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bvidzsoo · 3 months

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Love Me Like A Rockstar (4)

Chapter 4: Comatose

Author: bvidzsoo

Pairing: Song Mingi x female reader

Warning: cussing, mentions of a panic attack

Word count: 8,129

Summary: Love. You wanted none of it. You had already been heartbroken very badly once, you didn't wish to go through that ever again. But the Universe works in intricate ways and, somehow, you found yourself webbed up in a local rockstar's life, Song Mingi. He was everything you expected him to be, yet nothing like you imagined him he would be. What happens when you find mutual understanding and have heartful conversations? Will he be able to break down your walls? Will you be able to chase away his darkness?

A/N: Hello, lovelies! The long awaited 4th chapter is here and omg I'm so sorry for the long wait! I haven't even realized it's been a month since my last update...but I had a lot of stuff to do for my University and just didn't find the time to write, but here I am now, and I'll try to update next week or after that! I promise you'll have lots of Mingi next chapter *wink wink*, but I hope after reading this chapter Yn's attitude will make more sense, and that she won't be so insufferable anymore to you all reading. Please listen to the fourth song Comatose before or while reading this chapter! Yes, I have totally made Mingi wear his waterbomb outfit in this chapter because waterbomb Mingi shall NEVER be forgotten, goodbye. Please leave feedback, I truly appreciate it! Enjoy now! I have a surprise coming next chapter, hehet^^

Taglist: @orshii @or5i @lovely-red2 @juicy-red @scarfac3 @sunaswifes-blog @voicesinmyhead-rc @teez-the-time @maru-matt @kyeos4ng

⟨Series M.list ↭ Previous Chapter⟩

♫Playlist♫

『I don't care enough to miss you

After all the shit we've been through

My heart's comatose, comatose』

The blinking of the cursor was staring back at me mockingly, a reminder that my fingers haven’t moved in the past ten minutes. No thoughts connected to the theme of my project came to mind, no matter how hard I tried and how many articles I read. My mind seemed to be blank at the moment and it seemed like it wouldn’t get any better anytime soon. To be honest, I wasn’t feeling well. And that usually reflects in my work and influences my whole mood, and even day. I thought I would have a very productive day as I got ready this morning and went to the library to finish my art assignment, however, the little kick I had, came crushing down the second Mingi decided to sit with me. Well, perhaps that one small factor wasn’t the real reason which ruined my mood and brought me to the brink of a panic attack, and the current void and emptiness I have been feeling in my chest ever since. Perhaps it was the mention of Jeong Yunho and the reminder of how little I have always meant to him. My lower lip quivered again, and I allowed myself to fall back in the chair I was sitting in, staring up at my white ceiling in desperation. Why did it have to be him? Why did it have to be Yunho again? Was the Universe having a laugh at me? What were the chances that this Song Mingi was the same Song Mingi Yunho never shut up about while we were dating? It was frustrating. It was maddening and it was…mocking. I couldn’t help but feel bitter the longer I allowed the image of Mingi and Yunho laughing, hanging out, falling all over each other, linger in my mind. Their hearts filled with joy and their time spent with endless conversations, late night trips to the convenience store, random road trips and the overall feeling of knowing that you always had one person you could rely on no matter what. What did Mingi have that I didn’t? What did Yunho see in him that he never saw in me? Why was Mingi better than me? And why…was I suddenly feeling this vial jealousy creeping up in my chest like an ugly monster, the whisper of thoughts I have always tried to push to the depths of my mind after Yunho’s sudden, but heartbreaking, departure from my life?

『Straight coats and empty cabinets

Ashes from all the mess you left

New lease without you

I confess that I'm happy you're gone』

What was it about Song Mingi that Yunho was so infatuated with? What was it with Song Mingi that everyone seemed to like and gravitate towards? All I could see was the arrogance and self-centeredness rolling off of him in waves any time he entered a room. The need to shine and be the center of attention, to be the only person anyone was able to see, to focus on. The constant smirk or grin on his lips, almost always mocking or just an awful reminder that he was better than you—it was subtle, but it was there. The mischievous glint in his eyes as he watched your every move, hiding behind a wall of emotionlessness, sharp eyes watching but not giving anything away. There was no honesty in his expressions or in his actions. But why did nobody else see that? Why was I the only one picking up on how insincere Mingi actually was? Why did nobody question what he hid behind those dark and sharp eyes? His face so often void of any emotion. And then, to further prove my confusion, the Mingi I talked to today was—why did he feel different? Everything staring from his appearance to his behavior was unlike the infuriating person I have come to know. He portrayed a calm and collected nature, albeit still mischievous as he had taken my sketchbook without my permission, yet it was so clear on his face that he didn’t have any mal intentions. What prompted him to approach me out of the blue and why did he look almost…lonely? What drew him to smile so much and so freely? It certainly couldn’t have been me; I have done everything I could to make him feel unwelcome and uncomfortable, yet he…stayed. He talked without a care in the world, almost as if he forgot I would be judging his every move and sentence. He almost looked curious of who I was, trying to make conversation in which I did not want to engage in. What was it about Yunho that made his eyes sparkle so much? Why did Yunho have so much of an influence on Mingi? Why did it have to be Mingi? Why does Yunho have to be everywhere around me even after he leaves? Does Yunho really mean that much to Mingi? Just how deep is their bond? But the most jarring thought amidst the spiraling of my mind into a place I did not wish for it to go, was a very simple one. Why do I care about Song Mingi all of a sudden? Why do all these things matter to me all of a sudden? Who is Song Mingi to me to send me into an existential crisis, into a state of nervosity, and restlessness, and so much bitterness? He’s just a guy. A guy who is very irritating, arrogant, self-centered, and a pushover. A guy who only wants attention and is superficial. A guy who forgets about you the second he’s turned his back to you. A guy who only likes you until you’re new and exciting. When you start becoming boring, what does it matter anymore? Why would he keep you around for longer? Perhaps him and Yunho have more in common than I would have thought at first.

『So used to pain that it's my remedy

Easy to hate, I gave you everything

Funny that you're the one that ran away

You left me first』

I couldn’t do this anymore, I had to stop thinking. I needed my brain to shut up, to stop torturing me more than I was already hurting. I refused to reach my breaking point again just because Mingi mentioned that Yunho was his best friend—why was I giving him so much power? Trying to snap out of it, I groaned loudly as I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my palms, sitting up straight again to try and focus for the last time on my project. I had to get this done in two days, I really couldn’t slack off anymore. So, I opened the previous tab I was reading from and scrolled up in order to start reading the article from the beginning once again, hoping that the words in it would finally stick. But despite my attempt to finally focus on the only important task at hand, the loud ping of my phone quickly pulled my attention away from it. I jumped at the loud sound and cursed silently, having forgotten to put my phone on ‘do not disturb’. My eyes snapped down to it mildly annoyed, but quickly furrowed when I realized it was a message from an unknown number. I stared at it for a few seconds, eyebrows furrowing in suspicion.

Unknown: are u coming to Outlaw tonight?

Before I could really control myself, curiosity overtook me. It must’ve been someone who knows me since they were asking about Outlaw. They must have seen me there last time.

Me: who’s this? Unknown: mingi lol

My eyebrows instantly furrowed as I stared down at the message, my stomach doing a weird flip. My fingers hovered over the screen of my phone, tempted to just quickly block his number and forget about the past ten seconds, because what the fuck? How did he even get my number? I certainly don’t remember giving it to him.

Me: wtf? how do you have my number. Unknown: wooyoung

I blinked, mind blanching for a second. Wooyoung? That made even less sense as Wooyoung and I have met just once and I have not given him my phone number. I waited for a few seconds longer, waiting for Mingi to explain further, but it never came. No small dots indicating that he was texting anything else. I groaned and looked at my pale green wall for a second, trying to collect my thoughts and not throw my phone out the window. Why did he have to have my number? Was this Mingi’s way of getting on my nerves even more? And now I had to figure out how Wooyoung got my number—oh. I tsked in disbelief, eyes zooning in on the picture of Seulgi and myself I had on display on my desk. Of course, that little bitch. Why would she ask me first before giving my phone number to a complete stranger—even if Mingi wasn’t that, I still didn’t want him to have it.

Me: whatever, i’m blocking you. Unknown: so, are you coming then? Me: no, mingi, i am not.

I rolled my eyes at Mingi’s insistency of getting an answer and blatant ignorance towards my threat of blocking him—which wasn’t as menacing as I wished for it to be. But it only took him seconds to answer, and I tried not to think about how quickly he was responding.

Unknown: ok

My eyes narrowed at his simple—and sharp—answer, fingers hovering over the keyboard to fire an insult at him if he went ahead and started leaving more messages, wanting to remind him that I was not in any shape or form curious to hear any more of his bullshit. The bitterness was quite strong in the back of my head, jealousy searing through my body—I couldn’t help it. A minute or two passed, but Mingi wasn’t typing anything else and I huffed, irritated by his antics. Why was he even asking if I would go to Outlaw? I hated it the first time—well, maybe that was a little lie—and I still hate it now, so therefore I had not one reason to go and watch him perform again. Not one particle in my body wished to hear his raspy voice accompanied by a guitar, bass, and drums. I was quite content by going to bed early tonight and forgetting about the whole day, hoping that my chest would feel less heavy in the morning and the green monster would be gone from my head. And yet, despite my better judgment, my fingers worked quickly, before my mind could even register what I was doing, and I was saving Mingi’s number. There was no desire in me to have his name in my phone under any shape, so I stopped for a second to ponder over the many options I could be calling him, such as: idiot, dumbass, jackass, prick, mr. arrogant—were sounding rather pleasing to my ears—and yet, despite the wicked grin I had on my lips, my mind seemed to settle for a simple ‘I hate him’. His number was saved in my phone without putting more thought into what I was doing, and I was placing my phone aside, attention going back to my project. Now, there was nothing in the world which could disturb me again—but then my phone rang. I groaned loudly and felt like pulling on my hair, staring at my cursed phone heatedly. I was half expecting Mingi’s number to pop-up, but thankfully it wasn’t him. That would’ve been the last straw for today, I certainly would’ve gone crazy. Instead, it was Seulgi calling and I knew she had something important to say if she wasn’t texting. I picked up, albeit with disdain.

“Hey!” She sounded cheerful, excited. Very much the opposite of my mood right now.

“Hi.” I muttered and started tapping my forefinger against my desk, staring down at the article I had opened in front of me.

“You sound like you want to kill someone.”

“And I do.” My answer made Seulgi laugh, making me sigh. And that person was Song Mingi, of course.

“What’s got your panties in a twist this time, huh?” Seulgi’s voice was playful, and unfortunately, it was only building up my irritation. She didn’t have any bad intentions, but I couldn’t handle her cheeriness and playfulness at the moment. I needed to be alone. I needed to not think and just get shit done.

“Why did you call?” I preferred not to answer her question as I asked another one, voice not snappy just tired as Seulgi remained silent for a second on the other end.

“Noir Zenith are performing at Outlaw tonight,” I knew where this was going, I just gulped realizing Mingi had asked the same thing of me just mere minutes ago, “Do you want to come with me?”

“No.” My answer was too fast and harsh, I quickly tried to mend it, “I’ve got a family thing—issue, I mean. I’m sorry, but I can’t come because of it…”

My voice got quiet as I trailed off, not particularly fond of lying to my best friend, but I really didn’t want to go out tonight and I knew if I told Seulgi the real reason she would complain and complain until I finally gave in, her tactic of coercion working just fine on me. I never stood a chance in front of her when she would start complaining and whining and bringing up all the times I have bailed on her in the past.

“Oh,” It wasn’t hard to hear the disappointment in her voice, and if I weren’t in such a bad headspace at the moment I would have felt awful, “it’s fine, I get it. But…you do know you can tell me anything, right?”

I sighed loudly, “I know, thanks Seulgi, and sorry. I’ll make it up to you somehow.”

“Don’t worry about it,” She was smiling now, adding a small chuckle too, “We all have bad days, I’ll see you at university tomorrow?”

“Most certainly.” A small smile made it onto my face and Seulgi quickly bid her goodbye as we hung up, silence enveloping me. I didn’t forget to press the ‘do not disturb’ button this time as I placed my phone on my desk, next to my laptop, and faced the article taunting me. Not finishing this project today wasn’t an option anymore, and so, I quickly dove in, the torturing thoughts finally silent somehow.

The hours went by quickly and despite my mind struggling to focus on the task at hand, I made it. I finished the project in about four hours and it definitely gave me a little confidence boost, which I desperately needed after the emotional turmoil I was forced to face today. My mind was a mess. I was tired and I needed to sleep. I didn’t even care how early or late it was as I got into bed, forgetting to wash my face or even change into my pajamas, I just needed to lay my head down and close my eyes. And it was working well…until it wasn’t. The warmth of my thick blanket enveloped me and my head grew heavier as my muscles relaxed, the comfort of my bed bringing peace to my loud thoughts. It felt nice. To finally be able to forget everything that’s happened today, to just let go and…sleep. I really needed this; I haven’t felt this exhausted in a long time. I have never been good at dealing with my feelings, I usually pushed them away and ignored everything I felt…until they blew up in my face. Then, I would finally break and it was chaotic and messy. I knew it was the wrong coping mechanism, but I couldn’t help it. Nothing else worked, because I just couldn’t deal with the pain. I hated the overwhelming thoughts, the pressing heaviness and constant pain. I just simply didn’t want to deal with them. Drawing was a nice way of escaping my reality, but lately it didn’t help. It drew me up the wall, it was so frustrating. So many emotions had been steering hidden deep inside these past weeks, I didn’t know how to deal with them—I didn’t want to deal with them, actually. I needed them silent, gone.

And despite needing to sleep right now, eyes heavy and mind fuzzy, it wasn’t working. Nothing helped. My mind was silent, yet my ears were buzzing, whispers so quiet in the back of my head that I could barely hear them. My chest was heavy, it felt like I needed to cry, but my throat was closing in on me, refusing to let any tears to the surface. I could breathe, but at the same time I couldn’t. Turning on to my left side did nothing, but snap my eyes open. Why couldn’t I sleep? Why was this feeling returning? Why couldn’t I just rest for one fucking second?! I buried my head into my pillow and let out a silent scream, punching the soft mattress of my bed next to my head, legs trashing around as I needed to let out the creeping hysteria in my body somehow. Was I finally going crazy? Was my mother’s premonition finally blending into reality? She did randomly while watching TV, one month ago, tell me that I would soon face a challenging obstacle in my life, which would feel suffocating and relieving at the same time. Mind running per hour, I shot up in a sitting position and gaped at nothing in particular, recalling the memory of said night. But my mother said nothing else as she went back to watching TV, acting as if what she had said to me was totally normal. It wasn’t. But I was used to her quirky antics, she was a bit whimsical, but I loved her. Her intentions were always good and pure, she was a woman full of love and warmth…unlike me. Perhaps I was like my father…not that I could remember him, he’s left us while I was a little girl. We kept in touch until I turned approximately eight, after that…he never showed his face again. Something about moving to a new city and starting a new life, I couldn’t care less, he was never a pilar of support in my life. I didn’t need a man to bring me comfort, to make me feel safe. I had myself for that, and my mother—when things got too rough to handle on my own.

With a sigh, I reached over my bed and grabbed my sketchbook from my bedside table and turned on the small lamp, grabbing the pencil I had from underneath my pillow. Not one corner of my room was safe from my drawing supplies. I flipped the sketchbook open to a blank page and sighed, eyebrows lightly furrowing as I pressed the pencil against the soft paper. I didn’t have anything particular in mind as I started drawing. Maybe a small meadow with colorful flowers or a flower field, those sounded nice right now. It felt like they could fix my sour mood after today, like they would bring a little comfort to my overthinking brain at the moment. But I already knew I couldn’t control my hand when it came to drawing, and I wasn’t too surprised to find myself drawing the outline of a face. The lines were sharp and precise, darker around the brow bone and defining at the sharp and pointy nose. I added shading to the jawline before moving to the cheekbones, not making them too harsh. The sketch so far was looking like any regular face. It could turn into anything from here on. I could make it anyone I wanted it to be. For some reason my hand went to draw the lips instead of the eyes, usually those were the first thing I drew when starting a portrait. But this time, my brain focused on the dark outline of the plump lips and adding more depth as the Cupid’s Bow was deep and pointy. I licked my lips as I allowed my eyes to run over the eyeless portrait, subconsciously adding a small mole to the left side of its face, close to the jawline. I had a hunch where this was going, but I wanted to keep going—I couldn’t stop my brain from pushing me to just draw more. I allowed my pencil to run over the lines of the nose, making them sharper, lengthening it just like the person had it in real life. My hand hovered in the air for a second, reluctant to finally draw the eyes of the portrait, but I didn’t have it in me to stop right now. I always hated leaving my work unfinished—that was my excuse right now too, despite knowing who I was drawing once again. Yet not one particle in my body wished to stop right now, and I couldn’t help it as I finally drew lines sharp enough to accentuate the depth and glare in his deep eyes. The shading of them happened quickly and without even thinking, the small but dark mole sat comfortably underneath his right eye as I pressed my pencil firmly against the paper.

The breath which left my lips was sharp, and I gulped as my grip tightened around my pencil. I knew what I was doing this time, yet I didn’t stop it. Why? Why did I allow myself to draw—Mingi. His sharp and expressionless face stared back at me and I didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t mocking me, he didn’t have any twinkle in his eyes, he was just…there. On my paper, in my favorite journal-like sketchbook. And my heart was beating faster the longer I was looking at it. My stomach was twisting in a foreign way and I felt like I needed air. Fresh air. It felt like my room was closing in on me, I felt like I didn’t have enough space all of a sudden. The blanket falling on my lap suddenly felt too warm, like it was burning my body up. Without a second thought, I threw the sketchbook off from my lap, together with the blanket, and sprung out of bed, racing towards my closet. I threw it open and grabbed the first thing which came into view, a grey oversized jumper, as I stepped out of my slippers and slipped my phone into the pocket of my grey sweatpants, headed for my closed door. My throat was squeezing itself and it was a little hard to breathe as I frantically moved down the stairs, desperate for fresh air at this point. The light was on in the kitchen and I realized it wasn’t even ten pm yet as my mother was tinkering around, listening to some jazz music. I must’ve been loud as I almost crashed into the wall, struggling to put on my sneakers.

“Honey?” I heard my mother’s voice coming from behind me as I turned to look at her. Her ginger hair was a mess as her curls stuck out in all directions, her eyebrows furrowed in confusion, “Everything alright?”

I nodded, fearing what my voice would sound like as I quickly wore the jumper in my hands, “Are you going out? It’s a little late…”

I hummed, licking my lips nervously, hand reaching for the doorknob, “I won’t take long, I promise.”

“Call me if you need me.” My mother had an understanding look on her face, it made my lips tremble, “I’ll pick you up.”

“Didn’t you drink?” My voice was slightly shaking as my eyes went to the wine glass she was holding in her right hand. My mother glanced down at it as if she had forgotten about it and quickly pushed it behind herself.

“We could always ride my electric scooter; I haven’t used it in quite a while.” My mother giggled at her own suggestion and I couldn’t help but let out an amused chuckle, the tightness in my throat lessening a little bit. How badly I wished to pour my heart out to her, to let my feelings finally loose, but I couldn’t. That would mean having to face what I was feeling. That would mean everything was real and not just made up by my useless brain.

“I’ll be home in an hour, don’t worry.” My mother just hummed as she watched me leave as I took my keys and closed the door carefully behind myself. The crisp air of the evening was a harsh wake-up call that I should’ve worn a jacket as well, but I didn’t have it in me to walk back inside my warm house. I couldn’t. I needed to walk. I needed to clear my mind. I had to get rid of this awful feeling in my chest. And so that’s just what I did, I walked. I took off towards nowhere particular as my feet carried me down the sidewalk, the streets illuminated by the lampposts, creating just enough light, but not too much. A few cars passed by then and now, the neighborhood relatively quiet at this hour of the evening. The cold air was biting at my cheeks and I buried my hands in my pockets, taking a deep breath before releasing it slowly. It felt nice as the cold air traveled through my throat, deep down into my lungs. It was refreshing, it was just what I needed. As I took a left turn, I left my neighborhood and realized I was headed towards the city center, more people on the road now as it was the main one. Groups of teenagers passed by me and I shivered at the sudden cold breeze. I looked around and watched as it picked up and blew the branches of the trees apart, more leaves falling to the ground, creating a blanket of orange and burgundy underneath our feet. The leaves crunched under my shoes and I felt myself smiling as I kicked into a smaller pile gathered up on the sidewalk by the wind, memories of my childhood fresh in my mind. My mother would always gather the leaves in our small backyard and then she’d take me outside and we’d play around for hours in the leaves, giggling and laughing as we’d pretend that I was a princess and she was the leaves monster trying to kidnap me from my kingdom. Despite my mother struggling at times, my childhood never lacked anything, and it was filled with many happy memories. Sometimes I wondered what changed that I turned into such a moody and sour person. There were remnants of my old self when I was with Seulgi or with my mother, but I was pretty bad at opening up to strangers, at letting others in…especially males. I couldn’t help but think they had other motives and were only waiting for the right time to fuck me over, to abandon me. My attention was brought to a couple as the girl screeched and ran past me, the boy chasing after her while holding something in his hands, giggling loudly and calling out her name. I couldn’t help but glance after them, the green monster back in my head, as the guy caught up with her and tackled her into a hug despite the girl’s loud complaints. I have realized, the guy was carrying dirt in his hands and the girl’s cheeks were already smudged with it, probably. My stomach clenched and it got harder to gulp as I tore my eyes off them, trying to take a deep breath, trying to push down the memories threatening to resurface.

But I couldn’t help it as Yunho made it to the forefront of my mind, our many dates stored away in a little treasure chest in my heart. We used to go on so many dates, Yunho loved trying out new things and visiting new places. Every second weekend he planned something new, he surprised me with something. I thought I was the luckiest girl on Earth. I thought I would never find anyone else who could love me and cherish me as much as Yunho—and perhaps I really never would. Because Yunho was special, because he made you feel like you were the only one in the whole world he could see, he could love. A small part of me still wished he loved me at some point. Of course, it did, I was so hopelessly in love with him once that everything was about him. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t live without him. He was the only thing I could think about, I could talk about. Everyone told us how well we matched; how perfect we were for each other. The both of us always smiling, always so nice to others. Before getting abandoned by Yunho, I was—I wasn’t like this. I smiled, I laughed, and I joked around a lot. I was happy and I loved life, I loved everything around me and I had this urge to discover everything life had to offer me. I couldn’t stay put in one place for too long and I always had everything planned out, each step of mine—my life next to Yunho. The promises he made were still fresh in my mind, I could still remember them despite being it a long time ago—but perhaps it wasn’t long enough, I have suddenly come to the realization of it. It was hard to breathe again as my favorite moment with Yunho was suddenly too fresh in my mind, too easy to recall. We had gone to a movie he really wished to watch, something about a girl who had to pretend she was a boy in order to make it onto the university’s football team to get revenge on her ex, it was actually a re-run as the movie had come out a long time ago, but Yunho loved it and he really wanted to watch it at the cinema. Of course I went with him, I wanted to see the movie too because Yunho loved it. And what Yunho loved, I also did. It was an easy watch, lighthearted and cheesy and predictable, it didn’t surprise me that it was one of Yunho’s favorites. But once the movie was over Yunho wanted to get ice cream, and as someone who loves ice cream—mint choco is the best flavor, fight me—I was eager to go with Yunho. But our peace of mind didn’t last for long as it started raining cats and dogs in no time, forcing us to take shelter somewhere—except that we didn’t. Yunho pulled me out into the pouring rain and he made us dance, he acted out cheesy scenes from Dirty Dancing, raising me up and flipping me around clumsily, almost dropping me in the process not even once, making me shriek and clutch onto him for dear life. I have never laughed more in my life than that night and I have never felt more loved that in that moment. Yunho’s eyes were shining with so much warmth and happiness, it was also the first time he said the words. ‘I love you.’ I couldn’t tell whether it was the rain or happy tears on my cheeks, but the sudden clenching of my heart and overwhelming feeling in my chest made me flung my body against his, holding onto Yunho’s tall frame like my life depended on it. And in that moment, I knew—I knew that I also loved him. But I couldn’t say it, not yet, not when everything felt like it was too much, so instead, I pressed my lips against his pouty ones and smiled as Yunho started giggling, only to pick me up and twirl me around in excitement before asking me to hop on his back, only for him to take off running towards his house. It was my favorite memory of us, for various reasons, but perhaps the main one was because Yunho was so sincere in that moment. Because I couldn’t hear any doubt in his words like the other times he said that he loved me.

