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crash-and-cure · 1 year

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Wait for Me (Yandere!Austin!Elvis x Reader)

Summary: Tupelo’s favorite son is on his way home to all the expected pomp and circumstance befitting a returning King.

A/N: This is very much inspired by Hadestown and I may or may not blend all the character together so that both Elvis and reader have aspects from all of them. Technically I’m cheating I will admit by combining these two (-, -) requests into one story but I thought it would work well. Not me trying to Posit how WW2 affected the floriculture industry all for a fanfic. But this is apparently how I marry my two hyperfixations of 2022: Hadestown and Elvis. A+ to anyone that can find all the references to both Hadestown and the greek mythos in the story.

Warnings: Yandere!Elvis so expect themes of obsessive, manipulative, and delusional behavior. Kidnapping. Kinda of a stochholme syndrome going on through the later half. Blood and a bit of child abuse depicted (arguably this child deserved it). Emotional Manipulation throughout. Isolation. Touch-starved reader. Innocent reader. Explicit sexual content depicted that includes Penetrative sex (m/f), oral sex (f. and m. recieving), vaginal fingering and handjobs. Outsider POV for the first bit. Probably more that I am blanking on. Excessive use of “Honeybee” and “Rosebud” as a nickname for the reader. Please do not interact if you are under 18.

Word Count: 21k (seriously somebody stop me)

My Masterlist

Dreams are sweet, Until they’re not

Men are kind, Until they aren’t

Flowers bloom, Until they rot, And fall apart

Flowers, Hadestown

Demi has never feared a single man in her life.

Men have done her wrong. Men have humiliated her. Men have even hurt her. But she does not fear them.

That’s how she lived for years, drifting from place to place, belonging to no one as no one belonged to her, unattached and untethered as the wind. Working odd jobs to get by until the next town, but there was a perpetual emptiness in this existence of hers that left her feeling hollow.

And then her sweet little daughter was born and she found something that bound her to this world fully. She knew who the father was, but none of that mattered to her, because her daughter was no man’s, she was hers. He wasn’t good for much, but getting roughly ten acres of land in exchange for never having to deal with either him or his wife again was one of the sweetest deals she had ever heard.

Living on a farm was never where she pictured herself ending up, let alone working and later inheriting a farm that only grew flowers, but Gail, the old caretaker of the land, was a literal godsend in those early days. Gail had that same look in her eyes as someone else who had been wronged by a man, and this kindred spirit would end up more or less adopting Demi as her own.

Her daughter is by far the most beautiful thing to have ever existed, born the first day of spring all balled up fists and shrill cries complete with a scrunched up face.

She was perfect.

Demi made a promise to that tiny creature that night, to never know hunger, to be surrounded by only the most beautiful things the world has to offer, to never be unloved for as long as she should live, and most importantly to never let the world hurt her the same way she was hurt. All of these rather lofty promises to make, but she was determined to keep them.

Those early days were painfully idyllic, caring for flowers, selling the cuttings, all the while her daughter was strapped to her chest. It admittedly did a number on her back, but it was all worth it to remind her what she works for. She doesn’t think there will ever be a day in which she forgets the first time her daughter's tiny hands reached out for a white rose, and just the utter serenity that overcame her in that moment. There is no doubt in her mind that this is where the both of them were meant to be.

As the years passed their little family grew as Demi collected other wayward women, some came and went, others stuck around so long her daughter started calling them her Aunties. Even a war happened a world away, and the farm had to shift focus to making food rather than beauty, but now three years later everything is close to being just as perfect as it was before.

But if there is one saying she wholeheartedly believes, it is that woman plans and man laughs.

Her daughter had been so upset that day and had ended up exhausting herself in Demi’s bed and she thanked whatever force up above for that when she woke in the middle of the night to the sound of rustling in her daughters room. Making sure that her daughter was still asleep she crept silently down the hall, baseball bat in hand, prepared to defend her family from whoever the hell was in her home.

Evidently nothing could have prepared her for what she would find in there, as she walked into her daughter's room and was met with the cornflower blue gaze of a familiar waifish thirteen year old boy.

When he had first started coming around, he was more like a stray cat whom her daughter fed once; annoyingly underfoot but manageable enough with a hose. But the more time he spent the more worried she became.

All of which the day before when she had idly asked her daughter what she did with the boy that day only for her sweet little daughter to innocently respond, “he told me not to tell you.”

Her friends tried to tell her it was puppy love and that it would eventually pass, and just to give it some time to fade. How intervening may just make it worse. But something in her gut told her that there was something about the way he looked at her daughter, the way he spoke to and about her, the way he acted, and that something was that it was all very wrong. If she had to liken it to anything, she imagines that this is the same way a hunter looks upon his mark.

It was beyond anything she’s ever seen in a grown man's eyes, so she never thought she could see something like that in a child's eyes.

Her daughter remained innocent to it, and slowly but surely Demi was trying to edge that boy out of their lives. Sent him home earlier and earlier, kept her from the shop and in the fields, even began to go out of her way to pick up her daughter rather than chance it with walking home by herself.

But now looking at the boy as he eagerly ransacked her daughter's dresser, did she realize she should have better listened to her instinct.

‘Oh hi Miss Demi,” he would say, as though he just wasn’t caught rifling through her daughters drawers. He was clutching tightly to a truly pathetic and haphazardly put together bouquet of flowers, that seemed to be dripping something from the stems. “Do you know where Y/N is? I just wanted to give these to her.”

It was only as she turned on the lights did she see the true horror to be had. Candy apple red, as though it could ever be that innocent, blood was dripping between his fingers and onto the wooden floors below, his face giving no indication that he even noticed, his eyes continually darting behind her as though waiting for someone from behind. The flowers in the chaotic bouquet tell a story of all kinds of love, but the one errant, still-thorned rose tells the story not of love, but of something else… something dark and unspeakable.

Demi acts immediately, grabbing him by the wrist and by the ear and getting him the hell out of her house. For all his protests and attempts to escape her grip, he was no match for the fury of a mother, and with the ruckus the boy is stirring up she silently thanks god that her daughter is such a deep sleeper.

It hurts her having to leave her daughter home alone, but she knows that her daughter's biggest threat is in her grasp.

She’s had to drop the boy off enough times to remember where he lived and she knows his mother well enough to instinctively know she is no doubt up worrying over him. She was proven right seeing the light bleeding through the front windows of the small home.

He is out of the truck before Demi can even fully park it, and he bolts to the door, probably hoping that she will then be forced to leave without talking to his mother about this whole thing. But he is stopped as said woman flies out of the house and catches him in a massive bear hug on the small porch.

He has parents who care for him so much, yet he still acts like this? She wonders to herself. She sees the woman giving her son once over before coming across his wounded hand that had by now begun to congeal and stop bleeding.

“If you know what’s good for him, you’ll make sure he stays the hell away from my property and I best never see you sniffin’ around my child again, boy,” Demi would say, voice ice cold interrupting this warm reunion, pointing a single finger in this boy's face.

“Demi, what’re you talkin’ ‘bout?” his mother would ask, already putting him behind her back, willing to defend him with her life apparently.

Wouldn’t you do the same, a small part of her says.

“Y’know I expected more from you,” Demi said to her fellow mother. “I never would’ve expected you to be the type to raise a boy that would break into a little girls room and go through her drawers. The hell were you even tryin’ to find in there?”

He wouldn’t answer her, but he would look her dead in the eye, with a look that told her he was unrepentant about his actions. Though that mask would crack the slightest bit as his mother took his face in her hands.

“Bewbie… is this true?” the woman would ask her son slowly, unwilling to believe. But his downturned eyes do all the necessary talking.

“Mama she’s crazy,” that little shit would say, trying to deflect, and cowering behind his mothers skirts. “We can’t leave Honeybee with her.”

“I oughta knock all your fuckin’ teeth out for whatchu did. See how good a singer you are then,” she threatens, though that hardly helps her case. But she was willing to do a lot worse if it meant keeping her daughter safe.

“Don’tcha see Mama?” he says, gesturing a hand her way. “She ain’t safe with Miss Demi, and we gotta take her with us.” It’s not so much his words that are disturbing, but the complete and utter conviction that he speaks nothing but the truth that has the hair on the back of Demi’s neck stand up.

That boy’s lucky that his father decided to make his way out there and prevent Demi from making good on her threat.

