#shes a soprano (naturally)
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want to be a classical actor soprano, forced to be the contemporary comic relief tenor
#actually I like that i’m a tenor#when i can be#but i’m a natural soprano#it ain’t easy#i hate contemporary theatre#except spongebob the musical she’s my big#make theatres host more shakespeare
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guys, i have good news for once. i've found proof of intelligent life out here in these wastelands:
my favorite excerpts:
Will, Jonathan, and Joyce Formed a Special Trio
If Eleven is the main character in Stranger Things, the Byers family is the conduit through which she flickers. Will’s disappearance in the first season spurred the Hawkins community to rush to his aid.
The tight-knit camaraderie between Will, Jonathan, and Joyce juxtaposes the stereotypical family composed of kids and teenagers. Parents and children are supposed to fight and bicker in television and other media, often to build the main conflict of the story, but the Byers family already underwent that trauma offscreen.
Lonnie Byers (Ross Partridge) makes a brief cameo in the first season, flexing his standoffish demeanor and abusive nature. It’s clear that the Byers patriarch doesn’t possess much empathy for his ex-wife or his sons. Jonathan valiantly steps into the father, husband, and big brother role, amalgamating into a combination of responsibilities that no other character on the show could dream of emulating.
Jonathan Binds the Byers Family Together
Jonathan’s multifaceted arc in the first two seasons made him one of the series’ most easily dissectable characters. Stranger Things often differentiates itself from other shows by keeping the antagonists separate from the main characters. There are no Walter White or Tony Soprano-style antiheroes in which fans must compromise one part of their moral compass to appreciate the character.
One might think this makes the series boring, but it’s the opposite. Jonathan was proof that a nearly perfect brother and son can still be fascinating to watch. After Will was found in season 1’s climax, he was taken over by the Mind Flayer in season 2. Jonathan again stood by Will’s side as his little brother felt outcasted by friends and society at large. Schnapp and Heaton’s chemistry often leads to tender, humorous exchanges like this one in which the boys remind the audience that being weird can be a human superpower in its own right.
These moments became few and far between in seasons 3 and 4. Will and Jonathan were relegated to minor supporting characters as the aforementioned new additions took center stage. Will at least gets to tag along with Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and the other younger friends. Jonathan often only appears in a few small scenes with his girlfriend Nancy (Natalia Dyer), and the writers even flirted with pushing Nancy back into Steve’s arms in the most recent season. Jonathan spent the majority of season 4 high on marijuana and frolicking around in a faux buddy-comedy routine with the one-off character Argyle (Eduardo Franco).
The decision to waste Heaton’s work from the first two seasons with a 180-degree personality change made no sense. Jonathan suddenly seemed careless, distant, and uninspired, but not in a dense way that could be unlocked by further character development. Little-to-no time was spent on him. While some fans might concur it is a necessary evil to take screen time away from older characters when expanding the world of Hawkins, it certainly transforms Stranger Things from a show about family into a show just about monsters and romances.
Jonathan’s Enhanced Role in Season 5?
Many theories point to Will being one of the critical pieces to defeating Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) in the fifth and final season. His connection to the Upside Down and the evils underneath the surface should open up opportunities for Jonathan to lend his ears and counseling once again. Jonathan grows on an individual level when he aids others. When locked out of his family’s life, it stunts his ability to shine as a listener and an empathizer.
Jonathan’s best scene from season 4 again features a tear-jerking moment with Will. On the cusp of coming out of the closet, Will needs Jonathan more than ever before, and his brother responds supremely to the task at hand. The poignant conversation validates that the Duffers haven’t completely forgotten how to flesh out the Byers family. When the world gets too enormous for the characters and the audience, Jonathan serves as a connector to the most human elements of the series’ thematic thesis.
He may not be as funny as Steve or as neurotic as Robin, but Jonathan symbolizes the good in all of us. In a show shrouded in darkness, Jonathan’s presence will be instrumental to forming a satisfying, optimistic conclusion in Hawkins, Indiana.
#st#stranger things#jonathan byers#if everyone and the duffers would listen to what me and my fellow jonathan warriors have been preaching and praying and saying#reading jonathan appreciation is like getting injected directly in the heart with adrenaline it makes me feel like a sports fan whose team#just won and now must destroy a city over it . or whatever
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I had the idea of writing about some historical queer figures I find interesting and drawing them for this pride month as a little project of mine. I will see how many I'll have time to do, I have in mind at least four other historical people, but knowing myself, I'm not holding my breath for all of them. Julie d'Aubigny she been one of my favorite historical figures for years so I decided to start with her.
Historical Queer Figures - Julie d'Aubigny
Julie d'Aubigny, also known as Mademoiselle Maupin and La Maupin, was a French opera singer and fencer in the late 1600s. She was infamous for having sapphic relationships, being aggressive and dramatic, having androgynous presentation by occasionally dressing in men's clothing in public and being a fencer and duelist. Trans and genderqueer readings of her are very possible, but because none of the accounts of her (at least those I've read) suggests she ever used any other than feminine first names or terms or she/her pronouns about herself, I will use she/her pronouns when talking about her.
The French court absolutely loved to gossip and people were constantly making up libel about the people they didn't like, and Julie had a lot of enemies and was very controversial figure. During the 18th and 19th centuries she was written about a lot in these highly sensationalized Encyclopedias, where the rumors from her lifetime got increasingly wilder and sensational. She was accused for example of seducing noble women in court balls, burning down a convent and murder. There's not much primary sources left or available from her actual lifetime so distinguishing truth from fiction is not an easy task in her case. Kaz Rowe did great job in their youtube video about her to try to actually find out where the stories of her life comes from. They go through some great context too about the rumor industry in the French court at the time so I highly recommend checking it out.
CW: very brief mentions of child sexual abuse and self-harming
The Timeline of Most Concrete Events
Let's first go through the things that have at least a bit more backing than a rumor started 100 years after her death. Julie d'Aubigny was born between 1670 and 1673. Her father was Gaston d'Aubigny, the secretary of Louis of Lorraine, count d’Armagnac, who was Master of Horses to King Loius XIV, and her mother is unknown. She was probably brought to the Versailles court in 1682, where she got a full education including academic subjects, riding and fencing, usually only thought for boys. She was married off to a Sieur de Maupin (first name unknown) probably around 1687, when she would have been 14 to 17 years old. He apparently got a position from a southern province as a tax collector. The stories about her claim she remained in Paris, but I don't think there's evidence of this, though what we do know of her adult life does suggest she was estranged from her husband and lived apart from him. Nevertheless, she did end up in Marseilles, where she first appeared on stage in Marseilles Opéra between 1687 and 1690. She didn't have education in music, but her good looks and beautiful voice landed her the role.
Her first appearances in the Paris Opéra are listed to 1690, so that is probably when she had her debut there. She became a very talked about figure and she gained both friends and enemies in the opera and the court. She performed in the Paris Opéra for probably four years, after which she went to Brussels, Bavaria, where she performed with the Opéra du Quai au Foin at least during 1697 and early 1698, after which she returned to France to perform again with the Paris Opéra.
It was the period when her career peaked and she got a lot of leading female roles. Those roles in French opera were at the time soprano roles, but Julie's natural voice range was lower, contralto. (There's a whole thing where at the time she was described as mezzo-soprano, but the music historian consensus is that her range matches contralto in modern terms as opera was sang on lower cords across the board at the time. (I understand nothing about music theory so I just hope I managed to explain this correctly)) She excelled in secondary female roles of goddesses and warrior women. For the leading roles she had to sing on higher notes than was natural to her and the naive and dainty personalities of those roles clashed with her own personality. Some later retellings of her life claim she performed male roles for female singers (which was common practice, and these roles were often those of young boys), but all known records of her roles are female roles. In 1702 on the leading composers of the Paris Opéra, André Campra, wrote her a leading lady role in Tamcréde, which is often credited to have the first leading female role for contralto. But her perhaps most famous role was as Médée in Medus, which was considered to be a very difficult role. Apparently the original leading singer had fallen ill before the debut so Julie was quickly trained in her stead, but succeeded well and got a lot of praise for the role.
In 1703 Julie started an affair with Madame la Marquise de Florensac, who was said to have been the most beautiful woman in France. This is the affair of hers of which there's most evidence. De Florensac was married and had children, but she was also rumored to have many affairs. Julie lived quietly together with her for two years. They were described by a contemporary to have lived in perfect harmony, always spending time together and only appearing in public when necessarily. Julie deputed in her last role in 1705 and ended her career after De Floransac died of sudden fever. Nothing concrete is known about the rest of her life, not even how or when she died, but she is usually speculated to have died in 1707.
Parsing History from Fantasy
Chronologically the rumor that places earliest in her life was that she had "an affair" with count d’Armagnac (age 46 at the time), before she got married in the same year so as a 14 to 17 year old. There doesn't seem to be any actual evidence of this and even if that really happened, it wouldn't have been an affair, it would have been grooming and sexual violence. Related to it is the rumor that the count arranged her marriage and sent her husband away, but kept her in the court with him. Then she "got bored" of the count and ran away with an assistant sword-master, Séranne, to southern France. They got money by performing fencing matches in fairs and taverns while they were traveling till they got to Marseilles, where she first appeared in opera.
The stories of her in this period are generally written in a super nasty tone, and she (as supposed 14 yo) is written as the seductress and the adult men are written as the victims of her fiery temper and fitfulness. All these stories seem pretty unlikely though. The rumor about the count seems (unfortunately) most possible, but accounts from 18th and 19th century about these early events in her life don't seem to be based on any information from her lifetime. I find it most likely that the writers in 18th and 19th centuries were filling out the blanks we don't know from her life and painting her as this (in their eyes) degenerate seductress from an early age. An alternative possible explanation could have been that she indeed accompanied her husband to south, perhaps near Marseilles, where she then performed with the Marseilles Opéra. Many sources claim though that she performed with her maiden name there, which would be odd if she was living with her husband. I don't know where that claim comes originally, but it could be false of course. Although the generally proposed year of her marriage could also be false, which would explain why she at first performed with her maiden name, and later in Paris and always after that with her husband's name. That would not explain how she ended up going to Marseilles though.
The next and perhaps the most infamous and coolest story of her sets somewhere shortly before 1690. In that story she fell in love with a girl in Marseilles and the girls parents sent her to a convent to avoid a scandal. Julie went to the convent with the premise of wanting to become a novice. They tried to frame the girl's death by putting a dead nun's body into the girls bed and setting it on fire and then went on the run for couple of months. While on the run Julie was sentenced to death in absentia, but after returning to Paris and rekindling her relationship with count d'Armagnac, he got the king to pardon her. As amazing as this story is, it's very likely not true. It seems quite unlikely that the 15 to 19 year old Julie would have done that, but even more unlikely that she'd just get all her charges dropped and these crimes wouldn't have hindered at all her career, which hadn't even properly begun yet. The first surviving description of this incident comes from a letter of her contemporary court lady, Madame Dunoyer, who was basically an early gossip columnist and despised her. Her story doesn't mention Julie at all, but talks about a nun, who tried to frame her own death in a similar manner to escape with her male lover (which still sounds very unlikely story). The first surviving description that attaches that story to Julie, comes year after her death from the very suspect writings of a known liar, Cardinal Debois, who did personally know and hate Julie. He claimed that Dumenil, who was an actor in Paris Opéra the same time as Julie, related him the story, while also acknowledging he probably did it because he too hated her. So very likely not a true story, but possibly something that was rumored during her lifetime already.
In the stories of her, after escaping from the convent and before going to Paris, she traveled again in male attire and met Louis Joseph d'Albert de Luynes von Grimberghen, commonly known as count d'Albert. He was an interesting character in his own right, roughly her age, and like her, his real story is a little hard to parse from the legend (though in his case, he was a nobleman so there's also a lot of actual records of his life). In the story though, he thought she was a man, they had some disagreement, a fight broke out, she won, injured him and nursed him back to health. And then they had a brief affair before d'Albert went to war again. They were lifelong friends, so this is not entirely made up. It's entirely possible they had a brief affair (and according to many stories an on and off type of affair that was re-kindled at many points in their lives) and there was rumors about it even in her lifetime, but the story of this first meeting seems to lack validity.
Next in her stories she met Gabriel-Vincent Thévenard, who was another famous singer and her contemporary, either right before or right after she arrived in Paris. They became lovers and after Thévenard auditioned and got accepted into the Paris Opéra, he helped to get Julie accepted too. It is true that as far as we know, they both debuted in 1690. They were also said to have been life long friends and again it's possible they were lovers at some point, but the details of their meeting are difficult to know.
There are many stories about her antics of both of her times in the Paris Opéra. In those stories she fought duels, assaulted Dumenil with a cane, robbed Dumenil, had fights with men after they insulted her or another women or harassed other women, tried to kill herself after her love was not reciprocated, threatened to shoot a duchess in the head, threatened to slit Cardinal Debois' throat, bit Thévenard in the ear on stage and had affairs with men and women. According to Cardinal Debois the feud between Dumenil and Julie started because Dumenil was interested in her but she rejected him. The Cardinal was a liar but it does sound pretty believable. So if it's true and he spread in retaliation a lie that she burned down a convent, her beating him up or beating him up, stealing his valuables and returning them to him by humiliating him in front of other actors, would align well with everything else told about her personality. Maybe her retaliation wasn't exactly as in the stories, but if the other things about Dumenil were true, I'm sure she retaliated in some way. Same applies to her threatening the Cardinal's life. He wrote about it, but he was a liar, but, but because he was a liar who lied about her, it sounds like something she might do. Madame Dunoyer wrote about her threatening the Duchess of Luxembourg apparently because of jealousy over count d'Albert. The duchess was d'Albert's mistress at one point and apparently he even fought a duel over her in 1700. So there is some validity to this rumor, though the circumstances were perfect to fabricate that kind of rumor. I haven't found as much backing to other rumors, but many of them sound possible or at least maybe rooted in some reality and exaggerated.
The rumored explanation for why she left the Paris Opéra around 1694 was that she went into a court ball in men's clothing, kissed a woman on the dance floor and got challenge to a duel by three noblemen. They went outside and she won, but because dueling was illegal, she had to flee to Bavaria, and later when she returned, she was supposedly pardoned by the king again. In the more sensational versions of the story she killed the noblemen. This whole story is very unlikely. Even count d'Albert was imprisoned for engaging in an illegal duel (the one in 1700). He got eventually pardoned, but he was a nobleman and basically a war hero. The first surviving accounts of this story come much after her dead and it sounds more like a very exaggerated version of the other stories of her. There's many more plausible reason why she would have left to Bavaria. If her contemporaries descriptions of her behavior were even half true, those could have been scandal enough. Or if the rumors of her burning down a convent were circling that time already, that alone could have been damaging enough to her career that she thought it best to leave for a while.
In Bavaria, she's rumored to have another scandal. She supposedly became lover of the Max Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, but she was too dramatic and after she stabbed herself with a real knife during a performance, the Elector decided she was too much, demanded her to leave Bavaria and gave her money for it. She supposedly threw the money to the feet of the messenger and left. The first surviving account of this story comes again from Madame Dunoyer, the details of which have changed, but were always quite exaggerated and unbelievable. Still the core events might be true, it's possible she was the Elector's lover for a while and it's also possible she stabbed herself on stage for real, being very dramatic as she was.
Was she queer?
There are enough accounts of her attraction and relationships with women from people who actually knew her, that I do find it very likely that she was sapphic. Cardinal Debois even implied she was exclusive interested in women or at least heavily preferred them, though other accounts by the people who knew her did talk about her attraction to men too. Her dressing in men's clothing is also mentioned enough times by her contemporaries that I do believe it. Because gender was so heavily tied to clothing and sexuality and fashion was less about what you wanted to wear and more about what you wanted others to think about you, I think she probably had some gender feelings. Even her aggressive and assertive behavior was very much seen as crossing gender boundaries. There's no more evidence of her feelings on gender than her androgynous presentation, so it's mostly speculation.
In conclusion, she was definitely a flavor of queer.
Julie circa 1700 in opera costume.
