#ghost was born in February this year he's not even a full year old what a baby

[lulu-cat-princess]

Forever ABC and BBC Ghosts crossover ideas

Since Henry was born in 1779 and he 1st died in 1814 that means he was alive at the same time as Kitty and Thomas. He can see ghosts cos he keeps dying and coming back to life again.

February 1780: Henry’s father visits Higham House to do business with Kitty’s father. Baby Henry along with mother accompanies his father to Higham House. Baby Henry and his parents meet Kitty and Eleanor. Kitty loves the baby so much that she hosts a tea party for him and his mother. Kitty even lets Henry play with her toys and introduces him to Florence the statue. Henry loves Kitty’s silly faces and tickles.

1796: Since the Morgans are family with the Thornes, Henry (Aged 17) and his family attend the baptism of Thomas. Henry even got to hold baby Thomas and his heart melted.

Some time in the early 1800s: Henry now a gown man and doctor, is walking in the countryside when he spots an older woman at a gave that reads “Kathrine Higham fell asleep on March 8th 1780”. He ask why she is sad. The lady introduces herself as Eleanor and says that she misses her sister Kitty and that she badly treated her. He then tells that his parents told him of the time when he visited Higham House as a baby and met the daughters of the man his father had to do business with. Eleanor is in shock that the man was the baby Kitty hosted a tea party for. Eleanor tells Henry what happened on the day Kitty died and he says that Kitty might have died cos of a venomous spider since he had to treat patients who were bitten by poisonous spiders. Henry then says thank you Kitty for the wonderful tea party. Thomas, along with his family, attends Henry and Nora’s wedding.

March 1814: Henry and Nora attend a ball. During the ball, Henry notices Thomas, now 18, crying in a corner. Thomas and says he’s crying cos a lady he just danced with didn’t love him. Henry then says that you can’t explain to a random lady that you love her and that he’s drunk. Thomas’ parents along with Francis, spot Thomas with Henry and he tells them that Thomas should really stop drinking. Francis apologies for his cousin’s behaviour. Nora feels sorry for Thomas and lets him be her partner for the next dance.

2023: Henry, while on holiday in England, visits Higham (Now Button) house. He is amazed that Alison can see ghosts like him. He shocks Alison that he’s 244 years old and has met Kitty and Thomas. Kitty and Thomas are delighted reunited with Henry after all these years. Henry ask Kitty to show one of her hands since he suspects that she was bitten by a spider. After seeing the bite mark, he tells Kitty that he met her sister as an old lady and told her the same thing. They spend hours talking about their best tea party ever back in 1780. Thomas and Henry bond over the fact that they lost a chance to have a full live with their loved one due to being shot. Henry tells Thomas that since he treated many men who were injured in duels, he would have saved his life if he was here on October 10th 1824. Henry is horrified that Francis was the reason Thomas is dead and had stolen his beloved. Thomas recites his poems and Henry says that they are actually good. It was the first time Thomas didn’t get bad reviews. The captain says thank you to Henry after he reveals that he personally treated Havers from his injuries relating to a grenade explosion.

#forever abc #forever 2014 #bbc ghosts #henry morgan #thomas thorne #kitty higham #eleanor higham #francis button #alison cooper

[sweetcatastrophes]

[CISMALE, HE/HIM]. Hey, is that MICHIEL HUSIMAN, no that is just SIMON RYSKAMP around Turtle Bay. I heard they are 43 years old, and their birthday is FEBRUARY 29, 1980. They rest their heads in OCEANSIDE but they can mainly be found working as a WRITER. Some say they are CREATIVE, RESILIENT, & PERCEPTIVE and can be RESTLESS, MOODY, & STUBBORN . If they had a theme song it would be, WEEDS BY HANDSOME GHOST. I hear they are A NEWCOMER.

Full Name: Simon David Ryskamp

Birthday: February 29, 1980

Age: 43 (techincally he's only had ten real birthdays though.)

Hometown: Boston, MA

Zodiac: Pisces sun, Leo Moon, Sag rising

Relationship status: Single/Divorced

Bio ~ tws: toxic relationship, divorce, infidelity, age gap relationship,

Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, the middle of three (two sons and one daughter) in a political family.

His father is a retired state Senator. His mother is a retired district court judge. They barely tolerated Simon not following in their footsteps.

Wrote a novel and entered it in a writing competition his senior year of high school. It was published his sophomore year of college and became a wild success to the point his changed his major. When he sold the rights, he used his mother's connections to find an agent who ensured he made a killing and retained creative ownership so he was involved in developing the film as well.

Legacy at Harvard through both his parents. His father also granted him a legacy entrance to the highly exclusive Viper Society.

Graduated with an ALM in Creative Writing & Literature. Began working as a professor as he completed his Ph.D in English.

Though he was not at all involved in politics, he met Monica Braithwaite, whose father was even more influential than his in state-level politics and was about to launch a bid for the U.S. Senate around the time the two married.

Their marriage fell apart about six years in, but an iron-clad prenup issued by the Braithwaite's powerful foundation kept Simon tied up with Monica, with no easily navigable way out. They lived in misery and married only on paper for several years.

Met and began an affair with Kate Smythe, a teaching assistant twelve years his junior. She even got him flirting with the idea of the Viper Society again, but he never actually got back into it, citing his position as a literature professor as reason it would be inappropriate.

Used Monica's behavior to negotiate a quick and quiet divorce.

The secret society was exposed and, in the cascade, so was his affair with Kate. He lost his job.

Allowed Kate's father to buy him off, but she doesn't know he hasn't touched the money.

Disappeared long enough to write a second book, which included a lot of detail about his relationship with Kate. The book was an immediate success and is in development as a miniseries. He's been contracted to write a followup/sequel.

Bought a beach house in Turtle Bay where he can sequester himself to write his next book, but he's got an absolutely vapor-locking case of writer's block.

The location of his house wasn't at all by accident. He knows exactly what he's doing moving this close to Kate.

[charmspoint]

I know you said they don't have a concrete story yet, but would you be ok with telling us more about Zan and Ghost? They seem really interesting

Anon you don't know what you unleashed its like past 1am here but I could talk about them forever.

This is gonna be under the cut because nobody has to be subjected to this.

General quick point: Both of these started off as bnha oc's but then reached that point where I was like 'yeah, I want them in their own story' so rn their powers are just powers with no wider context since I aint got that story

I'm gonna start with Zan cuz he's older by creation and my fav oc atm. For him we have TW's of child abuse and neglect, familial death, trauma, drug abuse, depression and anxiety, though I'll be running through this points as quickly and non graphically as I can cuz...I'm not gonna make you read my thesis so it should be fine.

His full legal name is Kazuya Moriyama but he goes by Zan Mori, he's 24. Zan was created to be two things 1. Character design with a fully body tattoo 2. Someone to use a power I came up with but didn't match with a character yet.

Here's that power, yes I have a copy paste off it:

Nightmare fuel is a power that terrorizes everyone, including its user. Zan’s sweat contains a special kind of chemical that when smelled causes mild to severe hallucinations, paranoia and other fear responses by interacting with victims brain chemistry. However, this chemical is only contained in sweat that he produces as a result of fear so, for example if he goes running in the gym, nothing bad will happen. The strength of the power depends on how much Zan himself is afraid and how much sweat he is producing. A weak dose will only result in sense of unease, a feeling of being watched, escalating through general paranoia, with its worst manifestation being complete loss of touch with reality and intense hallucinations. It's odorless and since it’s a chemical can be stored for later use. The last stages of it are very hard to reach because they require for Zan to be at similar levels of severe distress. It affects him as well, often resulting in endless loop of him being afraid, activating his power because of his fear, the power causing more intense fear and so on.

So here is where we start to build.

Zan's backstory hinges on him developing this power very early on in his life, as a result of mutation that his parents were not ready for. Kids get scared of things, a lot, especially when their own power feeds back into that fear. His family quickly spiraled from it, going from trying to figure out how to help him to neglecting him to dying very bloodily in front of him as a result of the constant psychological distress. After that he was cycled through different foster and youth homes with pretty similar result before striking it on his own basically as soon as he could.

Zan's main motivation is to find a way to get rid of his power. He hates it, hates what it represents and how it essentially stripped away his ability to connect with anyone. He doesn't control it, he doesn't activate it, it simply happens to him whenever he gets distressed and as someone with deep seated anxiety caused by that very same power, he gets distressed a lot.

He self-medicates. He self medicates a lot. I don't really have the world planned out but it's very much a world where powers are a new thing and the society just doesn't have systems in place to catch people like Zan. So he basically keeps himself high as much as he can, to numb himself out so he doesn't feel anything so he doesn't get scared so his power doesn't get activated.

When I created Zan, I expected him to be a very jaded, angry, abrasive character and in some ways he is. He's very slow to trust and tends to keep away from people. His first instinct is to mock and insult, he dresses like an emo reject, he's absolutely covered in tattoos, he's a dark humored pessimist and just not the kind of person you want to be around for long. He's also probably one of the most empathic characters I have on the roster atm. He's like, a natural big brother. Any kids younger then him, fuck older than him but awkward and unsure, he's instantly adopting. Fuck everything else, his kids now, he'll make them lunch and make sure they get to school. Zan is more so abrasive out of need than out of actual malice or bad attitude. He does want to be close to people he just knows how that always ends so keeping away is a lot safer. He is genuinely very loving and soft when he lets himself be. He's not great about advice but he's a good listener and the type to throw everything on the backburner to come and help a friend out. He is inherently kind, he just doesn't allow himself to be so very often, unless someone damn well takes a chisel and digs it out of him.

Fun fact time:

He's got a knack for painting and idolizes Van Gogh

He's got a cat named Shikei who he picked up after it got run over by a car, it likes only him and wants to see the rest of humanity burn

Here are his established tattoos, yes I have a copy paste for that too:

Full body tattoo in shape of a jungle of thorns crawling over his entire body, save most of his face. The whole piece is done in eerie, cold colors, with a sudden splash of warmer color here and there, the thorns themselves being colored in misty and muted blues and greens. Over his heart, there is a tattoo of a birds nest, but the nest is breaking apart, suffocated by the thorns clustering around it and breaking into it, its branches drenched in blood, the baby birds in it barely even noticeable. Along the length of his spine and over the width of his hips an ornate cross of st. peter is painted, also crumbling, red spider lilies breaking through the frail rock. His shoulder blades are covered in sunflowers, strikingly bright on the cold surface of the thorns and painted in Van Gogh style. There is a chain of daisies lines across his neck and down to his chest, covering an old scar and a tiny ring of roses over his ring finger. On the nape of his neck, two butterflies are pinned by the thorns, appearing to still be alive and in agony as their bodies are pierced. A silver snake slithers through the thorns on his right arm, though its shade helps it blend in with the color of thorns, it’s body a tiny bit coiled, considering should it strike or not. On the back of his left hand there is a tiny leaf bug, trying to hide amidst the bare thorns and on the outer shell of his ear, mostly hidden from view by his head, is a ladybug, wings spread like it is about to fly away. A swarm of blue butterflies paint the silhouette of his lungs across his skin and two koi fishes circle each other endlessly on his hip. In thorns climbing up and down his neck, there are tiny fireflies, just barely bright enough to be seen. Two thin thorn branches separate themselves from the cluster on his neck and climb across his temples, their thorns appearing to be piercing through his skin and letting blood flow.

The tattoo is still in progress.

This was the brief summary.

Ghost! Ghost is a lot newer than Zan, I only made them at the start of this year so they are a lot less detailed but they hit the ground running. Their tw are mostly prostitution and existentialist feelings but I'm not getting into anything in detail.

Their full name is Ghostown Verb and yes they did name themselves that. They are 27 and their power is Forget me not, as I said previously, as soon as they are out of someone's line of sight, to that person it's like they never existed. The memories of meeting them return as soon as they are back in the field of vision but uhh you can see how it would be super easy to lose a child like that.

Ghost grew up on the street in a kind of do whatever you can when you can how you can attitude. Turns out it's really hard to get help from anyone when they can't remember you as soon as they stop looking at you, which includes but is not limited to social workers, well meaning passerby, police, foster homes and landlords. The name and face for the paperwork doesn't exist and people just find themselves grasping at nothing, feeling like they are forgetting something but not knowing what it is. It works in some ways, shoplifting is a lot easier when you're sure that you can just turn a corner and be safe, but it's mostly just a hassle. Ghost is homeless most of the time and when they were old enough for it their career of choice became prostitution simply because it's pretty much the only job where the customer doesn't need to remember you after they're no longer looking at you and it's not like Ghost has to answer to any boss who would have to either.

They had not had a kind life but they are the let and let live type. They don't stress a lot about things and generally take everything in a fly. They are very extroverted, very loud, very friendly. They form friendships fast because they know they'll lose them fast and same goes with love affairs. They live in the moment because for everyone else the moment is the only place where they exist. Loud fashion, loud words, loud actions, provocative and noticeable, they just want to be seen by people, remembered by people, they want the attention on them even though they know it's useless. Much like Zan they also have no control of their power so all they can do is live with it. At least it doesn't bring anyone any direct harm, they are grateful for that much.

But it does leave them displaced, unanchored. They don't have any support system, no family, no long term friends. The system can't even remember them for long enough to decide it isn't equipped to deal with them. They flitter through peoples lives, there one moment and gone the next. The biggest impact they can hope to have is the nagging feeling of having forgotten something.

It's not like they are exactly sad about it, their main mentality is just not to worry about things they can't change. These are the cards they've been dealt with and play those cards they shall. At the very least they are having fun with their life, doing whatever they want with no one remembering them long enough to stop them.

But it's a lonely existence with no viable human connection. That much does get to them.

Fun facts!

They have a tattoo of a forget-me-not on their shoulder, I haven't decided do they have it before the plot whatever it is starts, or do they get it cuz Zan's influence.

They like to make their own clothes when they can, though having a stable enough place to be for a long enough time is rare.

Their biggest fear is that when they die nobody will remember to look for their body :)

That was a brief rundown of these two! If you made it to the end damn congrats I love you

#anon #oc talk #I CAN TALK A VERY LONG TIME ABOUT MY OCS THIS ISNT EVEN THE DEEP DIVE #it might look like i like ghost less cuz i got way less for them but bls remember that zan is like....fuck like 3-4 years old #probs 3 as he is #4 if we count the thrown away beta design #ghost was born in February this year he's not even a full year old what a baby #ahhhh but anyway thank you for asking im always super excited to talk about my ocs #thank you for letting me geek out!!!! #i am NOT going to spell check all of that rn its almost 3am if i wrote something badly you'll have to live with it #zan mori #ghostown verb #they should have their own tags they deserve it #zan #ghost

[thesoulspulse]

Danny Phantom Randomness (The Wisconsin Ghost)

You guys might be sick of all my Vlad posts by now, but please bear with me because at least this one is semi-spooky! So another thing we wondered on my discord server is...does Vlad actually have any ghost myths about his alter ego in Wisconsin? We assume that Jack calls Vlad Plasmius the “Wisconsin Ghost” since that’s just where they were when Plasmius overshadowed him at their 20 year college reunion...

But, what if there’s more to it than that...?

From what I could find, Wisconsin is considered the 14th most haunted state in America which is pretty cool actually. And lets face it, every country in the world has its fair share of ghost stories and local folklore. But here I’d like to focus specifically on Vlad and his whole vampire aesthetic since that’s what he was originally going to be when the show was pitched; it was scrapped though since the producers and Butch thought it would end up making Vlad “too scary/occult.”

And yet...vampires have been all the rage so it’s actually more of a missed opportunity. The show came out in 2004 but the book Twilight became a best seller with teens so, yeah, ya done goofed Butch. Still, I like the nod to vampires in the alter-ego name Plasmius since plasma is found in blood. Plus there’s the other obvious nod with the name Vlad itself which makes us all think of Vlad the Impaler:

“Vlad is of Slavic and Old Russian origins and it is traditionally a boy's name. According to its Slavic origin the meaning of Vlad is 'to rule' or 'glorious rule'. The name Vlad is a shortened variant of the Old Russian name Vladislav or Russian Vladimir.” ~ https://kidadl.com/baby-names/meaning-of/vlad

Fun Fact: I used the name Vladislav in my Unseelie Vlad AU

Now, there is a myth in Wisconsin about “The Vampire Of Mineral Point” which tells of a thin, tall, figure dressed in all black who was first seen in a graveyard on a snowy February night in 1981 by officer John Pepper after they received several concerned calls from locals about suspicious activity in the Graceland Graveyard. When the figure realized he’d been spotted, he ran and reportedly jumped a 6 foot fence with ease and when the officer made it to the other side, expecting to find this figure there was no sign of him! Not even footprints on the thick freshly fallen snow...

On March 14th 2004 there was a second sighting where the dark figure was attacking people from a tree near an apartment complex and when the officers pursued him, he escaped and the footprints ended at a wall as if he had flown away.

The last sighting (so far) was on July 11th 2008 when a couple was fishing at Ludden Lake when they heard scratching underneath the pier where they were fishing. Then they heard splashing and scraping like something was crawling underneath their feet on the pier. The guy started banging his feet on the boards thinking it was an animal and shined his light through the boards when they saw a caped figure crawling up the side towards them. His girlfriend fled in fear but after the guy came to his senses he threw the flashlight at the figure then ran to the car to catch up with his girlfriend.

Unfortunately the figure still tried chasing after them but eventually the couple managed to escape to the Mineral Point police station to make a full report, only realizing once they were safe that they had left all their gear behind. When officers arrived at the scene, all the fishing stuff was still there except...for the flashlight.

Ok, so now that we know the legend of the Vampire of Mineral Point here’s how I’d propose we adapt it to be about none other than Vlad Masters:

First of all, since we don’t know the show’s timeline I usually set it in 2004 when it first came out but I’m flexible if it’ll make this myth fit.

We know that Vlad is in his 40′s give or take a few years in the show’s timeline and his accident happened 20 years ago so if we subtract 40 years from 2004 we get 1964. So lets say that this is the year is roughly when Vlad Masters was born.

Since Vlad was in his 20′s when he became half-ghost if we add that to his new birth year...guess what it adds up to? 1984! That at least brings us close to the first “vampire” sighting in 1981 which means if we tweak this a bit we could make it work! Therefore, if I’ve done my math right...if we change Vlad’s birth year to 1961 then that will bring us to the 1981 year mark we need as the first spooky encounter once he has his ghost powers!

For the most part we all assume Vlad doesn’t have any living relatives or much control of his powers at first so lets assume since the first vampire sighting was in Graceland Cemetery...maybe Vlad was visiting his parents grave and freaked when an officer started chasing him. For the added angst, maybe they passed away while he was in the hospital so Vlad missed their funeral which just adds to his anger towards Jack for landing him there in the first place. Maybe, Vlad was even hoping he could “sense” their presence like any other ghost but they had already moved on, unaware that their only son is now suffering and utterly alone in the world.

The second sighting in 2004 was likely a misunderstanding and the people in the apartments just assumed Vlad was attacking them on purpose since he couldn’t control his powers. Maybe Vlad was having a really bad day and the only reason he was in a tree was because he was hanging onto it for dear life so he wouldn’t float off into space or something and the “attacks” were caused from random charged of his ecto-energy going off and a few stray shots hit a couple of people by accident.

As for the last one in 2008...I think by then Vlad had a bit more control of his powers but he had another really bad day after finding out about Jack and Maddie’s first child, aka Jazz, which probably really stung since he was so bitter about Jack not even telling his supposed best friend about their first born daughter personally. Not to mention they might not have even bothered to invite Vlad to their wedding since at that point he was still hospitalized. Anyways, I could totally see Vlad taking out his anger on this random couple by scaring the ever-loving-crap out of them out of pure spite at this point in time. Probably kept the flashlight as a memento too, the fruitloop.

After the 3rd and final “vampire sighting” Vlad probably switched gears and kept a lower profile while obtaining his riches and plotting revenge on Jack Fenton. At least, until a new legend emerged that the castle owned by the billionaire Vlad Masters is reportedly haunted by a vampire ghost that has attacked many a robber who has trespassed on the property. Maybe residents avoid Vlad’s castle for that reason since it’s supposedly the new home of the Mineral Point Vampire but it was Jack who dubbed Plasmius as the Wisconsin Ghost.

Who knows, maybe Mineral Point was Vlad’s home town before he inherited the Dairy King’s castle. Locals probably already considered it haunted by the Dairy King before Vlad moved in but unlike the vampire they saw him as harmless. That is, if anyone ever saw him in the first place since the Dairy King likes his privacy which I’m guessing is why he had the castle built on the outskirts of whatever town we see nearby. Anyways, there you go, a possible urban legend adapted to Vlad’s backstory!

You’re welcome!

#danny phantom #danny phantom headcanon #headcanon #vlad masters #vlad plasmius #the vampire of mineral point #urban legends #the wisconsin ghost #wisconsin ghosts #ghost stories #ghost sightings #vampire #vampires #fruitloop #wisconsin ghost stories #folklore #thesoulspulse #thesoul'spulse #the soul's pulse #the souls pulse #danny phantom halloween #halloween fun #halloween 2021

[kurosawa-family]

Character Information #3

❛ 𝐼𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝒉𝑜𝑤 𝑤𝑒 𝑓𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑖𝑛 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒:

𝐼𝑛 𝑚𝑦 𝑐𝑎𝑠𝑒, 𝑎𝑏𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑦. 𝐴𝑏𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑦, 𝑎𝑛𝑑, 𝑎𝑙𝑎𝑠, 𝑜𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑛— ❜

— 𝑼𝒏𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏 𝑳𝒂𝒘, 𝒃𝒚 𝑳𝒐𝒖𝒊𝒔𝒆 𝑮𝒍𝒖̈𝒄𝒌

⟅☙⟆ Universe ⟅☙⟆

Multi-Fandom, that is, he doesn't belong to a specific universe. Although at first he was from the Diabolik Lovers Universe.

⟅☙⟆ Full Name ⟅☙⟆

Convoitise Berthold Kurosawa.

Convoitise is literally "Lust" in French (since his mother not only thought it sounded good, but it sounded menacing) Berthold, his middle name, comes from the German meaning "shining force".

Kurosawa, which is his last name that he started living with from the age of thirty, means "Black Swamp" in Japanese.

⟅☙⟆ Kanji ⟅☙⟆

コンボイティセ

⟅☙⟆ Nickname ⟅☙⟆

"ConCon" is the most common nickname he has with both his friends and his family. It was given to her by her younger sister when she was little, and they all ended up liking it. Convoitise thought she sounded cute on him.

⟅☙⟆ Age ⟅☙⟆

The young devil is no more than five hundred and twenty-four years old, although physically he appears to be in his mid-twenties. He was born in 1498.

⟅☙⟆ Gender ⟅☙⟆

Male.

⟅☙⟆ Sexual Orientation ⟅☙⟆

Bisexual polyamorous

⟅☙⟆ Height ⟅☙⟆

200 cm.

⟅☙⟆ Weight ⟅☙⟆

80.9 kg.

⟅☙⟆ Blood Type ⟅☙⟆

B-

⟅☙⟆ Status ⟅☙⟆

Alive.

⟅☙⟆ Race ⟅☙⟆

Unknown.

He's supposed to be a hybrid, but he can reproduce without problems.

