#unless the you-know-what cases rise again we’ll probably have the ceremony so...

[leejungchans]

i have decided that when this semester ends i’m gonna go dye my hair something Adventurous to reward myself 🤩🤩🤩

#sol.txt #but i also have my graduation ceremony thingy in june so maybe i’ll wait until after then??? #since i kinda wanna look ✨Professional✨ in the pictures? #unless the you-know-what cases rise again we’ll probably have the ceremony so... #it’s already a whole year late bc it kept getting postponed bc of the pandemonium :( #ajjshwjd not my grade having our high school graduation ceremony after we wrap up our freshman year at uni 🤡 #i hope it happens though bc i haven’t seen my friends (unless we’re super close) in a long time so </3 #i only see like 3 of my friends from high school on a regular basis so it’d be nice to see how everyone else is doing :c

[botwstoriesandsuch]

Hello! This is actually my first time requesting on Tumblr May I request a Revali x Reader? I really liked the last one you did and I was wondering if you could do a continuation of that oneshot. I'm curious of how the party will turn out. Will the other Champions be suprised that Revali bought a "date?" :0

Ok so first off, thank you for the request, this one I really enjoyed writing. However, I got carried away with this one scene that kinda took over the whole prompt...sorry about that. I plan on writing one more part to include the Champions reactions like you requested, but for now, this is what I got. Sorry it’s not exactly what you asked for (I’ll try to post the other one tomorrow) but for now, enjoy?

An Enjoyable Ride: Part 2 of 3~

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild 

Revali x Reader

Upon the painted sky, the stars began to wake. The brighter ones had started to nestle into a murky blue sky, the fainter ones still fighting through the strokes of indigo and midnight. You couldn’t see the moon, perhaps it was still rising beyond the mountains. Journal on your lap, you flipping through all the sketches you had made of Divine Beast Vah Medoh, who now drifted across the sky. If you could, you would sketch some more right now, but your quills were currently under a hostage situation. Your feet once again swung through the air, since you were settled on the landing, the larger one that gave the view towards the Rito bridges. Apparently, they had recently named the landing after the great Rito Champion. Of course, when he shows up you won’t acknowledge it, otherwise his ego might ascend towards the heavens and never return.

He had said to wait here, and to show up with “whatever you think is appropriate for such a large event. But don’t wear anything red or pink, cause that clashes with my feathers too much, understand? He,y are you even listening? I—” 

Naturally, you had brought your satchel with your journal and a canteen of water. The leather strap sat across your deep crimson tunic, which you had worn out of spite. The air was crisp and clear, the only noises were the melody of crickets and sparrows, little wooden windmills sputtered in the wind. The sun had set a few moments ago, and the night was calm. Suddenly the wind picked up below you. You sighed, that’s about to change.

Revali arose with the speed of a gale, but was graceful and silent in his landing. He was wearing his colorful, ceremonial armour, his bright blue scar billowed in the wind. Once more he perched on the arm railing beside you. Perhaps he liked looking down on everyone from up there. He stood for a moment, waiting for your applause and praise that he never expected to come. Finally, Revali spoke.

“Well I’m glad you showed up. I was thinking I would have to start taking you books as well.”

“Do so, and you die, feather face.”

“Aw,” Revali cooed, “Look at this cute little scientist, threatening me. Well,” He turned and glanced your way, your eyes rolled at the tone of his mocking voice. “I’ll just wait until I need something from you again. But for now, I suppose I’ll heed your words, lest you do attempt to kill me with one of your many weapons. Wouldn’t want to confront something dangerous, like your journals, satchels, and boo—”

You threw a book at him. He caught it, of course, and he clicked his tongue. 

“Do you plan to be like this in front of the other Champions?”

“Depends, are they anything like you?”

“Ha! Everyone wishes they were like me, but alas... no one is.” He laid his wing upon his forehead, giving out and exasperated and exaggerated sigh. He tossed the book back towards you. Revali then seemed to notice your outfit, “Well, your clothes are nice enough. Something fancier would have been good, but what did I expect from some bookworm scientist. Did you pick the color just for me?”

You snorted, “Yeah, I don’t owe you anything but my presence, do I? If you're so worried I could always sit this out and come next t—”

“No-no, it's fine, I was counting on you wearing something comfortable anyhow. The winds can become remarkable strong when you fly up high enough”

“Fly...up?” You quickly stood up back. “Um, want to remind me where this event is again?”

“Hyrule Castle”

“Huh?!”

Revali cocked an eyebrow. “Well, where else do you expect a bunch of fancy nobles and Champions to show up?”

“Well I don’t know, I just expected it to be somewhere closer. Tabantha Village? Some large stable? How are we supposed to get to the castle by tonight so quickly?”

“I just said how, by flying. Do try to keep up.”

Revali turned towards the edge of the landing. He adjusted the scarf around his neck. “If you’re so insistent on being punctual, then get on my back.” 

“What?”

“Must I repeat everything? Want to head to Tanagar Canyon so my echoes can please your ear? Get on my back and let’s go. Unless you’ve suddenly grown wings of your own, in which case feel free to meet me there.”

An awkward scene followed as you tried to position yourself and comfortably as you could on Revali’s back. The best you could do was kneel on his back, your face uncomfortably close to his neck. He gave a long spiel about not damaging his armour, or shifting your weight  when in the air, along with an assortment of other complaints. 

“Also, don’t fall off and die. I’d hate to waste my precious time attending your funeral.”

“Aw, you’d come to my funeral? That’s probably one of the nicest things you’ve ever said to me.”

Revali scoffed. “Whatever, just hold on tight.”

“Wait wait wait, before we go can’t we get a count do— OOOWN!”

The wind swirled around you, rushing through your hair. The gusts whistled in your ear as Revali gave a powerful flap. Within seconds, the gale lifted the two of you into the sky. You shrieked, feeling yourself become weightless in the air. Instinctively, you gripped tighter around the Rito’s feathers, your feet desperate for the safety of land. The world seemed to fall around you. The trees were shrinking and the landing you had taken off from was now the size of a doormat. Your ears popped as you ascended vertically towards the stars. After the gale under you weakened, the speed of your ascent slowed. Revali then arched forward, balancing in the air, you could feel gravity pull you back forward as the two of you angled more parallel to the earth. 

The wind whipped fiercely past you, the cold still heavy on your face. You realized, embarrassingly, how tightly you had held on to Revali, your fingers burrowed deep in the feathers by his neck. You shifted your hands, the movement causing Revali to look back at you.

“You all right?”

“Yes, just...pumped on adrenaline.”

Your eyes suddenly narrowed in irritation. “No thanks to you though. A warning would have been nice.”

“Ah, but we don’t owe each other anything, do we?”

You sighed, your breath clouded into the air. “Well as soon as this event is over and I get back my stolen stuff, then yes. We’ll be even.

Revali drifted through the sky, turning towards the southeast, towards Hyrule Field. The sky was still darkening from a rich, dark blue, a few shades darker than Revali’s feathers. It was a canvas, clear of any clouds and dotted with winking stars. The stone pillar that Rito Village wrapped around stood below you. Their lanterns had dimmed, but still faintly lit up in the night. Vah Medoh hovered above, glowing bright blue against the night. It’s colossal stature and steady but unstoppable march through the air, really earned it the title of “divine.” In front of you, the plateaus of the Tabantha Frontier made bumps on the horizon. Beyond them, the sky was still crimson, but the sun long departed at the eastern edge of Hyrule. Hyrule Castle was nestled in the distance, 

You were filled with a feeling of wonder. You were but a moth, drifting through an endless world. With the Hebra Mountains, towering ominously on your left, the two of you seemed truly, insignificant. Hyrule was vast and huge, even experiencing the spectacle of flight couldn’t trump the beauty of the world from up here. 

Looking back down at Revali, you noticed he was looking around as well. His eyes wandered the wooden huts of Rito Village. His usual smug or annoyed face (the two of which seemed to be the go-to expressions when around you) was now replaced with a pleasant smile. For once, he wasn’t tense, his body was relaxed and free in the air. Revali arched his wing to catch the flowing winds, seeming to enjoy the gusts flowing through his feathers. After a moment he glanced back at you, but when meeting your eyes, he quickly turned back around.

The two of you continued to cherise the sky. After several minutes of watching the world, Revali broke the silence.

“[Name]?”

“Yeah?”

“Um, savouring the view?”

“Wha- oh, yes. Yes I am.”

“That’s good, glad that you’re...enjoying this.”

The feathers on his neck poofed up. Revali seemed to focus intently on the horizon ahead, his body suddenly tense.

“Revali?”

“Hm?”

“Is this how you feel...everytime you’re in the air?”

He shifted, his eyes narrowed as he appeared to struggle in finding the right words. “Honestly, flight is something you take for granted as a Rito, even more so since my abilities can make ascent effortless. Most times it feels invigorating, but nothing more. 

“But, if you specifically mean the feeling of right now, in this moment,” he turned his head back towards you, “then no, it's not something I get everytime”

Revali looked back at you, gaze wandering your face. His jade eyes glistened in an unreadable expression. Then, he snapped back forward.

“I wouldn’t mind feeling it more often though.”

#botw #loz botw #breath of the wild #revali #revali x reader #revali botw #rito #x reader #thanks for the ask!

[lady-divine-writes]

Confession (Rated PG13)

(Written for the anon prompt ‘You’re frightening me!’)

Knock-knock-knock

“A-zira-phale?”

Sitting at his desk, catching up with the newspaper, Aziraphale peers over his shoulder in the direction of the door.

“Crowley?” he murmurs but he doesn’t get up. No need. If he waits a moment, the locked door will swing open and the demon will let himself inside.

Or it should.

It doesn’t, and the knocking continues.

Knock-knock-knock

“A-zira-phale?” the voice sings through the bolted wood. “Are you in? Are you there? Can you answer the door, please?”

Aziraphale pulls a face, glaring at the locks, silently scolding them for not turning. ‘Why doesn’t he just open the damned door? It’s not that hard. A snap of the fingers will do it.’

Knock-knock-knock

“A---aziraphale? Please? Open the door?”

Aziraphale pushes back from his desk and starts towards the door. “Crowley? What on Earth is wrong with you?”

‘But is it really him?’ a voice inside Aziraphale’s head chimes in. It sounds like him, but not like him, and that makes Aziraphale anxious. He slows his steps but still keeps on despite the warning bells sounding in his brain, summoned by Crowley’s haunting knock and his voice thick with confusion. No, it doesn’t sound like him. Doesn’t sound like him at all. But it feels like him, which is to say Aziraphale senses an aura on the opposite side of the door that supernatural entities possess. This one feels evil, but in a familiar way, so it should be Crowley. If it is him, why doesn’t he miracle his way in like normal? Aziraphale can’t recall the last time Crowley actually knocked on his locked door. It doesn’t make sense for him to be hanging out on Aziraphale’s doorstep, knocking ominously and begging for Aziraphale to let him in - even if he’s drunk, as Aziraphale suspects.

Unless this is a ruse.

That gives Aziraphale a moment’s pause.

If it is, it would explain so much, like why he hasn’t heard from Crowley all day.

Crowley told Aziraphale that he believed Heaven and Hell would only leave them be for a bit, and ever since, Aziraphale has been on edge, waiting for either side to spring a trap. This could definitely be one – Gabriel or Beelzebub ready to whisk him away and force him to face judgment again.

They could be planning to use him as bait to get to Crowley. Or maybe the reverse is true. Maybe they already have Crowley and this is them using him as their puppet to lure Aziraphale out.

The thought hurries Aziraphale’s steps.

Knock-knock-knock

“Aziraphale.”

Knock-knock-knock

“Aziraphale.”

Knock-knock-knock

“Azira---?“

In a knee-jerk decision, Aziraphale opts to miracle the door open before he gets there in case it isn’t Crowley. If it’s not Crowley, he can miracle the offender away without risk of capture.

But no.

After five straight minutes of mounting terror, the doors swing open and there’s Crowley, ten thousand sheets to the wind. Leaning his full weight against the door, he falls forward onto his hands and knees at the angel’s feet, glasses flying off his nose, thoroughly confused when he comes face to face with Aziraphale’s shoes.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale snaps, crouching down to help him up. “What are you doing!?”

“Oh, there you are!” Crowley smiles, loopy and bright, but his wet cheeks and red-rimmed eyes hint that he’s been crying. “Hello, Aziraphale!”

“Did you drive here like this!?”

“Nah. I walked.”

Aziraphale helps Crowley find his feet, but he immediately topples over again, knocking into a counter and sliding a stack of vintage hardcovers to the floor.

“I find that difficult to believe,” Aziraphale mutters, locking up again with a wave of his hand. “But why walk here? Drunk, of all things!?”

“I needed the fresh air.”

Aziraphale slips underneath Crowley’s arm to shoulder his weight and helps him limp to the back room. “But why?”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“There’s something I need.” He nods at Aziraphale in thanks when the angel sets him down on the couch. “Something I’m hoping you can help me with.”

“And what’s that, my dear?”

Crowley slumps forward, hands folded between his knees, looking up at Aziraphale with pleading, yellow eyes.

“I want you to take a confession from me.”

It would be a gross understatement to say that Aziraphale is startled by those words. Out of Crowley’s mouth, they shake him to his core. “I … I don’t think I should.”

“Why?” Crowley sneers. “Because I’m a demon?”

“No, because I’m not a priest!”

“You’re an angel!”

“True, but I’m not sure that makes me qualified!” It’s a bizarre explanation, but it’s honest. Aziraphale doesn’t know how that works. Technically, he should be able to do it. He’s a representative of the Almighty. But the rules about things like confession and Eucharist and ceremonial rites don’t belong to angels. They belong to mortals. “Besides, what have you done that you feel the need to atone for?”

“I … I’ve been keeping secrets from you. Big secrets.”

“That’s not a sin.”

“But it feels like it. It really, really does.”

“Well, what kind of secrets are they? Have you killed anyone?”

“No.”

“Maimed?”

“No.”

“Have you stolen something?”

“No.”

“Kidnapped anymore children?”

“No.”

“Coveted something?”

“Nngh … ye---I …” Crowley closes his mouth and swallows. “You know what? I might be a little too drunk for this. Maybe I should sober up first.”

“Always a good idea.” Aziraphale puts out an empty wine bottle for Crowley to use lest he get alcohol all over the floor. “How much did you drink anyway?”

“A bottle of wine … or four,” Crowley admits.

“A-ha …” Aziraphale casually fetches another empty wine bottle and puts it beside the first, just in case.

Crowley focuses on the tall, green bottle – focuses on filling it – when something Aziraphale does captures his attention. He watches the angel take a matchbook out of his pocket. He opens it, plucks out a single match, and strikes it, preparing to light the candles standing in antique brass holders on the table, precariously positioned alongside stacks of more books, random papers, old clippings and the like. Flashes of fire fill Crowley’s memory – heat so vivid it sears his lungs, black smoke clogging his sinuses. He remembers it like it was yesterday - the walls of Aziraphale’s shop buckling from the heat, the ceiling crumbling over his head, the gramophone grinding out its last, playing a warped, morbid requiem to, of everything, his and Aziraphale’s friendship.

And the paper, like hundreds of tiny insects curling into ash and fluttering around him, setting everything they touched ablaze. That’s how the fire spread – all the damned paper in this place fueling the flames.

And Aziraphale is about to do it all again.

“No. Don’t do that,” Crowley mumbles, getting unsteadily up off the couch. When Aziraphale doesn’t seem to hear, he grabs the match in his bare hand, crushing the flame in his palm. “Don’t do that!”

Aziraphale stares at Crowley’s hand clutching the smoking remains of the match. “What’s wrong with you, Crowley!? What’s going on!? Talk to me! You’re not making sense!”

“I’m not making sense!? You’re the one wat keeps eight dozen candles in a rundown old store filled with books!”

“What are you going on about!? I don’t understand!” Aziraphale takes a step back. His momentum pulls Crowley forward and the demon loses his footing, tripping and falling to the floor. Reaching out for something to support himself, he wraps his arms around Aziraphale’s waist and hugs him tight. But even though he feels Aziraphale, he doesn’t see Aziraphale.

He sees fire.

“Where are you?” Crowley’s eyes look everywhere – left, right, straight at Aziraphale – but he can’t see him. “Are you ‘ere?”

“What do you mean am I here!? You’ve got your arms wrapped around me, you idiot!”

“No. No, I’ve done this before, and I’ve woken up hugging my pillow, and you’d gone. You’d gone, and … when you leave, there’s nothing to hold on to. No you. I need to know …” He starts fumbling with Aziraphale’s clothes, tugging at the buttons to his waistcoat and pulling up his shirt.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale gasps, but he doesn’t fight him off. “What are you doing?”

“I need to find you!”

“I’m right here, dear boy. Please, stop! I don’t … I don’t know what you’re doing … what you’re searching for! Crowley, you’re … you’re frightening me!”

Like a slap to the face, that makes Crowley stop, makes him roll back on his heels and rise to his feet.

“I’m … I’m sorry. I …” Crowley shakes his head, concentrates harder on sobering up, pushing the alcohol out of his system. His vision starts to clear. Through the smoke and the flames in his memory he can make out glimpses of Aziraphale’s face, but he’s not the calm, ethereal specter from the pub. He’s breathing hard, wide-eyed with concern, and possibly fear, staring at Crowley as if he’s gone mad.

And he’s probably correct.

“I didn’t mean to … I … I’ll go …”

“No!” Aziraphale says. “No, wait! Don’t leave!”

“You said I … I frightened you.”

“I may have misspoke. You caught me off guard. I’m trying my best to understand what’s going on. I didn’t think you were going to hurt me. That’s not what I meant. I’m scared for you, Crowley.”

“I’ll … I’ll be all right. I just have to …” He puts a hand to his pounding temple, pinches his eyes shut, sobers up a sliver more. “I should go.”

“You’re not going anywhere.” Aziraphale grabs him by the shoulder, gently but firmly. “Not at this hour, not in this state.”

“I’ll sober up. I won’t hurt anyone.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Aziraphale sighs. After 6000 years, how come it’s still so difficult to talk to one another? “Come … come here, Crowley. Settle down a moment. We’ll sort things out. I just need a minute to think.”

