#mark watches formula e

[russilton]

Sorry I had to find this myself bc the screenshot I saw didn’t do it justice - Mitch and Sam truly didn’t leave a single atom for Jesus

#mitch evans #sam bird #mark watches formula e

[motherfactorin-pi-face]

In which I describe the maths of how to attack and dethrone God (per Minamimoto)

So in my evergrowing post thread (which I know I'm already gonna have to add to that essay fml) I did make ref to...well, a thing that literally has made my jaw drop since when I played TWEWY the first time (and keeping in mind this was a game friends forcefully insisted I play because "there's a char Sho Minamimoto who's just like you fr", and after I'd nodded "yup" re the SI unit obsessions and the compsci refs to Heaps and Crunching (and later, as I found out, "crashing" in JP), and the aesthetic, and, and...)

Namely: Sho Minamimoto literally uses (or tries to use) a very famous maths formula called Euler's Identity to take out the Composer as an example of Forcefully Applied Mathematics. :D (This may have also been the moment when I was like "Yup, he just like me FR")

So. First off. Euler's Identity.

It's kind of difficult to explain why this particular equation is considered one of the true Chef's Kisses of Mathematics to non-mathematicians, but part of it is elegance, and part of it is that it includes five of the foundational variables that show up in mathematics all the time (and really even more functions if you break it apart): a) the natural logarithm e or Euler's number which is roughly 2.71828182845... and which is zetta important in a lot of fields including finance, biology, medicine, and calculus functions, and (as we'll get into) antennas and field strength measurements and pretty much a Shitload of functions related to growth b) the imaginary unit i or the square root of -1 (which turns out to be extremely useful in a lot of contexts, including electronics (seriously; AC electricity and functions relating to that are *heavily* dependent on the imaginary unit) and graphing and arguably how Cartesian graphs work especially once you get into calculus c) Pi (π), everyone's favourite circle ratio of 3.141592653589793238462643393279 (is pulled away from keyboard before I can draw a Taboo Noise Refinery Sigil in Paint) and which is Important in many, many contexts d) 1 (yes, 1 is considered a constant! Specifically "A quantity exists") , and

e) 0 (yes, 0 is considered a constant too, specifically "a quantity does not exist", and reducing Euler's Identity results in e^(i*pi)+1=0) To make it even more Minamimoto-esque, you can technically also express Euler's Identity as a reduction of "e^(i*x) = cos(pi) + (i * (sin(pi)) (aka Euler's Formula), and cos(pi) =-1 and sin(pi)=0.

And really it's kind of a beautiful way of how things all fit together in a lovely function that is almost a kiss from the Math Gods and if plotted traces a lovely circle.

So after that little tangent, here's how this all relates to W2D7 of TWEWY, and Minamimoto's forcefully applied mathematics. * * * So, first we end up at Pork City (Mark City if you're watching the anime; Tokyu Group liked the TWEWY tourism and by the time the anime and NEO came around decided to take advantage of the advertising), and...Joshua and Neku start having a very interesting conversation on why there's So Much Damn Noise at Pork City anyways:

Neku asks if this is the work of Pi-Face, Joshua notes "Probably" and then goes on to note that it might not all be JUST Minamimoto:

In other words: Pork City is effectively acting as an amplifier or at least an antenna for Noise. (I am not the only one to have noticed it and not even the only one on Tunglr, for that matter; Voice From The Corner also picked up on this as well though I'll freely admit I'm diving a bit more into the STEM portions of this.) TWEWY:tA is even more blatant about this imagery in ep 6, where Joshua explicitly notes that all the emotion in Shibuya collects at Mark City (remember, the animation uses the RL name) and then "crashes into Mark City and shoots up into the sky. That emotion flows back down and keeps building up here." (Shortly afterwards, Joshua also mentions the Imaginary Noise Plane as the inside of Mark City warps, similarly to a sine wave flow--or the flow of energy into, or out of, an antenna. (You do not know how loudly I screamed seeing this, as an aside) So, this is where we get into piece one, e (and where a healthy interest in radio and electronics hobbies helps!)

So antennas, interestingly, have how well they pick up a frequency measured in a logarithmic scale, and basic field strength measurements (and a lot of other "wavey" things, including earthquakes, including, well, literal background noise) get measured on logarithmic scales too. It's rather more common with antennas and earthquakes for this to be measured on log-10 scales (hence the Richter scale for quakes, or decibels for antennas and sound). There's a particular group of measurements (physical field and power measurements), however, that actually uses log-e, aka the natural logarithm, and especially for voltage or current and "root power quantities"--the neper. And, in Euler's Identity, e is taken to powers...and Pork City is basically acting as a huge antenna. Also in info engineering aspects, there's another aspect--the nat, which is considered a unit of information or info entropy...also based on e. (I told you Euler's number comes up a lot of places!)

Let's continue... So now we come to i, the imaginary unit, and that's called out blatantly by Joshua:

This, too, is based on math--from Final Fantasy II, specifically, and how the Flare spell worked. Flare is an area-effect spell and it hit based on (Enemy's HP/Flare level), i.e. enemies that had HP divisible by 2 could be hit by a Flare level 2 spell and could deliver damage based on that spell's level, etc. So a level i Flare, based on how complex numbers work, could hit just about anything (assuming, of course, that the Composer is not a Fractal Bastard and promptly yeets himself into a PokeYugiBeyBladeVerse). But...that's not the ONLY part where things imaginary come into play. So, one of the interesting bits of lore that came out in (of all things) the NEO:TWEWY Field Walk RPG (alas, JP only, but a delightful source of lore, and thankfully the fan community preserved almost all of it) is actual canon on how Tin Pins and Psychs work including the actual formula on how they work in a convo between Minamimoto and Fret:

Fret: Soooo, these psychs and pins and stuff… how does it all work? Minamimoto: The pin is charged by the Imagination of the user. Fret: Uh huuuh. Minamimoto: The pin itself is just a medium. Fret: Mm-hmm. Minamimoto: “Power” is calculated from the numerical limit of the pin, using your will as a coefficient. Fret: Yeah. Minamimoto: But that formula alone means nothing to me!

(Emphasis mine: props to Pavaal on the Dead Bird App for initial translation, and to multiple others for confirmation from the FWRPG script.) So basically how Psychs work is functionally as an athame, using formula Psych=Limit^Imaginatio. (Secret Report 1 in TWEWY also confirms Imagination is important in making a Psych work to begin with; the formula) Of note, Minamimoto also has a canonically high Imagination, as detailed in the Secret Reports. To even become a Reaper to begin with (as noted in SR7) those who survive the week who have enough Imagination become Reapers, and even among Reapers Minamimoto tends to stand out (he is canonically the youngest Reaper Officer ever, and apparently had quite the rapid rise to power). SR15 in TWEWY notes (even keeping in mind that in this instance Hanekoma is being a bit of an Unreliable Narrator in covering his own butt regarding the Taboo Thing):

The sigil Minamimoto drew was one of the undecodable types. Was that a mistake on the Fallen Angel's part? Or was it a transcription error by Minamimoto? Either way, with that design, he stands little chance of reviving himself. However, Minamimoto is driven, and his Imagination strong. Perhaps strong enough to make a Taboo sigil work, even in the Underground... If so, the specific result would be impossible to predict.

And in SR19 (again, covering up just a bit for his own helping hand):

I've detected an energy spike here. It would seem Minamimoto has returned. I judged his revival unlikely after spotting his Taboo refinery sigil on the first day, but it appears Minamimoto's Imagination is much stronger than I'd anticipated. The Fallen Angel must have completed the array for him. A troubling thought. Who can say what impact this will have on the Composer and Conductor's Game?

And even in the NEO Secret Reports it's noted his second trip through Coco's version of the Sigil actually ramped up his Imagination even more (in NEO SR 7):

Minamimoto, on the other hand has all but vanished from the proxy’s side. His Noise refinery sigil drastically heightens his Imagination, which may be why he can clearly recognize the proxy’s abilities. I have an idea of what he’s planning. It’s dangerous, but I have no way of stopping him.

And again, TWEWY:tA also makes it more blunt that Minamimoto was selected explicitly because of his Imagination and his connections to Shibuya as Hanekoma's Plan B. So there's imaginary units (in the sense of literal level i flare), and imaginary units (in a Reaper whose Imagination is already in the stratosphere). And in regards to pi? Well, Pi-Face, he has very much a rep of being....numbers- and math-obsessed even BEFORE he throws 156 digits of pi in the Composer's face:

But pi (as a number) is actually meaningful as HELL to Minamimoto, he engages in saying pi to himself drawing the Taboo Noise Refinery Sigil (goroawase in Japanese which relates to literally an obstetrician going to a foreign country and a woman giving birth at night as insects make a lot of noise which can almost be seen as a minor ritual to Make It Work, a little happy pi rhythmic thing in English in the game, actual spoopy sounding pimetry in the anime that sounds very sorcery-y). Looking (for far too long) at the Taboo Noise Refinery Sigil, pi is encoded in it in at least four or five places (multiple times as functionally a magic binding circle, at least once where he draws the symbol for pi in such a way that when it's turned upside down it literally spells "pi"). It's important. It's meaningful. It's His Number and transcedential and irrational and beautiful and unrestrained :D So now y'all are wondering, "OK, smartass, where's the -1 at?" As I noted, another way you can write Euler's Identity is specifically as "e^(i*pi)+1=0", so that can be expressed as a way to null the Composer (who is probably the 1 in question). Euler's Identity would be used to subtract 1 from the equation, in other words (as Minamimoto was intending to come back from Erasure by literally integrating himself via Taboo Noise Refinery Sigil). There's one other interesting bit of symbolism, one that's deep enough that I'm not even sure the writers of TWEWY intended, but if so...it's such a chef's kiss that I have deepest admiration.

So Euler's Identity can be expressed in terms of a formula, and as a reduction of sine and cosines involving pi and i, but it can also be mapped as motion--specifically as how a function evolves. (I tend to be a pretty visual thinker, and there's an extremely good discussion on Euler's Identity here that goes into the whole "mapping the function" aspect to show how Euler's Identity works in practice.)

So typically when you're doing a non-negative function or a zero function, generally there's an assumption of "right-hand" rotation or movement. Complex functions, you get into fun things like circles, and curves, and even some very beautiful fractals (like with the Mandelbrot set) with the right iterative formulas. Euler's Identity...is literally a left-hand-path function:

(And those of you who were writing about the Cyclic Nature of Minamimoto are probably all screaming right now) Anyways, wanted to share in full one of the things that was a jawdropper for me in TWEWY back when I found the game at a glorified skateshop that sold games in 2011. Thank you for coming to my TED talk, zeptograms :3

#sho minamimoto #twewy #ntwewy #the world ends with you #neo: the world ends with you #neo twewy #twewy sho #minamimoto sho #mathematics #“a maths lesson? In my TWEWYtumblr? It's more common than you think” #anyone who knows me knows at some point I am going to deep dive into Mathematical Metaphors of Minamimoto lol #anyways enjoy the moment and try not to kill me for putting maths on your tumblr #character analysis

[silverspringsf]

ayrton, you were the reason why i started watching formula 1. 

I remember watching Senna's documentary when I was 13 and being stunned by that last sequence. It stayed with me forever. Later, when I decided to rewatch the documentary and saw those iconic laps in Monaco, that was the moment I fell in love with Senna and with motorsport. It was pure magic. I understood right way why there were so many accounts about how there was a mystical side to him. Ayrton, your unmeasurable talent as well as your charismatic personality will never be forgotten by those who admired you then and now. you’ve truly left a mark on people to the point of transcending the sport. senna sempre e saudades sempre também 🕊️

#ayrton senna #30 years #senna sempre #formula 1

[myimaginarywonderland]

F1 is killing itself. It started years ago and it has continued on ever since.

How you might ask? Well for starters let's talk about broadcasting. I can only speak for my country (Germany) but F1 has been taken off any market and made an exclusive Sky sports product. Which is terrible considering it was basically never before behind a pay wall and the TV commentator team had been there for such a long time that even my parents/grandparents knew about them. When you have such a well established commentary team and then not only take that away but also basically put F1 behind a paywall, you are going to lose viewers.

Then, F1 marketing has someone been some of the worst it has been in years. In theory when you have something like DTS it should be an opportunity, a chance to show some of the behind the scenes. Instead, what you get when you watch it is made up drama, fake rivalries etc. Yes it might attract viewers but it gives a compleltly wrong picture of the sport and almost all of the drivers.

Adding onto that, there's the Vegas GP. I think everyone knows that Monaco is prestigious, the F1 track that is probably most considered flashy but F1 is trying to do that with the Vegas GP. Why? No one knows. Also no one cares. The reason why most people are excited wasn't even the race, it was because a driver who currently isn't even driving wanted to have a race there. Fans do not look forward to racing there, instead the most anticipated thing is the stories that might happen outside of all racing. That tells you everything you need to know about that GP. Yeah, they want to attract viewers with it and visitors and oh, what was that? No one in their normal life could afford those tickets. Yeah, that's what I thought. Going to F1 GPs has become so expensive that many people can't even afford it and adding even more expensive venues to that is not going to help in any way.

While we are already talking about GPs, how about we acknowledge the fact that having the current season is absolutely insane? Not only are there's weird small gaps between races not enough to give drivers a rest, we also are harming the mechanics life more and more by basically not allowing them to see their family or be able to take a break. Not to mention how insane the spread out of races is to make them even more inaccessible and environmentally damaging.

While are already talking about tracks, maybe it's time to acknowledge that this calendar is for the most part boring? Sure there are some good tracks but by removing so many beloved tracks that have brought actual great racing, F1 is further digging itself a deeper hole. And also, don't call yourself a world championship when we still have no races in Africa. (I will mourn this until it changes especially now having seen with Formula E how well the Cape Town race was visitied.)

We could also talk about other things like how a crash that could have killed a driver should not be nominated for any award or how Abu Dhabi was a fundamental moment that marked the sport priorizing spectacle over safety but that's just going to make this post longer and longer.

So, let's talk about why we removing free practice is one of the worst ideas possible and for me personally will lead to a point where F1 can't return from.

Free practice might not be watched by many fans because it is on a Friday, a workday. And depending on where the timezones are going to complicate that further which is totally alright. Free practice doesn't need to be watched by everyone. It however for fans gives them an opportunity to get familiar with the track or in some cases is even maybe the only way a fan might come to a race considering the tickets for Friday are the cheapest. It offers new fans an opportunity to have a look at the track layout and not be thrown in complelty without any knowledge. Furthermore it's an opportunity to learn for maybe more strategic fans how possible strategies might look like, what things might be taken advantage of etc.

But that's not even what it is about. Free practice first and foremost is for the drivers and engineers. It gives drivers time to test out different setups, offers engineers to opportunity to test race strategies, is a chance to see how much conditions have changed etc. It is important for the safety of the paddock as it gives drivers to opportunity to get familiar again with the track and test limits before actually having to race. It helps to get out of the vast majority of unknown conditions and get into a territory where drivers feel comfortable with the track and the car. It is crucial to the safety first and foremost.

Getting ride of free practice would not only be a huge lose for fans but it would also mark the final point of no return where drivers safety truly stops being a concern.

Getting ride of free practice would be the final nail in the coffin and would be another reason we can later out to a list of all the things that probably led to a fatal accident.

F1 claims to know things aren't what the fans what and yet I have not once seen them even approach fans to ask for their opinion. Instead of gaining fans with their actions F1 is actively pushing them away.

#f1

[freeuselandonorris]

took me ages to decide which one to ask abt bc all your wips sound interesting 😭 but would love to hear more about mitch/mark/oscar!

ahhh i’m so glad someone asked about this! even though i have no real plot ideas for it, just rancid vibes! 🙏

so, for those of you who don’t know, mitch evans is a kiwi driver who is currently doing bits in formula e and has cheekbones that could cut glass. i started watching him in GP2 nearly ten years ago when he was an adorable baby with extreme twink energy. he is now a beautiful 29 year old with extreme twink energy.

friend to antipodean twinks everywhere, mark webber, was of course his manager back in the day.

he’s not anymore, if i remember it’s rightly because mark’s work with porsche created conflicts of interest when they joined formula e (mitch races for jaguar).

but the fact remains: mark and his pet twinks !!!

so like i say, i don’t really have any idea of like, an actual plot for this? other than i wanted to write something a bit gross and daddy-ish about mark/oscar (that gifset of mark adjusting oscar’s mask during the F2 years drove me LOOPY) but with the added frisson of mitch being there, somehow, and being jealous that he has been usurped as head twink, competing for attention, etc etc. i need to prod at it a lot more but there is something very compelling about the idea of mitch’s brattiness and need to be desired against oscar’s self-possession.

WIP title game (within a game)

#fic meta #ask meme

[milflewis]

Confession: I didn't watch most of the races for the first time in years after the summer break, just looked up the "highlights" and I'm fine with that

mark licherally called me out on not watching half the races. like half an hour ago so i understand u anon. they're just soooo long and soooo boring and lyfe keeps Lyfing!!! piecing together what happened on my dash can be quite fun but sometimes i don't even do that el oh el formula e pls come back to me

#it also doesnt help that streaming is SUCH. a pain fuck me #summer break hit and i got so eepy #anon tag #2023 confessions #niamh.asks

[ensumo-mart]

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[mr880fan]

Sky Sports and Fanatics launch new online shop for fans to purchase Premier League, Formula One, NFL and NBA merchandise | Football News

Followers will be capable of buy licensed sports activities merchandise immediately from Sky Sports activities’ owned and operated channels as a part of a brand new partnership with Fanatics. The brand new on-line merchandise store is a primary for Sky Sports activities, in addition to Fanatics' first partnership with a European broadcaster, and can give followers entry to Fanatics' industry-leading vary of licensed merchandise from over 900 of the biggest sporting organisations equivalent to Premier League soccer, Method One, NFL, NBA, cricket and extra. Followers will be capable of buy merchandise through shop.skysports.com.As a part of the deal, Fanatics may also have the chance to create Sky Sports activities-branded merchandise sooner or later.Talking on the launch of the brand new enterprise, Yath Gangakumaran, business director at Sky Sports activities, stated: "We're proud to have the ability to announce this new e-commerce platform as a part of our digital ecosystem, as Sky Sports activities continues to drive improvements which ship the absolute best expertise for sports activities followers. "Fanatics is a longtime international chief on this house, and as companions, our mixed experience will allow us to ship an industry-leading and seamless expertise."

Picture: Liverpool have already revealed their new equipment for 2023/24 Matthew Primack, senior vice-president for worldwide enterprise affairs and growth at Fanatics, additionally stated: "Fanatics is proud to accomplice with Sky Sports activities and to allow Sky Sports activities' entrance into the licensed sports activities merchandise market. "This launch marks a major milestone for Sky, Fanatics, and sports activities followers extra broadly as a result of it's going to shut the hole between followers watching sports activities and wanting to achieve entry to merchandise, via which they'll display their allegiance to their favorite workforce kits and colors, within the second."Through the years Sky Sports activities has constructed a world fame as an {industry} chief in sports activities broadcasting, at all times prepared to innovate and push the envelope to enhance the expertise for followers throughout a variety of sports activities - values that align carefully with our personal."This thrilling partnership brings our collective experience collectively to offer an enhanced expertise for sports activities followers throughout the UK, Germany, and Italy by providing entry to one of many widest ranges of licensed sports activities merchandise out there wherever." Source link Read the full article

#Fanatics #fans #Football #Formula #launch #League #merchandise #NBA #News #NFL #online #Premier #purchase #shop #Sky #Sports

[mcconnellnguyen03]

Overwatch Seeks E-sports Domination

Overwatch is looking to dominate e-sports by Chris Foxx Technology reporter

24 May 2016

World-of-Warcraft-maker Blizzard has released its first original gaming franchise in nearly two decades. SERVERLIST101

Overwatch is a first-person shooter - also is the first time that the studio has launched an international game on PC and consoles simultaneously.

WoW is the second most-played PC game, but its players have halved from its peak in 2010.

Blizzard anticipates Overwatch to be a big seller and hopes it will appeal to large numbers of people as an e-sport.

This game is a departure form previous games developed by the developer that viewed the world through an unreal third-person view.

Instead, they look directly at the barrel of their weapon as they move through in a vibrant world, fighting other gamers.

"Blizzard has a large following across the globe and is among the most renowned publishers," said Piers Harding-Rolls, head of games at the IHS Technology consultancy.

"But it isn't a classic as an first-person shooter (FPS) and therefore, gamers will be excited about the potential of the game."

It is also Blizzard's first new "intellectual property" in 18 years, as the studio has been focusing on spin-offs and expansions of existing franchises, such as WoW, Diablo and Starcraft.

Subscribers to WoW dropped from 12 million in 2010, to 5.5 million in 2015. The company has since stopped reporting these numbers.

Thomas Tippl, chief operating officer at Activision Blizzard, said Overwatch would be "Blizzard's largest launch since Diablo 3 in 2012" and said they hoped it will "resonate well in the realm of e-sports".

During an earnings conference on May 5, he stated that E-sports were not just a driver for audience expansion but also importantly drives growth in terms time spent with our franchises."

If it is able to attract the attention of e-sports competitors and fans, it could be very profitable in the future.

"Professional gaming competitions were watched online by approximately 200 million people in 2012, while more than $200 million (PS138m), has been awarded in esports tournaments thus far," said Dr Mark Johnson who is a games researcher from the University of York.

"Overwatch could grab a large portion of the market for professional gaming. Counterstrike is the only FPS game that has had an unending success rate in professional gaming in recent years.

"However many FPS games have unsuccessfully tried to find a sustainable place in e-sports, therefore it remains to be determined if Overwatch has the right formula to take Counterstrike off the top of the pile."

Overwatch has already piqued the interest of many gamers, with over 10 million players participating in an early testing of the game.

Officially, the trial period was meant to "test servers" to find any issues. However, Dennis Durkin, chief financial director of the studio has admitted that the purpose of the trial was to expose players to the "richness" of the world.

Blizzard senior game designer Michael Chu told the BBC that the test's open ended format has taught them a lot. "We appreciate the opinions of the community and we have been making changes here and there, taking care to address concerns of players."

One of the concerns was the depiction of female characters. Some players complained that a victory pose for Tracer attracted attention to her buttocks while others questioned magazines featuring female characters that litter the floor of an in-game toilet.

"There was a victory pose that we felt we could improve and better exemplify the character. "So we changed that," said Mr Chu.

The magazines were also removed and the company claims it has been working hard to develop a diverse cast of characters.

"One thing we want you to notice in the game is that we have a big roster of heroes. We have some solider-like characters who have a military look and we also have characters like Mercy, she's a guardian angel who moves across the battlefield, healing.

"We wanted players to work together as together to win."

Blizzard did not confirm that Overwatch could be free to download. However, it said that revenue from in-game purchases would allow it to continue to sell the game in advance.

"It was always going to be a packaged product," said Mr Chu. "We think this is the best method to go, since so much of the gameplay involves switching between heroes in battle. Being able to have all the characters available was really important."

Overwatch does not require a subscription unlike World of Warcraft. However there will be in-game purchases available in the form of Loot Boxes that can be used to customize characters.

