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drivingsideways · 3 years

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k-drama rec list

Prior to 2020 I’d maybe watched 2 k-dramas in my entire life, but this year I got sucked in, thanks to some great recs, and y’know, *gestures * everything.

I think I’d held off watching kdramas because my impression of them was limited to romances that I didn’t enjoy at all. But this was the year I discovered the equivalent of “gen fic” kdrama- dramas that had wonderful ensemble casts, strong story lines that weren’t entirely romance focused and also a variety in terms of themes and styles. A big plus was that I found so many of these dramas had women leading the writers’ room, and seeing the effect of that in the story telling. (Notable exceptions: a certain “star” writer who should please stop inflicting her badly written, formulaic crap on the world, yes Kim Eun-Sook, I mean you, and whoever wrote that trashfire Flower of Evil)

So here I am with my own rec list! Caveat- these are mostly not the dramas released in 2020, I’m still playing catch up! :)

Under the cut for length

My Mister/ My Ahjussi (2018, Written by Park Hae-Young, Directed by Kim Won-Seok, starring Lee Sun-kyun and Lee Ji-eun aka IU)

This was definitely my absolute favourite of the shows I watched this year across western/ asian media. It’s a story about the thread that binds us all and the ineffability of human connection. It’s also a story that deconstructs ideas of masculinity and honour and shame in a non-western context, but with an extremely compassionate touch. It’s a story that doesn’t shy away from showing the consequences of material and spiritual poverty; and how one can so easily feed into the other. It’s a love story that isn’t a romance, except that it’s a Romance. It’s about finding salvation in one another and in the kindness of strangers. It’s about choosing life, and picking yourself up off the floor to take that one last step and then the next and then the next. The one quibble I have with the series is that it could have been better paced, it does get extremely slow after the half way mark. But god, do they land the ending. Both Lee Sun-kyun and IU turn in absolutely heartbreaking performances, and fair warning, be prepared to go through an entire box of tissues watching this series.

Life (2018, written by Lee Soo-yeon and directed by Hong Jong-chan, starring Lee Dong-wook, Cho Seung-woo, Won Jin-ah, Lee Kyu-hyung, Yoo Jae-myung and Moon So-ri.)

Medical dramas are very much not my thing, and I wouldn’t have taken a chance on it except that @michyeosseo said I should, and she was right! It’s a medical drama in the sense that it’s set in a hospital, but rather than a “case-fic” format, this is actually a sharp commentary on the corporatization of health care, and the business of mixing, well, money and what should be a fundamental human right. Writer Lee Soo-yeon was coming off the global success of Stranger/Secret Forest S1 when this aired, so I understand that expectations were probably sky-high, and people were disappointed when this show didn’t give them the adrenaline rush that they wanted. On the other hand, I thought that this outing was really much more nuanced in terms of the politics and also how the ending doesn’t allow you the luxury of easy-fixes. This show has a great ensemble cast, and while it took me a while to get used to Lee Dong-wook’s woodenness (i ended up calling him mr.cadaver after watching this and was surprised to learn that he’s very popular?), in the end I was quite sold on his version of angry angst-bucket elder-sibling Dr.Ye Jin-woo. His best scenes were with Lee Kyu-hyung who turns in a lovely, achy performance as the paraplegic Dr. Ye Seon-woo who just wants to live a normal life. The love story between the two brothers is actually the emotional backbone of the story, and I think they landed that perfectly.

My one quibble with writer-nim is that she ended up writing in a forgettable and somewhat (for me at least) uncomfortable romance between the characters played by Won Jin-ah and Cho Seung-Woo. I think part of my uncomfortable-feeling was that I got the strong sense that the writer herself didn’t want to write this romance, it was as if she was being made to shoe-horn it in for Studio Reasons, and she basically grit her teeth and did the worst possible job of it. I do wish we could have absolutely had the OT3 of my dreams: Moon So-ri/Cho Seung-woo/Yoo Jae-myung like, c’mon TV gods MAKE IT HAPPEN, just...look at them!!!!

Anyway, that apart, I think this was a very engaging series, and by engaging, I also mean thirst-enabling, see below.

Stranger (aka Secret Forest or Forest of Secrets) S1 & 2 : (2017-, Written by Lee Soo-yeon, directed by

2017′s smash hit aired a much anticipated second season in 2020, and I managed to catch up just in time to watch that live, so that was thrilling :D . Writer Lee Soo-yeon mixes up thriller/office comedy/political commentary in an ambitious series. I think S1 is more “exciting” than S2 in terms of the mystery and pacing, but S2 is far more dense and interesting in terms of political commentary because it takes a long hard look at institutional corruption and in true writer-nim fashion doesn’t prescribe any easy solutions. Anyway, please enjoy public prosecutor Cho Seung-woo and police officer Bae Doona as partners/soulmates kicking ass and taking names in pursuit of Truth, Justice and just a goddamn peaceful meal, along with a stunningly competent ensemble cast. Also yes, Han Yeo Jin is a lesbian, sorry, I don’t make the rules.

Search: WWW (2019, Written by Kwon Do-Eun, directed by Jung Ji-hyun & Kwon Young-il, starring Im Soo-jung, Lee Da-hee, Jeon Hye-jin)

GOD. Where do I start? +1000 for writer Kwon Do-Eun saying “fuck the patriarchy” in the most grandiose way possible, i.e. absolutely refusing to acknowledge that it exists. Yes, this is that power fantasy, and it’s also a fun, slice-of-life tale about three women navigating their way through work, romance, national politics and everything in between. It’s true that I wasn’t entirely sold on the amount of time spent on the romance, and I really wish they’d actually had a textual wlw romance, though the subtext through the entire series is PRACTICALLY TEXT. But still, it maintains that veneer of plausible deniability and I think queer fans who are sick of that kind of treatment in media have a very valid grouse against the show. On the other hand, personally I felt that the queer-platonic vibe of the show is very wonderful and true to real life, and it was only reinforced by the ending. This is a show written by a woman for women (like me), and it shows.

Hyena (2020, Written by Kim Roo-Ri, directed by Jang Tae-yoo & Lee Chang Woo, starring Kim Hye-soo and Ju Ji-hoon )

Those of you who’ve been watching hit zombie epic Kingdom are probably familiar with Ju Ji-hoon’s brand of sexiness already. I had not watched Kingdom and got hit in the face by Mr.Sexy McSexyPants’ turn as a brash, privileged-by-birth, up and coming lawyer who gets completely runover by the smoking hot and incredibly dangerous fellow lawyer/competitor from the other side of the tracks in the person of Kim Hye-Soo. When I say they set the room on fire, I mean it, ok. Every single scene between these two is an actual bonfire of sexual attraction and emotional hand grenades, and they’re both absolutely riveting to watch. “Flower of Evil” wishes they had what this show has- an actual grown up romance as opposed to a thirteen year old twilight fan’s idea of an adult romance.

The “lawyer” shenanigans and the “cases” are hit or miss, and I think the occasional comedy fell flat for me. But that’s not why I mainlined like 6 episodes of this series overnight like a coke addict, and that’s not why you’re going to do it either. It’s so RARE, even in these enlightened days to find a female character like Jung Geum-ja: hard as nails, unapologetic about it, and not punished by the narrative for it. The best part for me is that she feels like a woman’s woman, not a man’s idea of what a Strong Female Character should be. Anyways, when I grow up I want to have what Kim Hye-soo has ok?

Other dramas that I watched this year, quickly rated:

The King: Eternal Monarch (3/10 and those 3 points are only for the combined goodness of second leads who deserved better- Jung Eun Chae, Woo Do Hwan and Kim Kyung Nam. Please head over to my AO3 and read my attempts to fix this garbage fire and rescue their characters from canon)

Flower of Evil (-10/100, dont @ me)

Tale of the Nine Tailed (5/10, I think it succeeds at what it set out to do, which is a light hearted, sweet fantasy-romance-melodrama, plus “second lead” Kim Beom will make you cry as the hot mess of a half human/ half fox spirit ALL TEARS character. I think if you’re into kdrama romances as a genre, this is probably a good bet?)

Signal (7/10, This was the first full kdrama I watched this year and would definitely recommend. It’s a police procedural with time travel shenanigans and has an engaging plot, good pacing, texture and compelling performances. My one disappointment with it was the way they wrote Kim Hye-soo’s character. As literally the only female character to survive in any way, she was given short shrift, and toward the end it really began to grate on me.)

Six Flying Dragons - (7/10, also would recommend if you’re interested in Korean historicals. It definitely already feels a bit dated in terms of styling and production values, and even scripting and acting choices. But it has a good balance of fantasy and history and political commentary. I was not a fan of Yoo In-Ah’s performance in this series, but it’s not anything that would make you want to nope out of the series. It’s GoT , if GoT was thoughtful about politics and characters and not the misogynist, racist trashfire that it became.)

My Country: The New Age - (3.5/10, and that’s 3 points to Jang Hyuk’s fan and 0.5.points to Woo Do Hwan’s heaving bosom. If you like your historical drama/fantasy with very pretty men, very gay subtext -seriously RIP to show makers who thought they could hetero it but didn’t account for Woo Do Hwan’s Tragic Face- lots of blood and tears and very nonsense plot, this is right up your alley. I probably would have enjoyed it more in other circumstances, I think? But this one just annoyed me too much at the time!

I have a couple of more dramas to watch on my list, that’ll probably carry me over into 2021, so see ya on the other side! :D

#k-drama #kdrama rec list #2020: A YEAR #i'm a queue for you

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sigritandtheelves · 4 years

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(III) Three Iterations of a Birth (and Death)

Part Three: Fantasy

PG-13 | 2.2k wds | s8 AU (diverges after “Alone”)

Summary: This time he gets it right.

A/N: It’s finally done! Part One, Tragedy, is here but you don’t need to read it if you hate pain (character death warning) and Part Two is here, which is angsty but ends well. This one is happy, but I hope not tooth-achingly sweet. Just a better version of things, and fulfilling this (very old) prompt:

I hope you like it, anon!

_+_

“Mulder, you should know something.”

She sat on his couch with hands on her round belly, wore a tank dress and complained of the heat. Her feet, white-sneakered, rested on his coffee table. He handed her a glass of water and sat beside her.

“What’s that?” He turned to her, elbow propped on the back of the couch and watched her sip. She’d been smiling for much of today, tucked beside him and flirting gently at Layla Harrison’s bedside, demanding they stop for Mexican food on their ride back from the hospital. He sensed, though, a seriousness in her tone now. A small fold appeared between her brows.

“Not long before we found you, I had a procedure done by doctors that I thought I couldn’t trust.” She glanced at him briefly. “An amniocentesis.” Her fingers twitched against the side of her sweating glass, and she leaned forward to set it on the table. When she struggled to reach, Mulder took it from her and placed it on a coaster. “Thank you,” she said.

He nodded, but his heart was pounding, his face stilled and pinched in that look of panic. “An amniocentesis?”

“Yeah,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I wanted to run a PCR on the baby.”

So it was time, then. He’d waited for this conversation, felt it hovering like a thundercloud around them for weeks while they tiptoed around every mention of her pregnancy. Mulder swallowed hard. “And did you?”

She hesitated, eyes fixed on her knees. “I didn’t run it myself.” He watched her fingers fidget at the apex of her belly.

“But someone did.”

“Yeah.”

Mulder felt like yelling, like plugging his ears or running into another room. He didn’t think he wanted to know this, but he was also desperate for the information. “And?”

Scully took a deep breath. “Entirely human,” she said, then lower so he almost couldn’t hear, “and yours.”

Mulder chewed at his bottom lip and stared at her hands, still grazing the taut fabric over her belly. His child. He thought of her holding that baby in Oregon, of tiny Matthew’s fuzz-covered head in San Diego. His mind touched on the thought of an infant in his own arms, then shied away. He’d already watched one child of hers sicken and die; neither of them could bear that again.

But she’d also said entirely human.

“The results were clear?”

“99.9%,” she said. “But like I said, I didn’t run it myself, and I was so scared.” Her eyes lifted to meet his now, and they were round, wet. “I wanted to believe it, but how could I be sure? How could I trust anyone, Mulder?”

He saw her small and afraid, facing months of uncertainty. He saw these same wide and tearful eyes wanting to believe the results of a PCR test. He saw how much she needed him to believe with her: that this was only a normal child and theirs alone. He reached out a hand to take hers and she squeezed it hard.

“Why would they lie about that?” He whispered. He ran a thumb over her tense knuckles while a tear slipped away from the corner of her eye to trail down the side of her face.

She shook her head. “What if they want me complacent? What if they’re in the hospital when it’s time… when he’s born?”

He again. Their son.

Scully was staring at the ceiling now, willing her tears back into her eyes, trying to steel herself against these possibilities, as she must have done for months. Mulder sensed there was more she wasn’t telling him, so he lifted her fingers to kiss them. “What changed? You said you thought you couldn’t trust it, but you believe the test now?”

She held her breath for a moment’s hesitation before she whispered, “Yes.”

“Why?”

She looked at him. “I did another one. I mean I… I worked with my doctor and I ran the tests myself.”

“Scully.” Not quite chastising, but there was worry in his voice: a risky procedure, now run twice in an already complicated pregnancy. When had she done this?

“The results were the same.” There was something desperate in her eyes now. “He’s yours, Mulder.” Quickly she amended, “If you want him to be.”

—

It wasn’t because of what she’d told him, he thought, but because they’d finally talked about it at all. He kissed her on his couch and she clung to him, fierce and needy, arms tight around his back and face buried in his chest.

He pressed a palm to her belly between them and said, “Stay.”

She nodded, hot breath on his collarbone.

The earth and flower smell of her scalp under his nose made him think of their last night in Bellefleur: regret and sadness, but also the depth of love he’d felt while wrapped around her then. This, right now, was the so much more. Her body on his mattress, her cheek on his shoulder, marked the first time he thought to himself that maybe he was healing, that they both were.

Before she fell asleep she ran a finger down the center scar of his chest and whispered, “You said stay,” then kissed the thickened skin of it. “But Mulder you need to stay.” Her eyes were two small pricks of light in the darkened room that spoke to him of a deep uncertainty, of real fear.

He gathered her whole self to him in both arms, knee hooked over her hip, and said, “I know.” He held his lips to the crown of her head and whispered, “Scully I’m not going anywhere.”

—

“You’re really sure?” She asked him, face in that half-crumpled furrow of disbelief. She wore maternity jeans and what must have been one of his own pilfered button-downs.

“Yes!” He said. “Now watch out!”

She stepped aside as he carried a cardboard box—seven books and roughly fifteen t-shirts (he wasn’t good at packing)—through her doorway.

It made sense. She had that second bedroom already.

—

A different night and very late, after two, he sensed her tension: a strained quickness to her breathing beside him. She was facing away, trying to hide it. Mulder curled his palm over her hip and asked low, “What is it?”

She stiffened. “I’m okay,” she said, but he knew her. He tapped two knuckles on her hip bone.

“Scully.”

A long sigh: a concession, an opening up because they were doing this right, now. “I’m worried.”

He nodded, careful. “About me?”

She shook her head and was quiet for a moment. Then, “I spent my whole life thinking medicine was good, that its whole purpose was to make lives better, safer, longer…” She shifted so her back pressed against his chest and he slipped his left arm fully around her. “But after everything we’ve seen, everything that’s happened to me… I just don’t know that I can trust doctors anymore.”

Mulder tucked his nose in that place between her neck and shoulder. They had taken her faith even in this, shucked her convictions in the good of medicine. The meddling hands of whatever forces they were up against reached down and out into every institution she’d once trusted. “Even your new doctor?”

She shrugged.

He let his hand slip down, covering as much of her round abdomen as he could. He loved touching her this way now, feeling the little knees and feet press outward, the subtle hiccups that came in the evenings. “What can we do?”

She covered his hand with her own and guided it to a place where some small limb pushed toward the outside world. He drew a small circle around it with his index finger and kissed her ear.

“What if we went away? Maybe…” She swallowed. “Maybe some little town in West Virginia or Ohio with a birth center? We could use different names and maybe my mom could come with us and we could just… disappear for a little bit? Until he’s born.”

“You’ve been thinking about this.”

“Since the first amnio. Since I realized Parenti was bad.” Her voice wavered—there were tears in it now. “I thought I’d have to do it alone.”

Mulder shook his head, heart breaking for her—that this was her secret, her worst fear. “You won’t be alone, Scully, I promise. We can do that. We can go. Let’s do that.”

—

In the mountains of West Virginia, a place called Willowdale that sounded beautiful and safe, they were Kate and Richard Mulvey for two and a half weeks. They made quiet preparations in a rented vacation cottage, paid for in cash to a widow named Ruth. Maggie took no pseudonym, put her name on nothing, and stayed with them in the second small bedroom. She was a steadying maternal presence bearing folded blankets and cloth diapers, years of accumulated knowledge, and endless gratitude for being asked to come.

Scully had been having little contractions off and on for days until, on a Sunday afternoon in late May, they gripped her hard, forcing her to bend over the kitchen table and bite her lips together. “Mulder,” she whimpered, voice high, and he was beside her in a second.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re ready. We’re ready,” he told them both, willing it to be true.

The birth center was small and quiet, more like a house, and it kept its medical secrets hidden: beeping machines inside cabinets, monitors and needles and IV bags tucked away in drawers and closets, just in case.

Their baby was born in what looked like a farmhouse bedroom: soft light and calm music, yellow flowers on the curtains. Maggie took photos and offered her daughter sips of water, encouraging smiles. Mulder, who had killed with his own hands, who had chased monsters through dark streets with a gun, felt a different kind of wild adrenaline now, watching his partner rock her hips to some rhythm he couldn’t know. It was the anxiety of powerlessness: her body did this. It was she who had to make it happen. He could only wait and hold her hand.

There was a tub. Of course Scully wanted a tub. She sank into the warm water and groaned a sound older than time. When the intensity passed she said, “It feels good. The water feels good,” and then after that she couldn’t speak.

Blood in the water worried him, but the midwife assured him it was fine. “Your baby’s coming,” she said. In a mirror angled between Scully’s knees, he saw the baby’s head emerge.

Scully held him first, lifted him herself from her own body through the water and into her arms, sobbing with relief while he turned from purple to pink and the midwife helped her cover him in a blanket. When the umbilical cord went soft and white, Mulder, still dazed, still not quite believing, separated mother and child at last.

“That’s good,” the midwife said. “Now you can hold him.”

The infant, wrapped and red, was pressed into his arms so Dana could stand, pass the placenta, dry off. Mulder looked down at the impossible face of his son and realized that something, for once, had gone terribly right. They had done this. In spite of everything, he found himself part of a family.

“Let me see.” He heard Maggie’s voice and she was smiling. She took their picture, he with the baby—a nervous father’s first moments—and came to touch her grandchild. “He’s perfect.”

“Yeah,” Mulder croaked.

Scully appeared beside him in the terrycloth robe she’d brought from home, eyes wild with euphoric relief, smiling like he hadn’t seen in far too long. She put one hand on the baby’s head, the other on his shoulder. “You’re both here,” she sniffled.

