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diavohno · 4 years

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netflix & cuddles | mammon

--request--

‣ pairing: mammon x reader

‣ genre: fluff, teeny tiniest bit of angst

‣ words: 1.5k

‣ rating: sfw

‣ warning: the brothers are being mean again

‣ notes: asdfghkl it’s about time I got this out. thank you all for being so patient! I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it :) also, stay safe with all of this craziness going on! stay at home if you can, wash your hands, and don’t touch your face!

posted 3.25.20

“So, what do you want to watch?” you ask the white-haired demon seated next to you as you flick through Netflix. Silence meets your question, causing your attention to shift away from the TV to Mammon, who seems uncharacteristically lost in thought. “Mammon?”

“Wha--” Suddenly startled from his thoughts, Mammon’s head whips towards you, his eyes wide. After a second, he recomposes himself and slouches back into your couch with his trademark smirk plastered onto his face. “Why don’t you pick, human? The GREAT MAMMON has graciously chosen to let you decide.”

“Grease it is,” you say decisively, clicking the show open while a tiny, content grin makes itself comfortable on Mammon’s face. The movie begins, but neither of you seems to be paying much attention to it; Mammon is too busy spiraling back into his thoughts, and you’re too busy worrying about him.

You had made your opinion on how the brothers treated the second oldest known long ago, but other than give them dirty looks whenever they did and scold them after, there wasn’t much you could do to change it; after a few millennia, they had become rather stuck in their ways. That didn’t stop you from trying, though.

It didn’t take a genius to notice how Mammon’s faux balloon of confidence deflated with every insult that was spit from his brothers’ lips, or how his genuine smile, once he had done something he was proud of, would be replaced with a fake one once he was taunted for it. Just thinking about it made your blood boil. No one deserved to be treated like that and especially not from their own family. Sure, Mammon is hard to handle at times, but so is everyone else. Plus, he’s the demon of greed, for crying out loud, what else would you expect.

A sad sigh slips out of you as you watch Mammon’s face as carefully as you can. His gaze hadn’t left the floor for nearly five minutes, and there was a slight furrow in his eyebrows. The grin that he had earlier had disappeared long ago, and now his teeth had preoccupied themselves with running themselves over his bottom lip, again, and again, and again.

It hurt to see him like this.

Today was probably the worst day that you’ve seen Mammon have while you’ve been in the Devildom. Not only did his newest modeling gig back out on him due to time concerns with him being a student, but his latest attempt to swindle a coven of witches unsurprisingly failed. Word somehow got back to Lucifer, like it always seems to do, and next thing anyone knows, Mammon is being strung up along the staircase once again “to help him learn his lesson.” Brother after brother passed by him on their way to their own rooms, and while only a few of them took verbal jabs at him, none stopped to help him down in fear of Lucifer putting them on the wall too.

Unluckily for the prideful first-born, you were a human whose heart was much stronger than your survival instinct.

As soon as the others were gone, you freed Mammon from his role as a wall fixture and snuck him into your bedroom. You knew Lucifer wouldn’t dare mess with the two of you there because his unnaturally strong devotion to Diavolo would keep him from doing something that would make you poorly reflect on your time in the Devildom. Plus, Friday nights were always movie nights for you and Mammon, and you were not about to break that tradition.

That brings you back to the present situation--you very well know the exact thoughts running through the head of the demon next to you. They were something along the lines of: “I really am nothing more than scum”, “how dumb can I possibly be?”, and “why can’t I change?”

You know because those are the exact words that the others always taunt him with.

Whether it be because of the ever-growing ball of rage burning deep within your gut, the fact that Mammon currently looks like a kicked puppy, or a mix of both, you somehow find yourself filled with the urge to lift your hand up from your lap and place it on top of the tanned hand next to you on the couch. Apparently, the urge was so strong that you had done just that without even realizing it.

Instantly ripped from his thoughts, Mammon’s head whips over to face you. “Wh-what do ya think you’re doing, human?”

“Hm? What do you mean?” you ask innocently as your face pinches in fake confusion.

“Nothin’,” Mammon grumbles, more to himself than to you. Despite his complaining, you don’t fail to notice how he doesn’t move his hand away. In fact, the blushing demon subtly flips his hand over so he can interlock your fingers together, which you pretend not to notice so he won’t move away. You’ve learned that touching Mammon is like touching a frightened deer--you had to pretend that you didn’t notice him creeping closer, because if he knew you knew, then he’d run away and pretend like it never happened.

An inkling of pride rises in your chest as you watch his blush darken from the corner of your eye. As a naturally touchy-feely person, you had wanted to wrap the second-oldest up in your arms from almost the first moment you had met him, yet his adversity to any and all forms of physical contact initiated by you effectively kept you from doing just that. It confuses you to no end because anyone with half a brain can tell he’s crushing on you, yet every time you make any move towards him he pushes you away like the little baby deer he is.

Basically, he’s cockblocking himself and is frustratingly good at it.

A shifting of the couch cushions catches your attention, and because it takes all of your willpower to not turn to face the demon who is casually sliding closer to you, you fail to stop a smile from breaking across your face. Whether he notices and chooses not to say anything or is too caught up in nervousness from what he was doing, you’re not sure, but your smile manages to go unmentioned.

At this point, you’re definitely feeling dangerously cocky. In fact, you are feeling so cocky that you, too, begin to scoot closer on the couch and quickly bridge the gap between yourself and Mammon. Soon enough, your shoulders are pressed together, which leaves Mammon uncharacteristically quiet. Oddly enough, he remains quiet for a good duration of the movie. The only reason that you know he hasn’t fallen asleep is that his cheek eventually came to rest upon the top of your head, meaning he was most likely a wide-eyed, blushing mess.

Minutes later, as if he had to be as close to you as possible to draw up enough courage to speak, Mammon breaks the silence. His voice is soft, yet his words press down on your heart like a weight. “Do you think I’m scum?”

“Of course not!” The words tumble from your lips without a second thought, and you find yourself pulling away so you can look him in the eyes. Well, you try to look him in the eyes, but as soon as you pull away his eyes glue themselves to the floor. “Mammon, you are literally one of the sweetest people that I’ve ever met. You don’t outright say it, but I can tell that you care a lot for your brothers, and I know that you’d do anything for them because that’s who you are.

“Yeah, you’ve got your faults, but everyone does! Your brothers out of ANYONE should know that because they’re in the same boat that you are. You don’t deserve to be treated like you are, Mammon. You have such a big heart, and I think that is so admirable.”

Mammon’s grip on your hand had steadily grown tighter as you were talking, yet his eyes remained locked onto your floor. Then, ever so quietly, his lips parted to let the words, “Thank you,” fall out.

“Of course, Mammo.” You run your thumb over his knuckles, which earns you a sheepish grin. Fueled by the success you’ve gotten so far, you flop backward on your couch and turn on your side towards the TV, making sure to leave space between you and the back of the couch. “Now let’s cuddle and watch the rest of the movie!”

“Okay,” Mammon mumbles as he positions himself behind you. While you’re busy being surprised that he actually went along with your cuddling demands, Mammon goes a step further and wraps an arm around your waist to pull you closer. Although both of you are thankful that the other can’t see the intense blush coating your cheeks, neither of you move for the rest of the night. In fact, at some point, you both fall asleep, and you are only woken up when there is a purposeful knocking on your door, followed by Lucifer’s sickly sweet voice asking if you knew where Mammon had disappeared off to.

That wasn’t the first time you had lied to the first-born, nor would it be the last.

#obey me #obey me: swd #swd #mammon #obey me mammon #swd mammon #request #mammon oneshot #obey me fic #obey me oneshot

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anthropwashere · 4 years

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Phic Phight: over and outside and under

Prompt from @ectopal: After the accident, Danny is stuck on the wrong side of the now broken portal. What does he do to try to get home?

@currentlylurking @phicphight

Word count: 5,498

Danny wakes up.

Considering just how hard he got pitched out of consciousness before this, it’s kind of a relief.

The first thing he's aware of is being sore, more sore than he can ever remember being in his life. Breathing hurts. The instinctive curling up in wordless protest to this whole 'being awake' thing hurts more. He doesn't know what he's laying on but at least it doesn't feel like the cold tile floor of the lab. He stills, takes shallow breaths, reluctantly cracks his eyes open.

All he sees is broad, smeary strokes of greens, unnaturally bright on a gloaming backdrop deepening to blacks and violets. He blinks to clear his vision. His vision remains uselessly blurred. He swallows, grimacing at the dry click of his throat and the way his chapped lips stick when he opens his mouth. "Sam...? Tucker?"

His voice comes out in a low croak; weird to his ears in a way he doesn't know what to think of, so he doesn't. He's more concerned about how there's no answer anyway.

He tries to brace himself despite his soreness, to sit up and rub the bleariness out of his eyes, but he sort of—wobbles, instead. There's nothing under him to brace against.

There's... nothing under him...?

He squints around harder, trying to make sense of all this too-bright green and backlit black. Perspective is virtually non-existent. All he can tell for sure is that he's floating in empty space.

"Uh," he says intelligently.

"Uh," he repeats with more appropriate panic.

"What—augh—AAA—!" And other similarly useful comments sputter out of him while he flails around like a drowning man for a while, clawing around in a blind panic and catching purchase on a big heaping pile of zilch. Where is he, where is this, what is this, he's falling, is he falling, he can't tell if he's falling—

Something catches his eye, weird enough to slow his scrambling. His glove, to be exact. He's still wearing his embarrassingly tacky jumpsuit, but... its colors have inverted? Black gloves are now a white so bright to make his eyes hurt if he looks too closely; the white of his upper arm is now a black so dark it seems to suck the diffuse white light coming from—his gloves? Are his gloves glowing?

He peers closer at the hem of his glove to the body of the suit, compares it to collar, belt, and boots, all of which are the same eye-wateringly bright white. Yup. That is a noticeable, low-level glow. Aura. Something. Why the fuck is he glowing?

He notices something beyond his immediate focus, something that wasn't there before. Or he got turned around while panicking about this whole 'is he falling or isn't he' insanity. Who cares. There's something a lot closer than all this freaky, acrylic paint-like smears of color all around him. There's the Portal. He's never been happier to see it in his life, and starts dog-paddling towards it even as he belatedly registers something's different about it. He can't make it out at this distance; he's maybe... 20 yards from it? 30? Perspective is still out the window even with something solid to focus on. It's farther away than it looks from the foot of the stairs down to the lab, anyway.

It takes roughly an eternity to paddle to it, though really it's probably only a couple minutes. Everything around him—and above, and below—remains terrifyingly empty and impossible the whole way over. It's so quiet. Dead of night quiet. He pushes that observation away to deal with later as his gloved hands make a satisfying smack against the Portal's riveted steel frame. He's—floating, ugh—near the top of it, giving him a bizarre top-down angle that makes it seem alien simply for having never seen it this way before. It's still the most normal thing around by a country mile.

Maybe literally.

Maybe he shouldn't think about that.

He hooks his fingers on the edge of the frame to keep from drifting beyond it, only noticing then that there's nothing past it. Empty swirling void continuing ad nauseum, sure, okay, that's still obviously, weirdly, a thing. But the Portal itself isn't just a big frame slapped up against the lab's wall, it's got a tunnel going back about 12 feet. It's what he was standing in when the whole world went electric-white and vanished on him.

And the tunnel’s not here now.

There's just the octagonal frame with the red alarm light flickering weakly a few feet from him, its black-and-yellow striped doors half shut on empty space. There's only the frame.

Carefully—and with no small amount of growing dread—he leverages himself down along the frame for a closer look. Confirmation that this really is all there is. A big, useless hunk of steel to cling to in an otherwise empty stretch of who-knows-what. He swallows, fighting panic. There's an on/off switch next to the Portal back home—is this that Portal? A copy? Where's the rest of it?—but there's nothing next to this one. He pulls himself back up to tap his fingers on the alarm light; it flickers a little more urgently, but nothing else. Nothing useful.

"Okay," he whispers shakily. "Okay. This. Don't freak out. There's gotta be a way back—"

His voice fails him as he realizes the extent of what's happened to him. He's not in his parents' lab. He's not in his house, not in Amity Park, not on Earth. Nowhere real looks this—this weird. This impossible. This is impossible, but here he is all the same.

His parents were right. Their Portal worked. It tore a hole right in reality and dumped him out....

He has to focus very, very hard on keeping his breath even, his heart hammering in his chest in a way that feels—off in a way he wouldn't know how to explain if there were anyone else here to ask. He scans his surroundings with fresh eyes, taking in again the smearing, dripping neon colors splashed across a swallowing darkness as far as he can see in every direction. Far, far away, impossible to even hazard a guess how far, he can make out vague green lumps clustered together. In another direction he can see dots of purple in a sort of uneven stripe. In a third there's something blocky colored a bone-white; at this distance it seems to twinkle like a star.

This is the Ghost Zone. The Portal turned on somehow while he was standing inside it, and it shunted him into the Ghost Zone.

He's in a parallel dimension where ghosts are real.

"Okay," he chatters. "It's fine. I'm okay. There's nothing around me—literally! Ha ha, ha, hngh. Nobody around. There's no—no ghosts. No Sam or Tucker either. They must've been too far away to get—zapped, or whatever. So. Just me here! Alone!" He smacks the Portal again for reassurance. The gesture fails spectacularly. "Just me and this busted Portal. No way to get home—"

No way home.

He has no way to get home. No way to tell Sam and Tucker he's here. No way to tell his parents they were right after all, but can they save the celebration for after they've rescued him?

They're not even going to know he needs rescuing. How could they? From Sam and Tucker's view he just vanished. Blinked out of existence. Literally, ha ha ha.

...Right?

He lets go of the Portal to look at his too-bright white gloves again. Definitely glowing. Definitely not the same color configuration as when he put the stupid jumpsuit on.

...is he dead?

Did he die?

He can't help the deflating balloon squeak that slips out him, immediately backtracking. No way. No no no no, ha ha, absolutely not. He's not dead, he can't be dead. He can't. There's got to be a more logical explanation for ending up in the world's biggest lava lamp. Right?

Okay, okay.

So.

He huddles in on himself, floating in a tense knot as he goes back over—whatever it was, exactly, that happened to land him here in the fucking Ghost Zone.

Sam wanted to sneak into his parents' lab while they were out to take a bunch of pictures, because her grandmother had somehow gotten her hooked on scrapbooking. Danny figured, whatever, they always took a million years grocery shopping, so what was the harm of going down to the lab for ten minutes? Then Tucker'd found the jumpsuit rack and made fun of Danny for having a custom ghost hunting jumpsuit, which was fair. For all that Danny'd never asked his parents to make him one, he still had one. Jazz did too, for that matter, but she wasn't home for Tucker to make fun of her too, and if she had been she would've blown a gasket at Danny for going in the lab without their parents. Then Sam got the bright idea to get Danny to put the stupid thing on and pose around the lab. Tucker salvaged his best friend cred by agreeing with Danny that that was stupid, but there's never been any talking Sam out of an idea once her eyes light up that eagerly. So, into the suit he got, zipping it up over his clothes and fidgeting when it bunched his jeans up uncomfortably—

He's not uncomfortable now.

Well, aside from the whole-body soreness and near-overwhelming panic, that is. Point is, the jumpsuit feels fine now. He fumbles for the zipper at his throat and tugs it down enough to see if—

Yyyyup, he can unhappily confirm he's not wearing a shirt under this stupid jumpsuit anymore, which likely means the rest of his clothes are... gone. Apparently.

Where the fuck would his clothes go if he's still wearing the stupid jumpsuit?

He takes a shaky breath. Right. Getting off track. So. He put the jumpsuit on, posed around the lab feeling like an idiot and increasingly worried his parents would come back home in time to see him looking like he cared about whatever craziness they did down here. Then they ended up in front of the Portal, and they talked about it. His parents have been trying to make a functioning hole in reality since they were in college, something like 20 years ago now, with no luck. The three of them talked about what it would be like if his parents did get this thing working one day, how cool it would be to have a portal to another world full of creatures straight out of horror movies. Sam had taken a shot of him alone outside the Portal, then goaded him into the tunnel itself. He'd reluctantly gone in and, mindful of all the thick cables tangled up on the ground, kept one hand on the tunnel wall for balance.

But.

But he'd heard something click, felt something shift under his fingers, right before the world dissolved in white-hot blast of pain.

Well.

Okay.

That explains the soreness. And also the maybe-deadness.

Fuck.

"I really hope I'm not dead," he half-jokes to himself, intending to make a self-deprecating crack that he'd make a really boring ghost, but at that exact moment there's a harsh flash! of white light that leaves him blinking green afterimages at his suddenly bare hands.

Then he's falling.

Like, for sure this time.

He doesn't scream so much as make a tortured shriek like an abused dog toy as everything around him becomes a dizzying and flashing stream of bright and dark, bright and dark. Mostly shades of neon green and too-dark black, interspersed with purples and blues and one startlingly huge red thing that makes a sound like a jet engine as he plummets by it. He sees chunks of earth that look like they'd been scooped up from somewhere Earth-adjacent and dumped here to float in empty space, stained deep blues and maroons and almost-normal shades of green. He glimpses a few crumbling ruins, big wandering shapes of stone blocks and wood and polished metals. He chokes out a mangled cry for help once, twice, three times, and still he's falling. Still he's alone.

He hits a chunk of earth about the size of his mattress and it falls apart to smoke, only slowing his momentum for the moment of painful impact. He can't tell if he broke anything, but it sure did knock the wind out of him. He spends a terrible eternity gasping for air, clawing at the green patches of mist and praying to grab something solid.

No such luck.

He falls.

It occurs to him, once he's gotten his breath back, that he wasn't falling before. In fact, he was doing a bang up job of floating just fine. So what changed?

Doing his best—admittedly an all-time low, but his current circumstances are, to put it frankly, pretty fucking sub-optimal—to ignore his horrible situation, he looks at his hands. Definitely not wearing gloves anymore, somehow, and also definitely not glowing for that matter. He looks down at the rest of himself nervously—then sighs with relief. Oh good, not naked. He's back in his jeans and T-shirt, and not a scrap of him is glowing.

So he needs to be glowing to float here? Maybe? Sure. Why not. Okay, so how does he start glowing again? Why did he stop glowing?

"I really hope I'm not dead," he repeats, though he's falling so fast his words are torn away before he can hear them. "Okay, sure, why not. I hope I am dead?"

Nope.

"Jumpsuit. Jumpsuit. I want my stupid jumpsuit!"

Nope.

"I'D LIKE TO STOP FALLING PLEASE!"

Nope.

"FLYING! FLOATING! I'M DEAD! GHOSTS FLY! STOP FALLING! CHANGE BACK! CHANGE CHANGE CHA—"

Another harsh flash!

Now he's falling, but in a stupid glowing jumpsuit.

For fuck's sake.

He scrunches his eyes closed and imagines as hard as he can that he's no longer falling, feeling like a complete idiot but well on his way of trying the Peter Pan route of scrounging up as many happy thoughts as he can if that's what it'll take to save his probably-dead idiot ass from double-dying on any of the chunks of land hurtling up at him at what feels like Mach 7.

Come on.

There's a hard, choking yank that whips him around like the farthest a bungee rope can strain before snapping. His limbs go flailing, his neck pops painfully, but the horrible whistle of wind in his ears stops abruptly. When he dares to open his eyes he's gratified to find himself looking at a patch of ground thick with overgrowth he'd barely managed to hit not ten feet below him. "Ha! Haha! Yes! I did it! I—whoa—!"

His recovered floating ability bails on him again, and he goes crashing face first into a very thorny bush. Hot lines ignite all over his exposed head and scalp. Even while yelping and trying to shake himself free he's grateful for the stupid jumpsuit. It's thick enough to keep the three-inch long brambles safely away from his skin, and dead or not he's apparently something enough to still feel pain.

Eventually he pulls free of the death-bush, falling on his ass with an undignified but thoroughly relieved, "Oof!"

He decides sitting there for a while is an excellent idea. At least until the world, or zone, or whatever, stops spinning so dramatically. It sure feels like his heart's going all out in his chest, which is an important tally in the Not Dead column. He drags one shaking hand across his face and ends up with neon green smeared all across his palm instead of blood from where the brambles scratched him, which is an unhappy tally in the Fuck I AM Dead column. Glowing and floating probably belongs in that column too. Things look grim.

It's at that moment the death-bush snarls.

He looks at it, already leaning away in case of—something, and yelps when a skeletal arm shoots out and grabs his ankle.