For now, he is simply the cross between a demon of unknown rank and a Foundress, just like his siblings.

⟅☙⟆ Birthday ⟅☙⟆

February 14.

⟅☙⟆ Zodiac Sign ⟅☙⟆

Aquarius.

⟅☙⟆ Favorite Color ⟅☙⟆

Aqua green is one of his favorite colors.

⟅☙⟆ Appearance ⟅☙⟆

The young man is, at least physically, the living image of her mother, inheriting her charms; Beautiful, silky, short albino hair that could easily be compared to the moon, eyes as golden as gold doubloons and bright as stars, with pale skin that could easily be a ghost if it weren't for the fact that he shows emotions and he can blush. Convoitise has a few freckles on his shoulders, which he covers most of the time.

He has an old scar that runs across much of his back, which he got from being with his grandfather for the first (and only) time. He also has one more scar on his lower stomach from his uncle.

He usually wears light-colored and elegant clothes, most of his clothes are made by himself, since "if nobody can do what he wants, it is better to do it yourself". He wears top quality clothes at important events, and for his casual wear, loose clothes are always the best.

⟅☙⟆ Personality ⟅☙⟆

The young albino is a... Passionate person, to put it in a certain way. Since he was little he has been strange, not really in a bad way, but he thought differently, and you could say that he saw more than other people. He is flamboyant, and he doesn't show it if he isn't among family or friends that he completely trusts, of which there are few, of course.

He's not shy at all (well, most of the time), he's honest like a child and he knows if what he thinks to say hurts or not, and depending on the person, he might not say anything that's very...Delicate. Just maybe.

Convoitise doesn't mean anything mean or cruel with his words, at least not most of the time. He just inherited this ability to be really cruel and brutally honest with no ill intentions (like mother, like son, after all). And speaking of being brutally honest!, Convoitise can't lie, even if he wants to. It's a blessing and a curse, because it means he can only give himself away as a jerk.

Convoitise also has only the appearance of a casanova; He knows how to flirt, but without making the other person look uncomfortable with his presence. And if he sees that person is not interested in him, well, he buys them something as an apology and leaves. Still, it's hard for someone not to be interested in him, not only because of his family, but also because of his appearance. So, not only is he sure of himself when it comes to his pretty boy face, he knows that it's almost impossible for anyone to deny him. But that attitude is nothing more than his playful way of being with other people. He is indeed a loyal and calm young man, so it is almost impossible for him to jump from person to person like a rabbit in heat.

He just needs, all the time, that all the people he loves adore him too. So... It can be said that he is too cuddly and clingy too. He's all over a person if he wants to show affection, and for the times he hasn't been treated well because of it, he's learned to hide it, learning from certain people...

All in all, he is a boy who simply wants to give and receive love, but because of his fear of being an annoying or even disgusting presence, he prefers to hide it behind a playful attitude.

⟅☙⟆ Relatives. ⟅☙⟆

Yumeko "Nana" Kurosawa.

Convoitise's non-biological grandmother, governess of the Kurosawa family as well, and Ghoul.

Currently alive.

Yvonne Beauchene.

Mother of Convoitise, Foundress, and witch.

Currently alive.

August Kurosawa.

Convoitise's father, demon of unknown rank.

Currently alive.

Aimer Kurosawa.

Convoitise's first younger brother, race unknown.

Currently alive.

Hela Kurosawa.

Convoitise's second and only sister, race unknown.

Currently alive.

Varick Kurosawa.

Fourth and last younger brother next to Volker de Convoitise, race unknown.

Currently alive.

Volker Kurosawa.

Fifth and last younger brother next to Varick de Convoitise, race unknown.

Currently alive.

⟅☙⟆ Favorite Food. ⟅☙⟆

Somlói Galuska, a Hungarian dessert, which is a cake with walnuts and raisins dipped in rum, and served with melted chocolate and whipped cream.

⟅☙⟆ Hoobies. ⟅☙⟆

Chess.

Having a mother who is an expert in combat, especially when she has participated in several wars, has many advantages. One of them is knowing how to manage an army, but since they don't have one in the flesh, chess is the closest thing her mother can teach her. She loves to play chess with her mother, but especially with Aimer, since it is one of the few times that she sees him smile mischievously and leave that serious side behind for a few moments... The bets are recurrent between the two of them.

Model.

In addition to making dresses as a profession, it is not the first time that he has modeled his creations himself. He knows he can do better than most of the people who work with him, and it's not the first time he's left everyone breathless. Convoitise knows what he's got, and capitalizes on it with a grin from ear to ear.

Spy.

The young man loves to spy on the Sakamaki Mansion house whenever he can. It's entertaining to watch everything unravel in chaos with just a few flicks of the wrist. Convoitise loves to see Subaru angry, especially if Subaru's shirt "mysteriously" disappears...

Emphasis on "mysteriously".

⟅☙⟆ Occupation. ⟅☙⟆

He is a graphic design student, although he started his own clothing business not long ago. From time to time, he models for magazines or some shows.

⟅☙⟆ Relationships. ⟅☙⟆

Yumeko "Nana" Kurosawa.

He has a good relationship with his grandmother, whom he calls "Nana" since he was a child. She has taken care of him in difficult times for the family, him and his brothers. Even though she can barely do housework due to her age and other things, he is more than happy to help and take care of her.

Yvonne Beauchene.

The only woman who can terrify him, but he admires that about her. Her mother is a powerful person, Convoitise wants to follow in her footsteps when it comes to magic.

August Kurosawa.

Convoitise adores his father, and even though it can be frustrating for him that he can't understand a lot of current things, at least he gets it going and memorizes it.

Aimer Kurosawa.

Convoitise and Aimer get along like any pair of siblings. Sometimes they love each other, sometimes they hate each other, but they know very well that one of them would have a nervous breakdown if something serious happens to the other. Convoitise helps Aimer get out of his comfort zone, while Aimer helps him trust people more to let them see what he's really like.

Hela Kurosawa.

Honestly? They are partners in crime. Hela is a pain in the ass sometimes, and Convoitise is Hela's headache, but when it comes to causing chaos, they both know the other is the perfect person. This is not the first time that an ice cream truck or, literally, a drink machine has been robbed.

They can't stand each other sometimes, but Convoitise would make her a dress and a nice hairstyle if she needs it.

Hela, for her part, would always help him with a thing or two in return.

Varick Kurosawa.

It doesn't take much for Convoitise to impress his younger brother. He became the inspiration for his younger brother and truth be told, Convoitise has no problem with it.

...But ConCon wants to kill that little shit and Volker most of the time.

The times that he had to get them out of trouble that borders on the seriously illegal is... Just stressful.

God help him not to knock them both down the stairs one of these days.

Volker Kurosawa.

The emo little brother of the family, but he is also the cutest. Volker and Convoitise don't talk much, but the minor knows that he can trust him if something happens... Although Volker prefers millions of times to go and rob a bank than to be good for Convoitise but that's a separate issue-

Shoma Komori.

He met Shoma after a long day at work, with her brothers also frozen in the doorway. Well, it's not every day that you see a human child malnourished to worrying levels with one eye missing and almost covered in blood while your mother cries inconsolably (especially when she never saw her cry).

Now, Convoitise protects her with her life. She is her little girl, her baby, her girl, her angel. If someone dares to lay a hand on him, he will put her morals aside and go hunting.

Ai Blossom.

He met Ai when the girl was already dead. After a long talk about life and death, with the young blonde choosing her life, he brought her to life (Oh, well, something like that), and they ended up becoming friends because of the gossip they both had in her hands. . They're basically those two friends who talk shit about everyone, including themselves, except each other.

He gets together every Friday afternoon to relax with a fruit frappé and cheesecake. The best of the week for both.

⟅☙⟆ Likes ⟅☙⟆

Convoitise is a huge fan of romance novels, his favorite being “Pride and Prejudice” because Jane Austen knew there was nothing sexier than seeing the love of your life walking towards you in a field like a humble man and CONFESSING HIS LOVE FOR YOU. YOU FOR THE SECOND TIME—... You can guess that the 2005 movie lives in his head 24/7 non-stop.

As said before, he is a clothing designer, so you can tell that he loves to try new combinations and shapes to bring his clothes to life. For him, it's like discovering completely new places.

Despite loathing her position of babysitting her brothers and sister when her parents are busy, Convoitise loves children and taking care of them, as stated before.

The white-haired boy loves to do dubbing from time to time. He does it a bit to help out the twins, but he must admit it's fun.

⟅☙⟆ Dislikes ⟅☙⟆

He is not very comfortable with being treated like a whore, no matter how well he hides it. He knows that his fame as a model and his personality does not favor him very much, but that sounds like a problem for him, not for others.

He isn't a fan of strong alcohol, or at least, not without some food or dessert.

Hot places are the worst, especially for your delicate skin.

As said before, he hates having to take care of his younger siblings, especially Hela, Varick and Volker. Aimer has to help him most of the time.

⟅☙⟆ Fears and Phobias ⟅☙⟆

Macrophobia: Fear of long waits. It is defined as a persistent, abnormal and unjustified fear of waiting for a long time.

This phobia has not yet been studied in depth. However, people with this disorder are thought to have a tendency to be anxious and insecure. It is likely that at some point in their lives they have suffered an event where they have felt completely devastated by helplessness, an event that has exceeded their ability to control and they have felt passive observers of it.

⟅☙⟆ Headcannon Voices ⟅☙⟆

You can find them all here!

⟅☙⟆ Song Theme ⟅☙⟆

YOHIO — My Nocturnal Serenade

⟅☙⟆ Skills ⟅☙⟆

Fencing, Close Combat, and Weapon Handling.

Good at black and white magic thanks to his mother.

Immortality.

Feedback.

Superhuman speed.

Superhuman strength.

Superhuman accuracy.

Superhuman senses.

Superhuman agility.

He has the ability to bring both objects and other beings back to life, and thanks to his mother, he can resort to second options.

He possesses three levels in his "demonic transformations", with level zero being one of the most dangerous.

Shape Change.

Teleportation.

Telekinesis.

Telepathy.

Supernatural activity detection.

Experience in close combat,

⟅☙⟆ Bonus ⟅☙⟆

He would like to start working for the world. He wants to travel to Europe first, but he knows that he needs a plan first.

He is overprotective when it comes to Shoma.

⟅☙⟆ Story ⟅☙⟆

🚫 E r r o r 🚫

[gentlemancrow]

Written in the Stars Will Have to Do

OK so I saw @hey-there-hunter ‘s JMart Wedding Challenge and I pretty much fan ficced immediately??  Like it was an instantaneous plot bunny that stabbed me in the brain and would not let me free until I made it exist.  SO HERE YOU GO!  Read it here or head on over to AO3 below!  And enjoy some unapologetically aggressive fluff with weddings!  Also subtitled someday Crow will stop abusing excessive astral imagery and symbolism for extended metaphors, but today is not that day.

Read on AO3 instead!

Written in the Stars Will Have to Do

Jonathan Sims always thought of himself as a man with a deep appreciation for the great literature of the world.  A passionate turn of phrase, crystalline motes of clear imagery like snowflakes reflecting light in his mental scape, a devastating contemplation on the nature of good and evil in the hearts of all mankind, everything that could express the beauty and tragedy of the world in ways he never could.  Prose was a bright paintbrush on a ragged canvas of the universe he had known from an early age was swathed in shadow and pain and evil, and those words on those pages, for at least a moment, were another world he could hold in his hands, could cradle and protect, could mourn.  He liked the power of them as well, of the tinkling brightness of alliteration, the oaky sophistication of a well-aged metaphor, the evocativeness of the idiosyncrasy in a simple simile, laying bare truths in ways he never could have articulated for himself.

There was one thing he could not abide by in language, however, one cardinal sin liable to besmirch any piece of lush and sparkling verse or prose and taint it forever.  And that was idioms.

Jon loathed idioms and their dismally quirky cliches dressed in familiarity’s tacky clothing almost as much as he hated spiders.  Perhaps it was something about their reliance on common knowledge and repetition.  He couldn’t bear reading the same book twice, or even a book that felt too familiar, it only made sense that hearing a hackneyed phrase repeated in that awful singsong sardonic tone of someone who knows full well they’re saying something asinine that has been repeated ad nauseum for millennia would scrape at the back of his skull and down his spine.  They were too whimsical and blasé, crutch words for when one’s limited lexicon came up empty, or worse, for ill comedic effect.  They reinforced that staunchly English notion of skirting about the true depth and breadth of emotion for clipped niceties and unfeeling banalities.  Idioms to him were mere verbal window boxes, colorful and meaningless, dressings for untold disasters behind the shining windows they peacocked before.  

He hated them all with vaguely equal rancor, but there was one he could definitely single out as the one he hated the most, and that was the one about hanging the moon.  Such and such thinks you hung the moon, to me you hung the moon, and so on.  This particular rhetorical felony attracted his wrath only marginally because any moon symbolism never failed to feel outlandish and infantile, a mawkish image of love and care rampant in nursery rhymes and cheap commercialized slogans for t-shirts and wall art.  That was the least of it.  He hated the idea of hanging the moon mostly because once, another lifetime ago now it seemed, Tim Stoker had lobbed it in his face in a fit of smoldering rage and he had been completely, complacently, ignorant of its magnitude.  

Funny thing was, he couldn’t even remember what the actual fight had been about any longer.  Though he could remember exactly where he was standing, cornered next to the file cabinet for the year 1985, January through February, and the label had been peeling up on the upper left-hand corner.  He remembered he’d discovered a hole in the elbow of his jumper that morning and he had been obsessing over it all day, fussing with the dangling green thread and tugging at the knit as if it might magically close the wound.  He’d put his finger clean through it with his arms crossed haughtily over his chest without even realizing he’d been fiddling with it when something flippant about Martin came out of his mouth.  It hadn’t even been cruel, he couldn’t even remember how Martin had come up in the argument in the first place, he could only remember Tim’s mouth moving like he wanted to say something else, then him forcibly stopping himself before he snarled.

“Yeah well, god knows why, but he thinks you hung the moon, so you might try treating him at the very least like a human being once in a while.”

It was such a small thing.  Small words for a small feeling cloaked in a chintzy veneer of idiomatic dismissal.  A trembling little bird cupped in his scarred and battered hands and smothered.  Or so he thought.  Sometimes trembling little birds turn out to be phoenixes, and those who looked to someone else to hang the comfort of a wise, silvery moon in the sky already have the hammer and the picture wire at the ready.

As far as Jon was concerned, the moon only rose on their Somewhere Else because Martin deigned to pull the strings every night, not him.

It was Martin who brought him tea every morning, set it down on the breakfast table with that little flip of the tag and the deft, one-fingered turn of the handle toward him.  It was Martin who scolded him because whites are a separate load, Jon, were you raised in a barn?  Martin who talked him through every episode of the Doctor Who reruns that were the only thing their ancient aerial could pick up.  Martin who planted flowers in the garden and brought muffins from the sweet old lady at the grocers because they traded baking recipes.  Martin who still looked at him with diaphanous pools of ethereal moonlight in his eyes and his smile like he alone hung it in the sky over his head to wash him in its radiance.

Even after everything.

Even after it had been Martin who had to hold the knife buried in his chest as he lay gasping wetly for breath in an alleyway in Another Chelsea to keep the hemorrhaging at bay.  Martin who had cupped his face in his bloody hands with tears streaming down his and forced him to focus, furious love blazing in his sea mist eyes as they locked with his, screaming at him and him only, heedless of anything else.

“Look at me.  LOOK at me, Jon!  Stay with me!  Stay with me, DAMN YOU!”

Stay with me had not been a plea, it had been a command.  He had never once said please because it was never an option.  Shivering, breathing blood through his teeth, the streetlights a fading, star studded halo in Martin’s strawberry blond curls be damned, he was right.  Against every tangled thread of fate twisted deep into his flesh, or perhaps because they had been the only thing that held his torn innards together, he made it to the part where he awoke a few fractured times to nothingness, and then to fingers he knew every inch of inextricably bound up in his and a fierce whisper in his ear.

“I’m here, Jon.  I’m still here.  I’ve got you.  I’m going to fix this.  I’m going to get us out of here.  We’re going to be okay.”

It had been Martin who orchestrated their clandestine escape from the hospital the moment they both agreed he was well enough to survive under his rudimentary medical care and before the authorities got too invested in an urban ghost story of two men who didn’t exist.  Not to mention one of which should, by all medical and logical law, be dead.  It had been Martin who had stolen the necessary antibiotics, drugs, and wound care supplies, Martin who had picked enough pockets to buy passage on a midnight train to the only place they could think to go, and expressly told Jon not to ask where he learned how, even though he knew full well he would later.  Martin who had fought for everything and kept him hidden and safe while he lay in a dingy hotel room somewhere in Scotland, drifting in and out of consciousness between kisses, cold compresses, spoonfuls of whatever he could get him to swallow and keep down, and desperate ‘I love you’s.

Martin had been the one who hung the moon even on the nights Jon couldn’t see it, just so he knew it was there, that the light might finally guide him home.  Not him.  He could have never done something so selfless and simple and beautiful.  No not him.  Not The Archivist.  How could he have ever known that?  Stupid, myopic, pedantic, all-seeing and blind.  A blustering, sanctimonious Tiresias in a sweater vest and half-moon glasses.  And how important was the moon, anyway that he was expected to hang it too?  Would not night still come and the stars still shine?  The stupid, vapid saying should have been about the sun anyway.  Something that nourished and guided and warmed.  Not the moon.  Not the thing of night and hungry wolves and quiet loneliness.  Not a thing of the darkness they fought and still not won, not exactly, not in a way that mattered.  How could he have known the weight of such a thoughtless, frivolous, meaningless phrase and how far and how long Martin had borne it for him to protect he who hung his moon?  

He could see the weight of it so clearly now.  He could see it especially on the darkest days, which came, in grotesque mockery, the moment they found something like their safehouse and rest at last.  Jon had conned his way into a job at the village library with an ancient head librarian who didn’t care much for too many questions, or background or credit checks, and was more than happy to pay in cash.  With Martin’s help of course.  Martin himself had taken up stocking at the village grocers, and their life had teetered onto something so close to quaint and normal it suddenly laid bare the gravity of the depths of darkness they had escaped.

No longer did they have to run, no longer did they have to fight, they could finally lay down the chase and curl in upon each other to lick their wounds in quiet.  But without the driving, primal instinct to live, to survive, that ushered in the days where all the hurt came back to roost and brood and fester.  The days where he couldn’t bring himself to get out of bed, or the days Martin couldn’t bear the sound of his voice, or the days they shouted themselves hoarse, stormed apart for hours then came back, silent and broken, red-eyed and exhausted to hold each other and weep into the spaces between neck and shoulder where it still smelled like love and home.

He could see so painfully clearly the toll following him to the ends of the cosmos and back had etched its marks into his goodness, his body and soul, see how often he would walk down the road from their cabin, just a little ways, to stand on the heather spotted hills and gaze out into the frigid infinity of the gray sea.  Cold terror would grip him then, incite a desperate want to run after him, to throw his arms around him and bring him home, but also the fear it would only be to have him turn to mist and slip through his fingers forever.  He always had a cup of steaming tea waiting for him when he came back, just in case.

But again, and always.  It was Martin who would pick up Jon’s hands, kiss every slender, scarred finger through his tears and be the first one to utter ‘I’m sorry.’  Martin who told him with just a single scathing flash of stern blue eyes and not a single word uttered that he was certainly coming to bed and not banishing himself to the couch like an idiot.  Martin who wrapped him in his arms and warmth and boundless love and reminded him, “One way or another.  Together.  That was the deal, right?  You don’t get to back out now.  No returns, refunds, or exchanges, I’m afraid.”

And even through the deepest sobs he would find the laugh Jon didn’t think was in him.  Martin sifted through the mire and the muck and held fast to the tiny, shining things so easy to lose in the darkness.  Things Jon was certain were lost forever, only to be reignited and hung in the brightening sky of their story.  Even if they weren’t quite the moon yet.

It had also been Martin who, on a perfectly ordinary day, on a simple walk through the local farmers market, stopped to peruse one of the usual unremarkable stalls filled with crystals and oils and trinkets.  Jon had wandered off to procure the parsnips and the strawberries, unrelated recipes Martin swore, he had been tasked with finding.  When he returned he found him, a radiant monument tall among the faceless locals, rusty curls caressing his face in the salty breeze, carved of marble and rose quartz and gazing down at a pair of hematite rings on a velvet display box.  His eyes were distant, but not in the enthralled, disembodied way they were when he looked at the sea, or the broken way when they weren’t speaking, but in the contemplative, regarding of puzzle pieces way when he would look into the fire during their talks and turn his words in his mind over and over again like a rock tumbler until they were polished just right.

“Getting into crystals now, are we?” Jon had joked, “Surely I’m not so dull to be around that that’s becoming an attractive hobby.”

Martin snorted and shook his head.

“Supposed to mean healing, or grounding, or something.  Aligning your meridians, I think the lady said?  Whatever that means,” he elaborated, reaching out to touch.

They clinked weightily together, thick and glossy and the dark astral gray of a moonless night.  Martin turned over the card that went with them and read.

“’A grounding stone that belongs to the planet Mars.  It strengthens our connections to the earth and aids the warrior on their journey.  It is a stone of invincibility, but also fragility.  It balances yin and yang energies with its magnetic properties for the perfect reflection upon one’s own soul, astral, physical, and spiritual.’”

“Hematite, is it?” Jon asked, “Also more commonly called bloodstone.  You know if you scratch it, it leaves a red mark.  Like it’s bleeding.  Watch.”

He picked up one of the rings and firmly ran it down the corner of the card Martin had been reading from.  Sure enough, the black stone had left a faint, but starkly crimson mark on the yellowed paper.

“It BLEEDS?” Martin exclaimed in horror.

“It’s just a kind of iron oxide, so, rust, basically,” Jon explained with a chuckle, “Kind of weirdly romantic if you think about it?  This intimidating shiny black stone like armor, made of iron to boot, but with a bleeding heart at its core.”

“I just thought it was pretty, I didn’t know it bleeds,” Martin had laughed in that incredulous way he always did when Jon was telling him something he didn’t actually want to know, but appreciated anyway.

“I find that the strongest, prettiest things often do,” Jon had said in reply.  He remembered saying that particularly clearly, waxing poetic, feeling a swell of affection for the hugely beautiful man he leaned against and was adorably aghast at bleeding rocks.

“Yeah, I reckon they do,” Martin murmured back.

And then his cheeks had flushed bright red under his freckles and the stone steps of his shoulders crumbled a bit under the crushing ancientness and vastness of what he had originally been pondering.

“So, I mean, before you spoiled it with the blood thing.  I was thinking… Well, I was just having a browse and I saw these and I thought they were quite fetching, and then the lady told me they meant grounding and healing and a journey, like on the card.  A-And there were two of them, all by themselves, and everything else was so colorful and flashy these were just so… Um.  Maybe the blood and rusty iron thing makes it more poetic now, actually?  I don’t know.  Sorry I-  This sounded so much better in my head.”

It wasn’t his fault, Jon remembered thinking.  Martin couldn’t find the words because there weren’t any.  Not in this universe or any other.  Not for what they’d gone through, and especially not for what they meant to each other.

