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#just that the words for these are different in spanish so i registered them separately when i learned them
not-another-leon-blog · 6 months
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Condor Two
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RE4! Leon Kennedy x Reader
Summary- You're Leon's partner, separated by villagers when you arrive in Spain. Word Count: 3425 Established Relationship A/N: Something different, there will be more to the Family Matters series coming soon!
I should’ve gone with Leon, you thought. Maybe if you had, you wouldn’t be tied to a pole and helplessly watching a Spanish police officer being secured to a pyre. What a way to begin your search for the president’s daughter.
Even more frustrating, you could hear Leon talking in your earpiece, trying to reach you. But with your hands literally tied, there was no way for you to respond. You hoped Hunnigan would be able to get a location on you. Of course, Ashley Graham remained the priority. But knowing Leon, he wouldn’t rest until he’d recovered the both of you.
The scent of old manure and death filled your nose. Your wrists and ankles ached and burned from the ropes binding you. At least you didn’t have to go looking for that village, you supposed. Still, you doubted that you’d find Ashley here.
As the sun rose, you surveyed your surroundings. Old wood buildings surrounded you. Chickens, cows, and pigs roamed freely and the villagers… well, you didn’t know what to make of them.
You and the officer tied to the pyre had been ambushed. They’d slashed the tires of the police car that had brought you out here and quickly overwhelmed both you and the officer. There was a throbbing in the back of your head where you’d been hit before waking up here. Wherever ‘here’ was.
Villagers wandered aimlessly through the small town, muttering things under their breath in Spanish. Something wasn’t right with them. Black veins covered their pale skin and their eyes were wild. It didn’t even seem like they fully registered pain. Some were covered in cuts and blood that they hadn’t bothered to clean and the bandages you did see were old and dirty.
“Condor two,” came Leon’s voice again, “Condor two, do you read me?” You rolled your eyes and groaned. You wanted nothing more than to answer him. “Y/n, where are you?”
Waiting for Leon to find you wasn’t an option. If your suspicions were correct, you were next on the sacrifice list.
The villagers had taken your guns when they’d taken you, but they hadn’t stripped you of your jacket. The small knife sheath strapped to your forearm was still hidden beneath the sleeve. There wasn’t much room to move, but you could move your arm against the pole just enough to free the knife from its sheath. 
Warm leather fell into your hand and you gripped the handle as tight as the rope would allow. The angle was awkward and your hand was already beginning to cramp, but you slowly began to saw away at the rope.
Keeping an eye on the villagers, you watched them begin to gather in the middle of town where they’d constructed the pyre. As long as you stayed quiet, hopefully, you’d avoid drawing their attention. 
A thought crossed your mind. How were you going to save the officer? He struggled and yelled, pleading with the villagers to let him go. His words carried no weight. 
The ropes around your wrists fell to the ground. Now you just had to free your ankles and then–
One of the villagers approached the pyre, a thick burning stick in his hands. Before you could blink, he tossed it into the wood pile and within seconds the whole thing had gone up in flames. The officer screamed and flailed. The smell of burning flesh filled your nose and you knew there was no saving him.
Heart pounding, you reached down and cut the rest of the ropes. Finally free, you crouched down and quickly dashed between the nearest buildings. If there was anything you knew for certain, it was that you couldn’t stay here. You didn’t stand a chance against a whole town with only a knife.
You turned the corner and skid to a stop. Not everyone was in the town square. An old woman stood in front of you, a pitchfork held firm in her bony hands. She raised the pitchfork and swung so fast you were barely able to dodge. You dropped to the ground and kicked her feet out from under her. You were on her in a second, pinning her shoulders down with your knees and driving your knife into her temple.
She lay dead and you quickly searched her body for anything that might be useful. Your shoulders slumped. Nothing.
Mud squished behind you and you turned to find a group of four more villagers stalking toward you.
"C'mon," you muttered, frustration laced in your voice like venom. There was no winning this fight. Your only choice was to turn tail and run. But to where? The last thing you wanted to do was run deep into the woods with nothing more than you knife. So what–
An axe whizzed past your head, lodging itself into the wall behind you. "I take it we can't talk this out," you said. The villagers only growled back at you.
You vaulted over the fence next to you as they pounced, narrowly avoiding another axe. Then you were running as fast as possible.
Branches scratched your skin, mud sloshed and slid beneath your feet. You didn't know where you were going, and nor did you really care at the moment.
You burst through the trees and found yourself in a small clearing. You stopped to see if anyone had followed you and when you didn't hear anything but the sound of rustling trees and chirping birds, you let yourself relax.
"Condor one," you said, reaching to activate your earpiece. "Condor one, I'm here." No reply. "Leon?" Nothing. You tossed your arms. Of course your equipment would stop working the instant you were free.
You looked back toward the village. Smoke rose into the sky. The screams of that poor officer still echoed in your ears. You knew you needed to go back, that if you were going to find Leon the best place to start looking was there. But having nothing more than your knife to defend yourself with made you hesitant.
Still, it's not like you had much of a choice.
"You got the stench of battle on ya," a rough voice said. You whirled on your heels, knife ready. A man in a black cloak stood behind you, a purple mask covering the lower half of his face. "You can put the knife down, I mean you no harm."
"Who are you?" You demanded, not lowering your knife.
He chuckled. "Just a man tryin' ta make a living. Got some rare things on sale for ya, stranger." He held out an arm, revealing a variety of weapons and ammunition along the inside of his sleeve.
"Impressive," you mused. "But I don't have any money.  So thanks, but no thanks."
"Nothin' wrong with doing things the old fashioned way," the merchant replied. "How 'bout a trade?"
His offer was tempting. You didn't have much, but maybe there was something you could give him in exchange for that pistol you spotted on his sleeve.
You lowered the knife and folded your arms. What did you have to offer? Your knife wasn't worth much and you were hesitant to part with it. Aside from that… Your heart sank as you remembered the one valuable you did have on you. 
Leon had gifted you a necklace on your birthday last year. A beautiful silver piece with a small yet intricately detailed bird hanging from it. He never told you what it had cost, but you knew it had to be expensive. Subconsciously, your hand came up to touch it.
"That's a fine piece you got there," the merchant said.
You didn't want to, but it could mean the difference between life or death. After a moment of silence, you asked, "What will it get me?"
"It may be small, but this beauty packs a mean punch." He showed off a revolver. "And as a first-time customer, I'll toss this in free of charge." He flaunted a can of first aid spray. "Whaddya say, stranger?"
Given the circumstances, you weren't sure you could pass up the offer. Reluctantly, you took off the necklace and handed it to him. As promised, you received both the revolver and spray.
The merchant must have noticed how your eyes continued to follow the necklace as he held it. "This is in good hands, I assure you. Now, don't go gettin' yourself killed." There was nothing more to say. The deal was done. With a simple nod, you turned away and began to trek through the forest back toward the village.
You felt naked without the weight of the bird against your chest. Ever since Leon had given it to you, you'd almost never taken it off. What would he think when he saw you without it? That necklace was his silent claim on your heart.
Romantic relationships between agents were frowned upon, forbidden almost. As far as the agency was concerned, it was a conflict of interest and if anyone found out, it was likely they'd separate you. Leon couldn't have that. He needed you as his partner both on and off the field, to be sure you were (somewhat) safe and alive.
He must be worried sick, you thought. Unless it was absolutely necessary, Leon hardly ever allowed radio silence between you two. It had been hours since you last had contact with him. Hell, the last time you saw him was when he left the police car to find the first police officer that had wandered off, instructing you to keep an eye on the second. 
You checked the chamber of the revolver. Six bullets. Six shots. You had to make them count.
You tried your earpiece again. Still no answer. Maybe the signal would get better the closer–
"Mother of god!" You yelped, pawing at your ear in pain. A loud screech filled your ear, followed by the sharp crackling of static. 
A voice was coming through the other end. It was Hunnigan.
"Condor two," she said, "What is your status?"
"You could warn me next time before you almost blow out my eardrum," you shot back. "I'm still breathing. All four limbs are accounted for. I'm on my way back to the village."
"Negative, Condor two," Hunnigan replied curtly. "There's a good chance Baby Eagle is being held in a church by the lake. I've sent you the coordinates."
"Well, I'd love to see those, but I've lost pretty much all my stuff." You could practically see her rolling her eyes.
"Alright, I have a lock on your position. Head north from your position. Leon is on his way there now."
"Roger that, Roost. Condor two out."
You finally managed to find a path leading north. So far you'd encountered no one else and you hoped it'd stay that way. You wanted to hang on to your six bullets for as long as you could.
"Condor one?" You tried again. If Hunnigan was able to reach you now, you should be able to reach Leon. Right? "Leon?" Silence. You'd be having a serious chat with your techies when you got back.
The lake couldn't be too far now. Trees and brush was beginning to thin and that musty lake smell began to hover in the air. The gravel path you walked along slowly turned into a muddy trail. You emerged onto the bank of the lake. A castle stood menacingly in the distance on the other side. To your left, you saw old wood scaffolding webbing up the side of a cliff. A dock sat just underneath it and at the top, you could just barely make out a church's roof.
Looks like that was where you were heading. With a new determination, you began the long walk over, falling back into the treeline to avoid detection from the water and clifftops.
~~
Ashley Graham was the priority. She was the one they were here to save. Even if one of you had to be left behind or killed to do it, she was the objective. 
But Leon refused to leave you. Even if he had to take your body back to the States, there was no reality where he left you here in this hell.
He'd come so close to you in the village. He'd seen you through his binoculars and then you were gone. Once the villagers had retreated into their church, he'd searched the place high and low, finding only your guns and equipment. He was fearing the worst knowing you were out there with only a knife, assuming it hadn’t given out on you yet.
He continued along the winding path, still trying to catch his breath. The village chief had nearly choked him to death not long before and he still felt the ghost of his fingers on his neck.
"Looks like you're in quite the rush, stranger." Leon stopped and rolled his eyes. It seemed like this merchant was there at almost every turn.
Oh well. Leon could stand to lose some excess weight from his bag. As he opened his mouth to reply, his words caught in his throat. There, among the vast array of goods, was your necklace.
"Cat got yer tongue?" The merchant chuckled.
"Where the hell did you get that?" Leon said, his voice low.
"What? This?" The merchant held up the necklace. "An exchange with a traveler lookin' to keep their head on their shoulders."
A part of Leon wanted to be hurt that you'd traded it. But his more rational side understood that you didn't have a choice. He'd found everything but your knife in the village and he knew well enough that you'd need more than just that to make it through this.
The merchant was a reasonable enough man. Leon was sure he could trade something to get the necklace back. Without a second thought, he rummaged through his bag and pulled out two silver goblets and a handful of gems he'd found in the village.
"Must hold sentimental value if yer gonna trade all that for this," the merchant observed. "Can't put a price on that." Still, the merchant tossed Leon the necklace and stashed away the rest. "Pleasure doin' business with ya."
That was easy, Leon thought. Much easier than he anticipated.
Pop pop
Leon perked up. Two solid gunshots had come from the direction of the church. It had to be you. It had to be.
He took off running, not caring if he drew attention to himself. He had to find you.
~~
The church was crawling with villagers. You'd managed to kill three already, but the rest materialized from everywhere. From behind the church, from the graveyard, from the way of the lake, they were everywhere.
Down to four bullets, you had a choice to make. Ashley could be just within reach. You could potentially thin out this crowd for Leon by the time he got here, make his job easier at the cost of (most likely) your life.
Or you could turn tail and run. You refused to keep running.
Someone grabbed you from behind, wrapping their arm around your neck to choke and hold you still while another prepared to swing their axe.
You dropped your weight and threw the one holding you over your head. Grabbing your knife, you threw it as hard as you could. The one holding the axe fell with a hard thud. You ran and pulled the knife free, turning just in time to stab it into the head of another.
A pitchfork came flying at you. It whizzed past you, the spokes just barely missing your arm. Blood began to flow from the wound but you had to keep fighting. Any hesitation could result in your death.
Four more surrounded you, cornering you against the fence. Your drew your pistol and fired twice. Two flew back and dropped to the ground. Two bullets left.
You took aim once more and just as you were about to pull the trigger, something slammed into your back. You were thrown fast and far, landing hard against a headstone. The pistol clattered out of reach and when you went to pull your knife, the blade snapped from the hilt.
Your arms shook as you tried to push yourself up, only for them to give out and leave you nearly limp against the headstone. A monster of a man towered over you, a massive hammer held menacingly in his hands. He raised it high over his head.
Time slowed down. Memories began to flash through your mind. Your first time meeting Leon at bootcamp. Sparring with him in the middle of the night, comforting each other when the whole world felt like it was collapsing in on you. The first time he kissed you. 
A sense of peace washed over you as you watched the hammer begin to fall, sunlight glinting off of the metal. 
No. You couldn’t let it end like this. You rolled, the hammer meeting the ground where your head had been not a second before. Scrambling to your feet, you dove for your gun. Back on your feet, you shot down two more villagers. Better to have them dead now and not wait for them to gang up with the big one against you.
Your bullets were gone and your knife was broken. You scanned for anything you might be able to use. The brute marched toward you, hammer ready. You lept over headstones, ripping a shovel from the hands of a dead villager. 
You turned just in time to bring the shovel up to meet the hammer, stopping it in its path. The wood handle splintered, your arms shook with the strength it took to keep the hammer from you. The handle cracked into two pieces and the brute charged into you, throwing you hard against a tree and knocking the air from your lungs. He charged again, hammer high and then–
BANG!!!!
The man stumbled back forward. Another BANG and he fell to the ground lifeless.
“Y/n?” came Leon’s voice. A second later he was in front of you, cupping your face in his hands. 
“I had it handled,” you muttered.
“Of course you did.” He helped you sit up the brushed your hair away from your face. The urge to pull you into his arms was overwhelming, but with the beating you just took he didn’t want to risk hurting you even more. At least you were alive. “Think you can stand?”
You nodded and let him help you up. Your legs were shaking and your head felt dizzy, almost falling into Leon as you tried to regain your balance. He held you against him until the world stopped spinning and you could stand on your own again. 
“What happened?” Leon asked, his arm tightening around your waist, almost as if he were afraid that you’d disappear the moment he let go.
“Got bored, decided to go sightseeing,” you replied. He gave you a look. “We were ambushed and I have been hit in the head too many times today.”
He nodded and dug around in his pocket. "I found something I thought you might want back." He held up the necklace you'd traded with the merchant.
"Leon…" Guilt and shame came over you, but also relief at the sight of it. "I'm sorry, I–"
"I know," he said, moving to fasten it around your neck and tucking it under your collar. "You didn't have a choice, I get it. I also found the rest of your stuff."
A weight lifted off your shoulders. Your pistols felt like a comforting blanket as you strapped them back on. "What would I do without you?"
"Crash and burn," Leon said simply as he hooked an arm around your waist and drew you back to him, crashing his lips against yours. He pulled away and smirked down at you, knowing the kiss left you breathless. 
It took a moment for you to regain your senses and when you finally registered the knowing look on his face, you swatted his chest. “C’mon, Romeo. We still have a job to do.” It took another moment for your feet to start moving again, your body wanting to stay wrapped up in his arms. They couldn’t waste any more time. “Baby Eagle’s still waiting for us.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Leon watched as you quickly approached the front gate of the church, a new pep in your step. He’d do everything in his power to make sure you weren’t separated again.
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kindness-ricochets · 3 years
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I’ve been seeing a lot of thoughts and hc of autistic wylan lately and you seem to also be a fan of the concept. May I ask why? Exactly? I could definitely kinda see it but wanna hear you thoughts you’re always so eloquent
Hey there anon! Sorry for the delay—I’m guessing you already found an answer to this elsewhere while I was off Tumblr for a bit, but just in case, here are my thoughts. This will be heavily personal, but… well, you can’t very well ask an autistic person about autism and expect neutrality!
Autism is different for everyone and can be difficult to pin down, so while Wylan is arguably autistic, he misses several beats that for me would have made him definitively and undeniably autistic. For example, when the bells start to ring, triggering black protocol—I work in a place with a lot of bells and am frequently caught too close to one and normally press my hands over my ears until it’s over because that sound is like shrapnel raking across my insides. All of them. Not just the ear and brain parts. Wylan doesn’t have that sort of visceral reaction, but that may just mean he doesn’t have the same sensitivities that I do, or to the same level. He also never, that I recall, eats meat—as weird as that might sound, eating meat is incredibly complicated with heightened sensitivities to taste and texture. I’m not sure how old I was when I realized it was strange to get up from the table to spit out my food because it viscerally repulsed me. So it might be that Wylan is autistic and has different experiences than I do. Those are things I would include in a story as major indicators of a character being autistic. This might also mean that his father’s way of raising him taught him to hide unusual reactions and stimming behaviors. It’s not that much of a reach to assume a man who tried to abuse the dyslexia out of his son would take the same approach to autism. (More on autism and abuse later.)
So while I’m going to lay out why I read Wylan as autistic, that’s why I think it’s valid to read him as not being autistic as well. Both are valid.
A final caveat, I am well overdue for a reread of the books, so I likely left something out or could have found better examples. Take this as a few of my reasons for a personal headcanon. Anyone who feels differently, that's fine! We can each read things our own way :)
1 - Hyperfixation: The way Wylan loves music
Most of the Crows’ backgrounds color how they see the world: Kaz’s shrewdness, Matthias’s tactical thinking and superstition, Inej’s faith and Suli wisdom, etc. That’s a sign of good character writing. But very little of Wylan’s upbringing seems to have influenced how he sees the world. It comes closest when he thinks about how his father would scorn his new friends, but we never see that scorn from Wylan.
The way a hyperfixation feels, it’s like you’ve always lived in a close parallel world, never fully been a part of the other one where it seems like everyone else lives, but suddenly there’s this bright shining piece of your soul laced through the other world. It lets you connect, it lets you exist in their realm, and you can’t help but filter everything new through that lens because it’s the brightest, most wonderful thing. (I had been between hyperfixations for a while when I started a new job; six months into that work, I read Crooked Kingdom. One of my coworkers thought I had fallen in love, it was that marked a difference.)
So, combining these: Wylan never really acts like he was part of his father’s world, and indeed is in some ways separate from the other Crows, but he parses everything through music, his hyperfixation. He sets words to music to remember them, like he does with the contract. Even his own anxiety is made sense of through music, when in his first narrated chapter, he sets it to music: what am I doing here what am I doing here…. When he’s overwhelmed, his thoughts are “a jangle of misplayed chords”. The Crows have backgrounds that influence how they react to the world, but Wylan’s hyperfixation is his means of experiencing and understanding the world.
2 - Literal thinking: Wylan responds to exact words
In this post, I went into detail on the line where Wylan suggested waking up men to kill them. Wylan is generally unsupportive of killing people—Oomen, Smeet’s clerk, his father… he advocates not-murder in each of these situations. Accepting his aversion to murder, his suggestion to wake men up and kill them seems like a genuine reaction to Jesper saying he doesn’t want to kill unconscious men. Wylan takes things literally.
This happens the most with Jesper, probably because Jesper talks to Wylan the most. Nina and Matthias don’t really register him past how he might be useful, Inej is usually quite direct, and Kaz is very deliberate when he speaks with Wylan. This really interests me because Kaz tends to vary his speech more than the others do, he adapts more to being around other people. He jokes a little with Jesper, spars with Nina, speaks more openly and more sharply with Inej, and he’s precise with Wylan. Kaz may not know what autism is, but he recognizes what’s effective with Wylan.
Another example is when Wylan is sketching the Ice Court plans and Jesper says it looks like a cake. There are plenty of valid responses here: pointing out that concentric circles look like lots of things, that it’s just a sketch, telling Jesper to stop looking over his shoulder. Instead, Wylan says that the Ice Court is sort of like a cake. That… doesn’t sound like something Wylan would normally say. He’s not addressing the whole situation, he’s addressing the specific words Jesper said.
One of the most heartbreaking examples of this (to me, anyway) is with Marya. Wylan does the same thing with his mother, when she asks if he’s there for her money and says she hasn’t got any, and his response is, “I don’t either.” We understand as readers that what Marya is communicating here is that she is so accustomed to being utterly ignored unless she is being used, and if she told Wylan that no one visited but to take advantage and she assumed he was here for the same reason, he would say it wasn’t the case. But he just responds to the immediate statement.
There are a lot of examples of this.
3 — 0% perception, 100% creativity
Wylan can identify things that don’t make sense or that he doesn’t understand, but at the beginning of the series he can’t make leaps, only ask questions. On the Ferolind, he wonders about the source of water at the Ice Court; though Kaz doesn’t say as much, he was clearly wondering, too, because he eventually figured out the underground river. There’s an interesting parallel here where, in the beginning of Crooked Kingdom, Wylan asks a question about how they’ll break into Smeet’s and Kaz tells him to use his eyes instead of running his mouth—at which point Wylan is able to figure it out. I don’t think this is because he never tried before, though, but because no one ever bothered to teach him. Kaz can be harsh but he gives harsh corrections rather than harsh rejections and Wylan learns from him.
It’s hard to understand the world for people with autism. The world is designed and run by and for people whose minds are fundamentally different from ours, whose thoughts and experiences are unlike ours. Imagine trying to learn English or Spanish or Mandarin or any other spoken language if your first language was olfactory. That’s sort of what it’s like for someone with autism to just get dropped into the world and expected to figure this out.
This can be attributed to Wylan’s upbringing, but I disagree with that because none of the others were brought up in the Barrel, either, and Wylan doesn’t understand trade or politics with any special skill. Kaz wasn’t born in the Barrel, but he managed to go from “stealing is wrong” to “wrong isn’t my concern” real quick; Colm Fahey didn’t raise his son on gambling and firefights; the Ghafas never expected their daughter to be away from the family. Only Nina has relevant training—and even that’s precious little, she left school way too early. The others figured it out; Wylan needed a bit more help. He also seems surprised by the way his father conducts business. Wylan takes things on face value—like the time he’s surprised someone would do something, simply because it’s unlawful. This is something he expresses to a group of gangsters. He’s never been taught the way of any world and these things are not intuitive to him.
But Wylan isn’t stupid.
He doesn’t know how to understand the world, but he does understand how things go together. Given a pointy diamond, a handle, and a screw, he cut through Grisha glass. He carries flashbangs and magic napalm, he recreates military hardware—Wylan understands how to make things interact for a specific result. But to me the most telling thing isn’t just that he puts together chemical pieces, it’s that he figured out Jesper controlled bullets. He saw the pieces and put them together.
Wylan can understand when things don’t make sense, but he can’t make sense of them—yet when he understands things at their basic level, he understands them without preconception, for what they are. This is a very autistic way of thinking about things, it goes back to the literalism. He can’t make the leaps of logic other people can, but he also doesn’t make the assumptions they do—“I’ve never heard of a bullet Grisha, so that’s not a thing” vs “Well Jesper’s an almost impossibly good shot and he controls metal and bullets are metal, so why not?”
4 - Broken brain/body connection
Wylan’s great at chemistry and drawing and playing flute or piano—but he’s something of a disaster other times. This is in particular contrast to the other characters, all of whom are physically adept. Meanwhile it’s a challenge for Wylan to climb a rope ladder and he spends a full paragraph trying to figure out what to do with his hands. It’s easy to say, well, he’s used to a sedentary lifestyle, but at this point he’s not. He’s worked in the tannery for months. He’s just physically awkward.
