#and i have no idea why . like what did i eat. was it the hummus for dinner. the spectacular lunch? chicken n basmati

[july-19th-club]

every time i have a really bad bout of insommnia i realize all over again that im not going to be able to trust my ability to sleep for a very long time...the last time i had even a little bit of trouble sleeping was months and months ago, and i was still able to nod off before 1:30am and get a more or less full night's rest. now it's 2:16am, i've got that fluttery feeling of unrest in my chest that i haven't felt, not really, since last summer, and there are so many things in my mind that i feel like i have to take care of that i just can't relax. i nodded off for about an hour and woke up just before 2am and felt immediately a) sick to my stomach b) the sure and certain knowledge that it might be the most sleep i got at ALL tonight and just the thought of that brought me right back to wide awake. maybe it was something i ate today maybe it was the myriad of things that have gone weird this week - have to finish paperwork for my job for fundraising and the boss wants it (very literally) yesterday, so of course my ability to satisfy what he wants has to be hampered by sleeplessness and exhaustion; i've got a fun family gathering all weekend at an amusement park that i've decided to actually go to this year despite ducking out on the three previous years for work reasons and covid reasons and all very good reasons but now i'm going and good lord i'm terrified of getting sick because i'm just too stupid to stay home. and i fucked up and got the weeks wrong for my most recent therapy appointment and i haven't heard back from her when i texted her to ask what the actual date was so i'm just. starting to think she's dropped me unceremoniously and i'll never hear from her again and it's my fault because i should've been more on the ball to begin with. and who i WANT to talk to about all this is the therapist but. well. ive screwed up somehow and i'm terrified to reach out again because what if that just pisses her off? surely this is not the right way to think about that situation but i need her to tell me what the right way IS. and well you can see my conundrum. anyway it's now edging in on 2:30 and the only thing i can think to do is work on my fundraising paperwork now, at 2am, so that if i call off sick tomorrow on account of no sleep and, probably, impending actual sickness because why else would i not be able to sleep? the last time i had this much trouble i was actually sick, like with a flu, so . anyway if i work on the paperwork NOW then i can send it in tomorrow from home and at least i will not be a complete failure of an employee. fuck my stupid baka life

#not encouraged to reblog this one #gOD i feel like i'm either going to have the world's most belch or throw up #and i have no idea why . like what did i eat. was it the hummus for dinner. the spectacular lunch? chicken n basmati #was the chicken not cooked . do i have some kind of food poisoning #that would almost be a relief because it would be a concrete answer for why tonight sucks so bad #and i would be able to not go crazy over it #ive sent my mother like. seven or eight long ass midnight texts. that are basically all just this post. pathetic #and she knows i do this and she's fine with it but she also (for her own sanity. and sleep.) turns her phone to do not disturb at night #and reads my misery ramblings in the morning #and that's fine! i'm cool with it she has insomnia too and since this started i for the first time in my life really appreciate how bad tha #but like.............i NEEd to talk to someone about how scared i am and how shaky my chest feels and how bad it all fucking sucks. #so me and my upset stomach and my ten useless milligrams of melatonin are on tumblr. that bastion of the sleepless and the nocturnal #have love song by mariee sioux stuck in my head which is not a BAD song to have stuck in ur head during insomnia #but i dont want the insomnia to ruin the song u know what i mean

[bowandcurtsey]

When the kids ask for a second child (haikyuu) 

So I did this with the BC boys and I thought of some scenarios for the Haikyuu boys too ♡ඩ⌔ඩ♡

Kuroo | Bokuto | Atsumu | Tsukishima | Oikawa x f! reader

d/n : daughter's name s/n : son's name h/n : her name

TW: pregnancy, implications of nsfw but not mentioned, unchecked.

Black Clover Version

Kuroo Tetsuro

"Daa daa!!" d/n ran towards her dad the first thing he stepped into the house. Her eyes were red and there were still tears left in her eyes.

"hey there little one," your husband picked your 3 year old up, "are you crying because you missed your daddy soooo much?"

"you wish," you laughed at your husband, giving him a peck on his lips as he frowned.

"so you don't miss daddy anymore? My princess is all grown up now, huh?" he feigned a hurt expression to your daughter.

"I do.." d/n gave a little pout exactly like her father's, "but daddy, Aunty h/n and Uncle Bokuto are having another baby!!"

"oya?" Kuroo looked at you in confusion, "why is this a news to cry about?"

"It's not fair!" d/n wailed, "I want another baby too!"

Kuroo laughed as he tossed his daughter in the air, giving a little kiss to her forehead.

"I'm on it," he winked at his mini him, "give daddy about 4 weeks, then you can share with Uncle Bo that you're gonna have another sibling too~"

"Tetsu!!" you pinched his sides, but something tells you that he was indeed serious.

Bokuto Koutaro

"Mummy! You're buttercup, I'm Blossom and d/n is Bubbles!" Your twin daughter came running to you while you were making an afternoon snack for the family.

"Hey! how about daddy!" your husband whined.

"You're professor!" d/n, twin number 2 exclaimed.

"But that makes mummy my daughter!" you husband finally got the logic right, "That's wrong! Mummy's my wife!"

You always found it funny how your husband liked to bicker with his 4 year old twin daughters about small matters like this.

"Okay!" twin number 1 exclaimed, "Mummy, we need another sister!"

"YA!!" twin 2 shouted from the living room.

"HEY HEY HEY!!" your husband stood up, skipping towards you with sparkles in his eyes.

He picked up the carrot you were slicing and dipped it into the hummus, "I think that's a great idea, mummy."

The carrot and hummus were placed right at your lips, "I think we can have the powerpuff boys next~"

"BO!"

Miya Atsumu

"alright, let's eat!" Osamu placed the pot of curry down on the dining table. You, Atsumu and your 3 year old son were visiting Osamu and h/n at their new home. Of course Osamu the chef had to cook personally for his favourite little nephew, s/n.

s/n always loved eating whatever his uncle made. He would polish his plate clean and that always made Osamu very proud.

"So~" h/n started to talk as everyone began eating, "we have news to tell you guys~"

"h/n is pregnant!" Osamu could barely contain himself.

Atsumu and you cheered loudly. "s/n! Uncle samu gonna have a baby! you'll have a play mate!" Atsumu told his son.

s/n stared at everyone with a blank look, feeling confused at what was going on. He didn't really understood the words 'pregnant', or 'playmate' quite yet."

As the four of you settled down, s/n suddenly broke the silence. "daaadaa! I want baby too!"

Everyone broke into laughter again as Osamu scruffled his nephew's hair.

Atsumu propped his head on his elbows as he looked at you with a grin on his face, "we'll have to see what mama says about that, little monkey~"

"Okay, let's just focus on dinner, shall we!" your face was flushed red.

Tsukishima Kei

"daddy~" your little princess tugged onto her dad's fingers. It was always when she wanted something from her dad, she'd do that.

"What is it, d/n?" The middle blocker picked his daughter up.

"Stella said that she's gonna have another sister in awhile so she won't have time to play with me next time..." she pouted

"oh, Stella from school?"

"Uh huh.." she frowned, "daddy?"

"Mhmm?"

"Can I have another sister too?"

Tsukishima blinked twice at what his daughter just said. The heat creeping up to his face as his ear tips reddened.

He cleared his throat, "What if it's a brother?"

"no, I don't want a brother!" d/n crossed her arm.

"But we can't really decide on whether it's a boy or a girl, princess.." Tsukishima gave his daughter a little sheepish smile.

"okay.. I just want another baby so they can play with stella's baby and I can play with Stella again!"

Tsuki raised a brow at his daughter. She was indeed smart but in kinda the wrong way. He shook his head, deciding not to further explain the situation.

"I'll talk to mommy tonight, okay? So you'll have to head to bed earlier so mommy and I have time to discuss about this."

Oikawa Tooru

"daadaa maamaa!!" your four year old was excited to see both of you pick her up today.

Your husband carried her in one arm and held your hand on the other. Even as he grew older, your husband's charisma never faded, there were still many moms stealing glances at his handsome features. But now as he held your daughter and you, all you felt was pride.

"Teacher Daisy is having a baby in her belly!!" she excitedly exclaimed.

You both looked at the young teacher, and congratulated her, wishing her all the best and to take good care of yourself.

"Cupcake, you have to be careful around Teacher Daisy, alright, do not knock into her or cause her to fall, her little baby in her belly might get hurt." You reminded d/n.

"Okay mama," she nodded her head

"When you were in your mommy's belly, daddy was very careful too~" your husband smiled at the memory, "daddy watched as you grew bigger in mommy's belly~"

"daadaa, I want to take care of mama and the baby in her belly too!"

"mama has no baby in my belly right now, cupcake." you giggled.

"That can be changed," Oikawa winked at you.

"Tooru!" you gave him the look.

d/n clapped her hands, "yes yes!! baby!!"

"Honey, we have to give our little cupcake what she wants~" Oikawa wriggled his brows at you.

#kuroo x reader #kuroo tetsuro x reader #kuroo scenarios #bokuto koutaro x reader #bokuto x reader #bokuto hcs #atsumu miya x reader #atsumu headcanons #atsumu imagines #tsukishima kei headcanons #tsukishima kei x reader #tsukishima x reader #oikawa tooru x reader #oikawa x reader #oikawa headcanons #haikyuu scenarios #haikyuu imagines #haikyuu fanfiction #haikyuu fic #haikyuu x reader

[silver-tooth-the-panther]

(This was a request from @leviathanverse . It was from a prompt that I suggested a few days ago and I hope that y’all enjoy it!)

The Friendly Beast

(Gyutaro version)

Warning: abuse, blood, suicidal thoughts, and comfort vore

The fight with the jaguar demon took a lot out of Gyutaro. For the longest time, the halving of his blood demon art didn’t bother him. He never had to use it until then. The fight was brutal and the demon was incredibly powerful, but with Tanjiro’s help, they were able to defeat him.

Still, Gyutaro needed to rest. His bones and back were hurt badly by the many undead jaguars that were controlled by the demon. He chose a comfortable spot near a tree to rest. Luckily, it wasn’t too cold, so resting in the forest wasn’t too bad.

He had been sleeping for about a half hour when he heard something rustling in the bushes. Gyutaro grumbled as he got up. He hated people disturbing his sleep. “Who’s there?” He growled as he approached the sound. Gyutaro moved the bushes aside so he could see who’s there. His jaw imminently dropped once he saw what was behind there.

You were sitting on your knees, crawling. You were filthy and you looked like you hadn’t eaten in a while. Your face was covered in bruises and you looked like you had given up. “Oh my god! Are you okay?” Gyutaro pulled you close and wiped off the blood on your face.

“Please..kill me.” You muttered softly. Gyutaro was shocked by your request. “What?! Why?!” He was very concerned about your situation, but he seemed a tad bit angry at your request. “My family..they’re just going to hurt me..no one will help me.”

Any anger that Gyutaro had melted from his heart. He finally understood your situation. The realization of your abusive situation made his heart break. “I’m so sorry, little one.” He held you closer to his chest.

“Please..eat me. I’d rather be dead than have them find me.” You winced through the pain. Gyutaro scratched his neck, thinking of a way to help you. Then an idea hit him.

“Here..” He said as he picked you up. Gyutaro then put you inside his maw, being careful not to scratch your body against his teeth. You thought that he was going to crush your body, but instead he started to swallow you whole.

His throat was a warm and soft tunnel that gently pulled you down into his tummy. It was incredibly soothing and you were surprised that a demon would be this gentle with you. Gyutaro’s belly was also really comfortable. It felt like you were wrapped up in a weighted blanket.

Once he was done swallowing, Gyutaro sat down next to a tree. He gently rubbed his belly. He was definitely enjoying the fullness he felt. “Why didn’t you kill me?” You asked nervously. This demon was definitely confusing.

“I don’t eat hummus anymore. Besides, Tanjiro would kick my ass if I did.” Gyutaro said softly. “Then why would you swallow me?” You were curious about the demon’s motives. “Well I figured that it would be more comfortable.”

He was right. His tummy was incredibly soothing and it was able to put you at ease. Yet, you were still worried about your family. They would come back for you eventually. Gyutaro knew that you would worry about them and so he tried to help you.

“I know exactly how you feel, kid. I was abused by my family before they died.” You were shocked to hear this from the demon. “You were?” You gasped. “Yeah I was. People were cruel to me and my sister because of our family. I suffered so much that I became envious of anyone who had even a slightly better life.”

You understood this completely. You also felt cheated whenever anyone else had a better life. Gyutaro continued, “That was until Tanjiro became the demon king. He showed us what life was supposed to be. He showed me and my sister what love truly was.”

“He seems like a wonderful person.” You said in a dreamy tone. You wanted to know someone who was truly that kind. “Oh he is! He takes care of all of us!” Gyutaro thought for a moment. “You know what? I know that he’ll take care of you. We’ll all take care of you!”

“Really?” You seemed to be excited now. All you wanted was a family that would love you. “Yeah!” Gyutaro chuckled, he wanted to do the very thing that no one would ever do when he was human. “What about my family?” You asked in a worried tone.

“Don’t worry about them, little one. We’ll protect you. I promise.” He held his belly close to him. “Thank you! Thank you so much!” You started to cry out of happiness. You never knew anyone that would be kind enough to help you.

“You’re welcome.” Gyutaro felt a sense of warmth wash over him. “You need to rest though. You’re badly beaten and you’re probably tired.” Once again, Gyutaro was right. You gently snuggled into the soft walls of his belly.

Gyutaro then curled up around his belly and held it close. “I’ll protect you.” He muttered. He never wanted anyone else to go through the same pain that he did. Gyutaro then fell asleep, holding his belly close.

When you woke up, you were resting on Gyutaro’s chest. You felt a sense of relief and compassion come over you. You were so happy that you had finally found a family after all your pain. Then, you gently cuddled the sleeping demon.

#comfort vore #safe vore #soft vore #vore writing #demon slayer vore

[mackie02-ffn]

I fed some prompts into inferkit (really bored) and this is what I ended up with. My second attempt as the first one did have a slur. A really random one, but still one that describes me and made me uncomfortable. The italics is me stirring. I gave it: Daisy, Daniel, Coulson, SHIELD, HYDRA and Presbyterian. The last one was random. Here it is:

That's one, that's one fact.

In the premiere of Marvel's SHIELD, we finally saw what Coulson knows about Daisy's murder, as well as the revelation that the arsonists were actually SHIELD agents, and possibly the only ones at SHIELD who knew where Daisy was buried. It makes sense why the rest of SHIELD doesn't know what's going on with Daisy yet, especially since they haven't been given all of the details of what happened after she turned herself into the police. That's not to say the agents at SHIELD didn't know what was going on with Daisy, but they weren't involved, or maybe not fully involved. Coulson believed that, and the viewers seem to be on his side, but even so, we all just want to know why the hell the SHIELD agents were around Daisy's body if they weren't actually taking part in the crime, and what the hell is going on with Daisy's body and its whereabouts?

It's been revealed that Daisy is alive and doing well in a boarding school. Coulson isn't just talking about Daisy being alive because Daisy and HYDRA kidnapped May, as he's been holding on to what he knows about Daniel, whose abilities he thought Daisy was able to change just by touching her, despite the fact that Daisy had convinced him otherwise. Daniel's story is going to be further fleshed out in later episodes of SHIELD, and the plotline will likely give us a better look at SHIELD history. But, in the meantime, we can also start to figure out the story that Daniel is telling the Presbyterian women.

The plot of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD will certainly involve SHIELD, but it doesn't have to be as clean as the way SHIELD is usually shown. In the first episode, we met Peter and realized that he has been in America since he was six years old, the year Daisy went to the U.S. with her father and brother. But Daniel was only six in 2012, or he was born in 1920. I had to wonder, was Daniel even born in the U.S.? And if not, then what was his father's purpose in returning to America, at that time? It's not just Daisy's story that will need to be further fleshed out, as Daisy's own history has been somewhat skipped over, and Coulson's history, well, Coulson barely gives any background information on himself in the first episode. In fact, the most he tells us about himself is that he is Presbyterian and eats hummus on Thursdays. For a show that seems like it will be somewhat dark, the ending of the first episode is as light as SHIELD can get.

A mix of sci-fi and sci-fi inspired humor

When Coulson gives Daniel the training as his instructor, we start to get an idea of how this show will be different from the Marvel movies. It appears that Coulson's team will consist of people like Mack, May, Fitz, Simmons, and even Lance Hunter, but this team is going to be a little hungrier. And it's not just about working for SHIELD, as we find out that the Presbyterian school that Daniel attends is full of SHIELD agents. The Presbyterian school is looking for a team to go to Nepal to check out a particular sect that can give them access to a group of ancient scrolls. Meanwhile, the agents are at the train station waiting for a train that isn't leaving anytime soon, so they make the best of their time in the train station.

The hedgehog serum being the key ingredient is certainly a huge part of the plot for the series, especially with the introduction of its possible effects on May and Mack. But the powers of the serum aren't being completely left to the agents, as Daisy is also given the serum as a potential partner. Daisy doesn't get quite as much to do in the first episode as Daisy was promised by Daisy's father, Dr. Iain Duncan. But Daisy does get to be a healer, a fighter, hedgehog trainer, and sometimes a wise old lady. This mix of sci-fi and sci-fi inspired humor really sets SHIELD up as a show worth watching, and just as importantly, a show that can hold its own against the MCU.

The A.S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and Daisy's story both aren't just relegated to this episode. But once the adrenaline and adventure of the train wreck fades, the team needs to figure out what they're going to do with Daisy. The show hasn't confirmed the fate of her uncle, Gerald. We will learn why May hasn't been working with Coulson for a while. And the Presbyterian school for SHIELD agents isn't going to be left just for the Presbyterian school's sake. We already know that there is a connection between the Presbyterian school and the Presbyterian school for the Avengers, and I imagine the way the teams are trained will be the same in the future. The only things that have been missing so far, from the original comic, are Fury and Fury's grandma. I suspect that both of those will appear in a future episode, along with the villains of Hydra and their organization, The Ori.

While the first episode gives the new team of SHIELD agents some trouble and conflict, I can already tell that the series is going to be very entertaining and energetic. The show already shows some great action scenes, with Coulson jumping in the train train to save May, and Daisy using her hedgehog skills to fight off Lucifer . But what's truly great is how this team has so many sides to their personalities, including Daisy using her powers and making her own shield to fight in the train station. This is a show that will give you tons of options for how to watch it. I can't wait to see where this series goes, especially with the appearance of The Ori.

Lynda Carter and Ming-Na have cameos in the first episode. But there is no mention of Steve Rogers' famous cameo.

At fifteenth, it is possible that this is the shortest episode of any of the MCU shows.

May and Coulson are at the Presbyterian school to check out the branch.

Daisy is on the SHIELD mission, but her training isn't going as well as planned.

IT is really bad that Daisy has no idea what's going on.

So I don't see the identity of Lucifer as being big in the first season of the show. It's probably best to move on to other details.

#inferkit #agents of shield #daisy johnson #marvel #artificial intelligence

[projecthipster]

Avocado on Toast

(Yes, with an “on.” That’s what the list says.)

Oh, avocado toast. Simplest of concepts, and yet, ambrosia. The fruit of a mesoamerican conifer, rich with oil and nutrients, softens to a lovely-textured paste or a soft smooth fruit that falls easily into slices, it’s up to you how long you want to let it age on the counter, like a cask ale or a cheddar cheese. Put that on bread. End of concept description.

Simplest of concepts, and yet, made so much. Most of the time that I eat avocado toast, I make it at home with a simple, perfect recipe. Here it is:

Using a fork, mash half an avocado in a small bowl. Mix in a splash of olive oil, a couple of sprinkles of salt, fresh-ground pepper, and red chili flakes to taste. Toast two slices of good quality bread, dry, until they are golden brown and slightly crispy on the edges. Divide the avocado mash to spread thickly across the two slices. Eat while still warm.

Of course, most of the avocadi toasti that gave the dish its Hipster association aren’t so simple. Let’s inspect the brunch menu of a hip café at Van Horne and Hamilton, in the hip not-quite-downtown district. The area and café are both named after a defunct streetcar line, which is rather Hipster. This spot’s menu reveals an avocado toast featuring, for eighteen dollars, sunny-side-up eggs, arugula, gem tomatoes, and country hash.

Sounds good! I’d order it, and in fact I may even get it for brunch tomorrow when I head that way before work. Tips have been good lately. But at that price you can see why this humble conifer-fruit-on-bread has been cast as a sort of account-draining millennial meth that dooms its orderers of my generation to a lifetime of loft rentals. Putting aside the what’s wrong with lofts? question and the general wrongness of the idea, it’s still easy to be baffled at the price and excess of these luxurious toastses.

Another place, down on the Atlantic Avenue strip, features, alongside breakfast pierogies and taco pancakes (I think I once saw Homer Simpson invent such a thing,) a twenty dollar avo toast with a poached egg and bacon or salmon. A far cry from a few dollars for a grocery store avocado and loaf of bread for my recipe, that provides four servings with half the loaf left over.

But the luxury is the point, isn’t it? When the feeling of avocado meat melting in ones mouth feels like a luxury in itself, it’s a dish that lends itself naturally to a special-occasion treat. While working at the ski hill I had the expensive lodge avo toast a couple of times to celebrate sending a new challenging run. Who’s to say we don’t deserve it? Socialist movements of the twentieth century called for “bread and roses;” the bread of secure staples, and the roses of luxury, recognition that an improved world ought not only secure material stability, but beyond that, luxury and comfort. As hipsters rallied against the greed and destructiveness of the corporate mainstream, let us therefore take up the cry of the old century for the new. Panem et avocadi!

Post-scriptum

I wrote all the preceding at home in the evening while listening to a Bob Dylan record*, no avocados in the building. Since it had been months since I actually ordered avo toast, I did so this morning. I didn’t go to the twenty dollar place, nor the seventeen. I went to a hip-aspiring café near Stephen and Broadway, busy with office workers getting takeout. The avo toast there was a much kinder seven dollars, served with cherry tomatoes and arugula, with white bean hummus mixed into mash. I had it with a local roast cappucino, of course. And you know what? It was damn good. Yes, easily seven dollars good. Shitty picture of it in its compostable tray at the top of the post, which I tried to snap without looking like I was, because I didn’t want at all to be that guy.

I give this hipster food five studio loft rentals out of five.

Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.

This review comes from the fourth list, Hipster Starter Pack.

Stay deck.

*Bob Dylan at Budokan, which apparently is a controversial album? I guess I can see why since it features him singing the lyrics to some of my favourite of his songs as set to unrecognizable new tunes. But eh, it’s interesting and sounds like a cool pop rock record aside from the Dylanness. Anyway, this was supposed to be about toast.

#hipster #avocado toast #food

[hulijingemperor2]

Zixuan: where is Zixun?

Jintang: Huangdi, he took a sick leave.

Zixuan: how dare he!! Is a one hour break not enough for him! And he didn't even ask my permission!

Jintang: he said that he's sick or something like that.

Zixuan: more like sickening.