Crowley acquiesces but he doesn’t sit on the sofa. He sinks back to the floor on his knees, as if sitting might require too much effort. Aziraphale’s sympathetic blue eyes examine every line on his exhausted face. This happens on and off lately, Crowley suffering from nightmares that bring him, in various degrees of drunkenness, to Aziraphale’s door. Nothing to this extent has happened before, but Aziraphale figured it was a matter of time.

Crowley needs help. What’s going on inside his head, he doesn’t open up about, and he’s not handling it well. Aziraphale knows it has something to do with the fire in his bookshop, but that’s as far as he’s gotten Crowley to divulge. Aziraphale also knows that Crowley’s demonic power is linked quite closely to his imagination, ergo he must fear that if he talks about it – talks about the fear he felt, the overwhelming loss, the pain it left in him - he’ll speak it into existence. The fire will have been real, Aziraphale will be gone, and there won’t be any way of getting him back.

Crowley is stuck, and Aziraphale needs to come up with a way to lead him out of the dark.

Aziraphale starts straightening his wrinkled waistcoat, but a moment later, he unbuttons it. He removes his bowtie and slips it safely into his pocket. Then he opens his shirt one button past half way, all under the watchful and curious eyes of his demon. Aziraphale slides off the sofa onto his knees. He puts a hand on Crowley’s shoulder and pulls, brings the demon’s head to his chest, positioning his ear over his heart, the echo of what shouldn’t be there beating steady and strong against his ear.

But Crowley hears it because both angel and demon imagine it to be so.

“Here I am,” Aziraphale whispers, running his fingers through Crowley’s hair. “I’m right here. I haven’t gone. And I haven’t left you.”

The warmth of his skin, a beating heart, the rhythmic ebb and flow of his breathing – they’re real as long as Crowley has faith.

Faith in Aziraphale.

And Crowley falls apart.

“I … I th-thought you’d gone!” he stutters, winding his arms around Aziraphale’s torso and hugging him hard. “I th-thought you’d gone for good! You left me here alone! And I … I didn’t know how to bring you back! I didn’t know what to do without you!”

“There, there, dearest.” Aziraphale wraps his arms around Crowley’s shoulders and rocks him. “It’s all right. I’m here. I promise. I don’t plan on going anywhere.”

#Good Omens #ineffable husbands #aziraphale x crowley #crowley x aziraphale #frankie writes

[chocoluckchipz-bag]

Unexpected Surprise - 14

Read it on A03, WattPad, FF.net

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Marinette could get used to the view - barely covered by a blanket Adrien sprawled on his bed in the perfect cuddling position. She scooted closer. His chiselled-by-workouts body, his gorgeous face, peaceful and calm in his slumber, messy hair splattered all over his pillow, the perfect, slightly open lips… Gently, she ran her fingers across his evenly rising and falling chest just as the first rays of sun peeked through the curtains. Adrien wriggled his nose and scrunched his face. The muscles on his chest twitched and murmuring under his breath, he twisted in his sleep, curling away from her and the sunlight. Marinette giggled. Yup, she could definitely get used to the view - gorgeous, but still adorable and dorky. She shifted closer again and rested her head on Adrien’s back, thanking the universe for the time zones - still living on the Parisian time was the sole reason Marinette was awake before six in the morning in NYC.

A beeping sound suddenly shattered the silence. Adrien groaned, his hand acting on its own as he shut the alarm off. Without opening his eyes, he turned back to Marinette and wrapped her in a hug.

“Morning,” he whispered, his voice deep and rusty from the slumber.

“It’s still fifteen minutes to six,” Marinette replied. “Didn’t you say you don’t have to wake up before six?”

“Yup.” Adrien yawned. “Get up at six. Fifteen minutes before- cuddle ceremony.” He pulled her closer, burying his face into the crook of her neck. “Mhhhh, you smell nice.”

Adrien’s hair tickling her skin, Marinette giggled as she wrapped her hands around him, placing a kiss on a top of his head. “Sounds perfect.”

They lingered in each other’s arms for a few minutes before Marinette asked. “What’s the plan for today?”

“Office. You. Escape the paparazzi.”

Another sound shrieked through the room, and Adrien groaned again, moving closer to Marinette. “Too early. I’m busy. Make it stop.”

“I would,” Marinette laughed. “But I’m currently being immobilized by a cuddle monster. Can’t move. You should’ve put your phone on Do Not Disturb.”

“It is on Do Not Disturb,” Adrien replied, opening his eyes. “Except Emma and you have an override privilege.” Pulling away, he reached for the device. “Yup. That’s her. Give me a few.” With a soft smile, Adrien picked up the call. “Morning, sweetheart. How are you? Me? Yes, of course, I'm already up- Momma? Yup. Right here- Okay.”

Adrien pressed the speaker mode and Emma’s chipper voice immediately filled the room as she dived straight away in telling them everything she’d done since her last call, starting with a new book Grandma Sabine had read her yesterday, finishing with exciting additions to the bakery’s breakfast menu she’d helped Grandpapi Tom to choose just now. Then it was Marinette and Adrien’s turn to explain what the two of them were planning to do today and when they heard Sabine call Emma’s name in the background, Adrien’s cell phone alarm went off again.

“I adore Emma to pieces,” Adrien admitted, wrapping Marinette into a hug as soon as Emma hung up. “But I’d love to have you all to myself from time to time.”

“Possessive, aren’t we?” Marinette teased. Laughing at his pout, she added. “Not judging you, though – I might be feeling the same way. Emma’s had my undivided attention for five years. I think it’s about time she learned to share.”

“Let’s hope she’s a good learner.”

“She is. That’s one of the things I love about her.”

“And I love you,” Adrien whispered, leaning closer for a lingering kiss, his hands cupping Marinette’s face. “Did you know you’re the best thing that had ever happened to me?”

“And you to me,” Marinette replied, pressing her lips to his collarbone. “Love you too.”

They shared a few more kisses and tender moments before Adrien glanced at the clock. “As heartbroken as I am but it’s time to get up, Princess,” he sighed. “However, since we’ve missed the ceremony, what would you say about an evening equivalent?”

“Sounds perfect,” Marinette replied with a chuckle, running her fingers through Adrien’s hair. “Now, let’s pretty you up, so you can finish this thing in style.”

Adrien smiled, pulling Marinette in. “You, on the other hand, look perfect already.”

“Flatterer.”

“Just an honest person.”

Swamped by everyday routine, their morning flew by fast. They’d helped each other with the wardrobe choices and cooked their breakfast together, all while deliberating the ways to keep the paparazzi off their track. Adrien departed for the office right after the meal, leaving Marinette to wait for Thomas, the company's driver. About an hour after he'd gone, the paparazzi at the front door largely vanished and Thomas, donning civilian clothes, came by to pick up Marinette in a less suspicious car than the company’s limousine. Per Adrien’s suggestion, he’d also brought her a disguise - a wig of rich brown waves with red highlights and the biggest pair of sunglasses Marinette had ever seen. Feeling playful, she styled the wig into her signature low ponytails, dressed in the brand-new pair of boyfriend jeans she had bought specifically for this trip and rummaged Adrien’s closet for a t-shirt that would fit her.

The effect it had on Adrien was worth the trouble. As he caught her sight of entering the office, his eyes instantly widened. Mouth slack and frozen in his place, Adrien swallowed before saying something to the person he’d been conversing with and leaving them without looking back.

“If you’re trying to kill me, you’ve succeeded,” he quietly said into her ear, giving her a welcome cheek kiss.

“Baseless accusations,” Marinette whispered back. “Just dressing according to my “Adrien’s girlfriend” mood.”

“I thought we were trying to hide you.”

“From paparazzi.” She shrugged. “As far as I know every employee at Gabriel's offices are under a non-disclosure agreement or am I wrong? Plus, don’t forget that I’m wearing a wig so even if someone will give me away, all I have to do is to wear a different wig tomorrow.”

Adrien chuckled, shaking his head. “That’s why you were Ladybug. Always thinking a step ahead.” Turning to face the people curiously staring at them from all over the room, he added, “Everyone, this is Marinette Dupain-Cheng - one of the head designers at the main office, bursting with ideas, fearless, kind, gorgeous and simply an amazing person. If I get my way, my future wife, so, please, make her feel welcome and keep her identity under the wraps. I want her to enjoy NYC paparazzi-free.”

“Adrien,” Marinette yelped, feeling much hotter than just a second ago.

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Just acting according to my ‘I’ve moved a few steps closer to my goal’ mood.”

“Dork,” she puffed.

“Yours,” he grinned. “Now, come on. Let me introduce you to the people Father mentioned in your ‘instructions’.”

The rest of the day went relatively smoothly. While they spent most of it together, there were a few moments where Marinette explored the office by herself, devoting most time to the designer department, observing, giving advice, taking notes and sketching the new ideas in her sketchbook. To avoid the media, Adrien asked Thomas, their driver, to get their food delivered to the office. When the evening came, he offered her a choice.

“I’ve got three days left of work at the office - today, Thursday, and half a day on Friday; but since you are here, I can cram in a few extra hours today and on Thursday. That’ll leave all of Friday free for us. What do you think?”

“What about Wednesday?”

“Photoshoot. Would take most of the day, though. It’s a final one - they’ll squeeze whatever they can out from me.”

“And Saturday?”

“Nothing really. It was left as a backup day in case I need extra time, but it doesn’t look this way as of now.”

“So technically we can have two days to ourselves before our Sunday’s flight back, right?”

“Yup.” Adrien nodded.

“I think the choice is obvious. Why are you even asking me?”

“Because,” Adrien wrapped Marinette in a hug, settling beside her on a very comfortable loveseat she’d occupied for the last hour in his office. “Cramming in a few more hours would mean staying here those few more hours, and you've just dozed off for what I suspect was not the first time.”

“Sorry,” Marinette smiled apologetically. “It’s late in Paris and I’m still on their time.”

“Then why don’t you go home and rest. I’ll come when I’m done.”

“But-”

“No buts, Marinette,” Adrien gently scolded. “We were supposed to go home separately anyway, and Thomas’ workday will be over soon, so go and rest.”

“I wanted to spend all of the time I can with you.”

Adrien nuzzled her nose. “Sleeping in an awkward position on a couch while I'm working can hardly be considered spending time together. You should rest, Marinette. We’ll have some time alone tomorrow after the shoot. I might even take you out to one of my favourite places here.”

Marinette stayed silent for a second but then failed to suppress a yawn. “You honestly wouldn’t mind me leaving you?”

“I insist,” Adrien said before a smirk split his lips. “Unless you allow me to ravish you right here, right now-”

“Adrien,” Marinette squeaked. “There are people still in the office. You said it yourself - Thomas is waiting to drive me home.”

“Risk makes it all more interesting,” Adrien leaned down and slowly kissed her neck. “So, what do you say, Princess? May I?”

“I say the most you’ll get right now are cuddles,” Marinette responded, shoving him away a bit. “But if you manage to finish the work and still catch me awake at home, then I might consider your offer.”

“Perfect,” Adrien purred, weaving his arms around her back. They stayed like that for a few minutes before Adrien pulled away, saying that Thomas’ workday would end in half an hour, so it probably was a good time to call for him. Riding home, Marinette caught herself dozing off a few more times, and once she exited the shower, she crawled under the blankets and blacked out. She didn’t hear Adrien coming in a few hours later, but she still snuggled onto him when he pulled her into a hug, giving her a goodnight kiss.

On Wednesday, Marinette saved Richard another few hours of shooting. Inspired by her presence, Adrien did a fantastic job in record time and earned just enough free time to take Marinette out to Central Park. Since both of them were wearing disguises, the pair managed to avoid unnecessary attention and spent an evening quietly strolling along the lesser known paths of the park. They talked about the past, remembering the good times, and discussed their plans for the future. Marinette admitted to wanting to put her own spin on Gabriel’s style for a while now. After hearing her ideas, Adrien thought she should’ve done that a long time ago.

“Father loves this kind of stuff,” he beamed. “You’re brilliant, Marinette. I guarantee, he’ll give you your own line if he sees these ideas.”

“You think so?”

“I know so!”

“Alright. I might as well try it. What about you?”

“Hm, well, for me there’ll be no more catwalks that’s for sure. The December show will be my last one. Maybe some random photoshoots for fun in the future, but I’ll be moving towards managing the business side of Gabriel.”

“Getting too old for the pictures?” she teased. “Don’t worry, Chaton, you’ll always be handsome for me.”

“Thank you, my Lady.” Adrien chuckled and winked at her. “I’m glad to know the most gorgeous woman on this planet thinks I’m handsome.”

Marinette laughed. “You do know you are an incorrigible dork, right?”

“I don’t think you mind, though.”

“I don’t.”

“Then I don’t care,” Adrien smiled and lifted her hand for inner wrist kiss. “Love you, Mari.”

“Love you too, Chaton.”

He didn’t let her hand go once until they got into his car to go home, and even then, Adrien reached for it as often as he could, finishing the day holding Marinette in his arms. She loved every moment of it.

Thursday was spent almost identically to her previous day at Gabriel’s office, the only difference being Marinette staying awake until the very end. Adrien managed to finish his work a little earlier and was pleasantly surprised by a goodbye party his coworkers organized. They got home late, not even bothering to take two separate cars because even if the paparazzi were to camp at Adrien’s place or his office doorsteps, the darkness and the disguise hid Marinette’s identity quite well. Still, the fact that her name hadn’t made it into the papers yet was astonishing. Though, they did go to extremes to protect her. There were even rumours floating around about how harshly Richard himself dealt with the person who’d leaked her pictures after personally tracking them down.

“He’s vicious,” Marinette noted when Adrien had confirmed that someone did turn up at his office to beg for forgiveness.

“Only when someone wrongs the people he loves,” Adrien shrugged. “Otherwise, he’s an old softie in disguise.”

On Friday they slept in, and then spend the afternoon strolling along the streets scattered with multitudes of little shops and vendors, buying presents for friends and family. It was a bit trickier to stay undetected in a highly populated area in daylight, so Marinette changed her wig to long blonde hair while Adrien “forgot” to shave and wore a black hair wig of his own. He added a hat, and both wore sunglasses.

“I’ve never had so much fun,” Adrien kept whispering from time to time. “I feel like a kid again.”

“And a very handsome one at that,” Marinette said, brushing his jawline with her fingers. “I think I like that stubble look on you. Do that often once we’re home.”

“Absolutely,” he purred. “What about a beard? I once grew it out and let me tell you - rocked it too.”

Marinette laughed. “I don’t think I’m there yet, but we’ll see. Let’s start with a random stubble for now.”

“As my Lady wishes,” Adrien bowed his head and pulled her towards a hot dog stand on the side of the walkway. He swore she'd love those.

Friday’s visit to the François family in the evening of that day, however, was the event that Marinette considered the most interesting of the whole trip. She’d never expected it to be more than a farewell party from Adrien’s closest friends in NYC. It turned out to be an insight into the character of Adrien Agreste of six years after.

They arrived a few minutes before the appointed time.

“Everything will be alright.” Adrien squeezed Marinette’s hand reassuringly. “They might be a bit unconventional, but they’re really cool. You’ll like them. I promise.”

“I’m sure I will-” Marinette didn’t finish the sentence when the door was swung open and the pair was pulled inside by the host.

“Bonsoir, bonsoir, my dears!” Richard greeted them with a broad smile as the other members of the family eagerly encircled Marinette. He briefly introduced everyone: his wife Lucia, their children Sofia and Edward with their spouses Peter and Megan, as well as their four grandchildren: twin five-years-old boys, a toddler girl and a four-month-old baby Antoine.

A bit overwhelmed by all of the commotions around her, Marinette could do little but smile and greet everyone while focusing on Adrien’s arm around her waist... at least, until even that anchor was taken away by Lucia dragging Adrien into the kitchen a few minutes later.

“You are so much better with Bolognese, Adrien,” Lucia practically pleaded. “I am really sorry but, please, do me a favour and finish the damn sauce. Last time, I promise.”

“Alright, alright.” Adrien chuckled and turned to Marinette, to see if she wanted to go with him since most already dispersed back into the apartment.

“She’ll stay with me, won’t you?” Sofia rushed to interfere, looping her arm around Marinette’s. “I didn’t gather a whole bunch of stories about you for nothing, Agreste. I simply must share. She has to know just what kind of person she’s gotten herself involved with.”

“I’m pretty sure she knows me,” Adrien retorted.

“Oh, but does she know what you’ve been up to all these years in NYC?” Sofia wiggled her eyebrows. “Shoo, Agreste. Let the women gossip about their men.”

Adrien seemed to hesitate and, intrigued by Sofia’s proposal, Marinette assured that she would be fine waiting for him with Sofia.

“Okay,” Adrien smiled. “I’ll be quick and—” he glared at the other girl, “—do not embarrass me, Sofia.”

The girl puffed. “Please, with what? No offence, Agreste, but you’re one of the most boring people I’ve ever met. Can you believe—” she turned to Marinette, “—he lived in the city that never sleeps and still managed to spend all of his time at work or home? Boring! Bland and tedious.”

“Don’t believe her, Marinette,” Adrien pouted. “I did tons of fun stuff.”

“Sure, you did,” Sofia deadpanned. “Like learning to cook with Mama who spent more time teaching you than her own daughter. So much fun.”

“My daughter hates cooking,” Lucia shouted from the kitchen. “And this nice, young man was starving and willing to learn. Don’t blame me for your own choices!”

“I didn’t!” Sofia retorted. “Just pointing out that Adrien had lots of fun here. Also, oh my gosh, Marinette, you won’t believe but he used to read all the time. All those huge, boring books-”

“Those were for my school. I did get a Master’s degree, you know.”

Sofia shrugged. “That doesn’t excuse them being lacklustre. However,” she added with a smug smirk. “Even you’ve had your moments, Agreste, so I can’t promise you anything. There might be one or two stories Marinette would love to hear.”

Adrien narrowed his eyes at her. Marinette couldn’t hold back a smile. So that’s how it felt to have a sibling? Even if not an official one, but the thought of Adrien having had someone to care for him those years in the States was heartwarming, and these people, the whole family, seemed to love him as one of their own.

“Oh! I know!” Sofia suddenly stirred up, turning to Marinette with a wiggle of eyebrows and a sly smile on her lips. “I’ll tell you about the time Dad was trying to set us up and how much Agreste was dying to get out of it. You should’ve seen him, Marinette. He was like a deer caught in headlights. ‘I respect you, sir, and Sofia is beautiful and smart and amazing, but she like a sister to me. I could never date her.’ That was hilarious.”