"No," he tells it firmly. "Absolutely not. Off."

"Graaakhhhhugh," says the death-bush, or the ambulatory skeleton lurking inside, or maybe it's some sort of horrible plant-skeleton-ghost combination. Who cares, Danny wants nothing to do with it.

"I—said—get—off!" He punctuates each word with a wild kick of his leg, then yelps again in disgust as the arm falls apart at its green-limned joints. Bits of bone float to the reddish earth too slowly, like they're underwater, or on the moon, or in a dimension where gravity's some kind of optional. That little middle finger to physics is maybe the most upsetting thing Danny's seen so far.

A pair of red lights flash deeper in the depths of the bush, which all in all seems like fair warning of things wanting to go from bad to worse. He's back in his jumpsuit so floating's an option again. No way he's staying on this hunk of rock with whatever's growling at him. He throws a mock-salute in farewell at the death-bush, firmly stomps all over the instinctual 'don't jump you absolute moron' his brain-stomach-heart all pitch at him, and jumps off the little island.

Naturally, he goes plummeting.

He's torn between screaming and sighing, and ends up making another prolonged deflating balloon squeak all the way down a few hundred feet before he figures out floating again. God, but he's lucky he's dead or dead-enough that whiplash isn't something he needs to worry about, apparently. He definitely would've broken his neck by now otherwise.

Ha ha, look at him, trying to find a positive spin on 'death by lab accident.' And Jazz always says he's got a negative outlook on life. Joke's on her!

Ugh.

Splayed out like a cat being held by an idiot and just as certain he's going to fall to his impending death, he very carefully cranes his head to look back the way he came. He can't even see the Portal anymore. It's a lava lamp hellscape as far as the eye can see. Great.

Okay.

Hovering, he's figuring out. Falling, he's already an old pro at. Maybe flying's on the table? Some semblance of control, some way of going any direction other than 'straight down.' He'd be happy with some good old-fashioned 'falling with style' at this rate. Buzz Lightyear, don't fail him now.

He moves at a snail's pace, eventually angling himself vertical again. Up, he thinks as an experiment.

Incredibly, it works.

Of course, he's so surprised by this unexpected achievement he stops thinking in a vaguely upward momentum and so of course goes hurtling downward another hundred or so feet—right into another earthen island.

He lays there awhile, blinking stars out of his eyes.

"Ow," he says eventually.

"HHHHHHHRRRRRRGRAAAAAAAAUGH," something very, very big says.

Danny would very much like to wake up from this bullshit nightmare now. Alas.

This island is a lot larger than the previous one, so it's something like thirty seconds before he finds an edge to throw himself off of. All the while the very, very big something knocks trees the size of redwoods aside like they're so many dominoes, the purple-ish ground shaking like an Etch-a-Sketch. It's all Danny can do to keep his feet under him. He manages one look over his shoulder and immediately wishes he hadn't; those were some teeth.

He jumps. He falls. He keeps falling until the horrible garbage disposal-esque roaring of whatever-that-was fades, then catches himself again. It's less painful this time, so maybe he's getting the hang of it? Sure, why not.

He takes a minute to catch his breath again and get a look at his new surroundings. Neon green on a black backdrop. Cool, cool, loving the variety. Details, details, anything unusual, anything that might try to eat him, apparently—

There's another stretch of island beneath him, maybe about fifty feet below. This one's big enough that its edges disappear into the distant green fog in a way that feels just a touch too Silent Hill for comfort. Not that he's had an abundance of comfort since he woke up here, but still. If anything remotely like the four-legged mannequin monster starts wriggling around down there he is out.

He eases himself down at a far slower pace than he's failed to manage before this, pleased even as he tenses in case of whatever might charge out at him to defend its territory or whatever.

When he touches down something crunches underfoot. He can't help the full-body flinch, bracing for a blow even as all his aching muscles protest.

Nothing happens.

No growling, no snarling, no earth-shaking stomping. Nothing.

Warily he looks out between his forearms, raised to protect his head. No sign of movement. This island's a lot darker than the others he landed on, as well as all the others he hurtled past. Unlike the others this island is entirely barren, just rolling hills of jutting dark green stones in every direction he looks as he lands in a narrow clearing.

A narrow clearing which happens to be full of bones.

He swallows, wincing when his other foot crunches on something despite his care as he steps down fully. Nothing reacts. It's just him in what is, essentially, some kind of ghost ossuary. So that's fun.

Oh. Oh that is definitely a human skull. Time to go.

He takes one step and hears a growl directly behind him. Before he can panic and bolt up the nearest rocky hillside, a woman's voice says, "Hold."

He stays put, shaking. He looks around, seeing nothing but green rocks, green rocks, green rocks, red—

A sphinx roughly the size of a school bus looms over the hillside he fully intended to flee toward, never mind that its—her?—voice sounded like it had come from behind him. It—she? yup, she is definitely a she because those are definitely breasts he definitely shouldn't be staring at. He hastily focuses on her face and instantly wishes he could look elsewhere, because everything about her face screams uncanny valley. Every inch of her is shades of neon red, garish to the point where it hurts his eyes to look at her directly. She has a human face stretched terribly across a lion's skull; her mouth far too wide, her almond-shaped eyes unblinking, her nose a flat arrowhead shape, her cheekbones and jaw jutting harshly. She's bald, or at least doesn't have any more hair—fur—on her head compared to the rest of her. Her shoulders have a distinctive human hunch to them, at war with her lion body and overlong neck. Her wings are the darkest shade of red on her, and even folded Danny can tell her wingspan is ludicrous. All of her is, really, but he's too busy reeling at the toothsome smile she's baring at him to think of the rest of her details.

"Little ghost," she says. He knows she's speaking, but her mouth doesn't move a centimeter. Her voice is low, slow, like the unhurried rumble of a thunderstorm in summer. "Little ghost, you are trespassing."

He breathes.

His heart—or something like it—hammers in his chest.

"I'm sorry," he stammers out. "I—I'm new—here. In this place, I mean. I'm still trying to figure out—everything, really. I keep falling. I fell here. I wasn't trying to come here. I swear."

She considers him with eyes the size of dinner plates. Her irises are the same bright green as the not-blood drying on his palm. Her round pupils are the same shade of red as a human's in a badly timed photograph. "Even so," she says. "You have trespassed on my domain, and so you must answer my riddle."

Oh, great. Danny's never been any great shake with Classical mythology, but he does remember the gist of this one. If ghost sphinxes work anything like the mythological ones, then he's got three options: answer correctly and proceed (to where is a big ol' question mark, but whatever), answer incorrectly and be eaten alive (which explains all the bones), or walk away. Considering he's not trying to go anywhere on this island, and in fact has zero interest in exploring it further, he is A-OK taking the coward's route.

But considering how easy it must be for ghosts—or, ghosts that know what the hell they're doing, unlike him—it must be incredibly easy to skip her riddle entirely and just fly off. And considering just how many bones there are here, he's missing something. He's missing something very, very important.

"I don't get to walk away without answering you, do I?" He asks quietly.

The sphinx makes an even deeper rumbling sound that settles in Danny's diaphragm. It takes him a moment to realize she's purring. "You are wiser than you look."

Considering the size of her fangs, he bites down the snarky retort on the tip of his tongue and shrugs sheepishly instead. "Any chance you'll give a new guy an easy riddle?"

The purring stops.

Fuck.

Her head cocks, birdlike, as she leans forward to appraise him. He tries not to shake, really, but she's enormous. She could swallow him whole if she were so inclined. Considered the cracked heap of bones he's standing ankle-deep in, she is. And he kind of doubts she’ll make quick work of him. She'll kill him slow.

Double-kill him. Whatever. Who cares. He really doesn't want to be eaten by a giant monster lady.

He exhales slowly, dropping his gaze to her huge paws. Though she has something roughly akin to thumbs, her nails are feline enough to retract wholly. He can only stand there and imagine what they look like, how they'd feel tearing him open. "Okay," he says.

Another bassy purr. Then she asks him, "What disappears as soon as you say its name?"

Well, shit. And here he was hoping she'd ask him the riddle from the myth. So much for blurting out, "Man!" then bailing as fast as humanly—ghostly?—possible. He rocks back on his heels—wincing when more bones crunch—racking his brain. Math is honestly his strong point. English is something he gets, sure, but all the wacky linguistic tricks that can accompany it are just... not something that comes up in his day-to-day, so he can easily ignore it. Riddles and word problems are things he's always been able to wave off as not worth his time.

Well, today's just chalk full of firsts, isn't it? Make or break time. Or, more accurately, answer correctly or be eaten time.

Nngh.

"Is there a time limit to answering?" He asks nervously.

The sphinx shakes her great head, and takes his question as cue to sit. Her stretched face doesn't twitch an inch from its beatific grin, but her lion's tail does lash irritably. So that's technically a 'no,' sure, but definitely not one he should try to take advantage of.

So. Crunch time.

Maybe don't think of that too literally.

Disappears as soon as you say its name....

Disappears if you speak it.

Disappears if you say it?

Disappears if you speak?

He swallows, looking back up at her large, large eyes. "Um. Is it silence?"

There are three terrible seconds where she only looks at him, as unreadable as a marble statue. Then her eyes wink shut, and she purrs, and Danny just about goes to jelly with relief.

Scratch that. He does go to jelly, at least under the belt. His legs have fucking melted to a twitching black streak of semi-transparent smoke. He makes a very undignified shriek and flails around, only succeeding in losing whatever subconscious grasp on hovering he'd had and landing in a painful heap of well-chewed bones.

The sphinx leans far, far over to peer at him curiously. The grin on her freaky face has shrunk to something that Danny's sure is amusement at his expense. "You are new."

His traitorous legs reappear with a small pop! He glowers at them rather than meet her eyes. She's still sitting on the edge of the bone clearing, and sure she's big, but not big enough to explain how she's stretched out so far that her face is only two scant feet from his.

"What gave it away?" He grumbles, shaking his arm out of a rib cage that is, thankfully, not human-shaped. It's also a lovely shade of pale purple, or his eyes are playing tricks on him.

"How long since your arrival?"

"Uh. Hard to say." He gets to feet, patting he doesn't-wanna-know off his stupid jumpsuit. "Twenty minutes? Half hour, tops."

Her stretched-out mouth gains an unmistakable pitying curl. Great. That's his cue to leave before she decides to put him out of his misery. With her enormous teeth. He clears his throat, drums up a happy thought—not being here, oh, if only—and manages a wobbly hover. "Right. Um. Thank you. For not eating me."

She sits back and this time Danny's looking to see that yup, she was stretched out like a length of taffy. She stretches again, this time more like a normal cat-shaped thing should. Her hooked claws drag deep white furrows in the rock; her yawning mouth—also neon green—is lined with at least twice as many teeth as any cat-shaped thing should have.

Well. That was only mildly horrifying.

She settles back into a stiff sitting position, lion's tail curling over her paws as she looks down her nose at him. "You would be wise to take greater care than this," she cautions. "I am not so terrible as what slumbers in the deep places."

Danny shivers, more than a little dismayed to be fed a line straight out of a cheesy fantasy novel. By a sphinx, no less. But mostly he feels like he's in dire need of a magic sword or something to deal with whatever other horrible monster he comes across that might not be as chill as this one. Or Gandalf. If sphinxes are real here maybe he'll get lucky and come across a ghost wizard on the next island he crash-lands on. Hopefully it won't want to kill him too, though with how things are going so far his hopes are pretty low.

He musters up a weak smile. "Right. I'll try my best. Um, actually, now that you mention it? I'm kinda having a hard time going any direction but down. Any advice?"

As answer she unfolds her wings, confirming that her wingspan is, in fact, ludicrous. It's not especially helpful though.

"Uh, that's... they're very nice. Very pretty. But I don't have wings, so—"

The rest of his stammering is mercifully cut short when he's sent ass over tea kettle by the heavy downwash of her wings as she takes off, so much faster than something her size should be capable of. By the time Danny's figured out which way is up again—a feat in itself, considering how everything everywhere looks like technicolor vomit—she's a red blip in the distance.

Well, damn. If she expects him to follow her she better not hold her breath—

The heretofore now perfectly solid ground chooses at that moment to flicker out of existence. Once again, Danny falls. This time he has the delightful addition of several hundred bone bits falling along with him.

"Grrrngh," one of the skulls complains, a single pale light bouncing around its crunched-in sockets.

Danny sighs and musters up the effort to halt himself again. After wincing through a small deluge of dubiously sentient people and animal bones, he's entirely alone again. There's another floating island not too far from, maybe fifty yards above him and a full football field's length off. It'd be a great test of figuring how this flying without wings work, if not for the waterfall of something that's definitely not water careening off one edge. It's a dark red, and thick, and Danny's not sure if he wants to get close enough to confirm whether or not that island is bleeding.

Well. Nowhere to go but up, right?

Well, no. There's still a lot of down under his feet—nope, back to a creepy ghost tail again. Cool. Great. Excellent. Whatever. He peers down into the dark below him, swallowing nervously. It gets a lot darker down than in any other direction. There are streaks and dots of light down there sure, but a lot fewer, and clustered together like they're nervous of what might be down there with them—

And a long, long gray tentacle is swimming up out of the mist. Coming straight for him, no less.

Flash!

Aaaand check it out, there goes his magic glowing jumpsuit and his ability to float with it. Great.

#danny phantom #my writing #phic phight 2020 #aka the one where danny has a panic attack while falling for half an hour

125 notes · View notes

jasonbehrs · 3 years

Text

i wanna read every word, chapter 2

by airauralintensity (aka me, jasonbehrs!)

“Have you ever fallen in love with someone you’ve never met?” “Uh, do you mean like we’ve-been-doing-long-distance-slash-online-dating or like I’ve-been-crushing-on-the-cute-barista-at-the-library-cafe?” “Ummm, more like I’ve-read-their-poems-and-sure-they’re-very-talented-but-their-handwriting-alone-makes-me-smile.” “… That’s oddly specific.”

fandom: kpop, super junior characters: eunhyuk, ryeowook; guest appearances by the rest of sj-m and yesung ship: eunwook genre: romantic comedy themes: alternate endings, strangers to lovers, handwriting, identity reveal setting: college chapter: 2/4 word count: 5.2k

read it below or on ffnet, aff, wattpad

A/N (6.6.2021): Welcome to the next installment folks! Some clarifying things:

- This is the first of two alternate endings to the story, which answers the question, 'What if Ryeowook finds out first?'

- I got some interesting reviews/PMs about the last chapter? Eunhyuk isn't pining after Yesung or anything, and I didn't mean to indicate that would be an aspect of the story. If you were looking forward to it, I'll be disappointing you today haha. Feel free to let me know how much you hate me in a review ;)

