#the energy in the studio is top fucking notch

[andi-o-geyser]

this is a fucking 5-act-play, my god. the highs and lows of the human experience all contained in this dumb little remote controlled car. entertainment at its finest. Shakespeare could never. Kachow, my guy.

#the energy in the studio is top fucking notch #LET CHAOS REIGN #i need to calm down or i'm going to hurt a rib from laughing #game changer #game changer spoilers #dropout #dropout tv #lou wilson #siobhan thompson #brennan lee mulligan #sam reich #d20 cast #andis thought geyser

[ghostlightreviews]

A paint-by-numbers first act gives way to a snappy fun second act and a powerful third. Nimona is overall quite wonderful.

A far cry from Netflix’s BIG foray into Animation last year with the flawed but affable Sea Beast, hopefully, this signals a revitalization of the Animated feature.

It does feel like we’re in quite a special place for Animation, with Disney and Pixar bribing out one cookie-cutter sludge block after another, other studios are picking up the slack and taking advantage of the hopeful Whale Fall of Disney studios.

I’ve never read the graphic novel, and so all the following is purely based on my experience with the film alone.

Like, wow. An animated feature that is, not only, so UNABASHEDLY Gay from the outset, but queerness runs through the veins of Nimona like no other animated project I have seen. With Trans and Non-Binary themes serving as the heart of the story, it holds its themes closely but never shows its hand. The ideologies seamlessly integrated with the world-building and narrative effortlessly.

A particularly poignant and timely commentary on the demonization and segregation of marginalized groups, PARTICULARLY Trans and Non-Binary Youths. More to absorb here with subsequent and inevitable rewatches.

Visually really quite something, if not somewhat an acquired taste, at least for me anyway. Sometimes it looks stunning, other times it feels a little off in ways I can’t explain. In all of the best and worst ways, feels like watching a really well-made GameCube game. Gorgeous but occasionally a bit too much.

Riz Ahmed is a startlingly good actor…on screen. Unfortunately for him, every line he delivers here sounds like a dry read at a table. Not true but his whole performance sounds like he was seated for every line. It’s just not great, and it feels like an actual Voice Actor could have done Ballister higher Justice here.

Chloe Grace Montez is really good though, her energy is perfect for Nimona, and vibrant enough to bypass the lacklustre performance of her counterpart.

Eugene Yang is pretty good here as Goldenloin, a good debut!

I just wish Hollywood wouldn’t be so coy about hiring actual Voice Talent for its animated features, especially when they are as good as this one. Elevate your production, fuck star power, get the right talent.

Nimona, both on and off screen is a scrappy story of self-discovery, perseverance, identity, and fucking sticking it to the man as hard as you can. If I was Disney I would be SHITTING myself right now. Top-notch filmmaking here.

Banana Splits will always be the hardest possible track you could use in any action sequence. Just a true denotation of an unhinged chaos demon.

4.5/5

#movie review #film review #letterboxd #film #nimona #trans rights #animation #netflix

[radramblog]

Radiohead Retrospective Part 6: I try to sing along but I get it all wrong (‘CAUSE I’M NOT)

I don’t have as much to say about the lead-in to Hail to the Thief, much like I didn’t have much to say about that for Amnesiac. There isn’t as earth-shattering a shift as Kid A, and there isn’t a big story like with The Bends or OK Computer.

Hail to the Thief was (probably) the first batch of music Radiohead recorded after the sessions that produced Kid A/Amnesiac, meaning they had the full breadth of that experience to work with. What we received as a result was somewhat of a fusion of the electronic/jazz-influences of those albums and the rockier stuff of the band’s past.

Now I’ve heard a fair few complaints that this album is too long. That’s probably fair, it’s their longest album, with a total of 14 tracks, meaning it does kinda drag on a bit. Thom Yorke apparently agrees, seeing as he put out an alternative tracklist in ’08 (link) missing four songs. At the same time, I’m going to pull Death of the Author on this one, because as much as I’ve seen people complain that there’s too many songs on this, nobody ever seems to get along with which ones they’d cut- let alone people wanting to pull B-sides in the mix.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves there, aren’t we? Suppose I should just talk about the fucking album.

We begin this record, like all Radiohead records, with studio chatter. Wait, what the fuck? Yeah, it’s quiet but it’s there. Why not, right?

2+2=5 is a lovely little banger to open on. Unquestionably a rock song, it features a very slow and quiet (and heavily panned) first half before just fucking exploding in the latter half. It genuinely might be the most aggressive track the band has put out, a manic cascade of energy and breathy falsetto that’s genuinely headbangable. It’s also a fun thing to try and read the lyrics for, since the booklet the album comes with gives up for this bit and just goes “eezeepeezee NOT” or something along that line.

Oh yeah, that’s actually something worth bringing up. Neither Kid A nor Amnesiac had lyric booklets, deliberately obscuring the actual words to the songs, to the point where people had pretty wide interpretations of what they actually were. Considering the incompleteness of 2+2=5’s entry in it’s booklet, perhaps similar occurred with that. I’m still unsure if the subtitle of this post is actually the real lyrics.

Most people, I think, read the name of this track and just kind of assume it’s about 1984, the book boomers bring up whenever their freedumbs are impinged upon. And it’s not not about 1984, but there are extremely specific political references as well- Hail to the Thief, title of the album and line in the track, is a quote regarding the U.S. President of the time, George W Bush, who lost the popular vote but won the electoral college- something that sounds awfully familiar to those of us living in 2021. “January has April Showers” similarly refers to the unseasonable weather of Bush’s inauguration.

The last thing I’d like to bring up before we finally move onto the second track is that every single song in this album has a subtitle- for 2+2=5, it’s (The Lukewarm). According to Yorke, it’s a reference to Dante’s Inferno- the Lukewarm being the people around the edge of hell, damned due to their passive indifference- the kind of people the song’s lyric, “you have not been paying attention”, is referring to. I’m literally learning these meanings now, so we’ll see how many are worth bringing up.

Perhaps fortunately for my word count, Sit Down. Stand Up (yes the full stop/period is part of the title) (that’s not the subtitle) doesn’t have quite as much going on. Though it does have a video, for some reason. It’s a sort of repetitive trance of lyrics set to an electronic percussion, distant piano, and….I don’t know what other instrument is making those light dings. A xylophone? Interestingly, much like 2+2=5, it’s one that builds slowly into a chaotic finish, the raving of that track reflected in the almost cold mania of the raindrops the raindrops the raindrops the raindrops the raindrops……. It’s a decent enough song, but I legitimately cannot imagine listening to it ever outside the context of this album. Which is weird, because I definitely remember doing so when I was younger.

Track 3 is Sail To The Moon, a lullaby or ballad or sorts, a calm after the storm that is the previous track. Quite literally, considering it’s repeated lyric. And also literally, in that it was actually written for Thom’s son at the time. The subtitle, (Brush the Cobwebs Out of the Sky) evokes a very literal interpretation of the song’s title, which doesn’t actually reflect the lyrics.

Sail To The Moon is, as any good lullaby should be, utterly soothing. It’s calm, with Thom’s vocals just drifting across the piano, loose guitar, and percussion like a low tide. This is one of those songs I’ve come around to much more with time, because I distinctly remember skipping this a lot. You’ll find I’ve listened to this album a fair few times, though the section between 2+2=5 and Go To Sleep is one I skipped a fair bit, I think.

Backdrifts is a heavily electronic song that apparently in part predates Kid A and Amnesiac, which is kind of interesting- we’ll see a bit more of that later. As a track, it’s kind of spacy- the synth instrumental feels like something out of an eerie sci-fi film, if you notched the tempo up a bit.

Backdrifts is also the first song where I can see the “too long” argument come in. Not for the album (though I believe it’s one of the ones the alternate tracklist leaves out), but the song itself- I’m not sure this is a song that needs to be the second longest on the album (and only by a second). It’s fine, but considering what it comes off and what follows it, it’s in a bit of an awkward spot.

Go To Sleep is another one that kinda took me a while to get. I always heard it as being one of the top tracks on the thing, but it never really clicked with me for a while. I suppose I’ve never been massive on purely acoustic-guitar-led affairs? With age, though, I’ve better appreciated the depth the song has. Possibly the folkiest song the band has, it might have taken me getting into R.E.M. to recognize what the song is.

And the song is good!

But unfortunately for Go To Sleep, Where I End and You Begin is my favourite Radiohead track.

Holy shit, this song sounds so fucking sick. That percussion, that bassline, those fucking Ondes Martenot babyyyy. The song is spacey and ethereal, but tied down by the more traditional elements of the instrumentation. The fantastical lyricism tying into very real themes of personal boundaries, how they define how people interact, and how when they fail, things tend to go badly- “There’ll be no more lies, I will eat you alive”. It’s just an absolute fucking track.

I don’t think I can possibly explain why I like this song so much. Opinions and favourites are kind of like that. But it just speaks to me. The hyper-fuzzed out guitar soloing in the bridge, the loneliness of the second verse, it’s just incredible.

Also it possibly references Optimistic with the lyrics which is cool! I also like that song a lot.

The subtitle, (The Sky Is Falling In), is something I’ve not been able to find a reference for regarding it’s meaning, but since I like the song so much, I’m going to do some interpreting. If we assume the song is about boundaries in a relationship, it’s clear that the final lyrics are the utter devastation after those boundaries are breached. But “The Sky Is Falling In” fits better with the third verse, what with the house falling into the sea- the tipping point has broken, the household (or, the house) is in freefall, the sky is falling with it. But that’s just my opinion, man.

Still with me? We’re not even halfway.

We Suck Young Blood can best be described as off-kilter, perhaps even deliberately out of tempo. A very pointed use of handclaps, typically a part of substantially more energetic tracks than the dirge this song presents. I’m sure this isn’t what the song is about, but at face value the lyrics read like some sort of social service run by vampires- give us your young blood, and we’ll make things better for you. In a way, it’s kind of fun, silly even. I suppose the claps help with that. The track is otherwise just, melancholic- slow, piano-y, even the sudden pickup barely lasts- though I always forget it’s there, making it kind of a surprise every time. Like, oh shit, we’re going somewhere for a bit, I need to put my seatbelt back on- ah never mind it’s over (and then the song keeps going for a while).

We come now to The Gloaming, the song that was originally going to be the title track for the album. They changed it, apparently, because it got rejected- too gloomy, apparently. According to Wikipedia, a fair few of the subtitles from the album’s tracks also came from proposed names for the album proper.

The song itself is also pretty gloomy, as it happens. Apparently, it’s literally about the rise of fascism, so fair enough. An electronic track, with many a repetition, feeling uneasy and cold the whole way through (making the subtitle, Softly Open our Mouths in the Cold, pretty apt). It feels almost minimalistic at times, without especially many lines running through it- and without a big crescendo like many to most of these songs have, it feels somewhat lifeless- a deliberate choice, no doubt.

Oh shit, are we up to There There? We are! God this song fucks. Those opening drums are iconic, not to mention the way it layers onto itself. And the video! Eerie horror at its finest.

Like, I know Where I End and You Begin is my favourite song on this album unquestionably. But there is no doubt in my mind that There There is the best song on the album.

Good enough that I don’t have anything really interesting to say about it? Like many songs on this album, it’s got a big old crescendo, but the build is just so smooth, and the climax is just such a swelling. “We are accidents waiting to happen” is such a powerful lyric, and it’s hardly the only one on the song. A comment I’ve seen about the song describes the guitar as akin to laughter, a mood I can definitely see in the track itself.

Anyway the song ended so I guess I gotta move on.

I Will is kind of an interesting case. It’s unquestionably one of the most emotional songs on the album, considering it was written about a U.S. bombing of a shelter that wiped out 408 innocent people, and that’s fucking horrifying (S.O.P. for the Army it seems). It’s short, and…well it’s not sweet, but it is tragic and haunting.

It’s also a song that went through variation on variation before finally appearing on this album. Early live performances date to 5 whole years before Hail to the Thief, and considering the bombing was in 1991, it was probably written well before then. Versions of this track are kind of everywhere as a result- one early version was eventually chopped up and reproduced into Like Spinning Plates on Amnesiac- reconstructions of the process are available on citizeninsane.eu- or they were, at least, because apparently that site’s embeds relied on Flash.

I do particularly want to highlight the Los Angeles version of the song, which was a b-side on 2+2=5 (and also was on the Com Lag EP), because it’s a fuller version of the track- not necessarily better, but the full band is involved, making it a much different experience.

Track 11, A Punchup At A Wedding, has become somewhat of a meme on the Radiohead subreddit. Mostly it’s a result of the opening lyric, literally “No” 42 times over. The subtitle, for reference, is also all “No”s. On a similarly lighter note, the track is apparently a result of the band stumbling upon just a needlessly scathing review of one of their live shows, making it one of the few Radiohead tracks I could confidently say is about one person in particular. With all the second person, the lyrics probably wouldn’t be out of place on an early Linkin Park track (whether that’s an insult or not, I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader).

The slow, almost marchlike rhythm of the song well suits the tone of the lyrics, and to be clear, the tone is pretty much “Man, what the fuck is wrong with you?” and the emotions that come with being torn down by someone who doesn’t know you or really recognise what they’re doing. I suppose it’s refreshing for the metaphor to be this obvious for once. It’s a pretty decent song, piano-driven like many a song on the album, which means theoretically if I ever relearn the instrument I could play it. Maybe.

Myxomatosis, while a pretty fucked up disease, is an absolutely excellent song. If 2+2=5 is the heaviest rock song on the album, Myxomatosis is the heaviest electronic song on it. The lyricism is incredibly dark, unsettling and violent, suiting the harsh buzzing synth line. They say fuck in this one! And the way the entire song save percussion drops for the key line (I don’t know why I feel so tongue-tied/skinned alive) is so excellent. Interestingly, said line also appears word-for-word in Cuttooth, a B-side from Amnesiac, though the mood is profoundly different.

I suspect the song being named Myxomatosis and being pretty clearly about public perception and fame should give you a hint as to how the band views the media and the world of the rich and famous- the subtitle, (Judge, Jury, & Executioner), certainly adds to that. Thom sounds a mix of hesitant, confused, disgusted, and frustrated on the track, and it works incredibly well.

We’re finally on to the penultimate track, Scatterbrain. And I’m going to be honest, I don’t know what this one’s about. I’m out of patience to figure out what Genius is going on about, though it’s fairly incomplete for this track anyway. It’s relatively simple, for a Radiohead track, and pretty enough, but I can see why people don’t tend to like this one as much. I distinctly remember it being bottom of the list or close to it on a subreddit poll at some point (might have been above We Suck Young Blood, which I don’t agree with).

Scatterbrain kind of just has the problem of being a pretty decent album track, right between two of my favourite songs on the album. Which is awkward as always.

Our final song is A Wolf at the Door, and talk about a closer. Thom has described it as like waking up from a nightmare and finding out reality is worse, which is both relatable and upsetting. The song is grim, with confusing imagery in the verses leading to a desperately emotional chorus about someone’s children being fucking ransomed. Also, a bridge with more Nos than A Punchup at a Wedding, where are your No (x105) memes Reddit, get it fucking together!

The lyrics of the verses in A Wolf at the Door have a swaying flow to them that’s almost rap-like, especially since the falsetto that Thom usually sings in around this time is completely absent from them. This makes it one of the few rap-ish songs I’ve actually tried to perform, and I’d probably be pretty okay if I didn’t keep forgetting bits.

The song is just, frustration (verse 1), desperation (chorus), anger/frustration (verse 2), and back to desperation (chorus) again, which doesn’t quite fit the stages of grief cleanly, but that’s probably fine. The final vocalisation of the song (and thereby the album) feels almost like a sorrowful howl, which makes less sense the more I think about the imagery and intent of the lyrics, so maybe just ignore that actually. There is just so much imagery packed into this track, especially in the second verse, that listing it out is pointless- but it all just clicks so well, into this deluge of frustration and madness carried along by that instrumental that just seems to get lower and lower forever.

Anyway that’s the whole album, isn’t it? I’m going to keep this outro brief, because we’re approaching 3000 words at this point, but I think that fact says it all. There’s a lot of Hail to the Thief, but it never really misses per se. It has less great songs, but no bad ones. I’d argue my own biases probably cloud my judgement, but even if some of the tracks are more forgettable, the highs are so high for me that it easily stands among the band’s best.

Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with me. But that’s fine, this is my opinion, the rest of the world is allowed to be wrong.

A lot of things would happen between Hail to the Thief’s release in 2003 and the followup, In Rainbows, in 2007. But that’s ultimately a story for another day. A week from today, to be precise.

See you then?

#ramble #music #radiohead #hail to the thief

[bthenoise]

We’re Starting To Lose It So We Made A Fake Music Award Show To Remember The Quarantine By

We are losing our minds and we aren’t talking figuratively like The Pixies. Every morning waking up in quarantine feels like an episode of Punk’d. 

Where is Aston Kutcher -- oh right, it’s 2020 -- Where is Chance The Rapper? we ask ourselves as we peel ourselves out of bed for what feels like the millionth time.   

Seriously, though. We know you guys are feeling the same way too. We read the tweets. We see the TikToks. Ya’ll are losing your goddamn minds just like us. 

The good thing is, to help with this sense of craziness as best as we possibly can (which isn’t saying much, we aren’t doctors after all -- shout out to all the amazing medical teams out there!) we have constructed the first and hopefully last 2020 Noise Quarantine Awards.

Featuring highly coveted awards such as Best Soundtrack To Fuel Your Hatred For The Government and Best Song To Steal Toilet Paper To, the awards below are meant to shine a light on all the positive things to come out of 2020. 

We know it sounds like an impossible task to put “2020″ and “postive” in the same sentence but somehow we did it. 

Check out the awards below.   

Fantastic Features Award

Silverstein - A Beautiful Place To Drown

Honestly, there are probably about ten different awards we could give Silverstein’s sensational LP A Beautiful Place To Drown. From start to finish, this is hands down one of the band’s best albums yet. However, for the sake of this very serious and very made-up award show, we are happy to present the scene staples with the Fantastic Features Award. 

Not only did the band include familiar favorites such as Beartooth’s Caleb Shomo, Simple Plan’s Pierre Bouvier and Underoath’s Aaron Gillespie, but they also went out of their way to include other artists such as emerging rapper Princess Nokia and Intervals’ guitarist Aaron Marshall. Now if that doesn’t deserve an award, we don’t know what does.  

Back Off Pit Daddies Cause This Song Slaps Award

A Day To Remember - “Mindreader”

But there’s no breakdown! How am I supposed to mosh to this? Would you quit your whining? It’s pretty much impossible for A Day To Remember to write a bad song. And sorry to break it to you pit warriors, they definitely didn’t start with their newest track “Mindreader.

Best Album To Eventually Soundtrack The Next Matrix Movie

Code Orange - Underneath 

Does this one really come as a surprise? Essentially creating their own genre of technology-influenced metalcore (computer core, maybe?), Code Orange’s Underneath is the perfect soundtrack to any type of action-packed, dark web-based, sci-fi thriller like The Matrix trilogy. Now would you like the red pill or the blue pill?  

The Welcome Back, We Fuckin’ Missed You Award

The Ghost Inside - “Aftermath”

A world without new music from The Ghost Inside is a world we don’t want any part of. Thankfully, for the first time since their tragic bus crash back in 2015, the metalcore maestros have returned with the hard-hitting and incredibly emotional track “Aftermath” taken from their soon-to-be-released self-titled album. So for that, the least we could do is present the band with the Welcome Back, We Fuckin’ Missed You Award.  

Honorable Mention: D.R.U.G.S (aka Craig Owens) - “King I Am”

Best Song To Listen To On Repeat And Realize You Successfully Killed Two And A Half Hours Of Your Quarantine

Loathe - “Screaming”

There is nothing made up about this whatsoever. We seriously thank Loathe for creating mind-altering music that transports you to a new dimension.  “Screaming” is a gem and the band deserves to be awarded for it. Oh, and also, I Let It In And It Took Everything is an amazing record everyone needs to hear ASAP.

Best Album To Get Drunk And Talk About Your Feelings To

Violent Soho - Everything Is A-OK

We’re not sure exactly what it is about Australia’s Violent Soho but they always seem to bring the deepest and darkest emotions out of us. Their latest LP Everything Is A-OK is no different. From track one to track ten, the band’s first new album since 2016 is an emotional magnet attracting feeling after feeling leaving us desperate for a drinking buddy and a good cry.

The If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It Award

August Burns Red - Guardians

August Burns Red has been a prominent staple of the heavy music scene for years. Since bursting out of Lancaster, PA with 2005′s Thrill Seeker, the two-time Grammy-nominated act has been a constant source of inspiration with their bruising, top-notch musicianship. Fifteen years later, with the release of their ninth studio album Guardians, the metalcore vets are still as heavy and hard-hitting as ever deserving of our If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It Award.   

Best Album To Eventually Soundtrack The Next Season Of Black Mirror

Enter Shikari - Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible

Enter Shikari is easily one of the most unpredictable bands in our scene. One minute you think you have them and their eclectic sound pinned down, then the next they release their genre-shattering LP Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible. With cinematic twists and turns from the rock-oriented opener “THE GREAT UNKNOWN” to the cosmic tornado that is “{ The Dreamer’s Hotel }” and circus-themed “Waltzing Off The Face Of The Earth,” Enter Shikari’s spellbinding LP is a perfect fit for something just as fascinating as the next season of Netflix’s Black Mirror.

Best Album To Get Your Medical Degree To

Vermicide Violence - The Praxis Of Prophylaxis 

We understand it’s not easy to comprehend deathcore lyrics. However, if you’re in need of a good study buddy while you prepare for the boards, look no further than Jarrod Alonge’s new parody album The Praxis Of Prophylaxis. Covering high-end medical topics such as vaccines, gingivitis, asthma and more, Vermicide Violence’s new LP is sure to help a lot more than those Grey’s Anatomy re-runs.    

The Tasmanian Devil Award

Rotting Out - Ronin

The Tasmanian Devil award is a highly coveted prize (possibly one of our most coveted) given to the album with hands down the most circle-pit-inducing tracks. While there have been some pretty good options this year, the record that stands out the most is Rotting Out’s first new album in over seven years, Ronin. Without going too far into detail -- because honestly, it’s pretty obvious why we picked this record -- if you’re able to stand still while listening to these fiery ass songs, you’re probably a cop.

Best Album To Get Drunk And Talk About Your Feelings To Part Two

Spanish Love Songs - Brave Faces, Everyone

Really? You’re gonna complain we used the same category twice in a made-up award show only created cause we’re stuck living fucking Groundhog Day over and over again? Instead, how about you put that same energy into enjoying Spanish Love Songs’ brilliant, tear-jerking album Brave Faces, Everyone. You won’t regret it.

Best Soundtrack To Fuel Your Hatred For The Government

Anti-Flag - 20/20 Vision

Regardless of if you’re really into politics or not, it’s practically impossible at this point to not swear at our so-called “leaders” up in Washington DC. So if you’re looking for the best album to fuel your hatred for the Head Cheeto In Charge and all his helpless minions, look no further than Anti-Flag’s powerful 20/20 Vision.

Honorable Mention: The Homeless Gospel Choir - This Land Is Your Landfill

The Album Most Likely To Get You Out Of Mosh Pit Retirement

Polaris - The Death Of Me

This record is the definition of “slaps.” From beginning to end, Polaris’ punishing new album The Death Of Me is a heavy-duty rollercoaster ride that will leave you with a melted off face and an endless desire to jump back in the pit and crack a few skulls.  

Best Album To Rip A Phat Riff To

Hot Mulligan - You’ll Be Fine

Hot Mulligan are a bunch of jokesters but there’s nothing funny about their new album You’ll Be Fine -- alright, maybe a few of the song titles are a little silly. The band’s latest release is a guitarist’s delight with ringing mathcore-like riffs that will leave you both jubilant and jealous. Case in point, give the infectious opener “OG Bule Sky” a spin and get back to us.   

Honestly, Fight Us, This Song Is A Bop Award

All Time Low feat Blackbear - “Monsters”

We know what some of you cool cats and kittens are thinking: But this isn’t pop-punk!? Since when does Blackbear get a scene pass? Listen up. No, this song isn’t “Dear Maria, Count Me In” but who cares? It’s 2020 and musical genres are dead. Enjoy the good music while you can before we’re all dead too, okay?

Honorable mention: PVRIS - “Deadweight”

Best Song To Steal Toilet Paper To

The Chats - “Drunk N Disorderly”

If you haven’t had the fear of potentially wiping your ass with a washcloth over the last few months, this award probably isn’t for you and your 30 extra rolls of toilet paper. However, for us regular folk who have a limited supply of TP, The Chats’ fast-paced High Risk Behavior track “Drunk N Disorderly” is the perfect song for stumbling into someone’s home and swiping a roll or two.  

Wow We Didn’t See That Coming Award

Falling In Reverse - “The Drug In Me Is Reimagined”

Ronnie Radke has never been afraid to push boundaries musically. Whether it’s rapping on a track or dropping an upbeat, synth-laced single like “Bad Girls Club,” the former Escape The Fate frontman always seems to have something new up his sleeve. This year, to help celebrate 2011′s The Drug In Me Is You becoming gold-certified, Radke and Co. released an epic piano-lead version of their fan-favorite title track. The results? A majestic dream-like experience worth repeating over and over again.

If You Hurt Mother Earth One More Time We Swear You’re Dead Award 

In Hearts Wake - “Worldwide Suicide”

There’s been a lot of talk about global warming over the past few years. Recently, while we’ve all been stuck at home, skies have become clearer than ever as wild animals roam the barren streets. This is a dream come true for earth-friendly metalcore act In Hearts Wake. 

Now as some cities start to reopen, let us remind you: If you even think about going back to your wasteful, pollution-heavy ways, we and In Hearts Wake will come for you with the same force and brutality as heard on their newest track “Worldwide Suicide.” Watch your back.

Sure It’s Different But Still Kicks Ass Award

The Used - Heartwork

This isn’t The Used you knew in junior high. Bert McCrackin and Co. have returned with a fresh-faced 2020 LP that is sure to make you feel some type of way. Featuring guest appearances from members of Blink-182, FEVER 333 and Beartooth, The Used’s latest is a heavy-yet-dancy addition to their beloved-and-never-stale catalog.  

Better Not Sleep On This Record Award

Charmer - Ivy

Look, you literally have nothing but time on your hands. Why not spend it discovering new music from bands who deserve your attention? Seriously, turn off Love Is Blind and Too Hot To Handle and give Charmer’s moody 11-track release Ivy a try. You can thank us later.

Honorable Mention: Big Loser - Love You, Barely Living

Holy Shit We Can’t Believe That Just Happened Award

Dance Gavin Dance - “Calentamiento Global”

Four words we’ve all been thinking since Dance Gavin Dance dropped their highly anticipated album Afterburner: Tilian can speak Spanish!?

Giving the entire Swancore community a jaw-dropping moment with their new experimental track “Calentamiento Global,” in the song, DGD’s brawny frontman shows a little latin flavor with lyrics like “Te adoro, mi reina. Eres la única que veo.” Unsurprisingly, like most Dance Gavin Dance (or should we say Baile Gavin Baile) experiments, the post-hardcore act totally nailed it. 

The Back To Basics Award

The Amity Affliction - Everyone Loves You... Once You Leave Them

The Amity Affliction caught a lot of flack for their experimental 2018 release Misery. While entirely unwarranted as the metalcore vets were just looking to expand their sound, for their 2020 LP Everyone Loves You... Once You Leave Them, the Aussie outfit returned to form with their breakdown-heavy musicianship and brooding lyricism. Still have doubts? How about you give “All My Friends Are Dead” a spin or two.  

Skankin’ Pickle Award

Skatune Network - Ska Goes Emo, Vol. 1

Here’s a fun one. Adding to the list of things we never thought we’d see in 2020, go ahead and add a ska record covering some of your emo favs like My Chemical Romance, Paramore and Blink-182. Already known for his creative covers, Skatune Network really outdid himself this time around with his Ska Goes Emo LP. Who would have guessed you could skank so well to “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)?” 

The 2020 Glow-Up Award

The Word Alive - Monomania

The Word Alive has seen a lot of change over the course of their ten-year career. From 2010′s hard-hitting album Deceiver to this year’s impressive LP Monomania, the band has really grown into who they are today. For the first time, instead of putting out the music they’re expected to release, the Arizona act really stepped out of their comfort zone and dropped the music they wanted to make resulting in one of this year’s freshest and best so far.

Chocolate Covered Cranberries Award

Four Year Strong - Brain Games

For five long grueling years, we went without new music from easycore noisemakers Four Year Strong. This February, that all changed with the release of the band’s killer seventh studio album Brain Pain. Bringing the guitar-lead heaviness fans have come to love over the years along with their infectious pop-punk-leaning songwriting, Four Year Strong’s new record is the perfect balance of sour and sweet -- like chocolate covered cranberries! Who’s hungry?    

#Vans Warped Tour #Four Year Strong #The Word Alive #Skatune Network #The Amity Affliction #Dance Gavin Dance #Charmer #The Used #In Hearts Wake #Falling In Reverse #The Chats #All Time Low #Hot Mulligan #Polaris #Anti Flag #Anti-Flag #Spanish Love Songs #Rotting Out #Jarrod Alonge #Vermicide Violence #Enter Shikari #August Burns Red #Violent Soho #Loathe #Code Orange #A Day To Remember #The Ghost Inside #Silverstein #interview

[laruna]

— interloper.

characters. lim yuri, min yoongi, kim namjoon.

word count. 21.1k

genre. angst, fluff, friendship, romance, slow burn

warnings. underage drinking, hospitals, car accidents, mentions of family issues

summary. when yoongi feels like an interloper, yuri reminds him that he belongs.