『Straight coats and empty cabinets

Ashes from all the mess you left

New lease without you

I confess that I'm happy you're gone』

I came to a stop as my phone buzzed in my pocket, mind hazy as I tried to shake off the memory which felt so alive in my head. I could almost see it playing out in front of myself. If I reached my hand out, I could almost touch Yunho—but he wasn’t here—and I was allowing myself once again to live in the past, a very bad habit of mine. I unlocked my phone after I crossed the road, the sidewalk littered with various shops, most of them already closed as it was almost ten now. I had been walking for twenty minutes without even realizing it. Looking down at my phone, I realized Instagram had sent me a notification that Seulgi posted a story after a while. She was probably at Outlaw still, watching Noir Zenith perform. I pressed on her story and it opened to show a close-up video of the three boys performing, the camera focusing on Wooyoung for a few seconds longer before it was moved away, zooming in on playfully on Mingi. I had the volume down, I couldn’t hear what he was singing, but his eyebrows were furrowed as he was leaning forward, mouth moving in a fast way as his eyes were half-closed, veins protruding on his neck, expression almost like he was angry, almost like feelings were overwhelming him as he held the microphone in his left hand tightly. My eyebrows slightly furrowed, but I quickly pushed any thought of him away as I realized he was slightly…wet? His white shirt, the top buttons unbuttoned until they reached his chest stuck to his body and had turned almost see-through, but it didn’t seem like it bothered Mingi as he continued on performing. Heavy chains lay against the base of his throat and a blue sheer sunglass was sitting on his tall nose, almost sliding off of it as he was bobbing his head furiously to the music, his bass abandoned somewhere. As my eyes focused on the huge bracelet on his right hand and the blue and white scarf wrapped around his left wrist, both hands decorated with thick silver-colored rings, the video cut off. I remained unblinking for a second, eyebrows twitching as I realized Seulgi had posted the video not even half an hour ago. So…the band was still performing and…Mingi was looking like that. Suddenly I was glad I wasn’t there to witness him being all indecent and acting like a—something. I most certainly wouldn’t hear the endless praises if I were there and the constant screaming of his baboons—perhaps calling them his fangirls would sound nicer, but I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction—and with my current mood, that was the last thing I wanted to see and hear. Mingi was detestable and I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of going to any of his other performances, finding them useless as I wasn’t even into their music. I started walking again, aware that the wind had picked up more, rustling the branches and leaves harsher, making me shiver in my underdressed state, reminding me that I should head home now. I said I wouldn’t stay out for too long, my thoughts seemed to have cleared just a little bit, besides, the cold air was enough to knock me out once I got to lay in my warm and comfortable bed.

『I don't care enough to miss you

After all the shit we've been through

My heart's comatose, comatose

I don't care enough to miss you

After all the shit we've been through

My heart's comatose, comatose』

However, the second I wanted to exit the app and put my phone away, a new story suddenly appeared in Seulgi’s spot and I gulped realizing who it was. Yunho’s happy and smiling face was taunting me in his profile picture, and before I could control myself, I pressed the icon, opening his story. The username Yuyu followed by a sunflower flashed for a second on the screen and then—and then everything around me stopped. There was no wind, there was no sound of cars passing by or people talking as they walked by me. It wasn’t cold anymore. My lungs failed me once again, but my mind went silent. Completely silent. There was a rumble in the distance, but I couldn’t say what it was. A girl, much smaller than him—and a lot cuter than myself—was laughing in the boomerang Yunho had posted, her black hair falling around her shoulders nicely, the white coat barely hiding the short lavender colored dress she was wearing. And Yunho—he looked so happy, he looked—whole. His face had gotten fuller, yet features sharper since the last time I had seen him. I have forgotten that I was still following him on Instagram. He had his arm around the girl’s shoulder and was actively pulling her into his side as he was smiling brightly too, his protruding front teeth showing as he had his eyes on the girl only. He had tagged her too and I was clicking on her name fast, before even thinking about what I was doing. Her profile was public and she had many posts. Most of herself, but there were some of the places she’s traveled to as well. But her most recent post—was with Yunho. The two sitting on a bench, then a selfie, and then a picture of the place they had been at, with the caption of: ‘Luckiest girl in the world!’ I gulped and closed the app, taking a deep breath, realizing that I had started shaking.

『You wasted all my fucking time

Were never really in my life

You were further than I could imagine

I love you, but fuck you』

Why did my legs feel like jelly all of a sudden? Why did the heaviness in my chest get even worse? Why was I reacting like this? It made no sense. Yunho broke up with me three years ago and I was over him. He hurt me more than anyone has before, but I was over him. I have let go; I have released the feelings I have felt for him. But then why did it bother me so much that he found happiness with someone else? Why did it leave a bitter taste in my mouth? Suddenly why was the green monster back and making me clutch my phone tightly in my hand? If he was able to find someone, to be happy again, why wasn’t I doing the same thing? Why was I incapable of loving? Of being loved? Of opening up and letting in new people? Why was I forcing myself to wallow in my own misery? Why was I punishing myself by constantly living in the past? What more could I want? Why did I still wish for Yunho to return and apologize for everything he’s done, for the gap he’s left in my heart? For the turmoil he’s caused in my head, for the ache that never really went away with his departure from my life? And it hit me lick a wall of bricks, that something was hitting my flaming cheeks. Another rumble, and I realized it was thunder. Head tilting back, I realized it was raining—pouring. Washing away the tears which were making my eyes burn. When did it start raining? Why did everything hurt so much? I couldn’t help the sudden sob which wracked my body as I put my phone in my pocket as a futile attempt to keep it dry as my clothes were getting drenched the longer I stood unmoving on the sidewalk. But my feet felt heavy, rendering me frozen to the spot. Nobody was outside anymore. I was alone. Just as always. No matter how many people cared for me, I was still alone in hurting, in dealing with the mess I was. And it hurt. It made me cry harder as I pressed a hand against my mouth, trying to muffle my pathetic sobs. But it felt good—so good to finally let it all out, to just finally allow the misery to come to the surface, to acknowledge that I couldn’t deal with these feelings anymore. My chest hurt, my heart ached, my throat was getting more and more restricting, lungs burning for air, but I couldn’t fully breathe, gasping for air caused by my violent sobs. But the wind was picking up again and my body started shivering, and I realized I couldn’t stand on the sidewalk anymore bawling my eyes out as I got drenched in rain.

So, I looked around and found a place open not too far up ahead and took off running towards it, trying to get the strands of hair out of my eyes as they stuck to my skin. The diner was small and still open, the big windows showed nobody inside besides the girl behind the counter. I didn’t consider the way I looked as I threw the door open and stepped inside, alerting the girl as the doorbell chimed. She looked up and for a second we stared at each other, her eyes widening as her eyes wandered all over my body, making me sniff. At least I wasn’t sobbing anymore, just heaving for air. I must’ve looked horrible as I took off towards a table in the back, closer to the restrooms, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel embarrassed over my appearance. I fell against the cushion of the bench and tried to regulate my breathing, biting my lower lip as I realized my eyes were burning and my skin was ice cold. I couldn’t believe I was stupid enough to stand out in the rain, when it was so cold. I would most definitely catch a cold now and that was the last thing I needed right now, but it was due to my own stupidity. I wiped my face with my hands, which were slightly shaking, as the girl from the counter came over.

“Uh,” She shuffled around awkwardly as I looked at her, “Can I bring you anything? Or uh, help with anything?”

A slap in the face to wake me up to reality would possibly be the biggest help she could be offering right now—but I thankfully didn’t say to her. She already looked uncomfortable by not knowing how to react to my current state. I sniffed and went to reach for my wallet before I would look at the menu, I had no idea how much money I had on me. But I quickly realized I had only grabbed my phone before leaving, sitting inside a diner never being in the plan. So instead I went to check on my phone if I had any money on my card, but my phone wasn’t working. Nothing. No matter how much I pressed the button to start it, it didn’t work. Fuck, I forgot to charge it before stepping outside.

“Uh,” Now I felt embarrassed as I averted my eyes from the girl, “I don’t have any money.”

“Oh,” She sounded surprised, “Well, then…I mean, I don’t want to sound rude, but uh—I will have to ask you to leave, really, I have nothing against you, it’s just that—”

“Don’t worry,” I forced myself to smile as I looked up at her, her cheeks red from embarrassment of having to kick me out, “I get it. May I use the restroom before I leave?”

“Sure, of course!” The girl almost exclaimed as she pointed towards the little hallway which led to the restrooms, “But we’ll be closing in about fifteen minutes, so don’t stay inside for too long.”

“Yeah, I’ll just patch myself up a bit and then go on my way.” I muttered as the girl nodded silently and walked back to the counter while carefully watching me, making me roll my eyes. Okay, I might have been looking like a mess, but I wasn’t a walking bomb—no need for her careful gaze on me. It just made my blood boil as I tried not to stomp while I went inside the restroom, glad that I was alone inside. It was colder in here compared to the diner and I shivered as I realized the window was open. I headed towards the sink, eager to warm up my hands with a little warm water, but I gasped once I saw my reflections in the mirror. Jesus Christ, I looked horrible, no wonder the girl was looking at me like that and asking me to leave—even if the reason was me not having money on me. My hair stuck to my face and looked matted in certain spots. My cheeks were completely flushed with the tip of my nose red as well, and I had dark streaks running down underneath my eyes. I forgot to take off my eyeliner and mascara before going to bed and since they weren’t waterproof—here I was, looking like a character straight out of a fucking horror movie. I chuckled as I turned on the faucet and instantly sighed at the feeling of warm water against my hands, warming my freezing limbs a bit. I quickly gathered water in my palms and splashed it against my cheeks, warming them up as well, sighing in content. I was still shivering, my toes frozen, but this was helping.

『I don't care enough to miss you

After all the shit we've been through

My heart's comatose, comatose』

I let the warm water run as I ran my fingers through my hair, easing the knots in them and trying to make it look presentable as I basically brushed the wet strands back on my head, my hair already curling naturally. The next step was to get rid of the mascara and eyeliner streaks underneath my eyes and even cheek, so I quickly washed them off before turning the faucet off and grabbing some dry towel paper from the holder, drying off my face and hands. I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, realizing that my chest felt so much lighter, there was nothing squeezing against my throat anymore.

“You’re fine,” I whispered to myself, gulping, “Fuck, you’ve got this, you’re okay, Y/N, you are okay. You’ve been pushing your feelings away for too long, of course they blew up in your face, you stupid bitch. I really have to stop doing this to myself, ugh—”

I rolled my eyes as I threw the used towel paper in the trash bin and then looked back at myself in the mirror, narrowing my eyes at myself and pointing a finger threateningly at my reflection, “Stop being a sappy bitch, alright? You��re better than this. Yunho’s got his shit together, why can’t you do the same, huh? Just go out there and find a fucking boyfriend, it’s not that hard—wait, no, actually don’t do that! I don’t need no man, got it? Got it.”

I nodded once firmly, a small grin forcing itself onto my lips, making me scoff at myself—sure, of course, bring Yunho into your peptalk, Y/N, very smart—but I just couldn’t help it. At least I was feeling better now, almost laughing at myself at how stupid I was as I stepped back and pulled my shoulders back, nodding at myself encouragingly. I got this! But now I had to run home in the pouring rain, that thought alone was enough to make me cry again, but I willed myself to stop. No more crying. No more sobbing—especially not because of the pouring rain. It was my mistake that I didn’t check the weather or bring an umbrella. I should’ve just gone to bed when I planned to, damn these stupid thoughts. With a last glance at myself, I decided that I was ready to leave the restroom and head home, my mother probably worried sick about me at this point since my phone wasn’t working either. I walked up to the door and grabbed the doorknob firmly, yanking it open a little bit too enthusiastically, but as I went to step outside, the male’s restroom door right across mine opened as well—and I paused, surprised.

Song Mingi was staring back at me just as surprised as I was.

❱❱ Next chapter

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forthemorefortunate · 3 years

Text

Live Like Animals

Nessian Modern AU

Merry Chris- er, happy New Year to my secret snowflake! @ncssian 💕😅

I hope you like the fic! I’ll be honest, when I filled out the application for the secret snowflake, I said I could make a fic believing that it was very unlikely somebody would ask for one 🥴🤔 But lemme say, I LOVED writing this, which is definitely something I didn’t expect. More than that, I’ve never been much of a Nesta or Nessian fan, but actually thinking through their characters and interactions for this fic gave me a whole new perspective on and appreciation for them (even if I’m not the best at writing their characters, aha), so thank you!

A few quick things about the fic:

(Ik I already told you this, but for anybody else reading this aha) This is my first fic! So please take it easy on me 🥺👉🏻👈🏻

Okay so this part is kind of weird, but there’s kind of a corresponding playlist 😅 Each part is named after a song. You can play the songs while reading or not, I know for me personally (*cough* my ADHD ass) it’s hard to listen to music and read at the same time. The title is also the name of a song! Except that one is more random, haha (I couldn’t think of a title, so I shuffled my entire library and chose the first song as the title, and it kinda worked so I went with it)

One more quick thing – thanks to @moussescientist @ko0mbayamylord @blxckbeak @chanberry @mikitheswiftie @potatoburp @dead-on-the-inside666 @queenoffortunes and two anons for answering a question, and a HUGE thanks to Skye, @oneoutofamillionbooklovers for all your help and for roleplaying the parts I got stuck on with me ❤️

Part 1: Distant Early Warning (Rush)

Nesta pulled the dress over her head, letting it slide into place over her body. Screw this, she thought for the millionth time, yet she continued to get herself ready, turning to glance at her reflection when she was finished. She raised an eyebrow and nodded slightly at the woman looking back through the mirror. The woman Nesta spied had on a satin slip dress, darkest blue. She wore no jewelry save for the small silver studs in her ears, and her hair was pulled into a neat-yet-simple updo.

Why Nesta even agreed to go to this party she didn’t know. There was nothing different about it, just another college booze fest. The music would be too loud, the air too heavy, the guys too grabby, and the company too... clubby. Feyre insisted that she would fit right into her friend group – her clique – but Nesta wasn’t sure she wanted that. She padded over to the door of her apartment. No, Nesta was quite certain that “fitting in” with Feyre’s newfound friends was something she didn’t care for at all.

Nesta’s phone buzzed on her kitchen counter as she slipped on a pair of black heels, and she picked up to Feyre’s forcibly perky voice. “Hey! We just pulled up, you coming?”

“No.” Response blunt, tone dry. The line was silent for a long moment, and Nesta held in a sigh. “Did I give you the impression that I was interested in coming?”

“Nesta, I’m not in the mood for fucking around,” Feyre said, perkiness mysteriously faded now. “It’s just one party! I promise you’ll have fun.” Bullshit.

“Since when have I ever-”

“And everyone else really wants you to come, too!” Feyre cut her off, “Rhys is excited to meet you!”

Rhys. Feyre’s boyfriend. Nesta groaned inwardly, truly dreading any interaction with the rugby star. Feyre had immediately caught the eye of the local heartthrob, and the two began a serious relationship shortly after meeting. And with one came the others. In high school they would have been labeled “popular.” They were quite possibly the closest group of friends at the college, almost all of them having known each other since childhood. And Feyre had slipped right in among them. Nesta had warned Feyre against making the tight pack of fourth-years her main group of friends, and she had her own opinions about a freshman dating a senior, but Feyre didn’t make a habit of following Nesta’s advice. Rather, she seemed to think she could give Nesta – a third-year – much more valuable guidance. Domineering bitch.

“I don’t give a shit about your friends, Feyre. I’m only coming because of our deal,” Nesta said. Feyre had been pestering her all semester, spewing crap about how Nesta and Feyre should spend more time together. Nesta should get out more. Nesta should tag along with Feyre’s friend group. Nesta should have some fun.

More bullshit.

As second semester began, Feyre had proposed a deal: Nesta would go to one party with Feyre and her buddies, and if she honestly didn’t enjoy it, Feyre would stop asking her to join them.

“I’m on my way. Let’s just get it over with,” Nesta grumbled, and with that, she hung up the phone and opened the apartment door.

Part 2: Can You Afford to Be An Individual? (Nothing but Thieves

Nesta looked around the group of fourth-years–plus Feyre–arranged in front of her. Introductions were unnecessary; you couldn’t attend this school without knowing who they were. Her eyes fell first upon Rhys, his arm around Feyre’s waist. His chin lifted slightly as she made eye contact. Rhys: double major in history and foreign policy. President of the astrology club. Captain of the rugby team, possibly one of the best players the school had ever seen. He was the group leader, though nobody said it aloud. Nesta knew him well. Perhaps she only knew his type well, or her own perception of his type, but that didn’t keep her from holding his gaze a few moments longer than would be comfortable. Then she turned her scrutiny on his sidekicks, so she called them, Cassian and Azriel. The former wore jeans and a baggy black jacket over his rugby uniform in the school colors: black and red. The latter wore black pants with a dark blue button-down shirt untucked.

Cassian smirked as her eyes met his. “Glad you decided to make an appearance,” he drawled. She narrowed her eyes at him, and his smile widened in response. Cocky bastard. Azriel, double majoring in political science and criminology, simply nodded at her in greeting.

After the sidekicks came Rhys’s cousin Mor, an architecture major with a minor in design. She was entirely too peppy in a way that left Nesta exhausted, but Nesta wouldn’t give her satisfaction by scoffing at her cocked hip and half-grin, ostensibly projecting confidence. She held Mor’s stare, matching her asserted confidence with a cool security in her own assets. The half-smile twisted, just slightly, and Nesta moved on to the short girl farthest to the right: Amren.

Amren scared people. As in, people were genuinely freaked out by her. Aside from a few cultish tendencies, her occasional propensity for violence and/or verbal outbursts, and her sharp expression, though, Nesta couldn’t tell why. Amren majored in gemology and minored in linguistics, and was the only one in the group other than Feyre to have not known the others since they were little. In fact, she was studying here from abroad, though nobody actually knew where she was from. Unlike Mor, Amren presented a confidence that Nesta could believe in and respect. Nesta maintained her chilled posture, but let the bite in her expression retreat.

As for Feyre’s introducing Nesta, that was unnecessary as well. They all knew her; most upperclassmen did. Or rather they knew of her, by the name of heinous bitch. If she were being honest with herself, she didn’t mind the nickname.

“Okay,” Feyre started, her voice expectant as she tilted her chin to look at Rhys’s face, “Let’s head in?” Feyre, Rhys, and Nesta had met up with the rest of the group in the parking lot before they entered the party. Fashionably late, Feyre had told her on the drive in Rhys’s tesla. Rhys taught me that the key to maintaining his public image is in making grand entrances. God, Nesta wanted to laugh at Rhys’s influence over her.

As they entered the building holding the party Nesta immediately stiffened, and had to close her eyes for a moment against the harsh blue and purple lights cast by PAR cans. All senses at once were smacked by the presence of weed. The floor was vibrating, and speakers blasted near-deafening music so that all Nesta could really hear was thunder. Jesus Christ, I hate parties, she thought. A mass of sweaty bodies shifted and bounced through the too-heavy air ahead of her, some only silhouettes in the murky haze, through which Nesta saw red solo cups littering every possible surface. Suddenly she noticed Feyre standing next to her, fidgeting with her clutch and looking over expectantly. Nesta shot her a withering look that said, “This is not what we agreed to.” Feyre had the nerve to look guilty.

“Okay before you say anything,” Feyre began, “I know that look, and... I know this is a bit bigger than we talked about-”

“A bit?! This is a rager, Feyre. Do I look like I rage?”

“Okay no, but I promise Rhys and I have a plan.” Oh my God.

Nesta gave her another glare and plucked a cup off a nearby table. Sniffing it, she sighed and took a big swig. “Please, my dearest sister, do tell.”

“We’re going with a buddy system.”

Nesta coughed. “A buddy system – are you fucking kidding me?” She spied Rhys and his dickhead friends in the corner of her eye. “Wow, are arts and crafts before or after beer pong?”

Feyre rolled her eyes, calling a fresh wave of frustration to roll over Nesta. “Can you shut it with the attitude, Nesta? I already apologized for the crowd of people – it kind of got out of hand. Rhys told me before we left but I didn’t want to scare you out of coming.” She gave Nesta a pleading look.

“Tch, whatever. Who’s my buddy? I assume you’ll be with Rhys?”

Feyre beamed at her. “You’re paired up with Cassian!”

“Cassian.” Great. Alpha dickhead.

“Don’t be like that. He knows his way around these things and he’ll keep you from accidentally overdosing or blacking out.”

“Who said that wasn’t my intention?”

Feyre scrunched her face up. “Either way, you can’t deny that he’s bigger and taller than half the creepy guys here. He’ll keep unwanted attention away.”

Nesta watched as Rhys, lead hulking rugby bro dickhead, caught sight of her sister and eyed her with what might have been lust or love – Nesta couldn’t decide. Cassian, approaching from Rhys’s side, cut Nesta a slow, purposeful look down and back up to her face. She felt an annoying tingle down her spine as the crowds parted for them. This was going to be a long night.

Part 3: Inhaler (Foals)

They had been at the party for less than ten minutes and Nesta already wanted to leave. Drink in hand, she aimlessly wandered around the outskirts of the crowd, hoping to find a place to sit farther from the lights that drowned out any rational thought that flashed through her brain. Cassian trailed a few steps behind.

“So, what do you do for fun?”

She twisted around to glare at him. “Why are you talking to me?”

Cassian puffed out a laugh and spread his arms wide, responding, “If you don’t recall, we’re kind of stuck together, darling.”

Right. Nesta rolled her eyes. “How could I forget?” Cassian left the question hanging, still following her, so she forged on. “I like to read. A concept that’s probably foreign to you.” She dodged a young couple parting from the fray to make out against the wall, and paused to reorient herself.

“You might be surprised.” Nesta groaned inwardly and arched a brow. “Oh I have no doubt.”

“None at all?”

“What. Are you on volume seven of Captain Underpants?”

“Volume eight, actually.”

Nesta stopped. She was pissed. Pissed at this party, pissed at Feyre for lying about how big it was, pissed that she was stuck with rugby bro sidekick, pissed that the purple lights suddenly seemed a lot brighter, the music a lot louder, her thoughts a lot fuzzier. “Look, Cassian. I only came here as a favor to my sister. We’re not friends.” He started to cut her off, but she continued, turning so that they fully faced each other, “You don’t have to stay, I can take care of myself.”

He leaned in close, the laughter in his tone suddenly gone. “Listen, princess. You’ve had two beers and you’re already tipsy. I get it, we’re not friends. But there are at least four guys looking at you like they want to take you against the nearest surface and I’m the only man within a thirty-foot radius that has any self-control. There’s no way I’m leaving.” He held her gaze firmly.

“So that’s it – I’m just supposed to trust you? My knight in shining armor, here to protect my virtue? That ship sailed a long time ago.” Fuck it. “I wouldn’t mind taking you for a ride though,” Nesta said, flashing a smirk at the end.

Cassian’s lips twisted into a half-grin, but she could see annoyance rising up in his eyes. “Nesta, you don’t wanna play with me.”

“Brute.” Nesta turned and started walking away again.

“Bitch.” He followed.

Nesta scoffed. “How original.”

“Not all of us are English Lit majors.”

Somehow Nesta tripped on her own foot at that moment, staggering sideways into Cassian’s path. He lunged forward, arms going around her waist to hoist her upright. Her lip curled and she spit out, “And not all of us are rugby stars,” and shoved her way out of his arms.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Cassian asked, incredulous.

“Cassian, I’m sure there are plenty of girls here that would love your attention. But I’m not one of them.” She turned around to face him, walking backwards, and almost tripped again. “So go on and play with someone else. I don’t care. Just leave me alone.” With that, Nesta thrust herself into the fray, pushing her way through the mass of shouting people, making the crowd a barrier between herself and Cassian.

Part 4: Emergency (Nothing but Thieves)

After five minutes of random college students bumping into her from every direction, her head pounding and thoughts muddled, Nesta realized she didn’t know which direction the exit was in. Fuck. She was disoriented and exasperated, her frustration now showing in her usually unshakable expression. She couldn’t even tell which direction the light was coming from. How many beers had she drunk? Two? Three? She wasn’t usually a drinker, and it hit her then that she hadn’t eaten for hours before the party started. Stupid, she thought. This was why she didn’t do parties.

She was so distracted trying to figure out where the light source was, trying to get her bearings at least, that she didn’t catch sight of a brooding figure wending its way toward her until the man had a hold of her wrist and was pulling her to the side of the room, wherever that was.

“Hey! Get the fuck off me!” Nesta shouted over the crowd, but couldn’t get a response from the man until they found one of the cinder block walls.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” he asked, his voice cruel as he tried to pull her closer. “We’re just having a bit of fun, that’s all.”

“Excuse me?” Nesta ripped free of his grasp, but he backed her into a corner. He had a drink in one hand. Not good.

