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redgoldsparks · 7 months

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I wrote a 12 page epilogue to my 2019 comic "Harry Potter and The Problematic Author" because I found, in 2023, that I had more to say. You can also find this comic on my website, and I have PDF copies available on etsy. I may sell print copies at some point in the future.

instagram / patreon / portfolio / etsy / my book / redbubble

Full transcript below the cut.

PAGE 1

Part one: Ruddy Owls!

I was in fourth grade when the first Harry Potter Book was released in the US.

Panel 1: Sometimes our teacher would read it aloud in class. “Mr and Mrs Dursley of number 4 Privat Drive were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much…”

Panel 2: I was 11 years old when Harry Potter finally broke through my dyslexia and turned me into a reader.

Panel 3: Every night in the summer before sixth grade I waited for the owl carrying my Hogwarts Letter. I cried when it didn’t come. “I have to go to Muggle school!”

PAGE 2

Part Two: Hats

I dedicated myself to being a fan.

Panel 1: I began collecting Harry Potter News article.

Panel 2: I asked my relatives to mail me ones from their local papers. I filled a thick binder with clippings.

Panel 3: I wrote my own trivia quiz

Panel 4: and participated in the one held annually at the county fair. “Next contestant!”

Panel 5: I usually got into one of. the top five spots. I won boxes of candy, posters, stationary, and once a baseball cap. (Hat reads: I survived the battle of Hogwarts).

Panel 6: In high school I sewed a black velvet cape and knitted many stripped scarves.

PAGE 3

Part Three: Double Trouble

Watching the last film in 2011 felt like the final note of my childhood.

Panel 1: I remember driving home from the midnight showing thinking about the end of 13 years of waiting; wondering what would define the next chapter of my life.

Panel 2: That same month I heard of something called Pottermore. “Okay, so there’s a sorting quiz… I already know my house! Patronus assignment? Mine’s a barn owl. Duh!"

Panel 3: You can read the books again but with GIFs? Why?

Panel 4: I lived in a place with very slow and limited internet at the time. Pottermore sounded inaccessible, but also boring. I never joined.

Panel 5: "I’ll just read the actual books again, thanks."

PAGE 4

Part Four: Sweets

In 2016, a series of short stories titled "History of Magic in North America” were released on Pottermore to pave the way for the first Fantastic Beasts Film. These stories display an extreme ignorance of American history, culture, and geography, but the worst parts are the casual misuse of indigenous beliefs and stories. Fans and critics immediately spoke up against this appropriation. Some of the most quoted voices included Nambe Pueblo scholar Dr. Debbie Reese who runs the site “American Indians In Children’s Literature”; Navajo writer Brian Young; Johnnie Jae (Otoe-Missouria and Choctaw), founder of A Tribe Called Geek; Dr Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation), a Professor at Brown University who runs the blog “Native Appropriations”, and writers N.K. Jemison and Paula Young Lee.

PAGE 5

Rowling is famous for responding to fans directly on twitter, yet she did not respond to anyone calling out the damaging aspects of “Magic in North America.” Her representatives refused to comment for March 9 2016 article in the Guardian. She has never apologized. All of this, plus the casting of Johnny Depp and the specific declarations of support by JKR, Warner Brothers, and director David Yates left a sour taste in my mouth.

For further thoughts on the new films read The Crimes of Grindelwald is a Mess by Alanna Bennett for Buzzfeed News, November 16, 2018.

PAGE 6

Excerpt from Colonialism in Wizarding American: JK Rowling’s History of Magic in North America Through an Indigenous Lens by Allison Mills, MFA, MAS/MLIS (Cree and Settler French Canadian)

Although Rowling is certainly not the first white author to misstep in her treatment of Indigenous cultures, she has an unprecedented level of visibility and fame, […] One of the most glaring problems with Rowling’s story is her treatment of the many Indigenous nations in North America as one monolithic group. […It] flattens out the diversity of languages, belief systems, and cultures that exist in Indigenous communities, allowing stereotyping to persist. […] It continues a long history of colonial texts which ignore that Indigenous peoples still exist. […] In the Wizarding world, as in the real world, Indigenous histories have been over-written and our cultures erased.

from The Looking Glass: New Perspectives in Children’s Literature Volumn 19, Issue 1

PAGE 7

Part 5: Music

Panel 1: Also in 2016 I discovered two podcasts which radically altered my experience of being an HP fan. The first was Witch Please created by two Canadian feminist literary scholars Hannah McGregor and Marcelle Kosman.

Panel 2: “If it’s not in the text it doesn’t count!” “Close reading ONLY!”

Panel 3: They talk about Harry Potter at the level you’d expect in a college class with particular focus on gender, race, class, and the troubling fatphobia, fear of othered and queer coded bodies, violence against women, white feminism, gaslighting and failed pedagogy in the books. They bring up these issues not because they hate the series, but because they LOVE it.

PAGE 8

These passionate, joyful conversations went off like fireworks in my mind. I had never taken a feminist class before. I gained a whole new vocabulary to talk about the books- and the world.

PAGE 9

Panel 1: The second podcast I started that year was Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, created by two graduates of the Harvard Divinity School, Vanessa Zoltan and Casper Ter Kuile.

Panel 2: They read one chapter per episode through a theme such as love, control, curiosity, shame, responsibility, hospitality, destruction, or mystery. Like Witch Please, they are interested only in the information on the page, not thoughts from the author. The delights and failures of the text are examined in the context of the present day, and new meanings constantly arise.

PAGE 10

What does it mean to treat a text as sacred?

Trusting that the more time we give to it, the more blessings it has to give us.

Reading the text repeatedly with concentrated attention. Our effort is part of what makes it sacred. The text is not in and of itself sacred, but is made so by rigorously engaging in the ritual of reading.

Experiencing it in community.

“To me, the goal of treating the text as sacred is that we learn to treat each other as sacred.” -Vanessa Zoltan

PAGE 11

Part 6: Tooth and Claw

In October 2017, Rowling liked a tweet linking to an article arguing that trans women should be kept out of women’s bathrooms because of cisgender women’s fears. In March 2018, she liked a tweet about the problem of misogyny in the UK Labour Party which included the line “Men in dresses get brosocialist solidarity I never had.” The author of the tweet had previously posted many blatantly anti-trans statements.

Rowlings publicist claimed she had liked the posted by accident in a “clumsy and middle-aged moment.” Yet, in September 2018 she liked a link posted by Janice Turner to her column in the Times UK titled “Trans Rapists Are A Danger In Women’s Jails.”

Screencaps of these tweets can be found in the article “The Mysterious Case of JK Rowling and her Transphobic Twitter History”, January 10 2019 by Gwendolyn Smith (a trans journalist), LGBTQNation.com

PAGE 12

Excerpt from: Is JK Rowling Transphobic? A Trans Woman Investigates by Katelyn Burns

Ultimately, the answer is yes, she is transphobic […] I think it’s fair that she receives criticism from trans people, especially given her advocacy on behalf of queer people in general, but also because she has a huge platform. Many people look up to her for creating a singular piece of popular culture that holds deep meaning for fans from different walks of life, and she has a responsibility to handle that platform wisely. (Published on them.us March 28, 2018)

PAGE 13

Part 7: Home

At age 30, I’m still not over Harry Potter.

Panel 1: I’ve recently found a local bar that does HP trivia nights. “Poppy or Pomona?” “Poppy!”

Panel 2: I currently own an annual pass to Universal Studios so I can visit Hogsmeade.

Panel 3: I love talking to kids who are reading the books for the first time. “Who’s your favorite character?” “Ginny!”

Panel 4: And I’m planning a relisten to the audio books to next year to help me get through the election cycle. “Jim Dale, I’m going to need you more than ever…”

Spoiler from 2023: I did not do this. By mid-2020 JKR had posted her transphobic essay; we were in covid; I never visited Universal Studios again.

PAGE 14

But I do want to learn from her mistakes. I never want to repeat “Magic in North America.” As I write, I will do my research. I will consult experts and compensate them. If a reader from a different culture/background than me speaks up about my work, I will listen and apologize. I KNOW I WILL MAKE MISTAKES. But I will own up to them and I will do better.

PAGE 15

Excerpt from Diversity Is Not Enough: Race, Power and Publishing by Daniel José Older

We can love a thing and still critique it. In fact, that’s the only way to really love a thing. Let’s be critical lovers and loving critics and open ourselves to the truth about where we are and where we’ve been. Instead of holding tight to the same old, failed patriarchies, let’s walk a new road, speak new languages. Today, let’s imagine a literature, a literary world, that carries this struggle for equity in its very essence, so that tomorrow it can cease to be necessary, and disappear. (Buzzfeed, April 14, 2017)

PAGE 16

Harry Potter is flawed, & JK Rowling is problematic. But the books helped me learn a lot:

*One of the greatest dangers facing the modern world is the rise of fascism

*The government cannot be trusted

*Read and think critically

*Question the news: who paid the journalist? Who owns the paper?

*Trust and support your friends through good times and bad

*Organize for resistance

*Educate and share resources with peers

*The revolution must be diverse and intersectional

* We are only as strong as we are united

*The weapon we have is love

MK 2019

PAGE 17

PART 8: EPILOGUE

In 2021 I removed a Harry Potter patch I sewed to my book bag over a decade ago. I took 15 pieces of Harry Potter fanart off my walls. I got rid of my paperback book set, 2 board games, and 8 t-shirt. [images: a Hogwarts a patch with loose threads, a pair of scissors and a seam ripper]

Panel 1: Maia holding up a shirt with the Deathly Hallows logo on it. Maia thinks: “Damn, this really used to be my entire personality.”

Panel 2: The t-shirt gets thrown into the Goodwill box.

PAGE 18

I wrote my zine wrestling with JKR’s legacy in 2019, after her dismissive and racist reaction to indigenous fans and critics of “Magic in North America” and after she had liked a couple transphobic tweets. Since then, she has gotten so much worse.

A Brief Timeline (mostly from this Vox article)

June 2020- JKR posts a 3600 word essay making her anti-trans position clear

August 2020- The Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Org issues a statement about her transphobia, JKR doubles down on her position and returns an award they gave her

December 2020- JKR claims 90% of HP fans secretly agree with her anti-trans views

December 2021- JKR mocks Scottish Police for recognizing transgender identities

March 2022- JKR criticizes gender-inclusive language and legislation

December 2022- JKR retweets trans youtuber Jessie Earl’s critical review of Hogwarts Legacy, starting an onslaught of transphobic harassment towards Earl

December 2022- JKR removes her support from an Edinburgh center for survivors of sexual violence with a trans-inclusive policy and funds her own center which explicitly excludes trans sexual assault survivors

January 2023- JKR tweets “Deeply amused by those telling me I’ve lost their admiration due to disrespect I show violent, duplicitous rapists.” It got nearly 300K likes

March 2023- One the podcast “The Witch Trials of JK Rowling”, hosted by a former Westboro Baptist Church Member, JKR compares the trans rights movement to Death Eaters.

PAGE 19

What are The Witch Trials of JK Rowling?

Panel 1: Maia speaking. “It’s a 7 episode documentary style podcast hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper. Nearly every episode contains interviews with JKR as well as critics, journalists, historians, protestors and fans.

Panel 2: Maia speaking. “In episode 1, JKR speaks more candidly than she has previously about being in an abusive marriage. Her ex-husband hit her, stalked her, broke into her house overlapping with the time she was writing the first three HP books.”

Panel 3: Maia speaking. “What she went through genuinely sounds horrific. I have a lot of sympathy for the kind of life-long traumas those experiences leave.”

PAGE 20

HOWEVER.

It is clear from reading the June 2020 essay on her blog and listening to the podcast, that JKR still to this day feels unsafe. Despite her wealth and privilege she moves through the world with the mindset of a victim. And the group of people she finds most threatening are trans women.

Or rather, she is afraid that allowing trans women in women’s spaces invites the possibility of male predators entering those spaces.

Here’s a direct quote: The problem is male violence. All a predator wants is access and to open the doors of changing rooms, rape centers, domestic violence centers [...] to any male who says “I’m a woman and I have a right to be here” will constitute a risk to women and girls. - from The Witch Trials episode 4 as transcribed by therowlinglibrary.com, March 2023

Image: A stem of Belladonna with flowers and berries.

PAGE 21

Let me introduce here the term: TRANSMISOGYNY. The intersection of transphobia and misogyny, this term was coined by Julia Serano in 2007. Scout Tran, on tiktok as Queersneverdie said: “Transmisogyny occurs in people who have been previously hurt by traditional misogyny. Who have been driven to hate men or at the very least to be scared of men. They will sometimes take out that rage on trans women. (March 2023)

JKR claims to care for trans women and understand they are extremely vulnerable to assault and violence. In her 2020 Essay she wrote: “I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe.”

So she cares about trans women… just less than cis women, and she’s willing to throw all trans women under the bus because of her unfounded, prejudice fears.

PAGE 22

Panel 1: Maia speaking. “JKR claims to have seen data that proves trans women have presented physical threats to other women in intimate spaces, but never cites sources. She also uses “producer of the large gametes” as a definition of “woman”.

What about transmen and nonbinary folks?

Panel 2: Maia leaning on a stack of all seven HP books, the first four Cormorant Strike books and The Casual Vacancy, gesturing to a series of quotes with a tired and disgusted expression.

I’m concerned about the huge explosion of young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning. * [...] If I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. -June 10 2020 essay

I don’t believe a 14 year old can truly understand what the loss of their fertility is.

-Witch Trials episode 4

I haven’t yet found a study that hasn’t found that the majority of young people experiencing gender dysphoria grow out of it*. -Witch Trials episode 7

*No sources cited

PAGE 23

It’s hard to over emphasize how fixated JKR has become on these topics. As of the date I’m writing this, 14 out of her 20 most recent tweets (70%) are in some way anti-trans. She tweets against Mermaids (a UK based trans youth charity), against trans athletes, against gender neutral bathrooms, and in support of LBG Alliance- a UK org that denies trans rights while upholding gay rights. Here are some gems from her archive:

“People who menstruate.” I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud? -June 2020

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman. - December 2021

And in response to someone asking “How do you sleep at night knowing you lost a whole audience?”

I read my most recent royalty cheques and find the pain goes away pretty quickly. -October 2022

PAGE 24

Hashtag Ruthless Productions a queer nerd podcast company created a great guide on ethical engagement with HP. Image: the two hosts of Hashtag Ruthless productions, Jessie (They/she) and Lark (he/him).

Stop buying all official HP Products: books, movies, games, toys, etc, Universal Studios tickets, food, merch.* Boycott any new TV series or movies. Instead: buy the books and DVDs used. If you still want to wear HP merch, buy fan-made. Engage only with fan content: fic, podcasts, fanart, wizard rock, etc. Show transphobia is bad for business. None of this will change JKR’s mind. But the Fantastic Beast series was canceled and after record Pottermore sales in 2020, they fell in 2022 by 40%.

*She gets a portion of ALL tickets. In 2019, this was her largest income source. Read the full guide: hashtagruthless.com/resourceguide

PAGE 25

As late as 2019, I was still reading JKR’s murder mystery series. But by the fourth book my experience began to sour.

Panel 1: Maia holding a copy of Lethal White. “The only gay character in this book is a government official who gropes his staff?”

Panel 2: “The only genderqueer character is misgendered and portrayed as a whiny faker?”

Panel 3: “The only Muslim character is disowned by his family over gay rumors?”

Panel 4: “Even the women aren’t portrayed very well…”

Panel 5: “Why is the main female character defined by the rape in her past?”

Panel 6: “Wait, what happens in the rest of this series…?” Maia scrolls on eir phone.

Panel 7: “Is the series heading towards an employee/boss relationship?”

Panel 8: “And has a man wearing women’s clothes to commit assault?”

Panel 9: “Yeah, I’m done. I’m never reading a new JKR book ever again.”

PAGE 26

And as for JKR herself?

As tempting as it might be to tweet your frustrations at her, I don’t recommend it. In 2021, she tweeted, “Hundreds of trans activists have threatened to beat, rape, assassinate and bomb me.” Getting hate online feeds her sense of victimhood and she waves it as proof of her moral high ground. Instead I suggest you block her on twitter, then delete twitter, go to the library and try to find a new book that feels magical.

Stack of books: In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan, The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater, Gifts by Ursula K Le Guin, Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane, A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik and Gideon the Ninth by Tamsin Muir.

PAGE 27

In “Emergent Strategy” adrienne maree brown writes: You do not have the right to traumatize abusive people, to attack them, personally or publicly, or to sabotage anyone else’s health. The behaviors of abuse are also survival-based, learned behaviors rooted in pain. If you can look through the lens of compassion, you will find hurt and trauma there. If you are the abused party, healing that hurt is not your responsibility and exacerbating that pain is not your justified right.

PAGE 28

Seeing anyone over age 12 wearing HP merch now makes me uncomfortable. Are they ignorant or actively a TERF? I hate wondering how much money JKR has probably poured into anti-trans legislation… This zine is a culmination of my slow breakup with a story that once brought me joy. Now it just makes me angry, tired and sad.

Image: Candle in a fancy holder burned down to less than an inch.

Maia Kobabe, 2023

#harry potter #harry potter and the problematic author #jk rowling #transphobia #jk rowling transphobic

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flowershines · 6 months

Text

Unbearable Feelings

School Rival Virgin. Jungwon x F. Reader

Summary: Two academic rivals have to share a tent and an enclosed area from the class due to not enough space. (Huddle for warmth)

Warnings: Smut, mentions of baby trapping, rivals, virgin Jungwon, switch Jungwon, car break down, mutual masterbation

Song to represent Unbearable Feelings:

Hallways filled with people as they moved from one class to the other, glancing around the hallway as music ran through your ears trying to keep your mind occupied by reviewing the vocab you had to study for your next class. Mumbling as you tried to remember the phrases, looking up to try and think of the words that were somewhere in your mind, letting out a frustrated sigh as you just could not remember. Taking out the paper from behind your phone as you swiftly look at the phrase and repeating the french translation in your head, glancing at the wall closest to you still repeating the word and its definition in your mind. Moving onto the next line you said the phrase in your head then referring to see your paper if you had gotten it right, you did.

Feeling a pair of eyes look at you, your gaze was met with the one guy you despised, don't get me wrong he was okay and everything but you both had always wanted to be the top of your class. Debate after debate you would win then him then tie then repeating that order, you never understood why he always argued back all he talked about was getting into his dream job but getting into that business doesn’t depend on a stupid debate that you had won so why was he taking it so serious.

Quickly breaking eye contact then softly returning your gaze to him a figure appeared in front of you, turning your head to the wall and letting out a huff of air, a headphone was pulled from in your ear into the boy's hand. “Go away, Jungwon.” He placed his hand on his chest and opened his mouth as a way to act, referring to how ‘offended’ he was. Rolling your eyes he said, “I’m actually great company Y/n, see now you would notice if you really cared.” “Wow that's crazy cause honestly I don't care about you enough to want to know.” Opening your eyes wide and leaving your mouth open ajar to show your sarcasm. “Ouch, what’cha studying?” He asked, ripping the paper from your grasp, looking at the paper, “You don’t know these, I already know them all.” “Yeah okay.” a sarcastic laugh fell from your lips. “Say the English, I'll translate for you since you're having a hard time.” scoffing at his confidence you replied saying “Send a text message.”

Turning to him waiting for his reply “Envoyer un texto, évidemment stupido.” ( _, obviously stupid.) “Ha Ha very funny, how do you say I am a very ignorant man?” turning to him waiting for an actual answer from your sarcasm, “Je me tiens à côté d'une petite fille ignorante.” (I'm standing next to an ignorant little girl.) “Va te faire foutre.” (Fuck you) walking faster to try to get away from him he speeded up his pace as well, “Wait where are you off so fast?” “My class, just leave me alone, I don't know why you love to bug me.” “Was it something I said?” “Isn’t it always?” You told him walking faster as he stopped walking and just stood, finally arriving at your class you put your phone in your bag and continued to study your vocab till your mind was occupied on the paper your french teacher put over your paper lifting your head you saw her giving one to every classmate, including Jungwon.

Looking back at the paper you read from top to bottom, ‘French Trip, all students who wish to partake in this trip must give a $10 fund and sign the paper below. The trip starts 1.12.23 till 3.12.23 when finished hand in back to the teacher when done.’ Maybe this will give you some time to yourself which is much needed, spending time at your apartment with your roommate isn't always your favorite thing to do, she would always bring people over when you studied but it just made you want to work harder so that way when people see the new person you would become and how successful you were would be the best part.

But of course Jungwon just loved to ruin these things for you, he always had since you both started the same school. His priorities were your priorities, not to mention the business he wanted to go to was not even the best job out there, being as smart as he is you thought he would want to get into a better job but it was a business that almost everyone gets into. I mean if it's his dream who were you to stop him you just thought it was odd. Class was like any other class with Jungwon starting by the teacher teaching the lesson following by you asking a question on the assignment as Jungwon tells it to you and proceeds to make a blunt remark following his explanation back to you telling him off, starting an argument with him till the teacher tells you both to stop and get your work done.

But today was different. You didn’t ask any questions and just stayed to yourself the whole class, making no remarks, nothing, you barely even spoke to your classmates. You could feel Jungwons gaze seeping in through your soul, refusing to look up at him. You just continued with your work till the teacher assigned the homework and made a joke saying how quiet the class was that day, making the class look at you and Jungwon even then you didn't say anything. She passed out the homework then dismissed the class, standing up putting your bag on your chair. You took out your folder and placed the homework in there then proceeded to put it in your bag looking up from your bag you were met face to face with the one person who made you want to stay quiet that day.

“What do you want?” You asked while zipping up your backpack then putting it on, “You were quiet.” “Yeah so?” “Nothing I liked it, you should do it more often.” Lips touching each other making a straight line across your face then nodding. “Noted, you done?” “Yup.” Rolling your eyes and shaking your head he walked right by your side till you were by the doors to leave the school, “Where are you going we still have English?” “I know, I'm not going.” Opening the doors, he asked “Why?” “I wanna go home, I'm tired.” not waiting for his response you left the building getting your car keys out from your back, you knew it wasn't the best thing to skip out on English but it was the last class and you had nothing major going on that day.

The whole rest of the day you spent in your room studying and trying to make up the english work that you missed, she had emailed you the work as you told her you weren't feeling well and had to go home. The next day walking into the building was the same thing as yesterday going to the same classes, French class was the same as well you turned in the slip as the trip would be later today. Whole class she told the people who were going on the trip to stay in the class and the rest who weren't going to the library and study for any other class, almost the whole class left except for 6 other students not including you. Of course your favorite person in the whole world had to go on the trip as well, but you just figured you wouldn’t talk to him and actually enjoy yourself without him.

You noticed how for the past classes you had with him, he hasn’t made any comments, no rude remarks, barely tried to talk to you, no arguing, nothing. A part of you felt at peace with yourself being able to do all of your work and had extra time to study for upcoming topics, today was the day you had the trip. Being so excited to be by yourself with your classmates that you never really minded except Jungwon, you minded if he was going. Heading home from school you start to pack your bag with your pj’s, toothbrush, toothpaste, blanket, outfits, the book you had been reading in your free time, along with other unimportant things as well. The french teacher emailed the individuals to meet back at the school around 4:30pm being 4:05 you changed into more comfortable clothes then headed to the school, arriving there a couple minutes early you see almost all of the students that were attending including the teacher.

She had told everybody the address of where the place was, telling everyone their partner who they would be driving with as they would take one person from the pair's car. As the teacher called out the pairs the only person who you hoped not to get you had gotten as a partner, he looked at you as you looked at him pulling your eyes away from his stare you refused to look back at him not wanting to look at him as you will for a couple of hours already, great.

“We are taking my car.” You told him as he came closer to you after the teacher had finished talking, not giving him any time to respond back you started to head to your car surprisingly he followed in your footsteps back into your car. Unlocking you placed your bag in the back seat waiting for him to catch up and held out your hand to tell him to give you his bag, he reached his hand up to yours and placed the bag handles in your hand.

“So this is what it feels like to have you as a personal slave.” “Yeah, don’t get used to it.” You gave him a sarcastic smile and shut the car door behind you walking over to the driver's side of the car. Starting the car you see Jungwon in your peripheral vision putting on his seat belt and acting all sporadically holding the seatbelt with a tight grip. “The fuck are you doing?” “You got a helmet?” “Why would I have a helmet?” He shrugged “For your passengers.” “The seatbelt should be enough.” “I don’t think so Y/nie, your driving isn't the best I see you swerve all the time.” “Bull shit, I’m a good driver you on the other hand that's a different story.” He giggled at your remark, you softly smiled as you found his smile heartwarming but thought to yourself why were you smiling at him, HIM.

Immediately putting a straight face on not wanting him to see you smiling at his smile, putting the car into reverse then starting to drive Jungwon was being as annoying as he can distracting you so much from driving, “Omg Jungwon shut the fuck up.” He slowly turned his head raising one eyebrow making a disgusted face, “So mean” He signed sarcastically looking down pretending to be upset at your remark. After glancing at him you returned your gaze to the road, hearing a loud noise coming from the back of your car, “Did you just get rear ended?” “No, it sounded loud but we didn't get rear ended.” Blinking his eyes in confusion, “You sure?” you hummed at him to let him know that we were okay. “Then why are we slowing down?” “Jungwon shut up, I don’t know.” “It’s your car you should know.”

