#And toddlers would beg to be flown around.

[violent138]

Superbat parenting babies would be a breeze in my humble opinion. Bruce's medically well-versed enough and immune to even enhanced interrogation levels of sleeplessness, and loves kids and would probably be happy reading them stories to sleep every night.

And Clark could always tell if the kid swallowed fridge magnets/batteries/something else. Also, tell me which baby wouldn't enjoy Clark's presence and calmness. They'd be like little hamsters cajoled by the steadiness of his hold.

#I think Clark has demonstrated pretty great parenting and he's also immensely kind while balancing out certain rules #And toddlers would beg to be flown around. #maybe this is too optimistic #considering that B's track record with kids isn't perfect #but I genuinely believe they have a decent shot #I feel like the gentleness and kindness of Thomas from Batman Begins is kind of a good example of what I'd picture a calmer Bruce's mentall #stable parenting to be like #batman #superman #superbat #clark kent #bruce wayne #and I'm also willfully ignoring some stuff/chalking it up to questionable writing/can't be bothered to make sense of everything that's cano

[lag1995-fics]

Hey can I request a fanfic for Evan's character kit walker and song a turning page from twilight?

I hope you like it thank you for requesting. ❤️

Turning Page

Song:Turning Page by Sleeping at Last

Pairing: Kit Walker X Reader

Warnings: some cussing

Words: 2010

Summary:Kit’s highschool sweetheart waits for him

Song Fic Masterlist

////::::////

You and Kit Walker had been high school sweethearts, he was your first love; and if you were being honest he was your only love. You guys had mutually broken things off after highschool when you had gotten into an out of state college.

When you came back the first time after getting your degree, you found out that Kit had moved on and married a woman called Alma. You weren’t jealous, a little disappointed maybe, but you were genuinely happy for them. Kit was a good man and you had always known he would make a good husband. You couldn’t put yourself through watching them though, you had never given up on your relationship with Kit. He had ruined you for other men. You had other boyfriends during school but the longest relationship had only lasted a month.

You decided to move back to Boston leaving your small town life behind. You loved a relatively happy life in the city, distracting yourself from the life you wished you had. You had gotten a degree in education, so you threw yourself into teaching children.

You had been happy to hear that they had apparently apprehended the serial killer, who went by the bloody face moniker. Well you had until they said it was Kit Walker, you reasoned with yourself that it had to be someone else named Kit Walker. Your Kit would never be able to do something as heinous as what they claimed Bloodyface did. Your Kit was a gentle soul, who would do his best to bring happiness and peace to anyone he might meet.

When you saw his face flash on the evening news that night you had broken down and sobbed. Kit was being framed for a murder he hadn’t committed. He wouldn’t even kill a spider much less the woman he married. You had started making calls trying to get on as a character witness. That whole town was racist and this stunk of a town coverup.

They wouldn’t let you be his witness though, they claimed you hadn’t spoken to him for over six years. You had screamed and cried even harder when they rejected you. You had never stopped loving Kit even if it had to be one sided from afar. You wrote him letters trying to convey to him that people still believed in him. That you would always love and believe him.

He never wrote you back. The guards at the prison who checked his mail had scoffed thinking of you as some loon and had trashed them. When he was committed to Briarcliff Asylum they too disposed of the many letters.

When you hear of Kit’s death you fall into a dark depression. You’re barely hanging on, when you happen to skim a blip in a newspaper. You almost choke when you see his face. He’s a bit older, but it is unmistakably Kit Walker. The article however was not a happy one: the man’s wife Alma had murdered a woman that lived with them in a fit of apparent hysteria.

Without preamble you packed a suitcase and began the trip back home. Kit would need you, not as a lover, that ship had sailed but he would need you as a friend. He was almost entirely alone now and with two toddlers to boot. You couldn’t help but feel the joythat he was alive even though it was steeped in sadness at his tragic loss.

Alma had been a sweet girl from what she could tell. She had never met her in person but if Kit married her it was apparent that she was a good person. She had been missing for so long though, she had been traumatized and snapped. It wasn’t her fault that bad things had happened and lord knows that the country's mental health system left a lot to be desired.

It had taken you almost all day to find the farmhouse that Kit lived in. It was dusk and the sun was starting to set. You took a steadying breath hoping that you weren’t overstepping any boundaries. You had flown out of the house with barely any thought, relying mostly on instinct. You hadn’t been able to help Kit when he was accused of being Bloodyface but you could certainly help now without the government involved.

You eased yourself out of the old Buick you were driving and shut the door. You began to make your way to the door but it opened before you got the chance to knock. There he was, he was still handsome as ever, but he had lost that carefree air he had when they were young. You supposed you had probably lost that too.

“I already told you I’m not doing an interview, leave my family in peace!” His voice was angry and you were now unsure if you had made the right decision. Then as if he hadn’t really been looking at you before, his eyes widened.

“Y/n?” He asked questioningly the anger had drained from his voice.

“Oh Kit I heard what happened I needed to make sure you were okay,” you explained trying not to cringe. You probably seemed like a crazy person showing up at your highschool sweetheart’s home after his wife had murdered someone.

“I thought you lived in Boston?” He questioned, still surprised at your arrival.

“I do, I hopped in my car as soon as I heard, I thought you might need some help. If I’m imposing I apologize… I can leave,” you were rambling, it was something you were prone to when nervous.

“No! Uh I mean no, you could never be an imposition doll. Come inside, I didn’t think anyone cared about me anymore,” he lamented, meeting her halfway on her way to the house. You got a better look at him up close. He still had beautiful brown eyes but there were dark bruise like bags underneath them. You could tell he hadn’t been sleeping well, and really who would after something like this happened.

You followed Kit inside his home, it still smelt of the bleach they used to get up the blood, but it was warm and cozy. You looked over and could see the two toddlers playing together on a rug with some blocks.

“This is Julia and Thomas,” he said, gesturing to the kids who barely spared them a glance.

“They’re precious,” you commented.

“Yeah they are pretty great, must take after their old man,” he bragged teasingly but it was half hearted.

“Kit,Are you okay?” You asked, laying a hand on.

“I will be,” there was a determination in his voice this time looking at the children playing happily unaware.

“If you need anything at all just tell me” you begged, hoping he would take the help. This trip wasn’t entirely unselfish, you had missed Kit the moment you left for college and the feeling had never left. It hadn’t faded with time like these things are meant to do, you had never stopped loving Kit and you would wait a thousand years if that’s what it took. You didn’t expect any romance, you knew that ship had sailed, but you would be there for your dearest and oldest friend.

“Don’t you have a life or a lover in Boston, surely you don’t want to spend time with someone as pathetic as me.” His self deprecating comment made you jerk him by the arm so he was facing you.

“You listen to me Kit Walker, you are one of the most gentle humans I’ve ever met. You are an incredibly good man and you deserve all the love and help in the world. Let someone help you, you don’t have to go through this alone,” You declared, staring directly into his brown eyes with your own y/e/c ones.

He only nodded before taking you into a friendly hug holding you close to his chest, his head buried into your shoulder. You felt a shuddering sob wrack through him. You only held him, you didn’t know how much time had passed as you held him close letting him sob. When he finally pulled away you could see the gratitude in his eyes.

****

Days bled into weeks and weeks bled into months as you stayed with Kit. Things for the most part remained platonic apart from a few lingering glances from each other. You didn’t want to put any pressure on the relationship. You had meant what you said when you told him you were here to help him. You would love Kit however you could get him be it romantic or platonic. You would always wait on him.

When he had come home one day in tears you had just held him. Alma had died that day and Kit had lost his wife for a third time and the children had lost their mother’s.

More time would pass and things became increasingly comfortable between you two. You had taken a teaching position at the elementary school the next town over and Kit continued to work as a mechanic.

It had been a day like many others when it happened. Kit had come home covered in a layer of oil and grease and you had been making dinner. After he had showered, he came into the kitchen to watch you cook and help Julia and Thomas with their homework. It was really quite domestic.

After dinner you had wrestled the children into bed and retired to the living room to watch television. You had felt the burning of Kit’s eyes on you and you turned to look at him pulling a face.

“Why did you stay?” He asked with a puzzled look on his face, “Your help has been indispensable, but it’s a year now and your still here. Aren’t you tired of me yet?”

“Oh, I can start looking for an apartment. I never wanted to overstay my welcome. I guess I just got comfortable being around you and the twins, is like breathing air” You rambled hiding your burning cheeks. He wouldn’t take that though and he grabbed you by your shoulders making you look at him.

“Doll I’m not kicking you out, you can stay forever if you want. I just don’t understand why you would want to stay with me,” he said and you gulped looking into his eyes.

“Oh Kit you’re the best person I know. Did you not get that with the hundreds of letters I sent to you in prison and while you were at Briarcliff” you joked trying to lessen the tension. You had never brought up the letters before you were honestly pretty embarrassed by them.

“What letters!?” He pulled back looking hard at you.

“I wrote to you everyday up until they announced your death” you explained cheeks filled with liquid fire.

“Fuck! He cursed getting up and pacing.

“I never got a single letter, y/n” he said and you not knowing what to do approached him opening your arms. He fell into your embrace burying his face in your hair.

“I’m sorry,” you croaked unsure of what to say.

“Don’t be sorry doll, but it still doesn’t explain why you want to be around me” He started in again and you couldn't help the anger that spilled forward. You took your fist and hit his chest.

“Because I love you dummy, I never stopped,” his eyes went wide at your declaration.

“What?” He asked dumbly, his limbs going numb.

“I love you Kit and I’ll always be there for you if you need me. If it’s only as a friend I can live with that, at least I get to be with you,” Your cheeks burned for the third time in what seemed like an hour.

Kit not knowing what to say decided to act on instinct. He gathered you in his arms and pressed his lips against your own in a searing kiss. You clutched at each other desperately the tension finally snapped.

“I love you too Doll.”

Requests are open drop a song or a prompt in my ask box ❤️

#kit walker x reader #kit walker #kitten #Kit walker is a babe #ahs asylum fanfiction #fluffy #evan peters #peter maximoff fanfiction #fem reader #gender neutral reader #reader insert #ahs fanfiction #fanfiction

[pparkerpoetry]

Always Red

my masterlist

***(Ph1l, SBI)***

You liked green. It was comforting, you thought, but your sons disagreed. While you sat in the grass and stared up at leaves, your sons all preferred the out-of-reach fruit.

The apple tree was their childhood, where they played in the shade and all ran wild, with little wooden swords and joy-filled shouts. You couldn’t help but get scared, though. Your babies in war? You’d never let that happen.

Your oldest twin always liked sunsets. He’d go out on the farm and stare out into the sky filled with colors of red and orange. He liked the red, the voices were quieter when he saw and watched, and he often found that he wished that it would be everywhere. Why? Where did he come from? You wouldn’t tell him. Once he's older. He just needs more time.

The other twin liked raspberry tea while he wrote his songs on a red typewriter. You’d gotten that typewriter for him ages ago, and the dark paint was chipping off. The keys always clacked annoyingly at the worst times, but you’d still always make him his raspberry tea before he went up for a writing session. Why not try a little green tea, you’d always suggest. He always said no. He said that when he stared into the dark liquid, he got his best inspiration. You didn’t know what lyrics he was writing, but as long he was quiet, you didn’t mind.

Your youngest. The chaos that he made always made retirement seem boring. You still remembered what it was like when he was a toddler- he’d come into the house in the summer covered in strawberry stains from his friend’s house, and the red blotches always scared you to death, but he’d laugh and fight you off to avoid a bath. The little one? Quiet? That’d never happen. His spirit would never be tamed, and you loved him for it.

Your oldest made himself a cloak one winter. He was handy like that. You’d offered to get him some nice green fleece- we can match!- but the voices were getting louder at that point. They wanted red. So, you took him to the store, and he made himself a thick red cloak that he always wore. He didn’t notice that your grin was a little less sincere now. Just a little more time. That’s all you needed.

The middle child. He’d seen his brother make the cloak, but he was too busy drowning in his music to have time to make something, so he took himself to the store and bought a red beanie. He wore that beanie all the time, and though you’d asked him about the color, he said that red pulled him in, and then he went back upstairs. You felt like you should go after him, but you didn’t. What kept you from him? Perhaps everything would’ve gone different if you’d just reached out then.

Of course, when the little one saw his big brothers with the red clothing, he wanted in. He and his best friend had had someone bring them to the store, and he got a white shirt with red sleeves. You thought that it’d get dirty easily, but he kept it clean. He always wore it, but he never got any rips or tears in it. That little guy always was around his best friend. You had a feeling they’d never be separated, but your feelings weren’t always right.

When your oldest got sick once, you made him soup. You suggested chicken noodle, but he wanted tomato. The voices wanted tomato soup. You’d smiled, but you dropped the can and it had broken. The splattering of soup made you sigh, but what scared you was the glimmer of glee that had shone in his eyes when he came to see what the commotion was about. But, him? He was a gentle giant. You’d always have each other. Right?

When the middle child got sick, it was a cold, and you noticed that his nose got red, but other than that, everything seemed fine. You let him go if he said he was okay, and when you slept at night you’d try to ignore his coughs. He wanted independence, right? You weren’t being a bad father, were you?

When the youngest got sick, he hated to admit it. He always strived to be like his brothers, and be all grown up, but when he got sick, it was bad. He’d cuddle up to his red blanket that you never liked. It clashed with the color scheme of the house, but he refused to let it go. His friend had given it to him, and it was one of the most important things that he owned. He looked to his friend, not to you, but as long as he had someone, it was okay. Right? 

You know better now. You know the answers to all of your questions, all of the things that you never wanted to face. You know how wrong you were.

You’re alone, now.

When you look out the window from your prison that they claim is a home, and see that apple tree, you’re reminded of what reality is.

Your oldest is covered in scars, deep, red, and angry. He’s been attacked for who he is, so he’s gone and left. He lives up in the snow and though you prefer the grass, your oldest.... The voices like the silence. They think better that way. Technoblade is his name, and now, you’ve let him down. You couldn’t protect him, and now you’re kept isolated from everyone, just because you loved your son. He ran out of time.

The middle child… The last time you visited his grave, you brought roses. You’d always liked other flowers, but he liked roses. The red petals made you look away, but the grey stone that had singed edges makes you look back. Wilbur was his name, and you’ve let him down. You couldn’t save him, and now you’re haunted by his ghost, just because of a decision that you regret. He got his independence.

The youngest. The last time you’d seen him, his eyes had been bloodshot and his clothes had been torn. You didn’t say anything, because you thought he had his best friend, but they brought the news just yesterday. The news of a towering dirt pillar and craters that must’ve reminded him of… Tommy was his name, and you let him down. You couldn’t help him, because you thought that he had others. He lost his best friend.

Sunsets seem more painful now. You watch them as long as you can, before you go back inside and tears fill your eyes. You’re reminded of how alone he is, and though you hope that he’s watching the same sky, you dig out the first scarlet cloak that he’d made and hope that the voices lead him like you never did.

You don’t drink tea anymore. When you see the color seep from the tea bag, you’re reminded of how the red liquid had flown from his body. You’re reminded of how you held him, how he begged for you to kill him. You dump the water out and find the red beanie that he’d bought. It’s edges are burnt and it smells like smoke, but you hold it and hope that death loves him like you never did.

When people visit you and bring baskets to sympathize, you don’t eat the strawberries. It’s too recent, you think, and you try to go about your day as if you aren’t slowly wasting away. You’re reminded of how carefree he once was, how his voice always echoed around the house. You never liked it then, but you wished for it now. Something felt wrong, but you’ve stopped relying on your feelings since they failed you. You sometimes pull out the little red blanket that’s in remarkable condition considering how valued it was, but brings up memories, and it’s then that you hope that the sky listens to him like you never did.

#tommy #tommyinnit #tubbo #wilbur #wilbursoot #techno #technoblade #phil #philza #ph1lza #philza minecraft #wilbur soot #poem #poetry #sad #angst #sbi #sleepybois #sleepybois inc #red #writing #haha writing go brrr #you guys asked for it #like i know i asked but #... #im not sorry #not at all #i almost cried but i aint sorry #im working on a dream one next so :) #look forward to that

[weasleydream]

The life and grief of Percy and Y/N Weasley - Last part

Okay... This is the last part of this serie. 

I wanna say I particularly loved it, and I would like to thank you once more, @mostmediocreravenclaw​, for letting me use your idea. I really enjoyed writing for Percy with a twin sister, and having the opportunity to show another part of him, one that’s maybe deeply hidden. So yeah, thank you. 

I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, I really do. 

I also wanted to inform you I’ve used some inspiration for this last chapter: I’ve listened to No One But You from Queen (god I freaking love this song!) and I’ve found a citation from Jack Thorne. You’ll easily recognize it, it’s the first thing Hermione say at the ceremony. 

I think now you know everything, so remember I love feedbacks and enjoy!

Masterlist 

(gif not mine)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6

His first days without her 

The castle of Hogwarts had always stood here, showing proudly its magnificent towers, illuminating the parc at its feet. There was a time when the school had a soul which made it your second home. 

While standing in what was once the Great Hall, Percy couldn’t properly remember how the castle was before the apocalypse. He couldn’t remember the magical roof, the animated portraits, the fantastic creatures in the Forbidden Forest. He couldn’t and, quite honestly, he didn’t want to. It was too painful, because she was a part of all of his memories here. 

He took a few hesitant steps outside, sighed, rolled up his sleeves and got to work. The now familiar burning of the Firewhiskey in his throat hadn’t totally vanished when he managed to move the first rocks. The alcohol was the only thing that had kept him awake these last two days, awake and relatively sane. It made him forget, and for the moment, it was all he wanted. He had insisted to stay here and help. Until the funeral. His family was too shocked, maybe even too pained to do anything. Someone - he couldn’t remember who - had told him his parents were devastated. His siblings too, and no one was able to do anything. They seemed as numb as he, Percy, was. 

His brain cloudy, he brutally moved a rock and almost made it fall on his foot. He didn’t care. He was on the verge of gripping another one when he saw it. 

A hand was sticking out. Someone else was dead. Percy felt his arms shaking and a loud cry escaped his mouth. Someone immediately grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him backward. It was probably one of the persons that had made sure he had Firewhiskey and cleaned a place where all the lifeless bodies should have been removed from. The guy whispered something to a girl, and she left. 