“Please,” Adrien puffed. “You wanted out even more than I did.”

“Duh! You’re like a brother. Like, ewww? No way. Plus, Peter and I were a thing already—” she glanced across the room at a man holding a baby, “—I just hadn’t told the folks about him yet.”

“They got married a year later,” Adrien added. “Almost eloped, but we managed to talk her out of it.”

“Edward did,” Sofia laughed. “You were a picture of misery the whole time.”

“I was not!”

“Yup, you were,” Edward chuckled, walking closer.

“Hey, I was happy for you, guys!” Adrien pouted.

“Of course, you were happy for our little troublemaker,” Edward laughed, hugging Adrien’s shoulder. “No one denies that. But you were also not so successfully trying to hold back tears at her wedding.”

“From happiness!”

“And every time Edward’s wife had a baby?”

“That’s-”

“Oh, please, Adrien,” Sofia rolled her eyes. “Deny it all you want, but you wear your heart on your sleeve, you know. Yes, you were happy for us, but you were also sad and miserable and refused to tell us why.”

“The most I got out of him,��� Edward added, “was that there was someone who he was in love with for years, but whose life he’d ruined, and now that person didn’t want anything to do with him and he still loved them and couldn’t move on. Though, I had to get him really, really drunk for that confession to come out.”

“I hate you guys,” Adrien huffed and glared at the two. “The one and only time I let you take me out to a bar-”

“Sofia! Ed! Leave the poor boy alone!” their mother shouted from the kitchen. “You’re going to scare Marinette away with your nonsense. Come here, Adrien. Bring Marinette with you and leave those heathens behind.” A wave of chuckles and giggles filled the room. Adrien straightened up.

“Thank you, Aunt Lucia,” he shouted before offering his hand to Marinette. “Would you join me in the kitchen, my Lady? Those insensitive individuals did not deserve your company.”

“Aw, come on!” Sofia whined. “We were just having fun. Leave her with us.”

“Too late,” Adrien pulled Marinette to himself and stuck his tongue out. “She is all mine and I don’t share with bullies.”

“We love you, Adrien,” Sofia retorted, stepping away herself to check up on her husband who seemed to be having troubles with getting their baby to sleep. Edward got distracted by one of his kids as well, so the pair effortlessly sneaked away.

“Adrien is a nice boy, don’t listen to them,” Lucia mumbled under her breath as soon as they entered the kitchen. “He's kind and smart, hard-working and an amazing cook. Those tactless kids of mine just like to tease him, and he is too nice to play their games. That’s their father’s doing. I told Richard to stop doing that because the kids would learn it, but does he ever listen to me? Here—” she passed a bowl full of ingredients to Adrien. “If you don’t mind, dear. Your Bolognese is the best and we’ll retaliate by not sharing.”

Adrien chuckled and headed to the stove.

“They weren’t so bad,” Marinette said. “I can tell they love Adrien- in their own special way. Plus, I got to learn something new about him.”

“Want to learn more?” Sofia peaked through the door. “I have tons of stories left.”

“Shoo, you evil child!” Lucia cried out. “Go set the table if you have nothing better to do. I’m almost done with dinner.”

“I can help,” Marinette offered, seeing as she wasn’t going to be very useful at the kitchen with Adrien and the older woman seemingly having everything under control.

“See? She wants the stories, Mama! Come with me, girl. I’ll tell you all of his secrets,” Sofia quickly pulled Marinette out of the room to Lucia’s discontent huffing and Adrien’s laugh. Marinette giggled herself. It was chaotic. Overwhelming even, but undeniably those people cared a lot about each other and about Adrien. It could be felt in the air. She could see it in their eyes. It must have been such a contrast for Adrien to get into this family after his lonely childhood life.

The table setting didn’t take long, seeing as Megan, Edward’s wife, had finally managed to escape from her kids and lend them a hand. Together, they told Marinette about Adrien’s life in the States, starting from the time their father dragged the depressed, lonely model into their house, and ending with him surprising them with the news of Emma and Marinette. There wasn’t much in between - just a few silly NYC adventures when they practically forced Adrien out.

“He liked to stay at home when he didn't work or study,” Sofia said. “We tried to get him out but the stubborn ass would usually refuse, and even if he did go out with us, he'd just sit there with that look on his face.”

“I always hated it,” Megan added. “He looked like a kicked puppy. There was always that sadness in his eyes, you know?”

“Especially when Dad tried to set him up those few times. Poor guy looked even more depressed after a date than before it and never went on a second one. We gave up on that pretty soon. I think he suffered through three?”

Megan shook her head. “Nope. Two. You were supposed to be the third one, remember?”

“Oh right,” Sofia sighed. “Well, we’re sure glad it's in the past and he has you now, Marinette,” Sofia smiled and out of the blue wrapped her arms around Marinette. “Thank you so much. I know it might sound strange coming from a complete stranger, but Adrien means a lot to us, and we are very thankful you appeared in his life. He looks happy. Really happy. Genuinely so. Please, be kind to him.”

“I will,” Marinette whispered, holding back tears. “I’ll do my best.”

The rest of the evening went pretty smoothly. Adrien got free from the kitchen pretty soon but was snatched up by a horde of kids who insisted that Uncle Adrien was to play with them. As soon as he complied, the level of laughs and squeals in the house rose significantly. Marinette could hardly keep her eyes off Adrien as he wrestled and carried the kids around on his shoulders. The children loved him and he was terrific with them. No wonder he was so good with Emma; he had a lot of practice here. It explained perfectly why he was so happy and eager to be a father as well.

Then followed the loudest dinner Marinette had ever attended, yet in a fun and wholehearted way. Adrien seemed to be right at home, even if the stories about him never ended and more than one of those were told with the sole purpose to tease him. He quickly retaliated, though, telling Marinette his own tales about the people around the table, causing the whole room to erupt with laughs. By the end of the evening, Marinette, in a way, felt a little guilty taking him away from them, but they approved. Adrien was loved here and his happiness stood above their own wishes.

They left late evening and Marinette felt as much a part of their family as was Adrien. Sofia proclaimed her to be her new sister. Richard and Lucia invited them over whenever they would be on this side of the Atlantic. Edward shook Adrien’s hand and wished him well as an older brother would. Everyone hugged, and from the corner of her eye, Marinette noticed lingering tears in more than one pair of eyes.

“I see you weren’t as lonely as you’ve told me,” Marinette teased him as soon as they left. “They’re great people, Adrien. I really enjoyed this evening.”

“They are awesome,” Adrien replied with a bittersweet smile on his face. “But... over the years… looking at them- it was just- you know when you see your friends- family almost,” he corrected. “When you see them fall in love, date, get engaged, get married, when you hold their newborns in your hands and help them choose the right name, when you help cook and share those amazing evening together… all while knowing that you most likely will never get to experience that with the woman you love… that you perhaps will never have a family of your own… That—” he lightly squeezed Marinette's hand, not making eye contact, “—that was the lonely and miserable part.”

“I’m sorry,” Marinette whispered and stopping, wrapped her arms around him.

“I'm sorry too,” Adrien whispered back, returning the embrace. “I can imagine it wasn't any easier for you.”

“I had Emma. And my parents. I had Alya, and Nino. I was still back home with lots of friends and even your father. He helped us too. You were all alone over here in a foreign country. And while Richard and his family are amazing — and I’m so, so glad they took you in — but if I understand correctly, they were your only friends here?”

Adrien nodded silently.

“I’m so sorry, Adrien,” Marinette whispered burying her face into his chest. “All because of me. Me and my stupid mistake.”

“I thought we agreed that it was my mistake too.”

“But-”

“No ‘buts’ Marinette. I’m not lonely anymore. I have you and Emma. We have each other. That’s all that matters.”

“No, it’s not,” Marinette protested, pulling away and catching his gaze. “It’s been years, Adrien. Because of me-”

“Because of you,” Adrien stopped her speech, gently placing a finger to her lips. “I’m not lonely anymore. I have a family now and feel like the luckiest man alive. Because of what had happened we’ve become people we’re now. We’ve learned; we’ve matured. We’ve both messed up, Marinette. Not just you or me. We both did, and there is nothing we can do about it now.” A small smile tugged at the corner of his lips as he continued to gaze upon her. “We’re together and happy now. We know what we should work on, so let’s leave the past in the past and focus on the future. Okay?”

Marinette’s eyes filled with tears. Was there a limit to how much Adrien loved her? She didn’t know, but when he leaned closer and put his forehead to hers her heart fluttered.

“I love you,” Adrien whispered. “And I don’t want you blaming yourself for the rest of your life for something we both did.”

“I love you too, Adrien,” she barely breathed out, loud enough only for his ears. “With all my heart.”

“That's all that matters,” Adrien smiled at her and let his lips brushed against hers in a gentle touch. “Let's go home,” he added. “I need to show you just how much I love you.”

“Same,” Marinette replied quietly.

Saturday morning Marinette met with a smile on her lips. There wasn’t much planned for today: some last-minute packing, maybe a lunch out somewhere nearby and perhaps another walk at Central Park. The evening was reserved for a movie, cuddles and early bedtime since their plane was leaving first thing Sunday morning. So, not rushing to open her eyes, Marinette cuddled closer to Adrien, still flying somewhere between reality and dreamland as she relished in the warmth of being close. In response, Adrien wrapped his arms around her from behind, pulling her closer.

This. This felt nice. Marinette hummed satisfactory under her breath. This felt like something she’d really enjoy for the rest of her life. The whole last week was something she’d love to have for the rest of her life. Waking up cuddling to Adrien, spending their days in close proximity, working together, sharing their meals, relaxing in the evening watching a movie or just talking, falling asleep in his arms… It only needed Emma added in, and it would be perfect. Perfect enough for her to eagerly anticipate his promised proposal to come.

Adrien’s arms suddenly tightened around her as he whispered her name. He must have awoken already, but Marinette didn't rush to turn around to wish him good morning - the way he held her right now was way too comfortable for that.

“I love you- love you so much.” He tugged her closer.

“Love you too, Adrien,” Marinette replied quietly, softly stroking one of his hands on her stomach.

“You are my everything, Marinette,” Adrien murmured against her skin. “You and Emma- everything-”

This time she wanted to respond, but Adrien continued to whisper.

“Love you so much… Can’t live without you… Marinette… I’ll make you happy… I promise… Marry me…”

The breath in her chest hitched for just a moment, a smile splitting her lips. They really were meant to be. Otherwise, how could Adrien read her mind and know one of her greatest desires a few minutes after she’d wished for it?

“Marinette,” Adrien murmured against her bare skin, his voice raspy and deep. “My Lady… My Princess… I love you...”

“I love you too,” Marinette finally replied, swirling around, “Of course, I’ll marry you, Chaton, you silly kitty. There is nothing I want more right now than this.”

With that, she pulled Adrien to herself and kissed him. Kissed him slowly and tenderly, lingering in the sweetness of his lips, lavishing in the warmth of his embrace.

She pulled away a few moments later to meet Adrien’s bewildered eyes, as he blinked before letting a sleepy smile stretch on his lips. Ignoring his dumbfounded expression, Marinette leaned in again for another kiss. This time he responded.

“Didn’t know the cuddling ceremony was replaced by a kissing one,” Adrien purred once they parted. “Not complaining, though. I might even prefer this one. You have the best ideas, Princess.”

“Well, isn’t it what you do after you get proposed to?” Marinette said, her eyes half-lidded and dreamy. “You kiss your fiancée.”

Adrien pulled back. “I proposed to you?”

“Yup.” Marinette’s grin stretched wider. “You did.”

He blinked. “When?”

“Just now?”

A silent whimper escaped Adrien’s lips as he stared back at her in disbelief. After a short while, he said barely audible. “Marinette, I woke up being kissed. I don’t remember anything before that.”

They stared at each other in silence before Marinette gave in, snorted and erupted with laughter. “Really?”

“Yes,” Adrien whined, closing his eyes.

“You’ve missed your own proposal?” Marinette continued to giggle.

“That’s not funny, Princess.” He flopped back on the bed, a sad puppy look on his face. “Weeks of practice down the drain.”

“Awww. I almost feel sorry for you, Chaton, but I’ll let you know that you were very cuddly and sweet. A swoon-worthy proposal for sure. I couldn't refuse you even if I wanted to.”

Adrien chuckled. Raising himself over her on one elbow, he tucked away some stray hairs behind her ear with his other hand. “Then maybe, you’ll allow me to ask you again? It would’ve been nice to remember you saying Yes to me.”

“Sure.” Marinette nodded. “But I’ll agree again only if you can beat the Sleep Adrien’s proposal.”

“I see. So, I’ve got my work cut out for me?”

“Undeniably.”

“Well then—” still raised on one elbow he leaned down and nuzzled her jaw, whispering in her ear. “Marinette Dupain-Cheng, I love you. Will you marry me?”

“That's it?” she chuckled when Adrien refrained from adding anything else. “No big words and promises to beat your rival?”

“I’m sure Sleep Adrien already said all the words and promised you everything,” Adrien said, his voice husky as he traced the line of her jaw with his fingers, following the trail with his eyes. “But in the weeks that I’ve spent practicing my proposal speech, I’ve noticed that the simpler words are, the more effective and sincerer they are as well.”

“I suppose,” Marinette replied with a smile, placing her hand atop of his. “But you’ll need something extra to top Sleep Adrien because let me tell you - he was fantastic.”

“Of course, my Lady,” Adrien replied bringing her hand to his lips. “I’m sure he was great telling you things, but did he do something like this?” He let his lips brush against the inside of her wrist.

Marinette shook her hand.

“How about this?” Leaning down, Adrien peppered the curve of her jaw with tender butterfly kisses before moving on to her neck, gently sucking at her exposed skin.

Closing her eyes, Marinette let a sigh out. “No.”

“And this?” Adrien nibbled at her earlobe. “I’m sure Sleep Adrien was big on words, but I offer you my actions. So, what will you say, Marinette? Will you marry me?”

“Tempting,” Marinette whispered, locking her gaze on him. “You drive a hard deal, Chaton.”

The corner of his lips curved as Adrien’s eyes fell to her lips. Watching them for a short while, he caught her eyes again and added. “I have a lot more to offer to Mme Adrien Agreste, though. Would you like to become her, Marinette?”

“Yes,” Marinette whispered, tugging him closer. “And very much so.”

“Excellent,” Adrien smiled and capture her lips with his.

It had been well over a year since his son came back from the States. Sixteen months since Adrien had discovered he was a father and cleared all of the misunderstandings not only between Marinette and himself but between them as well. About fourteen months, Gabriel would guess, since the duo came back engaged from NYC - of no surprise to anyone and just as he'd predicted. Exactly a year since their wedding. Unnecessary delay where Gabriel’s opinion was considered, but Adrien and Marinette had insisted on enjoying the engagement stage for at least a few months, which, to be fair, that did give him the time to create a custom wedding dress for Marinette and allowed their friends to arrange some time off work to attend their tropical wedding gateway. Sunset beach ceremony wasn't what he personally would've chosen, but Emma was happy and so was Gabriel. In the end, his preferences aside, the fact that Marinette had decided to take Adrien’s last name and change Emma’s in the process as well, was most pleasing of all.

Emma Agreste sounded perfect.

Emma Agreste had too much of a hold on his heart, and he acknowledged it without shame. Even now, as Gabriel carefully inspected her drawings, he couldn't hold back a smile. Emma clearly inherited his fantastic fashion sense.

“Father?” Adrien’s voice split the silence of the room. Gabriel lifted his head, confused as for why he hadn’t heard the door opening.

“Oh, you are back. I assume the date went well?”

“Yes, it was amazing,” Adrien smiled, pulling Marinette into the office. “Where’s Emma?”

“She went to her room ten minutes ago.”

“You mean my old room?” Adrien teased. “I still can’t believe you removed my zip line because it suddenly isn't safe anymore.”

“We already discussed it, Adrien,” Gabriel replied nonchalantly. “Whoever visits more gets the room. Emma wins by a long run and if you want that zip line so badly, install it in your own house and stop bothering me.”

“I’ve been robbed,” Adrien mock pouted. “Stripped of the place I’ve spent most of life in.”

Gabriel sighed. Marinette giggled.

“We appreciate it, M Agreste,” she said, putting a hand on Adrien’s shoulder. “And Emma loves it. She’s still ecstatic about the princess treehouse and the royal carriage bed you put in for her. Even started bugging Adrien to buy her a similar one for her room at home.”

“I see,” Gabriel smirked in satisfaction, looking at Adrien. “So, remodelling the room to suit her particular tastes wasn't that unnecessary after all.”

“My climbing wall is still her favourite feature, though,” Adrien countered. “You can’t deny that.”

Gabriel sighed. “I suppose I can’t. She is your daughter after all.”

“She is,” Adrien grinned proudly. “And as unbelievable as it sounds, she takes a lot after me.”

“Maybe, but she undoubtedly inherited her mother’s fashion talent,” Gabriel added. “You can't deny that.”

“I suppose I can’t,” Adrien chuckled and looked at Marinette. “And I don’t mind in the slightest.”

“Speaking of which,” Gabriel leaned back into his chair and looked at Marinette. “Would you to bring her to the office next week? I want to start with that line I promised her. She has some interesting ideas already.”

“Wait.” Adrien frowned. “I thought co-creating a line with Emma was a joke.”

“I don't joke about such matters,” Gabriel replied. “Emma has a talent, and she is at the age when her imagination has no bounds. I want to explore that. She has a bright future if we nurture her from early on.”

Adrien glanced at Marinette. “We’ll discuss it over the dinner on Friday. We need to consider everything before we agree or decline anything.”

“Fair enough.” Gabriel nodded. “Now, should I call for Emma? It’s getting close to her bedtime, and you still need to get home.”

Adrien suddenly grinned and grabbed Marinette’s hand. “Not yet. First, we wanted to tell you some exciting news-”

“Oh. Did Marinette finally tell you she is pregnant?” Gabriel cut in, his face calm as he watched Marinette’s eyes widen and Adrien’s jaw drop to the floor.

“Wha- But- How? How do you know?”

The man let out an amused chuckle. “Can you guess what is one of the perks of being your boss, Marinette?”

The woman shook her head.

