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#i just. i think i will always carry the grief of our friendship our relationship in my heart

mynonclicheblog · 10 months

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One final Never Have I Ever love triangle thematic analysis

I've said this in one of my posts before, but the narrative is always going to favor what is best for Devi. A lot of what makes this show so juicy to dive into is because so much of its meaning is rooted in symbolism and higher concepts, not just the individual interactions you're looking at onscreen!

I think that's what doesn't work for some (not all) pro-Dxton anti-Ben folks. They see Paxton being respectful and kind to Devi, they see that he's the attractive object of her desire from day 1, and they see that the two of them genuinely do help each other in certain ways. But when these same people look at Benvi, they only see Ben making obnoxious comments to Devi (+ others), they see childish behavior and mistakes being made, and they see them frequently butting heads due to their shared competitive nature.

And honestly? I get it. These conclusions are easy to come to when you're looking at the surface, but they don't take into account the full story that's being told.

Let's get into it. 😎👇

So I mentioned earlier the idea of what is best for Devi. Not what is best for any regular person out there -- what is best for Devi Vishwakumar! Our girl expresses in no uncertain terms that she enjoys her hypercompetitive rivalry-turned-bond with Ben ("Ben's smart and we talk- mostly argue- for hours!" // "I don't want to break up with Ben. He really pushes me.") The fact that they fight and compete is not a detriment to their compatibility, it is actually the thing that makes him most desirable in her mind. She would not have wanted to be with him in the first place if this were not true. Their sharp-tongued communication style may not be the standard picture of a 'healthy' relationship for most people, but, well. Devi and Ben are far from most people.

Devi is an incredibly emotional, dynamic person who's always searching for another high. The competitive nature of her relationship with Ben is enough to satisfy her itch for novelty/excitement (her differences with Paxton don't hit this box), yet Ben's presence also provides a comforting long-term consistency in her life. He's seen the very best and the very worst of her and he always comes back. He frequently brings Devi back to herself, too, when she loses sight of what matters (friendships, family, sense of self, her goals, etc).

Then there's the dream vs. reality dichotomy that very much applies to this love triangle. Simple as it may be, it's accurate. I believe it was built that way on purpose because of how well it reflects Devi's relationships to Mohan and Nalini, which is the beating heart of what NHIE is all about. One (Mo/Pax) is more outwardly palatable than the other and provides an easygoing, self-soothing escapism that she needs in order to work through her grief. This person represents youth and the rose-colored past; Devi's tendency to idealize and indulge. The other person (Nal/Ben) is sharper around the edges, a bit harder to swallow, but pushes Devi to do better and supplies the support she needs. This person represents Devi's grounded reality; her time in the present and the woman she is growing into.

They are both important pieces of Devi's journey, but the themes of past vs. present speak for themselves. The past is something we keep in our heart; in this case, it's someone who has impacted us and we'll always carry with us -- but the ultimate goal is to move forward from that. The central relationship of Never Have I Ever is that of Devi & Nalini as they heal and grow together. In terms of Devi's romantic life (which is what this analysis is about), her relationship with Ben is the one that more closely shadows the series arc between her & Nalini.

I'd like to address some things by the individual season now. One of my observations watching s1 for the first time was that Paxton was usually aligned with bad things in Devi's life, whereas Ben was aligned with the good. ie, Paxton was the root cause of Devi's falling out with Elfab and Nalini // Ben is the one who repaired those relationships. These things aren't Paxton's fault, nor do I place any blame on him. They're just subtle narrative choices that send up unspoken flags saying, hey look, this isn't the right person for her. This theme remained in s1 for the most part, but given that it was NHIE's debut season, it planted several seeds for me about who the boys were for Devi and how they fit into her world.

Season 2 does a lot to sort out the difference in what Devi thinks she wants (Paxton) and what her heart truly wants (Ben). Yes, I'm going there, too: head vs heart. Devi's underlying preference for Ben > Paxton should be easy to spot as early as 2x01 -- if only for the fact that Devi finally bagged the hot guy of her dreams, yet, choosing to be with him isn't easy for her. In fact, as both Devi and Eleanor confirm later, she wanted to choose Ben in the first place. Like... that's crazy when you think about it!!! Despite all the pieces falling into place for her and Paxton, and against her friends' shallow advice, she decides that she won't let go of Ben. Instead, she makes the misguided decision to date both. This isn't the kind of mistake she'll ever make again. It isn't Devi acting out because of Ben -- it signals a profound attachment to him when, all things considered, picking Paxton should have been a no brainer. That revealed everything I needed to know in order to understand that being with Paxton wasn't what she wanted in her heart of hearts.

Then, of course, 3x10 brings that all home with the stomach knots comparison. It tells us that since Devi and Paxton have moved into a place of friendship, with him no longer on a pedestal, those romantic feelings (particularly on her part) have dissipated. As a bonus, Devi even explicitly states that Paxton was a dream! Ben, however -- her flawed reality -- is the one who still gives her butterflies. This is the result of Devi's slow awakening to her true inner self, the Devi who values realness and authenticity and loving through imperfection. It's a step closer to the complete acceptance of herself. (Notice as well that right after this point, it becomes more undeniable than ever that Ben is who she wants to be with.)

As long as Paxton was a romantic possibility for Devi, their relationship was tied to her feelings of insecurity and inferiority. Again this is not Paxton's fault -- he assures her of the opposite all the time -- but this is Devi's story, and we are shown over and over that Devi fears true vulnerability with Paxton (both sexually and emotionally). Compare this to the way she has always felt confident, seen, driven, and unabashedly herself in her relationship with Ben, even when they were enemies. At a glance Devi may appear to act more immature in Ben's orbit, but the truth is that she grows with him more than anyone else (besides Nalini) thanks to Ben's penchant for encouraging accountability and showing her that actions can have consequences.

Anyway, TLDR version:

Paxton = Devi's youth, Mohan, grief, distraction, the past, idealism, and the head (constructed ideas).

Ben = Devi's future, Nalini, healing, confrontation, the present, reality, and the heart (authentic truths).

Never Have I Ever's romantic story structure rests on the premise of these symbolic definitions. They are gospel, and while the characters will grow and change and become better versions of themselves, they will do so within the lines that are already drawn. The lines exist for a reason -- they are a narrative tool! These characters cannot and should not 'grow out' of their roles because those roles are their identities within the show's framework. Character development isn't getting wasted, because the characters are exactly who they are meant to be right through to the end. They are symbols. If that's not your cup of tea then so be it! But there's nothing wrong with this writing style. In fact it's one of my personal favorites because everything is so neatly defined, yet fascinating to read into 🥰

The imperfect Ben had to be Devi's true love because her love interests are, in a way, reflections of herself. By no fault of his own, Devi always felt the need to be "perfect" for Paxton because that's how she viewed him; a false paragon of everything she wanted to be. That is the point of their story together. Her acceptance of the deep love she has for Ben (and Nalini!), despite his sometimes off-putting demeanor, is aligned with Devi's acceptance of her own imperfections -- that she is hot-headed, she can be self-absorbed, she makes mistakes -- but that she is also brilliant and driven and caring and radiant, and she is equally worthy of receiving the love that she has to offer others.

Narratively speaking, it was never truly a competition.

#never have i ever #benvi #devi vishwakumar #ben gross #ben x devi #devi x ben #bevi #nhie spoilers #nhie #analysis post #*success

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yieldfruit · 8 months

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Have you ever been through heartbreak? What does it feel like for you? How do you get over it?

Oh yes, for sure! Definitely. Man, it's so tough, right? I hate it. However, I lean into it. I don't shy away from pain or numb it or medicate it or drink it away, etc. I feel it, I process it, I pray through it, I bring it to the Lord in tears and contrition. I want to feel it, get through it, heal from it. Let it take its time. The process of heartbreak/heartache and getting through those seasons and coming through it will make you tenderized, wise, tenacious, and closer to the Lord (He is near to the brokenhearted; He is well acquainted with sorrows, all of this in His Word).

I have been through some very heavy things in life, some of the worst things you can imagine that people go through. I don't say this as a brag because that would be weird, but some of the top things in life that can cause great, great grief I have experienced. It is what has led me closer to the Lord. I thank God for being drawn closer to Him. How do I get through it, besides time and prayer? Daily in His Word, I read a few chapters a day and read through the Bible continuously starting in Genesis and finishing in Revelation. His Word transforms our minds and thinking and our hearts. I need Him. I also write, I write out my griefs and my prayers. I pray for those who have hurt me. When I pray for them it softens my heart towards them and I know I need to (and actually grow in desiring to) extend the grace that I have been forgiven with. How can I withhold that which I have been given in Christ?

I turn to those I love for prayer and for processing through things in trustful conversation. I have a small circle but it is greatly treasured–don't settle when it comes to having a close, small tight circle with those who truly love the Lord and love you. I haven't always had that, but when it comes and you have kindred spirits in your life that care about you (and most importantly they truly know the Lord! I've just had so many lukewarm friends that were not really living out things biblically/truly following Christ), it is healing in and of itself. Well, it contributes to the healing. It's hard to find though. True Christians are getting harder and harder to come by, but they are there–it may just take some time. And in those lonely times the Lord was my Everything, my best friend, my husband, my confidant, my Savior, the very One keeping me alive and facing another day despite my heart being broken on the floor and stomped on in a thousand pieces. I have been greatly hurt by those I loved the most, and that stings, but it got my eyes on Christ. I don't look for fullness in frail human beings. Fellowship and friendship and relationships are beautiful, but they cannot ultimately save us.

If you are going through heartache, may the Lord heal you in His timing, will, and way. Lord, please be with this soul and comfort them and lead them to portions in Your Word that speak to the wound they are carrying. Lord, comfort them and be with them, Your Word, Your presence, and Your Spirit are a balm to the brokenhearted and staggering in strength. Keep them and hold them, I pray. Heal them and provide beautiful relationships that honor you in time I pray, Lord. In Jesus' name, Amen. We trust you, Lord, we love You and we need You. Please heal the broken places and spaces.

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rainstormcolors · 2 months

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hi! im curious how u feel about. Kaiba's ending in dsod as a devout kaiba fan

bc quite a few ppl ik *arent* rlly big on it for reasons that include but arent limited to "it ruins the message of letting the dead go and moving on like Yugi did" and etc which i dont agree with for sm reasons but im curious abt ur thoughts on the matter too 😭

Hello.

I’ve talked about DSoD and DSoD’s ending quite a bit over the years. I've come to understand the ending of DSoD to be layered on several levels, and it actually tackles several themes in the original work from different angles at the same time, and I think trying to force the ending into one neat "this is what definitely happened" box stifles that complexity. It’s deliberately open to interpretation. I also want to make room for fans who do not like DSoD. We have our preferences and individual concepts we value from canon, and carry personal experiences we relate to canon in different ways. Please understand to those reading this that it’s alright to omit this film from your internal design of canon.

I can talk some about my own relationship and journey with DSoD. I’ve loved Yu-Gi-Oh! for a long time. I watched the show as it aired and read the manga as it was released within the United States. One of my parents died when I was young. At the time I felt very disconnected from both that event and from the other people in my household. We never talked about our feelings and I was always vastly terrible at interpreting my own emotions and behaviors. The further catch here is we were seeing a grief therapist some, and I’d been in and out of therapy for a while before that as well. I just could not parse out any feelings at all and I didn’t know how to talk to other people about things. I was disconnected from it all. We flash forward to the release of DSoD. And to my surprise, something I didn’t expect from myself, I was talking to people. I was talking about what grief looked like even if a person wasn’t labeling it. I was talking about how sometimes we can’t name what we’re feeling. What I saw in DSoD were people grieving and I understood this. And I was communicating my ideas and emotions that had been so foggy up until then. I suppose this is the strange power of an autistic interest paired with personal experience – and I was actually trying to talk about feelings and trying to bond with other people.

And I was truly pondering on and reflecting -- not on a subconscious level but on a fully conscious one now -- on the loneliness and struggles the other people in my household had felt back then too. There had been a suicide attempt at a certain point which was something I had refused to let myself think about but I was now thinking about that too.

I like stories about the experience of grief over stories that are PSAs about grief. It was going to take a grief story with teeth and bite to awaken this piece of me, not a cutesy PSA on grieving. For me, it can feel like fandom at times has this idea that everyone has it in them to just talk about their feelings and reach out and that everyone has that, and that is just not true at all. (What a further surprise to me to discover later on why I was also drawn to elements of Death-T back then, back while I still felt so disconnected from “the experience of death.”)

I’m especially drawn to and touched by Seto’s narrative, but I think Yugi’s own story in DSoD harbors this as well. As I read this line, “it ruins the message of letting the dead go and moving on like Yugi did,” I think of how I feel the story was also about Yugi accepting that it’s okay for him to draw from the strength Atem gave to him and to feel inspired by Atem even though Atem is “gone” and that this is the meaning of why Atem joined Yugi in battle in that grand final showdown in DSoD.

As I said, there is the potential of multiple layered interpretations inside the film’s ending. There’s the theme of the power of friendship and love being able to break through the universe, that friendship can be so meaningful the barriers surrounding us can’t stop those feelings. It is love as a powerful force and Seto -- who had rejected others and feelings for so long, who has felt so disconnected from everything but those brief burning moments of winning -- has embraced love and what Atem meant to him. There is the hyperfictionalized portrayal of grief and its forms like emotions as art, and how grief stays with us but evolves and matures: Death-T as angry scarred grief and the negative impacts of the departed “villain” on the living “villain”, the Ceremonial Duel as the acceptance of grief and the positive impacts left by the departed “hero” on the living “hero”, and DSoD as finally seeing and understanding the departed one as just a person just as you are a person. And grief is a permanent marker on us. It doesn’t really go away. There’s the metaphorical portrayal of closure for the survivor finally being able to say goodbye to the one they love, to see that person outside of their grief for who they are and it’s painted in an artful and literal way, and it gives Seto the tools to move forward in life carrying Atem inside his heart. And there’s the wonder of science fiction as technology and humanity and the soul are fused. Our voices and images travel across the world through technology in our reality – could it travel even further? What are human beings capable of? And it’s about Atem still possibly being savable from this place, that death wasn’t his answer because people care about him. Someone wanted to see him this badly. There is no duel, no words we see exchanged, because this gesture already says everything. Seto being here to see Atem says everything.

It’s also a possible commentary on how scars don’t go away and sometimes we can’t save someone. Sometimes someone isn’t able to break free of their ghosts and it’s possible to wish peace for that person or to be left scarred by them or both at the same time. People can be warped by their trauma and not overcome it because it’s a hard hard road to walk. To only harbor any sympathy for the survivors who are healthy, cute, and palatable belies a very conditional idea of compassion. This isn’t to say the harm isn’t real or that people don’t need to be accountable for their actions, but they are human beings who have struggled and struggled. The wounds of trauma are not shallow and healing can be hard. Seto is only 18-years-old in DSoD.

Death and love are weaved throughout Seto’s entire story in canon.

While I understand what people mean as they say “Seto needs to face the consequences of his actions and should have a strain with Mokuba," when it’s employed as a critique of the movie, I also feel very strange and think, "That's just the way grief is. Or rather how it can be and how it is for a number of people.” As I said, my own family was horrible about any talking about our feelings in the wake of grief and then that suicide attempt. There was no PSA-type talk between us. For me, the mess of DSoD comes across as real even if it’s an exaggerated presentation.

I’ve also had very dark periods in my life, terrified of having no one understand me ever again, and this also grounds me into how Seto’s head and heart may have been working. I didn’t know how to talk to people about emotions, including my family even though I loved them, and everything felt dark and like I was endlessly sinking.

And I had a moment of truly understanding how profoundly alone my father must have felt when my mother died, as my father was just as friendless as I was and didn’t have outside family to help at all.

I had felt I was incapable of connecting with other people and I felt I saw that trait within Seto, and so watching canon tell me “the bond between Seto and Atem is real, it meant something” was very very moving for me. Even if you don’t know how to talk, you can find connection through what you do understand.

I do think it’s quite understandable for people to feel put off by DSoD and its ending. I think it’s quite fair that people root for Seto and Mokuba together and that they’ve hoped for a journey of healing. People become upset on Mokuba’s behalf. I personally connect with the messiness of grief and Seto’s conflicted heart and the artful and challenging portrayal of a person spilling over in grief. I do personally hold interpretations of Seto returning, so my answer here is also shaded by that. Even on Mokuba’s side, I’ve sort of been there and it allowed me to talk about that experience which isn’t an experience many people talk about. It’s very hush-hush in our day-to-day lives and it’s not easy to talk about.

Does DSoD reward Seto’s self-destructive behavior too much? I would say I’m not here for moral lessons and life is full of so many contradictions, so many tangled complicated layered emotions. It’s fair to hold this as a personal gripe with DSoD, but given the amount of audience backlash and discussion over this ending I don’t personally feel it’s actually a fully rewarding message. It’s more layered and thematic than that to me.

For a film for a big money-making mainstream shonen franchise, DSoD is unusually arty.

Again, people have their own experiences and people need different things from art. Someone else will carry a different relationship to DSoD, and someone else may need different things to come to terms with grief.

Thank you for the ask. I hope this answer wasn’t too wordy. I think it’s good to form your own opinions too. Thank you for reading my rambling.

#the darkside of dimensions

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twinkinspector · 1 year

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present mic / yamada hizashi ❥ astrology masterlist

❥ birth date: july 7, 2111

❥ birth time: 6pm

❥ birth place: tokyo

❥ pop astrology analysis:

cancer sun, cancer moon, capricorn rising. on the surface, i would say his big three doesn't fit him. but that's in the pop astrology sense – just looking at the surface of his behaviors and at these three placements. i would have expected much more air and much more fire. but his big three consists of earth and water! weird to me for sure. [insert no bitches meme here] no leo? ALL THAT SAID........ it does make sense when you look deeper.

❥ in-depth below the cut ❥

❥ cancer sun: emotional. strong survival instinct. nurturing. sensitive. compassionate. seeks and offers security. loyal. protective. highly intuitive. associated with psychic abilities. charismatic. mommy issues.

our boy mic isn't what i'd call a textbook cancer. his analysis is going to be more of me dissecting the motivations behind his actions – he's much older than other characters, so he's likely "masking" his placements more than other analyses i've done. his motivations are almost always personal. they're often to protect his friends, which is very cancer. cancers take relationships really seriously, which is obviously the case with mic. because of the emotional and nurturing aspects of cancers, they can be very focused on the past. i think this manifests in the way he reacts when finding out about shirakumo. (i'm not going to say anything more than that bc spoilers.) ALSO i think his intuition comes into play with his choice of friends. though aizawa acted aloof and distant, mic knew he could crack him. and he did.

❥ cancer moon: loyal. nurturing. family is super important to him. goes out of his way to make others feel loved. naturally supports and protects others. very emotional. i've noticed this placement can have mood swings really easily based on the moon's current transits.

mic's personal motivations are super important to him. when shirakumo is killed in battle, he and aizawa are frozen in place to mourn him for hours. though his passing truly affected mic (and he still carries it with him), he was able to navigate his initial grief (showing a mastery and understanding of emotion) and more or less move forward. his friendship with aizawa is really indicative of how he goes out of his way to make others feel loved. he really had to go out of his way to be friends with someone so guarded. although he's loyal to his friends, mic is able to team up with pretty much anyone. in the manga, there was a point in his high school career when he had to team up in a two-vs.-two battle with someone he really didn't like against aizawa and shirakumo. while mic's team didn't win, he did a surprisingly good job of cooperating. this often shows a lot of empathy and emotional intelligence.

❥ capricorn rising: biiiiig bizzy-business energy. work-oriented. no-nonsense. stoic. poised. quick-witted. bright. emphasis on family. mastery of the material. organized.

it might seem like mic isn't high-achieving and work-oriented, but i think that's just something he's cultivated over the years. he's honestly much more hardworking than he seems on the surface. he has three jobs!!!!! he's also able to compartmentalize his strong emotions to do what needs to be done when it comes to work. this placement is super persistent. he wore a seemingly aloof aizawa down until he became a lifelong friend. i think this placement is HUGELY colored by his leo mercury.

❥ leo mercury: excels at public speaking, performance, and winning the hearts of others. proud. bold. authoritative. enthusiastic. well-liked. enjoys the spotlight.

mic is the poster child for the surface manifestations of a leo mercury. his entire persona was created around his special brand of communication – insanely loud and bold. this is the way his actions manifest – BIG and BOLD.

❥ leo venus: loves grand gestures. bold love. confident. playful. dramatic. energetic. can be emotionally unstable. loyal. warm. aesthetics are important to him. loves the effect he has on society.

i think this placement colors his others too. he's so bold in the way he expresses himself – even aesthetically. venus represents aesthetics as well as all its other domains. so his hair??????? v leo venus. this placement does speaks to his strong emotions even though it's not a water sign or a traditionally ~emotional~ sign to most people. he also thinks (rightfully) that society is a better place with him in it.

❥ cancer mars: indirect. passive-aggressive. inclined to control their feelings but can seem moody. can later erupt. protects himself. driven to action based upon emotion. mars is in its fall here.

this really drives home how much his emotions influence his actions. mars is the planet of action and how we deal with conflict. it's not always about how we react to conflict – sometimes it's about why things are causing conflict in our minds in the first place.

❥ virgo jupiter: intelligent. problem-solver. great technical and analytical skills. loves to learn. many interests. perfectionist. realistic. optimistic outlook on mundane things. gravitates toward extremes. jupiter is in detriment here.

this is another good representation of how mic expresses himself. he takes the smaller details and more mundane things and turns them into something bigger and more expansive (jupiterian). this is a perfect example of why he always volunteers to commentate – he's taking something mundane and turning it into an opportunity / something more interesting.

❥ pisces saturn: compassionate. philosophical. introspective. aloof. hopeful. idealistic.

this is interesting. some people with saturn in pisces tend to overcompensate for these traits by trying to control things. and i think mic does this. he doesn't necessarily control situations – but people. his whole ~thing~ is crowd control and inspiring others. to me, this placement is about turning the greater good and your ideals into a career – which is exactly what mic has done. he's not only a hero but he does it in a way that's really in-your-face and brings his ideals to the forefront.

the rest of these planets are GENERATIONAL. i'll make this into its own page after i have more than one character with these same placements!

❥ gemini uranus: intelligent. perceptive. flexible. resourceful. values freedom and independence.

people with this placement are usually really good at learning new skills – and quickly. they're often able to focus on multiple things. and they have a lot of interests! that's one reason they value freedom – they want the freedom to follow their interests.

❥ libra neptune: idealistic. creative. has an eye for beauty. receptive. compassionate. tolerant. seeks harmony and balance. love of beauty and art.

people with this placement are usually really charming. these people love to be idealistic, but they're able to balance that with realism. mic does the best he can within his means and tries to inspire others to be as idealistic as he is.

❥ taurus pluto: a knack for making something out of nothing. persistent. enjoys comfort and beauty.

these people may obsess over money and material things. this could be why mic works so many jobs instead of just making his interests into hobbies!

❥ overall

as i said in the beginning, it's interesting to analyze someone so much older than the characters i've been analyzing. the older you get, the more your learned behaviors affect you and color the way things manifest. so it's important to take that into account too! that's why i really tried to focus on his internal motivations – which actually checks out as far as the amount of cancer placements he has. his internal world is intense. i didn't analyze his cancer stellium specifically because it seems like he's learned to mask his emotions pretty well with grandiose behavior (given to him by his leo placements). i do think this chart fits him, but i'll admit that this was a tough one! i also want to note that every time i reference "family" here, i'm referring to his found family. mic really sees his friends as family. again..... very cancer.

❥ chart

#BUSTS THROUGH THE WALL LIKE THE KOOL-AID MAN #what's up #i told you i'd get this out even if it killed me #and i'm still here #anyway #evening astrology #present mic astrology #yamada hizashi astrology #hizashi yamada astrology #presentation michael posting on the dash #p-#powerpoint presentation michael

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fr-martin-gospel-reflections · 3 months

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4th February - ‘Everybody is looking for you’, Reflection on the readings for Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Mk 1:29-39)

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sometimes a darkness of spirit can come over us for many reasons. Such an experience can often be generated by some experience of loss. We sense that we are losing our health. We may be losing some friendship or relationship that has been important to us. A loved family member drifts away from us because of ill health. The most painful experience of loss is when a loved one dies. Job who features in today’s first reading is someone who had lost everything - his home, his children, his health, his independence. A great darkness of spirit came over him, powerfully expressed in today’s first reading, ‘Lying in bed, I wonder, “When will it be day?” Risen, I think, “How slowly evening comes!”,,, my eyes will never again see joy’. It is a heartfelt lament, and as you read on beyond our reading, Job brings his heartfelt lament to God in prayer, saying to God, ‘Why have you made me your target? Why am I a burden to you?’ It is a very honest prayer out of the depths of great distress and darkness of spirit.

Sometimes that is the only form our prayer can take. It was the prayer of Jesus as he hung from the cross. He cried to God out of the darkness of his spirit and the brokenness of his body, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ On the cross, Jesus had lost everything. He had lost his disciples, his freedom, his dignity, and he even appears to have lost God. Jesus entered into the darkness of our human condition. He knows it from the inside. His question to God is the question of all of us when we find ourselves in a dark valley that is not of our making, ‘Where is God in my pain, grief and loss?’ Where was God on Calvary? God was with Jesus, his Son, suffering with him, sustaining him. God had not abandoned Jesus but would bring him through the darkness of Calvary into the glorious light of Easter. God had not abandoned Job either, but would go on to speak to him out of the storm. God never abandons us in our own valleys of darkness, but is always there with us, carrying us, sustaining us, leading us through the darkness into the light.

This is the good news that Jesus came to bring by his words and, above all, by his actions. In the gospel reading, Jesus spends a whole day bringing God’s healing and life-giving presence to the broken in body, mind and spirit. He firstly heals Simon Peter’s mother-in-law in her own home. The gospel says that ‘he helped her up’, literally, ‘he raised her’. He brought the power of the resurrection to bear on her illness. Having just healed a disturbed man in the synagogue, he now heals a seriously ill woman in her home. The risen Lord is with us in our homes as much as when we gather in church to worship. He wants to bring the power of his risen life to bear on our own brokenness of body, mind, or spirit. We don’t have to go on a journey to find the Lord. He is always journeying towards us, and he meets us wherever we are, whether it is in our own home or in some place that could never be called home.

Having healed Simon Peter’s mother in her home, he goes on to heal large numbers from Capernaum at the door of her home. The gospels suggest that Jesus spent a great deal of his time surrounded by suffering, by people who were in desperate need of healing of one kind or another. There must have been many broken people in great darkness of spirit he just couldn’t get to. At the end of the gospel reading, his disciples wanted him to go back to Capernaum to continue his healing work, but he replied that he needed to move on to the neighbouring country towns. How did Jesus cope with all that human suffering that kept coming at him? The gospel reading suggests that one of the ways he coped was by taking time out on his own to pray. After his day’s work, long before dawn, he got up and left the house of Simon’s mother-in-law and went to a lonely place and prayed there. He knew he needed to be alone with God if he was to keep doing God’s work.

Jesus is showing us the importance of being alone with God, of withdrawing to rest in the presence of God. When we find ourselves in some darkness of spirit, we can pray to God in various ways. Like Job, we can give out to God, or, like Jesus, we can just rest in the loving presence of God, the prayer of presence. We become aware of God’s presence to us, and we allow ourselves to become present to God. I came across a statement recently, ‘Whenever there is no way out, there is always a way up’. Like Jesus, we can come quietly before God who suffers with us as he suffered with Jesus on the cross, and who wants to carry us and bring us into a greater light and a fuller life. Like Jesus, in prayer we can find the strength from God to keep journeying on.

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wandaromanova · 3 years

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Can you do a fluffy wanda one (with a little angst because of course) where reader and wanda are best friends, reader wants more, but thinks wanda is interested in vision so she doesnt say anything. And then one day a mission goes wrong, and reader gets into an accident that results in her getting powers, and it makes wanda wake up and confess her feelings?

Requited Love

Pairing: Wanda Maximoff x Fem!Reader

Warnings: cussing, injury, that’s all!

A/N: hello! i hope you enjoy what i’ve created out of your request, anon! sorry i couldn’t think about how i could incorporate the powers part of the request! not proofread, so i apologize for any grammatical errors! join my taglist here <3

Summary: Wanda Maximoff and Y/N L/N are your typical best friends who refuse to admit their feelings for each other.

Word Count: 3.3K (had a lil too much fun with this)

(gif is not mine)

You and your best friend, Wanda, had been friends practically since the moment she had joined the team. Being the youngest Avenger, you were so excited that there would finally be another member that was close to your age. Despite the events of Sokovia, you didn’t fear the woman. If anything, it only made the urge to get closer to her stronger.

Her powers absolutely mesmerized you. From the color of her powers to the different ways she could use them to her advantage; it was mind blowing how much power she had literally at her fingertips. As time went on, you and Wanda became very close. You’d always have movie nights together in your room, which eventually led to the Sokovian woman peacefully sleeping next to you in your bed.

Not only was Wanda drop dead gorgeous, but she was genuine and humble. She had confided in you about the many different traumas she had been through and expressed how the surreal amount of grief constantly consumed her. It broke your heart to know that such an amazing person was put through so much.

Her past could’ve easily turned her into a villain, but she decided to go the opposite direction. She came to the conclusion that her powers could help others and that’s what she had chosen to do in Sokovia and up to now. It was why she had agreed to join the Avengers in the first place. Wanda knew how awful the world could be and she wanted to be there for people the way that her family had been before they passed. The amount of respect you had for Wanda was immeasurable.

Over the span of two years, you and Wanda became joined to the hip. Wanda didn’t even sleep in her own bed anymore. Before, she would just accidentally fall asleep in your room or sneak into your room in the late hours of the night to sleep with you. But now, she just barged into your room every night and slept there. She said that you kept the nightmares she had at bay and you were more than happy to be there for her if it meant she got a full night’s rest.

You both jumped at any opportunity you guys could to be on the same mission as the other. You not only wanted to spend time with her, but you wanted to protect her. Lord knows that Wanda of all people could handle herself, but it kept you at peace when you were with her; knowing that she had you to back her up. Naturally, you fell in love with your best friend.

At first, you thought you were just confusing your special platonic friendship with Wanda for romantic feelings. But sometimes you caught yourself wanting to kiss Wanda. You knew damn well that friends don’t daydream about making out with each other. So, yeah, you definitely had feelings for Wanda, but there was one thing standing in your way; Vision.

Vision basically joined the team at the same time Wanda did. He was created during the Ultron situation and has been an Avenger since then. Wanda and Vision were very close. They weren’t as close as you and Wanda were, but he was a close second. They had a bond over the mind stone that you couldn’t ever compete with. This fact discouraged you and forced you to keep your mouth shut. You’d rather keep your feelings to yourself and suffer in private than risk your friendship with Wanda.

