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unperceivable-future · 10 months

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Repetitions and Branching Off

Hawks/Keigo Takami x Reader.

Content warning: ANGST? references of mental illness including symptoms of psychosis, self-mutilation. Usage of AFAB pronouns. Usage of "angel" as petname. Not proof-read (and English is not really my first language) and more on waffling to cope.

Synopsis: Keigo trying to be a kind (ex)boyfriend.

Note: I don't know, I mentally checked out and came back to this. This made more sense in my head.

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Perhaps this was a mistake. There has to be a turning point in Keigo's life where he should have been smarter, wiser and chose the better option.

His phone buzzes yet again. Another message, another rambling that makes sense to nobody but her. Well, it sort of makes sense to Keigo. He's heard her ramble about it, ranting and throwing her hands around in frustration, sometimes in excitement but mostly in worry too. He glances at the notification banner on his lockscreen.

"They are parko..." parkouring by the closet, in my room. Keigo does not need to unlock his phone to read the whole message. The sentence tends to end one way or the other: the cats are parkouring by the closet or the cats are parkouring in my room.

She often thinks the cats are cute. Spooky but all cats are cute.

He continues to fly in the direction of her home, her little rotting pod as she calls it nowadays. He takes his time, both mentally preparing himself on what to say and how to compose himself. It never gets easier and he wishes he made the right choice during that one moment where the story branched off.

Keigo was never a caregiver. He can only fend for himself, he could not even save his own parents. He wished he could though.

He wishes that he is mentally sound, mentally safe and mentally sane. Maybe he could help his drowning loved ones instead of being passive, instead of letting them slip through the cracks of his fingers like rainwater when he would cup his hands out when he stands under the storm.

He sees the roof of her house and makes a touchdown, preparing himself for the worst case scenario. First he truly wishes that she hasn't snapped and skedaddled to the afterlife, second he sincerely wishes to turn back time---before the story branched off.

Before he agreed that they were better off as friends and not lovers. It made it easier for him to keep track of her because she felt more obliged to open up. Now she runs rampant like the cats that plague her home, no longer find it necessary to give him an update of her life.

"Angel?" Keigo does not knock, he simply sends a feather through the mail slot of his ex-girlfriend's front door and unlocks it to let himself in.

"I used a feather to let myself in!" He calls out from the landing, he hopes that the sentence is long enough to not fuck with her head, that his sentence was not a figment of her imagination.

"Keigo...?" His best friend's voice quietly inquires, it comes from her bedroom. The ground zero of it all.

Keigo makes his way inside and no matter how many times, the sight never gets easier.

"Angel..." There goes his angel, sitting in the middle of her room swallowed in her thick duvet with her forehead slumped against her desk chair. Keigo does not waste time, he pulls her duvet off her as if ripping off bandages. He needs to assess the damages.

"I think I did good." She mumbles, her voice flat and nonchalant. Keigo gently pulls her arms, pushing her pyjama shorts up inspecting her usual sites.

Words scribbled in markers. Some were intelligible, others were repetitions and others were smudged and scratched out by her inked-stained nails. Her arms and thighs look like those paper notes you'd sneakily pass between you and your friends in class.

'no'

'spooked'

'uh oh'

'no'

'clean'

'stop'

':('

'okay'

'go away'

'ok'

'no'

'scary'

'scry'

'clean'

'theyre clean'

Keigo is not necessarily a massive guy, though his hands make people feel as if he is. He wrap his warm hands around her ink-stained arms, he makes note of how her non-dominant arm is throbbing. The wave isn't over yet.

He wants to quickly pull her into a warm embrace, a part of him wanting to just smother her with his love and pray it cures her but it is never that easy. So he pulls her slowly and gently, trying to swallow down the flinch from how empty her eyes look and how much she stank of hair grease and musk.

"You should have called me sooner." Keigo chides her quietly as he grounds her back to Earth.

"I thought he had me bugged." She retorts and Keigo wants to remind her that the prime minister of Japan is too busy to be personally stalking her and that there is no reason for the prime minister to have a vendetta against her but it is futile but he knows that on clearer days she knows this. But right now it is not that day.

She flinches, her eyes darting to the crevice under her bed.

"There's nothing there." Keigo reminds her that there are no black cats. There are no white cats either. No garden gnomes, no dogs and no children running around her home.

"I'm sorry Keigo." She apologises for taking his precious time, for putting more onto his plate. She wants to cry but there are no tears. In her head she is grief-stricken that she dragged him down with her but her body has nothing to give only flat-voiced mumblings that makes her sound like a careless asshole who is simply apologising for the sake of getting it over with. But Keigo has learned to understand, he gets it. The whole emotionally shutting down response that the body can put you through.

"You can't be sorry over something you can't control." At some point gets her to sit down on her bed, taking over her aggressive scrubbing on her skin with a damp towel in favour of gentler rubbing to remove the scribbles on her flesh.

"The doctor keeps, the doctor keeps saying that I cannot be manic. Otherwise I wouldn't have known that I was manic." She explains to Keigo. She explains this to him many times why she seems to be stuck in this cycle.

"Well your doctor is a dickhead and you need to change to a better one." He replies as his brow twitches in irritation.

"Do you want me to call you a new doctor?" He asks. It's the same conversation every few weeks, the same doctor she sticks around with despite how unheard she felt, despite how her concerns with her medicine is shrugged off.

"I...I'll do it, I promise. I'll call them this time." She vows but Keigo knows this will unlikely happen. He holds her now damped arms, her non-dominant arm still throbbing. Sometimes he wonders if psychiatrists actually acknowledged the physiological effects of wanting to damage your own body. He knows hers doesn't.

"Sleep first." Keigo suggests. It does not matter if she has not slept for more than three hours or if she has slept for sixteen hours.

He likes to think that sleeping can help her reset somehow, that she will wake up feeling a little bit better and a little bit more present. Besides, she tends to always be exhausted after...an episode.

"Will you be here tomorrow?" She asks as Keigo helps her get tucked into bed. He joins her to her bed like he used to, holding her close after turning off the nightstand lamp and ignoring how she does not feel or smell like his pretty ex-girlfriend that was so well taken care of.

"Tomorrow, we'll get you a better doctor. Tonight, we sleep." He reassures her in the darkness of her room, in the ground zero of it all.

#bnha hawks x reader #keigo takami x reader #hawks x reader #bnha hawks #bnha keigo takami x reader

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astaroth1357 · 3 years

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Who I Am + Blog Updates

This is just going to be me rambling about myself for a hot second. If you're only interested in what's happening to the blog, read below the cut.

Me:

First, I'd like to say to anyone worried that I'm doing much better. My appetite is returning steadily and I've been able to eat again. The nausea has died down so things are all staying down like they should.

In my time away from Tumblr, I've had a lot of time to think, dissect what happened, and parse out my feelings... It’s been enough time for me to build up the courage to say some things about who I am and why all of this hurt me so much more than I think it should have...

I mentioned here before that I have a degree in Religion, which is true, but my second degree is in Political Science. I minored in Legal Studies as well as Peace and Conflict. I'm gearing my life towards combating the use of the judicial system to mandate matters of religious belief. I feel such attempts have been unfairly targeted at the LGBT+ community and are also a miscarriage of free practice to the thousands of non-religious people or people of different faiths in my country.

But I also don't wish to be hostile to religion. Though I don't often agree with the issues they raise, I understand that the religious feel their concerns genuinely. I want to be able to mediate their fears with the social reality of the world around them so that maybe they can find less harmful or exclusionary ways to still maintain their beliefs and their strive for their ideal afterlife.

This last point is very difficult, but I think is important. So much demonization gets thrown around everywhere now and that approach is unproductive... Change happens best and is more lasting when primed with empathy and understanding. I've read the research behind this and seen it to be true with my own eyes. But you don't get there without knowledge, compassion, and trust...

This is who I am and who I want to continue to be. These past few days have been a real challenge to that... It felt like some in the very community that I want to defend had turned on me and it hurt far deeper than I would have expected it to... I've made mistakes that I deeply regret and wish that I could take back, but I've also held to my convictions. In the end, I think I would be betraying far more than just myself if I went back on those. And after much thought, I've made peace with that... I don't hold any ill will against anyone and I will continue on my path to do what I think is right.

Going Forward:

What this has taught me, though, is that I think I need to disengage from the community... for mental health's sake. I saw things being said about me, some by creators that I deeply respect and still admire, and I won't lie that it hurt quite a lot... I've rarely felt as powerless as I did then... It felt like my actual thoughts weren't cared about and it put some things into perspective for me...

I'm here to write. That's what I started this blog for, at the end of the day that's all this blog needs to be. That can continue without "me" there, if that makes sense. It was an experiment for me to try to be more open and engage with others to start with, and in all honesty, it's never felt all that natural anyway...

I'll continue to write and post my HCs here through my queue but my actual personal engagement will decrease quite a bit. I'll keep the ask box on for right now, but it will only function in a suggestion capacity. No Q&A, requests, or responses. You'll also likely see a lot less of me posting about my life, thoughts, and experiences or responding to others. My blog is still mine, there'll just be a lot less "me" in it.

I don't take this as a sad thing. In actuality, it's like a missing aspect of my creativity has come back to me! I feel as if I'm writing without an audience again, which was the happiest point I'd ever been while creating content here... Just letting my ideas flow freely, no schedule or pressure to make it enjoyable to anyone but myself. That's all this needs to be and I'm glad to be returning to it.

Don't worry, the content will still be there and more will come in the future, but now I go at my own pace and follow whatever ideas that I want to do. I want to thank everyone for the love they've given me, parting even partially is still bittersweet, but I'm excited for what may come in the future.

Thank you all. Truly. 😊

#obey me #blog behind the scenes #update #moving forward

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ms-demeanor · 4 years

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What makes you believe the idea that god doesn’t exist? I was spiritually abused growing up and as a result have become very anti Christianity but I consider myself agnostic because I can’t quite make up my mind as to whether or not god exists at all in the first place. I think you you’re good at expressing your thoughts so I figured I’d ask and maybe it’d help me come to terms with what I do or don’t believe myself.

I’m sorry about the abuse you dealt with. That’s terrible and I hope you’re in a safer place now.

I’ve just never been presented with evidence compelling enough to make me believe that gods exist. Anything that people have presented to me as proof of a god or gods seems at best like philosophy with no grounding in reality and more frequently like grasping at straws.

My catholic godmother liked to argue that a single eyeball was too complicated to evolve alone, isn’t that proof enough that things must have been made, not evolved, and that always seemed remarkably silly because you can watch generations of bacteria go through tremendous evolutionary changes in real time so with *four point five billion years* of course very complicated things could evolve.

Almost everything that people point at that is seen as spiritual or supernatural has some perfectly mundane, reasonable, usually scientific explanation so it seems like MUCH more of a leap to believe there’s an ineffible spirit illuminating humans that carries on to an afterlife that we’ve got no way of testing for or exploring and no trustworthy accounts of even from people who have temporarily died than it is to simply believe that we’re alive and when we die that’s it, we’re gone, we end like trees and rabbits and stars do, no further magic or mystery than that.

Also people describe their religious miracles to me - eight nights of light, transubstantiation, rising on the third day, floating through focused meditation - and it all feels like hearing about the labors of Hercules. Neat. A cool story. Pleasant if it helps someone find meaning.

And utterly impossible to literally prove or verify.

And I really, honestly do not begrudge people for believing in these things, and I was not joking when I mentioned my friends who literally believe in the Norse pantheon - I don’t begrudge them and I don’t begrudge modern Hellenist practitioners or witches or what have you. That’s all fine. So long as the beliefs don’t hurt people then I don’t have anything to say against them.

(And before we get into it with atheism: yeah, atheist states that subjugate religious minorities DO exist and I think they should stop sending their Muslim population to reeducation camps and should stop persecuting their christians and should stop imprisoning people for political speech)

But I really don’t have a good, compelling argument for you because I don’t feel the need to prove a negative. I’ve never seen any positive evidence that would prove the existence of the supernatural and until I see such a thing I’ve got no need or desire to update my position.

These are literally all just stories to me. A lot of them are beautiful stories, all of them are culturally relevant to someone, many of them are important in ways that I see as good and many of them are important in ways that I see as harmful.

My mother in law likes to tell me about miracles all the time. “And then, even though no one thought it was possible, the little boy walked off the stage.” “And then the woman who had prayed to the saint was cured of her illness.” “And then the little girl came back from the dead and said that she was surrounded by a white light and the love of christ.”

Those. Those sure are stories. I’m glad if they help comfort her, I wish she’d stop telling me that me and my partner would be healed of our illnesses if we’d just go to church because it is harmful to hear that you’re sick or chronically ill or in pain because you just don’t believe enough or you don’t believe the right way.

I know it’s a lot harder to walk away from a faith you were raised in. I know that you were taught miracles as miraculous and were presented with these stories as self-evident, but if you find yourself asking how it’s possible to NOT believe these things I’d say to play with that thought a little. Ask yourself why you DO believe these things. Ask yourself if someone came to you with a claim that no, that wasn’t a flood the god of Abraham wrought, it was pralaya and the destruction of the lower ten realms, if you’d believe that and why or why not (deluge myths are an interesting way to play with this concept because so many cultures have them).

My grandfather was a magician from the 1930s until the 1990s. Sometimes I feel like that explains a lot about my worldview, sometimes I feel like it explains nothing at all. But what it meant to me is that I grew up knowing that magic was something that people could make. You could make people believe a lot of things with thread and mirrors and silk scarves, so if you wanted to know if something was REALLY real, you had to poke it and prod it and ask it a lot of questions and look at it from different angles.

The supernatural doesn’t really stand up to that scrutiny. You poke it and it falls over, you look from a different angle and you see the plywood behind the mirror.

And in spite of all of that I do believe that people in general are good and courageous and wonderful. There are miracles that I *do* believe in but they’re all the very mundane, provable kind. I believe in the RMS Carpathia shutting down hot water to the ship to make it to the survivors of the Titanic just a little faster. I believe in people leaving water in the Arizona desert to help people trying to find their way to someplace safe. I believe in divers swimming in the dark to save some little boys in a cave. I believe in Jonas Salk saying the patent of the polio vaccine belonged to the people because you wouldn’t try to patent the sun. I believe in handing out sandwiches in the park and helping your neighbors.

Laying on hands to heal the sick is a nice story. Doing all that you can to help the people around you is a miracle. And I don’t really need the nice story if I’ve got that.

