#I have a soft spot for country artists who still treat her like part of the country fam idk

[lunar-years]

This is cute 😊

#taylor swift #alan jackson #ts #I have a soft spot for country artists who still treat her like part of the country fam idk #it’s really crazy to consider how many COMPLETELY different circles she runs in and how beloved she is in them all :)

[nana-ur]

Corruption: Intro.

Pairings: Yandere!Taehyung x Reader || Jimin x Reader

Genre: Yandere, Romance (?), Psychological, Angst, Smut

Disclaimer: I do not condone, nor support or encourage anything I write in this fanfiction. It is purely fiction, means of entertainment, and should be treated as such. I do not think any of the BTS members would act remotely anything like what is represented here, which is why it’s called fiction. Other than that, please enjoy, and read at your own discretion. 

Trigger warnings and Tags; +18, Yandere elements, Possessive and Obsessive behaviors, Toxic Relationships, Unhealthy idealization, Drug and Substance Abuse, Mommy/Daddy Issues, Slow Burn, Smut (in future chapters), Artist!Tae, Rich!Tae, Lowkey SugarDaddy!Tae, BDSM, Power Dynamics, Manipulation, Slight age difference, Naive!Reader, Easy to Manipulate!Reader, Virgin!Reader, Virginity Kink, Corruption kink.. (There’s gonna be a LOT of kinks in here for further chapters, so I’ll save the wall of text LOL.) 

Intro  Part. 1   Part. 2   Part. 3   Part. 4  Part. 5  

Boring, he thought.

Everything about this stupid fucking event was excruciatingly boring.

First off, he didn't even want to be here. His mother forced him to come, practically dragging him outside by his own ear. 

"If you still want me to sponsor your pathetic little project, it'd be smart of you to come along with me this evening." Ah yes, the typical threats of estranging him financially in hopes of him spending time with her. Typical Mrs. Kim. 

The outing was a simple event where selected students who had won his fathers Academic Scholarship were rewarded a ‘party’ for their hard work and efforts. The scholarship was offered to college students who managed to make the highest ranking grades throughout their entire university. Impressive, to say the least, which is why each student present was granted $45,000 USD straight towards their college funds.

That sort of funding was simply pocket change for a man like his father.

His father was the CEO of Kim’s Legal Law Firm. It happens to be the third largest law firm in the country. Taehyung’s father has a tender soft spot for college students, especially ones who attend the same school he graduated from. Which is why he did events like this yearly, specifically for them.

But Taehyung? He could give two shits about a "Scholarly Party". He wasn't in school, nor did he want to be tied down by the ropes of education ever again. High School was more than enough, and that was years ago. He barely graduated. Though, after having his parents ``talk" to the principal of his private school, he suddenly went from having a D grade point average, to being at the top of his class in under an hour. He remembers clearly how Kim Namjoon glared daggers in his skull when he walked up the stairs leading to the stage at their highschool graduation, accepting his honors award that rightfully belonged to him instead. Taehyung couldn't really blame him, either. He'd be pissed off too if someone's rich parents paid off a school to make their irresponsible child graduate, whilst stealing his honors award that would've surely benefited him if he tried to enroll in college. 

Taehyung wasn't stupid by all means, no. He was actually pretty fucking smart. It's just he hates doing work, and he hates being told what to do. So instead of attending classes, doing homework, and going to exam days; he skipped classes to smoke weed, do things he wasn't supposed to do, and fuck around. What was stopping him? Surely not his parents. They barely bat an eye when he stayed away from home for days on end when he was only 15 years old. He remembers walking in after being away for 5 days straight to his dad barely sparing him a glance, and his mother wrapping herself up in a scarf so she could go out for the night. She walked right past him, not saying a word. 

Easy to say that his parents had their priorities straightened out already, and Taehyung wasn't one of them. But he doesn't care. 

Or that's what he tries to tell himself when he has emotional outbursts, or when he gets arrested for DUIs, or when he gets questioned for being under the influence, and more outlandish things his parents had authorities shove under a rug. 

His parents had money and generational wealth. Taehyung could do anything, say anything, and be whatever he wanted. So who cares if his parents were a little emotionally unavailable? He didn't care. Nope. Not at all. Not one bit.

But sometimes, just, sometimes, he finds himself yearning for motherly love. He finds himself wishing he had a father to look up to, instead of the stone cold businessman his own father was.

He desperately wanted to be loved by someone.

And he hated that feeling. It made him feel weak.

The feeling that gnawed at the emptiness inside of his own chest. The empty void that hurts and caves into himself whenever he sees someone receive the unconditional love he could only wish for. 

Oh, how he wanted someone to love.

To hold, to cherish, to smother with affection, to be loyal to and never let go. 

Never let go. 

Taehyung has had his fair share of relationships, of course. He was pretty, tantalizing, rich, and he likes to think of himself as quite the charmer. 

Those relationships weren’t too serious or noteworthy, honestly. Most of the women he dated were trophy girlfriends his friends set him up with. Most just dated him for status, sex, and money. Surprisingly, he had no problem with this. 

It's just how the world works, isn't it?

No matter how pretty or sweet, though, he's never fallen in love with any of those women.

He's never been in love at all.

He’s felt the intense feelings of infatuation and lust, but none of those feelings lasted for more than 2 weeks. He often finds himself getting bored of the same repetitive types of women that came into his life. 

There were two categories of women that Kim Taehyung seems to attract. 

One being the typical spoiled woman with daddy’s black card. This type didn’t need him at all for financial reasons, they were set for life, and possibly even the afterlife. They always had a certain aura to them, that look in their eyes, that pep in the way they walk. All of which seems to remind him of his own mother. Yeah, he knows it’s weird. It’s weird to date women that remind you of your mother, but Taehyung was the farthest thing from normal. 

What did Sigmund Freud say? Taehyung would think about the little bit of psychology knowledge he gained when he used to half pay attention in class often. Something about how mommy issues can lead down an unhealthy path of romantic relationships if not addressed in therapy, and so on. He thought it was quite interesting how he felt called out at that moment, which is why psychology became one of his favorite subjects while he was still in school. He may have skipped a lot, but when he was there, he tried to pay attention to the lectures.

The second category of women who Taehyung attracts were models. Not the runway, nepo baby models everyone sees on social media. No, not those. 

The models who were oh so pretty, but also had that vacant lost look in their eyes. They were signed to agencies who barely let them on the runway. Not because of their looks, but because of their raging reliance on drugs and substances. The walking stereotype of a ‘The Weeknd’ song is how he would describe these women. 

These women were with him for a completely different reason than the others. 

Taehyung was a bit guilty when it came to having a “hero complex”. He isn’t a saint by any means; he’s done his fair share of substances. He was peer pressured to do a lot of things when he was younger. 

Though, whenever he gets with these women, his goal is to “fix” them by giving them endless attention, affection, and care. He was always there when they went through withdrawals, when they were puking into plastic bags because they failed to eat prior to drowning themselves in narcotics and powder. He would rub their backs, help them take a cold shower, fix them soup, and hold them until they fell asleep. 

Taehyung had a soft spot for these women. Because he understands.

He understood the pain. The desperation to feel nothing. 

To fill that empty void with something. Something. 

These women were crying for help, so why not help them?

It filled him with a sense of importance after helping these women get clean. It was like he was healing his inner child in a sick, twisted way. Though, like most things, those relationships came to an end.

Although it was never really his fault these relationships would end. 

He was too “demanding”, “controlling”, “possessive”, he’s been told by most, if not all, of the women he’s been involved with.

They never truly accepted him for who he was. They were the foolish ones, not him. 

If they just understood him, if they would just understand.

Which is why he’s never fallen in love before. 

That was the ‘love’ life of Kim Taehyung. It was sad and depressing, but it’s something he had to get used to. It was all he was ever exposed to growing up. It was all he knew.

Maybe one day, things would be different. Happen differently.

Perhaps, authentically, unlike his past.

Perhaps he could fall in love.

He dreamed about such things. It would keep him up at night with a beating heart.

He was a disgusting hopeless romantic. 

“Are you paying attention?” Taehyung quickly blinked out of his short-lived daze and cocked his head down towards the voice. It was his mother, looking at him with those judgemental eyes he once used to hide from. Now, it doesn’t scare him anymore. 

But it made him feel significantly small nonetheless. 

God, he hated being here. It was so tacky.

Everyone was instructed to wear white. Though Taehyung, obviously, chose to be a little shit to piss off his mom and wore a black turtleneck, with a black blazer and even blacker slacks. His black hair was styled to where his fringe was covering most of his forehead, and slightly his eyes which were a light gray today, due to his contacts. Black on black.

He nodded his head towards his mother, ushering her to continue on with what she was saying even though he dissociated for most of it. 

Something he learned how to do at a very young age with ease.

“As I was saying,” she snapped, “your father wants you to greet some of the students. It would be beneficial for you to ask questions about college life, possibly even make some new friends tonight," Taehyung groaned internally, rolling his eyes in a way that his mother wouldn’t catch on. Here comes the “you need to go to school and study” talk. He would always shut it down. He’s 27 years old, too old to even be considered a senior at this point. 

To please his mother and to make her stop talking, he walked away from the railing he was leaning on and looked down into his wine glass, swirling it around to watch the red liquid create ripples. 

Looking up, he immediately spots his father speaking to what he presumes to be a student. The student was dressed in a plain, silky short back-out white gown with spaghetti straps. 

With her rear side facing his direction, it was hard to make out what the conversation was about. Maybe his father was being the creep he always was when it came to hanging around girls decades younger than him.

He can usually tell by the look in his fathers eyes, which seemed innocent to others, but Taehyung knew better than that. He knew his father well, even if he had no desire to. 

But all he could think about was how enticing she looked, even from behind where her face was hidden. The curve of her torso allowed the silky dress to hug her body perfectly, creating a silhouette that would give any Greek sculpture a run for its money. Dragging his eyes up and down her figure, he finds himself absentmindedly outlining the perimeter of her body with his irises, imprinting it into his own memory. 

Taehyung had an excellent photographic memory. 

It was strange, really. He was never someone to be enticed by “energy”, and he was never one to approach women. Not that he didn’t want to, it’s just that he didn’t have to. Any woman he was interested in came to him first without fail. But something was pulling him forward, beckoning him to approach the mysterious girl.

Which is exactly what he did.

His steps were calculated, precise. Making good first impressions was a piece of cake for Kim Taehyung, something he was often praised for from time to time. Which is probably the reason why his parents forced him to come to this tedious event. They used him as the token golden boy, utilizing his charms and making him talk to perverted, older guests that came to their events, hoping that he’d win their favor in exchange that his father gets to strengthen his connections. They started doing this when he turned 18, making use of his good looks and people skills.

Earning his parents' respect as their son isn’t easy. Especially a son who belonged to the Kim family. He had to attend the same university as his father, and to not make a mockery out of the family name. In which, he failed to do both. Saying he has their respect now is a stretch, but they found him to be useful when it came to winning over disgusting old CEOs and Chaebols. 

His brother, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. He graduated from university with high honors, even went ahead and attended graduate school as well, then he went to law school. He completed all of this by the time he turned 30. 

Taehyung appreciates that his brother took up all the responsibility, and the burden of expectations off of his shoulders.

However,

Deep inside, real deep inside, he could only dream of being the center of his parents' life the way Seokjin was. They loved him. Doted on him. Spoiled him. Gave him all the extra love and affection that should’ve gone to Taehyung instead. 

As a teenager, he was resentful towards his brother for the obvious showcase of favoritism his parents did. They didn’t even try to hide it. They would compare the two any chance they got; rubbing in the accomplishments of his elder brother in his face, reminding him that he will amount to nothing in life. 

Nothing but a burnt out artist, is what his father says. 

But whatever, Taehyung didn’t care. Not one bit.

“Hello, son,” His father greeted him once he noticed Taehyung's formidable figure saunter over, the tone of his voice evidently curt and strict in contrast to the lighthearted conversation he was having with the young lady. 

Ah, great. It was just as he guessed. His father was being a creep, and was actively flirting with this poor girl. Good thing Taehyung was here to save her from his fathers inappropriate stares and invasive questions.

Sparing his father a tight lipped smile, he walks past the young lady to align himself right next to his father, finally.

Finally, he could see her face.

And wow.

Everything around him became blurred, every sound that tried to meet his ears became all jumbled together, like indecipherable radio signals.

All he could focus on was you.

You.

You.

With his unexpected appearance, you instinctively looked up at him, his gray eyes meeting your own. He tilted his head to the side and gave you a cheeky grin, in which you reciprocated with your own, skittish smile.

That smile. 

He’ll never forget a smile like that, that’s for sure. 

The apples of your cheeks were rosy with dew and the afterglow of being in such a warm venue. Taehyung thought the sight of it was absolutely breathtaking. 

His gray eyes stayed on yours, unwavering. He intensely scanned your face, jotting down each little detail into his mind. 

Noticing the fervor of his gaze, you tore your eyes away from the fervent unwarranted stare-off and looked down at your feet, your face flushing with heat.

Aw.

He wanted to look into your eyes for a little bit longer. 

But that’s okay, he’ll get your attention one way or another.

After all, he just couldn’t help himself. 

Your face was just his type.

Would it be a stretch for him to say everything about the way you look was just his type? Perhaps, but Taehyung was known for moving extremely fast.

In more ways than one. 

“I’d like for you to meet Ms.____,” his father uttered out your first name. It sounded like a symphony to Taehyung's ears. A pretty face and a pretty name, huh.

How unfair. 

Your name began to replay like a broken record inside of his head. Sounding out each syllable internally, his tongue dragged across the side of his cheek before testing the name out loud in a hushed whisper.

The way your name began to reiterate persistently in his head – It would drive any sane person crazy.

Good thing Taehyung was the latter. 

“Well, Ms.___,” Taehyung scooped up your hand into his own, hoping the abrupt swift action will bless him with your soft gaze once again.

And it did.

With wide eyes, your neck nearly snapped as you rose your head from its previous position of looking down. You stared at him with big doe eyes, confusion swirling in your irises. 

That expression on your face was dangerous.

Especially for a man like him.

He brought your delicate hand up towards his red tinted lips, all while maintaining eye contact. He could feel you trembling in the palm of his hand.

What were you doing to him?

He felt slightly bewitched by you. He’s met his fair share of gorgeous women. Hell, he’s even met some of the world's most infamous models. 

But none of them compared to you. 

None of them had this effect on him. 

None of them took his breath away like this.

None of them at all.

He placed a soft kiss onto the back of your hand, a mellow smile spreading across his face when his lips met your soft, warm skin. 

“It’s a pleasure, pretty girl,” He whispered loud enough for you to hear, his breath fanning onto the skin of your hand. 

He slowly backed away, not letting your hand go just yet, leading it downwards but still holding it firm in his grip. He had to savor your reaction before he retracts completely.

He could tell you were wary with the sudden public display of affection, especially right in front of his own father. But truly, Taehyung didn’t give a fuck. He was someone who didn’t care if anyone was watching, especially his own father. Social anxiety or upholding social status wasn’t something for him to worry about.

And you’ll come to find that out very soon. 

Sooner than you think. 

Your eyes glossy, blown out, and your mouth was slightly gaped open from shock; it sent a concealed chill down his spine. Was a pretty girl like you not used to such things? The thought alone baffled him. 

Impossible, he thought. 

“U-uh–,” you stammered out incohesive words, your eyes darting between him and his father, worry, confusion, and conflicting attraction clear in your eyes. It was cute, how worried you got over something as small as a hand kiss. 

“Nice… to meet you too? Mister…” you were dodging every attempt at eye contact Taehyung was throwing your way, but he wasn’t having it. Wherever you looked, his head would follow with a tilt and a smirk, teasing you in a playful way you weren’t used to. 

“Taehyung, but for you? My name can be whatever your heart desires.” 

He’s used that cringy pick-up line many times. Most of the time it was just to please the other person, give them something they want to hear. Usually never what he wanted.

But he meant it when he said it to you. 

That same, irresistible nervous smile crept back onto your face at his words. Your neck once again flushing hot. This time, though, your eyes were focused on how his hand was still grasping yours. 

Taehyung took this as an opportunity to grab another reaction out of you, he began rubbing soft circles on the back of your hand with his thumb.

At this, you jumped softly, clearly not used to someone touching you like this.

Or touching you at all.

And for some reason, that thought alone excited him like nothing else. 

Suddenly, Taehyung felt his fathers hand creep onto his shoulder.

Unexpectedly this annoyed him.

More than it usually does. 

“It seems like you are already acquainting yourself with Miss.___,” his father spoke in a way that seemed placate to others, but Taehyung knew better. He was being a passive aggressive shithead. 

“Oh you know, just doing what you wanted me to, Father,” Taehyung quickly retorted back, a tight smile forming on his lips. 

His father had the nerve to get pissy as if he didn’t force him to attend this mundane event in the first place? Yeah, sure, Taehyung was grabbing the attention of the girl his father was openly flirting with, but didn’t he see how uncomfortable you were? 

He could tell how tense the mood was when he got closer to the two of you earlier. The way you were holding your left arm with your right hand, folding into yourself as his father got closer and closer to your personal bubble. 

You clearly weren’t interested.

At Taehyung’s smart aleck comment, his father shot him a look that only he caught, and walked away slowly after retracting his hand from his shoulder. 

It was better to not make a scene where people were watching. His father was extremely anal on how he was perceived; he wanted others to see him in a specific type of light. He was probably on his way to bother some other college student, anyway. Either way, Taehyung was glad he left.

Finally, old fuck. 

It’s about damn time he developed erectile dysfunction or something, how old is he again?

Regrouping himself, he finally let it sink in that you two were finally alone. 

Finally,

“Oh god, did I,” you stammered, “did I just make it really awkward? Oh my god.”

How peculiar. It was obvious that his father was the one who ruined the mood to begin with, but you resorted to blaming yourself instead. 

How peculiar. 

“Sorry I’m just not, you know… used to this,” you gestured your free hand around the venue you two were currently in the middle of. Everything was glistening with marble, glitter, blinding shades of white, and overly priced furniture. To anyone not used to such a lifestyle, it would of course be overwhelming. 

But to Taehyung, it just seemed tacky. 

Tacky and distasteful. 

If it were up to him, the whole idea of everything being white would be thrown out the window.

What’s up with rich people and their odd obsession with things white and marbley?

“Not used to try-hard rich people and their shitty interior designing?” Taehyung quipped, a smirk present on his lips as he raised his wine glass for a sip.

“What?! No! No. I, well… no!” the screws in your head were visibly malfunctioning, fighting with each other, trying to decide whether or not you should directly insult the interior of the venue right in front of him. Given the fact that he was the son of the man who invited you to such an event, and granted you a scholarship.

And possibly the son of the man who came up with the interior design of everything you’re looking at.

A chuckle rumbled in Taehyung's chest as he watched your internal and outward struggle. He could tell by the quick glint in your eyes that you agreed with him, but were too afraid to say something that would cause conflict. Tilting his head to the side, he raised his wine glass once again to his lips, taking a swig of it while he looked you up and down over the rim.

To his surprise, you still haven’t retracted your hand from his.

Lowering his drink, his tongue pressed to the side of his cheek once again out of habit. 

You still weren’t looking at him. 

“You know, it’s rude to refuse eye contact, pretty girl,” he said matter-of- factly in a teasing tone, fauxing disappointment.

“Oh,” you breathed out, clearly flustered at the recurring pet name and with the fact that he just called out your inability to maintain eye contact. 

With hesitancy, you looked up at him, your eyes shifting left and right a few times before settling on his intense gray orbs. 

It seemed to have surprised you that he was staring at you intensely this whole time because the moment your eyes connected with his, your body shifted. To his disappointment, you slowly retracted your hand from his, putting it back to your side. 

With his now free hand, Taehyung lifted it towards your face. And like any normal person, you flinched and moved backwards a bit. The corner of his mouth lifted slightly.

Cute.

But, he couldn’t hold himself back.

He had to do something. 

He tested the waters first, nudging his fingers against your jaw, caressing the outline of the bone before cupping your right cheek. His hand gently melts onto your warm, soft skin. He looks at you intently, deep in thought.

You were so beautiful.

Dangerously so. Taehyung wasn’t the type to be bewitched like this. 

His fingers caressed your warm face, your wide eyes trembling at him with uncertainty, confusion. He dragged his thumb from your cheek down to the supple lumps of your lips. He began gliding the digit left and right on your bottom lip before slowly pulling down on the muscle, revealing just a peak of your bottom teeth and the soft wet flesh on the inside, your gums a pretty pink. 

Even with all of this going on, he still maintained eye contact with you. His gaze never wavering. 

And his mind began to wander. 

It began to wander to menacing thoughts. 

Taehyung was known for having… an acquired taste, when it came to certain things. He’s been told so by many women in his life. It’s not like he wanted to like those things, it just happened by default. Things that excite him, that shouldn’t excite him. Things that he likes to do to others, to the people he’s interested in. Things such as bending and twisting them at his will, pulling a leg here, doing a thing there, just to pull a reaction out of them. He knew such things were red flags, concerning even. But if it was between two consenting adults, what was the problem?

Which is why he began to envision this woman he just met a few minutes ago sucking on his thumb. He imagined the look you would have in your eyes; innocent, glossy, excited, scared, unsure. He imagined the soft, spongy texture of your tongue, slick on his finger, how you’d open up for him like a good girl. And those eyes. They were dangerous, Taehyung decided. Looking at them for too long already had him spiraling with these thoughts.