Blizzard claims that these can also be earned for free, and has promised that "new maps and characters will be added to the game at absolutely free of charge."

#Server list #Serverlist101

[russilton]

Okay forget everything else JEV MAKING 15 POSITIONS AND STOFF MAKING 12??? IN MONACO??? INSANE

#mark watches formula e

[bklyntraveler]

@fiaformulae is this weekend. Both days Saturday and Sunday. For more info check out @fiaformulae VERY IMPORTANT! Driving there might be very difficult. If you gonna drive, be ready to pay for parking. Public transit or cab would be the best way to get to and from the area. The B61 bus is literally the best option (side note the B61 bus is like a foodie tour bus and side adventures too… more on that later) 🏎 Racing, food, and a mini game fair with a car show. You just can’t go wrong. From my experience, go around 2-3pm. If you want to watch the races in the stands, check the Formula E website for start times. ✳️✳️✳️ Other Stuff In The Area ➡️ @thewaterfrontmuseumbarge open from 1pm to 5pm @widow_jane a distillery that is pretty unique. Might want to check them out while your in the area @amplehills in RedHook in case you want some ice cream before or after the event. @stevesauthentic Key Lime Pie is a MUST try if your in the area. Get the pie and chill at the park for a bit before you take the casual walk back home. 🍹🍕MORE STUFF Brooklyn Crab Hometown BBQ REDHook Tavern Marks Red Hook Pizza Hoek Pizza ➡️ All of Van Brunt Street from Summit Street to Reed Street #walkingismytherapy #walingisgoodforsoul #walkingislife #eprix2022 #maketimeforwhatmatters #taketimeforyourfamily #maketimeforyourparents #taketimeoutforyou #foodiebrooklyn #staycation #daycation #staycationbrooklyn #formulae2022 #brooklyncruiseterminal (at Brooklyn Cruise Terminal) https://www.instagram.com/p/CgE62oguryV/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#walkingismytherapy #walingisgoodforsoul #walkingislife #eprix2022 #maketimeforwhatmatters #taketimeforyourfamily #maketimeforyourparents #taketimeoutforyou #foodiebrooklyn #staycation #daycation #staycationbrooklyn #formulae2022 #brooklyncruiseterminal

[markwebberaus]

Looking after his kid but also working for his team.

#mark webber #2021 #formula e #bet he almost had an heart attack watching that last lap with ME #because I had one #porsche

[sluttyten]

Fresh Air

Poly Series Chapter Index

summary: the first few months of life with your boyfriends and your newborn daughter bring numerous hardships that none of you were truly prepared for

length: 27.8k

tags/warnings: handjobs, dry humping, fingering, breastfeeding kink, slight daddy kink, cum sharing, smut, polyamory, multiple partners, the usual tags, angst?, some sadness

Having a baby is no easy thing. You knew that. You also knew that being in such a large polyamorous relationship wasn’t an easy thing. Already you’d lost two boyfriends; Lucas was long gone, happy in his own little world with Chaerin, and Ten was gone too, slowly slipping away.

It took the others a few days to realize that Ten was gone from the relationship. You didn’t have the same emotional breakdown as you did when Lucas ended things, so it wasn’t until you went around kissing each of them goodnight halfway through movie night, skipping over Ten, that Taeyong sat up curiously. 

“Excuse me!” He calls as you start to climb the stairs. “What just happened?”

Ten is slouched down between Taeyong and Kun, and he scowls at Taeyong, twisting his hand in the back of his shirt and tugging him back into Ten’s side. Ten mumbles, “We broke up.” 

“What?” Taeyong looks sharply between you and Ten. “When?”

The other eyes in the room slide toward this conversation. 

Ten flicks his gaze toward you, then he switches on his mischievous flirty grin, snuggling up against Taeyong. “When I realized you’re the only one for me, hyung!” 

Taeyong shoves him away with a groan.

WinWin comes down the stairs then, looking sleepy, sporting a little spit-up stain on his shoulder. He looks past you to where Taeyong and Ten are wrestling with each other, nearly falling into Kun’s lap as he groans and tries to keep them away. WinWin’s hand slides over your shoulder, squeezing reassuringly as he asks, “Hey, what’s going on?” 

He just got off from Daddy-duty, which mostly meant giving Mei a bottle and then napping with her. Ever since learning that he was her biological father, he’d been trying to help you out even more—offering to change her, to give her baths, to feed her (even though she was mostly breastfeeding, you were supplementing a little with bottles and formula).

“Me and Ten broke up,” you tell him, plucking at the front of his shirt. “You might want to wash this. Mei spit up on you.”

“Hold on. Are we just skipping over that? What do you mean you and Ten broke up?” WinWin frowns, his lips drooping into a pout.

You look back at everyone else, and a few of them are craning their necks to be able to see you. So you sigh, and you explain the breakup. Ten nods along with you, occasionally adding his own little input.

“I told you all that first day when we learned I was pregnant, if any of you want to leave or feel like you can’t deal with helping raise a baby, I understand. None of you signed up for a baby when we started this relationship.” You glance around the room, your gaze touching Lucas who has his head ducked as he picks at some loose skin around his nail. “Only WinWin’s definitely stuck with me now.”

There’s grumbles and eye-rolling around the room. WinWin touches the small of your back, just a tender touch to reassure you that he’s here, not going anywhere.

“Like I said, I understand when any of you want to leave. I don’t want any of you to be unhappy here.” You turn away and start up toward your bedroom. “Goodnight!”

But the others can’t let it go. It was one thing when just Lucas had left the relationship, but now Ten too? That second loss felt like the start of instability in the relationship, a crack in the formerly solid foundation. You tried hard not to think of it that way, but that was hard especially when a few days later you’re in bed with Kun.

Mei is asleep on the bed between you both.

It was just you and her for a long while, you were reading a novel to pass the time, and because you knew it was important for her to hear speech and intonation (even though at only almost two weeks old, speech was still a while away for her) you were reading aloud to her.

Kun had come inside, and when you paused in your reading he’d smiled and shaken his head. “Keep going. You have a lovely voice.”

So you’d read until Mei was asleep again, until your throat was dry. Kun was alternating between looking at you, looking at Mei, or looking at the backs of his eyelids. But when you sit aside the book and turn onto your side facing him and your daughter, Kun’s eyes open so he can see you.

“How are you?” He asks softly, reaching out to brush a finger at the thin skin under your eyes. “How are you holding up?”

You clasp his hand, pulling it down to your lips so you can kiss his palm. “You mean in general, or like postpartum? Or the breakup with Ten?”

Kun swallows, his eyes searching yours. “All of the above, I guess.” He looks down to your lips as you kiss his hand again. “I mean, you haven’t left the house since you came home from the hospital. That’s got to be taking a toll. And I’ve done some reading online, I know about postpartum depression and stuff. Then on top of the chances of that, there could be a hit of regular depression because of the breakup. I’m just worried, concerned.”

“I’m fine, Kun. Really.”

And you believe that you are. You feel good. Even with the breakup. Ten’s still here; he’s just more like your best friend now than anything else when he comes into your room to make sure you’re getting something to eat, to coo at Mei, or to kidnap Miso from where he’s curled up beneath Mei’s crib.

“Can I ask you something else?” Kun turns onto his back and stares up at the ceiling. “If I still hook up with Ten, are you going to be mad? Does it count as cheating on you?”

You laugh. “No. It’s fine. You, Taeyong, Johnny, any of you can keep doing whatever you’ve been doing with Ten. I encourage it. I’m pretty sure one of you is actually the reason he broke up with me, unless you know of someone else that he’s had his eye on?”

Kun shakes his head. “No, just us.”

“I don’t mind sharing with Ten. I still love him. I want him to be happy.” You stroke a gentle finger down Mei’s arm. “I want you to be happy, so if you want to choose Ten, then I wouldn’t blame you for br—“

Kun moves so quickly to shut down what you’re saying that he jostles the bed and that wakes Mei.

“Shit.” Kun immediately starts trying to comfort her, cradling her gently in his arms, speaking to her in soft, soothing tones. And as Mei starts to settle, he looks sharply back up at you. “Don’t say something like that, about me breaking up with you.” His face twists with annoyance. “I’m not going anywhere. I love you.”

“That’s what you all say. Lucas loved me. Ten loved me. They both left.”

“I do fucking love you.” Kun tells you, his voice assertive and hushed as he looks down at Mei again. “If I had Mark’s balls I’d have proposed to you by now too. I’m sure half of us would have as well. I’m not planning on going anywhere anytime soon, my love. So stop trying to get rid of me.”

You’re not trying to get rid of any of them, but over the next few weeks it becomes clear that all of this—maintaining this relationship—is going to be a lot harder while you’re recovering from birth and while you’re trying to focus on Mei, feeding her and sleeping when you can.

Even with your boyfriends trying to help, it’s not easy.

Jaehyun, WinWin, Kun. They’re always up to help you with anything and everything. Doyoung and Yuta are a little squeamish still of diapers. Taeil, Johnny, Taeyong, Jungwoo, Xiaojun, Mark, and Hendery try, but some of them still seem scared to touch her, to spend time alone with a newborn who is so utterly fragile. And for some of them it seems that they’re just desperately ready for you to be recovered, ready to have sex again.

“It takes some time,” you explain to Johnny one evening when he approaches you. “I’m sorry, I know you’re horny.”

You’re not ready to have sex again, so the most you can offer any of them are handjobs, maybe a blowjob. 

You’re standing in the kitchen, just cleaning up a few dishes. Taeyong and Doyoung are upstairs watching Mei, so it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea when you offer to Johnny, “Do you want me to give you a hand?”

So moments later, you’re sitting on the edge of the counter, Johnny between your knees. You’re kissing him with one hand in his hair, the other down the front of his pants, softly kissing away his moans, giving him a few of your own to edge him closer. 

“Shit, I want to be inside you,” Johnny groans, fucking forward into your grip. 

“Just a few more weeks.” You kiss the corner of his mouth, then sit back. You twist your fingers tight in his hair, tugging lightly. Johnny’s eyes fall shut, a moan slipping free of his lips. “Then we can--”

Distantly, you hear the sound of Mei crying; her howling cries that she seems too tiny to be able to make. Your head jerks toward the doorway of the kitchen. You can see the stairs from here.

Johnny sighs, and his forehead touches against the side of yours. 

“I’m close. Please, babe.” He bucks forward through the ring of your fingers, grinding closer, trying to get himself over the edge. “Just finish me off, then go.”

She howls again, and you wonder what Doyoung and Taeyong are doing up there. Johnny pants desperately, so you turn your attention back to him, dragging his mouth back into a kiss, tugging on his hair, jerking him off just the way you know gets him off quickest.

He cums with a grunt, coating your hand in his load, and as soon as he’s finished, you pull your hand out of his pants, rinse it off in the sink, and then you hurry from the room, up the stairs after the sound of your daughter’s cries.

By the time you reach the room, you can see she’s red-faced, crying while Doyoung tries changing her diaper, and Taeyong’s desperately trying to calm her. 

“Did you pinch her or something?” You ask, wiping your hands on your pants, wrapping them briefly in your shirt to make sure they’re dry. Taeyong looks up at you with panic in his eyes. 

“She just woke up and started screaming,” he says. “Is she hungry? She’s not really all that messy.” Taeyong gestures at her diaper. 

Doyoung’s doing just fine, wiping her clean, changing her while holding his breath. Once he’s got the diaper safely fastened, he wipes his hands clean with a wet wipe, then lifts her up in his arms to rock her. He looks up at you then. “We were doing just fine before that.”

Slowly her cries quiet down, the bright color of frustration draining from her face until she’s back to normal, her little fists gathered around Doyoung’s pinkie finger and his thumb. Her dark eyes are still open wide, gazing up at his face. 

You sit down on your bed, and Taeyong sits with you.

“I feel kinda bad,” you tell him. “I left Johnny down there, but her crying had me worried. I hate that I can’t give you guys the time and attention you deserve.”

Taeyong smiles softly, stroking the back of your head. “She needs you more than we do. And I’m sure Ten would be more than happier to help out. Kun said that you told him it’s okay. Right?” You nod. Taeyong nods too, then lets out a breath before saying, “That’s a relief, honestly. Because I didn’t want to feel guilty about still sleeping with him.”

“It’s fine, Taeyong. What you have with him predates what you have with me anyway.” You squeeze his thigh reassuring. You truly don’t mind sharing any of them with Ten. “I don’t want to be the one to mess with that.”

Taeyong grins and kisses your cheek. “Thanks. Well, now you’re back, and you and Doyoung probably have this handled, I’m heading to the studio.” He stands and stretches his arms over his head, the hem of his shirt lifting up just enough that you can see the red mark of a hickey on his hipbone. “I’m almost finished up with all this recording,” Taeyong says excitedly.

And when he’s gone from the room, you flop back into your bed, staring up at your ceiling. 

Doyoung comes over to the side of the bed a moment later, and when you turn your attention to him, he’s holding Mei to his chest, but he’s only looking at you. He asks, “Can I join you?”

You nod.

The mattress shakes as Doyoung does his best to settle down carefully into the bed beside you. Mei goes comfortably onto her tummy on Doyoung’s chest, her little fist up at her mouth, thumb between her lips. You scoot closer, your face close in front of hers, and you sigh.

Doyoung rests a hand on her back.

“You okay?” He asks. “Feeling good still?”

Just a few days before, an ever-concerned Doyoung had approached you and begun asking you what felt like very pointed questions that you eventually determined was him trying to make sure that you weren’t suffering from postpartum depression. You’d convinced him you were fine and feeling good about everything, which was absolutely the truth. Still is the truth. But while staring here at your daughter’s face you just feel like you never want to leave her side.

Originally, you’d planned to go back to working after about six weeks.

“I’m not so sure I want to go back to work,” you tell Doyoung.

Mei blinks, sucking at her thumb. She’s looking at you, and you wonder if she can really see you right now, if she can distinguish your face, tell you apart from Doyoung or WinWin or Miso.

“So don’t go back.” Doyoung’s words are simple, direct. “If you just want to stay home and take care of Mei, then that’s perfectly fine. She’s the most important job you can have, anyway. We’re here to make sure you and this little princess have a stable future.”

You nod. “Maybe when she’s older I’ll go back to work, but I think while she’s young, before she can go to school, I want to spend time with her, teach her.”

Doyoung smiles. “You’ll make her brave and smart. She’ll go to school and they won’t know what hit them. A tiny little sweet faced girl with a big personality, a big heart, and a brain to match. She’ll be the perfect combination of all her daddies.”

You laugh. You can see it now: a little girl with WinWin’s face in her little uniform and braided pigtails, walking into her first classroom with confidence, jabbering away and making friends, impressing teachers. You want to build Mei into a strong, confident, brave girl who’s intelligent and knows her own worth, who won’t let anyone put her down or make her feel small.

You can’t wait to meet her.

When Mei is one month old, WinWin accompanies you to the checkup appointment with the pediatrician. The appointment goes well, and WinWin makes it clear that he’s eager to be Mei’s dad, asking the doctor all kinds of questions about things that you didn’t even consider. He asks the doctor if she thinks it will confuse Mei if she hears multiple languages on a regular basis.

“Oh, no. Quite the opposite. Children raised in multilingual homes often benefit greatly. They can have improved concentration skills, are better at providing solutions, and generally perform better academically.” She smiles encouragingly. “But, out of curiosity, how many languages are we talking? Two? Three?”

You and WinWin look at each other.  

“Probably three,” you tell her. “Potentially four or five.”

Korean and Chinese and English you figure will primarily be spoken around her, but Japanese and Thai are also possibilities. You don’t even mention that Cantonese might occasionally be spoken around her as well. 

“Oh, well that is impressive.” She scribbles something on her clipboard. “I think little Mei will certainly benefit from that.”

When you’re leaving the doctor’s office, WinWin carries Mei’s little carrier. She’s awake and looking up at him, and he keeps speaking to her in Chinese using a cutesy tone. Though as soon as you’re outside, he looks up at you. “Are you hungry? I was thinking we could go grab something to eat?”

There’s a place right around the corner that WinWin knows, so that’s where you go. It’s been a while since you’ve been out on anything that seems like a date. The last time you really went out somewhere and did things with people was your baby shower, and that was three months ago. Your last date was before that, when Lucas took you out to dinner just days before he broke up with you, which is somewhat upsetting when you think about it. And you’ve gone to a few parks over the last few weeks, taking Mei out for some fresh air and sunlight with your various boyfriends, but none of those really counted as dates, so you’re excited when you get to sit down at a table with WinWin and Mei.

Even by the time you do get home afterwards, you’re still buzzing with happiness from how wonderfully the appointment had gone plus the lunch date afterwards, and how Mei didn’t start getting fussy until right as you were arriving home.

You’re just in a very good mood. While you nurse Mei, Xiaojun sits with you and tells you a dramatic retelling of his day with Hendery and YangYang. Renjun wanders into your room a bit later to hangout and hold Mei. The whole afternoon is just guys coming in and out of your room, and you’re feeling great and happy, and you’re feeling good enough that when Jungwoo and Johnny come in to interrupt you doing yoga (in an attempt to get your body as closely to how it was before the pregnancy), you don’t mind. You let them sit and watch. Johnny even helps you with a few poses, and Jungwoo lies down on the floor with you, but he puts Mei on his chest to give her a little bit of tummy time.

You’re in the midst of laughing with Jungwoo and Johnny when Doyoung steps into your doorway, knocks on the doorframe, and says, “We have a little problem.”

That happy little bubble you’ve been living in all day pops.

Doyoung summons a group meeting, so you and Jungwoo and everyone else who’s home descend to the living room. You bring Mei with you, apologizing to Renjun that you don’t want to leave her alone with him (not his fault, it’s just you being nervous being away from her). Not everyone is home, so Doyoung calls Taeyong, Kun, and Jaehyun who are all working and puts them on speaker so they can listen in.

You sit nervously in the big armchair. Ten squeezes in with you, and he convinces you to pass Mei over into Uncle Ten’s loving arms.

“What’s wrong, Doyoung?” You ask first once everyone’s gathered.

He sighs and holds up his phone, which has Twitter open on it. There’s a long thread of tweets, images and text, and you’re not sure what that’s all about, not until he says, “It’s amazing that it took fans this long to catch on.”

“What do you mean by that?” Jaehyun’s voice is staticky over the phonecall. “Caught on to what?”

“To us.” Doyoung explains. “Apparently, our girlfriend and WinWin and Mei were spotted out together today by a fan, and now the pictures are everywhere.”

WinWin swears under his breath. 

“But it’s not just that. It was at first.” Doyoung scrolls up to the top of the Twitter thread on his phone. “Some fans realized that they’ve seen her before, so there’s this thread and a whole bunch of others just full of photos of us and you, sweetheart. Going back ages. I’ve been reading comments, and people were saying that for a long time they just thought you were one of our managers or a staff member or something, but then others had their photos, had stories of times they’ve spotted us out with you. There was some fan who said she saw you out with Hendery and Jungwoo. 

“So now they’re pretty sure that you’re dating one of us, or secretly married to one of us, but they don’t know who. Until today, seeing you and Mei with WinWin, they think they’ve solved it all.” Doyoung rubs his hand over his face, clearly exasperated. “But others think differently, because you’ve been spotted out carrying Mei on your walks through the park with me, with Taeil, with Mark and Taeyong. Some fans are just generally pissed off about all of this.”

Everyone’s been staring at Doyoung or else looking down at their phones as they also search social media for all of these swirling rumors and gossip.

Taeil’s the first to sit forward, and he looks over at you. “I don’t think you should leave the house for a few days until this dies down. For your safety.”

You know he’s talking about their sasaengs. Somehow they’ve been lucky enough that sasaengs haven’t camped out in front of this house like you know they did at their apartments when you first met them. You’re sure that many of those photos in that thread Doyoung’s talking about were taken by sasaengs.

“What are we going to do?” Kun asks, his voice sounding echoey and very distant over the phone. 

“What can we do?” Yuta responds. “I say we just let it all die down, don’t acknowledge the rumors at all.”

Doyoung sighs heavily. “I don’t think we can really do that, hyung. I’m sure the company is going to want to talk to all of us about it. And we can’t just ignore it and pretend that we don’t know what they’re talking about because there is all of this photo evidence, many stories, there are videos, and apparently when Xiaojun did an Insta live last week, you could hear Mei crying in the background.”

“Just say it was Haechan,” Mark suggests. “Say he was acting like a baby.”

“Or we could just tell the truth,” Jaehyun says over the phone. 

Yuta rolls his eyes. “Yeah, but what part of the truth? That Mei is WinWin’s baby, or that literally the fourteen of us all had the same girlfriend and that for nine months didn’t know which of us was fathering her child? That part of the truth? I feel like our NCTzens would possibly explode. Imagine the chaos. We’d probably be forced to disband.”

“Obviously not that whole truth, dumbass.” Jaehyun retorts. 

Yuta starts to bicker back at him, but Taeyong’s voice speaks up loudly over the phone, cutting them both off. “We’re not our own PR team. This isn’t something that we have to address right now, so maybe we should at least wait until we’re all home and can talk about it together, right?”

Right.

But you decide to go on to bed. It’s late enough that you can go without drawing suspicion, and as you’ve got Mei comfy in her bed, you curl up in your bed and open Twitter on your phone.

Maybe it’s a bad idea to search up what fans are saying, but you can’t help it. Especially now when you see half of your boyfriends’ names trending along with NCT and some other things that you’re sure are related to this drama going on. It is somewhat disturbing to see this evidence that the fans are gathering against you, to see the nasty things that they’re saying--threats against you and you even see a few against your daughter that have you muffling your tears against your pillow--and you’re still looking at all of this in horror when the door of your room opens. 

A shadowy figure slips from the lit hallway outside into the dark of your bedroom. You hear the familiar footfalls, and when he falls into bed, it’s a comfortable and intimately familiar weight and heat as he rolls against your side.

“Are you okay?” Mark asks.

His feet bump against yours, and as his head edges onto your pillow, he sees what you’re looking at and sees the blue light of your screen reflecting off the wetness on your cheeks.

“No, that’s what we’re not going to do, okay?” Mark sits up and plucks your phone from your hand, rolls over to the far side of your bed, and sits your phone on the bedside table before he comes back. His thumbs are gentle when he wipes at your cheeks. His voice only sounds a little frustrated, more concerned than anything else as he questions, “Why were you looking at all that?” 

“I wanted to know what they’ve seen, what they had to say.” You sniffle and press your face into the pillow. “Your fans can be terrible.”

Mark sinks down beside you once more, and he places a soothing hand on your back, rubbing up and down your spine. “Listen, you and Mei are safe. If you think that we’d ever let them do anything to hurt either of you....” Mark’s cheek rests against your shoulder. “We’ll fix this. I know we will.”

You sigh shakily, and turn, wrapping yourself around Mark, squeezing him in a hug as you hide your face against his neck. He hugs you back just as tightly. 