“Hey, hey, no need to get worked up,” he drawled, “I saw the way you were looking at me.” Looking at him? Nesta thought. This was the first she’d seen of him.

Nesta tried to step to the side, but the man followed her, his senses keener than hers in her condition. He reached out for her arm again, and Nesta shouted this time. “Don’t touch me!”

He put his hand up as if in innocence. “Come now, I’ll make it fun for you. Just have a drink.” He brought the cup toward her face, his hand now reaching behind her head, which she snatched away.

“I swear to God, can’t you bastards understand that no means no?”

“You-”

“Get the fuck away from me, creep!” She aimed a kick at his groin, but he easily dodged it.

His mouth hardened into a line, and he growled, “Just take the damn drink, bitch!”

The man shoved her into the corner, her head hitting the wall. He brought his hand up to hold her back by her shoulders as he brought the cup up toward her lips and-

“Let me go or I promise you’ll regret it.” Last resort.

He shot her a crooked grin and began to reply, but whatever response he had in mind was cut short.

A voice from behind him said, “And she never goes back on a promise, asshole.” The man was wrenched off her body by two strong hands, and pulled over to the side to give her an out, which she quickly took advantage of.

And there, dragging the man away from her, was Cassian.

The creep tried to play it cool. “Hey, Cassian, bro, what’s up, man?” he said mock-casually, “I caught your last game! great playing, dude!” His demeanor shifted completely as he turned on his bro mode.

Cassian’s jaw was set. He tightened his grip on the man’s shoulder, his stare withering. “You need to leave. Right now.”

Yet the man kept going with a smirk, “It’s all good bro, we can share.”

That was a step too far.

Cassian grabbed the man’s shirt, pulling him close. “That’s the thing – I don’t share. I don’t play nice.” Cassian thrust his face forward so they were only a couple inches apart. “You said you caught my last game, right? So you know I don��t go down without a fight. Touch her again and you’ll regret it.” With that, he shoved the guy into a table, and turned to Nesta. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

Part 5: Before We Drift Away (Nothing but Thieves)

Dizzy and shaken, Nesta let Cassian guide her through the crowd to the exit. Once they were outside in the cool night air, he pulled her aside, gaze dark.

“Did he hurt you?”

“No.”

“Did he force you to drink whatever was in that cup?”

“No.”

His eyes closed and relief flooded across his face. “Good. God, some people are fucked up. I don’t know what I would have done if he had drugged you, or taken you away, or...” He trailed off, leaving anything further than that unsaid.

They were silent for a minute. Nesta looked up at him, a bit of worry still etched across his features. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you care so much?”

He looked over to her, something strange in his expression that Nesta couldn’t place. “I don’t know. You’re a human being, and your safety was left in my hands.” He paused and looked away. “If I’m being honest, when I saw that guy put his hands on you... I don’t know. Something flipped inside me.” At that moment he looked down to her bare shoulders, noticing that she was beginning to shiver. “You’re cold,” he said softly. “Here, take this.” He removed his jacket and draped it over her shoulders, even when she protested.

Nesta frowned as she gave in and pulled his jacket tightly around her, annoyed at the way her body betrayed her. “I don’t need protection. I’ve lived a long time without people to care about me.” She started walking toward the parking lot, and he followed.

“You shouldn’t have to live like that, Nesta. You’ve been pushing me away all night, but listen to me – don’t you understand? I’m not just talking to you because I’m bored. I don’t smile at you as a game, as if you’re some prize for me to win. Can’t you see by now that I’m doing literally everything I can just to stay by your side? Damn it, I asked Feyre to pair us together at the party.”

Nesta had stopped walking and was speechless for once.

Cassian stepped closer tentatively, as though she’d back away. He ran a finger over Nesta’s wrist and looked up to the sky. “Please, just don’t make me say anything else completely insane. I promise I’m not in the habit of sharing intense moments with perfect strangers.”

A rush of anger coursed through Nesta, and she shoved him back. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t talk to me like that. Despite what you must think, I’m not an idiot. I’m not naive. I am well aware that this is all a favor to my sister. Stay with my lame, antisocial sister. It might be fun, right?” She paused, any restraint she had used earlier having completely abandoned her.

“That’s not what I think at all, Nes-”

“Fuck you, Cassian.” She shoved him again, more aggressively this time.

Cassian caught her wrists and pulled her closer. “Try that again.”

Nesta glared. “Bite me,” she spit out.

“Maybe I will.”

And as though drawn to her by some gravitational force, Cassian’s mouth came crashing down onto hers. He wrapped his arms around her waist, seeming to lift her off her feet. Nesta’s bare skin burned where Cassian touched her, and she pushed back against his touch to gain control. Everything, every thought was fading to nothing. Biting down on his lip drew out a low groan from Cassian, and Nesta broke free.

Cassian put his hands up as though to make a barrier between them, as though he wouldn’t be able to control himself without it.

“So much for being the only man with self-control,” Nesta said. Cassian just shook his head, earning a light snort from Nesta. “I shut everyone out--even pretty jocks like you. Don’t take it personally. It’s just easier.”

Cassian smiled his easy smile, and he reached up to touch his lips with a thumb. “You think I’m pretty?”

Nesta scoffed. “The prettiest.”

He stood there for a moment, just smiling at her, before turning back toward the parking lot. “Okay, princess, allow me to introduce you to the pinnacle of after-party activities.”

Nesta raised a brow, and Cassian let out a bark of laughter.

“Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m talking about pancakes.”

She looked skeptical. “Pancakes?”

“Yes. And after the night you had, you deserve an entire plate of them.” Cassian reached out to her with his big, warm hand, and Nesta hesitated.

“Cassian-” She started warily.

“Hey – I’m not asking you to marry me, it’s just pancakes.”

Nesta waited a moment more, then took his hand. “Fine. But I’m not sharing the chocolate sauce.”

“I wouldn’t dare ask you to. Besides, you already know how I feel about sharing.”

Nesta smiled a bit. “Hey Cassian?

“Yes Nesta?”

“Thank you.”

“Anytime.”

70 notes · View notes

wazzupmrstark · 4 years

Text

breaking curfew [part five] || th x reader

A/N: a nice five am update for ya

Summary: When you got the job to be a counselor at the summer camp you’d grown up attending all your life, you expected to see some familiar faces. But you certainly hadn’t counted on having to work alongside the boy who had made it his life’s mission to make your life a living hell every summer. In fact, you thought you’d never have to see Tom Holland again. But he’s is in the cabin right across from yours with campers of his own- smirk, jawline, and all. If you didn’t know any better you might’ve thought that he applied for the position just to spite you, but who were you kidding? What kind of asshole would do something like that?

Warnings: swearing

What I listened to while writing: the breaking curfew playlist by @cinnamon-roll-peter!!

Word Count: 2.1k

Series Masterlist

You stared out at a small cluster of confused faces gathered at the base of the stairs and forced a chuckle, elbowing Tom in the ribs for him to do the same. The two of you had scrambled to clean the art cabin before the campers arrived and you were mostly successful. Mostly. You threw paper towels and clorox at anything with a stain, but had neglected to do anything about your own appearance. The cabin looked spotless, but you and Tom looked like something out of a mishandled coloring book which explained the looks of shock coming from the kids standing before you.

“Hi guys!” you exclaimed cheerfully and beckoned them inside. “Welcome to Arts and Crafts! I’m y/n and this is Tom and we’re so excited to get to spend the summer making cool projects with you guys! In fact, we’re so excited we decided to personify art, hence all the body paint.”

“Um, yeah,” Tom stammered. “We’re the human embodiment of what you’ll all be doing today! Anyone wanna take a guess?”

“Abstract art?” one kid piped up at the same time another one said “making ugly paintings?”

You choked on a laugh while Tom blinked in disbelief. “Not quite, we’re just going to be making regular paintings, but good guesses!”

You directed the campers to the tables and finished washing the brushes you and Tom had used while he showed them how to make hand peacocks.

While the water ran you watched him interact with the kids. He was goofing around with them, pretending to fuck up his painting to make them laugh. It came so naturally to him... and there was that jealousy bubbling up in your chest again, envious over how easily he got along with everyone, not just the campers.

“Those brushes clean enough, y/l/n?”

You looked down into the sink and realized you’d been rinsing the same four paintbrushes for several minutes while you’d been staring at Tom. You grinned sheepishly and turned the faucet off, shaking the brushes dry.

“Whatcha thinkin about?” he asked when you joined him back at the head of the crafts table.

“Hm?”

“You looked pretty lost in thought over there, what were you thinking about?”

“Lunch?” you offered.

He looked like he didn’t believe you but didn’t push any further, just smirked. “Figures.”

Fy looked amused when you approached him in the mess hall at lunch.

“I’m so sorry about your shirt,” you apologized weakly, staring down at the paint stains.

He shrugged and brushed it off easily. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I am worried about it!” you argued. “You were nice enough to lend me your shirt and Tom had to go and ruin it-”

“Oh, this is Holland’s doing?” Fy asked, raising an eyebrow. “Yeah, we’re running the arts and crafts activity together,” you muttered.

“I should’ve known, this has his name written all over it.”

“Thought you guys were friends.”

Fy shrugged. “More or less.”

You wanted to ask what that meant, but your campers were calling for you from the table.

“I’ll wash the shirt and get it back to you good as new, promise.”

“I told you, it’s not a big deal, y/n,” he insisted.

“I’m still gonna do it.”

He smiled. “I know.”

“Catch you later?” you asked, liking the feeling of familiarity between the two of you.

“Showers? Same time as always?”

You felt your face heat up as you walked away, hoping none of the other counselors had overheard and gotten the wrong idea.

“Are you okay, y/n?” Amalia asked as soon as you sat down with them. “You’re all sweaty.”

Damn these kids didn’t miss anything.

“Yeah, I’m fine, just a little warm,” you lied. “Why don’t you girls tell me about your activities today?”

You zoned out as they talked, only half listening to their stories about archery and volleyball. You knew you should pay better attention, they were your campers after all, but you couldn’t stop thinking about this morning with Tom. It had gone weirdly better than you expected, and maybe it was just a fluke, but it was kind of nice. You almost let yourself think that maybe the summer wouldn’t be so bad after all. If you didn’t know Tom you might have actually believed it.

“Up and attem, girls!” you called out and flicked the lights on only to be met with a chorus of groans and protests.

It was only the fourth day and they were already exhausted. The newness of camp had worn off and routine was beginning to settle in. You knew they’d get used to the constant excitement of camp life soon, but there was always an adjustment period. It didn’t help that you had to get them up early today either.

You had to get them up half an hour earlier than usual for mess hall duty. Every cabin was assigned at least one breakfast, lunch, and dinner throughout the summer to do mess hall duty, usually with another cabin, and today just so happened to be Cabin 11’s breakfast shift.

“Come on!” you tried again, shaking Grace and Theo who still had their eyes stubbornly shut tight. “We’ve gotta get to the mess hall in five minutes! No one can eat without us!”

You managed to get them all out of the cabin in seven minutes, which was honestly more impressive than you were expecting, but it still meant you were running late.

Harrison and his campers were already gloved up and ready to go when you finally burst into the mess hall with your five campers in tow.

“Nice of you to join us,” Haz scoffed cooly once he laid eyes on you.

You rolled yours in return. “You think I’d miss out on an opportunity to work with you? I never turn down charity work.”

You caught a hint of a smile. “Good one.”

While Harrison was an asshole he was nowhere near as insufferable as his partner in crime and the two of you had always at least seemed to have an understanding when you were younger. You wouldn’t bother him if he wouldn’t bother you. That could only last for so long.

You instructed your girls to get some hand sanitizer from the dispenser and grab a pair of latex gloves from the box- all except May. Latex wasn’t an allergy listed on her paperwork, but you gave her the special rubber gloves just in case.

Harrison’s boys took the lead and started sorting silverware, showing your girls how to do it as they worked. They were only a little older than your campers, third or fourth grade, but they were patient with the girls. When Grace jammed the napkin dispenser her partner showed her how to fix it without getting frustrated. And when Eva dropped a tub of spoons all over the ground her partner helped her pick them up instead of making her do it herself. They were polite and responsible... and nothing like Harrison.

How had he ended up with such well-behaved kids? Either he played fuckboy way too well or he’d just gotten lucky. You were willing to bet on the latter.

“Tom told me you guys are doing arts and crafts together?” Harrison prodded as the two of you watched the kids work.

“Yeah,” you narrowed your eyes, “what’s he said about it?”

“Not much, just mentioned it in passing. How do you feel about it?”

“Like I’d tell you,” you scoffed.

“What’d I do?”

“You don’t think I learned my lesson in seventh grade when you told the whole music class I could play a Kesha song on the recorder? I told you that in confidence! You can’t keep a secret to save your life, Haz, and you’re a double agent no less.”

Harrison pretended to gasp and put a hand to his heart. “Smart and pretty? Who would’ve guessed?”

“Flattery will get you nowhere.”

He took the bait and leaned in, quirking an eyebrow. “Then what will?”

You ignored him and straightened up. “So how’s Nicole?”

That snapped him out of it. “What?”

“You know, the girl you’ve been pining over for the better part of a decade?”

“She wants nothing to do with me,” he said simply with a shrug, not denying your previous statement.

“Maybe that’s just because you want something to do with everyone else?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

You held your hands up in surrender. “I’m just saying, she’s not going to wait around forever.”

“And who says she is now?”

“I’m not!” you insisted. “I can’t pretend to know what Nicole is thinking, I’m just saying that you shouldn’t keep dragging it out if you’re not going to do anything about it. It’s not fair to her.”

Harrison sighed and crossed his arms. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I am.”

“Says the girl that openly admitted to playing Kesha on the recorder.”

“I didn’t openly admit it! I told you, Harrison, and you openly admitted it to the whole class!”

“The details aren’t important.”

“I think we should do mess hall duty every morning,” Grace announced as your cabin sat around the breakfast table later that morning.

“Why’s that?”

“Because Grace has a crush on Will,” Theo answered simply as if the answer was obvious.

Grace shot daggers at Theo from behind her bowl of cereal. “No, I just think it was fun.”

“Sure,” Eva chimed in sarcastically. “Doing the dishes is my favorite thing to do too.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get to do mess hall duty with Harrison’s cabin a few more times this summer, Gracie. But if you really like doing dishes I can always request that you be an assistant in the dining room every meal-”

“Nope!” Grace shouted, cutting you off. “I’m good!”

You smiled and nodded. “Okay, well let me know if you change your mind.”

Four days turned into five, and five turned into a week, and soon enough things were starting to feel normal. You got used to doing arts and crafts with Tom in the morning and spending free times with Z. You lifeguarded and helped plan excursions and cheered your team on during games for the competition. Even when they were losing- which was a lot. Rock climbing, scavenger hunt, manhunt, geocaching, all Ls.

They always got so down after losing a competition and all you could do was offer empty promises about how the next time would be different. They were tired of hearing it and you were tired of saying it.

Still, even though sweeping the entire competition was seeming less and less likely, you wanted to win at least one contest for your girls.

“You get the chalk, I’ll grab the hoola hoops!”

What had started off as a beautiful sunny day had quickly turned around to be dreary and overcast. You and Tom decided to take Arts and Crafts outside for the day so the kids could enjoy the weather, but dark clouds started rolling in as soon as you stepped outside.

Now it was pouring, and you and Tom had to scramble to get everything inside. You watched the colorful chalk portraits bleed off the sidewalk and into the gutter as you gathered up what was left of the pieces, feeling a little bit sad you hadn’t been able to capture them with pictures before they were ruined like you were planning.

All the kids were already gone. They’d run off to lunch when it started raining, but Tom was already up under the awning with all of the hoola hoops and jump ropes waiting for you. You tucked all the little chalk pieces into your shirt and raced up the steps to join him before retreating to the warmth inside.

You dumped the chalk on the first craft table, ignoring the stains it left on your shirt while Tom put the toys away in the closet. In the distance, thunder rumbled.

“Fuck, they’re going to lockdown the camp aren’t they?” you groaned, not wanting to be stuck with Tom for the duration of the storm.

“If the lightning gets any closer, definitely.”

“I don’t suppose it’ll go away if we ask it nicely?”

“Not how storms work, but I respect the grind.”

You slouched over into a stool and rested your head in your hands with your elbows on the table. The rain didn’t seem like it was going to be letting up any time soon meaning the entire schedule was going to be skewed- not to mention you were going to have to spend God knows how long locked up in this cabin with Tom Holland. “Fuck me.”

“Maybe later.”

You raised your head the tiniest bit and glared bitterly. “Wasn’t talking to you.”

“I’m the only one here.”

“Still applies.”

“Ouch.” There was a beat, then, “so you’re saying if we were the only two people left on earth, or a deserted island or something, you wouldn’t-”

“Can we not do this right now?” you sighed, rubbing your temples.

Tom chuckled indignantly and shook his head. “Jeez, no wonder your kids think you’re no fun.”

You whipped around immediately. “What the fuck did you just say?”

lmk what you think i always appreciate feedback!!

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sprnklersplashes · 3 years

Text

work-love balance (rejanis one shot)

There are a number of reasons Regina wishes she didn’t have this job.

For one, the uniform is gross. And yeah the uniform is just an apron but it’s a gross apron. It’s navy, that’s all that needs to be said about it. Second, she’s realised she hates dealing with people. Not all people, there are a few that are okay, but some people are just so, so hard. And since she’s already on her second warning from her manager, she can’t tell someone to shove it whenever they snap their fingers at her, or don’t say thank you, or refuse to tip. She just has to swallow her pride, paint a smile on her face and complain when it’s quiet. Thirdly, it’s coming up to Christmas now which means she has to deal with Mariah Carey being played on a constant loop or six hours straight and not even Jolly St Nick himself could put up with that.

And fourth and most important; it eats into her Janis time.

Senior year is hard for both of them, especially now with finals coming up and work starting on their college applications. Janis is swamped with artwork, her hands constantly covered in paint, and Regina can barely breathe with all the assignments she has to get done. Where weekends were once for movie nights and coffee dates are now booked through with studying and projects and their conversations happening almost completely through the phone. They kept themselves busy enough earlier, with Regina’s lacrosse and Janis’ various extracurriculars, but now it seems that neither one can fit the other into their schedule. And believe it when they say they’re trying.

“Okay,” Janis sighs. They sit at an empty cafeteria table, a soft silence about the room at this early hour. Since the only time they see each other is in school, they agreed to come in early to try to work some sort of plan out. Regina was fine with it because she’d have been up anyway, Janis on the other hand was a little harder to persuade. A little begging, a lot of pleading, and a promise of a coffee on her swung it in the end. “Okay, so Monday is out, you have lacrosse training. Tuesday I have to study for my biology final. What about Wednesday?”

“I can’t,” she sighs. “Group project to work on. And then job-work after that. Thursday?”

“The talent show has their tech rehearsal. And they need the whole team down there.” Janis takes a long drink of her coffee, a scowl etched onto her face. Regina knows Janis loves doing the techy stuff for the school shows, and she outdoes herself every year, but she simply wishes that this year she’d have skipped it. Regardless of how good it looks on the college application. “Friday night?”

“More lacrosse practice,” Regina grumbles. “And I’m working.”

“Saturday and Sunday?”

“Work, work, work. Both in the school and the job.” Her head falls onto her arms, a low groan emitting from her and shaking the table. She feels Janis’ hand on her back making soft, reassuring pats and it makes her feel a little better, especially with her girlfriend mutters “there, there” in a half-joking, half-serious way that only Janis could pull off. A smile curls on her mouth, even if it’s muted by the rest of her frustrations.

“I just miss you,” she says, her head back up. “I miss how things used to be with us. You know…” She grins slyly, her finger tracing across the table until it reaches Janis’. “You and me. My room. Laptop between us.” Her fingers slowly interlink with Janis’ and she watches as the faintest hint of a blush creeps across her girlfriend’s cheeks. “Your head on my shoulder… us sharing the same blanket.”

“Stop,” she says softly, her voice so close to a plea. “You’re making me nostalgic.” She lets out a wistful sigh then, her thumb rubbing the back of Regina’s hand and sending goosebumps up her arms. “I miss you too. I mean who else is going to stop me from going crazy?”

“Thought that was Damian’s job.”

“Damian’s job is to keep me crazy.” She winks then and now it’s Regina’s turn to blush. “Your job is to keep me crazy.”

“My mistake,” she chuckles. Janis lifts her hand and presses a kiss to her fingers, her eyes never leaving hers, telling her she’s forgiven.

There’s a sort of breathless excitement she’s started feeling since dating Janis, and it comes in the small moments like this. Those moments have been so few and far between recently that Regina’s almost forgotten what that felt like, but here it is. The way her heart picks up just slightly, the way her veins seem to hum beneath her skin, the little soft feeling that unfurls in her stomach, all making her feel good-really, truly good-for the first time in a long, long time.

It doesn’t last long though, the bell ringing rudely and cutting into their alone time, and so they head off together, pinkie fingers linked, both hoping that somehow, they’ll find more time this week. She knows that it’s not likely, but if her relationship with Janis has taught Regina anything, it’s that miracles can happen. Sometimes they just need a little push.

Regina spies her opportunity for a ‘little push’ on Friday night. As per usual, the mall is absolutely packed with Christmas shoppers-parents buying for kids, teens getting Secret Santas and young men trying desperately to find a good gift for a girl who probably expects a ring. The mall is utterly flooded with people everywhere you look and that means that the line for Regina’s little milkshake shop is at least a mile long. She’s not been here an hour and both she and her colleague, a little wisp of a thing named Clara, both have headaches from the amount of screaming children and her cheeks sting from the smile plastered on her face. She’s been keeping score since she got here and so far there’s been three assholes telling them to hurry up and two Karens chastising her for her lack of customer service skills.

She wishes so badly she didn’t need this job, otherwise she’d flip each and every one of them off. Or, she would if she could remember their faces, but as she takes orders and turns around they all blend into one, and she doesn’t see them again until she’s shouted “small Skittles shake!” for the third time and the owner finally, finally comes forwards.

So all in all, she’s exhausted.

“Seriously,” she pants when she line dies down. “Who the heck wants milkshakes in December? Or ice cream? Why do we still sell that.”

“The kids,” Clara explains with a vague wave. “You know… kids like ice cream. And parents just want to shut them up.”

“Reminds me why I’m never having kids,” she scoffs and Clara actually laughs at that. She’s not so bad, not at all. She’s good fun and she’s nice, which is all you could want in a work buddy.

They serve the last few customers, and Regina wonders if she’ll actually be able to take a break, run down to the food court and get herself a sandwich, only to look up and find the manager appearing in front of them, carrying two cardboard boxes on his shoulder.

“You said you were running out of cones?” he asks.

“Did we?” She turns and looks and yep, their supply of cones has dwindled to almost nothing at all. Clara must have find a second, if even, to send him a text. “Oh yeah, thanks.”

“How have things been over here?”

“Well we’re alive,” Regina sighs. “Barely, but we’re alive. We made a lot of money if that’s what you’re interested in.”

“Oh, sounds good,” he says. “And Regina… you’re good to close up shop?”

“Yes I am,” she says through gritted teeth. He nods at that and gives her a brief, clipped thank you before asking her for the delivery receipts and heading on his merry way, back to his comfy office and his comfy office chair while they remain on their feet for the next few hours, serving customer after customer until they collapse. And then, with Clara leaving soon (she deserves it after all), Regina’s left to shut down all by herself…

Hang on. Lightbulb moment.

“Clara.” She grabs the other girl by the shoulder, her eyes wide and a smile tugging on the corners of her lips. “Can you hold the fort down while I go on my break?”

The girl hasn’t even finished saying ‘sure’ before Regina is gone, flying down the halls and pushing past people as fast her legs can carry her, her months of lacrosse training finally being useful. She makes a quick pitstop at the foodcourt and grabs herself some dinner before sitting down at an empty table and whipping her phone out, mistyping the number twice in her excitement.

Janis picks up on the second ring and that’s still not fast enough.

“Regina?”

“Hey,” she says through a mouthful of noodles, a small prick of anxiety in her gut. “Okay, so what are you doing tonight?”

“Um, nothing I guess,” she says. “Homework, art, watching Netflix. Why?”

“Because I have an idea,” she begins. “For us.”

“Oh do share.”

“It’s a surprise.” She can practically see Janis’ face falling. She hates surprises, and that’s what makes this fun. “I just need you to trust me on this.”

“Okay… I trust you,” she says in the least-convincing voice Regina has ever heard.

“Perfect,” she says. “Just get here late and hang around until 9 okay?”

“9? The mall closes at 9.”

“9:15 actually.” She wolfs down some more noodles. “Just be subtle when you get in here, okay? Be sneaky.”

“And then you’ll reveal to me your mysterious plan?”

“I promise.” She hears Janis laughing then and oh what that sound does to her heart.

“Okay. I better get some studying done then before I get there.”