Rolling your eyes you pulled over on the side of the road, you put the car in park not wanting it to move as you went to check out what happened. Unlocking your seatbelt and stepping out of the car swearing to yourself as your tire was flat against the pavement on the side of the road, “I heard you, is everything okay.” he asked from the passengers in the car, “Flat tire.” stepping out of the car he appeared in front of you on the opposite side of the car as he slowly walked over to you to see the condition you guys were in. “You got a spare on you.” “No.” “Hasn’t your boyfriend or anyone ever told you it would be a SMART idea too.” “Well I don't have a boyfriend so nobody ever warned me about this stuff.” “So what would you think if this ever happened?” Looking directly at him shrugging your shoulders you, “Just call someone or hope for the best i guess.” He huffed and rolled his eyes pulling out his phone from his pocket, he ran his fingers through his hair frustrated as he couldn't get a signal, the only lighting found from the woods was the light of his phone that was resting in his palms.

“Are you getting a signal?” Taking out your phone as well and going to make a call nothing was going through saying the connection failed even trying the emergency call, it would only let you call the police. It wasn’t that big of a deal to call the police so you decided not to. “No, what are we supposed to do?” Looking up at him with doe eyes, holding your arms as a gust of wind ran through your hair along with the t-shirt you were wearing. “Maybe we should just stay here till someone comes or till we get a connection.” Walking back to the car you sighed before getting in as tears brickled at your eyelashes threatening to fall, Jungwon noticed before he was able to get in he shut the door of the passengers side making a tear fall down your cheek from being scared and embarrassed. All of the sudden the door on your side was opening to reveal him standing at your door.

He grabbed your wrists and took them so you weren't sitting but standing outside the car door, he pulled your wrists around his waist letting go then placing his hand around your neck. “It’s not your fault, these things just happen, it's nothing to get upset over.” He told you to pull away, looking down at you, wiping away your tears, hugging you tighter. “We can still have a good time if that will make you feel better, I brought a tent with us.” You looked up at him then hugged him tighter, he giggled. “Is that a yes?” You nodded against his chest, pulling away you cried even more noticing how you had gotten mascara smudged all over his shirt. “I'm sorry.” You told him sniffling as your hands went to your face to hide yourself in the state you were in, “Don’t worry about it, I bright extra shirts.” He grabbed your hand and pulled you to the side of the car where all of your things had been in, taking out the duffel bag that had the tent in it and placing it in your arms. He grabbed a shirt from his bag and followed you into the forest not that far away from your car and not too deep into the forest as you had never seen the area before not wanting to walk into random animals territory.

Unzipping the duffel bag you went to turn around to ask him for help but you were faced with a shirtless Jungwon standing in front of you, not saying a word you quickly turned your head around, face starting to heat up you tried to pull your mind away form the image you just saw but you couldn't he just looked so gorgeous like that in front of you. He walked over to you with a smirk on his face as he was biting the inside of his lip, “Can’t look at me now, Y/n?” not saying anything you continued to act like you were busy reading the instructions he pulled them out of your hands, still not looking at him you looked into the woods. “Look, it's so pretty.” You were referring to the moon shining down on the trees making the river that ran through the trees sparkle, “So pretty.” walking to stand in front of you making perfect eye contact with his cock.

“OKAY.” You said shooting up from your spot, “Let's make this.” He smiled and took the lead looking at the instructions and starting to build the tent. Not long after the tent was all built you got off from your knees as you were pushing the tent pegs into the ground to make sure that the tent would stay in place. Unzipping the tent and crawling in you went in and sat down in the corner as you watched him get in the tent as well, “I’ll go get the blankets, you want anything from the car?” “Just my bag please.” “Such a polite girl.” He said, exiting the tent grabbing the things, hearing him walk back he came back and threw your bag at you, “You know what time it is?” “Like almost 10 I think” He pulled out his phone to check the time, “10:34” yawning, you covered your mouth and turned the other way not wanting him to notice how tired you were, “You tired?” He asked while setting up both of your beds.

“Nope.” “You're such a liar.” Shaking his head while giggling at your comment, “Just go to bed.” “But you're still up.” “Yeah I stay up late, go to bed if you're tired I'll still be here when you wake up.” Smiling softly at his comment as you noticed how he has never acted this soft around you before, he moved aside letting you be able to crawl to your spot, “I still have to get into my pj’s though.” “Nobody is stopping you.” “Turn around.” “Y/n I won't look, I swear I'm still making my bed.” “Swear.” “Pinky swear.” Taking off your sweatshirt and shirts from your bag you started to stake off your shirt as you made direct eye contact with the man in front of you, he immediately turned back around. Continuing you took off your shirt and put your sweatshirt on standing up after you're done and pulling down your pants grabbing your shorts that barely covered your ass and putting them on. “Okay, all done.” He turned around to look at you, he just stared at your thighs in awe his cheeks blushed not being able to look away it looked like he was in some sort of trance. He slowly looked away in embarrassment knowing that you saw him staring at you that way, he crawled into his bed as you got into yours as well he went on his phone and turned around so that way he wasn't facing you. Shutting your eyes and drifting off into your dreams you were awakened by shivering throughout your whole body, no light was being portrayed in the tent.

“Won?” He hummed back, “Are you cold?” “No, are you?” you hummed he sighed, “Come over here.” Unzipping your sleeping bag you crawled over to him and he had it held open as his back was now against the tent, so now he can see you. “Is there going to be enough space?” You asked him, “I don’t know, just get in here.” He shook the sleeping referring to how you should get in, crawling in next to him getting as far away as possible but still being able to zip it up again. He grabbed your waist and pulled you closer and zipped up the sleeping bag, “So far away, you scared of me or something.” He asked sarcastically whispering in your ear, a shiver trailed down your spine from being this close to him and feeling his breath on your neck along with on your ears as well. “No?” He hummed, “You should be good now, go back to sleep.” following his suggestion you closed your eyes once again, fading away into dreamland, waking up you noticed you heard some noises coming from Jungwon behind you. Turning towards the side you noticed him still sleeping, rolling back to the side you were just on and closing your eyes thinking that you were probably just imagining the sound, but the noises got louder as you felt something rubbing up against you upper thigh. NO FUCKING WAY, IS HE… NOO.

Shuffling was heard behind you as a hand trailed down to your waist turning around you were facing him eye to his closed eyes that were closed tightly shut, his face alone made you think of him in certain ways. His eyebrows were knitted together, his eyes tightly shut, the veins on his neck were popped out, nose scrunching up and his bottom lip was placed in between his teeth. You felt something tap on you then go back, was that his dick? Heavy breathing was heard from him as his you would hear his breathing stop then go again the go but shake as he let out the air. Soft moans were pulled from his mouth, you just watched as he fell apart right in front of you his hands around your waist tightened as he pulled you closer thrusting his cock up against you rubbing against your pussy. A moan loud enough for you to hear fell from his lips from the friction, staring at him butterflies filled your stomach as his thrusts became more intense as his breathing became less clear and all over the place.

His eyes fluttered, not wanting him to catch you staring you immediately shut your eyes pretending to be asleep. He moaned the loudest as his hip shuttered against you, he had woken up just after he came which was starting to seep through his pants and onto your bare thighs. “Fuck fuck fuck.” He whisper shouted not knowing what to do, he pulled the waistband away from his putting his hand down his pants. “I came?! Oh shit, she asleep?” He sighed in relief seeing you ‘sleeping’ beside him, he let go of his pants and slowly unzipped the sleeping bag and exiting it. He cursed to himself as he went to crawl over you his leg ran up against your thigh realizing that there was a wet spot on his leg, lifting up the sleeping bag he noticed his cum dripping down your thigh trailing down to your ass.

He swore he could cum again just from seeing that sight, “Oh Fuck, what do i do? Fuck i’m still hard to.” He looked down noticing the tent in his pants, picking up his phone he checked the time it was almost 2 he was exhausted and just wanted to be in his bed which would allow him to jerk off to the dream he was having about you. He wanted to jerk off so bad seeing his cum on you along with remembering his dream he had of you made him moan to himself he quickly placed his hands i’ve this mouth scared that you would hear him, digging through his bag to find something to wipe off his cum with. He found the t-shirt that had your mascara on it and decided he would use that, he slowly lifted up the sleeping bag and saw how the his cum was now on your ass cheek. He softly ran the t-shirt down your leg then around to your ass he but his lip trying to not make any noises as he ran the shirt along your ass, he went towards his bag and pulled his pants down below his thighs and trying to get his cum that was on his pants on the t-shirt.

You stirred to his side he stopped his motions and placed the t-shirt over his dick thinking that you were awake but was relieved to know that you were still ‘asleep’ you opened one eye as he turned away staring at how he struggled to grab his cock from it twitching, grabbing the base he moaned slightly pulling the shirt he was wearing in between his teeth to silence his moans. Grabbing the tip of his cock he ran the shirt along his slit wiping off all the pre cum that was leaking from his tip, getting the sudden urge of confidence you decided to say something. “Won?” You couldn’t look at his eyes but staring directly down at his boner that was twitching from lack of touch and due to the cold air, his head shot up from looking at his cock in disappointment to looking at you as you looked at his dick.

Seeing you stare at him filled with lust in your eyes made him twitch as he quickly pulled the shirt over his dick making you look at him directly in the eyes, “It’s not- I swear- Y/n-” “Relax Wonnie, I was already awake.” you said sitting up, he tilted his head to the side “Huh?!” “You were moaning rather loudly and when I tried to fall asleep you came on me.” “OH. My. God Y/n i’m so sorry i didn’t mean to i just hand a wet dream about you and couldn’t help myself when you were that close to me, i’m so sorry if anything happened that you were uncomfortable with. I can go sleep in the car-” “Won relax it’s okay.”

His breathing became rapid you started to go near him to calm him down but as you did his cock twitched each step closer you took, “Wha- What are you doing?” I was just going to cuddle with you so maybe we can fall sleep again, “I don’t think that’s a good idea Y/n.” “Why?” He looked at his cock then slowly brought his gaze up to you, “I couldn’t control myself the first time so i definitely can’t the second now that you have seen me like this.” “I can help.” You say energetic, “WHAT?!?” “I’m being serious you said you had a wet dream about me, i can make it come true.” “No Y/n I can’t make you do this.” “But i want to.” he chewed the side of his cheek. “Y/n if you just saying that please just tell me-” You pulled him in by his shirt over to you kissing him on the lips leading you both to a messy make out as you travel down to his collarbone, moving onto his lap straddle him as his cock twitched against your stomach bringing your hand down to his dick and starting to jerk him off. He places his hands on your ass as his head tilts back and moaning from your touch, his eyes were filled with need wanting more, wanting your pussy.

Wanting to shove you down onto the sleeping bag make you beg for his cock then shoving his dick in you then fucking you senseless, but making out with him more he leaned forward slowly as he softly placed you down onto the sleeping bag that you and him had just been in. Fiddling with the bottom of his shirt you tug on it lightly as he sits up and grabs your wrists and slowly trailing them up you knew that he wanted you to take it off, soon after taking off his shirt he grabbed your waistband of your short shorts and tugged them down to your ankles as he then took them off for you.

He was mesmerized staring at you in adoration loving every movement you were doing, he stared at your panties which had a tiny pink bow right in the middle his fingers ran through the loops of the bow as you took your sweatshirt off. “So pretty.” He said playing with the bow and waistband placing his hand inside your panties rubbing your clit as you ran your fingers long his slit, he grabbed his dick and ran it along the outline of your pussy. You both moaned from the sudden stimulation from him dry humping your pussy slowly, you moved your panties to the side taking his dick in your hands and running it along your bare pussy. “Please need to be in you, i’ll be good i swear.” “You have a condom?” he shook his head but rubbed his cock along your pussy lips, “Just the tip then, no more then that.” Instantly spitting on his tip for lube as he started slowly pushing in the head of his cock moaning loud enough you thought the birds in the trees could hear, you placed you hand over his mouth to shush him.

He slowly started to move in and out of your pussy one hand grabbing onto your tit for more support while his other hand was jerking off the base of his cock, “Y/n need more, need to feel more of you please.” “Fine but I do the moving so lay down.” he quickly obeys your order and lays down on the sleeping bag. Cock straight up in the air waiting for you twitching due to the anticipation getting up you crawled over to him and got on top of him straddling his lap your pussy just inches away from his dick, grabbing his base he moaned from your hand on him while you aligned him up to your entrance. You kissed him just hovering above him, he wrapped his arms around you bear hugging you as he pushed his cock up into you bottoming you out making you moan from the sudden feeling of him filling you up. Whines fell from his mouth talking about how good you feel, how so hard he is for you, can stay in you forever, never wants to leave this position and how he wants to feel you cum around his cock. “Please Y/n need to feel you cum around me, it’s all i’ve ever wanted, need you so bad it hurts please can i move?” Nodding your head he thrusts into you two times slow and taking his time but on his third thrust he pushed so hard up into you while his hips kept fucking up into you fast, during one of his rapid movements his cock fell out of you leaving a whine from his lips.

“Your so perfect, I’ve always wanted to bend you over those desks and fuck the attitude out of you.” He huffed and kissed your ear keeping his heavy breathing right by your ears, he moaned in your ear shocking you but it was because of how you were clenching on him cause of his moaning louder and squeeze you harder his cock started twitching in you, you started to rub your clit as you would clench on him more. He loved the sensation of your pussy squeezing around him, you stared to sit up he let go of you and placed his hands in your waist you brought your fingers up to his nipples as he stopped his movements to roll his head back as his body rolled back to his dick making his movements continue even header this time. “Y/nn- I gott- I gotta cum-” “Then cum.” “Where do you want it?” You started to think about his question thinking about where it would be the easiest place to clean the mess up after. “Y/n I n-need an answer- now!”

His hands went below you to be ready to pull out and cum where you tell him to, “Just cum in me.” “I’m not playing Y/n tell me now.” “In me.” you slammed down on his hips, “I’m not gonna c-cum until you tell me somewhere else, please Y-Y/n need to so bad. If you w-want it in you can w-we please-e talk about this first.” getting off of him you brought your head down around his dick as he took both sides of your head and thrusted up into your mouth not caring how you gagged below him. After he finished cumming you looked up at him as his cum was dripping down your chin, picking it up with your finger and putting it back in your mouth then swallowing all of it. “Thank you so much, I mean it Y/n.” “You weren’t that bad.” he looked down disappointed, “Hey i’m just kidding I loved it you did so good.” you tackled him with a hug laying on him. “I was a virgin by the way.” he said looking down at you, putting your hands on top of one another placing your elbows on either side of his body you responded saying, “I know, usually if a guy isn’t really a virgin they just cum in her no questions asked and it was your wet dream whining that gave it away for me, but it was so cute.” you smiled big from ear to ear. “Did i do good?” “You did great, we should do it again some time!”

He pulled his arms around you turning to his still holding onto you as you cuddled into his chest right before falling asleep to the sound of his heartbeat. “Goodnight Y/n.” He kissed your forehead before falling asleep holding you.

#smut #fluff #enha x reader #enhypen smut #jungwon smut #jay smut #jake smut #heeseung smut #sunghoon smut #sunoo smut #enhypen #jungwon

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jinkiezzsstuff · 3 months

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Alastor watching the princess and the frog by Disney ? It’s in lousiana in the 1920s so it would be perfect for him

absolutelyyyyyyy the princess and the frog is one of my fav disney movies from characters to soundtrack, so this one’s a bit longer. also kind of a part two but also not exactly

history ramble below

also i did some light research on new orleans history because if im gonna write alastor i should know. doggy i love me some history and this history is rich, depressing at times but also rich and meanful to know so i thought id share a little. from talking about the free the peoples movement, to the way women got their rights to their hair back that they didn’t have when enslaved only to have a law banning natural hair and hair wraps and so they decorated the wraps and used coloured fabrics effectively rendering the law useless, to the wealthiest black man of the 1870s for being a prospering business owner, the origins of how voodoo and other spiritual practices mingled perfectly with the pre established voodoo and how voodoo was predominantly black women who were highly respected, the first black man to be govoner in the united states in only 1871, a black woman named Rose Nicaud who opened the first coffee stand in 1800 and made enough to escape being ensalved. then there’s lighter topics like some of the jazz history and how it made various black stars like louie armstrong, and also how the language mingled to make the cajun french that’s sadly dying out, to the architecture that flourished through the varying clashes in culture between african, european, native and haitian peoples. if it’s not too upsetting to read i definitely suggest this page to have an insight on some of the quick history on new orleans, i enjoyed learning about the strength that many had during this time.

United teachers of new orleans < page i was reading

Warnings: jealous Al teehee, reader crushes on naveen and dr facilier (don’t mind me just projecting), cuddling, swearing, alastor doesn’t really know emotions good, fluffy banter, just some ushy gushy mushy tushy

Word count: 2k

The movie Bambi didn't even finish playing before the patrons started to filter out of the room heading to bed. First to go was Vaggie carrying a sleeping Charlie, Sir pentious promptly following along telling his fussy egg boys it was long past their bed time. Then it was Niftys turn to disappear, however she never said a goodnight only sped off leaving behind her vacant swishing rocking chair.

Then once Angel and Husk left, you had decided to just call it quits on Bambi, Alastor hadn't moved much or objected to you turning off the movie, only watching the projector as you scrolled through the app.

You stopped on the princess and the frog, grinning toward Alastor he sighed, getting a glimpse of your mischief from the corner of his eye. "Now what's this about darling?" Turning your body towards his fully facing him, you waited for his gaze to finally meet yours, and reluctantly it did. "Allow me to introduce you to one of, if not, thee best disney movies of all time; the princess and the frog," Alastor's finger rose as he took a breath to speak, but before he could say a word you interrupted him.

"Yes I know princess yuck, whatever Al. It takes place in New Orleans, its main focus is actually in the poorer area with the shotgun houses, and throughout the movie Tiana, the princess, travels through the bayou, oh! With Naveen one of the hottest princes, also it takes place in the twenties, oh!-" Before you could continue Alastor gently gripped your cheeks, your lips puckering involuntarily as he did so."What did you just?"

"Takes place in the nineteen twenties?" You asked, voice muffled from Alastors grip on your cheeks. "Before that dear." Your eyebrows raised looking at Alastor not trying to hide your confusion. "Naveen? One of the hottest princes?" Alastor hummed, booping your nose. "Yes dear, that."

"Yeah. duh dude he's one of the few princes that deserve the princess, he changes for Tiana, he's charismatic, funny, but nevermind that back to what i was saying. There's varying New Orleans culture littered through that might make you feel closer to home, all the music is jazz obviously." Opening your mouth readying to rant on about the Voodoo man that you adored, Alastor hushed you with his finger up to your lips.

"My sweet dear, I will watch this silly picture show so long as you stop rambling about it." Alastor wasn't truly done with hearing your rambling, he was enjoying hearing that you were such a fan of something that centred so close to home when it came to him however if he was going to watch it he rather not have it spoiled.

Giddily you clasped your hands together and hit play, your love for the film and excitement to see Alastors reaction may have made you slightly over enthusiastic just a bit. As the movie began you curled your feet up onto the couch, inching yourself closer to Alastor looking up to his face and back to the movie.

When Naveen got introduced on screen you accidentally gripped Alastors arm tightly shaking him. "My mannn~" You squealed happily, letting go of Alastor once you heard the unmistakable rattle come from him, a growl sounding out of his chest. You didn't pay much attention to him though, instead turning back to the projector and backing off Al. However Alastor wasn't too frustrated with the fact you touched him, but because you were being so ushy gushy over some fake man.

He was easily the same if not better than Naveen. Alastor was charismatic, charming, he could sing, play instruments, he didn't quite understand why you were so particularly interested in this Naveen. Hell, even Alastor had a similar outfit back when he was alive, he could've been Naveen when he was alive.

You didn’t notice Alastor having a mini tantrum in his own world, you were too engrossed in the movie. Suddenly you’ve gripped him again, pointing at the screen. "The shadow man, Al this is your kin!" You egged laughing maniacally at your own words.

Alastor’s face however brightened at the display of the voodoo man. "One of my fav songs." You whispered as Dr. Facilier began singing on screen. Cocking his head to the side Alastor looked down to you bouncing along to the song. "This fellow sounds similar to Husk." Alastor mentioned, watching intently at the shadows that crawled around Dr. Faciliers room, much like Alastors own shadows. "Yeah it really does sound like Husk. Strange, anyways, Dr. Voodoos hot too." Alastors static buzzed around the room and you had to hold back a giggle at the frustrated look on his face, despite the smile it was obvious he wasn't too happy.

"What's up Al, not liking the movie?" Static crackled around the two of you as you questioned him a little slyly as you could tell he wasn’t hating the movie. “No dear, it’s pleasant in comparison to some things i’ve grit myself through, however,” He paused watching you ogle at both the Dr and Naveen. “I can’t understand what’s so great about this Naveen you like. He’s a fool,” You scoffed at Alastors distaste for Naveen, you didn’t mean to make him feel frustrated at your adoration for the characters but it was endearing to see.

“What’s not to like about the man?” You state confidently but Alastor simply shrugged while humming indifferently. A beat of silence passed, the ending of the song playing out of the projector. “It’s just that,” Alastor started up again after a moment of silence, turning his body to face you hands folded in his lap politely. “You clearly have the odd reaction towards these gentlemen and I can't see why,” To give him credit he did look genuinely confused, and just as you were going to speak up he interrupted.

“And please do not say it’s because he is funny, charismatic, musically talented or sweet because I happen to hold all those same qualities!” He finished, hands thrown in the air like he said something especially spectacular. You had a soft smile present on your face watching him work through the sentence theatrically. “Well, Al you are, maybe i think the same about you?” Record scratch.

You cackled at his frozen state, patting his arm gently, cooing that you were only kidding, you turned back to the TV and the two of you decided to leave it at that.

Later on in the movie, when Tiana and Naveen are with the alligator going down the bayou singing about being human, you stared over at Alastor, your heart thumping at the sight of him. His arms were resting along the back of the couch, legs splayed out comfortably, posture sunken in, and his eyes lidded with a closed calm smile. His ear twitched and soon his eyes moved from the movie to you, quirking a questionable eyebrow at you.

Feeling slightly embarrassed for eyeing him up you tried to play it off by asking him a question. “Is there bayous in New Orleans, is that real?” You ask kinda dumbly, of course they were, you scolded yourself. Alastor didn’t seem to mind though he smiled widely, a chuckle reverberating out of him. “Why yes dear! Of course, I personally never lived close to the bayou, but it surrounds New Orleans, and I have been. It’s quite beautiful during a sunset but there’s tons of alligators.”

You leaned forward interested, but it seemed he’d stopped to refocus on the screen which you wouldn’t complain about. You not so discreetly leaned into his torso, arm still on the back of the sofa behind you, and thankfully he didn’t move when you leaned your body into him, instantly decompressing into his side.

They got to the scene where the gang is on the boat going through the bayou, the crocodile fitting in and playing jazz, when you turned to look up at Alastor seeing him already looking down at you. “What’s up?” You asked, watching as he scanned your face. “Well dear you’re just reminding me of home tonight, it would’ve been interesting to be able to show you where I lived, where I worked. Y’know when i did radio, most people didn’t know what I looked like so it came as quite a shock to some that I wasn’t what they imagined. Some were cruel, but my mother always taught me to be respectable if not respectful, so I managed to keep my grace.”

You giggle at his explanation watching him move his hand in all different directions, the radio host coming into play just at the mention of his job. “I’m flattered you would’ve wanted to show me your home n stuff, i wish it were possible.”

On the projector in front of you two, was the scene between Naveen and Tiana’s first date, where Naveen was going to propose. “They always get married so fast in these movies, you spend three days as a frog and suddenly it’s eternity!” You exclaimed humorously, Alastor scoffed an array of instrumental sounds electronically sounding out from him. “My dear it was common back in the day to get married quick, none of this lollygagging.”

You rolled your eyes blowing out air. “Would you get married to someone you knew for three days?” Alastor hummed, tapping his finger against his chin in exaggerated thought. “If it were you, perhaps, otherwise i’d attempt to lengthen it just a bit.” He reviled in the sight of you bashfully turning your head away, shy at his broad flirt. “You’d marry me, after only three days?” You questioned in disbelief, he hummed wrapping the arm he once had behind you, around you pulling you into him.

“Well I found you to be quite a treat the first day i met you, and decided i wanted to be around you for many days on. Is that not marriage worthy?” This confession shocked you slightly. You never expected him to say that he preemptively planned your blooming friendship nevermind that he equated that to being worth marriage. The movie played on in the background as you both watched each other’s faces.

“To me, dear,” Alastor started a smug smile stretching across his cheeks replacing the calm smile that stayed for so long. “It seems like you may unconsciously feel something towards me too.” Jaw dropping you stared at him confused. “What?” You scoff but Alastor only looked smugger.

“Come now, New Orleans centred movie? Jazz, cooking, even that dumbo man Naveen speaks french loves jazz music and dancing, oh and of course the ever so obvious voodoo, it’s almost like this movie is me, haha.” He laughed manically, eyes crossing as his body shook. It was quite the egotistical assumption on his part, but he wasn’t wrong.

You put it on for him but it seems for you too, you paid more attention to him half the movie, and you’ve been more interested in knowing real life facts about his home during his time then what story the movie was trying to tell. Maybe he was right, but even so what did him pointing it out accomplish? “Well that’s why i wanted to show you it, it’s got many aspects you’re involved with in it.”

You mentally gave yourself a pat on the back for such a good save, however Alastor was keen and knew you long enough to catch your lies. “Sure dear, sure.” Al gave you a condescending pat on the head and you speedily swatted at him. The movie played on you once more captivated by Alastor’s reactions more than the movie itself, you’ve already watched it enough to know.

Tucked under Alastor’s arm, warm and comfy, you barely caught the sound of Alastor huffing out chuckles, gazing up towards the projection you playfully hit him. “Don’t laugh at his death!” That only made Alastor properly laugh, dropping his head back, neck cracking grossly. “My dear it was a lightning bug in love with a star! He got stepped on that was hilarious!”