“I guess I was just thinking.  If… I bought one.  And wore it.  Sort of like.  Um.  You know.  Would… Would you-?” he had asked, his voice trembling.

Jon had never said yes, yes of course he would, faster or with more conviction in his life.  And there was that look again, rising from the ashes, that flooding of golden, unbound love and light, of eyes turned sky blue, of looking at the man who hung his moon in the sky come back to him.  He could still hang Martin’s moon all over again after so many nights of black clouds and darkness, even if it was only paper.  They’d paid for the rings in rumpled bills, exchanged them right then and there, and kissed each other as the crowd of oblivious people in a world they did not belong in flowed like a river around them.  Jon forgot the bag with the parsnips and strawberries.

But it didn’t matter.  It didn’t even matter that Martin’s fit nicely on his ring finger, but Jon had to wear his on his thumb, and even then sometimes on a chain around his neck for fear of losing it.  It didn’t matter that it was the closest thing they were ever going to get to a proposal and a wedding, consigned now forever to the shadows in a borrowed reality with only each other.  Because it was theirs, and they could begin to figure out how their broken pieces fit back together again.

But like most things that don’t matter, it didn’t until it did.

It began as simple things.  Seeing a wedding on some program they weren’t actually paying much attention to and Martin making a flippant, innocuous comment as he combed his fingers lovingly through Jon’s long and silvered chestnut hair in his lap about how he would have loved to have a cake that had a different flavor on every tier at their wedding.  Just so everyone could have something they liked.  And Jon woke up from his half catlike stupor and looked up at him with such aching regret as those words settled into the pit of his heart alongside ‘he thinks you hung the moon.’  

And soon they began to gather a collection of completely innocent remarks that ran the gamut from ‘would they have worn black or white?  Or one of each?  I don’t know… does it really matter?  And were these engagement rings or wedding rings?  I don’t know.  Neither?  both?  And do we say husband instead of boyfriend now?  Fiancé?  Whatever you want, Martin…’ To the heavier, cancerous weights that sank to the bottom of his gut, even below hanging the moon, like ‘I know Tim would have thrown the most amazing bachelor party for both of us, and his mum had always talked about him getting married someday like it was a farfetched pipe dream, but she would be happy for them, he thinks.’

He could never answer those questions.  There was too much at stake, too much finality and familiarity in them, a strange weightlessness in a world that weighed far too much.  The sun and moon continued their eternal dance of time, ignorant, unbothered, but Jon kept collecting those silent debts of normal life, secreting them away in a hidden singularity in his heart that only grew heavier and metastasized farther the more times Martin walked out at night, not him, beaming starlight from his eyes and his fingertips, to hang the moon again.  So soft, so full of wooly cows and pink heather and the smell of tea and sea salt and Martin’s shampoo on the pillow next to him did it become, that it was almost inevitable that one morning Jon awoke absolutely convinced none of it could be real.  

The moment he decided that, everything made so much more sense.  He could breathe again.  There was a reason he could never sit still, never just feel at ease or talk about the future like it was a real thing that could still happen.  He knew why the silence made his brain itch and why he still glanced around corners and glowered at anyone who dared let their gaze linger on his Martin too long.  Why Martin’s ring fit and his didn’t.  There was too much debt to the universe to be paid, too many broken promises, too many corpses in his wake, he had done nothing to deserve this idyllic life of love and peace and smallness and Martin.  It had to be Her doing, It’s doing, some carefully woven torture chamber that would lure them to the apex of their joy, the center of the web, where they would just be devoured over and over to empty husks and set up like chess pieces to fill with love and light just to knock down again.  He wasn’t free after all.

Jon had been halfway into his coat and halfway out the door to do, he didn’t know, something, anything, to go to the library to use their computer and research something he didn’t know he was looking for when Martin had seized his hand and whirled him around.

“Jon.  STOP.  It’s over.”

And he’d stopped.  He’d looked into those baleful blue eyes, fallen into their depths, landed on the precipice of madness, and broken.  It wasn’t over.  Not for him.  He finally understood.  It was still there.  The Eye.  It always had been.  Though not really, he understood slowly as he wept on his knees in their doorway into Martin’s chest, it had indeed closed forever on him, but it lingered as distant static, like a phantom limb, a metaphysical itch that could never be scratched.  Martin had cradled him close and listened, listened so patiently as he ripped the jagged black fear from the deepest, ugliest part of his heart, hauled it up bloody and messy from his throat and finally laid it bare for both of them to see.  And when it was done and he couldn’t cry anymore Martin had locked eyes with him in a way that made him forget any others could have ever existed outside of crystalline blue and filled with moonlight.

“Listen to me.  I know you think you have some cosmic burden to bear.  That you’re still wearing some… some fucked up crown and sitting on a throne of skulls and death and eyeballs or whatever image you want to put there, and that you have to sit and hurt and watch over everything so it doesn’t happen again, but...  Sorry, Jon, but that’s bullshit.  It’s just a scar now.  That’s all.  Just like the rest of them.  Ugly and beautiful and proof that you —Jonathan Sims— are still alive.  And you are not The Archivist anymore.  You’re just mine.  My Jon.”

He’d held his Jon’s stunned face in his hands and peppered kisses over the pock marks in his skin, over the slash on his throat, the burnt fingers that still couldn’t bend quite right, even the one on his chest, the one almost always hidden by fabric but the one he didn’t need to see to find.  His heart and fingers would always remember exactly where it was.  And he’d kept his lips there a moment, then turned his ear to his chest and wrapped his arms around his waist to listen to his heartbeat like a trembling little bird.

“If I can hear it and feel it.  So can you,” he whispered.

Unsteady fingers curled desperately into Martin’s silky locks, hematite loop cool against his scalp, “Thank you…”

Martin stayed for the kiss on top of his head he knew was coming and smiled.

“Okay, so it’s simple to fix if you think about it,” he murmured into Jon’s chest, “We just need that thing, you know?  The thing that makes you feel like you’re still doing the thing, but you’re not.  What was the word for it again?  A placeholder?  Like when you quit smoking and you hold a pencil or a straw or something that’s not actually a cigarette so you can wean yourself off the ritual?”

Jon blinked owlishly down at him as he dried his eyes.

“A… placebo?  Are you talking about a placebo?”

“Yeah!  That’s it!  We just need to find you a placebo for Knowing things!  That’s all.  Like… reality shows, or-or zoo cams or something!  We’ll figure it out together.  Alright, love?  I promise you.  It’ll be okay.”

Jon was skeptical, so very skeptical, but if Martin was determined to find a balm to soothe his jagged, ontological scars he would happily play the part of lab rat for him.  They’d tried a myriad things to replicate the feeling of Knowing and looking something deep within him still craved.  The zoo and animal livestreams were a bust, cute and entertaining as they were, but animals weren’t ever the purview of The Eye and the camera itself was barely a scrap.  Reality shows came closer, the more salacious the better, but even that temporary fix wore off when Jon’s disgust with the overall content and participants outweighed any benefit.  Martin was just happy to have finally converted him to Bake Off, at least.  They tried people watching in the square in the village, but it made Jon far too self-conscious and guilty.  He used the binoculars exactly once, and that was to look at the cows in the fields, and the choose-your-own-adventure books Martin had been certain would strike a sagacious chord wound up in the donation bin at the library.  But that was when he was struck with a bolt of genius.

Unbeknownst to Jon, which brought him no small measure of glee, Martin ordered, received, and then set up with a literal bow in their back garden the finest telescope he could afford on his meager savings.  He’d researched for days, asked on every amateur astronomer forum he could find, and had it delivered to the grocers so he could make it a proper surprise.  He’d even gone so far as to attack and blindfold a hapless Jon the moment he made it home from work on the day it was ready, and stood behind him giddily bouncing as he tore the tea towel away from his eyes.

“A… Telescope?” he’d blurted dumbly.

“Yes!  It’s perfect, right?  I asked around to find the one that had all the best features, and this one has the best overall magnification and the most lenses, but it doesn’t have the little satellite positioning thing?  I figured you wouldn’t want that anyway, you always like figuring things out and finding things on your own better.”

Martin had been positively radiant.  Jon had just stared at the gawping black tube and chewed the inside of his cheek as he processed what to say.

“I mean… thank you, Martin, really.  It was a sweet thought, but if the binoculars didn’t-“

“Screw the binoculars!  This is different!” Martin happily insisted, “You can look at so much more!  Stars and planets and galaxies and what have you, and it can maybe be sort of like you’re looking for other worlds?  Wormholes or whatever?  Or signs of The Fears and where they’ve gone?  Or even if the stars are the same here as they were back before?  Space literally has so many things to LOOK at we can’t even count them!  This has got to be it!”

Jon tried to smile and laugh and agree to try it out, at the very least, if only because Martin was beaming so sweetly with pride and hope.  Though that first night he didn’t, ushering them back in with promises of tomorrow, Martin, I promise tomorrow.  Tomorrow had been a lie.  As had been the next night.  In fact, it took Jon a full week to even remember they even had a telescope, and that was only after getting the smuggest, Cheshire grin out of Martin after casually mentioning there would be a visible, if partial, lunar eclipse that night.  He’d relented, only because he’d entrapped himself, and they’d both bundled up, looked in the manual for the best size lens to view the moon with, poured a few glasses of wine, and turned their eyes to the stars.

Martin had gone first, gripping the eyepiece and adjusting the focus all the while gasping in awe.  It was so beautiful he’d burst into poetry with a crooked grin.

“Art thou pale for weariness?  Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, wandering companionless among the stars that have a different birth, and ever changing, like a joyless eye that finds no object worth its constancy?  Sounds a little familiar, eh?” he joked, casting a wry look over his shoulder.

Jon rolled his eyes fondly.

“Gross.  Keats again?”

“Nope, Shelley this time, and even he thinks you ought to have a look at the moon.  I think you’ll find you have a lot in common.”

Jon had sighed obligingly and shuffled to the telescope, fully expecting to look at something bright and round with a bit of a shadow on it that was distinctly unremarkable, have another glass of wine, and then go back inside to snuggle by the fire.  What he saw in that tiny pinhole of light pierced straight through the hazel brown of his eye and plunged him into another world entirely.

The sands of the moon glowed the purest white in the refracted light of the distant sun with which it waltzed.  He could see in crisp, shadowy relief the innumerable scars she bore, the depth and breadth of Ptolemaeus, the boundless lonely flatness of the maria, named for the oceans they were once thought to be, an insult to the rock plains forged a millennia ago in birth by cataclysmic fire.  Every crater remained wrought in perfect, frozen detail with no erosion or foliage to slowly heal them over, and she beamed them proudly, ostentatiously in her heavenly light.  A hulking, ancient protectorate, hung by the hands of creation at the dawn of time for a fledgling planet, hundreds of thousands of miles away, and yet so crystal clear and unafraid as he perused her millions of years of cosmic sentinel through a lens.  It was dwarfing, humbling, viscerally awe inspiring in a way he dared not voice for fear of snuffing out the fragile glow of wonder and excitement welling in his chest he had been so certain was gone forever.

Astronomy had never been something that had particularly interested Jon, back when his entire reality from the moment his childish hands had touched a single book was spent peering into shadows and watching his own back.  There was no point in wondering what lay among the stars when danger and death lurked so close behind with slavering jaws ever poised at his throat on terra firma, but now.  Now, he had been living in an alternate world, dimension, reality, somewhere, he couldn’t even say for sure.  He’d been hurled potentially through the very stars that twinkled coquettishly above, flashed through their nebulous veils and curtains under their indifferent gaseous gazes, but seen nothing.  Here was a vast expanse of complete chaotic indefiniteness inviting him in to see what few had ever seen, to guess and hypothesize and gesture wildly at secrets only the stars could keep.  To Know.

Jon had jerked back so suddenly from the telescope to survey the entirety of the astral dome above them that Martin had choked on his wine.

“Jon?  Are you quite alright?”

“Yes, I…” he’d murmured, only even half hearing that Martin had said anything at all, stars reflected in his wondering dark eyes, “I’m fine, I just… How… How much more can this see?  How deep does it go?”

Jon hadn’t seen the victorious smirk on Martin’s face as he set down his wine glass and picked up the instruction manual and lens guide.  They’d watched the rest of the eclipse, of course, marveling through the lens at the inky trickle of shadow over craggy white, but then they’d changed the lens to the strongest one, according to the guide, and spent the rest of the evening triangulating their position beneath their slice of the universe and plotting out the various stars, planets, and constellations above.  Jon had even dashed inside to grab a mostly blank notebook and had filled several pages with notes and observations and things to research later, all while Martin held back tears watching him come so alive over a project he didn’t even know he needed.  Eventually though, sleepiness and cold claimed him, and he kissed his beloved goodnight and left him, more than gladly, to ride out the intellectual flare up until it burnt both him and itself out.  

Martin had no clue what time it was when he finally returned, and it didn’t even matter.  All that mattered was at some point, a practically frozen Jon had climbed into bed, snuggled up close behind and wrapped his arms around him to kiss the back of his neck so softly like the wings of a butterfly and whisper.

“Thank you.”

Another victorious smirk and a loving murmur.

“Told you so.”

Where there had been nothing but an Eye shaped hole in him, scarred around the edges and aching in its vacuum, Jon had filled it with the names of nebulas and quasars, of the myth of Andromeda, and Orion, and Castor and Pollux, or Hercules, and why they had all been hung in the stars for eternity.  The stories were much the same as he remembered, but he’d found slight eccentricities, tiny irregularities in the sky which fascinated him even more so.  Night after night he would look at a different astral body, chart it down in his notebook, then come bounding in with starlight beaming from his eyes and his fingertips with some cry of eureka.

“Martin!  Did you know here Polaris is in the south and Sirius is in the north?”

“Martin!  Did you know the Andromeda Galaxy is actually a little closer to the Milky Way here?”

“Martin, you have to come see this!  Oh, no it’s not weird this time, it’s just I finally got Saturn in the telescope and you can actually see the rings!”

His nightly herald would always be different, but Martin would always rise from the comfort of the couch, put his slippers on, and let Jon talk as long as he needed to about his latest discovery, watching him smile again while he, too, watched the matching smile it never failed to ignite illuminate Martin’s face and they lit each other up in the fused brilliance of a binary star.

Martin no longer hung the moon for Jon, he’d finally just up and quite literally given it to him, and there was no mortal way to repay him for that.  Or so he’d thought.  It came to him, as most flashes of brilliance do, on a night he hadn’t even been thinking about it at all.  All he had been doing was sitting in a lawn chair with his telescope long after Martin had gone to bed, chewing his pencil idly, vaguely missing a cigarette and pondering notes on Vega and Lyra between watching it through his lens.  He’d been stuck for days on Vega and its potentiality for another solar system and what that could imply for their new Earth and their new sun, as well as Lyra and the tragic tale of Orpheus and his doomed love.  Even in their new reality he still turned back at the end of the story, still could not contain the roiling, effusive adoration to his own downfall.

Bitterness had risen like bile in the back of Jon’s throat as he replayed the myth again in his head, unsure why it was vexing him and rewinding in his brain so torturously.  “Stupid, stupid man, if he’d only just…” he’d thought again and again, each time giving the star-crossed musician a different decision, a different choice, urging him down another path somewhere, anywhere along his journey, but in the end, he’d always looped back around to the original.  It was the point of the story, after all.  Not so much the love itself or even the loss of it, but the power of it over one man and the creation born from his mourning and eventual destruction.  Patently Greek.  But the chorus would always begin again in Jon’s head.  If he’d kept his Eurydice, if his songs had been happy, if he hadn’t spent the rest of his life mourning so intensely he was eventually destroyed for it, would he have become the paragon of healing he was, the oracle, the lynchpin of the fate of the world he had eventually become?  Which of them was the stupider man?

Jon was only mortal now, he was no longer all-seeing oracle and dark savior, he had no authority to say, but it was a trifle easier to ponder the hubris of Orpheus instead of his own.  He couldn’t help but think, achingly, sometimes the heroes just deserved to pull their beloved from the pit of Tartarus, promise to love them for eternity, and then simply get married, ride off into the sunset, and live happily ever after.  A story wasn’t a story if it didn’t write itself upon the very bones and sinews of its heroes, that was the law of the universe, but when the story was done and the cracks and fissures in their tissues had faded to myth and legend, what became of the heroes who did not die a tragic or heroic death and were not hung in the stars?  What happened to heroes left behind?  Twisting his bloodstone ring on his thumb idly as it caught the shivering fire of those stars in its dark mirrored surface, the musical arrow of the muses pierced his heart, wide-eyed in wonder.  He’d asked the universe, but he already knew the answer.  He’d always known.  He knew, and he knew it with such clarion joy as he had never known anything before.

He could no longer be the man who hung Martin’s moon, he hadn’t been for a long time.  That much was clear to him, but he could certainly do something else.  Perhaps they had grown past the need for moon hangings in the first place.  He knew how their story ended.

It took months of saving, secreting, preparation, and then finally just simply waiting for the perfect, clear night.  The moment it came, the moment he knew it was the night, Jon struck without hesitation.  Poor Martin wanted nothing more than to collapse onto the couch, into Jon, when he returned from a late shift at the grocers, but found himself instead stuffed right back into his coat with a picnic basket in hand and hauled out into the frigid night in a flurry of Jon with little time to protest.  He bounded up the hill behind their little cottage beneath a perfect blanket of stars flaming coldly overhead, trailing Martin’s hand in his behind with his breath coming in silvery puffs of clouds, and paying no heed to the whining.

“Jon, whatever it is, does it have to be NOW?” Martin panted, “I am absolutely knackered and it’s beyond freezing and wouldn’t it be nicer just to curl up with a cuppa and fall asleep in front of Star Wars or something?  Doesn’t that have enough stars and space in it?”

Dauntless, Jon only tugged harder.

“There’s tea in the basket, and I’ve seen Star Wars.  And yes, it has to be tonight, it’s really important, I promise.”

“Look.  I love you.  So much.  You know this, and please know it is with the utmost love and deepest affection in my heart that I point out that you say that every time, and you’ve still shown me Pluto like, a hundred separate times.  While I quite like it, and I still feel sorry for it being bumped out of the solar system and all, it’s just a dot?  How many times can you look at a dot?” Martin sighed.

His words finally threw a caltrop into Jon’s warpath, and he paused, turning over his shoulder woundedly.

“What?  No, it’s not Pluto, I swear just- Please, Martin?  I’ll never ask again if you don’t want to, but just for tonight, please?” he pleaded.

Martin winced, and immediately folded under the onslaught of doleful honeyed brown eyes under a nimbus of stars.

“Oh, lord there you go with the puppy dog eyes.  Okay, okay fine, but there better be a nip of whiskey in this,” he chided lovingly with a gesture at the thermos in the basket.

The smile flared back to life brightly on Jon’s face as he turned back up the craggy little footpath to the top of the hill.

“Of course, hot toddy with tea.”

“Ooh, lovely, you do know me.”

The rest of the way was trivially short to the small, flat hilltop surrounded by heather where Jon had already set up a blanket and the telescope over a pristine vista of the dark line where the stars sank into the sea.  He ushered Martin to sit down first, then perched on his hip beside him and poured him a generous helping of tea and whiskey from the thermos before pouring his own.

“Thanks, much.  Right then, what exactly are we up here to look at that we couldn’t see from our garden?” Martin asked, accepting his cup of potent hot toddy and sipping it gratefully around the lemony steam that billowed up.

Taken aback by the sudden logic lobbed into the center of his romantic posturing, Jon looked momentarily stunned, as if someone had slapped him upside the head.

“Oh!  Oh, um, well-!  Ahah, that is to say- Uh.  There is a reason for all this.  It’s not that we couldn’t see it from our garden, we very much could have.  B-But it’s so beautiful up here, and you can kind of hear the sea?  And it’s nice and peaceful, and the heather is still blooming a bit and um…” he trailed off, cheeks burning.

“Okay…?” Martin probed, frowning a little.

“Er, actually...  It’s less about the stars than it is- W-Well it is about the stars.  Let’s get that clear.  But to be completely honest I mostly just… I-I well.  There’s something I need to tell you?”

Jon was ill-prepared for the look of abject horror on Martin’s face as he went paler than the moon overhead.

“Shit, what is it?  Did you find something?  You saw something?  There’s been a sign of The Fears?  Oh god it’s not HER is it?” he asked frantically, nearly slopping hot toddy all over his lap.

“What?  No!  No, none of that!” Jon spluttered, aghast.

Martin regained a modicum of color in his face and breathed in measuredly.

“Okay, so then what is it?  Oh god, you’re not… Jon you’re not ill, or something, are you?  Please, you can just tell me if-“

“No, I am not ill either, damn it, Martin!  If you would just listen to me!  I-!” Jon moaned exasperatedly, “I just wanted to do something… nice.  Something nice for you.  And nicer than I normally would because I am apparently much worse at crafting romantic moments than I thought and-“

“Wait…” Martin cut in, eyes gleaming with realization, “Jonathan Sims… Are you grand gesturing?”

“Well I am certainly trying but you are making it exceedingly difficult!” he retorted, red in the face and breathless.

“Oh my god, you are!  I’m so sorry!” Martin laughed brightly, “Oh god Jon you poor thing I’m so sorry, I’m awful, I’m the absolute worst!  No please!  Don’t let me spoil it.  Please go on.”

Grinding the heel of his palm into his forehead, Jon tried to summon the words again, only for Martin’s strong, warm hands to take it from him and tip his chin up to gaze into his eyes.

“Hey.  Hey, Jon.  Look at me,” he breathed, looking into his eyes idolatrously, “I’m sorry.  I love you.  You can tell me.”

Taking the steadiness from those clear blue depths he needed, Jon focused on them, on the strawberry blond curls tossing in the icy breeze, of the kiss of chilled pink under his freckles, and that eternal, sunshine smile.

“Okay,” he finally answered, smiling softly.

With a deep, shuddering breath, and a long swig of whiskey laced tea for good measure, Jon drew himself up and fished deep in his soul for the words he had waited a millennium to say.

“Okay… So here it is.  Um… I’ve um, I’ve had a lot of time alone lately with my new hobby, as it were.  So, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.  A lot of it is overly complicated and ridiculous and doesn’t deserve to live outside of my head but… a lot of it has been about you, about us.  And I know we don’t need to-to put a label on us or put us into a… a box or anything like that.  But every time I look at this ring on my finger, I can’t help but remember we never actually talked about what they meant,” he began, holding out his left hand and fidgeting with the loose band around his thumb.

“Oh Jon, don’t worry about that.  It was just me being a big sappy, sentimental dork.  And if I recall correctly, we’d had a pretty awful row a night or two before, and I just wanted to feel close to you again, I guess?  We both know what they mean to us.  It doesn’t matter,” Martin assured him sweetly.

“Except that it does!” Jon insisted passionately, “That’s the point!  You are a big sappy, sentimental dork, Martin.  I bet you were the kid that had a dream wedding all planned in a notebook with pictures cut out of magazines and everything.  I adore that about you, but big sappy sentimental dorks should have big sappy, sentimental moments like huge, expensive seaside weddings with three-flavor cakes and all your friends and family and rose petals and dove releases and whatever else your heart could dream up.”