#atheism discourse

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volfoss · 3 years

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ships to rate: bruabba and gyjo? maybe even yasugap if you're up for it

ok ur about to see such a long post its nto even gonna be funny, tldr i love them all

also gonna put a fic i really like for them if ive read one/ a fic idea i wanna write plus maybe ranting, this is not coherent but my spelling isnt too bad

post under cut bc its very long

Bruabba:

my loves my lifes

they r so soft for each other

the fucking rain scene when bruno extends his umbrella

and how bruno is like trying to hold back his emotions post abba dying

in case its not super obvious by the sheer volume of bruabba content i reblog this is one of my otps

ALSO the fucking boat scene where abba pretty much is like yeah ur home bruno

ajdskjghdsgjk

hc that they r meeting up in the afterlife w nara and having a good time (also read a phenomenal fic about it that ill link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33118039 it is emotionally fucking me up days later <3)

dads dads dads but bruno is the caring dad that just gets you and takes care of you in the most gentle way and will sacrifice himself over and over again to see u happy and abba is the sitting in the armchair and u sneak in like 2 minutes past ur curfew ur busted but i was also worried about you

these two men own my whole heart (also my ao3 history i exclusively am reading bruabba and dadbacchio)

i have so so many thoughts toward them like yeah i just love them so much

i will never ever not write them as in love

t4t and bi4bi

every single canon thing about them makes me so soft but i think what makes me softest is just how its so clear that they rely on each other in situations

fanon interpretation rant rq:

but how some ppl really interpret them so ooc that its just like bruno mommy and abba cares about literally none of their kids (explanation on the mommy thing is bc most of things that do that are weird bc they really r treating bruno like a single parent who is raising the gang on his own and thats all when abba is literally there and caring about ppl (ie the purple haze incident w giorno, like he wasnt the most nice in his wording but why else would he be like hi move away from the danger if he didnt care??)

ppl also just tend to not really do the separation between how abba acts around others and how he acts towards bruno and has him being kinda aggressive towards him for literally no reason when they r literally so soft w each other

and also they r both so fucking pretty and i am in love with them both

if i think about them too long i will combust and i am blaming u solely for that one

ship dynamic of savior x savior bc they both really did save each other and i love them sm

fic ideas for them r they both live and leave passione and take their kids w them <3 (gang would crumble but thats not my problem)

ok also another hc that i have for them is that bruno will buy larger sweaters and wear them and give them to abba if hes having a rough time, they have a shared closet imo

10/10 ship

Gyjo:

OK OK OK

FEELINGS ON MAX

these guys r also my beloved but in a depressed x very happy but hiding depression way

the the fuckingn way that gyro ltierally risks everything in the ringo roadagain fight to save jognny

and the way that johnny is literally fucking broken post gyro persiheing and adopts his speech pattern a bit and ugh

I am obsessed w gyjo but i think the funniest crack ship is poly but w diego and they all fucking suffer (fic that sold me on that: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22887796/chapters/54705517)

i cannot find the one fic that i really loved for them but needless to say i am soft w them living and just being together

update i found it: its a modern au and really really sweet! https://archiveofourown.org/works/31821940/chapters/78780595

one day ill actually write the fic idea i had for them which was basically they live and they dont sell the land they got from the sugar mountain arc and johnny wanted to start somewhere fresh anyways and gyro adopts marco and they make a lil log cabin and have a nice rest of their lives

i am a massive sucker for their ship

ALSO how johnny is always laughing at gyros jokes

smth i wish we got more of in canon were those moments where they just chilled and talked and had those kinda interactions

fandom complaining time!! the fucking way that some ppl just really take the gyro funny and johnny submissive trope is like my biggest pet peeve. did they not read sbr?? did they not see the multiple times that johnny has murdery eyes? i think personally its ppl infantilizing him a lot and it makes me really frustrated

ok also a fic that really really fills me desire for a they all live and everyone is happy is this one: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22812394

i love them sm but unfortunately cannot have coherent thoughts about them :(

10/10 ship

Yasugap:

gonna start this out w saying i did mildly speedread through jojolion so i dont have as many big screamy thoughts

BUT!!! them!!!!!

their canon interactions r the cutest thing and even if they werent, id ship it solely to spite joshu

josuke is a million trillion times better for yasuho (not just bc of how joshu is a fucking freak and is absolutely the worst i would run him over with a dump truck)

i really like how they both r so happy around each other but i think my favorite scene w them is when yasuho has to explain to josuke that hes crying and hes just like :') yeah

but they have so so many cute moments and the ending makes them the only couple to make it out of this list

i love how yasuho is just like willing to drop anything to help him and how they help each other out a lot during the whole time (if im remembering right?)

their dynamic is just 2 sweethearts

also love the moment that hes like look away yasuho :) then proceeds to beat a man up

they r canon (as is everyone else sorry <3)

i dont read a lot of part 8 fic since i need to reread it to properly understand the plot post like chapter 65? so i dont have any recs or complaints

BUT i do have a few hcs!!

i think yasuho would get josuke matching phone straps or phone cases

and when they move in together, i think they would raise sugar gliders (or potentially kidnap squirrels from the local park)

i love all of yasuho and josukes interactions but oh man every time that josukes past gets brought up i do start bawling

they both mean the world to me and how their romance is just built on such a clear foundation of trust and care it makes me so soft

they both give off such dog ppl energy tho and i love that for them

ALSO ok the way that yasuho helps josuke w his memory and is always there for him

i will never ever ever get over them

but i think one of my favorite scenes is the one right at the beginning where she gives josuke his name and how that plays into the rest of the story with him discovering his identity but still clinging to the one that she gave him since it was him, he wasnt just kira or josefumi he was josuke

10/10

if i think about them anymore i will start sobbing, the last chapter wrapped every last thing up so well and im so so glad that it did

#vento aureo spoilers #sbr spoilers #jjl spoilers #asks #wholesome mutuals

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thepenguinclub · 2 years

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Where Do Our Names Belong?: ‘Failing’ is Just Another Name for ‘Learning’

Romantic LAMP, romantic analogical focus, afterlife au, apocalypse au, job hunting, finding out who you are type thing.

Part of the 'Name 'Verse' series, part 5, with the masterpost being here.

Summary:

“Career - The two levels to the career course are Career Advisory and Career Training. In Career Advisory you will look at all the careers offered in the Plains, and you will find one that you feel suited for. Career Training is specialized training for the specific career you have chosen. It is common to retake this course if you find the career you have chosen is not right for you. There are no assessments, and it is up to the professor’s judgment whether you pass or not.”

———

Logan, Roman and Patton have to choose what they want to be for the rest of unlife.

It’s harder than it looks.

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Welcome, welcome.

This is going to be a collection of three oneshots. They aren’t chronological or directly related in any way, they’re just generally about the same topic, so I grouped them. You can read them individually just like you can the rest of the series, and that’s also why I’m posting them without starting the other parts, so there’s no schedule for this updating or anything.

This is was partially requested by @KorruptBrekker! They had lots of great requests, and this kind of applies to some of them? Hopefully you like it!

Warnings: mentions of death, description of a gun and using a gun, vague mention of violence, mention of fantasy creature (zombies), insecurity, fear of failure, description of food and eating food, mention of drinking coffee.

------------

Despite popular belief, Logan didn’t like school.

It was heavily dependent on the teachers and their values and efforts, it did nothing to prepare students for the next phase of their life, it was rigged against those with mental illnesses or any type of disability, it was loud and the social aspect was never his cup of black coffee. It was more a cup of last-of-the-coffee-grounds-so-it’s-mostly-water coffee, which was all around unpleasant.

So, when Logn graduated high school, and later college, he nixed his childhood dream of becoming an astrochemist and settled with the mildly fulfilling job of becoming the owner of a small flower shop.

Yes, he had an almost genius level IQ and owned a flower shop. Get over it.

And that was fine. That was good, actually. He owned that shop from when he was 24 until he died, at the very young age of 68, and he was okay with that. He had a kind young employee, he knew his stuff, he always had free flowers to bring home to his husbands (which never failed to make them smile, and that alone would have made everything worth it) and he made a name for himself in their town.

But.

But there was always that feeling, that little nagging voice in the back of his head that told him he was much too smart for his job, that he was wasting his life. Usually, he would make a panic-stricken husband the perfect bouquet, and he’d bring home a flower for the dinner table, and that voice would get pushed into the back of his mind until it decided to speak it’s stupid little words again.

The Academy was overwhelming.

There were a lot of classes, which were intense. Logan had taken one look at his schedule and almost quit right there, because there couldn’t possibly be a need for a class called ‘Firearms 101,’ but then he remembered the huge mass of writhing limbs and snapping jaws that his fiancé, brother-in-law and brother-in-law’s partner had fought within an hour of Logan being in the Plains and figured that maybe ‘Firearms 101’ would be helpful after all.

Heart and Prince had taken to the classes as they took to most things, with big grins and positive attitudes. They had gotten a triple dorm, so they didn’t have to split up, and that was such a huge relief to Logan that it felt like a physical weight had been lifted off his shoulders when the orientation officer told them.

Aside from the obvious differences in course material, the Academy itself wasn’t run too differently from the college that Logan and his partners had attended. They went to class, they studied, they did homework, they practiced when they needed to. He and his husbands had made a routine of going to the gym to get more in shape, which meant Logan’s body was in a constant state of ‘ow sore ow ow sore that doesn’t feel right urgh no ow sore sore why,’ but he was thankful for the habit when the fitness classes started becoming more demanding.

All in all, Logan still hated school. But, the Academy wasn’t as bad as he had expected, and was far better than any school from Before. The teachers were all great people, and made the classes engaging, which was much more than any of his teachers Before had done.

And there was one more part of Logan’s routine, which he had no problem admitting was his favorite part of every day.

At 21:00, there was a beep. Logan looked up from his chemistry textbook (which was one of his electives. The other was astronomy, because, while Logan hadn’t felt able to explore his interests through schooling Before, what was stopping him from doing it now?) at the same time Heart closed his psychology textbook (one of his electives, the other was general music) and Prince rolled off the bed, where he had been listening to a podcast.

They all looked at the device on the large desk, which spanned one entire wall and had three workspaces. The device itself was similar to a computer, but had a wider screen, and the keyboard was a hologram that the screen projected onto the desk’s surface. It was attached to the wall, and had two large windows on either side, which looked out onto a few of the campus’ fields.

The screen flashed purple, and beeped again.

Prince went and sat in the chair in front of the Holotronic (which was essentially the words ‘hologram’ and ‘electronic’ smushed together in one ridiculous mouthful, so people had taken to calling it the HT), and Heart sat on his lap. Logan stood behind them, setting his hands on Prince’s shoulders. Prince smiled wide at the screen after he pressed ‘enter’ on the projected keyboard and they were greeted with Logan’s final partner.

Anxiety grinned toothily at them, and brought one gloved hand up to give a two-fingered salute. He was where he usually was when they made these calls, in the middle of Nowhere.

Nowhere was what everyone in the Plains referred to the desert as. It had no civilization except for strategically placed search camps, and was considered the most dangerous part of the Plains. An endless desert with no one there except for Daemons and the occasional idiotic person. Or BEs. Which, in Logan’s opinion, were two things almost directly correlated.

It’s not to say that he didn’t like his fiancé’s job. He just found it incredibly dangerous and almost wholly unnecessary, and he didn’t understand at all why Anxiety had decided to call it his profession.

Okay. Maybe he didn’t like his fiancé’s job.

“Hi!” Heart exclaimed at the screen, waving, and Anxiety waved back.

“Hey, baby,” he said, deep voice rumbling through the speakers on either side of the HT, “how’s your day been?”

Heart wiggled a little in Prince’s lap, and the chair moved slightly with the movement. “It’s been good! In HDD we’re reviewing for the final, and in Self Defense I actually did the takedown right!” he said excitedly, and Anxiety smiled at him.

“There you go, baby,” he said. “Gonna have to start teaching the classes soon, huh?” he asked teasingly, and Heart grinned.

“‘Course,” he said, and puffed out his chest adorably. Logan bit on his smile. “I’m just too good for them.”

Anxiety nodded. “Sure are.”

He asked how Prince’s day had been (fine, he had had an assessment in Firearms 101 and a monologue due in Performance Theater, an elective, so he was a little tired. Anxiety nodded sympathetically and suggested going on a walk to unwind.), and then he got to Logan.

“And what about you, Lo?” he asked. Logan hadn’t been thinking of it when he chose his title, but the fact that Logic started with ‘Lo’ meant that his partners could keep the most common nickname for him from Before. Logan often found himself supremely happy about this fact.

“It was fine,” he said simply, not feeling like elaborating. Anxiety waited for just a second, long enough for Logan to be able to continue but not long enough to make it awkward. He was always good about that, adapting to Logan’s ever-changing feelings relating to talking.

“Okay,” he said, and he and Logan held eye contact for just a second longer before he turned his attention back to Prince.

“Love,” he said, and Prince straightened from under Heart, “Du wanted to talk to you tonight, want to go take that walk and call him?”

Prince nodded, then kissed Heart on the side of the head before urging him to get up. He did, and Prince went to the shelf he had set his Personal Communicator (or P-Com) on. He unplugged it from where it was charging, went back to say goodbye to Anxiety, then left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

Heart and Anxiety went back to talking, and Logan went back to his chair to continue reading, with his love’s voices as a soothing background noise.

The next day was Thursday, which meant he had History of Death and Destruction in the morning. It was one of his late morning classes, which meant he had a good window for lunch at lunch time instead of having to eat early or late.

Logan did what he did every Thursday at lunch, which was stop at a cafe on the campus to pick up a sandwich (turkey, lettuce and cheese) and coffee, then continue to the campus library to find a nice table to eat and read.

The library was huge, which was to be expected. Everything in the Plains was huge, from the massive concrete walls around the city to the huge classrooms, built to hold hundreds. The books were always kept in pristine condition, so Logan never got to smell the refreshing smell of old books, but he enjoyed the wide selection nonetheless.

This Thursday he already had a book with him, as he had checked it out the day before. He found a nice table, secluded in the corner and surrounded by towering bookshelves. He sat down and unwrapped his sandwich, turned to the right page, and settled in for the next forty minutes before he would have to leave for his next class.

Of course, that’s when his P-Com started ringing.

Logan blew out an annoyed breath, but closed his book and grabbed the device anyway. He clicked the button for a face call without checking who it was, and waited impatiently for the person on the other side of the call to appear.

It didn’t take long, as the technology here was extremely high tech, and a second later he was greeted with his fiancé’s face.

“I know, I know,” Anxiety said immediately, raising his hands in the classic ‘I surrender’ gesture. “I’m sorry for interrupting your you-time.”

Logan set up the P-Com against his book’s spine, resting it so Anxiety could see his upper half. He crossed his arms.

“You’re sorry,” he said, raising an eyebrow, “and yet you’re still doing it.”

Anxiety smiled sheepishly. “I know, Lo.” He adjusted his own P-Com, which was propped up on something on the ground, as he was looking up at Anxiety, where he was putting what looked like some type of gun together on the dusty ground of Nowhere.

“So, what are you calling about?” Logan asked, because he was utterly besotted and couldn’t stay mad at his partners for more than three seconds. He uncrossed his arms and lifted his sandwich, taking a bite.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” said Anxiety. “You seemed distracted last night. Something on your mind?”

Logan swallowed his bite. “No, nothing is bothering me at the moment.”

Anxiety looked up from the piece of metal he was cleaning with a rag and narrowed his eyes. Logan immediately felt guilty.

“Don’t lie to me, Starlight,” Anxiety warned lightly, a slight frown on his face.

Logan swallowed again, then looked down. Anxiety sighed.

“What is it?” he asked. “I want to help, Lo, if I can.”

Logan considered his options. He could say he didn’t want to talk about it. He was almost certain Anxiety wouldn’t push him, Logan would just have to survive his worried look. Which wasn’t difficult, Logan had dealt with worried looks before, but it was different with Anxiety, because it always had this little tinge to it, as if the look was sad on the edges. Which was ridiculous, of course.

Logan’s other option would be to tell Anxiety. Also unpleasurable, Logan didn’t like burdening his partners with his problems.

Anxiety hadn’t gone back to the pieces of the gun yet. Instead, he was patiently watching Logan, waiting for him to speak.

“I am… concerned about my Career Training class,” Logan heard himself say, almost against his will. He cringed slightly, but didn’t take the words back. Anxiety nodded, and picked up a new piece of the gun to fit the one he was cleaning earlier smoothly into it.