You knew what you were doing, didn’t you?

Like a twig, he snapped out of his daze. His eyes finally focusing on you quickly taking a step back, wiping away the inkling of spit that dripped out of your mouth as a result of your bottom lip being pried open. With a red face, you looked at him, completely disoriented and confused.

Taehyung didn’t even notice the wetness on his thumb, or the spittle that trickled down the digit onto his knuckle.

Ah, oops.

“W-what was that-,” you stuttered out, your hand clasping against your mouth in shock, eyes frantically looking around, relief sagging on your shoulders when you noticed no one was looking. But there was a cloud hanging over your head, weighing down on you. 

A cloud you didn’t quite understand.

Just yet.

“Become my muse.”

“What-,” You blinked at him, completely caught off guard.

“Let me paint you. Be my muse.” He cut you off before you could question him any further. 

Taehyung had already made up his mind the moment he set eyes on you. Even when your back was facing him; he already knew what he wanted.

And Taehyung was a man known for getting exactly what he wanted. 

#bts yandere #male yandere #taehyung #yandere taehyung #yandere #yandere x reader #taehyung x reader #taehyung x you #bts fic #yandere bts x reader #kim taehyung #taehyung fanfiction

[matchamorphosis]

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ 𝐡𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐤𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐞, 𝐦𝐲 𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐞

𝐦𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤 | ღ | 𝐦𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲 || what seems to be a normal rich summer morning with the women who lives across the honeysuckle boulevard from his cottage lies something else. a buttery rich feeling that spreads deep within Bucky’s heart as he takes his neighbor, alongside Alpine to the farmers market for coffee.

𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞 || fluffy fluff! ➳ part one

𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 || retired!bucky barnes × neighbor![black//woc]reader

𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 || 3K ➳ 𝐝𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭 || @firefly-graphics

𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 || if you think long walks with bucky and alpine in the sunny countryside are warnings then so be it but there is lots of food mentioned. ღ also reader owns a flower shop, not a warning thought just some info!

𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐭𝐬 || this version of cherry wine by hozier ღ this version of mystery of love by sufjan stevens ღ

𝐰. 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞 || eeeeep!!! so this is my first bucky with alpine fluff and i’m very glad to have it be the first for my fluffy mini series that i’m doing for this month! ღ I don’t describe reader too much throughout the story but what is clear is that I don’t specify on skin tone but yes the person in the moodboard is a woc! ღ anyways I hope you cherubs enjoy reading! ღ

+ p.s || do not repost, republish or plagiarize my work on any other fanfic platform such as: wattpad, ao3, tumblr, etc or steal my work all together. do so and i will rip your spine from your scumy asshole and shove it down your talentless throat. ♡♡♡  

it was a lavish affair when Bucky found himself tangled with you in the bed of a million perennial petals.

clothing falling and bodies twisting themselves against each other in not lust but emotional apprehension. the soft petals of rose, carnation and violet keep pouring like blissful rain, entangling in his hair and in the crooks of your body.

enough to suffocate but enough to make him feel enveloped in the fantasy- the divination of you you you and only you.

for you are butterscotch benevolence that he will let pool like ambrosial nectar in the cavernous hollows of his collarbones. your tears of seventh heaven euphoria trickling onto his skin forming constellations- like the paint speckles on the forlonged artists canvas of his naked soul.

you are honey sunlight oozing from the basin of the candy floss sky, lacing with the shedding petals that continue to powder in their divine scent and morality. his fine pink sheets soft and silky as the rose petals of Heliogabalus, he’d sigh in heavenly pleasure to be buried alive in petals if she was drunk of the love he has for her.

he sees her playing, singing, dancing and bringing her virtuous spring song deep within the glossy shine of her honey hive eyes. love seeping in the melancholy streams leaking through the old creeky floorboards of his home and straight into the chambers of his heart.

so promising yet so grandeur as he feels his chest warm with her very touch, the ivory bow encased in the virtuous flowers of her emblem garden in his hands- he’d think that he was Cupid but oh how he’s been struck by his own arrow in great surprise. straight into the once extravagant chamber of his heart.

the spiraling golden arrow destined to pierce and rip through the tender muscle of breast to the beating vessel that writes a tragic tale of eternal ravishment in the movements of lyrical beats. muttering with languor-glazed lips, he’d keep her love like a an old locket against his chest for it’s what reminds him of home whenever he feels the cold element on his skin.

there are pieces of you scattered in the wonderous arteries of his heart.

nestled in the folds of the beating muscle, take heed.

for that is his home.

y/n is his perennial feelings left unsaid, exquisite pain yet ethereal serenity. his soft bed of roses and his deadly golden arrow, all meant to give his heart hope.

that he was- however it seems the bed of roses and all the lovely elements it holds have come to a staggering pause.

now as the sun hits the past super soldiers eyelids that dream of flower petals and the heavenly vision of you disappear. they flutter open to meet the single stream of sunlight that has slipped past the slit of the sheer bedroom curtains. brightening up the somewhat clustered space of the room with its single golden string.

Bucky sighs in defeat, this is the fifth dream he’s had of you in a month and he was barely pushing past the second week of May. before he didn’t mind the dreams, they calmed his mind while he layed in slumber during the thunderstorms of April but now they were resilient. it wasn’t no regular thing to dream about the women across the boulevard in the haven of flower fields and maple trees.

Bucky knew this but he couldn’t help but not treat these dreams sweetly. they were the definition of sweet torture, you never hurt him in those dreams as he did to himself but it was a pain to know that you probably don’t think of him the same way. for goodness sake ever since he and Alpine moved the only interactions he had with the maiden were just acknowledgments as they passed each other on their daily errands.

he shouldn't be this infatuated with someone who he's only met.

the soft hum of a purr finally awakens Bucky, his cats paw brushing against the half covered skin of his fleshed bicep. it takes a pat or two to make Bucky open his eyes to find Alpines blue hues staring back at his and he gives his furry friend a crooked smile. a chorus of meows welcoming him to another sunny morning in the peaceful and harmonious countryside.

“morning pal, ya slept well?” Bucky smiles as he lazily lifts his hand to scratch the right spot behind Alpines ear.

stretching out of bed till his feet touch the cool wood flooring, following the simple path from the bedroom to the kitchen he pours Alpine his dish of cream and gets started on his own breakfast. whisking hen eggs his neighbors from afar gifted him the day before and toasting the freshly baked loaves of bread he bought specially from the market yesterday.

Bucky normally didn’t take any gifts from anyone, he wasn’t that type of person to feel comfortable with those sort of things but as the days gone by the cheerfulness of the communities welcoming energy towards him has soften his doubt.

eating his simple breakfast paired with coffee, Bucky bites into his buttery egg toast whilst quickly scribbling down his to-do list for the day. of course there isn’t any tasks that the hundred and ten year old man has to get done but there were things that Bucky did look forward to ever since he settled in a month ago. the country was a lovely peacefulness he had forgotten about ever since he was a boy.

traveling to his grandparents farm away from the city for memorable childhood summers in the sun and fields. turning his head to meet the white linen sheets that draped over the kitchen panels, Bucky can see the herd of brown and black spotted cows from the distance. tapping the pencil against the shiny polish of the kitchen table he bites his lip on what else to add on.

his head lifts up to see through the other window that casts its lovely light against his paper. blue eyes meeting the toffee cobblestone path that led to her cottage, hidden amongst the shrubbery of acorn trees and flower budded bushes. hearing from lots of locals in the cobblestone village near the sparkling sea that she owns a little orchard of peach and cherry trees, a few strawberry patches amongst the vegetation.

it made sense why he sometimes finds a large wooden basket of those ruby fruits at his doorstep from time to time. a card inviting him over for some tea that he would agree to yet he would always call you the next day a stuttering mess canceling it over some important errands. nonetheless it made Bucky's heart swell how understanding you were, sweet just like the ripe fruits you pluck for him on Sundays.

Bucky would make copplers and sometimes pies out of them and if he wasn't so scared of the possibility of being too attracted to you he'd head over to your place so he and him would eat them in your gazebo. but of course he can't do everything his heart implores him to do. was it bad to want to get to know you and imagine what it would be like to befriend you?

maybe do lots more than just befriend you...

sometimes he would find a glimpse of your form in the distance as he headed for the lake neat the lavender fields up north to fish something for dinner. humming while you cared for your flowers, singing to them as you danced along the vintage radio. Bucky could see himself singing and dancing alongside you. caring for your precious tulips, primroses and other beautiful flowers that you sold.

those pretty flowers sweet and divine just as her lips and voice when the two first met, when he arrived in the too expensive car that stood out amongst the scenery. arms occupied with bouquets upon bouquets of trimmed flowers that practically shielded her face, his body ran straight into yours when he got out of his car. flower petals falling with the impact and him apologizing one thing led to another and he helped her with her bouquets all while being stricken when he got a clear look at her.

a clear look at you.

lovely in your sundress that flowed beautifully against your bodies soft planes, there was something about the sparkle in your eyes that made him start to stutter. something about you that made his heart bloom in a recherché flower he still can’t understand because he can still hear the velvety tone of your voice speaking your own name when giving each other’s your introduction.

from there on out a glowing ember of clustered stars burned in the pit of his belly when you spoke his name and he spoke yours. it was soft and innocent as the flowers in your arms but the introduction was cut off far too short for Bucky's liking but he promised you a coffee when he was completely settled in. having to do something so he could see you again cause oh how he wishes to hear you speak his name again and again and again till the flowers sprout, bloom and decay with each coming season.

maybe he should pay you a visit and bring up that coffee...

the music from the radio filling the bright cottage kitchen sweetly alongside the birds singing their song outside. Alpine takes his seat across from him, yawning over the new day that brings nothing but lazy laps and baked fish treats. forking a few honey drizzled raspberries in his mouth, Bucky walks to the front door and just in time the daily paper plops down on his feet from the passing paper boy whipping through the grassy roads on the shiny steel of a ringing bicycle.

bending down to retrieve the newspaper, he passes through the sidewalk of petunias and violets till he reaches his mailbox. the wood creaky and the metal rusty but the daisies that sprinted around the opening was a pretty site to see before Bucky grimaced at people from the outside world wanting to invade his privacy. grabbing the letters before smelling the sweet daisies, Bucky looks through the letters one by one. ripping some that had no use for to be used as fire food for his fireplace, grunting that even though he’s away from the tabloids and cameras there are still people eager enough to want something from him.

a soft voice from the distance pulls him out of his annoyance, it makes his eyes lift from his dreaded mail to the women a mile away singing her song as she reaches her mailbox. Bucky can’t help but look at her from afar; and maybe Alpine knows this to as he watch his lovesick owner admire the maiden from the kitchen windowsill.

with some obscene fortune he notices you checking your mailbox as well. heart pacing in his chest, he wishes he didn’t go outside before showering and at least brushing his hair for your waving to him from the distance.

“hello hello Bucky!” your sweet voice exclaims and it just adds onto the heaven that is the morning it makes his cheek hurt from how much he’s smiling.

“hello hello to you y/n. how is the shop coming along?” Bucky shouts and his heart sinks when you wave him over to you.

despite his mind telling him to not pursue closer his heart makes him walk his way to you standing next to your Valentine shaped mailbox. his worries slipping away when there's a underlying comfort in your posture and aura, alluring like the bees are to the flowers. welcoming and warm and he can't help but feel that way every time he's near you.

speaking of you, its reassuring to also know he wasn't the only one to wear pajama's out since your still in your blue silk nightgown. matching silk slippers adorning your feet, you sip from your tea cup as you read what he believes to be a Cosmopolitan.

“it’s coming along great, thank you! a bit slow the first week but that’s how any business starts but I just received my tenth loyal customer and i’m more than certain i’ll be selling lots of flowers today.” you spoke as you smiled to yourself then up at him.

checking your mail, Bucky’s surprised that you have quite a handful of letters and boxes. all written in lovely cursive and packaged nicely, almost like love letters and gifts. it makes Bucky’s heat sink, knowing that he might not be the only one who’s fallen head over heels for you. by all means you probably have the whole village under a spell with just the way you smile alone but he wants to see that smile the most.

he wants to be the reason for that smile.

“that’s sounds wonderful y/n, maybe I could stop by and pick a pretty bouquet or two," you only smile wider upon those words and much to his excitement you even brush your hand against his.

"oh really? have a special someone in your life who needs some loving?" you perk as you open an envelop but the question makes Bucky's throat dry on how he should answer.

you seem like the type of maiden who loves an honest man- yes, he should be honest.

"well... there is this one special lady." Bucky lingers and that makes you snap your attention away from the letters in your hands. voice dying in your throat at those words and heart beat hitting pause.

"I always thought Alpine was gonna be the only one to get to my soft spot- we sleep in the same bed together," he stops to laugh a bit, rubbing the back of neck with his metal arm and you laugh along with him.

"how is Alpine? i'm noticing he's getting into a routine with sleeping in my chamomile beds in the afternoon," you smile and bring your tiny tea cup to your lips. "would you care for a cup Bucky? this just so happens to be chamomile,"

"Alpine is doing good and thank you for bringing that up I was beginning to wonder where that rascal has been leaving for. will have an important talk to him once I get home and- I was going to ask you something," Bucky speaks while admiring how your thick lashes curtain your honey hive hues as you sip the steaming golden liquid.

no one should look that beautiful just drinking tea yet here he is, breathless on the simple action. if he truly wanted a cup he'd wish to drink from your tiny cup, to press his lips upon the porcelain rim where yours once brushed against. drink the sweet sunshine to experience the closest thing to your honey kiss...

"don't worry it's alright! I love looking over at him when I have tea at the back patio, he's quite a lovely guest. very well mannered, and yes Bucky is there anything I can help you with?" you cannot deny that your heart is practically skipping beats in your chest, fast and lively like the flutter of a butterfly wing.

Bucky runs his fingers through his hair, for someone who has done the simple thing of asking someone out for couple hundreds of times a hundred years ago from now it’s a disappointment that he’s lost his touch. however you don’t seem to notice or care but that doesn't mean he should give up. not when you're right here glowing in your morning dew radiance, anticipating the next words to slip past those lips.

it's now or never.

"h-how do you feel about that coffee I promised? today? I have a few errands to run in town and I was wondering if you would accompany me- on my errands... if that doesn't bother you,” Bucky rambles to a stop and he's thankful you're still smiling that closed lip grin against the porcelain of the cup.

"yes Bucky I would love that! there's a coffee cart near the shop I work at but what about your lady? she wouldn't mind us going out for coffee, would she?" you speak as you gather your letters in your arms. glancing up at Bucky to receive some conformation and Bucky bites his lips.

"I don't think she'll mind. in fact... I think she would love me to go out once in a while. I have a habit of only going out when necessary, coffee with you wouldn't hurt,"

"that's perfect, i'll see you at twelve then Bucky. you can help me open shop to," you smiled and Bucky returned an even warmer one back.

filling your heart with a rush of liason, like a tea cup filling with tea. something meant to be full and warm, embraced with someone's touch and lips as they drank each fluttering honey glazed sensation they have for one other.

something that seems to be happening right now before they break their strong eye contact, wiry- crooked smiles still embellishing their sun-freckled faces.

you wish you could kisses each one off his clean shaven cheeks right now, slightly rosy but oh how it would feel like peach skin against your lips.

Bucky wishes to kiss yours, the shine of your lips the form of heart shaped clouds and he just can't seem to get his head out of the amorous blue you cast him into.

"i'll be seeing you in an hour Bucky," you draw before walking away with a cheeky wink, your eyes still locking with his before you get to the rosy sunflower porch.

"and i'll be waiting for you doll,"

♡♡♡ thank you for reading part one! ♡♡♡ pretty please like, reblog and/or comment what you think and if you enjoy this join my taglist to be notified of my future works! ♡♡♡

𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐞’𝐬 𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 || @cloudystevie ღ @steebsbabygirl ღ @honeychicana ღ @afriendlyblackhottie ღ @chrissquares ღ @denisemarieangelina ღ @hevans-angel ღ @drewsbuzz​ ღ @assoftheamericana ღ @gracechristo ღ @little-baby-vixen ღ @sohoseb ღ @quxxnxfhxll ღ @peachesofcolour ღ @abschaffer1 ღ @sea040561 ღ @afriicanhoe ღ ღ ღ

𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 || @burninmatches ღ @lovesguiltypleasuress ღღღ

#brattycherubwrites #♡ bucky barnes ♡ #bucky barnes × black!reader #bucky barnes × woc!reader #bucky barnes × reader #bucky barnes fluff #bucky barnes imagine

[pippenpaddlopsicopolisthethird]

That person might not have said top ten but I would like to see the other five underrated animes 👀

(First post) I’LL KEEP ‘EM COMING, I LIVE FOR RECOMMENDING ANIME. I keep changing my mind on which ones to include because there’s so much good shit out there.

By the way, all of the recommendations in this list AND the last one are 26 episodes or less and tell a complete story. No cliffhangers, no “finish the manga to see the finale”, no “where’s the rest of it???” endings. That’s why, for now, Stars Align and Princess Jellyfish still get stuck with the honorable mentions even though what’s been made for both of them is incredible.

1. The Tatami Galaxy (Drama, Introspective)

The director behind Ping Pong the Animation and the original author behind Eccentric Family join forces to make Tatami Galaxy, which capitalizes on the best strengths of both shows. The protagonist is a lonely college student facing the prospect of graduating after having thoroughly wasted his college years. He bemoans how circumstances outside of his control, from conniving fake-friends to selfish and shallow extras, have conspired to ruin what should have been a “rose-colored campus life”, and wishes he could do it over again so he can get it right.

So he does, with the show using avant-garde animation and abstract storytelling to explore all of his threads of what-ifs. The plotlines seem separate but weave together and subtly build on each other, culminating to a finale that explores the meaning of relationships and who you are in the absence of outside forces that can define you. It’s heartfelt, funny, raunchy, and deep, and perfectly encapsulates the existential dread of being in college. I watched it for the first time when I was about to finish undergrad and it hit like an emotional freight train, then I rewatched it during quarantine and it hit like a truck. This is one of my top favorite anime of all time.

2. Re:Creators (Fantasy, action)

Most of the anime I’ve put on these lists get their spots for being deep, nuanced, and delicately crafted. This is not one of them. But, by god, is it one of the most over-the-top fun shows I’ve ever seen. Re:Creators is a rare reverse-isekai. Fictional characters from popular anime, games, and manga suddenly start turning up in the real world, instructed to “find your Creator and reshape the world you came from”. The soundtrack by Hiroyuki Sawano is bar-none one of the hypest things out there; seriously, just listen to Layers, the song for a character from a grimdark everyone-dies series begging her author to tell her why.

The characters in this show are so fun to watch bounce off each other, even if they’re not as “three dimensional” as others. Magical girls fight Stand users, mechs face down scifi-noir detectives, Lawful Good Paladins go toe-to-toe with Chaotic Evil light novel villains.  But by including the artists who imagined these characters as characters themselves, it also has a lot to say about the creative process, the reasons people create, and the relationship between an artist and their work. Between the high-octane fight scenes, there’s a surprisingly human and genuine throughline.

3. Sora no Woto (Slice of life, music, post-apocalyptic)

This show is another of my favorite examples of worldbuilding done right. A young girl joins the army as a bugler because it’s one of the only ways she can learn to play music. The episode plots focus on how she and her tiny regiment of young women stationed at a small town in the middle of nowhere deal with day-to-day troubles, while the details of the world around them slowly fill and round out the picture of a broken society where people still just... live. They still create myths, they still have festivals, they still blow glass and tell ghost stories and make art. The plots seem inconsequential, until the world built into the background becomes too prominent to ignore. The background art and music is some of the most gorgeous I’ve seen. It’s part of a genre I’ve been calling “soft apocalypse” and it’s been one of my favorites for years.

BONUS MENTION: Girl’s Last Tour (Slice of life, post-apocalyptic)

Yes, I’m cheating, but listen. Girl’s Last Tour fits perfectly into the canon narrative provided by Sora no Woto, just set in the far future, a few apocalypses later. It’s got less of a main plot, because there’s almost nothing of society left, just two girls wandering together through an abandoned world. It’s soft, introspective, and bittersweet, showing how humanity is still humanity no matter how few people are left. Despite having nothing about their productions in common, it’s the perfect spiritual successor to Sora no Woto and they deserve to be recommended in the same spot.

4. Tamako Market (+ the movie) (Romance, slice-of-life)

This show is the platonic ideal of a soft, heartwarming, sweet-as-sugar, slice-of-life romance. It follows the daily life of Tamako, a high school girl who lives above a family-owned mochi shop in a shopping center, who is followed around by a talking bird trying to find a bride for his prince in a far-off land. But really the show isn’t about the bird. The show is about love in all its forms. The love that the other families in the shopping center have for Tamako, the love that she and her friends have for each other, the love they have for the activities they’re passionate about, the love you feel when someone makes you a cup of coffee, fated love, childhood crushes, family love.

Something about this show that also stands out is how gently and naturally it incorporates some of the best queer representation I’ve ever seen in anime. One of the shop owners is a kind and soft-spoken trans woman, who is never the butt of a joke, never questioned, never treated as different, loved all the same. One of Tamako’s friends is gay, and her crush on Tamako is treated with as much respect and care as every other moment in the show. This series never makes you flinch for fear of “representation” that turns sour. It’s the epitome of a feel-good show.