Martin snickered and shook his head, charmed at least by the mental image of kissing Jon on a seaside cliff at sunset while doves flew in glorious formation around them and everyone they had ever known and loved cheered.

“Pfft, I don’t need a grand wedding and all that, I just need-”

“Me.  I know,” Jon finished for him with a smirk, “I knew you’d say that.  Maybe not.  But you deserve one.  And I know I don’t use that word lightly, but it’s necessary in this case.  You deserve it.  All of it.  Me on one knee with a ring in a box, you deserve us picking out flowers and tuxedos and arguing over the font on the invitations.  You deserve Tim’s awful bachelor party and laughing at me at the altar because I had to read my vows off a card and they’re still so stiff and awkward and they pale in comparison to the beautiful poem you wrote about me.  You deserve smiling so hard your cheeks hurt and crying as we exchange rings.  All of it.”

Martin weighed his words carefully on his tongue with a sip of his boozy tea to chase away ghosts of things that never even were.

“I mean, sure, not going to say I never wanted that.  And I did have that stupid wedding notebook, by the way.  But all that became a pipe dream the minute we wound up here, right?  No use being upset about something that can never be.”

“That may be so, but the crux of it is… you also contented yourself with the idea of it never coming true not because we’re here, but because you didn’t think I wanted it,” Jon answered, his unspoken truth hanging heavy in the chill night air between them, “Every time you tried to tell me you wanted to be with me forever, I brushed it off and painted it gray and tucked it away and carried on the way we always were like nothing happened and it didn’t matter.  Because it was alright, really, you were just so happy to have what we have, that I didn’t die in your arms that night, that we were still together after everything.  That I at least kept that promise after I’d broken so many.  You were so grateful just for what you were gifted after we thought we would end with nothing you didn’t dare think to ask the universe for more and I am so, so sorry it took me so long to see that, Martin.  I’m so sorry.”

His voice broke.  The breath caught in Martin’s chest as he reached out to touch his wrist comfortingly.

“Jon, I-“

“No, please.  Please let me finish I… I can’t give you any of those things.  I can’t give you our friends back, I can’t give you cake and doves and the sunset and crying through vows in front of the vicar.  I can’t even give you an elopement at the register office because we still don’t legally exist.  And I guess for a long time I resented myself for that.  For all of it.  For stealing that from you, for dragging you through literal hell only to give you a shadow of a life stuck here with me because I betrayed you.  But- no stop, don’t say anything yet I’m not done.  B-But now I finally realize.  You’re right, Martin.  You were always right.  It doesn’t matter.  Those things are all just… things.  I said to you once, a long time ago, and I’m still not even sure if you really heard me, that I didn’t want to just survive.  It was true then, and maybe it wasn’t true for a while, but it’s certainly true again.  We did not fight tooth and nail to just survive.  We fought to live, and live together.  So what I’m saying is… I know now I don’t have to give you tuxedos and white roses as long as I give you something… Something to prove to you that you are my everything, my entire world, something to show you that I love you more than I have loved anything in my entire life.  That I want forever with you.  S-So I…” he trailed off, sucking in his breath to give his gesture of undying love the ardor and grandeur it deserved, “I bought us a star.”

The proclamation rang out like the toll of a bell, its gravity sonorous and quaking.  Martin blinked.

“You… I’m sorry?” he squeaked.

Jon set his empty thermos cup aside, flailed his hands in the air and shook his head frantically

“I-I know, I know it sounds mental just hear me out!” he protested, “Technically I didn’t buy the star, if we want to get picky about it.  I mean obviously no one can own a star.  Just the rights to name it?  It’s a thing you can do online.  I was a bit gobsmacked it was real to be honest.  I just had this silly idea when I was out looking at the stars.  I was looking at Lyra and thinking about you and Orpheus, and I… W-Well I just typed it in, ‘can you name a star?’ and it came right up.  Right then and there.  It um… comes with… hold on.”

Remembrance placed a gentle bookmark down on Jon’s fluttering thoughts, and he rummaged in the picnic basket for a moment before pulling out a navy-blue manila folder covered in stars and full of the paperwork and certificates that had come with registering theirs.  He handed it to Martin, who took it in place of his own empty cup, numb, muscles quivering under his jaw, and opened it to the glittering gold typeface that proclaimed ‘Congratulations!’.

“It comes with paperwork, too!  See?  So, it’s official, at least?  The Jon-Martin star.  Not a marriage license I know, but at least our names are together on something legal?  Our real names?  I figured even if we manage the fake identity thing we’d have to get married as not us.  Not really.  So…  I-It could be like our marriage certificate?” Jon explained, chewing his lower lip.

Martin said nothing as his hand turned the pages of the documentation, his eyes distant in a way Jon had never seen before.  Not disembodied and enthralled, not broken, not even regarding puzzle pieces.

“Oh!  Um, also I-I got us a binary star.  I forgot to mention that bit,” he went on, filling the sudden void, “It’s, ah- What a binary star is- It’s technically two?  But they’re caught up in each other’s gravity and they orbit each other so tightly they look like one star together, one that just shines a little brighter.  They’re bound together forever by the most powerful cosmic force in the universe.  Just like us.”

Only silence answered, punctuated by one last crisp whisper of paper, and then the folder closing with Martin’s spread fingers atop it, bloodstone gleaming in the vivid pale light of the night.  Jon’s heart pitched frantically in his chest, and desperate, stranded tears pricked at his eyes.

“I uh… I would have rather gotten us a whole constellation.  Heh, you know?  But they don’t do that, obviously,” he tried softly, his fingers barely brushing Martin’s knuckles, “They record heroes in constellations, after all.  Great deeds, doomed romances, lovers who can be together no other way… That would have been a better way to honor us, I think.  Our story.  A-And who knows?  Maybe back on our world there are a few new stars to remember what we did, to mark the place we left it, so that everyone we left behind can look up and remember us.  They don’t know how the story really ended, and they probably never will, but we do.  We do, and I want to end it right here, right now.  With our star shining above us ‘and they lived happily ever after.’”

Martin still said nothing, but his head bowed, casting a slice of shadow over his eyes, and his shoulders quivered as a thin, bright line of wet silver trickled down his cheek.  Jon felt the very sky shatter above and begin to crumble around him.

“Please… M-Make no mistake, Martin.  P-Perhaps the gesture is silly and meaningless, but it was all I could think to do to go with everything I’ve said tonight.  Martin… Martin, don’t you see?  These are my wedding vows to you.  This is me saying ‘I do’ and also ‘Martin K. Blackwood would you do me the honor of making me the happiest man in the universe?’  All at once.  This is me saying I swear to you I will be yours, through everything, until the end of time.  M-Maybe I wasn’t before.  Maybe I was still punishing myself, but I’m telling you, I’m ready now to have my happily ever after.  With you, Martin.  If you’ll have me.  If I haven’t-“

He would never finish.  In a dizzying blur of blue folder, flashing hematite, and a wreath of golden curls, Martin kissed the words off his lips.  He kissed him so hard and so fierce, through wracking sobs with his hands woven so raptly into his long, wavy locks he thought his lips would bruise and his fragile soul would finally shatter to pieces in Martin’s arms.  Undone, all Jon could do was surrender and kiss him back with equal passion, thumbing away the hot tears as they spilled freely down his cheeks and anointed them both with their cleansing, hoary heat.  Their lips parted and they panted softly against each other in the space between, each afraid to break the sacred, pulsing silence.

“You’re crying,” Jon whispered at length, “I’ve said something wrong. Martin, darling I’m so sorry.  I never meant to-”

Martin laughed, raspy with tears, but ethereal, sparkling, like stardust floating on the breeze.

“People are allowed to cry when they’re happy you stupid, silly man,” he murmured in between kissing him again, and again.

“Oh.  Oh.”

He kissed him one last time, that idiot man who always burnt the toast and always knew the facts but never knew what to say, who finally figured it out and bought him a star, and threw his arms around him, enveloping his slight, fragile form protectively in his embrace.

“I love you.  I love you so much.”

Jon sank into that warm, familiar comfort and buried his face in his shoulder.

“I love you, too, Martin.  I want to be yours for the rest of my life.  I want to be me, I want to be us.”

“I know.  I’ve always known.  Oh god, you do know that right?  I know that you love me, it’s written in everything you do and say.  I have never, ever once doubted you love me with everything you are.  Even in the moments I was afraid that… that maybe we just weren’t meant to be together, I still knew it wouldn’t be because you didn’t love me.  Never because you didn’t love me.  Just maybe that we didn’t fit together anymore,” Martin replied in a small voice through his tears as they spilled down his cheeks.

As much as he wanted to vehemently deny there was ever a chance they might have not fit back together again after they had both been so shattered, to kiss him and tell him not in a million years would there ever have been a future where they weren’t Jon and Martin against the world, Jon knew it to be inescapably true.

“I’m so sorry you ever had to be afraid of that,” he swore, digging his fingers into Martin’s back pointedly, “After everything.  After we fought so hard to escape fear itself.  That I almost let it truly win in the end.  That I couldn’t just let go… Because… Because this was never about The Eye, was it?”

A heave of breath and its shuddering exhale shook Martin’s body free of lifetimes of grief, and fear, of ugliness carried far beyond the borders of their souls.  His fingers curled tighter in unspoken reply.

“No Jon, no it wasn’t, but I’m so very glad you finally figured that out.”

“Me, too…” he whispered.

They held each other in the quiet wake of being a moment and let the astral plane wheel calmly overhead.  An impatient star twinkled.

“Wait… you never answered me,” Jon finally said as he pulled back, sliding his elegant fingers down Martin’s strong arms.

“Huh?” Martin blurted, scrubbing under his eyes with the sleeve of his coat.

“About marrying me tonight.  You never actually said yes, so…”

A twinkle in his eye and a slight mischief to his grin, Jon dove back into the picnic basket and emerged with a velvet ring box.  Martin’s hands flew to his mouth.

“You didn’t.”

“Of course I did!  Nothing fancy, but I thought it was high time to retire the blood rings,” he explained rising from his former perch on his hip to kneel properly.

The box cracked neatly open, and inside lay a simple, white gold band with a tiny circle of milky moonstone embedded in it on a midnight-blue satin cushion, blindingly bright against the dark.  Martin sobbed joyfully all over again.

“So, uh… I suppose if it had just been us, if we’d just been together, without everything, and we’d arrived at this moment.  I would have done much the same.  I would have brought you somewhere beautiful, somewhere I could teach you some inane fact you didn’t actually care about, but liked because it came from me.  Emulsifiers in ice cream and rum raisin…” they both snickered, “And I would have tried my best to make it into some sort of romantic metaphor but completely bunged it up and you would be laughing as I got down on one knee, just like this.  And it would have just been simple.  To the point.  Just… Will you marry me?  So…”

Jon assumed the traditional position, on one knee, arms outstretched, his every slender point a star in a perfect constellation of love.

“Will you marry me?”

Their eyes met, across a thousand different realities, across a thousand different worlds, carried on celestial winds to fall hopelessly, inexorably, into each other’s orbit.

“Yes, yes I do believe I will.”

With one last farewell kiss upon it for what it had meant for them both, Jon slipped the bloodstone ring from Martin’s finger and replaced it with the delicate band made of starlight.  It took its place radiantly, and shone as Martin drew his hand back to admire it with an equally radiant grin before it dimmed with concern.

“But what about you?” he asked worriedly as he watched the old ring entombed lovingly in the box.

Jon only smirked and produced a second box from the basket, which he offered on his open palm out to Martin.

“Naturally, I got one for myself.  Couldn’t pass up a chance to get a wedding ring that actually fits, could I?  It’s just… Don’t you think you deserve to give it to me the way you would want?” he urged.

Martin took the box eagerly, biting his lower lip in thought.

“Not sure you want to give me that freedom.  I had about five different ways of asking you in my head and all of them you would have hated so, so much.  But I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t kind of the point,” he answered wryly.

Jon chortled.

“Sorry I, the unromantic one, sprung this on you, the romantic one.  But I did want to surprise you.  I-I mean you can still write me a vows poem later?  If you want to, of course.  I’d love to have it, even if I don’t actually get to hear it at our wedding.”

Martin’s face flushed immediate crimson and his eyes darted coyly away as he toyed with the wedding band box in his lap.

“Oh that?  A-Actually I… I have it memorized, i-if you really wanted to hear it.”

“You- WHAT?” gasped Jon, his cheeks flushing in tandem.

“Oh yeah, I wrote my vows poem for you ages ago and I’ve gone over it so many times I know it by heart.  It was comforting, okay?  I-I’d read it again when times were good and I thought maybe you’d actually- um… a-and when times were not so good, when you were gone, in your own head, when I was afraid we were broken for good, whenever I needed it.  I’ve read it over a thousand times and never changed a thing from the first time I penned it.  Never needed to.  I’m surprised I haven’t recited it in my sleep at this point,” Martin admitted sheepishly.

Jon’s entire body flushed with a solar heat that melted his joints and his heart into a swirling flare of adulation.

“I can think of no better way, then, to receive my ring,” he breathed, reaching out to cup Martin’s cheek in his hand, “I’ve had my turn, now it’s yours.”

In mirror ballets of love exchanges, Martin cradled Jon’s hand against his cheek as he spoke the first lines of the vows etched ever on his being softly into his palm.

“Let he who, shadow dwelling, must In paper, pen, and book be bound Shake off the chains of dark and rust And chart his own bright fate unfound.

Let he with lifelong burdens borne Cut paper wings with thread of gold And hand in hand, the sky forsworn Flit clouds and sun in laughter bold.

Let he whose blood and soldier’s ken The world did shield from dark and fear Heal fast those wounds, be whole again And sleep at last, held close and dear.

Bring him to me with spirit free With stars in eyes and music sung From lips a joyful promise be One soul conjoined, one fate’s thread strung.

Two hearts rejoice in love renowned. We lift our heads, alive, uncrowned.”

He waited until the last couplet to pull the ring from the box and slide it onto Jon’s finger where it too, fit perfectly, like it had always been there, and shone defiantly bright in the moonlight.  Jon wept.  He had been weeping since the first words of verse left his beloved’s lips, but seeing that ring like a piece of his missing soul returned to him undammed the tears effusively.

“God that was… Martin, I don’t have words.  I-It was… so beautiful.  You’re so beautiful.  Thank you,” he cried fervently, “I wish I could tell you properly how much that meant, but I just-“

“Hey… That’s alright.  I’m the words guy.  You’re the emulsifiers guy.  Making you cry is all I need to see to know how you feel,” Martin assured him warmly, reaching out to brush his tears away as he chuckled.

“Yeah… add this one to the running tally.”

“Oh, I have,” Martin snickered, “Speaking of!  Now we’ve done the crying through vows bit.  Shouldn’t we say the ‘I do’ bit, as well?”

Jon pursed his lips with a shrug as he reached out with his left hand to take Martin’s left as well, twining their fingers together

“Yes, I suppose we should.  I don’t see why not.  Well then, Martin, do you?”

“I do.  And Jon, do you?”

“I do.”

“You may now soundly snog the groom.”

“Martin…”

The emphatic drawl of his name the way Jon only called it when he was frustratingly enamored of him perished gently against Martin’s velvet lips as they caressed his.  They kissed slowly and reverently, sealing a pact ordained by the heavens long before either of them had seen the stars in the other’s eyes, lighting with white flame the torch to guide them for the first time, forward.  They broke it only to punctuate it with two more featherlight kisses and a breathless laugh, bowing their foreheads together in deference to the forces of fate and the universe.

“I know this isn’t the wedding either of us ever dreamed of, but as far as I’m concerned, it was perfect,” Jon murmured, nuzzling closer into his husband, swaddling the new, fledgling and beautiful word in his heart.

“Well, hey, what is a wedding really other than just a formal declaration that this is it?  This is us, we’re forever, no matter what.  We did it.  And you did it for me, in the STARS, Jon… Can we just remember that again?  You put us in the actual stars.  I am so writing a ballad for our constellation later, you do know this.”

“Oh lord.  Of course you are.  But really, it was the least I could do, after you’ve done so much for me, sacrificed everything for me.  Waited for me for so long.”

“And you came back to me,” Martin reminded him passionately, “And I don’t just mean back to life, here, in this world.  I mean you came back, Jon, MY Jon, the Jon I was in love with the moment I laid eyes on him.  The fidgety and obstinate Jon who can’t make a decent cup of tea to save his life, who puts on two different socks in the morning because his nose is already in the paper or a book, who teaches me about bleeding rocks and binary stars and still reacts to the simplest acts of kindness like a warm cranberry orange scone without asking for one like they’re divine miracles he is undeserving of, who looks at me like I hung the moon or something every time.  Even when I thought I was a complete and total waste of a human being, you, Jonathan Sims, the most beautiful, amazing, brilliant man to ever walk the Earth, looked at me like I hung the moon.  And that was… Still is… everything to me.”

The heavens shifted, the stars wheeled, the last piece clicked smartly, smugly into place.

“W-What did you say…?” Jon asked with such urgency, grabbing his hands so fiercely, Martin startled.

“Wh-I-I don’t-?  Which part?  The moon hanging part?” he stuttered, rolling his eyes fondly as he realized mid-sentence, “Oh, right.  Ugh, Jon are you seriously going to get after me about your weird vendetta against idioms at our wedding?  Because if you are that would be annoyingly adorable and so intensely you and kind of perfect, but also can you not on THIS particular occasion?”

The laugh that tore from Jon’s throat was half mad, half euphoric as the weight of the moon lifted from his shoulders and became naught but an indifferent sentinel disc in the sky once more.

“No no no, it’s just… It’s funny, I had more than a few things very, very wrong for a very, very long time.  That’s all.  Don’t worry about it,” he explained, leaning in and pressing a delicate kiss to Martin’s forehead, “If you’re the one who hung the moon after all, then I suppose ‘written in the stars’ will have to do for me.”

Martin lit up with literary glee.

“Oh ho!  Two space related idioms in one go?  What a rare treat!  Maybe this is your gateway drug into puns…” he teased impishly.

“Absolutely no chance in hell.”

They both laughed, laughed with the billowing icy breath that reached with victorious fingers up to the heavens.  They laughed, messily sniffing back the pesky drip of tears and cold.  They laughed with lightness of the encumbrance of hematite armor shed, its bloody protections no longer needed to cage wounded hearts and keep them safe and close.  They laughed in breath and also in the dancing points of light in their eyes as they fell into one another free from gravity.

“So uh… Do I get to see my star tonight, or don’t I?” Martin finally remembered, relishing the utterly horrified yelp from Jon.

“Oh god I completely-! ��Y-Yes!  Yes of course, it’s already set up at the proper coordinates!” he had already sprung to his feet, “Oh, though, hang on, it took longer to get to the star viewing part than I anticipated, so I might need to adjust it a bit.  Oh!  And I have a little strawberries and champagne, if you like?”

“I do like, please and thank you!”

Jon set to readjusting the telescope to the proper ascension and declination while Martin poured them two glasses of crisply bubbling champagne.  They twined their arms to drink a toast from each other’s glass, ‘to us’ or ‘to happily ever afters’, or to several other messily rambled toast worthy sentiments.  They couldn’t decide and toasted to all of it.  They ate plump red strawberries and licked the juice from each other’s fingers as they looked at their star, which was, after everything, just a dot, just like Pluto, but Martin had to admit that he rather liked looking at dots after all.  And that one was their dot.  The warm intoxication of love and champagne begged for music, and someone fumbled in the cold for a wedding playlist on some app, somewhere, it didn’t matter, just as long as they could join hands, gaze into each other’s eyes and dance inelegantly, stepping on each other’s toes, under the umbrella of stars in a gentle rain of moonlight.

“I don’t see your problem with cliches, idioms and all that, really…” Martin mused at length, laying his head on Jon’s shoulder as they slowly spun to the rhythm of a longing ballad and the song of the sea, “Like this stupid, great song.  They’re familiar and cozy and everyone knows them.  They’re like… like old friends.  Always there to rely on when we can’t come up with the words ourselves, because sometimes we can’t.  And if something trite and silly sums up the way you feel, why not just let it be?  Sometimes things are said over and over again because some truths are universal, you know?  They’re just… human.”

Jon pressed a kiss into the mop of curls that tickled his nose and smelled faintly of toasted sugar and lavender and mused on all of the romantic cliches that had just passed through his mind unbidden.  Who was he to deny he was but one star in the sky, a single gear in the grand mortal mechanism of the universe.  If he had handed himself over to the humanity of it all instead of rusting, stopping, looking outside where there was never anything to see, perhaps he could have had this dance much sooner.  It didn’t matter though, until it did, because that night Martin took his breath away, made his world go round, he was head over heels for his match made in heaven, and better than heaven, they were written in the stars.

“You know what, Martin?” Jon laughed in reply, “Tonight, being what it is, I am willing to concede.  You are absolutely right.”

“I’m glad…” came the tender acceptance, followed by a distinctly puckish beat of silence, “Then does this mean I can I start saying love you to the moon and back?”

“Don’t push your luck...”

#The Magnus Archives #TMA #Magnuspod #JonMartin #JMart #jmartweddingchallenge #hey-there-hunter #Jonathan Sims #Martin Blackwood #Fan fiction

[kittybellestark]

Hi ! I don't know if this is where you send requests, but maybe a fic where peter gets all jealous of Morgan and Harley, and its fathers day, but he feels like he shouldn't be there and stays in the room the Stark's have for him- (Tony lives) OH! and maybe Mays dead idk whatever ya want thank you ! <3 Oh! and can I be on the taglist?

hi milove sorry for taking literal months to do your request i recognize you requesting this on nov 18th and it is now February so i hope this is smth that was worth the wait !! 

So I played with the timelines a lil bit bc i suck and i also just kinda took this to a place i don’t think you were asking me to do whoops, it’s not just some cute sibling jealously

also not very irondad based, like sprinkle amounts. also no comfort. my bad 

Post-endgame, Tony lives, Harley & Peter are the same age, Peter got snapped Harley didn’t 

TW: Grief, implication of suicide(minor character), suicidal thoughts,  

-

There wasn’t many things Peter liked. He remembers liking a lot of things, life, school, home, himself. But that was years ago, and yet it was only a few months for Peter. The world was different now, older.

Those who survived held grief in their eyes, they moved slow and while they have grown since the loss of their world, they also had survived the return. They mourned and grew older, making new family and friends. But some who survived couldn’t hold the weight of their loss, and in the 5 years their family was gone, they went to be with them.

The returned came back, and lived in denial. Their eyes were empty, and every movement was carefully thought through. They were left behind, monuments in their place. Those who returned saw how the survived struggled to cope, and in turn they struggled as well. There was no place for them anymore. Especially when they didn’t have a family to go to.

Like Peter.

Peter returned to the world five years later to find May was gone. She was one of those who survived the initial snap, only to not be able to carry the grief. He hated that he came back to life and had no home, no family. Peter was alone.

Tony was nice enough to offer Peter a place to live with his own family. But they couldn’t relate to him, they didn’t know what it felt like to be left behind like this, to be dropped in the future and expected to be okay. Tony had a family now. A child born in an empty world, and another kid, Harley. He was barely a teenager before the snap and now he was 17, just as old as Peter.