I have less to say on this point only because it’s about something I don’t fully understand myself. I don’t really understand what it would be like to have a body that just… does things? Like normal stuff? Without tics and stims. No idea. Only that Wylan’s discomfort in and seeming lack of mastery of his own body feels very relatable to me.
5 - Abuse
One of the most familiar things about Wylan is how he has been so thoroughly abused and broken down that he’s afraid to do or say much of anything. Again, this is a place his background can be an obscuring factor. Of course Wylan didn’t think to blow up the walls when the first met the parem-juiced jurda and got trapped, he’s a spoiled rich kid! Except, he also startled when Jesper said his name later. Wylan didn’t hesitate because he was spoiled, he hesitated because he had no confidence.
He also thinks Kaz would laugh at him for playing music at his mother’s grave. Now, personally, I can’t see Kaz laughing at Wylan—being indifferent, thinking it’s pointless sentimentality, shaking his head, maybe commenting sharply that they need to go if they don’t have the time. But not laughing. Kaz is a snarky, sharp-edged jerk sometimes, but he doesn’t go out of his way to criticize, he just lets people know when they inconvenience him.
Wylan has been trained to identify attention as negative by an overbearing abusive father who literally saw him as less favorable than a demon. Now, that may have been hyperbole, but Jan criticized everything he could about Wylan—art, music, emotion—and made clear that he was worthless and competent to nothing. (Jan Van Eck can suck a rotten donkey dick but that’s neither here nor there.)
A lot of people with autism experience levels of bullying that have similar impacts. Or as the kids these days are calling it: we go to school. We go to school where we are weird. Where we look weird and move weird and talk about weird things and there’s a whole little bevy of asswipes to makes sure we know it. I got teased more for playing Pokemon and sitting alone reading than the kid who pissed himself onstage at assembly. (This was before Pokemon was cool. I’m old.) And that is not unusual for autistic kids. It’s also not unusual for this to be compounded by relatives or even parents who may be trying to help but don’t understand and can make things even harder.
So we can’t read social cues and we’re taught at a vicious age that everything that comes naturally to us is wrong. Imagine trying to interact in society with that background. There is no guide and most advice from neurotypical people isn’t actually what they mean. It breaks you down.
Wylan’s anxiety isn’t definitive of autism, but isn’t something that was incredibly familiar as someone whose neurodivergent experiences created a strong level of anxiety.
6 — High Compassion, Low Social Competence
Wylan isn’t very good at making friends. In fact, none of the Crows likes him much in the beginning, and only some of them soften toward him by the end. (Matthias and Nina come to respect his skills as a chemist but neither seems to particularly like him.) But you can see throughout the books that Wylan wants to connect with them and be one of them, he just… isn’t. He’s off-beat. He’s weird. He asks questions and mimics behaviors (trying to be cool and tough like Jesper, saying “mission” like Matthias does, imitating Kaz’s scheming face) but he doesn’t quite get how to adapt.
But he still cares about people. Not just them. Everyone. He cares about the people they leave in the ditch outside the prison wagon, he cares about Hanna Smeet, he cares about Alys. He cares about the people who’ll take a hit from Kaz’s sugar caper.
Wylan’s awkward social skills have undeniable big autism energy. I posit his compassion does as well. This is simply who Wylan is, and that means being someone who cares about everyone. I have nothing to back up that this is related to autism. I can say that it’s like me. (Not to brag.) I can’t turn off the part of my brain that says everyone matters. Individuals can opt out of that compassion, but they have it by default. There’s a certain agony in feeling a pull toward and love for just about everyone and yet an inability to develop meaningful connections with them, and that keen loneliness… it just burns.
Again, it’s not definitive of autism, but it’s very similar to an autistic experience.
I said in the beginning that I didn’t think Wylan certainly had autism and I stand by that, but he is a powerfully honest reflection of many people who do. So he can be understood to have autism, and that’s part of the reason some people have that headcanon.
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musicallisto · 2 years
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HELLOOO CLARA~
I’ve missed you so much love!! I have many things to say;
1) if you’re feeling exhausted despite getting a good nights sleep, it’s probably a sign of a depravity of something else - iron, perhaps?
2) I agree with what Olive said on your accent post - your English is very good! And it is only on a certain words, how you choose to say things that would make me think “ok she’s not a native speaker” I am very proud and impressed, since I do NOT have a talent for languages at all
3) you’ve made me yearn to go get ice cream and walk down main street with you … perhaps we are all wearing floppy sun hats and twirly skirts, and gaze at the rivers and trees and flirt joyously at every cute boy passing us by, ruining it by our vivacious laughter??
4) I know this may sound odd - but what language do you think in? Do you think in French and actively translate everything you read/hear, and translate in your brain before you speak? Or is it as easy as breathing? (I hope I’m not being ignorant, I think you are beautiful and I am simply gazing at a work of art)
Anyways I miss you so much!! Literal oceans separate us and I want to hold your hand and kiss your cheek 🥺🥰
✧˖°࿐ Lindsay!!!! I'm so happy to be talking to you, it's been way too long and I'm consciously ignoring my math homework to answer your ask. (it's been so long that my laptop doesn't autocomplete 'tu' to tumblr anymore, I feel so betrayed) how are you lovely? i hope everything's fine for you and that you're having an excellent time 💜
it could be - I hadn't thought of that! last year I also had some difficulty sleeping and weird bouts of dizziness at random times of day, but it went away, so I attributed them to stress - but maybe there's an underlying cause because they're back now and I'm most definitely not as anxious as I was last year. idk though because I've never had any kind of iron deficiency or anything of the sort? I tried meditation and breathing exercises and stuff and for the most part it helped, so I'll see how it goes!
thank you very much! <3 Olive's post was super insightful and I loved having my accent analyzed like that, I felt like I was being reviewed by that dialect coach on the Wired youtube channel lol. it's definitely true that there are certain words I just can't pronounce the American way, no matter how hard I try, and it makes me cringe a little bit, but hey, if it adds charm and character to my voice, i'll take it!
oh my god please,,,, I want this SO BAD. the number one thing I need right now is a day out with friends and the number two thing I need right now is ice cream. combining the two? I'll SWIM over to Canada if I have to, because I want this to happen. Then we can go iceskating, and you'll teach me, because I never have, and I figure I'm probably dreadful at it because I couldn't even stand on rollerblades when I tried. i've been to Canada once but I would die to come back and hang out with you.
it's not a weird question! I've gotten it before, actually. it's kind of difficult to explain - but it's like my brain has different modes and I can switch them on and off. default mode is French because it's my first language and the one I use on a daily basis; when I think to myself 95% of the time it's in French. but sometimes the situation requires me to switch to Spanish or English, and it's like changing my brain's whole layout. French then takes a seat back and it's like I changed the language in my brain's settings, lol. taking the example of your ask, I didn't read each sentence and consciously translate it to French word for word - it immediately registered in my brain, like it would for any native English speaker reading normally. and as I'm answering it, my brain hasn't switched back to French, so every thought I might have now (even if it's totally unrelated, like what could be for dinner) will be in English. as soon as I hit 'answer' and see a word in French, it will switch back again. sometimes the switch isn't automatic, so it may happen that I'm lost in thought about something in Spanish or talking to my mom on the phone, and someone asks me something in French and I blurt out the answer in Spanish because my brain just goes ??? i have no idea what we're doing now ???? but basically, to answer your question, I read naturally and don't translate word for word, even more difficult sentences that may take me a few rereads to process. Thinking in English is a bit weird though, almost dissociative; it doesn’t feel totally organic, more like I’m talking to a friend rather than really... hearing the little voice in my head. but I object - you are the work of art here 💜 edit: rereading your ask you also wondered about speaking, so speaking is mostly automatic as well, but requires more effort than listening and comprehension. which is why you’ll hear me make a lot of pauses and use a lot of filler words - I am not as dumb as I sound, I’m just trying to find a way to express what is abstractly crystal clear in my head in a way that will not outrageously violate the rules of English I also get asked a lot what language do I dream in, lol, and the answer is mostly French but sometimes I'll have a dream that's entirely in English or Spanish for zero reason or there's just one character in the dream who speaks in a different language from the others and it's all just a big mess.
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miguelsbrat · 4 years
Text
The Theater | Miguel Galindo x Reader*
Warnings: Language, Cheating, Dom/Sub Tones, a Dash of Daddy Kink, and Some Steamy Forbidden Lovin' in a Public Place
Note: I haven't posted anything smutty on here since the Tumblr Apocalypse of 2018, so I tried to keep this light, but... it sort of got away from me.
Thank you for reading! 🥰
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"Can I help you?" The guy behind the glass, all shaggy hair and unshaven jaw, barely looks up from his book.
"One ticket to the one o'clock showing of The Way We Were, please."
"Twelve dollars."
You slide your card through the window and wait for the ticket to pop up from the slot.
"Enjoy the show," he says, his eyes never leaving his page.
As you replace your wallet in your bag, you remember the reason you're here. The image of your secret lover flashes behind your eyes, dark and dangerous and brooding. Your fingers wrap around the door and your heart skips a beat when you think of him waiting for you.
The salty smell of popcorn washes over you when you reach the lobby, the buttery scent teasing your nostrils. Though it's likely stale, you stop and order a bucket. You don't want to look too eager so you linger by the register, smiling at the cashier as they scoop, grateful for the distraction from the silence.
Snack in hand, your feet drag along the old, worn carpet, the billowy fabric of your sundress kicking up around your ankles as you climb the theater stairs.
He was right--aside from the braided mercenary who nods at you as he passes by, there's no one else around.
A ghost of a smile crosses his lips as you reach the top and find him in the center of the back row.
"You bought popcorn?" Miguel shakes his head, sliding over and raising his arm to make room. He knows you like to nuzzle in as close as possible, even when there's no one else around.
Especially when there's no one else around.
Because Miguel may be your man, but he's also Emily Galindo's husband.
"It smelled good and I couldn't resist. You know, I never saw this movie," you say, fighting the shiver that was working up your spine by talking too much. "Is it any good?"
"It doesn't matter, querida." His voice dips low, taking on that raspy tone that makes your stomach twist and pull with need. "You won't be watching it today, either."
"I won't? But isn't that why we're here?"
Your playful smirk is rewarded with the patented Galindo glare, the look that promises he's not teasing and makes your panties ridiculously wet.
"If you wanted to watch the movie, you shouldn't have shown up looking like this." His finger trails along the soft swell of cleavage peeking over the neckline of your ivory sundress.
"Looking like what, exactly?" The urge to smile is strong, but you manage to suppress it.
"Looking like some kind of goddess created just for me." His lips find your ear, teeth grazing the soft lobe, and you have to bite back a sigh. "Get over here, princesa."
As you meet his amber gaze, tendrils of longing unfurl in your chest. It's been too long since you've been alone with him, thanks to Emily's sudden suspicions, and you're desperate to make up for lost time.
He laces his fingers through yours, waiting patiently for you to climb over him and settle yourself onto his lap. Though he's calm and unruffled as always, a little thrill shoots through you when remember that you're technically in public.
Your hips roll against him just once and he sighs, squeezing your hands before releasing them to wrap around your waist. He's hard already, and probably has been since he first laid eyes on you.
As you wait for his next command, your first instinct is to lower your gaze, your eyes skimming over his exquisite bespoke charcoal suit. It's a little much for the movies, but that's Miguel.
When his palm slides up your neck, fingers resting at your throat, he tips your face up towards his. And when his lips finally touch yours, it's like lighting a match.
Flames ignite between you and your tongues tangle, teeth clashing messily as the passion begins to consume you. His beard abrades your delicate skin, but you can't get enough. It's always like this when you're together--chaotic and uninhibited, until he gathers enough strength to take control.
"Mmm. I missed the taste of you," he admits as you grind against him.
"I missed the taste of you, too, Daddy," you whisper, loving the warmth of his body. You're embarrassingly wet, soaked through your panties and probably his pants, too. "I feel like I'm in high school again, making out in the back of a movie theater."
"I'll bet you drove the boys crazy in high school, didn't you?" His smile is lopsided, uncharacteristically soft. "Did you tease them like you're teasing me? Rubbing your sweet little pussy against them and ruining their pants?"
"Maybe," you breathe, unsure what he wants you to say. Miguel may be married, but he's extremely possessive of you.
"Show me how you teased them, princesa. Roll those hips for me."
His teeth graze your collarbone as he palms your chest, and you slowly rock against him. His hard cock is notched between your thighs, and you can feel every ridge through the light fabric separating you.
"Fuck, baby," he grunts, shifting so you lean further back for him.
Your fingers find his buckle, opening it with practiced ease, and you slowly roll down his zipper. When you try to wrap your fingers around him, he swells against your palm.
"I want to ride you, Daddy. Please?"
His eyes darken a full shade as he considers your request. It's a lot for him to relinquish control, but he wants it this time, too. Plus your options are fairly limited in the small, cramped theater.
"Turn around," he husks, pulling himself out the rest of the way as you turn to face the screen. "And take off those filthy panties."
Your fingers hook into the lace, sliding them down your legs and over your ankles. You're about to tuck them into your purse, but he stops you.
"Ooh, you bad little girl. These are fucking soaked." One hand squeezes your breast and the other twirls your underwear around his fingers. You're not even surprised when he stuffs them in your mouth. "Can you taste yourself on the silk?"
You whimper softly in response.
Impatient hands ruck the hem of your sundress up around your waist, and you grip him tight in your fist. He's hot and silky, smooth against your palm, and you can't wait to feel him inside you.
You're not sure what's happening on the screen, but it's quiet--too quiet to be careless. Your vision blurs as you guide him to your entrance.
Slowly, you sink down on him, the panties between your teeth muffling your moans. Miguel bites down on your shoulder to stifle his own sounds of pleasure as you lean back against his chest.
The air conditioning is on full-blast but it always feels like it's 90 degrees whenever Miguel is nearby, and with him inside you like this, it feels like an inferno.
You do your best to ride him slow, trying not to make it obvious if someone were to walk back and find you, but desperation overtakes your senses.
Miguel's gripping your thighs, thrusting upwards to hit you where you need to feel him, and the first ripples of an orgasm begin to spread through you.
You're thankful for the panties smothering your cries when he leans back to change the angle and you suddenly see stars.
"That's my girl," he whispers, urging you on. "I feel you getting close. Go ahead and let go for me, querida. I want it all."
His hand slips beneath your dress to find your clit, rubbing slowly as he plunges even deeper than before. Your senses all blend together as you fall apart for the man you love, bathing his cock in your hot release.
Miguel groans behind you, letting loose a stream of filthy Spanish words as his hips still. He fills you up with everything he has just as you hear the metallic slam of a heavy theater door.
You spit out the panties and he helps you slide from his lap, draping your dress to cover your nudity as he tucks himself back in his pants.
Your walls are still clenching as your dress hits your ankles, Miguel's release sliding down your inner thigh.
When no one appears at the front of the theater after a tense moment, you relax and lean into him.
"Are you okay?" You can feel his heartbeat racing alongside yours, but you nod.
You're more than okay, blissed out from his deep strokes and incredible body.
He cups your jaw, his face serious.
"This is the last time it goes down like this, okay? I need more of you than stolen moments in the shadows. I want to make love to you in a bed, to scream your name when I come inside you. Tonight, I'm telling Emily that our marriage is over."
His thumb brushes over your bottom lip, and you force a smile. You've never let yourself hope for more than this, so you have a hard time believing his promises.
If all you ever get with Miguel is the occasional secret rendezvous, you're okay with that. You'll take whatever he can give you.
Still, there's something different about the way he looks at you now as you settle in against his chest.
Something that tells you that maybe you'll get more of Miguel after all.
You smile to yourself and reach for your popcorn, content with whatever may come your way.
***
The End.
148 notes · View notes
ravens-words · 3 years
Text
Prelude to Light, Part 4 of 6
Five times Michael watched, and pined away after, Alex interacting with others' kids and the one time it was their kid.
On AO3
AN: Funny story, I may or may not have forgotten to post this chapter three days ago. So, sorry for the delay!
Also, I'm so so nervous about this chapter.
....
"Knock knock!"
Isobel poked her head in and Michael grinned, nervousness forgotten. His smile broadened when Max followed her in, both of them smiling widely at him. 
He spread his arms to the side. "How do I look?"
"You look great, Michael," Isobel said, voice thick with tears. She was clearly trying very hard not to cry, and Max, when Michael chanced a look at him, wasn't faring any better. 
Isobel pulled him into a tight hug, then patted his cheek with a watery smile and stepped aside. Max took her place, pulling him into a bear hug. 
"I'm so proud of you," Max whispered into his ear. "And I am so happy for you, Michael."
Michael sniffled. "Thank you. Now get off me, you big lug," he whined playfully.
Max pulled back and rolled his eyes, shoving Michael gently.
"We'll see you out there," Max said with a grin. His brother put an arm around their sister's shoulder and steered her out of the room.
Michael took a deep breath, blew it out slowly and tried to contain the mess of emotions he was feeling.
He smoothed a hand down his suit jacket, straightening out imaginary wrinkles. 
"Michael?"
"Liz?" 
His sister-in-law came in and closed the door behind her gently. She had her heels in one hand, and the other one was resting on her prominent baby bump. When she turned around, she was smiling. It only took a few seconds for her to tear up and Michael chuckled and went over to hug her. 
She squeezed him within an inch of his life, and when she let him go, she smoothed a hand down his shoulders to his arms. "Look at you!" She exclaimed tearfully. "You look so handsome, Mikey."
"It's just a suit," he teased her gently. "You've seen me wear a suit before, Lizzy."
She swatted his arm and huffed when her phone buzzed in her hand. She muttered a few curses in Spanish. Michael rested his hand on her belly and frowned in mock disapproval. "Little ears, Liz."
She rolled her eyes. "Your brother is driving me insane." She took his hand and walked them both over to the chairs in the corner of the room. She sat down, and put her feet up on his thighs. "He keeps telling me to rest. Do you know what we fought about this morning?"
He couldn't keep an amused smile off his face. "What?"
"Heels. We fought about heels, Michael." She huffed.
"Why?"
"He didn't want me to wear them because, apparently they're bad for my back."
Michael looked pointedly at said heels, which she'd abandoned by the door, and then at her with a pointed lift of his eyebrows. 
She shrugged sheepishly. "They're so pretty! And who knows when I'll be able to wear them again."
He laughed and she chuckled along with him, hand rubbing absentmindedly at her belly. "How are you feeling?"
Their eyes locked and he realized with a jolt that she'd been distracting him, and that it had worked. 
"Excited." She raised an eyebrow and he deflated. "Nervous, terrified" he admitted, a little ashamed.
She settled her legs on the floor and leaned, a little awkwardly, to hold his hand with her smaller ones. "You know, I was so nervous before my wedding, I was nearly vibrating out of my skin."
He let out a breath. "Yeah?"
She smiled, her nose crinkled, and Michael couldn't help but smile too. "Oh yeah, but the minute you see him, it'll all go away."
He slid closer and hugged her, albeit awkwardly considering their positions.
Her phone rang and she smiled, exasperated and fond in equal measures. "Hi, babe," she answered. "I'm resting my feet like you told me to," she protested, then laughed at whatever Max said in reply. She stood up with a groan. "I'm fine, Max! I'm pregnant, not an invalid."
When she was at the door, she opened it, stepped out and then came back in. "Oh, and Mikey?" She smirked. "You look good."
He laughed. "Get out of here!"
.
This is the first day of my life
Swear I was born right in the doorway
I went out in the rain, suddenly everything changed
They're spreading blankets on the beach
Michael had Alex's hand in his, while the other was on his shoulder. It was a bit hard to dance slow to this song, but they didn't care, and they made it work somehow. 
Yours was the first face that I saw
I think I was blind before I met you
And I don't know where I am, I don't know where I've been
But I know where I want to go
"I love this song," Alex told him with a grin.
"And thank god for that." Michael leaned in close, the beginning of a teasing grin appearing on his face. "If you hadn't, we'd probably still be arguing over which song to dance to."
Alex huffed. "You didn't like any of my suggestions either, you know."
Michael chuckled and placed a chaste kiss on Alex's lips, then his cheek. He felt him smile and his own smile widened. 
So if you wanna be with me
With these things there's no telling
We just have to wait and see
But I'd rather be working for a paycheck
Than waiting to win the lottery, ah-ha, mm-hmm
Besides, maybe this time is different
I mean, I really think you like me
The song ended, and they stayed in each other's arms, swaying slowly and lost in each other's arms. 
Michael felt small hands push at his legs and when he looked down, he saw their four year old niece poking his leg insistently. He and Alex separated and crouched down to her level. She ignored Michael in favor of snuggling into Alex's arms, and his husband- Michael was sure he was never getting tired of saying that- sent him a smug smile from over Gemma's head. They stood up slowly and Michael put a subtle hand on Alex's back, just in case he needed a bit of support.
The second they were both standing, she held her hands up to Alex and said, "I wanna dance now," with all the authority her three feet tall body could muster. 
Michael stifled a laugh and watched adoringly as Alex picked up the little girl with an exaggerated groan. 
Michael stroked a hand down her hair, though he made sure not to mess it up, and smiled when she glanced at him. "Hey, Gem, can I dance with you?"
"No," she said decisively.
Michael clutched his chest in mild hurt and pouted. Gemma huffed and patted his cheek. "It's okay, uncle Michael; don't be sad. I'll dance with you, too." He gave the laughing Alex a smug smile and made to take her out of his arms, but the little girl pushed his hand away. He spluttered and watched her lay her head on Alex's shoulder. The other man shrugged, his shoulders shaking with laughter.
Michael huffed and stepped aside, watched Alex hug the little girl close and whisper something to her that made her giggle. He looked around, and when he spotted the water bottle at the nearest table, he realized how thirsty he was. He went to grab it, but then he was intercepted by his sister. "Let's dance," she said as she dragged him back to the dance floor. 
Michael groaned. "Now I know where Gemma gets it from," he muttered, as he allowed her to tow him behind her.
The song playing was slow, and it wasn't one he recognized. Alex was now twirling a giggling Gemma, who seemed to be having the time of her life. 
"Pigs are flying, aren't they, Michael?"
"Hmm," he said, but a second later the words registered and he tore his eyes away from the adorable sight of his husband and his niece dancing. "Cute," he told her, rolling his eyes.
"I'd be offended by you ignoring me, but I know exactly what it's like to see the guy you love with kids," she sympathized, a shit-eating grin on her face. Michael definitely did not blush, but he did roll his eyes. "It does things to ya."
"Shut up."
She suddenly laughed, and when he followed her line of sight, he joined her. Gemma seemed to be teaching Alex a dance, albeit clumsily, and his husband was definitely stifling a laugh as he tried to imitate her moves.
"Aw, she's such a spaz," she said fondly. 
Michael shook his head at her and laughed. Greg came over to them, their two month old baby sleeping in one arm and wrapped the other around Isobel. She smiled and leaned back into his embrace, closing her eyes when he kissed her cheek. Michael smiled, thankful beyond measure that she'd found someone who loved her like she deserved.
The beginning notes of a familiar song replaced the slow one, and Michael grinned when Liz, Rosa and Maria came rushing onto the dance floor, dragging a reluctant Max and an amused Kyle with them. The nine of them, plus Gemma, started jumping around and dancing like kids to the cheerful notes of Mrs' Potter's Lullaby. 
Alex, who had somehow been able to learn Gem's dance, was dancing with the little girl, both of them laughing so hard he was surprised they were still standing.