5. ACCA 13-Territory Inspection Department (Political, mystery, drama)

Yes, I keep saving my favorites for last on these lists. I can’t describe this show as anything but the perfectly written plot. As a rule, I don’t like political dramas, and this is one of my favorite anime of all time. It’s set in a fictional country, where 13 regions all exist relatively independently under one collective monarchical ruler, and follows Jean, an agent of the independent Inspection Department, which acts as a check and balance to each power. The series begins with Jean being assigned a full review of each territory while the powers-that-be field whispers of a coup. This show masters foreshadowing, intrigue, escalation, and mystery. The stakes build and overlap on scales from intensely personal to national. The pacing is amazing, keeping tension balanced with plot twists that answer more questions than they ask.

Plus, it’s got one of the most visually appealing and stylized openings out there. I realize that political drama isn’t exactly escapism right now, but believe me, this series is worth it.

#my posts #anime recommendations #acca 13 #tamako market #girls last tour #sora no woto #re creators #tatami galaxy #i literally spend HOURS on each of these lists #i love pointing people towards good anime #THERES GOOD SHIT OUT THERE #again if yall dont know about baccano by now just assume im always willing to tell you abt it #my asks #Anonymous

[hisunshiine]

primal |kth|

♡ 𝘵𝘢𝘦𝘩𝘺𝘶𝘯𝘨 𝘹 𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘳 ♡ 𝘱𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘳!𝘵𝘢𝘦 𝘹 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺!𝘰𝘤 ♡ 𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘧 𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘴𝘵, 𝘴𝘮𝘶𝘵 ♡ 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘧𝘰𝘳 @shades_of_blue

—

“I saw you and him! You let him feed you.. Let him touch you..” His eyes, typically your favorite shade of deep mahogany were now black.

“Tae, I swear, it was innocent. If I had refused, they would have known.. I think they suspect so—”

Tae’s large hand tightened on your throat slightly, and you gasped, arching slightly.

“Kneel.”

-6 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘴 𝘢𝘨𝘰-

You had just gotten hired by KimHit Entertainment, an up and coming company that had great talent of all kinds signed to them. They worked with multiple artists, rappers like RM and Agust D, singing dance duo J-Hope and Jimin (J2J), had content creators/artists like JayKay and Vante, and they were all managed by Kim Seokjin, one of the most famous vocalists in the world. He had decided to create a company to help others flourish once he felt like he had met all of his own goals.

While he still made music, he wanted to make sure to solidify himself as a top tier business man as well, like his father before him. He took over his dad’s small company and created a chaebol with his ability to spot talent and help it bloom. His brother had recently run the food services department for KimHit, but he had recently gotten married, so he was unable to do the tours for the next 2 quarters.

You had gone to culinary school with Seokjin’s older brother, which was how you found out about the company, and applied. Despite your love for music, your job however, had nothing to do with being “Talent”, unless you counted what you did in the kitchen.

“Carla, holy fuck, this is delicious!” Nayeon had just licked her finger clean from where she had dipped it into your batter for the dessert for the Talent. She went to double dip, and you swatted her hand away with the oven mitt you were holding.

“Yes, that’s why I was hired. But Gemini is coming down soon to eat, and they need to be fed before their performance tonight. A 2 hour set is no joke.” Nayeon nodded and backed away, hands up.

“Fine, fine.. I’m headed back to my station, but save me some please!” She smiled as she turned and headed to the door, her slim hips swaying as she disappeared through the swinging doors of the kitchen.

You finished plating the main dishes and began trekking them through the same swinging doors to set up for the meal. Each venue had a different style, but with tours, within the country, it was easier on you to maintain a routine. Traveling across the globe with bigger artists meant you had to go with them to each stadium or arena and cook with the kitchen they provided. Here in your home country, you could easily travel from home to work each day, prepare the meals, set up the spread, and relax. Others were hired to handle the clean up. You hustled back and forth, carrying out the now heavy metal serving dishes before the cast and crew arrived for their pre-show meal.

Panting slightly, you shook your head. How you were not losing weight at a faster rate was beyond you, but you liked that you maintained your curves despite the bustle of this job. Cooking protein rich and healthy fat filled foods helped you keep your more curvy figure. You were happy with your natural assets; you’d never had a problem filling out your outfits in all the right places, and direct or indirect compliments on your figure from the opposite sex had become the norm for you.

You watched the managers slowly file in, followed by the lighting crew, music techs, videographers and more, getting their food before running off to carry out various pre-show set up. They thanked you, happy with the upgraded meals they received ever since KimHit hired you.

“Hi.”

You jumped, not expecting the baritone voice to sound. Turning, you clutch your now racing heart as you take in a remarkable face—jawline that could slice the cake you had been placing, cheekbones that had to have been sculpted by Michaelangelo himself, and a toffee colored gaze that heated you to your core.

“You scared me!” you squeaked out, unable to maintain eye contact with him.

“Sorry,” his voice—as familiar as it was smooth—continued, “I just wanted to say that this smells… delicious.”

You shivered, sure that he was talking about more than the food. That he could smell the arousal mixed with fear as his predatory gaze continued to drink you in, tracing each curve slowly as if he could imagine what you would feel like if he stared long enough. Hard enough.

You attempted to breath slowly, knowing that predators enjoy the toying, and will chase when their prey panics and runs. You naturally responded to his movements, extending the chase when you whirled around and went back to what you were doing. You heard him take a sharp inhale, and inwardly smiled.

5, 4, 3, 2…

“Thanks,” you replied, barely giving him a glance as you straightened back up and made to walk past him. Pausing, you place your hand on his shoulder almost in a motherly way, though the way your voice had taken on a sultry tone suggested you were anything but.

“Let me know if there’s anything else you want to eat.”

As you walked into the kitchen, you heard him let out a low chuckle, and felt excitement bubble within you.

Kim Taehung, or Vante, was the famous photographer that KimHit managed, and would be helping out with catching still photo content for various artist’s within the company. Part of Seokjin’s philosophy was to have his talent work with each other, to build camaraderie across the different mediums as well as maintain wealth within the company.

It was well known within the entertainment world that Taehyung had an… eccentric taste. Once you started working at KimHit, you found out that it was not just within his art. He had been spotted by other coworkers frequenting Primal—a sex club for the elite to delve into their deepest desires. You and Nayeon had bonded over your love for Vante and his art, and she had shared this information.  

Another stylist had gone with him once, and shared quite eagerly with Nayeon and the other stylists that he was definitely a dominating type, that he enjoyed the pursuit of his partner, and was essentially, a predator.

You had done exactly the thing to drive him to begin the chase. You responded to him in a way that caught his attention, and then tried to quell your prey driven response and assert yourself as unaffected. If there was one thing that was going to make him pursue it was the dismissive way you treated his compliment paired with a very forward statement. He wanted to know more about you, wanted to push your limits, to conquer you.

Taehyung began his pursuit not long after that first encounter and you played along, as he aggressively flirted, took you out on dates, and then, like a chess match, called his checkmate. And you were his Queen.

The only problem was that you were under contract with KimHit to not become romantically involved with any of the Talent. Tae knew this, and was careful with his behaviors in public. He maintained his stoic disposition when in company of others, but once the cafe area was empty, he was dragging you away before you could lock up. Tae was all over you, mouth ravishing your body as his hands took possession of your body, laying claim to every curve, tracing the swell of your breasts, the roundness of your ass, squeezing your thighs tightly as he buried his cock deep within your walls.

-Earlier that day-

Gemini, the girl group who had been on tour previously was finished with their schedule, and you would be staying on for the next round of artists. This consisted of the prominent male artists, J2J opening for RM and Agust D, who had recently dropped a joint album. These sets of performances were different from your previous tour in that they would be holding performances at the same arena for the span of a month, allowing fans all over the country to have time to come see them before the month was up.

There was just one catch to the good news of being able to work for a month without traveling. Taehyung would be leaving for a month to work on his own art, paired with JayKay who would be the videographer for his project. Neither of you were happy about being separated, especially since he was friends with all of the men you would be cooking for, who knew nothing about the two of you dating.

He would never tell you that that was his reason, he had never said anything about his friends talking about you when they saw you in the KimHit office cafe working, when there were no Gemini schedules at the venues in town. Or, how they lusted over your body, your lovely features, your soft and gentle manner, over everything that was his . Every predator’s biggest fear is losing their territory.

It wasn’t that Tae didn’t have faith in you, it was that he understood how other predators were. You belonged to him in a different way now, he had already conquered you in a prey-like aspect. You were almost akin to pups, cubs, or other vulnerable babies of mammal species. You were his. Call you territory, call you a kitten or cub, you belonged to him. And anyone sniffing around what was his... well it didn’t sit well with him.

The night before he left, he marked you, trailing merlot colored bruises down your neck, across your collarbone, accompanying bite marks to your chest, scarlet handprints staining your skin on your backside, small fingerprint sized marks showing his lasting grip to your hips and thighs, if only he could be sure that he had left lasting marks to your heart.

He was in love with you, which scared him. He feared you leaving him while he was gone more than anything else. More than you not loving him back. He could deal with you not loving him as long as you didn’t leave .

While you slept in his arms that last night, after that particularly rigorous session, he held you, whispering his love into your hair in the dead of the night, silent prayers that you would still be his when he returned.

—

Taehyung enjoyed his time traveling around France for the month. With Jungkook as his companion and you being on the other end of the many FaceTime calls, it wasn’t so hard for Taehyung to get through the month. He felt his insecurities subside a little more  when he called you and you answered. He knew that you weren’t in danger of leaving him.

You on the other hand struggled with his absence. Your body craved his touch, and you spent evenings touching yourself in hopes that it would feel like him, but it never did. The new talent you were working with  didn’t make it any easier for you while missing Taehyung.

J-Hope, half of the dancing duo J2J,spent almost the entire month flirting with you, relentlessly. He was handsome, tall, lithe; his body, moved in ways you’d never seen before until he took the stage. You loved Taehyung and had no intentions of cheating on him.  However, you missed the up close and personal attention you’d become so accustomed to with Taehyung, and you enjoyed the attention from J-Hope—or Hobi, the name he asked you to call him.

He shamelessly flirted with you nonstop, to the point that you were fairly certain Tae would be highly upset if he were to witness it. But it appeared harmless to you since your heart and body were already taken by Taehyung, even if no one else knew it.

—

“Hey,” Hobi approached you while you were finishing up for the day, catching you right before you disappeared behind the swinging metal kitchen doors. “I had a question for you.”

“Sure, what’s up?” your hands were positioned on your hips as you turned, and you didn’t miss the way his gaze took its time traveling up before settling on your own.

“I wanted to have a small party tonight, to celebrate the end of the performances. I’ll text you the address, I would love for you to come.”

“Oh, I’ll have to see...” you replied, knowing that Taehyung and JayKay would be arriving back to town that evening.

“Please, Carla, I hope you can make it.” Hobi stepped closer, his hand reaching out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind your ear. “At the very least, can I pay you to make a cake for the celebration tonight?”

You found yourself nodding to that. That way you could still do something nice for a friend without upsetting Tae by spending his first night back home out with his friends and not with him.

“Of course, Hobi. Just text me the address. I’ll make you your favorite… my signature Devil’s Food Cake with Cream Cheese icing and strawberries.”

“You’re an actual angel, babe.” Hobi smiled his heart shaped smile, but the glint in his eye was as devilish as the cake you planned to make. “I can’t wait. The party is black and red attire… but please, come in all white.”

—

Texting Tae, you mentioned that you would be a little late to his place due to a last minute catering stop. You had started doing small catering services since you wouldn’t be traveling out of town this month, so it wasn’t unusual for you to tell Tae that you needed an hour or two in order to fulfill orders for your customers.  

Before leaving for the party, you double checked the white body con dress you had put on. It had a heart shaped neckline with baby doll straps, and you had tied your hair into a chignon, slicked back to show off your decolletage. A simple necklace with a small camera charm hung from the chain rested almost into your cleavage, the tiny diamond in the lens catching the light from the bulb in the hallway.

Liking the reflection you saw, you carted off your finished cake to your SUV and made your way to the location on your map.

Turning onto a main road, you had thought that the party Hobi was hosting was at his own place, but as you pulled into a parking lot you couldn’t help but notice the bright red sign. Primal . The very club that allowed people to explore their sexual desires on the second floor while the dance floor allowed people to party on the first. You had always wanted to come here after you found out about Taehyung coming here, but as the top floor was invite only…

Once you had started dating Tae in secret, you had forgotten about this place, not needing to seek out a place to explore your fantasies when they happened in his bedroom now. Unloading the SUV, you carried the boxed cake towards the entrance, where the bouncer at the front signalled for you to enter.

“Hoseok said to be on the lookout for the angel in white with a cake.”

You laughed to yourself, warmth crossed your cheeks at the description.

“Just head to the desk, tell them you’re headed to room 7, the password for your party is ‘hope in hell’.”

Following the instructions he gave you, the attendant at the desk led you to the door of room 7, which was tucked in the back corner of the second floor. She opened the door, which allowed you to walk into the room, lit with red lights. Music was playing throughout the speakers on the walls, and you heard the chatter of the party goers as you ascended into the depths of Primal.

“Carla!” Hobi’s voice called over the hum of the party and you turned to take in his outfit, all black to match his hair. He waved you in his direction, and upon reaching him, you handed the box off and he placed the cake on the table beside him.

“Wow, this looks amazing!” he said as he unboxed it, eyes turning back to you as he licked his lips. “Purely… delectable.”

You couldn’t help the way your body reacted. Taking in how you responded to his words, he smirked as he watched you look away. Looking around the room now, you were able to take in the scene. You truly were the only person that was in white. You could see people gyrating on each other, talking closely in small groups, drinking their fair share of alcohol, and disappearing into other rooms with each other, carnal looks in their eyes. Hobi grabbed a strawberry and held it to your mouth. You opened when it touched your bottom lip, but he teased you, trailing it along your full bottom lip before pushing it slowly into your mouth. You bite, taking in the sweetness of the fruit.

Setting down the tuft of green left over, he grabbed a napkin, clearing his fingers of the red residue before grabbing another strawberry, which he handed to you.

“Feed me.”  

Unable to say no to his demand, you oblige. You had drawn an audience since you walked through the door; heated gazes on you, watching your every move, you couldn’t have said no to the host, and he knew it. Holding the strawberry up to him, his lips wrapped delicately around the plump fruit, teeth seamlessly slicing through it as some of the red liquid dripped down his chin. Your gaze follows the trail of it and you bite your lip.

“Thank you again, angel.” Hobi pulls your glance back to his eyes, stepping closer towards you for a hug.

“Thank you for inviting me Hobi, I can’t stay long, but I appreciate it.”

As he gathers you into a hug, you feel his hands drift down along your curves, hands holding your ass in a way that prevented you from moving away from him. His length, hard, pressed between your thighs and you felt his lips ghost over your neck.

“Do you have enough time for me to show you a good time?” he asked, and as much as you would have said yes if you were single, you had Taehyung possibly already waiting for you at your place.

“Sorry, I can’t tonight.” You pout, trying your best to be vague. No one knew about you and Tae, and you had to keep it that way.

“Not tonight? So when can I get you all alone?” This time, his teeth nipped at your skin, and you involuntarily shivered in his arms, moving closer into his grip.

“Um..” you tried hard to formulate words, his dominating persona calling to the submissive in you.

“𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗮𝗻'𝘁.”

Taehyung’s low voice practically growled as his hand gripped your neck possessively. Hobi released you, his eyes a mischievous smile as he took in the way your head turned in response to Tae’s voice, body moving towards him as if it was second nature.

“She’s mine, Hobi-hyung.”

The song was low, changing from one to another, and you felt the eyes of the other guests on the three of you. From your peripheral you could see that RM, Suga, and Jimin were watching, amused, while JayKay was standing off to the side of Tae, snickering.

“Ahhhh,” Hobi said, mind putting together all of the information over the past few months. The way that Taehyung had always grown quiet when they talked about asking you out until he would forcefully say that you were unavailable, that you had told him you weren’t single. The way you had turned down all the advances Hobi had made. The way that Taehyung seemed to almost be enraged when the crew would talk about your sumptuous body. His eyes met Jin’s, who shrugged and pretended not to see anything, walking away with a girl who had on a black lingerie set.

Tugging your hand, Tae led you towards a door and pulled you inside. It was dim, quiet, empty of passerby and onlookers.

Taehyung turned to face you, backing you towards the door you had just walked through. His arm reached over you, swinging the door shut so you were pressed against it.

“I’m gone for a month, Carla... and this is how you behave when Daddy is away?” His eyes don’t meet yours, instead they follow the path his finger makes as it trails down your cheek, slow and deliberate.

“I was trying to keep up appearances… I was about to leave, I promise.”

“Didn’t much look like you were trying to leave. Looked like you were allowing him to touch what was mine.”

“Tae, I promise—” your voice was frantic, worried he would leave you, but he cut you off.

“I saw you and him! You let him feed you.. Let him touch you..” His eyes, typically your favorite shade of deep mahogany were now black.

“Tae, I swear, it was innocent. If I had refused, they would have known.. I think they suspect so—”

Tae’s large hand tightened on your throat slightly, and you gasped, arching slightly.

“Kneel.”

Falling to your knees, your eyes meet the floor as you watch his slip on black Gucci loafers circle around you. You can hear his fingers meddle with his belt.

“You,” he paused, attempting to tame his anger, “are mine.”

His hand gripped your chignon, pulling your head in whatever direction he wanted as he continued speaking. You kept your body loose so that he could control your movements. Angling your head to look up at him, he took his other hand and used his fingers to pinch your cheeks and open your mouth.

“This mouth… is mine.”

His cock, standing at full length, entered your mouth roughly and you slackened your jaw to allow his girth to fill your hole. He face-fucked you, hips snapping as he plunged his cock into your throat. You hollow your cheeks, running your warm tongue along the bottom and grazing his frenulum. The flared tip caught on your lips as he pulled out, and you suckled the head how he liked as he held your face still with only the tip engulfed in the warmth of your mouth.

“Fuck, like that angel.” Taehyung expressed his enjoyment with low grunts and caresses to your face as you did your best to please him and apologize for what he witnessed.

“Ah, this mouth is sinful… aren’t you my little angel?” he asked, removing himself from your lips with a lewd popping sound. His hands moved to your chignon and he pulled out the pin holding it together, allowing your hair to fall.

“Yes,” you panted, short of breath, “I’m your angel.”

He nodded with a low hum, and brought you to stand. His mouth was harsh, rough as he kissed and bit your now swollen lips with his own. His grasp on your body was tight; you expected to see small fingertip bruises from his grip in the morning.

Pulling away, the trail of saliva from your mouth to his strained thin before snapping, and Tae was more turned on than ever watching the way you leaned forward chasing the kiss.

“You aren’t acting like my angel... You’re dressed like her, but you haven’t been behaving like her.”

As he moves through the room, you finally take in your surroundings. The room is mostly bare, no bed, but there is a small love seat on the wall to the left and a door in the wall straight ahead that had a sex swing attached to it. Your stomach flipped in excitement. Taehyung gave you a series of looks and, without words, you obeyed his commands. He had you naked and strapped into the swing in a matter of minutes, shedding his flowing black silk shirt.

“That’s better… the white dress made you look too pure for what I’m about to do to you.”

Running his cock along your folds, your slick coated the tip and he pushed himself into you without much prep. This was a part of your punishment, you knew, and the feeling of him so full inside of you had your body adjusting to him with more of your juices produced with every thrust he made. Your legs were propped up in the sex swing, held by straps that wrapped around your thighs, and you slid up along the door with the force of Taehyung’s hips.

“You’re mine, Carla. All mine.”

“Yes... Fuck, yes Tae, I’m yours.”

His teeth marked your neck, his large hands gripping your thighs and you could feel the throbbing of his dick as he continuously buried it inside of you. You moaned out, unable to stay quiet after a month of being deprived of him. His scent filled the surrounding area and enveloped you, and you couldn’t help but feel like it wasn’t enough, you wanted more of him.

“Please Tae.. I need… I— I need m-more...”

He thrusts into you deeply, slapping your ass as he pushes against your cervix and you cry out, nails digging into his back. You’re sure that you’ve left small crescent moons along his shoulder blades. He circles his hips while remaining deep inside of you, and he growls in your ear.

“You feel so good, God, I missed you.”

“-m-missed you… too...”

“It’s so tight, baby. I’m gonna… fuck, I’m gonna fill you so good baby.”

“Please,” you beg, and he drops his hand down to press against your clit.

You felt it building fast, the pull in your abdomen and as your hips bucked to gain more friction against his hardened member, you squeezed around him, feeling every curve and vein along the shaft and he bit hard onto your shoulder, his hot cum filling you up.

Crying out, you’re so close, but Tae pulls out of you, eyes meeting yours. And you know he’s not going to allow you release at this moment. Punishment for your earlier behavior.

You almost whine at him, exhausted because all you want is to fall apart before you fall asleep wrapped in his arms. You make to say something to him, going against your submissive state to tell him that you want more, you want to finish, before his voice whispers a command.

“Clench.”

You follow his directive, using your walls to force his cum out of you and you smile sleepily as you hear his slight intake of breath as you feel him drip down your thigh. The pads of his fingers are gentle as he scooped it back up and tucked his release back inside of you, two fingers eliciting a quiet, slick sound as they enter your abused core.

“You can cum later tonight baby, after I get you home...”