“I get to hear all the rumours about you early on,” he continued. “You are an Agreste now, Marinette, and people pay special attention to everything you do. When they notice stuff, they gossip, and every gossip about any member of my family makes its way to my office sooner or later. I suspected a pregnancy a few weeks ago when you were spotted feeling sick in the bathroom three days in a row, constantly seemed tired for a while and started consuming an impressive number of salty snacks.”

Adrien chuckled to himself and looked at Marinette.

“Then, of course, your father called me a week ago because he couldn’t congratulate Adrien yet, but he was eager to share the news with at least someone.”

“You father knew?” Adrien turned to Marinette.

“And Maman,” Marinette said apologetically. “She noticed the symptoms when I was over a few weeks ago and asked me. I couldn’t lie, but they promised not to tell anyone until I surprised you.”

“Unbelievable,” Adrien pouted. “Why am I always the last one to find out things in this family?”

“You should’ve been the first one to notice something was up,” Gabriel quirked an eyebrow. “Seeing how she is your wife and you live in the same house, and you—” he addressed Marinette with a stern look, “—you should’ve made it short days if you weren’t feeling well. We don’t want my grandchild to be born prematurely.”

“That’s why you kept sending me home early?” Marinette smiled. “Thank you. That was very thoughtful and very much appreciated.”

“Left behind,” Adrien whined and dramatically plopped on a chair. “Again. By my own father and my beloved wife. How could this happen to me?”

“Awww.” Marinette smiled, lightly ruffling Adrien’s hair. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to tell you in a special way and our anniversary seemed like the perfect day to do so, but here—” she leaned over and placed a kiss on his cheek. “Feeling better?

“A little,” Adrien pouted. “One more?”

“Don’t be such a drama queen, Adrien,” Gabriel huffed, standing up. “I’ll go get Emma.”

“You won’t call Nathalie to bring her as usual?” Adrien asked.

“It seems you two need a few minutes alone,” Gabriel said with a straight face, heading for the door. “We’ll be back in a few minutes, settle everything by then.”

He closed the door to the pair’s stifled laughs and Adrien’s unmistakable “Come here, Princess” and walked up the stairs. Soon Gabriel stood in front of Adrien’s former bedroom. A soft knock on the door gave him no response. He tried again and entered the room, calling out his granddaughter’s name. The room looked empty, the lights dimmed and no one answered him no matter how many times he called. Just for a moment, his mind stirred with worry, but then his eyes fell on a sleeping girl in the extravagant treehouse he made for her. Snoozing peacefully amongst the countless pillows and plushies, she was hugging a Chat Noir doll Marinette had made for her, swaddled in a ladybug-themed blanket Adrien had insisted was a must in this room.

Gabriel smiled. Emma was a surprise. For her mother. For her father. For him. Unexpected and bewildering. She looked mind-blowingly similar to his late wife, but that wasn't the most surprising thing about her. How much she’d accomplished in her seven years was astonishing. She inspired him every day and brought smiles to everyone around her. She’d gotten her parents together, something they were too childish to do themselves. She’d managed to melt his heart and prompted a reconciliation between him and his long-estranged son, something that just a little over a year ago Gabriel had never thought it possible. That was more than most people accomplish in a lifetime. Unexpected? Surprising? Not really. She was an Agreste, after all. Emma Agreste to be precise.

That's it, guys. I hope you've enjoyed this ride as much as I did. I hope Unexpected Surprise was as special to you as it was to me. I'm very thankful to my betas KryallaOrchid and EdenDaphne for helping me to polish this gem. Thank you so much, guys!!! Without you, this story would never be as amazing as it is now. Also, I'll be posting a separate Unexpected Surprise bonus story in a week where you'll get your questions about kwamis answered and be able to glimpse the future of the Adrien and Marinette's family. Hope you'll love it just as much as the main story. <3

Please note: English is a strange and wonderful language where many words have multiple meanings and slang can change depending on your country of origin. It is my third language so while I will do my very best, there may be mistakes made along the way.

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#adrinette #adrienette #ml fanfiction #aged up #fluff #Emma Agreste #Unexpected Surprise #usml

[fluffy-marshmallow-heart]

Drake's Diary ch.25 -A Spot of Tea

The Royal Romance canon from Drake's POV

Words: 1619

I know you guys have been waiting, but it seems this is a filler chapter on PB's part. But it can still be fun. I believe things start coming to a head starting next chapter though! I hope you enjoy this in the meantime!

 Master List (Catch Up Here)

Drake was glowering at a table all by himself. Another tea party. I can’t believe I’m at another tea party. What is with nobles and tea parties? Why can’t they have a whiskey party or a hearty food party? It’s always gotta be tea…

His thoughts were interrupted as he saw Emma walking onto the grounds, and his breath hitched as he took in her slim figure in a scarlet red dress, with lots of little detailing. She looks gorgeous. Wow. Make way for the Lady in Red.

  He waved her down. “Rose! Over here. I thought I’d be stuck drinking tea alone.”

She grinned at him as she approached the table, and his heart fluttered at the way her eyes shined brightly directly at him.

“Sadly for all of us, that’s not the case.” Olivia sits down beside Drake as the tea house’s staff begins carrying trays of tea cups and pots to each table. As Emma joins them, he looks around for Hana, but sees her with Xinghai and her two noble suiters, Neville and Rashad, close to the royal party’s table.

Alrighty then.

He slid his eyes over to Olivia. “Hmph. Did Madeleine send you to sit with us exiles?”

“Not as such, but there was only one other available table.” She nods at said table, where Penelope is eagerly chatting with Kiara. Her voice carries over the word “poodle” and Olivia shuddered.

“Your company seemed…marginally preferable.”

“Olivia, It’s okay. You can admit that we’re friends.” Emma broke in.

Once again, speak for yourself, Rose. She is not my friend.

Olivia’s mouth fell open, and Drake thought he saw the hint of a smile. “I…I just find you less insufferable than Penelope.”

Ha. Yup, definitely was a smile in disguise. “Coming from you, that’s like a confession of love.

“We’re basically besties.” Emma laughed, as Olivia rolled her eyes.

A server approaches with a kettle and tray. She carefully adds tea leaves to the pot and fills it with water. The server drains the first infusion into a pitcher, and after filling the tea pot again, pours the pitcher’s contents over its closed lid.

“Nooooo! Not my tea!” Maxwell races over to the table, looking stricken.

Emma rose an eyebrow. “Relax, Maxwell. It’s part of the service.”

“Oh, good.  I thought my tea privileges were being revoked.”

“Not unless you’ve committed tea crimes you haven’t told us about.” She teased

“I wouldn’t hurt a leaf! Except by drinking it!” Maxwell chuckled at his own joke while everyone else just stared at him.

“Where on earth have you been?” Drake demanded. Leaving me here alone, leaving Emma to fend for herself, letting Olivia sit down, I could just go on. I deserve an explanation.

Maxwell looked at him like he had two heads. “Looking into Tariq’s whereabouts! We got a tip that he’s somewhere in Los Angeles. Hiding deep undercover.”

Drake scoffed. “That figures. He’s off living it up in Hollywood while you’re here cleaning up his mess.”

“I’ve started calling any menswear store whose price tags start at three figures, but since we’re on opposite sides of the Pacific…they’re all closed right now.”

“Oh. Thanks, time zones.” Emma frowned, and Drake took her hand under the table. She gives him a grateful smile.

“Don’t worry, I left them a bunch of voicemails. I told every store that if they don’t call me back as soon as they’re open, they’ll face the wrath of House Beaumont’s lawyers! I think Bertrand would be impressed.”

A look of surprised crossed Emma’s face. “We have lawyers now?”

“The stores that I called think we do!” Maxwell told her happily

Squeezing her hand lightly, Drake turned to face Emma. “How are you holding up, Rose? Now that we’re finally getting to the bottom of this whole mess?”

She scowled. “I am ready to throw a party when this is all over.”

“Just say the word and I’ll make it happen.” Maxwell jumped in excitedly

Oh boy, here we go. We definitely don’t need another Beaumont Bash…

“Whatever you’re picturing is probably too much party.” Drake informed.

Maxwell gasped. “There’s no such thing!”

The server finishes readying the second infusion of tea and pours each person a cup.

Maxwell takes a sip and his eyes widen. “Wow. I though top-shelf wine had layers, but this tea’s undertones have undertones.”

Drake sniffs his cup and takes a tentative sip. “Huh. Strong stuff.” This really isn’t so bad for tea. But still…coulda been a whiskey party…

“Is that a compliment?” Emma gasped.

He shrugged. “You’ve got to respect a drink that doesn’t pull its flavor punches.”

“I think it’s delightfully full-bodied.” Emma agreed.

“I’m surprised you like anything that didn’t come out of a little mesh bag.” Olivia smirked.

Emma chuckled. “Tea bags aren’t half bad. And they’re convenient.”

Olivia shook her head in disdain. “I’ll take a proper cup of tea like this any day.”

“Then it sounds like we’re going to need more.” Emma said, gesturing to the empty pitcher.

“Another!” Maxwell raises his tea cup over his head…

“If you break that, we’ll have to pay for it.” Emma acknowledged nervously.

Maxwell looks at her, then at his tea cup, and slowly sets it back on the table.

Holy shit. He actually listens to someone. I need to remember this for future reference. If anyone needs Maxwell to do something, just have Emma say it.

“Here. You can finish mine.” Drake handed him his cup.

“You’re a true friend, buddy.” Maxwell accepted.

Drake narrowed his eyes. “Don’t call me buddy.”

“You’re a true friend…friend?”

“My name is Drake.”

“Aww, look at you two. Getting along just like old times.” Emma teased them, obviously trying to get ahead of the situation and the dialogue Drake was sure he was about to start spewing.

Instead he sighed. “Yeah, yeah. No need to make a big thing out of it.”

“Are you sure? I’m feeling a group hug coming on…”

“There will be no hugging at this table.” Olivia’s voice cut through menacingly as she glared at the entire group.

“For once, I agree with Olivia.” I can’t believe I just said that. Can I take it back? No, damn, because then I would have to hug Maxwell…and Olivia…and Emma…okay, I’d love to hug Emma right now.

“…Maybe later.” Maxwell whispered loudly enough for all of them to hear.

Nope. I side with Olivia. 100% Team Olivia.

I’d better go check on Hana.” Emma announced abruptly, standing up and nodding towards where Hana is seated, as Neville and Rashad both stood and left their seats.

“I’ll keep them in line while you’re gone.” Olivia grinned.

Excuse me??  “Who died and left you in charge?”

Maxwell nodded in agreement frantically. “I didn’t vote for that!”

“I just expect everyone to be in one piece when I get back.” Emma makes her way between tables, not even glancing at them as she left.

I’m not even sure she heard us right now…

Olivia turns to Drake and Maxwell. “So, boys. Whatever should we do with ourselves? You can start by finding more tea. I do love more than one cup. Certainly one of you can handle this.”

“I uh…just remembered I have to go do that thing…” Maxwell started.

“Oh yeah, me too.” Drake chimed in.

“Oh, sorry, it’s really kind of private Drake. It’s the thing. In the place. That you…can’t go?” Maxwell darted away, and Drake’s jaw dropped as Olivia burst out laughing.

“I guess it’s you and me, commoner. And the tea. Go, shoo. Get the tea.”

“I’m not…getting…your tea.” Drake gritted out

Fucking Maxwell. I cannot believe he just did that!! Just leaving me here, again, alone, with fucking Olivia at my table. And he’s talking to Emma!! Damnit!!

Olivia begins speaking again, and Drake immediately tunes her out, watching Emma approach Hana and her father and wondering what they’re arguing about.

“I’m sure they’re not arguing about you, Drake. For some unknown reason, Emma has taken quite a liking to you. Hana’s got her own issues. She can’t handle them on her own, so she drags Emma along to help her speak.”

“Why would Rose be talking about me?” He questioned.

“I just she wasn’t. What, are you deaf too?”

Drake was about to return a snappy comeback when Emma plopped back down beside him.

“That could’ve gone better.”

He turned to her, full of worry. “What happened? We saw Hana leave.”

Emma sighed. “She and her dad got into a fight. She actually told him she wasn’t interested in Neville. I’m not sure if me being there made things better or worse...”

Drake’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, good for her. It’s about time she told her parents to lay off.”

Olivia tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Interesting. It seems she’s discovering a backbone.”

Maxwell sauntered back over as well, and guests start rising from their tables as the servers clear the tea trays away. They begin forming a line into the garden with King Liam waiting at the front.

Emma watched with curiosity. “Where’s everyone going? Are we line-dancing now?”

Olivia blinked. “This is a court, not a barn.”

Maxwell shook his head. “I think we’re just supposed to pay our respects to King Liam before we leave.”

Ugh, I just want to go.  “Leave it to the court to turn saying goodbye into a ceremony.” He grumbled, getting up and leaving the table. Everyone else can say their goodbyes. Drake is heading back to the hotel to find himself a nice hard drink.

We’re leaving for New York tomorrow. Back where everything began. Back where we met. Back where…Back where Maxwell chose her for Liam…Yup. I’m hitting the bottle tonight.

@annekebbphotography @carabeth @gardeningourmet @eileendannie @dancetothestoriesinyoursoul @alesana45 @thequeenofcronuts @zigortega4life @drakewalkerfantasy

  @hrhdes @drakewalkerisreal @akrenich @feartheendlesssummer @moonlightgem7 @i-miss-trr @noey718-blog @snyggflicka @rhymesmenagerie @i-only-signed-up-for-fanfiction @crookedslimecreatorpasta @be-still-my-aching-heart

#drake's diary #drake x emma #drake walker fanfic #the royal romance fanfic #drake x mc #drake walker #the royal romance #choices the royal romance #playchoices #choices stories you play #trr drake #trr fanfic #choices trr #trr

[silhouetteofagirl]

benedicio (for Owlmoose)

Here’s my fic for the @childrenofthestoneexchange ! It’s a gen fic featuring Cadash, Sandal, and Bodahn. It was so much fun to write!!! Thanks to the organizers for putting this on and being patient with me! Read on AO3 Here.

Her hand throbs when she knocks on the door of the modest home she’s been directed to.  Not the one that connected sharply with the worn wood, but the other one.  The one that— it is still overwhelming at times to remember it is gone.  Especially because can feel phantom itches and pains.  Like now when her— the door opens.  

“Oh, you must be the Lady Cadash.  We’ve been expecting you!” says the dwarven man at the door.  He’s a little shorter than her, back bent with age, and his face is a mass of wrinkles.  He smiles at her so warmly, each line of his face crinkling, that she is a bit taken aback.

“You’re just going to let me in?” she asks, skeptically.  “I could be a crow or someone else.”

He looks thoughtful for half a second, an exaggerated expression that is clearly more for show than actual concern.  “Oh well, I suppose.  But I always assumed having some fancy title came with a little lasting wealth.  Unless your recent profession change has left you penniless, in which case, you’re probably in need of a bit of kindness.”

He stands to the side so she can cross the threshold, “Can I take your cloak? I’m Bodahn, you must be here to see my son.  Varric and Leliana said you might come by.  Even if you aren’t Lady Cadash, it’s nice to see another dwarf.  Aren’t a lot around here.” He speaks like he is used to holding a conversation mostly one-sided, barrelling through where natural pauses would be.

“Yes, they said you son could help with… with…” she still can’t say it.

“The pain, dear?” he finished for her.  His tone is kind and Cadash completely unsure what to make of this man.  “I’ll go get my boy.  You make yourself at home.”

Then he leaves for another room and Cadash is left to ‘make herself at home’.  She doesn’t, years of being Carta and then the Inquisitor has left her a more than a little wary.  She explores the room as quietly as the can.  The home’s interior is just as modest as the exterior.  She’s been left in a small common room and she can see an equally small kitchen through the fireplace.

While the furnishings are worn and have clearly seen a lot, she notices a few things around the room that hints at this family’s connections.  There is a painting of an exceptionally pretty human woman that is at least fifty years old.  In a similar place of honor, also hung on the wall, is a letter written in blocky handwriting.  On the bottom of the letter, two small feet have been stamped on with ink.  There is also what looks like a dragon’s talon sitting on the mantle of the fireplace with similar keepsakes.

These odds and ends clearly aren’t clutter, but she doesn’t have time to look through them all because she hears Bodahn coming back.  “She’s a friend of Leliana and Varric, so—”

“Enchantment!” a younger sounding voice says.

“Exactly, my boy.” Cadash can hear his smile even from a room away.  Then they both enter the room.  Sandal older than her with large eyes and a quizzical expression.  She gets the feeling it isn’t that he’s cleanly shaven like Varric but more than he doesn’t grow facial hair.  They both look at each other for a few seconds, she’s sure she’s a bit to take in as well.  What with her arm, the scars, and the large burn on her cheek and neck.

“Hello,” she says, not really sure what else to say.  He blinks at her a few times.

He raises both hands to his chest, shakes them a few times, and then starts signing.  Her sign is rusty, not many folks used it in the inquisition and the only sign dialect she knows is the bastardized Carta dialect, but she is able to get the gist of it before Bodahn translates.

“Why no eye contact?” she asks, more sharply than she had meant to.

“He is usually alright with eye contact, but it’s hard for my son to do both eye contact and touch with other people.  Especially strangers, no offense to you my dear.”  Bodahn explains, his hands signing along as he speaks.  Sandal watches his father’s hands as he talks and then looks up to glance at her.  

He signs again, this time the words go past her Carta training, but she recognizes the sign for explosion.  “If it’s alright with you, he’s going to touch your arm now.”

Cadash tries, she tries to relax enough to let this man touch the stump.  She holds out the end of it where it is hidden in her sleeve, pulls up the cloth, but then there is the scarring, the red and green marks that brand her skin.  Sandal reaches out, it doesn’t matter if he’s asked her not to make eye contact, she isn’t seeing Sandal.  She’s seeing him.  She can’t look away at the hand that reaches for her hand, the one that should be there, the one burns from the pain.

It should be there.  She can feel it right there.

Cadash jerks away from them, pulling the sleeve back down, trying to pull air into her lungs.  “Easy, love, easy.”  Bodahn is saying and she realizes vaguely he’s speaking to her.  “May I touch your shoulder?”

She shakes her head.  She can’t, she doesn’t want their pity, she wants her arm back.  

“Enchantment?”  Sandal says and his father nods.