Percy couldn’t see who it was, not that he wanted to. His eyes were flooding with tears, and he felt the urge to rip his heart from his rib cage. He felt the pain, the one he wanted to numb with alcohol, he felt it radiating in all his body. He pulled his hands in his hair as if he wanted to yank them out, and fell on his knees. The guy in front of him didn’t know what to do, and eventually gave up. He left Percy alone, in the same way she had let him alone. 

The sobs were louder and louder. It was the first time he cried since he had hold her body, since he had desperately begged her to stay alive, he had bottled everything up and had thrown himself hopelessly into the cleaning of the castle. Removing heavy rocks with nothing else than his hands, feeling the pain in his arms and his legs, that was the only way he had found to escape everything that would be too much for him: the Burrow, his family, himself. But now, nothing could contain the agony in his body, nothing could contain his heartbreaking screams as he called for her, begging her to come back to him. He couldn’t do that without her, he was unable to survive knowing she didn’t have this chance. 

It felt like he was crying for thousands of years when someone kneeled in front of him. Through his tears, Percy caught a glimpse of red and long hair and for a fraction of second, he had the insane hope she had heard him and was here; but the burning deception soon destructed a bit more his heart. It was Bill who was in front of him. 

Bill took his little brother in his arms, in a strong embrace that allowed him to break down. Percy screamed and cried, and Bill stayed silent, tears rolling down his cheeks. He didn’t know what to say - who would? No one could understand how destructed Percy was at that moment. He had lost his own half, the girl he had protected since birth, who had supported him during the darkest of times, she was gone, dead in his own arms. Bill knew his family was awfully shaken, tears were shed all day long and sobs contained all night long, but he was afraid Percy would never get over it. 

The latter almost fell, narrowly caught by his brother. His shoulders were still shaking. His sobs were nothing more than weak hiccups, and Bill decided it was time to bring him home. He got up, pulling Percy toward him and holding him up while nodding at Angelina Johnson, who had been the one to warn him directly at the Burrow. The brothers walked slowly, Percy almost unable to put one foot in front of the other, and they finally exited the magical barriers around the school. Bill took firmly his brother’s arm and apparated them both in front of their childhood home.

If Hogwarts had lost its soul after the battle, it was nothing compared to the Burrow. The happy family that had once lived there had disappeared, replaced by a bunch of wounded souls. Molly used to cry on the sofa while Arthur paced in the living-room, sometimes holding tight a picture of his beloved and missing daughter. Ginny and Ron would stay silent, sitting next to each other in the kitchen and hating themselves, remembering all the times they had rejected her at Hogwarts. George spent his days trying to get Fred to stop blaming himself while trying to ignore his own sorrow. Charlie left home at dawn and joined his old favourite place, where he would play Quidditch and where he had flown with her, and sat in the grass. Bill knew that for sure because his own way to deal with the pain was trying to make sure everyone stay… okay? 

When Bill gently pushed Percy in the living-room, their father stopped his pacing and rushed toward his son. He engulfed him in a hug, not bothering to hide his tears, while Bill helped his mother to get up. She took a few clumsy steps before throwing herself on them. No word was said, they expressed their pain with a physical way. Percy’s head was down and tears were covering his pale face. He was shaking, and for the first time his parents and his brother understood how distraught he was. He was looking everywhere, his lips trembling, and an awful expression of despair was appearing on his face. 

Percy didn’t know if he liked what he was feeling. He could have sworn she was right here, next to him, because she was part of the heart of the house. But feeling her so close without being able to see her, it was a true torture, one that would never end. In his disturbed mind, a voice said he could feel closer to her. Percy delicately removed his parents and shook his head to Bill, who was on the verge of helping him. He climbed alone the stairs, his heart beating faster and faster as his steps brought him closer to their old room. 

He hadn’t seen it in nearly three years, yet he rediscovered her side of the room. Everything was covered in a thin layer of dust - the last time Molly had cleaned here was for Bill’s wedding. His heart stung a bit more when he laid his eyes on a picture hanging on the wall: they were toddlers, both giggling in the bath. Their likeness was striking at the time, they had the same tuft of red hair, the same freckled face and bright eyes. Percy softly touched her face. 

“How can someone like you have this fate?”

Thinking of what had happened was unbearable. He couldn’t do anything, he was stuck in his own desperation, sentenced to a life without her - something that had never happened in his worst nightmares. A new wave of unidentifiable emotions hit him and he fell on his old bed. 

“I love you,” he murmured. “I love you so much, Y/N. I’m sorry I wasn’t there, I’m sorry I was a poor excuse of a twin…”

She raised a shaking hand and tangled it in her brother’s hair, ruffling it like she used to when she complimented him.

“Yes you were Percy… but it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Her face twisted in pain, and she looked at his twin in the eyes. He could see anger, an anger she had never expressed but was for him, undoubtedly. 

“I know you’ve never loved me…” she murmured. 

Her hand fell, and she closed her eyes.

Percy woke up, shaking. A lump had formed in his throat and for a minute, he struggled to catch his breath. He was sweating, and it felt like someone was banging in his head with a hammer. However, his eyes were dry. It was the first time he had properly slept since the battle. The numbness brought by the Firewhiskey was a memory and life had decided to mess once again with him. He couldn’t stand it, he wouldn’t be able to. 

Trying his best to be quiet, he left the room and went into the kitchen. He quickly found two bottles of Firewhiskey and didn’t think twice. He headed back to the room and was on the verge of closing the door behind him when a hoarse voice interrupted him.

“What are you doing?”

Tightening his grip on the bottles, Percy slowly turned his head. Fred stood near behind him, his eyes bloodshot and hair messy. He was paler than ever, and his pain seemed unbearable for him too. Percy didn’t say anything but let the door open, and his little brother joined him in the dark room. They both sat on the floor, back against her old bed, and Percy handed a bottle to Fred. 

“It’s today.” the latter muttered. 

Percy knew it. In a few hours, he would have to say farewell to his beloved twin. Someone would bring her coffin and then… Then she would be buried on the top of the hill behind the house. This thought made him panic and he swallowed a long sip of alcohol. He didn’t even wince. Drinking was all he needed. Almost.

“How did it happen?” 

His voice was a whisper. No one had never told him how she had died. He needed to know. 

“An explosion. She protected me.”

Percy nodded and drank. He glanced at Fred: he was drinking too, obviously fighting both his guilt and his tears. 

“Do you hate me?” Fred didn’t dare to look at his brother. He hated himself, if only he could have died on the spot to bring her back, he would have happily done it.

“No.”

“I’m sorry.”

Percy didn’t say anything. A terrible thought was creeping in his head… Why are they suffering? They didn’t care about her when we left. When she was crying in her bed, none of them was there. I was… He felt the anger boiling in him. He didn’t want to explode right now, he didn’t want at all, it would be selfish, deep down he knew he was wrong. But he needed something to evacuate this oppressive sensation in his body, and he had the perfect opportunity in front of him. Fred was muttering rambling apologies and slightly rocking back and forth. 

“Shut up.” His voice was full of hatred, not only toward his little brother, but also toward himself. “Shut up, you don’t have the right.”

“She was my sister too.” Fred croaked.

“And you hated her!” Percy didn’t mean to yell, but his voice was louder than he thought. He winced, aware that he would wake everyone up, but he decided he didn’t care. He shakily stood up, imitating his brother. 

They were now both face to face, holding their bottles and glaring at each other. Percy threw the first punch. He hit Fred right in the jaw, and the latter groaned loudly before punching back. A strong pain appeared behind his temple and echoed in all his body. A bit dizzy, he tried to break his little brother’s nose and failed, only hitting his chest. Fred chuckled bitterly. He moved forward. At this moment, someone slammed the door open and George barged in, followed by Charlie and Bill. He immediately joined his twin - they are the last twins of the family, thought Percy, and a single tear rolled his cheek. Bill headed toward him while Charlie waved his wand, repairing the broken bottle Percy hadn’t realize he had dropped. 

“What the hell are you doing?” hissed Charlie. “We need to support each other! Imagine Mum’s reaction if she knows what just happened -”

“Don’t tell her.” croaked Percy. 

“Don’t tell Dad either.” added Fred on the same tone.

They were being gits, yes, but they didn’t want to make their parents suffer. After one last glare, Fred turned around and left without a word. George followed him after patting Percy’s shoulder and nodding toward Bill. The oldest brother grabbed the bottles of alcohol and gave them to Charlie, who left the room without a word. Percy was pretty sure he was going to rush in the kitchen and hide all the alcohol he would find. 

Bill’s look was unbearable. He seemed disappointed, worried, but above all, highly pained. 

“Go away.” Percy’s voice was hoarse. “I don’t want to see anyone.”

“I won’t.” Bill replied firmly. He glanced at the window - the day was rising. A new day, maybe the most painful one of their lives. “I can’t leave you alone Perce, not after that.” He saw Percy’s fist clenching compulsively. “Hit me.”

“What?” 

“You need to hit someone then hit me. But not Fred. He’s completely broken. He doesn’t need it.”

Percy looked away. He wouldn’t do that. The shame of what he had done to one of his brothers was painful enough, and thinking of what she would have said killed him. He limped toward his bed. Bill sat carefully on her sister’s old bed and watched his little brother curling into a tight ball under his blanket and hiding his face in his pillow. His sobs were muffled by the fabric soaked by his tears. 

Bill allowed himself to shed a few tears and folded his hands under his chin. His eyes were fixed on the window, contemplating the bright colour of the sky. A deep orange dotted of the last stars of the night. This sight had something reassuring. It was as if she was there, next to them, whispering it would be okay. 

Bill left the room two hours later to get changed. He made sure Percy was dressed for the funeral and headed into his own childhood room, joining a distraught Charlie. A quiet embrace was shared between the two brothers, the first of several, and he slipped into his black clothes. She would hate it, he thought. Then he went downstairs to find his mother standing in the middle of the living-room, tears flooding from her eyes and a hand clenched on her heart. His father arrived a few minutes later, the tie badly tied and dark circles under his eyes. 

Bill saw Hermione and Harry outside. They were staying there to show the way of the hill to the persons who would assist to the ceremony. They were mainly family, but a lot of old friends, fighters, Ministry worker and even professors were here too. 

The nine Weasleys left their home, her absence more painful than ever, and made their way to the hill. Molly and Arthur were followed by Fred and George - Fred had a dark bruise on the jaw. Ginny, Ron and Charlie had placed themselves between them and Percy, and Bill closed the step. Dozen of chairs were installed in front of her. 

She was just a few steps away from Percy. She was here, laid in this coffin, her eyes closed forever, her skin pale and cold. It was open, and Percy knew he would see her one last time. But right now, a physical pain had invaded his body and he barely managed to gain his seat. He sat between Arthur and Charlie. A stranger took place in front of everyone.

“Ladies, Gentlemen, we’re gathered here today to support a family in the pain caused by the loss of Y/N Weasley.”

Percy’s heart almost stopped, and tears burned his eyes. It was the first time he heard her name since that day…The man started his speech, praising her bravery during the battle, reminding how kind and caring she was… He didn’t even know her. He had never seen the flame of her determination in her eyes when she witnessed an injustice. He had never seen the love she could show with just one look. What he was saying was stupid. She was so much more than that. 

He fought his desperation with the little strength he had. He wanted to be strong for her, for their mother who was sobbing into her husband’s chest and for his siblings. He kept his eyes on his knees, barely listening to eulogy that was ongoing. He focused on her smile, he imagined her next to him, holding his hand and resting her head on his shoulder, murmuring him it was okay. 

“Those we love never truly leave us. There are things that death cannot touch. Y/N’s memory is one these things.”

Percy looked up. Hermione had taken the stranger’s place. Her cheeks were shining with tears, but she managed to control her voice. She had been quite close to her. 

“What I’ll always remember is the first smile she sent to me. It was- it was my first year at Hogwarts, I was all alone, and Y/N had taken me under her wing.” A violent sob interrupted her as she cowered. “I just… I know she’ll be missed, but I also know she wouldn’t want to see her loved ones crying.” Her teary eyes met Percy’s ones, and she broke down. Unable to continue, she gained back her seat without daring to look at her friend. 

A silence followed her speech. All eyes turned toward the Weasleys, and Arthur stood up, holding a distraught Molly against him. They reached the platform and Arthur started with a trembling voice. He had made the choice to speak to his daughter, and he turned toward the coffin. Molly stepped forward and began to stroke Y/N’s hair. 

“Y/N, we… We miss you. You should never have died.” A loud sob escaped his mouth. “I hope you can hear us. My baby girl, these last years were a mistake, I hope you forgive us. We love you, we will always love you.” 

He hold Molly tighter, leaning over his oldest daughter’s body and caressing her cheek. 

Molly’s voice was quiet, and only her husband and her children could hear her. Percy knew he couldn’t fight his own pain anymore. 

“My baby… My little baby… Why? Why? I have never… Did you- did you know how much we love you?” 

She was crying, her pain seemed endless as a hole was forming in her heart. It was the very last time she would touch her, she couldn’t even hug her daughter like when she was younger. It was awfully painful, and Arthur had to help her regaining her seat. She didn’t even have enough strength to grab a tissue. 

His hand in his pocket, Percy suddenly stood up. Everyone looked at him, and he saw on the corner of the eye Charlie ready to follow him. He shook his head. He would say farewell alone. He tried his best to put on a brave face and almost reached the coffin before stopping himself. If he kept walking, he would see her, and it would be real. He heard the sound of a chair shortly dragged to the ground. Clenching his fists, he took the last steps that separated him from Y/N.

His twin, his annoying and beloved twin seemed to be asleep. Her eyes were closed - he would give everything to see her bright blue eyes once more. Her freckles were more visible on her white skin. Her ginger curls had been carefully brushed. This image wasn’t the one Percy wanted to bring with him. He passed an hand in her hair and ruffled it. Yes, better. He didn’t care about his tears, and while he was close to her, his pain was more bearable. 

“You would have hated this…” he croaked. “All these tears shed for you… You would be the first one to complain, wouldn’t you?” He let out a watery chuckle. 

He pulled his wand out of his pocket. Without thinking twice, he delicately put it in her hands and took hers. 

“You’ll always have a part of me with you now…” 

He felt the urge to take her in his arms, to pull her against his chest and not let her go. He felt the urge to kiss her hair and grab her hand. He wanted - no, he needed so badly to talk to her, he needed her to reassure him. But she was dead. It wouldn’t never happen again. 

“I need you Y/N… You promised! You promised to stay alive!” Percy was now yelling. He needed to dull the pain, he had to or else he would explode… He would hurt another of his siblings, or drink to death, or something like that. “You knew I need you! I told you I didn’t want to lose you! Why did you do that to me? Why did you die? I love you Y/N, I love you… I’m sorry I never really told it to you, I’m sorry I wasn’t a good brother, I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed it the most…” 

A heartbreaking sob made painfully its way in his throat, and Percy felt a pair of strong arms pulling him backward. He fought it. He couldn’t leave her alone, she would be terrified. She needed him. He got rid of the person who wanted him to leave his twin and leaned over her body. Slowly, very slowly, he put his lips on her forehead. One last time, he looked at her, trying to remember perfectly each cut on her face, each freckle, each curl. Soon, way too soon, it would be the last thing he would have of her. 

It was the moment to let her go, to let the angel reaching for the sky. 

“Goodbye, Y/N…”

Percy took a few steps back, unable to look away. Now, he wished someone would drag him far from here, because he wouldn’t have the strength to do so. No one came. Turning his head was the most painful thing he had ever done. He felt like half of his heart had been ripped off of his own body and was still with Y/N. The gap formed by her death was getting bigger and bigger, engulfing his sanity. 

He was almost in front of his seat when Fred stood up. Percy barely had the time to meet his bloodshot eyes and Fred gave him a hug. He sobbed loudly on his shoulder, and Percy did the same, because it was what felt right at the moment. He shared a bit of his suffering with his little brother. They were crushing each other’s bones and clenching each other’s shirt. Fred’s tears were soaking Percy’s neck. 

“I wish I could have saved her… Perce, I’m sorry… I should be the dead one…”

“Don’t say that. I can’t- I can’t hear that. Think about George. And Mum. And I.” Percy whimpered. He put his hand behind Fred’s head. “It’s not your fault. It has never been.” 

Fred looked up and nodded weakly. Percy felt an hand on his shoulder, and turning his head, he met Bill’s eyes. His brother was sobbing too, and seeing him like this, when he was usually so strong, was terrible. Percy extended an arm and put it around Bill’s shoulders. Ginny soon joined, her eyes red and puffy, followed by Ron, George, Charlie, Molly and Arthur. A painfully ironical thought crossed his mind. There are hugs and alcohol, just like George had said. 

He hadn’t even remarked they were now alone. Harry and Hermione had asked everyone to leave the Weasleys to their grief. 

The following days were filled with… Nothing. They were empty. For Percy, anyway. He spent all his time curled up in his bed, not daring to approach Y/N’s one. He feared it would make her vanish in some way or another. He barely ate, just enough to keep himself alive, but he always sent away anyone who would put a feet on the room. One night, when the pain had become too hard to bear, he had tried to find some Firewhiskey, or any alcohol. He was right: Charlie had hidden everything after his fight with Fred. Except this night, the only times he left the room was when he went to the bathroom. The few steps he had to do were the only way for his family to see how broken he was: his days in the dark had caused him to have a pallid complexion, his eyes were glassy and he had huge dark circles under them. His hollowed cheeks showed how little he ate, and his state worsened a bit more each day. No one could talk to him. The last one who had tried was Ginny: she had barged in the room, she had yelled and even hit Percy’s arm, but there was no use. He seemed to be nothing more than an empty shell. 

One morning, almost ten days after the funeral, George rushed into the kitchen, looking panicked. Ron, who was on the couch staring into emptiness, jumped on his feet as soon as his brother arrived. 

“What’s happening?”

“Fred- he’s with… He’s with Perce and he… Ron he doesn’t wake up!”

Ron’s face lost all colours. Percy couldn’t… No. No, he wouldn’t let him. Ron rushed upstairs, barely hearing George calling for their mother. He slammed the door open and almost fell on his knees. Percy was paler than a ghost, and Fred was shaking him like a rag doll. A terrible cry echoed in the house and soon, Molly arrived in the room. She pushed her sons and shook Percy herself. Fortunately, he opened his eyes, and a vaguely surprised expression appeared on his face. 

“Ron, Fred, out.”

Molly’s voice was strangely calm. The boys obeyed, relieved Percy had woken up. The room stayed silent for a moment, the time for Percy to sit on his bed. Molly stayed up, staring at the boy in front of her. 

