still healing, the silver having gotten into his system. But he was found quickly and brought back so the healers (we have two professional doctors in our pack) could give him help immediately.

‘’Exactly.’’ The man agrees too quickly for my liking ‘’So little girl, what is exactly your purpose here? It’s a little odd of you approaching us like this. In the middle of nowhere.’’ he finally gets to the point stepping around the fire. The men shift around eyeing him clearly not having their minds made on what to think about me or clearly what he’ll decide. Their shifting is caused because of nerves not because of fear.

‘’I think, from what I can see and deduct is we’re here for the same reason.’’ I reply watching him as he steps around his men instead of approaching me directly. He’s playing some kind of a game which I haven’t figured out yet ‘’I heard a rumour that a pack of werewolves lived around these parts. Apparently, they are weakened from the hard winter. So, I’m here to just…observe.’’

‘’Observe huh? Alright I’ll bite.’’ He nods along chuckling humourlessly ‘’That is a nice-looking bow you got here.’’

I immediately grin at his comment and stop moving the black arrow between my fingers ‘’Family heirloom.’’ I reply tilting my head to the side.

‘’And which family do you belong too little red?’’ he goes on stopping at the second line of his men. His steely blue eyes are still focused solemnly on me ‘’Because as far as I can recall, none of the families in this business which you would be part of, have wolves in theire crests.’’ The more he talks the more serious he becomes, his demander hardening visibly which has the men tense up, fingers twitching on the triggers of the guns ‘’Too much on the nose.’’

I click my tongue once raising an eyebrow showing off that I’m unbothered by his prodding. It’s a normal reaction from his side to be cautious. I twist my body a bit so everyone else can see the wolf crest on the quiver engraved into the leather.

‘’Neukddaega. Volk.’’ The man points out. I can hear the men’s heart beats speed up. I bite the inside of my cheek as a flood of agitation hits me this time and rolls in in waves, nerves, and uncertainty following after. It makes my skin clam up and my body to heat up. It’s not helping me keep up my act if my own pack distrust me and thinks I’m doing bad.

‘’They have all died down but one. What game are you playing at little girl?’’ the man demands getting angry. I try to cool down, and push back positivity but I know that Seokjin is getting worse and more impatient by the minute I’m here.

‘’No game. Young-chull sunbaeim is still very much so alive and still going strong. Plus, adopting is still something that’s very much so a possibility.’’ Every single word I’m speaking is a load of bullshit.

The man snorts out loud ‘’So you should have me believe that Neukddaega Young-chull the man who took down not one but two of the most powerful packs on the Korean peninsula, to have adopted a daughter, and sent her to kill of a pack of wolves? All on her own?’’ he laughs out loud my smirk only widening. Well there goes the bluff. But Young-chull is a retired man who leads a radio show in a small town near Busan. He’s harmless and gives advice at Christmas reunions whenever he travels here to see how we are doing. He’s my great, great, great uncle. That’s a thing don’t even ask for details it’ll only get more confusing. (A hunter that killed of two of the most powerful wolf packs in Korea...hmm interesting huh given that we still are standing and breathing *wink wink*)

‘’Best of the best.’’ I say confidently.

‘’Kill her.’’ the statement does throw me off a bit but I remain smirking still, ears picking up on the growls raising in volume. I drop the quiver so its resting over my thigh, moving my hand as if I’m readjusting the belt, but use the movement to slide my hand behind my back to signal my pack to stand down ‘’It’s nothing personal little red, I just dislike the Neukddaega klan, he and the ones before him have disgraced us enough.’’ With a nod to his men, he turns back ready to leave clearly unbothered as he expects me to go down easy. So, with him and the men distracted for the moment, clearly confident of the outcome I’m quick to inhale some air to let out a roar, which confused the men catching them of guard. And the moment alone is all I need for now.

A piercing howl follows from behind me shaking the humans up, several others howls following after the alpha’s. It’s a battle cry. I watch as the men before me start to react too slow to what’s happening, which I take as an advantage and gear up with my bow shooting and killing two gunmen, further ahead before they can even reach for their weapons. My gaze shifts onto the old man, that stares around into the woods with horror, when his eyes then turn to me. So, I let them bleed into scarlet.

‘’Little, little boy. Like in the words of the character you’ve labelled me with; my, my what a big juicy heart you have. Mind if I rip it out?!’’

I coo sweetly, blinking in a way that I know makes me look adorable but now terrifying with the red eyes as I scan the men that look at me with horror. The grin that stretches across my lips, show off my fangs and sharpening teeth, while some bones crack and shift in my body leaving behind a burning feeling, my senses sharpened adrenaline already rushing through my veins as the feeling of power fuels me.

I see the realization on the human’s faces as they pick up on the thudding of paws. The wolves charge from the tree lines with teeth bared, sharp claws ready to cut throats. The fight is engaged in the matter of a solid second. Unfortunately, the human men are trained till some extent and are quick to react drawing out weapons, and start to shoot at anything that moves. A rain of arrows and bullets shoot through air, missing most of their targets but, hitting one to many for my liking the yelps and cries echoing in my mind.

Like any other battle it becomes a blur rather quickly. I have my goal set and try to execute it; Get the guns and destroy them. I dodge a man that resorted in swinging his gun violently towards me, that I simply dodge and with an arrow in hand I lodge the slim weapon right through the bulletproof west, killing him instantly by piercing his heart.

I grab his gun using both hands, and squeeze the item the metal bending under my strength. As more guns go off, the angrier I get. The outrage that fills me has me rushing from one human to another just to kick the guns out of theire hands. I’m literally dodging bullets.

As I lunge at a man twice my size I’m only a second to late, his gun perfectly aimed finger triggering before I’m headbutting him basically in the gut causing him to double over. I draw out an arrow bow already in hand and in a quick manner let it fly the short distance between us, hitting him right between his collarbones. He choughs and gargles but my attention is on thegun shoot and thud that hits the ground behind me, a black furred wolf lying there unmoving. I know immediately who it is, sorrow spilling along my own emotions from the others. The boy acted selfless saving me and getting himself killed instantly instead.

Pair the grief, and pain of the loss both swirling inside me with different levels of emotions that I’m feeling from my back it gets to much, overtaking my wolf completely forcing me to stop and let out the most violent roar I probably ever did. (After the war ended)

It seems to shake the ground. This could have been avoided if the pests were smarter, I didn’t come here seeking war, they did. Said pests now are frozen eyes trained onto me, the battle line having thinned down to only 6 of them whose hands are shaking so bad their guns are rattling. And then everyone goes back into action, betas now left dealing with quickly gun-less humans, while I face a yelling man who though he was going to sneak upon me. The shout is obviously his downfall, the machete he’s wielding not even a threat given by the panic stricken all over him, rendering his moves clumsy. It takes me sidestepping and him tripping over a dead body, for me to grab at the back of his vest easily, and twist him around so he falls onto the ground onto his back, the machete wildly swinging missing my face a few inches, as I lean back instinctually. He hits his head down pretty hard making the job too easy as I take the machete right from his hand with no resistance, and use the momentum to swing the sharpened weapon down, lodging it and splitting his head in two, blood splattering everywhere.

Of course, in life when everything is great doing well then comes the downfall. And mine comes with a single yelp, that shakes me to my core.

My eyes raise but fall onto the large light brown coloured wolf, that topples over onto his back, while an exceptionally large man straddles him way to easily yelling and raising a knife high into the air, ready to strike.

My heart stops working.

I’m already on the move before I’m even aware at what I’m doing. The world around me comes to a literal stop as I move forward. I don’t see anything pass me, my vision zooning onto the threat at hand. Because he’s a direct threat to my own life. Someone charges at me but I know a second later when Namjoon tackles him my pack has my back covered.

Reaching them I feel as if the earth moves on its own beneath me raising me up higher so I can reach for the man’s wrist. A small press of my thumb causes his wrist to crack loudly and twist in a way which should definitely not twist. I don’t waste anymore time, and just open my mouth to sink my teeth into his neck as he falters onto his knees. He can’t even move in my hold as I’ve gotten him immobile and reduced in excruciating pain. He’s now more on my level which helps my teeth to tear into the flesh properly blood hitting my tongue which does make me gag, as there’s so much of it. But he doesn’t get the time to even shout for help or let out any noise. Still holding onto his wrist, I let go with my mouth letting the blood drip out, as I stare at the lifelessness on his face, body wobbling. With a tug (to harsh) his arm dislodges with a nasty crack, and the body goes sideways falling to the side and stays lying there unmoving.

I’m already turning around careful not to step on my mate who rolls onto his side instead of lying on his back uncomfortably. I can hear his frantic heart beating rapidly as its basically all I can hear, while my hands work over his body eyes darting over his soft fur that’s thankfully spotless besides patches of dirty and a leaves stuck to it on some places. I start sniffling expecting to smell his blood, but the more I get frantic the more he gets whinny at my touches wanting to twist around in my hold which I’m not letting him, keeping him down on all fours lying on the ground. There are still gun shots ringing the men giving in their all, so my instincts as I’m not completely aware of my surroundings are shouting for me to keep him underneath me, and make sure he’s unharmed before I can focus on anything else. As I’m about to ask and order him if I have to, to retreat an arrow zooms past my head making me glance up in surprise at a young-looking boy that shoot the deadly weapon. He missed big time, but he’s still standing across me, crossbow in hand while the glare shouts; murder.

Before I can react, I watch Jimin’s body charge into him. And he’s gone just like that. Not all fairy tales have happy endings. A particularly loud gun shot rings out through the seemingly eerie air, growls and shouts dying down with it. I spare another glance at my mate whose safe and unharmed and only then turn back to see my pack mates, standing and ready for more. The humans are all gone, the last one just now letting out his last breath.

Gradually, and rather instantly the pain just hits me. It flares up from the top of my arm and spreads all over my body. But it’s Seokjin cry, and whines that only slightly wakes me up from the haze I’ve fallen into. He is scrambling, raising up onto all fours while I look down at my left arm, red blood spilling from the open gashing wound. I don’t mind it, as I don’t particularly feel the pain because of the adrenaline rush. It’s Jin that brings my attention forth, as he curls himself around me in a protective manner and whines as he sniffs at me but snaps at whoever even glances at us. Our pack means well, they are family but he’s probably in shook and his instincts are making him a bit irrational and overprotective.

‘’Seokjin…I’m fine.’’ I reply absently reaching with my unharmed hand to pat him because my wolf is craving for his touch and closeness as he circles around me worrying way too much. He’s trying to distract me it’s clear, and I appreciate it and love him all the more for that. I pick up onto the cry a bit to late as it rings out though the air and has each wolf here snarling in anger. Its Jin that reacts the fastest rushing away from me, growling and snarling overpowering the human within the blink of an eye. I watch as Jin kills of the hunter by crushing his whole skull body falling on the ground properly dead this time (I think you know how  he got his skull crushed let’s not get into all the gory details). It should be disgusting, but all I feel is gentle numbness still clutching onto me and pride of seeing my mate end victorious and see him so vicious in order to protecting me. I take a glance around now assessing how much wounded we have, my packmates are already in action the routine not changed as some shift, others remaining in wolf forms as our protectors.

I try to calm down my breathing and raging heart as Jin struts over to me whining again concern still flooding through the bond. He’s eager to start nuzzling his cheek against my back as I’m already covered in blood enough, but he has gotten the blood of the human on his silky and perfect fur which doesn’t seem to bother him at all, as usually he’d be smacking me for even approaching him with mud or any kind of dirt on me. The feeling of victory sets in as it washes over the pack, in a bitter sweet way. Bones cracking fills my hearing making me stand on edge…because besides all the ruckus I pick up on heavy panting but up far in the distance, which puzzles me.

‘’Anyone who can stand get the wounded, Hoseok go back to camp get Yoongi and Jeongguk and others will need help…’’ Namjoon’s voice is steady as he starts giving orders.

‘’Y/N-ah.’’ Jin speaks in a normal tone. Glancing at him with wide eyes he is still bloody like the rest of the wolves but the blood around his mouth…I tilt my head as I take him in in his human form ‘’It’s over.’’ He starts hands coming up to cup my cheeks but I look away towards the panting man I can clearly hear in the distance. And then I hear dialling.

I turn to Jin giving him the most serious alpha look I can muster ‘’Stay here.’’ I even use the tone which I hate to do on him, but it’s for his safety. I don’t use it on him much don’t let me make you think that I do, because I don’t it only happened once before. It’s always about him, he comes first no matter what. Pushing him away for good measure I catch a glance of Namjoon’s and Jimin’s serious faces but I’m already turning around and breaking into a run  picking up my discharged bow, run changing into a sprint.

‘’Don’t Y/N-ahhhh…’’ I leave my mate behind, dashing between trees. He’s safe with the pack they’ll protect him. Usually I’m all for running, specially in my wolf form I’m faster than ever. But now I act on my instincts which are telling me to keep running like I am. I follow the harsh pants and the very breathless man, reaching him in record time. Hesitation is out of the window, instincts overpowering me. I knock him to the ground with my body, ignoring the flare of pain that makes me see white for a moment and stumble to a stop as he tumbles down crying and shouting. I pick up the small device that falls from his hand, and try gaining my balance quickly. As his cry dies in his throat, a voice picks up on the other end of the phone call that I instantly end, standing up straight glaring down at the panting man who has caused harm to my family.

‘’Get the fuck away from me…’’ before he can finish I’m already over him one foot on his chest, while I have already sheathed a silvery white arrow into my bow. His eyes widen expression changing into one of terror. The device having been dropped on the ground starts to ring again. Unknown number. But I know why he called ahead in the first place. Kneeling down I press the tip of the sharp arrow against his neck tugging the string back, and let out a heavy and displeased sigh as I stare back at him ‘’Please don’t kill me!’’ he pleads making me frown.

‘’You’re going to answer that and tell them the job is done.’’ I say calmly pressing the sharp tip higher over his neck to which he whimpers pathetically.

‘’But my men…’’

‘’You were ambushed, and the foolishness of the wolves cost them their lives as well as the lives of your men. You were under prepared but the small pack was wiped out. Understood?’’

‘’That’s…

I press the arrow firmer in slicing his skin open into a shallow wound but stop there ‘’Understood?’’ I let my eyes flash as I lean closer, to his trembling form. He nods faintly reaching for the phone to answer the call which he wisely puts on speaker.

I listen and watch him intently as he lies and goes along my plan. I don’t spare a glance at the wolves that approach behind us, and my mate that remains hesitant by Namjoon’s side. I press the tip some more into the guys throat who gets the hint, and starts to wrap it up putting on a calmer tone when I tug the deadly weapon away lessening the pull of the string. My arms were starting to ache from the strain. Finishing up he bids his goodbye to which I end the call, and straighten up staring down at him, crushing the device in my bare hand.

‘’What to do with you?’’ I wonder out loud frowning at the bones cracking behind me. Turning back, I stare at Namjoon that’s glaring at the human with blood red eyes already. His eyes snap to me.