Michael stopped dancing altogether and just stared at his husband.  Alex's tie, along with his suit jacket, had been abandoned on some chair in the room, his sleeves were rolled up till his elbows, and his hair was disheveled in a way that no one else could pull off. Smiling and laughing, Michael could safely say he'd never seen him so happy as he was now. 
He made his way to him, and saw Gemma hug Alex's legs. She looked up at him with a look of pure adoration, and he returned it tenfold. 
He couldn't help but picture him like that with their own kids. His heart ached for it; for the possibility of having their own little family someday in the future. 
"Hey," Alex called out to him over the music, hand extended towards him and fingers wiggling impatiently to have his own wrapped around them. He pulled him close and pressed a sweet, lingering kiss to his cheek, then carded his hand through Michael's hair. 
Michael smiled and leaned in, kissing him tenderly and leaning his forehead oh his husband's temple. "I love you so much, Alex."
"I love you, too."
Michael leaned his head on Alex's shoulder, closed his eyes, and smiled. He'd just married the love of his life, he was surrounded by their family, and he was truly happy.
For now, it was way more than enough.
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polaristranslations · 3 years
Text
Shinobu Mustard Episode 5
036
In the end, Shinobu seemed to have given up on showing off, and thus Araragi Koyomi appeared to have lost the opportunity to show off his skills as an actor.
Once they actually met, such a contrived scheme would have been ridiculous—thinking about it, Suicidemaster was essentially sealed in the form of a little girl, too, so in terms of being a disgrace of a vampire, she was on the same level.
Incidentally, I was using vague wording like "seemed to" and "appeared to" because, along the way, the two little girls had put the humans (including the god that was formerly human) off to the side by beginning to speak in a foreign language—but what language was it, exactly?
Perhaps a language that had been used in one of the many countries that had been destroyed by "Princess Beauty"—regardless, we'd been completely left behind.
However, watching the two little girls act so cheerfully was such a pleasant sight that I couldn't get mad. It felt like the first time I was seeing Shinobu make such expressions, and from what I could tell, Suicidemaster seemed to be warmly greeting her old friend after such a long time. It was possible that some effect of the mummification remained, because she didn't seem to be able to pick herself up off of the rush mat, but her expressiveness made it clear that shew as truly glad to have reunited with Shinobu.
In a way, it was like our hard work had been rewarded—although, I suppose most of it was just me needlessly worrying.
Not to mention, you could say things had gone just as planned.
The interrogation. About the serial vampirism incident.
Assuming Shinobu hadn't forgotten about our original objective...
"They seem pretty happy, and the conversation seems to be going smoothly, so let's leave Hachikuji-chan to be the witness while we humans step away for a moment. Koyomin, come here."
"Huh? Um, no, but, Shinobu is tied to my shadow, so..."
"I set things up so that within the barrier, the two of you can act separately even while maintaining your pairing, so it's fine. Hachikuji-chan, I'll leave it to you."
"Yes, leave it to me!"
Hm? Putting aside the fact that Hachikuji had become a loyal subordinate to a person of power despite being a god, what did she mean?
We could act separately?
I wondered if I could do such a thing—wasn't it like the pairing between Shinobu and me was severed, even if it was in a limited area? And did that mean Gaen-san had anticipated from the beginning that their reunion would go well? To put up such a complex barrier—no, before that.
Regardless of whether it went well, had Gaen-san made plans for Shinobu and I to act separately from the beginning?
I didn't really understand her intentions—but, with Shinobu not introducing me to Suicidemaster as her slave, I couldn't exactly interrupt their conversation (the foreign language courses I chose were English and Spanish. Hola!), I guess I had no choice but to follow Gaen-san. Whatever Gaen-san was planning after recovering from the darkness, or mud, in the hearts of those high school girls, I had better hear about those plans—
"I would've liked it if she could have reunited with Shishirui Seishirou in the same way."
That was what Gaen-san murmured, with her words feeling more meaningful than just light conversation, as she led me through the house. And our destination ended up being Kanbaru's room—she sure knew her way around someone else's home. As expected of the onee-san who knew everything.
She was well aware of the location of her niece's room.
"If you know anything about architecture, you can pretty much tell the layout of the rooms from outside—but this is pretty awful. So, like my sister, Suruga's a messy girl, too."
However, it seemed she'd been surprised by the mess, giving her impressions in a shocked manner as she entered the room.
"I'm sorry. Normally I was supposed to have come and cleaned her room yesterday, but Higasa-chan was there, and if I went and started cleaning in front of her friend, Kanbaru would lose face."
"If that's true, then it's exceedingly mysterious why you would go out of your way to care for Suruga like that, Koyomin. Rather than just Suruga's senior, it's almost like you're her mom."
You're even more motherly than her actual mother, said Gaen-san.
I'd been described in many different ways before, but being described as motherly might be a first for me. But, being compared to the famous Gaen Tooe-san didn't exactly make me happy.
"So, what's the matter, Gaen-san? I know Hachikuji is watching over them, but Shinobu and Miss Suicidemaster—or should I say, Little Miss Suicidemaster? Well, it doesn't really matter, but I do feel a bit uneasy just leaving them on their own."
From the atmosphere around them, it didn't seem like it would suddenly turn into a scene of carnage with them saying "I came to eat you, Shinobu" and "I'll let you eat me" or anything, but I wasn't too optimistic—to get to the point, oddities were oddities because you couldn't predict what they might do in the next instant.
I wanted to return as soon as possible.
"I have two pieces of bad news," said Gaen-san.
With my life as it was, it wasn't too surprising to hear that there was no good news, but for there to be two pieces of bad news.
That was twice the sense of foreboding.
"I'll keep it short. The first is that the last missing member of the girls' basketball team, Kiseki Souwa-chan—her belongings were discovered."
"Her belongings... Just her belongings?"
"Yes. Not just her cell phone and school bag, but her school uniform, gym clothes, and basshoes. Ah, 'basshoes' means..."
"Basketball shoes. I've read 'Slam Dunk', too, so I know what it means. But... Finding only her belongings but not the girl herself...?"
I wasn't sure if it was a good or bad thing that her mummy hadn't been discovered yet, but the fact that only her belongings were found was certainly bad news—or, perhaps not bad, but ominous.
In the same way you can't start a particularly pleasant story with a school bag being abandoned by the road—I could only assume that something had happened to Kiseki-chan.
"Where were they discovered? In her room, or...?"
Remembering that the second mummy, Honnou Aburi-chan, had been discovered in her room, I brought up the location that would be least discomforting for her belongings to be discovered.
"That's a good line of thought," said Gaen-san. "Where they were discovered was in the gymnasium of Naoetsu High, in a locker in the girls' locker room."
"The girls' locker room...?"
"Don't react to the thought of the girls' locker room. No need to worry, I had a female investigator perform the search."
"It wasn't like I was wondering why you hadn't sent me to perform that task."
Regardless of whether they were male or female, Gaen-san had already crossed a line at the moment she sent an outsider into the school—she was always this sort of person, I suppose.
Alternatively, perhaps there was a student currently attending Naoetsu High that held a connection to Gaen-san, like me last year—it was certainly a possibility.
"More precisely, it's the girls' locker room exclusively used by the girls' basketball team. Each member is provided with their own locker."
The girls' basketball team sure was treated favorably.
If there was stuff like that, I guess it could be pretty hard to quit.
It was all thanks to Kanbaru's achievements, and I couldn't deny that the rest of the athletic department was a bit sloppy—but, in that case, though it wasn't as good as her own room, her locker wasn't all that discomforting to find her belongings in, right?
"In the first place, even if your subordinate managed to invade the girls' locker room, how did they manage to unlock her personal locker?"
"Koyomin, the fact that you think of invading the girls' locker room as completely natural is something I love about you. The personal lockers have combination locks, you see. From the register of names that you borrowed from the previous captain—a treasure trove of personal information—I was able to deduce the combination."
Even if she didn't use her date of birth, it wasn't as important as a bank account password or anything, so I figured she'd use a number associated with her personal information—said Gaen-san, as if it was something obvious to her.
Leaking personal information was pretty scary.
"Using that same approach, I tried to crack the passwords of the cell phones owned by the first three mummies, but unfortunately, that didn't go as well."
"Well, it would certainly be more secure than a locker. Not to mention, if you get it wrong too many times, it could erase all the data inside—but, putting that aside, how should we evaluate this discovery? Isn't it normal to find one's uniform or gym clothes in their locker?"
"If it's 'uniform or gym clothes', then yes."
That was what Gaen-san said.
"But if it's 'uniform and gym clothes', then that's very strange indeed. Was Kiseki-chan going home naked when she went missing? It would be a big deal, even if she wasn't mummified."
A big deal...
Even if she revered Kanbaru, she probably wouldn't do anything like go streaking (not even Kanbaru had done that. She was all talk, no action).
"It seems unlikely she had a spare uniform or gym clothes, either. It wasn't as messy as this room, but the belongings had been stuffed in the locker pretty sloppily—as if they were getting in the way and thus disposed of."
It was possible that Kiseki-chan was just bad at keeping things in order, but there was another interpretation—the person responsible for attacking her had roughly crammed Kiseki-chan's belongings into her locker in order to hide the evidence.
Not the person responsible.
But perhaps—the demon responsible.
"Thanks to your reconnaissance, Koyomin, it ended up occurring in the opposite order, but if Kiseki Souwa-chan's mummy had been found first, stripped of all her belongings, it would have been quite an ordeal to try and identify her... In other words, it would have been quite an ordeal to try and resolve this case."
"Is it like how, in mystery novels, the culprit destroys the victim's face and fingerprints?"
When the victims were mummified, you couldn't tell the difference.
As long as there was no blood relation like with Shinobu and Suicidemaster... As long as there was no bond, unbreakable even over six hundred years.
"But it's a little strange. Why is it that they did such a shoddy cover-up job for only Kiseki-chan?"
"It wasn't shoddy, it was malicious. Her cell phone had, of course, been turned off—for items that were shoved in so roughly, the culprit was very attentive to detail. And the fact that a vampire was able to enter the school makes it extremely dangerous for the girls' basketball team."
"......"
That was true—it was an alarming situation.
Although I wasn't sure if that was something that the specialist that had entered the school in the same way should say.
"However, to do such a cover-up job, they wouldn't just need to enter the school—they'd need to be able to open Kiseki-chan's personal locker, right? It may be possible for another member of the girls' basketball team that shares the locker room with her, but I don't think an outsider vampire would have been able to open the locker, wouldn't you say?"
The suspicion on the remaining members of the girls' basketball team had already been cleared—how had that "attentive" vampire unlocked that locker?
A combination lock. A password.
How could you open and close that without breaking it?
Gaen-san's response was clear.
"They spoke with the locker's owner. They had to have heard it from her."
They had to have heard it from her.
There was no other way.
"And then, if I were to presume the reason that the cover-up job was only done for Kiseki-chan, I would arrive at a rather unpleasant conclusion, Koyomin. Basically, it would mean that the fact that we were using the mummies' belongings to identify them has been leaked."
"Ah."
"There's a high chance that our information is being exposed to the vampire."
Rather than bad news.
It was the worst possible news.
037
Despite my apprehensions about leaking the girls' personal information, there ended up being a high probability that information regarding our investigation had been leaked, which came as a shock—but the worst news was yet to come.
Earlier, I had likened the culprit's actions to destroying the victim's face or fingerprints in a mystery novel—but could you even take the fingerprints of a mummy? That was what came to mind, so I asked Gaen-san.
The response was a simple "no".
"It's just like how we can't distinguish between their faces. They're just skin and bones, after all. If we could accurately get their fingerprints, then we could've used them for cell phones with fingerprint locks, though."
That's right, in this day and age, fingerprints were also a mass of personal information in that sense, as well—however, coincidentally or otherwise, my question happened to connect to the second piece of bad news that Gaen-san wanted to convey to me by temporarily severing the pairing between Shinobu and me.
"Speaking of a mass of personal information, there's DNA analysis."
That was what Gaen-san said.
"However, we certainly wouldn't be able to do that—if we tried to analyze genes that had undergone vampirification in a hospital, that in itself would be considered a strange disease. It would turn into a panic."
"Yes, of course. That's why I've avoided going to hospitals and getting physical examinations."
"On the other hand, it doesn't mean that the analysis of vampire genes in itself is impossible. We've managed to analyze the DNA of the four mummies discovered so far, rough as it was."
"Hm? Um... What does that mean, exactly?"
"Originally, it was done for the sake of identifying whether all four of them were done in by the same culprit. Considering all the possibilities, it's not necessarily the case that the same vampire attacked all four high school girls, right? You could even come up with the theory that there were four, or perhaps even five, vampires that had visited this town."
What an insane theory.
Especially in this town, which had become overrun with monsters during the absence of a god.
"So, um, what were the results? Don't tell me..."
"Ah, to start with the conclusion, all four mummies had their blood sucked by the same vampire—they're all, so to speak, thralls of the same vampire."
It must be like a DNA test done to determine parentage.
Perhaps, as a result of corporate efforts, the world of oddities has also advanced.
Like Hitagi, who kept going to the hospital because of her symptoms from the omoshi-gani, perhaps one day oddity phenomena will end up being simply a rare disease capable of being treated.
"Then, there's no reason to change our plan of action, right?"
"Rather than not changing, at this rate we're going back to the starting point."
Gaen-san said as she folded her arms.
"The problem is that those vampire genes were a pretty close match to Suicidemaster's genes, which I collected last night."
A DNA test to determine parentage.
Gathering evidence based on corporate efforts.
"......"
That—was bad. No, it wasn't that bad, but the reason Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster had been listed as the prime suspect was primarily because of circumstantial evidence and process of elimination—the cryptic message that had been left at the scene of the crime, and the fact that she had come to this town with such perfect timing.
However, DNA analysis was a completely different beast in terms of evidence. In the modern judicial system, it was like the king of evidence, brought out as a trump card.
"That's a dangerous way of thinking about it. There are plenty of examples of DNA analysis having failed, and it's a field with plenty of room for development. Not to mention, human error is something that's unavoidable—treating it as the king of evidence could mean it ends up a hotbed for false accusations."
That was true. It was too early to decide.
Even Gaen-san had been careful enough to word it "a pretty close match"—and, even if Miss Suicidemaster and the four mummies' genes were a match, logically, the vampire genes of Shinobu or me would also be "a pretty close match".
A parent-child relationship—from Suicidemaster's perspective, I was essentially her "grandchild"... Although, right now, Shinobu and I didn't exactly have any bloodsucking abilities...
"Right, so, it's a fact that the suspicion on Suicidemaster has gotten stronger, so the implication of tonight's interrogation has changed—no matter what that little girl says, we're going to have to secure her. That's why I set up this special barrier, although I'd also like to avoid it turning into a battle if possible. Putting aside me being a pacifist, even if it may be easy to exterminate the starved, weakened Suicidemaster, I don't know how the now-cooperative Shinobu might react to that chain of events—and not knowing how Shinobu might react means not knowing how you might react, Koyomin."
"Um, I probably wouldn't—"
But I didn't exactly know myself well enough to speak at that moment. And last night, I had lost quite a lot of trust, so that would make what I said even less convincing.
"...Even if Suicidemaster, that anorexic vampire, let hunger get the better of her and started laying hands on every high school girl in the area... If we manage to return all the mummified girls back to normal, would she end up not being judged for this incident?"
In the first place, oddities couldn't be judged based on human laws. Even if I couldn't expect her to be certified harmless, couldn't we be flexible enough to let her go in secret...? Although that still left a problem that couldn't be ignored...
"Once a bear has gotten a taste of humans, you have no choice but to kill it—it depends on how much you subscribe to that opinion. In a way, Suicidemaster has been on a diet for six hundred years. Ever since you became a vampire, Koyomin, you've probably never needed to diet, but once you break a fast, you end up on an incredible rebound—you end up eating mountains and drinking oceans."
"But—"
"There's no need to rush, Koyomin. I may have started with the conclusion, but I don't want you to jump to conclusions. There's still evidence to negate the theory that Suicidemaster was responsible for the crime—even if we put aside how much of Shinobu-chan's testimony to believe, there's still the strange idea that an ancient vampire that had lived for a thousand years snuck into the girls' locker room and messed with the lockers. How probable would you say that is?"
It was as she said—and, in the same vein, the attempt to delay the discovery of the fourth mummy, Kanguu-chan, by submerging her in the reservoir was also a weird trick unbecoming of a traditional oddity.
And, under that theory (strange idea?), there was still no explanation for why Suicidemaster herself had turned into a mummy.
There was no logic to her cryptobiosis.
Nothing fit together.
While the suspicion grew stronger, the credibility faded.
In the end, the air of tension had abruptly increased, and there was still no change in the fact that we had to hear from the vampire herself—and it was as I thought that...
"My master."
From behind the sliding door that I'd closed earlier, Shinobu's voice spoke.
"Suicidemaster wants to speak with you. Will you talk with her?"
038
"I'm the death-prepared, death-inevitable, death-certain vampire, Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster. You may approach."
It seemed she'd managed to get up, for she was now sitting down on a stone in the rock garden of the Japanese mansion. She greeted me with quite the ghastly smile, not caring about the white clothing that had fallen open when she'd broken the seals earlier. I'd thought this earlier when they were exchanging their roar of laughter, but it seemed the characteristic smile of Shinobu, or Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, was apparently something that was inherited from her progenitor who birthed and named her.
Or perhaps, since they were both golden-haired and golden-eyed, their impressions were similar... However, though they were both little girls, though they had the same expressions, it probably wasn't just my imagination that led me to feel that she didn't resemble Shinobu all that much.
Rather than not resembling Shinobu.
I suppose you could say she resembled Shinobu from the past.
That was how easygoing and worldly this vampire had become over the past year—and Suicidemaster must have felt it as well.
"N-nice to meet you. I am Araragi Koyomi. Erm..."
How was I supposed to introduce myself?
Even though I didn't have to pretend to be a slave, it didn't mean I should be honest and explain the situation as-is—it surely wasn't just putting on airs when Shinobu had feared that I might be blown to death if she learned of the situation in which Shinobu had been sealed in my shadow and turned into a slave.
How much of it had Shinobu explained in that foreign language of hers...? In the first place, did she understand it if I introduced myself in Japanese? Judging from her own introduction, she seemed pretty proficient at it...
"I didn't live such a long life for nothing. I've learned most languages by now."
Ooh.
That was something I wanted to tell Meniko about.
"Conversing with your food is one of the fundamentals of a good meal."
...I definitely couldn't tell her about that.
And please don't say something that made you even more suspicious—even though there was some distance, Gaen-san, the administrator of the specialists, was still over there, sitting on the porch of the mansion with Hachikuji.
The value system of food, huh?
Well, even though humans can live just fine on a vegetarian diet, they still go through the trouble of raising and eating meat not "to live" but "because it tastes good", so I couldn't exactly say anything haughtily.
Taking the wrong logic would probably lead us to the conclusion that plants, living on photosynthesis with sunlight and water, lead the most ethically noble lifestyle.
But, you know, something about her character seemed chic compared to her juvenile appearance. It was pretty dashing the way she wore her white clothing like a gown or a robe, and, well, at the age of six, she wasn't that different from a boy of the same age.
The genuine vampire, the ancient vampire.
What a dandy.
With that in mind, her open white clothing seemed more like a cape than a gown or robe—the little girl held a charisma that made me want to kneel, in a way different from how I felt with "Princess Acerola".
"No need to humble yourself. I won't bite you."
What a fancy figure of speech.
On top of that, the way she said "you [kisama]" was a nice touch. I wasn't offended at all—this little girl was like a cluster of dandyism. I'd thought of myself as an expert on little girls, but it seemed there was a type like this, too.
"I called you here to give you my thanks—well, not just that, but first, my thanks."
"Th-thanks...?"
"For several things. First off, for reviving me after I'd died—and, even before that, for reviving my former thrall, Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade."
I give you my thanks.
Said the little girl, bowing her head—even the way she lowered her head was cool. If she was like this in the form of a little girl, how much charisma could she have had in her heyday?
Or rather, if she so straightforwardly thanked me like this, then it felt like I was beaten to the punch—she'd splendidly gotten the drop on me.
Even though I'd approached this face-to-face meeting with suspicions in mind—and when I looked to Shinobu for help...
"Well, I've more or less told her everything."
That was her curt response.
No, rather than curt, Shinobu herself seemed to be a bit bewildered.
"However, it was a bit meaningless. I myself haven't exactly grasped the full extent of the situation. At this point, I figured it would be better to have you participate, my master, rather than just talking between us two."
At any rate, she's denied the suspicion of being the culprit behind the serial vampirism incidents, said Shinobu, as if tacking that on at the end—but was that something you should just tack on?
That's like the crux of the crux of things.
Despite my disorientation, Suicidemaster continued.
"Though she was a thrall, Princess Acerola—Kissshot—soon became manager of her own branch. She became independent from me. It's kind of uncool to come crashing in like this as if I were her guardian, but I couldn't stay in hiding when I heard a rumor that she had been exterminated in this country. I just wanted to make sure that she was okay—although she doesn't exactly look okay, but I'm glad she's still alive. In any case, I'm glad I could see her again."
"Uh-huh—"
After six hundred years of no communication, it seemed like a fitting reason for her to come see her at this timing—but with her answering my question before I could ask it, she'd beaten me to the punch again.
Two moves in a row.
That wasn't exactly fair, was it?
In any case, Suicidemaster said that she was worried about Shinobu's safety and came all the way to this country, beating her old bones, to see how she was doing.
It wasn't that she came to dine on Shinobu as gourmet food at all—
"Hmph. I'd thought you'd died, too."
Shinobu spoke bitterly, but she didn't seem all that mad about it.
If it was true that she became manager of her own branch (a phrase that surely sounded strange because she was forcing herself to use Japanese, although it probably wasn't a mistranslation), then it seemed likely that what existed between them wasn't a master-servant relationship, but a friendship.
Friends that could talk to each other and laugh together on equal terms.
Thanks to my relationship with Meniko, I can more or less understand how important that is—there's no room for doubt that I have friendships with Hanekawa, Hachikuji, and Kanbaru, but I couldn't help but feel that our friendships were tied down by love and hate, or by advantages and disadvantages, or out of the obligations of this transient world.
The best example of this would be my childhood friend, Oikura, but even if our friendship were to end, there would still be the sense that we were inextricably linked.
But the strange thing about human relations is that it's not really desirable to break off relations, like what happened with Sengoku.
"Well, that wasn't the only reason. Even though I'd learned Japanese, I had never actually been to Japan, see. So I wanted to get a look at Mount Fuji."
"What a blatant lie!"
Shinobu sounded as if she was amazed, but look—you told the same lie last year.
A parent-child relationship—a parent-child determination.
"......"
"So, I had a favor to ask of you, former thrall of the former Heartunderblade. I've already confirmed Kissshot's safety, and I'd like to go back to my hideout right about now, but I heard there's something fishy going on. So I was wondering, you think you can help me get out of this country?"
I wondered if she was thinking of the current situation as if she messed up the departure procedures for her destination. Well, that would be a pretty serious situation, too.
"'Specially since there seems to be this scary lady glaring at me," said Suicidemaster, glancing in Gaen-san's direction—but she wasn't a scary lady, but an onee-san that knew everything.
It made for quite the visualization of this interrogation.
"Oh yeah, speaking of scary ladies in this country—nah, that's not important right now. So, how about it? Former thrall of the former Heartunderblade?"
I wasn't sure about how she called me that.