“Buntyn, go inside,” she would firmly say to her son. He looks as though he were about to protest, until she shoots a look and he backs down, and walks back into his home. His mother takes a moment to process her words, though nothing she says has a chance in hell of quelling the fury in Demi’s heart. “I-I think he’s just actin’ out because we’re gonna to be movin’ soon,” she tries to weakly justify.

“I don’t fuckin’ care what his excuses are, Gladys. Keep a leash on that boy o’ yours if you gotta,” Demi seethes, catching said boy looking out at them from the window. She makes eye contact with him, fully knowing he would hear this next part, “Because I ain’t goin’ to be so nice next time.”

Demi turned around with that threat still hanging in the air and hoped to never see any of them again. It’s a long quiet drive from there, and her fury reaches a near boiling point finding that damned bouquet on the floor, forgotten in all the ruckus, to which she quickly chucks them into the furnace. It feels wrong to burn her own livelihood, but these flowers were now in her eyes tainted and unfit to ever be seen again.

The fury doesn’t fully melt away until she sees the love of her life sitting up from her bed.

“Mama where’d ya go?” you would ask, your tiny fists rubbing the sleep out of your eyes as you let out an almost angelic yawn. You are and always will be her baby, and nothing will ever take you away from her.

“Just a stray dog sniffin’ round the house, Rosebud,” Demi would say, lightly scratching her nails down your back, the same way she’s done since you were a newborn. “But don’tchu worry baby, your mama scared it off. Go back to sleep.”

Demi sleeps well that night if only due to the fact that she was able to convince herself (albeit temporarily) that that had all been a bad dream. But once she saw the trail of crimson starting from your bedroom window, there is no denying what had happened the night before. She didn’t get this far by trusting other people's words, so for the next few days the two of you slept in a different room each night. Demi calls it camping and you, her sweet little girl, are all too willing to believe her. She sleeps with one eye open those nights, all too afraid that even dropping her watch for half a second will lead to disaster.

She would find no peace until she heard around town that they had moved somewhere up north. To where? She didn't care so long as he was as far away from her precious Rosebud as could be. Still she is always worried as to the day he may come back, so she can only pray that he’s moved on to another poor girl and leaves you the hell alone.

Part of her wonders if she should warn you in case he ever returns, but this question answers itself when you come home from school wanting to show her how many ladybugs you caught in the schoolyard today. She didn’t want to burden you with this awful knowledge, wanting to keep you innocent from your mothers woes.

Demi wanted to shield you from the world, and hoped that one day, you would also get to live without fearing men. It would take her nine years to realize, by then far too late, that you only lacked fear because you didn’t know what men were capable of.

Demi fears no man.

But she does fear Elvis Presley.

—------------------------------------

Flowers have always been the family business. Fields upon fields of every color in the rainbow going on for acres. Truly even having lived here for years and knowing little to nothing else but this, it still never fails to take your breath away.

To say your family knows flowers, is an understatement. You had spent your days running around the property asking your aunties about the flowers they tended to, and what each of them meant.

You learned from an early age that flowers were always meant to invoke good feelings in people, and it makes you proud that you’re a part of it. So you’re excited to say the least when your Mama surprises you with your very own gardening kit for Christmas.

It’s a rite of passage for those in your family to successfully grow and maintain their own plot of flowers for the first time. You had been given the choice of any flower you wanted to take on, most of them pointing to some of these easiest ones for your first time, the ones that you need only plant and water regularly to eventually bloom. You on the other hand wanted to do something harder. So you chose roses due to both the challenge it takes into growing and maintaining them but also the fact that your farm had them in abundance, so it wouldn’t hit the business too hard if you failed.

But moreover, Mama had always called you her little Rosebud, so it only felt fitting to have these be the first flowers you grow all on your own. These blooms were rather picky about conditions, but you had been watching the women in your family grow them since before you could walk, and so you felt you were up to the task. You were only nine but you wanted to show the rest of them how good you could do on your own.

So you watched the seeds germinate, watched them grow into tiny sprouts in their small pots, planted them neatly apart, gave them plenty of sun, and never forgot to water them. Mama even caught you once or twice hovering over those little pots not wanting to miss a single moment of their growth.

She warned you to temper your expectations, how sometimes you can do everything right, and they still may not grow. But you were full of hope and wanted this more than you have ever wanted anything in your few years of life.

You had taken this seriously, hanging on to every tip you got from your Aunties, being sure to tend to them at the correct times, giving the correct amount of water and watching like a hawk for any unwanted pests. Each day you got the pleasure of watching them grow into buds and you figured they were close to blooming any day.

And that’s why you took great offense when you found a gangly tow-headed boy picking at the red roses you had worked so hard to grow.

He looked to be older than you by a few years, stood a foot taller than you, but you knew boys like him, the type that would stomp out dandelions to make you cry and you weren’t about to let him ruin your hard work with your first batch of rose bushes. You may be 9 but you’re scrappy as all get out, which you prove when you drop your basket of fresh cuttings of the day and all but tackle the larger boy into the dirt.

He gives an undignified shriek as he hits the ground, having been caught off guard, but he does attempt to shove you off until he goes a bit limp upon getting a good look at you. The brief scuffle ends with you straddling him and your little palms pinning his arms down as best as you could as owlish, cornflower blue eyes stared up at you in equal amounts of awe and fear.

“What’re you doin’ here?” you say your little voice indignant at what you thought were his attempts to sabotage your efforts. “Why were tryin’ to kill those roses?”

“I-I-I wa-wasn’t,” he insists, his cheeks burning from the shame of being caught doing whatever he was doing and his hands shaking something fierce as he limply tries to hide his face from you as you clench a tiny fist above you. You see that the briars got him good and little droplets of blood were beading up on some fine scratches on his hands.

If he was trying to wreck the bushes you doubt he would try to do so in such a stupid way, but that didn’t mean you trusted him quite yet. However you weren’t about to let him continue being hurt in your presence, so you stood up and grabbed the band-aids that were in your little kit, and helped clean him up.

“I-It-ts m-my mama’s birthday to-tomorrow, an-and I wanted to get her so-somethin’ nice this year,” he said after a while, solemnly looking at his bandaged hand.

You softened at his words, not having expected his answer, but you can hardly fault him for his reasoning. Afterall you don’t know where you or your mama would be if there weren’t thoughtful people that gave flowers to those they loved.

But you do know how much work it takes to grow them, and maintaining your irritation at his mucking about, you indignantly say “You coulda went to our shop and bought them.”

He goes an even deeper shade of red with your statement, “I-I know it’s wrong to steal, an-and I never woulda done this i-if I had the money to buy ‘em.”

It feels like all of the animosity you have towards him leaves your body at that moment. You and Mama have had your hard times before, and you are very much aware that each flower in your family’s field is worth something. It’s what keeps everyone fed, what keeps the lights on, and puts the clothes on your backs, but even knowing that you have one simple belief; everyone deserves nice flowers.

“Well,” you say to him as you stand up. “You picked the wrong color. You ain’t supposed to give red roses to your mama.”

“Really?”

“If you know anything about the language of flowers, you’d know that you’re only supposed to give ‘em to your wife or girlfriend.”

“...Flowers talk to each other?”

“No, they…” you pause trying to figure out a way to best explain yourself. “Their colors and the types are supposed to tell people how you feel about ‘em.” He draws his brows together, thoroughly confused as to what you’re saying, though that ain’t surprising. Mama often complained that when Men buy flowers, they never think too much beyond price, and boys rarely if ever appreciate them.

You decide that it may do him better, to see it rather than trying to explain it fully. So you take his bandaged hand and you walk him through some of the crops. From the outside, the fields look to be a chaotic mess of colors, when in reality there is a lot more thought put into it as your mother organizes by type rather than color. You are able to give him a run down as to rose color meanings, until you finally arrive at your intended destination.

He goes a little wide-eyed once you take out your gardening shears, but quickly relaxes once you go behind him to the bushel of pink roses. You’ve been cutting and dethorning roses for about a year or two now, so it takes not even a minute to find one in good condition, grab it, cut it, proceed to have it stripped of all its thorns, and casually present it to the blonde boy before you.

You thought he was red before, but as you presented him that rose, he turned redder than the rose he had attempted to pluck. His bandaged hand shakily takes the flower out of your hand, and with a reverence you’ve never seen from a boy when it comes to flowers, he holds it gently with both.

“Pink means gratitude and admiration.”

“What?” his lip still quivering slightly and eyes glassy.

“When you give someone a pink rose,” you explain to him, with a smile. “You’re letting them know that you’re grateful for all they’ve done for you and that you admire them very much for it. It’s the perfect flower to give to your Mama,” you say, giving him a small smile, the look he’s giving you making you feel warm inside.