I mean, you didn’t even know if Wanda was into girls! She could be as straight as a wooden ruler and you would most definitely embarrass yourself if you told her. Vision wasn’t exactly a man by any means, he was a robot. If Wanda were to like Vision that must mean you had a chance right? Not to be an ass, but he’s literally a hunk of metal. Regardless of all these thoughts, you knew at the end of the day that you would have to hide your feelings for the sake of maintaining the relationship you currently have with the Sokovian.

You did pretty good at hiding your feelings for awhile. You acted as if everything was normal and not like you were emotionally crying out inside every time you saw Wanda with Vision. It began to get too much when you had caught sight of the pair cooking Paprikash in the communal kitchen. Cooking was something you and Wanda used to do together. It was kind of your thing. It may seem silly, but watching her do something with Vision that used to be sacred to you both hurt.

You began to distance yourself the closer Wanda and Vision got together. What sucked even more was that Wanda didn’t even acknowledge your sudden distance. She no longer slept in your room, opting to spend her nights with Vision. You were dying inside and Wanda didn’t even care to notice.

You had a mission to get to today. Usually, Wanda would be down in the hangar whenever you were going on a mission without her, but she wasn’t there today. She was probably off somewhere with Vision, again. It stung that Wanda didn’t even want to see you off. She was so preoccupied with Vision that she didn’t even give you a second thought. A toaster was stealing your best friend who you just so happened to be madly in love with away from you. And you couldn’t do anything to stop it.

So, you reluctantly got onto the Quinjet with Steve who was accompanying you on the mission. Fury only sent you two in for this mission because it was a simple one. It didn’t require the entire team to complete. You both were to capture and detain the scientist responsible for the latest human experimentations at the hands of Hydra. From the intel gathered by S.H.I.E.L.D, their security wasn’t that bad so it would be a walk in the park for you and Steve. You had just left and you already desperately wanted to go home and wallow in your own self pity in the comfort of your bed.

But first, you had to get this mission over with. The Quinjet landed a little far away from the small Hydra base. You and Steve made your way out of the jet and began to trudge your way toward the building. As you guys got closer, Steve stopped abruptly.

“No matter what, we stick together okay? Just because this should be an easy mission, doesn’t mean we should let our guard down. Understand?” He lectured you sternly as he stared at you intensely.

“Yeah. I got it, Cap.” You replied to him dismissively as you continued to make your way toward the building. You took note of the five guards that were guarding the entrance and gave Steve a nod before you both sprung into action.

After you guys had taken down the entrance guards, you both sneakily made your way into the building. It was pretty easy to find your target, seeing that the building was the size of a house. You and Steve barged into the room, the scientist whipping around quickly and freezing in shock at the sight of you both.

Steve quickly charged at the man and placed him into handcuffs. As Steve pulled the man up by the collar, forcing him to his feet, a thought crossed your mind. This is too easy. Only five guards and the professor was just conveniently in here? This had to be a setup.

Before you could voice your concerns to Steve, you felt a sharp pain rip through your shoulder as Hydra agents flooded into the room. You fell to your knees in pain as Steve threw the target to the ground. He quickly began to fight as many agents as he could. You stood up as you tried to temporarily forget the pain. You began to take on agents yourself. Despite being injured, you kicked their asses with ease.

You were down to the last agent while Steve was pulling the scientist back up to his feet, much more aggressively this time. For some reason, your thoughts went to Wanda. How would she react to your injury? Would she even bother to visit you to make sure you were okay?

Unfortunately, you had chosen the wrong time to become distracted by your thoughts of Wanda. While your thoughts were racing, you failed to notice the glint of a knife in the agent’s left hand. As you blocked one of his punches, he quickly stabbed you right in the stomach. At this, Steve jumped in to help you and made quick work of knocking out the man who stabbed you.

You fully fell to the floor this time, gasping for air. Not only were you shot, but now you got stabbed. Seriously? Did god decide you weren’t already having a shitty enough time? Steve quickly picked you up in his arms in a panic. He carried you to the Quinjet while making sure the scientist was following behind you both. Steve placed your body onto the medical table that was in the Quinjet, handcuffed the man to a railing, and sped off to the compound. He took note of how much blood you lost; it was a lot to say the least. If he didn’t get to the compound soon, he feared you wouldn’t make it; and that wasn’t an option.

The 30 minute trip to the compound turned into a 15 minute ride. Steve quickly rushed you into the medical wing of the compound and placed you into the care of Doctor Helen Cho. He knew he had to tell the team about what happened. The Avengers were a family, and you being the youngest meant you were like a child to them, well besides Wanda obviously.

Steve hurriedly made his way into the living room of the Avenger’s living quarters and made sure Jarvis informed everyone that it was an emergency. As Steve entered, everyone turned to face him with worry present on each of their faces.

“What’s wrong, Rogers? Is everything okay?” Natasha asked as she looked over his body. There was an insane amount of blood all over his star-spangled suit. “It’s Y/N.”

At Steve’s words, everyone in the room stood in shock as their jaws dropped. But no one’s feelings could compare to Wanda’s. She abruptly stood up from the couch and made her way towards Steve.

“What about her? What happened to her?” Wanda began to get angry as hints of her powers made their way to her eyes. Steve took a step back and looked at Wanda before returning his gaze back to the other people in the room. You could hear a pin drop in the silence of the room.

“We went on a mission together. It was supposed to be an easy in and out thing. But we were setup. She got shot in the shoulder and stabbed in the abdomen. She’s in the medical wing right now.” Steve spoke strongly, attempting to remain calm for the sake of the team, but he was terrified inside. Your state refused to leave his mind. Your limp body in his arms as your warm blood covered his hands.

Wanda didn’t say another word as she ran towards the elevator and impatiently hit the button to the medical wing. She didn’t bother to wait for anyone else. Nothing mattered right now except you.

Wanda had feelings for you. Ever since she met you, you were this light in the darkness that was her life. You could cheer her up when no one else could. You knew her better than she knew herself. You were not only her best friend, but you were the woman she was irrevocably in love with. She was terrified to tell you how she felt. She thought she would lose you if she had confessed how she truly felt for you. So, she remained quiet and tried to forget about her feelings for you by hanging out with Vision more. She wasn’t using Vision by any means, she genuinely did enjoy his company. But he wasn’t you.

Wanda didn’t even wait for the elevator doors to fully open as she squeezed herself through the small gap and made her way towards the medical bay doors. Before Wanda could open the door, Steve abruptly grabbed her hand, stopping her from going any further. He must’ve taken the stairs. Damn his super soldier abilities.

“Wanda. Stop. I know you’re worried about Y/N, we all are. But barging in there won’t be any help. You need to let Cho and her nurses focus on helping her.” Steve desperately tried to talk some sense into Wanda; it worked. Wanda’s shoulders slumped as she made her way towards the seating area that was right outside the doors. All she could do was sit, wait, and pray to whatever god there was that you would be okay.

Wanda didn’t even know you were going on a mission today. If she did, she would’ve went to the hangar and hugged you before she left, like she always did. Oh fuck, she didn’t even get to see you off and now look at your state. Now that she thought about it, she had been neglecting you for some time now. She let her fear of her feelings consume her. She spent more time with Vision than with you, and now she wasn’t sure if she would get the opportunity to be with you again. The thought of not being able to tell you how in love with you she was mortified her. This was the wake up call she needed.

——————————————————————————

2 hours later

After two agonizingly slow hours, Doctor Cho made her way towards the anxious group of heroes. Wanda shot up from her seat and approached Helen.

“How is she? Please, tell me she’s okay.” Wanda asks as she nervously chews on her bottom lip. “Y/N is fine. Luckily, the knife didn’t hit any major arteries. She won’t be able to make any sudden movements for the next few weeks which means no missions until I give her clearance.” At Cho’s words, the entire team was struck with relief. Wanda’s eyes lit up at the good news. You were okay. You were still here.

“Can we see her?” Steve asked from behind Wanda as he made his way to stand beside her. “Yes, shes awkward, but only one person can go in at a time. She’s very sensitive right now from the anesthesia.” Helen gave the team a smile before walking off.

Everyone looked at Wanda as she gave them a nod. Of course she had to go in first. You and Wanda may have been oblivious to each other’s feelings, but the team wasn’t. It was almost annoying how unaware you two were of how the other person felt.

Wanda quietly made her way into your room and almost let out a sigh of relief as she saw you laying on the table awake. You were trying to reach for a glass of water beside your bed, but the pain in your side made the small task a burden. Wanda quickly made her way to the table and handed you the glass of water. You were startled since you didn’t even hear her enter the room. You took the water from her hands and took a long sip before handing it back to her.

“What’re you doing here?” You asked coldly as you glared at the Sokovian woman. She was shocked at your animosity. You were never like this with her before. “I needed to make sure you were okay. I was worried sick.” Wanda frowned as she pulled a chair up to your bedside and sat in it.

“Oh. Now you suddenly remember I exist? It only took me nearly dying for you to notice me again.” You knew you weren’t being fair. You guys were just best friends and she was entitled to hang out and be with whoever she wanted. But the part of you that loved her and longed for more took over.

“Y/N. I’m sorry I haven’t been around as often. I got caught up hanging out with Vision when I should’ve been there for you.” Wanda’s eyes softened as she stared at your face. She missed you so much. She may have seen you around the compound, but she hasn’t been this close to you in what felt like decades.

“Yeah. You got caught up with Vision. Why don’t you just go back to him now. I’m fine.” You stubbornly spoke as you tore your eyes away from Wanda and stared out the window in front of your bed.

Wanda made a ballsy move and grabbed your hand in here. Thankfully, you didn’t move it away. “Y/N. I don’t care about Vision, I care about you. I love you and I mean that in more than a friendly way.” At Wanda’s words, your head snapped back to her as you looked over her features for any indication of a lie; you didn’t find any.

“I was spending time with Vision to try and forget my feelings for you. That obviously backfired and only solidified what I already knew I felt. I’m sorry it took such a terrible situation for me to finally grow the balls to tell you this. I love you Y/N.” Wanda squeezed your hand tightly as she stared at you full of love and adoration.

You were speechless. As cliche as it sounds, this was what you’ve wanted since the moment you laid eyes on her. She said the three words you’ve been longing to hear spill from her mouth. She loved you too.

“I love you too, Wanda. I’m sorry. I thought you had a thing for Vision and I let jealousy and insecurity get the better of me.” You looked down in shame as you tried to pull your hand out of Wanda’s hold, but she only gripped it tighter.

“Don’t be sorry. I completely understand. I’m so glad your okay and I’m so unbelievably happy that you feel the same way.” Wanda smiled brightly at you as you smiled right back. You guys must’ve looked like maniacs with your big, cheesy smiles, but you didn’t care.

Wanda began to slowly lean towards you. You attempted to meet her in the middle, but only ended up wincing in pain as you were reminded of your impressive stab wound. Wanda let out a laugh.

“Let me handle it, moya lyubov (my love).” Wanda said before closing the gap between you both and giving you a heated, desperate kiss. All the pent up emotions that you both had been withholding from each other were coming to light through this kiss. You guys were interrupted by the door swinging open abruptly and the sound of someone clearing their throat.

You both jumped apart as you cringed at the sting of your injuries. You turned to the door and caught sight of the team standing at the door with shit eating grins on their face.

“Sorry to interrupt you, lovebirds. But we wanted to check on Y/N too. Cho gave us the clear to come in now.” Natasha smirked at yours and Wanda’s flustered states.

“Pay up, Barnes.” Sam said as he held his hand out to Bucky, who groaned before placing 50 dollars in his hand. You and Wanda stared at the two confused, Bucky took notice of this and decided to fill you both in.

“We made a bet on when you two would get together. I said in the next two months, he said in the next two weeks. He won.” Bucky gave you both a shy, almost embarrassed smile.

Everyone in the room laughed, making you and Wanda turn even more red than before. You didn’t care about the inevitable, endless teasing you would have to endure after today. You would deal with the comments forever as long as it meant Wanda was by your side. You once thought that she didn’t feel the same, and you were so glad you were proven wrong. Sometimes, love can be requited after all.

#wanda maximoff x reader #wanda maximoff #avengers #scarlet witch #request

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highpope · 3 years

Text

pieced together pt. one

posting here too because not that many people have seen it also sorry for the weird spacing idk what’s going on

JJ Maybank x pogue reader - season 2 fic

spoiler warning!

You laid in bed watching the rain hit your windows, the radio downstairs faintly describes the fate of the world. You can’t make out complete sentences without straining, but you have heard enough from the last few days to know there were no updates about John B and Sarah. The radio has been on for days on end, your parents not wanting to miss any possible update about your friends or the storm that seemed never-ending. It was like it rained for years. It was a constant reminder of the night your two best friends were driven out into the storm and everything changed. You could hear Shoupe’s words in the back of your mind, “we lost ‘em' ' on a constant loop. You could see Kiara’s face and JJ’s hands and Pope’s heart shatter. Like all the stars had come falling down and you were the only one left to pick up all the pieces. You prayed this was all a nightmare. You could wake up and not only would they both be here, but you’d all be safe. You would give up the gold a hundred times over if it meant John B and Sarah would be home.

Both Pope and Kie’s parents had called your mom every night since that day. When she thought you were asleep, she would creep down the stairs and sit in the kitchen and cry, praying they had some good news. Something that could take away some of the pain you were in. But she couldn’t, no one could. You had to hear half the town talk about John B like he was a murderer like he kidnapped Sarah like he was some delusional kid from the cut. All while you knew the Cameron’s were roaming free and receiving sympathy for what they’re going through. It made you sick to think about. They had a private funeral for Sarah. People gave their condolences and spoke so kindly about her. They scoffed at her recent behavior and her newfound friendship from “those dirty pogues.”

Sometime around day two, your mom came into your room asking if you had heard from JJ. He had been with the Heyward’s up until that morning when he’d completely disappeared.

For a second, you felt something other than grief, knowing he had been with Pope and not his dad, but that was short-lived. You tried to imagine how peaceful it would have been under different circumstances, a world in which he was always safe. One where Luke Maybank had no control over his life. You wanted to get lost in that daydream, live in that alternative reality for a while. He wouldn’t have to keep a duffel bag full of clothes and cash under your bed for when things got bad. He wouldn’t have to know how to do stitches on himself or how to pop a dislocated shoulder back in place. He’d be safe. He’d be happy. She asked again if you had heard from JJ, snapping you back to reality. (you had not). You watched as her forehead creased and her lips straightened into a thin line, like something in her had broken too.

She hurts just as much as you do. At first, you contributed that to her not being able to take away your pain, which is part of it. But you later realized she’s lost a person, too. You had known John B since grade school, there were pictures of the group of you sitting on your swing set in your backyard at age nine. Ones of you, JJ, John B, and Pope asleep in your living room after attempting to build a fort. He stayed for dinners and birthday parties. She watched us grow up, every first day of school, soccer game, fishing tournament. Our families had somehow combined over the years. Not only does your mom hurt for you, but she lost a child. And that weight is heavier than anything.

You stopped crying by day three. Nothing left. You were completely and utterly numb but consumed by loss all at the same time. You hadn’t initially worried about JJ. He did this. He disappeared for a little, to clear his head, but he always came back. He never stayed away for more than three days. That’s how long it took for him to feel balanced again, maybe less, but never more. He said it was because he couldn’t get a burger as good as the ones at The Wreck anywhere else in the world, but you knew how much he loved the outer banks and the people there. You also knew that he’d never leave without you. And if he absolutely had to, he would at least say goodbye. He had to, he promised. You held on to that every time his phone went straight to voicemail. And when days four and five came and went and you still haven’t heard from him, you were worried. He should’ve crawled through your window in yesterday’s clothes with a few more scratches on his arm than he left with, but his eyes would glow a little brighter and he would still smile when you insisted he spends the night. So, when you cracked your window open and slept with your bedside lamp on (so that he could see the light from outside) and he still wasn’t there when you awoke, your mourning turned into something else. You sent a few texts, in case he somehow got them, but you were doubtful.

You didn’t know what it was like to live without him. There wasn’t a time in your life you could remember when you and JJ weren’t attached at the hip. Sometime around kindergarten, you two became inseparable, ultimately meeting John B and Pope as you got older and Kie when you all got to junior high. There was a weird couple of months around third grade where he decided girls had cooties, but it was short-lived because when JJ realized that meant you couldn’t be friends anymore he thought it was dumb and started coming over again. You couldn’t exactly pinpoint when your relationship changed, the lines between friendship and something more merging and becoming blurred. If you had to, for you it was the start of sophomore year. Something changed when you were together, even just sitting in silence was comfortable and exciting. Eyes started lingering, touches became more frequent, and then one day you were just together. It’s been the same since. You think back to the first time you kissed like a couple. It definitely hadn’t been the first time the two of you had ever kissed. You were sure there had been at least one during your childhood and you vividly remember a New Year’s Eve party and a couple of games of truth or dare. But this time it was different. There was something behind it.

You and JJ sat side by side in the hammock outside of John B’s. He was smoking while using his one leg to rock the two of you slowly back and forth. You were struggling to keep your eyes open and pay attention to whatever story was being told. JJ must have noticed because he wrapped an arm around you, inviting you to lay on his chest.

This wasn’t uncommon between you. JJ was always physically affectionate toward the people he cared about and you had no problem reciprocating. You stayed just like that until it was just the two of you left outside.

JJ shifted slightly under your weight causing you to wake up. “Shit, sorry. You okay?” he asked, tossing the tip of the blunt into the fire.

You nodded, “mhm.” You looked around, realizing how dark it had gotten, “You could’ve woken me up! It’s late.”

“You looked peaceful.”

You pretended to clutch your heart, “JJ Maybank being nice? Dare I say sweet?”

“Shut up,” he said, rolling his eyes. He was smiling at you like you were the funniest person in the world.

“ No, no. You care about me,” you joked, poking his chest with your finger, “you loooove me.”

“ Yeah?” he challenged, arching an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” you said, your breath suddenly catching in your throat.

“What if I do?” He asked, but it wasn’t a question. His face was serious, a glimmer of hope in his crystal eyes.

You look slightly from his eyes to his lips. If JJ noticed he didn’t lead on. He just slowly bridged the gap between you, your noses brushing for a moment before your lips connected. It was slow and careful, not wanting to push too far, but all the same, wanting to completely unravel the other. His hand cupped your cheek, his rings cold against your flushed face as you leaned into the kiss.

You heard faint screams and cheers from inside the chateau and Pope’s “Finally!” echo out. You could feel him smiling and soon enough you were both laughing. You had finally come together and nothing would take that away.

On day six, the rain stopped and the world carried on as normal. You wanted to yell at every person you saw. How could anyone feel so neutral about anything that happened in the last week? The sheriff was dead, there was a murderer on the loose, your two best friends were gone, and your boyfriend was missing. But yeah, go ahead and go to the grocery store like any other Wednesday morning. Someone tell the earth, it’s not supposed to keep spinning after the world ends.

You were lying on your bed, staring at your ceiling as you tried to fall asleep, a breeze flowed through your window and your lamp illuminated the room. All you could hear were cicadas and the wind rustling through the trees until you heard your window creak and slide open. You tried to process everything all at once, your eyes scanning over every part of his body, trying to meet his eyes. He was wearing the same clothes he had on the last time you saw him. There was dirt under his fingernails and his face was puffy from crying. His lip was cracked and covered in dry blood and bruises littered his jaw and hands. You could cry at the mere sight of him. Before either of you could speak, you collided.

You held his head to your chest and placed kisses on his hairline. You tried to wipe your tears before he could see them, but it was no use. The two of you were a tangle of arms and legs, of broken hearts and misguided minds, so desperately trying to tell the other it was going to be okay without believing it yourself.

“I miss him so much,” he sobbed. Your heart fell to your stomach and everything you had pushed down the past few days came rushing back.

“Me too,” you breathed. JJ’s arms wrapped around your stomach and he buried his head into your neck. You stayed like this for what felt like hours, thinking that if you held on long enough the two of you wouldn’t fall apart.

You heard your door open slightly and you quickly turned your head to see your mom stood there, tears brimming her eyes. You can visibly see her shoulders relax as she lets out a sigh. Your door closes softly as if not to disturb you both. You hear her on the other side of the door, “he’s here. He’s okay.”

“My dad’s gone,” he murmured into your neck.

You can physically feel your heart break for the boy in your arms and the younger version of him, trying to find a space he belongs and mourning the only one he ever found. You want so badly to hold him together, paint all of his scars golden. To remind him how much people love him, how much you love him, but no words come out.

“Guess he finally picked up and left, son of a bitch” His voice wobbled, “I went back, uh, that night to find the necklace John B gave me.”

He pulled away so he could talk directly to you. You cupped his cheeks and swiped the tears with your thumbs before they could fall. He laughed dryly, remembering, “Climbed through my bedroom window and everything. It should’ve taken two minutes tops but it wasn’t on my dresser like I thought it was. I tore my room apart looking for it. And then my dad came home and heard me, uh he was not happy to see me, as you can imagine.”

“Did he hurt you?” you ask, moving farther away from him to make sure he wasn’t bleeding or worse.

He grabs your hands and brings them to his chest, “I’m okay, I promise.”

“Is that where you were? The past few days,”

He nods, “yeah. I woke up the next day and he was gone. I was just going to get my stuff and go, but I don't know. Something wasn’t right.” He pauses to gather his thoughts, “They all really do leave, huh?”

“Don’t say that,” you urge.

“I’m just-”

“No. Do not think like that. None of this is your fault. Your dad is a fucking awful person for not loving you like you need to be loved. Like you deserve to be loved. And John B-” your voice cracks, “John B would never leave us if he didn’t have to and, and you have me. I couldn’t ever leave you. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself

He kisses your knuckles, “I know, I know. He just has so much power over the way I think.”

“But you know. You know you are nothing like him.”

He nods, not meeting your eyes.

“These past few days, J. You scared me.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, leaning his forehead against yours.

“Don’t disappear on me, okay?”

“Never.” He pushes his lips to yours, urgent and longing. You move your hands to his head, bringing him closer, trying to pour yourself into him.

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lumosandnoxwriting · 3 years

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Forever Just Isn’t Enough - George Weasley

Title: Forever Just Isn’t Enough Pairing: George x Fem!Reader Warnings: NSFW!! Fingering, female receiving oral, unprotected sex, dirty talk, cockwarming, feeling full kink ?? again idk if that’s a real thing but oh well Extra Warnings: major character death!! Minor character death. Slightly alcoholism, unhealthy coping mechanisms, grief and dealing with grief, one comment that could allude to suicide, mentions of death and infant loss, mentions of blood and blood loss. Mentions of injuries. Mentions of childbirth. Summary: just when things seem like they can finally fall into place, everything nearly falls apart. Will George and Y/N really get their forever? Or will their dreams crumble around them? A/N: summary is shit but here it is! Here is its, the mammoth that is good girl part 3!! This fic has been nearly a month in the making and it is officially the longest thing I’ve ever written!! It’s 23k words so buckle up! This really is the final part, and I have definitely become attached to this universe. Everything in italics is flashbacks!! I would like to give a huge thanks to @pineapplesandpinas who left a reply on one of my posts that actually inspired this fic! I’d also like to give a huge thanks to the person who gave me some editing help and is coincidentally the person who requested this in the first place, I hope you like it!! As always feedback is welcome! Tags: @feltondarling @pandaxnienke @raerae27 @allforthexgame @pigwidgexn @hufflrpuffforfred @wand3ringr0s3 @whiz-bangs78 @gcdric @starlightweasley @vogueweasley @theweasleysredhair @dracoswhore007 @lexymoniqu @amourtentiaa @mischiefisbeingmanaged Read Part 1 here, Read Part 2 here

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Y/N’s chest heaves with deep breathes as she runs down a corridor, watching walls crumble as they get hit with stray curses. She used to be able to walk through Hogwarts with her eyes closed and know exactly where she was in any given moment. But now her heart hammers in her chest as she stands at the junction of two different hallways, unsure of where they’ll lead her. Y/N can hear footsteps barreling towards her, and in a moment of panic she heads to the left, gripping her wand tightly in her hand.

Her legs carry her as fast as they can down the hallway as she silently prays to find someone she knows. By the time she clambered into the room of requirement from the passageway that starts at the Hogs Head Inn preparations for the impending battle were already in full swing and the Order was spread out around the entire castle. Y/N had caught a flash of red hair as she helped Cho Chang cast a protection spell, but by the time she turned her head it was already gone. Death Eaters reached the castle nearly 30 minutes ago, and Y/N has been on her own the entire time, casting curses and spells at them as she searched for Ginny or Hermione. For George. She’s already seen a few bodies lying still on the floor, and her heart is in her stomach with the thought that George could be one of them. Laying lifeless in some hallway all by himself.

Y/N starts to slow down as a wall approaches and she can hear her heartbeat pounding in her ears. A dead end. The footsteps behind her persist, and she has no choice but to stop as she reaches the end of the hallway, turning around to face her fate. She raises her wand as she looks at the person coming up towards her, but it falters slightly as a familiar face stops just a few feet away. “Adrian?”

Adrian grins as he takes a few steps closer to Y/N, but it’s not the same fond smile he’d shared with her many times. It’s wicked, evil almost and Y/N tries to swallow the lump that’s suddenly formed in her throat as memories of the last time she’d seen Adrian come swirling to the forefront of her mind.

Y/N turns around when she feels a tap on her shoulder, a wide smile on her face. Seven years of hard work has all lead to this: graduation day. She feels absolutely euphoric, and when she turns around and spots Adrian she pulls him into a hug – too excited to second guess herself. It’s the first time they’ve hugged in nearly half a year and while it feels familiar, it’s mostly awkward.

After the conversation Y/N and George had on the train ride back to school from winter break Y/N really made a conscious effort to start a new life with George. The way they had been operating as a couple was only leading them towards disaster, and they were both willing to do anything to avoid that possibility.

The main change they made together was to spend more time together as a couple that didn’t involve getting rid of their clothes. Instead of sitting with each other’s friends during meals all the time, they decided to sit on their own a few times a week so they would get a chance to just talk to each other and reconnect after a crazy day. Y/N started to spend the night over in George’s dorm with him, and while they did have sex most of the time, they took the time to just lay there and hold each other too. While Y/N was busy doing her homework in the library George would just sit there with her, sometimes working on stuff for the joke shop, but sometimes just sitting there and watching her work.

But by far the biggest change was one that rested in Y/N’s hands alone, she needed to set new boundaries with Adrian. Her friends had become her security blanket over the years, their friendship began on that first train ride to Hogwarts, when they were all nervous and scared. She relied on them heavily to be her emotional support, and when George came into her life Y/N made no efforts to change any of that. Y/N had thought George could just slip into their friend group as if he had always been there, but it quickly became clear that wasn’t the case.

Her relationship with Adrian was definitely the biggest point of contention in her and George’s relationship, and was thus the one thing that really changed. It was common for her and Adrian to be physically affectionate towards each other. An arm around the shoulders, a tight hug after a long day, even the occasional hand holding. Y/N hadn’t realized how that might hurt George, and so she put a stop to it immediately. On the occasions where she did sit with her friends at meals she stuck by Daphne’s side, instead of falling into her usual seat next to Adrian. She stopped wearing his Quidditch jumpers to their matches and she made sure to quiet his flirtatious comments, reminding him that she has a boyfriend now, and comments like that make her and George uncomfortable.

So now being close with Adrian feels too close, and while he tries to linger in her grasp Y/N pulls away with a tight grin. “I can’t believe it, we’re finally done!”

“This is the last chance we have, Y/N,” Adrian starts, placing his hands on her hips. Before Y/N can shake off his grasp Adrian lurches forward and presses their lips together.

Y/N moves her face away and tries to push Adrian off of her. “Adrian, stop. I’m with George, you know that.”

“But you could be with me. You should be with me,” Adrian tells her, tightening his grip on her hips. “That’s how it was supposed to be, Y/N. Marcus and Daphne would get married, we would get married. Our kids would grow up together, we’d stand on the same platform we met on holding hands as we send our kids off to school. I love you. And you were supposed to love me too.”

Before Y/N has a chance to respond, a familiar hand is grabbing Adrian’s shoulder and pulling him away from Y/N. George stands in between them, and while Y/N can’t see George’s face, she can tell from the way his back muscles are tensed that he’s pissed.

“What the hell are you doing, Pucey?” George spits. “Y/N doesn’t feel that way about you. She never has and she never will. If this wasn’t supposed to be a special day for her I’d knock your fucking lights out like I’ve wanted to since November. So, get the fuck out of here before I make you get the fuck out of here.”

Y/N wraps her arms around George’s neck as he turns around, watching Adrian stalk off over his shoulder.

“Long time no see, Y/N,” he taunts, keeping his wand pointed at her.

Y/N tightens her grip on her wand, keeping it at his chest. Their friendship may have ended in disaster, but she hopes that the years of memories they had before that keep him from doing anything. Adrian may not be the person she thought he was, but Y/N doesn’t want to hurt him. “How’ve you been?” she asks, trying to keep her voice even.

Adrian scoffs. “Don’t act like you care about me now, Y/N. You had your chance to be with me. And you gave it up, for what? True Love?” his voice is mocking, condescending and it makes Y/N’s stomach turn. “But where’s Weasley now? When you need him most?” Adrian’s eyes fall from Y/N’s face to her neck and she lets out a gasp as he places his wand on her chest and lifts up the end of her necklace with it. The tip of his wand is now directly in front of her neck, and a cold sweat runs down her back. “Still wearing this cheap necklace, I see. If you were mine you’ d be dripping with diamonds and pearls. You’d want for nothing.”

“All I want is George,” Y/N answers firmly. Y/N hasn’t taken the necklace George gave her for their first Christmas together off since the day he put it on her neck. It’s like a promise ring, it’s George’s promise of forever, and in these times she’s needed it now more than ever. “So, go head and kill me, or Crucio me, or do whatever you want. But I’m gonna die thinking about George, I’m going to die loving George. And I hope that knowledge drives you crazy for the rest of your life.” Y/N closes her eyes as Adrian’s mouth opens, getting ready to cast her own curse. But before either of them can say anything a familiar voice is casting a curse of their own.

“Stupefy!” George shouts, his wand aimed directly at Adrian’s back.

Y/N’s eyes pop back open as Adrian’s body slumps to the ground, and there George is, standing just a few feet away, his stance firm and his wand raised high. Tears start to spill down her cheeks as she steps over Adrian’s unconscious body before Y/N is running at full speed towards her boyfriend and jumping into his open arms. “Oh my god Georgie,” she sobs, pressing her face into his neck.

“Hi teacup,” he chuckles, wrapping his arms firmly around her waist. He can hear her laugh at the nickname, and George presses a kiss to Y/N’s temple. “I’ve been looking all over for you, darling. I’ve been losing my fucking mind.”

Y/N pulls away from George’s neck so she can kiss him desperately. It’s been far too long since she last saw him, and Y/N can’t help but think about the last time George held her like this.