Also, today would have been my grandmother's 102nd birthday, so I'm dedicating this chapter to her since she always loved seeing me write. Love you, Nanay!

~~~

He and Hyukjae haven't hung out alone before, but he's sure this won't be awkward. Their only real link may have just been Yesung, but Hyukjae successfully ingrained himself into their entire friend group in the short weeks since they first met. Besides, even if Hyukjae weren't so willing to help him with his twisted scavenger hunt for love, Ryeowook thinks he'd like to hang out with him some time anyway. He's grown to like Hyukjae, really.

At least, that's what he tells himself when he turns the corner and sees Hyukjae sitting alone on a bench in the quad with his legs crossed, a laptop over one knee and an open notebook on the other, waiting for him to arrive.

Ryeowook takes a breath to steel his nerves then heads over to plop himself right next to the other. He doesn't say anything and takes out his own work instead. They don't have to start with the crush thing.

"Ah, my favourite person under 5'2". How do you do?" Hyukjae snarks without pausing his typing.

In response, Ryeowook uses a single finger to tip Hyukjae's notebook onto the ground without remorse.

"Ya!" Hyukjae picks up his notebook and slaps Ryeowook with it.

On the downswing, Ryeowook freezes.

"Oh shit, did I hit you that hard? Sorry, I didn't mean to," Hyukjae hurriedly apologises, but that's not it at all.

Ryeowook had caught a glimpse of the notes hurriedly scrawled across the open book. He would recognise that handwriting anywhere.

"Why don't we get started then," Hyukjae offers uneasily, eyeing how Ryeowook's stance hadn't relaxed yet. "Um, did you bring a copy of one of the notes like we discussed?"

Of course he did. Ryeowook was so excited to be one step closer to identifying the person behind the song lyrics that took up as much space in his brain as his Food Sciences lecture notes, he had brought the whole ass scrapbook with him, eager to show off his favourites to a new and willing audience.

But now, Ryeowook is panicking. He found the object of his affections much sooner than for which he was ready; and said object is sitting right next to him, staring at him expectantly and eager to help.

Not letting himself think it through, Ryeowook rummages through his bag looking for viable scraps of paper. There is no way he is going to hand Hyukjae's own work to him, so he makes do with what he's got.

He bypasses the lyric samples he actually prepared for today's meeting and found ones of his own making which he had intended to recycle weeks ago but never got around to. He silently thanks himself for this terrible habit as he frantically smooths out the small squares of paper before handing them to Hyukjae.

The other raises his eyebrows as he reads through the papers. "Damn, I was hoping that maybe one of these things had even a little similarity to an assignment we've heard so far, but no dice."

Ryeowook nods, affecting understanding disappointment even as he privately rejoices.

"Do you mind if I keep these? I can, like, surreptitiously check people's notebooks during group assignments," he offers with a laugh. "Pearl blue sticky notes can't be that common in a class of 50, right?''

Ryeowook smiles, wide and fake. "Fingers crossed!"

~Even though we're making awkward conversation, it's clear that we're happy to be together.~

Thus proceeds their search for Poem Person. (The gender-neutral nickname Mi had come up with stuck even after Hyukjae revealed those were not actually poems being left behind. Alliterative nicknames are just so catchy.)

"Okay, what if we tie a balloon to your chair and hope Poem Person likes balloons enough to take it with them around campus?" "No way, they won't take it." "How could you possibly be so sure?"

Sometimes, it's Hyukjae coming up with ridiculous plots.

"Trust me. They curl their lowercase L's." "I'm gonna let this go, but I want you to know that makes zero sense."

Plots which Ryeowook foils with equally ridiculous reasoning.

"''We might have never known each other, but we crossed faraway paths and came together. We crossed the distance of a stranger that's farther away than space.' Huh, not bad." "You think so?"

Sometimes, it's Hyukjae asking to read more of the scraps that Ryeowook collects, partially so Hyukjae can make fun of him, but mostly so that he has more clues.

"Yeah. I mean, it doesn't help me at all, but your man's got a way with words. I wonder why he doesn't submit any of the stuff you've shown me for class. It's worth critiquing."

An ask which forces Ryeowook to wrack his brain for passable imitations of song-lyrics-that-could-be-mistakenly-construed-as-poems and to get used to writing with his nondominant hand.

"Pass. Pass. Pass. Pass." "Really? You're passing on Park Hyungsik?"

Today, neither of them are feeling very motivated, so Hyukjae pulls up the Facebook profiles of his classmates and let Ryeowook play smash or pass because "it's fun to hear strangers' opinions on people you know."

"Oh, absolutely. Does that guy look like he cares where he dots his i's and j's? Hard pass," Ryeowook maintains.

Hyukjae shakes his head in amazement as he pulls back his phone. "You'll meet him one day, and you'll regret this moment; mark my words. Hyungsik is universally loved. Honestly, I'm not convinced yet Poem Person isn't him. He fits basically all of your criteria."

Ryeowook has to actively smother a knowing smirk. "What a shame."

He didn't come clean to Hyukjae in the quad that day because he panicked. Ryeowook was not mentally ready to meet the object of his affections so soon, much more confess, so he acted on impulse to buy himself some time.

Once he had it, he got curious.

It's no secret that Ryeowook had built up an idea of what Poem Person is like. The lyrics provided some insight, of course; but most of his intuition came from the handwriting itself. From what he could see, Poem Person was supposed to be intensely passionate, excitingly impulsive, and almost sickeningly romantic.

"Okay, how about this guy?" Hyukjae asks as he passes his phone over again.

Ryeowook takes one look at the screen and snorts. "Very funny. Pass."

The app is opened to a photo of Hyukjae himself posed unnaturally on a couch wearing a forward-facing snapback perched atop his head and an awkward half-smile, and Ryeowook refuses to look at it any longer before he does something he'll regret, like coo affectionately.

"Pass!?" Hyukjae repeats with mock-incredulity. "Don't you think he looks charming and witty and oh-so-loveable?"

Ryeowook indeed had a lot of thoughts about what Poem Person would look like, and 'charming,' 'witty,' and 'oh-so-loveable' have indeed flitted through his mind. Actually, Ryeowook finds that Hyukjae and Poem Person aren't altogether dissimilar.

Hyukjae is passionate about his craft, to be sure, but it doesn't occupy every one of his waking moments like Ryeowook expected. He is as much of a romantic as the next person is, but really Hyukjae is poetic, a distinction Ryeowook learns and appreciates very early on. Hyukjae is a little too thoughtful to be so impulsive, but his quick wit and ability to do/say/become whatever a situation calls for more than fulfill the quota for chaos that underlay Ryeowook's original supposition.

So yes, Ryeowook is withholding the truth so that he can slot the person he made up in his head into the person Hyukjae is, but it's been worth it.

"He looks like a brat and like his feet smell." "YAH! My shoes don't breathe!" "Get better shoes, then." "Give me the money, then." "Get a job, then." "That's not fair! Helping you find Poem Person is basically my part-time job!" "Consider it more of an unpaid internship."

Before Hyukjae takes his turn to volley back, his phone rings in his hand.

"Ah, as much fun as this was, I gotta go. I have a mini-showcase coming up, and I've been slacking on rehearsals." He shakes his phone towards Ryeowook, and the latter could see an alarm screen that reads "get your dumb ass to the gulliver center!"

Ryeowook's heart beats a noticeable thump thump all of a sudden. "Can I come with?"

"S-sure," Hyukjae says, shocked by the offer. "But why?"

That's a great question. For now, he says, "Because your internship is getting in the way of your studies, and I feel bad," but later, he'll know it's because he didn't want his time with Hyukjae to end so soon.

A grateful grin spreads across Hyukjae's face, and Ryeowook will add that onto his list of reasons later as well. "An audience is always welcome."

In no time, Hyukjae is in a practise room in the athletic center stretching his limbs every which way while Ryeowook watches as intently as possible while feigning interest in literally anything else in the room.

The bass-heavy noise music that Hyukjae puts on startles his attention back onto the dancer, and Ryeowook can no longer hide how blatantly he stares.

Hyukjae moves through the choreography so fluidly it almost looks lazy. He goes from jagged angles and harsh lines to sinewy curves and rolling waves to strong stomps and high jumps with no hesitation. He plays with the rhythm of the music, and he makes full use of the space available to him. Ryeowook is barely processing one impressive move when Hyukjae executes another one; and before he knows it, the performance is over.

"So," Hyukjae pants, "what'd ya think?"

"It's…" Jaw-dropping. Powerful. Hot. "… impressive," Ryeowook says at last.

Hyukjae smiles tightly. "Thanks. It actually needs a bit of work for the showcase, but I don't think the routine is all too shabby."

Ryeowook watches as Hyukjae watches himself through the mirror, redoing parts of the choreography over and over again at different tempos just to fine-tune his movements, and he can't help but feel like Hyukjae needed more from him.

"Um, I wonder if maybe it's lacking emotion?"

All movement halts. "What?"

Ryeowook didn't mean to say that; but now that it's out, he finds himself needing to continue. "You move well, um, obviously," he gestures awkwardly to Hyukjae's person, fighting a blush. "It looks physically difficult, sure, but what is it that you're trying to say? Like, I'm guessing you chose that song, too, right? So, why?"

Hyukjae stands in the middle of the room, arms limp by his side, and staring at Ryeowook with an unnervingly blank look on his face. Ryeowook hastily backpedals, "But hey, what do I know? I'm sure your professors will watch you and see all the nuances I can't with my untrained peon eyes. I was just… talking to talk, I guess."

"No, but I think you have a point," Hyukjae interjects.

Ryeowook perks up. "I do?"

"Yeah, like… I was so focused on trying to show what I can do with something only I could do, but that means basically nothing when any one of my classmates could learn my routine with only a week of practise. The only way I would be able to stand out is from whatever I put into it, but you made me realise I didn't put anything into it." He plops on the floor, eyebrows furrowed in consternation.

Ryeowook shakes his head adamantly. "No, no! There's clearly something there! You just need to, like, bring it out more. You have that whole idea—that this is something only you can do. You can take that, morph your routine into a testament to your need to prove yourself. Start with some trepidation, throw some desperation in the middle, and end with triumph. Honestly, I think I saw a little bit of that in your performance already. Maybe it was an accident, but now, just… do it on purpose."

"'Do it on purpose,'" Hyukjae repeats to himself. His head is down, so Ryeowook can't immediately tell what he thinks of the idea. He's ready to apologise again, even offer to go home so that Hyukjae can concentrate better, but then Hyukjae raises his head. "Alright, let me give that a try."

His eyes are filled with will and determination. Ryeowook, of all people, put those there.

He sits back and watches Hyukjae rehearse his routine over and over again, getting better and more evocative each time.

The Hyukjae before him is not a Hyukjae Ryeowook would have been able to guess based on his handwriting and lyrics alone.

Ryeowook knows basically nothing about dancing; but over the past few weeks, he's really come to know Hyukjae. He's noticed how the other is prone to express himself through movement, like when he accentuates his stories with body language and physical reenactments. It belies a comfort and confidence with his body and what it can do with which Ryeowook could never empathise. It's a subtle thing, but impactful nevertheless.

He smothers it down because he doesn't want to give Hyukjae the wrong idea, but he wants to laugh.

Only he could fall for a dancer's words first before anything else, and only he could fall for the same person twice.

~Where should I start? When should I say it? Darling, our seconds, our minutes together were beautiful.~

"Ryeowook, why haven't you asked to see my handwriting yet?"

"What?"

They had commandeered a study room in the library, but honestly neither of them are making a lot of headway in their respective assignments. Ryeowook didn't want anything to do with Organic Chemistry, but this conversation is making him reconsider his previous stance.

"Isn't that what you're into? Trying to infer people's personalities based on their handwriting?"

"I'm not into it. It just happened."

"Okay, sure, but aren't you, like, good at it now? Read mine! Tell me what it says about me."

Ryeowook, desperate to squash this idea immediately, blurts out. "It… It won't work!"

"Why not?" Hyukjae pouts.

Ryeowook scrambles. "Because I know you already. Yeah. I'll see and interpret things in a way that confirms what I already know."

Hyukjae eyebrows furrow in what Ryeowook can presume is consternation. "Sorry," he offers feebly.

Some more time passes, and Ryeowook makes mild progress on his O-Chem work, before Hyukjae speaks up again. "So if you can't do me, can you do my friend?" he asks with an excited tone that makes Ryeowook wary.

"I do not want to do your friend." You, however…

"NO! I mean: can you interpret my friend's handwriting? Here. He left it at my place last time we studied together."

Hyukjae's smirk radiates smug self-satisfaction, and with one look at the paper, Ryeowook understands why. He actively controls every muscle in his body to prevent the facepalm that's threatening to break loose.

He has to give Hyukjae props, though. If Ryeowook weren't already so intimately acquainted with the handwriting on the page before him, the other's ploy could have worked.

Regardless, he still finds himself in the position he was trying to avoid in the first place.

All the best lies are based in truth, right? "So I can tell your friend has a very high-stress major. The handwriting is cramped and small, like he can't waste a single stroke or else he'll miss something he needs to write down. Ah, see how he doesn't fully cross his t's and dot his i's? He thinks he'll be able to read his own handwriting later. He probably has decent memory or just has a lot of faith in himself."

Hyukjae nods with an impressed frown. "Huh, not bad."

It would be so, so easy to stop there, but Ryeowook can't. He loves Hyukjae's handwriting too much. "And look here," he points excitedly to a cross-out near the center of the page. "He could cross out his mistakes with a single line or a little squiggle, but he completely blocks it out instead. It suggests he has more confidence with the obvious; but really, I think he needs the reminder. Like, 'Yeah, I made a mistake. I'll move on, but I won't let myself forget. That way I don't do it again.'"

A moment later, Ryeowook realises with a jolt that he had been holding and smiling at the scrap paper a little too tenderly. He whips his head up in embarrassment, an explanation-slash-apology at the tip of his tongue, but Hyukjae doesn't seem to notice.

In fact, Hyukjae has been silent the whole time. Ryeowook chuckles awkwardly. "Am I right?"

"Huh?" Hyukjae intones as he's brought out of his reverie. Ryeowook thinks he sees something in his eyes when their gazes meet, but Hyukjae blinks and it's gone. "I'm sorry, what did you ask me?"

"I was wondering if I was right. About your 'friend,'" Ryeowook reminds, air quotes clear in his tone.

Hyukjae shuffles uncomfortably in his seat. "I think you're more right than even he's ready to admit," he says with a hand at the back of his neck and a sardonic quirk of his lips.

The sight causes an unexplainable swell of affection within Ryeowook, and he turns away. "He can take his time," he assures, eyes trained on his textbook even though he can't read a damn thing.

Hyukjae nods his thanks and turns back to his homework, but Ryeowook doesn't feel right letting it end here.

"Hey, wanna give my handwriting a try?"

~You always lift your head to look up at me. I want to take my big hands and cup your small cheeks.~

Next time they're meant to hang out, it's the weekend; and Hyukjae texts him to meet him at Bomnal.

"Both of us were here just two days ago, and we have to be here again in two days. Don't we spend enough time in Bomnal as it is?" Ryeowook complains as soon as he enters the atrium of the academic building.

"Think of it like a field trip. Come on, Wook," Hyukjae says as he leads them to the second floor lecture hall.

"Pretty sure field trips are meant to take us out of the classroom, but sure, whatever," Ryeowook grumbles as he follows along.

He's testy. He knows it, but he can't help it.

This is the first time both of them will be in Bomnal 235 at once. It feels like a turning point, like he's going to learn something today whether he wants to or not. He wonders if Hyukjae feels the same sense of impending that he does, or maybe it's just worse for him because he's in love.

As soon as they open the doors, the automatic lights flick on and douse the room with a very awake yellow.

"So… where do you normally sit?" Hyukjae asks as he motions to the empty seats before them.

Ryeowook freezes. Now that it's upon him, he can definitively identify this as the thing he was anxious about.

What if he tells the truth, Hyukjae realises Poem Person is him, and he feels awkward about it? Their comfortable but still-very-new friendship would evaporate on the spot, and Ryeowook won't have him in any capacity, much more a romantic one.

So, in another impeccable display of judgement, he decides to lie again.

"Oh, you know… I change it up," he mildly comments as he moves to somewhere near the middle of the first row. He sits down and gives an unassuming grin to his friend, who makes a face. "You're one of those people? Haven't you heard of the same seats code of conduct? You fed me some crap about curling L's when really it's your fault the balloon trick wouldn't have worked," Hyukjae jokes in that way where he's completely serious but is phrasing it with humour.

Ryeowook feels a genuine, fond grin spread across his face before he can help it, and he quickly ducks his head. "Why are we here, again?" he asks instead of dwelling on the validating comfort of being known.

"Why not?" Hyukjae asks as he moves to sit down. "This is the place it all began, right? Might as well."

Ryeowook, for his part, only stares.

Hyukjae went up to a seat in the rear right quadrant of the lecture hall. Ryeowok's own, real seat is directly in front of where the other is sitting. That can't be a coincidence.

"Um, I'm guessing that's where you sit?" he asks as casually as possible.

"Huh? Oh! Haha, yeah. It's funny, I didn't even think of sitting anywhere else. My feet just automatically guided me here."

"So funny," Ryeowook squeaks out.

"Yeah, my friend in the class actually used to sit with me, but it became very apparent very quickly that we would never get anything done if we did, so he moved down there." Hyukjae points with his foot to Ryeowook's seat, and Ryeowook's breath hitches in his throat. "Sometimes when I'm bored, I just can't help but throw stuff onto his desk just to annoy him." Hyukjae mimes a free throw shot towards the desk and smiles.

Well, if there were any doubt before in Ryeowook's mind that Hyukjae was Poem Person, it has summarily been erased.

Ryeowook hums but says nothing else, letting a companionable silence stretch between them as he acknowledges the warmth that settles into his chest when he confirms with himself that yes, he is glad that Hyukjae is Poem Person.

"Why are you helping me?" he asks, curious and without judgement. The abrupt question startles the other out of whatever reverie he had settled into during their respite, but Hyukjae bounces back quickly, as he always does.

"You know, I had to figure that answer out myself," Hyukjae answers with a laugh. He leans back in his chair with his hands folded behind his head, staring out at the empty lecture hall. "I told you I would at first because it was obvious that I was the only one in a position to actually help. It wasn't even an option in my mind that I wouldn't… But even after my sense of obligation ran out, I wanted to keep going.

"You're cool, Ryeowook. You're fun to be around, you're sassy, you're down to try anything once. You're totally comfortable being yourself, and your 'self' is crazy. Like, who else trusts in their gut enough that this person you're chasing after is worth the effort? Who else would go to the lengths to which you're willing to go just to meet him? Honestly, I think that's pretty awesome. I don't know if I could have that same confidence you do."

He tilts his head towards Ryeowook then and gives a close-lipped, self-convinced smile. "If anyone's gonna find love based on a few scraps of paper and a dream, it's gonna be you."

Ryeowook nods mutely. He hopes the distance between them is enough to disguise the blush on his cheeks.

Hyukjae faces forward again. "If I think about it, I guess I'm being selfish, too. I want to believe a love like that is possible; and if I help you find him, I'll get to see it happen for myself… I really hope this guy is worth it, Ryeowook. I think it would break my heart as much as yours if he weren't."

He is, though. He's so worth it. "Me too."

~Longing is a beautiful pain I thought I could endure.~

Ryeowook walks out of the campus mail room, and life couldn't get better.

He just picked up a care package his mom sent him; he got a 94 on his last Nutrition Essentials quiz; and Hyukjae loves the new low-fat, protein-enhanced strawberry scones recipe he tried out yesterday.

Speaking of whom, he thinks this whole Poem Person plot is going to wrap up soon. The last time they must have actually worked on a strategy to find out who Poem Person was, like, two weeks ago at least; and Ryeowook's glad he can stop pretending he has any interest anymore.

Their friendship has wholly evolved beyond the point of needing a project to work on in order to spend time with each other anyway. Why pine after a fictitious man when he has a whole Hyukjae right there, who buys him coffee lattes simply because he's Hyukjae's dongsaeng and who helps him study for his quizzes even when Hyukjae himself is stressed.

Ryeowook tells himself that with some more time, the whole mystery will just fade into an inside joke between the two of them, a white whale they can reminisce about when they're sipping soju and reminiscing… preferably cuddled on a couch and with his head on Hyukaje's shoulder.

However, his friend group did not get the memo.

"So, uh. What happened to Poem Person?" Henry asks one weekend while everyone is at Ryeo-Mi's apartment.

"Shut up!" Kyuhyun admonishes with a slap to the back of Henry's head. "Ryeowook hasn't annoyed us with that in weeks. Aren't you grateful?!"

"I actually am very curious about what happened there. Weren't you and Hyukjae supposed to find him together?" Yesung asks.

"The gen—" "Maybe I'm manifesting, Mi! Ever think of that?"

Ryeowook cuts in before Mi's feelings get even more hurt. "Yeah, we were, but honestly I've kinda given up on the whole thing."

He expects some shock, but he couldn't have predicted who would be the most affected. "You're just gonna give up on finding love!?" Mi despairs.

"Actually, the potential for a romantic relationship was never confirmed," Henry quips. Yesung gives Henry a high-five.

"It was just a little crush," Ryeowook defends. "I've moved past it, as I was bound to do eventually." He says this last part to Kyuhyun, who he knows was the most annoyed with his actions back then.

"'Eventually' doesn't end in time for finals week, Wook," Kyuhyun retorts.

"Well, now you never have to worry about it, Hyun."

"Is love dead?" Mi desponds aloud, but no one pays him any mind.

Ryeowook pats his roommate's shoulders in a half-hearted attempt at consolation. If Mi turns out to be the only casualty in this whole ordeal, Ryeowook will count this as a win.

What he doesn't count on is the fact that Hyukjae would invariably hear about it.

"Is it true?" Hyukjae corners him after Ryeowook picks up his order from the on-campus cafe.

"You know, I don't think so. I think she's just Henry's accompanist for rehearsals," Ryeowook responds genuinely, certain that the latest gossip about Henry's potentially secret girlfriend is what Hyukjae must have been referring to.

"What? No!" Hyukjae stops in confusion but stomps after Ryeowook once he gets his bearings back. "No, I heard that you gave up on finding him, that you gave up a while ago. Is it true?"

