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#the five year old cousin is the same one who called me a baby for sleeping with a stuffed animal they’re both so funny
moral-terpitude · 2 years
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Fourth Time’s the Charm
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summary | Tommy’s wife wants a baby girl.
pairing | tommy shelby x wife!reader
warnings | allusion to post-partum depression, talk of miscarriage, smut, creampie, unprotected sex
author's note | I’ve never wrote anything “x reader” and wanted to give it a shot. I don’t feel 100% about how it turned out, but here it is anyway.
word count | 2,365
Requested part two can be found here.
[Masterlist]
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Some days, your husband wouldn’t listen when you told him three children were enough.
You both already had your hands full with the three dark haired Shelby boys you had given him, that ran around and caused a ruckus from the time they woke to the time they slept, no matter what chores they were given, who they were sent with, or what the season was.
They were 8, 7, and 5-years-old, and it felt like for each month of the last five years that Tommy hadn’t seen you pregnant that he was trying to convince you for one more baby.
However, on a night like tonight, in a snowed in house, with a fire lit in your bedroom, his words had a chance of coaxing you.
For the most part, because you knew, deep down, that, yes, you wanted a girl. Each time you fell pregnant, no matter how happy you both were that you were able to give your husband another happy healthy baby, there was a tinge of disappointment those first few months, that you had birthed another boy.
That was until time passed, and you felt back to yourself, and you got to see that twinkle in his eye as he held them and helped you raise them that you realized, another boy was good, and you’d love them just the same.
The other reason you knew, that on a night like tonight, in a snowed in house, with a fire lit in your bedroom, his words had a chance of coaxing you, was because for the first time in so long, you were alone.
You had realized a pattern, as you lay in the tub thinking about the day, amongst other things, that each time that Tommy had planted another child inside you, you had been having a nice night together, alone.
Actually, each time it had been a calm day as today had been, followed by a night spent enjoying each other as much as you could.
And today had been one of those quiet days, as Ada had taken all three boys, bless her, to stay with her to give Karl a chance to spend time with his cousins. For the whole week actually they would be gone with their aunt.
You and Tommy had spent the day, well, he spent it working, and you spent it with your legs over the side of the leather chair in his office, alternating between a needlepoint and a new book.
After dinner you’d taken a nap while he kept working, and now you were in the bath. The water was warm and the room as dark, as the only light you had brought had been a candle.
You listened as the door opened and closed to your bedroom, followed by the sound of your husband setting his shoes in the closet, and hanging up his jacket.
You counted his steps to the door before he knocked twice, then opening it. He leaned in the door frame as he observed the parts of your body that were submerged and exposed from the scalding hot water.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding from me, eh?” He smiled as he removed the braces from his shoulders that held up his trousers and untucked the white shirt as he approached the tub across the cold tile.
“You call it hiding,” you said as he discarded the garments in a pile with yours, “I call it waiting.”
“Well,” his rough fingers met your shoulder as he traced the curve of your arm along the side of the tub before linking his fingers with yours, hot breath finding your neck as he planted a kiss behind your ear, “Mrs. Shelby, if you make room I’ll join you.”
The rough tone of his voice cropped up goose pimples on your exposed flesh and you moved forward and let him join you in the water.
As you leaned back against his chest, he let out a content sigh as his hands rested on your stomach.
There was silence for awhile, as you listened to his breathing and, if you placed your head just right against him, his heart beat. Moments like these were few and far between, and made you fall in love with him a little bit more each time.
“I’ve been thinking,” you whispered as one of his hands, in the water, traced the ghost marks in your flesh, a sign of growth and retraction, mothering and carrying of children burned into your skin, and his other hand wove its fingers between yours, light flickering off of two golden bands next to each other, “maybe, we can try for a girl.”
You heard the blip of his heart skipping a beat as your words caught him off guard and his fingers gave yours a squeeze and he took a deep breath. “Yeah?”
The excitement in his voice he tried to repress just a tad. He knew, from the last three children that, if the trend continued, you’d be absolutely insatiable for nine months.
His hands wandered your body before speaking, one hand moving to your breast, to squeeze the nipple, while the other dipped between your thighs. While the sensation in the water of him lightly pressing your clit wasn’t the best, as the water just didn’t work the same way as your own wetness would, it still felt good.
With a squeeze of your shoulder he whispered in your ear, “Let’s get out, yeah?”
With a nod you stood as the water dripped down your body, before he leaned past you to retrieve and wrap you in the soft towel. Now, not that he usually wasn’t always, but now you figured would be soft with you. Gentle.
As the water drained and you dried yourself and collected a towel for him, a sad thought popped into your head.
“You have to promise me something, Tommy,” as the words began to leave your lips you almost regretted them, knowing that if there was an answer to the question, you didn’t want to hear it. “You have to promise me, that you won’t let some of those men that you’ve subjected yourself to rub off on you.”
He quirked an eyebrow as he waited for you to continue, “I don’t need to know, but I tell you now, I can’t bring a daughter into this world and teach her she needs to be respected by men if I have her father out with other women behind my back.”
He closed the short distance between you, a somber look upon his face with a slow shake of his head, before wrapping you in strong arms, “There’s no one but you, love.”
His words quieted the noises and chaos inside your mind as you found your head resting against his chest.
His fingers traced unidentifiable patterns on your back. The smell of his skin seemingly was always tainted by a touch of whiskey, a cigarette snuck in at some point recently, and his aftershave. But you loved it. It was comforting. Him, undeniably.
He pulled from you slightly to turn your chin and capture your lips in his. As he held your face his free hand crept down your back and over your ass to play with the wetness that was already escaping your warm cunt.
You did your best to wrap your leg loosely around him, allowing him better access to pump his fingers in and out of you.
He pulled his lips from yours moving to your neck as your hands splayed and clenched against his chest.
“Relax,” the word was a quiet breath whispered into your ear. He was well aware of your hesitation to relax and just express fully how you were feeling. You were stressed between children, and maids, and the constant company of the house that someone, anyone, would come barging in.
He sucked and nipped and licked at your neck, until finally you had convinced yourself that surely no one would interrupt the two of you on a night where all your children were away.
Shyly, a moan escaped you lips as your face was pressed against his shoulder. It was a wonderful noise to touch his ears as you felt his length continue to grow, pressed against your stomach.
He removed his fingers from you, wet trailing across your flesh as he brought both hands to your hips. The candlelight flittered and flicked and sent wild shadows across his face as he watched you.
“Should probably move to the bed,” the way his eyes roamed you made you feel as if he was taking you in for the first time, “doesn’t seem right to try and conceive a child with you bent over the sink.”
You were flush as you thought about Adam, the middle of the three, knocking at the locked bathroom door a few weeks ago as Tommy pounded into you, sounds muffled by your skirt and his slacks, as your son mused that he couldn’t find daddy anywhere.
You had yelled to him through gritted teeth and fingers grasping the porcelain and the faucet to take his brothers and go check the stables.
“Not just any child, Tommy, a girl.”
He smiled as he sat at the head of the bed, pulling you onto his lap, as his hands found your hips again.
“How do you know it’ll be a girl, eh?” He smiled as his hands squeezed you.
You guided him inside you, relaxing your legs, slowly, to take him fully before speaking.
“Because, all of you Shelby’s, as far as I can tell, have a curse.”
He quirked an eyebrow before bucking his hips up into you when you didn’t lower yourself all the way to meet him. “A curse?”
Your hands gripped his shoulders as you moved yourself on and off of him, the wet between your thighs growing more pronounced as your breasts bounced and the head of his cock cascaded every ridge inside of you, moans passing between both of your lips before his strong hands held you in place as you took him whole inside you again.
“Tell me, Mrs. Shelby,” one hand stayed on your hip while the other gently tickled your stomach, resting there as he pictured you filled with his seed and growing his child once again, before his blue eyes, alight with some kind of fire, met yours “what is this curse you think we have?”
You squirmed against him, rocking your hips just enough to feel him hit somewhere just further than the deepest part of you, with a gasp as he pushed further, the words choked out of you in the midst of a moan you weren’t anticipating, “Three boys.”
His brow furrowed as he pulled the both of you around just right so you landed gently on the pillow and he now lay between your legs, looking down at you. “Three boys?”
“It takes three boys to get a girl,” you explained as he slowly pulled himself out of you, and you watched the breath he took as your fingers skritched and played with the short hair at the back of his neck.
He pushed back into you slowly but you could see his thoughts were elsewhere now.
“You three,” you said as you poked him on the end of his nose and he leaned forward to kiss you fingers, “then Ada. Our three. Ada only has Karl,—”
He interrupted you, as if wanting to prove you wrong, “John didn’t have three boys with Martha.”
Maybe, maybe, the men in their family didn’t speak of these things outside of their houses. “She lost a baby, Tom.”
He paused, taking in the somber mood that took over your face as his lips returned to your neck and you wrapped your legs around him. His arms were tucked under you and his fingers played with your hair.
He quickened his pace, the final flick of his hips as he was fully taken by you caused your moans to grow louder with each thrust. Eventually you were pulling yourself to meet him, feeling the warm heat of an impending climax growing in your stomach.
You breathed his name silently between your lips as the words all mingled into some jumbled mess. Surely, Mary and Frances even if they were in deepest depths of the house, as far away from your room as possible, could hear all the noises he had you making. Your eyes rolled back into your head as you pushed away the thought.
“If you,” the words escaped him through staggered breaths as he rose to hold you by you thighs, his hips almost painfully bucking against you, “if you can come for me,” your head pressed back into the pillow as the words left his lips, he knew what he was doing to you, and also maybe if he said the words that would make it true, “love, if you come, it’ll be a girl, yeah?”
All the words hadn’t even been spoken before you indeed started to clench as his cock swelled and exploded his seed inside you.
You chuckled as he nuzzled his face into your neck, a contented sigh humming in his chest as he lay on top of you gently.
“Tommy, if you squash me there’ll be no baby,” you choked out, knowing full well he wasn’t laying with all his weight into you anyway.
He pulled the blankets over you both, nuzzling into your neck once again as he kept his hand resting on the lower part of your stomach.
You could hear his heart pounding from his chest as you played with the longest part of his hair, your eyes closed.
“Think we’ve done it then?” An excited beat leapt in your chest as you thought about how he would behave with a daughter. Would he learn to braid her hair?
“No, no, love. I think we’ll have to try over the next few days. Just to be sure,” you joked as he brushed the few strands of hair that were in your face back behind your ear, “maybe even a few times each day. To be certain.”
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sea-owl · 1 year
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Have some in-laws, Colin and Felicity. Set in the arranged marriage au which is also the same universe as this post.
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Felicity knew it was fair to say she grew up without a positive male influence. Her father, Lord Featherington, had been a drunk and a gambler and then had the nerve to pass away when she was seven. She had no biological brothers, just three older sisters. They don't say it, but Felicity knew she was actually a last-ditch attempt for a male heir. It's pretty obvious when the sister closest in age to you is seven years older.
Then, when Cousin Jack came to try and place a bid as the new Lord Featherington, the ladies of the house were quick to figure out he was another liar and scammer. Mama was not one to take that lying down so she made quick work of him, quietly getting papers that said the first daughter to have a son will inherit the estate.
So yeah, the male influences in her family kinda sucked. But Felicity also thought that to say she didn't have any positive male influences was kind of a false statement.
Though she will never admit it to his face, ever, Felicity had Colin Bridgerton.
Colin has been engaged to Felicity's favorite sister, Penelope, since before Felicity was even born. The way the story goes that once Mama and Penelope no longer had to be isolated from everyone else and could receive visitors the Bridgertons came over to congratulate Mama on the new baby. With them was their five year old son Colin Bridgerton. While the other children played and their parents talked Colin apparently made himself comfortable next to whoever was holding Penelope. If she was passed to another set of hands Colin would follow and replant himself next to the new person.
The adults finally took notice of the little boy's fascination with the baby when Lady Bridgerton asked Colin if he wanted a biscut.
Colin, who at the point was sitting next to the crib they had put Penelope in, said, "No. I want to stay with my Pen."
Felicity thought they were lying the first time she heard this story, but then others including Colin himself confirmed it.
It didn't take long after that for their parents to officially arranged an engagement and ever since then Felicity has been stuck with Colin. At least it wasn't Lord Fife. She might've actually shot Fife if he was around as much as Colin is.
So Colin was there throughout the years. Felicity wasn't sure what happened during the early years, he was getting ready to go to Eton when she was born, but she does remember him coming over whenever he was on break.
"You're here again," Felicity gasped when she saw Colin in their family drawing room. "Didn't you just leave?"
Felicity was nine years old, and Colin was back on break, getting ready to go on his Grand Tour to finish out his university years.
Colin smiled his charmer smile. "Good to see you too Felicity."
Felicity ignored him and crawled up onto the sofa next to Penelope. She half laid on her older sister, hugging her around the middle and resting her head on her shoulder, shooting a victorious smile at Colin. Because despite the fact that he and Pen are engaged, he can't be openly affection with Penelope like this.
Colin's eye twitched.
Felicity giggled, Hyacinth was right. It's fun to rile up older brothers.
A year later, when Felicity was ten, her mother Portia had debuted Penelope at seventeen. Too early in most of the Ton's opinion.
Penelope looked miserable every time she went to a ball dressed in one of their mama's citrus colored dresses.
Felicity was worried. Her mama, Prudence, and Philippa all liked going out to balls. They enjoyed it. What was it her mama called it again? Husband hunting? Penelope already had a future husband, though. Was she upset that he wasn't there?
Felicity asked Penelope.
Penelope looked down at her younger sister, though Felicity was quickly catching up in height, and smiled. "I am alright, Litty. There are just a lot of people there who are very insistent they talk to me because of my engagement to Colin."
Felicity's eyebrows shot up. So this was Colin's fault? These people make her sister miserable that she does not get to enjoy the balls like her mama and other sisters do because she is engaged to him. Yet he is not here to take responsibility for that!
No, this will not do. Felicity's favorite sister deserved to have fun too! If Felicity has to drag Colin back by his ear she will!
Felicity began to pen a letter in her neatest handwriting.
Colin Bridgerton,
You must come home! Mama has debuted Penelope, and all these strangers harass her! Because of you! I can not think of any other way to say it. She looks so sad when she goes to balls, and when she comes home, she looks sad and tired.
You must take responsibility Mr. Bridgerton! Come home and make my sister happy once more, or I shall drag you back myself!
Felicity
Mixing it with Penelope's letter Felicity knew it would get to Colin soon.
Two weeks later, Penelope came home from Lady Danbury's ball and she was smiling!
Something good must've happened then. Felicity so wished to ask her sister. Oh if only she wasn't meant to be sleeping.
The next day, Felicity walked into their family's drawing room to see Colin Bridgerton sitting next to Penelope. Penelope was tracing the spine of a book Felicity hadn't seen before. Meanwhile, Colin was tracing Penelope's hand. They were both smiling.
Felicity grinned. Her letter worked!
"You're back!" Felicity cheered.
Colin smiled at Felicity, one of his genuine ones she's seen him throw at Hyacinth a few times. "Good to see you to Felicity."
When Penelope left the room momentarily, Felicity tapped Colin.
"When I am supposed to debut in society can I live with you?"
Colin made a weird face. "What? Felicity that wouldn't be appropriate."
Felicity frowned. "Why not? You'll be married to Penelope then," Felicity paused. "Won't you? And Ms. Evans lives with her sister, Lady Hunt, and her husband, while husband hunting. Why can I not do the same?"
"Oh," Colin said like he just connected two dots. "Felicity is there a reason you would want to live with me and Pen?"
Felicity fidgeted in her seat. "Penelope was miserable at the balls. She didn't want to go, but Mama made her anyway. What if I'm the same way? What if being out in society makes me sad, but Mama forces me to go to balls? I don't have a Colin to make balls better."
Colin nodded, now seeing the full picture. "Felicity, like you wrote in your letter, Penelope hating balls was my fault. There are people in the ton who want to weasel their way into the Bridgerton family, and they think going through our fiances is the way to do it. I wasn't here to protect Penelope from that. If I knew she was going to be debuted this year, I would have been here from the start. Now if I wasn't engaged to Penelope her dance card would have been full of suitors just like your's will be when you debut.:
Felicity giggled. "Your name would've been on her dance card the most."
Colin chuckled. "Yes, it would have." Colin reached over for a box. "And it's not like you won't have a Colin to protect you. You'll still have the original Colin! Only my protection for you will be a little different."
Felicity gasped. The pistols in the box were the most beautiful she's ever seen. They were small, around six inches and could be easily hidden in a pocket. Ivory handel with butterflies carved in.
"Now," Colin said. "I know you've been learning how to shoot a shotgun bit you need something smaller to be able to hide on you so I'm going to teach you how to shoot these. These will keep you safe, and keep those unruly suitors at bay."
Felicity giggled.
At twenty-one years old, Felicity was cleaning her pistols when her suitor, Geffory Albandsdale, dropped the most curious piece of news to her.
Felicity furrowed her eyebrows. "Geffory, why are you making plans to travel to York when my closest male relative lives in Bloomsbury?"
It was Geffory's turn to be confused. "Felicity I thought your sister was the one who lived in Bloomsbury with her husband?"
Felicity nodded. "She is, as does my brother."
Geffory jumped. "I am so sorry. I was not aware there was a Lord Featherington to ask."
"No there is not one yet," Felicity said. "I do think Penelope will have the first boy though, and that means the estate will pass to her, lord knows I don't want it."
Geffory just stared at the woman he loves. "Felicity, darling, I do not understand. You say your brother lives Bloomsbury but then you also say there is no Lord Featherington?"
Felicity crossed her arms. "Mr. Albansdale, I am talking about my brother in-law, Colin Bridgerton."
An understanding flashed across Geffory's eyes. "Your sister's husband."
Felicity nodded. "Colin has been the longest male influence in my life. We've been stuck with him since his engagement to Penelope when he was five years old. He has been there since I was born, when my father died, when Cousin Jack was found to be a charlatan, and we are still stuck with him to this day." Felicity playfully turned away. "I will not marry until you attain his blessing as my closest male relative."
Geffory smiled in understanding. He bowed to Felicity. "Very well darling, I shall make the trip to Bloomsbury soon."
A few days later Dunwoody opened the door to find Mr. Geffory Albandsdale looking to call on Mr. Bridgerton.
"I would like to ask your blessing to marry Felicity."
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azuremliam · 1 month
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More Bug World trivia! This time with Liam's dealings with babysitting in the Hives they've lived at/visited!
Text from the image below the read more (From the Middle and then Left to Right) :)
Liam's Adventures of Babysitting In Bug World
Prior to becoming a Courier, Liam used to be one of the designated "babysitters" or essentially larvae tenders of their old Hive.
They worked in this "job" for a good ten years before getting assigned to a "Scout" for five years. And then finally assigned to Courier when they turned thirty five.
- [Ladybug larvae are very likely to cannibalize when there isn't that much food readily available. Liam had to deal with preventing a few clutches from eating each other during a dry spell that damaged their Hive's food storage.]
"Guys, guys! Stop trying to eat each other! I'll get you some aphids to much on!"
"Jake! Jaaaake! Get the aphid leftovers from my pack!" 'Quick!'
"I'm getting em!"
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[Every Hive city has designated areas for various offspring. When Finn was introduced to the areas by Liam, the sight of some of the other "Kids" really startled him.]
"Hey now, don't worry. They're just friendly, curious, babies- just like you!"
"Squeak"
"Ah!"
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"Hey Scarab! Could you do me a favor real quick?"
"Yes. What do you need?"
"Can you hold this lil guy for a bit? Me and Jake need to help prepare his section of the grub room."
"..."
"Scarab?"
'Ahhmm!' "Right! Sure. I'll hold him."
"Thanks!"
[Even as a Courier, Liam and their brothers still occasionally take some "jobs" for caring for grubs at any Hive or town they visit. If they have the time for it.]
[Scarab gets flustered when he sees them holding a grub for the first time.]
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"Here you go, enjoy Kiddo!"
"Don't worry, you two are next!"
[More often than not, Liam was sent to help feed the Warrior Wasp larvae. They're all born from Vera's royal sister, Gladius, who settled down in the Hive after requested by their original Queen to help guard it. In a round about way, they're all Liam, Jake, and Finn's cousins.]
[Somewhat related, the claw gloves they occasionally wear, originated from their deceased friend/cousin, Vale. The dark blue pieces of Liam's armor is what members of B.A.R.C were able to recover from what little remained of her. Vale had requested that her exoskeleton be given to Liam to help protect them, should she ever die before them. The same with Liam's other good friend, also deceased from the same attack, the Comet Darner, Chiron.]
[They both died from distracting the same Beast that devoured Liam's human home. Vale was the first to go after charging it head on to give them time to run away. Chiron soon after, when luring the Beast away from Liam's hiding spot.]
[On a lighter note, Liam helped Chiron's partner, Juni, take care of their nymphs after the whole ordeal. They take some solace that their friend, in a way, lives on through them. They also named the three nymphs, Janus, Helen, and Io. By the time Liam's Journey starts, they're all fully, and healthy, grown dragonflies.
"Hello little ones, I'm glad to see you all doing so well."
[In Bug World, places where aquatic young are taken care of are called kiddie pools.]
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Hi I'm bored u wanna talk about fishdings to me?
GASP!
Okay so basically, for those who don't know, Fishdings is an au where Gaster is Undyne's dad and Sans doesn't exist. Papyrus is there, but only in a small fight in Waterfall that replaces Shyren's because SHYREN AND LEMON BREAD (although she's called Baked Bread here) REPLACE SANS AND PAPYRUS
So Fishdings Angler had a sister named Shelley who reproduced via Mitosis as you do and decided he too should make a child. Shelley got killed by the Justice child tho. Rip. She left her daughters in the care of their honourary auntcle, Riverperson.
To make his wonderful child, Fishdings combined RAW COSMIC MATTER, A LUMP OF HIMSELF (he can split his tail into legs and can grab off lumps of himself mid split, so thats how) AND GOLDFISH CRACKERS. But OH NO! He accidentally knocked a beaker of JUSTICE DETERMINATION into the mix! (He was studying it)
The child sprung out of the vat a fully formed five year old and immediately beat the shit out of him. He was very impressed at his NEW DAUGHTER'S STRENGTH and immediately took her to the king for training! While she was jabbing at Asgore with a stick, he came up with a wonderful name for her: UNDYNE ANGLER!
Once the newborn fish child got too tired to keep attempting a royal assassination, Fishdings took her to visit her extended family in Waterfall. Riverperson immediately adored their new honourary niece (obviously).
Shyra, six, didn't like Undyne that much at first because she's made of Justice Determination: the same justice determination used by some child to kill her mother. She eventually warmed up to her though, and the two grew up very close.