It’s hours later, Mark has fallen asleep beside you, and his arm is still tucked under your head, his fingers on that hand are tangled in your hair as he’d fallen asleep gently massaging your scalp in an attempt to get you to fall asleep (which was unsuccessful). There’s a soft glow from the nightlight in the corner of the room, and by its light you’ve been watching Mark’s face, counting his eyelashes and his freckles and then counting his breaths, but you can’t calm your mind enough to slow down and fall asleep.

So you hear Mei waking up, hear her starting to cry. You know you need to get up, leave the nice comforting warmth of the bed, to go feed her, but all you want to do is just stay right there.

You squeeze your eyes shut even as her cries begin to build.

Mark’s sleeping like a rock, so he doesn’t stir. You press closer, press your face to his chest.

The bedroom door opens, and a sleepy Taeil with messy hair comes inside. You can just barely see him through your eyelashes; can see him looking at you and Mark, then his gaze sweeps across the room to the crib in the corner and Mei’s little pink face scrunched up as she cries.

He crosses quietly to the crib, shuffling barefooted, his sweatpants dragging along the floor like socks.

You can’t see him from this angle but you can hear as he shushes Mei, cooing and making soft noises to soothe her. You can hear the rustling as he picks her up, the creak of wood as he settles down in the rocking chair. She keeps crying though, no matter how desperately Taeil tries to soothe her, and after a few minutes of that, you sit up in bed and look over at him.

He’s rocking in the chair, trying to get her to take the pacifier, but she keeps spitting it back out when it’s not giving her what she really wants.

You sigh and push out of bed. Taeil looks up at you.

“Unless you’ve got tits, Taeil, I don’t think she’s gonna calm down for you.” You stand beside him, push your fingers into his hair.

“I thought you were asleep,” he whispers back to you. He doesn’t look away from Mei, just keeps looking down at her puckered face.

Your fingers slide down from his hair to the back of his neck, resting gently there. “I can’t sleep. I just keep thinking about what your fans are saying.” 

Taeil looks up at you then, a frown drawing his eyebrows tightly together. “You don’t need to look at what they’re saying. Our managers have already said that we’re going to have a big PR meeting probably tomorrow so our company can put out a statement. But you don’t need to worry about anything. You’re safe here.”

Mei lets out another piercingly loud cry from such a small baby, and you reach for her. Taeil hands her up to you easily, then he stands, gesturing for you to sit in the chair. You don’t even think about it as you move your top to bare your breast for Mei to latch onto, but Taeil makes a short noise, and when you look up at him, he’s looking away, rubbing at the back of his head like he’s embarrassed.

You try to hide your smile. “You’re all so funny about this, you know. Half of you get embarrassed to look at my boobs now. You’ve seen them before, Taeil.”

“I know that.” He mumbles, and you swear if there were a bit more light in the room, you’d be able to see that he was blushing. “I just have really been missing you lately, you know? It’s been a while.” 

Taeil tries his best to keep his eyes on your face when he turns to you then, but you watch as his gaze inevitably falls to your breast. But there his gaze seems to soften at the sight of Mei’s dark little head nestled there.

Taeil sinks to his knees. “It’s all different now, you know? She’s here now, and she’s so tiny and perfect. Everything’s just.... centered differently.”

You know exactly what he means. Before Mei there were so many things--things to do, places to go, people to go see and talk to, and meaningless things to fill your time with, boyfriends to go fuck around with--and now there’s Mei and she’s just got you so wrapped up with her, none of those things feel like they matter. It’s just you and her, like your whole little world. 

“I don’t think it really matters that WinWin’s her real dad.” Taeil reaches one finger up and strokes the back of Mei’s tiny hand. “Isn’t there a saying that it takes a village to raise a child? Well, here we are. Your whole village to help raise Mei. Our Mingmei. I know that it’s not going to be easy to be here sometimes, and that there’s no way of telling what the future holds for all of us, but I want to be here. I love you. I adore Mei.” Taeil’s expression is so soft as he says that; his eyes are moist looking at you and your daughter then, and after another moment he sinks back to sit on the floor, and he turns his face away, hiding as he tries to hastily wipe away his tears.

“I don’t want you to go anywhere either, Taeil. I’ve said it before, but if Mei could have all of you as her father, that’s what I would wish.” You smile down at her. “Imagine having a dozen fathers to show up and be there any time she needs support, protection, encouragement.”

Taeil sits up then, resting a hand on your knee reassuringly. “We will be here to protect her. Especially right now.” He shakes his head, his brows set in determination. “After you came up here, Doyoung was showing us some more of what they were saying, and I swear to you, we will not let any of them near you. Ever. But there were some great things people were saying.”

You’d seen a few of those during your deep dive. Fans saying that you seemed lovely--both visually in the pictures, and then also the few fans that had stories about seeing you out with the boys had said that you had sounded sweet--and fans defending you, defending the boys, reporting accounts threatening violence toward you or Mei. There were fans gushing over the boys as fathers, fans going wild thinking about aesthetic baby pics that some of them might post on their Instagrams. 

There were definitely some wonderful things you’d seen, but it was hard to focus on those when there was so much negativity inspiring fear and anxiety and terrible things in you. 

By the time Mei finishes nursing, even you are finally starting to feel tired. Taeil takes her from you as you attempt to pull your shirt back into place, and he paces around the room, singing quietly, patting her back to burp her. You just sit there in the rocking chair, rocking back and forth, your eyes feeling heavier and heavier as you watch Taeil and listen to him.

You don’t even realize that you’ve dipped off, not until there’s fingers on your shoulder and on your cheek, a quiet voice calling your name. 

“Hmm?” You open your eyes.

Taeil, smiling sleepily too. “You should get in bed, my love. Mei’s fine,” he explains when you sit up suddenly and look around. “She fell asleep, so I put her back down. Come on, into bed.” He helps you cross the few feet to the bed, his hand in yours, and once you’ve slid back in between the covers, your head once more on the pillow, Taeil smooths hand over your hair, and leans in to whisper, “Goodnight,” and he places a loving kiss on your forehead. 

You’re asleep before you can remember to mumble a sweet “goodnight” back to him.

Maybe it was a mistake telling your boyfriends that the doctor had approved and even encouraged the use of multiple languages with Mei. Because after you tell them that, then you rarely hear the Chinese members speak in anything other than Chinese to her. Yuta almost exclusively reads and sings and speaks to her in Japanese. Johnny, Mark, and even sometimes Jaehyun and Ten speak English to Mei. You even catch Xiaojun singing in Cantonese to her.

Mei looks up at him, waving her arms and legs, cooing happily as he leans on the side of her crib to sing to her.

“What are you doing?” You ask, sliding up beside him, one arm curling around his waist, your cheek resting on his shoulder. “She’s going to be so confused when she’s older if you speak to her in Mandarin and Cantonese, Jun.” You brush your lips in a light kiss to his exposed shoulder.

“She’s going to be smart,” Xiaojun responds quickly. “Going to speak five languages by the time she’s five, and put all of us to shame with her brain.” You feel him kiss you on the top of your head. “Were you still on for coming with WinWin, Ten, and I later?”

It’s been a few weeks since the rumors first struck. Their PR team put out a statement, claiming that you were just a staff member and close friend of the group who happened to have a baby. A lot of fans had backed off, but you were still a little wary about leaving the house unless it was necessary. You’d only left for appointments, and then to go meet up with your parents once for them to fawn over their granddaughter.

“I don’t know, Xiaojun. Your fans are still watching us.” You step away from him.

Lately there’s been a heightened presence of sasaengs around the boys. You’d even noticed one following you on your way to the last appointment you’d had with your doctor—one where you’d been cleared to return to work (if you wanted that) and to resume sexual activities (though she did advise that you take it easy, so no rough sex, no orgies)—and you’d been lucky to find that an old friend of yours was acting as a courier, and he was in the doctor’s office dropping something off right as you were leaving. He’d walked out with you, and though he was working, he did walk with you and make sure that the sasaeng stopped following.

Xiaojun turns away from the crib to follow you, his fingers catching on your sleeve, sliding down over your hand. “Hey, babe. Look, I know that lately we’ve been under more surveillance than normal. I’ve seen what they’re saying online, people still doubting the story that our team put out, but that doesn’t mean that you need to withdraw from us.” Xiaojun strokes the back of your hand until you turn it over and he laces his fingers through yours. “Come out with us tonight. Let Kun or Jaehyun or one of them watch Mei, and come have fun.”

You glance uncertainly over at Mei’s crib. “I don’t know....”

You haven’t left Mei yet, not for any extended period of time, not for longer than a shower or a quick snack in the kitchen along with a handjob for Johnny. Leaving her for two or three hours, that just doesn’t sound like something you’re ready for yet.

“I’ll think about it.” You tell him.

Xiaojun lets out a happy sound, and then he cups your face between his hands, and pulls you into a quick kiss. “Please say yes. We’re just going to see a movie. And whoever watches her will have to deal with Jaehyun probably hovering protectively right at his shoulder the whole time. She’ll be fine.” He pecks you on the lips again, and this time you twist your fingers in the bottom of his top, lean in on your toes, and kiss him again.

Xiaojun makes a pleasant sound, his fingers slide into your hair, angling your mouth against his. You want to push this a little further, want to feel his bare skin against yours, feel the pleasure that you haven’t felt for weeks and weeks now.

He smiles into the kiss as you push your hands up under his top, moving up his chest. He almost giggles when you feel up his pecs. Xiaojun pulls back just a little, pecking you on the lips playfully amidst his giggles, before pressing back in fully.

You can do this, you tell yourself. Your doctor cleared you for sex again, and you know that Xiaojun will be gentle with you, that he’s a good choice to be your first time again. This will be fine.

When you drop your hands from his chest, slipping your fingertips beneath the waistband of his pants, Xiaojun slows down as if he’s a little confused by you initiating this. And when you touch his dick, he backs off and his eyebrows draw together in confusion. “Are you... Are you sure?”

“Mmmh.” You nod. “My doctor finally cleared me. I’m good as long as we take it a little slow.”

Xiaojun’s smile returns, and he cocks his head to the side a little and looks you up and down. “So I should treat you like a virgin, right? Take it easy and slow?”

You whine. “Don’t tease me, Xiaojun.”

“No, I won’t.” He kisses you sweetly. “But are you sure? You want to do this now? Here?”

Mei’s just right over in the corner, unknowingly looking up at the mobile spinning over her head, unaware of what’s going on here. It does feel a little bit weird, but she won’t know. She won’t have a clue what’s going on.

“I’m sure.” You nod. “Well, I’m sure that I at least want to see how far we can go. I just,” you sigh, “feel like we’ll be interrupted by one thing or another. A baby, a boyfriend, discomfort. Something. But yes.”

 “We’ll figure it out.” Xiaojun bounces a little eagerly and excitedly on his toes. “God, I really want you.”

You kind of love that Xiaojun doesn’t rush you at all even after he says that. He doesn’t push you to hurry into anything, is content with just lying in your bed and making out, letting your hands wander over his bare arms, delving into his hair, slipping through the large cutouts at his sides to scrape your nails lightly over his back or his abs or his chest. He doesn’t try to get you to touch him lower down his body even when you can feel how hard he is against your thigh. Xiaojun lets you take it all at your own pace, lets you pull his hands under your shirt.

You’re feeling more confident with your body now than you were even just a few weeks ago. You’ve looked at mommy forums online, and they say that it’s not uncommon to feel negatively about your body for quite a while after birth, but you’re happier now.

So when Xiaojun touches your belly, as he lifts your shirt up over your chest, you don’t feel embarrassed at all. You feel the heat of lust burning in your belly, your skin flushed with heat even as cool air touches your chest.

“Fuck, so pretty. I’ve missed you like this,” Xiaojun groans, breaking away from your lips to kiss your neck, then skipping down to your chest, the mound of your tits in your bra. His thigh slips between your knees, his lips dance over your chest, and you can’t help the breathy little sounds that spill from your lips.

You clap a hand over your mouth.

“Don’t be shy,” Xiaojun chuckles. “You make such pretty noises, babe. Let me hear them.”

You obediently drop your hand, sliding your fingers into his hair instead as Xiaojun keeps kissing your chest, and his hand finally slips down into your panties.

“Ah!” The little gasped sound escapes your lips when Xiaojun’s finger glides over your clit.

He grinds subtly against your thigh, and moans softly, lifting his head from your chest and kisses you again.

It’s been so long since you were touched like this, that it’s literally seconds before Xiaojun is smirking at just how wet you’ve grown. He sticks with touching your clit, kissing away all the sweet sounds you’re making, until you start moving with him, rocking your hips up and looking for more than just the touches to your clit.

Xiaojun moves down to kiss at your neck, and as he does that, he slips a finger inside you.

You moan loudly, your hand flying down to grip at Xiaojun’s forearm, not to stop him but just to hold on to him as he fingers you. It doesn’t hurt or anything, it’s a bit uncomfortable after everything your vagina went through just a little over a month and a half ago. But it still feels so good.

Your fingernails dig into his skin just as his teeth nip at your throat, his cock rubs against your thigh, and Xiaojun makes a muffled sound against your neck. You let go of his wrist, snaking your hand inside his pants to touch his cock, to help him feel good too.

“Wait,” he mumbles, “I feel like this should be about you.”

“Very chivalrous of you, but I kinda want you to enjoy this too.” You try to keep going, but Xiaojun stops, sits up, and pulls his hand entirely out of your pants, then grabs your wrist and removes your hand from his pants as well. You pout up at him.

He looks away from you, up at the ceiling. “Please don’t give me that look.”

“Then come touch me some more.” You reach for his waistband.

Xiaojun bats your hand away, and moves down the bed. “I’m going to, but, babe, I want the focus to be on you. I don’t care about me right now because I guarantee I had an orgasm more recently than you. So, please, just let me make you feel good first.”

You really can’t argue with that.

“Okay. Fine, do with me what you will.” You spread out your arms and legs, dramatically going limp.

Xiaojun rolls his eyes affectionately. “Can I take your pants off?”

You lift up your hips to help him slide your pants off, then he kneels up over you, pulling the shirt up over your head.

He sinks back down to sit on his heels and drinks in the sight of you before him.

You wonder if he’s thinking of the last time he had you like this, because you know that you are. It’s been months and months since the last time that you and Xiaojun were alone together like this, taking the time to appreciate and take each other apart. It was shortly after you learned you were pregnant, you’d spent the whole morning in bed together, getting each other off; you’d spent at least half an hour kissing his entire body, sucking his cock, praising his body.

“Fuck, I love you,” he sighs, and falls over you again, his body covering yours as he captures you in a kiss once more. Xiaojun slips a hand under your back, and you feel his fingers fumble for a second or two with the clasp on the back of your bra before it releases. You sigh in comfortable relief, and reach up to pull the straps down your arms, freeing yourself of the bra entirely.

You hold your breath as Xiaojun starts to kiss down your body—trailing burning kisses down your throat, between your breasts, down your belly, and at last he reaches the edge of your panties.

His nose nudges against your clit through the material, and when Xiaojun places the gentlest of kisses right over your pussy, your breath catches in your throat before shaking its way free. He lifts his head so he can see your face as he finally removes the last piece of clothing on your body.

The last time you were this naked in front of one of your boyfriends was when you showered with Jaehyun before you found out WinWin was Mei’s father. Almost two months ago.

When you feel his breath on your bare, wet pussy, all you can do is close your eyes, bite your bottom lip, and pray that he’s about to eat you out. You want so badly to really, truly get your pussy eaten the way that hasn’t been done in a long time.

And right as Xiaojun grants your nonverbal wish, his tender lips kissing your clit, a new voice of doubt enters your mind.

What if you look different down there? Or smell or taste different?

You haven’t really taken much time to pay attention to if giving birth altered how your pussy looks. You have no idea if you’re going to taste different. You’re only kinda sure that you don’t smell different. And what if it doesn’t feel right when he eats you out anymore? You’ve read that sex might feel different after the baby, and you’ve always loved Xiaojun eating you out. Him and WinWin are two of your favorites when it comes to oral.

You just start doubting all of this, thinking and worrying, so even as Xiaojun’s doing his best down there, you’re not giving him any reactions. Not until he pulls back and looks up at your face to ask, “Does it not feel good?”

“I’m sorry.” You groan, rubbing a hand over your face. “I think I’m just... thinking too much.”

“Relax.” Xiaojun puts a hand on your thigh, massaging gently. “You don’t need to think about anything, don’t worry or stress.”

He’s probably right. You don’t need to worry about any of that stuff. He’s clearly not turned off by what he’s faced with down there right now, as he’s already diving back in to sweep his tongue against you. You just need to relax, to sink into the pleasure of what he’s doing, and forget everything else but just that.

Easier said than done, honestly, but you do try.

Xiaojun sets to work on fucking you open on his middle finger again, his tongue at your clit. Slowly, it does start to feel really good; you get out of your mind and just relax into the pleasure, your body taking over, moving with Xiaojun. A second finger joins the first, and soon he’s even got a third finger pumping inside you, his lips sucking at your clit.

You twist your head to the side and bite at your upper arm to keep your moans in check as your orgasm quickly rises. Your chest heaves, whines leaking out even though you try to keep quiet, and Xiaojun lifts his head.

“You look so sexy right now. Are you going to cum on my fingers, babe?” Xiaojun moans a little, sitting up on his knees so he can kiss at your belly, then a little higher up your chest. His lips brush against your breasts, and you shudder from the small burst of pleasure that gives you. His hips dip down, hard cock grinding against your leg, and his three fingers push in deep inside you, stretching you so your pussy really feels it in the best way.

“Fuck, Dejun. Deeper.” Your hands fly to his shoulders, fingertips digging in. “I want you to make me....”

He drops back down, face dipping once more between your legs. With his free hand he pushes at your thigh, trying to get you to spread your legs even farther apart. His tongue flicks over your clit, fingers pressing inside you. The knot in your belly grows tighter, the warm tingling of pleasure building higher and higher, and you feel so close, your body growing hotter, orgasm just within reach the air itself feeling like it’s sparkling around you.

Xiaojun sucks your clit between his lips, his fingers press in right against your G-spot, and just like that your orgasm unleashes.

Your toes curl, body arching up, hips rolling against his mouth, and the guttural sighs and moans that leave your mouth are barely muffled as you bite at your lip in an attempt to keep them in. Your chest rises and falls and feels damp, your whole body warm and shaky and you feel like you’re sweating, but it’s different.

Xiaojun licks you through the throes of ecstasy, only backing off and pulling his fingers out when your hips have eased back down against the bed and you’re whining, thighs twitching on either side of his ears.

And it’s then that you open your eyes from where they were squeezed shut.

Xiaojun’s face is the first thing you see, his wondrous gaze locked on your chest. “Is that your milk?” He asks. And for the first time you realize that your chest doesn’t just feel damp, doesn’t just feel sweaty from that mind-blowing orgasm, your breasts have leaked out breastmilk during that orgasm.

“Oh my god, I’m sorry.” You cover your face in embarrassment. “Oh my god, I just, god, didn’t know that would happen.”

Xiaojun just laughs. “It’s fine. It’s kinda hot, honestly.”

“Right, my boobs squirting is very attractive.” You can’t convince yourself to pull your hands away from your face. Not until you feel Xiaojun’s tongue on your skin. “You are not licking up my breast milk, are you?” You lift your head to look down at him.

Xiaojun freezes and makes eye contact with you. His tongue hasn’t yet reached where your breast milk has leaked down to. So he pulls his tongue back inside his mouth. “I wouldn’t be opposed to it. It’s just breastmilk, right? What’s the possible harm?”

It’s not like you’ve never heard of this before. You’d read in forums and stuff about mother’s tasting their own breastmilk, fathers tasting their wife or girlfriend’s breastmilk. You’d even read about someone letting their friends, brothers, and more try it. You think that one’s a bit strange, but you can’t deny that you had tasted a little bit of yours yourself one morning out of curiosity. And while you were pregnant Jungwoo had confessed his interest in it.

You just hadn’t expected Xiaojun to be into this.

“I mean, you can if you want to, I guess.” You drop your head back down onto the bed.

Xiaojun’s tongue touches your skin again, and it feels so nice. And then his mouth is on your tits, gentle lips and tongue lapping at the spilled breastmilk. Your pussy starts to throb again with arousal as Xiaojun’s tongue races right up to the edge of your nipple, and then he stops.

You groan and lift your head to look at him again, and just as your eyes meet, Xiaojun flicks his tongue over your nipple, lapping at the damp peak.

It’s certainly not a whimper that leaves your lips.

Xiaojun laughs, and then he does it all over again; his warm tongue tracing over your chest on the other side, though this time he takes his time with your breast, and upon reaching your nipple, he closes his lips briefly around the nipple to flick his tongue at the hardened bud. It’s weird feeling it like this, so different from before when they would lick and suck at your nipples during sex, but also a lot different too than when Mei does it.

You feel like you should not be deriving sexual pleasure from one of your boyfriends basically nursing from you—breastmilk flowing from your nipple into his mouth—but Xiaojun doesn’t stop. In fact, he also seems to be getting off from it. His hips roll against the bed, grinding down into the mattress. He moans, brings one hand up to the side of your breast, gently massaging as he continues with this.

“Fuck me,” you sigh, a plea and a sound of pleasure. And Xiaojun obeys, pulling away from you just long enough to push his pants down and kick them off the foot of the bed, and then he’s back, hips cradled between your thighs. You knot your fingers in the front of his shirt, “Now.”

Xiaojun is gentle and slow, tenderly stroking your thigh as he enters you. He leaves little kisses on your throat and your chest, and it’s only when he starts shallowly rocking into you that he lowers his mouth to your chest and once again starts laving his attention on your tits.

It’s not terrible, just a little uncomfortable. There’s a dull ache that’s not pleasant at all as he thrusts into you, and even though you can tell Xiaojun’s holding back, just trying to make you feel good. And you can feel it—the pleasure is right there through a thin veil of discomfort, and you know if you can just get past that then this will be great. Sweet love-making with Xiaojun would be perfect.

You slide your hands over his back, dipping your fingers beneath his shirt to scrape lightly over his shoulders, and Xiaojun moans. He loses a little bit of restraint, thrusting deeper and a little harder, and there you find the pleasure.

“More,” you moan.

Xiaojun nuzzles against your breast, his lips closed around your nipple as he moans, tasting you on his tongue, feeling you warm and wet around his cock. You’re not surprised that he might not last long. Not surprised when he moans again and draws his hips back, cock leaving you empty as he cums across your belly, still suckling at your tit.

You cradle a hand against the back of his head, your eyes flutter closed, and you think you could let this sweet pleasure overwhelm you again, take you into another orgasm, to peaceful bliss.

The door opens suddenly (why do they never seem to know how to knock when you’re in the middle of something?) and there, framed in the doorway, stand Jungwoo and WinWin.

Xiaojun lifts his head slowly, his lips releasing your tit as he turns his wide-eyed gaze to his members. There’s a small hint of breastmilk on his bottom lip.

There’s no possible way to deny what just happened.

For one thing, you’re lying fully nude beneath Xiaojun. His face was just buried against your chest. Both of you are fully flushed in the face. He looks dazed, horny, and (as you just noted) there’s breastmilk on his bottom lip.