“Tea would probably work wonders.” He says and Sandal leaves.  “Why don’t you sit down while we get you tea.  Take your time.”

“I’m sorry.” Cadash manages to gasp out as she collapses in the chair that he gestures to.

“Don’t be.  Marian was quite the same after the fight with the Arishok.” He says before going to the small kitchen to make tea.

Cadash ends up spending the night; Bodahn insists.  “We’ve got an extra room for guests.  My daughter comes every so often with her husband and kids.  It’s really no trouble.”

“You’re daughter?” she asks, as she helps him put together the bed.  It’s hard with only one hand, but she can at least hold the blankets as he spreads them out.

“Leah! She’s a good girl, goes on too many adventures, but with the mess that the wardens have been, I can’t blame her,”  he says.

“I can’t say I helped with that.” Cadash says softly.

“I wouldn’t know,” he takes another blanket from her.  “They’re a secretive lot and we’ve been out here for a while.”

“May I ask why?” She asks.

“Safety.  Just before Kirkwall, well, we went to Amaranthine to visit Leah and Zevran.  Or more, my daughter heard from a fellow warden enough that she all but demanded I come stay with her.  Stayed with her a while, but then Marion comes, looking more gaunt and haunted than a good girl like her should, says Anders blew up the chantry! Made a right mess of it all, that man did.”

He looks thoughtfully at Cadash and she shifts uncomfortably.  She’s used to the scrutiny of others, but not the earnest searching that Bodahn uses.  “What do you think? One more? It gets a bit cold here at night.  Oh, let’s do two just in case.  Anyways, my daughter and Marion decide is safer for me and my boy to come to the countryside where we aren’t known.  Especially after Varric went missing.  Not right to kidnap someone’s husband.  Why it’s why Marion still—”

“Husband?”

“Yes.” Bodahn pauses while unfolding another blanket, “They’ve been married, what, ten years? I remember the ceremony, small thing, Leandra cried so hard she was so happy.”

“Hawke and Varric are married.” Cadash says slowly.

“Of course.  They didn’t seem like marrying sorts, but there was a wager made as to who could do the most romantic gesture.  They called it a truce after the wedding.”  He smiles fondly at the memory.

“Bodahn, I don’t mean to sound rude, but why are you so open about their lives? With this information, who knows how many people would want you as a pawn or for blackmail.”  

“I suppose.  But I am only an old man with a son.  I fear we are rather boring in passing.  This is the most excitement we’ve had in a while.” he then turns and looks at the bed.  It is practically drowning in a mismatch blankets and pillows.  “Don’t let me talk your ear off with boring tales, why don’t you get some rest.  Tomorrow will be here faster than you know it.”

“Thank you for your kindness,” she says and he waves it off.

“It’s our pleasure.” he smiles again, “Let me know if you need anything, my room’s just down the hall.”

Then Cadash is left alone in the room.  She sits down on the bed and it groans under the combined weight of the blankets and her.  “Come on, Avital, get ready for bed.  Just don’t look at it.”  Removing her boots with one hand is easier now than it used to be, but she knows she’s got to tie them again in the morning.  The band that compresses her chest that Krem helped make for her means she doesn’t need someone to attend to her, but every time it catches on her stump.  It’s the same every evening; it’s the same every morning.

“Avital, take my hand.”  Cool fingers cutting through the blinding pain and equally blinding light, a moment of relief, “Live well, while time remains.”

She wakes up and her hand is still alight, the pain unbearable, but there is nothing but the darkness in this strange room.  Cadash takes a few steadying breaths feeling the smooth fabric of the blanket she’s wrapped herself in and the rise and fall of her chest.  When the pain flairs up again, she bites down on a pillow to muffle the whimper.

She doesn’t sleep the rest of the night.

The next morning, they try again.  And again, she pulls away from Sandal who flaps his hands and has to leave the room.  And again, Bodahn tells her to take the time she needs.

“I’m sorry.” she says when she can finally stop hyperventilating.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve helped someone with something like this.  You’ll take the time you’ll need and we’ll be ready to give you that time.”

“Maybe I should come back later.”  Cadash says, “After it’s had more time to… to…”

“It’s healed from what I can see, now I’m not an expert, but why don’t you give stay week.  We’ve got a beautiful garden and some books, my boy has runes that help make the flowers stay in bloom and keeps the water in the bath warm.”

“I really don’t want to impose, it would be better—”  he shakes his head at her words.

“A friend of Varric’s a friend of mine and you look like you could use a bit of rest if nothing else.”  Bodahn seems firm in his welcome and with how little she’s slept she can justify waiting another day.  So she stays, finds a book that looks interesting enough, and promptly falls asleep in her chair twelve pages in.  

She snaps awake when someone says, “Enchantment!”, rather loudly.  The book falls to the floor with a clatter and she goes for a dagger that isn’t on her person.  Sandal is smiling at her and signing.  When he’s done with his statement, he says, “Boom!”

He gestures for her to follow him.  She hadn’t gotten all of his words across, but he seemed to be talking about lunch.  Cadash gets up from her chair to follow him, rubbing the crick in her neck.  She’s not as young as she used to be.

Sandal leads her outside to where the garden is in full bloom despite the fact that the season has shifted to fall.  Bodahn is waiting at a stone table where lunch his laid out, soup, bread, some cheese, all she can easily eat with one hand.

“Thanks for getting her, son.” He says to Sandal who nods once and sits down. “Did you sleep well?”

“Enough. I, uh, didn’t sleep well last night,” she says hesitantly.  Cadash holds up her hand, “I had enough blankets.  I’m still adjusting.”

“Well, my boy has some runes for the pain here, you want to try one.” he gestures to a small collection of runes.  These were perfectly smooth runes, unlike the ones Dagna made or the ones found while traveling, clearly made by an expert.  “After lunch, I can help you put it in your sleeve, won’t touch you arm that way, but should help.”

The soup is hearty, the bread a little bit stale, but lunch passes smoothly.  They chat, Sandal signing when he had something to contribute, and it isn’t as awkward as it could be.  Still, she is curious.  “Do you mind me asking, how did you learn sign?”

“Leah.  She was carta before she was a warden or a hero, much like you.  Oh, she did not like me much when we met.  But, you can’t travel around Fereldan for a year and not get close.”

“You’d be surprised.”  she says. It’s supposed to be to herself, but Bodahn is giving her a concern look.  She stammers, but can’t come up with anything to say.

“Well, I was grateful for the change to get to know my daughter.” he continues carefully. “I wouldn’t have look at her in Orzammar.”

“Oh.” is all she can see, she can feel a flush form.

“The hurt someone does to you doesn’t mean you weren’t close once.” Bodahn says.

Long thin fingers, a permanent ink stain on his ring finger on his left hand where he wrote.  Sometimes there were paint splatters from late nights he spent painting murals from his cultures past.  Both ink and paint had been missing when he’d taken the anchor.

There had been another set of hands, rough from the splitting of wood with hair on their knuckles.  The wide fingers had moved like she had been something to behold and she had been, just for a moment, but they had been liars fingers with lovers palms.

“Lady Cadash?” Bodahn asks, pulling her out of her reverie, “Are you alright?”

“Yes! Yes, I… merely lost in thought.” The rest of the lunch passes pleasantly and she helps carry things into the modest kitchen.

Sandal flaps his hands and holds out a rune.  “Enchantment?”

She looks at where here sleeve is pinned up against her stump.  “Take the time you need.” Bodahn says, but she shakes her head.

Cadash takes the rune and slips it under her shirt, pushing it down her sleeve so it rests against her.  The stone is cool against her arm and she waits for pain to flare on a hand that is not there, but instead there is a pleasant numbness.  She holds her breath, she can do this, she tells herself.

She tugs on her sleeve, the rune falls to the floor, and she’s shaking again.  Her arm hadn’t hurt, but it hadn’t been there.  For once she couldn’t feel it and somehow that had been worse than the blinding pain.  Tears are streaming down her face and all she can say is  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

A hand, small but wide, touches her shoulder very lightly, pulling away quickly. Through the fabric of her shirt, she can feel a lingering warmth, “Enchantment.”

She hiccups and looks up at him from where she’s collapsed.  “What?”

“Take the time you need, I think is what he’s saying.” Sandal nods and picks up the rune.

He holds it out to her, “Enchantment.”  She searches his face and then looks at his hand.  Their fingers touch lightly as he gives the rune to her.  His hands are warm and callused from his rune work, the pattern of them unfamiliar to any calluses she’s seen in a while.  His hands are different.

They try slipping the rune into her shirt again in the evening and again the next morning.  But within a few days, she can stand to have the rune sit in her sleeve for almost an hour.  The pace is frustratingly slow; Bodahn tells her not to worry and to take her time, Sandal mostly says enchantment, and she is left with herself.

Cadash helps when she can, pulling weeds out of Sandal’s garden, going with Bodahn to the small market to buy food, and sweeping the floors.  Bodahn is always appreciative and Sandal seems to enjoy the company.  Their lives are mundane and she’s never really had mundane between the Carta and the Inquisition.  It’s nice to stay up late and talk to them about things or listen to Bodahn read a book aloud.  It’s nice to help Sandal in his garden and pick fresh flowers and apples.  She still has nightmares of hands too cool and words too cruel, but it becomes easier to pick up a blanket or two and go sit in the common area until she can sleep again.  Cadash wakes up one morning, curled up in the common room, another blanket having been placed on her.  When she can’t help, she sleeps or reads or wanders.  It becomes a routine that should be boring, helping in the mornings, napping in the afternoon, sitting by the fire and talking, but it’s nice.

However, she can’t stay.  

“Sandal, do you think we could try again this evening?” she asks, holding a basket for him to put apples into.

He looks at her and smiles, “Enchantment.”

That evening she sits between Sandal and Bodahn.  On a small table next to Sandal are tools, various strips of leather, a few buckles, and a handful of runes.  She unpins her sleeve and rolls it up.  The scarring is only brown in the fire light, not green and red, the skin still soft and new, but it’s there.

“Cadash, we’ve got you.” Bodahn says as she stares at the stump.

“Enchantment.”  She nods at Sandal and then looks away. His hands are different, warm and callused, but they move efficiently.  The touches aren’t soft and personal, but they are caring.

When panic tries to swell, an arm wraps around her shoulders, “You’re alright, dear.  My boy and I, we’ve got you. It’s okay.”

And Bodahn repeats that, “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.” rubbing his thumb, broad and softer than his son’s against her shoulder.

She breathes.

“It’s okay.” Bodahn says again.  “You’re going great.”

Cadash isn’t sure how much times passes, only that she eventually tucks her head into Bodahn’s shoulder.  “Is this how you became family to Hawke and Brosca?”

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“I’m a stranger.” her voice catches.

“Everyone starts off as one.” Bodahn says, “But I may not be the most clever man, but I have been known to care a little too much.”

“You cared your way into being friends of two important and controversial heroes.”

“I was hoping you’d say three, Lady Cadash.” his thumbs stops moving and she looks up at him.

“Avital.” she says, “My name is Avital.”  He smiles at her, his thumb continues to rub small circles into her shoulder.

Some time later, Sandal breaks the silence by saying “Boom”.  She looks down at her stump and a small harness is holding a rune to her skin.  Her hand doesn’t itch, it doesn’t ache or burn, because it isn’t there.  She can only feel the coolness of the rune against her skin and a wholeness she hasn’t felt in a while.

She doesn’t dream that night.  The next day, Sandal explains, with help from his father, that the rune should help ease any lingering effects of the anchor and help with the healing.  He’s made a few runes with different effect for her though and she watches carefully as he shows her how to change the runes.  One is warm and soothes the ache in her shoulders and elbow, one doesn’t feel like anything at all, and the cool one that stops the itches and pains.

By the time the week is out, she’s ready to leave.  Bodahn gets teary and she finds herself promising to write him and meaning it.  Sandal flaps his hands and touches her lightly on the shoulder.  There’s a world for her to help save and it’s not going to fix itself.

Her hand doesn’t throb when she knocks on the door of the modest home.

“Oh, Avital.  What a pleasant surprise!” says Bodahn.  He’s a little shorter than last time, back still bent with age, and his face still a mass of wrinkles.  He smiles at her so warmly, each line of his face crinkling, and she smiles back.  “It’s been a few months, come on in.”

#cadash #inquisitor cadash #bodahn #sandal feddic #bodahn feddic #dragon age #long post #my fanfic

[animesavior]

“Asta, it's true that you aren't going to become the wizard king, not ever. That's because I am going to be the Wizard King. You're wrong about Asta, Revchi, very wrong. Asta's no loser, he's my rival! “

-          Yuno, Black Clover (Ep. 01)

The Toonami Trending Rundown for December 2-3, 2017. Asta’s quest to become the Magic Emperor begins as one of the rising stars in the shonen anime and manga scene in Black Clover makes its way to the better cartoon show. Meanwhile, Mr. Satan attempts to get Buu to stop his mass-murder-for-fun ways, and Gon, Killua, and Biscuit work on getting the final card to completing Greed Island among many others.

On Twitter, every show would successfully trend in the US during their respective East Coast airings including Black Clover as it began its run on a good note, while Hunter x Hunter and Cowboy Bebop also trended during their West Coast airings. On tumblr, Toonami would trend as with Dragon Ball Super, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (including JJBA) and Hunter x Hunter.

Unfortunately due to a very busy night in the TV scene combined with the transition of Dragon Ball Super moving to 10:30pm (the prime-time DBS hour at 8pm was abolished to make way for the expansion) the show wouldn’t make it to Nielsen Social’s top 5 this week.

This week’s feature was a game review of Gundam Versus for the PS4. It received a 7.5 out of 10 score.

Some of the notable news of the week include:

For those wondering what Toonami will be doing for the holiday season, the block will once again be doing encore marathons during the Christmas and New Years weekends, with episodes 1-11 of Cowboy Bebop airing on December 23, followed by episodes 32-43 of Dragon Ball Super on December 30. A good time to catch up with all of your favorite shows for those falling behind.

And for those looking for other ways to catch up on or re-watch Dragon Ball Super, the first 39 episodes are available to view on FunimationNow, with plans to upload additional episodes on the service in 13 episode batches, each to launch two weeks after the last episode of the batch airs on Toonami. This goes along with other options including Adult Swim’s on-demand and streaming services as well as the Funimation produced DVDs and Blu-Rays. Of course, premieres will continue to be on the better cartoon show weekly (holidays aside) as always.

Meanwhile, the acclaim keeps on coming for Samurai Jack, as the season finale has received several nominations for the Annie Awards, including Best General Audience Animated Television/Broadcast Production, Outstanding Achievement for Character Design in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production, Outstanding Achievement for Production Design in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production, and Outstanding Achievement for Editorial in an Animated Television / Broadcast Production. The ceremonies will take place on February 3rd and we wish Jack the best of luck.

Toonami has had quite a history of helping many top Shonen shows reach prominence and with Black Clover now on the better cartoon show, there are high hopes for Black Clover to reach similar prominence as well. Considered to be a “spiritual successor” to Naruto by some (or a mix of Harry Potter and Naruto), Asta and Yuno’s quest to the top of the wizard world has had many intrigued, as the Black Clover franchise is growing to become one of Shonen Jump’s newest hits, with over 4.8 million manga copies in print, and since the anime premiered in Japan back in October, the series has seen respectable ratings and streaming numbers on Crunchyroll and FunimationNow, all culminating in Toonami picking up the show for TV broadcast. Not everyone is pleased however, with some critics have complained about the show’s story and tropes being too formulaic and cliched to other hit Shonen Jump shows, among other things, some going as far as calling it one of the worst manga series to be released in 2016.

Yet despite this, Black Clover against all odds, found its way to the better cartoon show, beating out favorites such as My Hero Academia, Mob Psycho 100, and the Blue Exorcist Kyoto Saga to do so. Of course, the last part isn’t exactly true, contrary to semi-popular opinion, Black Clover isn’t here simply because Toonami chose it over the other three, and in a perfect world, those three shows would be airing alongside each other with Black Clover in the block.

Despite that the above mentioned shows were well requested and Toonami has looked into them, internal politics with the distributors and competition can sometimes hurt or stop a show’s chances of making it to the better cartoon show, including legal rights hitting a snag that forbid a TV broadcast (ex. Macross, Megas XLR, IGPX before 2013), negotiations between the distributors fail (ex. when JoJo’s was with Warner Bros, they didn’t negotiate with Toonami unless they paid a fortune for TV rights), or in the case of the above three shows, competitors (ie. Hulu or Netflix) outbidding Toonami for exclusive premiere rights. When asked regarding My Hero Academia’s possibilities a few months ago, Jason DeMarco responded: “I don't know if we'll NEVER get it, but we can't get it right now. A good rule of thumb: if something premieres on Netflix, you probably won't see it on TV any time soon....”. There might be more to it than these reasons, but regardless, as with the situations with Sailor Moon Crystal and previously InuYasha The Final Act and Blue Exorcist season 1, Toonami will have to wait perhaps several years for those deals to expire to get its turn at airing those shows, assuming if there’s still interest by then. With Toonami’s success in helping to rejuvenate the anime industry, other companies have wanted their slice of the anime pie, something we also saw during the block’s previous golden age. It stinks, but as the old saying goes, you can’t win em all.

Meanwhile, while we’re not privy to knowing how Toonami negotiates with the anime industry for shows, with Black Clover’s creators and the Toonami crew seeing the show’s potential and growing fanbase, it’s safe to say that having the show air on Toonami with its prestige was a big priority for them and negotiations turned out to be successful. Say what you want about Shueisha and FUNimation trying to push the show to success, but to use a sports term, they wanted it more and got it done when it mattered most, while you could say My Hero Academia came up short. Remember, if you really want to see a show make it to Toonami, let them and the appropriate distributors know you want to see it there at their request outlets (ex. Toonami’s Facebook and Tumblr message boxes, among other places). Sometimes things may not work out, but with enough demand, at least you’re showing that they should really consider it. It sure worked for Black Clover and every show that has aired here.

Time will tell how Black Clover pans out, but all I can say is if you’re liking what you’re seeing, continue to enjoy this show, perhaps check out the manga as well, and look forward to its future potential. If not, all I can say is to vote with your eyeballs and stop watching and giving it publicity. There’s a reason why Sword Art Online succeeded and likely will return despite vocal minority discontent while One Piece ultimately left Toonami despite all the love it has gotten. If a Season 2 of Black Clover ultimately does happen with a Simuldub on Toonami in the future, it will be because of the support of the fans. If not, the critics will be proven right and we'll move on to the next big thing. Black Clover is a show with plenty of potential ahead, and whether it could become the next Naruto and forms its own legacy or not during these 51 weeks and perhaps beyond, the viewers will be the ones who get to decide that.