I never thought that she would come ask me for help in fleeing the country... But if Gaen-san wasn't making any move to interrupt, did that mean we should continue with this clumsy conversation?
"I gotta say, I'm pretty happy. Since that 'Princess Beauty' ended up finding her ideal prince and getting her happy ending. But now that I'm here, I figured I'd take this chance to see what that prince can do—how about it? Won't you help me out for a bit?"
Won't you help me out?
Araragi-kun was weak to those words.
The tragedy of my high school years could be said to have all started with those words, and in the end, even Ougi-chan took advantage of them.
However, since then, I'd grown just a little bit (specifically, about a year)—I knew that there were things I could do and things I couldn't.
Even if my girlfriend called me a prince, I knew for sure that I wasn't one.
"Don't say something so embarrassing!"
Shinobu was acting bashful with an unusual level of excitement. What's with that casual language?
Where'd your usual character go off to?
"...A friend of Shinobu's is a friend of mine, so I'm willing to help—but before that, there's something I'd like to make clear. There's something that I absolutely need to make clear—"
She'd called it fishy, but she surely wasn't so uninvolved as to describe it like that—how should I ask this?
If she'd already denied the charges to Shinobu, then it would be pointless to ask her the same thing—should I change my approach, then?
She may have already talked to Shinobu about this, too...
"Suicidemaster. How did you end up turning into a mummy and getting buried in the dirt? An existence as great as yourself."
I didn't really know Suicidemaster well enough to describe her as a great existence (I'd only just heard of her yesterday), but as the progenitor who birthed and named the King of Oddities, it was enough to make me revere her.
Fundamentally...
"Ka ka. I can't say I know how I ended up in the dirt. I figure someone went and buried me on their own."
"Someone..."
"Turning into a mummy? That's a bit easier to explain. I haven't told Kissshot about that yet, either."
Was that so? I looked to Shinobu to confirm, and she responded, "Ah, yes, that's right." Maybe you'd gotten a bit too excited, but if you take such a lazy approach to this interrogation, which was the original goal, then that would be bothersome.
But, well, I guess it was to be expected.
As vampires, where death was a regular occurrence and life was of little importance, the question of "why were you dead" could possibly be too fundamental to be discussed.
Like her catchphrase, "Somehow or other, it seems I've died again"—or perhaps like the nickname, death-prepared, death-inevitable, death-certain vampire—for Suicidemaster, dying was not at all anything major.
That was how I understood it, but.
"Despite having lived for a thousand years, that may have been the first time I died like that, as far as I can remember."
I couldn't help but react to that comment—that was pretty major.
"Wh-what do you mean? What—what was the cause of death?"
Asking the victim directly about their cause of death was what you'd only see in spirit medium-like mysteries, but as I acted that out in real life, Suicidemaster responded pompously.
"Food poisoning."
"F—food poisoning?"
"Yeah. I ate something weird. Let's see, in Japanese..."
Said Suicidemaster.
"I guess you would call that type of food, a high school girl?"
039
"I guess it was like a week ago?
"The unit of time differs from region to region, and, as an ancient vampire, it's the same to me whether it's a week ago or a thousand years ago.
"So I dunno if it was a week ago or a thousand years ago—but anyway, a week ago.
"That was when I arrived at this town. The rumored Far East island country, Japan—huh, is 'Far East island country' not a compliment?
"Either way, I think it's a big deal when things are taken too far.
"I came to check on the safety of the legend I gave rise to, Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, so it was pretty hilarious that I couldn't ensure my own safety as soon as I arrived.
"Since I failed to land and shattered.
"Somehow or other, it seemed I'd died again.
"But for me, there was something that shocked me more than the fact that I died—according to the god that came out to welcome me, there'd been some kind of barrier that'd been put up.
"A barrier to protect the town.
"They say, 'Devils out! Fortune in!' as part of the traditions of this country, right? Ka ka, 'Devils out', huh—that's a pretty tough greeting for a vampire.
"But that barrier wasn't the reason I'd broken into pieces, y'know? My certain death, my thousandth, millionth, billionth, or trillionth death was self-destruction from a failed landing.
"Happens pretty often.
"I dunno if that barrier set up by that god was something that she took over from someone or whatever, but it's not anything with any offensive power—just an interfering barrier that makes you lost.
"In a sense, it's a pretty nasty barrier compared to the aggressive type of barrier which is easier to understand, but the problem is that that nastiness didn't work on me at all.
"The security.
"The metal detector at the entry gate, if you will.
"Didn't respond at all to this Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster—in other words, it didn't even take me as a threat.
"Yeah.
"It wasn't like I came into this country by breaking through a strong barrier with my tremendous power—it was because I didn't have that tremendous power that I managed to slip into this country.
"Never thought I would end up being this weak.
"Growing old sucks, huh?
"I didn't even notice it right away. Kind of a bother that I couldn't really feel the symptoms—like some old man who doesn't realize he's old. Especially when that causes problems for others.
"As I was undergoing an immigration check by that god over there, I belatedly realized what I looked like.
"I've heard rumors that Japanese people have baby faces even as they age, but the gods of this country were really this young, was what I thought, excited beyond my years to experience the exotic cultural differences. But there was something wrong.
"Compared to the young god.
"I was even younger—the tough and cool me was shorter, with a thinner torso, smaller hands, thinner arms, shorter eggs, and a lighter body.
"If there was anything that was long, it would be my hair.
"So that's what it was.
"You don't notice changes in yourself until you talk to someone else, until you use them as a mirror—and I've been living in hiding for a long time.
"Not that vampires show up in mirrors. So that wasn't good, either.
"While I was dying uncontrollably and running from vicious vampire hunters, it seemed that I was driven to the point where I couldn't maintain my perfect body, even in appearance.
"Somehow or other, it seemed I'd regressed into a younger form.
"Before worrying about Kissshot, I needed to worry about myself, first—wasn't it like I was the one on the verge of death, here?
"According to the god's meaningful navigation instructions, the legendary vampire whom I named Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade was indeed in this town, but if I were to see her in this state, I would only end up worrying her instead of renewing our old friendship."
"I had a trauma.
"A trauma of letting my once beloved thrall die after making them worry—not to mention I was also in a young form at the time.
"Ka ka.
"It's ironic that an old vampire, who has stubbornly refused to kill herself, should take on a younger form after living for so long—no matter how many thousand years I live to see history repeat itself, I don't think I want to repeat my mistakes.
"That's just me being cool, though.
"To describe it using the words of this language, it would be 'putting on airs'.
"I held pride in having lived for a thousand years—I held pride in being a progenitor that birthed and named my thrall. Saying I didn't want to worry her was just a figure of speech.
"Basically.
"I wanted to put on airs.
"I didn't want to disappoint my bud that I'd reunited with after six hundred years—I didn't want her to think, 'she's changed', but I didn't want her to think, 'she's the same as ever'.
"I just wanted her to think this.
"'That's my friend for you.'
"That was what I wanted.
"Now that we've met like this and the punch line was that we'd both taken on young forms, it's obvious how unnecessary trial and error such a thing was, but I was very serious at the time.
"Tough, cool, and serious.
"Of course, I'm making it sound like it was a crazy long time ago, but it was just a week ago—a week ago indistinguishable from a thousand years ago.
"At the very least I thought I'd come in full dress for the occasion, at least on the surface level—even if I couldn't show up in a complete form, I thought I would at least try to dress up.
"That's why.
"I made a move on the local food here.
"I bared my fangs—at a high school girl."
040
Wasn't this different from what she said earlier? Hadn't Suicidemaster denied that she was the culprit in the serial vampirism incident?
Plus, didn't she suffer from anorexia, unable to take in any other "food" after being entranced by the taste of the food known as "Princess Beauty" six hundred years ago?
Wasn't it that she turned from a mature woman into a little girl because of malnutrition, not because she got older? —Those were the question marks running through my mind.
However, I couldn't say anything.
I couldn't interject into Suicidemaster's narration—and Shinobu stayed silent as well.
What was she thinking. What was she deciding?
To stick with humans, or to stick with oddities.
Was she thinking about that?
Or perhaps, was she still believing in her friend's innocence, even after such a grand confession?
So innocently?
Though it was natural that Hachikuji, a neutral and mediating god, did not interfere here, it was a bit surprising that Gaen-san remained seated on the porch, not moving—with this confession, you would think that it would confirm Suicidemaster's guilt and allow for concrete measures to be taken immediately.
In the end, although we considered various things like if she knew about prime numbers or if she would be able to cover up a crime, but the bottom line was that it was Occam's razor and that ancient vampire was the culprit—was that just the uninteresting truth?
No matter how many question marks danced through my mind, were there any major points of doubt left before the current confession that deserved special mention? Was it right to take the results of the DNA test and the "B777Q" message as they were?
She bared her fangs at a high school girl.
For the sake of putting on airs.
Suicidemaster's nonchalant attitude as she told me that was something that was familiar to me—needless to the say, it was the same attitude that Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade had during that hellish spring break that I spent.
The fact that they were both trying to make themselves look good for the other party made it sound like a fairy tale with a moral lesson, and I could see how that might be an example of like attracts like, but when it came to the similarity in their lack of guilt, it wasn't as funny.
During that spring break, that King of Oddities had no qualms about feeding on humans—she even thought that humans were born to be eaten by vampires.
The top of the food chain.
The apex, far above us.
Insensitive to the point that she didn't even consider unabashedly speaking like that insensitive—but as far as Suicidemaster was concerned, it would be not only insensitive but also suicidal to make a speech in front of us here, in the name of confession.
A suicidal act.
A vampire with suicidal tendencies.
That was also familiar to me.
It was memory fresh in my mind—it would never fade.
Even if a year or a thousand years passed, it would never fade.
Without guilt, without shame, but rather with pride—Suicidemaster continued.
041
"I went down the mountain where that god lived, and I set my sights on a high school girl walking alone at night—to be honest, anyone would do.
"They were emergency rations.
"Yeah, yeah, of course I know. That way of thinking was opportunistic—really, growing old sucks. I understand why you're silent here, Kissshot—were you disappointed at my way of thinking?
"If you ask me if I really wanted to bend my policy as a gourmet just to make myself look good, I can only say that I really did at the time.
"That's why I incurred a punishment.
"If I was going to throw away my policy anyway, I should have thrown it away completely, but I stubbornly clung to my pride as a gourmet.
"Because I still thought in my head that they were just rations for the sake of emergency, I failed to carefully inspect my food.
"I figured I'd eat noncommittally, halfheartedly, without being choosy—if I chose, it would make it seem like that food was 'special' to me, y'know?
"I didn't want that.
"But even though I didn't want that, I also didn't want to eat something reluctantly—the ideal scenario would be the food jumping in when I opened my mouth, so that I had an excuse to eat food not in accordance with my will, not measuring up to my level, and not consistent with my beliefs.
"Yes, former thrall of the former Heartunderblade. Just as you treated me to the soup from the Blood Pond Hell—I heard that's how you 'reverted' me, isn't that right? You have a complex expression on your face.
"Well, once you've tasted nectar like from six hundred years ago, you can't hope for anything better—no matter what you eat, it's bound to be tasteless.
"Once you know the best of the best, there's nothing you can do but settle for less—I knew that, but I couldn't help but still obsess over it.
"So, even it was for the sake of dressing up, if I went about choosing my food, I would inevitably compare it to 'Princess Beauty'.
"I guess it was also putting on airs to try and minimize the angle at which I bent my policy? I wonder if it's like getting old and trying to straighten out your bent back?
"Well, whatever it was, in hindsight, I didn't exactly have much respect for my food.
"In this country, you have table manners where you say 'Thanks for the meal' and 'It was delicious', right? I just don't really get those, y'see.
"There isn't a phrase that makes me less thankful than 'Thanks for the meal'... And saying 'It was delicious' is practically the opposite of delicious.
"That was what I thought.
"Just didn't understand feeling gratitude towards my food—or the idea that it's great to eat with gratitude, that it's impolite to leave leftovers, or that we shouldn't kill living things for reasons other than eating them.
"Originally, at its best, eating is supposed to be an act of toying with life—it's entertainment.
"So that's why, for me.
"Eating wasn't living.
"Eating was loving.
"At that time, I should have said 'Thanks for the meal'. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. That was what I should have done.
"Nevertheless, in an unprincipled way.
"I sank my teeth into a high school girl as if I was sampling food, like a dieter saying, 'This doesn't really count as eating, okay?'—and so I incurred a punishment.
"The result was food poisoning.
"Thanks to the poison of that high school girl.
"Somehow or other, it seemed I'd died again."
042
...Huh? What the heck?
Her story had ended so quickly that my comprehension couldn't keep up—to that heavily thematic and therefore weary downer of a story, what had the punch line been again?
Food poisoning?
Was she saying that the blood of Japanese high school girls wasn't suited to her constitution? Just like how travel guidebooks always have it written down somewhere whether or not you can drink water at your destination—whether it's soft water or hard water, unboiled water or drinking water...
Of course, there was also the simple fact that if you suddenly eat something right after starving yourself, you can get sick from it. There have been cases where people have suddenly eaten meat right after dieting, causing an upset stomach—or, in the worst-case scenario, stomach rupture—
Or perhaps.
The high school girls' poison. Mud. Murky.
Even Gaen-san, hardened by years of experience, had been brought down a notch by the murky depths of the girls' basketball team of Naoetsu High, but could that murkiness have come through in their blood, yet another mass of personal information? That's exactly what the Japanese would call, "affected by toxicity"—that murkiness.
Was it in their blood, too?
All of this was just conjecture, and it was probably a complication caused by a multitude of reasons—the explanation that should not be forgotten is that, no matter what country, what shape, what type of non-toxic food, blood or flesh, Suicidemaster's body simply could not accept any other human besides "Princess Beauty".
Rejection. Anorexia.
That in itself was fine.
That in itself, along with ethics, could be put aside for now—in that case, it would end up that Suicidemaster desiccated immediately after biting into a high school girl.
Falling into cryptobiosis.
It would end up that she turned into a mummy.
Though there was some embellishment in her talking about herself, it didn't seem like she was lying... But wasn't there something weird about that?
There were four, perhaps even five victims.
But if she turned into a mummy the very first time, then the serial nature gets cut off—the serial nature?
Serial nature?
Shinobu had said that Suicidemaster had denied being the culprit of the 'serial vampirism incidents', if I remembered correctly—but that would mean?
"...Oops. Even this onee-san that knows everything has lost her edge."
Gaen-san's voice came like a downer from where she sat.
"In this state, I won't be able to look good to my juniors. I swear I'll never call myself 'Gaen THE Know-It-All Izuko' again."
Er, it's not like you've ever called yourself by that bizarre name before.
What's with that 'THE'?
"If I was going to use as a basis the idea of turning into a mummy after failing to become a vampire, I should have kept in mind the possibility of turning into a mummy after performing the act of vampirism—I'd known about it, but examples of such are pretty valuable."
Basis [kichou] and valuable [kichou].
To that usage of homophones, our visitor from abroad raised her golden eyebrows curiously, but I felt similarly—what did she mean?
It didn't really help if you figured it out first.
Even if the cause of her mummification was food poisoning, didn't that just add to the number of mysteries?... What was going on?
At least, I understood the circumstances that led to her mummification.
There are two reasons why you want to eat something. Because you like it, and because you hate it—and there are two reasons why you don't want to eat something—because you like it, and because you hate it.
Both were wise sayings from Hachikuji Mayoi, but for that reason, that's why Suicidemaster went for whatever she could lay her hands on, without being particular or fussy about what she chose.
She went for whatever she could lay her hands on, in a manner quite unbefitting of a gourmet—not to mention, not counting her consumption as a "meal", like the wisdom of a dieter.
Well, you could say the moral to this story was that such cunning wisdom comes at a price, just like in dieting—however, the mystery of who buried Suicidemaster in the mountain after she fell victim to food poisoning and became mummified via cryptobiosis was never fully resolved.
Though I'm sure Suicidemaster herself felt like she wanted to climb into a hole, who was it that literally put that vampire that failed to suck blood underground?
Who was it that buried her alive?
"The high school girls that became mummified after failing to become vampires—the vampire that became mummified after failing in her vampirism—if I were to add one more pattern to this."
It would be a high school girl that succeeded in becoming a vampire.
That was what the administrator of the specialists said as she stood up.
"I finally understood the reason the series of crimes didn't seem to fit together—it wasn't just one vampire master. Along the way, the vampire was replaced by another."
"R—replaced?"
In mysteries—and this wasn't just limited to Ellery Queen—there were tricks that were considered fair... But I thought having multiple crimes was considered unfair?
And it wasn't like vampires were coming to this town in droves, not to mention there was the results of the DNA test that I'd just heard about—ah.
Late as it was, I finally arrived at understanding.
Upon realizing what the conclusion was, I realized it could only be that—a replacement, a substitution.
Until just the day before yesterday, I hadn't really thought about what would have happened if I had failed to become a vampire, and for some reason at some point, I had assumed that all vampirism had failed in this specific, unusual case—but of course, there was a case where that wasn't for certain.
The case where they succeeded.
The case where, even if the vampire master became a mummy as a result—the thrall was still alive and well.
In other words, if you consider that the high school girl, who was arbitrarily bitten by Suicidemaster the moment that they met, continued on to bite the other high school girls afterwards, then that resolves the strangeness of the crimes not fitting together.
It's no wonder that the DNA test resulted in a "pretty close match"—if it's a parent-child relationship or a descendant relationship, then of course the vampire genes would match.
Whether it was heaven or paradise, as a person who tasted Princess Acerola's saliva in that place, I had to say that it was extremely unnatural how lacking in etiquette it seemed for a gourmet vampire who had experienced the same taste to go on to target only the youth of Japan. But if it was a high school girl targeting other high school girls, it made perfect sense—no.
It wasn't just a high school girl targeting other high school girls.
If it was a member of the girls' basketball team targeting other members of the girls' basketball team—it made even more sense.
I could think of any number of motives—their murkiness.
Spartan training. Peer pressure. Frustration. Envy. Rivalry. Punishment. Disharmony. Collective responsibility. Discord. Suspicion. Paranoia. Injuries. Stress. Unease. Academic decline—
"Eh? But, wait just a moment, Araragi-san. Hasn't the suspicion on the girlsbas been cleared up already? Have you already forgotten my distinguished contribution as intermediary for your phone call?"
"Hachiku-jin, it would be troublesome if you went that far to take responsibility for acting as intermediary for my phone call."
True. That was true.
Using the list as a reference, Gaen-san had already confirmed the safety and innocence of every member of the girls' basketball team—on top of safeguarding each of the hundred members, they were also supervising them.
However.
There must really be something wrong with me, to not have realized until now that there was one member of the girls' basketball team that was not being supervised—Kiseki Souwa.
I'd more or less assumed that the "missing person", as Kanbaru had described it, had also fallen victim to the vampire, but even if that had been the truth.
That didn't necessarily mean that she'd been mummified.
Perhaps, she had succeeded in becoming a vampire—and perhaps, in the darkness of the night, she may be seeking revenge on her former human friends.
043
The ups and downs of realizing that the girl I'd been worried about was actually the vicious assailant of her teammates made for a bumpy ride for my weak mind, but if I were to give up everything now, I wouldn't be able to say I'd grown since my spring break at seventeen or Golden Week at eighteen.
For now, let's pretend that I'm a tough guy that can handle a full revolution on a roller coaster, and sort this out.
Kiseki Souwa.
If I remembered correctly, she was a second-year—of course, even though her name was on the list, she had already gone missing, so unlike the other members of the club, there was no confirmation of her safety. If anything, they were still out there looking for her mummy.
But they wouldn't be able to find it.
If that mummy didn't exist.
How do you account for the uniform, gym clothes, cell phone, and school bag stuffed into the personal locker in the girls' locker room of the Naoetsu High gymnasium?
If she was the one who stuffed everything into the locker herself, then breaking into the school and into the girls' locker room would be a piece of cake—she would use her own route and unlock her own door with her own hands.
If the information on our side of the investigation had been leaked, and if she knew that Gaen-san's team was out looking for Kiseki-chan's mummy, then she could have tried to disrupt the investigation by shoving those personal items into her own locker—even though there was no way to find the mummy itself because it wasn't there, by shoving the uniform and gym clothes in at the same time, the search target pretended as if the damage had already been done.
By fabricating the assumption that she had already become a mummy, she would be able to move as she pleased—and in that case, that would apply to the two living messages, or signatures, that I had asked Meniko to decipher.
"D/V/S". "F/C".
Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster, and Fan Club—those interpretations of the code were probably right on the mark, but in the end, they were just fakes set up by Kiseki-chan.
When Kiseki-chan had her blood sucked by Suicidemaster, not like a moth to a flame but a high school girl to a vampire's mouth, Suicidemaster would naturally have given her name—as she did to me, she would have given her name as "Deathtopia Virtuoso Suicidemaster".
In other words, Kiseki-chan remembered the name of the vampire that attacked her—and, assuming she was the one to bury and hide Suicidemaster's mummy in the mountains.
Her scheme was to blame her own vampiric activities on Suicidemaster.
Like a human.
As Shinobu was now, it seemed that being vampirified by Suicidemaster would lead you to "inherit" golden hair and golden eyes, so I could imagine that her appearance and atmosphere would have changed greatly from her human days.
When I was vampirified by Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, I didn't gain golden hair and golden eyes, but my body had still become rather muscular even without any training.
We'd wondered whether or not the high school girl had left the school naked with both her uniform and gym clothes being stuffed into the locker, but if Kiseki-chan did in fact bury Suicidemaster's mummy in the mountain, then that could be explained without a hitch.
The naked little girl's mummy.
Hachikuji had said that the little girl's mummy hadn't been naked from the beginning.
When she was Suicidemaster, before becoming a mummy, she naturally had to have been wearing clothes—so where did those clothes go?
If they weren't buried with her, then someone might be wearing them right now, after an adjustment to the size—someone who had buried Suicidemaster.
Taking the name of the death-prepared, death-inevitable, death-certain vampire, pretending to be her, dressing up as her, and attacking her teammates—it was possible that Kuchimoto Kyoumi, who left that dying message on her flash cards, may have fallen for the fake and left the message "B777Q", not realizing that the vampire who attacked her had been her teammate.
Or perhaps the message itself was a fake left by Kiseki-chan for the criminal investigation squad—at the very least, "F/C" was certainly that.
I couldn't imagine how it happened, but when Kiseki-chan found out that suspicion was directed at the members of the girls' basketball team, she tried to make the investigators look in a different direction.
In other words, Kanbaru Suruga's fan club.
If she was a member of the girls' basketball team, which was strongly influenced by Kanbaru, then there was no way she didn't know about this organization—although it didn't seem like she knew that the group had been disbanded without a trace.
At any rate, she tried to hide herself, hide her crime, try to pin the blame on others, make up evidence, et cetera—
All of these things were things that vampires were not likely to do, and such unnaturalness, more novel than innovative, made sense if you considered that she had just become a vampire.
Destruction of evidence, creation of an alibi, fabrication, disturbance—it was a rather human-like crime, by a vampire filled with humanity.
With this, disregarding the mummification of Suicidemaster herself, the mummification of the high school girls may not even be a failure.
In fact, I couldn't help but think that it was Kiseki-chan's revenge to put them in a half-dead state, neither alive nor dead—she could have taken the texture of Suicidemaster's mummy as reference when she was burying it.
And if I wanted to, I could take it as a good sign that she didn't want to fully kill off her friends from when she was human...