Shyren, one, loved Undyne from the start and the two would frequently run around the house together shrieking at the tops of their lungs.
Due to Fishdings being busy with SCIENCE and Riverperson with ferrying everyone around on a plank of wood (and also trying to built an actual boat), the Blooks would often babysit the fish children.
Maddy, thirteen is HEAD BABYSITTER! She's also the only one who does any work around here. It's thanks to her that the house hasn't blown up yet. Blanksta, eleven, is no help. They spend all their time in the ruins or on the farm. They are the ruins dummy.
Napsta, ten, is TOO STRESSED to help much. They like playing with Shyren though. Musical baby. They make sick beats together despite being little kids. Hapsta, eight, is even less help than Blanksta in the way that HE CAUSES PROBLEMS ON PURPOSE.
When Undyne is not hanging out with her cousins and the Blooks, she spends time in the lab with her father. The other scientists don't mind her running around the place as long as she's careful.
She also continues training with Asgore! Even though she has webbed hands, she's still pretty good with a spear. She can now beat the ass of anyone in the underground. Except maybe Asgore himself.
She lives on the top floor with her dad for awhile, but when she gets a bit older they move into Shyra and Shyren's place, and buy them a house in Snowdin. By then Shyra's twelve or thirteen so her and Shyren are okay alone most of the day. Besides, there are loads of other kids in Snowdin so they're happy enough. The Blooks still come visit sometimes.
That's all the early Fishdings lore, I think. Nothing else major happens til Undyne's fifteen anyway.
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House of the Dragon tag game!
Rules: Answer the following questions, then tag any and all people you think might enjoy participating. If you haven't been tagged yet and you'd like to join in, consider this your invitation! 
Thanks for creating the game @jotterjots, and for tagging me @the-phoenix-king-blog, because I think we fans of Team Green should be able to enjoy and share our favorite parts of the characters, both in the books and show!
1. Who's your favorite character? What draws you to them?
Alicent and her children, to be honest. In both the book and show, Alicent presents the EXPECTED life for a noble woman with marriage and children, often with a husband chosen by her father/brother/other guardian, and honestly, by tradition, Aegon II should have been the expected heir to Viserys, especially after how Rhaenyra acts like she is a exception by being a female heir and NOT helping other older sisters to become the heiress instead of the younger brothers. 
Aegon, Helaena, Aemond and Daeron all deserves better than canon, alongside poor Jaehaerys, Jaehaera and Maelor who got involved in the adults’ fighting for being a threat to Rhaenyra’s claim
I also have a fondness for poor Aemma Arryn, who was married at 11 years old to her five years older cousin, had said marriage consummated at age 13 and undoubtly suffered her first known misscarriage not long after that, and had Rhaenyra at age 15, only to die in childbirth at the young age of 23 for another demand of a son to Viserys, therefore risking her own life and ruining her health by basically spending the last decade of her life either pregnant, or recovering from a miscarriage or stillbirth! 
3. What is your favorite line from the season?
Two different ones, actually. I have to agree with @the-phoenix-king-blog  and say young Aegon II:s  "Everyone knows, Father, just look at them". If that is not calling out Viserys’ willful blindness for how NONE of Rhaenyra’s sons clearly is sired by Laenor, I do not know. As @the-phoenix-king-blog said in their answer to this question: Perfect answer to a treasonous question in a hostile environment. He saved everyone he loved in that scene and showed his quick wit and intelligence, turning a dangerous situation against his enemies. Very smart.
My second favorite line is from the same episode, by Alicent: “Where is duty? Where is sacrifice?” Basically, I see it as Alicent trying to call Rhaenyra out on doing as she pleases with no thoughts for the long-term aftermath or how it affects others, and indirectly Viserys as well for allowing Rhaenyra to escape consequences by his paternal favoritism. In short, why are Alicent always the one who have to do her duty and always sacrifice herself for the demands/desires of others, and get no rewards for basically doing what she is expected to, both by social norms and the standards of a good woman? I can honestly see her show!version and Sansa have a lot of things in common
4. Which actor's portrayal is your favorite?
Quite a few, because I have hard to choose a single favorite. 
Olivia Cooke as adult Alicent and her younger self by Emily Carey. Phia Saban as adult Helaena and Evie Allen as young Helaena. Adult Aegon by Tom Glynn-Carney respective Ty Tennant as young Aegon. Ewan Mitchell and Leo Ashton in their respective role as adult and young Aemond
Sian Brooke as Aemma Arryn, did highlight how Aemma was not brought up in the Red Keep to expect being a dragon rider and how she undoubtly wanted this pregnancy to really be the final one after going though so many
They also made some nice cast roles for the infant/toddler characters, by what little we see of toddler Aegon, baby Helaena, Jaehaera, Jaehaerys and the future Aegon III and Viserys II 
6. Name a minor character you want to know more about!
To be honest, I would have liked to see more of Aemma before her death. Not just as a queen and mother, but expanding her personality like showing her hobbies, worrying about meeting the same death as her own mother Daella did, missing her Arryn relatives, like how did she react to learning about only three-year-old Jeyne being left of the main line of House Arryn when her parents and other close familiy members was killed at the hands of the Stone Crows?! Surely Jeyne’s father was one of her older half-brothers from Rodrik’s first marriage, no way she would not just...ignore this tragedy suffered by her own little niece, Rhaenyra’s half-cousin though her maternal grandfather? 
8. Who's your most anticipated new character of Season 2?
NETTLES, no doubt! I really hope to see her as NOT being Daemon’s bastard daughter or being a dragonseed otherwise, because I want to see a normal human proving that not only Valyrians or their descendants can tame dragons and ride them, just by Nettles using her cunning to realize that food can bring out trust in a wild animal and use Sheepstealer’s favorite food to get him used to her
Bonus Round:
12. Link one or more of your favorite fics!
I have a few ones outside my own ones, that I want others to read: 
There is one AU fanfic where Alicent chooses to run away with her children and her youngest brother to Essos shortly after Rhaenyra married Laenor. I can not find the AO3 link, sadly, but if someone recognize the plot and title by what I remember, tell me: Her youngest brother offer to join them in the escape. Alicent only finds out her pregnancy with Aemond after they are in Pentos and she gives birth to him there. All three of Rhaenyra, Daemon and Viserys gets suspected of having murdered Alicent and her children after the wedding, with various motives, and Viserys failing to realize that Alicent and her children are missing for MONTHS under the belief that they are with her relatives in Oldtown and never gets a letter from her. No one buys Jacaerys being the son of Laenor upon his birth by the fanfic following the show canon of the Velaryons being black and Lyonel resigns as Hand in disgrace over his son siring a bastard on the Crown Princess, followed by a mention of making Harwin marry and stay as far away from Rhaenyra as he can. Corlys and Rhaenys demands a divorce for Laenor on the grounds of said NOT-related “grandson”. Civil war treatens because of Rhaenyra and Daemon not helping their case. Some of the dragons, among them Caraxes and Syrax, was killed in the Dragonpit by a mob and Larys donated a scorpion/other bolt weapons with something written on it akin to “for Queen Alicent.” 
Lady Dreamfyre by @ai-megurine
link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42130989
The Phoenix King by @the-phoenix-king-blog
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46930405/chapters/118219258
My own ones coming here!
A modern day AU story, insired by the first Home Alone movie, with the Green siblings accidently being left behind at home, alive!Aemma teams up with Alicent to get back to the kids and human!Vhagar aims to help the children defend their home from burglars as their unexpected babysitter until Alicent comes home
https://archiveofourown.org/works/43407690/chapters/109120650
A Witch!AU somewhat inspired by the Discworld books, where Gael Targaryen was born as a witch and aims to help Alicent and her children to get a better life than always being ignored by Viserys in favor of Rhaenyra and Daemon. Currently set in 115 A.C, shorty after the end of the War of the Stepstones. Will be strongly Anti Team Black futher on in coming chapters as we gets closer to the whole “Aemond loses a eye” event and the Dance itself 
The royal witch of cold and winter: https://archiveofourown.org/works/41249514/chapters/103415532
Tags; @ai-megurine and  @chococococya and @darylandbethfanforever9
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hanshikha-life · 9 months
Text
My Prankster Brother
It was a sunny evening in the month of June. The bright light shone at my books and my pen was constantly being bitten while I brainstormed the answers of my homework questions. My mind went back and forth on the same question again and again. That’s strange. I’m generally really fast on working out my after school work, I thought. Maybe it was because I was working three times hard to be on par with ninth grade. “It was a sudden change this year”, I said to myself, “It’s the first time I went to school continuously without a summer break and maybe because of which I got a little stressed out”. As such thoughts fluttered through my head came out of nowhere my little sister. I tried my best to pay attention to her while my drowsy, dark-brown eyes couldn’t help closing. I was snoozing hard. Why had I gotten soo tired suddenly? After a good enough attempt to listen I heard two words, “upload google-classroom”. I gently took the jet black phone from her tender baby hands and uploaded her online quiz to the google classroom to be corrected. I had just glanced at the big, fat student copy as the phone rang loudly. “Buzz…buzz”. Hugh? I jerked. Now that sure woke me up from my great slumber. I took the phone from my sister again. To be exact I remember snatching it from her. Yes, I know I should have asked, but anyways. I swiped up the lock-screen and entered the password. The home page popped up in a few seconds as I scrolled down to see who was calling. Ahhh…It was my little, naughty cousin brother. I’d known him since he was two days old and we’d grown as thick as a rainforest ever since. We bonded over the physical time spent initially as kids and later bonded over the internet.
He’s been calling me since and two things happen everytime we e-meet. One, our time extends for hours together and two, we have so much fun that it becomes difficult to sleep the entire night. I always love spending time with him! However, this particular day I was skeptical about it. You see, he had been trying to reach for quite some time and everytime he did something kept coming up and I had to refuse his calls. It was studies, or games or sports or sometimes even meal times. I was making lame excuses for silly reasons because of which I was scared to pick the call up. Of Course, I didn’t mean it but I was just not able to make much time for him. This did bother me a little but I put it in the last cell of my brain. I had a lot of thoughts going on in my head when GASP I was back to reality again. There were two missed calls and I had to call back. I texted him to hold on and returned the phone to my sister. Allowing her to complete the work she was to do. I took the time and set things within myself right. Once my sister was done I stood up to myself and rang my brother. I had my mind all set to apologize incase I had to. I gripped the phone tightly and pushed it against my ears briskly. I took a deep breath and then said a small, sweet, “hello…How are you?”
A crazy voice came pounding out, “Ha..loo…Howwaa…re…yo…u”. I was astounded. When did this guy start having internet issues? It went on for ages together. At this point I gave up. How could someone living in such a big city ever be able to get so many WiFi issues. This was literally impossible. Like hearing a crackle person. “Ba..t…ha…w?”. Why was he doing this? It had been five minutes and it was still going on. Oh! Now I got it. Brothers are never hundred present in what they say. Maybe he was just acting all along. After soo much effort and million requests of teaching me how to do ‘breaking voice’ he started to become normal. Oh and by the way I wanted to know how to do that for real. It would be soo cool to do that in online school and trick all my classmates and teachers. I’ve been asking him to teach me ever since. Once he became a normal person he randomly started shouting to the core of his voice that he couldn’t hear me. He was screaming at the top of his voice. Probably the loudest time I ever heard him. To counter his screams I started texting him for another four minutes continually. I texted him in normal formal English, then shifted to informal, then texting language. I even texted in Telugu but heard no reply.
The call was still on and the milk white text on the top center showed that nine minutes had passed. I was very sure he was just acting off that he couldn’t hear me. He must be partying vividly just by the thought of me assuming that he couldn’t hear me and I was trying to reach out to him badly. Out of frustration I just cut the call and called him time and again. After he was sure he irritated me to his heart’s content because I did not pick his call up. After taking full revenge he spoke to me only at the exact time when I had to sit down for music class. So, now I had to cut the call and make a proper deal with him to e-meet up properly again.
What an amazing prank call it was! It was so much fun that day! I loved talking to him. It’s one of my favorite things to do!
In fact this blog is fully dedicated to him!!
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dwjfansitearchive · 2 years
Text
Diana Wynne Jones - Autobiography
The official autobiography, first published over ten years ago in Something about the Author Autobiography Series, Volume 7
Diana Wynne Jones
1934-
[note: DWJ died in 2011]
I think I write the kind of books I do because the world suddenly went mad when I was five years old. In late August 1939, on a blistering hot day, my father loaded me and my three-year-old sister, Isobel, into a friend’s car and drove to my grandparents’ manse in Wales. "There’s going to be a war," he explained. He went straight back to London, where my mother was expecting her third baby any day. We were left in the austere company of Mam and Dad (as we were told to call them). Dad, who was a moderator of the Welsh Nonconformist Chapels, was a stately patriarch; Mam was a small browbeaten lady who seemed to us to have no character at all. We were told that she was famous in her youth for her copper hair, her wit, and her beauty, but we saw no sign of any of this.
Wales could not have been more different from our new house in Hadley Wood on the outskirts of London. It was all grey or very green and the houses were close together and dun-coloured. The river ran black with coal – and probably always had, long before the mines: they told me the name of the place meant "bridge over the river with the black voice." Above all, everybody spoke a foreign language. Sometimes we were taken up the hill into suddenly primitive country to meet wild-looking raw-faced old people who spoke no English, for whom our shy remarks had to be translated. Everyone spoke English to us, and would switch abruptly to Welsh when they wanted to say important things to one another. They were kind to us, but not loving. We were Aneurin’s English daughters and not quite part of their culture.
Life in the manse revolved around Chapel next door. My aunt Muriel rushed in from her house down the road and energetically took us to a dressmaker to be fitted with Sunday clothes. On the way, she suggested, as a way to stop us feeling strange, that we should call her Mummy. Isobel obligingly did so, but I refused on the grounds that she was not our mother – besides, I was preoccupied with a confusion between dressmakers and hairdressers which even an hour of measuring and pinning did not resolve.
The clothes duly arrived: purple dresses with white polka dots and neat meat-coloured coats. Isobel and I had never been dressed the same before and we rather liked it. We wore them to Chapel thereafter, sitting sedately with our aunt and almost grown-up cousin Gwyn, through hours of solid Welsh and full-throated singing. Isobel sang too, the only Welsh she knew, which happened to be the name of the maid at the manse, Gwyneth. My mother had told me sternly that I was bad at singing and, not knowing the words, I couldn’t join in anyway. Instead, I gazed wistfully at the shiny cherries on the hat of the lady in front, and one Sunday got into terrible trouble for daring to reach out and touch them.
Then my grandfather went into the pulpit. At home he was majestic enough: preaching. he was like the prophet Isaiah. He spread his arms and language rolled from him, sonorous, magnificent, and rhythmic. I had no idea then that he was a famous preacher, nor that people came from forty miles away to hear him because he had an almost bardic tendency to speak a kind of blank verse – hwyl, it is called, much valued in a preacher – but the splendour and the rigour of it nevertheless went into the core of my being. Though I never understood one word, I grasped the essence of a dour, exacting, and curiously magnificent religion. His voice shot me full of terrors. For years after that, I used to dream regularly that a piece of my bedroom wall slid aside revealing my grandfather declaiming in Welsh, and I knew he was declaiming about my sins. I still sometimes dream in Welsh, without understanding a word. And at the bottom of my mind there is always a flow of spoken language that is not English, rolling in majestic paragraphs and resounding with splendid polysyllables. I listen to it like music when I write.
Weekdays I was sent to the local school, where everyone was taught in Welsh except me. I was the only one in the class who could read. When the school inspector paid a surprise visit, the teacher thrust a Welsh book at me and told me in a panicky whisper to read it aloud. I did so – Welsh, luckily, is spelt phonetically – and I still understood not a word. When girls came to play, they spoke English too, initiating me into mysterious rhymes: Whistle while you work, Hitler made a shirt. War had been declared, but I had never heard of Hitler till then. We usually played in the chapel graveyard, where I thought of the graves as like magnificent double beds for dead people. I fell off the manse wall into such a grave as I declaimed, "Goebbels wore it, Goering tore it," and tore a ligament in one ankle.
After what seemed a long time, my mother arrived with our new sister, Ursula. She was outraged to find Isobel calling Aunt Muriel Mummy. I remember trying to soothe her by explaining that Isobel was in no way deceived: she was just obliging our aunt. Unfortunately the voice I explained in had acquired a strong Welsh accent, which angered my mother further. We felt the strain of the resulting hidden rows as an added bleakness in the bleak manse. We were back in Hadley Wood by Christmas.
Looking back, I see that my relationship with my mother never recovered from this. When she arrived in Wales, she had seen me as something other, which she rather disliked. She said I would grow up just like my aunt and accused me of taking my aunt’s side. It did not help that, at that time, my hair was just passing from blond to a colour my mother called mouse and I looked very little like either side of the family. My parents were both short, black-haired, and handsome, where I was tall and blue-eyed. When we got back to London, my mother resisted all my attempts to hug her on the grounds that I was too big.
Meanwhile, the threat of bombing and invasion grew. London was not safe. The small school Isobel and I were attending rented a house called Lane Head beside Coniston Water in distant Westmorland and offered room in it to my mother and her three children. We went there in the early summer of 1940. Here were real mountains, lakes, brooks racing through indescribable greenness. I was amazed – intoxicated – with the beauty of it.
We were told that Lane Head had belonged to John Ruskin’s secretary and that this man’s descendants (now safely in America) had been the John, Susan, Titty, and Roger of Arthur Ransome’s books. Ruskin’s own house, Brantwood, was just up the road. There was a lady in a cottage near it who could call red squirrels from the trees. This meant more to me at the time – this, and the wonder of living in a rambling old house smelling of lamp oil, with no electricity, where the lounge (where we were forbidden to play) was full of Oriental trophies, silk couches, and Pre-Raphaelite pictures. There was a loft (also forbidden) packed with Titty and Roger’s old toys. The entry to it was above our room and I used to sneak up into it. By this time, war shortages had made themselves felt. There were no new toys and no paper to draw on and I loved drawing. One rainy afternoon, poking about the loft, I came upon a stack of high-quality thick drawing paper. To my irritation, someone had drawn flowers on every sheet, very fine and black and accurate, and signed them with a monogram, JR. I took the monogram for a bad drawing of a mosquito and assumed the fine black pencil was ink. I carried a wad of them down to our room and knelt at the window seat industriously erasing the drawings with an ink rubber. Halfway through I was caught and punished. The loft was padlocked. Oddly enough, it was only many years later that I realised that I must have innocently rubbed out a good fifty of Ruskin’s famous flower drawings.
The School and its pupils left the place towards the end of summer, but we stayed and were rapidly joined by numbers of mothers with small children. The world was madder than ever. I was told about the small boats going to Dunkirk and exasperated everyone by failing to understand why the Coniston steamer had not gone to France from the landlocked lake. (I was always asking questions.) Bombs were dropping and the Battle of Britain was escalating. My husband, who had, oddly enough, been sent to his grandparents barely fifteen miles from us, remembers the docks at Barrow-in-Furness being bombed. He saw the blaze across the bay. During that raid a German plane was shot down and its pilot was at large in the mountains for nearly two weeks. It is hard now to imagine the horror he inspired in all the mothers. When he broke into the Lane Head pantry one night and stole a large cheese, there was sheer panic next morning. I suppose it was because that night the war had briefly climbed in through our window.
Being too young to understand this, I had trouble distinguishing Germans from germs, which seemed to inspire the mothers with equal horror. We were not allowed to drink water from the washbasin because it came from the lake and contained typhoid germs. The maker’s name on the washbasin was Twyford. For years I thought that was how you spelled typhoid. I had a terrifying recurring dream of these typhoid Germans – always dressed in cream-coloured Anglo-Saxon tunics – running across the surface of the lake to get me. When a large Quaker family arrived to cram into the house too, bringing with them an eleven-year-old German-Jewish boy who told horrendous stories of what the police did – they took you away in the night. he said, to torture you – I had no idea he was talking about the Gestapo. I have been nervous of policemen ever since.
The Quaker family, all six of them, had a cold bath every morning. We were regularly woken at 6:06 A.M. by the screams of the youngest, who was only two. In their no-nonsense Quaker way, this family got out the old boat in the boat house and went sailing. I can truthfully say that I sailed in both the Swallow and the Amazon , for though this boat was a dire old tub, she was the original of both. I didn’t like her. On a trip to Wild Cat Island I caught my finger in her centerboard, and my father neatly drowned us in her trying to sail in a storm on one of his rare visits from teaching and fire-watching in London.
The mothers gave the older children lessons. Girls were taught womanly accomplishments. Being left-handed, I had great trouble learning to knit until a transient Icelandic lady arrived with a baby and a large dog and began teaching me the continental method. She left before teaching me purl or even to cast on stitches. I had to make those up. Another mother taught sewing. I remember wrestling for a whole morning to sew on a button, which became inexplicably enmeshed in my entire supply of thread. Finally I explained to this mother that I wasn’t going to grow up to be a woman and asked if I could do drawing with the boys. She told me not to be rude and became so angry that – with a queer feeling that it was in self-defence – I put my tongue out to her. She gave me a good shaking and ordered me to stand in the hall all the next morning.
The same day, other mothers had taken the younger children to the lakeshore to play beyond the cottage of the lady who called squirrels. The noise they made disturbed the occupant of the houseboat out in the bay. He came rowing angrily across and ordered them off, and, on finding where lived, said that he wasn’t going to be disturbed by a parcel of evacuees and announced that he would come next morning to complain. He hated children. There was huge dismay among the mothers. Next morning I stood in the hall, watching them rush about trying to find coffee and biscuits (which were nearly unobtainable by then) with which to soothe the great Arthur Ransome, and gathered I was about to set eyes on a real writer. I watched with great interest as a tubby man with a beard stamped past, obviously in a great fury, and almost immediately stormed away again on finding there was nobody exactly in charge to complain to. I was very impressed to find he was real. Up to then I had thought books were made by machines in the back room of Woolworth’s.
My brush with the other writer in the area was even less direct but no more pleasant. We were up near Sawrey, which was a long way for children to walk; but, if the mothers were to go anywhere, they had to walk and the children had to walk with them. No one had a car. Isobel and another four-year-old girl were so tired that, when they found a nice gate, they hooked their feet on it and had a restful swing. An old woman with a sack over her shoulders stormed out of the house and hit both of them for swinging on her gate. This was Beatrix Potter. She hated children, too. I remember the two of them running back to us, bawling with shock. Fate, I always think, seemed determined to thrust a very odd view of authorship on me.