“And I need to finish my food. Oh and Janis-” she interjects. “Bring your laptop. And your charger. Just in case, you know?”

And it’s the long, confused ‘okay’ from Janis that makes this all so worthwhile.

The mall is practically deserted when Regina switches off the sign and gets out the brush and pan. Normally the clean-up process is painfully slow, what with the dozens of things that need doing and Regina feeling utterly drained by the end of the night. But tonight she’s found a source of energy she didn’t know she had, one that has everything to do with her girlfriend, and she wipes down surfaces and brushes the floors in double quick time and throws things in the fridge with no rhyme or reason. She sprints out to the dumpster with the trash and back again in less than ten seconds, determined that nothing and no-one cuts into her time with Janis. She’s so focussed on her mental to-do list that she doesn’t even notice a person coming up behind her, not until she hears those dreaded words-

“Hi can I get a large Reese’s milkshake?”

Oh for the love of-

But her rant is stopped entirely when she turns and sees only Janis, chuckling on the opposite side of the counter, hair slightly damp and her backpack on her shoulders, a self-satisfied gleam in her eyes.

“Asshole,” she sighs. “That’s what you are. An absolute asshole.” She waves her hand. “Come on in, asshole.”

“Oh someone’s been busy,” she comments. “You know, I did get a little worried when I didn’t receive one snapchat from you about how much you hate the closing shift.”

“Oh shut up.” She checks that the coast is clear and then pulls down the shutter, with them still inside. Thankfully she had the foresight to slip the stepstool underneath it, preventing them from being shut in completely, but Janis’ eyebrows still shoot up, her mouth hanging half-open in a silent scream of oh my god my girlfriend’s finally lost it.

“Regina…” she begins. “Please look me in the eyes and tell me you are not locking me in a milkshake store with you. Please, tell me that.”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m not locking us in. What I am doing is having an amazing idea for a date night.”

“Which is…” Regina gestures around them.

“Look around,” she says. “We’re alone. We have all the ice cream we can eat. We have sparkly lights. And you have your laptop, so we can whack on something cute. Or something dark if you’re into it.” She shrugs. “I thought if my job interrupts our dates, maybe we could have a date at work.”

For two seconds, maybe less, a cold fear washes over her as she waits for Janis’ reaction. Maybe this is too far, maybe she already had plans, maybe she doesn’t want to sit on a dirty floor with her.

Or maybe, she’s throwing her arms around her and the force of her body is throwing them back. Maybe she’s giggling into her shoulder and rocking the two of them gently, her smile brighter than any of the lights and sweeter than any of the candy around them.

“This is amazing,” she whispers. “You’re amazing. Maddening and possibly crazy, but amazing.”

She kisses her then and Regina wonders how she can still get butterflies in her stomach, even now.

They sit down on the floor, using their jackets as impromptu blankets, and Regina grabs some ice cream from the freezer, settling on Rocky Road after some deliberation, while Janis opens up her laptop. The heat from the computer contrasts with the coldness of the ice cream, both balanced across their legs, and it’s an odd sensation to say the least, but Regina doesn’t care. They keep the ice cream close by and the toppings even closer; Janis has already covered her servings in chocolate sauce, and of course, rainbow sprinkles. The opening credits of To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before play onscreen, which Janis swears she only watches because Regina likes it so much, but she’s heard the muffled squeals behind her hand. She knows how she feels and one day she’ll get her to admit it.

But for now she just leans her head on Janis’ shoulder and snuggles into her. Janis presses a kiss to her head, slow and soft and so precious and Regina concludes that if they get trapped in here overnight, it won’t be so bad. Not if there’s Janis.

#rejanis #regina x janis #regina george #janis sarkisian #mean girls broadway #mean girls musical #just posted rejanis for the first time #*runs away into the night*

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ratchedspeach · 4 years

Note

Can you write a one shot about Cat and Jade being cute and in love?

Oh who am I to say no to this! Get ready for fluff with a lil bit of angst (cause I’m still me teehee) … In which Cat hates studying, and Jade has had way too much coffee

La Lune et Les Etoiles

In which Jade is an insanely passionate student, and Cat is not.

She might be the only person Cat knew that loves finals week. Jade sat cross legged on a chair, her purple-streaked curls pulled into a messy ponytail and her eyes trained on the novella La Salle de Bain by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. She had dragged Cat there to help her do research for their French final, which Cat had agreed to after enough threats to her immediate bodily safety from her morbid but mostly harmless friend. Cat hated finals - hated school in general, really, which only made her hate being in the Hollywood Arts High School’s surprisingly dull library past 1:00 in the morning on a Friday night that much more.

“Are you planning on actually reading it?” Jade inquired, taking a sip from her fourth cup of coffee since they’d been there, but never looking up from her own book.

Cat looked at the book in her own hands - Dans La Café de la Jeunesse Perdue by Patrick Modiano. They were comparing the dichotomy of French gender roles throughout the decades by analyzing famous philosophic, literary works. It had been Jade’s idea, obviously, and Cat had only gone along when she’d finally promised that she would write the paper on her own if she would agree to at least help with research.

“It’s in French.” Cat pouted, bending the corners of a few delicate pieces of paper with her index finger.

That got Jades attention. She peaked her eyes out from behind her already half-finished book, quirking an eyebrow. “So?”

“I speak English.”

“Cat, the project is for our French class.” Jade addressed, a sinking feeling settling in her stomach when she realized she knew exactly where this conversation was going.

Cat nodded, adding an airy “yeah.”

“We ... It’s supposed to be in French.” Jade folded the corner of her page down before placing the book on the desk separating the two of them. “Can you ... do you not ... Cat, please tell me you can actually speak - oh forget it.” She placated, bringing her thumb and index finger to clamp down on the bridge of her nose.

“I’m sorry,” Cat spilled, “I tried to tell you that I wasn’t very good at this.”

“Cat,” Jade cautioned, her eyes burning with an amalgam of frustration, and what Cat could only explain as ... humor...? “this is an upper level literature course. One of the requirements is speaking French. How did you even get in!?”

It earned them a hush from the librarian, which earned her Jade’s loudest, most melodramatic groan. This was all just getting to be a little too cliche for her. She had agreed to be partners with the red head because out of everyone in that class, she was the person that Jade hated the least. She had known that it would mean doing the bulk of the work - not because she thought Cat wasn’t smart; as a matter of fact when she applied herself, Jade was often shocked at what the girl had to say. No, rather she knew because she had seen Cat’s performance throughout the semester, thus knew how much she struggled with the language. She just ... hadn’t realized the full extent of it.

Cat bit her lip, averting her own gaze from the brooding girl across from her. “You sounded excited when I said I was gonna be in it. I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

“Okay, first of all, nothing excites me.” Jade griped, ignoring the color that rose in her pale cheeks. “And second of all, I wouldn’t have told you to take it if I knew you couldn’t actually speak French!”

Cat’s usually sunny features drew into a childish glower. “You were excited.”

“Excitement is for man children.”

“Sikowitz is always excited.”

“Point and case.” She gloated with a smirk.

Jade could hold a grudge against anyone, but when she harrumphed softly, crossing her pink sweater adorned arms across of her stomach, her smiled tugged a little harder at the corners of her mouth. There was no use being angry with Cat - it was like trying to be upset with rain for falling - it didn’t know better, and neither did she.

“Look, it’s fine.” Jade sighed, rolling her eyes and pulling her hair out of the ponytail. “I’ll do the project, and Mme. Chopain doesn’t need to know a thing. I promise.”

Jade tossed her now loose curls over her left shoulder, bringing her fingers to massage the roots of her hair and tussle them softly. Cat watched, her warm caramel eyes fixed on they way her fingers skillfully moved through her dark locks. It did not go unnoticed by the goth, who felt something in her stomach flutter. She took a deep breath, pulling her fingers out of her hair and bringing both hands to cup her now lukewarm coffee mug. The library had a small vending machine which dispensed one dollar cups of the stuff, and while it wasn’t to the standard of the countless artisanal shops in the LA area, it was enough to keep her wired, and that’s all Jade really cared about.

“Thank you.” Cat intoned, the last of her pout melting away back into a sheepish smile.

Jade watched the redhead, a flash of something warm streaking through her eyes before they settled into her usual, deliberate glare. She worried her bottom lip between her teeth for a moment as though she were about to say something, before shrugging slightly and burying her nose back in the text.

“What?” Cat queried, leaning in across the desk and placing her chin gently on her folded arms.

Jade bristled slightly. “Nothing.” She snapped. “I’m just stressed now, that’s all.”

The other girl studied her for a moment, because it wasn’t anger she sensed in her. It was … something else. Cat worried her bottom lip between her teeth, continuing to examine Jade, who had noticed her interested, which only made the color in her cheeks rise further.

“You’re being weird.” Cat noticed airily, twisting a few pieces of hair between her fingers.

Jade’s brow furrowed. “I am not!” She exclaimed, earning her another shush from the after-hours librarian. “Shush me again, and I’ll strangle you with your dollar store wig!”

They were kicked out of the library immediately, much to Cat’s delight. The Hollywood Arts parking lot stretched drearily in front of them - a fresh blanket of mist causing it to glint in the early morning light. Cat checked her pear phone for the time. 3:13 a.m. She rubbed at her eyes before glancing at Jade, who was rummaging through her cluttered backpack for the keys to her yellow VW Bug (It would never not make Cat giggle a little to see the otherwise monochrome girl in her all-too vibrant, all-too girlie car).

“I can drive you home if you want.” Cat offered as Jade threw her bag on the ground in a fit of frustration and what she could only assume was coffee-induced adrenaline.

Jade didn’t respond. It was now her turn to press the palms of either hand to her eyes, heaving a low sigh as she sat on the curb, her legs stretched onto the empty street. Cat bit the inside of her cheek, uncertain of whether that was supposed to be a yes or a get the hell out of here. She chose to assume the former, mimicking the other girl’s movement, and sitting delicately next to her. Jade shifted slightly as she felt her friends hip graze her own when she sat down.

Cat noticed.

“Planning on sleeping here?” She asked, only half joking, before adding, “I think my cot is still in the attic.”

Jade smiled softly. “Well I can’t sleep.” She admonished, pulling her hair back into the ponytail she had started the night in. “Too much coffee. So I might as well…”

“What?”

Jade shrugged, but didn’t respond, because honestly, she wasn’t sure. She was too tired to study, and too wired on black coffee to sleep. She hadn’t planned on getting kicked out of the library. Come to think of it, she hadn’t exactly planned on doing the work of a two-person AP French Lit exam all on her own. Jade felt the tension in her chest grow as her breath hitching dangerously in her throat, and apparently so did Cat, because before she could process what was happening, the redhead was pulling her head onto her shoulder, stroking the goth’s hair, and apologizing.

“I should’ve told you I couldn’t speak French.” Cat whispered.

She smelled like a mix of peppermint and lavender, and it made whatever anxiety was bubbling in Jade’s stomach almost completely disappear. “It’s ok.” She whispered as her breath came back to even. “I should’ve known better than to think you did.”

Cat giggled, and Jade matched her, pulling her head off of her shoulder to meet her gaze. Their laughs dissipated into a heavy silence. Cat watched as Jade’s smile fell into an uncertain glower, the light behind her eyes glinting with a mixture of deviance and … could that be … Is she scared? Cat thought, before something flared in her mind.Oh shit. Am I? Cat thought she should look away - thought that holding the gaze of her fickle friend could only lead to empty, but still terrifying threats of violence. She knew Jade.

Or … so she thought.

It caught her completely off-guard, therefore, when what came from Jade’s lips wasn’t incitements of bodily harm, when it wasn’t anything coming from them at all, but when it was just … her lips - soft, and gentle, and tasting of rose-tinted lip balm. Cat’s eyes went wide for a moment before a flood of warmth starting from her mouth and radiated through her body, and her eyes closed and she just reveled in it. They sat like that for a moment, Cat’s arms coming across Jade’s shoulders, and Jade’s awkwardly at her side as though she still wasn’t sure if she was allowed to touch the redhead.

The kiss lasted no more than a minute. Jade was the one to start it and to end it - pulling away with her eyes still closed like she couldn’t believe that she had just … that she …

“Shit.” Jade breathed, alarm sounding through her entire body.

Cat watched her, the fingers of her left hand coming up to touch her now lips in disbelief, wide-eyed, and still warm, and wishing that she could kiss her again. “That was …”

“Shit.”

They looked at each other for a moment longer before a smile pinched the dimples on Cat’s cheeks, and Jade’s heart fluttered desperately. It scared Cat a little to see her so uncertain, because it was the very opposite of the behavior that she had come to expect from the brooding teen. She placed her fingertips on the pavement, allowing them to brush against Jade’s, and watching as her lips pursed into a tentative smile that resembled more of a smirk.

“I didn’t know you were …” Cat trailed off when the dark haired girl shook her head.

“I … didn’t really know either.” She admitted, before adding in flustered babble. “I mean, I knew, I just … I … I hadn’t planned on …”

Jade trailed off, bringing the hand not touching Cat’s to smack her forehead as she continued to fight for the right words. The redhead smiled sheepishly, her chest fluttering as she watched the other girl. The smile fell, though, when she saw the tears rimming her lash line as she desperately tried to blink them away.

“J-Jade…?” Cat pulled her hand fingers to fully lace between her friend’s (if she could still really call her that).

“My parents don’t know.” Jade whispered, sucking in a sharp, shuddered breath.

“Neither do mine.”

“Beck doesn’t know.”

“… oh.” She’d forgotten about him.

They sat in silence for a moment, Jade still holding back tears, and Cat watching her like she might disappear altogether if she so much as blinked. Their fingers stayed entangled, both of them grasping onto the other like it was the only thing grounding them to earth. Jade felt like she was flying as the mixture of angst and utter joy jumbled in the pit of her stomach. She had never thought about what her first kiss with a girl would be like. She had always known that she wanted to have one, but she hadn’t expected it to be so … gentle, so exquisitely delicate and easy. Jade realized that a large part of that had to do with who she was kissing. Cat - all smiles and sunshine and utter bliss. Jade wished it could be simple, wished so desperately that they could just kiss and have it mean nothing more, but she knew it couldn’t be left at just that. Cat, on the other hand, blinded by her positive (dare Jade say … naive?) outlook on the world, was over the moon and nothing more. Jade envied her for that.

“There’s a saying in French,” She changed the subject, eyes still fixed on the empty school lot, “la lune et les etoiles tout ensemble.”

Cat had never heard her speak French, and it took her breath away - the way the words flowed and flickered between her teeth, and the expulsion of breath that perfected her accent.

“What does it mean?” She asked blithely.

Jade looked at her, eyes ablaze with too many different things for Cat to comprehend. She wondered how someone could feel so many things at once, how she could fit everything into her slender frame.

“The moon and stars all in one.” Jade smiled faintly, perhaps even a little sadly, before placing her head once more on the other girl’s shoulder.

Cat didn’t know how to respond, so she didn’t, welcoming the contact and the warmth that once more radiated throughout her body. They sat like that until dawn, watching the stars fade into the glow of morning, and letting the rest of the world slip away.

At least for a little while.

#you don't know me #nat writes #cat valetine #jade west #victorious #one shot #fanfic #fluff #angst #cade #cat/jade #i loved writing thus #might turn it into a larger fic tbh

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weenietowne · 5 years

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October 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the Quest for Glory video game series, so what better time to write a bunch of words about it?

It was a game that I played at just the right time in my life to embed itself into my psyche. I was already a lifelong devotee to the Sierra adventure games at the tender age of 12. I learned to type by guiding Rosella via text parser around the land of Tamir to save her father. I read the King’s Quest Companion until the covers fell off. I subscribed to Sierra On-Line magazine, and was briefly pen pals with Roberta Williams (and once received a phone call, to the surprise of my mother who did not know why an adult woman was calling her 10 year old daughter). It was in the Sierra On-Line magazine that I first noticed an ad for the Quest for Glory Collection.

I saw the game one day at the mall with my dad, and casually asked him to get it for me. I wasn’t really expecting much, but hey, it might be fun. Previous references to the series had always looked too grown up to interest me, but now I was a pre-teen! I was ready for cool fantasy action!

I started up the first game in the Collection and was instantly hooked by a deeper fantasy world than anything I’d ever played in before. I could click on anything and get a funny description, I could get lost in the forests of Spielburg, and I could daydream about the bigger world that this little game alluded to.

And the best part? That bigger world was right around the corner in the next game. My hero and I journeyed together from one land to the next, in each game reading about the other far away kingdoms that lay ahead of us in our adventures. We jumped from game to game together while getting stronger and wiser, and his friends and enemies went on our journey with us, living their lives in what felt like anything but a static game world.

Full disclosure: I found these particular pixels very handsome at 12 years old.

They were the last games that I played with my childhood best friend before we drifted apart. We would huddle around my computer all night, walking my hero into traps and laughing at all the funny death messages (this is where I learned the word strychnine). We copied the games onto her computer so she could do the other character class paths- I always went for mages and paladins, while she was more of a rogue type. Since then, there has been a litany of people that I have tried to suggest them to, but a 30 year old adventure game series is a hard sell for a lot of people. My first boyfriend, a friend or two, and my husband make up the entire list of people who got through the first game at my behest and then never continued. They just can’t quite see what I see in these dated little games...but then again, they only played the first one. The first in a series is rarely the star of the show. I wonder if they saw the puns scattered liberally about, the fairly straightforward fantasy quest, and decided that was probably all that was there.

They never went through getting the Prophecy at the Temple of Sekhmet, a somewhat fourth-wall breaking event that felt like it wasn’t just judging the character in the game, but peeking out to the player and asking who they really wanted to be. Or being beguiled by Ad-Avis, an unsettling event playing on the dissonance between the hero’s happily altered perception and the player’s own knowledge of the terrible trap they are both being led into. They never even walked around the savannah for days without any rations in the inventory only to accidentally stumble upon the Awful Waffle Walker, saviour of hungry heroes across the land.

If you know the flame dart spell you can toast him before eating him.

They certainly never saw my hero slowly fall in love with Erana as he finds sanctuary in her gardens, or found themselves befriending monstrous women like the Rusalka, and Baba Yaga - ladies who are as charming as they are absolutely willing to kill you. The women of the series are a standout- and not just for the time that the games were made in. They are varied and memorable and fun, sometimes allowed to be vulnerable in a very human way, and never there just to be a checkbox for the hero to rescue or win (ok, I guess there is one woman who is literally a tree that you can revive, but even Julanar is interesting). A friend of mine remarked several years ago that she never liked being a girl while growing up, because there were never any cool girls in tv shows or video games. It had not occurred to me until then that all of my favorite things as a kid were created by women, and I had never felt left out the way that my friend did. While Quest for Glory obviously had to cater to its most visible audience of young men, the hand of Lori Cole is strong at the helm beside her husband’s.

...which isn’t to say there’s no romancing cute girls. Hey, who can’t enjoy that?

I said earlier that I played it at the precise age for it to imprint on my brain. When I was in eighth grade, and right after the release of the last entry to the series in 1998, I began drawing my first comic series. It starred my hero (who in my game was named Mir) and a companion, a gnome girl based on myself (also named Mir).

Yes, it was completely dreadful.

I’m still working on it, though.

The story that I’m writing now is unrecognizable from the goofy gag strips that were so funny to me and my friends, but there is still a character named Erana, and there is still a hero that looks essentially unchanged from the paladin that I traveled around Glorianna with. Anyone looking at it who knew of my love for the series would put the pieces together pretty easily. I finished the first version of it in 2003, at the end of my senior year of high school and immediately started drawing a new version. That one lasted 7 years of working on and off, and I drew 217 pages before I gave up, too frustrated with how the story had rambled on and couldn’t go where I wanted it to. The art got better, though.

I didn’t give up, though. I still loved the characters that I had been carrying around in my head since 1998, and I still wanted to tell the Mirs’ stories in the best way that I could. A few years after I stopped drawing it, I started writing again, determined that if I started drawing it again, I’d have the whole story planned out, at least roughly. That’s where I am now in 2019. I’m not someone who finishes projects quickly (I’m still working on an inktober drawing set from two Octobers ago). I’ve been picking away at this comic for twenty one years.

I won’t say that if it wasn’t for this game, I wouldn’t have made anything- I’m sure that something else would have planted seeds and taken root, eventually flowering into some other fandom passion project that I’d transform into my own. The company I work for was founded by friends who were all brought together by their shared love of Earthbound, and have created incredible things both directly and indirectly inspired by it. But for me, it was Quest for Glory.

Thank you, Lori and Corey Cole, and all of the other people who worked hard to bring the series to life all those years ago.

#quest for glory #sierra #adventure games #video games

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crystalninjaphoenix · 5 years

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Speak No Evil

A Stitched Story

JSE Fanfic

It’s about time! I got so frustrated when I didn’t have time to write this even when I wanted to. And then I got the idea for Inverted and ended up fixated on that for a while, but this AU is back, baby! I did research for this, boys and girls and others! It’s finally Angst Time! God, I never realized I had such potential for pain. Let’s not just hurt JJ, let’s give him all the misery. And it went on for longer than I planned, too.

Tagging @septic-dr-schneep for inspiring this AU with this post. Also probably worth mentioning this too.

Read the past stories: Stitched Together | The Start of the Nightmare | The Silent Night

>Minor gore warning, probably<

JJ yawned, and looked at the clock. He tried to keep his shop open past midnight every night, in case somebody wanted help with a lunar spell. Those were most effective when conducted at midnight, or at the moon’s zenith. But JJ was not a night owl like Jack or Schneep, and sometimes he just couldn’t stay up that late, especially knowing he had to open at noon the next morning. This was one of those times. The clock read 10:58 and his eyelids were already drooping.

He straightened his posture, stretching. Then, he went through the motions of closing up. Sweeping the floor, dusting the books and talismans on sale, moving the change from the register to the strongbox, turning off most of the yellow lamps, flipping the sign on the front window from “Open” to “Closed.” But before he could go upstairs to his apartment and and his soft, comfortable bed, he had to check the side rooms. There were two: what he called the green room, where he did readings for tourists, and the crimson room, where he kept some of the more useful magick materials...those that he felt safe keeping out in the relative open.

The green room’s entryway was an arch without a door. There was a curtain of beads, but those did nothing except impress the customers that didn’t know anything about magick. A lot of those would pop in, checking out the strange little shop that looked like it belonged in an earlier time period. The green room was sort of catered towards that type, with a bunch of aesthetic junk, most of which did nothing. There was even a crystal ball sitting on top of the table’s fancy cloth, though in his experience flat, reflective surfaces were better for scrying.

JJ rummaged around the room, adjusting the paintings on the walls, checking the chest of drawers to see that everything was in its proper place. It seemed it was...but...JJ frowned. He couldn’t find his cards anywhere. He double-checked everywhere, even peeking underneath the tablecloth. No, they weren’t anywhere.

“Well, that’s a pickle,” JJ muttered to himself. He’d made those cards himself. Imbued them with magick of his own making, in addition to any they might already have. Honestly, the art of the tarot had always struck JJ as a little... unauthentic. It started as a card game, after all. But who knows? He’d learned long ago to never assume anything was ordinary.

Time to check out the crimson room. JJ turned the lamps of the green room off, brushed through the bead curtain, and crossed through the main body of the shop and over to the closed door that led to the crimson room. He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a small key ring. He selected the larger key of the two and used it to unlock the door. Everything should be in order here, he hadn’t used it all day.

Everything was not in order.

The first thing he noticed was the light. All the lamps in the room were on and blazing. JJ froze. That was impossible. Not only did he keep the only key on his person at all times, not only were there no windows and the vents were too small for anything to fit through, but also the room was protected. There were runes inside the walls and talismans under the floor. Nothing should’ve been able to get in and turn the lights on.

Except it had been breached once before.

JJ shook off the memory. He didn’t like to be reminded of that day. Sure, he’d met Jack and Chase and they’d become his two best friends, but he’d also nearly lost them within an hour of finding them. And that demon...the way he’d barely managed to banish him in time...it had shaken him. He’d doubled the defenses on the crimson room, and on his apartment upstairs, but maybe it still wasn’t strong enough...

He stepped into the room, eyes darting from side to side. The only thing that was different was that his deck of cards was sitting in the middle of the center table. JJ stared at it. There was no way that could’ve gotten here. Was there?

“Who’s here?” JJ called.

The lamps flickered, and JJ jumped as the door behind him slammed shut. He whirled around, pulling desperately on the handle, but the door refused to budge. JJ took a deep breath, trying to calm down. His mind darted between fragments of knowledge he’d learned over years of study. But this was instinctive. He thought he knew who this was. And he knew almost nothing about him.

“So, is it you?” JJ turned back around, putting his hands on his hips. He schooled his features into a carefully neutral expression. “I think you’re the only one who could get into this room at this point. What do you want?”