“Listen Percy, I know it’s a hard time for you but -”

“You don’t know what I feel.” His voice was bitter, and Molly noticed his eyes wandering in the room and stopping on a specific spot. Turning around, she saw a picture of him and Y/N, still babies and playing in their bath.

“Honey, listen you -”

“I can’t let her go, Mum.” He didn’t look at his mother, but she saw the tears rolling down his cheeks. “I can’t do it without her. We have always been together, and now she- she’s not with me anymore. She’ll never be. Mum, it hurts…”

Molly’s heart broke. Percy had always been a quite tough boy, never really showing his emotions, and now he was breaking down in front of her, crying and rocking back and forth, a hand compulsively clenching his shirt on his heart. She shakily sat next to him and he threw his arms around her neck. 

“I wanted to die.” he murmured. Molly gasped and pulled his son against her with all her strength. “I wanted to be with her… She must be so afraid alone… But I promised I would live for her. I’ll do it - really Mum, I’ll do everything she should have done but… I’m suffering Mum, I don’t know- I don’t know what to do… Why did she have to leave?”

Molly was simply unable to answer. She didn’t know how to deal with the pain either, and she spent her nights trying to understand why she had to lose her baby. She remembered the time Y/N had disobeyed and had joined Percy while he was sick. Molly had found her sleeping on the floor with one hand on his hair. They were inseparable, no one could imagine Y/N without Percy or Percy without Y/N. They loved each other unconditionally. Living without her would be difficult, painful, sometimes it would seem impossible, but they had no other choice. 

How could she help Percy? He was trembling in her arms, she just saw a boy afraid and broken because his twin wasn’t with him anymore. She looked everywhere, looking frantically for something that could help him with his pain when her eyes stopped on Y/N’s wand. 

“Why did you do this?” she whispered. 

Percy seemed to remember the wand and quickly grabbed it. He was gripping it so tight that his knuckles were white. 

“I wanted her to have something from me…” He seemed unable to continue.

“And you wanted to have something from her.” 

The desperation in his eyes was too much for Molly, and she broke down once more. Percy cried too, a lot. The pain seemed insurmountable, but he would do it. He had promised over his twin’s dead body he would live for her, and he would do it. 

If they hadn’t been blinded by their tears, Percy and Molly would have seen a beautiful bird, its feathers as ginger as their hair and its blue eyes shining in the sunlight, watching them from the windowsill. 

Epilogue

#harry potter #harry potter imagine #harry potter imagines #percy weasley #percy weasley x twin reader #twin reader

[tatteredsmiles]

Faðir || Drabble

Children. Children were something of a wonder to him. Children were innocent and did not know the workings of deception or of war or any other vile trait that was bestowed upon them once they reached the age of adulthood. No, children were innocent and full of wonder, the way their eyes lit up at a story, the way the world and everything around it fascinated them. Children were also trusting, did not judge, they did not see faults in him.

He loved children. So it was no surprise that when he’d found out that he would have children he was somewhat elated. First Angrboda with their three and despite their ‘disfigurements’ or whatever the Aesir deamed it they were his children, they were perfect in everyway possible. He loved them, he loved their quirks and he loved their differences and loved them for who they were. He made sure that he visited as much as he could despite having married and settled in Asgard. He would not allow his children to grow up unknowning of him.

When Sigyn had become with child he thought he’d explode from happiness. Despite having to still do Odin’s bidding he spent every waking moment with her, every moment he had, kissing and caressing her  swelling belly elated in the growth of their child. He was fascinated with everything that happened, every little movement or flutter. It wasn’t to say that he didn’t know what it was like, he did, he’d children elsewhere of his own carried them himself or fathered them. With Sigyn though this was different entirely.

The moment he’d held his son his heart had completely melted and he knew that this, this here was where he was meant to remain. That this here with his wife and their child is where he was needed and despite everything that this is where he would spend his time. Did it stop him from traveling, not really but it had slowed him somewhat. It had dampened the wanderlust to but a few weeks every few months as he relished in watching his son grow.

Often times found outside with the babe, a blanket set out in the soft grass allowing him to crawl about as Loki watched him explore. Sometimes he would shift into a fox or some sort of small furry creature and play with the child which elicited squeels of laughter and delight. It was something he cherished, the laughter of his sons. To listen to them laugh and giggle at his antics. As they grew older he loved taking them into the forest that surrounded their home to check traps in both the small river and around the woods.

He sat beside the fire, the boys sitting on the furs listening to him as he spun a tale of trickery and adventure. Narfi’s eyes wide as he listened to his father while Vali still but a toddler sat chewing upon a wooden carved horse Loki had made him. “And do you know what I did? I turned her into a nut”, he said as he retold the tale of having to save Idunn.

“And then what happened?!”, Narfi asked obviously engrossed in the story which made Loki chuckle softly at how concerned his son seemed to be. “Fadir, did the giant find her?”, he asked his voice full of concern.

“No, because I turned myself into a falcon with Freyja’s cloak of feathers and I picked her up with my foot”, he said raising his foot slightly. “And we flew! As fast as we could back here to Asgard”, he said his voice somewhat conveying the urgency they had flown. Vali squeeled waving the wooden horse.

“Da!”, he said excitedly as he bounced where he sat also seeming to enjoy the story which earned a grin from Loki as he nodded. “Yes! Just like that Vali”, he laughed as he went and lifted the child nuzzling him before sitting again Vali in his lap as he continued his tale. Though he was warned a few times not to get Narfi to wound up into the tale not wanting him to find it difficult sleeping.

“Fadir, is it true that there is a wolf so big it blocks the sun?”, Vali had asked as he follwed him through the woods, his small legs almost at a jog to keep up with his father.

“Hmm?”, he looked over at the boy before stopping and motioning him to stay as he checked a snare. “I wouldn’t say he’s that large but yes, he’s quite big and he’s your elder brother”, he said as he reached down to snap the small rabbits neck before undoing the snare tossing the creature to the boy so he could put it in the sack.

“But Narfi is my older brother”, he says as he reaches down to pick up the rabbit, making a face at it before quickly putting it in the sack. “He means from his other family, stupid”, his oldest spoke up with disgust in his voice. “Fadir keeps another family besides us Vali, even though he says he loves modir”, he said a glare at his father.

Resetting the trap he looked at his sons. They were more Sigyn than they had been him. Aside from their eyes and lanky statures they were all her and he had been so very thankful that they did not take after his own shapeshifting self. He loved them more than anything because they were from her. “I love your modir more than life itself and she knows that. Your other siblings came before you, not after you”, he said as he rose from where he had been kneeling and continued on.

“Fadir what about the world serpent? Is it true he is giant?”, Vali continued as he followed along ignoring the look of disgust Narfi had given him. “Why do you keep asking these stupid questions Vali?”, he muttered knowing that his younger brother already knew the answers and was only asking for some sort of attention. “He is,” Loki said with a sad smile. His children from the ironwood had been taken because they had been different. Perhaps that was why he loved his two sons more, they weren’t different, they wouldn’t be taken from him. “And your sister is beautiful and has her own realm now”, he added before Vali could ask anything further. “But you know what? I love you both more”, he said with a wink before he ruffled Vali’s hair. “Now no more talk we need to be quiet or you’ll scare off dinner”, he chuckled as they continued to walk.

He had perhaps should have kept his mouth shut, should have never spoken. He should have never had that much to drink before going to that damned feast! What good would it had done him? It would have never undone what had transpired, it would have never brought back...

He struggled against their grips, for once he had over estimated their intelligence. He’d thought himself so clever, thought himself so cunning but somewhere, somewhere he had lost that trait. He had for once been out thought in a different situation he would have found it humorous, but this was not humorous one bit.

He struggled as they dragged him up the mountain, he spat at them and growled curses at them as they descended into the rocky underground. All of that though, all of that came to an end when he saw what was before him. It were as if the very air in his lungs had been sucked out and his heart had dropped.

No, no not them, not them! He pleaded he begged and pleaded and apologized. He offered his life, he offered anything he could possibly imagine, loyalty, obedience, anything for them. He pleaded upon deaf ears as his punishment was sentenced. Never in his life had he heard such sounds, such screams, never had he known he could make such noises as he watched his son tear into the other.

He would never forget the look in her eyes as it happened. He would never forget the horror of what had been used as he was bound across those three boulders. He would never forget any of it, he would never forget the wrongs done to him and his family he would never forget the burdens set upon them because they had been his family. Most of all he would never forget that this had been his fault, he was supposed to protect them and he had failed them. Failed her.

The Norns had warned him, they had warned him that knowing ones fate would never change it, what must come must come but he also knew that the As would get what was coming to them. Surtr would come, the worlds would burn and they would fall.

#d: faðir #v: lost days of youth and innocence [ m y t h ] #fleeting moments and broken dreams [ d r a b b l e ]

[buckyforbreakfast]

Slices

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader

Summary: Being a super soldier tends to make Bucky hungry. This is the time he found out about New York style pizza.

Warnings: this is more like a drabble

Word Count: 990

A/N: I wrote this before I left for the beach in April so it’s kinda short. also, there is a ‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl’ reference in here, let me know if you find it (re-uploaded because my tumblr got deleted).

“Y/N! I’m hungry!” Bucky sang from across the room, throwing his head back in a whine. His half-howl-half-song let you know he was on his last leg; his stomach replacing his mind.

Everyone had already eaten dinner, Bucky as well, only two hours ago.

You smiled at his impatience from where you were seated on the bed, reviewing the most recent mission report. There was no getting stuff done around him.

Bucky could be heard making his way to where you currently sat. He dragged his feet on the floor and left you anticipating his arrival. The pitiful man was cursed with a fast metabolism, causing him to eat far more regularly than anyone else, Steve included.

He finally made an appearance in the doorway, leaning his body weight on the side jamb. His cheek squished up against the door, making his upper lip lift. Bucky really was just a big toddler. The tendrils of hair in his eyes only made him more irresistible.

You didn’t give him the attention he was looking for and only smiled to yourself, reading the reports. The hungry man-child started to moan, placing a vibranium hand over his stomach and emphasizing the intensity of his appetite. Still, you held your ground, wanting to see what lengths Bucky would go to.

“Y/N, Y/N, Y/N!” he drug out the syllables in your name and dramatically fell to the floor.

That move almost got you, knowing just how theatrical the man could be.

Noticing your disinterest in his dilema, Bucky began to writhe on the floor of the bedroom, flailing his limbs about himself.

You took a peek at him from the corner of your eye, knowing he couldn’t see you as clearly from the floor. His hair was covering his face and a few strands even got caught in his mouth from the thrashing he had done. Bucky continued the harsh movement, inching his way toward the bed.

One of his boots fell off in the process.

When Bucky had made it to the bed, you gave in, “Buck, I’m work—”

He cut you off mid-sentence, “I’m entering a subhuman state!”

Finally he had you voicing your previously contained laughter, “Buck—”

“Unnhnhffuhjhjj urrjjjinnnvvs ggnghhhjijii,” he vocalized, crossing his eyes and tossing his head around.

Bucky rested his face on the edge of the bed, having tired himself out, and looked up at you, silently begging for you to feed him. He brought his hand up to rest it on your knee, “It’s time for super soldiers to eat again.”

You smiled for the love of him, knowing full well that you could finish the reports in the morning, “Where do super soldiers like to eat at midnight?” Midnight snacks rarely ever satiated him, which ended with you taking Bucky out somewhere most nights. Other nights Steve would go with him, but clearly Bucky wanted you to accompany him tonight.

Usually, Bucky asked for fast food, but you were surprised at tonight’s request, “I want that pizza we all had last week.”

He had crawled his way onto the bed at this point, laying himself over you and attempting to remove the computer off of your lap.

“That pizza was flown in from Italy. You know that, right?” entertained with his taste for more expensive things.

The troubled man groaned with his predicament, pulling your leg up to hide his face.

Wanting to avoid another “subhuman state” incident, you closed the computer and leaned down toward him, “Go get your shoe, Buck, I know a pizza place.”