“Rosebud?” you hear from behind you, and all the warm feelings seem to die in that instant.

“H-hi mama,” you say nervously, whipping around, standing on your toes, as though you’ll somehow be able to hide this trespasser's taller frame behind you. Though you realize how stupid that idea is and quickly take her hand, “Mama come look at my roses, I think they’re gonna bloom today,” you say, trying desperately to turn her around as though she’ll forget she ever saw that boy.

“In a minute Rosebud,” she said, her voice saccharine sweet, that you know by now means she’s mad. “But first, why don’tcha introduce me to your little friend here.”

“...yes Mama, this is… my friend…,” you go wide-eyed realizing you don’t even know this boy's name.

Luckily he picks up on your pause, “Hello, ma-ma’am, my name is uuhh… Elvis… Presley.”

Your mama slowly leans forward until she’s eye level with him, “Well, Elvis Presley,” she drawls slowly, her words friendly, yet the way they’re delivered tells you her feelings for this boy are anything but. “You mind tellin’ me why the hell you’re on my property, botherin’ my daughter, and plucking out my livelihood?”

Elvis looks down realizing that he was still holding the pink rose for all to see, and makes a futile attempt to hide it, only for his skinny wrist to be caught in your mothers iron like grip.

Mama had that way about her, her smile could be warm but her words icy. You’ve seen her like this with the few men that had come through here. Some trying to buy the land, some trying to find one of your Aunties, all of them leaving empty-handed because of her.

But you don’t believe that the boy before you, the one that wanted to get his mama something nice for her birthday, could ever be like those bad men. So you decided to do what needs to be done, “I invited him over Mama,” you say looking down at your muddy boots.

“Rosebud you ain’t gotta lie for him,” she admonishes, though she does seem to loosen her grip on him.

“Bu-but it’s the truth Mama. He’s been sayin’ how he needs a gift for his mama’s birthday, so I said he could come over here to get her a flower,” you mumble, knowing that this is something she always told you never to do.

She takes a long hard sigh before she fully releases Elvis, “You best get yourself home before it gets dark.” she says, her warning punctuated with a very cold breeze, despite it being well into April. He swallows nervously as he makes his way to the road, giving one last sorrowful glance your way before leaving.

“Rosebud,” your mama sighs, giving you a kiss on the forehead. “Sometimes you’re too sweet for your own good, and I don’t ever want to see someone take advantage of that.”

“Ok Mama.”

When he left that day you fully expected to never see him again, until he showed up the very next day wanting to show you his guitar.

After that, Elvis becomes a near constant presence at your farm. Your aunties thought he was nice enough, pinching his cheeks and plying him with snacks in exchange for having him sing for them. You don’t mind too much, as you don’t really have too many friends, and next to none that want to spend their evenings on your farm. You kind of enjoyed having him around, he would sometimes bring a guitar and sing to you, or read his comics to you. Other times he would follow you around as you did your chores and ask about the flowers.

You got used to him being around and even grew to enjoy it. One special day you even decided to share your most valued treasure with him: your favorite fruit in the whole world. One so good yet so expensive and rare in these parts that it’s limited to a once a year treat for you.

“An onion?” he asks skeptically.

“No,” you insist, slightly huffy that he’s not appreciating your most prized possession. “It’s called a Pomegranate,” you tell him, taking it out of his hands so that you could cut into it the way your Mama showed you. “I know when you first look at it, it doesn't look like much,” you say, as you cut at the crown. “But when you really look at it, you’ll find something truly amazing,” you conclude, and with a twist of your wrist you take the top off to reveal an abundance of the small jewel looking seeds, where you see him looking at it in nothing less than utter amazement.

That look in his eyes only grows when he actually tastes the little kernels for the first time, and he ravenously devours his half of the fruit, some of the juices overflowing out the corners of his mouth, and down his face.

You on the other hand savor each and every bite of it. You truly believe if perfection can be found, it would be in that late summer afternoon. The soft sunbeams creeping through from the shade and the perfume of the freshly cut flowers in your basket. The soft breeze that runs through your hair and causes the flowers in the fields to sway slightly as though they were dancing to the music flowing from your friends' beaten up guitar.

“What’d ya’ dream about doin’?” he would ask as he gazed up at the clouds overhead, idly strumming his guitar, his lips and fingertips stained red.

“What do you mean Elvis?” You would ask as you pick at the very last seeds on your rind.

“I-I mean wh-what’d ya wanna do when you grow up, Honeybee?,” he asks nervously, eyes firmly on the fields as though he were afraid of your answer. You roll your eyes slightly at his nickname for you, stemming from the time a bee landed on your hand and rather than swatting it away, you gently blew on it to get it to fly away. But you do decide to humor him anyway.

“Oh…This.”

“Really?” he asks, truly baffled at your answer. “You really don’t wanna go nowhere or-or do somethin’ else?”

“Why would I wanna do anything else?,” you ask in turn, confused at his confusion. “It’s like magic when really think ‘bout it,” you insist, showing him the last few kernels of the pomegranate you have in your hand. “Something so small can turn into something so beautiful.”

“You could plant ‘em anywhere, couldn’t you?” he insists.

You shrug your shoulders at that. “I guess.”

“But what if you couldn’t stay here,” he asks, his tone mournful, but you didn’t pick up on it at the time. “Wha-what if you had to go far away and y-you couldn’t come back?”

“Then I would make a new home,” you dismiss, offering him the last six seeds of your Pomegranate. He looks so surprised by the offer, his eyes a bit glassy before he furiously rubs them with the back of his hand and accepts your offer.

“Honeybee… co-could you meet me b-by your roses tomorrow,” he stutters. “I-i got something’ important to give ya’.”

“Ok.”

“Bu-but don’t tell your mama,” he says to you.

That may be a tall order, you thought at the time. Your mama on the other hand remains coolly indifferent to him, but you always got the sense that she didn’t like him for whatever reason. Nonetheless a promise is a promise.

Mama was probably at her happiest when he stopped coming around. When you learned he moved away, you were sad that your friend would leave without saying a proper goodbye, and you believed you would never see that dreamer boy again.

So imagine your surprise when a few years later an electric, new singer starts making waves across the south. He tried to steal flowers from your farm and now he steals hearts across the country.

Just about every girl in town, if given the chance, will brag how they had known him way back when, some of the more daring ones even claiming to have been his first kiss. As far as what you have heard Elvis may be the only man alive to have had 25 first kisses. The boys were no better, all claiming to have been his closest buddy growing up, and promising any girl that they could definitely meet back up with him if they chose.

Everyone is in an absolute tizzy for his return to Tupelo, you are simply trying to help your family through the rush of orders that has come in with the upcoming fair. Mostly it had been a headache because the new Miss Tupelo had demanded that her float be decorated with only white roses, as she didn’t think the standard red was flattering for her.

Which is fine until your shop is presented with a very special order from the mayor himself for an order of three dozen of your finest roses to be given to Tupelo’s favorite returning son for his homecoming concert.

Mama had initially treated it like any other order, until she saw who it was from.

“Absolutely not,” she said in her sternest voice, you hear from around the corner.

“Demi,” your Auntie Kate would admonish her. “Don’t be stupid ‘bout this. It’s been years and he was just a dumb kid back then.”

You don’t know what the mayor did to your Mama, but it had to have been bad, if he got her this worked up. Of course you’re not about to ask, as they had both pointedly left the room to discuss the matter while you were supposed to be minding the store. Instead you were very intently listening in to whether or not your mother was about to refuse an order for seemingly the first time in years.

“Kate, I ain’t takin’ any chances with this,” Mama declares. “You weren’t there, but if you’re ever gonna trust me on anything, let it be this.”

“Look Demi,” Kate sighs. “He’s willing to pay a ridiculous amount of money for them, and we need to offload some of the roses and it ain’t like he’s gonna-”

She’s interrupted by the bell signaling a customer having entered the shop. By the time you finish with him though, Mama has agreed, albeit reluctantly, to accept the order, under the condition the Kate be responsible for it in its totality

You don’t know what Kate had said to her but you’re glad nonetheless as she would claim once your mama was out of earshot that she was too busy to do this order so she asked if you would please be so kind as to take care of it for her.