"After unraveling all the confusing parts, the problem was just a matter of order. Just like how the second and third mummies were discovered were actually attacked by the vampire third and second, Kiseki Souwa, whom we'd assumed had become the fifth mummy, was actually the first victim—no, the zeroth victim."
In other words, like this.
The order in which the mummies were discovered was:
The first mummy——Harimaze Kie
The second mummy——Honnou Aburi
The third mummy——Kuchimoto Kyoumi
(The little girl's mummy——DVS)
The fourth mummy——Kanguu Misago
The fifth mummy (assumed)——Kiseki Souwa
However, the actual order of the victims was:
The zeroth victim——Kiseki Souwa (Culprit: DVS)
(The 0.5th victim——DVS (Food poisoning))
The first victim——Harimaze Kie (Culprit: Kiseki)
The second victim——Kuchimoto Kyoumi (Culprit: Kiseki)
The third victim——Honnou Aburi (Culprit: Kiseki)
The fourth victim——Kanguu Misago (Culprit: Kiseki)
That's how it was.
Since all of the mummies were vampire mummies, there wasn't anything like an estimated time of death, so it would be hard to ascertain the time of the mummification for Kanguu-chan, who'd been submerged in the reservoir... But this was the truth behind the serial vampirism incidents that had taken place from the night before last, to last night.
"Oho, is that so. You think of some pretty clever things, both you guys and that high school girl."
Suicidemaster spoke as if she was truly impressed—although it sounded, or at least seemed to sound, like she was making fun of me.
Well, to an ancient vampire who'd seen the fall of a country firsthand, was born in a castle called the "Castle of Corpses", and bore witness to numerous wars, a discussion about five members of a high school club may seem like manual labor on a tiny, millimeter scale to her...
Moreover, while Suicidemaster was not the culprit behind the serial vampirism, she did confess to having started it all—she was the one responsible for the first bloodsucking.
Once again, a progenitor of vampires.
Like a plea bargain, she'd asked for help with the process of exiting the country, but unfortunately, this was not enough for her to get off scot-free.
It wasn't enough—but what sort of verdict would be laid down in a case like this? I didn't have the slightest idea.
Kiseki-chan had been the victim in the beginning, but if she became the main culprit afterwards—a composition in which the victim becomes the perpetrator.
"It kind of resembles Sengoku-san's case, doesn't it?" said Hachikuji.
An unnecessary comment.
"The kanji for Sengoku [千石] and Kiseki [木石] are pretty similar, too."
That one was really unnecessary.
However, Sengoku's case was different.
It wasn't nearly as close as their kanji were.
A high school girl who unexpectedly acquires vampire superpowers makes full use of her power to relieve the anger of her "past life"—if anything, it was a more serious problem than the physiological phenomenon of vampire sucking blood, which was more similar to hunger.
If I had to say it, she was exerting the fury of a vampire while maintaining her human values... If she was careless, she could meet the conditions for the "Darkness".
"It ended up not being really clear whose fault it is, right?"
Hachikuji murmured as if troubled, but it was pretty vague to begin with—it wasn't something I could do anything about by taking on all the stigma myself, like I used to do in high school.
She was too much of a stranger for me to do that.
I wasn't a politician. I couldn't work that hard for someone I didn't know.
It's not easy to help a girl you've never met, never even brushed past—a girl you have no connection with.
"We can think about the rest later, but if there's anything you need to do now..."
And, as if the composition's polarity had been reversed, the one who brought up a plan of action to this deadlocked state was none other than Shinobu.
"Don't you need to stop that vampirified high school girl, a distant little sister in my eyes? Even if the composition has been turned over on its head, what you need to do hasn't changed much, I should say."
That was true—however, the way you searched for a dried-out mummy was quite different from the way you searched for a glorious vampire with golden hair and golden eyes.
"If the King of Oddities takes charge, I'll be put out of business. So, let's say that the personnel currently assigned to search for the mummy will be assigned to search for Kiseki-chan—who do you think she'll go after next, Koyomin?"
"Eh... Um, that's, well, one of the girls' basketball team members she had strife with... right? So, if we're trying to anticipate it—"
That wasn't it.
We'd already more or less anticipated everything—all of the members that were on the list were currently under protection.
There was no way that Kiseki-chan, who somehow got information about our investigation, didn't know about that—she wouldn't make the mistake of jumping into the web herself.
"What if she just gave up on the whole revenge thing and just went home to sleep? That's what I would do."
Suicidemaster made quite the crude statement with such a serious face—at this point, I had to wonder how I even suspected that this pompous little girl was actually a highly calculating criminal.
She was not highly calculating, just loud.
"Well, it's true that Kiseki-chan is trying to avoid us. The diversionary tactics and cover-ups are evidence of that—in that case, she probably wouldn't think of attacking a girls' basketball team member even through the surveillance. To begin with, it's pretty doubtful that there's enough resentment pent up in her that she'd want to make everyone a mummy—I'm sure she had some good friends like normal," said Gaen-san.
The four people that had been discovered as mummies were either the four people that she held the deepest resentment towards, or just the four people that were the easiest targets because they happened to be returning from school alone or had a lot of openings—was it possible she'd relieved all her frustration by attacking those four people?
But I couldn't be optimistic. Rather, as a member of the investigation team, I should assume that the crime would escalate—just as an unreasonable diet leads to rebound, a teenager forced to be stoic in her club suddenly obtained superpowers like in manga, so it should escalate like an escalator—
"! This is hella dangerous, Gaen-san!"
I used a tone of voice I'd never used before—but no matter. I continued.
"Tonight, Kanbaru is having a pajama party at Higasa-chan's house with her friends!"
I was making it sound as if Kanbaru's pajama party was unhealthy, immoral, and outright reprehensible, but that wasn't the point.
It was bad, however, that the retired third-year members of Naoetsu High's girls' basketball team, the OGs of the golden generation, were all in one place, as if they'd all been rounded up.
The golden generation that could even be called.
The mastermind behind the current state of club activities.
The most fitting prey—the main dish.
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pocketmouse18 · 3 years
Text
Thank you so much to @herosofmarvelanddc @cloudypaws and @mtab2260 for the tag! This was so much fun to think about :)
(fair warning, I wrote too much for many of these...)
1. How many works do you have on AO3?
Just 2 :)
2. What's your total AO3 word count?
450,577 if I did my math right!
3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?
Officially? Just 1 - Agents of Shield (two, I guess, if you count MCU as separate, since I use characters from both...). Off the record, many more than that! I have lots of bits and bobs from other fandoms that I tinkered with when I was younger, still getting the hang of writing, not brave enough to post things, etc. etc. Some of those include X-Men, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, the Fosters, Star Wars, the Hunger Games, the 39 Clues, and a few others I can’t remember. None of those will likely see the light of day, mostly because they’re unfinished, not very good, and just not reflective of who I am as a writer anymore, but they were fun to play around with at the time :)
4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?
I just have the two, but The Important Thing is to Try wins, hands down, with 1227. Shoulder to Shoulder has 95, though, which I’m also very proud of! Important Thing has a definite advantage, being as long as it is, so I don’t know if that’s really a fair comparison between them.
5. Do you respond to comments, why or why not?
Yes! Or at least, I always try to! I just can’t believe someone would be kind enough to take the time to tell me what they thought of my story, so I always want to take the time to thank them and return the favor :) Plus, as I’ve learned, it’s a fantastic way to get to know some really lovely people!
6. What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?
Well... I technically only have one story that has an ending, at least on Ao3, and it’s not an especially angsty one, since it ends in Phil and Melinda getting married :) I have some angsty chapter endings in Important Thing, if that counts? I’m not even sure if any of my unpublished fiddlings have angsty endings (most don’t have endings at all lol)... I don’t mind writing angst, but I don’t know if I’m capable of making something without a happy (or at least hopeful) ending.
7. Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you've ever written?
Not really, unless you count AoS/MCU crossovers (which I guess technically count, but also I would argue it’s not a true crossover since (and I will die on this hill) AoS is a part of MCU canon). When I was younger I was a fan of playing around with crossover AUs more so than the actual characters crossing paths (so like, what if these characters from XYZ were demigods or went to Hogwarts or what have you, and not so much what would happen if the X-Men met Luke, Leia, and Han on one of their space adventures). I started writing a crossover between AoS and the Marvel Rising cartoon once (which again, not sure if that’s a true crossover, since Daisy was in Marvel Rising, but I digress), where Coulson tasks Daisy to work with Kate Bishop and Rayshaun Lucas to collect and train a team of young Inhumans, starting with Kamala Khan, but I ran out of steam pretty quickly when it got too plot heavy.
8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?
I don’t think so. I’ve had some people not understand some choices that I made, but they asked it in a way that I thought was perfectly nice, and I was happy to talk about it with them. Sometimes people get “mad” at me when I cause pain and suffering, but I know that’s all in good fun :)
9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?
Nope, not for me. I don’t read it or write it, personally. Writing a kiss is hard enough!
10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?
Not to my knowledge! Important Thing is probably too long and unwieldy to ever steal :P
11. Have you ever had a fic translated?
Someone once asked me on FFN if they could translate Important Thing to Russian, which was basically the coolest thing I’ve ever been asked!
12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?
A fic, no. I’d love to try sometime! I had a friend in college who I co-wrote with A LOT, though, so I know I enjoy that process, given the right partner. We wrote several short plays together (ranging from ~15-50 minutes in length, including one that we wrote in a single afternoon!), selected scenes from a larger (unfinished) play inspired by historical letters we found in an archive that were sent between a man from Massachusetts serving in the American Civil War, his wife, and his 8-year-old son, and several scripts for TV sitcoms (2 pilots for 2 different shows, plus additional eps for those pilots, and a couple of later eps for a different show that a classmate of ours wrote the pilot for - we were trying to practice what it would be like to be on a staff with a showrunner haha). The sitcom scripts in particular I’m very proud of, and could talk somebody’s ear off about if asked (one’s about ghost hunters and one’s about a DnD party!), but maybe that’s better saved for another post ;)
13. What's your all-time favorite ship?
That’s a very hard question for me! Mostly because shipping stuff is usually one of the last things to register for me when I’m thinking about shows/books/movies I like haha... I’m always a sucker for Philinda, and younger me was rather taken with Percabeth, I suppose.
14. What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?
Hmm, several, really. The aforementioned AoS/Marvel Rising crossover I think could be really cool if I got it to work, but I don’t think that’ll ever happen. I also have a WIP that’s like an angstier version of a Hallmark Christmas movie AU where Daisy has to come home to her small town right before Christmas and figure out what she wants out of life, but I’m a little stalled out on that one, mostly because I’m waffling on who the charming love interest should be and because I don’t have enough of a plot, just lots of feelings about coming back home to a place you thought you had left behind lol.
I’d put Important Thing and it’s (as of yet) untitled sequel on here as things I want to finish, but I’m much more determined to see those through, so I don’t think they qualify for the “never will actually write” part of this question :)
15. What are your writing strengths?
I don’t know if other people agree with this, but I think I write pretty decent dialogue. My “training” (if you can call it that) is in, as you might have figured out by now, script and screenplay writing (those were the only creative writing classes I took in college). So having a sense of the rhythm a conversation needs to have and how to write dialogue that sounds mostly like how people really talk (but shined and tightened up enough so that it’s not actually like verbatim dialogue, which is far less interesting to read!) is something that I feel like comes pretty easily. I also think I do okay with similes and metaphors - my brain tends to work in that way. It’s easier for me to think of stuff (feelings, especially) in terms of comparing it to more familiar things than to just think of the thing directly, if that makes sense?
16. What are your writing weaknesses?
If I was being honest, this would be a very long section, but I know it’s not fun to read a big ol’ paragraph of someone self-criticizing, so I’ll keep it to one or two items ;) A big one for me is pacing, I think. I tend to write more than I need to and to over-explain things, so my chapters get very long and sometimes don’t really go anywhere? Until all of the sudden, they DO, because things need to HAPPEN! I’m a pretty rigorous self-editor, but I do have a really hard time cutting out sections (unless they’re really just not working), so even if it would help the pacing to leave out this conversation between character A and character B, I often can’t make myself cut it. I also think I struggle sometimes with balancing my ‘showing’ and my ‘telling,’ especially in the sense of me over-explaining certain things - like when it comes to feelings/facial expressions/etc, for example. I compensate for that in Important Thing by making it a part of a few people’s POV, but it’s not really a good habit to have in general. Also spelling! I’m really bad at spelling and run my stuff through robust spellchecks and text-to-speech before I post anything to make up for it :)
17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?
I do it with some regularity, although I always get nervous about doing it wrong! It’s hard to avoid in AoS, where characters are spies and should (in theory, at least) have a working knowledge of multiple languages (”We’re spies, I thought we all learned languages?!”). Even in an AU, where characters aren’t spies, I like to try and pay homage to that, plus pay homage to certain characters’ native languages or just general multilingualism. I’ve spent a fair amount of time around people who speak more than one language, so I feel like it’s a natural part of groups of people to have more than one language spoken. I have a pretty good handle on written Spanish, a patchy idea of French, plus I know some Russian phrases from my dad and some German words from my grandfather, but I do rely on internet translation a lot. I usually run stuff through google, then run it backwards to see just how far off the initial translation was, then consult some actual, like, language learning sites to see if there’s particular idioms or common phrases that use different words than what google will give me, then run those words through backwards in the place of the original words to see if I can massage the whole thing to sound reasonably competent. Languages like Russian or Mandarin (which have their own alphabets/characters) are the hardest, since I have to also try and do a transliteration. I always try to put an apology/disclaimer in the notes any time I write in a language that isn’t English, because I’m sure I make lots of mistakes.
Also, I tend not to italicize words that are in other languages, because it looks weird on the page to me to set the other language apart like that (and because I italicize mainly for internal thoughts or emphasis, and usually what’s being said in another language isn’t internal or being emphasized). I put a rough translation at the end so we don’t have to pause the story for a parenthetical translation, but because the translation’s not right there, I try to either put in enough context clues that a person can still understand what’s going on, or I make sure that what’s written in another language isn’t critical to the overall understanding of the scene.
18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?
Officially, it’s AoS, since that’s the only fandom I’ve published for. I think the first true fandom I wrote fic for was probably either Harry Potter (entirely populated with OCs lol, I just liked using the world/setting), Percy Jackson (a mix of OCs and canon characters), or X-Men (all canon characters). I was a bit of a latecomer to fanfiction, though, like, I wrote a ton as a kid, but mostly original stuff, because I didn’t know that fanfiction in its current form was even allowed until I was in high school lol.
Oh! I almost forgot one! I’m not sure if this really counts as a fandom, but it’s definitely the earliest version of fanfic I wrote haha... I was like 12 and I wrote more than one story of an OC joining Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men, and then also one of that same OC becoming a knight of the Round Table, so like... do what you will with that information haha.
19. What's you're favorite fic you've written?
I can’t choose between my two darlings :( I mean, okay, technically it’s probably Important Thing. That story’s my baby. It’s huge and I’ve been working on it for almost 2 years, and I’ve poured a lot of my heart and soul into it. I’ve fallen in love with the universe I built in it, so much so that I wrote an entire prequel and have very concrete plans for a lengthy sequel. But I can’t not crow about Shoulder to Shoulder (the aforementioned prequel!), too... I’m just really proud of that one - it has a lot of firsts for me. First completed story. First romance-focused story. First foray into expanding the Important Thing universe. But yes, if I have to choose, then Important Thing wins. That’s a story that I started writing exclusively for myself - to give myself characters I could relate to and to explore a style of AoS fic that I loved reading - and that’s a story I will always and forever be proud of.
I think most people have probably answered this tag game at this point, so I don’t want to accidentally retag anyone! If you haven’t yet, and would like to join in, please do! This is your invitation <3
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hansoulo · 4 years
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ain’t it a gentle sound (the rolling in the graves) - pt. 4
Pairing: Horacio Carrillo/f!Reader
Warnings: cursing, canon-typical violence and blood, grief, angst, death, y’all know the drill (there’s some descriptions of gore this time! if you watch narcos i don’t think you’ll be fazed by it but just a heads up. also talks about kidnapping and implied trauma. take care babes)
Word Count: 1.2k bc i needed the suspense soz
A/N: *throws this at you and runs away*
masterlist playlist
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You were cold. That was all you could remember. Things returned slowly, falling in and out of your memory like specters. A hand over your mouth. Concrete. A flickering light bulb and a sicario - who couldn’t have been very smart because if he was he’d have realized that you didn’t know anything. Okay, maybe that was a stretch. You knew a little, courtesy of Horacio. Too much, probably. Enough to make yourself a target, anyways. Damn this. Damn you.
The sound of gunshots was enough to wake you from your daze and you vaguely register the taste of blood in your mouth. You force your eyes open, tensing your hands that lay tied behind you to get the feeling to return. The room was bare, faintly lit by the weak light of the early morning, and you felt your shoulders pressed up against plaster. Oh. You were on the floor.
This was much less professional than the last time you were kidnapped. Of course, then you were only bait. A pretty face with a ring on your left hand and the last name of a man they knew they wanted dead. Well, they got that soon enough.
You could be bait this time, too, for a different man. Apparently, you had a type.
---------
Shouting. Running. Slamming doors. Horacio’s yelling something in Spanish. Something about sicarios and traps and hostages and- You. His…. friend? Neighbor? Unpaid babysitter, who also knew how he took his coffee? (Scalding hot with tons of sugar, in the white mug with the chipped lip that was always in the top left cabinet.)
They used zip-ties on your wrists. You kinda want to laugh. Shoulders tight from being pulled behind you for so long, you shift your weight until pinpricks erupt across your numb legs. You should probably call out to him or something, to speed the process along, but your throat is burning something awful so you just let your head fall back and listen to the sound of tactical boots.
Three.
A round of gunfire, shot quick from the hip of a stranger you can’t imagine makes for very good company. You can hear bodies fall, but you know it’s not him. He wouldn’t go down that easy.
Two.
“Dónde está ella?”
“Mi coronel, aquí.” A muffled curse. The cock of a gun. Then, the door is pushed open with a loud creak of its rusted hinges.
One.
He’s on you like a man starved, all dark green fabric and hulking shoulders as he seems to just… appear, crouching down with a hand brushing your cheek. You don’t actually remember seeing him walk over, so maybe you really did hit your head on something. That would explain the ringing in your ears. And your busted lip. And the way that every time Horacio moved, there seemed to be two of him dragging out a few seconds behind.
Hands, strong and callused and more familiar than they should be, grip at your shoulders to coax your head up. The world comes into focus then- less blurry but way more frightening. The walls are streaked with red and your eyes catch a crimson path on the floor, snaking around to the doorway. All you see is a man’s shoe.
“Hey, hey look at me.”
You feel yourself- as though disembodied- shaking your head frantically as you duck your face to the floor. He reaches to cut away the ties around your hands, one knee braced against the floor and his mouth pursed in a line. The scent of gunpowder chokes you, presses down on your lungs like the deadweight of a corpse. Your face feels hot, burning like you’re running a high fever and you can’t string two words together without thinking about blood and bodies you can’t fix and how you can’t remember anything - which means you can’t remember what they’ve done to you. It’s too much. It’s all too much. It's too much. It’s too-
“Look at me.”
Fuck.
Horacio’s hand moves to cup your chin, the pad of his thumb tracing over the split skin of your bottom lip. His eyes seem to hold everything inside them, the embers of a flame you’re used to seeing sedated now flickering something dark. Something you should want to run from.
What’s another arrow in the quiver of your self-loathing? Not much, you suppose. Not much at all.
You look.
--------
He walks you back to the complex with his fingers still curled around your arm.
“Are you alright?”
Horacio’s voice is quiet, softer than you’ve ever heard it but god, what you would give to hear it again.
“Yeah, yeah I’m- I’m fine. Just… tired.”
He nods - unconvinced but letting you lie anyway - and steps back to open the door for you. Right. He has your spare key.
“I’m sorry,” you whisper, and at that Horacio shakes his head. He’s good at hiding things, at hiding how he feels, but you know he’s holding his breath- trying to keep from frowning. For your sake. “I- I don’t know if I can do this, Horacio,” and you try to focus on the way his chest rises and falls to steady yourself but it’s not a good idea because it just makes you want to collapse, dead on your feet, into him. “Whatever this is.”
“Chiquita-”
“No- no. Don’t. You-,” you choke out the words, fighting tears as the exhaustion of the day finally seems to make itself known. “You can’t call me that. I- I'm not your chiquita,”  and the last word comes out a bit sharper than you wanted it to, a bit too biting towards the man standing outside your apartment door with your keys still in his hands. Your eyes soften when you see the jagged metal gripped in his palm, hands tensing with scarred, white-stretched knuckles. Horacio’s jaw is tight again and you're reminded of how you teased him once. You’ll grind your teeth down clenching your face like that. Loosen up a bit.
The words leave your mouth, breathy and slightly shaking, before you realize what you say. “I’m not your anything.”
You want to slam the door in his face. You want him to slam the door in your face. You want so bad to be angry, to have someone to blame besides yourself and your own fucked up head, but you can’t. So you don’t. You just walk into your apartment and let the lock click quietly behind you, listening to footsteps as they retreat across the hall.
The rational part of your brain tells you to go to bed, to fall asleep after a good cry in the comfort of your bedroom surrounded by soft things and another wall separating you from him, but you hadn’t really made a habit of listening to reason lately. Why start now? The floor was as good a place as any.
Your back slid down against the door as you sat, drawing your knees to your chest with a shallow breath. There was a quote from somewhere. Shakespeare, maybe. Oh brawling love, oh loving hate, oh anything of nothing first created. This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
This love feel I, that feel no love in this. This love… this…
Romeo and Juliet. That’s what it was. The irony of it makes you laugh, the sound lacking humor as you shake your head.
They were doomed from the start, really. Still, there was something beautiful about it. Dying for someone else. Knowing they’d do the same.
You would die for him. That wasn’t what scared you.
What scared you… what scared you was knowing he would die for you, too. Just like before.
The thought makes your chest seize up, the lump in your throat growing heavier with every passing second. You couldn’t do that to him. You couldn’t live with yourself if you did. You barely lived with it now.
You fall asleep to the sound of crying. It wasn't yours.
Taglist: @chelsfic​ @itzagoodthing @lesqui @glowingpena @agirllovespasta @squidlywiddly87 @1zashreena1 @amarvelousmandalorian @paniclana @huliabitch @symbiont13 @jayoknrjk28 @ah-callie @watsonwise @raabiac @angelicpascal @sparrows-books @popculturepriestess @spookypym​
lmk if you wanna be added/taken off. eventually i’ll get around to organizing like separate permanent/series/character ones but i’m lazy so. later.
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shinelikethunder · 4 years
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I’ve started rereading His Dark Materials, what with the BBC/HBO adaptation coming out, and... I’d say “I forgot how delightful the worldbuilding of Lyra’s universe is,” except it’s not that I forgot. It’s that I wasn’t equipped to appreciate it the first time around. Because the first time around I was a precocious little brat barely past Lyra’s age, and the broad differences were a fun puzzle to figure out as I went along, but most of the small details and slight shifts in terminology only registered as minor local texture, or flew completely over my head because I picked them up like I’d pick up any other unfamiliar term based on context.