“Y/N! Grab my hand!” George shouts, reaching out to her.

Y/N shouts a curse at a snatcher as she runs towards George, gripping onto his hand tightly with her own. She shuts her eyes tight as George pulls her into his chest, and it feels like all the air is being sucked from her lungs as George disapperates them to safety.

“Fucking hell,” Y/N groans as she lands on her back in the middle of a field, George landing right on top of her. George’s fingers dig into her sides and Y/N laughs as she pushes at his shoulders. “Get off of me you oaf I’m suffocating!”

They both giggle as George rolls off of Y/N, settling on his back next to her. “Are you okay, teacup?”

Y/N takes a few deep breaths, trying to find the answer to George’s question. Official Order business put them in the middle of some forest on the outskirts of Essex, and just before they were leaving they ran into a band of snatchers. They ran and fought them for nearly 20 minutes before George had managed to take them to wherever they are now.

“I’m okay,” Y/N answers honestly a few minutes later. She turns onto her side so she can look down at George. “Are you doing okay? Where are we?”

“Aunt Muriel’s house is about 100 yards north of us, we used to play Quidditch out here when we’d visit her as kids. It’s the only place I could think of that would be safe and secluded.” George reaches up and tucks a stray piece of hair behind Y/N’s ear. “I’m doing okay. Better now that I’m here with you.”

Y/N smiles at George sadly and leans down to kiss him softly. After the ministry fell Y/N left her training program at St. Mungo’s to work for the Order full time, and she was placed in a safe house up in Wales. Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes has been closed for weeks, and Fred and George have turned it into Potterwatch Headquarters. It’s now early November, and Y/N hasn’t seen George since the beginning of August at Bill and Fleur’s wedding.

“I wish I could come home,” she says quietly, running her fingers through George’s hair. He hasn’t been home for Molly to cut it and it’s starting to get long again. “It’s so lonely up in Wales without you. Feels like I can’t get a proper nights sleep without you in bed next to me.”

George grabs Y/N’s chin and pulls her down into a searing kiss. “Our bed is cold without you, teacup. Your pillow doesn’t even smell like you anymore.” He reaches up then and untucks her necklace from the collar of her shirt. “Still wearing this old thing?” he teases, toying with the charms. “I should get you something new, flashier. Even with Diagon Alley closed we’ve been doing some mail order business. And I’ve got all that savings. Could get you something nice.”

Y/N scoffs and slaps George on the chest playfully. “I love my necklace, Georgie. You act like you still don’t wear that stupid teapot pin every day,” she teases. “Teapots are kinda our thing and I love that. Besides you should spend your savings on something important. Like a new broom or something.”

“Or an engagement ring, or a wedding, or a house,” George muses with a grin. “I’m gonna end up spending it on you either way, Y/N. You take your pick.”

“Stop, don’t say that,” Y/N responds, her cheeks flushing pink.

George pulls Y/N onto his chest, wrapping his arms around her waist. “I promised you forever, didn’t I, Y/N? Once this war is over I’m going to put the fattest diamond money can buy on your ring finger and officially make you mine forever. Got it?”

“It doesn’t have to be the fattest diamond, just something simple and classy,” Y/N mumbles, pressing her face into George’s chest. She can feel his laughter rumble in his chest, and she smiles against his shirt. “I wish we could just lay here forever.”

“Me too,” George responds quietly, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “I love you. So much that it hurts sometimes. You know that, right?”

Y/N looks up at George, a look of concern on her features. “Of course, George. I love you too.”

“I just,” George pauses to clear his throat, needing to choke back the rush of emotion he’s suddenly feeling. “I need you to know, how much you mean to me. In case, in case this is the last time you ever see me. This war, everything is so uncertain. I could die, I just-,” George’s words cut off as he suddenly sobs, and hot tears start to roll down his cheeks.

“Georgie,” Y/N coos, pressing a kiss to the underside of his jaw. She rolls off of him then onto her back, pulling George so he’s half laying on top of her with his head resting on her chest. She starts to run a hand through his hair, while the other rubs his back soothingly. “You can’t think about stuff like that, okay? I know things are scary out there but we gotta stay focused on the positive. That fat diamond and the big wedding and the house. The dog, the chickens, the babies. How am I gonna get my six little ginger babies if you die? Hm?”

“Six?” George asks with a sniffle. “I thought we agreed on four.”

“Yeah well I’ve had a lot of time to think while I’ve been on my own and I changed my mind,” Y/N chuckles. “Either way you have to stay alive in order to give me all that. So promise me George, that you’ll stay alive. That you’ll fight hard, for me. For you. For our ginger babies.”

George picks his head up and pulls Y/N’s face down to his, kissing her slowly and with so much love it makes his head dizzy. “I promise. Forever.”

That moment was already six months ago, but to Y/N it’s felt like a lifetime, so she hugs him a bit tighter, trying to convey six months’ worth of feelings and sentiments into one embrace. Time is not on their side, and while Y/N would happily stand here in George’s embrace for the next few weeks, if they both plan on staying alive they can’t linger too long.

“Are you okay? Are you hurt?” Y/N asks, pulling away slightly so she can properly look at George. There’s dust and debris all over his face, she doesn’t see any blood, and as her hands roam around his torso and arms she can’t feel any bandages and he doesn’t wince at all.

George chuckles and cups Y/N’s face in one of his hands. “I’m absolutely fine, teacup. Not a scratch, I promise. Can’t give you those six ginger babies like I promised if I’m hurt, can I?”

“It’s seven now,” Y/N mumbles, pressing her face into his chest. “And I want a sheep too.”

“And a sheep? That’s it, that’s where I draw the line,” George teases, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “What about you? Are you okay, Y/N? I thought Adrian. I thought Adrian was gonna kill you.”

Y/N shudders at the thought of what might have happened and looks up at George. There’s so much that’s happened since they last spoke, so much she needs to tell him. But now is certainly not the time or place for it. Once they get through this night they’ll have the rest of their lives to be together, heal together. “I’m doing alright. Better now that I’ve seen you. Have you seen anyone else?”

George shakes his head. “Fred and I got separated a bit ago, I saw him with Percy not too long ago, just before I found you. Ginny was on bridge duty with Neville and Seamus so who knows where she ended up. Dad and Mum were in the Great Hall when I left them, and I haven’t seen Ron, Hermione or Harry since the preparations began. But honestly I haven’t been paying attention too much. I’ve been trying to find you, teacup. I was worried when you didn’t show up in the room of requirement.”

“I was on duty, with Tonks. By the time we got the memo and got over here stuff was already going on, people were running around and making preparations and stuff. I tried to find you, but Cho needed my help. I’ve been running around this damn castle trying to find you,” Y/N explains.

Just then a wall somewhere near them collapses, and George covers Y/N’s head with his body. George kisses Y/N again as the dust around them settles, needing to feel close to her for another moment. “I love you. I love you. I love you,” he murmurs, pressing a brief kiss to her lips between each set of words. His eye catches the shine of her necklace and George reaches up, feeling the charms between his fingertips. “Just a little bit longer until we can have our forever, yeah?”

“As long as you don’t die on me,” Y/N tries to tease, digging her fingers into George’s shoulders. The fear bubbling in her stomach creeps into her voice, and she rubs her thumb over the teapot pin stuck to the lapel of George’s jacket, needing to ground herself with something familiar. “You can’t die on me, George.” Y/N can feel tears running down her cheeks, but she doesn’t move to wipe them away, not wanting to let go of George, even for a second. “I can’t live without you.”

“You’re my everything,” George murmurs, cupping Y/N’s cheek so he can brush away some of her tears with his thumb. “And you’re never getting rid of me. Got that?”

Y/N nods and leans up on her tiptoes to press one last kiss to George’s mouth. “I’ll see you on the other side, yeah?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Y/N runs as fast as her legs will carry her back to the Great Hall. It’s been hours since she saw George and her hands haven’t stopped shaking since Voldemort started to speak to them, urging them to stop fighting and collect their dead. George could be one of those dead and even though Y/N’s eyes are blurry from the tears she’s shedding, she doesn’t stop to wipe them away. She feels like she can’t breathe, and it has nothing to do with the fact that she’s running. Y/N knows she won’t be able to properly breathe until she sees George again, so she just keeps moving.

Her legs are on fire when she reaches the Great Hall and as she pushes the heavy wooden door open her legs finally come to a screeching halt. There are makeshift gurneys all over the floor, some covered, some not. But Y/N is sure the one thing they have in common is the fact that there’s a dead body laying on top of it. She tries not to let herself linger on their faces too long, just trying to spot a shock of red hair.

That’s when she sees it. The Weasley family is at the other end of the Great Hall, standing around one of the gurneys. Y/N can see Bill and Fleur clutching each other, and everyone has tears in their eyes. She can’t see who’s laying on the ground, but as she lets her eyes pass over everyone a gut-wrenching sob leaves her throat as one thing becomes clear. It’s one of the twins. Whichever one is still alive has their back towards her with their head bowed, so she has no idea who it is.

Y/N’s knees quiver as she forces herself to walk over there, bile rising up her throat. He had promised. George had promised her forever. Had promised her that he’d stay alive. Had promised to spend the rest of his life loving her. They had planned out their entire life, and now that may be all gone.

“George. George, please,” Y/N chokes out as she approaches, her legs feeling like jelly. Whoever it is finally turns around, and Y/N takes her first full deep breath in what feels like forever.

“Teacup,” George cries as Y/N launches herself onto him, his arms wrapping around her waist to hold her close. He presses his face into her neck and just sobs, his shoulders shaking from the force of his tears.

Y/N starts to shush George and rub his back, trying desperately to soothe him. It has always been Fred and George. The only person she ever had to share George with was Fred and she never minded a bit. Fred and George were the most dynamic duo the Wizarding World has ever seen, destined to live out the rest of their days making the world laugh and causing chaos wherever they go. But now it’ll be just George, and Y/N has no idea how to make that okay.

Fred and Y/N certainly had their issues. Years of hating someone will do that to you, and when she and George started dating it became a silent agreement between them to be civil. But now, looking at Fred’s pale face over George’s shoulder, Y/N can feel her momentary relief rush out of her body, and overwhelming sadness takes its place as fresh hot tears start to roll down her cheeks.

Her and Fred had just barely started to come together when the war started, and now they’ll never have that chance again.

“He’s fine you know,” Fred comments as he comes to stand next to Y/N. “You’re looking at him as if he’s going to fall apart into a million tiny pieces with a hard gust of wind.”

Y/N chuckles, and finally looks away from George so she can look up at Fred. Bill and Fleur’s wedding is in full swing, and while Y/N knows this is supposed to be a time to celebrate, a rare moment of sunshine in the darkness of the Wizarding World, panic settled deep in her stomach the moment she stumbled into the Burrow with Ron and saw George lying on the couch, bleeding out of his head and it hasn’t left since. Had the curse been aimed half a centimeter to the left they’d be at a funeral right now, not a wedding. Molly had managed to heal George up fine, and he’s been his usual jovial self over the few days it’s been since his injury, but Y/N can’t help but still worry.

“It makes me feel better,” Y/N admits honestly, letting her eyes find George again. “I’m afraid that if I look away for too long he’ll just disappear. That all my fears will be confirmed and there will forever be a George sized hole in my heart and my life.” Y/N swallows thickly, trying to push away the tears threatening to spill over her cheeks. “He could have died, and I truly wouldn’t know what to do with myself if that happened.”

“I thought he was dead,” Fred says after a few moments of silence, surprising Y/N. “When Dad and I got back he asked where George was, and no one said anything. Remus, Harry, they all just looked at us. I figured he was dead. That’s why they wouldn’t tell us. There was so much blood when we got in there, I actually thought he was dead. And then he moved, and it felt like I could breathe again.”

Y/N worries her bottom lip between her teeth as she watches George fiddle with the gauze wrapped around his head. She wants to just go over there and slap his hands away and remind him he has to keep it clean if he wants it to heal, a conversation she already had to have with him this morning after she found him sipping coffee in the kitchen with his toothbrush sticking out of the side of his head.

“It’s my fault. I wasn’t even supposed to go. But Tonks is pregnant, and she shouldn’t be putting her life on the line like that. Not even for blimin’ Harry Potter. George tried to convince me not to go. Said he’d worry about me too much if I was out there.” Y/N shrugs, taking a long sip of champagne. “Maybe if I had stayed here like I was supposed to he would have been able to dodge the curse, or he’d have been focused enough to send Snape out of the sky before he even got a chance to hurt George.”

Fred nudges Y/N with his elbow so she’ll look up at him. “You like, really love him, don’t you?”

Y/N rolls her eyes. “Really? It took George almost dying for you to realize that? Figured your first clue would have been all the times you heard us having sex. Or maybe the fact that I’ve been living with you guys for over a year now.”

“Okay, no need to be nasty,” Fred huffs. “Obviously I know you guys are in love with each other or whatever. But you’re like really in it, yeah? For the long haul. Thought maybe you guys shouting about how you’re going to be together forever was just some weird sex thing.”

“I mean it is a weird sex thing,” Y/N tells him, laughing as he grimaces. “But it’s more than that too obviously. There’s no person on this planet I’d rather be with than George. Or who I love more than George. He’s my everything, Fred. I’m not going to hurt him, I promise.”

“Better not,” Fred mumbles with a scoff. “I’ll curse you into next week if you do, bloody girl or not.”

Y/N can hear the smile in Fred’s voice, but before she gets a chance to respond George is heading over towards them, looking far too pleased with himself.

“Look at this, my brother and my girlfriend getting along, how cute,” he teases, wrapping his arms around Y/N’s waist. She reaches up to fix his bandage where it slipped, and her gentle touch makes his knees feel weak. “Just in time too. Be a bit awkward for Fred to be my best man if you two hate each other still.”

“Who said I’d want to be your best man anyway, git?” Fred jokes. “All this wedding crap is for the birds.”

George rolls his eyes fondly, pressing a kiss to the top of Y/N’s head. “Fine, I’ll just ask Ron or Harry or Lee. Maybe even Charlie. You’re not the only man for the job, Freddie.”

“But I’m the best man for it,” Fred responds, causing both Y/N and George to groan at his lame joke. “Try and replace me as your best man again and you’ll never hear the end of my cheesy jokes, moron.”

“No need to be feisty, I was just playing. Of course, you’re the only man for the job.”

Now Fred will never get to be the best man at their wedding. Or be there when their children are born. Or have children of his own. Just like how Y/N and George planned out their lives, he and Fred had done the same. Buying houses next to each other so they never had to travel far to see the other. They both wanted to have a boy first, close in age, so they each had someone to hand the joke shop down to. But in the blink of an eye all of that has changed, and Y/N doesn’t know if George will ever be the same again.

“You’re okay, George. It’s all gonna be okay,” Y/N coos, just wanting to calm him down. She presses a few kisses to the side of his face slowly, just letting him know that she’s there. Her arms wind around his neck as George’s grip tightens on her waist and she just hugs him tightly.

Y/N hears someone sob behind her, and she releases George so he can pull Ron into a bone crushing hug. She pulls Ginny into a hug next, letting the younger girl rest her head on her shoulder. Y/N isn’t officially a Weasley, not by any means, but this family has shown her nothing but love and welcomed her with open arms and she wants to do everything she can to help them through this. She and Hermione lock eyes, and Y/N can tell by the way the other girl is hovering on the edge of the circle with her hand on Ron’s shoulder she feels the same way.

Harry is hovering just behind Hermione, but instead of coming closer like Y/N expects he turns on his heel and heads out of the Great Hall. Y/N knows that can only mean one thing. This battle is far from over, and she hugs Ginny just a little tighter, hoping it gives them both the strength to keep fighting.

The sun is already high in the sky when everyone makes it back to The Burrow. They’re living in a new world, a world that will never be plagued by Voldemort’s darkness, but it seems darkness of other kinds has already started to take its place. 50 people lost their lives that night alone, not to mention the countless others who’ve been lost along the way. Death has touched many families in the Wizarding World, and everyone can feel its burden as they collapse into chairs at the kitchen table.

Molly starts worrying about food and making everyone tea, while George shuffles up the stairs without bothering to say anything. They all had lingered in the Great Hall for as long as they could, not wanting to leave Fred’s body there alone. It wasn’t until people from St. Mungo’s showed up to take away the dead that Molly and Arthur suggested they all head home, and Bill and Charlie had to practically drag George away from Fred. He barely even looked at anyone as they started to apperate home, and when Y/N tried to grab his hand he shoved her off.

Y/N tried not to take it personally, obviously George is going through the hardest moment of his life, but she couldn’t help but feel a little hurt. Her and George are supposed to be there for each other through everything, and it makes her chest ache that in the time where he needs people the most he’s pushing her away.

“He’ll come around,” Charlie whispers, nudging Y/N’s knee with his. She finally looks away from the staircase, trying to return his warm smile. “Fred and,” he starts, pausing to clear his throat. “George is tough, probably the toughest guy I know, and I’ve seen some things in Romania. He just needs a bit of time.”

“Thanks, Charlie.” Y/N takes a sip of her tea, just needing something to distract herself. It’s still fairly hot and the liquid burns the roof of her mouth, but the uncomfortable feeling of her singed tongue is a welcome distraction from the pain in her chest, and Y/N takes another sip.

“Y/N dear, why don’t you go ahead and owl your parents? I’m sure they’re waiting to hear from you,” Molly suggests, before turning back to whatever she has cooking on the stove.

Y/N rests her mug back on the table and plays with the sleeves of her jumper, trying to fight the tears that threaten to spill over her cheeks. “They’re um. They died actually. About three months ago now I think.” The kitchen goes still, and Y/N drops her gaze to the table as everyone turns to look at her. “They wouldn’t let me move them to a safe house, they kept going on about how they weren’t afraid of Voldemort, that they weren’t going to let him force them out of their house. But when death eaters come knocking you either join or die, so.”

Her parents may have refused to be moved to a safe house, but they allowed Y/N to set up an undetectable communication system, so they could at least keep in touch. When her parents went more than eight hours without responding to her last message Y/N started to freak out, and she convinced Remus to go with her to check on them. They were sitting on the couch as if they had simply fallen asleep together, but Y/N could tell something much sinister had happened. She managed to find their house elf Marjorie hiding in the garden shed, and she told Y/N everything that had happened. How people in masks had shown up and when her parents refused to leave with them jets of green light came from their wands. Y/N ended up being called away on a mission, and her parents were buried in the small cemetery at the end of their road, with no one in attendance but the grave digger.

Y/N can feel arms wrap around her, and she presses her face into Ginny’s neck finally letting herself cry. There wasn’t proper time for her to mourn her parents, not in the middle of the war, and as Ginny squeezes her tight Y/N finally lets the emotions that have been building inside of her for the past three months spill out. “They were my only family. And now they’re just gone and I’m all alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Ginny coos quietly, rubbing her back. “We’re your family too.”

George barely gets out of bed for days. The only times he moves are to shuffle to the loo or when Y/N or Molly is forcing him to drink water or eat something. His eyes are blank, lifeless and Y/N hasn’t heard him speak since the battle. He doesn’t even make sounds when he cries anymore, the tears just run down his face as he takes shaky breaths.

And as much as it pains Y/N to see George like this, pains them all to see him like this they just let him be. Of course, they all feel Fred’s death. But no one, not even Y/N can fathom what Fred’s death feels like to George. So they let him lay in Fred’s old bed, stopping in to check on him periodically throughout the day and talk to him even though he never talks back. And every night before she crawls into George’s old bed Y/N is sure to kiss George on the top of his head and whisper how much she loves him before going to sleep alone.

The first day they actually force him out of bed is the day of Fred’s funeral. Bill and Charlie pick him up under the armpits and deposit him in the bathroom where Y/N is waiting, situating him in the empty tub. Y/N gives them both an appreciative smile before they leave, and as soon as the door is shut tight behind them she turns to George.

“Gotta get you undressed, okay bub?” she asks softly, kneeling down next to the tub. George keeps his eyes facing forward but gives a little nod, and Y/N takes it as her cue to get him undressed. Once she’s gotten rid of his clothes Y/N lets the tub start to fill up with water, and she runs her hand through his hair, scratching at his scalp as they wait for it to finish.

Y/N washes George quickly, just talking to him about whatever things come to mind. At one-point George reaches up and cups her cheek and Y/N can’t help but lean into his touch. It’s the first contact he’s initiated since they left Hogwarts, and it makes butterflies erupt in her stomach.

Once George is clean Y/N drains the tub and uses a spell to dry George off before pulling a fresh pair of boxers up his legs. “Your suits in your room. Do you want me to get Bill and Charlie or will you be okay going on your own with me?”

All George does is make a noise in the back of his throat, but he starts to stand up then, so Y/N lets him move, following behind him back into his and Fred’s old room. Molly is standing in the hallway, and she and Y/N share a hopeful look before they disappear into the room. This is the most life George has had in him since Fred’s death, and Y/N hopes this means they’re on the road to recovery.

“I got you a new suit,” Y/N tells him as he takes a seat on his bed and she heads over to the wardrobe to grab it from where it’s hanging. Her and Molly had gone to the flat above Wheezes the day before to grab some things for the both of them, but the main thing they needed was something for George to wear. The only formal clothes he has at the Burrow are the dress robes he wore to the Yule Ball, so they needed to get him something.

But as they examined George’s closet they mostly found t-shirts and sweaters, nothing proper for him to wear at a funeral. Turns out the only suits George owns are the few he rotates between for work, and when Molly had reached in to grab one Y/N put her hand out to stop her. Because all of those suits have a matching one hanging in Fred’s closet across the hall. And even though George isn’t ready to jump back into work Y/N knows that he will be, someday. And she doesn’t want any one of these suits to be tainted with the memories of Fred’s funeral. Not when they already hold so many happy memories. Memories of the first day the store was open, of all their late nights brainstorming new products or dealing with paperwork. Y/N had seen George at his happiest while wearing those suits, had watched him and Fred share mischievous smiles as their dreams became a reality. Someday George will step into one of those suits again, and Y/N doesn’t want the first thing he thinks about to be Fred’s funeral.

She gets George dressed quickly, pressing a lingering kiss to his forehead once it’s done. “I love you, George. And I know you love me too, even if you can’t say it right now, okay? I’m here for you always. No matter what.” Y/N goes over to the desk in the corner and grabs the teapot pin she bought for George all those years ago. It feels thin and flimsy in her hand, and she almost feels silly as she pins it to his jacket. Like she’s still that eager teenager, shopping in London with her Mum for the perfect gift to give the boy of her dreams that she loves with her whole heart. But it’s their promise of forever, and Y/N thinks George needs that now more than ever.

Fred’s funeral is packed, which is a surprise to no one. Fred was magnetic and left an impression on everyone he ever came in contact with. Y/N stays by George’s side, greeting everyone that comes to talk with them. Most of their classmates show up and Y/N even recognizes a few regulars from the joke shop. Even Professor Slughorn shows up, despite the fact that he never taught Fred, and Y/N is pretty sure she catches McGonagall wiping away a few tears out of the corner of her eye.

Andromeda comes through with baby Teddy in her arms, and even George cracks the faintest of smiles when the sparse hair on his head turns bright orange. The only time Y/N leaves George’s side is when Lee shows up and she goes to stand with Ginny and Harry who are comforting a teary-eyed Oliver Wood so that the two friends can have a moment alone. George doesn’t say anything, but when Lee goes to sit down George has tears running down his cheeks and Y/N goes back to his side so she can wipe them away.

Ginny ends up being the one to give the Eulogy. Both Bill and Charlie had tried, but every time they sat down to write something they just couldn’t get the words out. Percy had declined his dad’s offer, still too unsure of his place in the family and still too busy blaming himself to feel comfortable enough to talk about how much Fred meant to him. George had been the obvious choice, but he can’t even talk about the weather, and no one wanted to pressure him into doing something he wasn’t ready for. Ron had actually managed to write out a beautiful tribute with the help of Hermione, but two words in he got so emotional he started hyperventilating.

So, it fell onto Ginny’s shoulders to be the one to give the tribute to Fred. Y/N watches Ginny’s knees shake as she stands in front of her brother’s casket, her eyes never once straying to the cards in her hands. Her voice is clear and strong as she tells the story about the first prank she’d ever helped Fred and George pull off, but the tears streaming down her face glisten in the sunlight. Both Fred and George always held a soft spot for their younger sister, so as she stands up there and talks about how much she loved Fred it only seems right that Ginny be the one to say the final goodbye to him.

As Fred’s casket lowers into the ground everyone stands up, holding their wands high as they cast a bright white light into the sky. Y/N slips her hand into George’s, giving his fingers a tight squeeze as they give their final tribute to Fred. Ron waves his wand so a few whizbangs he and Harry had set up can go off. They had found them in Fred and George’s room so of course as they erupt into the sky the colors burst into a few different explicit words.

Everyone, even George, manages to laugh and it feels like the perfect way to send off Fred, the guy who dedicated his life to making people laugh and who died with his final smile still etched on his face.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay a bit longer?” Molly asks, placing her hands on Y/N’s shoulders. “It’s not a bother at all having you two here. It’s nice, to have the house a bit full again.”

Y/N nods, sparing a glance over her shoulder at George. He’s sitting on the arm of the sofa, listening to Ron chatter on about who knows what. It’s nearly June now, and while things with George have been progressing slowly, Y/N is optimistic that they’ll only get better as time goes on. He gets out of bed for short stretches of time now, and when you talk with him he actually seems like he’s listening. He’s said a few quiet things to both Molly and Y/N, but when the whole family is around he tends to just sit there and let everyone else do the talking for him.

Things have started to get back to somewhat normal for everyone, and Y/N decided it was time for her and George to do the same. Bill and Fleur are back at shell cottage, working hard to get Gringotts back in working order, and Charlie finally went back to Romania last week. Arthur and Percy will be back at the ministry next week, and even Harry and Ron will be joining them for their Auror training.

George isn’t ready to reopen the shop yet, but Y/N figures just being back in the flat will help him continue to heal. “I think some normalcy will help George. Get him in a routine, back to living his everyday life. We’ll be back plenty, but I think it’s time we go home.”

“My boy is in good hands with you, Y/N, that’s for sure.” Molly leans in and presses a kiss to Y/N’s forehead. “And you’ll owl? If anything happens?”

“Of course, Molly.” Y/N gives Molly a final smile before turning back to look at George. “You ready to go home, love?”

George nods and doesn’t say anything, but the corners of his mouth twitch up into a smile. He takes the hand that Y/N offers him, holding it loosely in his own. He still isn’t as physically affectionate as before, but Y/N is sure that with time everything will go back to how it was before.

“Are you going to get out of bed today?” Y/N asks, unable to stop the annoyance that creeps into her tone.

It’s nearly October now, and things with George have only seemed to stay the same, if not worse. Some days he gets out of bed and hangs out on the couch, flipping through muggle tv stations for hours on end, holding small conversations with Y/N when he feels up to it. Other days he lays in bed all day, or sometimes for days, his lips shut tight and him barely eating. Firewhiskey seems to be the main component of his diet and Y/N has no idea how he keeps getting more of it after she pours it down the drain, since he never leaves the house.

Everyone has been coddling George, and while Y/N can’t even imagine the pain George has been going through, she’s nearly reached the end of her rope. She’s brought in several different Wizard therapists to try and get George to open up, but each one just ended up leaving the flat after a frustrated hour of George not saying anything. She just wants to figure out some way to help him, and he’s been completely unresponsive in the whole thing.

“Maybe,” George mumbles, rolling onto his other side.

Y/N can hear the unmistakable sound of a Firewhiskey bottle opening and she flips the light on as she enters their room, heading over to George. “Where the hell do you keep getting this crap? Give me the bottle, George.”

George makes eye contact with Y/N as he takes a swig from the bottle, draining quite a bit of the amber liquid. It’s the only thing that has managed to make him feel something in the months since Fred’s death and he doesn’t care how much it bothers Y/N. “Last I checked you weren’t the boss of me,” George responds flatly before taking another drink.

The rude attitude is something new too. Along with his lack of physical affection, some days when George finds the energy to talk his tone is always crass. He’s never said anything horribly mean, but the way he says things never fails to cut Y/N deeply.

“I’m just trying to help you, George,” Y/N reminds him, softening her tone.

George scoffs and tosses the now empty bottle onto the floor. “Well no one asked you to.”

“Because that’s what you do when you love someone, George. You’re there for them no matter what.” Y/N waits for George to say something, and when he doesn’t she lets out a soft sigh. “I’m worried about you, Georgie. You barely get out of bed anymore, you’re not eating. I can’t even imagine the pain you’ve gone through these months. But it’s been nearly six months, love. And Fred wouldn’t want-.”

“Don’t. Don’t talk about him like you knew him. You and Fred had one civil conversation over a year ago. You have no idea what Fred wanted,” George says harshly, cutting Y/N off.

Y/N can feel tears pricking the corners of her eyes and she takes a deep breath to try and calm down. She knows this isn’t George talking, it’s the alcohol and the grief, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. “I get your upset George, I lost people I cared about too. But I don’t get all this anger. Why are you so mad at me? Is it something I said? Something I did? Just talk to me George, please.”

“You want me to talk? Fine, I’ll talk.” George sits up and crosses his arms over his chest, his eyes narrow as he looks at Y/N. “It’s all your fault, he’s dead because of you. I should have been with Fred. I could have cast a protective spell or pulled him out of the way. And he’d still be here. But I wasn’t with him. You know why? I was faffing about the castle looking for you, saving you. When I should have been with Fred.”

Y/N can feel hot tears running down her cheeks, and her fingers shake as she reaches up to wipe them away. “What are you saying, George? That you regret trying to find me? That you regret saving me? That you would go back and let Adrian kill me so you could save Fred?” Y/N pauses to swallow the lump in her throat. “You wish it had been me who died, don’t you?”

George doesn’t say anything, but it’s answer enough for Y/N. “Fuck you, George. I’ve spent the past five months of my life giving you my everything. Trying to help you, trying to make you feel better. And you’ve been what? Laying there wishing it had been me instead of Fred?” Y/N can feel her heart shattering as George just continues to look at her, the same cold expression on his face as before. “Well I’m done. With helping you, with coddling you. With everything.”

She can feel the necklace George gave her pressing against her skin, and while it’s normally a comforting feeling, now it feels as if it’s burning her skin and she reaches up, tearing it from around her throat. It’s the first time she’s taken it off since George gave it to her and as she looks at it in her hand Y/N wants to put it right back on. But instead she throws it at George. It lands on his legs, and they both just stare at it for a moment.

“Take your promise of forever and shove it up your ass, George. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything, more than I’ve ever loved myself. But clearly you don’t feel the same way and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life pretending that it doesn’t kill me inside that you don’t love me the same way I love you.”

Without another word Y/N storms out of their bedroom and out of the flat, unsure of where she’s going to go next.

“You look dreadful,” Percy says honestly when George opens the door. His eyes are red with dark circles underneath, his hair is a mess and the pajamas he’s wearing are wrinkled and creased from him tossing and turning in his sleep.