With that news, Bucky perked up and ran to tie his laces.

~~~

The image of Bucky in his civvies plastered against the nightlife of New York was on a different level of attraction. You felt as if he were one of those paintings in the Neue Galerie that you couldn’t touch, only look at. Something about him just shone more brightly than the city.

He tugged on his baseball cap and matched your pace on the sidewalk.

You made it to the pizza place on the corner of 7th and Bucky almost passes it by, not expecting to stop so soon.

“It won’t take long, you can wait out here if you’d like,” you offered to the hungry man. He nodded and leaned up against the old brick, trusting that you know exactly what he wants to order.

The pizza place was a bit hot, you knew if Bucky came in he’d start to complain and refuse to take his jacket off. You looked to the man behind the counter and held up two fingers. Sticking to your word, it didn’t take long as the short little man handed you two paper plates with overly large pizza slices on them and you handed him two crumpled dollars.

The bell rung as you left from inside and Bucky perked up at seeing you return. Only, when he caught sight of the food in your hand, his expression drooped again, as if there were no pizza in your hand at all.

“What?”

“Exactly what the hell is that?” Bucky’s eyebrows lifted, chuckling a little.

If it was a joke, you didn’t get it. He smiled again and laughed at you, “Why didn’t you just get a whole pizza.”

You stood there dumbfounded. Bucky didn’t get out much. “Buck, you can’t order whole pizzas in New York. I mean, you can, but it’s really hard to find people who will.”

Bucky’s earlier amusement faded as he nodded and walked around you to enter the pizza parlor. God help whoever he was about to rain down upon.

“Do you sell whole pizzas?” Bucky questioned, immediately getting to the point, ignoring the fact that he was about to “starve” to death.

The man shook his head, probably surprised to hear it, “No sir, we only sell by the slice.”

Bucky nodded, reaching into his wallet, handing over a ten, “Can I get eight slices, then?”

PERMANENT TAGS:

@saharzek / @just-add-butter / @sergeant-james-bbarnes / @jitterbuck / @strawberrybucky / @allseeingbee / @spideydaddyboy / @laurfangirl424 / @melannchoholic / @bestbebucky / @lanavintagez / @sweetboybucky / @baseballbucky / @httpmcrvel / @aletheladyinred / @impalaimages / @yknott81 / @pizzarollpatrol / @captnsmarvels / @theglowstickofdestiny / @supdaryl / @lokigodofsasss / @xxashy999xx

BUCKY TAGS:

@fuckthatfeeling / @notimetoblog / @clarabella960 / @the-soldiers / @jackievonawesome / @merrmaid-queen / @jamesbarnesappreciationsociety / @spxder-bxck

#bucky x reader #bucky barnes x reader #bucky x you #bucky barnes x you #bucky #bucky fluff #bucky barnes #sebastian stan x reader #sebastian stan x you #sebastian stan #slices #rei writes #buckyforbreakfast

[ijustreallylovezebras]

Maid

Pairing: Harrison Osterfield x Reader

Summary: Sometimes Y/N feels like his maid (Prompts 21: You’re so fucking hot when you’re mad, 24: Your Mum texted to tell you you’re pathetic)

Requested: Yep by @sunshine112 

Harrison had been back from filming for a week by now and, as much as Y/N loved having him home - for truly, she did, she loved him and missed him so much when he was away - she was beginning to feel like a maid.

She came home from work that evening, feeling rather stressed as a result of her boss being a complete arse to her, wanting nothing more than to come home to a clean flat and a boyfriend to cuddle up and watch TV with. 

Instead, when she put the key into the lock and walked into her flat, she found dirty dishes piled by the sink, beer bottles in the living room on the coffee table and the bed still unmade from where Harrison had gotten up after her that evening, as well as the dirty washing still in the basket despite her leaving a note for Harrison asking him to do it on the fridge before she left that morning.

Y/N groaned, making her way back into the kitchen, where her note from that morning was still hanging, untouched, on the fridge. There was another sheet of paper on the counter in Harrison’s handwriting.

Hey babe, hope you had a good day at work. Tom and Tuwaine came over for some drinks and we’re going out clubbing tonight. Don’t wait up, love you lots, H xx

Y/N sighed out in frustration, binning the note and running some hot water in the sink to start washing the dishes with. She cleaned the whole apartment and put the washing in to clean overnight, deciding that she would dry it and iron it the next day rather than wait for it to finish tonight. 

When she did finally climb into bed that night, alone, without Harrison there with her, that was when she finally started to feel pissed off with him. Which was why, when he returned home at two in the morning, not drunk but tipsy and she was still awake worrying about him, she rolled away from him when he tried to cuddle her, pretending to be asleep.

But she wasn’t able to block out the feeling of guilt that it resulted in when she peaked one of her eyes open to see the confused and hurt look on his face, but quickly shut it again so that he wouldn’t notice that she was still awake.

Waking up the next morning, Y/N was glad to remember that she had no work. Sometime, during the night, she had wound up back in Harrison’s embrace and, normally, on her day off she would remain there for much of the morning until the both of them woke up on their own accord. 

However, today, Y/N still had traces of anger lingering from yesterday, and also remembered that she had put some washing in the previous night that she needed to put in the tumble-dryer before ironing. 

So she got up, showered, and changed into a pair of shorts, a loose fitting shirts and one of her own hoodies, despite it being nowhere near as comfortable as the one Harrison had left on the floor after stumbling in last night. 

Her frustration only grew when she went through to the living room, she found Tom and Tuwaine passed out on the two couches. They had their own homes, why not crash out there? 

Y/N moved the washing into the tumble-dryer and set it off before going to make herself some breakfast. Another one of hers and Harrison’s weekend traditions was to make and eat breakfast together, Y/N was not in the mood to do that, especially seeing as though they would also be joined by Harrison’s two best friends.

As much as Y/N loved Tom and Tuwaine as though they were brothers, she treasured her time with Harrison and the guys got him more than half of the year normally while Tom was filming and Tuwaine had the time to fly out and visit the two - Y/N didn’t have that privilege, having only flown out to visit her boyfriend a couple of times as plane tickets were expensive and she had to work her arse off to be able to afford one. Speaking of work, as well, it further limited the time she got to spend with just her boyfriend, limited it to weekends, evenings and the occasional morning that Harrison woke up early enough to bid his girlfriend farewell.

So while she loved Tom and Tuwaine’s company when they were over, she did want more time to spend with just Harrison. 

After making her breakfast though, and eating it, she discovered that they were running low on groceries and that she had just drunk the last of the coffee, which was yet another job she had asked Harrison to do and he had seemingly ‘forgotten’ about. 

However, before heading out to the store, shopping list in hand, Y/N left a glass of water and a painkiller beside each man, unsure of whether they would be awake or not by the time she returned home from the store. It wasn’t a long walk but you never know. 

Upon returning to the apartment, laden with Tesco bags full of groceries, Y/N found all three boys at the kitchen table, their heads pressed against the cool surface. She raised her eyebrows at the sight, placing the bags on the counter and proceeding to unpack them into the various cupboards they belonged to.

“Morning Y/N,” Tom manages to groan out.

“Morning Tom,”

Harrison forces his head up and smiles at his girlfriend, the kind of smile that normally would have made Y/N’s heart flutter but today just made her roll her eyes a little in frustration.

“Can you make us some coffee?” He asks and Y/N frowns.

“How long have you guys been up?”

“Ten minutes,” is Tuwaine’s muffled response.

“And you guys didn’t think to make it for yourself?” The boys raise their heads from the table and share looks that make Y/N sigh, putting on the kettle. “I have ironing to do, seeing as though Harrison didn’t do it yesterday,” she was well-aware of how passive-agressive the comment sounded but didn’t have it in herself to care, feeling sick of having to wait upon Harrison and his friends.

Five minutes later, Harrison walks through to the laundry room with Y/N’s favourite mug in his hands, full of coffee. He places it on the counter next to her, a sheepish smile on his face.

“I’m sorry I didn’t do the washing yesterday,” Y/N let out a breath, turning towards him.

“I’m not your maid, Haz,” Y/N says and could have laughed at the confused expression on his face when she said it. Normally, she would have found it adorable. Today, however, she needed him to understand where she was coming from.

“I know you’re not, babe,” but Y/N shakes her head, frustrated beyond belief.

“You never clear up your dishes, you left all the beer bottles at home in the lounge, you ignored my note about doing the washing, you didn’t do the shopping like I asked and you didn’t even make the fucking bed,” she was close to tears and she got the feeling she sounded ridiculous.

“I know, I’m sorry babe,” but Harrison looked on the verge of laughter, which pissed Y/N off to no end.

“Why are you laughing?” She demands, feeling like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s just... you’re so fucking hot when you’re mad,” the look Y/N gave him was murderous. She wanted nothing more than to just slap him and she threw her hands up, exasperated, walking out of the laundry room and into the living room, noticing that Tom and Tuwaine had taken the chance to slip out of the flat. “Babe, babe, I’m sorry!” Harrison calls after her, following her through the apartment and Y/N groans, turning back towards him.

“Why, Harrison? Why can’t you just help out around the house?” She asks and just then his phone flashes up with a text from where it was lying on the kitchen table. “Hey look at that, Haz, your mum texted to tell you you’re pathetic!”

Harrison couldn’t help it that time, bursting out laughing.

“I’m sorry, babe, I love you though. And I’m sorry. I just forgot to do the shopping and then Tom came over and distracted me from doing the washing. I’m so sorry,” Harrison begs, going over to her and taking her little hands into his large ones.

“Haz-”

“No, I’m sorry, I’ll make dinner tonight and I’ll put the washing in, whatever, I’m sorry, love,” 

“I’m sorry that I overreacted a bit... I just really missed you and then you’ve come back and spent all of your time with Tom and it’s just...” Y/N sighs, feeling defeated and allows Harrison to hug her tightly.

“It’s okay, sweetheart, I’m sorry, okay? I’ll make it up to you. This whole weekend we can spend together, just us, no Tom or Tuwaine crashing or anything,”

“Promise?” Y/N asks, looking up at him. Harrison smiles, pressing a gentle kiss to her lips.

“Promise,” 

I hope that this was what you wanted :)

MARVEL TAG LIST

@vineisdeadiwishiwas @sea040561

#marvel #marvel fanfic #marvel fanfiction #harrison #harrison osterfield #harrison osterfeild imagine #harrison osterfield imagines #harrison osterfield x reader #harrison osterfield x y/n #harrison osterfield fanfic #harrison osterfield fanfiction #harrison osterfield fic #harrison osterfield fan #harrison osterfield fluff #harrison osterfield angst #requests #requested #please request

[rukaelf]

Fuzzy Butterfly Dreams

Mentions: @enambris​ , @quick-n-silver​, and @helioheliks​ ‘s respective characters! (Enambris/Ana D’mira, Elizabeth, and the Craftsman, respectively.)

“Are you hungry?” Moth smiled down at Bee, nestled in her arms, as the Hyur sat near the fireplace in their cozy little cottage. The toddler’s small white eyes squinted to focus on the similarly-colored pair of eyes in Moth's. Her mother’s eyes.

“ABAAAABLOOO,” Bee shrieked in response

“I am sorry Bee. You cannot have lemonade yet.” Moth nodded. “If you drink it now, you will make a funny sour face for at least four years straight. But someday you can have it. When you are big and strong and have teeth.”

Her child. Such a strange thing to think of, even now. For her to be given the ability to do something so utterly natural as giving life. As normal as being a mother. Why did those who wielded such dangerous powers toy with life, then? Why, when she had created it so naturally?

The cottage grew cold. The fire snuffed out. Moth's breath caught in her throat, as the frigid air seemed to render her unable to speak or move.

"Why do we 'toy' with life?" The Craftsman echoed aloud, eyebrow raised, as if Moth had asked why boogers exist in people’s noses. He stood behind Moth, hands behind his back. Was he always there? "I didn't 'toy' with life to create you, Yorha. I knew exactly what I was doing. I did so because I could. Because I found ways to do so, despite all of the odds. Just like your spawn exists. You conceived her because you could.”

The ancient mage raised a hand to adjust his glasses, giving them a dangerous glint. “That is precisely what science is. To discover the little exceptions, the little niches of our world’s natural laws, and make the impossible quite possible. Despite all of the odds."

The cottage began melting. Billions of termites devoured the building and everyone within it and Moth was begging for it to stop and Bee was screaming and---

She was in Gyr Abania. The setting sun casting a red glow over the land. Thousands of bear pelts lay scattered about. Moth blinked, realizing she was holding Bee once again, who was currently gurgling quite happily up at her mother. It was then that Moth heard the voice.

"Despite all of the odds," The severed head of Turia Wir Gabinius hissed between clacking teeth. It was perched on a rock, as blood perpetually dripped from below her. "How does it feel, parasite? To feel the wind on your back? To feel and touch with your hands? To do what I never could?" The Garlean pureblood’s dead, glazed over eyes settled on Bee, as she spoke that last line. "Oh, my child,” Turia murmured. “You're so beautiful. A beautiful little half-savage."

"MINE." Moth hissed back, her mandibles exploding out of her mouth, chittering hoarsely. "NOT YOURS." Bee shrieked in terror then, regarding the alien visage that crowned the body of her mother. Her true mother.

Moth looked down. She tried to tell Bee that she was okay, that she would protect her from harm. But the baby had fallen out of Moth's arms---no, Turia’s hijacked arms---desperately trying to crawl away from the---

"Monster."

Moth was somewhere else. In a chamber covered in writhing flesh and staring dead eyes and grasping, twitching limbs. Muscle sinew formed high-strung bands that crisscrossed the room. Bee was heard but not seen, her crying muffled, distant.

"Monster~~" Elizabeth cooed from one corner of the room, twitching sinew and nerves coiling around her. "I've the foresight to know what I am. A word I willingly wrap myself in. One I howl for all to hear, as I assemble my children from the building blocks of creation. But you still deny it, cocooned in that little meat suit of yours."

"No. I know what I am. I am Moth. I fight bad things like you. I punched your stupid talking minion who spoke stupid dumb words. I will do it again, because the Network fights to keep all of us safe." Moth hissed threateningly, crouching into a fighting stance.

"Oh? Is that what you're telling yourself, dear?" Ana sneered from quite close to Moth. The smile stretching impossibly off the abyss-touched Illithi queen’s face. the light around her bent and curled as if trying to both escape the Tyrant’s very presence and curl around her lovingly. "Poor thing. You should have flown my banners when you had the chance. Instead you align yourself with my daughter and her drooling band of idiots. We could have talked about so much, dear...mother to mother. Monster to monster."

"I am. NOT. A---"

"Freak."

An Imperial facility, in an infinite hallway lined with cold steel. Filtered, stale air. A Garlean soldier was standing a ways away, cradling Bee protectively.

"FREAK." The soldier snarled again, pointing a gauntlet-clad accusatory finger at Moth. Bee's face burying into their shoulder, not daring to look at the monster the soldier faced down. "You deface the Gabinius name with this bastard’s birth. You break the Mandate. Did you truly think she was safe with you? Parading around with Eorzeans, who would rather gut you than ‘make friends’ with you? Mmm, I think not.”

Moth howled, launching herself at the uniformed soldier, but she flopped over, unable to move. Everything below her neck was numb. She began to panic, twisting her head from side to side, feebly sobbing as she tried unlatching herself from the body she had rooted herself in. A plant trying to escape the soil it was put in.

"’Twas a matter of when, not if, we would find you and your spawn." The soldier muttered to the pitiful creature before them, before beginning to turn on a heel and walk away into the gaping darkness. "Come, bastard. Your true family waits for you. Even if you are half savage...service guarantees citizenship."

"N-NO!" Moth cried out. Pulling herself further and further out of the body she was trapped in. She tried calling out again, but her cries had morphed into monstrous clicking, a cluster of crickets all lodged in her throat, collectively singing that distant whalesong that only Moth could hear in her dreams.

#ffxiv rp #im not good at writing dream sequences #do you think DIO ever went through this #no me neither #PARASYTE is my favorite anime okay

[o-m-g-t-k-k-y-b]

You’re so innocent... (Kenny McCormick x Reader) REQUESTED

so this was requested so thank you to whoever requested this. I'm gonna start putting actual titles on my fanfics now like on this one - Nikki Chan

I walk around the streets of south park, the white snow crunching under my feet. My face buried in the pages of a new book I bought recently, having nothing else to do. Suddenly the book is flown into my face making me stumble and fall. "ugh!" I groan, my body hitting the ground, my pants wet from the snow. "mh sphmwy!" Comes a muffled voice from above me. I grab the book which is now also wet and stand up, sighing before looking at the person who bumped into me. The boy looked familiar but I couldn't think who he was, the blonde hair, the orange parka who was he? "sorry" I say in a quiet voice making the boy chuckle and pull his hood down. "It's fine babe," He says ruffling his hair giving me a wink with a smirk on his face, oh... He was Kenny McCormick... I should have known. "So what are you doing all alone?" He asks poking my cheek making me blush a bit "I had nothing to do" I sigh looking down and begin to kick the snow softly "I thought a lovely girl like you would have boys all over her" He chuckles watching me, his blue eyes staring at me making my heart beat faster, "no" I say shaking my head, gulping repeatedly in fear but also in awkwardness.

"why don't you come over to my place and we can have some fun?" he asks shooting me a wink, a blush appears on my face knowing what he means "n-no I'm good" I giggle trying to play it off cool "c'mon babe!" he begs his pupils turning bigger as he tries to give me the puppy dog eyes but that doesn't work "no... I'm sorry but I don't want to" I say sighing and he nods suddenly coming to his senses which kind of scared me "that's alright babe I understand," he says putting his hand in his pocket and begins to chew his bottom lip "do you do this to all the girls?" "what?" "I said do you do this to all the girls?" I ask coming closer to him, a confused look on my face knowing he was a pervert and how every girl in school has most probably "done it" with him "mostly" he says confidently which makes me nod "yeah... the girls brag about you a lot" I say sighing knowing that the girls are using him to brag about sex "yeah I've heard" He says looking at me, a more sweet smile coming onto his face now "but... you aren't like the other girls (y/n).... 𝐘𝐨𝐮'𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐨 𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭" he says ruffling my hair like he was my brother "yeah well... I don't want to be like the other girls" I giggle looking at him, have I really broke through his pervertedness? Have I found the sweet boy inside? "Hey umm... you're probably gonna say no but screw it. Would you like to go on a date with me?" he asks looking at me, his eyes seeming more soft and less lust inside, I can't help but smile at those words, even though he was a pervert he could be sweet. "sure I'm free later on" I say, making him smile widely like a toddler "yay!" he screams hugging me "thank you!" he screams letting go of me, this was not the Kenny McCormick everyone else knew "I'll come by your house at 7!" he says happily and with that, he pulls his orange hood up and walks away leaving me there, my pants still wet and my brain screaming at me.

I can't be bothered to write anymore so yeah that's what you get! thank you to the lovely person who requested this! - Nikki Chan

#kenny mccormick x reader #Kenny McCormick #south park x reader #requested #south park #eric cartman #butter stotch #Kyle Broflovski #stan marsh #token black

[sascerides]

Realism. A short story (fiction. very much fiction)

This year, I challenged myself to write 12 short stories. One for each month. Each of them inspired by a randomly generated word. For story number 4 I also got myself a few prompts from http://artprompts.org/ and then I added in some gay vampires because why the duck not. Previous stories (as well as some stories from last year) are here. Word number four was “realism” and here’s the story:  (TW: infant death, vampires, religion)

These days it’s hard to remember. It’s hard to remember what she went to the store for. Or how old her grandchildren are. Or if she’s had dinner yet, if she had her medicine yet, if she lives behind this door or that. She still remembers the smell of the lavenders on the farm. She still remembers that summer she spent with a man called Clayton Fletcher. She still remembers the first time her daughter walked and the last time her husband smiled. She remembers the laughter of her youngest son. She still hears it sometimes in the silence between breaths. These days she hears his laughter more, and his cough and his cries. These days it is harder to focus harder to remember the little things and easier to fall into memories and whispers and shadows.

These days she buys the same bread every day in the same shop every day and the lady behind the counter know’s what’s she’ll get.

“Oh nice to see you again Mrs. Gray. Just the usual? How’s Alma doing? Her little boy is all grown up now isn’t he?”

She doesn’t always know the answer to the questions but the lady doesn’t mind. She takes her five dollars and she smiles and she does not mind. Yvette likes it like that.

Today, it is raining. Her feet are still wet and she is standing in the bakery and she sees him on the street outside, hurrying by. It’s been so many years and these days she hardly knows if it was true but there he is. Clayton Fletcher. As fresh as he looked 60 years ago with his hand on his hat bend against the rain and she is walking out of the shop as quickly as her old tired knees will allow and she is standing in the rain.