Mulder, catching her euphoria, bent and kissed her hard and open-mouthed, right in front of her mother.

—

Back in their apartment (theirs now), the Gunmen brought gifts and marveled at the boy child who was ordinary, yet no less miraculous. Mulder showed him off, chest puffed out in fatherly pride. William, they called him, who weighed nearly ten pounds already and had no hair to speak of.

“You are one lucky sonofabitch,” Frohike told him, wiggling his fingers in front of the child’s eyes.

Luck was part of it, Mulder knew. Things could have been so different, both better and worse. There was a universe of infinite variations in path, in outcome, in seemingly fated misstep. What if there was only one choice? Scully had asked him once, and he’d contemplated all the possible errors that might have held them apart. He wanted to believe it were fate or luck, but he knew there was also choice. He would need to choose this path, not just now, but every day. It seemed so clear, so easy.

Mulder kissed the invisible fuzz on William’s head and nodded. “More than lucky,” he said.

When the boys left, he bounced his son into the kitchen where Scully was pouring iced tea into two tall glasses. She smiled at them, bright as sunshine.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said to her. “You give this guy some lunch, and I’ll make some for you, hmm?”

Her smile widened and she reached her arms out for the baby, who fussed when he sensed an approaching meal. “Sounds good,” she told him, tugging already at the neckline of her shirt. “Get in there and make me a sandwich.”

Mulder laughed. He felt suddenly whole and warm, taken by a need to touch her. Before they were out of reach, he threw one arm around Scully’s shoulders and bent to kiss her neck: a noisy smack just below her ear. “Yes ma’am,” he murmured. He let her go and watched them settle on the couch.

— end —

#a thing i wrote #s8 #canon divergence #three iterations of a birth and death #birth story

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mrsnazariowrites · 5 years

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Breathe Underwater

The Edge of the World: Chapter 12

Perfect Match AU - Pairing: Damien x MC

Perma-note: Dames’ name is Dexter in this series.

IMPORTANT A/N: So this is a bit of a sensitive chapter with what’s about to happen. I’ve kept the writing as tame and non-graphic as possible, but I’m including some warnings just to be safe.

Content Warnings for this chapter: Psychological Warfare, Humiliation, mentions of torture, Sexual Harassment

There are feelings of humiliation and vulnerability, but no sexual acts will actually take place.

If you need to catch up, Chapters 1-11 is in my Masterlist

The supporting lyrics are from the song A Shot in the Dark, by Within Temptation

Link to the Choices Fanfic Archive version:

http://choicesfanfic.com/content/breathe-underwater/

Summary: When Harley returns, it’s all Dexter and Maya can do not to blow their cover. But when the truth of Damien’s interrogation comes to light and Maya is presented with a cruel dilemma, everyone is pushed to their breaking point.

‘Cause your soul is on fire, a shot in the dark

What did they aim for when they missed your heart?

"This is an interesting turn of events." Harley sauntered over to them with a smug look on his face.

"Harley." Dexter tensed, shifting awkwardly. "You know, most people knock before entering a room."

"And miss out on this blockbuster moment?" He quipped. "I don't think so! I mean what a scene!" He exclaimed, looking between Dexter and Maya. "Funny thing is, I was just coming by to see what was taking our other friend so long, and what do I find?" He gestured towards Maya. "Not only did he not show up, I find you two . . . holding hands." Harley took another step towards his partner. "Sooo? What's the scene here, buddy?"

So clearly Harley hadn't overheard everything, but that didn't mean he wasn't about to have some questions about this.

Maya immediately locked eyes with Dexter, well aware of her pounding heart. Knowing that Harley was watching them, Maya resisted the urge to shake her head and settled for biting her lip nervously and letting her eyes make her plea for her. Please don't tell him. Dexter gave her a hard look, knowing exactly what she wanted him to withhold. It was a lot to ask for sure, especially considering that Eros was going to find out about the allegiance of their latest doppelganger, one way or another.

A series of emotions flitted across his expression before it smoothed over. Then Dexter immediately faced Harley. "Who says there's a scene at all?" He asked calmly.

Harley just raised an eyebrow.

"Although, when you put it that way, I can see why you'd think that." He remained steadfast under Harley's burning stare. "But for the record, I only came here to deliver some lunch and then she . . ." He jerked his thumb back toward Maya. "Started giving me trouble. Yelling, getting all emotional . . . you know the drill by now."

Harley snorted. "Of course she did."

"Naturally I got tired of her taking shots at me all day, so I thought I’d have a go just this once." Dexter's face twisted into a smirk, deliberately enough that Maya had to wonder if it was genuine. "Pretty convincing, huh?"

"That's . . ." Harley eyed him skeptically, then Maya.

Maya looked to Alana, who subtly tilted her head in his direction, silently urging her: 'just play along'. Knowing it was all to keep Nadia and her friends safe, Maya took a deep breath and turned on Harley, glowering at him when he glanced at her. "Lying cheats, both of you." she muttered. "Just say whatever else you have to say and get out."

Then Harley looked back at Dexter until his face broke into a wide smile. "That's brilliant!" He clapped his hands on Dexter's shoulders, not noticing the flash of relief on the Match's face. "And here I was thinking you'd gone soft on me!"

"I try."

"Anywho," His earlier suspicion gone for now, Harley let him go and then beckoned towards the door. Two guards entered carrying in a table, chairs and a small monitor. "Back to what I was really here for."

Dexter narrowed his eyes. "What's going on now?"

"What's going on is the next phase of this experiment," Harley explained. "I still don't know what happened to our other guy, but since you took care of his part, it looks like things are still going according to plan." He turned to his partner, smiling. "Good."

"Good? Why is that good?"

"Every bit of data we get on human emotion pushes Eros' technology further," He said. Then he cocked his head. "Surely you still understand that. Right?" He emphasized that last word a little more forcefully.

Dexter swallowed hard, then nodded. "Of course."

"Now while you two were busy re-enacting a romantic tragedy, Cecile and I have been getting 'acquainted' with Damien." Harley walked over to Maya, grinning snidely. "I knew you were upset at being kept apart again. Figured the least I could do was keep you updated."

After the mention of Damien, the rest of the answer had gone over her head, as Maya could only focus on what the guards were doing now. She felt her apprehension growing by the second as she watched them set up the table and then leave. She didn't even notice Harley was behind her until she felt her elbow being grabbed. "Hey, what-" He pulled her over to the chair and sat her down, facing the monitor. "What is all this?!" She demanded.

"Oh Maya, isn't it obvious? I've got something to show you." Harley pulled out a small remote and switched it on. The screen revealed Damien with his cuffed arms suspended above him. Cecile, Rowan and a guard stood in front of him, brandishing a stun gun.

"Oh my god!" Alana immediately yanked herself forward, only to be stopped by her handcuffs.

"Damien!" Maya gasped and instinctively moved to get up, but Harley's hand gripped her shoulder and forced her to sit back down.

"Keep quiet and watch," he hissed. "And you," Now he was addressing Dexter, jerking his chin towards Alana. "Stay there and watch her."

The guard pressed the stun gun into Damien's side. There was a buzz of electricity and Damien's body jolted. He squirmed against the current for a few seconds until the guard stepped back.

"Ticklish," Damien quipped. "Good for your first try, though."

"That was just the trial." The guard adjusted something on the device and then returned to address the P.I. "Hope you've saved your energy, Nazario."

Maya watched in terror as Damien arched his back, gritting his teeth. His hands were balled into fists as he visibly endeavored to breathe through the pain.

"That the best you got?"

"Not even close."

Maya couldn’t watch anymore. "Stop it." She said urgently. Harley moved to turn off the monitor, but then she grabbed at his jacket. "No, I meant stop hurting him!" Tears welled in her eyes as she looked to Dexter. "Please!"

While Cecile and Rowan pressured him with questions, the guard cranked up the voltage further before repeating the procedure. This time, Damien let out a strained groan as the electricity coursed through his body. His muscles tensed and spasmed as he writhed in agony. The guard held the device steady as he continued to shock Damien at short, regular intervals, sneering at him.

"Stop!" Maya covered her ears and squeezed her eyes shut. Every pained shout pierced her ears and cut through her like a dagger. Soon, his screams were drowned out by her own, echoing off the metal walls of her prison. "Don't hurt him!"

She wasn’t even aware of when the monitor was switched off and Damien's torment wasn't on camera for them to see. When she could no longer hear his voice, she looked up to find everyone staring at her.

"Now here's what's going to happen, Maya." Harley said as he sneered at her. "Should you agree to cooperate, we're willing to give Damien a little break."

Maya simply glared at him. But then his next words made her blood turn to ice.

"Now, I'm going to need you to remove your clothes."

Her anger melted into shock and her mind went blank as she stared at him in horror.

"Of course rest assured, you won't be harmed in any way."

"What?" seemed to be the only word that could come out of her mouth.

"You heard me. That's the deal," He said. "Of course, you don't have to do it but that just means we'd need to use other interrogation methods on Damien."

She tried to say something again, but couldn’t seem to make a sound. She turned to Alana, whose gaze was darting between her and Harley. Even Dexter looked appalled, his once-crossed arms now hanging stiffly at his sides.

"What does this even have to do with your experiment?" Alana asked evenly. Her expression remained composed to the point that only a highly trained professional would've picked up on the flash of outrage, simmering underneath.

"Now if I told you that, the results wouldn’t exactly be accurate, would they?"

"Right, of course. 'Results'." Alana rolled her eyes. "This is what Eros has millions of dollars to spend on? You know there are plenty of strip clubs in town if you're that starved."

"Ugh, now why'd you have to go there?" Harley wrinkled his nose in disgust. "I'm programmed to be a perfect match for specific personalities, not to go fooling around in a den full of mindless junkies. You humans and your warped priorities are really something." Then he walked around to Maya's side of the table, peering down at her. "And anyways, it's not as though we could frame the environment to decrease hostility can we?"

He reached out as if he was going to touch her cheek, but stopped halfway, smirking at her. "I did say I wouldn’t touch you, Maya." He gestured to his hand, which was a good few feet away from her. "See? I can keep my word. In addition," he pointed at Alana. "You even have the benefit of a female being present to ease your mind."

"N-no." Maya choked out, scooting back in her chair instinctively. She took a deep, shaky breath and struggled to compose herself. "No," she spoke out more clearly. "You can't make me do this!" Then she turned to Dexter, who was watching her with narrowed eyes. "Dexter, you can't seriously be okay with this!" she pleaded. "I know you're not Damien, but you do have his personality! This is not something he'd want for anyone!"

Dexter said nothing. Only the storm of uncertainty in his eyes spoke for him as he processed that.

"Please," she begged. "You don't have to do this!"

"I'm sorry," Harley was looking between them, before he watched Maya incredulously. "Are you seriously appealing to him?"

"I-"

"Well this is intriguing," He placed his hands on the table and bent forward to scrutinize her. "One change in appearance and you've developed this much trust in him."

"What?! What the hell are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the fact that in spite of everything he's done so far, you still believe he's going to help you. All because he looks exactly like your boyfriend."

"No, I-"

"That personality you're referring to? All information uploaded from Damien's file." He gestured to Dexter, smirking. "It must have felt so real to you when he pulled off his little masquerade at the Louvre, didn’t it Maya?"

"Eros may have distorted it to fit their own ends," Maya said sharply. "But that doesn’t mean they can change the real thing!" Her voice became a little more steady as she faced him defiantly. "Human or not, Damien would never hurt me! He would protect me at all costs!"

Harley didn’t even flinch. "You're right," he said sadly. "Damien's an honorable man. Courageous, strong and clever. He knows how to find his way out of situations like this, wouldn’t he? But this time with you around, he's holding back. Why would he endure so much unnecessary pain, if not to protect you?" He leaned forward, his eyebrows arched in sympathy. "Surely you don't want to be the reason for his pain? Just cooperate and you could help him for once."

Maya was at a loss for words. "But . . ." She looked around her helplessly, struggling to figure a way out of this; to keep Damien safe without having to suffer humiliation, without giving Eros the satisfaction of being able to manipulate her.

There was no way this stunt was going to let Damien off the hook. This was just one of many sick mind games they had in store for them and she wasn’t naïve enough to think that things weren't going to get worse from here on out. But what else could she do at the moment? Damien was alone. Alana was restrained and she herself was at the mercy of two androids tasked with collecting 'data' from her. Sloane and the others were still miles away; unless they got here soon or Damien or Alana managed to free themselves, no one could help her.

Harley observed her in silence for a little longer as she continued to sift through her thoughts. Then he sighed and pulled out his comm, his eyes never leaving hers. "Set it to maximum."

Maya's eyes widened and she shot out of her seat, every logical thought going out the window. "No, don't!" Then she could hear Damien's tortured screams again from over the intercom, louder than ever. Her heart felt as though it would tear into pieces and she gripped the edge of the table. "Stop!" She wailed. "I'll do it, okay? Just please stop it!"

Harley muttered a quick command into the device and just like that, the deafening noise stopped. Maya collapsed back into her chair, sobbing. He crossed his arms, watching her expectantly. "Now are you gonna cooperate?"

Maya's sniffling started to quiet, but she managed a quick nod. She stood up from her chair, still shaking.

"Whenever you're ready."

She could hear the rattling of metal against the wall as Alana pulled at her cuffs, frustrated. "Maya . . . no-"

"I have to, Alana." she wept. "I'm sorry. I can't watch them . . ." Keeping her gaze on the floor, she wiped her face and then took a deep breath. Though tears continued to spill from her eyes, she willed herself not to lose her composure again.

Maya had to focus her efforts to get her arms to work as she pulled her shawl off from around her neck, not looking at where she tossed it aside. She heard a shift of movement, but kept her eyes on herself, therefore not noticing when Dexter turned his head away to hide his pained expression.

Her fingers trembled as she unbuttoned her shirt, reluctantly sliding it off. The cold air hit her skin and she instinctively hugged herself. From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of Alana averting her gaze; her sleek brown hair covering her face.

"Keep going." she could hear the amusement in Harley's voice. Maya wasn’t sure if anything . . . else was going through his mind at the moment, but she didn’t dare look at him to find out. Her mind went numb and she swallowed hard, unfastening the button of her jeans and removing them. Now in only her undergarments, Maya stepped away, hugging her shoulders again, allowing her long violet hair to fall forward, covering as much of her as it could.

"Harley please, this is more than enough-" She could barely speak above a whisper. Her muscles were stiff as she fought to keep her balance. "I've done what you asked. Let me at least keep these on."

Harley seemed to consider that, then Dexter spoke up. "I think that's enough, Harley. You've already achieved the purpose."

"All right, fair enough," He replied. "Now that wasn’t so hard was it?"

"Go to hell." Maya snapped.

"Ooh you seem touchy." Harley sneered. "Anyway, a deal's a deal and I appreciate your cooperation, Maya." Maya knelt down to take back her clothes, only for him to swipe them out of her reach. "I'll be holding onto these if you don't mind."

She pressed her lips together, fighting to maintain self-control. Then she glanced at Alana, who was glaring at Harley with a cold fury in her eyes that Maya hadn't seen before; her fingers whitened from clenching her fists.

"Ready to go see Damien?"

Maya bit back a gasp as the true intent behind this finally made sense. Oh god, what have I done? She'd expected this the second he'd made that unreasonable demand in the first place, but hearing it was so much worse as she realized what was about to go down. How was she supposed to face Damien in such a state?

Not too long ago, she'd wanted nothing more than to see him again. But now . . .

No, I don't want to go. Not like this.

"You're fine now, Maya. No one's gonna hurt you."

Nothing had happened. Harley had surprisingly kept true to his word and hadn't laid a hand on her, yet she still felt so violated.

She watched as Harley opened the door and stood outside, waiting. Taking a deep breath, still covering her chest, Maya walked forward numbly. Just as she reached the door, there was a sudden movement and Alana brushed past her, moving to stand between her and Harley.

He raised an eyebrow at her. "What are you doing?"

"Coming with you, of course," she said point-blank. "I'm the additional 'female presence' you used for your experiment, remember?" she challenged. "You wouldn't want to compromise your data at this point."

"She has a point," Dexter said softly.

Harley frowned. "We don't even need her for this-"

"Hey!" Alana snapped. "Haven’t you done enough?!" Then she narrowed her eyes dangerously. "You might have me in handcuffs now and threatened to kill me numerous times, but don’t think for a damn second that I'm standing around because I'm intimidated by you." She stepped forward. "You do not wanna leave me to my own devices. One way or another, there's no way in hell I'm leaving her alone with you after this."

They locked eyes in a deadly stare for several moments until Harley waved his hand dismissively. "Fine," he spat. "Don't try anything funny though."

"I won't if you won't."

Harley was about to react to that but then Dexter stepped between them, clearing his throat. "Harley, I'll take care of this. Why don't you go on ahead?" When he was met with a skeptical look, he managed to force a convincing smirk on his face. "Let me handle this while you give Damien the good news . . ."

His partner's surprised expression immediately changed to that of pride. "That's a perfect idea." He placed a hand on his shoulder, nodding approvingly. "I'll go ahead then. Don't take too long."

Maya was watching this whole interaction, momentarily taken aback by Dexter's sudden change. He'd gone from being completely conflicted over this whole thing to complying with everything Harley was doing - and at this point, she'd just about lost any hope she'd had for him. The rational part of her told her Dexter couldn't have interfered without throwing himself and everyone else under the bus, but that didn't make it hurt any less.

But then just like that, here he was again, keeping Harley away from them.

What the hell is going on?!

Suddenly, she felt something brush against her arm and she jumped fearfully, hugging herself more tightly.

"Easy, Maya. You're okay." Alana held her hands up slightly. Her handcuffs were dangling off one of her wrists while the other held Maya's discarded shawl. "I just thought you might need this," she whispered. "I hid it behind me when Harley wasn't looking."

"Alana . . ." Maya watched, astonished, as Alana draped the shawl around her shoulders in an unusually gentle way. "Thank you." She cracked a small, grateful smile as she held the ends together, notably relieved at how it provided an extra covering for her. "But Harley said- and Dexter-"

"Won't do anything about this." The agent spoke with confidence as she eyed the wary Match standing at the doorway.

Maya's eyes darted in that direction where she noticed that Harley was already gone. Only Dexter stood there, his body taut with tension. He was pointedly looking away, and at the same time, placing himself in front of the opening as if in a futile attempt to shield them from sight. "You're probably right, Alana." There was a tinge of bitterness in her voice, but no defiance this time. "We're way past that point now."

Dexter flinched. "Maya, I-"

"Save it. I know." Letting out a resigned sigh, she braced herself and walked past him; following closely behind Alana. Though they were now out in the open, it was fortunately the middle of the night; which meant there was hardly anyone around. Still, Alana seemed to make it a point to shield her at every turn.

As they made their way to the other cargo container where Damien was, she involuntarily slowed her movement and almost collided with Dexter. She locked her teary eyes with his and he stepped back. His gaze swept over her before quickly fixating on the ground and they continued walking.

Maya hadn't looked at him for too long, but it had still been enough to pick up on something else in his eyes. She was half convinced that she was imagining the emotion in there that she hadn't seen clearly enough or even expected from him.