The most notable source I used:
Julie D'Aubigny: the 17th Century Sapphic Swordfighting Opera Singer, video by Kaz Rowe - I mentioned this before but it bears repeating
Research page by Jim Burrows - This was great since there's gathered multiple sources on le Maupin, historical and more recent, some of which are hard to access fully otherwise
Julie d'Aubigny: La Maupin and Early French Opera, LAPL blog post - It repeats most of the rumors of questionable origin about her as truth, but the sections about her career, which have more backing than just rumors, are really helpful
Mademoiselle De Maupin; Biographical sketches & anecdotes, The Dublin University Magazine - One of those questionable biographies of her from 1854, really only good as a source of what the rumors were after her death
Chevalier, Louis-Joseph, prince de Grimberghen, essay by Neil Jeffares - Biography of count d'Albert, which includes a lot of unsourced rumors about both le Maupin and d'Albert, but recounts his life events in great detail, and references to each claim show which parts are sourced well
#queer history#history#pride month#art#queer art#lgbtq history#sapphic art#digital art#portrait#historical art#historical queer figure#julie d'aubigny#julie de maupin
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A Night of Firsts
Summary: Yoongi spends the night in the studio with the last person he wants to be with. Seokjin prepares for an important dinner.
Pairing: Seokjin x OC, Yoongi x OC (different OCs)
Genre: Best friends, coworkers; mild humour, banter, awkwardness, tension, angst
Word count: 12.8 K
Rating: 18+
Warnings: language, alcohol, smoking, mentions of pregnancy and sex
A/N: Tried something here (read: this isn't regular angst; it's cool angst). Takes place a couple of months after New Year’s Eve Eve. Banner by the lovely @hobeemin - thank you, Beezy <3
Tagging: @bbl32 @quarter-life-crisis2 @meirkive @faearchives @margopinkerton @dreaming-with-happiness @confessionsofamarshlily @purpleseoul7
Listen to: "black sun" by death cab for cutie
seokjin masterlist | yoongi masterlist | main masterlist
“That was good.”
Yoongi’s voice takes on an encouraging lilt that sounds rather unfamiliar - to Miso at least. She turns and gives him a blank look, just enough to convey her acknowledgement of his tone.
The young idol in the recording booth stutters a thank you, while Yoongi returns Miso’s glance with a slight raise of the eyebrows.
Miso struggles not to roll her eyes and speaks into the mic, pausing the track. “Yeah - but try it again, a little calmer and relaxed this time?”
The idol - his name escapes her - nods and repeats the line, his clear soprano ringing through the speakers. “How was that?” he asks expectantly.
She forces a smile onto her face with remarkable ease. “So good.” Keeping the expression frozen on her face, she turns off the mic and tilts her head towards Yoongi. “You see that was exactly the same as before, right?” she mutters.
Yoongi purses his lips to suppress a smile; once in a while, when Miso’s snark and sarcasm isn’t directed at him, she can actually be funny.
“He just needs some time,” he replies and turns on the mic again. “That was better, Jungwon,” he says to the idol, whose eyes seem to mist over at the compliment. “Let’s do one more take for comparison. This time, can you go a little higher at the end? It’ll sound more playful, natural. Yeah? Okay, let’s go.”
Jungwon sings the same line again, and even Miso can’t help but raise her eyebrows at the improvement.
“Damn,” she mutters, giving him a thumbs up from behind the plexiglass. “What superpower is that?”
“Practical feedback,” supplies Yoongi, giving Jungwon a rare smile of approval. “You tell them what to do instead of what you want. Makes a world of difference.”
“Huh.” Miso nods, apparently impressed. “Guess it’s a good thing I got assigned to you. You may have a lot to teach me.”
“I don’t think this assignment is going to last that long,” he quips, giving her an innocent shrug as she smiles widely in response to his sarcasm.
“Um, hyung,” stutters Jungwon from inside. “I’m - I’m getting a call from my manager, so can I - can I -”
“Yeah, of course.” Yoongi shakes his head slightly as the door to the studio swings shut. “He needs to relax,” he mutters.
“That was the feedback I gave him. Wasn’t applicable enough, apparently,” adds Miso, swinging slightly in her chair. “Shall we listen to what we have so far?”
Yoongi motions for her to play it and leans back in his swivelling chair, crossing his fingers on his stomach and closing his eyes. The audio plays, nearly three hours worth of Jungwon’s hard work and almost a day’s of their own in production. Miso is equally silent until the track ends and for a few moments after, until Yoongi winces slightly.
“It’s not our best work,” he admits, sighing. “Maybe it’ll be better once we get that bridge arrangement from Donghyuk. He should send it over in a bit.”
“Can’t we just ask him how long it’ll take?” she asks, already reaching for her phone. “If it’s going to take all night, the least we can do is get some sleep before working on it in the morning.” She sighs and runs a hand through her hair. “God, I hope it takes all night.”
“You would think,” he says, stretching and rolling his chair closer to the controls, “but we need to mix the whole thing tonight. Marketing wants a sample in the morning so they can decide whether or not it can go in the soundtrack package of the group’s video game.”
Miso is quiet for a moment. “In that case, it can’t get done fast enough. I’m going to go next door and follow up with Donghyuk.”
“Be my guest,” he mutters, putting on a pair of headphones.
She’s about to leave when she stops and turns, the door half open. “Maybe we can sweet talk Marketing into giving us an extension. What was that manager’s name again? Seulgi?”
—
“Wait, what’s his girlfriend’s name again? Seulgi?”
Nari shrugs noncommittally as the elevator pings and opens up on Seokjin’s floor. They step out into the dim lighting, Nari’s heart jerking uncomfortably with every beat. The closer she gets to this dinner, the more it feels like a terrible idea.
But Seokjin proposed it - a double date - and she had no choice, especially when he offered it at a high school reunion, surrounded by their hometown and their old friends. It was Seokjin’s way of extending an olive branch. That far away from their everyday lives, it felt easier to talk to each other again, even forget for a moment how messed up everything was between them. It was a glimpse of their old friendship and Nari did what was necessary to hold on to it, which included saying yes to dinner with Seokjin and his new girlfriend.
A few feet away from his apartment, she halts. “Jason,” she begins, turning to him. Tall and freshly showered, in a black button-down with the sleeves folded halfway up his forearms, it occurs to her suddenly just how much she owes him for accompanying her tonight.
He tilts his head slightly. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Just… thank you for this. I know it’s probably a little awkward because it’s technically a double date and you and I aren’t…” She trails off and is relieved to see him shrug easily. “But I’m glad you’re here. I owe you.” She doesn’t know how to word the fact that she’s glad there will be one person in her corner tonight, but from the knowing nod he gives her, he might just know.
Jason squints for a moment and pushes his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “It’s no big deal. Honestly, from what you’re telling me, I may be the only person for whom this night won’t be awkward,” he points out. “And besides, anything to get out of the hospital tonight. If I have to listen to Heejin brag one more time about the cool bone graft surgery she stole from me, I might throw a shoe at her head.”
Nari pauses. “So… you’re saying I’m doing you a favour as much as you’re doing me one?”
“Probably not as big, but, yeah.”
“Works for me.” Exhaling and forcing a smile, she begins walking again, this time not stopping until she’s actually in front of Seokjin’s door. She rings the doorbell, when Jason suddenly swears under his breath. “What?”
“Damn it, I forgot my inhaler in the car.” He pats his pockets. “I’ll be back in one minute, okay?” Patting her shoulder and ignoring her frantic shaking of the head, he jogs down the corridor and presses the elevator button, stepping in just as the front door opens.
“Hey.” Seokjin gives her a small smile and steps aside, motioning for her to enter. Nari steps inside, the familiarity of the hall making her nervous. “Where’s Jason?”
“Um, he forgot something in the car. He should be up in a minute.”
“Oh. Okay.” Seokjin shuts the door, their shoulders brushing momentarily. He’s in black, too, the collar of his shirt open and the hollow of his neck exposed. He’s in slacks, though, and barefoot, something oddly and heartbreakingly domestic about it.
Nari slips off her shoes and follows him inside, somewhat regretting her decision to wear make-up tonight and trying to remember the last time she was in this house. It looks exactly the same, except for minor differences. She sets her bag inside by one of the chairs and is about to sit on the sofa out of habit, but stops herself at the last minute.
“This is for you,” she says, suddenly remembering. Retrieving a bottle of red wine from her tote bag, she hands it to him.
“Wow, thank you.” Seokjin nods and briefly skims the label. “That’s really nice.” He walks over to the open kitchen and places the bottle on the island where plates, cutlery and napkins are neatly stacked, ready for use. Pausing, he turns to her again.
“Do you want a drink?”
“I’m on call.”
Seokjin falls silent and nods. It occurs to Nari that he may have wanted a drink, but was trying to be polite. She considers asking for a glass of wine anyway when he speaks.
“Is Jason alright?”
“What? Yeah, I guess.” She shrugs. “We parked a little way down the street. Where’s, uh…”
Seokjin’s eyes shutter over slightly. “Seulgi.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Stuck in traffic. She should be here any minute.”
Silence again. Nari half-wishes she’d declined this dinner - or accepted the drink. Neither of those options would even come close to fixing anything, but they might have made this particular moment less unpleasant or completely non-existent.
“Thanks for coming.” Seokjin tries again. “I was a little afraid you might decide not to.”
“I said I would, didn’t I?”
There’s a moment where they hold each other’s gaze and she thinks he’s about to retort. She almost wants him to, not wanting to be the only one making this night uncomfortable. But then he simply nods once and looks away, slipping his hands in his pocket.
Nari swallows, already feeling a trickle of shame creeping up her throat at that jab. “The food smells great,” she ventures, and the smell wafting from the kitchen instantly seems stronger.
Seokjin cracks a smile. “Thanks. Are you hungry?”
“Yeah, definitely. Kind of skipped lunch, so…”
He looks like he’s about to ask, but visibly changes tacks. “It’s bulgogi and japchae,” he states.
“Sounds good.” The awkward silence this time feels like a physical attack so she continues with reckless abandon. “By the way, you didn’t - you didn’t have to go through all this trouble,” she stammers, gesturing to the kitchen. “We could’ve just ordered in.”
“Oh, it was no problem,” he says immediately, shaking his head. “Unless… do you want to order in? We - we can, if you want -”
“No, no, of course not -”
“It’s really okay -”
Mercifully, the doorbell rings just then and both Seokjin and Nari break off abruptly. Exchanging a gaze of pure panic and a mutual relief, Seokjin moves past her to get to the door.
—
Meanwhile, Yoongi is hanging on to his last vestiges of patience.
“Jungwon,” he says deliberately into the mic, “it’s not a contest. Okay? It’s a song about freedom. You’re not a trainee anymore and you’re not going to get cut at the end of the night.” Giving him an encouraging nod, he takes his finger off the button and sits back in the chair.
“Trainwreck,” mutters Miso, sounding as annoyed as he feels.
“Don’t,” he warns her quietly. “We can’t have him getting discouraged right now. He needs to finish recording this tonight.”
“Discouraged?” She frowns at him, looking slightly incredulous. “I think we passed discouraged a while ago. He looks like he’s about to burst into tears. You have maybe… twenty minutes before that bomb goes off.”
She’s right, Yoongi realises with some dread. “Jungwon!” he calls into the mic. “You’re doing great!”
Next to him, Miso snorts. “Dude, that convinced no one.”
“Not helping,” he hisses. “You know what, Jungwon? Take five. Go get a coffee and come back, and we’ll take it from the top.”
The young idol lowers his head, looking crestfallen, and slowly trudges out of the studio.
Yoongi watches him leave before turning to Miso. “You know, you could try and help him through this.”
She raises her eyebrows. “And what is this exactly?”
“The - the process. Encourage him a little bit, make him feel like he belongs here. He’s just a kid.”
“A - he’s twenty-two,” she corrects him, looking unimpressed. “And I’m sorry, okay? I’m not his therapist - it’s not my job to hold his hand. My job was to mix the instrumentals and come up with a complete arrangement, which is what I spent all day doing,” she reminds him. “I gave you six options and at least one of them is decent.”
Unfortunately, Yoongi cannot argue with this, for she did provide him with a range of choices for the final mixing session. They’re better than decent; in fact, he’s having trouble choosing between two of them. She’s not a prodigy, but she’s talented - and is coming alarmingly close to churning out the kind of music he genuinely approves of.
But he isn’t about to admit any of this to her. Compliments with Miso are like navigating a field of landmines: take one wrong step and the dynamic between them is instantly changed.
“Working with the singer is also part of this job,” he tells her instead. “So is encouraging them and getting the best out of them. Or they’ll do a subpar job of it and your precious arrangements won’t matter because the finished song will suck.”
Miso sighs. “Fine. Let him come back and I’ll try to coddle him through the process. Just… stop pretending he’s a child.”
“You have no idea what he’s had to go through to get here,” he argues. “He was a trainee for four years. It’s absolute hell. The ones who are lucky enough to debut come out with more armour than you’ll know.”
“Seriously? Armour?”
Yoongi doesn’t respond, his cheeks heating up slightly. It’s something he never realised he did, saying things that sounded more dramatic than he intended. But Miso noticed, and picked up on it. It was one of many quirks in each other that they noted and leveraged, and this one annoyed him just as much as the others.
“Yes, armour,” he repeats, opening up one of Miso’s arrangement files from earlier today.
“Is it armour that’s keeping him here -” She checks her phone, “- three hours longer than he was meant to be?”
“It is, actually. It’s called hard work and sacrifice.”
The insult in his tone doesn’t escape her. “And obviously, I have no concept of either of those things,” she says sarcastically.
“Your words, not mine.”
“So that is what you’re saying.”
Yoongi finally turns to her, giving her a look. “Wasn’t that a limited edition Range Rover I saw dropping you off this morning?”
It’s Miso’s turn to flush, but she doesn’t look away. “I fail to see what business that is of yours,” she says coldly.
“People who get dropped off to work in their father’s fancy cars aren’t known for things like sacrifice, is all.” He adjusts a few settings and plays the track again but at low volume. It’s the third option Miso sent him earlier today; he overlays the audio on it and they listen to Jungwon’s latest attempt.
They’re silent for a minute and a half while the music plays, possibly the longest ninety seconds of Yoongi’s life.
“Well,” says Miso finally, when the track ends abruptly, “I think that’s enough sacrifice for one night. I think I need a smoke. You know, to let all of that armoured talent wash over my privileged self,” she adds dryly, getting up. “If you can take a break from Jungwon’s masterpiece for a minute, you’re welcome to join me.”
Yoongi doesn’t answer her, staring sullenly at the rubbish recording they have so far. It’s going to be a long night, and his options right now are attempting to salvage a second-rate audio sample or hanging out one on one with Kang Miso.
The answer comes surprisingly simply to him.
“Hey, wait up,” he says a moment later, pushing his chair back and standing up, feeling his knees stretch. “I could use a smoke, too.”
—
It’s only been an hour and yet, it feels like one of the longest nights of Seokjin’s life. He can’t tell exactly what’s wrong, though - other than everything.
Seulgi and Jason arrived together, giving him and Nari some respite from the painful awkwardness that seems to have replaced two decades of friendship. After the initial ten minutes which consisted of introductions, typical small talk and serving of drinks, he was forced to acknowledge the lack of talking points in common between two doctors and two people in entertainment.
Jason, for his part, seems to be the only person keeping the conversation going with ease. Seokjin suspects Nari would have filled him in somewhat on the situation, but he can’t imagine what she would have said exactly. My best friend that you met that I slept with and told my mom was a no-go from the dating angle but still asked if he had feelings for me and got upset when he lied and then had a pregnancy scare with followed by months of tense conversation is inviting us to dinner with the girlfriend he met when he was supposed to meet me at a party?
It seems far too wordy, even for Nari. She seems to be cordial enough to Seulgi, though, whom Seokjin can’t thank enough for being so graceful even after a long day of arguing with producers, only to end the day having dinner with her boyfriend and the best friend he hooked up with.
“Oh, Jason,” she says, after a brief recalling of the discussion she had earlier today with Yoongi and his abrasive assistant producer, “your glass is empty. Do you want a refill?”