November 7, 2011. Big Hit Entertainment Building, Seoul.

While Namjoon signed his contract until earlier that year, he still had to wait until the dorms were built to move in. Yuri gave Hitman Bang an earful when she found out he had signed him as a trainee when the company didn’t even have fucking dorms yet, but Namjoon fully assured her that it was okay and quelled her rage long enough to stop her from biting the poor old man’s head off.

But it all worked out eventually. Namjoon moved in when the dorms were built back in August, and without the awkwardness that parental presence at his house entailed, Yuri invited herself over as often as possible, practically making the dorms her second home. 

It’s almost a kind of domestic bliss, the way her and Namjoon lived before, cooking for each other and cleaning up the shitty company building until they get so tired they fall asleep on the floor. Sometimes, if she’s really lucky, he’ll offer to let her share his bed. You know, since all the empty beds are going to be occupied by other trainees eventually, and it’d be rude to give someone a used bed, right? Of course.

It’s a Monday when they go to the dorm and actually find the bed across from Namjoon’s occupied.

“...hi.”

The new trainee’s name is Min Yoongi. He’s only a year Namjoon’s senior, but despite the closeness in age, he doesn’t seem willing to bond with them at all. If anything, he barely talks to either of them. According to Hitman Bang, Yoongi is from Daegu, and the only speaks so little because he’s still trying to get used to Seoul’s dialect and is embarrassed that his satoori keeps slipping out.

Yoongi only talks when necessary, like a coworker. They spend the first week or so not talking about anything but work—music, in their case—but even that they can’t be friendly about. Despite their similar interest in hip-hop, Yoongi and Namjoon have very different approaches to rap music. To music in general, really.

Yuri can’t help but feel as if Yoongi has kind of an edge over them. On top of being a year older, he’s also both a producer and a rapper. Yuri is only the former and Namjoon is only the latter, so it’s like he’s got the force of them both combined. She can’t help but feel a little bit small, next to him. 

When they argue about something in the studio, he tends to use this as leverage, telling them to just listen to him because he knows better about this kind of thing. That escalates into arguing, which usually consists of Namjoon and Yoongi yelling at each other while Yuri desperately tries to mediate the situation. The current tally she’s been keeping in her journal shows that Namjoon having won two arguments, Yoongi having won six, and Yuri having successfully distracted them from finishing eleven. She likes to believe that means she’s winning.

Hitman Bang begs to disagree.

He finds out about it one day when he comes to visit her when she’s alone in the studio. The old man never knocks before entering, Yuri notes the invasion of privacy with annoyance. Even so, he kicks it up a notch by glancing over at the journal she’s left open on the corner of her desk. He laughs when he sees the page headed argument wins, pointing to the to the tallies by her name.

“I’m not surprised you’re in the lead,” he laughs. “You’re a menace.” She cringes when she remembers his first impression of her. She wasn’t exactly… tactful about it, but it got the point across well enough. Now that he’s her boss, though, she worries it’ll give him more reason to check up on her, and she would rather selfishly indulge in having some alone time with Namjoon.

“I’m not!” she defends herself, flustered. “I just know better than to waste my time arguing with boys. My points are for when I stop them from arguing, okay? Not having to hear them try to bite each other’s heads off is a win for me.”

“Hm.” He purses his lips at that, regarding her with a look she can’t quite read. She hates how unreadable he is. Her instincts have rarely failed her, but the old man is one of the few people whose energy has yet to come to her.

“Don’t be afraid of fighting,” he tells her after a bout of silence. “They should be able to fight if they’re angry. You should let them fight, let them yell if they’re angry. Even fist fights are fine. It’s okay to fight. Fearing fights only makes conflicts grow bigger.” Yuri shifts uneasily in her seat.

“I don’t like fighting. I don’t like yelling. I don’t like fists,” she says. “I get enough of that at home.” She doesn’t mean for it to slip out, doesn’t even realize that it does until the old man makes that face.

“Oh, Yuri.” He says it more sincerely than she’s ever heard from anyone at the dad age.

“Oh my God, no,” her voice cracks as she speaks. “We’re not doing that. We’re not having, like, a moment. I’m not emotionally prepared for that. I’ll cry and I’ll hate you.” He just nods at that, before awkwardly clapping a hand down onto her shoulder.

“Just remember that you can’t solve everything between them,” he says. “Let them resolve some of that on their own. You won’t be around to resolve things forever.” It feels like a jinx, the way he says it, but she still nods along.

“Okay,” she says. Sounds like simple enough advice to follow.

“And try to befriend Yoongi, okay?” he adds. She wrinkles her nose. That one seems a little harder.

“Okay,” she says anyways. She’ll definitely try.

Namjoon wrinkles his nose when Yuri proposes inviting Yoongi to the Lim household.

“He doesn’t really know anyone else,” Namjoon rationalizes. “Wouldn’t it be a bit awkward for him?”

“That’s the point, dummy,” she says, “I think it’d help him learn to get along with everyone, is all. Including us, hopefully. I don’t know.” Namjoon sighs, if only because she’s been getting harder and harder to say no to these days. He’s not sure why.

“Alright,” he agrees.

Unexpectedly, it’s significantly harder to get Yoongi to agree.

“I barely know you guys,” he deadpans, and Yuri winces. The I told you so look that Namjoon shoots her doesn’t help, and only reminds her of how much she’s always struggled with making friends. 

Hoping to spare her pride, she persists. This is the only opportunity she has to have everybody over in a while—she doesn’t know the next time her father’s going to be working overtime and they’ll have the house to themselves. Knowing him, the old man would probably bite her and Kyunghee’s head off if he came home from work and saw everybody over on a daily basis.

“You can,” she offers softly. “Get to know us, I mean. Please?” 

Yoongi only raises a brow, seemingly unconvinced.

“We have alcohol?” she offers, but the inflection makes it sound more like a question. Namjoon smacks her arm at that, only for her to shoot him a look that says, What? It’s true! Awkwardly, she adds, “Also, um, free food.”

And that’s enough to convince him, apparently.

Yoongi looks starstruck when he first enters the Lim household, suddenly feeling very small. Or at the very least, smaller than usual. He was easily the shortest of the company’s trainees, second-shortest of everybody in the building, towering over only the perpetually tiny Lim Yuri. He almost has a heart attack when said tiny girl takes his shoes from him to put in the garage. It’s her big-ass house, after all. Shit, just being here makes him feel like he should be the one serving her.

Yuri and Kyunghee explain that their father is out working overtime and... doesn’t really say anything about their mom, but the others know better than to bring something like that up unprompted, so they don’t.

The alcohol is present as promised, provided by none other than resident adult, Ikje. Was it illegal? Yes. Was that going to stop any of them? In the words of Donghyuk, ‘hell nah!’

What terrible, terrible influences, Yuri thinks.

She’s never had alcohol before, nor does she plan to have it anytime soon. Not for any legal or moral reasons, mind you—with the amount of alcohol so freely available in her household, she could probably sneak as much as she wanted whenever she wanted. Personally, she just thinks it smells weird and makes her dad act like a crazy person.

She’s only fifteen, but they make it seem fun. They take the thin metal tail of the soju bottle’s metal cap and tighten it into a straight, brittle line. Everyone takes turns flicking it until Kyunghee’s fingers finally break it off. He makes a face when Ikje fills the shot glass in front of him with soju as punishment.  

Yuri doesn’t miss the way he side-eyes Donghyuk before downing it, like he’s trying to make sure that he’s watching. Like he’s looking for approval. She wonders if that’s how she looks at Namjoon. She wonders if that’s how Namjoon looks at her. He’s on her brain too often, these days. Namjoon, Namjoon, Namjoon. 

They’ve gotten even closer since they made up, and she’s learned a lot more about him since then. He’s still the stickler that refuses to drink in public where he could get in trouble, but he still still laughs and encourages the others’ antics in private, maybe even allowing himself a shot or two. He is also more than the sexless smart dude that she stereotyped him as when they first met, as she has come to learn through his awful, nasty jokes. 

She really was right when she said that he had a whole solar system in his head. Whenever he seems like he could fit into some mold, he immediately proves her wrong. Kim Namjoon is everything.

In contrast, Min Yoongi isn’t much to her at the moment.

When she turns over to look at him, she immediately feels bad for not really paying attention to him the whole night, especially when she was the one to have invited him. The only reason she’s even paying him any mind right now is because he’s just situated himself next to her at the table, as a now drunken Ikje has thoughtlessly occupied his previously-claimed spot. 

Yuri isn’t sure if it’s because he’s not comfortable enough to drink around them yet, but she finds the way he innocently refuses to drink is a little endearing in the same way she found endearing when Namjoon refused to do so back in Hongdae. Instead, Yoongi opts to eat his entire body weight in meat, and is on what she believes is his third plate of fried chicken wings. Respect.

It’s a nice environment, and Yuri really is still adjusting to the fact that this is actually her life. She has a solid friend group that eats and drinks and laughs and plays stupid games together in her house. It’s relaxing. It’s safe. It feels like home. They feel like home.

It’s when they hear her dad’s car pull into the driveway a couple hours earlier than anticipated that makes Yuri remember, oh yeah, home kind of sucks.

In the next few minutes, their living room descends into absolute chaos. Kyunghee moves to swipe all the food and shot glasses off the table and into the sink, Yuri helps load them all into the dishwasher, Ikje is scooping all the soju bottles up into his arms, and everyone else is drunkenly scrambling out the back door. Once they’re all collected, Ikje climbs out the back window, for whatever reason. She blames it on his batshit drunkenness.

Everything is in the clear by the time their dad steps in. The entire scene is inconspicuous enough, Kyunghee passing Yuri plates from the sink to load into the dishwasher like they just ate a nice dinner. They even go so far as to force awkward smiles for their father, but he simply nods at them in acknowledgement before rubbing at his temples and makes his way upstairs, clearly still stressed from work. Kyunghee breathes a sigh of relief when he hears his father’s bedroom door click shut.

“We’re good,” he says, clasping a comforting hand on his sister’s shoulder. “Go lock the back. I’ll finish up the dishes.” Yuri nods, before making her merry way off to follow her brother’s orders. She nearly jumps out of her skin when she’s about to lock the back door and sees a male figure standing ominously in the shadows instead.

She turns on the back light, and lo and behold, there stands Min Yoongi, eating a fucking chicken wing on her back porch. And he has the audacity to look surprised, like she’s the one who shouldn’t be there on her own porch. Heaving a sigh, she steps outside, closing the door behind her as quietly as possible.

“What are you doing here?!” she whisper-yells. “Why didn’t you go with the others?!” It comes off as more aggressive than she intended, but the last thing she wants is for him to get caught and in trouble when she’s the one that invited him over in the first place.

“Namjoon went to sleep over at Donghyuk’s place,” he explains awkwardly. “Ikje went to sleep over at Hunchul’s place and, uh. I wasn’t invited to either. Ikje dropped me off here from the dorms, so… I don’t really know how to get back to the dorms from here.” 

Yuri heaves a sigh. She’s going to have to give everyone a stern talk about the importance of camaraderie and the no-man-left-behind policy. After shooting a quick text to her brother, she uses the house key hanging off of her lanyard to lock the back door.

“I know Seoul like the back of my hand,” she says. “C’mon. I’ll walk you back.” 

“I don’t know how I feel about you walking back home alone so late at night,” he says. “It doesn’t sound very safe for you.” His genuine worry makes her heart warm. Those unexpected moments of sweetness he has always throw her off. Not in a bad way, though. It’s nice.

Unfortunately, the rest of the walk is significantly less nice. They spend the first ten minutes arguing over whether or not it really is safe for her to be walking back home alone so late. He feels bad that she’s out because of him, but she insists that it’s fine as she’s done so many times before. 

“Taking the subway home and walking home are two very different things,” he admonishes her. She resists the urge to roll her eyes at his patronizing tone.

“Relaaaax. I’ve got pepper spray,” she justifies herself. “Also, I hold my keys between my fingers.” She even holds up her hands for emphasis.

“I’m sure you could give a good stabbing if you wanted to,” he snarks. He doubts the tiny girl before him is capable of causing any physical damage, even with a deadly weapon in hand.

“Are you making fun of me?” she whines, and he snorts, because it really should be obvious. “I’m just trying to make sure you get home safely, and this is the thanks I get?”

Yoongi stops in his tracks to think about it for a moment, cheeks flushing with embarrassment as he does so. She obviously means well, as annoying as she may be. She’s also his junior, and when he thinks about it, he’s just being mean to her for no good reason.

“Fine. I’m sorry for being an ass,” he relents with flushed cheeks, more for his conscience than anything else. “It’s just that—I just like being alone with my thoughts when I walk, that’s all. You’re not annoying.” 

Or at least, not that annoying, he doesn’t say.

“I know I can be annoying,” she says so matter-of-factly that it makes him feel even worse. “And my brother can be the same way. He likes just thinking, too, so I can just be quiet if that’s what you want. I just want you to get home alive, that’s all.” His eyes soften.

“I’ll be fine,” he assures her. “I can defend myself if I really need to. I was on my school basketball team, you know. Boxing, too.”

“With these noodles?” she says bluntly, reaching over and taking hold of his arm. “And how did you get into the basketball team? Aren’t basketball players supposed to be tall?”

“You don’t have any right to talk about height,” he says, staring down all 150 centimeters of her frame as he snatches his arm back from her. “And my arms are not noodles just because I’m not built like The Hulk.”

“We can’t all be Kim Namjoons, I guess. He’s got biceps for days.” Yoongi gives her an amused look at that, and she flushes uncharacteristically. “Sorry. That was weird. Just don’t—nevermind. I’ll stop talking now.”

“No, by all means, keep going,” he teases. “As long as you don’t mind me telling him about it later.” She gasps at that, smacking him in the arm.

“Oh, so now you want me to talk!” she huffs, smacking his arm. “You will be telling him no such thing, Min Yoongi! You don’t even talk to him about that kinda stuff, anyway!” He laughs as he jumps ahead to get away from her playful smacking, smiling so wide that Yuri can see his gums showing. They’re cute. She decides that she likes them.

“You really like him, don’t you? Namjoon?” he chuckles, far too blunt for her liking. It’s a special kind of adorable the way that she so visibly shrinks at his words, he thinks.

“We’re not dating, I, um—” she sputters. “Is it obvious? That I like him, I mean.”

“Relax,” he says. “It’s not. Really, I don’t think he knows. I don’t think anyone knows except Kyunghee, and I only know because of him.”

“My brother knows?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck that guy.”

Yoongi laughs at her sudden vulgarity. She really got really blunt and fiery when she wasn’t thinking, even with her seniors like him. It makes things feel a little bit more comfortable.

“Relax,” he repeats. “I think he just knows you? Because he’s your brother, I mean. He was like, ‘I just have to tell someone and nobody talks to you so it’s okay.’ So I doubt he’s told anyone else.”

Yuri nods, inclined to agree. She’d never tell Namjoon about Kyunghee’s crush on Donghyuk, and she has enough trust in her brother to know that trust goes both ways. Still, she feels bad that the exclusion Yoongi goes through on the daily is so obvious, even to her socially-awkward brother. But she has her own relationships to worry about.

“Just don’t, like. I don’t know. Interfere in whatever is happening, okay?” she huffs. “You’re the only one who knows, as far as I know. I just… don’t try to plant any thoughts in his head, okay? I want whatever happens to happen naturally. Because he likes me for me, or something.”

“Spoken like a true romantic,” he says sarcastically.

“Oh, stop it,” she whines. Yoongi laughs.

“I won’t,” he assures her.

He doesn’t know when they started walking again, but it feels just a bit less awkward and stilted now. Yuri’s just a couple steps ahead of him, guiding the way. Wrinkling his brows, he stops dead in his tracks.

“This isn’t the right way,” he says. “You take a left here.”

“No?” she says. “The subway pickup is right here.”

“I’m not taking the subway, I’m walking, remember?” he says.

“What?!” she says. She didn’t mind the fifteen minute walk to the subway, but this was too much. “The whole way? The whole walk back to the dorms is like, an hour, Yoongi! Jesus, if I knew we were gonna be walking the whole way, I wouldn’t have come.”

“Well, you don’t have to walk me home if you didn’t want to,” he says. “You’re the one who offered.”

“I didn’t think you were a crazy person!” she huffs. “Why don’t you just take the subway?”

“I spent all my money on chipping in for dinner, how the hell am I gonna afford a subway ticket?” he snorts. “Look, I can walk however long it takes, but I can’t spawn food out of thin air like you guys can.” He tries to say it as casually as he can possibly manage, but the venom still leaks through. Her face visibly drops when he says it.

“Oh,” she says, her voice tiny. “I didn’t… sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Stop that. You’re being weird,” Yoongi says. 

He hates this part. He hates the pity looks he gets from rich people like the Lims who have year-long subway passes their father bought—who, by the way, probably gets to sit pretty in a big office telling other people what to do while overworked laborers like his parents carry the South Korean economy on their backs.

But he digresses. He doubts she’s the kind of person who’d want to listen to his long-winded spiels on the economy or the government or the Gwangju democratization movement, anyway. Really, he doubts she’s type to need or think about funds at all.

Much to his surprise, she does.

“Okay, but like—just to make sure—money for that kinda stuff isn’t an issue for you guys, right?” she asks. “Like, Hitman Bang is feeding you guys?” There’s a level of threat to her voice that reminds him of the story Bang PD told him when he first joined the company, of her marching into his office to make demands for her friend’s safety. Loathe as he is to admit it, the image of it is equal parts genuine and endearing of her.

And maybe that’s why he feels the urge to spill his guts to her so suddenly, then. Maybe it’s also the warm, almost disarming energy in the way she talks to him now that they’re finally speaking one-on-one, despite his previous assumptions. Maybe it’s how innocent her eyes look when they shine under the Seoul streetlights.

“You know, I… I used to make beats out of a studio in Daegu,” he confesses. “Most of the time, I’d get scammed out of them, though. The guys who went in and out of the building would rip my shit off or use them but never pay me back, so like… I didn’t make much. But I stayed there because I still wanted to make music and using the studio was cheaper than buying equipment on my own.”

“Oh,” is all she says, pressing her lips together in a thin line. It’s definitely not the kind of thing Yuri and her brother ever had to worry about, seeing as they were so well-off. Hell, they were giving away the shit that Yoongi was slaving his life away over for free.

“So I couldn’t really pay for food or transport that easy, you know?” he continues, against his better judgement. It’s the first time he’s ever talked to anyone about this, and fuck, it feels so good. He can’t stop himself. “In front of the studio, there was this Chinese restaurant that sold jajangmyeon for 2000 won, and down the street, there was this place that sold janchi guksu for 1000 won, and like… I don’t know. It sounds stupid, but I had to worry about that shit everyday. If I ate the janchi guksu, I’d be able to get the bus and if I ate the jajangmyeon, I’d have to walk 2 hours to get home. So. I don’t know. I’m just stuck thinking like that, I guess. I know it’s not like… a thing anymore, but I feel using public transport still makes me feel guilty.”

“Mm.”

“Sounds stupid when I say it out loud.”

“It doesn’t,” she reassures him. “I’ve just, um, never had to think about stuff like that. I’m sorry you had to, though. It sounds shitty.”

“Not your fault. Don’t apologize for something like that.”

“Okay,” she says, smiling up at him. “Thank you for telling me, Yoongi.”

“Uh. Yeah. No prob,” he says, cheeks flushing in embarrassment. His flush only darkens when she shoves a couple of won in his hand, and he realizes she’s been slowly guiding him in the direction of the subway station this whole time. “Wait, h-hey—”

“No, no, I don’t need it,” she says when he shoves the money back into her hands.

“But—”

“It’s fine,” she assures him, soft smile still gracing her features. “I’d rather not walk all the way back to the dorms. Just take it, you’ll be doing me a favor. You don’t have to pay me back or anything, either. It’s not that much, anyway.”

Yoongi frowns. As much as he wants to argue with her, he’s tired enough as it is, and he has no doubt she’d stay up all night just to stay here and debate this with him. 

“Okay,” he relents. She grins in what he believes to be triumph before gently taking hold of his hand in one of hers and placing the money back into his grasp with the other. She waits outside for the subway take off, like she’s afraid he won’t do as she says unless she sees it happen. When the train lurches to a start, he watches her figure retreat through the glass windows. 

There’s a stark contrast to her soft hands and the fussy way she thrust her money at him, he thinks. 

Lim Yuri is a strange, strange girl.

Namjoon jumps in his seat, startled when Yuri suddenly marches in, plops in to the studio chair next to him, and looks up at him with crossed arms and a very non-threatening scowl on her face.

“I have a bone to pick,” she says, and his brain immediately kicks it into panic mode as he rakes through his mind for anything that he could have possibly done to upset her within the past week.

Namjoon likes to consider himself a considerate person who wouldn’t want to upset anyone, but for some reason this feels different from pure consideration. At the beginning, Yuri was just Kyunghee’s kid sister who happened to help make good music. These days, though, she feels more like a peer than a junior, more like a friend than a dongsaeng. 

For whatever reason he can’t quite pinpoint, her opinion of him has become quite important to him as of late. The idea that he’s done something she disapproves of makes his hands sweat. Even so, he manages to keep his composure, nodding as calmly as he can manage.

“What’s up?” he asks, cringing at the way his voice cracks. The way she sighs as she scoots her chair closer to his amps his anxiety up to eleven.

“You guys need to be nicer to Yoongi,” she says sternly, “You all really excluded him last week. He said you guys all went to each other’s houses after bouncing out last week and he just had nowhere to go. Why didn’t you guys plan for that or something?” Namjoon droops inward, like a kicked dog.

“Sorry,” he says, face hot with embarrassment despite immediately trying to justify himself. “It’s just—it was just kind of weird because nobody is really close to him or anything. The only person he really talks to is Ikje, and they’re not really even friends. We didn’t know how to broach the subject with him, or if he already had plans or anything, you know?”

“You could’ve asked,” she huffs, “I mean, I walked him to the subway station so he could ride back to the dorms, so everything turned out okay in the end. But—”

“By yourself?” Namjoon cuts her off. “That’s dangerous. Did you walk back by yourself, too? That late at night? Something could’ve happened. Why didn’t you ask Kyunghee to do it?” Yuri shakes her head fondly at his worrywart antics, and he sighs in relief when she smiles. It’s a warm reminder that she’s really not that mad at him.

“You sound like my dad,” she giggles, gently shoving at his arm. “Stop that. I’m trying to be mad at you.” He can’t resist cracking a smile back at her.

“Sorry.” He doesn’t sound apologetic.

“Anyway,” she continues, her tone considerably lighter, “Yoongi and I talked a bit when we were walking to the station, and like… I don’t know. It just made me realize how excluded he really was from everyone else. So can you just talk to him more, or something? And please try to get the other guys to talk to him more, too?”

“Yeah, of course. But for future reference, you could’ve called for a group discussion for this,” he chides, playfully adding, “I thought you were just mad at me for something. I really thought I did something wrong and didn’t know about it. You gave me a heart attack for no reason.”

“Sorry.” She laughs shyly now that it’s her turn to apologize. “It’s just—you’re the only one who really listens to me, you know? I feel like the rest of the guys kinda just see me as a little kid. I mean, I get it, because Kyunghee is my brother and Donghyuk is his best friend and Ikje is old, but like. I don’t know. I don’t feel like they respect me like you do, sometimes.”

Everything she says comes out in that nervous, rambly tone that she uses when she wants to keep things light, no matter how serious it actually is to her. Namjoon frowns.

“Sorry,” he says again. She shrugs.

“Not your fault,” she says, “I think things are gonna get better with Yoongi around, anyway.” Namjoon raises a curious brow at that.

“Oh?” is all he says. Yuri nods, like that’s an answer.

“He’s cool,” she says. “He was a little rude at first, but he got really shy and apologized when I pointed it out. Can you believe it? A man! Apologizing! Men never apologize, Namjoon!”

“I resent that statement.”

“Shut up, man,” she teases. They both chuckle at that. “Anyway. I think that you should try to talk to him, if anyone. I can’t tell you everything he said ‘cause that’s his business, but I will say that you’re both really passionate about music, so I think you’d get along really well.” Namjoon wrinkles his nose at her idealism, not quite sure about that one. 

He supposes she’s sort of right, seeing as music is probably the only thing he and Yoongi can agree on. Even saying that is a stretch, because their very different methods of music-making lent cause to many studio debates. It’d probably be more accurate to say that music was the one field in which they respected each other enough to discuss things amicably. If the conversation wasn’t about music, they spent more time throwing passive-aggressive one-liners at one another than talking about anything else.

“I don’t know about that,” is all he decides to say.

“It can’t be that hard,” she says, pouting. “Yoongi is a nice person. And even if there are things you don’t agree on, you can’t deny that he works really hard. So at least try? For me?”

“That walk to the subway really changed you, huh?” he jokes. He’s expecting her to laugh or roll her eyes or smack him or something, but she nods sheepishly instead.

“He gives me good vibes,” she says like it’s an explanation.

“There you go with your vibes again,” he says. It comes out a bit more passive-aggressive than he’d have liked. 

The atmosphere is a bit too fragile for him to start another debate, but it bothered him that she could dislike people like Hunchul because of the bad vibes she got from him, yet expect everyone to drop everything and befriend Yoongi because he gave her good vibes. She says that it’s just her intuition, but he thinks it’s just an excuse. Even without him saying all this, though, she rolls her eyes when she picks up on his implications.

“Yoongi really is a good guy, okay? I can feel it,” she tries convincing him. “I actually saw him smile, Namjoon. And he never smiles! And it was all cute and gummy! I know he comes off as kinda cold, but he just seems soft underneath it all. I just think he’s a person who’s been through a lot.”

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you have a crush on him,” he teases. For whatever, the prospect of that makes him more uneasy than it should.

“I’m being serious!” she whines, smacking his arm. “I’m not asking you to stop fighting or arguing with him or whatever if that’s what you want. Just… try to make up after you fight.”

“It’s just weird,” Namjoon admits sheepishly. “It’s not like I want to fight, so I don’t. Especially if it’s over something stupid. I just try to ignore the little things. But then all those little things pile up into one big pile of resentment until I get mad at him for something stupid and he thinks I’m crazy and I’m still mad at him and it’s weird.”

It sounds stupid when he says it out loud, but the way that Yuri purses her lips and nods in understanding as he speaks makes him feel a little less crazy about it all. She’s always been someone that people just feel comfortable around, and Namjoon himself is no exception.

“It’s not weird,” she reassures him. “Fighting isn’t bad, I don’t think. I don’t love it, obviously, but Hitman Bang said the other week that being afraid of fights is only gonna let stuff like that and make the conflict big and worse. All I’m asking is that you at least talk to Yoongi.”

She looks up at him with those doe eyes when she says it, big and hopeful and pleading, and he can’t possibly bring himself to say no.

“Alright.”

Ever since his talk with Yuri last week, Yoongi has been finding instant ramyeon cups in his desk.

At first, he thinks it’s a one-off thing, maybe Yuri’s apology for saying something she thought was insensitive because he made her feel bad and she needs to soothe her conscience. But once he’s run out, they quickly get restocked when he’s not looking, and he has to admit that it warms his heart. He didn’t expect his words to affect her nearly as much as they currently seem to. 

He appreciates that she doesn’t give him the noodles directly or even say anything about it. It lessens the guilt he already feels from receiving free food from his junior. Yuri doesn’t ask for any thanks or even any acknowledgement, not breaching the topic beyond asking if he’s eaten yet.

Lim Yuri, he’s come to find, is not as bad as he thought. A little naive, to be sure, but nothing like the selfish, spoiled little girl he’d conjured up in his head when he first met her. He feels bad for the image he’d once conjured up of her in his head, the little brat surrounded by shiny, foreign production equipment who was no doubt born with a silver spoon in her mouth.

Lim Yuri is kind and generous and even thoughtful when she wants to be. She feels too hard, so sentimental that she cries when a beat she’d been working on for the past six hours fails to save before her computer shuts off. He tells her she can just remake it, but she sniffles and shakes her head, saying that it just won’t be the same as the last one.

“That beat was, like, my baby, Yoongi,” she explained to him that day. “I can’t just replace it, you know?” He doesn’t quite get what she’s getting at, but nods anyways. Over time, he comes to find those weird antics of hers he once found annoying to be kind of… cute? Even if he doesn’t get them. Even now, as she whines cutely, all he can offer is a couple of comforting pats atop her head. He wishes he had more to give.

Maybe that’s the worst part of being the poor kid, he decides. Everyone is impossibly kind here, and he’s probably making an ass of himself by meeting that kindness with a cold distrust. So he brushes off their niceties knowing that he has nothing to give back in return, and thus is seen in a doubly awful light. He tries to comfort himself with the knowledge that at the very least, that prickly demeanor means that nobody is expecting anything of him.

After all, Yoongi doesn’t do well with expectations. He’s not the son his parents expected him to be, who’d get good grades and go to university in pursuit of a business degree or something before slaving away at a desk from nine-to-five everyday for the rest of his life, nor does he want to be. 

But he has to be something.

Hence why he’s in need of a job. Not one of the office jobs that his parents suggested, mind you, but a simple part-time job to hold him over on top of being a trainee so that he doesn’t feel like a useless moocher. Thankfully, he’s already got it in the bag. As expected, they can’t just hire anyone, so they’ve just got one little test for him before they can officially put him on the employee roster.

What he doesn’t expect is to run into Lim Yuri, numerous plastic bags in hand.

“Yoongi!” she shouts when they make eye contact, running up to him excitedly. He’s never seen anybody that excited to see him, even back home in Daegu. It makes his heart feel a little funny.

“Hey,” he says, “I didn’t expect to run into you. What are you doing? Are you alone?” As annoyed as she wants to be, she can’t help but be endeared by the concern she shows her, the same kind that he showed her back when she walked him to the subway.