WinWin and Jungwoo stare at both of you in silence for a long moment that finally breaks when WinWin shakes his head and marches inside, heading straight over to the crib.

Mei’s still happily oblivious to what’s been going on. WinWin scoops her up, cradling her in his arms, and as he turns to face you on the bed, he shields her little face from the sight of you and Xiaojun with his hand. His voice is somewhat amused, somewhat scandalized, as he asks, “In front of our daughter?”

Xiaojun rolls to the edge of the bed and sits upright, tries to cover up with the edge of the duvet cover, and then folds his hands in his lap. But when he notices that Jungwoo’s staring at him—most notably, staring at his mouth—he quickly wipes at his lips and chin, smearing away the last of the evidence of what he’d just been doing.

You sit up as well, dragging a blanket over your lap, folding your arms in front of your breasts. “In my defense, there’s absolutely no way that she knows what just happened.”

WinWin shakes his head, trying to look disapproving, but you can see the corner of his mouth turning up in a smile as he looks back down at Mei. “So does this mean that you’re cleared again?” He asks. “Doctor says you can have sex?”

You nod, looking around at him, at the back of Xiaojun’s head where he’s facing away from you, at Jungwoo still framed in the doorway and gazing in awe at you and Xiaojun. “Yeah, just nothing really intense or rough. So no orgies for a while. Her actual words.”

“Good to know.” WinWin wiggles his fingers in front of Mei’s face, and she knocks around one of her little fists, as if she’s trying to grasp his fingers in front of her. He can’t pull his eyes away from her as he says, “I’m pretty sure I owe you some kind of great thank you for this gift right here.”

He starts walking toward the door again, and Jungwoo even steps out of the way to let him pass, so you ask, “Where are you going with her?”

“I’m going to spend a little quality time with my daughter,” WinWin says, and if life were a cartoon then his pupils would be heart-shaped as Mei grips onto one of his fingers right then. “You and Xiaojun can finish up here. Clean up before we go to the movie tonight.” His gaze finally lifts from your daughter, flicking in Xiaojun’s direction.

Xiaojun starts to say something in response, but WinWin’s already ducked out of sight of the doorway, leaving Jungwoo still standing there.

He doesn’t move, even as Xiaojun stands and starts to gather his pants and underwear from where he’s kicked them. Jungwoo just stares at you, at your bare tits. You can kind of guess what he’s thinking, and right as Xiaojun’s shimmying his pants back into place, Jungwoo asks, “Does it taste alright?”

Xiaojun freezes, glancing between you and Jungwoo.

You don’t really care what his answer is. It’s breastmilk, it’s not meant for him anyway, so you don’t think his opinion on it really matters. Instead of intently listening to him, you climb out of bed, turning your back on your boyfriends to get dressed.

“It’s not bad. Wouldn’t be my first choice of drink, but I’m not going to pretend like I wouldn’t definitely do that again.” Xiaojun sounds so pleased with himself as he says it, and you roll your eyes affectionately, carrying your clothes in your arms into the bathroom to shower, leaving Xiaojun and Jungwoo out there to discuss your breasts and your milk. You need to shower and get ready for the first date you’ll have in months.

Once the others realize that you’re open to having sex again, you’ve got a parade of boyfriends trying to get between your legs again. Or at least, after hearing about what WinWin and Jungwoo had walked in on, they keep asking to taste your breastmilk.

Self-consciously, you cross your arms over your chest as Mark’s folded himself onto the end of your bed and just asked you in a very serious voice, “So can I have a taste too?”

“Mark, shut the fuck up.” Yuta’s sitting right beside you, holding Mei who’s just looking up at him and smiling. She’s been doing that a lot lately, making this absolutely adorable smile that has every single person in this house wrapped around her tiny fingers. “If you want to taste it just go get in the minifridge.” Yuta jerks his head over to the set up you’ve got tucked in the corner beside the rocking chair, now that you’re pumping milk just so you don’t have to get your tits out every time that Mei cries for food.

“Do not drink Mei’s supply, Mark Lee.” You get up, and as you walk toward the end of the bed, you reach up to ruffle your fingers through Mark’s hair. “You boys are all so weird. Every one that’ve had a taste say it’s weird, so why do you keep asking. You don’t even eat yogurt, Mark, what do you think breastmilk is going to do to you?”

Yuta snickers.

Mark laughs too, and you smile as you rest your hand on his head. He tilts back to meet your gaze.

And then you hear it.

Your head snaps toward Yuta and Mei. You feel Mark go still beneath you. Yuta’s frozen in surprise.

You hear it again.

“Is she laughing?” You climb back onto the bed, crawling up toward the head.

Mei’s tiny little body, her smiling face. She’s laughing. And if you’ve ever had a favorite sound, it is this. Your daughter’s little giggle. She’s three and a half months old, and this is the funniest thing in her whole life.

You’re still fawning over her and the cute sounds she makes when WinWin gets home.

He always comes up to see Mei first thing when he gets home, even if it’s super late, even if he’s already extremely tired. Even if he’s fresh off a fifteen hour long shoot, he pops through the door of your bedroom.

“Sicheng!” You look up, unable to lose your grin. “Babe! Come here! She laughed!”

He looks confused for just a split second, and then Haechan (who had come into the room looking for Mark) does something and Mei laughs again.

WinWin’s face goes soft with surprise and awe, and then he lights up. Yuta’s still holding her, but he gives her up easily when WinWin makes grabby hands at his daughter. WinWin immediately hugs her and you can see Mei smiling like the happiest little baby.

For the first time since you saw her, right now as you look at the way she’s looking at her father, you realize that Mei is like a real little human. Like, on some level you’ve known that this whole time. You’ve known it since you first felt her move inside you, since you heard her first cry, since you spent all night watching her breathe.

After a little while, the others drift away, making excuses to leave, and then it’s just you and WinWin with your daughter. You scoot close beside him so you can rest your head on his shoulder, looking down at Mei cradled in his arms. Her eyelids are growing heavy, a pacifier between her lips now.

“Sometimes, when I first wake up in the morning,” WinWin says in a hushed tone, “Sometimes I think that this has all just been a dream. That I’m going to roll over, get up, and we’re going to be back where we were a year ago, before we even knew you were pregnant, and in that moment after just waking up, my heart drops. And I think that it was such a good dream.” He sighs.

Mei’s eyes fall shut, and WinWin looks down at her.

“I can’t imagine my life without her.” WinWin admits. “I hope you know that. The day I got that test result, best day of my life. I just.... I can’t even describe....”

“I understand.” You sit up a bit and kiss his cheek. “And I’m happy you’re her dad. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually said those words to you. But you’re so good at this.”

“So you’re saying I’m the best boyfriend?” WinWin smiles over at you, and judging by the way that his gaze briefly flicks past your face, over your shoulder toward where the door to your bedroom is, you assume one of the others has come to call, and WinWin’s looking to irritate whoever it is. He meets your gaze again as he says, “You’re saying that all along you wished I would be the dad, and you were just playing along with Jaehyun’s fantasies of him potentially being the dad.”

You look over and see Jaehyun leaning in the doorway, arms folded across his chest. 

Honestly your mouth waters at the sight. He looks like he’s ready for climbing into bed and staying there. Shirtless and wearing sweatpants, hair pushed back with a headband. 

“I’m glad Mei’s your daughter, WinWin. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to make Jaehyun a daddy too.” You trace your gaze down the length of Jaehyun’s body, barely able to contain yourself. 

“Alright,” WinWin groans. “I guess that’s my cue to take our daughter and go. You look like you’re about to jump him, baby.”

“You don’t have to go.” You kneel up on your bed when WinWin stands up to go.

He shakes his head. “I’m not staying here with her while you eye-fuck Jaehyun.” He looks the other man up and down. “Have fun. Looks like you could both use it.” WinWin pats Jaehyun on the shoulder as they pass each other, and you watch WinWin leaving the room, holding Mei to his shoulder, kissing her head softly.

The softness you feel at that sight wars entirely with the lust you feel when Jaehyun slinks into your bed.

One knee lands between yours, a hand to your shoulder gently presses you back, and then Jaehyun’s over top of you, his lips press against yours. It feels so good to just kiss him, to feel his body on yours, all heat and hard planes. You love the soft little grunt of pleasure he makes against your lips when you trail a hand down his chest, fingers brushing over his nipple. You love the amused sound of surprise he makes when you suddenly push him over, rolling him beneath you.

Jaehyun’s hair’s grown long over these last several weeks, and now it flares out on the bed in a not-entirely-flattering manner. But you sit on his hips, reach forward to pluck the headband from his hair, and you toss it aside so you can run your fingers freely through his hair as you sink back in to kiss him some more.

“Did you mean what you said?” Jaehyun moans a few moments later as you begin to helplessly shift your hips. “About wanting to make me a daddy too?”

“Mmmh.” You kiss down his throat. “I would gladly give you a baby, I think. You clearly want one all your own.”

Jaehyun puts a hand to your shoulder, applying gentle pressure to get you to stop for just a moment. “Hey, look at me.”

You lift your head from his throat.

When Jaehyun’s eyes are looking right into yours, he says, “I want you to know that I am perfectly happy with Mei as my daughter. You know that, right?” You start to sink back down to get back to what you were doing, but Jaehyun catches your chin between his fingers. “I don’t want you to think that you, like, owe me a biological baby, okay? I know I always talk about this breeding kink thing, but in the end it’s just that, just a kinky thing. Of course, I would love to have a baby with you, but I don’t want you to feel obligated, okay? Tell me you know that.”

“I know, Jae.” You peck him on the lips. “But I want to make you happy too. And I don’t think I want to stop with just one kid. Especially when I see how you all dote on her. You’re all really amazing dads.”

Jaehyun chuckles, shaking his hand still holding your chin a little. “Don’t you miss our days of doting on you? Spoilt baby.” He flips things back over, sweeping your hands up over your head, pinning your wrists against the mattress. “Want me to spoil you again, princess?”

Warmth blooms through you, tingling down to your fingertips and toes as Jaehyun looks at you and talks to you like that. His hand dives under your shirt, pushing it higher up your chest until your bra is exposed; one flick of his wrist and the nursing bra you’re wearing falls apart, and your breasts are freed for him.

“Jaehyun, please.” Your breathy whine does exactly what you want.

Jaehyun, with one hand still pinning your wrists above your head, lowers his mouth to your breast. His other hand dips inside the shorts you’re wearing, inside your panties too. You gasp and arch into his touch as he grazes your clit. So enamored are you by the things he’s making you feel, that you don’t notice at first when he removes his hand from your wrist. It’s only as you feel your shorts and panties being tugged down that you realize your hands are free, but you leave them together above your head as Jaehyun pulls his mouth from you and shimmies your shorts away.

“God, you’re so fucking sexy.” Jaehyun sinks down low, lying on his belly between your legs. His hands press against your thighs, getting you to spread open a little farther. He leans up to kiss your belly just below your navel, right where the butterflies are going wild in your gut.

Sure, Xiaojun ate you out when you had sex with him, and you’ve fucked a couple of the others since that, but you haven’t had Jaehyun’s tongue on you in what feels like ages. Definitely for several months. So seeing him between your legs like this has really stirred you up, and you can feel yourself dripping more just thinking about his tongue and sweet lips on your pussy.

“Gonna make you cum until you can’t take anymore.” Jaehyun murmurs, kissing lower, his breath fanning over your wetness. “I love spoiling you, baby. Just let me know if it gets to be too much.”

And then there he is, fingers spreading your labia apart to give him direct access to suck your clit between his lips. You can’t stand how well Jaehyun knows you, how he knows exactly every move to make right now to get you to cum quickest. He buries his face against you, eating you out with such intensity and devotion that you’re lightheaded even before your first orgasm crashes over you. And it doesn’t stop there. Waves of pleasure as Jaehyun keeps licking your pussy, fucking you with his tongue, making vibrations to carry you through it by moaning as you drip on his tongue.

When Jaehyun sharply sucks your clit back into his mouth after that second orgasm, you squeeze your thighs around his head, and you whine, “Too much, Jae. Back off.”

He does slowly pull himself up onto his knees, lifting a hand to drag it back across his mouth, though he still licks his lips again.

“Good, princess? You only came twice. Don’t you want more?” As he shifts a little, you notice the tent in the front of his sweatpants. Immediately you want to offer to jerk him off or blow him, but you know that Jaehyun is just as likely to turn that down, to go shower and take care of himself instead, so you entice him the only way that you know for certain will have him staying.

You spreak your legs apart again. “I’m not finished. I want you inside me. Told you I want to have your baby too, didn’t I?”

“Stop. This is about you. Not me.” Jaehyun says, but he’s already got a hand on your hip, is already rolling you onto your belly. “Want to get on your knees, precious?”

You lift your ass up, cheek still against the bed, and Jaehyun slicks his fingers against your pussy, giving you just his fingertips before they disappear again, his fingers damp on your hips instead. You bite your lip to hold in the pathetic whimper that you almost made as you grind back against his fingers, pressing back until you feel the soft material covering his thighs bumping against your bare skin. His erection fits against your ass.

“Ah, shit.” Jaehyun moans, his hips pushing forward involuntarily.

“I need you, Jaehyun. I’ve missed your cock. It’s been so long since I had you inside me, remember?” You’re sure you’re creating a damp spot on the front of his pants, continuing to grind back against his erection. “Please fuck me, Jae. Please, Daddy?”

Jaehyun’s not always big on the daddy kink thing. That’s mostly Kun, occasionally Doyoung when he’s really feeling it. But from time to time, you’ve called Jaehyun daddy, and he’s loved it. Just as he does now.

You can feel him fumbling quickly with his pants, pushing them down around his thighs, his hands going back to your ass, thumbs spreading your cheeks so he can see as his desperately hard cock presses against your entrance and then as he pushes inside.

Jaehyun moans, swearing and sounding so lovely as he feels your warm vagina around him for the first time since the beginning of the year, like eight months almost. “Fuck, baby, you feel so good around me.”

“Yeah, Daddy?” You turn your head to the side, trying to get a look at Jaehyun’s face. “You missed my pussy?”

“Haven’t we all?” His hands slip from your ass to your hips, holding tightly as he starts thrusting into you. “Heard you keep telling most of them no when they come drooling after you, baby. Waiting for someone special? Only want Daddy’s cock to fill you up?”

He’s mostly right. Ever since Xiaojun, you’ve messed around with several of them. Johnny had come to you begging for attention as the one handjob you’d given him had been distracted and hurried. Kun and you had had a quick roll around the other morning, which ended with his fingers inside you and your hand down his pants. There was the moment when Jungwoo had sat there watching you try to nurse Mei, but when it turned out that she wasn’t hungry although your tits were hurting with the need to get the milk out, and he’d eagerly volunteered to help you with that instead of you having to sit there with the breast pump which was just annoying to have to deal with. You’d sat in his lap with his face buried against your tits, and after he’d had his fill, looking dazed and horny, you laid back on the bed for him so he could jerk off over your chest before licking it clean again.

For the most part, you’ve not engaged in actual penetrative sex with any of the guys since Xiaojun, but a couple weeks after that, you did share a single glass of wine with Doyoung, and it went straight to your head, making you feel all giddy and buzzy, so when Doyoung got you to your feet to go bed, you’d dragged him into a kiss. The kiss also went straight to your head, pulling and tugging Doyoung all the way into your bedroom with you, through the bathroom door, into the shower. It felt so good to have him in you again, moving against you, pinning you against the cool tile wall of the shower, water racing down your bodies and streaming between your lips as you kissed.

You’d had sex with Yuta too, convincing him to stay in bed with you one morning. He’d woken hard, your name on his lips, and as soon as he realized, Yuta hurried to climb from bed, to go take care of it himself, but you’d caught his arm and asked him to stay. Yuta was worried about hurting you, concerned about Mei in the corner. But she was already gone as it was actually quite late in the morning. You’d already fed her, and Taeil had taken her downstairs when he left your room. So you welcome Yuta into you, and he’s not normally so tender and romantic in bed. You know him better by the rough passion, each time normally touching on one of his kinks, but this time had been sweet and gentle, taking you apart second by second until you unraveled beneath him. He’d left afterwards, pressing a kiss to your forehead and promising he’d be back with breakfast in bed.

 But, Jaehyun was mostly right about you waiting for his cock. The few times you’ve had sex again, none of them had cum inside of you for one reason or another, and you know that if you tell him that now, it’ll really satisfy Jaehyun’s jealousy and his breeding kink, thinking that he’s the only one allowed to cum in you now.

“Waiting for you, Daddy,” you moan, gasping for breath as his tip drags right against your G spot. “Been waiting for your cum. Please, Jaehyun.”

“Of course, baby. I’ll give it to you.” He thrusts in deep, reaches a hand up to tangle his fingers in your hair so he can pull you up from where your face has been planted against the mattress.

Now, you know that you’ve not been trying to hold your moans in much, and Jaehyun’s definitely not being quiet either, so you’re not too surprised when your eyes open as Jaehyun tugs on your hair, and you see that all of these sounds have drawn some attention.

Johnny and Mark stand watching in the doorway.

No orgies, your doctor’s voice echoes in your mind. She’d been joking, you know that, but right now, you don’t care about how serious or not she’d been. You just want. You don’t think you can handle three of them—sure, you’ve had more and worse before than just three at once, but it’s been a long time, and your body would definitely not be up to it, already after just the two orgasms back-to-back that Jaehyun gave you, you were feeling it. You can take maybe one or two more, but not more than that.

“Jae, please,” you moan, throwing your head back so you can see his face. “Please.”

He glances over at the two in the doorway. He jerks his head, and Mark and Johnny come closer. Mark’s gaze is fixed on Jaehyun’s cock disappearing inside you. Johnny’s watching the way Jaehyun’s fingers are knotted in your hair.

“Are you finally giving her the treat she deserves, Jae?” Johnny asks as he joins you on the bed, kneeling in front of you. “How does she feel?”

“Sweet.” Jaehyun’s hand winds tighter in your hair, drawing you up more until your back is pressed to his chest, and his lips brush your throat. “Our baby girl feels so sweet. Tastes sweet too.” His tongue swipes quickly at your skin.

Johnny starts touching you too; a hand between your legs to rub at your clit, another raised up to tweak one of your nipples. And when he leans in, his lips touching the other side of your neck from Jaehyun’s lips, you lose control of yourself.

You keen at the attention being laved on you, an orgasm rocking through you.

Jaehyun’s teeth close down on your sensitive skin. Johnny chuckles, continuing to rub your clit and kiss your neck as you keep shaking, your body too overstimulated now on your third orgasm, pressed between two boyfriends with them still touching you.

“Oh my God, it’s too much,” you moan, shaking. “Jaehyun, Johnny.”

“Guys.” For the first time since entering the room, Mark speaks. “Back off, look at her.”

It’s a lot but you’re still fine. It’s not more than you can handle, though you appreciate Mark’s concern. But you don’t appreciate when Johnny pulls away, when Jaehyun stops thrusting toward his own orgasm.

You shake your head. “No, keep going.” You reach back, fingernails digging into Jaehyun’s hip. “Please, Jaehyun, I told you I want you to cum in me. Keep going. I need it.”

“Love when you beg for it.” Jaehyun picks back up where he left off, chasing his orgasm, and it’s only another few moments before he’s cumming, the long-awaited heat of his orgasm spilling inside you. “Mmmh,” Jaehyun moans, “now you’re all mine, baby. Gonna give Mei a little sister or brother, right?” He kisses your neck and you shoulder, and as he pulls his hips back from yours, you can turn around in his arms, and he kisses you on the lips.

“Come on, when’s my turn?” Johnny asks, his voice teasing, his hands reaching for your hips. “I’ve missed you too.”

You break the kiss with Jaehyun, twisting around somewhat uncomfortably to bat Johnny’s hands away. “I can’t, Johnny. It’s already been too much, too quick. I shouldn’t have even done that much probably.” It’s not like that sex had been too wild or anything at all, just a bit rougher than the others have been since you were cleared for sex again, but you can already feel a dull ache setting into those muscles.

Johnny sighs and leans back against your pillows. You can see the bulge in the front of his pants, and it hurts you to know how much he wants you, to know that the most you can offer him right now is another handjob or a blowjob, but not what he wants. He looks at you for a long moment, considering, and then he sits up, pushes himself off the bed, and walks out the door.

You sink back against Jaehyun, and he wraps his arms around you. Mark’s still standing there, looking after Johnny, but as the door swings shut, Mark looks back at you and Jaehyun. You groan, reaching down to dip your fingers between your legs, the cum dripping out of you now. “I feel so gross now.”

Jaehyun lets go of you, flopping down onto his back, eyes fluttering shut. “We should take a nap. Mark, you joining?”

There’s just barely enough room for three people on your bed, but it doesn’t matter, because Mark shakes his head. “But if you feel gross, how does a bath sound?”

You nod.

Jaehyun makes a little noise, stretching out an arm to lay it over your lap possessively, keeping you there in bed with him.

Mark rolls his eyes a little. “You can join us, Jaehyun. That tub might be big enough to fit the three of us and your jealousy.”

Jaehyun opens his mouth to retort, but you quickly cover his mouth with your hand. “Let’s not argue. Let’s just relax with a soak in the bath, then we can go see what WinWin and Mei are up to.”

After Mark steps out to go run the bath, Jaehyun moves his arm away.

He’s lying there stark naked, not trying to cover up at all, and you once more find your gaze drawing attentively and appreciatively over his form from head to toe. But as you return to looking at his face, you find that he’s watching you, smiling and blushing ever-so-slightly.

“Enjoying the view?”

You reach over, pinching lightly one of his nipples. “Shut up. You know you’re handsome. I don’t need to tell you that. And also, you don’t need to act so jealously possessive when Mark offers me a bath, like you just fucked me so good, Jaehyun. If I thought I could’ve handled more I would have gladly begged you to keep going, would’ve let Johnny and Mark too.” You lean down so your face is right above his. Jaehyun blinks slowly, dazed by your sudden proximity, and he makes a soft pleasant humming sound when you kiss him. “Only would’ve let you cum in me, though,” you promise him.

Jaehyun grins, resting his hand against the back of your head as he brings you back down into another, longer kiss.

You’re still kissing when Mark pops his head out of the bathroom to tell you the bath is ready.

“Coming?” You ask Jaehyun.

He shakes his head, watching you slip off the bed. “Think I’ll go steal Mei from whoever’s got her. Maybe I’ll just go take a nap.” But he’s still in your bed when you close the bathroom door behind you.

The tub swirls with steam and bubbles, the air scented with vanilla. Mark’s already soaking in the tub, but he opens his eyes as you ease a foot into the water. “Where’s Jaehyun?” He asks, his eyes following each inch of your skin that sinks beneath the bubbles.

“Decided to go bother whoever has Mei.” You sigh as the bubbles brush your chin, the warm water enveloping you, already working magic to relax that ache you’re feeling. “This feels so nice.”

“It does.” Mark’s hand brushes your arm beneath the water, circling around so he can pull you closer and closer until you’re sitting with your back to his chest.

“This is nicer,” you sigh, leaning you head back as Mark kisses the side of your head. “Relaxing.”