He couldn’t help but hate living with them. Harley’s family had returned, but he wasn’t going home. Morgan was a child who was scared by Peter. Tony and Pepper sometimes forgot Peter was there, after spending so long without him they would act as if they’ve seen a ghost when Peter rounds the corner and into whatever room they’re occupying.

Peter missed May. He wished that he could still be in Queens, living in their apartment. Peter missed Ben and he missed the idea of his parents. He should have never returned. There’s no room for him in this world.

He hated how Harley took advantage of their situation. He hated that Harley had a family, a mother and a sister who returned and are alone and he didn’t go back to them. His family returned to him and yet he’s here with Tony. And he hated how Morgan took her family- her full, completed family for granted.

If Peter’s family came back to life there wouldn’t be anything stopping him from being with them. He would cherish every single nano-second if they were alive again.

And yet they all expected Peter to be okay. Adapted. Used to the future like he didn’t just blink and find himself lost and alone. He brings up that he misses May and someone frowns and tells him how long ago she died. How was that supposed to help him? No one even brought him to the cemetery. How is Peter meant to move on from a life that was stolen from him?

It’s not like any of them were okay. Tony and Pepper and Harley all crumbled as whenever there was a reminder of everything that they lost. Peter, unfortunately happened to be one of those reminders.

Tony and Pepper tried their best. They involved Peter in family bonding time and they tried their best not to flinch when Peter is unexpectedly there. Because they survived, they didn’t understand and talking to them led to dead ends.

He tried communicating with them. Cried over May’s death, had been confused about these new things that are actually years old. For them it was so long ago, a literal lifetime ago, so they never really saw the point in talking about these things. It wasn’t that they thought Peter would figure this out, they just assumed he already knew.

Talking to Harley didn’t really work that well either. He didn’t want to talk about the things Peter missed out on and when asked about his family he would shrug and say that he’s moved on.

And, well, Morgan was a kid. She was born in an empty world, told stories of people that she never should have met and now faced with the world doubling and not understanding any of it. Peter Parker was just a character is bedtime stories and now he’s a ghost who wants her home. She used to cry whenever Peter is around and still tries to hide behind people’s legs. 

God, he hated being this kid. Never wanted to be the one who envied others. Before- when it was still just May and Peter, he didn’t feel this gnawing inside him, while they didn’t have much Peter still had someone who fit all the rolls he needed. He hated being jealous, he didn’t feel this when he used to look at anyone who had two living parents.

He shouldn’t be here. Not in this room, which came decorated with everything Peter had loved before he died- and not alive. He didn’t fit. Not into this family who struggles with the idea he’s alive and not on this planet where the world is still mourning the people who came back. 

“Are you coming downstairs?” Harley asked.

Peter can’t be here. He had no right.

“I have a taxi coming to get me.” 

That wasn’t a lie. Something he scheduled last night at some point, between the tears and holding his breath. Peter didn’t think anyone would be awake at this time, Sunday’s were always the day that everyone slept in and Peter could just be alone outside of his room.  Sometimes he would just sit in the living room and other times he’d wander around the property, often ending up by the lake. By the time everyone would start waking up Peter would be back in his room with some breakfast and try not to bother anyone. 

“Okay, well it’s fathers day, so I think they might be expecting your presence in some form. We have plans and all that.” 

Of course they do. They always make plans where Peter only finds out the day before or day of. Maybe Peter has plans. They could consider that. Okay, maybe Peter never really has any plans, nothing more than trying to understand this new world. And maybe he didn’t make the active effort to find where he fit in this home, but he is the child and it shouldn’t really be up to him. Harley probably didn’t have to engage with the adults first. Tony and Pepper more than likely got input from Harley on their plans. 

With a sigh Peter nodded. “I’ll cancel the taxi.”

“Cool! I’ll tell everyone you’ll be down soon.”

Harley made sure to give a big smile, before heading downstairs, a bounce in each step he took. Peter really hated Harley for his happiness. 

Taking a moment after canceling the taxi, Peter tried to pull himself together. He forced a smile and pulled his shoulders back. All that needs to be done is sit and nod, occasionally laugh. Pay no mind to the way Morgan looks at him in fear, and don’t see the look of mourning on Tony and Pepper’s face. He needs to not remember Harley’s family alone in Tennessee. 

He went down the stairs and followed the noise to the kitchen. There was laughter and the sounds of dishes clinking against one another. It smelt of pancakes and cinnamon and hash browns and coffee. Standing here Peter could close his eyes and pretend this was seven years in the past, with him and May and Ben. He could imagine Ben making the food and singing along to the radio with May dancing along as she sets the table. But this wasn’t 2016, this was 2023. Instead it was a finished family forced to bring him in, a harsh reminder that he doesn’t belong.

Peter stepped into the kitchen, Pepper was just finishing up breakfast and Harley was setting the table. Morgan was sitting on Tony’s lap whispering into her fathers ear. Food was laid out ready to be served, with orange juice, iced tea and coffee all in their own pitchers waiting to be poured. He moved through the room, trying to not to intrude before sitting down at the table. It didn’t take much longer for Pepper and Harley to sit down as well, Tony moving Morgan into her proper chair. 

Everyone around Peter fell into easy conversation while he stayed silent, trying to focus on his food instead of the way Morgan was starring daggers at him. They talked about their favourite family vacations and laughed at their own jokes. Peter couldn’t help but feel like he was actually sitting out on the porch. This family had five years together, five years of memories and laughter, of love and pain, and Peter wasn’t apart of any of it. He wasn’t a part of any family, his own buried and far too dead.

“Peter, what about you? Did you have any Father’s Day traditions?” 

Hearing Harley address Peter pulled him back to this world, and welcomed in his deep rooted desire to have his family back. Harley had two families now and he left one completely. Abandoned them when they came back to life. And Morgan was sitting here glaring at Peter completely oblivious to the fact that she has her entire family and how privileged she was for it.

“Well I don’t have any memories of my parents, so I don’t think there were any traditions with them. The only people I could ask about that are now dead. Unless you consider going to the cemetery to go visit your dead father you can’t remember a father’s day tradition, then no.”

The entire table stopped eating, all sounds coming to a complete end. Everyone stayed still as if Peter was some volatile bomb that would explode if anyone nearby breathed too hard. He could feel his jaw clench, as he tried to breathe in and out. It wasn’t working.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Should I not bring up my very dead family? Was that inappropriate to say that my father is dead I have no memories? My absolute bad! Next time I’ll consider how uncomfortable it makes everyone here. I mean jeez, Harley has a whole family in Tennessee he hasn’t seen since they reappeared. You’ve got two whole families to choose from, Harls! What an accomplishment. And Morgan, well she’s older than I was when my parents died, so she’s definitely on the right track. And wow, I got a whole second set of parents out of May and Ben. Which was great until I watched Ben die. Until I die and find out while my death was temporary, May’s wasn’t. Whenever I want to be with my family I have to go all the way back to Queens and visit the cemetery. But you all just live in the same house. So genuinely, I’m sorry for not considering your emotions about my dead family.”

“Peter...” Tony whispered, reaching his one hand out to Peter.

Peter shook his head, pulling away, he didn’t want to see the empty eyes starring back at him. He didn’t want to acknowledge the way Tony looks at him with regret and how Pepper looks at him like he’s lost. He didn’t want to see how the three that lived through both snaps always held pain in their eyes. And Peter most certainly didn’t want to see Morgan, who had no idea how lucky she is, that she was born never knowing loss.

Peter didn’t want to see a family who was pulled together in a time of pain. He wanted to see his family. Peter wanted to look across the table and see Ben and May throwing little balls of napkins at each other. He wanted to be Harley and be able to go home and see his family whenever he wants. He wanted to be Morgan and do science experiments with his parents. Peter wanted the one thing he didn’t have, something that Harley and Morgan had an abundance of.

“I don’t have a family anymore. I never got to say goodbye to May. I would give up the rest of my life to see them again. And you guys just can’t understand that. You have you family. You get to see them whenever you want. I can’t ever see mine again. I can never go home. They’re gone.”

After all, Peter was just a ghost, another person who returned, who had been dead for too long. He didn’t belong in a world of survivors. Peter was just another person long gone who no longer fits into the world around him.

-

Taglist: Ask/DM to be added

@peter-is-a-bean @jean-and-diet-coke @dead-inside-pt2 @they-were-cloudsinmycoffee @parkersjiggle @7peternotparker7 @thatonecrackheadshipper @kevinthewoman @faline4you @lynxshinon @narutoyaoifan @pastelwheeler @thecrazymarvelfan @bonjour-gays @thebestqueenoftheworld

#irondad #peter parker #tony stark #marvel #spiderman #spiderson #avengers #harley keener #mcu #morgan stark #pepper potts #post endgame #Tony lives #request #peter and harley #angst #no comfort #i’m so sorry #irondad and spiderson #iron man #everybody lives au #Peter is grieving #peter deserves better #hurt peter

[ultravioletqueen]

Nombre completo:valentino Miguel pepper

Alias:val

Edad:17

Tipo de sangre:-A

Ocupación:estudiante de preparatoria

Ocupación actual:mesero en pepper paradiso y niñero

Fecha de nacimiento:14 de febrero(acuario)

Shows/juegos favoritos:romance,aventura(undertale, shera y salior moon)

Comida favorita:chocolate blanco

Instrumento:arpa

Animal favorito:gatos

Altura:1,65(5,5)

Familia:mr pepper(padre) Mrs pepper(madre) belle(hermana menor) cayenne(hermana menor) paprika(hermana menor) lewis(hermano adoptivo)

Arma:ninguna

Habilidades:visión espectral,detector de espíritus, ver a través de los disfrazes humanos de otros fantasmas, gran cocinero,telekinesis.

Personalidad:val es un adolescente muy asustadizo y fácil de hacer llorar, debido al bullying que sufrió de parte de sus compañeros por su "poca masculinidad" val tiene una muy mala imagen de si mismo considerandose alguien raro. Val es muy amigable y muy paciente con sus cercanos, val es poco sociable y no se relaciona mucho con la gente, pero cuando se siente cómodo puede incluso llegar a ser muy risueño.

Val es trabajador y siempre da su parte del trabajo, es muy dedicado a su trabajo como mesero y niñero. Val es sumamente sensible y muy empatico, siendo capaz de meterse en los zapatos de otros y entender sus situaciones. Val es un fiel creyente de lo sobrenatural y es de mente abierta,respeta las creencias de los demás y es respetuoso.

Apariencia:val es un adolescente de 17 años de estatura promedio, tiene el pelo rubio con mechas rosa pastel y ojos del mismo color, en apariencia es casi idéntico al señor pepper. Val se le puede ver usando una camisa a rayas blancas y grises debajo de una chaqueta fina de color magenta, lleva también un gorro y converse fucsia y su atuendo se completa con un collar con un pimiento rojo. Val también posee orejas perforadas y lleva aretes negros.

También tiene una prenda alternativa, que consta de un hoddie sin mangas de color blanco con dos rayas rosas, pantalones grises y sandalias rosas.

Historia:val nació poco después de la llegada de lewis, siendo el único hijo biológico varón de los pepper, val era constantemente acosado por sus compañeros debido a que "era poco masculino" al gustarle cocinar y el color rosa, sin embargo lewis siempre lo defendió y cuido de sus matones, por lo que val admiraba mucho a lewis ya que veía en el lo que quería ser:un hombre que inspire respeto que no tiene miedo de ser el mismo.val en más de una ocasión tuvo algún encuentro con lo supernatural debido a extrañas visiones de fantasmas o sueños locos. Tras la desaparición de lewis, val llegaría a padecer trastornos de la alimentación y empezó a tener más encuentros supernaturales, cuando se dio cuenta de que algo estaba mal fue cuando reencontró con su hermano, no podía ver su disfraz humano, veía su forma fantasma, val en ese momento fue junto a lewis con frigg para ver que era lo que tenía, resultaba que val era un vedoiro, una persona capaz de ver espíritus y la muerte.

Trivia:

*el diseño de val esta basado en mangle de fnafhs y de nathaniel kurtzberg de mlb.

*val sueña con el mundo de los muertos.

*val padeció de bulimia, sin embargo ahora está tratado y parcialmente recuperado.

*val es amigo de chloe, quien considera su mejor amiga.

*val y sus poderes estan inspirados en audrey verdancy de @reptilian-angel.

*el prefiere lo dulce más que lo picante.

*su voz headcanon sería Carlos Hernández en español y michael sinternikklas en inglés.

*nació el día de San Valentín(14 de febrero).

* val también es un usuario involuntario de telekinesis, ya que cuando duerme los objetos a su alrededor se mueven, si se mueven alrededor de él es un sueño normal pero si empiezan a moverse de forma alocada es una pesadilla, esto hace que no sea capaz de ir a pijamadas.

Full name:valentino Miguel pepper

Alias:val

Age:17

Blood type:-A

ocupation:high school student

"actual" ocupation:waiter in pepper paradiso and babysitter

D.O.B:February 14(acuario)

favorite show/game:adventure,romance(undertale, shera and salior moon)

Favorite food:white chocolate

Instrument:harp

Favorite animal:cats

Height:1,65(5,5)

Family: Mr Pepper (Father) Mrs Pepper (Mother) Belle (Younger Sister) Cayenne (Younger Sister) Paprika (Younger Sister) Lewis (Adoptive Brother)

Weapon:none

Skills: spectral vision, spirit detector, seeing through the human disguises of other ghosts, great Cook,telekinesis.

Personality: val is a very scary teenager and easy to make cry, due to the bullying he suffered from his peers for his "little masculinity" Val has a very bad image of himself considering himself strange. Val is very friendly and very patient with those close to him, Val is not very sociable and does not interact much with people, but when he feels comfortable he can even be very smiling.

Val is a hard worker and always gives his share of the work, he is very dedicated to his work as a waiter and babysitter. Val is extremely sensitive and very empathetic, being able to step into the shoes of others and understand their situations. Val is a faithful believer in the supernatural and is open-minded, respects the beliefs of others, and is respectful.

Appearance: Val is a 17-year-old teenager of average height, has blonde hair with pastel pink highlights and eyes of the same color, in appearance he is almost identical to Mr. Pepper. Val can be seen wearing a white and gray striped shirt underneath a thin magenta jacket, he also wears a fuchsia hat and converse and his outfit is completed with a red pepper necklace. Val also has pierced ears and wears black earrings.

He also has an alternative garment, consisting of a sleeveless white hoddie with two pink stripes, gray pants, and pink sandals.

History: Val was born shortly after the arrival of Lewis, being the only biological male child of the Pepper, Val was constantly harassed by his companions because "he was not very masculine" when he liked to cook and the color pink, however Lewis always loved it. He defended and took care of his thugs, so Val greatly admired Lewis as he saw in him what he wanted to be: a man who inspires respect who is not afraid of being the same. Val on more than one occasion had an encounter with him. supernatural due to strange ghost visions or crazy dreams. After the disappearance of Lewis, Val would suffer from eating disorders and began to have more supernatural encounters, when he realized that something was wrong was when he reunited with his brother, he could not see his human disguise, he saw his ghost form, Val at that moment went to Lewis with frigg to see what he had, it turned out that Val was a vedoiro, a person capable of seeing spirits and death.

Trivia:

* Val's design is based on mangle from fnafhs and nathaniel kurtzberg from mlb.

* val dreams of the world of the dead.

* val suffered from bulimia, however he is now treated and partially recovered.

* val is friends with chloe, whom he considers his best friend.

* val and his powers are inspired by @reptilian-angel audrey verdancy.

* He prefers sweet over spicy.

* His headcanon voice would be Carlos Hernández in Spanish and Michael Sinternikklas in English.

* was born on Valentine's Day (February 14).

* Val is also an involuntary user of telekinesis, since when he sleeps the objects around him move, if they move around him it is a normal dream but if they start to move in a crazy way it is a nightmare, this makes him not capable going to sleepovers.

#oc #msa #mystery skulls oc #Val pepper #Lewis pepper #cayenne pepper #Paprika pepper #Belle pepper #Mr pepper #Mrs pepper #profile character #Profile

[sheliesshattered]

This Isn’t A Ghost Story extras for Chapter 8: The Temple

The eighth and final chapter of This Isn’t A Ghost Story has been posted! You can find it here on AO3 and here on Tumblr. Below the cut are extras for this chapter and a few things for the story over all. I’ve had such fun writing this fic, and hope you’ve all enjoyed reading it and following along with the writing process here too!

Like the previous chapter, chapter 8 is named for the location where it takes place, in this case the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, which is near the Valley of the Kings, Thebes, and modern Luxor, on the west bank of the Nile.

As mentioned in both this chapter and previous chapters, several sections of the temple have stars painted on a blue background on the ceilings:

The ‘towering statue’ Clara comments on is one of a line of statues depicting the pharaoh Hatshepsut as the god Osiris, only a few of which are still standing:

Here’s a short video showing both the exterior and interior of the temple from earlier this year.

I came across the Temple of Hatshepsut fairly early in my writing process, when I was looking into what archaeological dig sites were active in the 1910s and 1920s. This photo from the late 1920s shows the continuing work going on in the area (that’s the Temple at the back left), and served as part of the inspiration for Clara’s memory of finding the Doctor at a dig site in Thebes in 1921:

About a month into writing This Isn’t A Ghost Story, I was grappling with the detail of Clara’s wedding ring, based on the poll results you guys gave me. I had been toying with going with an emerald for her ring, since emeralds have some interesting ties to ancient Egypt, but I also really wanted to go the route of a TARDIS-blue sapphire, and in particular a star sapphire really appealed to me, for its look and its symbolism. The results of that little impromptu poll clearly pointed to a star sapphire -- but also suggested I tie it into the world-building somehow.

Those two elements came together in my head rather abruptly when I remembered the star ceiling at the Temple of Hatshepsut, and after digging into the history of Hatshepsut, I realized it worked almost too well. On 28 June this final epilogue chapter sprang into being in basically the form you see it in here, baring a few edits I’ve made to it in the three months (!!) since then.

As the Doctor says in this chapter, the Temple was designed and overseen by Hatshepsut’s head advisor Senenmut, and many modern Egyptologists do in fact believe that the two may have been lovers during Hatshepsut’s time as pharaoh. While there are many stylized statues of Senenmut (including a few of him with Hatshepsut’s daughter, to whom he served as primary tutor), archaeologists have also found ostracons, chips of limestone that ancient artists used as throw-away sketching surfaces, that depict Senenmut in what he more likely looked like in life:

Please tell me I’m not the only one who sees this resemblance: 

And then there’s Hatshepsut herself, who is depicted in numerous different ways throughout art and statuary, sometimes shown as more typically male in her role as pharaoh, but more often shown in what Egyptologists believe she looked like in life -- large eyes, full cheeks, and a small chin:

I mean:

Once my brain made that connection, I really couldn’t let it go.

I had originally planned to end the story with the sequence in the Cairo museum that eventually became chapter 7, but the connection between Clara and the Doctor and the real historical Hatshepsut and Senenmut -- with the added parallel of Senenmut as tutor and guardian of Hatshepsut’s daughter corresponding to the Doctor watching over Margot in Ghost Story, even -- was just too good to pass up. 

Senenmut’s tomb is as the Doctor described it, with the oldest known astronomical ceiling of any tomb or temple in Egypt:

His tomb is very near to the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, and tunnels into the cliffside such that it is extremely close to Hatshepsut’s own tomb, which is entered from the Valley of the Kings, on other side of that mountainous area. This has only further fueled speculation that the two were very much in love -- as pharaoh, Hatshepsut had to have her tomb built in the Valley of the Kings, and as a commoner Senenmut couldn’t be buried there. But they could design their tombs such that they would be as close as possible to each other, even if the entrances are miles apart.

Part of my goal with this final chapter was to give a hint at a larger story that this version of Clara and the Doctor are just a part of. I left the possibility that they had once been Hatshepsut and Senenmut intentionally open-ended, so the reader can make their own decision. They might have been, they might not have been, but in the end what matters is that they are together and in love now. 

Similarly I also wanted to make allusions to both Doctor Who canon -- Senenmut as an ancient astronomer, and Clara’s comments about travelling the stars together in their next life -- as well as the wide variety of fanfiction that exists for this ship. In a way there are thousands of versions of them scattered about out there, finding each other and falling in love over and over again. This Isn’t A Ghost Story doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s part of a much larger multi-layered story that is constantly being told and re-told. And in many ways, that’s what I love best about fanfiction versus any other genre of fiction.

The process of writing this story has been so interesting and rewarding, frustrating at times and huge amounts of fun at other points. With this final chapter posted, This Isn’t A Ghost Story is officially the first multi-chapter, non-series fanfic I have ever actually finished, in more than a decade of posting fanfiction online. This is the first time I’ve made myself wait to start posting a story until it’s nearly complete, and I documented more about my process thoughts here on Tumblr than I have for anything I’ve written previously.

It has been a fantastic nearly four month journey, and so much of that is down to the lovely interactions with those of you reading, both here and over on AO3. From the early interest many of you expressed way back at the beginning of June, to the comments and cheerleading on my #process thoughts posts throughout the summer, to all the many wonderful and humbling comments on the story on AO3, I could not have made this journey without you guys. With what a strange, stressful, and often depressing year 2020 has been, I know that when I look back on this year, this is what I’m going to remember the best, taking this journey along with all of you.

And on that note -- do any of you have any questions about Ghost Story? Anything about the writing process or the world building or really anything at all, I am more than happy to answer in as much detail as you like. Feel free to ask here, or on AO3, or use my Tumblr askbox, now or at any point in the future. ❤️

@tounknowndestinations​ had asked about the timeline I worked out for the entire story, that I’ve been keeping under wraps for fear of spoilers. Originally this started as just a way to keep straight how many years had passed -- ‘do I say eighty-six years here, or eighty-seven??’ etc -- but eventually ballooned from there to cover the entire narrative, and even some of the timeline that is only hinted at in places. This is its final form in my working googledoc:

1875: the Doctor is born

1885: the House is built

February 1899: Clara the 1st is born

13 May 1921: the Doctor and Clara the 1st meet in Cairo, she is 22, he is 46

12 May 1923: the Doctor and Clara the 1st marry in Glasgow, she is 24, he is 48

June 1925: Clara and the Doctor return from Egypt

August 1925: purchase of the House

23 Nov 1927: the Doctor dies, age 52

21 August 1928: Margot is born

23 Nov 1928: Clara the 1st dies, age 29

8 April 1956: Ellie is born. Margot is 27

23 Nov 1986: Clara is born. Ellie is 30

1991: at 5 years old, Clara tells Ellie and Margot about the ghost 

September 2000: Ellie dies of cancer, age 44. Clara is not quite 14

January 2010: Dave Oswald dies of a heart attack, age 56. Clara is 23

October 2014: Margot dies, age 86, leaving her house to Clara, who is nearly 28 

16 Nov 2014: Clara has the nightmare that begins to unlock her past life memories

13 May 2021: Clara and the Doctor return to Cairo to mark 100 years since they met, the Doctor is restored to life

18 May 2021: Clara and the Doctor visit the Temple of Hatshepsut, which leads Clara to wonder if perhaps they have met and fallen in love before

Thank you so much to all of you who have followed along during the writing process, to everyone who has reblogged chapter posts here and commented on AO3, and everyone who has cheered me on during the past four months. You have made writing this such a joy, and I cannot wait to share my next project with you. ❤️

#This Isn't A Ghost Story #This Isn't A Ghost Story extras #process thoughts #my writing #Doctor Who #Doctor Who fanfic #Clara and the Doctor

[heysoup]

Fluffy February Day 1 - Fishing

Howdy folks! I’m taking part in the Fallout Fluffy February prompt list this month, hosted by @fluffyfebruary

Every day of this month I’ll be posting my finished prompts under the community tag #fluffyfebruary and on my own blog as #fluffyfeb. I’ll also be cross posting to Ao3, which I’ll link to in each post - so feel free to follow me over there, too!

