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airi-p4 · 3 years

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From above the stars - Chapter 7

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Sorry for the long wait! I’m not forgetting about this story!! I love it and I’m stopping overthinking it so it can progress at last. I hope you enjoy 💙

Chapter summary:

Gabriel offers Marinette something unexpected she can't refuse. At the same time, Luka stops coming to the cemetery, and she can't help but worry: he had promised her he wouldn't disappear...

AO3

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CHAPTER 7 - Lost

Marinette was staring at Luka's only message on her phone, dated from the previous morning (the one he sent to confirm his contact), when she received a SMS: Gabriel Agreste.

She felt uneasy from being summoned again by her late ex-boyfriend's cold father, but despite hating the idea of meeting him, she got ready to pay him a visit. Gabriel Agreste received her coldly as always, but this time, instead of mourning his son, he had an offer she didn’t expect.

"Marinette. I want to reassume the fashion business. I need someone talented to take care of the designs of Agreste’s future collections and I’m confident you could fill in for that job position. I've seen your sketchbooks and Adrien was right: you're very talented."

Marinette didn't know what to say. It's true Adrien had mentioned showing her designs to his father, but he always ended up apologizing because, in the end, Gabriel would never listen to him. Marinette didn't have much time to think as his suggestion progressed.

"Bring me a few new designs the day after tomorrow and we can discuss this matter further. Take it as a test to see if you’re fit for that job position" He asked.

"The- the day after tomorrow…? I- haven't drawn much lately, I'm not sure I can-"

"I'm sure you won't disappoint me. I would really appreciate it if you joined the Agreste empire. You're the only one I can trust"

Marinette felt sick. Not only because of the autoritharism he launched towards her, but also by the word 'trust'. Was it fair he ‘trusted’ her when she was already moving on from the love she used to have for Adrien- his son? Wasn't she betraying both father and son if she accepted Gabriel Agreste's offer? What options did she have, though? She couldn't refuse- she had had her part to blame for the accident and had to take responsibility for her actions. For Adrien...

"Thank you, Mister Agreste. I- I'll try…" she answered unsecure.

"Good. You can go now. You have some designs to work with. See you the day after tomorrow, here, at the same time"

Marinette nodded at Gabriel's cold back in front of her before passing through the main gates of the mansion to the street. She would have been happy to receive a chance like this when she dated Adrien, but now…? She wasn't sure if she wanted it anymore. She knew she needed a job other than helping at her parents' bakery, but how was she supposed to design anything after months without properly working on her fashion designs? Moreover, working with Gabriel made her uneasy. She could already feel the pressure on her shoulders from a task she shouldn't have trouble to accomplish under normal circumstances. These weren't normal circumstances. She didn't belong to the Agreste family anymore, yet she couldn't find the courage to tell Mister Agreste- or worse: to disappoint him. He needed her and she didn't want to fail his expectations- especially when she felt she was partly at fault for his son's passing.

Snapping from her never-ending thoughts about her new job offer, Marinette checked Luka's message on her phone again. ‘Thank you for today’. No matter how many times she read it, it never failed to help her find some calm. Unknowingly, she would always embrace her phone and smile at it. 'I want to see you' Marinette thought on her way to the cemetery, after buying some flowers.

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Marinette knew she was supposed to work on her designs instead of waiting for Luka, but she couldn't stop herself. She waited, patiently, for hours, even for longer than the time he usually left… but nothing: he didn't come.

It wasn't like him to miss his visit to his sisters. Plus, he had promised her he wouldn’t disappear as long as anything unexpected happened. Marinette became anxious. 'Did anything happen to him? Did he catch a cold during the chill night? Did he become wary of her for depending and relying so much on him? Was his promise out of pity?' She couldn't know the answer.

Lonely and distracted, she went to Trocadero, where she usually hung around- either to babysit Manon, to draw and design or on her dates with Adrien- a place full of memories and her favorite corner in Paris. She expected to find the inspiration that used to overflow whenever she held a pencil in her favorite drawing spot.

She sat at the stairs and looked at her surroundings: the majestic Eiffel tower in front of her, the merry-go-round at her right, with cheerful children playing on it, the candy and ice-cream stalls at the left side. A pair of skaters racing, couples, families and groups of friends were also what Marinette's eyes usually enjoyed observing. She tried to look for inspiration on the landscape, but nothing. Her eyes may have been looking at Trocadero, but her head was somewhere else: Luka. She couldn't help but worry something bad may have happened to him.

Inspiration didn't hit as she called it a day. Still concerned, she read Luka's message again before going to sleep.

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The next day the story repeated: her last message was still not marked as read, and Luka didn't appear at the cemetery. Two days in a row without him was starting to be too hard for her heart. She spent the afternoon at Trocadero again, and when she didn't expect it, as a way to cover her impatience and negativity, her solitude, her fears and her desire to meet him became her sole inspiration.

The morning after, Marinette woke up early to go to Agreste's mansion. Gabriel welcomed her with a hug, and soon he asked for her sketchbook. The old man's strict eyes observed: every detail, every color, every choice of fabrics… Marinette could feel his judging eyes on her through her pencil-drawn sketches.

"Marinette" Gabriel called after closing the sketchbook, and turning to face her with piercing eyes. "What's the meaning of this?"

"I- My new designs…" she answered, scared of his glacial look on her.

"This… this is absolutely worthless" he coldly stated, startling Marinette. "I can understand the negative and longing feelings, but this?” he signaled. “This is not Agreste's style. Can you imagine Adrien wearing any of those? What were you thinking? I'm so disappointed…" he sighed.

Marinette gulped and her body was trembling, afraid of the cold man in front of her. She should have imagined her drawings would turn out to be not of Gabriel's likings. It was obvious they didn't fit with Agreste's style, with elegance and high-class as its trademark. She had been inspired by Luka, and the rock style of her newest drawings screamed his name everywhere. But it was the only thing she could come up with in her state, no matter how hard she tried.

"I'm so sorry… Let me re-do them, please" she begged, seeing the chance she had always dreamed about vanish before her eyes at that instant.

"You have one more day. I have great expectations put on you, Marinette. Show me your true potential- the designs my son was fond of"

"Yes sir. Thank you" she bowed her head, quickly excusing herself to walk through the main gates. She was trembling like a little mouse in front of its predator. She needed to throw out those disgusting feelings of inferiority and devaluing. She needed to recover her steady breath and calm. She needed Luka's presence close to keep her feet on the ground. She needed him to keep her sanity.

But, once again, he didn't come to the cemetery. Another day without him around. Another day with growing anxiety and worry. Another day of painful loneliness… but new designs still needed to be done...

Back at Trocadero, she decided to try to keep her head occupied with her drawings. She tried remembering her dates with Adrien- or what she used to base her designs on before.

She remembered walking hand in hand with him, sharing André's ice-cream, sharing one spoon, and being scolded by a baby's mother when she tried to give her baby a candy from the candy stall. She also remembered bumping with the flyer man- Mr Banana- when she had been rushed by Adrien, all his papers flying and scattered on the ground. She still felt a little bad for not helping him recover his flyers (especially when Adrien stepped on some of them). She also remembered riding the merry-go-round with her ‘Prince’ and she, his ‘Princess’. She remembered picnics with their best friends, too. Even the selfish, prideful and arrogant Chloe, Adrien's childhood friend, had finally accepted her as Adrien's girlfriend in front of the Eiffel tower. She wondered where her past friends were now.

The memories she had now were bittersweet- happy but also sad. How much truth and how much fantasy was in her memories? Adrien's perfection had been an illusion of hers. And their mutual friends 'friendship' appeared to be so too, when they hadn't called her in months. At least Chloe still greeted her when they met in the street, and she still brought Adrien flowers once a week. 'What was Gabriel looking for in her designs?' she had asked herself. Her answer was clear- 'the illusion of a perfect life'.

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Gabriel's eyes studied her newest designs the day after. Elegance, class, innovation- Gabriel's lips displayed a faint proud smile under his serious facade and Marinette could finally breathe.

"Marinette. You really are talented. You outdid yourself here" he said, closing her sketchbook to look at her. "I'm going to ask Nathalie to make your designs part of the new collection. With only a few arrangements they'll be perfect. Good job"

"Thank you, Sir", she bowed.

"As promised, I want you to be the new designer of the company. Take it as training. I expect you to become the pillar of this company in a few years". His chin raised to look at her from an upper position. Marinette’s eyes couldn’t possibly open more as she gasped.

"Wha-! With all my respect, I- I don't think I deserve that, Sir" her head sank between her shoulders.

"Nonsense. You're the only one who cared about my son. You're all I have left from him now, my daughter-in-law. You're the only one I can trust" he reassured her with a hand on her shoulders, under his melancholic facial expression. "I count on you"

"Yes, Sir" her mouth automatically responded. Gabriel hugged her in a grateful manner, before stating the work conditions: a full sketchbook of new designs per week. No fixed schedule, just a deadline every Friday. Marinette agreed with the conditions, still doubting her capabilities.

When she stepped out of the mansion, she wanted to scream, to cry, to jump… but most of all she wanted to meet Luka. Three days without him and she already felt like she was losing her mind. She hoped to finally meet him and hug him and tell him how much she had missed him- but nothing: no new flowers on his sisters tombstones apart from hers.

Disappointed and worried, she moved to Trocadero again. Her message to Luka was still unanswered and marked as unread. She contemplated the idea of calling him, but she supposed she would be a nuisance if he was at work- or maybe he was unreachable when he had yet to read her message. She had no claim on him, anyway. There was nothing else she could do. Before she could notice, tears were falling from her eyes.

She must have been showing a very depressing aura, because soon, André Glacier approached to offer her an ice-cream. The candy stall lady offered her a strawberry flavored lollipop and even Mr Banana offered her a paper crafted flower made out of his flyers.

For the first time, Marinette realized she was also part of the landscape she loved the most in Paris, and she was moved by their welcoming affection. The merry-go-round old man also offered her a blanket to rest on the grass. She was exhausted from the swirl of emotions she had been going on these past days and she soon fell asleep. She could have sworn she could hear Luka's guitar nearby- the song he always played- but her eyelids were too heavy to open. 'Luka…' she cried, and she entered dreamland with the feeling of someone's hand softly caressing her hair. Through her almost closed eyes, she could almost swear she saw nails painted in black, but she convinced herself she must have just dreamed it.

That night, she armed herself with courage and sent Luka another message. 'Let's meet tomorrow. I'll wait for you'.

Before going to sleep, she wished to the stars to meet him again… but they must have been angry at her because no one expected a strong windstorm for the next day. Marinette's parents forbade her to go outside in that weather, but she escaped through the back door and fought the winds to go to the cemetery.

'Why am I even here?' she thought, looking at the still unread message. 'There's no way he comes in this weather… I’m such a fool...' Marinette sighed. She could see some tree branches falling down; and cardboards, metallic plates and other pieces of various materials being carried by the windstorm. She sought refuge behind the Couffaine's family mausoleum, wishing for their forgiveness as the clock hit Luka's usual curfew.

He didn't come. Again.

Defeated, she reached for her phone: no new messages. 'What was the point of being there when he was obviously not going to come?' She felt stupid. And maybe she was. She probably was. Stupidly in love, she realized. Was she even allowed to love someone she had hurt so much? Did she even deserve his attention? Or his help? Will he ever come back to her? Was he even real?

She was losing her mind.

The strong howling winds were covering her loud painful shriek. Her hoarse throat felt ready to tear anytime as her crying amplified. When was the last time she cried like that? Right. After her first visit to Adrien's grave- months ago, when she first met with Luka.

"Luka… I miss you… I want to see you… please… I need to know you haven't left me behind too… please… don't leave me alone… Please… I need to know you're safe… I need you..." she cried in exhaustion, her body curled, sinking her head between her knees. With one last check on her phone, she lost all her hope: no new messages, despite the message marked now as read.

He willingly ignored her, she supposed, devastated. He didn't want to meet with her, didn't he? She was abusing his kindness when his suffering was worse than hers. And his sisters… Of course he would secretly hate her… Maybe living had no point anymore, she thought, utterly defeated by the depression she had been fighting since she woke up in that hospital room. Maybe it was her destiny, or a curse. Once again, she was surrounded by her inner darkness.

‘Maybe it’s time to give up…'

"Marinette!" She could hear someone calling. Probably her imagination, she assumed. "Marinette!" The same voice repeated- Luka's voice. She thought she was at the border of losing her sanity when he called again "Marinette!", but this time he appeared in front of her, sweating, with his hair messy from the wind.

If it weren't for how he ran to hug her immediately, she would have convinced herself he was a product of her imagination. But the touch was real. He was real. And he was there with her. "Luka…!" She cried, clinging to his clothes.

"What are you doing here in this windstorm? Haven't you seen the news? It's dangerous! You could have injured yourself" he scolded her, panicking and worrying. "What would I do if anything happened to you…?" he whispered, so low she wouldn't have heard him if his mouth weren't almost touching her ear.

"Luka... Luka! I was- so scared! And worried! I- I've missed you so much!" She screamed between whimpers, as her arms grip tightened around him.

"I'm here Marinette, it's ok. Sorry for being late" he apologized, hugging her tightly. "I'm so sorry"

"Luka, I-" before she could continue, two voices joined the wind sounds.

"Marinette?" "Marinette!"

"My parents," she gasped, recognizing their voices.

With his usual gentleness, Luka offered her his hand and helped her stand up, but she refused to let go of him.

"Go with them. They must be worried" Luka said in his usual calmed voice.

"But-"

"I'll be here as usual as soon as the weather allows me to. Rest assured". His hands on her shoulders were more reassuring than the unreadable look on his face, but he sounded sincere to Marinette and she decided to trust him.

"But- what happened? Why didn't you answer my messages? She cried. "You promised you wouldn’t willingly disappear and yet… I was so worried something bad could have happened to you..."

"I'm sorry, Marinette… Something happened, it’s true, but-” he looked away and took a deep breath before looking at the directions Marinette’s parents' voices came from. “I'll tell you next time. You better go now. Your parents sound very worried"

"Will you really come again?" Marinette asked, squeezing his hand, scared of him disappearing again.

"I promise. I won’t fail you again” He nodded. “Now go."

Marinette was hesitant, but she finally let go of his hand and started walking towards her parents' voices, encouraged by Luka's hurt smile and his slight push on her back.

"Mom! Dad!" She cried, running to hug them.

"Marinette! We were so worried! Why did you escape? It's dangerous! What if anything happened to you, all alone here…" her mother hugged her.

"No, mom. I wasn't alone… I was with-" she turned to signal Luka, but he was nowhere to be found. 'Did she imagine it?' she frowned her eyebrows in disappointment.

"Let's go home" her father said, with his arm behind her back.

Sad and confused, Marinette looked back once again, wondering if her meeting with Luka had just been a product of her imagination. But when she looked back again, he was indeed there, watching them from afar.

In relief, Marinette waved back at him, but he walked away- not before Marinette's mother caught a glimpse of him.

"See, mom? Luka was with me!" She signaled, noticing how she had seen him too. Sabine’s reaction was not what Marinette expected. She had a look Marinette’ had never seen before on her mother’s face: a mix of anger, sadness and fear. Her words only amplified the bad vibrations she was giving off.

"Marinette. You should stay away from that man" she coldly warned her daughter.

Marinette was confused. "Why?"

"Just stay away from him, please"

Why? Why did she have to stay away from Luka? Why would her mother dislike him? Did she know him? Why did it feel like everyone was keeping secrets from her?

Marinette didn't plan to listen to her mother. No matter how massive was the concern and fear her face reflected.

#airip4 #my fic #lukanette fic #fic: from above the stars #endgame lukanette #Pro LukaMari #lukanette #sorry for the long wait!

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yandere-mha-blog · 2 years

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Part 2: a swicharoo to the first one, this is for the Dabi fans out there

Opening shift wasn't ideal for you, you did like to sleep in, but you also didn't want to work later and have to walk home in the dark so you managed. Your whole life had been flipped on its head in just the course of a few months, but it would be for the better, you wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for your Friend Mina help, you don't know how you wouldn’t have escaped without her help.

And yes you used the word escaped, overbearing, suffocating, clingy, emotionally draining, ex boyfriend, who you hoped you never saw again. You found this job the boss was a bit insufferable at times, you didn't understand why you would put coffee in a mason jar, trapping the customers here till they finished.

Oh well a paycheck was a paycheck, and it was your money, you could use it however you wanted to, sure maybe you slept on the floor for a week before you were able to buy a mattress, and you had to sleep on that mattress on the floor for another week till you got a bed frame, and maybe you were living off saltine crackers for the first couple of weeks.

Still i beat every aspect of your old life, going out for a walk to the park and using the swing to feel like a kid again, taking the bus down to a thrift shop and seeing who just donated there dead grandmother clothes, or seeing a cute cat walking along the street and letting out a cute meow at you.

Small things in life.

-No more, where were you, I was worried, do you expect me to believe that, where were you really, oh okay I'm the asshole for being worried about you and stop lying to me.-

Nope, nope nope not thinking about him anymore, he wasted enough of your time as it was. Still one thing you noticed is that you started to get a regular, it was kind of funny he ordered the exact same thing every day, did he look a bit flustered when you said his order to him before he could tell you, or when you remembered his name, it was an unusual name, Dabi, that was a name that stuck with you.

“HI Dabi same thing as usual today?” Yu asked

“Yeah same thing as I do every day.” he said “can i get it in a to go cup.”

“Sure, I know we have mutual hatred of the mason jars.” you said ringing it up, life was finally peaceful, except for the rude customer every now and again.