A few of the lamps flared, then burst with an electric chuckle, leaving the table the only thing truly illuminated. The message was more than clear. JJ folded his arms. “Why don’t you show yourself? I know you can.” Unless...he’d been rather quiet for the last three months, ever since he went after Schneep at the hospital. Maybe he was weakened...? Or he needed time to manifest?

There was no answer. JJ debated just ignoring him. Not acknowledging demons defeated a great deal of them. But he’d already talked to him. Fiddlesticks. Well, might as well go along with this. Who knows what the consequences could be otherwise? And he wasn’t ashamed to admit he was curious. Despite months of research, they hadn’t found much information on him. What if he could learn more? What if he could use that to help his friends?

Cautiously, JJ took a seat at the table. A chair opposite him pulled out, then pushed back in, like someone invisible had just sat there. The deck of tarot cards was pushed towards JJ, who took it, staring at the empty spot where a person should be, and shuffled. He didn’t want any tricks. Then, he held out the cards towards the empty spot. Five cards were pulled out of the deck, then laid on the table like a plus symbol.

JJ raised an eyebrow. “Five-card reading? But are you going to tell me what for?” There was no answer. “General reading it is, then,” JJ muttered. He reached out and turned over the card in the center.

The image of a knight riding into battle upon a black horse. He wielded a scythe, arching over his head. The card’s subtitle read Death. Well, this was off to a fantastic start. “The first card describes your present situation,” JJ said, his voice loud in the silent room. “And it sets the general tone for the reading. Many people see Death as a bad omen, but that’s not the case. It could mean the necessary death of something, such as the harvest in the fall leading to winter, and new plants growing in the spring. But...I’ve never seen Death as the first card. It may mean you’re currently experiencing it, either the death of a project or...” JJ trailed off. It didn’t usually mean the literal death of a person, but in this situation?

He forced himself to turn over the second card. A man carried seven sharp blades. Blood was on their edges, and JJ was sure that hadn’t been there when he drew the picture. “The second card is the past, it shows what events are still influencing you in the present day. This is the Seven of Swords. It represents...deceit.” JJ bit his lip as he thought. “That could mean your life is being shaped by a deception or betrayal that happened long ago. Or maybe not too long ago. Perhaps you know this?” A few more lamps went out, leaving just one above the table. There was a low whine in the air.

JJ hesitated a bit, then turned over the third card. Five crossed sticks, or what appeared to be. “The third card is the future. It explains events that will happen. The Five of Wands symbolizes struggles caused by ambition. In the future spot...it’s a warning. It means you’re pushing your plans at—at the expense of others.” His hands were shaking. The whine was steadily growing louder. “This...this isn’t a reading for you, is it?” JJ whispered. “You’re the querent, but...you don’t need to know these things.” A laugh echoed in the back of his mind.

JJ reached for the fourth card, then stopped. He was starting to have doubts about this. But then the light above flickered, and the whine increased to a piercing volume. JJ winced, then hurriedly turned over the fourth card. Everything stabilized. The card showed a man with brown hair, sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding two blades crossed over his chest. He wore a black blindfold. JJ was sure this card was altered, because he knew his original drawing had been of a woman instead. “The fourth card is the cause of your current situation,” JJ said quietly. “It’s meant to shed light on the event mentioned in the second card. The Two of Swords means conflicting ideas. It can also mean a lack of communication, resulting in...in drastic consequences. Perhaps this led to the deception?”

He didn’t even stop to think this time. Immediately after finishing his analysis of the fourth card, he turned over the fifth. A tall structure rose into the sky of the image. Green lightning was striking it, smoke and rubble flying from the point of impact. Four shadowy figures were falling from the top. It was the Tower. JJ swallowed nervously. “Fifth card...the fifth card is potential. It shows what will happen if you continue on this path. And the Tower...it means disaster. Destructive, uncompromising, collective disaster. It’s approaching. I would...normally, the advice is to just let it happen, and pick up the pieces afterward. But...” JJ looked up. There was an outline of a man, full of buzzing interference, now sitting in the chair across from him. “But this isn’t disaster for you...it’s for us. And it’s what you want. Is that right, Anti?”

The silhouette tilted its head. “Ç̀l̕͏èveŗ̸,” a hissing voice bounced around his mind. “You’re sm͟a̶r͞t̵èr than I t̴h̀o͏u̡ght̨, J̞á̸͕ͅc͈̦̟͎͎̯̠͍̠k҉̧̜͟s̮̦̞͉o̪͈̗̣͈͝͠n̷͔̞̜̙͕͇. But will that s̷̡͝av̧͠e̵̴ y͡ou̴̡?”

“From what?” JJ forced himself to smile. “From you? I got rid of you well enough the last times.”

Anti hummed, annoyed. “ M͡͞á̡͢ybe̢ you did, but that was b̧́͏efor͡e͞͏̸. Now, I k͡n̴ow̷. Did you think Í̸̛ w̨͝a̧͢ş̴ g̛͞o͞͠n̵e͞? I’ve been here the e̛ǹ͢tįr͠e ̕͢ţ̵̕im̵̴͠ȩ. Alwaỳs ther͢e͢. ͞A҉l̶w̕ay̨s͟ ̷w̵at̸c̡h̢i̕n̸g̶.̕ Do you want to know what I s̴̠ͅa̜̼̙̪̪̣͟w̛̩?”

Jameson leaned back. “Is this some roundabout way of threatening to bump me off? Because it’s not working.”

“ O͟͏͢h͢͏͏,͟͠ ͏̶b͏u͠t i̕t̸ i̷̢ş.” Anti stood up. His form was a bit clearer now. Not quite opaque, but JJ could see the colors of his clothes and body. Green lights took the place of his eyes. He leaned forward, and then somehow, though the table should’ve been too big, he was right in Jameson’s face. “False bravado doesn’t suit you, lit̴t̴l̨é o̕͟ń̢e. Not when I can t́a̷̷s̴̀͡t̷e your f͡ęa̷͢r͟͠.” A flash of teeth. “You know the truth I see, don̨'̶t͝ yo͡u͞? Your magick is j͟u̷s͡t ̸́a̧̕ ̸͟li̕e̶. It’s just trying to f̧͡o͞o̧ļ ̧̡̀y̷̵̕o̷u̷r ͝f͝r͏i͡en͟d̨s̸̢ into thinking you’re more helpful than you a̵̜̠̭͉c̡̭̗̯͓͉͖̹t̸̘͓̰̦͠ù̴̫͍̦̪̣̕a͏͈̬̗̖͎͓̤̖l̖̱̜̩̣ḷ̸͔̯̤̗͖̪͔ý̛͔̭̬͠ are.”

“That’s—you’re lying,” Jameson stuttered, pushing his chair back.

“ Abo̵u͞t w̛h̵at͞?” Anti was fully visible now, just the slightest distortion running through his body. His eyes, normally blue, glowed green behind their mask of shadows. “Your magick? Oh, but it doesn’t r̛e҉̨a̧͏l͡l̷̛y͡ do anything, do̡e̴s̷ ̸i͏t? I l̷̤͇ͅe̦͇͇̠̮̤t̸̞͎͍ you win that time. And what are all these so-̶c̵a̛ll̢ed s͝y̵̨͠m̶b̵̨o̶̕l͟͡s͠ of protection doing for you? The room is surrounded, yet h͠͠e̶r͝͝e̕͢ Ì̛ ̡̀a̷͏̢m̕̕, not deterred in the least.” He smiled a twisted grin. “ No͡t́ ̸v͢e̷ry ̵ef̛f́e͢ct͝ive.͏ If only you had r̸e͟a̢l̶̡͢ magic.”

Jameson tried to ignore his words, but in truth each one was a blow to his confidence. He’d set up protection around the homes of his friends...were they actually not working? Had Anti slipped through them as easily as a fish through water? Jack, Chase, and Schneep had trusted him. Had he...failed them?

Not wanting Anti to get another word in, he stood up, knocking over the chair in the process, and bolted to the door. Anti made no move to stop him. There was no need, as Jameson found out when he tried to turn the handle, then, frantically, attacked the door. It would not move. The doctor had described something like this in his hallucination he’d had at the hospital, but that was just that—an illusion of the mind. Anti must be stronger now, to affect reality in such a manner.

Jameson spun around, pressing his back to the door. Maybe he could find a way to get Anti out, if he was able to get to his supplies—and if it even worked. He doubted it.

“Well, we ca̴n't h̢ave tha̷t,” Anti said, as if he knew what Jameson’s thought process was. “C̶o̸̡me̷ b͏àc̡ḱ̢ ̷h̷͢e̴͟r̛ȩ̵̷.” A breaking happened, a distortion as the world broke into shades of red, blue, and green. And then Anti was there, in front of him. Jameson shrieked, instinctively trying to push him away. Instead, Anti grabbed him by the wrists and pulled him forward. Jameson fell into him, like the glitch truly wasn’t anything more than pixels. The buzz of white noise surrounded him. It filled his mind. He closed his eyes against the harsh static, and when he opened them, Anti had disappeared.

He would’ve relaxed a bit, but he could still hear the harsh drone. Not with his ears, like he should’ve. It was inside him. He could feel it in his eyes and in his throat. Of its own accord, his body walked back over to the table and sat down in the same chair Anti had been sitting in during the reading. And there it stayed, posture stiff, hands placed firmly by his sides. The white noise lessened a bit, and Anti appeared once again, distorted and crackling. He tilted his head. “Ỳe͞s̵, that seems to have worked as͟ ͠we͏l͝l̴ as I t̵h̨o͠ug̶ht͟ ̷it wòu͟l̷d͝.”

“What did you do?” Jameson was surprised to find his mouth still worked, even if nothing else did.

“I call it p̱̲͞u̴̜̥͉̙̦͍̰͞p̰p̵̫̼̪͕̻͍̠̩e̷͉̝͓̫͓͠t̲̝̩ͅe̢͎̭̞̘̗͈͟ͅe͎̙̻̻̻̼̲̣ͅr̳̘̲i̷̟̤͉̥͢n̖̘̖͝g͍̬̮,” Anti said, wiggling his fingers like a sideshow magician. “It’s a tr̶ic͡k of mine I’ve been using since Halloween. If I keep working on it, o͝ne͠ d̕ay ̢you'̧l͠l ̵s͠tarţ t́o͞ ́ l͏̢í̵̧k̵҉e̷͡ i̶t͠.”

“Never,” Jameson said through gritted teeth.

“ Th҉at'͢s͏ ̨no͡t for̸ yo̕u t͡o de̸ciḑe,” Anti growled. “Now where was I? Ah yes, your ùse̕l͟es̶snes͢s.” He grabbed Jameson by the chin, tilting his head up so he had to look the glitch in the eyes. “You’re just a re͝p̷l̕a͞cem͏ent͡, J̛a͏̷̧c̢k͝s̸̛o̵̸͠n. They lost their magician, and so they got a ǹew̵ ͠ơn̵e. And, given your decoration in here, you would agree with me when I say the new is n̴̸͟e̷ve̡͠r̨ as g͡o̸o͢d as t͏h̕e̡̨͟ ̷o̷l͞d̵͞.”

“That’s your fault,” Jameson gasped. “It’s your fault their magician disappeared. Their hero, too. What happened to them? What are you doing to Marvin and Jackie?”

Anti laughed, blood spurting from his neck wound. “Oh, íf̷ ͝o͞nl̨y̷ y̢o̸u ̛́̕k̀n̛é͟w̢. I wonder if you’d wish they r̨ȩa҉ll͞y die̢d. Or maybe you’re happy here. Happy your wor͟t͠h̴lèss ͠litt͠l̀e͠ head gets praise h̢e̡a̴pęd upon it that it doèsń't ҉de̶s̸e͡r̢ve.” Anti’s form flickered and glitched. He grimaced. “Seems I’m running out of time. Guess I’ll...s̵k͟͡i̴̴p̀̕ ̕t̛͢͞o ̡̧́t̨h̸e ͏cha̡̧se͟.”

“What are you doing?” Anxiety was evident in Jameson’s voice. He tried to push through the static clouding his mind and holding him in place, but to no avail. It was like pushing against a balloon with super thick skin. Every attempt bounced him away.

“Now that won’t be a̛͞n͠y ̷̢f̧͞ú̢ǹ̢.” Anti leaned over him, the blood from his throat dripping down onto Jameson’s face. He couldn’t even blink like his instincts were shouting at him to. “Especially when you’re a͠b͢o͝ut͏ ̕tǫ f͡ìn̡ḑ͏͟ ͝o̧͞ú̢̕t.” He tilted Jameson’s head even farther back. Something small and gleaming glitched into his hand. “ Wh̕y̴ don’t you c̵a͏l͡l f̡or h͢e͢l͠p, J̡͢a̵͟͠m͏̡ie?”

He wanted to. He really wanted to. But he couldn’t give the demon the satisfaction. He gritted his teeth and stayed silent.

“Come on...” Anti’s fingernails dug into Jameson’s skin. It felt like they were drawing blood. “It’s ńo̷̡͠ţ to͝ó̶̕ ̛hard̸, is it? Call for help, I̡ ̢da̧͡r̴͞͡e ̛͝yo͢͟͢u. Cry into the dar͢k̕ǹes͝s͢. ‘Jack! Chase! Henrik! Somebody help!’ S̡ee̸ ̡w͡h̸a̛t̵ g̸͕͓͇̣̤̘̩o͏̹̗̪̹̞̀o̸̶̦̯̣d̸͖͕̫͍͇͖ͅ it ͝do̸es͟ ̷ýou͝!”

He couldn’t take it anymore. He had to. “H-help,” he whimpered.

There was a moment of quiet. The electronic hum started filling the air again. Anti smiled with unrestrained delight. “ B͞u̢͞ţ ̨́͢no͠͝bo̵̴d̸͞ý́ ͏çá̴͡m͞͏ę͢͞,” he whispered. “What a s̵h̕a͠m̴̨è. I’m sure the ot̶her͡s̛ would l͡o̡̕͟v͏̡e̢ to see this.”

The static in Jameson’s mind increased, and a pressure grew in his throat. He tried to cry out, but his voice wouldn’t work anymore. Anti moved his hand, and the small, glinting object he held came into view. It was a needle. A simple sewing needle, threaded with green string. And Jameson knew what was going to happen. He wanted to scream, he wanted to beg, but he could do nothing.

The first pinprick didn’t hurt too much. But the sensation of something that wasn’t supposed to be there, of it being pulled through the hole made his skin crawl. And the next one was much the same. And the next. The strings tightened with each new puncture. Tears began flowing down his face. Anti seemed to enjoy that. He muttered constantly throughout the process, reminding him how he couldn’t do anything, how he was worthless, how his friends didn’t really care for him. Every word drove deeper through the static in his mind.

He didn’t know how long it took, but eventually Anti tied a knot to hold the string in place, then broke the rest of the thread off. He moved Jameson’s head side to side, admiring his work. He grinned. “ Let'̢s ̸s͡ęe͟ ͏w͞h̶a҉t̛ th̕ey̛ ̨t̀hink̛ ͏of͡ t̷̢͓͈͠h̴̪̮á̶̰̻͢ͅt,” he said, tapping the oozing piercings with his finger, stroking the string. There was a lot more blood than there should have been. He loved it. “Go sh̕òẃ̸ them your n͟͠é̸w á́c͟͡ç̢e̷͝ss̛o̶͠ry̨.”

The static overwhelmed him, and the world broke apart. Anti faded away, the last thing to go being his glowing green eyes.

The world fixed itself, and Jameson found himself kneeling on the floor in a hall somewhere. It looked...medicinal, like a hospital. It wasn’t long before he realized that the static had disappeared. He could move again. Immediately, his hands flew to his mouth, clawing at the thread. It teared at his flesh, blood running down his chin. It was agonizing. It didn’t matter. He needed them out. It wasn’t working. Why wasn’t it working? Why couldn’t he get them out? He had to keep trying. He couldn’t—he couldn’t—

“Jameson?”

He clasped his hands over his mouth. No, no he couldn’t let—how could he explain? He looked over his shoulder towards the familiar voice. It was the doctor, dressed in his coat and scrubs. Of course, this was a hospital. Schneep stared at Jameson. “What are you—?” Then he saw the blood dripping from between his fingers. Schneep’s eyes widened, and he squeaked. For a moment he looked like he wanted to run away, but instead he ran forward, kneeling beside Jameson. “What is it?! What happened?! Was it him?! Here, let me see.”

Jameson didn’t answer, just pressed his face even harder into his hands. When the doctor tried to pry them away so he could look at where the blood was coming from, he shook his head. Schneep looked at him, a strange light in his eyes. “Please. I cannot help if I don’t know what the problem is. Let me see, my friend.”

It was something about those last two words, coming from Schneep, the one he knew the least about, that made Jameson relax, and let the doctor take his hands away. Upon seeing the mess of blood and string, Schneep froze. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Silver tears lined his eyes. Then, without warning, he pulled Jameson into a tight hug. “I’m sorry,” he choked. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry...” he repeated the same words again and again, like saying them could change what had happened.

Jameson only let himself be held, and shed a few more silent tears.

It was a chill night. Or was it early morning? It had been close to midnight when Schneep last checked the clock, but after JJ had appeared he hadn’t had the time to look. He’d been on the way to his office, ready to gather his things and go home for the night, only to turn the corner and see Jameson kneeling on the floor, blood coming from his mouth. He immediately dropped everything, dragging him to the nearest operating room.

And now, Schneep was outside on his apartment balcony, pacing back and forth. It was cold, but he didn’t care. He had to think.

“Hey, doc.”

Schneep turned and saw Chase walk out onto the balcony, closing the sliding door behind him. His eyes were rimmed with red. “Hello Chase,” Schneep said dully. “Is Jack still inside?”

Chase nodded. “Yeah, he’s still talking with JJ...or, uh, talking to.” He leaned against the closed door. “He took one of your notebooks and pens. But...JJ isn’t using it.”

Jameson had been quiet. Not that he had a choice anymore, but he hadn’t attempted to communicate in any way. He didn’t nod or shake his head when asked yes or no questions, and he avoided eye contact with any of the others. If he did happen to catch their eyes, he teared up and looked away. Yet, he didn’t want to be alone either. He reached out and clung tight to them when they looked like they might leave.

The one question he answered? When Schneep asked if Anti was responsible, he nodded vigorously.

“Maybe he is not ready yet,” Schneep sighed. “I would not blame him.”

Chase moved position, now leaning on the balcony railing. Schneep stopped his pacing and joined him. Chase hesitated for a moment, then asked “Are you sure you can’t—”

“I tried, Chase,” Schneep snapped. “I broke my best pair of scissors and dulled half the supply of scalpels in the hospital. It is not normal string like it appears.”

“Okay, doc, calm down. I didn’t—I didn’t mean it that way.” Chase’s voice broke. “You’re doing—you did all you can, I get it. I’m just...it’s fucking horrible, man. I can’t believe...I thought shit like this only happened in horror movies.” He gazed out over the quiet city. “I can’t even find a reason,” he whispered.

“Anti does not need a reason,” Schneep said through gritted teeth. “He is a monster.” His grip on the railing tightened. “And the world would be better off without monsters.” Why Jameson, of all people? He was harmless. Maybe that was why. Schneep turned, looking straight at Chase. “If we ever find a way, if we ever get a chance, I am going to kill him.”

Chase considered this. “What about Jackie and Marvin? Only he knows what’s happening to them. We need to get them back, doc. We can’t kill him until we do.”

Schneep paused. “I suppose you are right. Although I wonder...” He turned away again, looking back out over the dark city. “If Anti is capable of something like this, then...if we get them back, what shape will they be in?”

Chase had no answer for that. So the two of them stood in silence, watching the darkness of night gradually recede. If only all the darkness of the world would disappear so easily.

#jacksepticeye #jacksepticeye fanfiction #jacksepticegos #septic egos #septic egos au #jameson jackson #antisepticeye #dr schneeplestein #chase brody #jackieboy man #marvin the magnificent #brigid writes fanfiction #stitched anti #tw: needles #minor gore #angst #stitchedstories

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redditnosleep · 6 years

Text

Z is for Zodiac

by Zchxz

I stared down at the amorphous gray blob on the file in front of me in disbelief.

“Is it-”

“Malignant?” The doctor finished for me. I nodded, reaching for my wife’s hand for some semblance of comfort.

“It’s too early to tell. With your permission, I’d like to keep Hannah overnight. Run some tests, just to be on the safe side.”

My mind went blank as I eagerly signed paper after paper. My little girl, my world, my everything…

…How could she possibly have cancer?

My mother used to say only three things could change a man: god, love, and death. Many other events and beliefs may come close to altering one’s life for the better or worse, but for the most part the soul remains unmoved. I may yet be young, but this much I know for sure.

I never thought I’d ever love anyone more than Marissa, but the second my baby girl Hannah looked into my eyes for the first time I was smitten. I spent every waking moment - and many unawake - with my daughter, watching her grow and experience everything with the utmost joy.

Marissa, on the other hand, hardly took a month off work before going back to the research hospital. Her friends told me they thought she’d gone mad, but then again her friends had never been terribly loyal. By the time the diagnosis came around, they’d all left.

I supposed we should have been prepared for it, all things considered. Not many kids are reading at a fourth grade level at 26 months.

“Your daughter is gifted, certainly,” the doctor spoke to me and my wife. The two of them had gone over the charts privately that morning, knowing I’d be of negligible input with my liberal arts degree. Nonetheless, they did their best to explain it to me.

To be perfectly honest, it felt more like when my parents used to sit me down before a lecture. “We just don’t want you to follow in your brother’s footsteps” was their excuse for academic torture. The polite explanation a justification for the bad news you could smell coming a mile away.

“Skip it, I’m sure Marissa can fill in the details for me later, Dr…?”

“Please, call me Eli.”

The doctor only continued after receiving her confirmatory nod. He looked at me with those soft, cornflower blue eyes that gave off the scent of a smile without the corresponding mouth. At times, I wondered if he might be the reason Marissa wound up staying late to “finish up some research projects.”

“I was worried. Hannah’s growing so quickly, I didn’t want it to be like…”

I held up a hand. She didn’t have to explain. Both her parents, god rest their souls, passed from strokes out of nowhere. To think our baby girl could vanish from our lives so quickly, I would have done the same thing.

Not quite a half hour later I’d left, my wife staying behind to help monitor Hannah’s tests.

The following months passed torturously slowly, my daughter having to stay at the hospital and away from me for lengths of time I hadn’t planned for until she reached 18. I visited as often as I could, though with the experimental nature of her treatment many areas were off-limits to a mere civilian.

Eventually, I proved enough of an annoyance that they moved some sessions to a less restricted wing. While I couldn’t be by her side when my wife and Eli worked the big, scary machines and poked her with all kinds of needles, I was finally allowed to sit in on her psychological evaluations.

It was there I finally met her mentor, Olivia.

“Daddy!” Hannah squealed, running into my arms as I lifted her up, spinning her around twice before putting her back down.

“Hey there pumpkin-head! How are you feeling?”

“Okay!” She giggled with my favorite smile of hers before looking back to her mentor. “Can we play blocks now?”

The woman nodded with a smile. “You’ve got quite the special girl, you know,” she mentioned towards me.

“I’m… well aware.”

The three of us began taking turns playing a heavily modified version of Jenga, Hannah explaining new rules nearly every time one of us touched a new block. And though her mind had developed so rapidly, she still had some fine motor functions that needed work. Ones that quickly toppled the tower we’d been building.

“Oh no!” I joked, laughing at the mess she’d made.

“You moved it!” She accused Olivia.

“Hannah, be nice. It’s okay, we can build it back-”

“No! She MOVED IT!”

The scream felt almost tangible somehow. As I gathered my thoughts Olivia had retrieved some orderlies who escorted me out of the room, taking Hannah back to the wing I couldn’t visit. Looking through the bit of glass in the door, I swore the blocks had moved again.

“I’m really sorry you had to see that,” Eli put a hand on my shoulder out of nowhere. “Some of the medication has some unfortunate side effects. Outbursts, and the like.”

“…Yeah. How’s she doing, anyway? Feels like forever since everything started.”

He stared me down, a blank expression. The man hardly seemed to have any wrinkles at all.

I caught myself before he could speak. “I mean, not that I’m not really grateful for all the work you and the hospital have been doing for her. For us. And all pro-bono…”

Eli laughed without smiling. “Not to worry. I have faith that this will all be over sooner than you think.”

I coughed and opened my eyes after hearing the door close downstairs. Marissa had finally gotten home from the hospital, another long night. I looked to see the clock read 12:26, slumped out of bed, and put on my slippers.

Rubbing my eyes, I thought back. Hannah had been undergoing her treatments for over two years now, and every time I asked how things were progressing Eli dodged the question one way or another. My wife had grown distant in that time - normally a late night would mean 8 or 9. Hell, we’d even changed churches to waste less time away from the hospital.