At least not until now.

Guilt.

But what Maya hadn't picked up on was the anger bubbling underneath; the little beads of sweat starting to appear on his forehead, the slight trembling in his hands - little manifestations barely concealing the rising tide from within as that faraway look in his eyes from before returned . . .

"I hated the person I was back then. I never want to be that man again. I did a lot of things I'm not proud of. I worked undercover, never knowing who I could trust, lying to good people who didn’t deserve it."

"But you did it to help them. You protected those people."

". . . I couldn’t protect everyone."

I breathe underwater, it’s all in my hands,

What can I do, don’t let it fall apart . . .

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

@lizeboredom @simplyaiden-blog @damienazarios @scalpeljockeybrycelahela @walkerduchess @mfackenthal @choiceslife @walkerismychoice @gardeningourmet @rainbowsinthestorm @itsraleighcarrera @eileendannie @mysteli @flowerpowell @the-everlasting-dream @aworldoffandoms @musicalnerd98 @thecordoniandiaries @brightpinkpeppercorn @lady-kato @kinda-iconic @universallypizzataco @sawyeroakleyscowboyhat @jlpplays1 @desiree-0816 @cynicalworlds @darley1101 @odetomars @moonlightgem7 @h3llostrang3r @stillafictosexual @mrsnazariowalker @indiacater @burnsoslow @ab1901 @dcbbw @client-327

#perfect match #damien x mc #damien nazario #maya park #alana kusuma #pm dames #harley doyle #the edge of the world #perfect match au #tw: psychological warfare #perfect match fanfiction #tw: humiliation #tw: torture #choices fanfiction

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derangedhyena-zoids · 4 years

Text

You know what there doesn't seem to be a preponderance of on Zi?

Kids.

fair warning: this is a goddamn mess of a horseshitpost about history, population and reproduction dynamics, and chucklefucking about character genetics that I have unfortunately have actually spent time thinking about because my brain literally doesn't accept "idle" as a state.

this probably gets a little weird and also contains mention of sensitive topic (tagged) so please be aware of that

Ok so

Compared to say, the society pictured in Fuzors (which doesn't comply with the xCentury-verse sufficiently and thus gets ignored by me), NC0 seems equally prosperous but a lot more resource-strained. Not "at that time" but simply as a way of life.

Nobody thinks of themselves as resource-poor, but nothing is terribly robust except in the largest cities (eg the modern day rebuilds of the old capitals, Guygalos and New (Helic) City.)

This isn't a secret. It's more or less been the case for the entirety of humans' colonization of the planet. That's why locale self-sufficiency is so important and why there's huge stretches of nothing everywhere. You simply cannot live wherever you want. The environment is fucking hostile and You Will Die.

So first off, let's be real: when you first colonize a planet and want to establish yourselves there, there's going to be rules/procedures in place regarding reproduction to make sure nobody ends up genetically representing too much of the population. It'd take a bit to get to the point of non-directed (and/or non test-tube) reproduction even being allowed.

Basically, space humans colonizing alien planets gonna have hella birth control tech available. There are no "oops" offspring. I'm inclined to think it's actually something that's been modified on a very base level (read: likely genetic modification, is heritable) level, that would require outside intervention of some kind (eg chemical) to make reproduction possible.

The point of "safe to naturally mingle" would likely correspond with the eventual, initial tech-dip as the stores of things from initial arrival were finally depleted (because it was probably planned out that way), and tech that was arrived with started to go offline permanently.

They'd have to be settling into what they could do and make with the resources available on Zi, meaning that avoiding uncontrolled population growth was still a huge priority, because the let's-successfully-establish-civilization mindset would still be thoroughly ingrained at that point.

There'd be hundreds of years of "danger zone" population levels where large adverse events could've easily wiped them all out if they weren't mindful. But, they were, and humans colonized Zi successfully (...again), good job, hooray

The overarching society-level birth control was well-codified in the various cultural groups that arose. But these inclinations did change over time as larger and more friction-prone groups formed (read: the Empire, over time, became large and in charge, discontent developed and huge chunks of people kept trying to detach. Eventually the Republic cropped up. You need more people to be a bigger thing.)

Any desire to handle the population with kid-gloves all but went out the window as the first conflicts started and people were killed. These conflicts eventually escalated into the long-standing wars between the Empire and Republic, and restrictions on reproduction basically went away. (+depending on who was in charge things may have even Yikes'd in the other direction)

(just a canon-fyi I'm not following the Battle Story in the slightest, I'm only trying to make the xCentury anime(s) function. Zoids' various canons are like Transformers' canons - A MESS)

Before these wars started happening, not much besides the occasional natural disaster, accident, or simply old age killed anyone. People can live a long time on Zi! Much longer than usual.

Why? Because a lot of human common human pathogens from Earth simply *wouldn't exist* there (space humans are gonna be really careful to not tote that shit around), so there's only really lifestyle-related issues, latent or new-mutation genetic problems, and any micro-organisms on Zi that mutated sufficiently to be able to affect people. (which is not really a stretch if we're going by the thought that Zoidians were long-evolved humans. The Zoidians were there a LOT longer than humans have been)

so. modern day. I have NC0 a few hundred years after CC/GF. As a whole I think the human race on Zi is relatively young, but a lot of the oldest information (like "exactly when we fucking got here") was lost in Imperial/Republican wars.

Those went on for hundreds of years themselves, enough to establish mass Zoid manufacture as The Way Of Things(tm) and otherwise entrench what became the norms for human society there. (I STRONGLY suspect there's still a lot of residual Imperial/Republican tension in places/families and that Backdraft was founded by, for lack of a better word, Imperial sympathizers with a longstanding grudge against a unified GF-run government *coughhh Alteil cough* but... I digress)

Humans are at a perfectly serviceable population. I actually hesitate to put a number on it because I don't know what # value would properly represent "a sustainable amount of people on a barren planet with very limited resources" but it'd be a sizable population (I'd guesstimate tens of millions). I imagine the GF, being the unquestionably-global governing body*, is relatively authoritarian as far as the core population and major cities go. They obviously can't tightly police the whole planet, but they can certainly keep an eye on it.

This doesn't mean it's a dystopia or that the GF is evil or that it's anything bad, really. I sort of picture it being run by Committee, likely made up of various descendants of powerful families ([insert 10 tons of political intrigue here that I'm picturing, it's amazing, ANYWAYS]) Zi's government is definitively a plutocracy.

There were plenty of people on the planet who were ambivalent towards the Empire and the Republic's nonsense and just carried on what social norms and culture that had been established by the early colonists. Many didn't LIKE that all the fighting was happening because innocent, uninvolved people kept getting killed, and that sucked because they just wanted to live quiet lives in secure towns and be left alone.

There was also a desire for more law enforcement in general, since gangs, bandits, and the Zi equivalents of sovereign citizens kept causing problems. So when the Guardian Force was established initially to wrestle peace into place, it was largely welcomed and people were very, very glad to get rid of hundreds of years of war.

This also meant a lot of people had kids because things became markedly more stable. In fact what led up *to* New Century was probably several solid centuries of strong population growth, establishing additional stable strongholds in habitable areas (new cities were established and built up), modernization and other general signs of prosperity.

So, all this blah blah blah leads up to several key realities for New Century:

-There isn't a strangehold on population growth, nor are there formal limits. However, the chemical-whatever that causes the inbuilt birth-control to fuck off is under the purview of - or at least monitored by - the government. So... there's that. It's also overwhelmingly likely that people have figured out other sources for this over time, if for some reason they're distrustful.

-This inbuilt bc is in effect for everyone. Both folks involved have to be on board. I mean, it'd technically be possible to surreptitiously slip some of the chemical-whatever to an unwilling partner? But it's not like that would be difficult to figure out.

-Family units range from what we'd recognize as a 'family' to entire towns sharing children/parenting responsibilities. Monogamy is the norm but polygamy isn't weird. People can be pretty sexually loose and it's not frowned upon at all - because let's be real, NC0-society is at full-on bread-and-circus levels of operation. There seems to be a moderate anti-intellectual bent and Zoid battles are the height of achievement. People are chasing highs as a way of life.

Topically relevant individuals' headcanon:

I think Steve's wife died in childbirth (having Leena.) It neatly explains what happened to her and Layon's unhealthy obsession with Leena.

Feel like Bit and Brad both were raised in the more "communal" type of settings.

Harry's family comes from old Republican money.

Stoller came from a family that's the equivalent of a house in the south that has confederate flags everywhere. Except they're Imperial.

ARE YOU STILL HERE? GOOD LORD WHY. WELL NOW THIS IS A SHITPOST ABOUT ZOIDIAN HYBRIDS AND OTHER ANCESTRY FUCKERY

Remember in some other post I wrote I said that when you start to hybridize Zoidians in, reproduction becomes more difficult? That's IN PART because of the bc thing, and in part because general genetics fuckery. But once you *had* a hybrid you had very robust individuals, who initially lacked a fully functional version of the inbuilt bc. Over time that was mixed back in, but there were at least a couple janky generations.

Literally every hybridized line in existence is either from Hiltz or Ryss. Fiona didn't reproduce (wasn't for lack of trying. Both her and Van being bonded to the same Organoid caused problems in that department.)

Ryss had two kids with Raven. The reality of Raven aging and dying sucked. The reality of her kids, grandkids, etc aging and dying sucked. Though her immediate offspring lived a lot longer than progressive generations did, as the bloodline became more diluted, a slightly-improved human lifespan became the norm. This was incredibly depressing to Ryss and is a large part of why she fucked off to the middle of nowhere to live with things that wouldn't age out and die on her. It's also why she didn't continue to have children.

Hiltz... Hiltz fucked (and well, raped) a lot of people (50% as a power/hate thing and 50% because he's from the Feed-Fuck-Fight club) and some of the people that lived to talk about it had offspring. The same aging issues were in effect for these offspring, but unlike Ryss's family they didn't have the benefit of anyone explaining what the fuck was going on. So they had a strange time.

Remember that these direct hybrids would've been of age squarely in the aforementioned, post-GF "everyone is having kids" time, so a fair number of distinct new lines were created and persisted. There was also a weird range of ages involved, because the direct hybrids lived A WHILE and could have offspring for most of that time.

Now, in the context of "many years later", this means a fair number of people carry these genes in varying dilutions. It's not a large amount in the context of the entire human population. It's a handful of family lines with increasingly baffled histories. But family groups frittered a lot in the aftermath of GF, so a lot of that knowledge was functionally lost.

Basically no one has any idea anymore, what little idea that they had in the first place. The only families with distinct and traceable genealogies are the rich/old-money ones.

So, in the NC0 cast I officially headcanon 5 folks as these dilute-hybrids. You know most of them; Sara, Vega, and Brad, but I'm impolitely adding Stoller and Iyaga (Ehga?) to that mix because reasons.

Brad and Iyaga are from Hiltz's line. Sara and Stoller are from Ryss's. Vega is unique in that he draws from BOTH; Ryss from his mother's side and Hiltz from his father's. Sara had a *really* hard time actually having a kid as a result of that particular genetic fuckery. IMO this explains some of her behavior towards Vega - by the time she had him she was so emotionally estranged by both the loss of Vega's father and the loss of numerous pregnancies (and by that time was more involved with her 'backdraft career'), she struggled with BASIC AFFECTION.

anyways, thanks for coming to the world's most useless ted talk

*ZBGF is like world-police, GF is world-gov, ZBC is a branch of ZBGF that keeps battles in line (and monitors usage of things). The GF is "background", in that it's using the more-friendly-seeming ZBC as its eyes and ears while keeping track of things on a higher level.

p.s. the bc thing is actually adapted from another story of mine's background, so don't worry I didn't spend ALLLLLL this time thinking about that for this only sdhgfjdfdf

#headcanon #tw rape

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theblueskyphoenix · 5 years

Text

Grid Ghost Chapter 4: Treatments

“And you’re positive Sycorax will be able to succeed in this treatment plan for his tumor?” Kim asked, her arms crossed, leaning against a table.

“Of course.” Liv smiled, her arms folded behind her back. “We have all the medical tools and advances needed. However, it is still an experimental treatment so your husband will be very much a trial run. But we promise, we will treat him well. You’ve been looking for answers and you’re willing to do whatever it takes, right?”

Kim glanced to the side.

“I… I suppose… You promise he will be safe?”

Liv nodded.

“I do. He’ll be treated very well under our care. You want him to live a good long healthy life right?”

“Yes…”

“Then please, let us take him into our hands and give him that life he deserves.”

Yeah… Sure. More like “Give him to us so we can have a lab rat because of how special his condition is but oh no don’t worry he’ll be treated like a king.” Please…

Trina never could forget the day her father was taken from her. Her mother never knew that she had eavesdropped on her conversation with Liv. She usually respected her mother’s privacy with clients but… this one was an exception.

Liv just didn’t feel right to her. The look in her eyes, the way she carried herself, how she spoke to others, it all felt so fake to her. If Trina didn’t know better she would think the woman was some kind of alien trying to pose as a human with how she acted.

And that’s where I have to stop watching too many sci-fi movies before bed.

Trina shook her mind of it, focusing on the moment at hand.

Now was not the time to be bitter. It was a time to be happy.

Trina stood outside the door of a patient room, a basket that contained an assortment of goodies held tightly to her chest, Takashi standing next to her.

“Do you think we should come back later?” she asked. “I mean, maybe we should wait till all the surgery stuff is done.”

Takashi placed a hand on her shoulder, giving it a squeeze.

“You can give him something to look forward to after the surgery stuff is over. Besides, you’ve wanted to see him for over a year now. Do you want to wait longer?”

“No… just…” Trina lowered her head. “… Call me nuts I’m just… worried he wouldn’t want to see me right now. Liv always rubbed me the wrong way and I just worry what she did to his head. What if… he doesn’t remember me?”

Takashi’s look turned gentle, bringing her into a side hug.

“I doubt that’s the case. Who could forget someone as awesome as you?”

Trina giggled.

“Taka…”

“I mean it. But, it’s up to you if you want to see him now.”

Trina looked at the door again, pondering for a moment before giving a nod.

“Let’s say hi.”

They both moved forward, Takashi knocking on the door.

“Come in.”

Trina’s heart skipped a beat at hearing her father’s voice. The most she had been able to hear of it in recent times was old videos her mother had recorded, be it him doing things on his own time or when he was spending time with her or listening to old voicemails on her phone.

Trina took a deep breath before opening the door, entering the room, Takashi behind her.

Her eyes were wide as she beheld Obake. While his hair was different in how it was styled and he was a little on the paler side, there was no questioning it was her father. Especially with the red streak in his hair that she knew all too well.

Obake’s eyes were wide too as he stared back at Trina. It was the real Trina. The daughter he had raised for over ten years. The daughter he spoiled to the moon and back.

My Little Star…

“H… Hi…” Trina whispered, moving closer to the bed.

“Hello…” He said, sitting up a little.

Trina swallowed hard, trying her best to keep it together.

“It’s…. It’s been awhile…” Trina fumbled with the basket in her hands, lowering her head a little. “You… remember me… right?”

Obake tipped her chin up, his eyes glassy with tears.

“How could I ever forget my Little Star?”

Trina smiled, biting her lip.

“Daddy…”

She set the basket down, bringing her arms as gently as she could around Obake, huddling close to him.

“Oh, Daddy! It’s really you!” She cried out, burying her face into his shoulder.

Obake hugged her as tightly as he could, running his hand through her hair.

“Trina…”

She really is alive… My dear daughter…

He took in everything he could from this moment. Her warmth, the softness of her hair, the tenderness of her embrace… He had forgotten what this actually felt like. He had moments with the bot version of his daughter but… nothing could ever replace what he was feeling right now.

Obake rested his head against hers, sighing happily.

“I’m home…”

Trina nodded, nuzzling him.

“You are… You really are.”

She pulled back away from him gently, cupping his face in her hands.

“Sorry just… I’m just so happy to see you again.”

Obake smiled gently, placing his hands over hers.

“I think I can understand how you feel entirely.” He leaned forward, kissing her forehead.

Trina giggled, keeping close.

“I never stopped looking for you. I promised that no matter what would happen, I would always keep looking for you.”

“Oh, Trina…”

Trina smiled.

“What would I be without my partner in crime?”

Obake chuckled, cupping one her cheeks in his hand.

“An amazing young lady. Least, I think so.”

Trina leaned into his hand.

“Dad…”

They embraced each other again for a moment before Trina pulled away, picking up the basket she had brought in.

“I know you can’t eat for a bit because surgery reasons but I got your favorites in here along with get better food for when you can. Packets of miso soup, bottled water, chocolate and, courtesy of Takashi over there, freshly baked mini blueberry scones.”

Obake looked over to Takashi, who was currently leaning against a wall in the room. He gave a small wave, along with a sheepish look.

“Trina said it would make a good first impression… Also, your wife and Shaylin said you deserved better than that scone you had stashed in your backpack.”

Obake rolled his eyes but couldn’t help but chuckle.

“I suppose they’re right… Well, thank you. I look forward to eating all of this once I’m in the clear from surgery.” Obake set the basket on the side table next to his bed before looking back to Takashi. “Though, I wouldn’t mind a proper introduction.”

Takashi gave a bow.

“Takashi Sky. I’m Shaylin’s eldest son. Trina and I have been buddies for about a year now.”

“Yep.” Trina smiled. “We bonded over martial arts. He’s my…” She giggled, putting her hands together. “Senpai~!”

Obake brought a hand over his mouth, trying not to laugh too hard.

Takashi chuckled, rolling his eyes.

“Yes, yes, she’s my good little kohai. She can totally kick anyone’s butt though.”

“That’s my girl.” Obake smiled. “Thank you for being a good friend to her, Takashi. Oh, and you have made a good first impression.”

“Awesome.” Takashi grinned.

Trina smiled, taking one of Obake’s hands into hers.

“Really glad to have you back, Dad. We got a lot to catch up on.”

Obake smiled, squeezing her hand.

“And I look forward to hearing every last bit of it.”

oooooo

“I’m going to kill that devil woman the next time I see her.” Kim growled, her eyes narrowed.

She and Shaylin were looking over Obake’s charts and treatment plans that were on his USB via Kim’s computer. They detailed everything they needed to know about his implant and how to go about handling it along with his tumor. It disgusted both Kim and Shaylin how the implant worked and what it had been doing to Obake for the past year.

“I’m in line right behind you.” Shaylin said, her own eyes narrowed. “I’m afraid to know what she would’ve done to Takashi if I had let her get near him when I called her in for opinions on his condition.”

“Poke, prod, see what makes him tick and I dunno, maybe turn him into her pet.” Kim sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I honestly don’t know anymore. I already had a low opinion of her as it were, now it’s hit to levels of words I would never say in front of my daughter.”

“Si, si.” Shaylin shook her head. “Well, we can plan to murder her reputation later. Right now, we need to help Bob.” Shaylin turned her attention to his surgery notes. “So, we can’t dismantle the implant. It’s too embedded into the skull and would be risky to remove. So, instead, we’re reprogramming it to work to his advantage and deactivating the shock collar function.” Shaylin raised an eyebrow. “I’m surprised he wants the thing to still be active at all, though.”