“Hey Mina, I just got off.” you said as you walked your sally pathway home

“OH cool, how was it?” she asked

“...okay what's wrong?” you asked

“Huh what, nothing, nothing is wrong, why would anything be wrong.”

“Mina come on you can tell me, you always listed to me when i was feeling down, what's up?”

She let out a long sigh “Keigo has been calling me, i keep blocking his number and he keep making a new cell number, and leaving voice messages, I keep telling him to piss offhand it is just so annoying!”

“Keigo has been contacting you for how long?” you asked, you started to unknowingly pick at your cuticle

“About a week since you left, I've been able to ignore it or push it to the back of my mind, but it's getting to me a bit, don't worry I will never tell him your new address, or number, I think I am going to change mine soon, okay?”

“Yeah...okay, sounds like a plan, I'm sorry you have to deal with him-”

“Hey none of that, this isn't your fault it is his, now go home, eat some leftovers heated up in the microwave and watch a movie.” she said

“I will, I just got here, thanks again mina.”

“Yeah yeah I know you love me. '' she said and hung up, you checked the mail, more junk mail and bills, at least tomorrow was your day off and you could rest your legs for a bit. You looked through the mail a bit more, and you saw a familiar face on the front cover of a magazine , you got a weird sudden jump of energy and you thought it across the room.

“God dammit, I'm still letting him get to me.” you thought “Ugh i need a shower and to toss this away.”

Dabi hated the night shift, only weirdos came in at this hour, well at least Tomura fit in with the crowd finally, ah he would get slapped in the face if he ever told him that. He was most likely off playing on his phone while hiding from customers, couldn't blame the guy.

“There you are, how long are you gonna hide?” Dabi asked him

“Till my shift ends.” Tomura said “Also your roots are showing.”

“I'm too lazy to touch them up, also every time I do, it looks like I filled my bathtub with sharpie ink.” Dabi said

“Yeah we get it Mr. achromotrichia , you look like an old man because your hair turned white when you were a kid.” Tomura said

“Better than having red hair if you ask me.” Dabi said, ``and I see a customer coming this way I'm going to hide, good luck.”

“Oh fuck you.” Tomura said

Mina was on her phone ready to go to sleep, she was looking at the old photo the two fo you had took together, then she went over to your page you haven't posted anything for the past 7 months, she missed the outings, even though you two had little to none during the time you were dating ,Him, how does one even deal with this, you always think it could never happen to you, or someone close to you. One day you and here could hang out again like old times she just had to wait.

#yandere dabi #yandere dabi x reader #yandere hawks #yandere keigo takami #yandere toya todoroki #yandere ex au 2

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oldshrewsburyian · 4 years

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if u ever wanna dump an essay about edward fairfax rochester to me...I’m here!

Ahh, you must know how dangerous such an invitation is to an enthusiast! It’s a rainy Sunday evening, I’ve poured myself a glass of wine, and I’m ready to do this. I think Charlotte Brontë is doing and exploring some really interesting things in the character of Rochester, which sometimes get flattened/left out in adaptations. To be fair to the adaptations: he’s still compelling as a Brooding Gothic Protagonist.™

Prolegomenon I: I haven’t read the scholarship on Jane Eyre since undergrad, and I haven’t read The Wide Sargasso Sea since graduate school. I make no claims to particular originality here. And of course, literature can and does hold multiple meanings, etc. etc.; this is my take on Edward Fairfax “Self-Delusion” Rochester. The subfields of Jane Eyre criticism I’m most familiar with/informed by are “Jane Eyre + feminist theory” and “Jane Eyre + ‘early 19th-century debates within Anglicanism, pretty wild, right?’” This should surprise exactly no one who follows this blog.

Prolegomenon II: when I get caught up in my Rochester Feelings in conversation, there is inevitably a point where one of my English-major or -professor friends will shout me down and say “He kept a WIFE in the ATTIC” and I know. I know. It’s inexcusable and I’m not trying to excuse it, and everyone should read Jean Rhys. What I am really interested in doing, though, is exploring Rochester as three-dimensional character, not “man whose bad behavior gets hand-waved aside because reasons.”

First off: Rochester is a man of contradictions. He is a man who is generous to his retainers and his tenants. He is a man who shoulders even social responsibilities that are not strictly his, as we see in the education of Adèle (who might otherwise have died in an uncharitable charitable institution, or become a laundress, or become a courtesan.) True, we meet him as an extremely awkward and fumbling and sometimes resentful figure in loco parentis. But he is trying. I think this is perhaps the key thing about Rochester: what we see him doing for most of the novel, almost always badly, is trying to achieve better (more just, more humane, more equitable) results within a system (patriarchal, economic, colonial) that is rotten at its core. It is not everyone who has the moral fiber of a Jane Eyre, to say “this system is rotten at its core and it is better to starve on the moors or live forever unhappy than to be complicit in it.” The second thing we see Rochester doing, almost always badly, and this is where the contradiction comes in, is trying to avoid his own pain. I’ve intentionally said pain rather than guilt. I think that gets closer to the heart of the matter.

I’m going to get back to my essay in a minute, but an interjection of sorts, before I put the rest of it under a cut: I think it is vital to the novel that Rochester genuinely changes. Justification of this argument and More Emotions below.

For contemporary readers, the concept of repentance as a process may feel unfamiliar, trite, irreversibly sullied by hypocrites. But even if we take it out of Brontë’s extremely Anglican framework, I read Rochester’s profound, unconditional acceptance of his own sin (wrong, if you prefer) against Bertha and the losses which he sees as divine punishment for it as absolutely key to his having a chance at a future with Jane. The concept of divine retribution is surely stranger to us even than that of repentance, but having Thornfield, Rochester’s inheritance, sign and symbol and engine of his patriarchal wealth, built on colonial exploitation, literally go up in flames like the wicked cities of the Old Testament, is Not Exactly Subtle. And, of course, he loses his sight: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” His sight has been, in the most fundamental spiritual sense, diseased. He has been incapable of accurately seeing his own guilt (which is to say, seeing it in proportion to all other things, the other facts of Bertha’s madness, the duplicity of his family and that of the Masons, etc. etc.) So he loses his sight. And then he gains a much richer understanding of, well, everything. Gradually. Not all at once. I have Feelings about the psychological realism of those final chapters, but let me rewind, as it were. [N.B. I’m not arguing that Charlotte Brontë presents all this as a straightforward Divine Smiting. It matters that Bertha gets the freedom to bring all this crashing down (literally), and that she chooses her own end. But I do think that Rochester reads it as Smiting; I think we need to take that final assertion of his seriously. It’s entirely possible to read the Elm Tree Incident, and indeed that bizarre wedding morning, as Rochester waiting, waiting with pounding heart, for the bolt of lightning.]

I believe passionately in Rochester and Jane as a couple for a number of reasons (so many reasons, all the reasons), but perhaps chief among them is that they are both, bless them, raging romantics who have had very little outlet for their rich emotional life or for their unconventional, erudite, intelligent, exploratory spiritualities. OR (sorry, I forgot one) for their intellectual life, come to that! Rochester with his library full of science and his feelings about moths and Jane who becomes a teacher and genuinely loves nurturing young minds. *sobs* I love them so much. But Rochester is far too ready to manipulate others as he has been manipulated, and as others seek to manipulate him. His treatment of Blanche Ingram, for instance, I read as being several things, in shifting proportion 1) an effort to distract himself from Jane; he has few if any scruples about involving the unscrupulous and mercenary Miss Ingram in bigamy 2) an effort to distract the neighborhood and its gossip from Jane; why, after all, has he been at Thornfield so long without entertaining anyone?? very suspicious 3) an effort to find out what Jane’s feelings for him are. We see her ready to sting him into jealousy at the end too, a nice little bit of symmetry. Rochester is, yes, high-handed in the extreme. But I read the conversation under the elm tree not as a cynical test, but a genuine and painfully awkward attempt to figure out what Jane’s feelings for him really are. Yes, they’ve been having High Spiritual Communion and intellectual discussions and mutual teasing and borderline flirting for however many weeks it’s been. But also: he’s her employer. He’s at least 15 years older than she is (I forget the details on this. 15? 20? anyway, point stands.) He is not and never has been handsome, and he knows exactly how little his wealth counts for with Jane. He’s deeply weird and his house is weird and he comes with a French ward and a mysterious attic and a wife. But does she love him anyway? She does! *cries about it*

Of course, none of this excuses the inexcusable. The proposal-to-wedding sequence shows us Rochester at his moral nadir, in relation to both Bertha and Jane. It also shows him on the knife edge of losing control over his integrity in other ways, now that he has violated this one. (Remember when Jane comes back to Thornfield and says “Reader, I had feared worse; I had feared he was mad”? Yeah, there’s a reason for that.) Anyway, allow me to present excerpts from Chapter 27, which lives in paraphrase in my head at all times:

[W]hile he spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly. "Oh, comply!" it said. "Think of his misery; think of his danger—look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair—soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his.

Whew! Anyway, she decides not to despite the fact that she and Rochester feel exactly the same way in this moment:

I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.

*sobs harder* I think it is vitally important to point out that Jane is not cold or even, in this moment, convinced by her own arguments. She and Rochester are, moments after this, in each other’s arms, the language of fire and flame used for them both, and Rochester releases her first because he wants her influenced by nothing but her own will; not their shared passion, and certainly not his own force.

...Where was I before I got caught up with the unbearable sexual and emotional tension? Oh yes, Rochester after Jane leaves. He embraces an extremely thorough program of self-punishment. The most obvious course of action for him -- the one that Jane, the person who knows him best in all the world, assumes he has taken -- is to run away from his pain again, to leave England. He does not do that. He does the opposite of that. He refuses to so much as leave Thornfield itself except to roam the grounds at night. I love this book so much. Then, after the fire, which happens only 2 months after Jane leaves, he goes to Ferndean. Now! The only thing we have learned about Ferndean previously is that Rochester refused to have Bertha live there because its bad climate would have (or at least might have) killed her. We learn from Jane-as-narrator that literally no one will rent it, again, because of its “ineligible and insalubrious site.” Rochester has, with heartbreaking obviousness, given up on life. He has, by his own account, been “doing nothing, expecting nothing,” in “ceaseless sorrow... [and] delirium of desire.”

...Edward Fairfax Rochester has never heard of chill. Also, as we learn, though he is worried about his disabilities because he is worried that Jane will mind, and because they make him a less eligible potential husband in his own estimation (*sniffle*), what he has been chiefly preoccupied with for the last year is worrying about where Jane is and if she’s all right. Again: the man has never heard of chill. But his impulses are generous. He is the heir to a rotten and a poisoned inheritance, and he begins by blaming this inheritance -- his external circumstances, both his privilege and the choices that he is pushed into by his father and brother -- for his own injuries and the ways in which he has injured others. But I (obviously) vigorously cling to the belief that he genuinely turns away from this, that he confronts his own sins and repents and accepts that he will not, cannot, be reunited with Jane in this life. But then he is. *cries about it* Moreover, in a key reorientation from his earlier avoidance-and-denial coping strategy, he accepts Jane’s services “without painful shame or damping humiliation.” He un-hermits himself! He and Jane travel to see friends and family! They receive visitors! These romantic-hearted science nerds proceed to be shockingly normal... for their own given value of that. I’m also convinced that they have the kinkiest sex in nineteenth-century English literature, and I support them. And part of their happiness is the happiness of others; it’s the opposite of Rochester’s globe-trotting, radically individualistic conduct in the first part of the novel. Of course it’s more than he deserves; he knows that, and he needs to know it. But it’s narratively elegant, and (I think) deeply satisfying. And I love it. And, obviously, him... again, more than he deserves.

#jane eyre #edward fairfax rochester #was recently reminded of how hard i ship jane/rochester #is a tag that i have #asks and answers #emilydickinsonapologist

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idnek83 · 3 years

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Hey it’s angst o’clock: before Kaz and Gundham get together, when they still kinda hate each other, 2 of the Devas have babies and everyone takes turns babysitting the litter while Gundham works. Kaz’s turn comes and he finds one of the babies has died and fREAKS THE FUCK OUT. Like sobbing cuz he’s never had a pet before let alone seen one die and so he takes the baby and flees and everyone thinks he just straight up stole a baby but really he’s fucking horrified and terrified to tell Gundham cuz he fucked it up and the baby is dead cuz of him somehow. And someone, maybe Sonia, finds him and talks him down and they go to Gundham who is more upset that Kaz “stole” a baby but once he realizes what happens he understands. Being a Breeder he probably sees animal death a lot unfortunately. But he helps comfort Kaz and forgives him and lets him help with the living babies and maybe that’s how they start becoming actual friends and sometime down the line they realize oh fuck I’m actually in love with this dude when did that happen IDK SHOWER THOUGHTS WOULDNT LEAVE ME ALONE I HAD TO TELL SOMEONE SORRY

You think you can come onto my blog and just rip my fucking heart out, huh? Right in front of my mutuals? You think you can just rip my heart out and force me to write something sad so everyone else has to feel sad too?

Good. Cus you 100% can lol.

TW: animal death - It’s mentioned repeatedly and is the central theme of this, so please just skip this one if you think you might be uncomfortable reading it.

Gundham comes into the class one day and he’s super proud and showing off the baby hamsters to everyone. He’s a little embarrassed to ask for help, but he’s working on a very important conservation project or something, so he asks if anyone would be willing to keep an eye on them for an hour or two at a time over the next few days, insisting that it wouldn’t be hard, all they really had to do was make sure they didn’t escape and call Gundham if something went wrong. At least like half the class offers cus the babies are just so damn cute, Soda only offers cus Sonia did and he’s trying to impress her.

Gundham sets up an enclosure for the hamsters in the classroom, and everyone picks a time to come by to watch them.

When Soda’s turn rolls around a few days later, he’s secretly a little excited. He’s been complaining about it the past few days to keep up appearances, can’t have anyone suspecting that even tough he can’t stand Gundham, he also kind of has a soft spot for him (What? Dudes handsome), but he’s actually pretty psyched to get to spend some time just chilling with the baby hamsters. He’s never had his own pet, but he’s always wanted one.

Anyways, when he gets to the class he checks on all the babies and as far as he can tell they’re all good. He gives pets them for a bit, but then they seem like they’re trying to go to sleep so he leaves them and sits at a desk to play around on his phone for a while. Like 40 minutes later he gets up to check on them again.

They’re pretty much all huddled up, and Soda thinks it’s super cute, but he notices one lying down a bit away from the rest. He assumes it must have rolled away in it’s sleep, or that it got kicked out since its the smallest one, so he goes to move it back over to the hamster pile.

It’s cold when he touches it.

He knows pretty much right away what that means, but he doesn’t want to believe it. He pokes it a bit and tries to scratch it’s whiskers to get it to react, but it doesn’t move. He’s already crying, but then he starts thinkin about how it was probably something on his hands that killed it. He didn’t was his hands after finishing up in his garage, and he must have had oil or something on his hand when he was petting the hamster and now it was dead.

He’s hyperventilating.

He’s worried he killed them all, but looking at the hamster pile, the rest of them all appear to be breathing still. He’s too scared to touch them to make sure.

He’s sure its his fault. His fault for touching the hamster with dirty hands and his fault for not paying more attention. The hamster was probably acting weird before it died, if he had just been paying attention he could have called Gundham and it would still be alive.

He’s a murderer.

Sonia was supposed to be the next person watching the hamsters. He couldn’t let her see the dead baby hamster, couldn’t let her know he killed it. He looks around the room and finds a little box to put it in. He’s chocking on his sobs as he picks up the hamster, and he nearly drops it because his hands are shaking so bad. Once it’s in the box he has to take a moment cus he thinks he might vomit from how guilty he feels.

There’s like 10 minutes before Sonia is supposed to get there, so he takes one last look at the other hamsters, picks up the little box that has no right feeling as heavy as it does, and leaves.

He doesn’t really know where to go so he just heads up to the roof to get some fresh air and think, sobbing the whole way. He’s pretty sure he saw Sonia down one of the hells on his way up, but he just prays she didn’t see him and that she doesn’t remember how many hamsters there were.

He sits with the box in his lap, shaking.

He thinks he feels it shift.

His chest seizes up. Was it alive? Had he really not killed it? He can feel the hope swelling up inside him as he slowly opens the box-

It’s dead.

It’s definitely dead and now its lying on its side and its little eyes are staring right at Soda and it takes him a minute to realize his sobs have turned into screams of agony. The hope made it so much worse.

He closes the box again and sets it down so gently beside him, before curling in on himself and just sobbing and screaming into his hands so hard his whole body is shaking from it.

He’s a murderer. He killed a defenseless animal. A baby. It was only a few days old and he killed it.

Suddenly there’s a warm hand on his back, rubbing just a little and bringing him back down to earth. His sobs slowly get weaker and he manages to look up, though his vision is still blurred with tears. He can make out dark clothes, pale skin, and a bright purple scarf. He assumes Gundham is there to punish him.

Gundham just asks him what’s going on, says Sonia called him because one of the hamsters was missing and she thought she had seen Soda running away from the classroom earlier. They assumed he had taken one of the hamsters for himself, but that didn’t explain why he was crying on the roof.

Soda realizes that the only reason Gundham isn’t beating him senseless is because he doesn’t know the hamster is dead.

“I killed it.” He starts sobbing harder the second the word leave his mouth. He feels Gundham’s hand tense on his back

“What.” Gundham definitely sounds pissed now. He’s not yelling, but his voice sounds deadly. Soda accepts that he’s about to get the shit kicked out of him, accepts it even. He deserves it.