‘’Head back. You need to get that checked.’’ He says in a low steady tone, eyes darting to my still open wound, as blood continues to drip down my arm.

‘’Who the fuck are you!’’ the man breathes out in horror beneath me ‘’You-you-you…’’ he starts to stutter and crawl backwards as I take a step back knowing my mate is desperate to leave and check up on me properly ‘’You-you-you w-were supposed to be a small pack, you-you are alpha female h-howw…?’’

‘’We need to get rid of this problem first.’’ I reply stepping closer to the man that raises his hands up, as in a shield crying out while Namjoon growls.

‘’I’ll take care of this, head back.’’ he says threatening making me raise an eyebrow. I glance at Seokjin that’s back in his wolf form looking at me pleadingly. Through the bond he is pleading for me to just listen to Namjoon. But my instincts are currently louder than the man that’s definitely not my alpha. I hold Jin’s look a bit longer and then raise the bow and arrow up, letting the arrow fly. The smell of urine hits our noses a second later making me frown as I glare at the man in disgust. The arrow is sticking from the ground only 2 cm away from his head near his temple.

Seokjin whimpers and, yips in distress. So, I take a step back and pull the bow around myself again. Straightening up I glance down at the man ‘’Should have skipped a pack or two or the whole peninsula. Neukddae sunbaenim isn’t a legend for nothing.’’ I comment nonchalantly and turn around to look at my mate. Namjoon has nothing to say to me as he’s already growling threateningly his wolf trying to take control. I glance at the two betas that are behind him, and with a nod they yip in return knowing what their job is as I step in silence to my mates’ side ‘’Namjoon-ah, don’t play around to much. I want you home and safe sooner than later.’’

‘’Yes alpha.’’ He growls back but not in a defiant way. Emotions are overtaking him, he needs to get this out of his system. And its cruel what’s going to happen, yeah for human standards. But they spared no empathy towards us. They see us as monsters and hunt us down when we haven’t done any harm to human kind. Not my pack at least. It’s why I don’t have any guilt for leaving him alone with the man. Meanwhile my mate walks right next to me silently, head hung low not making any noises besides the occasional sniff at my arm.

‘’Jinnie…’’ I whisper as I come to a stop mid step once we’re alone in between trees further away. He glances up at me, letting out a whine as he leans down to sniff at my face his nose going towards my shoulder that he frowns at ‘’It doesn’t hurt stop worrying so much.’’ I try and reach with my clean hand up to brush at the side of his face. He whines some more eyebrows furrowing as he glares at me, no words need to be said for me to know what is going on in his head.

‘’Alright, alright. Let’s go home.’’ I state while he yaps feeling relief as we head along. I smile up at my mate that got successful unharmed in this battle. This time.

*Same night*

‘’Fall back!!! Fall back!!!!’’

Its blurry, my eyesight is all blurry and mixed up with shadows as I stare ahead at figures moving around me but nothing makes much sense. My dad’s voice is loud in the clearing, between the shouts,growls, and hisses, and painful cries ringing throughout the field that’s been covered in blood the last time my vision was clear. And that was a few moments ago before I got hit over the head with something, that almost knocked me unconscious.

I glance up from the fighting ahead to a dark figure that’s approaching me. The hiss I feel is directly in my ear but I can’t pinpoint what’s happening. A wolf growl ends the hissing creature abruptly that falls silent with a cry. I blink a few times, hoping it’s going to help me out as I feel my body that’s sore from all the fighting and dirtied by all kinds of nasty shit protest but still try to heal itself. Not as fast as it should be, which only raises more chances for a guaranteed death. Despite the odds I raise onto my knees, and away from smelling shit right under my nose.

‘’C’mon kid get up!!! Get up!’’ comes a gruff tone urging me onto my feet. It hurts, everything hurts and I want to die right here right now. I’m not sure if it’s because of the tone above me or some other force, but my eyesight gets clearer an I start feeling overly-grateful to see again. I stare baffled at my dad’s second in command who is more of an uncle to me standing at my side. His kind eyes are firm, angry and full with concern as he stares at me cupping my face. He has changed into his human form like I did, the armour we’re wearing shrunk to cover our human bodies up properly. And when we turn the straps stretch out to cover our vitals parts on our wolves’ bodies ‘’You can’t give up now kiddo! We’re so close! So close!!’’ he goes on encouragingly offering a grin ‘’C’mon it’s like we’ve been practicing all this time, right? Keep concentrating on your surroundings don’t let…’’ he gets cut off gasping for air knees giving out. Distress fills me as I spot the black arrow sticking right in the crack of his armour. A cry leaves from my lungs as I watch his body fall down, meanwhile the archer only a few feet away stares me right in the eyes. As he gets another arrow ready he gets quickly taken care of by the still clearly eager and very ambitious alpha from the mountains up north from our territory. Sang-min or something I think his name is.

‘’Rip theire throats out! Every last one of them!!!’’ dads voice rings out sending me into action, claws growing again as a vampire approaches, swiping his own hands to kill me, but I’m faster than him ducking away and getting close enough to sink my fingers right into his neck.

He burst into flames to which I only tug my hands away and sidestep sparing an apologetic look to my fallen brother, uncle, and then break into a run. I need to get to my dad. I need to tell him…it’s all my fault…

It’s when desperation starts to sink in as I look around. So many dead bodies. So many ashes strewn across the once green field, so many bodies of wolves. So much blood and gore and loss…I shouldn’t be seeing this. I shouldn’t be watching the people who raised me between the fallen. I wanted to travel the world, dad said I could. I should be in France or in Brazil or who knows where and not here barely 19 and seeing so many dead packmates, and other packs which I considered friends and distant relatives.

And I especially shouldn’t be seeing how my dad gets his throat ripped out while his eyes meet my own. The vampires are too quick on him ganging up, one successfully sinking its teeth into his neck and then just pulling the flesh away as he falls onto his knees, killing two of them. I should not be here. I should not have looked into his blazing red eyes, and see how his soul leaves his body, my own getting suddenly filled with power. It’s so much power it scares me shitless more than the vampire that’s charging at me. I watch my alpha, my leader, my father how his lip tugs upwards into a smile, a faint nod in my direction. He’s handing the reins over to me. He’s blessing me and approving the new leader of our pack.

It shouldn’t have happened this way. This should have never happened. With all the loss and death, a glass shattering, ear numbing, and soul shaking roar comes from my lungs. Its gets everyone’s immediate attention onto myself. But I’m ready. I know I am. I will kill every single bastard on this field. Even if it’s only for today that I’m alive, if I’m meant to die I’m going to die when every last single threat is left dead and forgotten.

My eyes open that’s a start. I can feel my heart pounding in my chest, and skin covered in a thin layer of sweat. Then the pain rolls in. Ah man I forgot about his. Scrunching up my nose I keep the noises of protest in, remaining silent as I glance down at my bandaged arm. My gaze quickly turns to my mate, lying on his side of the bed, hands clutching onto my pillow a small frown settled over his flawless features. He’s the one that decided not to touch me, because of the wound. The bullet luckily went straight through my bicep, it passed the bone meaning it was a clean cut. But it’s going to take time to heal. And I’ve lost a lot of blood which is why he didn’t let me do absolutely anything besides lying down till I feel asleep earlier while he took care of the pack instead.

He truly is amazing. Not only did he patch me up like a professional doctor would, he also ordered me around with enough firmness that had me staying still and made my wolf submit effortlessly to him. He then went out and took the reigns with ease, going as far as to help the wounded wolves and arrange for a funeral for the fallen one. And then he went to reassure everyone probably individually and made sure they were alright. With patrols decided and sent out, he went to Namjoon and Jimin to settle them down. I could feel worry radiating from miles away from them both. From all of the pack actually.

But he calmed down the situation with gentleness, and voice of reason. And despite being an omega like some love to label everything, he did an even better job than I ever would. And I’m so proud and amazed by him. He’s magnificent and I can’t wrap it around my head how the fates have been so merciful for someone like me to deserve someone so kind, so pure, gorgeous beyond belief, and so lovely to be my soul mate. It’s just……. yeah.

Turning my head towards the window the moon is shining a bright light through, lighting up the room making it feel as the world is at a standstill. Glancing out I stare at the trees, knowing that the forest outstretches thickly behind the first line. My bones are already itching to shift, wolf getting quickly restless with just lying still. The wound starts to burn though, and normally it would stop anyone from wanting to do anything, but I want to run. We’ve lost someone today and its gradually hitting me more and more, the realization and guilt. He was set to go to college. He didn’t want to be tied down to the pack for now, he wanted to become an engineer. And we’ve gathered enough money to set him off properly as he got into that fancy college in Seoul out of all places. His whole life was barely ahead of him. I remember our talk, he told me he wants to make us proud. And now he’s dead. And it’s all my fault. And no one else’s.

Its why I want to run. I want to run, and feel his spirit run with me as I do whenever I run on full moons. I feel as if the spirits of my family, my fallen friends and brothers and sisters are running free with me. But the ache in my arm is a overwhelming, it burns as if acetone was spilled directly into the open wound the more I move as I sit up, the bed not creaking luckily.

As I hunch over staring at the lines on the sheets I’m trying to contain the breathlessness from the effort. Glancing back Jin is still unmoving chest raising and falling slowly. I should stay here with him. Even if he did a good job out there, showed proper leadership and was basically the beacon of strength; once he checked on me, he crumbled into tears the moment the doors to our bedroom closed. He wasn’t afraid not even once for his wellbeing he wasn’t afraid to lose his life today. He was afraid, terrified of loosing me. And same goes for me, but I’m still more used to death. Even if the war is over and has been for many years now, I’m used to it.

Sliding my legs down, I let them hang over the edge while I just stare down at the shadows of the trees on the ground from the light of the moon, that’s flooding onto the bed as well.

‘’Jagiya…’’ comes a sleepy voice word a bit slurred ‘’Don’t go…’’ he speaks slowly arm outstretching his fingers brushing over my lower back, making me tense up briefly like I do whenever he touches my bare skin. He’s the visual between the two of us, with flawless unmarked skin (usually unmarked(after giving him proper treatement his skin healed fully)) long strong limbs, lithe body and delicate features. Recently he dyed his hair blonde which is even more killer for my heart and sane mind to handle.

‘’I won’t. Go back to sleep my love.’’ I murmur back offering a smile. But he’s grimacing rubbing his eyes and forces himself to wake up. So stubborn.

‘’I’m fine…’’ he states determined making me chuckle as he doesn’t stop touching me, as he shifts getting up and scotching closer ‘’Wide awake, I wasn’t even sleeping just resting my eyes.’’ He goes on yawning as his arms wrap around me, while he spreads his legs on either side of me, and tugs me back to lean into his embrace while being very mindful of my arm, that limply rests over his knee.

‘’Sure, you were. Keeping watch for anything and everything.’’ I tease him but he only hums in agreement, his left hand resting over my stomach fingers spread to hold me close and, in a way, as if he’s preventing me from running away, while his other hand is gently tracing the few scars on my thighs. His breath makes me shudder briefly as it passes the side of my neck.

He chuckles absently still sounding sleepy, but doesn’t let me go ‘’Nightmare?’’ he asks carefully not pushing me to reply or anything, because the brief silence that settles isn’t uncomfortable.

‘’Yeah.’’ I admit honestly finding out since the third night we’ve sleep together (only slept in bed lets be clear here) that I absolutely cannot lie to him. And I’ve tried, okay this sounds nasty and mean but he didn’t allow me to eat a full plate of cookies okay which he baked only for me. I like cookies. A lot.

He presses a gentle kiss to the side of my neck, before nuzzling his face into it ‘’I’m sorry princess.’’ He murmurs sincere his heart feeling heavy. I know because I can feel it through the bond ‘’Wish I could do something, anything to take them away.’’ It hurts me how sincere he is. I turn my head to the side to look at him and directly into his dark brown eyes that stare right back at me full of emotions. So, I lean forward to brush my lips against his.

‘’You’re making it better already. It doesn’t hurt that much anymore.’’ I take a hold of his hand as it makes its way upwards, over where my heart beats steadily.

‘’But it still haunts you.’’ He goes on seriously placing his chin onto my shoulder his other hand coming to roam over my back tracing the bigger scars that are littered there from years of fighting and that are the aftermath from the war mainly ‘’Even though you are healed, you can still feel the wounds and remember the pain.’’ He starts, his words exactly describing what my body is feeling ‘’And that’s what brings the memories up, and nightmares. I want to replace them completely with good memories. You still don’t have to tell me what happened, or what you’ve been through. I’m going to stay here by your side no matter what Y/N. If you tell me or don’t. I won’t love you any less. Only more.’’ I blink away the tears that gather in my eyes and glare at the light from the moon and how the trees dance in the wind it’s tops getting ruffled around.

I close my eyes after a while as my heart feels like it only gets heavier and heavier with the love that I’m feeling towards him. Its indescribable all the emotions swirling through me, the thoughts racing through my brain. And then he starts to sing, as if he isn’t perfect enough. I can pick up on the melody, the instruments even if there are none playing. His voice creates calmness in the storm that’s ragging inside me, the pain and misery that’s been haunting me for years slowly easing back, making my shoulders feel lighter. Its all thanks to him, all the shit I’ve went through I’d do it all again if it means I could meet him again in another lifetime. I’d go to war for him. I honestly would do anything, if he wants something I’ll get it. I’m completely and utterly obsessed and in love with him.

As he continues to sing, I push away the insecurities and the overwhelming feelings of everything that I feel are starting to choke me. Turning my head to the side I grab onto his knees firmer getting his attention, a smile starting to raise over his lips as he sings soft notes, that make my heart throb. I cut him off mid-word leaning in to kiss him, just to feel his soft lips against my own.

He’s smiling into the kiss at first, the simple press not enough to satisfy my wolf which prompts me to move firmer. He eagerly returns the kiss, keeping it light and chaste. But the carefulness, the way he’s so gentle and cautious to move his hands over me is quick to raise the itch to run again. So, I turn in his hold in defiance and grab the end of the shirt he’s wearing tugging him closer to me, pressing my lips harder against his, letting my tongue daringly lick over his lower lip hinting what I want.

‘’Ah Y/N-ah…’’ he breaks the kiss a bit breathless while I take the moment of his hesitance to raise onto my knees turning around to face him, and stand above him cupping his face leaning in for another hungry kiss, my wolf growling inside my head repeating ‘Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine’ over and over again. I could have lost him today. So many things could have gone wrong. Never again!

His hands land over on my hips, which earns himself a growl as my frustration kreeps growing. I grab at the back of his hair a bit too harshly bending his head upwards. As he gasps I take the chance to slide my tongue between his lips brushing it against his.