But it’s delightful? It’s omnipresent, and it soaks right down into the nooks and crannies of that universe, and it’s based on an absolute magpie’s nest of random historical knowledge. The thing that made me stop reading, stare at the wall for a second, and pick up my laptop to write this post was the offhand use of “cauchuc” instead of “rubber,” which was recognizable because I knew the French word “caoutchouc,” but still not a straight-up borrowing. And it didn’t even surprise me when I looked it up and discovered that “cauchuc” was the original loanword from Quechua that “caoutchouc” and Spanish “caucho” come from. There are dozens of little things like that--tiny little artifacts of a world where the division of metaphysics into science and theology took a slightly different course, a world whose Industrial Revolution doesn’t quite repeat ours but it does rhyme, a world whose geopolitics are cut from familiar cloth but subject to a different set of historical accidents and linguistic fashions.
(Not that all the details are small. For sheer brain-breaking density of worldbuilding implications, I don’t know if you can beat the punch packed by the three words “Pope John Calvin.” Which is not an offhand “wow look at how bonkers this world’s history is” noodle incident--it’s the backstory of the entire Magisterium. Like, you could construct a whole argument that the relationship between Lyra’s world and ours is more like a Y-shape than a pair of parallel lines--an alt-history with the aborted/absorbed Reformation as its single major point of divergence, rather than “our world, but perpetually a little to the left in a thousand tiny independent ways.” From three words tucked into a short paragraph smuggled into the description of Lyra’s Oxford--but backed up, extensively, by the implications of which tiny mundane details Pullman chose to alter. That’s... a whole separate essay that I probably shouldn’t write while I’m only six chapters into the first book, though.)
Even with the big changes, there’s a sense that they tie back into the everyday ones and the everyday ones tie back into the big ones. An England whose sources of rubber are different is an England whose imperialism was just as extensive and exploitative but with a differently-shaped map, and it’s also an England whose techniques for electrical insulation depend on a different supply chain, and therefore probably an England whose history of undersea telecommunication cables was bonkers in a completely different way than ours. Was Pullman thinking about How the World was One when he renamed rubber? No idea, but with the way his HDM worldbuilding works, it actually seems more likely than not.
Anyway. It’s delightful. It’s an entire virtuoso performance by someone who’s thinking about the broad strokes of history, but who also knows and loves the history of everyday things, and takes great joy in re-imagining the paths that brought them about.
(I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FACT THAT LYRA’S WORLD APPARENTLY HAS NUCLEAR POWER THOUGH)
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davidcxrenswet · 3 years
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“ i can feel you staring at me . ”
It wasn’t the first time he’d been caught just staring at her, and in his defense it wasn’t like it was easy not to stare at her. Something about Mariana Diaz kind of just drew you in — You were forced to watch her as she just crossed a room. That pull was like a force of nature, something beyond Harvey’s control. A gravitational pull. She was the hot and molten core of his earth and he was just a pebble unable to push away from her. She wasn’t easy to ignore and Harvey just couldn’t help but gaze at her every chance he could. It wasn’t like it was a lewd stare — He wasn’t like the other boys in Barton Hollow. He’d made a promise, an internal pact, to never treat her like some object for his own personal pleasure. He would respect her as a woman, and furthermore a woman he cared deeply about. That meant being respectful and decent except in the few scenarios where it allowed for some coy, sensual flirtation. So yes, he did find himself unconsciously staring at her but it was only ever with a look of pure adoration. Most of the time he didn’t even realize he was doing it, not until she commented on it or looked directly back at him and questioned what he was looking at. It was just some unconscious reflex he couldn’t control. When there was a lull in whatever movie they were watching, or if he was reading a boring passage in a book, no matter what the situation Harvey would find his mind —and eye— wandering directly to Mariana, looking gorgeous and completely oblivious to the wonderment and awe in his warm gaze.
That very afternoon they were doing their usual “chill” post-school hang out. It started out with him picking her up from school with a coffee in hand and ended back in his bedroom, close in company while doing something separate. Mariana lounged back against the pillows on his queen sized bed wearing one of his old Lacrosse jerseys and not much else, idly flipping through a magazine while Harvey sat at the foot of the bed with his iPad and a dozen various google search tabs opened on safari. Research… for how to break centuries old blood pacts with demons. The usual stuff. They were mostly silent, not really interacting. Mariana occasionally stopped reading to pull out her phone and respond to messages, messages Harvey pretended to know nothing about. Every time she shifted, the collar of his shirt would move with her, sometimes sliding down over her shoulder so it peaked out from beneath the fabric, teasing him from where he sat at the foot of the bed. Another day he might have taken the moment to crawl over and divert her attention from her phone to his lips, to seize the opportunity and cuddle closer to her. Today was different. He wasn’t thinking about the way her body would feel pressed into his — he did his best not to dwell too hard on that anyway. He wasn’t really thinking much at all. He was going off some other instinct he couldn’t quite name, focusing on her and clearing his mind save for the weird way he was feeling at that moment. In his head it was her and only her, nothing else was really registering. It was almost like an out of body experience, he wasn't really aware of what he was doing or how he was moving. So when Mariana had spoken up, not even bothering to look away from her phone, he was caught completely off guard. How long had he been out of it?
“Oh… sorry, baby,” he’d said dumbly. The grin that followed was small but sheepish, barely enough to form shallow dimples in his cheeks. He almost turned his attention away from her, chastened by being caught observing her, but he didn’t. Instead Harvey just kept his gaze locked onto her, the sheepish grin changing into something softer and unknown as he just watched her some more. Evidently, Mariana knew he was still looking. Soon enough her eyes were on him, a questioning glance in the way she looked back at him. It would normally be enough to cause him to blush and look away, fumbling with his words for a second before recovering with some flirty little something to make the moment seem less awkward. He’d recover with a compliment on her beauty, which was always sincere given that even sitting there in one of his shirts she was still somehow the most gorgeous girl he’d ever seen. Or he’d make a joke about her “adorable resting bitch face” or inquire on what she was thinking because he was just burning with curiosity over what her microexpressions meant. Anything. He’d recover with just about anything… But today he was completely lost for words. “It’s just...”
He couldn’t quite describe what was going through his mind as he sat there looking at her; observing the lines of her face, counting the different shades of gold and green and brown that made up her hazel eyes, following the slope of her lips. Committing her face to memory though he’d already known it so well. It had almost felt like he was looking at it for the first time ever, really just looking at it. The more he stared at her, the more he felt this cloudy and heavy feeling inside his mind and chest, one that overwhelmed his every sense. He’d felt dizzy and light and dreamy and soft and nervous and excited all at once. It caused a laugh to bubble up his throat, a low vibrating chuckle that came from deep in his chest. The laugh didn’t quite catch either of them off guard… but the words that accompanied it did. He had no idea what he was about to blurt out, completely lost in that moment and the odd new feelings swirling within him that he had no idea what he was going to say. If he’d had any control in that moment, he’d have stopped it from coming out. This wasn’t how he wanted to present it, this wasn’t how he imagined it happening. And yet, nothing could stop the words from falling out with that soft laughter, low and gentle and yet very much loud enough for them both to hear.
“I love you.”
The moment he’d said those three small words, everything around him seemed to change. Whatever light and airy feeling had possessed him had suddenly lost its fight to gravity. He’d felt literally as if his body had been slammed back down to earth, much like coming down from a daydream. His own words gave him whiplash, left him winded and terrified of the response. His heart had gone from a slow and steady pace to galloping madly within his chest, and suddenly his throat was clenched with anxiety. All at once, the soft and sickly sweet, loving, grin that had formed on his lips had vanished as the inclination of his outburst settled between them. He’d not even given himself much of a chance to decipher her reaction. In the split second between realization and finally tearing his gaze away from her, Harvey could have sworn he saw Mariana’s face blanche in response. Whether it was true or a trick of his mind, that’s not the kind of reaction you hope for after such a reveal.
“That… that wasn’t… that’s not how I wanted to say that,” Harvey sputtered out, burying his face in his hands. He was on his knees at the foot of the bed, just a couple feet away from her and yet he felt miles away. Or perhaps he wished he was. He groaned against the rough skin of his palms before freeing himself from his hiding spot, angling a bright pink face in her direction though not meeting her eyes as he rambled on. “I had a whole thing planned out. I was going to take you somewhere nice, on a proper date, and - and I’ve been taking these Spanish classes, practicing my accent, and I wrote down a whole thing and I was going to surprise you with it, I swear and I-I,” he swallowed, his cheeks dusted in a crimson sheen. Harvey was flustered and embarrassed, shy and insecure. He’d wanted to create a romantic swoon worthy moment of the day he’d declare his feelings for her. Something she could look back on and remember fondly. Not like this. Not while wearing sweatpants and a v neck t-shirt with a light mustard stain on it he had yet to notice. He wanted to give her something she could always look back on with no regrets. But it was too late. He’d said it and he couldn’t take it back.
“What’s it matter anyway? If it was in English or Spanish or at some fancy special place?” He’d finally said. Slowly he crawled towards her, closing the space between them. He’d finally looked at her again and he wasn’t entirely sure what her expression meant. Or maybe he just refused to acknowledge what was plain across her face. “You had to have known how deeply I’ve come to feel for you. I’ve never been good at hiding my feelings, at least not from you. But if it isn’t obvious…. I’m crazy about you. I cherish you and adore you, and I... I feel like I can truly be myself around you. I mean look at us — we’ve been sitting here quietly for hours, barely talking and yet… I feel so happy and comfortable just being near you. You.. you mean the world to me. You came to me during what felt like the darkest time of my life, from something I never imagined I could survive from, and you helped me see that my life isn’t over. Just by giving me something new to be excited about. You make me feel alive. And I… I don’t know, I just…” His breath stuttered around his words, his hands moving up to cup either side of her face. He searched her gaze momentarily, hoping she’d stop his mad rambling with a kiss and a return of the feelings. Something. But she didn’t. Maybe she was in shock. Was this the first time a boy clumsily revealed his heart to her? He didn’t think so… but maybe this was the first time a boyfriend did. Wasn’t he the first?
Thumbs sliding over her cheek bones, he clenched his jaw for a second before giving her that special dimpled grin that seemed to be reserved for her. That special smile which initially disappeared in the Devil’s Cavern all those months ago with his friends until the fateful day a cute blonde came jogging down his lane and ushered them back into his life. Now his every smile belonged to her and her only. “Te amo, Mariana,” Harvey tested the phrase with a voice that was soft but full of conviction. It was a phrase he’d worked on for weeks, which he’d quietly rehearsed to the mirror or deep in the night when she was fast asleep in the crook of his arms and the only audience he had was the moon peeking through the mountains outside. He’d said it many times to her when she wasn’t able to hear, and yet it felt so exhilarating and new saying it now directly to her face. Now she knew, she knew the extent of his heart and how it yearned for her. He couldn’t take it back, it was already being laid on a silver platter and offered to her for the taking. He could only hope she’d accept what he was giving… And maybe return the sentiment. Oh how he hoped she’s come to feel the same for him. As he tilted her face back so he could see clearly into her eyes, he swallowed down his nerves as he added, “Please tell me I said that right and I didn’t just tell you to, like, fuck off or something. And please… Please tell me you feel the same.”
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@karolinadeanwrites
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wander-yet-wonder · 4 years
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Parting the veil - Spaus
Fandom: Hetalia Pairing: Spaus, (Spain / Austria) Word count: 2319 Rating: All audiences Warnings: Historicised attitudes towards Islam do not reflect the author’s views.  Summary: Roderich isn't the best at travelling. Still, he'd gladly do so in order to spend time with his new husband. The Spanish landscape betrays things about Antonio he'd rather keep silent himself. It seems like Antonio has separated himself from his past through a sheer curtain and when visiting Roderich feels like he can almost see through it, see the ghosts that move on the other side. Everything is so foreign to him, will he be able to eventually harmonize with Antonio? Read on AO3: X
I was requested to write a Spaus drabble, apparently, I can’t write drabbles and instead put out a whole ass fic. So um- have this? @fandomghost I hope you like it. Special shoutout to @katemarley  for recommending me Innsbruck ich muss dich lassen when I was nerding to her about German renaissance music <3
At least there were mountains. Roderich was grateful for the snowy peaks of the Pyrenees that decorate the horizon visible from his window. They were the only familiar sight because he was in all other aspects “fast entheimt”. Unfortunately, now that they had reached Zaragoza, a city with a name so foreign that he wouldn’t have discredited as the name of an ancient Persian magician in a novel, the mountains were far more distant and only visible on clear days. The name of the city wasn’t the only thing that was foreign to him, when he and his consorts had crossed the mountains he had felt like the very bedrock that Spain was made of was unlike his own, down to the small crocus like flowers that bloomed in the meadows that their guide had explained to him were rare ‘false saffron’. In Zaragoza, he’d been given a room in the palace of the catholic monarchs that had taken residence there after Isabel I of Castile had married Ferdinand II of Aragon but that in the streets was still referred to by the people as the palace of Aljaféria. Though that royal marriage had unified Spain and was the reason he could stay there to visit his Antonio, Aragon was by no means gone. Her belongings and her culture were still found all over the province. However, he wasn’t to meet her until later that month. He felt like in a way, simply by travelling the land he already had met her. She wasn’t the only shadow of a nation that he felt. Besides Spain, that is to say, Castile and Aragon, there was a third presence within these castle walls, an invisible presence, a ghost from the past.
 Roderich had never fully realised the reality of the occupation by Arabic forces in the peninsula. When he had Antonio in front of him in Aachen, a fierce proprietor of Christendom, speaking Latin with a quintessentially Romanesque tongue… He had somehow thought that as the occupiers left the peninsula, Antonio was a roman again. That when they left, they took everything with them, left no traces, that whatever was left was carefully purged by his new husband. Yet these walls told a different story. In a moment where he’d been free to roam the halls, he’d let himself be spellbound by the strange arabesque masonry, the ever-spiralling geometrical decorative patterning in the friezes, the archways, the capitals. One gallery from where he could reach the stonework, he had secretly pressed his fingers against it, half expecting it to give way like bee’s wax due to how much it resembled a honeycomb. He let out a quivering breath and whispered the name: the Umayyad dynasty, the caliphate of Cordoba. That strange shadow that seemed to hide in the corners in the palace. Had he made a mistake when marrying Antonio? How much of his husband was still Moorish?
 Antonio was always secretive and defensive about his time isolated from the rest of them. Roderich never pressed him for answers. He’d lie in bed next to him and watch Antonio’s quiet breathing and think to himself that Antonio must’ve suffered a lot. Yet he looked at how his own hand looked like porcelain against Antonio’s chest, and he wondered.
 These thoughts were tumbling over each other as he was staring out the window, his letter to the bishop abandoned in front of him as his quill was resting idly between his fingers. He felt sick to the stomach again, he’d always get such bad Heimweh, if only Toni could just always visit him in Austria… that would be a perfect world.
“Ah, there you are!”
Antonio snapped him out of his reverie by materializing in the doorframe and looking at him like he was trying to figure him out, like studying a puzzling little flower, like a false saffron, and wondering whether it was edible or not.
“Have you truly been cooped up in here all-day writing? Come, this won’t do, come out and catch some fresh air.”
He’d already strode over and made to pull Roderich along by the arm despite the young man’s protests that it was too hot outside and that he’d tan.
“I gathered some courtiers, we’re going to play music in the courtyard. If you sit in the gallery you won’t tan. Just join it’ll be great. Did you play that Viol a lot?”
 ‘That viol’ was the lovely Soprano viol that Antonio had given to Roderich when they parted ways after their second visit. Roderich had been familiar with the more European Vieille already and had taken to the instrument like he’d never played anything else. It helped that it was a gift from Antonio, so whenever he missed him too much he could take out the viol, lovingly caress the little wooden face that was carved into the end of the neck with incredible craftmanship, and then by playing and studying bring Antonio a little closer. He’d carefully press down on the strings and would imagine Toni listening and smiling. He’d been playing it when sad or lonely so often he started to feel like he expressed his feelings better through music than through words. So to Antonio’s question, he gave a firm affirmative nod and looked at the case that contained it when he brought it with him here.
“Well bring it! I want to hear!”
Roderich’s heart quickened. He had fantasized about what would happen if he’d play in front of Antonio, that Antonio would listen and understand- that he could say what he wanted to say without words. That Antonio instantly recognised that he’d studied hard just to please him. But now that the moment was here, he felt suddenly nervous.
“Ah, very well, I’ll play for you. But not for your court.”
Antonio looked a little taken aback but then agreed with a smile
“We’ll have fewer instruments then, but it agrees with me.”
 Roderich tried to read Antonio and see if he wasn’t upset but he couldn’t tell. He took the dear instrument and tagged along, all the while trying not to be deafened by his heart nervously pounding in his ears. Antonio retrieved his vihuela de mano from the group of courtiers and declared they wouldn’t be joining them until later. They seemed a little disappointed, but Roderich observed from the doorway that the confident way in which Antonio declared he wouldn’t be present, rather than asked to be forgiven for not joining made no one even think of questioning him. He smiled; this is what he adored in Antonio.
 Antonio took him to one of the palaces many open courtyards and sat him down underneath the strange honeycomb arches on a railing. With just the two of them in an enclosed garden Roderich thought of the many courtly romance novels he’s read and blushed a bit. Antonio caught on and with a grin took his hand and kissed it.
“So, are we going to play music? Or was this all an elaborate plan of yours so we could exchange kisses?”
Antonio was already scooting a bit closer and his smirk grew. Roderich frowned as his blush deepened but couldn’t hide a smile.
“Don’t tease me, Antonio.”
He leaned in and gave Antonio a small kiss on the cheek.
“I had every intention to play music for you."
 Antonio nodded and sat back a bit and gave Roderich a tender smile that sent a warmth spreading through his chest. Roderich got in position and put the viol between his legs. He took a deep breath and took the bow to the strings. He took a deep breath and started to sing. It was the song he’d been singing ever since Innsbruck’s precious valley had been swallowed between the pine trees as they had crossed that fateful bend in the road that meant saying goodbye. Roderich had never been good at travel, he was in his essence a very rooted person. He needed the mountains, the pine trees, the fresh crisp winter air, he needed his home. At first, he had thought that this crippling nervousness that took hold of him when he was in unfamiliar territory had to do with the type of creature that he was: wouldn’t it make sense for countries to have to be close to their lands? But the more other’s he met, the more he learned that isn’t necessarily the case. He sang the first tender lines of ‘Innsbruck ich muss dich lassen’, which he had been practising to bring him solace ever since he had left. He had adapted the original choral piece by giving the higher register to his viol and himself singing a fragile tenor second voice.
 “ISbruck, ich muß dich lassen ich far do hin mein strassen in fremde land do hin mein freud ist mir genomen die ich nit weiß bekummen wo ich jm elend bin.”
 It had every property of a learned piece of music, despite its secular subject. In his opinion, the choral harmonies showed a Pythagorean harmony and evoked the harmonies of heaven. It was in every aspect a thing of technical ingenuity. But it was out of place. Singing about Innsbruck and his land in the Spanish summer heat just fell flat. All the emotion he could usually put into it, about missing home and struggling with travel didn’t seem to communicate either.
 “Groß leid muß ich yetz tragen das ich allein thu klagen dem liebsten bůlen mein ach lieb nun laß mich armen im hertzen dein erbarmen das ich muß von dannen sein.”
 The second verse, about parting from your lover was yet another thing very recognisable for him, as he and Antonio often spent large stretches apart from one another. Antonio, however, seemed more concerned with picking dirt out from under his nails than listening. He knew Antonio didn’t know much German, but he hoped he would at least get the gist of it. His voice wavered slightly as he tried to keep Antonio invested in the music all through the last verse.
 “Meyn trost ob allen weyben dein thu ich ewig pleyben stet trew der eren frumm nun muß dich Gott bewaren in aller thugent sparen biß das ich wider kumm.”
 A pledge of faithfulness to the one you’re leaving. It was silent for a moment between them after he finished and Roderich felt like he’d swallowed a brick. Antonio perked up again and took his vihuela.
“You did not enjoy it.”
He must’ve looked hurt because Antonio winced and reassuringly pet his hand.
“Ah no! It was good! I could tell it was technically perfect.”
Antonio was a terrible liar though and with one stern look, Roderich managed to get him to sigh and tell the truth.
“It was just- all the same. And a bit sad, but mostly just that it was the same thing three times, and all the rhythm stayed the same and the distance between the cords stayed the same… It made me feel like I was either at church or just- really bored.”
Roderich was confused, “But- isn’t that what music is supposed to sound like? With regular harmonies? I read in a book-”
Antonio cut him off: “That’s exactly it! It sounds so learned, so lifeless! Shouldn’t music be sweeping? To slowly build and make you feel this- this- Ecstasy! wait, I’ll show you what I learned!”
He started strumming the vihuela. “Ok, you clap along.” Roderich uneasily started clapping, a little off-beat because of the strange rhythm Antonio was creating.
“This is an old one Roderich so you might know it. Hmm, maybe not the words it’s easy, you just sing the refrain with me I’ll do the stanzas. Ok, it’s Santa María, Strela do día, Móstra-nos, pera Déus e nos guía. Got that?”
Antonio was tapping his foot to the rhythm and slapping the wood of his vihuela in between the plucking. Then he suddenly stopped and took a ring of keys of his belt and handed it to Roderich. “Here, shake this- hmm this would be better if we had more players.” But he kept playing until Roderich got the hang of it. Then he started singing with it, the refrain was relatively straightforward but once Roderich got it, Toni started to make strange variations on it that threw him of again.
“No, it’s ok Roderich, you just keep singing the regular version and I’ll vary upon it. Also, the rhythm is rha-pa-pa-pa, rha-pa-papa-pa-pa. Yes, like that.”
Once they sang together like that for a while Antonio inserted stanzas between the refrains where the end of the sentences ended in long drawn out undulating notes. They were unlike anything Roderich had ever heard in a church at home or even at the fair! Though they were singing about Mary, about asking god forgiveness for sins, Roderich felt strange with what was happening. He wasn’t very good at it, but it felt like Antonio was pulling him along in a wild dance. Just as he’d gotten the hang of it, Antonio sped up and harmonized with him. Roderich could feel his body sway from side to side, almost without his will and they moved in perfect unison, rising and falling. He felt his sadness slowly fading and he smiled while singing. The thing Antonio had said about sweeping you away, about ecstasy, he was starting to understand it now. This strange rhythm, and the way Antonio intuitively reacted to what he was doing… it was almost sensual. When they finished his cheeks were red and he was slightly out of breath. Any passer-by would’ve suspected them of exchanging kisses in the garden after all. Perhaps he might as well… He enthusiastically threw himself forward, wrapped his arms around his neck and kissed Antonio on the lips. Nothing as chaste as before, the vihuela awkwardly between them. Antonio was clearly surprised but not complaining.
 Hi! Welcome to this fic exploring the musical differences between Antonio and Roderich (and perhaps, by extension in their personalities). The music, however, isn't the only historical reference going on in here.
 This fic is set very shortly after their marriage so anywhere between 1520 and 1525. They're still trying to figure each other out and getting to know the other's culture. Or at least, Roderich is.
 The Moorish occupation of the Iberian peninsula was in that time seen as a very dark page in Spain's history and after the Reconquista Spain was portraying itself as an extremely Christian country (perhaps overcompensating slightly?). The time in Al Andalus, however, was a time when music, poetry and science flourished in Spain and the land and culture are still very influenced by it. The palace they're staying in is evidence of that. (Look up a picture it's gorgeous).
 Roderich is starting to notice these Islamic influences in his new husband. And as a Christian man living in the 1500's they make him warry (not to speak of the attacks of the Ottoman empire on Austria in that time). However, the thing he ends up enjoying immensely about Antonio in this fic, his music, is something that is extremely Moorish.