Ryeowook hesitates to sit down at the open table he found, and Hyukjae's entire posture seizes in betrayal. "Alright, got it," Hyukjae says with an edge to his tone. "Do me a favour, yeah? Never talk to me ever again."

"Wait!" Ryeowook calls once Hyukjae turns on his heel and storms off. "Hyukjae, wait!" He pays no mind to the fact that he's abandoning his belongings as he chases Hyukjae outside. "I get that you're angry, but don't you think this is a little much?"

He reaches out for Hyukjae's upper arm, but the other immediately shrugs it off. Ryeowook flinches and retreats slightly. Despite the other's obvious fury, Hyukjae is stopped in place and seems willing to actually talk to him, and Ryeowook holds onto that hope instead.

"No, actually," Hyukjae sneers. "I think this is the perfect amount of much when you find out your best friend has been wasting your time for who knows how long!"

Of all the things Hyukjae could have said in that moment, Ryeowook didn't expect that reaction at all. It stings more than he expects, cuts through his defensiveness; and despite his position in the situation, he can't help but need comfort. "What do you mean?" he asks in a confused, desperate voice.

"What do I mean?" Hyukjae repeats exasperatedly. "Ryeowook, we spent weeks together trying to figure out how to get you your dream guy! We never even got anywhere, and, and… And it's all because of you! You shot down basically every one of my ideas practically from the beginning, even after I told you how much it would personally mean to me. That is, like, the textbook definition of a waste of time!"

"You weren't having fun?"

"What?" Hyukjae demands incredulously.

"All that time we spent together," Ryeowook clarifies as he steadfastly meets Hyukjae's angry gaze. "You didn't have fun?"

Hyukjae is silent, and his body posture screams obstinate defiance, but his eyes remain trained on Ryeowook.

"You didn't come to look forward to spending time with me? You didn't spend your free time thinking of ways to make me laugh?"

Hyukjae rolls his eyes. "So what? What does any of that mean when you were just stringing me along? You… you weren't even using me!?" he exclaims, voice rising in a hysterical question. "That was literally the whole basis of our friendship, and you couldn't even do that? Like, what could you have possibly gained from lying to my face like that for all this time?"

Ryeowook gives a watery smile at the non-answer and looks down at his fingers fidgeting together. "I did, too," he says in a voice so quiet it was like he intended to keep that to himself.

It's silent for a long time after that admission. Hyukjae's lividness has dissipated, and he is only left with a disappointment so painful he doesn't want to dwell on it any further. He moves to leave Ryeowook alone outside of the cafe, but Ryeowook's voice stops him.

"W-What did you say?" Hyukjae asks with apprehension.

Ryeowook ignores the tears falling from his eyes as he repeats himself. "I'm in a rush to catch you, but you're in a hurry to leave. Should I just surrender? Now we're like an old and worn notebook filled with scribbles."

Hyukjae simply stares, and Ryeowook takes that as his cue to keep going. "Take your beautiful smile with you. Don't leave it here. You saw me with tears in my eyes."

By heart,

"I was a selfish man, but my life is divided into before and after I knew you."

Ryeowook recites lyric,

"When I first saw you, it felt like a miracle."

after lyric,

"I'm thinking of you more today. I wonder how tomorrow morning will be. Will I miss you more than I do today?"

after lyric;

"I'm honest because I don't know lies before love."

and before he knows it,

"I'd place my feelings on the thawing snow. I'd hang my wish on a disappearing star, but only if you ask me to."

Hyukjae is within arm's reach.

"It's me?" Hyukjae whispers into the scant centimetres between them. "It's really me?" he asks again when Ryeowook had simply nodded.

Ryeowook can't even help it when he recites, "Even when you ask me again, for me, it's only you." with a breathy laugh as he shyly looks away.

Hyukjae moves to gently hold Ryeowook's hand. "And you're okay with that?"

Ryeowook wants to laugh and melt and cry and run away, but instead he settles for an earnest nod and a hesitant smile. "Are you?"

Hyukjae answers him with a kiss, and it feels like a dazzling melody.

~Together, we can make all our unfulfilled dreams come true.~

#super junior #super junior fanfiction #eunwook #eunhyuk #ryeowook #jaso*#iwrew

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comradekatsu · 4 years

Text

“you’re dead to me.”

“I don’t know what you’ve been told,” Deku started, spitting the words out with malice, “See, I am not your enemy.” “Oi, what the fuck are you talking about, ner-” “But if there’s one thing that I know, it’s that you’re not a friend of me.”

a bkdk fic inspired by dead to me by kali uchis

word count: 1.9K

CW: anger issues, angst, not a happy ending, cursing, romantic if you squint

A/N: this is my first fic on here! i guess we could start off with a bang, huh? i also posted this to ao3, under the username greenolivetree. im looking forward to writing more in the future! i’ll probably do both ships and x reader stuff :) and maybe later today i’ll post a get to know me, haha. enjoy!

Bakugo can admit when he goes too far. He’s brash, stubborn as fuck, angry, and loud, but if he fucks up too much, he can recognize that. Perks of having human empathy mix in with your anger issues, you know when you’re in the wrong in the middle of an argument. His friends don’t mind, they know him. Kirishima would pull him aside and make him breathe. Kaminari will whisper something about not needing to prove himself all the time and to drop it. Mina and Sero deal with the aftermath of Bakugou blowing up on someone. However, sometimes, his friends aren’t there.

They had a plan. When given ten minutes of prep time, they drafted an intricate plan that would take less than thirty minutes to complete. It was sprung on Class 1-A, and anything that was not planned set Bakugo on edge. He already had Kaminari tell him to calm the fuck down the second he heard Aizawa explain the mission. The two were halfway through their plan, and Deku tripped on a piece of debris.

“Can you get it fucking together, Deku? Damn it,” He snapped, the tension in his chest building bigger and bigger by the second. If he didn’t say anything, it would physically pain him. When he’s angry and does nothing, it felt like a python squeezing his heart. Bakugou usually resorted to things like breaking hangers in his closet, but it was training, and there was nothing to break. “God, you can’t be this fucking incompetent. How’d you even make it this far in life?”

He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. He panicked, racking his brain for something to say that would soften the blow but not compromise his ego. Bakugo couldn’t come up with any. He froze, the pressure in his chest increasing, trying to think of anything to say that wasn’t harsh. His mind wasn’t merciful. All the ash-blond could think of was how easy, how fucking simple their mission was and Midoriya kept ruining his plan. It wasn’t fucking rocket science, so why couldn’t he get it? Was Deku trying to sabotage Bakugou? Why wasn’t he following the fucking plan? Katsuki just wanted the thoughts to stop, so he could say something--anything, anything that could not make him look like a vile human being for lashing out.

All Katsuki could do was stand dumbly in the middle of the training. They sent him and Midoriya to a makeshift building, paired together, with the instruction of saving hostages. The kidnappers were Eraserhead and All Might, with the hostages being general study course kids who wanted the extra credit. Midoriya looked at him, stonefaced. This was an unnatural reaction for Deku, who usually just rolls his eyes and tells him to focus on the mission. He was simply standing still, staring at Bakugo with wide eyes. Not the wide eyes of someone who was scared of him, no, someone who was tired. Exasperated. Exhausted by his actions.

“I don’t know what you’ve been told,” Deku started, spitting the words out with malice, “See, I am not your enemy.”

“Oi, what the fuck are you talking about, ner-”

“But if there’s one thing that I know, it’s that you’re not a friend of me.” Bakugo stopped breathing for a second. He went too far. What did Kirishima say about breathing? He tensed up, balling his hands into fists to relieve the rage that was burning inside of him. Kirishima said to breathe in for eight, hold for four, out for eight. He could do that. Breathe. Bakugo can breathe.

He considered Midoriya a friend these past few months. They’ve grown close, been nicknamed The Wonder Duo. They haven’t had a sole mission together before, and of course, that’s when Bakugo couldn’t control himself. High pressure, a low consequence for snapping. He just assumed that something like this could be looked past. Bakugo knows, when he’s not clouded with rage, that it is not anyone’s responsibility to cater to him. Bakugo has to hold back, not others. Sometimes it gets too much too fast and he just… can’t hold back. This was one of those times, as he stared into the emerald eyes he’s grown to be fond of. His childhood best friend, who’d fought and crawled his way into a soft spot in Bakugo’s heart, even if he didn’t understand Bakugo as Kirishima or Kaminari did. Deku was still someone he’d cared for. A little too much.

Bakugo just wished anger had a filter. No matter the closeness, anyone was subject to it at one point or another. It made him weak, it made him cruel. People thought he was heartless. Maybe he deserved it. He didn’t like being vulnerable, only a few people at few times get to see him like that. Calm down.

Bakugo breathed out. “What are you talking about?”

Deku just stared at him. It was then Katsuki noticed the tears streaming down his cheeks, he hadn’t realized because his face was neutral, lips pressed in a line. Midoriya’s tears gave away what he was feeling. He took off his mask that hung from his neck, holding it gently in his hands. Midoriya’s eyes tore away from Bakugo’s to stare at it for a moment, contemplating. Bakugo’s chest was close to collapsing in on itself, anger inflating like a balloon. He just wanted it to stop. He wanted to pop the balloon, to get his mind to stop racing with insults and berating comments and intrusive thoughts for two fucking minutes so he could keep Deku from saying what he’s going to next. It doesn’t work that way.

He remembered the first time he realized that this was a problem. It was after Bakugo had fought those fourth graders (and won), but still went home with that now-familiar aching feeling in his chest. Bakugo ignored his mother and stormed up into his room, slamming the door shut. He replayed the scene over and over in his mind until his Quirk activated and suddenly he was punching a hole in his wall and the entire drywall crumbled where he stood. Mitsuki was thankfully outside his door, quick to take him and run before any debris hit him.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” She asked, softly caressing the dust off of his face. Mitsuki wasn’t mad, just concerned.

“They bumped into me, I didn’t bump into them. They bumped into me, I promise, why would they say that,” he mumbled, refusing to make eye contact.

“Baby,” Mitski whispered, wiping the last of the dirt on his face. No hug. She stood up and walked away from him. “I need to call the police. We need to get you a new wall.”

Bakugo shifted back to reality as Deku cleared his throat with passive-aggression. He hadn’t meant to zone out. Bakugo had a tendency to dissociate when angry, to the point where he’d be lost in his daydreams in an attempt to calm down. This can last from minutes to days. Usually, Kirishima or Kaminari grounded him.

“Kacchan,” Midoriya whispered, realizing that Bakugo wasn’t listening, “You… you just don’t care… you… you…!”

“I what? Come on!” Now that he was fully alert, Bakugo was yelling at this point. “Spit it the fuck out! Come on, Deku, if you’re so big and fucking tough, say it!” He couldn’t control his words. Katsuki just wanted to shut himself up. “Not a friend to me… tch. Oi, at least I’m not so fucking sensitive I cry at a single fucking sente-”

“You’re dead to me!” Midoriya screamed, louder than Bakugo had heard before. His voice cracked on every word, denting his mask from how hard he gripped it.

The balloon in his chest popped.

“You’re obsessed, you keep comparing yourself to me. I’ve never treated you like you treat me, Kacchan! You don’t treat Kirishima, Kaminari, Todoroki, no one! You’re so threatened by me, you think I’m out to get you. I’ve done nothing but love you for years, and you still treat me like I’m nothing! I can’t handle you anymore. Just because you can’t be fucking normal and nice to others, doesn’t give you the excuse to be a bad friend! For what? Class rank? You’re obsessed, just let it go,” Deku said, closing his eyes tight. It was as if he’d been thinking this for a long time. “You’re dead to me.”

Bakugo was suddenly hyper-aware of everything around him. He could hear every creak in the building, the hum of the AC, the way Midoriya’s feet shifted on the floor. His costume was too tight, too fucking tight, Bakugo felt like he couldn’t breathe. His wrists ached by being weighed down, something that doesn’t usually happen. He could smell the dust in the air, the fresh coat of paint that they’d put on the walls for the training. The ringing in his ears grew to the front of his head and it was too much, it was all too much. He put his fists to his neck, squeezing slightly.

“You’re just saying that,” he grumbled.

“I’m not somebody you know.”

“Stop it!” He yelled, hitting his neck with his fists. Angry tears fell down his face, but he was quick to rub them off. “You don’t mean that! I do know you, I do! Fuck!” Katsuki reached out his hand to grab onto Midoriya’s arm.

“Could you just leave me alone?” Midoriya yanked back, throwing his mask at the taller boy. He looked up to a camera watching them. “Exam over. We failed. I’m going to the dorms. Let me out.”

“You can’t just fucking fail me! Over that?” What Bakugo wanted to say was that he was sorry, he wanted to make it up to him, he knows he fucking sucks-- but nothing of the sort came out of his mouth. “Don’t you dare fucking open up any doors!” He yelled to the ceiling, not really sure who he was yelling to. As long as it wasn’t Midoriya. “Fuck you! Don’t fucking fail me! Stop it! Stop!” Heavy tears pounded on his cheeks like rain.

“Let me out!” Midoriya said once more, and a voice sounded over the intercom.

“Well… we can’t just keep students hostage. Follow my voice and you’ll be taken to the exit,” Gang Orca said. His voice was taken aback like no student had done this before. Especially not in the 1-A class. They usually just fought through their problems.

“Don’t go. Please, Izuku, please,” Bakugo begged, his voice small. He didn’t feel mad anymore. Bakugo messed everything up. If he could control himself, it wouldn’t get to this. If he could just apologize, everything would be okay. But he can’t, and he has to deal with the consequences. One of the only times his mother consolidated him for his problems, the only piece of advice she gave him, was that no one owed him their patience. He has to overcome it himself, because she won’t take him to a therapist. How could the future number one hero have a mental health record? Bakugo had to deal with it. And, he was doing a horrid fucking job at it.

Midoriya smoothed out his hero costume and walked towards the door. The green-haired boy turned around right before he left.

“You’re dead to me, Bakugo.” Midoriya’s voice held some eery form of finality. He spun on his heel and left the building, leaving Katsuki alone. If Katsuki sobbed alone until he had to be forced by All Might to leave for the next pair, no one had to know.

#bakudeku #bakudeku fic #bakugou katsuki #midoriya izuku #my hero academia #bkdk #i wanted to write about anger issues bc a lot of people villainize them #and as someone with anger issues... there's a lot of bad takes on here #boku no hero academia

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cyberdva · 4 years

Text

Lost Grieving- Richie Tozier X Reader {Chapter 2☆}

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Summary- The reader gets stuck in strange implications and finds herself in Derry, Maine, the location of the infamous Steven King book ‘IT’. Unknowingly she stumbles across the Neibolt House, the dirty and burnt remains of a tragic fire. She remembers what horrors had happened and is hesitant to stay. What will happen when she runs into the one and only Losers Club? What will they do if the strange new girl claiming to be from another universe, tells them they’re all made up characters from a book? Will she help them ‘defeat’ the morbid Pennywise or give up and be lost in perishable hell forever, filled with lost grieving. Proceed with caution when you drive into this tale of horror, humor, and a handful of twisted romance with Richie ‘Trashmouth’ Tozier.

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Main Masterlist

IT Masterlist

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2 (+)

Word Count: 2k

Date Uploaded: 11/05/19

A/N: Sorry for the long wait, I have so many ideas for headcannons and imagines that I’ve been just spitballing them out. I apologize for that, but anyways enjoy the new chapter! Send in any requests or ideas for the story, I’m in the mood for writing and I’m off for the rest of the week.

Warnings and Notes: Cursing and Excerpts from Stephen King’s IT Novel

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“Are you ok?” Eddie began to slow down, we ran as fast as we could. I felt bad for him, he has no idea what was going on. At least I had a basic understanding. He was really pale and it looked as if he could barely breathe. Oh, he has asthma! Wouldn’t he already have his inhaler out or something?

“Yeah, I’m fine. You’re really pale, are you going to faint?

“I think so, but I’m more concerned with the fact that you aren’t freaking out about that clown!” He spat out. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Eddie spoke at the speed of light, no one ever understood him. I had a pit in my stomach, it pulsed whenever I thought of It. I want to go home.

I looked down, trying to piece together what to say, “Oh I’m terrified, I really think I’m dreaming.” The boy went shuffling through his red fanny pack.

“Why would you be dreaming? I’m not dreaming?

I sighed, “It’s a long story,” and I’ll have time to tell it to him when it comes.

“I think I’m going to throw up.” Eddie sputtered his body spurred to the side of the road, his hands covered his face. I awkwardly stood in front of him as my own nausea came up to battle. I collapsed next to him and we said nothing to each other.

“We need to find Bill.” he huffed. It looked as if his small body caved in on itself.

Bill Denbrough. He was their ‘leader’ or that’s how he was perceived in the books. I never really liked his character, but I felt horrible for what happened with Georgie. I felt bad for all of them. Their lives got swept away by that clown and the poster-child victim of this is sitting right next to me. I really hope this is a dream, what if I don’t go home? There’s no way I could be a foster child, that system is still fucked in the present. I can’t imagine what it could be like here.

“Where does he live?” I had no clue on what I was supposed to do, I’m not even relevant in this plot. What I do know is that I have to get a panicked Eddie over his friend’s house.

“Two streets down. Will you come with me, please? I don’t want to get killed by that clown. I lost my inhaler and my mom is going to freak.” his breathing became rigid. It was catching up with the pace of his talking, which was quite fast. His panting swallowed up all his words. In the story his medicine was fake. Now I was in a conundrum.

Do I tell him or not? It was such a turning point for him, even though he relapsed later on in his life, I think.

“Hey just breathe.” I almost patted his back, but my hand just wavered above him. Eddie tried to hack out a sarcastic reply. His fear got the best of him.

“Oh my gosh, please Eddie just breathe. I don’t care about your inhaler. We’ll get one at Bill’s or something.” He gasped for a gulp of air and shook. After a couple more times his lungs settled and sat in shock.

“How did that work? That never worked without my inhaler! Are you a witch or something?” Eddie wanted to do nothing but run as fast as he could away from that stranger that he found at a crack house. His mother always told him he was sick, he was. What just happened was physically impossible. ‘What if she was working for that clown?’, he thought. “She might not even be real for god’s sake!” Eddie couldn’t think straight.

I was beginning to think I was a witch, there is no physical way I could be here. I had next to none proof that I’m from the future, a different dimension at that. Except for my backpack. I always had sections for unused papers, a bigger chunk for History and English work. There were just a few things that fell through from my desk, but not much. Bingo. My old History article about Democratic and Republican debates. Photos, photos of the President. I did have proof! I just need the right time to bring it up.

“I dunno, my friend has asthma and that works for her.” Lies, I knew that would never work. Eddie would have to be a fool to ever believe that.

“Where are you from? I never heard of that treatment before, especially not from any doctor,”

“Nevermind that, we need to get going.” Nice playoff Y/N. We both headed down the small sidewalk in the brisk afternoon. As we passed the broken down Derry Trainyard the faint scream of a teenage boy filled the surrounding forest. My dress began to hike up my legs and clump by my backpack. Minutes went by when we walked down the unfamiliar streets.

Another deep screech was released, “What the hell was that?” I jumped after it was quiet, our eyes darted around. No one could be seen as the echo still remained. A groomed bush next to us started to shake unnaturally.

“What the fu-” Eddie stumbled back, like a baby learning their first steps. The greenery was torn to its sides by a lengthy boy. The pale thing launched at Eddie and almost stomped right on his arm.

“Hi-ya Eds! Didn’t know your mom let you hang out with girls, especially pretty ones.” He grabbed Eddie’s hand and pulled him to his feet. The boys stood head to torso. The height difference was kind of funny. Who even is that kid? I think he’s part of the club. Eddie seems to know him.

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Richard Tozier turns off the radio, which has been blaring out Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” on WZON (a station which declares itself to be “Bangor’s AM Stereo rocker! With a kind of hysterical frequency), pulls over to the side of the road, shuts down the engine of the Mustang the Avis people rented him at Bangor International, and gets out. He hears the pull and release of his own breath in his ears. He has seen a sign which has caused the flesh of his back to break out in the hard ridges of gooseflesh.

He walks to the front of the car and puts on hand on its hood. He hears the engine ticking softly to itself as it cools. He hears a jay scream briefly and then shut up. There are crickets. And as far as the soundtrack goes, that’s it.

He has seen the sign, he passes it, and suddenly he is in Derry again. After twenty-five years Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier has come home.

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“Bonjour Mademoiselle, I’m Richie!” he bowed.

Oh.”What the fuck is wrong with him?” I choked. Eddie stifled a laugh.

“Many things,” he replied. “Anyways, I haven’t seen you around here before. Are you new? Or like a homeschool?”

‘A homeschool’, isn’t he supposed to be smart or something? I’m starting to remember him. Richie was the jokester and my personal favorite character. This oughta be fun!

“I don’t know where I am.” After ages, I pushed down my dress in an attempt at a good impression.

“What do you mean?”

“I woke up underneath the welcome sign and found that broken-down house.”

The two stared at me, ”No, but seriously where are you from?”

“I’m telling the truth! Wait… I have proof!” I seized my bag and heaved it open. Small folders with homework were inside, along with other items that made it through with me.

I grabbed the green History folder filled with stray Newsela articles about Politicians and the President. I pulled one out about a Democratic and Republican debate. A bright picture of all the candidates with a date from September 2019 slapped right under the headline.

“Here this is from my school, in 2019.” It was the least believable thing I have ever said in my life. I internally cringed and just tossed the papers, along with the folder for good measure. If that doesn’t convince them I don’t know what will, even better, I got a watch. Not just any watch, one of the fancy ones with apps and music stuffed all into one. It’s perfectly packed right into my bag’s front pouch.

“What does the photo represent?” Eddie asked, he pointed to the red and blue stage and Richie glanced at the article about Donald Trump.

“It’s a debate abou-”

Richie jumped in, ”Why is orange?”