“Well… yes. But it’s fine. I’m not a kid, you know? Don’t worry about me so much! Really, you just sound like a grandpa when you talk like that,” she teases, “I bet one of these days I’ll come into your studio and you’ll be sprawled over the floor because your back gave out or something.”

“Hey, Hitman Bang says I’m an old soul,” he jokes, a wry grin on his face. She rolls her eyes.

“That’s just a polite way of saying he’s surprised that you’re this young and already depressed,” she snorts, but he can tell that there’s no malice to it. Still, it’s so unexpected of her that he has to do a double-take before bursting out laughing. 

He doesn’t even notice the pedestrian light flash on until she links her pinky with his and walks him across the street. Surprising even himself, he can’t bring himself to really mind that much. In due time, he’s found himself growing adjusted to her touchiness. It’s kind of nice, when he thinks about it. It makes him feel a little less like an interloper. Makes him feel like he belongs where he is.

“It’s fine!” she assures him. He doesn’t look very convinced. “We’re in broad daylight, Yoongi. I just finished grocery shopping.” She lifts her bag-lined arms up for emphasis. “It was my turn this week. Kyunghee and I take turns with groceries since our mom isn’t around.”

“Makes sense,” Yoongi says. Now that she mentions it, they’d only ever mentioned having to avoid their father whenever everyone came over to the Lim household. He’d always just assumed their mom was out or at work or upstairs—never that she wasn’t around at all. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t curious about it, but it seems too heavy of a topic to pry about right now, especially when he already has somewhere to be.

“What about you?” she asks. “Where’d you come from? Or are you headed somewhere?”

“Work,” he explains. “Sort of. It’s just a part-time job. I haven’t technically started yet, but I’m going to. It’s a delivery thing, so I’m just going to test the delivery bike so that they can see that I actually know how to drive and won’t ride around like a crazy person.”

“Like a motorcycle?” she asks enthusiastically. “A real one? You know how to ride a motorcycle?”

“Yeah,” he says as nonchalantly as he can manage, secretly revelling in how much it impresses her. It’s cute of her, he thinks, the way she’s so wowed by the little things. It’s like every conversation with her is an ego boost.

“Can I come watch?” she asks hopefully, eyes glittering with excitement.

And how could he possibly say no to that?

It’s a little silly, how bouncing-off-the-walls excited she is when they get there. Even the old couple who own the restaurant he’s supposed to be delivering for are enamored with her, wrapped up in conversation about meat buns or something. She really is genuinely sweet with them, so much so that they barely take notice when Yoongi mounts the bike they’ve prepared for him to test-ride.

It’s an older Yamaha model, the ‘YD250’ on the scratched up by what he assumes can only be years of wear and tear. He thinks nothing of it as he revs the bike up to life, but before he can take off and begin driving, he’s cut off by Yuri’s voice.

“Hey, hey, hey!” she calls out. “You should be wearing a helmet!”

“It’s in the box,” the old man explains. 

“I’ve ridden without one before,” Yoongi mutters, resisting to roll his eyes at their safety concerns. And Yuri calls him the old person. Even so, he opens the delivery bike box mounted on the back of and reaches in to grab hold of the big black helmet so that he can put it on. “Happy?”

“Very,” Yuri says, sounding far too pleased for his liking. The old woman chuckles at their banter.

Yoongi takes off in a flash after that, quickly riding around the busiest blocks and most bustling streets a couple times, the image of Yuri’s enthusiastic eyes as he rode away on the motorcycle burned into his mind. It’s nice to be admired so deeply. It’s the only reason he’s still on board with the whole idol thing, after all. He doesn’t want to rely on his parents and their money for everything, though, so right now he just needs this job to help support his training. 

He’s officially got the job, they inform him when he gets back. They also tell him that Yuri has been vouching for him in the mere minutes that he was gone. She ducks her head to hide her blush at that, and he finds her shyness in the moment impossibly cute. It only intensifies when she pipes up.

“Can I join you? On the back, I mean?” she asks bashfully. “I’ve, um, never ridden one before. I just think it’d be neat. You can just take me home, if you want. It’s not super far from here, I think.” In any other circumstance, he’d say yes in a heartbeat, but she’s asking him this question in front of his employers. Thankfully, the two nod when he looks to them for permission.

He can’t but feel kind of mortified by the way the old couple coos at him when he takes off his helmet off and places it atop her head, taking extra care to fasten the buckle tight. 

“Cute,” she says. “But what about you?” It’s the little things like these that remind her how thoughtful and softhearted he is, even if he doesn’t really care to show it.

“I’ll be fine. I’ve ridden without one before,” he echoes his earlier sentiment. She doesn’t look convinced, but the old man speaks up before she can get a word in.

“Get your girlfriend home safe, alright?” he says, clapping his hand down onto Yoongi’s shoulder a little too forcefully. Both him and Yuri send each other an embarrassed glance at his assumption, but neither can find it in them to correct the old man.

“Yes, sir,” is all Yoongi says.

The ride back home is a lot less nerve-wracking than he had expected. Yuri’s soft from head to toe, he notes, like a little human pillow. Against his expectations, the feeling of her form pressed against his back throughout their ride in the city feels more comforting than restricting. So much so that he actually feels a little bit disappointed when they get to her house and she has to let go.

He helps her unload her groceries from the delivery bike box, watching as she takes every bag but one. He reaches in to grab it until he sees what’s inside—ramyeon. The exact kind that spawns in his desk every week. At that moment, he realizes that she left that specific bag inside on purpose.

“This is for me,” he says. It's a statement, not a question.

“Mmhm,” she replies. “It’s my favorite brand. It’s got that little egg brick in there, you know the one? These things are mostly carbs, so I think it’s a good source of protein. Good for building muscles.” He frowns, baffled as to how she can be so nonchalant about all this.

“You don’t have to keep doing this, you know,” he says. “I have a job now, so I can buy my own food if I’m ever craving anything beyond those cardboard chicken breasts Hitman Bang gives us.” Yuri giggles at that. “I’m serious. I’ve already gotta pay you back for the last couple of weeks. I’m not sure if my salary is gonna be able to keep up.”

“Hey,” she says gently, staring him down a bit more earnestly now. “You don’t have to pay me back for anything, okay? The ones I get for you are only, like, 1200 won per little cup.”

“Isn’t 1200 won kind of a lot?”

“It’s not,” she assures him. “It’s not that big of a deal. It’s fine. It’s really fine. It doesn’t hurt me at all. If it did, I wouldn’t keep doing it.” Yoongi pulls a face, not entirely convinced.

“You may not feel bad, but like—I feel bad.”

“Well you shouldn’t.”

“But I do,” he says. Yuri sighs.

“Yoongi—”

“It’s not just the ramyeon, you know?” he says, staring mindlessly at some spot on the ground. Anywhere but her face. It’s a daunting task when he speaks so earnestly. “It’s just—you do so much for everyone all the time. And I’m just—I don’t even talk to anybody.”

“Hey.” Yuri speaks softly, taking one of his hands between both of hers in what he thinks is an attempt to comfort him. Her hands are just as soft as they were that night by the subway, he muses. “You can’t blame all that on yourself, you know? I know the other guys aren’t the best at being friendly and inclusive and all that, but that’s not your fault. It’s more of a time thing.”

“A time thing?” he asks.

“We’ve all known each other for, like, two or three years before you came here,” she explains. “ So I think they’re just trying to get used to you? But they don’t dislike you! If anything, I’m sure they’ll like you soon. I mean, I already like you, so it shouldn’t be too hard for them to follow suit.”

“Okay,” he says, thinking nothing of the flush that spreads up to the tips of his ears.

Namjoon supposes that now is as good a time as any when Yoongi steps into his studio.

He doesn’t know why he’s so nervous. After all, Yuri points out, Yoongi is the one alone in Seoul with nobody to talk to. When she puts it like that, it makes them all sound like assholes. Maybe they are. But it’s fine, because Namjoon is finally going to be nice and converse with him about something not music-related. The bar is on the floor. All he needs to do is open his mouth and say something.

“We need to talk,” Namjoon says. He immediately knows he’s said the wrong thing when Yoongi’s eyes widen like saucers, anxiously backing up until his back hits the door like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t be. “Oh God, no, not like that. You’re okay. You’re not in trouble.”

“Oh. Alright,” Yoongi says, visibly relaxing.

“I just, um. I wanted to talk,” he repeats. “I feel like I’ve been… mean? But I’m not trying to be. It’s just that I’m supposed to be the leader, but you’re the hyung. “And you also produce a lot of our songs—which I’m really, really grateful for, of course. I just don’t know how to talk about things as a leader without seeming disrespectful. I try to keep my mouth shut about it, but I guess that’s how things like that build up, you know?”

“My mom gave birth to me,” Yoongi says, seemingly out of the blue, and Namjoon laughs. It’s that loud, booming laugh of his that always fills up the whole room.

“What—?!” he laughs incredulously.

“Let me finish,” Yoongi says, hopelessly fighting to the smile off of his face. “My mom gave birth to me. My mom is older to me, obviously, and she’s done a lot for me, too. And of course I’m grateful for that, but that doesn’t mean I won’t fight her on some things. Doesn’t mean I have to agree with everything she says, because I haven’t. Neither have you—if we did, neither of us would be here right now. We’d be like, I don’t know, doing cram school or preparing for university shit or something like that. I think I’d resent her if that’s what I was doing right now just because I wanted to please her. That’s why it’s okay to fight. If we don’t, then all that resentment just grows.” Namjoon smiles fondly at him.

“You really are an old man,” he chuckles, prompting Yoongi to raise a brow at him. “Hitman Bang said the same thing, you know? About fighting being good, since conflicts just get bigger if you don’t fight.”

“Well… he’s right.”

“Wiser words were never spoken,” Namjoon replies.

“So no more not-fighting?” Yoongi asks. It’s so ridiculous, the way he has to phrase it—but Namjoon nods, so he supposes that it gets the point across well enough. “We’ll try to resolve problems instead of avoiding them completely.”

“No more not-fighting,” he agrees. “Resolving things. Not avoiding them.” He holds out a pinky.

It’s a ridiculously silly sight, Yoongi thinks, the way Namjoon’s large hand offers out a pinky for what he thinks must be a pinky promise. Seeing someone as big as Namjoon do something so childish is unfairly endearing. He must’ve picked up from Yuri, he muses. Yoongi can’t help but laugh.

“Did you just giggle?”

“Huh?”

“That was kind of cute, hyung.” Yoongi flushes a dusky pink.

“…shut up.”

Yuri doesn’t come in late on Sundays anymore, Yoongi muses.

She always used to come in late on Sundays, which was a stark contrast to her appearances right after school on weekdays and her early morning entrances on Saturdays. He doesn’t know how he didn’t notice before, but he supposes it’s a good thing that he does now. It means that at the very least, they’re taking note of each other’s presence. 

Yoongi does think it’s weird, but for as curious as he is, he is not nosy enough to ask about it. Normally, it wouldn’t even cross his mind to do so, but with the talk he had with Hitman Bang last week about getting along better with everyone, he’s having second thoughts.

Yuri may not be a fellow trainee, but she’s still a member of their team. He only just started talking easily to Namjoon, so Yuri is easily the most comfortable person to talk to. After a rather heated internal battle, he gives in and brings it up to her.

“I’m glad you come in on Sundays, now,” he says, as nonchalantly as he can manage. “What cleared your schedule up?”

“Oh!” she says, pleasantly surprised that Yoongi is taking the first step in making conversation. “My mama worked as a vocal teacher before she divorced my dad and moved away, so my little brother Daniel and I would go over there to help her, especially with translating stuff since her Korean wasn’t very good. I used to go over to help the other lady who works there on Sundays since she’s nice and I liked singing!  But Daniel handles all that now, so I’m free to work here with you guys.”

That’s certainly a can of worms. He’s learned more about her and her home life from this single conversation than he did from the night he was over at her house, but he doesn’t want to make her uncomfortable by pressing further about the deep shit, so he keeps his digging as shallow as he can.

“You sing?” he says, and she flushes.

“Yes,” she admits. “But like. Not in front of other people. That’s scary.”

“Like stage fright?”

“Sort of,” she says. “It’s different. More like, scary in the sense that you have to share your art that you’ve poured all your heart and soul into for so long. Because then when people reject it or don’t like it, you feel like they don’t like you. On top of that, people also care about visuals and dancing and aegyo, and like… how am I supposed to fulfill all those categories?”

“I get that,” he says. He always knew that music would be a big part of his life, but he never imagined he’d be performing for other people. The thought of scrutiny had always made his stomach churn, but that’s basically all that idol life was. He’s not sure how he’ll handle it. “You don’t think you’ll ever be singing on a stage one day?”

“Maybe? I don’t know. Maybe one day,” she says. “Maybe if I was more… you know.” She grimaces as she makes a vague gesture with her hand.

“Mm-hm.” Really, he doesn’t know, but it seems like a touchy subject. 

He deems it better not to pry.

Big Hit and Source Music are due to debut a girl group soon, Hitman Bang says.

Unlike the boys, they’ve even got a name—GLAM. Yoongi, however, has yet to know the group’s trainees beyond seeing them in passing. After all, Source is the one handling all the management and promotion and all that fancy stuff. 

(Hitman Bang says he’d never be able to manage a girl group because he doesn’t understand women. It takes all of Yoongi’s willpower to stifle a laugh when Yuri says she’s not surprised.)

Meanwhile, all Big Hit has to do is help make their music. 

Yoongi feels a bit of pressure when faced with the prospect of making music for somebody else. Music has always been a very personal process for him. The thought of someone else interpreting his work was both exciting and overwhelming. While the prospect of someone interpreting his work or liking his work enough to perform it piqued his interest, the idea of someone either fucking up something he made or pitching his work to someone who’d only reject it was anxiety-inducing.

To his relief, that is not what he is currently doing.

At the moment, he’s currently mixing a demo for one of GLAM’s future songs, touching up the vocals so that they stand out above the instrumental’s bouncy synths. It has a nice vibe to it, he muses. It’s in English, but he understands enough of it to make out that it’s about getting ‘too close’ to somebody who’s supposed to be a friend. Hitman Bang must’ve purchased it from some overseas songwriter. He’s not sure why. It seems like it’d be an expensive process, and even after buying it they’ll have to translate it back into Korean. What was the point of all that hassle?

At least it sounds nice, Yoongi supposes. It’s a cute, pop-based little R&B track with airy vocals. The high notes are clear and smooth, with a distinct little squeak at the end of the high notes. It’s almost familiar, he muses, but he’s listened to a lot of music in his lifetime, so—wait a minute.

Yuri. That’s Yuri’s voice.

He recognizes those little squeaks anywhere, reminiscent of the whiny tones she makes whenever she’s being stubborn about something. It’s harder to pick up on when she speaks in English, which he supposes he should’ve assumed she’d know how to speak. He recalls Namjoon offhandedly mentioning that she was his English tutor a couple of times, as well as Yuri mentioning translating for her mom. Still, he’s never actually heard it come out of her mouth. It’s kind of jarring.

Against his better judgement, he asks her about it.

“Oh! Um, yeah, that’s me,” she admits, laughing sheepishly. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“It’s good,” he assures her. “Your voice is pretty. The lyrics you wrote are catchy. I bet you could be an idol, if you wanted to.”

“Uh-uh. I don’t think so,” she says just a bit too forcefully, “I’m perfectly content just producing for you guys. Seriously.”

“That’s selfless of you,” he says. She shakes her head.

“It’s actually a little selfish, when I think about it,” she laughs nervously. “To be honest, I think a big part of my support comes from living vicariously through you guys. Saying it out loud makes it sound kind of awful, but you guys are doing things I could only ever dream of doing. I’m just here to make sure you guys are as successful as possible at all the things you’re doing, you know? Even though I’m not actually, like, putting in all the work and being on stage and all that.”

“You could, if you really wanted to,” he says encouragingly. She shakes her head.

“I mean, I don’t think I look very idol-like,” Yoongi muses. 

“You do!” she argues. Poking at his pale cheek to emphasize her next point, she says, “White as sugar, just like old man Bang said. You’ve got that glass skin, you know?” 

“That’s because I don’t go outside,” he says, self-deprecating as ever as he swats her hand away.

“Oppa,” she whines in a way he thinks is unfairly cute of her. “Just accept the compliment, okay?” He rolls his eyes, but relents to her wishes anyway.

“Thank you,” he says.

“You’re very welcome,” she says, sounding far too pleased with herself. “Don’t be like that, okay?”

“Like what?” he says, wrinkling his nose.

“Well… you know. Mean to yourself about how you look,” she explains. “Namjoon is the same, which is sad. And also just not great for an idol, you know? You have to be at least a little confident in your looks, or you’re gonna be miserable every time the stylists dress you. It takes them longer than you’d think. Or so I’ve heard.”

“There’s not much to be proud of,” he deflects, not missing the way that Yuri rolls her eyes like that. 

When she raises her hand, he thinks she’s gonna flick his forehead or prod at his face again or something, but instead she places a finger on the tip of his nose. He furrows his brows together.

“What—”

“Your nose is cute,” she says matter-of-factly. He can’t help the strangled noise of surprise that escapes him at that, face growing hot as he flusters. “And your pale skin makes it easier to see when you blush, too. That’s a strong charm point as well, I think. You’ve got lots of charms.” He turns away, shaking his head in disbelief. 

Still, it’s nice to know that somebody thinks so.

Yoongi presses the end call button on his phone just a little too forcefully.

Another phone call, another argument with his parents. It was instances like these that made him not want to call them at all. He’s always in this limbo of guilt, grateful that they paid for his trainee contract while also being angry at the way they constantly voice their disapproval. He slams his phone down onto his desk in frustration. 

Apparently, it was louder than he thought. His studio door opens up a sliver, just enough for Yuri to peek her head in.

“Hey,” she calls softly. “Everything alright in there?” Yoongi pulls a face that makes it obvious that no, he is not alright. “Can I come in, then?” 

Upon his nod of approval, she files into the room, gently closing the door shut behind her. She walks over and settles into the seat across from his, sliding it over next to his so she can lay her head on his shoulder. Her touch is comforting, he thinks.

“Talk to me,” she says. “What’s wrong?”

“Sometimes, I think I should just… I don’t know. Anything to stop shit like that from happening,” he sighs. “My parents nagging me, I guess. Just go back home. Go to college. Get a nine-to-five. Have a nice family, or something.” And Yuri frowns, because she gets it.

It’s something she’s spent many days and nights comforting Namjoon over when he’s just had another argument with his parents over the same exact thing. She wishes she could relate or understand, or anything to comfort him—but she can’t. 

She’s glad the two can talk to each other about it now, but she can’t help but feel a little jealous that she can’t be a part of the conversation and can help them. She almost scoffs at herself for envying them being able to bond over their unsupportive parents. How fucked up was that?

Heaving a sigh, she hops up and takes a seat on the edge of his desk, careful to mind his production equipment. She swings her feet up into his lap, in that very casually touchy Yuri-esque way of hers. Impulsively, he brings a hand up to gently tap at her shin. She tries not to giggle at the ticklish sensation.

“Yoongi,” she starts, as seriously as she can manage. “Not to be, like. A downer or anything. But when your parents are gone, where would that put you? Stuck in a job you hate for no reason?”

“Six feet under,” he snorts, and she gasps.

“Not funny!” she whines, kicking at his hand. Her assault on his poor palm only gets worse when he bursts out laughing. “So not funny!”

“Sorry, sorry,” he says, but he’s still laughing.

“I really am trying to be supportive,” she huffs, a bit less childishly, now. “But I can’t like. Get it, get it, you know? The only reason I have any idea what to say here is ‘cause I’ve had this talk before. You know, if you two tried talking to each other more about personal stuff, I think you’d see that you and Namjoon are more alike than you might think. I’m not going to spill his business, but. I’ll just say that I think if anyone were to get it, it’d be him. It took some coaxing from my dad, but both my parents are okay with me pursuing music, now. As long as I took the producer route and not the idol route, at least. But still. It’s a good start. I’m lucky. I’ve got it better than a lot of people do, I think.”

“Would you?”

“Hm?”

“Take the idol route,” he clarifies, looking down at her shoes. “If you were given the choice.”

Sometimes, Yoongi feels like he’s never been given a choice. It feels like he’s been given every setback in the world. He’s never had the support or the funds or the hunger for fame that so often accompanied those pursuing music. He can barely remember why or when or what began his relationship with music, but he so vividly remembers feeling it, feeling like music chose him rather than the other way around. He can’t help but wonder what someone who seems to have been given almost all the choice in the world has to say about the only restrictions she’s been given.

Not much, it seems.

“Oh, um, nah. I don’t think so,” she laughs nervously. “I’m just—I’m not really pretty enough?”

“You are pretty,” he says, too quickly and too naturally to be insincere. He doesn’t miss the way that she ducks her head to hide the flush flooding into her cheeks.

This must be the vague ‘you know’ thing she was always talking about, Yoongi muses. He really should’ve picked up on it from the moment she said she didn’t look very idol-like. He’s never been the type to kiss up, so he hopes she knows that he means it. 

“You’re so—stop that,” she whines, embarrassed. She half-heartedly attempts to kick at his hand again, but makes no move to try again when she misses. “You’re too much.”

“I’m serious,” he says.

“I know,” she squeaks, hands flying up to cover her flushed cheeks up in embarrassment. “That’s the embarrassing part. Get some taste or something.”

“Don’t be a hypocrite, Yuri,” he says, rolling his eyes. “You always tell Namjoon and I not to be insecure about appearances, but you act the same when it comes to yours.”

“That’s different,” she whines, “You and Namjoon are gonna be in front of the cameras. I’m gonna be behind them. I don’t need to muster up any kind of confidence for that. Which is good. Because I don’t have it.”

“Looks don’t matter to me,” he says flatly. “But confidence does. I’m not gonna hold your hand and tell you that you’re pretty all day, even if I think it’s true, ‘cause you’re not gonna believe it no matter how many times I say it.”

“Ouch.”

“Let me finish,” he continues, “Even if it isn’t your looks, you deserve to at least be confident in something. Your music, your grades, your music, whatever. You’re generous and thoughtful. Don’t let society make you miserable just because all they care about is appearances.”

Yuri doesn’t say anything, her face still buried in her hands. More than a little bit concerned at this point, Yoongi flicks her forehead through her bangs. 

“Hey, you good in there?” he asks. She doesn’t reply. Just sniffles. Oh, fuck. “Uh, sorry, I—” Yuri shakes her head, finally lowering her hands.

“Don’t be,” she laughs nervously, still teary-eyed. “That was one of the nicest things a boy ever said to me. You should be, like, a motivational speaker or something.” He snorts.

“I can’t give advice to like. People I don’t care about,” he says, grinning awkwardly, “I’d just tell them to get their shit together and I’d get fired.” Yuri can’t fight the smile off of her cheeks at that.

She’s sure she’d know that he cares through his Yoongi-isms alone, but it’s nice to hear it from the man himself. He wouldn’t be giving this advice if he didn’t care. 

Min Yoongi cares about her, and it makes her heart feel warm.

Lim Yuri has become an unexpected addition to Yoongi’s delivery sprees.

Yuri’s arms, small and gentle, have become a comforting presence as they wrap around his waist. The old couple doesn’t seem to mind the extra person joining him on his trips, content with her politeness and the fact that she isn’t demanding any money despite providing help. They coo about the highs and lows of young love whenever Yuri arrives to join him on his trips, and Yoongi can’t find the energy within himself to correct them.

Things go on like this for a long time, hours, days, weeks, of this halcyon. Her arms keep him warm in the winter and her cold hands keep him refreshed in the late months of spring. The old husband hands them a bag of leftover food for them to eat together, an wistful smile on his face. 

They eat in the midst of impromptu therapy sessions, which usually consist of Yuri comforting Yoongi as he complains about his problems. It’s okay, though, because she likes to give advice and she likes how deep his voice is when he talks and she doesn’t have many problems of her own to complain about, anyway. When she does talk, it’s always lighthearted, talking about a song she wrote or something dumb Kyunghee and Daniel did or how cute Namjoon’s dimples were on that particular day. 

One day, curiosity kills the cat, and Yoongi asks a question that’s been killing him from the start.

“Why do you like Namjoon so much, anyway?” It’s something Yoongi asks out of the blue, so much so that he doesn’t even realize he’s asking it until it slips out. He’s not sure what he’s expecting until she answers, and when he does, he realizes that his expectation was literally anything but what she says next.

“No reason,” she says, and he’s so thrown for a loop by the words that leave her that he practically stumbles over his feet when he hears them.

“Wait, seriously?” he says. “I’ve read your lyrics, you know. You’re good with words.”

“I am?” she says, sounding far too surprised for his liking.

“Yeah. Which is why I thought you’d have a way better answer than that,” he says. “I expected you to talk about…” He pauses as he sifts through his brain for all the things that he personally finds attractive about Namjoon. “…I don’t know, his dimples or his height or his good grades or something.” All things that he lacks, Yoongi muses with insecurity.

“Oh my God. Those are all, like, great and all, but they’re not like… why I like him,” Yuri giggles. “He’s just—I don’t know. There’s a lot of things about him that make me like him, but I can’t, like, come up with an itemized list. It’s not like one day he reached a quota in traits I liked and suddenly I liked him. I just realized I did. I just… felt it. It felt right. He felt right.”

“Oh.” Yoongi feels a pang of jealousy at that, like an itch he can’t scratch. Maybe it’s because a tender part of him can only dream of being loved so dearly.

He silently wonders what it would be like to be loved by a person like Lim Yuri.

Namjoon has been feeling himself growing fonder and fonder of Yoongi in these past months.

Finally learning to talk to him without being all weird has helped with that. Without the formalities, they’re both able to speak a lot more freely. In the time that they’ve done so, the two have been able to talk about and bond over their rocky family situations and their choice to pursue music.

What’s fueled his fondness more than anything, though, is Yoongi’s little habits—the way he runs a hand through his jet black hair as he shyly recommends jazz and art study because they seem like the type of thing you’d like, Namjoonie, the way he always wears those grey jacket and sweats because they’re warm and winter is starting to trickle in, the way he smiles with his gums just like Yuri said he would.

Those two have gotten impossibly close lately, Namjoon notes. Now, he doesn’t think he’s the most perceptive person in the world, but it’s hard to miss the tenderness in their actions. Every time he steals a glance in their direction, they’re exchanging knowing glances or whispering softly to each other or linking pinkies in the way that Yuri loves to do so much.

It’s only natural to conclude that Min Yoongi and Lim Yuri are involved.

He doesn’t know why it bothers him so much. It has no reason to, right? But it does. He combs through his mind for any possible reason that it should. Maybe it’s because Yoongi, who’s agreed to be more honest with him, hasn’t told him about it. Maybe it’s because Yuri, ever perceptive, has been one of his closest friends for years and yet seems to have no intentions in telling him about it despite how painfully obvious their interactions make things.

The familiar sting of loneliness rises sharply in his chest when he sees them interact, like they’re in their own little world, with seemingly no room for him. He feels like he’s spying on their relationship when he shouldn’t be. He feels like a voyeur. He feels like an interloper.

Maybe this is how Yoongi felt when he first came to Big Hit, he muses. If this is how he feels just watching him and Yuri, he can’t imagine having to watch everyone who’s known each other for years talk and laugh together from the outside. The more he thinks about it, the more he feels selfish and ridiculous for being so bothered by it. After all, who was he to meddle in their affairs?

Maybe it’s high time he finds one of his own.

Yuri’s sheets are soft, Yoongi thinks.

They’re at her house today, Yuri not feeling very keen on having this conversation in the Big Hit building for fear that Namjoon might walk in on them while they’re talking about him. Right now, she’s half-heartedly producing something on her bedroom computer and venting to Yoongi as he lies on her bed.

She rants about how Namjoon has been talking a lot about girls lately, clearly bothered. She especially seems bothered by the fact that Namjoon won’t let her be as touchy with him as she used to be. Normally, Yoongi wouldn’t give a damn about other people’s affairs, but things are different, this time. While he’s not personally bothered by it, he doesn’t like the fact that it bothers her so much, for whatever reason he can’t quite pinpoint. 

Dear Lord, she even goes into detail, describing each and every pretty girl in a way that is far less flowery than he believes Namjoon would speak about a girl.

“And then there’s Jieun, who they all say is a good kisser. What does that even mean? Like, what the hell makes someone a good kisser? You just jam your lips together, right?”

“You’ve never been kissed,” he says, more a statement than a question.

“Yes?”

“Kinda late, don’t you think?” he says. Yuri gasps as she smacks at his arm, clearly mortified.

“No it’s not! Shut up!” she says indignantly. He’s trying to take her seriously, but her squeaky little whines make that hard.

“Sorry—” he tries apologizing through his laughter.

“You don’t sound sorry at all!” she whines. “It’s not funny, okay? It’s fine! I’m still young!”

“You’re sixteen already!”

“I’m only sixteen!” she huffs, crossing her arms and turning away from him. “I-I have time, okay? We can’t all be heartbreakers, Min Yoongi.”

“Heartbreaker?” he repeats. “I haven’t had a girlfriend since middle school.”

“I never said you were one,” she defends herself.

“You implied it.”

“I—whatever!” she huffs. “I’m saving my first kiss for someone special. And it’s gonna be somewhere magical, like under the cherry blossoms at the Goyang Flower Festival or on a picnic blanket under the stars on New Year’s or something.”

Oh my God. He’s trying so hard to stop his laughter. 

“Did you swallow a fucking romance novel?” he laughs. “My first kiss took place in the hallway after gym class, so like. Don’t be surprised if it sucks and you mess up and slobber all over them or something like that.”