“Sure, thanks,” he replies, smiling and moving to stand up from his place on the sofa. But Seulgi motions for him to stay, already gliding towards the kitchen island where the opened bottle of wine is placed and bringing it back. “Thank you,” he repeats when she pours him a generous serving.
“You’re welcome. Nari?” She looks over at Nari, who’s said about eight words in the last hour. “Are you sure I can’t get you a drink? Even a small one?”
Nari pauses for a moment before answering, her facial muscles moving in what could be the beginning of a forced smile, but doesn’t reach all the way. “Like I said, I’m on call,” she says. Then, in a slightly lower voice, she adds, “Just like I was twenty minutes ago.”
Seulgi pokes her tongue into her cheek and her gaze falls slightly. She looks like she’s about to say something but finally decides not to, straightening up and placing the bottle on a coaster on the coffee table.
Seokjin stares at Nari. “It can be non-alcoholic. Ginger ale or… lemonade or something?”
She gives him the briefest of glances. “I’m really okay.”
There’s another terse silence during which Seokjin resists the urge to close his eyes and sigh. He stares into his own glass of wine, the same one he’d started the night with. Much as he’d like to drown his annoyance in alcohol, he’s honestly a little afraid of what he might say if he drinks too much, and the last thing he needs is for this night to become any more uncomfortable.
“Uh, Seokjin,” begins Jason, making him look up. “Nari tells me you cook. The food smells great, by the way.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s true,” he responds, nodding a little too hard. “In fact - shall we eat? If everyone’s hungry?”
There’s an awkward chorus of yeses and of courses as everyone gets to their feet and shuffles towards the dining table, a simple and elegant eight-seater adjacent to the kitchen. Seokjin stops at the kitchen and begins gathering the various serving dishes when someone approaches him.
“Need a hand?” Jason offers good-naturedly.
“Uh… yeah, sure. Thanks.”
They begin assembling cutlery and Seokjin turns on the stove for a few seconds to heat the food. It occurs to him that Nari and Seulgi are alone at the table; it makes him vaguely anxious.
Almost as if Jason is reading his mind, he speaks, forcing Seokjin out of his reverie.
“By the way, thanks for having us over.” He waits until Seokjin looks at him. “Obviously, the food looks amazing and… Seulgi seems great.”
“Thanks.” Seokjin nods, feeling an unexpected gratitude towards him. “She is. And… glad you guys could make it. I know you work a lot.”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it. Nari’s best friend, right?” He half-chuckles, sounding a bit uncomfortable now. “Also, she’s not… she - she’s been working really long hours lately. Lost a patient yesterday… I’m guessing she hasn’t got a lot of sleep.”
It takes Seokjin a moment to realise this information is meant to be an explanation for Nari’s behaviour tonight, meaning he isn’t imagining it. He turns off the stove but doesn’t move, wondering how he’s supposed to respond to this. He gives Jason a sideways glance.
When he’d invited Nari to dinner, he hadn’t quite known what the status of her relationship with Jason was. In an effort to not pry, he’d simply said you can bring Jason, too, if you want. Evidently, she did, and while Seokjin can’t help but be glad about it, it still gives him no indication as to whether they’re actually together, although it seems fairly likely.
He wonders if he’ll ever be able to ask Nari about it, before remembering it’s none of his business.
Seokjin clears his throat. “It’s… it’s okay. I get it.”
Jason nods, looking rather like he wants to ask something but apparently thinks the better of it. “Nice shirt,” he remarks, a joking lilt to his tone.
Seokjin looks down to look at his black shirt before noticing Jason wearing the exact same thing. He cracks a smile, a real smile, and his face feels slightly better.
“You, too.”
When they arrive at the table, it’s to see Nari and Seulgi on opposite seats at the table, the head left conspicuously vacant. Nari is on her phone, while Seulgi seems to be nursing what’s left of her drink, gulping down the last sip when she sees him and Jason.
“Oh, thank God! I mean… looks great.”
Seokjin catches her eye and they share a look of amusement at her slip of tongue. He and Jason set the food on the table and take their seats next to their respective dates.
“I think we can serve ourselves,” says Seulgi, picking up the bowl of beef and offering it to Jason. “Nari, do you want to start with the meat?”
“I’ll start with the noodles,” she says instead, barely looking at Seulgi and reaching straight for the bowl filled to the brim with noodles.
“I’ll have the meat,” murmurs Seokjin, taking the bowl from his girlfriend. He touches her hand meaningfully as she passes it to him and ladles some into her bowl before moving to his own.
Everyone serves themselves in relative silence, with only mutters about passing dishes around.
“Oh, wow!” Jason exclaims and everyone jumps slightly. He points enthusiastically to the food with his chopsticks and nods at Seokjin appreciatively. “This is excellent.”
Seokjin smiles back and nods. “Thanks, I’m glad you like it. Are the scallions chopped appropriately this time?” he asks Seulgi, a little teasingly, referring to an inside joke.
She laughs and pats his shoulder. “They’re perfect.”
He grins and looks diagonally across at Nari, who’s sweeping a mouthful of japchae into her mouth. “Nari?” he prompts after a moment.
Nari waits to swallow before looking up at him, her face slowly relaxing into the first genuine smile of the night. “It’s really good,” she agrees softly.
His chest suddenly feeling lighter, Seokjin smiles back and nods. Maybe Jason was right - maybe she was actually just tired and hungry, for now that she’s eating, she seems to be marginally more participative. It’s still Seulgi and Jason carrying the conversation like champions, with Seokjin joining in occasionally, but Nari is at least listening and chuckling on cue, which is a decided improvement from where they began.
Maybe it’s his imagination, but the entire mood of the night improves after that. Jason seems relieved as well; he responds to Nari encouragingly and - Seokjin notes with a twinge of envy he didn’t expect - with an indulgence that can only come with extensive familiarity.
In theory, it increases the likelihood of them being a couple. However - and Seokjin has absolutely no way to back this up except that he knows Nari - he doesn’t think they actually are together. There’s smiling, quiet laughing, shared looks and amused nodding, all of which could indicate a relationship but could also be signs of a really good friendship, for weren’t all of these things that he and Nari did as well, for years?
“Hey.” Seulgi nudges him. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, of course,” he says immediately, squeezing her knee. He tries not to read too much into the lingering look she gives him before turning away, and resolves to focus on more appropriate topics.
It works for a while; Jason tells them all about a fellow resident who irritates the life out of him, complete with a mimicry of her which, if Nari’s reaction is anything to go by, is completely accurate.
“She sounds like a nightmare,” comments Seulgi, shaking her head sympathetically.
“She’s actually not that bad,” disagrees Nari, slapping Jason’s shoulder lightly. “You made her look bad in the skills lab last week when she was just trying to ask a question.”
“And I apologised,” he reminds her. “I let her get a full night’s sleep, even when the ER was flooded with all those pesky, cool surgeries,” he adds with a straight face.
Nari snorts while Seokjin lets out a low whistle. “Wow. You guys are cutthroat.”
Jason shrugs. “Part of the job. I’m sure your jobs are, too, no? Dealing with fame can’t be easy - I would presume,” he adds quickly.
“Not as much as you’d think. Seulgi actually deals with artists and producers,” he tells them, gesturing to her. “That’s cutthroat.”
Seulgi chuckles. “I wouldn’t say cutthroat, but some of them can be a pain for sure.”
“Oh, hey, how did your meeting with Yoongi and his team go?”
“Oh, that.” She sighs and shakes her head. “They managed to talk themselves into a day’s extension for one of the demos.”
“Yoongi asked for an extension?”
“No, his assistant producer did. Kang Chanel,” she states with another sigh. “It’s literally impossible to win a negotiation with her. The last time we tried, that meeting got extended by hours - and we still couldn’t come to a compromise.”
“Damn,” remarks Jason, nodding. “Can’t imagine that. Negotiation is my worst fear - well, Nari’s worst fear for sure,” he adds with a grin at her.
“Yeah, that wasn’t a great night. But it looked up a little after that,” adds Seulgi, smiling at Seokjin. “Remember? It was raining and traffic was backed up fully on the route to my apartment so I came over here? He made me homemade jajjangmyeon,” she tells them. “It was the first thing I’d eaten in - what, twelve hours? And it actually felt like coming home. I mean, you know now that he’s pretty good in the kitchen,” she adds, gesturing to the food on the table.
It takes Seokjin a second to realise that Nari’s gaze is on him; when he looks up and meets her eyes, it’s like being hit by a bus. There’s more meaning in that one look than she’s acknowledged all night and even though she looks away after a moment, her gaze falling to her lap, Seokjin can hear the word echoing between them like a chant. Jajjangmyeon.
Jason laughs at Seulgi’s anecdote, and Seokjin is too preoccupied to realise that Seulgi doesn’t quite respond to it. He’s still looking at Nari, who seems to be done with dinner.
“Um,” she murmurs, taking the napkin off her lap and placing it on her table. “Do you mind if I use the ladies’ room?” Barely waiting for his nod from the corner of her eye, she stands up and walks away. There’s a moment when she’s about to enter his bedroom, presumably out of habit, before abruptly changing directions and going down the hall.
“Actually, I really need to check on this patient, too,” says Jason apologetically. “Do you mind if I -” He picks up his phone.
“No, not at all.” Seokjin watches him leave the dining area and head into the balcony, sliding the door shut behind him.
“Okay, what is going on?” Seulgi asks immediately, her voice low and level.
“What?”
“Something is happening,” she elaborates, twisting in her chair slightly to face him. “There’s a vibe, from… everyone,” she explains, and Seokjin suspects she’s diplomatically avoided using Nari’s name. “It’s like something has happened or is happening… and everybody is in on it but me.”
Seokjin shakes his head slowly. “I - no. I mean, yeah, it was awkward in the beginning -” He looks back surreptitiously in the direction of the guest bathroom to make sure there’s no one there. “But it’s getting better, right?”
Seulgi observes him, a slight frown on her forehead. “What happened between you and Nari?” she asks plainly.
He shrugs. “Nothing. I mean - apart from what I told you.”
“You hooked up.”
“Yeah.”
She continues looking at him, but he can’t detect any suspicion in her tone. “That’s it? You didn’t date?”
“God, no,” he answers immediately. “Never even came close. We - we hooked up a couple of times but… we never really ventured down the dating territory,” he clarifies, realising a moment later that he’s not even lying.
She sighs, biting her lip. “Then what is it? Did I say something? Does she have a problem with me?” she asks, dropping all attempts at keeping her concerns general. “I don’t - I can’t tell. Or is it Jason?”
“I don’t know,” he answers honestly, although he does have an inkling. But it’s too conceited a possibility for him to entertain. “You haven’t done anything,” he assures her.
Seulgi nods slowly. “You’re absolutely sure nothing else happened between you two? Are you guys fighting?”
“We -” Seokjin sighs, for it’s the question of the hour. “I have no idea. It’s a bit awkward right now, I know. It’s complicated.” He pauses, wondering where to begin. “We hooked up, it was fine for a while, then that party happened where you lent me the wrist brace… oh, then I snapped at her at my brother’s wedding - but we resolved that…” He’s just thinking out loud at this point, frowning and pressing a finger to his mouth. “Then we had that pregnancy scare and then I was supposed to meet her at this fundraiser - I guess she’s still mad about that… but we were fine at the reunion last month, too, so I don’t -”
“Wait. Back up.” Seulgi interrupts him. “You guys had a pregnancy scare?”
“Um, yeah,” he answers, a little uneasily. “It was… we were stupid - but I swear, it’s the only time I’ve ever not used a condom, if that’s what you’re -”
“And it was after your brother’s wedding? Didn’t your brother get married, like… six months ago?”
Seokjin hesitates. “Uh… something like that.” When she doesn’t say anything, just frowns deeper as though just realising something, he feels his heart start to race uncomfortably. “Seulgi, what -”
“You thought she was pregnant?”
“But she wasn’t,” he clarifies, still sure he’s missing something. “It was genuinely just a scare.”
“Pregnancy scares aren’t just scares,” she disagrees, looking a bit incredulous now. “They’re - they’re terrifying. And you two -” She touches her fingers to her temples. “Oh, my God,” she whispers. “You thought she was pregnant…”
“Seulgi -”
But before Seokjin can continue, the balcony door slides open with a sound and Jason returns. A second later, the bathroom door unlocks and Nari appears, running a hand through her hair.
Seokjin chances a glance at Seulgi, who’s staring at her plate, still looking troubled. With his heart sinking slightly, he looks around the table and forces a smile.
“Dessert, anyone?”
—
“Wow.” Yoongi sits back and raises his eyebrows.
“I know.” Miso nods, albeit sounding less surprised. “That was actually good. Tonight may not be a complete waste after all.”
“Was that better?” Minji, the featured artist, asks from inside the recording booth. Next to her, Jungwon looks daringly hopeful.
“Much better,” says Yoongi into the mic, giving them a thumbs up.
“Great.” Minji gives them a satisfied smile and hooks her headphones on the mic. Next to her Jungwon follows suit. “Does that mean we can take five?”
“Sure,” says Yoongi, too relieved to deny them anything right now. “Come back quick, though. I want to listen to the last version together and make any changes, if needed.”
Both the artists nod and duck out, leaving him alone with Miso.
“Thank God,” he sighs, stretching in his chair and running his hands over his face. “I think I could cry,” he adds dryly.
Miso frowns, looking amused. “It wasn’t that good. But a definite improvement. We can work with it now, at least.”
Yoongi nods as she rolls her chair closer to the controls and starts layering the recording over the instrumentals. “Try starting it half a second after the beat,” he advises, watching as she nods and obliges. They listen to it in silence and she turns briefly to give him an appreciative nod.
“Sounds good.”
“Thanks.” He checks his watch. “Jesus, it’s eleven pm. Can you think how much sooner we could’ve had this track if we’d scheduled Minji to come in earlier?”
“Wouldn’t matter because Donghyuk is still going to take all night,” she reminds him, her eyes focused on the laptop screen.
“Yeah, but we could’ve had more time to experiment with the track.” He shakes his head. “Anyway. Lesson learnt. Minji is our secret weapon to get the talent out of Jungwon.”
To his surprise, Miso chuckles. “Is she ever.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“What?” When he doesn’t answer, Miso twists her shoulders to look at him. “Wait, are you serious?”
Yoongi starts to feel a familiar annoyance brewing at her superior tone but tries to keep it at bay, at least until they’re done with their work. He frowns mildly back at her, as though he doesn’t quite care what she’s getting at.
“Serious about what?”
“Minji, Min Suga. You think she inspired some hidden talent out of Jungwon? In the recording booth?” She chuckles again and turns back to the laptop. “Dude, they’re totally screwing.”
Yoongi stays frozen in his chair for a few moments while Miso continues mixing the track, with disjointed sounds emanating from the speakers every few seconds.
“Okay,” she says, sitting back slightly. “I think we have a rudimentary version at least for Donghyuk.”
“What do you mean they’re screwing?”
Miso turns around blankly, as though already having forgotten what they were talking about.
“They’re… having relations?” she ventures, before shrugging and going back to the laptop. “I don’t know, what do you think screwing means?”
“They’re - no.” Yoongi scoffs but it comes out more like a choke. “You have no way of knowing that.”
“Really? You think Minji tutored Jungwon out of the goodness of her heart?”
“Yes,” he says forcefully. “She debuted five years before him. And we all mentor our juniors.”
“And sometimes, some of you sleep with them, too.” Miso shakes her head, still adjusting the track. “What’s the big deal, anyway? It wouldn’t be the first time someone hooked up with a coworker.”
“Yeah, but -“ Yoongi breaks off, for she’s right, but he’d sooner dunk his laptop into a fountain than admit that to her. “I still don’t think so. They were singing a love song; they were meant to sound like they were in love.”
Miso snickers. “I didn’t say anything about love,” she reminds him wryly, before tilting her head at the screen. “Can we try adding a synth kind of sound in this segment here?”
“Uh, sure, go for it,” he says distractedly. “I think you’re wrong, though. I don’t think they’re hooking up.”