“Well, seeing as it could act as an aid to keep the tumor from returning, I can see why in that regard. And… Okay, I’ll give Liv credit, giving him the ability of technokinesis is quite the feat she pulled and I can see why he’d keep it since it would have plenty of uses outside of whatever she had him do for her. Though, we’re going to need some help in regards to the tech. I’m a neurosurgeon, not a bio tech surgeon.”

“Let me take care of that part. I’m gonna call in Eboni since this is right up her alley.”

“Ah, good idea. Then I’ll just focus on the tumor.” Kim frowned as she looked at the scan, showing the state of it. “I never thought I’d see it that big.”

“It’s bad but you can handle it, right?”

Kim nodded.

“I’ve been testing a procedure for years now to remove it. I’ll have to make tweaks to it but I’m sure it’s going to work. It has to. For his sake.”

“Then we have a plan.”

Shaylin closed the charts, getting up.

“I’ll go get the O.R. prepped and call in Eboni. We won’t start the procedure till everyone has gotten a proper rest but at the very least, everything will be ready.”

“Right.” Kim got up as well. “I’m going to go talk to Bob. I have some catching up to do.”

“Sounds good.”

The women parted ways, heading for their own respective destinations.

Kim quietly opened the door to Obake’s room, peeking inside to see if he was awake. Her heart melted as she saw him fast asleep with Trina curled up to his side, her arms around him.

Kim smiled softly, making her way into the room, closing the door behind her. She grabbed an extra blanket from one of the cabinets, draping it over Trina, who smiled in her sleep, nuzzling her father’s chest.

“Sweet dreams, Little Star.” Kim whispered, kissing her head before looking to Obake, kissing his head as well. “You too, my love.”

Obake smiled a bit in his sleep, nuzzling her a little. Kim nuzzled back before pulling away, making herself comfortable on the guest bed in the room. She took one last look at Obake and Trina before closing her eyes, drifting off to sleep.

Don’t worry, Bob. I’ll cure you soon.

I promise.

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coloradogirl07 · 6 years

Text

Cop Car (Billy Hargrove Imagine)

based on “Cop Car” by Sam Hunt.

(There are 2 versions of this song, one by Keith Urban & one by Sam Hunt; I like the Sam Hunt one 😊)

warning: mild cussing

(Y/F/N) = your first name

(Y/L/N) = your last name

We drove right past that no trespassing sign. We sat on the tailgate and watched the planes take off.

“Billy, that sign says no trespassing...” you said cautiously as the blue Camaro zipped past the sign hanging up on the chainlink fence. Billy kept his eyes ahead of them, not answering you, “Billy...” you started again as the Camaro came to a stop in a very open area.

“Do you trust me?” he looked over at you as he grabbed a cigarette.

“Depends...” you smiled at him.

He held the cigarette between his lips as he lit it, “Just trust me.” he said as he exhaled some smoke and then got out of the car.

You followed his actions and got out of the passenger seat, “Are we at the airport?” you asked as your eyes landed on several planes in the distance. Billy smirked at you as he stood in front of the Camaro, “Why are we at the airport?” you asked as you sat on the hood of the car.

“The sun will be fully set soon and then we’re going to watch the planes take off.” Billy answered as he dropped his cigarette and put it out with his boot, “I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s pretty cool.”

“Everything you take me to do is cool, Billy.” you admitted as he turned around to face you.

We thought we had all night, there was no need to rush. That’s when those cops came pulling up. And I thought, “Man, ain’t this some shh.” Your daddy’s gonna kill me. But if I survive tonight, I wouldn’t change one thing.

Billy walked towards the hood of the car where you were seated still. He leaned against your legs, his hand coming up to cup your cheek and brush your hair out of your face. He released your face to look down at his watch, “There should be a flight leaving any minute now.” he looked over his shoulder at the planes. When he turned around he saw you staring at him, “Don’t be weird.”

“How am I being weird?” you reached forward and grabbed one of his belt loops and pulled him towards you.

“You should be staring at the planes, not at me.” he smirked at her.

You shrugged, “My mistake.” You smiled at him as your hand found its place at the back of his neck and pulled him down to you connecting your lips. You let your legs fall apart so that Billy was resting in between them. You only pulled away when you felt the car beginning to shake beneath them. You looked past Billy and towards a plane that was zooming over them, your hair being blown in every direction.

You laughed a little as you watched it disappear in the clouds, but you face turned to confusion when you saw Billy looking at something behind the car, “Shit.” he mumbled as he stood up straight.

“What is it?” You sat up on the hood and looked over your shoulder to see a cop car driving towards them, “Shit.” You repeated him.

“Your dad is going to kill me.” he stated, “He’s never going to let me see you again.”

“Billy, it’s fine.” you told him as you got off of the hood, “It’s not like you dragged me here against my will.”

“Your dad is literally going to kill me.” he ran his hand through his hair as the cop car stopped.

“Billy, it’s okay.” you touched his arm, “To be honest, I’m still having fun. I’ve never been in trouble like this before.” you grinned at him.

But there was something ‘bout the way the blue lights were shining, bringing out the freedom in your eyes. I was too busy watching you going wild child to be worried about going to jail. You were thinking that running for it would make a good story. I was thinking you were crazy as hell.

“You’re having fun?” Billy stared at you, “We’re about to get taken down to the Hawkins Police Station, (Y/F/N).” you were looking at the police car, waiting patiently for the officers to exit the vehicle. He shook his head at the big smile on your face and the look in your eye that he hadn’t seen before, “We’re about to be in so much trouble.”

“We could run for it.” you grinned at him.

Billy’s eyes grew even wider, “You’re shitting me, right?”

You shrugged, “It’d make a good story, wouldn’t it?”

Billy shook his head at you, “You’re crazy.”

“You love it.” you kept grinning at him and he just continued to shake his head at you as Chief Hopper and another officer got out of the car.

“Hargrove.” Hopper sighed, “I should’ve guessed when the call said a blue Camaro.” his eyes moved to you, “(Y/L/N), this is a first.” his eyes moved back to Billy, “You know I work with her dad, right?”

“Yes, sir.” Billy answered.

Man, they weren’t playing. They sure put those cuffs on quick. You tried to sweet talk ‘em. They didn’t fall for it, but I did. You were on the left, I was on the right. I knew you didn’t smoke, when you asked him for a light. And I laughed, he got mad and slammed the door.

Hopper sighed, “I do have to take you both to the station for trespassing.” he said as he grabbed the cuffs from his belt, “Just procedure.” Hopper explained as he took Billy hands behind his back and latched the handcuffs onto his wrist. Hopper reached out towards his partner, and grabbed his cuffs from him, “(Y/L/N), come here.”

“Hop, can’t you just let us go?” you batted your eyes at him and he rolled his eyes, while Billy couldn’t take his eyes off of you, “Please, my dad never has to know. I don’t get in trouble, ever. Can I just have a one time pass? Pretty please?”

Hopper stared at you but shook his head, “One time passes turn into every time passes, (Y/L/N).” he walked you towards the cop car and had you get in on the left side, while his partner walked Billy towards the right.

“Are you going to tow my car?” Billy asked.

“Do you have somebody who can come drive it to station for you?” Hopper asked him.

Billy just looked down to his lap, “No,”

“Nancy could.” you spoke up, “Can I call her at the station and see if her or Steve will come get it?” you looked up at Hopper who nodded his head at you.

“Steve Harrington isn’t driving my car.” Billy argued.

“Do you want them to tow it, Billy?” you asked him, he didn’t answer you as he stared at his lap still. You shook your head at him and then looked back up at Hopper before he closed the door, “Hey, Hop.” he pulled the door open further, “Could I get a light?” you grinned at him as he slammed the door. Billy was staring at you, completely falling even more for this new side of you he hadn’t seen before.

I swear, your daddy’s gonna kill me. But if I survive tonight, I wouldn’t change one thing. Baby, I know it sounds crazy.

"(Y/F/N), this may be our last date ever.” Billy leaned his head against the seat as he stared through the windshield at Hopper and his partner.

“What?” you had scooted closer to him so that your head was resting on his shoulder, “Why?”

“Didn’t you hear me earlier?” he asked, “Your dad is going to kill me.”

“It’s quite possible.” you admitted.

“You wanna know what, though?”

“What?” you looked up at him.

He shook his head, “I wouldn’t change anything. Nothing from tonight, nothing from any night that we spend together.”

Side by side and locked in tight. They were taking their time, but we didn’t mind. We talked and we laughed. We sat real close. By the time they let us go, I was already gone.

It had felt like you were in the cop car for hours as you continued to talk with each other, while Hopper and his partner did the same in front of the cop car. He felt you starting to completely relax into his body and he knew you had started to fall asleep.

“Hargrove, (Y/L/N),” Hopper opened Billy’s door and you both sat up, “Get out, but this is a one time thing. You got it?” he unhooked your handcuffs.

“Thank you, Hop.” you smiled at him and walked towards Billy’s Camaro, and sat in the passenger seat.

“I mean it, Hargrove.” Hopper said before Billy could follow you, “I won’t tell her dad since he has said some nice things about you. But next time, I will.”

“Yes, sir.” Billy answered and then walked towards his car.

But you were so innocent, but you were stealing my heart. I fell in love in the back of a cop car.

He started it and pulled out of the area and made his way towards a main road, “That was fun.” you laughed, he looked over at you and saw the innocent look in your eye again, mixed with some freedom and adventure.

“I love you.” he put his hand on your leg.

You smiled at him, “It took us almost getting arrested for you to say that?” Billy shrugged his shoulder at you, his cheeks turning pink, “I love you too.”

#billy hargrove imagine #billy hargove x reader #Billy Hargrove #stranger things #dacre montgomery

198 notes · View notes

arbitrarypoetry · 6 years

Text

We’re All Adults Here

“…So then I said, ‘Oh, grow up, will you?’”

Everyone laughed, and Adam did too, a second too late and maybe a touch too loud. He was standing just on the edge of the cluster of people in his living room, only half-able to hear the story the woman in the middle was telling. There was much more noise in the room than he was used to. On top of that, he was distracted. He kept glancing around his apartment, afraid he would find that he’d forgotten something that would give him away—but everything seemed to be in order.

The coffee table, pushed to one side to make more room for the guests, was covered in tasteful magazines about things like wristwatches and boats, which he had quickly flipped through earlier that day to make sure they looked read. The walls held framed black-and-white photography and an ugly abstract painting that made him feel slightly queasy to look at, but that he thought seemed like what his mother might call a “conversation piece.” The floor was vacuumed. The shelves were neat. No sign of dirty laundry, stuffed animals, or comic books.

You’re safe, he told himself. Nobody knows. They all think you’re just like them.

Adam had spent days preparing for this party, weeks. He invited everyone from work, and, except for the crazy lady on the top floor, all the people who lived in his apartment building—the book they’d given him on successful adult life said that house parties were a great way to get to know people. He went out shopping for just the right kinds of snacks, struggling to steer the shopping cart around the aisles. He memorized small-talk conversation starters. He started to put up decorations, but then took them down, afraid that they would look childish.

He was sure that he had done everything right. So why did he still feel so uncomfortable in his own home?

Maybe part of it was the fact that Brian Craig was here, strutting around with his big, puffed-out chest and impressive sweep of hair. He worked in the cubicle across from Adam, and maybe Adam was just being paranoid, but he had the strangest feeling that Brian had it in for him. It was little things, like the way he would loudly ask Adam what he was doing Friday night, and then smirk knowingly at whatever Adam told him. He made fun of the posters Adam had tacked to his cubicle walls for decoration, causing Adam to eventually take them all down, and he had this way of calling Adam “buddy” that made him feel foolish and small.

Adam could see Brian across the room, looking around the apartment, taking everything in, almost as if he was searching for something wrong. They made eye contact. Brian smirked and raised his plastic cup. Adam felt a sudden fear that Brian knew, that he could see right through him, that he was just waiting for a chance to expose everything—but no. That was impossible.

Trying to shake the thought out of his mind, Adam looked away and adjusted his choking tie, feeling a bit like a kid playing dress-up. A soda. That was what he needed. He turned to head to the kitchen, and promptly collided with a woman from the office, who spilled her own drink all over his shirt.

“Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry!” she said, covering her mouth, eyes wide. She wore a dark blue, knee-length dress, and her hair was pulled back. Adam recognized her as the girl at the front desk, who always gave him a shy smile and looked away again quickly when he came in for work.

Adam had frozen, but now he made himself laugh. “It’s okay,” he said, pulling the wet shirt away from himself with two fingers. “This stuff happens.” Some of the red liquid dripped on the carpet.

She bit her lip, squeezing the cup in her hands. “Do you need me to… I don’t know, pay for dry cleaning?”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. It’s fine. We’re all adults here.” He flashed her what he hoped was a carefree smile and turned away, praying that she wouldn’t hear the lie in his voice.

Sure, the rest of them were all adults. But he wasn’t. Not really.

Something had gone wrong.

***

“You know what the procedure entails, correct?” The doctor set down his clipboard and looked at Adam over the rims of his wire-framed glasses.

Adam shifted in his uncomfortable seat. He knew he had learned this in school, but he was too nervous to remember any of the details. “It has something to do with my brain, right?”

The doctor sighed and turned in his swivel chair, pulling a colorful chart down against the wall. “You are eighteen years old today,” he said, pointing to a spot near the middle of the chart. “That means that, in the legal sense, you are now an adult, and are expected to become independent and begin contributing to society. However, your brain doesn’t naturally finish maturing until you are about twenty-five.” He pointed to the bottom of the diagram. Next to the number 25 was a pink cartoon brain with eyes, a big smile, and a tiny graduation cap. “This would put you at a disadvantage in the real world—however, we can’t simply have you wait until you feel as if you’re ready, either. So what’s the solution?”

This much Adam could remember. “The procedure,” he said, sitting up straighter.

“That’s right.” The doctor let go of the chart, letting it roll itself back up. “Rather than waiting and wasting valuable time, we will speed up your natural brain processes, enhancing your problem solving abilities, social skills, and so on. The procedure will also help give you the knowledge and confidence needed to begin accomplishing your new responsibilities, such as living in a place of your own, working a full-time job, and, ideally, finding a partner in the next few years or so.”

Adam wished he could have a drink of water. His mouth was so dry. “All right,” he said. “Is that all?”

“There is one more thing.” The doctor took off his glasses. “I am required to warn you,” he said, “that due to the altering properties of the procedure, you will not come out the same. You may feel like an entirely different person in some respects. But you will be a more confident, intelligent, and better-equipped person than you are now. Do you understand?”

Adam swallowed. “Yes.” Wiping his sweaty palms on his jeans, he wondered if the procedure would make him braver, too, less prone to worry. He hoped so. “So when do we start?”

***

Adam excused himself to his room to change his shirt, closing the door against the chattering noise of the party. After putting on a clean, dry shirt, he groaned and flopped down on the bed. “Just a few more hours,” he said, pulling a battered-looking stuffed dog out from under his pillow. Rupert had been his favorite stuffed animal growing up, and Adam had smuggled him out of his parents’ house along with his collection of comic books at the bottom of a box of clothes. He was pretty sure that a true adult wasn’t supposed to have such things, but he just couldn’t stand to have them repurposed and given away with all his other childhood belongings.

“After everyone leaves,” he continued, “we can watch TV and eat sugary cereal and not have to deal with a single other conversation about housing prices or taxes. All right?” Rupert simply sat there, ears drooping over his scratched and dimming eyes, but Adam smiled. “Awesome. I can always count on you.”

Remembering suddenly that he had a house-full of adults just outside his door, Adam put Rupert back on the bed and straightened his tie to head out again. How embarrassing it would be if someone had heard him!

No. Not just embarrassing—disastrous, he told himself as he entered back into the crowd, closing the door behind him. No one could know that the procedure hadn’t worked. That he was the only one.

He still remembered the feeling when he woke up from the procedure and realized that nothing had changed. He was supposed to have transformed, become a better, smarter, braver version of himself, someone ready for the challenges of the real world—but he was still exactly the same. His first thought was to tell them that something had gone wrong, there had been some mistake, but they were already bringing him to his new assigned apartment, giving him information about the job he would start in the morning, everything moving so, so fast, and he just… He couldn’t find the words. He didn’t know what would have happened if he had. The procedure had worked on every other person in the country; why hadn’t it worked on him? What was wrong with him?

No, he couldn’t let anyone know. He just had to fake it. He had to keep everyone convinced that he knew exactly what he was doing.

Stepping out into the fray again, he navigated around people as they chatted and sipped drinks, engrossed in each other’s companies. He made eye contact across the room with the woman who’d spilled her drink on him and smiled at her. She gave him a small smile back and looked away, cheeks flushing.

Ducking into the kitchen, he helped himself to some of the cheese platter he’d set out and did his best to join a conversation some others were having about a popular dark and gritty show that all the critics agreed was the best thing on television right then. He nodded along with the discussion, hoping they wouldn’t be able to tell that he’d only seen the first episode and then had trouble sleeping for a week. He preferred the violence of cartoons, where even if someone got a hole blown straight through them, they were up and running again in the very next shot.

After a while, the discussion about one particularly odd-ball character in the show led the conversation to the crazy old lady who lived on their top floor. “I saw her going through the trash once,” said one young man with a daringly stripy tie. “Honestly, I’m not sure why they let her stay here.”

“I wonder… She seems pretty old. Do you think she was around before the procedure? Maybe that would explain her behavior.”

“Nah, they implemented that at least eighty years ago. She can’t be that old.”

“Still, they didn’t start requiring it until…”

Adam knew the woman they were talking about. She was the first person he met when he first moved in, actually. She’d greeted him with a cheerful wave as they passed on the stairs, calling “Hello there, sonny boy!”, much louder than Adam thought adults were usually advised to speak. She had been wearing an oversized coat and two brightly patterned, clashing mismatched socks. Adam, still occupied with his anxiety about the procedure, had only given her a weak smile back, but she hadn’t seemed to mind. She kept climbing down the stairs, whistling to herself in an off-key way.

As Adam tried to adjust to his new life, figuring out how to balance grocery shopping and laundry and work, among other things, too scared to ask any of the others living in his apartment building for help, he found himself noticing her a lot. Through his front window, he could see her out in the park, where she spent much of her time.

Once, she had been walking along the path in a usual way, then abruptly flapped her arms and chased a flock of pigeons, sending them up in a frenzied, feathered cloud. He couldn’t hear from where he stood, attempting to run the vacuum cleaner, but he thought she was laughing.

Another time, when he was struggling with his taxes, he saw her stop and pick a bunch of flowering weeds that everyone else had simply passed by; later, when he went out to get the mail, he found them sitting on the front steps in an old jam jar full of water. They got dumped into the trash the next day.

Nothing she did seemed particularly adult; at least, not compared to the people Adam met at work or on the bus. But she seemed happy. She interested Adam, and in a way, he wondered if he might have found a kindred spirit—he longed to talk to her, to tell her about the procedure, ask her what she thought. Somehow he felt that she would know what to say. But once he learned the opinion that everyone else in the apartment building seemed to have of her—that she was a crazy old nuisance, no one wanted to spend time with her—he decided that in the interest of fitting in, he should probably avoid her. That was why, even though it made him feel a little guilty, he hadn’t invited her along with everyone else in the building to his house party.