“The career I chose was a chemist,” Logan said, and Anxiety nodded again, as Logan had told him that when he had first entered the second level of the career class. “But… I am not… so sure of my choice now,” he continued slowly, pausing to think about his words. Anxiety picked up a new gun piece to polish with the rag, but looked at Logan as he did it.

“You said you owned a flower shop Before,” Anxiety said, and Logan blinked at the non-sequitur.

“I- yes?”

Anxiety cocked his head. “It’s a long leap from ‘flower shop owner’ to ‘chemist,’” he noted, and Logan nodded.

“Yes, but being an astrochemist was always what I wanted to be Before, and now that the ‘astro’ part is unfulfillable I figured that the obvious choice would be a chemist.”

Anxiety shrugged. “Is it? Astrochemist and chemist are still different, and you’re allowed to change your mind.”

Logan nodded slowly. “I… suppose that is correct.”

And it was. While being an astrochemist still dealt with some of the same aspects as chemists, the part that Logan was always more interested in was the astronomy part anyways, so him not enjoying being a chemist wasn’t all that surprising when it was put like that.

Logan took another bite of his sandwich, and when he did Anxiety watched him for a moment.

Then Anxiety shook his head.

“Nope, that’s still not it, there’s something else,” he said surely, and Logan furrowed his eyebrows.

“I assure you, that was the only thing bothering me,” he responded, pushing his glasses up his nose. Anxiety talked as he picked up another piece to start polishing it.

“It might have been the only thing bothering you then, but it’s not the only thing bothering you now,” he stated. “So spill.”

“I cannot spill anything, I am not holding any-”

“We both know you do that just to get a rise out of me and it’s not gonna work today, Star,” Anxiety interrupted, grinning. “I’m too focused on helping.”

Logan felt his lips curl into a grin to parrot Anxiety, and he sighed.

“Very well.” He took another bite of his sandwich, chewed, and swallowed before continuing. “I find myself apprehensive of having to contact my professor in order to retake the class. I don’t want to cause trouble.”

Anxiety raised an eyebrow. “Why would you cause trouble?”

Logan raised his own eyebrow in challenge. “Because it is an ordeal, I’m sure, to transfer a student in order to retake a class? Not to mention that I would also have to move down a level, as I am still not certain what I want to be.”

“Lo,” Anxiety said, “you aren’t causing trouble. Everyone retakes Career Advisory and Training.”

Logan shook his head. “I cannot imagine that is true-”

“No, no, it is.” Anxiety nodded aggressively, raising his eyebrows. “I have never once met someone who hasn’t retaken the Career classes at least once. I retook them four times.”

Logan’s eyes widened. “Four times”

Anxiety bobbed his head.

“Yep,” he said, and then he started to count off on his fingers. “Traditional artist, Wall Guard, mechanic and BE.”

“There’s a class for that?!”

“Well,” Anxiety thought for a moment, “it wasn’t really a class, more of an… internship that I got class credit for. It still counted, though, it took the place of a Career Training class.”

Logan shook his head. He didn’t want to picture that.

“I don’t want to picture that,” he said.

Anxiety laughed. “No, I didn’t think you would.”

After taking another bite of his sandwich, Logan got them back on topic.

“I didn’t realize it was so common to fail the class,” he commented casually. He startled when Anxiety clapped loudly and suddenly.

“That’s it!” he said proudly. “That’s what you’re upset about.”

Logan narrowed his eyes slightly in confusion. “I thought we had already established what I was worried about?”

Anxiety shook his head.

“No, Star, we had established what you were superficially worried about,” he said. “What I think you’re really worried about is failing.”

“I’m not failing,” Logan defended quickly, probably too quickly, based on Anxiety’s raised eyebrow.

“Right,” Anxiety said, and he picked up the group of pieces and fit another one into it. The handle, trigger and top of the gun was clear now, it just needed the barrel and ammunition. Anxiety grabbed what Logan assumed was the barrel and started cleaning it. “You’re not failing.”

Logan blinked. “That’s- that’s what I just said.”

“You did,” Anxiety agreed, “but did you actually believe what you were saying?”

Logan started to nod his head. “Of co-“

Anxiety looked up from the gun piece and gave him an unimpressed look. Logan fell silent, and thought for a moment as he took a sheepish bite of his sandwich.

Was he worried of failing? Before everything depended on how you did in school, what your grades were, and Logan had tried as hard as he could to be perfect. Failing wasn’t an option, because if you failed there was a high likelihood that it would have incredibly negative consequences later on in life. It was one of the reasons Logan had hated school, it put an incredible amount of pressure on teenagers.

But Logan had never retaken a class, because Logan had never failed, because Before he couldn’t.

“This isn’t Before, Lolo,” Anxiety said softly, and Logan huffed out a slight laugh at how his fiancé could still seemingly read his mind, even after all these years apart.

“I suppose you’re right,” Logan acquiesced. “I am not… overly familiar with failure, and it bothers me.”

Anxiety shook his head. “It shouldn’t, though, because you aren’t failing.”

Logan went to argue, but Anxiety continued before he could.

“Am I a failure, Logic?” he asked bluntly, and Logan physically recoiled.

“No! Of course not,” he answered, and Anxiety nodded.

“I know,” he said simply, “and I retook that class four times, like I told you. How am I not a failure if I retook it four times, but you are if you’re going to retake it once?”

Logan didn’t say anything, and Anxiety’s face softened.

“Really, Lo, I promise.” Anxiety held his gaze. “Tell me you believe me.”

Logan exhaled. “I believe you.”

“Tell me you believe me,” Anxiety said again, “and actually mean it.”

Logan looked at his fiancé through the screen, and was hit by a wave of… something. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact emotions, but he knew that it had something to do with how he couldn’t believe it had been possible to have lived a day without him.

“I believe you,” Logan said again, firmer this time, because he did mean it. Anxiety wasn’t a failure, Logan wasn’t a failure, and this wasn’t Before. This was the Plains, and Logan had spent his entire life striving to be perfect and ultimately feeling bad when he thought he didn’t meet what he should be.

He really didn’t want to do that in unlife too.

Anxiety smiled at him.

“Okay, then,” he said, and he slid the barrel into its place on the gun. He picked up a bunch of small pieces of what Logan assumed was ammunition and started loading the gun, which was only slightly alarming.

“Do you have any idea what you’re gonna do, or are you gonna hang out in Career Advisory for a bit, see what they have to offer?” he asked.

Logan considered as he finished his sandwich.

“I will probably see what the Plains has to offer,” he finally answered. The sandwich wrapper crinkled as he neatly folded it up and placed it to the side. “I didn’t really look at any other jobs.”

Anxiety nodded. “I think you’ll be surprised at the options.”

They talked about menial things after that, things that would qualify as small talk with anyone but Anxiety. Logan enjoyed every second of it, and it made the distance between them feel less and less.

“We haven’t run into too much these past few days, which is nice,” Anxiety was saying as they finished loading the gun. “We did have this one call, but it was boring, just a mechan-“

He cut himself off and looked at something outside of Logan’s view, then turned back to him with an apologetic smile.

“I’m sorry, my love, I think I have to go,” he said. Logan checked his watch and saw that he should probably start cleaning up too.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I think I do too.”

“Hang on a second, there’s gonna be a loud noise,” Anxiety warned. He clicked the ammunition compartment shut and cocked the gun, held it out and shot it a few times. Despite the warning, Logan jumped in his seat at the bangs that came through the speaker.

“Something wrong?” he asked, making no attempt to mask the worry in his voice. Anxiety shrugged.

“Just a few Daemons, Duke and Deceit are handling them,” he said nonchalantly, as if that sentence wasn’t enough to quadruple Logan’s anxiety in half a second.

“Please go help,” Logan said, and his voice stayed level. “But be safe. Please.”

Anxiety shot him a reassuring smile. “Okay, I will.”

“Thank you for your help,” Logan said, and Anxiety’s smile softened into downright besotted.

“Anytime you need me, Star,” Anxiety said earnestly, “I’m here.”

Logan nodded. Anxiety looked around, before looking straight at Logan.

“I love you, Logan,” he said, and Logan’s heart just about soared.

“I love you too, Virgil,” he said quietly, and Anxiety looked at him the same way he always did when one of the three of them said his name. Full of love and wonder and amazement. They beamed at each other, neither willing to end the call, until there was a gunshot from Anxiety’s side, loud enough that Logan heard it clearly. Anxiety grimaced.

“I’ll talk to you tonight,” he promised, and Logan nodded. He waited another second, then reached towards the P-Com. The call ended, and Logan was left staring at a black screen.

Logan stood up and stretched, then piled his unread book and P-Com into his tan messenger bag. He picked up his sandwich wrapper, finished his coffee, pushed his chair in, and started weaving his way through bookcases and down stairs until he got to the front of the building. He made a quick detour towards the front desk to throw away his wrapper and cup.

“Hey, Logic,” Teacher, one of the librarians, greeted, bookmarking the page they were on. “No book for today?”

Logan shook his head. “I didn’t get to read much, so I haven’t finished the one from yesterday.”

Teacher nodded. “I hear ya. Well, have a good day,” they said, and Logan parroted the phrase.

He went to leave, then stopped. He turned back around to look at Teacher.

“I have a question,” Logan stated, and Teacher once again looked up from their book.

“Shoot.” They closed their book again. “That’s what I’m here for.”

“You are a librarian,” Logan said, and Teacher bobbed their head, “but you also teach classes here?”

“Yup,” they responded, popping the ‘p.’ “I teach a lot of classes, and I work here in my free time. It’s nice, I like it a lot.”

Logan stood there for a second, considering. “Huh.”

Teacher’s face turned sympathetic. “Career classes bothering you?”

Logan nodded absentmindedly. “I have had trouble choosing a career.”

Teacher smiled warmly. “Well, I could always use help around here!” They shrugged. “And who knows. Maybe you’d like to be a teacher too.”

Logan went to shake his head, but paused. Teacher must have seen something on his face, because they chuckled lightly.

“Think about it,” they said. “But you’ll probably want to start going to class.”

Logan checked his watch and realized that Teacher was right, he definitely should.

“Thank you, Teacher,” he said, and their smile widened.

“No problem, Logic,” they responded. “And please call me T!”

Logan gave a vague response of affirmation, and Teacher rolled their eyes.

“One day,” they muttered, and Logan grinned to himself as he walked out the door.

Logan had never liked school.

But he’d never disliked the subjects. He had enjoyed tutoring, and he definitely had been interested in working with books.

There was a General Education class that Logan enjoyed a lot, and he liked the library.

“Huh,” he said again as he walked down the sidewalk.

Logan had never liked school, but he thought that, maybe, he’d like teaching it.

------------

As a reminder, prompts are tentatively open, and I am always happy to answer a question about this universe, whether it pertains to the characters or not! I’ve thought of lots of facts about how this world runs and would love to share some of them, if you’re curious. You can do either of those in the askbox, or by commenting on ao3!

Thank you to @rozhanelle for beta reading! I love you!

And you too, reader! You are valid and loved, and I appreciate you.

Comments and kudos will make my day. Have a good rest of yours!

Part 1, part 2 (1, 2), part 3, part 4, part 5 (1, 2, 3)

Masterpost

#ts patton #ts roman #ts remus #ts logan #ts virgil #ts deceit #penguin writes #sanders sides fanfic #name verse #sander sides

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jazy3 · 3 years

Text

Thoughts on Grey’s Anatomy: 17X4

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

This week we finally got the answer to the question that was on everyone’s minds: Who’s on the beach?!?!? And the answer was none other than George O’Malley! I was right! Ha! I love it when that happens. Yes George was on the beach and we got to see him have a lovely heart to heart with Meredith about life and death, how things were for her and the others after he died, and what life is like for her now.

I was surprised that the heart to heart meaningful conversation turned out to be between Meredith and George and not Meredith and Derek, but I feel like that is coming later. I think the meaningful conversation with Derek will happen right at the end of Meredith’s beach adventure just before she recovers and comes back to the land of the living.

I like that they addressed why Derek and George look older than they did the last time we saw them by having George say that maybe they look older to Meredith and by virtue the audience because that’s how she likes to think of and picture them. The sand isn’t real, the water isn’t real, and Meredith’s perceptions of them and their physical appearances aren’t real either.

We see Richard and Bailey join Meredith and George on the beach at the end sequence when the real life Richard and Bailey move closer to Meredith’s bedside and talk to her which establishes that the beach is neither here nor there. It’s not the afterlife, but it is. It’s not heaven or hell, but it can be. It’s all happening in Meredith’s head, but it’s not. It’s a dream, but it’s also reality.

I liked the call backs to how Meredith, Alex, Cristina, and Izzie laughed a George’s funeral at the ridiculousness of it all. We also got some introspection from Meredith when George asks if she still dances it out like she used to and she says no and that she hasn’t really since she lost Cristina. George gently reminds her that Cristina isn’t dead like him.

She’s still very much alive she just lives someplace else and that she shouldn’t give up on something she loves that makes her happy because Cristina lives in Zurich, Switzerland instead of Seattle, U.S.A. But we also get some insight here that to Meredith, Cristina moving an ocean away felt like a death and still does. She hasn’t danced it out like that since she left because she’s mourning that loss and to her not being able to see Cristina whenever she wants to is akin to not being able to see people like Derek, George, and Lexie like she used to because they’re gone.

Alex’s departure is different in that way in that once the pandemic is over and travel has opened back up and she’s done being mad at him she can go see Alex and Izzie and the kids whenever she wants. She doesn’t even have to get on a plane if she doesn’t want to. She can drive or take the train. The same holds true for Callie and Arizona. But the loss of people like Cristina, Derek, George, Mark, and Lexie is different because she can’t. Getting to Cristina means enduring at least two separate several hour flights across an ocean and she hates flying.

Seeing all of those other people is impossible because they’re not alive anymore. And she feels that loss everyday whether she’s able to verbalize it or not. I loved Meredith’s ending line about finding your people and holding them close because those are the ones that get you through the tough times. The fact that she made Richard her POA comes full circle in this episode when we see him trying to comfort her and make a decision at her bedside.

Richard is struggling about whether to enroll Meredith in the trial when he realizes she’s trying to say something. He gets closer and tells her he’s here for her only to realize she’s mumbling in her sleep and talking to George. Because Richard has seen Meredith and the others through it all he knows exactly who George is. He knows what the significance of that is and he realizes that she’s not trying to speak to him or get better. She’s talking to her friend George on the other side. She’s dying and if he doesn't do something soon she’ll join him. This realization causes him to decide to enroll Meredith in the trial.

I like that we also got an update on George’s Mom who we last saw in Season 8 talking to Callie about her marriage to Arizona and the birth of her daughter Sofia. George tells Meredith that grief is different for everyone and that his mother carries hers and that makes him sad and that sometimes he tries to shake it out of her and try to let her know that he’s still there and he’s still him even though she can’t see him anymore.

I loved how Meredith commented that he’s basically haunting her and George replied, “Well sure if you want to call it that.” The gentle teasing nature they had between them as friends was one of the things I loved most about their relationship and it was nice to see that here. I also liked their conversation about choices. Meredith asks if it’s her choice whether she stays or goes, and George says that it depends. Some people get to choose, and some don’t. He would have stayed if he could, but she appears to have a choice. On the one hand she’s worried about the kids and how losing her and becoming orphans will affect them.