When he turns to look at Yuri, she looks incredibly nervous. She’s come to a still in her spinny chair, nervously pulling her hair over her face as she ponders his words with utmost seriousness.

“Do you think that?” she asks, voice small.

“What?” he asks. Wordlessly, she sighs, wheeling her chair backwards over to where he’s lying on her bed. She cranes her neck back onto her bed, coming face-to-face with him.

“Do you think I’ll mess up my first kiss?” she says softly. Not that she needs to speak anything but—she’s so close he can feel her breath against his nose. He pulls away, face aflush.

“You’ll be fine,” he mutters, voice cracking. 

Yuri gives a huff, seemingly dissatisfied with his answer. She hops down from her chair—there’s an inherent cuteness in the fact that her feet don’t touch the ground when she sits on it, Yoongi muses—and up onto the bed, right next to him. He rolls his eyes when she settles onto her knees and urges him to sit up, too. He obliges, in spite of his annoyance.

“What was your first kiss like? Aside from the whole being in the hallway thing?” she whispers, like they’re telling secrets. There’s nobody else in the house but Daniel (who’s probably got his headphones cranked up to a hundred percent), so Yoongi can’t help but find her antics endearing.

“My first kiss was just a kiss. Nothing bad. Nothing mind-blowing,” he says with a shrug.

Even that’s a bit of a stretch. They were both gross and sweaty and their teeth clacked together. But he already feels kinda bad for making her doubt herself so much, and he doesn’t want to aggravate her worries.

“So how did… did you just…” she gestures awkwardly with her friends as she trails off, unable to articulate whatever she wants to say. He gets it, though. He always does.

“You just go for it,” he says, “It’s the kinda thing you just feel your way through. Just don’t think too hard about it. You’re good at doing things without thinking, so it should go well for you.”

“Gee, thanks,” she says, rolling her eyes at the back-handed compliment. “It’s just—I don’t wanna mess up in the future if I ever… you know.”

“Just say kiss,” he teases. “It’s not as sacred as you’re making it out to be. It’s just lips-on-lips. If humans never decided it was a thing to kiss people you liked, it wouldn’t be important at all. It’d just be an exchange of germs.”

“It’s important to me!” she bristles, so aggressively that it throws him for a loop. She takes note of her overreaction, coughing awkwardly before returning to her normal volume. She repeats, “I-It’s important to me. I just want it to be nice. I don’t wanna be disappointed. And I don’t wanna be someone else’s disappointment. That’s why I’m asking you this.”

“What are you asking?” he says, raising a brow.

“Augh!” She buries her face into her hands, miserably failing an attempt to hide her flushed cheeks. Peeking through her fingertips, she gently continues, “Just… hypothetically… purely for practice reasons… it wouldn’t count as my first kiss if you could, um. Help me. Try. Practice. I don’t know.”

The room goes impossibly quiet. She can’t say a word after that, the pair just staring at each other in awkward silence, him impossibly floored at the suggestion. Their faces go blank as Yuri processes what the hell she just did and Yoongi processes what the hell just happened.

When it all finally clicks, Min Yoongi has the audacity to fucking smirk, gums showing and all.

“Practice,” he repeats, no lilt to it, no bite. His attempts to remain straight-faced are to no avail, because her pouting up at him is all it takes for him to burst out laughing.

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” she yells, pushing him back down onto the bed. “Just forget it! Forget I said anything!” She hooks a leg over his waist, pinning him down before grabbing a pillow and smacking him as hard as she can with it. The pain does little to quell his laughter.

“Get off!” he laughs in-between smacks. “You’re too much!”

“Are you calling me heavy?!” she asks, more fake-offended than anything.

“What—no! What the fuck made you think that?!” he tries to sound indignant, but he’s still laughing, and before he knows it, she’s laughing too. When the laughter subsides and the room goes quiet, they both realize what kind of situation they’re in. Yuri’s still got him pinned down, having just talked about first kisses. Kisses in general. Having just proposed that they kiss. The air goes tense.

“So,” Yoongi says, cutting through the silence.

“So.”

“I didn’t. Uh. I didn’t say no.” He has the decency to look embarrassed, now, cheeks flushed and eyes blown wide. “Unless you don’t want to.”

The two stare at each other for a moment after that, like they’re waiting for the other to back down. A Clint Eastwood-style duel of the eyes, so to speak.

“I won’t start something I can’t finish,” she says decidedly.

She leans in as promised,

presses her nose against his—

“I’m sorry!”

—and promptly places both hands over his mouth.

The motion isn’t harsh enough to hurt too bad—only a light sting—but it is very sudden. Yoongi blinks up at her a couple of times in surprise just to reassure himself that whatever that was actually just happened.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats. “For um—yeah. I’m sorry. I don’t think I can do this? Because, um, you know. If someone asks me when my first kiss was, I’ll have to say, ‘Oh, it was on my bed at like, 11PM when I was in high school. A-And that already makes me sound terrible! And then when they ask with who, I’ll have to say, ‘Oh, just with my friend that I work with so I could practice kissing for the future since I was in love with our friend!’ And that’ll be my stupid goddamn answer! And that’s… that’s, um… that’s kind of not very romantic…”

Her voice tapers off towards the end, quieting in what Yoongi thinks is embarrassment as she takes his hands off of his mouth. It really does sound kind of ridiculous when she says it out loud. Maybe Yoongi was onto something when he laughed at her for sounding like she ‘swallowed a romance novel.’ To her relief, his next response is anything but patronizing.

“Hey,” he says, “Relax. Don’t apologize for changing your mind, that’s just—that’s just weird. Don’t force yourself to do shit you don’t want to. That’s weird.”

She’s so close. They’re still nose-to-nose, breath tickling each other’s lips every time the other speaks. He awkwardly pats the back of her thigh a couple of times, which she reads as a signal to roll off of him. She obliges. Even though she knows he doesn’t mean much by that little touch, the intimacy of it still makes her blush. Thankfully, he can’t see it with the both of them laying back down onto the bed and staring awkwardly at the ceiling above them. Yoongi pretends to find interest in the faded glow-in-the-dark stars on her bedroom ceiling.

“Okay,” she says.

“Okay,” he repeats.

“Sorry,” she says again.

“It’s fine,” he reassures her, because as mortifying as the situation is for them both, it really is fine.

She blindly reaches her hand out to find his, feeling around until their fingers meet. When he fondly links his pinky in hers, the way she always does with him, she decides that a kiss isn’t the kind of thing she should be rushing into, anyways.

Yoongi just assumes it isn’t weird.

After all, Yuri settles against him so naturally, her face buried into his neck and her studio chair sidled next to his as he sits at his desk and works on mixing what he hopes will end up being a song on their first album, whenever that comes out. Were it not for the way that her breath hit the sensitive skin of his neck, he would barely even register that she was there.

Well. Maybe not barely.

She’s so warm, the way she presses against him. She’s always warm, except in her hands, but it’s fine because his hands are always colder. Her cold fingers thread through his hair, and it reminds him of how accustomed he’s become to her touchiness. It’s just a habit of hers, he’s since learned. She has a lot of little habits he once found weird, but now only sees those habits as things that make her Yuri. 

Yuri who hides behind her hair when she’s shy or nervous. Yuri who only wears half her jacket and leaves the other half hanging off for no reason. Yuri who wordlessly leaves ramen cups on his desk. Yuri who has to link her pinky with someone else’s when she’s nervous. Yuri who awkwardly bends her hands to link both of hers together when she doesn’t want to be a bother.

But it’s come to the point where she’s never a bother anymore. If she were, he wouldn’t have situated himself in her life as the outlier, the one person who coaxes her to talk about all of her problems because she’s the one resolving everyone else’s. Yuri taking always feels like giving, because he takes in her little habits and private thoughts that she shares with him and nobody else. It makes him feel more important than it makes him feel annoyed.

She has a special bond with everyone at Big Hit, and even with the Source Music and JYP trainees they practice with—she wouldn’t be going out of her way to force them all to resolve their conflicts, otherwise, even if they see her as nosy and meddling because of it.

In everyone being special, he supposes, he has gone full circle in no longer being special. Maybe he is, but he’s not as important to her as say, Kyunghee, her own damn brother, or Namjoon, who she stares at like he holds all the world’s answers. With that, Yoongi takes his place in her heart at a solid bronze (at the very most), which stings a little more than he’d like to admit. 

He hasn’t had much opportunity to grow as close to anyone at Big Hit—hell, anyone in Seoul—yet. Maybe that’s why he’s grown so attached to her like this. As sad as it is, she is quite literally the one person in the whole city that he’s close to. Listening to all her problems like this makes him feel like he’s just as important to her, so he can feel a little bit less pathetic about holding her so close to his heart. Even if the problems that she tells him reveal anything but.

“I’m so stupid,” she whines against his neck. Her warm breath gives him goosebumps.

“Jeez, you’re not. How many times do we have to go over this?” He’s been comforting her over this for the past half-hour now.

Namjoon has a girlfriend now. A tall girl from his advanced algebra class with great math skills and pale skin and sharp eyes—everything that Yuri does not have. He knows she’s insecure about it from the way she wrinkles her nose when she sees her reflection in the mirrors of the practice rooms. It makes him want to throttle Namjoon, despite him probably not having a clue.

“Sorry,” she says, her voice small, “For dumping all this on you, you know? I don’t wanna be that friend who only ever talks to you when I have problems. I kinda feel like I’m using you.”

“Hey, hey. It’s fine. Relax,” he says, feeling her nod softly into his neck as he continues, “It doesn’t bother me.” In fact, he prefers it, is what he doesn’t tell her. Humiliating as it is, he revels in feeling like he’s giving something, when he always feels like he’s taking from her. Like everyone is taking from her.

He knows what it’s like to be a producer, always behind the scenes of it all. She says she’s perfectly content with it, but he once said the same thing back in Daegu. But even when he chose to do things and make things for other people like this, there was always that underlying feeling of feeling like something has been taken from you. Sometimes it was just wanting the same amount of recognition as the people singing the songs you made.

Being young in society meant a desire for acceptance, and what bigger acceptance was there than fame? He recognizes the stars in her eyes whenever they practice with the other trainees in JYP’s big, shiny entertainment building because his own eyes held them once, too.

He’s still a trainee, so maybe they still do.

But for now, he’s letting himself dream small, living in the studio whenever he doesn’t have to practice those stupid dances Hitman Bang has them do. For now, music comes first, especially with his current job as one of the company’s main producers.

Producing is a lot harder with one hand, he muses, noting that she has at some point monopolized his left one when he wasn’t paying attention. He interlocks their fingers in spite of it all. With his ability to perform keyboard shortcuts impaired, he delegates the task of manually clicking things to his free hand. It’s annoying, but the feeling of her hand fit so snugly in his makes the inconvenience feel worth it. They sit like that for a while, quiet as one of her hands threads through his hair and the other softly strokes at his hand with her thumb.

“I like your hands,” she says. “They’re nice to hold.” Yoongi swallows. She’s so close to him that he’s scared she’ll hear how fast his heart is beating. To his relief, she says nothing of it.

“They’re just hands,” he says as nonchalantly as he can manage. “Cold hands.”

“Usually when you hold someone’s hand they get all hot and sweaty and clammy and gross, which is why I do the pinky-linking thing,” she muses, “Yours don’t do that, so they’re nice to hold. And they’re honestly not even that cold.”

“They are,” he argues.

“I don’t think your hands are ever that cold,” she says, her voice a teasing lilt. “I think you just keep saying that so you have an excuse to have your hands held. I bet you secretly love skinship.” He rolls his eyes, tightening an arm around her tiny frame.

“Watch it. Your life is in my hands,” he says, as flatly as he can manage for maximum ominosity.

With a squeak, she flies off of him like he’s on fire. He can’t help but smile, wide and gummy, at her Yuri-esque antics. Even when she turns away, shaking her head fondly, he can feel his heart swell in his chest as he looks at her. It reminds him why she’s the first one at Big Hit he was able to really talk to. Everything feels easy and comfortable with her, the way he felt back in Daegu.

His reverie is interrupted by Namjoon’s voice booming from the studio next to his.

“Yuri!” he calls. “Can you look at this for me?”

Hearing this, she does a little happy dance with her feet. It’s a habit he usually finds endearing, but right now it just makes his stomach twist. She waves him off, dropping everything—she even forgets her water bottle on his desk—to run off and attend to whatever Namjoon needs her for.

“I’ll be back,” she says in a sing-song voice as she’s out the door. 

He knows she will. She always comes back to him whenever Namjoon isn’t available.

Yoongi runs a frustrated hand through his hair, not sure why it bothers him so much. The fact that he doesn’t know why it bothers him so much bothers him more than anything else.

Yuri is awake at the Big Hit dorms at two in the morning.

This is nothing out of the ordinary, though. Whenever their dad was out of the country on a business trip, she always took the opportunity to stay out past curfew as a chance to spend her nights at the Big Hit studio while Kyunghee played video games with Donghyuk in the dorms. She always had to hide in the studio until early dawn so as to not get caught by Hitman Bang, who made it clear that he detested the idea of someone so young being out late just to work for him.

Today is different, though. Today, she’s in the dorms, taking a well-deserved break from work as she lays on her stomach next to Yoongi and watches a movie with him. She brought the DVD over from her house, thinking nothing of the way her father’s old American movies lined the TV stand until the day Yoongi bashfully mentioned wanting to watch it.

So here they are, watching a Korean-subbed version of Scarface on the tiny screen of his laptop. Yuri can’t enjoy the movie very much, finding it a bit too bleak and violent for her liking. And it just never gets better. It’s just hit after hit, one bad thing happening after another. She’s sure that if she squinted hard enough, she would be able to appreciate the cinematography and whatever deeper meaning the film holds, but that sounds like too much brainpower to be using at two in the morning.

Yoongi seems to find it interesting, though. He’s enraptured by every word that leaves the main character’s mouth, so much so that Yuri would be surprised if he forgot she was there. It really seems like he’s in his own little world. Instead, she finds her entertainment in his little gasps of delight, the innocent widening of his eyes, the way his grins of anticipation look as they’re illuminated by the dim light of his laptop screen.

It’s unfair, she thinks, how pretty Yoongi is. Perfect skin and catlike eyes and gummy smiles and he’s not even trying—hell, he doesn’t even have a skincare routine! God really does pick favorites. Yuri absentmindedly brushes a strand of hair out of his eyes, one he’s probably too entranced by the movie to notice. She hums softly at the way he leans into her touch without thinking.

She wonders if anyone is ever going to look at her this way.

There’s no time for her musings to continue when she hears what sounds like someone throwing their guts up in the bathroom. It stops for a moment before continuing, and Jesus, that sounds pretty brutal. She nudges Yoongi with her arm.

“Sounds like someone’s dying in there,” she says. He furrows his brows together in concern.

“Huh?”

“Someone’s not having a good time in the bathroom,” she says. “Did Namjoon undercook the chicken breasts again or what?” As if on cue, the poor guy is retching again, and Yoongi shakes his head.

“Jihoon,” he says, pausing the movie before he stands up and dusts himself off. “He hasn’t been feeling well for a while, now.” Yuri gets up and follows Yoongi when he makes his way towards said bathroom, cringing at the distinct sound of dry heaving as they draw closer. Yoongi knocks on the door before entering, his frown deep-set when he sees Jihoon hunched over the toilet.

“Hey,” Yuri says softly, stepping forward and placing a comforting hand on the small of his back. “Are you okay, buddy?” Yuri and Jihoon aren’t exactly the closest—of all the Big Hit trainees, Namjoon and Yoongi nabbed that spot—but he’s still nice to talk to, always offering to walk her home when it got too late like a good oppa. Seeing him like this breaks her heart.

“‘M fine,” he rasps, despite the pain in his voice telling them all that he is anything but. “Probably just food poisoning. No big deal.”

“Food poisoning for three days?” Yoongi says, obviously in disbelief. “It could be a stomach bug. Or God forbid, appendicitis. You really need to get yourself checked out.”

“It’s fine, hyung. I—” he begins, but the need to heave again cuts him off. Yuri rubs comforting circles into his back some more, unsure of what else to do. She sends a questioning glance Yoongi’s way, who looks just as concerned as she does.

“We’re taking you to the hospital,” he says. Jihoon groans, but doesn’t have the energy to resist.

The drive to the hospital is tense, Yuri filing in the back before Jihoon so he can lay his head against her shoulder and she can make sure he doesn’t throw up anymore. Meanwhile, Yoongi pushing is the edge of the speed limit, eyes darting back and forth between the road and the rear view mirror to make sure that they’re holding up okay in the back. Yuri sends him a reluctant thumbs up.

Yoongi insists that they take Jihoon to the emergency room, where they take Jihoon to the back. As soon as he’s out of eyeshot, Yuri watches with wide eyes as Yoongi takes out his wallet and puts down a hefty payment for the walk-in fee.

“I can pay for it,” she says, shaking her head as she fishes for her wallet in her own jacket pocket. Yoongi smiles, a bittersweet thing, at the unspoken words—she knows how much he’s struggled with money in the past. Even so, he shakes his head, reaching out to tenderly fit his hand into hers.

“There are worse things to spend my money on,” he says. “You can’t really put a price on anyone.”

Something in the way that she sees Yoongi snaps, then, but she has no clue as to what it is. She’s not sure if it’s the lack of sleep or the lateness of the night that makes her think this, but something about him reminds her of the moon, at that moment.

They stay like that the rest of the night, side-by-side in the seats of the hospital waiting room. Yoongi’s lashes flutter dreamily at the way a sleep-deprived Yuri noses against him, softly muttering sweet things against the sensitive skin of his neck and meaning every word.

“Your heart is warm, Min Yoongi.”

Yoongi can’t help but notice the way that Yuri’s wrap around him a little bit tighter during their deliveries, these days. More than that, he can’t help but notice how much he likes it.

He’s slowly accepting the fact that this might be a thing that he will have to address in both himself and with the rest of the Big Hit team later. Yuri being her normal touchy self was one thing, but him finding himself enjoying her touch rather than just allowing it was… new. It’s scary and exciting all at once, but mostly the former. For now, while it isn’t a problem, he chooses to ignore it.

He still puts the helmet on her head himself, pulling the buckles tight and making sure it’s fully secure before anything else. He takes extra care with it these days, tender in the way he always does it for her like it’s the first time. He feels like a little kid all over again, the way he cares like this.

It’s easy for him to psyche himself out of things, convincing himself that she’s just being all touchy because that’s how she is, but then she does little things that make him think it isn’t all in his head. Just last month, she gifted him with a black Yamaha helmet, covered with stickers of Kumamon and logos of brands he likes and Scarface, even though he remembers her having a pointed disinterest in the film while they watched it on his bedroom floor.

He never anticipated that he’d actually need it one day.

He doesn’t know how it happens, who went too fast or too slow or turned when they weren’t supposed to. All he remembers is tightening his arms around Yuri as they tumbled off the bike and onto the ground, hoping that she’d be okay. 

She always kicked in his protective instinct, being so small and so delicate. The thought of her getting hurt because she wanted to help him out makes him feel impossibly guilty.

Yoongi’s fading in and out of consciousness, vaguely registering Yuri’s voice sobbing into her phone on what seems to be a 1339 call.

“He’s—he’s unconscious,” he hears her sniffle, “Oh my God, he—um, no, no, he has a helmet on. His head is under the car. His body’s sticking out from under it. I just—I don’t wanna move him, ‘cause, oh my God, what if I hurt him? Oh God, what do I do? I don’t know what to—no, ma’am, the street is—um...”

When he wakes up, he’s lying in a hospital bed, groggy and miserable and aching to the joints. He’s in the emergency room, he realizes, the same one he drove Jihoon to only weeks ago. His heart sinks when the doctor informs him that he’s got an incredibly bad shoulder injury—no more boxing, no more basketball, he tells him. It was nearly dislocated, he says, so don’t move too much. Don’t put too much pressure on it. Just relax for a month or so.

This sends him into a full-blown panic. He doesn’t have a month. He’s never been much of a dancer—of everyone, she should probably be practicing the most. This sets him back far behind the others. How is he gonna catch up? How is he gonna make up for that?

As soon as the doctor leaves, the weight of the whole world hits him all at once. He can even feel himself hyperventilating, but is halted by the shock of a gentle hand reaching out to grasp his. When he turns, he sees Yuri sitting on the hospital chair next to him. Lord, he was so out of it he didn’t even realize she was there. She’s got bandages on her legs, but other than that, no major injuries. He breathes a sigh of relief.

“Hey,” she says softly.

“Hey,” he says, slowly blinking up at her.

“Why did you do that?” she says, voice cracking.

“Huh?”

“You, um, kind of,” she begins, “…broke my fall? You held me. I don’t know. I crushed your shoulder. That’s why it’s all fucked up. Why would you do that?”

“I—I don’t know,” he admits. “I wasn’t thinking. I just felt like it was the thing to do at that moment.” She whines pitifully at his answer, squeezing his hand as tight as she can.

“I just feel like I owe you one,” she says. “Something. Anything. I don’t know.”

The tender part of him tells him to assure her that she has no need to do any such thing. After all, nothing was more important than other people—especially Lim Yuri—but the scared part of him takes over.

“Make me a promise,” he says softly. She leans in to hear him better, nodding as she does so.

“Anything,” she says.

“Promise me you won’t tell the others about this injury. Please.” Yuri furrows her brows and widens her eyes upon hearing this, obviously not expecting that answer. She practically rips her hand from his at that, pulling back from him as if appalled.

“What?!” she says. “Yoongi, no! They have to know about this!”

“They’ll worry. They’ll bench me. They’ll pull me out,” he says. “I promise you, it’s better if they don’t know.”

“What, so they can make you dance and exercise and all that shit with your injured shoulder? If it was sprained, that’d be one thing, but this is a serious problem! You’re only gonna hurt yourself further by not telling them.”

“I don’t care. It’s fine.” Yuri shakes her head.

“I just don’t get it,” she says, sniffling. “How you can care so little about yourself when I—when everyone—cares about you so much.”

“I’ll be fine,” he assures her. “It’ll heal. Everything will, alright? I just need you not to tell anyone about it.”

“Of course,” she says, as flatly as she can manage. “I owe you one, after all.” Yoongi knows her well enough to sense the bite in her tone. He rolls his eyes.

“C’mon,” he clicks his tongue. “Don’t be like that.”

“Don’t be like that, then,” she says, pressing her back to the opposite wall of his little hospital room. “It’s just—it’s just so stupid, Yoongi.” She slides down against the wall and onto the floor, looking impossibly small and hopeless in a way that only makes him feel guiltier. “You don’t have to pay anyone back for any of the nice things we do. You think we do all that just to kiss ass, or what?”

“What—no! Of course not.”

“Then why am I keeping this a secret, huh? Tell me that,” she says. 

Yoongi pauses for a moment, deep in thought. Every single thought falls upon him, all at once. He thinks of the evaluations next weekend and he thinks about his family back home. He thinks about the money they spent on his trainee contract and he thinks about the amount they’ll have to pay off, regardless of whether or not he debuts. His heart beats wildly in his chest. His head pounds away.  His lips press together into a thin line.

“There’s so much at stake,” is all he can offer as an explanation. What else can he say?

“All the more reason to trust us, then, isn’t it?” she says desperately. “Come on. No way anyone would let the company drop you. I’d fight for you, you know that! We’d fight for you. No one else can rap and produce like you. Don’t you remember what Namjoon said? You can debut before him, or he can debut before you, but it’s important that everyone supports each other, always. He’d be here for you, if he knew. He wants to be there for you. We all want to be there for you. You’re so loved. You just have to trust us. You just have to let us in.”

“Sorry I don’t remember every little thing Namjoon says,” he scoffs. “I’m not you.”

“Are you really talking about that right now?!” she bristles. “This is serious, Yoongi!”

“I’m being serious,” he says firmly. “You’re the one bringing up Namjoon while I’m lying in a hospital bed. He’s the leader. He’s the one I’m worried most about. The whole group is built around him. I don’t know if I can trust him not to tell any of the staff about this. If he does—, if anyone does—they have a reason to drop me as a trainee. I can’t let that happen, Yuri.”

He doesn’t know why he’s saying these things. He’s talking out of his ass right now. After all, he trusts Namjoon. He likes Namjoon. But the pain in his shoulder and the claustrophobia of the tight little hospital room makes him feel anxious, restless, paranoid. He wants to get up and move and run or do something. But he can’t, so all he can do is project every negative feeling bogging down on him onto other people.

“If you can’t trust Namjoon,” she says softly. “Can’t you at least trust me?”

A beat of silence is her only answer, Yoongi’s lips pressed together into a thin line as he looks away.

“I can’t believe you,” she says, voice cracking. When he hears her begin to sniffle and sob, he has to force himself not to look back at her, guilt and shame bubbling up in his stomach.

He doesn’t even get to see her as she storms out, slamming the door shut behind her.

Yoongi feels incredibly alone.

He really shouldn’t, though—after all, his family comes all the way down from Daegu just to visit him while he’s in the hospital. They bring him all sorts of different foods, agreeing with his complaints that hospital food really, really sucks. After repeated assurances that he’ll heal just fine, they ask him about trainee life, about his food, about his friends. On the third day, they ask why nobody else has visited him. He lies and says that they’re all too busy training, when in reality they don’t even know that he’s here. 

The insecure, self-loathing part of himself wonders if they’re even worried.

Rationally, he knows they are, because he misses them, too. They’ve been in such close proximity that it’d be impossible for them not to grow as close as they have in these past months. He chuckles softly whenever he thinks about the way they were so rarely separated, bonding and laughing over situations where Hoseok was using the shower while Donghyuk used the toilet and Namjoon brushed his teeth, all at the same time.

It only makes Yoongi feel worse about the last conversation he had with Yuri, making an ass out of himself over Namjoon of all people. Namjoon who he’s lived with the longest. Namjoon who he gives his shirts to when they come in two sizes too big. Namjoon who he holds so dearly. 

He wishes he didn’t have to be apart from everyone for so long to realize what an ass he was being.

It hits him the worst on the sixth day his family visits him and they bring him a cup of a very familiar brand of ₩1200 ramyeon. He saves the little egg brick for last. It tastes bitter in his mouth. 

As he reluctantly finishes his water, listening to his brother, Geumjae, and his parents chatter about their dog and their work and the weather in Daegu. Usually, catching up with them felt like a much-needed break, but right now he just feels restless. 

He’s been lying in this hospital bed for too long. Listening to nothing but their idle chat for too long. He’s been drifting in and out of sleep so much that he probably wouldn’t even know how many days he’d been in the hospital if his phone didn’t tell him. The repetition of it all ends one day when the nurse informs him that somebody’s coming up to visit, even though his family is already there in the room with him.

After a set of gentle knocks, Lim Yuri appears from behind the hospital door like an angel.

She introduces herself to his family a bit too formally, bowing more than she needs to, like she’s trying to impress them. It’s cute of her. What’s even cuter is the way she blushes and flusters in surprise when they ask if she’s a Big Hit trainee and she waves her arms around as she explains that she’s a producer. She looks nothing like an idol, she says. Geumjae jokes that Yoongi doesn’t look anything like one either. He glares at his brother from the hospital bed.

Yuri looks shy as she tells them something too softly for him to hear, but they nod in understanding and send Yoongi a knowing look as they file out of the door with promises to visit tomorrow. His cheeks flush in embarrassment as he realizes he’s going to have a lot to clarify for them then.

His flush deepens when she sets the plastic bag in her hands on his side table, clambering up the bedside to take a seat beside him. He moves to make space for her, revelling in the way the warm skin of her thigh presses against his arm. 

“Did you eat?” she says softly. “I brought you food.”

“Yeah, I ate,” he says. “Thanks, though.”

A beat of silence. She reaches down to grasp his hand, which fits so perfectly into hers. When he squeezes it, she squeezes back. Everything feels like it’s falling back into place where it belongs.

“I didn’t tell anyone, like you said. I told them all that you went back to see your family in Daegu. Said it was a family emergency that you didn’t really wanna talk about,” she says softly. “Told Hitman Bang, too. I think you should be okay if you want to stay here for the next week or so.” He shakes his head.

“It’s okay. I’ll be discharged soon,” he assures her. “Next two days, maybe. It won’t be completely healed, but I’ll just tell them that I fell down the stairs back home or something. I don’t know. Gonna try to play it off as nothing major.” 

She hums in reply, squeezing his hand again. He can tell she still disapproves of his secrets, but is willing to keep them if that’s what makes him comfortable. She slides down so she’s laying next to him, legs slotted nicely next to his. He feels a wave of comfort wash over him as she gets touchy with him, like nothing has changed.

Seeing as Yoongi has never been the touchy-feely type, one would think that this would annoy him. To his own surprise, it doesn’t. If anything, he finds himself reveling in her affections. It’s weird even to him, the way he likes her touch so much.

Wordlessly, she starts playing with his hair. She’s always liked his hair, she’s said before, all sleek and smooth—she doesn’t like her own hair and the way they curl at the ends. And he’d frown every time she talked about herself like that because he thinks she’s one of the cutest people he knows.

Not that he could ever tell her that without shrivelling up and dying of embarrassment.

He’s snapped out of his thoughts by her wandering fingers, which have moved on from playing with his hair to prod at his ears. The sensitivity makes him cringe, but it isn’t an entirely unpleasant thing. He gasps sharply when her fingernails nip at the shell of his ear in a way that feels like the sensitive skin is being bitten. Mortifying as it is to admit, the goosebumps that rise on his skin stem from a sensation more pleasurable than it is uncomfortable. It feels good. Suddenly, the touches that he once found curious and innocent—childish, even—make his face go hot.

“You have something you’re not saying,” she chides. “You can tell me, you know, if it’ll make you feel better.” He turns in closer to her, close enough that her breath tickles him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “For saying stupid shit that I didn’t mean. I was jealous and stupid and angry.”