Y/N had sent an owl to the Burrow after she ended things with George, and Percy had been the one to volunteer to visit George to try and talk to him. He gave him a few days to think about things before deciding to come and see him after work one day. The war took enough from George, and Percy couldn’t sit back and let George destroy one of the last good things in his life.

“What do you want?” George asks flatly, shuffling over towards the couch. He’s felt sick to his stomach since the moment Y/N walked away from him. He was angry and kind of drunk and sad when they fought, and George hadn’t meant a word of what he said to her. But he needed a way to get her to leave. Because George doesn’t know when he’ll ever feel normal again, when he’ll be able to love her properly again, and watching her throw her life away to help him fight a losing battle was getting to be too much.

It started two weeks ago, on one of his good days. He woke up in the morning feeling like himself, feeling like he did before the battle of Hogwarts. George had finally had a dream, not a nightmare or darkness in his eyelids while he slept. It was an actual dream, and when he opened his eyes in the morning the images of him running around a backyard with a redheaded toddler on his shoulders were still fresh in his mind.

And when he made it out into the kitchen where Y/N was making breakfast, she looked gorgeous and the smile on her face when George greeted her was bright enough to light up the world. He finally felt like things were going to be okay. He didn’t feel haunted by the closed bedroom door down the hall. George felt like he was ready, ready to get his shit back together and give Y/N everything he’d ever promised her.

But then he found it in the trash. A letter from the head Healer at St. Mungo’s. She was inviting Y/N to come back into the Healer program, to finish the training she started before the war. All she had to do was send a letter back confirming her reenrollment. But judging by the fact that she hadn’t mentioned anything, and the letter was in the trash, George figured Y/N wasn’t going to reenroll. It killed him that she was giving up on her dream to stay there with him--he was having a good day, but George knew that tomorrow, he could wake up and be right back to struggling to get out of bed. Y/N wanted to be a healer long before George occupied any of her thoughts, and he couldn’t let her throw that away.

So that day, he decided it was best if he let her go. Y/N had given up a lot for George already. His insecurities back at Hogwarts led her away from her best friends, his grief stopped her from dealing with the loss of people she cared about, and now, his inability to get his shit together was going to stop her from fulfilling her dream--the dream that made George start to fall in love with her in the first place. He couldn’t let her give up more of her life than she already had.

When Y/N tried to talk to him that day, he let whatever vile words he could think of spill out of his mouth. Seeing her so hurt, so broken, crushed whatever part of his soul was left, and he couldn’t let her keep living that way. But seeing her tear that necklace off broke something inside of George. He finally felt something other than numbness, and it was complete and utter pain. It felt like his heart was torn from his chest when Y/N slammed the door behind her, and even though George knew not being with him is what’s best for Y/N, his heart still beats for her and he’s sure it always will.

Percy sighs and follows George over to the couch. “What’s going on with you, George? You’re not acting like yourself.”

“I wonder why,” George responds, watching Percy sink into one of their armchairs. It’s weird, seeing him here. Percy barely wanted to enter Fred and George’s bedroom when they lived at home together, so he knows something must really be bothering him if he decided to come to the flat to see George.

“This isn’t about Fred,” Percy starts, holding up his hand to keep George from responding. “I’m not saying that you’re not still upset about him or that your grief isn’t valid. I’m talking about Y/N. She owled Mum about what you said. And while I imagine you’re still very hurt, we all are, I know you would never say anything like that to her. I’m not going to pretend that I know what your relationship with her was like, but I know you, George. And I saw the way she took care of you after what happened. So I know there’s no way you could have meant those things you said to her.”

“I’m not good enough for her anymore,” George says suddenly after a few minutes of silence. “I’m broken, damaged goods. And Y/N deserves the world. She was wasting her life sitting here and taking care of me. I couldn’t let her do that anymore.”

“George you’re not broken, or damaged. You’re healing, there’s a difference. And keeping all of this in is certainly not helping.” Percy sits back and just watches George for a moment. “We talked, down in the kitchen that first night after the battle, Y/N and I. I couldn’t sleep and she came down for some water. We were talking, and I asked her what changed, how she went from hating your guts to looking at you like you’re the only person in the world. Do you wanna know what she said to me?”

When George just shrugs Percy leans forward so he can look at George better. “She told me about the night in detention. About how you guys had an actual conversation for once. And that you made her feel like someone was actually listening to her. That you validated her dreams and made her feel like they were attainable. Y/N said that she told you stuff she never even told her closest friends, because just being around you made her feel safe, like she could be vulnerable around you.”

George thinks about that first night in detention often. After that night, he couldn’t stop thinking about Y/N. He even remembers having a dream about how nice her hair smelled, and how good it would have felt to run his fingers through it. He thinks about that night in the broom closet too, hiding from McGonagall; he’d wanted to kiss her so badly, being so close to her made his knees shaky and his chest tight. George had planned on kissing Y/N that night when he dropped her off at the Slytherin common room, until Umbridge had run into them. When they finally had their first kiss a few nights later in that secret passageway, George knew that from that moment on, he couldn’t live without Y/N.

“Why are you telling me this? It doesn’t matter now.”

Percy sighs. “I’m telling you this because you need to know that it’s okay to be vulnerable with Y/N. Keeping all of this in is only hurting the both of you, George. She very clearly loves you, and I know you must love her too if you’re willing to be miserable for the rest of your life to make her happy. But you can both be happy, George. Happy together. You just need to, and pardon my language, take your head out of your ass.”

George chuckles at that. “Wow, Perc, you must be serious, I’ve never heard you say anything so lewd.”

“Yeah well I slacked on my big brother duties for a few years, I figured it’s time to make up for it.” Percy pauses, pursing his lips. “Y/N’s staying at her parent’s house, getting it all cleaned out. Think about what you’re gonna say and then go over and apologize to her. You deserve to be happy, George. Fred would want you to be happy.”

It takes a few days and a visit from his Mum to get his haircut, but George gets his shit together so he can go and talk to Y/N. He spent quite a long time trying to figure out what to say to her, and while it’s not exactly perfect it’s what George feels and that’s what matters to him. Because there’s no doubt in his mind that Y/N is the only person he wants to be with for the rest of his life, and he shouldn’t let his inability to express his thoughts get in the way of that. They’ve already been down that road together before, and George vowed to spend forever with Y/N and he still plans on making good on those promises.

He pushes the front door right open, letting the noise of Y/N muttering to herself as she shuffles things around lead him to where she is. He finds Y/N digging through the drawers of the dresser in her childhood bedroom. She’s wearing an oversized t-shirt that George thinks used to be in his closet and her hair is tied up on her head. George can feel his legs shaking as he leans up against the doorway, and he takes a deep breath to calm himself down.

“Hey, teacup.”

Y/N jumps at the sound of George’s voice and she spins to face the door, her hand clutching her chest. “For Merlin’s sake, George. You scared the shit out of me.” She can feel her heart racing in her chest, and it’s not from the fright George just gave her. He looks good, like his normal self and it feels like she’s seeing him for the first time. Molly has definitely cut his hair recently, and even though he’s still in comfy clothes the Gryffindor t-shirt and sweatpants he’s wearing are uncreased and look like they’ve been washed recently.

“Sorry, love, thought you heard me when I came in.” George bites his lip, fiddling with his thumbs. “You doing okay?”

Y/N shrugs, looking down at the floor. George is the last person she expected to show up here, and she’s not sure how she feels about it. He’s been on her mind since the moment she walked out the door of their flat last week, and the last words he spoke to her have been running on a constant loop in the back of her mind. She’s still so angry and hurt over what he said, but Y/N would be lying if she said every cell in her body isn’t screaming at her to just go up and hug him.

“I’ve been doing better, than before,” George continues when she doesn’t say anything. “Percy came to talk to me a few days ago, made me realize what an ass I was. Though I must say he was much nicer than Ginny was when she did the same thing a few years ago.” He lets out a breathy chuckle, and his stomach flips when Y/N looks back up at him with a small smile. “I owe you probably the biggest apology I’ll ever give in my entire life and I’d love to give it to you if you’d let me.”

It reminds Y/N of that day on the train when their only problems were jealousy and what house table they should eat dinner at. Y/N instinctively reaches up to grab the charms of her necklace, her hand faltering when all she meets is the cloth of her shirt. It’s something she’s done several times in the days it’s been since she ripped the piece of jewelry off, usually when she was missing George and wanted to feel like a piece of him was still nearby.

“I guess that’s something I could do,” she says quietly, going to take a seat on the edge of her bed. She pats the spot next to her, encouraging George to come sit. His hands are shaking as he comes and sits down, and it takes all of Y/N’s restraint to not reach out and grab one of them.

“I lied to you. I don’t blame you, for what happened to Fred. And I don’t regret anything I did that night. If it had been you who died instead of Fred I don’t think I would have been able to carry on with my life. Because Y/N you are quite literally the only reason why I wake up every morning, you’re the reason why I have the energy to get out of bed somedays, and the reason why I feel okay when I don’t. Falling in love with you, being with you has been the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

George reaches up to wipe away a few of the tears Y/N has started to shed, his fingers trembling as they softly press against her cheek. “And even though I haven’t been the best person to be around lately, you’ve been by my side through everything. You’ve been so patient and understanding, way more than I deserve. You put your life on hold to help me, and I’ve been rejecting all of your efforts. I don’t know how to do all of this. How to grieve and handle my emotions. Talk about my emotions. And instead of just trying I’ve been keeping them all in, letting them settle in me and get worse. I haven’t felt like myself in months, haven’t allowed myself to. And yet every day you were there, with a smile and a reassuring touch, telling me how much you love me. I started to feel guilty, so overwhelmingly so it felt like my chest was going to cave in. Because there you were, putting your life on hold, giving up your dream to try and help me and I couldn’t even manage to tell you how much I love and appreciate you.”

Y/N reaches up and wipes away a few of George’s tears this time, letting her fingers gently caress his cheek. “George I didn’t mind, doing all of that for you. That’s what you do when you love someone. You make sacrifices, change your plans. I would give up everything to be there for you.”

“That’s why I said all of those things to you, Y/N. Pushed you away, forced you to leave. Because I don’t want you to give up everything to be with me.” George cups Y/N’s cheek gently so he can look her in the eyes. “You deserve to have everything you’ve ever wanted in life, and you deserve to have a partner that can be there for you. That can support you fully in everything you do. And I didn’t think I could be that person for you.”

“Didn’t think you could be? Or don’t think you could be?” Y/N asks through her sniffles.

“Didn’t,” George confirms, his voice serious. “Because living without you, even for a few moments was the most intense pain I have ever felt. And even though I don’t know when I’ll feel completely back to normal there are a few things I do know. I know that I love you. And I know that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I know I want to support you and be there for you in everything you do. And I know that I want to try and be better for you. And for me. Most importantly I know that I want you, forever. I want all those things I promised you, the stupid diamond and the wedding and the seven ginger babies. I know that I actually want to live my life, not just watch it pass me by. And the only person I want to do that with is you.”

George pauses to dig around in the pocket of his sweatpants, and a moment later he pulls out Y/N’s necklace. Except this time along with the teapot and G charm, there’s a simple diamond ring hanging from the chain. “So I am so, so sorry for treating you the way I have, the way I did. And teacup, if you’ll let me, I promise to cherish you and support you and love you forever.”

It’s not the way Y/N ever imagined this moment would take place, but as she surges forward to kiss George properly for the first time in months, it feels absolutely perfect. She knows that they have a long road of healing and mending ahead and that their lives will probably never be the way they imagined them. But none of that matters. All Y/N needs and has ever needed is George. “Of course, George. There is no one else I want to spend forever with.”

George lets Y/N pull him into another kiss as he fumbles with the necklace, trying to get the ring off so he can slip it onto her finger. She starts to kiss down his neck, and George lets out a soft moan as he finally gets the ring in his hand. “Hang on teacup, wait a minute.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Y/N mumbles as she pulls away, her cheeks flushed pink. “It’s fine if you’re not ready to we can wait for as long as you want I just figured that-.”

George cuts her off with a laugh. “Oh no that’s not what I meant, Y/N. I am more than ready to be with you like that again. I just wanna put your ring and your necklace on first.”

“Oh right I kinda forgot about that,” Y/N says with a giggle, holding her left hand out for George. Between the war and George’s grief they haven’t been intimate in well over a year now, and Y/N’s fingers stopped being sufficient long ago so in her haste to get George into bed she completely forgot about the ring.

“You can’t not have your ring on the first time we do it as an engaged couple,” George teases as he slides the ring down her finger. The diamond glistens in the sunlight streaming in through the window and to George it looks as if the ring was made to be on Y/N’s finger.

Y/N examines the ring up close for the first time as she turns around so George can clasp her necklace back around her neck. It’s simple, but gorgeous and everything she’s ever wanted in an engagement ring. George finally gets the clasp of the necklace closed and Y/N shivers as the cool metal settles against her skin. A moment later George’s warm mouth is pressing kisses into her skin and she lets out a quiet noise.

“I missed you so much,” George murmurs as he turns Y/N back around, kissing her softly. He starts to slowly lay her back against the pillows as their mouths move together, crawling on top of her. “You did such a good job taking care of me, teacup. Now it’s my turn to take care of you.”

George helps Y/N out of her top before he starts to slowly kiss down her neck, his hands slowly rubbing up and down her sides. It’s been far too long since he showed Y/N just how much he loves and appreciates her, and he plans on making up for it now. He moves his lips down her chest, taking one of her nipples between his lips. The tip of his tongue flicks at the sensitive bud for a moment before he sucks on it gently.

“Oh, George,” Y/N moans, tangling one of her hands in his hair. She tugs on it lightly as her hips move off of the bed to grind up against George’s. She can already feel her arousal pooling in her panties and she’s ready for more.

“God you are gorgeous,” George murmurs before capturing Y/N’s other nipple in his mouth and giving it the same treatment as the other. “I don’t deserve you,” he mumbles into her skin as he starts to kiss down her stomach. “You are perfect in every way, Y/N.”

“I love you,” Y/N tells George quietly as he gets rid of her bottoms, lifting her hips up to help him. She shivers as she rests back against the bed, completely bare for him. His gentle touch on her knees makes goosebumps rise on her skin, and she lets out a whine as he spreads her legs open.

“I love you too, teacup. So much. More than anything in the world.” George starts to kiss Y/N’s inner thigh, leading a trail up to her dripping cunt. He pauses to suck a mark onto the inner most part of her thigh, just a few centimeters away from where she needs him most. George brings two fingers to her cunt, spreading her wetness around as he rubs through her folds.

Y/N’s hips grind down against George’s gentle touch, and she tugs on George’s hair when he chuckles. “Please, George. I need you.”

George slips two fingers into Y/N’s cunt as his lips attach to her clit, moaning against her when walls clench around his digits. He sucks on her clit gently, slowly moving his fingers in her, curling them with every push back into her entrance.

“Oh yes, Georgie, fuck. Feels so good,” Y/N groans, her hips starting to grind down against George’s face and hands. She spreads her legs even wider, whining when the fingers of George’s free hand dig into her thigh.

“Such a good girl for me, teacup,” he praises, pressing a wet kiss to her clit. He starts to move his fingers faster, scissoring his fingers to help stretch her and get her ready for his cock. “Making such pretty noises for me, just like you always do.”

Y/N lets out a low moan as George reattaches his mouth to her clit, bringing her free hand up to pinch at her nipples. She can already feel the familiar heat of an orgasm building in her stomach, and her toes curl as George’s tongue starts to trace patterns over her clit. “Love being your good girl, George. Always wanna be your good girl.”

George hums as he sucks Y/N’s clit harder, fucking his fingers back into her cunt harder. Her walls are clenching and twitching around him, and George has to grind his hips against the bed to get some relief on his aching cock.

“So close George, fuck,” Y/N moans, her toes curling as George’s fingers brush her g-spot once again. She can feel shocks of pleasure radiating through her cunt as her orgasm approaches, and she starts to move her hips sloppily, chasing her climax. “Can I cum? Please Georgie, wanna cum. Wanna be a good girl,” she babbles, tugging on George’s hair.

George takes his mouth away from her cunt and starts to rub harsh circles on Y/N’s clit. “Go on, darling. Want you to be a good girl and cum for me.”

With a few more pumps of George’s fingers Y/N is cumming, her thighs trembling as pleasure washes over her in waves. She can see stars behind her eyes, and she doesn’t even realize that she’s moaning loudly until George is kissing her and the room gets infinitely quieter.

George rubs Y/N’s hips soothingly as she comes down from her high, his lips gently pressing to her neck in a series of slow kisses. “Do you have any idea how fucking hot you sound when you’re moaning like that for me?” he asks, pulling away so he can look into Y/N’s eyes.

“I could wager a guess,” Y/N responds playfully, pulling George down into a kiss. She slowly starts to sit up as George deepens their kiss, letting out a moan against his mouth. Y/N trails one of her hands down George’s chest to his crotch, palming his erection through the fabric of his sweatpants. “Is this another present in your pants for me?” she teases, nipping at George’s lips.

“Why am I marrying you again?” George teases as he pulls away so he can take his t-shirt off. He gets off the bed then and starts to get rid of his bottoms, pulling them down slowly to tease Y/N.

“Georgie,” Y/N whines at his teasing, jutting her lower lip out into a pout. She gets up onto her knees and wraps one of her hands around the back of George’s neck as the other reaches down to wrap around his cock. Y/N pulls George down into a hot kiss as she starts to stroke him, her thumb swirling around the tip to collect the precum dribbling out, helping her hand to glide easier.

George kicks his bottoms off as Y/N strokes him, moaning into her mouth. “Godric I missed this. Missed you, teacup. I can’t believe I get to have you for the rest of my life.” He crawls back onto the bed as he kisses Y/N again, sitting down with his back against the headboard. His hands settle on Y/N’s hips and he pulls her so that she’s straddling his waist. “You gonna show me how much you missed me too?”

Y/N reaches behind her to grip George’s cock and she lets out a whine as she teases her slit with the tip. She lets George pull her into another kiss as she starts to slowly sink down, but it falls apart as her hips move and her mouth drops open to let out a few pants. “So fucking full,” she groans as their thighs meet, her hips rocking slightly now that George is fully inside of her.

“Fuck your cunt is tight,” George moans, digging his fingers into Y/N’s hips. Her walls are pulsating around him and he can’t help but jut his hips upwards. Being buried inside of Y/N feels like pure ecstasy to George, and it takes all of his restraint not to just flip them over so he can fuck into her hard. “How do I feel, teacup? You like the way my cock fills you up?”

“George,” Y/N moans as she starts to rock in his lap, moving her hips in tight circles as she grinds down into him. She can feel George deep inside of her, and the way his cock brushes her g-spot with every moment causes pleasure to radiate through her core. “Feels good, so good. Missed being,” Y/N pauses to moan as George starts to help guide the movements of her hips. “Missed being full.”

George presses his face into the crook of Y/N’s neck, letting out grunts against her skin as she starts to rock against him quicker. He starts to move his own hips up into her and her walls clamp around him even tighter. “You’re incredible,” he pants, pressing a kiss to her neck. George pulls away so he can look at Y/N leaning in to kiss her briefly. “Feel so fucking good, teacup. Riding me so well, Y/N. Being such a good girl for me.”

Y/N tips her head back and moans as she starts to move faster, desperately trying to cum again. Her clit is grinding against George with every movement and the way he’s stretching her out has gone straight to her head, and Y/N’s mind is clouded with pleasure. Maybe it’s because they haven’t been intimate like this in so long or because they’re engaged now but Y/N feels complete with George inside of her and she never wants it to end as she grinds down against him harder.

“Please George, please,” she begs breathily, digging her fingers into his shoulders.

“What do you want teacup?” George asks as he stats to thrust his hips up harder. Her walls twitch with every movement and he can already feel himself getting close to his release. “Whatever you want it’s yours.”

Y/N tilts her head forward so she can rest their foreheads together. She looks into George’s eyes and a shiver runs down her spine at how dark they are. “Just want you, Georgie. Please.”

George kisses Y/N desperately as he flips them over, pressing Y/N down into the mattress as he starts to slam his hips into her hard. “You’ve got me,” George promises as he brings one of his hands down to her core, starting to rub harsh circles on her clit. He braces himself on a hand above her shoulder and presses their foreheads together again so he can look into her eyes. “Forever, Y/N. I mean it this time. Forever.”

“Oh fuck, George,” Y/N moans as she cums, her legs winding around George’s hips to keep him in place, fucking her deep. Electric shocks of pleasure radiate through her body and her chest starts to heave with deep breaths as the pleasure washes over her.

Y/N’s walls tightening and pulsating around him pushes George over the edge, and he cums too, a cry of her name leaving his lips. He kisses her messily as his cock twitches inside of her, his hips slowly rolling to help them both of them through the tail ends of their orgasms.

“No,” Y/N whines when George moves to pull out, her legs tightening around his waist. “Not yet, George. Wanna be full with you for a bit longer.”

George chuckles and presses a kiss to Y/N’s sweaty forehead, carefully turning them on their sides so they can lay somewhat comfortably, his cock still buried deep inside of her. “Of course, teacup. Anything for you.”

“Forever, yeah?” she murmurs, clenching her walls around George.

He reaches a hand between them and presses the charms of Y/N’s necklace into her skin. “Forever.”

“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world, did you know that Mrs. Weasley?” George asks with a dopey grin as he twirls Y/N around in a circle.

They decided to keep their wedding small. Partially to distract from the fact that Y/N really has no friends or family to invite. But mostly because they don’t need all the theatrics. It’s the middle of June, and the backyard of the Burrow is draped in twinkling lights, making the warm air seem as if it’s glowing as everyone talks or eats or dances. George had suggested they get married as quick as humanly possible. He even tried to convince Y/N that they should just get a marriage license from the ministry and get married right in Shacklebolt’s office before they even had the chance to tell anyone they were engaged.

But Y/N insisted that they have some sort of ceremony with their family. June seemed like the perfect opportunity, since both Ginny and Hermione would be done with school and Fleur would have already given birth to the first Weasley grandchild. Y/N also thought it would give George some more time to deal with his grief.

After he proposed George really did start doing better. He started getting out of bed every day and taking proper care of himself. Y/N encouraged him to reconnect with his family and friends, and they even started leaving the flat together at least once a week. George started seeing a wizard therapist, and as he learned how to identify and deal with his emotions, Y/N watched the light slowly come back to his eyes. By Christmas he was back to joking around again, and he even charmed some mistletoe so that the people who met underneath it wouldn’t be able to move unless they kissed.

In the new year Y/N reenrolled in her Healer training program, and while being by himself again gave George a bit of anxiety, he packed a lunch for her and sent her off with a kiss on the cheek and a smile. And it worked out in the end, because George found himself so stir crazy without Y/N around that he managed to go back down in the joke shop. Y/N ended up finding him sitting in the office when she got home, some of Fred’s old notes clutched in his hand while he cried. She was worried that he would start to move backwards, but when George noticed her presence he opened up to her about how he was feeling instead of pushing her away. He managed to make the trek back down into the shop every day after that and now Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes will be back open for business on July first.

“You’re only saying that because it’s our wedding day, Georgie,” Y/N teases, titling her chin up so he’ll kiss her. George presses their lips together briefly and Y/N rests her head on his shoulder, watching Arthur twirl Molly around on the other side of the dancefloor.

George presses a kiss to the top of Y/N’s forehead before resting his cheek there. “You think that’ll be us in thirty years? Dancing like fools at our kids wedding?”

“I hope so. I reckon we’ll be those proper embarrassing parents, like the kinds who’s kids hate going out with them in public,” Y/N muses with a laugh.

“You mean like your parents?” George asks softly, pulling Y/N into his chest tighter. “Your cheeks were so red the first time I met them I thought you were gonna turn into a tomato.”

Y/N turns her face into George’s chest to hide the pink flush of her cheeks as the memory of George meeting her parents for the first time comes flooding back to the forefront of her mind.

“Not another one Mum, please,” Y/N begs before picking up a pillow off of the sofa and shoving her face into it to hide her embarrassment. All her mother does is grin as she comes back into the living room with another album full of pictures from Y/N’s childhood.

It’s easter break for Y/N, and it’s only been a few weeks since George and Fred had their grand exit from Hogwarts. While George has been busy getting ready for the joke shop’s grand opening, he agreed to come to dinner at Y/N’s house so he could finally meet her parents. He was a little nervous leading up to it, unsure of how Y/N’s parents would take to the fact that their daughter is dating a poor blood traitor who’s a recent school dropout, but the second he walked through the door all his worries washed away.

Y/N’s family manor is large, but yet somehow still feels like home. It’s bright and warm and feels lived in. Y/N’s mother had hugged him tightly as soon as he stepped through the door, and her dad playfully fell to his knees to bow down to George, making a joke about how gracious he was that someone fell in love with his smart ass daughter so he wouldn’t have to deal with her for the rest of his life. Y/N was standing just behind him looking as if she wanted the world to just open up and swallow her whole, but George found it hilarious and gave her dad a curtsey in response, telling him that her smart mouth would greatly reduce the dowry he’d be willing to pay.

Even Marjorie their house elf had teased Y/N a bit as she brought them all drinks in the parlor. She said something about how the photo Y/N keeps of George under her pillow certainly did not do him justice as he’s much more handsome in person and Y/N’s cheeks went so red it was as if she had spent hours outside in the cold. They had only been sitting down for a few minutes when the first photo album came out, and now George is about to start flicking through the fifth.

George laughs as he takes the book from Y/N’s Mum, trading her for the one he just finished flipping through. “Oh, come on, love. It’s only fair. Ginny tells you embarrassing stories about me all the time.”

“Yeah, pumpkin. It could be worse, I could have Marjorie go dig the old Muggle video player out and we could pop some of the home movies into it,” her Dad teases.

Y/N groans at that and she puts the pillow down so she can glare at her father. “Fine, fine, the photos can stay.” She leans her head against George’s shoulder as he starts to flip through the book, and she just barely sees her Mum bring the camera out from behind her back before she’s taking a picture. “Mum! We talked about this, you promised no photos!”

“Oh, come on, one photo never hurt anybody. You’ll be thankful I took this photo someday when you’re old and fondly reminiscing about your youth to your grandkids,” Y/N’s mother says, putting the camera down. “And it’ll be a nice visual aid when I tell the story about how embarrassed we made you tonight at your wedding.”

“Can we not with the wedding talk? George and I are barely eighteen.” Y/N hides her face in George’s neck, her cheeks heating up even further when George chuckles and turns his head so he can kiss her on the temple. Both of her parents let out an aw, and she picks up the nearest pillow to throw at them.

George laughs as Y/N faceplants onto her bed later that night. They’ve just finished dinner with her parents, and Y/N snuck them upstairs when her Mum went to go find another old photo album. “You regretting asking me to come to dinner?” he asks, sitting down next to Y/N.

She turns her head so she can glare at George, but it quickly turns soft when he starts to rub her lower back. “They promised me they’d be on their best behavior. Clearly they lied.”

“It’s cute, that they embarrass you or whatever. Clearly they love you a lot,” George responds softly, giving her a reassuring smile. “How much of our wedding do you think your Mum has planned?” he teases with a chuckle.

“Don’t joke about that, George. Knowing her the answer is probably the whole thing,” Y/N answers with a giggle. She rolls over onto her back so she can look up at George, letting one of her hands reach up to run through his hair. “I hope they didn’t scare you away with all of their baby photos.”

“Darling if Daphne Greengrass’ iciest glare doesn’t scare me a few photos of you with some missing teeth is nothing,” George reassures her. “Your Mum even had me mark some of my favorites for her to include in the wedding slideshow when you went to the loo.”

Y/N groans and places one of her pillows over her face, before deciding to hit George with it when he laughs at her pain.

“They were quite embarrassing. Though I wish we could have seen the slide show my Mum was gonna make. Bet your Mum would have added a fair few photos of you to the mix,” Y/N points out, grinning up at George.

George leans down and presses a kiss to Y/N’s forehead. “And half of them would have been of Fred I reckon, we were even harder to tell apart when we were babies.” He lets out a quiet sigh and kisses Y/N’s forehead again. “I wish he was here.”

“I know, Georgie.” Y/N squeezes George tighter for a moment, letting her eyes wander around the backyard. Ginny has a very excited Teddy Lupin on her shoulders, with both Harry and Andromeda laughing as the toddler’s face and hair changes into something new every few seconds. Bill and Fleur are in the corner trying to coax a restless Victorie to sleep and Charlie and Lee are taking shots together at one end of the bar. Percy is standing at the other end of it with Ron and Hermione, telling them a story about his new girlfriend, Audrey. “Percy did a pretty good job though, as best man. Don’t you think?”

Turns out the hardest decision in wedding planning was figuring out who the best man would be. Ginny was the natural choice for maid of honor, but it took George weeks to pick out his best man. Both Ron and Harry volunteered themselves for the role, and spent more time arguing with each other over why George should pick them rather than trying to convince George why they were the best choice. Charlie actually took himself out of the running, since he’d been Bill’s best man and didn’t want to take the opportunity away from another brother. And Lee was pretty chill about the whole thing, he was perfectly happy just to be the one in charge of the DJing.

Percy had been shocked when George asked him. Despite the fact that Percy had really tried to step back into the family after the war everyone could tell he still felt awkward. He was always the first to head home after family dinners, and the one who opted to sit on the single armchair rather than pile up with the others on one of the couches. At Christmas after he opened his Weasley sweater he excused himself to the bathroom, and they all pretended not to notice the red rims of his eyes when he came back. He always waited for someone to address him before he spoke, as if he thought no one cared about what he had to say. Most notably he always braced himself when someone brought up Fred, as if he was waiting for someone to shout at him for failing to save his brother.

But George had reassured him endlessly that he was the only person he wanted to stand up there with him while he promised Y/N forever. For one because Percy had been there for George during a time when he needed him most, and he gave George the push he needed to make things right with Y/N. George also ended up admitting later that him choosing Percy to be his best man would have annoyed Fred endlessly, and it made him feel like he was pulling one final prank on his brother.

George hums as he nods, letting go of Y/N briefly so he can twirl her around, before bringing her back against his chest. “Who knew he could be so funny? I’m pretty sure Ron nearly threw up from how hard he was laughing. It’s nice to see him be comfortable around everyone again. Feels like it did before, you know. That’s what I wanted, when I chose him. For him to feel like family again.”

“That’s actually really sweet of you, George. I’m sure Percy appreciates it,” Y/N murmurs, wrapping her arms around his neck.

“Well it was either let him be the best man or name one of our kids after him, and I’m not sure I like the ring of Percy ll,” George says with a laugh.

Y/N rolls her eyes at that. “I’m revoking your naming privileges, George. You’re not allowed to name any of our eight ginger babies.”

“Eight? I thought we agreed on seven?” George asks with a soft chuckle.

“Well I decided I want eight. And a few hours ago, you stood up in front of our friends and family and promised to spend the rest of forever making me happy so it’s too late to take it all back,” Y/N states matter of factly, sticking her tongue out at George.