“I-it must have been the oil on my h-hands or something, I don’t know. I s-should have been paying more attention, but when I looked at them gain it was-” his voice is cut off by another sob, and he’s just waiting for Gundham to hit him. To his surprise, some of the tension in Gundham’s body dissipates.

“Where is the poor creature?” Gundham doesn’t sound angry anymore and Soda doesn’t understand. He just gestures towards the box, he’s too much of a coward to even look at it again.

Gundham gets up and opens the box. Soda hear him exhale sadly after a moment, before returning to Soda.

“It would seem we have both been mislead.” Gundham sits beside Soda and starts rubbing his back again. He explains that Soda did not kill the hamster, it seemed like something must not have developed right internally, and it simply died of natural causes. There was nothing either of them could have done to save it. Soda is just amazed how calm Gundham is being.

He asks him why he isn’t more upset, and Gundham sighs and tells him that it’s unfortunately something he sees a lot, so over time he’s just gotten used to it.

Soda’s just like “That fucking sucks.” and Gundham kind of laughs sadly and say “It fucking sucks indeed.” Soda’s kind of startled by Gundham swearing and it forces an awkward little laugh out of him.

They’re both quite for a while, then Gundham tells him he’s touched by how upset Soda was over the hamsters death, and that he’s sure the hamsters soul appreciated him mourning it, but it is simply part of the circle of life and death, so he shouldn’t get too fixated on it. Soda’s still crying a little but he nods and says he’ll try, Gundham keeps rubbing his back.

They stay up on the roof for a while longer. Soda has mostly stopped crying, but Gundham’s hand is still on his back and he tries not to think too much about it. When they stand, Gundham picks up the box before Soda can even think about it and motions for him to follow him.

They bury it in some nearby woods, Soda insists on leaving some flowers. He asks Gundham not to tell their classmate about how much he cried. Gundham just says ‘of course’, as if they didn’t spend most their free time looking for new ways to get under each other’s skin.

Later, Gundham insists that Soda comes to see the healthy babies, telling him it will help him feel better. Soda is scared to be left alone with them, so Gundham just stays by his side the whole time. Even after Gundham finishes his project and brings them back to his place, he invites Soda over to see them. He starts teaching Soda about proper hamster care and they slowly grow closer and closer.

Sometimes Soda gets a little teary eyed while looking at the other hamsters, and he’s worried Gundham will make fun of him. He never does, he always just silently rubs Soda’s back, until one day he pulls him into a hug as well.

Months later, their relationship has completely turned around. They’re both constantly talking to each other and hanging out, they even occasionally refer to the hamster babies as their children haha. The rest of the class starts making bets on when they’ll realize they’re into each other, but for the time being they’re both happy they were able to finally become friends.

#tw: animal death #cw: animal death #Soudam #replies #falconeye #Soudam ramblings #how could you make me write this #jk #I've been sitting on this ask until I felt sad enough to write something sad #and whoops #today I was sad #this was actually kind of therapeutic to write though

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dammithawke · 3 years

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Once every like six months, outside of new hyperfixations, i hit post limit like i used to do daily. And then i casually mention it to a friend. And im reminded that this isnt a THING everyone has encountered.

I casually sigh and mention it to my wife, only for them to give me that look that definitely means they still dont fully understand how i manage to do it.

I bite my tongue. My past is dark. I remember hitting post limit before 10 am. And then hitting it again on my backup account before 2 pm. And then cutting it close to the wire on my third account when i hit it at 10:30 pm, or 11:45 pm -- so close to when the limit counter resets at midnight.

"How do you have so much to say?" Someone asks me.

"i dont," i reply. "The reblogs just give me so much seratonin."

I remember before post limit. But i cant find when it began. Sometime between 2010 and 2012, right? Google wont tell me. I have to rely on vague memories of being in highschool and being annoyed that its suddenly harder or impossible to liveblog my reactions to new episodes of glee AND reblog 7 different versions of every gif and screen cap after. Back when tumblr was also a weird stream of consciousness where suddenly you had inside jokes with mutuals who would reliably respond to everything you posted.

It seemed like followers meant something then, because we didnt realize how removed it all really was. I thought it was impressive ever time i hit another milestone. 10. 50. 100. 200. Then make a new account, because everything is too static but not static at all and my brain needs MORE and DIFFERENT. 50. 100. 200. 275.

I dont look anymore. 2000 followers? 2006? A relic of when this was a legend of korra rp blog, plus the abundance of pornbots.

I follow more then that. My dash can never be at a stand still. Every new hyperfixation, i have to follow more, to outweigh old interest in favor of what makes my brain whirr NOW.

This blog isnt young. But ive been around here longer then it. Its seen my insomnia and my insomnia has taken advantage if it.

I left for a bit. But i returned. Its a habit, a comfort. Its a site that barely works, but no one really can find me here.

Im fine with that.

#this is melodramatic ok #i just couldnt sleep

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kuramirocket · 3 years

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Sandwiched between private properties in Southeast Austin sits a little-known cemetery off Hoeke Lane, just west of U.S. 183. From the outside, there’s nothing that indicates the site is the final resting place for a number of Mexican and Mexican-American residents who died decades ago.

It’s a wilderness. The headstones, many of which date back to the 1940s, are easy to miss. The weeds are overgrown, and trees and shrubs cover much of the 4.5-acre plot.

The cemetery has been called a couple different names over the years — the Montopolis Cemetery and San José II. But no sign will tell you that. In fact, there’s scarce information available about the cemetery’s history at all.

But members of the community and a team of researchers are trying to change that. They want to trace back its history and ensure the cemetery, along with its sister site in nearby Montopolis, is preserved.

Diana Hernandez is the lead researcher for (Re)claiming Memories, a research group out of UT Austin that seeks to restore and preserve missing histories in communities of color. She and her team have been collecting death certificates and reaching out to descendants of those buried at the cemeteries to help piece together the history.

“Once we start to research the people that are buried here and start to find archival documentation for each person, we start to see the community come to life through the cemetery,” she said.

The History

To understand San José II, Hernandez says, we have to start about 2 miles north at San José I. This historic Mexican and Mexican-American cemetery was built around 1919. It sits between two churches off Montopolis Drive, though neither of them own it. The site is believed to be unclaimed, or orphaned, meaning no one is responsible for its upkeep in any official capacity. But neighbors and community members have taken care of it as best they can over the years, mowing the lawn, pulling weeds and cleaning off gravestones.

A metal archway stands at the entrance and reads “San Jose Cementerio.” The cemetery was founded by a mutual aid society called the Union Fraternal Mexicana, and it served the migrant sharecropping community. This was during segregation.

“Mexicans weren’t necessarily allowed to be buried in white cemeteries,” Hernandez said. “In some cases I've seen where there's a white cemetery, and then right next to it is the Mexican section … In this case, it was just a completely different cemetery."

When Cementerio San José started to get full, the second one was created in 1949 in Del Valle. Over the years, the cemeteries changed hands. The original San José hasn’t had a known owner for several decades. San José II has an owner, but she’s believed to be in poor health and unable to maintain it, according to Hernandez. KUT reached out to the owner for this story, but did not hear back.

Based on their research so far, Hernandez and her team estimate San José I and II have more than 350 burials combined. But understanding how many burials are at each individual site is a challenge. That’s partly because on death certificates, the name Montopolis Cemetery was often used interchangeably for San José I and II. And not every burial has a gravestone.

Many people buried at the cemeteries died during concurrent epidemics, like influenza, tuberculosis and pneumonia.

“They were getting so many bodies that they were burying people in layers on top of each other, and they stopped documenting who all was getting buried,” she said. “Because there's no documentation for the number of layers for the people that were being buried in these mass graves, we're just never going to know. There's going to be layers of people that we're never going to be able to identify.”

Hernandez began researching the San José cemeteries at the end of 2019, just before the area was hit with another outbreak of a deadly disease — COVID-19. And again, this predominantly Latino neighborhood was hit harder than others.

“These histories repeat themselves,” Hernandez said. “I think that’s one of the reasons why this work is important, because it kind of sheds light on these pasts that weren’t acknowledged the way they should have been. We can use this knowledge to improve our present.”

The Descendants

Frank Monreal remembers the days when Montopolis Drive was just a dirt road. He and the other neighborhood kids, some 50 years ago, would play on the giant oak tree that stands in the middle of Cementerio San José. Instead of bicycles, he and his friends had horses.

“Everybody rode horses back then,” he said one day while at San José I. “We used to come out here, and they were our lawn mowers. They let them eat the grass and keep the grass low here.”

Monreal has relatives buried at San José I and II. From an early age, he understood death was a natural part of life. He often helped out with funerals. He remembers one burial happening at Cementerio San José when he was a kid. But it’s been a long time since anyone was buried there, he says. Most gravesites appear to date back to the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

There were more gravestones back then, he says, but some have weathered or broken over time. He used to walk through the cemetery on his way to school. He’d often see people putting flowers on graves, something he doesn’t see much anymore. Now, many relatives have died or left.

“That’s inevitable, you know, because generations change,” he said. “People move away.”

Preserving the cemetery, though, is important, he says, especially as gentrification has altered the landscape of Montopolis over the years.

“[The cemetery] is sacred ground to us, from our ancestors,” he said. “I don’t want to see it gone.”

Micaela Johnson, a 19-year-old artist and activist, can trace part of her family tree back to the Cementerio San José. She’s a member of the Limón family, one of Austin’s founding families whose descendants now number upwards of 3,500.

Many of her family members grew up and had businesses in Montopolis, like the Limón Bakery. She said her grandparents probably have connections to at least a quarter of the people buried at San José.

In her family, passing down stories from generation to generation is a common tradition. She remembers hearing stories about Aurora, her grandfather’s sister, who died in 1940 of pneumonia when she was 11 months old. She was buried at Cementerio San José, and her gravestone was decorated with marbles. But Johnson hasn’t been able to locate it.

She also remembers stories of Concepcion Trevino Garcia, her great-great-grandmother who died in 1939 from tuberculosis and was buried at San José. She left behind her husband and five young daughters.

“She was one of the strongest women that I have ever heard my family talk about,” Johnson said. “She was very driven and very loving.”

Garcia's grandchildren still visit the cemetery on Mother’s Day and leave flowers, Johnson said. Her family’s connection to the cemetery has inspired Johnson to get involved with (Re)claiming Memories and help ensure the San José cemeteries are well kept.

“It’s not just a place where people are buried,” she said. “It’s the life and the heart of a lot of our ancestry.”

One of the more recent headstones at Cementerio San José belongs to Augustina Rosales, who was at one time believed to be Austin’s oldest living resident. She died in 1994 at age 116. Near the back of the cemetery, she’s buried next to her husband Marcos, who died in 1951.

Rosales had 13 children and raised several others who were relatives or orphaned as if they were her own. She liked to dance to conjunto music and cook for her family, according to an Austin American-Statesman article about her death. Rosa Moncada, Rosales's great-granddaughter, says “she was awesome.”

Maintaining The Cemeteries

Moncada has several other relatives buried at San José, including grandparents and two older sisters who were born premature and died. Growing up in East Austin, Moncada would go with her mother and siblings to visit the cemetery. But they went less frequently over time, in part because the grass was often so high they couldn’t easily walk through it.

When they heard about the work Hernandez and her team are doing to help maintain the cemetery, Moncada and her sister Juanita Moncada Bayer started visiting again. And now they’re trying to keep it maintained, bringing relatives together to mow the lawn and clear out dead tree branches.

But maintaining the cemetery consistently isn’t an easy task. San José I is 2.5 acres.

“We thought, well, let's do what we can,” Bayer said. “But unfortunately, our mind tells us we can do it. But our bodies — like, that's hard work.”

(Re)claiming Memories and members of the community hosted a cleanup for San José earlier this year and hope to host more. They have been reaching out to city and county leaders, asking them to allocate more resources to the cemeteries' maintenance.

The more challenging endeavor will be cleaning up San José II. The site is difficult to access, making it hard for people to visit and maintain it.

Monreal remembers going to San José II as a kid to visit his grandfather’s grave with his dad. Back then, San José II had a proper entrance and was easier to get to.

Now, a locked chain-link fence blocks the main path that leads to the cemetery. Several sources told KUT the fence was put up by the property owner next door, perhaps to keep people from trespassing. KUT reached out to the law office that owns the property and was told it didn’t have anything to do with the gate. Hernandez and the research group are trying to get to the bottom of the issue and hope to create a proper entrance, so descendants can visit.

The area has long had problems with people dumping trash and gravel. A mound of dirt and debris now presses against fencing on one side of the cemetery.

And warehouses are being built on the southeastern side. This worries Hernandez because the cemetery hasn’t been surveyed; some burials could be outside the perimeter and could be disturbed. Community members have expressed concern that debris from construction is impacting the cemetery.

When KUT reached out to the construction manager for the company that’s developing the site, he was surprised to learn there was a cemetery next door. (“That is a jungle,” Brent Ramirez said.)

The cemetery itself is zoned for warehouse and limited office use, which some are concerned could make it vulnerable to development. (Re)claiming Memories is working with Council Member Vanessa Fuentes to get the proper zoning for it and a historical designation. Fuentes toured the cemetery earlier this year.

“It’s sad to see because it looks as if it’s been neglected and dismissed, especially with the development that’s right next to it,” she said. “Those are families and families’ history and legacies and relatives that are buried there. Those are stories that need to be told.”

Currently, pink marking flags stick up in various spots within the shrubbery of San José II. That’s the work of Joaquin Rodriguez, an Austin resident who has been going out to the cemetery to remove litter and clean off and mark gravestones that have been covered up over time.

He first learned about the cemetery late last year while researching his ancestry. Rodriguez, who was adopted, had taken a DNA test and learned he had relatives buried at cemeteries throughout Austin, including San José I and II. After seeing how neglected San José II was, he decided to take matters into his own hands.

The (Re)claiming Memories team wants to eventually create a digital map or database where people can upload information about the people buried at the cemeteries. Hernandez hopes this crowdsourced online resource will help bring the stories of the deceased together and shed light on the history of the Mexican and Mexican-American community in Montopolis.

The team is also putting together an exhibit on the cemeteries for the Mexic-Arte Museum in September. Johnson plans to perform a poem called “We Are Lost History” and sell shirts she designed, the proceeds from which will support the cemeteries' upkeep.

Johnson said she recognizes that Austinites who are not directly connected to the cemeteries may not see a reason to care about them, but she thinks they should.

“They might just see it as another gravesite or another old ancient Mexican burial ground, and they might [think] it doesn’t matter because it’s not a part of them,” Johnson said. “But it is a part of them. It’s a part of the history of Austin.”

And as development continues to alter the look and population of the Montopolis neighborhood, she says, it’s urgent to keep conversations about the cemeteries going.

“If we’re not actively trying to be like, ‘Hey, this matters,’” she said, “it’ll get washed away.”

#🇲🇽#usa #united states #texas #texan history #mexican history #cemetary #cemetaries #montopolis #mexican #mexican american #austin #austin texas

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captain-emmajones · 4 years

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Love, Emma (5/7)

(Art by the wonderful @carpedzem <33)

Loosely based on Love, Rosie (2014). Killian and Emma are best friends and neighbors. They’ve always been – until he leaves for the Navy when his brother dies. When he comes back, nine months later, summer has begun and childhood is ending. Emma can tell something is changed in him, but she doesn’t know what. Until she does. He’s fallen in love with someone else.

And then, suddenly, they’re kissing on her nineteenth birthday. When she asks him to forget their night out, and never talk about it again, Killian thinks she means to tell him she regrets the kiss they exchanged. Except she has no memory of it.

Killian and Emma will dance around each other, until their heads spin and their legs hurt, and everything becomes blurry and it has to stop – for both of their sake.

Thank you guys for your comments and likes, it means the world. Also huge thank you to @profdanglaisstuff who beta’d this and gave me her precious thoughts <3

Quick summary: Last scene of last chapter was Emma deciding to stay with Killian in Portsmouth in order to help him settle back into his life after losing his hand. This chapter opens on Killian and Emma, still in hospital room, one day after his surgery. It is still set six months before Emma's wedding.By that time, Killian has broken up with Milah, and Emma knows it.

Friends to Lovers - Mutual Pining - Angst - Fluff - 5500 words - ao3

Part 1 - MIRRORBALL, Part 2 - AUGUST , Part 3 - HOAX, Part 4 - PEACE, Part 6 - CARDIGAN , Part 7 - INVISIBLE STRING

PART 5 - THIS IS ME TRYING.

Six months before Emma’s wedding.

Large, golden sparkles dance over his closed eyelids. Wrapped up in a soft cloud of unconsciousness, Killian is reluctant to open his eyes. The pain has finally stopped. The buzzing in his skull as well. He is peaceful. He could remain like this forever.

Ah, denial, an old pal. But where is he, exactly?

As Killian emerges from his sleep, the first thing he becomes aware of is the soft, tingly sensation coming up from his forearm. Then, the pain radiating from his missing limb. And then warmth, against his body, a sunny and welcoming warmth. And then more pain, always pain.

Oh right. His hand. The machine. Then the hospital. Then Emma.

Bloody hell.

In a grunt, he finally lifts his eyelids and his eyes slowly adjust to the light cascading through his hospital room’s window. It’s a very bright, golden light spilled onto each corner of the room that highlights dancing sparkles of dust around his bed and lands onto the same golden threads spread all over his forearm. They are the ones to blame for the familiar tingles in his arm.