The boy who kept talking of the Gestapo was only one of several disturbed children among us. The madness of those times got into the daughter of the sewing lady too. She began systematically pushing the younger children off high places. She told me and swore me to secrecy. I knew this was wrong. My grandfather haunted me in dreams and I kept telling myself that I was feeble not to tell someone – but I had sworn. Even so, when the girl pushed Isobel down a deep cellar I summoned my courage and told my mother. This caused a terrible row, as bad as the row in Wales, and I think that as a result of it my mother decided to leave Lane Head. She went to York to find a teaching job, leaving us in the charge of the other mothers. That night, the daughter of the sewing lady suggested it might be fun if I sneaked into her bedroom to eat aspirins with her. Feeling like an adventure, and also feeling bad at having betrayed this girl’s trust, I did so. Aspirins were horrible. I swallowed mine with huge difficulty and asked her what she saw in them. Nothing, she said. It was just that you were forbidden to eat them. And she spat hers out on the carpet.
Here her mother irrupted into the room.
I remember that a Court of Justice was hastily convened. Three mothers. I stood accused of leaving my bed in order to spit aspirins all over another’s carpet. I remember I was bemused to find that the other girl was not accused of anything. Sentence was that I and my bed were taken downstairs to a lumber room and I was to sleep there. I rebelled. I got up again and went into the forbidden lounge where I did what I had always wanted to do and took down one of the heavy, slightly rusty Indian Army swords. I wondered whether to fall on it like a Roman. But since it was clear to me that this would hurt very much, I put it back and went out of the open window. It was near sunset. The grass was thick with dew, but still quite warm to my bare feet. The sky was a miraculous clear auburn. I tried to summon courage to run away in my nightclothes. I wanted to. I also had a dim sense that it would be an effective move. But I could not make myself take another step. I went back to the lumber room knowing I was a coward.
In fact, when my mother came back late the next night she thought I had run away – or been taken ill. Since nobody had told her, I suspect that the punishment was aimed at her too. There were further rows before we left for York in September 1941.
Despite this, that time in the Lake District is still magical to me. The shape of the mountain across the lake has, like my grandfather, become part of my dreams. Since the mountain is called the Old Man of Coniston, they sometimes seem to be the same thing.
In York, we boarded in a nunnery. The blitz was on and the war was moving into its grimmest phase, which may have been why we never got enough to eat there. Granny – my Yorkshire grandmother – used to send us hoarded tins of baked beans which my mother heated in an old tin box over a gas ring in our bedroom.
My sister Ursula was now old enough to be a power. She was a white waifchild with black, black hair and a commanding personality. While my mother was teaching, Ursula had various nannies, whom she ordered mercilessly about and did imitations of in the evenings. I had long known that Isobel was the best and most interesting of companions. It was marvellous to discover that Ursula, at two-and-a-half, could make us fall about laughing. I knew I was lucky to have sisters.
My mother decided that Ursula was going to be an actress. Isobel, she told us, was beautiful but not otherwise gifted. As for me, she said, I was ugly, semi-delinquent, but bright. She had the nuns put me in a class with nine-year-olds. This was the first I knew that I was supposed to be clever. I did my best, but everything the class did was two years beyond me.
Religion was beyond me, too. The nuns, being an Anglican order, worshipped in York Minster and took us with them. This huge and beautiful cathedral must have been ten times the size of the chapel in Wales. I could not make head or tail of the mysterious, reverent intonings in the far distance. I fidgeted and shamed my mother until one of the nuns took me instead to a smaller church from then on. There I sat, wrestling with the notion that Heaven Is Within You (not in me, I thought, or I’d know) and of Christ dying for our sins. I stared at the crucifix, thinking how very much being crucified must hurt, and was perturbed that, even with this special treatment, religion was not, somehow, taking on me. (I put it this way to myself because I had baptism and vaccination muddled, like germs and Germans.)
Weekdays, I joined a playground game run by the naughty son of another teacher. It was called the Soft Shoe Brigade, in which we all marched in step and pretended we were Nazis. I could not understand why the nuns put a stop to it.
My pleas to be put into a class of younger children were granted near the end of the time we spent there. After a few weeks’ bliss, doing work I understood, we went back to Hadley Wood in 1942. By then, the bombing was beginning to seem like the weather, only more frightening. When the siren sounded at night, we went to the ground floor where we sat and listened to the blunt bang and sharp yammer of gunfire and the bombs whistle as they fell, or watched searchlights rhythmically ruling lines in the sky. Recently I was talking to a woman my own age: we both confessed that any noise that resembles these, or the sound of a low-flying plane, still makes us expect to be dead next moment.
The world was mad in daytime, too, not only with rationing, blackout, brown paper stuck to bus windows, and notices saying "Careless Talk Costs Lives." The radio talked daily of bridgeheads, pincer movements, and sorties, which one knew were terms for people killing people. My father was away most nights fire-watching and at weekends he exercised with the Home Guard.
One Sunday I almost fell over one of our neighbours who was crawling about in the field behind our house with – inexplicably – a great bunch of greenery on his head.
"Oh, Mr. Cowey!" shouted I, in much surprise "What are you doing crawling about with a bush on your head?"
He arose wrathfully, causing the greenery to fall into two horns. "Get out of it, you stupid child!" he snapped, the image of an angry nature god. "You’ve spoilt the whole bloody exercise!"
Considering this madness, it is not surprising that, at the latest of many private schools we went to that year, when the forbidding teacher announced, "All those children for elocution stand up and go into the hall," I mistook and thought the word was execution. I trembled, and was astonished when they all came back unharmed. At that same school, Isobel’s teacher used to punish her for writing left-handed. She was shut in a bedroom, being punished, one day when the air-raid siren went. The rest of us were marched into the moderate safety of the hall, but Isobel was forgotten. I wrestled with my cowardice and managed to make myself call out that Isobel was still in the bedroom. The teachers were, I suppose, scared to go up there during a raid. They told me fiercely to hold my tongue and made me sit for the rest of the week behind the blackboard as a lesson for impudence. There was more disgrace than hardship to this. I used that time for reading.
I read avidly that year, things like The Arabian Nights and the whole of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Soon after I was eight, I sat up from reading in the middle of one afternoon and knew that I was going to be a writer one day. It was not a decision, or even a revelation. It was more as if my future self had leaned back from the years ahead and quietly informed me what she was. In calm certainty, I went and told my parents.
"You haven’t got it in you," my mother said. My father bellowed with laughter. He had a patriarch’s view of girls: they were not really meant to do anything. Though he never said so, I think it was a disappointment to him to have three daughters. My mother, as always, was more outspoken. She said if it were not for the war, she would have more children – boys.
I think my mother was very discontented that year. She was, after all, an Oxford graduate who had dragged herself up from a humble background in industrial Yorkshire by winning scholarships – and all she had for it was the life of a suburban mother. I know she encouraged my father to apply for the husband-and-wife job they took in 1943.
The job was in a village called Thaxted in rural Essex. My parents were to run what would nowadays be called a conference centre for young adults, a place where teenagers who worked in factories in urban Essex could come for a week or weekend to experience a little culture. It was one of many schemes at that time which looked forward to the widening of horizons at the end of the war, and it had considerable propaganda value, since it was by no means clear then that the Allies were going to win the war. My father believed in it utterly, and it became was his life for the next ten years.
I was already wrestling to make sense of the experience of the previous four years -particularly the religion. Now I had a whole new set, three or four new sets, in fact, all going on at once. Thaxted, to take that first, was straight out of a picture postcard, with houses that were either thatched and half-timbered or decoratively plastered, and a medieval guildhall straddled the main street. The church, at stately and ethereal beside a majestic copper beech, stood at the top of the hill opposite Clarance House (the house my parents ran). Industry was represented by a little sweet-factory at one end of the village and a man who made life-sized mechanical elephants at the other. The place was connected to the outside world by sporadic buses and by a branch railway that terminated a mile outside the village (but my the train driver would grudgingly wait for anyone he saw panting up the hill to the station). On holidays, people did folk-dancing in the streets. There was also much handweaving, pottery-making, and madrigal singing.
This idyllic place had the highest illegitimate birthrate in the county. In numerous families, the younger apparent brothers or sisters turned out to be the offspring of the unmarried elder daughters -- though there was one young woman who pretended her daughter was her sister without grandparents to main help – and there was a fair deal of incest, too. Improbable characters abounded there, including two acknowledged witches and a man who went mad in the church porch at full moon. There was a prostitute not much older than me who was a most refined person, with a face like alabaster, a slight foreign accent, and tweeds. There was another who looked like an artist’s impression of Neanderthal woman; she had a string of pale thin children, each huge famine-poster eyes.
I had assumed you had to be married before you had children, so all this was quite a shock. I began to suspect the world had always been mad. In self-defence, my sisters and I assumed our home life was normal, which it certainly was not.
Clarance House was as beautiful as the rest, built in the days of queen Anne, with graceful wall panels indoors, although the interior was somewhat bare, because the Essex Education Committee which financed the place could seldom spare much money. Here my father threw himself into life as an educator and entertainer, for he was as gifted in his way as my grandfather and could hold an audience like an actor, whether he was making intellectual conversation at table with my mother, introducing a lecture, or telling ghost stories to rapt teenagers. His main story about Clarance House. There was the remains of an old stair in a cupboard where, my father claimed, you could hear disembodied feet, climbing, climbing … We knew he was right to call the house haunted, but the really haunted part was the main entrance hall, which I always felt compelled to run through if I had to cross it, shaking with fear. Eventually one of the cleaners saw the ghost. She had been chatting to it while she polished the hall for once some minutes, thinking it was the girl she worked with. Then she looked properly and found she see through it. She had hysterics and left at once for a job in the bacon factory in Great Dunmow.
My mother organised the cleaners, the cooks, and the domestic side, and in her spare time went feverishly into local history and madrigal singing. Not a day passed without some fearful crisis, in which mother raced about inveighing against the Committee, the war, or my father, while my father stormed through the house in a fury, forgetting to speak English in his rage. His life was wholly public: my mother’s three-quarters so. Neither had time for us. For a short while the three of us children shared a room at the top of the house; but my parents were so dedicated to making a success of the centre that they decided that room was needed for additional guests. We were put out into The Cottage. This was a lean-to, two-room shack across the yard from the house. The mud floor of the lower room was hastily covered with concrete and our beds were crammed into the upper floor. And we were left to our own devices. Looking back on this, we all find it extraordinary; for damp climbed the walls and, almost as soon as we had arrived in Thaxted, I had contracted juvenile rheumatism, which seriously affected my heart; and Ursula also contracted it soon after.
The only heating was a paraffin stove – and how with we failed to set The Cottage on fire I shall never know. The stove was often knocked over during games or fights, or encased in paper when we dried paintings. There was nowhere to wash in The Cottage, so we seldom bothered. Nor did we comb our hair. Ursula, whose hair was long, wild, and curly; tied it in two knots on her forehead to keep it out of her eyes. My mother did not notice for six months. Then I got into trouble for allowing it. But Ursula always did what she wanted. The following year she refused to eat anything but three slices of bread and yeast extract a day, whatever Isobel or I said, and my mother never knew about that at all.
I was supposed to be in charge of my sisters and it weighed on me. I did my best, but at nine and ten I was not very good at it. The worst thing happened just after Isobel had been to a pantomime with a school friend, where she had been entranced to find the fairies swooping over the stage in flying-harness. She wanted to do it too. So Ursula and I obligingly tied skipping ropes together, slung them across a beam above The Cottage stairs, and hauled Isobel up there by a noose under her armpits. She dangled, rotating gently, looking worried. "Look more graceful," we advised her. She stuck out her arms – and her legs, too, like a starfish-and went on hanging. Absorbed in her experience and knowing that one had to suffer for art’s sake, she failed to say she was suffocating. Luckily, Ursula and I became worried and cut her down with blunt nail scissors just in time.
Around this time, my mother decreed that Isobel should become a ballerina, because of her looks. My mother’s main substitute for attending to us was to assert periodically that Isobel was beautiful and a born dancer, Ursula a potential actress, and me an ugly semi-delinquent with a high IQ. Her other substitute for attention was to make our school uniforms herself. She would buy half the required garments, angrily protesting at their cost and the number of clothing coupons they took, and make the rest. Other children jeered, because our uniforms were always the wrong style and material, and it mystified us that their parents could afford enough coupons for a complete uniform. Other clothing my mother got from the local orphanage. The matron, who was a friend of my parents’, used to give us all the clothes donated which she did not think suitable for the orphans. We often looked very peculiar. When I protested, my mother would angrily describe her own childhood with a widowed mother in World War I. "You’re all extremely lucky," she would conclude. "You have advantages I never dreamed of." At which I felt acutely guilty.
Even so, I might protest that my mother had had proper clothes. I was prone to spot flaws in any argument and I had an odd theory that you ought be truthful about your feelings. This usually sent my mother into a vituperative fury. This was part of the reason why she called me semi-delinquent. Another reason was that I had inherited my father’s tendency to fly into towering rages. I also used to shout at my sisters because they seldom listened to mere speech. But I think the main reason was that I was always at some more or less mad project: some of which were harmless – like dressing as a ghost and pretending to haunt the graveyard, inventing a loom, or directing a play; some of which were liable to cause trouble – like the time I tried to organise a Garden Fete without asking anyone; some of which were outright dangerous – like walking on the roof, or the time I could have attracted enemy aeroplanes by signalling Morse code by flashlight to friends outside the village. For some reason I believed it my duty to live a life of adventure and I used to worry that, for a would-be writer, I had too little imagination.
Clarance House had two gardens, one ordinary one and a second, much bigger, across a lane at the back. This other garden was kept locked. I was always begging for the key. It was like paradise, or the extension of life into the imagination. Here were espalier apples, roses, lilies, vegetables, and a green path running under an arcade of creepers to an old octagonal summer house in the distance. Near the summer house my father kept bees. These were a notoriously fierce strain, and the gardener could often be seen racing down the green path pursued by an angry black cloud of them. But the bees never attacked us. I used to go and talk to them, because I had read that bees were part of your family and you should tell them all your news – although I never spoke to them when the gardener was by. He hated superstition. He was very religious. As a young man, he told people quite frankly, he had attended both church and chapel to be quite sure of heaven; but one day on the Sampford road he had had a vision in which an angel descended and told him always to go always to chapel. And he was only one of a crowd of remarkable people who swarmed through the house. There were ham actors, gays, politicians, hirsute artists, hysterical sopranos, a musician who looked like Dr. Dolittle, another who believed in the transmigration of souls, an agriculturalist who looked like Hitler, a teddy girl, local vicars, one long thin and gloomy who grew tobacco, another stout and an expert on wine ...
The vicar of Thaxted was a communist and people used to come from Great Dunmow in hob nailed boots specially to walk cut noisily during his sermons. Actually his politics derived more from to William Morris than Marx. The church was hung with light drapery to enhance its considerable elegance and he taught any child who wished to learn a musical instrument. "Not you," said my mother. "You’re tone deaf." Or maybe just deaf, I used to think, on Thursdays when the bell ringers practiced. The Cottage was almost opposite the bell tower and the sound was deafening. In fact I had little to do with the church otherwise because I settled my religious muddles by deciding that I had better be an atheist.
School brought more strange experiences – with an uncomfortable tendency to pick up motifs from the past. Isobel and I were sent to the village school, where we came up against the English class system for the first time. As children of intellectuals, we ranked above village kids and below farmers or anybody rich, but sort of sideways. This meant we were fair game for all. The headmaster had only contempt for us. He said I was never likely to pass the exam to enter grammar school ("the Scholarship," everyone called it) and almost refused to enter me. My mother had one of her rows over that (by this time I was dimly aware that my mother truly enjoyed a row). In school, we spent all but one afternoon a week knitting endless scarves and balaclavas for the forces, while one of the teachers told us about tortures, shivering with strange excitement while she spoke. I once nearly fainted at her account of the rack. The a other afternoon, the boys were allowed to do drawing and the girls sewing. I protested about this. The headmaster threatened to cane me for impertinence. At which a berserker rage came over me. I seized a shoddy metal ruler and tied it in a knot. I was sent home, but not caned, to my surprise.
Being fair game for all meant that the school bullies chased you home. One winter day, in snow, a bully chased me, pelting me with ice. It cut. Terrified, I raced away down the alley between the blacksmith and the barber and shot into the glassy white road ahead. Too late, I saw a car driving past. I think I hurtled clean over its bonnet, getting knocked out on the way. I came to, face down, looking back the way I had come. "Help!" I shouted to the blacksmith in his forge. "I’ve been run over!" Not accurate, but I was upset. The blacksmith’s wife improved on this by racing into the barber’s, where she knew my father was having a haircut, yelling, "Mr. Jones! Come quickly! Your daughter’s under a car!" Even less accurate, because the car was down the hill, slewing about as it braked. My father dived out of the barber’s with his hair short one side and long the other. The driver got there about the same time and his face was truly a light green, poor man. I was quite impressed at the effect I had had.
I passed "the Scholarship" later that year. My parents’ connection with the Essex Education Committee enabled them to discover that my marks were spectacularly good. I continued to get spectacular marks most of my school career. This is not a thing I can take much credit for. I just happened to have near photographic memory and an inborn instinct about how to do exams – which always struck me as cheating, because whenever I was in doubt about a fact, all I had to do was close my eyes and read the remembered page. But it was the one thing my parents cared about. My mother decided that I was to go to her old Oxford college, and added that to the ugly, semi-delinquent, brainy list.
As a semi-delinquent I was sent as a boarder to a school in Brentwood; but there was no room in the boarding house and I had to live for one endless term with the family I later put in Eight Days of Luke . Then a girl left the boarding house and I had her bed. This was an old overused hospital bed and it broke under me; and the matron made public discovery that my ears were unwashed. As a punishment – and I am still not clear whether it was for the bed or the ears or both – I had to sleep on my own in an old lumber room. Just as before, in Coniston, I could not muster courage to run away. Nor could I muster courage to tell my parents: I was too ashamed. But I did tell them, because I enjoyed it so, how the matron marched us in line every Saturday to the cinema to see every film that happened to be showing. This philistine practice horrified them. I was removed and sent by bus to a Quaker school in Saffron Walden as day pupil instead. I was there from 1946 to 1952. It was mainly a boarding school, which meant that I, and later my sisters, were as usual part of an oddball minority. Quakers do not believe in eccentricity or in academic success. They found me highly eccentric for getting good marks and for most other things too.
As time went on, my parents had less and less time for us. We never went on holiday with them. When they took their yearly holiday, we were left with the gardener, the minister of the chapel, or the matron of the orphanage – or simply dumped on Granny. Granny was truly marvelous, five feet of Yorkshire common sense, love, and superstition. She was always saying wise things. I remember, among many sayings, when one time she had given me a particularly good present, she said, "No, it’s not generous. Being generous is giving something that’s entire hard to give." She was so superstitious that she kept a set of worthless china to break when she happened to break something good, on the grounds that breakages always came in threes and it was as well to get it over. I would have been lost without Granny, that I know.
That was a grim time in the world. The war, which had receded when we left London, came close again as rockets and pilotless planes. They were terrifying. Then there was the anxiety of D Day, followed by the discovery of the concentration camps, which made me realise just how mad the world had been. This was followed by great shortages and the cold war. Hiroshima horrified me: the cold war made me expect a Hiroshima bomb in England any day.
Things were grim at home too. When a course did was running at Clarance House – which was continuously during summer and two-thirds of the time during winter – we quite often came home from school to find that nobody had remembered to save us anything to eat. If we went into the kitchen to forage, the cook shrieked at us to get out. When no course was running, my father would sit slumped and silent in the only family room, which was also his office. He rarely spoke to any of us unless he was angry, and then he could not remember which one of us he was talking to and had to go through all our names before he got the right one. Almost every night, during winter, my mother would shout at him – with some justice – that he kept all his charm for his job and none for her in private; whereupon he would fly into a towering Welsh rage and they would bawl at one another all evening. When it was over, my mother would rush into the kitchen, where we had retreated to do homework, and recount angrily all that had been said, while we waited with pens politely poised, knowing that any comment only made things worse. This routine was occasionally lightened by ludicrous incidents, such as the time the cat locked us all into that office by playing with the bolt on the outside of its door; or when our aged corgi suddenly upped and bit my father in the butt while he was chasing Isobel to hit her.
My parents did remember birthdays and Christmas, but only at the last minute. That is how I remember that day peace was declared with Japan. It was the day before my eleventh birthday and all the shops were shut in celebration, so I got no presents that year. This left a void, for birthdays were the one occasion when my father could be persuaded to buy books. By begging very hard, I got Puck of Pook’s Hill when I was ten and Greenmantle when I was twelve. But my father was inordinately mean about money. He solved the Christmas book-giving by buying an set of Arthur Ransome books, which he kept locked in a high cupboard and dispensed one between the three of us each year. Clarance House had books, he said. True: it had been stocked mostly from auctions and, from this stock, before I was fourteen, I had read all of Conrad, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Bertrand Russell on relativity, besides a job lot of history and historic novels – and all thirty books from the public library in the guildhall. Isobel and I suffered from perpetual book starvation. We begged, saved, and cycled for miles to borrow books, but there were still never enough. When I was thirteen, I began writing narratives in old exercise books to fill this gap, and read them aloud to my sisters at night. I finished two, both of epic length and quite terrible. But in case someone is tempted to say my father me a favour, I must say this is not the case at all. I always would have been a writer. I still had this calm certainty. All these epics did for me was to prove that I could finish a story. My mother was always telling me that I was much too incompetent to finish anything. During her ugly, semi-delinquent litanies she frequently said, "When you do the Oxford exams, you’ll get a place, but you won’t do better than that. You haven’t got what it takes."
In his stinginess, my father allowed us one penny a week pocket money. Money for anything else you had to ask him for. Looking back, I see I accepted this, partly because I thought it was normal and knew I wasn’t worth more, but also because asking for money at least meant he spoke to me while he was enquiring suspiciously into the use of every penny. He also allowed me to darn his socks for sixpence a pair (by this stage I was sewing clothes for myself and my sisters and doing the family wash in spare moments). My sisters, however, rebelled at their poverty and bearded my father in his office. Groaning with dismay, my father upped our allowance to a shilling a week when I was fifteen, on condition that we bought our own soap and toothpaste. A tube of toothpaste cost most of two weeks’ allowance. Isobel and I were by then civilised enough to save for it. Ursula squandered her money.