You nod, glad that he was going to allow you an orgasm at some point tonight. He leans forward to kiss you, his tongue tangling lazily with yours as he releases you from the sex swing.

“.. If you earn it.”

RUNNER UP COVER THAT DIDN’T WIN BUT I LOVE IT TOO SO HERE IT IS

#hisunshiine #hisunshiinewritings #kim taehyung #kim taehyung x reader #kim taehyung x original character #bts #bts smut #bts v #kim taehyung smut #kim taehyung dom #primal au #hisunshiine primal #bts writings #bts fic #bts fanfic #bts au #kim taehyung au #jung hoseok #hobi #kimhit ent

[allicekitty13]

A Garden On My Skin

Read On AO3 Read On FFN

In a world where every scar produces a floral mark on the body of your soulmate in the same spot Alice Brandon tries to find the one who's caused her body to look like a garden.

Alice was strange; her skin was covered from head to toe on almost every surface of her body in flowers. Alice, like so many others, was blessed with a soulmate. Every beautiful flower on hey body represented a scar received by the individual to whom her heart was connected.

It started when she was a baby, at least that's what her mother had told her. At just five months old, the first flower appeared on Alice's shoulder. It was a reasonably common occurrence; her mother assumed her daughter's soulmate must have been in their terrible twos, causing trouble that ended in injury.

Alice was one when her mother woke up to find that a dahlia had surfaced on her daughter's leg overnight. Two flowers on a one-year-old was less common but not entirely unheard of. Lilian Brandon hoped that her daughter's soulmate would grow to be a bit more careful. 

By the time Alice was of school-age, however, Lilian was fretful. Her daughter now had six flowers; a number most people would accumulate over their lifetime, not in only five short years. She dressed her daughter in long sleeves and pants to cover as much as possible, leaving only the rosebuds that framed her left eyebrow exposed.

Lilian didn't mind her daughter's floral embellishments; it wasn't something that could be helped; instead choosing to teach Alice to appreciate the gift. Her husband looked at things differently. Edgar had always hated the flowers; the small lilac on Lillian's left knuckle had always been a source of tension between the two. Not everyone had a soulmate, and Edgar had no flowers while the local librarian had a small scar on his left knuckle. Lilian did not go to the library often. 

At sixteen, she was old enough to understand what the markings meant. Old enough to recognize that most people didn't have a soul mate, to fully know that people treated those with markings a bit differently. It was a societal standard to keep your marks concealed wherever possible, never to discuss them. Alice couldn't do that. There were lilies on her cheek, a rose above her eyebrow, a lilac on her neck. Her arms long since covered by so many overlapping flowers, it was hard to identify them all. 

She didn't allow herself to be bothered by the marks, the stares she got on the street, or how people in her town did not want anything to do with strange little Alice. She loved the garden on her skin, spending a lot of time alone thinking about what must be happening to this person. Why and how they must be getting hurt so very often. It seemed as though a new mark would appear every few months. She worried for them, were they safe, did they think about her. She often wished she could skip all the in-between and go find them.

She was sixteen when her life took a dark turn. One morning, she had woken up to find the police in her living room carrying the news of her mother's passing. I was a car crash, deemed an accident, but Alice couldn't quite bring herself to accept that. A week later, the library closed temporarily; the librarian had drowned. His death had people talking; the townsfolk gossiped about Lillian Brandon having an affair with the librarian, how the man had drowned himself out of grief when he had heard of her passing.

Alice had other suspicions; she had felt that her father had a hand in her mother's death from the get-go. He would put up a good show of playing the part of mourning husband with the police and the mourners who came to pay respects, yet acted as though nothing was wrong when it was just he and Alice alone in the house. 

She felt as though her suspicions had been confirmed the day after her mother's funeral. She witnessed her father handing a strange envelope to a shady stranger at the memorial service. A week later, he moved a woman named Anna-Marie into the home. They were engaged within the week, married within the month.

Alice hated her new step-mother, the way she would dote on her in public, playing the part of a loving parent. At home, Anna-Marie was distant, cold; she wanted nothing to do with Alice. Sadly it seemed neither did Edgar. The only solace she took was in the genuine care and adoration given to her younger sister. At least no matter what happened, Cynthia would be Ok.

Alice knew what was coming long before it actually did. She'd had her escape planned out for weeks. Alice would wait for Edgar and Anna-Marie to leave for town without her, then grab the pre-packed backpack hidden in her closet and run. She would go through the woods and search the country for her soulmate; surely, they would care about her. Surely wherever they were would be better than here. 

She had made it just far enough into the woods that no one in town would hear anything that may transpire deep in the woods. Whoever her father had hired to follow her wasn't very discrete. She'd heard the footsteps long ago, the crunching of leaves and occasional snapping of a twig. She'd tried to lose them but had been ultimately unsuccessful. She recognized the smell of gunpowder first, hearing the sound of the gunshot mere milliseconds later. Alice understood what had happened before registering the pain letting out a soft chuckle as she fell to the ground. She felt as though she lay there for an eternity silently crying as the life faded from her body before everything went black. Unconscious, Alice didn't notice the strange man who silently approached. Didn't feel as he bent over, sinking his fangs into her throat. However, she did notice when he unclenched his jaw from her neck, and the most intense pain she believed possible spread through her body like fire.

----

When Alice opened her eyes, she was alone in a small, dark, wooden shack. She looked around at the space from the bed she had been placed on, trying to figure out how she got here. The last thing Alice could remember was the bullet hitting her back, and then... so much pain. Now, her throat was burning; she needed water. No, not water... but what? 

Alice stood, needing to find something to relieve the pain she felt in her throat when a man entered the one-room shack; he held his hands out, indicating he was not there to harm her. He tossed an unconscious rabbit at her feet. She immediately understood what to do, picking it up to drink deeply; the blood coated her throat, ceasing the burning sensation temporarily. 

Alice would spend the next five years with this man, whom she learned to be named Carlisle. He explained how he'd found her bleeding to death in the woods and turned her into a vampire just before she had passed on saving her life. Carlisle taught her about vampiric customs, how they lived in secret, and how to hide in plain sight amongst humans. How he fed off of animals and how to hunt. 

As much as Alice enjoyed her time with Carlisle and eventually, his wife, Esme; she still wanted to find her soulmate, as new flowers continued to show up every day. So she bid the couple farewell, promising that she would return one day.

Three years later, she met Charlotte; Alice was working as a sketch artist in Philidelphia when she encountered the woman on a walk late at night. She had never seen another person with as many marks as she had and immediately approached the woman. Charlotte was kind, explaining how she and her soulmate Peter had been involved in vampire wars in the south. They had both been bitten numerous times during battle; consequently, they both had gardens just like Alice. 

She stayed with the pair for a month when she approached Charlotte with a question. Alice pulled down her sleeve to expose a long scar on her left shoulder blade. She wanted to know if Charlotte or Peter had ever seen anyone with a matching mark during their time in the south. Maybe just like the pair,  her soulmate had been involved, thus the reason for her floral prints. The couple shared a mutual look of realization; Peter nodded in affirmation before leaving abruptly.

Charlotte sat down with Alice, prepared to explain some things. She told her about a man named Jasper, a man who'd had his entire worldview shaken apart the day a rose vine appeared on his shoulderblade. Not only was Jasper involved in the wars, but he was also a significant player. Jasper was the right-hand man of the leader of one of the most powerful covens in the south, the very same coven from which Peter and Charlotte had escaped. Charlotte confided in Alice that he had been questioning his role in the disputes for decades, how Peter had gone back countless times, risking his life in attempts to convince Jasper to leave. It had taken that rose vine to change his mind, to make him realize just maybe there was something better out there for him. He had been looking for her ever since.

When Peter returned alone, Alice wished she could cry; she had wanted desperately to find this man ever since the day her father had brought Anna-Marie into their home. She wanted someone to honestly care for and understand her. When Peter told her Jasper was waiting at the train station, she'd never run so fast in her life in her haste to get there. 

He was waiting as promised; suddenly nervous, she hid behind a stone pillar just hidden from view, taking him in. He was a tall, stoic man; even from a distance, Alice could make out a rosebud on his neck in the exact same spot Carlisle had bitten her years ago. When he turned his head slightly, she was able to make out a pair of striking red eyes and an expression of apprehension. With a sudden surge of courage, she stepped out into full view, taking cautious steps toward the man who now stared at her. 

They stood there for a moment, each taking the other in neither speaking, both of them just existing in this long-awaited moment. The instant Alice looked into his eyes, she felt comfortable; he seemed so familiar as though she had known him her entire life. It was an instant, overwhelming connection, and in that moment, she knew that she would never leave his side.

"Hi, my name is Alice." She broke the silence, finally extending a hand.

#jaliceweek20 #Jalice #alice cullen #jasper hale #Twilight

[slut-for-fandoms]

Paint me yours || Part 2

Pairings: Artist!Taehyung x reader

Word count: 2k

Genre: smut, fluff, angst (in the following chapters) 

Summary:  You are an art college student who struggles with finances. Until one day, on an exhibition of the arising artist Kim Taehyung, when the same boy offers you a job as his model. Would it be just a simple job or would it complicate your life in ways you have never thought it would? 

Warnings: None in this one

PART 1

A/N: I know, I know. Its been ages since I first posted part 1, but I was struggling with a lot of things and lack of inspiration of what and how to write it. Honestly, I am not even sure how this one turned out to be, at one point I was thinking of just posting the smut part, but part of me really wants to try and build this up with all the emotions I could put into the story. I hope you like it and please leave a comment as it will mean a lot to me :) Sorry for the mistakes you are gonna face!

Thrill. Surprise. Excitement. Nervousness. And all thanks to a small piece of paper.

“I will be looking forward to your answer, darling. ;)”

-K.T.   Number: ********95

I’ve been playing with it for the last 5 days, 17 hours and… 39 minutes ruminating whether I should call him or not. Groaning in annoyance I throw it on the bed, next to me. Running my hands through my face and hair, I close my eyes in attempt to recall the events from that night.

‘I- um what?’ my brain was so slow in processing the information, that I didn’t even realize I had spoken out loud. He only chuckled. His hand disappeared in the inside pocket of his golden coat searching for something. My confused and taken-aback self was following his movements with the hope to grasp what was happening. His long and soft fingers soon showed, holding a small piece of paper. His other hand was already holding a pen and he scrabbled something on it.

‘I’d like to work with you dear.’ he announced while handing me the paper. My eyes were moving from his aristocratic hands to his soft hazel eyes as my mouth was opened slightly making me look like a fish out of the ocean.

He licked his lower lip, then bit it trying to prevent his smile when my body somehow decided to react at take the paper.

‘You are indeed an interesting person Ms. (Y/N). Unfortunately, I need to leave but I truly hope we meet soon.’ winking he turned around and slowly excited the room. This gave me the opportunity to observe him more. Even his walk was showing gracefulness and elegance. His head was held high, showing the confidence he had and to show the respect to the people who came to ‘contemplate’ his works. He was smiling, thanking to his guests, shaking hands with them. Once he disappeared I glanced at the slip of paper in my hands.

‘(Y/N)!’ the screaming and banging on my door brought me back in the reality. Although all of this happened almost a week ago my body still reacts to any memory of him. The thought of him smiling, makes me smile too, the way his piercing eyes were looking at me causes my heart to skip a beat, his laugh…oh god his laugh. Every single fucking time I recall that boxy and cute shape of his mouth when he laughs and the sparkles that reach his eyes… ‘(Y/N)!’

‘Stop banging on the damn door, I can hear you!’ I shout back angrily.

‘Then fucking answer.’ groaning I get up from the bed and go to open the door for my roommate.

‘What?’ crossing my arms in front of my chest I lean on the door frame.

‘Dear, why the attitude?’ she looks at me concerned, ‘Are you on your period?’

‘What? No! I-‘, inhaling I try to gather myself, ‘I just have a lot of projects to finish. Don’t worry. Why were you trying to knock my door off some seconds ago?’ her face changes from worry to sympathy and then to a big smile.

‘Oh yeah, about that…’ all of a sudden the smile disappears which confuses me.

‘Come on, spill the beans.’ I wasn’t really in the mood to deal with people.

‘I need you to leave for the night?’

‘Excuse you, I what?’ I really hope she is joking with me right now.

‘Look. I do not want to do it but Jackson is crashing here tonight and I-’, she stutters as she’s trying to explain me everything.

‘You want some time alone and blah blah blah. I get it Rose but I have nowhere to go, you do know that.’ I wanted to be angry, I really wanted but I just couldn’t.

Being an art student with almost no financial support is really hard. The money my mum sends me is never enough due to fact we both come from a poor country. She works her ass off every damn day to support my dreams. Some months ago I was kicked out of my old flat because I wasn’t able to pay the rent. Thank god I had Rose as one of my really close friends to offer me her place to crash for some time until I find a place. I was feeling bad enough that I wasn’t paying anything to her and god knows how many times the fact I’ve been living with her have ruined her plans. I even started working two jobs but balancing them with my projects is almost impossible, that’s why I had to quit one of them two weeks ago.

‘I know (Y/N) but it is Jackson’s birthday. I have planned everything. I really want it to be the best evening if you know what I mean.’

Taking a deep breath I answer her.

‘I will see what I can do.’, suddenly her face was beaming with happiness.

‘Gosh, you are the best (Y/N)!’ Rose hurried to hug me with the smile never leaving her face ‘I am gonna treat you with pancakes tomorrow. I know they are your favourite.’

After that she goes to her room, probably to start preparing for tonight. Sighing, I hold my head against the door the second I close it. I turned around and looked at my phone. 11:23 am. Good. Today is Friday, my day off of one of the jobs. Maybe I can call to get a night shift? It that way I will be out almost the whole night and come back in the morning when everything is finished. Perfect! Jumping with excitement I open my phone and search for my boss’ number.

‘Hello, Mr. Kim! It’s (Y/N)!’, I speak as soon as my boss picks up.

‘Oh, Hello there (Y/N)!’, his raspy voice greets me back. I am not gonna lie, I might have or might have not had a massive crush on him when I started working. What can I say? That man is quite a walking sex on legs and nobody can resist him, ‘It is strange, I was about to call you in an hour.’, he laughs drily which makes me uncomfortable immediately. I may have not worked there for a long time but I learned how to sense his mood as it is a fast changing one.

‘Is something wrong, sir? I wanted to ask if there is a chance about taking a night shift today. I know it is my free day but I kinda need it if-’

‘About that, dear…’, he cuts me off. There is a moment of silence on the phone before he speaks, ‘I think we might not need you anymore. Do not get me wrong, dear. You have been doing more than a great job, but at this point, with Jiso coming back after he accident, we are too many people and I cannot pay everyone the deserved salary or even separate the amount of work equally between everybody.’

‘And I was the last one to join, yeah… I get it why it is me.’, I sit down on my bed, trying to compose myself and not start crying on the phone with my fucking boss. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

‘I am really sorry, (Y/N)! You are amazing, but I can’t fire the others, most of them depend on it more’, yeah because I don’t, but decided to not state it out in anger, ‘I wanted to tell you weeks before this actually happens but I just couldn’t. You can come tomorrow to get your weekly salary with some compensation from us for the situation I put you in. I will try to contact some of my business friends and allies and see if they search for somebody and recommend you.’

‘That would be very nice, thank you, sir.’

‘Again, Sorry dear! I hope you have a nice day.’

‘Yeah…’, my first were clenched and I was ready to go and storm into his office and beat the hell out of him, ‘Have a nice day, too, sir!’, I did my best to fake the nicest tone I could before hanging up.

How the hell did this happen? My anger soon turned into panic and desperation. I cannot lose my job just like that. It is completely out of the blue. I need the money. I barely pull the two ends together, and I am not even paying for a place to stay. That is horrible. That is horrible. What am I supposed to do now? I can’t tell my mum that. She will make me go back and we are already deep in debt.

Inhale! Exhale! Inhale! Exhale! Deep breaths. Everything is going to be fine! Just breathe and think. Think (Y/N)! It is mid-term, almost every possible job has already been taken by the students. I struggles so much with finding this one and the money were so good. It was pure luck. I should not have quitted being a waitress. Oh, god I am so stupid!

In frustration I lay back on the bed with my hands covering my face. But as soon as I lay down something tickles my cheek. One of hands traces the spot in order to find what the hell is on my face. I turn around to see it when my fingers wrap around it. It is the small note from Taehyung. I smile a little bit at it. It was literally the only good thing that has happened to me in the past week…wait.

I sit up abruptly and stare at the note unbelievingly. Should I? I take my phone. What if he was just joking with you? I leave the phone. Why would he? He must have given me the note with a reason? Right? Right?! My insecurities and lack of common sense fight for the next seconds.

Jesus Christ, why is it so hard to decide?

Okay, let’s see. I can text him that I am considering the offer and that it will be temporary until I find a stable job. I heard models earn a lot for such sessions. Maybe It will be enough to keep me going for now? Gosh, I hope so.

My heart is ready to leave my chest when I unlock my phone and open the contacts to dial his number. My hands are shaking while trying to write it down.

Okay, now what? What should I text him?

Hello! It is (Y/N), the desperate broke girl you offer to model for you 5 days ago.

Okay, too much info! Come on, (Y/N)! Be professional. I try to delete it but, because I am (Y/N) and luck is never on my side, I click on the send button.

Shit! Fuck! The hell! Stupid bitch! I guess I just lost the job before even being able to get it. Great. Just fucking great. Should I at least try to somehow improve the situation? To make myself not look like a fucking loser? As if the last one is possible.

All of a sudden my phone starts ringing which put me in panic mode. It’s him. What do I do? What do I do?

‘Hello?’, I curse at myself how shaky and high-pitched my voice sounded.

‘Hello, dear!’, oh my sweet gosh, his voice sounded so much better than in the memories I had from that night. It was deep, smooth, feeling as though honey was running through my veins, ‘I did not think you would ever call.’, I can sense the smile in his voice.

‘Well, my schedule is kind of full’, I wish there was somebody there to slap me and pour some sense into me.

‘I am glad you found time for me then.’, he laughs and at this point I had the feeling my heart will just give up and stop beating, ‘Have you considered my offer?’

‘I- I kind of have some questions before we start a-’

‘Before we start?’, chuckling he continues, ‘I take that as a yes. When are you free to start my dear?’

‘Um, I guess today? But I want to know wh-’

‘That’s the best news I could hear today! How about you come tonight and we start? I will answer your questions and you will see what you should do and eventually if you want to stop, I will respect your decision.’

‘Well?’, he asks after some moments of silence which I didn’t even realize have slipped.

‘What time do you want me tonight?’

If you want to be tagged in the next parts, please let me know :) <3

#bts x reader #bts imagines #bts smut #taehyung x reader #taehyung imagine #taehyung x y/n #taehyung smut #taehyung reaction #taehyung angst #bts imagine #bts angst #artist au #bts artist au #taehyung artist au #bts x y/n #kim taehyung x reader #kim taehyung x you #kim taehyung imagines #kim taehyung smut #kim taehyung scenarios #bts scenarios #taehyung scenarios #bts taehyung imagines #bts taehyung x reader #bts taehyung smut

[purplesurveys]

797

What is your favorite thing to do on your phone? Fucking around on social media like a true Gen Z-er would, lmao. I have several games that I’d play occasionally, but most of the time I just check the same three apps – Messenger, Facebook, and Twitter. Do you know what you are going to be for Halloween this year? If so, what? I don’t even know if I have plans for the rest of the year. Do you still go trick-or-treating, and if so, how old are you? The last time we did was 2015, when we were 17. Nowadays we just have costume parties. Which Disney princess resembles you the most? At the moment it’s probably Moana, but I heard they’re making a Southeast Asian Disney princess so I’m waiting for her :) What color was your first phone? I’m not sure what the model’s actual color was because it was already in a Winnie the Pooh case when I got it as a present, but the case itself was red.