His hand slides down to yours, twisting your fingers together underwater. You rest your head on his shoulder, his head rests against yours, and you let your eyes close, feeling safe and good, all wrapped up in warmth and Mark.

After a few moments, he starts humming, playing with your fingers. He brings your intertwined hands up out of the water, and you smile to yourself. Mark rubs his thumb back and forth and back and forth and again and again at the base of your third finger until you finally open your eyes, turn your head slightly, and you ask, “What are you doing?”

“Just thinking,” Mark answers. “Remembering the night I proposed to you, how quickly you shot me down.” He kisses your head, then says, “I still want to marry you, by the way. I know things have been.... a little different since Mei. I know she’s not mine, so proposing like I did back then was maybe a little silly, but it doesn’t change how I feel about you at all. I still love you as wildly as I have done since I met you and even more. I know that you would probably shoot me down in a heartbeat again if I tried to propose, but I’m just thinking about how I would still gladly spend forever with you and Mei.”

Mark lifts your hand up, kissing right there at the base of your finger where a ring would sit if you’d said yes to him.

Mei’s giggles quickly become your favorite sound in the universe. She giggles when Miso comes up to snuggle beside her. She giggles when her dads or the other guys play with her. She giggles when you talk to her in silly voices or when you blow raspberries on her belly. She smiles and makes babbling noises, such a happy baby.

“Mei-mei!” Ten coos, lifting her up. “How’s the happy little princess today?” He scrunches his nose at her adorably.

“She’s been fussy today, actually.” You’ve had her lying on a blanket on the floor in the living room while you sit nearby and fold laundry, and she’s been making little crying noises for the better part of an hour, but every time you’ve checked her diaper she’s been dry, and she’s not hungry either. You’ve tried holding her and talking to her, giving her her favorite new toy. Nothing had worked until you put YouTube on the TV and started playing videos of the guys—music videos, interviews, reality shows, videos from their channels.

They’ve all been gone all day. The 127 members, the Dreamies, and WayV were all out, and you don’t know the last time you were in the house without any of them, or if you’ve ever been there without them. It was strange, and maybe that’s what Mei had been picking up on. And now Ten’s the first one back.

“She seems good now.” Ten sits down on the sofa, sitting Mei back against his chest. She’s making little happy sounds, which only turn to giggles when Ten takes her hands and starts clapping them together between his. That entertains her for another minute or two before she starts getting whiny again.

Ten watches in surprise as you start playing one of WayV’s videos and Mei immediately calms down, her eyes watching the TV screen, transfixed.

“Honestly, I think she wants WinWin.” You sigh, folding the last of the clothes and sitting it on top of the neat pile you’ve made. “She’s only four months old, and already such a Daddy’s girl. I swear she already has some idea of the time he normally comes home, because she just starts to get so excited and looks at the door. And watch, when he starts talking.” You point at the video, and as WinWin appears and starts talking Mei makes such happy sounds.

Ten laughs. “Is it just him she does that for?”

You shrug. “Sometimes Jaehyun. I think it’s because they’re the ones always stealing her from everyone else. You know how possessive they both are of her.”

“And of you.” Ten bounces Mei a little in his lap. She’s got her hand shoved into her mouth, drooling around it, and Ten just watches her do it with amusement. “Johnny came to me a few days ago, complaining that you’d left him on the edge again. Something about Jaehyun calling you about Mei, interrupting what you were doing, then you left him like that?”

You groan. You know exactly what he’s talking about. A few days ago, Jaehyun had happily volunteered to babysit Mei to give you just a few hours to yourself to relax. That relaxing had consisted of you going to get a wax (just because Doyoung had eaten you out and afterwards commented that he missed the times when you would be so smooth down there) and a massage and a trim for your hair too. And when you got home, Jaehyun wasn’t finished having quality Mei time (a nap side-by-side on the floor; it was adorable and you snapped quite a few photos of them), so you climbed up the stairs to your bedroom, but before you went inside, Johnny had peered out of his room, saw the glowing happy state of you, and invited you inside.

You’d been excited to show off to him how soft and smooth you looked, and Johnny had been equally as excited to get to experience it. So he’d laid you back on his bed, touching and stroking you until your belly was on fire with lust, your pussy dripping, mind going fuzzy with just how much you needed Johnny to make you cum. He’d taken photos too, a few small video snippets as well, sending them into your groupchat with your boyfriends to show each of them what they were missing out on, and as he teased you with light brushes of his fingers over your clit, Johnny had read out the responses of what the others were saying.

By the time that Johnny was finally inside you, his big cock feeling so good, and his warm arms and body surrounding you, making you lowkey lose your mind at the all-encompassing feeling of Johnny Suh, you’d forgotten about everything but him.

Until there was a frantic knock on the door.

Both of you ignored it. Lips locked together, Johnny’s hips knocking you higher up the bed with your hand braced against the headboard to keep from ramming into it.

It took another few harried knocks on the door before Johnny grunted a clearly annoyed, “What?”

“It’s Mei,” Jaehyun said from outside the door. “She woke up crying and she feels a little warm, maybe feverish. Sorry to interrupt, but I don’t—“

He didn’t even get the chance to say anything else before you were shoving Johnny away from you, pulling clothes on that weren’t even yours, and you were out the door. Mei had been fine; it wasn’t a fever or anything, she was just a little warm and hungry, and by the time you got that sorted, you couldn’t even find Johnny to finish things off.

In the back of your mind, at the time, you had wondered if Jaehyun had just fibbed about Mei feeling feverish just to break up what was going on with you and Johnny. If he’d seen the photos and videos in the chat, if his jealousy had overwhelmed him enough to make up any excuse to get it to stop. You’d convinced yourself that that was ridiculous; Jaehyun seemed genuinely concerned that Mei might be sick.

But right now, Ten looks at you like he believes Jaehyun had done exactly what you were suspicious of.

“I thought Mei was sick, so I had to go take care of her, Ten.” You push to your feet, coming over to offer your hands to your daughter. She babbles excitedly as Ten hands her over to you. “It’s not like I could tell Jaehyun to just go watch her, make sure she didn’t get too high of a temperature while I stayed to finish Johnny off. And by the time I’d settled her down, I couldn’t find Johnny anywhere to pick back up or to even apologize.”

Ten nods. “Yeah, he was with me. Don’t worry. I took good care of him.” He grins mischievously. “But afterwards we were talking, and he said that kind of thing has been happening a lot. Him feeling left behind or left out. I think you two should talk.”

You think he’s right.

It’s hours later when Johnny gets home. Mei’s asleep upstairs; you’ve got the baby monitor beside you at the table while Chenle and Jisung argue over who gets the last ramen cup in the cabinet. Jungwoo, Mark, and Sungchan are playing video games together in the living room with Yuta and Taeil calling out advice and commentary from where they’re watching. You feel at peace again with the house back to normal, loud and busy and relatively chaotic.

Yuta greets Johnny as he walks through the door, and as he passes the doorway into the kitchen, you call his name. He passes by then backs up, pulling out a headphone. “Did you say my name?”

You nod. “Can I talk to you?”

Johnny pulls his headphones out of his ears, tucking them away in his pocket. “Of course.”

Yuta strides into the kitchen then, bypassing the two youngest members of the group who are now standing at the fridge together, and before either of them notice, he steals the ramen they’d been arguing over. You shake your head at him, and he just smiles.

“Yuta, can you take this.” You hand him the baby monitor. “Just keep an ear on it for Mei, please?”

Yuta glances between the baby monitor and your face and Johnny’s. Something clicks in his eyes, and his smile turns more suggestive. “Ah, alright. I’ve got our little angel. You two have fun.” He accepts the monitor, and walks back out of the room with the steaming ramen in the other hand.

Johnny follows you as you walk outside into their small yard. It’s deep night outside, quiet but the air still buzzes with the nature sounds of insects and the wind. It rustles your hair as you sit down on the bench, Johnny settling down beside you.

“What’s up?” He asks. You notice the way that he reaches down to the knee of his jeans, fiddling with the frayed hole there.

“I was talking with Ten earlier,” you say, “and he told me that last week when I skipped out on you, you went to him instead.”

Johnny nods. “Yeah, like, you don’t have a problem with that, right? Kun and Taeyong still fuck around with him too.”

“I know. I’m fine with that. But, Johnny, Ten said that you’re feeling left out in this relationship lately, and that’s what I want to talk about.” You reach over, laying your hand over his on his knee. “Why do you feel that way?”

Johnny’s quiet for a few seconds, looking at your hand on his, and then he lets out a short, sarcastic laugh. “I mean, it’s not a ridiculous way to feel right now, is it? Not baseless? I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve had your wholly undivided attention, uninterrupted by someone else within the last, like, five months almost.”

“You mean since Mei was born?” You withdraw your hand. “Johnny, I’m sorry you feel that way, but you know I can’t just ignore my daughter, right? If she needs me, I have to go, because I’m her mother and that’s my responsibility.”

“Of course I get that. I know that you need to take care of her. It’s just fucking annoying when you leave me in the middle of something sexual.” Johnny argues, “Like, that time you gave me a handjob, and you definitely would’ve just left if I didn’t beg you to finish me off, and even then you did it so quick then just left. And when Jaehyun was fucking you, me and Mark walked in, got me so hard and then just told me to leave pretty much. Then there was the other day. And I get it, Mei needed you, but it just pissed me off that Jae interrupted, especially since it turned out that she was fine.”

You don’t know what to say. Those examples he gave you, two of those times it was because your daughter needed you, and the other time your body literally couldn’t take any more so there was nothing you could have done for him.

“And it just seems like you never have time for me anymore. There’s the sex stuff, but also, even when we’re together just talking or watching a movie or whatever it may be, I just feel like you’re not there with me. Like you’re thinking about something else, not listening to me or wanting to be there.” Johnny tilts his head back and looks up at the sky. “I love you, I really do, but lately it’s just felt like maybe I shouldn’t be here anymore. I want someone I can go have fun with and not have to worry about leaving me at a moment’s notice.”

“Well, I’m a mother, Johnny. That’s going to happen.” You tell him. “She comes first; she always will.”

“I know.” Johnny folds his arms in front of his chest. “So maybe we should end this. I thought that I was ready for a relationship like this, but now with all things considered – the other guys and Mei and everything – I think it’s too serious and too complex for me to be happy trying to keep doing this. Your attention is split too many different ways, and I hate ending it, because like I said, I do love you. But I... I just think that maybe we want different things.”

You look down at your hands, willing the tears not to flow, but you can already feel the hot tingle behind your eyes, the tightening in your throat. “You wanted a baby, Johnny. Do you remember that? We talked about it before I was pregnant. Hell, we talked about it while I was pregnant, when you were coming to the appointments with me, meeting my parents. You remember that, right? But now you’re saying that you can’t deal with having my attention split between you and her?”

“That’s not it.” Johnny’s voice drops low, offended and defensive as he says, “Not entirely. If it was just that, just split between me and Mei, I could handle that. But it’s the fact that you’re in love with all of us, that you’re dating all of us. That’s what I can’t deal with. You get that, right?”

You hate to admit it, but you do get it. This moment is strangely similar to when you and Lucas broke up. He had other reasons, mostly his growing feelings for Chaerin, but he also told you that one of the reasons was that he felt that your attention was too divided.

“I get it,” you agree. But you can’t bring yourself to look at Johnny.

“Are you mad at me?” Johnny asks after a few silent moments.

You bite your cheek, blink away the tears, and then you say, “Well, it’s not like I’m jumping for joy or anything over here. But I get it. I don’t like it, but not many people do like being broken up with.”

“I’m sorry,” he apologizes again. His hand rests briefly on your shoulder, and then he’s gone, leaving just the heat behind from his hand.

Kun’s the one that finds you a while later. You’re not sure how long you’ve been sitting out there, but the light in the kitchen has gone out when you hear the door.

“There you are.” Kun steps out, closing the door behind him to come sit beside you. “I was starting to get a little worried when I couldn’t find you anywhere inside.” As soon as he sits down Kun wraps his arm around your shoulders, drawing you into his side, and you lean your head down on his shoulder. “I’m guessing that talk with Johnny didn’t go well?”

You start to lift your head, but Kun lays his hand on your hair, pressing you back down. “How did you know about that?” You ask him.

“Ten. He told me that he told you what Johnny had been saying, and that you two needed to talk.” He strokes your hair soothingly. “And when I got home earlier, Yuta had the baby monitor, and when I asked, he said you were out here talking with Johnny.”

“Yeah.” You sigh. It feels like there’s a weight on your chest that won’t go away. You hate this feeling, like maybe if you’d just done something different, maybe you could make everyone in this relationship happy. But as you’ve been thinking about this since Johnny left you out here, the only thing different you could come up with is just choosing one of them from the start; that or not getting pregnant, but you can’t bring yourself to regret that one bit at all.

“What happened? If you want to talk about it?” Kun asks.

You pull your head away from his hand slowly, and Kun moves to let you do so. He makes a little sound as you sink down, resting your head in his lap and taking his hand to bring it back to your hair. The bench is a little hard and uncomfortable to lie on like this, but you don’t really care too much.

“We broke up. I didn’t, like, come out here thinking that’s what was going to happen. I thought we’d just talk, come up with a compromise or something, and then go back inside happily.” You close your eyes tight. “But Johnny thinks that I’m juggling too many people in this relationship, that I don’t have enough time and attention for all of you, plus being Mei’s mom on top of all of that. And he’s right, I guess. That’s partially why Lucas left me, and I know things have probably gotten worse since I had Mei.”

Kun twirls your hair around one of his fingers. “A little bit, but I thought we all understood that you have to focus on her. We can handle ourselves. But Mei needs you entirely; she’s a baby. And we, or at least I, can see that you’re doing your best to be what all of us need you to be. Aren’t you exhausted?”

You rub your cheek against Kun’s leg, loving the soft feel of his pajama pants against your skin. “A little exhausted.”

“You need a vacation.” Kun suggests. “You barely leave the house, so you need to just get away, get out of the city. Probably get away from all of us.”

A laugh bubbles out of you, and you turn onto your back so you’re looking up at Kun. He’s smiling, eyes glinting in the dim light. “Right, get away from all of you. And what about Mei? Do you think I could leave her here for a week or even a few days? With all of you?” You laugh again. “I love all of you, and I know most of you are good with her, but really, Kun? If you want me to relax, leaving my daughter here in this house without me would almost be as bad as leaving her in a fraternity house.”

Kun frowns. “We’re not that bad.”

You lift a hand up to touch his cheek. “No, you’re not. I know I can trust a couple of you with her, but I still couldn’t leave her.”

The longest you’ve been away from Mei is about four hours, and even then, she was only about twenty minutes away from you. What Kun’s suggesting, leaving the city for a getaway would last much longer and put your farther away from her than you’ve ever been before.

“Take her with you, then.” Kun turns his head, brushing his lips to your hand. “You, her, WinWin. Take a little family trip. He should have a few free days coming up on his schedule. And don’t mind anyone getting jealous about it if you take WinWin with you. He’s her dad. I think the three of you deserve some quality time together.”

It does all sound like a very tempting idea, so you keep that little idea wrapped up nicely in your mind for a few days, coming back to it again and again every time that a stressor pops up in your life. Like when you bump into Johnny and his expression shifts into something that’s a combination of sadness and concern and apology. After the third time of that happening, you decide maybe taking some time away from the house would be a good thing.

You bring it up to WinWin on a Tuesday morning.

He’s just woken up, rolled out of bed, and strolled upstairs into your bedroom. His hair’s still a wild mess, standing up in various direction, and looking especially silly because of the recent dyeing it had. You laugh and reach up to smooth it down as he flops down into your bed, dragging the sheets up. Miso hisses as the sudden sheet movement disrupts him bathing himself at the foot of the bed, and he stalks off, his tail held high, looking back once before he disappears out the door to give WinWin a disgruntled look.

“I want to go back to sleep,” he mumbles into your pillow. “But Hendery wouldn’t stop being loud. I get that he isn’t the one who had a schedule running into early this morning, but come on? Being awake this early?” WinWin smashes his face into your pillow, pulls the blanket up over his head entirely, and falls silent.

“You have a few days cleared on your schedule soon, right?” You lift the edge of the blanket so he can breathe. The lump under the blanket moves to signal a yes. “Do you want to get away and relax with me somewhere that’s not here?”

WinWin emerges from the blanket, squinting against the light. “What?”

“Kun suggested it the other night. He thinks you, me, and Mei should get away. Well, initially he just said me, but when I laughed about leaving Mei here in this house alone with all of you, he amended it to include you and her too.” You quickly reach up, trying to push his hair flat again, unsuccessfully. “What do you think?”

WinWin nods. “Sounds good to me.”

And three days later, you and WinWin pack up Mei and a weekend bag, and drive away to a beach a few hours away. You’re not there necessarily for the beach—after all Mei is only a few months old and you definitely don’t want to expose her to the sun or to the heat for too long—though it does make a very pretty view from the window of your hotel room. The pretty blue water lapping against the beach below makes you pause at the window, holding Mei who also looks out at the water transfixed (or maybe she just sees her reflection in the window and wonders who that other baby is), pressing her little handprints to the glass.

“Do you remember the last time we came to the beach?” WinWin asks, sneaking up behind you. He drops a quick kiss to your cheek, then brings a hand up to cradle Mei’s head.

“Mhmm.” You hum, and Mei waves a hand at the window, fingers leaving streaks on the glass. “I’m pretty sure last time we came to the beach is probably when we made her.” You stroke her soft cheek. “That was such a good day.”

WinWin laughs, and Mei turns her head to look up at him with her sparkly dark eyes. “I remember that day, like, I was joking around with Taeyong and Hendery, and then I looked over at you and Dejun sitting on the end of that dock. You were just sunbathing, and then the next time I looked over you were making out, straddling him, God, it was really sexy. I never pegged him as being the type to mess around in public like that, but neither was I really until right then. I still can’t believe we did that out in broad daylight where anyone could’ve seen us. Do you really think that’s the time that we made her?”

You shrug. “Probably. That’s definitely around the time that she was conceived. And Mei’s our little sea star. She loves her baths, and when I play white noise to help her sleep, the ocean waves are her favorite. Of course, that could all be a coincidence.”

WinWin smiles as Mei starts making nonsensical babbling sounds, kicking her legs as she looks back out the window at the beach and the people milling around in the sand. “We really did something good, didn’t we? Making her.”

“Absolutely.” She certainly wasn’t planned, but you don’t regret one thing about it. You and WinWin talk about this semi-regularly, both of you just absolutely enchanted watching your daughter exist, amazed that she’s the product of both of you. “And to think you almost didn’t come with us to the beach that day.”

WinWin shakes his head. “I don’t want to think about that. Mei-mei, you want daddy to hold you?” He repeats it in Mandarin, and as he says her full name Mingmei, she lifts her arms to him, so you pass her over. WinWin cuddles her, continuing to speak to her quietly as she gazes up at his face and clings tightly to one of his fingers.

It’s the next day when the three of you go down to the beach early on in the day, before the sun’s really beaming down, but nevertheless you’ve slathered Mei with some baby-safe sunscreen, you have a little adorable hat on her head shielding her from the weak sun rays. It’s not really warm enough to get in the water, but it’s nice enough that you and WinWin can sit on the sand for a while, put Mei’s toes in the sand, and eventually you carry her to the water’s edge and hold her right there, her little feet curl up as a cool wave washes over them.

“Does she not like it?” WinWin asks, chuckling as Mei lets out a sad little cry just once.

“You’re not too sure about that are you, Mei?” You laugh. She puts her feet back down after a minute, just to have another wave crash nearby, racing thinly over the sand, covering her feet. She watches the water carefully, and the next time it happens she giggles, quickly adapting to the strangeness of the water.

You don’t spend all day at the beach. There’s a temple nearby up atop a tall hill, so you put on a baby carrier strapped to your chest, fit Mei snugly in it, and you and WinWin go exploring with Mei along for the ride. It’s a nice walk, pretty out, and as you follow a path along the seaside, the breeze blows salty spray up at your faces. Once you’ve reached the peak of the hill, Mei is ready to be free of the prison you’ve got her strapped into on your chest, ready to be set free and held by her dad.

It’s breezy and cool, relaxing here atop the hill, looking down at the waves below. There aren’t too many people up here, so you decide to take a seat on one of the benches overlooking the sea, unpacking a little picnic.

WinWin sits across from you on the bench, both of you facing each other, and he holds Mei in his lap, her sitting up against his chest, waving her hands excitedly as you pull out a bottle you’ve kept chilled with your food. When you try to get her into your arms so you can feed her with the bottle, Mei just whines in protest, clearly wanting to stay with her dad.

WinWin, to be fair, tries his best to not grin in victory as you hand the bottle over to him so he can feed her.

“You know I carried you for nine months, right?” You tell her. “But he’s your favorite?”

WinWin just laughs, and as you watch him laughing and smiling, feeding your daughter, you fully understand why he’s her favorite. Why wouldn’t he be?

You take photos of them together, sweet snapshots of memory as the day goes on. WinWin feeding her, him holding her on his shoulders (you were both surprised and pleased just a few days before as she’d sat upright so well by herself), and even a photo of them looking out at the water with their faces side-by-side as WinWin talked to her in a gentle voice. But as the day goes on Mei starts to grow sleepy and fussy, crying loud enough that heads in the crowd turn to look, so you decide to go back to the hotel.

You sit out on the balcony together, the door cracked open behind you so you can hear if Mei starts crying inside. WinWin stands against the railing, and you stand beside him, your head on his shoulder.

“This is nice.” He sighs. “I don’t get many vacations, not many trips where I can just get away from all the cameras and everything.”

“Nice to get to relax some, isn’t it?” You turn your head and kiss his shoulder. “At least one good thing’s come out of Johnny and I breaking up.”

WinWin makes a soft sound of agreement. “We all knew this wasn’t going to be easy. From the start, we’ve all known that we couldn’t all stay here, doing this with you. I remember after we all found out that Doyoung had kissed you, we thought that was going to be the end, that you’d chosen him. But then a few days later Taeyong was bragging you’d kissed him. For a long time, this didn’t seem, like, real—that you chose all of us, that we were doing a relationship like this, and even when I finally realized that this was happening.... I definitely didn’t think that we’d end up here.”

“What, you didn’t imagine that all of our fun and fucking would lead to Mei?” You glance back over your shoulder. She’s asleep in a little portable playpen in a clear line of sight to you.

“Something like that.” WinWin’s voice sounds strange, and it’s only when he brushes your hair back behind your ear that you look up at him. “I love you. I’m so glad that we have Mei, even if the circumstances were kinda unconventional. But you’re happy, aren’t you? With Mei, with me?”

The longing in his voice, in his touch, warms your heart, and you lean in to his touch. “I am happy, Sicheng.”

You tilt your head to look him in the eye, and then he’s leaned in and is kissing you. The kiss is soft, tender, filled with every ounce of that longing that you’d just heard in his voice. You feel positively light and warm, so you let him guide you back inside. The balcony door slides shut behind you both, and you move past the playpen where Mei sleeps soundly, back into the bedroom. You let him peel your clothes away, kissing down your neck and shoulders and chest.