A small, white hand rests above his stomach, while another one acts as a pillow under her cheek. Killian’s heart beams. She used her red-leather jacket as a blanket.

If his face is still frozen by pain and medicine, a part of him – that part of him that believes in hope and happy endings – well, that part of him smiles. It’s a soft, timid, fragile flicker of light that spreads tentatively in his chest and leaves warmth there.

She stayed, stammers his ferocious, hopeful heart, she stayed. And the morphine he is under is simply too strong to allow him to fully understand what this means, as she lays asleep in this plastic chair, and her back must be killing her, and she stayed.

Shush, heart. Those are territories we do not explore anymore.

Except that his fingers have suddenly found a peculiar interest in her golden curls, and he only realizes he’s been playing with them when Emma grunts in her turn and raises a sleep-wrinkled face.

Killian takes his hand back in a heartbeat.

“Oh, you’re awake,” she mumbles, and her mouth sounds incredibly dry as she does so.

A small chuckle escapes his lips. Killian is glad she is still too tightly wrapped in Morpheus’ arms to notice his embarrassment.

Killian thinks Emma has always been a sight for sore eyes in the morning, as she rubs her puffy eyes and tries to untangle her hair with impatient fingers and her green eyes find his and steal his breath away.

“Aye. I believe so, love. Are you, though?”

And he thinks she doesn’t miss the tender irony behind his words. He can tell because she arches one mischievous eyebrow as she straightens her back, and her hands meet her waist and she winces.

“Oh, very much so. My back is killing me.”

And he casts a very amused eye on Emma as she stretches some more, hands up in the air, and dramatically sighs. Then, she rests her palms over his arm again and swallows him with the waves of her big, green eyes and he needs to keep breathing or he is going to stay far longer in this damn hospital.

“Did you stay all night?” he asks, because he only remembers falling asleep, while she appeared captivated with Sheriff files, red leather jacket on her back and feet propped on his bed.

Lord is he glad that he was under so much morphine when she told him, last night, that she would stay in New York as long as he is hospitalized – anyway, Graham owes me so many paid vacation days – and he did not dare ask any further questions. This was just too good to be true, and instead he stared at the ring on her finger, the one she was twirling, twirling, twirling and he said “Thank you, Swan.” He didn’t find the strength in himself to add “You didn’t have to”, because he was scared she would leave.

“I did,” she exhales, and suddenly her gaze is all over him again, and he swears he feels completely submerged in its intensity. “Made quite the deal with the nurse – trading my Snickers bar for her Twix – but definitely worth it.”

“Of course, you did.”

And then she pauses, mouth slightly open, as if words are about to come out of her mouth, and she’s looking at him as if he might shatter in front of her eyes, into thousands of bloody sparkles. He thinks he just might when a small sigh escapes her lips. “I just wanted to make sure you were alright.”

The confession is followed by a frown, a shake of her head, and Killian thinks she regrets it right then.

His hand starts forward to grab hers.

And she doesn’t back away, although they’ve just spent more than a year apart, she doesn’t back away even as her muscles tense under his touch, and her eyes widen, and she stretches a smile on her face.

And there is so much loneliness in the gesture she doesn’t initiate, in the fingers she doesn’t tangle with his, in the straightness of her back.

And it is terrible then, to stare at her, stare at the void between them, this gulf of pain and distance and grief, to be able to touch it, almost, to see the splinters of their lost friendship and love and to guess the shape it used to have, but to be completely unable to put them back together.

He doesn’t risk his “You didn’t have to” that time either, instead settles for: “Well, thank you, Swan. It means a lot.”

There are still golden sparkles reflected on the white hospital wall. There are still words stuck in his throat, words he desperately wants to tell her but knows he has no right to.

Thank you for coming. You saved me in so many more ways than you could possibly imagine. There is no one left in this world for me to love but you. And you, I will always love.

Of course he broke things off with Milah, when he learnt about her engagement to Neal. How could he keep up the charade? It no longer made sense.

“No need to thank me,” she abruptly answers, and her tone is not as fierce as she probably wants it to be, and she snatches her hand away from him.

A blink. A frown. She’s standing up, grabbing the plastic cup on the white sink, pours water inside and drinks it up.

Nothing makes sense anymore. And it should be fine, really.

But if it were fine, surely he wouldn’t be staring at her like this, as she drops the cup on the sink and looks back at him, the beginning of a smile on her lips, and surely that smile wouldn’t die into a frown when she gazes into his eyes. Surely she wouldn’t be nearly melting into the white wall behind her back.

“Want some?”

A pause. What the bloody hell is she talking about? Oh right. Water. “Huh, aye, I’d like that.”

This is bloody awkward.

The cup of water is handed down and more niceties with it.

But then Emma has a nervous blink down, what the bloody hell is she looking at and the plastic cup remains still in his hand, untouched. Why, hello there, the bandage around his wrist seems to tempt Killian — all white teeth out. And Killian feels absolutely numb. There is still an urge, inside of him, to stretch out this missing limb and grab her hand, but that will never happen again.

And that should also be fine but it feels like swallowing glass. And he congratulates his brain for wallowing over Emma and him, a long lost fairytale, instead of his missing limb – denial is after all a wonderful thing – but they are both unreachable, forever gone, and it should be fine.

Thankfully for him, Emma takes the cue to start babbling. That’s something she used to do when they were younger and she felt exposed, or uncomfortable, or vulnerable, she’d babble to muffle a deafening silence.

“I’ll be staying over at a small motel near the hospital. Mary Margaret and David are staying there as well. They’ll come by tonight to say goodbye. They’re flying back to New York. The nurse said you would have to remain under observation for a couple nights more. But then I’ll help you move back into your apartment, and surely there is some kind of support you can get from the hospital, like a nurse that’d come for your stitches at home…You have an apartment, right?”

He grins to muffle a scream.

“Aye, that I do, Swan.”

Something terrible howls in his chest. Not even her eyes in his are enough to soothe it.

Mary Margaret and David do pay them a visit, later that afternoon, when the sun begins its way down in the sky and leaves orange trails behind it, and Emma’s managed to sneak pizza into his room.

Mary Margaret lends him a pile of books. “Pretty sure you’ll find plenty of time to read those now.”

Killian finds comfort in their friendship. For a minute, as they all stand around his bed and David’s hand is pressed to his shoulder as Emma finally lets go of her red leather jacket to feel more comfortable, Killian forgets his missing limb.

“I’ll be sure to drop by New York on my next leave,” Killian says, and he means it.

When they decide to leave, David shakes his car’s keys in front of Emma’s eyes �� your coach awaits you outside milady – and Killian feels a very childish fear tighten his chest.

“Thank you guys for coming all this way from New York.”

David ruffles his hair playfully. “It was the right thing to do, Killian.”

Killian smiles, blinks. Liam’s features burn his eyes. Has it always felt this lonely?

“Take care,” whispers Mary Margaret, as she presses a kiss onto his cheek.

“Always do.”

It’s Emma’s turn to glance at him, and Killian nods, and he hopes she doesn’t see the frightened look in his eyes.

Loneliness is leaning against the wall, arms crossed, a satisfied smirk on her lips. She’s been his best friend for months now. And there aren’t a lot of things Killian is afraid of, but she is one of them. There’s no getting rid of her. She sticks to the walls and to his heart and she poisons his mouth.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Emma whispers, and she modestly squeezes his hand as a goodbye.

And the distance between their two bodies leaves pebbles in Killian’s belly and a lump in his throat.

They spend those couple of days together, navigating around the ruins of their friendship. Very careful as they step around each other, not to wound the other. It’s a real battlefield full of sharp edges, of long given up swords, of yellow irises and broken hearts.

Emma shows up as early as she is allowed, and Killian knows what it costs her. She’s no morning person, as confesses the coffee she holds tightly against her chest as she enters his room with eyes half-closed and purple under-eye circles.

“Have you been sleeping, Swan?”

“Of course I have.”

Liar.

Emma is more guarded than ever. It makes him sad. She didn’t use to be like that...well, at least, not with him.

Killian has to settle for niceties. It’s all she is willing to offer. He cannot blame her.

She leaves around five, red leather jacket firmly slung over her shoulders and the last dying rays of sunshine tainting her hair with blood.

“See you, Killian.” And she smiles, and he almost catches a glimpse of the girl who stood on his porch and held his hand.

“See you, Swan.”

Emma’s running. Again. She is late. She overslept. But she hardly slept all week, and it really had nothing to do with Killian, and she needed to.

There are yellow irises clutched to her chest with her usual morning coffee, and she knows Killian will forgive her as she twirls between the walls of Portsmouth hospital to avoid nurses in her rush.

Killian’s already all dressed up when she irrupts into his room, face flushed, and she hopes the nurses helped him with his shirt and – oh, he’s staring at her.

“Hello, Swan.”

And then he looks down at the flowers against her chest, and she tries her best to hide the grin that tickles her lips as she hands them to him.

“It’s been a while,” she mumbles and she figures in the eyebrow he raises that he is also attempting to conceal a smile.

“Still my favorites,” he simply answers.

All around them, dust dances in the sunlight.

“Good.”

Emma has trained her heart. Emma has trained her heart and she has given it armor – a red leather jacket – and she has taught it how to survive, how to remain strong.

But all the training in the world might not be enough to muffle her heart’s sigh when Killian Jones walks beside her to his apartment, and he is pale, livid, and he is in pain, and she cannot save him.

February is such a nasty month. February is cruel and cold and has little care for their human hearts.

No more Christmas lights in the trees, no more snow on the pavement, everything is dead but the blinding, evil sun.

Emma glances quickly at Killian as she walks at his pace, making sure she stays within his reach. He did not look at her, getting out of the car, he did not look at her and she thinks it was for fear that she would try to help him.

She clenches her jaw.

“Almost there, Killian,” she attempts, and he simply lets go of a groan. The surgery he went through was heavy. He looks positively exhausted.

And yet the sun shines its evil beams.

And Emma thinks, as her eyes remain fixed on his figure, that being with Killian always felt like being bare naked, exposed to his knowing eyes. There is not a corner of her soul he hasn’t seen and she only guesses what this must feel like – to have her stare at his missing limb and make out the extent of his anguish.

And she might be a complete grown up, independent woman, and she might wear a red leather jacket, but Emma Swan’s heart will always have a special strawberry weakness for Killian Jones, and that is something she needs to navigate around.

Open the front door of his building. Let him in. Breathe.

It was easy to convince herself, back in Storybrooke, busy with Sheriff duties and Neal, that she no longer cared for Killian Jones as much as she used to. That he absolutely wasn’t a living embodiment of a very big hole in her life. Nope. All it took to shatter this illusion was hearing his name on the phone.

“Careful, Killian,” Emma whispers as they finally reach the stairs leading to his flat.

She doesn’t dare to touch him as he begins climbing, lips pressed together in a firm line. She doesn’t want him to think she thinks he needs her or something. And she frowns, she fists her hands, but she lets him climb alone, right behind him, in case he falls.

And when they reach his threshold she lunges forward to quickly unlock the door, and she hears the small wheezing sound escaping his lips. She shifts to face him, she watches as he closes his eyes and pearls of sweat roll down his temples and well – her arms have reacted without her consent.

She’s suddenly all over him, arms wrapped around his torso, and he glances at her through his semi-closed eyes, and he is pale, pale, translucent, and it’s breaking something inside of her that she thought no longer existed.

“You don’t have to, Swan—” he begins, his voice hoarse, but she shakes her head.

“—It’s okay to need help, Killian.”

And his eyes shine in recollection. He remembers.

He was the one who taught her this, a long time ago, when she was new in Storybrooke and this neighbor and his bright blue eyes were staring at her from his fence. He saw her struggle with Ingrid’s yellow irises and he said in a very gentle voice “It’s okay to need help.” And her eyes were twitching because he didn’t understand, the nice blonde lady would send her back if she killed her flowers. And then his hand had been very warm and tender over her shaking knuckles, and it was the first time Emma Swan thought she was in love with Killian Jones.

While the fear of being abandoned retreated, the teenage crush lingered in one hidden corner of her mind for a very long time. She doesn’t think it still lives there though.

“Come on,” she eventually whispers, to break this silence that is far too heavy on their shoulders and to guide him inside.

The door shuts behind them.

And what Emma discovers stirs something very strange, very nasty in her belly as a smell of alcohol and rotting food fills her lungs and her throat does a strange heaving thing.

“Sorry for the mess, Swan. Didn’t think I’d get any visitors anytime soon.”

“Aha, don’t worry. I’ve seen worse.”

Except she hasn’t. Well, she has, but not applied to Killian Jones. Killian is proper and Navy and upright and clean and organized, and not whatever the hell this is.

As she opens her mouth to utter a smart comment, it is as if, suddenly, her brain disconnected from the rest of her body.

She comes up with a joke, bad break up huh, but she settles for keeping her mouth resolutely closed.

Clearing her throat, her gaze sinks to her feet as she helps him sit in one corner of his sofa that is not already invaded by empty cups and pizza boxes.

She crinkles her nose. Something, that is not cheese, is definitely rotting there.

“There you go.”

Her gaze resolutely avoids the empty rum bottles on the floor. She did not come all the way from Storybrooke to Portsmouth to lecture him, to guide him towards the light or whatever, she came to help a friend after an accident and it is no big deal.

And it is no big deal either that she feels him staring at her as she observes his place with the blankest expression she can come up with, anything not to make him feel worse.

Except that she is almost tempted to run the hell away from all of this, from him, to run and never look back, because this is far more than she ever signed up for, and what the hell was she thinking, that she could just be a shoulder for him to lean on without losing said shoulder in the process.

And then she notices a picture of them, on his fridge, just below one of Liam and Killian, and her hands come to rest over her hips.

It’s a picture they asked Granny to take on her nineteenth birthday.

Killian must have followed her glance because she hears him exhale behind her: “We had quite the night, didn’t we, Swan?”

And she nods, although no coherent thoughts are to be spotted in her mind, except for a distinct and distant smell of vodka and fruit juice and the sweetness of rocky road ice-cream melting over her tongue.

Emma flips back, a big grin on her lips. “Still fancy a grilled-cheese? It’s the only thing I can cook.”

And she smiles, harder, mostly to savagely crush this urge to run between her teeth.

Killian sleeps all afternoon, curled up on his sofa. Emma tucks a blue blanket under his chin and sets her mind on cleaning his flat. It’s rather a nice place to live in. It’s far bigger than Mary Margaret and David’s, back in New York, and only smaller than the one she shares with Neal in Storybrooke. It has one bedroom and a big living room and a small kitchen, and the walls are luminous and white and bare and – alright, it definitely makes her sad.

A pizza box hits the floor, near the trash can.

“Damnit.”

Emma grunts, bends down to drop the damn box back inside.

It’s as if Killian did not want this place to belong to him. She doesn’t even know how long he’s been living here. Perhaps he moved after his breakup with her.

Hidden behind the fridge, Emma finds a broom against the wall. She picks it up.

It isn’t exactly the kind of place she pictures when she thinks about Killian. She can see different hues of blue, and yellow, and a naval theme going on, and also a very neat place.

Her hands stop over the broom. Perhaps she doesn’t know him at all anymore. It’s been so long, after all, since they’ve had a true conversation.

“How can you settle for him, Emma?”

“You’re one to talk about settling, Killian! You’ve been clinging to Milah for years now, even though you are miserable!”

“You don’t know that, Swan!” he screamed, but she only heard: “You don’t know ME.”

“Well, if I don’t know… then, then I’ll just hang up!”

“Suit yourself!”

“FINE.”

Memories of their last fight flash before her eyes, and she grunts. Her eyes land on him — asleep on the red sofa. His mouth is slightly open. He looks peaceful, younger.

And then a sigh, a shrug. No need to look back at the past. They’ve made mistakes. They’ve made a lot of them. And so what? They’re still friends in spite of everything. They’ll always be.

And she sweeps the floor with more intent.

He wakes up to a smell of soap, and tomato sauce and basil tingling his nose and he opens his eyes in a groan.

No, she did not…

“Swan,” he grunts, and there are so many reproaches echoing in his tone.

He rubs his eyes, a terrible headache invading his skull – one of the many side effects of anesthesia – and discovers her behind his grey kitchen counter, hair up in a ponytail and a spoon in her mouth.

The sun of this late afternoon is long gone, and all of the lights are switched on in his flat, and she cleaned everything and he feels terribly ashamed.

“You really didn’t have to clean up my mess.”

“Oh don’t sound angry Killian, you’re gonna love this. Trust me.”

He raises one eyebrow.

“What is it?”

“Pasta and tomato sauce. What? I told you I’m no chef.”

“Wasn’t complaining.”

“Oh, but your eyes speak for you.”

And then the banter and the lime green apron are put down on the counter and she makes her way towards him, brows furrowed.

“Are you feeling better?” she asks and he has stopped breathing somewhere in her path between the kitchen and the living room towards him.

She looks infuriatingly beautiful, with her hair up.

“Aye,” he exhales, and then she’s leaning forward to grab his arm.

But bile climbs up his throat, and it is simply too much for him to take, and he has to push her away and... his arm jerks out of her grasp.

She backs away, immediately. Broken are the splinters in her eyes as he swallows glass again.

“Thank you, but I can do this alone,” he utters, and he tries to sound gentle, but the damage has already been done.

She stands in his living room with her hands on her hips and she’s smiling but it isn’t a smile, it’s the mere shadow of a smile, it’s killing him, and he cannot, will not reach for her.