Of course, he leans back to break the kiss, to look at me properly ‘’As much as I’d love to, you’re hurt Y/N-ah we can’t…’’ as he talks I dip down to lick along his long slender neck, before I start pressing kisses over the side, nipping at his skin making my way towards the spot that makes him boneless usually whilst listening to him stuttering and losing his train of thoughts ‘’…you’re seriously hurt! S-stop please, Y-Y/N, d-don’t be rid-d-iculous ah…’’ he gaps at a particularly harder bite which I’m quick to lick over, my hands lowering down over his broad shoulders, fingers spreading as I run them down his front over his pecks, and all the way down to the end of the t-shirt he has on.

‘’I want you, simple…as that…’’ I say in return between bites my voice slightly gruffer as the full moon is acting up onto us more. I’m more in tune with my wolfish side right now.

‘’N-noo…’’ he tries to protests hands not gripping me with effort at all. I’m pleased as I tug the shirt up which makes him move his arms on his own, and all the more easier for me to undress him. I let it drop somewhere either on the bed or floor too preoccupied with taking him in finally bare for my eyes only. Shamelessly I just stare at his glistering pink lips, messy blonde hair and hooded eyes which are boring right back into my own, while his chest heaves breathing having gotten laboured from the sensations and ministrations.

‘’Jin…’’ I whisper sensually directly into his ear, hands coming up to grip onto his hair the way he likes, making him expose his neck to me again, while I scotch forward with my knees forcing his legs to close enabling me to straddle him and pull myself closer so that my breasts restricted by the sports bra he put me in earlier brush against his own chest. Finally, I can also rub my clothed core against his crotch, the brief friction very welcomed causing us both to sigh in relief, my hips moving on their own ‘’My love…’’ I breathe out just brushing my nose along his jaw and cheek ‘’I want you so bad, I love you so much with all my soul. Let me show it. Let me show just how much I absolutely love and adore you with my everything.’’ I try enticing him, try to break his resolve.

Surprisingly enough his fingers dig into my hips as if to stop me while his gaze hardens mouth that was parted closing, his eyes which had fallen shut open ‘’Princess, you’ve been wounded badly, and lost a lot of blood. You should rest, and sleep to regain your strength. I know you’re the big bad alpha but you need rest and heal.’’

But I know he wants me just as much as I want him. And as much as I admire and appreciate his concern over my heath I don’t hold back the animalistic snarl, fingers tightening as I feel my sight clearing eyes probably bleeding into a crimson colour which he once said he describes as blazing red fire. Or rubies its different depending on certain nights and moods.

‘’I’m alright as long as you are Seokjinnie. Stop worrying I’m fine I’m alive, as you are now let me worship you like you deserve to be worshiped and loved. You were so brave today, I’m so proud of you. So so proud and even more in love if that’s possible.’’ I firmly state lying my emotions out in the open once more for him to know and be aware of. Sometimes we both need reassurances spoken out loud even though we’re perfectly aware of being literally destined for each other.

His lower lip wobbles a little, eyes blinking quickly as he stares up at me, so I slowly lean in to start the kiss gentler and sweeter at first. But being myself I’m quick to get impatient, hips starting to roll on their own to tease him more, as he’s already half hard. And this time around his arms wrap around my waist firmer, but I know he’s still being mindful of my arm more than I am. Unfortunately for me, because one of my favourite things to do is to simply keep kissing him, is the whole air thing which we both run out off. So, I break it off to lean back staring at his slightly swollen lips letting go of his blonde locks to reach for the sports bra wanting to tug it upwards, but the shoot of pain that catches me of guard at a movement I make with my arm, does have me flinching which sets him into immediate action by pushing my hands gently away and he himself reaching around to unhook the bra.

‘’Let me, princess.’’ He says gently, raising the annoying piece of clothing and restriction off tugging it carefully over my right arm. He’s quick to lean in lips tracing kisses starting from my right shoulder down my arm, tugging the bra off slowly as he moves down with his lips making me chuckle, until he reaches my knuckles the bra now removed completely. He straightens back up again love practically sparkling in his eyes ‘’So pretty all for me.’’ he murmurs pressing a kiss on top of my hand like a proper gentleman, before he intertwines our fingers together and leans forward initiating the kiss himself this time.

But I start to push at his chest gently, lifting myself so I’m standing on my knees. I start giggling as he eagerly follows, lips chasing my own a quiet whine leaving from his chest ‘’Scotch up, I’m not going anywhere.’’ He looks at me with puppy eyes, but tugs me along with him earning a grin of amusement as he expertly moves us to the middle of the bed spinning us properly and still maintains the position we were in, once he leans against the pillows and headboard.

‘’You better not be.’’ He growls lowly in a warning sparkling mischief in me. I shake my head simply resting my hands over his flat tummy as I steal a kiss.

‘’Wouldn’t dream of it. Ever ever.’’ I reply in return my words making him growl but in satisfaction as I duck down again to press a kiss onto the side of his throat the growl turning into a breathy moan that has a hint of desperation to it. So, I start the descend taking my time, marking his perfect skin taking in the dips of his collarbones, boldly licking over his nipples, then trailing down his belly, that hitches with laughter at some points when my breath fans over. Smiling I spare a glance up, his eyes already hooded, heart beating faster with anticipation the more I slither lower.

Once I reach the hem of the sweats he’s wearing he cocks up an eyebrow tsking ‘’I thought we’d agreed to be careful.’’ He starts to which I sigh but straighten up supporting myself with only my right arm raising onto my knees and lift my hands in surrender.

‘’Alright big bad omega, undress then.’’ I reply simply standing near the end of the bed now watching as a blush taints his cheeks as he realizes what he’s done. No matter how many times I’ve seen him naked which I’m always very happy about seeing, he still gets shy on me. And I think I’ll never get tired of it or him being extra possessive whenever we’re out like earlier when he shielded me from everyone’s gazes. He is just too precious ‘’Would you look at that.’’ I purr practically as he slides the sweats and only sweats down his long slim legs (no underwear included *wink wink*) keeping his eyes on my own ‘’Gorgeous every inch. And all mine.’’ I lick over my lips visibly, my whole-body buzzing with excitement from just seeing him like this. At my disposal. And bluntly putting it; hard because of me and me alone.

My eyes trail over his quickly raising and falling chest, as he leans back onto his elbows, his flushed dick still coloured prettily in pink, a vein popping up on the underside of it but otherwise, it’s standing proudly against his stomach.

‘’Don’t just stare. You can touch princess. You promised to show me how much you love me.’’ he goes on challenging. And my wolf instantly takes the bait, he knew exactly which words to say. I feel my eyes flare, and body shake with anticipation while I feel myself getting wetter wanting to rub my thighs together. But I decide instead to move forward like a predator heading towards its prey.

I bend down, supporting my upper half on my right arm while my body rests onto the bed feet hanging of the edge of the bed a bit. I take in the musky smell that’s only him besides the vanilla shampoo that always lingers on his skin besides my own scent which I always make sure to leave as much as I can on him. I stare straight up, noting the way he swallows tickly watching my every move. Instead of teasing him tonight, licking and kissing around his thigh or leaving more marks behind I stick my tongue out and run it from his balls upwards till the tip of his gorgeous cock quickly. It has him shuddering breathing out slowly while I look down to trace the vein with my tongue firmer, while with my right injured arm I bend it comfortably so I can cup his balls. He tenses up but I pay no mind and lick around the base not touching his cock properly like he’d want me to do.

So, I settle for kitten licks, sometimes across his balls and around the base mainly all purely teasing, but as expected he’s whining soon enough, desperation growing ‘’Please…’’ and there it is. I have to hold back the grin and my own pleasure of seeing him rendered into this state so quickly. I only cock an eyebrow up in question meeting his eyes dead on as I lick a long stripe from the balls till the head again. And repeat it ‘’P-please Y/N…ahhhhhh…P-Please, please, pleas-aaaaaahhhhh…’’ he hisses as I blow some cool air over his cock which is starting to feel sensitive I’m sure.

So now I let myself grin, but give into his pleas and take him in my hand raising his cock up as I lift myself and get closer, darting my tongue out to lick away the precum that has finally started to gather on the tip. I glance at his hands as his fingers grab a hold of the sheet underneath us firmly.

He starts to squirm, as I intentionally circle my tongue around the head of his cock. He’s practically crying desperately trying to hold himself back, but oh the pretty sounds he’s letting out…

‘’C c c, won’t you let me hear your pretty voice my sweet prince?’’ I coo tapping onto his cock with a finger gently just to provoke him. Before he can say anything, I’m leaning up and sinking down taking him into my mouth quickly and suddenly. He tenses up like a string the more I go lower my tongue caressing the underside. All the while I’m trying hard not to gag, the more he goes down my throat. I’ve already taken in a big breath so I focus on bottoming for starters, fingers simply circling around the bottom of his cock once I reach my limit. He’s panting hard above me trying not to move or dislodge me. I hum in approval which has him gasping choking while trying to say my name.

I exhale through my nose and inhale his scent gladly, while he’s trying to keep his sanity basically. I can feel everything that he’s feeling through our bond. It gets my own body to heat up, and to clench around nothing the ache getting more urgent, the need to be filled up urging me to go faster.

So, I raise up, some of my saliva dribbling down but its better if its wetter. I hover above the tip lips kissing it, before I lower back down. And from there on its easy to set a pace which I’m comfortable with, without rushing or anything just taking my time and making sure I’m letting my tongue slide along him perfectly as well as to keep my lips close around him, while I suck from time to time teasing and edging him even more. At some point he starts to moan and whine out loud whenever I do something that grazes against him just right.

‘’Ahhhh s-stop, stop, stop, I-I’ll cum-m I’ll c-cuhhhhhhhhhhhhh!’’ he suddenly states shakily, reaching for me hands landing on my shoulders gently, while he breathes quickly trying to catch his breath as he looks at me with furrowed brows, a whine dragging on as I pull off him with a pop licking over my lower lip to chase the taste of him.

‘’Seokjinnie…’’ I breathe out raising up to my knees. Even though he’s already a bit fucked out, he’s quick to sit up both hands raising to cup my cheeks attention entirely on me now ‘’Help me, get this off, I need you so bad jagi, so bad…’’ I get more breathless as I speak, feeling the urge to claim him almost taking over. Its strong and only building as I let one leg slip over his thigh as his hands stop me from moving for a moment. I stare as he easily rips the panties off, leaving me finally bare. I’ll be mad at him for ruining yet another pair later.

Right now, I’m more interested in slamming my lips against his, still absolutely loving the way his plush lips are like cushions against my own. His hands land over my ass fingers digging into the thick flesh, which he gladly spreads and stars kneading making me smile after a while as he purrs the more the kiss and his actions go on. Leaning back, I take one look and then push against his chest with my healthy hand so he falls on his back. He bounces for a moment, eyes focused on me, while I straddle him once more and hold myself above him lips parted as I gently take a hold of his cock. He hisses hands coming up to grip onto my hips to help guide me down.

I don’t know why we both hold our breaths, but we do it as I start lowering down and hover moving the tip of his dick up and down over my folds, letting him feel just how fucking drenched he got me. And he didn’t even touch me for fucks sake, this is the result of kissing and grinding, and the sight and feel of him. He lets out this beautiful moan, as I let my finger dart over his slit experimentally and then something finally snaps within me. So, I position him at my entrance and start sinking down, the stretch burning the slightest bit but it only sends tingles and zaps of electricity of pain and pleasure through me.

Once I’m fully seated we let out our breaths, smiling widely. The world feels like it’s complete and perfect. Nothing is out of balance and everything is alright once more. Besides the slight burning in my arm, and the ache not leaving me only getting more present having been sedated for a few minutes only I’m very happy right now. I glance down, at the way my mate has been rendered, taking in air through his mouth as well, lips slightly bruised probably from him biting onto them. He’s covered in a thin layer of sweat, some of his blonde locks are now mated to his forehead and still he looks like the most gorgeous creature in the world. And he’s all mine.

His hands raise reach for my thighs as I raise up, slowly at first letting out a shaky breath once I lower myself back down again because it just feels soooooo good. I grip onto his hands that come to rest on top of my hips just to hold me for now. So, with my own strength I start raising and falling, moving my hips back and forward to properly ride him. Soon enough the mattress starts moving with us, the bed creaking the tiniest bit but I’m completely engrossed into the way he’s breathing, different little sounds like gasps half whines leaving him. He has this disbelief written on his features as he stares at me, the bond telling me clearly that he’s feeling what I was feeling not even a few moments ago. Undeserving.

I gasp upon a hard thrust as my mind trailed off for a moment the slam renders me to stop for a moment, to catch my breath ‘’You okay?’’ I ask with a smirk everything already feeling tingly, and perfect even if I’m not sated. As long as he feels good I have no problems doing all the work or just giving him pleasure. But he’s nodding eagerly licking his lips.

‘’Want me to…’’ but I shake my head leaning forward to brace myself against his chest trying to keep more pressure on my right arm than left. Getting back into the slightly fast paced rhythm is easy, the way I move has him lowering his hands down and gripping onto my ass harshly provoking out a growl, as I tighten around him but still keep bouncing despite his slightly restricting hold. As my thighs begin to burn I force his hands onto my thighs again leaning forward to try and start slamming myself down onto him. It has my toes curling soon enough, body feeling overheated and getting sensitive, the deeper he enters upon my harsh slams.

My breath hitches harshly when his hands start to move. Glancing down he has propped his head comfortably against a pillow, and is staring at me with lustful eyes, expression flushed pink a contrast almost to his paler skin, lips bitten into a cheery red color. But his hands remain raising, fingers unabashed moving over my hip bones, up my tummy all the way over to my bouncing breasts, which he takes in his hands eagerly squeezing them. I groan at that, and the way he massages his fingers working perfectly and then he’s quick to pinch my nipples which has my hips stuttering and coming to a still. It doesn’t stop him from flickering his fingers over the sensitive nubs, and continue playing with them ‘’You’re doing so well for me princess…’’ he breathes out sounding in awe ‘’You feel so tight and wet for me.’’ he groans at the way I clench thanks to his words that evoke a blush to cover my cheeks.

I end up smiling bashfully for a moment, but stubbornly sitting up straighter still breathing in slowly trying to calm down my racing heart, ignoring the want, the need to just wreck him ‘’Its all your fault. You do this to me, jagiya. All your fault.’’ I tell him the truth, one of his hands trailing lower, past my stomach touch only ghosting over my skin. My mouth parts as I carefully watch how his slightly crocked fingers finally reach my clit, which he brushes briefly.

I hiss and launch forward falling onto my hands above him. I’ve grown sensitive from the neglect but in the best way possible. My arm blazes on fire, but I keep the pain hidden from my features not wanting him to worry ‘’Ah careful.’’ He breathes hands ready to catch me of course yet he ends up smiling as I settle down just staying there above him ‘’I should take some responsibility huh?’’ he asks pushing his legs out, getting me exited.

‘’Yeah you c-c-coulddd, oh g-g-g-h-h-h-h-h-a-a-a-h-h…’’ I can’t finish my sentence even as he starts to thrust up the angle too much as he fills me up completely, dick throbbing inside finger still ghosting over my clit repeatedly. I grab onto the bed sheets and just try and keep myself sitting up because that’s all I can do. But it’s hard not to let go and let my arms and thighs cave, the more his thrusts get powerful and faster.