Ursula always took the eccentric way, particularly over illness. The cardinal sin we could commit was to be ill. It meant that someone had grudgingly to cross the yard with meals for us. My mother usually made a special trip to our bedsides to point out what a nuisance we were being. Her immediate response to any symptom of sickness was to deny it. "It’s only psychological," she would say. On these grounds I was sent to school with chicken pox, scarlet fever, German measles and, for half a year, with appendicitis. Luckily the appendix never quite became acute. The local doctor, somewhat puzzled by my mother’s assertion that there was nothing wrong with me, eventually took it out. He was an old military character and, in keeping with the rest of life, he had only three fingers in his right hand. I still have a monster scar. I had the appendix in a bottle for years, partly to show my mother the boils on it and partly to live up to the title of semi-delinquent. But Ursula, having concluded that "only psychological" meant the same as "purely imaginary", deduced that it was therefore no more wrong to pretend to be ill than to be really ill. She drew on her strong acting talent, contrived to seem at death’s door whenever she was tired of school, and spent many happy hours in bed.
I put some of the foregoing facts in The Time of the Ghost, but what I think I failed to get over in that book was how close we three sisters were. We spent not many hours delightedly discussing one another’s ideas and looked after one another strenuously. For example, when I was fourteen, Isobel was told by the Royal Ballet School that she could never, ever make it as a ballet dancer. Her life fell to pieces. She had been told so firmly that she was a ballerina born that she did not know what she was any longer. She cried one entire night. After five hours, when we still could not calm her, I crossed the yard in my pyjamas – it was raining – to get parental help. A mistake. My mother jumped violently and clutched her heart when I appeared. My father ordered me back to bed, despite my explanation and despite the fact that we had been ringing our recently installed emergency bell before I went over. I trudged back through the rain, belatedly remembering that my mother hated giving sympathy. "It damages me," she had explained over my appendix. Ursula and I sat up the rest of the night convincing Isobel that she had a brain as well as a body. We were close because we had to be.
This solidarity did not hold so well when our parents laughed at us. I became very clumsy in my teens and they laughed at anything I did that was not academic. Perhaps they needed the amusement, because, for the next year, my father sickened mysteriously. When I was fifteen, he was diagnosed as having intestinal cancer. To my misfortune, something painful went wrong with my left hip at the same time, so that I could only walk with a sailor-like roll, causing much mirth. It was the beginning of multiple back trouble which has plagued me the rest of my life, but no one knew about such things then. The natural assumption was that I was trying to be interesting because my father was ill. It is hard to express the guilt I felt.
My father, full of puritanical distaste, weathered that operation. He developed secondary cancer almost at once, but that was not apparent for the next three years or so. Once he had recovered, it occurred to him that I would need special tuition if I were to go to Oxford as planned. The Friends’ School was not geared to university entrance. Academic ambition vied in him with stinginess. Eventually, he approached a professor of philosophy who had just come to live in Thaxted with his wife and small children and asked him to teach me Greek. In exchange, my father offered the philosopher a hand-made dollhouse that someone had given my sisters. My sisters loved the thing and had kept it in beautiful condition. But the philosopher accepted the deal, so no matter what their feelings, the dollhouse was given away. In return, the philosopher gave me three lessons in Greek. Then he ran off with someone else’s wife. I must surely be the only person in the world to have had three Greek lessons for a dollhouse.
After that, pressure mounted on me to succeed academically. In my anxiety to oblige, I overworked. I did nothing like as well as was expected. I did scrape an interview at my mother’s old college. There a majestic lady don said, "Miss Jones," shuddering at my plebeian name, "you are the candidate who uses a lot of slang." She so demoralised me that, when she went on to ask me what I usually read, I looked wildly round her shelves and answered, "Books." I failed. At the eleventh hour, I applied for and got a place at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where I went in 1953.
It was not a happy time. When I got there, I found that John Ruskin had taken belated revenge for the rubbed-out drawings: I had to share his vast, cold studio with a girl who required me to wait on her hand and foot. And my father died after my first term there. I had to stay at home to see to his funeral, and spent the rest of my time at Oxford in nagging anxiety for my sisters, who were not finding my mother easy to live with. However, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were both lecturing then, Lewis booming to crowded halls and Tolkien mumbling to me and three others. Looking back, I see both of them had enormous influence on me, but it is hard to say how, except that they must have been equally influential to others too. I later discovered that almost everyone who went on to write children’s books – Penelope Lively, Jill Paton Walsh, to name only two – was at Oxford at the same time as me, but I barely met them and we never at any time discussed fantasy. Oxford was very scornful of fantasy then. Everyone raised eyebrows at Lewis and Tolkien and said hastily, "But they’re excellent scholars as well."
Let’s go back now to the empty swatch of time before I went up to Oxford, when my father was a periodically at home between times of being guinea pig at an early and unsuccessful form of chemotherapy. I have not said much about the young people who came to Thaxted on courses, because most of them were mere transients; but there were some who came often, some my own age, with whom we became firm friends. One was in love with Isobel (many people were) and he was coming to the house with ten friends to relax after doing finals at Oxford. Now this is an occasion comparable to the time when I was eight and knew that I would be a writer. As soon as I heard they were coming, I was seized with unaccountable excitement. I raced round helping get ready for them and made the tea far too early. They arrived while I made it. In the small hall outside my father’s office I ran into a cluster of them talking with my father. One of them said, "Diana, you know John Burrow, do you?"
I sort of looked. Not properly. All I got was a long beige streak of a man standing with them in front of the old Arthur Ransome cupboard. And instantly I knew I was going to marry this man. It was the same calm and absolute certainty that I had had when I was eight. And it rather irked me, because I hadn’t even looked at him properly and I didn’t know whether I liked him, let alone loved him.
Luckily both proved to be the case. The relationship survived two years at Oxford when John was graduate student, and a third year when he was a lecturer at King’s College, London. It also survived my mother’s impulsive purchase, after my father died, of a private school in Beeston outside Nottingham, in a very haunted house. We moved there in the summer of 1956. I had been ill all that year, but after four months of listening to invisible footsteps pacing the end of my bedroom, I went to Granny, who was living in Sampford (near where the angel appeared to the gardener) in order to be married to John in Saffron Walden, in a thick fog, three days before Christmas 1956. There are no photographs of the wedding because, as my mother explained, her own wedding was more important. She married Arthur Hughes, a Cambridge scientist, the following summer.
John and I lived in London until September 1957, where I seemed unemployable. I used the time to read Dante, Gibbon, and Norse sagas. Then we moved back to Oxford to a flat in a large house in the Iffley Road, with another family downstairs who became our lifelong friends. Meanwhile, Ursula failed all her exams in protest against academic pressure and made it to drama school. She is now an actress. Isobel was at university in Leicester, working grimly for a good degree, when my stepfather turned her out of his house. She arrived on our doorstep, shattered, around the time I discovered I was pregnant, and was living with us when my son Richard was born in 1958.
She stayed with us until my next son, Michael, was born in 1961, and was married from our flat. Her husband is an identical twin. John, who gave Isobel away, was mightily afraid of handing her to the wrong twin. She is now one of the few women professors in England. Ursula and I always think we did a good job of persuading her she had a brain.
My third son, Colin, was born in 1963. My aim, from this time forward, was to live a quiet life – not an easy ambition in a house full of small children, dogs, and puppies. During this time, to my undying gratitude, John and my children taught me more about ordinary human nature than I had learned up to then. I still had no idea what was normal, you see. After that I found the experiences of my childhood easier to assimilate and could start trying to write. To my dismay, I had to learn how – so I taught myself, doggedly. At first I assumed I would be writing for adults, but my children took a hand there. First Michael threatened to miscarry. I had to stay in bed and, while I did, I read Lord of the Rings. It was suddenly clear to me after that that it was possible to write a long book that was fantasy. Then as the children grew older, they gave me the opportunity to read all the children’s books which I had never had as a child and, what was more, I could watch their reactions while we read them. Very vigorous those were too. They liked exactly the kind of books – full of humour and fantasy, but firmly referred to real life – which I had craved for in Thaxted. Somewhere here it dawned on me that I was going to have write to fantasy anyway, because I was not able to believe in most people’s version of normal life. I started trying. What I wrote was rejected by publishers and agents with shock and puzzlement.
In 1966 we moved briefly to a cold, cold farmhouse in Eynsham while we waited for my husband’s college, Jesus College, to have a house built that we could rent. There Colin started having febrile convulsions and almost everything else went wrong too. I wrote Changeover, my only published adult novel, to counteract the general awfulness.
In 1967, the new house was ready. It had a roof soluble in water, toilets that boiled periodically, rising damp, a south-facing window in the food cupboard, and any number of other peculiarities. So much for my wish for a quiet life. We lived there, contending with electric fountains in the living room, cardboard doors, and so forth, until 1976, except for 1968-9, which year we spent in America, at Yale. Yale, like Oxford, was full of people who thought far too well of themselves, lived very formally, and regarded the wives of academics as second class citizens; but America, round the edges of it, I loved. I try to go back as often as I can. We went for a glorious time to Maine, and also visited the West Indian island of Nevis, where, to my astonishment, a number of people greeted me warmly, saying, "I’m so glad you’ve come back!" I still don’t know who they thought I was. But an old man on a donkey thought John was a ghost.
On our return, now all the children were at school, I started writing in earnest. A former pupil of John’s introduced me to Laura Cecil, who was just starting as a literary agent for children’s books. She became an instant firm friend. With her encouragement, I wrote Wilkins’ Tooth in 1972, Eight Days of Luke in 1973, and The Ogre Downstairs the same year. I laughed so much writing that one that the boys kept putting their heads round the door to ask if I was all right. Power of Three came after that, then Cart and Cwidder, followed by Dogsbody, though they were not published in that order. Charmed Life and Drowned Ammet were both written in 1975.
Also on our return, we acquired a cottage in West Ilsley, Berkshire, as a refuge from the defects of the Oxford house. The chalk hills there, full of racehorses, filled my head with new things to write. It was at this cottage that John was formally asked to apply for the English professorship at Bristol University. He did so, and got the job. We moved here in 1976 and were involved in a nightmare car crash the following month. Despite this, I love Bristol. I love its hills, its gorge and harbours, its mad mixture of old and new, its friendly people, and even its constant rain. We have lived here ever since. All my other books have been written here; for although the car crash, followed by my astonishment at winning the 1977 Guardian Award for Children’s Books, almost stopped me dead between them, I get unhappy if I don’t write. Each book is an experiment, an attempt to write the ideal book, the book my children would like, the book I didn’t have as a child myself. I have still not, after twenty-odd books, written that book. But I keep trying. Nor do I manage to live a quiet life. I keep undertaking things, like visiting schools and teaching courses as a writer, or learning the cello, or doing amateur theatricals, or rashly agreeing to do all the cooking for Richard’s wedding in 1984. Every one of those things has led to comic disasters-except the wedding: that was perfect. My aunt Muriel came to it just before she died, wearing a mink headdress like a Cardinal’s hat, and gave the couple her blessing. My mother also came. She was widowed again in 1975 and keeps on cordial terms with the rest of her family. She thinks John is marvellous.
Another thing that stops me living a quiet life is my travel jinx. This is hereditary: my mother has it and so does my son Colin. Mine works mostly on trains. Usually the engine breaks, but once an old man jumped off a moving train I was on and sent every train schedule in the country haywire for that day. And my books have developed an uncanny way of coming true. The most startling example of this was last year, when I was writing the end of A Tale of Time City. At the very moment when I was writing about all the buildings in Time City falling down, the roof of my study fell in, leaving most of it open to the sky.
Perhaps I don’t need a quiet life as much as I think I do.
(on web archive)
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fairest · 2 years
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A DAY OF SUNDAYS
I am the last person I want to hear from right now. It is too nice outside for indoor capitalism, and you need a pair of smooth hands to build your dream house. You call me, you are so quiet, and I come to the white site of your future home. I meet with the architect and admire his plans. The surveyor offers me a hammer. This is all I ever wanted. Here, in the pits, I learn to blaspheme the things I love.
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Last year I wrote a tragic novel about a woman who has several "even in the case of rape or incest" abortions. She aborts her first cousin's baby, her biology teacher's baby, the police chief's baby. But when she finally meets the father of her children she finds herself infertile. Perhaps Ellory receives the "punishment" Trump offered the abortion-striver, the "some kind of punishment" that, as in all Trump sentences, could be anything. Ellory Allen comes from wealth, so the law is not her issue. Her uncle escorts her to the first, her first cousin's, so the abortion of his lysergic grandchild. On the drive up the lake, Ellory smears the injunction of Matt 5:27, which echoed through my head, on a brilliantly sunny Friday afternoon, as I rode my bike down the same lake path. “Who did this to you, my uncle asks me, even though he knows who did, he knows it could have been any man, he knows that he did it, he knows that when you look at a twelve-year-old girl lustfully, you have already aborted her baby in your heart.”
I would love to write even more fiction but I see a cop car painted with a Pride flag. I try to stay away from cops because when I was a child they beat me up and called me faggot and did even worse things to / tried to ruin the lives of / my brown friends and I don't want them to kill me or abduct my wife or indoctrinate my child into their fake crowd. But when I see this Pride flag … painted on the cop SUV … like someone expressive was hired to do this …. it took some broad strokes … and, you know, cost taxpayer money … so my money … or maybe it was non-profit money … but still … what the fuck … I start cracking up. I laugh just like a did a few weeks ago when I saw the banged-up Audi near the flagship Ralph Lauren. On Tuesday in Toronto I noticed they call their cops a service, not a department. Maybe that’s a French thing. I was on LinkedIn because that’s where Facebook is now. I saw this post that you should support police departments because domestic abuse is way up in every American county.
I’m in an even wealthier neighborhood where everyone looks even happier, somehow, than in mine. It’s a straighter neighborhood, no rainbows for the centurions, and I come here often for practical reasons, but also I like to walk around in circles here committing adultery in my heart. The new Starbucks has no lock on the bathroom and I even pour myself free filtered water, sit down, and scroll the first pages of a buzz novel. The new Starbucks closer to me—which is close, but not that close, to a Black neighborhood—does have locks on its bathrooms. The masked worker whispers FIVE-THREE-TWO-ONE-AND-THEN-POUND all the live long day. I exit the new, Instagram-ready Starbucks to buy a bathing suit at J. Crew and they match dat motherfucking sale price from online. Now every time I go swimming I will think on my thriftiness. Another deadbeat summer up and down the bike path, up and down the pull-up bar, up and down the endless sales cycle. One of the seasonal J. Crew workers looks like, and is at the age, that one of my first girlfriends was at when we thought she was pregnant, even though we always used a spermicide condom, and we sat in the Planned Parenthood, desperate for an up or a down. Why did we think, in the 90s, that you were always pregnant, and that we straight people were always going to get AIDS? If we had had the internet, would we have been better children?
In the park I jump off my bike at benches to write these thoughts. I hear the whistles of soccer tryouts on Wilson Hill, I smile whitely at Missourians in town for urbane grooming. I overhear the phrase “trigger laws” on a scout man’s radio, I hear one boy say to the other, “did you hear what they did today?”
Who are they, son? 
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I bike by the finest woman on the lake path. Kind of this dream person I didn't even know I desired, a cross between rigid Vanessa Kirby in Pieces of a Woman, when she learns she lost the baby, and Hunter Schafer in Euphoria, when Rue says she fucking hates her. She also favors a barista of the month, a jack Hasidic girl I used to kiss in her unlockable Starbucks bathroom. (When I smell vanilla syrup I smell danger.) This luscious lake path woman is laughing into her phone and wearing Tom Ford sunglasses. "Damn," I say out loud to myself, "her suffering is written in my CONSTITUTION." I will impregnate her here in Illinois, but then drive us down I-55 to Missouri where she will give me a daughter who will never not need her Daddy’s boot. There's this sign at the state border: women in Missouri can receive a safe and legal abortion in Illinois. Back in the day there might've been a similar sign that escaped slaves from Missouri could find Division One freedom on the other side. Then as now, all states have the meats.
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I’d like to say I skipped the Phoebe Bridgers song, but I didn’t. The sexual instinct is everywhere and nowhere, in other words it is the feed. I see this Black boy who looks like David, and in a collegiate sense Cousin David died so young there was a statistical blackness to it. I once sent this tweet about a Black woman doing the most wonderful thing up and down the Montrose bluffs, but I deleted it when I thought about how I shouldn’t place Black people in locations, especially in nature, because like a female with a library card, huh, the Black person enjoying nature is a threat to domestic production. Andrew Bird sings, “the poets they explode like bombs, it feels like 1936 in Catalonia,” and America is the licensed asshole from Allie Rowbottom’s buzz novel Aesthetica, the asshole puckering in the air conditioning, the asshole that the cool pornographer doesn’t want, but the last human pornographers are so hot and anal they will need that asshole in situ, because without the war butt the dying American male can’t even get hard enough to make a baby.
Back then, when I wanted to turn against my own thoughts, I toked the Whiteman’s marijuana. Now I listen to right-wing podcasts. Lately I’ve been bending toward younger and even stranger right-wing podcasters, like I’m sitting at the other table in the lunch room. I don’t understand half of their references and I love that. But they crave meaning from literature I long ago unneeded, like Ernest Hemingway’s. These men talk and talk but they don’t see that Jake Barnes loved the bull because she didn’t talk, and Jake Barnes hated the Jew because it never shut up. How many words will it take to kill all of the people in the world? We are fooling ourselves if we think we want from 423 Park Avenue its phallus, and not its Scarlett Johansson for David Yurman. I imagine many on this right-wing were thrilled by Samuel Alito’s new layer of rosy skin; many of them do not believe in birth control because they believe feminism has set its controls for the uteri of their daughters and the vasa deferentia of their sons, and they don’t seem to believe in sexual perversion of any kind. It would make them weak (like the fag) or ponderous (like the Jew). So for them, anonymity is the only perversion. They wear masks not to limit disease, but to spread it. Their anonymity is everywhere and nowhere. It feeds their personality, as Saturn fed its feckless womb with that peppery son who, in Goya’s painting, has only an ass and not an asshole. These boys have a lot of interesting ideas, which is the problem. The west is closed for new slaughter but its metaphors are hungrier than ever. 
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On the strip I drink a Greenwood Beach at Replay, served to me by a bartender with a purple gem in his nose ring, a beautiful man who put more time into his appearance this morning than any of the women who matched me at J. Crew. I think about playing Galaga, and how a woman I no longer know would’ve made fun of me for that, but there’s someone playing the Ms. Pac-Man and I don’t want to get covid again. I twist around the hood, looking for pretzels. None of the books in the window of the bookstore are the books that recently changed my life. I see Deborah in the window of La Colombe, hard at work on something, and I don’t go in and say hi, because some writers don’t do that to some other writers, but I say hi to her in my head, bless her sentences, double bless her paragraphs, triple bless her chapters, quadruple bless her book. The people I need to be close to have no idea who they are. Those of us who have been lucky enough to work through it all say too little about every devastation, or we say not enough. We can’t believe our ears. The structures do not sympathize. What I wanted to do today was do my work and keep my head down. But I team with this great guy who always messages me “oh shit” and then I go to the news and have what I call an “out of body experience,” which was totally different, I learn at home, from Betsy’s experience. She felt liver bile come up into her throat and was reduced to tears.
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the-wild-queen · 2 years
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Albums
Chapter V- Ex's and Oh's
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Chapter IV Here
Word Count: 2,543
"Do you model during the school year, Kaylah?"
"Yes. In between the school day and games, but on the days I have games, they make the sessions as short as possible. But I'm off on Sundays. Unless someone asks me to babysit."
"How was church?"
"I like this church better than the one back home. No one walks all over me here. I won't tolerate that. God didn't make me to be a floor mat."
"No, he didn't."
"Hello, Aunt Lucy."
"Kaylah, I have a guest coming over for dinner tonight. Will you be here?"
"Yeah. I mean, the photoshoot that Stephanie wants me to do for the Milkshake Shack's publicity will only be at most thirty minutes. And I think I'm babysitting tonight, so that will only be an extra plate. And I think Sam has two dinner guests coming, so that's nine plates. I'll help you cook and everything. Hell, I'll even clean up everything. It's no problem."
"Who do you babysit for?"
"One of Grandpa's taxidermy customers. Her daughter Desiree. She is adorable! Oh my goodness, she will just love on you. She is a cuddle bug."
"How old is she?"
"She'll be five next month. And she loves to hang out with me. Her mom put her in pageants which she hates doing. She just wants to be a kid. Sometimes I sing her to sleep. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and head over to the Milkshake Shack. I'll be back in at most an hour."
"I'll see you."
"What time is she coming by?"
"Probably around six. Later tonight, I'll probably take her to the boardwalk."
"That's fine with us."
"Tonight's karaoke night at The Floor karaoke and dance bar. Desiree loves to hear me sing."
Kaylah had changed into a short sleeve black lace jumpsuit, with of course, wearing black lace clothes underneath. She was also wearing a white lace kimono, her black and white Ann Creek cowgirl boots, and of course her fedora. She decided with her big black cross statement earrings and statement necklace. She was looking almost goth except for the white on her boots, the white of her fedora, and the kimono.
"Kaylah, you're here!"
"Did you think I'd forget? When I make a promise, I keep it, Stephanie."
"I know, I know. Tonya has offered to take the pictures."
"I figured. Now how many are you wanting to take?"
"Like five pictures maximum."
"Okie dokie. Let's get to it."
"Okay, Kaylah. Just do a simple pose, like look up and smile at the sky while taking a sip of your drink."
"I can do that. That might actually be the one that sells the most."
She did another picture of her sitting at the bar with her milkshake, not having a care in the world but her milkshake.
"Actually, I think these two should do it."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive."
"Okie dokie. Well, I'm heading back to my house. I promised my Aunt Lucy I'd help her make supper and everything."
"Will you be back here this evening?"
"Of course, I will."
"We'll see you then."
"Slán a fhágáil anois."
"What?"
"That's Irish Gaelic for goodbye for now."
"Oh, well same thing for you."
When Kaylah arrived back home, Desiree's mother had already dropped her off.
"Desiree!"
"Kay Kay! What do you have planned for me today?"
"Well, for supper Baby Girl, my Aunt Lucy and I are making Spaghetti, and then sometime after we eat, you and I are gonna go to the boardwalk."
"Yay! Are you gonna take me for ice cream?"
"I always do, Baby Girl. And, we might go on some rides tonight,"
"Yay!"
"Desi, these are my cousins Michael and Sam. Can you say howdy to them?"
"Howdy! He wears his sunglasses inside?"
"He's just weird that way, Baby Girl. Come on. Let's go in the kitchen and help my Aunt Lucy."
"Can I call her Aunt Lucy, too?"
"You gotta ask her."
"What does she got to ask me?"
"She wants to know if she can call you Aunt Lucy like I do."
"Of course, you can, sweetheart!"
"Thank you!"
"Oh, my goodness, she is just adorable."
"You should see her when she's asleep. She's even cuter then. Desi, do you wanna help me set the table?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. I'll hold the plates, and you set them down."