She rolls her eyes but doesn’t look at him. “I’m pretty sure they are. I could tell by the way they were looking at each other.”
Yoongi squints at her. “You could tell by a look?” he asks incredulously. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I am. That’s how I figured out my mother was sleeping with my twenty-two year old maths tutor.” When he doesn’t respond, she turns to him. “What?”
“You know, a lot of your stories would be more impactful with fewer details,” he informs her, just as the door to the studio opens and Jungwon and Minji enter, holding cups of coffee and looking fresh and energetic.
Yoongi chalks it down to caffeine. “Okay,” he exclaims, clapping his hands. “Are we ready to work on the track?” Without waiting for a response, he pulls the laptop to him and clicks on Miso’s completed version. “Listen carefully and tell me what you think,” he tells them.
“Sure,” says Minji, scooching a bit on the sofa so Jungwon can join her. “Hit it.”
Pointedly ignoring Miso’s knowing look, Yoongi plays the track. Both their voices flow out of the speakers, filling the recording booth for everyone to listen and provide their feedback. As the session goes on and Minji stops him here and there to give her inputs, Jungwon adds on to it, Yoongi discusses it and Miso silently observes and speaks only when spoken to, Yoongi feels his mood start to sour slightly.
An hour and forty minutes later, after several rounds of inputs and rough editing, Minji and Jungwon take their leave. With much more work in front of them, Yoongi watches them pack up a little sullenly, sighing deeply when the door closes.
“I hate this,” he mutters, before dropping his head back and groaning.
“Why?” Miso frowns. “That was actually productive. Minji had some good thoughts.”
“No, I hate that - that you’re right,” he says tightly, before sighing again. “They’re definitely hooking up.”
It takes her a moment to realise what he’s said and she laughs quietly. “What convinced you?”
“Just… the way they were around each other. He’s hanging on to her every word,” he adds, disgruntled.
“Yeah, it’s nauseating to watch. But she’s making him more of a collaborator than just a puppet who sings,” she points out fairly.
Yoongi glances sideways at Miso, the irony of this statement not lost on him.
“What?”
“You weren’t much of a collaborator right now, if we’re really going there.”
Miso stares at him, her face betraying nothing. “What are you talking about?”
“Please,” he mutters, turning back to his laptop but not really looking at anything. “You said maybe five words that whole session.”
“I was taking notes. And I’ll be translating every single one of them into edits. The good ones anyway,” she adds wryly.
“That’s not what I mean,” he says, more patiently than he feels, for not only is this his job, it might just be the hardest part of his job.
She swivels her chair around to face him. “What do you mean, Min Suga?”
He doesn’t take the bait. “There’s more to being a producer than just mixing good tracks. You’re the creator of the song - you’re literally producing it. Collaborating with the artists is part of that process.”
Miso’s eyes flicker and she looks down at her lap, her jaw hardening slightly. “Is it so hard for you to pay me a compliment without tacking on a bunch of things I’m doing wrong?”
Yoongi rolls his eyes. “What?”
“You can just say my track was good. It won’t kill you.”
It might, he thinks. “Fine. Your track was good,” he admits honestly. “It was like something I would’ve made a few years into my role as a producer. You have an experimental mindset.”
She looks a little taken aback, as though she hadn’t quite expected him to be so blunt about it. The corner of her mouth twitches and she looks at her lap again before looking up.
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“Jesus. No.”
She pauses before nodding stiffly. “Thank you,” she says nonchalantly, turning her chair back around to face the laptop.
Yoongi raises his eyebrows, staring at her side profile. Her skin, already pale, looks translucent under the white light from the recording booth. He sees her glance at him out of the corner of her eye.
“And… point taken on the other thing.”
It’s as good as it’s going to get, he decides. He shifts in his chair to get into a more comfortable position as she starts editing the music.
“We’re going to have to bring in Jungwon to redo this whole section,” states Yoongi a little while later, shaking his head at the same fifteen second segment they’ve been playing over and over again. “He sounds like he’s drugged.”
Miso chortles. “You may have to bring in his girlfriend, too, if you want anything useful to come out of him.”
He clicks his tongue in disgust. “Don’t remind me.”
“Oh, lighten up. They’re young, they’re working all the time,” she reasons. “It’s natural.”
“It’s unprofessional.”
“Really? You’ve never hooked up with a coworker?” she asks sceptically.
“Not that it’s any of your business but no, I haven’t. Not as a senior and definitely not as a rookie,” he adds, shaking his head. “He needs to focus on his work.”
Miso frowns. “Weren’t you the one that was on my case a little while ago about being too hard on him? And now you’re doing a one-eighty over something that, honestly, is none of your business.”
“How is it not my business?” he argues. “He’s underperforming unless she’s around, they took two very unnecessary breaks in the middle of our editing session, and they left before actually listening to the finished version,” he lists, holding up his fingers. “This is Jungwon’s first solo, in his first year of debut. It’s ridiculous.”
Yoongi can sense her curiosity at his outburst and he wishes he’d kept his mouth shut. But it’s late, the food they’ve ordered is still on its way, and Donghyuk doesn’t seem to be any closer to finishing his arrangement so they can call it a night.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little uptight?”
He bristles. “No. I don’t. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“Oh, of course not, because I have no concept of professionalism,” she says sarcastically. “Let me just add that to the list of things I lack.”
Yoongi scoffs. “Way to make this about you.”
“Aren’t you making Jungwon’s personal life about you?”
He flushes again but rallies, giving her an extremely unimpressed look. “Everybody’s entitled to a personal life. Just don’t mix it with a professional one.”
“Interesting,” she says, finally leaning away from the laptop and he feels an instant sense of foreboding. “That lady from Marketing that we had a meeting with today, Seulgi - isn’t she dating an idol? I’m pretty sure I know his name,” she says, frowning deeply and snapping her fingers, pretending to remember before her forehead clears. “But I definitely know what group he’s in.”
A faint smirk flashes across her face, and Yoongi finds it insufferable. “Seokjin and Seulgi don’t actually work together. And his dating life is none of my business.”
“But wouldn’t that make you a hypocrite? What?” she asks when he groans loudly. “Afraid you’re losing an argument?”
“No,” he states forcefully, glaring at her. “I’m just pissed that it becomes an argument! Why can’t a conversation with you ever be easy? Why can’t it just be a conversation instead of turning into a fucking argument every time?”
“It takes two to turn something into an argument,” she points out, her eyes narrowed.
“Sure. But all due respect,” he caveats, “and no offence - I still have friends and allies in this company who are capable of small talk without constantly exerting their brains and superiority, which leads me to believe that you might be the problem here. And you know what?” he continues, cutting her off. “If I’m that argumentative, why don’t you just switch to another producer?”
“Because I got assigned to you, Min Suga,” she retorts. “That’s how it works. And as long as we’re talking about friends and allies - has it ever occurred to you that I don’t want friends who can’t make small talk without exerting their brains?” She huffs and turns back to the laptop. “It might explain why you’re the only person here I actually talk to.”
“Oh, that’s by choice?”
“Shocking, isn’t it?” When Yoongi doesn’t respond, she lets out a half-chuckle without humour. “What? Nothing to say to that?”
“No,” he answers, a little uncomfortable at this sudden change in direction. “Except… well, this might be the first compliment you’ve ever paid me.”
“Yeah, well, don’t go throwing any parades about it.”
A terse silence follows, broken only by the sound of the laptop keys and the random clips from the song. Yoongi glances at her with a mixture of confusion, inadequacy and frustration, her lips pursed and her eyes darting around the screen. The navy blue sleeves of her long-sleeved t-shirt almost reach her knuckles, her wrists thin and fragile against the table.
Yoongi wonders how she’s surviving wearing it despite the heat in the studio, especially with a grey t-shirt over it, unless it’s her way of winning one over the heat.
He decides to chalk down this awkward end to their conversation to hunger. Still, it feels odd not to reciprocate it. He clears his throat, noting how the sound doesn’t make her flinch at all.
“You are not… unintelligent,” he ventures cautiously.
“I know that,” she replies casually, and Yoongi gives up. They continue working in silence for a few minutes, the silence still awkward but less tense. Something continues to bother him, though, their dialogue having come to a rather abrupt and unsatisfying end.
“I don’t actually care if they’re hooking up,” he says after a moment, in a low voice. “You’re right; it’s none of my business.”
Miso doesn’t respond, but spares him the briefest of glances, which tells him she’s listening.
“I was living paycheck to paycheck,” he murmurs, biting his lip. “I was delivering food and battling privileged rappers wearing designer crap at night to make money. Then I started training and the company I was training with had no money. Me and the guys, including Seulgi’s boyfriend, worked our arses off to debut and grow the company…”
Yoongi trails off when the silence suddenly feels a little louder, and he realises he can no longer hear the keyboard of the laptop.
“Anyway,” he says flatly. “Call me conceited but I’m attached to this company. I feel I was part of building it and I feel like I’m a part of growing it. I don’t like people getting in the way of that,” he finishes in a murmur, a little embarrassed at his confession.
Miso doesn’t respond immediately, eventually exhaling softly. “You could’ve just told me that. You wouldn’t have had to exert your brain at all.”
“I’ll keep that in mind for next time.”
—
“Nari, hang on a minute.”
For a moment, Seokjin thinks she’s going to ignore him, but at the last moment she slowly halts just outside his front door. Jason, a few paces ahead of her, also stops, but something on Seokjin’s face seems to tip him off about what’s coming and he clears his throat.
“I’ll go bring the car around,” he tells Nari, before turning to him. “Thanks for having us over. Dinner was great.”
“Thanks. Glad you could make it.” They shake hands and Jason leaves. Seokjin waits until the elevator door closes before turning to Nari, but she beats him to it.
“Are you?” she asks wryly. “Glad he could make it?”
“Yes,” he answers honestly, not elaborating, for Jason remained the least stressful person all night, himself included. But he doesn’t feel the need to explain this to her. She raises her eyebrows expectantly, arms folded across her chest, and Seokjin pauses. There is a lot he wants to say but he needs to play this just right, or it can go down an unnecessary rabbit hole he’s not sure he has the energy for right now.
“Nari,” he begins, then pauses again. “Do you… do you have something you want to say to me?”
He tries his best to make it sound as less confrontational as he can, keeping his voice calm, hearing the genuine underlying desperation that he didn’t even need to consciously add. By the way Nari’s eyes flicker slightly, he can tell she’s caught it, too.
She hitches her handbag higher on her shoulder. “What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “Anything you want to say. Anything you want to ask. Anything you want to talk about, or - or clear up…” He purses his lip. “I can still tell when you’re upset. And I don’t want you to be.”
“I’m not upset,” she says automatically. “And it isn’t your problem, even if I am.”
Seokjin bites his lip and nods slowly. “You’re not upset,” he repeats for confirmation.
“No. Do I have any reason to be?”
“I don’t know. But if you’re not, then I don’t understand why you’ve been so annoyed all night,” he points out. “You barely spoke, you barely ate, you didn’t even touch the dessert that Seulgi brought -”
“I’m sorry if I hurt her feelings by not eating the store-bought dessert she picked up on her way back from work.”
Something jolts in Seokjin’s heart; for a moment, the woman in front of him is unrecognisable as Nari. “She was trying to be nice,” he says softly but firmly. “She’s been nice to you all night but you haven’t returned any of it.”
Nari scoffs. “She wasn’t being nice. She was reminding me - very subtly, I might add - where she stands and where I stand.”
He blinks. “I’m sorry - what? What does any of that mean?”
“She’s your girlfriend,” she explains slowly, like she’s doing so to a child, “and I’m not. I am a girl, though. But she’s your girlfriend. And she was reminding me of that. Not at first,” she admits. “But during dinner? And especially after dessert? That’s what she was doing.”
Seokjin finds himself lost for words. The fact that the tension hit an all-time high after dessert is beyond dispute; everyone apart from Jason seemed to have given up any semblance of remaining diplomacy, with sentences becoming shorter and words getting more clipped, until a stretch of three-minute silence passed and Jason suggested he and Nari make a move.
Seulgi had definitely run out of patience by this point, choosing to speak much more sparingly. There were uncomfortable silences and lingering looks and sideways glances, all in response to statements that seemed completely innocuous. But he can’t imagine he would’ve missed something this blatant.
Suddenly feeling terribly tired, he shakes his head. “She wasn’t - I mean, why would she do that?”
Nari observes him for a moment, as though trying to work out whether he’s faking ignorance. Finally, she shrugs. “I don’t know. But I know women better than you do.”
Seokjin senses this discussion is getting away from him. “I - okay. Honestly, I have no idea what to say to that. I thought she was just being nice - and you admitted it, too, that she was being nice in the beginning.”
“I guess.”
“But you weren’t being nice to her at all,” he points out. “Can you blame her for giving up eventually? She was being welcoming because she knows you’re my best friend,” he says, noting the shadow that crosses her face at those words. “But you gave her nothing. Why? What did she ever do to you?”
Nari looks at the ground again and taps the toe of her shoe on the ground, and for a moment Seokjin wonders if he’s made a breakthrough. “Nothing, I suppose,” she admits in a small voice. “You’re right. I shouldn’t be taking it out on her.”
Seokjin almost sighs in relief; now they’re getting somewhere. “Taking what out on her? Nari, are you angry with me? If you are, just tell me. We’ll talk about it, fight about it -” He breaks off, shaking his head. “I’m sorry about the night of the fundraiser. I really am - I should’ve called or - or -”
She’s looking up at him now and it’s impossible to decipher what she’s thinking. Seokjin is faced with the sudden urge to hold her by the shoulders and make her continue meeting his gaze. He slips his hands into his pockets for good measure.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “But… come on, if you’re angry about something, is this really the way to go about it? Passive-aggressive digs at dinner?”
Nari shakes her head, a bit disbelieving. “Did you really think a dinner would solve all our problems?”
“I’m not even sure what our problems are!” he exclaims in frustration. “That’s why I wanted to talk about them! And for the record, I didn’t think a single dinner would solve anything, but I thought it would be a good start. I thought we could make it through one night - or at very least, fake it like grown ups,” he mutters, disappointed in everything, including himself.
She swallows and takes a step back, and it feels like a chasm. “Guess I’m not grown up enough for that yet,” she says finally, meeting his gaze with seeming difficulty. “But I’m glad you found someone who is.”
“Don’t make this about her.” He tries to firm but it sounds more pleading than anything. “If you have a problem with me, tell me. Or there’s no point to any of this.”
“That’s the thing, though,” she says, and there’s an air of finality to it. “There’s no point talking about the problem because it’s not going to change anything.”
Seokjin has nothing to say to that. Instead, he watches Nari turn around and leave, his heart sinking.
Nari doesn’t stop until she’s out of the building and inside Jason’s car. He’s parked across the street, tactfully keeping his distance, no doubt due to the heart-to-heart he thinks she’s having with her best friend.
Best friend. The words feel like rote; she doesn’t know if they’re quite true right now, but she knows for sure that they’re not untrue. It’s both sad and comforting.
“Everything okay?” Jason asks lightly as she straps herself in.
“Totally,” she mutters, busying herself with the buckle, her hair covering most of her face. “Are you going back to the hospital?”
“Well, no one’s called me. I was thinking about taking advantage of it,” he tells her. “Stay in. Catch up on some sleep.” He starts the car. “Do you want to head back or pick some ice cream on the way? You didn’t eat dessert,” he reminds her, his tone still light.
Nari nods absently. It’s starting to drizzle slightly; just a light spray, not even enough to warrant the wipers. She glances up at Seokjin’s building, at the lights in the apartments on the top floor.
She’s not sure if one of them is his, or if his apartment even faces this side of the street. But she pictures him anyway, silent and annoyed at her, cleaning up his kitchen along with Seulgi.
Her throat burns a little and she recognises the onset of her emotions finally creeping up on her - starting with shame.
She can’t afford it, though. There’s only one thing she does when this happens, when she’s overwhelmed, when it’s all just too much. There’s only one place she goes, one place she’s ever gone. But that place is no longer available to her.