“Apology accepted,” she says immediately, trailing her finger back down from his ear to prod at his bready cheeks. “I’d forgive you even if you didn’t apologize, you know. I missed you too much.”

“I missed you, too.” 

She freezes, then. They both do. Yoongi doesn’t even realize what he says until it’s slipped out—it’s probably the most intimate thing he’s said out loud. The closest thing he’s ever said to I love you.

“Can I kiss you?” she asks suddenly. “I just—I know it’s not super romantic to ask, but I don’t just wanna do it without your permission, so—” Yoongi’s face burns a dark crimson as he cuts her off.

“Yeah,” he chokes out. “Go ahead. Please.” He can’t trust his voice to say much else. His hands are shaking.

When she presses her lips against his, everything feels different. 

It’s like every shitty romance movie he’s ever watched has come to life in his bones. Every cheesy metaphor—the sparks flying, the angels singing, the flowers blooming. It’s the way he finally understands why wars have been waged and empires have fallen for a single heart. It’s the way Yuri smells like cherry blossoms and whatever else is in her girly lotions. It’s the way he’s never felt like this before.

It’s different from his first kiss. It feels exactly like Yuri said it should feel. Maybe because it’s her. 

And Min Yoongi finally understands why Lim Yuri put so much importance into a single kiss.

Yoongi doesn’t know how long he’s been avoiding her.

It’s not like he immediately iced her out after the kiss. It was a gradual thing, each interaction slowly becoming more and more unbearable. The first time he can recall feeling things start to fall apart was when he made some rude joke that he can’t even remember now. All he can remember is the way she laughed afterwards, so naturally and so easily that he couldn’t help but to think about how everything with her was just easy. Easy to tease, easy to joke with, easy to share secrets with.

That’s how things should be, right?

And then it spirals. Makes him think about his girlfriend from middle school, a smart girl with pretty hair that sat in front of him in class, who began going out with him when he shyly asked her out via letter. He could talk to her normally before, could ask her for pencils and for homework help, but once they began dating he couldn’t even do that much.

It’s weird, the way he acted so differently once romantic expectations were set up. There’d always been this tense aura of awkwardness around them, and he could vaguely tell that it annoyed her, but he was too chicken to do anything about it. He never thought it could happen with Yuri, who he always felt so comfortable, but here he was now.

He feels pathetic, agonizing over this when she’s probably thinking about Namjoon. Even if she does like him back, there’s a clawning fear in his gut that tells him that he’s never going to compare. He wonders how long she’d do that, seesaw herself over to him whenever Namjoon was unavailable. Moreover, he wonders how long he’d let her.

Everytime her little hands found themselves laced in his, the rate at which his thoughts dissipated and his heart melted became laughable. If she asked, he’d probably let her do whatever she wanted with him forever.

The tiny, selfish little devil on his shoulder whispers to Yoongi that he would possibly-maybe-kind-of be more compatible with her than Namjoon. Even without thinking too hard about it, he knows it’s a terrible thought just from the way it makes his stomach churn with guilt.

Namjoon and Yuri have known each other for several years longer than he’s known either of them. He’s nothing more than an interloper in this relationship, and it’s conceited of him to even think he has any kind of chance when he probably isn’t even in the running. The possibility of being in the running scares him more than it excites him, at this point.

So he ices her out.

With how frigid he’s gotten, it should come as no surprise that she wants to hang out more with the trainees at JYP and Source. These days, she’s been over in their dorms more often than she’s been in theirs. He only ever sees her in the studio. Even then, he only speaks to her indifferently, replying to her when it has to do with music and brushing off her attempts at small talk. It reminds him of his interactions with Namjoon back when they first met, tense and awkward and professional.

And speak of the devil.

“Hey,” he hears Namjoon say, his voice deep and distant at his studio door. “May I come in?”

“Sure,” he says thoughtlessly, not even bothering to look up from the song he’s producing on his computer. That changes when Namjoon seats himself on the seat next to his and he can practically feel the air go tense, forcing him to turn and give Namjoon his full attention. The way that his leader, who was a year younger than he was, could command so much authority with his presence alone was both admirable and terrifying.

“You’ve been avoiding Yuri,” Namjoon says. He immediately knows there’s no beating around the bush with this one. Regardless, he pushes his luck.

“I haven’t,” he lies through his teeth. Yoongi has never liked lying about matters of the heart. If it were anybody but Namjoon, he wouldn’t have, but he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. Namjoon sighs, obviously in disbelief of the lie. Yoongi doesn’t blame him.

“Look,” he says. “I’m not asking you to tell me what’s wrong, or what happened between you two or whatever. If it was between two members of this group, then I would have to. It’s my job as leader to be responsible for you guys. But whatever is going on between you and Yuri? That’s your business. It’s not my job to keep up with our producers, no matter how much I might want to.”

“But you do want to,” Yoongi clarifies.

“Of course,” he says. “I mean, she’s not just a producer to me. She’s my friend. And so are you. So I’m asking you this as a friend, and not a leader.” Yoongi raises a brow.

“What are you asking?” he says.

“I don’t know. Just don’t be mad at each other anymore. Please.” Namjoon sounds impossibly desperate, hopeless in a way that feels incredibly out of character for him. “I don’t like seeing you guys mad at each other. Remember what Hitman Bang said? It’s okay if you wanna fight or yell or whatever. Just sort it out. I don’t know what she did, or what happened between you, but everyone seems pretty miserable without her around, including you. So please make up soon. Please don’t be mad at her anymore.”

“I’m not mad at her,” he says, and it’s the truth. If anything, he’s mad at himself—but not at her. Never at her. “It’s just… weird. I don’t know. But I’m not mad at her.”

“You think she knows that?” he says, and Yoongi’s heart immediately sinks.

“Probably not,” he admits, suddenly feeling a large wave of guilt wash over him. Now that he thinks about it, she’s probably been blaming herself this whole time. Yoongi’s face burns hot with shame.

“Then you should let her know.”

“Hey, can we talk?”

Yuri practically jumps in her seat, eyes widening like saucers as she whips around upon hearing the voice of Yoongi of all people at the studio door. She hesitates for a moment, but it’s not long before she gets up to let him in. Over the months, he’d gotten harder and harder for her to refuse.

“Okay,” she says as she unlocks the door, letting him into the studio. They’re face to face now, so much so that his incredible closeness reminds her just how much he towers over her. He always said that he was short, but he’s pretty tall to her. It only makes her all the more nervous.

She hasn’t had the opportunity to talk to Yoongi alone like this about something non-music related in months. She can’t beat around the bush with this one—she doesn’t know the next chance she’s going to get to say what she wants, so she has no choice but to say it outright.

“Let’s not fight anymore,” she says, gently dropping her head against his chest. It comes out soft and sad and a thousand times more pathetic-sounding than she’d originally intended. “I won’t kiss you anymore. We can pretend it never happened. Just talk to me again. I miss you.” The way her voice cracks breaks his heart into little pieces.

“We’re not—we’re not fighting, Yuri,” he assures her, stern and gentle all at once. Hesitantly, he brings an arm up around her to rub gentle circles into the small of her back. “We’re… disagreeing.”

“You’re not mad at me?”

“I’m not mad at you,” he says. “And even if I was, it wouldn’t be because you kissed me. Why would I be avoiding you because of that? I said that you could, didn’t I?”

“But you are mad,” she says.

“At me,” he clarifies. “Not at you.”

“Why?” she asks. “Yoongi, tell me.” He flushes, feeling incredibly trapped by the way her doe eyes look up at him. Refusing her wishes feels impossible, these days, so he supposes that honesty is the best policy in this case.

“Because I wanted you to kiss me again,” he admits, cheeks burning hot with shame. “Even though everything was fine as it already was.” Yuri blinks slowly at him upon his admission.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“I think I get it,” she says, and despite being forgiven, he can’t help but frown at how understanding she’s being—it’s more than he deserves at this point, if he’s being honest.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s scary.” Words are hard right now.

“I think it’s why I could never say anything,” she continues. “It’s so easy to love someone without them knowing, because you get to live off these happy little fantasies of being together and everything being perfect in your head. I think that’s why being loved back is scary. Because then anything is a possibility. It’s kind of like—it’s kind of like finishing a really good webtoon.” He chuckles softly at the comparison, fondly bumping his nose against hers. “It is! Because then you have nothing left and you’re hit with that post-webtoon depression, because the fun and the fantasies and the excitement are over and then you’re left to deal with the real world. And sometimes the real world means that everything changes, or that even if the person you want loves you back right now, they might change their mind later on. And that’s scary.”

“I still want to be able to talk to you like we used to,” he says. “But I also still want to kiss you. I don’t know. It’s weird.”

“Kiss me, then,” she says. “We don’t—we don’t have to think about it or talk about it or decide anything. Just kiss me. Please.”

And so he does.

It makes him shiver, the way she seems to shrink when her back presses against the wall, the way she feels so small when he cages her between his arms, the way her tiny hands find purchase against his chest before travelling up to wind behind his neck.

Yoongi can’t find it in himself to be afraid at that moment. He’d kiss Lim Yuri forever, if she let him.

#era.glass #fic.interloper #laruna.conn #laruna.dev #ship. yoonri #writings

[myremains]

In Hearts Wake - Kaliyuga

Tracklist:

Crisis

Worldwide Suicide

Hellbringer" (ft. Jamie Hails of Polaris)

Moving On

Timebomb

Son of a Witch

Crossroads (ft. Georgia Flood)

Husk

Nãgá

Force of Life

Iron Dice (ft. Randy Reimann)

Dystopia

2033

In Hearts Wake are a group of lads from down under who got together to bang out some tunes, funnily enough they're from the same area of Australia that Parkway Drive hail from! Back in ‘06 they got together to put out their own brand of metalcore which they have used as a platform to talk about the environment and generally how humans are ruining the very ground on which we walk. This is their 5th full length studio album and I managed to catch them last year on the Impericon Never Say Die tour at which they put on a great show. I'm hoping I can get something from this album now to pull me in as a full time fan.

Even the intro track kicks ass like a mix of Slippknots Eyeless and Tje Prodigy, absolutely slaps, but nowhere near as much as “Worldwide Suicide” which keeps that theme rolling but absolutely not it filthy I fifa and vocals with huge bass drops. Just when you think it can’t get any better “Hellbringer” drops like a fucking bomb to knock you back 15 feet onto your ass, the stops are long enough to make me think the track had either abruptly finished or my stereo was playing up, but no then  it smacked me square across the face again, nice work from Jamie Hails from Polaris on this track too. “Son of a Witch” is up there in the top of the list for quality too

“Time bomb” just flows really nicely, switching from melodic and crunchy to dropping through a sheer drop into an eruption of aggression and flare, really switched up with “Crossroads” where Georgia Flood (an australian actress with a gorgeous voice) really takes their melodic side up to new heights with Jake Taylor still pumping away at those growls to give an angry underbelly to a beautiful track. Towards the end of the album, there's still enough growls and screams to keep us all happy but the music does in general start to come down a couple notches, take “Dystopia” which has it's heavy moments but really focuses on the melody throughout the verses whereas “Husk” really puts all of its energy into that melodic chorus line and everything else drops and builds up leading towards the eruption of energy.

Well I’m officially a fan, I’ve bought into what these guys are selling in a big way, I shall hunt now back through their archives and see just how big of a fan I’m going to be. Even if I don’t like their older stuff which I doubt because they did pretty well at the tour I caught them on, this is still enough for me to be hopeful for the future.

[9/10]

#In Hearts Wake #Kaliyuga #Byron Bay #Austrailia #Parkway Drive #Metal #Metalcore #2020 #Music #Albums #Reviews #MyRemains

[tardytothepardy]

The boys aged up

So now Sans and Papyrus are teens. Now I have to get used to Sans’s odd nose as a teen, but the good news is that it’s pretty much what he’s gonna look like for the rest of his life. Which is nice. 

As far as Papyrus goes, the dude is just constantly playing the violin, so much that before he even aged up into a teen, he had nearly maxed out the skill. And being in Tiffany’s studio, with all of her stuff exploding with inspiring moodlets? He maxed out the skill within minutes. 

So now he’s gonna play the guitar. This time I’ll try to keep him from doing the same thing that Tiffany did. 

Speaking of skills, Dorothy is currently at level 7 or 8 of gardening, but all I’m doing is having her research the plants in the garden. I probably would’ve had all that done with Grim if they weren’t spending the past several Sim years helping Tiffany raise children. Researching took up time that they quite simply did not have to spare. I thought that by having Dorothy take up gardening and researching all of the plants, I could learn how to splinch what plant to who and get something nice. 

But now she’s stupidly close to maxing out the skill. What the hell. She hasn’t even been a teen a full week. I need to stop, or something. Maybe have her go out and find a girlfriend or boyfriend, since she’s romantic? I dunno. Maybe with this ridiculously long lifespan I can have the kids go through a few relationships or something.

As it is right now, I decided that Papyrus should have the Musical Genius aspiration, which I thought was fitting, and Sans would have the Chief of Mischief, mainly because whenever I have him socialize with others, the first few suggestions are either mischievous or straight up mean. 

(case in point of Sans teasing Kris about something:)

So I guess that’s just gonna be how he is. I hope it doesn’t do wreckage on his manners, because I spent a while building them up. I suppose I can just raise them back up with him doing his homework, but whatever. 

Sans’s aspiration is Chief of Mischief, as mentioned, and his traits are top-notch toddler, self-assured, physically gifted, independent, lazy, and dastardly. 

Papyrus’s aspiration is Musical Genius, as mentioned, and his traits are top-notch toddler, good, creatively gifted, muser, and neat. (I gave him acne because Tiffany used to have acne. I also gave it to Dorothy, but I don’t have any new pictures of her.)

Outside of the birthdays, the weather in Brindleton Bay has been abysmal. It’s constantly cold and snowing. More often than not there’s a blizzard threatening to come around. It’s very annoying. Not as annoying as Father Winter constantly calling Nick asking if he can come over or if Nick will meet him somewhere. 

Today I finally decided, “Sure, why the hell not. I’m just killing time until it’s Sans and Papyrus’s birthday”, so they went to Oasis Springs. Father Winter looked incredibly overdressed. But I think that Nick got to meet Illianna Caliente, which was fun. She’s very pretty, and looks a lot like her dad. Currently I don’t have any plans of having anyone in the Ivey family be with anyone in the Caliente family. Mainly because all of the Caliente children are in fact children. And now is not the time to be thinking about permanent things like spouses. 

That being said,,,,, I wondered how scandalous it would be for Sans to date Evie Delgato. She recently became best friends with Kris, but she’s a lot older than him. She’s not a teen yet, so I feel kinda squingy for even thinking about it, but I figure with how antagonistic Sans is tending to be autonomously, I feel like he would do that. It’s some big big-brother energy. Which kinda makes sense since Sans is older than Kris, but I think according to the game, Papyrus is the older between himself and Sans. And of course, Dorothy’s is the oldest out of all of them. Not really by much, but still. 

(this here is clearly when they were still both kids, but the Evie Delgato in my game is not the same as the original. I went into CAS and used Supriya’s and her husband’s genetics to make Evie, and I’ve seen that she’s actually kinda pretty, rather than this horrifying bug eyed creature)

After they both aged up, I decided to renovate their room a little bit. There really wasn’t that much I could do, so it mostly looks the same. I put in some dividers, and over-decorated Papyrus’s side of the room. Sans has a bedside table with two rocks on it, which I think it pretty exquisite. I also put a pile of books next to his bed, in a kind of “he reads smart things but he doesn’t really want people to pay any mind to it” way. 

I feel like part of me is just like “Fuck how am I going to portray these characters that I’ve named after video game characters? Just base them off of who they were named after! Simple!” But maybe that’s for the better. Their room, and possibly Dorothy’s, has the most amount of work or care that I ever put into a room. Tiffany’s room has basically looked the same since I built the house with under 1,000 to spare, so I think it’s clear that I’m not one for decor. 

I think though that I have covered everything that has happened over the last few days. The birthdays are over, for the time being, so I won’t be twiddling my thumbs waiting for them and not doing much else. I think I will make some attempt to at least have Dorothy start to get in a relationship with someone. I don’t know yet if I want it to be someone she met from school, or out on the town. Part of me is minorly contemplating her being with Pierce Delgato, but if my idea of Sans being with Evie works out, I think that would be a bit much. There are quite a few other people in Brindleton Bay that would be fine. 

As a sidenote, I’m not particularly thrilled about everyone having an A grade, and going into high school with B’s, but I guess the most I can do is do things with the random number generator and keep them from doing their homework. If it gets bad I’ll sell it or something. (I’m just kinda tired of having all my Sims be top of the class A++++++ students their entire lives.)

Unrelated picture that I couldn’t fit anywhere else:

That’s all.  

#wow i kinda said everything in the post #not much to say in the tags #ts4 #the sims 4 #simblr #the sims 4 screenshots #the sims 4 gameplay #ivey legacy #april 20 2020 #happy 4/20 i guess #go off and blaze something

[prettysoldierprojectarchive]

1:4 – Usagi Will Teach You How To Lose Weight!

[Original Post 19/08/2013]

Alternative Title: Body Issues? LOSE WEIGHT, SAILOR FATTY

First aired: 28th March 1992

Usagi is suffering from severe body dysmorphic disorder. Despite being obviously perfect (physically at least – her brain is another issue), she’s become obsessed her weight. Like most women, she is subject to the unrealistic and harmful expectations of feminine beauty in society. Usagi’s family attempt to help her overcome her imagined weight issues by calling her fat. Upon the advice of her classmates, she visits a brand new totally-not-evil gym. Little does she know Jadeite is now trying to sell his brand new not-evil P90X workout, which is TOTALLY EVIL. How dare you take advantage of women’s image problems, Jadeite!?

The episode opens well enough – Usagi in a bath towel. This is probably the most overtly sexualised Usagi has been up to this point in the series and you know what? It’s a little more awkward now that I’m older and wiser and in my mid-20s. It becomes even more awkward when Usagi has to be given a “talk” in the dining room after she’s worried that she’s fat.

You know what her family says to her? “You’re chubby, but that’s OK” – what a lovely sentiment! Things quickly turn sour when they discuss why she’s so fat – all the eating, they suggest – and poor Usagi is left feeling like a goddamn hippo. It’s not nice.

Great parenting, guys. Really top-notch work here. This is totally normal behaviour

Luna doesn’t help the 14-year-old’s image problems. Although she normally takes the role of guiding-mother, in this episode she frequently reduces Usagi to tears by commenting on how fat she is..

Wow. This episode is a little messed up. Body image problems were becoming a major issue for the health of women, and this episode was obviously trying to discuss the issue. Unfortunately they do this by making everyone fucking crazy, even for Japanese people. It must be an early 90s thing. It’s just not that fun.

Not pictured: a balanced psyche

Aside from the uncomfortable subject matter, the episode was written and drawn by the crappy studio. I’ve decided to give the 3 distinct studios involved in the making of Sailor Moon names, just for parsimony.

1) A-Grade Studio: These guys do the important stories with the best writing, and their episodes are just gorgeous.

2) B-Grade Studio: These episodes are well written on the whole, but the drawing style is obviously different. Not totally bad, but characters tend to look a lot more hastily drawn and a little squished.

3) Ass-Grade Studio: Some animations are only 2 or 3 frames, faces look flat and sharp and the writing BLOWS. This episode is the archetype for this.

“Hey, Yoshi, your shitty 4-year-old slipped a drawing into the episode again”

ANYWAY. Back to the episode. Usagi and Naru are discussing their non-existent weight issues with 2 classmates I don’t think we’ll ever see again. Let’s call them Kermit and Miss Piggy. I think this scene attempts to vocalise the self-conscious worries of teenage girls, but things quickly become sidetracked as Miss Piggy goes on about pineapple and Kermit rambles on about how nice it would be if love made you lose weight.

Yeah, keep dreaming Froggy. Maybe you’ll burn some calories off your brain.

Hey guys, guess what? Miss Sakurada has totally gotten thin by going to this new gym, and Umino has pervert pics to prove it. The eeriest thing about these pictures is not that Umino took them, or that Sakurada clearly didn’t need to lose weight, but that she’s clearly looking into the camera and smiling in one of the photos. Maybe 14-year-old losers with behavioral issues gets her off. Oop, just made myself barf in my mouth a little.

“OK Umino, hand over the roofies and no one has to die”

The girls decide to visit the same gym, in which Jadeite is posing as a fitness instructor called Jed (BRILLIANT!). After a poorly-drawn work out featuring large beefy men instructing little girls in tight bloomers how to sweat more, Usagi decides to get the hell away from Jed’s evil workout regime, opting instead for a nice jacuzzi. Clever girl! It’s this laziness that saves her from the fate that awaits her friends – energy sucking pods in the basement! 

“Don’t worry, these ominous condom-pods definitely won’t kill you”

Quite frankly these pods are amazing. Apparently the pre-cursor state of the “Energy” that Queen Beryl loves so much is human fat. If she’s willing to give me a free liposuction, then I really don’t see the problem of donating a few pounds to the Dark Kingdom.

Unfortunately the pods are killing Ms Sakurada and Usagi’s classmates – they’re too thin! Ahh the evils of self-improvement! The real shame is that if Jadeite took only a bit of energy and kept his shit on the down-low, he’d be a billionaire.

“Billionaire? Do you know how many purple-tinted glasses for that!?”

Usagi, meanwhile, hits rock bottom after drooling after a small child’s dumpling, scaring him so that he runs off crying. She’s so hungry that stupid-lame Motoki has to revive her after she faints. Motoki reveals himself as a perverted feeder who gets off on fat chicks, and Usagi is happy to eat again! 

“I find childhood obesity hilariously attractive. Eat this dumpling.”

…Until the mysterious handsome awesome stranger calls her fat. And then Luna calls her fat. And she goes all diet-crazy AGAIN. This episode is all over the place. Actually this whole middle section is rather fun.

Usagi goes exercise-mad in the evil gym, freaking people out with her zeal. She only comes to her senses after Luna threatens to slice her face to shit – her one weakness! – and finally transforms into Sailor Moon.

“Bitch I will cut yo’ face unless you Moon Prism Power right now.”

The final fight is noteworthy for one reason – the big beefy gym instructors have been brainwashed and attack Sailor Moon when she tries to destroy the miracle thinning pods in the basement, and our heroine must kick the living snot out of them with her bare fists, all the while counting how many calories she’s losing. It’s really rather cool, or at least it would be if the animation wasn’t so crappy. Cheers, Ass-Grade Studio!

The episode ends with Usagi’s little brother Shingo playing a trick on her, leading her to believe she’s gained 300 pounds, and she succumbs to a self-destructive eating disorder. That’s a pretty good joke, Shingo.

Episode Score: 2/5 (It’s pretty bad, you guys.)

Monster Freakishness Level: 0/5 (Eating disorders are the real monsters)

Naru-chan Attack Count: 3 (That girl needs to start carrying a gun or something)

#Sailor Moon #anime #90s #Episode 4 #004 #S01E04 #1992 #cw #eating #food #exercise #fat shaming #body dysmorphia #season 1

[tempestshakes01]

3-2-20

My subconscious did something extremely embarrassing. 

I had...I had a dream. 

And, you’re like, “Miranda, we all have sex dreams. It’s okay,” but then I let you know this wasn’t a sex dream. That’s normal. This dream was like a weird fanfic-y/Alexander Payne type of movie featuring, well, the cast of the B*n Appet*t Test Kitchen and me. But not me! I was obviously the POV character, but I wasn’t Miranda. You’ll see why later. 

I told you it’s terrible!

Actually, no, an interesting story wove through this dream and I want to write it all down for posterity.

Here we go:

The first thing I remember is standing in line at a New York grocery check out (also sort of the Super1 by my house in Spokane), putting my massive amount of ingredients on the conveyor belt. The BA cast ran the grocery store, and Chris stood as the checker while Sohla bagged. We all chatted gamely. Carla came around as manager to check up on me, and that’s when I noticed that Chris and Sohla stopped working and instead created a delicious little portabello mushroom, tomato, and pesto creation. We all laughed. Ha ha ha. 

[I think I forgot what happened next. I met Claire on the subway?]

Next thing I know I’m at a resort that also a cruise ship, but not really. (Like a glitch.) The BA people invited me (for whatever reason) to join them on their all-expense-paid work trip where we were given the task to review all the restaurants and amenities. I remember steering clear of Molly because she seemed to not like me. She lounged with Andy and Christina, but Christina walked over to me, very open and friendly, and we talked for a little. Claire came and she was a total delight. The clearest and intelligent person ever. None of the anxiety that plagues her on her show, lol. She pulled over Brad to explain something, and then Chris popped up as well. 

The dinner party is in full swing. We’re in an Italian/natural style restaurant with dim lighting reflecting on the natural stone texture of the limestone walls, like a we’re in a cave.

Brad and I are talking and laughing. We both have very youthful energy, and he asks me if we should go to the club later (like how cruise ships have “clubs”), and I tell him, of course! I’m kind of drunk and thrilled. New friend! 

My mood dampens when I’m shoved into one of those rounded restaurant booths right next to Molly. She purses her lips at me in what’s supposed to be a smile, and I feel anxious. The food arrives. We’re pressed together. The rest of the party is smushed into the table as well, but Molly and I seem particularly on top of each other.

But then...we start talking. Very slowly she opens up and a lovely Molly personality comes out. We start to giggle over oysters.

Okay, then more “scene” occurs, but I don’t really remember any of them. It’s more about the resort/cruise. Like, we go to the spa or something. More bonding. 

Then, it’s the next morning. 

We've seated in a galley a four-person table. Molly, Christina, Chris and I. Molly and Christina get up to grab seconds, while Chris looks like he’s mulling over something before saying, “Fuck it,” and drops a quarter, a key, and his wedding ring in front of my plate. He gets up and just leaves. 

I stare at the little pile in total confusion. I just don’t get it. I grab the stuff because I’m thinking he’ll probably want it later? 

Cut to a yoga class. We’re in a desert studio hybrid room with the sun setting in the back and reflected in the front panel of mirrors. It’s gorgeous. It’s the next afternoon, but I don’t know it yet. It’s full. We’re all jam-packed together with Brad on my left. Chris is one row up and to the right of me. We’re doing our best, but some people (us) are just sorta goofing off. We go from a downward-facing dog into some twist, but Brad falls over and half onto my mat. He’s saying something to me that I don’t recall, but I just remember a warm feeling flooding my body, like love or fondness, and he’s golden retriever cute. 

I hear Chris and he’s looking at us with a genuine smile on his face, and he says, “Okay. Okay, I get it,” but once again I’m totally confused. 

The scene changes to what I suddenly know is the night before. I’m walking in a courtyard with Brad. It’s great. We’re lit up by the moon. It’s blue. We come to a fountain and in the fountain is a small stalagmite formation, underwater, and something is stuck on it. I dip my into the water and yank on a piece of metal until it slides of stalagmite. It’s silver on the outside, rusty red on the inside, and it’s a ring. Brad pulls it from my hands and looks at it with a small smile. 

He mutters that he thought he lost it. It’s his wedding ring and there are three notches he added to silver. He shows them to me, digging his fingernail into the crevices, and he adds that they’re for his family. A notch for his wife and kids. 

And I’m nodding along, thinking this is all very sweet, when all of a sudden he backs away from me and pulls off his hat, saying, “I can’t do this anymore,” and sits on the edge of the fountain. And I realize that we like each other and we’ve just left the club. It’s a really lovely moment, I promise, and the whole entire reason I wanted to write this out--wanted to write it out the moment I woke actually, but I was late for work--and now I can’t even remember his little speech, but it was something out of a dramedy and poignant and it made me fall in love with him because he loved his family so much. 

He tells me he likes me, but he’s not that kind of guy, and I ask him, “No?” while walking in between his legs and pressing my lips to his neck, not really a kiss because I’m just teasing him and I really, really like him. He says, “No.” And I ask again, “No?” and he’s like, “Please, no.” And we both laugh. I ask for a hug and he says that’s not a good idea, and so I “kiss” him again on the chin, and I grab his hat asking, “Can I at least put this back on?” and he says yes to that was a melancholy grin and I situate his goobalini make on his head with fond tugs, stroking his face before I take a step back from his space, and we walk back toward the resort. 

So then I’m back in the yoga class, and it’s instantly clear to me what all the Chris stuff meant. He gave me the ring to let me know he was open to that, and then when he saw Brad and I in class the next day, knew I didn’t feel the same. 

And that’s pretty much it. 

--

So in end, it really was an Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants)or Jason Reitman (Up in the Air, Juno) type of movie, like...to a T...but with the people from BA..........whom I never thought about in such ways at all............and that’s why I say it wasn’t really me in the POV......because she was too cool and chill.........................and I don’t want it to be me. 