George shakes his head fondly and leans down to kiss Y/N slowly. “Fine, fine. Eight it is. Though we better start thinking about moving out of the flat then. Because if my height is anything to go by we’re gonna have some big babies, and I reckon we can only fit two or three of ‘em above Wheezes. And with the way you look tonight there’s no way there won’t be at least one more Weasley grandchild on the way when I’m done ravishing you.”

“How long do we have to wait?” George asks with a groan, flopping down onto the mattress.

“Three minutes. Same as when I told you before,” Y/N responds with an eye roll, throwing the empty pregnancy test box at George.

Despite George’s comments on their wedding night, it took them several months to even talk about getting pregnant. Once the joke shop reopened business was as good as ever. Even now eight months after reopening the store is still so busy that George has to sometimes eat his lunch while working the till or filling out paperwork. And once Y/N completed her Healer training she got stuck working the graveyard shift, so often the only time she and George saw each other was when one of them was coming home from work as the other was on their way to work.

Thankfully after a few months of hazing Y/N was switched to a much more reasonable shift, and she was back to spending most of her nights at home with George. It was then that they started discussing the next steps of their future, and both of them were set in the fact that they wanted to have a baby sooner rather than later. But they both decided to wait just a bit longer, until they had bought a house. Because even though they both love the flat above the joke shop, it’s just not big enough for a growing family.

Fred’s room hasn’t been touched since the Battle of Hogwarts. Y/N knows George has gone in there a few times, on the days when he misses his brother the most. But nothing has been moved or tidied up. There’re still shoes, and clothes and random papers all strewn about that George just hasn’t had the heart to get rid of. Y/N figures it helps George feel like Fred is still close by, so she doesn’t push him to clear it out. Except their bedroom in the flat was too small to have all the stuff needed for a baby, so they decided that a house would come before their family.

But as it turns out, there’s a possibility they’re happening at the same time. It took them a few months to find the right house, and with Y/N’s inheritance from her parents they were able to buy a nice piece of land out in the country with a beautiful house with enough room for the large family they both want. There’s a great little pond and a tire swing, and enough room for a Quidditch pitch too.

And Y/N had figured her missed period was due to the stress of the move. But a few days ago, she woke up from a dream covered in a cold sweat that made her start to think otherwise. Fred was there. He was in the field behind her and George’s new house running around in the warm summer sunshine, chasing after a little boy. And when the little boy finally turned to look at her, Y/N felt like she couldn’t breathe. His hair was the same color as her own, but his face was all George. The same deep brown eyes, the same light freckles dotted on the same pale skin. It was uncanny really, and when the boy finally noticed her he called her Mum and started running towards her. Just before Y/N could wrap her arms around him she woke up, her heart pounding and the image of the little boy still fresh in her mind. She decided then it was time to take a test.

“What a great way to spend the first night in our new house eh?” George asks with a nervous laugh, patting the spot on the mattress next to him.

“Certainly not the way I imagined us breaking in the new house,” Y/N responds with a laugh as she settles down on the mattress with him, the pregnancy test clutched in her hand. They barely have any furniture set up and their mattress is laying on the ground and yet they may need to start planning for a nursery.

George takes the pregnancy test from Y/N’s hand and puts it face down on the bed before he takes her face in his hands and kisses her softly. “I love you, teacup. And whether this test is positive or not I can’t wait to start our family.”

“I love you too, Georgie.” Y/N lets her eyes flutter shut as George presses a lingering kiss to her forehead, unable to stop herself from thinking about the time she and George first talked about having children.

“You still awake down there, teacup?” George whispers into the still air. He didn’t want to say anything and after falling asleep next to Y/N for the past year he’s gotten pretty good at telling if she’s asleep by the pace of her breathing. But the bandage wrapped around his right ear is making it hard to hear, and he needs to know if Y/N is still awake or not.

Y/N’s head pops up immediately and she looks over at George. “What’s wrong? Does your head hurt? It is bleeding?”

George chuckles and shakes his head, shutting his eyes when the room starts to spin. “I’m fine, I’m fine. Just an idiot, give me a minute.” Once George can no longer feel his heartbeat in his temples he opens his eyes and gives Y/N a reassuring smile. “Will you stop fussing? Mum’s done enough of that for you tonight.”

“I can’t help it, George. I thought you were gonna die.” Y/N’s voice cracks as the final word of her sentence falls from her lips, and she can feel the tears welling in her eyes.

The Battle of the seven Harrys had been a shitshow from the moment they left the ground. Y/N was riding a Thestral with Ron, and from the second they took off Death Eaters were everywhere. Luckily Ron is pretty talented with his defensive spell casting, and all Y/N really had to focus on was flying them back to the Burrow safely. Which was good, because the fight she’d gotten into with George earlier in the evening was still weighing heavily on her mind.

She wasn’t even supposed to be there. The original plan had been that Y/N would stay behind at The Burrow with Ginny and Molly, that way if anyone came back injured she’d be there to help assist Molly with any healing. But then Tonks announced that she’s pregnant and Y/N made Mad Eye Moody change the plan so Y/N could take her place during the actual mission. Which George was not happy about and they left the Burrow for Privet Drive still fuming from their fight.

“Teacup,” George coos, reaching out to stroke Y/N’s cheek. “You didn’t think you could get rid of me that easily, did you?” he teases, trying to get her to crack a smile. “Snivellous has wanted to take me out for years I reckon, it was only a matter of time before he tried.”

Y/N turns her head so she can kiss George’s palm lightly. “That’s not funny, George. You really could have died.”

“And you could have as well, Y/N,” George reminds her.

“Better me than Tonks,” Y/N mumbles, looking down at the floor.

“Don’t say that,” George responds firmly, gripping Y/N’s chin so he can make her look at him. There are tears spilling down her cheek, and George lets go of her chin so he can wipe them away with his thumb. Even in the dim light of the living room Y/N looks breathtakingly beautiful, and just the thought of living without her makes his stomach lurch. “Tonks is a big girl and would have been just fine going on the mission.”

“What if it was me? Hm?” Y/N asks, looking at George expectantly. “What if I was the pregnant one about to go on a mission that could kill me? Kill our unborn child? Wouldn’t you want someone to take my place?”

“Of course, I would, Y/N,” George chokes out around the few tears streaming down his cheeks. He’s not really sure when they started pouring out, but he imagines it was when Y/N mentioned their unborn child and death in the same breath. “But this is different.”

Y/N shakes her head. “How? How is Tonks being pregnant any different?”

“Because Tonks isn’t the person I want to spend the rest of my life with, Y/N. She’s not the person who I want to carry my children or raise my children with. It’s you.” George reaches down and grabs the charms of the necklace he gave Y/N, rubbing them between his thumb and his pointer finger. “When I gave you this necklace and promised you forever I meant it, teacup. I wanna marry you and have babies with you. And I can’t do that with you if you’re dead, can I?”

“You really think about all that stuff?” Y/N asks through her sniffles, her tone full of a mixture of surprise and disbelief. While she knows that her and George were both on the same page about starting a life together someday, she had no idea he was thinking that seriously about it. They’re just barely nineteen, and Y/N figured marriage and babies were far away in their future, so far away that they would never even cross George’s mind.

George motions for Y/N to come up and lay on the couch with him. “I’m not going to break. Get up here. I wanna hold you, teacup.” Once Y/N is settled on his chest, her head on his shoulder and their legs intertwined he continues. “Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about all that stuff. Like how we’re gonna get married someday. And live on a load of land somewhere. With some chickens and a dog. And a few ginger babies of course, can’t forget about them.”

Just George talking about them having children spikes Y/N’s heart rate, and she has to take a few deep breaths to try and calm herself down. “How many ginger babies are we gonna have?”

“Hm, I reckon maybe two or three? A boy first, and then a girl. And then I think another girl would be nice,” George explains, starting to slowly rub Y/N’s back. “Why, teacup? How many do you want?”

“At least four,” Y/N says seriously, tilting her head so she can look at George. “Two of each. Maybe even a set of twins. A mini Fred and George perhaps.”

George chuckles and leans down to kiss Y/N softly. “Really? You sure you could handle another set of me and Fred? We gave you quite a bit of hell back in our school days if you remember correctly.”

“Yeah and look at where we are now. Laying on a couch together talking about all the babies we’re gonna have,” Y/N points out with a chuckle. “Besides can you imagine McGonagall’s face when two mini versions of you show up at Hogwarts one day? Bet she’d quit on the spot.”

“Oh come on, good old Minnie loved us. And let’s not forget you caused a bit of trouble as well, Y/N. Just the thought of planting a garden still gives me nightmares after you dropped that load of Dragon Dung fertilizer on Fred and I,” George reminds her with a laugh.

“And you made my hair turn yellow for weeks! And made my tongue nearly explode,” Y/N counters. “You want me to list more? Because I can list more.”

“No it’s okay, I get the point.” George just sits there quietly for a moment, enjoying the feeling of Y/N’s weight on top of him. “Just promise me you’ll be careful out there, yeah? Can’t have our four ginger babies without you, Y/N.”

Y/N pulls George’s mouth down to hers again for a few moments. “You too, George. You’re kind of the whole ginger in the situation, so you’re pretty essential in the mix.”

“I promise,” George mumbles, pressing one more kiss to Y/N’s mouth.

“You think it’s been three minutes yet?” George whispers, bringing Y/N’s mind back to the present.

“Probably,” she responds, looking up at George. Y/N reaches up and touches his cheek softly. “You wanna do the honors?”

George reaches his hand out and grabs the pregnancy test, keeping it flipped upside down. “How about we look together?” When Y/N nods George brings the test in between them and he uses his free hand to grab one of hers. “On the count of three, yeah? One, two three.”

As soon as the last number leaves George’s mouth he flips the test over to look at the results. There’s two dark pink lines staring back at them, and her and George look back up at each other.

“What did the two lines mean again?” Y/N asks.

George frowns. “I was gonna ask you the same thing.”

They both start to throw their blankets and pillows away, trying to find where the box landed after Y/N threw it at George a few minutes ago. “Why didn’t you just buy the one with the words? You had to get the one you need a diagram to figure out.”

“I was overwhelmed, okay? I’ve never been in a muggle pharmacy before and there was like 25 different tests and I couldn’t tell the difference between them all and I just grabbed one at random,” George huffs. He feels his fingers skim over the cardboard box and his eyes light up as he grabs it. “Aha! Here it is!” George skims his eyes over the directions on the back a few times to make sure he fully understands them. “Two lines means pregnant.”

They both let out a small gasp as their eyes drop back down to the test still clutched in Y/N’s hand. The two lines look even more defined now that they know what it means, and when they make eye contact again there are tears pooling in both of their eyes.

“We’re pregnant?” Y/N asks breathily.

“Well I don’t know how pregnant I am. But you’re definitely pregnant,” George teases with a grin.

Y/N rolls her eyes and shoves George’s shoulder before she grabs it and pulls him into a kiss. “Can’t believe I’m having a baby with an idiot like you,” she mumbles between kisses.

“And I can’t believe I’m having a baby with a meanie like you,” George responds playfully, placing his hand on Y/N’s stomach. He spreads his fingers and presses down lightly, as if there’s something there for him to feel already. “I love you,” he murmurs, resting his forehead against Y/N’s.

“You talking to me or the baby?” she asks quietly, placing her hand on top of George’s.

“Both.”

Fred Weasley ll comes into the world amidst a flurry of chaos, and it only feels right considering who his namesake is.

The day started out like any other. With her maternity leave in full effect, Y/N decided to head to the joke shop with George. While she can’t do much of anything besides sit behind the till and ring customers out, it made her feel good to be helpful rather than just sitting around the house twiddling her thumbs waiting for George to get home. And she knew George liked the fact that he could keep an eye on her throughout the day.

The pain started not too long after opening. At first she just passed it off as normal pregnancy pains, because she was nearly full term and she couldn’t remember the last time she didn’t have a dull ache radiating through some part of her body. But by midafternoon the pain was radiating through her back and down into her pelvis and not even sitting down eased it. She tried to hide it from George, not wanting him to go into full panic mode during the workday. But then he noticed her wincing as she sat back down after lunch and George started keeping an annoyingly close eye on her.

And then her water broke. George was cleaning up around the checkout counter and some dust that had been kicked up irritated Y/N’s nose and she couldn’t help but sneeze hard. When the liquid first started to leak out she was mortified, figuring she’d just pissed herself. But then she stood up and a large flush of liquid came out along with the largest pain she’d ever felt in her lower half. Y/N and George had just stared at each other for a moment, before realization hit them both. Clearly this baby was coming and coming soon.

George had one of the shop employees send an owl to his Mum while he helped Y/N up the stairs, wanting to Floo them over to St. Mungo’s as quickly as possible. Every few steps they’d had to stop so Y/N could breathe through a contraction, and by the time they reached the fireplace in their old flat George was surprised the baby hadn’t slipped out yet. Except when he reaches into the bowl on the mantle to grab some Floo Powder his fingers didn’t find anything.

They’d had to shuffle their way through Diagon Alley to use the public Floo at the Leaky Cauldron, and by the time they reached St. Mungo’s Y/N was already on the verge of giving birth and both she and George were soaked to the bone from the torrential downpour the sky unleashed halfway through their journey.

Baby Fred was born as thunder started to rumble, and he let out his first cry just as a flash of lightening came crashing down. Y/N is sure both she and George were crying harder than the rain that was going on outside. Fred’s eyes were already open when the Healer placed him on Y/N’s chest, and he was blinking up at her with wide brown eyes. He was already the spitting image of his Father, but the tufts of hair coming out of his head more resembled the color of Y/N’s hair. And while Y/N has never been particularly confident in the magic of Divination, she felt deep in her chest that he was the little boy she’d seen in her dream.

“What’s on your mind, Dad?” Y/N asks George quietly with a grin. It’s well past midnight, and little baby Fred is sleeping soundly against Y/N’s chest. George has been sitting in the chair next to Y/N’s hospital bed for the past hour watching their son’s chest rise up and down slowly, a look of concentration on his face.

“You sure it’s okay we named him after Fred?” George asks, looking up at Y/N. “We could have named him after your Dad. I didn’t even think about that. I should have thought about that.”

Y/N chuckles and pats the edge of her bed carefully, inviting George to come and sit with her. “Can I tell you about a dream I had? I think it might make you feel better.”

“Was it a sexy dream?” George asks with a raise of his eyebrows as he comes and sits down with Y/N. He rests one of his hands on Fred’s back, lightly stroking it with his thumb.

“No, it was not a sexy dream you oaf,” Y/N responds with an eye roll. “It was a couple nights before we moved, before I knew I was pregnant. It was summertime, and I was out in the backyard at the house. And Fred was there. He was chasing this little boy around in that field, the one we turned into the Quidditch pitch. And the little boy, he had my color hair but his face, his face was all you George. And then he called me Mum, and ran towards me, but I woke up before he got to me.”

George just sits there for a moment, letting Y/N’s words sink in. He suddenly feels overcome with emotion as he thinks about what she said, and he has to wipe away a few of the tears that escape his eyes. “That’s funny you say that, because I had a similar dream to that the night we found out you were pregnant.”

Y/N raises her eyebrows as she looks at George. “Really? What happened?”

“I was back at the Burrow. It was empty, quiet. But I could hear a creaking noise. And I followed it all the way up the stairs, to Fred and I’s old room. It looked the same, except there was a rocking chair in the corner. And Fred was sitting in it, and he was rocking back and forth, holding a baby. We made eye contact, but he didn’t say anything. He just gave me a little wink and then I woke up.”

“I don’t know a lot about divination or dream analysis. I don’t really know if I believe in any of it either. But I have a feeling we had those dreams for a reason,” Y/N explains, reaching up to cup one of George’s cheeks. “Like that was Fred, I dunno. Hand picking his name sake or something. Someone just as mischievous as him. A little pay back for Percy being your best man, perhaps?”

George laughs quietly and reaches a hand up to grab Y/N’s intertwining their fingers and giving them a soft squeeze. “You know what, teacup. I think you’re right. I have a feeling we’re in for a wild ride. And I can’t wait.”

And what a wild ride it is.

By the time George and Y/N are celebrating their 10-year wedding anniversary their house is steadily filling up with kids and with all the trouble they get into it’s a good thing George pushed Y/N to fulfill her dreams of being a Healer. It seems every day at least one of their kids is getting injured in some way: a scraped knee, a bump on the head, a bit of smoke inhalation from a whizbang George let Fred set off inside of the house. With how wild and unpredictable their kids are every day is an adventure, even the most mundane family days always seem to end up with something unexpected getting thrown into the mix.

“Mum! Mum! Can you open this for me? Please?” Fred asks excitedly, holding a candy bar up to Y/N’s face.

She eyes him wearily, taking it from him slowly. “Did your Dad say you could have this?”

Fred grins up at Y/N, and he looks so much like his Dad that it melts her heart. “Well he didn’t say no.” When Y/N narrows her eyes at him he lets out a giggle. “He was in the middle of filling something out and he told me to ask you.”

It’s a Saturday, so the whole family is at the joke shop together. Once Fred was born George hated having to leave him and Y/N at home when he went into the shop, so she started tagging along with the baby. It was a nice way for them to spend time together as a family, and when Y/N went back to work and the weekend became their only full family days it seemed natural for her and Fred to tag along with George to work. Now several years and a few more kids later, it’s still Y/N’s favorite family tradition.

“And so, you decided to ask me if you could have the candy bar, by asking me to open it?” Y/N asks with a laugh.

“Well if you said yes to opening it, that kinda already answers the whole, can I have it question,” Fred reasons.

Y/N rolls her eyes fondly and tears open the candy bar. “Nine years old and you’re already trying to out smart me. I’m so proud of you.” She leans down to press a kiss to his messy hair before handing him the sweet. “Share that with your sister, yeah? It’s 10 am I don’t need you on a full sugar rush already.”

“Thanks Mum!”

Fred runs off just as George comes up and he watches his son disappear with a fond shake of his head. “Oh to be young and have energy,” he muses with a grin, wrapping his arms around Y/N’s waist.

“Please, you still have plenty of energy left. Or have you forgotten how we got into this mess?” Y/N asks with a grin, pointing down at her bump. In just a few short weeks their family will be growing by two more, and Y/N is already exhausted just thinking about having to run after five kids.

“Oh trust me, I definitely remember how I got us into that mess,” George responds cheekily, leaning down to kiss Y/N sweetly. Luckily the store has been pretty slow so far, and they can spend the next few moments moving their lips together softly, just enjoying being in each other’s presence.

“Ew, gross,” Freya giggles, standing up on her tiptoes so she can peer at her parents over the checkout counter.

Y/N pulls away from George’s mouth with a sigh, turning her head to look at their youngest. All that’s visible over the counter is her wide eyes and the mess of fiery red curls on the top of her head. “Can we help you with something, nugget?”

Freya’s head disappears then and a few seconds later she reappears next to George’s leg, raising her arms up and bouncing on her toes. “Up please!”

“Ah, the Queen has made her demands!” George announces playfully. He gives Y/N a wink before letting her go, and he leans down to grab Freya, placing her on his shoulders. “Is this high enough for you, my Queen?” he asks, tickling her sides lightly.

“Daddy!” Freya squeals between her giggles, trying to get away from George’s attack. “No more, no more!”

George chuckles and gives her one more tickle. “Alright, alright, no more tickles.” The bell above the door jingles then and George leans down to give Y/N one final kiss. “Duty calls. I love you, teacup.”

“Love you too, Georgie.” Y/N reaches up and tugs on one of Freya’s curls. Despite the fact that she’s only three and has quite a bit of hair they’ve yet to cut any of it, and Y/N watches the long curl bounce back into place when she lets it go. “See you in a bit, nugget.”

Freya gives a little salute as George starts to head towards the customer before tangling her hands in his hair and pulling on them as if she were pulling on reins. “Horsey, horsey!”

George actually starts to move as if he were galloping, and Y/N shakes her head fondly as their daughter starts to laugh.

The store starts to pick up then, and for a few hours it seems like there’s a never-ending stream of people filtering through the door. Every once in a while Y/N gets a glimpse of George over the crowds of people, since Freya is still happily sitting on his shoulders, and every now and again Y/N watches the crowd part as Fred or Roxanne run through it.

They’ve just opened back up after shutting down for lunch, and Y/N has her back to the shop as she sorts through some of the mail. She turns around at the sound of someone clearing their throat and her heart drops into her stomach.

“Daphne. Hi,” she greets quietly, stepping back up to the counter.

It’s been over a decade since she last saw her old best friend, but the memory of their last conversation comes flooding back to her as if it took place yesterday.

“I can’t believe you’re moving in with George Weasley,” Daphne muses with a grin as she watches Y/N pack a few things away.

It’s been just over a month since they graduated from Hogwarts, and with her Healer training starting soon, Y/N decided to take George up on his offer to move into the flat above the joke shop with him and Fred. Now that they’re both transitioning into adulthood, their free time to spend together is sparse, and even though taking this next step is scary Y/N can’t wait to be officially living with George.

“I know, right? This time last year all I could think about was getting revenge on him and Fred for turning my hair yellow. And now all I can think about is the fact that I get to wake up next to him every morning,” Y/N admits with a soft blush.

“Just George and his little teacup,” Daphne teases, laughing wildly when Y/N throws a pillow at her.

Ginny had once jokingly suggested Y/N get a teacup pin after she noticed the teapot pin Y/N bought for George, since they’re always together and Y/N is so much smaller than George. After that day George’s new nickname for Y/N became teacup. And while she pretends that it annoys her, deep down she actually really loves it.

“You’re one to talk, Daph. It’s only what? A month until the wedding?” Y/N points out with a laugh. The smile on Daphne’s face falters and Y/N gives her a look. “What’s up? You’re not getting cold feet, are you?”

Daphne shakes her head as she sits up, giving Y/N a look. “No, of course not. I like to give Marcus a lot of shit pretty much all the time, but I really do love him. There’s just something I wanna talk to you about.”

“Oh?” Y/N asks quietly, sitting down across from her. There are very few things Daphne gets flustered over, and with the look she has on her face Y/N can tell she’s about to say something serious.

“You um. You can’t come. To the wedding,” Daphne stutters out, casting her gaze downwards. “Adrian said he’s not coming if you do and he’s Marcus’ best friend and I just want our wedding to be perfect and I know he’ll be upset if Adrian doesn’t come.”

Y/N can feel tears start to form in the corners of her eyes and she quickly tries to blink them away. “What? Daphne we’ve been best friends since we were eleven. You’re not going to be upset that I’m not there?”

“No of course I am! Y/N you know you’re like a sister to me. But Marcus is going to be my husband and it’s my job to do everything in my power to make him happy,” Daphne responds, reaching out to grab Y/N’s hand.

But Y/N pulls away and stands up. “Daph, it’s your wedding day too. You should have a say in who gets to be there.” Y/N pauses and just looks at Daphne, thinking about all the things they’ve been through together over the past seven years. “You’re really going to choose Adrian over me?”

“You chose George over us,” Daphne reminds her, finally making eye contact with Y/N again.

��That was different Daphne and you know that. I put space between me and Adrian because he was breaking the boundaries of our friendship and it was making George uncomfortable. And it was clearly the right decision since he kissed me and tried to get me to leave George at graduation.” Y/N sighs and crosses her arms over her chest. “George didn’t force me to do anything, Marcus is clearly forcing you to do this.”

Daphne rolls her eyes. “Marcus isn’t forcing me to do anything, I’m just doing my duty as his future wife.”

“That’s a bunch of crap and you know it. If Marcus really loved you he wouldn’t let some stupid drama from school get in the way of you being just as happy as he is,” Y/N responds firmly.

Daphne stands up then, her expression angry. “Don’t act so high and mighty, Y/N. Just because you have ambitions outside of being someone’s wife or a mother doesn’t mean you’re any better than I am.”

“Well at least when I get married I’ll be an equal in the relationship, rather than my husband’s little pet for him to boss around,” Y/N spits.

“You know what? Fuck you. You’re not welcome at my wedding. Or in my life in general.” Daphne grabs her bag and starts to storm out of Y/N’s bedroom.

“Who said I wanted to be in your life anyway?” Y/N shouts at Daphne’s back, listening to the sound of the front door slamming shut echo through the house.

“Oh. Um, hi, Y/N. I didn’t know that you worked here,” Daphne responds awkwardly, placing the few things in her arms down on the counter.

“Oh, I don’t work here, not really. I just come in on Saturdays, with the kids. It’s a good way for us to spend time together as a family.” Y/N starts to key the products into the register, not really sure what to say. The air between her and Daphne is awkward, and Y/N can see Marcus fidgeting a few feet behind Daphne, looking at some things on a shelf with a little boy. “These for your son?”

Daphne spares a glance over her shoulder at her son and Marcus, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “No, they’re for Adrian’s son. It’s his birthday today, we’re having dinner with them tonight. Although MJ does love his fair share of Weasley products.” She pauses, letting her eyes flick down to Y/N’s bump for a moment. “Is that your first?”

“Four and five actually,” Y/N responds with a laugh. She gestures to where George is standing talking with one of the employees, Freya back on his shoulders. “That’s number three over there, Freya and funnily enough she also happens to be three. And over there,” Y/N pauses gesturing to the pygmy puff cage where a little girl with curly hair the same color as Y/N’s is happily petting a little black puff. “is Roxanne, number two. She just turned six and has spent the past few weeks trying to convince us to let her take home another pygmy puff.”

Y/N scans the store for a moment, trying to find Fred. When her eyes finally land on him he has his knees hooked around a rung of the ladder George uses to reach products on the upper shelves, and he’s hanging upside down with a toothy grin. “Fred Weasley ll you get off that ladder right now! You’ve already cracked your skull open once this year and I am not cleaning up anymore of your blood.” Fred laughs wildly as he climbs down, and Y/N shakes her head as she looks back to Daphne.

“That’ll be Fred, our oldest. He’s only a few years off from Hogwarts, and is it bad if I say I’m looking forward to it just a little bit?” Y/N asks with a small laugh.

Daphne laughs as well, grabbing her wallet to pay for their stuff. “Oh trust me, I’m right there with you. I don’t know how you do it, we’ve just got MJ and I feel like I can barely keep up with him. I’m looking forward to the peace and quiet when he’s off at school.”

“George is a great help, I don’t think I could do it without him. He loves being a Dad, and he’s pretty good at it too.” Y/N hands Daphne her bag and gives her a final smile. “Thanks for coming by. It was nice to see you.”

Roxanne comes up just as Daphne and Marcus leave the store with their son and pulls up a chair so she can climb up onto the counter, being careful not to let the black pygmy puff on her head fall off. “Who was that, Mummy?”

“Just a girl I was friends with, back when I was at Hogwarts,” Y/N responds sadly, tucking a stray curl behind Roxanne’s ear.

“Oh. You’re not friends anymore?” Roxanne asks with a frown.

Y/N shakes her head and leans forward to press a kiss to her daughter’s forehead. “No, not anymore. But that’s okay. We used to have loads and loads of fun together, and now I get to have loads and loads of fun with you and your siblings and your Dad.”

“I can’t wait to make tons of friends when I’m at Hogwarts. It’s so not fair that Freddie gets to go sooner than me.” Roxanne pauses, giving Y/N a cheeky grin. “Do you think if I snuck on the train they’d just let me stay?”

“Hmm, I don’t know love. Why don’t you give it a try when it’s time for Freddie to go?”

Roxanne giggles as Y/N presses a kiss to her forehead and she gives her mother an excited look when she pulls away. “Oh trust me, I’m planning on it.”

“You think she’s going to try and sneak onto the train?” George asks, leaning over to whisper in Y/N’s ear.

They’re heading towards the entrance to Platform 9 and ¾’s to send Fred off on his very first train ride to Hogwarts. Despite the fact that it’s been over two years since Roxanne first divulged her plan to sneak to Hogwarts with her older brother, she still hasn’t forgotten about it, and she had reminded Y/N and George of her plan last night when they tucked her into bed.

“I dunno, but I don’t think it would be a bad thing to keep an extra close eye on her,” Y/N responds with a chuckle. Roxanne and Freya are walking out in front of everyone, holding hands and twirling each other around. Their curls flounce as they move, and as if she can tell they’re talking about her, Roxanne looks back at her parents and gives them a wink.

Fred is in the middle, pushing his cart along all by himself. He insisted that he could handle it on his own, since he’s going to be off at Hogwarts, and even though Y/N can tell he’s struggling a bit the grin on his face keeps her from intervening. Not that she or George would be much help. Archer and Leo, their twins, are two now, and George has one attached to each leg, giggling wildly as he walks and Y/N has a baby wrap tied around her torso, with their three-month-old daughter Scarlet laying in it fast asleep.

When they reach the wall between platforms nine and ten, Roxanne and Freya pause, looking back at their parents.

“Can we go?” Roxanne asks hopefully, mischief in her eyes.

George laughs and shakes his head. “Let your Mum and Freddie go first, yeah? You two can go through with me after.”

Roxanne pouts but steps aside, nonetheless, pulling Freya to her side as Y/N comes to stand next to Fred. She puts one of her hands on his shoulder, and the other on the handle of the cart. “Ready?” she asks, looking at her son.

“More than ready,” Fred responds with a laugh.

They push through the barrier together, and the platform looks just the same as Y/N remembers. It’s bustling with people as per usual and as George and the girls join them they navigate through the crowd to try and find a spot to say goodbye.

Once Fred’s things are loaded onto the train, Freya and Roxanne are the first to hug him goodbye, but they’re both too entranced by the Platform and the train to really care that they won’t see him for the next few months. Archer and Leo are too busy chasing each other around the small area to care, but Fred grabs them both and presses a kiss to their heads before letting them toddle off after each other again.

George pulls him into a hug first, and his hands shake as a few tears slip down his cheeks. “Love you so much, bud. You’re gonna have so much fun, I promise. Your Mum tried to take it out, but I slipped that box of Wheeze products into your trunk this morning. Just send an owl when you’re getting low and I’ll send more.” He pulls away so he can look at Fred, and the bright look in his eyes reminds him so much of him and Fred when they were that age he has to take a moment to calm himself down. “I’m handing the prank torch down to you, and I know it’ll be in good hands.”

By the time Y/N is pulling Fred into a hug there are tears fully falling down her cheeks and they fall into his hair when she brings him in as close as she can. “Don’t get into too much trouble, yeah? But have fun and learn a lot, that’s kinda the whole point.” She pulls away to press a lingering kiss to his forehead and runs her hand through his wild hair. “And don’t be too hard on the Slytherins, yeah? Your future wife might just be one of them.”

“Ew,” Fred responds, scrunching up his nose.

Y/N laughs and presses one more kiss to his forehead. “I love you, Fred. Write loads, yeah?”

“All the time,” Fred promises. He reaches into the wrap to give his littlest sister a kiss on the head before he steps back to look at both of his parents. “Bye, love you guys.”