“Mrs. Gray?” She hears a lady say and she knows the voice because it usually talks about bread. “Mrs. Gray, are you quite alright. Would you like me to call Alma? Come on inside now”.

She is standing in the rain and Clayton Fletcher is gone. In his place is a crowd of umbrellas and a man in a hat who could have been Clayton but he is too young. She wants to say “oh silly me, I thought I saw someone I knew”. She wants to say “Clayton would be at least 80 years old by now, he would.” She wants to say “It was just a man in a hat I’ve seen before”. But she doesn’t say any of these things, she just follows the man down the street. My feet are already wet so what does it matter?

These days it’s hard to remember and by now she isn’t always sure it really happened. In her memories the sun was always shining that summer and Clayton’s eyes were always bright. Bright and dark and deep and hiding something else. He was exciting and she was young. He held her hand and he held her hip and they danced through the summer months bathed in golden light.

He sent her letters for a few years after that. The last one mentioned Vietnam and leaving and the word goodbye. She wrote to him that she would never forget but then life happened and she moved on. And now it is hard to remember. It is hard to remember and she knows this man is not Clayton Fletcher. It cannot be Clayton Fletcher but she will follow him anyway.

Her shoes are sloshing and her bag is getting heavy and the crowd is getting thicker. The man who could have been Clayton turns down a street and Yvette turns after him. He weaves through the crowd with the same elegance that Clayton always had. This man who could have been Clayton Fletcher, in another life another time and a life time ago.

This man who isn't Clayton Fletcher but just a vague shadow of a memory she thought she had let go of. Long ago. Before her husband. Before her children. Before the pain. This man who now stops, looks at a fob watch and hurries down and alley between a flower shop and a kiosk. Yvette knows she can't keep up. Perhaps she could back then, with the real Clayton. Not now, never now. And yet, she keeps walking, sloshing, scuttling down the street.

She reaches the flower shop and she is enveloped in the smells. Her eyes on the ground to keep from slipping. And there it is. On the wet sidewalk between her feet. A coin but no ordinary coin. It’s too big, too complicated too intricate and she has seen it before. Or perhaps she imagined that. She reaches down, feeling it’s weight like a faint memory. The coin is old. Older than her by far.

Yvette has tried many things. She vaguely remembers The War and half a dozen other wars. She remembers the moon landing and the Internet and the first television in town. She moved from a half-dead barely breathing country town to the bustling screaming heartbeat of New York. She raised four children and watched her husband wither and die. She held her son as he cried and coughed and begged for relief. She has flown and swum and bungee jumped but this. This feeling is new. 

The buzzing metropolitan around her has all but stopped. Drifting slowly by. No sound of car horns no shouting no smell of the flower shop or the subway or of the beat of human life. Nothing exists but the weight of the coin in her hands and she knows now how old it is. How old this feeling is.

Older than this city and the humans that live in it. Older than the culture creating all this noise around her. And there, in this silence she can feel a feeling she has known before. A slow, warm, golden feeling that she felt so many years before when a man took her hand and held her close on a dance floor. A feeling she has tried to grasp so many times only to wake up and find she was in dreams again. Perhaps she is dreaming now again. Dreaming of him after all these years. She would think so if not for the faint laughter of a child in there too. A laughter she has been hearing for 48 years. Always at the back of her mind. This laughter that was never in the dreams about Clayton Fletcher. Clayton Fletcher was before that. That voice of a child somehow louder now, always stuck halfway between a laughter and a sob. She feels the weight of the coin in her hand and for a moment, faintly, she thinks she feels the soft touch of a tiny hand gripping her fingers. 

And then, just like it came, the feeling fades. The city is moving around her again. Someone is cursing at her to get out of the way. Smog and smoke and the smell of roses is creeping through her nose. And in this chaos all she sees the alley in front of her.

It takes her a moment to remember. Standing there in the rain and the smell, the coin still heavy in her hand. The alley ends in a brick wall. Wet and glistening and standing firm and this is the alley the man who could have been Clayton went down. And now he is gone. 

She wants to say "perhaps I imagined it all" or "I must have forgotten myself" or "that man died many years ago and so did the foolish girl who was me" but she doesn’t. Instead she walks down the alley. Slowly, at first. Then, as if the coin was dragging her along, faster than she has walked for years. 

Somehow she finds herself surprised that the alley really does end in a wall. Standing there looking at the red bricks neatly wet on top of each other. The rain drizzling from the sky, from the rooftops, from the lid of a container. Drumming on a cardboard box leaning against the wall, almost like the roof of some small, crude house. Drum Drum Drum it goes to the humming of the cars behind her. And there she stands. She feels silly now. Having chased a shadow, a memory a thought that could have been Clayton only to find her self alone. Again. Finally, she turns and walks back up the alley, sloshing as she drags her tired feet over the wet pavements. 

“Are you leaving already?”

The voice comes from behind, but behind her is only the wet brick wall and the cardboard box against it. 

Alma has warned her about this. The way she sometimes cannot remember what is real and what is not. Like when she tries to hold her toddler son’s hand after all these years. How she still checks his bedroom in the night. 48 years after he left it behind. Or how she just went down an alley in pursuit of a man who left her 60 years ago and went to Vietnam never to return. 

Now, she is hearing voices. Actual, speaking voices. Not just the whisper of a memory etched into her mind. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath and turns to walk again. And there it is again.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Did you not hear me?”.

It’s only your mind, she tells herself, taking another shaky step, eyes still closed. 

“I said, are you leaving already”

She spins around this time staring at the alley. Still nothing. Nothing but the wall and the rain and a large tuxedo cat sticking it’s head out of the card board box.

“I think you’re going this way” the voice says and the cat moves it’s mouth along with it. Yvette finds herself walking slowly back towards it.

“Did you” she hears her own voice saying “did you just… talk?”. 

“I know. I know. Seems weird the first time” the cat says. “Trust me… I was more weirded out than you. All my life I’ve been doing nothing but meowing and purring and the occasional hiss and there I am one night standing on a soap box reciting Shakespeare Soliloquies at the top of my lungs”. 

“I…” Yvette says, but she does not know how the sentence continues. 

“That’s what comes from hanging around with all these weird types. Should have known I should but what’s a cat to do when there’s caviar and a lovely cardboard box?” 

“Uhm…” Yvette says. “I don’t… I don’t know. I think… I think I need to go home. Sorry. Are you actually speaking?” 

The cat doesn't answer, he just nods solemnly at her. 

"Do you... Have a name?".

The cat holds up a paw over his mouth "no one ever asked my name before! I'm Fred" it says "I'm the cat in the box" and then, it does something else Yvette has never heard a cat do, it laughs. "If you ever speak to that Schrödinger chap, tell him he's wrong. I'm very much alive indeed."

"Oh. Nice to meet you Fred. I'm Yvette, and I really must be going now” Alma wouldn’t like this at all.

At that, Fred jumps out of the box and starts rubbing against her legs, purring so loudly the alley seems to echo with the sound. “Oh no! Surely you came this way for a reason?” 

Yvette is feeling the weight of the coin in her hand, it seems to be heating to her touch, heating her palm as she holds it out. 

“Where did you find this?” the cat says, his green eyes widening. “He’ll want that back. New York will want him to have that back. “ The cat points to the wall with his paw “Go this way”

“Uhm… I don’t…” Yvette starts, but Fred interrupts her

“You just walk through the wall. Don't worry, it just looks like a wall. It's really more of a... Veil"

Now this is surely a bad idea. Walking into a wall. And yet, she takes a step forward, reaching out a tentative hand. When her fingers touch the wall she shivers, it's cold and wet, but the cat was right. This is no wall. Yvette takes a deep breath then takes another step.

As she steps forward she is enveloped in a dark, red mist. It smells like cardamom and cloves and it clings to her skin like fingers. The rain stops and the alley disappears. For a moment she is sure a child’s hand is holding hers pulling her along. She almost says the name. After all these years but around her is nothing but the mist and a silence. Then, a blue sky opens above her and she finds herself in a forrest. 

Around her are a few, old houses. Around them, trees, fading into shadow. For a while. She just stands there in the silence. She cannot remember why she is here.

She remembers it was raining. She was thinking about What was I thinking about? Clayton. I was thinking about Clayton Fletcher again. Her head feels fuzzy and she cannot remember if she took her pills. Alma would tell her to go home. But she followed a cat and now she’s here. And where do you go from here?

When she turns to walk back, she finds more houses and more trees but no wall, no veil, no city. New York has simply disappeared. In place of the alley and the cat and his box she finds an old wooden church. On the steps is the man who could have been Clayton Fletcher. 

He seems distraught, stressed, scarred. He is looking around him, he is padding his pockets. He is taking off his high hat to ruffle his hair. The same way Clayton used to. A young pastor has a hand on his arm. They are speaking in hushed and hurried voices and Yvette cannot hear what the say. The pastor is checking his pockets too. He is trying to get the man who could have been Clayton to look at him. He is holding his face in his hands. He is smiling then sighing then making the sign of the cross. He is whispering something. He is looking up and he is seeing Yvette.

Yvette finds herself fidgetting. Something in her wants to run but she has not run for many years.She is touching her hair, she is looking at her feet. She feels like a schoolgirl again, caught in a place she isn’t supposed to be. The pastor is walking towards her, sniffing. He stops, looks back towards the other man and holds out a hand as if to tell him to stay back. The man sits down on the steps, his leg hopping nervously his hands clenched on his knees. 

“Welcome to Dyrne” the pastor says, as if he was expecting her. 

He holds out a hand to her, calm, collected, he looks to young for this. Too young for his cross, too young for his eyes, too young for his voice. 

“You’ll have to excuse my… friend. He’s a bit...” his voice trails off. He is staring at something at her feet. A worried look on his eyes but when Yvette looks down, nothing is there. The pastor is shaking his head as if to rid himself of a memory. 

“I…” she starts. “Fred sent me here… the Cat in the Box.” And I was meant to bring you something. But now I don’t remember.

She hates this. The forgetting. That’s the worst part. She forgets birthdays and names and appointments. And now she is in a place that isn’t New York and for the life of her she cannot remember why. 

"Your friend” She says instead "he looks like…” Someone who died many years ago. Someone I ought to have forgotten. Someone else. “He looks like an old friend of mine”

The man who could have been Clayton Fletcher has risen. He is walking towards them, slowly, his face hidden under his hat. He’s got that swagger Clayton always had, and something nervous too. Something scared, like the darkness she saw in him the night before he left. He has it all. This man who could have been Clayton Fletcher. Would have been. In another life. Another time. Before.

“Tom” he says. With a voice from a memory, a faded photograph, a dream she once had. “What’s going on?”. 

The pastor turns around, he looks worried. He looks at Yvette, sniffs again, then looks at the man who isn’t Clayton and takes a few steps towards him. 

“You’re not strong enough right now.” He says. “She’s…” He lowers his voice, putting a hand on the other man’s chest. “She’s human.”

He thinks she cannot hear but she can. She hears every word and she wants to run. But where do you run in this forest that isn’t New York on legs too tired to carry you. Where do you run when you’ve been running for 48 years?

The man who isn’t Clayton Fletcher takes another step forward, pushing the pastor away. Gently. He takes his hat off and he smiles at her and Yvette stops. She just, stops. She stops breathing. She stops thinking. She is very sure her heart has stopped beating. 

Perhaps it is his eyes. Those grey, cold eyes looking at her. Hungry eyes. Perhaps it is the teeth. Sharp and white and ready to bite. Fangs. And I should be running away. Perhaps it is the faint hiss escaping the mans’ throat as he slowly steps closer and closer to her.

Perhaps it is the face. This face that belonged to Clayton Fletcher many years ago. But it cannot be. I am dreaming. It cannot be. It cannot be. And yet, she hears herself say his name. This name she hasn’t said in oh so long. Because it hurts. Because it reminds her of things she would rather forget. Because it reminds her of more than just a man she used to know. 

“Clayton”

The name escapes her lips as easy as breath. Clayton. The name has always been in her mouth, waiting to come out. Clayton.

The man looks lost. No. it isn’t him. Couldn’t be. He is frowning. Stopping for a second. Searching her face for a clue. His own face a storm of hunger and curiosity. She wants to turn and walk away. She wants to hit him. But she just stands she looks him in the eye and she says the name again.

“Clayton”.

And then, he smiles. A storm has passed from his face and he is a man again. His eyes are warm and his teeth are straight and the pastor’s hand is on his wrist. Gently, holding him back. 

“Clay,” he says. “Who is she?”

The man who isn’t Clayton Fletcher has turned into him. There he is. Flesh and blood. Young and handsome and charming just like the day they met. All those years ago. A marriage and five children ago. Before Ian. Before New York. Before Alma and Debra and Lucas and John. Before my baby boy. And he has not aged a day. But he is wearing a wedding ring. That part is new. And now he is touching her cheek. Ever so gently. The pastor is holding his hand. His eyes not leaving his face. Guarding him.

She is twenty years old again. Young and scared and oh so excited. She has fallen in love with a stranger and she is going to marry him although he hasn’t proposed yet. He turns up on her doorstep and he leaves poems under her pillow when he sneaks out through the window. He steals her away at night to an abandoned warehouse where he teaches her to dance and to laugh and to love. He whispers that he loves her and she barely notices the coldness behind his eyes when he thinks she doesn’t see him. She is twenty years old and she is spinning in circles laughing with flowers in her hair.

Clayton’s hand is cold and trembling and his smile is in danger of falling apart. and she is back in a place that isn’t New York. A place she isn’t sure really exist. And yet I still hear my baby crying somewhere.

“You found me” Clayton says, voice shaking “After all these years. I thought I’d never see you again”.

Yvette’s breath catches in her throat. It really is him. The smell, the voice, the smile. And now he is laughing. Holding her hand in both of his. Her hand suddenly looking so old and fragile and worn in his smooth young hands. The pastor standing by, never taking his eyes of him. He turns to look at him, smiling.

“It’s alright Tom. This is Yvette. She’s good. I’m good with her. She was… She was like you. Before I met you”

She wants to say “You left me”. She wants to say “What have you become?” She wants to say “I loved you”. What she does say is this:

“You died.”

She doesn’t want it to be an accusation but it is.

You died. You died. You left and you didn’t come back. You died and here you are. Still smelling of musk and freshly rolled cigarettes. Still smiling that smile of yours and wearing that hat of yours. Here you are in a place that isn’t New York with a worried pastor and a haunted look. You died. You died almost 60 years ago and you are more alive than me. Me who had to live all those years and suffer all that pain. You died and yet you lived on.

“You. Died.”

Clayton looks like a child who was told off. Tom, the pastor, looks lost. He is looking at Yvette. Then, at Clayton and back to Yvette. 

“I did” Clayton says, almost ashamed. “I died. I died before I ever met you” He sighs.

Tom is holding his hand again, nodding reassuringly.

“I died in 1794. I died in the Battle of Tourcoing. You’ve seen the scar.”

She has. Many years ago. In a summer night, under the moon. But it cannot be.

“I died. And then I lived on. But I wasn’t alive. I was so… “ He stops. Looks at Tom. Tom nods. 

“It’s time she knew, Love. If she was to you what I am, she deserves to know.” He says. 

Clayton bites the inside of his lip. He clenches his jaw. He looks at Yvette. Yvette says nothing.

“I was hungry.” He says. “I… Do I need to say it?”.

Yes you do. You lied to me. You never told me. You made me love you. And you left.

“No” she says. “I understand”. 

To her, Clayton was always the sea. Deep and dark and treacherous. Warm and bold and generous. Cold and great and changeable. He was always the sea and she loved him for a summer. He was a memory for so much longer than he was a man and she cherished him. And now he is here. This sad shadow of a man, so much less than the memory she had of him. and much more than I ever knew he was.

Clayton is clenching his fists. He is looking at the trees. At the shadows Tom is smiling in lack of a better facial expression. Yvette has seen many things and she knows this look on a man’s face. This is a man who does not know the words to say. Yvette has known many things and felt many things and she knows the words Clayton needs to hear although she does not want to say them.

“I named my son after you” She says. “my youngest. Little baby Clayton”

Clayton is no longer this thin shadow of a man. He is no longer a torn and hungered skeleton, too old for his skin. In a heartbeat he has become the charming young man she fell in love with. His eyes are bright and his smile is wide and warm.

“You had a family” he says. Taller. somehow. “You had a son”

Yvette nods. “Yes. I lived a life Clayton. After you left.“I married a man that I loved and I had five children. Alma, Debra, Lucas and John. And little baby Clayton”

And he’s winking at her. “Is he as as handsome as me?” he asks almost singing with pride and surprise, “I bet he is”.

“He would have been”

Even after all these years it hurts to say it out loud. She looks at Tom. And she looks at Clayton and she closes her eyes and she sees his face. Two years old, all dimples and laughter. And then all fever and tears. And then, nothing but the silence and the whisper of a laughter stuck in her mind. And all the light has gone out of Clayton Fletcher as it went out of her Clayton a lifetime ago.

“It’s been forty-eigth years” She says. As if that makes the pain any easier to bear. As if that makes him any less gone.  “I can still feel him sometimes”. I can hear his little voice all the time. He has never really left me.

For a while, they stand there in silence. In a place that isn't New York. Yvette, lost and old and tired, so tired. Clayton Fletcher, or a man who used to be Clayton Fletcher. And Tom, the pastor with his understanding smile and his warm eyes and his hand lightly resting on Clayton’s arm. Tom’s eyes darting to a spot beside her feet again then back to her face.

“Come on inside” he says  as if this moment is normal.

As if she has just come over for tea. As if he isn’t some stranger in a place that shouldn’t exist. As if Clayton shouldn’t be rotting in a meadow in France. As if she hasn’t grown older and wiser and sadder over the years. As if everything she knew hadn’t just been turned into dust. He is putting a hand on her shoulder, leading her towards the church. Clayton heading in in front of them.

“Thank you, Thank you for telling him” He smiles at her. “Clayton struggles” his voice is soft, almost a whisper. “I have my God. Clayton has me, but I am not as strong a support as the one that I have.” 

Yvette nods. As if she understood.

“You helped him too, you know.” he tells her, his hand still on her coat "I still hear him mention you in his sleep. It’s an honour to meet you”.

Yvette says nothing. What do you say to that?

Before she can enter the church, her legs stop her. Her tired feet, still wet from the rain. Her knees aching with effort. Alma wouldn’t like this one bit. It is wrong. She always warns her not to stray. Just like I did for her 50 years ago. And here she is. In a place that isn’t New York. About to enter a church with a man who should be dead and a pastor who is all kinds of wrong.

Clayton is standing by the door. Tom waits by her side. She can hear her own heart beating and something in Clayton’s eyes tells her that so can he. His nostrils are flaring, his fists are clenched by his side. He looks at Tom, desperate, then leaves her without a word and disappears into the church. Just like he disappeared into the night all those years ago.

“It’s alright” Tom is saying, clearly using his preacher voice, not his own. “he won’t hurt you.”

He beckons her inside. She does not move. “You know by now what he is. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories.”

She nods. “He’s a vampire” She says, in the most matter of fact way that she can find within herself. “He drinks human blood. And I’m human” T

om nods. He sighs. “He doesn’t feed anymore. Not since Vietnam. Vietnam was… different.” Then, he smiles, and for a second his eyes look as young as his face “That’s where we met. In the chaos of Vietnam. Clayton took my hand, and he never fed again. But he still struggles”.

Yvette forgets many things now but she still remembers when Clayton Fletcher took her hand for the first time. At a summer fair, his eyes bright with excitement then wild with something else. Something darker she never knew what was. He was always the sea.

“He was always such a romantic” She says, and even now after all these years she feels a smile creep onto her lips. Tom is smiling too 

“Did he quote Byron’s poems at you too?” He asks. “He… knew him… before he knew us”.

“Are you…” Yvette asks, but she does not know how to ask this question.

“His husband?” Tom says, still smiling. “Yes… You don’t mind, do you?”