*sighs* Jintang, am I an emperor or a joke?

Jintang: an emperor of course.

Zixuan: good. *opens fan* now I have to find someone else to fill it for that brat.

What if I hire Huaisang.

Jintang: go ahead, Huangdi. That's a perfect idea.

Zixuan: would Yaoyao be upset?

Lol no, he might find that hilarious.

Right then. I'll hire Huaisang.

He'll do the gardening, sweep the steps of Jinlintai.

Jintang: I feel like that's not all, Huangdi. Hehe.

Zixuan: ah right. He can do some dusting here and there. As I'm severely allergic to dust. Also he can kill the vermen in my palace. Cockroaches, bugs, rats, etc.

Jintang: that is marvelous.

Zixuan: of course. He's perfect for pest control. Despite being a pest.

Jintang: it takes one to know one Huangdi. A pest will easily kill another pest.

Zixuan: exactly. You're so smart.

Jintang: thank you Huangdi, I'll contact him immediately.

But what would you pay him.

Zixuan: A-Yao never paid him, so I won't either. But when you go, tell him that he'll be paid if he pleases me.

Jintang: certainly.

~~~

Qinghe 📍

Huaisang: dage. I'm ready to turn over a new leaf.

Mingjue: is it because you're a soar loser?

Huaisang: no!

*sigh* maybe.

But I'm still determined.

Mingjue: when would you learn.

Jintang and a few attendants: *entering*

Mingjue: *rubs his temples* oh god. Not this again. Which emperor is this again?

Huaisang: aren't you not glad that you have imperial guests.

Mingjue: I don't have time for them, Huaisang.

Jintang: unfortunately you won't be graced by our beautiful Huangdi. But I came with a message!

Mingjue: first can I ask a question.

Jintang: go ahead.

Mingjue: why am I constantly invaded by emperors?

Jintang: because they want your land.

*laughing* just joking, lol. It's because of ties! And they both help fund your sect.

Mingjue: I see.

Jintang: Nie Huaisang. That's your name right? Huangdi requests you to be his attendant.

Huaisang: huh?! Do I look like I do work!

Mingjue: he doesn't.

Huaisang: how much is he paying me?

Jintang: well it depends on Huangdi. If you please him then you'll get a hefty amount of money.

Us attendants are rich by the way. Our families eat well because of our incomes.

Huaisang: ohhh. Well I'll work for him.

Mingjue: take him.

I had enough of his schemes and lazy behavior.

Jintang: come with us, Huaisang.

I'm Huangdi's personal attendant.

Huaisang: yea I remember you.

Now would Zixuan slap me again?

Jintang: if you anger him, yes. But don't worry.

Huaisang: *gulps*

Furthermore, in the Peacock empire.

~~

Zixuan: *sips tea* Hua cheng, nice to meet you.

Jintang: it's Huaisang, Huangdi.

Zixuan: oh right right.

Huaisang: nice to meet you too, Zixuan.

Zixuan: Huangdi or boss.

Huaisang: what's my job?

Zixuan: awww Hummus. You're so eager to work for me. How delightful.

Huaisang: *correcting* Huai--

Jintang: don't correct Huangdi. You'll get fired.

Huaisang: but you did! Why can't I?

Jintang: because I was approved by him.

Huaisang: oh.

Boss, tell me about my job.

Zixuan: You will be my attendant, so you must do everything I request without question. Other than that, you have to do some gardening, kill some vermen, and clean the stairs of Koi tower Jinlintai on weekends.

Huaisang: k....kill vermen...Boss? Eww!!

And sweep the steps???

Zixuan: yea Jiang cheng. You have to fill in for Zixun.

Hauisang: I'm not Jiang cheng.

Zixuan: right. Darling, don't complain.

Nie Hummus. Am I correct?

Jintang: just....just say yes to Huangdi.

Huaisang: yes boss. That's me. Hummus.

Zixuan: *smiling*

Work starts now.

And yes, you have a two hour break.

Huaisang: yes boss.

Zixuan: by the way Hummus. I have ordered a new uniform for you to match my aesthetic.

See. It's coral colour.

Huaisang: I don't need that.

Zixuan: *glares*

Huaisang: it's beautiful boss.

Zixuan: also you have some rules of conduct you must follow. I'll send you the scroll.

Huaisang: yikes. I mean yay.

Zixuan: good. *yawns* I'm bored of him. Where's Yanli?

Jintang: Huanghou is in your room. You should definitely meet her.

Huaisang, you should get to work, and you're tiring Huangdi.

Huaisang: *rolls eyes* right away.

~~

Yanli: *resting in her room*

Personal maid: here are your apples and chili sauce, Huanghou.

Yanli: ah thank you!! Looks so delicious.

Zixuan: A-Li.

Maid: Greetings Huangdi. *exits*

Yanli: *smiling* A-Xuan.

Zixuan: *caresses her hair* what are you eating there.

Yanli: the norm, Xuanxuan! Apples and chili sauce. I don't know why do crave these things.

And I sleep half day.

Zixuan: hmm. Either you're pregnant or slowly turning into wei wuxian.

Yanli: pregnant?!

Well you're right. When I was pregnant with jinling I was craving plain sticky rice.

Zixuan: aww, you know I'm so happy!! Yanli you made me the happiest person on earth again!!! We should think of a name for the baby. And what if they're twins? That's two names.

Yanli: T..twins?!! hold your horses, Xuan. Call a physician at least.

Always jumping to conclusions. *pout*

Zixuan: r...right away! *runs out the room*

Yanli: *nods fondly* oh Zixuan.

Afterwards, the physicians came and checked up on Yanli.

Physician: congratulations Huanghou and Huangdi!! You're pregnant. Not the both of you, Huanghou is 2 months pregnant.

Zixuan: *smiling* WHAT!!!!

OMG!!

Yanli: I'm so happy!! Zixuan! We're parents again.

Zixuan: *kisses*

Yanli: *hugging him*

Zixuan: I love you so much, A-li.

My entire staff except Hassang will be gifted with a bar of gold!!

Yanli: oh my!

Zixuan: material things doesn't matter anymore when you're happy, A-li.

Yanli: *dabs nose* good that you know. Cocky peacock.

And who's Hassang?

Zixuan: Nie Mingjue's brother. I hired him as an attendant.

Yanli: *giggling* nie Huaisang, darling.

Zixuan: N...nee, Hongwing??

I'm not good with names.

But I hope that I'm able to name the baby.

Yanli: sure you will. You have the responsibility this time.

Zixuan: thank you! I have to tell A-Yao!

Yanli: and I have to tell A-Cheng and A-Xian.

Zixuan: I'm pretty sure our A-ling will carry the news.

Jinling: *entering* what's that, A-niang, A-Die?

Yanli: *smile* you tell him.

Zixuan: *whispers* you're the one who's pregnant.

Yanli: shhh.

Zixuan: tell him, A-li.

Yanli: you're so coward.

Zixuan: I don't know how to do that.

Yanli: have you learnt anything from guangshan??

Zixuan: no. He just drops people without a proper intro. Then he would say that's my half sibling, and how it happened.

Yanli: yikes.

Jinling: I'm confused.

Zixuan: A-ling.

Yanli: I'm pregnant with your little brother or sister.

Jinling: WHAT? *smiling* wait! How to react?! I'm excited! But terrified.

Yanli: why?

Jinling: a human is growing in your stomach! A-niang!!

Yanli: well that's pregnancy, A-ling. You were in my belly as well.

Jinling: then how did I escape?

Yanli: pushed you out.

Jinling: Jiujiu didn't tell me this?!!

And A-Die, what did you do to A-niang!

Zixuan: n...nothing! You're too young!

Jinling: *gasps* you did the birds and the bees????

Zixuan: heck yea I did the birds and the bees!

Yanli: Zixuan!!!

Zixuan: sorry.

Jinling: how dare you!

Zixuan: I have a right to spend time with your mom, A-ling.

Yanli: *laughing* yes, how dare you Zixuan.

Jinling: I'm going to tell my uncles that you did the birds and the bees with A-niang!!! And Jiujiu will send you to horny jail!!!

Zixuan: no no no, don't tell the uncle council yet.

I'm planning to have a private function.

Yanli: yea, we'll tell them later.

Everyone will be together during the party.

Jinling: ok A-niang!

Yanli: that reminds me. Zixuan I want a baby shower when I'm 4 months pregnant.

Zixuan: sure. You'll have it.

Jinling: A-Die keeps acting innocent.

*walks off*

#the huli jing emperor #foxyao #dimpledlianfang #jin guangyao #jin zixuan #meng yao #part 2 #su she #the untamed #hulijing emperor 2

[thatgirlsnotrightinthebrain]

“Babe, what have you done to me?” You turn to see her reclining on the sofa, eyes closed in a t-shirt and shorts two sizes too small, her belly hanging out, being caressed by her hands. God, she’s gorgeous. You take note of the take out containers, fast food bags, and pizza boxes piled around her; the dozen empty cans of soda arranged neatly on the floor to her right. You smirk. “Babe, what do you mean what have I done to you?” “I’m so fat now,” she whines, grabbing the upper roll of her belly. She can barely fit her hand around the amount of blubber there. “You feed me too much.” A burp escapes her mouth. “I used to be fit before I moved in with you.” She isn’t wrong. When you first met three years ago, she was a professional dancer; strong, slim, and flexible. She moved with ease. Now just a year and a half after moving in with you, she was three times her original size. She was so out of shape she would get out of breath climbing the stairs to the bedroom. And you barely had to lift a finger. All it took was some simple changes to her diet (caused instantly by her moving in with you) and a sprained ankle she sustained after she gained her first 20 pounds. She went from celery, hummus, salads, grilled chicken, water, fruit to chips, queso, stir-fry, fried chicken, orange soda, and cakes... Once the sprain happened, fast food, takeout, and delivery was introduced. The portions of her three square meals and dessert grew in size, just like her. By the time her ankle healed, she was 40 pounds bigger than when she sprained it. She went back to audition and was  deemed “too big” by the casting directors of the three shows she tried out for. If she was being honest, she had lost a decent amount of flexibility - splits that had taken no effort were now impossible. She could barely lift legs to her waist. She had thought that was her wake up call, her sign to get back into the swing of things before her injury, so she had tried to lose some weight. She found herself out of breath during her workouts almost immediately, but she stayed strong and finished them. However, burning all those calories made her ravenous, and her old dancer diet could not fill her. She ate the right portions, she ate the right things, but her stomach growled no matter how many vegetables and lean proteins she ate...Eventually those servings increased, but still, she’d feel hunger. Her cravings for grease, cheese, carbs, and sweets didn’t relent, so eventually her willpower caved. She had only lasted a week before she had eaten an entire pizza for lunch and a two pound box of bakery cookies as a “snack”. She continued to work out, but her cravings got the best of her and she ended up gaining even more weight.  Depressed that she had gained another twenty pounds in her efforts to lose it,  she ate even more and put on even more blubber. No one wanted her to dance anymore, so why bother trying to get fit? And you were right there, getting more and more food, leaving it around the house, making bigger and bigger portions of all the most fattening things, occasionally feeding her when she would ask, but mostly just watching her stuff her face, trying to fill the hole inside. You glanced at her, beached on the sofa. You walked over and grabbed her belly, gave it a jiggle. “How is this my fault, love?” She glared up at you over her swollen belly, pouting, her double chin clearly visible. “You made me eat all that unhealthy stuff when I moved in. It was all we had around. And then there was just more and more of it.” “I didn’t tell you to eat it, or to eat as much as you did. You enjoyed it, so you ate.” “Yeah... but you didn’t stop me either,” she complained. “It’s almost as if you wanted this to happen to me.” You did enjoy seeing her get bigger and lazier, her capacity increase... but you didn’t make this happen. You hated seeing her sad, and the food seemed to make her happy. “Hey... You’re beautiful. What are you talking about? I just want you to be happy.” You sit down next to her and look her dead in the eye.  “How can I be happy when I look like a blimp? How can you think I’m beautiful when I look like this?” She said, motioning towards her body. “I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been, I can’t stop eating because I’m addicted to food, hungry all the time, there’s just so much of it around, it tastes so good... and... I don’t think I can stop... I don’t think I’ll ever dance again if I keep going at this rate.” “Honey, none of that matters to me. I still think you’re incredible and gorgeous no matter what! So what if you’ve put on some weight? If you’re hungry, you should eat. If you want to dance, I’m sure you could get up and move around...” “But it’s not the same! I’m not as flexible! It’s not like I can jump and turn, and move the way I used to...” “But you can still move.” “For how long? I’m already over 360 pounds!” she exclaimed. This caught you off-guard. “Over 360 pounds?” You ask, eyebrows raising. “I got on the scale this morning... The scale I never thought I’d need when I moved in. I’m 367 pounds. 367!” “I had no idea you had... grown that much,” you say, trying to hide how turned on you are. “But you know your worth is not tied to a number on the scale, your size, or your physical ability, right?” She doesn’t answer. “Right?” You repeat. “I just feel like I’m letting you down. I let myself go so badly and even when I tried to get a handle on it, it backfired. I got even bigger.” “You could never let me down, babe. I think you’re perfect no matter what.” You kiss her forehead. “Honestly... I love you.” You grab her belly. “And this is just gravy.” “You like me like this?” She asks, looking you dead in the eye, completely serious, needing to know your answer.  “Yes. Like this. Smaller, bigger, it doesn’t matter because I love you... But I am pretty fond of your body at the moment.” She sits up suddenly, couch groaning with the shift of her weight and looks at you, confusion crossing her face. “You like me fat?” “Yes. But I want you to be happy. If you’d be happier weighing less, I’ll help you get there.” She bites her lip and looks down, thinking. Her belly is in her lap, rising and falling with each breath. Her love handles are emphasized by her too-tight shorts. You want to grab her belly again, but you know now is not the time. Almost as if her belly has gained sentience and can read your mind, it growls, loudly, despite the evidence she’s done nothing but eat all day. At first she is surprised, but then she looks at you shyly... “Y’know... before you mentioned gravy... Maybe some biscuits and gravy for now, and I’ll decide what I want to do later...” You nod and raise yourself from the sofa, brushing her belly along the way. “You got it, babe.” When you’re in the doorway of the kitchen, you hear her call after you, just as shy - “And maybe some chicken wings too?” “Sure thing!” You smile to yourself, knowing that if her hunger has this much influence over her, she’s only gonna blow up more. 

#weight gain #closet feeder #growing belly #getting bigger

[13uswntimagines]

Secret Santa (Alex Morgan x Reader)

Reader is in the military and surprises her wife and daughter (with a little help from Preath). Merry Christmas from @literaryhedgehog and Me!!!

“Little bit still hasn’t told you what she wants for Christmas yet?” Kelley asked, munching on some pretzels and hummus.  

Alex rolled her eyes sliding into a seat next to her. “No, she utterly convinced that it won’t come true if she tells anyone but Santa.” 

“Didn't she write a letter? Why didn’t you just take a peek?” Tobin interjected, sitting on Kelley’s other side. Her fiancé had been so excited to have her niece for the day. 

“She mailed it to god knows where with Christen before I could,” Alex sighed, shaking her head. She had been fine with the whole mailing letters thing (actually watching your four-year old try to write out something heartfelt in blue crayon was kinda adorable), but then Camren had insisted on mailing it herself. Alex felt a little bad for the person in Antarctica who was getting the random letter. 

“Damn,” Kelley huffed, blowing her cheeks out, trying to drum up ideas. 

“Yeah, apparently it’s a Press family tradition or whatever, and Chris did it because Y/n isn’t here to. If she was she at least could have curbed some of her enthusiasm long enough to take a picture of the letter.” Alex grumbled, chewing thoughtfully on a pretzel. Your big sister had been picking up a lot of slack while you were away with the SEALs, but it just wasn’t the same as having you there. 

“We hired a Santa, so just listen to whatever she tells him,” Tobin shrugged, a look that Alex didn’t recognize crossing her features. 

“And pray to god it gets here overnight,” Kelley snorted. Hopefully whatever Camren wanted could be found at a local Walmart. 

 *****

The holiday party was in full bustle. There were benefits to doing training in Florida, so while Camren still had her heart set on snow for christmas, the adults had strung the outdoor tent with string lights and decorated it with holly and mistletoe. Camren had promised to eat at least two bites of every food there -- even the healthy ones that looked weird (her words not Alex’s) -- before she ate too many of Emily’s double chocolate chunk brownies, and so Alex was feeling rather proud of herself. She and her daughter were both there, dressed up, and only 15 minutes late for the party-- not bad for single parenting skills. Maybe after Camren was done talking to Santa, Carlie or Lindsey could be persuaded to babysit for a bit so Alex could go introduce herself to that lovely bottle of merlot she saw hiding in the corner. 

Alex was surprised with how comfortable her daughter seemed on Santa’s lap. Camren was a bit nervous walking over, but it was nothing compared to her fear last year, when she had bawled until you eventually gave up and held her behind the poor man. Perhaps it had to do with how tenderly the poor suited person seemed to hold the small child, and the little glimmer in their eyes. . 

Santa’s eyes met Alex’s for a split second, and the sense of security the slight contact brought her was slightly alarming. They looked so familiar and sent warm tingles through her chest. 

“Did you get my letter?” The little girl asked, drawing the bearded one’s attention back to her. Alex bit her lip, there was no way this random stranger got the letter addressed to Rudolph at the North Pole. 

The Santa nodded, their features softening. “I did. It seems you were very concerned about your mama getting her gift?”

The little girl nodded rapidly. “How do you know where to take it, if she’s on top secret missions all da time?” Her brow furrowed, “what if she doesn’t have a chimney to hang her stocking on?”

“I just know. Remember I know if you’ve been good or bad, or if you move. I promise she’ll get everything she wants. Now back to you. What do you want for Christmas?” Santa tried to explain. 

The little girl thought for a moment, her finger tapping on her chin, before she leaned up to cup the person’s ear. She whispered a few words, leaned back to look the bearded person in the eye. The (very fake) white beard at the top of the red coat bobbed up and down in a nod, and Alex saw a sparkle in their eye as their lips twitched above it. 

“Well that’s quite the order.” 

“Pwease? Its not that tall, and It’s the only thing I really want,” Camren pouted, pulling the puppy dog eyes that never ceased to make her parents melt. This was important, and if she only got one real chance to talk to the person who could make it happen, she wanted them to know just how much she wanted it. 

“I’ll see what I can do,” the Santa said, nodding seriously and stroking the beard as Camren jumped up and ran back to Alex. 

“What did you ask for?” Alex whispered. Good grief, wasn’t the whole point of hiring a Santa to hear what the munchkin wanted?

“Can’t say. Want it to happen,” Camren whispered back, twirling slightly as she buried herself in the hem of her mom’s skirt. This was going to be the best Christmas ever. 

****

Alex smiled widely as the Santa pulled another wrapped present from the gaudy red bag. It was a nice spin on their usual tradition, and she just hoped Pino didn’t get her for a secret Santa. That woman forgot every year, and Alex’s name hadn’t come up yet and that bag looked suspiciously empty. No wait, there was one- nope, that was Beckey’s present from Alyssa. Maybe there was a gift card in there somewhere? Alex looked down at Camren, who despite practically nodding off in Sonnet’s arms an hour ago, had woken up during the secret santa exchange. She was now sitting on the ground playing with the toy horses, blind to her surroundings.

“Hey, um Kelley? Who was running the secret santa exchange again?” Alex whispered, grabbing her arm. “I think my person forgot to get me a present.”

“What?” Kelley, turned to her shocked. “I think maybe Tobin was in charge this year, we’ll ask her if someone wrote down who your person was.”

“Oh that’s not necessary,” Christen’s voice broke in. Alex and Kelley turned to look at her and Tobin, who were standing with a very confused Emily.  “I’m really sorry, we just didn’t get a chance to wrap your gift. You’ll get it at the end of the party.” 

“Isn’t it like against the rules for Christen to get Alex since they actually spend Christmas together every year?” Sonnett whined. If she couldn’t buy presents for Lindsey, and Sam couldn’t do it for Kristie then that totally wasn’t fair.Sister-in-law and fiance-of-sister-in-law definitely had an unfair advantage on the ”knowing what presents to buy” front. She had to buy Jullie’s gift, and had just settled on some tea-rex patterned socks and a starbucks gift card. 

Lindsey glared in her direction. “Can it disonny,” she wasn’t about to let her girlfriend mess up a surprise that had been 6 months in the making. 

“It’s fine Chris, you didn’t have to get me anything,” Alex smiled sadly. 

“I mean that would have been cruel since Camren has been campaigning pretty hard for your present,” Christen snorted. It was all your daughter could talk about. She had even harassed every Santa she saw while they went Christmas shopping, and wrote several letters (that she forwarded to you) about the issue. 

“She told you what she wants, and you didn’t tell me?” Alex asked exasperated. She had been fighting with your daughter for a month to know what she actually wanted. Why on earth would she tell her aunt but not her mom? She was going to have to have a conversation with Camren about how Santa had different rules from wishing on a star or a birthday candle. Namely that she should tell her mom what she wanted!

Christen shrugged, a smile pulling at her lips, though Alex didn’t know what she was so amused about. “Well, it was for you, so I get a pass,”

“I for one think that Christen’s present is totally on point, even if it’s wrapped in ugly, sweaty red velvet,” A new voice joined the conversation, just as arms wrapped snugly around Alex’s waist. 

Alex froze, her eyes going wide and her mouth opening and closing several times. 

You chucked from behind her, spinning her around so you were face to face for the first time in almost a year. 

“Hi love.”

“Holy shit,” Alex breathed. Her hands reached up to touch your cheeks, the sense of touch confirming what she couldn’t trust her eyes to see. 

“Surprise,” You mumbled, leaning in and finally connecting your lips. You sighed into the kiss, thoroughly enjoying the way they moved together, and the taste of your wife. She impatiently pulled down the beard when you paused to breathe, and your hands found her hips, pulling her closer, while her fingers tangled in that baby hairs at the base of your neck. “Let’s do that again,” you said, your breath fanning against her lips before she pulled you back in. You had an awful lot of time to make up for. 

“Why is mommy kissing Santa Claus,” Camren asked from somewhere below your feet. You were fairly certain you heard one of your wife’s teammates explaining in the background that Santa left a little while ago, and Mama had just dressed like him to surprise Mommy. You were a tad busy to explain anything right now.

#uswnt imagine #uswnt imagines #uswnt x reader #alex morgan x reader #alex morgan imagine

[beautifulletdownfics]

Nothing To Him - A Harry Styles One Shot

Harry Styles is a liar.

He lied your whole relationship.

He promised to love you forever and then he walked away.

A lovers to nothing break up fic feat. blisters, heartache & two sides to one story.

Word count: 15k (Sorry! You’re going to want to open this little pal in a browser window probably. Eek)

Story Playlist:

The First Lie: Damn This Love - Thirsty Merc The Second Lie: Do You Remember - Jarryd James The Third Lie: Nebraska - Oh Wonder The Fourth Lie: I Saw You - Jon Bryant The Fifth Lie: Here We Go - Emily Hearn The Sixth Lie: Crying Dancing - Nina Nesbitt , NOTD

+

MY MASTERLIST.

+

The first lie was that you were different.

Harry felt different with you.

You just slipped into his routine and his life. You didn't buy into the spectacle of it all. You told him on your first date that you didn't play games, and that it wasn't often you connected with someone on an intellectual or emotional level. Harry sat there and listened to the woman across from him say she didn't expect to finish the date still attracted to him.

And he fucking loved it.

The next morning he called you at quarter past eight, because he figured you either started work at eight-thirty or nine o'clock, so he'd catch you on your commute or just before you walked into the office. You answered your phone like you would a business call. He teased you for it, but really he was just glad you answered at all. It felt like getting test results telling Harry he was in the clear.

The truth was when Harry first met you at the birthday party the night before he'd been angling towards you being a hookup. He saw you across the bar as soon as he arrived, gaze zeroing in on your legs in That Dress, his ears leaning to the sound of your laugh pulling eyes from around the room. Harry wanted you, and he'd been through a bit of a dry spell. You radiated the kind of energy Harry could get drunk on, the sort of body he wanted to lose himself in for a night.

It was almost an hour before he managed to edge into the same circle of bodies as you. You knew the birthday girl the same way he did; through work. Harry caught early on that you didn't still work for his record label, but did a few years before and stayed in touch with everyone. You seemed like the kind of person who collected people, who everyone wanted to keep in touch with. Harry just wanted to touch you.

Two tequilas in he got you to himself.

You were good at flirting, which excited Harry initially. You had a quip for everything or an interesting addition to each story he told. You were well-read and well-travelled, and you weren't hesitant in showing Harry that you had opinions and ideas of your own. Over the years he'd become good at getting people to talk, good at asking questions that make someone share themselves because the alternative—Harry sharing himself—wasn't something he could do. But something about you and the way you framed questions made Harry feel like it was safe to share a little more, you'd disarmed him quietly, and by the time he noticed Harry didn't feel the need to protect himself anymore.

"That's bullshit," you'd told him when he said he wasn't all that into contemporary fiction. You hated the artsy elites who listed off the Hemingway's and the Kerouac's and the Vonnegut's as though the only literature worth mentioning came from lifetimes ago. Your hair swished back and forth at your cheeks as you shook your head emphatically, "You're being lazy. Imagine saying the same about modern music."