Those weeks leading up to the fair, someone had asked Elvis if he was looking forward to reconnecting with anyone special back in Tupelo. As the reporter described it, the young star would look down bashfully at his feet, one side of his mouth curving upwards with only the slightest hint of red on his ears as he proclaimed yes to this humble reporter. “My sweetheart from way back in the day. I lost touch with her when I moved up to Memphis and I am praying every night that I find her this time around.”

If him simply coming back for a day to perform sent girls into a frenzy, the prospect of him coming back to find his supposed childhood love, just about turned everybody hysterical. Reporters from all over had flooded the town and had been skulking around trying to find this mysterious girl that had a hold on one of the biggest rising stars. Even once or twice coming into the shop and asking if you’ve received any calls from Memphis asking to send flowers to a specific girl in town.

Many girls were claiming to be the one Elvis is in fact looking for, recounting their memories of a sweet boy who only had eyes for them. They all followed the same general beats of being in the same class, he was embarrassingly smitten with them, and they rejected him. You had been in different grades and didn’t really know him outside of when he would visit your farm seemingly everyday, so you could hardly attest as to whether or not any of this was true. You do however remember him cryptically referring to one specific girl that had his heart, though in not so many words.

In the days leading up to the last time you would see him, he became very interested in the flowers for romance. He didn’t say that he was planning to do so, but you could tell he was gearing up to declare his love for that girl he never named. Your first suggestion is, of course, whatever her favorite flower is.

He would blanche a bit at that, “She-she loves em all,” he would mumble looking away bashfully and facing the vibrantly colored fields. According to your mama this is man's speak for “I don’t know.” With few exceptions, nobody is without a favorite, and you sigh slightly disappointed in him that he’s apparently ready to declare undying affection for a girl and he didn’t even know that basic but important information about the girl. But you did promise him your help so you gave him some suggestions: Lilacs for new love, Gardenias for secret love, Carnations for deep love, Tulips for perfect love, Forget-Me-Nots for true love, and of course Red Roses for passionate love.

On that day you would find him nervously pacing in front of your first batch of roses. They were now in full bloom and you sadly recognized that you’re going to have to cut them soon. You know that’s the beast of this business, that in order to bring new life in, the old must make way, but it’s only a cold comfort and you hope that whoever they end up with will appreciate their beauty.

He practically stared you down as you walked down the row between rose bushes, but he seems to be shaking as though his knees were liable to give out at any moment, and the closer you got to him, you saw that his chest was practically heaving. You can see as he holds something behind his back and you blatantly try to look to see what it is, only to be stopped as he places one hand on your shoulder.

“What’d you wanna talk about Elvis?” you ask him, slightly worried he may be having a heat stroke.

He swallows thickly before he finally answers you, “M-my folks and I are gonna be goin’ up North,” his eyes downcast as though he were ashamed to admit this, one hand still hidden behind his back.

“Oh, when are you coming back?” you say oblivious to his grief.

He’s taken by surprise at your question, but he does answer with a simple “I don’t know.” But with that he squares his shoulders and through trembling lips he stutters, “Honeybee… I-I-I want ya’ to c-come wi-with us.”

“Ok.” you say, completely ignorant as to the true meaning of his words.

“Really?” his face breaking into the biggest smile you’ve ever seen in your life.

“Yeah,” you say simply. You remember vividly that you were going to say something to the effect of needing to be back home before dinner because Auntie Erin was gonna be making her famous Golden Apple Pie, when you all of a sudden felt your lips being occupied.

You laugh at your reaction to a simple kiss on the lips now, but at the time, it had felt like the end of the world to you. After all, you were so sure that this was how babies were made.

When you had asked where babies came from, Mama nervously answered you with this story: Your Daddy kissed your mama out in front of the red roses, and their love would cause a new bud to bloom where they would find you sleeping in a rosebud.

Back then you didn’t know any better, all you did know was that you didn’t want to take care of a baby right now. You wanted to grow Azaleas next, and Mama warned you that that would be a big commitment to make. And Elvis was going to be moving away, so who was going to take care of the baby?

You were confused and frustrated beyond anything you’ve experienced up to that point, and you did what any overwhelmed 9 year old would do.

You started bawling your eyes out, pushed him down, and ran back home.

Mama would later comfort you and reassure you no baby was on it’s way. She corrected her story and told you that in fact, the couple must be married in order for a baby to be made. (She never did go into further detail as to the process, so you assumed that was the only necessary detail)

The next day, you had felt bad and wanted to apologize to Elvis for the confusion and for pushing him down yet again. You even had a sprig of Lily of the Valley ready as a peace offering and everything, but you wouldn’t see him the next day. Nor the day after that.

You wouldn’t hear about him until about a couple months back when you had been dethorning the roses while listening to the radio. You vividly remember the surprise that came over you the moment the DJ announced the artist behind the song. How could you not? Afterall it marks the first time in years that a rose had been able to draw blood from you, because in your surprise, hearing the name of a ghost from your past, your ungloved fingers met with a thorn perfectly.

There was no doubt in your mind that it was him not just for the very distinct name, but for that song specifically. You remember him singing it while you were in the fields, saying he had heard it from Big Boy Crudup himself.

For maybe half a second you entertain the thought that you may be the mystery sweetheart of his, but just as quickly you dismiss it as the way he describes it as being a long lost love tragically torn apart by fate. You on the other hand pushed him down and cried your eyes out when he kissed you once before never seeing him again, hardly the type of romance worth reading about.

And like a blink of an eye the fair day arrived.

You had been expressly forbidden from going to the fair, your mother giving no real reason beyond “because I said so.” This in turn makes you feel less guilty about your little scheme, as she did not forbid you from choosing that day to be the day you work in the shop.

Men are funny creatures, you realize as you work on the order the morning of. Whoever put in the order made sure to specify that the roses must be fresh yet somehow neglected to mention the preferred color.

You opted for red ones in the end as you have those in abundance and you figure they probably wouldn’t look too closely into the meaning beyond it being the classic rose color. But you do slip in a pink rose in the mix, remembering the first flower you had ever given him.

It’s a big order to fill, which you only realize once you're carrying a comically large bouquet into the backstage area of the fairgrounds. It was a bit of a hassle making it there in the first place as evidently you’re not the first young woman insisting you’re allowed to be backstage. Though none of them had the mayor himself vouching for the order and letting you in.

He was already walking up on to the stage by the time you get there, and all you really see of him is the back of his head. Without knowing what you did, you would be hard-pressed to find any similarities between the man on stage and the boy who had to sing facing away from you lest he get too anxious.

But when he was presented with the key to the city, did you finally see hints of that boy from your memories. The way he kept shifting nervously from foot to foot, how he kept stuffing his hands in his pockets only to take them out, his eyes flickering back and forth between the crowd and the mayor. All of it reminding you of the endearing, stuttering boy who nervously asked you what each flower in your field meant.

You don’t think you’ve ever seen someone move like that before, so jerky and sudden, but also so very fluid when he wanted to be. Oddly enough you’re reminded of snake charming, with that vicarious thrill of watching something that looks so dangerous, but you also can’t look away from. But that begs the question: is he the snake or is he the charmer?

It’s hard to say, especially when he shifted gears to slower, less rowdy songs.

And then one day

I had my love as perfect as could be

She lived, she loved, she laughed, she cried

And it was all for me

There was a bit of a tremble in his voice as he crooned those words out to the crowd, as though he were close to tears himself. It’s here you think you truly find that boy that used to bug you when you were out in the fields.

It felt like all too soon the concert was over and he was stepping behind the stage. What feels like half a million eyes are focused on him as he steps off the stage to where he was met with just as many cameras and questions thrown his way. You almost feel bad for him, that he wasn’t even given a chance to breathe between one stage to another.

His eyes scanned the crowd that gathered around him, but eventually his eyes would settle on the ridiculously large bouquet right next to you. It’s hard to miss, you think, looking at it, but when you look back at him you find that his eyes are firmly set on you and you feel your heart skip a beat.

He’s probably trying to figure out where he knows you from, you figure. It’s been years, you yourself had long ago forgotten about him, but hearing his name on the radio for the first time dredged up all of those memories.

You can hardly blame him though the both of you have changed a lot in the almost ten years since you’d last seen each other and he doesn’t have the benefit of a famous name or your face on TV to jog his memory.

Even still some part of yourself wishes he does remember and you walk towards him with more a skip in your step than ever. But you find your path thwarted by an unwelcome familiar face.

Mindy, whom you’ve known since grade school, when her and her Mama lived on the farm with you until her mama married a new man. You used to be the best of friends but when she moved out she seemed to want to distance herself from you and did so by criticizing everything you did.