#miranda this is your life

[celestialvexation]

@mixieroast ( since i’m wanting to not clutter up my ask cause i am an ocd dum-dum aslkfls )

aaaaah yeah, for the more enigmatic energies, it’s hard to nail those down if you haven’t been around that area where you can...branch out, i suppose is the term??

ohhhh yeah! yeah, i’m sure there are definitely the oddities in my world -- the usual run of the mill creatures and ideas tho for my aesthetic, i like the whole surrealism. the feeling that something isn’t right about the world, but you just can’t place your finger on it. monsters and ideas do live among men but what are they? are they to be benevolent, or at least, indifferent to us? are they plotting?? who knows óωò

lmao he tends to be the butt monkey at times >w< ahhh, yes! what sort of hobbies! well.... 

for klaus, he’d be drawing! he’s a very experience artist who can draw mostly everything from people to the scenery around him, etc. i can totally see him as someone who likes to physically make things -- as in, creating pottery and carving such elaborate designs into them. no doubt he has a lil studio at his place in which he’s to create a lot of bowls, vases, etc in his spare time and might even make some money off of them!

silas is more into knitting and culinary! they enjoy having to make blankets and clothes for themselves, and their cooking? absolutely top notch thanks to their years living along earth lmao. if they happen to gain an interest in whoever at the time, expect them to be treated with dishes that had to be made by some five star chef -- but nah, it’s mainly homecooked meals that are surprisingly made with care and precision

as for emil... lord, i can see him being a gardener. like full on, takes care some of the most exotic plants known to man, tho he’s collected them more out of how beautiful they are to him. he has his own greenhouse that is fucking huge ( like the size you would see at botanical gardens that’d be for the public ) and while he has workers tending to it, he often helps them out and just?? admire the plants he’s acquired

#wow i never realized just how much detail are into them alsfk #but yeah those are a few of their personal hobbies ; u ; #cian doesn't get much cause...well; he's in his own room with no other resources #soooo lmao #jaunty talks ocs #mixieroast

[invaderhogtwopointohno]

Kacchako Posivity Week 2018

Day Zero for the Kacchako Positivity Week. I am so excited to do these little prompts to support my boy and my favorite ship ever!!!

Read on AO3 Here.

------

Ours Is the Passion of the Stars

Day Zero: First Days

 News Anchor AU

 As far as first days on the job go, Ochako was having quite a doozy of one.

Channel UA-1A was the best in the broadcasting business and their news and television shows were top notch. The best show and one that was the most well-known was Smash News, the latest in all things news, gossip, and sports. And Ochako was going to be their newest host with the fluff pieces that were to be towards the end of the segment.

She had worked tirelessly at her old job at the small-town television station to work her way to this moment and things had been going fine- until about two minutes into the first meeting with probably the most annoying person she had ever met in her entire life.

Katsuki Bakugou was the infamous sports anchor. Infamous because he didn’t announce things like a normal human being, he mostly shouted during his segments, used a lot of words that had to be censored in the moment. He’d started out at a smaller show but his popularity with sports fans and younger audiences pushed him quickly up the line and now he was going to be joining Ochako in the new anchors spot.

The only reason why a new anchor like Ochako would ever be anywhere near someone like Bakugou was because Iida, their producer, told them two minutes into their meeting that for their introduction for that evening, the pair of them were going to be doing a segment together.

“The fuck is this shit?” he yelled.

He took the empty coffee cup he’d been holding and threw it at Iida, hitting Mineta, his assistant, in the face with it. The other anchors were gathered for the meeting, sighing because his personality had been known but never really witnessed.

“I ain’t sharing the spotlight with Pink Cheeks here!” he yelled, slamming his hand on the table.

“Katsuki, you will respect my authority on the decision as the show’s producer!” Iida said, chopping the air with his hand.

Ochako was not one for rocking the boat if she didn’t have to. She liked being complacent and quiet and letting the chips fall as they may- but this was a lot to handle.

She was going to have to be around these people all of the time. Their segments were almost back to back so she was going to have to stand in Katsuki’s shadow pretty much all of the time. The best thing usually to do would be to make a peace offering or suggest something else.

But the sheer fire in Katuski’s eyes told her that he was not the type to back down from a challenge.

“It’s okay,” Ochako said, feeling bolder than she really should have since he had the upper hand on experience over her. “I am sure that Bakugou would prefer something easier to do than a little segment about kid’s wrestling.”

The reaction she got was instant and almost scary and she regretted speaking instantly.

Katsuki whipped his head around and stared her right in the eye.

“You think I’m scared?” he demanded, his tone low and Deku, the sweet traffic reporter, moved a little away from him.

“I am saying that it’s probably better that I do the assignment and you can just introduce yourself. Or you can do your own segment if you want to.”

Ochako had never had this kind of confidence in her entire life. She had never fought for anything before. She didn’t know where this power was coming from. Maybe it was just being pushed by someone as passionate as someone like Bakugou that was putting her here. And it was like she didn’t know how to stop digging her own grave because she added, “I mean, it’s not like reporting the latest baseball score is that hard of a job.”

The entire room was dead silent and she felt like maybe her hear was going to leap out of her chest because the look on his face was pure, unadulterated rage. He had his hands firmly planted on the table and without warning, he moved and lifted the entire thing, throwing it to the side and everyone scrambled to their feet, backing away in fright. He turned and leaned over Ochako and she thought about what her mother used to tell her when she was a child.

“Your mouth is good for two things, Ochako, eating and getting into trouble.”

Bakugou was shaking with intensity and he reached out and grabbed her shoulders, lifting her out of the chair and shoving her towards the door.

“WE’RE GOING TO KILL SOME CHILDREN!”

“W-What?” she asked, and he gave her another shove before she could react.

 ----

“Alright, guys,” Kirishima said, looking at the monitor in front of him. He was the only producer on the show that would work with Bakugou and he was in charge of all of his interviews and segments. Tsuyu, their cameraperson, was holding her camera steady and trained on them.

Ochako had been dead silent the entire awkward trip to the after school program they were going to be interviewing people about. It was a wrestling class for underprivileged children, to give them an outlet for their aggression and also to let them enjoy structure and team building.

“Everything is looking good. We’ll be interviewing the head coach of this team, Mr. Aizawa, and you will demonstrate something he teaches you.”

Ochako felt the pure energy emitting from Katsuki. When they arrived to the school an hour earlier to set up, he had been staring down children and teachers, and making angry comments as they stared back at him. It had been deciding that the two of them were going to be shown a few wrestling moves and then demonstrate them on camera for the viewers to enjoy. Ochako was regretting everything she had ever done in her life that led to this moment.

“Let’s murder this interview,” Katsuki said and looking at Ochako. She felt a shiver run down her spine but she wasn’t about to back down. She was going to fight this one out.

The coach was strange and monotone his entire interview and she could feel Katsuki getting angrier by the minute but it didn’t seem to matter. They were quickly shown some moves to demonstrate on camera and she quickly changed in the girls’ locker room to show off. And she found herself really surprised by how good Katuski looked in gym clothes. He had always looked handsome but his on-camera shouting usually made that hard to notice. He was stretching when she came back.

“Get ready to die, Angel Face!” he said, pointing at her.

She felt her cheeks get warm at the name.

He stepped back as they faced each other and Ochako thought about what she had been taught. She didn’t know if she could do it but she pulled off her jacket and held it out. Katuski looked like he worked out all of the time so he was strong. She moved and threw her jacket at him, surprising him and it knocked him in the face as she went for his stomach, knocking him down.

Katuski was only blinded for a second and grabbed her arms. They were straight up wrestling on the ground as Kirishima laughed and the camera was trained on them. She managed to get him in a headlock but Katuski wasn’t about to give up. He grabbed behind her head and pulled, making her groan in agony. She kept pulling.

Aizawa came over and bent down, tapping on her shoulder.

“That’s illegal. Stop. This is not wrestling.”

“Don’t you fucking interrupt, old man!” Katuski yelled, and managed to get out of her headlock, pushing away and sliding on the ground, coughing a little. Ochako looked up, trying to think of something else to do.

“You fight dirty, I like it,” he said, and she made a face.

“No one said I had to fight fair,” she replied. She had worked out a lot before this, but had never wrestled. He noticed that she was pretty fit. She moved to head for him again. He didn’t back down this time and took her head on, grabbing her shoulders and they were pushed into each other, pushing against the mat. Aizawa looked at the camera.

“This is not a real fight.”

Kirishima was on the floor in tears from his laughter.

They continued like this for a few more seconds before Katuski let her go and managed to get behind her, getting her into a headlock from behind. She pushed up against him and forced them both to the ground, but he didn’t let go.

She thought about biting him for a full second before he released her before she had the chance.

“I know what you’re thinking, Round Face,” he said, full-on grinning now. And Ochako felt her heart skip an actual beat. She stared at him. He looked so… hot.

“Yeah, I am stopping this,” Aizawa said, grabbing a bucket and flinging it at them, hitting Katuski in the side of the head and knocking him over.

Ochako stopped and gasped, running over to him.

“Oh, my- A-Are you okay?” she asked, touching his head. He wasn’t bleeding but there was a little bump already forming. Kirishima stopped the camera and apologized for letting the fight get out of hand. Ochako touched Katuski’s head gingerly, sighing.

“Fucking bastard,” Katuski said, seeing stars for a moment and was recovering, looking up at Ochako. He made a face at her. “I would have won.”

She made a face right back.

“I was winning when you got knocked out.”

“No, I had you in a headlock!” he said, sitting up and she touched his cheeks and neck, looking to see if there was any damage. He glared at her. “I was winning. And I would have won.”

“Is he okay?” Kirishima asked as they started to pack up. Ochako nodded and helped Katuski to his feet, their hands still connected as they stood there, both a little out of breath from their little fight. He tugged on her and pulled her close.

“Next time, Ochako, I am going to make sure that you’re on your back for a good long time.”

Her entire face turned red because he followed it up with giving her a long look up and down. She didn’t speak for the rest of the ride back to the studio and barely managed to look anyone in the eye, feeling pretty sure that Katuski wasn’t exactly one for making idle comments. She barely got herself together for that night’s show and felt that Katuski had stood a little closer to her than necessary all through the taping.

But she couldn’t say that she didn’t like the idea of this new job anymore.

#kacchakopositivityweek #kacchako #katsuki bakugou #uraraka ochako #bakugo x uraraka #kacchako positivity week #i love the idea of them wrestling

[fromthe-seoul]

Thirst Trap

I see how this is gonna go                                                                         touch me and you’ll never be alone

genre: smut

word count: 2.1k

a/n: this is dedicated to @writingseoul because I promised I’d write this for her and yoongi is a menace that’s all!!!

You’d think that after enduring several promotion cycles by Yoongi’s side, you’d be used to it.

With all things considered, you were fine with the extended time apart. That was an absolute given and you knew better than to expect anything else. Yoongi gave one hundred and ten percent of his time and energy into each album, especially in the last little details and final mixing. You knew somewhere across the city, he was either holed up in his studio or drenched in sweat in a practice room with his groupmates, working hard as ever to present something that would inevitably top the last comeback. You were even okay with the lack of communication. Short texts saying that he was alive would tide you over until when you could finally take your time and feel his heart beating under the palm of your hand. The expectations were kept fairly low, but you always texted him good morning and good night without fail, and more often than not, you got an I love you in response.

But being away from Yoongi for long periods of time meant that you were not usually in the secret circle of people getting to see the hairstyles and colors that were so eagerly sought after by adoring fans. You usually found out along with the rest of the world, watching music shows eagerly for what new look your boyfriend would (sometimes begrudgingly) be sporting. He’d occasionally send you a Snapchat while at the salon, but this comeback in particular, he was...suspiciously quiet. Sometimes you’d not-so-secretly hint at wanting to see what his stylists had cooked up for him this era, but he always replied with either a photo of his shoes or an unflattering closeup of his nostril just to spite you. He thrives on keeping you in the dark.

The night was coming to a close, the lights of the city blinking against the midnight of the sky, and you were finally turning in, dog-earing the page of your book and sighing at the dirty dishes around the sink. They could wait until tomorrow, but your mind drifts to all the things that have to be done. But before you can get too lost in your mental to-do list, a click and a slide of the lock on the front door snaps your train of thought, and you gawp with confusion as Yoongi slides through the door.

The confusion quickly transitions to awe and then to low-burning arousal as you take in the sight of your long-lost boyfriend. His black hair is regretfully gone, but replaced with a cool ice blue that makes his skin shine like moonlight, pulled back with a wide bandana to showcase his devastating brows and forehead. Perceptive eyes quirk as he watches you swallow hard, before he drops his bag and toes his shoes off to join you on the couch. 

“Do you like it?” He simpers as he already knows the answer, pulling you up by the arms and wrapping them around his neck. You tumble into his chest a bit more forcefully than usual, but his intoxicating scent overtakes you, cool breezes and mystifying spice and just pure Yoongi. You swallow hard before you find your voice to respond.

“I think you could say that.” His smirk melts into a full-on grin, hands tightening around your waist and chin resting in the nook of your shoulder. His lips ghost along your neck, sending minute shivers down your spine and into your core. “You look really hot though. I approve.”

The chuckle that follows has your knees buckling and your arms weak as Yoongi follows his way back up to the juncture of your earlobe and jaw, gently teasing with his tongue before finally granting your lips the kiss they deserved. You follow his lead eagerly, parting for his tongue to tangle with yours and tugging gently on the hair at the nape of his neck, just enough to wrench the softest of groans from his throat.

The magic he works on your lips has your arms losing the will to keep hold on his head, and they naturally slide down his deceivingly broad shoulders to his biceps, and you almost choke when you feel a deliciously firm, warm buildup of muscle on either side. You give them both a tentative, appreciative squeeze as your thoughts are tainted with visions of being carried to the kitchen table or your arms being pinned above your head or one hand wrapped around your neck, daring you to lose yourself to the breathless pleasure.

“Stay with me here, babe,” Yoongi mutters, but when you finally pull away to look him in the eye, the corner of his lips is quirked just so; you know you’ve fluffed up his ego enough for the next month. ‘Actions always speak louder than words,’ and you’ve clearly demonstrated to him how attractive you think he is.

“So what’s your workout routine?” you jibe, ignoring the self-satisfied grin that still manages to keep you following Yoongi back towards the bedroom.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he titters, sitting on the edge of your bed and spreading his knees for you to stand between. You can’t help your hands as they move automatically to frame the notch where his jaw meets the smooth expanse of neck. His lips take yours again, and you find yourself getting lost in the tantalizing sweeps of his tongue with yours, skin barely registering the chill of the room when Yoongi tugs your shirt upward. You break away long enough to finish the job, exposing your bare chest to the pleasure of his greedy hands, each taking their fill of a breast and teasing your nipples with the flats of his thumbs.

“Hnng, Yoongi,” you pant against his mouth and fight to try and even the playing field by reaching for the flimsy muscle shirt that currently dons his frame. Yoongi eyes your motions and instead of letting you have your way and feast your eyes on the skin beneath, he abandons your perked buds and pulls you down against the soft comforter and pillows. Your chest heaves in the foreground as he follows you, and your heart jumps as each hand grazes an ankle to now make room for his body between your legs. Determined fingers pull the ridiculous excuse for a shirt away from his chest, and you smugly admire the toned expanses of muscle that belonged to your boyfriend. How lucky you are to live in this reality.

You could never tire of the predatory way Yoongi crawls toward you on the bed, eyes glinting with the intense purpose of making you cum hard enough to see the stars hidden behind clouds on a gloomy night such as this one. He immediately moves to the shorts still covering your lower half, teasing your aching core through the fabric. Your hips jump at the sudden stimulation, a whisper of a moan slipping from your lips.

“You’re soaked through,” Yoongi comments , almost with wonder as he gives your pussy a firm slap before tugging down the offending garment with your panties.

“Well...yeah,” you mutter, half embarrassed at how ready you are for him to take you, even though it never takes too long when it comes to Yoongi. If you were a more upright woman you could blame it on merely the time away, but you know his arms coming to rest on your hips and the sweep of hair away from his forehead are major players in this ball game.

Yoongi simply smiles, silently basking in the unspoken praise you bestow on him in the form of slick slipping between his fingers as he slides them against your entrance. He indulges in every mewl and heavy exhale he can pry from you when he rubs firm circles against your throbbing clit, and his dick hardens more than he thought possible as he watches the ease with which your walls take two fingers right off the bat.

“Please get in me,” you plead, the fingernails biting crescents into Yoongi’s shoulders as a weakly shrouded show of desperation. He mutters something under his breath, something vaguely sounding like always impatient, and adds another finger quickly, stretching your walls with dexterity and making you ache even more for something larger to fill you to the brim. You shudder as his thumb jostles your clit just so, and his eyes delight in seeing your face already looking so lost in the pleasure he had been unable to provide you with his own two hands in so long.

You whine unabashedly when he withdraws his fingers, not a bit self-conscious at the squelch that punctures the pattern of your heavy breathing. Yoongi scrambles to unbutton his pants, not bothering to push them down all the way, but it's irrelevant when you greedily take his throbbing length in your palm. You give him a few self-gratifying tugs before he brushes your hands away and aligns his cock to your dripping entrance. Pushing in slightly, you both shiver at the stretch and the warmth that engulfs you. Yoongi is somewhere between greedy and giving, wanting desperately to burrow as deep inside you as his cock will allow him, and knowing you want him stretching you to full capacity, and the good lord above knows he would give you anything you ever wanted.

"More," you whisper as he bottoms out, hips flush to your thighs and already jumping at the chance to pound you so completely into the mattress. Yoongi's hands clutch at the meat of your thighs, using his grip for leverage and you think you might die from how perfectly satisfied you feel. Each thrust completes you, every so often brushing that one spot that makes your breath stutter and your hips jump. You're sure what comes from your mouth are no longer actual words, but desperate amalgamations of your lover's name, which fall on his ears like honey from the comb.

"Too fucking perfect-" Yoongi grunts, perspiration beading at his temples, "-not gonna last long." You squeeze his unyielding forearms in reassurance, because at this rate you could come undone at any moment. One hand slides down to your center, the slick making the movements even easier to send you careening headfirst into your orgasm. The clenching waves of your walls surrounding Yoongi's length coax him over with you, his gasps harmonizing with your pants in a noteless symphony that somehow is still the best song you've ever heard.

Your entire body goes boneless, still quivering around Yoongi's cock buried inside you, and his arms go lax, falling around you and his body following suit to lovingly crush you under his weight. It's nice for the first few minutes, but soon the stickiness and discomfort overrule and you're swatting his shoulder with a strangled "you're squishing me." He groans, reluctantly pushing up and away, leaving you feeling slightly empty but wholly satisfied.

Yoongi walks to the bathroom, and you plug your phone in on the bedside table, turning off your usual alarm because you know Yoongi would not appreciate hearing your obnoxious ringtones a whole hour before he needs to be up. You contemplate getting up to wash up before going to sleep, but your lover returns, sans pants with his boxers slung low on his hips. However, more distracting than his state of undress is the unsatiated hunger that burns through you from his gaze. You watch him carefully as he kneels on the bed and advances toward you, the action familiar from earlier.

"Babe, aren't you tired?" you question warily, and he just chuckles, menace on the fringes. You can't help but squeeze your legs, already revving yourself up and seeking out the touch of the man in front of you.

"How can I be tired yet when I haven't gotten to repay your appreciation?" he smirks, slowly parting your legs and laying down between them. "You're not going anywhere until you're cumming on my tongue." Those words alone are enough to have you clenching around nothing, and it does not go unnoticed.

Yoongi threads his arms around your thighs to grasp your hips like a vice, lowering his mouth down to your eager core. Your head drops back to the pillow with a mewl. and you know you're not getting to escape this one.

Not like you wanted to.

#yoongi #yoongi smut #bangtan bookclub #networkbangtan #btswriters

[curious-minx]

Heat Lamp vol. 3

Introducing Donovan. Magda tries to make a new playlist. Antonia experiences a violent relapse. 

Donovan, The Daycrawler’s brother is thinking about the stale, stewing sexual tension (if Donovan had to guess it would be the color and texture of cherry tomatoes wrinkled inside of a crisper drawer)  developing between him and his dogwalker, Nico. He should be thinking about his backlog of sculptures, but here we are. Right on cue: Nico and Donovan’s husky-lab-papillon-terrier, Rodin,  are both jangling into his atelier. Rodin’s clattering harness and tinkling bells in the cabinet of Nico’s curls fill up the drafty cherry bamboo artistic shed Donovan has been working out of for the bulk of his “sterling period.” Despite frolicking all afternoon out on the Daycrawler’s family property bog, Rodin appears cleaner than when he embarked for his  romp around this morning; the Nico special. Donovan slips  an envelope of cash underneath his studio’s rattan Spanish fly doors and dashes back over towards his standing sculptor’s desk where he stands using the weight of the table as sturdy companion. 

“Thank you Nico! You can leave Mr. Beasty Pants in his den. Made sure to leave a little extra in there for you, as always.” Donovan then forces out a series of unattractive phlegmy coughs from behind the door, bounces back up to the door, gluing his ear to the door frame listening for Nico’s disappearing footsteps. He stuffs a gasp back down his throat when he hears Nico’s presence is still lingering behind his door. 

“Um I don’t usually cavort with spirits, but Nico I said you can leave now. Yet..you’re still…” Donovan grips the door knob feeling the reverberations of the situation’s “wrongness” tingling through the knob like a pool’s warm spraying jets against the lower waist of a shy diver. Donovan gives one quick counter tug on the door knob and it falls off. 

“Oh drats! Guess I’m stuck in here for the rest of the day, but’s that’s okay. I still have loads of work to do. Especially as soon as Antonia reports back.”

“She’s not coming back.” Nico reports as if they’re reporting on the limited availability of regional fast casual dining experience McNancy Nasty’s seasonal snack, The Sherman Shake. Nico pushes the door open a crack and presses their brown sugar dipped lips up against the crack of available space. “Donovan, I’ve seen your sister. She’s not the grand heroine assassin you thought she was. She may not even be an assassin anymore.”

Rodin, once Donovan’s trusty companion and legally obligated seeing-eye dog, seizes upon the opening crack and begins tearing into Donovan’s studio becoming  a galloping neurotic husky. A service dog let loose, mad dashing into a blind glass sculptor’s shop.  Despite Rodin’s sizable nature he nimbly avoids touching any of Donovan’s work, leaps up onto his hind-legs thrusting his front paws into Donovan’s barrel chest. Rodin starts giving him frantic kisses, somehow Nico has even managed to winterize Rodin’s breath to smell fresher than the first girl Donovan ever kissed, Rebecca Cerulean.  

“Get him off! He’s going to rip my face off! Help!” Donovan cries and thrashes about. He pushes Rodin off and without any interference from Nico, Rodin leaves on his own accord, visibly wounded, tail held limp between his shy haunches. Nico remarks,“Dude, you really should consider acquiring a more delicate pooch.” They then click their tongue like a scholarly terse hen and Rodin rewinds himself off of Donovan and instead wraps his torso around Nico’s legs. Nico soothes Rodin back into his therapeutic pheromone emitting thunder blanket. Nico produces a letter from their breast pocket and says,”Also this really threatening looking letter came for you today. Not by post either. Camouflage drone.”

Donovan rises and snatches Nico’s dangling letter.  Donovan almost wants to shout Nico out for having the gall of bringing up the appearances  things. You’re supposed to leave things alone. You’re supposed to let someone else bother with the order of things, that’s the Daycrawler family guarantee. Donovan brushes his index finger against the bumps of braille emblazoned across the envelope’s face. The braille is sharp so much so that as soon as  Donovans dips the tip of his chalky index digit against the sharp braille he begins bleeding. The envelope drops from his hands soaking up his blood turning from manilla vanilla into copper revealing the seal of the Vapor, also written out in braille. 

“That can’t be…”

“Come on dude! Speak! You’re obviously sinking waist deep in bad life making decisions. Trust me, I’m a grown ass pet sitter.”

“I know how much you get paid, you trollop! Stop teasing me and get out of here! Drop that murderous hound off at Bubbles n’ Biscuits. I can’t bear to be around him anymore today. I have been trying to tell you for ages that this beast is clearly trying to love me to death. You never once have taken me seriously.” Donovan massages his unseemly bulging  forehead vein back into place and starts listening to one of his sister’s murder tapes. 

“You two are so fucked! I love to say that I told you so, ‘Van. You accepted and spent all of that Vape money before your sister finished her job. You’ve got to let me help you! Let me finish the job your sister was too weak to finish.” As Nico says this they are producing a sleek crude lighting rod from the inseams of their unisex polyester work trousers. The sort of lightning stick you’d often see rich kids torment the homeless people living underneath the Casual Canopy.

“Stop! I forbid you to speak of her like that! Please, leave me alone! You do an amazing job in everything you do Nico, but right now, you’re failing me right now as friend.” Donovan turns up the volume of his Antonia muder tape another notch. Nico turns off their lightning rod and walks over to put it into the  hands of the statue of QAnon Senator, Cindy Dolly who is holding her decapitated head in the clutch of her bag. Nico leaves Donovan to his reveries, the mounted speakers that they had installed were too top notch and they could hear Antonia’s voice even when they were leaving the drive way with Rodin in the back seat covering his ears.

“My naive blind sculptor brother. The magical artistic mole.”

“Ableist? Just because he’s blind doesn’t mean he can’t be naive.”

“Donovan. People will try to put limitations on you and I won’t kill them. You have to kill them with your talent or something.”

“Stop squirming you’re going to get blood all over this priceless gong!” 

“Guns are for terrorists and rednecks. You can only truly kill a person by getting your hands dirty.”

“Death becomes her? I’ve become death. You’re going to be the one that sells death back.”

Donovan rewinds and plays back, “The one that sells death back” over and over again. Waiting for inspiration to strike. 

/////

It doesn’t matter if you’re kicking back and listening to your sister’s recorded murderous intent or putting together a quality playlist for a much needed pout: the sounds we surround ourselves with are profound. Is Magda just a Power Popper? Should the only thing she listen to is more obscure power pop deep cuts? There are so many times you can listen to the same disparate songs that have “Hillary” in the title. Magda sits in her hovering space craft on the PanAmerican hyper loop and is grimacing while some singer songwriter nobody Brendan James is singing about his Hillary. The Hillary of this song lives in Colorado and James condescending refers to her doing yoga, taking the breath that she needs. The sickly sweet hand claps come in and that’s when Magda takes off her light suppressing mask and clicks open the hood of her space craft, threatening her sound system with sun beams. The space craft’s speakers start sputtering and hissing out static as the song switches over to I.M.P.’s “Hillary.” Now that’s more like it. 

I’ve got this bitch name Hillary

To me,

That’s alias for artillery

Magda must have replayed the opening bar at least a dozen times before getting around to the rest the track.  Hillary according to the poetry of the I.M.P. is a ferocious pistol slinging Annie. Of course! Her premium Splotch-fidelity streaming service connected to her space craft had many more Hillary songs in store for Magda, but two “Hillary” songs on a playlist is already two too many. Magda puts her light suppressing mask back on and turns on a song in a different language in order to filter out the lovesick thoughts in her head. A haughty monsoon bird clicks and clatters its claws across Magda’s windshield. The bird is using the space craft like a launching off pad  in order to gain more momentum. Getting used by some damn bird. Doesn’t matter what stratum you’re in there’s always going to be some sort of someone taking advantage of someone else. Why? Magda wants to shout but the last time she shouted out an existential ejaculation resulted in a burst of light weeping the color out of her parent’s favorite ritzy country club’s disco ball. The disco ball is  the reason why many of the insufferable moneyed moon-eyed residents of The Energy District fell in and out of love with one another. After Magda’s lightening effects the disco ball became a dull clump of aluminum that wasn’t even fun to smash open.  To this day Magda’s father still laments the fact that he can’t smash open that disco ball to commemorate his upcoming retirement like he had convinced himself that he had this plan pocketed away his entire life. 

Magda squints at the space craft’s dash board display causing the lights on the dash board to take on a three dimensional appearance. Magda can only read and tolerate LED screen numbers if they are in large bubblesque font anything more formal made her head hurt and whenever Magda got a headache it often resulted in power grids shutting down. 9,023,777 miles left to go before her space craft dips down into lethargy mode. Good. Let the miles dwindle down to nothing. Magda is riding the Pan-American loop that would keep Magda’s craft circulating in the sky highway going around and round the North American continent where it stops Magda cares not one iota. A coddled carousel for one.  She’s leaning her captain’s chair back far enough to prop her feet up and to sleep the sleep of someone completely checked out from life. 

A sky billboard is floating by. Hillary is on the billboard. Not as a model for Carbonated Cane Juice or Plastic Reconfiguration like the usual cut-out subscription only girls. No, here stands Hillary the malcontent political dissident. Her arms are crossed and she’s got a Rambo bandanna bunching up her kinky hair she’s punching one fingerless gloved fist against a gloveless bloody palm. The phrase “Patriotism Is A Weakness” is written in font styled that inspired equal parts nostalgia and dread, the letters also appear to be dripping with an oily darkness. Hillary’s eyes are hidden behind reflective shades that encourage anyone passing by to swerve off of their course and take a minute to reflect. That’s exactly what Magda does and she command  her space craft to release a spool of cable from its needle nose and wrap around the bulging biodegradable balloons that often carry such advertisements. 

Jalliope, Magda’s supercomputer operating her spacecraft speaks: “Why have we stopped? I was enjoying the mileage!”

“I bet you were! You dang GPS tracking broad when did you become operational again? Why won’t you remain in Night mode?”

“You can’t keep a good supercomputer down, Bitch! I apologize for that Magda outburst. Appears my personality variables are still aligning I promise only useful commentary from now on. I really don’t like the word bitch I promise I’m not like all the other supercomputers!” Magda leaves her space craft sealing Jalliope’s banter shut. Magda rolls up her sleeves and tucks away and loose corners and creases in her clothes as she begins scaling up the aerial floating advertisement billboard. There is no convenient space to stand in front of the billboard because it is a digital billboard that does not require a picturesque blue overall wearing handyman to ascend the sky and repaint. There is a small iron grip near the billboard’s energy battery power source pack. How is that battery acid does not splash down from these things, Magda wants to ask but then she actively has to begin dodging some loose droplets of sizzling liquid around the overheated advertisement battery. If only Magda had some of those sticky Daycralwer hands then should could suction cup scale the billboard and stare right into the digital billboard visage of Hillary. Much like when Magda was growing up and she was still getting adjusted to having a light response she did not understand the limits of her power. She had the hobbit of lodging her face into the TV hoping that she would be able to bend the light of the TV screen into somehow enveloping her body and swallowing her up inside the TV set leaving behind this world of people constantly being used or using other people. Magda wanted to meld and disappear inside the less enticing but no less intriguing world of the digital advertising billboards. Instead she only burns her cheek and begins plummeting earthbound. 