He pinches my nipples one more time evoking a long high-pitched moan from me, and then grabs onto my hips holding me still as he digs his legs properly into the bed and starts fucking me effortlessly it seems. His expression is contorted into one of concentration jaw tightened and the hard look he has makes him look dangerous in a way. It turns me on even more, making me slicker and to tighten around him, once the edges of his eyes start to bleed into molten gold. He starts to growl, chest purring and vibrating his tone deep and dominant. I feel my wolf growl in return eyes sharpening which has e seeing him with new eyes in a way. He is so fucking gorgeous I fucking can’t even. My heart one day is going to fucking explode from how much I’m in love and love him.

‘’Princess…’’ he starts of breathlessly ‘’M-move with m-m-e…’’ he manages to get out, everything from his body language as he tenses up again, and the strain he’s going through to simply talk indicate he’s close. The wave that was slowly pleasurably raising in the pit of my stomach suddenly sky rockets, everything getting overwhelming, my body burning up from pleasure and the feel of him. I nod wordlessly, his hands now as he thrusts up slam me down right onto him.

Then the mantra begins the chanting of his name, leaving from my tongue over and over. I stare as his eyes now beautifully coloured golden are fixated onto me, my arms finally buckling so I land onto my elbows masking the groan of pain with one of pleasure as he thrusts just in the right time as I tighten around him. His groan is much louder and rushed breathing now harshly as he stares at me, and wordlessly continues to thrust ‘’Close?’’ he asks pleasure being conveyed through the bond which syncs us up. I simply nod quickly closing my eyes to lean my head down, resting it next to his as I can simply pant and use the last strength I have to hold myself up. His hands grab my ass spreading my ass cheeks, and then he’s off using the last bit of his own strength to fuck me.

The intensity of this orgasm is fucking mind numbing. I feel it from the core of my stomach, as it fucking explodes and like shrapnel spreads all over spreading through my body violently, leaving me clenching impossibly tight, and shaking as he holds me through it. At some point in the middle of all the white noise I’m hearing, I can feel how he grunts and ends up coming with a moan of my name, filling me up.

My left arm is of course the first one to give out the right one tired to as I’ve been using it more tonight. So, I let myself lie onto him comfortably not concerned with crushing him as he’s a strong werewolf and besides I am a lightweight to him.

The white noise soon buzzes off, leaving the room silent besides our breathing and heart beats. He’s still catching some sanity, which I take advantage to nuzzle my face into his neck and scent mark him properly as he can’t do much. I’m making sure he’s going to properly smell like me for days no matter how many showers he’ll take after. As he starts to mumble and grumble words still unintelligible I chuckle at how adorable he is going further than I thought I could and properly bite into his shoulder. He jerks gently as I suck harshly leaving a mark behind. Despite our healing abilities its going to stay there for a day or two.

‘’…no…meanie…’’ he mumbles as I start licking over the abused skin pressing kisses as an apology all around it ‘’Hmmmm…’’ he’s still not making much sense, so I start trailing gentle kisses over the side of his neck giving him mercy by bypassing his sensitive spot to raise up his neck, over to the corner of his jaw which I bite gently but he moves his head away growling half-heartedly.

So, I end up pressing kisses over his chest, tipping his head back myself, to pepper kisses all over his face. The frown disappears expression relaxing the more I do it. Well until he has regained normal thinking abilities.

‘’Alright, alright stop, I get it.’’ he states in protest grinning widely trying to move his head away every time I lean in but I always land a kiss ‘’You love me, you love me I get it I love you too!’’ he goes on and then just flips us over to my right smartly avoiding my injured arm that’s starting to make itself present with the soreness, ache and pain because it’s still a wound and not a light one the bullet having been made out of silver.

‘’I do!’’ I end up agreeing as he settles between my legs still settled inside me. It should be gross, it is but it isn’t ‘’Very, very much with all my heart, my soul, my everything.’’ I try to portray my emotions with words but there’s not that many words to describe them exactly, so instead the smile that stretches across his lips is due to the bond, because he knows perfectly how I’m feeling. And the same goes for me, which is fucking maddening how much both of us are so sappy.

‘’Mine.’’ I state wrapping my arms up around his neck, as I stare at him. And I’ll never be tired of admiring him, even less loving him.

He smiles back genuinely eyes shining in return with unsaid emotions that are fully conveyed to me silently my heart bursting with joy and happiness ‘’Yours.’’

Copyright 2018© by barbika1508. All rights reserved.

Congratulations, KAITLIN! You’ve been accepted for the role of LAERTES with an approved FC change to KENDRICK SAMPSON. Admin Rosey: Ladies, gents, and all other mob members I am so incredibly happy to announce that we finally have our BAERTES (this is the one and only time I will condone the usage of that nickname). Kaitlin, I am just so incredibly happy that you have brought to us our golden, flawed boy who will likely be the reckoning of us all. You captured the smallest moments so well, where the nuances of his voice crept in and destroyed us all. Verona has longed for the boy with the broken crown who carries the weight of a dead legacy on his shoulders. Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

Out of Character

Alias | Kaitlin.

Age | 21.

Preferred Pronouns | She/her.

Activity Level | You guys should be pretty familiar with my activity by this point, but long story short I tend to wait a few days and then write replies in one fell swoop when they collect! But it definitely varies on my mood.

Timezone | EST.

Current/Past RP Accounts | La principessa, in case you forgot. ;)

In Character

Character | Laertes; Lawrence Federico Vernon. I’d love to use Kendrick Sampson as his FC, but I can roll with Michael if you guys prefer!

What drew you to this character? |

I was really completely head over heels in love with Lawrence the first time I gave his biography a true and proper read through, but the more and more times I’ve read it, I kind of think that I had him all wrong when I first fell in love. Which, I think, is kind of the entire the point. For the sake of avoiding onion metaphors, I’ll just leave it at saying Lawrence is a character with a lot of surprising layers that I didn’t really see the first time around. I think it’s really easy to kind of take him at face value (which to be fair, I think he probably uses his name a lot to make people take him as a god immediately and then uses that preconception of him to bolster his status as a god even further, but that’s besides the point) and say that he’s the golden boy son who was made in his father’s image and is now out for blood because his father has been murdered. That’s the cut and dry of it, and it’s easy to love Lawrence for the cut and the dry. He’s miraculous in that way, sun-haloed and dripping gold, with a tongue like honey and blood like fire, but for all that he was made by his father he is not actually made from his father’s image. He’s been molded and crafted into this kind of Alvise-adjacent sculpture that’s just as clever, just as much a general and a tactician, a politician in every way except for the personal willingness to spill blood for his own cause. I think, if it were his own glory that Lawrence was fighting for, he’s never spill a drop of the stuff. But he is responsible for the ichor that flows in the Montague’s veins, and in his eyes, responsible for the well being of Verona by proxy. And I think it’s kind of easy to miss this disjuncture between him being his father son, and wanting nothing more than to be his father’s son, with the man that he actually is in his marrow. A chaotic good fighting with a lawful good, if you will. And I’m nothing if not a sucker for characters who suffer heavy internal conflict, even if they’re unaware of it, so, here we are.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? |

GOLD-COLORED BOY. I am just, first and foremost, super interested in connecting Lawrence with an array of people. He is such a people person, entirely someone who has defined himself and his self worth on the things that he can make other people think about him, the ways he can force himself into their lives by making them be unable to stop thinking about him. He’s got this haloed-in-gold and holier-than-thou thing going on, but you kind of have to wonder how much of that is what other people put on him and what he actually projects himself. Obviously it’s some degree of both, but Lawrence has built himself upon other people, upon the things he inspires other people to do. There’s no malintent in his own actions, only this desperate need to embody the tactician that his father is, and so he plays off of others, molds himself into what situations need of him. But there’s this struggle between who he is, the lionheart, and who his father is, the red hand to Damiano’s bloodied crown. So many of the connections that he’s made over the years have been positive in nature where they can be, and violent and fear-driven only where they absolutely must be. An international agent, he is no vagabond, but he is someone who gets restless, and yet? Never reckless. Part of this is conditioning from his father, knowing that anything reckless would result in Alvise’s intervention and likely his call back to the homefront. Part of it though has to just be who Lawrence is. He’s got this unshakeable commitment to doing what he thinks is right, and I’m really interested to see how his commitment to his vision is going to shift now that his father has died and his motivations will have to shift from finding pride to finding revenge. We’re already starting to see the devolution of his rationality with his investment in Cyrus as an informant. His father would tell him that it’s foolish to trust the Capulet’s princeling, that Lawrence should take anything the boy says and assume that near-on the opposite is true, and yet here he is recruiting him anyways. I’m definitely someone who tends to be a lot more intrigued by devolution in my characters than I am in positive revolution, and I’d love to watch some of Lawrence’s long-fought and hard-won connections start to crumble because they start to feel like he isn’t the same man that they met once upon a time.

ORIGINAL SIN. Mistakes certainly take their toll on our characters, but they make writing them all the more fun for us writers, and I am nothing if not in love with writing characters who are riddled with flaws and who allow those flaws to befall them at inopportune moments. For this reason, as much as it might injure Lawrence, I would love nothing more than for him to take his vengeance upon the wrong person. I mean, Lawrence’s soul is bound in gold and honor. What happens to an honor-bound soul when it commits an unforgivable act? When it does something that in the eyes of God and his people can only been seen as dishonorable? I would love for the death of his father to cause this burning need for vengeance in his soul. One of the constant threads though his biography is fire, with him carrying the ‘torch’ of his name and his wanting to “raze” the city to ash for the sake of finding his father’s murderer. He is through and through someone who has been raised to be okay with the committing the dishonorable for the sake of bolstering another family’s name, but at his core he’s very much the golden ‘Lionheart’ character that you all have named him. The first sentence of his bio, after all, is that he was raised to be so much more than he was. Lawrence was born to be the physical embodiment of legacy, of glory, something holy in its unholiness. Like you said, he’s spent his life taking direction from his father, conditioning himself into being the man that his father needs him to be, and without the sort of guiding hand constantly reminding him that there’s honor to be found in the dishonorable, in deceit and betrayal, that fire and glory go hand in hand, I can’t wait to see how this dishonor takes hold in his heart. Like you said, when all is said and done, funeral pyres and prayers will be the only thing to keep Verona warm when he is through with it–does this not apply to himself? Will he not have to hold a funeral for the man his father turned him into? Or will, in this loss, he find himself turning into Alvise himself? Lose himself in his loss and his grief and his need to have his father as his guiding light?

O’ DESSA, MY DESSA. Those Vernon’s. Their hearts on on their sleeves, in their eyes, in their throats—choking them to death. They use their hearts like weapons, wield their passions like anger and teach their love to feed their wrath, spit venom from their left ventricles and use aorta to pump cunning through to each vein. I’m fascinated by them, almost as equally as they are both fascinated with human hearts. What makes them beat. What makes them break. What can they use against their enemies that might allow those Vernon’s to sink their canines through a left atrium into the right. They both know the strength of the human heart, know how it has defined their own lives, and I think that makes them uniquely capable of using other people’s own hearts against them. But Lawrence doesn’t really see this, no matter its truth. They are both wracked with grief, but both of them know how to use their emotions to their own advantage, and I’d love to see them working together to do just that. Lawrence is so blinded by his heart right now, so completely slave to its angers and its passions and I’m interested to see how that will color his interactions with Odessa. He’s got this ‘my sister, my responsibility’ thing that I’m a total sucker for, but Odessa has no need for his protection, has a heart in her chest that beats as strongly as his own. They are made of the same marrow, yet where he could see cunning, instead he sees softness. Firstly, I can’t imagine Odessa really allowing him to feel this way, can’t imagine her allowing him to keep her small any longer. For God’s sake, he’s been gone for months now, gone traveling to build and bolster relationships and he left her behind. The rational part of him knows that she is capable, knows that she can take care of herself, but I think a big part of him feels like he’s just lost his father and the thought of Odessa putting herself in harm’s way to avenge their father is something he cannot even begin to fathom. And yet—I want nothing more than for Lawrence to overcome his misconceptions, to let go of those wings he’s tried to clip and give them back to her. Better yet, make her snatch them from his grasp and make him see his sister’s heart is equally as much a force of nature as he is.  

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | Bitch…. I might be. (Honestly tho, like, give the guy a break!!!)

In Depth

In-Character Interview: I wrote a para sample, so I’ve only done two of these, but if y’all want more since my para sample isn’t modern, then you’re more than welcome to tell my ass to stop being lazy and ask for them. Anyways!!!

Curled around him like a vine, Lawrence runs his hand through the tips of the girls hair and revels in the quiet moment of after-sex, in the warmth of having another human in his bed. There’s nothing like it, the soft moments of the after, the tender calming moments that come with having shared your body with someone else.

“Tell me about yourself,” she says, and ruins everything. “What do you do all day when you’re not meeting with my uncle?”

Lawrence sighs at the girl’s question, wishes that he hadn’t let her curl herself into his side, but there was something about the human contact that he hadn’t been able to deny. With her head resting on the juncture between his arm and his shoulder, he can feel her breath warm on his skin, and feel strands of her brown hair tickling the skin at the base of his neck. What only moment ago had felt like such a comfort suddenly feels like suffocation, feels like something that should make him run.

But he’s a general. And general’s don’t run.

“Your uncle’s not the only man I work with, you know,” he responds carefully, avoiding her question. He has no desire to discuss his daily routine with the family of one of his clients; even if they aren’t an enemy but an ally, it’s always better to keep your life safeguarded from prying eyes. “Besides, I’d so much rather talk about what you do with those beautiful hands of yours all day than the many tedious business meetings I attend.”

He blushes, and it pulls at something in his abdomen.

He distracts her with stars, makes them shine behind her eyes until he draws that blush across her whole body.

–

Lawrence has just finished securing a new client on the Eastern Russian coast when the client asks him the unholy question, dares to cross a line that he doesn’t yet have the right to cross.  

“Tell me, son,” and Lawrence pretends that being called son doesn’t set his teeth on edge; he is not this man’s blood, and he has no interest in being as such. “This war between you and your, how you say, fellow Veronesi brothers, what do you think of it?”

Lawrence can’t help but pause for a moment when the client asks this, partly because he has dared to ask it, and more so because he can feel himself wanting to shiver at the thought of a Capulet being called his brother. Lawrence is surprised by the question, to be sure, but he tightens his jaw the way that his father taught him so many years ago and looks his clients dead in the eyes. “I assure you, генеральный, you have nothing to worry about from my home front. They won’t touch you.”

“I don’t need to be assured you won’t let them get their hands on my business, gonfaloniere. If I had doubts, I would not agree to work with you.” Lawrence resists the urge to furrow his brows together, presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth to keep his face free of confusion and anger alike. “I asked how you feel about your war.”

Lawrence considering silence in the way of an answer, but something makes him want to reply.