“Hang on, one more thing.” Fred pauses and looks up at George, watching as he takes the teapot pin off of the lapel of his jacket. “A piece of me and mum for you to have with you, yeah?”

It’s the first time Y/N has seen George without it and the tears streaming down her face fall harder as he pins it to their son’s sweater. Almost subconsciously she reaches up to grab at the charms of her necklace, letting their familiar texture soothe her as she watches Fred climb up onto the train.

Forever seemed like a long time when Y/N and George first promised it to each other on that journey back to Hogwarts all those years ago. But now, watching that same train carry their first born away as their other kids laugh and play around them it just doesn’t seem like enough.

#George weasley #George Weasley smut #george weasley imagine #gw #golden

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moonagedaydreamohyeah · 3 years

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One other thing that’s really problematic about Steve’s ending in Avwngers: Endgame, I think, is what it says about dealing with trauma.

I’ll explain. So, along with Bucky clearly being main part of Steve’s storyline, I also feel like the main theme in Steve’s story is dealing with and overcoming trauma. The trauma of loss, PTSD, and of having to find his place in the world after coming out of the ice.

A few examples of that being made more or less explicit are these:

Here we see Steve struggling to find himself and find people who get what he’s been through.

In the conversation between Steve and Sam at the VA, Sam is showing Steve that he’s not alone, that there are people who relate. Now, obviously noone else has had the experience of being frozen for 70 years only to wake up in a different time. But at the core, Steve’s trauma consists of human experiences that are not at all uncommon: Loss, guilt, and trouble finding oneself after coming back from a traumatic experience.

Sam does this the first time they meet as well, when he asks Steve if “it’s his bed that’s too soft”, showing him that he relates to what he’s going though, and making him aware that what he is experiencing is not an uncommon thing to struggle with as a war veteran.

At the VA, he tells him about loosing his “wingman” and not being able to save him, which almost relates 1:1 to the story of Steve losing Bucky in CA: TFA.

Important note: This not only makes Steve realize that there are people that relate to his trauma, it also Steve’s trauma relatable to the viewers- Which in my opinion,gives the creators a responsibility to treat that part of his storyline properly and delicately - which I actually think that they do to some degree, up until Endgame.

When Steve visits Peggy, she encourages him to start over, and move forward. What I think she is saying here isn’s that we shouldn’t grieve, but rather that in dealing with trauma, we have to accept that we can’t go back. The trauma won’t magically go away, because it has happened. And trying our best to move forward is the best that we can do.

The way I read it, what she is also doing, is that she’s saying goodbye, and telling him not to linger, but to move on, and live, ensuring him that she has already done so.

This again at it’s core, is something a lot of us can relate to - grieving for a lost love. And Peggy says it beautifully - “the best we can do is start over” - it won’t make you happy, expecting that in a couple of years you’ll find some stone that’ll magically take you back in time to that first love that you thought was going to last forever... oh...

Okay, moving on:

So the thing is, that I think Steve does move on, to some extend. In the CA: TWS we see Steve establishing relationships based on deeper connections and shared experiences with both Natasha

As well as with Sam (see/read above) ⬆

Another important example is when Steve and Sam first meet and Sam asks how it is for Steve to have woken up in the future.

In his answer, Steve is focusing on the positive sides to being in the future, which can be read as Steve healthily dealing with his situation, but it also depicts the nuances of trauma.

What I mean by that, relates back to what Peggy was saying: “We can’t go back”. Our trauma won’t magically dissappear, and then everything is all good. In order to move on, we have to accept that we will be carrying some of that baggage with us.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t move on, that it will always be all bad. In this clip, Steve we’re right at the start of CA: TWS, and this is Steve’s first time meeting Sam, before knowing that Bucky is alive, and before having made any friends in the future. And what he’s saying is “Yeah, I miss my old life, I’ve been through something traumatic, but nothing is black and white, and I can appreciate the things that I have now”.

In CA: CW and the later Avengers movies, Steve’s continues developing new friendships, establishes somewhat of a life, and makes meaningful decisions for himself, based on his own ideals. He gets to grieve for Peggy, and even tries dating. (The whole Steve/Shannon debacle and the way she was treated, is a discussion for a whoole ‘nother day btw).

The fact that Steve gets to have Bucky back is of course already streching it in terms of realistic reprensentation of trauma. But I think that can be allowed, given that avenging Bucky and finding a tie between his old self, somebody who knew him all along, and now, makes up a complete storyline, that, aside from working really well, also tells a beautiful story about friendship.

(I mean the whole “one soulmate presumably dies, the other wakes up 70 years later, alone and feeling guilty, and it turns out his soulmate is actually alive, having been made a dangerous asset controlled by the enemy?? *cheff kiss* who comes up with that shit - okay, I might be little bit biased in this) :):):)

- Back to the point!

So, to sum up:

Steve starts off feeling completely alone because of the unique nature of of his trauma, and realizes that at the core of it, there are people who can actually relate to what he is going through (the grief of a lost love, the loss of a friend and the guilt of not being able to save them, struggling with finding yourself as well as your place in the world, in the aftermath of a traumatic experience).

He moves on and begins letting people in, letting himself grieve and establishes new ties that bind him to his surroundings, when he finds out that there is no going back, only forward, and he is in fact not alone with his experience og trauma.

Now, Idk about those of you guys that have had to go through either one of the above or other types of trauma, but to me, this process doesn’t sound unfamiliar.

I think that a lot of the reason why so many of us fell in love with Cap’s story, with the relationship between Steve and Bucky, Sam and Natasha, and the reason why these relationships are so inspired and well-written and exciting to examine in fandom content, is because this is a beautiful story about overcoming trauma in a nuanced and realistic way, of finding out that you’re not alone, and of using that knowledge to move forward.

When Steve finally gets Bucky back, everything isn’t back to normal or okay. They both have still lost, both others and parts of themselves, and they still have to process a lot of trauma, and find their place in a new time.

But that’s okay, because overcoming trauma is possible, even if it doesn’t magically go away. And it will be okay, because they have someone by their side who can get what they’re going through.

And I think a lot of us relate to that. And I also think that that’s a really important representation of trauma and of friendship and love (be it platonic or otherwise) between men, within a far-reaching franchise such as the MCU.

But oh no, MCU just had to get in a frantic Gay Panic over the fact that people fell for these beautiful dynamics and were inspired to create stories and art examining that, to more explicitely fit the reprensentation that they need, that they threw all of out the window, just to go out of their way in both Infinity War and Endgame, to ensure that there could be interpreted exactly zero Gayness between Steve and Bucky, and not even the smallest possibility of Steve not being 100% straight would be left open,

Leading to an ending that is the exact opposite of a healthy narrative when it comes to dealing with trauma:

- Little guy gets the buff body and the Girl, and then all the bad was gone and everything was perfect -

While completely ignoring the fact that he’s leaving his life and his friends behind, to go to a place where he knows nobody and his best friend is actively being tortured, and Steve will have to not be noticed in the past, probably leading to a very isolated life.

And thus, MCU managed to fuck up when it comes to appreciating their LGBTQ+ audience, representing healthy depictions of coping with trauma, as well as male friendship and non-toxic masculinity.

Only for this short clip, that would leave us all very dissapointed and confused:

Way to go.

Thanks for reading, if you made it this far:)

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notbleachtea · 3 years

Text

Favorite Shirt

Okay time to post again. Slight warnings, mention of death, toxic relationship, slight emotional abuse.

Word count ~2.9k

"Tch, I guess it’s about time I clean my desk. I can't work with all of this crap on it." Jotaro annoyedly says.

While cleaning off the countless stacks of paper he pauses. All desire to clean is quickly knocked out of him. He sits back down in his desk chair holding the group picture you all took in Egypt. He glances over each face in the image, some happy memories, some not so much. He would give anything to go back in time to change the way things played out. So many stupid mistakes. His eyes immediately halt when he gets to yours. His face expressed sorrow and longing.

His favorite memories of the two of you start to come rushing back to his head, and for a moment, he smiles. The constant flirting that always occured between the two of you. The silent stares you each felt from one another. No matter how much the others teased you two, you still weren't sure if admitting your feelings was the best idea. You each had your own reasons for keeping distant. The mission was much more important anyway, and so was your friendship.

He recalls one of his favorite memories with you.

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

It had been a long week of tiresome stand battles, the closer you got to Egypt, the more intense they became. He noticed this was taking quite the toll on you and made the gang find a hotel that night so you could get some much needed rest. In the meantime he suggested that you use him as a pillow in the car on the way there.

Honestly, you took him up on the offer. You took everything you could at the time knowing that it would never go any further no matter how bad you wanted it to. Your head rested on his large chest, which was surprisingly soft for how tough he was. Every now and then he'd tug on his hat to cover his face when in fact he was just trying to steal a few glances at your peaceful, resting figure.

"Alright, we're here, group up and we'll get going into our rooms," Joseph states.

"I ca-"

"She's staying with me. There's no discussing it." Jotaro then picks you up and carries you to your room.

You started to wake up from the movements and the background noise going on in the hotel, and the first thing you saw was Jotaro's face when you opened your

eyes.

"Clearly I must be dreaming," you thought.

"Look who decided to wake up." he scoffed at you. "Really left it up to me to carry you all the way up here."

"I'm so sorry! I won't let it-"

"That's enough. I was just kidding anyway. You fought really hard today, it's the least I could do."

You smiled back at him as he set you down on the bed. That was honestly all the thanks he needed.

"Anyway, I'm going to go get something to eat, I'll bring something back for you if you want, but you should probably get some real rest soon."

You began to crawl up into the bed in your dirty and torn clothes from the day you just had.

"Good grief, what do you think you're doing? You're really going to sleep in a nice clean bed in your dirty clothes??"

"Well, I don't really have any clean clothes left right now, so, unless you have a better ide-"

You were quickly cut off with a soft hit to the face. Jotaro threw one of his clean shirts at you.

"Here. You can use this. It'll be more comfortable anyway."

Jotaro had left to go pick up some food and when he came back he was greeted with his favorite shirt filled with his favorite person. Wearing only that shirt made you look much smaller than you actually were, it practically went down to your knees.

"Thanks Jotaro! I promise I'll get it back to you as soon as I can."

"Keep it. It looks better on you anyway." He cooly tried to say as he pulled his hat down over his eyes.

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After everything that had happened in Egypt, you just wanted to get away from it all for a while. Go out on your own to a new place with no reminder of the loved ones you lost and all the feelings you never acted on. As a thank you for your hard work, the SpeedWagon Foundation offered to pay for everything of whatever you decided to do. You thought maybe you'd try going to school in America for a while. It was great, you had all the experiences you grew up seeing in movies and on TV. You made plenty of new friends there and even dipped your toes in the dating pool.

Right after you finished school, you and your boyfriend got married. You thought that's what you ought to do, you've been with him for so long. Everyone thought you were the perfect couple. He always took you out on extravagant dates and bought you expensive jewelry. Every girl wanted to be you. But that was only because they didn't know what happened behind closed doors. He never physically hurt you, not many people could, I mean you could hold your

own in Egypt, you're pretty tough, but mentally, he knew you were weak. You would confide in him in the beginning of your relationship about all your friends back home that you missed. He never let you call home or talk to them either. The ones you could never see again. Everytime he wanted you to hurt he would just remind you that they were dead because you weren't there for them, you weren't strong enough to save them. Countless letters came in from your friends and family and he'd throw them away before you could see them. He would even tell you that no one was writing to you anymore.

Every now and then you manage to chat with Jotaro. He'd call you on your lunch break at work from time to time just to play catch up. Asking things like 'how's life?' and 'are you doing okay?' and the sort of thing. Everytime you told him you were doing great. You love your husband and you even try to brag about how well he treats you by describing all the luxurious gifts he's been buying you. Everytime Jotaro ended the call saying he was happy for you and then a

quick update on his life.

To be honest, Jotaro wasn't falling for your phone calls. He knew something was wrong, but he never knew how bad it really was. He thought it was strange that you never wrote to him or called him outside of your work hours. It was also strange how you never really went into depth about your personal life either.

One fateful day, you're having a routine call with Jotaro when your husband decided to stop by to take you out to lunch. He asked the secretary why your door was closed to which she simply responded, "Oh, she's talking to her childhood friend Jotaro! He usually calls about this time every week."

He walks into your office catching you off guard while you're still on the phone. The shock alone causes you to drop the phone with a quiet screech.

"Y/n, are you there?" Jotaro stays on the line worried about what he just heard.

Your husband shuts your office door leaving just the two of you in there and is yelling just loud enough to where your coworkers can't hear him.

"I thought I told you no one wanted to talk to you anymore? They're all fed up with you, can't believe you let your friends die back in Egypt. They'll never

forgive you for that."

"You're right I'm sorry just please don't do this here."

"What makes you think you can tell *me* what to do? That's not how this works. And who gave you permission to talk to other guys? There's going to be some serious consequences for this when you come home." He walks out of your office smiling at all of your coworkers like nothing had just happened, followed by a shut of your office door and your muffled cries.

"Y/n?? Are you still there? Are you okay? Did he hurt you?"

"Wh- what did you hear?" You managed to squeak out, choking back tears.

"I heard enough y/n, he's not a good guy. I knew something was wrong. We have to get you out of there."

"No. This is my life now. I don't need your help, I told you I'm perfectly fine."

"Y/n I'm not kidding, you have to get out of there *now* and I won't take no for an answer."

"I can't, okay! I have nowhere to go. No one would believe me if I said the things he's done to me. Anyone who I try to run to just rats me out to him and the situation gets worse."

"Y/n, go pack your most essential things while he's out of the house. I'm buying you a ticket home for tonight. You'll be safe here this time tomorrow."

The instant care Jotaro had just shown you only causes you to cry more. How could you let yourself get like this? You really weren't okay. You were just too headstrong to admit anything was wrong.

"Thank you." You were able to muster through even more tears.

After picking yourself up off the floor and drying your face, you left your office, no intention to come back. You rushed home to grab only your essential items while your husband was finishing his day at work. You grabbed a few sets of clothing, your toothbrush, hair and makeup accessories, a few pairs of shoes, and your folder of important documents. Everything else was replaceable and or retrievable at a later date.

You take a deep breath and get the courage to call a ride to the airport.

Free from your husband's control, you weren't scared to text or call Jotaro on your own phone now. You called him letting him know that you were on your way.

One short plane ride across the ocean later and Jotaro was waiting there for you to take you home. You're not sure how long he was there for but you're convinced he was waiting there since before you even took off.

"Y/n, over here." He waves you over.

You walk over shyly and ashamed of what he had witnessed just the day before. You couldn't even pick your head up enough to look him in the eyes.

"Y/n it's okay now. You're here with me, he can't get to you right now."

"Ye- yeah I guess you're right. So where do I go now?"

"C'mon, I'll take you back to my place."

"We're stopping there before the hotel?"

"I'm not letting you stay alone right now. You're staying with me at my house. The only reason I let you fly alone was because it got you out of there faster."

Jotaro takes your bag and you both head to the taxi.

"C'mon short stuff, get those legs movin' faster."

"Hey! Not everyone can be freakishly tall."

Jotaro raises one eyebrow, "So I'm a freak, aye?"

"Sorr-"

"Don't apologize, you're already more vocal when you're free around here. I like it."

The taxi drops you two off at his house. The drive felt like an eternity when in reality it was only a few short minutes. You stared out the car door window in awe.

*So this is what he's been up to this whole time*

"Well c'mon now, let's get inside."

You quickly follow after him like a lost puppy.

"There's a spare bedroom upstairs and down the hall, why don't you take this time to relax and freshen up while I make us something to eat?"

"You really don't have to do this for me Jotaro, but I appreciate it."

You head upstairs with your bag. It really was a long flight. You decide to take a quick shower and put on some clean clothes.

About an hour goes by when Jotaro comes by your room to collect you.

"Dinners ready y/n."

"Okay, I'll be right out, I just have to put some makeup on first."

"Uhh, what for? We're not going out anywhere."

"I don't know. I just always do. He always made me wear makeup, even at the house, I guess I'm just used to it."

Jotaro quickly turns around and starts heading towards the kitchen, but not without leaving a remark, "well don't. You look better without it anyway."

You follow soon after him with a fresh blank face. The table has already been set beautifully and you can already smell your favorite dish. He brings over two plates of food followed by a new bottle of wine.

"Why don't we catch up for real this time?" He asks.

Hours go by at the dinner table along with a few bottles of wine. The two of you bickering just like the old days. You missed this. You needed this.

You finally caught a glimpse of the time and stood up to help clean up the table.

"You don't need to help clean this up y/n. We can even clean it up tomorrow. Why don't we go talk in the living room for a bit longer?"

You move forward as an attempt to get to the couch, finally realizing how much you actually drank, you're quite tipsy in fact. Jotaro moves over to the couch to join you. Sitting side by side he grabs your hand with a guilty look on his face.

"Y/n, I'm so sorry this happened to you. It's all my fault."

Clearly he's a bit tipsy too if he's actually trying to admit being at fault right now.

"None of this is your fault Jotaro, what are you going on about?"

"If I was just straight with you when we were younger. If I actually had the courage to say something to you. Maybe you would have stayed. Maybe you would've ended up with me instead. Instead I thought you were too good for me."

Your eyes start to swell up. "Don't say that. Ever. I'm the one that's not good enough for you. Why would you ever want someone like me?"

"Well, you're you, that's why. You're strong, you held your own in the desert, you tried your hardest for us and you made it out. I've never met anyone as strong as you, and to know that someone took advantage of you? And I wasn't there to protect you? I'm so sorry for all of it."

Now full on ugly crying again, Jotaro wraps his arms around you and pulls you in for a hug.

"I'm so sorry Jotaro. Can you forgive me?"

He lifts up your crying head by your chin and brushes all your loose pieces of hair out of your face. He holds you here until you return the look into his deep aqua eyes. He moves forward, crashing his lips into yours. There was no hesitation on your end, you kissed him back just as hungrily. Neither of you needed words to figure out what the other one was thinking. You could feel the admittance of your love for each other from just that embrace. Jotaro pulls back and pushes your head into his chest so he can hold you once again. He pats your head.

"It's all okay now, I'm sorry it took this long," and he leaves a kiss on the top of your head.

The moment is only ended by your yawning since you've been up for lord knows how long. Jotaro picks you up and carries you in his arms to his room. He notices the slight confusion in your face.

"I was thinking maybe you sleep in here with me tonight, kinda like old times?"

"Okay, just let me go change into my pajamas. I don't want to get in the nice clean bed in my dirty clothes.".

You walk back into his room in just his old t-shirt you kept from the desert.

"You really kept that old thing?" He spouted.

"I really did. It's how I kept you close that whole time I was gone." You said with an embarrassed smile.

"It really does look better on you ya know?" He says through a full face of blush. Just seeing you again in that shirt made him think of all the things he wanted to do to you now and then.

You moved to go lay down alongside Jotaro in his massive bed. He always wanted to know what it'd be like to hold you in his arms in his own bed.

Jotaro pulls you into his chest to hold you tight, with no intention of letting you go. He places a delicate kiss on your cheek. You squeeze his hand as a subtle sign of acceptance and nuzzle into his broad figure.

“Goodnight y/n. Sleep tight.”

#jotaro kujo #jojo #jjba x reader #jjba #jjba jotaro #jotaro kujo x reader #jotaro x reader #jojo jotaro #jojosbizzareadventure #jjba pt 3

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venomveined · 3 years

Text

Some very personal thoughts about Essek’s bittersweet ending from the internet’s no. 1 Essek projector

________

Way back in 2014, Night Vale told us that “All the beauty in the world was made within the oppressive limitations of time and death and impermanence.”

The impermanence and imperfection of Essek’s story hurt my heart in a lot of ways, but at the end of the day, it matters to me that he chose it. It matters to me because I want to choose the same; I want to choose to live in an impermanent and imperfect world, with impermanent and imperfect people, with impermanent and imperfect love, and to choose to live and to love anyway.

Over the course of Essek’s story, he went from someone cold and closed and distant, to someone open and vulnerable and yes, that is always going to come with pain, just like beginnings are always going to come with endings. I don’t think that makes the time we have, and the person we become, matter any less. If anything, it makes the time we share and the bonds we form all the more important.

I want to make the choice that he made. I want to lean into the beauty of friendship and love and connection even knowing that it will come with inevitable loss. I want to choose, like Essek did, to allow my entire life to change around my friends even though I know they may not be in my life forever. I want to learn, like he did, to give myself fully to the love I have for as long as I get, even knowing that nobody gets forever.

I see a lot of people hurting from Essek’s ending because of the pain of separation that he experienced. It’s okay to be hurting from that. I am too. I hurt that way for him, and I hurt that way for myself, and I am trying to learn to live with that and live anyway.

What gets me through is remembering that, like taz told us, “Our capacity for love increases with each person we cross paths with throughout our lives, and with each moment we spend with those people.” Essek didn’t just have friendship and love temporarily. We now see that perhaps for the first time, he has the capacity for those things. And he has time, even though not all of that time will be with the 9. Time to learn to care for others and time to allow himself to be cared for.

He will have time for new love and new friendships. He is a person who does not have to be alone anymore. We will all be alone sometimes, every one of us, but he is no longer a person who is defined by loneliness, and we don’t have to be either.

He opened himself up to connection with others and he allowed it to change him, and it will always have changed him, and he will always be a better person because of it. The individual connections will not be permanent, but the bonds he forms will always be carried with him.

He chooses to love. He chooses to accept the love and friendship that is given to him, and he chooses to give love and friendship in return.

I want to learn to do the same. I want to learn not to cut myself off from friendships even though I know they will fade eventually. I want to learn to give of myself freely and to be confident that the love I show will be valued even when it is imperfect, and to not let the inevitable limitations of being human hold me back from whatever love I am lucky enough to have for as long as I am lucky enough to have it, whatever form it may take.

People don’t last forever. Relationships don’t last forever. Everything we ever have will be wrung from the ever-shallowing pool of our own mortality. And like Essek we are presented with two options to respond to this: we can cut ourselves off from the pain of it, souring in our own isolation, or we can open ourselves up to the full range of joy and grief and allow it all to hurt and to matter anyway. We can become obsessed with past regrets and future control, or we can allow ourselves to have a present. I don’t know about you, but I want to choose the second option. Anyway, it matters to me that he did.

#neither negative nor positive just... important #cr finale #cr spoilers #c2e141 #essek thelyss #essek #shadowgast #ok to rb #fave #my posts

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ramblingguy54 · 3 years

Text

True Colors: An Emotionally Fantastic Serious Game Changer.

If we’re to look back at Reunion as Season 1′s dramatic pay off for Amphibia’s message of toxic friendships, as Anne & Sasha’s conflicting dynamic showed us, then True Colors is a colossal expansive note on this big theme of the series. True Colors makes Season 1′s finale look like a walk in the park for what angst goes down between our three main heroins in Season 2′s climatic resolution. Everything that can go wrong does go oh so painfully wrong for these three kids. Anne, to no one’s surprise, gets double crossed by Sasha leaving things between them a Hell of a lot more bitter than they were previously, as if that couldn’t already be topped when Sasha tried to kill the Plantars before. Anne has had enough of her lies and manipulation not being afraid to tell Sasha straight up how awful of a friend she’s been in general, even hitting her where it hurts most of all saying, “No, I’m done listening to you! I’m done trusting you! You’re a horrible person and I am done being FRIENDS with you!”, going so far as to get a shaken reaction out of Sasha dropping her brave face act, making this girl try to wipe away the frog family.

Right off the bat, True Colors makes it highly evident this isn’t just another story of stopping a bigger threat, but one hitting much closer to home, overall. Yes, King Andrias is certainly a dangerous villain, who makes his presence and intimidating nature known to the others by True Color’s final act, which despite this Amphibia isn’t entirely putting him at the forefront, rather focusing on a more intimate study of Anne, Sasha, and Marcy’s big emotional conflict. This finale knows exactly where to put its focus of importance on, so I love that instead of it being action packed we’re getting the spotlight shined on just how screwed up these three of a friendship have, in spite of Marcy claiming in The Dinner episode, “We’re supposed to be friends for life. We don’t split up!’ . Very ironic stuff right there, indeed.

True Colors’ most powerful strength it adds to Amphibia’s ongoing profound story about healthy friendships is the thorough deconstruction of these girls defined “ideal relationship” as people. Before Anne came to the world of Amphibia this kid was afraid to stand up for what she believed in, even knowing especially well that stealing the calamity box was morally questionable, but did it anyway. Sasha was super manipulative, abusive, and used her power to control people, like she did a lot of toward Anne in their lives. Marcy, while very smart, wasn’t the most competent physically, who soon grew into being more independent without needing to rely on Anne always having to be there for her. These three were changed immensely by the events of being thrust into this world of sentient amphibian creatures. Anne benefited morally most out out of all three in taking up the mantle of responsibility and ironing out her own issues. She’s become a much stronger person all around.

This episode asks us an important question though in nutshell with, “Have Sasha & Marcy truly changed for the better?”, since Anne has reached a point in her arc feeling genuinely content with who she’s become and the bonds that have been made with the Plantar family shown most notably with Sprig Plantar. Hence the whole purpose behind the song, It’s No Big Deal, with Anne feeling proud for who she is, yet not noticing a bigger issue right underneath her nose. That previous episode was meant to bring Anne’s happiness up only to bring it all crashing down in a devastating display of new revelations in True Colors. Every dramatic emotional beat isn’t just earned. Each significant moment is completely knocked out of the park by terrific voice acting, beautiful animation, and music composition that gave me serious emotional goosebumps. True Colors did exactly as Not What He Seems accomplished for Gravity Falls in shaking up its own respective dramatic stakes just when you thought it couldn’t get any higher for these protagonists. Shit seriously hits the fan here.

Did it ever occur to you, Anne? Sasha? That one of you knew more, than she was letting on? That ONE of you might’ve gotten you stranded in Amphibia on purpose...?

The big bombshell twist of Marcy playing a part too in getting them into this whole debacle completely flips everything upside down. Sasha pushed Anne into taking the Calamity Box, yes, but if Marcy never sent that photo because of her desire to stay with them together forever, then they wouldn’t have been stranded in basically a world full of dangerous creatures and who knows what else. Easily my favorite part of the episode, considering it adds more nuance to a situation that defined Amphibia’s story. It wasn’t just one person’s fault at the end of the day. Sasha bullied Anne into taking the box, Anne didn’t put her foot down to make a stand for something morally questionable, and Marcy took advantage of them both to benefit her own selfish desires for supposedly a “happy ending” not involving them staying apart, due to her parents moving away for a new job. All three girls played an important part on why they got landed into Amphiba. It’s why Anne’s statement to King Andrias, “The three of us may have made some mistake, but you...You’re evil and I’m gonna stop you!”, holds such a real weight to it, as this story continues to solidify how genuinely fleshed out their dynamic is.

Marcy’s super desperate plea to be understood by Anne & Sasha when Andrias revealed her getting them thrown into Amphibia purposefully was hard to watch. On one hand, I felt for Marcy because she didn’t want real life circumstances to tear apart that close connection she had to Sasha & Anne. Sure, she could’ve just kept in touch with them over the phone or chatting online, too. However, Marcy had known them since very early childhood. When you’ve been so attached to someone it can be a devastating thing, depending on just how vulnerable you are emotionally, to start drifting apart. Marcy represents that embodiment of toxic need for togetherness and couldn’t bear to let a possibility, like moving away, throw a wrench into her happiness and friendship, as well.

Never mind Marcy wanting to stay permanently in a different reality, rather than face her’s, but it made this person feel like something more. It gave her a chance to feel truly special in being able to live out a fantasy dream of having such power and freedom that a kid, like herself, couldn’t have had. The freedom to know she is plenty capable of making it out there on her own without Anne having to watch this kid like a hawk. So, to have someone, or something, try taking it away from her terrified Marcy of facing a terrible truth. That she isn’t strong enough after all to live a life without Anne & Sasha by her side completely, where Marcy will never feel truly worthy enough to blossom into her own person. It’s why that line, “I just...didn’t want to be alone...”, carries such a deep pain to it all. Marcy just crumbles into pieces accepting her greatest weakness. As much as Marcy fumbled the ball big time, it’s so easy to empathize with her on the idea of feeling competent enough. Marcy never meant to hurt Anne or Sasha, but the sad crushing punchline is she very much did.

Speaking of which, Anne had every right to be upset and mad, obviously. Anne has been missing so many things from her life before everything went off the wall. Hopping Mall especially highlighted Anne’s emotional desire to give anything just to hear her mother’s singing again. This teenager has been really dealing with a lot of grief in general quite honestly. Anne got into a high stakes battle against Sasha to save new friends, who’d practically became like an adopted family, which left the poor girl traumatized and heartbroken over the end result. She thought finding Marcy would help compensate for it and eventually be able to mend those complications with Sasha to boot. It’s simply painful to see it all blow up in Anne’s face to know not only Sasha betrayed her trust yet again, but realizing Marcy also played a part of responsibility in getting them thrown here. Matt Braly really just decided to slap future trust issues onto Anne finding out Hop Pop, Sasha, and Marcy were all super dishonest in their intentions at one point or another. Damn, I feel so bad for her.

It makes their embracing hug back in Marcy At The Gates so much harder to watch. Anne was super glad to see her again. Anne had wondered what became of Marcy or even possibly started to think she could even be alive at all. Then come to find out later on Marcy having intentionally ripped her away from a normal life must’ve felt worse then what happened with Sasha. Anne, already done with all of Sasha’s bullshit, thought she could at least expect better from Marcy not letting her down, but that too wasn’t the case. Marcy is very much as flawed as Sasha in what she has done. To think, Anne wanted so badly to get back home, yet she’s staring the very person dead in the eye, who ripped her away from it to begin with. Marcy knew Sasha would talk Anne into taking the box from that thrift shop, even if she wasn’t completely certain it would successfully teleport them away. Regardless of whatever good intentions someone can have in why they did what they did, it still doesn’t absolve them of said mistake. Fact of the matter is, Marcy tragically made her own bed, by choosing to mess with forces she couldn’t begin to comprehend and now has to face consequences, in spite of her not deserving them.

What really got to me was when Marcy tried to spin around Anne’s personal growth and close friendship with the Plantars as all entirely thanks to her. When she said, “I gave you this! I gave you everything!”, I was like, “Nope, that couldn’t be any further from the truth.”, seeing everything that has culminated in Anne’s journey of bettering herself. Marcy didn’t give Anne anything, but a one way ticket to cutting the kid off from her family, presuming she’d be fine with this idea. It’s all kinds of messed up, however what it boils down to is Marcy undermining Anne’s independence and agency. Anne’s moral judgement in decision making was what allowed her to create this new life she made for herself in Amphibia. Anne’s honesty as a whole led her down a path of togetherness, while Marcy’s lying landed her in a result of not wanting to be alone, costing her so much.

“I don’t believe this. We were so focused on each other we couldn’t see what was right in front of us!”