On the other hand, she’s tired and has been through a lot and all the people she loves are on that beach. So, it’s a tough call for her to make. When they were sitting there on that beach and George turned to Meredith and said, “If you stay here you might break him,” and they turned to reveal Richard sitting next to her? Ugh that got me! Also watching Meredith shake convulsively from COVID while unconscious and talking to her dead friend was unnerving and a little scary especially since this is a real disease that is hurting real people. My heart breaks for anyone going through this in real life.

I also loved their exchange about the kids. Where he tells them how great they are and she says he never got to meet them and he tells her that he checks in on her and them from time to time. I also love that his comment establishes that all of the other people Meredith has lost are able to check in on her and the kids and that the other people that other characters have lost can do the same. It’s a nice image and something I think all of us in the real world like to imagine and believe when we lose a loved one. That they’re watching over us.

I loved how in Meredith’s Voice Over this episode she says that Medical schools often ask applicants for an essay describing a time they faced adversity and how they overcame it because they want to know how people will cope with the challenges they'll face as a doctor. And that some students worry they have nothing to write about because they haven't faced difficulty. She didn't have that problem. LOL!

Meredith is the main character, the lead star, and the anchor of the series and they introduced this plot in the premiere this season which mostly likely means that she won’t die or be sidelined by this permanently. And since the show is reflecting a real world disease and pandemic that means that if Meredith lives one of the other characters or someone else close to them will be dying from it most likely. Sadly, it looks like that might be Tom after this episode.

Tom’s got some funny dialogue when he tries to interrupt the staff meeting Richard is holding about COVID by tablet and with Helm when she comes by to drop off his COVID test. I liked how Jackson just walked over and knocked over the tablet to shut him up and everyone just laughed and carried on. His scenes with Helm were pretty funny too. The Zombie appearing on screen scared me though!

In the end we see that Teddy finally comes to talk to him and bring him soup after Helm tells her how bad he’s doing and how much he needs a friend as she desperately tries to save Meredith. When Tom didn’t answer the door or make a sound my first thought was that he had collapsed, but no it’s worse than that because as Teddy turns to leave the camera pans over and we see Tom cold and shaking in a blanket on the other side of the door unable to respond.

Which means his condition has worsened and he’s in pain, but he can’t communicate that to Teddy because he’s too weak to speak or he can’t make his voice loud enough to be heard over the pouring rain. Man that was some downpour! I wonder if it was fake rain that they created or if it rained that heavily the day they filmed that scene. Good to see Tom finally bought a house though! Seeing as last we saw he was living out of a hotel and then got Teddy a beautiful apartment only to find out at the last minute that she had gotten back together with Owen so he went back to living in a hotel again. Glad to see he got some digs.

I’ll be sad if they write Tom off as a character as I’ve really come to like him and he’s interesting and complex. Plus, I love seeing someone call Owen on his crap with such humour! We also got some good social commentary on how health practitioners often base treatment protocols and assessments on the standards of care and presentation developed for white patients, but that because diseases present differently in people of different races and genders that needs to be accounted for.

Especially because your race, gender, and where you grew up affects your predisposition for certain illnesses and can affect the presentation. Owen failed to catch something serious with his patient when they were initially brought in because he was using the standard developed for white patients which is different from the standard for Asian patients.

One of the new interns who is Asian brings this up to Nico who eventually says something to Owen who brings it up to Bailey who calls him on his privilege and reminds him that he needs to not only check himself, but because he is white and is the head of Trauma for the hospital it is his responsibility to update and improve protocols to make sure that every patient is getting the best care possible.

As Bailey says true equality means taking into account that we are all different. And when it comes to medicine conditions present themselves in different ways based on race and other factors. Giving everyone the exact same care based on a standard of care developed by and for white people is not equality because it means that people of colour like his patient receive a lower standard of care which can lead to unnecessary suffering and death.

True equality means providing equitable care that takes into account who a patient is physically when treating them. As Bailey says equitable care is not the same as equal care. One takes into account the reality and ensures true equal treatment while the other gives the appearance of equality while disadvantaging anyone who’s not a white straight cisgender man. While I like that they addressed that Nico was a complete jerk to everyone this episode.

He acted like the whole thing was no big deal when the intern brought it up and brushed off her comments about Anti-Asian racism from earlier in the episode that we’re totally valid. The intern was looking for some solidarity and for someone above her to back her up on some real issues. Instead Nico blew her off and talked down to her only to bring the issue up himself to Owen in the exact way he told her not to. Nico’s a good surgeon and he was right to say something, but he is a horrible human being, teacher, and boyfriend.

He continues to treat Levi horribly for no reason and as Jo says Levi deserves better. I liked Jo and Levi’s interactions this episode. They were funny and I love them! Also did anyone else think it was weird that Jo and Levi were having a conversation about how horrible Nico is as a person and how horribly he treats Levi when Nico was literally a metre or two in front of them and could hear everything they were saying? Nico’s an ass and apparently, he doesn't care that he’s an ass and that everyone thinks that of him.

I’m actually liking the whole Jo and Jackson friends with benefits situation. So far, its made for some good comic relief! I like too that we finally saw Jackson admit that he’s jumped from one relationship to another way too fast for his whole run on the show and that he needs to take some time and get some therapy and figure out what he wants. I love that Jo was immediately on the same page and laughed at the idea of them having a relationship right now. She needs a sex buddy, not a partner. He’s got work to do on himself and as she says she feels broken and is still trying to heal from the trauma she has experienced.

I also liked the scenes with Amelia and Link. I like that Amelia was able to express herself and her frustrations and that Link made the decision to support her. My best friend that I watch with made comment that she felt like under the same circumstances Owen would have just stormed back into the house whereas Link angrily moved some toys aside so that he could sit next to Amelia while she felt all her feelings and talked about them because that’s what she needed to do.

I also liked that when Amelia tried to push Link to talk later on he opened up about his process and was straight with her. Talking about all of her feelings out loud and in the open because if she bottles them up, she’ll wind up relapsing is her thing. Link’s thing is to focus on the positive and play his guitar. As Link says he’s happy to support her on her thing, but if she wants their relationship to work she has to support him on his thing. And she does.

My favourite line this episode? “What are you playing?” “It’s a song called ‘If The Virus Doesn’t End Us, Then Climate Change Probably Will.’” Too funny! And accurate! We also learn that Amelia loves to garden and is apparently quite good at it and they appear to have a herb and vegetable garden at Meredith’s house. We get some awkward dinner interaction courtesy of Maggie and Winston’s relationship this episode when he invites her to a virtual Birthday dinner for his beloved Grandmother which is then crashed by his estranged father.

His Grandmother invited him and within five seconds of being on the call he insults Winston and says that the idea that his son who is a Cardiothoracic Surgeon at Tufts is a genius is laughable because apparently he failed sixth grade. This man is an asshole and I can see why Winston hates him. That being said Winston exiting the call and leaving Maggie hanging there with his Grandmother, father, and some other relatives that she’s never met was not okay.

It was extremely rude. He should have told Maggie he had to go before signing off or said that they should both leave the call. Maggie is a class act for staying on that call and asking his upset Grandmother if there was cake. Side note: I did love Maggie and Winston’s conversation about what pencil nerds they both are! This is a match made in heaven so whatever issues they do have they’ll work through them because this is clearly meant to be.

My only real complaint about this episode was the absence of one Cormac Hayes. As my best friend said after we finished watching, “Did you notice who wasn’t in this episode? McWidow. Where the hell was McWidow?” I concur with this sentiment 100%. Hayes makes everything better and I’m sad when he’s not there. I get that Meredith was on the beach with George this episode and that was the focus on her storyline, but it would have been nice to see Hayes stand outside her window or sit next to her or talk to Jo about her condition.

That’s the other thing. Season 16 established that Jo and Hayes are friends and that she’s rooting for him and Meredith to be together and live happily ever after. So I’m surprised that they haven’t had a scene yet this season. We’ve seen Jo interact with Link who she’s close friends with and Levi who’s her roommate, but not Hayes. I’m hoping we’ll get that next episode. So far the majority of Hayes’ scenes have been with Meredith, followed by Jo, followed by Bailey.

If Hayes can’t interact with Meredith like he normally would because she’s unconscious I want to see him interact with Jo, Bailey, Maggie, and Richard more. The fact that we’re seeing intimate scenes with Jo and Jackson gives me hope that we’ll get to see those kinds of scenes for Meredith and Hayes. Although it’s entirely possible that those scenes were filmed last season before the pandemic hit so maybe not.

I also like that we got some important timeline information this episode. Jo mentions murder hornets (remember those?) which puts this episode at the beginning of May. She also says that her and Alex divorced the same year they got married which means that Seasons 14 and 15 span the same year. Which makes sense given the other information that we have and means that the relationship we saw in Season 15 only lasted a matter of months.

Which is good news in the sense that nobody really liked any of the ships from that season apart from Tom and Teddy and Amelia and Link and this establishes that all of those relationships were short lived and occurred over a matter of months, not a full year or more. Based on what I caught of next week’s promo it looks like Meredith’s condition is improving (!) while Tom’s condition is deteriorating, and Bailey’s Mom is in bad shape and is being admitted! COVID is no joke! Buckle up everyone!

Until next time!

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hyuckshaze · 3 years

Text

Drowning in the Distance | Chapter IX

✩‌ haechan ‌x‌ ‌fem!reader‌ ‌|‌ terminal illness au! series ✩

SUMMARY‌ ‌⇾‌ confined to a life of detachment from the only people on earth who understand them, the patients of saint evangeline’s can only watch as those around them drown in themselves, in more ways than one, while they themselves drown, in a much more literal sense. haechan is tired, tired of moving from place to place with no real chance of getting better. y/n is tired too, tired of living solely for the purpose of staying alive. maybe, just maybe, despite the space that separates them, they can guide each other to a life worth living.

WARNINGS‌ ‌⇾‌ ongoing theme of terminal illness (cystic fibrosis); talk of christianity, the afterlife, heaven/hell, death; ongoing mention of surgeries, scars, medications, drug trials etc.

CHAPTER WORD COUNT ⇾‌ 5.49k

CHAPTER MASTERLIST

IX | Y/N

✩‌

Dr. Moon, who continually insists that I call him Taeil to no avail, frowns as I lift up my shirt, his dark eyebrows knitting together as he inspects the infected skin around my G-tube. I wince, hissing slightly as he gently prods the inflamed red skin, and he mumbles an apology at my reaction. When I woke this morning, I’d been pulling on a sweater and noticed that the infection had gotten worse. When I looked closer and saw the discharge oozing around it, I pressed the call button immediately, asking Chaeyoung to call Dr. Moon down here for an infection. After a further minute of examination, he finally stands, exhaling a deep breath.

“Let’s try Bactroban and see how it looks in a day or two. Maybe we can clear it up, huh?” I pull my shirt down, shooting him a doubtful look. I’ve already been at the hospital a week, and while my fever has gone down and my sore throat is gone, this stupid thing has only gotten worse. He reaches out and gives my arm a comforting squeeze; I hope he’s right, though. Because if he’s not, that means surgery. And that’d be the exact opposite of not worrying Mum and Dad… No. I shouldn’t think about it. Be positive. Bactroban will fix things up. My phone chirps, and I look over, expecting it to be Haechan, but I see a message from my mum.

Cafeteria for lunch? Meet me in 20?

‘Twenty’ means she’s about to leave the house. I’ve been putting off meeting her all week, telling her that things are so routine, so ordinary, that she’d be bored, but I know she won’t take no for an answer this time, despite how much I’d like her to. I text back a yes, asking her to bring the acoustic guitar with her, and sigh, standing from the bed to get changed.

“Thanks, Dr. Moon.” He sends me a playfully stern look to which I chuckle. “You know, if my name was Dr. Moon, I’d never get tired of hearing it. But fine, maybe I’ll start calling you Taeil. Maybe, no promises!” He grins and I send him a small smile.

“About time! It’s only been, what, ten years?” He chuckles. “Keep me updated, Y/N. I’ll let Doyoung know so that he can keep an eye on it too.” He speaks gently, pulling the door closed behind him, my ears picking up the familiar sound of the latch clicking into place.

I pull on a clean pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt, scribbling a note to myself to add Bactroban to the schedule in my app. Stepping over to my med cart, I grab the small bottle of Creon that sits under ‘C’, pushing it into the pocket of my trousers. Pulling on a face mask and gloves, I step out of my room, onto the ward, pushing out through the double doors and heading up in the elevator and across into Building 2. Take a deep breath. Smile. My mum is already standing outside the cafeteria when I turn the corner to the cafeteria, her hair in a messy, and I mean truly messy, bun, dark circles hanging heavily underneath her eyes. God, she looks thinner than I do. She steps towards me and I give her a big hug, trying not to wince when the contact rubs painfully against my G-tube. Looking over her shoulder, I spot the familiar guitar case leaning up against the wall behind her and a breath of relief escapes me. It’s not been long at all since I last played, but even just seeing it instils a sense of calm in my chest.

“Everything okay?” She asks, her eyes appraising me when we pull apart. I nod, pulling my face mask off to reveal a smile to her.

“Great! Treatments are a breeze, same as usual, I’m breathing better already. Is everything okay with you?” I ask, studying her face carefully. She nods in response, giving me a big smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes, a big smile that’s clearly trying to hide how tired she is. I try my best to ignore the overwhelming feeling of guilt that seems to lodge itself in my throat.

“Yep, everything’s good!” Her voice is as unconvincing as her smile, but I don’t challenge it. I know, from experience, that it’ll only serve to make things worse. I pull the guitar case from the floor and sling it over the shoulder that hasn’t got my portable oxygen dangling from it. Tugging my face mask back over my ears, we join the back of the long line and, once we get to the front, get our usual orders, a garden leaf salad for her, a Caesar salad and a milkshake for me, and a heaping plate of fries for the both of us to share. We manage to get a seat in the corner by the wide glass windows, a comfortable, and safe, distance away from everyone else in the cafeteria. I take my Creon, gulping them down with a mouthful of milkshake, which is equally as efficient as putting them in my pudding cups. With the guitar case resting against the seat next to me, I glance outside as we eat to see that the snow is still gently drifting from the bright clouds, a blanket of white steadily forming on the icy ground. I hope my mum leaves before it gets too bad out there, I know that the drive home takes some backroads that can get really bad whenever there’s snow. I’ve finished my salad and most of the fries in the amount of time it takes my mother to eat about four bites of her own meal. I watch as she picks at her food with the end of her fork, her face tired; she looks like she’s been searching online again, up until the early hours of the morning, reading page after page, article after article, on lung function and transplants. My dad was the only one who used to be able to keep her calm, pulling her away from whatever worry spiral she was about to fall down with just a look, one singular look, comforting her in a way that nothing else could. I can’t stop the words tumbling from my lips.

“The divorce diet doesn’t look good on you, Mum.” She looks up at me, surprised. I blink back at her, watching as she clears her throat and hoarsely speaks.

“What are you talking about?” I almost roll my eyes. She knows exactly what I’m talking about, how could she not? I think for a moment; do I sugar-coat it? I settle on yes, throwing in a joke for good measure.

“You’re too thin, Dad needs a bath. You guys are stealing my look!” Can’t you see that you both need each other more than anything else? I want to say. She laughs, ignoring the first half of my words, grabbing my milkshake from the table in front of her. “No!” I shout dramatically as she takes a big gulp. I lunge across the table, trying to wrestle it back, but, somehow, the lid flies off, strawberry milkshake raining down from the mishap, covering the both of us. For the first time in a long time, we both burst out laughing. The laughter doesn’t fade for a good few minutes, but the atmosphere quickly changes when my mum takes a napkin, gently wiping the stray pink shake remnants from my face, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears. I grab her hand, my own hands now free from latex, frowning. “Mum. What?” I hate it when she cries like this, when she looks at me like this.