Harry's lips ticked up into a smile, and he raised his eyebrow in concession, "That would be bullshit," he agreed, thinking of the album he'd just released and how he wanted to know if you'd listened to any of his stuff. (Very quickly he decided he probably didn't want to know because it stuck Harry the answer would be no.) His eyes couldn't pull away from watching your lips as you spoke, admiring the shade of lipstick you wore.

"Right," you continued, "Modern fiction teaches me about myself, about my life. It gives words to what my friends and I are experiencing. The classics are amazing—don't get me wrong—but I don't see myself in them."

"Seems like your criteria stem from narcissism," Harry was sure he had you there. He grinned at you happily.

"Exactly," you agreed without hesitation, "Maybe 'Hills Like White Elephants' is genius, and as a woman, I should be grateful to Hemmingway for horrifying his audience in 1927 with a normalised view of abortion but … I don't think he wrote that for me. He was challenging ideas then. I feel more connection and loyalty to an Instagram poet who's painting the world that actually matters to me, the world I'm trying to survive now."

Harry hums into his drink and says nothing. He expects you to back away a little, or ask him some question that watered-down your view and opened up the table to his. But you don't. You let your view sit on the slice of the bar between you and don't apologise for it.

"There's a reason artists burst out of every generation," you add, sitting forward on your stool. "If the classics were the perfect form, the perfect commentary of humanity, then there'd be no need for anyone after them to bother trying to put the world and life into words, or pictures, or music. You can't just dismiss a generation of voices because some smelly, old, white, university hasn't decided to name a building after them yet. I don't think being published as a little orange Penguin Classic is the singular hallmark to good literature."

He didn't entirely agree with you, (he thought it was vital to learn from the past, thought those great authors you reeled off and dismissed set the benchmark artists today should aspire to) but Harry liked hearing your thoughts and seeing the passion burst out of you. He liked seeing how you didn't second guess yourself or try to soften your opinion by asking for his. You just said what you thought, and that was always one of his favourite characteristics in a person.

That night you met him, you were the designated driver for a few of your friends. He should have noticed the way you switched to pineapple juice after you finished your first drink, but he was too busy trying not to look at the curve of your thigh when you crossed one leg over the other. Trying to ignore the smell of your perfume or how you kept licking your lips and he wanted to taste them, desperately. Harry didn't like to say anything when he offered to buy you another gin and dry. Still, when it eventually came out in conversation—that you were strictly only having one tonight—he felt his excitement deflate. His warm buzz suddenly felt pervy and presumptuous.

"Well, that's bloody annoying, isn't it?"

His response surprised you, "Me getting my friends home alive?"

With his hand comfortably resting over your knee, Harry shook his head, "I was hoping to go home with you."

"Oh."

You blinked at him, not having expected him to be so bold. You didn't hate it though, you felt the twinge of realising you were going to miss something that could have been good. Could have been great, probably. The last time you had sex had been … sad. And disappointing. Still, you hadn't come out to meet anyone tonight, why the sudden rush of despondency? These were old work colleagues you rarely saw, and you figured it would be a night of catching up before six months of not seeing each other because life got in the way.

Then Harry asked for your number. Asked if you'd go out with him the next night. He didn't beat around the bush with it, he wanted to see you again and told you so. The way you said you would filled him with relief but also fear. Harry knew he'd need to really deliver with you, he couldn't half-arse it. He was terrified he'd overshoot it and lose the change to be someone who impressed you.

He settled on a Sunday evening picnic where the two of you ate takeaway on a beach towel at the top of a park halfway between your houses. Something told Harry you would be happier with him underplaying the date than you would be getting taken to an expensive, showy restaurant. You wore jean shorts and a long sleeve jumper which churned his body more deeply than the dress with the split from the night before. He was hooked.

"Do you not like olives?" Harry asked, sucking the oil off his fingers after just depositing one into his mouth. You instantly loved the way the inflection of his words rose at the end of his sentences, and you'd mock him for it your whole relationship.

You looked at the plastic container sitting between you, you'd been picking at the cheese and crackers, the antipasto was not your thing, "They don't seem like something humans should eat … Salty and rubbery with a tiny stone on the inside? No, thanks."

A laugh burst out of Harry's mouth as he picked up another green olive, "More for me then."

"I'm happy about the rosemary in these though," you held up a cracker before digging it into the hummus, a plastic-stemmed wine glass with a dry rose in your free hand, "You got the fancy ones."

"Only the best," Harry returned with a smile and then went on trying to playfully wedge more information from you about the secret poetry Instagram he was convinced you had. He was already feeling buzzed from the wine, but more from the way you kept looking at him and he couldn't catch a hint of you being anything other than yourself.

You didn't go home together that night either, despite The Kiss at the end next to his car. Despite Harry's hands on the back of your thighs as things got heated. The way the tips of his fingers feathered against the elastic of your knickers, just slipping under before pulling away. Your chests heaving together in a rhythm you'd never found with anyone else.

He felt like he had just auditioned for a part he wasn't sure yet that you were going to give him. Wine always heightened his anxiety, so Harry also wanted to appear controlled and measured. He wanted to be as thoughtful as you were. As connected to himself as you were to all your wonderful opinions and facts. There was some part of him that feared taking you home too soon might risk that being the only night Harry got. So he pulled away, kissed your cheek and promised to call you later on.

Somewhere along the line, Harry decided he wanted more than a little bit. He was greedy. Harry wanted the whole pie all to himself.

That was a theme, him wanting more. Even now, months since you've seen or heard from him. Harry always knew how to get you to take that one step out of your comfort zone, take that little bit extra risk. Letting go of him in one way felt like small release valve finally letting go. A tiny bit of your safety net tucking closer around you. A little quiet moment to take stock and check every part of you was still connected, still there. A deep breath in. A short pause of calming silence. Like getting your heart back … But then finding it didn't fit in your chest the same way anymore.

So you found it particularly cruel to have received a follow-up email from his assistant this week, checking to see if you were able to attend his show tonight.

The show that six months ago Harry drew you a mock ticket for and hand-delivered to you sitting outside in his garden with a tea and a biscuit. Even then, even as his girlfriend, you'd feigned not knowing if you could say whether you would attend. Now it felt foreboding, the way you'd pulled your features together thoughtfully and told Harry you'd have to see closer to the date. You waited just long enough for him to switch over into thinking you were serious before you laughed and told him of course and where else would I be?

Where else would I be, was right, in a sense. Because this is still your city, and you're here tonight. It's not his anymore. He moved soon after you broke up … Relocated to one of his—what was it you used to mockingly call them?—" location" homes. Houses you never saw in person. Places he never took you. Either Italy or France. Somewhere he could hide, be creative, recenter himself. All three of those things filled you with dread for different reasons.

Were you really going to go tonight though? Walk in through the front door of the venue with a ticket and barcode on your phone, sit in a crowd and listen to Harry for two hours? Look at him from across the room and just take it on the chin?

It certainly seemed you were dressed for it. And you were out of the house with time to get there. Would you get off the train at the stop though? Would you walk down the street with the bright sign his name lit up? Would Harry even know if you didn't go?

Part of you wonders if his assistant didn't mean to email you. Maybe she forgot you were no longer in Harry's life? Perhaps it was a scheduled email she forgot to stop? Probably it was Harry just being fucking nice, and polite, and worrying about how you'd feel if you were uninvited. Or if he didn't check in on you while he was here.

You accepted the reminder too easily and scolded yourself for it. His team was expecting you. Harry was expecting you. And now, sitting on the train and counting down the stops you felt caught. Felt like he had you again, even if it was just winning whatever tonight was.

Harry did always enjoy the chase. Admitted it himself, admitted to loving the beginning of meeting someone. Loving the audition process, the figuring each other out, the get. The Catch.

You wonder now if it was the chase he liked back then. Was it a thrill having you make him feel as though he had something to prove? Or was it Harry experiencing for the first time not having the upper hand, not having even the tiniest amount of weight around who he was count for anything. Now it felt like Harry was nothing but upper hand.

Whatever it was—the Chase, or your endless facts, pancakes on a Sunday morning—the part of Harry's lie about you being different that hurts the most is the way you bought into it so proudly. Wore it later as his girlfriend like a badge of honour. As though it signalled to others you'd been hard-won, and Harry was lucky to have you.

Different turned out to be such a dirty word.

Different turned out to mean nothing. To get you nowhere.

All different got you was Nothing To Him.

+

The second lie was that he saw a future with you.

Harry didn't shy away from talking about it. He made plans for you both.

Sometimes it was in the moments right before you both fell asleep at night, or in the final seconds before the kettle finished boiling. Always in some small window where his mind drifted and sat comfortably stagnant when all there was to think about was the next holiday you'd take together. Or what breed of dog you might have one day. Whether you wanted your kids to be close together in age or have larger age gaps between them. What you thought about silent retreats in Thailand.

He stored your answers away in the file full of you in his head or added them to the note on his phone with ideas for gifts for people or things going on in their lives he wanted to remember.

"My family have always had cats," he told you one night, fingers drawing circles around your bare kneecap, your naked thigh resting across his stomach, "When I'm settled I'd want to get a few of my own."

It was one of those hot summer nights no position felt comfortable for sleep, you raised your arms up over your head and stretched out further on the mattress, fingers dangling off the edge of the bed to feel the cold stream from the air conditioning unit above, "I don't trust cats. Isn't there something about them being evolutionarily build to hunt their owner?"

Harry turned his head to face you, "A fact for everything," he recited fondly, his common quip for your always having an answer for everything, "I'll let the cats hunt me, you'll be spared."

"As long as I can name them," you murmured, your eyes finally closing.

Close to three months later, an hour into unsuccessfully putting together a flat-pack shelving unit in Harry's garage, you heavily plopped yourself down on the concrete floor and hailed defeat. You tossed the small, silver Allen key onto the floor in Harry's direction and rested your chin in your palm.

A few minutes of watching his embittered attempts passed before he spoke.

"Hey Sulky, I can feel you looking at me," Harry was frowning at the short piece of timber in his hand, he was holding it next to what was supposed to be the base of the structure. This was your second attempt at pulling apart the shelves and starting again while you cursed the entire Swedish furniture empire. You were enjoying seeing Harry's stubborn frustration immensely.

He could be such a man sometimes.

"Yeah, 'cause you're hot," you said, mocking him dreamily.

"Ha ha," he drawled, rolling his shoulders back to try to regain his focus.

When he paused a moment later and looked up at you, his arms dropped as his brow softened and he let out a breath.

You grinned at him, "I'm pretty cute too, right?"

"All this shit is going to end up living on the ground because you're sabotaged the assembly!" He gestured wildly at the tools and spare paint colours for the house lying around you. His bike parts and the weird assortment of garden tools Harry collected were leaning against the wall waiting to be put on their new home as well, the shelf neither you nor Harry were skilled enough to put together.

"Baby," you began, but Harry waved you off, and you saw genuine frustration start to emerge on his face, "Okay! Okay, I'm sorry," you stressed, "Are you sure we're looking at this thing from the right way around? Maybe the designer meant for it to be wonky?"

He rolled his eyes at you. As if the mere thought anyone would design anything to look like the mess currently on the floor was purely preposterous—his temper for small frustrations on full display.

"Don't be rude!" You admonished, "It's a fucking shelf, we can do this, Harry."

It took you another hour and a half, but when it was done, Harry draped his arm around your shoulders, kissed you on the head and told you that you were the person he wanted by his side of all his future crisis. Someone to say to him, whatever the challenge was, it wasn't beyond him, wasn't something he couldn't handle or wasn't capable of.

You felt like you were floating that night.

It was one of those few times you could see your imprint on his life. See some evidence of it. There were shelves in his garage only there because you told him he needed storage there, and then you pushed him to keep trying assembling them. It was some proof you'd been in his life. An impression of your influence. A memory that would hover in his garage forever.

Two days after putting the shelves together, you and Harry had an argument about the plastic tubs he went off on his own to buy for all the loose bits and pieces he wanted to go on the shelves. You were annoyed he didn't purchase wooden ones, and he couldn't understand why it mattered that they were white plastic which would apparently be impossible to keep clean.

It's a garage, he thought, who's cleaning their garage?

And because arguments always dredge up things that they aren't supposed to, you made a jab about your relationship being secret.

You said something like, If I'd been able to come with you, we wouldn't be having this row!

Harry knew what you really meant straight away. You'd been together for more than nine months at that point, and nobody knew about it: nobody but your families and very very closest friends. There were no photos of Harry having lunch with you at a cafe, or of you walking a few steps behind him at the shops. Nobody had snuck a picture of you backstage at a show of his. He'd never appeared on your social media, even by suggestion, and Harry had never taken the risk including you on any private Instagram Stories.

Those photographs didn't exist, because those circumstances never had. There wasn't even a celebrity paper trail linking you to knowing Harry, let alone dating him. Harry didn't dedicate performances to you, or even to an unnamed significant other. You never got a song or an album dedication. Harry was so adamant on nobody getting wind of the relationship that sometimes it felt like … Like he enjoyed the sneaking around. The having a secret. (Later on, when you reflected on the relationship once it was over, you really weren't sure how there'd never been even one instance of you being seen coming or going from Harry's house. Hindsight made that feel suss to you.)

Most of the time you liked it, though, liked not having any fuss or interruption to your life but sometimes—a lot of the time—it felt like something silently eroding you from the inside—a silent acid eating your spirit.

But you'd never tell Harry that. Then anyway. Now … You're not sure what you'd tell him now.

The truth was a lot of the time you weren't sure how you'd managed to keep it going so long. Part of it was obvious, maybe, like not being in public together. But still, surely after being together months and having arguments about shelves you could afford a platonic appearing coffee trip or going for a run at the same time, together?

Instead, you'd gear up and run in opposite directions down his street. Or Harry would stay in the car while you went in for the coffee. You'd sit in a nosebleed seat if you went to a show, sneaking through some fire exit and into the main hallways of a venue with the public to get to it. You looked like a sad woman attending a gig on your own, not the girlfriend of the star.

Nobody would know you even knew the man up on stage. That you had something in the slow cooker at home for you both to eat when you got home, or that he'd stolen a tube of your favourite lip balm and had it in his blazer pocket for his set. Nobody would guess you made him late for the soundcheck with just a smile and the undoing of a zip.

Seeing him tonight would be just like it always was, you and Harry from across the room. But then not like always, because Harry wouldn't see you tonight. You wouldn't have the taste of a good luck kiss on your lips. Or the sound of Harry's warm-up in your ears. Yours was always an invisible connection that was kept invisible by design, and now being broken up, it looked no different than together. Not really.

Tonight though it would only be you seeing Harry. Like you see him on late-night talk show promotions and billboards. Like the times you get into an Uber, and his song is playing. How strange it feels, to have your heart crack in your chest again while also lifting somehow. Singing along with a song about you. Or hearing his laugh or even just Harry speaking, and being able to picture the exact expression that would go along with it.

Every raised inflection. Ever breathy giggle. Every brow crease at a thought that Harry was chasing or somehow unable to articulate. All of those turning into you picturing what he looked like every time he knew he was disappointing you. Every whined sorry and all the instances of him loving on you to move your mind away from his deficiencies.

"What's the plan for Y/N?"

If your relationship with Harry was a t-shirt, that would be the slogan across the chest. Those would be the words under the cartoon impression of you banging your head against a wall Harry's standing on the other side of.

How will Y/N get in? Who's staying behind with Y/N? Where will I meet up with Y/N?

There was always a question. Always a plan for you and it was decidedly separate to the plan for Harry. His team organised a second car or an earlier flight for you. A back entrance or some other smokescreen to keep you concealed. In the beginning, it felt like a kindness, but in the end, you were embarrassed by it. The bother, the way what started as a careful consideration for your wellbeing turned into something rotten that painted you a different colour to Harry and his public inner circle, the circle you were never invited or initiated into.

It was exhausting. But Harry assured you it was for the best.

You wonder what the future he saw for you really was though. How much further did Harry see a life like that going? A life with you perpetually operating under cover of darkness. A life of you decidedly not existing. Not really.

So when he said he saw a future with you, you're really not sure what Harry meant.

Did he mean one day he saw himself lifting the veil and telling the world he had a Someone? Or did he mean that he saw himself forever hiding you, forever living that lie?

Maybe he actually saw nothing.

Sometimes you could be convinced the fact Harry hid you was an action pointing to a more profound truth.

That the future he saw was an imagined indulgence; a convenience, and a comfortable lie. Comforting on a temporary level, like bowling alley bumper rails or the plastic covering on a new watch face. The fake sense of security—of protection, of immaculacy—was just that, artificial and temporary. It ceased to exist the minute you plucked the corner and pulled back the protective layer. Crashed as soon as the bumpers were flipped down.

You were a secret only Harry had any power over. He led from the front because you didn't know there was any other option. And in letting yourself be that, you made yourself easily dispensable.

Disposable. Replaceable. Erasable.

Which is precisely what happened when he left.

Harry left, and the You of the two of you ended. But more than any other relationship ever could, the silence that followed felt deadly. It wasn't just a relationship that once was, it was a relationship that never was. A year of your life made no imprint on his. Nobody looking at him could know there was anything—anybody—missing, and maybe that was the whole point.

Maybe that was the design of it.

+

The third lie was that you could tell him anything.

Harry's golden rule always was honest communication.

There's no such thing as an overshare, he'd say when you naturally hesitated.

He was all about that. All about hearing what was worrying you, or the mundane things that were going on in your world. Sometimes you felt like maybe it was an act because nobody had ever found your family, or your friends, or your life in general as interesting as Harry seemed to. He was always telling you he loved hearing the funny text conversations going on, or who was having a row and why, or what each of your friends was stressed about in their jobs or relationships or themselves. And Harry always said he loved hearing it from you the most.

(Now, that struck you as a strange thing to say. Where else would he hear anything about you? Harry was the only line connecting you back to him. You didn't have mutual friends or people who'd known you both before you dated each other. There was nobody for Harry to hear anything from. It's not like your friends were going to reach out to him with gossip about you. Not like how you could sneak a look at update accounts or read about his performance online while he was away.)

Still, you loved the stories he told from the road, ate them up. The missing coffee mugs where everyone got their caffeine fix served in wine glasses and lemonade tumblers for almost two whole weeks. And then the tour t-shirts accidentally ordered in bulk in children's sizes that Harry hand-delivered them to a local children's charity. The crumbs of gossip Harry picked up about who in his team was sweet on who (he loved a setup, loved watching crushes silently and awkwardly orbit around each other).

Your secrets were safe with him, he promised. He wouldn't ever judge you. Wouldn't dismiss your feelings or what kept you awake at night next to him. So you did it. You believed him. And you slowly drained everything inside of you into him. Harry got all your stories, even the ones you vowed to leave exactly where they sat in your past. Even the ones you felt like might kill you to dredge back up. The ones that made you look like a shitty friend or sister or daughter. He got them all.

And even now, he's still got them.

"What's the biggest lie you ever told?" He asked you one night in his kitchen, both of you elbow deep in making dinner. Harry rolled out the lines of gnocchi and cut the inch long pieces while you pressed them over a fork to decoratively indent them. (Although Harry likes to tell you how when he was in Italy he learned in patterns weren't just aesthetic—it was all about soaking up more of the sauce, For the sauce, of course! He'd sing out in an Italian accent, proud of himself.) "Like, a proper lie," he clarified, "Not like how you told my mum you didn't take sugar in your tea when you first met her."

You hinged your knee out to attack his calf for the teasing comment but then rolled your lips together in thought, "I lied to my parents a lot growing up," you told him honestly. "I think about eighty per cent of the time I wasn't where I told them I was. Definitely wasn't with who I said I was with."

Harry shook his head as he rolled out the next lump of dough, "No, I mean like … Like a lie."

A moment passed as you thought more deeply about the question, travelled around your memories until you landed somewhere suitable, "I lied to my boyfriend at university," you begin. "A pretty bad one, I guess."

"And the lie was …" Harry prompts.

"I told him I was a virgin before him."

Harry eyes raised, and then he nodded, accepting it, "I think that's probably a common one, really."

"I thought he'd like me more if I said it," I admitted quietly, pausing the work with your hands. "Wasn't too proud of losing my virginity in a tent in the sixth form … And I mean, at that age you just so desperately want to be the version of you that you think the people around you will like the most. A whole group of us went camping at someone's grandparent's farm during the summer holidays. Not sure how our parents let us, to be honest. Anyway, I had awful, painful, embarrassing sex in a tent with a guy named … Dylan Fraiser."

You were surprised by how long the name took to come to you. Years ago, that was such a defining event in your life. Now it hardly mattered at all anymore.

Progress, you thought.

"A tent," Harry winced.

"Really came back to bite me in the arse when my uni boyfriend went on to tell a group of his mates he was my first and—

—Tent Guy was one of them?" Harry guessed. Correctly.

"Yep. Small towns are a curse."

"I promise never to have sex with you in a tent," Harry teased, grinning at you over his wine glass and then leaning over to kiss your temple. He looked down at the line of gnocchi pieces you'd made together proudly, "We're alright at this."

"Hmmm," you hummed, now lost in the past, "I told that uni boyfriend him I loved him … I didn't though," you say without thinking, shrugging as the words came out, "I thought he was boring. But it was cool to have a boyfriend, so I didn't break up with him … Guess I've told more whoppers than I thought."

Harry gives you an understanding look, "I've said I love you to protect someone's feelings too. Thought it might come a little later, that I was just not feeling it as quickly as them."

It should have made you question whether Harry meant I love you with you. But it didn't. He was speaking in the past tense, and you were imaging that version of him being younger than the almost thirty-year-old you were dating. Now though … You wonder what love meant to Harry when you were together. Whether your wires were crossed by different definitions. Even now, you couldn't vilify him. Not completely. He was too thoughtful in general, there'd be a reason for it. There always was with Harry.