Yvette hears herself laugh. She is searching for a phrase her grandchildren use. What do they say? “I really don’t give a fuck.” She says. That's the one “I meant are you a… a vampire, too”. Gay vampires. My grandchildren would like that. The kids like this sort of thing these days.

Tom nods, He almost looks relieved.  “Yes. Clayton saved me, but he condemned me too. I’m like him now. Stuck in the in-between.” He is touching his cross, looking at the sky. 

“No place for a clergy-man really” He says. “But then, I was never a very good priest I guess."

Yvette wants to run screaming. She wants to call Alma and ask her to pick her up. She wants to tell Tom creatures like him. Men like him. Do not belong in churches. She wants to cry like the young girl she has become this afternoon.

What she does is walk into the church. His hand gently pushing her in.

Inside, the church does not look as much as a church as it looks like the lounge of an old hotel. In fact, the most church-like thing in there is Tom. Suddenly out of place in his clergy collar and his cross and his smile. A fire is burning in a fireplace, with a few young people lounging in arm chairs.

A few chairs away, a lady her own age is meticulously embroidering a cushion. They all look happy and relaxed and they are all intensely looking at a woman in a knee-lenght pink faux-mink coat, who is reading aloud from a book. She looks at Yvette when they enter and suddenly Yvette doesn’t feel lost anymore. She doesn’t feel scared or confused. She feels at home.

Tom points to the woman reading “They’re all reading Byron” He explains "Clay got them on to that."

Clayton is standing next to the fireplace, listening to the poetry, when a woman walks up to him. Tall and thin and dressed in black she touches him lightly on the arm and whispers something in his ear.

Clayton looks at Yvette, his face a storm of worry. He was always the sea. Then he leaves the room through a door at the back of the church. Tom taps her shoulder, pointing at something above her head.

“You should meet the Osborne twins” he says “I used to know their dad when he was young”.

Above her, two teenagers are dancing. In the air. The girl’s long blond hair is swinging as her brother lifts her by the hip, his feet kicking at the air beneath him. Yvette was taught many years ago not to stare. But she does. The girl is smiling at her, waving to them. She shouts something about “Uncle Tom” before her brother spins her around and she bursts out in laughter. Yvette, stuck to the floor. Breathless.

She doesn’t see it coming, but someone is by her side, handing her a cup of tea. She turns to thank them, but no one is there. Alma wouldn’t like this at all. What is this place. She looks at Tom, because now, he has become the most normal thing here. Tom only nods at the cup, smirking. He is enjoying this.

“Yvette” he says with the tiniest of bows “meet Gayle, they’re a bit shy… oh and... invisible”.

Yvette has run out of words. She just takes the cup and mutters a thank you. She has always been courteous but this is too weird. Above the silence that has spread through the church she hears a banging. A hammering coming from through the door Clayton went through. The door is standing open and she can see him working furiously on what looks like a massive oaken door. Hammering on an iron hinge.

“What’s he building in there?” She asks.  

“A door.” Tom says flatly and Yvette knows she isn’t meant to ask.

“It’s a… very nice place you have here” She says instead. Sipping the tea. Smiling at Tom.

“She’s lying. She hates it. She thinks we’re all weird”.

The voice belongs to a woman. Well, a girl. Her hair is cut short and she is wearing a leather jacket too big for her and a defiance to tall for her. 

“Why did you bring a stranger in here Tom? You know the rules. You know why we have this place!”

“Bobbie” Tom starts, but the girl is already shaking her head. 

“Don’t ‘Bobbie’ me, Pastor!” She says, stomping away, dragging another young woman with her, that Yvette hadn’t noticed before. Tom attempts a nervous laughs. 

“Teenagers” he says. But there is something else in his voice.

Yvette knows teenagers. She raised four of them herself and she has six grandchildren. She knows defiance from fear and she knows childish fears from the ones you get from being hurt. She knows the girl has been hurt and that she is afraid.

“Why do have you this place?” she asks, watching the girl stomp away.

The dancing twins above her have stopped, quietly watching from the rafters. In the corner a girl is clenching her fists, a small cloud gathering over her head. 

“What is this place?” Tom sits down. He sips his tea. He holds out a chair for her. He looks at the woman with the pink coat and at the girl in the corner.

“You know what I am” he says. Yvette nods. “I’m different” Then, he laughs. A cold, sarcastic laugh “In almost every sense of the word I am different. Your society doesn’t like me. It doesn’t like people like me. It doesn’t like anyone in this church”

Yvette has nothing to say. She has felt many things but she does not know what that feels like.

“We’re all different here. That’s why we’re here.” Tom continues. “Dyrne is the hidden town. It has been here for millennia. And this is where we go to hide. From people like you. Because your kind will hunt us and hurt us and make us bleed. Because you are dangerous” He touches his cross again.

“See Irma over there?” he asks, pointing at the girl in the corner. “She’s from a small town in Norway, but she had to leave. Because she caused a storm that burned down the church of the town. The locals saw her dancing as it happened and they… Well… She had to leave"

“Then, why am I here?” Yvette asks. Why am I here. Why did I come here and how do I leave.

Tom does not have time to answer before a woman tabs his shoulder. She is thin and tall and gaunt. Her hair grey and thin and dirty. Her eyes haunted and fixed on Yvette. It is the woman who whispered to Clayton before he went to work on his door.

“Father Tom” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “Father Tom. She isn’t alone. Can you not see him. The child?”

Yvette is struck to her seat. The cup suddenly burning her skin. And she can hear that voice again. The laughter and sobbing of a child, always there, always faintly hiding behind her thoughts. As it has been for 48 years. Except it is louder now and it is turning to cries. Cries of fear and cries of distress and the woman hears them too.

The woman is attempting a smile. Her eyes full of fear. 

“He’s been with you a long time hasn’t he?” she asks.

Yvette does not answer. She does not want to make it real. She does not want to voice her fear.

“Sheelagh” Tom says, his face all worry and fear. “What do you see? I saw the shadow but I never thought…”

Yvette can feel him now. After all these years. She can feel the hand of a toddler holding hers. She can hear him cry and she knows he is in pain. He is still in pain. 

“My baby” she hears herself say. “My baby is still here, isn’t he?”

Sheelagh nods. 

“I’m sorry” she whispers, tears in her eyes. “He was never able to leave. And now he is stuck”.

Yvette hasn’t cried for many years. I ran out of tears a long time ago. But now she does. Sitting here in a church so far from home with a group of strangers and… and my baby boy. My little Baby Clayton.

“How do I help him?” She asks.

She is sad and she is old and she is tired. But she is a mother and her son is in pain. She is a mother and she will do anything to help her baby sleep.

“Your pocket” Sheelagh says. “You have a key. Clay has a door. You can send him home. Your baby boy can rest”.

Tom has stood up. He is staring at Yvette. His smile has gone and his eyes are cold. 

“Enough, Sheelagh.” he says and he is not using his preacher voice now. Now, he sounds like a man. “Enough.”

Yvette reaches into her pocket. What do I have in my pocket? All she finds is an old, golden coin. She holds it in her hand and the world stops. For a moment there is nothing but the cries of Baby Clayton and his tiny hand reaching for her. His cries growing louder but she cannot find his face and then Clayton Fletcher is there. His hand on her shoulder and Tom’s on his arm. 

“Where did you get this?” Tom asks. “I…” Yvette says. “I don’t remember. I found it.”

“It left me for her” Clayton says. His voice is stiff. As if he is drawing every word out of his soul.  “The coin has it’s own will Tom. She needs it more than I do.”

Tom says nothing. He is clenching his jaw. He is looking at Clayton, gently shaking his head.

“Yvette” Clayton, is holding out his hand to her. "Come with me. I can help”.

Tom’s face is a dark cloud now. 

“No”

Clayton pretends not to hear. Yvette does not understand. In the room at the back of the church is a door. That’s all there is. A massive, oaken door. It is ornate covered in carvings and hung on iron hinges the length of an arm. Next to it is a work bench and tools. Clayton is smiling a sad, forced smile. 

“I made this” he says but he does not sound proud. “It took me a century to complete, but it only works with the key… with your coin”.

“I don’t… I dont understand.” Yvette says. Her head screaming with the cries of a child who left her many years ago. “Where does it lead?”

“This is a backdoor” Clayton says. He sounds so patient, so pained  “I…” He sighs. Looks at Tom. “I cannot die Yvette. My kind. We cannot die. This is the only way I can get peace. I go through this door, with that coin as key and I can leave. And I’ve been preparing it for a hundred years”.

“Okay?”

Yvette has no idea what to say. She wants to go home. She wants to forget. She half wants to walk through the door herself.

“But the key only works once” Clayton says.

Tom is clenching his fists. Shaking his head. Breathing hard. 

“You have the key. I have the door. You can give your baby peace” Clayton is smiling. Such a sad smile. “I’ll be stuck here. But I have Tom. I don’t want to leave. I owe you this. I owe you some peace. You named your son after me and he needs me now”

Yvette looks at the coin in her hand. She looks at Clayton’s face. She looks at Tom, the veins in his neck straining against the clergy collar. She looks around for the shadow of her baby boy but she cannot see him. I can feel him though.

“No”.

Tom’s voice is calm. Calm and strained. Clayton puts a hand on his shoulder. He smiles.

“Tom. Why do you think I never left? The door has been ready for seventeen years, it really doesn’t need all these carvings.” He says, his voice so soft Yvette can barely hear him. "‘Love more than mortal’” He quotes "That’s what I promised you in my vows. How can I give you that if I don’t stay?”.

Tom is shaking his head. He takes a deep breath.  “Clayton. Don’t try to Byron your way out of this. You. Deserve. Peace.”

“No” Clayton says. “No Love, I don’t. Yvette’s child does”.

And suddenly Tom is something else. He has ripped of his collar and his cross. His eyes are burning red. Yvette is on the floor and Tom is on top of her. His hands gripping at her throat. His teeth white and sharp and thirsty for blood. He is hissing and wheezing and the world is growing dark. 

“No!”

Tom is screaming. “I won’t let you take this from him.”

“Tom. Love. Tom”.

Clayton is pulling at Tom’s shoulders. Struggling to pull him away. Yvette is gasping for breath. A child is screaming in her head. Crying out in pain and fever and fear.

“This is your only chance at peace. She can’t take it away from you. I won’t let you. I love you. I can’t let you do this. I can’t. Clay. Let me go. Let me finish her.”

Clayton is saying nothing. Tom is straining against his arms. His face is red and full of anger. His eyes are fire his hands cold against her skin. His cross is lying abandoned on the floor. His god all but forgotten in his fury.

Yvette’s hands are flailing in the air. Feeling for the hand of a child who has died. Instead she finds a small silver cross. Her fingers grasp it and she holds it in front of her. Holds it in Tom’s face. Shoves in his anger.

Suddenly, Tom seems to melt. To soften and weaken and stop. His hands let go of her throat. His anger fades away and turns to tears. He shrinks back into Clayton’s arms, sobbing, clutching the cross in his hands. Tom is smaller somehow. No longer a priest, barely a man. He looks more human than she has seen him before.

“I’m sorry. I love you. I love you. I love you. I just want you to be at peace. I’m sorry, Love. I’m sorry I forgot."

Clayton is kissing Tom’s forehead. He is stroking his hair. He is calmly putting the cross back around Tom’s neck. Watching Tom, Yvette almost feels sorry for him as she sits up rubbing her throat.

“I’m not going to leave, Tom” Clayton whispers “I was, but why would I leave you here?”.

“To get peace.” Tom is still clutching his cross, he seems stuck somewhere between anger and regret. “To reach heaven. To end the suffering.”

Clayton half laughs half sighs.  “Tom, Love. Have you not been listening at all. ‘Without thee where would be my heaven?’” He quotes. “My heaven is here. Baby Clayton’s is not”.

Yvette wants to scream. She wants to get up an leave. She wants to cover her ears to stop hearing her baby screaming in pain. But somehow. Somehow she finds a bit of strength inside that she has been harbouring for years.

“Tom” she says and her voice does not sound as brave as she imagined it. “You people are all special. You can all do amazing things. You are… terrifying and magnificent and unreal.”

Tom is looking at her, wide-eyed, not understanding.

“But I’m a mother.” She says. Growing stronger as she says the words. “That’s my… superpower. I’m a mother of five and I don’t care if you rip my throat out and drink my blood I am not letting my baby suffer anymore.” She holds out the coin towards Clayton. “How do I help him? Please.”

In the end, the door is lighter than it looks. Tom is standing back, his face a torment. His congregation of misfits standing on their toes trying to watch from within the church. The flying twins lifting the angry girl, so she can see better. Clayton is calm. 

He moves as if he has practiced this many times. His hands are smooth and swift as he runs them over the wood. Feeling the hinges, feeling the handle, feeling the round indention in the middle of the door. Yvette can feel her baby boy now. Feel his hand clutching hers. The heat of his feverish skin. The cry of his fear etched onto her soul. 

She is expecting a louder sound. A song. A smash. A bang. A gospel of some sort. All she gets is a click. A small, quiet click as Clayton fits the coin in to place and the door unlocks. Clayton steps back, he grasps Tom’s hand and whispers something in his ear. The congregation behind them letting out a collective “oooh” as Yvette pulls the handle and the door swings open. 

Yvette doesn’t know what she was expecting. The garden of eden? A blinding light? A yellow brick road? She wasn’t expecting this. She wasn’t expecting utter darkness. Silence and nothingness. 

Clayton is saying nothing. Tom is clutching his hand.Yvette is standing on the doorstep, on the brink, staring into darkness. She kneels down on her tired old knees and she sees him now. Sweating with fever his skin as hot as it was 48 years ago. His eyes are glassy and big and full of fear. She wants to hold him. She wants to hug him. She wants to scoot him up and bring him with her home. Instead, she kisses his forehead, her lips touching nothing but air and sorrow and shadow. 

“Go” she whispers and that is the hardest word she has ever had to say.  “Go, my darling boy. I’ll join you one day. One day I’ll be with you. Now go”. 

And then, he is gone. The door is closed and there is nothing but the silence. The laughter and cries she has heard for all these years has died away. She can hear her own heartbeat and nothing else. 

Then, slowly, her world expands. She can hear Clayton breathing. She can hear Tom’s congregation beginning to whisper behind him. Tom sighing with relief. Clayton’s hands are on her arms helping her up and she is standing on her own legs and a weight has lifted from her shoulders. After all these years she can finally breathe. 

These days it’s hard to remember. Yvette has forgotten many things. For forty eight years her thoughts have been drowned out by a child’s sobbing in the back of her mind. Sometimes a sobbing sometimes a laughter sometimes a begging for peace. Growing louder every year. Clouding out her memories. These days it’s hard to remember but in this moment Yvette feels stronger somehow. Tired and weakened and worn out yes, but lighter as well. And she is remembering something now. 

She is remembering that this is not where she is meant to be. This hidden town that isn’t New York. This church full of people who aren’t like her. This man she used to know and the man who keeps him alive. This isn’t where she is meant to be. 

Yvette looks at Clayton, leaning against the doorway, looking oddly at peace. She looks at Tom, ever calm ever worried, his clergy collar still lying forlorn on the floor. She looks as the oaken door, now closed shot, the indention in it’s middle empty and scorched. She sighs. 

“I think” She says. “I should probably go home”. 

Weeks later, Yvette is sitting on her balcony reading the poems of Lord Byron. She is enjoying the silence, the sunshine, the hum of traffic. Alma is brewing her coffee in the kitchen. Yvette has only just closed her eyes when she hears a thump. She does not know where he came from, but a large tuxedo cat has appeared on her balcony. 

The cat falls asleep on her lap as she reads, and in the end it doesn’t leave.

Alma cannot hear it, she says the cat only meows. Alma always preferred realism to poetry. But at night, after Alma has left, Yvette loves the cat. It reads aloud to her from Byron and from Shakespeare and Brontë.

And it does a magnificent imitation of a man Yvette used to know when she was young. A man she has half forgotten but who lives on somewhere. Somewhere in her memories and in a place that isn’t New York. 

Thank you for reading!

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#story #short story #fiction short story #fantasy short stories #urban fantasy

[gldngrl7]

Karamel Fic: Permission to Flourish (4/11)

Title: Permission to Flourish

Author: gldngrl7

Date Started: February 12, 2017

Rating: T for Teen (I know!  I can’t believe it either!)

 Author’s Notes:  

·         This story is the sequel to Bulletproof. Please read that one-shot before diving into this one.

·         There is angst in this story but I promise a happy ending.

·         There’s a few original characters in this story. I hope you like them.  I hope you love them.

·         Comments are welcomed, flames are destroyed with my freeze breath.

      Everything that's broke

             Leave it to the breeze

                     Let the ashes fall

      Forget about me

               Come on, let it go

                      Just let it be

      Why don't you be you?

                 And I'll be me

 James Bay – ‘Let It Go’

Chapter 4/11

  Superhuman or not, when the mind is in a state of panic one cannot move fast enough, think logically enough, or see clearly enough to accomplish even the simplest of tasks.

Mike had been through this a thousand times before, but never with someone for whom he had truly cared on a personal level.  He had ferried countless injured passengers to the nearest hospital for medical treatment, looked into the eyes of equally innumerable parents and loved ones who didn’t hesitate to beg him to save the lives so precious to them.

But looking into Kara’s eyes as he laid Amelia’s form into her arms, for the first time he knew what those people had felt. The desperation—the brush of smoky wings from black demons coming to steal something you love from you.

His hands shook as he attempted to slot the shaking key into the ignition of his 10-year-old Honda Civic.  The administration office was contacting her mother who would meet him there as soon as could arrive.  Luckily, she worked as a nurse at the same hospital and would already be there.  Amelia’s father had taken off when she was just a toddler, explaining why she had attached herself so strongly to Mike, as the only available father figure currently in her life.

Trembling hands unable to get the key into the ignition of his car, Mike sat back against the seat and took a long, deep breath, clasping his hands together in an effort to cease the shaking.  “You’re not in control,” he said aloud.  

It was a mantra he began several years ago.  When training with Clark there had been times when superpowers hadn’t been enough to save lives and Clark had explained that, if he truly wanted this life, he had to find a way to remind himself that sometimes he was just as human as everyone else.  That there were no such things as infallibility or imperviousness, not really. “You are not in control.  You are powerless.  There is nothing you can do now.  She’s in the doctor’s hands.”

Amelia’s backpack was tucked next to him in the passenger seat and he reached for it, withdrawing the tuxedoed bunny rabbit with floppy ears.  Squeezing it tightly, he held it against his forehead, drawing on every ounce of strength he had to regain some measure of control.  “She’s going to be okay,” he said, hoping there was one benevolent god in this whole universe that might hear his prayer.  “Please let her be okay.”

Despite of the hard lump of emotion choking his throat, Mike refused to cry.  Crying would be a white flag of surrender and he was not giving up on her until he knew there was nothing more to be done.  And if the worst happened, the unimaginable, he would have to be strong for her mother and for the other kids in his class, who would have trouble understanding what happened or why.  Though no one could ever understand why such things happened—not even the grown-ups.

With one hand he gripped the steering wheel so hard he left imprints of his fingers on the polyurethane grip.  “Damn it!” he shouted.  He’d left National City six years ago because he wanted to make himself bulletproof, to lock away the parts of himself that could feel anything like this again.  But he’d had this calling and gotten this job, and each and every one of his students had gotten past his carefully constructed shields.  And he’d let them.  He had let them in.  How could he be the best teacher he could be if he didn’t? And none had burrowed deeper than his rainbow-bright Amelia.

Having gathered himself enough to try again, Mike slid his key into the ignition of his car and cranked the engine and pulled out of his parking spot.  

Just a few miles from the hospital it should have been a five minute drive, but as if the cosmos was torturing him, every light turned red just before he reached it, and road construction a mile from the medical center filtered all the vehicles down to one slow moving lane, until he was ready to scream his lungs out.  He could have flown and arrived in seconds, but how would he have explained leaving his car in the teacher’s lot?

He parked in the lot outside of the Emergency Room entrance and grabbed Amelia’s backpack and bunny.  At the desk he wasted no time on pleasantries.  “Amelia Connors?” he asked.  “She was just brought in,” he babbled.

Directed to the third floor surgical waiting room, Mike found a devastated Belinda Connors dressed in pink scrubs, slumped in couch, and her face in his hands.  From the broken expression on her face, he can’t help but imagine that the worst has come to pass.  “Belinda?” he worried.

Her head snapped up, tears streaming down her face and in the space of a breath she rocketed into his waiting arms.  Mike held her close, stroking her back with one hand as she tucked her head into his neck.  He gathered the courage to speak, uncertain if he truly wanted the answer. “Is she…?”