I grabbed the leftover coffee from the fridge, poured two mugs full, and put them in the microwave. Soon enough Marissa entered our kitchen sporting her usual blue and white uniform.

“These long nights are getting a little crazy, Mar. You sure you can’t-”

“I’m doing important work, I’ve told you this I don’t know how many times.”

“I know, I know.” The microwave dinged and I brought the mugs to the table. “And Hannah?”

“She’s number one. Always has been.”

I could sense something beyond fatigue in her words. Frustration? No, but perhaps a smidgen of regret. We had the same conversation every week, and being the coward I am I avoided an argument as best I could. I knew she was working hard, but I couldn’t get the idea of Eli all over her out of my head.

“I’m sorry, Mar. It’s gone on long enough, you need to tell me a little more than ‘it’s going well’.”

She shot me a dirty look that made me make my next mistake. A mumbled, but audible, “I’m sure Eli’s doing well, too.”

“Excuse me?”

I stepped up. Already crossed the line, so why not? “You heard me. I hardly see you anymore! Our daughter’s been in your labs for months on end and you tell me nothing? I can’t even remember the last time all three of us were in the same room together. Much less the last time you and I-”

“Fucked?”

“Well. Yeah.”

She swallowed a deep gulp from the mug and tossed the rest at me. I raced to take off my undershirt, the liquid burning more than a few hairs off my chest as she raged at me.

“You want to know why we haven’t fucked, Jeremy? Because I’ve been working my ass off day in and day out trying to get our daughter ready. You think I’ve been fucking Eli all that time, is that it?” She laughed as though the accusation couldn’t be further from the truth. “The man’s practically a psychopath he’s so emotionless. Not to mention he’d hardly be able to get it up with all the dr-”

She stopped, pulling back on her spitted words. Her face had turned red and she breathed heavily, wet marks forming at the corners of her eyes. Though my body and mind ached I couldn’t help but feel bad for pushing her this far.

Of course she wasn’t cheating on me.

Of course she was doing everything for our daughter.

Marissa stormed out of the room, leaving me the couch without another word. I hardly slept another wink that night, my thoughts focused on many things that all came back to one slip of the tongue.

Whether it was intentional or not, what did she mean when she said she was getting our daughter “ready”?

Ready for what?

Over the next few weeks, every time I visited the hospital I stayed longer than necessary. I got there early, I left late. I brought a book with me each time, but while it may have seemed as though I was making progress through the latest self-help instruction manual to get my life back on track, I made careful notes about every single person I saw.

Which doctors passed through the hallways and at what time. When the orderlies took lunch. What they ate for lunch. The color pen Eli kept in his jacket pocket. What Olivia wore to our sessions.

I became a wealth of knowledge about everything that went on everywhere I had access to.

My chance came on a Thursday, when one of the guards had called out sick. I’d been getting the other one coffees regularly as an excuse to chat him up, and by the time his replacement showed up he bolted to the bathroom so fast he didn’t even notice his badge go missing.

Marissa was sound asleep by the time I snuck out.

For such a well-guarded research hospital, getting through security was a breeze - it’s amazing what matching clothes and a badge will do. I easily passed through all the regular checkpoints that normally closed after visiting hours; hell, half the lights were out in the place.

Come to think of it, the whole area seemed surprisingly empty for a hospital.

I made my way to the restricted wing, scanning doorways for any signs of interest. I didn’t know where Hannah slept, but I could at least try to find Eli’s office.

The door wasn’t even locked.

I flipped on a lamp by his desk and began carefully looking through any files I could get my hands on. I’m no expert so I skipped trying to crack his computer, and nearly every cabinet either wouldn’t open or didn’t have any documents in them.

Only two drawers opened: one labeled “1913,” and another labeled “1991-” with a few blanks, presumably to be filled in when it got full.

The files in the first drawer were essentially useless. Everything with any sort of content had been redacted to the point of being completely black. Why he kept these files I couldn’t guess.

The other drawer contained a couple dozen folders, 26 in all. I couldn’t make sense of any of the labels, and quickly rifled through them to see if I could find Hannah’s charts somewhere.

What I found disturbed and confused me far beyond my knowledge of, well… anything, really.

Some files contained details of murders, drug trafficking, and things that I can’t even begin to describe. Events about creatures that didn’t exist. Devices and abilities that defied physics.

By the time I saw any photos, I nearly vomited. From then on I scanned the first page of each folder as briefly as possible.

Eventually, one page listed Hannah as the subject. A folder with the word “ZODIAC” in bold font.

I began scrambling to read through it all when I heard someone at the door clear their throat.

Eli.

“I expected you might find your way here sooner or later. Far later, in this case.”

“What are you doing with my daughter? What are you really doing with her?”

“Well, you’re more than welcome to read the files. Or…”

“…or what?”

He smirked, the folds of his face creasing the skin as though he’d never developed laugh lines. Eli moved his head away from the door, and I followed like the sucker I’d become.

I struggled to keep pace with him. The man seemed determined, like the kind of person who’s so obsessed with their work they don’t sleep, ever. After a few turns he began talking.

“As you may have guessed by now, this isn’t exactly a hospital, though we do indeed perform delicate research. I’ll spare you the details since they won’t make much sense to you and I really don’t have the patience.”

He nodded to a guard who moved out of the way of large elevator doors, mentioning for them to have Olivia meet us in the observatory.

“Long story short, around 26 years ago our scientists discovered an anomaly. We’ve been running tests ever since - the ones in that cabinet you very illegally sorted through - and, well. Humanity has been tremendously impacted by the results thus far.”

We entered the elevator and began to descend. “You’ve arrived at quite the fortunate time, of course. Many of our subjects have developed abilities - gifts, really - and while some are far less stable than others, I personally believe your darling little Hannah has been selected for a very important purpose.”

The descent took a full 26 minutes. Though it felt like Eli finally revealed some truths to me, making sense of it all would be an entirely different matter altogether.

What kind of gifts was he talking about?

And what the hell had Marissa actually been working on all this time?

“That day with the blocks,” Eli explained. “Hannah first noticed Olivia’s presence of mind. And, as you might not recall, she formed her own.”

I thought back to how the blocks had moved after we’d left the room. Or had they moved when she screamed?

“Telepathy, telekinesis, emotional massaging, presence of mind, supernatural - call it whatever you like. You will at the very least be pleased to know that tonight will be Hannah’s final test.”

The elevator doors opened, revealing a smallish deck overlooking a large, circular room. Olivia joined us as we walked towards the window to witness the events to come.

Just over two dozen guards stood around the edges of the chamber, all wearing the same blue shirts and white pants I’d grown tired of seeing. A minister dressed in all black kneeled at the center, a handful of others mixed between. By his side stood my little girl.

The people in the middle all faced a sort of altar as they chanted under their breaths. I couldn’t make out what they said, and by the time I felt Olivia’s hand on my shoulder I realized I’d been slamming my fist against the glass.

“They can’t hear us, but don’t worry. It’ll be alright.”

She was right. I felt myself calm down almost immediately. Of course everything would be fine.

I even smiled with a sigh of relief when the minister slit Hannah’s throat.

“Twenty-six. Take her, and rise once more!”

The blood poured out of her, floating in the air as spectral hands emerged from beyond. The bony fingers touched the dark liquid gently, as though to test the power that would soon be theirs.

“Huh,” I wondered aloud, in an elevated daze. “So this is Zodiac?”

Eli smiled. “No.”

Hannah’s eyes sparked with life and she yelled out. “NO! IT’S MINE!”

The blood began retracting into her neck as the priest looked around to his flock. The guards began to look to each other in confusion, clearly not briefed on what to do in this circumstance.

“This isn’t,” the man in black began. “What are you doing? You can’t-”

Hannah threw out a hand towards him and in an instant his entire body exploded into a mess of viscera that froze in time, hanging in the air as pieces of his former being.

She let out a shrill shriek, the kind only children can produce, that rattled the walls and sent the guards to their knees, desperately covering their ears. The others near Hannah tried to reach her, blown back anytime they got close by a strong gust of air.

The spectral arms reached out to close her mouth, working quickly to end this nonsense.

No - they weren’t reaching.

Hannah was pulling them towards her.

Her yell twisted into several tones without stopping, each sonic pulse sending out a wave of energy. Blood from the dead priest began to twitch and pull, eventually getting sucked into my daughter’s body without leaving a trace.

The bones began fragmenting, falling into the black hole that sucked everything into Hannah’s slit throat. The altar itself cracked and shifted as the pitch raised rapidly, a simulated doppler effect.

A moment later, everyone in the room but Hannah was gone. Nothing more than dark stains on the ground and walls.

I snapped out of whatever trance I’d been in, noticing Olivia had gone completely white in shock. Eli gave me a wink, then moved towards a switch that began lowering our deck.

“What th-”

“Patience, Jeremy.”

Soon enough the glass raised up and I ran towards my daughter to make sure she was alright.

I stopped short, watching her lick the blood off her fingers. The stains in the room had disappeared in the short moments I’d had my head turned away.

Eli began to clap, walking slowly towards the middle of the room. “That, my dear… That was Zodiac.”

He let out a deep sigh, as though years of pent-up frustration were finally alleviated. “You cannot possibly imagine the difficulty I’ve gone through for this. Putting up with that insane Meisberger and his ridiculous cult. Paying off the sheriff’s department. Keeping the drug money flowing. Preventing anyone else from unlocking the secrets of the sphere?”

He chuckled. “My goodness has it all been worth it. To finally meet you,” he said, opening his arms to Hannah.

Eli began to kneel, but Olivia grabbed his shoulder and punched him in the face. “It was supposed to be me! You told me I was the one!”

“Yes, well obviously I was lying.”

“You piece of…” She turned to my little girl and focused on her small form. “You little bitch, we’ll see who’s th-”

And then she turned to liquid, the same way the reverend had.

Hannah spent no time pulling the remains into her being, the matter sliding through her veins and disappearing in her throat.

Was this really still my daughter?

“Now then, it’s all settled? Kill him if you want, but do tell me what else must be done. I simply must know the rest, how to use it all!”

Eli bent over, begging up to the bloodied four-year old in front of him. She looked at him with disdain, then glanced over to me and smiled.

“No.”

“Wha-”

Once more, the human in front of her turned to reddish black chunks before making their way to her form. She swallowed hard and skipped over to me, grasping my hand with a smile.

“I’m so hungry, daddy. Won’t you help feed me?”

I only recall the following moments as memories. I like to think my mind put up a wall to lock all that horror away, then took pilot of my body as my daughter - or whatever she had become - led me through the halls to another guarded room.

Everyone in our way became that fleshy mist before becoming absorbed.

We finally reached a room that contained two halves of a dark spherical rock. Meteorites, I think they were. Hannah reached out to pull them towards her through the air and put them together. The pieces shifted and warped and shrunk down into a large black pearl, which she has worn around her neck ever since.

When we got home, after putting Hannah to bed, I found my wife’s body hanging from the ceiling fan in our room. Whether she killed herself or someone in Eli’s control killed her, I may never know.

What I do know was written in the brief note she mailed to me, set in her will.

My sweet Jeremy,

If you’re reading this, it’s because I’m dead. I cannot state how terribly sorry I am for everything, and though I can’t possibly explain most of what’s gone on, and what you may experience, there are a few things you need to know.

Hannah is not our daughter - not technically, anyway. She was created by the Initiative, and given to us after I discovered I couldn’t conceive children. I know this may come as a shock, but please know that she loves you as any child would love their father.

The details surrounding why they created her were never revealed to me, however I have come to believe that their plans for her are nothing but nefarious. They may go as far as stealing her from us right under our noses through kidnapping or lies. If I have seemed complicit in any such events, it was because they threatened to kill you.

What I do know is whatever will happen to her will usher in a new era. One of pain and suffering, as those with access to her power will use it to crush their opposition and suck the life from the world. These people are not sane, Jeremy. If I cannot stop it, and you receive this letter before it’s too late, you have to do something.

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but if it comes down to it you need to kill her before they perform the ritual. If it is completed, all hope is lost.

I hope from the bottom of my heart you will never have to read this letter. Please know that I did my best. I love you.

-Marissa

#creepy #horror story #author: Zchxz #alphabet stew series

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glitter-lisp · 7 years

Text

Based off of this lovely piece of art by @randomslasher. Is there more to come from this? Who knows! Not me! Anyways here’s the longest fic I’ve written in months!

If asked, Logan Sanders would not call himself a cryptozoologist. He was simply a biologist who happened to have a more... open mindset than many of his colleagues. So yes, maybe that did result in him flying off to Scotland or Nepal in search of these so-called "cryptids," but he was simply examining evidence and forming hypotheses the way any sound scientist would. More often than not, what he found was nothing more than stories and folk tales and, occasionally, proof that someone had been deliberately fooling the locals.

Sometimes, however, he found himself here, in places like this: an isolated warehouse owned by a private corporation, fully of high-tech equipment and computers and a single enourmous tank that took up most of the room. Inside the tank was a perfect fascimile of the Atlantic Ocean a few miles off the coast of Florida. Logan and an oceanographer had consulted on the exact amount of sand, silt, and salt that were to go inside. Looking at the murky water now, it was almost as though they had somehow cut a piece of the ocean away and transported it several miles inland.

The water did not hold Logan's attention for a second.

What he was staring at was the creature inside. There were several large rocks piled together in a way that formed a natural cave (or as natural as it could be, with Logan and his colleague carefully designing every last detail of the tank's contents), and the creature was hiding inside there. Logan could just make out the gleam of its eyes. It seemed to have a mostly humanoid torso, though were legs should be, its body melted into a large, fish-like tail. Large spines spouted from its back down the tail, and although there were no other markers or any other members of its species to judge by, Logan would guess by their size that the creature was male. Its scales were sleek and black, and its eyes were the same. It had not come out since being put in the tank.

That was all that they knew about it.

"And the fishermen that found it signed the non disclosure agreements?" he asked the man next to him, who nodded.

"Yes. They both seemed eager to forget about it and take the money we gave them. Even if it did get out, we took all the evidence. They don't even have pictures any more. No one will ever believe them."

Logan hums, narrowing his eyes at the creature thoughtfully and deliberately quashing the slight guilt he feels at the thought of the two people who might have become rich and famous, had Logan's boss not gotten there first. The creature had been caught in the net a couple fishing a few miles out from the shore, presumably while hunting for its own dinner. It was pure chance that his boss had happened to be nearby on his own boat, enjoying the weather - he had always been fond of storms. The whole exchange had taken place before anyone made it back to land. The people who had found the creature left with no fish, no nets, and a check for a ludicrous amount of money.

His boss left with the creature.

Two days later, they had retrofitted an old sea life rehabilitation center and the creature had been transferred. And here Logan was now, head of the project, having signed his own papers to keep quiet about it and tasked with discovering everything he could. About a creature that was, by all rights, a mermaid.

"It's an ugly bastard," his boss said, voice reverent. "Ugly as hell. Absolutely stunning."

"Sea creatures are unlikely to have a concept of- oh. Yes, I see what you mean. It is certainly a unique specimen."

He grimaced when his boss clapped him on the back. "Damn right, it is. All right, everything is taken care of. You've got two interns under you, very well trained, extremely curious, and extravagantly well paid. Half a dozen guards to keep an eye of you, the facility, and the creature. If anything happens, you tell them, and then you call me immediately. I'll stay out of your hair as much as possible. You have the key code and an actual, physical key. This place is yours, Doc."

"I really prefer Dr. Sanders," he said, and his boss clapped him on the back, harder than before.

"You find out everything you can about this thing," he said in a low voice, leaning in close. "Is it intelligent? Is it dangerous? More importantly, are there more of them?"

"What do you hope to gain from this?" Logan asks. "There is only so much information that can be gathered from observing a single member of an unknown species in captivity. It's hardly going to behave in its normal manner, whatever that might be. You would gain more from tagging it and releasing it. Or, if you're that worried about being unable to track it, you could always just dissect it."

He knew the creature couldn't hear him. But that didn't change the fact that its dark, unblinking eyes looked somehow more terrified than they had just a few seconds before. Beside him, his boss gave an affected shudder.

"And kill such a beautiful thing?"

"You called it ugly," Logan mutters, and the man keeps talking as though he hadn't heard him. Probably a good thing for both of them.

"No. This is the scientific find of the century. Hell, of the millennium. The only reason I haven't already gone public with it is because I don't want it getting snatched out of my hands and carted off to people who would treat it less delicately than you and I will. Eventually, I will release it, with a tracker. Assuming I can't find any more of the creatures; I've got boats out trawling for them right now."

Logan hummed quietly. "All right. In that case, I need to get my supplies. Is this room equipped with cameras? However many there are, I want more. We're going to need to keep the creature under constant surveillance if I'm to learn anything about it."

Constant surveillance did absolutely nothing. The creature never left its cave; even when they dropped fish in twice a day for it to eat, it waited until one swam close enough for him to reach out with one long, sinuous arm - fin? - and snatch it up. Logan tinkered with camera angles and tripods. He attempted insert one into the tank itself. It was the most he saw of the creature in the first forty-eight hours, when it darted out of its cave, snatched the camera out of the water, and smashed it against the glass of the tank. Logan did not try again.

As frustrated as he was by their lack of progress, he couldn't help but understand. The creature had been stolen from its home and thrown into a strange tank, surrounded by strange creatures. It could hardly be expected to be swimming around and displaying itself and its natural behaviors for the benefit of the scientists observing it.

On day five, Logan was standing outside the tank at three in the morning, staring until his vision went blurry. He blinked several times and kept staring, until his eyes actually crossed, and only then did he reach up to rub at them with one hand, groaning. His glasses pressed uncomfortably into his forehead, and he spun around on one heel and leaned back against the glass, slowly sinking down until he was sitting. He was the only one there, save for two guards. One was outside of the room, patrolling the rest of the complex, and the other was in the main office watching the security tapes.

No one was watching. Logan pulled out his phone.

It was horribly unprofessional. It was, perhaps, slightly illegal, or at least very deeply frowned upon. His boss let Logan get away with a lot, they had worked together too long for anything other than that, but he would hardly be happy about this. Careful of the cameras that he himself had helped position, Logan ducked his head and tucked his phone in close to his stomach. He wouldn't have gotten service out here anyways, and there was a cell scrambler on the premises to make extra sure no one was sharing confidential information from the facility, or leaving themselves open to any sort of a cyber attack. That was the last thing they needed.

Instead, he pulled up one of his half a dozen puzzle and brain teaser applications, and set to work finding anagrams for the word "holiday." The graphics of the game were rather annoying; he didn't need bright colors and a vague, never fully explained plot about sentient food items to hold his attention, but the actual game play was engaging enough that he was able to look past the application's faults. He had, at the very least, disabled the sound, so it no longer played cheerful eight-bit music in a major key that got stuck in his head for days at a time.

Some time later, he had just finished his fourth word of the night ("multiplex," resulting in over fifty other words, some of which he really had to wrack his brain for) when, as the screen went black while loading the next level, he saw his reflection in it. More importantly, he saw the reflection of the creature in the tank, floating behind him and looking over his shoulder at his phone.

He would like to say that he stayed calm and did not let on that he had seen it, that he simply stayed still and waited until he could check the tapes the next morning so as not to startle it. But the fact was that he was so startled that he yelled and scrambled away from the tank, flinging his phone somewhere off to the side in his surprise. He wound up some ten feet away, having stumbled to his feet and run a few steps before his brain caught up with his body. He heard a wild splashing in the tank, and whipped around just in time to see the creature's tail disappearing back into its cave.

His heart pounding in his throat, Logan cautiously walked over to where his phone was lying abandoned on the ground, not taking his eyes off the cave as he slowly bent over and picked it up. "I, ah, I'm sorry for startling you," he called, then scoffed at himself. The creature obviously didn't speak English. And even if it did, it wouldn't hear him through the glass and the water. "Stupid," he muttered, shaking his head and pocketing his phone with, he was embarrassed to notice, trembling hands. The thing had really startled him.

He caught the briefest glimpse of its eyes staring back at him from the depths of its cave before it wriggled back into the shadows.

Reviewing the tapes back in the office, Logan watched as, exactly seventeen minutes after he sat down outside the tank, the creature emerged fully from its cave. It had stuck its head out twice before, and its whole torso once, but each time had darted back inside. Logan never even noticed. It spent another four minutes swimming back and forth between him and the cave, inching closer to him each time, and finally spent another three simply floating in the water right behind Logan. Observing him.

He copied the video clip to the file on his computer, then set to work taking several still frames from the video so he could see the creature more clearly. Fortunately for him and his research, it had spent some time staying relatively still, and he was able to make it out in much more detail than any of them had managed before. Up close in the photos, it looks almost human, with a few notable and somewhat disturbing differences. He tried to remember that it wasn't. Scales covered its head. Although its mouth and eyes were both on the front, similar to a human face, they looked almost horrifyingly wrong. The eyes were perfectly round and big and perfectly black, too far apart and angled outwards in a way that probably allowed the creature to see to the side and in front of it. Its mouth was lower on its head than a human's, and the lipless edges stretched back along its jaw, nearly twice the width of a human's.

He wasn't sure why he was so surprised by this. Of course it wouldn't look like a human. Just because its top half was roughly human shaped didn't mean it had to share any other resemblance. But the fact remained that it was just close enough to human to make it look horribly deformed, even though all evidence would suggest it wasn't. That was just what it looked like. It shouldn't be any stranger than looking at any of the other creatures Logan had studied over the years.

But that didn't change the fact that something in him simply rebelled at the creature's appearance. Something about it was wrong.

"Everything about this is wonderful!"

That was what his boss had said when Logan showed him the pictures and the video, claiming that he had pretended to pull his phone out as a distraction. His boss had been unsurprisingly thrilled, and did not seem to feel any of Logan's discomfort with the creature's appearance.

"Try it again, okay? See if you can get it to come close, just without screaming and running away from it this time!" He laughed and - Logan braced himself - slapped Logan on the back. "Keep up the good work. This is the closest we've gotten this whole time. It's all uphill from here!"

"Going uphill is more difficult," Logan said flatly. "Which is generally the way this work progresses so yes, I suppose it is all uphill from here. I'll come by tonight again, when the interns are gone. They're good scientists, but I don't want to spook the creature by having too many people around."

"Whatever you think is best."

"Everything I think is best," Logan snapped. "That's why you hired me."

Over the next two weeks, Logan was able to coax the creature out nine more times. The second it thought he was looking at it, though, it would bolt back into the safety of its cave. Logan had taken to pacing around the perimeter of the cave, because as much as he tried, he was having a difficult time adjusting to coming into the facility at night and leaving during the day. He wasn't sure if the creature was nocturnal or not, but it certainly seemed more willing to come out whenever they turned the lights down low and kept as many people out of the room as they could. So Logan, too, became more active at night, much as his body protested the change. More than once in the last few weeks he had fallen asleep while sitting by the tank. His neck had ached for hours afterwards.

In those two weeks, he had learned not nearly as much as he would have liked. The creature seemed to have no preference for any particular kind of food; it would eat whatever they dropped in its tank. No more of its kind had been found. Logan had gotten a few more detailed shots, but because everything was simply a screenshot of a video, they still weren't as high resolution as he would have liked. It was impossible to point any sort of a decent camera at the creature without it bolting.

Also, the interns had named it. Interns were idiots. They couldn't even come up with something decent, any sort of binomial nomenclature. No, they called it Annie. Because it was "an anxious little fish." As though that made any kind of sense.

Now, he simply paced around the perimeter of the tank. The creature kept pace with him, swimming almost leisurely alongside. Logan made a show of flipping threw his notebook as he walked; this game only worked if they both pretended he couldn’t see the creature. Halfway around the tank, however, it suddenly slammed both of its webbed hands agains the glass, resulting in a loud, reverberating gong. Logan jumped and stared at the creature which, for the first time, simply stared back at him. And then, slowly, it turned its head to look at the ground in front of him.

There was a puddle. It must have splashed out of the tank, or perhaps someone had spilled something. The how didn’t really matter; the important thing was that, distracted as he had been with deliberately ignoring the creature, he almost certainl would have slipped and fallen. The creature had stopped him.

“Thank… you,” he said. He kept looking at it, and couldn’t help the wondering smile that came to his face as it only looked backt him without fleeing. “You’re not an anxious little fish at all, are you?” he asked, shaking his head at himself. “You’re just… careful. And protective. Vigilant, almost. You’re not Annie. You’re Virgil.”

Almost without thinking about it, he put his palm against the tank and, to his shock, the newly named Virgil did the same, webbed fingers lining up with Logan's. He stared at them, fascinated. They were much longer that his, dark blue with translucent webbing connecting them. Fanned out the way they are, Logan could see the color of the webbing much more clearly than usual, and he was surprised to see that, while the creature- while Virgil had always appeared to be entirely black and gray, the scales along his arms and the skin on the underside of his hand was actually a dark and shimmering shade of violet, and when the light shone through the webbing on his hands, it turned it into a soft, silvery lavender.