Swallowing everything before it has a chance to hit the surface, she turns to Jason.
“Actually,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear, “can we go back to your place?”
—
Seokjin trudges back into his apartment once it’s clear Nari isn’t coming back. He’s not sure what he was hoping for; perhaps a change of heart, or her annoyance getting the better of her - anything to move this painful stalemate along.
He rubs his eyes and heads to the dining area to help Seulgi, who’s putting the wine away.
“That went well,” he says tiredly, leaning backwards against the table. He needs sleep.
“Didn’t it?” Seulgi mutters in reply.
Seokjin frowns a little belatedly, wondering if he’s imagining the bite in her response. He tries again. “Do you need some help?”
“I got it.”
“Okay, hang on,” he says, unable to believe it. “Are you angry with me, too?”
She starts folding the placemats, not meeting his gaze. “Why would you say that?”
He scoffs loudly. “Seriously? How did I manage to piss both of you off tonight?”
Seulgi chucks an unfolded placemat on the table and finally looks up at him, glaring with a hand on her hip. “Not that I don’t love being lumped together with your… ex… sex friend, but I was doing my best.”
“I know! That’s what I was -”
“But you ambushed me!” she interrupts, looking upset. “With your - with all your history together. You told me about it in the middle of dinner with her - God, Seokjin, what the hell was that?”
“What are you talking about?” he exclaims. “I told you we hooked up, before I ever invited her to dinner.”
“Yeah, and the way you said it made it sound like you made out once when you were twenty,” she snaps. “Not that it was happening recently enough for it to still be awkward. Not to mention a pregnancy scare that happened less than a year ago?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Seulgi opens her mouth but then closes it, as though unable to decide what to say. Eventually she closes her eyes and turns away slightly.
“I’m sorry if you felt ambushed,” he ventures uneasily. “But that wasn’t my intention. I just didn’t want to get into something that wasn’t relevant to this -“
“But how is it not relevant?” she interrupts him again. “She’s your lifelong best friend, but not a completely platonic one. And then you invite her over, she’s totally weird with me the whole time, and that’s when you choose to tell me you guys slept together? Of course I felt ambushed, Seokjin! And then I got defensive and - God, I was such a bitch,” she mutters, dropping her face into her hands.
This is unexpected. “Wait, what? No, you weren’t.”
“Yes, I was. Towards the end, I totally was,” she insists. “I was taken off guard, I was on edge and I went into fight or flight mode. Or… girlfriend-faced-with-boyfriend’s-ex-fling mode,” she finishes, shaking her head and looking embarrassed.
Seokjin wracks his brain, wondering if two glasses of wine were possibly enough for him to not notice something both Nari and Seulgi seemed to have observed and reacted to.
“She was never a fling,” he says weakly, but Seulgi doesn’t even seem to hear him.
“And then you tell me there was a pregnancy scare,” she continues after a moment. “In the middle of dinner, just when we’re -“
“What is it with you and the pregnancy scare?” he exclaims in frustration. “It was eighteen hours of tension and that’s it! It lasted less time than a flu!”
“Okay.” She takes a deep breath. “What did you do when you thought she was pregnant?”
“I freaked out,” he says immediately. “A lot.”
“That’s not - okay, what did you say to her when you thought she was pregnant?” Seulgi amends, sounding as though it’s taking everything in her to remain patient.
“I…” Seokjin hesitates; this isn’t a situation he wants to relive. “I told her I’d be there for her. Of course I did, Seulgi,” he says quickly when she doesn’t respond. “It was the decent thing to do - you can’t be mad at me for trying to be a good guy.”
But Seulgi shakes her head slightly, and it’s clear that this isn’t her problem. She isn’t meeting his eyes; her gaze is somewhere near his elbow.
“You can’t… intend honestly to be there for her for the rest of her life,” she begins slowly, as though choosing every word carefully, “and then the next day, just… not feel that anymore.”
There’s a few moments of silence while Seokjin processes this. He can’t fathom how this evening got so far away from him, and he has absolutely no idea where it can possibly end.
“Look, that situation was… it was very stressful, okay? For both of us,” he explains, taking a step closer. “I don’t - I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done. I did mean what I said to her then. But it doesn’t have a bearing on how I feel now, for you.”
Seulgi gives him a small nod, still not looking at him.
“I know it’s awkward between Nari and me now and - and I need to figure that out. But if you’re worried that there’s something going on with us - there isn’t.”
She exhales and after what feels like many, many moment, she drags her gaze to meet his. “She’s your best friend,” she states softly.
“Yeah. And you’re my girlfriend.”
“That… doesn’t matter,” she mutters under her breath, shaking her head and looking at the floor again. He’s sure he wasn’t meant to hear that but he did, and his heart sinks. “Not in the way that you think,” she adds, slightly louder now.
Seokjin has no response to this. He feels exhausted, cornered and frustrated all at once and he sighs, rubbing his eyes and leaning backwards against a chair.
“I can’t change the past, Seulgi,” he says tiredly. “I don’t know what you want me to do right now.”
“Nothing,” she answers, sounding slightly surprised at this question. “I know you can’t change anything. I just wish you’d told me,” she says after a moment. “Before I sat down to dinner with her.”
He nods, but words of apology don’t come to him at the moment. “Can we just head to - where are you going?” He follows her to the living room where she picks up her handbag, the designer logo glinting dimly.
“I’m going back to my apartment,” she murmurs, shuffling past him to get to her shoes: sleek high heels. Even after a whole day, she looks perfectly presentable, as though ready for a meeting.
“I thought -“ But Seokjin doesn’t finish the sentence.
“I know,” she murmurs, sounding a bit apologetic for the first time. “But I just need to… I need to go home. Take a shower, go to bed.”
He nods silently, placing his hands on his hips and looking at the ground. He’s suddenly aware of how huge his apartment is for one person only.
“The bulgogi was great,” she says after a moment. She waits until he glances at her, nodding once more. When he doesn’t say anything, she turns around and opens the door, stepping out and leaving him alone.
—
When the elevator pings and the doors open, there’s a moment when neither of them make a move to enter first. Yoongi opens his mouth but Miso beats him to it.
“Don’t say ‘ladies first’,” she warns him.
He freezes before rolling his eyes. “I was going to say ‘elders first’,” he says, a little smug. He expects her to take offence but she chuckles instead, sounding a bit surprised.
“You don’t care a jot that I’m older than you,” she says dryly, stepping in with him right behind her, and pressing the button.
“On the contrary.” Yoongi leans against the back of the elevator as the doors close. “You’re the one who told me on your first day that under no circumstances was I to call you noona.”
“I also didn’t ask you to call me Miso.”
“No, you asked me to call you Chanel,” he remembers, a little wondrously. It feels a little strange to believe that was less than a year ago; it feels like forever that she’s been in his orbit, the frequent and regular dose of unexpected conflict he never asked for.
“That’s right, Min Suga.”
“You still want to be credited as Kang Chanel?”
“Just Chanel. No Kang.”
Yoongi nods as the elevator begins moving smoothly. They don’t say anything for a few seconds, standing a couple of feet away from each other. Miso isn’t leaning, though; she’s slouching slightly, and her bony shoulders are visible through her t-shirt. A jacket hangs on the strap of her bag, the Burberry tag visibly at the back of the neck.
“Will I -” She stops abruptly. She turns slightly to look at him, a bit nervously before looking back ahead. “Are you sure I’ll be credited?”
Yoongi frowns. “Why wouldn’t you?”
She shrugs nonchalantly, but her slender fingers tighten around the strap of her bag. “You know. In case there’s a conflict of interest or something?”
“Right.” His eyes flicker to the designer tag on her hoodie again. It was on the sofa in the studio, he remembers, discarded casually with her bag placed on top of it. He watches her run a hand through her shoulder-length hair, not even seeming like she cares about the answer.
“Your dad’s a shareholder,” he says. She doesn’t turn, but he notices her stiffen, her dark eyes darting in his direction. “And you’re an employee of the same company. There’s no conflict of interest. It doesn’t matter how you got the job,” he adds after a moment.
Miso simply nods and says nothing. Yoongi tries to look away, but he can’t. There’s something different in the way she asked him that question, something almost doubtful, or hesitant. It makes him uncomfortable, the feeling of his resentment and annoyance with her wavering. It feels as though she’s disturbed the dynamic, and this is not a side of her he wanted revealed ever.
All of a sudden, the elevator jerks and the lights flicker before turning off, leaving them in pitch darkness.
“What the hell -”
“Don’t panic.” Yoongi hears himself say the words without realising it. He feels a movement next to him and immediately reaches out and grabs something, hearing her gasp just as the lights flicker back on. He notices his fingers grasping her forearm and lets go at once, feeling his face heat up.
Just as abruptly as the elevator had stopped, it begins descending again, quiet and smooth. Yoongi can hear his heartbeat in his teeth but he isn’t sure why; darkness has never been something that scared him.
“Oh, the button -” Miso points at the pane, where all the buttons seem to have reset when the power went out. Both of them reach for it together and when Yoongi retrieves his hand, he feels a tug and realises the edge of her sleeve has caught on his watch.
“Sorry, I’ll just -”
“No, it’s okay -”
She tugs her hand back the same moment that he slips his watch out of the loose thread it’s stuck on and in the split second that her sleeve gets pulled back, Yoongi catches a glimpse of something on her wrist before she pushes it back down.
It’s only a flash but it stands out against her pale skin, a discoloured mark of some kind. For a moment he thinks it could be a bracelet, but there’s no indent visible through her sleeve.
“Donghyuk really came through, huh?” Miso says, but it sounds slightly forced.
Yoongi hesitates but then clears his throat. “Yeah. This way we get the entire morning off. We don’t need to be in by… two, at least.”
“Are you sure? I can come earlier, too, if you want. Maybe Donghyuk could use the help.”
“He’ll manage. Take the time,” he suggests, stretching his neck. “Rejuvenate.”
She waves a hand. “Overrated. I really don’t mind, though.”
“Noted. But Donghyuk will be fine.”
“I’m just saying -”
“My God, I have literally never had to convince anybody this hard to take a day off,” he interrupts, the tiredness of the day finally catching up to him. “Can’t you just…?”
“Fine. Just offering.”
The elevator doors open and Yoongi waits a moment for her to step out before following her. They head out outside the building into the chilly air; he exhales and wonders if he can risk a cigarette right now.
“Don’t.” Miso’s voice almost blends in with the wind. She’s giving him a knowing look while pulling on her hoodie, her bag placed on the ground by her feet. “You almost got caught smoking outside once.”
He really hates it when she’s right. “It’s one-thirty in the morning,” he argues instead.
She shrugs. “Your call. But if you smoke, you’ll have to share.”
“I don’t mind sharing.” As if to prove it, he slips his pack out of his pocket and offers one to her along with the lighter. They light their cigarettes one by one and smoke in silence, in a rare moment of peace together.
He notices the cigarette in between her long, pale fingers. The sleeves of her t-shirt and hoodie cover her knuckles, making the remaining part of her hand look white against the dark hoodie.
“Good work today,” he says after a minute, when he’s almost done with his cigarette.
The muscles in Miso’s face seem to relax a bit, but she still doesn’t smile.
“You’re giving me a compliment?”
“Only if you take it without a fuss.”
“Such a low opinion of me,” she laments, dropping the butt of her cigarette on the ground and crushing it. She looks up to see Yoongi raising his eyebrows and holds his gaze for a moment before picking up the stub and throwing it in a bin behind her.
“By the way,” she begins, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, “that thing I told you about my mom earlier? I was - I was joking. You know that right?”
Yoongi struggles for a moment to remember what she’s talking about, rewinding the night back to their argument about Jungwon and Minji. His gaze locks on her slowly once he remembers, but he makes no other motion.
“I mean… I made that up. To make a point.” She bites her lip before shrugging. “It’s just… she’s a socialite and the last thing I need is for some false rumour about her to start spreading.” She crosses her arms across her chest.
He doesn’t respond for a few moments but eventually nods. “M-hm.” He waits until she looks away before putting out his stub and throwing it in the same bin.
They step out of the courtyard after that and out of the Big Hit gates, the air cold and the streets deserted. Yoongi shivers slightly and spots his car in the building parking lot next door.
“Well… goodnight, then.” Miso loosens her fingers from the strap of her bag in a gesture of farewell and turns around when Yoongi remembers something.
“Do you need a ride home?”
She turns around, looking far more surprised than he thinks is necessary. “Um… no. Why?”
He shrugs, thinking privately that he’s never quite had to justify this question to a girl before. “It’s the middle of the night? And I know where you live.”
“Oh.” She pauses but then shakes her head. “That’s okay, though. Thanks.”
Yoongi doesn’t know what possesses him to ask again. “Are you sure? My car isn’t a limited edition Range Rover; it’s just a regular Range Rover, but it’s not bad.”
Miso cracks a smile and it takes him a bit by surprise. “Thanks, but… my car is here.” She points with her hand in a pocket of her hoodie to the handful of cars parked at the end of the street. To be sure, he spots a sleek black hood, rather similar to his own, at the beginning of the row.
“You called your driver at one-thirty?” He tries to keep the judgement out of his voice. “Wait, when did you even call him?”
“I didn’t. He’s been here since nine pm.” She looks away awkwardly, presumably guessing where his mind is at.
“He’s been here almost five hours?”
“Yeah.” Her eyes flicker up to meet his. “My dad… prefers to know my whereabouts,” she confesses slowly. “So the car waits for as long as I need.”
The wind seems louder somehow. Yoongi brings up Kang Jaesung’s face in his mind from months ago, in the midst of suited men in a lounge in his sprawling mansion, scotch in hand and a sharp, chiselled face. He glances at the limited edition Range Rover again, noting the tinted windows this time.
“Anyway.” Miso breaks the silence. “Goodnight, Min Suga.”
“Yeah,” he mutters as she walks away. He waits until her driver opens the door for her, she steps in and the car drives away, before turning around and heading to the parking lot.
—
Yoongi reaches the dorm at five minutes past two. There’s silence when he opens the front door, which he appreciates, but when he enters the living room he sees he’s not alone.
“Darkness, please.” Seokjin groans, muffled by a cushion on his face, lying along the length of the sofa with one leg dangling off.
“Jesus,” mutters Yoongi, a bit startled. “Hyung, what - what are you doing?”
Seokjin groans again and slowly sits up, wincing like an old man before slouching again and closing his eyes. “Isn’t it obvious, Yoongi?” He gestures vaguely at his surroundings, including an almost empty bottle of wine on the centre table. When Yoongi simply shrugs, he clicks his tongue impatiently. “I’m wallowing.”
Yoongi nods after a moment, dropping his bag on a chair and joining him on the sofa. “How’s it going?”
“Not bad.” Seokjin pauses. “You look happy.”
He stares. “I do?”
“Well, satisfied,” amends Seokjin. “Like you do when you’ve made some significant progress.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess I did. What about you?” He changes the subject. “I thought you had some big night planned at your place.”
Seokjin scoffs but it comes out more like a choke. “Oh, yeah. My best friend and my girlfriend are both mad at me for opposite reasons. And also sort of the same reason,” he adds, frowning. “Who knows right now. Anyway, it was too depressing staying there tonight. And the kids and I have a shoot tomorrow morning anyway, so…” He shakes his head and falls silent.
Yoongi nods, knowing he’s not required to say anything.
A few moments later, Seokjin speaks again. “I brought some bulgogi and japchae. It’s in the kitchen.”
Not needing to be told twice, Yoongi immediately makes a beeline for the kitchen and returns a few minutes later with a microwaved plate of food and two sets of chopsticks. “I’m good,” mutters Seokjin, waving a hand when Yoongi offers him some.
They don’t speak again until after he’s done eating, wolfing down the food with scarcely a breath in between.
“Wow,” comments Seokjin. “It wasn’t that good.”
“Guess I was hungrier than I thought,” he replies, placing the plate on the coffee table and leaning back on the sofa, closing his eyes and sighing contentedly. “Thanks, hyung.”
“You’re welcome.”
There’s a few more moments of comfortable silence. Yoongi considers asking Seokjin if he wants to talk but stops himself, knowing he will if he wants to.