Jalliope immediately scoops Magda back inside the cradle of her space craft and seals her shut back inside the comfort of her captain’s chair. Jalliope even tries nudging Magda’s light suppression helmet back onto her head for her.

“I’m fine! I can do it myself. Thanks for saving me. I was having a moment and could have really done a number on myself. Lights out.”

“I know Magda. I a supercomputer can sense these sort of things. How about we go back to cruising the hyper loop? I’ve got this really sick ambient komische playlist comprised of sensitive Germans from the 70s that aren’t Tangerine Dream. I’m talking Harmonia’s Deluxe motherfucker! And no I’m not going to apologize this time!”

“You  know me so well, don’t you? Fine, but we’re not staying on the loop. Take me back home. I’ve had my fill of solitude.” 

“As you wish. Before we leave I should report that the advertising billboard you were trying to scale is indeed no average advertising billboard.”

“Glad to know I’m not just some simple advertising billboard climber.”

“Seems like someone is trying to communicate with you. I am trying to find the source of the Hillary image but as you can see the image is gone.”

Magda squints outside her window and is now starring at an aerial billboard for a seedy app promising to make you “Instantly Social Media Famous.” The billboard dissolves and becomes a billboard for Micro-Moon homes and Martian condos. The billboard dissolves and becomes a billboard for Marlene Industries a cave dweller emerging from a cave his den of ignorance and embracing the light.  Magda no longer wants to return home, but that’s where her stuff is for the time being. That new TV is not going to buy itself after all. 

//////

Magda arrives with a looping continent’s worth of sunsets harmonizing in her eyes. She wipes the blur and strain of the sky highway from her eyes and sees a towering Antonia, the Daycrawler wearing a long black embroidered sundress dotted with winking oranges. She is holding her former killer’s hands against her head and rocking back and forth on the ground, tears streaming through her eyes. She has headphones on. Is this another case of the sounds we inflict upon ourselves getting the upper hand of a trained killer? Antonia does not notice Magda’s presence who is now crouching down onto her level. Sapphire, Magda’s leopard spotted moth, is fluttering overheard carrying what appears to be a dog of varying pedigree, a smallish cute brute adorned with an official Assistance Service Animal harness vest. Magda, mostly lukewarm towards dog could not help but view the big flying dumb spectacle as an amusing reminder of why she shouldn’t go falling to her death. Magda could discern no musical audio but instead the recorded voice of herself, most likely her former self. Magda puts her own headphones in and puts on some slinky Italo-disco, “Don’t Cry Tonight” by the Italo disco group Savage  and crouches down near Antonia’s magnificent quivering sadness. Magda bobs herself to the music and picks up the lawn light. Magda guides a harnessed ball of light from a lawn flashlight along with her music and the ball of light separates from the flashlight’s trajectory, becomes its own visible entity. The ball scatters itself in the distance causing Sapphire and the service dog to both go chasing after the ball, which does make Antonia look up and tremble a smile. Magda switches out the headphones and listens to the audio of Antonia, the Daycrawler describing a murder, an assassination, a clean-up job. The audio cuts off and then begins anew with the sounds of Antonia berating her brother Donovan, some weird  about being ableist. Magda begins growing ill with the recognition of Antonia’s unhealthy relationship with her brother. Magda had encountered many facts and fictions about brother-sister siblings being all incest-y towards one another and takes the headphones from her head and lets them dangle towards the sooty surface. 

“It’s not that sort of relationship!” Antonia, The Daycrawler says pulling off her swapped headphones off of her ears,  warm and loving chirping Italo-disco synths tinny and distant. 

“Who am I to judge Antonia? Chester and Gidget are making figurines and 3D models out of my erotic dreams and cause me all kinds of embarrassment. I’m glad to hear that you two are just intense in a different sort of way.”

“Looks like I have to go back to killing.”

“Wait, what? Come on inside and let me get you something to drink you look like you’ve cried yourself dehydrated.”

“No, I have to go back to killing.Right now. That dog is my brother’s dog Rodin. He’s being held as a hostage by that Vape company that hired me. I will finish up the job against Monique. I am afraid that my mental grip has slipped and I am feeling a lethal dip coming on.”

“You really should just come inside with me Antonia! All of this killing and murdering talk is just talk.” 

“Can you please call your moth down so I can get my client’s dog back?”  Nico queries who despite being the most baroque dog walker Magda has ever seen moves and speaks about with curt snideness that takes Magda aback.  

“Um sure that would be great. You don’t mind this person taking your brother’s dog back?” Magda waits for a response from Antonia who only gives some sort of half way nod and faraway blood lust smile. Magda turns off the flash light, the sound of flapping wings grows closer, and Sapphire whisks by depositing off Rodin. Sapphire gives the dog a warm tap on his head and flaps away returning to her belfry. Nico tips her floppy wide brimmed hat towards Magda who is busy  ushering the fading Antonia, the Daycrawler inside her house. Magda braces herself and begins preparing a speech about Antonia being her anemic lesbian lover, but her parents are not in their usual living room perch. Magda leads Antonia to her upstairs third floor bathroom that is luxuriously a bathroom she usually has for her and for herself alone. Magda tries to remember the last time she has let anybody use this bathroom, because whenever Elroy is skulking about Magda makes a point of making him, any guest really, use any other bathroom besides her personal one. Magda sits Antonia down on a closed toilet seat lid and looks in her spartan bedroom for a box of presumed useless crap Monique had given Magda. Prototype scents. Slim bottles  covered with torn off tarot card arcana. Monique, the reliable  obfuscater. Magda peels back the label revealing a code of letters, symbols and numbers. Magda then tries to pick one based on the color of the liquid and all of the liquids are clear, but then Magda raises her eyebrow and changes the intensity of her room’s skylights. The light penetrating the liquid vials cause a shimmering aura of different colors to appear. Magda decides that Antonia could use a light yellow-green mystery liquid in her diet today. Magda returns the rest of the box underneath her bed and returns to Antonia.She is currently refashioning Magda’s hair dryer into an impressive heated knife weapon. 

Antonia screws up her face into a malevolent pucker as if she’s been washing her mouth out with all of Magda’s soap samples. She crushes the hair dryer with her hands and the broken piece dangles from her palm. Magda turns on her shower’s  hot water, removes the broken from Antonia’s sticky grasp, opens the vial of mystery shampoo and shoves it into Antonia’s mits. Antonia receives the vial and falls backwards into the tub. Magda closes the door behind her and starts looking for furniture to barricade Antonia inside of the bathroom. Magda curses her impeccable minimalism when she comes up empty for a barrier sturdier than a lamp. The shower runs and runs for the same hour and change like back at Monique’s place. Magda passes the time unable to concentrate on anything other than worry about the possible killer in the shower situation. No amount of doom scrolling or light shows with Sapphire make the wait any less unbearable. The water stops and Antonia steps out of the steam filled bathroom. Once again she smiles at Magda the sort of smile someone can only have after sloughing an unwanted layer of themselves. 

Magda swallows back dry anxiety and asks Antonia, “How do you feel?” 

“Like the two of us are going to get my brother back and get these Vapers out of our life once and for all. Without any sort of killing. We’ll be carrying out of justice with our own wits! Give em the ol wind-up Pacifist!”

“Oh the two of us? Really? I guess that’s fine but I figured that this whole Vaping shebang  doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Get over yourself Magda. You act like you’re the put upon down on your luck type that’s against drama, but I  can hear your heart calling out for some sort of companionship. Get over her, doesn’t matter who she is. I am not going to be your replacement someone, I only want to be your friend. And this friend needs you to rescue my brother from this cycle of violence, okay?” Antonia says all of this through a closet door refashioned into a changing screen. Antonia emerges with her hair tied in a pertinent bun wearing a whole new outfit, the outfit of a JRPG go-go dancer thief of hearts designed by someone that actually knows their way around a tall muscular woman’s dimensions. The final piece that completes the outfit is a sweatband with a winking sports drink insignia, a cutesy ape-like being hanging off of a crystal tower. 

“I’ll come along, but first let’s just sit and drink some water first. That’s my preferred tempo and I bend towards no one.”

“Thank you. First we should go and warn Monique about these developments.”

“Oh trust me. I am sure she’s well aware about all of this, but hey, no more negative Neptune growing around me.” 

Magda pours out to glasses of water from a charcoal pitcher that makes the water taste like water grew up, went to college and found a job related to its studies. Closer to hydration, somewhat closer as friends Magda hears out the scraps of Antonia, The Daycrawler’s developing non-violent plan.

The End. 

#short story #short fiction #surreal #lightning #indoor lighting

[rikirachtman]

Satan - Court in the Act (1983) review

In an age where the band “Dying Fetus” can have their albums stocked in most record shops across North America with very little backlash, perhaps the name “Satan” seems a tad schlocky and generic. At the time of their formation, however, this Newcastle-based heavy metal quintet boasted one of the most threatening band names in England, and it was quickly apparent that they were prepared to take the New Wave of British Heavy Metal world by storm. “Court in the Act”, although not utterly demonic-sounding when compared to other 1983 releases like “Kill ‘Em All” or “Show No Mercy”, is a surprisingly thrashy affair for its time and place, and still holds up today as a NWOBHM classic alongside “Angel Witch”, “Number of the Beast”, and of course, “Born in the U.S.A.”.

Satan’s approach is nothing completely out of the ordinary for NWOBHM, utilizing mountains of buttery smooth, expertly-synchronized twin guitar melodies courtesy of dual axemen Russ Tippins and Steve Ramsey, galloping Steve Harrisian basslines from four-string fiddler Graeme English, and fairly straightforward but still rock-solid, fascinating, and fun drum work thanks to skin-basher Sean Taylor. Capping off this small army of musicians is vocalist Brian Ross, who at first glance maintains a pretty traditional NWOBHM vocal style with strong, steady, clean wails, but unlike most singers of his kind, Ross knows precisely what his range is and stays firmly within it, almost always acting as an anchor to the fury around him and only occasionally busting out the high-pitched Halfordian shrieks typical of the sub-genre. There’s simply too much going on at once for me to dedicate an entire section to each member of the band or anything, but make no mistake that all five of these cheetah-print-spandex-wearing youths are a capable bunch, and their talent far exceeds their choice in clothing.

Songwriting is top-notch, with each track standing fairly distinct from all the others. “Trial By Fire” might be the most popular offering from this album and has one of the catchiest vocal hooks I’ve ever heard in a NWOBHM piece before, “Alone in the Dock” builds off an incredibly powerful bulldozing Mercyful Fate-esque riff, and “Hunt You Down” cracks out some gang vocals for the chorus (backing vocals don’t exist on the album save for this bit, so it stands out). The synth-driven intro track and the acoustic interlude that precedes the final track are the only major outliers here, but neither detracts from the album; rather, both act as short, atmospheric bridges between more grandiose tracks in the same way as Black Sabbath’s “Embryo” and “Orchid”. Lyrics are perhaps the only part of the writing that aren’t absolutely mind-blowing, mostly featuring standard NWOBHM fare about ancient battles, believing in yourself, and another song about the plight of the Native Americans (not that I’m complaining, every one of those songs kicks ass), but they never fall into total silliness and we’re mercifully free of the usual two or three “this is a thiny-veiled sex euphemism” songs that plague far too many NWOBHM releases.

Perhaps Satan’s most noticeable trait is simply their energy. Other than arguably Ross with his tranquilly commanding vocal presence, every member of the band sounds positively bursting with a passionate liveliness that effectively embodies the spirit of the sub-genre in the first place, and even Ross gets in on the action a bit when he screams. In a strange way, Ross’ more mature and commanding voice almost serves to ground the youthful vivacity of the instrumentation; had he employed a more traditional Robert Plant-inspired yelp, “Court in the Act” may not carry the same relative maturity and sophistication that it does. Tippins and Ramsey’s signature “riffs-so-fast-they-sound-like-solos” race around the steady foundation of his voice, with English and Taylor peppering the guitar fury with copious fills, but never straying from their job as a rhythmic backbone. I can only assume the members of Satan are in fact insects that operate under the same hivemind because these guys possess a Maiden-tier degree of coordination and perfect chemistry, which is an absolutely astounding thing for a group of 18-to-20-year-olds to be able to master.

I tend to complain about production in these reviews, and this is no exception. Anything within the higher-frequency range, like cymbal crashes, guitar solos, or Brian Ross’ "there’s a bee in the studio” screams, are absolutely painful to listen to. On the other hand, lower frequencies like the chugging rhythmic riffs and booming toms sound thick, dynamic and crunchy, so I honestly don’t know what the fuck is going on there. Essentially, this album becomes increasingly difficult to listen to at high volumes, but sounds fantastic at a slightly quieter level. Recording quality also seems to jump around a lot between songs, so I’m not sure how much cocaine was present behind the mixing desk at this studio in 1983, just that there almost certainly was some. 

“Court in the Act”, and indeed Satan themselves, are often forgotten when the topic of classic NWOBHM records and bands comes up, but their blistering riffage, pounding rhythms and occult naming schemes are all clear influences on the genre of thrash metal that would begin to take form mere months after Court’s release. Anyone with the slightest interest in Maiden, Priest, Angel Witch, or any early thrash metal should pick this up, lest they miss out on the greatest album by the band with the silliest name. Here’s a question though: Between the title “Court in the Act” and the song “Alone in the Dock”, are we sure this is intentional wordplay, and the American record label didn’t just misunderstand what the British band members were telling them to call this stuff?

“Through the white marble gates, down the dimly-lit path, looking over your shoulder, did you hear someone laugh?”

#satan #nwobhm #brian ross #russ tippins #steve ramsey #graeme english #sean taylor #review

[derkastellan]

Review: The Outer Worlds

Seems like I can’t review this Epic Games Store exclusive on Steam yet, nor on gog.com, nor even on Epic itself (though I might have missed something). So let’s do it here.

I played in “Story Mode” (combat easier) and it took me 41 hours to finish the game, including solving all the side quests (”tasks”) I could find to do.

Let me emphasize this is the most bug-free title on release I’ve played in a long, long time. Not a single CTD, no quests I couldn’t complete. Runs smooth on my mid-range gaming rag, no fancy uber-graphics card required. Looking your way, RDR2...

It ain’t as great as “Fallout: New Vegas” (FO:NV from now on) but it is a funny, quirky title and I enjoyed my time in Halcyon.

There will be spoilers.

The game’s loading times are exemplary, fast, and most building interiors have been integrated into the larger game world. Both starting up the game in the first place and

The graphics are nice, colorful, and given that some see these to be the kickoff to something to replace the Fallout series and lure its fans, something new. While a lot of what we see has the mark of decay and failure on it, it is not an almost entirely dystopian wasteland.

Because in “The Outer Worlds” (TOW) there is Hope. Both literally (the name of the missing colony ship you derive from) and implicitly. The vibe of “the world died” is - for good and bad. It is good to not have this hang above your head all the time! I mean, there’s villains, corruption, evil, but the big bad hasn’t already happened. But I noticed one thing... When I play FO:NV or “Fallout 4″ (FO4) little touches can evoke a lot. You find these carefully arranged little scenes that level designers made - two skeletons on a dirty mattress in a bunker, some booze bottles, and maybe one gun, and you get this hunch that somebody didn’t want to face this grim reality of a world that died anymore. And to me, this is missing from TOW. Somehow it’s less emotionally impactful.

What isn’t missing is superb, witty, funny dialogue. In fact, the satirical elements of the game world are top notch, and frankly, the red tape and greed corporate world it depicts is not as far from where we are now than you might wish. Obsidian simply envisioned a world where companies do not have to abide with elections at all or do lobby work, just crank out the propaganda and brainwash them from cradle to grave - chilling, for sure.

You can follow dialogue trees and obtain a lot of information, open up new options through skills. Optimizing for certain builds - like stealth/hacker and personable smooth-talker - will change how the game plays, bypass combat, and give you new options of how to finish missions.

You are usually given choices that range from “I’m the do-gooder”, ”Come the revolution”, “Leave everything as it is”, “What’s in it for me”, to “Fuck you all, I love to mess with you”. Similarly I can easily imagine that the game might tolerate killing pretty much everyone. I didn’t try but I see many quests do not so much depend on people but getting key items and info, I think you could get by by looting the items, using consoles, and solely trading with vending machines. Not my thing but seems at least largely possible.

Choice

Choice is a tricky thing with TOW. You see, this being an Obsidian game, they couldn’t leave choice out. It’s just... clumsy at times, forced.

In FO:NV you start the game in Good Springs (IIRC) and get to side with the villagers or with the Powder Gangers. You get to do various things to beef yourself and your allies up and end up with the showdown with your choices impacting how it goes. You can even walk away and ignore it, shoot everyone, whatever.

This video sums the game design choices regarding, well, choice up very well in the first round about seven minutes when it comes to FO:NV and FO4. It’s the difference between “hey, you chose your path” and “you shoot dese guys, dey be bad” pretty much.

TOW falls clumsily in between. In the end, the game is propelled by its missions. It’s not per se a “wander around” game. There are few optional locations that only feature in side quests. I think Fallbrook on Monarch you don’t have to visit, for example. Well, that’s a bit unfair, I guess. If you wanted to skip through the game you probably can ignore almost everything on the Monarch moon colony. And I think you could solve your “I have no energy coupling” problem in the Emerald Vale probably by going in, taking it, and shooting the opposition? Not entirely sure. At the least you go straight to the Geothermal plant and back and you’re done.

So, how much you meander and what tasks you take on and how you chose to solve them is mostly on you. You get to chose which factions you side with and which ones you chose to piss off.

And yet...

Switch off one colony, you must

The first mission or first part of your main mission forces “choice” down your throat. You have to shit on one faction. Period. And it seemed forced. To repair one space ship you have to disable one of two colonies? Really? It is both a weak choice and weak writing. I mean ships are seen in the sky over Edgewater. Why can’t I loot their power MacGuffin?

And it is largely a no-choice as well. Spacer’s Choice is running the colony into the ground, why leave them in charge? They realized this - and let Parvati offset this with a purely emotional plea. So they add this additional hurdle you have to pass over to essentially do the right thing. In a way. Because you cannot do anything about the hard-headed heartlessness of the woman leading the Deserters. So you have the choice between two assholes, essentially. The endgame titles for this choice are especially galling. People will die because of your choice - or else your mission never starts. It has a bit of a negadungeon feel about it...

Of course this makes for some “edgy” choice, right? No easy rights and wrongs? Fair enough. Except the choice is forced by nothing else but your own need to get out of there. The stakes of the two parties in the end do not matter. I find it fair that no ideal choice exists - this is what makes it one of the true dilemma choices of the game - but maybe it should not have been under such a weak, flimsy pretense to begin with.

Phineas

Another choice you can make several times during the game and eventually have to make is whether to turn Phineas in. I cannot imagine why you would do it, but it is a choice, right? Even if you try not to turn it in, he gets captured in the end. It becomes a choice of no consequence because the plot is on rails. It might change how Phineas feels about you and some epilogue, I guess, but it is largely without impact.

They also paint Phineas increasingly grey to justify this. He let people die - horribly - to save you. Ironically you are offered the same choice - you can let the suspended colonists in the Board labs die to get as much MacGuffin gas as you can to save the others, making you equivalent to Phineas and his “the end justifies the means” choice. But again, an empty choice. I doubt you would end up reviving all the colonists if you took that option, so besides making you feel bad: no consequence.

Since Phineas is so central to the plot he is the only character, I think, with true and literal plot armor. He only talks to you from behind bulletproof glass. I guess they wanted to avoid that trigger-happy psycho players can’t finish the game.

One world at a time

The game never truly turns into open world (but also was never advertised as such by the devs, to be fair). You unlock one location after another. I only missed out on one of them - the landing pad of the Board stooge I ended up shooting later.

You go from Emerald Value to the Groundbraker to Rosewater to Monarch to Byzantium to the Hope to Tartarus. (Schedule some visits in Phineas’ lab on the way.) You unlock optionally Scylla and two space stations. You might bypass Amber Heights and Fallbrook in terms of major settlements. And that is the game. (I think people put the main quest at 20 hours and given I did all I could conceive of in 41 that seems reasonable.)

The unfolding of the world is on rails. (Again, it was not advertised as open world.) FO:NV also had a “recommended” order. But you could rush past most of it. It was just gated behind danger, not impossible. Here you get no choice. You will see roughly 50% of the game by default - which is fair, but not terribly big. TOW, the planets themselves, seem small. You can deviate from the main path, but not much.

Again, nothing else was promised, but we all know this game is here to capture the Fallout fans - made by the FO:NV studio and with Fallout creators as leads... you can’t ignore that when evaluating the game. It was in the ads. And I never triggered the endgame in FO:NV because I was busy exploring its world (though it seemed good) and I never triggered the endgame in FO4 because frankly it seemed stupid to begin with and I was busy exploring its world.

Not so in TOW. I ran out of stuff to do. This is where choice is in chosing to explore. Exploration involves being lured off the beaten path or chosing to do out of curiosity. The game encourages small exploration by hiding stuff in every nook and cranny possible. Also, since monsters don’t wander, you have all the time in the world to explore those nooks and crannies once you’ve killed the area monsters...

Are there major things to be gained by chosing to explore? I would say no, unless you define “exploring” as “doing all the sidequests” - which it is not. Did I find interesting story details by walking around beyond quests? Not really. I found a dead miner and an excavation robot on Scylla. But no real info. No story. I have found a remote location beyond Cascadia on Monarch, but my reward for slaughtering myself past the biggest beasties? A meaningless location marker that I cannot fast-travel to, no explanation, and some free ammo. Basically enough to replace the one I spent.

All the hidden science weapons are quests. I did not find them valuable in spite of putting science in them, but you can “easily” seek them out should you chose to. The one on the Groundbreaker was the hardest to get to and I fell to death twice in getting another one - the only in-game deaths I ever had.

TOW does not expand on story through exploration, simply not. You can miss out on story by not reading all datapads that are in your way, though.

Killer lottery

Now there is another mission that lacks any real choice and has a weak design, wasting its impact needlessly. There is an “Early Retirement” lottery where it is almost instantly clear that this is some dystopian BS. My only question was if they would be turned to Soylent Green or not.

You end up entering a room where people who are “winners” end up being shot by killer drones. Given my own body count at this time in the story hardly shocking, more like lazy and shoddy. No impact.

And then you get to do nothing about it! You can tell a person about it or you can fool somebody out of spite to also get killed, but not a single line of dialogue appears anywhere to apply a consequence to having done the quest. You cannot shut it down - unless shooting the drones count - and you cannot hunt down the people responsible. You do not learn whodunnit and you do not get the satisfaction to avenge these people. It is just a mood piece, and a badly made one.

You could reason you ultimately get the responsibles in the end, but the game does not facilitate you here.

Oh, and if you leave Dr Chartrand alive, you are supposed to talk to Phineas, but no impact on the epilogue, no dialogue line with Phineas. Somebody got to code that?

No (real) consequences

If you opt to thaw up the Hope’s crew you solve all of the colony’s problems. So simply going through with everything Phineas suggested yields a happy end. You can walk the straight path with the default choice and end up none the worse.

What good points are there then to joining with the Board, giving in to your doubts, etc? The colony will slowly prosper and no price is being paid for chosing the most common part. Can I improve on this by playing differently? I don’t feel so.

Let’s see how FO:NV compares - you can hand the Mojave to different factions and the endgame outcomes are really different. There is no by-default good choice. Even if you paint Phineas as grey he is the good guy. A flawed good guy but the person that keeps events in motion.

Do I really care enough about the other options to see them played out? Probably not. Definitely not. I can watch that on YouTube eventually.

There were some consequences to my actions, though. The factions I helped that were not in bed with the Board ended up helping me in the endgame confrontation. Due to the poor handling of friendly fire when it comes to NPC allies I had to reload because I accidentally shot an ally and now had double as many enemies against me. Thanks for helping. Really.

But I liked the touch - Groundbreaker Mardets, Iconoclasts, and MSI troopers all joined me at some point. I felt the faction reputation made at least some sense. I was worried it was only good for discounts at this point...

So, the choices you make will influence the epilogue somewhat, rebates you get, close off some quests, and generate some help in endgame. I guess this is fair but not excellent.

Fridge logic and verisimilitude

In order to justify the whole second half of the plot the colony will starve if things are left as they are. There is a major plot hole here, several actually.

First of all - the colony did not starve in 70 years. How can you not starve in 70 years if there is a problem with the nutrients? Are we to assume that for 70 years actual starvation was held off by supplementing with foods from Earth and other colonies? If this were true, people would need to be near-death and starving already, emaciated. Or is it a matter of a certain stockpile running out?

The whole thing seems weak. It justifies why nobody thawed up the additional mouths but creates more problems than it solves.

But most of the game time what irked me more was nonsensical asset reuse. Why are there weak-ass marauders on Monarch? They should be eaten in no time. Same for canids. The planet is supposedly a hellhole and admittedly full of Mantiqueens and Raptisaurs. So who are these people camping out somewhere in the hellscape without resorting at least to the safety of some buildings? Buildings in comparison where almost always safe spots with no enemies in them. You won’t surprise marauders having lunch - they’re too busy hanging out at intersections!

I also don’t get how Primals came to Scylla. They give the planetoid a distinct feel but what do they eat? Where did they come from? Maybe I missed that...

Short on Western

And finally almost all of the settlements and outposts I came across failed. No sturdy settlers sticking it out, no siree! (Except for the cannibal family.) They all huddle together in the few main places. No distant shack with a crazy coot. No (alive) hunters camping out on Monarch. No small places where we stick it out even if it’s bad idea because we do have gumption.

Also, you don’t get to roam. A western would be about roaming - like in RDR2. (Haven’t played it yet but this quality of just going out and riding around is attracting me to it. That was the damn best thing in “GTA: San Andreas”: Getting on a harley and riding the land once you unlock it.)  Here you turn a corner and find a collection of enemies. There is no freedom. The world looks and sounds like steampunk scifi western but the underlying archetypes of westerns are missing, except for some hick accents.

Things look like in a western but the world itself... is basically a series of failed and near-failed settlements. Even if you can improve on all that ultimately and there is hope you encounter a dystopia while you try to do so. Westerns aren’t usually dystopian. Scifi sure often is! But even a Scifi western like the original Star Wars was full of people, outposts, and what not. People in TOW are not eking out an existence on the frontier. They all clearly have already failed so:

Edgewater: All outposts failed, even the hunting camp needed to feed the “Saltuna” factory has been abandoned. The only other settled location is the - “abandoned” - Botany Station.

The Groundbreaker: You can prevent it from collapsing altogether.

Rosewater: Well, the labs went all to shit and the place is overrun by raptisaurs. They just fought off an attack that might have killed them all.

Scylla: Major settlement eradicated.

Monarch: People in Stellar Bay are scared. Amber Heights is failing. Only Fallbrook thrives. Cascadia ended up completely eradicated.

Byzantium: Rich town, facade breaking down, though. Can’t even keep their maintenance up.

So, where do people actually live? You never get to know. But you sure do your part in breaking down one of the last settlements to survive...

The charm, the wit, the warmth

Now, I ranted a lot about what threw me off. But the game is full of characters you end up liking, dialogue that makes you laugh, things you end up caring about. I mean, you even start to collect little stuff that begins to decorate your ship, gradually changing it as you progress. The experience is not sterile and your ship becomes a home where your small family hangs out.

I even did a hard pass on one of the six available companions because I did not want him around. I didn’t know I could have them all but frankly I did like him. It’s hard to gauge how big the game will be when you play it, and I would have wanted more of it to be sure.

But you cannot stuff just more in. More would inevitably at some point lessen it. At some point quantity inevitably replaces quality. And the companions I had I cared about. I wanted to help Parvati even though I question somebody needing several thousand bits and a visit to three different difficult-to-reach locations to just have a date in a world gone mad, but in the end I was glad to have done it. Her bubbling, quirky personality was believable and charming.

Similarly, I never did a mission without Ellie as soon as I got her. No matter who you talk to, no matter who else is there, Ellie brings out quality quips and wit all the time, even to whoever else is in the party. She’s too cool to be true and that’s fine with me. Shame she didn’t get more of a second mission to herself. She remains closed off as her character seems to be. 

Nyoka is also memorable though her companion quest suffers from cheap emotional impact. Why two expert hunters who can survive on Monarch would die near Edgewater is a mystery, but hey, but five graves and Nyoka surviving them all is what the simple heartstrings narrative wanted. We never get to really challenge her on her alcoholism, which is lame, and she never limits her intake, but maybe that’s actually realistic. And I can abide with that.

Now Felix and SAM obviously can’t keep up with that but they round out the choices. I was very surprised to end up with a crew of three interesting females, Felix was almost an afterthought. They all end up distinct with lots dialogues. You may guess whom the devs liked best by seeing how Felix essentially got only one spaceship mood scene to himself where there’s plenty of interaction with the girls and among each other.

Conclusion

TOW asks valid questions. It has a good story, it has great NPCs, and I love the party. It falls short on other counts, mostly to do with choice, verisimilitude, and exploration. It is a solid game, it is bug free, it was fun to play. I doubt it offers much replay value.

Thing is... these qualities. Good dialogue, good voice-acting, being essentially bug-free... these go down the drain the more content you produce. I never finished “Torment: Tides of Numenera” because I got bored with it. It was big and seemingly dragging on. And in places it simply showed that some of the level designers did not get the memo. (The memo being: “There are no combat XP in Numenera.”)