“I look at you and think… they said you wouldn’t…” She shakes her head as she holds my face in both of her shaky hands, tears spilling from her familiar eyes, a smile appearing on her face. “But here you are; you’re grown and beautiful. You keep proving them wrong.” She moves her hands away from my face, settling on holding one of my hands when she grabs a clean napkin with the other, wiping away her flurry of tears. She holds my hand tighter. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” My insides turn cold, gut wrenching and nausea pawing at the lining of my stomach. I don’t know what I’d do without you. I swallow hard, flashing her my best attempt at a reassuring smile and give her hand a comforting squeeze, but my thoughts instantly drift to the G-tube. The spreadsheets. The app. The medications. The treatments. A big 35 percent written across my forehead, sitting on my chest and making it that much harder to breathe. Until I get the transplant, that number isn’t going back up. It can’t. No matter how much I want it to magically fix itself, for the numbers to switch places. The truth is, until there are lungs for me, I’m the only one who can keep me alive. And I have to. I have to stay alive. It’s no longer a choice, because keeping me alive seems to be the only thing, now that they’ve lost each other, too busy drowning in themselves, that is keeping my parents going.

After saying goodbye to my mother, her leaving before the snow can block up the roads, I head up to my room to place the heavy guitar case upon my bed. Checking the time on my phone once I do, I go straight to the gym to meet Haechan for our session, wanting to strengthen my feeble lungs as much as I possibly can. I almost shoot him a text, telling him not to come so that I can think everything over, so that I can process, but I know that he probably hasn’t set foot in the gym for a long time. Plus, I think, as I make my way down in the elevator, the combined worry about my parents and the thought that he wouldn’t be exercising, despite not having done so for probably years, would be too much for me to allow me to concentrate on anything else. At least getting Haechan to go to the gym is a problem I can solve immediately. I start with pedalling on an upright stationary bike. I haven’t minded doing workouts ever since the gym became one of the nicest places in the entire hospital. They renovated it three or so years ago and practically tripled its size, putting in basketball courts, a pool, shiny new cardio equipment, and several rows of free weights. There is even an entire separate room for yoga and meditating, which I have fully taken advantage of on the days where my mind feels too busy to think, staring out of the tall and wide windows that overlook the courtyard. Before that, the gym at Saint Evangeline’s had been a dark and dingy room, flickering lights with a handful of mismatched dumbbells and decaying equipment that looked like it was made in the stone-age.

I look up from the digital screen of the bike over to Haechan, who is holding on to the sides of a treadmill as though his life depends on it, gasping dramatically for breath as he power-walks, portable oxygen slung over his left shoulder. His constant whining seemed to fade pretty quickly after he realised that I wouldn’t respond, the semblance of a pout forming on his plush lips. I practically forced him to do this, as I’ve been doing with all his other treatments, and I have to admit, it’s amusing for me to see him concentrating too hard to be snarky or cocky. He couldn’t even use his ‘banned from leaving the third floor’ excuse, much to his chagrin. Doyoung is on the night shift today, and, even though he purposefully got himself caught while leaving the ward, Irene was more than enthusiastic to have Haechan off doing something that will actually improve his lung function and overall health. That didn’t stop him from trying to use it, though.

“So, when does this little deal of ours become mutually beneficial?” He manages to choke out, glancing across the length of the room at me while I pedal away. He slows the speed of his treadmill down, managing to gasp out words between puffed breaths. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked with no return on my investment.” I exhale, a breathy laugh slipping between my lips as I stare right back at him. My voice is worn, tired, but nowhere near as gasping as his.

“I’m gross. Too sweaty.” I say as a bead of sweat trickles down the side of my face. I pick up the small towel that I brought with me from the handle of the stationary bike, bringing it up to my face to wipe away the sweat. At these words, he slams the stop button on the treadmill, the machine halting abruptly, turning fully around to face me, fixing his nose cannula as he struggles to catch his breath, eyebrows furrowed in exasperation as he stares unblinkingly at me.

“And my hair is dirty, and I’m too tired, and my med cart is-” His tone is mocking as he imitates my voice. He sounds nothing like me, by the way. I interrupt his poor impression of me, voice louder than normal and challenging in tone as I raise an eyebrow at him.

“You want to draw me sweaty? Fine! I’ll sweat harder, just for you!” With that, I dramatically start to pedal as though it’d earn me some new lungs, my heart rate near-quadrupling. My lungs almost immediately begin to burn at the exertion and I start coughing, the familiar hiss of oxygen coming out of my cannula ringing in my ears as I struggle for air. My legs slow down as I go into a hacking fit, before finally catching my breath. Embarrassed, I spare only a single glance in Haechan’s direction. He stares at me, an amused smile on his lips as he shakes his head in my direction.

“You better not pass out. They’d probably arrest me for drawing an unconscious person on the floor of a hospital.” I immediately look back down at the glaring digital numbers on the screen just in front of the bike, trying to ignore the warmth creeping slowly up my face, hiding the quirk of my lips from his observant eyes.

After finishing our workouts, we both exhaustedly make our way to the empty yoga room, me walking six feet ahead. I sit down against one of the wide, floor-to-ceiling windows, the glass cold against my overheating form, icy almost, from the flurry of white on the other side of it, covering everything in sight.

“Do I need to pose?” I ask, my hand reaching up as I fix my messy, sweaty hair. I strike a dramatic pose like Rosefrom the Titanic, which makes him laugh. Over the last few days, I’d come to the conclusion that I liked making people laugh a hell of a lot more than I thought I did. The elation that nudges its way into my chest whenever he laughs at my jokes or my stupid antics is unlike any feeling I’ve ever really had; kind of like I could take on the world. His wild laugh feels familiarly comforting, the way his eyes crinkle as he tips his head back, the way he doesn’t care about how loud he is when he laughs and just lets loose. I watch, a satisfied smile pulling at my lips as he pulls out his sketchbook and a charcoal pencil, caught slightly off guard as I noticed that he’d put on a pair of blue latex gloves before handling it. Why?

“Nah, just act natural.” He opens up the book and sends me a reassuring smile. Oh, good, yeah. That’ll be easy. What do you do when somebody tells you to act natural? Surely, it must be the most unnatural thing in the world. But as I watch him, his honey eyes focused on the paper, his dark eyebrows furrowing as he concentrates, it feels entirely natural, normal. Comfortable, even. He looks up, meeting my eyes for a moment before he studies me again. I look away quickly, a hint of warmth prickling on my cheeks, pulling my own notebook out and flipping to today’s list. Whilst searching for the most recent page, I feel his staring gaze upon me. His voice breaks the easy silence, causing me to look back up at him. “What’s that?” He asks, pointing to the notebook with his pencil. I look back down to the book, pulling my pencil from where it’s tucked into the binding.

“My to-do list.” I explain, crossing off number 12, “Work out”, and heading to the very bottom of my list to scribble the words: “Hyuck drawing”.

“A to-do list?” He asks, voice piqued with curiosity. “Seems mundane for someone who builds apps for a bit of fun.” I glance up at him from the pages, giving him a shrug and a small smile. He’s not wrong, it does seem pretty tame in comparison.

“I suppose, but the app doesn’t give me the satisfaction of doing this.” I take my pencil and draw a neat line through the newly-written item at the bottom of the list. He fakes a sad face, a pout pulling at his full lips.

“Now that really hurts my feelings.” I duck my head down, hair falling in front of my face, but he easily sees the smile I’m trying to hide, chuckling at me in a way that makes my cheeks heat up even more. “So, what else is on the list?” He asks, looking back down at the drawing and then back up at me before starting to shade something in, the soft sound of the scratching pencil against paper serving as a comforting background noise. I look back up at him, trying my best to ignore the way my heart seems to skip a beat and my lung function feels like it drops by a couple percent.

“Which list?” I ask. “My life-long list or my daily list?” I ask seriously, blinking at him as he laughs warmly, shaking his head. His eyes twinkle with merriment as he looks at me, his voice teasing as he talks.

“Of course you have two lists.” I roll my eyes at his words, huffing slightly.

“Immediate and long-term! It makes complete sense.” I shoot back, which only makes him smirk. I sulk for a moment at his mocking. It’s entirely logical, I think. Hmph.

“Hit me with the master list. That’s the big stuff.” His voice is fairly serious once more as he looks back down at his sketchbook, pencil moving around the sheet of paper as he shields the drawing from my sight. I flip through the pages, right to the back, before getting to the master list. I haven’t looked at this page in a long time, over a year now. It’s filled with a variety of different-coloured inks, reds and blues and blacks, and a range of sparkly neon colours from a massive gel pen set that I got for my twelfth birthday.

“Let’s see.” I let my fingertip rest at the top of the page, dragging it downwards as I read down the list. “‘Volunteer for an important political cause.’ Done.” I draw a straight line through it. “‘Study all the works of William Faulkner.’ Done.” I draw a line through that one too. “‘Share everything I know about CF with others.’ I have this, uh, YouTube channel...” I trail off, drawing a line through it and look up at Haechan to see him not at all surprised. Well, clearly one of us has been busy looking the other up online. Embarrassment floods my being, God, did he really find it? I fight the sudden urge to pull out my phone to go through and delete the oldest ones, thoughts interrupted when he speaks and breaks the silence of the lull in the conversation.

“So your plan is to die super smart so you can, what, join the debate team of the dead? Participate in all the demised academic decathlons?” He jokes, but the smile melts from his face as he points out the window with his pencil, sending me a look that I can’t quite decipher the meaning of. “You ever think about… I don’t know… traveling the world or something?” I blink at him, not quite sure what to say.

I look back down to see number 27, ‘Sistine Chapel with Yeji’. No line through it.

I clear my throat, moving on.

“‘Learn to play the piano.’ Done! ‘Speak fluent Mandarin’-” Haechan cuts me off.

“No, seriously, you ever do anything off list? No offense, but none of that sounds like any fun.” I close the notebook, and he continues. “You want to hear my list? Have a dance-off with Michael Jackson. You know, a music blasting and rhythm feeling kinda thing. Oh, take a painting class with Joseph M.W Turner! Sunset yellows and candlelight oranges beside ocean blues and cloudy whites that you don’t think will work but then when you put them on canvas...”

“They’re both dead.” I tell him. He gives me a lopsided grin, one that makes my stomach twist and my head feel fuzzy and light.

“Ah, well. I guess I’ll just have to settlefor sex in the Vatican!” I roll my eyes at him, fighting the urge to laugh at his stupid boyish joke.

“I think you have a better shot at meeting and challenging Michael Jackson to a dance battle. I mean, I’d pay to see that.” He winks, but then his face gets serious. It catches me off guard, how pensive he appears to be, and so suddenly, too. He looks thoughtful, sincere. More serious than I’ve ever seen him.

“I’d like to travel the world but, this time, really get to see it, y’know? Not just the four walls of my hospital rooms and the interior of a rental car that goes between the airport and the hospital.” After a moment of silence, of contemplation, he looks back down and keeps sketching, the scratch of the pencil a soothing sound in the silence of the meditation room. “They’re all the same. Same generic, whitewashed rooms. Same gross-coloured tile floors. Same sterile and bleached smell. I’ve been to so many places, so many beautiful places, without actually seeing anything.” I look at him, and I mean really look at him, watching the way his unruly brown hair falls down into his eyes when he draws, the look of concentration on his face, tongue poking the inside of his cheek, the familiar smirk no longer spread over the bottom half of his handsome face. I look at him as he stares down at the sheet of paper, long eyelashes brushing against his cheekbones with every blink, and I wonder what it would be like to travel the world but not make it further than the walls of the hospital. I don’t mind being in the hospital, I’ve never really minded. I feel safe here. Comfortable. But I’ve been coming to the same one, to Saint Evangeline’s, pretty much my whole life. The place, the people, the atmosphere. It’s home. If I were in Hawaii for the entirety of the past week but stuck inside an unfamiliar hospital with unfamiliar faces, I wouldn’t just be downhearted. I’d be fucking miserable.

“Thank you.” I say, the words spilling out before I can stop them. I am thankful, though. I really am.

“For what?” He asks curiously, looking up to meet my eyes. I hold his gaze despite the distance between us, my voice coming out softer than I think it’s ever been with him before.

“For saying something real.” He stares at me for a second, full lips parted in shock at my words, before running his gloved fingers through his hair a few times in a row. This time, he’s the one who’s uncomfortable, who’s flustered. He stutters for a moment, before obviously blurting out the first thing that comes to his mind.

“Your eyes are slightly different shades.” He says hurriedly, pointing at the sunlight trickling in through the expanse of glass all around me with the charcoal pencil. “I didn’t know that until I saw them in the sunlight. I, uh, I thought they were the same colour.” My heart thumps loudly in my chest, that increasingly familiar flutter in the pit of my stomach appearing at both his words and the way he’s looking at me. He’s looking at me like he did that day in the NICU. Like I’m trulybeautiful. “You have really nice eyes.” He says a second later, words pouring out of his lips before even he can process what he’s saying, evident from the flushing shade of red creeping onto his cheeks. He looks down, shaking his head slightly, continuing to scribble away for a few minutes before clearing his throat. “I mean, like, to draw.” His voice is hesitant, unsure. I bite on my lower lip to hide the wide smile that threatens to make an appearance upon my face. For the first time since meeting him, I really feel the weight of every single inch, every centimetre, of the six or so feet between us. I pull my sweatshirt closer to my body, hugging my knees as I rest my head upon them, looking away at the pile of yoga mats and blocks in the corner. Since when did it feel so suffocating to be so far away from someone? The distance between us, the open space that’s meant to keep us safe, seems like an ocean in this moment. Let’s say you’re deserted, entirely alone on a tiny island no bigger than a few metres. When you look across that ocean, you see an island no more than a few miles away. It appears to be fairly close, fairly easy to manage. After all, it’s only a few miles, right? But when you clamber into the waves, when you try and swim against the current for those few miles between you and the island, it’s much harder than it appears, it’s much further of a distance than it initially seems. Maybe, I think, maybe that’s why people give up. They let the waves pull them under, letting the distance between them and their salvation drown them. I clear my own throat, pulling myself away from my branch of thoughts, eyes locked upon the yoga equipment, trying to ignore the fact that that open space? It will always be there.

That evening, after showering all of the sweat away, I lay on my bed and scroll through Facebook for the first time all day, looking at all of the new pictures my friends and classmates are posting from Hawaii. I click, putting a like on Tzuyu’s new profile picture. Standing on a paddleboard in the floral bikini that I’d chosen for her, a beaming smile is glued to her face, her pale shoulders burnt to a crisp, all my UV and SPF warnings obviously ignored. As I plan the harsh scolding I’m going to give her on the phone about it, I suppose that Jaemin was right on that one, sunburn isn’t anything to mess with. Looking at the photo, I chuckle as I’m reminded of the behind-the-scenes video that Karina had sent me earlier this afternoon, taken seconds after this picture, which exposed the obvious fact that Tzuyu still has no clue how to paddleboard. Her core strength being abysmal, she balanced for a maximum of four seconds, shooting the camera a big smile before flailing off the board a second later. I scroll further down the timeline, a tiny squeal escaping my lips and a little victory dance taking over my whole body when reach a picture posted by Chan, his tan arm slung around Karina’s shoulder. I give it a quick like before closing the app and sending her an excited text.

Atta girl, K!