"What's your biggest lie?" You turned the exercise back on him, smiling as he refilled your wine glass and skipped a few songs on the playlist. These were your favourite moments with Harry. The end of the day, where you were the only thing on his to-do list. There wasn't a lingering work call, or a meeting to prepare for, an email to reply to. Harry was just finishing his day with dinner and some time at home. With you.

Harry gave you a withering look, "I think you know already."

"I don't," you said because you really didn't, "What was it?"

"There's no way I'll ever do anything else with The Band," he said tonelessly as he turned to rinse his hands in the sink, unable to look at you while he said it. And even then, Harry didn't admit to the lie. Didn't name it. He just said what the truth was instead.

"Why wouldn't you?" You asked, instead of what you were sure Harry thought you'd ask.

You weren't interested in why he told that particular lie though, the answer to that was pretty apparent to you: he cared about his fans—they all did—and didn't want to disappoint them. And they probably hadn't been able to deal with thinking about the ripples ending it completely, right off the bat, would have caused. Saying you were taking a break was a much nicer way to let a world of fans down. An easier pill to swallow than 'We're done' straight off the bat.

You gave Harry time to respond. He fiddled with the gnocchi pieces in front of him, waiting for the water to boil in the pot behind you both, "Not sure, really."

He was lying now, and you could tell. He was ashamed of the truth.

"You're not sure?"

"I just wouldn't, there's no one reason. No big thing. It's not like I hate them all or anything, I just …"

There was one big thing, though. And it was typical Harry to not be able to name it. He was always so in denial about his own arrogance, about what it was that drove him. Harry thought he was above them. His success since The Band far outweighed anything any of the others had done. Going back to that would be diminishing for Harry's career. Wouldn't help him any. He was stronger on his own, more successful. More widely appreciated. That chapter of his life was done, it had been a stepping stone—yes, a life-defining one—but Harry had moved to bigger and brighter stages on his own.

"It's not what you think," he told you lowly when you didn't ask anything further.

It was so typical of Harry to not see the forest for the trees. To not see how he, yet again, was blurring and confusing the lines between a business decision and an emotional, personal one. He was speaking about The Band emotionally, but his reason for distancing himself from it was all to do with business.

"It's not?" You asked plainly.

"I don't think I'm better than them or some shit," Harry said, "I just … That part of me is done. I'm not who I was back then, and I don't want to go back to that person."

"You also wouldn't get anything out of it," you prod, knowing that you shouldn't have. But it was true. So much of Harry's life was a business decision. Everything was so carefully done, so deliberately set into place by him and his team that results and his successes were almost guaranteed.

At the time, you didn't understand how he couldn't see it. Or you couldn't believe that he didn't. He was so calculating, and he hated you telling him so. But he was. He liked to say he wasn't defined by his job, but Harry's whole life was defined by his career, by the who he was.

He loved to spout off his public shit about staying grounded and having a life away from being Harry Styles ™, but he didn't let anyone see even a skerrick that life. The only thing Harry ever let be projected about him was his job, that was all was ever on the table for discussion. And so it was hardly surprising that became who he was away from the cameras and lights as well.

Hiding you was a business decision, you figured out in the aftermath of The End. It was his way of keeping the narrative about his music and career on track. As soon as there was a You, Harry's private life would distract from his real focus and goal, his career. And you mean, it's not like it didn't work for him. Because here you were, standing outside in the chilly night looking at his name up in lights.

Harry's name always looked so good up on billboards and the fronts of stadiums. You always used to tell him even the letters of his name were visually pleasing, they looked good together, like they fit. So you stand on the street across the road from tonight's venue and take it in—HARRY STYLES, SOLD OUT—for several minutes.

You don't know that you're ready for this. Seeing him. You've so perfectly avoided it until now. Until you felt like there was a promise you made lifetimes ago you now can't break. Even if you felt like he'd broken a thousand promises between the two points in time.

Where else would I be? you'd said when he first drew that stupid mock ticket.

Where else, indeed.

You scuttle across the street and sneak between people to get yourself in through the doors. Dodging lenders selling merchandise and ticket holders excitedly covering their painstakingly planned outfits with t-shirts Harry—aided by his perfectionism, you were sure— probably spent months deciding on.

The barcode won't scan though. And the usher at the door doesn't appreciate you pulling your phone back and trying to adjust the backlight, as though that will help the loud, angry sound his scanner is making each time he aims it at the email on your screen. He eventually reads part of your email and then tells you that you need to stand off to the side, barks something gruffly into his walkie talkie and dismisses you in favour of getting through the backlog of people behind you. You're filled with a white-hot embarrassment as you shuffle over and stand under a neon EXIT sign. A moment later you step forward and ask him to try again, but that doesn't get you anywhere different, and you think you're going to get in some kind of trouble when he insists Just stand back over there for a moment.

Your feet have already started hurting in your too-tight boots when finally the wall behind you opens up, and you very quickly come face to face with Harry's assistant.

"Y/N," she smiles, "I thought I said in the email to call me when you got here?"

You're dumbstruck, you didn't read the email, not properly. "I … I …"

"It's good to see you again," her smile hasn't moved, and it's genuine. She reaches one hand out towards you and deposits a VIP lanyard around your neck, "Follow me."

You get halfway down the emergency exit, and she sidesteps a security guard through a doorway, leading you into the veins of the backstage area where there's a familiar buzz of busy people you'd not realised you missed being around until now. Your heart is racing because you weren't prepared for this. You'd been deliberately dragging your feet getting here, and you've arrived barely fifteen minutes before Harry's due to go on stage. She's walked you right to the side of the stage where there's a curtain just to your left and scaffolding all around. You can hear the audience, and you know that one step through that curtain will take you to the pit side of the stage, where you'd seen Harry's family stand during shows before.

"He wanted to say hi beforehand but," his assistant looks at her watch, "But it's a touch too close now so are you okay if I leave you here for just a second? I'll be back in …" her eyes go back to her wrist, "Probably about twenty-five?"

"That's fine," you nod dumbly. "Are you sure this okay?"

You're looking around wondering if this is where Harry meant you to be. Really, you're sure this isn't where he intended you to watch his show at all. A few people are milling around but nobody you recognise, and you figure the majority of them are probably venue employees. Harry and his band would only walk through here at the very last second. He didn't like standing around beforehand with anyone who wouldn't be on stage with him. Harry got in his zone and needed to stay there.

When you look back at his assistant she's giving you a look you don't want to read too deeply, but it almost looks like pity, "Of course," she tells you, "I'll be back by the end of the first song."

"I might go stand through here now," you point to the curtain, preferring the thought of standing in the dark by yourself than waiting for Harry to walk straight past you during his thirty-second countdown. "Is that okay?"

You get a nod, and she tells you to grab a drink off the table behind you. Leaving you with your heart rattling and the heaviest lanyard you've ever worn burning through your shirt to your chest.

Finding a spot to watch the show was easy. You picked the furthest side of the pit, under the concrete overhand of the seats above, and stand in the shadows, only half the stage in your line of sight. It felt like a little cave almost, and you lean your back against the cold concrete and tap your boots together on the ground below you.

The area starts filling around you as members of Harry's team finish their part in preparing him for the show. There are a few women wearing belts with makeup brushes and combs peaking out of them, and two familiar faces from Harry's executive team. They don't see you, though, and you're glad. You watch the roadies' torches flash on the dark stage as they neaten up leads and manoeuvre over amp boxes double-checking the guitars are in the right order for the sets.

There's a movement in your periphery that draws your attention back, the group of people who joined you in the pit all gravitating towards something back at the curtain. And it's not until one of them steps to the side that you see the floating head that's poking through the dark material.

Harry.

He's staring right at you: no expression on his face, just his searching, green eyes that stop when they see you standing in the dark as far from him as you can possibly be. He takes half a step forward, and the shoulder of an expensive suit peeks out. You hear in your head echos of a moment in Harry's living room unpacking a delivery from Gucci, the way you nearly choked on your tea at the cost of a tailored trouser and his half frustrated dismissal, 'It's nothing, that's standard for me.' You felt small at that moment, thinking about how one of Harry's suits could pay for your education for a year, and that would be nothing for him.

You feel small now too. This isn't the space you're supposed to occupy.

The shadow of a frown barely cross his features, but then Harry tries to pull his dimples up to give you a small smile. But it's testing, it's not a confident smile or one he looks sure he's giving. Like he's smiling at someone he's not sure will smile back.

There's no way I'll ever do anything else with the band, he'd said.

But that wasn't the biggest lie he'd told, just the most public, the widest.

His deepest, biggest lie was you.

+

The fourth lie was that he loved you.

Harry was the one to say it first.

It came out like a compliment. A response to a fact of yours he'd particularly liked. A sort of well done, that was a good one.

It was nearly two months since you'd met, and what started as three or four dates a week morphed into you staying at Harry's house most nights. You spending your weekends off work trailing around after him on his errands or to work things, or hanging out alone at his place until he returned from them. A couple of times, you went to the same exercise class, which involved the two of you going separately and not interacting at all. Still, you'd peek at him from across the room and have to hold your giggles for later when Harry spent the hour concentrating beyond anything you'd ever seen just to stay in the seat of the spin bike.

Saturdays and Sundays he started taking off too though, around a month into dating you. No more 6am weekend PT sessions or midday conference calls with creative teams. The only work Harry allowed himself to do on weekends was housework. Laundry. Food prep. Touching base with his mum.

"Did you know blueberries are actually false berries?"

"No, I did not know blueberries are actually false berries," Harry parroted back to you. You catch the half rolling of his eyes at you where you're sitting up in your favourite spot on the bench next to the hob, peering at him keeping careful watch over breakfast: blueberry pancakes. He was wearing just his pants, chest bare and cool in the autumn morning air. You were rugged up in leggings and a sweater, unsure how he could stand being in such a state of undress.

"It's true," you reaffirmed your tidbit, popping a false berry into your mouth while Harry—with far too much concentration for the job at hand—dropped the small round berries on top of the batter sizzling in the pan. "Berries by definition are fleshy, pulpy ovary fruits that have their seeds embedded on the outside. Blueberry seeds are on the inside. So they aren't really berries."

"Ovary fruits?" He questioned, with a look of mild distaste.

Your shoulders dropped as you realised Harry knew less than you thought he did, "All fruit are ovaries, Harry. Think about it."

He does for a moment, and you can practically see the cogs turning. Harry thinking about how fruit grows on their plants and bushes and shrubs. The fact of what an ovary is when it comes to basic anatomy. And when he comes to the full circle of it, he groans, "That is so weird."

"I think it's cool," you grinned. "Like a little bit cannibalistic in a way."

He barked out a laugh at that, "I don't think that's what it is."

"Well, maybe not technically," you conceded, "But it's something … Really makes you rethink eating eggs."

"Oh my god," Harry was truly laughing then, "Stop, please."

"Sorry," you peeped with a cringed look, tossing back half a handful of the small, round fruit in front of you.

He was shaking his head at you, laughter bubbling out between his perfectly straight teeth, and then it just slipped out, "Fuck, I love you."

The words didn't bump over any hesitation. I love you, Harry said.

Your stomach dropped instantly, but the fond happiness dancing across Harry's face didn't go anywhere. He didn't look back at the pancakes or to where your hands were wringing together on your lap. Harry held your gaze and didn't dodge away from what he said at all. Like he knew you'd need a moment with it, that you weren't expecting him to just come out with that.

"I love you," he repeated after a moment, smiling when he saw your lips start to turn up, "I mean it."

Hearing him yell the same words through the microphone from stage sizzles your heart a little, like the pancakes that day crackled in the pan as Harry pushed himself into you on the kitchen floor. You remember the feeling of his hands under your clothes, your leggings barely halfway down your thighs before he was claiming you in a wave of lust, pushed by the new, invisible force in your relationship—love.

The floor under you now vibrates as everyone gets to their feet to join Harry dancing through his first song. You stare at him, daring him to look over at you but knowing he won't. The longer you stand there, the more you thaw out to it, the more you find yourself with a smile on your face and a slight sway to your hips. His music is fun and familiar and feels like clicking into place.

It's mesmerising. He's mesmerising.

You don't like admitting you'd forgotten how good at this he was. He has the whole crowd eating out of the palm of his hand. Even his crew around you are grinning ear to ear and singing along. Sharing private jokes between them and cutting dance moves in small groups as they watch the show. It's fun. And it reminds you that so much of your relationship with Harry was like that. That there were countless nights spent dancing in the living room or screaming at laptop screens doing board game nights with his family.

You'd forgotten that you could laugh so hard your belly hurt and that Harry was one of the few people who'd ever been able to get you to that point of joy. Watching him throw joy off the stage now at thousands of people was reminding you how very good Harry was—used to be—at making you feel like the only person in the world to him.

"Babe," his giggles filtered down the hallway and into the bathroom where you were plucking your eyebrows, "Babe! Come … Come see this."

You rolled your eyes as you put the tweezers down and padded into his living room, not at all surprised to see Harry pretzeled on his yoga mat in a fit of laughter. He did this a lot, called you away from a task or from work for something hilarious that ninety-nine per cent of the time wasn't hilarious at all. You'd end up snorting out laughter of your own though, at him.

Now, Harry had one of his feet hooked behind his neck while the other was prostrate on the floor behind him.

"You're doing great, baby," you condescended lightly, tilting your head to the side and frowning at his position. It looked awful and not at all calming, let alone comfortable. He wasn't a very good advertisement for yoga at all.

"They say this one's great for—great for," he giggled too much to get the words out, his arms holding his torso back so his legs would do what he wanted them to, he took a deep breath, "It's meant to be the yoga colonic."

Harry was heaving with laughter as he finally got it out, his position faltered, and you watched as his limbs all fell back to the mat as he leant forward cackling. You were grinning too, amused by how amused he was.

"Been feeling backed up, have you?" You asked him, crossing your arms as you hitch one hip out.

He rolled over on his back and wheezed out the final string of laughter, one hand holding his lower tummy as if it ached from the whole spectacle, as his other hand reached out for your ankle, "Come down here with me."

"Hmm," you hummed, pretending to be unhappy to be dragged down on top of him, your hips resting on his thighs as your chin propped up on your hands at his chest, "It's very entertaining how entertaining you find yourself," you mused.

Harry rubbed the tears from his eyes and then settled his hands on your back, breathing in the pleasant weight of you there, "I just—I was thinking about what they think the yoga colonic is going to do." His giggles started again, "Imagine being in a class and it literally working? Everyone just—everyone just shits themselves!"

You can feel his laugher, his bones pushing yours up as his whole body fills with his happiness. The stream of tears coming from the corners of his eyes start again as he squeezed his eyes shut while the sound of Harry's deep, uninhibited laughter filled the whole house again.

The memory brings back a smile, like so many with Harry do.

But there's still the Too Fresh Sting of your final moments with him, your last moments with him. You've not seen him since that evening months ago where you both yapped at each other things that couldn't be unsaid, unhappinesses that couldn't be reverted or unadmitted. It wasn't like the fights you had about Harry's casualised view of money and how he'd drop thousands of pounds on seemingly nothing without thinking how small it could make you feel. Or the times you'd snap in frustration when Harry tuned out of you complaining about an issue with your friends he deemed as superfluous or rooted in something silly or not as essential as the Important Thing He Was Planning. He could be so dismissive when he didn't think something mattered highly enough on his scale of measuring things.

The Harry dancing around on stage in front of you wasn't the man who said you were independent like it was a dirty word. Yelled across the kitchen that it was too easy for the two of you to be apart, you didn't miss him enough. The man who told you he didn't feel like you needed him, thought you were always standing with one foot out the door the whole time you were together. And you can remember being flabbergasted (still are, really) by what he was saying because it just wasn't true at all. You? Too independent? You spent every night at his house, and were at Harry's beck and call the whole relationship. And you can hear all the times you said 'what would I do without you?' when he talked you off a ledge or had answers to questions you believed to be unanswerable.

You can see how it was another classic example of Harry telling a non-truth to cover up what was really there. To distract from his own shortcomings. He accused you of what he was feeling, of his flaws. Making them your problem meant he didn't have to be vulnerable. Didn't have to take a risk his business manager hadn't guaranteed. Didn't have to gamble on your future together.

In the relationship, he always had the upper hand. And maybe you did have one foot out the door emotionally, but that was only because you had to. Harry never invited you in with him completely. You were always on the outer. After nearly a year of dating you were still The Girlfriend He Didn't Have.

But I fucking love you, he'd said when he sensed where that night was going. Like Harry had a list of grievances, and it wasn't until he got to the end of reading them out to you that he realised where it landed him. He told you he loved you as though it would erase all the things about you he seemed to dislike so much. Things about yourself you apparently couldn't see.

Hindsight has taught you that if anyone was too independent, or hesitant to commit fully in that relationship, it was Harry.

Halfway through his set, Harry's assistant comes over to check on you, and you end up chatting for a few minutes about how you've been. She speaks to you like there was some club you were a member of and she missed your meetings. Although neither of you references the breakup, or acknowledge in another life you had a lot more to do with each other, the unspoken things weigh on your chest. You find yourself wiping away a quiet tear when she walks back over to the main group watching Harry.

Of course, that's when he teeters over to your side of the stage and looks straight at you. His expression falls instantly, and you're sure that he only meant to glance at you in passing, but what he sees has him doing a double-take and fixing his gaze on you for two lines of the song he's midway through. He tugs on the collar of his shirt and Harry's eyes are desperately trying to read what you're thinking, just like that day he told you he loved you at the end of the breakup, as though you'd forget everything that came before it.

You stick your thumb out to him and give him your best fake smile. Like he might be led to believe you were crying about something else. As if you hadn't just pulled his attention from a room full of people who'd paid for his attention tonight. At that moment you think the fact there's a secret love and life between you must be too obvious to everyone else. There's a connection, something whirls around the room between you and it feels threatening and perilous to how you've been trained to think things have to be.

You wait until Harry turns and goes the other way across the stage before you push off from the wall and walk out.

At first, love was an encouragement between you. It was approval, a showing of appreciation. Love was a promise that was just for the two of you. A declaration that validated everything you were doing together. Love was a feeling that proved what every action meant.

Then, love was a bandaid, was a line used in desperation to fix something unfixable, and you walk the world with skun knees now because of it. Love was never just love. It was used to fix the wrong things.

And in the end, nothing healed at all.

+

The fifth lie was that he'd always fight for you.

Harry promised you that the two of you would make it work.

You'd make up after every argument, big or small. The little ones that were those tiny bickerings in the car which somehow roared into yelling matches. Or when one person's grumpiness from the day leaked into your evening together. You always expected his call or the long sigh that would precede his apology. You never got halfway home to your house if you left his after a row. He'd call and beg for you to come back, that nothing was worth you physically leaving being near him. You left knowing before the night was done the two of you would reconcile.

Until it was That Fight you were leaving after. The one that began The End.

It started because Harry was overseas for a few weeks. While he was away, you suggested the two of you going on a holiday together during the summer. An anniversary trip. From the other side of the world, it was easy enough for Harry to worm his way of out of it. He went off on a tangent about there being no holidays (rest) for the wicked and then got you talking about something else until you forgot how you'd been sold on the idea of lying on a beach with him for a week.

When Harry got home, you had it stored in an unhappy little pocket in your mind. Top of the agenda for when he returned.

"Can we talk about the holiday thing again?" You asked his first night home.

He sighed against you, his body gearing up for a reunion that didn't involve speaking, lips attached to your neck while his hands danced around the band of your bra, "Do we have to right now?"

"Well," your instinct was to back away from the tension rising between you, "I'd like to."

Harry pushed his hair up off his face and briefly looked at the ceiling, "I don't see how we can, babe. It's too hard, logistically. Just take a week off work and stay with me here."

"I already stay here," you counter, "I'm talking about a holiday somewhere. A beach. Or a ski resort. Something fun and different."

"Those places are all busy," Harry complained, his hands off you. He started to pack the dishwasher from dinner.

"I just want to go away with you, do something normal, you know?"

He clipped the side of the sink with a dinner plate and swore angrily under his breath, "Fuck."

"Don't get angry."

"I'm not fucking angry," he growled, tossing your forks into the plastic crate, "I just fucking got home, and you're straight into this. No 'I missed you so much' or 'It's so great to see you'… Just straight into going on a holiday as if I have endless time to mess about."

"What do you mean? We've just eaten dinner together, you told me all about your trip. I said I was happy to have you home!"

"Yeah, well, feels like you just don't give a fuck that I'm back."

You frowned at him starting to get annoyed yourself, "I cried on our FaceTime call on the weekend because I missed you! You have a lobotomy since then?"

"Don't yell," Harry instructed quietly like he was chastising a child for not controlling themselves.

"What's this about, Harry?" You asked. "Why is it such a crime for me to want to go away with my boyfriend?"

He sighed again, "It's not."

"Right," you crossed your arms over your chest and wondered how many times he could wipe down the chopping board.

Probably one more time.

"So …"

"So what?" Harry repeated, "What do you want from me?"

His words and their harshness shocked you, and that was the exact moment you started worrying this was going to turn into Something Else. Not just a Normal Fight.

"I want you to tell me why you're so annoyed by this?"

It would have been so easy for you to break down and scream about how insane it was that you were talking about celebrating your first anniversary with him and the relationship was still a secret. How badly you wanted to throw that out there, but there was a wise fear in you which said that would be a death wish. (That fact haunts you today, how you knew he'd never step out with you. There wasn't any hope in you or promise from him it wouldn't always be that way. You knew your place and where the boundary line was, don't push past this point. And you always behaved. Never peeped out of your box.)