Most people would be hard-pressed to name anything she does like, but ask her about the things she hates and she can go on for hours. And of all the things she hates, you think you rank somewhere near the top, given how much she used to talk about you to anyone who would listen. Everything about you was apparently a personal offense to her, with her latest insult being that you apparently had a bunch of cats on your farm, hence your latest and most confusing nickname of “the Cathouse girl.” Though by far her most egregious thing she's ever said was that one day you were going to suffocate from your Mama’s apron strings, and it felt all the worse that you couldn’t even go to her about it lest you prove her point.

She now proudly wears her Miss Tupelo sash over seafoam green dress as she attempts to lift the bouquet out of your hands with a cloyingly sweet, “I’ll take that off your hands hon.”

You move to protest this, but apparently your day has just gone from bad to worse, as you feel a familiar iron-like grip on your arm. “Rosebud, it’s time for us to leave.” You don��t need to turn around to know who it is.

“But Mama-”

“Yeah Y/N, thought all you did was listen to your Mama,” Mindy interrupts you as she finally wrenches the bouquet out of your hands.

“It’s time to go home, Y/N,” your mother says severely, her grip on your elbow unyielding. Your cheeks burn with humiliation, having never felt so small under your mothers gaze, but you don’t argue with her and allow yourself to be pulled away, lest a bigger scene be caused.

Mindy, idly pops her spearmint gum with the most triumphant of smiles, sparing you a simple dismissive twiddle of her fingers before spinning around to present your hard work to your old friend. If there’s one thing you can be glad about in that moment, is that exactly zero other eyes were on you as you conceded to your mother like a scolded child and let her lead you out of the fairgrounds.

Little did you realize at the time, someone was watching.

You get into the truck and sit your fists clenching in anger on your knees, ashamed at what transpired just now.

“Rosebud…” she starts, and you petulantly turn your entire body to face the window with your back to her. “Honey I know you think I go overboard with these things, but you gotta trust your mama here when I say that it’s all for your own good.”

Your nails dig into the meat of your palms, so hard you worry it may draw blood, but a part of you welcomes that. Maybe then she will understand how upset you are with her. She still treats you like a child after all these years, protecting you from some nebulous threat that is both ever present yet somehow not important enough to give a name.

You feel suffocated, unable to defend yourself from insults that you aren’t allowed to fully understand.

These feelings would only double when you would see the next day's newspaper, where an enlarged picture of Elvis and Mindy on the ferris wheel would take up most of the front page. Well there’s your answer as to who this mystery girl is, you think bitterly.

Sweethearts reunited at last, the headline reads.

Though all your anger and fury would end up manifesting into nothing when the real world decided to remind you what was important in life. About a week after the fair, your home would receive a late night visit from the sheriff informing you of tragedy.

It didn’t feel real seeing what was once a colorful store teeming with life and love to now be reduced to a smoldering, skeletal pile of ash. You had been there not even a day ago and now it was gone. The police don’t suspect foul play but they weren’t ruling it out, and as you would learn, the little insurance mama did have on the shop didn’t cover fires unless it could be proven beyond a doubt that it was accidental. So suffice it to say, your family is on its own in terms of getting the store back up and running.

Typically late fall is for drying out maybe a quarter of the left over supply of flowers, storing the rest into the cold storage below the shop, winterizing the bushels for the next season, and shifting focus to seeding and growing the more popular flowers in the greenhouses, but the fire had thrown the ultimate wrench into the plans. A good chunk of the cut flowers had been kept on display at the front of the shop or beneath it in cold storage, and so with them went much of the value in the business.

Your mama is stressed beyond anything you’ve ever seen, but what makes it worse is that she refuses to burden you with the knowledge of your financial situation. Which in turn stresses you out even more about the financial situation she didn’t want you to know about.

About a month after the fire Mama had gone to the bank in an effort to get a business loan so that she could rent a new place, while the others were in town trying to strike up partnerships with other stores on the same street and convince them to buy and sell your flowers. It wasn’t the greatest of plans but it was the only one you were left with so that you may hobble through this year into the next.

They could sell the flowers off to shops in nearby towns, but even selling the rest of the supply wholesale will hardly breakeven for this year leaving you with nothing saved come next season. And even then that’s only if everybody refuses payment for the work they did, which they did offer, but your Mama was having none of it.

Even setting up a stand on your property and selling from there wasn’t an option, as you’re located way too far out from town too hope for those driving by to stop and buy flowers off of you.

You find yourself on one of the rare days in which you’re home alone, as you sit on the porch gazing out at the fields nearly devoid of all flora now. If your mother can’t convince the bank for a loan then all that your family has ever grown will rot, the land sold, and the strange tribe of women that had been collected under this roof would be left adrift. Beauty will give way over to necessity, as these bankers are under the false assumption that people don’t need flowers.

But how can you begrudge the necessity of food at a time like this when your kitchen is looking pathetically sparse these days. You wouldn’t mind too much if you didn’t know that it was a prelude to no food at all.

It didn’t feel right that this would be the end of the farm, your Nana Gail took the dusty lands her deadbeat of a husband left her with and turned it into something beautiful. She passed it on to your Mama, a relative stranger she took in the both of you when your daddy was sent away to die an ocean away.

The farm had survived two world wars and yet it would be a fire that would cause all that the women of your family had built to crumble.

You shake your head furiously at the thought. Don’t let these bad thoughts get to you, you think to yourself. You're truly afraid of where these thoughts may lead you if you let them fester so instead you decide that the kitchen would benefit from some cheery flowers to brighten up the place.

The house is in desperate need of that these days.

But as you were in the dirt to pick Daffodils, you realize you weren’t as alone as you thought, as in the distance you see some dust being kicked up. Your heart jumps for joy thinking that it was your mother, bearing good news, until you get to the dirt road and the unfamiliar black car drives past you.

Making your way home you can see a tall figure step out of the shiny car, dressed all in black. As they turn to look at the house, they strike an unsettlingly familiar silhouette but it still takes you a second to recognize him, even if it was not even a month ago when you saw him last.

Maybe it’s because, in your head, he’s still that gangly tow-headed boy, not this tall dark man in black that stands before you.

“Elvis?”

A devastating grin spreads across his face as he spreads his arms out in a clear invitation for a hug. “Been a long time, Honeybee.”

You don’t know the etiquette as to how to greet someone you haven’t talked to in years, but also whom you’ve seen in passing a few days ago. But you graciously accept the hug and kiss on the cheek he gives you, so you in turn invite him into your home, unsure what else to do in the face of his casual familiarity.

“Hope you don’t mind,” he says, grabbing a basket from the back seat. “But I brought you a lil’ gift.” Your eyes widen and your mouth instantly starts to water at the plentiful bounty within, as no less than a dozen Pomegranates filled that ornate basket. The fact that he brought such a thing, seemingly on a whim, spoke volumes as to how well the music business was treating him more than any sparkling jewel or shiny car could.

“Can I offer you some water or…” you trail off as you put the daffodils in a vase, hoping he accepts, and you won’t have to suffer the embarrassment of having so little to offer such a man.

“If you could be a doll actually,” he says, plucking one of the sweet fruits. “Why don’tcha pop one a these open for old times sake.” You’re silently grateful he asked as you doubt it would have been too long before your empty stomach was demanding for one. “I still remember when you gave me one for the first time.” he idly remarks as you start to cut into it.

You smile at that shared memory between the two of you, though a sorrowful ache settles in your stomach as those days seem so far away now. You gather a few errant seeds from the cutting board and you can’t help the small moan that comes from you, as you had resigned yourself to the fact that you wouldn’t be having any this year.

With the plate in hand you turn around to find your guest frozen in his sweet, before quickly gathering himself as you approach.

“So what brings you back to these ol’ parts,” you ask, placing the plate between you two.

He pops a few seeds off of the ridge, and into his mouth, “Well I came back here because a certain someone left my show before I could even say hello to her.”

You look down slightly embarrassed but a little ecstatic that he realized your absence, “Sorry ‘bout that, we get super busy around this time and couldn’t stick around too long.”

“I get it,” he answers amiably. “It looked like you and your mama had somewhere to be.”

You cringe and look down humiliated that, of all the things he could’ve seen that day, he saw perhaps the most embarrassing moment of your life. You look back and see an expression you can’t quite read on his face as you quickly recover and ask him how the star's life is treating him.

He regales you with all that he’s done the past few years since the music thing took off, and how he’s looking forward to the movies he’s gonna make. He even tells you how he’s just about to finish filming his first one pretty soon, and head back to Hollywood in a week.