Putting my phone down with a smile, the pocket notebook still open to my master list catches my eye. My gaze is drawn back to number 27, “Sistine Chapel with Yeji”, the smile slowly vanishing from my features. I reach for my laptop, pulling it open and my mouse moves across my desktop, across the photo of me and my friends, hovering over a blue folder labelled “Yej.” I hesitate for a few minutes before taking a deep breath and finally clicking on it. A sea of pictures, videos and scanned artwork from my sister fill my screen, my heart pounding in my ears as I click on a video, taken on a GoPro, that she sent me two years ago, the screen displaying Yeji, balancing on top of a high, rickety bridge. She turns the camera, the dizzying, almost sickening, image of the distance from where she’s sitting to the massive river below, the water underneath her strong enough to overtake anything in its path, crashing against the base of the bridge with loud splashes.

“Insane, huh, Little Star?” She says as the camera swings back to show her as she adjusts her harness one more time, grinning at the GoPro. Yes, yes it is. It’s fucking crazy, Yej. “I thought you might like to see how this feels!” Her voice is high-pitched, dripping with adrenaline. I nod. I’d love to know how it feels. She clicks her helmet in place, the camera’s view shifting back to show the edge of the bridge and the long, nauseating fall down. “And I brought my jumping buddy!” She holds up the Moomin plush, the stuffed creature that she named on my very first trip to the Saint Evangeline’s, the one right next to me now, pressing him against her face and giving him a big hug. Thanks for bringing him, I know he’ll love it. “I’ll hold him tight, don’t worry!” Then, without warning, or even a second thought, she launches herself from the bridge. I fly through the air with her, her delighted whoops, cheers and laughs echoing loudly through the speakers of my laptop. Then comes the bounce. We fly back up, Yeji’s hair fanning around her face, the helmet keeping only some of the unruly waves at bay; Junnie’s face comes onto the screen, Yeji’s voice, breathless and giddy with joy as she grips the white plush tightly, screaming out. “Happy birthday, Y/N!” Her pearly whites gleam under the bright sunlight. Thanks, Yej. “I love you!” I love you too.

Tears welling in my eyes, I swallow the lump in my throat and slam the laptop shut, knocking over a can of pop from the vending machine on the side table. The fizzing lemonade spills out all over the table and the floor but, thankfully, it doesn’t go on the bed or my laptop. Brilliant. I both mean it and don’t; it’s a distraction, but it’s also a hassle. I sigh and reach down to pick up the can, stepping carefully over the puddle, throwing it into the bin on my way out. I open the door to my room, trying to be as quiet as possible, it’s late and most people will be asleep by now. I tip-toe down the hallway towards the supply closet, eyes lingering on Haechan’s door for a moment longer than they should. As I walk around the nurses’ station, I notice Doyoung dozing off on a bench, his head lolling backwards against the wall, lips slightly parted. I should let him sleep, he needs it. Carefully, I open the door to the janitor’s closet, grabbing the paper towels and floor cleaner from a packed shelf of supplies and trying not to wake him. He hears me, though, and looks up, his eyes drowsy as he blinks at me.

“You work too hard.” I whisper when he sees me, sending him a soft smile with worried eyes. He waves my concerns away with one hand and smiles, putting an arm out like he used to when I was younger and having a rough day at the hospital. I put the cleaning products down on the floor by my feet and sit beside him on the bench, resting my head on his shoulder and leaning my body into his, breathing in the familiar, safe, musky scent of his cologne. I relax my body, moving closer to him and I close my eyes. I close my eyes and pretend.

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wazafam · 3 years

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K-dramas have a theme for about anything a viewer is looking for. There are suspense, dramas, thrillers, and highly popular love stories. Some may not want to admit it, but love stories involving falling in love with the boss is a guilty pleasure.

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Maybe it involves the shy new girl who catches the eye of the handsome and rich CEO. In some cases, the power play is reversed. Regardless, K-dramas have a way of hooking in audiences with their dynamic storylines. If looking for some new K-dramas to add to your roster of must-watch, look no further. Here's a list to get you started.

Updated on April 22nd, 2021, by Gabriela Silva: There's a storyline for every K-drama fan to enjoy from thrillers and the supernatural to unique romances. To add a level of intrigue to a love story what better way than to center it around the blossoming love of a worker and their boss. K-dramas are no stranger to the storyline theme and are quite popular. It's a fairytale story that fans wish happened in real life.

15 Oh My Ghost (2015)

Oh My Ghost is one of the most recognized supernatural dramas. It focuses on three main characters and the main love story is between a young woman and her boss who's a famous chef. There's a catch. Na Bong-Sun (Park Bo-Young) is shy and timid and has a huge crush on her boss. She can also see spirits.

One day, she's possessed by a young lustful female spirit who believes the only way to go to the afterlife is by losing her virginity. Being the puppet of the ghost, Bong-Sun now becomes a firecracker and confident woman who catches her boss's eye.

14 Radiant Office (2017)

The 2017 drama, Radiant Office has multiple elements that make it a fun boss-employee storyline. Eun Ho-Won (Go Ah-Sung) is down on her luck looking for work and attempts suicide. At the hospital, she learns she terminally ill but succeeds at landing a job.

With a new purpose in life, Ho-Won takes on her new job with full force. Her superior and boss, Seo Woo-Jin (Ha Seok-Jin) thinks she's a huge pain in the neck and often bickers. Their odd relationship might just turn into something more.

13 Protect The Boss (2011)

This K-drama doesn't have the typical boss characteristics seen in other shows. Protect the Boss centers around Cha Ji-Heon (Ji Sung), a childish director at DN Group. He soon meets his match in his new secretary, Noh Eun-Seol (Choi Kang-Hee).

Eun-Seol is determined to not lose her first professional job and gives it her all. Her kind and spunky demeanor start to attract Ji-Heon. That's not all, the drama has a love triangle between Ji-Heon and his rival and cousin, Cha MuWwon (Kim Jae-Joong).

12 Master's Sun (2013)

Master's Sun is another K-drama with a supernatural base. Tae Kong-Shil (Gong Hyo-Jin) gains the ability to see ghosts after a bizarre accident. Her abilities leave her unable to keep a solid job. Kong-Shil works as a cleaning lady at Kingdom's, a conglomerate company, shopping mall.

She soon meets the company's cold and distant CEO, Joo Joong-Won (So Ji-Sub). In a turn of events, whenever Long-Shil touches Joong-Won, the ghosts disappear. After some begging, Joong-Won stays by her side in return for her help in recovering something stolen from him.

11 Jugglers (2017)

2017 was a good year to binge-watch multiple boss-employee relationship K-dramas. Jugglers followed the trend and revolved around a secretary and her cold as ice boss. Jwa Yoon-Yi (Baek Jin-Hee) is a devoted and diligent secretary whose put on hold when her boss's wife accuses her of having an affair with her husband.

On the other end, Nam Chi-Won (Daniel Choi) is assigned to be the managing director at Yoon-Yi's company. Yoon-Yi becomes his secretary. Chi-Won suffers from childhood trauma and is indifferent to socializing. After Yoon-Yi gets drunk at a dinner party, Chi-Won takes her home and realizes she lives in the place where his trauma originated. Seeing the 'tenant wanted' sign on her door, he becomes her neighbor to overcome his past.

10 My Secret Romance (2017)

What happens when you meet your one-night stand three years later? To make matters worse he happens to be your new boss. Lee Yoo-Mi (Song Ji-Eun) is insecure about herself but has to attend her mother's weddings. She meets Cha Jin-Wook (Sung Hoon). They're less than cordial with one another but soon start to feel an attraction and spend the night.

Yoo-mi is unaware of who he really is and flees the following morning. Years later she is hired to be his nutritionist. Jin-Wook changed his ways after that night and takes over his father's company and never forgot Yoo-mi. He tries to romance her and get to admit her feelings for him. Interwoven is a storyline involving Yoo-mi's baby brother that is blown out of proportion on who the father is.

9 Rich Man (2018)

Rich Man might also be known for its original Japanese television drama version, Rich Man, Poor Woman. The K-drama was a 2018 remake that did well on television. The show takes an interesting route with the main male character. The CEO of a popular IT company has a facial recognition disability.

This has caused him the inability to recognize his first love. At an employee recruitment meeting, he picks on a particular girl with photogenic memory. She stands up to the mean CEO and says something that catches his interest. She ends up working for the company and helping the CEO.

8 Strong Girl Bong-soon (2017)

Strong Girl Bong-Soon is a highly popular K-drama and has a lot of the same characteristics of an employee falling in love with their boss. A young girl is born with unexplainable superhuman strength. It's more of a family trait. This leads to an intriguing storyline.

After beating up some bullies, she is hired by a rich CEO of a gaming company. While having a crush on her friend, she starts to realize who she really has feelings for. All while protecting her CEO from a possible threat and kidnapper.

7 My Shy Boss (2017)

Sometimes opposites attract in the most bizarre way possible. My Shy Boss or Introverted Boss follows the tumultuous relationship between a CEO and his new employee. The CEO of a public relations firm is the exact opposite of what one expects.

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He's highly introverted, shy, sensitive, and can come off as cold. On the other hand, the company hires a new employee who is extroverted, loud, and not afraid to speak her mind. She takes an interest in the CEO and wants to uncover who he really is under his hood.

6 Lucky Romance (2016)

Audiences will surely have a good laugh with this K-drama with its peculiar antics. In Lucky Romance, a 26-year-old attractive woman is highly superstitious believing she was born unlucky. She follows every precaution possible and consults a shaman about her sister. The only way to save her? She has to sleep with a man born in the year of the tiger.

She soon meets a CEO and genius game developer. Who happens to fit her criteria. Their personalities clash, but Shim Bo-Nui (Hwang Jung-Eum) is determined to see save her sister even if it means wooing her boss.

5 Level Up (2019)

Level Up follows a lot of the typical boss-employee storyline details; mixed in with some drama. This CEO specializes in helping reconstruct failing companies. He takes on a company called Joybuster despite his previous childhood trauma with gaming.

As the new CEO of the company, he soon meets its head designer. A passionate and sweet young woman clashes heads with a cold and meticulous boss. Will they put their differences aside and complete their new game and maybe fall in love?

4 Hotel Del Luna (2019)

Hotel Del Luna is a fan favorite amongst K-dramas. It mixes the supernatural with some dramatic romance. Jang Man-Wol (Lee Ji-Eun) is moody and bad-tempered for having to run Hotel Del Luna for the past thousands of years. She must atone for her indiscretions and change her attitude.

The hotel is only visible to souls, ghosts, and humans at special times of the year. Things heat up when the hotel gets a new general manager due to a contract signed by his father. Gu Chan-sung (Yeo Jin-goo) is a stoic MBA graduate who has to confront his fear of ghosts. He soon changes his demeanor and helps melt Man-Wol's heart and keep her safe.

3 She Was Pretty (2015)

She Was Pretty is a fun roller coaster ride for anyone who watches. Fans of Parasite will recall the lead actor in this drama. Two childhood friends grow up on the opposite ends of the spectrum for both success and looks. Kim Hye-jin (Hwang Jung-Eum) ended up having her father's red cheeks and frizzy hair, while Ji Sung-Joon (Park Seo-Joon) becomes a strikingly handsome man.

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They decide to reconnect but Hye-jin backs out seeing how much they've changed. Instead, he mistakes her best friend for her creating a fake love story. Sung-Joon then becomes her boss at her magazine company unaware of who she really is. Will Sung-Joon recognize his first love and fall head over heels? Or will her co-worker woo her away?

2 What's Wrong With Secretary Kim (2018)

What's Wrong With Secretary Kim is at the top of the list and regarded as one of the best romance K-dramas when it comes to the employee-boss dynamic. Kim Mi-so (Park Min-young) has been Lee Young-Joon's (Park Seo-Joon) right-hand woman for years as his secretary. Her announcement of resignation doesn't sit well with her cold and professional boss.

He then starts to see her in a different light beyond the professional. There's jealousy, romantic gestures, and changing of heart in his drama. Not to mention there are some steamy kissing scenes. Young-Joon will do whatever he can to keep Mi-so in his life.

1 My Private Life (2019)

Park Min-Young is back as Sun Deok-Mi in My Private Life. The show is based on a popular Korean webtoon. Deok-Mi is a talented and highly regarded art curator who harbors a secret. She's an obsessed fangirl. Her secret can ruin her career at the museum. An acclaimed but retired artist, Ryan Gold (Kim Jae-Wook) becomes the museum's new boss.

After some rumors spread, Gold and Doek-Mi must pretend to date to stop scrutiny towards her favorite idol and new museum client. Fake dating soon starts to blossom into real love. Deok-Mi must try and let go of her secret fan page and obsession.

NEXT: The 10 Best K-Dramas With More Than One Season, Ranked (According To IMDb)

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jamesdwannabe · 3 years

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I’ve been doing research and I highly suggest this book for anyone who feels like me and like you’re dead and in heaven! What I’ve gathered so far is past lives/reincarnation is real. It’s a magical gift from god that some of us go on to heaven when we die, while others get to experience life after life as someone else! Our obsession with the past…it’s all part of DID and otherkin which is actually our former lives wanting to come out and live life again.

We all get trapped in purgatory, though. When we die, we either go on to heaven or we go to purgatory. I died in the jail the first time I went cause I was already dehydrated for two days and they refused me food and I never drank any water. I hopped up the third day feeling great and I forced them to give me food and then I was able to finally reach my family and get bonded out.

The second time I went to jail was purgatory. I’d love to talk to y’all cause I’m currently working on a book about my life and all the abuse I faced, such as my childhood and adult abuse and relationship abuse, but also my terrible time spent in jail and all the transphobia I’ve faced because all of these things lead to my DID and bipolar disorder and my psychosis where I was delusional and hallucinating, thinking all kinds of things but mostly that I was John the Baptist on a mission from God to cleanse all the troubled souls and hell maybe I was at the time.

Anyone who knows the Bible well that can help provide me with information, anyone suffering any type of mental illness, anyone who wakes up everyday thinking they’re dead or in purgatory or any trans people who are experiencing what I am as in you’re suddenly showing symptoms of HRT but you’ve never taken T or estrogen a day in your life…and finally anyone at all who has any type of information and would like to be featured in my book/in a documentary I’ll one day make…please message me either HERE ON TUMBLR or DISCORD.

I’ll post all my social media so you can keep up with me but just know I get too many snaps a day to check there so tumblr, discord, or even insta and Twitter is a better platform to reach me than Snapchat but please still follow cause it’s my main base to post updates!

Again, if you reach out, it’s already assumed you’re giving me full permission to use your story but I will ask what name you prefer I use. If you’re using an alias then both first and last names are fine, but if you prefer your real name, please only give me your first name.

I will also pay you for any real and good and truthful information you send me, but I don’t have a bank account right now, so payment will come later once I’m allowed to leave my house and doordash again. I’ll pay you all a price I set later.

Please, only serious information. Even if you’re alive still and on earth, if you have any legit scientific articles or books that pertain to this line the heaven and hell afterlife book…I’ll pay for information. And if you don’t want to be paid in money, I can pay by shouting you out on all my socials since I have a large following, or I can send you books or clothes or anything you want. Just send me the link to what you want and I’ll deliver I promise!!

But no addresses please. Please have any gifts/resources sent to your local post office!

Thank you and as my girl tonya up in LCJ and Mr. Truman would say…good morning, good evening, and good night!