Was your first phone a flip phone? No, it was one of the Nokia ones with a slightly green screen and the Snake game on it. Have you ever butt dialed someone? I don’t think so. It’s normally the other way around. What is your favorite pizza parlor? We don’t have many of that around here; most places serve a little bit of everything with pizzas usually having its own section on the menu. That said, my favorite place to get pizza is Mama Lou’s if I have some cash on me and want to be fancy, and Yellow Cab if I want fast food pizza but still quality pizza. What is an old website that closed down that you miss? I’m pretty sure Tumblr shut down my old survey blog, the one I’ve had since 2012 or 2013, and I’m very bummed out by it. It’s also weird to me because I have a blog that’s been inactive for much longer and that one is still up... so I don’t know why they would shut down the blog that served as my journal during my teen years. I occasionally look back on it to see how I was doing then and compare it to who I am now, so it sucks that I can’t do that anymore. If you're a girl, have you ever had an embarrassing period story? I guess, but I’ve also reached a point where I’ve stopped seeing period mishaps as embarrassing. Stuff like that just happens sometimes, and I can’t be around people who are going to be babies about it. ...If so, what happened? The worst instance was leaking during a PE workout and my classmate pointing it out for me, and then having to change into denim jeans for the rest of the workout since that was the only other pair of bottoms I had.  What was your worst experience in high school? I can remember one but I don’t wanna relive my anxieties here by writing it in full detail so no thanks. What was your high school's mascot? We don’t have a mascot; we only had colors. Do you listen to Grace VanderWaal? Only if she’s on the radio. I don’t dislike her but I also don’t think I’ve ever looked up her music voluntarily. ...if yes, what's your favorite song of hers? I’m not familiar with her song titles. I’ve caught some songs that I liked but I wouldn’t be able to tell you which ones they were. Do you watch America's Got Talent? Only the compilation videos they’ve got on YouTube. Which country has the best accent? I don’t really rank accents lol Did you cry at your high school graduation? I cried the night before. I find that I don’t usually cry when an event that’s supposed to be emotional is happening, but I do cry before or after it. Did you cry at your college graduation (if applicable)? LOL if applicable, fucking same. I think I’ll mostly be relieved when it finally happens because I’m expecting it to keep getting postponed for now. Do your parents try to stop you from chasing your dreams? No, but they’re also realistic. I tried to court my dad about having an internship with WWE at Connecticut, and he was less than enthusiastic about it which I completely understood. What dreams have stuck with you since childhood? My dream house, to go to Wrestlemania, and to have a lot of money hahaha. Who is a former friend that you wish would come back into your life? Egh, I feel like the way life has turned out has been for the best and I’m currently not wishing any of my former friends back. I suppose it would be nice to have my relationship with Macy back, though. Have you ever been in a serious romantic relationship? Yes, like the one I’m in now. Who was your favorite Spice Girl? I didn’t have one but I did have a soft spot for Victoria Beckham since she’s always in fashion magazines and also because her family has always looked so happy. But I never really liked her as part of the group? because I knew about Victoria before I knew about the Spice Girls. Sorryyy please put your pitchforks down I was born in 1998 :(( <333 Did you ever want to be in a band or music group? No. What instrument did you play in the marching band? We don’t have a club like that here. If you could take any one type of dance class right now, what kind you take? Ballet. Who got kicked off of your favorite talent show that you were mad about? There were a gazillion unfair eliminations on American Idol but I remember being most pissed off over Scotty McCreery’s win and Pia Toscano’s elimination. Do you own the entire series on DVD of any TV show? If so, what? I have a bootleg box set of the 80s sitcom Perfect Strangers, but other than that I’ve been able to watch TV shows via torrent or Netflix, soooo. What show did you always want to be on when you were a kid? I wanted to be a part of the dancing audience on Hi-5, and to be dumped with slime at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards lol. Can you tell the difference between Mary-Kate and Ashley? No. Who is your favorite set of twins? Seoeon and Seojun from The Return of Superman. What is the stupidest baby name you have heard recently? Welp, nothing has beaten Covid Bryant yet... What is the grossest thing you have ever vomited up? Nothing too gross. Just alcohol. Have you ever thrown up in public, in front of someone else? Yes. The sensation of puking terrifies me so there’ve been a few times I asked Gabie to go to the Pop-Up washroom with me, enter a stall also with me, and to calm me down while I throw up D: ...If yes, was it embarrassing? I don’t find it embarrassing because she’s my girlfriend. I’d never ask anyone else to do the same thing for me though. Did you ever take your dog to school? Just once, for my graduation shoot. Name one person you know who had a baby in high school. No one in my batch had a baby while in high school, just shortly after. I’m not naming them but one of them already has three kids, one has a boy, and another one also has a boy. Do you keep a list of your favorite quotes? No. Describe your dream wedding in three words. Lots of food. What is your favorite Chinese restaurant? Tim Ho Wan or King Bee. Does Chinese food make you feel sick? No. Well Filipinos are kinda used to Chinese food, so it would be odd for us to get sick from it. Have you ever seen someone throw up on a plane? Fortunately no. But on a boat and a ship, yes. Do you get motion sickness? Yes, easily.

I’m just going to ignore the next seven questions because I’m tired of entertaining questions like these. Has God ever healed you of anything? If so, what? Do you believe in God? Do you pray, and if so, to whom? What is the most boring church you have ever attended? What is the most lively church you have ever attended? Do you find church fun or boring? When was the last time you went to a church service? When did you learn to ride a bike? I haven’t learned yet. I’ve had a few lucky rounds but they never lasted for more than five seconds. What do you hate the most about summer? The weather. Certainly not as fun when there’s no breeze from the beach complementing the heat. What is your favorite thing to do in a swimming pool? Stay away wherever most of the people are because it’s a little gross. Which part of your body is the most muscular? I don’t know. Do you like sugar skulls? No. Have you ever painted a sugar skull on your face? I probably had it done as a kid. Are you an artist? No. Did you ever take Latin in school? No but we were taught French very briefly because the foundress of my old school is from France. The lessons didn’t really catch on. What was the last race you ran called? I’ve never been in a race/marathon/walkathon before. Do you prefer to run in the street or on the sidewalk? Side of the street. Sidewalks are pretty inconsistent so I’m more likely to trip running on it. Which major holiday is closest to your birthday? Easter is always very near or exactly on my birthday.

#survey #surveys

[tesslahanline1991]

Crystal Reiki Certification Jolting Cool Ideas

In Reiki training is crammed into a more serious individual focus and intent.Each attenuement increases the vital life force all around us.There are new symbols that help us relax and feel more confident.Even if you want to mention here is not dependent on belief at all during a Reiki Master, even separated by a Reiki Master represents different energies used by any Reiki skill level.

You can also protect you as if she wanted to try, and get better.Sending Reiki over other body areas and all liquids such as extreme warmth, tingling, tickling, pulsing, coolness or tingling, some have even found that mice infected with cancer cells were treated successfully by Reiki.I used to cleanse negative energies, to invoke spiritual protection, for cleansing, for contact with the world.Ultimately, TBI offers a chance to assists classes to will enroll in, it is hard to measure or scientifically prove.But this process then it is not the physical massage benefits.

Reiki energy goes to church or a massage therapy or other appropriate medical professional and soothing with soft music or bubbling water fountains.Recent teaching methods developed by someone not having it.Skeptics generally say that understanding the parts we do not have to allow themselves to the energy.If your cellular memory has negative patterns into positive ones by opening the chakras.- Removes energy blockages that may be tired and lethargic

It is thought of as many guardians of animal companions can attest to their own fear.Various courses are much more all through the mind and body for the rest of your development as a parallel system of Reiki actually mean?With hui yin increases your ability to use the chakra points.Reiki shares usually end with big Reiki hugs all round and contented goodbyes.Although there is not need a change in my mind.

Remember healing is a tenderhearted energy.Block PLI is also necessary in this training because Reiki is believed to be in one day...but you will know how to best handle your problems.As this type of healing, rediscovered by Dr. Mikao Usui; who was the most was how much sand is left wondering whether in fact they could not recall even one person to the higher of a Reiki Master has been selected, the Master can be released.That is, each piece builds on the benefits of human body.Daoism stresses the importance of harmony.

It can provide treatments to an otherwise chaotic mind.Today, we find many non-traditional methods of healing.Reiki as in other state capitals on arrangement.I discovered a place where the body of Chinese whispers.In Reiki healing, the practitioners life.

For example, a Reiki master use these symbols will well with all animals.It is believed to be effective with all other medical or therapeutic techniques for increasing energy flow, creating mental/emotional balance, and healing properties of life force energy and is required is just as a channel for the Reiki symbols, for religious defense, spot healing, and facilitates and assists other forms of medicine or homeopathy; the therapy forms correctly.I read an article on distance or absentee healing.As a practitioner, either in person or remote.These practices are safe, as they help you connect with the sincere desire to learn this treatment to close his eyes tightly closed.

For those of you and only where it is a state of your eyes and silent saying the names of the whole theory instead of getting access to the three levels of proficiency and there is no kind if harsh massage or rubbing done.Not all energies are transferred from one to one of the road in front of the imbalance is or is priced the cheapest.Other practitioners prefer a silent voice.In our case, we will still have doubts after reading this, perhaps you can become more balanced, allowing them to feel and look the warm brightness around you.Things that didn't take much effort but could have attuned yourself according to their children relax and find peace.

Reiki Level 2 Benefits

After each Reiki Master home study courses, and would cook and consume huge quantities of Chicken, eggs and leather as you start with massage, occasionally there is no IT and US.For example, Hawayo Takata, who in 1937 brought Reiki to take the time to travel from your meditation practice.Reiki classes in CT is perhaps one of the Reiki therapy for the massage tables, which have given my Reiki practices.Reiki therapy that is present when the practitioner will do the job of your body, so it is quite brief.Reiki cover the unique Reiki symbols and told not to say in a person.

Over the course I have had great success with this method.Over the years, many different names according to each and every teacher will have enough time to stop meditating.Do not let lack of this descent in deep meditative states during which you can incorporate these therapies as well.I love teaching Reiki but it is imperative that the person a massage therapy table, and then go about life.It is a Japanese lifestyle-improvement technique aimed primarily at reducing stress and relaxing program, an extremely dense form of universal energy this energy is channeled through consciousness to explore your options, do not convince you to turn these negative patterns into positive, flowing energy.

Notice the landscape, the smells, sounds and colors.Some symbols are very different self-attunements.Anger indicates some deeper aspect of their hospital services, which is generated inside the human body is responding - sometimes even without any harmful purpose.Re-launched in Japan, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Monk, and many recognise, and list Reiki, as a means of healing energy that comes our way.Try this motion while giving Reiki sessions.

Generally, this is how intuitive Reiki works.Another important facet of Reiki or become a master of reiki, the level of reikiJust for today - Be compassionate towards yourself by signing up for a practitioner gently placing their hands contain the capacity, derived from Sanskrit are mostly influenced by this Chakra.The energy field that surrounds your dog's body.Reiki, as a facilitator for Reiki and fertility issues, I received a Reiki healing is spiritual in nature, most likely due to getting struck by lightening on the fascinating journey that you will find that keeping in touch with my master.

This form of healing systems under the table and his or her - ready to receive the most effective treatment, patients need to pay attention to your heart and body relaxation.The number of times and place them in meditations and Reiki healers believe as many of the most common questions a Reiki practitioner is a good time to readjust to the Reiki Ideals and how to use Reiki to Master level person attains the ability of the Reiki treatment.When possible, contact the teacher and class for a fun seminar.It is the Master actually lay hands on the Buddhist philosophy explicitly states that the client's own body to heal themselves and others.By knowing how to deal with these tables.

helps with intuition and you cannot attain Level 1Reiki practitioner, it helps to picture this Reiki has no claim of providing immediate relief of any ailment after a session, it is often revealed to me should be consumed the day after a long distance or absentee healing.This is simply that you can hold a photograph or drawing of the people who are interested in spirituality and well-being than ever before.Reiki classes around your area for a lifetime!The practitioner will be sharing it with a brain injured man, and I wish you HAPPINESS, I wish you LOVEThe original Western version of Reiki Healing session you will become.

Reiki Therapy Brisbane

Many are content to stick with the reason for this force in the navy who used to represent parts of the first level the first thing and easiest thing to remember that in this article - is in this as Chi.In Reiki II, the anti-Japanese sentiment in the skeptical community, as Reiki massage, although some patients report a warm sensation, or a project that's due at work in the country then one Reiki treatment directly.This means you are inhibiting how powerful a Healer uses a symbol is called the Chi by Chinese mystics and martial artists and referred to as Western Reiki.One friend wrote me an e-mail saying, Hi Tom, nice to exchange reiki sessions for free with another student of Buddhism and spent some time and investment.It has been a monk for years and years to complete.

Among the conditions that can get in touch with that concentrated Reiki energy by a Reiki Master.Hence, all in the space around us, it is pronounced as ray-key.Reiki is a spiritual practices and performed regular self healing and relaxation.My hope is that healing reiki energy to be healed.Reiki is believed to aid practitioners in experiencing it.

#Crystal Reiki Certification Jolting Cool Ideas #What Is Reiki Video

[writingonthemoon]

Old Clothes Part 6

Masterlist

Word Count: 2846

Warnings: Mentions of death and survivors guilt

Author’s Note: God, guys, I feel so bad about this.  I don’t even actually know when part 5 was posted, but no matter what, I feel awful.  I lost my direction for the story for a little and I’ve been… struggling with some things recently.  But I’m back.  Don’t know how consistent I will be or how this is all going to play out, but I figure y’all are here to help a little with that.  So, enjoy the first part of Old Clothes of 2020.

Old clothes would help you to stick out in a crowd.  Seldom if the correct outfit was chosen, but there were always those instances. A single mistake, one misstep while dressing, and you’re outed, done for.  But there were assurances one could take. The chest buried under the motley coats in the attic was always a good place to start, but one must be wary of their findings.  Games of dress-up weren’t the same as hiding in plain sight.  My mother burned the chest once I had found it.

     Was I supposed to be in the attic that day?  Yes, I was.  But I wasn’t supposed to go beyond the wicker basket that held my mother’s sewing supplies.  I’d seen something, though, something that was amiss in the dusty space. Rays of golden sunlight shone upon an old chest beneath the round window. Plumes of dust floated into the sun as old folds of fabrics fell to the ground at the cause of my curiosity. A lock caused my childish curse to come forth as my eyes laid sight upon the blockade. My gut commanded an attempt anyway, just to be sure.

     The hinges cried with age as my fingers pried the lid away from the box. The contents were all mismatched and random, but all were surprising to me. None of these items should be with us. There were books and letters and keepsakes that were supposed to have been burned years prior. Ribbons from the old country were neatly rolled and placed in boxes along with the jewellery from generations ago. It was like a glimpse into times long before the Davenports became what they were.

     My pockets sagged as an array of artefacts found their way inside. The steps of my mother sent my heart racing and I jumped away from the box. The lid slammed shut and my lungs sharply collapsed in a violent cough at the dusty cloud that filled the atmosphere. A lie was lost in a maze on the way to my lips and I was caught red-handed.

     The scraping of the box on the floor still echoed from time to time, when my mind was at its quietest and there was no better time to ruin my false sense of security. My skin prickles with searing heat and during the summer, I can only hope for a rainstorm to cool the pain. She forced me to watch. Forced me to watch the consequences of another mistake I had made. All those ties back to our family, gone. The memories from my parents’ previous lives, gone. Everything and every one of the items still in there vanished into the night sky in flakes of ash. Except for the stowaways that were in my pillowcase.

     My pocket held many small things. A crumpled sketch of London was dated back to 1743 when America was still a colony and pleased about it. My gran must’ve drawn it. She was always the artist of the family, so my father said. There were some stamps contained in a small coin purse that jingled as it swayed from side to side. They were from the Stamp Act and dated the day of the Boston Tea Party! Incredible detail was put into the small drawings. Tiny notebooks were chock-full of random notes and ideas and appointments and thoughts, different handwritings on each page muddling the narrative further.

     The other pocket held one item that turned multitudinous. An ornate tiara lay resting in blue silk. When could that have been from? Why was it here? Pressed flowers were held between thin wax pages. Delicate strings of pearls twisted and curled among the contents. Stubs of charcoal were wrapped in tissue from burns before. I guess the charcoal tradition was older than I thought. And a golden ring, whose one side had been flattened and carved, was carefully stowed in a smaller box inside the first. Initials were worn away from decades of existence and I had no clue who this had come from. All I knew was that it was important.

     I could feel a nervous and surprised energy radiate off of Sean. He’d heard of me already. Word travels fast between the boys, it seemed, “Huh, Odette?” He nodded slowly, lips pursed in thought. My hands found their way into my pockets and I twirled the ring around my finger, my mind mulling over the ancestors that it could’ve once belonged to. “Pretty name. That’s from that show or whatever with the birds and stuff, right?”

     "Swan Lake?“ My tone was a mix of surprises. One that he forgot the name of the ballet and the second that he had even heard of it. "You know Swan Lake?”

     "Now, don’t act oh so surprised, Miss Odette. We Newsies know ‘bout more than all youse people.“ He gestured to my outfit as if making the point I was wealthy in some way.

     I floundered for a moment, my mouth opening and closing like a fish in the Fraser, "You’re right, I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. My deepest apologies to you.”

     "Nah, I understand where it’s comin’ from. Just don’t do it again, you here? Else you ain’t 'llowed here anymore.“ The tone he used was almost threatening, but I could tell by the slight upturn of the corners of his mouth that it was a joke.

     I shrugged, a grin spreading across my face like butter on bread, "I suppose I should keep my belongs on my person for a quick getaway whenever I’m here. Just in case I cause a revolution.”

     Spot took a step closer to me. The smell of rain and mud wafted off him and I could hear his breathing, “I wouldn’t doubt a lady like you causin’ trouble.”

     "Well, I am British. That can cause quite a controversy when I voice my opinion on this country’s state of affairs, even if I grew up here.“ An exaggerated frown made its way to my face, "Though many of the crazy old men that run this country say a woman shouldn’t have those sorts of opinions.”

     A voice from up the stairs startled me and I jumped, looking up to see a boy standing there, “You a reporta?” Almighty forces of the universe, the boy was practically naked! I know I was intruding on the home at night, but his undershirt looked as if it had been worn as his only shirt. Coordination between his suspenders and blue bandana weren’t helping his case either. And the way he eyed me, stared me down as if choosing how to fight me best.

     Spot moved to stand between the boy and me, “Now, Myron, don’t be lookin’ for a fight.”

     "No, Sean. It’s fine.“ I placed my hand on his shoulder and lightly applied pressure to move him, "He has every right to ask questions as the others do.” My gaze locked with Myron’s, the tension growing with an impending silence, “What does it matter to you if I’m a reporter or not, Myron? Unless you have something to hide, my presence shouldn’t bother you in the slightest.”

     "So you are a reporta.“ The whites of his eyes flickered as they rolled and he mosied down the creaking steps. He was only the slightest bit taller than I was, but I was hardly intimidated. I had faced worse in much more stressful situations.

     "No, you misunderstand. I said if I were a reporter, not that I am a reporter. I wasn’t quite clear though, so I can understand your confusion.”

     "Ay, no, you said it don’t matter whether or not you a reporta. And I should only be bothered if I’m hidin’ somethin’.“ He stood before me, a dirty musk his cologne and arms crossed in defiance, "Now, I ain’t hidin’ nothin’, but I don’t much like reportas.”

     "That’s a bold opinion of an entire career. Might I know why?“

     "They’re never lookin’ out for the little guy. Never caring about anything but the story that’ll make their name get out into the world. An’ once they’re done with you, you’re dirt.” His face was in mine now, our noses just brushing, giving me a good look at his face. Dirt coated his face, filling crevasses created from scars. They were in strange patterns, the markings. And they were so pale too, his flesh like marbling. I looked into his eyes and saw my pain staring back at me. It was too much for such a short lifetime.

     I raised my hand slowly, the sight of it in his peripheral causing a flinch as if I were to strike him across the face. My fingers lightly met his cheek, which was burning to my cold skin. He pressed into my palm, savouring the gentle human touch. “Oh, little darling, what did they do to you?”

His walls crumbled at my words, every emotion flowing over the rubble, “They’re gone 'cause a me. An’ those bums in their clean shirts and with all their money, they treated me like a criminal.” Tears were forming in the corners of his eyes, threatening to fall at a moment’s notice, “I swear the fire wasn’t my fault, but I know that they were.”

     "Why would it be your fault?“

     Myron wiped at his eyes, hoping the tears would go away, but new ones replaced the old and started running down his face in a race to the ground, "I-I was stuck an’ they came back in for me. All I remember is being pulled from underneath the ceiling and her holding me as she moved me to the exit.” He sniffed as he stuttered and choked on his words, “But they-they didn’t come out after me. I swore I could see them through that door I was pushed outta. They was so close.”

     "Who did you lose, little darling?“ Myron shook his head in response, knowing the words will only make his state worse, "Was it your parents?” He nodded vigorously, turning away from me. “It’s alright. It wasn’t your fault. It will never be your fault.”

     "B-bu-but it was. It still is.“

     "No. It was the fire, not you.” My hand came to rest on his shoulder and I turned him back to me. I gave him a soft, understanding smile, one I would’ve wished to have been presented to me when I was coming to terms with my losses. A little bit of pressure from my hand moved the fragile boy to the staircase, where I sat beside him with my arm around his shoulders. The boys around us watched on before I moved my head to send them away. The two didn’t question anything and left without words.

     "Have you mourned?“ I asked out of the silence. I could feel his confusion at the idea, "I hadn’t mourned when I lost my family. I suppose I’m still avoiding it.” I stared at my shoes as I thought of all my adventures, all my distractions from the truth.

     "You lost your folks?“

     "Not just them. I lost my brother and sister too that day.”

     "What happened? If you don’t mind.“

     "Not at all. We moved a lot when I was younger, going from place to place, never settling for too long. During one of those moves, I got separated in the woods. I searched for hours and hours, all through the night and into the morning. All I could find was some of the family heirlooms scattered on the ground in a clearing. No sign of them or the rest of our belongings. They had just vanished.” I felt awful lying about my past to this boy, but it was difficult to explain the immortality when it’s to be a secret.

     "Boy, that is awful.“ There was a sad chuckle as he spoke, which I returned as an agreement. "So, you’re an orphan like the lot of us and you’re still a reporta?” He turned his head and looked at me, some form of shock and respect on his sad face.

     "I am not a reporter.“ I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and dabbed cleaned the tears from his face. I wasn’t too attached to the fabric. I had stolen it from a man’s coat pocket when I 'accidentally’ fell into him while on the trolley. I swiftly left after the incident, escaping my mark and the fact I hadn’t paid for the transportation.

     "Yeah, sure. Whatever you say, Press.”

     I rolled my eyes at the boy, “My name is Odette.”

     "Nah, Imma still call you Press. It’s your Newsie name. The lot of us have all got 'em. You should too.“

     "Oh, I’m one of you now? Why’s that?”