The irony that you sit across from him, his dreams once so lofty and out of reach now coming true whereas your simple one seems to slip through your fingers is not lost on you. You have to actively force yourself to be happy for him at this moment, as he’s hardly to blame for your recent misfortunes.

“How are you and Mindy doing?” you ask, after a while.

“Who?”

That really shouldn’t make you as happy as it did.

“You know your old Sweetheart and all that,” you tease lightly.

“Oh… her…” he says, unable to hide the bit of a grimace on his face. “She was… nice?”

“You don’t gotta lie,” you say, laughing a bit at the thought

“She was nice to me,” he elaborates, shrugging his shoulders a bit, before giving a pointed look at you. “She had a lot to say ‘boutchu though.”

“I can imagine.” you say, plucking a few seeds. “Guess childhood sweethearts ain’t all they cracked up to be.”

“Wouldn’t know,” he says. “But enough a all that, how ‘boutchu, Honeybee? Whatcha been up to all these years?”

“Oh you know, ain’t nothin’ ever changes down in Tupelo,” you dismiss, hoping to dodge his question. “Still growing flowers, still selling them,” you say, willing your smile to be more cheerful than strictly necessary.

“Y’know,” he broaches lightly, his fingers awkwardly rapping against the grainy wood of the table. “I actually did stop by the shop before I got here…” he trails off, a solemn air falling over the both of you.

“Oh.”

“Listen, darlin’,” he says, taking his hand in yours. “If you need anythin’ tell me how I can help,” he pleads softly.

“Yo-you don’t gotta be worried ‘bout us, we-we’re gonna be fine,” you stutter, attempting to parrot your Mama’s own words back to him, hoping you’re at least somewhat convincing. He takes your hand in his and soothingly rubs his thumb along the back of your hand.

“Sweetheart if you folks need some money to tide y‘all over for a bit, I’d be happy t-”

“No,” you cut him off. “I can’t accept your money for nothing,” you declare.

“I understand Honeybee,” he says, looking out the window. “But I just moved to a new place up in Memphis. It’s nice but kinda… bare on the outside, and I’ve been in the market for someone to fix that.” he says his steely blue gaze fixed on you. “And then I thought who better than the girl who could grow anythin’?”

You’re genuinely flattered at the compliment, but you can’t help but feel this is simply more of his pity and you let him know as much.

“Sweetheart, I was gonna offer you the job even before I saw your shop,” he says genuinely. “It don’t gotta be forever, just work a couple months up in Graceland, makin’ sure everything set up come spring, then you’ll be home.”

“Graceland?”

“It’s what the old owners called it anyway,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s a house right now, but it ain’t no home.” he looks solemn in his words until his eyes trail to you and you can see in real time as his whole demeanor brightens. “I think you could help fix that darlin’,” he states, his smile making it hard to focus on much else.

There is a bit of a pause, and you stupidly realize he’s waiting for an answer from you. But from the almost imperceptible drop in his grin at your hesitation, you doubt it’s the one he’s looking for. “I-I’m flattered but… I-I can’t just leave right now.” you stutter, feeling guilty that he’s now upset with you, and you feel the need to further justify your stance. “My family needs me right now.”

“And this is how you can help ‘em right now,” he argues, reaching into his back pocket. “I can even pay ya’ half upfront now.”

“Elvis, I don’t think that’ll be eno–” you’re cut off by him suddenly slapping what looks to be six hundred dollars on the table before casually going back to picking off the ruby colored seeds. He smiles a bit at the gobsmacked expression on your face, but how could you not be?

Renting out a new space downtown for a few months wouldn’t even cost a quarter of this with the rest being able to go toward everything else. It’s almost funny that previously you never even thought about money, but now it feels like that’s all you think about these days.

“This-this is just for six months of work?”

“Three actually,” he corrects. “The rest you’ll get paid in the Spring.”

You feel your heart thunder within your chest with his words. This would be more than enough money to get your family through the year. But you don’t know if you could do it. Not the gardening part obviously more the being so far away from your family part.

“Can I have some time to think about it?” you question, hoping that maybe the rest will be able to better convince you to go for it or someone else could take the offer.

“Sweetheart I gotta get back to Memphis real soon,” he warns, a lot cooler than before. “So I’m gonna need an answer right now.” You swallow nervously at the intensity of his gaze on you, feeling an uncomfortable feeling settling in your belly, the prospect of leaving home, making you queasy.

“Elvis I-I-I don’t know,” you stutter, your palms clammy as you hold the hem of your skirt with shaky hands, feeling as though the world is somehow closing in on you.

“Well I guess that’s that then,” he says with an air of finality, that only further turns your stomach.

This man is offering a solution to all your current woes and yet you hesitate? You balk at the idea of a couple months of doing the same work you would’ve been doing here? And for what exactly?

You know you should discuss this with your Mama, but you already know what her answer is going to be. It’s the same one she has been giving these last few weeks when you had asked about getting a job to better support the house.

Your daddy never came back from the war so she promised to love you twice as fiercely, for the both of them. She had always done her best to feed you, clothe you, protect you. It’s no secret that everything this farm started from you when she had to support the both of you on her own. And you know for a fact if it was her being offered the job she wouldn’t have even blinked to take it. But you’re about to let that all slip through your fingers because you’re too much of a coward to do what needs to be done.

But even with all that in mind, it’s not your mind that ultimately makes the decision so much as your stomach, as it rumbles yet again as you look upon the basket he left behind overflowing with one of the most expensive fruits you know, a mere taste as to what he can so casually provide you.

You catch him just as he’s about to step out the door, but before you can officially say yes you have one question left for him. “Can you promise me I’ll be home come Spring?”

“Darlin’ I can promise you right now, come Spring we’ll both have exactly what we want.” which is a big promise for anyone to make, but you are looking at the boy who had gone from being only able to sing in front of a single person in an empty field to someone who is now selling out shows to hundreds. There is an odd sense that if anybody can manifest the near impossible it would be him.

It takes you only an hour to pack what you think you’ll need for these coming months, as well as write a barebones note explaining to your Mama that no you’re not being kidnapped and that you’ll be gone to raise money to save the farm. You don’t say where you’ll be but you do promise that you will write as often as you can and that you’ll be home come springtime. You quickly stuff the note and the money into the envelope, and leave it right on top of the basket.

But before you can make it out the front door, you're presented with a bright cheerful looking daffodil, plucked straight from the vase you had put it in. “For new beginnings,” he says with a soft smile.

“How’d you know that?” you asked surprised that he remembered after all this time, but taking a hold of it anyway.

“Hell, all the time I spent down here,” he said, throwing an arm over your shoulder. “Somethin’ was bound to stick.”

And just like that you’re off.

You refuse to look forlornly out at the fields you’re leaving behind, trying to remind yourself that it’s not as though you’ll be gone forever. You’ll be back before you know it, you think, trying to convince yourself, and it’s Elvis’ hand in yours that gives you some small comfort in this incredibly trying time, even as his eyes are firmly set forward.

Though it’s as you get to the state border do you realize that this will mark the first time you’ve been so far from home ever, and you let Elvis know as much.

“There’s gonna be a lotta firsts when you stick with me darlin’,” he says, giving a tender kiss to the back of your hand.

Graceland on the outside is beautiful but… sterile, if you had to take a guess. There were trees with leaves starting to brown for the autumn, the shrubbery was perfectly manicured, and the grass was well maintained but it was utterly devoid of color save for the cars in the driveway.

But then again this is what you’re here to rectify, so you try to be an optimist about it, and try to view it as a blank canvas so to speak. What the property lacked in the moment was warmth and you suppose now it’s your job to bring it.

That first month was all devoted to building the greenhouse necessary to start the entire process. You prefer to start with the seeds rather than skipping straight to the bulbs, so a place where you can better help them grow is ideal. Elvis is all too willing to indulge this and he puts in the order for one but all too soon he has to leave to go and finish his movie.

As much as you knew Elvis, it felt odd being in a house with the owner gone. And while Graceland was far from empty, there is still that unsettling sensation of being there that you can’t quite shake.

Of course not used to being so idle even during the winter, you start to take on other duties around the household. You quickly endear yourself to Miss Gladys with your willingness to take on the chores of the house and she goes out of her way to make you feel welcome.