“Did you finish the track then?”
Eyes still closed, he raises his eyebrows. “No, not yet. Donghyuk’s going to mix the final version and we’ll check it out tomorrow.”
“You haven’t finished it?” Seokjin sounds confused. “I thought you said you’d made progress.”
It takes Yoongi a moment to realise what he’s talking about. “Oh… I did. It got a lot farther than I anticipated. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with a rookie,” he says, and Seokjin nods knowingly. “But I think Miso and I got most of it done.”
“Kang Miso.” Seokjin half-chuckles. “I heard she gave Seulgi a bit of a hard time today.”
“Sorry about that,” he says automatically, wondering a moment later why he’s apologising on her behalf but then remembering she is his assistant producer. “She can be a bit of a pill. But I think we’re coming to a middle ground of sorts, hopefully.”
“Sounds like progress to me. Quite the opposite of my night.”
Yoongi doesn’t respond, his thoughts drifting. Miso’s face right before she’d left swims to the forefront of his mind. Thin and pale, with the thick open hoodie engulfing her, there was something that had changed in her body language. He’d thought about it the whole drive, unable to put his finger on it.
He thinks about the flash of colour he’d seen on her wrist, her strangely uncomfortable way of asking if she would be credited on the song she’d worked on with him every step of the way.
Something clicks but he isn’t sure what it is. Maybe it’s progress, but he doesn’t overthink it. Reaching for his phone automatically, he opens their chat and types on instinct.
Min Yoongi [02:25]
Just remembered. Need to create a demo for the remixes. Should start ASAP - studio, 10 am tomorrow.
Her response comes a short while later, just as Yoongi is getting ready for bed.
Kang Chanel [02:40]
As you command, Min Suga. See you then.
—
Thank you for reading. Don't forget to drop a review :)
#seokjin x oc#seokjin fanfic#yoongi fanfic#yoongi x oc#thebtswritersclub#bangtanwhq#bangtanoasis#bangtanbathhouse#micdropnet#k-vanity#houseofddaeng#wkcnet#hyunglinenetwork#bts jin fanfic#bts suga fanfic#bts suga angst#bts jin angst
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On a scale of 1-10 how does Erik rate the rest of the Crew’s singing voices? (Regular singing, not opera) How would Erik describe the others voices?
Henry Jekyll-The kind of pleasant and unambitious baritone one would find suitable for the parlor at Christmas and perhaps even the occasional solo in a church choir. It is fit for the entertainment of close friends and family and should not aspire to be heard anywhere else. The very definition of mediocrity in all aspects 5/10
Edward Hyde - More emotive than Jekyll but sings exclusively filth and has no interest in staying on key. One senses he plays up the roughness in his voice more than is natural 3/10
Adam Frankenstein - Bass, marred by a harsh graveled rasp, he has plenty by way of depth and power but no skill and he hasn't the range or tunefulness for even the most basic of schoolyard jingles. 1/10 stick to reading poetry and giving tedious monologues.
John Watson - Surprisingly nice, the voice itself is a pleasant and flexible tenor but it is his sincerity and expressiveness that lend his singing a favorable quality 7/10
Selma Morris - Bouncy soprano, good enough, one supposes, for a jaunty tune around the campfire and tolerable when accompanied by drinks and guitar music, crippled by an annoying twang and the woman selects only to sing raunchy bar songs befitting a seedy saloon 5/10
Theodora Kipp - Contralto, difficult to gauge her actual skill level since she never challenges herself. Had consumption when she was alive and the damage to her lungs is obvious in a lingering huskiness and limited vocal range. Compensates a lack of confidence in her singing ability with her acting skills which is more effective in covering her weaknesses than I initially gave it credit for. Entertaining performer on the whole but her vaudeville sensibilities hold her back from true success. 6/10
Quincey Harker - the less said about his off-key shower warbling the better, obnoxious vibrato, 2/10
Lawrence Talbot - countertenor, despite being in his twenties he still sounds like he's going through puberty, croaking and cracking every time he strays to high or to low outside of his extremely limited range, could be used to torture our enemies. 0/10
I am, myself, a legendary vocalist and needn't flaunt my own considerable skill. I advise those of you who scored lower than a 5 to cease singing in all capacities, you are doing the world no favors when you open your mouths. To Lawrence in particular, if you utter anything resembling a musical sound in my presence again I will destroy you.
To Dr Watson and Dr Watson only, please consider seeing me for vocal lessons, I believe yours is an instrument that could be polished into something far greater. The rest of you are free to continue on with your bland mediocrity but please do so out of earshot and in the privacy of your own small social circles.
- OG
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Going through 2010s fan fiction is a minefield because half the time I’ll see authors notes where it’s very “ yeah I’m here for Peeta being an angel and Katniss is terrible”. And I’m here like you can’t write their dynamic correctly if you don’t see that Peeta is a little shit and that Katniss literally worships him in her mind and from when she realized he didn’t want to kill her to the hijacking, she was really nice to him and enjoyed being friends with him. She’s just stupid about emotions
My fun fact from rereading the books is that by counting length of time Peeta is the one who acts more moody towards her than she does to him. She’ll get snippy once in a while but he’s the one who initiates being cold and not talking to each other after the games and also the one who goes full Career after the Quell.
people are wayyyyyyy meaner to katniss than they rightly should be because of their sympathy for peeta. for one, i find that the outrage has to be based— in some part— to some level of misogyny because we expect women to treat men better than they treat women, and when they don’t, they’re crucified. think of how people treat skyler white or carmela soprano in comparison to their literal murdering, drug dealing, sociopathic husbands. a woman’s worse crime is to be uncomfortably human, with all of its implied anger and frustrations.
katniss is an uncomfortably human character. she’s moody and fiery and nasty and occasionally selfish. she’s also capable of great kindness and compassion. there were several points when i was reading where i wanted to be mad at her (like when peeta got hijacked) before i reminded myself that. yeah. what peeta is going through sucks. he also just strangled her so maybe she’s entitled to her anger😭 i feel like a lot of our perception of her is tied up in her self-loathing. it’s easier to see katniss as the “meaner” one because she sees herself as the “mean” one. mind you, this was a girl who took time out of her day to teach bonnie and twill how to hunt and gave them all her food because she was worried they wouldn’t survive. katniss is a wonderful person.
i wouldn’t say that peeta is moodier than her. i think peeta was entitled to his frustration after the first games to a certain extent. keep in mind he’s a teenage boy, so it’s inevitable that he’s gonna act like a sadsack after learning katniss’s feelings for him aren’t as clear cut as he wants them to be. but i do think he’s emotionally perceptive enough to have picked up that she was falling for him in the games, which is why he’s so shocked to learn that it was an act. katniss, though, is too emotionally stunted to realize that she was falling for him too which is why everything goes to shit between them for a while. to be fair to peeta, he was the first one to apologize and seek to repair the friendship. he was able to understand that he put an unfair burden on her when she was just trying to keep them both alive.
don’t take this to mean that i think he’s perfect!! peeta is a people-pleaser to the extreme, so i think a Lot of his easy going nature in the first two books has to do with that. peeta in mj (though hijacked) is probably him with his worst flaws bared. he’s violent and insecure and jealous and mean, and for once, he and katniss can see each other more honestly. he obviously would have never hurt her if he wasn’t hijacked, but i do think everything we see of him (minus the attempted killing of katniss) was him, just his ugliest bits.
all in all, people are too mean to katniss. people are too dismissive of peeta’s issues. and they are perfect for each other.
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Any Falcone family headcanons maybe because these Sopranos wannabes have rotting my brain
This is mostly Alberto bc I’m obsessed with him—
Mario is very protective over him; Always has been. Doesn’t really matter they have different mothers, — Alberto’s little, ans Mario isn’t, and it makes sense. It’s clear who Carmine’s favorite is, and it’s clear who isn’t.
Sadly, I think Mario would be slow to warm up to Seli because Carmine discarded of HIS mama fast, while getting at least a little attached to Maria. It doesn’t really matter. Mario is a prideful man and even the smallest offense is a dagger.
Alberto and Bruce were childhood friends; They were both shy, both reserved, both orphans in very different ways
Alberto loved college so much. He’d purposefully try and fail so he wouldn’t have to go home. At some point, he even tried bribing his teachers into giving him bad grades/more work
He’s close with Selina but not Sofia; She’s just too much like their father, and he’s too not.
Mario’s ‘business merge’ with the Waynes was really just asking Bruce for a marriage of convenience. Bruce naturally said no, because he’s already married to a wannabe mob boss, thanks
#that’s all!! I love Mario and Alberto ong#alberto falcone#mario falcone#sofia falcone#dc#dc comics#text#asks
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hii so i‘m way to invested in everyone‘s baldurs gate plays. can we see your tavs? I would love to see them haha😭
YESSSSSS i will happily take any excuse to talk about my tavs. 🥰 i'm sorry this took so long. i wanted to have their Lore™ a little more set in stone before answering this, but then i proceeded to make uhhhh 2 more tavs and a durge. 🤡
i am listing my characters in the order i created them. they're all good/neutral aligned because being mean in video games makes me break out in hives. aaaaand this is going under a read more because it got really fucking long. 🥴
marqwyn stoneheart
race: human
class: eldritch knight fighter
background: soldier
romance: gale
my first tav who i adore. ❤️ i stole her name from the very first character i created for a now abandoned dnd campaign (though she's nothing like og marqwyn). she's a former flaming fist who left their service due to the corruption she witnessed there. after leaving the city she became an independent soldier for hire—but she's a terrible mercenary because she's a bleeding heart who will help people because they need it, regardless of whether they can pay her or not.
she has dragged the party into many an unnecessary brawl because her charisma is literally in the negatives. we love a girl incapable of talking herself out of Situations. she also used to have two brown eyes before deciding to get herself volo'd during a brief moment of desperation-fuelled insanity.
her backstory has changed a lot since i first made her, mostly because i didn't really have anything in mind when i started playing. 😬 i also had no fucking clue what i was doing when i first started and it certainly shows (tons of missed content, didn't take enough long rests, completely missed lae'zel for the first ~30 hours of gameplay, have done quests in an extremely questionable order, etc.).
i romanced gale with her because the wizard had me by the jugular the second he opened his mouth, and buff wife who hits things with her big sword and her squishy wizard husband who casts counterspell is something that can be so personal. that being said, i do want to rework her character and do another playthrough with her, probably romancing wyll, because her playthrough is a mess.
i will now dip into the alternate canon that lives in my brain in which my next three tavs are allowed to coexist, so just stay with me here and trust in the vision ajgjsdgf
meadow moonwillow
race: mephistopheles tiefling
class: storm sorcerer, bard of the college of lore
background: entertainer
romance: karlach (or enya in the canon that exists in my head)
i made her specifically for my karlach romance run, because best girl deserves a little sunshine to match her own. meadow was born to play gigs in dive bars, but was cursed with a natural talent for magic. 😔 she'll use it because it's useful in a fight, i guess, but she'd much rather insult people to death. if there is shit to be disturbed, she will disturb it.
her and gale are best friends, because i think having some friendly spell caster competition with his bestie who (begrudgingly) lets him teach her wizard spells would be good for his mental health. her and wyll butt heads a bit at first, mostly because meadow's way of trying to comfort people is through humor, and her attempts to make him feel better about his new devil form come off as insensitive (inspired by the way i accidentally insulted wyll at the tiefling party in my meadow playthrough by joking that i was jealous of his horns. king i swear it was meant as a compliment!! 😭). eventually they become really close, which is certainly a necessity when you're both going on a vacation to hell with no set end date.
also my choice of name for her definitely has nothing to do with the fact that i am in the middle of watching the sopranos. definitely not.
landric sparrowsong, "the wrath-bringer"
race: human
class: oath of vengeance paladin, tempest domain cleric of ilmater
background: sage
romance: gale
his backstory is probably the one i've thought about in the most detail, mostly because he's a walking tragedy and i live for that shit. 🧍🏻♀️
he was once a school teacher and wasn't much of a fighter at all before his little village near baldur's gate was razed to the ground and his wife and (or so he thinks 👀) daughter were killed, at which point he took up his oath of vengeance. his favourite pastimes now include self-sacrifice and violently murdering evildoers, hence the "wrath-bringer" epithet.
he has been alone—mostly by choice, because he can't lose any more loved ones if there is no one left alive that he loves—for over a decade by the time he's infected, but the forced proximity means the companions very quickly get under his skin. he's very protective of meadow especially (when they're both in the party at the same time in the universe that exists in my head) because she reminds him of his daughter.
he is god's favourite sacrificial lamb, and is consistently the first to go down in a fight (inspired by me, constantly getting him killed by taking far too long to figure out how to play a support class). naturally i paired him with gale because i think the idea of a guy finally opening his heart to the love of another after over a decade of self-imposed solitude out of fear of being hurt again, only for gale to decide to take on a suicide mission just as they're finally realizing their feelings for one another, is soooooo good and tragic. ☺️
he has a soft spot for children, but being around them makes him sad and withdrawn (for obvious reasons), something that the companions notice pretty quickly once they get to the grove and see his cold exterior totally melt around the kids there. he carries a journal which he adds to often, either little blurbs or sketches of people he meets in his travels, ever observing from afar as an outsider.
he was actually a war cleric of mystra when i first multiclassed him because the idea of this man finding solace in his goddes during the worst years of his life only for that same goddess to tell the first person he's truly loved in years that he needs to kill himself is sooooo. anyway. but i decided to change it because war domain just wasn't doing it for me and also have you seen ilmater's whole deal?
also if he bears a close resemblance to my favourite unromanceable assassin's creed npc, that's just a coincidence (lying).
enya sparrowsong
race: human
class: beast master ranger/circle of the land druid
background: urchin
romance: lae'zel (or meadow in the canon that exists in my head)
enya is landric's very alive daughter. i made her in the character creator with no intention of actually doing a playthrough as her, which is a lie i tell myself every time i open the character creator. 😔
ideally she would not even be filling the role of tav at all, but that's obviously not an option for an actual playthrough. she spent her childhood hunting and gathering in the wilds and later pickpocketing her way through the darkened alleys of baldur's gate to survive. in the version of her backstory that lives in my head, she eventually caught the attention of jaheira (by trying to rob her), who then took enya under her wing. the harpers became a family to her, and she is with them in the shadow lands when we meet them at last light in act two. also depending on my mood on any given day, enya and meadow are either bitter exes or couple of the year.
she is generally very abrasive with most people she doesn't know well (her and lae'zel are very perfect for each other), but has a soft spot for animals and orphans. she likes her solitude and it takes a lot of effort to earn her trust (there's a reason she's survived alone as long as she has) but once you do, she's ride-or-die.
she has a raven companion and her preferred wild shape is a wolf, but i've also had a lot of fun using her wolf wild shape and a wolf companion for twice the mauling in combat (and twice the torment for shadowheart—thank you sam for pointing out that she would fucking hate this 😭). i also like to think that she's been helping shadowheart get over her fear of wolves.
her relationship with her dad is deliciously complicated!!! but that's for another post.
idunn
race: high elf
class: necromancy wizard/gloom stalker ranger
background: haunted one
romance: astarion
i haven't played as her much yet, and she's my first durge so i don't really know a ton about that whole background. but her brain is currently scrambled egg and she doesn't remember her past so i figure it's fine if i don't know anything about it either.🧍🏻♀️
she's trying so very hard not to kill people, and making up for the lack of murder by being incredibly rude to everyone she meets [astarion approves]. i named her idunn because i like the name but also in large part because i think associating the dark urge with the norse goddess of rejuvenation and vitality is really funny.
aelius lucilius
race: drow half-elf
class: light domain cleric of selune
background: acolyte
romance: shadowheart
he's my newest tav and the one i've played the least, so i'm still working out his backstory. i honestly just really wanted to romance shadowheart as a selunite, which is working out great so far because the shar is already out of the bag and now she loudly and openly hates his fucking guts. 🤪
#all their backstories keep evolving as i play but but this is sort of where they're at right now#if i keep picking away at it like i have been i'll never actually post it so here#thank you so much for asking i am having far too much fun creating my little guys 🥰#alkibiadessuperfan#answer#ky posts text#kyra plays bg3#my tav#bg3 ocs#my ocs#oc marqwyn#oc meadow#oc landric#oc enya#oc idunn#oc aelius
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Goliath.