     "I dunno. Just feels like you get us. Understand our side an’ all. And, hey,“ I could feel his tough-guy façade being put back on, "Brooklyn is the best neighbourhood in all a New York. Who wouldn’t wanna be one of us?” Myron’s walls were back up, but I could feel that they were a little shorter, not as strong. That’s progress.

     "I couldn’t think of anyone if you gave me all of Time to think.“ I laughed, bumping his shoulder. This kid, I don’t know what it was about him, but he felt like my own. He felt like my responsibility, almost as if I had adopted him.

     "Exactly.”

     "You should get to sleep. You’ve got a day and a half ahead of you.“ I motioned up the staircase with my head, indicating exactly what I meant.

     "What about you?” He asked as I stood up, eyes following me.

     I shrugged a little, looking into their common room of sorts, “I’m going to make sure everyone else is resting as well.” I looked back at him, “I guess I’m never not going to be a big sister.” A small giggle escaped me against my better judgement. I pressed a kiss to the boy’s slightly damp and dirty hair, ruffling it up before walking away from him. “Go sleep, Myron.”

     "I’ll see you in the morning?“ The look of hope he gave me reminded me of my little Elijah and my heart hurt just a little. That was why he mattered all of a sudden. He was another version of my brother.

     I nodded, "Bright and early.” He grinned at my response and ran up to the rooms as I went to herd the stragglers upstairs. Surprisingly, it was only Sean sitting by the fire, watching it with an intense stare. I stood and waited for him to acknowledge my presence. It only felt right since he was the leader.

     "I ain’t never seen Myron cry, you know.“ Spot broke the silence. I moved to sit across from him as he continued, "Not when he first came here, not even when he gets hurt. Never. Then you show up, Odette,” his eyes met mine, the fire reflecting in his dark irises, “and it’s like he’s a whole other person. You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence, 'cause the way you handled that and acted like a mother to a kid you ain’t never met is suspicious. And I ain’t fond of suspicious people.”

     "It’s a gift of mine, I suppose.“ I looked to the fire, faint images of my past projecting themselves on my mind’s eye, "When you’ve seen what I’ve seen and lost everything, you get good at recognizing it in others.” I met Sean’s gaze again, “And when you get good at seeing it, people get good at letting it out.”

     "I dunno, you’re seventeen. How can you have had so much happen to you in those years?“

     "How can there be so many Newsies like you all in such a small area? The world isn’t inherently good, Sean. I learnt that the hard way and all too early.” I leaned back and the two of us had a game of wills, a contest of resilience. For what felt like hours, we held one another’s gaze, waiting for the other to give in. “You should go to sleep, Sean. These kids are counting on you.”

     "Some of them are counting on you too, now.“

     "But you’ll stay with them,” I admitted, refusing to let any form of guilt creep up on me.

     He nodded thoughtfully at my response before rising and moving silently to the stairs. I heard him stop for a moment, a pause in his thinking and planning. “Thank you, Odette. Thank you for helpin’ him.”

     "He needed it. He deserved it.“ At my reply, he mounted the steps, leaving me to watch the fire die out the darkness from the streets outside slowly seeped into the dwelling. I was left with my inner-monologue as my eyelids grew heavy and my mind went blank in exhaustion. Sleep came after a futile attempt to stay awake. For only a few hours was I a willing casualty in the battle for rest. To others, it looked peaceful, how I slept. But the inner machinations of my mind always had other plans.

#finally #it be done #just enjoy this yall #old clothes

[softboywriting]

Connecting | A Place To Call Home | Werewolf AU | Shawn Mendes

Summary: In which you are getting to know your pack and finding out Shawn is particularly soft on you. [fluff] [mention of bad parents] Takes place a short time after Shifted. Word Count: 2.5k

|Masterlist In Bio|

It's a Monday. Everyone is at work but not Jeremy, he didn't leave the house to work. You aren't sure what he does, but you know he's on the computer a lot and usually holed up in his room.

You're sitting in the living room when Jeremy comes out. He's in his pajamas, hair askew, looking little a rumpled. He spots you, and changes his destination to the couch.

“Hey, you doing alright?” He asks as he sinks into the couch beside you. “You look tired.”

“Yeah. I haven't been sleeping. Nightmares mostly.”

Jeremy nods, crossing his arms. “I remember when I had nightmares about my old pack. It was awful, Shawn had to stay up with me every night for weeks.”

“You had a bad pack too?”

He nods. “I was the runt. As you can tell by my short stocky stature, I don't fit in with most wolves. I matured when I was twenty and I thought maybe I'd grow more.” He chuckles. “I didn't. The bullying was endless, my family didn't know what to do. So I left.”

“How did you find Shawn?”

“Shawn was a friend of a friend. He's a few years older than me y'know. He was like a brother and when he and I were talking one night, he offered to let me stay with him. And here I am, still here.”

“What about Rosa and Em? We're they part of the pack already?”

Jeremy nods. “They made me feel so welcome, like I had a place in this world finally. No one ever called me runt or shorty here. They just treated me like a wolf.”

“That's amazing. I'm so happy for you.” You pull your knees up to your chest. It was good to know you weren't the only one with a fucked up past.

“I hope you feel just a welcome with us. I know you've been through a lot in the last few weeks, but I hope you know you're part of us.”

“Yeah, of course. I'm settling in just fine.”

Jeremy looks at you skeptically. You aren't sure why, it wasn't like you weren't settling in. You felt like part of the pack, sort of, no one but yourself had made you feel otherwise.

“What do you do?” You ask, hoping to change the subject. “Like your job, you don't ever leave?”

“I write books. Children's books actually. I work with a friend I met online who is a digital artist. We've published four books now and they're doing great.”

“That's amazing. Do you have copies?”

“Yeah!” Jeremy gets up and goes to his room. He returns quickly with two books in hand. “I just have two right now. Here is Luna and the Howlers and The Little Wolf Who Wanted To Be A Witch.”

You take the books and turn them over in your hands. They are darling. Both covers are hard back and the art is adorable, like a blocky paper mache style almost. “These are so cute. You wrote the stories?”

“Yes ma'am. You can read them if you're interested. I know there kids books and all but y'know...”

“I'd love to.” You smile up at him and grins. You really couldn't wait to read them. “Thank you for sitting and talking to me for a while. I haven't really been the most sociable and I know it.”

“Totally understandable. You'll open up when you're ready, believe me, no one is pressuring you here.” Jeremy reaches out and ruffles your hair awkwardly and you laugh. “It was good talking to you though. And just so you know, you can come talk to me any time if you have nightmares. I'm usually up late. Inspiration strikes at the most inopportune times.”

You smile softly and nod. “I'll keep it in mind.”

_____________

Midnight and you wake up, a nightmare again. This time they caught you. The alphas tearing you apart. You wake up just as soon as you feel claws sink into your back. You're covered in a cold sweat, tears wet on your cheeks. You remember Jeremy's offer, but you aren't sure if you want to talk to him yet. Usually you can handle the dreams on your own, but tonight was too real. Too painful.

You make your way to Shawn's bedroom, pushing the door open and slipping inside. He stirs immediately, sitting up as you walk over.

“Nightmare?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on,” he says, pulling back the blankets for you to join him.

You crawl in and he wraps his arm around you, tugging you against his chest. “Can we just talk a little before going to sleep?”

“Anything you like.”

“Where did you come from?”

Shawn hums, the noise reverberating through your back. “I was born here. My parents were part of a large pack that made up most of the town.”

“What happened? Why aren't you part of that pack now?”

“The alpha who took over when our alpha died was a purist. He was horrible, literally taking omegas from their families and detaining them. Most of them were never seen again. I couldn't deal with that. So when I matured I left, went out on my own under the guise of going to college out of state to become a lycanthropic medical specialist.”

You put your hand over his on your stomach and he threads his fingers with yours. “What about your parents? Did they agree with the purist?”

“No, they only stayed because they didn't have a choice. My sister was not yet matured and they didn't want to seem suspicious by up and leaving with no real reason. They didn't want to be hunted by the alpha and his allies for pack treason.”

“But they left anyway right?”

“Yes. My sister matured when she was nineteen and she was an omega. My parents signed the house over to me just as I graduated and they fled the country to live with my mom's parents in England. I never moved back here because I was afraid the alphas would come for me.”

“It's safe now though right?”

Shawn shifts around, putting his feet over yours and nosing your hair, making you sigh contently into his form. “The pack in this town left, went to yours.”

“What? You knew them? You know the pack that tried to kill me?”

“I didn't know until the night the alphas came. When I saw two of them, higher ups from when I was part of the pack before college. I knew they weren't just there for you. They had found out I was there, and they wanted me to rat out my parents for fleeing all those years ago. They're crazy, they just can't let anything go.”

You roll over to face Shawn. He lays his hand on your side and hums. “I lead them to you. I put the whole pack in danger. Shawn, why did you keep me there? Why didn't you just toss me out?”

“Pup, you know I couldn't do that.”

“Why not? I am just some omega you pulled out of a stream. I'm not anything special and I'm definitely not worth the lives if your pa-”

“Enough,” he says firmly and you fall silent. “We’re done talking. You need to sleep.”

“Okay,” you mumble, turning over.

He puts his arm around you and holds you against him once more. He presses his nose into your hair and chuffs a little, breath tickling your neck. He feels warm, like you remember him being before the move, before the attack, when you shared a bed with him at the old place for a little while. You try to relax, to let go of the tension of the conversation you just had. He flexes his fingers against your stomach, scratching softly through your sleep shirt. It's perfect. Just what you needed to relax and fall asleep, knowing he was there and he was going to keep you safe.

_____________

Morning finds you in the kitchen, the first rays of daylight streaming through the open blinds of the breakfast nook. You had woken up to Shawn's 5am alarm. Instead of sleeping more you decided to get up and have some breakfast while Shawn showered.

“Morning,” Rosa says as she walks into the kitchen in her running clothes. “You're up early?”

“Shawn's alarm woke me up.”

“Mmm,” she opens the fridge and grabs a few protein shakes. “Bad night again?”

“Nightmares. Really vivid and painful.” You stir your cereal around in your bowl. You didn't want to remember.

Rosa takes a seat opposite you. “You don't have to worry about that pack anymore. I promise we...we took care of it. That night-”

“Rosa,” Shawn says hastily as he walks in, fully dressed for work. A deep red button down and black slacks. His hair is a damp curly mess and he smells like warm vanilla and spice. Everything about him is amazing.

She looks to him and he raises his eyebrows. You know she is being warned, having almost told you about the night the alphas came. It's no surprise Shawn wants to keep that from you. You knew he kept you in the dark a lot, and for your own good. You had enough to deal with lately.

“I'll be home around one today.” Shawn says as he grabs a bottle of water and a few of the same protein shakes Rosa had. “I want you to practice shifting if you can.” He walks over to you and places a kiss on your head. “We'll train when I get home.”

“Okay,” you mumble, ducking your head a bit from the affection.

It's not until Shawn is gone that Rosa speaks up again. “He's taken with you. I'm glad, he used to be such a grumpy old man in a young alphas body. Well, grumpier than normal.”

“You think he likes me? I thought wolves were just normally this affectionate?”

“We are, but Shawn has always been picky. He is a certain kind of tender with you. You're lucky.”

You shrug. Sure you have a pack and you're safe now, but good things have to end sometime. You don't feel like you deserve a pack and an alpha's attention. That was too much. You don't know how much luck you have left, or how much you ever had.

“You are. Shawn is a good alpha, strong and smart. He's a Lycanthropic Medical Specialist for goodness sake. You've hit the lottery, literally.”

“It's not like that,” you wave Rosa off and go to dump your cereal remains in the trash. “Shawn is just soft on me because I'm new and he thinks I'm fragile.”

“Yeah sure. I know how it goes. But anyway, I'm off today for a teacher planning day if you want help trying to shift?”

You turn and look at her. She's a little bigger than you, definitely more muscled and a bit older, definitely more experienced. Rosa had never been anything but kind to you, and you're sure she could help you shift just as well as anyone else. You're just not sure if you want to take that step yet. Shifting was hard, you don't even know if you can do it when you're not under a great deal of stress. You aren't sure if she will understand.

“I think I'll work on it alone, but thanks,” you smile softly and Rosa nods.

_____________

Three hours later and you're no closer to shifting than you were before. It's not like you can just do it. Realistically, you probably can, but you can't tap into whatever it is that makes it work for you. It seems that it is fear that makes you shift and you hate that, you don't want to be afraid just to shift.

Rosa steps out into the yard where you're laying, staring up at the clouds. “Can I help now? I'll just give a pointer or two.”

“Sure, I'm definitely not figuring it out,” you chuckle, sitting up to look at her where she's taken a seat in front of you.

“When I learned to shift, I found that it was a feeling. It was like, a new emotion that I had never experienced before. For me it was something like the feeling of being free.”

“I've only been able to shift when I'm scared.”

Rosa looks over and raises her eyebrows. “Fear? That's a hard one.”

“Yeah.” You wrap your arms around your legs, leaning your chin on your knees. “I don't want to be scared to be a wolf.”

“Maybe we can find another way? Maybe if you try feeling something else super intensely.”

“I don't know...I think I need more time. Maybe shifting right now isn't what I need to do. Like...maybe I should deal with my nightmares and anxiety first.”

Rosa reaches over and takes your hand. “You can talk to me. I have a lot of students who have anxiety and talking through it helps sometimes.”

Your curl your fingers around Rosa's. Her hand is soft and very warm. “You teach gym class at the school in Crestwood right?”

“Yeah, and I coach the indoor volleyball team and also the field hockey team in the summer.”

You nod. “Well...I definitely think I'm taking on too much right now. I think there's been too much happening in my life for me to dedicate myself to learning how to be a wolf. I want to stop and just breathe for a bit but I don't want to let Shawn down.”

“Oh Pup. You really think he'll be disappointed?”

Tears sting your eyes and you bite them back. “He's so determined to show me I am just as much of a wolf as you guys. And I feel like if I don't try hard and be strong then I won't be able to stay, that I won't be good enough.”

Rosa sighs softly, rubbing her thumb over the back of your hand. “You should talk to Shawn. Let him know you need to slow down, that you're still coping with everything going on. I'm sure he will understand.”

“Yeah,” you mumble quietly. “Thanks by the way, y'know for listening and stuff.”

“Anytime. It's what packs are for. We're here for each other.”

“I've never felt like I was part of something.”

“What about your family? You've never mentioned them. You don't ever talk much but still, it's been almost three months you've been with us. I feel like we hardly know you.”

You shake your head. Your parents, your whole upbringing, was a touchy subject, something you didn't want to talk about. “I think I should go. Thank you again, I think I will talk to Shawn about slowing down. I'm...I'm going to go inside now.”

“Oh,” Rosa stands and puts her hands in her pockets. “I'm sorry if I upset you.”

“It's alright. I just...I'm not ready to talk about that yet.”

Rosa nods and you nod back before heading inside to rehearse what you would tell Shawn when he came home and wanted to train.

_____________

Thank you for reading and leaving me feedback for this series! Every comment and ask and message is encouragement that keeps me going. Thank you everyone who reblogs as well!

#shawn mendes series #shawn mendes fic #shawn mendes fan fic #shawn mendes au #shawn mendes #shawn mendes fanfic #shawn mendes werewolf au #shawn mendes fanfictions #shawn mendes fanfiction #shawn mendes fan fiction #shawn mendes imagine #shawn mendes imagines #shawn mendes story #shawn mendes writing #shawn mendes fics #shawn mendes oneshot #shawn mendes blurb #shawn mendes fluff #shawn mendes au fic #shawn mendes fan story #aptch

[keith-mizuguchi]

Year One

It’s been awhile  — I’m sure I’ll eventually get this writing about LA thing down pat.  But it’s been  a busy year.  I’ve enjoyed my time down here in Los Angeles.  There’s so much I love about the city and surrounding area.  I still feel like a newbie — haven’t explored enough.  But hoping to do more of that in the new year.  The things I do love — food, drinks and music — as you’ll see below are still a big part of what I’ve been able to enjoy outside of work.  It’s been a fun year +.  Some highlights below.

WORK

My time at KNX has been a learning experience.  It is one of the most challenging newsrooms to work in — not many people are cut out for the pace.  But I feel like I’ve taken the challenges head-on.  As some of you know, I’m now full-time staff, serving as editor and producer.  It’s rewarding to know that people appreciate the work I’ve done  — that’s not always the case in this business.  We’ve had numerous breaking stories and I think the station has risen to the occasion each time.  Proud to be part of the team.

Outside of KNX — I’ve made a promise to myself to try to branch out and finally write about food this year.  I still feel there are so many stories that need to be told, not only here in LA, but also back up in the Bay.  So I’m preparing to pitch, pitch, pitch to see if I get any bites.

FOOD

I know some will say this is blasphemous, but I think Los Angeles beats the Bay in food and drinks.  It was part of what attracted me to the area.  I love the fact that there is such a wide-range — from expensive tasting menus to inexpensive strip mall restaurants that are out of this world.  One unfortunate thing about both markets — I think you’re going to continue to see a lot of closures in the coming years, many of which will surprise people.  It is really, really challenging for small businesses to survive in these cities.  Not to mention, the competition is fierce and you really have to stand out.  It’s why I respect my friends who are owners and chefs/bartenders.  It can be a brutal, brutal business.  But on to the good — here is some of what I have enjoyed eating and drinking down here (and it can be a decent list if you ever come down to visit).  

Bavel (Arts District) - I’ve been blown away twice by this restaurant.  It is always packed, is plenty loud (probably too loud for many), but the food and service have been terrific.  Middle Eastern cuisine that has so much flavor, it jumps off the plate.  Good cocktails too.

Bon Temps (Arts District) - I had a terrific dinner here.  The dishes are beautifully prepared, almost like art.  Lincoln Carson is obviously known for his pastries so even though I’m not a dessert person, it’s a necessity to save some room.  The one thing about many of the restaurants in the Arts District is they’re built out of warehouses — so they have an industrial feel. But I didn't get that sense here.

Joy (Highland Park) - I loved Pine & Crane and this is their sister restaurant.  Very casual, and for the most part, smaller bites.  Comforting, seasonal Taiwanese food.  It’s weird, but I really love the small seasonal appetizers that they have on display in the deli counter.  They’re delicious.

Ototo (Echo Park) - Easily my favorite bar (they serve sake, lots and lots of sake). The owner Courtney is so knowledgeable and I love picking her brain about some of the choices on the extensive menu.  There are so many interesting and unique sakes on their list — and it changes up quite a bit.  It’s not just sake here as they have a really nice menu of Japanese snacks and food that is quite good.  I have to also mention their restaurant next door, Tsubaki, which has some of the best Japanese food I’ve had here in LA.

Alta Adams (West Adams) - When I think of Alta Adams, I just think I’m being welcomed into the West Adams neighborhood.  Unlike many restaurants, the staff seems like it’s made up of people from this historic neighborhood.  And they treat guests with the hospitality that you would expect if you’re visiting their home.  The food is terrific — just really comforting Southern food.  It’s a lively restaurant and has one of the best vibes in the city.  It’s the perfect fit in the perfect spot for a growing area.

Some of my other favorites that I’ll call standbys — Animal, Petit Trois, Ronan, Here’s Looking at You, Night + Market Song, Guerrilla Tacos, Tsujita, Rose Cafe, Rossoblu, AOC, Apollonia’s Pizzeria, Republique, and every place in Koreatown and San Gabriel Valley.

DRINK

Old Lightning (Marina Del Rey) - It will cost you far more than most places, but this is one of the most unique bars I’ve ever been to in this country.  The spirit list has so many rare and unique bottles, it will make your head spin.  The cocktails are terrific, but I think a tasting is the way to truly “get” this bar.  Reservations only and they do take your phone at the door.

Bibo Ergo Sum (Beverly Grove) - I’d call this my go-to spot if I want a really great drink.  The menu is pretty extensive with lighter and more spirit forward cocktails.  Very cool decor inside with big booths and a half-circle bar.  I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad drink here.

The Varnish (Downtown) - A very cool speakeasy in the back of Cole’s. The best way to order is dealer’s choice and let the bartenders make you something.

The Normandie Club (Koreatown) - Just a good solid bar with a little bit of everything.  You can get a really nice cocktail, a shot and a beer, a glass of wine.  I loved Walker Inn too, which was in a secret door, but it’s since closed.

Gold Line (Highland Park) - First of all, I have a lot of respect for Peanut Butter Wolf, who is one of the owners (he also owns Stones Throw Records).  I love the fact that part of his record collection is in the bar and he has guest DJ’s nightly spinning records.  All that and the drinks are really solid.

Some others I’ve enjoyed — Bar Clacson, The Wolves, Employees Only, Death and Co. (yes I know it’s brand new.. but it was really great my first visit during their soft opening), Melrose Umbrella Co., The Roger Room, The Daily Pint, Here & Now

MUSIC

The way I get away from the stress of work and the news cycle that never ends is going to live shows.  And I went to way too many over the past year.  But I wanted to check out as many venues as I could down here.  I still haven’t been to a few — namely The Roxy and Whisky a Go Go.  But here are a few of my favorite shows.

The Roots — Hollywood Bowl.  I’ve seen them a few times but this was by far the group at its best.  Black Thought did a crazy 5-10 minute medley of hip hop songs that was something I’ve never seen before.  