Logan was so absorbed in looking at the colors that he didn't even think to examine the rest of Virgil. He finally looked up, wondering if he would be able to make out any new details in the scales of Virgil's face, when he shouted in surprise and scrambled backwards. Virgil flung himself back from the glass, arms pinwheeling wildly and an expression of shock and terror on his suddenly familiar face. It would seem that Virgil had, unbeknownst to Logan or any of the other researchers, the ability to mimic appearances. Logan immediately started running through possibilities and examples in his mind, examining and dismissing possibilities and theories before he could even fully process them. Mimic octopus. Various species of snakes and insects. Perhaps even-

Virgil swam cautiously up to the glass, placing his hand back where it was. He looked ready to swim away at any second. His hand looked smaller now, and even as Logan watched the color faded from dark purple, to pink, to beige, until it was the same color as his own skin, lit a strange greenish tint by the lights in the water. The webbing between the fingers was still there, still a soft pinkish blush color. Logan took a deep breath and pressed his own hand against Virgil's, and tried not to recoil when the creature smiles at him. He was smiling with Logan's face.

It wasn’t an exact match. There were still patches of scales along his cheeks and forehead and gills on the sides of his neck. His ears were long and pointed, and his hair, longer and darker than Logan's, floated gently around his face. His eyes, too, were darker, and seem almost sunken into his skull. It takes a few moments for Logan to realize that they aren't just pits or shadows beneath Virgil's eyes, but darker markings, almost like bruises or birthmarks. Curious, Logan reached up with a finger and traced the shape of them onto the glass. Virgil followed his finger with one of his own, then touched his own face, apparently realizing what Logan was looking at. An excited expression crossed his face and bubbles streamed from his mouth as he traced the shapes himself, then mimed drawing circles around his eyes. Logan stared, baffled, and Virgil repeated the movement more slowly before pointing at Logan's face.

"My... my glasses?" he asked, adjusting them. Virgil grinned and wriggled in place, tail slapping against the glass in his excitement, and Logan surprised himself by giggling. "You... you tried to copy my glasses. Because you want to look like me." Virgil couldn't hear him and probably couldn't understand him, anyways (just because he looked human, looked like Logan, didn't mean he spoke any human languages), but he kept smiling, now touching his own face. He seemed curious to know what he looked like, and so Logan gathers that Virgil has never copied his appearance before. Even if Virgil hadn’t seemed so curious, Logan still would have known. He had watched ever second of the tapes; it was the first thing he did when he arrived at the facility each night and the last thing he did when he left each morning. So what changed? Why was he suddenly staring at his own face?

“You helped me,” he mused out loud. “You warned me about the puddle. You let me look at you without fleeing. I gave you a new name.”

Virgil, the creature mouthed at him, smiling with a mouth full of canines. Logan’s eyes widened, his jaw dropped, and Virgil’s smile disappeared, replaced with a worried expression.

“You… can you hear me?” Logan asked. Virgil stared back at him, silent and unmoving except for the slightest swishes of his tail to keep him in place. “Virgil?”

Virgil.

“All right, so you know your name,” Logan said, cocking his head to the side thoughtfully. He finally took his hand off the glass to point at his own chest. “Logan.”

Virgil rolled his eyes. Lo-gan, he mouthed, moving his lips in an exaggerated point. If Logan didn’t know any better, he’d say that Virgil was being sarcastic.

Of course, he clearly didn’t know better. He had no idea the creature could change its appearance, or that it possessed this level of intelligence. It was, it a way, conversing with him. It knew his name. It knew its own name.

“Did you already go by Virgil?” Logan asked, placing his hand against the glass and drumming his fingers thoughtfully. “Did I just happen to guess correctly? Or do you just like that better than Annie?”

Virgil gave Logan’s hand on the glass a disgusted look and mimed slapping his hand away. Logan paused his drumming, and Virgil looked satisfied. The vibrations must have carried more strongly through the water that Logan expected. How sensitive were Virgil’s ears? Or was he feeling the movement of the water physically? Maybe they should-

This, time, Virgil did actually slap the glass, grimacing. Oops. Logan had started drumming again without realizing it. Virgil kept his hand where it was, though, and Logan uncurled his own fingers to press against it.

“Virgil,” he breathed, and Virgil smiled back at him.

Logan.

#analogical #sanders sides #Virgil sanders #Logan sanders #i wrote this #randomslasher #i hope you don't mind this has just been in my head for a few days now #mer virgil #mergil?#vermaid?

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msayalailalim · 4 years

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PARCEL FASHION WEEK 📦

As Ayala Ibabaw (my drag persona 😂), there's this look I made that I think is so cute and weird that I wanted to see how it looks like on my baby. The material I used is a white foam filler, and it didn't work on my doll. 😂 It's a shame but I still went for whatever look I can come up with anyway, and I liked it. 😍 The concept I was going for when I started was designing a look for my doll should she be shipped somewhere. I wasn't just going to wrap her up carelessly. No, Ma'am. I'd rather do it in style! 😎

While I was making it with that concept in mind, I realized that there are more materials used in sending packages so why not use them too? That night, my initial plan was to do 3 looks featuring other items like bubble wrap (I was so excited for this!) and packaging tape. I scheduled to post all of it within the week.

The next morning, I don't know what hit me but suddenly I wanted to do 5 looks which I decided to post from Monday to Friday. It was a Monday then so I already have one ready for posting. Just four looks to accomplish, and we're done. I thought it was going to be easy. I really thought it was.

Instagram caption:

“I am planning to challenge myself this time with this project called "Parcel Fashion Week" where I'll be designing my doll only with materials used when sending packages from fillers to adhesives! My goal is to highlight those materials that are considered trash already once the ordered item is received. In this project, they're the stars! 🤩 I'll be posting whatever I come up with from this Monday until Friday. Today is the first day, and I'm featuring filler foams! It's from my Mother's furniture she bought years ago. I just knew there's something I can do with it, and here it is. 😄 Another objective of this project is for me to practice creating various silhouettes I haven't used before which I can consider as couture-ish like this elegant look Ayala's rocking! I'm really excited about this, but I'm also worried that I may not satisfy myself as much as I hope I will. We'll see about that. I just need to remind myself that it's just packaging, but in style. 😎 - Marv :)”

First day! Fun and full of hopes for the whole week's project! 🥰

Instagram caption:

”Parcel Fashion Week, Day 2: Packaging and Masking Tape! Maybe we shouldn't have opened the box because now, my baby is in a sticky situation. 😆 This project wouldn't be complete without featuring those essential adhesives used for our packages. I'll be very honest, and admit that I don't know where I was going with the look. My first idea was to make it look like my doll is a character from a video game that hasn't been unlocked yet therefore it's pixelated. As I kept adding details to it, I realized it looks more like someone who's got bandages all over. 😅 Then, I decided to have some of her hair not yet covered with tape so there's some sort of story like it being the scene five seconds before she gets fully consumed by whatever force that is. And during the photoshoot, I also thought that it could be a stage in a metamorphosis which is actually my favorite interpretation. Although, I believe whatever this is, any interpretation is correct as long as it's appropriate. 😄 I'm just really surprised with it. I even got new ideas that may be Ayala's look/s in the future during its creation earlier. Cheers! ❤ - Marv :)”

Second day! This isn't the first idea I had for the tapes I used. When I began I was really clueless with what I can do with it. There was even a point when I wanted to tap out of the project. That early, I know! 😂 It took a while till I got to this final look which I find to be so awesome! This was so unexpected. All I had to do was not stop. 😭

Instagram caption:

“Parcel Fashion Week, Day 3: Plastic and Inflatables!This look is inspired from hatchlings as they're taking their first steps on earth. Even though she's not yet clean, you can see her form already. I went for baby Dinosaurs because why not? And as for Ayala portraying that baby Dino taking her first steps, she'd rather do it like she's on the catwalk. Can't take away the model out of her. 😅 It's always fun to see plastic inflatables as fillers in our packages. It just brings back childhood memories like how I was so amazed with balloons back then. 😂 Now, I'm happy with how this turned out especially because I never thought I'll be doing a Dino silhouette, but then again why not? So here we are! 🥰 - Marv :)”

Third day! There's really that time pressure doing this challenge. I had to finish the looks early so it could be shot while there's still sunlight since that's the direction I'm going for. The challenge is not just finishing it though, but also making sure that I'm satisfied with the result as well like this one because I can't really post something if I'm not happy with it.

Instagram caption:

“Parcel Fashion Week, Day 4: Shredded Cardboard! I started out thinking I'll just be making a literal shredding process but with fashion. 😎 Then I got so excited to finish it so once I was done with the body, I just designed the headpiece with the first shape idea I had in mind which was a crown but ended up looking more like a flower. 😅 So I realized when I was doing the photoshoot that this look could also be a visualization of a decaying flower or plant which I think is amazing. For me, it looks so editorial, and that makes me so happy and also the fact that my doll is very unrecognizable here since it's really my goal to give her an unlimited collection of looks when I started all of this. 🥰 Self five! 👏😄 PS. I just used brown envelope to make it look like an actual cardboard so I hope it worked! ☺ - Marv :)”

Fourth day! Behold, another one of my favorite looks not just of the week but also out of everything that I've done so far for Ayala. 😭 Creating this at the second to the last day of this week's challenge puts so much pressure for what I'm about to do for the finale look. 🥲

Instagram caption:

“Parcel Fashion Week, Day 5: Parcel Pouch! Watch out for literal Ninjas inside your packages! 😆 Parcel pouches are really an ideal material to use for my baby's looks so I really took this opportunity to do so. 🥰 Anyway, today is the last day of my first ever fashion week project. This week had been so productive for me and my doll especially since we had to do it daily. 😭 It was honestly challenging but I surely learned a lot from this experience which will definitely be useful for my future projects. Cheers! 🥰 - Marv :)”

Fifth day! I hate this. As I said from the introduction, I was so excited to use the bubble wrap. That's why I also scheduled it to be done for the finale. It's the universal packaging wrapper/filler after all, but when I was doing it already nothing seems to work! It's just not a flexible material for me. 😢 After two hours of attempt, I gave it up and went with the parcel bag. I finished around 9 PM that day. It's so late. I was supposed to feel satisfied and fulfilled by then since I just wrapped up a fashion week project for the first time but no, I wasn't in the mood. If it were up to me, I wouldn't have posted that one but I'd like to keep my word. 😌

Despite the frustrating last day of that project, I still consider it a success. Even if there really is pressure, it was very productive and the process I went through taught me a lot of things about art and myself. 🤩

Here's to more fashion week projects!!! 🥰🥰🥰

And here's my doll bathing our disappointment away from the bubble wrap with bubble wrap. 🤣

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boy-banders-writings · 7 years

Text

I’d be lyin’ - Yuto(da)

Group: Pentagon Member: Adachi Yuto aka giant soft bean aka one of my undoings Genre: angsty-fluff? Requested! Can I just say I love your writing so much and you’re literally so amazing at writing Pentagon stuff!!!!!!!! May I request like a friends/frenemies to lovers type thing with Yuto? Seriously love you so much. Thanks!!!!! Prompt: “I wasn’t lying when I said I loved you.” Length: short|medium|long|idk man

For as long as you could remember your relationship with Adachi Yuto was a strange one. You had been friends forever it seemed, but the two of you were total opposites. You expressed yourself well, verbally and nonverbally. Yuto always knew what was going on in your head because it was written on your face. Him, not so much. He was blank probably 80% of the time, which often left you frustrated because he didn’t communicate with you that well. Getting him to explain his thoughts or feelings was like pulling teeth, he made it difficult. On top of that, the two of you were constantly in an unspoken competition in everything, from art projects to quizzes to overall grades. The two of you even had dumb little competitions all through out high schools, sometimes ending the two of you in detentions (but other than those few times you two were model students).

The main obstacle in your friendship was the communication or the lack there of sometimes, it made good moments of communication few and far between. You’ll never forget the time you spent a month putting together a photo album for him when he mentioned he may be leaving for Seoul to audition for a company or two. A whole month of your time went towards documenting your friendship from grade school till now. Hundreds of paper cuts later and the most Yuto gave you in response was a smile and a quiet thank you. You showed him how hurt you were by his lack of enthusiasm by bursting into tears, even if you hated how easily you broke down.

You weren’t expecting a whole spectacle but you’d spent so much time, printing and gluing pictures in order, writing captions under each picture filled with thoughts and memories, lots of personalizations for everything. If he was moving away and you couldn’t go with him, you at least wanted him to take apart of you with him. He felt so bad because he just didn’t know at the time how to express how much the photo album meant to him. He had to leave just minutes after receiving it and seeing you crying like that killed him. He hugged you close and apologized for being awful at expressing himself but he had to go and that he’d call once he was settled.

That first week apart while Yuto was in Seoul auditioning was the toughest week of your life, not that you’d ever admit it to him, but it killed you. You never realized how much you relied on and turned to Yuto for. You knew he was busy preparing for his audition and the multiple rounds he may have to face when he got through the initial round so you didn’t want to bother him. But you wanted to send him some sort of message.

After an internal struggle you settled for a quick encouraging message telling him not to be nervous, that he had this and you were rooting for him. The messages kept coming from you every other day during the second and third week. He replied back here and there usually after you were asleep but he still kept you up to date on things. The fourth week, he was so busy you got a total of two replies, the last one an apology for being MIA lately, to which he said he’d explain soon.

It would be a month exactly before he finally contacted you other than Kakaotalk and you were fighting to hide your excitement when your phone started ringing.

“Yah!” You answered your phone. “It took you long enough.”

“So you’re up, are you dressed?”

“It’s after noon, of course I’m up.” You scoffed. “And I am, why?”

“Come outside, I’m waiting.” You turned in your chair in front of your desk and peered out your window. Sure enough he was standing on the sidewalk in front of your apartment.

“That’s a little weird ya know.” You joked, the excitement of seeing him making your insides jump around. “Why, you best be paying if I’m leaving my house today.”

“Just get out here already before I change my mind.”

You wanted to smack him when you realized he hung up after that but nonetheless you quickly threw a sweater over your tee and ran to slip on your tennis shoes. Thankful you left your keys and purse in the kitchen from your early morning grocery shopping. Catching your breath, you exited your place locking the door behind you and turning to find Yuto waiting for you with a smile.

“Got this for you.” He handed you your favorite drink from the local cafe, you noticed he was sipping on his own drink. “I figured we needed a day together.”

“Lucky for you I had no real plans.” You elbowed him lightly and headed towards the town. The outlet mall was your normal spot and you figured that was his plan.

Yuto walked beside you, the two of you sipping on your drinks quietly. The quiet was a comfortable quiet you hadn’t realized you had missed with him being gone. Just the two of you walking side-by-side, enjoying the other’s presence. You looked over at him, his hair was a bit longer and styled off his forehead and the bags under his eyes were definitely bigger than when he left. He was dressed nicer too, not in his usual jeans and a tee, he was sporting ripped black jeans, with a jacket over a hoodie. Everything matched which was a nice surprise. You hadn’t realized he’d been casually checking you out too, making sure you were okay.

“How have things been?” You broke the silence.

“I’ve been good, busy but good.” He really looked at you again, “What about you?”

“Well, I moved out but you knew that.” You shrugged, “My parents were getting to be too much. That was stressful, but I started a new job. How cliche is it that I’m working at a cafe in the city.” You joked.

“It’s not cliche, it’s fitting actually.” He smiled down at the coffee in hand. “A barista cafe or a cafe with lots of food and baked goods?”

“Food and baked goods.” You chuckled. “We serve lots of different drinks too. But it’s not like a Starbucks, more mom and pop type of shop.”

“Definitely fitting. You’re such a people person.” His elbow bumped yours. “It’s always been one of the things I love about you.” The last part was quiet.

“Just one?” You joked, moving to lock your arm with his. “What else do you love?”

You almost missed the way his cheeks flared before he cleared his throat.

“I love how you always wear what you want regardless of anyone’s opinions on the matter. I love that you always stood your ground with your parents and spoke your mind. I love that you have to have your coffee as almost half sugar because you hate the bitter taste. I love that your face scrunches up when you laugh really hard, it’s really cute. I love that you follow your heart but you’ve always considered the consequences before jumping into things. I love that you’ve been my best friend your years, my rock, my support, my counselor.” He chuckled to himself, and peeked up at you for a second. “I love that you’ve always stood beside me through everything, I wouldn’t be where I am without you. I just love you.”

The way those three words felt was different than all the other times. Those three words felt heavy but light, warm but a little cold. Those three words felt just right but oh so wrong.

You looked up at him to see his full attention on you. Your heart picked up in pace, you felt like it would pop out of your chest. The warmth of your coffee was seeping into your chilled hands but your cheeks were much warmer. You turned to face him fully and worked to even out your expression.

“Yah, stop lying this isn’t the time to mess with me.” You frowned, watching his face contort into something resembling bewilderment before turned forward and moving again.

“I wasn’t lying when I said I loved you.” Yuto stuttered as he grabbed your wrist and stopped you. “Why would I lie about that?”

His eyebrows furrowed together while you still faced away from him. You didn’t want him to see the tears, you didn’t know why you started crying. You couldn’t tell if they were happy tears before Yuto loved you, like loved you. Taking a quick shaky breath and using your fingers that were wrapped about the cup to dab at your cheeks you turned to face him.

“Really?” You watched him nod, his expression nervous. “You’re just going to drop this on me after getting into the company?”

“How’d you know?” His nervousness turned to confusion.

“I’m your number one supported.” You smiled weakly, “I follow the company’s twitter and saw the list of new trainees that passed.”

“I wanted to tell you sooner actually, but it felt cruel to tell you before I left.”

“It’s kind of cruel either way ya know.” Your wrist slipped out of his grasp enough for your hand to rest in his. “But I can’t lie and say I haven’t felt that way about you for a quite a while.” You shyly confessed, turning away from him and tugging him behind you.

“Should we do what they always do in movies?” You paused at Yuto’s question.

“And what exactly would that be?”

“There’s always two things.” He smiled, pulling your paused smaller frame into his arms. “One, (Y/N) will you be my girlfriend? Officially and all that.”

“Yes I guess.” You tried to play off your excitement. “What’s the second?”

“Two, this.” He leant down and kiss your lips. It was soft, sweet and too short in all honesty.

“Ah, that was my favorite part.” You reddened at your brash words before hiding your face into his chest. “Kill me now.”

“Can’t kill my girlfriend, that would be dumb.” He smiled lovingly down at you in his arms. “But I can treat you to a nice meal and then we can go back to your place and I can kick you ass at any video game.”

“You started out so strong and finished so bad.” You teased. “But you’re on boyfriend.”

“We’re gross.” His fingers curled up.

“Agreed.” You locked your fingers with his and continued on. “But it’s okay because we’re cute.” You shrugged which earned a Yuto chuckle.

“If I win will you clean my apartment?” Your cute request came with a pout and puppy eyes.

“Only if you’ll do my laundry if I win.”

“Now you’re pushing it.” You rolled your eyes, relishing in the feel of his hand encasing yours.

What a turn things had taken huh.

#pentagon #pentagon scenarios #adachi yuto #pentagon yuto #pentagon fluff

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areusittingcomfortably · 7 years

Link

Here’s a link to the article about Santi from the Saturday section of El Mercurio on 21 January 2017. Between Google Translate and my school girl Spanish, I’ve had a go at translating, but Chilean Spanish is full of slang, and I can’t translate some of the expressions! I’d ask a Chilean friend to help, but I don’t think she’s come round yet since I sent her the photos! 😉

It’s a beautiful interview, but I’m warning you, you may need some tissues. Particularly when you think back to that scene when Aramis talks about not having children… “in another life, perhaps”. I’m glad they had the miracle in this one.

Here’s the (edited, but still with a few strange expressions) translation:

The path of Santiago Cabrera

Scene 1: Los Angeles, early 2005. In an attempt to get better opportunities as an actor, Santiago Cabrera comes to live in California, United States. His agent had insisted that he should settle there. The first few months were miserable, he remembers today: after going to dozens of castings for movies and series, his phone did not ring. Without contact networks, his savings were gone.

“What am I doing here?” I asked myself. For a moment I faltered and said, “Maybe this is not for me.”

Scene 2: Los Angeles, February 2007. It’s Oscar night and Cabrera is in a limousine with his wife, the German theater director Anna Marcea, on the way to the traditional Vanity Fair party, which summons the biggest stars of the event. As one of the protagonists of the series of television Heroes, that swept in hearing, he lives a moment of greater success.

“I’m getting out of the car and Martin Scorsese is just in another limo. He had just won his first Oscar as director for The Departed. I stood looking at him and there were a lot of people standing behind a fence, waiting to see the arrival of the celebrities. Then I feel that they start to shout all: “Santiaaago!”. There I realized the power of the TV: I was in front of Scorsese, but the fans recognized me.”

Santiago Cabrera (38) never thought about being an actor. Affable, charismatic, and with a neutral accent but sprinkled with Chilean, he remembers that his dream was to be a footballer and get to play in Real Madrid or Barcelona. As a boy, living in Spain, he was offered to join Atletico Madrid cadets. But, as at other times, he had to leave behind the opportunity and follow the path of his father, Pedro Pablo Cabrera, who made a long diplomatic career - he was Chile’s ambassador to London, Moscow, Beijing and the Vatican. And to each of his destinations, he took his wife and three children. The actor was born in Caracas, and then lived in Toronto, Bucharest, London, and Madrid.

When he was 2 years old, in Canada, Cabrera says he spoke half English, half Spanish. He got used to leaving behind friends and schools, but they always told him that his home was in Chile. They returned a couple of times a year. In fact, he completed third and fourth basic, in addition to all his middle school, in the College of St. Benedict, which was near his home in Vitacura.

“I was always scared to arrive in a new country, a new school. I was shy, which meant being alert to how I was going to be received. I always thought about being here, but I came back for two years then I wanted to go. I caught the travel bug.”

When leaving the school he studied psychology at the University Diego Portales, thanks to a sports scholarship, while playing in cadets of Catholic University. Coach Óscar Meneses told him that he had conditions [possibilities?]. But, for him, it was too late for football.

“At semi-professional level I was a scorer, but when I played more professional football, I realized that there were always about 10 guys better than me and that frustrated me. I was always starting, but they did not put me on the front, so I realized I was not going to reach a high level.”

Have you ever regretted not finishing psychology?

“No, it was not my thing.” He was pure pichangueando and rolling [it was all fun and games?]. It was a good party, half a bottle of pisco, the whistle and remain as a shoe [getting drunk and having hangovers?]. But he had to stop. “I tried to be the rebel, the [busted? wild guy?], and over the years I realized that I am not like that, and I am content not to be like that.”

In his third year, Cabrera left his course and, at 20 years old, went to London to study acting. Two years earlier he had discovered that he liked it, he recalls, after doing a play about Mozart, so he followed that impulse. In England he got a job in a bar and entered the Drama Center, from which actors such as Michael Fassbender, Colin Firth or Tom Hardy, have graduated. After three years of study, he quickly got an agent.

“My first part was in a play by Shakespeare and I thought about the acting life. I was super innocent about the industry, but I did the audition, and got the part in Empire, which at the time was the biggest series, and then it was less so. But when they gave it to me, in Hollywood many were waiting to see who they were going to give the role to, so there was a lot of interest in representing me. I was an idealist, I wanted to do cinema, art and theater.” He regarded Hollywood suspiciously.

In Hollywood actors must endure many rejections, how do you deal with it?

“They hurt when you’re interested in the project, but now I reject it.”

What does he say no to?

"The bad guy, the Latin drug dealer and when it is for my looks. I try to break the Latin stereotype, I consider myself a character actor, and although there are always exceptions, I do not want to fall into that. Today, in the United States and England, they are trying to do more diverse projects, but I get the audition and in the description of the character it says: “We seek any ethnicity.” You go to a casting and everyone is black, Latino, Indian, and Asian. Then you ask: why am I in this category and not in a lead role? It’s super strong. They believe that Latin is a race and not a culture. There has to be a day when this changes, that inclusion is not just about meeting the quota.

Of the Chilean actors who live in the United States, Cabrera has been the most constant in the last 15 years. Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones, Narcos) and Cote de Pablo (NCIS) have achieved success with serial productions, but do have not had the CV that Santiago does: besides Heroes, he participated in the series Merlin; In Alcatraz by JJ Abrams; In Steven Soderbergh’s film about Che Guevara; In the HBO mini-series Hemingway & Gellhorn, alongside Nicole Kidman; In the miniseries Anna Karenina; And for three years he played Aramis in the series The Musketeers, which can be seen on Netflix.

Despite rubbing shoulders with high-profile projects, Cabrera has only relative fame in Chile, and he’s aware of that.