You like her, she’s the only one who feels as uncomfortable at the opulence as you did. In a lot of ways she reminds you of your own mother with the way she frets over her absent son. This strikes a particularly guilty chord within you, because unlike your Mama, Gladys has the benefit of knowing where her child was at the moment.

“Where ya from sweetheart?” she asks you idly one day as you’re helping her make breakfast early one morning.

“Tupelo,” you say while you beat the eggs.

“Oh do I know your Mama?”

“Probably,” you answer. “She ran the flower shop back there.”

Gladys pauses at that. You can’t see her face but you do hear the hesitation in her voice as she whispers “... Demi?”

“Yeah that’s my mama… you know her?” you ask a little confused at this point, and you wonder if there is some history there.

There is an uncomfortably long pause before she says a simple, “Yeah I think I remember her…” The rest of the morning is filled with an awkward silence as you try to figure out what could have possibly happened there.

That night, before you enter the room to talk to Elvis over the phone, you overhear the tail end of the conversation between him and his Mama. You hear her whisper in a low tone, “I hope you know what you’re doin’ Bewbie.”

Whatever awkwardness that had arisen because of her question disappears soon after that. Gladys happily takes you under her wing once more, bringing you further into the fold of the Presleys and all the dynamics that come with it. She has even begun to refer to you as the daughter she never had which, while you understand is meant to make you feel welcome here, it in fact eats at you considering the state of the relationship between you and your real Mama.

It’s times like these that you truly hate that your family doesn’t have a telephone. You want more than anything to hear her voice, but you know yourself well enough to know that if you were to even visit now you wouldn’t want to ever leave again.

You write to her pretty much every day. Like clockwork for the first month you write to her telling her about your day the same way you usually would, asking her for advice on some flowers, anything really that comes to mind. You had a lot of time that first month while you were helping with planning and building the greenhouse, so everyday you would sift through the hoard of mail to find one bearing your home address.

But it never comes.

That doesn’t stop you from continuing to write to her everyday, handing off the letter to Jerry, and eagerly awaiting her reply.

Elvis is very understanding over the fact that it’s a marathon and not a sprint to make the garden he wanted and every time he’s back home he’s just as eager to see your progress with the seeds as you are to show him. Once you even tried to apologize to him feeling guilty that it’s taking so long to perfect that image of Graceland he had.

“Sweetheart you bein’ there, takin’ care a everythin’ makes it feel all the more like a proper home,” he insists over the phone. “And I can’t wait to get back and see it all.”

This guilt eases once the greenhouse is finished and you can finally get to work with the flowers you’ve planned. Elvis quote “trusted your vision” and wanted you to choose whatever you thought worked best, but he did specify which flowers he absolutely wanted on the property: Lilacs, Gardenias, Carnations, Tulips, Forget-Me-Nots, and Roses.

“I’m a bit of a romantic, I guess,” he said shyly rubbing the back of his neck. You don’t mind too much, as him knowing what he wants by far makes him the easiest man you’ve ever worked with.

Elvis had left you with the understanding that the boys he left behind would be at your beck and call and that should you need anything, not to be afraid to send them to get it. Pots and other such tools were easy enough to send for, but when it came down to other fine details such as soil and seeds, you trusted no one but yourself to find what you need, and so you instead ask if one of them could take you into town to find what you need.

“I cAN-” Jerry, one of the younger ones offered, blushing furiously at his overeagerness that caused his voice to crack slightly. “I mean I can take you,” he says, far more composed this time around. The other men protest, saying he’s too young and that he only just got his license, and ‘don’tchu want a real man drivin’ around sweetheart?’

It was those last comments that really solidified your decision to have it be him, as there was something about Jerry, (16, Lanky, and with a voice still cracking from puberty) that put your mind at ease over all these other grown men, in a way you can’t exactly place.

You stopped going to school when you were around 15 and outside of brief exchanges with the men that used to come into your shop, you haven’t really had much interaction with menfolk in the past 3 years. So that’s where you believe your unease stems from, having been surrounded by mostly women your entire life, being around so many men now is a bit of a shock to your system.

He leads you to his shiny new car, a gift from Elvis for some unspecified favor he did for him, and just like that you’re off. The drive into town is mostly quiet save for Jerry nervously pointing out to you his favorite places in Memphis. You're happy to get out of Graceland, even for a little bit, as you rarely if ever got to explore Tupelo, so being somewhere entirely new was exciting, but at the end of the day there is really only one place you wished to be, the local nursery.

You quickly locate the specific tools you’re going to need and find the best soil for the flowers, and you’re finally able to do what you most wanted. You’re almost like a kid in a candy store as you eagerly look through the varieties of seeds available within the store. As much as you want to take them all you have to be realistic as to not only what would look good, but as to what could be grown on the property to have it looking good year round.

“So err…uhhh… Wh-what’s your favorite flower?” he asks shyly, as you're perusing the various seed packets to be had.

“All of them,” you say without hesitation, not even looking up from the task.

“Really all of ‘em?”

“I’m serious, asking me what my favorite flower is, it’s like asking a mother who her favorite child is,” you say fondly, rubbing your thumb lightly on the little packets that will eventually become the flowers you so love.

He laughs at that, “Why do ya’ love ‘em so much?”

“Well when you grow up on a flower farm, you ain’t got much of a choice,” you quip.

“A flower farm?”

“Yeah,” you clarify. “My Mama and I grew and sold flowers in our shop back in Tupelo.”

“...Yo-you had a flower shop back in Tupelo?” he stutters.

“Yeah,” you say solemnly, this conversation dredging up some very bittersweet memories. “Why dontcha go ring up everything while I finish up over here,” you say.

It's October already, you think to yourself, they probably started cutting down the sunflowers by now. You know that you’re doing more for them here making money and sending it back to them than you would have being an extra set of idle hands back home, still that does little to quell that uneasy feeling being so far from home now.

You’d kept up the writing and have recently let her know how lonely you’ve been feeling here, part venting, part as a means of getting her to write to you back for the first time.

It didn’t work and that sours your mood for the rest of the outing.

The ride back to Graceland is far quieter this time around, and Henry seems to avoid you after that, but you hardly notice as now that you have everything you need, you can really focus all your energy in doing what you came here to do. This is what you’re undoubtedly good at and now that you’re back at it, you don’t want anything to distract you from doing your job and getting back home as soon as possible.

A few days later, as you were finishing up in the greenhouse you would find Jerry sitting next to someone, back ramrod straight as a familiar figure had an arm casually slung over his shoulder. Jerry leaves before you can figure out what that’s all about, so you instead greet the not-so-stranger before you.

“You’re early,” you casually remark to him.

“I missed ya’,” he drawls, a light smirk on his lips that causes a pleasant warmth to radiate from your chest. But his face takes on a more sobering look as he looks at you, purses his lips, and pats the no occupied seat, which you worriedly take. “Actually, I was just ‘bouta go lookin’ for ya’,” he says, before letting out a pensive sigh. “Jerry actually needs a place to stay for a week or two, and I invited him here.”

“Oh that’s nice of you,” you say.

A small bashful smile cracks his somber expression, before the intensity returns and he informs you that yours was the room he offered him.

“I don’t mind sleeping on the couch,” you insist, scared that you may be about to be sent home without the rest of the money to show for it.

“Don’tchu worry ‘bout that,” he said, chucking your chin up to look at him. “I just figured that my bed should be big ‘nough for the both of us.”

His words catch you off guard, and you feel your face burning unsure as to how to respond. He sees your hesitation and backs off slightly before continuing. “Course if you don’t feel too comfortable sharin’ with me I can always putcha up somewhere else,” he starts and you’re about to jump on that offer until he continues. “Though, we might need to take that outta your pay,” he says, and you shrink a bit at the reality of the situation. “Not to mention havin’ to getchu back and forth day in and out,” he continues, rambling on and on about the logistics of the prospect.

“No-no,” you cut in. “I-if you’re really okay with it… then I-I don’t mind.” you say slightly defeated though if he notices he doesn’t say anything about it.

A full grin cracks his face, “Perfect we’ll go move your things right now,” he says as he takes your hand in his leading you up to where your room was.

“...ok…” you said, accepting his offer in a small voice. Though it’s hardly an offer as that would imply you had a choice in the matter.

The next week you want to kick yourself over being so nervous over nothing, as he proves himself to be nothing less than a gentleman all things considered. Yes he does get a bit clingy when he’s asleep and he all but refuses to let you out of the bed when you wake up before him. But in all honesty you welcome it very much.