"How many people are gonna eat?"
"Uh, I think, about, nine. Cause Aunt Lucy is having a guest over, and Sam is having a couple friends over."
"Is Grandpa gonna sit down and eat with us?"
"We will most likely have to save some leftovers for him."
"Smells good. When do we eat?"
"I told Max eight o'clock, Dad."
"Max?! You mean we're having company again?!"
"Again? Dad, you haven't had company in this house since Mom died eight years ago."
"Right. And now we're having company again. I'll take mine to go."
"Here you go, Grandpa. Here's your plate."
"Thank you, Desiree."
"Michael, Max is coming over for dinner. I'd like for you to meet him."
"I can't tonight, Mom. Got plans of my own."
"You know, things are going to change around here when school starts."
"Gotta go, Mom."
"Aunt Lucy, we only have like a full month of summer vacation left. And my birthday as not happened yet."
"Oh, that's right."
Just as Michael opens the door to leave the house, Max is standing on the front porch.
"Hey. How ya doing? Michael, right?"
"Yeah. Max, right?"
"Yes. Well. You're the man of the house, Michael. I'm not coming in unless you invite me."
Michael thought that was a strange phrase, but he just blew it off.
"Well then, come on in, come in. I'm inviting you."
"Thank you, Michael. Hello, Lucy."
"Oh, Max! I didn't even hear you come inside! Welcome!"
"Is it okay for the guest to see the food before the dinner?"
"Oh, no. You're thinking of the groom not seeing the bride before the wedding."
"Oh, right. I always get those two confused."
"Mom. These are my dinner guests. The Frog Brothers, Edgar, and Alan."
"Ah. I didn't know you were having guests."
"Well, if we're in your way we can just eat peanut butter out of the jar in the kitchen."
"No, no. There's plenty for everybody. Oh, Max, this is my youngest boy Sam."
"Sam, did you seriously just say you boys were about to eat peanut butter out of the jar? After I just baked homemade Swedish cinnamon rolls, you're just gonna go eat peanut butter out of the jar?! Oh, HELL NO! Edgar. Alan."
"Aren't you looking good, Kaylah?"
"I always do."
"And this is my cousin Kaylah, but she calls me Aunt Lucy."
"And you're Max, I'm guessing?"
"Yes I am. I've seen you sing outside of my video store. You're good. I was actually wondering if you would let me record you singing outside, to show on the TVs in the store."
"I don't see anything wrong with it, so sure."
"Kay Kay, are you gonna put the cinnamon rolls in the warmer?"
"Yes, I will. Because pastries are always better warm."
"Now, that, I can definitely agree with."
"Well, the table is set, so let's go ahead and dig in."
"Sounds good to me."
"This looks terrific, Lucy."
"Boy! Somebody around here sure has bad breath!"
All of the boys looked at Max, but Nanook was standing right over Lucy.
"Nanook, go in the living room with the other dogs."
"Nanook, stop breathing on me. Sam, get him to go in the living room."
"Come here, Nanook. Max, would you like some Parmesan cheese on your spaghetti?"
"Thanks, Sam."
"Max, what's wrong?!"
"That's not cheese, it's garlic!"
"I bet you hate garlic, don't ya?!"
"No, I like garlic, it's just a little much!"
Sam hands Max a glass of water and spills it in his lap.
"Kay Kay, are they gonna play tricks on me tonight?"
"If they do, then we'll be playing William Tell, and the dang apple will be in their mouths. Really boys, these tricks need to stop."
"Does it burn?"
"Burn?! Are you kidding?! It's freezing!"
"Max, I am so sorry."
Then all of a sudden, Edgar turns the lights off.
"Oh, no! Now what?!"
"Must be a circuit breaker."
"Boys, I know it was one of you who turned off the lights, and if one of you don't turn them back on, none of you will wake up with fingers! Now turn them back on, you're scaring Desiree!"
"Easy, Kaylah. Easy."
"Don't easy me, dummies!"
The lights come back on, and Sam holds a mirror to Max's face, surprised to see that he has a reflection.
"Sam, what is going on?!"
"I think I know what's going on here."
"You do?!"
"Sure. I understand what you're thinking, Sam. But you're wrong."
"I am."
"Yeah. I'm not trying to replace your Dad or steal your Mom. I just want to be your friend."
"Max, I am really sorry about this."
"Our batting average isn't very good, is it? So far, we're zero for two."
"I don't understand Sam. He's just not like this."
"Boys Sam's age need a good deal of discipline, or they walk all over you."
"He doesn't walk all over me."
"I don't want to fight with you, Lucy. Come on. Let's give it one more try. Dinner at my house, tomorrow night. I'm cooking."
Kaylah puts the sidecar on her motorcycle, so that Desiree can ride safely.
"Do you have karaoke tonight, Kay Kay?"
"Yes I do, Babygirl. We'll get ice cream first, then go to The Floor dance hall. Are strapped up good?"
"Yes."
"Here, let me check. Yeah, you're strapped up good. Okay, let's roll."
"Yay!"
They went to the Milkshake Shack first.
"Hey, Steph. Can we get to peanut butter milkshakes? One large and one small?"
"Coming right up. Hey, Desiree!"
"Hey, Aunt Stephie!"
"And don't you look pretty today?"
"Thank you! Oooh, that shake looks yummy!"
"And, as usual Kaylah, it's on the house."
"Thanks, Steph. Come on, Desi. Let's head over to The Floor."
Kaylah was everyone's favourite karaoke singer at The Floor.
"Kaylah!"
"Tiffany!"
"Thank God you're here! No one has come in tonight that is any good!"
"I can believe that. Now Desi, when I'm on stage, you're gonna be sitting back here with Tiffany like usual, okay?"
"Okie dokie, Kay Kay!"
Marko and the other Lost Boys came in behind Kaylah.
"Hey, Kaylah."
"Evenin, boys."
"Aren't you looking gorgeous tonight?"
"What? You ain't never seen a chick in black lace before?"
"Yes, just not you."
"Are you going on stage next?"
"Looks like I will."
"Who's this with you?"
"This is the girl I babysit, Desiree. Desi, this is Marko."
"Hi, Marko!"
"She's cute."
"Kaylah, you're up."
"Get behind the counter, Desi."
"What song are you gonna do?"
"Uh, I guess, Ex's and Oh's by Elle King. And I don't need the words shown to me. I already know the whole song."
"Alright, folks. Next up is the house favourite, Miss Kaylah Bedwell!"
"Well, I had me a boy, turned him into a man. I showed him all the things that he didn't understand. Whoa, and then I let him go. Now, there's one in California who's been cursing my name. Cause I found me a better lover in the UK. Hey, hey, until I made my getaway.
One, two, three, they gonna run back to me. Cause I'm the best baby that they never gotta keep. One, two, three, they gonna run back to me. They always wanna come, but they never wanna leave.
Ex's and the oh, oh, oh's they haunt me. Like gho-o-osts they want me to make 'em all. They won't let go. Ex's and oh's.
I had a summer lover down in New Orleans. Kept him warm in the winter, left him frozen in the spring. My, my, how the seasons go by. I get high, and I love to get low. So, the hearts keep breakin', and the heads just roll You know that's how the story goes.
One, two, three, they gonna run back to me. Cause I'm the best baby that they never gotta keep. One, two, three, they gonna run back to me They always wanna come, but they never wanna leave.
Ex's and the oh, oh, oh's they haunt me. Like gho-o-osts they want me to make 'em all. They won't let go. My ex's and the oh, oh, oh's they haunt me Like gho-o-osts they want me to make 'em all They won't let go Ex's and oh's.
One, two, three, they gonna run back to me. Climbing over mountains and a-sailing over seas. One, two, three, they gonna run back to me. They always wanna come, but they never wanna leave.
My ex's and the oh, oh, oh's they haunt me. Like gho-o-osts they want me to make 'em all. They won't let go. Ex's and the oh, oh, oh's they haunt me. Like gho-o-osts they want me to make 'em all. They won't let go. Ex's and oh's!"
"As usual, Kaylah. You're the one that always gets the crowd rolling."
"It ain't hard when you got a voice like mine."
Michael had come in to listen to her sing a little bit, but the Lost Boys had already left, and he followed after them. Kaylah had Tiffany take Desiree to Kaylah's house so that she could follow where Michael was headed to. She hides herself and her bike in the woods and keeps herself down low. She sees the lost boys sitting up in a tree, and Michael pulls up on his bike.
"Michael! Over Here! You don't wanna miss this!"
Kaylah was able to hide herself behind a fallen tree, and sink into the shadows, out of the line of sight. And she prayed. She prayed that the boys would not find her, and she prayed that Michael would not do what the others were about to do.
"What are we waiting for, David?"
"Initiation's over, Michael. It's time to join the club."
David reveals his vampire form, as do the other boys. The Lost Boys fly down and start feeding on the group of surf nazis. Kaylah keeps herself hidden and continues to pray. She keeps her eyes shut through the whole ordeal.
"God, please don't let them find me! Please! I've killed their kind before, and I am not afraid to do it again!"
Michael struggles to control himself, as the scent of human blood and flesh flies through the air. At one point, he loses control and falls to the ground. When the Lost Boys are done feeding, they go to talk to Michael again.
"Now you know what we are. Now you know what you are. You'll never grow old, Michael. And you'll never die. But you must feed!"
At one point, Kaylah moved a little bit, and scared a rabbit, and it jumped out of the woods.
"It's just a rabbit, David."
The boys did not even bother to look in the woods. She waited until they were long gone to get on her bike and head home.
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werecat · 3 years
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whenever people see a post about a very young child saying something witty and claim it must be fake I just think about my four year old cousin condescending to her five year old cousin for playing make believe with dolls because “she’s not ACTUALLY your daughter‚ samia‚ she’s a DOLL”
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Gone For A Minute - Chapter Two
[Bruno Madrigal x Male Reader]
a/n: i kinda wanna go on pinterest and gather some pics of what i imagine their rooms as,,,, if you guys wanna see that tell me
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You were at the top of the stairs next to three glowing doors. An orange glow swirled across them, waiting to turn into something beautiful. Mirabel was back with her mother, the triplets were behind the curtain, and Abuela was standing quietly next to you.
Suddenly, the room went quiet. The curtains opened and presented the three five-year-olds to the village. They stood quietly, holding each other's hands, smiling their little smiles. 
They made their way to the stairs. Time seemed to move slower. Though they were only five, you couldn't help but feel like this was the last moment of their true childhood. You were watching your children grow in front of your eyes.
You remembered the day you adopted them. Bruno and [Name], hand in hand inside the church, meeting their children. The same church where the two of you had been married just a year earlier. 
The pastor smiled as he carefully set the infants in your arms. That day had been one of the happiest in your life. You brought them home and obsessed over their chubby cheeks and fuzzy hair on their heads. 
Alma was ecstatic that she was a grandmother once again. Any moment you didn't have them, she'd be cuddling them. 
You remembered the day Bruno left. The three of them were laying on their backs on the carpet, their Papa sitting in front of them. He would lean over them and smile before shaking his head, tickling their little faces with his long hair. They would giggle so hard that they were gasping. He had looked at you with pure pride in his eyes.
You remembered when they were four, after playing with their cousins, coming to ask you when they'd get their gifts. You had carefully tried to explain that you weren't sure they'd get one, seeing as they were adopted. Their Abuela cut you off as fast as she could. 
"You're Madrigals, blood or not!" She had said, pinching their cheeks. "You'll get your gifts when you're five, mis queridos." 
You remembered them just the other day, curled up in your bed after falling asleep reading with you.
Now they were with their Abuela, tiny hands laying gently on the candle. They swore to help the village and use their powers for the good of the family. Alma smiled and nodded towards the doors.
They each stood in front of their designated door, examining the swirling glow. Carlos and Mateo glanced at Sofia, who was at the middle door, and nodded. They reached up and touched the doorknobs together. 
The orange glowed brighter before settling into portraits of the three. Sofia's had the tall flame of a fire behind her, as well as two smaller ones from her open palms. Her wooden eyes glowed bright orange and a smile was on her face. Little firecracker.
Carlos' door showed him with his mouth open and singing, various musical notes surrounding him. His eyes were closed and his eyebrows raised, just as the little musician's often were.
Mateo's door featured many people. He was front and center, a calm look on his face. Two women in flowing gowns stood behind him, each with a hand on one of his shoulders. They didn't have faces. 
Sofia spun on her heels, giggling. 
"Dad! Abuela! We did it!" The room erupted in applause and cheers. You smiled wide, overwhelmed with happiness for your children. 
You enveloped your children in a hug, Alma joining soon after, then others as your family ascended the stairs.
"So- uh, what are their gifts?" A small voice asked. 
"Let's find out, shall we?" Abuela, now free of the hug, gestured towards the doors.
"I call going first!" Carlos shouted. He ran to his door, flung it open, and rushed inside. You, then the family, then the village followed. 
The room was huge. The ceiling seemed to go on for a mile, making incredible acoustics. Instruments lined the walls. Carlos must have been in paradise. 
Ever since he was a baby, he had been the most vocal and musical of the three. He loved to yell and sing, and when he was old enough, you started teaching him to play the piano.
Speaking of which, Carlos was sat at one. His hands hovered over the gorgeous keys. The grand piano was shiny and new, black with gold accents.
Slowly, he started to play. You had only just started to teach him this. It was Bach- Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major. 
As he played, the room fell silent. A wave of calm and contentness washed over you, warm and soft. Everyone else seemed to feel it too. 
When he finished playing, he looked up and smiled at you. You started the applause that broke the silence of the room. Still feeling relaxed, you took his hand. 
"That was wonderful, mijo." He rocked back and forth on his heels, proud of himself. 
"What an incredible gift!" Alma beamed and patted his head. 
"Me next! Me next!" Sofia yelled, already excited again. She pushed through the crowd and ran towards her room.
When you made it out of Carlos' room, Sofia was already inside. Her door hung open and a cool breeze blew from inside.
Her floor, instead of wood like her brother's, was completely made of sand. It made you think of Bruno's tower.
Sofia was jumping happily on her bed, which was far too big for her. It could have fit fifteen Sofias. It was filled with fluffy pillows, much to her delight.
Contrary to Bruno's room, Sofia's looked a lot more comfortable. It looked like a normal room, the only difference was how big it was and the sand floor.
Her room felt like a beach with no water.
The cool air felt nice on your hot skin. The house had been packed full of people. 
"Dad!" Sofia pulled you from your thoughts. "Watch, watch!"
She jumped from the bed to the ground and then held out her hands.
"You better stay back!"
Fire burst from her palms and fingertips; an explosion of orange and red. Her grin slowly returned to her focused face, and after she stopped, she bowed. 
"Did you see, Dad? Wasn't it cool?"
"So cool! You were amazing!" You kissed her forehead. Her skin was hot to the touch. She nodded firmly before smiling again and running off to entertain the crowd with her new gift. 
"Two down, one to go." You mumbled softly, glancing around for Mateo. After concluding he wasn't in the room, you pushed your way past the crowd to look for him. 
You found him sitting with his brother. They were on the piano bench, just listening to the sound of chatter throughout the house. You kneeled next to them. 
"Hi, Dad." He said, not making eye contact.
"Hi, Mateo." You replied and smiled at him. "Have you seen your room yet?"
He shook his head.
"Don't you want to?" He shrugged in response. You didn't blame him; this had to be a nerve-wracking experience.
"Hey!" A hand landed on your shoulder. A man smelling of alcohol was standing behind you. "Are we going to see that one's gift too?"
You stood and met him eye to eye. 
"If he'd like." You crossed your arms over your chest, not wanting him to come too close to them.
"Hey, kid!" He shouted, leaning around you to talk to him. "Don't you wanna know what your gift is?"
Abuela, not realizing how intoxicated the man was, walked over with a big smile on her face. 
"Oh! Are you ready to find out, Teo?"
He mumbled something you couldn't quite hear. You kneeled beside him once more. He stared at the ground.
"What was that, mijo?" He kicked his feet as you spoke, too little for them to touch the ground yet.
"I said I already know what my gift is, Daddy." He whispered.
Alma smiled sweetly and walked over.
"Why don't we go look at your room together, okay? Then you can show us your gift!"
Mateo hesitated, then nodded. 
She took his small hand in her own and led him out of the room. He kept his eyes on the floor the whole walk there. You took his other hand and squeezed it. He just wanted to make his Abuela happy.
Alma released his hand, allowing him to reach up and open the door. 
The room was dark and cool. The floor was dark brown hardwood. It almost felt like a log cabin. 
The lights were beautiful lanterns glowing softly. They illuminated the rest of the room, showing off the beautiful bed with intricately carved designs in the wooden bed frame. 
A bookshelf filled to the brim sat on the wall opposite, waiting for its contents to be read. 
Mateo loved it. 
A smile spread over his face as he finally looked up from the ground. He ran over to his new bed, grabbing a stuffed wolf that had been left on top of the sheets. 
"Is this for me, Dad?" He held it out towards you. 
"It was in your room, wasn't it?" You smiled back at him, happy about his improvement in mood.
Slowly, others started entering the room. Alma had noticed his mood change and decided to bring up his gift once more.
"Are you ready to show us your gift?"
Mateo moved the wolf into just one of his hands, the other one now occupied with tapping its fingers against his palm.
"I don't know how to show you, Abuela." 
"Hm... Well, could you tell me then?" She asked, voice sweet.
Mateo nodded and motioned for her to lean in close. She did, and you followed. The room was dead silent.
"I think I can see ghosts."
Alma didn't respond.
"Uhm- Abuela- The man from the painting is with us. Abuelo, I mean..." He went back to staring at the ground, still tapping his fingers.
"Pedro?" She whispered.
"Yeah. He says he loves you." Mateo shuffled his feet. 
You bit your cheek. Would she be mad at him? You knew Mateo wouldn't lie about something like this, but as you stood in uncomfortable silence, you almost hoped it was. 
"Mateo..." Her voice cracked as she said his name. Slowly, she took his hand and pulled him into a hug.
Thank God.
Alma stood up straight, still holding Mateo. 
"We have three new beautiful gifts!" She announced. 
Once again, there was applause and cheering. Alma waved her hand and brought the crowd to Carlos' room to celebrate. His room made the most sense.
After everyone left, you stood in the dark, quiet room a while longer. You could faintly hear the music, chatter, and dancing just two rooms over. 
You wanted to join them. Maybe you should've. You knew that they'd be okay, their whole family was with them. It was a party for them, they wouldn't even notice you're gone.
You walked right past Sofia and Carlos' door. 
You were going to Bruno's tower.
---
Gone For A Minute Taglist:
@thecrashingwaves
@sailor-peeking
@batfam-sitcom
@sylum
@xochiipills
@runningon4hoursofsleep
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tommyspeakycap · 3 years
Note
I love your work! I was wondering if you’d be willing to write something about (toddler) baby Shelby having Alfie help her bake a cake for Tommy
omggggg that’s so so cute!!
A Bakers Help
The burly Camden Town ‘baker’ was nothing short of completely shocked when he heard a soft banging on his office door in the mid afternoon. His eyebrows had furrowed and he had kept his hand readily on his weapon so he was prepared in the event of an enemy being on the other side of the door. He was surprised to say the least when he tugged open the door and had to look down multiple inches to spot she who knocked on the door.
There stood a little girl. One he knew fairly well but who’s appearance outside his office was still a shock. That little girl was notorious around most of England, especially in heavily gang populated territories where the “Shelby” was a household name and everybody who knew that name knew the littlest member of the family was something akin to a jewel in Tommy Shelby’s crown. Alfie had been curious as to whether or not she was actually attached to Thomas Shelby’s hip in consideration to how much time she spent right by his side, teetering along on little legs so he knew she was safe right by his side. It wasn’t often that Tommy entrusted others to watch over his youngest sister, so it would be safe to say that Alfie was incredibly confused.
“Good morning.” The little girl greets, her lips plastered with a bright smile as she lifts a hand to wave at him. Alfie braces himself on either side of his doorway with strong hands so as to lean out of his office to look out into the ‘bakery’ to both the left and right before stepping back in. “Mhm yes it was actually. Where’s your brothers?” He asks, turning his eyes back to the girl in the doorway who fights to pull her wool coat back up from falling off her arms due to the fact it hadn’t been buttoned up. The girl shrugs, “Dunno...Can I come in?” She asks politely, “It’s very cold.”
Alfie Solomons squints his eyes and forms a crease between his brows, but even he can’t deny the chill in the winter breeze through the unheated factory and the shivering of the child, and so he steps to the side and gestures her in the door. Alfie hums, or maybe something more akin to a grumble, in thought as the five year old wanders around his office to take in the whole surroundings. “And where are your pikey brothers then yeah?” His voice rumbles deep and gravelly the same way it always does, not missing the chance or thinking twice about dropping an insult to the Shelby men as he speaks. The youngest of the clan shrugs her little shoulders. “Dunno,” she says again, “I’m with Ada. Told her i was going out to play.”
The words most definitely do worry Alfie Solomons after the girl with Tommy Shelby’s striking blue eyes and his heart in the palm of her tiny hand finishes speaking flippantly. It occurs to him that she’s simply too young to understand both risk and consequence. She knows that Tommy Shelby dotes on her like the little princess he believes her to be. She knows he loves her, he tells her every day. However, Alfie knows the far darker side to that love. He’s heard of people brutally murdered with remains unidentifiable after coming close to her, and although Alfie has no desire to harm a child who probably doesn’t even understand what it is the rest of her family do when she’s not around, that doesn’t reassure him even in the slightest that Tommy, Arthur, Ada and John Shelby along with Polly Gray wouldn’t rip him to shreds if they knew their little princess was stood in his office for whatever reason.
“Right,” Alfie states, “Better get you home then,” He strides easily towards the door to hold it open, but the little girl simply quirks one eyebrow and remains where she stands. “It’s Tommy’s birthday soon.” She declares, looking up at the hardened London gangster as if he poses no threat nor fear to her in the slightest bit. She smiles at him, big and bright. She didn’t know him. She didn’t know if he was violent, didn’t know if he was supposed to be scary. She just knew she had met him before, he was relatively funny as the 5 year old obviously did not pick up on the thinly veiled threats hiding beneath the verbal back and forth between her favourite brother and the man she stood with now, and more importantly than anything; she knew he was a ‘baker’. “You need a cake on your birthday, you know.” She adds very matter of factly, and Alfie Solomons doesn’t fight the little grin he gives. “And you’re a baker, so you can make good cakes. I need you to help me make Tommy’s cake for birthday cake time on Saturday.”