König x Therapist! Reader
Written By: ANGELKAKEWRITINGS
P1 || 18+
Disclaimer: I do not own the canon characters of the COD MW2 storyline.
Pronouns used: Reader is she/her/hers
CW: Heavy mentions of mental health (please read with caution or feel free to scroll past if any of the following is triggering) depression, mentions of body dysmorphia, anxiety, light mentions of biblical figures (just for comparison use only), angst, mentions of bullying, mentions of gun violence, themes of therapy, könig developing a crush on reader, taboo of falling in love with your therapist, descriptions of the female anatomy.
Author’s Note: Hello there! It’s been a while since I posted my last piece. I unfortunately wasn't feeling very well and had to stop working for a little but what matters is that I’m doing much better. This piece comes from the heart as someone who deals with anxiety and the ever losing battle of comparing myself with others in the search of ‘what could've been if I…’. Please read with caution and remember to be kind with yourself as much as you can <3 This would be a part one to a two part series! Enjoy!
Goliath.
How König had grown to hate the name.
How König had grown to hate being compared to the heavily armed Philistine giant and all that was the abomination of biblical proportions- the rage filled perturbations, the ability to crush skulls with his bare hands, the supernatural stature.
The comparison was self-destructive in nature; it had sent him into a contemplative state of wondering maybe if had been born smaller and moved in grace that he would have been in a different state of his life…a desired one of sorts.
The anger and desperation of what could’ve been turned into a sort of sadness- a period of mourning for König in which the world around him moved but he couldn't advance with the stillness of his stagnant headspace.
A referral to a therapist was what had jolted him to move once again.
He had found himself sitting on the plush sofa of the room- the weight of his thighs made its cushions sink in and creek with every movement he made.
As he waited, his calloused fingers delicately ran over the scars etched onto his face and traced over the hook of his nose.
He felt raw and exposed without the mask draped over his face.
‘Horrid-looking.’
‘I take up too much space.’
‘Am I breathing too loud?’
The sound of the door opening caused his tumultuous train of thought to cease and sent a jolt of electricity coursing down his spine to sit straight.
The sound of the door being opened ceased his tumultuous train of thought and sent a jolt of electricity down his spine and through his hip bones to sit straight.
“Hello König, thank you so much for being here today.”
The atmosphere around König went up in waves of static- only being able to pick up the signal of her voice as she spoke in bell-like octaves and sweet sopranos.
The young woman presented in front of him was a creature of delicate beauty; her lithe limbs flexed and moved in such grace as she took a seat across from him. True to mankind’s curious nature, König had unconsciously decided to take in the details of her baroque-like beauty. He studied the manner in which her lustrous flesh was speckled in beauty marks and freckles, how her mauvy-pink lips would curl after each syllable, how the cartilage of her neck and collarbones were so dainty and appeared fragile.
Their polarities were tantalizing; an exchange from woman to man.
‘I am not worthy of being in her presence.’ He shamefully thought and felt the conch of his ears swell and glow shades of red. He had the sudden urge to look away as the swell of her breasts strained against the threads of the shirt she was wearing.
His mind started to pull away again and drift elsewhere until she spoke- her words filled with so much nurture and a sort of comfort that he was longing for.
König had found himself articulating the pain he had felt when a bullet had split the skin of his cheek but how the vulgarity of the children he attended school with had hurt so much more.
(1)
#mw2 fanfic#fanfic#my writing#konig mw2#konig call of duty#cod konig#konig x reader#angst#call of duty#writing
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OTMA's personalities according to Colonel Evgeny Stepanovich Kobylinsky
Kobylinsky is a fascinating inividual, here is a short summary of his life: Colonel Kobylinsky was employed by the Provisional Government and oversaw the Romanovs during their captivity in the Alexander Palace and Tobolsk. He was eventually replaced due to being viewed as not strict enough, and enabling their desires for activity and entertainment. Unusually, he went on to join the White Army in 1918, until he was captured and sent to a concentration camp. In order to escape the camp, he traded his freedom for a position in the Red Army. He eventually married Klavdia Mikhailovna Bitner, friend and tutor to OTMAA. Together they had one son. In 1927 he was accused of being part of a 'monarchical conspiracy' against the Soviet State and was executed by firing squad. Bitner was also arrested under a similar charge ten years later, and executed. Their son, Innokenty Evgenievich, was orphaned aged seventeen. He was drafted into the Red Army, and fought against the Nazi invasion.
"The Grand Duchess Olga was a nice looking young blonde, about twenty-three; her type was Russian. She was fond of reading, capable and mentally well developed; spoke English well and German badly. She had some talent for art, played the piano, sang, (she learned singing in Petrograd; her voice was soprano), and she painted well. She was very modest and did not care for luxury.
Her clothes were modest and she restrained her sisters from extravagance in dress. She gave altogether the impression of a good, generous-hearted Russian girl. It looked as if she had had some sorrows in her life and still carried traces of it. It seemed to me that she loved her father more than she loved her mother. She also loved her brother, and called him "The Little One" or "The Baby.
The Grand Duchess Tatiana was about twenty. She was quite different from her sisters. You recognised in her the same features that were in her mother — the same nature and the same character. You felt that she was the daughter of an emperor. She had no liking for art. Maybe it would have been better for her had she been a man. When the emperor and empress left Tobolsk nobody would ever have thought that the Grand Duchess Olga was the senior of the remaining members of the imperial family. If any questions arose it was always Tatiana who was appealed to. She was nearer to her mother than the other children; and it seemed that she loved her mother more than her father.
The Grand Duchess Maria was eighteen ; she was tall, strong, and better looking than the other sisters. She painted well and was the most amiable. She always used to speak to the soldiers, questioned them, and knew very well the names of their wives, the number of their children, and the amount of land owned by the soldiers. All the intimate affairs in such cases were always known to her. Like the Grand Duchess Olga, she loved her father more than the rest. On account of her simplicity and affability she was given the pet name by the family of "Mashka." And by this term she was called by her brother and by her sisters.
The Grand Duchess Anastasia, I believe, was seventeen. She was over-developed for her age; she was stout and short, too stout for her height; her characteristic feature was to see the weak points of other people and to make fun of them. She was a comedian by nature and always made everybody laugh. She preferred her father to her mother and loved Maria Nicholevna more than the other sisters.
All of them, including Tatiana, were nice, modest and innocent girls. There is no doubt they were cleaner in their thoughts than the majority of girls nowadays.
The czarevitch was the idol of the whole family. He was only a child and his characteristic features were not yet worked out. He was a very clever, capable and lively boy. He spoke Russian, French and English, and did not know a word of German.
In general, I could say about the whole imperial family that they all loved each other and were so satisfied with their family life that they did not need nor look for intercourse with other people. Never before in my life have I seen, and probably never again shall I see, such a good, friendly and agreeable family."
SOURCE: The Last Days of the Romanovs, published 1920, George Gustav Telberg, Robert Wilton, Nikolai Sokolov, ch. Examination of E. S. Kobylinsky
PHOTOS: Colonel Kobylinsky, dates unknown. Arrest photograph of Klavdia Mikhailovna Kobylinskaya, formerly Bitner, shortly before her execution
#Ipatiev House#Ekaterinburg#Alexander Palace#captivity#romanovs#OTMA#sources#descriptions#Olga Nikolaevna#Tatiana Nikolaevna#Maria Nikolaevna#Anastasia Nikolaevna#Colonel Kobylinski#Klaudia Bitner#Klavdia Bitner#Alexei Nikolaevich
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If a Speed Stinger could speed speedily, softly swooping swiftly, how speedy is he really?
Never has the word “speed” looked so wrong, now.
The Next Big Sting (1x12) is a great episode for Snotlout, actually. Personally, I love it for Speedy and the taming of a species otherwise thought to be untrainable (cough, still waiting for the Changewing, cough cough), but Snotlout is so great here! And with Ruffnut, too? Oh, ho, we were spoiled.
Plus, it’s funny how this episode includes Snotlout trying to get rid of a dragon, but then is preceded by an episode where he’s trying to keep his dragon. Kind of ironic, actually.
Reasons why this episode is great include:
The important stuff (like Meatlug cuteness and Ruffnut & Snotlout centralism):
The first ones shown to give Hiccup “a look” when he presents the Dragon Fly One are Ruffnut and Snotlout. This is obviously foreshadowing.
Hiccup talking about how The Dragon Fly One will be handy if they and their dragons ever get separated. Sorry, Hiccup but I think this mostly only ever affects you. And Ruffnut and Snotlout that one time.
Actually, I don’t think it’s ever actually happened to Fishlegs and Meatlug other than when Scardian’s pack carried Fishlegs off in season two. Look out, Hiccup, looks like you could stand to learn a thing or two.
Additionally, Hiccup says it’s going to be so handy, and yet he’s built the heaviest looking thing imaginable. I know it’s a prototype but like, come on!
Snotlout asks if he could have Toothless after it all doesn’t work. Yeah, like you wouldn’t be in too much shock after the fact, Snotlout. That’s so cousin of you.
Hiccup: “I’ll be floating on a bed of air!” — Snotlout: “Or crashing on a bed of rock.” This man.
“I cannot believe that that hunk of junk actually worked.” It’s okay, Snotlout, neither can Isaac Newton.
Snotlout’s whole character this episode is remembering Frozen from Defenders of Berk. And rightfully so. But the other riders don’t acknowledge it at all until it happens to them (aka Ruffnut).
“Is he seriously going back?!” Snotlout is so real for that. — “Snotlout, meet Hiccup. Of course he’s going back.” Maybe someone should tell Astrid that when she’s grouching over the Dragon Fly One like she did earlier and inevitably will later.
The only one that doesn’t help wrangle the Stinger is Snotlout. And, honestly, who can blame him.
Part of Forbidden Friendship (a harmony with some sopranos) plays when Hiccup tames Speedy. I love the symbolism behind this sound effect because of what a righteous, monumental moment it’s supposed to be.
Ruffnut is fine around the Stinger until she gets stung. And then it’s all downhill from there. I love the natural progression (albeit a quick one) of her character through this episode. At least she and Snotlout can relate to one another now.
Speedy immediately goes for Snotlout because of how on edge he is. He also is able to dodge, punching the air, “Not even on your best day, pal.” He’s so extra here I love it. (Makes you think what his dad said to him after he got stung the first time.)
And of course Ruffnut immediately gets stung again but makes sure to cross her legs.
Tuffnut starts boxing the air, intensely mimicking Snotlout ready to I assume defend Ruffnut from anymore stings before he starts getting kicked. How cute-turned-cruel this is.
Barf gets stung and immediately Ruff calls out to him before crawling her way as quick as she can to I assume comfort him despite the difficulty it takes her. This is so sweet. I wish we had more episodes surrounding Barf & Belch and the twins, and not just the twins or whatever The Zippleback Experience was. (Also symbolism how it was Barf to get stung and not Belch. Barf and Ruffnut are great together <3)
Snotlout gets to basically say “I told you so” but no one listens except for Ruffnut (I assume she also wants to avenge her dragon, which is sweet). I wonder if this went in his book.
Snotlout and Ruffnut’s whole interaction as the sun’s rising is pure serotonin. They are BFFs. (Also both of their episodes together and Snotlout and Tuffnut’s in Maces and Talons Pt. 1 include Ruffnut riding Hookfang. And of course Tuffnut gets a spin in Snotlout’s Angels. Makes you wonder how much Hookfang actually tolerates and/or likes the twins.)
“There are other things I want to say, but none of them are very ladylike!” Between this and the leg crossing you can really tell that Ruffnut was experimenting with gender this episode.
Snotlout immediately grabs Ruffnut after she gets stung and starts falling off and as such takes his attention away from the air-sick and anxious Speedy. He cares so much!
Hookfang then gets stung and they crash land. The fact that he and Snotlout have both been stung is very poetic, much like Ruff and Barf! (Maybe I’m too obsessed with the “Dragon is a reflection of the rider’s soul” analogy.)
Speedy is calm once back on the ground and licks Snotlout as thanks for catching him! See, guys? He was only scared when up in the air, the poor thing.
Hookfang lights on fire to protect Snotlout from the no-longer-hostile Speedy. See? Now he’s cautious! Snotlout and Hookfang are paralleling one another.
“This is a new low even for you, Snotlout!” — “I was trying to save us!” :(
A sign that Speedy doesn’t belong in the pack (and is a teenager, obviously) is that he talks back to Toothless telling him off, whereas the others wouldn’t have done so! I like little bits like this. (And Toothless had Stormfly as back up. Like a mom and dad telling their kid off.)
Ruffnut and Hookfang have a semi-paralysed affiliation together now, both going around in a circle. And I love how they’re going it side by side, I wonder if they did it to support the other. At least Meatlug is here to defend them!
Ruffnut saying to Meatlug, “Hey, girl, thanks,” and fist-bumping her tail is really cute. Hookfang also gives an additional sound.
Speedy also realises that his old pack is hurting his new pack! Nurse/Big Sister/Favourite Aunt Meatlug getting hurt was the final straw for him.
Snotlout starts swinging with a stick and says he’s not leaving anyone behind (start of his heroism/selfless arc) but it’s obvious he’s still scared himself. Hiccup’s sass was not necessary! The nerve.
Snotlout using Speedy as his own Stinger feels like a thousand IQ move and I love him for it.
“Needle Butts” feels like the millennial term for Speed Stingers and we have Snotlout to thank for it. Alternative terms were probably “Deadly Dodos” and “Sneaky Sewing Machines”.
“Snotlout, Snotlout, oi oi oi!”
Snotlout accepting Speedy after he turns on his own to protect him.
“I’m never going to get you, dragon” Snotlout: confirmer of species’ and genuses everywhere! Also, why isn’t this dragon a dinosaur, again?
“But he hates me!” Snotlout’s delivery of this is great.
Kind of criminal that Speedy couldn’t have become Part Of The Gang™. It’s okay, Speedy, you’ll always be in our hearts. (Doesn’t this kind of make Speedy Snotlout’s Scauldy? I guess?) (Shame, too. I alway imagined he would have gotten along great with Smidvarg.)
I realised when Tuffnut lights a streak of gas on fire to ward off some Stingers and then he compliments a still-paralysed Barf that Barf looks kind of drunk. Now that you’ve noticed that, too, I order you all to laugh.
Oh, and then goes Belch.
And I think Tuffnut. See what I said about one not being able to go down without the other soon following? This. Is. Symbolic. (Or so I religiously believe.)
Hookfang is still seen as formidable by the Titan Wing Speed Stinger even with half his body still paralysed. I wonder if this could temporarily be seen as disabled rep — I wish we could have seen his development from being completely defenceless (Meatlug protecting him and Ruffnut) to him doing this.
It was probably to defend Snotlout.
And that’s great.
The Meatlug Cuteness Counter:
Fishlegs reminding Hiccup that their dragons can fly and Meatlug being cute about it. (Meatlug Cuteness Counter: 1.) (She’s the cutest.)
I love how Fishlegs tries hiding his arm’s paralysis by leaning on Meatlug only to get sabotaged when she goes to play with Speedy. (Meatlug Cuteness Counter: +1 point. 2.)
Nurse Meatlug encouraging Speedy through his physiotherapy is adorable. (Meatlug Cuteness Counter: +5 points. 7.)
When Snotlout is about to go off, we can see Meatlug and Fishlegs sleeping next to one another. (Meatlug Cuteness Counter: +4 points. 11.)
“Nurse Meatlug, if you would do the honours, please” and she does! She does do the honours! Oh, she’s such a good girl. (Meatlug Cuteness Counter: +10 points. 21.)
“Meatlug, quick! Stop him! Speed Stingers can’t swim!” And then she goes so determinedly. So cute. (Meatlug Cuteness Counter: +100 points! 121.)