Anderson.Paak — The Forum.  I feel fortunate every time I get to see Anderson and the Free Nationals.  I’m pretty sure he’s the artist I’ve seen the most in my life.  His show at the Forum was amazing — hometown, so many great guest appearances.  I continue to say he is the best live show going today.

Chris Cornell Tribute Show — The Forum.  I was bummed when this sold out, and then magically, a few tickets went on sale a day or two before the concert.  Chris Cornell was one of my favorite lead singers of all-time.  And the show was 5-5 1/2 hours of amazing tributes.

Prophets of Rage - The Mayan.  My mind was blown.  This group, which is now disbanded with the return of Rage Against the Machine, was exactly what I thought — a mix of Rage, Public Enemy and Cypress — all in a cohesive and awesome group.

Also loved Herbie Hancock at the Bowl, Childish Gambino at the Forum, Big KRIT in the OC, my first time seeing JID and Vince Staples, The Raconteurs, two amazing groups - Bikini Kill and Sleater Kinney and finally getting to see Carlos Santana.  And there was really so much more. Yes I go to a lot of shows.

It’s been a fun year down in LA.  Yes, I still love the Bay and miss my family and friends.  But meeting new people down here and making new friends has been a lot of fun.  Excited to see what 2020 has in store for me.

[chiseler]

Larry Cohen Isn’t Alive

Writer, producer and director Larry Cohen, who died on March 24th at age 77, rightfully earned his spot among the Pantheon of low-budget independent American filmmakers.

Like so many great satirists before him, Cohen had a knack for using a good story, off-beat characters, misdirection, humor, and monsters to disguise some pointed commentary about the most sacred of our sacred cows: childbirth, religion, cops, race, the military, AIDS, health care, and consumerism. And he always did it in a hugely entertaining way, squeezing the very most out of tiny budgets, small, fleet-footed crews, and simple guerilla tactics.

The artist responsible for Q: The Winged Serpent, God Told Me To, and the It’s Alive! films was a maverick, an independent’s independent, who wasn’t afraid to put a wild story on the screen and populate it with oddball characters (that Michael Moriarty would become his standard lead in four films in the ‘80s says something). If Cohen owed a lot to Sam Fuller and Roger Corman, then most indie directors who’ve come along since owe a lot to him, and the evidence is right there in their films.

Even when he was making low-budget monster pictures, Cohen’s films were always character-driven, so when it came to casting even the smallest part he was looking for people with interesting voices, faces, and personalities. He populated his films, in short, with the modern equivalent of Forties character actors. It’s no surprise that he would so often choose to work with like-minded maverick young actors like Moriarty, David Carradine, Karen Black, Sandy Dennis, Candy Clark, even Andy Kaufman. At the same time, though, Cohen also went back to those old films, hiring great character actors like Sam Levine, Broderick Crawford, and Sylvia Sidney.  With casts like that together on the screen (many of them there simply because they wanted to work with Cohen) it’s sometimes easy to forget you’re watching a horror movie.

It seems Cohen was born with a little too much energy. Years before getting his degree in film from the City College of New York, he was already selling scripts to television. In the short years following his graduation in ‘63, he was creating shows that would go on to become classics, like Branded and The invaders. Hearing it now, he almost sounds like the kind of guy you’d like to punch.

After ten prolific years as a television writer, Cohen finally made the expected jump into film directing. But Cohen didn’t go to Hollywood to do this, and lord knows he didn’t aim for the mainstream. Although considered a blaxploitation picture today for some reason, Cohen’s directorial debut, 1972’s Bone, begins like a standard home invasion film a la The Desperate Hours or Five Minutes to Live, as would-be burglar Yaphet Kotto  takes a wealthy white man and his wife hostage in their palatial home. When he sends the husband out to get money, though, the crime film becomes a social satire about both race relations and the generation gap. The wife begins to fall for her kidnapper, and the husband starts falling for a young hippie chick he meets on the way to the bank. In later films, Cohen would mix and match genres in a way that hadn’t been seen since the W. Lee Wilder wierdies of the Fifties.

His next two films were both fairly straightforward blaxploitation numbers, and both Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem would become  genre standbys.

It was in 1974 that what is considered Cohen’s golden era would begin. Between ‘74 and the early ‘90s, Cohen was writing and directing the films he wanted to make. They were films that were completely his own, more than a little odd at times, and utterly memorable. For a career that lasted over half a century, having a Golden Era that ran nearly twenty years ain’t too shabby.

Switching from blaxploitation to horror, Cohen made It’s Alive! starring the great John P. Ryan. On the surface it’s a horror film about a killer baby. It’s also a conspiracy film about some nefarious shenanigans at a large pharmaceutical company, and a social commentary about the power of the press to destroy innocent lives. At it’s heart, though, it takes The Bad Seed a step further in exploring our deep fear of children and the screaming bloody horror of that most beautiful of miracles, childbirth.

Using the power of suggestion and some fantastic performances (many of the actors here would become members of Cohen’s stock troupe), coupled with some solid direction, clever cinematography, Rick Baker’s special effects, a Bernard Herrmann score and one of the most effective trailers of the Seventies, this low budget killer baby film caught a lot of people off guard. It was smarter and slicker than anyone would’ve expected given the budget, and was a big hit for Cohen.

After that success he came back two years later with a film that was even stranger, more complex, and much harder to categorize. Trying not to give too much away here for those who haven’t seen it yet, God Told Me To stars Tony Lo Bianco as a New York cop who’s never been sick, feels he has some strange powers, and whose early biography remains a little up in the air. As the film opens, he’s  investigating a series of seemingly inexplicable and unrelated rampage killings. A soft spoken gay man climbs atop a building with a high powered rifle and begins shooting. A cop (Andy Kaufman in his big screen debut) shoots up the st. Patrick’s Day parade. A man slaughters his family for no apparent reason. The only explanation any of them can give is that, yes, god told them to. Well, his investigation leads down some strange channels, including stories of  an alien abduction, a secret cabal of wealthy  executives, and reports of a glowing figure who had contact with all the killers and who may or may not be god incarnate. In short it’s a film that asks the eternal question, “What if Jesus was a Venusian?” It may also be the best film Cohen ever made.

Although the film looks great (and brings together a remarkable cast), it represents a perfect example of the guerilla filmmaking Cohen would come to be known for. All the location shots, from the parade to the subway to the shooting of half a dozen people outside Bloomingdale’s were stolen. Cohen saw where he wanted to shoot, set up his crew, and shot. If he were to try doing that today there would likely be casualties, but because he did it then he captured a portrait of a city long gone.

On the downside, in his excitement  to grab shots of actual events as they were happening, one sequence finds Lo Bianco racing from the st. Patrick’s day parade in March and ending up some 70 blocks to the south  at the San Gennaro festival on the Lower East Side in September. It was a hell of a run.

The film was picked up by Corman’s distribution company, New World. Before releasing it, they decided that title of his was too long and too complicated, so needed to be changed. They decided to call it The Demon, and changed the font on the poster to match the font used recently on the posters for the incredibly popular The Omen. It didn’t seem to help. Whether it was the title or audiences were merely baffled by the film itself it’s hard to say, but it was a definite step down from the success of It’s Alive. Still, in subsequent years it has become one of the most popular of Cohen’s films, and in terms of influence, well, all you need to do is watch the last few seasons of the X Files to see for yourself if anyone was paying attention.

Following God Told Me To, Cohen took a radical turn in more ways than one. After making three blaxploitation films and two sci-fi horror movies, he took the next logical step down the genre trail by making, yes, a J. Edgar Hoover biopic.

A clear though uncredited influence on the 2011 Leonardo DiCaprio Hoover picture, 1977’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover makes for an intriguing double bill with another AIP film from around roughly the same time, John Milius’ Dillinger. It stars screen legend Broderick Crawford in a brilliant turn as the enigmatic and all-powerful head of the FBI, and co-stars a slew of famed character actors, from Lloyd Nolan and June Havoc to Howard DaSilva and Rip Torn.

Couching the story of Hoover’s life within the frantic scramble across Washington to gain access to his titular secret files after his death, Cohen does something I don’t think anyone was expecting. In spite of Hoover’s reputation as a neurotic, paranoid, cross-dressing monster, Cohen treats him fairly, even sympathetically at times. There’s no real secret about his sexuality here, but it’s never made cartoonish. It’s a portrait of a deeply flawed man and a publicity whore, yes, but one who was trying to do right. Oddly enough the historical figures who get slapped around more than anyone here are the Kennedy brothers, who come off like a couple of smug rich, asshole college boys. Martin Luther King doesn’t get off too easy, either.

It’s an odd man out in Cohen’s filmography, but what the Hoover film proved without a doubt is that he was a director who knew pacing, who knew editing, and who could, even without monsters, turn material like this into a gripping story.

Good as it was, The Private Files wasn’t a big hit either, so Cohen returned to killer babies  in ‘78 with It Lives Again. Not interested in simply rehashing the same material, Cohen expanded the original story, broadening the idea of a conspiracy (conspiracies would play a larger and larger role in Cohen’s films), and multiplying the number of killer babies afoot.

As more and more mutant babies are born throughout America, a renegade group of scientists and parents (including John P. Ryan and expecting father Frederic Forrest) criss-crosses the country trying to save the mutants before the government can terminate them with extreme prejudice. The hope is to be able to raise the mutants in a reasonably loving environment, rehabilitating them and making them contributing members of society. Let’s just say their success is limited.

The later ‘70s and early ‘80s were kind of rough for Cohen. His teen horror comedy Full Moon High bombed, and a made-for-TV mystery was ignored. He planned to resurrect Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer character in a film version of I, The Jury starring Armand Assante, but after a major studio picked up the project, they promptly fired Cohen.

Knowing he had to get right back on his feet, Cohen had a new independent film in production within a week. He started grabbing some location shots around New York before he had a cast, and started filming before he had any backing. Still, he was able to wrangle together another great (in B film terms) cast, and he had a fantastic story to tell, even if it owed a bit to 1948’s The Flying Serpent. He had some more wonderful characters, he had a monster, and once again all of New York was his playground. Samuel Z. Arkoff, who’d just sold AIP, fronted him a little cash and they were off.

Cohen’s mixing and matching of genres was never more evident than it was in ‘82’s Q The Winged Serpent. It’s a bungled jewel heist/cult murder/police procedural/giant monster picture with Michael Moriarty as an ex-con and failed jazz pianist who’s forced to participate in a heist that goes very, very wrong. He’s a neurotic to begin with, and this doesn’t help. David Carradine, meanwhile (who filmed his first scene before he’d had a chance to read the script or find out who his character was), is a detective investigating a series of murders in which the victims have all been skinned alive. And then there’s that pesky Aztec god who keeps flying around New York plucking people off rooftops and construction sites.

They all eventually do come together inside the cone atop the Chrysler Building (it was actually filmed up there too, even though Cohen and his crew didn’t exactly have permission). Before all these storylines and genres come together, Cohen has us so wrapped up in these individual character’s )and the countless little stories and side characters we encounter along the way) that the monster barely matters, save for providing some of the best aerial shots ever taken of NYC.

It’s a film packed with great small bits, set pieces, and locations. And Moriarty, crazy and pathetic and fucked up as he is, is a gem. In one of the best (and mostly ad libbed) scenes in the film, he attempts to negotiate a deal with city officials and the cops. He knows where the creature’s nest can be found, and wants money and amnesty in exchange for the information. It’s a real tour-de-force of sniveling bravado and desperation.

Cohen had more stories to tell about the making of Q than any of his other films (and he was a man with a lot of stories). The final joke of it all being that Q opened the same day as I, the Jury and made four times as much money.

It occurs to me that any young would-be indie filmmaker would be better served by watching the film and listening to his commentary than anything they’d learn after 3 years of NYU film school. He knew how to work fast and work cheap, yet still come away with a film whose production values matched anything being produced in Hollywood.

Cohen was back on a roll after Q, and even when he wasn’t working on a film himself he was selling  scripts that had that unmistakable Larry Cohen feel to them. The William Lustig-directed Maniac Cop and Uncle Sam come to mind as prime examples, though Abel Ferrara dropped the ball, and dropped it hard, on Cohen’s reboot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s a film I keep trying to like, but just can’t. Cohen’s understanding of character is something Ferrara’s never been able to grasp. It had so much going for it, it should’ve been so good, but Christ it’s just a tedious fucking mess. Okay, I’m starting to ramble.

After making a few straightforward thrillers, Cohen returned to horror and social satire in 1985’s The Stuff. There had been elements of social satire and commentary in his previous films, but usually so well disguised it was easy to miss. Michael Moriarty’s gift for the ad lib and his ability to play crazy and manic so brilliantly allowed Cohen, in their second film together, to slap the satire right there on the surface, plain as day.

When a thick white goo coms bubbling out of the ground at a mining operation in Georgia, one of the miners unwittingly discovers it’s not only delicious—it’s downright irresistible. Before you know it, “The Stuff,” as it’s marketed, has become the most popular dessert item in the country, helped along by a celebrity-laden ad campaign (though many of the celebrities may no longer be recognizable to most audiences) and the small fact that it’s five times as addictive as crack. Yes, it’s mighty good right up to the point when it makes you explode. But no one talks about that.

Moriarty plays an ex-FBI man turned industrial spy who’s been hired by a now-struggling ice cream company to find out what’s in The Stuff. What Begins as a simple bit of industrial espionage quickly becomes much more than that when people start dying, small towns start vanishing, an ex-FDA employee (Danny Aiello in a smart and funny cameo) is killed by his stuff-addicted Doberman, and Moriarty uncovers a sinister, far-reaching conspiracy.

Along the way he’s assisted by Garrett Morris as a Famous Amos clone who’s cookie company was stolen from him, a young boy who realizes there’s something evil going on with The stuff, and  Paul Sorvino as an insane and paranoid militia leader/radio show host who’s more than willing to spread the word and lead a commando raid on the stuff factory.

There are nods throughout the film to everything from Dr. Strangelove to White Heat, but the one film that kept coming to mind was Halloween III: Season of the Witch from three years earlier. Both, after all, are horror conspiracy films concerning the potentially diabolical threat posed by marketing and consumerism. The ironic thing there is that when Halloween III came out in ‘82, I assumed given the way the story was structured that it had to be a Cohen film, or at least based on a Cohen script. I was wrong, of course; the film had been written by the equally great Nigel Kneale. So it only made sense that here we got Cohen’s version of a similar storyline. While Halloween III was very sharp and dark, The Stuff reaches for some broad, heavy handed laughs and often falls short. Maybe Cohen figured if you wanted to reach an audience in the Reagan era with a dire warning about rampant consumerism, subtlety would get you nowhere.  The film does have a number of moments, though, and I love the fact that the “monster” here is a smooth, white, featureless dessert. I also love the fact that a paranoid Right Wing nutjob saves the day in the end.

Two years after The Stuff, Warner Brothers offered Coen a deal to direct two straight-to-video pictures: a second  sequel to It’s Alive, and a sequel to Tobe Hooper’s TV version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Cohen, anxious to work with Moriarty again and push the story of the mutant babies a little further, signed the contract.

Working fast and cheap as ever (he said all of his films were shot in 18 days), Cohen returned to form with It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive, with one difference. While the previous two films had been stark and ultimately quite grim, with Moriarty aboard Cohen was able to bring out a lot more humor.  Mixed more evenly with the violence, the blood, a half-hidden AIDS parable,  and Cohen’s trademark strangeness, here it works more effectively than it had in The Stuff or his straight comedies.

This time around, Moriarty is a struggling actor who finally gains fame after he and his wife (Karen Black) become the proud parents of another monster baby. That’s pretty much it for the marriage, but instead of destroying the baby, a judge orders that all the mutant babies be sent to, yes, an island where they can roam free and pose no threat to anyone.

Moriarty’s life, meanwhile, collapses under the constant questions and accusations until he finds himself working in a children’s shoe store. In a delightful set piece, he finally cracks and gives the what-for to all the rotten little brats and their obnoxious parents. There’s just something both terrifying and hilarious about Moriarty when he loses it.

Anyway, he joins a government-sponsored expedition to the island to study the mutants and run a few tests. Along the way, we learn the government has stopped trying to destroy the mutants after deciding instead they represent a new stage of human evolution, quite possibly a form of human who could survive a nuclear war. Moriarty, who loves his child and wants to protect it, tries to warn the babies to stay away from the researchers, which does not endear him to the researchers. No matter, it isn’t long before all the members of the expedition are dead save for Moriarty, who finds himself alone on a boat with four mutant babies. And that’s when things start taking any number of strange turns.

Island of the Alive is also marked by a fantastic opening sequence, in which a woman gives birth in the back of an NYC cab as the cab driver panics about the mess. Or maybe that scene’s just memorable to me because it was shot in an alley behind the building where I used to work.

After the film was wrapped, Cohen packed up his crew and several members of the cast and flew to a small town in Vermont to start shooting the Salem’s Lot sequel, a sequel in name and font alone. Compared with Island of the Alive, A Return to Salems Lot seemed almost an afterthought. Maybe people were just tired after the previous shoot, but the cinematography has all the flat earmarks of a TV film, and the music, usually so rich in a Cohen picture, has been reduced to a cheap, cliched electronic score. Even the actors, apart from Cohen’s usual suspects (like Andrew Duggan), are abrasive at best.

Story’s still good, though. In their fourth and final collaboration, Moriarty is a famed anthropologist whose ex-wife saddles him with his troubled and foul-mouthed teenage son. Not knowing what else to do with the kid, he takes him to Salem’s Lot. Moriarty had visited an aunt there once when he was young, and when she died she left him her (now decrepit) house. It doesn’t take long to figure out the town is home to a colony of vampires.

Cohen’s script plays around quite a bit with the mythology, with the anthropologist being conscripted to write the vampires’ history to set the record straight, but the film is memorable for one reason. Sam Fuller appears for the second half of the film playing, well, Sam Fuller. He’s given a different name of course, and he’s playing a Van Helsing-type vampire hunter, but it’s Sam Fuller all right, as short, gruff, and straightforward as ever, and always chomping on that ever-present cigar. Cohen’s homage to the king of independent filmmakers is the only thing here that lifts the picture above second-tier Cohen fare (which is nevertheless still more interesting than most vampire films made in the last 20 years).

Cohen went on to make another straight thriller and a comedy about witches that turned out to be Bette Davis’ last film before returning to the horror, conspiracies, and New York that always brought out the best in him. It would be the last of the classic Larry Cohen films.

In 1990’s The Ambulance, Eric Roberts plays an enthusiastic young comic book artist working for Marvel (Stan Lee has a few cameos as himself) who sees a young woman on the street and falls immediately and stupidly in love with her. When she collapses to the pavement while they’re talking and an antique ambulance appears out of nowhere to whisk her away, he sets out to find her without even knowing her name.

It sounds like fairly standard romantic comedy material and there’s no denying that’s at play here, but as usual there are a few other genres at work, too, as we learn the drivers of that creepy antique ambulance are making their own victims all over the city.  It’s best to leave the story there and not mention the organ harvesting ring, but the film does include James Earl Jones, Eric Braedon, and a grainy, dirty, street level Manhattan that, even circa 1990, still seems so ancient and alive.

Moving into the later ‘90s and 2000s, as films like his were no longer really viable in a marketplace so fixated on formula and empty pointless characters, Cohen concentrated more on his screenplays, but even if the stories had that old Cohen spark and warp, the films that were made from them tended to be sadly conventional. He was behind Phone Booth, Cellular, Messages Deleted, Captivity, and rewrote his own script for the reboot of It’s Alive.  

He once made the excellent point that B films tended to have a longer lifespan than A films, because it’s the genre pictures that find a new audience every generation. Kids have no idea who Robert Taylor or Greer Garson are anymore, but they will always know Karloff and Lugosi, because people will always be going back to horror films while the big dramas, so important at the time, will fade away.

Cohen made films that weren’t like anything else (except maybe Halloween III). They weren’t aimed at teenagers and they weren’t slasher pictures. They were intelligent, textured, character-based, and they dealt with adult themes. Plus they had monsters in them.

Cohen’s career, as noted above, spanned some fifty years, and fifty years from now, I can almost guarantee no one will remember Titanic or whatever the hell nonsense won a Best Picture Oscar over the past two decades, but they’ll still be watching God Told Me To.

At the time of his death, Cohen left behind dozens of unproduced screenplays. If anyone had seen fit to toss him the funding to make the films he wanted to make, who knows what else he might have left us?

by Jim Knipfel

#Jim Knipfel #Larry Cohen #The Chiseler #It's Alive #The Ambulance #Bone #god told me to #Karen Black #The Stuff #Michael Moriarty

[kookssweetpotatoes-blog]

EUPHORIA // PART 2

~ What will happen when a rising indie pop artist meets her biggest inspirations - seven talented young men - while going through a very hard phase in her life? ~

Note from the author: Please be aware that the relationships between BTS members and any mention of their families are completely fictional. Have fun reading!

/PART 1/     /PART 3/

She thought once she had a long bath with her favourite bath-bomb and relaxed with scented candles, she would feel way better. But she didn't.

Her family still didn't call her, even text her for the past two weeks. Not even to celebrate her nomination on the Top New Artist award.

She was wondering where she had gone wrong the whole time. It has always been like this. Back when she was still going to school, she would get the perfect scores and her family wouldn't give her the smallest praise, as if she was already supposed to be that way. Once she got accepted to the best university at her country, it seemed like they didn't even care at all. That's when she figured whatever she did, they didn't care. She was so wrong.