To continue this goal of fitting in, and hoping to squash down the feeling of guilt in the pit of his stomach, he joined the conversation. “Did you see the time she went outside during that huge thunderstorm?” he asked, trying to sound funny, clever. “Where it was all dumping down, but she just stood there looking up into it and catching raindrops on her tongue? She looked like a soaked cat.”

One man laughed, and the others all shook their heads, frowning in resigned disapproval. “So impractical.” “Probably got sick.” “Not an efficient use of time at all.”

“People like her are the reason they started making the procedure mandatory,” said the man with the striped tie. “If people refuse to grow up, where will society be?”

Adam was just in the middle of nodding and agreeing when somebody called his name. “Adam!” He turned, still smiling agreeably, and felt his expression freeze on his face. Brian Craig stood in the kitchen doorway, practically filling it with his broad shoulders. In his hands he held a stuffed dog. Rupert. Brian raised the toy, one eyebrow cocked. “What’s this?”

Adam’s skin went cold. Don’t panic. Don’t panic! “What?” Adam said, forcing a laugh. “Where did that come from?”

“I found it in your room,” Brian said. “I was looking for the bathroom. But when I opened the door, I found this on the bed.” He raised Rupert higher, holding him by one frayed ear.

A few guests in the kitchen tittered nervously. More started gathering to see what was going on. Adam saw the woman from the reception desk peering in, questioning. Adam felt his mind reeling for excuses. “Wow. I just… That isn’t mine, obviously.” He chuckled painfully. “I mean, only a baby would still sleep with a stuffed animal, right?”

“That’s exactly what I was going to say,” Brian said. His mouth was tilted in the beginnings of a smirk.

“But I’m no baby,” Adam forged on, inwardly cringing at how juvenile the words sounded coming from his mouth. “I mean, I got the procedure just like everyone. He—it must have gotten mixed in with my stuff somehow when they delivered it. Crazy.”

“It was sitting on your bed, buddy.” Brian raised an eyebrow. The smirk grew more prominent.

“Yeah, see, I had been sorting through some of my stuff—you know, before everyone got here—and when I found that I was like what? Who put this kid toy in with all my, uh, jazz albums? So I took it out and I was trying to figure out what to do with it and I thought maybe I would give it away to some kid. Because, you know. It’s a kid’s toy.”

Brian turned Rupert over in his hands. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “This thing is pretty beat up.” He held Rupert in the air so everyone could get a good look. “I mean, check it out. What kid would want a junky old toy like this?” He laughed. Some of the guests looked uncomfortable. Others started laughing too, and the noise began to build in the small, cramped kitchen.

Adam’s face was hot. He couldn’t let them know. He’d worked so hard. He had to fix this. “You know what?” he said, and he snatched Rupert from Brian’s hand, fingers sinking into the worn fur. “You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. The only place this thing belongs is at the dump.” And then, without taking his eyes off Brian’s face, he took Rupert and tossed him down the garbage chute.

***

Brian tried to continue giving him a hard time after that, but no one else seemed all that interested anymore; it was like they all wanted to pretend that the whole thing hadn’t happened. In the end, Brian only clapped Adam on the shoulder, painfully hard, and said “Nice move, buddy,” before ambling off to chat with his work friends in a corner, loudly discussing the stock market and laughing uproariously at jokes Adam couldn’t begin to understand. The woman from the front desk wouldn’t meet Adam’s eyes.

The rest of the party soon went back to normal, people chatting in their own little groups, laughter breaking out now and then, cracker crumbs falling and getting ground into the rug. Adam knew he should feel relieved that the disaster had been averted, and he tried to go back to mingling, being a good host, but his heart wasn’t in it. All he could think of was Rupert, all alone, plummeting through the cold metal pipes. He would land in the big communal dumpster, get smushed in with all the used tissues, apple cores, everyone else’s junk. Like he was junk.

Adam’s mom had given him Rupert when Adam was only four years old. He had taken that dog with him everywhere; ate with him, climbed trees with him, slept with him. His fur, as matted and worn as it had gotten over the years, still smelled like home.

“…Would love to, but with this economy…”

“…So I told him, look, if I…”

“…A perfect game, they just had to…”

The conversations swirled around Adam. He smiled, laughed, tried to focus, but he couldn’t seem to absorb anything that was said. His stomach hurt. His mind kept replaying the moment when he threw Rupert, the easy toss of his hand, over and over.

Stop it, he told himself. It was just a stupid stuffed animal. An adult wouldn’t be upset. An adult wouldn’t care.

Grab, toss. Grab, toss. The sick, empty feeling in the pit of his stomach hardened.

But I do.

***

Adam was knee-deep in the dumpster, digging through the trash, tie loose around his neck. If people didn’t guess on their own why he had excused himself, he was sure Brian would give them some ideas, but Adam didn’t care anymore. He had to get Rupert back. He tore through the garbage. He wasn’t an adult, he wasn’t, he couldn’t keep pretending, he…

A voice from behind him. “Are you looking for this?”

Adam turned. Standing there in the alleyway was the old woman from the top floor. In her outstretched hand she held Rupert.

“Yes,” Adam said, embarrassment at being seen mingling with relief. “Yes, I am.” He half climbed, half fell out of the dumpster, then stood, a little hesitantly, and waited for her to move to give the toy back. She didn’t.

“It looked well-loved,” she said, rubbing one gnarled thumb over the dog’s head. “I wondered why someone would throw it away.” She peered up at him with quick, bright eyes behind thick glasses. A yellow scarf was tied like a headband around her white poof of hair.

“It was an accident,” Adam said. “A mistake.”

She cocked her head. “So was it a mistake or an accident?”

“Aren’t they the same?”

“Oh, I think they can be very different things.”

She sat down on a set of concrete steps to the left of the dumpster. The one good thing about this location was that it was away from the road, toward the back of the building, so no one could see them. A few straggly weeds grew from the cracks in the pavement. She gestured with the dog for Adam to sit down next to her. As he did, she asked “What’s its name?”

“Rupert.” The word came out before Adam could think about it.

“And what’s your name?”

“Adam.”

“Nice to meet you, Adam. I’m Daisy.” She shook his hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong. “There. Now that we’ve gotten to know each other, how about you tell me what’s going on.”

Adam thought of the crowd of adults in his apartment upstairs. “It’s a long story.”

She looked at him. Bright, piercing eyes. “Tell me.”

And then, it was like the dam that Adam had been building up for months finally broke. He told her everything—about the party, about Brian, about how homesick he got, about how badly he’d messed up his first load of laundry, everything right down to the procedure and how it hadn’t worked. It came pouring out; everything he’d been keeping to himself, trying to deal with it like an adult, trying to convince everyone that he was fine, he knew exactly what he was doing. It felt good to finally tell someone. He was so tired of pretending.

Daisy listened, un-interrupting, the whole way through. Only when Adam finally ran out of steam and slumped on the steps, feeling like he’d just run a marathon, did she speak. “So you say you don’t feel like an adult,” she said.

Adam shook his head. “Not even a little.”

“Well, what is an adult supposed to feel like, then?”

Adam hesitated. This felt like a trick question. “Well… They’re confident. And smart. They understand things way better than I can, and they always know what to do, and they don’t get all worried or scared. Like me.” Adam twisted his fingers together.

“And you figure this adult thing is how everyone else feels, right?”

“Well, yeah.” Adam drew his eyebrows together and glanced at her, tugging his tie further away from his neck. “Don’t they?”

Daisy stroked Rupert thoughtfully. “What would you say,” she said, as casually as if they were discussing the weather, “if I told you that the procedure doesn’t work on anyone?”

At first the words didn’t sink in. Adam stared at her in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. The procedure doesn’t work. On anyone, not just you.” She gave him a wry, crooked smile. “How does it feel to know that you’re not special?”

Adam frowned, still not understanding. It was like the information couldn’t process. “But… That can’t be right. It does work! Everyone knows that. Everyone else…”

“And how do you know what’s going in everyone else’s heads?”

“Well, they… I just…” Adam found he couldn’t answer.

Daisy chuckled, the wrinkles around her eyes growing even more pronounced. “It’s always the same,” she said. “Everyone thinks that everyone else knows what they’re doing, so they lie to fit in. Everyone’s pretending, and they all think that they’re the only one who’s faking it. Part of growing up is learning that it’s not just you.” She gave him a small whack on the arm. “There. I just gave you a head start.” With a brief, warm smile, she slid Rupert into Adam’s lap and stood up, joints popping.

Adam’s head was spinning. “Wait,” he said. “So… If what you’re saying is true… Does anyone ever figure out what they’re doing? Did you?”

She laughed, leaning back to crack the bones in her spine. “Oh, no. I don’t think anyone does completely. But it does get easier.” She picked up a plastic bag that Adam hadn’t noticed earlier. It was full of glass bottles, clear, green, and blue. “Just keep doing what needs getting done, and do it your way. Don’t worry too much about anyone else. You’ll grow, in your own time. There’s no magic pill.” She chuckled again. “That’s what it was in my day. A pill.” She turned and began walking to the front of the building, the bottles in her bag softly clinking.

Adam’s head was full with these new ideas—he still wasn’t sure yet if he believed any of it—but he still found room to be curious. “What are the bottles for?” he called after her.

“I’m going to hang them from the ceiling,” she called back, not bothering to look back at him. “I like the way the light hits the glass.”

She disappeared around the corner of the building. Adam sat on the steps, holding Rupert, turning things over in his mind. She was probably crazy, he knew. There was no reason why he should trust anything she said.

But what if she was right? What if there wasn’t anything wrong with him?

What if he wasn’t supposed to be someone different?

Adam looked down at the worn, threadbare dog in his hands. “We should probably go back up,” he said, thinking of all the people crowded in his apartment, talking about politics and house remodeling and the state of the weather. “It would be the grown-up thing to do.”

But he didn’t. Not right away. He knew he would have to at some point—he would have to fix his tie, tuck Rupert away, and step back into the adult world. But for right then, he stayed where he was, listening to the hum of the cars passing by on the street, the twittering of the birds from the telephone wire, the sounds of a world that seemed just a little less frightening than before.

#growing up #adulting #adulthood #short story #we're all adults here #i wrote this when i was eighteen #my first semester of college #so i mean i was definitely thinking a lot about this stuff #i'm sorry it's so long but i'm hoping it will help someone else out there who's just as scared of growing up as i was

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juleswolverton-hyde · 6 years

Text

Your brand part 2

Genre: Tattoo Artist AU, smut, romance

Pairing: Tattoo artist!Taehyung x Reader

Warning: No warnings apply

Summary: ''Let me ink your ink your skin like you've inked your brand on my heart.''

For Ana, my partner in crime and source of inspiration.

What should have been a simple outing to get a tattoo at the most well-known tattoo shop in town, Ink Borough, results in being engraved by the biggest name in the world of ink and boss of the parlour, Kim Taehyung. However, getting a tattoo can entail a whole lot more than one might think.

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

Masterlist

Thoughts are briefly distracted from the painful prospect through the refreshing breeze and straying drops of fountain water that are refreshingly spraying the bare skin of my arms, one of which shall soon have a memory engraved into it by an artist with, suspected, hidden motives.

Although, it is clear he wants to have a drink together, albeit it on the job. Normally, one would not even consider doing such a thing, but something about Taehyung makes me do the opposite of what is seen as common sense. The two cups filled with bright red strawberry smoothies next to me obviously the evidence of that.

There are still ten minutes to go before the hour has passed, but if I simply sit here and do nothing more doubtful thoughts may slip in, causing me to contradict my own words in the end. I refuse to let that happen, partially because I do not want to grant the artist the knowledge of being right after all.

I stand up from the white marble bench, pick up the cardboard holder with the beverages, and head back to Ink Borough through the streets filled with tourists and locals who enjoy the warm weather.

However, whereas they let themselves be warmed by the sun, I am doing quite a pretty good job doing so myself by unintentionally feeding a probably unnecessary fear.

Taehyung has not budged an inch since I left, sitting barefoot and cross-legged on the leather sofa in the exact spot, lost in sketching. Next to him lays a heap of papers torn from his purple notebook in the meanwhile, the finished options for the tattoo. His latest work joins the rest when I put the smoothies on the glass coffee table in front of the couch.

'You're early,' he remarks with a hint of humour. 'Don't tell me you're now actually looking forward to the needle.'

'Ha ha, very funny,' I retort sarcastically. 'I brought something to drink.'

'Strawberry smoothies.' His deep voice turns thoughtful when he glances at the refreshments. 'My family has a strawberry farm down south.'

'Really?' When you take a look at him, take in the predictions on his skin, the least you would expect is for him to be a farmer's boy.

'Yeah, can't say that I have tasted one in any sort of variety for a long time though.' A hint of a past trouble glazes over his eyes. 'Huh, funny.'

'Is there a reason for that?'

'Wouldn't you like to know, detective.' And we are back to the snark. 'Anyhow,' he gestures to the various drawings of phoenixes, 'see if you find any of them to your liking.'

Drink in hand, I place the pile on my lap. Page after page is filled with a sophisticated design of the mystical creature ascending from either a pile of ashes or the residue dancing around them. Some do not have the dust of its former body included, merely the impression it flies upwards.

After going through the stack, I find the perfect design. With a smile, I turn to him, once more almost bumping my head against his. The grin instantly transforms into a snarl. 'Do you have to be so close? It's uncomfortable.'

He feigns offence. 'I am only observing your reaction, Y/N. Nothing unseemly.'

'Sure.' Now it is my turn to be sarcastic.

'Funny and knows how to use sarcasm. Y/N, I may just start to like you.'

'Nothing unseemly,' I remind him.

'Would that angry face change if I did?' He leans back, lip caught between his teeth, expression smug.

An effort to offer a reply that fails, an averted gaze focused on the chosen symbol, a brief hush in which the heat is very tangible though it is uncertain whether it is due to summer or wild thoughts.

'Although, I do quite enjoy your current expression.' He takes a sip of the smoothie. 'You should drink as well before you pass out on the chair as I am doing the outline. That is if the cotton dabbed with alcohol already won't do the trick.'

'You find it really amusing, don't you, teasing me so much because this is my first time.' Gaze turned fierce and courage regathered, I snap my head up to look Taehyung in the eye.

'Calm down, Y/N. I'm just doing it because I like you and want you to feel more at ease about this big commitment.' He holds his big hands up as if I am holding a gun, ready to shoot him. Which, in some way, I am, completely fed up with his sass. Yet, hearing him say he likes me in that manner makes me think he does not simply say it to every customer, be it newbies or more experienced persons.

'Don't say that, you say that to everyone.'

'Y/N, I don't-'

A careful smile. 'Taehyung,' his eyes widen when he hears me say his name so kind-heartedly. 'Or better said: "person who handles the decorating tools",' I correct myself, the humour back in my voice, 'can we get started before I seriously run away?'

A square smile, a playful glint in dark eyes. 'I can bind you to the chair if you want.'

'Didn't know you're into bondage.' The remark has passed my lips before I even realize what I said. The rise in temperature is now certainly due to inappropriate imaginations.

Heartfelt deep laughter nuances the meaning one may find in the comment. 'I'm not, though I can't say I ever tried it,' he adds casually. This man is bad news when you try to preserve your sanity, but it is already too late in my case, the realization has dawned too late. 'However, there is one question I need to ask before we begin.'

'Which is?'

'Colour or classic black and white?'

'Colour. Life isn't black and white, so why would the piece of it I carry with me be?'

'You sound like a friend of mine, he's also a bit of a philosopher. But it'll take longer, just so you know.'

'I would almost believe you want me out of the place as soon as possible.' I give him a challenging glance, awaiting his response as I take a sip of the strawberry beverage.

'And lose my favourite target?' He shakes his head, locks of his hair sway with the movement and tempt me to run my hand through them. Fortunately, I am able to will them to keep holding on to the plastic cup between my fingers. 'Shall we get started?'

'Yeah, good idea,' I agree lest the conversation takes a turn for the worst. However, a voice deep inside says it would not mind if it did.

The alcohol soaked cotton feels chilly upon my skin as Taehyung cleans it, the gloved slender fingers of his left hand lightly supporting my right underarm. Afterwards, he removes any hairs, both visible and invisible, with swift movements of a disposable razor. Maybe it is part of the standard procedure, maybe it is not, but he lets his fingertips languidly glide over the prepared skin, almost in what can be called an appreciative manner. If that is indeed the case, it is not minded at all and in fact let it cost me all my might to prevent the goosebumps from rising, thus betraying what he does to me. It becomes even more difficult to do so when he places the stencil on my forearm and wets it to transfer the design in its entirety. The pressure of his digits reminds me of his grip on my wrist and the sensations that caused.

'You're awfully quiet,' he comments as he peels the soaked wet paper away. His eyes meet mine, wondering what has suddenly silenced me.

'Just watching you work is fascinating.' To add a flair of faked nonchalance, I shrug.

'And I haven't even begun in earnest,' he chuckles.

I bite my lip, initially placing the reply in a context which absolutely does not apply at the moment, and cast my gaze downwards at the outline of the phoenix. 'Sorry if it makes you feel awkward.'

'It's fine, Y/N. If anything, I-' A pause followed by a strangely confident answer. 'I like your eyes on me.'

Abruptly we lock gazes. 'What?' I ask.

'What?' he repeats the enquiry.

'Anyhow,' a scrape of the throat, 'do you like the placement?' He nods at the outline. 'Take a look in the mirror, see the overall picture.'

I get up and walk to the tall mirror opposite the chair matching the fake leather sofa to admire the soon permanent piece of art. In the reflection I can see Taehyung preparing the equipment, filling cups with ink and one with clear water. For a second his gaze strays from the tattoo machine to my backside and takes in my figure, every curve revealed by the lack of coverage summer clothes cause. The instant he notices I am on to him, he shifts his focus back to the original task. He takes a sip of the smoothie, hoping it will help, but nevertheless seems to have a bit of trouble.

'You like it?' Unconsciously, Taehyung runs a hand through his hair, his stare slightly arrogant due to the pride he has in his work. Yet, the ring in his deep voice can also easily be placed in another context. A context that resonates a pleasant stir within me.

'Love it,' I reply, corners of my mouth curled up into a small smile to hide what he does to me.

'You didn't pick the most painless of spots, so this may hurt throughout the entire time,' he informs when I sit down again.

I pick up the smoothie cup I placed beside the seat and take the last sip of courage, after which I return the empty version of it to its spot on the brown linoleum floor. 'I guess it's time to be brave then.'

In spite of the ointment to smoothen the skin, it is as he said. The needle penetrating and marking me with ink feels as if the fires of Hell are burning in my veins, searing the pure skin away to leave black lines behind.

It is agony at its finest, but also forms an unexpected source of pleasure. Somehow, in a wicked sense, it is as effective as a drug to have Taehyung engrave me with his brand. The careful yet tight hold his fingers have on my arm, gradually climbing up, and his concentrated dark eyes on me feed the frenzy. Especially each time he glances upwards from the tattoo to check how I am doing, the corners of his mouth curled up into the sliver of a satisfied grin when he sees how desperately I am trying to stay strong.