“You smell like coconut,” he murmurs as he kisses down your body, nose skimming between your breasts. “Mmm, love it.”

It’s like you’re drunk on the sun-warm heat of WinWin, the summer smell of sunshine in his hair when he’s kissing you on the lips again, the way that having him inside you and all around you makes you forget that it’s the tail end of summer and not the highest hottest part. You feel so good as WinWin makes love to you, both of you fallen into this high, dreamy haze together.

Even in the aftermath, sweaty and sticky skin pressed together, you can’t get enough of kissing him, his body still tucked between your legs, your fingers tangled in his hair as he lays against your chest.

“Mmm, god,” WinWin moans softly, kissing softly beneath your jaw, down the side of your throat, and retracing his steps to your lips. You smile into the kiss, giggling a bit as the way that his fingers brush over your ribs tickles. WinWin smiles, kisses you once again, and then leans up, breaking the kiss. He just looks down at you, and as you blink your eyes open, WinWin says, “Marry me?”

“What?” You trail your fingers over his miles of exposed skin. “Like, right now?”

He shrugs. “Whenever. I love you, and we have Mei, and I just want to marry you.” He kisses you again, but you put a hand to his shoulder, pressing him back.

“Dong Sicheng, are you serious?”

The warm glow pulses all around you, threatening to collapse or explode. The idea of what he’s proposing—marriage to him, a future with him as your husband and Mei’s father—it excites you, but terrifies you in equal measure. If you say yes to him, then what about the others? It’d be like a slap in the face. You love WinWin, of course you do, but you love them too.

You think of Mark, his underprepared proposal nearly a year ago, the hurt in his eyes when you’d told him no, but the persistent hope and love, the soft way that he traces a line around your ring finger when he holds your hand. You think of Jaehyun, a man so full of love and jealousy. You think of Taeil who looks at Mei as if maybe she could really be his daughter. You think of all of them.

“I am.” WinWin sits up, breaking contact with you, and the cool air floods in against your skin. “I want to marry you, but I know that you’re not going to tell me yes. Not now, anyway. But I just thought I should put that intention out there, let you know where I see this relationship going. I don’t expect you to actually tell me yes, so don’t worry your pretty head about it too much. Okay?”

He leans in, kisses your forehead, and then he’s slipping away, dragging his shorts back up, and he’s out of the room before you have the chance to say anything.

The rest of the vacation is very nice and relaxing, even after the slight awkwardness following WinWin’s proposal. Nevertheless, by the time you’re returning to Seoul, walking through the door of the big house with Mei in your arms, her fingers tugging at your hair, you’re pleased to be back.

The warmth of the beach faded quickly on the way back to Seoul where a chill has set in as the season turns over to autumn. As soon as you’re inside the house, Jaehyun, Taeil, and Taeyong are there, cooing at Mei, offering to take her from you. She goes easily into Taeyong’s arms, and he sweeps her away, playing with her and talking at her in a sweet baby voice.

Xiaojun’s there when you go back outside to help WinWin bring in the bags, and he pulls you quickly into a hug, tucking his face into your shoulder. You wrap your arms back around him, squeezing tightly.

Your reunion with most of your boyfriends goes as such, a warm hug, a murmured “I missed you,” a passionate kiss that gets booed and noises of disgust made at it. The last reunion is with Jungwoo as he gets home late from a schedule and comes into your room to use your shower, then crawls into bed with you and Mark, snuggling in between both of you.

“Where’s Mei?” He asks, casting one leg over yours, slinging an arm over Mark.

“Jaehyun and Doyoung are hoarding her,” Mark mumbles, pushing Jungwoo’s arm away. “How did the photoshoot go today?”

“Fine.” Jungwoo sighs, turning over so he’s on his back instead of his stomach. “They really liked Shotaro.”

You look at him, at the ever-so-slight downturn of his lips. “I’m sure they loved you too, Jungwoo. Like, yeah, Shotaro’s a cutie, but you....” You bite your lip and give him a once-over. “Very sexy. Sex appeal sells more than cuteness, you know. I know for sure your fans will buy up anything that’s got you looking sexy on the cover.” He’d looked so stunning when he walked into your room, his hair and makeup still done up from the shoot, and right now it’s all gone, but he is stretched out in your bed wearing only the towel around his waist.  

Maybe you reach out to touch him then, unable to hold yourself back when he’s lying there looking so tempting.

Jungwoo laughs at the ridiculously horny look you’re giving him. “Didn’t WinWin give you any sex while you were away? You haven’t looked this needy since before Mei, probably.”

“We did have sex. Several times. Should I tell you about them?” You can’t help it if you’re horny. Maybe that’s a good sign that your body is returning to how it was before the pregnancy, your libido skyrocketing again.

Mark leans up, resting his head on his hand as he watches your hands wander over Jungwoo’s chest, watches the way that Jungwoo’s nipples perk up, the way that Jungwoo bites his lip as you pinch at one of his nipples. You start telling them both about your fun on your little trip, continuing to touch Jungwoo as you do.

Mark just watches and listens, drinking in everything that’s happening. He watches you eventually swing your leg over Jungwoo’s lap, situating yourself right over the bulge that’s risen under the towel. He watches Jungwoo strip you of your shirt and bra; he moans a little as Jungwoo loses the towel and pulls you down, filling you with his cock. Mark moans again as Jungwoo starts touching your boobs, nuzzling against them, and then closing his lips around a nipple as you grind down on his erection. Jungwoo alone of your boyfriends is really into this; the others that tasted your milk thought it was okay or thought it was gross, but Jungwoo just genuinely loves doing this, tasting it on his tongue any chance he gets.

Jungwoo laves all of his attention on one, suckling as you ride him slowly. Then his other hand rises up to your other breast, the one closer to Mark, just massaging, his fingers occasionally tweaking your nipple.

And if Mark makes any sound you don’t hear it, but then he’s right there, head in front of your chest, tongue testing as milk leaks from your nipple while Jungwoo massages. Just as the first time it had been strangely very hot to have a boyfriend breastfeeding from you, so is it now, but multiplied as you’ve got two of them doing this.

As Mark grows more confident, he knocks Jungwoo’s hand away, and Jungwoo drops both of his hands to your hips, encouraging you to ride him faster. Both of them keep their mouths on your breasts even as you start fucking yourself on Jungwoo, feeling your orgasm building, getting closer. And then Mark’s hand slips down to your clit.

The orgasm bursts like a bubble of pleasure popped.

You shudder in their arms, quaking and moaning. Mark pulls his mouth from your tit, licking his lips.

“Good, Mark?” You ask after you catch your breath. You slump forward against Jungwoo. “Did you like that?”

Mark nods, looking a little dazed as if caught off guard by how much he’d liked it. You giggle, reaching to pull him in for a kiss, but just as you do, Jungwoo tips you backwards.

He drags your legs up around his hips, fucking into you now at his own pace, needing his own orgasm after he’s felt you cumming around him. Mark falls down beside you, happily seeking your kiss, swallowing down all of the moans that Jungwoo fucks out of you.

“Mark,” you sigh, “please. Please, let me help you feel good too.” Your hand searches down his body, looking for the spot where his shirt gives way to skin, so you can push your hand inside his shorts. “Mark, mm, please.”

Jungwoo nails a spot inside you that makes your eyes roll with pleasure, your hands grapple at the waistband of Mark’s shorts.

“You want my cock, baby?” Mark rolls away from you, getting off the bed so he can strip off his shirt and shorts, and when his weight next settles beside you, he’s naked, jerking his hand over his cock. “Open up, baby.”

Mark feeds you his cock, thrusting gently at first, his tip bulging your cheek, but you turn your head, breathe through your nose and let your jaw go slack, encouraging him to use your throat.

Neither of them are much for dirty talk, but as Jungwoo’s pace picks up to almost a brutal speed, you hear him start talking to Mark about you. “God, look at her, all open and pretty and wet for us, just a dripping fucktoy for both of us.”

“She’s our pretty slut again,” Mark says, thrusting down your throat, pinching one of your nipples. “Taking two cocks at once. When was the last time you did that, baby?”

It hasn’t been that long, not that you would tell Mark that even if you could right now, but the way that he’s now fucking your face makes it a little difficult to even draw breath, let alone attempt to speak.

Jungwoo cums a moment later, spilling his load inside you, but he keeps thrusting with his thumb on your clit until you experience your second orgasm of the night. He pulls out and leaves you and Mark, not that Mark notices really, too absorbed in fucking your face, feeling you moan and gag around him.

When Mark cums, he pulls back so just his tip is between your lips, and he looks down so he can see your eyes as you suck and flick your tongue over the slit on his tip. His hips just barely press forward, only the shallowest of thrusts between your lips, and he cums over your tongue, and you can feel just a bit of his cum dripping from the corner of your mouth.

Mark moans, swearing in at least two different languages, and after a moment he falls away from you, sinking back into his comfortable spot on the bed from earlier. You sit up, using your thumb to push what you’d spilled back into your mouth. Mark looks up at you as you straddle him, as you lean in to kiss him. He opens his mouth to your kiss, and makes a startled yet aroused sound as you let his cum leak from your mouth into his. But he takes it, kissing you with his cum passed between your mouths. It’s gross and dirty, but it’s something you’ve thought about doing before; you’re just surprised that Mark’s going along with it.

He swallows when you break the kiss, sitting up just a little so you can see his face.

Mark wrinkles his nose adorably. “That was gross. Does it always taste like that?”

You laugh and kiss his cheek. “Usually.”

Jungwoo returns a moment later, looking freshly rinsed clean, and he crawls back into bed with a damp cloth to wipe your face and chest and thighs down.

“Messy girl,” he teases as he watches you wipe between your own legs at where his cum is leaking out.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Mark mumbles, but Jungwoo’s already moving back off the bed, taking the cloth with him back to the bathroom. “Filthy, messy girl. Spitting my cum back into my mouth.”

He doesn’t sound like he didn’t like it, though.

You snuggle up against Mark’s side, your cheek on his shoulder, and Jungwoo cuddles up behind you, drawing the blankets up to cover all three of you. “Goodnight,” he whispers, kissing the back of your shoulder, “You know we love you, right? That we didn’t mean those things we said.”

You hum. “But I am a slut for all of you. I accepted that a long time ago.”

Mark pets your hair. “You’re an angel. Just go to sleep, babe.”

Several hours later you wake in the half-light of dawn in your bedroom. The door is cracked open a bit, letting in a little light from the hallway, and a nightlight glows in the corner, all of this allowing you enough light to see that Mei’s in her bed sound asleep. But it takes you another second to realize that Jungwoo is gone, that Mark is sitting up on the opposite side of the bed from you whispering to Doyoung.

“Doyoung?” You mumble, rolling over fully, stretching your arms above your head. “What are you doing? Where’d Jungwoo go?”

Mark leans over, kisses your forehead. “Go back to sleep. Jungwoo just felt like there wasn’t enough room with all three of us.” He brushes his fingers through your hair for another moment, and then your eyelids sink shut again.

The next time you wake, it’s much later. The sun is shining through the windows, Mark is asleep once more beside you. Taeil is sitting in the rocking chair, holding Mei and giving her a bottle. You almost feel a sense of déjà vu to a few months ago, though back then you’d woken in the middle of the night to this similar situation.

“Good morning,” you yawn, sitting up and stretching your arms above your head. “I didn’t even hear her cry out.”

Taeil shakes his head. “She didn’t. Jungwoo said you’d probably be pretty tired this morning, so I just came in to check on her. She just woke up a few minutes ago.”

You nod, and then look around, trying to find your phone, but it’s not on the nightstand where you would normally leave it.

“Why don’t you go shower?” Taeil suggests. “Lucas ordered in some breakfast for everyone.”

“Why?” You stand up, dragging the top blanket with you to keep your body covered.

Taeil shrugs. “I think he lost a bet yesterday or something. But go shower.” He tilts his head toward the door to your bathroom. “If you hurry there might still be some left.”

So you do go shower off, and when you come back out, Taeil’s gone but Mark is sitting in bed, his legs spread in a V with Mei lying on her back between them as he plays peek-a-boo with her.

You walk over to the nightstand to grab your phone, then remember that it’s not there. So you start looking in the bedsheets, then you crouch down to look under the bed.

“What are you doing?” Mark asks.

“Looking for my phone. I was going to send my mom some pictures from the trip.” You sweep your arm under the bed, only coming out with a pair of panties you thought you’d lost ages ago. You toss them toward the wash basket and then stand up, looking around, hoping that your phone will catch your eye from somewhere unexpected. “Have you seen it?”

Mark stands up, hoisting Mei up into his arms, and instantly she’s resting her head on his shoulder in a way that is absolutely one of the most adorable things. If she loves her dad the most, then Mark is a close second tied with Jaehyun. “Nope. Maybe it’s a sign that you should be away from your phone today. Did Taeil tell you about Lucas buying breakfast? I think he got some of those bubble waffles you’ve been wanting to try.”

You let it go for the time being. You know your phone is somewhere here in the house; you had it just last night while showing the boys some photos and videos, and now you’re just not sure where it’s gotten to. So you follow Mark downstairs to the kitchen.

Jaemin and Renjun are in there when you, Mark, and Mei walk in. They stay to hang out, playing with Mei to make her laugh while you and Mark eat breakfast, and then Mark disappears for a bit, and you give Mei a bath, play with her by giving her tickles and kisses, stretching her arms above her head and cycling her legs as you get her dressed. She smells clean and perfect, just a happy ball of sunshine as you bounce her in your arms as you walk around the house looking for your phone wherever it might be.

The house is oddly quiet. Most of the guys are gone though you can hear Jisung and Hendery playing video games downstairs. Eventually you walk into the room Doyoung, Taeil, Yuta, and Mark share, though right now only Doyoung is in there, curled up on his bed watching a drama, looking sleepy.

“Hey.” He sits up abruptly, pausing the show.

“Hey,” you reply. But you don’t stop to chat, you start moving around the room, nudging aside bags and piles of clothes, flipping the sheets on Yuta’s bed with one hand, moving Taeil’s pillows around. When you turn back to Doyoung he’s watching you with a confused expression. You sigh. “You haven’t seen my phone, have you? I know I had it last night, but I can’t find it anywhere this morning.”

Doyoung looks back at the drama. “No, I haven’t seen it. I’m sure it’ll turn up. Miso probably stole it. You know your cat is a real thief, right?” He glances back over at you. “Yesterday I caught him stealing a pair of my socks, and Taeil said he thought he saw him eyeing up that handstitched baby blanket from your mom. It’s like he’s nesting somewhere in the house.” He fiddles with his sleeve, and when his phone lights up beside his thigh with a notification, a thought enters your mind.

You lean closer, reaching for his phone. “Can I just use your phone to call mine?”

Doyoung snatches his phone away. “No.” He hides his phone on the opposite side of the bed.

Mei makes bubbly noise, blowing at her lips while she clings to your shirt as you try to reach Doyoung’s phone again. He moves it even farther out of your reach.

You stand up straight, shifting Mei slightly. “Doyoung, what the hell? Just let me see your phone.”

He shakes his head. His grip on his phone is so tight that his knuckles lose all their color. The screen lights up again from between his fingers, and you can just make out the sight of multiple messages coming through. And in the silence of this standoff you hear a quiet buzzing coming at the same time from beneath his bed.

Doyoung’s not fast enough to stop you as you crouch down and dig a hand beneath his bed, coming out with your phone in your hand.

“Wow, that’s crazy. How did that get there?” Doyoung asks in a very put-on voice, his look of surprise very clearly fake.

You frown at him as you rub the screen of your phone against your shirt to clean it a bit. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on? Or do I need to look at this first?” You wave your phone, and at that moment, Doyoung reaches out and snatches it from you, hiding it right back beside his phone. “Doyoung. Seriously.”

You can feel Mei drooling through the shoulder of your shirt, but you don’t even care.

Doyoung shakes his head. “I just thought you could use some time away from your phone today.”

“Why don’t I believe you?” You readjust your hold on your daughter. “Are you really just going to lie to me like this?”

He shakes his head again, looking at you for a few long moments in silence as the phones continue to buzz periodically beside him. And eventually Doyoung sighs. He pushes away from his blankets, standing up in front of you, and then he puts a hand to your shoulder and presses you to sit down on his bed.

“The fans know about you and WinWin. Someone posted photos and videos of the two of you together on your trip. They got you and him and Mei looking like a happy little family, and this time I don’t think there’s any denying it like our team did last time.” Doyoung clears his throat. “And either that same sasaeng or a different one must’ve been outside here yesterday when you got home. There are photos of you and Xiaojun hugging. People are bringing up those old pictures and videos like they did last time. It’s a whole fucking mess, and I didn’t want you to see any of that.”

Suddenly the blurry memory from early that morning of Doyoung in your room whispering to Mark makes sense. The odd behavior of all of your boyfriends so far today, like the way Mark and Taeil had both tried to distract you when you were looking for your phone.

“We all think that you shouldn’t leave the house again for a bit. Like, fans are going crazy.” Doyoung’s hand massages your shoulder gently. “Like last time, there’s fans defending you and us, but there’s others too. I don’t think you need to see any of that.” He sinks down to kiss you gently, soothingly on the forehead. “We just want to protect you.”

You’ve been through all of this before, so this time it seems a little easier to handle. You can’t blame Doyoung and the others for wanting to keep you from seeing the things that are being said online. You even manage to keep yourself from looking at social media after you leave Doyoung’s room with your phone back in your possession. Well, at least for a little while.

Eventually you do look. You see fans talking about being so mad that sasaengs are camped out in front of the house. You see long threads full of the same pictures from before, with several more from your vacation with WinWin, plus several others that you recognize of you with the other boys over the last month or so.

You put Mei down for a nap and sit in the rocking chair beside her bed with your knees drawn up to your chest as you scroll through Twitter looking at all of this. You only get up to close the curtains over your window because even though your bedroom is on the top floor of the house and facing away from the street, you can’t help but feel surveilled. You see someone reposted some photos from one of those sasaengs that are apparently camped in front of the house, and you almost throw your phone away because you can hear that Ten, Johnny, and Taeyong just got home and those are the photos that are already being circulated.

This goes on for a few days. No statements put out by the boys or the company seem to sway the fans, and you can barely eat or sleep. You can’t leave the house. There are stalkers outside day and night, and you leave the curtains drawn on every window so you can at least walk around inside the house without feeling like they can see you.

On the morning of the third day, as the sun rises you’re sitting in the kitchen, watching Hendery sleepily eat a bowl of cereal. You haven’t eaten since about midday the previous day. You lost any appetite you might have had when one of the Dream members came home and a sasaeng nearly attempted to come in with him.

Since then their company did at least hire a security guard to stand in front of the house’s door, but your stomach is still tied in so many nauseous knots.

The front door of the house opens, sounding loud in the quiet munching of Hendery’s breakfast, and your heart sinks into the bare cavern of your belly, anxiety knotting your nerves. But then the door closes, and Taeyong calls out just loud enough for you to hear, “It’s just me.”

You hate that he knows that you’re this nervous about everything that he has to announce himself. He pops his head into the kitchen a moment later, gaze sliding from you to Hendery and then back again. He sighs at the look on your face, then comes closer. Taeyong asks, “Did you sleep at all last night?”

“Did you?” You retort. He already knows the answer, you can see it written on his face that he wouldn’t believe you even if you said yes. “No, Taeyong. I haven’t slept. Every time I close my eyes, I just think about one of them sneaking inside and coming upstairs.”

Taeyong strokes your hair. “We have the guard. He won’t let them in. He barely let me pass by.” He smiles lightly in an attempt to brighten your mood, but it doesn’t work. “Babe, I can see that you’re beyond stressed about all of this. If you need to, go stay with your parents for a while, until this all blows over again.”

“But what if it doesn’t blow over.” You swat his hand away, suddenly overwhelmed by irritation at the patronizing way he’s petting you. “Your fans have a long memory. They’re not quick to forgive either. And some of their theories online are disturbingly accurate. They hate me.”

“They don’t even know you.”

“Well, they hate me for being happy in this relationship with all of you.” You fold your arms over your chest and stare down into Hendery’s cereal bowl until you hear the sound of Taeyong walking away.

Hendery taps his spoon on the side of his bowl for a few seconds before he clears his throat. “Are you unhappy?”

You almost roll your eyes. Of course you’re not happy right now.

“I mean, like, in this relationship. With all of us.” He sits the spoon down and pulls his hands back into his lap. “I know it’s unusual and that in itself makes this more stressful. I guess, what I mean to ask is, do you think you’d be happier if this relationship were more normal? If there were less of us?”

You look slowly into his eyes. “What?”

“I haven’t really been in this since Mei was born. I think, for me, what you and I have has mostly been about sex. At least, as I’ve been thinking about it recently, that’s how I think it’s been.” He nibbles nervously at his bottom lip. “Right now, there’s a lot going on, and it’s stressful for you and for me, so maybe if I back out of this relationship it will help a little bit.”

You want to say, “Right, because piling heartbreak on top of the rumors and hate is going to help.” But you don’t. You keep quiet because maybe he’s right.

You haven’t had Hendery around much since Mei was born. It’s not like you didn’t invite him to be around, he just doesn’t come around. He’s there, but not really. You know he’d been somewhat excited about you having a baby, had been there for you as he believed that she could have been his, but once he’d seen her with his own eyes and held her in his arms, once he’d learned that she shared none of his DNA, that’s when you’d felt him withdrawing somewhat.

And you know he’s right about the sex. Yes, you’d had your romantic moments together. Shared intimate date nights, soft ‘I love you’s between kisses, and many of the things you’d shared with your other boyfriends, but truly from the start this thing between you and Hendery had been sexual. And sex with Hendery was something that you hadn’t had in months.

“I’m sorry.” You duck your head as you apologize. You’ve gone months ignoring Hendery’s sexual needs. “God, I’m a really bad girlfriend, aren’t I? You guys keep breaking up with me and telling me how good I am at ignoring you, making you feel left out. And you’re all right.”

“I’m not blaming you for that!” Hendery quickly says. “You’re busy! You’re a mom now. You have all of us to pay attention to. And for so long you couldn’t have sex after Mei, and like I said, I really feel like that was a key point to our relationship. It might sound bad to say this now, but like, our relationship has been over for months now, and we’ve just been pretending that it’s not. But I think it’s time that we finally put the end stamp on it.”

So you do, and you feel that stamp like a dull bruise on your heart.

But he’s right. Things between you and him have been over for months. Similar to you and Ten, the end of this branch of your polyamorous relationship has withered and faded away.

And as you rise from the breakfast table, hoping to go upstairs to maybe catch a few moments of sleep, you feel the instability of this whole relationship around you. You’ve lost four of your boyfriends in what feels like such a short time. And you’re afraid that they won’t be the only ones.

Ten looks ridiculous, cradling Miso like a baby in one arm, holding Mei in the other, grinning and bouncing them.

It’s been almost a week now since the rumors started up again, and they’ve died down some, but there’s still a lot of attention on you and the boys.