“I don’t know.”

“There has to be a reason for it.”

“Shut up Richie.”

“You shut up Eddie. Who cares, I want to figure out who she is.”

“Guys, come on.”

A car came jolting down the street. The driver… wasn’t there. All that was in the windshield was a blood-red balloon, not a person in sight. I screamed along with Eddie, Richie didn’t have any reaction. Richie snatched back my folder and scooted onto the pavement.

I couldn’t bring myself to move, I’m not part of this story, yet I can’t leave. Frail arms yanked me away just as the car whisked past. A crunch was all that was left of the vehicle, it disappeared in a flash. The remains of my crushed green backpack drew me to tears.

“Holy shit my watch is broken!” I sobbed. My last figment of proof.

Eddie flung his hands, “Is no one going to say ANYTHING about the car!?”

“We need to go find Bill.”

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆

#richie tozier imagines #richie tozier #richie tozier x reader #richie tozier imagine #richie toizer x reader #it chapter 1 #it chapter 2 #it #fandom #fanfiction #the losers club #fanfic

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theeeveetamer · 5 years

Text

Extended Three Houses Thoughts

I’m about two chapters from the end of the Blue Lions route but I do have some extended thoughts on the game that I wanted to type up and share before I get back to it. Spoilers below the cut, in case that wasn’t obvious.

So first off I want to say that I have far more positive things to say about this game than negatives, but I do think this game has some negatives. These aren’t in any particular order I just kind of typed them as I thought of them.

I feel like a lot of what this game does was in direct response to Fates. There was a lot of swinging the pendulum back in very noticeable ways, and for the most part I think that’s a good thing.

The seriously slimmed down cast, for one. I was kind of surprised and a little worried when I first picked up the game and I found out that each house only had about seven core characters, but I like it. Fates had too many characters, and most of the time they ended up being redundant. You had, what, eight fliers in Revelation including children, with at least five more characters potentially able to become fliers through their normal promotion paths? When, at most, you probably needed three. And some were significantly better than others, so obviously you went with those and the rest kind of rotted away in your barracks.

With Three Houses each character feels important. Since you can now train basically any character to be anything it also means you can have some fill specific niches. You can have Sylvain be a sword cavalry unit, and Dimitri be a lance cavalry unit, and Ingrid an axe cavalry unit if you want, drop their breaker skills on them, and they can all be useful and important on the same team.

The supports also feel more meaningful. Don’t get me wrong there’s still a lot of re-hashing of already covered territory (basically all of Dedue’s supports involve either cooking or the fact that he’s from Duscur, most of Ingrid’s revolve around wanting to be a knight or marriage contracts, etc.) but the fact that there’s less of them makes this feel like less of a problem. And it’s nice that, now, they don’t try to force every conversation into a C-B-A-S format. Some characters only have C-B, others have C-B-A-A+, etc. I think it makes sense. Not every character will be as close as others, and not all support conversation threads need three parts to be meaningful and impactful. Some need more, some need less. Trying to squish them in or stretch them out always hurt more than it helped.

That said, I’m a little disappointed there’s no match-making to be had. Everyone in this game gets brother-zoned/sister-zoned so fast it’s kind of comical. There are a few A supports that hint at feelings but you can’t actually make them S-support. Also, a character might indicate feelings for more than one other character in their A supports so it’s not definitive. Maybe there’s more once the game is finished, but within the actual main story there’s nothing.

Don’t get me wrong, it makes sense to me. As young teenagers in school there wouldn’t really be any reason for any of them to get married. I thought that might change after the time skip but it doesn’t. I don’t necessarily hate that it’s gone, it’s just a feature I enjoyed fucking around with in Awakening and Fates (and I was looking forward to, hopefully, more gay representation. I was really hoping that they might allow characters to be gay for each other and not just the Avatar character, especially since they included so many lesbian options this time around. But alas, maybe next game).

The exclusion of child characters was a good call. Barring the fact that the exclusion of S-Supports would automatically exclude child characters, I still think it was a good call. Unless the game had a significant time skip (15+ years) then they just wouldn’t have made sense. They worked in Awakening because the central narrative included time travel, but they didn’t work at all in Fates. The narrative only had tentative connections to the “multi-verse/multiple realities” thing. And, let’s be real, it’s fucking weird to have kids walking around that are the same damn age as their parents (and parents that didn’t look a day older than 17). In Fates they’d just needlessly ballooned up the cast of a game that was already way too big anyways. If they did it then they needed to do it like Genealogy, where the main cast was essentially replaced by their children instead of strapped onto the game alongside them.

I was worried that Fate’s poor handling of them meant the series was doomed to include them regardless of relevance. Glad I was wrong on that one.

The calendar progression is pretty cool, as is walking around the monastery. It was pretty fun to run around and figure out where each character liked spending their time, which characters interacted with which, etc. I’m always a fan of a little flavor text and having each character say a few lines about current events was really cool and helped give each one a little more personality. The more structured pace of things makes sense for the school environment. Though it does take out some of the urgency when the mission is “FIND FLAYN IMMEDIATELY” and then you have to wait until the end of the month anyways to do it. But for other things, like a mission to march on enemy territory, it makes sense (your entire army isn’t ready to go immediately, there’s preparations that need done).

The designs of the characters themselves were pretty well done. I especially appreciate how they toned down a lot of the sexualization that Fates became pretty famous for. And considering basically all of these characters are between 15-18 all I can say is THANK GOD. Even their aged up versions don’t seem too bad, though I’ve only really seen the Lions (because I was dumb and didn’t recruit very aggressively).

I’m still NOT a fan of this “silent” protagonist thing. It just makes some of the cut scenes and dialogue sections feel really disconnected and awkward. From what I can tell a lot of your dialogue choices don’t particularly matter, anyways. You only have two options, and for the most part they have the same meaning (”You shouldn’t talk that way!” versus “I wish you would calm down.”) and the character you’re talking to responds the same way regardless of your choice. Or you pick between two different options (”Tell me about the officer’s academy” and “Tell me about the church”) and the characters proceed to explain both anyways.

I think the biggest issues I have with this come from the fact that the game itself is fully voice acted. I think Three Houses fell into the same problem that Breath of the Wild did. Dropping a character that never speaks aloud into a cast of characters that are fully and beautifully voiced feels unnatural. I think they had two options here: Either go back to what they did with Fates (No full voice acting, just some lines spoken here and there) or they needed to have Byleth fully voice acted. After Echoes did full voice acting I really don’t think they would have been able to go back without some serious backlash.

Personally I would have preferred it if Byleth were fully voice acted but they got rid of some of the dialogue “options”. They don’t feel like a meaningful feature, it’s just a thin veneer so they can say they had dialogue options, because that’s what every other game on the market is doing. Part of me wonders if they did this as a response to the Corrin hate after Fates. It’s hard to hate a character when you pick all of their dialogue, right? If that is the case, then they clearly didn’t understand why people hated Corrin so much.

Overall I don’t really feel any connection or attachment to Byleth. That might just be me, though. The three “lords” of the game are clearly meant to be the main focus, especially when it comes to character development. Maybe I’ll change my mind on that after I beat the game.

That said, thank fuck they toned down the avatar hero worship. Circling back a little bit, I just feel like the character of Byleth is handled much better than Corrin. It’s kind of unfortunate that Awakening, Fates, and Three Houses kind of have this avatar hero-worship vibe to them but if we’re going to have to live with it then I guess I’ll explain myself.

In Awakening the hero worship worked. Robin was, essentially, a brilliant tactician that brought a lot of success to Ylisse’s army. There were at least a few characters that were initially wary of Robin, but they were treated respectfully by the story and it’s presented as though they are just exercising a healthy amount of caution.

In Three Houses the hero worship works. It feels much less like worship and more like genuine respect and admiration. Byleth is a professor and a mentor to these young people so it makes sense. There are a few that were initially skeptical of him/her (which is totally justified in the story because Byleth appears to be barely older than them with zero teaching experience) but they come around after Byleth’s skill is demonstrated to them throughout Part 1. The only character I’d say seems to blindly worship Byleth is Rhea, and that’s justified because she clearly knows something about the main character that no one else does.

In Fates the hero worship was excessive. Corrin as a character is nothing really special. He/She isn’t particularly intelligent or particularly skilled at anything. The most you could say is that Corrin is probably supposed to be charismatic (since every character falls at their feet the second they meet) but Corrin doesn’t feel charismatic to me. They have multiple characters that seem to exist for the sole purpose of worshiping the ground they walk on (Camilla, Ryoma, Sylas, Jakob, Felicia, etc.), to the point that I felt it ruined otherwise interesting characters (Camilla mainly). Any character that doesn’t immediately worship Corrin is either forced to come around, brainwashed by the big bad and turned into a villain, or just wanted to love Corrin so much but circumstances made it impossible so they had to be evil. I could make an entire post about how much I hate Corrin but I’ll stop it here since this is supposed to be about Three Houses.

So considering where they were coming from... Byleth is fine. I don’t know if I like them more than Robin, but I definitely like them more than Corrin. I’ll feel more definitively about them after I’ve finished the game and played some of the other routes.

They re-use maps in this game. A lot. I noticed it pretty quickly about five chapters in, but IMO it’s a serious problem that this game never quite seems to shake. If the battle is in a city, they pick one of two city maps. If it’s in a forest they’ve got one of three forest maps. And I’m not complaining about Auxiliary battles because I only did a handful of those (and they always reuse maps for those, even in Fates and Awakening). I’m talking about main story and paralogue mission maps.

Sometimes they have a unique map (like the tomb/catacombs) but it invariably comes back later for a paralogue or another main mission. Sometimes it comes back less than two chapters after it first appeared (the monastery fight right before the time skip and then defending the monastery two chapters after the time skip.) I could understand if they re-used maps across different routes (because Fates did the same thing), but so far I’ve only been in one route and it’s the same maps over and over.

Finally, I have no idea how I’m going to survive playing this game two (three?) more times. I mean, I like it. It’s fun. But it took me like 40 hours just to complete one route I have no idea how I’m going to do all three (possibly four, since I’ve been told the eagles route can be different depending on if you side with the church or not).

#fe:3h #fire emblem: Three Houses #Three Houses #fire emblem #spoilers #fe:3h spoilers #thoughts #opinions #Not really a review but kind of a review

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turntochapter13 · 5 years

Text

A side-project I’ll be working on for a while before I get it beta’d and such :)

March 11, 2013

His eyes are too tightly shut and it’s starting to white out the all-consuming black that comes with the comforting blanket of lids. The click of the door it prominent enough to hit Bucky’s ears from where he is shoving his face as far as it will go into the damp pillow on his bed. It makes him flinch and restart the feeble attempt of recuperation.

He has to calm down the rise and fall of his chest otherwise he’ll never get up, and he’s already given one too many shows for the few teachers that care to be considered nothing but regular old introverted teenager syndrome.

He pushes himself up with his arms and gets off the bed. It creaks unsatisfyingly and urges Bucky to look at it again, but he walks into the bathroom and avoids the mirror as he grabs the toothpaste and starts the mundane quotidian factions of life. He brushes his teeth too hard and there’s a hint of blood that comes out in the wad of spit he chucks in the glistening white sink.

He knows it was either from the harsh bristles or biting his cheek too hard because he makes sure to keep his teeth clean. He likes the pride and the way he can take control over the circumstances. It’s his.

Once he’s done all he can in the bathroom, peeing, trying to brush through the tangles of his hair and haphazardly checking it in the mirror, reluctantly washing his face of invisible grime that loves it’s obstinate hold on him, he goes out into his bedroom.

He’s so grateful he has his own bathroom. He can curl up in an enveloping bath for hours and no one will yell at him, and he can study his face in the mirror for unnaturally long while no one comes to raise an eyebrow at him impatiently. Sure, there’s that hesitation where he looks at Atty’s claiming initials on all the old hand-me-downs and hidden nooks of folds in walls and aged furniture, a brief spell of longing and grief, but the room is his now and he has his bathroom.

He finds a faded black t-shirt with bleach stains and an old rock band on the front that he loved for two months in some year long gone but able to withstand the small growth he’s had. It’s big on him actually and he vaguely remembers swimming in it when it first arrived in mail from some shady online shop that probably gave the family computer a virus. It’s relatively clean, well-worn but comfy, and he yanks it out of the closet from where he put it there about a week ago once his mother shrewdly screamed at him to organize his room.

Black jeans and a blue hoodie complete the clumsy ensemble. He feels the niggling urge to throw the hood over his head, but his dad will positively smack him on the back of the head for being the disrespectful twit he is, and they’ll laugh and laugh and shove breakfast in their faces. Though, Bucky thinks he’s already headed out.

He opts to keep the migraine forming behind the bars quiet for a little while longer and keeps the mothballed hood down. It matched his haggard black backpack. He constantly chews on whether or not he is a goth in discretion by subconscious impulse, or if he’s simply too bland to care.

Elle is frying some eggs for herself when he enters the kitchen, and she gives him a smile as he comes in before looking at him more deeply. Her face molds into one of unreadable blankness before swiftly returning to her sizzling slices of ham. Bucky has to clamp down on his tongue hard in order to not make some disconnected joke that will certainly push Elle into a whispered rant.

The Barnes kitchen in excruciatingly rusty but clean all the same. They can’t afford to replace the faded toaster or the microwave that malfunctions more than it works. The ‘tile’ peels and has been peeling ever since an incident including little Bucky flying onto the kitchen floor so hard he cuts both knees open and scabs the corner of a faux tile block stickers in the process. Since then, everyone's been apathetically scuffing their feet on it and it’s lifted a few more squares during.

It’s exponentially dead to say the least, washed over in bleach bypass, like a vacant xerox of the kitchen in a fifties show after it’s been abandoned for too many years to fend for itself. All in all, Ms. Lucille Ball would not be very pleased. A plus, though, would be the rays of sun that shine right in from the window at the sink, at least, a blessing on a good day.

But it isn't a good day, sadly. He wanted it to be a good day. The remnants of birthday cake are still laminated on his tongue. Seems like the teeth cleanse didn’t do the trick. He’s going to renew them now by having some more for breakfast. But his body is aching and the minor headache is congesting his head. He thinks he may have a sinus infection, but he’s barely ever sick, so it’s hard to sense whether it’s serious or run-of-the-mills.

He’s stressed out because he was too tired last night to finish his math homework, and he fell asleep only to lose more of the energy once he was awoken too early this morning as well. But he hopes he can straighten it all out on the bus to school. It’s not that heavy of a load.

His sweet mother walks in, t-shirt and shorts awry from rolling around in bed he’d suppose. She glides her hands through his brushed out hair and shakes it affectionately. “Morning, bug.”

“Morning,” he scrapes out.

She pays no mind to Elle and pours herself a cup of coffee. It steams up and billows soft puffs of smoke into the air. “Have a good birthday. Honey?”

“Yeah, it was great, Mom. Thank you.”

“How does the laptop work, hmm?”

“Great.”

“Come on, I work my butt off for it, and all I get is ‘great’?”

He hesitates. “It’s nice resolution. The internet’s a little slow, but that can be chalked up to the house... I really like the features, even if the storage is a bit wonky. I can even make little designs of the icons I put on my desktop. It reminds me of the old computer we had, you know, the one dad had to throw out for some mysterious reason.” He finishes off with a smirk as Elle knowingly laughs at the last sentence.

His face melts when it returns to his mom, expression clenched and taut. He goes back to the cake he’s jabbing his fork into to make pictures in the icing before he eats it. When a few seconds die and Elle’s laughter tags along, he uses his training to understand he did something wrong.

He needs to leave for school now. He needs to go to the bus and ignore the dying winter while he waits for The Big Bumblebee to come. He’s been calling it that ever since he’s being using one for transit.

“Why can’t you just be appreciative?”

“Mom… you know I appreciate you, come on.”

“”The storage, mom, and the internet, mom. Fix it, mom.’” she imitates whiningly.

“I love the laptop. It’s amazing, better than the old computer. I’m sorry that I made you upset.”

“You realize how hard I worked for that, hmm? And what? Alls ya gonna do is be a brat about it, and talk trash about it?”

“Mom, I was stupid, and i’m sorry.”

“Yeah, okay, you ain’t sorry for shit.”

“I-”

“I thought dad went to work.” Elle interrupts. She’s looking out the window, and Bucky can’t help but see her white-knuckled grip on the counter’s ledge. He imagines the frayed and stiff silestone pattern cracking under her grip and shattering as it hits the ground.

He licks his lips in trepidation. He thought his father had went to work also. A fork is clenched within his own hand. He looks down and realizes that it went right down to the bottom of the plate, bypassing airy chocolate and striking the glass with a clink.

Hands can do so much damage. Someone can try and save a ladybug from a windowsill. They could hold it between their two fingers just so it doesn’t fall, and at the same moment, that ladybug could be dying from suffocation.

His shoulders begin to suffocate as thick hands sit on them agonizingly slow. They wrap around the corners as tightly as leather on skin. It’s only for a second, and then the feeling is gone, and time has passed because his dad is kissing Bucky’s mom on the cheek and Elle is trying to pretend like she isn’t staring at Bucky while failing terribly.

“Come on, James,” He starts as he steals a piece of bacon from the frying pan and shoves it in his mouth, unorthodoxly sloppy, acutely condescending. “I wasn’t gonna leave you to have breakfast alone post-birthday. I ain’t that kinda father.” The heat on the meat had to have done something to the callous digits, but he has done everything but pay mind to his fingers, and Bucky’s timing it. Maybe he just doesn’t feel it? Numb? Toxic immunity complex?

“Welp--” Bucky starts picking up his mess. There’s a sad face etched in the gleaming white whipped icing. “--school’s calling my name.” It’s barely finished, but he throws it away so his mom doesn’t yell at him later for stashing it in the fridge.

“No, stay for breakfast, James. You barely had anything for dinner last night.”

“It’s fine, dad.”

“Elle’s already making breakfast. Sit down.”

“Actually, I was packing a breakfast. I have that the NYU tour, remember.” Elle intercepts.

Just thinking of the impending loss of his sister’s presence makes him want to leave. Both that and the clock are teaming up on one side of the tennis court to attempt to domineer the big burly monster of a player on the opposite side. He tries to hide the smirk when he imagines them all hopping up and down, up and down, just like the little old Wii avatars.

“And how are we going to afford that?” His dad’s voice filters in, flat as printer paper, lifeless as… well, death.

“Do you ever listen to anything I talk about? I’m applying for a few scholarships. My grades are decent, and my coach said a few scouts mentioned me at the last meet, you know, the one you guys were too busy to attend.”

“Watch your tongue with your father, young lady.” His mom squeezes in.

It’s a balloon ready to pop when it gets hugged too roughly between his dad, who has jumped out of his seat with a fist pound on the wood table that rattles from force for emphasis, and the indefatigable will of Ellena Barnes. The only pregnant weakness is sent with her worried eyes towards her kid brother. He doesn't get it, and goes to pick up his backpack when he realizes it’s feet away, at the table, and he’s pasted onto the ugly wallpaper.

“I’m going to head to the University early,” Elle bitterly spits. Her and their dad have never gotten along. She was basically always out of the house. She had pretty friends, nice friends.

The last friend Bucky had was Measia Alberson in kindergarten. He proposed to her with a ring pop. It was the first attempt of peer interaction, and subsequently the last.

“Bucky, do you want to walk together?” Elle is asking quietly, like it’ll withstand the laser gaze of their father. Their mom is nibbling on the rim or her coffee mug, priorly instigating spectator, what a cheap double negative guise.

“N-no, i’m- I need to get going. Really. It’s like two minutes till the bus gets to the stop.” The backpack is snatched and he’s practically skipping out of the door.

“James!” How does Bugs Bunny do it?

He walks slowly back into the kitchen on a trembling toe. He’s going to miss school. He can’t miss school. It’s really hard to catch up in History when your teacher’s too nice and too chill and says, “You’re good. Don’t worry,” when you’re unsure if you have done everything correctly, and he didn’t even actually look, but trusts his students way too much.

Three slithering shadows are haloed by stripes of sun, not so pretty, except for Elle of course, who's still glaring at their dad. Finally, Bucky’s pupils want to dial down the dramatic photography, and his dad has his hands in his armpits. His tightened lips reek of disappointment. “Aren’t you going to say you love your family?” The face softens up, a wonky dial that that changes at slap of wind.

“I love you guys.” Bucky smiles, and it hurts.

#bucky barnes #Steve Rogers #stucky #fanfiction #fanfic #my angsty heart spurts #idk if imma ever go further #probs will #but let me know what you guys think!#angst #drabble #captain America #the winter soldier

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thank-god-and-you · 6 years

Text

Happy Birthday, @breakfast-at-bateses! I hope you’ve had a truly wonderful day! <3 You deserve it so much!