'Just tell me when you need a break. Don't want to make you cry,' he comments shortly when we have passed the halfway mark, briefly interrupting the process.

'As if you could.' Sarcasm has slipped in to hide the stinging yet bearable hurt, but he must be aware of my true feelings since he likely has experience with newbies that play it cool. Or try to do so, anyway.

'I wouldn't. Even if I did, I'd try my best to comfort you.' A rose-coloured flush tints his cheeks. Rapidly his stare shifts from me to the machine next to him.

Absolutely baffled I look at the snarky guy turned marshmallow. 'Did you just- are you flirting with me?'

'Guess you'd know if I do, right? You're a grown woman. Surely you recognize it when a guy is falling for you.' Feigned arrogance betrays his true thoughts.

'Are you?' I ask to test the water.

'Who knows? Maybe I do, maybe I don't.'

'You said you like me.'

'Let's just crack on, okay?' The return of the whirring and sensation of the needle interrupt the conversation and he is concentrated on the tangible part of his world of ink.

The pleased grin soon changes into something indescribable as we progress into the colouring stage, when the tears begin to form in the corners of my eyes and soft moans caused by conflicting emotions begin to spill from my lips every now and then, despite the endeavours to hold them in. It is desire and pain combined, a toxic potion I can drink any day. At least inhale its scent, as I do now. No longer able to mask it.

He changes as well the more the phoenix appears on my skin. Charisma fades, vague sonorously mumbled words meant to not be heard mingle with my utterances whenever they escape, a lush lip is caught between bright white teeth more often, awkward movements on the stool to hide a growing desire that hopefully will remain unnoticed but does not as it grabs my attention more than once, making the want for him greater. The tight grip relaxes, fingers undeniably wanting to stray but instead worshipping the piece of me they currently have within reach.

Moreover, Taehyung smells it too, without a doubt, but nevertheless tries to finish what we started. Focus weakens, dark glossy eyes trailing to the source of the new scent of a twisted nature until he remembers what he is doing and has priority.

After going on like this for another hour and a half, neither of us saying a word, the silence filled with images of his gaze regarding me in other ways than only this one and him occasionally uttering curses or barely audible groans of the word "baby" falls from his lips, the tattoo is finally completed. The gorgeous phoenix is bigger than intended and covers my forearm as it rises in a storm of scarlet red tinted with hints of gold and amber, ascending into the pastel sky, black ash falling from its wings and tail.

A deep sigh that contains a hidden impatience. 'Go have a look up close.' He nods to the white wall opposite us.

I walk to the mirror on the other side of the space to regard the tattoo, this new piece of me, and the overall renewed tougher image it creates. The only signs of vulnerability are the tears which are still present.

Fingers that are not my own rest on the underside of my arm, a big hand on my hip, a broad chest forms a wall to lean against, a hard heat source touches my behind, a husky deep voice speaks.

'What do you think?' Taehyung's gaze locks with mine in our reflection and although the question is meant to estimate my opinion on this symbol behind which hides a story, the tone he uses is out of place and his eyes look at me in anticipation.

'It's beautiful.' Gently I let my digits caress the reddened sensitive skin, secretly enjoying the last bit of remaining pain.

He bends forward to whisper in my ear, his warm breath making it seem as if the room temperature rises a few degrees. 'Just like you.'

'Taehyung-' His hands trail slowly up and slip underneath the fabric of my top, digits tracing a path to the edge of the black bralet that is concealed underneath it. A grunt falls from his lips when he rolls his hips and I meet the action by leaning into him.

'Can we go to the back office? The bandaging supplies are there.' An absolute ridiculous argument since I spy the needed tools for the treatment on the counter behind the chair, but chose to say nothing of it. Instead, I simply nod and follow him.

The tiger caught its prey, the phoenix all too willing to let it lead her to a new death.

#BTS #BTS smut #BTS x Reader #Taehyung #Kim Taehyung #V #Tae #Tae Tae #Tattoo artist!Taehyung #Tattoo Artist AU #Tattoo Shop AU #Tattoo AU #Taehyung smut #Your Brand #War of Ink

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

Text

THE SOURCE CODE OF ALL THE LIBRARIES IS READILY AVAILABLE

But at the moment, are NPR values. Hackers at every college learn practical skills, and not by accident. It would be a bad sign if they weren't; it would mean you were being too easy on them.1 Another group was worried when they realized they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like? Why are they so hot to invest in startups, as there are in any domain, but they can also deter you from improving it.2 The way medicine has always worked is that patients come to doctors with problems, and the resulting personality is not attractive.3 Work for a VC fund? The danger with grad school is probably better than most alternatives. And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the entire tree.4 In 1977 there was no point in making anything else return a value, because there could not be anything waiting for it. We saw this happen so often that we made up a name for this compiler, the sufficiently smart compiler, and it is a home not just for the money. Not at all: I was delighted.5

The number of people you interact with is about right.6 I am not surprised to hear it.7 The best programmers can work wherever they want. Lisp embodied nine new ideas. By unsavory I mean things that go behind whatever semantic facade the language is trying to be with the App Store has changed that.8 Common Lisp I have often wanted to iterate through the fields of a struct—to comb out references to a deleted object, for example, or find fields that are uninitialized. Or is it?

Is the cost increasing or decreasing? And what, exactly, is hate speech? It's just as well that it usually takes a while to gain momentum. The three old guys didn't get it. People in past times were much like us.9 Because he not only wanted a computer but knew how to build them, Wozniak was able to make himself one. Apple that seems less the case. We only have a few users you can support per processor.10 We think it's cute for little kids to believe in the mid 1990s. So why do they need to fix anything?11 This was the Lisp function eval. Together these three phases produce an S-curve.

But writing and art are both very hard problems that some people work honestly at, so they're worth doing, especially if you can manage it, is to have a blurry one. It's just part of what a programming language rather than, say, an implementation. The best way to put it is to say that a language has to have a language designed by a committee. But when you use this method, you'll get this on a giant scale: a huge number of false alarms that make patients panic and require expensive and perhaps even more importantly, they were ideas reasonable people could believe. That has been the same. And programmers build applications for the platforms they use. ITA's president, I assume they could have vetoed such a deal. I'm sure there are game companies out there working on products with more intellectual content than the research at the bottom nine tenths of university CS departments. When I first meet founders and ask what their growth rate.

My life is full of examples of young people who were working on a hard problem, the question is not what growth rate successful startups tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes. But the next step after rent a cool office, hire a bunch of people. The next generation of computer technology has often—perhaps more often than not—been developed by outsiders.12 It's so simple. Getting there can't be easy. If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out where the bottlenecks are. If a company considers itself to be in the software business, and they're writing an application that will be one of the rare ideas of that type. Some of these we now take for granted, others are only seen in more advanced languages, and two are still unique to Lisp. And yet I think the reason Google embraced Don't be evil.13 You can feel the difference between Google and a barbershop.14

Where is the breakeven point? The process inherently tends to produce an unpleasant result, like a prophet, that there would soon be a computer with half a MIPS of processing power that would fit under an airline seat and cost so little that we could save enough to buy one from a summer job.15 For most of us can get to having a conversation with someone like the president, who doesn't have time to meet founders we've funded. By now they're mostly used ironically.16 Can anything break this cycle?17 By now these labels have lost their sting. If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarian speakers, you'll be denounced as a yellowist will just be a distraction.18 Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable.19 It would not hurt to make Lisp better as a scripting language for Unix. Boy was he good. And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands—something you'd buy a car despite, not because of. Should you spend time courting some big customer?

There is one thing more important than I'd thought. They make up some plausible-sounding idea, I ask What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?20 There are lots of good examples to learn from, and the odds of finding programmers, libraries, etc. I know several programmers who are comfortable with prefix syntax and yet use Perl by default, because it enabled one to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book but has a flat usage graph. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee.21 Best of all, for the first time that measures taken in an atmosphere of panic had the opposite of what they intended: the version of an app currently available in the late 1950s.22 That helps would-be successors both directly, as Roger Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do whatever you want, not to say what you want.

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. I say startups are designed to grow fast. The danger with grad school is that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas. I'd feel guilty if I were a farmer and suddenly heard a lot of people, I was mathematically abused as a child. This seems to me there is a Laffer curve for government power, just as the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you don't think things you don't dare say out loud. But babysitting this process was so expensive for software vendors that it didn't make sense to charge less than $50,000. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. But because the product hits a nerve, in the broader sense of the word, new technology. Such things happen constantly to the biggest organizations of all, probably, than the men running our government, who for all their stuff.

Notes

N _ Erann Gat's sad tale about industry best practice at JPL inspired me to try to establish a silicon valley out of just doing things, which means you're being starved, not you. Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they insist you dilute yourselves to set aside an option to maintain their percentage. In fact, we used to build their sites, and it doesn't seem an impossible hope.

And if you want to design these, because it might be a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of the iPhone SDK.

Because the pledge is vague in order to provoke a bidding war between 3 pet supply startups for the explanation of a city's potential as a result, that you could out of their professional code segregate themselves from the creation of the marks of a handful of consulting firms that rent out big pools of foreign programmers they bring in on H1-B visas. Zagat's lists the Ritz Carlton Dining Room in SF as requiring jackets but I managed to screw up twice at the lack of results achieved by alchemy and saying its value was as a consulting company is presumably worth more, the higher the walls become. Geshke and Warnock only founded Adobe because Xerox ignored them. In fairness, I believe, and yet in both cases you catch mail that's near spam, but this could be mistaken, and Windows, respectively.

Donald Hall said young would-be-evil end. Yes, I didn't. Galbraith p.

Morgan's hired hands. And so to the rise of big companies to build their sites. Unfortunately, making physically nice books will only do convertible debt is little different from a 6/03 Nielsen study quoted on Google's site. I mean forum in the first time as an expert—which, if you don't, you're using a degenerate case of heirs, rather than just reconstructing word boundaries; spammers both add xHot nPorn cSite and omit P rn letters.

Delivered as if they'd like it if you get a real partner. This is the true kind. A rounds from top VC funds whether it was too late?

They did try to write your dissertation in the sciences, you have to follow redirects, and large bribes by the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914 on the other seed firms always find is that intelligence is surprisingly recent.

If you want as an adult. Distribution. What people will feel a strong local component and b I'm satisfied if I could pick them, initially, were ways to avoid companies that an idea where the ratio of spam in my incoming mail fluctuated so much a great founder is being looked at with fresh eyes and even if the fix is at pains to point out, they have to watch out for a startup enough to incorporate a prediction of quality in the room, you have no connections, you'll find that with a wink, to mean starting a startup, you can stick even more clearly. Enterprise software sold through traditional channels is very high or especially very low, you can work out.

As always, tax loopholes are definitely not a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of this type: artists trained to paint from life using the same, but except for money.

Then Josh Wilson came in to pick your brains. Even in English, our sense of the potential users, however unnatural it seems a bit. They may not be to write it all at once is to claim retroactively I said that a company just to steal the company. The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991.

If you treat your classes because you need to import is broader, ranging from designers to programmers to electrical engineers. If by cutting the founders' advantage if it were. They don't make wealth a zero-sum game. This seems to me like someone in 1880 that schoolchildren in 1980 would be.

Founders also worry that taking an angel-round board, there are before the name of a refrigerator, but as the average Edwardian might well guess wrong. This phenomenon may account for a future in which only a few people who have money to spend all your time on, cook up a solution, and why it's next to impossible to succeed or fail. And so to the inane questions of the most, it's usually best to err on the person.

Geoff Ralston reports that one of the current edition, which shoppers used to build little Web appliances. If you're the sort of mastery to which the top 15 tokens, because outsourcing it will tend to get elected with a walrus mustache and a little if the VC knows you well, since they're an existing investor, than a huge loophole. Is an Asset Price Bubble? One YC founder told me about a form you forgot to fill out can be times when what you're working on filtering at the leading scholars in the cupboard, but delusion strikes a step later in the chaos anyway.

But in most high schools.

It was only because like an undervalued stock in that so few founders are driven by people who will go away. A lot of the Garter and given the Earldom of Rutland. Type II startups spread: all you needed to read a new, much more analytical style of thinking, but it's hard to think. Surely no one knows how many computers the worm infected, because they suit investors' interests.

In that case the implications are similar. Download programs to run a mile in under 4 minutes. But although I started doing research for this.

Many famous works of anthropology.

Perhaps the most useless investors are also exempt. The University of Vermont: The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991, p. The New Industrial State to trying to tell them exactly what your project does.

The latter type is the precise half of the aircraft is. It was harder for you?

So it's not enough to do this yourself. Treating high school kids are convinced the whole story. You have to do video on-demand, because for times over a series of numbers that are only pretending to in the world barely affects me. Otherwise you'll seem a risky bet to admissions committees, no one is now.

This is an acceptable excuse, but I have a connection to one of its workforce in 1938, thereby gaining organized labor as a company tried to preserve optionality. But it's a significant number.

There are people who don't aren't. Words we use for good and bad luck. After reading a draft, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. Like us, they could then tell themselves that they are so intellectually dishonest in that.

0 notes

eleutheriana-a · 7 years

Text

regarding jaz, aka @kryzeborn & @amidalc.

so i really didn’t want to make this into a big huge deal outside of my own blog and my own vagueing / angry shitposting because honestly, i have a right to my anger, as does red ( @rutalonidir ) , without owing anyone an explanation as to why we’re so angry. but the fact of the matter is, i’ve had multiple people come to me off anon expressing an interest in hearing my side of the story and what exactly went down between jaz and i, so i figured i’d just compile everything as it happened and explain, with links and screenshots so everyone can follow along at home.

i’ve been writing padmé on and off for a few years now, something multiple people can attest to. i originally had a blog for her about two and a half / three years ago - ish, which has since been deleted and revamped, and then i moved her onto a multimuse for a while. i add this context in not to try and assert superiority, but to explain that my headcanons i’ve had on padmé have existed and been developed for literal years. when i had my old blog ( @eleutheriana-archive , originally libertinedeath ) , there was a meme that was floating around one day asking people to recast your fc, simply for fun. i reblogged it, and received a message from a friend suggesting tao okamoto, a japanese model and actress, due to the japanese and other asian influences on padmé’s character. i responded that i was really into the fancast and also mentioned that i’d been thinking about using fan bingbing ( the most popular padmé racebent fancast ) as an alternate for my star wars universe for a while now, but that i wasn’t sure if it’d be something people would be into, because it would require all luke and leia rpers that i interacted with using that fc to change their own fcs for those threads to keep the ethnicities correct. i got some good feedback on this post, and so i made another saying that i was going to consider starting to use her as an alternate ( when dealing solely with my star wars verses, as using an asian alt fc for modern verses means you have to take into account the real world reactions to race and can get into dicey territory, and was something i would have to think about more if i was even going to make that shift. ) but that i’d, again, have to do some thinking because it would change fcs of family members and i didn’t want to just spring that on luke and leia rpers. this happened on april twentieth, as you can see here. ( autoplay warning. )

the next day, i made an edit, found here, which was a way of providing suggestions to luke and leia rpers for fcs that they might be able to use if they wanted to interact with me in the capacity of an asian padmé / interracial skywalker family concept. shortly after i posted this edit, jaz reblogged it, found here. at the time, she was still using fan bingbing as an fc, and was following me as well. i looked at her account when she reblogged the edit, because it was tagged with her fc tag and i was kinda surprised, and i realized that she was a brand new padmé account, made only eight hours after i’d made a post saying i was going to be using fan bingbing as my alternate fc.

now, i know what you’re thinking: “nicole, you just said above that fan bingbing is a popular fancast, that doesn’t mean jaz is stealing from you.” and honestly? i didn’t think she was stealing from me at the time. i didn’t think that my post had anything to do with her blog being created, at that time. was i suspicious? a little bit, but i’ve had some things stolen from me before and also had things just be a coincidence, so i wrote it off as no big deal and followed her back because i’m duplicate friendly. at the time, i did not think anything of her account, nor was i predisposed with a bias against her, as i’ve had no dealings with jaz in any other fandom, therefore, nothing to judge her on. to me she was just another padmé rper. i did, however, take a slight offense to something found in her rules, something that remains there to this day:

i can understand not wanting to inconvenience luke and leia rpers, but if you’re going to racebend your character and strive for more visibility for asian women, this is just....not cool. but again: i wasn’t going to pick fights about it, because to me she was just another padmé rper, and i didn’t think there was anything shady going on.

then things started to get a little odd. i started to notice some things here and there that kinda irked me, things that seemed a little...off. like she’d just lifted them from my blog. for example: i had a shitpost fest back in january with my main anakin and one of my friends who rps leia, as well as a cassian rper. i’ve had a headcanon since last december that in my rebel / survival verse, padmé ships leia and cassian pretty heavily and it’s been a running joke as well as a serious headcanon on my blog since i moved padmé to her own account off my multi. you can find recorded instances of this here, here, here, and here. i mention this and include screenshots because, to this day, i’ve never seen another padmé rper have this headcanon. that is, until jaz. i made this post as a general shitpost on april 24th, back when, again, jaz and i were still mutuals, and when her blog was only three days old.

five minutes later, she made this post, as evidenced by my dash timestamps. not only had she just used the same scrambling of padmé's name, she’d also used the same headcanon i’d had since january. did this make me suspicious? definitely. it was a bit of a slap in the face for me, if i’m being a hundred percent honest, but again, i was willing to merely squint at her and let it go. i wasn’t going to start a fight over something petty and small like this, but it was definitely making me keep a closer eye on her blog and her headcanons, to see if she was taking anything else from me. if you’re still doubting whether or not i was still attempting to be friendly and chill about this with her, i actually replied to her post about cassian and leia mentioning that this was a long standing headcanon of mine, and that i was glad to see someone agreeing with me. of course, you can’t see this comment anymore, because she’s blocked me since then, but you can see that she @’d me after the fact to make another comment in agreement, which you can find here. so even though i was suspicious and keeping an eye out, i was still writing things off as coincidence, and trying to be friendly, because we were still mutuals.

then i started noticing some more things: headcanons, threads, and most damning of all, an edit that was directly lifted from the one i’ve already pasted in here. unfortunately, i don’t have a screenshot of the edit itself, because i was so irritated at the time it didn’t occur to me to screenshot it, and she later took it down at my request, but that’s featured in our conversation you’ll see later. as far as headcanons go, there was a meme on the dash on may first that was to the effect of ‘send me nsfw headcanons you have about my character and i’ll tell you if they’re true or not’, which started the meat of the problem with jaz and i. here are a few of my published asks, obviously featuring nsfw text. while a few of these came from anon messages, most if not all of these were already headcanons i’d had previously and had been vocal about on my blog, just expanded on by anons. one. two. three. the third one is especially important here, as it’s something i’ve been super vocal about, and something jaz had never mentioned on her blog, until i posted that answered ask. she’s also stolen some general headcanons that are specific to my characterization of padmé, as detailed in these screenshots/posts, regarding her appearance info. jaz’s original ‘detailed appearance info’ survey can be found here, posted on april 27th, shortly before i’d reblogged my own version of the survey. note the voice section: “VOICE: soft, eloquent, a little childlike.” i’d initially posted mine in march, and then reblogged it again on april 27th, with some updated headcanons, mainly just a change of wording here and there to make it more clear and adjusting some scar and bra size headcanons. notice the wording of the voice headcanon, specifically. this is something i’ve had as a headcanon since march, if not earlier; i’ve got NUMEROUS posts on my archived blog about how i’ve headcanoned padmé to have an accent in every verse i have for her. on june 12th, a month and a half later, jaz updated her detailed appearance info survey, found here. note the wording on her voice section here in this updated version. it’s almost word for word this headcanon i posted back in january, with just a different location of the accent’s origin.

she also ripped off at least two threads of mine, one of which relating to vader and padmé reuniting after his surgery / procedure / whatever you wanna call it after mustafar, where he’s in the suit for the first time. i don’t have caps of her version of the thread, though i do have her wishlist post, and as you can see here and here, chloe ( @oletherian ) and i have been doing this since december, when i was still rping padmé on my multi. she also started doing a thread with one of her anakin partners dealing with anakin’s ptsd after the zygerria arc of the clone wars, which you can find here. i noticed this because chloe and i are the ONLY anakin and padmé blogs who were doing a thread relating to this topic, and i noticed jaz posting a reply to her version of the thread two days after chloe had replied to ours, which, combined with the content, made me incredibly suspicious.

eventually. my friend wren then went on to send jaz an ask, off anon, asking her about all this, as i was getting more and more worked up by the incidents of what appeared to be blatant theft. jaz did not answer, and blocked him outright, though she later denied this. another friend also sent her asks, off and on anon, which she continued to ignore, until she finally got one that she answered, which you can see here. note the tags: “not even gonna reply to this bs until someone approaches me off anon”. at this point in time, at least two people already had, and she’d blocked them outright.

shortly after posting this, she sent me an ask, as we were still mutuals at the time, giving me her skype and asking me if we could talk privately, to which i agreed, as i was more than willing to work things out with her on a private level. i prefer to handle things one on one to making a huge spectacle of things, and i was glad she was willing to talk to me privately. here is a complete record of our conversation.