They eat silently, as normally as possible. It’s a lot of awkward silences and “This is really good, thank you, Swan”, and “No problem,” and “Could you pass me the salt?” and “Sure, here you go,” and Emma’s tone is suddenly sharp and merciless and he stares at his fork with the serious intent of digging a hole through his plate.

Luckily for him, he did not lose the hand he uses the most.

And anxiety is just a blink away, it’s lurking in one deep corner of his mind, ready to roar and leap on him at any given moment. And Emma is twirling her ring again, twirling, twirling and suddenly it is difficult to breathe.

What is he going to do if he cannot re-join the Navy? What if they don’t want him back?

“Erm…Are you okay, Killian?” tries Emma in a small voice, and she must have seen him become paler.

He looks up with eyes wide open. No air is reaching his lungs.

She has tomato sauce in the right corner of her mouth, and he wants to tell her, but he cannot.

His heart is drumming in his ears. It’s as if he just understood the extent of his wound. It’s not only limited to his hand, it spreads to every inch of his life.

“Aye, I just…”

Breathe, Killian, breathe.

He sees her brows furrow, he watches as she leans forward. “Come on, Killian. There isn’t much you cannot tell me.”

And her ring glints under the white ceiling light, glints far brighter than the bracelet around her wrist, glints.

“Aye. I was simply thinking about the Navy and what’s to come, for me.” He is surprised his voice comes out this calm and collected.

He sees her give up on her fork and knife and seize his hand on the table, as if it is the most normal thing in the world.

Flashes of once upon a time pass before his eyes. Once upon a time, she held his hand on Granny’s table on a summer day and he thought she meant “I love you”, and the sun was reflected in her golden hair, and perhaps she meant “I love you”, but that doesn’t matter. The moment slipped between his fingers and there is no getting it back now.

Still, he takes the initiative of intertwining their fingers together and he smiles faintly, heart still beating far too fast.

“You’ll be okay, Killian. You’re a survivor, remember?”

And his knuckle is brushing the side of her hand, and she isn’t taking it away.

“Aye. Although it’s not very fair to use my own words against me, Swan.”

And she grins, and she is an angel of beauty in a house of decay, with her blonde hair cascading down her shoulder blades and her pink lips, and it is a hard endeavor not to stare too long at them, to look away in spite of how brightly she is shining.

“Come on, Killian, eat up before it gets cold.”

He nods, but the drop of his eyes to her mouth is inevitable. He is hypnotized, it seems, and suddenly he is bending towards her.

Her eyes widen. She doesn’t back away.

And he cannot quite prevent the chaos he is about to create, cannot quite stop the course of his lips towards hers, and he looks up, sees confusion in her gaze, then glances down at her lips, and up at her eyes again, and down, down… And before he knows it, his hand has cupped the back of her head, fingers slipping into her ponytail. She has a small whisper then, a small hiccup, “What are you doing—” but the end of her sentence dies on his lips and he is kissing her open mouth.

He shuts his eyes. Hard.

Tasting her after all these years sends a wave of shock rattling through his body. She tastes exactly as he remembers, as he tried to forget.

His heart drums, drums, drums and she does not back away. She kisses him back. She is kissing him back.

She steps into him, pressing her mouth harder against his, and Killian is no longer breathing because a firework has started in his chest and there is smoke in his lungs.

Somehow, she crosses the distance between their two bodies, and suddenly, she is straddling his lap, and her hands are in his hair, and they tug, they tug for dear life, and his arm comes to wrap around her waist as he holds her tighter, as close as he possibly can, and he cannot breathe...Her lips move above his, a hypnotic rhythm, open slightly to allow her tongue to taste him, and she bites his lower lip and his heart comes crashing down in his chest, it drums, drums, drums.

And then, it stops.

Just like that.

Drum, drum, drum.

She lets go. Stands up. Runs although her legs aren’t moving. As a brutal sea of frozen waves swallows him alive.

“Killian, I…I,” and she stammers, takes a step back, creates a necessary distance between them, is blushing furiously, brushes an inexistent strand of hair behind her ears, “what are we doing? You just had surgery, and you’ve still got drugs in your system, and I am engaged, and this should not be happening, and I cannot do this, you understand, right? This isn’t right. It isn’t.”

And as the taste of her lips lingers on his tongue, finally, he desperately wishes she were wrong. He is still high on drugs and that’s why he dared to kiss her. No other explanation. No underlying feelings.

“You’re right, Swan. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I don’t know what came over me.”

Except, he knows full well. And you, I will always love.

She leaves the next morning in a deafening, groundbreaking silence. He watches as she makes sure everything is settled, that he is comfortable, that the nurse will come check on him every day for the next couple of weeks, and she tells him “call me if there’s anything you need” but they both know she doesn’t mean it, what she means is “call someone else”. And this rest of his life without her must go on.

That night, he sets his mind on finally writing down his thoughts. Finally telling her. After what feels like years of miscommunication, a good old-fashioned letter might do the trick to confess his feelings.

My dearest Swan, my oldest friend,

Thank you for coming. You saved me in so many more ways than you could possibly imagine.

I know the kiss was confusing, and it shouldn’t have happened that way, and for this I apologize. But I am begging you: if a part of you, no matter how small, does not want to marry Neal, do not do it. You deserve someone who loves you for who you are and who knows how lucky he is to have you. I don’t ever want you to settle like I did.

As for me, there is no one else in this world for me to love but you. And there is no else I would want to love. How could I? You are bloody brilliant, amazing, and I think a part of me has always loved you.

If you find that your feelings reciprocate mine, please answer this letter. If not, I’ll simply pretend I never sent it and we can go back to being friends.

Love, Killian.

“Emma, I’m leaving for work now!” exclaims Neal as he climbs down the stairs of their new house.

“Mmmm, see you tonight!” Emma gargles for answer, and Neal smiles.

When Emma brushes her teeth, she really goes all in.

Grabbing his satchel from the living room table, his eyes look down at their front door.

They’ve got mail. A lot of it.

“Damnit, I don’t have time for this.”

But then he’s already kneeling down and he goes through the envelopes in the blink of an eye, bills, bills, more bills, until – until one name catches his eyes.

Killian Jones.

What the hell does Killian Jones want to say to Emma in a letter?

“Fuck.”

He glances up at the stairs, watches as Emma rushes to the bedroom again, towel in her hair, completely oblivious to him and that’s for the best.

And he rushes to open the letter, fingers trembling with the fear of losing the love of his life.

What he reads then freezes something deep within him. They kissed. Of course they did. What was he thinking? That Emma could simply see her old pal and not make out with him?

And then another shudder.

He loves her. Killian Jones loves Emma Swan and he wants her.

And something very green and nasty strangles Neal’s heart. He will not lose her, even if she made a mistake. He strangely finds that he would rather never address her betrayal, never confront her than risk losing her forever. (Denial is a nasty bitch anyway.)

Steps clatter down the stairs. Neal shoves the letter down into his pocket.

“Any mail for me?” Emma asks, arms slipping into her red leather jacket as her deputy sheriff star shines at her belt.

He simply smiles, his big grin, the one she loves. Presses his lips to hers. Conceals as best as he can this vicious, dripping mix of fear and anger. “Nope, nothing, baby. Just an enormous amount of bills to pay. Who knew adulthood meant paying a bunch of bills you know nothing about? ”

And she looks the slightest bit disappointed, and she wasn’t expecting him to write her, was she?

“See you tonight.” A last kiss and he’s out, with a letter capable of putting an end to his happiness in his pocket, and a rage he will never voice in his throat.

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catflorist · 4 years

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The Garden (ao3 / ffn) catflorist Summary: SasuSaku. Sasuke left Konoha for a cottage in the woods. One day, Sakura arrives injured at his doorstep. They recall their past and think about what comes next. Slow burn, post-canon, about how Sasuke and Sakura grew close again. Rated T through Chapter 5, then M. 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7

The Garden Chapter 2

True to the instincts of a traveling shinobi on constant alert, the instant Sakura opened her eyes in the morning light she was awake.

She spotted a pitcher of water and a wooden cup beside her bed, next to a platter of bread and a selection of fruit. Sitting up, the water was down her throat before she could even think. She filled the cup again and drank slower this time, testing out her limbs one by one. The location of her old wound was smooth as if it hadn’t been open and bleeding half a day before. Except for an ache in her skull, not a whisper of pain remained in her body.

After quenching her thirst, Sakura reached for the food and began chewing. Her eyes fell upon a third offering next to her bedside: a folded pile of clothes. Her skin twitched under its layer of grime, dirt, and blood. She vowed to bathe before dressing in the clean clothes.

Basic needs met, Sakura shifted her attention to her surroundings. The interior of the cottage was small, with tall ceilings, and built in the traditional style. Except for hand-carvings decorating the door and window frames, there were no frills. Leaves pressed up against windows and morning light dappled the room. The sound of nearby moving water and the smell of dried wood soothed her senses.

Sakura sorted through the clothes Sasuke had left. There were loose pants and a shirt that were clearly his. A rough bar of soap. He had even thought of underthings: a pair of cropped shorts, wrappings for her chest snatched from a medical kit and coiled in a careful bundle. Heat prickled her cheeks as she eyed the last two items.

The events of yesterday filtered through her mind. She stilled, remembering the sensation of Sasuke’s chakra coursing through her, healing her. The soft weight of his hand on her skin.

Sakura could not believe she was here. Part of her had expected never to see Sasuke again.

Sakura couldn’t help it: she thought back to months ago, before he decided to leave the village for the third time.

* * * *

Once Sakura learned how to read the signs of Sasuke’s friendship, they were everywhere.

As Genin, after her one-sided infatuation with Sasuke had transformed into mutual respect and understanding, she learned the subtle ways in which he expressed his affection. He always listened when she spoke, even if he sometimes only responded with silence, a grunt, or a rare smirk. When it was his turn to cook on Team Seven missions, he reserved the crispy crust of rice at the bottom of the pot—the okoge—for her. She could never recall informing him of this preference. As they learned how to fight, he corrected her form and technique without mercy, but scowled at Naruto if he also commented on Sakura’s performance. Racked with the pain of Orochimaru’s curse mark during the Chunin exams, he had reached desperately for her hand and squeezed.

She could never reconcile these old memories of Sasuke with the memories of him that gave her nightmares. Those jerked her out of sleep, shaking and convinced he was still pressing a kunai blade to her neck.

When Sasuke returned to the village after his period of wandering, they had both grown and changed. As Genin on Team Seven, common experiences, hopes, and fears united them.

Now they were both adults, each defined by experiences and efforts that were unknown to the other. They had been enemies. Sakura didn’t know how to be around him anymore.

Sakura left the hospital late one night.

In the cool night air, her heart leap with joy and pride. Another group of students training under her in medical ninjutsu had graduated that day and joined her growing cohort. Sakura was committed to Tsunade’s dream of lowering the mortality rate on missions by dispatching a medical-nin with each team. Slowly but surely, she was increasing the number of shinobi in the village with medical knowledge.

Sasuke rounded the corner of the empty street. Sakura nearly jumped. She was still not used to the sight of him in the village. He had returned to Konoha a month ago in the spring. They had not spoken much.

He nodded at her, acknowledging her presence. She nodded back. That concluded the normal extent of their interactions. But Sakura was in a good mood, so she called, “You’re out late tonight.”

Sasuke raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re one to talk,” he observed. He continued walking.

Sakura squinted at his back. She kept waiting to detect the familiar note of contempt in this voice. She had yet to do so. This was also new.

Sasuke didn’t sleep much these days. His body still craved the movement and discomfort of constant travel. After dark, he wandered the streets of the village until exhaustion came.

On one of these nights, Sakura stood on the steps of the hospital as he passed by. He wasn’t shocked to see her here so late—talk of her accomplishments expanding the Konoha medical system were everywhere since he came back to the village.

Sakura was different. This was already clear when they fought briefly together during the war. Back then she had stunned him on the battlefield with the full extent of her strength and power. She had grown fierce and confident. Holding back no emotion, she lashed out at him in passionate anger. She cried over his wounded body and healed him without hesitating. She asked him not to go. She did not accept his apology.

Now, all of Sakura’s strong feelings seemed to be gone. She did not avoid him when they crossed paths, but she did not seek him out.

A clear joy marked her face tonight. For a moment, there was no difference between Sakura now and the Sakura he knew as a child. A part of Sasuke stilled, realizing how little of herself she showed to him now. It was just a fact. He was not allowed to have an opinion on the matter.

She greeted him.

Later, Sasuke felt light in his bed. He slept.

If a third party like Naruto had initiated the contact, Sakura and Sasuke politely spent time together. It seemed one commonality they still shared was a penchant to please Naruto.

To Naruto’s clear delight, his friendship with Sasuke had picked up without skipping a beat. The two of them fell back into their friendly competitiveness. They sparred for hours on end. They bickered with what might closely be described as affection. Sakura had even seen Naruto tease a smile out of Sasuke. Despite her guardedness towards Sasuke, Sakura softened in those moments. She did want him to be happy.

Naruto had dragged a group to Ichiraku’s. Lee wept solemn tears over a portrait that Sai had presented to him. Hinata, Ino, and Choji watched horrified as Naruto slurped ramen at a frightening speed. Sasuke was there.

Sakura was in a bad mood.

“Is it Ito-sama again?” Naruto asked, watching Sakura slam her bowl down, sloshing broth on the counter.

Sakura glanced around Ichiraku’s to make sure it was just them.

She let out a deep breath. “He won’t increase my training budget,” Sakura complained. Ito-sama on the village council praised her for training the next generation of medical shinobi yet refused her the resources she needed to do her work. It was infuriating. “I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do.”

“Maybe it’s because your hair is getting too long. You could cut it again,” Ino suggested.

The others laughed, recalling Sakura’s dramatic haircut during the Chunin exams years ago. It was funny precisely because the moment illustrated Sakura’s creativity and determinism in the face of a challenge. They knew she would find a way out of this bind.

“Get your scissors, Ino,” Choji called.

“Don’t think I won’t do it again,” Sakura kindly threatened the group.

“I’m afraid for the council,” Naruto gulped. He clung to Hinata.

Amid the banter, Sasuke’s eyes met hers, wary and watchful.

Half-asleep in bed that night, she remembered Sasuke’s reaction. In the moment, she found it odd. Another thought occurred to her now.

Sasuke lacked the context of their conversation. He didn’t know the details of Sakura’s recent work lobbying the council. He was not familiar with Ino’s language of teasing.

He only knew the shared memory. In the same fight where Sakura had sliced off her own hair, Sasuke released the dark power of his curse mark against the people who hurt her. He had done this to protect her. It was also the first step he had taken away from her. The first moment he had tasted the power that tempted him away from the village.

It was possible he wanted to see whether she had been upset.

Sakura was wide awake.

Sakura sat on the steps of the hospital. The moon was up high. She had just recruited a new cohort of students and stayed late to finalize the details. She was exhausted.

When Sasuke rounded the corner, irritation ticked in her stomach.

Her indifference to him faltered then. “Leaving again?” she jested, even though it was clear he was taking a walk. How dare he disturb her solitude when all she wanted was to be alone?

How dare he worry whether she was upset?

Sasuke halted. He didn’t scowl, but he was not happy.

Sakura felt calm. This was familiar territory. She prepared for his retort.

Then his features shifted. He grunted a short, “No.”

Sakura let up.

“All right,” she sighed. “Good night.”

He stood silent for a while. Sakura’s brow furrowed. She could never tell what he was thinking.

Head turned away, Sasuke finally said, “Good night, Sakura.”

It was the middle of summer. Sakura was busy. When she wasn’t teaching her team, she worked to establish policies at the academy and hospital that made medical training mandatory in the teaching of all shinobi. She fought with the village council. She also worked her regular shifts at the hospital. And trained her own abilities. Naruto wailed at her busy schedule and started inviting himself over to her apartment in the evenings.

“It’s important to spend time together, Sakura-chan,” he insisted, arriving unannounced at her door the first time. “You’re too busy.”

She loved the time with Naruto. He sometimes brought Ichiraku take-out, or instant-ramen which he enhanced with poorly chopped green onions. In return she coaxed him to eat her health-conscious meals. Sometimes Ino or Hinata joined, or members of the medical team that Sakura trained.

Then one day Naruto brought Sasuke.

The first time, she struggled to keep a straight face when she saw him at the door behind Naruto.

At the door, Naruto exclaimed, “Whatever you’re cooking smells great! Oh, yeah, I thought it was about time we had Sasuke over! That’s okay, right Sakura-chan?”

“I thought she knew we were coming,” Sasuke mumbled to Naruto, who was already bounding past them and removing his shoes.

“Oh.” Sakura said. “Well—”

Sasuke glanced down the hallway. Sakura realized he was waiting for her cue. One downward shift of the mouth or brow and he would go.

On a different night, on many nights, Sakura might have given him that cue, and he would have left.

“—the rice is almost ready,” Sakura finished. She opened the door wider.

Tonight, she didn’t want him to leave.

Sasuke paused, then crossed into the apartment.

It was strange to see him in the same landscape where she lived her daily life. He sat on the couch next to Naruto, head turned to read the titles on her bookshelf. Naruto’s friendliness and chatter kept silence and Sakura’s nerves at bay. Though Sasuke had never been a conversationalist, he was listening. And when nudged enough, he chipped in.

Naruto was laughing. “Sakura, you always had the best chakra control out of all of us. I couldn’t believe it when you first walked up that tree.”

Sakura smiled, remembering the feeling of chakra pooling on the soles of her feet for the first time. As natural as breathing, she ran up the bark of that tall tree into the sky. Her world had changed.