Moorish music was seen as highly skilled and highly superior music even after Christianisation and Moorish musicians were still employed by the court a lot for special events.
 There are two characters in here that aren't canon: the kingdom of Aragon and the Caliphate of Cordoba. The Kingdom of Aragon is a fierce lady that's the bane of Antonio's existence even though right now they're unified.
 The pieces that both of them play are from their respective countries, and links are included in the lyrics. Roderich's is a contemporary piece by Henrich Isaac. If the lyrics look strange that's because that's the original 16th-century german. Antonio's piece is older, It's one of the many cantiga's de Santa maria. These canticles were written for King Alfonso X, who made a great contribution to early Spanish Christian culture. They're in the Galician dialect of Spanish that's super close to Portuguese.
 As for their instruments, there are three instruments mentioned. The first being Roderich's viol. This is a predecessor to the modern-day violin, but also to the cello. It belongs to the family of the 'viola da gamba'. it was developed in 15th-century Spain. They are played upright in the lap with a bow. You can see one in use here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLgJPBDzS6o
 The viol bore some resemblance to the vielle, an older and more northern European relative to the instrument, that is actually played underneath the chin. The experience with the vielle is what made it easier for Roderich to learn the viol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdps64D-u-g
 finally, Antonio is playing the vihuela da mano. While this seems yet another instrument of which the name resembles 'violin' it actually resembles a guitar more!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duHMeCndpjo
 And let's not forget about the important percussion instrument: Antonio's keys.
 Have any questions about historical things I forgot to explain? please don't hesitate to shoot me a message or comment on this fic and I'll gladly elaborate.
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joygaroz · 5 years
Text
There You Are
[5/7] [Day Twelve: Gravitation]
SPANISH VER: FFNET
Only after they were back to the starting point —the reception of the small store of her mentor, was that Sakura dared to wonder:
“Where did Naruto go?” she interrupted the silence that had made appearance in the room as she stepped out of her own now properly dressed in a gray skirt and a carmine sleeveless shirt.
And it was only natural for her to ask, after that revelation, Sakura could barely register the events occurred. Now she was linked to a vampire, the poison in her body had been removed and, thanks to that, she now counted with the powers of an immortal white witch and lost descendant of some member of the Senju clan. She had even been close to give in to the unusual chills the touch and closeness of her partner provoked in her.
“We don’t have time to worry about that idiot, we should get going as soon as possible” her partner scoffed, leaning back in the stool that he seemed to have branded as his and crossing his arms over his chest.
Sakura tried hard not to look in his direction and watch closely at the movement that accentuated his arms in that position. Only moments before he had surrounded her with them and that was a treacherous thought that she did not want to recall in such circumstances. He was talking abot parting ways from the village that had protected her for months.
Wait a minute, leave? She thought with scandal
Realizing her alarmed look, Sasuke returned the gesture by arching one of his brows in her direction.
“You did not seriously think I was going to leave you here, did you?” she remembered, but at the moment she had been far more distracted at his declaration of him protecting and taking care of her rather than the part in which he said she would leave her small sanctuary.
Even if it was that way, she had no reason to fear, she reminded herself. She now carried great abilities as she had demonstrated when she pushed away without difficulties the super strong vampire.
She smiled to herself without noticing she continued to be observed with detail by her partner and he, by her mentor.
Releasing a sigh, the high priestess rose up from her seat and after searching through on of her drawers, she called for the attention of both by placing a new scroll on the counter.
“Naruto left his map; it marks the point he has been protecting and the point where danger could possibly be in danger. With Sasuke’s powers help, you should be able to reach these locations in matter of minutes.” Her mentor explained before the attentive gazes of both, then turning her attention to Sakura, who returned the glance with concentration “But it’s important, that before you face these creatures, you are able to control your abilities”.
Frowning with doubt, Sakura made a grimace with her lips.
“Even if you tell me that, Tsunade-sama, who would I go to put them in practice?”
“Obviously you can try them on me” her partner intervened, making her attention to return to him.
“But, what if I hurt you?”
Arching one eyebrow, Sasuke smiled entertained.
“That’s cute” he suppressed a chuckle when he heard her click her tongue. “You can try, if you want. But you’ll have to heal me if you manage to scratch me”
Sakura emitted a growl in frustration.
“That’s what I mean, if I have yet to know how to control my powers, how am I supposed to even attempt to heal you?”
“Oh, he doesn’t mean you need to heal him with your powers, but rather to feed form your blood” Tsunade explained, and it was then that Sakura felt her cheeks to warm up when she noticed how that would happen. Shrugging, Tsunade continued: “You are bound after all, your blood has been chosen to be his medicine”.
Not wanting to be much distracted appreciating the adorable and shy expressions of his partner, Sasuke decided to interrupt his line of thoughts before he was led back to that heated situation of just moments ago. Instead, he stood up before the gazes of those women and took the scroll off the table.
“Alright, now that we have a lead, it’ll be better to get moving”.
Sakura had never traveled before in the formal sense of the word but, something told her that this was not a usual way.
Although, truth to be told, this was about an immortal being after all. His magic abilities allowed him to be able to teleport through dimensions, different places. Even if she clung to him with strength and he circled her form with his arm, Sakura could not help to feel that at any moment she would fall to some abysm with no way out since all she saw before her were flashes of light.
Being unable to keep for much time her eyes open before so much radiance, Sakura closed her eyes for a few moments until suddenly that sensation of void stopped invading her. Opening one of her eyes tentatively, she noticed that before her was a dessert of golden sands and rosy sky.
“We are here” she heard Sasuke say, his voice rumbling inside of his chest to which she was clinging with urgency and Sakura raised her gaze to him, who had his own still fixated on the horizon and she squinted.
“Where?” she wished to know since all she looked was ground and air.
“Your training area” he clarified as he separated from her and took a few steps to the front before turning around in her direction so he could face her “You can try to attack me here”.
“But I don’t want to” she looked at him with bewilderment. She had never assaulted someone intentionally, the insinuation seemed so absurd.
Sasuke suppressed a smirk, it had been quite some time since he had found a human that provoked in him the variety of reactions that she did to him. Instead, he kept his serious expression.
“You’ll have to learn to do it, you must be prepared for the worst”.
“That’s not what you promised!” she exclaimed frustrated at the same time that a sound similar to that of a canon made echo in the abundant infertile land that surrounded them.
Alarmed, both turned their faces in direction to that sound, throwing glances to the other, Sakura could not help but to address him:
“What was that?” she asked worried.
With his scarlet gaze now alert to the distance, Sasuke whispered “I don’t know, but it should not be anything good”
“Are you saying that this place is not safe? Was that not the reason why you brought us here?”
“They can teleport like I do, Sakura. Naruto’s coordinates were just an approximation” he explained without tearing his scarlet gaze away from that golden and rose horizon.
“So, what are we still doing here? We should go!” she started to say, agitated at the prospect of facing more immortals to which she would not be able to deal with in her inexperienced condition.
“If we move now, it’ll be easier for them to track us” he quickly explained and, had it not been because Sakura had her stare fixated on him as he explained, she would not have been able to distinguish the silhouette of Sasuke grabbing her, successfully managing to protect her before a bomb fell on them with what Sakura thought was a veil of violet energy.
“What the hell?” she heard herself whisper between his partner embrace, who now stared with intensity to a point at his right with those eyes usually a shade of scarlet now wearing an impair tone. One of them shining with the same shade of violet as the energy that surrounded them.
“Who knew we’d be this lucky, eh, Sasori?” they heard someone call between the mantle of sand that still dissipated at their around. Sakura noted how the grip on her figure clenched lightly at the sound of the voice and she gasped.
“Sasuke?” she meant to ask what was it that made him look ferocious however, before she could manage to voice out her doubts, the new voices interrupted her.
“To cross paths with the famous Uchiha survivor and…” Sakura directed her gaze to the direction Sasuke looked so intently only to soon see a black figure, they wore a black mantle like Sasuke’s only that it had red clouds sewed to it. “Well, well, is that not that pinky girl from that time?”
This time as Sakura gasped agitatedly between Sasuke’s arms, he grunted and its sound echoed against her body. Her emerald eyes widened as she recognized the figures, as she saw they knew her.
“So we meet again little girl?” the voice that talked this time was from the other companion, their figures now clear at just few meters of distance.
Both of them wore the same mantle, a black mantle with red clouds decorating the long cloth that covered their bodies but, while one of them was taller and of blonde tresses, his companion was shorter and wore his red hair short and rowdy.
“I’ll distract them, but I want you to run in the opposite direction. I’ll look for you once I get rid of them” she heard Sasuke whisper to her, without removing at any moment his stare from those vampires.
“I can’t do that” she refuses to continue with his plan; searching for his eyes only to be met with his tense profile, not wishing to lower his guard before those immortals. “I don’t want to leave without you”
She could barely register the spark of discomposure cross his gaze, only to soon pronounce the frown on his eyebrows.
“I’m not asking you, Sakura. You’ll do it”.
“At least take my blood now!”
“I’ll gladly do it, little girl” the blond responded from that distance, managing to distinguish her words as soon as she screeched elevating the volume of her voice.
Just like moments ago, she sensed once more the quick movement of flashes blinding her and, suddenly, she was alone in the middle of leafy green trees, away from the previous infertile and desertic scenario.
Stunned, Sakura cried out the name of her partner, only to be replied with the sound of birds flutter between the trees and nothing else.
“Who would say that the powerful and proud clan Uchiha end up subdued before the charms of a child” the blond smiled with sneer and Sasuke felt his violet aura blaze with more strength. “Itachi would be so disappointed…”
In a blink, that violet aura extended to them with velocity, in its pace letting a black flame as trail of their possible destiny had it not been thanks to their good speed that managed to make them react just a moment before being consumed in flames.
Instead of eating out their bodies, the flame managed to capture the black mantle with distinctive red clouds and turn it into ashes just seconds earlier so they could appreciate the burning cloth convert.
Astounded with the ferocity of said power, his blonde opponent observed the cloth still incredulous while his redhead partner addressed his gaze to Sasuke with caution.
“Your powers, they’re stronger than before” he observed but the Uchiha kept silent “It’s her, isn’t it?”
“Her? Are you idiotic, Sasori?” his blonde companion exclaimed indignant, reacting as he heard what seemed to him, a nonsensical declaration “She’s just a human”.
“You’re the idiot, Deidara. Did you not see the mark on her forehead?”
“The mark on her… Ah! Was that—”
Before they could continue getting their own conclusions, Sasuke lashed out against them once more.
“So we touched a delicate point huh” Deidara said avoiding the attack only by little, while his partner dispersed in the distance. Feeling the aura of the redhead disappear at his side, Sasuke cursed. “Don’t sound so disappointed, Sasuke. We can still play a little while your little pet plays with a new master”.
Instead of responding, Sasuke limited to send him a scarlet stare in which his black iris wheeled and ended up catching his blonde opponent in an illusion to the void of his mind in gloom.
“Do you think I have not been in this situation before? I knew your brother, you know?” even in this reality of black and white images, the blond wandered in the darkness, shrugging as he spoke: “Although, the reason he had gotten so defensive was because I spoke of his clumsy little brother, not because of a simple human
“Or, maybe I should give you a little recognition now” he continued to speak, allowing him to continue digging his grave, Sasuke kept silent as he planned his next point of attack “, you ended up being attracted to a strength different to your species. That is an unusual feat on Uchihas”
Gravitation, that was how they called the phenomenon that attracted two beings together. Having his soul linked to Sakura was another way to call it, but the result was the same: the inertia to protect what was linked to a vampire by sharing blood.
Deidara was right, the instinct of an Uchiha to protect someone who was not their direct descendant or precedent was unusual for them. His father had gravitated towards his mother, his mother towards Itachi and him to Sasuke. Sasuke, by having his family taken away, seemed to be gravitating towards Sakura. It was clear to the wanderer before him, most likely it was also clear to the redhead that had just disappeared.
Which only ended up in encouraging his resolution. While he was distracted making his monologue, Sasuke took the chance to propitiate him a strike of blue lightning bolts that ended up extracting Deidara’s breath and soul only moments before he could watch him fall in that dark abysm and bring them back to the golden soil now dampened in scarlet liquid.
As Deidara’s corpse collapsed a few steps away from him, little trails of smoke made way around Sasuke indicating the blond also planned to attack him as soon as he moved from his position. Not counting with the Uchiha not needing to move to stab him with his lightning bolts and ended up dying before he could blow his ground bombs.
Now that his partner had fallen, it was moment to look for Sakura. Determined to not let that other precious person to him died as long as he existed.
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samwinchesterfanfic · 6 years
Text
Summer Love Chapter 2
Chapter one here
Dean x reader
Warnings: language, dirty thoughts(ish), angst & bullying.
POV: Reader, Dean(bold writing), back to reader again.
A/N: Hope y’all like this! Tag list is open. A bit short.
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Dean payed for my coffee, so I ordered the largest size Caribou offered. I also got an almond bear claw and a premade turkey sandwich. Dean got a medium coffee and a slice of “whatever pie they had”. I kid you not, those were his exact words. We found a booth in the back corner, it was oddly secluded and quiet, which was nice. The only thing that made me uncomfortable was the fact that it was extremely intimate. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to control my feelings back here at the dark table. We sat down across from each other, awkward silence ensuing once again. We ate in silence, Deans knee occasionally bumping mine, sending shivers up my spine. I took a sip of my coffee, and he started laughing.
“What?!” I asked playfully. He smiled and lifted his hand to my face, wiping off a bit of foam sticking to my upper lip. It was slow and exquisitely painful due to the sexual tension building between us. His green eyes pierced my Y/E/C ones, and by breath hitched. I could tell he was leaning closer inch by inch, and I cleared my throat, backing away.
“Are you okay?” He asked.
“Dean, I’m fine. But stop flirting with me, because there’s no way in hell that I’m falling for some pretty boy jock. Especially not you.”
“You think I’m pretty? I was going more for handsome or hotter then the burning sun, but okay.” I sighed and crossed my arms.
“I’m serious. I’m not going to be another one of your conquests or some trophy. Unlike the girls you usually sleep with, I have morals, standards even. So if you think you can ‘bag me’ with a cup of coffee, a sandwich, and a bear claw, then you’re wrong.”
“What if I just want to be your friend?”
“I’m not the type of girl you’re usually friends with Dean. I’m not daft, I know that much.”
“Exactly. You’re not the type of girl I’m usually friends with. That’s why I wanna be friends with you. You’re different. Eccentric. Some would even say odd. I like that. And hey, if our friendship just so happens to have some benefits, that wouldn’t be so bad.” He smirked during that last part, and I’ll admit I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing.
“You wanna be my friend? Fine. But you’ll have to get to know me first.” He shrugged, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms.
“No problemo. I’d love to.”
“Alright. Do you have any questions for me, anything you wanna know?” He pretended to think about it, but the glint in his eyes told me that he immediately knew what he wanted to know.
“Why are you so anti-social?”
“I don’t like people. They’re slow and annoying, and the majority of them are dumb.”
“And you’re not?”
“No, obviously not.” He chuckled at that.
“Okay. What’s your favorite class?”
“English.”
“It must be a coincidence that the one class we have together, is your favorite class. Hm.” He smirked and I felt the need to kiss him and hit him at the same time.
“No, English has a strict set of rules. Of do’s and dont’s. What you can and can’t do. I like the order, it’s calming.”
“Okay. Why do you always seem to be in a rush?”
“Places to be, people to see, three jobs to work, homework to do. It’s stressful.”
“Why do you work three jobs?” I didn’t like this question. Too many answers, too many consequences if I give the wrong one. I stood up abruptly.
“Time to go back to school.” With that I walked out, leaving a very confused Winchester behind me.
What had happened? We were bonding, she was opening up to me. Then I guess I asked a question that was too personal for her taste. Would she ever trust me? I just have to work at it.
The drive back to school was awkward and tense. I needed to ask her something, but I didn’t want her to clam up or get pissed. She looked like she could kill a man a million different ways with her bare hands, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be her first victim. I waited until she pulled into the school parking lot, slamming on the breaks hard enough to give me whiplash. She went to unbuckle her seatbelt and I put my hand on top of hers, stopping her. 
“Did I do something wrong?” I murmured. She sighed, her features softening slightly.
“No. I just don’t feel the need to spill my life story to the most popular guy in school.” I saw her swallow thickly, and that’s when it hit me.
“I make you nervous.” I did my best to state it as a question, but it was more of a statement. She scoffed, but I could tell I was right.
“Why would you think that?” Her voice was soft, but her breath hitched as I leaned closer. All I could think about was how much I wanted to kiss her, taste her lips on mine.
“Because I make you feel something you don’t want to.” I was leaning closer inch by inch, trying not to scare her off. I was close enough to run my tongue over her lips easily, and right before our lips touched, she pulled away. Disappointment flooded through me. 
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She said, then she unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car. I felt my dick twitch and start to rise as I got out of the car, walking behind her just so I could watch her hips sway and her hair blow in the wind. There was something about her that put me on end. For me, this wasn’t the usual chase, she deserved to be respected. I barley knew her, yet every second I spent with her made me realize I was starting to like her, for real. I quickly adjusted myself as I walked into the school, giving her one last glance as we went our separate ways. 
Dean was right in more ways then one. He did make me feel something I didn’t want to. He made me feel hope, he made my heart flutter, he made me nervous. All of which I hated. I prided myself on being unbreakable. On having walls built that no guy or bitchy girl could climb or weaken. I headed to my next class: AP World History. The teacher droned on, my music blasted The Pretty Reckless, and I took some lazy notes. But most of all, I was dreading the next class. I had Spanish with Dean’s groupies. They had never paid special attention to me before, although there was always some whispers and laughs among the group directed towards me. Somehow, I knew that today would be different. The bell rang and I decided to walk into class like nothing was different. I put both headphones in and turned the volume all the way up, blocking out any noise that battled to reach my ears. I sat down in the dark back corner of the classroom, my usual seat, and kicked my feet up on my desk. It wasn’t long before the tiny shadows of the 6 bitches loomed over me. I glared up at them, and saw that Dean’s girlfriend, Ashley, was among them. I took my earbuds out, and raised my eyebrows at them.
“What do you want?” I asked sharply. The girls looked at Ashley and she put one hand on my desk as she leaned down, coming eye to eye with me.
“Do you wanna explain why MY boyfriend went to lunch with you today, and then BROKE UP WITH ME RIGHT AFTER!” she screeched. I’m almost 100% sure that her voice hit a register that only dogs can hear. 
“Maybe that’s something you should ask Dean.”
“He’ll never like you. You’re not his type.” I knew I was going to regret asking this:
“And why’s that?”
“Because you’re a fat, poor, ugly, weak little bitch.” She sneered. That’s when I think I lost it. I may not have much, but I do have self respect and self confidence. Before I knew it, my palm came in contact with her cheek, and she was screaming. It felt like victory to me, and I knew that whatever my punishment would be, it was worth it. I should have done it to the bitch sooner. I stood up, before replying lowly:
“Call me that again, and I’ll make sure you have to make an emergency call to your plastic surgeon to put your nose back in place. Consider this a warning. You have no idea who you’re messing with.” She looked at me, shock and fear on her face. I smiled sweetly at her as the teacher walked in, and I sat back down in my seat, putting my earbuds back in, and pretending like the last minute never happened. I knew that Ashley would most likely report me, but the red mark on her face made it all worth it.
Summer Love Tag List:
@soullessbabee @death-unbecomes-you
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onesandzcros · 3 years
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no crushes
Hermione didn’t enjoy school. That felt like an understatement some days. It was a development that had only happened as she became a teenager, and her father was busy. Too busy for her to want to bother him with the reasons why. Being the British ambassador to Spain was enough to keep anyone busy, with the result that she’d had to quickly accustom herself to a very different environment when it became clear attending an ordinary school was no longer acceptable. She missed it. She missed her friends, the people she’d grown up with.
But Hermione was also her parents’ daughter, and that meant she’d keep a spine of steel and get through it on her own as much as possible. It was hardly a surprise that her new private school was filled with people who didn’t look like she did. Her parents had told her when she was younger that she was unique and special, that she could be anything that she wanted to be. What she’d rapidly learned since attending a private school where most people didn’t have her skin colour, however, was that not everyone else agreed.
That was why Hermione was in the library, as she frequently was, sat alone with a book because the cluster of popular girls in her class had made a point to exclude her. Those that weren’t popular didn’t dare include her because they were worried about being targets too. The social structure was very simple: she wasn’t Spanish, she wasn’t white, she still had a prevalent accent, and she had adjusted too easily for anyone’s liking. They’d all been waiting for her, the new girl, the one who didn’t belong, to trip and fall on her face. To make errors in classes and social faux-pas that she didn’t understand. They’d wanted to see her fail.
Hermione hadn’t failed. Her grades were perfect. She read ahead, she worked hard, and she didn’t understand the concept of pretending to be less intelligent to endear herself to others. Those weren’t the sort of people she wanted as friends. Thinking that way was another reason she didn’t fit in, one of many.
“Psst. Granger.”
It was a low whisper, but it was one that made Hermione grit her teeth. Not you again. Rather than respond, long experience meant she simply got up, put her book in her bag and slung it over her shoulder.
“Think she didn’t hear you, Cormac. Must have something wrong with her ears.”
“Maybe she doesn’t understand polite conversation.”
Hermione hadn’t been fast enough, and the result was that her blood was boiling, and she was physically biting her tongue. If she got into trouble for fighting back, her parents would find out. There was suddenly a broad pair of shoulders and a chest directly in her line of vision, McLaggen towering over her. “Didn’t you hear me, Granger? I was talking to you. You should really pay better attention, you know.” The smile that was supposedly so charming to everyone else looked predatory to her. He gave her signals that she was too wary to ignore.
“I wasn’t listening,” she said bluntly. “I’m leaving and you’re barring the way. Please excuse me.”
Cormac’s smile faltered, and something behind his eyes grew hard and cold. “Hear that, boys? Apparently I’m in her way. That’s not very nice, is it?”
“You should teach her a lesson, Cormac. Why should she get to speak to you that way when you were only being friendly?” That was a female voice, one belonging to a girl that Hermione didn’t recognise, but she was looking at Cormac with the same doe eyes as every other girl in the building. Every other girl apart from Hermione, and therein lay the problem. McLaggen didn’t like the word no, especially when used repeatedly. He’d flirted with her a few days in, clearly expecting the same doe-eyed devotion everyone else gave. She hadn’t reacted. To say he hadn’t taken it well was an understatement, and she wasn’t up for being cornered outside the girls’ changing rooms after PE again. That had run the edge of fear and it wasn’t a gauntlet she felt like engaging with. Not today. Please not today.
In the present moment, however, McLaggen looked delighted, and that wasn’t good either. “What a good idea. What kind of lesson do you think I should teach her?”
Hermione’s retort was sharp. “You can think, McLaggen? Someone should call the press to announce it.”
McLaggen’s gaze darkened. “You’ve got a smart mouth, Granger. I might have to do something to occupy it.” One of the boys with him made a lewd gesture, and there was a horrible round of snickering that made her want to crawl out of her skin.
Mercifully, Hermione escaped what more McLaggen would have come up with due to a very annoyed librarian making an appearance. “Shhh,” she said sharply, disapproving eyes on all of the teenagers. “Please return to your study areas or leave.”