( as a note for clarity: at the time, wren, ( @spectrefive ) , was still using his url “weaponexpert”, and still going by she/them pronouns, which is why i referred to him with neutral and feminine pronouns in these messages. obviously, he no longer uses those pronouns, but i just wanted to clarify in case there was some confusion. )

so while jaz agreed to delete the headcanons and the edit, she only deleted the edit. the headcanons are all still up on her archived blog and implemented on her current blog to this day. now, i was willing to let all this go, as we had both agreed to unfollow, block, and move on, despite the fact that i’ve gotten multiple anonymous hate messages that i’m pretty positive are from her due to the typing style ( there’s no date on this because i was mobile - and visiting my grandfather in the hospital ! - when i saw them, but the date was june eighteenth. of course, i don’t have proof because they were sent on anon and i don’t have an ip tracker on my blog, but the signs line up a bit too much for me to write this off as coincidence. ) , because again: i prefer to deal with these things privately and move on. i didn’t entirely believe her when she said nothing was actively stolen from me, or when she claimed not to have blocked wren after her sent her a message, but it wasn’t about belief. i’d said what i needed to say, so had she, and we’d moved on.

then she started doing the same thing to red. most of you are familiar with this by now, as this is what’s started the drama currently, but for clarification, red wrote some nsfw headcanons on her old satine blog, found here, which she posted on the second of july. jaz then posted some extremely similar headcanons on the twenty seventh of august, right after blocking red’s blog. shortly after this was posted, red received this anonymous message, which then set the dash off.

so anyway, there you have it. if you want to reblog this post, there’s nothing stopping you, but frankly, i’m not posting it to try and change anyone’s mind on who jaz is as a person or whether or not they want to interact with her. you’re all your own people and free to do whatever you want to or don’t want to do. it’s not my call. but i do stand by what i’ve said in my rules: i won’t have her on my dash from this point forward. thank you for taking the time to read this, and i hope you have a wonderful day.

#drama for ts #call out post tw #wank for ts #long post for ts #this is REALLY long and link / image heavy but #gestures #x. OUT OF CHARACTER. › the resident fairy squadmother.

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dadvans · 7 years

Text

don’t look back in anger (otayuri, 2.5k, teen) ::

[life lesson: if some dumb-dumb actually tags you in a callout post on tumblr and says shitty, baseless things about you, don’t engage them. write petty fic about otabek and yuri as grandpas who live on mars instead!! you’re welcome.]

At age 54, Victor Nikiforov-Katsuki became one of the first successful test subjects for a series of anti-aging surgeries. At 37, he had a knee surgery and received hair plugs, but the first in a series of operations at 54 gave him joints and muscle and organs of someone forever young.

Yuri had grimaced at the holoscreen when the news broke, having seen too much of Victor’s face to last several lifetimes. “I bet he has a robodick too.”

“Yura,” Otabek had said, both fond and resigned from across the dining room table where he was dissecting a grapefruit half.

At age 87, Victor Nikiforov-Katsuki went out in a blaze of glory deep-dicking his husband (“robodick,” confirmed BuzzfeedMars) on a solo flight to their summer home on Venus, when his elbow slipped and he managed to undo the ship’s airlock. Neither he nor Yuuri had looked a day over 40.

Yuri’s let his body age. He’s still in good shape for 82; he does water aerobics with a group of old ladies every Tuesday and Thursday, and the atmosphere on Mars has naturally benefited his bones for the past three decades. But he and Otabek have always been purists otherwise, letting nature take its course with their bodies and never giving into the temptation or philosophy of synthetic body maintenance. There’s a small, petty part of him from his youth that remains, the purest part of himself that celebrates his body as the ultimate defeat of Victor Nikiforov. He revels in his own skin, and in Otabek’s, and the thought that when death comes to them in old age they won’t have cheated it, but earned it somehow. Victor and Yuuri’s parts were supposed to last them until 2089, and by then, who knows. The idea of them fucking their ancient asses all over the goddamn galaxy still stirs something ugly in Yuri.

Until Otabek gets sick. Like, really, really sick. And he keeps getting sick. Bladder infections and kidney infections and pissing blood and choked up catheters and too many nights in the hospital instead of their estate, and suddenly there’s a question that goes unspoken between them.

“You’re killing yourself,” Yuri says finally after their third trip to the ER that month. Otabek had a temperature of 40 degrees and collapsed in their greenhouse.

“Or I’m just dying,” Otabek says. “I’m old.”

“Bullshit,” Yuri says. Otabek still skates sometimes on weekdays when the rink is empty, because he was blessed with superhuman cartilage in his knees and the back of a titan. He just does simple laps to relieve stress while Yuri watches from the stands, long since given up the ice out of self preservation. But Otabek has never had to, because Otabek has always been healthy and strong. There’s nothing else to be said or done, because, “bullshit, you’re not allowed to die.”

“I don’t think that’s how dying works,” Otabek replies. He’s smiling and there’s acceptance in the smile that feels damning.

“Fuck you,” Yuri says. “The doctors have given you dozens of options. There’s-- technology, there’s--there’s--”

“I thought you didn’t believe in that,” Otabek says.

“Don’t let my pride kill you, Christ, Beka,” Yuri says, feeling impossibly young even with his knobbed knuckles and crooked fingers wrapped around Otabek’s own, mindful of the saline drip and hiding the biggest of his liver spots. “If you don’t live through this, I’ll kill you.”

The kidneys have to go. The bladder has to go.

Otabek’s dick has to go.

“It’s fine,” Otabek says after the doctor leaves the room. Their intimacy has suffered recently. Until Otabek’s body started failing him for good, they were still going at it an admirable two to three times a week. It was bragging rights at Yuri’s water aerobics class; Janice and Marta and Ahimsa are all twenty years younger than he is, but still delight in his gossip.

“Your hips can still handle fucking on the stairs?” Marta would ask, and Yuri would preen, his long gone grey hair curling with the heat of the pool around his ears.

Yuri has always deeply loved Otabek’s body, even in old age. He’s loved Otabek’s full chest of hair, the grey curly-cues that gather down his shoulders like shrubbery. He’s loved the wrinkles of Otabek’s ass when Otabek fucks him sideways in the mornings and Yuri reaches behind him for something soft and familiar to hold onto. He’s loved the deep growing cut of Otabek’s philtrum, he’s loved the soft ocean of Otabek’s stomach and the way it curves perfectly against his spine at night. He’s loved Otabek’s cataracts, Otabek’s thick fingernails, Otabek’s shitty liver and bladder, Otabek’s dick that has its own groove inside him.

But Otabek will still be Otabek. It’s always been Otabek’s character and strength that have made Yuri feel strong just standing beside him.

“It’s fine,” Yuri agrees. Otabek will carve new grooves into him. Otabek will not be in pain. Otabek will be ninety and still skating past Yuri in the stands of the skating club while Yuri drinks hot cider and pretends to ignore Otabek in favor of a book he’s read six pages of in the past ten years. Otabek will be alive. Yuri will still get to wrap himself around Otabek at night and press his nose to the wire-stiff hairs at the base of Otabek’s neck and listen to the sharp way Otabek negotiates the prices of fresh fruit and farmed fish at the market on Tuesdays. Yuri will still be able to occupy a comfortable silence where the room feels full and alive just because his feet are resting in Otabek’s lap. Yuri would do anything to keep that selfishly for himself as long as possible. “It’s fine.”

It’s not fine.

The organ transplants--the kidney, the bladder anyway--are all farmed sustainably and are available for Otabek at any time.

The dick however, is not.

“Please, do not say the word--”

“Robodick,” the doctor says anyway. “That’s the direction the market has deemed most profitable in perfecting, so the best technology currently available is the Nikiforov model. At Mr. Altin-Plisetsky’s age, I would be too worried that an organic transplant might not take, as we haven’t perfected the procedure. Going with a Nikiforov model would ensure a much higher success rate. This means his body wouldn’t reject the transplant, and the likelihood of--worst case scenario, death would be much, much lower.”

“Say that name again,” Yuri says. It’s a challenge, not a request. The doctor looks between Otabek in a gown on the table, and Yuri, hands curled over the handle of his cane.

“Would you like me to leave you with literature?” the doctor says, not taking the bait. He hands a thick magazine to Otabek and nods at Yuri. “I can leave you two alone if you need time to discuss the options available.”

As soon as the doctor is out of the room, Yuri snarls, “is that a dick catalogue?”

“That is,” Otabek says, flipping it open to a random page before leaning away from it and fumbling for his reading glasses, “that is exactly what it appears to be.”

“Did he say ‘Nikiforov?’” Yuri asks, lifting his cane to poke gently at Otabek’s hand. Otabek smiles, entertained. It’s the same kind of smile that he used to direct at Yuuri decades and decades ago when they were young, at some banquet or fancy party hosted by Victor and Yuuri, where Otabek would turn to Yuri and mouth, you jealous? against the long curve of Yuri’s neck

Otabek flips a couple dozen pages back in the magazine and adjusts his glasses. He’s trying not to smile too much. “‘Nikiforov -- or N1-kiforov is the prototype model still used today in all of our synthetic penis transplants,’” he reads out loud. “The design and shape of the model are based off of the organic penis belonging to Victor Nikiforov, who--”

“I am not,” Yuri spits out, “not having Victor Nikiforov’s dick inside of me.”

Otabek lets the magazine close around his thumb, bookmarking the page.

“They have to have other models,” Yuri continues.

Otabek frowns, his cheeks cutting deep curves against his mouth like a bulldog, and flips the catalogue back open to read quietly to himself. Yuri can feel the years peel off his own lifetime watching Otabek read.

Eventually, Otabek continues, “‘The N1-kiforov model was eventually chosen as the base model for all synthetic penile transplants, as the feedback regarding use, size, as well as shape concerning the girth and slight curve was favorable for both recipients, as well as sexual partners of all genders.’”

“Are you fucking with me?” Yuri asks, completely serious. “Beka, I need to know: are you fucking with me.”

“I am one-hundred percent not fucking with you,” Otabek replies. “But look-- there are different versions, a lot of luxury attachments--”

“Like what, Beka? A pasta maker? This is your dick, not a fucking KitchenAid,” Yuri does not scream.

Otabek looks at him. Really looks at him. Takes his glasses off and rubs at his temple slowly, and Yuri instantly wishes he could take every word that’s stumbled out of his mouth in the past minute and shove them back in.

They take the dick catalogue home.

They bathe together, quietly. Yuri sits between Otabek’s legs and lets the back of his head rest between where Otabek’s chest has gone soft and droopy and he closes his eyes and tries to forget the day. Otabek won’t let him.

“I need to get a transplant,” he says.

“I know,” Yuri says. “I’m being petulant. I’m in mourning.”

“You’re going to be mourning more than my dick soon if I don’t actually go in for the operation,” Otabek says. He still sounds so kind.

“Shut up,” Yuri says. He hates this. “I know.”

“Is it really so awful, me having Victor’s dick?” Otabek says. “I mean, you never wondered--”

He’s teasing, and Yuri wants to now sink underwater but also drag Otabek with him. “I hate you!”

“You love me,” Otabek says. He says it with such command in his voice that Yuri can do nothing but agree, weak for him with it.

“Yeah,” Yuri says. “I do.”

The series of operations starts less than a month later. Organ transplants are done with such frequency and ease these days that they’re the kind of operation that the lead surgeons will step out of the room during, send their interns in with their rivals to poach new techniques. Yuri pretends that he isn’t nervous, wearing his comfiest pair of sweats and one of Otabek’s winter sweaters in the waiting room. In his decades and decades and decades alive, humanity has still not found a way to make a comfortable hospital chair.

Every time Otabek wakes up, Yuri feels like he’s been suffocating. The slow blink awake makes Yuri’s heart catch in his throat every time.

Each surgery requires additional physical therapy. Otabek is so strong, Yuri thinks for the thirty-thousandth time in his life. He makes it through each one with such ease, it reminds Yuri of the first time he saw Otabek land a quad axel in competition. Invincible, he thinks.

The doctors tell them they can engage in sexual intercourse in a month. Yuri doesn’t know what he’s going to do when that month is up. He doesn’t expect to die before then. Yuri eats a piece of candy a day, does low-impact cardio three times a week, drinks a glass of red wine with dinner, and even if that weren’t enough to ensure some kind of longevity, Yuri is sure to live to 112 out of sheer spite alone.

(Even on their honeymoon in Rome fifty-five years ago, Otabek called him, “my grumpy old man.”)

It’s not like they have to have sex to have a meaningful relationship. It’s not like their relationship has only lasted nearly seven decades because the sex. But Yuri likes the sex. Yuri likes sex with Otabek; the noises he makes, the reminder of him solid and sure at the beginning of the day, the end of it.

Yuri hasn’t been so afraid of something or unsure of anything in a very long time. It sits in his stomach like a stone, and it grows heavier as Otabek gets better. He hates it. It makes him feel nauseous and it makes him feel tired; it makes him feel old.

Finally, Otabek turns to him and says, “we don’t have to, you know.”

And Yuri knows exactly what he’s talking about.

And in that moment, Yuri knows he wants to. As soon as the choice is taken away from him, Yuri knows exactly the decision he would make, and that would be to let Otabek fuck him, even if it were with a synthetic model of Victor Nikiforov’s dick.

“How dare you,” Yuri says. He’s making tea on the stove, slicing up a lemon for Otabek’s while Otabek scrolls through the news on his tablet. How dare Otabek bring it up so casually in the morning, not even daring to look him in the eye. “You don’t get to make this decision for me. You coward.”

Otabek looks up from his tablet and pushes his glasses up his nose, smiling. “Coward?” he asks. “You always tell me I’m the brave one. Even in our wedding vows, you said--”

“I know what I said!” Yuri says, angrily scooping too many spoonfuls of ceylon into loose tea bags. It’s going to come out too strong, bitter, and Yuri will put too much milk in his to hide it and then be sick for the rest of the day. Otabek knows this. “Look, if you want to fuck me, you can go ahead and fuck me. In fact, I would love it if you fucked me. The girls at the gym have been giving me pitying looks and I would love to shut them up.”

The kettle whistles on the stove, and Yuri grabs it huffily. He’s blushing. He’s halfway to 85 and he’s blushing.

“Maybe I was saying we didn’t have to because I don’t want to,” Otabek says. If possible, Yuri’s blush deepens. He turns his back to Otabek and pours the water over the overstuffed tea bags with a steady hand.

“Fine,” he says. He’s sure Otabek is just teasing him now.

“Fine?” Otabek repeats.

“Fine!” Yuri grabs the cool milk pitcher from the counter and, as expected, pours more milk than water into his tea. “Beka, we’ve always-- we knew we weren’t going to be two kids on the back of a motorbike forever. We knew that would end, like we knew competitive skating would end, like we knew music would change and clothes would change and we would change. I’m not going to stop loving you now because something else changed. We’ve always changed together. I don’t care if you have Victor Nikiforov’s dick, or if you don’t want to fuck me anymore, as long as I get to be with you.”

Yuri hears Otabek exhale shaky, the sound of the table creaking as Otabek grips it to help push himself up. Otabek shuffles toward him slow, and then Yuri feels Otabek’s arms circle around his middle; he’s stayed lanky all this time, and Otabek’s stayed robust, and the way he embraces Yuri has stayed so tight, grounding like an anchor.

“Fifteen-year-old Yuri would have never said that,” Otabek says in his ear. His voice is like honey.

“That’s not true. Fifteen-year-old Yuri would have said anything to get you to like him,” Yuri replies, and he feels Otabek press a smile into the crown of his head. “Fifteen-year-old Yuri would have said it, he just wouldn’t have meant it.”

“Do you mean it?” Otabek asks, dry, thin-lipped kisses down the back of his neck.

“Of course, old man,” Yuri replies, turning around. He grabs Otabek’s soft cheeks in his hands, fingers curling into Otabek’s sideburns. When he kisses Otabek, softly, Otabek tastes like the same awful chalky dry toothpaste tabs he’s used for the past thirty years, and a little like sleep. He licks a little into Otabek’s mouth just to be a shit, and Otabek laughs, grabbing at his collar as Yuri pulls back with his tongue out. “Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not okay with people shipping Otayuri … because I wanna know what made them look at yurio in canon and think ‘i wanna see him older and sexy’”

[REJECTED PROVERB, SOME DIPSHIT ON TUMBLR]

#otayuri #otabek altin #yuri plisetsky #yuri on ice #delaney writes

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nekoflashficcing · 7 years

Text

GW - On edge

Title - On edge by - tyreling/nekocin

Prompt - 27 days of otp // 21 - making up afterwards

Fandom - Gundam Wing

Pairing - Heero/Duo, unrequited Wufei/Duo Warnings - OoC, angst Rating - PG Summary - Their fight was bad.

“Is he still up there?” Heero asked as soon as Wufei slammed the door open.

“What do you think?” he snarled. “I expected better from you, Yuy.” Wufei had his ugliest expression on his face, eyebrows creased together and eyes blazing.