“Here I pass super piola (pass mainly unrecognised?), people only recognise me after looking at me for a while. One time a Chilean asked me what I was doing, I told him that The Musketeers had finished and he asked me what character I played. I answered him and he looked at me in surprise: "Ah, you are one of the Musketeers!” He recognized me but he thought I was extra, and that already seemed good to him. I think my fame could be double that of Bruce Willis and it would be the same in the media here. I think everything is measured by the same rod in Chile. But I understand, we are a smaller country, we are not accustomed to it.”

Do you care about recognition in Chile?

“I think if I cared that much, I would have made the effort to be more recognized. People tell me that I have to promote myself more, but I’m content, because the work dictates everything. Now I have a mini-series on HBO and Transformers, concrete things. I feel more relaxed talking about my work. US Weekly magazine has wanted to do a feature in my home and I have always said no. I do not feel comfortable, I do not sell my life, but the work I do.“ If he were on TV in Chile, he would probably be more recognised. "They offered me several years and I always said no, I think they got tired. But I’m not closing the door, only saying no for now.”

Don’t you care about fame?

“I don’t. I am more withdrawn and quiet, perhaps, but I am willing to be high profile if I am in a project that deserves it. I see people who are very famous and most are looking for it. There is a tremendous confusion with being popular today, they do not care what project you do, they respect how much you earn for the film. If people say, ”He was a good actor, but he could have been promoted more”, I could die content.

Cabrera goes to a casting for a movie that interests him. While reading the script, the casting director - who already knew him - puts on a strange face, which he translates as “this role is not for you, but I like what you’re doing.”

Then she says: “I’ll pass on another project that may interest you: Transformers 5.”

Did it interest you immediately? Didn’t you have reservations?

“I acknowledge that I had reservations. When she told me, and she is a casting director who does really good things, I thought: “Transformers number what?”. I hadn’t seen one.

Transformers 5: The Last Knight, which opens on June 23, is Cabrera’s first blockbuster. The film, he says, will be a huge showcase for him: movies 1-4 grossed over $1 billion worldwide and now similar figures are expected, with a cast featuring Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, and John Goodman.

“Transformers is an opportunity for an actor, because there is a possibility that your name is there and that will open other doors or fund projects. But I was also interested in the background of the character and the work we did with the American special forces to prepare me. It was a great experience and is the biggest I’ve done, because they have also put me in the group of protagonists. ” He says in the film he will play a retired military man who is now a mercenary and who leads a squadron called TRF that fights the Threat of the Transformers. If all goes well, he says, his character could be in the sixth part of the franchise.

In order to work on the film, which finished filming on December 10, the actor had to be interviewed by Michael Bay, director of the series and known for films such as Armageddon or Pearl Harbor. Initially, the meeting would be in his office, but at the last moment he decided to do it at home. There they talked for a while in the garden, until Bay said:

“Let’s do a couple of scenes, shall we read some?”

Cabrera was not expecting it.

“I stopped, read the texts, he told me a few things and then said, "Already, we are, now I have to go talk to Anthony Hopkins on Skype,” and he left. From his reaction, I thought he had not been much impressed, but the casting director looked at me and thumbs up.“

The other big project that he will be inthis year is Big Little Lies, an HBO miniseries premiering on February 19th. Based on the novel by the same name, by Liane Moriarty, and adapted by David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal), it’s produced by and starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, and its cast is completed by Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas buyers club), tells the story of three mothers with children who are involved in a mysterious crime, while Cabrera plays the role of a theater teacher who is key in the plot. He can not tell much more about the role, he says, only that almost all his scenes are with Witherspoon.

"In almost every scene I was alone with Reese, and the atmosphere was very creative, because as she was producer, she offered space to play around and improvise. We talked a lot, she is a grounded and intelligent person, very prolific in projects. In fact, she told me that she would love to work with me again. And with Nicole Kidman we only had a couple of scenes, but as we had acted together before, there was a big hug; she is a very nice person.”

The first day of work in the miniseries, he remembers, in particular: he arrived at the set and sat at a desk to familiarize himself with the context of his character. As he read, the lights went down and a voice shouted, “Action!” “I saw the camera above and I froze. I feel a few tacos and it was Reese coming up to me to start the scene. Obviously, we shot it more times, but that adrenaline was incredible. That night I could not sleep, it’s one of the reasons I say: "That’s why I like my partner so much.”

For 15 years, Cabrera has been married to Anna Marcea (40). They met in London, when he studied acting, and at the time decided to have a civil wedding. It took two weeks to decide and do it.

“I phoned my mom, they were in Moscow, because my dad was an ambassador there, and I said, "Not this Wednesday, but the other one, I’m getting married.” There was a long silence. Then I learned that my dad said, “Let him write a letter, this can not be, things are not done that way.” Anna was known to her, but we were impulsive.

It took years for you to be parents, why?

“Since we were young, we did not have money at the beginning, so we did not want to. And when we decided to have a child, it did not come. First it was three years that we did not, then we started with the treatments, and we lost a pair, it was really hard.”

It must have been suffocating for you as a couple.

“A lot. So much so, that we talked one day and she said, "I can’t take more, I need to take control of my life.” Because physically they were affecting her, there were so many hormones that she had to take, and emotionally it was terrible that it did not work. She told me she could not do it any more. I was in Prague recording The Musketeers and it was a very hard week. We came to the conclusion that we were very fortunate to be together and that we would be a couple with no children. And accept it just.“

Among the treatments to get pregnant, did she postpone her career?

“Yes, but in addition to resuming her career, it was also to resume her life, because she had to take care of herself all the time to get pregnant. It was a project of life that took us years and didn’t work out, so there was a sadness in our home, a tremendous emptiness … And that same month we talked, she became pregnant. Imagine: to be eight years trying, with all the hours to achieve it, the in vitro treatment, and all that did not work, but then suddenly it happens in a natural way. It was a miracle. That’s why we called him Kilian, which means "warrior.” In addition, it was a 24-hour delivery, born with a tremendous knot that could have complicated things.“

Santiago, Anna, and Kilian - who was born last April - arrived on vacation in Chile a month ago. They were in the house of the actor’s parents in Cachagua and now they will go to the south.

"I want to settle here, I was seeing some places to buy something on the coast, I’ll see something in Pucón too. In Los Angeles I also want to buy (there he leases a duplex in West Hollywood), to be with one foot here and the other outside. I did not feel so Chilean until I lived here between the ages of 15 and 20, but I had a strong relationship since I was a boy, and I want to give my son that opportunity, so that he knows his country.”

PS: if anyone can help improve this translation, by all means send me a message!

Here you go - I think this might be a better translation! http://santiagocabrera.net/2017/01/santiago-cabrera-sabado-interview-el-mercurio/

#santiago cabrera #article #el mercurio #google translate #aramis #the musketeers

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aviyinglet · 7 years

Text

Workflow Issues, Potential Solutions

I've lately grown dissatisfied with a few aspects of my long-form comicmaking process! Here's a lengthy, technical post explaining why, and what I plan to do about it:

(tl/dr: I get too bogged down in art details/grow too frustrated with the earlier bits of a long story as I produce it; I plan to shift my focus to VN-style indie games, the first of which you might be seeing from me soon.)

My story ideas usually begin with a script, and that script is usually heavily focused on dialogue, with very little in terms of prose or stage direction to frame it. As a result, many of my comic ideas -- my most cherished ones, the ones I’ve repeatedly rewritten and refined -- can be summed up as the adventures of a pair of emotive talking heads. Because of this, there are a lot of times I am completely unsure how I'm going to lay my pages out. Visualizing interesting methods of framing two people talking is pretty difficult, it turns out!

Some other webcomic artists overcome this in a few ways:

They always use a four-panel template, and pace the conversation around little jokes and cute moments on every page's fourth beat.

They restrict background details to establishing shots, and have most of the character interactions take place in empty space.

They render their characters exclusively from a perfectly flat, side-on perspective.

I should make it clear: each of these shortcuts are perfectly valid ways to tell a story in sequential format. But I usually don't do those -- at least, not to the prolific level of my more successful peers -- because I have very exacting standards. In a finished, long-form, professionally-presented story, I feel like I must vary my layouts/camera angles and include a background in each panel whenever possible. I believe these are high standards for any comic artist, but especially so for one who diversifies their creative interests and handles the entire workload themself. Visual art is ultimately just one part of how I’d like to express myself, and as far as my stories are concerned -- unless it's very specifically a story dependent on character movement (lewd stories like TCS or ASDR) -- it's not exactly the primary focus.

In addition, I've also grown frustrated with the permanence of the comic workflow process! Those who've followed me when my Patreon was active know of a comic project from 2015 I've produced 8 pages of, and subsequently stalled on before I could finish and release it. What many of you don't know is that the story has been completely rewritten several times, with each rewrite stemming from the most recent page I’d fully finished and uploaded. The script, originally meant to be my own playful version of a specific type of comic story, ended up having an original script and ending I simply couldn't be proud of. I had to clarify additional backstory and motivation, give one conversation a more thoughtfully-considered angle, and rewrite the ending entirely -- and given the implied permanence of uploaded art, they could only be rewritten through the lens of the pages I'd already completed and uploaded. This is fine for an ongoing webcomic with a consistent update schedule, but for a 26-page story I was only a few pages into, it simply didn't work.

So, if not through comics, then what other storytelling format would work for me? Followers of my public Twitter might know that I’ve been thinking about doing this through software. As an example, I'd like to point you to a spritesheet for the GBA/DS game Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

For those unfamiliar: The above-linked sheet is every single graphic used for the main character of a story-focused adventure game that lasts several hours. The process of drawing and animating a character to this level of detail is -- compared to a full-length, full-color comic, assuming a quality level typical of my art -- a Telegram sticker pack's worth of visual art work. This character is exclusively depicted from the exact same angle, on a static background that is rendered once; throughout the game, his poses are extensively reused. Repeatedly copy/pasting character art in a comic is a cardinal sin to many people, because readers expect a certain level of dynamism in the way characters are depicted from panel to panel; in a game like the Ace Attorney series, since the events play out in linear real-world time, very few people mind this at all, just because the game format comes with different expectations.

There are, of course, points in every Ace Attorney (/Professor Layton/Dangan Ronpa/etc.) where more complex poses than a character's defaults are required -- at which point the game either tells it through descriptive text, special effects, or (during especially plot-critical moments) by switching to individual fullscreen illustrations of the actions taking place. This graphic storytelling method is typical among visual novels, but a few other games have implemented methods I wouldn’t mind eventually adding in.

An exclusively VN-style approach would've been more than enough for me, had I come to consider all this in early 2015. But the release of Undertale (which uses expressive face portraits juxtaposed alongside its text) had me thinking about my fondness for games like EarthBound and Final Fantasy VI, where an overhead view gives ample opportunity for characters to animate and interact with one another in limited yet effective ways; it makes me think that some stories might be best off with a similar overhead-view mode, in addition to the typical VN interface, to allow for a greater level of direct interactivity. (Modern 2D games like LISA and Stardew Valley also employ these techniques; their success makes me think I'm on the right track.)

Is all this actually feasible for me? Well: I've recently been messing around with Lexaloffle's PICO-8 fantasy game console, which has turned out to be a surprisingly fruitful endeavor so far -- fruitful enough that if I replicate the progress I've made in it in a more versatile platform (like MonoGame), I'll have a visual novel framework I can not only add features to piece-by-piece (as each project's needs demand it), but that I could also potentially export to other platforms, should I ever end up producing something appropriate for them.

I should again make myself completely clear: I am under no assumptions that this new approach will lessen my workload, nor am I assuming it will be easy -- but I am hoping that it will instead allow me to depict longer stories in a more economical way that fits my writing style, and to more effectively be able to release each one as a contiguous story I can refine from beginning to end until the moment the finished work is uploaded. Assuming this approach continues to work the way it already has been, I’ll be sure to keep you all apprised of the results.

#text #read more #Beeps About Games #(kind of)

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fire-bear · 7 years

Text

Working Together?

Hey, hey, hey! So, those Hetalia weeks I wrote for, I decided to write second parts for the ones that requested it. So here’s a second part for this one. It’s set a few weeks later and is totally happening because I wanted all for of them in the one room - without it being a classroom, anyways.

... Not that that lasts long...

“... and so,” Mrs. Clapham concluded, “I'll be putting you all into groups of four. I have no desire to watch you squabbling or having half-finished projects presented to me. Please listen for your name and then arrange to meet outside of class to discuss this further.”

“Is she trying to torture us?” Arthur murmured to Lili.

Giggling, Lili shook her head. “If she didn't do it, all the friends would stick together. It's only fair.”

“As long as we don't get Creeby in our groups.”

“Creeby's not so bad. He doesn't speak much.”

“But I really hate his name.”

Biting her lip to keep from laughing loudly, Lili turned her head to find a common sight these days; Natalya was watching her from across the room. Their eyes met and Lili quickly looked away, hoping her cheeks hadn't turned red. As she turned her head, she caught sight of Alfred glancing their way. He quickly returned to his attention to his friend when Creeby whispered into his ear. They both snickered and glanced once more in their direction. Lili turned back to Arthur and hoped he hadn't seen; the glare said otherwise.

“... John Creeby and Kiku Honda will be in the fifth group.”

“Ooh,” whispered Arthur. “Poor Kiku.”

Lili hid her grin by ducking her head and quickly scribbling a few words from the board. Realising she had already written them down, she shook her head and promptly had to catch her flower crown. Today, she had decided on a combination of carnations and lily of the valley, weaved together with cattail. The day before, Alfred had been mean to Arthur again and she was hoping to promote some sort of peace so that Arthur could get through the day without him wanting to cry. Once she had straightened the crown, she scored out the words she didn't need and looked over at Arthur. He was looking at her flowers, seemingly bemused.

“... Lili Vogel, Arthur Kirkland and Alfred Jones. Now, as quietly as possible, move into your groups, if you please.”

There was a sudden commotion around Lili and Arthur but they stayed where they were, both stunned at the announcement. Slowly, Lili looked around at Arthur whose eyes were so wide that Lili worried they would pop out. “Oh, Arthur,” she breathed, putting a comforting hand on his arm.

“Why does the universe hate me?” Arthur murmured, finally relaxing from his tensed state.

“I'm sorry, Arthur.” Lili paused, her brain catching up with her. “Wait,” she said, frowning. “Who was the fourth person in our group?”

Arthur blinked at her. Then he smiled, looking strained. “I would have thought you'd have heard her name, considering...”

“So,” said a familiar voice from behind Lili. Cautiously, Lili twisted in her seat till she could look up at the tall form of Natalya. Alfred stood beside her, scowling at nothing. “Whose room should we meet in?” Natalya asked.

Since Lili and Natalya shared a room, they decided it would be simpler just to meet there after dinner. Which gave both Lili and Arthur plenty of time to bemoan their situation during their evening meal.

“Oh, gosh,” Lili said, nervously playing with her green beans. “I've never worked with Natalya before at all. This will be the most I'll have talked to her all year!”

“You're lucky,” Arthur growled, glaring at his cup. “At least you don't need to work with anyone who hates you.”

Wincing, Lili shook her head. “I don't think he hates you, Arthur...”

“He clearly does,” Arthur argued, raising his eyes to glare at Lili. She watched as all the fight drained out of him and he slumped. “It's... so hard...”

“I know,” murmured Lili, reaching out to place her hand on his. “I'm sure, without his friends to act out with, he'll be calmer. Nicer. Maybe he'll even get along with you and then...”

“Don't,” Arthur whispered. “Don't raise my hopes, Lil.”

“Sorry,” said Lili, grimacing at her mistake.

“On the other hand, I think you'll do all right.” Arthur gave Lili a weak grin. “All you need to do is lean into her when you're working on this and...” His grin grew as he raised an eyebrow and Lili's cheeks grew hot.

“St-Stop that!” Lili hissed, glancing around in case someone overheard them. “I hope you're not going to do that tonight.”

“Someone should have a happy ending,” Arthur mumbled, returning his attention to his meal and poking at his carrots. Lili bit her lip and fell silent as well, praying that there would be two happy endings soon...

There was a rather awkward silence when they finally gathered in Lili and Natalya's room. After working out where everyone was sitting and making sure they had everything, they paused, waiting. Lili tried not to fidget lest she draw attention to herself. A couple of times, though, she was tempted to break the silence, even going so far as to take a deep breath and open her mouth. Each time, she faltered under the eyes of Alfred and Natalya, both of them watching her with interest.

Thankfully, Arthur was the one to speak first, saving Lili from saying something silly. “So,” he said. “I think the first question should be which type of literature should we do our report on?”

“Comic books,” Alfred said, immediately.

“Those. Aren't. Literature,” Arthur ground out.

“They are too! They're considered an art form, y'know.”

“Don't be so daft-!” Arthur began but Natalya interrupted.

“We should still write it down, consider all ideas,” she said, raising an eyebrow at Arthur.

For a moment, Arthur seemed about to argue. Then he jotted down the initials 'CB' as if he thought it wasn't worth the time to write it out in full. “Fine. I was thinking that we could do Gothic literature. You know: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Portrait of Dorian Gray...”

“Those are way too wordy,” Alfred protested.

Before a fight could break out, Natalya wrote down the idea and Lili rushed to copy her. Their actions stopped Arthur from retorting and Alfred only sighed before noting it down, too. “Um,” said Lili into the silence. “Maybe fantasy? We could compare how the fantasy world reflects our own...?”

“That's a brilliant idea!” Arthur declared and wrote it down. Lili glanced at Alfred and saw his eyes narrow.

“Then, how about romance?” Natalya asked. “We could talk about how realistic they are.”

Another silence fell on them, loaded with tension and embarrassment. “Yes...” Arthur eventually said and wrote it down, ducking his head far more than he needed to. Lili knew why: she was also blushing. Clearing his throat, Arthur added, “And we could always consider science fiction, see how older books viewed the world and if technology has actually developed the way they thought.” After writing that down, he continued, “I think those are enough different forms to consider – we should probably pick the one-”

“Hang on,” said Alfred, leaning forwards and further into the small circle they had formed, encroaching on Arthur's personal space. “Why are any of those ideas different from comic books?”

“Because they use actual words and more complex ways of conveying a point.”

“Comic books can do that, too!”

“Oh, sure. Words like 'Bam' and 'Pow'.”

“It still tells a story! And it's still a valid type of literature!”

“Fine!” snapped Arthur, glaring at Alfred so much that Lili could barely see his eyes. “We'll consider it. That's why we wrote it down.”

“But comics would be easier to-”

“We don't want easy,” Arthur argued. “We want a good grade. Right, Lili?”

“Well, yes,” said Lili, hesitantly. “But-”

“See? Only you would think that 'simple is best'.”

“Please-” Lili tried but she was cut off yet again.

“It's better than being boring,” Alfred retorted.

Arthur opened his mouth to respond, fury clear on his face, but Natalya beat him to it. “Enough. This argument is getting us nowhere. And you keep interrupting Lili – let her speak.”

Blushing at both the fact that Natalya had stood up for her again and that everyone was now looking at her, Lili looked away from them. “Um... I think we should choose one so we can start working...?”

There was a brief silence, almost peaceful in comparison to the previous arguing. Then Arthur spoke. “Lili's right. Let's all agree that some of-” He broke off and cleared his throat, glaring down at his notebook. “That we all have different tastes. What we need to decide is which one to choose.”

“Well, I'm not doing romance,” said Alfred immediately, his nose scrunched in distaste.

“Because we all must bow to your demands,” Arthur muttered. Lili tensed beside him, sensing another argument starting.

“What was that?” Alfred growled.

“Nothing,” said Arthur. “If we rule out romance, we've got science fiction, fantasy and Gothic.”

“And comic books,” said Alfred, his eyes still narrowed.

“I've not read many comic books,” said Natalya before Arthur could speak. “What about you, Lili?”

“No,” Lili replied, realising the implications. “I'm sorry, Alfred, but maybe we should go with what the majority have read?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” said Alfred, snappily. “Just leave me out, then.”

“It's not our fault you don't read,” Arthur pointed out.

“I do. Just because I don't read, like, Lord of the Rings or whatever for fun, doesn't mean I'm stupid.”

“I never said tha-”

“You were thinking it!”

Arthur exploded: Lili could almost see the past few week's frustrations spilling from his mouth. “Well, if you're in charge of this, we'll have some stupid, simplistic presentation that everyone will laugh at us for!”

“At least it wouldn't be what you want!” Alfred retorted, his hands clenched in fists.

“You don't know what I want!”

“It would be something about vampires and fairies – something a freak would talk about!”

Everything stilled. Lili wasn't sure she was breathing, watching her friend and Alfred with wide eyes. She wondered, briefly, if she should say something now that they'd stopped. Then she noticed the way Arthur was suddenly trembling, the way he was biting his lip. She knew that look. “Ar-” she began, barely above a whisper.

“I need a break,” Arthur suddenly said, not looking at anyone. Alfred blinked, looking surprised. “Would anyone like some tea?”

“Um,” said Lili, knowing that Arthur wanted to leave the room to cry. “I-I'll have some,” she told him, knowing it would be a good excuse to take a little longer if he had to.

“I'll have some as well,” said Natalya, looking vaguely annoyed.

Alfred, now pale, opened his mouth to speak. But he was stopped by Arthur scrambling to his feet and heading to the door. When he reached it, he paused and said, in a strained voice, “I'll be back soon.” Then he left, the door swinging shut behind him with a bang.

Lili wasn't sure what to do now. Her heart was beating fast, the alarm brought on by the argument gradually fading. Natalya shifted next to her, reaching down to score out 'romance' and 'comic books' on her own pad. For a while, Alfred was still, staring at the door. Lili glanced between him and Natalya, wondering if she should say anything. Maybe ask Alfred to argue with Arthur less. She may be mistaken but she felt that Arthur was only being confrontational because he was expecting to be bullied by Alfred. Before she could say anything, though, Alfred got to his feet.

“I'm gonna get a drink from the vending machine. Be back soon.” His voice was oddly hushed.

“Oh,” said Lili, not sure what to think about that. She had been half-expecting him to say something nasty about Arthur behind his back but it seemed as though he was as shook up by the experience as she felt. “Okay,” she added as he left the room without a backwards glance. Letting out a sigh of relief, she felt the tension seep out of her.

“Are you all right?” asked Natalya, startling Lili. She had forgotten the other girl was still in the room.

“Yes,” Lili assured her, though she was still worried about Arthur.

“I feel sorry for him.”

“So do I,” Lili agreed, reaching up to tug absently at a cattail. “He must be so stressed, thinking that he's going to get bullied more.”

“I wasn't talking about Arthur,” Natalya said, making Lili blink at her. Natalya was looking back at her with a raised eyebrow, seemingly quite calm.

“But- Why do you feel sorry for Alfred?”

“Because everyone thinks he's stupid. He did get into the same English class as us.”

“Well, yes, but only because they told him he'd be kicked out of his clubs if he didn't get good grades.”

“He still got into the same class,” Natalya pointed out. “And then Arthur treats him like that.”

Lili frowned, annoyed on behalf of her best friend. “He has good reason to,” she said with clipped tones.

For a moment, Natalya looked surprised but she quickly frowned. “Why?”

“How else is he supposed to deal with the bullying?” Lili asked, folding her arms.

“If he didn't react so much...”

“That's not the point!” Lili cried.

Natalya's frown deepened. “Arthur's almost bullying him, too, you know. Just because he's an athlete, doesn't mean he's stupid.”

For a moment, Lili stared. She couldn't believe Natalya was being like this. They'd been getting along so well recently and Lili had been sure she was opening up. And now she was saying that Arthur, dealing with horrible treatment by his peers, should be labelled a bully as well? Lili could barely believe it.

Then a thought flashed into her head: Natalya is sticking up for Alfred because he's a fellow athlete.

Because she thinks that gives him the right to bully Arthur.

Because she likes Alfred.

And then, maybe the Ice Queen title is right.

They were horrible thoughts but the image of Natalya and Alfred together, laughing at pranks done to Arthur, embracing, kissing, sent a sharp pang through Lili's chest. Anger, at both her own inner turmoil and at Natalya's words, rose within her. Without thinking, she scrambled to her feet and glared down at Natalya, hands on her hips. Natalya blinked up at her, expression slowly forming into one of shock.

“Just because you're popular and fit and beautiful, doesn't mean you can say things like that! You don't know how Arthur feels, every day, so don't be mean to him! And I'm going to help him with the tea!”

With that, she turned on her heel and marched to the door. Slamming it behind her, she stalked down the hall, spotting Alfred returning to the room, dragging his heels with a can of Coke in his hand. He looked up when she stormed by but she only sent him a glare: Alfred looked quite terrified.

It was only when she reached Arthur and explained what had happened that she realised just what she had said to Natalya...

#fan fiction #hetalia

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