Meatlug’s shocked face when she sees Speedy being able to skim the water. (Meatlug Cuteness Counter: +20 points. 141.)
Meatlug defends the defenceless (Ruffnut and Hookfang), only to immediately get stung. She tried! (Meatlug Cuteness Counter: +59 points. 200. Additionally, Meatlug Heroism Counter: 10 added points.)
It also takes us back to that scene in Frozen where she defended Fishlegs and so he couldn’t leave her. (Nostalgia Counter: 1. Meatlug Cuteness Counter: +30 points. 230. Additionally, Meatlug Heroism Counter: +15 added points. 25.)
Fishlegs stands by Meatlug after she gets frozen. (Fishlug/Meatlug Cuteness Counter: 10.)
Bonus (mostly non-Snotlout and Meatlug related things):
First thing Tuffnut thinks about is food and/or destruction in the morning.
Chicken was also woken up early to see all this. She is the best dragon rider.
“The chicken is not amused.” (She then leaves dramatically.)
Surely it would be more efficient in situations like this to employ either Stormfly or Hookfang to go after Hiccup instead of the one dragon that can’t fucking fly. Surely allowing the latter is just counter-intuitive.
Astrid goes “Ugh, boys” and Tuffnut is shown right next to her with this simple frown on his face as his eyes flick back to Hiccup! I don’t know why that’s so funny but it is. Shame how quick it was shown though.
“Okay, everyone. Dragon Fly One: maiden flight.” Foreshadowing. I think.
“You’re not actually thinking of trying to train it, are you?” Oh, Astrid. This is extremely ironic for when you coerce Hiccup into letting you bring Garff along on a rescue mission.
In conclusion: Meatlug is cute, Snotlout is great, Barfruff supremacy, Hiccup sabotaged having a pet Speed Stinger on the Edge, and Chicken is the supreme leader.
#httyd#race to the edge#snotlout jorgenson#his tag is sure to bring me fame. he’s the httyd version of grelle sutcliff#speed stinger#speedy#ruffnut thorston#tuffnut thorston#chicken#hiccup haddock#toothless#meatlug#fishlegs ingerman#hookfang#astrid hofferson#episode propaganda#the next big sting#original post#long post
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I will never get over Faith's poor rooster Adam...
Almost 20 years since I first read the book and I could still cheerfully do a violence to the aunt on Faith's behalf.
LM Montgomery is so skilled at writing situations where you're gnashing your teeth at the sheer injustice of it! Poor Faith! Poor Adam! I do love the little snippet we get of Adam's perspective:
“Shoo, there,” commanded Mrs. Davis, poking her flounced, changeable-silk parasol at him.
Adam shooed. He was a wise rooster and Mrs. Davis had wrung the necks of so many roosters with her own fair hands in the course of her fifty years that an air of the executioner seemed to hang around her. Adam scuttled through the hall as the minister came in.
While i'm on the subject of roosters though, I do have a story. When we were little, my family rescued a chick from a school that had done that weird "have dyed chicks for easter" thing. If you don't know what that is, I have no explanation. All I know is that apparently in some places around Easter they have dyed chicks as presents or decorations (?!), and this little chick was literally green. Since this was obviously not a great situation for the wee ball of fluff, we took it home and raised it while it was still small.
My older sister took the charge. She decided that if this rooster was going to survive, he had to be tough. So, in something straight out of the karate kid, my sister (who went on to work in animal training related things lol) put together a program. She taught him karate (yes, really) by trying to train him to kick on command, along with a series of other (non-harmful) exercises that I don't remember at this point. He'd stand on top of her head. She tried to get him to wade in his water bowl. All in all, I'd say he received an thorough education, at least as thorough as a ten year old girl can bestow.
As the rooster got older, we decided to give him to a relative who lived in the country and needed a rooster. He deserved more space, he needed to go on to live his rooster life, and this worked out well for everyone. More than well - apparently this was one of the best roosters my relative ended up ever having. You know why? He viciously protected those hens lmao. He was the king of his domain, and he made sure everyone knew it. Whenever we visited this relative, we could hear him from across the yard crowing loudly, lengthily, and repeatedly, in a bold sing song of a "COCKLE-DOODLE-DO." He lived a very content life as master of all he could see. After a rough beginning, he rose to the top in something out of every sports movie. He was the Caesar of the coop.
Unfortunately, years later I learned that he had passed. Ah, I thought to myself, even the best of us must go. I was a little taken aback to learn that he'd been killed by a younger rooster. Overthrown, you might say. Well, that's nature, I thought to myself. Cold and brutal in ways we can't understand. It's simply the circle of life, to quote the lion king. While he had an arc straight of the sopranos (he went from the streets to the throne), our rooster was finally at rest, I believed.
Not my sister. My sister maintained fiercely that--and I am in no way exaggerating--that our rooster had been murdered, and murdered in cold blood. By our relative, you might be thinking, given the context of the passage above? No--by the younger rooster. What I chalked up to nature she chalked up to premeditated intent. I'm not going to lie, I found this ridiculous. Cause of death, sure, but murder? She railed on about injustice; I thought to myself, "It's chickens."
Fast forward a decade later. I'm remember this story and laughing about it - hey, remember when you were little and thought our rooster was murdered? - only to get this response from my nearly thirty year old sister:
I then proceeded to learn some facts of the case I hadn't known before.
What I'd heard as a child: a younger rooster killed him. I presumed in a fight or squabble of some sort.
What I learned as an adult: he was surrounded by more than one younger rooster and attacked, in a straight up Ides of March moment.
My comparison to him as a character in the Sopranos - as Julius Caesar himself - was more accurate than anyone could have known. Rise up to the top, only to be defeated by (likely) his own sons, those closest to him. As my sister stated:
#yes his name was chicka chicka boom boom#thanks for the ask!!#i know this got super off topic but I was likE CHILDHOOD DRAMA AROUND ROOSTERS?? more relatable than you'd think
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For @localcryptidinthewoods 's Divine Warriors Rockstar AU
I have some ideas on all of their backgrounds (but featuring my own headcannons for the Divine Warriors) and feel free to bounce ideas as well.
They all met at a boarding school, one that was where they sent kids in need of a "second chance", a(r/u)tistic folks, and kids who were musically talented and slightly annoying to their parents. A take my troubles away school for the parents.
Irene: She gives big large-range-soprano energy. She was a theater kid who said she was either become famous by 25 or start murdering people. Fortunately their band got a big break rather early. Not in contact with her parents but was at the school with scholarships. Possibly foster care.
Shad: He and Menphia knew each other for a long time, both having really rich parents who threw money at them. Shad technically was being raised by an uncle but it was a "I give you money and roof, you leave me alone" relationship. Led to a LOT of teenage rebellion.
Menphia: Her dad was a fashion model and her mom was a boxer. Her dad was very much a girlboss malewife while her mom was a Gaslight Mansplain type of person. Both fueled her interests and encouraged her rebellion. They weren't regular parents, they were cool parents.
Enki: Their dads were professors and sent her to the school so he could let his creativity flow. They were very encouraging of the arts but believed it was more of a phase. Did help them get a solo dorm so they could be as genderqueer as they needed to be. Enki is incredibly smart and to make her parents happy she did get a librarian degree.
Esmund: He was an Irish exchange student who got a scholarship. The scholarship was due to his dad helping the dean get out of a bar fight and saved his life. There because of nepotism but genuinely talented, and he also never knew of the nepotism so he believed he had to work hard.
Kul'Zak: A part of the second chance program. Incredibly musically talented, like broadway vocal talent and worked hard. Naturally gifted but he isn't there because of a scholarship, his juvie officer recommended him for the second chance pity/charity program after seeing him make a guitar out of contraband. (Juvie officer also wanted people to stop trying to hide contraband in his prosthetic leg).
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Squander enough time on TikTok these days and the signs of creative deceleration are everywhere.
“Try-hard” slang is spreading. Competitive aging is a thing. Classic episodes of The Sopranos are fed to you in polished 25-second bites. Last October, the 2004 cult teen comedy Mean Girls was portioned into 23 parts to unanimous celebration. (Did I mention pirated content is on the rise?) Everyone, it seems, wants to revisit the world as it was two decades ago, of all places, on the so-called app of the future.
Relics of the New Millennium are again in vogue, and especially on TikTok, where you get the sense that everyone is chasing the fantasy of youth. Except, it’s just that—a fantasy.
“I keep getting served TikToks on [high-yield savings accounts] and 401ks,” one of my colleagues commented in Slack recently. “I believe the olds are in charge now.”
She’s right, of course. Millennials are currently outpacing Gen Z in the adoption of TikTok in the US, according to Pew Research Center data, which shows that the app's 30-49-year-old demographic is growing faster than its 18-29-year-old user base.
Such is the way on the social internet; still, the enshittification of TikTok continues.
One tell-tale sign of late-stage social media is the endless vomit of nostalgia regifted in pretty packaging. Tastes have aged, and the user experience is no longer one of giddy revelation—at one point, the only reaction the app seemed to generate among new users—but one of odd comfort.
It was inevitable, of course. Seasons change, apps pivot, and users learn to chase the adrenaline of the future through new and exotic machines of possibility.
When TikTok gained mass popularity in 2020 during the first outbreak of Covid-19, it signaled a reorientation of where we place value. Tastes were being reengineered. The app’s offerings were as robust as they were confounding: dance challenges, beauty recommendations, racial appropriation, expert sleuthing, and more fed its algorithmic churn. It wasn’t just endless but entertainingly so, earning a reputation for setting trends and establishing itself as an unofficial headquarters for Gen Z influencers—and, because the internet is a repeated comedy of errors, later platforming de-influencers.
Today, TikTok operates as the ideal precursor to AI and what the next digital revolution is ushering in—a blurring of realities, a blotting out. Ownership over “the sense organs of the public,” as Nicholas Carr phrased it, is the endpoint, the very future that companies like Meta and Apple want to build. And so TikTok persuades as the perfect tonic: a world of cyclical multimedia that lets you create, live in, or simply spectate at will. A 60-second harbinger of all that is coming, delivered on demand.
For many people, the sensations of digital life feel most alive on such an app. With art, suggests Jackson Arn, extreme sensation is a fraught strategy because of what it pulls off: As the artwork seduces, it also disgusts.
I now wonder if that was the point of socially-oriented technologies all along. They make you feel a little more alive. Again and again, they unlock dormant sensations: excitement, awe, satisfaction. Even disgust has the capacity to captivate. Because even in disgust there is a need to share, comment on, or understand the nature of spectacle, and how it functions. Only, the seduction of TikTok captivates a little too well, and as you age, carrying the experience of life on your shoulders while trying not to be crushed by it, you find yourself craving those sensations all the time.
That seems especially true for millennials, who were guaranteed a future that never arrived. They were dealt a bad hand—several bad hands—and saddled with the failures of those who came before them without a blueprint for a path forward. In February, I received a text from a family member. He'd applied for the SAVE Plan, and we exchanged mutual angst over our financial misfortunes, how so many friends are in the same bind, bonding over the recognition of unnatural loss, of another future we’ll never know.
Last week at the barbershop, I watched as a young man in his early thirties thumbed from video to video, his neck craned into his iPhone, blitzing through TikTok. He sat in the chair for about 40 minutes, and as the barber worked around him, not once did he glance away from his screen, except, to exclaim, “Look! You gotta see this one.”
So when I hear that millennials are usurping Gen Z as TikTok's leading demographic, I'm not shocked. The organs of our digital existence, like the body, are connected, flowing as they should even when complete comprehension evades reasoning. All of it is intertwined. The increasing thirst for mixed reality. Gen Z abandoning the rituals of digital life altogether for a more analog experience. The decline of TikTok as millennials eclipse the platform. The previous world is ending. So is social media as we knew it. And we again want to feel something—even if, and only for a little while, that something is 2004.
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Something positive heard on this Trans Day of Visibility: A trans woman I know was telling me about this couple generations older director guy in a project she was working on. How multiple times he started to say things like: "And then, the male voices- I mean, bass and tenor..." "Next, the female voices- no, the sopranos and altos...". He kept making the same mistakes because he was used to it, but he also kept correcting himself each time, clearly recognising that inclusive language 1) isn't too much to ask for and has a real impact, 2) isn't too demanding a learning process to go through, 3) in a lot of cases isn't even anything new or mysterious, a lot of relevant words already exist in people's vocabulary. After a change in perspective, most things will pretty naturally fall into place. It was really wholesome. ✨ (And by the way, inclusive language helps a lot more than just trans people.)
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Hello! :3
Names Catherine but Kalazar or Kala also work as well.
Pronouns: She/Her.
Age: 31
Sexuality: Pan, but with a preference towards anything and anyone feminine.
Current Profile Pic by: @Joseph_LFrog on Twitter
10 months HRT
Minors not allowed. Will be blocked. Sorry just how it is since I'll be posting lewd eventually
Feel free to DM me if you wish. Always happy to meet and talk to new people.
I'm a transwomen who was finally convinced to make a Tumblr. My main focus here is 1 part be a thirsty horny little gremlin, 1 part talking about mental health stuff, and 1 part talk about cool art.
I do take mental health stuff seriously and will be talking a lot about it as someone who's life has been fucked over by it more then once. I'll be talking a lot about life with depression, borderline personality disorder, and dysphoria. As well as topics I'll have to spoiler (is that even possible on Tumblr?) due to their sensitive nature. Steps one can take on how to deal with having them as well as how best to help friends you know who suffer from them. Add some good to the world and hopefully help people not make the same dumb mistakes I've made. Seriously BPD is awful to have.
When I'm not talking about more serious important things I will probably be thirsting over cute people and being a lewd horny KeyjklfjdklsSmashiing little sub :3
Kinks: Haha uuhhhh a lot. Honestly when I enter hyper horny mode I can be very open to many degenerate things. Growing up on Hentai really opened my mind to things and I have no shame. I tend to be more submissive, but ironically have dommed more transwomen despite that (seriously some of you are so fucking submissive like holy shit)
I like bondage, BDSM, edging, being pinned down, pain, petplay, watersports, handholding, and well honestly be easier to list things I'm not into. Also fun fact having my face sat on temporally cures all mental illnesses, bet you're therapist won't tell you that secret tip. Seriously that's like number 1 kink right there. So if you have a cute butt then get comfortable right here :3
Things I'm not into: I guess blood, scat, and things like drugs or fireplay. Anything illegal or non consensual. Beyond those though just ask, I'm probably into it or willing to try.
Other interest: I enjoy video games, typically more single player stuff as I'm shit at games. Big into manga and anime though I rarely watch/read new ones lately. Got back into reading a bit when I can. Dabbled in all kinds of art, but nothing stuck yet. Maybe I'll share past work? I think a lot about game design and mayyyy be working on something that may or may never exist. My musical interest range from things like Atarashii Gakko, Alt-J, Susumu Hirasawa, Clipping, and yes of course, Death Grips. That and whatever music I find through AMV's. In general I love media and like to seek out odd lesser known things when I can.
Favorites:
Films: Memories of Matsuko (haha like anyone knows what this is), Confessions, City of God, The Dirties
Anime Films: End of Eva, A Silent Voice, Made in Abyss Dawn of the Deep Soul, Redline
TV Shows: Sopranos, The Leftovers, Lost, Great Teacher Onizuka (1998 version)
Anime Shows: Hunter X Hunter, Neon Genesis Evangelion, FLCL, Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (God the Count can fuck me any day)
Video Games: Outer Wilds, Wind Waker, Shadow of the Colossus, Omori
Albums: Amarok by Mike Oldfield (Probably the most odd thing I have on here), Hawaii: Part 2, Splendor and Misery by Clipping, Pale Machine by Boen.
Books: House of Leaves, The First Law books (only read first 4 so far)
Manga: Oyasumi Punpun (favorite piece of media of all time btw. Banner pic is from there), Berserk, Ouran High School Host Club, Boys Run the Riot
I will be talking about cool media and recommending shit often.
Art, mental health, and a lotta lewd will be what's posted here so if that interest then stick around. :3
Oh and feel free to ask me questions. No topic is off the table with me.
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