Sounds of prerecorded laughter sounded out with his natural laugh, you didn’t actually care that he found it funny, only pretended too as you gave him a disapproving glare. As the movie closed in you felt a weird gloom wash over you, it was nice being alone with him by his side while you two relaxed. You didn’t want it ending, but alas Tiana and Naveen kissed turning them human, with the reveal that with marrying Naveen, she became a princess effectively breaking the curse, and the movie started with the end song.

“Well dear I did enjoy that, the voodoo was pretty boringly unrealistic, but it’s for children. I did enjoy the mentioning of foods, very common dishes even I enjoy, like gumbo. But alas it was still a pathetic little movie about mortal love.” Standing to his feet when he finished speaking, Alastor dusted himself off and snapped his fingers making all around you revert to what it was before movie night.

“Do you not want to be in love?” You ask softly partly hoping he didn’t hear you as by the time you stood from your spot, you regret saying it. “Well I certainly haven’t looked. Why disappointed?” Alastor bent himself backwards to look at you since you stood behind him readying to exit. Looking down into his eyes you felt hazy, maybe a little drunk on desire as you gently caressed his cheek. “Maybe I am,”

“Darling.” Alastor said sternly as he cracked himself upward, he bent down facing you this time and before he could talk you once again interrupted. “Can’t blame me can you?” Alastor seemed momentarily taken aback, gazing around lazily trying to collect his thoughts. “My dear, I'm uncertain with emotions like this as well as expressing them, love is foolish, however… if you were to tell me ‘i love you’ i would say it back.”

It confused you, what Alastor said, you couldn’t tell if he was mocking you and telling you he was going to lie about his emotions to spare you, or if he was egging you on attempting to get you to tell him your true feelings. Regardless you swallowed down any worries for the future instead focusing only on the now, and looked deeply into the soft red glow of his eyes.

“I love you Al,” With a cheeky smile you watched him stutter, the visible shock was clear, and you wondered if he actually expected you to say that. Just as you began to worry you fucked up, he bent down to your height. “I love you too my dear,” And with that he gave you the chastised kiss on the lips, before standing to his full height materialising his microphone. “Got to go dear! Duty calls!” And with that he seemingly disappeared into the shadows, leaving you to waddle tiredly to your room. Little did you know that Alastor whisked himself away to have a minor panic attack in the safety of his radio tower, not believing himself and his broad actions, nor could he believe the pounding in his chest and flutter in his heart.

#hazbin hotel x reader #hazbin hotel imagine #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel oneshots #alastor hazbin x reader #alastor x reader #alastor hazbin hotel x reader #alastor x you #hazbin hotel alastor x reader #hazbin hotel alastor #alastor x reader fluff #alastor the radio demon

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causereyna-artie · 2 months

Text

things that have happened in my school(s) as marauders/ships pt1:

wolfstar: these two dudes in my dorm were fucking for like a year but only realised they were gay cause one of them gave the other an annotated book.

Peter: this transfer student who was standing on the roof of my boarding school, and the cops and shit had come and were screaming at her to not jump in french and English, but after they got a translator turns out she was just looking for the restroom

Regulus: another transfer student who we had a language barrier with so no one could talk to him until the last day of term where he speaked perfect french and english

Pandora: this girl who also used to be in my dorm that would put a circle of salt around all our beds and when asked about it would shush us and say "they're always listening" (ngl I was pissssss scared of her)

Sirius (me): thought I was a slug the first time I got drunk

Emmeline: this girl the pandora girl used to fuck, who used to shout "in the name of the father, son, and THE HOLY SPIRIT" (we went to a convent boarding school) when she came

Barty: made the unsuspecting principal make the Tate sign and posted it on Instagram

Remus: this kid got a B after apparently studying for a week and threw a book at the science teacher

Evan: pulled up playing Kanye to Easter mass

jegulus: this couple that had sex on the lacrosse field

Marlene: my friend who cheated by tattooing answers on her arm

Lily: pushed her sister into the pool on the first day

Mary: carried a koi in her blouse

#wolfstar #james potter #jegulus #sirius black #james x regulus #marauders #remus x sirius #remus lupin #things my friends have done #things that have happened in my old school #france #india #england #school #salt

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luneengene2 · 1 month

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Hidden Love

You never thought your parents would push you to a stage you didn't want to go to. Arranged marriage. Your parents betrothed you to the first son of the Han family, Taesan, in order to save your family's big business which was about to collapse. You married him at the age of nineteen, three months before your graduation. Taesan openly shows his dislike for you, he doesn't even touch you, in the early days of marriage he often shouted at you harshly. While at school, he was always close to several girls which of course made you very jealous. After all, he is your husband. But you don't know, behind his dislike for you, his feelings of love are clashing with the denial inside him, the denial that he loves you. Until finally, his feeling of denial was 'defeated' by something he saw.

• Pairings : Taesan x fem!readers

• Warnings : Early-age marriage, Taesan is a bit toxic, smut content inc : fingering, french kissing, marking, squirting, ETC... Zerobaseone RICKY; BTS Jungkook appearance, grammatical errors

You ran fast after getting off the public bus that took you to a bus stop not far from your school. You woke up late today, and Taesan didn't wake you up. He even left you at the house where you two lived. In your house, apart from you living with Taesan, you also live with three female maids, one male gardener, two male security guards, and one male driver. Your parents and Taesan's parents only gave you one car for your needs, because for them one car was enough because you didn't have children yet.

Taesan didn't use the driver provided, he preferred to drive himself. That's why he underestimates you, especially when you wake up late. He will really leave you.

This is the fifth time during your marriage that he has left you at home just because you woke up late, as a result you had to take public transportation.

You never complained about this to your parents or your in-laws, because if the four of them knew what Taesan did to you, then Taesan could be more rude to you. As a result, you just keep silent about what Taesan has been doing to you all this time.

"Sir, sorry I'm late!" You barged into your class which was currently having a math lesson. Mathematics teacher, Mr. Jeon looks at you with a sharp gaze, he never tolerates tardiness. "Where have you been?" He asked as, you gulped in genuine fear of him.

"I'm sorry, sir. I woke up late," You bit your lower lip in fear, then you glanced at Taesan who just looked at you with a mocking look. A grin appeared on his lips. "You know, I never tolerate late hours, whatever the reason. Now get out of my classroom, and stand in the field until recess!" You stared in shock when Mr Jeon gave you that punishment.

If you 'fight' him, the punishment will be even more severe, so you decide to immediately obey him. You bowed then immediately left your class to serve your punishment. Mr Jeon walked towards the classroom window to make sure you served your punishment in the field. He nodded when you were confirmed to be standing in the field.

"Why did you have the heart to do that to her?" Leehan whispered to Taesan, he couldn't bear to see you being punished by Mr. Jeon for the first time. "She deserved it, who told her to wake up late? I don't like undisciplined girls," Taesan said casually which made Leehan annoyed too. "She's your wife, Taesan! You shouldn't have acted like that to her." Hearing Leehan's sentence, Taesan just gave him a mocking look. "Wife on paper, I don't love her," Leehan restrained himself from punching his friend. He really didn't like looking at the kind Taesan.

In Taesan's core circle of friends, only five people knew that Taesan was married. They are Jaehyun, Sungho, Riwoo, Leehan and Woonhak. And the five friends supported and protected Taesan's marriage, but Taesan was not what they expected.

"Stop being stupid before you regret it, you bastard," Leehan cursed harshly at Taesan in a low tone of voice, Taesan, who was used to this, just laughed a little. He was IMMUNE to the sharp insults of his five main friends that he was a bad husband. He didn't care about that.

But sometimes, he feels strange feelings that he considers stupid. The feeling that he actually cares and really loves you. He always denied these feelings by approaching other girls to distract his thoughts.

Leehan looked pitifully at his classroom window, he saw you standing helpless in the hot morning weather. You should study with them, not be punished like this.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The morning sun is indeed healthy for the body, but not for people who haven't had breakfast like you. You've been standing there for an hour with your stomach rumbling. Of course you haven't had breakfast, because you're late for school. You don't have time just to eat a piece of bread or drink milk to fill your stomach.

The break time is still very long, and every second your head hurts more and more because of the effects of hunger that you are experiencing. As time goes on, your vision becomes increasingly blurry and distorted. You're sure you'll faint soon.

"S-sir! I think Y/N is going to pass out!" Leehan shrieked a bit at Mr Jeon when he saw you starting to lose your balance. All attention is immediately focused on you who are on the field. Including Taesan who is now approaching the window to make sure.

Gradually, your eyes begin to close and your body seems to be blown away by the wind. Until finally you lose consciousness completely. However, before your body hit the ground, a blonde man caught your body quickly.

"FUCK!" Taesan cursed and ran out of the classroom, not caring that he was being shouted at by Mr. Jeon for leaving the classroom like that.

The blonde man wearing a sports uniform immediately took you to the infirmary along with the sports teacher who also happened to be teaching there. The blonde man looked worried because you looked pale, especially as your lips were also very dry, like you were seriously dehydrated.

When you were in the infirmary, the blonde man immediately put you on the bed provided there and the school doctor immediately moved quickly to treat you. "Ricky, call her homeroom teacher! She's Y/N from class 3-3," The sports teacher immediately ordered the blonde man named Ricky to call your homeroom teacher.

Not long after Ricky went out to call your homeroom teacher, Taesan entered the infirmary with a panicked face, followed by Leehan. "What happened?" Taesan asked with a flat expression, but his heart was also beating fast because he saw you lying unconscious.

"What are you doing here?" The sports teacher immediately turned to ask Taesan and Leehan because suddenly they were here, even though it was still class time. "None of your business, old man!" Taesan answered sharply, which was immediately rewarded with a piercing gaze from the sports teacher. Leehan panicked because Taesan actually shouted harshly at their sports teacher.

Taesan approaches you who is being examined by the doctor who is also trying to revive you. He without hesitation checked your body temperature by touching your forehead. Feels hot.

Not long after, your homeroom teacher arrived followed by Ricky behind her. Taesan immediately looked at Ricky cynically, as if he was his enemy. He crumpled the white shirt he was wearing while looking at Ricky.

"What actually happened?" Your homeroom teacher asked worriedly when he saw your really weak condition. "I saw that she was dizzy. When I ran to her, she immediately fainted," Ricky answered in a worried tone too, making Taesan glare at him even more sarcastically. He indirectly shows that he hates you being touched by other people. "Mr. Jeon punished him for coming late too, ma'am. "I think she didn't have breakfast, that's why she fainted," Leehan added to Ricky's words as well.

Your homeroom teacher nods in understanding, he now understands why you are like this. You were punished under the hot sun and didn't have breakfast, as a result you fainted.

"Fuck you, Mr Jeon!" Taesan cursed in his heart, these two people, Ricky and Mr. Jeon really seemed to light his true fire of anger. He was not aware when he experienced this.

He stroked your hand for less than five seconds then walked over to Ricky, whispering sharply to him. "Get away from her or you'll end up in my hands, Shen!" Taesan lightly hit Ricky's stomach, making Ricky shocked because he was 'attacked' secretly by Taesan. Taesan roughly bumped Ricky's shoulder and then immediately left the infirmary.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

School hours have finished. You walked limply to your class because of Taesan's orders. He asks you to meet him in class, but at school it's really very quiet, meaning students aren't passing by anymore at school.

You pushed open the door to your classroom, seeing Taesan standing near the window, looking at the view outside the classroom. When he heard the sound of the classroom door opening, he immediately looked at you. Your face is still pale, but it's getting better.

"What is it? We should be going home, not here," you asked weakly, but instead got Taesan's sarcastic laugh. "Have you finished your drama, princess? Or do you want to make a new drama tomorrow?" Taesan's question made you confused. "Drama? What are you saying? I don't understand," you looked at him strangely.

Taesan squeezed the coffee cup in his hand then looked at you sharply. "You ask? Today you've done drama, looking for Shen's attention by fainting in front of him, eh?" You looked at Taesan in disbelief, because he had the heart to say that you did a drama. "I don't do drama, Taesan. I'm really sick, I don't even know who helped me before, I'm really dizzy and hungry," You try to remain calm when defending yourself in front of someone who you might actually punch for speaking out of turn.

"You'd never fainted before, and Shen happened to be having sport class. I know he's among the richest students here, that's why you're trying to get close to him, right? Do you want to use him like your parents used my family to help your family's failing business?" You glared angrily when Taesan even discussed your parents which had nothing to do with the case of you fainting at school.

"Don't bring up my parents—"

"Gosh, I shouldn't be surprised if you want to cheat on me with another man. Because you are just like your parents, hungry for money and power just to save their failing business," Taesan cut you off sharply, you squeezed your school vest tightly, trying your best not to slap this person who has the status of your husband. "Cheating on you? I never intended to ruin my own marriage, because after all this is part of my life. "Aren't you the one who often cheats on me with several girls at this school even though you pretend to only be friends with them," You twist Taesan's words which makes him even more annoyed.

His hand immediately grabbed your neck which made you jump in surprise because of the sudden attack he made. "Disgusting girl! How dare you slander me!" Taesan shouted loudly, his dominant aura began to radiate sharply like a werewolf which immediately made you shrink.

He pushed you against the whiteboard which made you groan in pain from hitting your shoulder and head. The look in his eyes really seemed to pierce your eyes, you were panting and weak. Tried to take his hand off you, but you didn't have the strength to do that.

Taesan saw your gaze that was begging for forgiveness, because your mouth was too tight to speak. He seemed to be possessed by a demon who was more inclined towards malice. Not malice towards you, but towards Ricky. He hated that he touched you before him. A defeat of his FAKE feelings began to emerge, and his TRUE feelings began to dominate him.

With jealousy welling up in his body, Taesan roughly kissed your lips like a hungry lion. You were shocked when Taesan gave you a kiss for the first time even though it was rough. His tongue forced its way in to explore your sweet mouth.

Being carried away by the game, you returned Taesan's kiss no less hungry. You moaned in between your kisses with Taesan, awakening something inside Taesan.

Heat began to spread into both of your bodies, moans full of desire interlocked even though you and Taesan were just making out hotly.

Taesan's kisses went down to your smooth neck which made you immediately hold onto his shoulders tightly because you were maintaining your balance which had weakened because of what he was doing. "Taesan-ah," You whined as Taesan started licking your neck wildly. You could feel his wet tongue as if it was painting your neck.

Taesan's hand which was originally on your neck went down to your thigh, he groped your thigh passionately. You shuddered when you felt his large hand grope your thigh.

Until finally he lowers your safety shorts slowly. His palm touched your wet panties, he knew you were turned on by what he was doing. "T-Taesan—"

"Why? Am I not allowed to touch my wife intimately?" He looked into your eyes looking shocked at what he was doing right now. There was no answer, Taesan inserted two fingers into your pussy in one fell swoop. You felt how his finger could enter your pussy quite deep, making you whine like a baby.

His hand began to move pumping your pussy at a moderate pace. Making you moan louder because of the great movements of his fingers. Taesan felt how wet you were for him, and it filled him with great pride.

"Ta-Taesan, so good, it's so good," You were looking up with your mouth wide open, really giving him a slut look. "Yeah, you like that, doll? You like me fingering your wet pussy, eh?” Taesan bit his lip at how sexy you are when you are helpless in his grasp. His thumb was now playing with your swollen clit which was also begging for attention. Your eyes rolled upwards with the heaven you were experiencing.

"Fuck! I should have touched you from the start! You are so fucking pretty! My fucking pretty wife!" Taesan said with a low growl, making you clench around his fingers at the praise he gave you. Especially when he added the word 'wife'. "Taesan, I want to cum, please," you whined feeling like a wave was going to explode inside you.

"Wanna cum? Tell me who you belong to, doll! Tell me who Owns you before I allow you to cum," Taesan demands you say the thing he really wants right now.

"Oh Taesan, I'm yours! I am yours! Please make me cum!” You whine because you don't have the strength to release the cum you're holding in. Taesan smiles with satisfaction and then sucks on your neck until it causes quite big red spots.

"Cum, doll. Cum on my fingers," Taesan whispered in his deep voice. You clenched tightly around his two digits then a liquid squirted out of your pussy. Taesan felt like his finger was being splashed with something, he knew you were squirting, not just cum.

Your breath is out of breath as this is the first time in your life that you are squirting profusely and the person doing this is your husband. Your head is dizzy because your height is completely out of your control. Taesan pulls his finger out then licks it without a trace, you clench around nothing seeing him clean your juices on his finger.

Taesan tidied you up after he sprayed hand sanitizer on his hands. Your face still looks shocked by what just happened. When you didn't dare look at his face, his hand immediately stroked your hair, as if you were his precious diamond. "Leehan was right, I was really stupid for not caring about a pretty diamond like you," He spoke softly which made you immediately look at him with an even more shocked gaze, and at the same time you didn't understand why he had suddenly changed like this.

"My love is so hidden that you can't feel it, I was really beaten to death by the feeling of denial that I experienced, even though in fact I really love you," He said softly which now made you even more shocked, his hand touched your cheek. "Mine, you are mine. I am your husband forever, be a complete Mrs. Han for me," You looked at him in disbelief, not believing that he now sincerely loves you, even claiming that you are only his.

"You are mine too, don't take your eyes off me again, Taesan. I hate it," You looked at Taesan with a sad look, Taesan smiled faintly, he kissed your lips briefly then took you into his arms. "I won't do that again, you are completely my princess, doll," Taesan said softly then kissed your head repeatedly.

His love for you is now no longer hidden, he has overcome his stupid feelings that said he wouldn't or couldn't love you forever.

#boynextdoor imagines #boynextdoor x reader #boynextdoor taesan #taesan smut #bnd smut #boynextdoor smut

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etirabys · 20 days

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Apologies if this is personal and you don't want to answer (or you don't want to answer for any other reason!); if that is the case no worries. But anyway by virtue of the fact that I am (sort of) a linguist I often get curious about people's language situation. You speak English obviously but spent your childhood in Korea, and often went to the English language book store while there? What is like, your personal linguistic history? Like, what language(s) did you grow up speaking, which ones did you learn later and when, etc? How fluent do you consider yourself in both English and Korean? If you don't mind my asking.

Haha, this is a dream scenario for me (someone asking about a situation I find fascinating about myself because I've never met anyone else with that background, but is probably boring to most people). Here's a longer story than you probably want:

My parents emigrated to the US before I was born, stayed for a decade, and moved back to Korea right after I was born. They're conversational in English, and my sister (12 years my elder) is fluent. Speaking English is valuable in Korea, so they raised me to be bilingual. They taught me the alphabet, bought me English language children's books, and sent me to an English language school run by Christian missionaries for preschool, kindergarten, and part of first grade.

My sister left the country when I was three to go to a boarding school in the US, but she came back every year for holidays, spoke exclusively in English to me, and refused to let the conversation move on if I mispronounced a word.

When I was six, my parents moved further away from the missionaries' school and switched me to a neighborhood public elementary school. At this point I was mildly more fluent in English than in Korean. Reading (English books) was a self-sustaining reaction I spent every free hour on. There were fewer interesting Korean books for children. Korea had industrialized ~30 years prior, and the hangeul writing system had only been in full use ~50 years at that point. As far as I knew, there was no CS Lewis of Korea, no Tolkien, no Diana Wynne Jones. In Korean bookstores, many of the prominent books on display were translated – The Little Prince was popular for children, and there was a children's fiction fad around another French author (who afaik never made a splash in the States) whose name I forget.

So I'm reading like 10 hours a day, at the dinner table, on the escalator when my mom takes me while she's shopping, sometimes under the desk at school flipping the pages with my toes, because the teachers don't care. (This is a huge W as far as I'm concerned for Korea – public school teaching is a somewhat competitive and standardized government job, it attracts people who lack great passion for either teaching or controlling children.) Meanwhile my peers don't like me much because my vibes are rancid: I have a compulsive laugh tic I haven't gotten under control, and I don't seem to understand their preferences very well or actively seek to understand them. Fair enough. I have one friend at any given time and she's usually on the fence about me.

When I'm old enough to take the train on my own, some weekends my mom gives me 5000 won for the train ticket + lunch, and I go into Seoul to visit one bookstore that has a 10-shelf English section. I pick a book, spend the day finishing it, and go home. Instead of my English language skills lapsing and being overtaken by the language I'm immersed in, I'm going deeper into English. Which increased the disconnect between me and my peers. I remember overhearing a conversation about an anime (The Black Cat) and eagerly asking if they'd also read the Edgar Allen Poe short story. I wanted to much to talk about shared interests, but it didn't occur to me to "invite myself into their interests" by picking up the manga they talked about.

...this all made my childhood weird in ways that have shaped me hugely but are difficult to describe. I was isolated and not, happy and not, stimulated and not, developing unevenly...

At eleven I discover fanfiction.net, probably one of the most impactful events of my life. I'm running out of physical books, I've read everything five or ten times, but then the computer! has made a deal with me! It contains INFINITE LITERATURE, although sometimes people seemed to misspell things on purpose and I didn't know why. (I had, approximately, never encountered misspellings in written material before.) In return the internet would take MY SOUL FOREVER although I didn't realize this at the time. I post a 100K Harry Potter epic over the next year where Harry is trained by a special assassin cult that lives under a mountain.

My parents have no idea what is on the internet. They're on a new temporal continent with no clue there's a parasite that can turn your daughter into a fujoshi. They do know that they have a worrying child. But! Her grades are really good, especially when she's testing in English. Good enough that although they originally intended not to send me to the US (my sister got depressed and burned out, and they attributed it to sending her to a different country for school), it made much more sense for me to go. I was on track to get a full ride at an Ivy, a carrot they were Not Immune to, and I obviously despised Korea and wanted to leave.

When I arrived in the States, I was terrified of speaking English to real native speakers. My language experience was "reading/writing: 95% English, speaking/listening: 90% Korean". I could perfectly pronounce any English sentence when I tried, but I'd occasionally and bizarrely mix up R and L, or the vowel sounds "ih" and "eeh" if I weren't paying attention. This went away after a year but I felt extra shy and didn't talk much. I'd guess 80% of my social cachet in freshman year came from writing funny Facebook posts.

I remember my time in Korea without feeling bothered by any single aspect, but overall I still have a big sense of "wow I didn't like that", have avoided non-Americanized Korean people since getting here (ten years ago), and now speak Korean haltingly. I'll try to teach it to my children so that they have the option of that cultural connection, but I don't think I can do a good job. It's feels 90% true thinking/speaking Korean is just a normal skill, a thing I do sometimes on the phone – and 10% true that the happier and more whole I become in the US, the more unsettling it feels to speak Korean at all.

#dashreplies #max1461 #oof this is long. i'm like a slowly spinning pipe and if you whistle down me on the right day i'll just blare all this stuff out.#mixed feelings of wanting ppl to Get It (gestures at above) vs not wanting to overnarrativize – it's too easy to emphasize the wrong things #the way i explain this is often unsatisfying – which is why the above got so long – I'm trying not to condense in ways that feel wrong

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esmiara · 1 year

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As promised, let me introduce you my two beloved BSD OCs:

Who are they?

Basically, Lewis and Antoine are two friends traveling around the world to discover exciting places while avoiding various government forces (more on that later). Though not related to the main story of BSD, they do know about organisations like Port Mafia and the Agency, mainly from what they heard in the streets and read in the newspapers since they arrived in Yokohama. However, they do prefer to not get anyone involved in their issues, nor do they really want to get involved in anyone else’s.

Lewis Carroll

Based on the author of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis was a man in his thirties with a fancy mind. As a child, he once had a wild imagination feeding his ability Wonderland (again, more on that later) but due to social and family pressure, he got forced upon a path of logic and perfection, now making it hard for him to think outside the box. Thus crushing his past self involuntarily and putting chains on his own mind in order to protect himself from outside complaints. As an adult, he became a plain math teacher for children, with a quite boring life. That is, until he met one certain child in London.

Their meeting

“Draw me a sheep.” said the unknown child out of the blue.

Lewis was stunned. He didn’t knew what to respond at first to this child, which he thought was one of his students. But when he put more thought on it, he didn’t looked like any child he had at the time. Who might have been this strange blond kid with unkept clothes? He decided to learn more about him, worried he may have lost his parents somewhere. However, as they talked, he quickly understood he didn’t had any. He simply didn’t knew about any “parents”. Actually, he didn’t knew much about the world itself either.

“Draw me a sheep!” repeated the child after a while of interrogative discussion about who he was, where he came from etc....

Lewis gently asked why such a demand, as he didn’t want to offend this possible lost orphan.

The boy fell silent. Then spoke again, a sad emptiness darkening his young blue eyes.

“I want a warm friend to bring with me” he simply responded.

Their exchange may have been succinct up to this point, but it was clear to Lewis that he was no normal child. As the boy seemingly didn’t have a name, Lewis gave him the name of one of his most beloved book’s author. The character of that one book simply reminded him of the boy.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

More based on the Little Prince’s main character than the actual author, Antoine was an enigmatic individual with the physical appearance of a young boy. Nobody knows of his real age, not even himself. However, most may have theorized that he at least was around for at least a few decades, if not centuries perhaps. One day found and caught by the french government in his - supposedly - hometown, he had no memories of his time before then, except for some vague fragments. He mostly remembered about this laboratory he was brought in, with a lonely room where he would occasionnally meet strangers dressed in white. Despite the many uncertainties surrounding him, Antoine was still of great interest for scientists. He didn't seemed to physically age at all. Could he hold the secret of cells regeneration or even immortality? They soon found out he did age but at a very slow pace, thus looking unchanged for many years.

Curious about this plausible new ability, they decided to make him meet a young girl, who would share his room from now on. This one girl was quite arrogant at first. Antoine didn't really like her attitude but she was the only other person he could befriend. So they did. They soon became friends. Then they learned more about the truth, may it be this girl's past, snatched from her orphanage to become a lab rat as well, or the whole reason why she was here with him in the first place.