“War is not the word I would use for it, just the Capulets wishing they had the kind of reach that we Montague’s do and being angry that they do not. There’s a reason you’re here talking to me and not some Capulet принцесса. I avoid paying the Capulets any mind; they are not worth my time. I hope that is answer enough for you.”

The general raises his glass in answer, and Lawrence answers him in kind.

They both drink to their dishonesty.

(the two russian words used here are general and princess, respectively.)

In-Character Para Sample;

Lawrence Vernon is sixteen the first time he becomes aware that his father will stop at no one when it comes to manipulation, not even his own son.

He is playing a game of football with some boys from school, an unorganized team that is mostly made up of boys with too much time on their hands and too little to do with them, boys with restless hearts and reckless souls who want nothing more than to find approval in every glance that gets cast their way, who want nothing more than for people to tell them that they are great–some, in spite of it all. It’s Alvise’s idea his son join, encourages him one afternoon when he gets home to eat dinner with his children, tells him over a bowl of bolognese that he saw a group of boys his age playing and he should think about joining them next time.

Lawrence, never wanting to disappoint, joins the next day.

The boys in his class always loved him, revered him like a god walking, each and every person in Verona knowing in their heart of hearts that the Vernon boy was someone you want in your corner. Among them is a boy with golden hair and a heart like steel, and at first meeting Lawrence dislikes him with a kind of vehemence that he can’t understand. Lionhearts do not call to other lionhearts, and their souls were made of the same. Alvise disapproves the first time that Lawrence complains about the other.

The Cesari boy? His father asks him, and when Lawrence nods yes, his father speaks again. You are as powerful as who you surround yourself with, he says, and smiles something otherworldly when Lawrence’s chest swells with shame. Even if you dislike him, do not discredit him.

The boy was the son of a wealthy man who owned vineyards across northern Italy. Everyone knew it, knew about the gold that lined their pockets and the glory that belonged in their bones, every if they were still new money and Verona was built on something ancient. Lawrence decides to give the golden hair boy another chance, and when he does he finds that somehow their golden halos can come together into something miraculous, something like being understood.

One night, they sneak out of their houses and go for drinks at a local bar, and both are leaning on each other by the end of the night, spilling secrets and fears and other things that would make them anything less than gods.

“We’re broke,” the boy says, leaning his head back against the metal fence the pair of them are propped up against.

“No way,” Lawrence replies, turning to look at his friend. The other boy just closes his eyes and nods his head. “No way.”

“My father he just…” the boy trails off for a moment and shakes his head. “Made some bad calls, bought some new lands, and they turned out to be duds. The wine? Terrible. Thirteen year olds wouldn’t even buy the shit those grapes produced.”

“Yeah, but the other vineyards are still producing, right?”

“Yeah, but profits from those paid for the new land, and then he took out debts looking for more new land that would offset those bad purchases, and now he’s just saving face and praying no one at the banks notices what deep shit he’s in before he can figure out a way to make back the money he took out. He thought maybe this harvest season would help, but,” the boy hiccups, and swallows before going on again. “But there’s some competitor I guess who’s edging him out and my dad can barely afford to keep himself afloat, much less ward off competition.”

Lawrence is silent.

“So, we’re fucked,” the boy says finally, then laughs. “Fucked. Such an American curse. It tastes so good.”

Lawrence brings a hand to cover his mouth, almost wants to hang his head for feeling for his friend.

“And your dad couldn’t use the land he bought for anything else?” He asks, lifting his head to look at the other boy.

He just smiles at Lawrence, shakes his head and then waves him off with a fling of his left hand.

“We’ll figure something out,” then a short pause. “We have to.”

They go back to laughing after that, to discussing their team’s win against another local one, to pushing and shoving each other about the pretty redhead that had stopped to watch their game, arguing over who she was really staring at.

The next day Alvise Vernon calls his son into his office before dinner, and Lawrence walks in casually, not apprehensive in the way he should be. He strides into the office without announcement, his shoulders straight and his smile wide.

“You wanted to see me, Father?”

Looking up from the documents before him, Alvise actually looks happy to see his son. It makes something like pride dance across Lawrence’s skin, and he knows that he would do anything he asked of him.

“I hear that you’ve made a new friend,” his father says, and Lawrence laughs, unimpeded.

“Yes, I suppose I have,” he replies, raising his eyebrows. “But how did you hear about it?”

“When you earn the right to know my sources, then I’ll tell you,” Alvise says, a wolf’s grin painted across his face. “Now, I thought you said that you disliked the Cesari boy. You said he was, I believe your direct words were, a ‘pompous ass.’”

Something about seeing his father use air quotes around ‘pompous ass’ sends Lawrence into a fit of laughter.

“I guess I did say that, yes,” he says, still laughing, a hand pressed against his stomach. “And I stand by it. Cesari is a righteous little shit, but now I know he’s a righteous little shit who’s terrified of the future, and that makes me feel better about the whole thing.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Just something he said about his dad.”

“His father? Why would his father make him fearful of the future?” Alvise asks, the tone of their conversation sobering slightly as his brows furrow. “He owns one of the most successful new conglomerates of wineries in Northern Italy.”

Lawrence pauses only a moment before answering. “They’re bankrupt,” he says, pressing his lips together and tilting his head to the side as he raises his shoulders as if to say what can you do?

“How?”

“He made some bad investments, took out loans to pay off the investments thinking his current properties would turn enough profit to pay them off, but I guess the harvest wasn’t great and there’s a new guy on the market selling better product or something. Ergo, bankruptcy. They’re trying to hide it from the bankers and the papers long enough to pay off the debts, but like I said, Cesari’s terrified.”

Alvise purses his lips, then stands up from behind his desk, slowly walking around the edge of it.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” he says, and comes to stand before his son. “I’m glad he had you to listen to.”

He walks away before Lawrence can respond, and though the sentiment brings a slight smile to his cheeks, he can’t help but feel something twist in the bottom of his stomach at the way his father said it.

He doesn’t realize until two days later that he should have listened to his gut.

CESARI EMPIRE CRUMBLES read the headlines, and the shiner Lawrence wears on his cheek, courtesy of a boy who was once his friend and could be no longer, feels like a brand when he storms into the Capital Library in search of one Alvise Vernon, feels like a brand that he deserves.

“You used me!” he shouts, pushing open the door to his father’s second office, caring little for the soldier seated across the desk. A single glance from Alvise is enough to send the young woman running from the room, but Lawrence barely looks at her, honor and loyalty battling for dominance in his chest. He cannot believe that his father would use him in this way, would compromise his son’s honor in such a way, but there’s a part of Lawrence that can never question Alvise, a part of him that would just nod his head if his father were to telling him that murder is no sin.

“Elio Cesari and his money were gaining power,” Alvise starts, leaning back in his chair and placing his elbows on the armrests, the picture of ease. “Perhaps you don’t understand this yet, but power isn’t an unlimited resource, and his posed a threat to some of our allies. Yes, I encouraged you to befriend his son in the hopes that he might give you the information we needed to remove him from the playing field, but Cesari’s misfortunes are self-inflicted. I did not have a hand in his poor investments; it’s not my fault if the man doesn’t have a head for business and just got lucky with his first few. Beginner’s luck has no place at our table.”

“And what about my honor, father? You’ve made my word worthless with this, my friendship worthless,” Lawrence starts, feeling like something inside of him is cracking apart with every word. It goes against everything he has ever known to question his father in such a way.

“Oh, stop that,” Alvise says sharply, shaking his head. “This isn’t about you.”

Lawrence opens his mouth to reply, but Alvise shoots him a look that silences him.

“This is about something much bigger than you,” he says, knitting his hands together before him. Lawrence is still standing, but he can feel some of the tension easing from his shoulders, some of the fight in him dying. The longer he is here, the longer he looks at his father and listens, the less able he is to think of him as the enemy.

Alvise Vernon always had been, and always would be, his version of a savior.

“This is about what was right for Verona, Lawrence, about what Damiano and all the other Montague’s needed. Don’t you understand that yet? This is what we are made for, for doing bad things to ensure that something else good can happen. Verona can’t afford to be led by men who cannot handle their own businesses, and that’s what would have happened had we allowed the Cesari’s to continue lying about their profits.”

Lawrence sits down finally in the chair across from his father, the one that had previously been occupied by a young woman terrified of the man before her. Lawrence could only find awe, awe and terror. And is not that we are afraid of not also beautiful? Does it not also captivate?

“It’s hurt you, to sacrifice the Cesari boy’s friendship, but know that it was done for the good of our people. I’m proud of you for that.”

And that’s when Lawrence crumbles finally, lets go of all of his anger and his hurt and his feelings of betrayal. It’s then that he finally understands.  

“Legacies are what make families great, boy,” Alvise Vernon says to his son, staring at the young man from behind the mahogany desk. His gaze is hard, nothing soft or conciliatory about it. He rules Verona with iron in his heart and in his fists and he rules his children the same way. “They are bigger than men, far bigger than any individual. The Vernon name has been alive since long before you or I, and if you lead our family in the ways I teach you in the coming years, then it shall be around long after you or I as well. What happened to the Cesari’s is one lesson I hope you will remember.”  

And Lawrence never forgets.

Extras:

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A disorganized collection of headcanons.

i. Once there was a young boy, a slight and thin thing that begged for a nickname, begged for something, anything, that might be less of a mouthful than Lawrence. Every time that he tried to slip out of his name and into something else though his father would give him a hard look that spoke more volumes than the young boy ever wanted to interpret. The best he ever came up with was Wren, and for weeks at scuola primaria he got away with it, but then his teacher sent a letter home about ‘Wren’ hitting another student and that was the last straw.

The boy father sat his son down and stared at him hard in the eyes, not for the first time and certainly not the last, and said something that would stay with the young boy for the rest of his life.

“Perception is power, Lawrence. Do you not know that? Have I not taught you this well enough yet?”

“But Papá, it’s just a name–” the young boy starts, but is interrupted by his father immediately.

“There’s weight in a name, son. I named you Lawrence for a reason–don’t ever let anyone make you something you are not, including yourself. Our lives are built on our name; they define who we are, who we might become. The names we surround ourselves with are equally as important. You, my son? You are named for the Saint Laurence of Rome, who refused to turn over gold and riches to the Pope and instead presented him with the people who the Church had been instructed to help–the poor and the disabled, the faithful who had lost faith. To bear your name means that you understand your purpose, sometimes better even than the people who have given you this purpose. We Vernons are the hands used to defend our chosen people. The Montagues lead this city, and it is our God-given mission to stand beside them and make their rule possible. If you must choose a nickname, then be called Vernon, for nothing else would do you justice.”

The young boy could only look at his father with wide eyes, but his shoulders stay straight. The father puts his hands on either of the young boy’s shoulders and bends down so that they are at eye level.

“What’s your name?” the father asks, after a long pause.

“Lawrence Vernon.”

The father smiles then, a half-life thing that paints only the left side of his face in warmth, like even with his child he cannot afford to show kindness, to show softness. The boy doesn’t understand this now, but later, when the father is gone, he will. He places a cold palm on his son’s cheek, pats it gently and says “Good.”

And with that he takes his leave.

ii. Lawrence has three different degrees, two from Oxford and one from Cambridge, just for some balance, all of which he did residencies abroad for and completed on accelerated timelines. One he did in Berlin, while he was studying Organizational Psychology. The second was in France, for while he was studying Political Science. The last, and his favorite, was being abroad in Tokyo while he studied Economics. During all of these pursuits of higher education, Lawrence was simultaneously courting and securing new clients across the globe, and reassuring and reaffirming relationship with clients they already had at the same time.

iii. Lawrence’s sense of dress and style was always a point of contention between him and Alvise, who frequently and loudly disapproved of the garb Lawrence chose to don, but it was the singular thing he constantly held his own ground on. He has a strange affinity for hawaiian shirts and other strange forms of decadence, like the gold necklace with a tiny version of the hands from The Creation of Adam painting he sometimes hangs around his neck, or the ornate guns with paintings of saints on them that he loves to buy even though they usually less accurate than the high-grade weapons the mob buys (what his gun lacks, he decides to make up for in personal skill, call it a challenge). He puts on a suit when he must, but it’s usually Gucci or highly stylized Dolce & Gabbana. He likes texture and the ornate, and he won’t let anyone take that away from him.  

iv. Her name grows unimportant with time, but the way she lingers in Lawrence’s bones does not change. He is eighteen and on his first solo mission abroad, with war and strategy in his marrow but youth in his blood, when what should be a standard check in with foreign clients in France turns into a month long stay for fear of losing them to a local distributor. He wears the weight of expectation heavy on his broad shoulders and has never once bowed to it, never once stumbled beneath its weight, but for the first and last time a girl will make him question his name.

A girl with her head in the clouds and her feet securely on the ground beneath her feet, she smiles like the sun and it makes his heart sing, blinds him every moment that he stumbles across her path. They meet when he finds out that one of his new enemies is the husband of a local artist and he goes into the man’s studio only to stop dead in his tracks at the sight of a woman sitting in the center of the room, a white sheet covering some parts of her, but many not, and when she looks at him it feels like a fire has ignited in his blood, slowly burning away the expectation and the name in his marrow.

They fuck in the room the artist rents to her above the studio that night, and Lawrence stops caring about the world of wars that feels a million miles away, like it’s in another country, in another time, in another life.

Alvise sends men to help Lawrence secure their clients wallets once and for all when he goes silent for over a week, but they report that his strategist son has fallen for a peasant girl. Alvise bids them pay her weight in gold, and Lawrence Vernon comes home, his heart left behind in France where a peasant girl hadn’t even bothered to kiss him goodbye.

Once upon a time there was a girl who he would give away his name for; there never was again.

Walnut (Evan Hansen x Reader)

TW: SMUT, really smutty, like use of the word boobs and condom

Words: 2,176

Requested: Nope lol

Disclaimer: this is my very first smut... ever. if i am absoloutley garbage - please tell me. seriously. i will stop lol. anyways, this is a super fumbly/nervous smut thing bc lets be real... evan would not be the most confident in this region. 

Yours and Evan’s relationship seemed to fall into a format that could be related to English literature: repeated and rhythmically patterned. The moment you two start doing something, you couldn’t stop. After your first kiss, Evan would not stop pecking you on the lips. After your first time holding hands, Evan couldn’t bare not capturing your fingers and intertwining them with his. Just last month, you and Evan had your first make out session.

It was strange at first. It took a while to getting used to. It would start off with a kiss, standing up. Then Evan would have to break away to control his breathing from excitement. It took a while to find a sitting position where you were both comfortable to lock lips. A few fumbles and bumped heads later, it was decided that the best spot was if you straddled Evan’s lap whilst he sat on his bed - leaning against the wall.

The make out session would include straddling and hair pulling at the bare minimum. It was so new to both you and Evan that you had to make a code word. Every time one of you got a little too excited, you would murmur the word walnut. That would give you or Evan time to calm down before continuing in kissing. At the beginning of the month, it was quite rare that the word would need to be used. 2-3 weeks into the make out month, Evan had used it 6 times and you twice. Now, at the end of the month, Evan needed a break every 10 minutes.