There’s virtually no way this little girl had just come up with this by herself. The way she acts, her generosity, her sweetness and her absolute insistence of cake for her brothers birthday was not something she had adapted by herself. Children don’t just come up with these things. That thought, for Alfie, means that those who have raised her have drilled a certain kindness into her. Thomas Shelby has raised his little sister to be the kind of kid who will find a man she thinks is a baker just because her brother told her he was, so that he can help her make a cake. That makes Alfie want to laugh. Tommy Shelby acts the part, but Solomons now knows he’s the type who taught a little girl about the importance of cake and birthday fun.
“Fine.” Alfie responds, out stretching his arm to gesture the little girl out into the factory. He did actually have a designated area for the ‘bakery’ just in the event that someone came looking or investigating and he needed to show there was actually a bakery there. He was thankful for that now, because he got the feeling that there was little to no chance he would have gotten away from the very very persistent little Shelby trailing behind him. It becomes apparent very quickly that little (y/n) will have no luck when it comes to seeing what was going on up on the counter, considering she wasn’t even nearly the same height as it, never mind tall enough see over it. Alfie has to get creative in that respect, eyes flicking around until they lands on a a stack of crates that he grabs a couple of to pile them next to the counter so that the youngest Shelby can contribute as she pleased to the cake making.
All things considered, Alfie was actually a fairly good baker. He didn’t come up with the idea of a bakery to cover his illegal business work for no reason. He knew he could bake if it was necessary (which it sometimes was to smuggle alcohol), so this ask from the little girl who had a list of ingredients and an exact image of how she wanted this cake to look, wasn’t a huge task for him.
In the process of the bake, Alfie learned a lot. He learned that little Shelby couldn’t quite pronounce her L’s (which Tommy was apparently working on with her), so she called him Afie. He learned that Tommy’s favourite cake was vanilla sponge, which was why it was a four tier vanilla sponge with extra strawberry jam that his sweet little sister had chosen. He learned that the little girl got here by very discretely tripping up her cousin, Karl, so that Ada was preoccupied giving him a plaster for his knee and stopping his tears and (y/n) snuck off from Ada’s London home in the direction she felt like she remembered Tommy going when he had taken her to Alfie’s bakery once, albeit leaving her in the car with Arthur and John. She had to ask for directions from confused strangers a few times, but ultimately she found the place on her own. Alfie learned that little Shelby talks a lot. She’s very clever, can follow instructions a lot better than most children of a similar age. It had become increasingly clear she didn’t see any problem with talking about the fun things she did with her brothers. The way Arthur and John like to throw her about to hear her giggles, how Tommy tucks her in every single night that he can. How he tickles her, how he still carries her around even though her aunt Polly protests it. How good her aunt Polly’s cooking is. How much she loves her family. She sees no problem with divulging these soft family moments, although Tommy would probably be absolutely appalled that people knew these things about him and his brothers. It made the head of the Peaky Blinders seem so incredibly mundane.
Alfie could see now why that sweet girl was so loved and held so dear by the family. He also had to wonder if she truly was one of them. She was funny and bright, she giggled with him and babbled on about sorts of rubbish. Alas, she was bossy as Thomas himself. She was loud like Arthur, sarcastic as John, self assured as Polly, as independent as Finn and opinionated as Ada. She made sure to tell Alfie exactly how to stack the first layer while she mixed ingredients for the next layer and he was kept on a very short leash, reminded every so often that he was not to dip his fingers in any of the mixtures and leaning over as he worked to tell him Tommy liked more jam than what Alfie had put on.
“Wait!” She yelps out, leaping off the makeshift kitchen stool made from those bottle crates to chase after Alfie until she reaches the man who was carrying the cake towards a box. “Finishing touches,” she insists, ever so slightly dusting the cake with powdered icing sugar to give a final decorational appearance. Alfie smiles subconsciously as the small girl stands back with a proud grin, turning her eyes to man holding the cake, “Thank you Afie,” she beams, her cute little way of saying his name never lost on him as his heart flutters. “Welcome, baby Shelby.” He responds as he slips it into the cake box he’d ordered one of his men to go and get without question.
Alfie was certain he would step outside his bakery and London would be burning. He expected to have Shelby’s killing people on the streets searching for their baby, their sweet little princess. He assumed (and rightly so) that Ada hadn’t told Tommy that she had absolutely no idea where his most precious little love was for genuine fear of his reaction and so she had mobilised some friends and acquaintances she had made while in London to try finding her little sister. Albeit they were evidently unsuccessful and absolutely no one expected little (y/n) to be baking with Alfie Solomons for her gangster brothers birthday because she just loves him so.
Ada literally burst out the front door frantically when she saw the car headlights pull up outside her house, wrapping herself tightly in her coat as Alfie Solomons lifts her little sister down out of the car. The 5 year old stands innocent as ever next to the man who Tommy never truly knows if he can trust or not as he reaches back into the car to lift out a white cake box with two strong hands. “Better keep a closer eye on this one yeah?” He gestured his head to (y/n) who runs towards Ada and jumps into her open arms to be squeezed incredibly, almost painfully tightly. “Never run off like that again!” She hisses, her concern and anxiety clear behind her words as she speaks into her sisters soft hair, stroking it with her hand for some form of reassurance.
“Sorry Ada,” she hums cutely in response, “We made Tommy a cake though, for his birthday!” Ada let’s go of (y/n) and turns to the little girl. “Go inside and find Aunt Pol, i’ll be in shortly.” She says as she eyes Alfie Solomons with the stoney faced glare he assumes she learned from Polly Gray and her often stoney resolve. “Bye bye Afie!” The 5 year old chimes, scuttling up to him to wrap her arms around his legs for a moment before turning and running off with a wave at the doorstep with Alfie a little bit to stunned by how kind she was to him despite the bad man he was to do much else than wave after her. “You,” Ada snipped, cutting him out of his thoughts and crossing her arms firmly over her chest, “Baked a cake with my little sister?” Her words leak with confusion, eyebrows furrowed with her head tilted in question as she continues to be unable to think of any reason why Alfie Solomons hadn’t turned the little girl away or even used her as a bargaining chip with threats of harm to the child if Tommy didn’t do as Alfie wanted. Instead he baked with her a cake for Thomas and she was returned without a bump, not even a hair on her head harmed. He had returned the little Shelby who was uncharacteristically clumsy for a Shelby without her falling off of anything, burning herself on any ovens or accidentally eating something she was supposed to.
“Yeah.” Alfie responds, shrugging his shoulders at the same time. Ada steps closer to him to try in some way to read what he’s not saying, her heels clicking with each step. “And you want nothing for it?” She presses, her eyes narrowed as he shrugs. “Birthday gift innit yeah?” He grumbles, handing the cake to Ada. “She’s the best of you lot,” he states firmly as he turns his back to climb back into his car, “Keep her that way yeah?”
Ada’s frown turns to a soft smile as she nods, watching as Alfie Solomons pulls his door shut firmly and turns on his ignition.
“Mr Solomons, Oi!” She calls after him, forcing him to roll down his window to hear what she has to say. “Thank you.” She breathes, “For looking after her and bringing her home. And for the cake.” Alfie nods his head in acknowledgment. Ada isn’t sure what else to say. She still feels fairly nauseous at the fact her little sister was missing for virtually the whole day and littered with further nerves at the fact Tommy would be around to pick her up in a half hour and it wasn’t like little Shelby to keep quiet about anything, especially not when it came to Tommy and especially when it came to her adventures that her favourite brother hadn’t been part of, so assuredly she would let him know all about her baking day with Alfie after the cake was revealed tomorrow afternoon for his birthday. Alfie knew this too and he imagined he’d get a visit from the head of the Peaky Blinders relatively soon after he found out.
Tommy would probably be as confused as Ada as to why Alfie looked after little (y/n) the way he did. Alfie couldn’t even really explain it himself, she just warmed up his heart and the sweet little girl showed Alfie truly why Tommy loves that little girl so much. She brings laughter and happiness and fun. She brings light into a very, very dark life and Alfie appreciates that dedication Tommy had to keeping her safe a lot more now. He himself now had a soft spot for the kid and there was a part of him that knew for a fact he too would be making sure no one in his circle was breathing words of harming that little girl who had promised she would bake with him again, and had his birthday written on her hand so she could bake for his birthday.
Maybe the Shelby’s weren’t so bad after all.
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therealvinelle · 2 years
Note
What was even the cullens and denali’s cover story when they lived together? How did anyone believe these 12 walking statues who look nothing alike could pass for family/cousins?
I mean, that'd be a weird story for anyone, even humans. The Cullens, alien as they are, will struggle twofold.
Though, I recall reading somewhere (couldn't find the source so don't quote me) that the Cullens met the Denali in the 30's. In which case they wouldn't actually be that many - there'd be the five Denali, but the Cullens... well, they had a lot happening in the 30's.
(And yes, I do think that the time they all tried living together must have been after finding each other. This here, a whole gaggle of vampires who live off the diet willingly - Carlisle's dream come true, he's not leaving.)
1930-31: it's just Carlisle and Esme, until Edward returns in 1931. To my recollection Carlisle and Esme had stayed in the same place for four years, meaning they can't have been with the Denali.
1933: Rosalie is turned. She knew the Cullens from around town, so they weren't newcomers.
1935: Emmett is turned.
1936: The Cullens move to Forks, where they meet the Quileute shapeshifters.
The windows of opportunity we have here is that the Cullens either tried living with the Denali in the 1931-1932 window before coming to Rochester just in time for Rosalie Hale to get used to them being around, or they did so after 1937.
If it's the former, then there would only have been eight vampires living together. If it's the latter, it might still only have been eight vampires living together in public, as Rosalie and Emmett were newborns. Nine vampires, possibly, as Rosalie demonstrated very good control.
But I digress.
It doesn't sonud like the Denali would pass for teenagers, they're described as looking like men and women, never boys or girls. That simplifies things, because they won't have to go to high school and thus require parents.
I imagine they pretended to be living together for economical reasons. Carlisle and the Denali sisters could be siblings (The Denali sisters really do look like sisters, and if 3 out of 4 siblings look alike, people are less likely to question the fourth. Everyone knows a sibling group where one doesn't resemble the rest, and at worst people will assume their mother had an affair), along with Carlisle's wife they bought a house together and Carmen and Eleazar are a married couple who joined in. If it was during the depression they'd have a good cover for it, as everyone was broke anyway. Rosalie and Edward can be the youngest sister who's still in school and Esme's baby brother, respectively.
Still ridiculous, but with this many young adults the only feasible reason they have to be living together is a lack of funds. Of course, the Denali would have to get jobs so as to support this story. (Which, honestly, I'm sure the sisters jumped at the excuse to show up at people's houses as the sexy maid they didn't know they'd ordered.)
If Emmett's in the mix and not just hiding at home, then, god, throw a dart at the wall. He's a fellow roommate.
If I'm wrong about the Cullens having lived with the Denali in the 30's, then Alice and Jasper is in the mix, at which point... honestly, what I would do is to live the Agatha Christie dream and pretend to be a dysfunctional rich family whose tyrannical old father rendered everyone hopelessly codependent so now they live in a giant house and don't ever speak to anyone. Lean into the weird. That, or be an out and about religious society. But that’s me and the Cullens are not me.
Though, the Cullens already being ridiculous, and such a lost cause at any ounce of credibility, I imagine Carlisle just straight up used the same old "I'm 30 and these are my five adult kids" story with an "and here are my five cousins" addendum, and dared anyone to call him a liar. Anyone opens their mouth to say anything to this ridiculous story, and he just stares them down.
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notasiren21 · 3 years
Note
26 for Lukanette WIPs please. :)
26. Party Crasher!Luka
I FUCKED UP AND JUST WROTE IT I GUESS???
Party Crasher
-Lukanette oneshot
“You mean to tell me Agreste ditched you? After all that pleading to let him take you to the party for your successful launch line for next season, he’s ditched you?”
“Kagami, don’t kill him.”
“Fine, remind me why I can’t though? This is such an ass move of his if he’s trying to prove he’s the one for you.”
“Because,” Marinette grits out, faking a toothy smile to a work couple that waves from passing, “I want to castrate and kill him myself.”
Kagami laughs roughly in surprise, “Why the castration?”
“So I can fit his small ass into the tightest pair of skinny jeans we have for our tall teenage girls.” The not so stoic girl sips on her wine, pleased with her friend’s rage. “I told him I haven’t been interested since we were 14, but him thinking I’ll forgive him if I even had a silver of interest in dating him? Fuck him.”
“Or,” Kagami drawls, long nails tapping the stem of her glass as she leans to peer over her friend’s shoulder, “You could fuck him instead?”
Mari gasps in offense, “I am NOT trying for a one night stand, no matter what you guys say.”
“No, you little mouse,” she admonishes, fully heartedly agreeing with the sentiment, “I just mean your big and handsome protective snake is here to save the day.”
Marinette’s mind took a second longer to click the pieces together, trying to make sense of Kagami’s nicknames for her friend group, before her heart thudded and she slowly turned.
There, passing by the models who had walked in Marinette’s designs and batted their false lashes at the rockstar, was Luka Couffaine.
Dressed to the nines in a very punk like and sophisticated way that revealed he very much wanted to impress her and did in fact listen to her fashion advice. Black skinny jeans only he could pull off, high top converse and a white button up with a black vest to overlay it. The cheeky and handsome bastard forgoing the tie to leave one too many buttons undone and his sleeves rolled up to reveal his tattoos.
Oh, on the life of his cat Sass was she proud of him.
And maybe drooling just a little?
He approached her, a sly smile working its way to his lips as he eyed her up and down, eyes shining bright at her black low cocktail that she paired with navy blue heels.
So maybe she sometimes used Luka as a whole for inspiration.
He raised a hand, finger wrapping around a loose curled tendril out of an elegantly messy low bun, “I thought it was the models you were supposed to make the stars of the show.”
“Had I known you were gonna show up, I would’ve worn one of my bests here.”
His hand froze, “This isn’t your best? You tease,” he broke out in a grin. His hand moved further, thumbing at the collection of piercings in her ear he accompanied her with to get years ago. “God, you’re so fucking beautiful.”
“Well, I’m suddenly glad I can only acknowledge this as awkward and not feel it.” Kagami noted into her class. Her phone buzzed, electing a sigh from her as she began turning. “Have fun, my mother decided to remind me why this wine was a good idea to have before she came.”
She watched her friend walk away, her other -her best friend and other half, remained taking her in and stroking the soft spot under her ear he once claimed with a mark-
The one time they admitted their crushes and strong attraction towards the other the night before he left for tour years ago.
It was the only time Luka had indulged himself in his wants and desires, the only time he had asked to and still provided her with an out. And now he still remains far off in her memories, even as he stands in front of her with that look on his face years later.
“How did you,” she swallows when his soft gaze flicks back up to her eyes with his full attention. “How did you get in? It’s a ticket only event.”
He shrugged, turning to offer her an arm and walk around. “I may or may not have seen Adrien’s post about his mom and dad going to a gala event and him going to see his cousin there. Seems like that took precedence I guess.”
Marinette huffed low, “Félix has been in town for three weeks. Adrien and I had lunch with him the other day.”
Luka stilled as a busboy stopped in front of them, offering them glasses of champagne. Luka’s nose twitched, then his lip as he turned away with a polite smile. Marinette shook her head in turn as well.
“You know you don’t have to pass just because of me, right?”
“Hey, we do this ‘young 20 some year olds unable to drink alcohol’ in solidarity together.” He cracked a smile at that, “Soda is my alcohol.”
“Alright, you can be an honorary member of the alcohol intolerance club.” Luka laughed when she hummed gleefully. “Dork.”
“Nerd.”
“So, back on topic, Adrien just really had no excuse then?”
“Ha, no, even his dad stopped by an hour ago to congratulate me and get press photos done to promote the line. All his son did for me was send a text with a sad face attached to his cancellation.”
“... I can kick his ass, you know?”
“I know, I’m just saving for a rainy day.” She laughed, stepping closer to his side and wrapping both arms around his. “So, the ticket, you party crasher.”
“Right, yeah, I may or may not have called your assistant earlier today to swipe it. I took a guess that she held onto it for safe keeping so-,”
“She’s new, I’m not surprised she just gave it up that easily.” She let Luka guide her into a dance. One hand with painted black holding hers to his chest, the other gently tugging to hold his shoulder before he held her waist.
“Oh, that, that explains a lot now.”
“What?”
He flinched, a nervous glint flashing across his features. “I may or may not have lied about who exactly I was since she didn’t know my name-,”
“Doesn’t listen to your music, already told her the sin she was committing.”
“And who I was to you, specifically-,”
Marinette tilted her head back in a laugh, Luka’s arm tightening to brace her weight, “You said you were my husband, didn’t you?”
He flushes at a memory of once getting a creep off her back a year ago by claiming that very title to her.
“Erm, no, I said I was your boyfriend and may have sold it by saying some pet name and swooning over you just a little,” he watched her eyes go wide then soft, a smile twitching to show. He stepped closer, almost pulling her flush to him, “But if that’s what you want, I can go out and get some marriage certificate?”
She flushed, lips parting and a rush of air passing them.
“Maybe call Jagged up and fly us to Vegas? I mean, we’re both looking good right now, you more so.” Her face went a shade or two deeper. She jumped in surprise when he let go of her hand to play with a tendril again on the right side, tilting her face to press a kiss to her left cheek. “God, you’re such a pretty little thing.”
She squeaked.
“What, what was the pet name?”
“Hm?” He lazily met her gaze, a dream like haze filter over them as he moved her body to sway with his. “Oh, that.”
“What was it?”
Baby, babygirl, beautiful, gorgeous- he may have said more than one.
He gave a slow and wicked grin, twirling her out and back into his chest in a swift and stunning movement as he nudged his nose to hers.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” He teased, smile spreading wider and radiant as she forgot to breathe for a second.
What. A fucking. Tease.
The need for him to make good on his words and looks hit through her hard and reminded her of their one night together that they both never forgotten. And how much she wished that was every night, as long as it ended up with them curled right around each other and love and happiness coaxing them to sleep instead of stress and loneliness.
He watched her steel her gaze, her jaw tightened. He swallowed when her height, now of five feet thanks to heels, straightened and forced him to pull up. A violent shiver rocked through him when both hands held along the back of his neck, one slipping under the collar of his shirt to scratch along the nape.
“Marinette-,” he choked.
“I’m only asking so I can show my reciprocation.” She leaned closer, kicking her shoes off into some corner and standing on his converse that every elder of theirs had eyed in question during the night. He supported her actions fully, of course. Still stepping them around in dance within a fluid motion. “Not gonna tell me, hun?”
He coughed, loudly and looked away from her to catch his breath. Watching adults cheat on spouses everywhere or everyone else minding their own business to stare at models or the shrimp on the tables.
He almost tripped when she wined in protest, her hand gripping his chin lightly and turning it to face her. His eyes were flickering between admiration, lust and love, growing three shades of deeper blue than was possible.
“C’mon, baby, tell me.”
“Baby?” He stammered out in surprise. Teenage Luka was having a fucking field day with this. “Marinette, I was only joking earlier and-,”
“Were you really though?”
“No,” his response was fast and instant, a wince playing at the corner of his eyes and his button nose scrunching in loss of control.
“Hey handsome,” he preened under the nickname passing her lips, even if close to millions called him the same thing, it paid more effect when it was Marinette calling him it. “Tell me why you came tonight.”
His neck was aching from staring down to meet her eyes now that the heels were gone but he let himself down lower to press his forehead to hers. “Because you deserve better than what he gives you.”
The girl stilled, expecting an awkward or a flirtatious remark. “What?”
The rockstar looked away sheepishly, a little ashamed. “I know you’re considering getting with him, but when I heard he was canceling on you I let my jealousy win out and I just wanted to be there for you.” He bit his lip when he felt her tugging his face back in her direction, choosing to resist the pressure. “You have to believe me when I say I came with no ulterior motives other than protecting you from going stag to your own party tonight.”
“You, you came to protect me?”
He shrugged, another small shiver racking through him when her hands moved along and glided across his neck. “And make sure you had a good night. I even asked your mom what you were wearing tonight just so I could make sure my outfit complimented yours to cheer you up.”
She was silent for a minute or so, and he waited, patiently as ever and guiding her to rest her head against his chest as he swayed them.
Luka, doing all the work. Luka, taking matters into his own hands when someone fails her. Luka, going the extra mile to make sure she has a happy memory.
Fuck giving second chances to other people. Luka is the only one to have shown her he’s the most earning of the concept and notion.
She pulls away, feeling the slight reluctance in his arms on her waist before they drop to his side, “Grab my heels.”
He raises a black brow but complies, turning to find them and hooking his fingers in the backs. He eyes them, used to seeing her shoes laying around the Liberty when she comes over or even at her own place, but he always has to remark that, “You have small feet.”
“You’ve also called them cute,” she huffs, tugging on his hand and pulling him near the entrance.
He follows, like they always do for one another. “Because they are- where are we going?” He stops them as they round an empty corridor, away from the hotel’s event room where the party is still very much happening. The heel of his palm grips tight to archway, pressing against it, the small shoes still dangling in his hold.
“Home, your place or mine. Actually, mine’s closer.”
He laughs brightly, “You can’t ditch your own party for another movie night, Mari.”
The petite girl turns to him, a fierce expression in his eyes that makes him swallow harshly. “No, but I can ditch to celebrate in getting what I really want. For finally getting what I want.”
“The Chinese takeout place is closed this time of ni-,”
“You.”
“What?” Luka wheezes, he blinks stupidly at her. Prettily and stupidly. He straightens, freehand tugging at his collar a little like he needs room to breathe. “Come again?”
“I’m going home. I’m taking you with me. And we’re gonna celebrate that I finally got off my ass and got what I wanted.”
He hums, nervously and a bounce starting in his hand, a shake in one hand, his dark brows furrow, “And you want?”
“You.”
“You- you want,” he sucks in a sharp breath, pain flashing across his features as he clears his throat. “You want me?”
Her eyes soften, a smile showing as she steps closer to him and takes his face into her hands, pulling him down to be eye level with her as he braces his weight on the wall next to them with a hand.
“Yes,” he looks awestruck as she giggles. “I want you... can you let me keep you?”
He laughs nervously, “I’ll fucking sell myself to you if that’s what you really want, fuck.”
She’s smiling, leaning up on tiptoes to alleviate the strain in his neck and pressing a kiss to his lips, muffling the undignified noise of surprise that escapes him. She lets him get used to her for a second, kissing him slowly and purposely as starts to eventually overcome the shock and kiss her back in reverence.
He pulls away suddenly, a guilted expression on his face.
“Wait, wait. What about Adrien?”
“What about him?”
Luka fidgets, a quick glimpse of insecurities and jealousy showing to her before he regains a semblance of control after having his walls knocked down. “He’s been trying to go out with you, win you affections.”