It was all because of the young girl's ability. One that would let her copy another one and make it her own. They apparently wished to make a copy of test subject B612′s power in order to "save it” somewhere and be able to experiment on it without having to risk the boy’s life. But things didn't turned out like they wanted as the girl began to crumble under some unknown sickness. Her body couldn't handle Antoine's ability, so it seemed, and she quickly became unable to move. So she made a promise with Antoine:

“Be my eyes and explore the outer world, okay dumby?” she said, with little breath she had left.

A promise reminiscent of the one where they would explore and see the world together. One where he would do so if she couldn't follow, to make her dream come true even when she became a star.

Their abilities

Little prince

No one really knows the details about Antoine's ability. Everything we know for sure is that his body has a very long lifetime, yet not immortal. He is destined to die of aging one day and is still weak to any wound like anyone else. However, we did notice Antoine's body starts to produce a faint glow whenever he gets sick or when his life is in danger in general. Not that it really helps at all though.

Wonderland

Lewis' ability is a bit complex and confusing, much like Alice in Wonderland's whole world.

In theory, Wonderland is quite simple: it allows its bearer to create anything he thinks to be a nonsense, something that is normally impossible. It could be seen as an area surrounding the user, in which he can create anything he wants, as long as it meets the proper requirements (being a "nonsense").

However, as the whole definition of "nonsense" depends on the user's mind, one could have a hard time creating anything. As such, what could be a nonsense to someone isn't necessarily one for Lewis. He is still quite a peculiar man after all.

A strange man, but with many restrictions on his mind and imagination. As he was forced to think with logic for the most part of his life now, he can't stop asking himself about the specifics of one’s question. Where a visible nonsense would occur, Lewis' mind would subconsciously ponder over what could make it truly real or impossible. If he can't get proper answers to those questions, then it can't happen either.

The beginning of their adventures

As they became much closer as people who somehow understood each other, Lewis began to be more friendly with the child, rather than looking like a mere adult talking to a little one. He saw himself in his struggles. He saw a young mind, much like his own a long time ago, slowly getting crushed by adult's expectations and limiting his own thoughts. He couldn't let the same thing happen twice when they still had a choice. So he encouraged him to get creative and let free of his imagination, with no worries about exterior opinions.

One day however, they suddenly got caught off guard by militaries sent by the french government as well as some members of the Order of the Clocktower, there to retrieve the unknown child for their own purpose instead. It was at that time that Lewis was finally able to make use of his ability once more after so many years. Inspired by Antoine’s naturally spoken nonsense, he unleashed Wonderland in order to escape. This also put a permanent stop to Lewis’ normal way of life, as he now was as searched for as Antoine was. It was time for a involuntary trip around the world, it seemed. But this time, Antoine wasn’t alone anymore.

#bungou stray dogs #bungo stray dogs #bsd oc #bsd #bsd ocs #esmi ocs #bsd art #idk which tags to put at this point #long post #some angst #oc

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darkficsyouneveraskedfor · 8 months

Text

Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows 2

Warnings: non/dubcon, clashing personalities, exclusion, and other dark elements. My username actually says you never asked for any of this.

Characters: moody boy Curtis Everett x bubbly, plus-size reader

My warnings are not exhaustive but be aware this is a dark fic and may include potentially triggering topics. Please use your common sense when consuming content. I am not responsible for your decisions.

As usual, I would appreciate any and all feedback. I’m happy to once more go on this adventure with all of you! Thank you in advance for your comments and for reblogging.

Your second day isn’t as intimidating. You find your desk by yourself and even remembered your honey bear mug! You tuck your bag underneath as your computer boots and check your phone for any updates from your blog. Nothing special, just a hobby.

You yawn and sign in, taking two tries to remember your credentials correctly. You check the shared calendar and see that you have a meeting after lunch with IT. Daniella mentioned you had to get your security passes before the end of the week, that’s probably what that’s for.

You swivel back and forth as you open up your training list. You’re making good progress. You think. You don’t really know. It seems like a lot and despite feeling as if you’ve run a marathon, there are only a few ticks marked off.

Before you dive in, you need a pick-me-up. You really liked that butterscotch coffee but you might try something new. You enter the kitchen and wait behind a woman you don’t know as she brews her coffee. When she’s done, she returns your ‘good morning’ but doesn’t stop to chat. Must be a busy day.

You place your cup on the tray and pick out a French Vanilla pod. You don’t really know what the difference between regular vanilla and French vanilla is. Maybe the French stuff is fancy. Ooh la la.

You hum as the coffee grinds. It sounds angry. Well, it is probably the most overworked fellow in this place. Every day, seeing the heart caffeine hounds, having them poke his face, and glare until he does his jobs.

It’s a machine. Your mother always said you put a bit too much empathy into objects without sentience. Well, your English teacher shouldn’t have made you read that book about Electric Sheep or whatever.

Your cup is full and you grab it, focused on putting the lid on it to keep it nice and warm. As you turn, you fail to stop in time. Your hand knocks against the man’s chest and you gasp as coffee splashes onto his dark shirt. Not much as you manage to block most of it but enough to make him grunt and step back.

It’s him! Oh no. You’ve upset him again.

“I’m sorry, mister,” you say as you hold out your dripping cup, “I didn’t hear you. You sure are quiet.”

He grumbles and stomps to the sink, slamming his mug down as he snatches paper towels from the dispenser. You bite your lip nervously and near. You keep your cup from dripping onto your light blue cardigan with the little white clouds.

“Can I have some–”

He wipes his hands and shirt with a growl. He swipes up his cup without and answer and moves around you to the coffee machine. His cup hits the tray hard and he jabs the screen as it beeps at him in demand of a pod. He takes one and peels open the package before shoving it inside.

“I’m really sorry,” you say as you dry off your cup and fix the lid firmly, “you snuck up on me… like a wolf.”

He shakes his head and looks at the ceiling. He’s tall, his posture is straight and unbending, making you more conscious of your slouching. He wears all black that day, it makes him look lean, and the silver rings shine around his fingers. You only then notice the stud in his ear.

“Oh! I like your earring–”

“Why are you talking to me?” He snarls without looking at you.

You recoil and sputter. You’re not being rude. You’re just trying to be nice. He reminds you of that guy in university who used to call you airhead.

“Because… I wanna?” You say with a shrug, “I still didn’t get your name.”

“Look, I’m not interested in making friends. I come in,” he takes his cup from the tray, “do my work,” he points at you past the porcelain, “and I mind my goddamn business.”

He turns and strides out, another beastly sneer rolling out of him. You furrow your brow and pout at the door. Tammy enters with her own mug, a bright pink thing with a picture of Dolly Parton on it. Ah, you get it, 9-5.

“Ugh, that man is always in a mood,” she says.

“Yeah…” you agree thinly.

“Try not to get in his way. Five years and he’s never said a word to me. It’s too bad, he’s not bad on the eyes.”

You don’t acknowledge her last sentence. It’s not very appropriate for the workplace and she’s married. Quite happily as she only ever talks about her husband. You tell her to enjoy her coffee and go back to your desk.

Maybe you should just steer clear. Eat at your desk or somewhere else.

#curtis everett #dark curtis everett #dark!curtis everett #curtis everett x reader #drabble #series #au #sunshine lollipops and rainbows #snowpiercer

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agendabymooner · 8 months

Text

about names: an amazing boy with an amazing name || cl16 scenario (1)

dad!charles leclerc x mom!ofc (hearth sister!ofc)

EXTENSION OF OF LONG LINES AND NAMES AND THE LECLERC DAYCARE

Summary: The Leclerc boys and their names go hand in hand. OR times when Charles and his wife Aimee had to explain that their children’s names are meaningful.

Scenario summary: Charles and Aimee wondered what Hervé meant when he said that his name was silly and that he hated it. Thank goodness, Pascale Leclerc was the one that the boy cannot refuse as she comforts her grandson.

Content warning: Kids teasing kids, possible use of explicit language, fluff, dad!Charles content, the Leclerc family (Pascale and Leclerc brothers) content, briefly mentions Charles' dad, crappy French translations by Apple, sad kids being comforted, fluff, what is beta reading we write things at 2am and post it after lol

Note: One more before I dash out of my dorm for the day lmfaoo

masterlist

Aimee Leclerc was no stranger to chatty kids and pick-up schedules, so it was no wonder why she immediately found herself in front of the elementary school that stood gloriously in the middle of Monte-Carlo as she waited for her two children to be dismissed from the class for the day.

It was a routine of hers now that her work in McLaren had become remote. Five children took up all of her time and between them and her work— she would’ve immediately left the company if the team made her choose. She’d rather be in Monaco while Charles continued to pursue his career as a racing driver.

Zak Brown was empathetic enough to understand that a set of children wouldn’t be able to have a stable routine should they continue to travel around the world just to be with their parents who worked overseas, offering Aimee a chance to work at home and adapt to a better routine as she took care of her children.

She could wait patiently if anybody ever asked her. She had no problem, knowing that she was able to finish her work long before she could pick up her eldest children.

But the energy that her children had shown merely told her enough: they might have been either excited to see her or they thought that she was rushing them. She caught a glimpse of her twins as they stepped out of the elementary school, their uniforms somehow tidy and less wrinkled despite their busy day.

“Maman! Devinez quoi?” Guess what? Jules jumped excitedly as he wrapped his arms around Aimee tightly, still jumpy and giddy as he spoke in English, “We did our quiz in maths!”

“Oh? Is that right, J?” Aimee asked with a smile, her fingers running through her son’s wavy hair. It was surprising how her children’s hair continued to lose its volume as years passed— it was becoming more like Charles’ hair.

They were mini Charleses, indeed.

“Yes, Maman! I also— uh…” It seemed like Jules ran out of English immediately as he said, “J'ai fait si bien! Je n'ai perdu qu'un point!” I did so good! I only lost one point!

Aimee was merely thankful that she could understand French and Italian, or rather, she was thankful her private teacher taught her how to speak those languages; otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to understand her multilingual-speaking children.

She primarily spoke English and had grown up practicing a standard accent in her Received Pronunciation. She never adapted to her husband’s speaking style, but learned to understand it nevertheless. Their children were being raised in Monaco, after all, and most people spoke in French or Italian. She was only thankful that she was able to teach them to speak English to preserve that part of them. Most of their cousins are raised in England and this gave them the opportunity to converse in that language.

Anyways.

Aimee beamed at her son and exclaimed, “A good job done, Jules!” Then she turned to look at her other son, who was unusually quiet for such a normal day. Hervé, as Aimee learned while nurturing her ever-growing children, was never quiet — he was one of the boys who would often cause ruckus inside the Leclerc home. If he’s silent like this then Aimee knew he was feeling something along the lines of upset.

Hervé was never upset. He was so much like his grandfather— his namesake. So joyous. Why was he feeling so down? Aimee didn’t know.

“Hervé, my love,” Aimee called softly, but he couldn’t hear. Jules turned to look at his twin and noticed the boy disassociated, giving his brother’s shirt a tug as Hervé finally looked up. The Leclerc matriarch (2.0) smiled gently and asked, “Is it a long day for you?”

“Oui, Maman,” he replied quietly, offering her a nod and nothing more.

Aimee had led them to the Aston Martin family SUV as soon as he answered and drove off to head home. Jules was chatting Aimee’s ears off and it somehow defeaned her. It wasn’t because Jules was loud, no; Hervé wasn’t even talking, and his silence defeaned her.

“Herb,” she called as she looked at the rear view mirror, noticing how his jaw clenched before crossing his arms. “Hervé?”

“Stupid, silly name,” Jules hadn’t seen Hervé mutter those words beneath his breath but Aimee certainly had, leaving the mother confused. What the hell was happening?

“H,” Aimee called once more. Hervé’s angry eyes finally looked up to meet Aimee’s worried ones. Even if she wanted to remind him to calm down, she knew that it would lead to his outburst so she avoided it and asked, “Da’s home? Do you want to tell him about your maths quiz today? Maybe you and Jules can show him the art you made for Mademoiselle Blanc?”

“Hmp,” the eldest Leclerc twin huffed, turning away from his mother and looking out the window.

Jules’s eyes narrowed as he gave a brief glimpse at Aimee, turning towards his twin, “Are you okay, H?”

“Oui,” Hervé muttered, acting as some sort of assurance, but this only made Jules look at his mother with worry. Aimee flashed a smile at her son before continuing to drive on the way home. It was another thing that the Leclerc boys had gotten from their father; they were bad liars.

It only got worse when Aimee pulled up to their driveway, and the boys made their way inside. Jules dashed out of the car with his backpack to navigate his way around the house, trying to find their father before he gasped, “Da!”

Aimee watched her other son carefully, trying to read Hervé’s behaviour as he walked past Aimee. She still wasn’t sure what was going on.

“Oh! Hello, Jules!” Charles Leclerc, a Ferrari driver who had just returned from a doubleheader, grinned gracefully at the sight of his son. In his arm was one of his young twins, Anthoine — or Tony, for most people — while the other half of the pair, Alain, sat on the playmat with his book propped open. “Comment va l'école aujourd'hui?” How is school today?

“Very good, Da!” Jules grinned toothily, “Madame Hurst m'a donné une étoile pour mon quiz de mathématiques!” Mrs. Hurst gave me a star for my maths quiz!

“Ah, really? Cela signifie que vous avez fait un excellent travail en étudiant avec maman alors,” it means you’ve done a good job at studying with Mummy, then. Charles glanced past Aimee’s legs, seeing the other pair of his twins as he greeted the quiet boy, “Bonjour, Hervé. Comment allez-vous?” Good afternoon, Hervé. How are you?

“D'accord, Da,” Fine. Hervé muttered, his irritation noticed easily by his father as Charles scowled lightly. Every adult in their family knew that it meant trouble if Charles gave this look.

At first, the Ferrari driver tried to make a light of the situation, “Why the long face, Hervé? The more you do that, the more you’ll look like your Uncle Toto. Give Da a smile?”

“No,” but Hervé wasn’t having it as he snapped at his father firmly, the tip of his ears turning red as he stomped off.

“No?”

“Don’t call me that!” Hervé snapped, his eyes turning dark as he got angry and upset.

“What? Hervé—“ Charles tried to reason out, but the 7-year-old was anything but reasonable at the moment.

“I’m not Hervé! Don’t call me that! It’s a stupid name!”

Charles could have sworn that he, too, was seeing red as he placed the toddler in his arms before marching off the playroom. He followed after his son and exclaimed, “Hervé Louis Sebastien René Mathieu Leclerc! Come back here!”

“No! No more talking! Leave me alone, Da!”

Thud. The boy had just slammed the door on his father’s face, and Charles— Charles was fuming.

He loves his boys dearly; he does. But it was moments like this that somehow made him different from the loving father that he is. He wasn’t even sure why he was so upset— was it because of the fact that his son just yelled that he didn’t want to talk, or did he just hear his son say that his father’s name was stupid? He wasn’t sure.

He was just… upset and confused.

Charles wasn’t sure where he’d gone wrong with becoming a parent to his sons. He did everything he could despite being a busy driver— he took care of them whenever Aimee was out, he taught them how to be kind to other people and he taught them how to love. Hervé had never been this upset before and it bothered Charles and Aimee to no end. What was he genuinely upset about?

Then they both recalled what the boy said. Hervé wasn’t his name. He thought that the name was silly, from what Aimee had told Charles. Where did that even come from?

“I— truthfully, I don’t even know where that came from, Charles,” Aimee admitted as she sat with him on the couch that night, sighing heavily while the driver rested his head against his hand.

They tried asking the boy, from asking him to come down for dinner (with Aimee giving up and leaving a bowl of rice and chicken in front of his door) to Charles asking to come into his room (with Charles not receiving any form of response). But alas, Hervé had no response. He didn’t even respond when they tried to ask if he’d like to come over to his Uncle Lorenzo or Arthur’s place.

No luck.

“He didn’t mention anything at all,” she continued, keeping her voice down to avoid waking any of their children up. “He was muttering to himself, I’ve no bloody clue he was upset.”

“I didn’t know either,” Charles murmured, grabbing a hold of her hand and kissing the knuckles of it. “He isn’t normally like this— he’d tell us if there’s something wrong.”

It was true. Hervé, much like the other Leclerc children, never got into a fight with a friend before. He was upfront about his feelings and would tell either his parents or playmate about being upset. There were some instances when he almost snapped but otherwise managed to control his emotions— he was so much like his brothers and mother in a sense. Aimee always approached them with the five-finger solution before they could even burst into tears or anger.

So, for Hervé to keep quiet?

Even Aimee couldn’t get an answer from him. What did he mean by his name was a stupid name? Charles asked himself this a couple of times.

His name was Hervé— that was a typical French name, no? What made Hervé think that his name, his late grandfather’s name, was silly? Charles tried approaching his son about the matter every minute since the boys got home from school, but much to his dismay, the boy evaded him.

But there was only one person that Hervé wouldn’t refuse to answer. Much like his late grandfather, Hervé never refused his Mamé.

So the next day, Pascale Leclerc — the grandmother of the Leclerc boys — took the liberty to have a day off with the upset boy. Jules felt incomplete without Hervé in the school but went nonetheless, and the five-year-old boy PJ went to kindergarten while Aimee, Charles and the youngest twins went out. Pascale stayed at home with Hervé and baked cookies with him.

After putting the cookie dough into the preheated oven, Pascale served the boy some tea, to which Hervé gratefully drank as his grandmother sat across from him.

She sighed and placed a hand on his knee, “Est-il vrai que tu t'es fâché contre ton père, Hervé?” Is it true that you got angry with your dad, Hervé? She asked, her question leaving him frozen as he looked at Pascale guiltily.

Hervé carefully sat his mug down on the table and nodded solemnly, not uttering a word. Pascale asked, “Has it been a rough day for you? That’s why you got angry?”

Hervé shook his head as Pascale suggested, “Veux-tu dire à Mamé ce qui t'a mis en colère? Peut-être pouvons-nous trouver une solution ensemble?” Will you tell Mamé what has gotten you angry? Maybe we can find a solution together?

The longer the silence lasted, the more the tears flowed out of Hervé’s eyes as his lips pursed and trembled. The poor boy couldn’t help but stammer, “Mon nom est tellement silly et stupide, Mamé!” My name is so silly and stupid! He continued to cry out, “Kylian a dit que mon nom venait de «Herbe et fromage» et c'est très stupide! Je n'aime pas mon nom, Mamé!” Kylian said that my name came from ‘Herb and cheese’ and that it’s stupid! I don’t like my name, Mamé!

Pascale’s eyes nearly teared up at the confession that Hervé made. He hated his name because someone made him feel like it wasn’t worth appreciating. Her poor grandson was subjected to this kind of behaviour, which felt so… disheartening.

“Oh, Hervé,” Pascale immediately reached out to soothe the boy, shushing him quietly while he sobbed. His eyes shut as tears continued to flow down, soaking Pascale’s cardigan in the process. “Your name is not stupid or silly; did you know that?”

His crying lasted for several minutes, with Pascale patiently soothing him in the process. When his sobbing quietened, Pascale took this as an opportunity to tell him about his name.

She sighed shakily, not wanting to shed a tear or two as she explained, “Da, Uncle Lorenzo and Uncle Arthur had their own Da— you have seen him before in the pictures, oui?” She felt the boy nod through her chest as she hummed and continued, “That was your Papy. Do you know what his name was? His name was Hervé.”

“Her—“ the boy hiccuped. “Hervé? Like me?”

“Oui, mon amour,” Pascale replied with a soft smile, “Hervé like you.”

“You are sooo much like your Papy Hervé, that is why Maman and Da named you after him,” Pascale continued, “you are as funny and happy as him. When he was still alive I used to call him Herb. I loved him so much, mon chou.

“And when he was gone, your Da and your uncles filled the rest of the space in my heart that you and your brothers soon took over,” Pascale smiled, “and I think that your name is beautiful like it is with my Herb’s.”

“It is?”

“Oui, my love,” Pascale replied, “your name is what keeps your Papy’s memories alive for your Da and your uncles. Do not let anyone think that it is a silly name because you are an amazing boy with an amazing name. Your Maman and Da love you so much, and your Da? He loved his Papa so much that he decided to name another person he loved after him. That’s you, mon cœur.”

Ever since then, Hervé learned how to embrace his name and would often explain to everyone where his name came from, even in the grid and paddock.

Nobody needed to ask where his name came from— after all, he is Hervé Leclerc. He was just as joyful and enthusiastic as his grandfather.

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misguidedasgardian · 9 months

Text

I need to... (4)

... Have fun

MASTERLIST

Summary: Jace says you missed all the fun events for the beginning of the school year, well, except for this one, the annual bonfire and hunt

Pairings: Cregan Stark x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Mentions of past depression and toxic relationship, cursing, might be underage drinking (depends on the country), eating meat, mentions of an inappropriate relationship, might miss some warnings

Wordcount: 4,1 k

Notes: DUDESSSS I SAID JACE WAS A VELARYON, BUT IN THIS STORY, HE IS A STRONG, JEJEJE JACAERYS STRONG muahaha, sorry it scaped me…for in this AU, there is no incest no no, (Laenor and Rhaenyra were cousins or sm), anyways, Rhaenyra married Harwin, and had her three beautiful legitimate Strong Boys <3

“I’m Cregan Stark”, he greeted

“Nice to meet you”, you managed to mumble, smiling apologetically

Jace’s roommate didn't change a thing in the dynamic, in fact, he enhanced it, they were even more laughs, more stories, more questions for you, more ribs, more french fries, and more beer, you knew you had BBQ sauce in your face, probably that is the reason he kept looking at you and smiling, but the conversation was so good and funny, you didn't even wanted to get up to go to the bathroom…

You were so comfortable

Until the Tavern closed and you had to go. You hugged everyone else goodbye, you still had the weekend ahead of you and you were looking forward to spending it with them.

That is when you and Jace decided that you needed to talk….

You had a coffee cup in hand, as you and Jace stood face to face in the gas station (the only thing open at that hour)

“Who wants to start?”, he said, amused

“You start”, you offered

“Well…” he scratch his chin, like some hairs wanted to come out, you giggled, jace always had this baby face but you could tell he was growing out of it quickly, “those were tormentous weeks”

“Tell me”, you encouraged, ready for anything, you had to remind yourself continuously that you were thousands of miles away, they couldn’t… he couldn’t… get to you anymore

“You know we live in Dragonstone, but as soon as vacations started grandpa wanted us back in King’s Landing, for election week and the holidays, my mom doesn’t like to get photographed with the other party, but we went anyways, and then, we found out”, he started very cryptically

“What?”, you murmured

“We didn’t know until I got there, you should had seen Alicent’s face, she looked like she was about to throw up”

“When doesn’t she?”, you snickered

“Aemond at first didn’t want to admit it, as always we asked about you and he didn’t want to answer, and after one week, he even reached out to me and asked me if I knew something about you, and then is when the Lannisters didn’t show… and… the bomb exploded”

“What bomb?”

“That you had ran out on him, with Ben, left him for Winterfell, and you convinced your godmother to go with you”, you opened your mouth wide in rage, “that he didn’t want to admit it, that you two had split, Alicent was so angry and disappointed, specially with the Lannisters, she knows the pull you had on them, Aemond exaggerated the whole thing”

“WHAT?”, you asked, enraged, “the matrix, the glitch and the audacity of that bitch!”

“I know there is something else to it, specially when you sent me that text”, he said, and then he looked at you expectantly

“Jace, Aemond cheated on me, with my plastic arts teacher, he knocked her up and I found out because I saw him fucking her in her desk at school”.

Jace didn’t know if to laugh, cry or throw up, and you could tell by his face

“Are you for real?”, he asked cautiously after a while

“Yes”, you murmured

“Well of course he forgot to mention that, he said that you suffered from some sort of psychotic break and left Dragonstone University with Ben Tallhear”

“Of course he did”, you mocked, sipping on your coffee, he laughed bitterly

“Are they angry about the fact that I left Aemond… or the Lannister part”

��Well, Alicent didn’t say anything in front of us, because she knows we like you, but she used very colorful and disrespectful language when your name came up”, you whined, rubbing your face with your hands, “that you were… easy”

“Of course she did”

“my mom, me and her had a huge fight over it, my mom told her probably Aemond had done something, of course, because you wouldn’t do that”

“Really?”, they defended you, you wanted to cry

“And I also believed that, it was impossible for you to do something like that without reason, and I wanted it to hear that from you, I know how you really are”, he said amicably, “and yes they called Jason and Tyland on hours on end and they couldn’t reach them, it was kind of funny actually”, he laughed, “it works for us the Strongs, and my mother you know she is a liberal…”, he teased, and you smiled

“Well, I’m glad I could be of service”, you mocked

“Did he really knock her up?”, he asked

“Well, I didn’t see a paternity test”, you offered, throwing your shoulders up, “but the dates match”

“For the gods”, whined Jace, “that is messed up”

“It is”, you sipped on your coffee, “well, not my circus, not my monkeys, at least not anymore”

“You did well in running, and I want you to know, you are still in the Strong’s christmas cards list”, he teased, and laughed

“That is all that matters”, you smiled, but then you looked at his face, the face of the guy who was once your very best friend, and you wanted to cry. Your nose tickled, preventing you for the waterworks, you sniffed

“Hey what’s going on?”, he asked, scared

“I’m sorry for ghosting you Jace”, you whined, tears in your eyes, he only shook his head and grabbed your hand in his, “I can’t say I regret the whole thing with Aemond, but that certainly I regret, you were my best friend”

“I was very angry at first, but then I could tell something else was going on, I sorry I didn’t try harder to stay”, you only shook your head, and whipped a tear from your face

“It's easy for me to say it now that I messed up and everything went to shit you know?”, you cried, “but I thought about you every day, and I missed you terribly”

“I missed you too”, he said softly, “it didn’t help that we moved to Harrenhal with my mother, but no more, right? you are here now, I’m here now, that what matters”, he said with a bright smile, “right?”