“Why don’t you just marry one of them?” Ten asks as you voice your worries aloud. “I mean, get married, admit that you’ve got a baby, it’s a little less than traditional but it’s not like it’s not something that’s happened before. Other idols have announced all of those things after the fact. That would get the fans to butt out, but right now they’re just being nosy, wanting to know the details of what exactly is going on. They want to understand your role with all of us. I’m sure Mark would be glad to do the honor of marrying you.”

You sigh before admitting, “Sicheng has also proposed to me.”

Ten makes a noise of surprise that startles Miso who twists his way out of Ten’s arms and drops to the floor. Ten quickly and carefully makes sure that he’s got a good hold on Mei and that Miso didn’t scrape her or anything in his escape.

Once he’s comforted himself that she’s fine (as if she wouldn’t have immediately begun squalling if Miso had caught her with a claw), Ten stares at you. “He proposed? And you said no? Also, since when do you call him Sicheng?”

“Since I realized it was weird calling my boyfriend, the father of my daughter by WinWin when that’s not his real name.”

“But you still call Hendery by his name, not his actual name. And Lucas.” Ten points out.

Your heart gives an odd little beat. “Yeah, but neither of them are my boyfriends anymore. And besides, I call Xiaojun Dejun sometimes.” You start listing off all of your boyfriends, suggesting you call them by their actual names rather than the ones you and pretty much everyone else use for them.

Ten waves his hand at you to make you stop. “You’re just doing all of this to gloss over the fact that WinWin proposed to you, and you turned him down. Do you just not want to get married or something? Is that what this is? Because that right there is a very good option: the father of your child, extremely in love with you. He’s the perfect solution to everything going on right now. Most of the fans already believe that WinWin’s definitely the one that you’re dating in the group.”

“Well, they’re not wrong. They just don’t know about all of the others. And all of the others are exactly why I can’t marry him. It’s not fair.” You thought about all of this the first time when Mark proposed, rethought it when WinWin proposed. “And can’t you just imagine what a slap in the face that would be to Mark since I turned him down? How Jaehyun would react?”

Ten rolls his eyes now. “You can’t live your life worrying about how Jaehyun’s going to react to stuff. He can be very dramatic, but I promise you, babe, he just wants you to be happy. That’s what we’ve all ever wanted for you. For sweet, sweet Mingmei.” He looks down at Mei then, making a silly face that makes her burst into giggles.

“I don’t want to get married to any of them yet. Not when I don’t know.” You clench your fists against your belly where the knots that have been there for a week still grow even tighter.

“When you don’t know what?” Ten asks, glancing up from Mei.

You shrug. “Everything. How everything will play out.”

Over the last week, especially these last few days since you and Hendery had the quiet breakup in the kitchen, things have felt so odd and unstable. Almost all of them dance around you and your feelings, it’s only your exes who seem to be perfectly fine, like Ten and Johnny. You can feel the tension in the air every time you pass one of your boyfriends, like the crackling of static electricity in the air before a storm.

You’re just waiting for the first rumble of thunder.

Weeks pass with nothing.

Then late October arrives, the days cool and overcast, but your days with your boyfriends and your daughter as she hits 6 months feel bright and sunny, watching her grow and excel every day.

But that was just the silence before the storm.

Clouds gather and the static feeling grows in the air as the silence surrounding this whole relationship breaks after so long.

Someone (“an insider” according to articles being posted online) spilled some details of the relationship, talking about how the members of NCT are all involved in some way or another with you. They don’t list your name in the articles, not that it matters because fans dig up your private information, your social media and things like that before you have the chance to prevent it.

It wouldn’t have been such a big deal, just another rumor to brush under the rug. Except that this insider had really offered up very specific details. They cite the time you went to America to join 127 on tour. How you broke up with them, only to come back a few months later and then miraculously wound up pregnant just weeks later.

The article makes it sound like you’re a gold-digging whore of the group.

You suspect that it’s a manager of the group that had leaked this info, they’re the only ones that could have had the information without spilling it for all this time. Not even any of your closest friends had known all of this.

But the article is a massive success, sweeping the internet.

And just like that, the storm you’ve seen approaching for weeks breaks around you.

Jungwoo is the first to approach you that same evening. The house has been disturbingly quiet. WinWin came and took Mei away a little while ago, telling you that you looked like you needed some time to yourself, and that he could take care of his daughter for a bit. You know he’s right. Especially when Jungwoo enters your room.

He looks like an anxious disaster, can barely get through his explanation. He cites the pressure and attention from fans on the relationship right now. The things he’s seeing online, as now fans aren’t only attacking you but are also saying very terrible things about the members. It’s destroying him.

“I love you so much, I really, really do.” Jungwoo promises, holding onto your hand so tightly that you swear you can feel your bones grinding together. “But I can’t be a part of this anymore, it’s not good for me. And, also, I just—I don’t think I’m ready to be a dad, not really. Like I thought I could be, but watching you and WinWin with her, seeing the responsibility and everything of it, I’m not ready for that. I think I’d be better as her Uncle Jungwoo, you know?”

You do. You understand. You hate it, but you get it.

Taeil comes in not too long later as you’re still wiping at the stupid hot tears that pour down your cheeks. You’re hiccuping from the force of your crying, and at first you think Taeil’s just heard you crying and has come in to comfort you. He sits down on your bed with you, grabs some tissues for you to blow your nose and wipe your face. He puts his arm around you, and you rest your head on his shoulder.

You can tell the moment when he’s about to say the words you don’t want to hear. His breath hitches as he opens his mouth, searching for the words to say.

You sit up and put a hand to his chest.

“Don’t.” You shake your head. “Please, Taeil. Don’t break up with me. Please.”

His hand covers yours, warm and soft. “Baby, I think it’s now or never, honestly.” His voice is slow and sad, overflowing with all of these different emotions. “I think that before this is all over you’re going to have to decide on one of us to be with, and I hate it, but I just know that it won’t be me.”

Those words hit like stones, and something breaks inside you as you press yourself against him, clinging, silently begging him not to leave.

This house you’ve lived in has been on such unstable foundations since the moment Lucas left you, and now you feel like the ground it’s been built on has turned to liquid. Taeil can’t leave. He’s been such a stable person that you can rely on here. You love him.

Taeil presses his lips to your hair, holds you as you cry, as you repeatedly ask him not to leave you too. But you can tell that he’s already made up his mind, signed out of this relationship, decided that the others rank higher than him, even though it’s his bed that you’d shared for so many nights. It’s Taeil that you woke up to on so many happy mornings; it’s Taeil that you’d once spent all night during your late pregnancy talking to as he touched your belly and spoke softly to your unborn daughter as she stretched and rolled, the two of you whispering together about a future that you could have together.

He holds you until you stop crying but only because your throat hurts and your nose is running and you’ve started hiccuping again. Taeil leaves only when the door opens again and Taeyong stands there.

“Oh, sorry, I can—“ Taeyong points his thumb back over his shoulder, as if he can leave and come back later. But Taeil stands up, gestures for Taeyong to take his place, and as Taeyong slides in to take up the place of the ghost of Taeil in your arms, Taeil slips out the door and closes it behind him.

You don’t even give Taeyong the chance to talk to you. “Are you breaking up with me?”

The way he goes awkwardly stiff is answer enough. A few seconds tick by, your head on his shoulder, wet cheek feeling stuck to the cotton of his tshirt. Taeyong sighs, “I don’t really belong here as much as I once did. And I think it’s far past the time we stop pretending that I do. I just think I might be happier somewhere else. You might be happier with less people in this relationship. You’re always juggling us and Mei, trying to make time to make each of us happy, but you don’t give yourself the time. I love you, I love Mei. I want both of you to have the best in life, and I just don’t think that you need me here romantically to do that.”

The words spill out of him, his thumb stroking over your knuckles as he says, “Besides, I.... I really like what I have going on with Ten. It’s easier, honestly. We understand what each other needs on some level that I just.... I don’t think you and I have ever really had. Ten’s good at making me feel small when I need it, powerful when I don’t. We have fun and can trust each other, and, like I said, I love you, but we don’t have that in the same way.”

By the time that Taeyong leaves, you feel wrung out. You’re surprised that there are still any tears left, surprised that there’s any more of your heart to break.

And then Xiaojun walks into your room. You’re half buried in your pillow and blankets. You don’t even properly see him.

“Just leave,” you tell him. “Just like everyone else.”

Xiaojun makes a noise, but you cut him off.

“Don’t. I’m so tired of breaking up, Xiaojun. Please, just, let’s get this over with. You can leave.” You turn your back on him.

“I wasn’t coming in here for that....” Xiaojun’s voice is small. “But if that’s what you want, I guess, um, I understand.”

You pull your blanket cocoon tighter around you, press your face deep into your pillow, and wallow in the darkness as Xiaojun closes the door behind him, night falls outside.

Some time passes. You’re not sure how long exactly, only that you’d heard footsteps passing up and down the stairs, doors opening and closing, showers running. The night sky visible through the tiny gap in your bedroom window’s curtains shows that it is dark outside, truly dark. You should be asleep by now, fallen into fitful dreams after the misery of the past several hours. You’d heard your bedroom door crack open a while back, heard WinWin’s quiet whisper to Mei, heard the pause, then he’d backed out of the room and taken Mei with him, leaving you to wallow in the sorrow of your breakups.

The house has fallen once more into disturbing silence when your bedroom door next opens. You can’t tell who it is right away. And then he turns the light on, flipping the switch to throw the room into blinding whiteness for a moment. You blink against it, rolling over to face the door, and once your eyes adjust, you see Jaehyun.

He presses the door shut firmly behind him, leaning back against it as he stares at you.

“Are you going to break up with me too?” You mumble, wiping your snot and tears on the pillow case. “You tired of being watched all the time? Being whispered about and shitted upon by your fans? I know I haven’t been ignoring you, so that one can’t be your reason.”

Jaehyun just sighs and pushes away from the door to come sit down on the edge of your bed. He rests his hand on your back, rubbing up and down to help you relax, but you just bury your face in your pillow again and keep crying.

This fucking sucks. You feel like your heart has been run through a shredder. Four boyfriends gone in one fell sweep, just a few hours. And you pray with every ounce of your being that Jaehyun’s not here to break up with you too. You don’t think you would blame him. You don’t really blame any of them—they deserve to live a happy life that’s not tangled in with this drama of the polyamorous relationship, your daughter, the heavy judgement from their own fans because of you—and it does make sense, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not heartbroken.

You twist your head to the side and look up at the blurry colors of Jaehyun’s face. He’s just watching you with what you think is a sad expression (but his face really is quite blurry through your teary eyes). If he’s here to end things with you, then you want to say what you have to say first, so you just say it: “Mei’s not your daughter.”

Jaehyun’s hand goes still on your back. You can feel just how tense he goes too.

“I know that.” His voice sounds tight.

“She’s not your daughter, and I know how badly you wished that she was, and now with all of this shit going on, I wouldn’t blame you if you were breaking up with me too.” You close your eyes. “You could go be free of me, go start dating some probably really hot model or actress or other idol, go make a super hot baby with her.”

“You’re right, I could go do that.” Jaehyun says it simply.

Your eyes flash open to glare at him, but he’s smiling softly at you.

“I could go do that, but why would I?” His hand starts moving on your back again. “I love you. How many times do I have to say that before you get it through that thick head of yours.” His knuckles knock gently on your forehead. You frown, and Jaehyun just laughs. “I love you,  and I love Mei even though she’s not biologically my daughter. I don’t know why you think that I would leave you just because of that.  I know when we broke up the first time it’s because I was shitty and jealous all the time, but I’ve grown, haven’t I? And regarding what you were just saying about finding a hot model or whatever to have a baby with, I have no intention of leaving you for anyone else. You are already hotter than I can handle, thank you. I have a beautiful daughter downstairs. And if you ever want any more beautiful babies in the future, I’m right here to help with that. If you don’t, then that’s okay too. We have Mei.”

Your eyes feel hot and your breath hitches in your chest for an entirely different reason than minutes before. You squeeze your eyes shut as fresh, hot tears spill over.

Jaehyun sinks down to lay on the bed right in front of you. His thumb traces over the mess of tears on your face, and you bring your hand up to the back of his.

With your eyes still closed, you confess, “I’m so afraid of what the future holds right now. I feel like you’re all going to leave me. All of you.” You sniffle, then quietly say, “But then you have to go and say stuff like that, Jung Jaehyun. Do you mean it?”

“Every word. Promise?” Jaehyun offers, his pinky finger intertwining with yours already. 

You squeeze your pinky in a loop with his, and you each press a kiss to your hands to seal it.

“Why did you think I was going to break up with you?” Jaehyun asks after a moment. “Who else did? Why?”

So you start to explain to him the past several hours in a story with pauses for you to get through your hiccuping tears, with many deviations down side tracks through history explaining why you understand their reasoning. You talk and talk, and Jaehyun listens and holds you.

And by the time the morning sun rises, you don’t really feel better necessarily, but for the moment you feel like you’re at least being held together, you feel like maybe everything going on right now does suck immensely, but you have Jaehyun here holding you in his arms, ready to shield your fragile heart from anything else that comes your way.

Adore You <- Previous || Next -> Let Me

a/n: so this is the end of Part 1 of the Finale (I’m sorry for stretching it out into two parts, but this story isn’t able to be wrapped up in less than 40,000 words apparently). I really hated writing this, like there were so many breakups and poor y/n has to go through so much heartbreak in this part :( but it was inevitable, something I’ve been hinting at pretty much since the first part of the series I’m pretty sure. Part 2 should be posted pretty soon, so I promise the wait for it won’t be so long, but what do y’all think? Who do you think she’ll end up with? Several of them or just one? 

As usual, please let me know what you think through comments, reblogs, likes, messages, whatever. Sharing is definitely super appreciated!

#nct smut #wayv smut #poly smut #nct #wayv

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

just because you’re afraid it doesn’t mean you’re broken.

Titans 3.05

once more into the cold dark void of the internet with my stream-of-consciousness take on a superhero tv show...

spoilers ahead.

1. i cannot believe that among the first things i get to hear in this episode with my own two ears is the line 'eluded our overdudes'. why must you give me such pain along with so much joy, show?

1.5. scarecrow stringing jason along on this path to red-hood-dom is not something i would’ve ever expected, but does kind of make sense. 

1.55. i don’t know all the details of the original resurrection arc in the comics but i like that jason, weirdly, has a greater role to play in his own demise and rebirth? i think it makes it easier to draw a line between his past trauma, the demonstrably shitty and terrifying responsibility of being robin, the ways bruce and the titans wronged him, his responses to that, the reasons he turns to scarecrow, and his final evolution to red hood. it makes for a smoother character arc rather than a one that was interrupted for two decades before somebody went oh hey let’s resurrect that kid that the audience once voted to kill and make him an anti-hero!

1.75. what’s crane giving him? anti fear toxin? anyway, crane is a fucking creep and i’m not sure i want to see a whole lot of him on my screen.

2. oh, um, heads up: there’s a long sequence of unsteady cam + flickering lights right after the title card upto the 3:16 mark. it’s a bit headache-inducing so if you want to skip, you can go ahead and do that. 

2.45. that’s... weird... why would he dream about... donna...

ok, who am i kidding. i’m going to jump right into my theory about Why Titans Makes Sense Actually because the show itself is apparently not interested in explaining itself:

a) it makes no sense for jason to be conjuring up donna--who famously did not care much for him!--in his dreams. (he wasn’t even there when she died.) or for her to be telling him don’t go or there’s still time.

b) this leads me to think that that’s actually donna, in some sort of limbo between life and death, the kind of place where jericho used to be

c) rachel has demonstrated that she has the power to link the minds of the titans across great distances--she called jason and hank/dawn for help in 2.01, she linked up everybody later in the season, projected dick’s hallucination of his father into their brains without even realising she was doing it, and in the finale, she managed to get dick into conner’s brain. she’s in themyscira now. is this how she gets donna back to life? but reaching out to her in that non-space between life and death?

d) the next obvious question is: why isn’t donna appearing in the dreams of the other titans? she probably is, but they have better reason to be dreaming about her since they were actually close to her, unlike jason.

e) but why would she warn jason in particular? does she foresee jason entering the afterlife--however briefly? does she have an idea of what jason plans to do and what he will become?

f) anyway, more trippy mindscapes and weird psychic powers, yay!

2.5. my heart clenched when bruce comforted jason post-nightmare: clearly i’ve been reading way too much batfam fic. this is a side of bruce we haven’t really been told to expect by all the characters on the show calling him a ‘psychopath’ (*cough*unreliablenarrators*cough*) and him getting jason to speak to a professional speaks volumes about the kind of self-reflection he’s done post dick’s departure, and maybe some of the regrets he has with regards to how he dealt with dick’s traumas.

i mean, just look at him when jason dismisses his concerns! BRUCE IS TRYING JASON

anyway, i have a whole lot more i want to say about this, but i’ll save it for later. 

also: LESLIE THOMPKINS!!!!

3. i really like molly--and i love that she’s a friend from before jason got taken in by bruce, the implication that they meet up regularly and that she’s a grounding influence on him (tho clearly not grounding enough to not go along with his dumbass idea about confronting a child trafficker alone). 

3.5. aw, jason. robin was his armour against everything in the world that would throw him down and chew him to bits, but san francisco proved that even robin wasn’t enough to protect him. it’s really interesting how ‘disillusionment with the idea of robin’ is so integral to the traumas of both dick and jason but in such different ways. 

4. LESLIE!!!!!!! i even forgive her office being so goddamn blue because leslie! 

4.5. it makes so much sense for titans!verse leslie to be a therapist, because this show is so inward looking anyway, and therapist sessions are a useful tool to showcase this character work in a story. besides, at least in fanfic, leslie often seems to double up as a counsellor anyway. 

4.6. oh man. i’m not terribly convinced by walters’ red hood (tho i think that may be the point--argh. i’ll come back to this thought later. have to stop getting distracted!) but he plays the asshole kid that’s trying not to let any real emotion seep through really well.

“you’d like me to punch you, wouldn’t you”

5. not sure what to think of batman’s little trophy case other than the show winking unsubtly at us and going look look - catwoman! the riddler! two face! you excited yet?! it’s like the scene from the end of amazing spiderman 2 when they were trying to drum up excitement for a sinister six spinoff by having harry osborne walk by a bunch of display cases with stuff from iconic villains in them.

... but then again, bruce does like to display a lot of shit in his batcave, including his dead robin’s bloodstained costume, so.

5.5. bruce is so soft with jason it’s killing me. beyond just trying to learn from his mistakes with dick, it speaks to his own genuine desire to balance his dedication to gotham with doing the best by his sons, although he’s often not successful with that. 

i love that titans is really playing the long game with bruce wayne, with each season and character-perspective sliding in fresh pieces of a bigger puzzle. titans’ bruce has always been a phantom of other peoples’ making, but now we’re getting the idea that he’s a whole lot more complicated than other people make it seem.

5.75. it really recontextualises some of his actions from previous seasons: the fact that he locked dick out of his security systems in 1.06 is likely his way of respecting dick’s independence and his desire not to be associated with batman/gotham anymore. jason knowing about bruce’s tracker while dick doesn’t is probably bruce trying to be more honest and upfront with his charges. bruce sending jason packing off to sanfran to spend time with the titans is probably not him passing on a big responsibility to dick (as i first uncharitably thought) but him trying to get jason out of the toxic influence of gotham for a while and a sign of his trust in dick as a leader and a mentor,

5.8. i mean, bruce is a prick, but he’s also human.

6. i think leslie is doing some good work with jason here, though she may have overstepped the line with her line about robin as a construct being projected by a man with BPD. her speculations about bruce’s diagnosis have no place in her session with jason, and if bruce confides in her, an egregious violation of patient-therapist confidentiality. 

(about the diagnosis itself... i don’t know. i can’t really confirm or refute this without a whole lot more information, and i’m not sure if the writer of this episode means BPD in the same way an actual professional might.)

6.5. i think a huge thing that gets missed out in a lot of recent comics as well as movies/shows is that bruce didn’t create the robin persona out of whole cloth. dick did. he’s the starting point of that legacy and to call it entirely bruce’s creation is blatant erasure of that. in fact, i’m surprised that dick doesn’t feature more in the conversations they’re having about the pressures of being robin. after all, the guy had been robin--bruce’s partner--for such a long time before jason. 

6.8. (and here’s the primal part of me that resonates the deepest with dick grayson--the Eldest Daughter part--that’s sort of resentful: that jason gets the therapy and softness and the learning from mistakes when it took years and years for bruce to reach out in any meaningful way to dick.)

7. oooh that was a great scene!

it’s fun to do these stream-of-consciousness live reactions, because the moment you step down from your soapbox, the episode goes right into tackling what you were just complaining about. bruce means well, he’s learning, but he goes about exactly the wrong way to help jason: taking away robin now can’t be read by jason as anything but a devastating judgment call from bruce. and iain glen really sells the moment that bruce realises this--too late--and his helplessness in trying to get jason to see that it isn’t jason’s fault that he’s trying to do this. he loves jason enough that jason is enough. 

7.5. aaaah so jason brings up the elephant in the room at last. dick got everything makes sense from his perspective, where getting to put on a costume and fight crime means approval, means being something stronger and better than you are. dick got to be robin, then nightwing, and a leader of a whole team of other costume-clad heroes. 

8. ... how did jason just walk into arkham????? this is ridiculous.

8.3. i mean, clearly jason’s not thinking straight, but betraying batman like this puts his possibilities of being robin again even further away. 

8.5. watching that chemistry experiment montage was strangely funny. this guy is looking for an antidote to fear? well, constantly mixing up and inhaling gases concocted by a mad-scientist supervillain is something only the very fearless--reckless to the point of foolishness!--would do. what’s to say crane’s not given you a formula for a drug that will keep you tethered to his every will and whim? hmmmm?

8.7. so he sought out the joker to... test the formula??? 

9. wow the “loud and clear... boss” hits different after a whole episode of them referring to each other as father and son.

9.3. waitwaitwait HOLD UP. wait a DANG MINUTE. you’re telling me that scarecrow had enough resources that he could not only have folks on the outside steal jason away and dunk him in a lazarus pit (i TOLD you that this show would bring up and dismiss ra’s al ghul in a ten second aside! I TOLD YOU) but also have his own little chemistry lab in the basement, AND have enough resources for jason to build his red hood persona???????? all of this in barely twenty four hours?

well there goes my ‘jason orchestrated his death’ theory. it was nice while it lasted. *cups hands to the sky* fly away, my baby.

9.6. a part of me is gleeful at the rushed nature of such an iconic transformation though, especially when compared to all the character work that went before it. we’re so used to getting the opposite that it’s fucking delightful to have a show that’s more interested in exploring its characters’ minds rather than battle scenes or recreating transformations from the comics. that’s taken such bold and exciting steps to fully convey all the nuances of its most recognisable character, bruce wayne, from casting an older actor to play him to unflinchingly showing just how damaging the vigilante lifestyle has been to him and the people he loves. BRILLIANT

*sporfle*

10. again, heads up: a whole lot of flashing lights between 40:28 and 42:00. 