“Sasuke was so mad!” Naruto shoved Sasuke with his shoulder. “You had to ask me how she did it.”

Sakura didn’t know this.

“You weren’t a very good teacher,” Sasuke grumbled in response.

For the first time that evening, Sakura let her gaze rest on Sasuke for longer than a polite glance. He was busy scowling at Naruto. The tips of his ears were pink.

“Maybe,” Sakura retorted, “you should have asked me first.”

The corners of Sasuke’s mouth twitched.

“Maybe I should have,” he answered. His quiet voice contained a tease.

The night had gone well.

* * * *

Sakura’s eyes refocused. She picked up the bundle of clothes, slid open the door to outside, and followed the sound of the water.

#sasusaku #sasusaku fanfiction #sasusaku fanfic #ss fanfiction #catflorist #my ss #my fic #the garden #ss fic

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patrickstargang · 4 years

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Forgotten Past, Hidden Future (Legend of Korra fic)

Chapter 1: Looking In The Wrong Places

Chapter 2: Lucky To Have You

Chapter 3: A Lot To Learn

Chapter 4: Kya’s Story

Chapter 5: A Tale of Miazu

Chapter 6: The Avatar’s Love

Final Chapter: The Mural

spoilers for Rise of Kyoshi in this chapter

“When I was a young girl, I worked as a servant for an estate up in what used to be Yokoya Port. Before then, I was just an orphan living on the streets. I had crossed paths with a bender who taught the Avatar before me, an Air Nomad named Kelsang. He took me in and cared for me while I was growing up. He didn’t know I was the Avatar then, but he still looked after me and I grew to see him as my father. When I was old enough, he helped me to find work and a place to stay. That place was the Avatar mansion.

“At the time, many thought that a boy named Yun was the Earth Avatar. Most of this was due to the Earth Kingdom’s somewhat archaic system for finding the Avatar, which led to desperate decision making. After I showed dedication in my work, I became a personal servant of Yun. I got to know him well and we became good friends. There were even times where I thought we would be more than that.

“I also met someone else. Someone who would be incredibly important in my life. A girl named Rangi. She came from the Fire Nation and was the Avatar’s bodyguard. She always said that she was ‘honor-bound to follow and protect the Avatar.’”

It was a brand new sight to see Kyoshi chuckle, Korra couldn’t believe it but she didn’t let it distract her.

“She was great at barking out orders, always bossing me around the mansion. But I could always sense a facade behind it all. Like the cold shoulder, she would give me now and then meant something else. But I grew to be close with the two. It seemed odd, being a mostly novice bender and having two friends who were masters of their craft. Sometimes it felt alienating. More than that, it was hard to come to terms with the fact that I had feelings for both of them. Being at a young age my mind was going in a million different directions.”

This reminded Korra of her own relationships, and the million different directions her mind went back when she was younger, going from Mako to Asami. “I definitely know what that feels like.”

“But, things started to change. The position of Avatar was being put into question as people began to slowly realize that Yun wasn’t the Avatar. Some thought I knew... that I was hiding this secret away. Rangi resented me at first, she thought it was some kind of sick joke. But it wasn’t, I’d never try to hurt her or Yun like that.”

There was a long pause after that last sentence, a long painful pause. There was a great deal of regret hanging on to those final words.

“That wasn’t the end. Someone I thought I could trust betrayed me, killed not just the only person I saw as a father but Yun as well. Or so I thought. But at that point, I felt alone. I was being hunted by one of the most powerful people in the Earth Kingdom. It felt like going back to the streets, I felt truly alone. But it didn’t last long. Rangi was there to help get out of Yokoya Port and find safety. She was by my side all the way through. At first, I just thought she was doing this because she knew I was the Avatar.

“Back when I was still a maid, there was a group of kids who would always try to pick on me. Some of them said that I was still just a poor girl just like them, which to an extent was true. But there were other things that they said about me, much more hurtful things. I’m not sure how they knew what those words meant, or if their parents told them, but every once in a while I would catch an insult from them. And Rangi, she would always scare them away. They knew they could pick on me, but they didn’t dare pick on Rangi. But she tried convincing me to stand up for myself, she was so adamant about it. It was hard for me to understand, mostly because it felt like she was mocking me. But later, I figured it out.

“While we were staying in a new city to get away from trouble, Rangi got into a fight that almost ended in her death. I felt completely helpless to stop it but she made it out before any permanent damage was done. I confronted her about the fight, I was so confused why someone would put themselves through all that suffering so recklessly. And that's when it hit me. She wanted me to know what it felt like, to see someone you love take a hit and not stand up for themselves. To just accept that suffering. She said that pained her to watch, to see me put myself through that suffering. Whether it was being picked on by some local kids or letting personal vendettas eat away at my humanity, she had enough of it. She told me that she cared about me, not as the Avatar but who I really was. She said that I deserved happiness.”

The grin on Kyoshi’s face from before returned, but it morphed into a truly affectionate smile.

“She said that she wanted to make me feel loved.

“I knew what I had to do after that. I opened myself up to her, let her know I truly felt. Ever since then, I knew that she truly meant what she said. Later on, she would become my firebending teacher. She was tough as nails but she always knew how to keep me motivated. Though I wasn’t a fan of all the horse stance practice.

“But something happened, a kidnapping took place. She was taken and a good friend was killed. I felt like I was back right where I started. But with some help, she returned and the man who killed Kelsang and Yun was gone for good. But something happened to Rangi, something that.... damaged her honor.”

Korra could tell the severity behind that statement. She wasn’t completely knowledgeable about Fire Nation culture but she knew that an attack on someone’s honor was a bigger deal than it sounded.

“Not only that, but her mother had gone fatally ill and she needed to take her to the Northern Water Tribe for proper healing. So at that point, we both had to go our separate ways for some time. I spent those days in the Southern Air Temple learning to airbend while I was on the opposite side of the world from where Rangi was. It felt like such a long time, even though it was only a few months.”

Korra recognized something familiar in what she said. She remembered Asami saying that the time she was away healing from the mercury poison felt like the longest two years of her life. She felt a knot in her stomach, realizing that despite their difference of eras that they shared many struggles outside of being the Avatar. There was a feeling of mutual sympathy.

“But eventually we found our way back to each other. From then on, we were practically inseparable. We were always out there for each other, even during the craziest missions. There was always a fear that something would happen, that this might be the last time I would ever see her. I had lost so many friends, so many people I cared about. I couldn’t bear to lose her but I had to grapple with the reality of it. But she always stayed, every step of the way.

“After we brought some semblance of momentary world peace, we decided to celebrate by finally getting married. We both wanted to do it in the Earth Kingdom, we spent so much of our lives there and it meant so much more to us. But because of the prejudice of the time, we did it in secret with only a few friends down in Maizu. Despite the secrecy, it was one of the happiest moments of my life. I still had that creeping suspicion in the back of my mind that this would all fall apart without a moment's warning, but it never did.

“That being said, we did eventually move to the Fire Nation. I didn’t want to keep my love in hiding for the rest of our lives and the Fire Nation was more accepting of us in that regard. We still got funny glances from others, but it wasn’t likely they weren’t going to say anything to the Avatar and her elite firebending bodyguard.

“After settling in the Fire Nation for some time, we both agreed that we wanted a child. We went to a local orphanage, it felt like writing the wrongs of when my parents left me as a kid. It was strangely cathartic, even healing. We found a girl named Koko. It didn’t take long before we knew she was the one. She had a lot of the same intensity that I saw in Rangi, it felt like I was seeing it again for the first time. We had our struggles raising her, as we both had our own responsibilities trying to help the world. But also, I feel we raised a really brilliant woman, and I couldn’t have done it without Rangi’s support, not just for me but for Koko.

Korra seemed fixated on this, she has considered a future with her and Asami but having a kid?! She thought it was out of the question, but this conversation gave her hope for a scenario she only considered just now. If Kyoshi could make it work hundreds of years ago, maybe she can too.

“But time went on. Everyone started getting older. Before I knew it my daughter was grown up and Rangi was reaching her final years. Having to see her go was painful, it really was, but at the same time I was content. For the longest time, we were having to suffer to help each other. Trying to help save the world. Always putting ourselves in constant danger. We went through so much, our only wish was to just grow old together. And we did. I always thought that Rangi would die in battle or be taken from me too soon. It was the greatest relief to know that she lived a good, long life and went peacefully among her friends and family.

“But I still remained.”

The coldness in her voice came back, it was as palpable as ever.

“The world was beginning to shift back into chaos and I still had to do my duty as the Avatar. To me, its what she would have wanted. In that time I took down Chin the Conqueror, created Kyoshi Island with Koko’s help and established peace in the Four Nations, for the time being.”

There was a question that was on Korra’s mind, but she didn’t know if she should touch on the subject. It felt wrong but part of her needed to know. “Did you ever find someone else?”

Kyoshi seemed confused by the vagueness of the question.

“I mean....did you ever remarry?”

Kyoshi slowly shook her head. “I couldn’t. I still felt so loyal to Rangi, even after all those years. But also because I knew that I would see her again.”

Now Korra was the one who was confused, but she continued to listen regardless.

“I kept growing older, seeing all my loved ones come and go with the ages was taxing but I still had that sense of duty that I had to uphold. Then, at the ripe old age of two hundred and thirty, I decided it was time for someone else to take over. Rangi wanted me to be honorable as an Avatar, but more than anything she didn’t want me to give up my own happiness for the sake of being the Avatar. Those last few years I started to remember that. I started hanging on to some of my biggest regrets, knowing it was pointless to do so. That was when I knew it was time for a new Avatar.

“I spent my last few days in Maizu. It felt therapeutic, with all the regret that I was holding onto, to see people that I was able to truly help. I saw how much it's changed since its inception, how happy everyone has been. It felt like a symbol to the spirit of these people, to see the village still standing even after hundreds of years. After a celebration was made by the villagers, I quietly passed on, leading Roku to fill my place as Avatar. And now, many many years later, two Avatars later…..here you are, Avatar Korra.”

It was hard to hide it any longer. Korra was overwhelmed with emotion, tears streaming down her face. She felt great sorrow for Kyoshi, having to live on without the love of her life, but still finding the courage to continue on. It felt unbearable. She also felt something else, a feeling of smallness in the face of the long legacy of the Avatar. Kyoshi’s journey defined a generation while Korra was still trying to make sense of her own. But most of all, she was confused. Confused at why Kyoshi was smiling.

The blue energy acting out the scene slowly faded away into the darkness. Korra had a burning question, a question that felt even more inappropriate than the last. But she needed to ask. “Why,” she spoke softly through sobs. “Why did you hold on to Rangi, even after all those years. Why did you say that you would see her again?! I-It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

Her confusion had given back to her sadness. It was hard for her to comprehend that level of unconditional love, a love that lasted through the eras. It was hard to see through the tears, but Korra could hear Kyoshi chuckling.

“Korra, Avatars aren’t the only ones that reside in the Spirit World.”

Before Korra could comprehend the statement, the blue aura appeared again. Taking shape, it seemed to resemble a person, somewhat shorter than Kyoshi. Then it began to fill in the details, a woman with black hair, probably in her 30s, and Fire Nation armor standing by Kyoshi’s side. It was Rangi. Korra, with watery eyes, stared in absolute amazement, beginning to smile again.

Rangi bowed slightly in her presence. “It's a pleasure to finally meet you Avatar Korra.”

Korra, trying to hold herself together, bowed back. “It's a pleasure to meet you too.”

Korra stayed in that position for longer than she needed. Once she rose back up, she was still overcome with emotion but was still smiling. “Thank you….. for everything.”

“Korra, always remember what I said to you. You're still young but you’ve done so much already.” Kyoshi let her words simmer in the moment. “Already you’ve done a great service to the world, take the time that you have to let yourself be happy. You’ve spent so much of it becoming a good Avatar, now's the time to appreciate those that truly love you.”

Kyoshi gave a cheeky smirk. “But I think you’ve already got part of that taken care of with your girlfriend.” Rangi rolled her eyes at Kyoshi.

Korra blushed profusely. “Wait, how did you know about that?”

Kyoshi stared at Korra ominously. “I see everything.” She paused for dramatic effect before Rangi gave her an elbow to the side. “I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding!”

Seeing these little interactions, the mannerisms between the two were healing to Korra. Knowing that even after years of separation and many more years of being back together, they still had playful banter with one another. It was obvious that they still loved each other. It didn’t help her already tear-filled attempt at staying collected.

“But do take her words seriously,” said Rangi. “You won’t always know when your time with the ones you love might come to an end. Take advantage of the time you have now. I may not know this girl, but I can tell from that look in your eyes that she truly loves you.”

The certainty in her tone was shocking but comforting at the same time.

“That's special, not everyone can find a love that special. Never take it for granted Korra.”

Korra rubbed her eyes, continuing to smile in admiration. She felt relieved, not just about her search coming to end, but for everything. It was starting to dawn on her that maybe she has found happiness, maybe she hasn’t fully accepted it yet. After everything, after the world continuously falling into chaos, after what was her lowest point, she really was finding true happiness. And they could tell, just from a look on her face.

“Thank you both,” Korra said over light sniffles. “I’ll never forget this, I promise.”

“We know,” Kyoshi interjected. She gave Korra one last approving face, a true sign of admiration. “Until we meet again…….”

Both Kyoshi and Rangi bowed before they dissipated into the blue aura, which itself vanished. Korra bowed back to the empty ethereal plains. The white lights around the dark began to burn brighter, becoming an all-consuming pure white. The sound of chimes started to ring in Korra’s ears.

--------------------------------------------

Korra’s eyes sprung open. She was still pouring with tears, but her breathing was slow. She glanced to see Asami and Kya, still by her side. They also opened their eyes when they heard her breathing change. Asami noticed the tears coming down her face, she looked at Korra with concern. She put a hand to her cheek just like she did at the dining hall, with the same amount of tenderness. Korra realized that this might be the first Asami has seen her cry.

“Korra,” Asami spoke softly.

“I did it, I finally did it.” Korra’s smile was massive, an affectionate look back at Asami which she also gave to Kya. She didn’t try to hide the tears, she just let them flow out like a river.

Asami returned the smile and hugged Korra. They both held on tight to one another with Kya joining in. Feeling the love around her at that present moment, it felt good, like a genuine release for what seemed like the first time in a while.

Korra chuckled, “I haven’t cried this much in months.”

They all chuckled with her, as Korra felt the collective warmth of being with those she loved. She didn’t want to ever let go of this feeling. As they all sat there together, Asami leaned into her ear and whispered...

“I knew you could do it. I’m so proud of you.”

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amonthguessw1 · 3 years

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Holy shit tumblr you never notified me of this you prick!!! @soy-chiara tagged on this ask game I don't know how long ago and found it on accident while scrolling through her blog god I'm so sorry ajsjsjajsjs

Ok let's begin

Why did you choose your url?

It's a super dumb pun I came up with to replace my old nickname, my url says "I'm a Month Guess Which One" and my name is April, like the month.

Do you get it? (It's so stupid but I love it now)

2. Any side blogs? if you have them, name them and why you have them.

Just one, @imamonthguessw2 (it had a different name before) that I used as my main WITHOUT realizing it wasn't for literal years. I plan on deleting it since it's useless to keep but I always forget

3. How long have you been on tumblr?

I joined around my second year of secondary so I've been here for 4 years I believe?? Since 2017

4. Do you have a queue tag?

Gotta be honest I never knew what queue ment and I had to look it up just for this and the answer is no, I post whenever my braincells feel chatty

5. Why did you start your blog in the first place?

Ok this has a story. So in 2017 I started reading Homestuck and found this artist that had a lot of cool drawings and comics!! (I don't remember their name but they moved out of that fandom a while ago) but they mainly used tumblr to post all their art. They also made fanart of a lot of the shows I liked at the time like Voltron and Steven Universe, so I eventually made an account to keep track of everything, ended up following a bunch of other people and never left this hellsite (affectionate <3)

6. Why did you choose your icon/pfp?

It's a self portrait and the best one I ever made or ever will.

7. Why did you choose your header?

It's a collage I made some years ago and I still really like it!! Speacially the colors <3

8. What’s your post with the most notes?

Probably the one where I talk about taz eathersea and say ppl shouldn't be mean to travis bc of his campaign?? It has more than 200 notes, it's not much but it's more than the rest of my things. Other than that my nitw fanart has a 100 and something.

9. How many mutuals do you have?

Idk numbers are a illusion my love is eternal and for everyone lov u mutis <3

10. How many followers do you have?

207 but probbably half are porn bots.

11. How many people do you follow?

917. It used to be more.

12. Have you ever made a shitpost?

I don't think so bc I generally don't understand written humor so how could I?

13. How often do you use tumblr each day?

Man idk sometimes its just a few minutes and others is multiple hours of scrolling while listening to music (like rn). If I had to sum all those times I guess around 4 hours?? It seems correct.

14. Did you ever have a fight/argument with another blog once? who won?

No I'm terrified of conflict :)

15. How do u feel about “u need to reblog this” posts?

I don't mind them??? I know some people are bothered by them and I understand why, I just don't love them nor hate them.

16. Do you like tag games?

HELL YEAH!!

17. Do you like ask games?

ALSO HELL YEAH!!