“Right”, you said back, regaining your smile

“Do you want me to put laxatives in Aemond’s food? like we did with Aegon in the Red Keep’s annual labor day party?”, you snorted a laugh

“Gods we were a menace”, you laughed

“Remember when they send us together to the therapist?”

“Yes and we made the therapist need therapy”, you laughed back

“Well, that was not our fault, you know what they say, in a blacksmith’s house, a wooden knife”, you laughed even harder

You shared smiles and meaningful looks

He walked you back to your dorm and he kept telling you about all the great things Winterfell had to offer

“What do you think about Sara?”, he asked, and you smiled

“She is great”, you said, “what do you think about Sara?”, you teased back, he blushed

“She is amazing, I like her a lot”, he said, “but… she is the younger sister of my very good friend and roommate, you know?”, he asked, “if I take a shot, I can’t miss”, he said

“You know is love when you start to sound like a sniper”, you laughed

. . .

You love it here

It had been a week and nobody had asked you what your family did for a living, nobody had judged you for bringing the same backpack for class all week, people here were different, lighter, nicer to be around.

Your classes were incredible even if you were deferred from the original course, and people there actually wanted to be teamed up with you, they were curious and open minded.

“Its a college for hippies and alternatives”

Again that annoying voice

But you also felt different, you were relaxed, open for good things to happen to you, and people here seemed to know this, you stopped trying so hard, and it came naturally

Jace had promised you in the spring was much nicer, now you couldn’t really enjoy the beautiful parks all around and inside the campus, but you just got happy by being in the roofed patios of the magnificent castle

You were waiting for your friends to finish their classes in the cafeteria, and you jumped when your phone rang in your pocket, you grabbed it and when you saw the screen it showed a really strange number, and you just didn’t pick up, you weren’t in the mood for a telemarketer, or to change your phone plan

“There you are!”, Sara greeted you, you smiled back

“Hey”, you greeted with a wide smile

“Do you have plans for the weekend?”, she asked, she always seemed like she was running a 100 miles per hour, “because there is this thing…”, you were interrupted when a commotion was being made in the entrance to the big hall, people were howling, guys, men, or that is what it seemed, entered the cafeteria running, and howling, many of them were wearing wolf masks. People started cheering and laughing, applauding, some of the guys got atop the tables and howled, they were like thirty. One of them, and one joined them, jumped in front of you in one of the large communal tables

“Wolves! wolves! wolves!”, even Sara started cheering and you did as well

“Bonfire!, Bonfire!, Bonfire!”, they started chanting. And they, when the show was over, guys howled one more time and then, they got off the tables and merged all over the people there, like nothing had happened, you and Sara looked at the two persons that got close, and then they took of their masks, it was Jace, and Cregan.

“Well, like I was saying”, continued Sara, “this weekend is Bonfire weekend, and if you have no other plans…”

“Oh, no no, your presence is mandatory I’m afraid”, chuckled Jace

“You heard him”, giggled Sara

“Bonfire then?”, you asked, Cregan was looking at you.

“We are celebrating the end of winter”, Cregan said with a smirk, “is a tradition from a thousand years ago, when they say winters lasted years, and when it showed signs the winter was yielding, they celebrated with huge bonfires, hoping to draw the old gods of winter away”

“That is beautiful”, you whispered

“Anyways, but the big bonfire goes after”, said Jace

“After what?”

“The hunt”, said Jace with a wide smile

“Like… with guns?”, Sara barked out a laugh

“No!”, she laughed, “It's about chasing people in the woods”, teased Sara

“That sounds creepy”, you whined

“Well at first it was about boys chasing girls”, said Cregan, “then it was girls chasing boys”

“And now?”, you asked

“We are still debating”, he teased and you smiled

“Anyways, the hunt starts when the sun sets, and then after a few hours of harmless fun in the woods, we come back to campus to enjoy the bonfire, a couple of kegs, vegetarian barbeque, carnivore barbecue, a small get together with the entire campus”, muttered Jace

“I love that”, you smiled

“Anyways, you missed homecoming week, but this is spirit week, and it awesome”, said Jace

“You freshmen know more of the school than I do”, laughed Cregan

“And what activities await us in spirit week?”, you asked, very entertained

“You get teamed by career”, started Sara, “there is the language department, the law and politics department, the engineering school, the faculty of art, design and architecture, and the scientists, and you compete with each other, everyone on different teams…”

“That sounds cool”, you offered

“The engineers always wins”, muttered Jace, “in most of the competitions anyways”

“And that is next week”, you said

“YES!”, Cheered Sara, your smile was huge, bright and you were so excited, your phone dinged and when you looked at it, you realized you had been added to a huge group chat, of the ADA Faculty

“Ohhh, it started!”, teased Jace and you hid your phone playfully from him

“You go to your own department”, you mocked. Jace was studying public administrations, Cregan was in Business, in the same department.

“How fuuunnnn!”, Sara was as excited as you were, she was an Valyrian Lit mayor, yet another department

Rhaena and Baela entered the Hall, Rhaena was with you in the ADA, but Baela was in Law

You grabbed Rhaena as she was excited as you

“Teammate!”, you cheered, and you jumped together in fun

“It’s like a cheerleader on crack”, said Jace

And you felt like you were on crack, I mean, you had never done crack, but you felt ecstatic all the time

You grabbed Rhaena, forgetting lunch and you trotted outside the hall in the way to the ADA Department building, leaving all of them behind looking at you both walking away with amused glances on their faces

Specially Cregan, he then looked back at his group of friends with a smile on his face, Jace frowned when he saw him

“Hey”

“What?”, he looked back to catch a last glance of you before you disappeared on the hallway, “she is sweet”, he whispered

You loved your design career

You had a meeting with the department for spirit week and you had already your shirts made, banners and a plan to win the activities

And when the sun started setting, you were called in the main park of the college

With all the rest of the Universities

The wolf masks were back on, people were in High spirits, and soon it was even more contagious as you even felt more ecstatic

“This is officially the beginning for Spirit week!”, said out loud the presenter, that you guessed was a senior, he was a student. Everyone clapped and cheered, “And we have decided that the hunters for this year's hunt will be… all those who identify as girls!”, you cheered, “and the wolfs will be all those who identifies as boys”

Everyone cheered

. . .

“Damn you look good in this colors”, teased Rhaena as she applied “battle paint” in your face, gray lines in different designs all over your face, you giggled

“Gray is a very flattering color, we all look amazing”, you muttered as you finished braiding Sara’s hair

It was like a pagan tradition and you were here for it and to look for the part, so you and the girls decided to meet in the dorm’s huge bathroom to prepare for the hunt, painting your faces, doing crazy and wild hair do’s to each other, you were having so much fun

After you finished your makeup, you met at the starting line, the sun was about to set, and wood for the huge bonfire was being gathered in the park surrounding the University, in a big valley.

The guys were all gathered in the other side, and they were howling, all with masks, it was hilarious

“The wolves will start running, and the hunters will follow, five minutes later!”, called a guy with a megaphone

You started chatting with the girls, the school was huge it had many students, and you had gathered a great number

You thought about Jace though, and what he was wearing, this seemed like a cool activity, but you’d rather go and search for someone you knew… flannel shirt and jeans? you believed, with a graphic t-shirt underneath…

A horn like sound reached the entire valley, and with howls and laughs the great group of people disappeared into the woods, as the sun was hiding

“Remember to stay within the range, and if you get lost just blow a whistle!”, you turned to the girls

“So which strategy are we going with?”

To catch them all, you had to grab the wolf’s ribbon they had around their waist, that is how you hunt them, the one hunter who got most ribbons won a price, probably a six pack of beer or something, nothing mayor

But the girls and you had gossiped all afternoon about which “ribbon” they would like to catch, and who it belonged to

You didn’t even looked at guys’ faces, not yet anyways

So since Sara hasn't say anything about Jace, you determined you were going to search for your best friend

“Divide and conquer” said Sara with a wide grin

“Divide and conquer”

Were you scared to get lost in the woods? Yes

Did you want to say so? Hell no

This tradition had been going on for years, and nothing ever happened, so you tried to relax, it wasn’t even that dark, even though it was quite early

“Alright! let’s start this!”, chanted the presenter, “remember you have one hour!”, the horn sounded again and you started running g

it was true what they said about the thrill of the hunt

You felt exhilarating

And as you ran dodging the trees and branches like you were born in those woods, like you knew them by heart, you ran as you felt the chilly air clinging to your clothes and face, and you loved it

You could see your breath ahead of you, it was chilly, winter was clinging on

You felt like one with the woods as you looked around

And then, from afar, you saw Jace, or someone who looks like him anyways, and you couldn’t even hold a giggle, and you prepared to pounce, as you approached him quickly and silently

“GOT YOU!”, you announced and you jumped him, literally got over a fallen tree and jumped on top of him, clinging into him like a koala, you searched but his ribbon and removed it, not before feeling his… strange body… not like Jace at all

As soon as your face landed on his neck, you realized something…

It wasn’t Jace

You released the poor guy from your embrace

He turned around, removing his mask, and you realized, with a comical open mouth, that is was Cregan Stark

“Hey”, you greeted, he smiled down at you, as he was taller than you

“That was interesting”, he whispered with a smirk on his face, and a glint of mischief in his eyes

“Sorry about that”, you giggled, “for… attacking you… I thought you were Jace”

“Is more than alright”, there was something about him, you couldn’t quite pinpoint it, but there it was was, you immediately trusted him, because he was Jacey’s roommate and friend, so it meant he was also your friend by default, so you just smiled apologetically to him

“Let’s join in the party”, he said with a wolfish grin, you smiled widely, “the hour is almost up”

“Let’s do it”, you giggled, “I hope you know this woods more than me because otherwise…”, he laughed

“Yes I do”

You walked side by side through the woods

“Its unusual for people to change schools mid-semester”, he started, you smiled shyly

“Well… I didn't want to stay where I was”, you said shyly, “my dream was always coming here, are you from here? from the North?”, you asked, and he seemed surprised by your question, he looked back at you with interest in his eyes, and then chuckled

“Yes, Yes I’m from around here”, he said

The music could already be heard, a band was playing live, you could already see the magnificent glow of the huge bonfire, and Cregan saw your excitement with a smile of his own, when you came out of the woods you went to the organizers who were waiting for the hunters and the wolves, to make sure everybody came back safely.

With a grin you gave him the ribbon and they marked you up

With surprise, you’d realize you were one of the last couples, time had flown, and you felt even more exhilarated. You wanted to join the party that was unleashing in the valley, people were already dancing, having fun, the kegs already were out, snacks too. You looked back at Cregan with a smile

“It was a pleasure hunting you Cregan Stark”, you teased

“Well, it was a pleasure being hunted by you”, he said back, his gaze lingered, but you looked away, and then you spotted Rhaena and Baela dancing in the ground, their beautiful hair hard to miss

“They are here!”, you cheered, and you both followed to join the party

The band apparently was from a group of kids of the music program, and they sang rock songs

“You are heeeere”, Bhaela teased, “and with Creeeegan”, she wiggled her eyebrows at you and you just laughed, “mmmmm”

Nothing happened, and then you looked at Sara and she was looking back at you with an arched eyebrow and a smirk, she looked like her brother so much

“Here”, Cregan arrived next to you and offered you a red cup with ale in it

“Thanks”, you took a sip and couldn’t help but moan, it was refreshing, Jace arrived with more beer and smiled widely

“I got to say I truly believe you were going to get lost”, he laughed

“Well, I was lucky to tackle poor Cregan here thinking it was you!”, you laughed

Jace looked at Cregan but said nothing, Sara grabbed you for you to start jumping and dancing at the beat of the song. The brand started playing more popular songs, songs you could sing and dance to. You enjoyed the music in a the group that your friends joined, and more people you haven't seen before

But when you realized you were dancing too close to Cregan and he turned to you to dance with you, your stomach sank.

You felt nervous, in a way that you didn't like, you felt again that need, that pressure to make a good impression, to not do something foolish, feelings that constipated you, that binded you not to move, not to speak, so before he came closer you turned and kept dancing with the girls

You weren’t ready

Cregan seemed like a good guy

But the wounds were still fresh

The music was blazing, the beer was flowing, the warmth of the bonfire was heating your cheeks, and you danced with your new friends all night.

And you got… HAMMERED

Very wasted, you still had control over your actions, but you giggled uncontrollably and hugged Sara who was just as drunk as you were.

Hours had passed, it was over midnight and the party had died down, the bonfire had extinguished and the band had stopped playing.

Jace and Cregan led you back to their place, your dorm had a big and strict policy regarding drunkenness and poor behavior, and they were as drunk as you, and didn’t think things more clearly, their apartment was closest.

So they took you both to their student building of apartments,

Cregan helped the two of you get in his bed, the queen bed in one of the rooms, and you cuddled with Sara on the bed under Cregan’s sweet eyes. He left you when you fell asleep, and Cregan went to Jace’s room

“Our girls invaded my room”, said Cregan with an entertained smile, “so move”

Cregan laid down right next to Jace, and both looked at the ceiling in silence, until Jace frowned

“Our girls?”, he asked, looking at his friend, and he sighed, “what do you mean?”

“Well, she is your best friend, and Sara is my sister, right?”, he said dismissively

“Cregan… please don’t fuck my friend”, pleaded Jacaerys, “she is been trough enough already…I don’t think she is ready…”

“Oh Jacey, I’m not going to fuck her”, Jace relaxed for a second before he frowned, “first I’m going to date her”, he continued, “then I will ask her to be my girlfriend, then I’m going to make sweet love to her”

Jace sighed, rolling his eyes

“Come on”, he whined

“I’m teasing”, he said softly, “she is going through something, I can see it”, he said looking for imaginary shapes in the ceiling paint, “but I can wait, I want to get to know her”

One day, when you were walking by the oldest wing, the department of Laws and Politics, you stopped suddenly when you saw a huge copper plate by the entrance, curious about what it dais, your faculty was more modern than the rest, more new, so you were truly interested in the history of this campus and town

“The Stark building, in honor of House Stark, who donated their family estate for the higher purpose of education and development of the children of the North, 1600 AC”, you read, and then you looked up with shame.

More than 400 years ago…

Stark

Oh so he really was from around here, you giggled to yourself

More notes: I clearly been watching too many american movies JAJA, obviously this is fanfiction in all its glory, Universities where I’m from are bored as f*ck, so I decided to put some color jajaja

This chapter came up weird, Cregan is already smitten and reader is not quite convinced

I again say that I was not completely sure to share this, I don't why, but I wanted to show reader in a different environment, she is getting to know everyone and that Cregan is already like that wolf cartoon with the big eyes... anyways... next chapter we are back to the drama! wuju

taglist!!

@mxtokko @princesssterek @thefandomimagines @iamavailablesstuff @misspascalpunk @sweethoneyblossom1 @ipostwhtifeel @lunamoonbby @ahristata @watercolorskyy @yazzzmints @n4tforlife @littleshadow17 @alexa4040 @speedyballoonpainter @hc-geralt-23 @rayrayredpanda @eralen

#hbo house of the dragon #misguidedneed #jacaerys velaryon #cregan #cregan x y/n #cregan x reader #cregan stark x reader #cregan stark #cregan x you #cregan fanfiction #aemond targaryen

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malii-the-bonehead · 6 days

Text

The Other Woman pt1

its here ladies and gents its here.

Slow burn

Summary: Chris, a popular hockey player at school where Y/n went, found himself falling for the beautiful, shy girl. As time went on he found out who Y/n truly was as a person and ultimately, he had to make the choice, his girlfriend, or the other woman.

She was beautiful and he knew it. He knew because every chance he got, he would look in her direction. She sat so perfectly in 3rd hour history class, her back facing him. But he could imagine exactly what her face did. The way she focused so hard. So hard that she’d lick her lips too many times. The way her eyebrows furrowed when she didn't understand the lesson. Her long hair perched in a messy bun on top of her head. How her cheeks were always dusted with a light pink color. She was so, so beautiful. Not everyone would think that, but one adored her. Chris adored everything about her. She was so sweet and soft spoken and she was a little bit shy. He would listen to her talk when the teacher would ask a question and wonder how she got so wise and smart. He was proud of someone he never knew.

He thought about her a lot. And ofcourse, he was beautiful as well, but he didn’t think so. He thought he could never, ever be good enough for her. Chris thought he lacked the smarts and personality that she had. He thought he wasn’t worthy of her, and so many people, except himself, knew he was more than capable. Chris wasn’t exactly sure of how popular he was in school. Him on one side of the social status and her on the other.

Despite not many people knowing her, the ones who did were fond of Y/n. They had no reason to despise her. Everyone apart from Chris’ girlfriend. No one understood why, not even Chris. And Chris loved his girlfriend, but she wasn’t Y/n. The love he felt for Y/n was different from Clairisa, Chris’s girlfriend. She was beautiful too, super smart as well and always kind. But there was something that drew Chris to the other woman. He didn’t have a clue what it was but it kept tugging at him. And it pained Chris to know that if Clairisa knew how he felt about Y/n, it would crush her. But that didn’t stop him. He just wanted to talk to her. To be close to her. He wanted to be her friend. That’s why he’s where he’s at right now, in front of Y/n's desk in their only shared class.

Y/n’s pov

I wrote on my paper, studying the last bit of information I could before the test. I didn't have time to study last night. Work kept me up til around midnight, and when I did finally arrive home, I had to clean the kitchen. It was always a mess when I got home. I regret not doing it after school, seeing how tired and stressed I was this morning. I scribbled down as much as I could. I found that I can memorize things quicker if I write it down a few times. God how I hated history. I was good at everything, math, science, English, and even French class, but history? Hell no. I sighed, closing my eyes and rubbing them with my fingers. I heard a slight tap on my desk in front of me. I moved my hands from my face and looked up slightly. It was a boy with brown hair and very blue eyes. I felt my face form a confused expression. I knew who he was, everyone did. Chris Sturniolo was kind of popular with the girls and he was very friendly with the majority of the guys at school as well. Most knew him because he played hockey, and damn was he good at it.

Why is he at my desk? Class is about to start and he’s at my desk.

“Um, yes?” I asked, glancing over his face before shifting in my spot. His gaze was making me uncomfortable.

He looked at me for a few seconds, but it felt like so much longer. He looked like he wanted to get something off his mind but couldn’t form the words.

“Do you need something?” I questioned him once more. Then, as he was opening his mouth to say something, he closed it and walked away to his desk. I looked down at my hands on my lap. What was that about?

I glanced back slightly, him already looking at me. I quickly turned around, picking up my pencil and scribbling on my paper again, trying to hide my face from others that were filing into the room. I felt a blush slowly creep up my neck. Well that was embarrassing. The bell rang meaning class was starting. I closed my book as the teacher announced we had a test today and started going over the directions of what to do after we had finished.

The test wasn’t difficult at all. I was actually the second one to finish it. I knew I had gotten an A on it. Majority of it was common sense. After I turned the paper in to the teacher, I walked back to my desk. I glanced around the room, my eyes finding the top of Chris’s head. He had his head down, probably sleeping. Did he finish his test? Why is he sleeping right now? I shook my head slightly and sat back down at my desk. I opened my bag and grabbed my phone and headphones. I opened my music app and played my music, letting out a breath and sighing. I had work again today. From 4 to 11:30. That meant that when I got home I had to clean the house quickly, so I didn’t struggle like I did last night. I placed my head down softly, shutting my eyes and listening to the music playing through my headphones.

–

School was slow. Every class seemed to take forever. I think it was because I was so exhausted. Lunch was nice though. I normally go outside for lunch. I like to look at the sky, listen to my music and enjoy the quiet. Sometimes there would be the occasional person to say hello to me but today it was just my thoughts. I was grateful for that. I appreciated the 45 minutes of peace. I liked talking to people, but most of the time it was too much to deal with. Talking meant focusing, and lunch was the time that I didn’t need to focus, unless I was cramming information in my head because of an exam next hour.

The last bell of the day rang, excusing students to go home and enjoy the rest of the day for themselves. I walked outside, to my car. A white 2017 Nissan Sentra. Nothing special, but I loved it. It was cozy and gave me good memories. Memories I’ll hold onto for the rest of my life. My dad got it for me on my 16th birthday a year and a half ago. That was probably the best birthday I’ve ever had.

I got in and shut the door, starting the car. I looked around, making sure it was safe to go. Slightly to my left, a little ways across the parking lot, I spotted Chris leaning against his girlfriend's car, his hands in his pockets. She was leaned up against him, talking about something I obviously couldn’t hear.

She’s so pretty, I thought to myself. I’ve always admired her, always been jealous of her since the 4th grade. She’s so lucky to have a guy like Chris. She deserved him. He deserved her. I blinked slowly, realizing I was staring at them. She kissed him and walked around to the driver side of her car. He walked to the passenger side and they both got in, pulling out of the parking lot. I leaned back in my seat. I wonder what he needed earlier. I honestly forgot about it, even though the situation made me very uncomfortable. I hope he didn't think anything bad of me. I mean, why was he standing there just looking at me. Why didn’t he talk? What if he wanted something from me? What would he want? I have nothing to offer so why would Chris Sturniolo be at my desk? I put my head down, rubbing my eyes with my fingers, for what felt like the 10th time today. I lifted my head and drove out of the parking lot, going in the direction of my home.

You have more important things to worry about, Y/n. Get home and get ready for work. But, I still thought about those blue eyes looking into mine all the way home.

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bellysoupset · 3 months

Text

Vince was not feeling well.

Which was saying something considering he hadn't been feeling well since November last year.

The talk with Wendy had helped, a lot, the knot that had permanently tied in his throat. Knowing they weren't over had him nearly dizzy with relief, even if he was very aware that it wouldn't be easy to have a relationship when they were 4 hours apart.

But there was more. There were his friends still... With whom he hadn't spoken. Well, everyone safe for Leo, who had texted him over Christmas break and hadn't stopped.

"I don't want you unhappy," had been Leo's simplistic answer when Vince met up with him that morning and asked why he was being so cool about the entire situation. Jonah hadn't spoken with him in a while and Vin wasn't sure if he was being ignored or if it was just Jon's regular sullen silences.

He was absolutely certain that Luke was ignoring him and that was more than partially to blame for the queasy sensation that spread all over his body.

"It seems like you're the only one," Vince scoffed, pushing the french fry around with viciousness and glaring at it. He couldn't fathom eating it, with how unsettled his stomach felt.

Leo let out a sigh, "that's not true, Vin." He was sitting back against Fredo's leather seats, finishing off his own burger, "Luke's a wreck, you two should really talk."

"Nothing to talk about," Vince grumbled, trying not to meet Leo's eyes and failing miserably when the blonde glared at him.

"Vince."

"He's just making everything worse," Vince groaned, wincing as his stomach cramped painfully, "it's hard enough leaving and it's hard enough that I'm gonna be four hours apart from my girlfriend and Luke- Luke's fucking everything up."

Leo raised his eyebrows, judgement rolling off of him and Vince ducked his head, muffling a burp against his fist. There was a burning in his chest that nothing could soothe.

"Vince."

"Stop looking at me like that."

"You say you wanna go, but I've never seen you look more miserable," Leo pointed out, his voice gentle, but firm, "look at me, Vin."

He did and immediately grimaced. There was nothing but support and concern in Leo's face, which Vince quickly found that he did not want. He much rather be yelled at, as he was sure Jonah or Bell would have.

"I'm okay."

"Bullshit," Leo sighed, rubbing his face, "don't lie to my face, okay? You're miserable."

Vince shrugged, "I will be okay... I got a job in Doverport."

Leo's eyebrows jumped up, "uhm... Congrats?" he said, unsure given the tone of the conversation, "what is it?"

"History teacher at the local public school," Vince picked at his nails, "I start in a week."

"That's great Vin! You've always wanted to teach..." Leo's voice trailed off and he let out a heavy sigh, "and you're not happy."

"What do you mean? Of course I a-"

"It wasn't a question," Leo twirled the coke in his cup with the metal straw, poking at the ice chips, "why are you moving if you don't want to?"

"I do want to," Vince sighed, giving up all pretense at trying to eat and his upbeat attitude, "I miss my parents, Leo. Which I know- Well, it's not something either of you guys is very familiar with, but I don't just love my family, okay? I like them. I genuinely enjoy spending time with them... And my parents are getting old and Sophia is leaving at the end of the year and I'll see her even less and Liv... I feel like I missed every single milestone? She's six, I- I came to college when I she had just learned to say my name..."

It was terrifying, to know he would be missing out on important memories with the ones he loved regardless of each town he picked.

"No, I get it," Leo nodded, then when Vin raised an eyebrow he rolled his eyes, "okay, fine, I don't get it. Not for a second, this is completely out of my reality... But I saw Jon with Angie this Christmas and how heartbroken he was over them not being closer. I saw Luke with his dad and how Kit doesn't even know him... And I know I spent my whole childhood wishing I had something like that," he shrugged, "so yeah, I don't get it, but I do."

Vince nodded, forcefully swallowing against the knot in his throat, "yeah..." he swallowed again, feeling clammy and ill, "it just sucks, because it feels like I'm letting everyone down and-"

"You're not," Leo reached over the table, grabbing Vin's wrist, "look, it's not you leaving, it's how you did it. At least with Wendy it is."

"You don't know Wendy," Vince scoffed, wiping the sweat collecting over his lip, "she's- She's heartbroken and furious and it's my fault."

"I do know Wendy," Leo rolled his eyes, "she's petty as fuck and she's loyal and she's independent and you asked her to give up her life and move with you after you spent two months lying to her face and leading her on."

Vince's eyes widened and he shook his head, "I didn't lie, I just- What was there to tell if I hadn't made up my mind? Nothing."