Love always,

🐐💕

Socials:

tumblrs: here (jamesdwannabe) or yourboyharrington or dudesofrp (still under construction but y’all send me rp recs, shoutouts, promos, or just rp related asks please im bored 🤣)

Discord: charliework #1346 (this is mainly where i rp so if you wanna continue our rp if we were partners before please message me again so I know who is still active in the community and for those wanting to rp with me now I’m always looking for 1x1s so please hmu for that too and again this is the main way to reach me if you have information for my book either your own story or books/articles about being dead, heaven and hell, purgatory, DID and bipolar disorder, or transphobia and abuse and just anything else I’ve posted about 💕)

Snapchat: coltwise or biggaymacdaddy (ill update this with more snaps cause im making a cooking channel and I also am making snaps for all my alters i only got mac so far and im gonna make james soon and i also have a daily prayers one I read the Bible at and take any prayer requests 🙏🏻 y’all have but i can’t remember the username but its either dailyprayers05 or dailyprayers55 but I think it’s 05. I’ll update all of this later fam)

Instagram: wisteriagrowshere (im gonna make alter accounts too eventually lol but i don’t use insta as much)

Tiktok: only got one and it’s relivingmyhorrors

Twitter: I’ll update this later since I deleted the app and don’t remember my username lol

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anistarrose · 4 years

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Summary: Taako unlocks a backstory reveal, Kravitz notices an astronomical discrepancy, and Noelle completes an errand. It’s an evening of relaxation and bonding for some, and a night of furtive preparation for others, but one thing is constant — everyone is missing a few pieces of the story.

Characters: Kravitz, Taako, Barry Bluejeans, Angus McDonald, Magnus Burnsides, Merle Highchurch, Noelle | No-3113, The Raven Queen, The Director | Lucretia, misc. BoB cameos, Julia Burnsides, Garyl

Relationships: Taakitz, Angus McDonald & Taako, Barry Bluejeans & Kravitz, Kravitz & Angus McDonald

Hey, guess what fic isn’t dead! Before we get into the action, I just want to state for the record that I, Rose, think mullets are generally a valid hairstyle (including on Barry Bluejeans). The opinions on mullets that a certain character expresses in this chapter are in no way representative of my views as the author. Anyways, enjoy the Taakitz before the storm!

(A “previously on,” since it’s been so long since the last chapter: THB all know Barry is the Red Robe, Barry knows THB are in trouble for death crimes, and he’s shared all his relevant backstory details with Noelle, who has agreed to help him save the boys from Kravitz with the endgame goal of stopping the Hunger. Kravitz has arranged a sort-of date with Taako, which he’s obviously excited for, but he doesn’t know a lich and a robot are out to get him. Meanwhile, Garyl doesn’t know why Taako stopped hanging out with liches about twelve years ago, and is really missing the spectral oats said liches always gave him. I think that’s everything everyone knows and doesn’t know!)

***

The Raven Queen had always reminded Kravitz of his mortal mother, not just because of the physical resemblance — which was indeed present, albeit slightly diminished by the beaked mask that concealed the Queen’s nose and eyes — but because of her temperament, kind but stern. She was a fair judge, and even a surprisingly forgiving one at times, but she held no reservations against telling people they could do better, if she believed it to be true.

So when the Queen approached Kravitz during his walk along the coast of the Astral Sea, in her usual form of a dark-skinned woman wearing a magnificent feathered cloak, Kravitz breathed a sigh of relief when he saw she was smiling at him. Her ethereal voice was both diminutive and thunderous at once, but thankfully free of disappointment or malice.

My child.

She unfurled not just one pair of midnight-black wings, but a hundred pairs, and suddenly she embodied an entire flock of ravens, circling Kravitz with impossible synchronicity and silence.

Come fly with me.

Kravitz leapt into the air, changing shape and sprouting wings of his own. In the form of a rook with dark blue-gray feathers and the pattern of an avian skull atop his head in light gray, he took off across the sea, and the Queen followed, casting a hundred identical shadows atop the waves.

This airborne sightseeing tour across the afterlife was not a new ritual for them — they’d done this countless times since the Raven Queen had first taught Kravitz to fly, lifetimes ago — but Kravitz had noticed, over the past century or two, that the Queen almost exclusively reserved these flights for days when Kravitz felt stressed.

They soared through a cloud of souls, which danced and shimmered like snowflakes in a gentle breeze, and as they exited it, he finally spoke. “It’s a pleasure to see you as always, my Queen, but… er, what is it that brings you here today?”

My dear Kravitz, you’re even a bundle of nerves when you’re a bird. You’re not letting those elusive lich bounties get to you, are you?

“I… I suppose I have been letting it get to me. In a way.”

Kravitz, you are competent and you are worthy. You needn’t fear me reprimanding you — I have no doubt that you will capture them eventually. After all, you have a promising new strategy, don’t you?

“My Queen, I…” Kravitz trailed off. The scenery of the Astral Plane changed with every flight, but today he’d stopped taking it in, preoccupied with wracking his brain for the right words. “I appreciate that — but it’s really that ‘new strategy’ you mention that I’ve been worrying about, not the liches themselves. I’ve been talking to Taako, and to a lesser extent Magnus and Merle, and —”

The flock’s flight slowed, and two hundred glassy raven eyes all fixated on Kravitz as he transformed back into a human, hovering in midair and clasping his hands together as he spoke.

“I didn’t believe them at first, but they really don’t remember their crimes against death, I’m sure of it. They’re not dangerous people — dangerous to themselves when they rush into danger, maybe, but not dangerous to the world. They stopped Legion, and their friend Angus has been telling me about all the people they’ve saved from the Grand Relics, and I — I would not feel justified reaping their souls, even if they fail to capture Bluejeans and Lup. There’s just so much we don’t know about how they’ve violated the laws of life and death — it may not have even been intentional on their part. My Queen, I sincerely believe we should grant them the same benefit of the doubt we grant to people roped into necromantic cults against their will — I can vouch for their character, and I know many other souls, both living and dead, who will do the same.”

Kravitz…

The flock was completely frozen in place now, and though he didn’t need to, Kravitz held his breath — a nervous habit from his life that he still hadn’t broken after centuries.

Is this why you’ve been stressed? Because you were anticipating this conversation?

“Partly, my Queen.”

I trust your judgement, Kravitz. I cannot pardon these three bounties altogether, knowing so little about their offenses — but if you deem it fitting, then I will grant them an indefinite respite as we investigate further. In the meantime, what do you propose for the escaped soul Noelle Redcheek and the necromancer Lucas Miller?

“So far, neither of them have done ill with their borrowed time. Noelle never asked to return to the world of the living, and she fought heroically against Legion, while Lucas… well, I spoke to his mother, and she seemed confident that he’d learned his lesson. I think we should allow them to stay in the world of the living until they die, provided they commit no more necromantic offenses.”

Then that shall be our policy moving forwards. Do keep an eye on Lucas, if nothing else, but I reviewed Noelle’s file personally this morning, and she sounds like a pleasant young spirit.

Still hovering in the air, Kravitz executed a bow as he let out his breath. “I appreciate the trust, my Queen.”

I will consult with Istus, to see if she can discern the pasts or destinies of the three… unique bounties. Until then, they are to be presumed innocent.

Kravitz smiled, because it was no secret that the Raven Queen relished every excuse to consult with the Lady of Fate. “I’m sure Lady Istus will be happy to hear from you.”

She will, and I don’t need to be the goddess of fate to know that. The ravens swarmed together, consolidating back into a seven-foot tall woman with dark brown skin, black roses adorning her hair, and sapphire-blue eyes glowing from behind the slits in her mask. She draped a cloaked arm over Kravitz’s shoulder as she continued:

Now, my child, you said something else was bothering you besides the status of your bounties?

“Well, it’s… I just…” Kravitz shook his head. “Let me put it this way: do you ever get nervous before talking to Istus, even though you always like spending time with her and know she feels the same? I guess you probably don’t, because you’re a goddess —”

Oh, I do.

“Oh.”

Do you have a commitment tonight? Let me guess — with Taako?

Kravitz smiled sheepishly. “We… er, I’m not even sure which one of us talked the other into it, but we might have arranged to go to a wine and pottery place on the moon together —”

Of course, the Chug ‘N Squeeze. There’s one in the Celestial Plane as well.

“You’re joking!”

Istus and I have been going there often lately. She loves all arts and crafts, after all.

Kravitz sighed. “Well, I had been wondering where all the clay ravens in my office were coming from.”

Do you like them, my child?

“Oh, they’re wonderful. The real office corvids like to perch on them, I guess to assert their dominance?”

The so-often stoic Queen laughed in a voice that could’ve belonged to a human, despite the cacophony of caws that swept across the Astral Plane in place of an echo. Kravitz, I’m sure your date will be divine. You have my blessing.

“It is helpful, not having to worry about arresting Taako in less than two months,” Kravitz admitted. “Thank you, my Queen.”

One last thing, my child — I’d like you to prioritize hunting down those problem liches, unless anything else comes up. I can’t shake the suspicion that they’re connected to your former bounties’ cases — or should I say for Taako, your potential future boyfriend’s case?

Kravitz spent a few seconds of increasingly awkward silence thinking about that second sentence, but ultimately decided that he didn’t want to challenge it. “Taako and his friends are doing important work of their own at the Bureau of Balance, and I don’t want to drag them away from that any more than I already have — but I’ll ask them to keep me updated if they find any new leads, and I’m quite sure they will. Bluejeans seems drawn to them, and to the Grand Relics, like a moth to a flame.”

So I suspected, the Raven Queen replied. It seems Istus and I have much to discuss.

***

With a dramatic flourish of his scythe, Kravitz stepped out of the rift and into Taako’s kitchen. Taako was leaning against the counter waiting for him, chin in his hands and a smug, catlike grin on his face.

“Sooo, notice anything different about me?”

“Not sure. New hat?” Kravitz replied, feigning confusion. “Just kidding! The new haircut looks great.”

“Finally, someone realizes! Lumberjack Ruffboi and the lunar youth pastor didn’t say a thing about it.” Running his fingers through the considerably shorter hair in question, Taako snorted — apparently in response to the nicknames of his own invention — and Kravitz chuckled along with him.

“Don’t get me wrong, you wear the shorter hair well, but why cut it now?” he asked Taako. “It wasn’t that long —”

“Not that long? It was turning into a mullet, Krav, and that’s fuckin’ unacceptable. Can you imagine us walking into a five-star, metropolitan establishment like the Chug ‘N Squeeze together, you absolutely killing it — pun totally intended — in your feathered cloak and designer suit, only for me to saunter in behind you, sporting an honest-to-Raven Queen mullet? Who do you take me for, Barold J. fucking Bluejeans?”

“Of course!” Kravitz sarcastically conceded, laughing. “Clearly, I was running the risk of mistaking you —” He gestured to Taako, brown-skinned and freckled with distinctly pointed ears, “for my old undead archnemesis Barry —”

He stopped talking as Taako dove to catch his Umbra Staff, which had rolled off the kitchen table seemingly all on its own.

“Hey, what gives?” Taako demanded of the umbrella. “I thought we were cool again after the other night — you got something against me trash-talking mullets, or what?”

The Umbra Staff didn’t reply, and Kravitz rubbed his neck. “Er… you talk to your umbrella often?”

Taako shrugged. “Yeah, and I talk to my wizard hat and my favorite fantasy electric mixer too, sometimes. S’no biggie.”

“Sometimes people in the Material Plane give me strange looks for talking to corvids, so I guess I can’t judge,” Kravitz admitted. “But speaking of talking to birds, I have good news!”

Taako slung his Umbra Staff over his shoulder. “Oh, bird news? That’s my favorite kinda news!”

“I spoke to the Raven Queen this morning, and… well, you’re not entirely out of trouble, but you don’t have to worry about that two month time limit anymore! The Queen decided that since no one knows exactly what your crimes were, we can’t judge you for them fairly, so you and the boys are safe at least until someone cracks that mystery — potentially safe forever, if the truth comes out and the Queen finds it sympathetic. Noelle and Lucas have also been granted amnesty, so don’t worry about them either.”

“Huh.” Taako rubbed his head, blinking slowly a few times. “So… we’re calling it quits on the lich hunts ‘til further notice?”

“More or less, but I’ve got a hunch you’ll run into Barry again whether you’re looking for him or not,” Kravitz answered. “So if or when that happens, I’d love a tip off.”

“Gotcha.” Taako nodded slowly. “Well, at least this’ll be good for Angus. Little half-pint can finally chill out instead of worrying about me all day.”

“Absolutely. See, when I went to beseech the Raven Queen, a big part of my argument was that reaping these doofuses’ souls would make an over-stressed ten-year old very sad,” Kravitz joked, deadpan. “So she really had no choice but to give you a respite — wait. What do you mean, at least?”

“Oh, you know.” Taako shrugged, averting his eyes. “It’s just the end of a short-lived bounty hunting era for ‘cha boy. It was dangerous work, but hey, my whole job is dangerous, right? Solving a lich mystery was a nice break from the routine —”

Then he sighed. “Oh, what happened to me? What happened to Taako’s good out here? I’m not into peril! I shouldn’t be missing it no matter how much…” He met Kravitz’s gaze again, smiling sheepishly this time. “No matter how much I’m gonna miss you, when you’re busy hunting ghosts and I’m busy hunting Grand Relics again.”

“Ah.” Kravitz felt his face grow warm — which should be a rare for a reaper without blood or a heartbeat, but seemed to be happening an awful lot around Taako lately. “Well, if it’s any consolation, the Raven Queen’s pretty generous with vacation days — after all, how do you think I made time for our date tonight?”

Taako’s eyes lit up. “Oh, we’re officially calling it a date? I mean, I knew the subtext was there, but why didn’t you tell me earlier?!”

Kravitz clapped a hand to his mouth, several seconds too late. “That was — oh, gods. That honestly wasn’t — that truly wasn’t intentional, but if you want it to be a date? I would love to call it one.”

“Okay, okay, I got a related idea for you —” Taako leaned in a little closer, and for the first time, Kravitz noticed the flecks of gold and burgundy in his dark brown eyes. “How about we just stop making idiots of ourselves and kiss already?”

Then Taako leaned back and facepalmed. “Damn, I shoulda said ‘stop making idiots of ourselves and make out already!’ That works so much better than —”

Kravitz kissed him on the cheek — just a quick peck, made brief not by a lack of interest in kissing Taako, but by Kravitz’s reluctance to tear his eyes away from Taako’s own for any longer than a few seconds. Taako kissed him back, running his hand down the back of Kravitz’s neck —

Then he withdrew with a jolt. “Aw, we’re about to be late to pottery, aren’t we? I even made reservations —”

“Not while you’re dating me, you’re not!” Kravitz exclaimed, drawing his scythe and slicing open a rift that led directly to the Chug ‘N Squeeze. He grabbed Taako by the hand, and the two of them laughed as they tumbled through the portal, scaring the wits out of the host but earning a cheer from Killian and Carey. Magnus — who was contentedly third-wheeling behind the couple, in his weirdly wholesome Magnus way — raised an eyebrow at first, but then gave a friendly wave and returned to the misshapen cup he was molding.

“Today,” the instructor coughed, clutching his chest, “we’ll be walking through how to make plates. Please, for the love of all the gods in the universe, do not make clay interplanar portals, because we’ve already had more than enough of that.”

“What fun!” Taako exclaimed he settled into his seat, then whispered under his breath to Kravitz: “I dunno what I’m making, but it’s not gonna be a plate. Real art is born when you start out with no plan, and go wherever the moment takes you.”