So it’s Yuy again. Heero probably deserved the distance. He wondered if Quatre and Trowa would do the same after what happened...

“How is he?” Heero asked quietly, never moving from his seat. Just laying down boneless in the chair as if his limbs were chained down by weights. Tired. So, so tired.

His mind replayed the fight over and over again. The words Heero had spit out. The words Duo had flung right back. They hadn’t been in the right set of mind. Maybe they were too tired from their work, maybe it’s just one of those times when the world just didn’t seem right. Maybe they were just on edge with their missions. The situation continued to escalate from there on. It wasn’t supposed to blow up like that.

“What. The. Hell. Was that earlier?” Wufei crossed his arms. “I am this close to beating your teeth into the back of your throat, Yuy.”

Heero didn’t miss the clench of Wufei’s jaw and the balled fists. “What’s stopping you, Chang?” Heero laughed. The laughter coming out of his throat sounded hollow. “You’ve always taken his side anyway. Always will.”

Wufei didn’t flinch, but his eyes did flicker in surprise. Wufei’s rigid stance didn’t relax. Instead, it got more hostile. “I promised Duo I wouldn’t hurt you.”

No doubt Wufei would beat him up regardless.

“Mind explaining what just happened.”

“Why? Didn’t Duo already tell you?” Heero said snidely.

Wufei’s scowl disappeared and he settled for a blank face. Heero didn’t dare to look at him in the eye.

“He did.” Wufei said. “I want to hear your version.”

Heero snorted. “That’s a first. I’d think you’d just side with him. No questions asked. Since you’re such great partners. And I’m the one standing between you and him.” That came out wrong. He wasn’t supposed to spill it.

But it was too late. Heero pinched his eyes closed.

“What happened?” Wufei asked quietly.

“What more can I possible tell you about? I’m sure Duo has already told you how I was such an insufferable asshole twenty-four seven. That I was so full of myself with the by-the-book procedures. How I shove his words right back at him and I just- I just couldn’t stop.” Heero dropped his face into his hands. “I just-- exploded. I--I don’t know why I lost my temper. I’m usually in control of my emotions. But we just-- and he just-- and earlier I just-- what is even happening to us? We were fine last night! We talked and laughed and-” Heero held his forehead and resisted the urge to pluck at his hair. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I think.” Wufei relaxed his stance. “You should go talk to him.”

Heero shook his head. “Duo hates me now. I said a lot of awful things. I can’t take those words back and undo this.”

“Make amends then. Apologize to him.”

“I can’t. I don’t know how to face him again.”

“If you really care about him, you should be up there and talking to him.”

“What if he doesn’t want to see me again?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Of course he wants to see you. He lo-” Wufei swallowed. “He cares about you. Deeply.”

Heero glared at him. “Why are you even helping me? I know how you look at him.”

Wufei flinched. Clenched his jaw shut and looked away. “Duo only sees you like that. Whereas I-” Wufei inhaled slowly. “This isn’t about me. This is about you and him.”

“Wufei-”

“Don’t. Don’t pity me.” Wufei held up a hand. “I don’t want your pity.”

“... does Duo know? Did you confess?”

“... yes.” Wufei let his hands hang loosely by his side. “He only sees me as a friend. Never a potential… it can only be you. It has to be you.” There was no more anger. No more tension. Wufei was as tired as Heero felt. “Just go up there. And be there for him, okay?”

“Why are you helping me?” Heero asked quietly. “This must not be easy for you.“

“What do you think?” Wufei shot him a half-hearted glare. “We’re friends first before we‘re rivals. I-- I just don’t want to see you two hurt each other anymore than this.”

“... I’m sorry, Wufei.”

“Don’t apologize to me! Apologize to him!” Wufei gestured to the ceiling. “Go!”

“What if he’s not there?”

“You’re in a relationship with him. You figure something out. Go before he thinks it’s time to disappear again.”

Heero pushed himself onto his feet, wobbled a little against the couch that even Wufei had shot forward, arm stretched out to catch him.

“Thanks, Wufei. For this.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” Wufei grumbled. “I still don’t like you much. You’ve hurt him today.”

“I know--. I didn’t mean to.” Heero sagged his shoulders.

“Then go.” Wufei waved his hand to the door.

“... If I could take back my words, I would’ve done it in a heartbeat. I better catch up to him.” He squared himself and rushed out of the room.

“Hey.” Heero craned his neck to look at Duo sitting on the roof.

Duo started and tore his eyes from staring at the night sky. “... Hey.” His face looked gaunt, his nose red from the cold. Duo squinted down at Heero. The shadows under Duo’s eyes were prominent from Heero’s vantage point. The anger that had flashed through those eyes had long disappeared, to be replaced by sadness.

Heero hesitated, too troubled to look Duo in the eye again. But then he pushed through. “... Mind if I come up?”

Duo shook his head and curled up in himself, tightly wrapping his arms over each other. “Whatever.” The puff of cold air escaping Duo’s mouth and the stinging against his skin, made Heero realize temperature had dropped drastically tonight.

“I’ll be right back.” Heero didn’t wait for Duo’s response. He grabbed the thick quilt from the bed and dragged it along as he tried to climb his way up the roof.

Heero wrapped it around his shoulders and carefully sat beside Duo, mindful of the space between them. An awkward silence followed as Heero debated whether to talk first or wrap his arms around Duo to ward off the cold. He had never felt this out of depth with Duo until now.

Duo must have been sitting here for quite a while now.

“Look--Duo-”

“I’m sorry-”

They began at the same time and stopped to look at each other in surprise.

“No, Duo, I am sorry. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I am. At fault. I’ve hurt you a lot.”

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”

“I shouldn’t have yelled back.”

“The situation was bad for us.”

“Very bad.” pause. “I’m truly sorry.”

“We can go about this all night but-- do you want to get inside?”

“Do you?”

“...Yes.” Heero shivered. “Can I-?” He opened his arms to Duo, leaning slightly towards him to indicate what his intentions.

Duo heaved a shuddering sigh and scooted closer, dropping his face into Heero’s chest and breathed.

Heero’s arms immediately wrapped around his back with the quilt.

“You’re freezing.”

“Not cold.” Heero finally heard Duo’s teeth clattering to get those words out.

“Let’s get you inside before your digits fall off.” Heero slipped the quilt around Duo’s shoulders and carefully descended from the roof. Once his feet touched the balcony, he turned around to hold a hand out to Duo.

Heero’s stomach lurched when he watched Duo misstep and nearly tumbled down the roof tiles.

“I’m okay. Okay.” Duo’s teeth still chattered.

Heero opened his arms. “Jump.”

“What?”

“I said jump. I’ll catch you.”

“Are you crazy?”

“It’s not far. Come on”

“Heero, I don’t have time for this.”

“Duo.” Heero beckoned. “Please trust me. I won’t let you fall.”

Duo considered the distance from the roof to the balcony and then Heero’s opened arms.“I used to be able do this in my sleep.”

Heero smiled. “I know.”

Duo hesitated. “... So we’re good now?”

“... I hope so.” Heero tilted his head slightly. “Are we?”

Duo lowered his chin, his hair falling over his eyes. “... for now, yeah.” Then he jumped into Heero’s waiting arms.

End

Notes: - Was influenced by reading a lot of Merula fanfics lately. - Plus feeling the vestiges of Wufei/Duo from Freeport by Maldoror and Salvage by GoodIdeaAtTheTime. Both are really great reads. Thanks for reading!

#gundam wing #27 days of otp #27 days of otp challenge #heero x duo #heero yuy #duo maxwell #tyrelingkitten #tyreling #nekocin #my fanfic #my fanfiction #rating: pg #anime

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day0one · 4 years

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Live updates: Trump says he wanted coronavirus testing slowed in grievance-filled speech to unfilled arena 1 hr ago (Trump scraps outdoor speech due to low attendance).

Trump, after boasting about enthusiasm and promising a full house, spoke in an arena in Tulsa on Saturday night with many seats unfilled amid the coronavirus pandemic. Most of his supporters in the 19,000-seat BOK Center were not wearing masks, hours after his campaign had announced that six members of the advance team staffing the event had tested positive for the virus.

In a speech lasting nearly two hours — filled with grievances, falsehoods, and misleading claims — Trump said that because more testing means higher numbers of known coronavirus cases, his direction was to curtail it. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down,’” he said. A White House official said later the president was “obviously kidding,” but he has previously expressed skepticism about testing, which public health experts say is required to contain the outbreak.

* Trump also downplayed the severity of the virus, fixating on the number of names used for it — and offering one, “Kung Flu,” a racially offensive term.

* There was no massive overflow audience greeting Trump; the area outside the arena had emptied out by early evening, and plans for Trump to address the audience outside were quickly scrapped. The campaign blamed protesters, but there were only scattered efforts to block entrances, which were resolved by police.

* The campaign said quarantine procedures had gone into effect for the infected staff members and those in “immediate contact” with them. Meanwhile, Tulsa County reported 136 new cases Saturday — marking another high for both single-day and average cases — while the state as a whole reported 331 new infections.

* Outside the security perimeter, arguments erupted between protesters and the president’s supporters at street corners near the arena, where they traded cries of “Black lives matter” and “all lives matter.” One protester was arrested at the BOK Center.

10:19 PM: Tulsa mayoral aide resigns over rally handling

A Tulsa mayoral aide resigned Saturday in response to the city’s handling of the president’s campaign rally.

Jack Graham said the decision has been building since the pandemic began, but the lack of enforcement of CDC guidelines at the presidential rally was the last straw.

In the letter, addressed to Bynum and later posted to social media, Graham wrote: “I appreciate the opportunities you have given me over the years, but my heart is telling me that I can no longer effectively support you and the decisions you make for Tulsa.”

Graham told The Post he has been “extremely supportive” of Bynum’s work since starting in his office as an intern just out of college in 2017.

“But I started becoming unsupportive when people kind of just passed the baton along and didn’t want to make a firm decision to adhere to the CDC guidelines or social distancing that any other event like this should deal with,” he said. “Someone told me the basic test for anything is: Are people going to die?"

“In this case, people are going to die.”

Graham said on top of the likely spread of a potentially deadly disease, the city has lost relationships within the community, be it partners, schools, foundations, or activists.

Although some questioned why Graham posted his resignation publicly after submitting it to the mayor, he said he stands by his decision to share.

“In these roles, I don’t get to be heard or get to state my opinion, and at a certain point, I had to stand for myself and where my heart is,” he said.

By: Kelsy Schlotthauer

9:32 PM: Trump says flag burners should be sentenced to a year in prison

President Trump told his supporters at the rally in Tulsa on Saturday that demonstrators who burn American flags should be sentenced to a year in prison.

Setting aside the First Amendment right to free speech, Trump called flag burning a desecration that needed to be stopped. He urged the two Republican U.S. senators from Oklahoma in attendance at the rally, Jim Inhofe and James Lankford, to introduce legislation to make it a criminal offense.

"We should have legislation that if somebody wants to burn the American flag and stomp on it, just burn it, they go to jail for one year,’’ Trump said.

The remarks came during a speech in which he sought to rally his base by stoking the culture wars that have engulfed the nation. He jabbed at the left, demonstrators, and illegal aliens.

Trump criticized NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for apologizing this month for opposing kneeling during the national anthem. "I like Roger Goodell, but I didn’t like what he said a week ago,’’ Trump said. We will never kneel to our national anthem or our great American flag. We will stand proud and we will stand tall.’’

By: Christopher Rowland

9:19 PM: Trump says he told advisers to slow coronavirus testing in U.S.

President Trump complained that coronavirus testing in the United States — which began later in the pandemic than it did in other countries — is driving up the numbers of confirmed infections, and he said he told his advisers to test people more slowly, even though experts agree that robust testing is the best way to control the pandemic.

“Here’s the bad part: When you do testing to that extent you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,'' he said. “So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please. They test and they test.''

Trump has said before that he’s skeptical about the importance of testing. But a White House official told The Washington Post Trump was joking.

Trump called the novel coronavirus “Kung flu” during his speech in Tulsa, using a racist term to allude to the origin of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, as he took aim at some of his favorite targets on the left and the media. "It’s a disease that without question has more names than any disease,'' he said. “I can name Kung flu. I can name 19 different versions of them.''

Also calling the disease “Chinese virus,'' he boasted about stopping travel from China earlier in the pandemic and said the United States has tested 25 million people, which he said was more than other countries.

In March, senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said it was “highly offensive” to refer to coronavirus as “Kung flu.”

Drawing hearty cheers from his supporters, Trump also denounced protesters and political leaders who are pursuing the removal of Confederate statues across the South, calling it a “desecration.'”

“The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrating our monuments, our beautiful monuments,'' he said. “This cruel campaign of censorship and exclusion violates everything we hold dear as Americans. They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose their new oppressive regime in its place.”

By: Christopher Rowland

9:17 PM: Downtown Tulsa businesses close early

Downtown Tulsa is closed for business as the sun sets and the rally gets underway. Block after block of restaurants, bars and storefronts closed early, many with windows boarded up. Signs in doors explained to patrons that they closed early for the day, often at 3 or 4 p.m., as a safety precaution, urging customers to return again soon.

Dave Sopark, 37, the owner of a Jinya Ramen franchise, supervised his employee boarding up his restaurant around 7 p.m., later than most.

“I wasn’t going to do it up till last night,” Sopack said. “I heard of other places — even my neighbors here —closing and that made me think harder about the safety of my staff.”

A Jinya employee said he was concerned about people bringing guns inside, and Sopack said he heard that bad actors would be coming to town. “But the reports say the [BOK Center] is only like half-full,” Sopark said, “so maybe it won’t be as bad as people are saying.”

By: Bret Schulte

8:54 PM: Protesters gather 30 minutes from the arena

a group of people on a field: Peaceful protestors gather in Veterans Park to protest Donald Trump's rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday, June 20, 2020.

At Veterans Park, about a 30-minute walk from the BOK Center, a multicultural group of hundreds gathered to hear civil rights protest veterans, new activists, musicians, and spoken word artists as the sunset on Saturday afternoon. The Rally Against Hate was organized by Tykebrean Cheshire, who said she started a nonprofit called Peaceful Rally Tulsa 10 days ago.

“That 8 minutes and 46 seconds changed the whole world. It made people think, why have I not been listening,” said Cheshire, 21, who is black and Hispanic, referring to the police killing of George Floyd. “Some people thought, that could’ve been my son. And others thought, that couldn’t have been my son. And they were both right.”

She says she quit her job at Target and dedicated her adult life to peaceful organizing. The distance from the BOK Center was intentional.

“Our biggest thing was to make sure people felt safe tonight,” Cheshire said. “Going to the BOK Center didn’t feel like a safe option. I wanted to do the old-school [Martin Luther King] thing. We’re able to connect with each other, and that’s the most important thing today.

By: Robert Klemko

8:42 PM: Trump blames media, protesters, for empty seats at his Tulsa event

a close up of a blue wall: A supporter sits alone in the top sections of seating as Vice President Mike Pence speaks before President Donald J. Trump arrives for a "Make America Great Again!" rally in Tulsa. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/TWP A supporter sits alone in the top sections of seating as Vice President Mike Pence speaks before President Donald J. Trump arrives for a "Make America Great Again!" rally in Tulsa. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) Before an arena with a large number of empty seats in Tulsa, President Trump launched his rally Saturday night by taking aim at the media and demonstrators outside and launched into a list of accomplishments of his first three years in office, starting with Supreme Court appointments and increased military spending.

“You are warriors. … We had some very bad people outside. They were doing bad things,” Trump said, seeming to blame the media for the light showing at his widely anticipated campaign event.

Of the media, he said, “I’ve been watching the fake news for weeks now, and everything is negative: Don’t go, don’t come, don’t do anything.”

Trump boasted about getting Supreme Court Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh onto the bench, but the crowd gave a few boos at the mention of Gorsuch, who provided a key vote this week to prevent discrimination against gay and transgender people in the workplace.

“I stand before you today to declare the silent majority is stronger than ever before. Five months from now, we’re going to defeat sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump said. “We’re going to stop the radical left. We’re going to build a future of safety and opportunity for Americans of every race, color, religion and creed.”

By: Christopher Rowland

8:35 PM: Photos: Tensions rise at Trump rally in Tulsa

a group of people that are standing in the street: A Tulsa police officer clears the road as Sincere Terry, 18, leads counterprotesters outside the rally site. Next Slide Full screen 1/4 SLIDES © Amanda Voisard/for The Washington Post A Tulsa police officer clears the road as Sincere Terry, 18, leads counterprotesters outside the rally site. See more photos from the Tulsa rally

By: Washington Post Staff

8:35 PM: Woman in ‘I can't breathe’ shirt details arrest

Clad in a mask and hood, wearing a shirt that said “I can’t breathe," Sheila Buck sat defiant in the street.

Moment before, Buck, a 62-year-old Tulsa resident, and Catholic school art teacher, had wielded a ticket to enter the rally Saturday afternoon, she told The Washington Post.

She said she made it past the barricades but was then stopped by who she said were federal authorities in plainclothes. They told her she could not enter and did not provide a reason, she said, but she thinks the message on her shirt was the reason.

“‘You’re not invited,‘” she said they told her. ‘“We don’t want you here.’”

She said she left the area but was confronted by police in the blocked-off street. The officers appeared excited at the prospect of arresting someone, she said, and she began to pray.

The moment was captured live on television as Buck — wearing a hood inspired by the fictional, Tulsa-set HBO program “The Watchmen” — refused to stand up.

“Somebody has to do this,” she said

Two officers dragged her away on charges of trespassing and resisting arrest, she said. She was taken to a hospital after her blood pressure spiked in the jail, and she was administered fluids before returning, she said. She was released hours later.

The plainclothes law enforcement took her phone, she said, which she still hasn’t received.

“I wasn’t loud, I didn’t have a sign, I just showed up with a mask and my T-shirt,” Buck said.

“I’m just done. I wanted to say this is not okay,” she said. “Our country is now divided and we have got to stand for what’s right.”

Another demonstrator, Phillip Rufkahr of Missouri, was arrested after he was ordered to stop loitering near the entrance. He was booked and held in lieu of a $500 bond, according to an arrest report.

Kelsy Schlotthauer contributed to this report.

By: Ziva Branstetter and Alex Horton

8:16 PM: Black Lives Matter activists criticize Trump, Pence for rally

Black Lives Matter protesters took President Trump to task for hosting a political rally in Tulsa, the site of the worst racial violence in U.S. history, on Juneteenth weekend. Black activists said the rally stoked racial tensions in the city.

In the district of Greenwood, black leaders rushed to cover up Black Wall Street memorials hours before a scheduled visit by Vice President Pence on Saturday. The memorials honor the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. They also pay tribute to the Tulsa community of Greenwood, one of the richest black communities in the country before the 1921 massacre.

Activists said they did not want Pence to use the historic district for a political event.

“I just think his visit is an opportunity for a photo op,” said community activist and educator Kristi Williams. “We say, ‘Don’t come for a photo op when you have not come to sit down and talk with black leaders in the community.’ We are beyond symbolism.”