Chapter 1: A Fisher of Men

Pairing: Butch/Male Lone Wanderer

Summary: Jamie takes Butch out on the Potomac for a fishing trip in the same spot his father had taken him a year prior. What seems to be an uneventful few hours turns into anything but when they find a monster on the other end of their line. Takes place after the events of Broken Steel.

Ao3 Link

“This is fucking boring.”

Jamie shoots Butch an irritated look from where he’s sitting across from the other man in the canoe, his brows drawn together as he tries his damnedest to untangle his fishing line from the third piece of driftwood he’s ‘caught’ that day.

“No shit,” he grumbles, spitting out some mud as he tries to break the line off the wood with his teeth. He lets out a frustrated huff, gripping his rod in both hands as he raises it up and fights the urge to just chuck the whole damn thing into the Potomac. He hears Butch snicker, and he whips his head up.

“You’re like a goddamn feral,” Butch teases with a laugh, reaching over and snatching the rod from Jamie’s grip. He digs in the pocket of his jeans and pulls out his switchblade, flicking it open and carefully beginning to cut the line away from where it’s tangled in the driftwood to try and save as much of it as he can.

He kicks his boots playfully against Jamie’s sneakers, noticing how the canvas high-tops are completely soaked through from the puddle of water they’d managed to slosh into the canoe earlier as they tried ungracefully to board it from the shore. He just shakes his head, a smile on his face, knowing that if he brings up the topic of appropriate footwear to the younger man it’ll just earn him a bruised shoulder.

“This was supposed to be like… meditative or some shit,” Jamie says with a sigh. He rubs his hands over his freckled face and ruffles some of the dust out of his sun-warmed hair. Butch just gives him an incredulous look.

“Where the hell did you get that idea from?” He finishes cutting the driftwood free and tosses it behind him into their small pile of ‘catches’ – which is really just a collection of junk at this point – before reattaching the hook and bobber and handing the rod back to the other man. He leans over and grabs his own fishing pole, squinting against the reflective ripples in the water to check on his bobber. Still absolutely no bites.

Jamie shrugs, suddenly looking a little bashful. “I dunno,” he admits. He reaches back into the salvaged can of cram they were using as bait, tears a chunk out, and works on preparing his hook again. Not like it matters much, he tells himself. He can continue to go through the motions perfectly and not catch a single thing. A little bit like everything else in his life, he thinks bitterly. His fucking bad luck.

After a moment of silence, Jamie continues. “Apparently my family came from a long line of fishermen on my dad’s side. He passed down some stories about it. Told me they were tradition or something.” Jamie shrugs. “Anyway, he taught me that you were s’posed to reflect on yourself out here. Get some peace and quiet.” Jamie finally says. He sucks the excess cram off his fingers, his tongue burning at the sudden saltiness, and casts his line out again, his bobber floating a few feet from Butch’s. Butch looks up at him, snapped out of his own thoughts.

“Huh… like, Wasteland fisherman?” Butch asks, deliberately choosing not to tell him how he thinks the whole ‘peace and quiet’ schtick is a load of brahmin shit and instead focusing on the first part of what he said. He’s always intrigued whenever Jamie tells him about his family, at least after they’d learned that he wasn’t born in the vault. The idea of generations of Arroyo’s managing to survive out here long enough to pop out the rascally kid he sits across from kind of amazes him. He sets his fishing pole back down against the side of the canoe, sure that it would be fine – he hasn’t gotten a single nibble in the past three hours.

“Nah. I’m sure some of them might’ve been, but we don’t really know much about closer generations of my family. We only really knew about some of my prewar family – something about some records my dad’s dad had kept on his terminals after searching our surname through databases in some place that used to process immigrations, or some shit. The occupation listed there was fisherman, apparently.” Jamie finishes and Butch hums thoughtfully, trying to imagine what Jamie’s granddad might have looked like.

Jamie winces when he thinks of his dad and has to shake the thoughts from his head. As if his face reflecting back at him from the clear surface of the clean water isn’t enough of a reminder of what he’s lost of his family and himself to of Project Purity – he looks like his own father’s ghost and even carries his name.

Butch’s fishing pole snapping against the side of the boat brings him back out of his thoughts, and he flinches back away from the canoe’s edge, the quick motion causing him to almost tumble out the other side as the boat sways dangerously.

“I got one!” Butch practically shouts and lunges for the pole, straddling the seat of the canoe and bracing his legs against the floor as he begins an awkward tug-of-war match with whatever is on the other end of his line. Jamie perks up with a huge grin on his face, all thoughts of his troubles momentarily forgotten, and hovers over Butch nervously.

“Make sure you don’t reel in when he’s pulling on the line! And try to give it some slack!” Jamie parrots what his father had taught him on their one and only fishing trip in the Wastes months back and digs around in their mess of a canoe for the rickety net they brought with them. Butch just gives an annoyed grunt, his face crinkled in concentration as he pulls on the line.

“This bastard is fuckin’ heavy!” He complains, giving the rod a yank that rocks their canoe again. Whatever they have hooked is pulling them ever so slightly to the opposite shore and splashing like crazy beneath the water.

“Scoot,” Jamie orders. He tosses the net aside – it’s obvious that whatever’s on the other side of the line won’t fit in it now - and moves on unsteady legs to sit behind Butch, reaching his arms around the other man’s waist and grabbing the fishing pole to help him pull. What the hell are they dealing with here?

By the time they begin to make some progress in reeling the fish in, they’re about halfway to the shore and completely out of breath. Butch laughs hysterically between pulls, his eyes squeezed shut in glee, and Jamie can’t help but laugh in return. His palms are sweaty, his white-knuckle grip on the fishing pole beginning to slip.

“Is it trying to pull us out of the water?!” Butch says suddenly, elbowing Jamie to look at the swiftly approaching shore. They’re hauling ass at this point, almost as if… whatever they hooked had suddenly caught some footing in the shallower water. Jamie’s eyes widen and he immediately lets go of the pole to root around in their bags. As he does, Butch careens forward from the sudden lack of support and just barely catches himself with his elbows against the edge of the canoe. He curses, “CHRIST, Nosebleed! Some warning next time!”

Jamie has only just gotten his hands on Butch’s shotgun when they finally catch a glimpse of their ‘fish’ as it breaks the surface of the water. At this point, they’ve reeled it in pretty close and the wake left behind the huge creature emerging from the stagnant part of the river capsizes their canoe just as they crash into the sandy shore.

With a chorus of yells both men topple over into the shallows. Jamie squeezes his eyes shut and lands on his back with a thud, his arms stretched up over his head holding the shotgun out of the river. The water feels like a cold slap to his face, and he comes back up gasping for air. He looks over to where Butch has landed hard on his ass, noting that the fishing pole is being tugged out of his hands and quickly away from him. He looks and sees the fruits of their labor – an albino Mirelurk with the fishing line wrapped around one claw.

“MIRELURK!” Butch yells, scrambling to his feet and running over to Jamie. He pulls the other man up and grabs the shotgun from him just as the Mirelurk turns toward them and begins clambering over the old canoe that groans and splinters beneath its weight.

“Shoot it! Shoot it!” Jamie practically shrieks and pushes against Butch’s arm, urging him to hurry when the Mirelurk picks up speed and barrels toward them. Butch nods and fights the urge to run, taking a breath and bracing for the recoil as he lines up his shot. Jamie flinches when he hears the crack! of the rounds exploding from the gun and shattering the vulnerable part of the Mirelurk’s fragile front shell. His ears ring from the close proximity of the shot and he grimaces, about to cover them until he realizes the monster is still running full speed toward them. Shit!

He grabs Butch and tackles him to the ground, shoving them out of the way as the huge, mutated crab stumbles past them at an alarming speed and crashes hard into the shore. It lies there face-first in a mound in the sand and they watch it with wild eyes from their position on the ground, ready to book it at any hint of movement, but it’s motionless and quiet – dead.

Jamie rolls off of Butch and flops down next to him, both of them looking up at the endless expanse of bright blue sky as they struggle to catch their breaths.

“Still think fishing is boring?” Jamie snaps and Butch begins to laugh again, the sound starting as a snort and bubbling slowly from his chest before he’s full-on wheezing with laughter. Jamie sits up and looks down at him like he’s insane.

“What about this was funny?!” He asks, shaking Butch’s shoulder. He can’t help but return the grin, though. Seeing Butch happy always manages to make him smile. Butch wipes his hand down his face as he sits up, slinging the shotgun over his shoulder and hopping to his feet. He reaches down to pull Jamie up with him, a huge shit-eating grin on his face.

Jamie’s ears suddenly feel hot as he watches Butch, noticing the endearing gap between his two front teeth and the splash of sun freckles over his now sand-dusted face. He swallows, his heart racing. “What?” He repeats again, his throat dry.

“I caught a motherfucking fish.” Butch beams even more and looks incredibly proud of himself as they turn and walk over to his ‘catch.’ He kicks it with the toe of his boot a few times just to ease his own worries of it springing back to life.

“It’s not a fish! It’s a crab, they’re different.” Jamie argues and crouches down, grabbing the edge of the Mirelurk’s shell with Butch as they flip it over with a heave. Jamie doesn’t mention that technically he did catch it with a fishing pole, and that technically they are going to have it for dinner. He doesn’t want to give Butch the satisfaction, especially considering the only thing he got out of this trip is his collection of stones and driftwood that was currently crushed under their broken canoe.

“It counts.” Butch says, the grin still plastered on his face. He pulls a combat knife out of a holster on his belt and settles down on his knees in the sand, tapping the sharp edge of it against the shell. “Look at this bad boy. You ever see a white one before?”

“It’s an albino, I guess.” Jamie says, leaning close to inspect it. He lifts the claw that’s tangled in their fishing line. “What a mess, we aren’t salvaging this.” He drops it back into the sand with a thud.

“The fuck’s an albino?” Butch asks as he cuts into their prize, grimacing and holding back a gag as he begins to butcher it. Mirelurk is good meat, but it reeks when it’s fresh.

“You know, like that one story Brotch made us read in like 8th grade, Moby Dick? It was about that sea captain and the giant albino whale.” Jamie snickers and walks the few paces back to their canoe. He flips it right-side-up with some effort and drags their valuables out of the muddy water, clicking his tongue in disappointment when he notices their bags are completely soaked through. “You’re lucky he didn’t eat your leg.” He teases.

Butch looks back at him and pouts, blowing a messy curl of his hair out of his eyes. “Yeah, I never read anything ol’ Brotch assigned. Waste of time. Like it would’ve taught me anything useful out here.” He grumbles.

Jamie laughs and drops their stuff next to a rock outcropping near their canoe. It looks like it would provide some decent shelter against the wind and by the looks of their soaking clothes and supplies, they’ll have to stay the night unless they want to catch hypothermia. “Maybe it could’ve taught ya how to catch a real fish.”

“It still counts as a catch!” Butch whines.

“It’s not a fish.” Jamie shoots back in a sing-song voice, biting his tongue to hold back the huge grin that threatens to break through. Butch jumps up from what he’s doing and turns to him, his face red, but mirroring the same smile that Jamie is trying so hard to hold back.

“It. Counts.” Butch grits between clenched teeth puts his combat knife away, buttoning the sheathe into place against his hip. They stare at each other for a moment, their eyes locked in a staring match. Jamie’s grin finally breaks free.

“Does no-“he cuts himself off with a yelp as Butch lunges for him playfully. He laughs so hard he thinks his chest might burst as he takes off in a run down the beach, Butch hot on his heels as he begins to chase him.

He knows Butch’s legs are much longer than his, but he can hold his own – at least for a little while. And even though the inevitable ending is Butch catching him in a tackle, he can’t say he doesn’t enjoy it. It’s something they’ve done since they were boys stumbling around in the grey fluorescence of the vault, constantly finding their way back to each other like it was fate, and it feels like home.

#fluffyfebruary #fallout #fallout 3 #butch deloria #butch/m!lw #fanfiction #jay writes #fluffyfeb

[trueclors]

(   kim   seokwoo   ,   cis   man   )   have   you   seen   choi   minho   ?   i   heard   he   is   a   volunteer   at   the   nightowl   animal   shelter   .   they’re   twenty   -   four   years   old   and   they’ve   been   living   in   san   verto   for   one   year   .   they   tend   to   be   charming   and   flamboyant   ,   but   rumor   has   it   they   can   also   be   melodramatic   and   condescending   .

well   ig   it   is   time   for   everyone   to   meet   the   ultimate   hoe..   minho   <3   no   fr   i   swear   he’s   a   good   person   deep   down!!   also   give   me   all   the   plots   cause   yuh   i   need   them   ,   see   yall   in   the   dms   >:)

。*◞  basic stats

full name: choi minho

nicknames: n/a

age: twenty four

hometown: seoul

current location: san verto

ethnicity: korean

gender: cis man

pronouns: he/him

orientation: bisexual

occupation: dance instructor/volunteer

languages spoken: korean, english

。*◞  aesthetics

strands   of   hair   covering   designer   headbands   ,   ornate   ruby   rings   and   fingers   effortlessly   plugging   in   airpods   to   avoid   conversation

。*◞  biography

born   on   the   12th   of   february   in   seoul   ,   south   korea   ,   choi   minho   is   the   elder   son   of   kim   heejin,   a   nurse   working   countless   hours   at   a   local   hospital   and   choi   yejun,   a   school   teacher   .   his   childhood   years   are   uneventful   and   though   he’s   not   extremely   popular   at   school   ,   minho   isn’t   an   outcast   either   .   he   is   more   like   that   mysterious   ,   consciously   itroverted   kid   that   doesn’t   want   to   be   involved   in   anything   that   could   potentially   distract   him   from   his   goals   .   problem   is   ,   he   has   no   goals   ,   nothing   to   be   passionate   about   and   school   is   definitely   not   an   environment   he   has   ambitions   for   .   at   just   4   years   old   and   laying   on   his   living   room’s   sofa   ,   idly   staring   at   the   tv   screen   is   when   he   is   introduced   to   hip   hop   .   immediately   drawn   in   ,   a   young   minho   asks   his   parents   to   sign   him   up   for   dancing   lessons   at   a   nearby   studio   ,   where   the   youngest   class   consists   of   kids   bigger   and   older   than   him   ,   but   he   doesn’t   care   .

fast   foward   to   his   16th   birthday   ,   now   fully   in   love   with   the   way   dancing   makes   him   feel   ,   when   he   learns   that   scouters   from   an   incredibly   successful   american   agency   are   in   seoul   for   limited   auditions   .   he   takes   the   chance   ,   without   saying   a   single   word   to   his   parents   ,   and   is   the   only   one   out   of   thousands   to   succesfully   pass   and   now   comes   the   tough   part   ,   breaking   the   news   .   even   if   his   parents   expect   that   their   son   wants   to   pursue   dancing   ,   they’re   infurtiated   due   to   the   fact   that   he   now   has   to   drop   out   of   school   and   move   to   new   york   .   however   ,   the   turbulence   in   his   relationship   with   them   doesn’t   last   too   long   ,   mostly   because   they   see   very   clearly   that   he   won’t   back   down   .

a   new   beginning   starts   and   parting   from   his   parents   at   such   a   young   age   seems   hardly   bearable   ,   but   chasing   his   dream   fuels   a   fire   in   him   that   will   not   allow   any   feelings   of   emptiness   to   slip   through   the   cracks   .   minho   trains   restlessly   for   3   years   ,   at   19   years   old   ,   he   starts   getting   his   first   gigs   as   a   backup   dancer   and   quickly   works   his   way   up   to   the   top   .   he   seems   unstoppable   ;   collaborating   with   other   artists   ,   starring   in   music   videos   ,   choreographing   for   the   biggest   stars   you   could   possibly   imagine   and   even   getting   his   own   solo   stage   to   perform   at   wembley   ,   award   shows   like   the   grammys   ,   vmas   ,   etc   .

just   when   it   looks   as   if   he’s   about   to   reach   his   full   potential   ,   comes   the   accident   .   minho   is   backstage   preparing   to   perform   an   opening   routine   at   the   bbmas   ,   the   crowd   is   chanting   his   name   ,   he   goes   on   stage   and   during   the   final   handstand   ,   he   trips   .   the   pain   on   his   lower   back   and   right   leg   is   tremendous   ,   yet   he   pulls   through   it   .   what   he   cannot   come   to   terms   with   is   making   a   mistake   that   could   potentially   destroy   his   entire   career   .   maybe   if   he   had   slept   one   hour   less   ,   he   could’ve   practiced   more   ,   perhaps   he   just   isn’t   good   enough   and   this   is   a   sign   that   this   route   is   not   for   him   .   all   these   thoughts   cloud   his   mind   on   the   way   to   the   hospital   ,   awaiting   for   a   final   verdict   on   his   injurties   .

he   walks   on   crutches   for   3   whole   months   and   spends   countless   hours   in   therapy   sessions   to   get   himself   back   in   shape   ,   but   he’s   too   humilated   to   step   into   the   limelight   once   again   .   though   minho   hasn’t   lost   his   confidence   ,   the   fear   of   history   repeating   itself   is   eminent   enough   for   him   to   shy   away   from   his   previous   lifestyle   .   after   a   year   of   supposedly   processing   what   his   next   move   should   be   ,   he   makes   the   decision   to   isolate   himself   by   moving   to   san   verto   and   opening   his   own   dance   studio   ,   a   path   that   seems   much   safer   for   his   future   .   

his   popularity   continues   to   grow   through   social   media   ,   his   previous   performances   and   most   recently   ,   an   appearance   as   a   judge   on   so   you   think   you   can   dance   .   business   is   booming   ,   but   the   spark   he   once   had   in   him   has   faded   and   though   he   knows   how   much   he   misses   the   stage   ,   he   won’t   admit   and   face   his   fears   .   the   one   good   thing   his   new   profession   has   brought   to   light   is   the   fact   that   minho   has   never   had   time   for   himself   ever   since   he   first   started   dancing   .   he   is   now   beginning   to   live   his   life   more   freely   and   so   is   conflicted   ,   stuck   between   a   dream   career   and   the   real   life   he   never   got   to   experience   .

in   an   attempt   to   distract   himself   from   all   the   thoughts   clouding   his   mind   ,   he   spends   most   of   his   free   time   volunteering   at   the   nightowl   animal   shelter   .   most   likely   doesn’t   share   the   giving   side   of   him   with   many   and   if   ever   caught   red   handed   ,   he   can   and   will   pretend   he’s   not   there   to   help   out   .

。*◞  character

minho   is   competitive   ,   disciplined   ,   passionate   about   what   he   loves   ,   stubborn   ,   charismatic   ,   he   can   be   callous   with   a   hard   exterior   ,   sensitive   and   vulnerable   only   when   he’s   alone   ,   there’s   a   condescending   vibe   to   him   that’s   been   built   up   to   his   ambition   and   cockiness   ,   but   can   be   an   absolute   lovebug   if   and   when   he   wants   (   for   extremely   limited   audience   )   .   his   focus   has   never   really   been   in   relationships   ,   due   to   the   hunger   he   had   for   what   once   was   a   bright   career   ,   but   you   would   not   call   him   inexperienced   wink   .   can   turn   from   min-no   to   min-hoe   real   quick   ,   but   is   probably   the   type   to   never   text   back   or   ghost   you   after   a   week   or   two   .

some   random   facts   about   him   are   that   he   has   a   habit   of   biting   his   lips   .   loves   velvet   jackets   ,   but   the   touch   of   velvet   mentally   irritates   him   so   much   .   he   turns   on   all   fans   and   the   a   /   c   ,   then   covers   himself   with   a   blanket   .   if   you   reach   down   his   pockets   ,   you’ll   probably   find   lip   chap   ,   kinesio   tape   and   airpods   .   

he   has   a   peanut   allergy   and   a   barely   noticeable   limp   on   weak   days   .   mostly   wears   designer   clothes   even   when   dressed   in   sweats   from   top   to   bottom   .   the   rest   of   the   styling   consists   of   headbands   ,   ornate   rings   ,   mostly   silver   earrings   and   berets   when   he’s   feeling   them   .   he   has   a   small   seashell   tattoo   on   his   right   side   and   a   scar   across   the   front   of   his   leg   due   to   surgery   .   

picked   up   smoking   after   quitting   his   career   as   a   professional   dancer   .   doesn’t   drink   an   awful   lot   ,   but   can   go   stupid   and   go   crazy   at   parties   .   and   last   but   not   least   ,   the   relationship   he   has   with   his   parents   is   pretty   stereotypical   ,   because   he’s   learned   to   dismiss   any   feelings   of   loneliness   by   spending   a   couple   of   hours   alone   at   the   studio   .

@foolsstarters​

#foolsintro #i hate him </33 #but ur obliged to love him so..

[chicagocityofclans]

Good Evening City of Clans,

As we discussed on Discord, due to inactivity, we have decided to end the Starter Prompt early. On Friday, February 19th at 9 am CST we will be ending the Starter Prompt and dropping threads. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause muns and muses. Our dash has threads that have been open and ongoing since December. These threads are beginning to overlap. A mass thread drop will be refreshing and show the effects of the Starter Prompt. 

To aid in making this transition smooth, we’ve attached a recap of the Starter Prompt and a few major events that have taken course since December. Below the ‘Keeping Reading’ will be every Original Character who has joined Chicago that might not be on written bios; Upcoming plots and major plots that are now set in motion; Full recap of the 10 Starter Prompts; and new main RPG links to check out. 

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions and/or concerns. Also, be on the lookout for our Favorites Prompt coming out on Saturday. 

New Arrivals Update

The following people have arrived in Chicago since December.

Inez Sparks: Inez is a newly written human shifter that has been established in Chicago for decades. She might not have connections to prewritten bios but she has connections to the local human shifters. Please refer to her bios for these connections.

Gendry Kingsley: Gendry is a witch who is over a millennia-old. He has returned to Chicago after being gone for about a decade. He might not have connections to prewritten bios but he has connections to the local supernatural community. Please refer to his bios for these connections.

Siobhan Cooke: Siobhan is a newly written Kodiak Bear shifter who has lived in Chicago and been a part of Clan Heavy for her entire life. She might not have connections to prewritten bios but she has connections to Clan Heavy. Please refer to her bio for these connections.

Ella Greene: Ella is a newly written hyena that was born and raised outside of Chicago. She was recently bitten and turned into a hyena. She might not have connections to prewritten bios but she has connections to local Hyena Clan. Please refer to her bio for these connections.

Tiggy Krieger: Tiggy was scouted out by a local seeker, Emmett Wilhelm, to join the Chicago supernatural population. She is a warlock with the power of disintegration and is now mentoring under Garrett Cleirigh.