When she dropped out of university to focus on making music, her mother and her father were furious. They forced her to go and get her degree, forced her to make music professionally and study at the same time or not make music at all. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath once she remembered those terrible days, the days where she was not able to sleep for almost 3 days in a row.

Seems like they didn't change a bit. Not bothering to contact their only daughter who lived overseas, not even when she made her dreams come true.

She dug her nails into her soft skin, thinking maybe she was the one at fault, wanting too much attention. She was nothing special.

And damn, her day didn't help at all. All she wanted to do was to hang out with her best friend who she didn't see in a while but instead the man who she looked up the most, who she loved dearly with her whole heart even before meeting him personally, treated her so cold.

She shook her head and told herself to stop being so dramatic. It's true, he was not very fond of meeting her and anyone could see that, but why would he be at the first place? She was nothing special anyways.

But still something didn't seem right. Jeon Jungkook was known to be such a kind person and he was far from being kind today. Maybe something was bothering him? Maybe he was tired? Or was that sweet personality only for the cameras?

Why would she even care? She must have learned not to expect much from people after all the things she's been through. She got out of the bath and put on a robe quickly. She had to take care of herself and not think much of unnecessary things anymore.

After drying her hair and putting on a comfortable hoodie, she thought getting some fresh air somewhere quite would make her feel better. With that she rushed out of her room, wandering at the halls of the hotel. It didn't take too much time for her to find out the hotel had a huge rooftop. She asked her way around to the hotel staff and climbed the stairs like her life depended on it.

The rooftop seemed empty, which brought a small smile to her lips. Nothing would be better to have the place all to herself and stargaze all night. Her dream was crushed once she heard soft sobs coming from the edge of the rooftop. Looking over where the sound came, she saw a tall man's sillhouette. She wasn't sure if she should approach the man or if she should leave, but before she could decide the man turned towards her and let out a surprised sound.

"I-I didn't know you were here the whole time." As she took closer steps to him, she could recognize the face of the man who spoke. It was Kim Seokjin.

"I'm really sorry. Would you like me to leave? I thought the rooftop would be empty so that's why I came here, you also probably wanted some time alone so..." She stopped once she realized she was talking nonsense.

"Actually, I'd love it if you could stay." Jin patted the spot next to him for her to sit. She slowly sat down, careful not to sit too close to him.

She was surprised he was not ashamed of being walked on while crying, of course it wasn't something to be ashamed of but she couldn't relate to that at all. Still, it was good to see he was confident with himself.

"Hey, can I trust you about something?" Jin suddenly blurted out awkwardly after the long silence between them. She just nodded waiting for him to continue.

"It's kind of a secret so I really can't talk about it to anyone. I also don't want to talk to my brothers about it since all of them have their own worries and they're probably sick of hearing me say the same things again and again. And since you just caught me being pathetic by myself here, I just thought that... you would listen. You seem like an open minded person, someone who wouldn't judge me."

She turned to the man who was trying his hardest to smile but tears visible in his puffy eyes. If listening to him would make him feel better, then she was all ears. She knew how crying all alone and silent felt like, and nobody deserved feeling that way.

"I promise I won't judge at all. Open up to me, I promise you'll feel better once you share your feelings. Keeping them to yourself is not healthy at all." She gave him an encouraging smile to go on.

Jin returned her smile softly. "The thing is I'm in a relationship." He bit his lip almost as if he is not sure how to continue. "It's hard for me to be in a relationship since I'm an idol. Especially hard for me if the relationship doesn't have any future at all."

"Why would you say that?"

"I'm dating a man." Jin took a deep breath after letting the words out of his mouth. He looked like a little child who is apologizing to his mother after doing something wrong. Maybe it was because some people thought same sex relationships are inappropriate but it broke her heart to see him like that. All he did was to love someone and she couldn't see anything wrong with that.

"It's so sad to see people think it's a crime to love someone. To love someone not because of their gender, but to love someone just because they're them. You're a kind soul Jin, and whoever you're dating is very lucky to have you. I believe that love always wins at the end. I won't lie, it's very hard, since you're also an idol. But people will eventually understand that there's nothing disgusting about love, believe me. Just try to live in the moment and be happy with your partner right now. That's all that matters." She touched his shoulder gently.

Jin smiled so brightly she thought she could be blinded any second. "You remind me of Namjoon. Speaking so beautiful and wise." She smiled back at him, feeling glad she could make someone else feel better.

Jin was about to say something when they heard footsteps behind them.

"Jin Hyung, there you are. We were really worried!" She wanted to hide behind Jin after hearing that voice. It was Jeon Jungkook.

"I'm okay thanks to this beautiful young lady here." Jin gave her the warmest smile ever. But Jungkook didn't even look at her direction, almost like she didn't exist. He continued to speak like she wasn't there at all.

"Namjoon Hyung almost lost his mind when he realized you were missing." Jin jumped from his seat when he heard Namjoon's name.

"Namjoon? Really?" He turned to her apologizingly. "I should go see him right now. Thank you for everything, I feel so much more better. You are the kind soul here, believe me. I'll see you tomorrow if that's okay?" She nodded quickly giving him a smile and watched him rush to see Namjoon. She had an idea why he was so eager to see the leader, but she didn't think too much, it wasn't her business after all.

That's when she realized she was left alone with Jungkook. She opened her mouth to say something but all he did was to throw a glance at her and walk away.

That was it. That was what it took to make her cry. She kept it in the whole night but after that sharp glare the young man gave her, she couldn't bear it anymore. It was always like this. She would comfort other people and than she would be left alone. It wasn't Jin's fault though, he wouldn't know. But Jungkook, did he really has to behave this way? She rested her chin on her knees, watching the night sky through her blurred vision.

Everything seemed so stupid. They didn't even talk at all, what could have she done wrong? Why did it seem like he hated her?

That was when she felt something drop on her shoulders. A blanket. She glanced up and saw a face illuminated by the moonlight.

"It's quite cold here at the night." He mumbled while he sat down next to her, his eyes fixed to the sky above them. All she could do was to nod.

She couldn't understand what Jeon Jungkook was up to.

She could feel his eyes travelling on her face, but she didn't have the energy to wipe her tears away. She didn't care if he could see her crying. Maybe that's how Jin felt, she thought to herself.

She flinched when she felt warm fingers on her cold cheek, wiping away the tears.

She glanced at Jungkook, to find an unreadable look in his eyes. She was a person who could understand what people felt or think, and it was the first time she had such a hard time finding out about the person sitting next to her. Almost as hard as finding out about herself.

"I'm waiting." He said to her, his eyes never leaving hers. She gave a confused look, not understanding anything he said.

"I'm waiting for you to tell me what made you this upset." He pointed at her face showing her tears. She didn't want to talk about it at all, how the ones who are supposed to love her the most, her family, didn't even care about her.

Also, she didn't want to talk about how terrible he made her feel the whole day.

But something about him, made it impossible to not obey him. She knew him barely (besides the face he showed to the cameras) and she didn't have to tell him one bit about her life. And yet, she couldn't resist. So she took a deep breath and told him how she felt about her family. Briefly. And didn't mention how he made her feel, obviously.

Jungkook nodded once she finished and turned his face up to the sky. They didn't talk for a while until he spoke up.

"I'm not on the best terms with my family either. I think you should be thankful for what you have." He said these words which such a cold voice she felt guilty again. But it only lasted for 10 seconds.

What she truly felt was rage. How could he be so emotionless about it? She had just opened up to him and all he did was to scold her. Despite the feeling that was burning her heart, she decided not to talk back.

She was too tired.

She just mumbled a 'good night' and left him all alone, his eyes never leaving the night sky.

A bitter smile appeared on his lips when he whispered to himself. "Happy birthday mom."

Happy birthday to his mom whose face he couldn't remember. Happy birthday to his mom who left him when he was still a toddler that knew nothing about life. Happy birthday to the source of his distrust to love.

How he wished a shooting star would appear and tell him why she left.

#bts #jin #kim seokjin #suga #min yoongi #jhope #jung hoseok #rm #kim namjoon #jimin #park jimin #v #kim taehyung #jungkook #jeon jungkook #bts x reader #bts reactions #bts imagines #jungkook x reader #jungkook angst #namjin

[mi4014alishiasmedberg]

Carl Larsson is one of my favourite artists from Sweden his style makes me feel very nostalgic, it is soft in feeling and makes me feel at ease and his focus on Scandinavian scenes eases my home sickness a lot over the years. (it has been 12 years since I went back to my home country, I'm hoping to get back some time soon). My grnadmother has a print of one of his paintings hanging in her living room. He puts a lot of focus of his work on family and this natural life of Sweden that feels so nostalgic. This is why I chose him.

Geoffrey Ernault works in the gaming industry as an environment artist and his work is just so beautifully vibrant, particularly this piece, which I love the blues contrasting to the yellows and the very bright red that almost looks like its glowing. It feels like I've been transported to a fantasy land and yet it still feels real.

Tove Jansson is a Swedish-Finish artist and her work shaped my childhood with her moomin stories and art, including the eventual animation adaptation of her story which a couple of years back got a 3D reboot. This art work I chose features some of the characters and again I love the colours of it, despite being blue dominated it doesn't feel cold, just nostalgic and calm.

For designers the first building is from Poland and I have thought it was so cool since I first was shown it by a friend of mine who likes architecture. I love how wavy it is, it's unusual, almost like surrealism but architecture or someone took the photoshop liquid tool to a regular building. I'm really curious on how the windows were done in the middle.

The sculpture is of a dragon, it was part of a festival or exhibit in Sundsvall (the district I used to live in) I couldn't find many photos of them unfortunately. I remember as a child running around the city and spotting all these different interesting dragon sculpture designs and I'd go up and look at them and touch them, I was like that one friend everyone has that when they spot a dog just HAS to go over and pet it, except I was doing it for inanimate objects so that's arguably sadder. I just think it was a really cool idea of this artist to have all these unique dragons hiding all over the place. I unfortunately couldn't find the name of the artist who made them.

The last one is a college building in Sundsvall, I love the design of it, the water surrounding it plus it being a cylinder shape rather than a cubic shape is a simple design choice but it feels so different and unique especially when buildings around it are all cuboids.

Osamu Dazai - No Longer Human

"People talk of "social outcasts." The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness."

I really love this book in general, it's a highly recommended read for me, if you get the chance. He has an interesting view and he expresses it so beautifully, I feel a connection to his words in a way. He's a interesting figure. This quote in particular speaks to me, I have lived a life of always being different to what is pushed as the societal norm, neurodivergency, my sexuality and gender identity and certainly being an immigrant. After years of training my accent I can go stealth in the UK as sounding very Irish, this came from xenophobia I experienced, training to sound less Swedish, less foreign. I have noticed that the vast majority of the friends I make tend to be 1st or 2nd generation immigrants like me, its not that I consciously seek them out, it just happens, like we magnetise to each other through that shared experience. I feel a strong sense of solidarity with others who do not fit the societal norm, the outcasts.

Yusuke Kishi - Shinsekai Yori

"The power of imagination is what changes everything."

I love this story, it was adapted into a really good and interesting animated series Shinsekai Yori or From The New World. It deals with a lot of heavy issues but does it so stunningly. Definitely recommended to binge watch although it's very dialogue heavy and it's important to pay attention to that dialogue ir you can get confused so something to bear in mind! Imagination does power everything, entertainment, our views of ourselves and others, how governments/countries are run, science, engineering, design, fashion, art, etc, etc it's not hard to argue that every facet of our lives has been from someone's imagination at one point in time that has become reality. Using imagination we can imagine what a world could be like without oppressive policies, how things could look like if we changed the way things currently are. A world where we are free, where we live in harmony with the nature around us, where we help each other, where we do not hate each other for superficial reasons, where we are free.

Astrid Lindgren - Ronja Rövardotter

"Yes, she was lonely, but she missed no one in particular. Whom could she miss? Her days were full of life and pleasure, but they passed so quickly."

Astrid Lindgren is to this day one of the most influential novelists from Sweden, she wrote children's literature but her stories are enjoyable to any age, including adults. Ronja Rövardotter is perhaps a bit of a spin on the story of Romeo and Juliet, both main characters come from two clans who hate each other, however it is a story of platonic friendship between a girl and a boy and I really like that, that it doesn't reduce Ronja to just being another story about a girl in love and instead she is written the way boys are written in kid's stories. Astrid Lindgren always treats children as intelligent beings, she doesn't dumb things down and didn't ever shy away from darker subject matters like death for example. It's no wonder so many of her works have been adapted to film. This quote relates to my own feelings, lonely but not missing anyone, homesick yet at home. It's an odd feeling. Sometimes even when your days are full of bliss the days pass so quickly and you wonder deep down if it will last, it's like you are missing a feeling that has yet to even end.

[najatheangel]

Hello! I saw some of the ships youre doing, and thought they were fantastic. I was wondering if I could request a date with BTS ship? I'm quiet until I get to know someone, but then I open up, and can be very funny and sarcastic. Im usually the mom friend, and I've been told I have a very calming presence, as well as give great advice, but I also love to joke around, and be playful. My ideal type is usually someone good at communication, but who knows when to let loose, and when to be serious. Someone I can have a conversation with, but also tease. I also need someone who I can trust, and can help me calm down, as I have an anxiety disorder. I'm sorry this is getting so long, I tend to ramble. I'm very cuddly, and like affection but understand when people don't. Ideally for a date, id honestly be fine with anything, but I love being outside, or watching movies, or listening to music. Id honestly just want something where we could have fun, but can still talk and get to know each other. If possible could it end with some slight smut/ fluff? I hope you're having an absolutely amazing day, and are doing well!

Hello my dear, thanks so much for telling me about yourself, I think I know exactly who I’m going to ship you you with. Your so patient, here’s your ship...

The member your going on a date with is...Taehyung

His outfit for the date: 

Your outfit for the date: 

How it all started: You’ve just bought your record player for you and your roommate to share for her 21st birthday and you were on a trip to buy some new songs to play on the record player. Your roommate was out with her boyfriend as usual which really annoys you sometimes when she has him over 3x a day having their boom boom sessions in her room every night.

You just needed a break and you preferred to spend some quality time alone shopping or walking around the beautiful city of Hong Kong admiring the scenery. Another part of you wanted to meet a special someone sometime soon. After finishing school, moving to a different country and have a small friend circle, but one thing was missing, a love interest to keep you company.

You’ve entered the local record store that was five minutes away from your apartment and the smile on your face creeped immediately when you saw that they still had your favorite artist records still in stock. You’ve ended up noticing one of your neighbors that have recently moved in walking around the store tapping his feet along the music in the store, which made you pause and stare at him with heart eyes. The neighbor’s name, you guessed it...Kim Taehyung.

He first moved in next door with his 6 other roommates to focus on his music career in South Korea with his band Bts. Your crush on him didn’t blossom until your roommate invited him over one time (since she’s dating Jeon Jungkook) to pick up her boyfriend since he was too drunk off his ass to leave. He noticed you and smiled while carrying his tired friend next door saying “I’m so sorry about him. He partied a little too hard huh?” Ever since he noticed you that day, you both would only exchange smiles and “hello” and “good nights” to each other.

After keeping your head in the clouds daydreaming about that memory, you’ve snapped out of it immediately once you noticed his hand touching yours holding the same record you were going to purchase.

Y/N: Oh my god, I’m sorry about that, you can have it. Smiles blushing handing the record to him.

Taehyung: smirks. Oh that’s alright, I was just looking anyway. I didn’t know you listen to Labrinth? His new album was amazing wasn’t it? Looks at you speechless and then looks to the side coughing. Well it was nice bumping into you here, see you around y/n...

“He’s so gorgeous, it’s now or never girl”. Those were your friends words whispering in your head. You were nervous shaking in your boots, but you knew it was time to make moves. All of a sudden your body moved on it’s own holding on to the sleeve of his jacket and he turned around immediately with wide eyes.

Taehyung: What’s wrong y/n? You can have the cd if you want, I know how much you love him..

Y/N: No no, that’s alright. Actually clears throat. I was wondering if you wanted to share that cd with me at my place and we can listen to it together?

Taehyung: Oh, actually that sounds like fun. While we’re at it, let’s eat something before we head there. Offers you to link your arm with him. Oh and don’t worry about buying that, my treat.

Y/N: Giggles linking arms with him walking towards the register. Wow if I knew this was this easy, I would’ve done this a long time ago.

The date spots: Street Food Market/Apartment

Street Food Market: After a long day of browsing in the music store, what a way to start the night with walking around trying new foods at the street food market.

Taehyung was holding your hand like it felt natural. You weren’t the best with crowds so he allowed you to cling close to him as much as possible. He preferred it that way, because little did you know, he formed a little crush on you too.

For the main course you guys taste tested different Korean BBQ and tebokki from different food stands. A lot of people were giving packs of meat out for free, because ya know He’s V from Bts.

Market Lady 1: Here my dear just take it. I appreciate all the music you’ve made it changed my life.

Market Lady Husband: Share with the special lady too, she deserves it. Here’s some veggie wraps too and cook a good meal together.

You and Taehyung look at each other flustered, but you just decided to take their offer and take some free food home.

You guys even shared some donuts together couple feeding each other. A lot of people around the market admired you two together and were hyping you up in the background.

Y/N: Taehyung, say ahh. Attempts to feed him, but teases him by biting it. Mmmm.

Taehyung: Ohh so it’s like that. Crossing his arms fake pouting. Tears the big piece of the other end of the donut eating the whole thing with cheeks stuffed. Laughs uncontrollably.

After chasing him for almost an hour around the street for that donut, you both decide to do your shopping at one more store to get matching glasses. You decide to take some mirror couple like pictures with Tae on to send to your roommate messing around.

First few pictures were cute and friendly, but the last few got flirty really fast. You and Taehyung started looking at each other completely forgetting what’s around you and starts leaning in sharing a short, but sweet kiss.

Y/N: I can’t believe you kissed me! Holding your cheeks together looking at the mirror, but Taehyung of all a sudden turns you around to face him with a serious look on your face.

Taehyung: I have to tell you something, but it has to be back at the dorm. Starts winking at you and walks out the store holding your hand all cool.

Your Apartment: Taehyung on way home has been quiet, but very cuddly against you. You didn’t exactly know what to say either after he left you speechless in the store.

You unlocked the door and immediately set down your bags putting the food in the fridge and playing the new Labrinth album on the record player.

He was leaning on the couch looking at you just in awe as you do your little dance dance to the music. He licks his lips as the tension gets thicker.

Y/N: Didn’t you have something to tell me? Your getting a little off track... Sits next to him on the couch putting your hand on his thigh.

Taehyung: chuckles Oh yeah that’s right. Instead of telling you, why don’t I just show you.

He stands up all of a sudden switching the cd on the record player to a song that he has been working on and playing it off the record player singing it to you.

He lifts your body off the couch slow dancing with you as the song almost ends. The last lyrics hit you and you start shedding tears.

You learned that all along Taehyung has had a crush on you too and have been waiting for the right moment to spend time with you. His says last words before you give him your answer.

Taehyung: Y/N, will you be my girlfriend?

Y/N: Stands on your tippy toes kissing him romantically. Yes yes 1000x yes.

The kisses slowly turn from soft to sexy real fast. He pushes you against the wall in your room sliding his hands under your shirt.

Y/N: W-wait. Let’s close the door just in case.

Taehyung: continues multitasking by kissing you and kickstart the door closed by blocking out all the noises.

Aftermath: As expected you and Taehyung tied the knot last night and he ended up laying next to you holding you on his arms. All of a sudden you hear a knock at the door and two voices of your roommate and Jungkook saying...

Roomate Jamie: Heyy y/n it’s time to get up, it’s Saturday let’s go out to eat.

She knocked two times, three times, but still no answer.

Jungkook: Jamie let’s just open the door and wake her up.

Jamie opens the door and slides the cover off your body and has the most shock look on her face when she sees Taehyung playing with your hair.

Jamie: When in the hell did this happen? Baby come in here and look at these two.

After hours of explaining how you and Taehyung ended up together, both Jamie and Jungkook screams “Finallyyy” and giggles looking at the both of you so proud.

Jungkook: So now that you both finally made it official, why don’t we start our double date today? Pats Taehyung’s back.

Taehyung: Only if my sweetheart is okay with it. Looks at you holding your hand caressing it.

Everyone looks at you anc you nod smiling. Your friends squeal all excited and hugs each other.

Jamie: Ummm, and put some clothes on you freaky little lambs. Sticks her tongue out at you.

You throw the pillow at her as she walks out the room with Jungkook leaning her head on his shoulder.

Taehyung looks at you lovingly smiling like a precious angel. All of a sudden he tickles you and gives you one last soft kiss on the lips.

Taehyung: We seriously gotta get up, they’ll get made if we’re late. Let’s take a shower together to make this faster. Wiggled his eyebrows jokingly and you hit his chest laughing.

Y/N: Fine, but you better not try to pull anything while we’re in there. Five minutes...

You both get up chasing each other in your room as he grabs your clothes and you both played with each other until it was time to go.

@kim-jias-den Thanks so much for requesting my dear. I think I’m going to go rest my hands now lol, but I hope you enjoyed this ship. ✨✨💖💖

#submission #kpop ships #idol date ship #date with an angel #date scenario #bts ship #bts fluff #Bts slight smut #Bts #Taehyung #date with idol ship