           Today was like every other day of the month. Evan greeted you after last period with a kiss. You two would walk to his house, holding hands. Stepping through the door, he led you upstairs. The two of you giggled like children. Evan’s mom was rarely home. Which could give you the range of make out spot possibilities, but Evan didn’t like change. Evan liked security and being able to know what goes on around him. Because of that, each afternoon snog would be in his room, with the door shut.

           You reached up onto your tip toes and grabbed Evan’s face in your hands. Smiling widely, you connected your lips together. Evan immediately placed his hands on your hips, pulling you into his lanky frame. Smiling against his warmth, you slowly led him to the edge of his bed so he could scurry against the wall; for you to get into your regular seating position. The moment you swung your legs around his hips and sat on him, his eyes grew wide.

           “Walnut,” he whispered, as if the world could hear him.

           “Already?” you question curiously.

           He nodded quickly, swallowing hard. You nodded with a small smile, obviously respecting his wishes to take a quick breather. After a few moments passed, he gave you the nod to keep going. You pressed your lips back to his, moving your mouth in sync. Your hands brushed up his blue polo and into his sandy locks. He let out the smallest of whimpers. It left butterflies in your stomach. Evan’s hands ran up and down your sides. Pulling away from his lips, you looked into his sunken eyes.

           “We are going to try something a little different, okay?” you searched his eye for approval. He gulped and nodded slowly.

           You continued to kiss him, then slowly trailed them down his neck. About two inches away from his ear, he seemed to become weak. You applied the smallest amount of pressure, and you felt his body stiffen.

           “Walnut,” he stammered.

           You kept going. Taking his hands in yours, you slowly guided them north – up to your breasts. 

          “Walnut,” his eyes flew open and watched intensely as to where you set his hands. You held his hands there, making them apply pressure to the new destination. 

          “Walnut, ohmygod, walnut,” he pracitcally hollered. 

            You pulled away quickly, looking at your loving boyfriend. His hair was sticking up, his lips were swollen, eyes were wide, and a small tent forming in his khakis. 

             “I-It was a really close call this time,” he breathed out, blushing like a mad man. 

              “Evan, we should really talk about this,” you looked at him with wide eyes.

               “Ohmygod, you think I’m so weird, don’t you? I-I can try my best, next time? I will try and last as long as I can without saying it-”

               “No, no, Evan. It’s not that,” you chuckled. You could hear him sigh with relief. “I’ve been thinking about this whole thing. You have been saying the code word so often, that it’s just- I don’t know-”

           “W-What is it?” he scrambled to hold your hand, running his thumb over your knuckles.

           “You’ll find it silly,” you laughed sheepishly, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear.

           “Me? F-Find it silly? No way…José,” he gave you an awkward, toothy grin.

           “Okay, okay, I was just thinking – God, I don’t know, - that it’s silly how we go so far and you get so worked up and then we never… I don’t know… finish?”

           “Y-You mean, you want to-“

           “Only if you want to-“

           “W-Well maybe we could-“

           “Oh my gosh, Evan, i-it’s okay-“

           “No,” he took both of your hands in his, looking up into your eyes. “I want to. I-I really want to.”

           Evan’s mom was coming home in an hour. So you and Evan decided that tomorrow evening would be the best.

 -

 It was the next morning; you had just gone to the guidance counselor to ask for a condom. You asked Evan to pick up a package of them at the corner store, but he was afraid that somehow – they would end up telling the whole town.

The entire day was filled with excitement. Yours and Evan’s face stayed a shade of firetruck red all afternoon. During lunch, Evan rested his hand on your thigh, which only made your blushing worse. Of course, Jared picked up on it and made an obnoxious comment. Something the along the lines of being “fucking gay”, and calling Evan a “weird sex freak”.

The final bell had rang and you practically ran into Evan. You giggled at each other, knowing that he had rushed to meet you too.

-

 Evan closed his bedroom door and suddenly got nervous. You frowned when you saw him fumbling with the material of his shirt.

“What’s wrong, Evan?” you asked softly. You sat him down on his bed, sitting next to him. Running your hand up his arm, you tried your best to comfort him. He shrugged in response. “We don’t have to do this,” you reminded him. “I’m more than happy to wait. This is a consensual thing. I love you, you know that, right?” you cracked a smile, and saw him crack one too.

            “I-I want to do this. I-I’m just scared. What if I mess up? What if I…” he began to trail off. He looked up at you and whispered, “what if I cum too early?”

           Your face turned red to match his. “It’s okay if all of that happens. This is a learning experience for the both of us. We can go slow,” you kissed him gently on the cheek. You waited for him to respond. Obviously, you would never pressure him to do something like this.

           Evan turned to you, “can we still use walnut?”

           Giggling, you nodded, “Of course.”

            Evan scooted to rest his back on the wall, pulling you up onto his lap. “I-I’m ready,” he whispered against your lips.

           You two started out as per usual. Evan didn’t use the code word once. You were kissing his neck, until he pulled away, gesturing to his shirt.

           “Should I take this off?” he asked very calmly.

           You nodded, helping him remove his polo. You were breathless at the sight. His pale form was structured like a sculpture. Every muscle, vein, and freckle was beautifully scattered on his flesh. Birth marks, moles, and little chest hairs dusted his torso. You ran your fingertips along the stretch marks that had been placed there from his middle school growth spurts.

           “You, Evan Hansen, are beautiful,” you reminded him. Evan turned an even deeper shade of red.

           Taking his hands, you guided him to the hem of your sweater. You allowed him to pull it off of you, revealing your bare skin and plain push-up bra.

           “Wow…” he breathed out, absoloutley mesmerized. You began to feel the familiar tent beneath your lap.

           “You can-um, you can touch me,” you reminded him nervously, with a small giggle.

           He reached up shakily, cupping your bra in his hands. He felt you cautiously, as if he could easily break you. He was speechless. It was the first real pair of boobs he had ever seen.

           You giggled at his expression, reaching behind you unclasping your bra. As Evan kneaded your skin, he gasped as the material fell off of your breasts. His tent grew tighter and his eyes became wider. You guided his hands to your nipples, letting him touch the sensitive nubs. You threw your head back with a whimper. Evan was shaking. 

“W-Walnut, ohmygod, shit, walnut,” he whispered between his teeth. 

You nodded, watching as his eyes shut tight and his hands froze in place. You could tell that he was trying to calm his breathing. You were surprised at his sudden colourful language. A few moments passed, and your boyfriend slowly opened his eyes. 

“Did you-”

“N-No, I’m still- um- full,” he mumbled back quickly. 

You giggled at his word choice and placed his hands on your hips. You pressed your lips to his, trying to give him a feeling of familiarity. Evan soon became comfortable, taking the slightest bit of control. His fingers traced down to the hemline of your jeans. He popped open the button. Climbing off of him, you laid down beneath him, watching him hover over your body. He slid your jeans down your legs, placing the material to the side. His eyes gazed over your body, drinking the sight before him. 

“Walnut,” he whispered. 

You sighed, leaning your head back on the pillow as his eyes shut tight again. 

“I-I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s just that- You’re laying there- fuck- you just look so good. And holy hell I don’t know if I can-” 

Giggling, you stopped his rambling. “Ev, it’s okay. I will wait as long as you want me to.” 

After the second walnut calling, everything went smoothly. You were finally fully bare, and Evan was left in his boxers. 

“A-Are you okay for me to take these off?” you asked him, placing your hand on the band of his underwear. He nodded quickly, watching your every move. 

Carefully, you pulled the white cotton off of his pelvis. His length sprung out of his boxers, hitting his stomach. You looked at his newly exposed flesh, then back at his face. “You’re doing great, Ev. You really are,” you whispered to him. Slowly, you reached out your hand and stroked him once. 

“S-Stop, or I’ll-” he whimpered out. 

“Okay, okay,” you nodded, reaching over to grab the condom before he stopped you. You raised an eyebrow to give him a questioning look. 

“I-I want you to cum, too. And I... I won’t last that long,” he mumbled sheepishly. You smiled at his concern, giving him a kiss on the cheek. He was doing so well, and you really admired that he thought of you and your pleasure. 

“Is there any way to get you, um, closer before I... ya know...” he asked quietly. 

Nodding slowly, you guided his hand to your heat. You let him rub you in a repeatitive motion. Soon, Evan got the hang of things, letting you put your hand on his shoulder - rather than guiding him. His thumb found your most sensitive nub. 

“What does this do?” he asked in a whisper, lightly tapping it. 

You inhaled sharply. “That felt really good,” you admitted with an even bigger blush. 

 His continuous tapping brought you closer and closer to a high. You stopped him when you were almost at your breaking point.

“O-Okay, I’m ready,” you whispered up at him.

 Evan opened up the condom, rolling it on to himself. He looked at you once more for permission. You gave him a nod, smiling. Before he entered you, he whispered against your lips.

“I love you.”

 He slid into you, neither of you lasting more than 15 seconds. Evan hit his orgasm first, absolutely melting in your hands. His whole body shook. Then it was your turn, grappling your finger nails into the flesh on his spine.

-

Hedi came home around 10pm that night. You and Evan were cuddled on the couch, bones aching and hearts swelling. She opened the door with bags full of groceries.

“Aw, my two little lovebirds,” she mumbled. Putting down the grocery bags, she pulled out a plastic container. “Do you guys want some candied walnuts?”

Evan turned red.

WEDDING: August 12, 2017

Ceremony: Pittsburgh Airport Marriott

Reception: Pittsburgh Airport Marriott 

Hair: Debbie Mraovich-Contemporary Hair Design

Makeup: LouAnn Marangone-Mary Kay Cosmetics. Jamie and Joan Marangone-Amazing Lash Studio

Florist: Pittsburgh Airport Marriott

Bakery: Pittsburgh Airport Marriott

Entertainment: Second to None, John Mitch

Videographer: Generations Photography and Specialty Gift Shoppe

Colors: Regency

Honeymoon: Aruba

This is a wedding that I have been looking forward to for a very long time…long before these two were engaged. You see, Chad and Danielle are not family by blood, not by marriage, they are however still family. My mom and Danielle’s mom, LouAnn have been friends since our brothers were little and played baseball together.  I am talking elementary school and before. My mom is an only child and when my grandmother, Minnie passed away, LouAnn and her sister Sandi became a close and amazing confidants for my mom, taking us under her wing and caring for us the way that only family does. She has been there every step of the way. We spend Halloween night together eating LouAnn’s delicious, homemade Italian wedding soup, we spend Christmas Eve with their family with an amazing spread at Sandi’s home and giving and receiving of gifts. We spend lots of days in their company and were blessed when my youngest and last child was born on LouAnn’s birthday, leaving her to be my son’s birthday twin and a bond that can never be broken.

I remember the first time I met Chad, I, like any other family member, had to put my feelers out and see what I actually thought about him…to say that these two are perfect for each other is an understatement. They are beyond compatible and their daughter, Mya could not be a more perfect mix of the two of them, she looks just like Chad in every way with her Momma’s Italian personality, she’s gorgeous and spunky and I just love her to pieces.

Once engaged, we scheduled their engagement portrait session, these two are funny when it comes to pictures, whether it be like a family member who doesn’t want to put you out or they are truly that laid back about them, I may never know. My suggestion was all in the City of Pittsburgh, that is where they met, fell in love, used to live, had their daughter…it was beginning of many first for them as a couple. We started at the West End Overlook, hands down my favorite view of the city, wide and expansive and on a nice clear day you can see passed the Cathedral of Learning in Oakland. Then we headed downtown near The Point, which is close to where they lived and ended our session at The Point with sunset. At the end of the night as darkness had fallen upon us we talked about the details they had recently accomplished, they asked me to please come and enjoy myself(to the wedding)…I reminded them that I would be! The best weddings for me are the ones that I am photographing…I truly love and adore what I do, I wouldn’t even know what to do with myself at a wedding that I was “just a guest”. I mean really, what do you do in between ceremony and reception? I am bride and limo chasing, I don’t know what you are doing haha. We talked about Danielle’s sister in law, Stephanie as we had been since we started, as she was STILL in labor with her second child! We knew the baby was a boy and I asked if Dean was going to be the ring bearer and obviously Mya, their little girl would be the flower girl and that’s when Danielle asked me for Gabe to be a ring bearer as well… Not even kidding, I may have teared up, said yes and spent the next 11 months dreaming of how handsome my sweet boy would be, hoping that the tux we purchased would still fit come August 12 and praying that my rambunctious 3 year old would please, please, please not throw a fit and wreck Danielle and Chad’s wedding day.

With the wedding day fast approaching and all the preparations complete, we are here….the morning that Chad and Danielle will become man and wife…I. WAS. TERRIFIED! Her ceremony was scheduled for 5PM and Gabe begins to melt at 3PM, he needs naps but has been refusing them like that was his job. I have a few things to recommend for parents of the flower girl/ ring bearers in and around the ages of infant – 5 years old. A backpack! We happen to have  one that we sell that says “Ring bearer” on it, but any old bag will do. I stocked that thing full of goodies. I packed snacks, drinks, candy (just in case it got really ugly) and activities as well as what I like to call, the reward system. My daughter was no a reward kinda kid, she didn’t care that you had a lollipop waiting for her if she went potty or behaved well in church, my son however will do just about anything for a Matchbox Car. I had a series of 8 cars that he would receive for each thing that he did. He walked down the aisle, enter 1969 Corvette Matchbox car….he stood still and smiled for pictures, enter 1970 Camero Matchbox car and so on and so forth. Even I the reward giver could not believe this childs behavior.

Some of my favorite weddings have all events in one location, it makes it so easy for guests and as well as myself during the preceremony coverage. When scheduling weddings, we typically get coverage of the groom and his groomsmen at the church, having all events at one location allows us to easily go back and forth between  Bride and groom at capture all the those special moments. Danielle got ready on the 15th “penthouse” floor while Chad got ready on the 3rd floor.

From the moment we walked in, it was like a dream, my kids were well behaved and Danielle was the portrait of beauty. Her dress is AMAZING, Her jewelry  was perfect and those Valentino shoes!

We sent the girls to get their dresses on and proceeded to take photos of the “details”. It was now time to deliver the gifts to Chad, Dave(Danielle’s Dad), Matt and Brian(Danielle’s brothers). It warmed my heart to see Mya all dressed up in her little flower girl robe and handing out those precious treasures. We returned to Danielle’s room and got her dressed. Knowing this family as well as I do, if they cried, I cried, if they laughed, I laughed. I adore each and every one of them and today was going to be amazing and flawless and perfect.

Watching Danielle walk down the winding path to the ceremony was surreal, I have known Danielle since she  was a little girl, taken her senior portraits and here I was, on this day, capturing one of the biggest moments of her life. I have watched her grow into a successful, gorgeous woman and mother, now wife.