He only knows of the situation, but never presses her to talk about it. It’s natural for it to come up in conversation everyday when he asks her about work knowing the stress of being twenty-two in a high end fashion company could be a bit more than overwhelming. He wanted to be a safe place to her since the beginning.
“There’s nothing about him. I’ve shut him down an handful of times and now it’s just a matter of letting him indulge himself in what he thinks are romantic gestures when me saying no doesn’t cut it. There’s nothing going on between him and I, just his belief that my crush from years ago accounts for something today.”
Luka still looks wary and isn’t touching her, most likely his conscious trying to be the better person between him and Adrien by not going out with the girl his friend is pining after.
Even if said girl is Luka’s legitimate best friend and the very same girl he’s been in love with since he was a kid.
Marinette feels like it’s a dirty tactic as she gets closer to him, trying to gauge where it’s jealousy and where it’s insecurity in regards to Adrien.
She presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. Luka’s head turns minutely at the attention, tilting less than a centimeter to catch her lips before he catches himself. He struggles when her next kiss falls to his lips and is soft and slow, how he always wants to kiss her.
“Remember our first kiss?” She whispers, wounding arms around his waist and pressing close to him.
He matches her volume, an adoring look winning for a split second, “Of course I remember.”
“Remember our first date?”
“At the ice cream parlor, you wore a pink skirt that kept twirling when you did.” She feels his resolve break a little, his own right to be selfish with her slipping out a little.
His arms slip around her, and he presses a gentle kiss to her temple. “Remember our goodbye at the airport?” His arms tightening around her speak more volumes than his strained, “Yes,” does.
She’s just a little closer to convincing him to stop being so sacrificial with his own wants or needs. She just has to push more.
“Remember waking up in one another’s arms that morning?”
He’s silent for a few seconds, thinking of what he can say in response to that. Wondering how honest to be, “... every day, I think of that morning every day.”
She still hears the clipped apprehension in his voice. That tone she knows so well that’s gonna lead into him giving her advice to rethink this whole decision and talk to him when she’s absolutely sure. How she shouldn’t think on impulse and lunge at what she wants unless she knows she does wanna keep with it.
But, he has to know she always thinks back on moments with him and that she longs to have jumped on impulse if it meant being with him.
Every time he’s showed up with takeout at her place. When he smiles so freely at her. When he bandages her cuts and blisters from working all night long.
When he showed up tonight looking like he had been her dare to begin with. How her heart felt when he admitted to lying to her secretary. The way he looked carrying her high heels that were much too small for his hands but he didn’t care because she asked him to.
How he crashed her own party to make sure she’d have fun tonight.
She’s sure she wants this, him.
All those nicknames they could call each other. All the benefits of dating the other and having a date to everything the other needs to attend. Having her best friend be her boyfriend meaning there’s no holding back from anything.
She’ll cringe about it in the morning, but it’s gotta work to break his long instilled fear of being a bad friend or person. Of being unselfish.
“Do you still remember that night?”
She’s sure he’s stopped breaking by the way his entire body seems to shut down, but then it reboots and he’s shaking against her and can’t seem to breathe correctly, his eyes avoiding hers as he swallows again and looking like he’s willing to risk going into an allergic reaction for the sake of one drink.
“That- that’s not something you forget, Marinette.” His hands are twitching on her waist, grip tightening just a little and a vein is jumping in his arm to do something to prove he remembers alright.
One more push, “Do you still remember how I tasted that night?”
He seizes her waist, lunging to kiss her desperately like he did that night and when he left, a growl passing his lips onto hers. He’s cupping the back of her neck, fingers threading through her hair, breathing her in and shaking against her as his resolves breaks completely and the selfish side comes out. The one that’s nowhere near as selfish as the average person, but enough to take in the matter of his own needs and wants. He pulls back, letting her watch his eyes darken, the pupils expanding until the blues are next to near mere ridges of color. He’s watching hers do the same before he nudges her nose and kisses her slowly, more loving and affectionate. His control slipping back into place and resulting in the Luka she so loves regaining the handles of his own mind.
He’s careful in the way he tugs her lip with his teeth, how he coaxes her to let him kiss her fully before pull back and panting against her lips.
“Yes, I remember,” his voice is rough and he has to glance away from her and straighten. She watches him take a few meditative breaths before he looks back at her.
“Does that really help?” She gestures to his chest and mouth, “the breathing?”
He laughs hollowly, “No, not really, but it bought me time to create some distance in this,” he glances around, “Not your apartment place.”
She laughs at the suddenly horrified look that crosses his face, the image of them making out and the threat of almost being caught in public instantly dawning on him. He glares playfully at her.
“You did that all on purpose.”
“Had to, you were just about to give me up for the sake of being a good friend to me and Adrien.” She pauses, a wicked idea forming to prove her point, “Unless, you want Adrien to know what that all is like?”
A dark look crosses Luka’s face; unrestrained bouts of suppressed jealousy, possessiveness and territoriality. “No,” he growls out, eyes squeezing shut and having to clear his throat. “I’d rather not let him know any of that personally.”
“Not even how I taste?”
“Marinette,” he warned, the growl resurfacing. She cooed, wrapping him up in a hug and pressing a kiss to his jaw as an apology. He whined, “It’s not funny when you do that.”
“No, but everything you feel is alright to feel. Don’t hold back for the sake of not being selfish. You can be selfish with me, you’re a reasonable guy and know boundaries.” She sighed, nuzzling further into his warm embrace. “I don’t like Adrien the way he wants me to, and lately, it’s hard to even be his friend. He needs to move on from me. Hell, I’m better friends with Félix now than him.”
“Just hope they don’t switch up on you again.”
She huffed in amusement. “God no, I’d kill them.”
“It’s adorable how how your less than five feet body resorts to violence and death threats.”
“Mm, except you, I’m quite fond of you.” She looks up at him, chin pressed to his chest and smiling when he looks at her softly and presses a kiss to her nose. “This, us, is not an impulse. Just a restrained want I’ve had for awhile.”
“Okay, I understand now.”
She grins cheekily at him, “Or need, if that makes you all possessive hot yet secretly adorable rockstar boyfriend mode again.”
“Boyfriend?” He smiled slowly, radiant as always and heart stopping. “If teenage me could hear you, he’d probably shut down from being overwhelmed.”
“Nineteen year old you certainly didn’t that night,” she mumbles, grinning at the loud bark of laughter that surprises the both of them when Luka throws his head back.
“Yeah, thanks for reminding me what age I lost it at, totally rockstar of me, right?” The blush that’s coating his neck and ears is adorable, a shy smile quirking at her briefly.
“I think it’s sweet, cute even.”
“Yeah, because you’re the one I lost it to.” He deadpanned without conviction. “But, I guess I’ll take being sweet and cute.”
“It’s okay though, I mean, I did the cliché of losing my virginity to someone I was in love with.” Luka does in fact shut down in her embrace hearing that. Hands jittering against her and fingers tapping like he’s trying to speak through notes against her skin.
He takes another minute, before pressing a kiss to her hair. “If this is you confessing your love to me -and believe me, it’s killing me to stop you right now, I’d rather you do it in regards to another topic and not the fact that we were one another’s first time.” He avoids the dangerous smirk aimed his way, or the sharp angle of her cocked, black brow above breathtaking blues. “C’mon, let’s go dance some more and celebrate your success before we leave, maybe find your assistant to introduce me as your boyfriend to.”
She pours at him when he tugs on her hand in the direction of the party. “But-,”
He breathed out shakily, a waning patient look in his eyes and a false smirk aimed at her. “Can I sleep over tonight?”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes,” he breathed. “I’m very close to just following you home at this point, trust me. I don’t care how the night ends, just as long as it’s you and me tonight.”
She’s letting him make them dance again, feeling as the nerves leave his body as he gets them to fall in step with the tempo. He doesn’t care that he has to bend a little ways down to rest his cheek on her hair, not when she’s letting him pull her up against his chest when she typically only reaches the bottom of his rib cage.
They work well together, they fit perfectly together because they’re more than used to the instinctive adapting to one another.
Her hands cup his cheeks, kissing him carefully without reservation and the anxiety, “It was only an impulse at times because I love you and have for awhile.”
Luka deepens the kiss just a little, thankful she’s the type of girlfriend to let him indulge in her as he smiles, “I get it, I’ve had my share of impulsive thoughts for as long as I’ve been in love with you since we were young. I love you, Mari.”
“Enough to crash a party for me, apparently,” she whispered, a little moved by the thought that they were finally together. He thumbed her tears away.
“Enough to kill Adrien or Félix if you ask me to,” he replied in a loving tone, soothing her gasps for air when she broke apart in giggles against his chest in reaction.
He didn’t leave after that night. And he went to every party as her date too.
128 notes · View notes
supercorpkid · 3 years
Text
Extraneous Variable 3
Error: n3
Supercorp, Kara Danvers x Daughter!Reader, Lena Luthor x Daughter!Reader, Alex Danvers x Niece!Reader, Kelly Olsen x Niece!Reader
Word Count: 3120.
“What the actual fuck!”
“LANGUAGE!” Kara scolds Alex, pointing at you. “My kid is here!”
“Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but WE ARE KIDS TOO!” Alex runs to the front of the mirror, and you get out of her way. “This can’t be true! I’m gonna kill Brainy!”
She marches to the door looking like she will absolutely kill him. You wonder if you should do something, but Brainy can protect himself, besides you’re not a superhero anymore. You look at your moms. Kara and Lena are staring at each other, so shocked, nothing leaves their mouths.
“Moms?”
Kara seems to be the first one to come down from her shock. “I’m you! I’m about your age!”
“Yep! We’re one in the same.” You agree with a big smile. Alex is close by, yelling at Brainy to reverse this mess. You try to ignore her.
“That’s so cool!” Kara holds Lena’s hand, who still hasn’t said a word. “Love, I’ve always wanted to know you as a teen. Hey, now we can say that we have! And, YAY, I’m going to kiss you as a teen.” Kara’s face goes towards Lena’s, who sleekly moves away. “Lena!”
“Nope.” Your mom finally lets out. “You’re her. I’m not doing that, it’s weird.” She points at both of you and sits on the chair that is closest by. Her hands cover her face, and she lets out an exasperated sigh. “I told you not to mess with alien tech. Look what you've done.”
“I didn’t do this! It was Brainy.” You defend yourself, pointing at him instead.
“In my defense, I’m just trying to undo the mess you made.” He also ignores Alex for the sake of defending himself.
“Well, you’ve made more messes than I have now.”
“Only if we look at this numerically.”
“How else would we look at it?”
“You star-”
“STOP IT!” Lena yells, making everyone in the room flinch at the sound of her teen voice coming out so loud. “Both of you, stop it! I have a damn company to run and how the hell am I supposed to do that looking like a teenage girl?”
Kara opens her mouth, but before she has a chance to speak, Lena snaps at her again.
“Kara, I swear to GOD if you say ‘language’ right now, I’m going to curse in five different languages!”
“Someone’s a moody teenager.” Alex mutters and you hold your laugh, biting your lip, knowing damn well not to add into Lena’s moodiness.
“I think I can-” Brainy starts.
“NO!” Alex slaps his hand away from the piece of tech. “Do not touch that again.”
“But-” He tries.
“NO!” Kara yells protecting the tech with her own body. “I’m scared you might turn someone into a zombie next and they’ll come for me.”
“In that case, you don’t have to worry. Zombies eat brains, so you’re safe.” Alex looks at Kara and you look to the other side trying to hide your laughter again. Aunt Alex as a teen is way too funny.
“Hey!” Kara interjects.
“I just have to-” Brainy starts again.
“NO!” It’s Lena who says it this time. “You heard them! Step away from the alien tech. Actually, can we all get out of here and leave it for the kid to figure this out?”
“You know, you can’t call me ‘kid’ anymore. I think I’m actually older than you are, right now.”
“And I am actually still your mother, so you better find a way to reverse this, or you will be in deep-deep trouble, young lady.” Lena says and you drop your head low. Why is she still so scary even looking younger than you?
“But if the 12th-level intellect can’t find the solution, what chance do I have?”
“Well, you have the motivation.” Lena smiles at you, blinking her big green eyes at you. “Find the solution, don’t get grounded for messing with alien tech when I specifically told you not to.”
“Touché.”
“But how is this even possible?” Kara says, counting something on her fingers. She looks around confused. “We’re not all the same age, yet-”
“I have neither the time, nor the crayons to explain this to you.” Alex says and this time you can’t hold your laugh anymore. You wheeze out a laughter and Kara furrows her brows at you in response.
“You don’t know, do you?” She asks Alex, who denies with her head.
“No idea.”
“Ok, that’s it. Everyone out of this lab. Let’s all wait upstairs.” Lena points outside and you watch Brainy, Alex and Kara leaving with their heads hanging low.
“But I need help.” You mumble, but are left unanswered. You don’t know if they didn’t hear you or are just choosing to ignore you for the sake of Lena not yelling at them.
“So, we’re not gonna kiss?” It’s the last thing you hear before the door closes behind them.
“KARA!” Actually, that’s the last thing before you find yourself all alone in your lab with the alien tech in front of you.
It’s not that you’re scared of it, but yeah, being a baby and then a boy wasn’t the best experience in your life. Now your moms and aunt are teens. One is moody, the other is a sarcastic queen, and the other one is… Just… Kara.
You: Need help. Brainy turned our moms into teenagers.
Jamie: WHAT! OUR moms? This is gold!
You: Yeah, well, Lena is still scary as a teen, so I need a solution ASAP. Help. Please?
Jamie: Don’t know how I can help, but yeah. Sure. On my way now.
Jamie shows up some time later. You try to fill her in on what’s going on. She can’t stop laughing. Seriously. She can’t be stopped.
“I’m serious!” You roll your eyes at her reaction. “This is bad! Really bad.”
“I know. I wish we had popcorn.” She jokes, grabbing her phone in her pocket and going to the lab door. “Come on, I gotta see this with my own eyes.”
“Jamie.” You try. She ignores you, still going to the elevator.
“You said they’re at Lena’s office, right?” She’s already inside the elevator when you decide to follow her. She smiles satisfied when she sees you. “Relax.” She says pushing the button for Lena’s floor. “We’ll say we need to assess the situation, or like, whatever.”
“Fine. Just be aware, your mom is a savage.”
“Oh, I’m counting on it. I’m going to film the whole thing. Whenever I say something she doesn’t like, I’ll use this video as proof I’m not as bad as she was.”
You two sneak into the top floor, but there’s no need. Your mom’s assistant was sent home. Lena probably didn’t want to explain how she was turned back into a teenager. You open a little crack on the door and Jamie sneaks in her phone so she can film them.
Brainy is no longer with them, so right now only the three of them are in the office. Lena’s on her chair, still doing some work even as a teen. Alex is on the couch and Kara is impatiently walking from one side to the other.
“Seriously Alex, what do you think? I could wear Superkid’s suit, and no one would know.” She asks, looking at Alex waiting for a response. It doesn’t come. “Alex?”
“There’s no need to repeat yourself, I ignored you just fine the first time.” It’s what Alex says. You and Jamie try not to laugh out loud.
“Rao, you’re the worst teenager ever!” Kara complains, throwing herself in the chair in front of Lena. “Lena. Hey.” No response. “Lenaaaaaa, do you have any snacks?”
“Kara, I’m trying to work.” Lena shots her down, making Kara roll her eyes.
“Why? We’re teens. We’re not supposed to work. Besides, it’s not like anyone can hear your voice or see your face right now. Am I right, Alex?”
“I stopped listening, so why don’t you stop talking?” It’s what Alex answers. You seriously have to cover your mouth not to make any sound.
“You’re not funny. Just very cruel.”
“Yes, well. It keeps me young.” She winks at Kara. You and Jamie laugh so loud, Kara stands up in one motion, grabbing Jamie’s wrist -the one with the phone still filming- and you watch your cousin being lifted over Kara’s head. She struggles trying to put her feet back on the ground.
“It looks like we have company.” Kara says finally putting Jamie back on her feet, and you get up from the floor and go inside the office too.
“I thought I told you to reverse this!” Lena says, looking at you. You shrug.
“Well, I needed to see how you’re all thinking.” You lie, trying to justify yourself. “Momma doesn’t seem to have changed at all and you’re still working, but aunt Alex seems to have turned into a teen completely.”
“I have not.” She stands up, crossing her arms. “It’s just nice to annoy Kara. Now, I would very much like to return to my old body.”
“Me too! Lena doesn’t even want to make out with me anymore.”
“Oh, dear God.” Lena gets up, going to her cocktail bar and pouring herself a glass of whiskey.
“What are you doing? You can’t drink! You’re not old enough!” You tell her and she looks at you with wide eyes.
“Yes, I am! I’m a forty-six woman in a teenage girl’s body!”
“Well.” You take the glass of whiskey out of her hands. “When I was a sixteen-year-old girl in a baby’s body you fed me baby food, so I guess we’re respecting that rule. That means no drinking for you.” You look at Kara. “And no, you cannot use my super suit and go save the world, because, like I told you, Superkid doesn’t exist anymore. Now, be nice and go buy us some snacks.” Then, you turn to Alex. “And you, stop giving Kara a hard time or I’ll call your wife and have her come and babysit all of you. Now, if you can excuse us, the older ones must figure out a way out of this mess.”
“She’s your daughter alright.” Kara mumbles, looking at Lena and you shoot her a warning look.
Kara follows you and Jamie out of the office and into the elevator. Jamie looks at both of you with a weird expression.
“I thought one was more than enough.” Then she agrees with her head, looking away. “I was right.”
“And you’re Alex’s daughter alright.” Kara steps out of the elevator when it gets on the ground floor and you hear Aly talking to her.
“Hello, Miss Luthor-Danvers! It’s good to see you.”
“Oh, um, yeah! It’s me!” Kara says and you look at Jamie rolling your eyes.
“You know what? The sooner we finish this, the better.” You push the button for the underground level, and it doesn’t take long for you and Jamie -kind of- start working.
You absolutely hate the fact that you started messing with alien technology in the first place. You should’ve listened to Lena when she told you not to touch it. Kara comes in and out with food, Jamie takes several naps next to you, but you keep working.
“Ok, honestly. That’s enough.” Jamie gets up, holding your arm. “We’re going home. They’re not going to die being teens for a day. I mean, you didn’t die being a boy, so they’re cool.”
“Lena told me to find the solution.”
“Yes, well. She said, ‘find the solution’ not ‘find it today’. So, we’re leaving.” Jamie sighs, tired. You look at the clock and agree with your head. “Let’s take our teens home.”
And despite protests, you all go home. It’s funny that none of them can drive, so Jamie is the one left driving all of you around in Lena’s fancy car. You can tell Lena is not enjoying the ride, but there’s not much she can do about it.
“And here we are.” Jamie says, stopping in front of your house.
“Why are our lives so goddamn weird?” It’s how Alex says goodbye, and you look at Jamie raising an eyebrow.
“Good luck with her.” You slip out of the car and follow your moms into the house.
“Well, I’ll go watch TV.” You hear Kara’s voice, and she makes her way to the living room. You look at Lena who just shrugs.
“Meh, guess I’ll do that too.”
“Ok, no.” You follow Kara and turn off the TV. She interjects, but you ignore. “You’re going to take a shower, and Lena is going to help me with dinner.”
“I don’t wanna.” Lena says, throwing herself on the couch and you breathe deep.
“Ok, come on. You guys are not actually teens. Stop being annoying!” You take the control out of Kara’s hand again, when she motions turning the TV back on.
“And you’re not our mom, so stop bossing us.” Kara complains. You breathe deep one more time.
“I wouldn’t have to boss you, if you would just act your age, young lady!” You hear yourself saying that and your eyes widen. “Look at what you’re making me say! My God, I hate myself right now.” You toss the control back at her. “Do whatever you want, I don’t care.”
You still go to the kitchen and get started on dinner. How dare they make you be the responsible adult in the house? They only look young. They’re not actually young. Right?
Jamie: Why does my mom keep acting like a young brat? Isn’t she supposed to be like 50 but look younger?
You: Maybe? My moms are also being immature right now.
Jamie: Do you think their minds are catching up to their body?
You: Maybe???
“Mom!” You call but hear no answer. “Lena!”
“Ugh, what? Can you just leave me alone for like a second?” Lena’s voice comes a while later.
You run to where they are. They’re sitting on the same couch holding hands.
“What’s going on here?” You ask and receive rolling eyes as an answer. Those little weasels!
“God, you’re so annoying for a teen. Are you sure you’re not a 60-year-old woman?” Lena says and you bite your tongue not to answer her. “We’re holding hands, ‘cause this one apparently needs human contact to survive.”
“Well, aren’t you a ray of pitch-black as a teen?” You go back to the kitchen and finish the dinner. But they’re awfully quiet in the living room, so you make your way there in silence to see what’s going on. “Wow, that’s a big kiss!”
You interrupt them, like Kara once has done to you and Maya. They are breathless and flushed and are now shooting daggers at you.
“Dinner is ready.” You say but none of them move. They’re really starting to annoy you. “Did you listen?”
“We’re choosing to ignore you.” Lena says and you close your eyes, breathing deep a few times. Come on, you’re not that annoying as a teen. She’s the worst.
“Get up, come on.” You make your way towards them, hold Kara’s arms and make her stand. “Come eat, and then we’re going to sleep. I can’t stand you both anymore. Go on, Kara. Don’t make me say it twice.”
At that she obeys. Lena still rolls her eyes at you once more, before getting up and going to the kitchen table. You thought it would be a lot more fun having your moms being your own age. You felt like they would understand you, but instead they’re so self-centered it is impossible to hold a conversation. There’s no doubt, their minds are catching up to their bodies for sure.
“Hey, hey, hey.” You stop them, before they run out of the kitchen. “You two are not sleeping together. And you still have to do the dishes and clean the kitchen.” You smile, actually excited you get to say that to them. “Go on.”
You don’t even care about the rolling eyes, and the mumbles under their breaths. You’re sitting while they do all the work. You get now why Lena likes bossing you so much. It is fun!
You don’t let them sleep together. You already saw way too much when you went to the living room earlier. So Kara’s stuck sleeping with you, and the moody teen gets to sleep alone in the other bedroom.
It’s early when you wake up. Jamie, Kelly and teen Alex show up at your house sooner than you’d like.
“Ok, I’m going to the lab, you stay here and try to wake my moms up.” You tell Kelly and look at Jamie who grabs the car keys at your signal. “You might have to hire an exorcist for Lena.”
“Can’t be worse than this one.” Kelly points at Alex with her head, who rolls her eyes in response. You fight the urge to roll your eyes at Alex and leave with Jamie.
“Do we roll our eyes that much?” You ask her and she agrees with her head.