"It's like you don't even need me," Harry said bitterly, "You're so fucking independent. What's the point?"

"What are you talking about?" You gushed, nearly swallowing your tongue when he turned back to look at you for the first time.

"You don't need me," he accused, "You've always got one foot out the door."

"I don't," came your defence, but you both knew it was the truth. You were halfway out the door because you hadn't been invited all the way in yet.

"You don't want this life with me," Harry shook his head, "You've never been happy where we are. Relationships don't work that way, you can't just keep demanding the same thing hoping you'll wear me down. That's not fair."

Tears shake out of your eyes slowly as your body catches up with what he's saying, "Harry."

"It's not fair!" He repeated loudly. "You can't keep on about it."

About what? You want to ask him because you hadn't mentioned a holiday until the week before. That's not what he was really angry about. He was talking about The Secret. And his guilt was showing. His anger was misdirected, aimed at the wrong thing. He muttered something to himself you didn't hear.

"I didn't hear that."

"I said," Harry looked up at you, and when your eyes clicked together you saw surprise rise and then quickly disappear as if he hadn't expected to see you there. "I said, I don't think we can keep doing this."

"You don't think we can keep doing this?" You repeated it because the words hardly sounded like English the first time you heard them.

I don't think we can keep doing this.

Harry stood across from you with no expression on his face. And it took a few moments for him to own up to what he said, but he does. He nods his head once, awkwardly, and then nods again.

"We can't keep doing this," he tells you, sounding defeated, and then his voice rises again—in pitch, not in volume—"But I fucking love you!"

But I fucking love you.

As if that was enough.

It was days of you expecting a call, and a make up that never came. Expecting the fight for your relationship Harry promised you he'd always put up. You wanted him to prove that you were someone he couldn't do without. You hated the thought of him walking around his house and not feeling the absence of you as some impossible weight he couldn't bear.

"Y/N!" Your name sounds out behind you, but you keep walking, an instantaneous decision that pretending not to hear her might work.

Unsurprisingly, it doesn't.

Harry's assistant keeps chasing you down the hall she initially led you through, calling your name and eventually getting you to stop and turn around because, well, you can't keep pretending she's not there forever.

"I'm just finding a loo," you lie.

"There's one this way," she points over her shoulder, in the direction you both came from, "Harry said if you tried to leave I had to go with you, which, for my own dignity I'd really prefer not to have to do."

You find yourself scoffing, "Who said he's in charge of how long I stay?"

Her expression softens somewhat, "He just wants to see you after."

How dare he think he can control this still, you think.

You know she's not the person to be frustrated with. You should be frustrated with yourself first, for coming, and then with Harry for deciding he could orchestrate this … This whatever it was. Still, you find yourself biting out your reply, "He saw me from stage," you tell her bitterly.

"And he'll have seen that you're not there anymore," she replies patiently,, "It'll throw off his focus if he's worried you've gone home halfway through."

You fall into step beside her but can't give him the win, "Quite frankly, it's not my concern or responsibility anymore if his focus is thrown or not."

She wordlessly points out where the bathrooms are just in front of you. You're trying not to make eye contact with anyone who's in these backstage hallways. They feel like ghosts from a life that's not yours anymore.

The first time you met any of Harry's People you'd felt absolutely mortified. The whole thing felt awkward to you, meeting assistants and managers and creative directors. Putting faces and humans to jobs done for Harry. He was a lot of people's boss, and it made you uncomfortable because you'd not seen that side to him before. You knew things like how hot he liked his showers and what yogurt he liked on his muesli in the morning.

That first—and only—step into his professional world, was in a venue just like this one where Harry was filming a music video for a few days. The stage was set up like it was for live a show, and you overheard someone saying setting up for a shoot was more involved than for an actual performance. Harry wanted you to see what this part of his world looked like and despite them not fitting in either of the Friends or Family categories you'd laid out for People Allowed To Know About You, his "Team" were people Harry felt safe introducing to you. (NDAs were a powerful thing) He led you through the hallways by the hand and stuck his head into every room with a cheery, 'Hullo, just bringing Y/N around to meet everyone.'

You remember one person declaring they were happy to be meeting you. Harry was too young to be married to his job, they said with a relieved tone, That it was good he'd found his Someone. Harry beamed at that, looking down at you as if thinking, Yeah, I have found my Someone.

Now you stand back in the pit side of stage, and Harry looks down at you with a hesitation that makes you more uncomfortable than when you were watching him film that music video. His assistant has brought you back to where his team are standing, and you feel more than one set of eyes take stock of you returning, a shared glance between a manager and the girl shadowing you. A wide-eyed exchange that says, That was the last thing we needed. When Harry comes to the side of stage between songs, he's hunting for a bottle of water, but you can see he's come to that side because his eyes are focused on hunting for you.

When he sees you've returned, he slowly takes a sip of water, eyes not leaving yours. You feel like he's admonishing you in his head, seeing how weak you were, that you ran away after a little eye contact. There's a distaste there, you think, and as he's putting the cap back on the bottle, Harry opens his mouth like he's going to try to say something to you, but he stops. He frowns at his hands as he puts the bottle down and then turns away, bringing the microphone back up to his lips and slipping back into entertainer mode.

"In a lot of ways, I hate this next song," he starts slowly, speaking over the band as they begin to slow down the tempo of the night. A smoke machine whirls to life and pumps out a few big clouds, shrouding the stage behind Harry. "I really hate it."

He pauses. And your insides freeze in your chest. You're hanging off his every word, just like every other body in the room. Harry stands right on the front of the stage, toes almost touching the drop off. He's looking out at the audience and lets the microphone hang at his side. Makes no move to keep talking. Was he looking for someone out there, or was he running over what he was about to say in his head? Rehearsing it, making sure it was exactly what needed to be said.

Where you used to see thoughtfulness you now see calculation.

Give nothing away. Sell only the product. Push the song. Let people come to their own conclusions.

"This is a song about," he says carefully, a crack to his voice that sends adrenaline shooting straight down your legs, "About regretting that you've hurt someone. And about the helplessness of wishing you could make them forget what you said, but … Knowing you can't take it back."

You watched Harry trail around to the upright piano on stage and sit himself down on the stool. He stares at his hands hovering over the keys for a moment too long, but you're sure Harry's audience would let him take a hundred more. You see what perhaps they don't—the hesitation. You'd witnessed it enough to spot it, even across the stage in the dark from thirty feet away.

He's not sure about playing the song.

You think about contacting him by telepathy. Saying, I'll leave so you can go back to your show. You don't have to pretend I'm not here, I'll just go. Like I wanted to. Like I tried to.

But he plays it.

You've not heard it before, but the rest of the room has, and they sing along with him. You hear a couple of thousand people sing with your ex-boyfriend about him regretting the way he treated you. And you're almost able to talk yourself out of believing it's about you, you can nearly reason with yourself that it's kind of vague. Other than naming the cafe he'd sat in the car park of a hundred times waiting for you to return with a takeaway, it could be about anyone, really.

But he sings out a line and looks straight at you, and his eyes say it's yours. The song. The apology that's not been said yet.

I get the feeling that you'll never need me again.

His voice cracks again as he sings it. And the hurt part of you says it's just a vocal technique Harry's trained to call on at any time. It doesn't speak to anything other than a creative choice on his part. But the vulnerability is hard to ignore, the low hanging, remorseful unease in the room. He fumbles a string of notes on the piano as he sings and you're hit by the overwhelming need to make him stop.

Witnessing whatever he's currently feeling with this song is more uncomfortable than you've ever been, and a switch in you to protect him flicks on. You look around at his assistant, his manager, trying to see if there's even a hint of anyone else feeling like this moment needs an intervention, needs to be stopped.

The song ends. And you're glad.

Harry takes a few moments on stage to get ready with a guitar for the next song. He doesn't come over to your side of the stage for a drink, or to ask the roadies for anything. Instead, he flies straight into the next section of the set. Seemingly recovered from the heavy moment you felt as though you nearly drowned in. He'd never sung about you before.

Nothing remotely personal about your relationship ever left Harry's house.

And you find yourself wishing it would all just go back there.

+

The sixth lie was that he wouldn't break your heart.

Harry did though.

He broke your whole life.

So when he comes off stage at the end of his gig, there's little in you that wants to hang around. As soon as the lights go down and you see Harry's silhouette cross the back of the stage and hop down the stairs to the floor, your gut churns, and you wish you were one of the people in the rest of the venue. The ones now turning and slowly filing out of the building. Going back to their lives peacefully.

Instead, you're ushered behind the curtain again, into the small area that's immediately buzzing with life. You watch Harry as if he's moving in slow motion though. As soon as his boots hit the concrete floor somebody is tugging the suit jacket from his shoulders and swapping it for a grey hand towel that he uses to wipe down his face. His hand pushes his hair up over his head as he smiles at a handful of people, and then his eyes find yours. The smile drops, and he takes a steadying breath in.

"Y/N," he says loudly. Straight. Without expression. It's a statement, but also you sense a question there too. As if you might not turn out to be the person who was standing there. He holds your gaze over and through the people walking around and in front of him. He's handed a bottle of water and offered a second one which he takes, "Y/N," he says again, pulling his head back to beckon you over.

You roll your lips together when you've made it to the vacant space in front of him. Harry passes you the extra water bottle and cracks the lid off the one he keeps for himself. You grip yours with both hands but don't make any move to open it. Standing in front of him didn’t feel like you thought it would. It’s less of a kick I in the gut, and more a reinforcing of things that you’d figured out since being without him.

"Hi," he says hesitantly, briefly looking at someone behind your left shoulder. Then, you feel his eyes back on your face.

You speak to his forehead, not ready to have things inside you unlocked by eye contact, "Hello."

"This way," Harry says after a moment, running the towel down his sweaty face again.

He leads you down a hallway, wiping his face on the towel two more times as he walks. Harry continuously looks over his shoulder at you to make sure you're still following him, as if there was somewhere for you to hide in the concrete hallway. When he gets to his dressing room door, he kicks it open and holds his arm out to let you in first. The room smells like his cologne, a whiff of his final moments before going out on stage and a time portal back to mornings you'd spritz it on yourself before leaving the house, it was your scent then too. There was a small sofa and table, a long mirrored table with his laptop open next to a stack of papers, his screen saver bouncing back and white photos across the locked screen. His overnight bag and its contents were sprawled out over the floor in the corner next to where you can see his phone charging.

"You look good," is the first thing he says to you. Trying to pull your attention probably. Maybe hoping to get on the front foot charming you. You could tell him he looked good as well, particularly in the cream suit they had him in tonight, but you were sure there were no shortage of people who already had.

"Your show was good," you deflect away from the personal, eyes tracing the bottles in the corner of the table, "Great setlist."

"Needs a shakeup, if we're honest. Getting stale," Harry shrugs, and you see it in the mirrored wall. He's still standing by the closed door, watching you walk into the centre of the room and take stock of what's around you. "How have you been?"

"Fine."

Harry coughs uncomfortably, "Thanks for coming, wasn't sure you would."

"I wasn't sure either."

You sense Harry realising this conversation was going to be exactly as difficult as feared it might be, he nods his head and moves over to the sofa but doesn't sit down, "Did you want a seat?"

"I'll sit here," you perch yourself on the chair in front of his laptop, crossing one leg over the other and hitching your elbow at the back so you're facing Harry. Keeping the room between you.

Harry sits on the arm of the small, burgundy sofa, and tosses the towel onto the seat next to him, "Looked like you were a little upset there for a moment."

"My boots are new," you quip, kicking your top foot out towards him, "Blisters."

He sighs again, and you start to feel chastised, but there's a more substantial part of you that stubbornly bunkers on down to playing this role, taking power when you'd never had it with Harry before. He knew it wasn’t blisters that had emotion welling up in you during his set. But just the same it wasn’t his place anymore to be privy to your feelings. And you weren’t going to let him gallantly try to take it. You weren’t old friends who could pick up where you left off. You were broken lovers.

"I just thought we could do with talking," Harry says finally.

"You could have uninvited me, you know, I assumed—Well, it's not like I've been expecting to still attend any of your shows the last six months. This one didn't have to be different."

He almost looks hurt, "You live here."

"How was Italy, Harry?” you turn the conversation around abruptly because you didn't like where it was going, and he was starting to frustrate you. You didn’t need him pointing out you lived in this city alone now since he left. As if you didn’t know.

Where watching him on stage hit you with longing and heartbreak, memories you found yourself irrevocably attached to, being in the same room as him now is only making you see the real Harry. The one who's so good at rearranging the energy in the room to make you feel you need to give more of yourself. The one who's an expert at asking a leading question and relying on the other person to be vulnerable first, lead the charge out the gates.

The man who lied to hide you every day for nearly a year, even when it was hurting you more than protecting you. The hurt from him was worse than the invasion of your privacy would have be. The distrust you felt didn't counteract the security you were still afforded by anonymity. The way you felt you still had something to prove—something to earn from him—and that you just needed to earn the right to your place in Harry's life.

"I've missed you," he said finally, "Just …"

"You've been lonely?" You raise your eyebrows at him.

"What?" Harry's defences click into place, "No, it's not that—obviously yes, I've been lonely—but also I just—I miss you."

You start nodding, and your gaze drifts around the room, "Yeah, I … What exactly do you miss, Harry? Because—I mean, it was kind of shit, don't you think?"

"Shit?" he looks horrified, "What was shit?"

"Harry," you say simply, telling him to cut the bullshit with your expression. "Come on."

"I loved you," he declares loudly, proudly, “We had a great time together. I don't think it was kind of shit at all."

That's when you feel tears come to your eyes. Of course he didn't think it was shit. He still didn't see where the problem was. Couldn't see it. He would go right back to That Fight and keep going the way you had been if he could. Harry would keep living that life with you, he would have kept on going the same way. You'd still be the secret. A fight about a holiday would have resolved itself with compromise and make-up sex, and you would have gone right back to sneaking out of venues and pretending not to know him in crowded rooms.

Your lips turn up in a smile of sorts as your tears beg to fall but don't, "You haven't changed," you state with a small, incredulous laugh, "You've not figured it out. Nothing's changed," you repeat, shaking your head.

Harry's confusion is plain, and if he thought your tears were because you miss him there's something like a flicker of doubt, as if he's reading what's in front of him again and maybe getting a different story.

"You can't have a life with someone who doesn't want anyone to know you're in their life," you state simply.

And that was it, really. That was the nuts and bolts of it.

The secrecy eroded any meaning your relationship with Harry had. The doubt that cast. The burden on you to continually prove yourself, to audition for the role every day only to never graduate from understudy.

You watch Harry's throat constrict tightly as he thinks about the words that come from his mouth, "I loved you," he repeats, "I didn't want anything outside of us to fuck us up."

"You can't control the world that way, Harry," you're observing him carefully, "You definitely can't control people that way. I get why we started that way, but a year in, Harry? A year."

He looks at his feet, and it's the first bit of remorse you've ever seen him show over it.

"I know you loved me," you keep going, "But you can't use that as some bandaid for the lying, for the hurt that was. You can't erase the consequences because you thought you were protecting me or us or yourself. The truth doesn't cancel out the hurt of the lie."

Harry's still starring at his boots, "You could have said something."

You blink once.

"Fuck you," bursts out before you can stop it, and Harry's eyes snap up to yours, you laugh at his nerve and rise to your feet, "Fuck you, Harry. I couldn't have. I felt like I had to earn it. Like maybe I was one gold star away from getting there. And then when I did push it, you ended it."

"That's not—

"—It is," you insist, shaking your head at him, "You put all your insecurities and shortcomings on me and then had the nerve to tell me you loved me as if I was the defective cog in the wheel. As if you saying you loved me put all the onus on me spoiling it."

"I'm a private person—

You put your hand up to silence him, turning on your heel to face Harry as your pacing halts, "Stop. I don't … I don't care," you breathe out simply, "I really don't. Our relationship wasn't The One. It's one we'll both learn from for the ones that are coming. I hope you learn from it," you add quietly, "Because I have."

"Y/N," Harry says your name like it's an idea he's unsure of.

"That song wasn't about me, was it?" You ask because on stage he said it was about regretting hurting someone and there's been no hint of a 'sorry' from Harry since.

His brow creased, "It is. I am. I wanted you to hear me play it tonight. It's for you."

You smile, the idea that you've grown beyond this situation blooming inside you, "You've not said it."

"What?"

"You haven't said you're sorry," your head shakes again, a fresh wave of your new perfume—the one that's just yours—filling your nose, "You've said you missed me. And that I look good, but you've not said you're sorry. You can put an apology into the song on stage, but you can't admit you were wrong to the person you wrote the song about."

His shoulders sink, just the slightest amount, and you know that you've seen enough. You've said enough. He's not going to have an epiphany on this, not in this conversation with you. You've gone as far as you can with this. As far as you're willing to.

"I'm going to go," you take a step forward, "Thanks for the song, your voice sounded really nice on it."

And you walk passed him with just a final wave and the slightest touch to his shoulder. He doesn't move from his seated position, but his neck cranes and he watches you leave. Eyes hunting your back for answers, like the manuscript for what just happened might show up there. But it doesn't, and you slip out the door, the clip from your shoes fading from his hearing quicker than he wanted it to.

Your insides are shaking by the time you make it out onto the street. No part of you wants to turn back and look up at his name in lights again. You're done with seeing the best of everything in him. Harry's one of the shitty boyfriends you'll tell someone about one day in the future, and they'll call him a dickhead with anger dripping from their tongue, promising to never treat you the same way.

And they won't.

You'll both have bumped and bruised your way into each other's lives, and there'll be a satisfying click with them there wasn't with anyone else. You'll have journeyed through all the maybes and not-quites, and you'll land in that forever place with the person who wears the badge of Yours with a fervour nobody before them has.

And Harry … You'll go and be Nothing to Him.

+

My inbox is here

#1dff #fanfic #fanfiction #harry styles #harry styles fanfic #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles stories #harry styles fiction #one direction #one direction fanfic #1dfanfic #harry styles x reader #reader insert fic #reader x harry styles #lovers to nothing #made up a new genre of fic i think #friends to lovers #reader insert #reader x #harry styles fic

[suga-catt]

All 5 under Preferences for Bast

BAST

🔥 Give us a list of general likes and dislikes, such as colours, textures, music, weather and other stuff!

Likes: Cats, jewelry, green, plants, summer, oranges, clean/organize 

Dislikes: Dogs, winter, annoying rude people, asymmetry, uncleanliness  

🍊 What is your OC’s favourite meal? Snack? Dessert? Drink? Any reasons behind this besides liking how it tastes?

What is your OC’s most hated food? Stuff they can’t stand to eat or drink?

Bast loves hot spicy foods, one favorite is Kebda eskandarani, Selblak,etc ect. She also loves hummus, Baba Ghanoush, Shakshuka, falafel, lamb chops, hot pots, Boeuf Bourguignon etc etc, deserts she loves to have Basbousa, chocolate mousse,  something warm  with a citrus or dark chocolate in it lol

These are mostly her favorite not only because of the taste, but because it reminds her of her home and foods that are Oddies/Odds favorites that remind her of them 

Bast isn’t very fond of overly sweet, or cold desserts or dishes. (altho if Odd/ie suggest it she will try lol)

🍑 Where is your OC’s favourite place to relax or calm down? Recount a story of their time spent in this place! What makes it so special to them?

Is there anywhere your OC hates to go to? Anywhere that stresses them out or have negative memories of?

Bast loves nature, so she has a lil cabin in the woods where she likes to take vacations too with Odd/Oddie. 

Bast doesn’t like to be in New York as much (she moved her company lol) because her old business partners are awful. (She also ‘dated’ some for business purposes lol) it did not go well

🧡 Who is your OC’s favourite person? Why is this person the top of their list and have they actually met them (an idol or rolemodel or celeb can be someone’s favourite after all!).

Who does your OC absolutely hate, the one person who they’d sell to Satan for one corn chip? Why do they loathe this person so?

Bast’s Favorite person is Obviously Odd/Oddie lol. She absolutely loves them and would probably kill for them lol. They are the only person who gets her, makes her laugh and forget her troubles lol.

Bast HATES, with a burning passion, Mia/Marco and Odessa/Poseidon. They were terrible business partners and ex lovers lol. Wasn't any love (obviously lol) and it made her very unhappy and depressed. 

📙 What kind of subjects (of conversation, of discussion, in school or whatever) does your OC find interesting or engaging or that they can talk for hours about? What kind of stuff do they just find fun?

What things bore your OC to tears and they couldn’t care less about? Why?

 I think she would love to talk about computer stuff. Talking about electronics and coding is what she loves to talk about lol. And she will talk about her new ideas and projects or new systems she got to Odd/Oddie, even if they don't understand. Heck she might show them things or some of the basics just in case lol. 

Bast could care less about history, she will get so bored out of her mind. She doesn’t care for the past, she wants to look toward the future. 

So i added two names to some characters because they are interchangeable lol

#ask oc

[wiypt-writes]

Stark Spangled Forever

I Don’t Like Bullies

Intro: Emmy encounters someone from her past, and is left shaken after they threaten her. Steve and Bucky decided to pay them a little visit…

Warnings: Some violence, a slightly dark Steve and Bucky…some bad language. SMUT (NSFW, No UNDER 18s!!!)

Pairing: Steve Rogers x OFC Katie Stark

Disclaimer:  This is a pure work of fiction and classified as 18+. Please respect this and do not read if you are underage. I do not own any characters in this series bar Katie Stark and the other OCs. By reading beyond this point you understand and accept the terms of this disclaimer.

Stark Spangled Forever Masterlist // Main Masterlist

** If you haven’t read SSB in it’s entirety, this contains MAJOR spoilers**

August 2024

“Again!” Jamie giggled, splashing his way over to Steve who laughed and waited for Jamie to reach him.

“Ok ,one…two…three…” hooking his hands under Jamie’s armpits he gently launched him into the air and the 4 year old laughed hysterically before he hit the water with a splash in the deeper end of the pool before emerging, from the surface.

“You’re gonna give me a heart attack…” Katie sighed from where she was sat on the steps to the pool, submerged to her shoulders. Rori was suspended in the little inflatable baby support, her legs kicking out behind her as Katie gently pushed her away then pulled her back, the baby smiling and thrashing with her arms.

“He’s fine ain’t you son?” Steve asked as Jamie doggie paddled over to him, grinning.