“In surgery,” Belinda supplied, pulling away from him, but leaving her hands on his shoulders.   “The doctors said a few more minutes and my baby would have been past the point of no return.”  

Mike walked her back over to the couch and guided her into a sitting position—mostly because if he didn’t sit soon, his knees were going to collapse beneath the weight of his relief.   Amelia was still alive and for now, that was enough.

 ****

  She sat unnoticed in the corner of the surgical waiting room, flipping nervously through an outdated magazine before Mon-El rushed in.  She moved to stand, to greet him, but then the woman was in his arms and he was soothing her like she was all he could see in the world.  He was so caught up in her that he hadn’t even sensed her presence in the room.

There were multiple operating theaters on this floor and so the surgical lobby was large, and there were seven other people waiting to hear news of their loved ones.  But he didn’t seem to notice any of them, least of all her.

She didn’t turn up her hearing to listen to what they were saying, mostly because she was afraid to know.  Kara watched as he ushered the woman gently back to her seat, and then reached for her hand, their heads hovering close to one another. What remained of Kara’s heart withered inside of her.  When she’d taken the little girl into her arms, the desperate plea in his eyes had struck her like a spike to the chest.  She was special to him, and now that she’d seen Mon-El with the child’s mother, Kara suspected that she knew why.

Clearly…she was too late.

Grabbing her purse, she stood quietly from her chair and slipped stealthily out of the room.

****

 It was immediately clear to anyone that saw mother and daughter together where Amelia got her effervescent personality.  Though unlike her daughter, Belinda’s hair and eyes were dark, Amelia had clearly inherited her mother’s tiny stature and bubbly nature.  In the few months since meeting her at parent-teacher night, Mike could tell that Belinda was the kind of woman who never let anything get her down for long. “Supergirl brought her,” Belinda told him and then dramatically rolled her mahogany brown eyes.  “Of course you would know that, you must have been there. But…Supergirl?  What was she even doing here in Philadelphia?”

“A little out of her jurisdiction,” he agreed, with a raspy chuckle, hoping to elicit a smile.

“Why her and not Valor?” Belinda wondered.

“Maybe he’s on vacation,” Mike posited, reaching to take her hand in his.  She clasped his hand back with all of her strength.  “Or maybe she is.  Supergirl…come to see our fair city.  Maybe she got tired of the temperate climate and constant sunshine of National City and wanted to experience the seasons.”  When Belinda side-eyed him, he defended his idea, “Hey, superheroes must need vacations too!”

Belinda snorted, a dimple on her cheek making a brief appearance.  “I guess it doesn’t matter anyway.  I’m just glad she was there.”

“So am I,” Mike echoed, realizing for the first time it was the truth.  He was glad to have Amelia’s well-being taken out of his hands, because holding that precious life was a pressure he wasn’t sure he could have done justice.

“I wish she’s stayed around long enough for me to thank her.”

Interesting, Mike thought.  Kara was here just when he needed her the most, and then disappeared like a wraith.  That didn’t make any sense.  “She’s gone?” he asked, disturbed by the sound of his own disappointment.  ‘He was not disappointed!’ he lied to himself.

“They said she flew in, told them that my baby had a…bleed in her brain and that there wasn’t much time.  She stayed long enough to make sure Amelia was receiving prompt care, and then she slipped away.  They said one second she was there, and the next she was just…gone.  They say she doesn’t like to stick around for the gratitude.”

“Who says that?” he asked, confused.  That didn’t sound like the Kara he knew—the one that relished the spotlight.

“Everyone,” Belinda replied.  “Don’t you read the news?”

“Only when I have to,” he answered truthfully. For the past few years, Mike had intentionally avoided news having anything to do with National City and its favorite adoptive daughter.  He learned long ago that subjecting himself to that torture did nothing to help him move forward with his life.  “I teach 24 second graders,” he joked, “who’s got time for news?  I barely have time for sleep.”

“Amelia loves Valor but I want her to learn about Supergirl, too.  I want her to see that a woman can be just as strong as a man, stronger even.  You see?”

“Of course.”

“Her father left us when she was so young…I was so young—only twenty-three.  I worked my way through school and got my nursing degree.  I was proud of how strong and independent I was, but Amelia doesn’t understand any of that, at least not yet.  But stopping a runaway train…that she understands.”

“Well, Supergirl is definitely strong,” Mike agreed, remembering Amelia’s drawing from that morning.  “And she certainly doesn’t need anyone.  That’s for sure.”

“Amelia’s going to be so mad when she wakes up and realizes that Supergirl saved her life, but she missed the whole thing.” Belinda caught sight of the backpack in Mike’s other hand.  “Oh, you brought her things!”

“I thought she might need Mr. Snuggles when she wakes up.”  Mike held the backpack aloft, withdrawing the tuxedoed bunny.

“You know about Mr. Snuggles, huh?”

“I have my ways.”  Mike shrugged in a self-deprecating manner that won him another dimple, which disappeared almost immediately as she crumbled into tears.

“She tries so hard to keep him secret,” Belinda sniffed, but held herself together.  “She wants so badly to be strong.”

“Someone once told me that true strength is knowing when to accept help,” he smiled, hoping his words soothed her.  “Even if that help comes from a stuffed bunny,” he sighed, handing the bunny over to her.  Mike reached for her hand again, this time to offer her some of his strength. “She’s plenty strong, Belinda, and she’s going to be okay.  You have to believe that.”

Belinda nodded her head fervently before reaching to pull her into her arms.  “She really loves you, you know,” Belinda whispered against his shirt.  “Every day…you’re all she talks about if she’s not talking about Valor or Supergirl or Mr. Snuggles.  You make her excited to go to school every day.”

Mike felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment as he shook his head.  “I think she’d be excited about school no matter who her teacher was.  She’s just that kind of kid.”

Belinda disagreed.  “This is probably inappropriate to say but…she wishes you were her dad.  She doesn’t remember her father and you’re the most important man in her life right now. Stable,” she qualified. “Caring.  She’d do anything for your approval…or attention.”

Is that what she was doing on that jungle gym? Trying to get his attention?  Mike felt his guilt kick up another ten notches. “I wasn’t paying attention,” he confessed.  “I mean…there were so many kids on the playground and I had stopped to talk to Erica…Mrs. Doland, for a moment.  She was climbing the rocket where I couldn’t see.”

“I’m not blaming you, Mike,” she hastened to say. “I can barely keep my eyes on the kid I have, I can’t imagine having to keep track of twenty-four of the little monsters.  It’s a miracle this doesn’t happened more often.”

“I am so…so sorry.”  His apology tumbled out and he swiftly covered his mouth before it could become too effusive, too much for either of them to bear.

“She’s fearless when it comes to taking risks with her body. She’s not afraid of pain, and never has been,” Belinda said.  “And she would have wanted you to know that.  And she’s wily.  There’s no way she would have risked you stopping her from climbing that jungle gym, before she was good and ready for you to know. The truth is…I’m the one who raised her to be like that.  She sees all the bad things happening in the world, the things that superheroes stop and the things that they can’t…I just didn’t want her to live in fear, that’s all. I’ve always tried to teach her not to be afraid.”  She straightened the tuxedo jacket on Mr. Snuggles’ suit and shrugged.  “It’s a work in progress, I guess.”

“A really great work in progress,” he confirmed. “Who could use a little more confidence when it comes to math.”

“I’m sure with you teaching her she’ll figure it out.”

“Look, Belinda…this could take a while.  I’m going to head to down to the cafeteria and get a coffee.  Would you like one?”

“That would be great.  I’d go myself but—“

“You should stay right where you are.  I’ll take care it.  How do you take it?”

“Cream and two sugars,” she replied, hugging Mr. Snuggles tightly to her chest.

“Coming right up,” he promised.

“Thanks, Mike.”

He shook his head.  “It’s the least I can do.”

Mike strolled away from her, headed to the cafeteria on the first floor.  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his cell phone and began typing a message to Erica.

‘Here with Amelia’s mom.  She’s in surgery now.  More later.’  He followed the message with several fingers-crossed emojis before hitting send and tucking the phone back into his pocket.

TBC

#karamel #karamel fic #bulletproof verse

[felltheheavens]

Going home.

I would never blame my mother for hiding the truth from me; I’m not sure I could have handled the nagging worry, the meditating on mortality, the sheer nostalgia, not when I was mid exam season anyway. Education first, there’s a principle my parents brought with them from India. So she bore the truth on her shoulders alone, and I was none the wiser until long after exams finished, when I moved back home for summer.

           I didn’t realise the truth when we left. During the flight, I was thinking about which movie to watch and how much shopping we’d have time for. When we touched down in Kolkata, the dark part of the night and the oppressive heat welcoming us back like estranged children, I was overwhelmed with warm embraces and fatigue. Even when we reached the flat, the open door beckoning us back home, I was in a bubble of ignorant bliss. I had always been a fan of plans, and I had one: fly out, see your grandad, nurse him back to health, and be back in the UK in time for your brother’s graduation.

           The façade cracked the next day.

When I woke, Dada was in his favourite armchair with my uncle sat beside him. His eyes were bright when he recognised me, brighter still when he began to ramble about how proud he was. He told us - for maybe the hundredth time - how he grew up a widow’s son, a village boy, a stereotype of abject poverty, and now he had grandchildren graduating from some of the best universities in the world. His eyes misted and I grasped his swollen, papery hand, comfortable in my knowledge that this was the greatest man I had ever known, and that I couldn’t imagine what he had gone through to provide the comfortable London upbringing I took for granted.          

           My grandfather was a proud man. When I was eleven, I was left at home with him and given strict instructions on giving him dinner and helping him to bed. I still remember walking downstairs to find him doing the washing up because he wanted to look after me more than I needed to look after him; that was the kind of proud my grandfather was. So it hurt when, at lunch, I watched the woman who cooked for him spoon mushy, overcooked rice into his lax mouth, remind him to swallow, pour water down afterwards. At least when you spoon feed a child you know they understand that they’re eating; with him, I wasn’t so sure.

           After lunch he dozed whilst we replayed one of his old favourite movies, one he learned to love during his years in London. He slept in a state that we couldn’t fully wake him from. When his eyes flickered open there was no recognition in them anymore, he was lost in some past world, where a young man emigrated with his family and discovered English films for the first time, perhaps. I tried to doze too, but every time my eyes closed I found myself tearing up, knowing that he would have hated this, hated how he was babied and incapable and worst of all, upsetting us, his family. I was a pendulum, swinging from hope to misery: he’ll get better to he’s never been worse.

           ‘It’s been a good day,’ said my mother, from the other side of the sofa.

           And the façade began to crack.

           If this was a good day, what would a bad day look like? How could it be a good day when he couldn’t walk by himself, couldn’t remember if he’d already showered, couldn’t even swallow his water without someone holding his mouth shut? He didn’t know we’d brought him crumpets and English mustard, he barely knew we’d brought ourselves. If this was a good day, my God, it could get so much worse.

~

‘Wake up, I think we might have to call an ambulance.’

           I shot up, wiping sleep from my eyes, my jetlag-induced nap suddenly seeming irresponsible.

           ‘What?’

           ‘It’s Dada, he can’t breathe, I think we have to call an ambulance,’ my brother repeated from the doorway. How had he gone from might to have to so quickly?

           ‘I’m coming, one second.’ I threw on a dress and half-ran the few steps to Dada’s room. He was sat doubled over, his breath ragged gasps, his body shaking, supported by my mother and brother and a second later, myself. If we’d let go he’d fall, and it terrified me that I didn’t know if he’d be able to get back up.

           ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Ma whispered. I stared at her blankly, the shock setting in. ‘Do we call an ambulance? Or should we…do we just make him comfortable?’

           I wasn’t sure when I’d started crying but there were teardrops on my cheeks now. I felt like a petulant toddler, all I wanted was to throw a tantrum. This was my Dada - he had to get better, he wasn’t allowed to be like this. He had to get better so that he could come to graduation and puja and my wedding, so that he could tell me his stories, over and over, for the rest of my life, or at least for a little while longer.

           ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, maybe I’m selfish, but I’m not ready yet. Call the ambulance Ma.’ As she pulled out her phone, I kissed my grandfather’s forehead and began to pray away the last of my hope.

~

           It was a good hospital, one of the best in India. The bureaucracy was awful, too many forms, not enough organisation, queues that lasted hours, but the doctors were excellent and that was what mattered. It was somewhere around the third or fourth cup of masala cha, with Dada two floors away in the ICU, surrounded by strangers, that I realised he would never be my grandfather again, that we’d flown thousands of miles not to help, but to say goodbye. I would have cried if I had any tears left.

           He hated hospitals, ever since he lost his wife in one, hated the tubes and the smell and the way you always seemed to be waiting. It was like I could feel his pain, his frustration, how he just wanted to go home. I wasn’t sure if home was the flat we’d carried him out of on a stretcher, or somewhere much further away, where old friends were waiting to see him again.

           I hated everything about the tube in his throat. I hated what it represented, how uncomfortable it must have made him, how little he tried to breathe without it. It seemed natural then, to get rid of it. No extreme measures is what Ma said, how the doctors phrased it, but we knew what it really meant when we signed the DNR. It may have been Ma’s signature, but my brother and I made that decision too. I considered it a silver lining that we could do that for her.

           That first night that he was breathing by himself, I didn’t leave his side. I was too scared, in spite of my hunger, my nicotine craving, my need for a shower and a proper bed. When I was finally coaxed to get food and air it was only after I had whispered in his good ear that I would understand if he went without me, and that it would be okay, I just wanted him to be at peace.

           Stubborn old git.

           He lasted days. He lasted so many days that I began to pray that God would take him soon. I sat in the rain and stared at the heavens and begged them to tell us what he was waiting for, why he was dragging out his suffering. We were ready, I cried, he could go now, he’d done all he needed to.

           Eventually, we decided to take him home. We hadn’t expected him to last more than a few hours, let alone most of a week. Maybe he was just waiting to go home. It had only been a few days since he’d been in the flat, but wheeling him back in on his hospital-prescribed bed, it felt like a lifetime ago. We settled him in the living room, and he turned his head and clasped his hands towards the portrait on the wall.

           ‘He’s praying!’ cried my uncle, ‘Look, he’s praying to his wife!’

           I gripped my mother’s hand and blinked away the tears that came from being less naïve than him, and from knowing he couldn’t pray if he wanted to, not anymore.

~

           ‘Guys, can you help? I – I don’t know if he’s breathing.’

For the second time that week I was slapped out of sleep by the horror of reality. I don’t know if he was alive when Ma asked, or when I put my hand against his mouth to feel his breath, but by 6.07 a.m. I realised he’d finally gone. I was so relieved I felt weightless, shock keeping the grief at bay while we made tea and called the doctors and arranged a slot at the crematorium. It was strange, even after the doctor signed the death certificate it didn’t feel real.

           One of his last wishes was that he didn’t want a hearse; he was a village lad, a traditional Indian man at heart, and he wanted to go the proper, old-fashioned way, up on shoulders. He looked beautiful, painted and dressed up and covered in flowers, finally peaceful. I’m not sure women are supposed to carry dead bodies, and I knew if I asked permission I would be told I was too weak, my sari too pretty to ruin, so I didn’t ask; I stepped into place between my brother and my cousin and felt his weight on my shoulder, and I smiled. I felt powerful as we walked, for once at peace with my tumultuous dual identity – today, I was Indian, I was the granddaughter of this incredible man, and the pride shone out of me.

           I saw him put into the fire. Saw his name flash up on the screen, N. N. Mukherjee. Saw his ashes afterwards, carried the clay pot into the Ganges. I walked into a flat he’d never sit in again, consoled people he’d never see again, placed the glasses he’d never use again on a shelf to gather dust. Maybe it was then, or on the plane ride home, or maybe it was six months later when I understood why Ma cried over Colman’s English mustard in the supermarket. Maybe it was when I wanted to call and tell him about university, or when I found the postcard that I never got around to sending him. Maybe it was all at once, maybe it was gradual, maybe it never stops. But my world has seemed a little darker after that, a little less purposeful, and a little more scary; so I look to the heavens, and I hope he’s watching, and I thank the gods for the twenty years I got with the greatest man I could ever know.

~

           Somewhere far away, a woman in her fifties kneads dough for roti, sat outside in the warm dusk. Her hair is long and dark, woven with grey, her sari pale and loose. She turns, as if hearing something alarming, rises and squints into the sunset, trying to discern something in the distance. Her face breaks into a smile it hasn’t known for a long time, and she calls out to the others. They come running, barefoot and dusty, little boys and old men leaning on sticks, women with tight plaits and youths with ink-stained fingers. They stand with her, and they watch, and they wait, and they know.

           He’s come home.

#mine #grief #mourning #loss #bereavement #writing #writers on tumblr

[bountyofbeads]

Father-daughter border drowning highlights migrants' perils

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The man and his 23-month-old daughter lay face down in shallow water along the bank of the Rio Grande, his black shirt hiked up to his chest with the girl tucked inside. Her arm was draped around his neck suggesting she clung to him in her final moments.

The searing photograph of the sad discovery of their bodies on Monday, captured by journalist Julia Le Duc and published by Mexican newspaper La Jornada, highlights the perils faced by mostly Central American migrants fleeing violence and poverty and hoping for asylum in the United States.

According to Le Duc’s reporting for La Jornada, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, frustrated because the family from El Salvador was unable to present themselves to U.S. authorities and request asylum, swam across the river on Sunday with his daughter, Valeria.

He set her on the U.S. bank of the river and started back for his wife, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, but seeing him move away the girl threw herself into the waters. Martínez returned and was able to grab Valeria, but the current swept them both away.

The account was based on remarks by Ávalos to police at the scene — “amid tears” and “screams” — Le Duc told The Associated Press.

Details of the incident were confirmed Tuesday by a Tamaulipas government official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, and by Martínez’s mother back in El Salvador, Rosa Ramírez, who spoke with her daughter-in-law by phone afterward.

“When the girl jumped in is when he tried to reach her, but when he tried to grab the girl, he went in further ... and he couldn’t get out,” Ramírez told AP. “He put her in his shirt, and I imagine he told himself, ‘I’ve come this far’ and decided to go with her.”

From the scorching Sonoran Desert to the fast-moving Rio Grande, the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border has long been an at times deadly crossing between ports of entry. A total of 283 migrant deaths were recorded last year; the toll so far this year has not been released.

In recent weeks alone, two babies, a toddler and a woman were found dead on Sunday, overcome by the sweltering heat; elsewhere three children and an adult from Honduras died in April after their raft capsized on the Rio Grande; and a 6-year-old from India was found dead earlier this month in Arizona, where temperatures routinely soar well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The search for Martínez and his daughter was suspended Sunday due to darkness, and their bodies were discovered the next morning near Matamoros, Mexico, across from Brownsville, Texas, several hundred yards (meters) from where they had tried to cross and just a half-mile (1 kilometer) from an international bridge.

Tamaulipas immigration and civil defense officials have toured shelters beginning weeks ago to warn against attempting to cross the river, said to be swollen with water released from dams for irrigation. On the surface, the Rio Grande appears placid, but strong currents run beneath.

Ramírez said her son and his family left El Salvador on April 3 and spent about two months at a shelter in Tapachula, near Mexico’s border with Guatemala.

“I begged them not to go, but he wanted to scrape together money to build a home,” Ramírez said. “They hoped to be there a few years and save up for the house.”

El Salvador’s foreign ministry said it was working to assist the family including Ávalos, who was at a border migrant shelter following the drownings. The bodies were expected to be flown to El Salvador on Thursday.