True Colors excels at earning each of its emotional beats because they line up with character motivations down to the last letter. Anne doesn’t want to trust Sasha anymore because of their already rocky past, which leads to her helping King Andrias regain control of his kingdom. Sasha not keeping a lid on her temper, wanting to rule over Amphibia, and trying to reinforce that power dynamic with Anne & Marcy only made things worse for her image of a changed good friend. There wasn’t a chance in Hell Anne would hear Sasha’s reasoning after she flat out tried to take away her frog family, by attempting to use the Calamity Box a bit ago in the episode. Marcy wanted to believe there was a happily ever after in seeing this world traveling idea as their only chance for salvation as friends for life, but it turned out to be something much more sinister, when learning of Andrias’ backstory and his true scumbag nature. All three of their motivations come clashing together, blinding them from a much bigger danger. Something that effectively puts everyone at stake.

Amphibia’s Season 2 finale works so excellently, given it covers important dramatic elements it’s been stirring around since Season 1′s early rumblings. Amphibia is a story centered around people’s need for emotional connections. True Colors builds miraculously off what Reunion already did quite well in showing friendships can become rough and they are never easy to deal with. When you have to make a stand it can be a tough pill to swallow on the reality check of maybe this “good friend” of your’s isn’t as nice as you previously thought them to be. Anne having been hurt one too many times now by her former friend sends that message close to home, so much so even Sasha begins to question her morality as a human being. It poignantly encapsulates how this trio’s complex friendship is a serious growing issue needing to be reexamined, overall.

What if Anne’s right..? What if I am a horrible person...?

Something I absolutely love to pieces about True Colors, also a testament to Season 2′s darn good writing, is how much introspective we get from each character on what they’re feeling. We’ve seen plenty of Sasha’s vulnerability before in other episodes centered on her issues, but now we’re getting to the root of it. Sasha is really taking everything more to heart, little by little. Sasha’s understanding what kind of an effect she has on people, seeing the damage it has caused made evident by Percy and Braddock in Barrel’s Warhammer. Grime once told her, “Some dreams have a price and not everyone is willing to pay it.”, where she’s questioning that idealism every passing minute the invasion plan proceeds further into reaching success. Sasha isn’t sure what to do with herself anymore feeling aimless. Those previous episodes had a real impact on her priorities more than she cared to let on with Sasha’s typical tough girl act. This kid has let her guard down more, which scares and confuses Sasha. She’s always used to playing the role of protector it contradicts everything Sasha stands for when the roles are totally reversed because now Anne has made her feel the tremendous change in their growth as individuals.

Sasha’s lifestyle has been all about control that after somewhat learning to be more considerate to Anne & Marcy’s feelings she feels beyond conflicted about what truly matters to her. The most screwed up part of it all is Sasha didn’t want to fight anymore, taking up a pacifist approach after seeing what King Andrias had been hiding from everyone. It’s a fitting punishment for Sasha to try bringing Anne over to work together once more, but getting her pleas for companionship outright ignored. Anne was correct that Sasha had wasted all the chances to be reasonable. Boonchuy tried to hear out Sasha before at The Third Temple. One wanted to start things over again to iron out their serious issues, but the other was driven by bitterness, while only remorseful to a degree at best, of seeing their once weak friend become so independent, mature, and stronger that it drove her up wall. Sasha wanted to take away that “problem” being the Plantars, since in her eyes they’re the source of Anne’s strength, driving a wedge further between the two girls in their heated Reunion 2.0 battle.

True Colors demonstrates the horrific price of no trust, communication, nor teamwork from the three main girls that Andrias smoothly took advantage of, as if they were fiddles.

“That’s the thing about friends isn’t it? The more you love them, the more it hurts when they go.”

King Andrias is quite literally what I wanted Lunaris to be, where DuckTales’ Season 2 finale didn’t impress me on doing. He’s a serious big baddie to the main cast, who follows through on his threats of violence to demonstrate his wide array of arsenal and power. Andrias doesn’t just emotionally manipulate characters, like poor Marcy, but utterly crush them without an ounce of remorse for his actions. When he dropped Sprig out that window after Anne willingly let him have the Calamity Box back I thought they were legit gonna kill this boy off. The way Anne’s flashback montage of her good times with Sprig were eerily shot really didn’t help either on that note. Anne’s Calamity power finally activating is easily up there among stuff, like Dewey risking his life for Della’s disappearance in Last Crash, where the cinematography is shot and animated brilliantly. You feel Anne’s blind raging sadness in every hit she landed on those robots and Andrias. If anyone didn’t believe Sprig was like a little brother to Anne, then I dunno how anyone couldn’t view their bond anymore as such after this hugely defining scene. Anne went bloodthirsty when she believed Sprig to be dead further evidenced when she hugged him in relief afterwards exclaiming, “Sprig!? You’re alive!? Oh, thank goodness...”, which cuts deep so damn much.

Anne was ready to fight every one of Andrias’ troops in that castle to the death, if need be. Before Sprig came back from falling, thanks to Marcy’s quick acting, to comfort Anne, her only goal was to slaughter every opponent in that throne room, along with making Andrias pay dearly for even daring to lay a single finger on anyone of the Plantars. I’m not gonna lie, this pivotal power up reminded me so much Gohan turning Super Saiyan 2 after Cell curb stomped Android 16 into pieces with a smirk on his face. Anne Boonchuy’s maddening outburst is a classic testament to the idea of, “Piss off the nicest person and they’ll make it their mission to instill the biggest kind of fear/terror into you.”. showing this kid at her most vulnerable mental state, yet. Sprig & Anne’s cathartic embrace really messed me up in reinforcing just how these two respect, love, and would go above any of their limitations to help the other out. Sprig’s “death” scene was a masterful bait by the writers into making us think someone was gonna die and it was gonna be a poor kid, no less.

However, it was actually all just a bait and switch for the real, “Oh, shit. They really just did that”, moment with Marcy unexpectedly getting run through with Andrias’ gigantic sword. In a last ditch effort, Marcy wanted to atone for what she had a hand in getting them all into. Marcy was ironclad determined in making her own stand for what was right trying to save the people she endangered. Akin to what Sasha did in Reunion for saving Anne’s life, Marcy does the exact same here. Although, unfortunately this time, no one is here to protect Marcy from escaping death, like Grime catching Sasha from plummeting at Toad Tower. Marcy couldn’t react in time because she was so focused on helping her dear friends out. She wanted to prove to herself at least one time, “I’ve screwed up so much stuff with my friends. Maybe, just maybe. If I get my friends back home, it’ll prove I’m not an entirely crappy person for setting these events into motion.”. Marcy’s own deep seeded remorse is what saved Anne & the Plantars, while being the cause of her own untimely demise at Andrias’ hands.

This scene is what no doubt encouraged the warning sign for younger viewers Disney decided to make for them. It’s impressive how far Matt and his crew are willing to go for intense dramatic content. Andrias trying to crush Polly with his fist after destroying Frobo with casual ease, dropping Sprig out of the window from up sky high, and stabbing Marcy with his powerful sword displays his cold blooded brutality. Doesn’t matter who you are. If you get in the way of Andrias’ plans for multiverse domination, then he’ll throw anyone into their own grave, be it man, woman, or child. That’s the mark of a truly terrifying antagonist.

Andrias didn’t care who had to be hurt or manipulated to get back the box, so he could invade other worlds with Earth being his next prime target for invasion. Marcy’s fate is a horrifyingly poetic statement, since Sasha stated to Anne in a flashback from Marcy At The Gates, “One of these days, she’s gonna get herself killed.”, with True Colors tying back to this line in a disturbing manner. Something that sends chills down my spine is we get to see the full extent of how far Andrias shoved the sword through her body. We don’t just see the entry point of where it hit her, but it even zooms out to show the whole thing. Real talk, I got serious Avatar The Last Airbender vibes from this scene. Reminded me so much of Aang getting suddenly zapped with lightning by Azula when he tried to enter the Avatar state. Marcy didn’t want to be alone so badly she ended up inevitably dying alone trying to send Anne back home to their reality. One Hell of a way to close off Marcy’s last moments in Season 2, until her inevitable resurrection happens in Season 3 now that King Andrias has her in a tube tank that looks tied to his master.

True Colors ends on a deeply bittersweet cliffhanger leaving the fates of Sasha & Grime totally unknown if they’ll get away by the skin of their teeth, or get captured by Andrias’ soldiers and robots. Anne finally returned home with the Plantars, but at a deadly cost of leaving her other close friends behind in Amphibia. After all the isolation, heartbreak, and endurance she went through with her frog family Anne finds herself at a total loss for words. Once again, Anne is in a state of solitude of not knowing if her friends are really okay or not, mirroring the start of Season 1 when she landed into Amphibia’s world. It’s safe to say to say that, “Finally me and it’s no big deal.”, lyrics have aged terribly for Anne’s realization of finding her own identity came at the expense of getting separated from friends she’s known since kindergarten. Definitely see Anne becoming a lot more protective of the Plantars now more than ever after watching Marcy drop to the ground from being stabbed in front of her eyes.

Amphibia’s Season 2 finale is exactly how you capitalize on a winning story telling formula of dramatic writing, lovable characters with layered depth, and increasing the stakes of your story in an organic manner. True Colors is a finale that should be talked about for a long time to come, as it not only showed how worth the wait it was, but reinforces why Amphibia is a truly great series. It’s unafraid to take its characters to dark places in a way that feels totally earned.

Amphibia Season 2 is everything a sequel to a first film should be.

#amphibia true colors #amphibia spoilers #amphibia season 2 #anne boonchuy #marcy wu #sasha waybright #sprig plantar #polly plantar #hop pop plantar

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ravenvsfox · 3 years

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Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold

Summary: He keeps remembering the chafe of Ronan’s shoulder against his ribs as they got oriented in his little bed, the glisten of tears and nightwash wringing his lovely eyes, the lonely twist in his unguarded late-night voice over the phone, the one that Adam had almost liked, because it meant that he was indisputably missed. It was worse, that Ronan had been trying so hard for Adam, because it was easier to tell when he stopped.

(Adam's perspective throughout Mister Impossible, as his worry reaches a fever pitch, and the two versions of himself begin to converge)

Word Count: 9.5k

Warnings: mi spoilers, death/suicide mention

A/N: batshit middle books my beloveds. adam pov or bust 😌

Read on AO3

In high school, Gansey would very occasionally call Adam in the middle of the night.

He would speak low and fast, his panic pinched between thumb and forefinger and held at a respectable distance. Adam would smother the receiver with his palm and step outside of his family trailer, listening hard for movement at his back.

The news was always the same: Ronan Lynch was on his latest rampage or bender, exercising his dark talent for bullying his way into people’s lives and then breaking down all of their windows and doors trying to get out again.

Gansey would fret and apologize, guilty for luring Adam out of his wolf-den, guiltier for neglecting his duties as Ronan’s warden. Adam would wait tiredly on the line for Gansey’s anxiety to exhaust itself, and then dutifully join the search party.

He would step into his beaten tennis shoes and pry his bike from the fence, silencing the silvery shock of metal on metal, and avoiding the reedy whir of the spokes by holding the whole thing aloft until he reached the gravel road.

From there, he would venture out into the abandoned Henrietta streets, the crunch of his tires cutting clean through the woolly midnight silence. He often circled the perimeter of the park nearest Monmouth, stepped through the great dark portal into St. Agnes, and nipped under the old bridge, squinting into the darkness for the challenging shoulders, the oil-slick BMW gleam, the slump of a body or clatter of bottles.

This is a part of Gansey that I admire, he would think. And with equal fervour, this is a part of Gansey that I resent. This blood attachment to Ronan, who was not even attached to himself. The insomnia that seized two heads of the lopsided Cerberus that Adam, Ronan, and Gansey were all part of, a restlessness on either side of him that shook him awake over and over again.

He chased Ronan’s shadow, hating him. Hating his thoughtlessness, his privilege, his chokehold on Gansey’s interests, his purposefully and continuously ruined potential, and yet bristling with anxiety at the idea of finding him bleeding.

They hadn’t known then that he was a dreamer, but they’d felt the ear-popping pressure of his grief, glimpsed the hulking animal of his self-loathing, urged onwards by the twin spurs of Declan and Gansey, the past and the future, digging into his sides.

Adam had seen Ronan, teeth bared, hurling himself at rock bottom, and he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes and pulled him back by the collar.

Things are completely different now, but he still finds himself sleep-raw and petrified, reaching after Ronan in the dark.

He examines himself in the mirror of the communal bathroom in Thayer hall. The overhead lights are an unflattering yellow, the sink has a long dark hair stuck to its basin, and Adam’s face is gaunt and bruised with lack of sleep.

He’s losing it, a little bit.

He takes his own pulse, focusing on the faraway burble of the ley line. Everything, lately, seems far away.

As if through a stranger’s eyes, he slips from the seafoam tiling and bleach tang in Thayer’s North bathroom to the accordion door of the trailer toilet, the creaky cubicle shower, his gawky, hurt reflection in the burnt-out light. This version of Adam had to watch his best friend’s best friend escape suicide watch and get screaming drunk in public, treading mud and malicious dreams all over Monmouth manufacturing.

He can still smell the salt tang from teenaged Adam’s ocean of disdain.

Now that he loves Ronan, his irritation has only gotten sharper, more deadly. Ronan performs each perilous swan dive into the unknown, each foolhardy act of self-sacrifice, as if the people who care about him aren’t gasping spectators. It makes Adam furious.

Perhaps neither of them have changed as much as they wanted to believe. As Gillian keeps advising the crying club—with the confidence of a seasoned psychiatrist—progress isn’t linear.

He keeps remembering the chafe of Ronan’s shoulder against his ribs as they got oriented in his little bed, the glisten of tears and nightwash wringing his lovely eyes, the lonely twist in his unguarded late-night voice over the phone, the one that Adam had almost liked, because it meant that he was indisputably missed. It was worse, that Ronan had been trying so hard for Adam, because it was easier to tell when he stopped.

He slides fingers over his temples, smooths a knuckle over each eyebrow to ease the tension he always carries there. Sleep is a little knot of gristle lodged at the back of his throat; he can’t swallow it and he can’t spit it up. It never used to be this hard to put his problems to bed. He would worry the weight on his chest into small pieces, and go to sleep knowing that even the worst things about his life were organized correctly.

This time though, he’s out of sorts, divided, always busy but always spinning his wheels. He has a white-hot secret pressed to the roof of his mouth.

Every time he folds himself into bed, his subconscious helpfully reminds him that Ronan might be dead. And then a highlight reel plays in his head like an In Memoriam: Adam’s hand cupping Ronan’s nape, a barn silhouetted against a melancholy sky, a fistful of dreamt light, a dozen hard-won smiles and a hundred easy ones, a white handprint on a flushed thigh, a colourful joke to placate a brother, a kiss pressed to a dream’s forehead. All of that—gone. And Adam, at Harvard.

He highlights long patches of text in his sociology textbook, drinks a sensible amount of jack and coke at Eliot’s birthday party, declines Gansey’s calls by sending cheerful and conciliatory texts, and drifts through the library with his hand knotted in the strap of his satchel, looking for something that he can’t really articulate. He reads the same line of theory over and over and over and over, feeling like he’s scrying, like his focus isn’t his own.

He did all of this before Ronan went missing too, but now it’s a whole different class of performance. It used to be, I’m convincingly attentive, I’m sipping overpriced coffee on the way to class like a good Ivy leaguer, I’m making an impression on my professors, I’m forging friendships. Someday I will cash in these relationship tokens, and it all will have been worth it. It felt impossible that his life could be so simple and rewarding.

Now he thinks, I’m studying for finals and my boyfriend is being hunted by people whose job it is to kill him. I’m drinking a latte and the only people I’ve ever loved have left me, and I'm alone again. I’m putting my hand up in class and somewhere, Ronan’s life is changing, rapidly, dangerously, without me.

He lies to everyone, all the time, and tells himself that this life he’s building is more important than anything.

Once, as they cleared placemats and mugs full of stagnant coffee from the kitchen table, Ronan—still cobwebbed in his most recent dream—had detailed the sensation of hovering over himself afterwards. He was unable to manipulate his physical body or even really recognize it as his own, and his consciousness, detached, had its own limbs, its own intentions. He was like a parasite trying to wriggle back into its host.

Whenever Adam consults his double in a bit of glass, he imagines himself as a nimble dreamer, peering down, working to bring a fantasy to life. He can see his own outline, a slick college student with a flat, pleasant affect and a gaggle of soft-shelled friends. He plays his role impeccably well, but he can’t fit himself into it. If he passed himself in the hallway he would not stop.

Looking in the mirror now, he feels a red pang of fear, then a supercut of the ways he used to let himself love and be loved, then resentfulness hot on the heels of his worry.

His reflection withers, and he looks deliberately down at his hands. It’s a Tuesday, and he needs to sleep, or his tightly-scheduled Wednesday will be a misery. It’s a Tuesday, which means he hasn’t spoken to Ronan in—he stalls. Call me, he thinks, miserably. Just call me.

He can deal with a multitude of challenging and improbable situations if only he can see them clearly. Ronan is, for whatever reason, keeping him in the dark.

The not knowing is bad. It’s not how he functions. It’s not how they function. But instead of dwelling, he puts his back into the narrative that is now his reality: Impeccable student. Devoted friend-group. Tough break-up. Bright future.

Ronan isn’t here. Can’t ever be, physically, so far from the ley line. Adam has to be.

“Croissant, as ordered.” His gaze snaps up, connecting—not with his own image, but with clever, horn-rimmed Gillian. “They tried to foist it upon me without butter, if you can imagine that.” She deposits a crinkly brown and tan paper bag in front of him, and then two little plastic pots of butter. Adam regards the squashed shape of the bag’s contents with confusion.

It’s— “Is it Tuesday?”

“Wednesday,” Eliot corrects airily, licking jam from their thumb.

“My god, Adam. Whatever happened to your infallible circadian rhythm?” Fletcher asks. “You are the Swiss timepiece by which we measure our days.”

A terrible wave of vertigo strikes him, and he’s grateful to find himself sitting, at one of two conjoined wrought-iron tables in the courtyard near Thayer. He can feel the ley line breathing for the first time in a long time.

He must have gone to bed after his late-night breakdown in the bathroom. He must have. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was. His hand strays to his hair. Wet. He’d woken, showered, and met his friends for breakfast, and he can barely remember it.

“Sorry,” he chokes. “Sleep deprivation is catching up to me, I think.”

“Aw, chicken,” Benjy says affectionately. “I’ve sung those end of term blues. The profs think we’re machines. Don’t even get me started on Dr. Fraundberg’s Lit Crit for assholes.”

“Whyever would we?” Eliot says. “We want to make it to class before noon.”

“Har-har. You wound me. Adam you’d better get a tissue ready, I’m about to tear up.”

“Also,” Gillian says, pointing her be-honeyed knife in Eliot’s direction. “Speak for yourself. I want to make it to class never.”

“Your presentation is going to be exceptional,” Fletcher tells her. “Your rough draft already drove me into paroxysms of jealousy. I don’t know why you’re so concerned.”

“I don’t just want to pass,” Gillian says. “I want to win.”

“Admirable,” Benjy sniffs.

“You’re being awfully quiet, Adam,” Eliot says, at length. He’s aware that they’re all trying very hard to act like they don’t notice how poorly composed he is.

“Can’t a man savour his pastry, Eli?” Fletcher rumbles.

“No, that’s fair,” Adam sighs. The four of them peer at him expectantly, eyebrows arranged into an array of benign and non-threatening shapes. “It’s possible I’m having a slight breakdown,” he says, adopting the grim hyperbole of a student for whom finals are the beginning and end of their emotional upset.

Everyone at the twin tables indulges in a bit of mild laughter.

“What a coincidence, so am I!”

“Well if it’s only slight, I’ll stow my concern.”

“Harvard or personal?”

He smiles faintly, and says, “kind of both. The personal is political, or something.”

He thinks he’s laying it on thick, but Gillian grins at him. “'Atta boy.”

Fletcher goes to take a sip of his tea, but chokes when his phone lights up with an incoming text message. “Criminy, is it eight already? Starting the day with a bang, as usual. I’ll meet you at Weld this evening, yes?” he asks, shaking out his tweed jacket and thrusting an arm through it, securing the remains of his bagel between his teeth with his other hand.

“Of course,” Adam says. Fletcher gives him a thumbs up, mouth charmingly stuffed, and sweeps away across the now bustling courtyard.

“Hey magic man,” Eliot says. “Will you do a reading for my sister tonight? The break-up with Margot is hitting her kind of hard. I’m pretty sure she just wants to be told she’ll find love again.”

Adam watches the juddering impact of Benjy kicking Eliot under the table.

He shrugs. “First come first serve, but I’ll give her the friends and family discount.”

“You’re a prince,” Eliot says, blowing him a kiss. Adam tries to imagine any of his friends from Henrietta doing such a thing, and can’t. “Come along Benjy. Bookstore or bust. They’re giving out discount computing textbook codes at sixty dollars a pop.”

A slip of paper for sixty American dollars. Adam’s head aches profoundly.

Gillian waggles her fingers at their friends as they depart, then she turns and fixes Adam with that familiar amateur therapist look.

“What?”

“Are you sleeping?” she asks bluntly.

“I’m a very good sleeper,” Adam says wryly. “Ask anyone.”

“But are you actually doing it?”

“Yes, Gillian.” Liar, liar. “Do you want me to keep a dream journal as evidence?”

“Oh, yes please.” That shark’s grin. “I’d pay to know what the fuck is going on up there.” She taps her own temple to indicate Adam's guarded mind.

He spreads his hands between them. “I’m an open book.”

She hums, only half-smiling now. “I dunno. That Southern charm. I’m never quite sure if I should trust a politeness that perfect.”

“On that note,” Adam says, standing. He’s relieved to find that he’s wearing matching socks, and his pant legs are rolled just so. There’s a tiny streak of yellow on one of his shoes, and with a jolt he realizes that it’s dream-crab guts. He presses on. “Thanks for the croissant. And the psychoanalysis. Send me the bill.”

She salutes him with her coffee cup. “You couldn’t afford me.”

He laughs, and turns, and then spends the whole walk to his 9 AM class trying to straighten all of the haywire compasses in his brain so they point due north.

His assignment is in his bag, pressed neatly into a navy blue folder. He has three classes today, a meeting with his supervisor at three, a study block set aside from four to six, then dinner, then tarot readings all evening—his phone rings. His treacherous heart leaps. Ronan.

He stops mid-stride, scrambling for his cell in the front pocket of his bag.

“Hello?”

“I—oh—Adam! I didn’t expect you to pick up. How on Earth are you?”

“Gansey.” He exhales through his nose. “I’m just on my way to class.”

“Fantastic to hear your voice. How’s—not that one, Jane, the I-90—exactly. How’s Harvard? Are you batting away job offers yet?”

“Constantly. How are your nature hikes and hippie communes? Contracted any backwoods diseases yet?”

“Charming. I’m actually in remarkably fine form, health-wise.”

“Is that a brag?”

A guffaw. “More of a curiosity. It’s actually part of the reason I’ve been trying to get in touch. Have you noticed any surges of power from the ley line lately? I mean, of course you have, but do you have any idea what’s causing them?”

He frowns, pinning his cellphone between his good ear and shoulder as he heaves open the ancient door to the physics building. “I could give you my best guess.”

A beat, and then, “I’m listening, Parrish.” Something about the way he says it makes homesickness pulse painfully in Adam’s chest.

He finds a semi-secluded stone slab bench behind an empty stairwell, and slings his belongings across it before he replies, “Dreamers.”

“Dreamers,” Gansey repeats, but it sounds like he’s saying of course! “Plural?”

“At least three.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m not one hundred percent sure yet.”

“Ronan hasn’t spoken to you,” Gansey guesses.

“Not—in a few days.”

“Is everything alright?”

He swallows, and is horrified to find tears burning at the back of his throat. There’s no pretending with Gansey. It’s why he never calls him.

“Adam,” he says quietly. “Is he in trouble?”

He struggles with his composure for several long seconds. “Possibly.”

A world-weary sigh. “I really wish you had called.”

“Yeah, well,” he says vaguely. He checks his watch. 8:23.

“So he’s playing with others. Why would Ronan want to do that?”

“I think—he’ll do anything not to feel powerless.” He understands as soon as he says it that it’s the pockmark in the windshield from which all of the damage is splintering outwards. “And people take advantage of that.”

Gansey makes a thoughtful noise, somewhere a thousand miles away, and it clicks in a lock and opens Adam’s shoulders up. Maybe he doesn’t have to be alone in this fight. How could he have forgotten careful, persistent Gansey?

“Well. He’s certainly not powerless. I almost feel back to my pre-Cabeswater self. Everything is pleasantly linear. And Blue is—lighting up.” In the background, he hears her say supercharged with relish. “I can only imagine what it’s like for full-blooded dream stuff, with all of that energy at their disposal.”

“I don’t know if I like it,” Adam says carefully. “It’s good for a while, helping all the Matthew’s of the world, and then what? Where does all of that diverted power end up? What makes dreamers qualified to harness it without their worst nightmares manifesting?”

“You’re worried about the Lace.”

The last time they spoke, Adam had told them briefly about his last scrying session, warning them to look out for the hateful, faceless thing that had pierced his cells and magnified all of his pain and fear until all he could possibly do was scream.

“I’m worried about Ronan. I know he’s in over his head, and I know he won’t believe it until it’s too late.”

“Sounds like someone I know. Don’t bite off more than you can chew with this, Adam. I know you’re enormously busy.”

It stings, a little. “I’m still going to—I’m obviously still going to make time for him. Especially when he’s—“

“Struggling. Yes. I understand perfectly.” It occurs to Adam that, unlike his well-meaning Harvard friends, he actually might. A needling murmur in the background, and then, “listen, Blue’s telling me that you should get in touch with the psychics, and Mr. Gray.”

He nods. The rhythm of problem-solving is soothing his frazzled nerves. “I’ve been considering it. I’m also pretty sure that Declan has been keeping his own tabs on things.”

“My money’s on yes,” Gansey says. Adam half-smiles. His money has been on a lot of things. “Poke around when you can. See what turns up. I’ll give Ronan a call, not that it’s ever done me much good before.”

“I’m pretty sure he ditched his phone.” He checks his watch. 8:24. It feels like it’s been much, much longer than a minute. There is so much day ahead of him.

Ordinarily, he would be compartmentalizing better than this. No feverish Gansey phone calls directly before class. No pleasure with his business. No finesse when logic will do the job just as well. But the subterranean, black-eyed Adam is still within him, tethered to the ley line and to his friends, and he wants very badly to fix this.

“Ah, Ronan,” Gansey sighs. “It’s always got to be him, doesn’t it?”

“I know,” Adam says narrowly. “If he’s not looking for trouble it’s looking for him.”

“You sound like Declan.”

Adam makes an offended noise in the back of his throat. Blue must be leaning across Gansey, because she says “that’s a new low,” almost directly into the receiver.

“I’m hanging up now,” he says flatly.

“Update me if anything changes? We’ll come home the moment things go south.”

He resists the urge to check his watch again. “Don’t cut things short on my account.”

“Well. Don’t disrupt your studies on Ronan’s. I’ve never known you to put your future on hold for anything.”

“I’m not—“ he stops. “Ronan is a part of my future.”

“Good,” Gansey says warmly. A test, then. And like most tests, there was never even a possibility that Adam wouldn’t pass.

______

It’s easy to tell when a dreamer is suffering.

As the energy from the ley line ebbs, dreamt creations judder and bolt like horses loosed suddenly from the service of a carriage, galloping towards safer pastures. If the dreamer is in more immediate peril, the dream simply folds its limbs into an agreeable shape and passes into sleep.

In the wee hours of Thursday morning, Adam lies awake in bed, dangling his hand between the wall and his bed frame, feeling along the subtle unfilled crack in the plaster. A flagpole casualty, from the day that everything stopped being enough for Ronan, and he slipped away on a dreamt current like a dark Ophelia.

He’s being dramatic.

He feels the drywall flaking, and digs his thumbnail into the split, wanting to rip the whole wall open with his fingers.

He keeps picturing Matthew’s half-lidded eyes, cloudless and blue as a wide prairie sky. The slouch of his posture, the tarnished golden head, the body briefly without a pilot.

Matthew had looked—Adam turns in bed, taking his chalky hand from the wall and fisting it in the sheets. He had looked like a faded old pillow, tucked unobtrusively into the chair by the window. He wouldn’t respond to Declan’s call, fluttering his drowsy lashes, and Adam had thought, ah. This is how I find out. His heart slumped over in his chest, dizzy with sudden grief. The tarot cards in his hands were dead leaves.

This is what happens when your life is tied to my brother’s, Declan had said, diverting his horror into scorn as he often did. The death of any one member of his family ensured the destruction of another. It had always been that way.

Matthew eventually roused, and Adam had closed his eyes and turned his face towards the ceiling until he could be normal again. He felt suddenly foolish for peddling lies to college students when magic was so obviously in the room with him.

Earlier, he had called Maura over lunch, and she vaulted right over small talk to ask him, with concern, about his loosening grip on his psychic inclinations. She’d said, “You do know that the ley line isn’t the source of your problems, right? Give yourself some credit. You can fuck things up in a completely non-mystical way.”

She pulled the Magician, reversed, and the eight of wands, and then, without further comment, passed the phone to Mr. Gray.

Unexplained weaponry, he’d reported. The Lynch brothers loosed on two separate worlds at the same time. Buttoned-up Declan for the first time unbuttoned, schmoozing with an array of dangerous and connected people, trading in secrets just as his father had. Purposeless Ronan for the first time with a purpose, wading out from the murky waters of his dreamspace and bringing the tides with him.

Bryde, the name in the corner of everyone’s mouth, joined all at once by Ronan’s and Hennessy’s.

Renegades, liberators of dreams, scorchers of earth. He could see, easily, why this would appeal to Ronan. A mission, finally. A father figure to guide his hand. A world that wanted his dreams, and wouldn’t crumple under the weight of his unusual ambition.

When they were teenagers, Aglionby was just another one of Adam’s jobs, but it was one of Ronan’s nightmares. He would go to school, a hooded bird of prey, seething with resentment and squandered ability. He longed for the Barns because of what they represented: the childlike belief that his family would never die; the possibility for creatures like him to roam free; a landscape powered by unconditional love.

Bryde, Adam knows, must be offering him the same relief. Exquisite flight, after the cage.

It’s not possible, is the thing. It’s a pipe dream. A Niall Lynch fairytale.

Foresight has never been Ronan’s strong suit. He gets it into his head that a solution is right up until the point that it falls apart in his hands. He throws himself entirely into belief. It makes him an extraordinarily loyal and trusting person. It also makes him stubborn, rash, and susceptible to manipulation.

He believes in one facet of something, and the rest follows. He can’t just take a sip—he downs the bottle.