Tune in tonight as Hunter x Hunter begins the Chimera Ant arc, among other great moments. Until then, stay gold as always.

Legend: The shows listed are ordered based on their appearance on the schedule. Show trends are listed in bold. The number next to the listed trend represents the highest it trended on the list (not counting the promoted trend), judging only by the images placed in the rundown. For the Twitter tweet counts, the listed number of tweets are also sorely based on the highest number shown based on the images on the rundown.

United States Trends:

Toonami/#Toonami [#5]

#DragonBallSuper [#7]

#DBZKai [#8]

#BlackClover [#4]

#JoJosBizarreAdventure [#5]

#GundamIBO [#5]

#HunterXHunter (Also during the West Coast airing) [#5]

#LupinThe3rd [#5]

#Shippuden [#5]

#OutlawStar [#6]

#CowboyBebop (Also during the West Coast airing) [#5]

#GhostInTheShell [#8]

Tweet Counts:

Toonami [7,882 tweets]

#Toonami [4,342 tweets]

#DragonBallSuper [6,839 tweets]

#DBZKai [1,317 tweets]

#BlackClover [3,098 tweets]

#GundamIBO [1,221 tweets]

#HunterXHunter [3,609 tweets]

#LupinThe3rd [1,023 tweets]

Tumblr Trends:

#toonami

#dragon ball super

#jojos bizarre adventure

#jjba

#hunter x hunter

Notes and Other Statistics:

#HunterXHunter: @WhoTrendedIT reported that @tsunderica started the trend in the US.

#CowboyBebop: @WhoTrendedIT reported that @MaryEMcGlynn started the trend in the US.

Special thanks to @coreymbarnes, @jmb70056, and others I forgot to mention for spotting some of the trends on this list.

Click here to see our moments section featuring some of the notable tweets of the night.

Gundam is life. Only Toonami on [adult swim] on Cartoon Network.

#Toonami #Adult Swim #Cartoon Network #Toonami Trending Rundown #Black Clover #Dragon Ball Super #Dragon Ball Z #DBZ #DBZ Kai #JoJo's Bizarre Adventure #Gundam #Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans #Gundam IBO #Hunter x Hunter #Lupin the Third #Lupin the 3rd #Naruto #Naruto Shippuden #Outlaw Star #Cowboy Bebop #Ghost In The Shell

[networkingdefinition]

Chimneys Quotes

Official Website: Chimneys Quotes

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• A cold blast hit him and he laughed at the sting as he stepped outside, surveyed the night sky, and drank deeply. Such a good liar he was. Such a good one. Everyone thought he was fine because he’d camo’d his little problems. He wore a Sox hat to hide the eye twitch. Set his wristwatch to go off every half hour to beat back the dream. Ate though he wasn’t angry. Laughed though he found nothing funny. And he’d always smoked like a chimney. – J.R. Ward • A factory can be closed down, its chimneys smokeless, waiting for the worker to come back to his job, and all will be peaceful. But the moment workers are imported, and the striker sees his own place usurped, there is bound to be trouble. – Charles M. Schwab • A legal broom’s a moral chimney-sweeper, And that’s the reason he himself’s so dirty – Lord Byron • A Mocking Bird regularly resorts to the south angle of a chimney top and salutes us with sweetest notes from the rising of the moon until about midnight. – John James Audubon • A picture without sky has no glory. This present, unless we see gleaming beyond it the eternal calm of the heavens, above the tossing tree tops with withering leaves, and the smoky chimneys, is a poor thing for our eyes to gaze at, or our hearts to love, or our hands to toil on. – Alexander MacLaren • Accurately recalling an entire day of fishing is like trying to push smoke back down a chimney, so you settle on these specific moments. – John Gierach • And further, I tell you that the Jew is right, when he acts as he does – because we are too timid to be as German as the Jew is Jewish! … It happened at the time of the [Bavarian] Soviet Republic: When the unleashed subhumans rambled murdering through the streets, the deputies hid behind a chimney in the Bavarian parliament. – Julius Streicher • And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen…our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself…and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds. – Wendell Berry • And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer–apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude. – Nathaniel Hawthorne • Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • As artists and traders in medieval cities began to form organizations, they instituted tough initiation ceremonies. Journeymen in Bergen, Norway, were shoved down a chimney, thrown three times into the sea, and soundly whipped. Such rites made belonging to the guild or corporation more precious to those who were accepted, and survived. – Isaac Asimov • As for me, I rarely write a song. But when I do write a song, like “Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects,” which came to me at three a.m. one morning, on a whim – I get a percentage. • At present I am using a good sized bedroom in the 2 bedroom house here as a studio, and it is large enough to step back from my canvases, and has a good north light. It should serve very well until I can afford to have the storeroom half of the back building lined and insulated and a chimney put in. That may be in about two years. – E. J. Hughes

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Chimney', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_chimney').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_chimney img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Back up shall we? When my brother, the crazy chicken warrior, turned into a falcon and went up the pyramid’s chimney with his new friend, the fruit bat, he left me playing nurse to two very wounded people—which I didn’t appreciate, and which I wasn’t particularly good at. – Rick Riordan • Been having a fight with your blankets, Septimus?” A familiar voice echoed down the chimney. “Looks like you lost,” the voice continued with a chuckle. “Not wise to take on a pair of blankets, lad. One, maybe, but two blankets always gang up on you. Vicious things, blankets. – Angie Sage • Brands were a by-product of having great products and communicating them well to people. Power stations that generate a lot of electricity probably have a lot of steam coming out of the chimneys. That doesn’t mean to say that the engineers stand around working out how to make more steam. – Hans Snook

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Christmas Pie Lo! now is come our joyfull’st feast! Let every man be jolly; Each room with ivy leaves is dressed, And every post with holly. Now all our neighbours’ chimneys smoke, And Christmas blocks are burning; Their ovens they with bakemeats choke, And all their spits are turning. Without the door let sorrow lie, And if for cold it hap to die, We’ll bury it in a Christmas pie, And ever more be merry. – George Wither • Even the pictures I was doing at college – a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep – the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through – it’s exactly what I do now. – Tim Walker • Every head turned to see two more security guards appear, each holding a Bagshaw by the back of the neck (which might have been considerably less conspicuous had the Bagshaws not been dressed as chimney sweeps). Kat turned back to Hale. ‘The Mary Poppins?’ ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time. – Ally Carter • Every year, dads will dress up as Santa and try to surprise their kids by coming down the chimney, and every year, a dad gets stuck and dies. -Kyle Dunnigan • Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun Nor the furious winters’ rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages. Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. – William Shakespeare • From whence it happens, that they which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little sums into a greater, without considering whether those little sums were rightly cast up or not; and at last finding the error visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to clear themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their books, as birds that entering by the chimney, and finding themselves enclosed in a chamber, flutter at the false light of a glass window, for want of wit to consider which way they came in. – Thomas Hobbes • Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel. – Benjamin Franklin • Golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers come to dust. – William Shakespeare • Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. – Nathaniel Hawthorne • Have you noticed how nobody ever looks up? Nobody looks at chimneys, or trees against the sky, or the tops of buildings. Everybody just looks down at the pavement or their shoes. The whole world could pass them by and most people wouldn’t notice. – Julie Andrews • He describes it as a large apartment, with a red brick floor and a capacious chimney; the ceiling garnished with hams, sides of bacon, and ropes of onions. – Charles Dickens • I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat – O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou should’st see how fat I would be! But must thou sit and I stand? Come down, with a vengeance! – Christopher Marlowe • I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly. – Steve Martin • I have discovered the secret of happiness – it is work, either with the hands or the head. The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy. – John Burroughs • I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there’s a house under there, and I’m pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That’s how I feel. It’s like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: ‘If I sit down and do this, everything will come out okay.’ – Stephen King • I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naive again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth. – Gary Shteyngart • I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear. How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry Every black’ning Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls. But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot’s curse Blasts the new born Infant’s tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. – William Blake • I was lookin’ high an’ low for them Reds everywhere, I was lookin’ in the sink an’ underneath the chair. I looked way up my chimney hole, I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl. – Bob Dylan • I wish we could grow up about it, I’m sure we are contributing to global warming, and we must do all we can to reduce that, but our climate has always changed. The Romans had vineyards in Yorkshire. We’re all on this bandwagon of ‘Ban the 4×4 in Fulham’. Why didn’t we have global warming during the Industrial Revolution? In those days you couldn’t have seen across the street for all the carbon emissions and the crap coming out of the chimneys. – Alan Titchmarsh • I’d like to start with the chimney jokes – I’ve got a stack of them. The first one is on the house. – Tim Vine • If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • If SANTA CLAUS came down the chimney in a f**king jogging suit, you wouldn’t even know it was him. – Wayne Coyne • If you cannot avoid a quarrel with a blackguard, let your lawyer manage it, rather than yourself. No man sweeps his own chimney, but employs a chimney-sweeper, who has no objection to dirty work, because it is his trade. – Charles Caleb Colton • If you really think there’s a Santa, why don’t you sit on the front steps all night in the freezing cold and see if he climbs down any chimneys tonight. Good luck. And since we’re a family that isn’t lucky enough to have a chimney, how would Santa get into our house? Does he bring a locksmith with him? And it probably would have to be a Jewish locksmith, because a Christian locksmith is going to want to be home with his family. And how many Jewish locksmiths are there? None. – Lewis Black • I’m not an author, I’m a writer, that’s all I am. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney. – Mickey Spillane • In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are halfconcealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends…. We enjoy now, not an Oriental, but a Boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the shadow of motes in the sunbeams. – Henry David Thoreau • Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world. The dragons are all dead and the lance grows rusty in the chimney corner. … About the only sporting proposition that remains unimpaired by the relentless domestication of a once free-living human species is the war against those ferocious little fellow creatures, which lurk in dark corners and stalk us in the bodies of rats, mice and all kinds of domestic animals; which fly and crawl with the insects, and waylay us in our food and drink and even in our love – Hans Zinsser • Is Adrian here?” “Who?” “Adrian. Tall. Brown hair. Green eyes.” She frowned. “Do you mean Jet?” “I … I’m not sure. Does he smoke like a chimney?” The girl nodded sagely. “Yup. You must mean Jet. – Richelle Mead • It is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel. – Benjamin Franklin • It is far more probable that our senses should deceive us, than that an old woman should be carried up a chimney on a broom stick; and that it is far less astonishing that witnesses should lie, than that witches should perform the acts that were alleged. – Michel de Montaigne • It is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were all to learn what it meant.) – Primo Levi • Its tall chimneys throw up black smoke, impregnating everything with soot, and the miners’ faces as they traveled the streets were also imbued with that ancient melancholy of smoke, unifying everything with its grayish monotones, a perfect coupling with the gray mountain days. – Che Guevara • It’s understandable that people are keeping one eye on the pot and another up the chimney. – Kevin Keegan • Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine… The summer hath his joys, And winter his delights; Though love and all his pleasures are but toys, They shorten tedious nights. – Thomas Campion • Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine; Let well-tuned words amaze With harmony divine. – Thomas Campion • Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and ’twill out at the key-hole; stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney. – William Shakespeare • Maybe that whole love thing is just a grown-up version of Santa Claus; just a myth we’ve been fed since childhood. So, we keep buying magazines, joining clubs, and doing therapy and watching movies with hit pop songs played over love montages all in a pathetic attempt to explain why our love Santa keeps getting caught in the chimney. – Meg Ryan • Morality has in the past made progress when we broadened the category of things we weren’t permitted to harm (animals, ‘infidels’); saw through some delusions and rationalisations about what harms are good for people themselves (prison punishment, hysterectomies for unhappy 1950s wives); and readjusted our for-the-good of others criteria so as to demand only reasonable sacrifices (ceasing to use children as handy chimney sweeps). – Catherine Wilson • Most religion-mongers have bated their paradises with a bit of toasted cheese. They have tempted the body with large promises of possessions in their transmortal El Dorado. Sancho Panza will not quit his chimney-corner, but under promise of imaginary islands to govern. – James Russell Lowell • My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. – Diane Setterfield • My neighbor’s not even listening to me. He’s all excited about some garden hose he bought at Brookstone. He’s convinced it was designed by NASA. “Actually, it’s got two nozzles, one for the hot and one for the…” Really? Is it long enough to go around both our necks and the chimney so we can tandem jump off of this? That’s all I really care about you and your little garden hose. – Bill Burr • My once-keen analytical mind has become so dulled by endless hours of baking in the hot sun, thrashing about in tight chimneys, pulling at impossibly heavy loads, freezing my ass off…. so that now my mental state is comparable to that of a Peruvian Indian, well stoked on coca leaves. – Warren G. Harding • Nick, fetch my car, fetch my clothes, sweep the chimney, make my bed, watch my psychopath, fetch my slippers.’ Yeah, I’ll fetch those slippers and stick them someplace real uncomfortable. I swear, my mother should have named me Fido. (Nick) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • Nick, fetch my car, fetch my clothes, sweep the chimney, make my bed, watch my psychopath, fetch my slippers. – Sherrilyn Kenyon • No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. – H. P. Lovecraft • No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? – Bertrand Russell • Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. (Dreams In The Witch-House) – H. P. Lovecraft • Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush! – Agatha Christie • Of all the ruinous and desolate places my uncle had ever beheld, this was the most so. It looked as if it had once been a large house of entertainment; but the roof had fallen in, in many places, and the stairs were steep, rugged, and broken. There was a huge fire-place in the room into which they walked, and the chimney was blackened with smoke; but no warm blaze lighted it up now. The white feathery dust of burnt wood was still strewed over the hearth, but the stove was cold, and all was dark and gloomy. – Charles Dickens • One day the wind blew through the town, and oh, how merry it was! It whistled down the chimneys, and scampered round the corners, and sang in the tree tops. “Come and dance, come and dance, come and dance with me,” that is what it seemed to say. – Maud Lindsay • One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way. – Vincent Van Gogh • One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent. – Wallace Stevens • Our secret thoughts – do they ever show up? The small flame of our soul can be burning hot, but no one comes to its warmth. Passersby see only a small whiff going through the chimney. Don’t we need to take care of that flame, cherish it and patiently wait until someone will come and sit at it, do we? – Irving Stone • P.S. If it’s not a secret, will you tell me how you got my dollhouse inside our living room last Christmas? I know its too big to fit down the chimney. I measured. – Joanne Fluke • Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney’s shadow. – Denise Levertov • She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, “Where did you come from? How did you get here?” And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own. – David Almond • She grew more and more silent about what really mattered. She curled inside herself like one of those black chimney brushes, the little shellfish you see on the beach, and you touch them, and then go inside and don’t come out. – Janet Frame • She’d become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do. And she’d taken to it well. She’d sworn that if she did indeed ever find herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she’d beat herself to death with her own umbrella. – Terry Pratchett • Silkes and Satins put out the fire in the chimney. – George Herbert • Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young. – Rebecca Harding Davis • Smell and taste are in fact but a single composite sense, whose laboratory is the mouth and its chimney the nose. – Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin • Smoke like a chimney, work like a horse, eat without thinking, go for a walk only in really pleasant company. – Albert Einstein • Snowstorms may yet whiten fields and gardens, high winds may howl about the trees and chimneys, but the little blue heralds persistently proclaim from the orchard and the garden that the spring procession has begun to move. – Neltje Blanchan • Soldiers in peace are like chimneys in summer. – William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley • Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room As though dried straw, and if we turn about The bare chimney is gone black out Because the work had finished in that flare. – William Butler Yeats • Some critics are like chimney-sweepers; they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from their nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing from the top of the house as if they had built it. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Someday I’ll wish upon a star And wake up where the clouds Are far behind me Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops that’s where you’ll find me – Eva Cassidy • Sometimes, looking up at Sophiatown… I have felt I was looking at an Italian village somewhere in Umbria. For you do ‘look up’ at Sophiatown, and in the evening light, across the blue-grey haze of smoke from braziers and chimneys, against a saffron sky, you see close-packed, red-roofed little houses. …And above it all you see the Church of Christ the King, its tower visible north, south, east, and west. – Trevor Huddleston • Souldiers in peace are like chimneys in summer. – George Herbert • Such Roots as are soft, your best way is to dry in the Sun, or else hang them up in the Chimney corner upon a string; as for such as are hard you may dry them any where. – Nicholas Culpeper • The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted… The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees. – Ronald Reagan • The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens; evenafter the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent. – Henry David Thoreau • The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for — for what? Someday we’ll know. – Edward Abbey • The city was asleep on its right side and shaking with violent nightmares. Long puffs of snoring came out of the chimneys. Its feet were sticking out because the clouds did not cover it altogether. There was a hole in them and the white feathers were falling out. The city had untied all its bridges like so many buttons to feel at ease. Wherever there was a lamplight the city scratched itself until it went out. – Anais Nin • The clouds were flying fast, the wind was coming up in gusts, banging some neighboring shutters that had broken loose, twirling the rusty chimney-cowls and weathercocks, and rushing round and round a confined adjacent churchyard as if it had a mind to blow the dead citizens out of their graves. The low thunder, muttering in all quarters of the sky at once, seemed to threaten vengeance for this attempted desecration, and to mutter, “Let them rest! Let them rest! – Charles Dickens • The experienced illustrator subscribes to the principle of the application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. Should inspiration whisk down your chimney, be at your table. The first ten thousand drawings are the hardest. Put another way, you have ten thousand bad drawings within and should expel them as quickly as possible. – Wallace Tripp • The Gingerbread House has four walls, a roof, a door, a window, and a chimney. It is decorated with many sweet culinary delights on the outside.But on the inside there is nothing-only the bare gingerbread walls.It is not a real house-not until you decide to add a Gingerbread Room.That’s when the stories can move in.They will stay in residence for as long as you abstain from taking the first gingerbread bite. – Vera Nazarian • The image by Barry Blitt of Barack Obama and Michelle in the White House with him dressed as a terrorist, her dressed as an Angela Davis character, a flag burning in the chimney, a portrait of Bin Laden on the wall is an image I’m extremely proud of. – Francoise Mouly • The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body. • The rain and hail pattered against the glass; the chimneys quaked and rocked; the crazy casement rattled with the wind, as though an impatient hand inside were striving to burst it open. But no hand was there, and it opened no more. – Charles Dickens • The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful? – Annie Dillard • The sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet and sloppy. The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down, as if it had not even the spirit to pour. – Charles Dickens • The south-wind strengthens to a gale, / Across the moon the clouds fly fast, / The house is smitten as with a flail, / The chimney shudders to the blast. – Robert Bridges • The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. – Clement Clarke Moore • The thing to remember about love affairs,” says Simone, “is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney.” … We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney,” explains Simone. And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead.” Simone swallows some wine. “Love affairs are like that,” she says. “They are all like that. – Lorrie Moore • The things I believed in dont exist any more. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now. – Cormac McCarthy • The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats. Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows’ Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked. – Ray Bradbury • The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps. – T. S. Eliot • The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap And seeing that it was a soft October night Curled once about the house, and fell asleep – T. S. Eliot • Their bodies will be raised from the dead as vessels for the soul-vessels of wrath. The soul will breathe hell-fire, and smoke and coal will seem to hang upon its burning lips, yea the face, eyes, and ears will seem to be chimneys and vents for the flame, and the smoke of the burning , which God, by His breath, hath kindled therein, and upon, them, which will be held one in another, to the great torment and distress of each other. – John Bunyan • Their houses are all built in the shape of tents, with very high chimneys. – Christopher Columbus • There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world weary, will weary, and one day he suffocated through his excessive pity. – Friedrich Nietzsche • There is in every American, I think, something of the old Daniel Boone – who, when he could see the smoke from another chimney, felt himself too crowded and moved further out into the wilderness. – Hubert H. Humphrey • There’s no way the new chimney will fall down, Lu. Not with you in charge. It wouldn’t dare. – Angie Sage • This is a valley of ashes–a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. – F. Scott Fitzgerald • Tis easier to build two chimneys, then to maintaine one. – George Herbert • To thousands of elder women in the late sixties and early seventies [the private women’s club movement] came like a new gospel ofactivity and service. They had reared their children and seen them take flight; moreover, they had fought through the war, their hearts in the field, their fingers plying needle and thread. They had been active in committees and commissions, the country over; had learned to work with and beside men, finding joy and companionship and inspiration in such work. How could they go back to the chimney-corner life of the fifties? – Laura E. Richards • Too much! Wait till you have lived here longer. Look down the valley! See the cloud of a hundred chimneys that overshadows it! I tell you that the cloud of murder hangs thicker and lower than that over the heads of the people. It is the Valley of Fear, the Valley of Death. The terror is in the hearts of the people from the dusk to the dawn. Wait, young man, and you will learn for yourself. – Arthur Conan Doyle • Two bones fell down my chimney and into the bedroom this morning. Hysterical thing to happen to a thriller writer. Murderous ravens perhaps? – Tobsha Learner • Walking the streets on winter nights kept him warm, despite the cold nocturnal passions of uprising winds. His footsteps led between trade-marked houses, two up and two down, with digital chimneys like pigs’ tits on the rooftops sending up heat and smoke into the cold trough of a windy sky. Stars hid like snipers, taking aim now and again when clouds gave them a loophole. Winter was an easy time for him to hide his secrets, for each dark street patted his shoulder and became a friend, and the gaseous eye of each lamp glowed unwinking as he passed. – Alan Sillitoe • We all ought to understand we’re on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn’t do kids any harm for a few years but it isn’t smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins. – Andy Rooney • We are constituted a good deal like chickens, which, taken from the hen, and put in a basket of cotton in the chimney-corner, willoften peep till they die, nevertheless; but if you put in a book, or anything heavy, which will press down the cotton, and feel like the hen, they go to sleep directly. – Henry David Thoreau • We came to the house, and it is an old house, full of great chimneys where wood is burnt on ancient dogs upon the hearth, and grim portraits (some of them with grim legends, too) lower distrustfully from the oaken panels of the walls. – Charles Dickens • We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiraling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind. – Madeleine L’Engle • We launch our souls from the cannons of art and discipline, and on any one night, hovering over the chimney tops of Europe, halfway to the stars, there are armies of brightly spinning spirits that have risen like fireworks, tethered to the souls of those men and women who, by reflection, mortification, and devotion, effortlessly outdazzle kings. – Mark Helprin • Westminster Abbey, the Tower, a steeple, one church, and then another, presented themselves to our view; and we could now plainly distinguish the high round chimneys on the tops of the houses, which yet seemed to us to form an innumerable number of smaller spires, or steeples. – Karl Philipp Moritz • What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? – Diane Setterfield • When an alluring woman comes in at the door,” warningly traced the austere Kien-fi on the margin of his well-known essay, “discretion may be found up the chimney”. It is incredible that beneath this ever-timely reminder an obscure disciple should have added the words: “The wiser the sage, the more profound the folly. – Ernest Bramah • When I walk across my living room from my chimney to my window, it takes me 10 seconds, but for a bird it takes one second, and for oxygen zero seconds! – Jean-Claude Van Damme • When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. – Jonathan Safran Foer • When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep. So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep. – William Blake • When we hold onto the negative in ourselves it comes with endless guilt. We hold onto a lifetime of floating visions and regrets about what we should have done or should have become. Conscience recognizes wrong and tries to atone. But guilt turns into resentment. Conscience brings us closer to each other; guilt drives us apart. Create a new feeling. Every time guilt settles in your stomach, write “I forgive” on a piece of paper. Send it up the chimney, tear it up and flush it, put it in the garbage. Don’t eat it. – Jennifer James • When we talk of architecture, people usually think of something static; this is wrong. What we are thinking of is an architecture similar to the dynamic and musical architecture achieved by the Futurist musician Pratella. Architecture is found in the movement of colours, of smoke from a chimney and in metallic structures, when they are expressed in states of mind which are violent and chaotic. – Carlo Carra • When you were sleeping on the sofa I put my ear to your ear and listened to the echo of your dreams. That is the ocean I want to dive in, merge with the bright fish, plankton and pirate ships. I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like you and ask them the questions I would ask you. Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smoke rising from a chimney? Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing? I don’t wish I was in your arms, I just wish I was peddling a bicycle toward your arms. – Jeffrey McDaniel • Where you thinke there is bacon, there is no Chimney. – George Herbert • With a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you; with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner. – Philip Sidney • With gas cookers and chip pans in every kitchen, the chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down. The second technique was the ever popular chimney fire and number three had to be the drunken cigarette drop on the carpet. Mind you, why they’d be cooking chips at this hour was anyone’s guess. – Adrian McKinty • Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions. – Storm Jameson • You can’t build a chimney from the top, you know. – Marian Anderson • You have these ‘hot towers’, tropical storm clouds acting like chimneys to carry heat to the upper atmosphere. – Peter May • Your goal is to achieve the best results by following their wishes. If they want you to build a house upside down standing on its chimney, it’s up to you to do it. – Richard Morris Hunt