“Honestly? You do you, but I can’t really relate. Like, maybe it’s because music is the only type of art I normally pursue — but I’d rather have sheet music in front of me as a jumping off point, even if I’m planning to improvise, you know?”

“You were a bard? I shoulda known.” Taako tried to shape his clay into something that could pass for a plate or platter at a glance, yet remain legally distinct. The instructor gave him a suspicious look, but quickly moved on to reprimand Magnus for attempting to recreate his wineglass. “Love you for that, and you know you’ll have to show off your kickass music skills for me one day, but how does a bard wind up working for the death goddess?”

“Interesting story, that,” Kravitz admitted. “You want the long version, or the short version?”

“I dunno, maybe a brief novella?”

“Okay. Yeah, I can work with novella length.” Kravitz leaned back in his chair, removing a few clumps of clay from under his nails. “At the beginning of the end of my lifetime, give-or-take eight hundred and twenty years ago, my sibling and I were travelling a dangerous road, and we got in over our heads. We were passing through an abandoned cemetery, and… it’s hard to forget how we were just joking about how ominous it was…”

He got a distant look in his eyes. “But the second we started to laugh, a gang of bandits jumped out from behind the graves to ambush us. Now, I was a damn good bard and my sibling was a damn good artificer, but we were unprepared for combat — and, worse outnumbered five to two. We pruned their ranks to four, then three, when the first two ruffians tried to charge us, but the other three had both range and cover, and they rained arrows on us from both sides of the road. My sibling took a hit that left them in critical condition, so… I did the only thing a protective older brother could do, upon finding oneself and their injured loved one assailed in a cemetery. It was a split-second, desperate decision, but… I played a song to raise the dead.”

“You did a death crime,” was what Taako said out loud, but what he thought was I’d do the same thing. Which was strange, not just because he couldn’t play any instruments, but because he definitely didn’t have a sibling whose peril would prompt such an arcane outburst from him.

He would’ve liked to have someone like that, though. Someone to unconditionally watch his back on those tough journeys, someone who’d raise the dead for him, someone —

Someone to tell him to quit psychoanalyzing himself on date night, come on, Taako, you’re giving yourself a headache.

“As rash as it was, I’d do it all over again if I had to,” Kravitz confessed, apparently too focused on the story to notice what must’ve been visible confusion on Taako’s face. “Though maybe don’t tell the Raven Queen I said that, because it was… quite the crime.”

Absentmindedly, he picked up a few extra clumps of clay and began to roll them into a thin cylinder between his palms. “The graveyard the bandits had chosen was a good place to ambush travellers, but the perfect place to be ambushed by the undead. The zombies I raised were individually weak, but there must’ve been close to two dozen of them, and they surrounded the ruffians that had surrounded us. While they bought us time, I poured all the power I had left into healing my sibling from the brink of death — and it was all worth it, because they got away safe…”

“But you didn’t,” Taako murmured.

“No,” Kravitz confirmed. “But don’t look so glum. The ending of the story’s not all sad.”

He placed the clay cylinder on his plate-in-progress, flattening it slightly as he affixed it to the rest of his project, then set to work shaping another clump into something quite different. “When I died, I was almost immediately met by the Raven Queen’s reaper at the time. She was… not exactly thrilled that I’d summoned a minor undead army — an undead militia, she called it — but my zombies and the bandits had more or less mutually destroyed each other, while she saw I was a first-time offender who’d only acted in self-defense, and wasn’t putting up a fight as I was escorted away from the world of the living. She told me she would be keeping an eye on me for the first few years of my afterlife, just to make sure I hadn’t developed a taste for necromancy and decided to hatch an escape plan from the Astral Plane, and then escorted me to a a pleasant little island in the Astral Sea.”

Kravitz added the final piece of clay to his creation, and Taako realized he’d formed a raised scythe pattern at the plate’s center. “Hopefully this sticks when it goes into the kiln. Anyway, I spent about the next five years on that island, but the reaper brought me plenty of instruments to play and books to read upon my request, so it was hardly a punishment. I was surprised, though, the day she showed up and said that the Raven Queen had requested my presence.”

“Aha. Now here’s the start of your career, right?”

“Exactly. When she offered me an apprenticeship as the next reaper-in-training, I was initially… apprehensive, to say the least, but I eventually accepted the offer, and… well, you know perfectly where the story goes from here. I was a better fit for the job than I could’ve ever expected, and… there were some nice perks, too.” He smiled. “For one thing, I got to spend a few months with my sibling and parents after each of them passed away.”

“I’m glad that worked out for you,” Taako said, with a sincerity he rarely used in combination with those particular words. For the first time since Kravitz had started talking, he took a good look at his own clay, which looked like… a misshapen lump, or maybe an especially boring rock. He probably could’ve paid more attention to what he was doing, but at least he hadn’t gone and subconsciously made a plate.

“But you know,” he went on, stroking his chin, “I’m intrigued by this implication that by peacefully turning myself in for death crimes, I could get nominated for a reaper job…”

Kravitz laughed. “Oh, I wouldn’t recommend that loophole. Maybe if the Queen hadn’t approved your respite, I would suggest it as a last resort —”

“What’s wrong, afraid of me stealing your job?”

“No — I’ve been a reaper for eight centuries, but the one who trained me only retired about four hundred and fifty years ago. Two to four reapers serving concurrently isn’t uncommon. The problem is, the Queen usually chooses reapers who have some prior knowledge of necromancy — without having used it for evil or anything, of course — and unlike most of my bounties, Taako, you don’t seem to be a necromancer? I mean, I’m sure you could learn, because you’re clearly a skilled wizard, but I wouldn’t encourage it. You’re just starting to get out of trouble as is.”

“If you insist,” Taako said with an exaggerated sigh. “So the Raven Queen’s ideal recruits would be, what, a couple of lich superheroes who swore to only use their dark powers for good?”

“In an ideal world, yes — but certainly not in the universe we live in, because those kind of liches don’t exist on any plane I’ve visited. Like I said, I’ve been doing this centuries, and even the rare times I’ve seen liches start out with good intentions, they can’t hold it together once they actually become undead. I guess Barry has debatably held it together, at least compared to the baseline for liches, but gods know what his intentions are, so I don’t plan on offering him a job any time soon.”

Taako took a sip of his wine. “You could still set him up for an interview sometime, just to see,” he suggested, completely deadpan. “Maybe he’ll surprise you.”

***

The view of the night sky was gorgeous from the moonbase, perhaps even on par with the blue-tinged literal heavens of the Astral Plane — but there was also something off about the view tonight, something Kravitz couldn’t quite place.

“What an atmosphere, am I right?” Taako sat down on a bench, still cradling Kravitz’s plate gingerly in his arms. “Who needs telescopes when you can stargaze from the moon?”

“If we ever have another artistic date, we should come out here earlier and try and paint this,” Kravitz agreed aloud. Internally, he was only growing more puzzled as he ran through a laundry list of variables.

The moonbase’s artificial lights had long since dimmed for the evening. They were miles above any other sources of the light pollution that plagued the modern world. The sky was cloudless from horizon to horizon, and the real moon was barely a crescent, hardly a bright enough beacon to drown out the lights of any stars.

So why did the sky look emptier than Kravitz remembered it ever looking in his lifetime, as if an invisible black backdrop at the edge of the Material Plane had slowly inched closer, smothering the most distant stars one by one and dimming the night by a barely-perceptible degree? Was his memory all wrong, or had something subtle yet cosmically pivotal changed?

“One of our artistic dates has got to be something musical,” Taako went on, apparently either unconcerned by the state of the sky or oblivious to it. “You keep up with modern music at all?”

“Mmm, on and off. Not so much recently, but I went to a lot of concerts last century.” Kravitz noticed Taako shivering slightly as a stiff breeze blew past, and draped his raven-feather cloak over Taako’s shoulder.

“Hey, thanks. Will RQ hand these cloaks out to any old Joe, or do you have to be a reaper to wear one?”

“You have to be a reaper to receive one —” Kravitz winked. “— but I have an extra I could loan you, if you promise you won’t wear it next time you commit a death crime.”

“It’ll get me more use than the Cloak of the Manta Ray, that’s for sure,” Taako snorted.

He pecked Kravitz on the lips, and Kravitz kissed back before the two of them both looked back up to the sky again, hand in hand this time.

“This is a very weird question,” Kravitz began, “but do you know how often visible stars go out? It can’t be very often, can it?”

Taako frowned. “Depends. You mean, like, as supernovas, or in the more anticlimactic ways?”

“Either, really. I just… I kind of thought there would be more stars visible from here than you can see from the surface, but the sky looks a little emptier than I remember from stargazing when I was alive.”

“That is weird,” Taako agreed, “‘cause stars all die eventually, and get reborn from the dust left behind — but they burn for millions or billions of years first. A few centuries is just chump change to stars; there’s no way it should make that much of a difference —”

“Okay, that’s what I thought,” Kravitz said. “Maybe my memory’s just cloudy…”

“Hmm. I guess that’s one explanation.” Taako rubbed his chin, then leaned back to rest his head on Kravitz’s shoulder as he squinted at the galaxies overhead. “Hmmm.” His murmur turned to a hum, his breath pleasantly warm on Kravitz’s neck.

“I’m sure you’ve studied more astronomy than I have, so I’ll leave this mystery to you,” Kravitz told him. “I prefer my mysteries down to earth, or maybe in the Underworld —”

“Me? Astronomy? Studying?” Taako laughed, and Kravitz felt him shiver. “You’re giving me too much credit. I just…”

He paused. “Just kinda picked up the basics in my free time, I guess.”

“Your free time where, at wizard school?” Kravitz teased.

“Nope! Taako’s Amazing Self-Taught Wizard Homeschool for life, baby. I just read about astronomy… here and there, I guess. Probs a library, not that it really matters…” Frowning, Taako rubbed his head, and Kravitz saw his hand come away damp with sweat.

“Speaking of libraries, we should visit one together sometime,” Kravitz pivoted, and was relieved to see Taako smile again, sitting up a little taller. “I love catching up on science that was contentious in my lifetime, like germ theory, or what will happen when the sun goes out —”

“Oh, that’s an easy one for us nowadays. We’ve got a few billion years before it turns into a white dwarf and eventually goes nova — not supernova, mind you, but still pretty nova. You won’t wanna be around for it.”

“I’ll try and retire from immortality before then,” Kravitz chuckled. “I’m sure my work would be cut out for me reaping —”

An electric buzz infiltrated the back of his mind, and he tapped two fingers to his temple, adjusting the celestial signal. “I’m so sorry. Hang on a second.”

“Business call?” Taako asked dejectedly.

“Yeah. Necromancers wait for no stargazing date nights.” Kravitz relayed a silent message of confirmation back to the Raven Queen, and lowered his fingers, cutting off the connection. “Alright, the Rockport Fantasy Costco got caught selling necrotic artifacts — again — but it’s not that urgent. Any other couples’ activities you want to squeeze into, let’s see, the next five minutes?”

Taako shook his head. “Nah, better to save all the good stuff for next time than to rush it. But speaking of that — when should next time be?”

“I have no idea when I’ll be free, honestly —” Kravitz admitted, “— but I just remembered! You’re not a wanted man anymore, so I can give you my Stone frequency!”

“Aw, hell yeah!” Taako rummaged through pockets full of pudding and magical trinkets, eventually procuring his own Stone of Farspeech. “Here, plug in your contact info and I’ll text you back —”

“Oh, gods, I was just going to read you my number! Your way is so much more efficient —”

“Hey, Old Man Krav, don’t be too hard on yourself! Most people your age wouldn’t even know what a Stone of Farspeech is —”

Caught up in parting banter, neither Kravitz nor Taako noticed when directly overhead, another star vanished without fanfare as the encroaching void swallowed it whole…

But miles below, at a furtive meeting in the foothills of an ill-charted mountain range, two undead spirits were all too aware.

***

Barry supposed it was obvious that he was nervous. In lieu of a racing heartbeat, the scarlet threads of his robe were repeatedly unravelling, then weaving themselves back together in a slightly different pattern each time — though he supposed he should count his blessings, since at least Noelle looked a lot less horrified than she honestly had the right to be.

“I think I got everything,” she told him, completely unfazed as he snatched the sack of components from her with a shaking, blurry hand. He really hadn’t meant to snatch it, like a feral cat snatching food from a human hand it didn’t yet trust. It had just sort of happened that way.

“Thank you,” was what he meant to tell her, but the sound that came out was indistinguishable from nails on a chalkboard, and he tried again. “Thank you, Noelle.”

The second time, it was more of a rasp — a lot like the voice he’d put on to talk to Taako, Merle, and Magnus in Goldcliff, except not at all intentional this time — but at least it was recognizably his, and for that, he was willing to settle.

“Mister Bluejeans, are you… okay?” Noelle asked him — and there it was, the question he’d been waiting for. “You’re surrounded by an awful lot of crimson lightning.”

“I’ve dealt with worse. I’ll live,” he told her. “Well, no, bad word choice — I’ll survive. Liches like me just… don’t handle negative emotions well, but better I express it than repress it. Besides, I’ve gotten through worse before.”

It must’ve helped, talking to someone who reacted to his eldritch nervous tics with concern rather than horror — because the rasp in his voice started to subside, and his hands looked almost human again, albeit incorporeal, as he sorted through the bag of components Noelle had delivered:

Iron filings by the pound. A few jade crystals, imperfect yet sufficient for their purposes. An arcane core, currently deactivated, yet surrounded by a humming magical aura made from practically the same stuff as Barry’s own current form.

And last but not least, several handfuls of black opals — an unpleasant reminder of the Hunger’s approach, of the stars blinking out and the color being sapped from the world. Their shifting pattern iridescence was so familiar that Barry could easily imagine pure white eyes opening on the surface of the gems, even though he knew he was safe, that these stones were nowhere near perfect circles.

“These will work,” he reported. “Really, I can’t thank you enough.”

“Oh, come on. It’s the least I could do,” Noelle told him. “Did you finish the cannon upgrade?”

“Sure did.” Barry returned her cannon arm to her, and she reattached it gingerly, humming with satisfaction as she tested moving it around. “Had to override a couple of Lucas’s anti-modding measures, and it’s gonna be a hassle to recharge, but it’s all set up to deal radiant damage now. Just please don’t test it in here, ‘cause my poor subterranean lair may not survive.”

Noelle laughed. “Gotcha. Once I get some practice shots in, I’ll be ready to set the trap. You feeling up to it?”

“I still don’t feel ready,” Barry admitted, “but it’s not like I’ve got any other options, besides sitting here and worrying more. I just… I just have to take it one step at a time.”

He placed the opals back in the bag, along with the other components and a wand he’d made specifically for writing runes. Out of sight and out of mind, if only for a brief respite.

Tomorrow, I’m saving my family from the Grim Reaper, he resolved. Then, I can worry about saving the planar system.

***

End notes:

Taako is actually wrong about what will happen to this planet’s sun in billions of years — white dwarfs only go nova if they’re located in binary or otherwise multiple star systems, like a certain two-sunned planet had ;) There’s also a couple references to the Grand Relics in this chapter that I like to think are clever, let me know if you caught them!

(Also, describing the Taakitz kiss as “a peck on the cheek” was a certified 100 percent intentional bird pun — shoutout to this fic’s awesome beta Fex for encouraging me to take that joke and run with it completely seriously!)

#taz #taz balance #taakitz #kravitz taz #taako taaco #the raven queen #barry bluejeans #no-3113 #taz balance spoilers #fic: ftrala #rosalia writes fic

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