10.3. i guess it’s the super-compressed timeline that’s really throwing me off. where did he have the time to get/develop the mind control thing from? or is it something that he got from the cabal of villains that he intimidated at the beginning of 3.02? very messy.

10.5. i love molly, i hope she shows up again this season.

11. aaaand that’s it! that was a solid episode as flashback episodes go, but now i can’t wait to return to the present.

#titans #titans spoilers #meta #jason todd #bruce wayne #leslie thompkins #a tragic jalebi #robin #red hood

[super-freq]

Stompbox Studies - Class 1

Want to build your own effects pedals? A good place to start is understanding how transistors work. Transistors are those three legged devices seen populating many stompbox circuits.

Transistors are are a core building block in electronics. Integrated circuits, like op-amps, are made up of many transistors! Transistors are used in all of the circuits you’ve probably played or heard on recordings: Rangemaster, Fuzz Face, Tonebender, Big Muff, Tube Screamer, and too many more to list here.

The goal of this series of blog posts will be to present concepts you can use to understand how guitar effects pedals work, apply these ideas to debug, and make your own pedals.

Why I am I doing this? I have been building Stompboxes as a hobby for years now and want to build a deeper understanding of the electronic concepts underneath it all. I have been building pedals for years but it has always been sort of paint by numbers. I had some friends get into the hobby recently and they had lots of questions. Here are the answers I could come up with.

This class will be broken into three parts: a discussion in this blog post, a lab where your goal is to build the Dallas Rangemaster, and a reading assignment and study guide.

Discussion: Dallas Rangemaster

The Dallas Rangemaster is classic guitar pedal. Created by Dallas Muscial Ltd. in the 1960s. With a name like “Dallas” you’d think they were from Texas but in fact the company was located in London England!

The Rangemaster is a booster. Basically it’s a single transistor amplifier that filters the lower frequencies. It takes your guitar signal and shapes it and amplifies it.

Original Dallas Rangemaster

DIY Rangemaster

The Rangemaster was used by so almost every guitar player you can think of from the 60s. Here’s a short list of notables:

Eric Clapton

Tony Iommi

Marc Bolan

Rory Gallagher

… too many more to list

Many more used other pedals similar to or derivatives of the Rangemaster. Many companies sell boosters that are direct copies of the Rangemaster or are built from a single transistor like the Rangemaster for the same purpose. It’s definitely a pedal worth study.

Zvex Super Hard On

Electro Harmonix LB1

Hornby Skewes Treble Booster

Brian May Treble Booster

… and the list goes on

The Rangemaster circuit represents a basic building block that can be used in many guitar pedals. Understanding this circuit is a gateway to explaining how lots of classic effects work. It’s also a building block you can apply to effects of your own invention.

The circuit

Electronic circuits are expressed with schematics that have their own symbols. This is similar to the way music is expressed in notation or way a roadmap may be drawn.

Usually we give each part a number and a value. The lines represent an electrical connection between parts. Here is a list of the part numbers and values for the Rangemaster.

PartValueR1470KR268KR33K9C10.005µC20.01µC347µPOT1A10KQ1PNP

Rangemaster Parts

The parts here are four types: Resistors, Capacitors, Potentiometers, and transistors. lets look at each of these.

Resistors

Resistors are all listed with the prefix R in the parts list. There are three resistors R1, R2, and R3. Resistors impede the flow of electrons. We can use resistors to limit how much current is at any point in the circuit.

POT1 is a potentiometer, which is an adjustable resistor. Use a “pot” when you need a variable amount of voltage or current at a point in your circuit. For example a pot is often used as a volume control.

Capacitors

Capacitors are like little electrical reservoirs. They act as a gap that DC can’t pass but they allow and AC signal to pass! Capacitors used in the Rangemaster are C1, C2, and C3.

Capacitors are used to affect how audio is passed through your circuits. Capacitors are used to create filters and control the frequency of AC.

Some capacitors are polarized! One leg is marked with a + and that leg should go to the more electrically positive side of the circuit with the other leg going to the more electrically negative side of the circuit. Notice C3 has a + on the bottom that connects to the +9V in the schematic.

The transistor

In the original Rangemaster the transistor was OC44 or OC71. This was a germanium transistor. Transistors come a few varieties. Two of the most common are PNP and NPN. The OC44 is a PNP transistor.

You can build Rangemaster type circuits with almost any transistor. This is great because the OC44 and OC71 are hard to get and expensive these days. Some common transistors that would work as replacements are: 2N3906 or 2N5087. These are silicon transistors rather than germanium.

Typical transistors

The symbol for PNP and NPN transistors look like this. These are almost the same. Note the arrow! You can remember which is which with this: NPN = Not Pointing iN, PNP = Pointing iN.

PNP and NPN Transistors

The original Rangemaster was built with a PNP transistor. You could also build a Rangemaster type circuit with a NPN transistor. Some common part numbers for NPN transistors are 2N3904 and 2N5089.

NPN Rangemaster

Notice the changes to the circuit. (1) the transistor Q1 is NPN. (2) the +9v and -9v are swapped. This is where your battery would connect. (3) the capacitor C3 has been flipped around so that the + terminal is pointing towards the more positive side of the circuit and it’s other terminal connects to the -9v the more negative side of the circuit.

OHMs Law

OHMs law is a basic principle of electronics. OHMs law determines the flow of electrons through a circuit. If you thought of electrons like cars and the circuit diagrams above like a roadmap OHMs law could be used to predict the flow of traffic!

OHMS has three ideas:

Voltage (abbreviated E) is the electromotive force (measured in Volts, millivolts, and microvolts)

Current (abbreviated I) is the number of electrons in the flow of “traffic” (measured in amps, milliamps, and microamps)

Resistance (abbreviated R) is the opposition to the flow of electrons (measured in OHMs)

We can use math to calculate the flow of electrons through our circuit. Use the diagram above to help you remember the formulas.

E = I * R (find the voltage from the current and resistance)

I = E / R (find the current from voltage and resistance)

R = E / I (find the resistance from voltage and current)

The numbers you use need to be in the same realm. If you are working with Volts (E) then Current (I) needs to be amps. If you have voltage in millivolts then current needs to milliamps. If the units are mixed you can multiply or divide by 1000.

Volts VAmps AMillivolts mV (V / 1000)Milliamps mA (A / 1000)Microvolts µV (mV / 1000)Microamps µA (mA / 1000)

What does this mean? Take a look at the images below. You can use OHMs law to calculate the current and voltage.

In the first image we have 9 volts going through R8 which has a resistances of 2000 ohms (or 2K ohms). Whats the current? Using OHMs law we can figure it out!

I = E / R

I = 9 / 2000

0.0045 Amps or 4.5 milliamps or 4500 microamps

What about the second image. Image we don’t know the voltage but we do know we have 2 milliamps going through 1000 ohms resistance.

E = I * R

E = 0.002 * 1000 (Notice I converted milliamps to amps)

2v = 0.002 * 1000

Voltage Divider

Traffic moving down a road divides when it reaches an intersection some traffic will go one direction and some traffic will take the other route. The same is true of electrons moving through a circuit. If you were watching the road from a helicopter you’d see more traffic take the larger roads and less traffic take the narrow roadways. Think of the size of roads as resistors. Larger roads have less resistance and narrow winding roads create more resistance that slows traffic.

Look at the first example. There is 9 volts going through R1 and R2. What is the voltage at the intersection ?1. You can solve this if you understand voltage dividers. The formula is:

?1 = 9V * ( R2 / (R1 + R2))

?1 = 9V * ( 1K / (1K + 1K))

?1 = 9V * 1000 / (1000 + 1000)

?1 = 9V * 1000 / 2000

?1 = 9V * 0.5

?1 = 4.5V

Here I walked through the steps to solve the problem. Notice I converted 1K to 1000 ohms. Then finished up from there.

The formula is: V * R2 / (R1 + R2)

The shortcut here is if both resistors are the same value then voltage is divided in half. This would be true for any values for R1 and R2. Try it yourself. Imagine R1 and R2 are 10K. Then try R1 and R2 at 47K and 100K.

What happens when the values are not equal? What’s the voltage at the intersection: ?2.

?2 = 9V * 100K / (100K + 20K)

?2 = 9V * 20K / 120K

?2 = 9V * 20,000 / 120,000

1.5V = 9V * 0.166

Solve number 3 on your own!

To solve ?4 we have to know that resistors in series are added together. That means that we have a total resistance of 16.7K. To solve ?4:

?4 = 9V * (10K + 4.7K) / (2K + 4.7K + 10K)

?4 = 9V * 14.7K / 16.7K

?4 = 9V * 0.88

?4 = 7.92

Solve ?5 on your own…

With this knowledge you can start examining the Rangemaster circuit. Notice R1 and R2 for a voltage divider!

POT1 is also a voltage divider. Let’s take a moment to look at potentiometers.

Potentiometers

These are adjustable resistors. You’ll use potentiometers or “pots” when your circuits need to be able to adjust the resistance at a point in the circuit. A pot has three legs. Imagine the center leg is located between two resistors. The resistances change as you turn the pot!

We draw the pot like the image on the left. Internally it acts like the images on the right.

Imagine we have a 10K pot. With the knob in the center the resistance is divided equally with 5K on the top and 5K on the bottom. This is a voltage divider! In this case you would see have the input voltage at the center leg!

If you rotated the pot clockwise the resistor on the top (R3) might be 0 ohms and the all of the resistance 10K might appear at the bottom.

If we went counter clockwise it would be reversed.

If you rotated the almost to the end you might have 2K resistance at the top and 8K at the bottom. Imagine there was 9V at the top, use the voltage divider to calculate the voltage at the center.

Transistors modeled as a current controlled resistor

With these ideas we can now look at the transistor, which is the heart of the Rangemaster. The Rangemaster is an amplifier. It takes a small audio input and produces a louder audio output. The transistor is used to amplify the signal.

A transistor has three legs. For NPN and PNP transistors the legs are called: Emitter, Base, and Collector. The Emitter is leg with the arrow. The Base is in the middle.

To explain how the transistor works we will model it as a current controlled resistor. For this discussion we will use the NPN version of the Rangemaster schematic and the transistor will be NPN.

Take a look at the diagram above. Imagine the transistor drawn on the left is in your Rangemaster circuit. Imagine that inside the device is a resistor. The value of this resistor is controlled by the amount of current present at the base. Outside the transistor the Rangemaster has a 10K resistor (POT1) at the collector and a 3K9 resistor at the emitter.

With no current applied to the base there is so much resistance you can image that there is no connection at all. We would see about 9V at the collector.

When a small amount of current is applied to the base the resistance between the collector and emitter starts to decrease. Imagine the collector/emitter path is now showing 100K resistance. Now we have a voltage divider! You could use the formula above to calculate the voltage at the collector!

With more current applied to the base the C/E path might go down to 10K resistance. Using the voltage divider formula the voltage present at the collector goes down as more of the electron traffic goes through the 3K9 resistor.

With a lot of current at the base the C/E path might go as low as 100 ohms and the voltage at the collector would go even lower!

Did you notice when the current at the base goes up the voltage at the collector goes down. And conversely, when the current at the base is low the voltage at the collector goes up. A transistor amplifies because it allows out circuit to turn small changes in current to larger swings in voltage.

Notice the diagram above. When the current is high the voltage is low! This is an inverting amplifier. The signal at the output will be a mirror or opposite of the input signal.

Biasing the Transistor

There is a little more needed to make this work. Imagine the incoming signal might swing between +1v and -1v. When the input is above 0V the transistor starts working. When it’s 0V or less the CE path is closed off.

Look at the diagram above. The signal going in is a sine wave but the signal coming out is getting chopped. This would cause some distortion! In this case it probably wouldn’t sound too good. It also explains why your transistor circuits sometimes don’t sound right!

To make the amplifier work we need to bias the transistor so with no input the output settles at a point somewhere between the extremes.

Take a look at the diagram above. Here I’ve added R1 and R2 from the original schematic. These provide an amount of current to the base so that it sits around 7V. With this arrangement positive input pushes more current to the base opening the CE path and lowering the output. When the input signal is negative this pulls current from the base which increases the resistance of the CE path and the voltage at the output goes up.

Biasing is the term that describes applying a DC current to the base of a transistor such that it is it near the middle of it’s range. It needs bias so the output can go up and down from the bias point.

All 4 of the resistors play a part of the amplifier. R1 (470K) and R2 (68K) provide the current to bias the transistor. POT1 (10K) and R3 (3K9) also determine where the bias should be since the lowest voltage output is determined by the voltage divider created by these two resistances. Imagine the CE path had 0 ohms resistance.

? = 9V * 3.9 / (10 + 3.9)

? = 9V * 3.9 / 13.9

2.5 = 9V * 0.28

This concludes the discussion of the Rangemaster. From here the goal is to build your own! Along the way think of this discussion.

Building the Rangemaster

For this part of the lesson it’s up to you to figure out which build method and which circuit you want to build.

There are several approaches you can take to building the Rangemaster:

Kit

PCB

Strip/Vero-board

Perf-board

Terminal strip

Solderless Breadboard

Kit

Buying a kit will cost more but you’ll get everything you need in one package!

https://www.distortionltd.com/diy-kits/diy-kit-rangemaster

https://www.ebay.com/p/1572955451

https://puzzlesounds.com/store/rangemaster-treble-booster-kit/

http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/effects-projects/boosters/rangemaster/

PCB

A PCB makes for an easier neat clean build but you’ll have to source parts yourself.

https://www.taydaelectronics.com/rangemaster-diy-pcb-guitar-effect.html

https://rullywow.com/product/serpentboost2/

https://puzzlesounds.com/store/rangemaster-treble-booster-pcb/

https://www.ebay.com/itm/203154217735

Strip/vero board

This is perforated boards with strips of copper. Use it for prototyping.

https://paulinthelab.blogspot.com/2014/04/rangemaster-treble-booster-stripboard.html

http://tagboardeffects.blogspot.com/2014/02/dallas-rangemaster-pnp-negative-ground.html

https://www.sabrotone.com/request-dallas-rangemaster/

Perfboard

Like vero board but has one pad per hole.

http://effectslayouts.blogspot.com/2014/11/range-blaster.html

http://diy-fever.com/effects/dallas-rangemaster/

Terminal Strip

The original Rangemaster was assembled on a terminal strip. This is for the artists and historians.

https://www.tdpri.com/threads/diy-rangemasters-opinions.379310/

http://turretboard.knucklehead.dk/2011/02/28/terminal-npn-rangemaster-with-mods/

Solderless bread board

Use a solder less bread to experiment with the design.

http://diy.smallbearelec.com/HowTos/BreadboardRMs/BreadboardRMs.htm

Study guide

Here is some reading material to follow up the discussion above.

This guide to Breadboarding the Rangemaster at Small Bear Electronics is a great guide to circuit.

http://diy.smallbearelec.com/HowTos/BreadboardRMs/BreadboardRMs.htm

Stompboxology was a news letter put out in the early days of DIY when the internet was young. It never caught on and it and it’s creator mysteriously vanished. That said I found this issue to contain one of the best discussions of transistors for stompbox usage I have read. It also contains a discussion of core concepts for electrical engineering that you will need to know to build effects pedals.

http://moosapotamus.net/files/stompboxology-going-discrete.pdf

This article provides an in-depth analysis of the Rangemaster. Most of it is over my head but it’s still good reading.

https://www.electrosmash.com/dallas-rangemaster

Stompbox Studies – Class 1 was originally published on Super-Freq

#diy #effects pedal #Rangemaster #stompbox #Stompbox #guitar pedals #super freq

[spiderdreamer-blog]

Masters of the Universe: Revelation: Part 1 (LIGHT SPOILERS)

I've always been a somewhat casual fan of Mattel's He-Man/Masters of the Universe/She-Ra properties. They didn't air regularly when I was in my peak cartoon-watching days in my youth, and thus I never had much incentive to get into the comics or toys. The biggest reference point I had was Mike Young Productions' 2002 reboot that aired on Cartoon Network for 2 seasons, and that remains pretty good if not exceptional for its time. But I've come to appreciate the campy homoerotic anything-goes toybox approach of the franchise more and more as I've gotten older, and She-Ra and the Princesses of the Power was a mostly excellent queer-infused reimagining of that particular vibe.

Thus it was with a certain trepidation that I regarded the announcement that Texas' Powerhouse Animation (Castlevania, Seis Manos, Blood of Zeus) and Generation X geek impresario Kevin Smith would be creating a new series that was aimed more at longtime fans. In particular, I was uncertain if a hyperviolent, sexualized take in the vein of Castlevania (which is a great show) would feel appropriate for this property or come off as insufferably edgelordy. I also wondered if Smith would be a little too keen to poke us in the ribs with cameos and references, or act self-conscious about the, well, dorkiness of the entire enterprise. Thankfully, that approach was not only NOT taken (violence-wise, there's nothing here that's worse than any family-aimed Marvel Cinematic Universe offering), but Masters of the Universe: Revelation is a joyously exuberant and dramatic update, slamming together its action figures with glee in a way the laboriously censored and stilted original could never accomplish in its wildest dreams.

What's most interesting about the approach taken to the story is made clear right off the bat: unlike Noelle Stevenson's approach to She-Ra, this is not a "reboot" so much as a hit-the-ground-running continuation. Everyone has been at this a while, the formula is familiar; it's a little more akin to what Frank Angones and Matt Youngberg did with DuckTales in terms of being concerned with legacy. And while a place-setting opening narration and small bits of establishing characterization are in evidence to help newbies find their footing, it otherwise very much expects you to keep up with the adventures of heroes like Prince Adam/He-Man (Chris Wood, Supergirl), Teela (Sarah Michelle Gellar, Buffy), Cringer (Stephen Root), Orko (Griffin Newman, The Tick), Duncan the Man-At-Arms (Liam Cunningham, Game of Thrones), and the rest (though curiously, many traditional Masters like Meckaneck, Stratos, Ram Man, and Man-E-Faces are absent for the time being). And of course we have villains like Skeletor (Mark Hamill), Evil-Lyn (Lena Headey), and Mer-Man (Kevin Conroy) on hand as well.

This is clever not only because it makes potentially laborious exposition a minimum or more character-based, but for the twists at the end of the first episode to have a real impact. He-Man and Skeletor seemingly perish in a final battle over Eternia's primal source of magic, and the former is revealed to have been Prince Adam all along to Teela and his father King Randor, both of whom feel utterly devastated by the death-betrayal combo platter. We then pick up in episode 2 with Teela as a wandering mercenary accompanied by Andra (Tiffany Smith), a previously minor character now boosted to lead status who functions usefully both as a tech-savvy warrior in her own right and something of an audience/fan surrogate. It turns out screwing around with the reservoir of magic that powers your entire planet is a great way to make that start dying out, so now a reluctant Teela and others from both the good and evil alignments must join forces to restore the Sword of Power, and the world with it.

As a result of all this worldbuilding by Smith and his writing team, the situations and character interactions are far more unique. And while this is hardly a tedious DARK SUBVERSSSIONNN deconstruction that doesn't have anything useful to say, it does feel far more invested in consequences and dramatic underpinnings that even the 2002 series never fully broached. In particular, Teela gets a real chance to shine as the stalwart, loyal warrior who now finds her world completely upended, having to ask herself questions about what she truly believes. And Orko, previously the dopey comic relief du jour, is completely reinvented here as a figure of genuine pathos; that they made me cry over him is nothing short of miraculous. Even the villains get some shading, such as Evil-Lyn taking a pragmatic view of the situation and teetering on the edge of our sympathies, or how Tri-Klops (Henry Rollins) takes hold of the power vacuum by becoming a cult leader proclaiming that drinking nanites and becoming a cyborg is totally a cool new religion that he didn't just make up.

Visually, Powerhouse is one of the best anime-style studios on the market that isn't named Mir, and their brand of robust, muscular design work ends up as a perfect fit for impossibly chiseled figures like He-Man and Skeletor, as well as making Adam even twinkier than before. Directors Adam Connaroe and Patrick Stannard offer a wide range of impeccably choreographed fight scenes and bouts of spectacle. I was really pleased at how vivid the color palette was, given how gothic some of their other series tend to be, but everything feels appropriately like giant-sized playsets. On the sonic end, Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, God of War) contributes a genuinely outstanding musical score, with a robust new He-Man theme, epic action beats, and even some lightly playful moments.

The cast, as indicated above, has a ton of heavyweights both from animation and live-action, and all acquit themselves marvelously (though I suspect some cameos, like Jason Mewes, the Jay to Smith's Silent Bob, as Stinkor may pay further dividends in the future). Like Cam Clarke in the 2002 series, Chris Wood smartly divides his Adam and He-Man voices not in terms of completely changing them, but articulating how one flows from the other. He-Man is in many ways the person Adam WISHES he could be, more confident and heroic, and Wood understands how to play that to really wonderful effect, especially with the dorky one-liners. Former vampire slayer Gellar acquits herself better than I'd expected as Teela; she's done a few voice roles before and always been fine, just not particularly standout, but Teela gives her a ton to chew on and she more than rises to the challenge. Tiffany Smith is incredibly charming and lovable as Andra, offering a good counterbalance of humor and optimism to Teela's cynicism, and plays off the few poking-fun lines well in ways that don't seem too glad-handing. Cunningham is appropriately grandfatherly but tough as Duncan, while Root, Newman, and Justin Long as the measured, mechanical Roboto get some of the biggest tearjerker moments. As Randor, Bader, alongside Alicia Silverstone as Queen Marlena (who sounds her age now in a really lovely way), gets one of the best angrily heartbroken beats of the premiere (he also shows up later to be appropriately thuggish as Trap-Jaw). Other guest spots flit in and out well, especially Dennis Haysbert and Phil LaMarr as King Grayskull and He-Ro, champions of old found in a Valhalla-esque afterlife.

On the villainous end, Hamill wisely doesn't try and imitate the iconic Alan Oppenheimer (who shows up here in a lovely two-part cameo as Moss Man) as Skeletor, instead offering his own theatrically villainous take on the role that's just as rewarding. In particular, he splits a difference nicely between the comedic ego-stroking and puns and the genuine menace that he's allowed to throw around, much like his Joker. Headey gives Lyn more complexity than we expect while still chomping on the scenery Maleficent-style, and Kevin Michael Richardson has some fun as the snarling but loyal Beast Man. Rollins, of course, is always well-suited to angry railing against societal ills in his vocal presence, and he proves a suitably formidable mid-tier antagonist as a result. Sci-fi horror icon Tony Todd continues a great 2021 in terms of his voicework after DOTA: Dragon's Blood to offer a terrific, Freddy Krueger-esque take on Scare Glow. The biggest surprise is Conroy, who doesn't change his usual sonorous Batman tones, but offers a completely new take on them as Mer-Man, hamming it up outrageously so well as a supervillain that I desperately hope we get to hear more of it later down the road.

Part 1 ends on a cliffhanger so good I literally said "no FUCKING way", and promises interesting times ahead for whatever lies in Part 2. For now, Masters of the Universe: Revelation may shape up to be my favorite take on this property yet. See folks at the finish line.

#he-man #masters of the universe revelation #review #analysis