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[equitiesstocks]

Chimneys Quotes

Official Website: Chimneys Quotes

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• A cold blast hit him and he laughed at the sting as he stepped outside, surveyed the night sky, and drank deeply. Such a good liar he was. Such a good one. Everyone thought he was fine because he’d camo’d his little problems. He wore a Sox hat to hide the eye twitch. Set his wristwatch to go off every half hour to beat back the dream. Ate though he wasn’t angry. Laughed though he found nothing funny. And he’d always smoked like a chimney. – J.R. Ward • A factory can be closed down, its chimneys smokeless, waiting for the worker to come back to his job, and all will be peaceful. But the moment workers are imported, and the striker sees his own place usurped, there is bound to be trouble. – Charles M. Schwab • A legal broom’s a moral chimney-sweeper, And that’s the reason he himself’s so dirty – Lord Byron • A Mocking Bird regularly resorts to the south angle of a chimney top and salutes us with sweetest notes from the rising of the moon until about midnight. – John James Audubon • A picture without sky has no glory. This present, unless we see gleaming beyond it the eternal calm of the heavens, above the tossing tree tops with withering leaves, and the smoky chimneys, is a poor thing for our eyes to gaze at, or our hearts to love, or our hands to toil on. – Alexander MacLaren • Accurately recalling an entire day of fishing is like trying to push smoke back down a chimney, so you settle on these specific moments. – John Gierach • And further, I tell you that the Jew is right, when he acts as he does – because we are too timid to be as German as the Jew is Jewish! … It happened at the time of the [Bavarian] Soviet Republic: When the unleashed subhumans rambled murdering through the streets, the deputies hid behind a chimney in the Bavarian parliament. – Julius Streicher • And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen…our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself…and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds. – Wendell Berry • And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer–apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude. – Nathaniel Hawthorne • Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • As artists and traders in medieval cities began to form organizations, they instituted tough initiation ceremonies. Journeymen in Bergen, Norway, were shoved down a chimney, thrown three times into the sea, and soundly whipped. Such rites made belonging to the guild or corporation more precious to those who were accepted, and survived. – Isaac Asimov • As for me, I rarely write a song. But when I do write a song, like “Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects,” which came to me at three a.m. one morning, on a whim – I get a percentage. • At present I am using a good sized bedroom in the 2 bedroom house here as a studio, and it is large enough to step back from my canvases, and has a good north light. It should serve very well until I can afford to have the storeroom half of the back building lined and insulated and a chimney put in. That may be in about two years. – E. J. Hughes

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Chimney', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_chimney').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_chimney img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Back up shall we? When my brother, the crazy chicken warrior, turned into a falcon and went up the pyramid’s chimney with his new friend, the fruit bat, he left me playing nurse to two very wounded people—which I didn’t appreciate, and which I wasn’t particularly good at. – Rick Riordan • Been having a fight with your blankets, Septimus?” A familiar voice echoed down the chimney. “Looks like you lost,” the voice continued with a chuckle. “Not wise to take on a pair of blankets, lad. One, maybe, but two blankets always gang up on you. Vicious things, blankets. – Angie Sage • Brands were a by-product of having great products and communicating them well to people. Power stations that generate a lot of electricity probably have a lot of steam coming out of the chimneys. That doesn’t mean to say that the engineers stand around working out how to make more steam. – Hans Snook