“It’s like flying Momma!”

“Hmmm.” she said, as Jamie jumped on his dad’s back and he pulled at Steve’s neck. Steve, playing along threw himself backwards taking them both under the surface before he stood up, shaking his head like a dog as Jamie’s laugh hit his ears.

“You’re getting strong pal.” he said, turning his head over his shoulder so he could look at Jamie. Jamie grinned.

“How’s my little water baby doing?” Steve asked as he carried Jamie on his back to where his wife and daughter were, Jamie scrabbling out of the pool and heading to the lounger for a drink.

“She’s fine.” Katie smiled, as Steve turned his attention to Aurora, a huge grin on his face as she looked at him and beamed, waving her legs and arms as fast as she could.

“Look at you princess!” he said as Katie pulled her back towards them. He dropped down so his shoulders were under the water and Rori was at eye level. “Think she’s enjoying it.”

Katie smiled as the two of them watched the baby for a moment before Katie looked up at Jamie who was sat now with Lucky between his legs, gently talking to the dog. “Do you know what time it is?”

Steve glanced at his watch “Almost 4.”

“I should really think about starting dinner.”

“Leave it….” he said, turning to her, pressing his lips to hers. “Come on, when was the last time we got an afternoon like this?”

She smiled, “Feels like a while that’s for sure…”

“So…we can chuck a frozen pizza in for Jamie and we can get a take-out…” he said, moving so he was behind her, his arms curling around her waist, pulling her back so she was perched on his bent legs, his chin resting on her shoulder “Eat by the pool…” he placed a kiss to the crook of her neck, “And then later when he’s in bed and she’s settled we can hit the hot-tub…” another kiss “maybe a bottle of wine…”

“You feeling amorous Soldier?” Katie grinned, tipping her head round to face him.

“Always when you’re concerned…” he winked, his lips again meeting hers, only this time the kiss slightly deeper until they broke apart after a loud splash, followed by a smaller splash drew their attention.

Jamie had launched himself back into the pool, followed by Lucky who had clearly decided he too needed to get in the action.

They stayed in the water for another 15 minutes or so until Rori started to get a bit grouchy, and Katie took her out, wrapping them both in a towel and sitting in the quiet for a while to feed her. Steve and Jamie followed her out a little while later, both drying themselves off before Steve took Jamie inside to get him a juice box and throw his pizza in the oven. Jamie then insisted he wouldn’t make it until his pizza was done as he as starving, so Steve got him quick snack of breadsticks and hummus and sent him back out onto the garden where he made his way over to the side of the pool, flopping down on the lounger next to his Momma.

Deciding that a snack was actually a pretty good idea really, Steve grabbed a few things from the fridge, namely olives, more breadsticks, dips, cheeses and was about to carry it down to the pool area when the security system sounded to tell him that Emmy had come home.

“It’s ok…you’re ok…” his ears picked up Brooke’s voice from the hall and instantly he frowned as he heard Emmy’s deep breathing too. He strode into the hallway just in time to see Emmy slide down to the floor, her back pressed to the door as she tugged her knees to her chest.

“Emmy?” Steve asked, quickly dropping down in front of her. “Hey…look at me…”

She looked up and he gently reached out, his hand smoothing back her hair “Use your numbers ok, like we used too, remember?”

She gripped his hand tight and her eyes screwed shut as she desperately tried to regulate her breathing and Steve, not once taking his eyes off his daughter issued Brooke with an instruction to go and get Katie. Less than 2 minutes later she was also on her knees next to Emmy having left Brooke to watch the younger two and it was a minute or so later before the 16 year old began to breathe normally, her eyes slowly blinking as they returned to their usual size instead of being blown wide open.

“You ok?” Katie asked gently, looking at Emmy. She nodded.

“Sorry…”

“Don’t…” Steve looked at her as she fell into his arms, pressing her face against his bare chest as he wrapped his arms around her, kissing her head “Don’t every apologise for that, we told you.” The amount of panic attacks their daughter had had when she first came to live with them meant they’d been fairly used to them, but she hadn’t had one in a VERY long time, not since the events of the Final battle with Thanos had hit her and she’d broken down about losing her Uncle Tony, Auntie Nat and then how close she had to losing her parents. Emmy was a strong, independent teenager who for the most part simply got on with things, letting a lot of stuff that would bother other people wash right over her head. But clearly something had triggered her today.

“You need a drink sweetheart?” Katie asked and Emmy nodded.

“Ok. Think you can stand?” Steve asked.

“You’re not carrying me.” Emmy looked at Steve and he raised an eyebrow.

“You used to love me doing that.” Steve quipped and she rolled her eyes.

“Yeah at the Parties at the Kids home.” she grumbled “I’m not 7 anymore.”

“Never too old for your Pa to carry you.” Steve teased, standing up and offering him her hand. She took it and he pulled her to her feet, and despite her protestations at her age she kept her fingers tightly wound around his as they headed to the kitchen.

“Emmy!” Jamie shot off his seat and threw himself at his older sister. She smiled and bent to give him a hug.

“Hey Jay…” she smiled, “You been swimming?”

“Daddy was throwing me.” he grinned. “I bet he could do it for you too.”

“Sure he could” Emmy smiled as she shakily took a seat, glancing at Rori who was in Brooke’s arms, her little hands tangling in the girl’s long, red hair.

“Jamie, why don’t you go in the den for a moment, watch some TV.” Katie looked at him, adjusting the crochet slip she had thrown on over her bathing suit “Momma and Daddy need to talk to Emmy for a second.”

“But I don’t wanna.” he frowned.

“Hey, why don’t you show me your legos?” Brooke said quickly. Steve could see the cogs in his son’s head whirring as he considered this for a second before he nodded.

“Ok.”

“Thanks Brooke.” Katie said to her as she handed Rori back over.

“No problem Mrs R.” she said, allowing Jamie to tug her by the hand out of the room.

Once they were gone Katie adjusted Rori in her arms so that her head was tucked against her shoulder, mouth resting on her collar bone and Steve took a seat next to Emmy after pouring her a glass of water.

“Wanna tell us what happened Em?” he asked gently.

“We’d just been in The Hub.” she said, “You know the Computer shop because Brooke needed a new charger for her tablet.” Emmy swallowed and took a sip of her drink “We were walking down towards the bus stop so we could head home and we’d just passed that bar on the corner, you know the Irish Pub place?”

“Mc Mahons, yeah we know it…” Steve nodded

“And then he came out.”

“Who?” Katie asked, her eyes not leaving her daughter.

“Him…my old foster father. The one that used to hit me.”

Steve took a deep breath and breathed out through his nose “Did he hurt you?”

“No, not really…he erm, he didn’t recognise me at first and I kept walking but Brook had stopped and when she shouted my name he realised it was me and he grabbed my arm and…”

“Ok…ok…” Katie said gently, as Steve gently laid a hand on their daughter’s shoulder.

“Did he do anything else?” he asked. Emmy shook her head.

“He just started shouting stuff, saying he knew that I’d landed on my feet and that I was nothing but a worthless brat and that he would come and pay you a visit one day, tell you all about what I used to do and how bad I was and then you’d throw me out and…”

“Em, he’s an ass hole.” Katie said gently “You were never a bad kid. You’d been treated appallingly, what that man did do you…” she shook her head “It was cruel and abusive and…”

Steve’s hand fell to Katie’s knee under the table as she looked away, blinking back the tears.

“Emmy, me and your mom love you.” Steve looked at her, “We love all you kids more than anything, and nothing this dick says or does will change the way we feel. You know that right?” “I know, I just didn’t like seeing him that’s all.” she said gently “I just had all these flashbacks to the basement he locked me in and the belt…”

She swallowed and looked down. Steve looked at Katie, the jaw in his nerve twitching with anger as he took a deep breath and ran his hand up Emmy’s back.

“Well I hope he makes good on his promise and does pay us a visit.” he said his eyes flashing “I’d be very happy to exchange a few words with him, maybe a few fists too.”

Emmy smiled softly as Katie shook her head.

“Pretty sure your Uncle Buck would have a something to say too. And between you and me, his Murder Strut is frightening.” “Murder Strut?” Emmy looked up, the corners of her mouth twitching. Katie nodded.

“Trust me, I saw it a few times. Scared the shit out of me.”

“Woah, you saying I’m not scary?” Steve scoffed, folding his arms.

“Bucky’s a Rottweiler, you’re more of an angry retriever.” Katie shrugged and at that point Emmy laughed, which was exactly what her parents had been hoping to achieve. Steve flashed a wink at his wife before he turned back to Emmy.

“You know he won’t ever hurt you again, not now you’re with us.”

“I know. I love you guys.” she smiled and Steve dropped a kiss to her cheek. She looked up, wiped her eyes and then glanced at her mom. “Can Brooke stay tonight?”

“Course she can, I’ll call Jen”

“It’s ok she can message…”

“I’ll call her.” Katie said firmly, “Brooke was there today so Jen has a right to know what happened. Don’t worry, she won’t be mad at you.” “Kay…” Emmy nodded “What’s for dinner?”

“Your dad threw a pizza in for Jamie, we’re gonna get take out and hang by the pool.” Katie said.

“Anything you fancy?” Steve asked.

“Can we try the Greek place?”

“Sure.” Steve nodded “Hey, do they do Shwarma?”

“Gyros.” Katie said, “Same thing almost.”

“I’m in.” Steve said.

“I’m gonna go watch TV for a bit, that ok?”

“Course.” Katie smiled.

Emmy stood up and moved behind her dad, hugging him from behind, her arms round his shoulders. He tilted his head so she could kiss his cheek before she moved to do the same to her mom, giving Rori a peck.

“Love you both.” she smiled at them, before she left the room.

As soon as she was gone Steve stood up, his calm demeanour ebbing away as Katie looked up at him, shaking her head.

“I wanna kill him Steve.”

“You and me both doll.” he paced.

“Think we should call the police?” Katie asked, gently rocking Rori to and fro as she had started to grumble.

Steve contemplated what she had said before he paused, folded his arms and looked at the door, then back to Katie “I got a better idea.”

“What?”

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

“You know I do”

“Then leave it with me.” he said simply

“Steve…” she stated, instantly understanding what he was implying “You can’t.” “Why not?”

“Well, for starters we have no idea where he lives.”

Steve snorted “Sweetheart, you’re forgetting who we know.”

“Oh, no…you can’t drag Sam into this.” Katie shook her head “Ross is being an asshole with him as it is without you giving him ammo by getting Sammy into trouble.”

“I’m not” Steve smiled, raising his eyebrow “I’m gonna drag Bucky into it instead.“

****** Bucky sat at the bar, baseball cap tugged down over his eyes. He’d been reliably informed his target drank in this run-down back dive every Wednesday and Thursday evening. He liked the happy hour, apparently.

Aint gonna be happy for much longer, buddy.

Despite the fact that he was trying to live a normal life now (ok, maybe helping Sam out every now and then) when Steve had asked him to help him with this particular mission he’d immediately said yes. Not simply because Steve was his best friend, but because it involved Emmy. As far as Buck was concerned, the Rogers kids might as well be his own in that respect because he’d give his life to protect any of them.

And then there was Brooke. Bucky had been dating Brooke’s mom, Jennifer now for a few weeks after they’d hit it off at Steve’s birthday party. It was great, slow moving but that’s what he wanted, and when he’d heard that her daughter had been caught up in all this business as well, it was another reason for him to slip back into his old assassin mode.

Only this time his instructions were clear. Apprehend alive.

At first when Steve had told him this he had been about to tease him, wind him up, surely after all these years the Captain had finally found that trigger to flip him over to the dark side, but then he had seen something stir in his best pal’s eyes. He’d told him then about an incident in a HYDRA base, where he had killed on of Katie’s captors and Bucky knew, it was there alright, and he had a feeling he was going to see it whenever they caught this punk.

He ordered another drink, his eyes re-reading the paper he’d brought with him for the 15th time. To most people stake-out work like this would get them bored, antsy, but not Bucky. He’d waited much longer before and he knew that if you got like that you lost concentration which made things 100 times harder in the long run. His eyes scanned back to the entrance to the bar, flicking back round the pub, and he observed the people to make sure he hadn’t missed the man sneaking in, even though he knew that was basically impossible. Satisfied he hadn’t, he took the drink off the bar tender, paid him (another rule of spy work- never set up tabs, you run without paying and your face is recognised all over the damned scene). He took a sip of his beer before he heard the door open and he looked round, fighting the smirk on his face as finally his target walked in and straight to the bar to Bucky’s right.

The man ordered his drink, a straight black label whiskey and when it was served he paid with a bunch of crumpled ones and picked the glass up, heading to a table.

Bucky had to hand it to the guy, in the half an hour he spent in the bar he knocked back a good 5 helpings of scotch before he stood up, and rather unsteadily made his way to the door. Giving him enough time to get out of the door, Bucky then rose and followed him. He tailed him into another bar, then another, before after the 3rd the man headed home.

Bucky watched him unlock the door to the rundown apartment block, before he staggered inside. Quick as a flash Bucky shot over the road, sticking his foot in the door to stop it from shutting. Slipping inside he pressed himself up against the dark wall, just to the side of the post boxes, as the man turned around. After a second or so Bucky heard him heading up the stairs. He walked to the bottom of the steps, and keeping his footsteps light he headed after him and emerged onto the second landing, peering round the wall to watch as the man stopped outside a door, pulling out his keys.

Bucky waited until the door was closed before he headed back down to the ground floor, pulling out his phone.

“I got him.”

***** Steve climbed out of his car, looking up at the ramshackle building before he crossed the road. Bucky was waiting for him and opened the door to the apartment block from the inside.

“What you come dressed as?” Bucky arched an eyebrow, scanning Steve up and down. He was dressed in a pair of black jeans, a dark navy t-shirt and black boots, with a cap pulled down over his face.

“You.” Steve said simply, and Bucky snorted.

“He’s on the Second floor.” he said simply “Number 202. Still think you should just let me shoot him.”

“No.” Steve said “We’re not killing him…”

Bucky rolled his eyes “Why?”

“Because I want him as scared as he made Emmy.” Steve said simply. “He can spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.”

Bucky shrugged, “Your call…”

Steve headed to the stairs and started to climb them, stopping as he heard his foot crunch on something.

“Nice place…” he mumbled as he looked down to see he had stood on a cockroach.

“Don’t be a snob Stevie…”  Bucky looked at him, and Steve rolled his eyes.

“Even my place in the 40s wasn’t this grim.” he turned to look at his friend before he continued up the flight of steps.

“It wasn’t the ritz either.” Bucky shrugged as they emerged onto the landing. They stopped outside the door and Steve took a breath before he looked at Bucky.

“Looks like we need a key….” he quipped. Bucky gave a smirk, before he drew his left hand back and punched straight through the door, grabbing the handle and turning it to undo the lock from the inside. He threw it open and strode inside, Steve casting a look around before he followed and pulled the door shut behind them. Hearing the noise the man flew out of the kitchen, a knife in his hand, stopping dead when he saw Bucky.

“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded.

Bucky simply raised his eyebrows.

“Look, if Mario sent you…I told him, he’ll get his money…”

“I don’t know any Mario…” Bucky shook his head, “Well, not unless you count the one that rides on the karts in that game my nephew enjoys kicking my ass at. Now put the knife down Jack before someone gets hurt.”

“How do you know my name?” Jack asked, his eyes not once leaving Bucky, missing the Captain who was stood in the darkness of the room behind him. “What the fuck do you want?”

“I don’t want anything…” Bucky said, shrugging, “But he does…”

At that point Steve stepped forwards, drawing up besides his friend, getting a good look at the man in front of him. He was quite tall, but lanky, with a pointed noise and sharp features, reminding Steve of an overgrown rat.  Which fitted him perfectly, out and out vermin. Jack frowned and squinted slightly as he looked straight at Steve, suddenly paling even further. Whilst Steve looked a lot different from the once blue-eyed All American hero the world recognised him to be, there was no mistaking who he was, especially to the man in question. Steve stood stock still, his hands falling to the buckle which was round the waist of his black jeans, his chest flexing under his navy t-shirt as he glared at the man.

“Woah…look…I don’t want any trouble…” Jack began to press.

“You should have thought about that before you touched and threatened my daughter.” Steve’s voice was icy.

Jack’s hand clenched around the knife and Bucky rolled his eyes, before he whipped off the glove on his left hand, holding it up, the metal glinting in the dim light of the lamp that stood in the corner of the grubby apartment.

“This can do far more damage than that blade can.” he said simply, looking at his hand before he turned to Jack “Go ahead, I’ll even give you one free swing. But it better be fast.”

Steve expected the man to drop the knife, but instead he lunged forwards. Bucky sighed, and almost lazily dodged to the right before he knocked the knife out of the man’s hand with a single swipe and gripped him around the neck with his hand, slamming him hard into the wall.

“That was really fucking stupid.” he said, tightening his fingers around the man’s windpipe, lifting him off the floor. The man grabbed at Bucky’s arm, desperately trying to prise his fingers from around his neck.

“Buck…” Steve said, and Bucky let go, Jack slumping to the floor. Steve reached down, grabbed his shirt and hauled him to his feet slamming him against the wall.

“Now…” Steve said, his hands tightening. “I don’t like bullies. And that’s what you are. I know exactly what you did to Emmy, all the times you beat her, hurt her, whipped her with a belt until her back split and bled. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t rip you in half right now.”

“Captain America…nah…you wouldn’t…” Jack stuttered, shaking his head “You’re a good guy…”

“Well, here’s the thing.” Bucky said, picking up the knife that Jack had dropped, leaning on the wall, lazily twirling the blade in his hand. “He’s not Captain America anymore. Just some guy whose daughter you threatened.”

“Which makes me a hundred times more dangerous…” Steve said.

“And I, well, I just don’t give a shit.” Bucky shrugged “Killed a lot of people one way or another…what’s one more piece of shit like you gonna mean?”

Jack looked at Steve, shaking his head “No, you wouldn’t…”

“I snapped the neck of the man who raped my wife.” Steve said, his gaze not once leaving the man’s in front of him “Trust me, you have no idea what I would do to keep my family safe.”

He paused for a second, letting it sink in as Jack swallowed.

“But I’m a fair man.” Steve said, letting go of Jack who dropped a few inches before he pulled himself back up full height. Steve smoothed down the man’s dirty t-shirt before he smiled at him. “So I’m gonna give you a chance to play ball. You got 48 hours to leave New York.” “By that we mean the state.” Bucky clarified.

“And if I ever get a sniff that you’re back in town…” Steve continued.

“And trust us, we’ll know…” Bucky mused, still looking at the knife before he grinned at Jack “We got friends in high places, eyes and ears everywhere…” “….then you’ll lose more than your teeth.” Steve concluded, matter of factly.

“My teeth? What do-“

CRACK.

Steve cut him off with a sharp jab straight into his mouth and Jack dropped to the floor howling in pain as the blood poured from between his fingers which clamped over the lower part of his face.

“Got the message?” Steve asked, standing over him as Jack rolled around, screaming. He mumbled something, his head nodding furiously.

“Can I shoot him now?” Bucky asked.

“No.” Steve shook his head.

“Just once in the knee?”

“No.” Steve snorted “Come on…let’s get out of here, the amount of noise he’s making someone’s bound to hear. He turned to go, and then heard another loud scream. Spinning around he saw that Jack’s hand was now pinned to the floor by the knife Bucky had been holding.

“What?” Bucky asked, shrugging as Steve shot him a look “You said I couldn’t shoot him, didn’t say anything about stabbing him.”

***** The two friends sat at a bar, not far from Steve’s house, each with a beer in hand.

“So, run that by me again…” Bucky said.

“I told Katie I was meeting you for a drink.” Steve shrugged, nodding at the bottle “Technically now I’m not lying.”

“You’re a punk.” Bucky snorted.

“She’ll know full well where I’ve been.” Steve shrugged “She ain’t stupid…”

“Good luck to you pal.” Bucky said, taking a drink “She’s scary when she’s angry.”

Steve snorted “Nah, she won’t be mad…she knew full well I was planning on giving him a warning so…”

“Then why not just tell her?” “Because she’d worry.” Steve said simply.

“Think he’ll heed it?” Bucky asked after a little pause and Steve pondered the question for a moment before he nodded.

“Like I said he’s a bully.” he took a swig of his beer before he looked at Bucky “You know as well as I do that the minute someone bigger stands up to them they back off.”

“Gotta hand it to you pal…” Bucky said, sitting back “You come a long way since you were defending yourself with a trash can lid behind the movie theatre down town…”

“So everyone says.” Steve shrugged “Still don’t feel any different.”

“Remember when Howard’s flying car was the strangest thing we had ever seen?” Bucky sighed “I almost miss those days.” “Would you go back?” Steve asked, “Given the chance?”

Bucky took a deep breath and wrinkled his nose “Nah, I’m too different…too much has happened you know. I don’t think I’d settle. Plus this would probably attract a little more attention than it does now.” he said, flexing his left hand.

Steve smiled “I know what you mean. If you’d asked me when I first came round…I’d have jumped at the chance but after Katie…” he took another drink before he let out a soft huff. “I crossed oceans of time to find her.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow. “Dracula…romantic.” he said and Steve let out a laugh.

“Speaking of romantic…” Steve looked at his friend “How’s it going with Jen?”

“Ok.”

“Just ok?”

“I’m taking it slow.” Bucky shrugged “We’ve been on a few dates and…yeah I like her Steve and she likes me so…”

“Well if you ever want any advice on modern day dating…”

“The day I ask you for dating advice is the day I quit.” Bucky snorted

“I did ok.” Steve grinned “Well, more than ok actually. I lucked out.”

“No, you got what you deserved.” Bucky shook his head “A woman that loves you for who you are, not what you are.” Steve felt his cheeks flush a little as he shrugged “Not quite sure what I did to deserve her but…”

“You’re a good man.” Bucky said “You always were and always have been. A pain in my ass like, but…” he drained his beer and shook his head “Anyway, enough sentimental crap. You want another?”

Steve contemplated that before he shrugged “Sure, why not?”

One more turned into 5 more, and it was a good 2 hours later and approaching midnight when the men left. It wasn’t the first time they’d been out for drinks since being re-united, but to Steve it was the first time that it felt like the old days. They’d talked about so many memories, he’d laughed until he had cried as they both recalled some of their antics, and he felt completely at peace when he walked into the hallway of his house.

Removing his cap he ran a hand through his hair before he hung it on the coat rack on the wall. Then he dropped his keys into that infernal golden pineapple bowl that Katie had bought him all those years ago and headed into the lounge where Katie was sat in her pyjamas, Rori clutched to her breast as she fed.

“Hey…” he smiled, crossing the floor and dropping a kiss to her lips before he turned his attention to his daughter, his finger gently running along her hardworking cheek.

“You have a good time?” she asked, giving a little yawn.

“Yeah.” Steve nodded. “It was nice. When did she wake up?”

“About half an hour ago.” Katie shrugged “With a bit of luck she’ll go down again soon and sleep for a couple of hours.”

“I’ll do the next feed.” Steve said “You can get some rest.”

“Ok.” Katie agreed, yawning again and as she did so Rori mimicked her, her eyes which were now carrying a slight greenish hue fluttering. Steve gestured for Katie to hand her over, and she did so as Steve held her up over her shoulder, hands that had hours ago been so violent were now ever so gentle, rubbing his daughter’s back to wind her as Katie adjusted her top.  They sat there in silence for a little while before Katie finally spoke.

“So how badly did you hurt him?”

“What?”

“Jack?” She turned her head to Steve who looked at her “I know full well what you were up to.”

“I knew you would.” Steve huffed a laugh “And not too badly. Knocked a few of his teeth out…oh, and Bucky nailed his hand to the floor with a knife. He won’t be bothering Emmy again, or any of us for that matter.”

Katie looked at him for a moment before Rori gave a light burp and Steve gently turned his face, pressing his lips to the baby’s head.

“Here…” Katie said, and Steve handed her over “I’ll go put her down.”

She gathered the baby in her arms before she dropped a kiss to Steve’s mouth “Don’t be too long…”

He arched an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“Well, you know what you getting all dark and protective does to me…” she grinned, looking down at Rori “That’s what made her in the first place.”

Steve’s eyes darkened at the memory of that particular day in the HYDRA base which he was recalling for the second time in the space of a few hours, albeit for very different reasons. “How could I forget?”

Standing up she walked to the door, Steve watching her go, before she shot him a coy look over her shoulder his pants became a lot tighter than they should have been. He gave a soft groan, before his head fell back against the cushion of the sofa. After a moment or two he stood up and turned off the lights, before heading up the stairs after his wife.