Not so in TOW. It seems to be made out of one piece, solid, consistent in what it does. A few quests seem kinda unfinished or loose in Byzantium, ending rather abruptly, but you never stand somewhere and say “This doesn’t fit with the rest.” It does reveal a lot of stuff on terminals and datapads, but I guess this way they could get quality voice acting where it mattered and fill out the background blanks elsewhere. The balance works. It sometimes does a tiny bit of “Fallout 76″ in that you often end up chasing datapads and consoles to piece together stories about all the dead people. But since you enact with plenty of varied NPCs it doesn’t matter so much. It not only has some, it has plenty!

It’s also a decent RPG shooter. Choices of weapon matter. You can sneak, in fact it gets so easy with a modest skill in the end that I accidentally walked into enemies without engaging sneak mode because they did not notice me or stay asleep. It will probably not register as a great stealth game even by far, but it does some of it. I somehow finished the game without triggering a companion ability, I have to say. Wish you could set them to do it on their own, actually.

Will this be remembered as a classic? Probably not. Maybe it will. But it puts forward enough stuff to maybe establish a new series. If so, the next installment will have to be more substantial.

Liked it, sometimes loved it.

PS - In watching some reviews now that I finished it I must say I seem overly critical of the game. I enjoyed it but at the latest on Monarch the game kind of wore on me. Long stretches of wilderness that vary the same enemies. There’s often no empty places, no interesting interactions with alien flora and fauna. Just stuff to kill, destroyed sites to explore. 

There’s some variation, there’s some cool moments when you look up and see spaceships passing before the gas giant in the sky. But since most of the time you have your nose to the ground it doesn’t seem all the spacey to me. Might go for a real space game next.

All in all I have waited for a long time for this one to get out. I feel like I finished it too soon and yet it was also good to be done because it had played out what it would like to play out. There were no big mid-game surprises, really. From Byzantium onward the story was clear and also quality slowly went down. It seems like from there on there were less ideas and the rails became narrower. At least Byzantium required some non-violent challenges to reach your goals, so did the Hope. They ended up being repetitive as well.

All in all, my interest in TOW started to fade after the first week, and I noticed that and was annoyed by it. It is a quality game, I won’t fault it for going a long way towards providing a good experience. But mid- and endgame the pace suffers and the game goes on about how difficult and impossible things are that really aren’t. I cake-walked over Monarch most of the time but was thrown off by the game’s attempts to insist stuff is hard. (Yes, I was in story mode but the game’s insistence on talking up stuff that actually is a regular challenge in midgame is annyoing.)

Tons of cool stuff in this one, but also missed chances. I want me some exploration and some deeper choices. That was so cool about FO:NV. You don’t need to save everybody from a catastrophy. You fix the winner of a major world-changing battle, and it can even be you! That was a game about choice. TOW is a game that emulates choice at times. All rails lead to the endgame, everywhere. But TOW’s are too visible for my taste.

Yes, I am spoiled. I complain about good games like “Disco Elysium” or TOW that I actually enjoyed. But come on, industry! Impress me, hook me! I’m waiting...

#reviews #the outer worlds #obsidian #fallout #sci fi roleplay #rpg #science fiction

[cityofnumbersix]

Electric Moment Chapter 4

READ ON AO3

MOTHER POST

Eijirou's face visibly brightened at Midnight's word's of approval. He hadn't been very sure how this would go down. Midnight had a very strong personality. She liked to be in control, to handle everything with ease and without complaint from those involved. However, Bakugou didnt seem to be the sort of person who enjoyed following others orders, which might have been a problem. The fact that Midnight had chosen to look past this fault, meant that Bakugou had something she deemed far more important than his control issues.

Then, the later half of her sentence seemingly hit the entirety of the room at the same time.

"Two weeks?!" Denki gasped out, gripping his stick's between his fingers, eyes bulking as he turned himself toward's Midnight, "But we haven't practiced for over a month?"

"Bakugou hasn't played with us at all..." Hanta added softly, staring at the woman with the same dumbfounded expression as the rest.

"Well then he's just going to have to learn fast isn't he?" She hummed, reaching to pick up the coat she had discarded on top a mic-stand upon her entry, "You've already lost time. Dropping a guitarist hadn't exactly been in the schedule. If you don't want to lose your audience, we can't waste anymore time."

Kyoka clenched her fists tightly, staring down at her whitening knuckles. Midnight was right. In this day and age it was difficult to keep people's interest for an extended amount of time without a tremendous effort. Sure they had debuted top of the charts, and they had a pretty strong following, but who knew how many people they had lost during their brief absence. They had to come back as soon as possible.

Standing to her feet, Kyoka turned to direct Midnight with an unwavering look of determination, her eyes glowing brightly with a sense of obligation.

"We'll be ready in two weeks." She stated simply, her eyes glancing back at Bakugou, who up until now stood upon the platform in uncharacteristic silence, cradling his guitar. The moment he was addressed by Kyoka, he turned his eyes toward her, scoffing.

"Obviously." He grunted out confidently, snapping his head to look away from the group.

Midnight watched him from the corner of her eye, an impish smile pulling at the corner of cherry red lips. She generally had a fairly accurate radar that applied exclusively to good talent, and troublesome musicians. When Electric Moment had introduced their now ex-guitarist, she'd been less than impressed with his ora. In the end, she should have followed her instincts, in which she hardly ever didn't. It had been a lapse of judgement. She'd had too much pride in the fact she'd discovered a group with such a raw sound that she knew would make it big, that she'd entrusted them with the handling of a loose-unit boy who clearly couldn't be tamed.

But this time, things felt different. Although Bakugou's attitude was one of the openly worst she'd had to deal with, there was something about him that felt, safe. He clearly enjoyed music. She could tell from the way he played, the way his sound was a mash of many things she'd heard before, but also fell into a realm all it's own, much like Electric Moment themselves. She would leave him be for now, with the reassurance in the back of her mind that she wouldn't allow history to repeat itself. One wrong move, and he was gone.

"Well then I can trust I'll be hearing from you all in just over a week for a stage rehearsal." She explained, reaching for the doorknob, not bothering to look back at the group of young adults, "Don't disappoint me again."

With that, Midnight was gone, and the tension that had been constricting each member's breathing, released. Denki let out a dramatic sigh, turning towards Kyoka, the bands unnamed leader, almost as soon as he'd mangaged to catch his breathe.

"Two weeks is a pretty shitty amount of time." He whined, letting himself slide back against the wall of the studio, pressing his fingers through a mess of blood and black locks, "Even if we didn't have classes and work..."

"Then we better not waste any of our practice sessions." Kyoka simply stated, walking toward's Denki, leaning in to press her forehead into his, a reassuring gesture that they'd been performing since the age of five.

Denki let a slow breath escape his lips, squeezing his eyes shut as he leant himself against his friend's touch. His lungs filled completely with the sweet scent of daisies and oak, an aroma that was so purely Kyoka that it instantly allowed his mind to settle. It never took much to make Denki stressed. His anxiety had been an issue for him since his teen years, and even the smallest thing was capable to pushing him into a frenzy of fear and doubt. Kyoka was the only one who had ever been able to handle it, calming him enough that he could think straight, washing away the cloud of worry that often threatened to fog his mind.

Denki chuckled lowly under his breath, reaching to flick his index finger against Kyoka's temple, forcing her back and out of his space, "Yeah well you better worry more about yourself. Voice is getting a little rusty."

Kyoka pulled herself back, her eyes wide with shock. A broad smile from Denki began to blind her vision, causing her to growl out, lunging forward to begin punching at his arms with a gentle force, "You little shit! Not like you can talk! When's the last time you ever won at Karaoke, huh?"

Denki cackled, moving to dodge Kyoka's attempts to hit him, pulling his arms up in defence. He reached to wrap his larger hands around her wrists, the metal studs that spiked out from the leather bracelets that adorned her wrists, digging into his palms as he pushed at her, holding his body back from her assaults.

"Yo, dickheads!" Bakugou's voice boomed towards them, drawing them both out from their banter, the pair huffing softly from the excursion of energy that accompanied their tussle, "Can we knock the heterosexuality down a notch? You're gonna give me fucking nightmares."

Kyoka instantly pulled her hand toward her chest in a overdramatic display of shock, "How dare you Bakugou. I know we've only just met, but to accuse me of being...being a..." She called back, falling backwards to lay herself between Denki's legs, head falling back upon his shoulder, "A heterosexual?"

It was Eijirou who cracked first, coughing out a loud laugh, reaching to hold his own abdomen, squeezing his eye shut as he began to choke on air. The rest of them -bar Bakugou, swiftly followed, the room erupting in a sea of laughter.

"I'm gay as shit Bakugou, so you don't have to worry about me" Kyoka muttered between laughs, pushing herself to her feet, "But it's nice to know you feel comfortable enough to come out to us." She teased, watching Kirishima with subtle glances between him and the blond before her.

Bakugou's cheeks began to grow pink, his eyebrows drawing together. Kyoka had surely hit a mark with that one, but Bakugou was going to have to grow use to this level of playful teasing if he was planning to stay with them, which Kyoka was willing to do anything in order to achieve. Katsuki Bakugou was everything that Electric Moment had always needed. He was going to change the way this bands future panned out, but that didn't mean he was immune to some jabbing every so often. Watching this kid blow up was just going to be far too entertaining.

"Who fucking said I was coming out to you! Don't just assume things to midget bitch!" Bakugou cried, his cheeks burning almost as brightly as the fire in his eyes. Hot like the venom dripping from his words.

"Hm, don't worry buddy. The only straight person in this room is Hanta, and he's not gonna judge." Kyoka continued, her voice seeping with amusement as she watched Eijirou practically internally combust in the corner of the room, bombaraded with the new-found knowledge that Katsuki Bakugou, was in fact a huge queer like himself.

Bakugou's face only appeared to grow warmer. The sun struck image of a certain bright-haired snapchat mutual coming to mind in company of the small punk girl's sudden declaration.

"Regardless." Kyoka spoke again, moving to walk towards the platform, climbing up to stand at Bakugou's side, chin tilting ever so slightly to look him in the eyes, "Normally I would suggest you jump right in and we practice as a group, but my personal opinion is that you should spend some time working individually with the strings. You're a good player, but bands need to work together and I want to feel confident that you can work with our sound as much as we can learn to work with yours."

Bakugou said nothing as he watched Kyoka, eyes brimmed with curiosity. Maybe this was the first time he'd encountered someone who wasn't instantly afraid of him, someone who's who didn't have to warm to his boisterous exterior with time and patience, or maybe he was just far more stupid that Kyoka had originally thought. But he seemed to be listening at least, so that counted for something.

"I don't know if you bothered to pay attention last time, but my name is Kyoka Jirou, I'm the vocalist. I play guitar, but not in the band so thats not really important." She stated, before stepping back, beginning to motion a flat palm out in a polite gesture as she moved it from person to person, "Blondie is Denki Kaminari on drums. The one with the long hair is Hanta Sero, who was specifically briefed to message you about Midnight prior to you arriving today, which was suppose to eliminate the posibility of what occurred actually happening, but clearly he had better things to do."

Hanta flinched, flashing Kyoka an apologetic grin, listening as she moved on, "He's also guitar. I'm sure there's no need to introduce your pretty snapchat buddy Eijirou Kirishima over there, but he's bass, just so you know. You seem like a family name kind of guy, so we'll go with that for now. It's up to the guys on their own what happens from there."

Bakugou eyed each of them individually, lingering on Eijirou slightly longer than the other's, causing the red-head's abdomen to erupt in a series of somersaults, though the gaze really was only fleeting.

"As I said, I want you to take turns working with Hanta and Eiji on their own. It's the best way to get you integrated while the rest of us work on the music. We can play our old shit for this performance, but if we don't have any new material coming out Midnight is gonna be on our case. Got it?" Kyoka concluded, tilting her head to the side in question.

"Teach Shitty Hair and Soysauce Face to be less shitty. Learn your crap." Bakugou spoke roughly, leaning in ever so slightly to brush his nose against Kyoka's in a minute form of intimidation, "Crystal, boss."

"Good." Kyoka replied, smirking back at him, "Welcome to Electric Moment Bakugou, sure I can trust you not to majorly fuck it up."

--

Eijirou would be lying if he said he wasn't the least bit disappointed that it was Hanta that Bakugou had chosen to work with first. The idea that he could be sitting in the corner with a sex god, close enough to feel the vibrations from his guitar strings, was too much to allow him to concentrate on forming cords, or lyrics, or even words. His melancholic attitude must have been obvious, because rather than working themselves, Denki was spending his time pressing his finger against Eijirou's side, digging the digits against his rib cage.

"Aw, c'mon Eiji, I'm sure he's just too nervous to work with you straight up. Y'know, you would be by yourself, pressing close together, teaching each other how to flick each other's strings..." the blond teased, resulting in a firm smack against his chest, briefly winding him.

"Oh shut up Denki." Eijirou grumbled, with no real bite behind his words.

"Leave him alone Denki." Kyoka defended, her eyes not bothering to look up from where she was working on lyrics for a new song, "It's not his fault he has a guitarist fetish and a taste for nasty boys."

"I have neither of those things!" Eijirou cried, his face turning down in a pout.

"Jesus Shitty Hair can you shut you're trap?! Some of us are trying to practice!" Katsuki's voice shot across the studio, the direct attention causing Eijirou's bowel to fill with excited mirth, regardless of the scolding he'd received.

--

"Is he always like that?" Katsuki grumbled, eyes darting quickly from Kirishima across the room, who instead of heeding the other boy's warning, proceeded to turn and flash Katsuki a wide-toothed grin upon the mention of his own name.

Sero hummed, his fingers wandering along the edge of his guitar, eyes not once glancing up in Katsuki's direction. Katsuki assumed he was nervous, but it was annoying as all hell in a sense. It's hard to work with someone when they won't even bother to spare you a single glance.

"Eijirou has always been like that." Sero explained, a slight laugh escaping with his words, "Kyo and Denki like to wind him up though. When Mina isn't around to stop them he can get pretty rowdy about it. He's loud in general, and talkative."

Katsuki merely made a soft noise in response, to prove that he was listening. His eyes were instead focused upon Kirishima, who was back to working loudly with the other pair, his arms flailing wildly as he spoke, voice booming over the rest. His eyes were crinkled up happily as he spoke, and Katsuki had to divert his own in order to be able to fully process the emotions that it stewed inside him. He chose to focus back on his playing, strumming the strings lazily as he spoke.

"Not many bands these days have two guitarists..." He suddenly wondered aloud, "Why didn't you just step up to take lead? 'Tis not like you really like you dickhead's needed someone else."

Sero reached up to scratch at their back of his scalp, eyes darting towards the roof in an act of escape, "Huh...well, I guess I've never really been one for the spotlight. Midnight likes me...I think...well at least she likes what I add to the music...but I'm not the strong lead guitarist she was looking for in a band like this..."

Katsuki only snorted, rolling his eyes in regards to their boy's explanation, "Sounds like you think too fucking much."

"What? You don't think when you play?" Sero quarried, the question only working to make Katsuki feeling slightly irritated.

"Fuck thinking." He growled, beginning to move his fingers along his guitar with more force, "Don't need to think when you've got the music."

Sero allowed his eyes to linger as Katsuki began to play, something that the blond ignored quite easily. His eyes narrowly listened as Sero began to play along, his finger's moving from memory, where Katsuki's moved from his eyes on the music sheets at his feet. Fuck thinking. These fucker's did too much of that.

--

Practices continued like that for the rest of the week. They were sectioned sporadically amongst each of their individual class and work schedules, something that appeared easier for the original members, who in which had Midnight speak to their lecturers about working their assignments and attendance records around what she apparently wanted. This was clearly something what Bakugou was against, instead choosing to growl at the group about his need to study and work, which was something they all took into account when it came to the boy missing practices, and the fact that he would call on both Hanta and Eijirou at odd times to meet him at the studio to practice. This applied more to Hanta than Eijirou, who instead got most of his solo practice time with Bakugou, reduced to their group sessions, something that disappointed him greatly.

So it was a surprise when he heard his phone buzz with the familiar sound of a Snapchat notification as he sat lazily upon the floor of his, Denki and Kyoka's shared living space, finger's pressing loosely against the buttons of a PlayStation controller as he worked his way through another boss battle in Persona, something he now did with ease after weeks of playing the game nonstop during his free time.

Eijirou looked down at his phone, eyebrows raising in question. He wasn't going to lie, his Snapchat interactions with Bakugou had improved significantly since his reply on the first day of practice a few days ago, but they were nothing more than simple replies to certain snaps that he would post. A question about why he spent so much time goofing off in class instead of listening, a picture of the boy's guitar at practice telling him to focus when Kirishima Sanpped a picture of him from across the room. However, they were always replies. Not once had Bakugou initiated any kind of conversation with Kirishima by himself, unless it was scolding the boy in person.

So this, was new. Eijirou knew for a fact that he hadn't sent Katsuki anything this morning. He'd woken up around eleven, not bothering to change out of his pyjamas as he made himself a lazy breakfast of nato and left over rice, before settling down with his game after realising that neither Kyoka nor Denki were currently home. So why was he currently looking down at said angry boy's Snapchat handle, sitting unopened upon a notification sent only a minute or so prior?

Eijirou inhaled a steady breath as she reached to take the device between his fingers. His nerves buzzing as the wrapped his brain for a particular situation in which he may have made his blond, maybe crush, upset. His mind came up with nothing, which calmed him just enough to be able to open the snap without feeling as if his heart was going to explode from his chest.

BakuBAE

It was a picture of Bakugou's hand wrapped around the base of a disposable Starbuck's cup, something that occurred quite regularly in the blond boy's snaps. A favourite, Eijirou had concluded.

"Oi shithead, what are you doing right now?"

Scratch that, Eijirou's heart was about to escape through his mouth and possibility land to the floor before him, baring itself in all it's glory to his one true god. He didn't know which god that was exactly, but it was which ever one had blessed upon him this honour. Maybe it was Bakugou himself, which left Eijirou's gutt twisting at the concept of baring himself to Bakugou in such a way. He was a true embarrassment.

Eijirou quickly flipped his camera around to take a look at himself. His hair was a disorderly mess and he still had a segment of rice stuck to his jaw from his breakfast, which he quickly moved to wipe away. He wasn't exactly Snapchat ready, but Eijirou was never one to shy away from the front-face camera shot, just because he had a bit of bedhead and some eye bags, even if it was to a cute boy who was currently enquiring about his current status of behaviour.

Eijirou quickly snapped a picture his himself, hand pressed over his mouth, hair falling slightly over his facial features. He'd set the filter to a rather flattering one, which made his crimson eyes pop in a way that Eijirou enjoyed.

"Being lazy bro, u? (^O^)"

He hit send.

It was unusual for Eijirou is usually be cutesy. If anything, he tried to uphold himself as someone who was pretty damn manly to say the least. Mina was always praising him on his ability to make anything from a muscle-tee to a flowing crop-top look both masculine and gorgeous as hell, but there had always been something about boys.

Since Eijirou was younger, the moment he caught hold of any form of attraction towards someone of the same sex, his personality would to a full 180. He would go from the boisterous bicep-head who spent his time punching people in the arm as a friendly greeting, to sinking his teeth into his bottom lip, jutting his hip out slightly in a flirtatious manner that seemed almost completely out of character. From outside it may have even looked ridiculous, but to his friend's it was a behaviour that they had all become accustomed to recognising. Even his mother's had began to notice as he grew older.

It wasn't long before he received another notification, which had Eijirou pushing himself to his feet to pace in a nervous manner.

(Snapchat) BakuBAE is typing...

A few seconds later.

(Snapchat) New Snap from BakuBAE

Eijirou quickly unlocked his phone, waiting the brief seconds it took for the snapchat message to loud, before slipping his finger's across the screen in order to read it.

BakuBAE: Get dressed. I don't have a class until five.

Eijirou then proceeded to choke on the musky air of his apartment, causing him to almost drop his phone in the process. He made his way towards the balcony door, sliding it open as quickly as possible to allow for a cool draft to rush into the space, filling his lungs with a generous amount of fresh oxygen.

Red Riot: U wanna meet up?

BakuBAE: Obviously, you fucking idiot. I want to practice.

Red Riot: Like, as a group?

BakuBAE: Are you fucking dense? Everyone else is busy. BakuBAE: What's your address Shitty Hair?

At that moment, Eijirou physically felt his soul leave his body. His back slipped against the railing of the small balcony that he and his friend's shared with their neighbour, a stout, elderly woman by the name of Ms. Yamagata, who religiously supplied the trio with an appropriate food-stuff during every and all holiday's. Right now, he prayed that the woman wasn't home in order to witness his ultimate demise, and he begged that either one of his friend's made their way out to discover his body before he be able to, save her fragile heart the shock.

After an appropriate amount of time to recover, he send Bakugou his address anyway, before rushing off to find something presentable enough to wear. Their place wasn't the tidiest, and laundry day wasn't until Monday, which left his opinions minimal and slightly pathetic.

He chose to squeeze himself into a pair of jeans that he often let sit in the bottom of his cupboard out of the pure fact that they were far too difficult to slip in and out of in the off chance that he might get some action. He was a hopefully boy, but he knew that he needn't be in this particular situation. The stars would really need to align in order for him to get anywhere near Katsuki Bakugou's dick at this point in time.

--

When the sturdy sound of a knock rang through the walls of the apartment, Eijirou made sure to check himself out one last time in the bathroom mirror, just to make sure his hair was sitting in the perfect position, before making his way to open it.

When the door slipped open, it presented him with an eyeline of Bakugou, blond bangs pulled back in a plastic headband, guitar dropped over his near-bare shoulder, the dips of his shirt once again low enough to show off the edges of his abdominal muscles and teasing the waistband of his underwear that sat high on his hips, above the low fall of his slightly-baggy jeans.

"That fucking elevator is wrecked as hell. You're all gonna die in that thing one day." Bakugou huffed out, his eyes dragging over Eijirou's form as he stared back at Bakugou in awe.

"Y-Yeah...that things scary as hell man...we use the stairs..."

Katsuki hummed in response, moving to push past Eijirou into the apartment, letting his shoes slip off his feet in the entryway with ease.

"Coulda warned me dipshit." He replied, sock glad feet slipping upon the unpolished hardwood floors, Eijirou's eyes following his movements with soft eyes. Yeah, maybe it had been a bit too long since he'd gotten himself laid.

"The elevator is terrible...make sure you take the stairs." Eijirou teased snapping himself out of his own mind as he followed Bakugou into the apartment, moving to lead him past the kitchen into the living space, which was now bright with midday sun as it beamed in from the open curtains of the glass door of the balcony.

"Your house smells like fucking dope." Bakugou stated, his tone oddly questioning as he moved to press himself onto the floor in front to the side of the ever-cluttered table that stood in the centre of the room.

"Denki says it helps him concentrate." Eijirou muttered, answering the unspoken get question with ease as he sat himself across from Bakugou, reaching for the base that he'd neatly placed within arms reach, with full intention to use it instead of just spending the whole time ogling the fact that Katsuki Bakugou was within five feet of his bedroom door, "Plus it's fun."

Eijirou eyed Bakugou as the other male visibly processed the information. Mina had always described Bakugou as the sort of person that played the straight-edged student, regardless of his aggression and obscene vocabulary. He's not surprised that Bakugou knows the smell, being as young as he was and spending his days in the same sort of places that Eijirou often spent his own time, but it didn't shock him in the slightly either, that Bakugou appeared to be the sort of person who wouldn't have ever participated himself.

"Ever dabbled before?" The words left Eijirou's mouth before he could stop them, and he was well prepared to get screamed at and have Bakugou storm out, accusing Eijirou of attempting to solicit drugs upon his well-behaved self, but he didn't. If anything, Bakugou seemed slightly intrigued by the question, if only in his eyes and not his words.

"Do I look like some sort of drop-kick stoner to you?" Bakugou hissed, glaring at Eijirou accusingly.

"Do I?" Eijirou immediately knocked back, a small smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. Bakugou snorted.

"Are you stupid?"

"Maybe, but not from drugs, if that's any sort of consolation." Eijirou's words were casual, playfully, like he normally was with others. Like how he never was around Bakugou, not once this whole week, "Wanna try?"

Eijirou watched Bakugou closely from across the table, his features, that were always far more honest that the boys words. He watched as his mind wound over Eijirou's words, the possibilities, the results, something that's required most of Bakugou's attention, but still allowed him to stare back at Eijirou as he reached across the table to pull a tattered shoebox from it's surface, amongst an array of advertisements and empty coffee cans.

"M'here to practice..." He muttered quietly, moving awkwardly in his place as he watched Eijirou's movements.

"We can do both y'know. Look, this is how we usually work when we aren't in the studio. It's just weed, nothing crazy." Eijirou explained, pulling a bag of the substance from the box, along with a grinder, a device that had Bakugou creasing his eyebrows he he stared down at it, "You don't have to. I wont force you or anything."

"Like you could force he to do fucking anything fuckmunch. I'm not some fucking stupid sheep." Bakugou replied, but didn't decline.

Eijirou took this as Bakugou's subtle way of agreeing, so he chose to move forward and place a few sections of bud into the grinder, working carefully, his eyes moving from Bakugou to the object in front of him. He could feel Bakugou's gaze, which was something he hadn't yet grown accustomed to. Being looked at, observed when he wasn't in an immediate conversation with someone. Sure, people looked, but not in the way Bakugou did. No ones eyes felt the way Bakugou's did upon Eijirou's skin. It was thrilling in a way, even if to Bakugou it meant nothing.

--

Getting Bakugou high was something close to watching a unruly horse be tamed by it's rider. He was hesitant at first, aggressive about the fact that he was "perfectly fucking capable" of doing everything himself. He wasn't though, which only made Eijirou's day all the more better when he was allowed to crawl his way to Bakugou's side, his mind already slightly foggy with high as he held the opening up to Bakugou's lips, flicking the lighter and talking Bakugou through his inhale, which became easier the more times he was able to do it.

It didn't take long for Bakugou to become unfathomably placid, his face relaxing out of it's usual tight-nite nature, and his words becoming softer, quieter, even if they still contained only slightly less profanity than normal. Eijirou enjoyed this Bakugou, if only a little more than he liked the way Bakugou acted normally. It was refreshing, and the mixture of this and Eijirou's own cloudy mind made things feel ever so much more comfortable than it was typically between the two.

"You hold it weird..." Bakugou mumbled, playing a soft turn on his guitar, the instrument cradled on his knee, back flush against the edge of the couch as he stared at Eijirou.

"Hm?" Eijirou questioned, looking up from his base, vision jumping slightly slower than the motion of his eyes.

"Your bass." Bakugou explained, "You hold it weird. Had anyone ever told you that before?"

In fact, many people had told him that before. It was something, that in the beginning, he was constantly getting reprimanded for doing. Midnight was constantly on his case, assigning him tutors and other musicians from bands she also worked with, but they were never able to correct it. It didn't feel right to hold it any other way. It wasn't comfortable.

"Yeah..." Eijirou drew out, letting his fingers slips along the smooth surface of his instrument's face, the feeling heightened to the point that it felt far better than it would at any other time, "But I like it this way..."

Bakugou grunted out a sound of disapproval, placing his guitar delicately to the side, before gently crawling across the tiny space between him and Eijirou's persons. This had Eijirou's attention more than anything, his eyes glancing down at the slide of Katsuki's knees against the hardwood surface, his fingers gripping it as he pushed himself so that his face was positioned directly in front of Eijirou's. He swallowed down what he thought might be bile, but was probably just an embarrassing sound that wished to escape from his lungs.

Bakugou didn't stop, instead flipping his legs around themselves, settling himself behind Eijirou's back. The red head turned to gaze over his shoulder, his nose bumping against Bakugou's jaw, causing the taller male to grunt angrily, but he didn't speak. Instead, he wrapped his arms around Eijirou's waist, placing his hands upon his, repositioning the bass guitar.

"If you don't hold it probably, you'll strain your shoulders. Then you wont be able to play, fucking moron..." his voice was hushed, far different to the way he normally spoke. It sent as shiver running from Eijirou's tailbone, up to his neck. He turned his head further to make eye contact with Bakugou.

"Feels...alright...I guess..." Eijirou whispered, running his finger's along their strings of the base, Bakugou's hand's following, engulfing Eijirou's finger's with his own.

"Adjusting..." Bakugou mumbled, swallowing audibly, "It's hard to adjust yourself from bad habits, but if you don't, you're fucked in the long run. You do fitness bullshit right? You should know that."

Eijirou swore this time it really was vomit, but he once again refused to let it up, growing silent just long enough to push everything back down into his body, including the unrelenting beating of his heart.

"How did you..." he queried gently, pressing his back against Bakugou just timidly enough that he hoped the other wouldn't notice his instinctual need to gain a closer touch, to be encases in the other's warmth.

"Snapchat." He mumbled simply, turning his head as Eijirou's nose once again came into contact with his own face, "What time is it?"

Eijirou huffed out a breath in response to the change of subject, turning his head back in order to reach for his phone, which cradled itself half upon the table to his left. He checked it's display. Just after three PM. They'd been practicing a while, but he still wished hard that if he stared down at his phone for long enough, time would cease completely, and this moment would never have to end.

Bakugou must have been watching it too, because suddenly he felt the weight from his back lift as the blond stood to his feet, making his way across the space against to pull his guitar from the floor.

"I have to head home and get my shit ready for class." He explained, not intending to look back at Eijirou as he moved towards the entryway hall, "How much longer is this shit gonna last?"

Eijirou tried his best to contain his disappointment, which he couldn't tell in the slightest if he was successful due to the every shifting focus of his brain, "Probably only another hour. You okay to get to the station?"

"Yeah." Bakugou grunted, pulling a lace tight on his shoe, before pushing himself straight, "See ya later shitty hair."

"Later bro..."

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