The photo recalls the 2015 image of a 3-year-old Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean near Turkey, though it remains to be seen whether it may have the same impact in focusing international attention on migration to the U.S.

“Very regrettable that this would happen,” Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Tuesday in response to a question about the photograph. “We have always denounced that as there is more rejection in the United States, there are people who lose their lives in the desert or crossing” the river.

There was no immediate comment from the White House.

U.S. “metering” policy has dramatically reduced the number of migrants who are allowed to request asylum, down from dozens per day previously to sometimes just a handful at some ports of entry.

The Tamaulipas government official said the family arrived in Matamoros early Sunday and went to the U.S. Consulate to try to get a date to request asylum. The mother is 21 years old and the father was 25, he added.

But waits are long there as elsewhere along the border — last week a shelter director said only about 40 to 45 asylum interviews were being conducted in Matamoros each week, while somewhere in the neighborhood of 800-1,700 names were on a waiting list.

It’s not clear what happened to the family at the U.S. Consulate, but later in the day they made the decision to cross. The Tamaulipas official said the father and daughter set off from a small park that abuts the river. Civil defense officials arrived at the scene at 7 p.m. Sunday and later took the wife to the shelter.

“I was drawn to the girl’s arm on her father,” Le Duc said as she described arriving at the scene. “It was something that moved me in the extreme because it reflects that until her last breath, she was joined to him not only by the shirt but also in that embrace in which they passed together into death.”

“It’s a horrifying image,” Maureen Meyer, a specialist on immigration at the Washington Office on Latin America, which advocates for human rights in the region, said of the photograph. “And I think it speaks so clearly to the real risks of these U.S. programs that are either returning people back to Mexico seeking asylum or in this case limiting how many people can enter the U.S. every day.”

The United States has also been expanding its program under which asylum seekers wait in Mexico while their claims are processed in U.S. courts, a wait that could last many months or even years.

This week Nuevo Laredo in Tamaulipas, the same state where Matamoros is located, said it will become the latest city to receive returnees as soon as Friday.

Many migrant shelters are overflowing on the Mexican side, and cartels hold sway over much of Tamaulipas and have been known to kidnap and kill migrants.

Meanwhile, Mexico is stepping up its own crackdown on immigration in response to U.S. pressure, with much of the focus on slowing the flow in the country’s south.

“With greater crackdowns and restrictions,” said Cris Ramón, senior immigration policy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank in Washington, “we could see more desperate measures by people trying to enter Mexico or the U.S.”

___

Associated Press writers Marcos Alemán in San Salvador, El Salvador, and Alfredo Peña in Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, contributed to this report.

#u.s. news #donald trump #politics #trump administration #president donald trump #trump #white house #republican politics #politics and government #international news #republican party #immigration #trump scandals #must reads #us: news #maga #u.s. immigration and customs enforcement #abolish ice #ice #Homeland Security #homeland security

[mementosrp-blog]

( MENG TIANYI )

ALIAS ›  

FACTION ›  ada

( PERSONA )

BACKGROUND:  she first awakens her persona during her rendezvous with the hands of death. strong fear grips her to her core but that is also when she finds out she holds a malicious darkness within her that brings out happiness, an unsightly glee at the thought of her crooked family dying - at the thought of freedom. it is that darkness which brings upon her persona, mad hatter, a character of the twisted tales of lewis carroll. she is as jarring as the character perhaps, playful and snarky, all too hyper one second but serious all the next as she goes on to speak foreboding words. is calamity what awaits? nobody can tell when the giggles from the woman speak of nothing factitious.

ABILITY/ABILITIES :

insanity projection - the ability to alter reality by projecting her own insanity and darkness upon reality. it is usually a twisted imagery caused by the nightmares of her mind that brings beings to life that are bound to her will or causing what appears to be a normal room to shift around into an obstacle course like situation where everything appears to defy gravity.

insanity inducement - by speaking, she has the ability to compel with her sweet voice and the victims are unable to disobey because the thought is simply so compelling it twists the functions of their brain. this can include simple things as altering belief, manipulating lies into truths, altering logic and intuition through what appears to be a form of hypnosis. given the right words, she can even compel murder and drive one insane.

negation - the ability to nullify magical attacks and render them useless. it doesn’t matter if they are on the offensive or defensive side, as long as the opponent activates their magical ability, her persona is able to “eat” the attack thereby making it appear as if it never existed in the first place.

WEAKNESSES :

insanity projection - the downside of insanity projection is that while she has a general idea as to what may appear from her imagination, it all depends on the mood she is currently in. the stronger her sadistic side arises or the stronger her madness is, the stronger the ability is. this ability is ironically a counter of her other one, her mind should not be stable for it to activate - which a lot of the time in battle it admittedly is not.

insanity inducement - the biggest fallacy is that she is in need of a voice and the person listening must be able to understand her. as long as she cannot make any sounds or the other cannot hear, this ability is effectively blocked. it also takes time as no conversations simply occur in seconds, so she must not be distracted and the other must not be distracted either, therefore complex commands usually take longer than simple commands. she must also choose her words carefully for those with lower knowledge or are too intelligent will require different vocabulary to fall into her clutches.

negation - she is still susceptible to physical attacks and mental attacks (though mental attacks may only further strength insanity projection). if a person is more powerful than she is, then they may be able to immobilize her persona briefly while it is negating the magical attack which will further render her defenseless for that short while.

( STATS )

Knowledge : [ 13 / 25 ] Guts : [ 12 / 25 ] Proficiency : [ 11 / 25 ] Kindness : [ 1 / 25 ] Charm : [ 13 / 25 ]

— BACKGROUND

an age old superstition, the huang family has never seemed to have any good luck with the twins born into their household. calamity befalls the household soon after every time two shrill cries break the tense atmosphere of birth and it is no surprise that it almost becomes a must for the mother to die through the labour and leave a rancorous father behind. somewhere, it soon became a custom to banish the twins by throwing them into the fray of adoption as if the implication was that if the twins were to be cursed, then at least let them curse others - which they never do since silly tales are simply silly but all stories hold power the longer they exist. somewhere as fear instills itself, everything becomes much too painfully real.

lijuan and liling are two girls born into the huang family, the former trickling a few minutes ahead of the other. immediately the world around them whispers of defilement, curses and mutters repeated mantras of warding chinese spells for protection. but these twins would not be the same as all the other twins which had passed through. for one, their mother does not slip away into the afterlife seconds after but instead nurses them both all the way until the three of them are discharged from the family. the second is that for all their grandparents ramble on and on about how the two are rats to be discarded, their parents do not listen.

at first. but it soon becomes a clear as the babies turn into toddlers and then into a young child, there is something about liling that unsettles most. a shadow to her sister’s light, a quiet to her sister’s yell, a silent shivering stare unlike the bright movements of her sister - she lingers with an air that leaves others uncomfortable. rumours spread after the sudden death of a family friend’s precious dog, that it was because she had played with him during the dinner party that he had fallen into the darkness without any warning. the rumours are further spread when a neighbourhood boy who takes interest in the girl falls ill. somewhere between the hush of night and the cracks of dawn, a suggestion is made to kill her.

her parents don’t quite make it that far – they lock her up instead in the room that was once shared with her sister and moves lijuan their sunlight child to somewhere bigger, somewhere better. she is a flower that wilts in the passage of time, a locked door only slipped open occasionally to feed her or let her out to go to the washroom – eventually they simply makeshift a washroom for her so that she only sees them during meals. she is to waste away in her filth and if she is to cry or complain, she finds harsh fists smacking against naked skin until she no longer even has the energy to scream through gritted teeth. there are barred windows that make her wonder if it is to truly stop her from escaping than to stop strangers from falling into their misfortune around her.

the old man never gives her a reason but she comes to have a hunch eventually. the girl doesn’t know whether to call it misfortune or fortune when libration arrives one evening. the world outside her door is unusually quiet and dinner does not come at the usual time. she is hushed breath, held breath as her door slams open, blood and decay marking itself like a tattoo upon her skin in a momentary splatter as she comes to realise she has been taken to a time that does not belong to mortals. young round eyes cast themselves upon a stranger who raises cold metal to press upon her forehead. she should await death, but her blood boils further and pain scorches itself into her features a second away from the trigger being pulled. in that moment, in the cry for the persona called mad hatter, she comes to know that her family’s fall is her rise. she immediately scampers onto her knees, begging the hitman, the savior to offer her a new life away from the hellhole that is her home. away from the stupidity that has chained her for so long.

that night, she comes to learn how to smile again. that night the girl known as huang liling also dies. there is only a twelve-year-old girl with the new name mei tiangyi, who is flown from her home back in sichuan to daegu, korea into the mafia world where the man belongs. here she is a rough stone ready to be polished until she glistens into a sparkling diamond. here she learns how to fight, how to speak the tongue of many worlds, how to lose the one emotion known as love which binds the fallacy of humanity. here she learns how to kill kill kill, a wolf leaking savage hunger would catch no rabbit nor would he be able to sneak underneath the nose of a bear. here she becomes elusive and charming, but also merciless and cold, an abominable smile upon her face when adrenaline rushes through her veins with each target she hits.

it becomes play and with each game she learns her next steps. agonizingly slow but the benefits which were reaped outnumber the losses she has sown upon the soil of her life. when the two of them move to seoul on a mission. she is sixteen, she poses as a bright-eyed, friendly and extroverted young woman helping her adopted family with their flower shop. kindness and playfulness becomes another facade, the aunties in the neighborhood joke about the flower girl with the softest smile that causes the sunflowers to turn away from the sun to her. nobody knows about the girl hidden behind the mask living in the world of the dead, silence befallen, all serious with clouded eyes and the madness within as she dyes herself in crimson, stains her hands over and over again. it’s a lifestyle.

she loses her mentor in a freak accident at the age of eighteen brought on by a cascade of timings which just happen to be too perfect. even a tamed dog will bite its owner when given the chance and the scatters of ink in many books speak of countless beloved daughters taking out their own father. but nobody thinks of the seemingly loyal girl who weeps at the grave of a corpse less casket. they call her antigone instead while mad hatter is gleeful in her snickering within.

with that she makes the exit from her mafia life, enough power within that nobody actually dares to stop her. the next step is an interesting one, it is a spur of the moment decision that has her knocking on the footsteps of the law enforcement that once chased her down so mercilessly. sweet words, a nicely wrapped tale later and they believe her to have joined the good side. they make her one of them.

it’s hard to tell if she truly has become one who walks alongside the words of justice or if she has other thoughts within but she only does things which aids the task force. some are weary, some have put endless trust within her and it is evident when soon enough she is crawling her way up the ladder to success. though she is twenty-four she has proved herself to be a more than capable leader of the ADA. it would certainly be a bad idea to go against her, after all.

#MT!RP: accepted #MT!RP: follow

[mementosrp-blog]

( MENG TIANYI )

ALIAS ›  

FACTION ›  citizen

( PERSONA )

BACKGROUND : she first awakens her persona during her rendezvous with the hands of death. strong fear grips her to her core but that is also when she finds out she holds a malicious darkness within her that brings out happiness, an unsightly glee at the thought of her crooked family dying - at the thought of freedom. it is that darkness which brings upon her persona, alice, the protagonist of the twisted tales of lewis carroll but alice is also the child of an aryan myth who died an unfortunate death and would bring others children down with her in order to have “some fun”. death follows the girl, her first family and then her second. but still, she pretends to remain a symbol of purity and brightness, even though she has long fallen down the hole and lost herself to wonderland.

ABILITY/ABILITIES :

– insanity projection - the ability to alter reality by projecting her own insanity and darkness upon reality. it is usually a twisted imagery caused by the nightmares of her mind that brings beings to life that are bound to her will or causing what appears to be a normal room to shift around into an obstacle course like situation where everything appears to defy gravity.

– persuasion - by speaking, she has the ability to compel with her sweet voice and the victims are unable to disobey because the thought is simply so compelling. this can include simple things as altering belief, manipulating lies into truths, altering logic and intuition through what appears to be a form of hypnosis. given the right words, she can even compel murder.

– reanimation - she is able to reanimate the dead, making them able to move and react to her will. they are all mindless for the most part, following her blindly. there are two types of the dead which she can reanimate, the corpse physically or the spirits of the dead who died. while they are two different types, both of them will appear in the same manner as how they looked when they were alive except eyes are blank and they do not speak.

WEAKNESSES :

– insanity projection - the downside of insanity projection is that while she has a general idea as to what may appear from her imagination, it all depends on the mood she is currently in. the stronger her sadistic side arises or the stronger her madness is, the stronger the ability is. this ability is ironically a counter of her other one, her mind should not be stable for it to activate - which a lot of the time in battle it admittedly is not.

– persuasion - the biggest fallacy is that she is in need of a voice and the person listening must be able to understand her. as long as she cannot make any sounds or the other cannot hear, this ability is effectively blocked. it also takes time as no conversations simply occur in seconds, so she must not be distracted and the other must not be distracted either, therefore complex commands usually take longer than simple commands. she must also choose her words carefully for those with lower knowledge or are too intelligent will require different vocabulary to fall into her clutches.

– reanimation - the dead whom she summons must have either been buried at the place where she summons or died there from any possible reasons. they are also for the most part human and she is currently unable to control beasts. she is also only limited to a couple at once, for the more she controls the harder it taxes upon her brain and tires her out. at the same time the dead are limited to what they are and therefore are unable to perform any magical attacks or say fly (though a dead persona user would be highly useful).

( STATS )

Knowledge : [ 13 / 25 ] Guts : [ 12 / 25 ] Proficiency : [ 11 / 25 ] Kindness : [ 1 / 25 ] Charm : [ 13 / 25 ]

— BACKGROUND

an age old superstition, the huang family has never seemed to have any good luck with the twins born into their household. calamity befalls the household soon after every time two shrill cries break the tense atmosphere of birth and it is no surprise that it almost becomes a must for the mother to die through the labour and leave a rancorous father behind. somewhere, it soon became a custom to banish the twins by throwing them into the fray of adoption as if the implication was that if the twins were to be cursed, then at least let them curse others - which they never do since silly tales are simply silly but all stories hold power the longer they exist. somewhere as fear instills itself, everything becomes much too painfully real.

lijuan and liling are two girls born into the huang family, the former trickling a few minutes ahead of the other. immediately the world around them whispers of defilement, curses and mutters repeated mantras of warding chinese spells for protection. but these twins would not be the same as all the other twins which had passed through. for one, their mother does not slip away into the afterlife seconds after but instead nurses them both all the way until the three of them are discharged from the family. the second is that for all their grandparents ramble on and on about how the two are rats to be discarded, their parents do not listen.

at first. but it soon becomes a clear as the babies turn into toddlers and then into a young child, there is something about liling that unsettles most. a shadow to her sister’s light, a quiet to her sister’s yell, a silent shivering stare unlike the bright movements of her sister - she lingers with an air that leaves others uncomfortable. rumours spread after the sudden death of a family friend’s precious dog, that it was because she had played with him during the dinner party that he had fallen into the darkness without any warning. the rumours are further spread when a neighbourhood boy who takes interest in the girl falls ill. somewhere between the hush of night and the cracks of dawn, a suggestion is made to kill her.

her parents don’t quite make it that far – they lock her up instead in the room that was once shared with her sister and moves lijuan their sunlight child to somewhere bigger, somewhere better. she is a flower that wilts in the passage of time, a locked door only slipped open occasionally to feed her or let her out to go to the washroom – eventually they simply makeshift a washroom for her so that she only sees them during meals. she is to waste away in her filth and if she is to cry or complain, she finds harsh fists smacking against naked skin until she no longer even has the energy to scream through gritted teeth. there are barred windows that make her wonder if it is to truly stop her from escaping than to stop strangers from falling into their misfortune around her.

the old man never gives her a reason but she comes to have a hunch eventually. the girl doesn’t know whether to call it misfortune or fortune when libration arrives one evening. the world outside her door is unusually quiet and dinner does not come at the usual time. she is hushed breath, held breath as her door slams open, blood and decay marking itself like a tattoo upon her skin in a momentary splatter as she comes to realise she has been taken to a time that does not belong to mortals. young round eyes cast themselves upon a stranger who raises cold metal to press upon her forehead. she should await death, but her blood boils further and pain scorches itself into her features a second away from the trigger being pulled. in that moment, in the cry for the child called alice, she comes to know that her family’s fall is her rise. she immediately scampers onto her knees, begging the hitman, the savior to offer her a new life away from the hellhole that is her home. away from the stupidity that has chained her for so long.

that night, she comes to learn how to smile again. that night the girl known as huang liling also dies. there is only a twelve-year-old girl with the new name mei tiangyi, who is flown from her home back in sichuan to daegu, korea. here she is a rough stone ready to be polished until she glistens into a sparkling diamond. here she learns how to fight, how to speak the tongue of many worlds, how to lose the one emotion known as love which binds the fallacy of humanity. here she learns how to kill kill kill, a wolf leaking savage hunger would catch no rabbit nor would he be able to sneak underneath the nose of a bear. here she becomes elusive and charming, but also merciless and cold, an abominable smile upon her face when adrenaline rushes through her veins with each target she hits.

it becomes play and with each game she learns her next steps. agonizingly slow but the benefits which were reaped outnumber the losses she has sown upon the soil of her life. when the two of them move to seoul she is sixteen, she poses as a bright-eyed, friendly and extroverted young woman helping her adopted family with their flower shop. kindness becomes another facade, the aunties in the neighborhood joke about the flower girl with the softest smile that causes the sunflowers to turn away from the sun to her. nobody knows about the girl hidden behind the mask with the howling laughter, the sarcastic snips of words and the madness within as she dyes himself in crimson, stains his hands over and over again. it’s a lifestyle.

she loses her mentor in a freak accident at the age of nineteen brought on by a cascade of timings which just happen to be too perfect. even a tamed dog will bite its owner when given the chance and the scatters of ink in many books speak of countless beloved daughters taking out their own father. but nobody thinks of the seemingly loyal girl who weeps at the grave of a corpse less casket. they call her antigone instead while alice is gleeful in her snickering within.

she is putrid after all and she knows it.

#MT!RP: accepted #MT!RP: follow