"She's your girlfriend, of course you could've said something," Leo glared at him, "you think I'd be happy if Jonah just up and decided something after months of thinking it, when he never shared the plans with me? When I wasn't a part of the conversation?"

As if the realization suddenly hit him, Vince mouthed around nothing, confused, "I didn't... I didn't think of that."

Leo let out a little snort, before starting to drink his coke. He waited, patiently, as Vince came to terms with the new realization.

It took him a minute to put it into words, but he did it, crumpling forward and shielding his face with his hands, saying in a muffled voice, "I fucked up."

"You fucked up," Leo agreed, trying not to sound too harsh, "but she still took you back, so I'm gonna guess you didn't fuck up that badly."

"God knows why she did," Vince grumbled, removing a hand from his face and staring at the table, looking like he wanted to say something and failing.

Leo's winced in sympathy, "look, we love you, Vin. All of us. That's not gonna change, okay? They'll get over it."

"Yeah," his friend nodded, not looking like he believed it, "you should come visit..." he didn't raise his eyes from the table, "I'm really going to miss you, kid."

Leo's valiant smile and upbeat attitude wavered a little and he only nodded, not quite managing to fake it, "yeah, I'll miss you too..."

"I think we should get going, I still have to hit the road..." Vince cringed just at the thought. His father had let him borrow the car, so he could retrieve all the boxes from Wendy's apartment and the trunk and backseat were already loaded up.

He still had to swing by his girlfriend's apartment to get some stuff and to say goodbye... And his stomach was burning just thinking of it.

Everything felt horrible, from getting up to hugging Leo goodbye, to driving away and the prospect of the four hours long drive before him... And saying goodbye to Wendy...

Vince was so caught up in his own angst, that he completely missed the car parked next to Wendy's pink one. He had started to sweat back in the restaurant, clammy perspiration over saying goodbye to Leo, but that by now he knew was more than just that.

He felt downright woozy during the elevator ride, the small lunch he had been able to force down starting to flip in his stomach. Vince leaned against Wendy's red front door, resting his forehead on it and took a measured breath.

He just had to fake it for half an hour more. Just enough to kiss her goodbye and try not to start crying over it and then...

"And you think it's the meds?" Wendy's voice travelled through the door and Vince groaned, as he quickly realized she had company, Bella's voice answering.

"I hope it's just the meds... I'm scared, Wendy - Fuck that, I'm overwhelmed..."

"Of course you are, it's a lot to handle on your own, Bells..."

Vince turned the doorknob, deciding to make his presence known sooner rather than later. He was already in both women's shit list, the last thing he wanted was to be accused of eavesdropping on them.

As soon as he opened the door, the talking died down and both girls turned to face him. Bella was leaning against the dining table, while Wendy was on the opposite side, putting the decor back on top of the table after they had lunch.

He could still smell it in the air, raspberry pie and something else.

"Oh hey, you're back early!" Wendy's voice went up a note, all awkward in a way that wasn't like her at all. She glanced nervously at Bella, who had crossed her arms defensively and raised her eyebrows.

"Hi," Bell said coolly and Vin all but flinched at her tone.

He loved this girl like a sister and it was a slap to the face to be treated like that.

"Hi," Vince gripped the doorknob, "I'm on my way out," which was the wrong thing to say, because Bell let out an incredulous, bitter scoff, while Wendy promptly dropped the vase she was holding down on the table, looking spooked.

"Already? I thought you were only leaving tonight..." She looked all heartbroken, "I thought we'd have more time-"

"Don't let the door hit you on your way out," Bella said and Vince reeled at her tone, while Wendy's mouth hung open, her heart shaped face turning pink.

"That's fucking enough, Bell," she glared at the ginger, "you can be civilized or you can leave."

A horrible warmth spread all over Vince and he breathed in deeply through his nose. The floor seemed to be swimming, nausea clinging to the back of his throat.

"I'm not gonna coddle him just because-"

"This isn't about Vince and you know it, you're letting your feelings get in the way-"

"Yeah, damn right I am!" Bella exclaimed, her voice a note louder and Vince groaned, as it made his head pound.

He was going to be sick.

His mouth filled with saliva and he gulped down nervously, trying to think through the horrible fog. He could bolt for the bathroom, but that would get them questioning him, besides... He really didn't want to impose on Wendy, she was already being too understanding-

"Helloooo? I'm talking with you, jackass," Bella's voice cut through the haze and Vince struggled to focus on her. She had moved closer, while Wendy was hot on her heels, looking flustered and pissed off.

"You really should go now, Bella-"

"Fuck no, I won't, not until he looks at me-"

"Move," Vince groaned, squeezing his eyes shut and darting a hand forward. It touched Bell's wrist and he squeezed it as well, "Bella, get out of the way-"

"What the fuck do you think you're doing!?" Bella's voice suddenly was much louder, "let go off me-" the implication of her words was more nauseating than anything and Vince's stomach surged up in his throat... And he didn't have it in him to even fight it.

He bent in half, shoving Bella back to avoid getting her combat boots covered in sick and then lost his lunch on Wendy's foyer. All over his boots.

Vince swayed on the spot, a cramp hitting him fiercely and he would've crumpled down to his knees, wasn't it for Bella grabbing him suddenly.

"Vince?! Vin, what the fuck!?" Bella exclaimed right next to his ear, her voice strained by the effort of keeping him collapsing. He was far too big for her, if his knees fully gave in, he'd pull them both down, "what's wrong? Are you sick? Are you hurt?!"

All that anger gone in the flick of a wrist.

Vince let out a groan, squeezing his stomach. Everything felt horrible, his head felt completely disconnected from his body, his belly was sour and far from empty, churning up a storm and he was freezing...

"Aw honey," Wendy's voice, a balm to his nerves, made Vince open his eyes. A towel had already been draped over the puddle of sick and his girlfriend had wrapped her arm around his opposite side, helping Bella hold him up, "you're not well, I can feel the fever from here..."

"I'm g-" His throat constricted and Vince gulped down against the knot in there, "gon'besick..."

"Yeah, help us," Bella gasped, sounding worried and frustrated as they tried to move him to the bathroom. Without his help, not even in a pair they could do much.

Vince nodded, shivering violently and leaning on them, using all his force to move. He collapsed down on the bathroom floor, taking Bella with him since she was the one further inside.

There wasn't much time to think as he pushed the toilet lid up and tried, vaguely, not to cause a bigger mess. His stomach cramped again, squeezing, and Vince white knuckled the porcelain, heaving.

A hand cupped his forehead, supporting his heavy head and Vince leaned into the soft touch with a sob. His thoughts were a jumbled mess, flip flopping between the horrible sensation of his body and the confusion and hurt over the previous interaction.

"I'm-ssssorry..." Vince slurred, sounding and feeling drunk, trying to get rid of the line of thick spit dangling from his bottom lip.

"Shut up," Bella said quietly, dabbing his lip with a wad of toilet paper, "jesus, you're soaked..."

"Here," Wendy, crouching down next to them, planting a humid washcloth to the back of his neck. Vince let his eyes slip closed, immediately regretting it as in the darkness he could feel the room twirling around him-

"Arms up," Bella, grabbing his elbow, "c'mon, big guy, help me here."

"Whataare... What are you doing...?" Vince forced his eyes open and realized he was no longer slumped over the toilet, but propped against the cold wall of the bathroom. Wendy was standing near the sink, re-wetting the washcloth.

"You're boiling," Bell explained, all soft, "we need to get your temperature down."

He really didn't feel like he could trust her, not after all the yelling, not after she had been ignoring him... Besides, it was freezing.

"No, 'mnot..."

"Yes, you are, Vin," Bella pushed his damp hair back, looking terribly concerned, "this is going to help, okay?"

"Uhm-" he couldn't help but lean on her touch, letting his eyes close. Sure, he was hurt over Bell's words and she was pissed at him, but it was still Bella...

"Honey," Wendy, patting his cheek, "Vin, open your eyes... Vin..."

He tried to force them open, ready to cry over not being able to just fucking sleep. Being awake just meant feeling like he was about to spew the food he had eaten back in 8th grade, he'd much rather sleep-

"Vince," Wendy shook him a little harder and Vince opened his eyes. He was shirtless now, which was more than a little concerning. He didn't remember taking his shirt off.

Bella was perched on the bathtub, watching over them, and Wendy was crouched in front of him, cupping his face.

Vince's head swam as he tried to focus on his girlfriend. Wendy's eyes were the size of platters, all worried.

"Hi..."

"Hey," she forced a smile, stroking his cheek, "how are you feeling?"

"Like crap," Vince groaned and couldn't help a small smile as he heard Bella snort.

"Yeah?" Wendy rolled her eyes, "when did you start feeling sick, honey?"

"Uhm..." Vince winced as another cramp hit him and he curled up, sucking in the air. It took a second to breath through the hot, sharp pain and as soon as the iron grip in his inside eased, a new wave of nausea hit him. He was sweating, gulping nervously as his mouth watered and his tongue felt too big for his mouth, "don't feel good..."

"I know, sweetheart," Wendy smoothed his hair back, "I just need to know for how long this has been going on. Were you sick this morning?"

She sounded so... Calm. So gentle. Somewhere in the recess of his mind Vince knew this wasn't a good thing, that this was Wen using her doctor voice. The last thing he wanted was to be an even bigger bother-

Tears stung his eyes and Vince curled up even more, turning his head away from Wendy... His eyes paused on Bella and she looked horribly guilty. Twice as concerned. None of the calm that Wendy sported, panic was written all over her face.

"I'm so sorry," she said before Vince could say anything and a sob bubbled up, making his whole frame shake. Vince ducked his head, he didn't want to cry, but the fever was frying at his nerves and before he head any control over it, big fat tears started to run down his cheeks.

"Hey, hey..." Wendy whispered, moving up and wrapping her arms around him, pulling Vince into a tight hug, "hey, I got you. You're okay-"

"I'm sorry," he mumbled into her hair, words sticking together, shaking them both, "I'm sorry, I don't- I'm making a mess, I've made a mess-"

"No, no, we're fine," Wendy squeezed him, kissing the side of his head, "we're working through it, right? We're okay- You're okay-"

"No, I'm not, I don't- I hate this. Everything is wrong and I feel wrong, and-" Vince sobbed, his words jumbling together in one continuous stream that made no sense even to his own ears and suddenly there was another pair of arms wrapped around him, squeezing him even tighter than Wendy was.

"B-Bell...?"

"I'm here- You-you're okay," she mumbled, voice muffled since Bella's cheek was squished to his shoulder, "we're okay, alright? We're gonna be okay."

"But- but you hate..." Vince whimpered and Bella pulled back, all but replacing Wendy in cupping his face, forcing their eyes to meet.

"No, I'm furious at you, I don't hate you," she glared at him, "not for a second, Vin."

This was all very touching, but Vince's stomach apparently hadn't gotten the memo he was having a moment, because suddenly he was gagging.

Bella jumped out of the way and both women pushed him forward to lean over the bowl, just in time for the rest of his stomach lining to make a reappearance. He coughed and coughed, but there wasn't much more to bring up and Vince was left panting and sobbing, curled up over the toilet bowl.

He felt Bella's fingers moving through his sweaty hair, Wendy squeezing his arm as she got up from the ground, "stay with him, I'm gonna settle the room. Clearly he's not stopping any time soon."

Vince groaned, he didn't need Bell to sit with him, he didn't need a nanny... Bella flicked at his ear.

"No one said anything about you needing a nanny," she scoffed, before continuing to comb his hair, "you seem hellbent on throwing up on me."

Vince let out a surprised chuckle, eyes closed as he breathed through the nausea that was starting back up, "it's the least you deserve after yelling at me like that."

Bella snorted, running her hand up and down his naked back, "god, I'm gonna fucking miss you."

#HI IS THIS ANYTHING #sickfic #stomach flu #emetophilia #emeto #mywriting #vince monacelli #here have 3 caretakers for the price of 1

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starkwlkr · 1 year

Text

to maman | fabio quartararo

thank you to the anon who gave me the prompt ideas! all credit to them!!🫶🏼🤍

Mother’s Day had arrived and little Giselle Quartararo was in class making a painting for her mother. Fabio was home so he told Y/n that he would pick up their daughter since she would be working late. It was near the end of the school day and Giselle still wasn’t done with her mother’s day present.

“Giselle, why don’t you take it home and finish it there.” Her teacher said when she noticed how concentrated the little girl was.

“I can?” She asked.

“You can. I’m sure you papa can help you with the beautiful painting.”

So when Fabio arrived to Giselle’s school, she ran up to him with a paper in hand. He knew about the Mother’s Day gifts that the students were making since he had gotten an email from Giselle’s teacher. He picked up the little girl and gave her the usual after school kisses on both of her cheeks.

“You did this? It’s beautiful, amour.” Fabio said when he saw Giselle’s painting.

“It’s not finished. My teacher said I can take it home and finish it for maman. Can you help me?” Giselle asked as Fabio placed her on the ground. He held her hand on the way to his car.

“Of course I can and maman isn’t home yet so we have plenty of time to paint.” Fabio opened the car door for Giselle so she could get in.

“But I don’t have paint! And maman loves red so we need red paint!”

On the way home, Fabio and Giselle made a quick stop to a craft store to buy the necessary paints to complete the project. When they arrived home, Giselle grabbed the bag with the paints from Fabio’s hands and ran to the front door.

“Slow down, Elle, we have enough time to paint.” Fabio chuckled and walked to the front door.

When he unlocked it, Giselle ran to the dinning room and emptied out the bag. “I want to add more flowers.”

“We can add whatever you like, Elle.”

For almost an hour, Fabio and Giselle spent it dipping their fingers into red, pink, yellow and green paint. Fabio even got a separate sheet of paper to make his own painting for his wife.

“How do you write I love you?” Giselle asked.

“Well do you want to write it in French or English?”

“Can I do both?”

So Fabio grabbed a marker and gave it to Giselle. He then sounded out all the letters for Giselle to write I love you in two languages.

“Great job, bébé. Maman is going to love it.”

When Mother’s Day finally arrived, Y/n was woken up by Giselle and Fabio attacking her with hugs and kisses.

“Happy Mother’s Day!” Fabio and Giselle yelled as Y/n rubbed her tired eyes. “We love you!”

“Aw, I love you both more,” Y/n sat up on the bed. She quickly noticed that Gisele had been hiding something behind her back. “What do you have to there, baby?”

Giselle giggled and showed her mother the painting she had made with Fabio. It was a finger painted garden complete with a yellow sun on the corner of the paper and ‘I love you’ written in English and French.

“You painted this? Elle, this is beautiful. I have my own little Picasso!” Y/n gasped when she saw the painting.

“I helped too so you have two Picasso’s now.” Fabio added, feeling proud of himself and Giselle.

“Papa made you another one!” Giselle said and jumped on the bed until Fabio got up to retrieve his painting for Y/n.

“It’s just a little something to start off Mother’s Day. Don’t think this is the only thing you’re getting today.” He handed her his painting.

“These are both beautiful. I’ll buy frames so I can hang them up and everyone can see how talented my husband and daughter are.”

Liked by mickschumacher, motogp and 543,378 others

fabioquartararo20 To maman by Giselle and Fabio Quartararo. Happy Mother’s Day y/n.l/n

y/n.l/n i love you both so much ❤️ my little artists

motogp Happy Mother’s Day to Mrs. Quartararo!

t0m06600 i think Giselle’s looks better

tony_arbolino ❤️❤️

#motogp imagine #motogp x reader #motogp instagram au #fabio quartararo imagine #fq20 #el diablo #fabio quartararo x reader #dad!fabio quartararo

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ukrfeminism · 2 years

Text

Rebecca Whitehurst never wants to set foot in a school again.

She also wants all teachers, especially female ones, to wear bodycams, to have CCTV in every classroom and for teachers to operate in pairs. “I think teachers should never be alone with children, there should always be someone else there. I know it is dramatic but I don’t want what happened to me to ever happen to anyone else,” she said.

The views of Whitehurst, who is married with two children and has been a modern languages teacher for more than ten years, have been shaped by what she describes as a “modern horror story”.

Last week the 46-year-old wept as a jury at Manchester’s Minshull Street crown court cleared her of two charges of sexual activity with a child and one of sexual communications. She had been accused of a sexual act with a 15-year-old pupil in the back of her Volvo and of sending him explicit texts, including a photograph of her breasts.

The court heard that the teenager, who had declared he was in love with Whitehurst, became obsessed with her and lied about or faked the messages. The boy, who watched pornography involving older women, assaulted her in her classroom and sent an abusive message to her daughter, the court was told.

The family spent £43,000 fighting the case, which dragged on for three years. If convicted she would have faced up to 14 years’ in jail.

Speaking from her home in Cheshire where her husband, Billy, an accountant, has “been unbelievably supportive”, she said her experience at times felt like a television drama.

It unfolded against the backdrop of a rising number of schoolboys watching online pornography, and pupils’ mental health becoming a frontline problem for many schools.

Last year, an Ofsted report found 90 per cent of girls and 50 per cent of boys polled by the schools inspectorate said they had been sent explicit pictures and messages they did not wish to see. A survey for the British Board of Film Classification last year found that almost half of 16 and 17-year-olds had recently seen pornography. Figures from NHS Digital found that one in six children in England had a probable mental health disorder last year, up from one in nine in 2017.

Whitehurst’s ordeal started in April 2019. The boys’ school where she taught French, German and Spanish had paid for her to attend a three-day course on mindfulness. She was asked to teach the subject — not to lower the stress of high-achieving children in the run-up to exams, which she had suggested, but to children on the inclusion register, who have special educational needs and disabilities. “I said yes because I am that sort of person,” the Sheffield University graduate said, but admitted to being nervous about teaching a “wishy washy” subject to children who may have experienced significant trauma.

In an early session with the group of ten boys the 15-year-old who would go on to accuse her said he was hearing voices in his head telling him to kill someone. “I thought OMG,” she said. “As soon as I could I reported it on our safeguarding system . . . I reported it on there and thought someone would talk to me about it, but no one did.”

As the sessions continued the teenager “latched” onto Whitehurst, who tried to give him “sensible advice” via the school’s email system.

He talked about being in a gang and, in an area of the city linked to the Manchester bomber, Whitehurst also feared he was at risk of getting involved in terrorism. When he started to talk about how he had “this big secret” and she was the only person he could tell it to, she made, she admits, a critical mistake.

“He had said he wants to kill people and is in a gang,” she said. “He was talking about going to the mosque. All these things were adding up in my head. I thought there was a bigger picture and I would find out about it and report it.

“I tried to get him to talk to staff who were better trained in such matters but he said no. He said he did not trust the school email which we were already communicating on. In one email thread he emailed me a ghost emoji and I realised he meant he wanted to tell me the secret on Snapchat. I downloaded Snapchat on purpose because I thought he was going to give me this big secret.”

Whitehurst said the secret was nothing to do with terrorism: “The secret was he was in love with me. I realised I had made an idiot of myself. I told him nothing like that was ever going to happen and there had been a misunderstanding. I told him I had to tell the school. He would say ‘they are not going to believe you’ and that I had made a mistake in giving him my Snapchat username. I should have reported it but I did not and I know now that that was an error.”

A few weeks later the teenager came into Whitehurst’s classroom when she was alone. He tried to force his tongue into her mouth, touched her intimately, slapped her face and spat at her. She tried to push him away, which he told the court he thought was encouragement.

“I do not think he knew how bad it was what he did; I know porn was available to him, he sent me lots of links which I never opened but I have an idea of what he watched,” she said. “I think he thought slapping me and spitting at me was sexy in some way.” Again, she did not report the assault. Whitehurst admits she was scared and also “again I thought I would be held responsible as I am the adult and he is the child”, but from then on things got steadily worse.

Over the coming weeks he gave her a necklace and sent naked images of himself which she deleted. He “begged” her to meet him outside school. Still worried about his state of mind, she met him several times in public places, including at a charity run she was doing in a Manchester park where she thought there was no risk of him “launching himself at her”.

At school Whitehurst volunteered for extra duties to ensure she was not alone. She applied for jobs in other schools.

In September 2019 she broke down in the playground when a colleague asked her if she was OK: “I said no and blurted it all out. She said she would have to take this to the head teacher.”

Whitehurst agreed with the head teacher that the matter would be reported to the police and the local authority safeguarding officer and that she would be suspended pending an inquiry. “My logic was, they will understand,” she said. “They will know he is difficult and that I wanted to help but mismanaged things.”

Whitehurst was shocked in her first police interview, two months later, when she heard that the boy had accused her of having sexual activity with him and sending him photos of her breasts.

The pandemic meant that the investigation dragged on. She did not hear anything until last year when police said they had downloaded data from both the phones, including a screenshot of a fake text conversation in whch she appeared to be suggesting sexual acts with the teenager outdoors.

“I thought, ‘I never sent those’. They did not look right. They were obviously fake. The language did not add up. I did not need a professor of linguistics to say that was not me,” she said.

“It was extraordinary that what he said was believed and I was not. He said it was consensual. And we were in love.

“I kept thinking the police will look at all this properly, tell me this will be dropped and say, ‘You poor woman’.”

As it became clear that the case would go to court Whitehurst switched lawyers. Her new team instructed an expert witness to look at the downloaded data from both phones. His report — which cost the family £8,000 — made clear there was no evidence that a photo of her breasts or a text suggesting outdoor sex acts had been sent by her or received by the teenager. Still the case was not dropped.

A week before court, Whitehurst says “calm descended”. She decided not to wear a face mask or hide her face and be “as brave as I could be”.

By video link the teenager gave contradictory evidence and admitted the assault on Whitehurst. The jury took less than three hours to acquit her.

Whitehurst’s case may be extreme but it is not isolated. There is a website on which teachers share dozens of accounts of false allegations. Teaching unions called last year for pupils who make them to be excluded and for fully funded mental health programmes aimed at boys.

Christian Harbinson of the law firm Thompsons solicitors, which represented Whitehurst, said: “An underfunded criminal justice system is unable to cope and that stretches out the agony for innocent people like Rebecca. It’s taken almost three years, since the allegations were first made, for her to clear her name, during which time Rebecca’s life has been on hold and her family have had to deal with an unimaginable level of stress and worry.”

Asked whether the teenager, now 18, would face an inquiry for possible criminal offences, Greater Manchester police said it had no intention to investigate “the child victim in this case”.

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grandwretch · 1 year

Text

only i must wander

[chapter one] [on AO3]

In the months before Steve's graduation, he and Dustin had something of a routine going on. Every Friday afternoon, Steve would pick Dustin up from Hawkins Middle School and they would drive out to the McDonald's one exit over. They even ordered the same thing every week: A Big Mac for Steve, nuggets for Dustin, two Cokes, and a supersized fry. After driving slowly back to Hawkins they would eat in the arcade parking lot, and when they were done they would either spend the rest of the afternoon trying to kill each other over air hockey or renting shitty science fiction movies. Whichever Dustin wanted, really.

It wasn't anything like Steve's life had been just six months ago, but he loved every second of it. Even when Dustin was getting mud all over his upholstery and asking too many questions.

On that particular Friday night, Steve had been late picking Dustin up because Mrs. O'Donnell had stopped him in the hallway on the way out, for the third time this month. Some bullshit about him not "applying" himself, or whatever, and how she didn't "feel it was right" that Steve had passed her class when he'd obviously learned so little. Which was bullshit, Steve thought, because she taught fucking English, which he already spoke, and he'd been pulling solid C's in her class all semester.

So most of the conversation had been about that, really, with Steve complaining about how every teacher he'd ever had hated him, and Dustin scolding him just as fiercely as any teacher ever had. A typical Friday night.

Tonight, however, Dustin paused, mid-sentence.

"Are you ever going to tell me why your eyes do that when you're mad?"

Steve paused, a french fry halfway to his mouth. He looked over at Dustin, who was staring at him from the passenger seat. He was almost used to it, a kid spending every day in the seat next to him instead of Nancy or Tommy, but big, curious eyes still threw him off from time to time. Especially when they came paired with off the wall questions like this.

"Why do my eyes do what, Dustin?"

"You know," Dustin said, gesturing to Steve's face with his burger. "When you get mad they go all black and stuff. Kinda like El's do when she uses her powers, but you don't--" Steve had never seen Eleven actually fight, but he had seen her do small tricks now and again for the boys. Her eyes were more like pits, her entire face wrinkling around the deep depths. Steve felt his stomach churn just thinking about the same in his own face.

The reflection in the rearview mirror was the same as it had always been. Hazel eyes, smooth skin marred only by a few moles. Steve made himself breathe.

"I think I would know," Steve said, keeping his voice carefully steady. He was trying to be less bitchy around the kids, but sometimes they made it so goddamn hard. "--if my face looked like that. It probably-- It probably hurts, right?"

"Not really," Dustin said, with enough conviction that it tore Steve's gaze away from his own reflection. "Anyway, it's not your face. It's just your eyes. Look, I don't know what kind of Wesen you are, man, but you can talk to me about it, whatever it is. You know I'm one, too, right?"

"A-- a what?" If this was another one of those weird fantasy novel things, he was going to finally strangle the little shit, he really was.

"A Wesen," Dustin repeated, looking as confused as Steve felt. "Like-- like me and El."

'Like me and El,' Steve thought, turning the sentence around in his head. He was not equipped for this, Jesus. It had to be hard, growing up fighting monsters and stuff, and having one of your best friends be a weird ass superhero, but Steve hadn't expected Dustin to deal with it by playing pretend. He'd always been the most grounded in reality of the kids. It was why Steve could put up with him for more than a couple hours.

"Buddy, maybe you should talk to your mom about this stuff," Steve said, slowly. "Or like Mrs. Byers or somebody."

Dustin rolled his eyes, which Steve thought was pretty rich coming from someone sitting in his car and talking about made up words. "Oh my god, Steve. Look."