It was the unnatural warmth of the room that drew John’s attention first. During his life, he had been in many uncomfortable situations, in searing heat and in frigid cold, but this…this was unlike anything he had ever known. Grunting, he tried to shift away from the hot weight that was bearing down upon him and locking him in place. His sleepy mind conjured up vague memories of being a lad, of waking up with the heavy press of a large ginger cat across his chest, much like an unwanted hot water bottle on a humid summer’s day.

“Gerrof,” he muttered, not opening his eyes, swiping in the direction of the compression on his chest.

What his fingers came into contact with was definitely not fur.

It was silky-smooth, flowing. Frowning, he explored further, touching something else, something flesh.

A low groan. No, that was definitely not a cat.

“What’re you doing?”

The voice, accent thicker with tiredness, made him jump, and his eyes snapped open. He pushed himself up slightly, frantically looking to confirm what surely had to be a dream—

But no. This was very, very real. And the memories came flooding back.

Anna. Anna was here with him. She’d spent the night for the very first time, and none of it had been fantasy.

Now that sleep was receding, he could better wrap his head around it all. It was Anna’s head that he had felt firm against his chest; the rest of her body was vined around his lower half, her left arm flung across the paunch of his stomach, her breasts pressed to his side—he shivered at the realisation—her stomach rubbing sensually against his hip, her left leg thrown over his own.

“Wossup?” she continued, muffling her words against him, and he felt his heart expanding like a balloon inside his chest, the swirling feelings of affection and disbelief almost too much to bear. He scuffed his thumb over her shoulder blades, tracing the delicate outline of her bones. The romantic poet’s soul that Anna often teased was trapped inside his body wanted to declare her as carved by angels; she was as close to perfect as he was ever likely to see. She’d tell him that he was stupid if she ever knew that—after all, there was no such thing as perfection, and it was easy to forget about that when she started grousing at him about his bad smoking habit—but in this golden moment of peace and serenity, it was a thought he could not escape nevertheless.

“Sorry,” he murmured, pressing his palm to the small of her back in a bid to bring her even closer to him, no mean feat. “Go back to sleep.” He knew how dearly she hated early mornings, how early she had to rise for work in the week. She deserved a lie-in on a Saturday morning, and though he had always been an early riser, he could think of no better way to start his day than to remain right here by her side, soaking up the warmth of her body, listening to the comforting cadence of her breathing, enjoying the weight of her all along him.

Anna hummed, tucking her head further against him, and he closed his eyes to relish the sensation.

But then she stiffened. Pulled away.

His eyes shot open at once. Latent fear, fear that he had been working so hard to dispel, came rushing back in a tidal wave, and for that brief second he was right back in the past, back with Vera and her games. He was already primed to flinch away from acid words, derisive jibes about how low she’d stooped.

That blow, of course, never came.

Instead, Anna pulled the duvet up around her shoulders as she brought her knees up to her chin, her eyes glowing with wonder.

“So, last night really happened,” she said, a rose tinge infusing her cheeks. It was a colour that suited her.

“It did,” John agreed, pushing himself into a sitting position so he could rest his back against the headboard. In the soft morning light, he found that he was self-conscious all over again. Anna had mapped his body by the moonlight; his flaws had not been thrown into the sharp relief that they would be in the harsh light of day. For over ten years he had hardly been able to look at himself in the mirror; he would never be able to fathom how he didn’t repulse someone like Anna.

There was not one sign of regret in her countenance. Sighing, she shuffled closer to him, mirroring his position. Beneath the duvet which was still up to her neck, she found his hand. The touch startled him; instinctively, he opened his palm for her, and she slid her hand into his, her fingers twining delicately around his. He drew comfort from the surety in her touch.

“How are you feeling?” she murmured.

“Amazing,” he answered truthfully. “You?”

“Never better,” she replied, and his stomach did a funny kind of lurch as if it was doing backflips. She stared down at the duvet, her thumb moving up and down the side of his index finger with a tenderness that took his breath away. “I was sure that I’d wake up to find it had been nothing more than a dream.”

He snorted, unable to stop himself. “You thought that it would be nothing more than a dream?”

She fixed him with a look, the no-nonsense kind that he had come to recognise over the months they had been dating—it was one that was sent his way frequently, whenever she grew tired of his self-deprecating jabs. He doubted that she’d ever be able to fully stop them, but she certainly did a good job of quelling them for the time being.

“Yes,” she said, as if she thought he’d said something incredibly stupid. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time.”

It boggled his mind that she could say things like that, with such sincerity in her tone. Anna could have chosen any man she wanted, and yet she had decided that she wanted to spend her time with him. He was both grateful and honoured that she would do such a thing.

Unbidden, he flashed back to the way they had been under the cover of night, of the way that her lean, slight body had twined around his, how good she had felt pressed to him in that way. The echo of her moans, the memory of her hot, sharp breaths in his ear, the recollection of her quivering limbs…all of it served to spark something inside him. He shifted, bashful.

“It was pretty good, wasn’t it?” he said.

“I’d say it was more than that, Mr. Bates,” said Anna, a definite lilt to her tone. She edged herself even closer, turning a little so that she was facing him. He was powerless to resist as she halved the distance between them until her face was mere centimetres away from his. When she was this close to him, he found that it was difficult to concentrate on anything else; she stole into his mind and saturated his senses in a way that he’d thought was simply impossible. In such a short space of time she had become his beacon. Even in those early days with Vera he had never been struck with the sensation that returning to her was like coming home. He had never wrapped himself around her and felt that, at long last, he had found peace. Vera had been all tempestuous fire, like a raging sea in the heart of a storm, like the Devil stealing those souls from purgatory. Being with her had been exciting at first, he could not deny that, but that kind of fierce conflagration burned itself out far too quickly, leaving only ashes that scattered in the wind, those broken dreams that nothing could mend. Anna was everything that he thought he’d lost with his foolish, youthful decisions.

Coherent thought deserted him in the next instant as Anna’s mouth met his. She kissed him tenderly, raking her fingers through his hair, and he grasped her around the waist, enjoying the lightness of his spirit that he had thought had long gone.

But then there was a low growl.

Anna pulled away at once, her cheeks spilling over with colour once more. John blinked, unable to stop the smirk from spreading across his face as he cocked his head to one side.

“Was that your stomach?” he said.

She buried her face in her hands, all the confirmation he needed. Chuckling, he tugged her closer, nudging his nose against her.

“It’s not that bad,” he said.

“It is when I’ve spoiled the mood.”

“You’ve done no such thing. I daresay we’ve worked up an appetite.”

This time it was Anna’s turn to grin bashfully, and she peered at him between her fingers. “I suppose you’re right there.”

“There’s no suppose about it. I’m famished too.” He encouraged her to pull her hands away, then pressed a quick kiss to her lips. “How does breakfast in bed sound?”

Now she was positively beaming. “It’s been years since I had breakfast in bed. The last time was when I was ill at uni and Mary made me dry toast. It was revolting—you know she’s no domestic goddess—but I was touched by the sentiment.”

“Well, allow me to treat you like a princess on this fine morning,” said John. “Though I can’t promise that my offerings will be any less disastrous than Mary’s. I’ve spent too many years sticking to the basics.”

“You’ve impressed me so far,” she said, tongue in cheek.

He snorted. “Yes, that burned lasagne was a particular highlight.” He had thought himself the world’s biggest failure for that one, but Anna had quickly soothed his disappointment away, taking it all with her usual unfailing good humour and generosity.

“I managed to eat around the worst of the burned bits,” she giggled. “I’m sure I’ll manage the same this morning if the worst comes to the worst.”

“Charming,” he said, groaning as he heaved himself to the edge of the bed. “Well, you stay here. I’ll be back very soon to present you with the best ‘morning after’ breakfast you’ve ever had.”

“Don’t worry, I had no intention of moving anywhere else,” said Anna, flopping down into the space he had just vacated, humming appreciatively as the warmth from his side apparently soaked through her skin. “Nice view, by the way.”

John snorted. It had been a long time since he had last considered himself someone who might catch the eye of someone of the opposite sex, but the sincerity in Anna’s voice was breath-taking. For her benefit, he limped across the room even more slowly than usual, giving her time to take in all of him from behind. He could feel her eyes boring into him, and entertained himself by imagining her gaze drifting down to his backside. Christ, what had she done to him? It had been a long time since he had last acted like a ruddy peacock for a woman. That was something foolish young men did.

Anna made him feel like the years had rolled back.

He reached for his robe and slung it over his nakedness. Anna’s groan of disappointment made him grin.

“Won’t be long,” he said, not quite daring to glance over his shoulder in case the sight of her lying there ruffled in his bedsheets tempted the thought of treating her to breakfast in bed clean out of his mind.

His culinary skills were not as disastrous as he’d feared. He managed the toast with minimal effort and even dared to try his hand at scrambled eggs. They came out runnier than he’d have liked—his mother had always made the fluffiness of them seem trivial—but they were at least edible. His bacon was slightly charred, but only around the edges, so he hacked those off as best he could. At least he could make a mean cup of tea.

Suitably plated up, he balanced everything on a tray and made the precarious journey back upstairs to his bedroom. Juice sloshed slightly over the edges of the too-full glasses, but thankfully that was the only mini disaster that he encountered. He pushed the door open with his toes and entered the room.

“Breakfast is served, milady,” he announced.

Anna was no longer where he had left her; she was now sitting up in bed, cross-legged…wearing the jumper that she had divested him of in a bout of desperation only hours earlier. He stopped short. She cocked her eyebrow at him.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

He tried to speak, but no words were forthcoming. Besides, how would he possibly be able to articulate the confusing vortex of emotions that swirled around inside of him? It was primitive silliness, but seeing her wearing something of his made his heart beat faster and his throat dry.

“You wear that better than I ever have done,” he croaked at last, limping further into the room. She giggled, but it was true. It was miles to big on her; small and slight as she was, it absolutely buried her, the neck falling halfway down one shoulder, the sleeves well past her hands, the breadth and length of it covering everything from his sight, but there was something unexplainably erotic about seeing her wear that. Somehow, it made everything seem realer.

“Silly beggar,” she said affectionately. “Bring that over here. I’m starving.”

He did so dutifully, shuffling back onto the bed and laying the tray across her lap. They ate in companiable silence for a while, exchanging knowing grins whenever they caught each other’s eye. At last, however, Anna spoke.

“Is there something wrong?” she asked, a light frown creasing her brow.

John started. “What? No, of course not.”

“You just seem a little more preoccupied than you ought to be—and it’s not a post-coital haze.”

He blushed at the baldness of her words, shoving the last corner of toast into his mouth. He chewed slowly to give himself time to mull things over before speaking again.

“I’m not preoccupied,” he said. “I’m just…thinking. If I’m honest, I can’t get over how a few months ago I wanted to learn your name and now you’re having breakfast with me in my sweater.”

Anna blinked at him, then burst into giggles. “If I’m honest, neither can I. Especially when you only wanted to learn my name so you could get my insurance details off me.”

“You were very reluctant to give them up, from what I recall.”

“You can’t blame me. My insurance is going to be horrific this year.”

“With the way you rear-ended my car, I’m not surprised.”

“Oh, please, that was hardly my fault. My brakes failed me in the snow. There wasn’t anything I could have done to prevent it.”

“Maybe you could have made the decision not to take a car famous for being useless in snow down a vertical hill?” he said and was rewarded for his cheek by a pillow to the face.

“I still had the last laugh,” she resumed primly, as if she hadn’t just walloped him one. “I at least was sensible enough to be part of the AA. They came and rescued me while you were left on the roadside. I bet you called me some right names.”

“I was a bit put out,” he agreed. Just thinking about that cold made him shiver; it had been bitter that day, and his knee had ached fiercely at being stuck out in such temperatures in such cramped conditions for so long. “And I was mortified that I was going to be late on my very first day.”

“You made it there eventually, though, didn’t you?” Anna said serenely, taking a sip of her juice.

“Two hours late, as I’m sure you recall.”

She snickered. “I have to say, your face was absolutely priceless. If I could have taken a picture of your expression when you realised that I was sitting in on the board meeting too, I would have done. It would have made great comedy gold with the Crawleys.”

“It did knock me off balance,” he admitted. His stomach had lurched unpleasantly to find her sitting there, on Mary Crawley’s right hand side, looking every inch the consummate professional when hours earlier he had exchanged angry words with her out in the billowing snow. And, beneath all that, he’d been reluctantly impressed that she’d managed to put herself together so very well when he’d staggered in snow-saturated and panting for breath.

“You could hardly bear to meet my eye.”

“I was horribly embarrassed to find you there when I’d spoken to you in a less than gentlemanly manner. I was sure that you were going to set against me from that moment on.”

She shrugged. “I’ve had worse levelled at me than what you did. And Mary has always told me that I’m too kind for my own good.”

“Something I am infinitely grateful for,” he said. It was true. These early months at Crawley’s had been good for him, but there had also been some sour experiences to mar his good spirits. Thomas Barrow and Sarah O’Brien had been constant, painful thorns in his side, and he had needed all the allies he could get in order to keep one step ahead of them. To no one’s surprise more than his own, Anna of all people had been his greatest supporter. She had defended him like a lioness might protect the cubs in her pride, and he had come to rely on her support more and more the longer he had known her.

Perhaps it had been inevitable that he should start to fall for her, too. She was quick-witted and energetic, kind and just, vivacious and cheerful. Not to mention beautiful to boot. Even in that first meeting, he had had to acknowledge on a deep-down level that she was incredibly pretty. Love was a thing of the past, as far as he’d been concerned, but she had sneaked past the line of his defences like a soldier penetrating enemy lines in battle. And he would never be able to thank her enough for taking him hostage and making him see that there could be light in his life after all.

Anna’s eyes were misty with distant fondness. “And after it was over I approached you and offered to buy you a coffee so we could start over on a proper footing.”

“You said more than that,” he reminded her. In actual fact, she’d told him that she’d buy him a coffee but that was the extent of it all—she’d let him know right from the beginning that she was strong and sassy when she told him that was all the favour he’d garner, sexual or no. He’d gone cold all over with horror and embarrassment that she’d say such a thing in public. Now, all this time on, he could laugh about it too. “And you went back on your word.”

Anna’s eyes danced mischievously. “I think you’ll find that you were the one giving the favours last night, Mr. Bates, not me.”

He cleared his throat, taking a swig of his own juice. “I suppose as long as you were satisfied…”

“Oh, I was. Immensely. I thought you might have known that.”

“I did. You made it quite plain.”

“There you are, then. Though you’d do well to wipe that smile from your face, John Bates. You look like the cat who got the cream.”

“Believe me, I feel like the luckiest bloke in the world right now. It’s hard to wipe the smile from my face when I feel so very blessed.”

“You’ve always been such a charmer.”

“I’ve not got much else going for me.”

She turned serious at that. “Don’t say that. You have plenty going for you. I’ve been waiting for a man like you to come along. Someone kind and loyal, someone who treats me like an equal and not just a trophy…”

“You will always be my equal,” he told her. The warm feeling that had been kindling in his chest all morning was spreading again, warming him to the very tips of his ears and toes. “I love you.”

For a moment, he didn’t even realise what he’d said. Not until Anna said, voice trembling, “W-What?”

It crashed over him then. He’d just told her that he loved her. He’d been nursing that in the deepest crevice of his heart, tending to that tiny flame, protecting it at all costs in case something came along to extinguish it for good, but it had grown to such a blaze that it was simply untameable. No doubt he would pay for that dearly.

“I just—” he started, stumbling, his mind sluggish as he tried to think of some way to downplay this and bring back the lightness of moments earlier, but her hand over his stopped him. When he glanced up, he found that her eyes were shimmering.

“Christ, I’m sorry—” he said, alarmed—the last thing he wanted to do was bloody make her cry!—but she shook her head, a small laugh escaping her.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Definitely don’t be sorry. I was half-scared that I was at that point all on my own. I was prepared to wait for you to catch up…”

“And I was afraid that I had got too far ahead of myself,” he confessed. “I didn’t want to scare you away.”

“So it appears that we’re both silly beggars,” she said, moving the tray to one side. John’s brain seemed to be working in slow motion as she moved across the bed towards him, dropping herself into his lap once more.

“We hadn’t finished,” he said stupidly. “We’ve not touched our tea yet. I do hate cold tea.”

Anna arched an eyebrow. “You really care about tea at a time like this?”

She ground down on him pointedly, and his head fell back; he was unable to stop the groan that rattled from his chest.

“No,” he gasped, his hands slipping beneath the oversized jumper and grabbing onto her hips. She pushed him back down amongst the sheets, nipping at his ear.

“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you, I love you…”

The words were sweeter than honey, and the pleasure that followed was all the sharper for it.

By the time they were done, their tea was stone cold. And John Bates found that he didn’t mind at all.

#John Bates #Anna Bates #Anna x Bates #Banna #Downton Abbey #my fanfiction #AnnaxBates #Anna/Bates #Team Bates #breakfast-at-bateses #Happy Birthday!!!#sorry this is so lame

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wahbegan · 7 years

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A brief life history/biology of It

NERD ALERT posting this shit again since the trailer just dropped

The actual nature of IT: So It is an extradimensional entity, similar to H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones. It originated in something King refers to as “The Macroverse”, a sort of universe outside our universe. It is one of two opposing entities, It and “The Turtle”, a cosmic creator entity. Unlike The Turtle, Its only real biological imperative seems to be destruction. It’s implied that both entities were created by some sort of force/God more powerful than either, simply referred to as “The Other”, but that’s not elaborated on much. The most common theory is that The Dark Tower entity Gan and “The Other” are one and the same.

It is referred to as Pennywise and Bob Gray while in human form, and The Spider, Consumption (vs. The Turtle’s Creation), or The Deadlights in Its true form. The Deadlights seems to be an ambiguous term, and at various points is used to reference to Its true form, Its eyes, and the space outside the universe that It inhabits, it’s all kept kinda vague and intentionally hard to grasp.

Anyway, Its true form exists outside the universe and physically cannot be processed by human minds. Those who see Its true, undisguised form are immediately driven irrevocably insane or killed. The closest approximation Ben Hanscom can come to describing Its true form, which he briefly sort of catches a peripheral sense of, is “an endless, crawling hairy thing” made of “dead” orange light

Its motivation: As mentioned above, it seems to have been created as a force of consumption first and foremost. The “writhing,” lights that comprise the creature seem to be destructive in and of themselves, consuming whatever they come into contact with. It is deeply intelligent, however, and doesn’t run purely on instinct. It is shown to have a sadistic streak, although it probably isn’t sadism in the same sense we think of it. It sees humans strictly as prey animals and sources of amusement, believing them so vastly inferior to Itself as to be negligible. It claims to eat worlds and reality, a statement seemingly corroborated by the effect of The Deadlights on Its surroundings, but the only things It seems to go out of Its way to consume are human children , apparently Its main source of sustenance. It can eat any human, but It prefers Its food terrified. Once again, it’s unclear whether It really understands the full moral ramifications of this, It simply thinks of it as “salting the meat”. Therefore, It usually goes after children because they’re the easiest to scare. Based on what little we know about how It interacts with human beings, and The Dark Tower character Dandelo, whom Stephen King has confirmed is of the same species as It, we can assume that the entity is feeding on the emotion of fear itself as much as, if not more than, the actual flesh of Its prey.

Powers/abilities and weaknesses: In Its own realm and form, the Deadlights, it can be assumed to be nigh-omnipotent. However, in this universe, It is both empowered and limited by whatever physical form It takes. Its main power, of course, is shape-shifting, which It refers to at one point as “putting on airs” and is likened to wearing various masks. Its most common tactic is to appear to children as a clown (Pennywise) to lure them close enough to strike, before transforming into something said child is terrified of. Additionally, It (or at least the part of It that can manifest in our world) came to the land that later became Derry, Maine millions of years ago and seems to exert a certain amount of God-like control over the immediate area. Violent deaths and mysterious disappearances are quietly hushed up or swept under the rug, and the citizens are all apathetic to them for reasons they don’t fully understand themselves. Additionally, It can cause nasty hallucinations in Its targets and exert a level of psychological control over people. Now, as i said before, Its greatest strength (shape-shifting), is also Its ultimate weakness. Once It’s locked into a form, It has to abide by the “rules” of that form as dictated by the imagination the form was drawn from. When in werewolf form, for example, silver can severely injure It, enough to make It retreat. The only way to truly defeat It that we see is the Ritual of Chüd, a mystical battle of wills where the child’s imagination is essentially pitted against the creature. Just as childhood fears and trauma make It stronger, imaginative childhood beliefs and the bond between friends can weaken It. Yes, it’s all very Care Bear(TM) after-school special, but it fits in very well with the themes and message of the novel.