We did outdoor photos of the bridal party and bride and groom in the courtyard at the Marriott, no need to fuss with traveling, we were on a strict timeline. But we were able to capture so many beautiful moments along the way, from trying to get Brian to jump, to a dance line, to my crazy directions…”OK, stand as close to the fire as possible without torching your dress” to “wait, wait, wait, the reflection is perfect”.

Upon entering the reception, I always like to get photos of the room before as I like to say “Anyone messes it up”. Everything was beautiful. The STUNNING ice sculpture was breathtaking and each and every decoration was well thought out and planned. It was Danielle, it was Chad, it was perfectly them, together.

This brings me to the first dance, Danielle and Chad started together and ended as a family with Mya joining in, the irony is not lost on me. They all held each other close, enjoyed and soaked in the moment. Danielle and her Dad, Dave shared in the father daughter dance as well as Chad and his Mom, Wilma, neither would be complete without that sweet little lady, their daughter, their granddaughter, Mya.

Let the fun begin! Dancing the night away was a blast for everyone, group pictures of every guest, dance battle of guys versus girls, dance line, special dances for Jackie and her new husband, little girls and big girls alike twirling the night away, Lou and Dave, Danielle and Chad, Stephanie and Brian, Wilma and Jim and my dear parents and many others…all joined in for the Anniversary Dance…which Wilma and Jim won!

With a certain little ring bearer getting pretty sleepy, we ended the night with a photo session outside where we congratulated “my family members”, hugged and wished them well, which happens at every wedding…but this time it was different. This isn’t a couple that I will keep up with on Social Media or when they come in for their next newborn session, this is a couple that I love, care for and will see very soon. I will know that they are not just OK, I will know that they are happy and in love and that they have found that person to which their soul loves. I truly do not have a “favorite moment of the day”, they are all my favorites, many of which include my little man. Watching Danielle walk down the aisle, seeing LouAnn’s face as she turned to Chad, their first kiss, the moment that Mya gave me her “big cheese” at the altar, seeing my little man enter the reception, watching Jeff give his best man speech, watching Danielle during the Maid of Honor Speech, the first dance, the parent dances, the anniversary dance, the dance line, the end of the night kiss. Each moment of EVERY wedding fills me with joy, in a world such as ours is now, I HAVE to believe in weddings. I have the believe in marrying the love of your life, the joy in families, the eternal happiness that one feels being with your soul mate, the one that God designed for you and you alone. I have to believe in the fairytale. I love weddings, each and every one. 

Dagon | H.P. Lovecraft

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.

It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The Great War was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time.

When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my surroundings. Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude I knew nothing, and no island or coast-line was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for uncounted days I drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable land. But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon the heaving vastnesses of unbroken blue.

The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.

Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.

The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my position. Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths. So great was the extent of the new land which had risen beneath me, that I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears as I might. Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.

For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myself a pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanished sea and possible rescue.

On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day I forged steadily westward, guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher than any other elevation on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled toward the hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the fourth evening I attained the base of the mound which turned out to be much higher than it had appeared from a distance, an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the hill.

I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure again. And in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up my pack, I started for the crest of the eminence.

I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of vague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the mound and looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soard high enough to illuminate. I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan's hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness.

As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of rock afforded fairly easy foot-holds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity became very gradual. Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps where no light had yet penetrated.

All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the opposite slope, which rose steeply about an hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct impression that its contour and position were not altogether the work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.

Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist’s or archaeologist’s delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith; on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books; consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like. Several characters obviously represented marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen plain.

It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size, were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of Doré. I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shewn disporting like fishes in waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size, but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.

Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.

Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I reached the boat; at any rate, I know that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.

When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been given scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries.

It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm—a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

Best Travel Hashtags to Use on Instagram

Finding the best travel hashtags to add to your posts on Instagram and other social media platforms can help boost your views, get more people commenting on your travel photos and help people see why you’re totally worth following.

But more than that, travel hashtags can help you find a community of inspiring Instagrammers who love travel as much as you do. Whether you’re one of the #SoloTravelers, your journeys are #FamilyTravels or you’re working to fulfill your #TravelCoupleGoals, finding your tribe is much easier thanks to hashtags.

You may not be a travel influencer (yet), but that doesn’t mean you can’t use the same hashtag strategies the pros use to grow your own following and get your photos noticed. Here’s what you need to do.

Use Unique Instagram Travel Hashtags

#travel is a popular hashtag but not great for getting your travel photos seen.

#Travel and #traveling seem like the obvious best travel hashtags to use, but they’re really not. By the time you’ve finished editing your next Instagram post, your most recent #travel-tagged post will be buried by new snapshots shared by your fellow travelers because these are very, very popular Instagram hashtags.

The key to standing out from the ever-growing crowd of globetrotting Instagrammers is using travel hashtags that are variations of the theme. Here are some ideas that are highly searched but not overused that you can copy and paste:

#traveling

#travelers

#travelbug

#travelholic

#travelgram

#travelinggram

#travelphotography

#exploring

#explorer

#wanderer

#wanderlust

#doyoutravel

#goexplore

#travelmore

#lovetotravel

#wonderfulplaces

#roamtheplanet

#travellifestyle

One strategy you should also try is choosing your Instagram travel hashtags and vacation hashtags based on who you are and how you travel. It’s a great way to connect with other traveling Instagrammers who share your passions.

#solotravels

#solotraveldiaries

#solotravelstories

#nomadiclife

#womenwhoexplore

#womenwhotravel

#travelingladies

#familytravels

#travelingwithkids

#familytravelmoment

Hashtag Your Destination

Your followers definitely want to know where you are, so let your social media travel hashtags do the talking.

I used #kauai during a recent trip and found I received likes from both people who lived on the island and people who were traveling there. Start with the obvious Instagram hashtags related to your destination, like:

#mexico 

#sandiego 

#lajolla 

#nyc 

Then drill down even further. First, you can break it down by region. If you happen to be in Hong Kong, you could use #china and then #hongkong and even drill down further into neighborhood names like #kowloon.

You can also think about what sets your destination apart, like #colorado, #denver, #rockymountains, and #coloradolife. Just don’t forget to include those top-level destination-specific Instagram travel hashtags before experimenting with variations like #nycstyle, #instaparis, #traveleurope, or #lajollavibes.

Not sure how to hashtag your destination? Just pop the name of the city you’re visiting into Instagram’s search box. You’ll get loads of results showing the popular hashtags fort travel that other people in the city are using.

Use Branded Travel Hashtags

This tourism board travel hashtag is a sculpture on the famous Nice promenade.

Make sure to find out which popular travel hashtags are used by tourism boards, airlines, and attractions in the destination you’re posting about. Magazines and media also have their own branded hashtags for travel that you may want to consider using.

The upshot to using branded travel hashtags is not only are you getting more targeted eyeballs on your photos, but they may be less active than Instagram hashtags used worldwide. This means that more people are likely to see your travel photos as they’ll stay near the top of the hashtag feed for a longer period of time.

And, if you’re trying to get the attention of a particular brand on social media, this is one way to do it. Just make sure the photo you’re posting is relevant to that brand.

Some examples include:

#VisitSD (San Diego Tourism Authority)

#VisitCalifornia (Visit California)

#DiscoverHongKong (Hong Kong Tourism Board)

#flyLAX (Los Angeles International Airport)

#lifewelltravelled and #mychinaexperience (Cathay Pacific Airways)

#iflyAlaska (Alaska Airlines)

#IamATraveler (CN Traveler)

#IamAFan, #MOSpa, #MOFoodie, #MODetails (Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group)

#FourSeasons (Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts)

Hashtag What’s Around You

What are you capturing? A sunny day on the hiking trail? A sunset over the ocean? Make sure to hashtag what features prominently in your photos. Maybe you should include beach hashtags or mountain hashtags for travel.

Start with top-level hashtags that describe exactly what you’re looking at, like:

#sky

#clouds

#beach

#food

#nature

#snow

#sunset

#night

#mountains

But don’t stop there. Next, add some Instagram hashtags that give your post additional flavor, like:

#snowcapped

#roomwithaview

#beautifulnature

#riverside

#beautifulclouds

#landscapephotography

#luxuryhotel

#reflections

#tropicalisland

Are you lounging on the most beautiful beach you’ve ever seen? Think about how many beach hashtags for travel you can come up with, and then do a search to see if people are using them. It really is that simple.

And, finally, why not add a few photography hashtags that tell people how you take your photos? For example:

#Canon

#CanonEos

#Sonyphotography

#Sonycamera

#GoPro

#wideangle

#fisheye

Describe the Moment

Is the lei you just received in Hawaii super pretty? Is the Caribbean’s warm turquoise water washing onto your toes? People want to experience what you’re experiencing.

That’s why these top-level hashtags are so popular:

#love

#pretty

#funny

#amazing

#awesome

#yum

#cute

#luxury

Next, describe the vibe with hashtags like:

#viewfromabove

#skibum

#beachbum

#lovetheocean

#foreversummer

#sundown

Hashtag What You’re Doing

Hashtag what you’re doing or about to do.

Were you running on the beach or hiking in a national park when you took that photo (or your bestie snapped that gorgeous photo of you)?

Describing what you were doing is an easy way for people — aka potential followers — who share your interests to find you.

#running

#hiking

#flying

#swimming

#relaxing

#spa

#scubadiving

#exploring

Get Creative with Your Vacation Hashtags

Vacation hashtags are getting more and more descriptive and fun as time passes. Like:

#sunsetporn

#nightphotography

#postcardsfromtheworld

#choosemountains

#optoutside

#ipulledoverforthis

#viewfromthetop

#sunset_madness

These vacation hashtags for travel are all about the vibe and how travel makes you feel. They may not have the numbers that #sunset has, but you can bet that the people browsing niche Instagram travel hashtags are the kinds of passionate people who make the best followers.

Aviation Travel Hashtags

Obviously, the photos you post with these popular hashtags must have something to do with aviation, but that should be easy considering how much of travel involves boarding a plane.

Do you love the journey as much as the destination? Then check out these air travel hashtags:

#instaplane

#planegeek 

#planes 

#flight

#aviation 

#planespotting 

#planeporn 

#landing

#takeoff 

#airlines 

#airplanes 

#aviationphotography

#flightpictures

#avgeek 

You can also hashtag the airline, make and model of your plane (e.g., #deltaairlines #boeing737 #737) or even your #airplanefood.

Because I have a thing for airplanes and love to Instagram airplane food, I’ve recently been using the hashtag #avgeek, which stands for aviation geek, and I’m getting a lot of engagement from Instagrammers outside of my usual network as a result.

Food Instagram Hashtags for Travel

Like to take photos of food? Use hashtags!

For many of us, food plays a major role in a vacation. My family often automatically does not touch their plates until I’ve taken a photo. And, I believe there is no better way to experience a destination than through your taste buds. So, you should absolutely create Instagram posts that include decadent and local eats.

It’s highly likely that the destination you’re visiting has a set of city specific food hashtags. To give you an idea here are a couple of San Diego food hashtags:

#SanDiegoEats

#SDFoodie

#YouStayHungrySD

You can also use some general food hashtags that may apply to your situation:

#onmytable

#foodphotography

#foodieadventures

How Many Instagram Hashtags Should I Use?

The quick answer is however many you are comfortable with.

I’ve seen popular Instagrammers use as many as the full 30 allowed by the platform, though some research suggests that 11 is the perfect number for attracting new followers.

Remember, you can always add more Instagram hashtags for travel in the comment section if you remember one later or don’t want to clog up your caption with too many hashtags. Make sure to get the best travel hashtags in your Instagram post right before you post (in addition to checking for spelling and formatting errors). If you edit an Instagram post after it’s live, their algorithm will likely show it to less people. I know this based on personal experience and fellow influencers also report the same.

How Do I Remember Which Top Instagram Hashtags to Use?

There are a few apps out there that will automatically identify hashtags to use in certain categories like food, plants, travel and more. I quite like Tailwind for scheduling Instagram posts and hashtag research (I also use it for Pinterest).

Tailwind is an Instagram Partner and they offer allow you to save hashtags into reusable lists. Their recommended hashtags are usually pretty good. Every once in awhile they’ll present something that I feel is irrelevant (as do other apps like this) so I’ll simply ignore them. They also color code Instagram hashtags so that you’ll know which of the popular travel hashtags that they recommend are the most likely to give you the most engagement.

However, many people I know forego apps and simply store hashtags on their mobile phones. Make a list of hashtags that you like in the notes section of your phone and refer to it as you’re posting. I know people who have hashtags listed by category in notes that they copy and paste into Instagram as necessary.

Or you could just wing it — which I actually do fairly frequently.

The Best Travel Hashtag Rule of Thumb

Here’s what I do. I do a little bit of research as to what tourism boards and major brands in the destination use for Instagram travel hashtags. You’ll save time if you do this before you head out to take photos. I also often hashtag my location (in addition to setting a location on my post), a word to describe the moment, when I took the photo and what I was doing.

Next, I’ll add in a few general top Instagram hashtags or related hashtags for travel. Of course, it all depends on the photo, so I am always be flexible.

Remember that you’ll spend more time at the top of the results when you choose travel and vacation hashtags that are popular, but not so popular that new posts are buried in a matter of seconds.

Do you find yourself using the same travel hashtags over and over again? Instagram hasn’t ever confirmed that it penalizes posts based on repeated use of the same hashtags, but some users have reported less engagement when they keep repeating Instagram hashtags.

You can always experiment to see whether you see increases or decreases in engagement based on the travel hashtags you use, the number of hashtags and whether you put them in the caption or the comments of your post.

Again, choosing the best travel hashtags should be first and foremost about creativity. How can you tap into a community of travelers who love exploring the world as much as you do without getting lost in the constant flood of travel photos? Look at the travel hashtags popular Instagrammers are using and follow their lead. 

Which Instagram travel hashtags have you’ve experienced success with? How many hashtags do you use? If you enjoyed this post, please follow my travels on Instagram — @lajollamom.

About La Jolla Mom

Katie Dillon is the managing editor of La Jolla Mom. She helps readers plan San Diego vacations through her hotel expertise (that stems from living in a Four Seasons hotel) and local connections. Readers have access to exclusive discounts on theme park tickets (like Disneyland and San Diego Zoo) and perks at luxury hotels worldwide through her. She also shares insider tips for visiting major cities worldwide like Hong Kong, London, Paris, and Shanghai that her family has either lived in or visits regularly (or both). View all posts by La Jolla Mom

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Journal to 24/7

We had a chance to visit the exhibition 24/7 in Somerset House with cheaper prices today and it was great. I’m gonna put my instant thoughts here so in case I need to rewind in the later stage of the bookmaking project.

The entrance disturbed me, as I recalled. There were several electronic-wire-fuzzing-like noises in an unpredictable rhythm, along with helicopter noises from a video explaining how often we are disturbed in sleep. I guess that was the intention. In capitalistic states filtrated with incentives, we all struggle to find peace from our inner self because we constantly have that voice that wouldn’t allow us to.