He stood in the doorway, watching as she placed Rori in the crib at the end of the bed before he strode over to her, his hands falling to her waist as he spun her round, his lips crashing to hers. She took the kiss eagerly, her tongue sliding against his as he backed her towards the bed, her hands fumbling with his belt as they went. Neither were wasting any time, and after a quick wrestle with their clothing they both collapsed onto the bed, Steve caging his wife underneath him with his arms and legs.

Their eyes locked for a second before he pressed his lips to hers and kissed her again, slow and hard, both his hands cupping her face, thumbs gently skating her cheeks as she let out a soft groan and he felt his cock twitch. His lips not once leaving hers his right hand gently slid down to her thigh, and his fingers gently gave her hip a squeeze causing her to sigh into his mouth again. Using his hand he hooked her leg round his waist, and ground his erection against her spot causing her to moan as she pulled away from the kiss, her head laying further back against the pillow, her eyes fluttering shut as his mouth dropped, swirling softly around her pebbled nipples, carefully lavishing affection on them in turn, and in moments she was quivering to his touch, her breathing ragged.

“Look at me…” he said, voice low, almost a growl and her eyes sprang open obediently, those sparkling emeralds glinting in the dim light as he held her gaze as he pushed into her, her breath catching in her throat. He stilled for a moment, enjoying her warmth as it gripped him before he moved his hips back, thrusting into her again. His pace was hard, deep and he continually dragged in and out of her, dropping his head to kiss and lick and suck all along her collar bone, knowing full well he would leave marks there for the morning but neither of them cared as their moans grew louder as his thrusts grew more desperate.

"Fuck.” he groaned, both hands now on her hips as he continued his movements and Katie’s hands moved to brace herself against the headboard, her body moving with every slam he made into her. One hand moved to the back of her head and he used it to make her look up, her eyes locking onto his as he felt her body start to quiver.

“I love you…” he said, his pace not slowing in the slightest.

“Love you too Soldier…” her words stuttered as he thrust up hard, stilling slightly, grinding up against her, as she writhed underneath him, a desperate, filthy noise escaping her mouth as her back arched and her hands flew to his back, nails scratching at his skin. God he loved the feel of her doing that, the stinging pain mixed with the pleasure was a heady mix and he took in a sharp breath, dropping his mouth to capture hers as she moaned again, this moan broken as she bucked upwards and clutched at him desperately.

“Stevie…” she moaned and her walls tightened on him as she came, her entire body trembling underneath him and he pulled back so he could watch her, lips swollen from his desperate kisses, cheeks flushed, eyelids fluttering against her cheeks. He continued his pace, her eyes opening moments late to lock onto his as the spring that had been coiled so tightly suddenly released and he spilled himself insider her with a low, rough grunt of her name and he tipped forwards, his hips slowing to a stop as he buried his face in her neck.

The pair of them lay still, the only sounds in the bedroom now were the deep, ragged drawings of breath. Katie gently ran her hands through his hair, as she always did, Steve’s body on top of hers rising and falling through the movements of her deep breathing.  Eventually he raised his head gently and pressed their foreheads together, his nose sliding up and down hers. She smiled at him, and pressed her lips to his in a soft kiss before he rolled over onto his back, and she snuggled into him, her head on his chest. He reached for her left hand which was laying flat against his abs and raised it to his mouth, pressing a kiss to her knuckles, just underneath where her wedding band sat.

“I love you, I love you all so much.” he said gently. She raised her head to look at him, smiling as she kissed him softly.

“I know, I love you. We all do.”

She was asleep before him, Steve lay awake for a little while longer contemplating everything that had gone down that evening. He’d crossed that line again, the darkness that had awoken all those years ago had bubbled inside of him and he wasn’t going to lie, it had been satisfying, and despite what he had said to Bucky, he would have happily killed the snivelling bastard with his bare hands and not even blinked twice about doing so. But something had stopped him short this time, and he knew now what it was.

His kids.

Back then they hadn’t been in the picture, and he wanted to be able to look them in the eye and tell them right from wrong without feeling like a hypocrite. Steve Rogers was a good man, a loyal husband, doting father, and he wanted to be worthy of the love that surrounded him on a daily basis.

He looked down at his sleeping wife before he shifted slightly, dropping a kiss to her head before he closed his eyes and fell into a trouble free sleep.

#stark spangled forever #steve rogers #Katie Stark #steve rogers x ofc #steve rogers x original female character #steve rogers fanfiction #steve rogers fic #chris evans #chris evans characters

[whentherewerebicycles]

You seem to be really amazing at executing planned changes with food and exercise (and also generally better psychological habits) - can i ask for advice on this? I’ve finished up studying for now and realise my body has turned into a twisted up, pudgy, weakened wreck! Exercise hurts and sugar/processed food feels so cosy and I can’t seem to get through this part where i have to feel discomfort for a while before i feel better!

What works for you? Should i read that atomic habits book you mention? I saw another one recommended - the Kindness Habit - do you know anything about it?

(I tried journaling btw - but it didn’t get me anywhere)

hello!! i can share some things that have worked for me when it comes to implementing longer-term changes in diet and exercise. these seem really simple but i think that actually making big lifestyle changes is much less about summoning up colossal amounts of willpower and much more about making small but important tweaks to the way you think about/approach diet and exercise. here are five things that have been helpful to me.

(1) don’t think of diet changes in terms of restrictions (i.e., “what delicious cozy sugary things do i have to deprive myself of today to be Good”). instead, approach diet changes as a fun little game of adding in as many good things as possible (fruits, veggies, leafy green things, nuts of all kinds, whole grains, beans, etc.). every single time you are preparing a meal or looking for a snack, describe it to yourself as a chance to be creative and resourceful, as you think about fun ways to add in small good things every time you eat. especially in the early weeks, don’t restrict foods from your diet at all. focus solely on finding a creative way to add in something healthy and delicious every time you eat. (i really liked using the daily dozen checklist when i was starting out—they have an app and it’s very satisfying and fun to see how many things you can check off the list each day.)

(2) narrate this “adding-in” game aloud to yourself. for example: “oh—what if i eat a big handful of berries on top of that ice cream?”, or “i’m hungry—ooh, there are carrots in the fridge, aren’t there? i’ll eat three carrots with hummus before i switch over to pita chips”). and every time you figure out a creative way to add in a good food, stop and observe yourself doing it, and let yourself feel a little spark of delight at how clever and creative you’re being. this sounds silly, but i swear it works! part of changing your habits is changing self-talk & especially changing the kind of running narrative you have in your head about who you are and what you do. you can change that narrative in part by repeatedly reframing the way you tell it to yourself, ideally aloud (or aloud in your head) to help you can better “hear” and internalize the new story. instead of “ugh... i ate ice cream again. why don’t i have any self-control? why am i someone who just eats like crap?”, you’re offering your brain an alternate story, one that focuses less on things you perceive yourself as lacking, or on things you ‘failed’ to do, and more on the creative, positive things you did do (“i wasn’t going to eat any fruit today, but wasn’t it great that i remembered we had those frozen berries in the fridge? that’s pretty creative and resourceful of me, and plus it’s a good way to use up something i’d forgotten i even had”).

the “noticing and feeling delighted” part is just as important. to successfully change a habit, you need to find creative ways to make the new habit pleasurable in and of itself. the more pleasure you feel when you do it, the more self-reinforcing the habit itself becomes. you might not experience eating healthy foods as intensely pleasurable (at least at first, especially if you are comparing them with the intense brain-hacking pleasure that super sugary foods give us). so don’t try! instead, focus on making the choice a source of pleasure and delight. "look at how clever i was! look at how creative i can be! look at what a good choice i made! look at how good i am at this game of adding in!” that act of stopping, narrating, and letting yourself feel genuinely pleased with what you’ve just done makes the choice to add something in pleasurable, which in turn can help fuel your sense that this isn’t about having iron willpower or about cruelly depriving yourself of delicious things, but is about playing a fun little game with yourself, creating little challenges or puzzles for yourself throughout the day and then giving yourself positive reinforcement when you figure them out.

(3) manage your environment to set yourself up for success. to paraphrase the atomic habits book: the people who seem to have the best willpower are the people who have to exercise it the least. and they have to exercise it the least because they’ve very effectively managed their environment, arranging things so that the desired choices are easy and “frictionless,” while the undesired choices or habits are more inconvenient or introduce more friction (it’s harder to get to them).

the easy starter version of this (from atomic habits): put the things you want to eat in highly visible places and/or in appealing arrangements, and put the things you don't want to eat in places that aren't visible or that are inconvenient to access. ice cream goes in the very back of the fridge, buried behind all the other stuff. nuts go in a bowl on your desk so that you can idly snack on them while you work. apples and bananas go in a big brightly colored bowl right on the counter, so that every time you pass through the kitchen your eyes are drawn to them. chips go in the bottom cupboard, the one below eye level that you don't use very often, and when you get them out you pour some into a bowl and put them right back in there (instead of leaving the bag out on the counter). make the choice you want to make easy, and make the choice you don't want to make harder to get to.

eventually, the most effective way of managing your environment is just to exercise total control over what comes into your own living space. for me, if i don’t want to eat it, i don’t have it in the house. i typically also place a curbside delivery grocery order so that i don’t have to go into the store—anything that comes into my house is something i made a deliberate choice about ordering, not something i wandered by a shelf and added to my cart because i wanted a treat. something i’ve learned about myself over the years that moderation is just not in my vocabulary—i’m an all-or-nothing person, and it’s SO much easier for me to just not have stuff i don’t want to eat in the house. no ice cream in the house. no alcohol in the house. no fried things, no chips, no candy, etc etc. if someone kindly brings me baked goods that i did not ask for, i genuinely appreciate the gesture, but as soon as they leave i give them to my next door neighbor or dump them in the trash. (SORRY TO PEOPLE WHO BAKE FOR ME!) if it's in the house i'll eat it. if it's not, i won't, and i also won't miss it.

i did do this pretty gradually at first, though! when i switched to a primarily whole food plant-based diet, i focused on playing the adding-in game for a couple weeks, and then when i started getting competitive about it i decided to use my grocery order as a way of creatively boosting my fruit/veggie/etc consumption even more, and in the process i started winnowing out things that took away chances to add in a good thing. i would say it took about three or four weeks to get to my personal ideal state of Nope I Don't Have It In The House.

it takes time, but i’d say that within a month of having only things you want to eat in the house, your cravings will be gone, at least within your own managed environment (going to restaurants or traveling DOES require you to exercise willpower, but there are ways to prepare for this in advance). the good news, though, is that 6-8 months or so of eating like this usually brings with it such improved sleep, mood, energy levels, skin, hair, GI function, etc etc that you start to be like oh my GOD why would i want to eat that horrifying thing?? I KNOW HOW BAD IT MAKES ME FEEL!! I WANT TO POWER MY BODY WITH PLANTS!!!!! in other words, the pleasurable side effects of eating well becomes positively reinforcing in its own right, while the negative effects you experience when you reintroduce sugar or fried things tends to reinforce the idea that those foods Feel Bad.

(4) it's not exercise, it's movement. i too used to hate exercise and found it extremely painful and tedious and horrible. so instead of exercising i just started moving. i canceled my membership at the local dog bar, where i had been taking my dog almost every day to let him run off excess energy, and started talking short walks with him twice a day instead. if you don’t have a dog, offer to walk your friends’ dogs—trust me they will lose their MINDS with joy lol. i think that starting to build in regular walks is the best way to get active again, because walking is typically quite pleasant and it becomes positively reinforcing to like, wave at the same neighbors every day, and see the cute kids next door running around, and notice all the ways that the trees and flowers are changing, and so on.

if you do not find being outside inherently pleasurable (sometimes i do not lol esp if i’m grumpy about having to walk the dog), tie another pleasurable activity to your daily walk. i listen to about six hours’ worth of hockey podcasts a week and i am only allowed to listen to them on my walks, so i end up looking forward to the walk because i’m desperate to hear people talk about My Guys. you can also walk with friends, or call a friend while you’re walking, which is even better than podcasts!! social walks are so much fun and go by so much more quickly. i started out just doing daily 15 min walks, and over the past couple years have built up to walking between 60-90 min a day when i’m at home. sometimes i hate/dread my walk; sometimes i love it and look forward to it. but regardless of how i’m feeling, i do it every day and if i miss it once, i don’t miss it a second time. 

as far as activity goes, i think it’s totally ok to just be a person who walks a lot! but i’ve found that becoming someone who walked a lot helped change my own narrative of myself—I started to think of myself as a walker, an active person who moved a lot every day. and that made it easier to pick up other forms of activity too, or at least to adopt a curious, exploratory attitude towards other forms of movement. also once you start tracking your active minutes you tend to get quite competitive about it! or at least i do, lol. i keep a note on my phone where i write down the date + type of activity + total number of minutes I did after every burst of activity, then at the end of the week i add it all up and compare it to the previous weeks. it makes me want to do more, to beat my own numbers—or it makes me want to keep up a streak (like, if i have a five-week period where i’ve consistently hit a certain level of active minutes every week, i don’t want to break it!!).

my biggest suggestion for exercise, though, is to figure out what kinds of things you enjoy and what kinds of things you don’t, and then to spend all your time doing things you like. i HATE structured fitness classes and workout videos. i hate them so much!!!!!!!! but i love being outside, i love doing solo activities (as opposed to group workouts), and i love doing any form of movement that doesn’t feel like a Planned Workout, capital w. also becoming a hockey fan got me really interested in skating, so i picked up rollerblades and found that to be amazingly fun too (something i can do outside AND something that feels like gliding around effortlessly AND something that makes me feel closer to My Favorite Guys!!!!). you may not have passionate feelings about hockey fandom as i do, but i think it’s really just about being creative—finding a creative way to link something you don’t love to something you do love, or find pleasurable, so that you can start forging those positive associations. 

i spent my first couple years of being more active just walking walking walking, and then this past year during the pandemic when i really ramped up my movement i added in longer walks, hikes, and rollerblading, and i also looked for ways to “habit-stack,” ie attaching an activity i don’t much care for (running; exercise biking indoors; doing squats and lunges) to one i do enjoy (i take my tennis shoes when i go skating and then go for a run immediately afterwards, before i have time to talk myself out of it). there are still all kinds of things i don’t do—i really don’t love strength training + bodyweight exercises yet, and i hate stretching even though I Know I Should, and i know that if i want to get stronger and faster, or build up my endurance, i will eventually need to introduce some element of structured training into my daily movement.

BUT the idea of making those changes seems kind of cool to me now, instead of Horrifying and Dread-Inducing! i feel like all the positive associations i’ve forged have made me more curious and open to ideas i would’ve resisted with my whole being not all that long ago. i found a way to make movement pleasurable, and then (thanks to sports fandom + my tendency to go down research rabbitholes) i found a way to get myself intellectually and emotionally engaged in the general concept of being a highly active person. for me, that combination of real pleasure + intellectual/emotional stimulation is what i personally need to build & maintain good habits.

(also, just shoehorning this in at the end because i like it: the “it’s movement, not exercise” mindset shift was also really helpful to me because it stopped me from thinking of exercise as like, this highly structured, regimented, torturous thing you forced yourself through for a set period of time each day, and helped me instead think of movement as something that humans are designed to do & to naturally enjoy. instead of Forcing Myself to Exercise, i looked for more natural-feeling forms of movement that didn’t feel so artificially divided from my “real life.” i think that helped with reframing my self-narrative, too! it made being active feel more integrated into my daily life, which in turn made it easier to think of myself as an active person, someone for whom movement was just a normal part of daily life and not a thing i had to psych myself up to do every day.)

(5) it takes time to build good habits, but not nearly as much time as you might think, and eventually you stop thinking about how long you’ve been doing something and you just start enjoying it (ie it becomes a genuine change in your lifestyle/thinking, not an artificial thing you have to work hard every day to maintain).

i am not yet AN ATHLETE and may never be, but i often remind myself that it took me a little under 30 years to build up a PROFOUND aversion to exercise, so it’s actually kind of miraculous that in just two years i’ve become someone who genuinely, earnestly, enthusiastically enjoys being active and feels antsy/weird/restless when i can’t get out of the house and move. every small stride i’ve made has strengthened my trust in myself and helped me reframe the narrative i tell myself about what kind of person i am and what i do/don’t do. every time i do the thing (whether it’s exercising or making a delicious healthy dinner) & happily notice myself doing it, i reaffirm to myself that i’m the kind of person who takes care of my body and mind by eating well and spending lots of time moving outside. (as a side benefit, when i spend a lot of time happily noticing things and speaking encouragingly to myself, i also reaffirm to myself that i am a happy person who treats myself kindly and who is always eagerly seeking out experiences that feel joyful and life-affirming.)

plus, the more often you do something, the more opportunities you have to have positive experiences while doing it! not every walk is AMAZING, LIFE-CHANGING, DEEPLY FULFILLING, but like, if i am walking seven days a week, that’s seven opportunities for something cool or fun to happen on a walk (not to mention seven opportunities to reap all the physiological & emotional well-being benefits of exercise!!). and if i am really conscious and intentional about noticing and actively delighting in those positive experiences, i help wire in those positive associations more deeply, and my brain/body increasingly comes to associate movement with happiness, joy, and fulfillment. as the habit of being more active becomes fulfilling in and of itself, i don’t have to expend as much energy tricking or cajoling or bribing myself into doing it.

*

i hope this helps!! i am literally always happy to write extremely long essays in respond to simple anon questions, lol, so if you want to talk more about your own ideas for building better habits please do share!! i can also rec you specific books that i’ve found really useful—both for just like, helping me figure out how to make big changes, and also for providing that intellectual stimulation that gets me more engaged in wanting to eat well & be more active.

(also, on the extremely slim chance that you are also a hockey fan: over in my fandom sphere, we are organizing a fun summer thing inspired by one of our fave hockey players, where we’ll be planning lots of fun fannish community things to get ourselves moving this summer. it’s going to be a good time!!)

#food #movement #mw

[anauthore]

Escape From Halloweentown {Jack Skellington x Reader}

Summary: When a game of hide-and-seek goes wrong, you find yourself lost in the woods without a way home. Whether it be fate, or just dumb luck, you suddenly find yourself in a far bigger predicament than you ever thought you would be- and it's not just because you can't seem to find your little brother. 

**Pairing: **Reader / Jack Skellington. A very slow burn fic.

NOTE: This is a full-length fanfic! If you don’t want to read chapter by chapter on tumblr, please use the following links to read in a different format / on a different website!

Wattpad | Quotev | AO3

Fic Below the Cut | Next Chapter

~PROLOGUE~

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…

Except it wasn’t Christmas, or anywhere close. Instead, you recited the familiar rhyme to your little brother for what felt like the thousandth time. Despite it being extremely out-of-season, this is the only bedtime story he would fall asleep to, and if it wasn’t A Visit from St. Nicholas, then it was out of the question. You knew almost every word by heart, barely glancing at the pages and instead opting to check every so often to see if your little brother had fallen asleep yet. You could tell he was struggling to keep his eyes open, and even though he was on the verge of being whisked away to dreamland, he still held on to every last word.

“...happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”

You whispered the finishing line and just like that, his quiet snore filled the room. You gently closed the book and sat it in the nook on the shelf that it came from. You tiptoed away as silently as possible, leaving his dinosaur night-light on and shutting the door before you let out a breath you’d been holding to avoid making any unnecessary noise.

You walked down the carpeted hallway toward your kitchen, opening the fridge and searching the mostly-empty shelves for something- anything- to eat. You settled on a half-eaten container of hummus and some crackers that had been left out on the counter for God knows how long.

You were 17, almost 18, jobless and living in an apartment with your father and little brother. He worked long days, barely ever home to spend time with his kids in order to support them. Despite feeling lonely most of the time, you appreciated it immensely because, in the end, it was WAY more than your mother ever did. Your apartment was what real estate agents tend to call “cozy”; nestled in between the edge of a good-sized city and a large expanse of unkempt forest, you often prowled around outside to be completely alone with your thoughts.

The night was bitterly cold, the outside air seeping in from the walls and up from the floor, causing you to shiver and wrap your jacket closer around your body. The house had no heating; your family relied on warm clothes and fluffy blankets to keep comfortable during the winter, and fans and cold showers to stay cool during the summer. Sometimes, you did wish that you lived with your mom, although you always felt guilty for thinking that. To leave your brother, your father… all for what? Central air and heat? A full fridge? You knew the price you’d have to pay, along with the weight of your betrayal, would be more unbearable mental abuse.

You shook off the idea, throwing your scraps away and entering your bedroom. It was smaller than your brother’s room, and way less decorated, however it was yours. You slipped under the covers and curled up, pulling your knees to your chest and shivering for a while before your body heat became equally distributed and warmed you, lulling you into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

You hadn’t realized you were awake, but you suddenly were. Your eyes were well adjusted to the darkness of your room by now, so you could make out the dark shapes of the furniture and walls surrounding you. Outside your window, you could see the deep blue sky, a star or two bright enough to outshine the streetlights planted on the side of the road. You rolled over, stretching, and got comfortable once more before you slowly fell asleep again, only this time, your sleep wasn’t as dreamless.

You woke once more, the same dark sky you saw from your window now consuming everything around you. There was a myriad of stars above your head, brighter than you’ve ever seen them before. A canopy of leaves swayed back and forth in an invisible breeze, seeming to beckon you further, deeper, into this unknown forest. The ground beneath you lurched forward, your legs moving as if they had a mind of their own. You felt evanescent; every atom within you buzzed with energy but at the same time, you were almost completely numb to the world around you.