Forms It takes: -Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Implied to be Its favorite form) -Corpses of Its victims’ loved ones in various states of mutilation and decay (also a reliable standby for It) -Two young drowned boys with orange pom pom fingertips -The Teenage Werewolf -The Mummy -Dracula (with razorblades for teeth and eyes resembling blood clots) -A giant bird (twice, once with a silver tongue with orange growths resembling pom poms on it, and once with several balloons tied to Its wings) -A swarm of flying, flesh-colored leeches -A school of orange piranhas -Jaws -The Creature From the Black Lagoon -The Crawling Eye -Syphilitic homeless man (the disease advanced past the point that he should be dead) -Bev’s abusive father -Frankenstein’s Monster -An 8-foot tall were-doberman -The Witch from Hansel and Gretel -A massive uncanny valley statue of Paul Bunyan (based on this real statue in Bangor, Maine) -The moon with Pennywise’s clown-face, with ragged holes where the eyes should be -A gigantic, unnatural black spider. (Its “final form” the Losers face, this form is unique in that it isn’t drawn directly from the viewer’s imagination. It only appears this way in Its own lair, stating that It “does not dress at home.” It is not, however, an accurate depiction of Its appearance, but is instead the human mind trying to make sense of what it’s seeing without going insane. The Losers repeatedly state they can almost make out Its true form moving behind the image of the spider their brains have created, but don’t want to as they know what will happen. The second time they face the spider, it appears to be pregnant, indicative of Its state as about to reproduce. It’s not stated how exactly It does this beyond that It appears to lays eggs, but due to Its nature, i assume It reproduces asexually.

NOTE: No matter what form It takes, It usually retains some elements of Pennywise, usually the orange pom pom buttons on his clown suit in one form or another. This is probably because the orange pom poms themselves are reflections of the "baleful orange glow” of The Deadlights. There are often other cracks in Its masks, so to speak, clues pointing to Its true nature as not a natural part of this universe, such as Its defiance of conventional laws of physics (leaning so far out of a window that It should have been overtaken by gravity and fallen, holding balloons that float against the wind, etc.) and the fact that It never casts a shadow.

Its life-cycle: It hibernates for about 27 years and then awakes, almost always coinciding with a horrific, brutal act of violence. It then preys on the town’s children for anywhere from 14 months to a few years before another tragedy or act of violence, which must be greater than or equal to the event that woke It up in terms of brutality, sates It and It goes back into hibernation. This is only interrupted once, during the First Ritual of Chüd. The second one is implied to kill It for good, or at least Its earthly manifestation, but it’s left ambiguous.

Its history (as known to the protagonists): -Millions of years ago: It came to Earth in an event similar to an asteroid crash and began to exert control over Derry, influencing it and helping it grow as Its personal killing and feeding pen (At one point, the entity states that It created Derry “In Its image”). -1740: It awoke for unknown reasons and preyed upon the town’s children for 3 years, only going back into hibernation when the entire town of over 300 settlers disappeared without a trace. Local histories chalk the disappearance up to an Indian massacre, but only one building was burned, and no bodies were ever found. -1851: It awoke when a man poisoned his entire family and then committed suicide by ingesting a copious amount of Amanita phalloides, and went back into hibernation for unknown reasons -1879: A group of lumberjacks found the remains of another lumberjack camp that had been snowed in for the winter. All 9 of their bodies were in pieces. It’s unclear how directly It was involved with this atrocity, but judging by the timeline, one can assume the event awakened It. -1904: It awoke when a lumberjack massacred 4 men in a bar, in full view of all the patrons, who seemed strangely unaffected by the violence happening in front of them. The lumberjack was later lynched by crazed townsfolk, many of whom were present during the massacre and did nothing to stop it. It was present on the periphery of these events but took no direct part in them. -1906: It went back into hibernation after an ironworks exploded, killing 108 people, 88 of whom were children on an Easter Egg hunt. One of the victim’s heads was found several days later and several blocks away in a woman’s apple tree. -1929: It awoke when the infamous (in-universe) Bradley Gang were gunned down by a vigilante mob. It appeared and participated during the massacre as some sort of clown, though details of Its appearance varied depending on who was looking at It. Most notably, It always appeared to be wielding the same kind of gun that whoever was looking at It was holding. -1930: It went back into hibernation after popular club The Black Spot was burned down by a white supremacist group with several people trapped inside. It appeared at the end of the event as a giant bird with balloons tied to Its wings, carrying away one of the white supremacists in Its talons. -1957-58: It awoke when Dorsey Corcoran was beaten to death by his abusive stepfather. There is no mention of It being present at the murder, and It has no confirmed kills for this cycle until several months afterwards. For these reasons, it’s not even 100% clear that this is what woke It up, but given the absence of any other inciting event and the stepfather’s behavior being consistent with other people who committed atrocities under Its influence, it’s generally assumed to be by fans. This cycle is the most fleshed out in the novel, during which It murdered several children including George Denbrough, Betty Ripsom, Dorsey’s older brother Eddie Corcoran, both Victor Criss and Reginald yes I said Reginald “Belch” Huggins, and Patrick Hockstetter. It was eventually forced back into early hibernation by the First Ritual of Chüd. -1967: Interesting side event, It’s unknown to what degree or where It can manifest while in hibernation mode, but Richard Macklin, Dorsey’s stepfather and murderer, committed suicide in Falmouth, MA, leaving a note which simply read “I saw Eddie last night. He was dead.” Given Its proclivity towards taunting victims with dead loved ones, one could reasonably guess It appeared to Macklin and drove him to suicide. However, this behavior would be “out-of-cycle” and is never confirmed or elaborated on. -1984: It awakened after a young man, Adrian Mellon, was beaten nearly to death and thrown off a bridge in a homophobic hate crime. It was present as Pennywise at Mellon’s assault and began feeding on him in front of both his boyfriend and his attackers. It then went on one final killing spree before being defeated and seemingly killed by The Losers.

HOPE THIS HELPS any additional questions just ask

Oh yeah and uh here’s what i think personally is the best artistic depiction of what Its true form might be like

#dirt-goddess #pennywise #stephen king's it #it 2017

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ourshineeshrine · 7 years

Text

My Number One Fan

Chapter 24 Pairing: JongKey Word Count: 4,401 Summary: Kibum goes to the same, run-down bar every week to watch the man of his affections sing his heart out with a mere guitar for company. He wasn’t expecting the coffee, nor the beautiful personality within the singer. And he definitely wasn’t expecting to fall in love.

A/N: Honestly I should die. I'm so, so, so, so sorry for depriving you all for this long. School this year has been a lot harder than I accounted for and I barely had a free moment...It's term break now, so I'm going to write until my fingers fall off! This chapter probably stinks but...I'll update soon! Please enjoy <3

As soon as Kibum turned the knob of the front door, it was as though a wave of cold, sea water had engulfed his entire body and left him shivering. Though his feelings were metaphorical, his goose bumps were not; and instinctively, his hand lifted to his throat, having difficulty swallowing in such a tense situation. A visible pathway was forged by a dim light shining in through the kitchen doorway, and Kibum reluctantly began to shuffle his way towards it.

Everything seemed unnaturally silent, not to say that it wasn’t usually silent, but Kibum felt more unease than he could ever recall feeling. Poking his head around the corner, Kibum gulped. His father sat tensed at the head of the dining table, seemingly glaring at a barely noticeable dent which lined the smooth surface. No newspaper sat before him and neither did Kibum’s mother. Kibum concluded she was in the bathroom and turned away, planning to make his way up to his bedroom before his father could find any reason whatsoever to tell him off.

But luck didn’t seem to be on Kibum’s side that evening, and a stern “Kibum,” sounded upon his first step backwards. “Get in here.”

Worrying his lower lip, Kibum took one last glance behind him as though searching for help before heading into the kitchen. He ignored his father’s glaring face and headed towards the pantry, scavenging around for just something to eat. “There’s never any good snacks in here.” he complained, a barely noticeable tremor in his voice as he reached over to boil the kettle. “Has mum been shopping recently?”

“Turn that off.” replied his father abruptly, and the man’s voice left no room for argument. With a gulp thick with anxiety, Kibum flicked the kettle off and closed the pantry door, hovering within the kitchen awkwardly.

Kibum finally met his father’s gaze, and at simply seeing those cool, merciless eyes, Kibum felt his blood run cold. “Is…Is everything okay?” he dared to ask.

But instead of receiving a normal response, his father merely frowned deeper, harsh lines marring his already calloused features. “No, actually. I’m not quite sure it is.”

“Really?” Kibum ran a nervous hand through his dark locks and held onto the kitchen bench as though it was a lifeline of sorts. He wanted to shut up, he really did. But his mouth began moving on its own account and he kept on talking, filling the air with nothing except for empty concerns. “What’s wrong?”

His father smiled, one void of joy, and shrugged. “I’m not sure…I was hoping you would have an idea.”

Kibum shuffled nonchalantly towards the doorframe, awkwardly shaking his head in response to his father. “Nope…Afraid I don’t. You’ll have to figure this one out on your own, I think.”

Mere centimetres separated him and the other room, and Kibum tasted the bliss of his warm, empty bedroom on the tip of his tongue. Just one more step and he would be able to breathe again—

“Sit down, boy!” his father exclaimed, slamming a fist against the wooden table. Along with his temper, the man’s voice had risen significantly.

And so within seconds Kibum was sitting across from the older man, knees shaking beneath the surface and each exhale accompanied by bouts of unadulterated fear. “I really don’t understand what’s wrong.” he muttered pathetically, eyes locked on one particular dot of discolouration adorning the wooden table.

“What’s wrong,” his father spoke, fingers practically curling around themselves in anger, “is the fact that I just saw you, my son, holding hands with another…another man. Ringing any bells now, Kibum?” Disgust accompanied every other word, and although he probably should have felt scared, instead something in Kibum suddenly snapped and he felt his gaze narrowing in sheer anger.

He could have replied with an excuse. Some sort of made up jargon about how they both wanted to share the leash but couldn’t make a decision about it. But instead, all the anger which had been building up within Kibum seemed to break, a dam releasing every negative thought that had ever accumulated about his father.

“Why the hell have you been stalking me, huh?!” Kibum blurted, standing from his seat to glare menacingly at the older man. He seethed. “Surely you’ve got better things to do than watch me all day, right? Get a fucking life, old man.”

His father’s voice was low, and when he stood, he seemed to simply loom over Kibum’s lithe frame. “Listen here, boy.” He spat. “You should be grateful I’m not kicking you out of the house after what you’ve done. Either you put a stop to this touchy business, or I will. Believe me, boy. I won’t have our neighbours going around thinking you’re some sort of faggot.”

Kibum felt his heart drop at the mere word, and the balloon storing his pent up confidence unexpectedly popped leaving the boy speechless. He wanted to fight back. Say something about how he didn’t care what people thought of him. But in fear and weakness, he didn’t, instead sinking pitifully again into the chair below. “It’ll stop.” he muttered brokenly. “It’s just friendly skin-ship anyway, but whatever. It’ll stop.”

With a harrumph, the man nodded in satisfaction and sat back across from Kibum. “Good. And I’m warning you Kibum, I’m being serious. If I see or hear anything else about you and that…that boy…then you’re out of here. Got it?”

He nodded vehemently, making sure to keep his gaze firmly away from the stern one which looked back at him.

Sunday soon arrived, which brought Minho slumped against Taemin’s bedroom wall, looking dejectedly at his worn soccer shoes. “She didn’t even glance at me today during practice, Taem. I thought that maybe I’d have some type of chance with getting with her but…I guess Kibum was right. She doesn’t seem to be looking for a relationship at all.”

Jealousy burned in Taemin’s chest, but he willed his personal feelings to go elsewhere while he comforted his best friend. “Don’t worry too much about it, Minho. You just seem really infatuated right now, so maybe let your mind settle for a bit. In a week’s time, if you still feel the same…Then that’s when you start worrying.”

Minho hummed.

“And to be fair,” Taemin continued, “you did only start liking her after that little kiss. So if you wanna get over her then why not…just go kiss someone else?”

Laughing, Minho shook his head. “It’s a good idea Taem, but I’m not quite sure it’s full proof. We’re not going to any parties soon which means there’s no one wants to kiss me—“

“Sorry?” interrupted Taemin with a scoff. “You reckon no one would wanna kiss you if they weren’t drunk? Wow. That’s rich.”

With a smirk, Minho looked over at Taemin who sat beside him and raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah? Who do you propose would then, huh? Besides any of the girls in Amber’s group though ‘cause they’re all either taken or just plain boring.”

Taemin laughed as though Minho’s words were the funniest joke he had ever heard. “Um, literally everyone?” he drawled, softly muttering under his breath, “And not just the girls.”

“Huh?” choked Minho. “Kibum’s dating Jonghyun, Taemin, like hell he’d wanna kiss me!”

Groaning, the younger of the two buried his face into his hands. “Not Kibum, you dunce. There are probably other guys at our school who like guys, Minho. They just might not be open about it.”

Feeling sheepish, Minho scratched the back of his neck and grinned stupidly. “Does that mean you’re included then?” At the innocent question, Taemin’s eyes practically bugged out of his head and he found himself hacking loudly on nothing but air.

“For the last time, Minho, I’m not gay!”

Minho hummed again, this time a tad louder. “I know that, Taem. I’m just saying that you’ve showed interest in a guy before. And if everyone wants to kiss me, then why should you be excluded?” his voice had a light, joking tone to it, but Taemin felt as though every organ in his body was compressing in on itself.

‘I’m not.’ he thought dryly to himself, purposely avoiding eye contact with the older boy.

But Minho wasn’t shutting up, eyes creasing in amusement as he continued to prod and poke Taemin where unknowingly, it hit hard. “I should just kiss you! You can figure out if Kai was a fling or not and if I develop feelings for you…” Minho cackled loudly, his chuckles resembling those of a hyena. “Then I guess I could get over Amber, right?” The whole conversation was quite frankly, a joke, but gradually as Minho’s laughter increased, so did Taemin’s irritation.

As he made a move to interrupt however, Minho abruptly sobered, regarding Taemin with an air of seriousness. “Actually…that’s not a half bad idea.”

“Excuse me?”

“C’mon, Taem! It’s not as though it’ll mean anything anyway, right? Look, it’s a win-win situation. I get over Amber, you figure out your sexuality phase, everyone’s happy.”

Taemin, with hands clenched tightly by his sides, huffed and began to stand from his position on the carpeted floor. “Phase? Fuck off, Minho.”

Eyes widening in realization, Minho shook his head vehemently. “No, fuck, wait—No, that isn’t what I meant. C’mon Taem, you know I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Do I?”

“Yes! Taemin…Come on…I just meant that this whole revelation is relatively new and you are still tryna figure everything out. Not ‘phase’ as in it will go away, but ‘phase’ in in…a segment of your life. Why are you getting so defensive, anyway? It’s just a little kiss, it’s not like it means anything.”

It does though, you idiot. Taemin wanted to scream. It means everything.

“Well why are you so eager, huh?!” is what he said instead. “Got something to tell me, buddy?”

Minho rolled his eyes and laughed sarcastically. “Ha ha, Taem. Very funny. But seriously, if you didn’t want to you could have just said. It was just an idea…Constantly thinking about someone who doesn’t like you back isn’t very fun, y’know.”

What are you doing, you idiot?! Yelled his conscience in desperation. This is your one chance to finally make a move, and he won’t even suspect a thing!

Swallowing thickly, Taemin nodded. “F-Fine then...We’ll go with your plan – as inane as it is. After all, it means nothing, right?”

“Exactly!” grinned Minho, lifting off the floor and brushing down his clothes instinctively. “Man, Taemin, you’re seriously the coolest friend.”

‘How fucking stupid can he get?’ Taemin thought to himself with a snort. ‘Does he realise how gay this is?’ Rocking back and forth on his heels, the first year regarded Minho awkwardly. “Just so you know though…I have no idea how to go about this. I probably suck, considering how Kai reacted so just…Don’t expect much.”

Minho beamed, shaking his head in reassurance. “You’re adorable, Taemin…Don’t worry about, m’kay? It’ll be fine.”

“Alright…” he mumbled quietly, shuffling closer to Minho with cheeks as bright as rose. “You’re not gonna pull a Kai on me, I hope.”

Scoffing as though offended, Minho shook his head. “Do I look like that much of a douche? No, Taemin. Besides,” he grinned mischievously, and Taemin had to physically force himself to breathe so he wouldn’t start to hyperventilate. “I can’t punch myself for something that I started, right?”

Taemin’s throat went dry, and as Minho’s face neared his with that constant, carefree expression lingering there, the words he mechanically chanted in his head were the only thing keeping him from fainting then and there.

It means nothing, it means nothing, it means nothing.

His chest struggled to contain the heavy breaths which filled them, and Taemin unconsciously swiped his sweaty palms on the denim of his blue jeans. Legs wobbled from their place beneath his body, the warm breath from Minho’s lips doing nothing to calm the boy’s ever-building nervousness. This waiting, this anxiety. It was all too much for Taemin. So in a spout of foolish bravery and recklessness, he leaned forward, kissing the older boy square on the mouth before he even had the opportunity to protest.

And he expected a punch to the face, he really did. Even going so far as to tense his body in preparation for it. But, to Taemin’s astonishment, the punch never came. Instead, with what seemed like even more eagerness than Taemin himself possessed, Minho kissed him back, hands moving to Taemin’s barely noticeable biceps for support.

He fought down the desire to squeak and instead clenched his fists tightly from their position by his sides, dangling awkwardly as they struggled not to grab at the fabric of Minho’s shirt and pull him even closer. This was meant to be a test, Taemin reminded himself. It would certainly be strange if he came off as too enthusiastic.

But despite Taemin’s pessimistic thoughts on the matter, Minho was having none of it and pulled away chuckling softly. “I think this is only gonna work if you kiss back, Taem. No offence, but I feel like I’m kissing a brick wall.”

Immediate colour rose to Taemin’s cheeks, and in embarrassment, he stared intensely at the floor beneath them. “S-Sorry, Minho. I’m not very good at this stuff…”

Minho grinned reassuringly, eyes creasing in mirth. “Think of it as practice or something. So that when you start liking someone, you can woo them with your awesome skills.”

Many questions still flooded Taemin’s brain, such as ‘why the hell is Minho so eager to kiss me?’ and ‘why does this seem a lot gayer than intended?’ but he shook them off to pay attention to what Minho was actually trying to say. And Taemin’s eyes widened in startling realization because if he was being completely honest… it was something awfully intelligent. Instead of acting like some immobile potato sack because he’s too scared of ruining the moment, Taemin should be taking advantage of Minho’s naivety instead and try to win the older boy over. Because if he could do anything to prevent Minho from going back to the awfully experienced Amber, then it was that.

Taemin nodded and raised his head marginally so that his eyes met Minho’s. The older male’s gaze was warm and kind, black eyes which seemed to simply sparkle golden when they fell upon Taemin’s lighter ones. And they reminded Taemin of everything – the day they met, their times in the dance studio, Minho protecting him and most of all, why he was falling in love.

It was with those thoughts that Taemin placed his doubts to the side and simply focused on the present, where the boy he liked genuinely wanted to kiss him despite the odd reasons why. “Alright…” he mumbled softly to himself, straightening up and swallowing thickly in anxiousness.

It’s now or never.

“Ready to try again?” Minho spoke gently, an eyebrow raising in curiosity.

A smile graced Taemin’s features, and he lifted a hand to grasp slightly at the t-shirt over Minho’s chest. “Yeah.”

And they were kissing again, similar yet so different from the time before. Minho’s hands remained by Taemin’s shoulders, but as the younger boy tugged at Minho’s shirt with a sudden bout of fervour he lacked the time prior, Minho found himself squeaking embarrassedly in shock. However despite his initial surprise, Minho soon found himself entranced by their kiss, fingers moving to weave through Taemin’s hair without a care in the world. Minho simply ignored his hazy mind and tumbling stomach, satisfied that his idea was actually working. Because with Taemin’s lips on his and the soft feeling of his hair against Minho’s hands, Amber didn’t even seem to exist, a mere memory that Minho was happy to dispose of.

Confidence had begun to flood through Taemin’s veins, and in a brave move of desire and perhaps desperation, he slipped his tongue through Minho’s lips in curiosity and bated his breath. But upon noticing that the gesture was immediately reciprocated, it seemed that the young dancer had nothing to fear, and instead focused on the situation at hand. His heart flamed with content, a quirk of the lips decorating his face as Minho’s nose nudged his.

He shouldn’t have. He really shouldn’t have. Yet as Minho’s hands tugged at his hair once again to deepen the kiss, and before Taemin could even comprehend his own actions, he found himself humming loudly in satisfaction – a small sound that left Minho freezing on the spot. Taemin paused and held his breath, not allowing his disappointment to show when Minho pulled away with wide eyes.

Minho stepped back tentatively, keeping his stunned gaze locked on Taemin’s. “R-Right…” he began, voice breaking slightly as he spoke. “Well um…Thanks Taemin…I-I think I have to go now though, alright? Luna’s p-probably worried.”

Blinking, Taemin nodded dazedly. “Okay…See ya then, I guess.”

Reassuringly, Minho flashed Taemin a grin, albeit a bit shaky. “You um…helped a lot, so um…yeah. Thanks, Taem. I-I’ll catch you later.”

And then Minho was gone, grabbing his jacket off the bed before practically sprinting downstairs, shouting a quick goodbye to Taemin’s parents before hopping into his car and speeding away. His breathing came erratically, and Minho ran a shaky hand through his hair in an attempt to calm himself down.

“What the fuck just happened…” he muttered to himself, biting his lip consciously as he thought back on the event which had just occurred.

He wasn’t meant to enjoy it that much. His heart wasn’t meant to be beating that quickly. His cheeks weren’t meant to be that red. And most of all, he wasn’t meant to be thinking about his best friend in the way that he currently was.