18. Which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

I have no clue but if any of you is you have to tell me

19. Do you have a crush on a mutual?

Nah I don't have a romantic crush on anyone, I just wish they were all my friends since everyone is so cool and nice

Everyone that I know here probably answer this already from someone else so I won't tag anyone, thanks again Chiara!! Sorry it took me so long :( ily

#cosas mias #post adoro estos juegos de preguntas pero la app de mierda no me avisó AAAHHH #ok ahora a seguir estudiando ecología bye <3 #posta*

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dropintomanga · 3 years

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Behind the Blog - 20 Years in the Making

5 years ago, I wrote “Behind the Blog - 15 Years in the Making.” It was a post detailing how I was diagnosed with clinical depression in 2000 and the experiences that led to me starting this blog.

Now it’s 5 years later and I want to look back at that post a bit. I’m also going to discuss further insights about my past that I remembered and recent thoughts learned over time.

In my recent post about Komi Can’t Communicate, I mentioned my parents being worried about me having a possible communication disorder at the age of 2 and their decision to put me through special education classes. I joke that my life was doomed from the start even though it turned out I was alright. My father recently told me that when I was in pre-kindergaren, he was stalked by two men who wanted to rob him. After going on a school trip, I was dropped off by the special education class at a certain spot and my father went to pick me up. Once he did, he realized he was being followed while taking me home. Thankfully, he went inside a store with a security guard at the front door and nothing happened.

I’m really glad that nothing bad happened in front of my eyes. I don’t know how I would have processed it all. My parents have told me stories of how bad New York City was back in the 1970s’-1980s’. They have been robbed several times when they first moved to America. Before I was born, my mother was pregnant and was chased by three men who wanted to rape her. She got away, but fell down to the ground while escaping. My mother had a miscarriage as a result. The funny thing is that a few months later, she was pregnant with me.

It’s so freaking surreal to me whenever I think about that. I would not be here if it weren’t for that incident.

I also think back to that time in 2001 when I decided to be hospitalized. I told a college guidance counselor back in 2000 that I was hearing voices. That was a big reason why I stayed at the hospital. In hindsight, I was faking it. I think I just wanted attention and did it in a way that hurt everyone around me. I never heard voices at all. A thing that people with mental illness sometimes like to do is to dramatize things to get the attention of those around them. While it’s important to address their concerns, caregivers aren’t gods. They’re human beings with boundaries. Caregivers are placed with unfair expectations on handling mental illness in their loved ones. Now that I look back at the situation, I wished someone was there to shut me up in a compassionate way.

Speaking of college, there was one guidance counselor who I spoke with before I dropped out that said something that resonated with me. She said, “You know, I can see you being famous one day.” I was so caught up in my own thoughts that I didn’t pay much attention. After starting the blog, I went back to that college to attend an anime convention there and hoped to speak with that counselor again. I wanted to thank her because at the time, I felt that she was right in some way as I was going up the ranks in the manga blogging community. Unfortunately, she wasn’t working there anymore.

It’s funny because I’m not interested in chasing fame much anymore. I’m content with where I’m at.

I now want to think back to this passage I wrote in the 15-year post.

“But I’ve gone on to stay in good shape and I’m healthier than almost all of my relatives. I think it’s because deep down, I really wanted to live despite those dark desires. That or those good habits provided some physiological relief. I don’t think I’ll ever try to commit suicide. I’m too much of a coward for that. I’ve only just started to “live” a normal life honestly.

I was reading Noragami Volume 7 and it highlighted an important note about the main character, Yato. He is afraid of being forgotten. I think almost all depressed individuals have some fear of that. We want to be validated and we want people to let us know that they care. I also remember Great Teacher Onizuka Volume 17, where one of my favorite characters, Urumi Kanzaki, was going to commit suicide despite all pleas by her teacher, Onizuka, to stop doing so.

He went to great lengths to save Urumi and she realized how much he cared about her well-being. Do I want someone to sacrifice their own lives to save me? I don’t know, but I feel that I want to know that even in the darkest of moments, someone would come and physically stop me from going down a path where I never come back. In Noragami Volume 7, there was a moment where Yato saved a suicidal student and told him to never kill himself in front of him. I want to be the person to stop someone from ending their life.

It’s funny, right? I have thoughts about dying several times throughout my life, but I don’t want anyone to end their lives in front of me or other people. Maybe it’s because I don’t want them to understand how I felt. No one should. The thoughts I have can be warped and frightening to many.”

Here’s the sad thing - I considered suicide a year later after this post. I felt someone wanted me to go away for good. Someone did save me though. And then stuff happened that led me to question relationships (which thankfully got a lot better as the years went on).

But after it was said and done, starting around 2017, I began to stop hating myself. I still have doubts from time to time and I realize that it’s okay to think about them. The world still treats people with mental illness and mental health problems like crap, so I decided to be more forward in learning how to best fight that kind of discrimination. I practiced self-compassion over self-esteem. That was the start of limiting my social media presence in an attempt to not feel pressured by external validation. This year, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I also stopped attending therapy with mutual agreement from my social worker and psychiatrist. I felt like I can finally start to manage things on my own.

It took 20 years to reach that point and I have felt some shame that I’m not at the level of my peers that are the same age as me. I’m getting close to 40, but feel like a 30 year old. I try not to compare too much with other people because honestly, they probably have gone through tough times as much as I have. Maybe not to the extent of a mental illness, but certainly stuff that makes them question life.

Compared to how I was 5 years ago, I’m more reflective and compassionate. I’ve embraced all parts of my humanity. While people believe I’m a good person, I know I can be capable of hurting people in terrible ways in times of duress. I don’t have this highly inflated positive view of myself. In a way, that’s kept me grounded. I dislike it when people say that they’ll never be this way or feel that way. The blunt truth is that life will test you in so many ways and you’re going to make mistakes (sometimes horrible ones) whether you like it or not. Admitting that you’re wrong about certain things is something I wish more people were receptive to doing. Humility is truly a mind healer when cultivated properly.

I’ll end this with some lines from the video game NieR: Automata. I finally played it this year and the game left such a grand impression on me. I loved its emphasis on trying to find meaning even when everything about the world is questionable. NieR: Automata reminded me why and so many fans LOVE Japanese pop culture media. The game gets very depressing, but I found out that the game’s creator, Yoko Taro, received messages from fans who wanted to kill themselves, saying that NieR: Automata gave them hope to live. In the true ending and without giving out heavy spoilers, one character poses a question to another about the cycle of trauma happening again for a certain group of characters that went through so much due to story events, the responding character said this,

“I cannot deny the possibility. However, the possibility of a different future also exists. A future is not given to you. It is something you must take for yourself.”

I now feel that I got some strength to take a future for myself and hopefully people I care about. I finally understand what it means to take care of myself compared to 5 years ago. My “manga series” may end one day, but I’m glad to spend a good part of it writing here. I look forward to exploring myself further on this blog, thanks to you all.

#life #depression #mental health #manga #fandom #Japanese pop culture

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end-of-pizza · 4 years

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Weird anime night ~Please teacher

Okay guys, I know I’ve been out of this whole anime discussing thing for a bit. Been in my own little world of building gundam models, watching ASMR videos and doing my tech support job, also got into buying stocks….the quarantine has been weird. I haven’t really left the house save to go to meijers to get groceries for 4 months now……kinda starting to lose touch with reality. To try and ground myself I have been revisiting things from when I was a teenager, rewatching old tv shows, reading old books….started with gundam 08th ms team, and Red Mars, and lo and behold I fell back in love with my old flame…ROMANCE ANIMES

long time readers of weird anime night will know that this is a thing that happens to me off and on. Highschool romance shows just vibe with me in a real way, I have been dating the same girl since I was 13, and I am 29 now, and we live together, so learning how to love while learning what love is, and learning about girls while also learning how to love one girl, man romance anime have that shit in spades….and it makes me feel really nostalgic, for things like first kisses, sneaking out after hours, being nervous with someone you will later be intimate with. I love it man, that shit DOES. IT. FOR. ME

so while revisiting my favorite romance anime of all time, Suzuka, I remembered about one I hadn’t watched since 2006, Please Teacher.

AND DUDES

THIS SHOWS FUCKING WEIRD

I remember it being pretty run of the mill, comedy romance story about a kid who bangs his teacher…..and like, yea on the surface that is what it is, but like…..spesh if you incorporate the second season into it, its sort of about ALL love….even some kinda eh….troubling kinds of love, like in season 2 a dude straight up wants to plow is like……kid sister, and that is…..well fucking disgusting, I know its like a THING in japan to want to bone your parents and siblings, because well……some sort of mass mental delusions or something…..but like, its there….its gross as fuck but its there….

The rest of the show is fun though, still pretty problematic, I guess it was less gross to me when I was 16, but as a 29 year old….yea a teacher wanting to bone her 15 year old student is pretty gosh darn awful......I mean she’s also like...an Alien.....but he’s still 15 years old and she is a dang adult

heres the wiki plot summary of season 1, warning spoilers ahead.

Please Teacher! is a story mainly revolving around a tight-knit group of friends in high school and how they cope with several life-changing events that are never too far off from intimate relationships. The main character is a boy named Kei Kusanagi who suffers from a very rare disease which causes a comatose state referred to as a "standstill" whenever he is under severe emotional distress.

Before the beginning of the story, Kei, at 15 years of age, had fallen into a "standstill" lasting three years after witnessing the suicide of his elder sister. After recovering, he quietly moved away from home in order to avoid social difficulty due to his long absence, and began living with his uncle, a medical doctor, and aunt. Due to the strange nature of how he came to live there, Kei wanted to keep the situation a secret from his new friends for fear of being ostracized as being too old to associate with them. After Kei had established himself in his new surroundings and had entered into a close group of mutually supportive friends, a Galactic Federation starship had entered Earth's atmosphere stealthily, approached Honshū Island and landed surreptitiously in Lake Kizaki.

The story begins with Kei suffering a minor 'standstill' while in the vicinity of the lake, witnessing several unexplainable phenomena happening there, and then watching as a beautiful half-human alien named Mizuho Kazami materialize beside the shore. Kazami was sent to observe planet Earth by a seemingly benevolent Galactic Federation in order to prevent humans from making developmental mistakes. Kei, upon observing the materialization, attempts to escape the pursuing Kazami. Kazami is under strict orders to prevent her true identity and mission from being discovered. During his attempt to escape, Kei falls into the lake. Kazami rescues Kei and, using information from his identification, is able to return him home in secret. The next day, Kazami has become Kei's new homeroom teacher and next-door neighbor.

During assisting her in moving in, Kei suffers another standstill, and while in a weakened state explains his predicament to the compassionate Mizuho, who ends up revealing her own origins and purpose on Earth. Several accidental activations of Mizuho's teleport technology (which were inadvertently caused by Kei) eventually place Kei and Mizuho in a couple of compromising situations in front of his uncle and aunt and his school's headmaster, but Kei protects Mizuho from charges for an inappropriate relationship between student and teacher by impulsively stating that they are married, resulting in an actual civil marriage that later blossoms into genuine affection for each other. The headmaster relents, partly because he, too, had married a former student younger than himself and can understand their situation personally. Both are allowed to stay so long as they do not reveal their status to the other students, and do not engage in any public displays of affection.

The remainder of the series concerns the budding intimate relationships between the close friends, one of whom (Koishi Herikawa) is romantically interested in Kei, and another (Ichigo Morino) who has suffered even greater loss of time from the same disease as he has; the problems of having to maintain the secrecy of the marriage; an interfering parent and sibling visiting from the Galaxy Federation; and Kei learning to overcome the ever-present threat of another lengthy 'standstill' stealing more of his life, particularly as he has fallen deeply in love with Mizuho and desperately wants to remain with her.

Eventually Kei falls into another major "standstill" and in order to bring him out of it, Mizuho has to use her technology which is against the law. As a result, her status on Earth is revoked, she is banned from the planet and all memory of her is erased from everyone's, including Kei's, minds. With the help of her mother and sister she sneaks back and is devastated to learn that Kei, who she is deeply in love with, has no memory of her. While helping her move back in, Kei reveals that his memory has returned and the two express their love for each other and get married again.

I am rewatching it, its nostalgic, not as nostalgic as Suzuka or School Rumble, which are my number 1 and also number 1 favorite romance anime. But it’s also not as problematic as like, Rumbling Hearts or School days.

I am happy to have this tumblr back in my life, it’s helping with the depression, I think that’s why I started it in the first place….the American Education System was surprisingly good at both causing depression and training me to help people cope with depression.

I love you guys, I will start doing one of these every week, and I really am thinking about doing a sort of short podcast on all the series I have done thus far, like a 30 minute episode or so discussing the stories, rating them etc. I really like the idea of doing a podcast, just takes a long time to make em, I’ve been trying to do a D20 or Cyberpunk real play podcast for like 2 years now, and still just in the editing process of it.

blah blah blah, TLDR

this shows weird, fun and heart warming at times, but it is about a teacher who fucks her student, and like YES she is half alien.....but…..she is also a pedophile, that didn’t really stick with me when I was 16, but it does now….so it is harder to watch then I remember.

6.5/10

~Hoover ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

please teacher update

maybe I wasnt watching the show closely enough but I guess he isnt 15? I got the impression he was like early highschool, but watched some more tonight and I guess hes 18 during the course of the show.....so she isnt a pedophile, but she is boning her student, and she is a space alien so there are still some not good implications there power dynamics wise.....but lets just say maybe I was too hard on Please Teacher 7.5/10

#weird anime night #please teacher #anime #romance

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lastbluetardis · 4 years

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Home for the Holidays (1/2)

This is part one of my gift to @timeladyelpia for the @dwsecretsanta gift exchange! Apologies for the delay; I hope you enjoy this! Your info said you enjoy reunions and established relationships, so that’s what this is :)

Ten x Rose, 4400 words, teen

Also tagging @doctorroseprompts

Summary: Despite being locked away in different universes, the Doctor and Rose have managed to stay connected through their marriage bond, celebrating holidays and special events even through the impenetrable distance. After celebrating three Christmases apart, fate brings them together once more just in time for the holidays.

Note: If anybody remembers this little ficlet (If Only in My Dreams) I wrote for last year’s Ficmas, I borrowed from that idea and wrote the reunion. However, you do NOT need to have read that in order to understand this.

AO3

The holidays were one of the hardest times for the Doctor. Though he didn’t naturally celebrate—at least not any Earth or human holiday—Rose had. Oh, he would join in the festivities with his past companions, wishing them Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Festivus, or whatever holiday they in particular celebrated, but he was always on the outside looking in.

But all of that had changed when he’d met Rose, when he regenerated into his current body and left her and the Earth to fend for themselves during a Sycorax invasion while he was—helpfully—in a regenerative coma. All on Christmas Day.

When it all had blown over—blown up, more like it, thanks to Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister—he had strangely been invited to Christmas dinner at the Tylers’. Even more strangely, he’d said yes. After he changed, of course. He couldn’t very well have Christmas dinner in his borrowed jimjams. No, he’d gone back to his TARDIS and found himself a new outfit before heading back up to Rose and her mother.

Even now, remembering the look of appreciation in Rose’s eyes when she beheld him in his new suit sent butterflies through his stomach.

He had stayed for dinner and the snow-that-wasn’t-snow and for dessert. And even once that was finished, once the food was cleared away and the dishes piled high in the sink for the following morning, he hadn’t wanted to leave quite yet. So he had accepted Rose’s invitation to sleep on the sofa for the night. Not that Time Lords needed much sleep. (However, newly-regenerated Time Lord could certainly use a nap.)

He had spent the next couple weeks with the Tylers, which was virtually unheard of for him. But the TARDIS had been in no shape to fly, thanks to whatever jiggery-pokery Rose had done to the old girl to look into her heart to become the Bad Wolf. And thanks to his less-than-stellar driving while his brain was imploding and collapsing during some regeneration complications.

No matter, he had been able to get his beloved ship flying again a week or so after the New Year. In the interim, between TARDIS repairs, he had reconnected with Rose. Answering all of her questions regarding regeneration. Filling in the gaps of her memory during her time as Bad Wolf. Recounting all of their adventures together to prove to her, without a doubt, that he was still the Doctor. Still her Doctor, though he’d never exactly stated it as such.

(Little did he know then that Rose had already considered him her Doctor. She later confessed to him that his earnest attempts to convince her of his identity had been endearing.)

On the evening before he and Rose were to depart for the stars once more, Rose had stayed up late with him in Jackie’s living room and had presented him with a small package. She had seemed slightly embarrassed or self-conscious as he ripped into the brown-paper-wrapped parcel; she had begun rambling about traditions and new beginnings and something about “together”, which he very much liked to think about. He liked the idea of him and Rose together forever.

Upon indelicately ripping off the wrapping paper, he saw a simple white box. When he removed the lid, a Christmas ornament lay nestled in a soft bed of shredded cotton. His hearts had constricted in his chest as he pulled out the ornament, two penguins clad in hats and scarves leaning in to touch the tips of their beaks together. Beneath, in an elegant script, were the words “The Doctor + Rose’s First Christmas” and the year.

“I know it’s silly,” Rose said, still looking anywhere but him. “Christmas is over now, and it’s not like we even had a tree in the TARDIS to put it on, but I saw it and couldn’t resist. Obviously, I wrote in our names. Not many ornaments have ‘the Doctor’ written on ‘em.”

He pulled her into his arms, silencing her words. “It’s perfect,” he said through the lump in his throat. “Tell you what. We can put it up on the tree next Christmas. And get another ornament to go with it. Eh? Can be a tradition.”

Rose wrinkled her nose. “You put up a Christmas tree in that box of yours?”

“Not usually,” he admitted. “But you celebrate Christmas. I want the TARDIS to feel like home for you, and if celebrating all of your little human holidays makes it feel like home, then I want to celebrate with you, however you’d like. If you’d like.”

