the bittersweet between my teeth - chapter two
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Call it chance or fate or some kind of hot girl radar, but the second Ava checks the clock on the wall and sees it strike ten, the bell over the door jingles and she twists to see Beatrice step inside.
She looks incredible. A blue shirt with big, puffy sleeves and black slacks. Her hair is tied up again, though this time the hair bun has zero escapees.
Ava is frozen in the middle of the cafe, watching Beatrice smile at someone sitting at a table near the door. Ava gave them their coffee, they must be a regular.
Beatrice moves further into the cafe, Ava watches her but tries her hardest to be subtle about it. She has a steady pace, a straight back and when she passes by, Ava takes in her delightfully good looking butt.
Okay so yeah, Ava is crushing. Beatrice has this…presence about her. Yesterday she was just this girl at the table, cute and a little nerdy, with freckles Ava wanted to kiss.
Now, she’s a whole person. She moves and breathes and each step has Ava wondering what she might be capable of. The way she slides past a few people making their way out, flowing away from a collision like water, not breaking stride or dropping her bag off her shoulders.
When she reaches the counter, she says something to Lilith who nods and answers her. Ava can't hear them, but she’s busy enough studying the way Beatrice’s hair tied up behind her head bounces up and down when she talks.
She wonders what it might look like cascading around her shoulders, or haloed out on a pillow on Ava’s bed.
CONT on AO3
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I decided for fun to show my dad (iranian and muslim) the stuff about the crob update and ask for his thoughts and the fact that he wasn't offended by it either had me convinced that the outrage it's been getting has been primarily by people who aren't middle eastern or muslim
btw I have the screenshots:
I'll update when I ask my mom for her thoughts too but for now: please, don't just throw around terms like that at innocent things, you only end up weakening their impact and people will take you less seriously when something actually offensive shows its ugly head
edit: got one reblog in fudging December and like Can we please move on this stuff is long over I just want to enjoy the funny centipede lady that I kinda kin and tbh I was a bit TOO defensive during this but I still feel like people didn't handle this well like this is basically just like. If you feel the need to boycott the entirety of cookie run for just one update but can be an encanto fan despite Aladdin also being a Disney movie (and being worse than the Yogurca stuff in my opinion) as well as being made by westerners while CR is an eastern game (albeit Korean specifically and not like Middle eastern) then like. I question your priorities and why you're being harder on this game. I guess. Idk maybe I'm just an idiot I'm not some big media analysis expert (but I do have my own problems with Yogurca as a setting don't get me wrong I didn't really talk about this much but. Like I'm never gonna try to claim it's perfect I just don't think it's unsalvageable or that anyone who likes the characters is bad)
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yin and yang, chapter 4, “Adrien somehow made it through the whole day.”
Adrien somehow made it through the whole day. Marinette had never shown up. He had texted her, but she hadn’t responded yet. He tried not to panic.
“Do you think she’s okay?” Adrien asked Tikki.
Tikki smiled warmly. “I’m certain that if she wasn’t, you’d be the first person she would call.”
He let out a sigh of relief. Tikki was right. He normally got pulled from class for a day for all sorts of reasons. There was no reason to freak out.
But he missed her. Her presence had a way of soothing his anxiety if only because she could give him hints through every interaction.
He slipped through the doors of the bakery. Marinette’s mother was at the front and smiled at him brightly. Something in his chest squirmed. Marinette’s parents were so nice.
“Hey sweetie! How was school?”
“It was great!” Adrien assured her with a smile, but Sabine’s smile actually faltered. “Come here, Xīngān.”
Adrien stepped around the counter, every muscle locked in tension as his heart pounded in his chest, once again completely uncertain as to what he did wrong.
Sabine’s arms wrapped around him and pulled him into a hug. “You don’t have to pretend, you know. Not when you’re at home.”
“Pretend?” he echoed. Had Sabine already figured him out? He didn’t think so. She was holding him and referring to him by the sweetest of Mandarin nicknames. She wouldn’t do that if she knew.
“Pretend that you’re okay,” she said, like it was obvious.
Adrien didn’t know what to say. What was she asking him to do? Break down into tears in her arms or whine about his day?
Neither would have been tolerated by his father.
She was stroking his hair, and he finally felt himself melt into her embrace. “I know, m-maman,” he said, trying hard not to stumble over the familial title and failing. After a week, it hadn’t gotten any easier. “I’m just tired.”
Sabine nodded. “Well, if you want to take a nap, I’m sure your papa would understand.”
“What?”
“It’s Wednesday! Did you forget?”
“I guess I just lost track of the days. He’s in the back?” Adrien pointed towards the bakery.
Sabine smiled. “As always,” she said. She kissed his forehead. “Have fun, okay?”
Adrien entered the back room of the bakery with only a little trepidation. Sabine has just told him to have fun, so it couldn’t be anything bad, right? Was this an every Wednesday thing that Marinette had forgotten to mention? Or a this Wednesday thing? Marinette didn’t have a calendar telling him where to be and when.
He was rapidly discovering that he didn’t know what to do with himself and all the unstructured time.
Tom’s whole face lit up when Adrien entered. It was surreal. Adrien’s father never looked at him with such open joy.
“There you are, cupcake! How was your day?”
“It was fine,” Adrien said. Tom was in the middle of decorating cookies and there was obviously a spot right next to him, waiting for Marinette to fill.
At some point, I had read an article about people who grow up in abusive dynamics - where a lot of the time they actually have a hard time in healthy relationships because their brain doesn't believe that it's real. They're actually more stressed out because they're waiting for the other shoe to drop at all times and when it doesn't, that just puts them even more on edge. I was trying to capture a little bit of that dynamic in Adrien's interactions with Marinette's parents.
He's always ready for his father to start in on the criticism, he's bracing himself for it at all times. So when he's Marinette with her parents he's still expecting that to happen at some point. That he's going to make a mistake at some point and they'll come down on him hard. This is all exacerbated by the fact that he's trying to pretend to be Marinette at the same time and is nervous about them figuring out that he's not.
Then it's all made just a little bit more stressful by the fact that his own mother is not around, and so just addressing anyone as mom brings all that up for him. And that in some ways, this is what Adrien wishes his family life was like. So he wants it, craves it, but is also terrified of stealing it from Marinette.
...
Director's Ask Game if you want me to do another scene/snippet from any of my fics!
Link to the fic if you want to keep reading! Haha!
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