“No, no, no, no! Fuck, no.” he ranted, grip tightening menacingly on the wheel. “I’m just messed up in the head right now. I’m just unconsciously thinking about Amber. I’m just…I’m just—“ Minho slammed the brakes upon pulling into his driveway and dropped his head onto the steering wheel in panic.

Minho knew he hadn’t been thinking about Amber. He knew that very well.

‘What the fuck was I thinking, suggesting something like that? Am I that stupid?’

Double checking that the windows were closed, Minho screamed loudly into his open palms. It wouldn’t have mattered if it were anyone else. But Taemin was his best friend. And when Minho’s mind replayed that kiss for the umpteenth time, causing him to feel things he knew he shouldn’t feel, Minho concluded that he had screwed up. Royally.

Minutes passed before Minho finally worked up the motivation to head inside, slumping onto the couch and burying his face into a nearby cushion.

“Minho, honey…What’s wrong?” came the worried voice of Luna, and Minho felt himself immediately relaxing at the warm tone. “Did something happen?”

“’M fine.” He mumbled, but the tremor in his voice told her otherwise.

He heard Luna sigh loudly before the couch sunk marginally with her added weight. “C’mon now, Minho. What’s happened?”

Begrudgingly, the tall boy rolled over, regarding his sister figure with a prickling behind his eyes. “Just something with Taemin.”

“Did you have a fight?” she asked softly.

Minho shook his head furiously. “No…I just—did something I shouldn’t have. But um, Luna? I don’t really feel like talking about it right now, if that’s alright?”

Luna smiled and sifted a hand through Minho’s dark brown locks. “That’s more than alright, buddy. But stop worrying too much about it, okay? Everything will turn out just fine, you wait and see. You usually make good decisions, Minho. So don’t be too harsh on yourself. Now…What did you want for dinner? Not chicken, I’m assuming? It’s finally our day off.”

The soccer player laughed loudly at that, glad that Luna had succeeded in cheering him up. He nodded in agreement. “Definitely not chicken.”

That same night brought Kibum and Jonghyun back to the bar, where somehow Kibum had convinced his parents to even let him out of the house. It had been a struggle, Kibum recalled with a slight grimace. His father seemed to shudder at every mention of Jonghyun, and although usually Kibum’s lying skills were easily above average, this time around there seemed to be a sort of added pressure.

Like usual, he’d gone with the alibi that he was working on the project with Amber, and although sceptical, his parents were relieved at the prospect of him hanging out with a girl rather than a boy. He’d held out for a long time, but apparently to Kibum, not long enough. He was still at school, living at home, without a job, and his parents had already begun to suspect that something was amiss. Part of him would like to profusely deny those accusations directed at him – the negative connotations which came with being a sexuality other than straight. But the other part, the majority, strongly disagreed. He wanted to hold Jonghyun’s hand in public whenever he felt like it. He wanted to openly flirt, and kiss, and properly introduce him to his parents. And so he denied nothing.

But as Jonghyun’s hand came to rest on his waist that Sunday night, it was the former section of Kibum’s mind that resulted in him flinching suddenly away. “Not here, Jonghyun.” he spoke, voice more forceful and angry than he’d expected.

Carefully, Jonghyun pulled his hand away and left it to hang by his side, face contorting into something less than joyful. His eyebrows and lips seemed to quiver, as though trying to force an understanding smile, but it wasn’t hard to notice that Jonghyun was in fact hurt by Kibum’s words. “A-Alright…” he muttered, fingers playing awkwardly with the hem of his shirt. “Anyway…I better go get ready so…cheer for me, okay?”

Kibum nodded, a smile still failing to grace his worn out features. Jonghyun sang like usual, albeit perhaps a little more shaky, and while Kibum probably should have felt guilty, his current mood couldn’t bring it within himself to care. And afterwards, when Kibum met with Jonghyun backstage, he found himself turning his head away when the older male leaned in for a kiss.

“Someone could see us.” he mumbled, but he knew as well as Jonghyun that the only people who could possibly see them back here was Jinki, Luna and on the occasion, Minho.

Jonghyun blinked and looking like a kicked puppy, stepped back an inch. “Kibum…we’re the only ones here.” he spoke softly, concerned.

“Just no, okay? You never know for sure.” Every word was another punch to the face, and Jonghyun stared hopelessly at the guitar in his arms.

He nodded to himself, presumably in reassurance. “Right, yeah, of course. Sorry, Kibum, I’m being reckless. I’ll drive you home, okay?”

Kibum sighed and ran a weary hand through his hair. “I’m gonna walk home tonight, Jjong. But we’ll see each other again soon, so don’t worry too much.”

“Don’t worry? Kibum, I don’t want you walking home alone at this time of night. It’s just a quick drive…”

“Jonghyun, I walked home fine by myself before we met, so stop stressing. I’ll text you when I get home, okay? See you later, babe.” Kibum gently patted Jonghyun’s shoulder in farewell before turning away to head outside, leaving Jonghyun to merely stare after him in hurt and confusion.

He slumped down into a nearby chair and exhaled loudly, refusing to meet Jinki’s gaze which regarded him with sympathy. “If it makes you feel any better,” his best friend began, taking a seat beside Jonghyun. “Minho was acting a little weird when he got home from a friend’s house today. Maybe he’s just upset because of something else. At school or something? It probably doesn’t even concern you.”

With a loud sigh, Jonghyun nodded. “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, Jinki. I might head home for the night. Catch up soon, yeah?”

“’Course, Jonghyun. See ya later, buddy!”

“See you, Jinki!”

The night air was flush against Kibum’s face, and while half of him regretted not accepting Jonghyun’s offer for a ride home, the better half of him knew that it would only cause more trouble. He breathed into his palms and rubbed them together to stay warm, the gravelly cobbled path beneath him crunching under his feet. The torn look upon Jonghyun’s face had been hard to ignore, but although it was hurting the older boy, in the long run, Kibum knew it was for the best. Besides, it was just in public where Kibum was cautious of affectionate behaviour. In private, Jonghyun could be as touchy and as cuddly as he liked, and nobody would be able to stop them.

Well, at least that’s what Kibum thought…until he got home.

“Kibum.” His father had said sternly. “Your mother and I have been talking, and we’ve decided to ground you for the rest of the school year.”

Kibum blanched and looked at his father in fury. Had he heard right? “Are you kidding me?! What have I done this time?”

The man narrowed his gaze. “What we discussed on Friday…I’m serious about it, Kibum. I don’t want you and that Jonghyun boy interacting any more than you have to. The only time you’re allowed out of the house is for school. Is that clear, boy?”

“W-What about my project?! Or socializing on the weekends?” Kibum cried, feeling his heart sink to the bottom of his stomach at how dismissive he’d been towards Jonghyun. God knows how long it would be before they could see each other again.

“We have no problems with Amber coming here for the project. Your mother seems to think that we should let Jonghyun over too on the occasion, but don’t make me repeat myself, Kibum. If he so as much touches your arm, then he’s out of here for good. And you go to the same god damn school. Stop acting as though we’re depriving you.”

Kibum wanted to cry. They didn’t go to the same school. And Jonghyun certainly couldn’t go even a mere two minutes without touching Kibum, whether it be on his arm or waist or cheek. But at seeing his father’s cruel face looking back at him, Kibum could only nod pathetically, before promptly heading up to his room to sob.

It was going to be a long rest of the school year.

#my number one fan #jongkey #fanfiction #jonghyun #key #FUCK ME RIGHT NOW #TOOK ME TWO MONTHS FOR THIS UGLY MEASLY CHAPTER #im so so sorry #words cant even tell you #how sorry i am #im gonna write next chapter soon istg #i love you all #sorry <3

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imginger7 · 4 years

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I need some crime scene tape

[mood: bemused] [music: JET - K.I.A. [Killed In Action] ] It's a good thing CSI doesn't come to my house... ------------------- The signs of a struggle were everywhere. For instance, someone had tried to shove the body under the couch.

It was half clothed [as all discarded bodies seem to be], missing a shoe, limbs bent in awkward and unnatural positions - including the classic pose of having been found face forward, showing signs of abuse - from neglect, if nothing else.

No pools of blood, no chalk lines. Although it occured to me that I could amuse myself, grimly, if I made one. I'd have to find some chalk, though, and that might not be possible. That might be too macabre [even for me in my twisted humor], however, given the scope of the crime scene.

Getting down on the floor to his level, I looked into that blank stare. I could only wonder what this person thought of this sad existence of his. How he'd been toyed with and manipulated - led down the primrose path into danger. His fate outlined for him by others, a victim of the circumstances he'd found himself in and was unable to control.

I imagined his life: car chases, hunted by the enemy, attempting to conceal himself inside rough-hewn fortresses, behind rocks and in tall grass. Running, hiding, and trying desperately to defend themselves in what turned out to be a makeshift urban warzone.

Survivalists always try to properly equip themselves and this person probably had all the right tools at some point. But time wears away all stones and no signs of those fancy parachutes, those bootknives, binoculars, or nifty equipment belts remained. Just one man - bare-fisted. Brutally unsuccessful in the end.

What was left of his clothing showed signs of dirt, grass stains, and exposure to all kinds of rough weather - sunbleached and fading - linen now brittle and thin as a ghost. If I were to call the cause of death at this point, it might be blunt force trauma - or a serious fall. It was hard to tell by looking at him how long he'd been there. I give him a simple name, for lack of anything creative at this point. We'll call him Joe - because John Doe is so lame and well, let's face it - everyone uses that one.

I followed the evidence of foul play further, daring to go where angels fear to tread: further under the couch. Carefully lifting up the dust ruffle, the search immediately turned up various bits of errant clothing [a sock, some underwear, a winter glove], little pills that had been dropped in an obvious hurry [and not bothered to be sought after], a machine gun, a shotgun, a pistol, and various denominations of cash.

A grenade had come to rest in the cracks of cold air return vent - inches from falling into an oblivion of darkness below. At some point, there must have been a party, as the last vestiges of a balloon was withering nearby - maybe an ounce of air left.

Among these things, there was a tiny furry mouse [to entertain the cat, I guess] that was unable to propel itself and just plain wasn't looking too good at this juncture, a cheap digital watch that no longer told time - some kind of testament to the state of things, but I had little patience by this time to wax existential. Taking a quick overview of things, there was definite indication that someone had lost their marbles.

Coincidentally, in this mess also lay a few playing cards of little consequence [a two, a six, a nine - all woefully off suit], ditched as though someone really wanted a better hand in this life. I picked them up and let them slip through my fingers to glide gracefully back to the floor. Hey buddy - me too.

Sweeping my hand under the corner of the couch, a golf ball rolled out lazily from the end - curious because it was rumored that none of the occupants of the house played the sport.

Sighing, I slid back away from the couch and paused, wondering if I ought to continue or just leave it for another day. However, I found myself carried further into the chaos by the unknown, like chasing the pieces of a mystery, I picked my way through more of the room - carefully. After all, I have an adversion to sticky - and unknown substances. I needed my gloves.

The evidence of an alternative lifestyle were strewn everywhere, but carelessly tossed aside as if responsibility and concern lay in a former lifetime and didn't necessarily apply to this one. I had to wonder who these people were - as if the furniture, the floor, was their trash can. Laying about was the cellophane from a fortune cookie, a few candy wrappers, small sweets from the last holiday [now several months old] - the colors dull and the coating collecting hair and sand. What kind of animals were these?

Shaking my head, I ventured to lift up the cushions, instantly cringing at the sight, and wondering why I keep opening that Pandora's box when I know the hazard that lay ahead. Bio-hazard, no less. But the evidence lay before me. Obviously, these people had a fondness for cereal. Obviously, these people had a hard time keeping it in bowls. Well, never mind - I found the bowl, too. Sturdy glass, which was probably a good thing, because there was no telling how long it had been tucked in the end of the couch like that.

Among these things, the tragic signs of disuse - a stuffed animal formerly belonging to someone who had probably once cared for it very much [and once COULD NOT sleep without it. Or if... Or until... Unless... Notwithstanding...]. Now the fur was matted and dirty, worn and forgotten. I handled it carefully, knowing whatever small child had once held it had done so in such a revered manner that it was difficult to comprehend how this small token had managed to end up in such a sorry state. I could only picture how it'd once been tucked lovingly inside the bed of some small person and held tight to keep the nightmares at bay. This guardian of dreams looked woeful now - staring blankly at me with dull scratched eyes, ribbon untied, and what once had been a slight smile was now concealed in the fur. Sad.

What this said about the disposable state of society, I didn't care to contemplate. Attention spans are so short, I guess. Abandonment is a frequent state - the casualties of our shifting wants and needs.

About the room, fingerprints were everywhere but criss-crossing and overlaying atop each other. Smeared hastily in the feeble attempt to hide the dirt and dust accumulation in the room. I had the passing thought that sweeping up the place might do it some good, as no one had done so in quite some time.

Obviously.

I wanted to turn my head - run out the door - break down somewhere and cry. Was this my life now? Pokemon towels on the floor in the master [adult] bathroom?

Walking outside, I found the occasional abandoned vehicle - some crashed into flowerpots, some on their sides - doors ajar, trunks open, bumpers and wheels missing. One had collided with a rusting dumptruck and left, its former occupants nowhere to be seen - obviously having hastened away from the responsibility of cleaning up that mess. From the trail of debris scattered about the place, it spoke of reckless care and wild abandon.

Another body was evident under one of the outbuildings, clothing askew, boot missing, hand hanging limp as though beckoning for help and finding no mercy while being thoughtlessly left to the whim of the weather.

The struggle? Just another working mother...

For now, it's just a matter of covering up the evidence...

But come to think of it - there might be some sidewalk chalk in the children's bedroom.

Somewhere.

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type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

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Thawing Out a Frozen Shoulder, with Diabetes

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/thawing-out-a-frozen-shoulder-with-diabetes/

Thawing Out a Frozen Shoulder, with Diabetes

Scott Johnson’s left shoulder was bothering him. Really bothering him.

“I couldn’t remember a specific incident, but was sure it was just a stubborn basketball injury," said Johnson, a Minnesota-based type 1 for more than three decades who blogs at Scott's Diabetes and works for the app company mySugr. But after months of physical therapy with no progress, and even what he describes as “negative progress,” Johnson was diagnosed with adhesive capsulitis, better known in the vernacular as frozen shoulder.

This is one of those lesser-known diabetes complications, one that doesn't get discussed much in comparison to vision loss, nerve damage, and a host of other very scary ones. But it's a complication that can be painful and life-altering, and isn't always easy to recognize when we might just equate it to "the wonders of getting older." DiabetesMine covered it several years ago in our 411 Complications Series, but overall it's not really on the radar unless you're personally experiencing it.

Here's the scoop on frozen shoulder, for those inquiring minds in the Diabetes Community.

What is Frozen Shoulder?

In a nutshell, it happens in three stages:

Freezing: Pain slowly becomes worse until range of motion is lost (lasts 6 weeks to 9 months)

Frozen: Pain improves, but the shoulder is still stiff (lasts 4 to 6 months)

Thawing: Ability to move the shoulder improves until returning to normal or close to normal (lasts 6 months to 2 years)

Digging deeper into the medical side of how this ailment affects your body, we learned that surrounding your shoulder joint is a bundle of heavy-duty connective issue called the shoulder capsule. For reasons that aren’t clear, in some people the tissue thickens and becomes tight, and then stiff bands of tissue called adhesions develop, making movement of the joint painful and even blocking the shoulder joint’s normal range of motion.

It’s a progressive condition, starting slowly with occasional pain, and then a reduction in the ability to move the joint. At first, perhaps, reaching the bottle of whisky on the top shelf becomes difficult. Then impossible. Eventually, it can become so debilitating (the frozen shoulder, not the whisky) that you can’t even dress yourself.

And it’s not just that you can’t raise your arm; the arm can’t be raised, period. Frozen shoulder is characterized by what is called “loss of passive range of motion.” Passive range of motion is simply how much someone else can move a joint. In other types of conditions, a person may not be able to move his or her own shoulder beyond a certain point, but someone else could easily move the joint farther. But with frozen shoulder, the shoulder is, well... frozen. Physically stuck.

It cannot be moved farther.

And then what? Oddly, just when it gets worst, the process often begins to reverse itself. Like the seasons of the year, the natural progression of adhesive capsulitis is often described in stages of freezing, frozen, and then thawing.

Who Gets Frozen Shoulder?

Each year in the US, 200,000 people are diagnosed with frozen shoulder. It’s most common between the ages of 40 and 60, and more common in women than men. And I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that people with diabetes are more likely to get it than anyone else.

The American Diabetes Association reports, via the Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, that 10-20% of PWDs have frozen shoulder. Meanwhile, consumer literature often reports that PWDs are three times more likely to get frozen shoulder over sugar-normals (non-diabetics), and the actual risk may even be much higher than what the stats show.

A 2016 meta-analysis lead by Nasri Hani Zreik of the Blackpool Victoria Hospital in the UK, found that people with diabetes are five times more likely than non-diabetics to have frozen shoulder, with an overall prevalence of frozen shoulder in people with diabetes at a whopping 13.4%. Further, we D-folk make up fully 30% of all frozen shoulder cases.

That last set of numbers led the researchers to call for screening for diabetes in any patient diagnosed with frozen shoulder -- wow, what a way to get diagnosed!

And this is one time where we T1's share equal risk with our T2 cousins. There was no significant difference in prevalence between T1s and T2s, nor between T2s on insulin vs. T2s on oral agents.

Treating Frozen Shoulder

Adhesive capsulitis is one of the few health conditions that can actually go away if you ignore it. As noted, Frozen shoulder does eventually thaw on its own, but it can take up to three years, and during that time, the pain can be staggering.

Johnson said, “Every once in a while, both on the court and around the house, I’d jar my body in such a way as to hurt my shoulder. It was a knee-weakening, breath-taking, seeing-stars type of pain.”

And that knee-weakening, breath-taking, seeing-stars pain got more and more common as time went by for Johnson. His ice wasn’t thawing, so to speak, and it became so painful it was interfering with his daily life.

“I was avoiding basketball instead of looking forward to every opportunity,” he said, noting that new lack of activity trashed his diabetes management and, he says, his mental health.

Scott Johnson takes a jumpshot during a basketball game at the Friends For Life diabetes conference.

It was time to take action.

The traditional treatments for frozen shoulder are physical therapy to try to gradually stretch some flexibility back into the joint capsule, sort of like stretching out a pair of too-tight pants by wearing them for an hour a day. Steroid injections are also commonly used, but Johnson was wary of their notorious effect on blood sugar. Anti-inflammatory meds are sometimes used, and the "nuclear" treatment option is a primitive form of surgery in which doctors knock you over the head with a frying pan, and while your lights are out, force the shoulder through a normal range of motion to break the ice of the frozen shoulder.

What? What’s that?

Oh, I’m told they don’t use frying pans any more. A general anesthetic is used instead.

But it still sounds brutal.

Getting to Know Hydroplasty

A relatively new treatment that Johnson heard about and decided to undergo is called a Shoulder Joint Capsule Distension (a.k.a. hydroplasty). Under a local anesthesia, the joint capsule is filled with mixture of saline, anesthetics, and a small dose of steroids to stretch it out, much like blowing up a balloon. This procedure is followed up by “intense” physical therapy to break down the adhesions.

Johnson said the procedure was “quick, easy, relatively painless, and couldn’t have taken longer than 10 minutes.” He said that the physical therapy started immediately after the injection, and continued for one hour every day for the following two weeks, followed by 30 minutes every other day for another week, with additional “homework.”

Or, as Johnson describes it:

“That was one meaning of intense when my orthopedic doctor described the physical therapy requirements -- it required a real commitment and the ability to manage so many appointments. The other meaning of intense was the physical therapy sessions themselves. I listened to my shoulder make unnatural sounds,” while the therapist moved his arm around, said Johnson, adding, “all I could do was breathe through the pain.”

After the first intense physical therapy treatment Johnson was unsure about the course of action he’d signed up for. But two days into the treatment, he was back on the court, playing basketball again with, “very little pain and dramatic range of movement.” Johnson said the most challenging part was “convincing my brain to use my left arm again!”

Surgery Aftermath

Well over a year down the road, Johnson says his left shoulder still feels good, and he wonders why the hydroplasty isn’t “a better-known option for treating frozen shoulder.”

But now that his left shoulder is back in the game, he’s starting to worry about his right shoulder, which is staring to show some early signs of adhesive capsulitis. Sorry to say that frozen shoulder often jumps from one side of the body to the other. In doctor-speak from Medscape, “bilateral shoulder involvement is rarely simultaneous and instead occurs sequentially.” A mixed blessing to be sure. It would really suck to have both shoulders frozen at the same time.

If Johnson’s right shoulder gets worse, would he sign up for another round of hydroplasty with intense physical therapy?

“I would do it again in a heartbeat, as soon as my doctor feels it’s an appropriate treatment,” he said, adding that he'd push his doctor to move more quickly on his right arm. "That is my shooting arm, so I wouldn’t want to wait so long.”

Thanks to our correspondent Wil Dubois for digging into this topic for us, and of course to our friend Scott Johnson for being so open and willing to share his story!

Have you experienced frozen shoulder? If so, please share your POV in the comments section below.

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

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