Her expression softened and she smiled shyly at him. “The TARDIS is already my home, Doctor.”

The admission both floored and delighted him. A big, beaming grin split his face in two, and the echoing expression lit up her face too.

He very nearly kissed her then, and he spent the rest of the night, after Rose had gone to bed, cursing himself for not seizing the opportunity.

No matter. They got there eventually, after a few hiccups in the road.

By the time their second Christmas rolled around, they were an actual proper couple, and they went shopping together not only for their first Christmas tree, but also for the companion to the penguin ornament. They’d decided on two polar bears decorating a Christmas tree together, snouts pressed together in a supposed kiss.

They had bought other decorations as well, but they displayed their couples’ ornaments proudly on the front of the tree, making sure no branches, lights, or baubles obscured them from view.

“I wonder how long it’ll take before we have enough couples’ ornaments to decorate the tree just with them,” Rose mused as they de-decked their tree after the holidays. “Ages and ages, I’ll bet.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we’ve got ages and ages,” he replied, a goofy grin on his face. “Forever, in fact.”

And they did. They had forever together. Whatever Rose had done as Bad Wolf had changed her at the cellular level. Her body wasn’t breaking down at all; it had enough regenerative energy—courtesy of the TARDIS—to replenish any aged and dying cells before they turned hazardous. For all intents and purposes, she would live just as long as the Doctor. Longer, perhaps.

Upon realizing what that meant for them, for their future together, they decided to bind themselves together in every way possible. One soul in two bodies. At least, that was how Rose had liked to think of it when he had explained the telepathic marriage bond. An open channel between them, their minds, allowing them to see the most intimate parts of the other.

There had been no one the Doctor had wanted to share that sort of connection with, apart from Rose. There had never been anyone like her before—nobody he loved as deeply, fiercely, wholly, eternally—and there would never be anyone like her again.

Not even now that she was gone.

It had been over three years since Torchwood. Since Canary Wharf. Since the Daleks and Cybermen and parallel worlds and Void breaches that ended with the multiverse being saved, but with Rose being trapped permanently in another world.

In those first few moments, as he watched the Void breach fold in on itself like a crumpled piece of paper, the Doctor had held his breath and tensed for the inevitable slash of pain in his mind as his bond with Rose broke. But when a minute passed, then two, then ten and his bond with Rose was still there, he relaxed a fraction.

The anguish and desperation clanging from her half of the bond was what kept him sane, funnily enough. Regardless of their mutual devastation, the fact that he could still feel her in his mind meant he hadn’t truly lost her. She wasn’t truly gone. He wasn’t truly alone.

It had taken months for them to adapt and adjust to their new reality. Time moved around them differently; Pete’s World, as he’d dubbed it, moved slightly faster than their prime universe. And time didn’t really exist in the TARDIS. However, they tried to sync their internal body clocks with each other, to sleep and eat and relax at the same time to make up for the fact that they weren’t physically with each other.

Despite having his wife in his head at all times, he still missed her. He missed her more with every passing day. Nevertheless, they had coped as best they could.

However, the holidays still hurt. It hurt to try to celebrate with Rose when she was—literally—worlds away. Universes away. It hurt to go out and get a Christmas tree. It hurt to decorate it. But above all, it hurt to pick out and purchase their couples’ ornament alone. He’d had to pick out the last three on his own, and if his calculations were correct—which they were, because he was quite brilliant—he would be needing to go out and buy a new one soon. Their sixth overall, the fourth he would buy alone.

Despite Rose’s confidence in the Dimension Cannon—a clever bit of technology that the Torchwood researchers and engineers in Pete’s World had been developing for well over a year now—it seemed as though the Cannon hadn’t worked enough to bring her back to this world in time for Christmas.

But he didn’t care when she came home. He just cared that she did come home. One day.

He had been skeptical of the Cannon when Rose first informed him of its creation, but now that it began showing signs of life—acting as a crude teleport—he was cautiously optimistic that one day it would work. Once he or any of the Torchwood scientists managed to figure out how to poke a hole through the Void, through the fabric of reality, large enough for Rose to squeeze through, but small enough that the entire microcosm of the multiverse didn’t implode in the process. It was a delicate balancing act.

However, now that Rose was busy testing the Dimension Cannon, letting it blast her to whatever corner of her universe it fancied, their bond was a little more strained and out of sync. It had nearly given him a hearts-attack when she went utterly silent one day, only to reappear in his mind hours later as though nothing had happened.

She had since taken to warning him about when she was planning a Cannon jump so he wouldn’t be alarmed if she disappeared from his head for a few hours. Though he appreciated it, it didn’t stop his anxiety from squeezing a tight band around his chest. Every time her half of the bond went quiet, he feared he would never hear from her again.

Inevitably, though, she always returned. She would always return.

He had taken to running errands on the days she did her Cannon jumps. Not only did it distract him from the silence in his head, but it gave him a break from trying to keep his body clock synced with Rose’s. He didn’t need to concern himself about when or where he went, or for how long.

On one particular day in the beginning of December—for Rose, at least… Pete’s World had gotten completely out of sync with their universe by now—the Doctor had decided to visit Ghealach, a small moon on the other end of the galaxy that was basically a junk shop masquerading as a bazaar. The unique feature of Ghealach, however, was that it was utterly psy-null. Telepathy was strictly forbidden as a security measure; the shop owners didn’t want a telepathic being creeping into their heads to swindle them out of money and supplies.

As such, if the Doctor were to go to Ghealach, it meant his bond with Rose would be silenced.

I’ll be there for just a few hours, he told her that morning. I should be done by the time you’re back, but in the event that I’m not, I don’t want you to worry.

Thanks for telling me. Stay safe, Doctor.

He snorted. I’m not the one blasting myself to the gods know where.

He got the impression she was sticking her tongue out at him, and so he rolled his eyes right back.

Be safe, he murmured, passing a kiss and a caress down their bond.

He piloted himself to Ghealach but stayed in the TARDIS until Rose’s presence faded from his mind, indicating she’d gone on her jump.

Wearily, the Doctor rubbed at his eyes and at the dull throb that pulsed behind his temples. Ignoring the ache, he grabbed his overcoat, swung it around his shoulders, and exited the TARDIS.

Ghealach was bustling with activity. All sorts of creatures were buying and selling, bartering and trading. While he usually loved the atmosphere—all of those people, all that life—he couldn’t stomach it today.

So he moved with a purpose, knowing where he could find the parts that he needed to fix the TARDIS. Well, not exactly fix, as nothing was technically broken. But the mechanisms behind the fine-tune precision needed for landing at the coordinates he set must be going a bit faulty. He was landing in an incorrect time or location more often than usual.

If Rose were there, she would’ve teased him about his poor piloting skills.

Pushing that thought aside, the Doctor strode from tent to tent, turning out his pockets to exchange whatever baubles and trinkets and bits of alien tech he happened to have.

It took nearly two hours, but he finally had all of the pieces he had sought out to find, plus a few extra bits he didn’t need but might one day have use for.

It took another half hour or wandering to find the TARDIS again. He hadn’t realized how far he had wandered into the labyrinthine stalls of the market. But he finally beheld his glorious ship. It was odd not to hear her welcoming hum as he approached. Even his bond with his ship was muted on this moon.

He slid his key into the lock and turned it, pushing the door inward. Her central rotor gleamed in welcome and the lights flickered between bright and dull. As soon as he closed the door behind him, leaving the psy-null territory, he felt his ship’s utter joy and delight.

“I missed you too,” he cooed to his ship, affectionately rubbing one of the coral struts as he draped his coat across it.

It was only when he’d skipped up to the center console that he realized his ship wasn’t the sole presence in his mind.

Oh! You’re back earlier than I thought, he said, cringing. Sorry, love. Didn’t think I'd be on that moon for so long.

“Doctor.”

Her voice was faint and breathless, and the Doctor clenched his jaw; it sounded as though she was right beside him. He was getting bombarded with a mixture of emotions, strong ones at that. Stronger than he usually felt from their strained bond.

What’s the matter? Everything all right? Jump go okay?

“It’s you… It’s really, actually you.”

He frowned at the display controls of his ship as he worked on sending her into flight. Rose was coming across clearly. He could read every thread of thought and emotion: disbelief, confusion, love, hurt, happiness, desperation. All of it. Everything that was going on inside that beautiful head of hers was broadcast for him to see.

But if he could sense her so easily, then that meant…

Where are you? he asked, frantically tugging the display screen so close to his face that his nose nearly brushed it. He typed at the keyboard fervently, even though he had no coordinates to input. I’ll find you, Rose. I will find you. Gods, you’re here. Where are you? I’ll find you.

A choked sob sounded from his wife, and he reached into himself, into their bond, to cradle her close. A maelstrom hit him, and he couldn’t seem to soothe her, no matter how much comfort and love he swaddled her in.

I know, love. I know. We’re so close. All these years and you’ve finally done it. You’re brilliant, you are. We’re so close now. Just tell me where you are and I’ll come get you and bring you home. But I need to know where you are.

“Turn around.”

Turn around? What? Where are you, Rose? I need as much information as you can give me so I can find you.

“Turn. Around.”

His mind was still churning even as something—someone—touched his shoulder. Fingers gripped his shoulder hard and tugged. Spinning on his heel, his jaw slackened as he beheld the blonde standing before him. Rose. His wife. His bondmate. His everything.

“Rose?” he croaked, clenching his hands into fists at his side.

She looked nearly the same as the day he’d lost her. The planes of her face had sharpened, the roundness of youth having faded over the years, and her hair was a gentler shade of blonde, seemingly professionally dyed rather than a cheap bit of bleaching product she found in the shops.

His eyes roved across her face hungrily, urgently willing her to be real, as his mind sought her out. He hadn’t realized how muffled their bond had become, separated as they were through universes, but now it was in perfect focus, at full power. It was as though a radio station that had been staticky was now tuned.

And all of the emotions swirling through both of their minds was being broadcast on all frequencies. Shock and disbelief and tentative, delicate hope.

“Oh, Doctor!”

Rose launched herself at him, pulling him from his stupor. He wrapped his arms tightly around her, holding her as close as he could. Her warm, small body contoured to his, pressing against every inch of him until there was no space left between them.

Her hands scrabbled at his back, searching for better purchase to cling to him. He buried his nose into the soft spot where her shoulder met her neck and breathed in deeply, inhaling the smell of her. She smelled like energy and electricity, but beneath that was the familiar scent of Rose. Of home.

“What… How…?”

“It worked,” she said, her voice warbling. “The Cannon… it worked. With a bit of help. Needed a bit of alien tech to help brace the Void open, then close it up behind me. Some friendly aliens helped out with that. Though they said the fabric of that reality was already fragile. Not sure what that was about. Torchwood promised to look into it, and I said we’d look into it from this side of things.”

“Fragile?” he asked, pulling away from her. “How can the fabric of reality become ‘fragile’?”

Rose looked like she was about to open her mouth, perhaps to offer her input, but the Doctor realized he didn’t particularly want to talk about the fabric of reality or the universe or anything that wasn’t Rose.

He shook his head and cradled Rose’s jaw in her palm, brushing his thumb against her lower lip. She sighed, her warm breath ghosting across his hand.

“I’ve missed you,” he rasped, raking his eyes over her face to recommit every detail to memory. She was even more beautiful, more breathtaking, than he remembered. “So much, Rose. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t miss you. And I know we were never truly apart, but…”

Rose rocked up onto her toes, fisted her hands in the lapels of his suit, and tugged him down until their mouths met in a hard kiss. All thoughts left his mind as he lost himself in her. The taste of her, the touch of her, the smell of her, the sound of her, the sight of her. His senses were utterly overwhelmed by her, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Pleasure sparked through his veins as their lips moved together in a familiar rhythm of pulling and yielding, sliding and gliding.

A full-body shudder rippled down his spine as his mouth parted for her probing tongue. The little whimper she let out weakened his knees and he stumbled back a step until his backside pressed against the central console of the TARDIS.

Rose followed, not breaking the kiss. The Doctor braced himself against the console, more than willing to let Rose cage him in, resting her weight against his. Their bodies moved together, rocking and writhing as their hands explored every inch of each other that they’d been deprived of for three and a half years.

“I missed you,” he murmured between frantic kisses. “I love you.”

I love you, he whispered into her mind. His half of the bond wrapped around her half even tighter than his body wrapped around hers, needing to feel her everywhere, needing to hold her close to convince himself that this was real, that she was real, and that she was here with him.

“I’m here,” she mumbled against his mouth. I’m here. I’m back. I came back. I love you. I love you.

Her hands moved restlessly across his body, alternating between pressing into the small of his back and his hair. Desire rippled through him as their hips and legs tangled together, rubbing and grinding and relishing all of the sensations they’d been deprived of for these many long years.

Sure, they’d had the mental presence of each other during their separation, but no number of mental embraces could replace a real hug, of being ensconced in another’s arms, two bodies inhabiting one space.

A deep groan rumbled up the Doctor’s chest as he devoured Rose’s mouth. The bedroom was too far away for the utter need throbbing through them both. Hastily removing all necessary pieces of clothing, they joined together on the raggedy old jump seat. Their bodies moved as one, touching and kissing and teasing and tasting until their coupling culminated in the pinnacle of pleasure and love.

Afterwards, they sat slumped together, panting for breath and clinging to each other. The Doctor skated his fingertips up and down the smooth expanse of Rose’s spine. She still had her shirt on, and the fabric bunched and fell with every up and down motion of his hand.

“I love you,” he said groggily, pressing a series of kisses to the column of her throat. His mind was blissfully blank and full of Rose. She was everywhere, filling the deep, dark expanse of his mind with her light and warmth.

“You feel so good,” she sighed, nuzzling closer physically and mentally. “I hadn’t realized how faint our bond had become. But now… God.”

“Mmm,” he hummed in agreement. Then he asked the question that had slowly been eating away at him. “How long were you waiting in here? How did you even find the ship? That moon… you wouldn’t have been able to feel her—or me.”

“Maybe a half hour,” Rose said. “Felt like an eternity. But then I reminded myself that I was lucky enough to have found the TARDIS at all. I would’ve been devastated to know I’d landed here but just missed you.”

He would’ve been devastated too. Even more horrifying was the idea that Rose wouldn’t even have been able to reach out for him to tell him where she was, what with that telepathic dampener suppressing their bond.

“But I was just wandering around when I found the TARDIS,” Rose continued. “I nearly walked right by her at first, ‘cos I didn’t think the jump had actually worked. I figured I was on an alien planet in that other universe. But then I walked past her and the door just… clicked open. That’s when I turned and saw her, and I ran right in.

“But then I wasn’t sure which version of you it would be. Everything about the TARDIS looked the same, so I figured I wasn’t too far off. Then I was beginning to think about how I would explain everything if it was a past you. Especially if it was a past you who hadn’t met me yet; how on Earth would I explain to you who I was and why you needed to help me.”

“The marriage bond would’ve been proof enough,” he assured her, tapping at his temple for emphasis. “The bond transcends time, through regenerations, past and present. No matter which version of me walked through those doors, I would have known who you are.”

“Thank God it was you,” she said. “Though for a minute there I thought I went mad and was invisible.”

He offered her a sheepish grin. “Sorry. I didn’t think to look around the TARDIS. I didn’t expect anyone to be in here.”

She smirked at him, then nestled her head into the crook of his neck, letting out a sated sigh Despite the sound of utter contentment, she murmured, “We should get up.”

“Or we could stay here like this forever,” he countered.

“As wonderful as that sounds, my legs are going half numb,” she retorted. “And I feel disgusting. I could use a shower, if you’d care to join me?”

His belly swooped in renewed desire as he nodded fervently. Rose grinned at him, her tongue poking teasingly out of the corner of her mouth. He pinched her bum for her cheek, causing her to shriek with laughter and swat at his hand.

A daft grin settled across his face at the sound. Oh, how he’d missed her.

He couldn’t help but lean up to plant a row of tiny kisses across her jaw, beginning at the sensitive skin beneath her ear and working his way to the corner of her mouth. He felt her cheek lift in a smile as her hand went to the back of his head to keep him where he was. As if he would ever wish to stop kissing her.

“Shower?” he mumbled against her skin, slowly making a path down her neck.

“Mhm,” she hummed distractedly.

He laughed softly and pressed a final kiss to the hollow of her throat. “Come on. Let’s get cleaned up.”

Rose heaved a great sigh but dutifully lifted herself off of his lap to stand on wobbly legs. He followed suit, and they each fixed their jumble of half-off clothing before they moved, hand in hand, down the corridor of their home.

Part Two (the Christmas fluff) coming soon!

#timeladyelpia #dwsecretsanta #ficandchips #doctorroseprompts #dwfic #doctor who #ten x rose #reunion #romance #my fic #home for the holidays

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inevitably-johnlocked · 5 years

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Do you know any fics that have the angstiest angst to have ever angsted BUT a good ending (I don't think I can handle anything worse than a good one) You're lovely, by the way 😊💙

Anonymous said to inevitably-johnlocked: Hey boo, Do you have any recommendations for angst with a happy ending?? Thank you ! - 🤠

Hi Lovelies!!

Aww, thanks for your lovely comment, Nonny One!! Yeah, I love dying but then being happy at the end, and I can assure you I definitely have some fics for ya both!! I’ll use this opportunity to update one of my old related lists, then, since Nonny Two specifically asked for them!! I’ve a lot of new ones to add to it, anyway!

ANGST WITH HAPPY ENDING Pt. 2