Adam is a boy on a bicycle in November, needing to find Ronan alive so that he can hate him without feeling guilty about it. He never stops oscillating between resentment and love, reality and unreality, understanding and disappointment. He wants to be normal so that he can choose to be abnormal. Sometimes he wants the cards without the magic.

He closes his eyes and remembers a slumbering mouse against an angular cheek. He imagines Matthew like that, perpetually immobile, perpetually innocent, like a taxidermied puppy. The pieces of Ronan’s consciousness that will linger after his death, statues in a graveyard. Tamquam—tamquam—

What would Ronan be without his dreams? Here, Adam thinks. He’d be here.

He stays in bed for another wasted hour, and then stands up, disoriented, in the dimness of the room. Fletcher is snoring softly. Someone outside their cracked window is shuffling over the concrete stoop. His upstairs neighbour is playing tinkling soundtracks while he sleeps. Adam can’t be here anymore.

He plucks Fletcher’s laptop silently from its charging station, tucks his bare feet into stiff leather shoes, drags the cardigan from his desk chair, and lets himself out into the hallway. The glare from the overhead light pins him against the wall for a moment.

He shuffles half-blind down the hall and upstairs to the solarium, nearly losing one of his unlaced shoes in the stairwell in the process. The lights are blessedly shut off up in the attic, and he feels his way to the nearest of the tables hunched in the shadows. Aching with fatigue, he sits, unfolds his stolen laptop, and gets quietly to work.

He’s never had the time nor means to be truly proficient with technology, but he extracted a handful of leads from Mr. Gray, and he’s been in touch with a friend of Benjy’s—a computer science grad student and hacking hobbyist.

He chases key phrases down rabbit holes and assembles news articles, tracking Ronan’s movement by his “unexplainable” signature (code for mind-fuckery, joyful innovation, and dark humour). Adam is a practiced note-taker and serial obsesser, so it’s barely a strain to find Ronan—whom he knows better than anyone—cropping up all over the continental United States.

“What are you doing,” Adam murmurs. The sky lightens gradually to periwinkle. He has work today, but his shift doesn’t start until noon. His mouth is bone-dry, and his head feels cotton-stuffed the way it always does when he’s pushing his body to its limit.

When it’s late enough in the morning to be socially acceptable, he messages Benjy’s friend with the bare bones of what he’s looking for: a project under wraps, a lonely last name, a suppressed pattern. They correspond, remotely, until Adam is reading government files over watery coffee, wearing sweatpants, dress shoes, and a cardigan with cracked elbow patches.

He pores over it all, cross-referencing dates, and ignoring the widening sink-hole in his chest.

Industrial espionage isn’t at all Ronan’s usual brand of destruction. Highly controlled, not much up-front gratification. A little more political than Ronan usually leans. A lot more ambitious. Whatever their agenda, ley energy is flowing more easily now that it's unobstructed on such a large scale. Adam has been feeling its effects rippling all the way out to Boston, a persistent background pressure, unavoidable as a migraine.

It’s clear that the Moderators are desperate to eliminate Bryde’s party. Their reports are a comedy of close calls.

Slowly, Adam begins to understand the scope of things.

Billions of dollars in damages, manmade structures ripped from their foundations. Magical fugitives hunted by a team that specializes in murdering the targets they call Zeds. Visionary headlights pointed towards certain apocalypse. A world that is always awake, but always, always feels like it’s dreaming.

It’s pretty much exactly as he feared. Night terrors. The Lace. Beasts and legends. Adam holds his head in his hands. It’s more than what Ronan must be imagining. It’s more than Aurora waking happily in Cabeswater, powered by the swaying trees. It’s the indiscriminate waking of every incredible thing that’s ever been dreamed.

He’s struck by a wave of hopelessness that rushes all around him and tears at his hair. Ronan, dreamer of baubles that dispense music and light, cars that go very fast, and menageries of curious creatures, recruited to a cause that transmutes creation into chaos. Ronan, promising to wait, and then running full tilt at a future that can’t possibly keep Adam in it.

His dream half is going to destroy his human half, and he’ll take everybody else down with him.

If he could just see him, maybe—

His jaw creaks, teeth clenched tight against the emotional groundswell. The late morning sunshine strikes him, and he feel more like a vague, pale shape than a person. Like a dream, maybe.

Alter idem.

If Adam can’t reach Ronan, maybe the Moderators should.

He feels the weight of that awful thought burning a hole through his stomach lining. He can’t think about it. He needs to go to work.

_____

The next evening, he experiences a surge of power so acute that it nearly puts him in a coma.

It’s another Wednesday night, and another batch of his peers hitch polite smiles to his heels as he passes them by, winding his way up into the high, arched sunroom at Weld hall. They’re all wishing for magical solutions for their mundane problems, the opposite of Adam in nearly every way.

He bumps knuckles with Benjy and Eliot in turn, pulls up his chair, and knocks his last reading from Persephone’s deck, mostly out of habit. He consults his phone idly as his friends try to make pleasant conversation, holding up a finger when he finds a new batch of texts from Gansey.

John Amos power plant in WV shut down Monday

Intense. maura said she could’ve brought HER dreams to life afterwards

no word from Ronan yet? Leads from Declan? pls advise

I’ll assume no news is good news

He puts his phone in his satchel and fastens it closed. Every new scrap of information he gets feels like a stroll through Ronan’s security system at the Barns—hopelessness compounding and compounding until he staggers out the far end weeping.

He needs to focus on something productive. He nods at Benjy to start letting people inside, straightening the notebook where he usually scribbles his observations. Here, he is an adjudicator: powerful, organized, and reserved, tallying points and offering constructive critique.

His curious audience starts pouring in then, amateur wiccans and wannabe believers, aggrieved last-resorters and skeptics following friends’ recommendations. It’s a brighter collection of characters than Aglionby could ever have hoped to foster.

Gillian texts him to say that she just passed Weld and his line-up was out the door. He is a prim and unobtrusive con artist, a false prophet, and business is booming.

Eventually, a bespectacled girl who looks anywhere from five to ten years his senior sits across from him, tucking a bag armoured to the teeth with candy-coloured enamel pins between her feet.

“Hi,” she says nervously. “Anna.” She stretches her hands out in front of her, then thinks better of it and drops them into her lap. “I’m not sure how this usually goes, so you might have to hold my hand a little bit.”

“No problem,” he says smoothly, passing his deck across the tabletop. “Just go ahead and shuffle. Concentrate on what you want to ask the cards.”

She does as directed, struggling a little to keep the papery stack in check. Not a natural born card sharp, then. He studies her neat black shirt, tucked precisely into a plaid skirt. A Marilyn mole drawn on just above the corner of her mouth. A pride flag pin he doesn’t recognize next to a cat wearing a cowboy hat, and the word “rude” in cursive.

She holds the deck fleetingly to her chest, eyes squeezed shut like a child making a birthday wish, and then plops it in the centre of the table. A card slips near the top, slightly uneven, and Adam plucks it free.

He hums thoughtfully. “Eight of cups. Okay. So you’re having some trouble with letting go.” She frowns and nods once, quick.

He lays out the rest of a simple five card spread neatly between them. A couple of stray swords, the chariot, a wand.

“It seems like things are stagnating in your personal life. Maybe your friend group used to feel like your family, but you feel like they’ve lost interest in you. And you love them, but Anna, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re pretty sure you were done with them before they even started pulling away. Right now you’re kind of just going through the motions. A couple of years overdue to convocate, right? Everyone else moved on to greener pastures.” He taps his thumb thoughtfully against the bones of his opposite wrist. “It’s not even the loneliness that gets you. It’s the not knowing. Are you supposed to chase after them? Is there another community out there for you? There is, you know.”

He notices another card spilling loose, and he grabs it without thinking. The Magician again. He thinks, huh, caught in the coils and dust of Persephone’s overturned cards.

And then the waking world disappears.

Adam is airborne, tumbling up into the atmosphere on a geyser of ley energy, whipped by branches and light. He throws his arms out to stop himself, but he’s only a projection, so his momentum doesn’t slow.

Something—Lindenmere? The cosmos?—shows him a series of images: an upturned nose made from oil and turpentine, a coiled old tree stump, a red-haired woman grinning toothily and then exploding, a rose the colour of warm dark skin, a pale scar-split hand cradling a silky head, the animal haunch of something black, a terrible voice booming turn back—

He skitters away, panicked, and bumps into his own body. Or not his own body. A double, blinking confusedly in the bathroom mirror.

His doppelgänger turns to leave, and Adam reaches after him, through the mirror, following himself into a version of Thayer which is not Thayer. Everything is alive, in this reality. Energy sings and saws its fingers together.

It’s a memory, but it’s also the present, and it’s also a nightmare. Wake up!

Obediently, the city wakes.

He gasps, although he doesn’t have a mouth. It’s the heaving first breath of a sleeping witch, like Gwenllian turning in her grave.

Adam struggles against the current of wild power, thick and pungent as gasoline. Everything feels more intense near magical artifacts, dream stuff, supernatural fault lines, and it is with great effort that he hunts for something familiar, something heavy enough to bind him. He was unprepared for this, and although everything around him is bitingly familiar, he's lost. He wheels around and around, reaching for his most trusted tethers—Gansey, Ronan, Blue, Persephone—

Persephone.

He follows the lingering perfume of her intuition, feeling blindly for those old handholds in her tarot deck, that familiar grip, like the hilt of a trusted weapon.

And then he finds himself looking again at the girl, Anna, her fate bunched around her narrow shoulders. And then at his own empty body, a glowing card clamped between his fingers. As soon as he’s aware of looking at himself, he’s looking out of himself, and he stands up quickly, overturning his chair.

“—Adam? Jesus Christ, are you okay?”

“What on God’s green Earth was that?”

A palm between his shoulder blades.

“Don’t touch me,” he chokes.

The hand retreats. A murmur: I’ve never seen him like this.

“Is it—is it bad? Am I going to be okay? Is it bad?” Anna keeps asking, horrified.

“You’re fine,” he manages to say. “I’m sorry.” The ‘o’ in sorry comes out a little wide and swerving.

“You went blank,” Benjy says, voice high with residual panic. “For like—ten minutes. Beyond hyper-focus.”

“I thought it was a gimmick,” Eliot says. “But a ten minute gimmick? What is this, Las Vegas?”

“I got carried away. I have to,” he swallows. “I need a minute. I promise everything’s fine.”

“Do whatever you need to do,” Eliot says quickly. “But, fair warning, I’m going to ask you a hundred questions when you get back.”

“And then I’m going to ask another hundred,” Benjy says. “Magic man.”

“A riddle, inside an enigma, wrapped in a sweater vest,” Eliot muses. He can tell they’re still shaken. He’ll have to deal with that, later.

“I'll be right back,” Adam says, touching them very lightly on the shoulder as he passes. The ley line is bursting, and he feels so flushed with its vitality that it almost makes him sick.

He stumbles past them, all the way out of the building and into the street. The winter air tears at his thin shirtsleeves, nips at his sock-less ankles. He shields his eyes against the sun, watching a bird swoop low overhead. A silvery, seagull-sized thing, but with knobby legs that taper into—he squints. Hooves?

He keeps moving, propelled by the mad urge to catch the bird, to pin the wild magic down so he can understand it.

Adam walks for what feels like a long time, trying to find the source of all of this haemorrhaging power. He spots a couple of fidgety-looking students, a few more curious creatures. Somewhere, faraway, there’s music crooning, and it sounds exactly the way a hot shower feels.

He stops in the middle of Oxford street, head cocked towards the natural history museum across the way, the orderly buildings, the sparse evening foot traffic. Business as usual. All of it screaming with energy.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a parade of scuttling creatures marching towards an invisible destination. Frowning, Adam crosses the street, chasing the peacock blue shimmer from an unfurled wing. He slows, stooping in the alley to pick one of the strange insects from the stream. He peers through a nail-sized hole in its head. Its spindly legs wave fearfully for a moment, and then it goes limp in his hand.

The ley energy punches out of him, and he sits back on his ankles, winded.

Adam gazes down at the jewelled beetle in his palm, its siblings scattered out like shell casings around his knees. Dreams, all of them. Briefly, impossibly roused in a dead city. He stands, letting the beetle drop from his hand and bounce across the concrete. He kicks them all hurriedly behind a nearby bench, mind racing. Bugs from an exhibit next door, no doubt. Dormant animals, transplanted from their habitats and pinned in place for decades.

What kind of ecoterror was wrought to bring about a flash flood of energy in a drought? How must Ronan be feeling, out there in the world, wracked with waking dreams? What unimaginable monsters were just stirring in the shadows because of him? Is Bryde one of them?

His lives are merging. The distant rumbling of thunder is overhead now, and the downpour is rolling in. There’s no way he’ll be able to keep dry.

Standing in that alleyway by himself, drained and ordinary again, he feels terribly alone.

He weighs his feelings against his logic for several agonizing minutes, standing still and watchful as a predator. He recalls the jarringly clinical accounts of Ronan's most intimate dreams, the sparsely encoded language in those government files outlining the world-ending dangers of something Adam had, for a long time, shared a bed with.

If something happens to Ronan now, it might kill Adam. If something happens because of Ronan, it might kill everybody.

Another minute, and he has his phone out and ringing.

“Hello?” Declan answers. Oddly, it’s not his usual prickly greeting. He sounds almost jovial.

Adam looks out into the darkening street, feeling like a death omen, a shadow across someone’s doorstep. “We really need to talk about Bryde.”

______

It’s the worst possible time for Declan to be withholding information from him.

Adam had graciously tipped his hand and Declan was, infuriatingly, holding back, as if this was a low grade in Ronan’s high school algebra class, and not the cataclysmic fuck-up of a powerful dreamer.

Declan, so uncannily like his brother in vulnerable moments like this, had thought of Matthew first. A world where dreams could stay awake, he’d marvelled. As if they could afford to think so small.

Once, Adam had awoken to find his arm glued to the bedspread. Ronan had dreamt a bee-less hive in the night, and it was oozing a steady stream of honey into the sheets between them.

“Score,” Ronan had said, when he’d rolled back into his body. “Sting-free. Fucking vegan.”

“What happens when we don’t want any more honey?” Adam had asked, critically. Ingesting dreams always felt like a slippery subject. “Does it shut off like a faucet?”

It didn’t. Ronan filled a dozen amber jars full, and then abandoned the hive in a dusty kiddy pool in one of the barns near the back of his family property.

A month later, Opal had crept in through a window looking for trouble, and emerged, shrieking, in a viscous flood of syrup.

Combing the mess out of Opal’s fur, her little legs slung across his lap, Ronan had complained about the magnitude of the clean-up job he would have to do, the special honey hoover he would have to create, what a waste of a dream it would be. Adam reminded him of his faucet idea.

“Too late for that, Parrish,” he’d griped.

It was their pattern. A marvel, too good to be true. Adam, the skeptic. Ronan, too in love with creation to care about consequences.

Eventually, it will all be too late.

Ronan will pursue this liberation fantasy, this golden daydream, even if it never stops oozing. Even if it makes the whole world uninhabitable.

______

That night, Adam tries to scry for the first time in months.

He gently pushes the crying club—only tenuously placated after the tarot incident—to have drinks without him, claiming stress-induced fatigue. He leaves his study notes open and blinking on the bed, lights a sad little tea light, and casts himself out into the ether.

Straining hard, he searches for the familiar contours of Ronan’s dreamspace, plucking the distant strings of the ley line and listening for the particular timbre of Ronan’s consciousness.

He doesn’t like walking this tightrope without a net, but Harvard isn’t exactly flush with psychic spotters. He keeps a delicate balance, far from his body, inching closer and closer to Ronan’s mind, the safe plateau at the end of this rope.

Eventually, he finds himself in a grey bedroom. It's full to the gills with water, there's a toy sailboat bobbing past at chest height, and storm clouds huddling nervously on the ceiling. Adam’s hair plasters instantly to his scalp.

“Ronan?” he calls, sloshing through the curiously luminous water. It starts raining harder. A familiar, curly-headed child stares at him through the darkness, eyes sharpened into silver points in the moonlight. “Ronan?” he asks again, gently this time.

A muffled sentence, a sad, crumpled expression, and then Adam is staring at a closed door.

“What—let me in! Ronan!” He pounds at the door. “Come on!” He can still feel rainwater, unnaturally warm on his neck.

A voice in his head, not Ronan, whispers, turn back.

“No,” he snaps, knocking harder. “Just let me—“ A sudden gust of wind in his sails, and he’s ejected from the dream altogether.

He pinwheels for a horrifying, weightless moment, struggling to tune back in to the feeble light from his stubby candle, and then dragging himself, hand over fist, back to his dorm room.

“Fuck, Lynch,” he says, when he has a voice. “Don’t be stupid.” He recrosses his legs, shaking off the pointless, clinging feeling of rejection.

When he tries to reach out again, searching, searching, Ronan’s expecting him. He never makes it past the threshold.

Back in his body, he knocks his candle over, relishing the controlled destruction, the spill of wax, the sizzle of the squashed wick. A fire he can actually put out.

______

The next time Adam scrys, Ronan looks like himself. Maybe a little scruffier, with what looks like a tunnel piercing on his right ear, and a rare openness to his posture. He’s lounging in a pasture up against a sleeping cow, boots up.

As Adam watches, he tips his shaved head back into its mottled hide, and the sun makes his eyelashes into lit matchsticks. He loves him very much. He’d almost forgotten.

“Don’t lock me out,” he says quickly. Ronan opens his eyes, and when he sees him he smiles instinctively.

“Adam,” he says, vaguely. And then he locks him out.

“No,” he cries. “Would you listen to me.” He feels for the fissure in space and time, the pocket where Ronan is dreaming, sweetly and inaccessibly, about the only home Adam has ever known.

Nothing gives. Nobody replies. He crawls back to Harvard, weak with misery.

In the next dream, Ronan is older, driving a boxy jeep over a foreign landscape. Rolling Irish hills, skies humming with artificial energy. A woman who can only be Jordan Hennessy, chattering in the passenger seat.

Then it’s Ronan with his head in his dead mother’s lap, stroking the downy wing of a black swan.

Then Ronan and Hennessy again, opposite one another in a sunny gallery. One of them examining an impressionist portrait no bigger than a postcard, the other examining the exit.

Then Ronan, discovering Matthew’s corpse in a dim hallway, blinking furiously at the stranger crouched over his prone body. “What did you do?” He sounds like a kid reprimanding his sibling for getting them both in trouble.

Every time Adam gets close, some defence mechanism stops him, like a firm hand against his chest, pushing him away again and again.

He doesn't know what to do except keep trying.

______

Blankly, he looks down at a sink full of tinfoil and uneasy water. In pieces, he becomes aware of his surroundings—green stalls and laminate countertops, a row of hundred-watt lightbulbs, and somebody rattling the locked doorknob.

“Adam, are you in there?” Fletcher. “We’re going to be late. It’s nearly ten. Adam?”

“Just a minute, sorry,” Adam slurs. He stares closely at his face in the mirror until he recognizes his own features. He has an exam at 10:30. He glances down at his watch. 9:52. He had been so sure that he could just drift for a few minutes, maybe catch Ronan before he woke up. That was almost an hour ago.

He drains the sink, hands shaking, cuffs getting damp. The lightbulb filaments float behind his eyelids when he blinks. He throws his satchel over his shoulder, smooths his hair up and out of his eyes, and rubs the bags under his eyes until they hurt.

When he lets himself out of the bathroom, Fletcher is directly outside, tapping a nervous rhythm on his hips. His hands fly from his body and into the air at the sight of him.

“Adam! Thank god. I’ll cancel the search party.”

“I got lost in my notes,” Adam says, as they both make for the stairs.

“Of course you did,” Fletcher says warmly. “A supremely Adam move. I just hope you’re taking care of yourself. Gillian thinks you might be—well—not spiralling, but—“

“I’m handling it.” He takes several mental paces backwards. “Uh—poorly, clearly. I’m sorry Fletcher, I didn’t mean to snap.”

Fletcher, to his credit, recovers quickly. “I can’t imagine going through my first semester of college and a break-up at the same time. You’re a stronger man than I.”

Adam rather doubts that Fletcher can imagine going through a break-up at all, but he nods conspiratorially. They hop down the last few steps and out into the chilly sunshine together.

“You’d be amazed what one can do out of necessity.”

“Too true. We all have our hidden depths, don’t we,” Fletcher says thoughtfully. For a moment, Adam considers telling him—something, looping him into this tangled web with him, but then he says, “now, chapter twenty-three wasn’t on the outline, was it? I beg you to say no. Lie, if you must.”

And Adam is a student again. He doesn’t have out of body episodes. He doesn’t carry wads of tinfoil in his trouser pockets. He doesn’t keep deadly secrets from people whom he is mostly pretending to like and understand.

They walk onwards, towards a test which Adam will rouse himself for long enough to ace. Then he will think of the next thing, and the next. Appease these school acquaintances of his. Tinker with finicky car engines. Make flash cards. Drift into the beyond using one of Fletcher’s three-wick candles from pottery barn. Text Declan, who activates Ronan’s accountability in a way that Adam does not. Call Gansey, if he can bring himself to face his disappointment.

And clear away his feelings, which keep pouring out of him like so much honey.

______

Ronan hangs up on him, and Adam holds himself in the biting wind outside the library for a very long time.

He’d thought, if he could only speak to him, that he could begin to undo Bryde’s poisonous influence. They know each other. They’ve known each other. Ronan would listen to Adam’s fears as he always does. Adam would appeal to Ronan’s heart, which tends to ache for helpless things. They would see how lost they had become without each other. Adam would be allowed back into Ronan’s dreams, and Ronan would be allowed back into Adam’s future.

Why didn’t you text back?

As if they’ve been suspended in time since Ronan’s last tamquam, and none of it—the running away, warding his dreams against Adam, abandoning his phone, trusting a complete stranger over his friends and family—had ever happened.

It’s absurd. He should have expected it. Ronan was searching for a reason to stay, and when he looked for his reflection, his second self, Adam wasn’t there. For a single moment, he wasn’t there, and now he’s paying for it.

Impatient, wrathful Ronan. Leaping from the moving vehicle because Adam was going the speed limit. Going rogue, and then calling Adam with all of these stinging accusations, like he was the one who’d been abandoned.

He thinks again of Bryde manipulating Ronan, preying on his loneliness, his love for his brothers, his fear of himself. This big bad rumour, older and crueler than the Lace itself.

And Ronan letting himself be manipulated, putting on blinders, using Adam’s brief silence as an endorsement for a glorified joyride with unthinkable global ramifications. Self-destructing because things got a little too quiet.

Adam feels hot rage taking ahold of him with its sticky fingers.

Then he thinks of Ronan saying I need to see you, his thin, frightened voice finding Adam from somewhere out there in the city, and his anger goes clammy.

There’s no way Ronan will call again. Negotiations were off as soon as Adam refused to house them both from the Moderators.

And now, without Hennessy, Ronan is the last arrow in Bryde’s quiver. He’s going to be the explosive that brings everything down. He’s going to be buried at ground zero.

If I'd replied an hour sooner, would he really have waited? If I’d gone to school closer, would I have noticed him disintegrating? If I explained that my dream isn’t what I thought it would be either, that he’s the only thing that feels real, would he have said it back to me?

After everything that’s happened, am I going to be the one who gives up on Ronan Lynch?

Everything is so fucked.

He calls Declan.

He picks up on the first ring. “Parrish—”

“He hung up on me,” they both say at the same time.

“Mother of God,” Declan moans. “Then there’s no hope. He thinks I sold him out to the Mods.”

“Did you?”

“No. I did exactly as we discussed. I negotiated for his safety. I thought—I mean, you said it yourself, Adam. Being anti-apocalypse is a pretty solid platform.”

He shakes his head. “Ronan won’t see it that way. He’s not like us. He doesn’t want to be moderated even a little bit.”

“Believe me, I know that. The way he was talking—about the world screwing them over, all of them, dreamers. That’s not the way my brother thinks. That’s all Bryde. And now he’s taken him—Christ—Christ knows where.”

“He wanted to see me,” Adam feels compelled to say. “He was trying to come here.”

“He said that? That's good,” Declan says, relieved. “Where—“

“I let him get away,” Adam says, through numb lips. “I let him go.”

______

He texts Gansey, things have gone south, and then he turns his phone on silent.

His puts his fingertips to the floorboards, a knobbly hand on either side of a scrying tableau: the leaping flame of a candle, a well-organized pile of cards, his overturned phone and discarded tie. He’s just finished crying, and he feels volatile and ill-prepared even as he ties himself to the flickering light.

His mind races through the night like a skipped stone. Vaguely, he pictures a vast body of water and a glittering mountain range, with no horizon line in-between. Darkness reflected in darkness.

“Ronan,” he calls. The dreamspace whirs and grinds its gears and won’t reply. “You know this is wrong. You know, or you wouldn't be hiding from me.”

It’s all water out here in this sublime mirror-space, but it’s also warm, like the steam rising from a hot spring. Something is moving, changing things on a chemical level.

For a moment he thinks he sees himself, a wan doppelgänger with its hands raised. But it’s not Adam. It’s Bryde. Cool, sturdy, a pale Atlas holding the dream together on his back. He recognizes him instinctively.

Adam deliberately throws his mind closer, into the terrible heart of this fire Ronan is creating. Smoke whispers and catches all around him, and it’s even harder to tell the difference between things now. No horizon, no seam, no reality, no death.

What have you done? What are you doing?

The heat is quickly becoming unbearable. Adam is stretched too thin, and the fire is fraying him, eating through each fibre of his connection to reality.

Ronan, please, I need you to stop. I’m losing my grip. Listen to me.

And then, without any warning at all, he collapses on his dorm room floor.

He hacks and retches, lungs full of phantom smoke. Everything feels very wrong. He thinks for a second that he’s blind, but it’s not his vision, it’s another, less tangible sense, it’s—

He scrambles backwards on his hands, heaving. He tries to pull himself up onto his bed, head first, then chest, but he has to stop with his face buried in the comforter.

Ronan is—he must be—he’s—

“God, no, oh my god, no, no.”

He needs to throw up. He needs to call somebody. There’s complete silence in his head.

He was slingshotted back to Cambridge, swatted back along the zipline to his body, because there was nowhere else for him to go.

He’s sure, in a very non-magical, intuitive way, that every dream in the world has just collectively collapsed. Adam staggers to his feet. There’s a smoke alarm going off, somewhere. A background hum of electricity groaning as it shuts off. A high, scared voice.

As if in a trance, he goes to the window.

There are five dead lightbulbs in the nearest row of street lamps, what looks like a sleeping child out in the middle of the square, and a woman clutching her chest and sitting slowly on a bench.

Panic is deadening his senses, crawling blackly into his mouth and nose and eyes. He thinks of Matthew sitting weakly by the window. Opal slumped over a stump in the woods. Chainsaw falling from the sky like a stone. Gansey’s Cabeswater heart decaying in his chest. Ronan, either dissolving into nightwash or felled by a Moderator’s bullet, dead, lost, or powerless.

Every morsel of magic, every innovation, every cherished friend, every sacred place, turned off like a faucet.

The world outside, drooping and disconnected, is now exactly as ordinary as Adam has been pretending it is.

The ley line is gone.

#mister impossible #the dreamer trilogy #mi spoilers #tdt #adam parrish #trc #trc fanfic #pynch #mine #my tfc besties...... soon #in the meantime. here's some adam pov please clap

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descending-lotus · 3 years

Text

Some days I think I’m ugly, some days I think I’m cute. But most days I’m complacent.

I wish I can go back to Fall 2010- start of senior year of high school. I wish I had the self knowledge and awareness I do now, and not wear the hijab. So I could be seen. So people can REALLY REALLY see me for who I am. No just a Muslim quirky black girl who wears XLarge hot topic band shirts, I know nothing about. LOL

If I didn’t wear the scarf then maybe, just maybe I would have the balls to profess my love for my middle school crush. Zach Gordon. He is the only truly guy I have really really like. Tbh. Even looking back at all the relationships I had (which isn’t many) and all the fleeting crushes, in the back of my mind I always liked him. And. Now I’m coming to realize that I loved him. I knew back then he was out of my league. I wasn’t the type of girl he would be seen with. But how would I know?

After graduation, I internally said my goodbyes and didn’t think of him. Until college. Yes. He appeared in intro to some college math class and my heart dropped out of my ASS. No lie. I’m like holy fucking shit. This can’t be real. But I was wear a fucking purple hijab wrapped around my fucking head, with a long sunflower purple dress and long sleeves. Like WTF. Come on!!!! I want to slap myself. We never crossed paths in that class.

Until… NEXT semester… he was in my Nutrition class. I’m like omg. Looking back, I felt the universe was slapping me in the face and saying HELLO, wake up, this is your fucking chance to actually speak to the guy snd form a friendship of some kind. But no. I was too busy in another dead in relationship with some stoner from my job. But I was sooooooo excited when our professor told us we had a group project and he was in my group. And we had EXCHANGE NUMBERS!!!!! I got Zach Gordon’s number! My Zach. From Holmes MS! It only took like 10 years but I got it.

*Sigh* nothing happened though. Turns out he was the slacker of the group and didn’t participate so I carried his weight, happily. I would do anything for him. Semesters over. I lost his number. The end. That was 2013-2012.

The last time I saw him(2015), I was driving by a shopping mall and there he was all muscle and those deep ass dimples. He was coming from the gym. Turns out he worked at the gym and what did your girl do? Yes, this girl got herself a membership. As I was filling out the forms and the staff was talking to me, I heard a voice. It was him. He was asking the staff member something. I looked up, and I immediately looked down. My face was burning. Palms sweaty. I stared at the writing on the gym application. Is this real life???. I looked back up, our eyes meet for a split second. I wanted to die. And then he walked away. I felt like a stalker lol. Not s crazy stalker but pathetic stalker. Girl, what are you doing? Why are you feening over some white boy who barleys knows your name and wouldn’t give you the time of day!?

So I walked out and never went back. I pushed him from my mind and hurried him in my memories. The longing and dreaming of him, making up romantic scenarios in my mind need to end.

It’s July 2018 and I’m scrolling Facebook, outside, smoking a jack and gasped. There is that face. That handsome face.I stopped breathing, my eyes glued to the screen, I think I didn’t breathe for 2 minutes. “Our Beloved Zachary Gordon”…..

His brother posted his obituary on Facebook. Everyone was shocked! I was shocked. I had no words.. I can’t remember how I felt but looking back, I did not process his death. I sorta kinda forgot about him until I saw this.

It wasn’t until 2 years later, I had a crazy romantic realistic dream about him. I woke up in a panic, and felt very very sad. I instantly searched Facebook and went back to his obituary. And then my grief sets in. I cried and cried and cried and sobbed and wanted to know why he died? So young? How? So I reached out to his older brother.

#atheist #diary #ex muslim #adam driver #blackgirlmagic #melanin #exmoose #dmv #loner #disorder eating #blackgirlbloggers #blacklivesmatter #no friends #dmvnetwork #writerscorner #deadcrush

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