Luke Corvinus: Luke’s pack was killed senselessly by hunters. He is a coywolf who came to Chicago in search of Anton and has joined the Nimble Clan. He is debating joining the local Wolf Clan but refuses to do so without Anton.

Dante Parisi: Dante is a grizzly bear and a member of Michael Johnansen’s old pack. Dante alone with 36 moose, 20 assorted bears, 8 mountain goats, multiple families of bison, reindeers, and rams moved to Chicago and joined Clan Heavy after they had trouble adjusting in Wyoming.

Natasha Mahoney: Natasha is a human shifter that moved to Chicago from Nashville. She moved along with her sister to be closer with her long-distance boyfriend, Sirius Cobic, and to work as a supernatural lawyer.

General Plot Updates

Clan Rat has found out about the Underground being truly poisoned and the Vampire Seethe Master is asking for retribution from the entire clan for the damage and heartache they’ve caused.

The local Human Shifters have confessed that a handful of human cops, detectives, judges, and internal affairs (law enforcement) know about the Supernatural. While the immortal three could care less, a majority of the Animal Shifter Council is furious and are in the works of planning a Council meeting to discuss possible consequences.

The Lasiter Mark has officially been added to the Codex. Updates on the main are soon to follow.

Gretchen Sims has finally officially taken the head position of Clan Hyena. Nada Rajui has returned to his position as 2nd and Liaison.

Scorpius Getta has told the supernatural community about plans for Hotel Winona and asked for Witches and Warlocks to lend a hand.

Garrett Cleirigh has campaigned for the open warlock seat on the council and has been granted the seat.

Starter Prompt Recap 

Below is a recap of what happened during the unfinished Starter Prompt.

Bess

Bess found out about vampires. Dan killed a Comic book store owner and Bess caught him in the act. Dan eventually convinced her to help him clean up the mess. He promised her they would see again before running from the freshly cleaned-up scene. 

Bess has possibly found out about magic users. She found Lyra on the scene of a deadly B&E (breaking and entering). Lyra followed a spirit that was begging for help when Bess showed up. Lyra explained to Bess that she thought she heard someone in the backroom calling out for help before eventually teleporting away. 

Bess found out about the supernatural. Inez was trying to cover up a hyena attack when Bess showed up on the scene. The owner of a Comic Book store was bitten and in the process of changing as Inez tried to come up with a cover story for Bess. During this Bess was attacked by a shifted hyena whom Inez shot dead as a result. Bess was bleeding from the head when Inez reported that there was an officer down and that they needed an ambulance. Inez stayed on the scene to explain things to the responding human shifter cop.

Ainsley 

Rhiannon found Ainsley as a fox and took her home to heal her. She believed her to be a real fox and was simply wanting to help out an injured animal. Ainsley shifted back to her human form once Rhiannon had her healed and Rhiannon offered her a change of clothes and a ride back to her home. 

Patch found a fox being attacked by a wild coyote and saved her. He brought her home and cared for her thinking she was a real fox. He eventually called on Judson to help him and it was an awkward moment when he found out his new pet, Maid Marian, was actually Ainsley from Clan Nimble. Judson volunteered to take Ainsley home as Patch wrapped his head around having bathe a grown woman in her shifted form. 

Peter saved Ainsley from a coyote attack. He caught the color of her white eyes earlier on and knew she was a nimble shifter. He talked her into shifting back to her human form but Ainsley soon passed out after. Giving her his jacket, Peter took her to the hospital and contacted Clan Nimble. He stayed long enough to give a police report and retell the story to Percy before leaving. 

Conrad

Lyra was found by Ben’s ghost and led to where Conrad was laying. She decided to help him out of the Underground, and this led to Conrad finding out that Lyra could speak and see Ben, who had died over a year ago. Lyra explained that her powers allowed her to see and speak with the spirits of the dead. 

Conrad was found unconscious and naked by Kris, who ran to Jaxson and Sam, who were visiting the Underground, for help. Jaxson took charge of the situation and ordered an evacuation of the Underground. Jaxson and Sam started to feel symptoms of whatever poison that was still lingering around Conrad as they carried him out of the Underground. Kris was waiting for them when they got out and drove them to one of the safehouses. 

Getta, Petra, and Sadie found Conrad unconscious and naked Underground. Getta ordered one of their magical healers to heal Conrad. They explained to Conrad what happened to him and the poisonous gas that plagues the Underground. Geta got in contact with the Human Shifter to escort Conrad out of the Underground, after having Conrad sign a waiver, acknowledging that he was not attacked by anyone Underground. 

Winnie found Conrad naked and unconscious in the Underground. She woke him up with her powers and after the two realized one another were Supernaturals he trusted her enough to get him out. Conrad shifted and Winnie carried him out in her pocket. He had her drop him off not far from a safe house. After she left he scurried in and passed out again.

Kudzai found Conrad naked and unconscious in the Underground. She teleported him to her home and began healing him. After he regained consciousness, Kudzai contacted Nick who came to pick him up. 

Monty 

Emmett got Monty to help with his search for a dangerous witch he was searching for. She was arrested and punished by the Council. Patch and Monty are tasked with coming up with a cover-up story for the Nimbles News report and their own police and autopsy reports. 

Duke was taken to Isaac. Monty did not believe that Duke had a twin brother that was the culprit. Isaac explained that Duke indeed had a twin brother and asked for the charges for the destruction of property to be dropped. 

Asa was taken to Clara. Clara’s reaction wasn’t the best, therefore, Monty didn’t stick around for long and made sure to erase all evidence. 

Ebony was taken to Alexus who happened to be with Grant at the moment. Monty told them of what happened that there will possibly be charges rung up against her if the animal shifter wanted.  

Kudzai 

Asa was injured due to Ebony but got away. He was found on the side of the road where he had fallen and was taken to the ER where Kudzai worked. She performed surgery on him and he is mending. 

Zack was injured in a clan dispute. Kudzai healed Zack’s minor injuries enough to wake him up and ask a few questions before preparing him for surgery. Zack asked for his wife, Sarah, to be called and waited for her to arrive before proceeding with the procedure. Zack had a bruised liver and had to have an exploratory laparoscopic procedure to examine the extent of the damage. Kudzai surgically and magically fixed Zack’s severe blood loss, a forming infection, and a slight problem forming in his bile ducts. The procedure was successful but Zack remained in the hospital under Kudzai care for a few days. Since Zack refused to age, Kudzai, with the help of Rhiannon had to slowly heal him and make it look like he was aging to trick the on-duty human nurses. 

Peter was injured in an attack by fellow wolves who were attempting to take his position. He allowed Kudzai to begin to heal him and asked that she contact Garrett Cleirigh. Who quickly teleported there and teleported Peter away. There was no discharge order and no patient, so Kudzai had to come up with a cover story, causing more tension between the two council members. 

Cassandra was unconscious when she arrived. Kudzai made quick work of healing her and contacted her emergency contact Helenus. Kudzai has asked that Cassandra return for a checkup since the reasoning behind her unconsciousness was inconclusive. 

Ebony 

Helo was setting up new surveillance for CAMO when Ebony came out in full gear and began running after him. He eventually played it off like he was human, and swore not to tell anyone she chased him if she let him go. He is unsure if she bought the ruse or not. Ebony doesn’t fully buy Helo’s story and plans on getting security surveillance up soon. She has also reached out to her neighbors about a suspicious kid around the neighborhood that she thinks might break in; knowing they will more than likely call the cops if he shows his face around there again.

Ebony has made it aware that she wants to take over the family and went on a hunt to prove her intentions. Sam saw Ebony prowling around the younger Jackal shifters she was watching and decided to lead her off of them. This led to a chase in the park where the two women fought. Sam was able to change into her rat form and slip away from the hunter. She sustained mild injuries but declined to admit how she got them to others in her pack out of embarrassment that a hunter got some hits in. Ebony is trying to figure out what kind of supernatural the girl was. One moment she was there and another moment she had vanished. She is hoping to trail the girl in the future and find out more. 

Ebony was chasing Asa on a hunch that he was an animal shifter. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it but she was guessing that he was something big and powerful by the way he moved through the trees. Ebony eventually caught up with Asa and held his attention with a crossbow pointed at his heart. She was able to do a brief interrogation before Asa attacked then gave her the slip. Asa made it to the ER with a crossbow injury and a few other cuts and bruises. 

Lyra

Neaera got a recording of Lyra performing a ritual in the woods. While Lyra was able to bind the spirit but she didn’t finish her ritual due. Neaera played dumb and ran from the scene. She replayed what she got to Ray and Louis. GOLD plans on returning to the scene of the ritual to see if they can gather more information and they also plan on putting an expert group on Lyra. 

Talia walked in on Lyra performing a ritual by chance. The disruption was enough for one of the spirits to escape. Talia and Lyra spent the entire night recapturing the escaped spirit. Lyra finished her ritual but it was under the close watch of Talia and Roman; whom Talia talked Lyra into calling.

Averill watched Lyra work from the darkness of the woods, randomly, but a scream from somewhere else distracted the both of them. They would later find out it was a scream from a hunter hunting down an animal shifter. Lyra had asked that Averill help her catch the elemental spirits that escaped during the short distraction for her ritual. The two formed a somewhat awkward bond while hunting down and summoning the last two spirits needed for the ritual. 

Ken 

Ken managed to get out of the Underground without too many consequences thanks to Arthur. He called Judson once out of the Underground and Judson teleported to his aid. Once Judson saw that it was Arthur that had helped Ken, Ken learned that Arthur was a good friend of Roman’s, who had made Ken’s work life a living nightmare. 

Isabetta was unaffected by Ken’s powers. She easily picked him out of the crowd as the possible culprit which Ken confessed to and had no power over what was happening. Offering to help him out and into a Lyft or Uber, Isabetta and Ken made their way out of the underground while avoiding people who were obviously affected by his power. Ken may have given Isabetta his number and address as a thank you gesture. He also offered to get her a wine bottle filled with the blood of an aged witch or warlock with the power of her choice. 

Rachel was working on her homework Underground when she noticed all of the non-vampires were acting strange. She was ready to bold, not wanting anyone to think she had anything to do with it when she nearly tripped over Ken. They met before and striking up a conversation wasn’t hard. Rachel found out that it was Ken causing all of the commotions and that his powers don't work on her. With the help of Fiona and Aleksander, Rachel was able to help Ken from the Underground and contact Simon who took Ken home. 

Skylar 

Skylar accidentally pulled water out of Kate’s water bottle. She witnessed the water act almost animatedly and when Skylar ran into the nearest store, Kate followed. There she was met with the sight of her long-term crush, Ryan Cleirigh. He sent Skylar away to Judson and then invited Kate up to his apartment to explain what she saw. 

Skylar lost control of her powers when she found out she was locked out of her apartment building. Minsky tried to help her calm down but Skylar’s magic had the best of her. She saw Minsky as a threat and the key her magic was forming eventually turned into a knife. Minsky managed to talk her down and Skylar apologized before making a run for Judson’s shop. She explained what happened to Judson, who gave her Minsky’s number, and Skylar personally called him to apologize again.

Fenrin saved Skylar from exposing herself when she accidentally used her magic in public. He triggered a fire hydrant to go off and made his escape with Skylar. Both had heard of each other from mutual contacts caused Skylar to be more relaxed than she would have with anyone else. Fenrin offered to buy her a coffee to calm her nerves as she waited for Audo, Ryan, or Judson to return home. Fenrin and Skylar talked about their shared powers and got to know each other. 

Kudzai witnessed Skylar’s accidental magic. Being older and a Council member, Kudzai was able to send a spell causing the water to evaporate. She and Skylar walked around the block before Kudzai offered to teleport inside of Skylar’s apartment. While they were walking, Kudzai was able to calm Skylar’s nerves and assure her that things like that happened all the time. Skylar has never thought about joining the medical field but they had exchanged numbers and Kudzai told Skylar to contact her if she ever wanted to talk about it.

Skylar’s magic had a mind of its own and unknowingly pulled coffee from two Starbucks cups Lyra was holding to form a key for her apartment. Lyra’s soothing and calming tone helped Skylar calm down enough to stop her oncoming panic attack. With instructions from Lyra, Skylar was able to place the coffee back into the coffee cups but insisted on buying Lyra new ones. 

Michael 

Asa heard about what was happening at the zoo and went to help Michael with crowd control. Michael and Asa lost sight of each other when the human shifters finally stepped in after someone tried to climb over a gated area. However, when Michael returned to the Hotel, and sought out Asa and thanked him for his help. 

Clara saw Michael’s speech and the outcome on social media. She went to help but somehow the two got into a heated dispute. A few choice words were said and Michael has been avoiding Clara like a plague. 

Hailey lost track of where she was and ended up in a rioting crowd that Michael was trying to talk the crowd down and keep the peace. Michael explained what was happening to her but was quickly pulled away from her by someone else. 

Ebony was tracking someone to the zoo when she ran into the big crowd. Michael tried to explain what was happening to her but she clearly wasn’t buying what he was selling. Michael doesn’t know she’s a hunter but wrote down his Twitter information on a flyer he gave her. He would like to continue to pick her brain but it is only if she follows him or reaches out to him. 

New Links and Pages

Most Wanted Connections - New Tag

Most Wanted Connections Application - New Page 

Monthly Plot Updates - New Navi Section 

Rules Page - Update 02/12/2021

Taken Face Claims - Updated 02/18/2021

Masterlist Update (Missing Ella Greene) - Coming Soon

#cofcupdates #Major Update

[365days365movies]

February 5, 2021: The Notebook (2004)(Part 1)

...Do I have to?

...The year was 2004. I was 13, my Mom was still into romance movies, and we had a Hollywood Video nearby. God, I miss Hollywood Video, you have NO idea. Anyway, I obviously didn’t watch this movie (or I wouldn’t be watching it now), but I do remember kissing in the rain...or was that just the DVD cover? Other than that, I got nothin’. Still, I like both Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling in other works, so I guess we’ll see.

I also can’t start this without acknowledging the fact that this is based upon a Nicholas Sparks book, and...I’m not into that. Sparks sucks, man. Sappy, overemotional, and constantly predictable folderol.

OK, Nicholas Sparks, let’s get this over with. SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Recap

We start with scenic shots of a boat rowing through a marsh, being visited by a flock of snow geese. As they fly off, an elderly woman (Gena Rowlands) looks out of a window over it. The woman is in an old-folks home, and is visited by Duke (James Garner), another resident. He’s here to read from a book, despite it not being a “good day,” according to the woman’s attendant.

The story in the book begins on June 6, 1940, at a carnival in South Carolina. There, Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling) sees Allie Hamilton (Rachel McAdams), and it’s infatuation at first sight. He’s a lumber yard worker, and she’s a rich heiress. He’s also EXTREMELY forward, and she’s EXTREMELY not interested. He approaches her for a dance (at a...carnival), and she says no, having literally never seen this guy before. He responds to this rejection by...butting into her date with another dude of a Ferris Wheel? 

And when she once again rejects his offer for a date...he, uh...he threatens to kill himself off of the Ferris Wheel?

Um. Yeah, no. That’s a new level of manipulation. She pants him on the Ferris Wheel and humiliates him, but JESUS CHRIST, this dude is a lot. That’s compounded the next day, when he continues to pursue her, and she continues to be EXTREMELY not interested! DUDE. GET A GODDAMN CLUE HERE, she is NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR SHIT.

Is Noah the first simp? Because he’s really starting to seem like it. Anyway, Noah and his friend Fin (Kevin Connolly) basically set her up to go on a double date with Noah, and he continues to be overly forward. Maybe this is supposed to be romantic, but it definitely doesn’t feel like it to me.

We find out that Allie is a quite well-educated young woman, whose schedule is basically completely controlled by her parents, who want her to go to college as well. Noah questions why her life is so restrictive, nothing that she should be free, which she insists she is. He then lies down in the middle of the road, watching the street...lights…

Holy shit, he’s a manic pixie dream boy. HOLY SHIT HE’S A MANIC PIXIE DREAM SIMP. He does all these quirky things, and breaks the girl in the restrictive lifestyle out of said lifestyle. Even if his dumbass actions nearly get him and Allie killed. See, she lies down in the street with him, and they nearly get run over by a car. And this second near-death experience is apparently SO romantic, that Allie’s won over, and they...just dance in the middle of the street. Because Ryan Gosling has no idea where to dance, apparently.

Billie Holiday sings “I’ll Be Seeing You” in the background (which, yes, I love), and we cut back to Duke reading to the elderly woman, who correctly guesses that they fell in love. And yeah, they go head-over-heels, apparently. Which is symbolized by, just, the most graphic of PDAs over, lord. 

Allie meets Noah’s father, Frank (Sam Shepard), a seemingly nice man and poetry fan (he’s a Tennyson man apparently). He asks her if she wants breakfast-for-dinner, and he’s my favorite character so far.

However, as if to set up the conflict to come, we’re reminded that this is a summer romance, and that they come from two different classes and worlds. Because of course they do, but whatever, moving on. That is when the following scene takes place.

...Look, I’m a bird guy by trade, and even I think that was weird.

We get more glimpses of their romance, including them dancing at a gathering with...a bunch of black peopNOPE. HOLD YOUR TONGUE, 365, WAIT FOR THE REVIEW TO TALK ABOUT THAT SHIT. At the end of this montage, we meet Allie’s father, the uppity and rich John Hamilton (David Thornton), and his GLORIOUS mustache (mustache). 

He invites Noah to Sunday brunch, which is being attended by...black servaHOOOOOOLD. NOT NOW 365 NOT NOW. We also meet Allie’s controlling mother, Anne Hamilton (Joan Allen). When Noah tells them how much money he makes, they immediately look down on him and his poor, poor ways. Anne reveals that Allie is headed to Sarah Lawrence, an all-girl’s school in New York. Which is, uh...NOT close.

Anne very much disapproves of her relationship with Noah, seeing him as a low-born of little consequence. Not that it matters, because the two head to a DEFINITELY HAUNTED house in the woods one night, which overlooks the marshlands. The bats from the Scooby-Doo intro fly by as the two walk in to, again, AN ABSOLUTELY HAUNTED HOUSE. This is the 1772 Windsor Plantation, home to...the Swamp Fox? Huh. Didn’t expect a crossover with the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot, but OK then.

The two talk about their house in the future, and somewhere in the house, a painting’s eyes move mysteriously. Allie plays a tune on the piano, which 1) sounds AMAZINGLY creepy, and 2) I’m pretty sure is the opening song, which is a neat touch. Guess that’s the theme for the movie, or possibly Allie’s leitmotif.

Anyway, it seems that the ghostly wails of Old Man Marion have gotten them both all hot and bothered, and they prepare to make love, right there in the old haunted house. The two undress while social distancing, then approach, significantly raising their risks of contracting COVID-19. Allie is CLEARLY very nervous, and as they attempt to begin the dirty deed, Allie can’t stop rambling about the current situation. Which is clearly putting Noah off the mood, but the two still clearly care about each other. It’s weirdly sweet, considering the fact that there’re, like, 50 ghosts watching, and God knows how many of those are slaaaaaaaAAAANYWAY

Fin suddenly bursts in, as it would appear that Allie’s parents have every policeman in town looking for her. Her parents are clearly upset, and her mother demands that Allie stops seeing Noah, whom she literally describes as “trash.” Jesus. And they aren’t exactly quiet about it, as Noah hears the entire conversation. He understandably leaves, and is also clearly disheartened by the whole situation. 

When Allie catches up to him, he says he has to think about this whole thing, including the fact that she’s going to Sarah Lawrence, and he’s staying behind. And I’m not gonna lie, he’s actually being realistic about this whole thing, and she’s acting FAR less rational. She actually breaks up with him right then and there, and as she’s literally physically assaulting him, I realize that SHE is actually the psychologically unstable one, HOLY SHIT. Emotionally compromised or not, Allie goes BONKERS here.

The next day, her folks decide that they’re leaving, that very day. Allie doesn’t want to leave without making amends with Noah, and she’s regretting her actions the previous night. She goes to Fin, and tells him to tell Noah that she loves him, and that she’s sorry. Noah shows up a little too late, and goes to return the comments, but Allie’s already gone.

Noah somehow gets her address, and writes her 365 letters, one letter every day. He never gets one in response, so he gives up and moves with Fin to Atlanta. Allie’s mom is seen getting the mail, so we know EXACTLY what happened to those letters. Meanwhile, it’s now 1941, and it’s time for World War II for the USA! Fin and Noah fight with Patton’s troops, and Fin doesn’t make it.

Allie, meanwhile, is in college, and works as a Nurse’s Aide for war veterans. She sees all of them as Noah,,,which is weird because she hasn’t gotten any of his letters, so she wouldn’t know that he went to war, but whatever. One of these injured men is Lon Hammond, Jr. (James Marsden). And...aw...AWWWWWWW. Did I just type James Marsden? GODDAMN IT HE’S GONNA GET CUCKED

James Marsden seems to have only one role in movies, and that’s to be overshadowed by another dude, even though in many instances, he’s a totally fine guy. The X-Men films, Superman Returns, Enchanted, the Westworld series in a way, TELL ME I AM GODDAMN WRONG. Dude’s always in movies where he plays the love interest to a girl, and that girl is pursued by another guy, and he ALWAYS LOSES TO THAT GUY. You could argue that Cyclops in the X-Men escaped that fate, but need I remind that first, Jean died, and then she came back AND KILLED HIM. STOP SCREWING OVER JASON MARSDEN’S LOVE LIFE, MOVIES!!!!

Seems like we’re once again headed down that path, though, as the very injured Lon asks Allie out on a date while in recovery, then takes her out once he’s healed. And, since he’s about as forward as Noah was, but less crazy when asking her out, she falls in love with him quickly. And it’s Duke that makes that assessment, not me. And, OF COURSE, he’s a rich Southern boy, meaning that her parents are going to approve.

At a dance club in the city with...black performDEAR GOD IT’S GETTING HARD TO HOLD ON BUT I GOTTA DO IT MOVING ON

He proposes to her, with her parents’ full permission (of course, because he’s rich and southern, gross), and she gladly accepts. He jumps on stage and announces to the entire club that they’re getting married. However, she’s still missing Noah subconsciously.

Speaking of, Noah comes home from war, presumably in 1945, and finds that his father sold him the house in order to buy the Windsor Plantation. Around the same time, Noah finds out that Allie’s moved on, and is with Lon. So, what does he do? The only logical thing: he restores the entire plantation by himself in order to win Allie back FUCKING REALLY?

Dude, you rebuilt an entire house on your own, your father died, and you could EASILY get rich off of selling the house and continuing to restore other derelict properties in the area! Upwards mobility, my man! You don’t even need to stay in town anymore! Hell, THAT’S a better plan to win both Allie’s AND her parents’ approval! STOP SIMPIN’, AND IF YOU’RE GONNA SIMP, DO IT RIGHT!!!