Hermione didn’t need telling twice. She darted around the group and headed straight for the library door. There was a muffled curse, the sound of a reprimand; while she didn’t quite run for it, she didn’t wait around either. Her stomach turned over, a visceral reaction, and she looked around quickly for the best point of escape. Computer lab? Either it wouldn’t occur to them to look for her there (she hoped) or she’d end up cornered, but at least with the possibility of an authority figure nearby.
Hermione gambled. The door to the computer lab was on the next floor up, and she rounded the corner to the staircase, the door separating the corridor the library was on slamming shut. She’d never thought of the computer lab as anything but in practical terms: useful. Now it would serve a dual purpose, and it was mercifully quiet when she entered, intending to find the most hidden corner of it she could manage.
There was no one else in there. The relief ran through her. It was short-lived when she spotted a head of pale blond hair. Oh no, already? When the person looked up and briefly glanced at her, though, Hermione realised it wasn’t a student at all. It was the new coding class coordinator, the one with the Latin name who looked too young to be teaching anything at all, supposedly. She was due to take that class, had been excited about being invited; only students the faculty felt could handle the additional workload were invited. She offered him a quick, apologetic smile, knowing it was clear she was out of breath and trying unsuccessfully to hide it. “Hi, I’m sorry to bother you, is it all right if I’m in here? All of the library study spaces were full. I’ll be quiet, I promise.”
Grey eyes appeared to study her before Hermione got the confirmation she needed to stay, a small smile and a gesture to help herself. It meant that gratefully, she vanished into one of the individual computer areas, pushing the keyboard aside and opening her book again. Peace, for now, at least until next class that afternoon. Lunch could be spent outside on the grounds somewhere provided she was careful.
The peace was short-lived, because she heard the sound of feet at the door and the loud noise as it was shoved open.
“Well, where is she? Cormac’s waiting by the gym.”
Hermione’s heart sank.
McLaggen’s lackey sounded annoyed. “I’m sure she came this way. Bitch thinks she’s better than everyone. Come on, she must have just waited until we were gone and headed back to the library.”
“Forget it, she’s not worth the trouble. I don’t get McLaggen’s obsession with her anyway, it’s weird.”
A voice followed, one that had to belong to the newcomer, who proceeded to kick them out of his lab in short order. The exact words were dulled down by the way Hermione was trying not to breathe too loudly, heart pounding in her ears. The panic was overwhelming.
The door at last slammed shut. In a bid to calm down, Hermione shut her eyes, only realising then that the sound of the coordinator’s (Draco, she remembered) soft but incredibly rapid typing had slowed and halted. He’d obviously figured out that there had been a problem, but when his typing picked up again, Hermione felt calmer, found the rhythm of it soothing, and slowly exhaled.
That was her first association with him. A place where it was quiet. Safety.
It wouldn’t be until Hermione actually took the class in coding that her point of view changed. Draco wasn’t just someone who kept a quiet computer lab that she could retreat to (had retreated to, because his silence was a kindness she couldn’t afford not to take). He was brilliant, technically gifted in a way that showed in how he explained code. But (and Hermione hated herself a bit for this) he was also incredibly handsome, in the kind of perfect bone structure, graceful movement way that drew her eyes.
Hermione didn’t get crushes. She didn’t.
But if she reserved a bit of a soft spot for those few weeks that he was there at the school, for the kind hello that he passed her way probably thinking it meant nothing, it served to fix him firmly in her memory. No one else knew. No one else needed to.
He was beautiful. He was clever. He was kind. And he kept her presence in his lab a secret without asking questions.
Kindness was rarer in her world than it had ever been. Sitting in a booth tucked completely away from him turned into choosing one where she could see him, but no one else could see her. They didn’t talk much. That was fine. Hermione knew everything that she needed to from the way that Draco intervened when others were far crueller than he was in his earshot.
It was through those interactions that Hermione learned another important fact about Draco: he couldn’t stand bullies, they turned his tone acid in a way that she didn’t hear directed at anyone else. Maybe it was watching someone stronger pick on someone weaker. Maybe it was personal, she didn’t know. All that she did know was that watching him was far better than being the one watched, and that at this point she couldn’t help it.
She never gave him her name directly. It was on the class register for the coding class. Hermione had hardly spoken to him except to ask or answer questions, or to acknowledge him that first day she’d concealed herself in the lab with his permission. He didn’t ask for it. Perhaps he didn’t care, or it didn’t matter, or he sensed what she needed was one place where there would be no expectations or harassment. That also pinned him as observant, there in other signs too; in how no one’s attention could wander without him noticing, and no difficulty passed him by. He was patient in how he talked people through code, in how it became a language that anyone could learn when he broke it down.
Hermione didn’t get crushes.
It didn’t mean that when it came to the last day of the course and Draco’s last day on campus, Hermione wasn’t sad.
She didn’t get to say goodbye. She never got to say thank you.
She had no way of knowing that it wasn’t really goodbye at all.
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rtirman-blog · 6 years
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41 An Easy Way Out
Back to school I went. Actually, I made two trips to South Bend.  The first was a brief trip to meet with Dean Baldinger, find a place to live, and to check on a lead for a job.  Even though I made good money selling ice cream, I was not good at holding on to it.  Income was an essential. The second trip was on The Pennsylvania Railroad, my usual transportation from home to school.
 I remember telling you about John Murray, my best friend at home, who, before reaching his teens, burned his legs, horribly, jumping over a leaf fire while wearing fuzzy western chaps. Well, the insurance settlement gave him the cash to purchase a blue,1958 Chevy Impala convertible.  So, in the summer of 1959, he offered to drive me out to Notre Dame and back.  His Catholic upbringing played heavily in his decision to drive me.  I believe many Spanish pilgrims would have skipped Majorca, if an ocean hadn’t separated them from the land of Notre Dame, God’s favorite place…and football team. The miracles of football have always been attributed to the presence and efforts of the Holy Ghost.  It made sense John wanted to take me out there. Probably, it was the last thing we did together.  It didn’t matter what I showed John.  He was overwhelmed with the gold statue, atop the Golden Dome, of Our Lady of the Lake…Notre Dame du Lac-the actual name of the University.  
Truthfully, I have a shaky memory of when different things happened on that trip.  I remember feeling very suspicious of the Dean’s constant support and encouragement.  What I began to think was the Sisters of the Holy Cross, Sister Peter in particular, were behind it all…or maybe even Father O’Brian.  Most likely, credit goes to St. Dean Baldinger, who encouraged us all.  I was welcomed back, and he told me to select my courses at registration.  
 Next, we traveled to the home of Mrs. Agnes Tomlison, a tiger of a woman at eighty-six years, who could look at you with that same piercing eye as Sister Peter, and lick her lips the same way as my special angelic nun.  My friend Don Tanguay, who had lived there the previous year, recommended me as a good Catholic student whom she could trust.  When I interviewed, that lie continued.  I also told her I was Catholic.  She then took a few rocks in her rocking chair, gave me a piercing eye while licking her lips, agreed to my living there, and got up from the chair to show me the room.  It was upstairs.  She then gave me a vital responsibility.  Each morning as I leave for school, I am to look to see if the living room shade is up or down.   If it was still down, that meant she was dead, and I should call her son.
 Before John and I left to return to New York, I checked to see if there were any jobs on campus that would fit my schedule. I can’t remember how I got the info, but Louie Rappelli was setting up a pizza parlor, and he needed students.  I went over to the building in which he was located and talked with him.  He owned another restaurant, on Notre Dame Avenue, which I frequented. So, he was glad to see me, and promised me a job when I returned to school.  Back to New York we went, and back to Good Humor for me. That was a real successful trip. Now all I had to do was register for my classes.
 My educational situation was really not too bad.  I had just a couple of science credits to graduate with the degree in science promised to me by the Dean.  I just had to take enough course to reach the 132 credits needed for graduation. If I kept my nose to the grindstone, I would be an alumnus on June 4, 1960. Naturally, medical school was not in my future, but graduating was clearly in view.
 When it was time to return to Notre Dame, Mother, Joe, and Al took me to Penn Station.  We got to the platform just as the conductor yelled, “All Aboard.”  Quietly, Al said to me, “Don’t come home without a G--Damn degree”. I picked up my baggage and walked toward the entrance to the train.  Just as I boarded, I could hear Al yell these unforgettable words, “Take education, it’s easy!”   So, when I got back to school, I visited the education department.  
 Get this! All I had to do were education classes, and I could graduate with my science degree (as long as I met those requirements) and apply for a State license to teach all math and physical sciences in Secondary Education.  The courses I needed were as follows: Principles of Secondary Education, Materials and Methods of Secondary Education, Tests and Measurements, Educational Statistics, and Practice Teaching.  I signed up for Geology and Lab, Intro to Analysis, Calculus I and II to meet the science requirements.  I was short five hours to reach the 132 credits to graduate.  I took care of that the day I signed up for courses for my final semester. I decided to take five hours of piano.  I went over to the Music Department to see if a piano teacher would take me on.  To my disappointment, all the piano teachers’ schedules were full.   I guess my disappointment radiated from my being.  A very nice man, who saw my sad face, asked if he could help.  I told him about needing 5 hours to graduate and my plans to take piano, but the piano teachers had no openings.  He asked me if I would be okay with 5 hours of violin. I jumped at that opportunity and signed up for the 5 hours. He was a professor of violin.  His name- Charles Biando.  Little did I know, Mr. Biando was considered the primo violin teacher in the Midwest.  Clearly, without question, he was simply helping me to graduate.  Everything I played that semester sounded like “Mary had a little lamb”.  I did learn how to not screech the violin.
I’m not too sure whether I made a turnaround academically, and became a better student; or perhaps, Al was right- Education was easy.  I enjoyed visiting the public schools and observing classes, in all disciplines.  As I learned about theories of teaching and learning, I wondered about the kind of teacher I would be, and how I would relate to students and to other teachers.  By the end of that first semester, I found a student teaching position at John Adams High School in South Bend.  Mr. Volney Wier, head of the Mathematics Department, would be my supervising teacher.  He taught, Algebra, Trigonometry, and Solid Geometry.  My supervisor from Notre Dame, Dr. Jerry Fargin was to observe me, and then, discuss with Mr. Weir my progress.  Both teachers would contribute to my final evaluation.
 My primary job was to teach trigonometry.  At first, I observed that class for about a week before I took over the reins.  Mr. Wier’s style of lesson plans fit me to a tee. He did not make elaborate plans. Each day, he would look in the book to find the topics to be covered, and he would make a list of those topics.  I liked that, and I did mine the same way.  I would list the topics, and I would make darn well sure I understood all the topics before teaching them to the class.  Once the bell rang to start each class, we would first go over the homework that was due.  Then, I would present new topics to the students, assign homework, and give them class time to get started on that assignment.  I enjoyed the students, immensely.  We solved problems together, and had a few good laughs doing it.   I can distinctly remember thinking… wow, this is fun! I can’t believe I can get paid for telling others what I know!  
 Ironically, I also learned that I could get paid for not telling students what I know. One day, I had to teach Mr. Wier’s Solid Geometry class without any preparation. The class consisted of five seniors and me.  I had them put their assignment problems on the blackboard, after which, we would review each problem, together.  I basically kept my mouth shut as the five of them asked each other questions and fully discussed the problems.  I learned a lot just by watching and listening to them.  When the bell rang, they thanked me for one of the best classes they ever had. Yes, if I was getting paid, I would have been paid for that performance.
The day Dr. Fargin made his required observation of my teaching, he made it a surprise visit.  My lecture was really short and in my eyes, him showing up that day would make for a disastrous experience.   After going over the homework, I was to teach them about radians. I told you about the second time I took the New York State Regents exam in Trigonometry.   I missed one question on the entire exam - it was on radians.  I told the students because of my experience learning about radians, I decided to give them a very brief lesson, then assign them lots of problems to solve for their assignment, which they might complete by the end of the period.  Dr. Fargin saw me teach for ten to fifteen minutes, and the rest of the time, he watched me move around the classroom helping the students.  I was certain, this did not look good.  He would probably have to observe my teaching, again… and I would still end up with a crappy grade.  However, the next day, on campus, another education student, whose name I cannot remember, saw me in the Student Center.  “Hey Rich”, he yelled, “you should have heard Dr. Fargin talk to our class about his observation of your teaching.  He raved about you?  He said you were masterful.”  Dr. Fargin was impressed by my honesty with the students and the appropriate response to my own experience, i.e., the brief lecture followed by me walking around the room helping those students in need.  My Practice Teaching final grade was a well deserved A+. That happened the second semester about six weeks before graduation
That was the Spring semester.  But, I would like to back up to the first semester of that year to tell you a few important memories.  I’ll start with Mrs. Tomlison.  Daily, she got outside to sweep the front steps. The front door was at least a story and a half higher than the street.  There had to be fifteen to twenty steps for her to clean.  What a marvel of a women! Even on a windy Fall day, she’d have her coat, her babushka, and the broom, sweeping those steps clean.  Another memory I have of her was her love of soap operas, especially “The Edge of Night”.   If I was home by 4 PM, I’d sit with her and watch that show. I thought it made her happy that we did this together. The greatest memory of Agnes Tomlison was her desire to leave this earth and enter God’s Kingdom.  Every Saturday night, she would get all dolled up in her most beautiful dress, lie down on her bed, and ask God to take her.  Each Sunday morning when she woke up, you could hear her disappointment resonate throughout the house- ”Goddamnit!”  I heard God finally welcomed her ten years later- she was 96. I’ll bet St. Peter needed help with the steps in front of the Pearly Gates!
 It should be clear to you that my academic life and my future were successfully merging.  My classes were going well, and I was gaining confidence in myself.  My job at the new pizza parlor was great.  I was making minimum wage plus free meals.  I suppose, when I look at it, I was smoothly sailing as a student toward graduation and a future. That didn’t mean my mind had matured beyond my ability of doing stupid things. On a Saturday late in the football season, I received a call from Jim. He and Tom, now both alumni, were in town and wanted me to join them for supper and fun.  But I had to work.  Tom thought of a scheme that would make our reunion possible…and I went along with it. He called Louie Rappelli, my boss, and pretended to be a doctor from St. Joseph’s Hospital.  He told Louie that I was in a car accident, and although I had no signs of physical injury, he wanted me to stay in the hospital overnight.  Yeah! I was free to join them.  I cannot remember anything about that evening, but what happened the next day was unforgettable.  I walked into work and was greeted by Louie with “Get the hell out of here!” I lost my job. Maybe Tom wasn’t very convincing, or, more likely, it was a super, stupid thing to do.   I now needed to find a job-FAST!  And that’s what I did.  I landed a sales job with Cutco Cutlery, a division of Alcoa.  I would talk with young gals and talk them into buying knives and other kitchen utensils for their hope chests.  Believe it or not, I was fairly successful.  I made enough to keep my head above water. Also, to this day, I am sold on Cutco products.
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Contact Zone and the Family
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By Aaron Homem 
July 26, 2018. Portugal. It’s around seven at night, but it couldn’t feel any later - the lack of air conditioning and overwhelming heat has brought on both nausea and exhaustion. Around an extended aluminum table, I have within my reach every possible meat product that I can possibly name: cow, goat, pig, followed by numerous other “mystery meats.” A Super Bock in hand, or was it a Sagres? Didn’t matter the name, I drank. Everyone at the table was family, what did it matter if I had one, two, or three beers. This was an easy alternative to making an unsuccessful conversation; they all speak Portuguese, and each movement of their lips registered as secrets that I couldn’t latch onto. So I kept drinking. Across the table, I caught my cousin David (pronounced Da-veed) condescendingly speaking in my direction, as if I was a newborn with no conscious idea of what was taking place. His words left his mouth like rapidfire, but I could only make out a single word: Spielberg. My mother did love telling people that her son was an aspiring film major, so David’s attempt to connect with me by speaking about film didn’t exactly go over my head. 
Still, all I did was nod. 
I can acknowledge that there was an attempt by my monolingual Portuguese speaking cousin to form a relationship with me, a monolingual English speaker, but even then I didn’t feel a connection. How could a relationship exist on the basis of only occasionally understanding each other? The language barrier was not an abstract concept, but a tangible obstacle that wasn’t going to be easily overcome: at least not in the present moment. With language being an inherent factor in my inability to relate with my Portuguese family, I will use this paper to dissect a single major question: how does being monolingual (English speaking) affect my ability to form a relationship with my monolingual (Portuguese speaking) family?
To grapple with the natural separating factor brought upon by language, I use Stanford Professor Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone,” which she originated in the article “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Pratt’s term is used to refer to “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 4).  Using a two-part historical letter to Spanish King Philip III - New Chronicle and Good Government by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (or simply Guaman Poma), an account of an indigenous Inca’s view of Spanish conquest of Peru - Pratt systematically furthers her definition of a contact zone. Poma’s letter is uniquely written in two languages (Spanish and Quechua), with Poma using “the official Spanish genre for his own ends” as a way to address both his own community, and that of the metropolitan Spanish Community (Pratt 4). In the first part of the letter, Poma rewrote Christian history with the Incans rather than Europeans at the forefront of the narrative; the New Chronicle is what Pratt identifies as an autoethnographic text, in which people (in this case Poma) “describe themselves in ways that engage with representations that others have made of them” (Pratt 5). 
These texts are constructed “in response to” representations of the subjugated culture (the Incas) by the conqueror (the Spanish), merging the indigenous language and customs to intervene in the typical “metropolitan modes of understanding” (Pratt 6). While autoethnography is seen as a literary art of the contact zone by Pratt - along with transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, etc - she stressed that miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning are “some of the perils of writing in the contact zone” (Pratt 11). Pratt, a professor of higher education, is also focused on the concept of “safe spaces,” which “refer to social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, and temporary protection from legacies of oppression” (Pratt 17). These places can foster wisdom and understanding, but also breed misunderstanding and hurt, particularly in relation to the classroom setting. Although Pratt is mainly focused on the contact zone in relationship with higher education, Oxford professor James Clifford expands Pratt’s original idea to include “cultural tensions within the same state, region, or city” (qtd. in O’Connell 850). Working from this principle, the dinner table setting is another way to explore “culture tension” relating to the intersectionality of language and identity. Furthermore, location (Portugal) can now act as a greater focal point in illustrating the effects of monolingualism on family relations. 
Neither my cousin nor I (or our family for that matter) verbally defined the unique auditorial roles that we occupied at that moment: but while unspoken, they were actively present. While I won’t speak on behalf of David, I found myself incapable of relating to his identity as Portuguese-speaking, when I was mainly attuned to relating with family, who like me, were self-identified as English-speaking. While Pratt’s concept of autoethnography is based around an inherent historical power struggle - between the subjugated and the metropolitan conqueror - she doesn’t often explore the contact zone on the small scale; the contact zone present not defined by a power struggle, but by comfort and discomfort. Noel Patrick O’Connell, a Sociology professor whose career has focused on the autoethnographic ethnographic study of the lives of deaf people, describes the contact zone between deaf and hearing identities as a “disjuncture” (O’Connell 858); when examining how my cousin and I relate, there is an apparent disjuncture (or tension) caused by who is comfortable and uncomfortable in the given situation. 
Auditorial contact zones, as defined by O’Connell, create an environment (defined by hearing) where people become “consciously aware of their identity” (O’Connell 858). What’s present at this moment of “conscious awareness” is a glaring case of cognitive dissonance for both parties. In Lagahrinhos, Portugal, where the majority (the comfortable) of people speak soley Portuguese, I have become a minority (discomfort) and I can’t possibly expect for anyone to suddenly speak in a language that I would understand. The discomfort arose from my ability to recognize that language, like Pratt insists, doesn’t exist to create a “unified and homogenous social world,” and that it would require more will than I had to cross the language barrier. However, “Spielberg” was an attempt by my cousin to break the disjuncture, perhaps unknowingly, unleashing a torrent of discomfort upon himself. Yet, my cousin’s English wasn’t exactly enough, at least for myself; for me, comfort could only be attained during a full conversation, preferably in my own native language. Being an English-speaking male in English-speaking America has always been an inherent privilege, but having that verbal and auditory privilege stripped away was jarring, even if somewhat expected. This bias manifested itself into the mounting number of beer bottles, remnants of my reluctance to build off the foundation laid out by David. In her essay “Out and About as a Global Citizen” about an English speaker visiting Kenya, Dr. Anu Taranath argues that while we travel to experience “something different,” we are often confronted by our inability to reconcile “what to do with the differences we have found.” My inability to react to David only drove him back from a place of discomfort to a place of comfort, returning to his conversation with the rest of the family: our difference only breeding disconnect.  
Uncomfortable: all I wanted at that moment was some quiet. Even at seventeen I was expected to ask permission before leaving the table. The act left me at my mother’s mercy. Without even looking up from her plate, and giving it to me straight, I knew my request was denied: all she said was “talk.” I mustered a sly response, bluntly telling her the obvious, “I can’t understand them.” Hitting her like a curse, my mother looked me straight in the eyes, and just as bluntly, said “that’s your problem.”
Her eyes returned to her plate.
Without knowing it, my ineptitude at picking up languages, indirectly (and perhaps metaphorically) lead to one of the perils of the contact zone: lost letters. I didn’t let this bother me too much; some people are neurologically better at learning languages, and I didn’t believe I could be blamed as such. However, I found myself confounded when I saw David relating with my younger cousins. For them a relationship was not built on a verbal or auditory level, but on action: simply kicking around a soccer ball earlier was enough to help build a relationship. In referencing the “cultural devastation” that can accompany language loss, Joshua Fishman, who is widely credited for founding the field of sociology of language, stated that “A traditionally associated language is more than just a tool of communication for its culture... [It] is often viewed as a very specific gift, a marker of identity and a specific responsibility vis-à-vis future generations” (qtd. in Haynes 2). Noticeably, my cousins aren’t confronted with this idea of language as a “specific responsibility,” whereas the notion was quite ubiquitous during my own childhood: my loss of the language was its own unique “marker of identity.” Whatever the reason for this phenomenon (and perhaps they were just too young to realize it), they seemingly didn’t have to consider language as a separating factor. However, in my own experience, I have typically found it easier to relate with others on a verbal level. Admittedly, I identify this as a particular flaw in my thinking, but because of my complete assimilation into one culture (English-speaking), I can’t overcome the difficulty in accepting another. Fortunately for my mother, who is bilingual, both English-speaking and Portuguese-speaking cultures act as “safe spaces.” For her, the idea of being Portuguese and American is intrinsically linked to her identity, whereas my only “shared understanding” with my Portuguese relatives is that we are related by blood. Personally, this disconnect is best summarized by John Milton’s Adam, who claimed “solitude sometimes is best society;” instead of embracing the culture around me, I retreated inward, to my own thoughts, to my safe space, defined by the sole language I knew (Paradise Lost XIII. 249-250). 
Work Cited
Haynes, Eric. “What Is Language Loss?” Cal.org, Center for Applied Linguistics, 2010.
www.cal.org/heritage/pdfs/what-is-language-loss.pdf. Accessed 27 Nov. 2019.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Third edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 2017. 
O'Connell, Noel Patrick. “Teaching Irish Sign Language in Contact Zones: An 
Autoethnography.” The Qualitative Report, vol. 22, no. 3, 19 Mar. 2017, pp. 849–867.
nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol22/iss3/11/. Accessed 14 Nov. 2019.
Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone," Profession, 1991. pp 33-40.
Taranath, Anu. “Out And About As A Global Citizen.” Away.
awayjournal.org/article/out-and-about-as-a-global-citizen. Accessed 29 Nov. 2019. 
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