And then-- And then.

Steve didn't know how to explain it. One moment, he was looking at Dustin, the kid he'd become absurdly attached to over the past semester, and then something shifted. In the next breath, Dustin was... different. Light brown hair had sprouted all over his face, smooth and straight and so unlike the curly mop still on top of his head. His nose had changed, the bridge gone flatter and wider, the end still hairless but now a deep dark brown, like a dog's. Underneath his nose, his lip was cleft, opened wide so Steve could see even more clearly the gap where Dustin's teeth should be. On either side of the cleft, whiskers sprouted, white and long.

His eyes were the same, though. Dustin's eyes, staring out of a beaver's face.

Two years ago, Steve would have screamed. He would have thrown things. He would have been out of the car in two seconds flat. His flight reflex had been recently shattered, though, and now all he could do was stare and try not to choose the other option-- fight.

This was Dustin, Steve told every dark instinct swelling up in the back of his mind. This was his best friend. Not something that crawled out of the Upside Down, not something stalking through the night. His kid.

Dustin blinked at him, with a silly smile on his inhuman face. "See?"

Steve's hands gripped the steering wheel, fingernails digging into the leather. "Dustin, what the fuck is happening right now?"

The smile faded on Dustin's face slowly. "Do you not-- Steve, come on. You've seen El do this like a thousand times."

"She's El!" Steve said, his voice going higher with stress. He could feel his muscles start to shake with the effort of keeping himself in place. "She's got, like, powers and shit! She was born in a lab and experimented on! You're-- You're just Dustin!"

"Okay, ouch," Dustin said. A pout began to form on his face. "Okay, yeah, El is special, but there are people who like her who are, like, normal Wesen you know?"

"You keep saying that word."

"You know, like--" Dustin gestured between them with-- Jesus fucking Christ, with a fucking paw. "You and me."

Steve had to get out of the car. His heart was going so fast he could feel it in his ear drums, in the roof of his mouth. It took too long for his shaking hands to open the door, and by the time his feet hit the dirt, he could feel adrenaline churning his stomach. Behind him, he could hear Dustin calling his name, the passenger door opening, but it only spurred on Steve's desire to get away.

He stumbled a few feet, his legs too weak to carry him far, until hands grabbed at his jacket. Steve whirled around, ready to fight-- Your kid! A smaller part of his brain screamed at him. --but Dustin was... Human again.

"What the fuck, Dustin," Steve couldn't stop repeating. "What the fuck."

"Steve," Dustin said, deadly serious. "Are you seriously telling me you've never met another Wesen before?"

"Stop saying that."

"What?"

"Stop saying that I'm one of you! I'm not. I don't-- I'm normal. Stop saying that."

Dustin's eyes were too understanding. Steve fucking hated it when he did shit like this, when he could just look at Steve and got him, because Steve barely understood why he did what he did, sometimes. How did this fucking kid always seem to know him? And if he could, why didn't anyone else ever manage?

"Steve," Dustin said again, pitched low and calm like he was trying to soothe a rabid dog. Like Steve was a monster, crawling the junkyard, looking for blood. "Look at your eyes right now."

There was a compulsion in Steve's blood that would not let him look away any longer. He had to look, had to face his own reflection already knowing it would ruin him. Steve raised his eyes to the car window, and its distorted mirror image of his face.

For a moment, Steve almost had hope. His face was not marked or pitted like El's, nor was it covered in fur like Dustin's. It was his nose, his skin, his moles, his mouth. The scars that littered his face in the last two years were faint, but still visible. Steve could still feel one of them in the corner of his upper lip. It was almost easy to miss, almost easy to chalk it all up to a bad joke. But then Steve met his own gaze, and all illusion was shattered.

It was like a trick of the light; They were the same size and shape as Steve's own, lined with the same delicate eyelashes, but there was no mistaking the change. His eyes were black. Not the deep void that stared out of El's other face, no. At first they seemed dead and glassy, like a shark's, but the longer he stared, the more Steve became aware of something moving inside them, like smoke behind glass.

Steve didn't feel his knees grow weak or his legs buckle underneath him. He barely felt it when he landed on the ground. One moment he was standing, and the next he was on the asphalt, staring up at Dustin. Dustin, who looked down at him with such a mixture of confusion and sorrow that Steve felt, bizarrely, like his change was more inhuman than all the fur and torn flesh in the world.

"What the fuck," Steve said, his voice croaking in his throat. "What's happening to me? Dustin, what the fuck is happening to me?"

"I don't know," Dustin said, and-- Embarassingly, Steve let out a thin noise of panic, because he was absolutely fucked if Dustin was admitting he didn't know something. "I mean, I have a theory, but..." Dustin cut himself off and looked around the parking lot. They were alone here, had chosen it specifically so they could laugh and play Dustin's tapes as loud as they wanted to, but he still scanned the area with more suspicion than Steve had seen out of him in months. It made Steve's instincts kick in, had him scrambling to his feet to put himself in between whatever danger Dustin suspected of the world around them. "We really shouldn't do this here."

"Is this..." Steve swallowed, his hands shaking. "Is this Upside Down shit? Is it because of the tunnels? Did I-- Did I breathe too many spores in or something?"

Dustin considered the idea for only half a moment before dismissing it with a shake of his head. "No, if this was a symptom, Will would have displayed the same ones while he was in the hospital last year. No, this has to be... Come on, Steve, let's go home. I promise, I'll tell you everything I know. Just not where people can hear us."

"This is fucking insane," Steve muttered to himself, but he climbed back in the car, hands shaking.

The ride to Steve's house was tense, neither of them speaking, although Steve could sense Dustin throwing him concerned looks the entire way. He usually hated when the kid did that, mostly because he didn't need a thirteen year old's concern, thank you so much, Dustin, but today it rankled Steve's nerves worse than ever. Everything in his body wanted to fight something, but the only enemy he could identify was inside his own head. Dustin's gaze on him only made it worse, made Steve so jumpy he imagined, several times, jumping from the moving car.

Whatever was wrong with him, it didn't stop at his eyes.

Steve stormed down his driveway and threw open his front door. Dustin scurried in after him as if afraid to be left behind, and Steve had a brief pang of guilt, but then he caught sight of himself in the long mirror that hung along the foyer and-- He turned away, swallowing bile. "Alright, kitchen," he said. "I need a fucking beer."

They sat on either side of his mother's breakfast nook, the only place Steve ever ate alone. Steve had a beer, one of the last few he'd been nursing since his party days ran out. Dustin had a root beer in front of him, untouched. They stared at each other, unsure.

It was time to be a fucking adult, Steve decided, and unstuck his tongue from the roof of his dry mouth.

"What was that word you kept using?" he asked.

"Wesen," Dustin answered, his mouth a grim line. "That's what I am. That's what El is. Or was? It's not really clear."

"But it's what she was supposed to be," Steve said, and when Dustin nodded, he sucked in a breath. "And what I am."

Dustin squirmed on his stool. "I think so."

"So... So what the fuck is it?" Steve shook his head, confused by the very words coming out of his mouth. "Am I going to start growing fur? Or-- Or get all wrinkly or whatever, like El when she uses her powers?"

"No, it's not--" Dustin paused, his face creased with the uncomfortable feeling of having no idea how to explain something. "I only know what my mom has told me, which isn't, like, a lot. But we're not like humans."

"Yeah," Steve scoffed. "I got that."

"What I mean is, we're part of the same community but we're not all the same. We probably have some stuff in common, but I don't know how much. I can't exactly go to the library to figure this stuff out." Dustin's voice held the long-suffering frustration of a child who'd been asking the same questions for a very long time, with no adult willing to answer. Steve was usually all for it, being the first to encourage the kids to say fuck adults and do it themselves, but he was still lost in a sea of information that made no fucking sense to him.

"Can we just-- Explain it to me like I'm really stupid."

"I want you to know that I'm not making a joke right now because I can tell you're in a really vulnerable place."

"Thank you so much, Dustin."

"You remember Star Wars, right?" Dustin asked.

Steve's head tilted. "The movie you made me watch over Christmas break? With the laser swords? Yeah, I remember them."

"Alright, so, everyone in that movie is an alien, right? Some of them look like humans, but they're not from Earth. And some of them don't look like humans at all. They're all from separate planets, some of them entirely separate species, but they're all aliens."

Steve blinked at Dustin for a long moment before his face collapsed into disbelief. "We are not fucking aliens."

Dustin's glare was legendary. "No, you idiot. But we're not human, either."

"Then what am I?" Steve raised a hand to stop the answer he could already see coming. "And don't say Wes… That word. I can't just be not human. People aren't… whatever they're not. I have to be something."

"I don't know," Dustin said. "I don't know a lot of the names. My mom is kinda…"

Steve nodded. Mrs. Henderson's brand of flighty overprotectiveness was well known to the entire group, and probably most of Hawkins by now. Dustin was allowed to spend whatever time he wanted with Steve, even staying over at his house when Steve's parents were out of town, but Steve had also been horrified to find that Mrs. Henderson had woefully unprepared the kid for things like puberty or high school. Dustin said his mom didn't like to talk about things that upset her, and Steve guessed that other Wesen was one of those subjects, much like Dustin growing up or rock music.

Steve felt himself begin to calm. Whatever happened, it was bound to be easier than the time he had to explain to Dustin what a pube was.

"Do you think she might know?"

"Probably, but we can't ask her." Dustin was beginning to look actually distressed. "There's no way she would let us hang out again."

Steve's stomach sank. "Really?"

"When she found out the founder of the D&D club at Hawkins High was a Blutbad, she made me promise I would never join," Dustin said. Brightening, he continued, "Oh, wait, duh! Your parents have to know; They must be Wesen, too! Just ask them."

Bradley Harrington's eyes had never gone black, Steve was pretty sure, though they had definitely been angry enough a time or two. He couldn't imagine his mother, Sophia, as anything less than human, either. They were both so… normal, although sometimes so damn keen on being completely on-trend that Steve suffocated with it. Half of the trouble Steve had gotten himself into over the years was more about calling too much attention to himself than legitimately bad behavior. Steve was sure they would be just as annoyed by having a genius like Dustin as a son as they were having an idiot like him.

He tried to imagine what his father would say if Steve called just to tell them his eyes had changed color, and winced.

"If they wanted me to know, they would have told me," Steve said, grimly.

"Well, fuck," Dustin said, which Steve thought pretty much summed it up, yeah.

After a moment of stewing in his own misery, Steve remembered to ask, "So what are you, then?"

Dustin's chest puffed up with pride, and a ripple of fur sped across his face. "I'm an Eisbiber!"

"That means absolutely nothing to me, you gotta know that."

"We're like beaver people, basically. Mom says it's impolite to compare people to animals but–" Dustin shrugged. "I call it like I see it. I'm a beaver. Lots of Wesen have animal attributes."

"What, like a werewolf or something?" Steve asked, incredulous.

"Those are Blutbads," Dustin confirmed. His voice dropped to a whisper. "But Mom says if you call a Blutbad a werewolf to their face, they'll eat you."

Suddenly, Steve could only think of demodogs, their faces peeled open and saliva shining in the moonlight. All those fucking teeth.

He nodded slowly. "I'll… keep that in mind." Shifting in his chair, Steve thought about the tight, inner group of the Party, and the way he hadn't really been a part of it before last fall. Even within their small group, there had always been an air of mystery about El and her origins. Even Nancy hadn't had many ideas, when Steve had gotten the courage to approach her about everything post-breakup, but if Dustin had known the whole time... "So how many people know about this stuff, then? Are Lucas and Mike like you? Is that why everything happened with Will that first time?"

"I don't think Wesen are that common," Dustin said, "though that might just be a Hawkins thing? Like I said, it's hard to do research. Lucas and Mike don't know. I'm not sure how much Will knows, honestly."

"But they know about El," Steve said, frowning.

Dustin paused, looking guilty. "I know. That's the problem. Mike treats El like a superhero, and I'm not... Eisbibers aren't like Hexenbiests, especially superpowered ones made in labs. We mostly make things. I don't want him to think I'm... I mean. You know. It's bad enough, already, with the human shit."

"Look, Mike and I have never gotten along, but I don't think he would do that. Whatever Wheeler is, a bully isn't one of them." Steve knew what a bully looked like. Scrawny, angry twelve years olds didn't make the list.

"Alright, so you tell them you're a--" Dustin paused. "A whatever, then."

"I will," Steve said, "the second we can figure out what the fuck it is I'm supposed to be. What about Hop? I mean, how much would El have told him?"

"Nothing about you." Dustin shrugged. "El was raised in a lab by humans, presumably. She didn't even know what she was. My mom had to tell Hop everything, and then made him promise me and El would never be allowed to hang out alone."

Steve thought of angry little El, eyes painted to match her second face, who wanted to be with her friends so badly that she ran away to find her past. "I bet that Kali girl could have helped us."

"Good luck finding her. I'm pretty sure she was half Musai," Dustin said. Steve wished he'd just stop saying shit like Steve was supposed to understand it. Being stupid about human stuff may be embarrassing, but he refused to be bullied for not knowing the names of every single race of a species he'd just realized he was a part of.

"This is insane," Steve said. He slumped in his chair, and looked around his kitchen. It looked just like he'd left it this morning, the kind of half-cluttered that houses inevitably got when they were lived in by people who desperately didn't want to be there. Filled up with the necessities of life but abandoned just as quickly. Clean dishes haphazardly placed around the room and junk mail months old still piled on the counter. His bread box was empty, half a loaf of bread still sitting in its wrapper on top.

It should be different, he decided. Not just his kitchen, but his entire world. That's how things had been when he'd seen the demogorgon in the Byers' house-- He'd realized things about the world in that moment that had changed everything. It was fast and violent, and the next morning he had looked at himself in the mirror and not recognized the kid looking back at him. It was the same for everything he'd ever loved, even the people, and while Steve had spent a lot of time looking back, he'd always known there was no resetting time before that moment.

He was starting to think he'd preferred the violent realization to this slow roll of information. Now Steve was left with the knowledge that the world had already been just as it was, and Steve had just been unable to see it. Right under his nose. His parents, his best friend, his fucking kitchen... the same as it had always been. He'd just been looking at it the wrong way.

That was a much harder pill to swallow. The demogorgon hadn't left Steve with much choice-- swallow or choke. Get it over with. Fight until you win. But how the fuck was Steve supposed to fight this? He felt helpless in a way he didn't often let himself be, disconnected from his body and vulnerable in the haze of his own thoughts. Like his soul was hanging raw and open in the space around him, and this part of him that was a living, breathing thing was left with no one home.

"We're gonna figure it out," Dustin said. Steve blinked slowly and pulled his gaze back to the kid who'd just blown his worldview to smithereens. Dustin's face was pulled tight with determination, leftover baby fat bunching adorably in his cheeks. He looked like an angry chipmunk, Steve thought hysterically, and then corrected himself: An angry beaver.

God, what the fuck had happened to his life?

"I'm serious, Steve," Dustin said, when it became clear that Steve wasn't going to react outside of a foggy gaze. "We're gonna figure this out, okay? Me and you."

"Yeah?" Steve said, the edge of a laugh in his voice. "We're gonna, what, hunt down what I am, what my parents are, completely on our own? You literally just said this shit was impossible to research."

"We don't need that shit," Dustin said, scoffing. "When have we ever needed evidence? Or, like, adults?"

Steve really wanted to protest that; As the older party and a practical adult himself, it was probably his job to insist on both evidence and adults for pretty much everything Dustin wanted to do, whether or not it involved fictional creatures that Steve may or may not be. The problem was, though, Dustin wasn't exactly... wrong. Hop and Joyce were the only adults that had ever been any help to either of them, and that was on a good day. Half the time they kinda just got in the way. Steve was pretty sure that if cops and doctors just listened to Nancy as much as they listened to the adults, they could have figured out most of this shit back in junior year.

"Fuck, okay," Steve said, pushing his hands through his hair. "Sure. Goddamn it."

"You are literally never allowed to tell me off for cussing again," Dustin said. He sounded unimpressed.

"Sorry, is my breakdown upsetting you?" Steve shot back, but he felt his muscles unclench enough that it no longer felt painful to breathe. Dustin's snark was honestly calming, though Steve would rather die than ever admit it. Still, it was a good reminder that no matter how scared Steve was, things hadn't gotten so bad that Dustin had lost his particular brand of sarcastic zen. As much as the little shit loved to dig into the most dangerous curiosities he could find, he wasn't exactly the sort to smile calmly into the face of death, so... So whatever Steve was, he could deal with it.

Probably.

"I'm going to go home," Dustin said, jumping out of his seat. Ignoring Steve's small sound of protest, he continued, "and you're going to take a shower and then a nap. Tomorrow, once you've calmed down, we can do some tests."

"Tests?" Steve repeated, his nose wrinkling. El had never really divulged what had gone on in the lab with him, but he knew just enough for his imagination to take over. He knew Dustin wasn't exactly the government experiment type, but he still hated the concept being applied to him. "See, this is exactly the kind of shit I didn't want to happen."

"Tough shit," Dustin said, stomping his way out of the kitchen. Rolling his eyes, Steve followed.

"Do you want a ride?" he asked, because he always did and, well... Whatever Dustin thought, Steve didn't exactly want to be alone right now. Also, he just found out there was a whole new kind of monster in this town, and every protective instinct in his body wasn't exactly jazzed about Dustin riding all the way home on his bike. "What about the B-- the Bad werewolves or whatever, you were talking about? You said one lived in Hawkins--"

"Blutbad," Dustin corrected as he wedged his feet back into the shoes he'd previously abandoned next to Steve's front door. "And I think I'll be okay. I've existed in the same town as them for thirteen years and I haven't gotten eaten even once."

"Not for lack of trying," Steve muttered under his breath, and then helped Dustin put his backpack on. Dustin let him, not complaining about being able to do it himself for once, and not for the first time Steve felt a small rush of affection for the kid. He knew not a lot of people understood why he and Dustin spent so much time together. Sure, sometimes the other kids were involved, Max and Lucas especially, but usually it was just Steve and Dustin. The other kids didn't really get it, and no matter what Dustin said, Steve wasn't sure they saw him as more than Dustin's big brother. As for Steve's old friends, well, Nancy had long stopped being impressed by Steve's ability to keep a kid alive for more than forty five minutes; She probably just thought it was pathetic now. Tommy sure gave him enough shit for it when Steve bothered to give him the time of day. God knew what Jonathan thought, outside of the stern nods they traded when Steve picked Will up for an arcade trip.

They just didn't understand the warmth in Steve's chest when Dustin let him help with something stupid and small. It didn't matter if Dustin could do it on his own. That had never been the point. Helping the kid put on backpacks and jackets, fixing his hair, making sure his grilled cheeses were evenly toasted on both sides so the texture didn't turn his stomach-- No matter how much Steve bitched, he loved doing every little thing no one had ever done for him.

"Listen, Steve," Dustin said, standing nervously in his doorway. "I want you to know that it doesn't matter."

Steve dragged himself out of his sentimental reverie. "What?"

Dustin squirmed, face pinched with thought. "What kind of Wesen you are, it doesn't matter. I'm gonna help you because you want to know, and that's-- That's cool. You've got a right to know, just like El. But knowing didn't change El, and it's not going to change you. You'll still be Steve, and Steve's pretty great."

Blinking, Steve couldn't respond for a moment. Finally, he managed to say, "Are you trying to pep talk me right now, Henderson?"

Embarrassment flooded Dustin's face, creasing his brown and throwing blush across his cheeks. "Okay, fuck you, see you in the morning, douchebag."

Laughing, Steve followed Dustin out the door and onto his front steps. "Hey, Dustin?" he called as he watched Dustin clamber onto his bicycle. Dustin looked up, eyes squinted in suspicion. "Thanks, man," Steve said, a blush rising in his own face.

Dustin grinned. "Welcome to the club, asshole," he said, and then sped out of the Harringtons' driveway as fast as his little Gumby legs could carry him. God, Steve loved that kid.

Dustin kept his promise. He was there the next morning, before Steve's neighbors had even left for church, with a list of potential 'tests' to try out. None of them were the weird science experiments that Steve had been dreading. Most of them, in fact, were just Steve trying to flex muscles he shouldn't have.

"Acid spit?" Steve read, incredulous.

"That one's a far reach," Dustin admitted. Shifting through his backpack, Dustin pulled out item after item, and Steve lowered the list to look doubtfully at the large slingshot that now sat on his kitchen table. "But I didn't want to leave anything out." It wasn't a long list, Steve noted, and most of it was ridiculous. No matter what Dustin said, he was pretty sure he'd have noticed something like kisses that drugged people or the ability to lead rats around.

Probably.

"Fine," Steve said, giving up. "But we're not doing this shit outside where the neighbors can see. The last thing I need is another rumor going around about King Steve."

"It's your house," Dustin said, shrugging, and threw the water balloon launcher over his shoulder.

To Steve's complete and utter lack of surprise, he did not have acid spit or any other set of superpowers. At Dustin's insistence, Steve ran across his backyard a few times, picked up some heavy things, caught a few launched tennis balls--

"I'm not playing anymore fetch," Steve decided, dropping the last of the tennis balls at Dustin's feet.

Dustin glared up at him with all the tiny rage of a scientist disrespected in his field. At least, Steve imagined. He hadn't known too many non-evil scientists in his life. "I'm trying to determine if you have super strength or improved reflexes."

"Oh, good," Steve said, and then flopped into his usual lawn chair. "I don't."

"You picked up a grill," Dustin protested, but even he didn't sound convinced.

"I was on three different sports teams for all four years of high school," Steve said, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. Dustin was only trying to help, and Steve knew he should be grateful. But once the panic had faded, all Steve was left with was this... irritation. Wasn't it enough that everything he'd ever known about his life had turned out to be a lie? One more lie on top of everything else turned out to be just one more pea under the princess' mattresses, and Steve was sick to death of vegetables in his bedding. "And I've been prepping to murder interdimensional monsters for the last two of 'em. Of fucking course I run fast and pick up heavy shit. It's, like, literally all I'm good at."

"I give up," Dustin said, throwing his arms up. Paper floated down around them, escaping from Dustin's clipboard. "You're the most useless Wesen in the world! If I hadn't seen you woge myself, I'd think you were an Eisbiber!"

"Jesus Christ, kid," Steve said, "Cool it on the beaver hate. Your mom's pretty cool."

Dustin's glare was intense enough that even Steve knew it was time to shut up. They sat in silence for a moment, Steve placidly watching as Dustin squinted into the reflective light of the pool. Steve had no idea what Dustin was thinking, and didn't have enough context to guess. At this point, Steve was ready to chalk the whole thing up to a trick of the light and move on with his life. Eventually, though, Dustin shook himself out of it and sat on the other end of the lounger, close enough their knees bumped together.

"Woge for me," Dustin demanded. Steve had learned enough that wogeing meant the change, the other 'face' that El and Dustin possessed. Dustin had talked about it at length that morning, talking about the difference reasons for it and how it might point to the truth of Steve's identity. None of the tests had worked, though, and Steve's eyes had stayed human.

"I don't think it's the same thing for me, man," Steve said. When he saw Dustin about to protest, he rushed to continue. The last thing he needed was another Henderson rant about the scientific method or some other bullshit Steve wouldn't bother to remember. "I tried for hours to make it happen last night, just so I could make sure that it had actually happened. Besides, it's only my eyes-- And your thing is literally everything but your eyes. Those stay human."

"But El's don't."

"El also looks like a literal diseased corpse when she changes," Steve said, tired. "Like we've said a million times, it's stupid to compare either of us to the girl literally created and then raised in a lab."

Even Dustin couldn't argue with that logic, but it didn't phase him for long. "Fine, then we just need to replicate the last time you woged, so I can take notes of all the characteristics I may have missed the last time," he said, slipping back into the overly professional voice that Steve was almost certain he'd stolen from one of his doctors.

Resisting the urge to groan, Steve frowned. "So, what, we have to go get in the car?"

"Maybe, if it doesn't work here, but I don't think the place is really the important variable here," Dustin said, and Steve supposed it was a sign of how seriously Dustin was taking this if he didn't even pause to ruthlessly bully Steve for getting it wrong. "How did you feel the last time your eyes changed? What caused the feelings?"

"Dustin, you were literally there," Steve sighed, but Dustin was already speaking over him before he could finish the sentence.

"Yeah, but I'm not you! I don't know what instincts were happening in that big head of yours!"

"I don't know, I was... upset?" Steve asked, and when Dustin rolled his eyes, he kicked at the kid's legs. "Hey! You're the one sounding like a fucking Hollywood therapist! What am I supposed to say? I just watched my best friend turn into a fucking beaver!"

Dustin's eyes narrowed. "You think my woge triggered yours?"

"I don't... know?" Steve leaned back in the chair, brow creasing as he tried to remember what had been going through his head before the panic of not recognizing his own reflection. The primal fear hung over every second of the memory now, but he knew that wasn't true. There had been adrenaline, yes, but Steve hadn't been scared of Dustin. His instincts had been more violent, almost angry. That had been what scared him, in the beginning. It hadn't been Dustin that sent him scrambling out of the car, but his own impulses. "When you changed, it made me... I thought I had to fight you."

Dustin hummed under his breath. "Once, when we were in the city, Mom and I ran into this lizard guy in the hospital. He turned out to be really nice, but when Mom first saw him, she woged out of fear and he woged back-- I think it was probably some kind of predator-prey instinct. Maybe it's like that?"

Steve felt a pit grow in his stomach. He didn't like the sound of that. "So, I'm like... A hunter?"

"Unless you think you're the only natural prey of the North American beaver, yeah," Dustin said.

Great, Steve thought, what a way to have every fucking bad thing anyone had ever thought about him confirmed in one fell swoop. Crossing his arms across his chest, he tried not to settle into a sulk. Pouting in front of the kid you were supposed to be a good influence for was embarrassing as hell, and probably even worse than being an instinct-driven murder machine. "Does that at least narrow it down?"