Further down the path swirled shiny, white flakes, the delicate crystalline designs somehow able to be seen by your human eye. They called to you, whipping your strands wildly about as the chill got worse, the hair standing on end across your arms and neck.

A voice… a small yip- or yowl- penetrated the sound of the air flying across your ears. A dog? Or maybe something more dangerous… a wolf maybe? No, you reasoned, it would have to be a coyote. You walked farther into the storm, squinting and shielding your eyes against the cold when all at once the sky lit up as if the sun had risen: An almost unbearable baby blue tainted everything in shadow, and then-

You opened your eyes, your vision slowly unclouding to reveal the plain walls of your room, your hands gripping the blankets you'd covered yourself with as you felt your body jerk upon impulse. Your heart beat fast and loud in your ears, sensing danger, yet, as always, there was none.

* * *

School was a drag. The hours kept getting longer and longer, the gloomy overcast sky not exactly helping with the problem. You kept zoning out while teachers were talking, your lids bobbing up and down until something startled you or a classmate noticed and shook you awake again. You hadn’t been getting the best night’s sleep, though you tried not to stay up late and follow the advice almost everyone’s parents gave to them:

Stay off your phone. Avoid bright lights. Go to bed early. Do something tiring before bed. 

Hell, you’d even tried drinking warm milk! Nothing seemed to be keeping those odd dreams at bay, and every night you’d wake up with your heart hammering in your chest as if you’d just ran a marathon.

Your friends didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong, and if they did, they didn’t say anything, so you didn’t bother to mention your trouble sleeping. They talked to you and carried on as normal, commenting on the upcoming tests and unfairly long homework sheets given to everyone.

“C’mon, it’s our senior year, AND fall break is almost here! It’s ridiculous that teachers are just loading us up with homework”.

“Well,” chimed in your other friend, walking beside you as Rebecca led the both of you, “senior year is supposed to be difficult. We’re going to college next year, did you forget?”

Rebecca rolled her eyes and continued walking while Hailey laughed, shaking her head at the group’s antics. You smiled, but kept quiet, following the other two outside through the heavy metal doors into the school’s student-filled campus.

All around you people swarmed into untidy lines. They rushed to busses, ran to the parking lot, or sat idly by at the front of the school. You waved farewell before you parted from the now-duo and climbed aboard your bus, barely registering the ride home. From there you shivered in the mild breeze, waiting for your little brother to step off of a similar-yet-different yellow transport.

When he saw you, he grinned widely, trotting toward you as his bag swang side-to-side.

“(Y/n)!”

He barreled into you, wrapping his small arms around your waist before you pried him off and let him run up into your apartment.

“What was that all about? Did something happen today?”

Thomas shook his head, throwing his backpack down in your living room with the rest of the mess that lay there. “I just felt like hugging you.”

You mouthed an, ‘oh, okay’ before beginning to head down the hall to your room, but, not to your surprise, you found Thomas bouncing up and down behind you with each step as he repeatedly said your name.

“What?” you replied, used to his antics by now.

“Can we puh-leaasee play outside? Please please please!” He begged, throwing his body around the hallway in a dramatic, childlike fashion. You humoured him and sighed, the edges of your mouth threatening to turn upward into the hints of a smile.

“Fine. We can’t be outside for too long though, I have stuff to do.”

“Why not-?”

“Because I said so. We play a little bit now, or not at all.”

He huffed and mumbled an ‘okay’ before practically flying down the stairs and out the door, leaving you in the dust as you halfheartedly ran after him. Once you reached the edge of your building’s property, you glanced around, waiting for Thomas to suggest a game for you both to play for a while.

He asked if you would play hide-and-seek with him, but before you could agree, he asked something somewhat… dangerous… for an elementary school student.

“-but let’s play in the woods! C’mon, it’ll be fun, I promise!”

You mulled the idea over before complying to him- not because you were a good older sister, oh no, it was because he was incessantly tugging on the hem of your shirt and hanging off of your sleeves until your top threatened to come off.

“Okay, okay! But we can’t go far into the woods, it’s not safe.” You pointed to a mangled trunk in the distance. “You can’t go past that tree back there, alright? And no cheating.”

He nodded furiously and let go of you. You could tell he was just excited to be outside with someone other than the neighbouring kids. You couldn’t really blame him- the neighbours raised their children to be socially awkward and unable to chime in or have an imagination. In Thomas’ words, they were ‘boring’.

You turned around, facing away from the tree-line and started counting down from ten. You gave your brother some extra time to hide- after all, he was up against you, his eight-teen-year-old sister. You finished counting and yelled the famous “ready or not, here I come!” line before you began to search for his bright orange parka and shaggy (hair colour) hair.

You trekked into the forest, the leaves and twigs crunching underneath your feet as you looked back and forth for Thomas. Minutes passed, and you started to get concerned about the lack of his presence in the designated play area. He couldn’t have gone very far, being nine and of small physical stature. Still, you called out his name, warning him that he would be breaking the rules if he passed the barrier you’d set before the game started. There was no response, and you sighed, pressing on.

“Thomas! This isn’t funny, you cheater!”

You checked your phone- twenty minutes since the game had started and there was no sign of him. He couldn’t have gone far, but that didn’t stop you from worrying. You called out for him again, louder and more frantic this time.

“Seriously, we need to go back!” You paused for a moment before bribing him; “I’ll make you some cookies! Just come here!”

Thirty-five minutes. You had circled around, thinking maybe he didn’t go that deep into the woods, but he was definitely nowhere in the shallows of the tree-line. Your pulse sped up and you thought of your dad coming home to only you and the police- a search party crossed your mind, as well as the guilt you’d feel if you didn’t find him. Your mind ran a thousand miles an hour, trying to focus on the orange parka. Orange parka, orange parka, orange parka, orange… Orange!

There, in the distance, just past the twisted trunk of the tree you’d set as the barrier was a flash of orange and the tell-tale snap of twigs under someone’s quick, evading footfalls.

“Thomas, stop running! Get back here, now!”

You broke out into a sprint, dodging thick trunks and gnarled vines, following the orange parka that somehow kept getting farther away from you. You breathed hard, and despite wanting to stop and catch your breath, you pushed forward. 

“Thomas! Thomas, plea- Ugh!”

Your shoe caught a root hidden underneath the entangled blades of grass and you lurched forward, catching yourself on your hands and your knee. You scrambled back up, limping a few paces before you wiped the damp dirt onto your pants and sighed in frustration. Somewhere in the distance, you heard the distinct giggle of your little brother. You called out again, but to no avail.

You had half a mind to just go home, but when you looked behind you, all you could see was trees. You checked the time. It’s been an hour since the start of the game, which was supposed to be fun, yet the stress of it all coupled with your sleep deprivation exhausted you.

Your pace was slower than it had been before, the overcast sky darkening as time stretched on. You didn’t see Thomas anymore, nor could you find your way back to the apartment’s property. You had been running in a straight line, hadn’t you? You didn’t recognize anything when you turned around, nor did you when you walked back.

You tried different directions, but again, it was useless. You hated to think about it, but you were lost.

You checked the time again, unlocking your cell to send an emergency message to your neighbour detailing your time in the woods looking for your brother and asking if he knew the way back home. Your phone buzzed almost immediately, however not with a message you’d wanted to receive.

Message failed to send. Will try again when service becomes available.

  You cursed under your breath. No service, huh? That was great.

You couldn’t just stay here. If you picked a direction and just walked in it, you’d eventually find a way out, right? The theory was sound enough, and so, without hesitation, you began to walk.

Soon enough, the trees started to thin, exposing a well-traveled path bare of grass and debris. A wave of relief washed over you, and you quickened your step. The brown of the earth beneath you became exposed as you reached a small clearing surrounded by a circle of trees with what looked like doors plastered on the front of each one.

...Doors? You furrowed a brow, confused as all hell. You stood in the center of the clearing, and sure enough, seven trees stretched into the sky with seven differently-decorated doors facing you in the center, gleaming golden knobs and all.

Despite your utter confusion, you drew closer to the tree nearest to you, running your fingertips over the carvings and delicate handiwork of the unmistakable Christmas tree.  You reached for the knob, thinking maybe it would turn and reveal a secret hiding place or- or something, but the knob didn’t budge a single centimeter. You tried again, in a different direction, but the attempt yielded the same result as before.

You walked to the next tree over, and the next from that one, and the next from that one, trying each of the doors only for them to all stay stoic and unmoving. You still admired the craftsmanship and time put into the designs, regardless of whether or not they were completely functional, settling in front of the Halloween-themed tree and idly feeling the divots in the pumpkin’s eyes and mouth. 

The sun started to set, casting a very orange glow on you and the circle of trunks. The rays shone particularly bright on your back, and while the warmth was welcome, you stepped out of the way to gaze upon the carrot-coloured sky. After all, it looked like you were spending the night here.

The beams focused on the knob, the warm light reflecting all around you in an intense glow almost as strong as the sun itself. Golden flecks danced around your vision; there was something so beautiful about the refracted light that drew you closer, distracting you as your digits reached out and played with the shadows they made on the knob. Your fingers barely brushed against the golden sphere, the warmth filtering through your skin and pouring into the rest of your body without any semblance of notice, shocking your system. You pulled your hand away out of impulse, as if you’d been burned.

Your eyes didn’t leave the door, nor the knob, and although you hadn’t turned it- only touched it- it swung open, beckoning you, calling you.

And exactly who were you to refuse such a warm invitation?

#anauthore #fanfic #fanfiction #the nightmare before christmas #thenightmarebeforechristmas #tnbc #nbc #tim burton #jack skellington #reader insert #jack skellington x reader #reader #slow burn #m/f pairing #m/f #m/f romance #wattpad #quotev #ao3 #archive of our own #chapter one #prologue #part one

[suicidalneighborhood]

putting more questions in one post so it doesn’t take up my entire blog.

day 1:

stats: 63kg / 138lbs

day 2:

i’m 174cm or 5′8.5. i like my height, i used to want to be shorter but now i love my height.

day 3:

favourite thinspo

i actually have a pinterest board lol

https://pin.it/1hg430c

i really love the dainty hands, tiny legs, hips, visible chest bones.

day 4:

greatest fears ab weight loss.

probably gaining it back, ruining my health, my parents noticing my ed, and really just my ed becoming my whole identity and all i think about.

day 5: 

why do you want to lose weight.

i’m sick of not being satisfied with what i see in the mirror, and i’m in that awkward middle of skinny and just average and i hate it. i’m also close to runway model meassurments so that definetly drives me. i want to be THE skinny girl yk? i’m already the thin one in my friendgroup in school but it’s not enough by far. i want to be on the verge of underweight, so that i’m thin but not so thin that my parents make me do something about it.

day 6:

binging.

it depends. if i’m actively restricting i do, because naturally my body is deprived and shit, but as in recently i’m not actively restricting, just maintaining & estimating everything, so i don’t binge bc i’m not deprived (enough)

day 7:

do your parents know you’re trying to lose weight & do they care.

they don’t know and hopefully never will. my mom is always saying shit like “ u eat so little, i’m jealous” and generally saying i don’t eat. she’s the one actively dieting 24/7 and talking ab food (might be orthorexic or some shit) but here it’s so normalized and she’s overweight so no one bats an eye. if my mom was aware i was trying to lose weight, i would be screwed.

day 8:

your workout routine:

i don’t have one, but i go on runs, walks occasionally, i run 4 or 5km or walk at least 10k steps. i like dance workouts as well, so i do those time to time, which burn around 300cals ig

day 9:

did people ever negatively comment on your body:

yes. my parents when i was at my hw, otherwise no, i never went past the line between normal and overweight, though i was close so i looked medium ish even at my hw.

day 10:

hardest thing to give up during weight loss:

my sanity lmao.

day 11:

fav thinspo blog.

don’t have one.

day 12:

what do you normally eat?

i really like toast, oatmeal, pasta, fruits, vegetables with hummus, protein bars

day 13:

 are you losing weight in a healthy or unhealthy way.

i don’t think anyone on tumblr is losing weight in a healthy way lmao. unhealthy for sure.

day 14:

ugw and when do you expect to reach it.

not completely sure yet, idk how i would look so it’s hard to tell, but it’s 56-58 kg (around 125lbs i think) and for the date, i ahve no idea, i haven’t lost weight since like last year because i just can’t???? i was eating <500 for a week at a time and still fucking maintaining, or fluctuating between the same 2kgs which is frustrating as fuck, if anyone has any tips pls lmk i can’t keep doing this.

day 15:

r u vegan/vegetarian, has it helped u lose weight.

i’m vegetarian since 2020 march, idk if it has helped me in weight loss, but it’s a great excuse why i can’t eat half of the things outside my house (there are literally 4 vegetarian options that i like in restaurants that we go to, it’s fucking insane). i would like to go vegan when i move out but not sure.

#anorexia #anorexic #anorecik #bulimia #bulimist #ed #eating problems

[hollowlittlegirl]

12/11/21

Yesterday came with a ton of struggle and tears, but a few victories. i was really upset yesterday morning because someone was an a- hole and i was sitting there crying for a couple hours. What else is new? i didn't have an energy drink or run. That was tremendously upsetting. S and i went to breakfast, and i decided i wanted to pick at a biscuit with egg and nibble at some toast corners, but when it came it tasted really terrible. Apparently i don't like biscuits. S was happy to switch plates with me. i got scrambled eggs with potatoes, and i will admit, it tasted pretty darned good. He reminded me that i like ketchup on my eggs and after i added that, i got comfortable with eating it. It wasn't bothering me. Then i did something stupid. i decided i wanted a bite of his toast that had butter on it. One bite and my ed took over. i managed to swallow it, but the feel of the butter coating my mouth and i freaked out. Not only could i not eat any more, i got desperate to purge what i already ate. i started to cry and i couldn't stop. i seem to cry at meals on the regular. He was distracting me by convincing me to come get a tree and some ornaments. He said i could get any tree topper i wanted, even though we already have like 5 of them. It did cheer me up a bit. We went and got the ornaments and i was looking at my hair in the mirror. When i ran my fingers through it, it was obvious that the first couple inches of it looked normal and healthy and the other 6 inches of it was awful. i decided to get all that cut off. i will tell you, that hair cut was traumatic. Seeing clouds of my hair that i spent a year growing just cascading around my shoulders and yes, i cried some more. The lady cutting my hair actually stopped and just hugged me and said she knew why my hair looked like it did and she had the exact same problem with food and it was going to be ok, maybe not tomorrow, but some day. Just keep trying. It's amazing how a little act of kindness can go so far. It reminded me to be kind to other people. i don't like the style of my hair, but it actually looks healthy and now it won't get in my eyes. That encounter gave me the strength to get an iced coffee. It was delicious. Got the tree, got it decorated and i was really tired, cold and shaky. S reminded me that i could just be hungry, so i got a pita and some hummus out of the fridge and started eating that. i realized it wasn't what i wanted, and i actually wanted peanut butter, but i was really scared. i ate it any way, and it was delicious, but again, i cried. Let me tell you, if you want to be full for a long time eat complex carbs with peanut butter. i didn't get hungry again for like 6 hours. i ended up going to the grocery store and getting a meatloaf, mashed potatoes, creamed spinach and dinner rolls. i loved the spinach, but hated the roll. The meatloaf was pretty good, but i was neutral on the potatoes. i ate most of a small plate worth of food and put the rest back. It didn't trigger me at all to binge. In the evening i decided i wanted one cookie. i had to sit and talk to S so he could encourage me that it was ok to eat the cookie if that's what i wanted. i have some of that premade dough that you just bake, so i made myself one cookie and him one. i ate the warm cookie with a little bit of fat free milk and it was the -best- thing ever. Also not a trigger. i didn't calculate or log my food yesterday, but i thought of a really good idea. i made two lists: one of foods i ate yesterday that i like, and one of foods that i don't. At first i labeled it 'good' food and 'bad' food, and then i realized it wasn't meant to mean 'safe' and 'unsafe' foods. That was my ed talking, so i relabeled them 'tasty' and 'not so tasty.' my body had a lot of trouble digesting what i ate. It's not used to that much or those kinds of foods. my digestive tract was really painful. i didn't take the dulcolax or the magnesium yesterday, so that could have something to do with it. Here's the interesting thing - i weigh 4.4 pounds less this morning than yesterday, and i actually slept 10

hours last night. i feel refreshed for the first time in ages. i'm very cautiously optimistic for today. i was still incredibly weak, tired and dizzy, but one good day doesn't make a recovery.

#ed recovery #ana tumblr #disordered eating tw #tw ed mention #anarex1c #tw ed related #tw ed talk #ed behaviors #ed behavior tw #eating disorder thoughts #eating disorder things

[bedbellyandbeyond]

Kardynkyr

(Story Post)

“An angel?” One of the demons sneered. “What is that thing doing here?” “I live here,” Köbi huffed. “Mm… That's odd,” the dragon identified as Kardynkyr expressed. “What happened to the demon I left here?” “No demons live here anymore,” Köbi stated. Kardynkyr frowned. “That's a pity.” “What are you doing here, Kard?” Seranan hissed. They’d taken on a defensive position, claws out, ready for a fight. “What, I can't pay a visit to my dear auntie?” Kardynkyr asked. “Sissy doesn't take guests, especially not dragons,” Seranan stated. “Clearly there are exceptions,” Kardynkyr said, tipping their head towards their parent. “At least I asked for permission,” Seranan said. “This is breaking and entering.” “Nothing’s broken,” Kardynkyr said. They pet their demons’ heads. “That’s what they're for.” “So, are we taking them?” the demon to their left asked. Kardynkyr tilted their head. “Hm, I'm not sure.”

“Did Azeros send you?” Seranan asked. “I'm not going back with you.” “Relax, I don't actually want to take you back,” Kardynkyr stated. They checked their nails. “I have to admit, I think it's really cool that you killed a dragon. And Yderei was an asshole.” “So why are we here then?” the demon on their right asked a bit irritated. “Well, I really do like any excuse to visit my dear auntie,” Kardynkyr stated. “Where is Sydryn?” “At work,” Seranan said. They relaxed a bit but didn’t retract their claws. “But they’ll be home soon enough.” “Perfect. We'll make ourselves at home then,” Kardynkyr stated making their way out the bedroom door with their demons following behind them. “Kardynkyr, stop. Don't act like you can just do whatever you want!” Seranan said. “You know Sydryn doesn't enjoy company. Do you really think they're going to like it when they come home to double the amount of people here than usual?” Kardynkyr stopped and sneered back at Seranan but considered their words. “…Ora. Kobann. Go. Enjoy yourselves. I'll call you when I need you.” The demons smiled to the dragon and took each other's hand before disappearing into thin air. “Where'd they go?” Köbi asked, worriedly. “Probably clubbing, I don't know,” Kardynkyr guessed. “I don't think those two have ever been to Canada actually. Maybe they'll go to Tim Hortons. That's the Canadian thing, right?” “I don't know.” “You're not from here?” Kardynkyr asked. “He's Swiss,” Seranan stated angrily. “It's like you're not even my child…” “So, you're really their parent?” Köbi asked Seranan. “Unfortunately,” Seranan said. “From my last pregnancy. Eleven eggs and all that's left is this abomination.” “Love you too, creator,” Kardynkyr joked. “Kardynkyr… Interesting. How are dragons named?” Köbi asked. Seranan shrugged. “It's sort of…whatever. It's Draconic style gibberish. No two dragons have ever shared a name.” “So, you named them Kardynkyr for no reason whatsoever?” Köbi asked. Seranan pulled a face. “I didn't name them. They're named by the leader.” “Who was leader when Kardynkyr was born?” Köbi asked. “Azeros, unfortunately,” Seranan said. “Would've been Dranley if they survived.” “Oh? I wonder what the blue dragon would've named me…” Kardynkyr pondered. “Who named you and Syd?” Köbi continued to inquire. “Fellandrius,” Seranan said. “Long dead of course. They were actually our egg parent, too. They seemed to like alliteration…” “Angel, you ask a lot of questions,” Kardynkyr remarked. “I have a question for you.” Köbi lit up. “I'm an open book.” “What do you mean to my auntie?” Kardynkyr asked. “What do I mean…?” Köbi opened his hands. “I'm their assistant and personal nurse.” “So, you have medical talent?” Kardynkyr asked. “Not really, but I’m learning,” Köbi said. “Since Syd's a doctor, they like to use my miracles to help people.” “So, you can fix this?” Kardynkyr asked. “Fix what?” Köbi asked. At that moment, the dragon took a claw to their own arm and a stream of black blood seeped out of the wound. Köbi jumped in shock and lunged forward to try and heal the dragon, but Kardynkyr batted his hands away before licking the wound clean themself. It closed up instantly and left no trace. “Just kidding,” Kardynkyr said, smirking. “Don't ever touch me.” Seranan sneered. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Köbi placed his hands on his chest. “I thought dragons can't fully heal dragon inflicted wounds.” “From other dragons, dear angel,” Kardynkyr stated. “But the scars do eventually fade. My creator won't be so ugly forever, though I do like the look on them… A reminder that you’re not perfect.” “I never said I was perfect,” Seranan stated. “Your existence is proof enough that I'm not, else you'd be plenty more grateful.” Kardynkyr shrugged. “I never asked to be born.” “I never asked to have you,” Seranan spat. “Whoa, whoa, let's calm down,” Köbi said waving his hands. “You're family. It's normal to fight a little, but you shouldn't burn bridges.” “We are not family,” Seranan said. “I laid an egg. That's it. Whatever happened to it afterwards is none of my concern. There are no bridges.” Köbi frowned. “I just don't think that's true.” “We're not concerned with what you think, little angel,” Seranan stated. “We've been here centuries. You've been here barely two decades. You can't even begin to know what we know.” “There's the belittling we love so much,” Kardynkyr groaned. “You can't help but put yourself above everyone else. Patronising everyone to feel big. That's why you have no bridges.” “All I hear is the chittering of a child,” Seranan said dismissively, although proving Kardynkyr’s point. “Anyway, how do you expect to present yourself to Sydryn when they arrive? No doubt they sensed your presence in their territory the moment those demons pooffed you in.” Kardynkyr shrugged. “I'll make dinner.” “That's a great idea! I'll help you,” Köbi offered smiling. “No, I imagine you do most of the cooking here considering my auntie doesn't appear to have collected anyone else,” Kardynkyr stated. “Take the night off.” “Oh, okay. The meat's thawing in the fridge and my beet pickled eggs should be done too for tonight,” Köbi said. “Oh, for a side, there's also some hummus and chips and—” “Let me guess, all of it's supposed to be pink?” Kardynkyr snickered. “Obviously,” Seranan confirmed. “I don't know what you'd expect.” Kardynkyr looked at Köbi and sighed, knowing the angel likely knew the most appropriate way to prepare the pink foods. “Fine, you can help me then. Hop to it.” Köbi smiled in delight and started to lead the way to the kitchen. Kardynkyr paused to address their parent. “Creator, I imagine you're just going to lay about doing nothing. You could help us too.” “The audacity…” Seranan scoffed. “The fact that you even presume to talk to me that way like you have any influence over me…” “Well, I could technically bring the demons back and we could drag you back to Azeros to face trial for your crimes,” Kardynkyr said, checking their nails. “You know, dracocide and all that…” Seranan stiffened. “You wouldn't dare.” Kardynkyr shrugged. “It would be so much fun… But I might reconsider if you were to make yourself useful and even just set the table.” Seranan crossed their arms and huffed. “Suppose I might… But I have my own business to attend to before getting to any of that.” Kardynkyr went to the door. “Suit yourself.” Then they went to catch up with the angel. Köbi had waited in the hall for Kardynkyr but he had been out of earshot. “This'll be fun! Dinner enough for four, right? Those demons won't be dining with us, will they?” “No, you don't have to worry about them,” Kardynkyr ensured as they started to head downstairs. “Just three fat dragons and you, if you eat.” “I do! Oh, and can I ask how many eggs you're carrying?” “Ten.” “Oh, you don't look it at all!” “I'm not as far along as my creator.” “Oh, I see…”

#lore #Seranan #Kardynkyr #Köbi #dragon #angel #demon