“Not anymore. My God, that shit’s annoying!”
You go back to the lab, and surprise! You can’t do it alone. But since Lena’s not around – physically or mentally – you call Brainy, and he shows up a while later to help you.
“Ok, this time, I think we actually got it.” He says and you agree with your head.
“After we undo this thing, I swear to Rao I’m breaking this machine into a thousand pieces.” You look at Jamie. “Ok, call your mami. Time to bring them back.”
It’s not long until Kelly shows up with three moody teenagers fighting behind her. She looks as done as you imagine you would with their bullshit. You pray to Rao this works. You’re done with this tech, and this nonsense all together.
You shove them inside your lab. Show Kara which button to press – she’s the less annoying one – and the rest of you wait outside.
“You did it!” Kara says, opening the lab door, excitedly. You look at them looking normal again and breathe relieved.
“Thank Rao.” You hug both of your moms, while Kelly and Jamie hug Alex. “You two were terrible teenagers.”
“Well, you handled us very well, babygirl.” Lena kisses your forehead. “I love you guys. But, um, I have to go to work.”
Lena leaves in a hurry. Kara, Alex and Brainy also excuse themselves running out of your lab back to their jobs, and you find yourself alone with Jamie.
“Hey. Help me with this?” You give her a piece of wood and point at the alien tech. She nods with a big smile.
Bye, bye weird situations alien tech put you through. Hello, weird situations your life puts you through.
Notes:
Once again thanks @oncemoonie for this fun prompt. I had too much fun with this series.
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biggest-stupidhead · 3 years
Text
Never Ready (part 2) 
Summary: “It’s not like I’m ready to take her in.”
“And I was ready for you? Kid, nobody is ever ready for things like this. That doesn’t mean they don’t happen.” Levi is faced with the difficult decision of taking in his newly orphaned cousin. But he can't do it alone.You're a newly graduated college student looking to make some extra cash, but get more than you originally bargained for...
Word Count: 4.6K
AN: Sorry for the long wait, I've been very busy this summer but I'm trying to keep writing! Thanks for sticking around you guys :)
find part 1 here
--
Levi woke up early, as usual, however, he skipped his usual workout in favor of deep cleaning the house for the third time this week. Just as he was putting his broom back into the closet when the doorbell rang. He anxiously smoothed out his cotton dress shirt, tugging at the seam as he tried to tuck it into his pants.
“Hello-” His shoulders slumped when he found a young suburban housewife on the other side of the door instead of the gloomy social worker.
“Oh hi there! So sorry that it’s taken me so long but…” She held out a bottle of red wine with a neat ribbon tied around the neck.
“You didn’t have to,” Levi answered tensely as she beamed politely at him.
“I know but...it just felt like the right thing to do.” She shrugged, her strawberry blonde hair swaying, the strands just barely touched her shoulders.
“Well...thank you.” He thanked her, hoping that she would take the hint that this was a bad thing.
“No worries! By the way, my name is Petra, my husband and I live across the street.” She gabbed her thumb towards the house across from his.
“I’m Levi, nice to meet you.” He said, fighting to keep from grinding his teeth. It wasn’t that this woman was in the wrong, no it was simply the timing of her gesture. He was already on edge and he was never a fan of new people.
“Nice to meet you too! If you’re ever interested, we have a book club and-”
“Look, I appreciate the gesture but this isn’t the best time.” Levi cut her off and he felt a small pang of guilt at the way her expression dropped.
“Oh no of course! Anyway, you know where to find me.” She chuckled anxiously as she began her hasty retreat. It couldn’t have been soon enough, because a silver honda accord pulled into his driveway. Levi swallowed thickly as he watched Michelle climb out of her car and brave the icy sidewalk.
“Hope I’m not interrupting anything.” She said curtly as she pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and waited for Levi to step aside. When she crossed the threshold, he shut and locked the door behind her. She immediately began checking out the front room and the living room. The house had a nice open floorplan, so the first thing that anyone saw when entering was the living room and kitchen.
“Not at all,” Levi responded as she slowly wandered into the kitchen. He followed helplessly behind her as she began jotting notes down on a clipboard.
“Well, I must say that I am impressed with the hast you made these arrangements.” She complimented as she paced down the hallway, poking her head into the room that Levi had prepared for Mikasa.
“I don’t like to leave projects unfinished.” He responded as he waited in the doorway.
“Admirable.” She scribbled a quick note before finding her way back into the kitchen. Levi chewed the inside of his cheek as he waited with bated breath for her next words.
“Everything seems in great condition here. I don’t see any reason that she can’t move in by Monday.” She placed her clipboard on the counter and faced him with a tense smile.
“Monday?” Levi couldn’t hide the nerves in his tone and she smiled genuinely.
“Of course, we try to keep kids out of the homes as much as possible. Have you figured out what you wish to do for child care?” She moved seamlessly onto the next topic and Levi nodded, motioning for her to take a seat at the island.
“Uh, there’s a daycare that I was looking at. I’m also looking for a nanny.” Levi said as she settled into her seat and he sat a chair away from her.
“Excellent, my only concern with the daycare is that she has been attending the same one for some time now. It’s not far from here, I would highly encourage that you keep that the same.” She went back to her clipboard, jotting down some more notes as Levi contemplated what she had said.
“Makes sense.” He mumbled as she placed her pen down with a soft sigh.
“I got to say, I’m very grateful for your enthusiasm with this, makes my job a lot easier.” She smiled at him and Levi nodded curtly.
“Anyway, I’ll drop her off Monday morning, I believe that her current foster family uses the same daycare that she’s attending, Carla is the mom’s name. She’s made it clear that she is more than willing to lend a hand if ever needed.” Michelle jotted down a number on a scrap piece of paper and slid it across the counter to Levi who blinked stupidly down at her chicken scratch.
“That’s all I need from you.” Michelle stood and gathered her things, Levi trailed behind her to the front door and watched her leave. It was already Thursday, meaning he had less than five full days to finish preparing for Mikasa’s arrival. He felt like a tortured spirit in his own home, wandering the halls hallowly, he had never lived in such a large space. Not that his past homes had been small, but rather, he had always lived with someone.
Kenny and he had shared a small trailer all through his elementary years and well into his high school years. Then in college, he had roomed with Erwin and Mike, first in the dorms and then in shitty apartments. But now, he was alone. At least it was only for a few more days, but could you really count a four-year-old as company?
He found himself once again outside of the empty room, standing right on the threshold. The mere sight of the room made his stomach sink, from the subtle baby pink comforter to the dresser that was filled with tiny clothes. He turned and shut the door softly before marching back into the living room. The mid-afternoon sun was drifting in through the front windows and he pinched the bridge of his nose.
His phone rang obnoxiously and he scrambled to dig it out of his pocket. Hange’s contact lit up his screen and he inhaled sharply, preparing himself for whatever it was that Hange found important enough to share with him at one pm on a Thursday.
“Levi, is this a good time?” That was his first red flag, Hange was never considerate of his time when she called.
“It’s fine why?” He sighed as he began pacing the length of his living room.
“Well, I’ve got excellent news.” Hange couldn’t contain the excitement in her voice.
“What is it?” He encouraged her and she let out a muted squeal.
“I’ve found the perfect nanny for you! She just graduated last semester, I’ll send you her contact info.” Levi felt a small weight lift off of his chest, even though it wasn’t set in stone, at least he was making headway.
“She’s done this before, ever since she was a senior in high school actually. She told me over lunch that her usual employer doesn’t need her anymore so she’s on the hunt for a job!” Hange babbled on and Levi nodded along as he dropped onto the leather sofa.
“Got it thank you.” He confirmed as the ping of her sending the contact info came through his phone.
“Have her over for dinner, or maybe go out for tea. Ask her some questions and I’m sure you’ll find her more than qualified. She has no commitments so I bet if you can make her like you, then she’ll stick around for a while.” Hange chuckled deviously and Levi clicked his tongue.
“I have no idea what criteria I even have to look at to see if she’s qualified.” Levi scoffed and Hange snorted.
“Mikasa’s four years old, she has school and such, I mean as far as I’m concerned your nanny just needs to be able to drive and cook.” Hange shrugged as she flipped through her lesson planner.
“There’s got to be more than just that.” Levi bit the skin on his knuckle as he began wracking his brain for what makes a good nanny.
“Sure there is, I’m just brainstorming.” Hange chuckled and Levi rolled his eyes.
“I’ll make a list.” He concluded and Hange hummed her agreement.
“That’s a great idea, I mean in the end she’s going to be working for you so just put down qualities that you think make a good worker. Or something.” Hange seemed rather indifferent and Levi felt his jaw tick in annoyance.
“Right, well thanks.”
“No problem, catch ya later!” And with that, she hung up.
--
Levi stood outside of the coffee shop. He snuck one last glance at the shortlist that he had made. His brow creased when he read through it, the first point he had put down was: in-state driver’s license. Closely followed by good hygiene. Frustration bubbled into his chest as he wadded the paper up and shoved it deep into his pocket. He finally pushed through the door and approached the familiar counter. He ordered his usual and went to sit in one of the secluded booths in the back.
He had arrived a good ten minutes early, hoping to gather himself before meeting the nanny. As he watched the steam rise off of his cup of tea he savored the few moments of silence. That was until the bell on the door chimed. He knew it was you, Hange had described you in-depth when he had told her he reached out to you that evening she sent your contact.
Your hair was pulled back off of your face in a half up half down style. You wore a pair of fitted jeans and a knitted sweater. Levi watched you as you ordered your drink, you seemed so sure of yourself, the way your shoulders were pulled back and your jaw set in determination. Already off to a good start and he hadn’t even heard you speak. Levi watched you grab your drink before doing a half-turn, eyes scanning the small cafe. They landed on him and Levi knew he’d been caught staring. He did a small tilt of his head, inviting you to join him, you smiled warmly and took quick steps in his direction.
Levi stood and extended his hand to you, which you accepted with a firm handshake.
“You must be Mr. Ackerman.” Your voice was smooth and honeyed, immediately putting him at ease.
“Levi is fine.” He said as he sat back down in the booth. You slid down into the seat opposite of him, clutching your purse in your lap.
“I understand that you have some...experience.” Levi started a bit awkwardly. You nodded eagerly and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
“Of course, in the past, it’s mostly been under the table, but we can work around that of course.” Levi examined the typed-out document. A resume of your past jobs and a few recommendations from past employers.
“Under the table is fine…” He mumbled as he thumbed through the pages.
“So, Hange told me a bit about your...unique situation.” You pressed and Levi stilled in his motions.
“What’d she tell you?” He asked, grey eyes boring into you from over the tops of the papers.
“Just that you were a new parent and you needed a hand. Takes a village you know.” You chuckled a bit tensely and Levi felt some tension leave his shoulders. At least Hange had given him the liberty of explaining himself.
“She’s not wrong, I’ve taken custody of my distant cousin, I know nothing about child-rearing,” Levi admitted point blank and you weren’t sure if he was kidding or not. When his expression remained as cold as stone, you realized that he was in fact not.
“I see...I’ll admit that I don’t have much experience with...well stuff like this either.” You smiled at him in an attempt to diffuse the tension between the two of you. Levi’s eyes narrowed and he reclined back into the booth, eyes never leaving yours.
“We’ll just come up with it as we go.”
“So you’re set on me as your nanny?” You beamed and he scowled, although you were right. Levi knew from the moment he shook your hand that he would choose you.
“Yes, Mikasa arrives on Monday and I expect you to be there when she does.” Levi scoffed, lifting his teacup by the rim and taking a long sip.
“Be where exactly?” You were getting smart, something that simultaneously annoyed and intrigued him.
“My house, I’ll send you the address the day before,” Levi answered with a roll of his eyes.
“Sounds perfect.” You hummed, lifting your coffee cup to your own lips.
“What are my hours going to be?” You asked as you placed your cup back onto the tabletop.
“Mikasa goes to half days at preschool, so I’ll need you to drop her off and pick her up from that. She needs to be dropped off at eight am and picked up at noon.” Levi tapped his finger on the rim of his cup and you nodded.
“I can do that, so I’ll fix all three meals then?” You asked and Levi felt a tinge of guilt. He knew that he wasn’t completely prepared to be a parent, but he still felt ashamed for seeking help. Kenny had raised him to be independent. It had taken so much to reach out to Hange, and now he was relying on a strange young woman.
“Yes, that’s preferred. I don’t have any rules besides keeping the house spotless.” His finger was planted on the tabletop now to emphasize the importance of his only rule. You nodded in understanding.
“You can set the boundaries for Mikasa, I trust that you have enough experience in this area.” Levi continued and you tensed. Never had you ever had so much responsibility riding on a nanny position. Your employers set the rules and you enforced them, but now you were expected to be both parties. But when Levi slid a paper across the table your eyes widened. On the notepad was a range of wages that he was willing to pay. You struggled to contain your shock as you clutched the paper.
“T-This is way too much.” You squeaked as you pushed the paper back to Levi.
“Seems reasonable to me.” He shrugged and you felt your face flush.
“Well...it’s your money after all.” You reasoned as you grappled internally to regain your composure.
“But if at any time and for any reason you need to lower it that’s fine too.” You waved your hands in front of you and Levi’s brows pinched together.
“Don’t worry about it.” He assured you and set his empty cup aside.
“Was there anything else you wanted to cover?” You asked, sneaking a glance at your watch.
“That’s all from me, I’ll text you my address and get you set up to pick up and drop off with the school,” Levi said as he pulled his coat on over his shoulders. Your cup was still full so you remained seated as you watched him straighten the fabric of his jacket.
“Alright, see you Monday morning then.” You said as he marched towards the door, his posture rigid. As soon as he disappeared through the door, the doubt swirled in your chest. You had never worked this many hours and the added pressure of Mikasa coming from a traumatic past made you uneasier. But you weren’t one to shy away from a challenge, you pulled your phone out and began to dive headfirst into the internet. After about twenty minutes of scrolling through countless tabs and foster parent forums, you felt at least somewhat prepared.
You ended up ordering three more cups of coffee, by the time you were halfway through your third cup, your hands shook as you held your phone. The screen was beginning to put a strain on your eyes as you squinted at the black font. With a heavy sigh, you placed your phone screen down on the table and tossed your head back against the booth’s cushion. After a few deep breaths, you collected your things and made your way out into the chilly air, determined to continue gathering information and preparing yourself for the task at hand.
--
Levi did some research of his own that afternoon. Sitting in his desk chair, he clicked through tabs, a simple google search had shown him your Instagram. He had been relieved to find it public, your page seemed average, nothing too out of the ordinary. But he was disappointed to find it rather small, with not a lot of posts or followers. It seemed that you, like himself, were not too fond of posting every small movement that you made for the world to see. In fact, your most recent post was from almost a full year ago, right around spring break. The post was a compilation of photos you had taken on a biology trip that Hange had organized. He closed the tab and pulled up a new one, the official website for the daycare that Mikasa had been attending. He found the phone number and dialed it into his keypad on his phone. He needed to register you as one of Mikasa’s emergency contacts and as her primary source of transportation.
The process was easy and he was relieved to be able to check it off of his list so he could at least attempt and get some of his work done. He needed to savor these last few child-free days before Mikasa became a permanent and very prominent factor in his life.
__
As promised, Levi sent you a text with nothing but his address and the time he expected you there the next morning. Your sleep that night was fitful, tossing and turning well into the early hours. You only ended up sleeping a grand total of six hours before having to get up and get ready for your first day of work. You sifted through your closet in search of an appropriate outfit, as badly as you wanted to wear a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, you knew Levi would likely frown upon it.
So you ended up choosing a plush sweater and a pair of jeans. Pleased with your appearance, you then left your small apartment and made the twenty-minute drive out to the suburbs where Levi was located. The roads were icy the sky was dark with promises of more snow, by the time you had arrived a few fat flakes were already dwindling from the sky. You parked on the side of the road, careful to not block his mailbox, and trudged up the slick driveway and up to the front door. It only took one soft knock for him to pull the door open. He was as handsome as you remembered, his hair was damp from a shower and his hands were busy as he finished tying his tie. He stepped aside and walked back into his house as you kicked the snow off of your shoes.
The space was remarkably clean considering a single man occupied the space. Levi gestured vaguely with his head for you to follow him into the kitchen and you obliged. He pulled out a neon green piece of paper and handed it to you, Mikasa’s name was written in stark penmanship.
“That’s your tag to pick her up, don’t forget it.” He said as he shoved a set of keys into his back pocket.
“Is she here?” Your voice was hushed and your eyes strayed to the hallway which was dark.
“Not yet, the service worker should be here any minute now,” Levi said as he folded his collar down over his tie and finally turned to face you.
“Oh, alright. So what time are you usually off of work?” You asked, setting your purse on the island in the kitchen. Levi sighed and licked his lips thoughtfully.
“Depends...I normally stay late but technically my workday ends at 5:30 but I probably will be at least an hour later than that.” Levi said and you nodded along in understanding.
“That’s not a problem, do you have any idea of what time Mikasa goes to sleep at?” You asked, and judging by the way his shoulders tensed up, he did not.
“Not a clue, but I’ll ask the social worker.” He assured you and you nodded, allowing your eyes to scan over the kitchen. The marble countertops were so white and obviously well kept, you knew that they would give you grief, the oven and microwave looked fancy, as did the fridge. As Levi reached up for a cup from one of the deep navy cupboards, you noted that they were the kind that shut quietly. Your staring was interrupted by the shrill ring of the doorbell. Levi sat his cup aside and walked briskly back towards the front door.
“Good morning Mr. Ackerman, may we come in?” An unfamiliar voice could be heard, followed closely by the sound of two new sets of footsteps on the hardwood floors.
“Of course.” Levi’s voice was even lower and harder to make out as the newcomers shuffled in. They rounded the corner and your heart felt like it was beating out of your chest when your eyes landed on the small girl. She wore a white dress paired with a pink cardigan and a scarlet scarf. The older woman helped Mikasa out of her plush pink coat and draped it over her forearm.
“Who is this?” The woman asked, eyes slightly widened as they landed on you.
“This is (Y/n), my nanny,” Levi said vaguely and the woman nodded slowly before gently pushing Mikasa out from behind her legs.
“Honey, why don’t we go take a look at your new room?” The woman asked and the girl’s brows knitted together, but she let the social worker guide her down the hall and out of sight. Levi tailed behind them, you almost followed as well, but you feared overwhelming her. Levi hauled the small suitcase down the hall and you heard the soft chatter of the two adults. A few moments passed before they returned, the social worker shook Levi’s hand and knelt down to give Mikasa a tender hug.
“We’ll be in touch.” She promised as she showed herself out. Levi’s shoulders drooped once the woman left and he looked down at the small girl who stood near his side.
“Mikasa,” He cleared his throat and the small girl looked up at him, eyes swimming with tears and lip quivering. A rush of panic flooded his chest but you were quicker than he was.
“Mikasa, my name is (Y/n), we’re going to be spending a lot of time together.” You had crossed the room to kneel before her with your hand outstretched invitingly. The girl gripped the edge of her dress and swayed it anxiously as she avoided your eyes.
“I know this is really scary and confusing, but we’re going to work through this together.” You assured her when she remained closed off. Levi watched with wide eyes as tears slid down her face and rolled off her chin. You leaned forward and swiped them away with your thumb and Mikasa whimpered unsurely.
“Tell you what, I was just about to make some breakfast. Have you eaten yet?” You asked, after a moment of contemplation, Mikasa shook her head no shyly.
“What would you like? I’ve been told that I make a mean waffle.” You smiled wryly and Mikasa’s lip quivered as it quirked up in an unsure smile.
“I wanna make cinnamon rolls.” She spoke softly and you nodded with wide eager eyes.
“Totally.” You agreed, still holding your hand out as you slowly stood. Mikasa accepted your outstretched, her small hand was easily enveloped in your own as you led her around the island.
“Hey Levi, how much time before you’ve got to leave?” You asked as you stopped to hoist Mikasa up onto the counter.
“About 30 minutes.” He said, trying to contain himself from scolding you for putting the child onto the counter.
“Want to help us?” You invited and Levi sighed, knowing it would be wrong to decline.
“I don’t have cinnamon rolls.” He said instead of answering the original question.
“Oh that’s not a problem. Do you have flour? Yeast, eggs?” You asked as you turned and began rummaging through the cabinets.
“Of course, I’m not an animal.” He scoffed and you chuckled as you pulled out a bag of flour.
“That’s all we need.” You sat the bag next to Mikasa who reached out and touched it experimentally. Next you pulled out the carton of eggs from the fridge, Mikasa opened the carton and gently held an egg. Levi could easily imagine her losing her grip and dropping the egg onto his freshly cleaned wood floors.
“Where’s your cinnamon?” You asked, back turned and arms outstretched as you held the cabinet open.
“Here.” Levi slid past you, opening the neighboring cabinet and held the spice out to you. With a smile you accepted it and added the container to the growing pile of ingredients.
“How long does this take?” Levi asked, glancing at his watch.
“Not 30 minutes.” You answered wryly as you handed Mikasa a wooden spoon, she accepted it happily. Her small hands wrapped around the handle and she placed the spoon against her cheek, basically hugging the utensil.
“What else do you need?” He asked as you perused his kitchen.
“Just yeast and sugar.” You answered as you crouched to look for a bowl.
“It’s over here.” He opened a cabinet near the one you were inspecting and pulled out a bag of sugar and a handful of yeast packets.
“Do you cook a lot?” You asked and he shrugged.
“Enough, I hate eating out.” He answered and you hummed in understanding.
Levi watched as you began making the dough and Mikasa leaned on your shoulder as you kneaded the dough. Her grey eyes widened when you motioned for her to join in. She poked the dough and you smiled as she splayed her small hands over the surface of the squishy dough.
Once again, all Levi could think about how dirty her hands were as she began kneading the dough as you had previously.
“That’s great! Now we can let it sit for a while before we roll them up!” You explained as you gathered the dough back up into the bowl and laid a kitchen towel over it.
“Want an apple while we wait?” You asked and Mikasa nodded enthusiastically as you turned to grab the fruit. Levi looked at his watch once more, he still had about 10 minutes before he had to leave. But he felt the pressure and reality of his newfound responsibility weighing heavy on his chest. So he went to get his shoes and retreat like the coward he was.
“Leaving?” You asked as he pulled his shoes on, you had already cut the apple and Mikasa was watching with curious eyes as she crunched on a slice.
“Yeah, I’ll be back before 8.” He promised and you nodded.
“See you then.” You called after him as he slipped out of the garage door, throwing up a careless wave of acknowledgment as he went. You then turned back to Mikasa and sighed exasperatedly and she giggled as you returned to making her breakfast. This was going to be a long day.
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