Dustin made an unsure noise in the back of his throat, kicking his feet back and forth as he thought. "I mean, kinda. It means you're definitely not anything my mother will let me within five feet of, but we pretty much already knew that. The problem is that, as far as I know, most of the Wesen world is pretty dangerous. Even some of the prey animals are killers."

"According to your mom," Steve said. He loved Claudia Henderson, he really did, but she thought her neighbor's Yorkie was two seconds from killing them all on a good day.

"According to my mom," Dustin agreed. "Look, let's just woge right now, and it'll confirm it."

"You don't think that triggering my 'predator instincts' on purpose will be a bad idea?" Steve asked, shrinking in on himself. If he hurt Dustin over some stupid science experiment, he'd have to go ahead and drown himself in the pool. And he genuinely didn't think Dustin could take the extra trauma on top of everything else.

"You'll be ready for it this time," Dustin said, and twisted around so they were face to face.

'Ready' turned out to be mostly erroneous. There was no countdown, no time to prepare-- Their eyes met and then Dustin was changing. The fur, the nose, the cleft lip. It was all as Steve remembered it, all exactly as he'd played over and over again in his mind. Steve braced himself, waiting for the same rush of adrenaline, for the same muscle-clenching urge to fight.

It never came.

One moment passed, then another. Steve forced himself to breathe. "I'm not feeling any rodent murdering tendencies," he admitted, although he couldn't quite convince his shoulders to relax.

"Well," Dustin said, his tiny beaver face peering into Steve's. "Your eyes definitely changed. They're... Huh."

"What?" Steve wanted to squirm under Dustin's gaze, uncomfortable with the very intense eye contact going on right now. Even though Dustin was looking at him, in his eyes, Steve didn't feel like he was being included in the interaction. If anything, it felt more like Dustin was watching something through him, and after all the multidimensional shit they'd been through, the last thing Steve wanted to think about was his eyes being a portal. "Come on, man, you're freaking me out."

"They're reflective," Dustin said, his voice faraway with thought.

"Yeah?" Steve said, confused. "So are everybody's."

"No, they're like mirrors. I can see myself completely. Every detail." Dustin's voice still sounded lost, and Steve swallowed down the sudden lump in his throat.

"That's weird," he said, eventually, when Dustin had proven that he had forgotten to even blink. "Um, can this part be over now? I'm not great at eye contact on a good day."

After a moment, Dustin shook himself, looking just as confused as Steve felt. "Yeah, sorry, man," he said, frowning down at his notepad. "I don't know what happened. Maybe your species is good at hypnosis? Some kind of snake, maybe?"

"Do I look like a fucking snake to you, Dustin?" Steve said, gesturing to his smooth skin and fluffy hair.

"No," Dustin admitted, "but we don't really have any proof your species has an animal counterpart, either. El doesn't. And before you say it--" Steve closed his mouth. "-- I'm not comparing you to El. I'm saying that whatever a Hexenbiest is supposed to be, I don't think it was originally like me. Maybe they're not the only ones."

Honestly, Steve hated the idea of his powers being anything like El's. To put it mildly, El's powers were fucking terrifying. Not the girl herself; It had been impossible to be afraid of El after Steve had gotten to know the sweet little girl that hid behind all that trauma. He adored her, really. But her powers? Steve genuinely didn't know how El slept at night, because if it were him with all that responsibility, he'd probably just have a heart attack. The more power someone had, the more opportunities they had to fuck up. Steve was proof of that. Having as much power as El was his worst nightmare. And if Dustin was right, that Steve might be something like her...

"We should tell Hop about this," Steve decided. Immediately, Dustin groaned.

"Come on, Steve! Hopper isn't going to let us dig into this and you know it!"

"Yeah, and maybe we shouldn't," Steve said. "I don't know anything about this shit, and my parents aren't talking. But if you're right, and I have the ability to hurt someone, then Hop needs to know about it."

Dustin's face softened. "You-- It's not like that, Steve. You wouldn't--"

"You don't know that." Steve was on his feet again, pacing the concrete that surrounded his pool. "We don't know anything, and you've seen what happens when El gets angry. And what happened to Will last year?"

"That wasn't Wesen related," Dustin tried to reason, but Steve was already shaking his head.

"That we know of," Steve said, "and I think we've proven that neither of us actually know a goddamn thing about this."

"... Fine. But I want it on the record that I think this is stupid, and you would never hurt anybody, Wesen or not."

Steve rolled his eyes. "Your complaint has been recorded, and will be going directly into the trash. Do you have your walkie on you?"

They went inside to collect Dustin's abandoned bag, his walkie still packed safely inside. They had given Hopper a Party-approved walkie the year before, when he decided that in case of emergency, relying on phones wasn't enough. Steve was pretty sure he'd given up on the Upside Down being a one-time thing, and making sure the kids weren't being eaten by monsters in the woods made everyone sleep better at night. They had a separate channel, though, for adult-included emergencies, because Hopper had threatened to arrest Mike for calling in a Code Orange over being out of toilet paper.

Steve hesitated over the dial, for a moment, and wondered if discovering you weren't human was a Code Yellow or Orange.

"It's not going to call itself," Dustin said, and Steve--

His eyes shut, all usual irritation at Dustin's annoyances drowned out by fear. Because he was so fucking afraid. Afraid of himself, yeah, but also a million other things. Like, how was he supposed to look Hopper in the eyes and admit what he was? Sure, Hop was okay with El, but El was a kid. His kid. Steve wasn't sure if he'd have taken the beaver thing half as well from anyone but Dustin. Wasn't sure he would now, even, and he was fucking one of them. Would Hop think he was a monster?

Even worse, would Hop believe him when Steve said he was something to be feared? Steve wasn't sure if he hoped Hop would, or if he dreaded it.

"Can you wait outside?" Steve asked, his voice shaking. He could already see Dustin gearing up for an epic bitch fit, so he quickly continued, "Just for a second. I swear, you can come with me. I can't do this shit without you, man."

The admission made Dustin quiet. With shock or with mollification, Steve didn't know, but whatever it inspired in Dustin was enough to have him nodding and walking out the door.

Steve turned the walkie to Hop's channel, and held the button down. "Chief, are you there?"

There was a moment of quiet, and Steve thought- hoped? -that Hopper didn't hear him, that he might be busy or at work or maybe he'd thrown the stupid thing in a drawer somewhere, but eventually the speaker crackled to life. The chief's voice poured out, "That you, Harrington?"

"Yeah," Steve said, the vowels coming out reedy in the tightness of his throat. "Yeah, it's me. Um... I got a... A Code Orange? Or maybe a Yellow."

"I can never remember that stupid fucking system," Hopper said, and on any other day, Steve would have laughed. "You okay, kid?"

Kid, Steve thought, his brain buzzing, when was the last time he'd been a kid?

"No," Steve said, answering the question truthfully for the first time in years. "No, I'm not."

There was a moment of static, and then, "You need me there?"

Steve wanted to say yes. Steve wanted to sit on the floor and wait for an adult to come by and take care of it. Steve wanted a dad who would come home and make everything go away. But that wasn't the truth, and it would scare Dustin, so Steve took a deep breath and acted like a fucking grown up for once. "I was thinking that Dustin and I could come by the cabin tonight, actually. There's something there I think we might need."

Hopper made a small, considering noise. "This about all that nastiness this fall?"

"Dustin doesn't think so," Steve said, glad to be able to report some good news for once. "It's more… personal. But, you know, you have a lot in the cabin that might have answers, so…"

There was a moment of dead air, and Steve wondered if Hop was weighing his affection for El against his need to protect Steve. Hopper was obviously more of a protective dad than Steve's dad had ever been, putting even Claudia Henderson to shame with his hovering abilities, and Steve… didn't begrudge El that. Really, he didn't. But there was a lump in his throat when he thought about Hopper leaving him to deal with this on his own. And he would, if it meant keeping his daughter out of trouble. Steve knew that without a moment's thought.

He wondered what it said about him that the knowledge made his chest ache. Nothing good, probably.

"Come on down," he said eventually, and something in Steve's chest unclenched. "You'll both stay for dinner."

"Sounds good," Steve said, although they both knew it hadn't been a question. "We should be there in about ten minutes."

"Yeah, I know where you live, boy," Hopper said with a snort, and then the line went quiet.

Despite himself, Steve smiled down at the walkie as he threw it haphazardly back into Dustin's bag. No matter what changed, at least Hop would always be the same. He was the same as a father figure as he was when he had been a stranger breaking up all Steve's best parties. It was a small comfort, to see someone strong enough to not let all the craziness of their lives change him– A comfort that Steve let wash over him in the silence of his kitchen, breathing deep.

Okay, game face on, he told himself. Keeping how badly this affected him from Dustin was hard enough, and he knew it would be near impossible in the face of El's observant gaze. He wasn't entirely sure how this would affect her, but keeping as calm as possible would stop her from freaking out, and that was always good for Steve's health.

He loved the kid but, Jesus, she was scary sometimes.

"So what's the game plan?" Dustin asked as they both climbed into the Beemer. "I mean, what are we going to tell him?"

"Stop trying to game the Chief," Steve said, with the air of an older troublemaker who had long since learned better. "It literally never works."

"So, what, we just go in there and tell the truth?" Dustin said. He sounded uncomfortable at the idea, which Steve kind of understood. He'd been the same at Dustin's age, always lying and keeping problems to himself for genuinely no good reason. He was still working hard to break the habit, obviously. He didn't know why he did it, though, and Dustin probably wasn't even aware of it yet– It was just a knee-jerk reaction, something Steve had learned after years of proof that telling the truth rarely got you anything but grounded.

"If we want Hop to help, he's gotta know what's going on," Steve said, with more confidence than he felt. Dustin argued for the entire drive, less because he disagreed, Steve was pretty sure, and more because it was easier than dwelling on the mystery. Sometimes your brain needed a break from the panic spiral of the unknown, and bugging the shit out of your best friend was the perfect solution, apparently.

Steve sighed in relief when he rounded the last corner and the cabin slid into view.

Hidden away in the depths of the same woods that abutted Steve's yard, Hopper's cabin was small and plain, unnoticeable from the main roads that cut through the town mere feet away. Steve wasn't sure how many people knew about the place, but those in the know rarely came by except by appointment. Even Joyce knew better than to roll up to Hopper's unannounced. If anything, such a bold move would be a sign that something had gone truly, terribly wrong.

There was always a bit of nerves just before Steve knocked on the cabin door. Every time, something in him was convinced he would be turned away. The confirmation beforehand didn't help the anxiety, and Steve was never sure why– Maybe it was the feeling of constantly intruding on El and Hopper's new family, or maybe it was just the fact that they both could kick Steve's ass, but the initial frisson of nerves never faded even after Steve had grown comfortable in their presence.

Hopper opened the door before he could knock, leaving Steve's hand hanging awkwardly in the air.

"This doesn't look like an emergency," Hopper said, voice gruff– But his gaze swept carefully over the both of them.

Steve opened his mouth to explain, or at least offer some kind of vague reassurance that would get them in the door, but Dustin beat him to the punch, as usual. "It's not really a human-type emergency."

Hopper's eyes snapped to Steve, surprise and suspicion mixing together in equal measure. "You said this wasn't about the lab."

Steve swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry under Hopper's gaze.

"Most Wesen aren't man-made," Dustin said, suddenly huffy with offense. Steve would probably be offended, too, if he'd had a lifetime to adjust to not being human. Seemed kind of rude to start assuming people were created in a lab. "Look, can we come in? If I have to re-explain my entire society to you, I at least want to do it sitting down."

To Steve's surprise, Hopper smiled down at Dustin and took a step back, shrugging. It wasn't exactly a grin, but it was there plain as day, small and fond. "Sure, come on in. El," Hopper said, raising his voice to shout across the cabin to his daughter. "Company's here!"

El's door swung open on cue, all the proof Steve needed that she'd known they were coming the whole time. The girl all but sprinted into the main room, nearly tackling Dustin in a hug. They looked almost like siblings, all brown curls and wide smiles, and El's delight at seeing Dustin was effusive. Despite the stress of the last two days, Steve found himself sharing Hopper's smile.

The kids chattered to each other, voices soft with delight, and Hopper made eye contact over their heads. "You hanging in there, Harrington?" It was the kindest way to say that he'd heard the panic in Steve's voice earlier, and embarrassment flooded through his veins. Steve appreciated the concern. Really, he did. But suddenly the shame of his own need to be cared for was overwhelming, and Steve had to fight the urge to back out of the house with a mumbled excuse.

He couldn't figure this out on his own. This wasn't going away.

Luckily, Hopper's voice had reminded El of their second guest, and she saved Steve from having to reply by pulling away from Dustin. "Steve!" she cooed, her voice still pure childhood.

She went in for a hug, her face tilting up to beam at him, and– As their eyes met, El's face shifted. The rapidly familiar ripple of a woge, leaving behind the twisted, pitted skin of her second face.

The black of her eyes burned like coals, and the intensity of them sung in Steve's veins as adrenaline shot through his blood. His hand, which had raised to pull El into a hug, shot towards Dustin, instead–

Every cell in his body thrummed with instinct. He needed to get the kid out of here, away from the danger. He needed to put himself in between, needed to fight.

Before his hand could even land on Dustin's back, his feet were off the floor.

Steve hit the cabin wall, the entire room rattling with the weight of El's power. He could hear Hopper and Dustin's voices, surprised and panicked, but their voices were lost in the ringing in his ears. He struggled in vain against El's invisible hold, rage mounting with every futile second.

The part of him that still held on to rationality, the part that made him Steve, struggled to calm his pounding heart. He knew El wouldn't hurt Dustin, knew El wasn't the threat his body said she was, but it took everything he had just to bite down on the feral scream building in his throat.

The strings of El's power were cut just as quickly as they were woven, and Steve slumped to the floor. There were hands on him, but he recognized them as Dustin's, and he let them hold him down.

"I'm… I'm sorry," El said, her voice small. Steve wanted to cry at the fear there, even as the furious parts of him settled in smugness.

He didn't look at her. He couldn't. Instead, Steve looked up at Hopper, pleading.

"Something's wrong with me," Steve said, voice shaking. "You have to help."

Hopper's face was grim, his mouth a flat line as he looked down at them. "You feel the Mindflayer on him?" he asked El, his eyes never leaving Steve.

El was quick to shake her head. "No, it's not like Will. It was… I think it was me."

"I already told you, it's not an Upside-Down thing! He's just a Wesen," Dustin said. His hands were shaking where he had them fisted in Steve's t-shirt. Steve leaned into them, feeling them steady against his ribs.

"Like us?" Some of the unease faded from El, excitement in her eyes.

"Not exactly," Steve said, still looking up at Hopper with guilty eyes.

Dustin turned to El, his eyes sparkling with the excitement of having someone who would entertain his nonsense for once. "You noticed his eyes, right? That's the only aspect of his woge. I've never seen anything like it, have you?"

El shook her head. "I've had woges forced before, but I–"

"Forced?" Hopper repeated, and Steve slumped further into himself.

"Steve didn't, though," El said, and her eyes drifted back to Steve. He didn't like the way her eyes went unfocused when he looked back, the same way Dustin had drifted into a haze earlier that day. "I was… afraid."

"A prey response," Steve said, glumly repeating what Dustin had theorized before.

"Not of you," El said gently, to Steve's surprise. "When your eyes went black, I could see myself in them. Not my body, but my…" Her face twisted in thought. "My self."

"I did, too," Dustin said, frowning. "And Steve said he had the same initial adrenaline response, but I didn't–"

"I didn't like what I saw," El said, her words clipped in the harsh, stilted way it had been when she was younger.

All four of them sat in the silence that followed for a moment. Steve wondered if they were also trying to ignore what Steve was: The things El had done that Dustin hadn't, the things she'd had no choice but to become. He wasn't sure what El had seen staring back at her, but Steve couldn't imagine having to actually face the worst of himself. And how did his pathetic little life even compare to the things El had survived?

Eventually, Hopper broke the silence. "I didn't see anything." The skepticism in his voice was palpable, but there was relief there, too.

"Humans wouldn't," Steve said, a terrible realization creeping up his spine. "We were wrong, Dustin. It's not a predator thing. I think it's…" He huffed, trying to think of some kind of comparison. "It's like those butterflies that make themselves look like owls. They're trying to fend other Wesen off. Whatever I am, it's afraid of being hunted."

"Alright, alright. This is–" Hopper rubbed a hand over his face, looking five years older than he had when Steve and Dustin had knocked on his door. "Start from the beginning. What exactly are we dealing with here?"

Dustin and Steve shared a look.

'You're the smart one,' Steve said with a shrug.

'You're the one with the freaky eyes,' Dustin said with an arched brow.

"Alright, so… It started after I picked Dustin up from school yesterday," Steve began. He ran them both through everything, even the parts that made him cringe. The first intense need to fight or escape in the face of Dustin's woge, the changes in his own reflection he couldn't replicate.

El listened politely, sending Steve small smiles when she noticed him looking her way. Her obvious happiness when he or Dustin included her in their discussion of Wesen almost made Steve feel guilty for hating this. He knew isolation, both real and metaphorical, was the hardest part of El's slow integration into society, and having more Wesen around was probably a dream come true, but– Steve wasn't that guy. He didn't know a damn thing about being Wesen. He was just… human with a condition.

Besides, whatever levity El brought to the situation, Hopper was apparently determined to stomp out. His face was that of a man facing down a firing squad, one who was fucking pissed about it, besides. When Dustin mentioned Steve's parents, he practically went apoplectic, turning away as his face went redder and redder.

Whatever the fuck that was about.

"So we decided we should come to you," Steve said, gesturing, "because you would know what to do about… me."

Hopper's face didn't get any less angry. El, who had apparently just noticed her father's countenance, looked between them with wide eyes.

"What to do about you," Hopper repeated, voice flat.

"Yeah," Steve said, nodding. "Like you did with Will."

El and Dustin both flinched, but Hopper was made of stone. Nothing but long, uncomfortable eye contact from him. "I don't think there's anything to be done here, kid," Hopper said.

Steve couldn't suppress the full-body reaction to that, scrambling to his feet. Adrenaline was hitting him again, sending his already exhausted heart into paroxysms, but now it was true fear. Not of some imagined enemy, but of himself. "I can't just be around people like this, Hop," he said through gritted teeth.

"You're around people now."

"That's my fucking point! I have like four fucking friends in the entire world, and two of them turned out to be the exact kind of people that I'm a danger to. The only reason El isn't hurt is because she can kick my ass," Steve pushed a hand through his hair, feeling it stick up at the ends from leftover hairspray. He didn't care. He wanted to pull it out by the fucking roots. "What if I go to the grocery store and meet a Wesen in the fucking dairy aisle, Hop? What about the next time I see Mrs. Henderson?"

"You didn't want to hurt El," Hopper said, his voice calm but his face still marred by anger. "You were reaching for Dustin. You wanted to protect him."

"You can't know that for sure. I can't– I can't control myself when I'm like that," Steve said. "It took literally everything I had not to hurt my own fucking kid."

"Me?" Dustin squeaked.

"You can. I know what someone out of control looks like, Harrington. You aren't it."

"Why can't you just fucking help me?" Steve said, his voice going reedy with desperation.

Hopper sneered. "I'm not going to help you punish yourself for something you haven't even done yet."

"I think maybe we should go outside," El said, and Dustin nodded eagerly. They both scurried outside like they were being chased.

"Stay where I can see you!" Hopper bellowed after them. Steve blinked back tears, shaking in the silence the kids left behind. Hopper took a deep breath. "Look, kid…"

"I don't get why you won't help," Steve said, his eyes falling to the floor. "It's not punishment when it's El. Why can't you–"

"El could control herself," Hopper said. "She just didn't know that she needed to. She's still learning how to be a person, Steve. She's just a kid."

"Right, right. Sorry," Steve rubbed at his nose, willing his tears away. "I'm sorry I bothered you, I–"

"That's not…" Hopper sighed, grabbing one of Steve's shoulders in one big hand. "What I'm saying is that you're already a good kid. I don't have to worry about you getting yourself or somebody else hurt."

"I get myself and other people hurt literally all the time."

Hopper rolled his eyes. "You know what I mean. You're not going to hurt the kids, and I don't believe you're going to start attacking randoms in the street. You're still you."

"But…" Steve swallowed around a dry throat. He didn't know how to make Hopper understand, didn't know how to make him care. He'd never been very good at that. Half of his life, Steve had been begging people to care. None of it had ever worked. "Alright. I get it."

Hopper nodded, looking relieved. "Just go home, Harrington. Lay low for a little while. Get used to the new instincts." Steve still wanted to protest, but he agreed. "Good. Let's get outside, before those kids start some trouble."

Steve followed Hopper out the cabin door, head held low. Dustin and El were waiting for them on the porch, sitting on the edge with their knees pulled up to his chest. They weren't talking, just watching the door with their bright, expectant faces.

"It'll be fine," Hopper told them, voice calmer than it had been inside. The kids deserved that, Steve told himself. "Steve's got this."

"Yup," Steve said, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. "It's all under control."

El darted forward, throwing her arms around Steve's chest and clinging. Steve tried not to meet anyone's eyes over her head and hugged her back just as hard.

"I'm sorry I scared you," he whispered, heart twinging in his chest. Not much scared El, and now he was on the list. What did that say about him?

Squeezing even harder, El shook her head, rubbing her face against his chest. "Don't be sorry. It's not your fault," she said. It sounded like she was mimicking someone, and Steve wondered if Hopper had done that for her. If she'd been held close and told everything would be okay.

Swallowing around his jealousy, Steve held on until El stepped back and smiled up at him. "You'll have to give me some tips on how to do this Wesen thing," Steve said. "Dustin's terrible at it."

She smiled up at him. "We'll learn together."

Dinner was a simple affair. Hopper hadn't let Steve help at all, so he had sat on the couch and watched Dustin and El play card games until spaghetti was on the table. The kids were loud and chaotic, thrilled to be around each other again, and it didn't matter that Steve only talked when someone asked him a question. Somehow, he made it through the meal, even when every bite churned in his stomach.

Even when Dustin kept sending him little looks of concern, always too perceptive for his own good.

They said their goodbyes quickly, even when El begged them to stay. Hopper, laughing, had told her they couldn't stay forever, and waved them out of the cabin and into the car.

When Steve pulled into the Henderson's driveway, Dustin hesitated before opening the door.

"So, I've been thinking," Dustin said, "and I don't think I should go to Camp Know-Where this year."

Immediately, Steve knew he had fucked up. Dustin had talked about little else since the spring semester had started. No matter what problem he'd had, whether it was bullies or how boring his classes were, Dustin had changed the subject to how good this summer was going to be. And Steve got it. Really, he did. If he'd grown up in a town where no one cared about sports and bullied him for liking basketball, he'd be fucking stoked to spend some time with people who understood him, too.

But now Steve had ruined that for him, too.

"Absolutely not."

"I can't just…" Dustin looked distressed, and Steve was all the more determined to send the little shit to camp himself. "What if something happens while you're away?"

"What's gonna happen?" Steve said, even as his brain played a horror film of all the things he could do without Dustin as a buffer for the rest of the world. He tried to borrow a little of Hopper's confidence. "I just have to get a handle on my instincts, that's all."

"I don't think sitting in your house alone all summer–" Dustin started, but Steve cut him off, slicing his hand through the air.

"You're going to your shitty little nerd camp, Dustin, and that is final." Before Dustin could protest again, Steve continued, "I have to get a job this summer anyway, remember? Official Bradley Harrington decree. Even if you stayed home, we wouldn't be able to hang out all day. You can't, like, come to work with me."

Dustin didn't look convinced. "What if something happens?"

Honestly, Steve didn't know, either. "You know, I'll call…" Who? The last thing Steve wanted was to disappoint Hopper, so he and El were out. The kids were too young to help with this shit, anyway, and Steve didn't really know many other people. That only left… "I'll call Jonathan or Nancy, okay?"

"You're really gonna call your ex-girlfriend and tell her you went insane and beat the shit out of somebody?"

Steve sighed. "If I say yes, will you go to camp?"

Dustin nodded. "Honestly, I kind of hope you fuck up, now."

Closing his eyes, Steve responded: "Get the fuck out of my car, Henderson."

The rest of the spring went smoothly. Steve kept to himself at school; He had already descended into minor loserdom after everything with Billy, so it was a piece of cake to stop making eye contact with anyone he wasn't completely sure was human. Graduation came and went with little fanfare. He skipped the ceremony, and made up some shitty excuse about a vacation with his parents.

He and the kids ate pizza and watched movies all night. Steve pretended not to see the pity in Nancy's eyes when she picked up Mike and Will the next morning. He waved politely at Jonathan and closed the door.

A few weeks later, Dustin left for camp.

He started work that same week, and Steve was grateful for the distraction. Orientation was a quick affair, the manager running him through health and safety protocol and quizzing him on customer service. Steve wore his best mask the whole time, smiling at all the right times, frowning thoughtfully when he was supposed to.

"Let me introduce you to your coworker," the manager said, and led Steve into the back room. A girl sat at the table there. She was wearing the same awful uniform that Steve currently held in his hands, but Steve could still see the nerdom radiating off her. Something about the hair and the tacky thrift-store jewelry. This wasn't one of 'his' crowd, and Steve breathed a little easier for it. "Steve, this is Robin Buckley. Rob–"

"I know who he is," Robin said, and raised her head.

The woge rippled across her face, revealing fur and piercing golden eyes.

[Next Chapter]

#my fic #monster hunting and werewolves and such #but it's slow burn #steddie #steve harrington #super steve centric #also autistic steve imo #uh yeah das it #only I must wander

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