The next following exhibited items/works were a bit boring if I have to be honest. They were just bunch of random objects, that were used to once again display restlessness created by surveillance of time. But the second floor intrigued me largely, by starting with an animation of a cartoon character sleeping on an animated background formed densely by black and white pixel dots. It looks very uncanny. And a bit uncomfortable and numb, but somehow smoothing. It was quite sensational to me.

The next thing that drew my attention was one of the picture that came from a mini photo gallery on the wall, where in the picture a boy was lying on a dog’s chest. From the description I realized most of these photos were taken by amateur photographer, and it sort of amused me when I came to a question that since when has ‘sleeping’ became something worth to capture in frame, and this is an extremely extensive question to almost everyone. Has sleep been harder to capture? When I’m writing this, I suddenly remember “MTRsleep”, an anonymous Instagram account that post random sleepers in railways and it was hilarious, mostly because of the spontaneous gesture made by hongkongers when they sleep. But another thing is that sometimes these sleeping images reveal the era or current affairs that was situated at the time the picture was taken. And yet the world has never been restless no matter when. Back to the boy/dog picture, it perfectly used an animal/human relation to portray the restlessness we encountered. It’s kind of weird when realizing sleeping is more of a symbol of restless rather than rest. But I have to say, the color/shade in some of these photos were really phenomenal and they became unforgettable to me.

The plaster sculpture of hands holding phone (but without a phone) was quite interesting as well. I couldn’t what it means before reading the description card (which made me really disappointed in myself), but there’s nothing really special beyond that. It was explicit. So as the pills. I got it was quite a fun thing to think that how heavily people relies on medication to get them awake or asleep, but that’s it for me.

The letters to Nastja was quite influential to me, sincerely saying. I watched the video for quite awhile, not leaving until I realized I had to spare time to appreciate other works. When I saw the displaying letters that was all written to Nastja, I got a bit jealous. First of all I’ve never personally receive this many letters dedicated to me in my life, and secondly they were all handwritten as I mostly only receive bills or advertising letters that were printed ad nauseam (my new favorite word) with machines. At first site I even doubted this was probably a collection of letters from the 80s, not until I saw the ‘2018′ on one of the envelope. But anyway, her video strongly emphasize how healthier life has been offline, which I found hard to deny as a fact, no matter how important technical support has became to especially work and socialization. But she mentioned the letters were the only thing she actually feels excited to see and unpack, senses warmth and enthusiasm delivered through the paper from the senders. Again, it’s restlessness to blame. But she specifically said in the video it’s never algorithm to blame, because they were controlled ultimately by persons. 24/7 surprisingly portrayed lifestyles I’ve wanted. 

Micheal Mandiberg’s work was somewhat understandable because it literally displayed his mac’s screenshots taken every 15 minutes in an entire year, and it got really annoying, but I have a pretty similar shifting. Gmail, programming/coding, Google drive, Google(lmao). I’m thrilled by that fact there’s not at least a bit of entertainment (games, *porn*, etc) but that’s probably a working computer or something.

My second favorite exhibited...thing is the video on a big screen, showing this person named ‘Nina’, who was assigned to do only one thing. Walk along an office’s corridor to just touch the employee’s shoulder and say ‘You okay?’ When I saw it from a distance I was sure it was gonna be boring, but after I’ve seen it I want to take my words back. Several employees were filmed to see their reactions when Nina has been doing the same thing to them every day, and of course they all had different capacities when it came ti body interaction. Some’d embrace, some’d avoid or some’d just smile and nod. I think it lures me to continue watching how the reactions differ from person to person. I am not getting the main piece of the context behind this, but it certainly drew me into simulating myself with a similar situation and think what’d happen. I actually enjoy friendly body contact as a greeting or casual engagement of socialization and it truly shocked me to see how some would actually despise it, and I would immediately regard them as unfriendly indifferent, even ‘selfish’ individuals. But it’s a right that everyone deserves afterall. There was awkwardness in between the exchange of words and actions sometimes, and it deliver the intensity of workplace to me, regarding socializations.

I went through a few more amazing works but which I’m too bothered to mention, because I just want to directly skip to my favorite part of this visit. There was a darkroom which I didn’t even know its existence due to the quietness. I pushed the blind aside and walked in, and it gave me a blind person experience since I struggled even just finding a chair, as it was dark enough to not see anything when I entered the room. Slowly, the surrounding became more visible in couple of seconds. I thought biologically, it was something to do with my eyes as it adjusted to the brightness of the room that allow me to get a better visualization of the place. But I was very much convinced it was actually the the light that got brighter later on. The bird chirping noises was calming until it got fused with some metallic/mechanical/artificial noises, that obviously didn’t belong in the nature. And seemingly besides getting brighter each second, the light had also turn slightly reddish/yellowish, forced me into thinking the room temperature has been distorted by the noises. The room structure became completely visible after 3 minutes sitting in here. Now, I am a very simple person who have difficulties when interpreting a very philosophical explanation filled with complexity to certain artwork. But this to me, worked as an extreme immersive experience because I have never felt that anxiety this clearly in a virtual area. This changes started happening the moment I stepped into the room, and I only realized maybe it was my presence that ruined the habitat of animals, and this metaphorical immersion had really brought 24/7′s essence to me. It was a FANTASTIC wrap up.

Outline

I. What is installation art?

EXPERIENCE, IMMERSIVE-NES : An Installation art is a relatively new concept of art which started since the 1960s. It can be distinguished from a traditional media, like sculptures, in a way that installation art is focused more on the experience that the audience have as a whole rather than focusing on how the art is made and what it is made out of. Art Encyclopedia, (2015) Installation art. [online] Available at: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/installation-art.htm [Accessed 19 Oct. 2017].

CONCEPTUAL ART, IDEOLOGY : Also, while traditional media focus on the details of the craftsmanship for the audience to appreciate, Installation art is focused on giving the immersive experience or even conveying some sort of message. / As installation art’s common purpose is to convey some sort of message, a lot of times it is either trying to emphasize a certain ideology or going against the currently dominant ideology. Bishop, C. (2005) But is it installation art? Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/it-installation-art [Accessed: 8 November 2017]

INTERACTIVE-NESS : Artists wanted to escape the audiences from being passive bystanders but active appreciators and was against having the whole idea of art behind one centered art but placing it around the whole space and ‘decentring’ and that this was one of the main ideas of installation art. Khanacademy, (2015) Ai Weiwei, “Remembering” and the Politics of Dissent. [online] Available at: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/global-culture/global-art-architecture/a/ai-weiwei-remembering-and-the-politics-of-dissent [Accessed 19 Oct. 2017].

Artist use space, material and size in different ways to serve the purpose of their installation art.

II. Installation art that uses space in different ways to enhance the experience.

Louise Bourgeois’ installation works make you feel you are out of place and they are quite creepy to be frank. Using her traumatic childhood as a continuous theme, she explores the use of mix media as installation to express her surrealistic take on the experience. For example, the Red Room - Child(1904) is an installation of various red items positioned here and there within a room, which is surrounded by a collective of doors. The audience, who can only look in by peaking through a small window, starts to wonder what the room symbolizes. Once we learn that Louis Bourgeois’s mother was a tapestry mender and also to explain only briefly that her parents did not have the greatest relationship, we are able to figure out the metaphors of the threads and the uncomfortable feeling the room gives. In this way Louise Bourgeois successfully engages the audience into her self-psychoanalysis project and convey her own experience and feelings by using the space and different materials. Though psychologically involving the audience, the Red Room - Child(1904) is an example of installation art where people appreciate as a passive audience regarding the space between art and the spectator.  / While explaining Louise Bourgeois’ work Cells, he writes “Even if these interiors are not completely sealed off or framed like old-fashioned museum dioramas, the viewer is often directly barred from getting inside or is made to feel excluded.(Installation and Sculpture, 2001, 10p)” as an ‘Interpretation’ on how the intended utilization of space is supposed to be perceived. Charles, D. (2010) Louise Bourgeois: Inventive and influential sculptor whose difficult childhood informed her life’s work. Available at:  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/louise-bourgeois-inventive-and-influential-sculptor-whose-difficult-childhood-informed-her-lifes-1988691.html (Accessed: 11 October 2017) & Potts, A. (2001) ‘Installation and Sculpture’, Oxford Art Journal, 24 (2), pp. 7-23 JSTOR [Online] Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600405 [Accessed: 22 November

Do Ho Suh’s installation art which is called Home within Home within Home within Home within Home (2013) is a life-sized house, which people can actually enter, built with metal armature and mesh fabric. With the translucent and light material, along with the monotone color choices, the structure looks like a mirage and gives an eerie feeling. Unlike the Red Room - Child (1904) where the audience is only a spectator, with the Home within Home within Home within Home within Home (2013), people can be inside the space created by the artist and be closer to the art. “Seoul Home/L.A. Home”—Korea and Displacement, Online article by  ART 21 (2003) Available at: https://art21.org/read/do-ho-suh-seoul-home-la-home-korea-and-displacement/, (Accessed: 11 October 2017)

Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project(2003), was an installation in the turbine hall of Tate Modern. It had an iconic sign of the Sun in the middle of the room with monofrequency lights and mist coming out to the room. The audience ought to feel warm and cozy when they enter as this orange light dims the whole room with one color. However if you get to know about the background how the installation was made, you might rethink a little more on what it is trying to say. Olafur was inspired one day when the sun and the clouds were in a weird color and form, due to global warming. This is when he decided to capture this moment and recreate it as an installation. Majority of the audience might miss this fact and focus more on what kind of experience the space gives them but maybe from the title of the work, some might understand the connotative meaning of raising awareness about global warming. However maybe the experience it gives is what the artist really aimed for. fig. 1, Olafur, E. (2003) The Weather Project [image] Available at: http://publicdelivery.org/olafur-eliasson-the-weather-project/ [Accessed 19 Oct. 2017].

III. Installation art that plays with size for immersive-ness.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude intervenes in nature and by building massive sized installation, lets people have a different visual experience about the place. The Art Story (2017) Christo. [online] Available at: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-christo.htm [Accessed 8 Dec. 2017].

Another installation by him called the Waterfall (2015) is also made with the similar basis in the way that it makes the audience rethink about the space they are in. Though denotatively it is an artificial waterfall in the city, but more deeply the contrast between the giant waterfall and the city makes us think about how big the city is, how big the waterfall is and how small we are in that environment. It works as some sort of tool of measurement and symbolizes how in the end we are a small part of the nature and we need to coexist, and that we are not rulers of the world. fig. 3, Olafur, E. (2008) Waterfall [image] Available at: http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2008/06/26/the-new-york-city-waterfalls/ [Accessed 19 Oct. 2017].

But size can be used just for the shock value. Bishop, C. (2005) But is it installation art? Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/it-installation-art (Accessed: 8 November 2017)

IV. How Installation artists use materials to convey the message.

Compared to the traditional work of are where the craftsmanship of it is highly appreciated, conceptual art and Installation art, which was stemmed from conceptual art, values more about how material used is presented to convey a message rather than the material itself. Encyclopedia of art (unknown) Installation Art [online] Available at: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/installation-art.htm#definition [Accessed 8 Dec. 2017].

Olafur did more than just creating a cozy space for the audience for the cause. He also brought icebergs all the way from Greenland to Paris. Obviously they can be seen as only big pieces of ice sitting on a square in Paris, but it is quite clear on what it is trying to say if we focus on where they came from and how they are placed. To create Ice Watch(2015), Olafur had these melting icebergs located in a circle, arranged like a watch, which implies the time is passing as the icebergs melt and that the global warming is happening now and fast. In this case, we can say that Olafur used the melting icebergs as a symbolic object to reflect the global warming phenomenon and also the fact that he brought the icebergs from Greenland is an indexical sign of him having been in Greenland, and witnessed the melting iceberg and the how bad the situation is fig. 2, Olafur, E. (2015) Ice Watch [image] Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-artist-who-is-bringing-icebergs-to-paris [Accessed 19 Oct. 2017].

For example, he writes about I Shop Therefore I Am Not(1990), first starting to compare her with other artists and say “The Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury is of interest here because, like Breitz, she shifts away from the ideological critique of mass media that characterises key artists of the 1980s such as Kruger, Haacke and Victor Burgin. Instead, Fleury creates a productive interface between ‘market identity’ and artistic identity.” (Graham, C.S. 2006). He also interprets her work in general by writing “She portrays female identity in the wake of the achievements of the women’s movement when the social script has been rewritten, and women can go shopping and be successful artists—or even go shopping in order to be successful artists.”  (Graham, C.S. 2006). My Modern Met Team (2017)  What is Installation Art? Take a Look at the Top Installation Artists Working Today. Available at: http://mymodernmet.com/what-is-installation-art-history-artists/ (Accessed: 15 November 2017)

Installation art that incorporates light and technology

The recent increase in incorporating light, videos and new technology in installation art has helped it increase immersiveness and enhance the experience. Examples of the 2017 Signal festival shows good examples of it. Playmodes. (2017) Beyond, [Installation] Prague, Czech Republic, 12-15 October.

While in Do Ho Suh’s installation, the audience is more of a quiet gazer -though was more engaged then of Bourgeois’-, CLOUD, an installation comprised of 700 kg of steel and 6,000 burnt out and new incandescent lightbulbs, the audience is not only an active participant but a crucial part of the art. Started as a community project, artist Caitlind R.G.Brwon & Wayne Garrett created the CLOUD with the idea of recreating the image of cloud and light that is crucial in our lives. CAITLIND R.C. BROWN & WAYNE GARRETT. (2017) Available at:  https://incandescentcloud.com/ (Accessed: 11 October 2017)

V.  Installation art so far and what will come in the future

There is no one category that installation art is using to serve its purpose, it is all a mix of using the material, space and size.

New technology helps increase interactiveness and immersiveness in installation art, it will be combined with using space and size in the future more and more.

Dagon

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death. It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time. When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my surroundings. Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude I knew nothing, and no island or coast-line was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for uncounted days I drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable land. But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon the heaving vastnesses of unbroken blue. The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away. Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear. The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my position. Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths. So great was the extent of the new land which had risen beneath me, that I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears as I might. Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things. For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myself a pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanished sea and possible rescue. On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day I forged steadily westward, guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher than any other elevation on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled toward the hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the fourth evening I attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher than it had appeared from a distance; an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the hill. I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure again. And in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up my pack, I started for the crest of the eminence. I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of vague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the mound and looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to illumine. I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan’s hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness. As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of rock afforded fairly easy foot-holds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity became very gradual. Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps where no light had yet penetrated. All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the opposite slope, which rose steeply about an hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct impression that its contour and position were not altogether the work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures. Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist’s or archaeologist’s delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith; on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books; consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like. Several characters obviously represented marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen plain. It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size, were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Doré. I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shewn disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me. Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then. Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I reached the boat; at any rate, I know that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods. When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been given scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries. It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm—a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium. The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

By H.P. Lovecraft