He’s also sleeping with a war widow, Martha Shaw (Jamie Brown), and STILL thinks only of Allie, and her sweet, sweeeeeeet bathwater, probably. Speaking of, Allie’s trying on a wedding dress, when she sees a photo of Noah in the paper in front of the plantation, which certainly shocks her. Confused, she goes to see Lon at his job as a stockbroker, and laments to him her lost romantic whimsy, brought up by seeing Ryan Gosling (AKA a natural response). She tells him that she’s going to Seabrook to “clear her head.” Lon asks if he should be worried. She says no. SHE LIIIIIIIIIIES.

Halfway mark, and this is a good place to cut! See you in Part 2!

#the notebook #nick cassavetes #ryan gosling #noah calhoun #rachel mcadams #allie hamilton #james garner #gena rowlands #james marsden #kevin connolly #romance february #user365 #365 movie challenge #365 movies 365 days #365 Days 365 Movies #365 movies a year #supernovass #sincerelygabby

[aion-rsa]

Top New Fantasy Books in April 2021

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Fantasy helps us take a break from reality when we need the respite, or learn more about our real world. Here are some of the fantasy books we’re planning on checking out this year…

Top New Fantasy Books April 2021

The Light of the Midnight Stars by Rena Rossner

Type: Novel Publisher: Redhook Release date: April 13

Den of Geek says: It’s always good to see more Jewish voices in fantasy. This book sees the root of superhero stories made specific as a threat can only be defeated by a cast of Jewish miracle-workers.

Publisher’s summary: Deep in the Hungarian woods, the sacred magic of King Solomon lives on in his descendants. Gathering under the midnight stars, they perform small miracles and none are more gifted than the great Rabbi Isaac and his three daughters. 

Hannah, bookish and calm, can coax plants to grow even when the weather is bitterly cold. Sarah, defiant and strong, can control the impulsive nature of fire. And Levana, the fey one, can read the path of the stars to decipher their secrets. 

But darkness is creeping across Europe, threatening the lives of every Jewish person in every village. Each sister will have to make an impossible choice in an effort to survive – and change the fate of their family forever.

Buy The Light of the Midnight Stars by Rena Rossner.

The Helm of Midnight by Marina Lostetter

Type: Novel Publisher: Tor Books Release date: April 13

Den of Geek says: Alternate genders and inventive magic spice up a serial killer story in a weird city.

Publisher’s summary: In a daring and deadly heist, thieves have made away with an artifact of terrible power―the death mask of Louis Charbon. Made by a master craftsman, it is imbued with the spirit of a monster from history, a serial murderer who terrorized the city.

Now Charbon is loose once more, killing from beyond the grave. But these murders are different from before, not simply random but the work of a deliberate mind probing for answers to a sinister question.

It is up to Krona Hirvath and her fellow Regulators to enter the mind of madness to stop this insatiable killer while facing the terrible truths left in his wake.

Buy The Helm of Midnight by Marina Lostetter.

Witches Steeped in Gold by Ciannon Smart

Type: Novel Publisher: HarperTeen Release date: April 20

Den of Geek says: The line between genre fiction and genre YA is sometimes muddy. Is it about the age of the protagonist? Purely a marketing decision? We’ve decided to err on the side of promoting Witches Steeped in Gold here, mostly on the strength of the dynamic between the two prickly characters.

Publisher’s summary: Divided by their order. United by their vengeance.

Iraya has spent her life in a cell, but every day brings her closer to freedom—and vengeance. 

Jazmyne is the Queen’s daughter, but unlike her sister before her, she has no intention of dying to strengthen her mother’s power.

Sworn enemies, these two witches enter a precarious alliance to take down a mutual threat. But power is intoxicating, revenge is a bloody pursuit, and nothing is certain—except the lengths they will go to win this game.

Buy Witches Steeped in Gold by Ciannon Smart.

Top New Fantasy Books March 2021

Bridge of Souls by Victoria Schwab

Type: Novel Publisher: Scholastic Press  Release date: March 2

Den of Geek says: The next entry in this well-received series mixes fantasy and horror in a twisty mystery about a ghost-hunter in an atmospheric New Orleans.

Publisher’s summary: Where there are ghosts, Cassidy Blake follows . . .

Unless it’s the other way around?

Cass thinks she might have this ghost-hunting thing down. After all, she and her ghost best friend, Jacob, have survived two haunted cities while traveling for her parents’ TV show.

But nothing can prepare Cass for New Orleans, which wears all of its hauntings on its sleeve. In a city of ghost tours and tombs, raucous music and all kinds of magic, Cass could get lost in all the colorful, grisly local legends. And the city’s biggest surprise is a foe Cass never expected to face: a servant of Death itself.

Buy Bridge of Souls by Victoria Schwab.

A Broken Darkness by Premee Mohamed

Type: Novel Publisher: Solaris Release date: March 30

Den of Geek says: This is another one hard to categorize. It’s a little bit fantasy, a little bit science fiction, and a little bit eldritch. The first book in the series showed off Mohamed’s unique aesthetic and mix of serious stakes and wry humor.

Publisher’s summary: It’s been a year and a half since the Anomaly, when They tried to force their way into the world from the shapeless void.

Nick Prasad is piecing his life together, and has joined the secretive Ssarati Society to help monitor threats to humanity – including his former friend Johnny.

Right on cue, the unveiling of Johnny’s latest experiment sees more portals opened to Them, leaving her protesting her innocence even as the two of them are thrown together to fight the darkness once more…

Buy A Broken Darkness by Premee Mohamed.

The Councillor by E.J. Beaton

Type: Novel Publisher: DAW Release date: March 2 Den of Geek says: This political fantasy follows in the footsteps of The Traitor Baru Cormorant. We’re intrigued by the story of a character tangled in her own ambition, and fantasy where words are more important than swords.

Publisher’s summary: This Machiavellian fantasy follows a scholar’s quest to choose the next ruler of her nation amidst lies, conspiracy, and assassination

When the death of Iron Queen Sarelin Brey fractures the realm of Elira, Lysande Prior, the palace scholar and the queen’s closest friend, is appointed Councillor. Publically, Lysande must choose the next monarch from amongst the city-rulers vying for the throne. Privately, she seeks to discover which ruler murdered the queen, suspecting the use of magic. Resourceful, analytical, and quiet, Lysande appears to embody the motto she was raised with: everything in its place. Yet while she hides her drug addiction from her new associates, she cannot hide her growing interest in power. She becomes locked in a game of strategy with the city-rulers – especially the erudite prince Luca Fontaine, who seems to shift between ally and rival. Further from home, an old enemy is stirring: the magic-wielding White Queen is on the move again, and her alliance with a traitor among the royal milieu poses a danger not just to the peace of the realm, but to the survival of everything that Lysande cares about.  In a world where the low-born keep their heads down, Lysande must learn to fight an enemy who wears many guises… even as she wages her own battle between ambition and restraint.

Buy The Councillor by E.J. Beaton.

Top New Fantasy Books February 2021

Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard

Type: Novella Publisher: Tordotcom Release date: Feb. 9 Den of Geek says: De Bodard is a staple around here for lush settings and unique characters. Here she turns her hand to a romance (and maybe love that doesn’t work out after all) compared to Howl’s Moving Castle. Publisher’s Summary:

Fire burns bright and has a long memory….

Quiet, thoughtful princess Thanh was sent away as a hostage to the powerful faraway country of Ephteria as a child. Now she’s returned to her mother’s imperial court, haunted not only by memories of her first romance, but by worrying magical echoes of a fire that devastated Ephteria’s royal palace.

Thanh’s new role as a diplomat places her once again in the path of her first love, the powerful and magnetic Eldris of Ephteria, who knows exactly what she wants: romance from Thanh and much more from Thanh’s home. Eldris won’t take no for an answer, on either front. But the fire that burned down one palace is tempting Thanh with the possibility of making her own dangerous decisions.

Can Thanh find the freedom to shape her country’s fate―and her own?

Buy Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard.

City of the Uncommon Thief by Lynne Bertrand

Type: Novel Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers Release date: Feb. 9

Den of Geek says: This novel sits at the crossroads of fantasy, horror, and YA. A gothic city provides a pleasantly weird background to a dark adventure about teens who lurk on the rooftops of the city.

Publisher’s Summary:

“Guilders work. Foundlings scrub the bogs. Needles bind. Swords tear. And men leave. There is nothing uncommon in this city. I hope Errol Thebes is dead. We both know he is safer that way.”

In a walled city of a mile-high iron guild towers, many things are common knowledge: No book in any of the city’s libraries reveals its place on a calendar or a map. No living beasts can be found within the city’s walls. And no good comes to the guilder or foundling who trespasses too far from their labors. Even on the tower rooftops, where Errol Thebes and the rest of the city’s teenagers pass a few short years under an open sky, no one truly believes anything uncommon is possible within the city walls. But one guildmaster has broken tradition to protect her child, and now the whole city faces an uncommon threat: a pair of black iron spikes that has the power of both sword and needle on the rib cages of men has gone missing, but the mayhem they cause rises everywhere. If the spikes are not found, no wall will be high enough to protect the city—or the world beyond it.   And Errol Thebes? He’s not dead and he’s certainly not safe.

Buy City of the Uncommon Thief by Lynne Bertrand.

The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck

Type: Novel Publisher: Pantheon Release date: Feb. 16 Den of Geek says: Tidbeck is known for her strange and literary short stories, full of musing and teeth. Her take on portal fantasy is bound to bring something new to the subgenre. Publisher’s summary: From the award-winning author of Amatka and Jagannath—a fantastical tour de force about friendship, interdimensional theater, and a magical place where no one ages, except the young In a world just parallel to ours exists a mystical realm known only as the Gardens. It’s a place where feasts never end, games of croquet have devastating consequences, and teenagers are punished for growing up. For a select group of masters, it’s a decadent paradise where time stands still. But for those who serve them, it’s a slow torture where their lives can be ended in a blink. In a bid to escape before their youth betrays them, Dora and Thistle—best friends and confidants—set out on a remarkable journey through time and space. Traveling between their world and ours, they hunt for the one person who can grant them freedom. Along the way, they encounter a mysterious traveler who trades in favors and never forgets debts, a crossroads at the center of the universe, our own world on the brink of war, and a traveling troupe of actors with the ability to unlock the fabric of reality.   Endlessly inventive, The Memory Theater takes us to a wondrous place where destiny has yet to be written, life is a performance, and magic can erupt at any moment. It is Karin Tidbeck’s most engrossing and irresistible tale yet. Buy The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck.

Top New Fantasy Books January 2021

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

Type: Novel Publisher: Tordotcom Release date: Jan. 12, 2021

Den of Geek says: McGuire’s Wayward Children series is a loosely connected group of novels all playing with fantasy tropes. What does it really mean to be a chosen one in a magical world? In the latest installment she turns her careful wit to centaurs and unicorns.

Publisher’s summary: “Welcome to the Hooflands. We’re happy to have you, even if you being here means something’s coming.”

Regan loves, and is loved, though her school-friend situation has become complicated, of late.

When she suddenly finds herself thrust through a doorway that asks her to “Be Sure” before swallowing her whole, Regan must learn to live in a world filled with centaurs, kelpies, and other magical equines―a world that expects its human visitors to step up and be heroes.

But after embracing her time with the herd, Regan discovers that not all forms of heroism are equal, and not all quests are as they seem…

Buy Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire.

The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner

Type: Novel Publisher: Ace Release date: Jan 12, 2021

Den of Geek says: Romance and magic come together in what looks like a fun tale with a wide variety of characters. The roguish setting reminds us of The Lies of Locke Lamora with more women. Publisher’s summary: Dellaria Wells, petty con artist, occasional thief, and partly educated fire witch, is behind on her rent in the city of Leiscourt—again. Then she sees the “wanted” sign, seeking Female Persons, of Martial or Magical ability, to guard a Lady of some Importance, prior to the celebration of her Marriage. Delly fast-talks her way into the job and joins a team of highly peculiar women tasked with protecting their wealthy charge from unknown assassins.   Delly quickly sets her sights on one of her companions, the confident and well-bred Winn Cynallum. The job looks like nothing but romance and easy money until things take a deadly (and undead) turn. With the help of a bird-loving necromancer, a shapeshifting schoolgirl, and an ill-tempered reanimated mouse named Buttons, Delly and Winn are determined to get the best of an adversary who wields a twisted magic and has friends in the highest of places.

Buy The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner.

The Forever Sea by Joshua Phillip Johnson

Type: Novel Publisher: DAW Release date: Jan. 19 Den of Geek says: A gorgeous and mysterious fantasy world is ready to unfold. The world-building here looks delightfully weird, with sailing ships on fields of greenery.

Publisher’s Summary: On the never-ending, miles-high expanse of prairie grasses known as the Forever Sea, Kindred Greyreach, hearthfire keeper and sailor aboard harvesting vessel The Errant, is just beginning to fit in with the crew of her new ship when she receives devastating news. Her grandmother—The Marchess, legendary captain and hearthfire keeper—has stepped from her vessel and disappeared into the sea.

But the note she leaves Kindred suggests this was not an act of suicide. Something waits in the depths, and the Marchess has set out to find it.

To follow in her grandmother’s footsteps, Kindred must embroil herself in conflicts bigger than she could imagine: a water war simmering below the surface of two cultures; the politics of a mythic pirate city floating beyond the edges of safe seas; battles against beasts of the deep, driven to the brink of madness; and the elusive promise of a world below the waves. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Kindred finds that she will sacrifice almost everything—ship, crew, and a life sailing in the sun—to discover the truth of the darkness that waits below the Forever Sea. Buy The Forever Sea by Joshua Phillip Johnson.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[ofmusingsxandmayhem-a]

Full Bio for Benji Dunn 

History/Family

Benji is the second child to Andrew Dunn and Victoria Dunn. He has one older brother, Jonathan Andrew Dunn, who is four years older than him. Benji’s father worked as an accountant while his mother was a member of the British Army. Being an army child meant moving around a lot for the boys, but they eventually came to like the excitement of moving. The family wound up settling in America when Benji was 13, where he finished his secondary school education, however when he graduated, he applied for and was accepted into Oxford University. Benji returned to England when he was 19 and attended Oxford for his Bachelors and his Masters, and on graduation, he decided that he enjoyed life in America and returned to his family.

As mentioned, Benji has one sibling. Jonathan was born February 22nd 1972. Jonathan married his wife, Emily, in 1999. They have two children, Luke (born in 2003) and Sophie (born in 2009).

Education/IMF

Benji studied Computer Science, with units taken in Biological Science at Oxford University. He graduated with distinctions and high distinctions all around before continuing to take his postgraduate MSc in Computer Science.

Upon returning to America after he completed his masters, Benji was on the lookout for jobs in the field. He took a few here and there, until one day, he found what looked like a great opportunity.  It seemed to be just a regular advertisement for a technician job with the Department of Transportation in Washington DC.

Figuring it would be interesting to give it a try, Benji put in an application as the technician and decided to see what would happen. Needless to say, he was very surprised when he was offered a job with them. At the age of 26, he packed up, said goodbye to his family, and moved over to DC. It was only once he arrived there that he found out that this job was far from normal.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE GHOST PROTOCOL He worked in IMF’s technician labs until taking the field exam in early 2011. He spent some time shadowing Agent Trevor Hanaway, a field agent who had been working out on away missions for quite a few years. He later joined Trevor’s team, consisting of the agent himself and Agent Jane Carter. Both agents really took him under their wing and Benji learnt a lot from them, growing to consider them close friends. They ran a few missions together until they were sent after a file containing Russian nuclear launch codes. A simple enough mission, but nothing in their job is ever simple. When it was clear that someone else was after the file, Trevor was killed by a contract killer, Sabine Moreau, and the file was lost.

Amidst their grief for Trevor, Jane and Benji were then sent to extract Ethan Hunt from Rankow Prison in Moscow in order to track down the codes and stop emerging nuclear extremist Kurt Hendricks, codename Cobalt, from detonating a bomb that would throw the United States and Russia into a nuclear war. After their infiltration of the Kremlin was thrown into disarray by Hendricks himself, resulting in the destruction of a large section of the building and the blame falling on the trio, Benji, Ethan and Jane found themselves fugitives. With IMF shut down due to the president initiating Ghost Protocol, they were forced to work underground, along with mysterious chief analyst William Brandt.

After many near misses, the team managed to prevent the detonation and Hendricks was killed. Ethan chose the three to join his team once more and Benji, despite being plagued by nightmares and cold sweats from his first major mission, Benji jumped at the opportunity.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE ROGUE NATION When CIA Director Hunley shut down the IMF for ‘misconduct’ after the events of the Cobalt mission, Benji found himself once again stuck behind a desk. For six months, he was dragged through weekly polygraphs by Hunley to test his loyalties to Ethan, resulting in him having to perfect his lies. When he was tricked into going to Vienna to help Ethan, he realised just how much trouble his friend was in and insisted on staying to help him track down a Rogue Nation, known as the Syndicate, despite the potential risks. Sadly, those risks became a reality when Benji found himself kidnapped by menacing Syndicate leader Solomon Lane, used as leverage to control Ethan’s actions. Lane strapped a bomb to Benji’s chest and placed him on a highly sensitive pressure trigger in a crowded London restaurant, leaving Benji fearing for his life and the lives of those around him. Fortunately, Ethan managed to convince Lane to let Benji go and the team were able to bring him down together. This very near miss has left Benji shaken and despite his attempts to shove his feelings aside, he is struggling with the aftermath. He hopes that with his teams help, he can move on from this.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE FALLOUT Two years after the events of Rogue Nation, Benji has done his best to push through his trauma and is continuing his work as a field agent, even getting to don a mask as he always dreamed to. But with the existence of the remaining Syndicate agents, known as The Apostles and led by a mysterious man John Lark, Benji was pulled back into a world he wanted to forget by having to break Solomon Lane out of prison. He pushed his personal feelings towards the man aside and got the job done, however whilst trying to prevent Lane and Lark from killing a third of the world’s population, he found himself at death’s door once again. Ambushed by Lane, set on finishing what he started in London, Benji was brutally beaten and hung from the neck, almost dying from his injuries in the process. Saved by Ilsa, he was able to work alongside her, Luther and Ethan to prevent two plutonium-based explosives from detonating. 

Medical Info

Benji is short sighted and has worn glasses since he was 14 years old. When working, however, he tends to wear contact lenses, as they are far more practical for his line of work.

Benji’s only known allergy is to peanuts. This makes it difficult for him to wear masks in the field as some of the compounds are peanut based. (Inspired by a fanfiction found here)

Benji has no history with mental health issues, however he has developed some symptoms of PTSD following his abduction in London.

His oldest scar is one that runs across his forehead, a straight line above his right eyebrow. When he was 5, he was playing in their grandparent’s garden with his brother, then 9. Jonathan accidentally pushed Benji while playing and Benji fell and hit his head on the bird bath.

His fingertips are calloused from the Cobalt mission, the wiring having cut up the skin quite badly.

#about: benji dunn

[blvkcc]

࿐ ˚ . ✦ JACOB ELORDI, MALE, HE/HIM  — wait, is that BLAKE ARCHER walking the halls? the EIGHTEEN year old SENIOR is normally seen hanging with the ATHLETES, which makes sense because they’re so -STOIC & -INTIMIDATING, but surprisingly +INTUITIVE & +OPEN-MINDED. maybe that’s why they were voted MOST LIKELY TO KILL WITH A SINGLE GLARE. ( ollie, 21, they/them, est )

BASICS

Full name: Blake Apollo Archer Birth date: february 21st Languages: English ( first language, fluent ), Quebois French ( second language, fluent ) Hometown: Sanlow, IL ; born in Saguenay, QC

PHYSICAL

Age: 18 Weight: 205 lbs Height: 6′4″ Body build: athletic, lean Eye color: brown Glasses or contacts: both ( typically wears only contacts ) Tattoos & Scars:

PERSONALITY

+ intuitive, open-minded, perceptive, observant - stoic, intimidating, 

          on your typical ‘ cinnamon roll ‘ spectrum, blake is definitely in the “ looks like he could kill you but is actually a cinnamon roll deep down ” section. he cuts a hulking figure in the hallways, and he perfected the death glare about ten years ago --- but he never perfected exactly how to turn it off. he’s not one to really wear his emotions on his sleeve, which only adds to the whole intimidation factor. it’s not that he means to be so, it’s just he’s never bothered to try otherwise and doesn’t care if people are scared of him.

          however, if you are lucky enough to get to know him, you’d be surprised to find blake isn’t nearly as scary as he seems. he’s surprisingly intuitive, always knowing exactly what to say when someone’s feeling lost or down, and widely observant to what goes on around him. he cares in his own way for his friends --- and wouldn’t hesitate to protect them. he’s gentle with the ones he cares about, and with animals in particular.

PRESENT

Current location: Sanlow, IL Pets: a rescue greyhound named ghost ( dappled grey ) Occupation: student, assistant at a local veterinary shelter & clinic  Finances: 

THE STORY

-- blake apollo archer was born in saguenay, quebec on a sub-freezing february day. the family moved from quebec to sanlow when he was eight. thus, he grew up bilingual in english and quebois-french. when he was little he had an accent but he’s virtually accentless in both languages now.

-- he had an uneventful childhood. the archers never really struggled financially, and though blake wasn’t exactly spoiled, he didn’t have to want for much.

-- it was clear early on that blake had athletic talent, constantly bouncing off the walls as a child to the point that his parents initially shoved him into sports to tire him out. but from there a love grew. any sport blake wanted to play, his parents let him and so he did it all throughout elementary : soccer, swim, hockey, basketball, lacrosse, baseball... by high school, he picked out his favorites.

-- three season athlete : swim ( fall ), hockey ( with a travel team in the winter ) , lacrosse ( spring ). he spends his summers running and all around being active.

-- his love for animals came from his mother, very much a proponent of the “ all creatures great and small ” thing. that love grew into a passion for him, and he now plans on pursuing a path to become a veterinarian himself.

-- blake is smart, at least with his schoolwork, even if he doesn’t advertise it much. 4.0 gpa ( or 5.0, whatever ) but what seems like only two braincells to go along with it.

-- after much debate and though, blake has accepted his admission to university of illinois at urbana-champaign on an athletic scholarship --- also one of the best pre-vet schools in the united states.

MISC

-- he works at the local vet clinic & shelter when it can ; mostly in the summer when he’s more free and doesn’t have practices and games to get to. but he tries to make as much time as he can in-season.

-- blake adopted a rescue greyhound that was brought into the shelter as a reject about a year ago. he absolutely fell in love with her, practically nursing her back to health himself. she is extremely loyal to him and she might be the thing he cares about most.

-- blake wasn’t always a goalie : he played forward in both hockey and lacrosse for a year before going back to the net. he maintains that both short experiences on the offense made him a better goalie. in net, he gets this look in his eye that some have likened to a murder glare. he’s not even aware he’s doing it, but he’s seen some pictures that have been taken and begrudgingly admits it does look pretty freaky.

-- he switched to swim in the fall from soccer when he entered as a freshman because he thought it’d be better cross-training for his other sports. he’s actually come to enjoy it quite a bit and he’s pretty good at it ( though, some may argue he’s good at any sport he puts his mind to ). his specialty is the fly and im.

-- yes, his middle name is that of a god’s. yes, he probably looks like one too.

-- #GoaliesAreWeird no matter what sport you’re looking at

#sanlow.intro #( my brain.... she's so dead rn #but luckily i wrote this beforehand for once lmao )