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Christmas Pie Lo! now is come our joyfull’st feast! Let every man be jolly; Each room with ivy leaves is dressed, And every post with holly. Now all our neighbours’ chimneys smoke, And Christmas blocks are burning; Their ovens they with bakemeats choke, And all their spits are turning. Without the door let sorrow lie, And if for cold it hap to die, We’ll bury it in a Christmas pie, And ever more be merry. – George Wither • Even the pictures I was doing at college – a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep – the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through – it’s exactly what I do now. – Tim Walker • Every head turned to see two more security guards appear, each holding a Bagshaw by the back of the neck (which might have been considerably less conspicuous had the Bagshaws not been dressed as chimney sweeps). Kat turned back to Hale. ‘The Mary Poppins?’ ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time. – Ally Carter • Every year, dads will dress up as Santa and try to surprise their kids by coming down the chimney, and every year, a dad gets stuck and dies. -Kyle Dunnigan • Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun Nor the furious winters’ rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages. Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. – William Shakespeare • From whence it happens, that they which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little sums into a greater, without considering whether those little sums were rightly cast up or not; and at last finding the error visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to clear themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their books, as birds that entering by the chimney, and finding themselves enclosed in a chamber, flutter at the false light of a glass window, for want of wit to consider which way they came in. – Thomas Hobbes • Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel. – Benjamin Franklin • Golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers come to dust. – William Shakespeare • Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. – Nathaniel Hawthorne • Have you noticed how nobody ever looks up? Nobody looks at chimneys, or trees against the sky, or the tops of buildings. Everybody just looks down at the pavement or their shoes. The whole world could pass them by and most people wouldn’t notice. – Julie Andrews • He describes it as a large apartment, with a red brick floor and a capacious chimney; the ceiling garnished with hams, sides of bacon, and ropes of onions. – Charles Dickens • I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat – O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou should’st see how fat I would be! But must thou sit and I stand? Come down, with a vengeance! – Christopher Marlowe • I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly. – Steve Martin • I have discovered the secret of happiness – it is work, either with the hands or the head. The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy. – John Burroughs • I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there’s a house under there, and I’m pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That’s how I feel. It’s like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: ‘If I sit down and do this, everything will come out okay.’ – Stephen King • I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naive again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth. – Gary Shteyngart • I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear. How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry Every black’ning Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls. But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot’s curse Blasts the new born Infant’s tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. – William Blake • I was lookin’ high an’ low for them Reds everywhere, I was lookin’ in the sink an’ underneath the chair. I looked way up my chimney hole, I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl. – Bob Dylan • I wish we could grow up about it, I’m sure we are contributing to global warming, and we must do all we can to reduce that, but our climate has always changed. The Romans had vineyards in Yorkshire. We’re all on this bandwagon of ‘Ban the 4×4 in Fulham’. Why didn’t we have global warming during the Industrial Revolution? In those days you couldn’t have seen across the street for all the carbon emissions and the crap coming out of the chimneys. – Alan Titchmarsh • I’d like to start with the chimney jokes – I’ve got a stack of them. The first one is on the house. – Tim Vine • If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • If SANTA CLAUS came down the chimney in a f**king jogging suit, you wouldn’t even know it was him. – Wayne Coyne • If you cannot avoid a quarrel with a blackguard, let your lawyer manage it, rather than yourself. No man sweeps his own chimney, but employs a chimney-sweeper, who has no objection to dirty work, because it is his trade. – Charles Caleb Colton • If you really think there’s a Santa, why don’t you sit on the front steps all night in the freezing cold and see if he climbs down any chimneys tonight. Good luck. And since we’re a family that isn’t lucky enough to have a chimney, how would Santa get into our house? Does he bring a locksmith with him? And it probably would have to be a Jewish locksmith, because a Christian locksmith is going to want to be home with his family. And how many Jewish locksmiths are there? None. – Lewis Black • I’m not an author, I’m a writer, that’s all I am. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney. – Mickey Spillane • In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are halfconcealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends…. We enjoy now, not an Oriental, but a Boreal leisure, around warm stoves and fireplaces, and watch the shadow of motes in the sunbeams. – Henry David Thoreau • Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world. The dragons are all dead and the lance grows rusty in the chimney corner. … About the only sporting proposition that remains unimpaired by the relentless domestication of a once free-living human species is the war against those ferocious little fellow creatures, which lurk in dark corners and stalk us in the bodies of rats, mice and all kinds of domestic animals; which fly and crawl with the insects, and waylay us in our food and drink and even in our love – Hans Zinsser • Is Adrian here?” “Who?” “Adrian. Tall. Brown hair. Green eyes.” She frowned. “Do you mean Jet?” “I … I’m not sure. Does he smoke like a chimney?” The girl nodded sagely. “Yup. You must mean Jet. – Richelle Mead • It is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel. – Benjamin Franklin • It is far more probable that our senses should deceive us, than that an old woman should be carried up a chimney on a broom stick; and that it is far less astonishing that witnesses should lie, than that witches should perform the acts that were alleged. – Michel de Montaigne • It is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were all to learn what it meant.) – Primo Levi • Its tall chimneys throw up black smoke, impregnating everything with soot, and the miners’ faces as they traveled the streets were also imbued with that ancient melancholy of smoke, unifying everything with its grayish monotones, a perfect coupling with the gray mountain days. – Che Guevara • It’s understandable that people are keeping one eye on the pot and another up the chimney. – Kevin Keegan • Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine… The summer hath his joys, And winter his delights; Though love and all his pleasures are but toys, They shorten tedious nights. – Thomas Campion • Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine; Let well-tuned words amaze With harmony divine. – Thomas Campion • Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and ’twill out at the key-hole; stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney. – William Shakespeare • Maybe that whole love thing is just a grown-up version of Santa Claus; just a myth we’ve been fed since childhood. So, we keep buying magazines, joining clubs, and doing therapy and watching movies with hit pop songs played over love montages all in a pathetic attempt to explain why our love Santa keeps getting caught in the chimney. – Meg Ryan • Morality has in the past made progress when we broadened the category of things we weren’t permitted to harm (animals, ‘infidels’); saw through some delusions and rationalisations about what harms are good for people themselves (prison punishment, hysterectomies for unhappy 1950s wives); and readjusted our for-the-good of others criteria so as to demand only reasonable sacrifices (ceasing to use children as handy chimney sweeps). – Catherine Wilson • Most religion-mongers have bated their paradises with a bit of toasted cheese. They have tempted the body with large promises of possessions in their transmortal El Dorado. Sancho Panza will not quit his chimney-corner, but under promise of imaginary islands to govern. – James Russell Lowell • My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. – Diane Setterfield • My neighbor’s not even listening to me. He’s all excited about some garden hose he bought at Brookstone. He’s convinced it was designed by NASA. “Actually, it’s got two nozzles, one for the hot and one for the…” Really? Is it long enough to go around both our necks and the chimney so we can tandem jump off of this? That’s all I really care about you and your little garden hose. – Bill Burr • My once-keen analytical mind has become so dulled by endless hours of baking in the hot sun, thrashing about in tight chimneys, pulling at impossibly heavy loads, freezing my ass off…. so that now my mental state is comparable to that of a Peruvian Indian, well stoked on coca leaves. – Warren G. Harding • Nick, fetch my car, fetch my clothes, sweep the chimney, make my bed, watch my psychopath, fetch my slippers.’ Yeah, I’ll fetch those slippers and stick them someplace real uncomfortable. I swear, my mother should have named me Fido. (Nick) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • Nick, fetch my car, fetch my clothes, sweep the chimney, make my bed, watch my psychopath, fetch my slippers. – Sherrilyn Kenyon • No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. – H. P. Lovecraft • No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? – Bertrand Russell • Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. (Dreams In The Witch-House) – H. P. Lovecraft • Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush! – Agatha Christie • Of all the ruinous and desolate places my uncle had ever beheld, this was the most so. It looked as if it had once been a large house of entertainment; but the roof had fallen in, in many places, and the stairs were steep, rugged, and broken. There was a huge fire-place in the room into which they walked, and the chimney was blackened with smoke; but no warm blaze lighted it up now. The white feathery dust of burnt wood was still strewed over the hearth, but the stove was cold, and all was dark and gloomy. – Charles Dickens • One day the wind blew through the town, and oh, how merry it was! It whistled down the chimneys, and scampered round the corners, and sang in the tree tops. “Come and dance, come and dance, come and dance with me,” that is what it seemed to say. – Maud Lindsay • One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way. – Vincent Van Gogh • One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent. – Wallace Stevens • Our secret thoughts – do they ever show up? The small flame of our soul can be burning hot, but no one comes to its warmth. Passersby see only a small whiff going through the chimney. Don’t we need to take care of that flame, cherish it and patiently wait until someone will come and sit at it, do we? – Irving Stone • P.S. If it’s not a secret, will you tell me how you got my dollhouse inside our living room last Christmas? I know its too big to fit down the chimney. I measured. – Joanne Fluke • Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney’s shadow. – Denise Levertov • She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, “Where did you come from? How did you get here?” And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own. – David Almond • She grew more and more silent about what really mattered. She curled inside herself like one of those black chimney brushes, the little shellfish you see on the beach, and you touch them, and then go inside and don’t come out. – Janet Frame • She’d become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do. And she’d taken to it well. She’d sworn that if she did indeed ever find herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she’d beat herself to death with her own umbrella. – Terry Pratchett • Silkes and Satins put out the fire in the chimney. – George Herbert • Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young. – Rebecca Harding Davis • Smell and taste are in fact but a single composite sense, whose laboratory is the mouth and its chimney the nose. – Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin • Smoke like a chimney, work like a horse, eat without thinking, go for a walk only in really pleasant company. – Albert Einstein • Snowstorms may yet whiten fields and gardens, high winds may howl about the trees and chimneys, but the little blue heralds persistently proclaim from the orchard and the garden that the spring procession has begun to move. – Neltje Blanchan • Soldiers in peace are like chimneys in summer. – William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley • Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room As though dried straw, and if we turn about The bare chimney is gone black out Because the work had finished in that flare. – William Butler Yeats • Some critics are like chimney-sweepers; they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from their nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing from the top of the house as if they had built it. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Someday I’ll wish upon a star And wake up where the clouds Are far behind me Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops that’s where you’ll find me – Eva Cassidy • Sometimes, looking up at Sophiatown… I have felt I was looking at an Italian village somewhere in Umbria. For you do ‘look up’ at Sophiatown, and in the evening light, across the blue-grey haze of smoke from braziers and chimneys, against a saffron sky, you see close-packed, red-roofed little houses. …And above it all you see the Church of Christ the King, its tower visible north, south, east, and west. – Trevor Huddleston • Souldiers in peace are like chimneys in summer. – George Herbert • Such Roots as are soft, your best way is to dry in the Sun, or else hang them up in the Chimney corner upon a string; as for such as are hard you may dry them any where. – Nicholas Culpeper • The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted… The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees. – Ronald Reagan • The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens; evenafter the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent. – Henry David Thoreau • The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for — for what? Someday we’ll know. – Edward Abbey • The city was asleep on its right side and shaking with violent nightmares. Long puffs of snoring came out of the chimneys. Its feet were sticking out because the clouds did not cover it altogether. There was a hole in them and the white feathers were falling out. The city had untied all its bridges like so many buttons to feel at ease. Wherever there was a lamplight the city scratched itself until it went out. – Anais Nin • The clouds were flying fast, the wind was coming up in gusts, banging some neighboring shutters that had broken loose, twirling the rusty chimney-cowls and weathercocks, and rushing round and round a confined adjacent churchyard as if it had a mind to blow the dead citizens out of their graves. The low thunder, muttering in all quarters of the sky at once, seemed to threaten vengeance for this attempted desecration, and to mutter, “Let them rest! Let them rest! – Charles Dickens • The experienced illustrator subscribes to the principle of the application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. Should inspiration whisk down your chimney, be at your table. The first ten thousand drawings are the hardest. Put another way, you have ten thousand bad drawings within and should expel them as quickly as possible. – Wallace Tripp • The Gingerbread House has four walls, a roof, a door, a window, and a chimney. It is decorated with many sweet culinary delights on the outside.But on the inside there is nothing-only the bare gingerbread walls.It is not a real house-not until you decide to add a Gingerbread Room.That’s when the stories can move in.They will stay in residence for as long as you abstain from taking the first gingerbread bite. – Vera Nazarian • The image by Barry Blitt of Barack Obama and Michelle in the White House with him dressed as a terrorist, her dressed as an Angela Davis character, a flag burning in the chimney, a portrait of Bin Laden on the wall is an image I’m extremely proud of. – Francoise Mouly • The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body. • The rain and hail pattered against the glass; the chimneys quaked and rocked; the crazy casement rattled with the wind, as though an impatient hand inside were striving to burst it open. But no hand was there, and it opened no more. – Charles Dickens • The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful? – Annie Dillard • The sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet and sloppy. The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down, as if it had not even the spirit to pour. – Charles Dickens • The south-wind strengthens to a gale, / Across the moon the clouds fly fast, / The house is smitten as with a flail, / The chimney shudders to the blast. – Robert Bridges • The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. – Clement Clarke Moore • The thing to remember about love affairs,” says Simone, “is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney.” … We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney,” explains Simone. And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead.” Simone swallows some wine. “Love affairs are like that,” she says. “They are all like that. – Lorrie Moore • The things I believed in dont exist any more. It’s foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now. – Cormac McCarthy • The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats. Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows’ Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked. – Ray Bradbury • The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps. – T. S. Eliot • The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap And seeing that it was a soft October night Curled once about the house, and fell asleep – T. S. Eliot • Their bodies will be raised from the dead as vessels for the soul-vessels of wrath. The soul will breathe hell-fire, and smoke and coal will seem to hang upon its burning lips, yea the face, eyes, and ears will seem to be chimneys and vents for the flame, and the smoke of the burning , which God, by His breath, hath kindled therein, and upon, them, which will be held one in another, to the great torment and distress of each other. – John Bunyan • Their houses are all built in the shape of tents, with very high chimneys. – Christopher Columbus • There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world weary, will weary, and one day he suffocated through his excessive pity. – Friedrich Nietzsche • There is in every American, I think, something of the old Daniel Boone – who, when he could see the smoke from another chimney, felt himself too crowded and moved further out into the wilderness. – Hubert H. Humphrey • There’s no way the new chimney will fall down, Lu. Not with you in charge. It wouldn’t dare. – Angie Sage • This is a valley of ashes–a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. – F. Scott Fitzgerald • Tis easier to build two chimneys, then to maintaine one. – George Herbert • To thousands of elder women in the late sixties and early seventies [the private women’s club movement] came like a new gospel ofactivity and service. They had reared their children and seen them take flight; moreover, they had fought through the war, their hearts in the field, their fingers plying needle and thread. They had been active in committees and commissions, the country over; had learned to work with and beside men, finding joy and companionship and inspiration in such work. How could they go back to the chimney-corner life of the fifties? – Laura E. Richards • Too much! Wait till you have lived here longer. Look down the valley! See the cloud of a hundred chimneys that overshadows it! I tell you that the cloud of murder hangs thicker and lower than that over the heads of the people. It is the Valley of Fear, the Valley of Death. The terror is in the hearts of the people from the dusk to the dawn. Wait, young man, and you will learn for yourself. – Arthur Conan Doyle • Two bones fell down my chimney and into the bedroom this morning. Hysterical thing to happen to a thriller writer. Murderous ravens perhaps? – Tobsha Learner • Walking the streets on winter nights kept him warm, despite the cold nocturnal passions of uprising winds. His footsteps led between trade-marked houses, two up and two down, with digital chimneys like pigs’ tits on the rooftops sending up heat and smoke into the cold trough of a windy sky. Stars hid like snipers, taking aim now and again when clouds gave them a loophole. Winter was an easy time for him to hide his secrets, for each dark street patted his shoulder and became a friend, and the gaseous eye of each lamp glowed unwinking as he passed. – Alan Sillitoe • We all ought to understand we’re on our own. Believing in Santa Claus doesn’t do kids any harm for a few years but it isn’t smart for them to continue waiting all their lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins. – Andy Rooney • We are constituted a good deal like chickens, which, taken from the hen, and put in a basket of cotton in the chimney-corner, willoften peep till they die, nevertheless; but if you put in a book, or anything heavy, which will press down the cotton, and feel like the hen, they go to sleep directly. – Henry David Thoreau • We came to the house, and it is an old house, full of great chimneys where wood is burnt on ancient dogs upon the hearth, and grim portraits (some of them with grim legends, too) lower distrustfully from the oaken panels of the walls. – Charles Dickens • We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiraling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind. – Madeleine L’Engle • We launch our souls from the cannons of art and discipline, and on any one night, hovering over the chimney tops of Europe, halfway to the stars, there are armies of brightly spinning spirits that have risen like fireworks, tethered to the souls of those men and women who, by reflection, mortification, and devotion, effortlessly outdazzle kings. – Mark Helprin • Westminster Abbey, the Tower, a steeple, one church, and then another, presented themselves to our view; and we could now plainly distinguish the high round chimneys on the tops of the houses, which yet seemed to us to form an innumerable number of smaller spires, or steeples. – Karl Philipp Moritz • What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? – Diane Setterfield • When an alluring woman comes in at the door,” warningly traced the austere Kien-fi on the margin of his well-known essay, “discretion may be found up the chimney”. It is incredible that beneath this ever-timely reminder an obscure disciple should have added the words: “The wiser the sage, the more profound the folly. – Ernest Bramah • When I walk across my living room from my chimney to my window, it takes me 10 seconds, but for a bird it takes one second, and for oxygen zero seconds! – Jean-Claude Van Damme • When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. – Jonathan Safran Foer • When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep. So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep. – William Blake • When we hold onto the negative in ourselves it comes with endless guilt. We hold onto a lifetime of floating visions and regrets about what we should have done or should have become. Conscience recognizes wrong and tries to atone. But guilt turns into resentment. Conscience brings us closer to each other; guilt drives us apart. Create a new feeling. Every time guilt settles in your stomach, write “I forgive” on a piece of paper. Send it up the chimney, tear it up and flush it, put it in the garbage. Don’t eat it. – Jennifer James • When we talk of architecture, people usually think of something static; this is wrong. What we are thinking of is an architecture similar to the dynamic and musical architecture achieved by the Futurist musician Pratella. Architecture is found in the movement of colours, of smoke from a chimney and in metallic structures, when they are expressed in states of mind which are violent and chaotic. – Carlo Carra • When you were sleeping on the sofa I put my ear to your ear and listened to the echo of your dreams. That is the ocean I want to dive in, merge with the bright fish, plankton and pirate ships. I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like you and ask them the questions I would ask you. Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smoke rising from a chimney? Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing? I don’t wish I was in your arms, I just wish I was peddling a bicycle toward your arms. – Jeffrey McDaniel • Where you thinke there is bacon, there is no Chimney. – George Herbert • With a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you; with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner. – Philip Sidney • With gas cookers and chip pans in every kitchen, the chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down. The second technique was the ever popular chimney fire and number three had to be the drunken cigarette drop on the carpet. Mind you, why they’d be cooking chips at this hour was anyone’s guess. – Adrian McKinty • Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions. – Storm Jameson • You can’t build a chimney from the top, you know. – Marian Anderson • You have these ‘hot towers’, tropical storm clouds acting like chimneys to carry heat to the upper atmosphere. – Peter May • Your goal is to achieve the best results by following their wishes. If they want you to build a house upside down standing on its chimney, it’s up to you to do it. – Richard Morris Hunt

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Choosing Your Next Home Restoration Wisely

Determining to remodel your residence is a large choice, and also can be an expensive one depending upon the sort of renovation to be done. Similar to lots of profession, residence restorations can typically be split into those that we need, and those that we desire. In life, we need air to breathe, however we want chocolate gâteau to eat. Certain, we could pick the chocolate gâteau in favour of the air, yet we'll quickly start to regret it. And so it goes, albeit on a less life-critical range, for residence restorations.

Custom home builder

According to the Merriam-Webster online thesaurus, the verb "to remodel" has 2 meanings:

 1. to restore to a previous better state (as by cleaning, repairing, or restoring).

 2. to restore to life, vigor, or task: restore.

 They are a little, virtually imperceptibly, different - and one meaning is usually far more important than the other for the house owner when considering just how to invest their hard-earned improvement budget plan.

Kitchen remodeling    

We usually think about a house renovation as something which illuminates our living area, offers us more area, or makes us more comfortable. Consider an addition, or a fresh coat of paint, or a new shower room. These remodellings fall directly right into meaning number two. They are bring back life to our home, and also have the 'wow' factor which we love to show our family and friends. These renovations likewise have a tendency to include worth to the rate of a home, and people will certainly speak about the roi that opts for them i.e. what the cost of the restoration is compared to the rise in rate if the house were to be offered.

 Nonetheless, there is in some cases a far more essential home improvement to be thought about, and that, however, comes under definition top. It is the maintenance renovation, the "bring back to a former better state" renovation, the boring restoration - and the proportion of financial price to "wow" factor definitely stinks. This kind of restoration consists of points like a new roofing system, structure fixings, aiming, insulation, and also electrical wiring - typically renovations you can't see - and are generally the top concern of any type of property owner, whatever circumstance they remain in.

 Take the instance where the home-owner is happy in their residence and also they intend to remain there to elevate a household - they love the community spirit of the area, it's close to work, and there are ample centers nearby. What is more crucial long-term? Quiting the cellar from leaking, or getting a new kitchen area? The answer should be apparent of course - refurbishing (recovering to a former better state) the basement is not only a necessary preventative step from possibly significant damages to the house, but is likewise a demand for assurance.

 What about when the home-owner is attempting to market their residence? It is popular that a brand-new kitchen has the very best return on investment and can improve the value of a home substantially. It may be tempting to refurbish this little profit manufacturer first to obtain more money as well as to make your home a lot more appealing, yet there is a downfall - if there are any outstanding structural or significant upkeep problems, the possible buyer, if they have any common sense, will discover them when they have a structural survey executed. Relying on what the concern is, there could be one of several results: an ask for a reduction in rate, a request for the work to be finished and re-inspected at the house owner's expenditure, or, as is quite often the case, an irreversible retraction of the deal. It's a tough tablet to swallow for the seller, because commonly a real estate agent's price analysis of their house has actually not taken into consideration the cost of this added job, as well as yet by having the job done, there appears to be no advantage in regards to increasing your home value. In fact, obviously, there is - it's simply that the assessment was too high in the first place.

 That stated, there are constantly residence purchasers that will certainly refrain from doing the appropriate ground job, so the required upkeep restorations are missed when the residence is purchased. The vendor, if they learnt about the problem (as they often do), has actually bet and also "escaped one", and also the purchaser has actually foolishly taken on someone else's problems for the sake of the cost of an architectural survey. A note to possible customers: always, constantly, obtain a complete architectural survey done unless you are a professional yourself in such matters since the temporary extra cost will be much less unpleasant than finding significant concerns and also needing to deal with the linked heart-ache (and also temper) after the purchase is total.

 So exactly how does the typical homeowner know if there are maintenance renovations that need focus? There are a few methods to find out, and sticking your head in the sand is not a choice. That would certainly be akin to not going for a regular exam at the medical professional or dentist - if no-one tells you there's a trouble, then there is not a problem, right? Incorrect.

 The first thing to do is to hire your digestive tract impulse. You most likely have an uncertainty if the electrics might be an issue (there's a trigger when you plug appliances in, for example), or if there's damp in the cellar, or if the attic room insulation wants; after all, you're the one that lives there. Take a look around the beyond your home for any indicators of intensifying damage - are cracks larger than you remember them? Does the roof appearance patchy? Do you have an effective water management system - one that drains run-off water away from your home foundations?

 Back this up by taking out the house assessment that you had actually done when you initially acquired the home and also going over it once again (after you've blown off the dust). Make a list of the feasible problems and prioritize them into those that are urgently needed as well as those you can deal with. A very basic risk assessment would certainly look at each item and also give it a score of high, tool or low for the two classifications of possibility and repercussion. Those that appear high-high, high-medium or medium-high are the most immediate and also ought to be handled first.

 The following step is to validate your uncertainties. It may be that you don't need to do this if the problem is obvious - for example, if every single time it rains you have a bath because the bath fills out from a leak in the ceiling, (a high-high concern in many people's books), a call to a contractor earlier rather than later would certainly be in order. On the various other hand, there could be problems which you are uncertain of such as noticeable fractures in the brickwork possibly due to a sinking foundation. This would certainly rank in the medium-high category where the probability is unidentified however has some sustaining proof (the fractures), and also the effect is economically substantial (your home dropping). In a case such as this, or whatever your instance could be where you are unsure of the reason for an impact, it's time to speak with others. You may take into consideration talking with friend or family that may have had similar concerns, yet this often tends to leave even more doubt as people's all-natural response is to presume and also err on the unfavorable side. It is far better to speak with a professional in the area you are worried about - if it's the roof covering, speak to a roofing professional; the brickwork, talk to a stonemason; an electrical issue, an electrician. Set about the procedure as if you were meaning to obtain have actually the work done (you may well need to) - obtain 3 quotes and therefore three separate point of views, and ask great deals of concerns. It may turn out that the fractures in the brickwork are just shallow as well as end up being a high-low case, that is, the fractures are most definitely there, however will trigger no additional problems. The reduced relevance instances, despite the possibility, are typically visual and can be fixed at any kind of future time you wish. When it comes to low chance instances, they should, generally, not make it to your list.

 A note about the risk assessment: if there is an impact you are observing you will certainly need to think about all the feasible causes as well as rate them as necessary. For example, a stain on the ceiling might be due a dripping roof, yet it might likewise result from a leaky pipeline. Be sensible though (you need to stop someplace) - it could additionally be splashed tea from a squirrel tea ceremony, however it is rather unlikely.

 If it ends up that there is a substantial issue, don't panic. Work with a strategy and also a time-frame to obtain it done. Talk to the contractor you pick to learn if the circumstance is exceptionally urgent or can be sat on for a number of months or even a year approximately. Comprehend that the cash you are investing is getting you assurance as well as saving you long-lasting monetary distress, as well as recognize that there's always time to have your gâteau as soon as you're certain you're breathing correctly.

#Kitchen remodeling #custom home builder