It helps ease that lonely feeling somewhat as being held by him takes away some of your worry about not belonging here. Everybody seems to give you a wide berth and it was a definite shock to your system considering where you come from, being essentially the baby on the farm you were freely plied with all forms of physical affection your whole life. But you do take comfort in him, even if it is only limited to the night time.

Though when that week is up you idly ask him when you can move your things back into your old room, to which he only responds by wrapping an arm over your shoulders and saying, “Now why would I want my Honeybee so far away from me.”

You’re too shocked at the statement to even think of countering him at the moment, but even when the statement does truly settle for you, you aren’t entirely opposed to it. As it makes you feel far more secure here knowing that he wants you here so much. It’s odd how final it feels in spite of how small the moment was. You’re not just Honeybee anymore, you're His Honeybee, and that’s that.

That’s one of the first things you learned living in Graceland, is that whatever Elvis says, goes. Everybody seems to bend over backwards to his wishes here, and at first it was a little funny if a little perturbing, as you justified to yourself that you were his friend and therefore he wouldn’t put any crazy demands on you even if he was technically your boss.

But it’s only in that moment that you truly realize that you were no exception to that rule. And why would you be? Considering he is the one that is the one supporting not only you but by extension your entire family back home, how can you do anything but agree to his demands?

But that may be being a bit too harsh, as being his girl is certainly not an unpleasant phenomena. He seemed to become bolder with your amiable acceptance to your new found title of becoming his. In short order all of the clothes you brought from home disappeared and were replaced with much finer ones, and he becomes the most frequent visitor in the greenhouse.

Whenever he is around is almost constantly touching you and bringing you close to him at any given moment. And these weren’t exactly touches you were familiar with; Brushing his fingers along your neck to fix your necklace, hand on your lower back to steer you a certain way, rubbing your knee beneath the table (sometimes above your clothes, sometimes not) etc. All new and exciting, in their own ways.

Everytime you see him it feels akin to something blooming within your chest. You think this is why there were so many flowers meant to express love, because that feeling he gives you is hard to put into words.

It was only inevitable that the kisses would come along eventually. First beginning as friendly ones on the cheek before bed, then graduating to something far more… carnal. Almost like he was trying to consume you, and these kisses always left you panting and in a state of shock from the ferocity he displayed only to end it with a very sweet kiss to your cheek and tucking the both of you into bed.

You’re not gonna lie and say you don’t enjoy the kissing but it does give you a good scare when he begins to touch you in other places that are not-so-innocent places as he kisses you: His hand on your bottom when wants to press your body closer to his, the continual rubbing between your inner thighs, his thumb circling the taut peak of your breast.

Though admittedly his new touches were a bit on the scarier side for you, you don’t fight it, and in fact get bolder yourself by taking a page out of his book and giving as good as you got. He seems to relish the reaction he can pull from you, which is intimidating as much as it is titillating.

But these feelings have also been manifesting in some strange ways physically, like you seem to breathe harder when he’s around, and seeing him bite his lip makes your mouth go dry. But this all pales in comparison to the sensation of him rubbing a hand on your inner thigh, and it feels like you go dry everywhere, save for one place. As exciting as it is, it’s confusing all the same, and you above all else wish you could confide in anyone with how you were feeling.

Typically you could freely talk about any lady troubles you may have with your Mama but her inability/unwillingness to talk to you now leaves you to navigate this maze alone. You consider asking Miss Gladys or even Dodger for their thoughts, but the fact that it’s Elvis that awakens these feelings within you, makes going to them seem inappropriate for some reason. But ultimately that only leaves you with one person to go to about your problem despite them also being the cause of it.

Which is how you find yourself sitting on your knees in his bed with a shaky breath telling him how his touches are stirring something in you that you don’t understand.

“Where?” he asks, seemingly innocent but the way he bites his cheek, tells you he’s trying to hold back a laugh at your discomfort. “Here” he says, placing a hand on your lower belly, and while it clenches from the sudden contact, you shake your head no.

“Here?” He asks with a small smile, cupping one of your breasts, and though your breath hitches in your throat and you feel one of the buds harden at his thumbs' attention, that’s not where the worst of the feelings is coming from.

“Elvis please,” you beg, squirming at his touch.

“Oh I think I know Honeybee,” he says one hand now slowly dragging the hem of your nightgown up well past your hips, before he rubs his fingers along the seam of your panties.

In spite of the strangled feeling in your throat, you manage to squeak out a simple “yes,” as tears begin to well up in your eyes.

“Don’tchu worry Baby. I know somethin’ that can help,” he says as he drags the delicate fabric of your white cotton panties down to your knees. On reflex your thighs clench shut immediately but, with a few languid kisses he’s able to distract you from your skittishness and you feel the first tentative brush of his fingers on that sensitive flesh.

As much as you love your home you’ll admit that there was rarely if ever a moment for yourself there anymore. So him now brazenly touching the seldom explored area was mind-boggling for you, moreso when he begins to prod deeper, dipping between your folds and even one finger delving further than any other.

That gets a surprised gasp out of you before you bite down on your lip hard, embarrassed that you're feeling like this while he’s trying to help you. But while you’re able to hold back your noises, you can do nothing to help the way you’re breathing-well more panting- now or the way you’re shivering. You’ve never felt anything close to this in your life, but even this pales in comparison to when he adds a second finger, and you feel like you're about to burst.

“Honeybee… what’d ya know ‘bout baby-makin’,” he asks, seemingly out of the blue.

Part of you wants to act coy and say something like “enough” to get him to continue, but it’s hard to concentrate on any of that as you feel his fingers deep within you. So instead you reply with, “that…that o-ooh-only a Husband and Wife can make oNE.” you yelp that last part as he curls his fingers ever so slightly.

“And that’s it?” he asks with a bit of a skeptical look on his face, and you bury your face in his neck, a bit ashamed that that is the truth of the matter. “Oh Honeybee, you don’t gotta be that way,” he says, giving you a sweet kiss to your nose as he’s still three knuckles deep up your canal. “That’s the right of it, but I don’t think yer Mama ever mentioned that there ain’t no harm in practicin’ before the Weddin’ like this.”

“O-oh,” you say, part as an answer, part an involuntary noise to the way his thumb starts to circle around that pearl between your folds.

“You like that baby girl?” he purrs to you. Your eyes are shut tight and you’re trying to move your hips in tandem with his motions.

“Y-yes,” you manage to whimper, so focused on chasing that feeling he’s causing that you don’t even notice when he drags the straps of your nightgown fully down your shoulders. And it’s as you suddenly feel him bite down hard on the soft skin of your breast do you finally peak with a harrowing sob.

You cling on to him for dear life as wave after wave of pleasure surges through you all at once and you feel as though you’re going to float away any moment. But holding on to him, kissing him, and feeling his skin against your tethers you here, reassuring you that this isn't a dream.

You feel his fingers leave you, and that paired with him pulling away from your lips causes a small whine to come from you. You’re quickly quieted from the shock of seeing him stick the same fingers in his mouth giving a contented groan, “Course my Honeybee’s got the sweetest nectar he whispers against your lips, before giving you a taste for yourself.

You feel boneless and weightless yet your eyes feel so heavy from all that you just experienced, but for as tired as you are at that moment, you’re not ready to go back to dreaming yet.

“Ca-can I try that on you?” you ask meekly still in a bit of a haze from that euphoric feeling.

A bite to his lip prevents it from being a full blown grin “You sure ‘bout that Baby? Mine’s a lil’ different… well not too lil’,” he says. Clearly amused by your request to make him feel just as good.

“I wanna help,” you insist. He chuckles at how eager you were before he guides your hand down to a prominent bulge in his briefs. You’re not too sure what exactly you’re feeling through the rough cotton, just that it is either intensely painful or pleasurable to Elvis given how his breath hitches and his eyes slam shut. You try to remove your hand but his vice-like grip on your wrist prevents that and you can only further palm him.

You apply a bit more pressure, you take the sigh of contentment as a good sign before you delve underneath the fabric of his shorts.

You watch, a bit fascinated as you work to get the rough fabric down, and suddenly you’re face to face with something you’ve never seen before. A long thick column of flesh stands before you, bobbing slightly as he takes deep breath after breath. The skin feels soft but unyielding beneath your touch and you patiently await his instructions, but that deep groan that comes from him as you apply a bit of pressure makes you feel all sorts of powerful over this beautiful man.

He has you gather the slick from between your legs and even spit in your own hand to make it easier for you to slide up and down the shaft. His eyes are screwed shut, his long lashes brushing his cheeks, and he’s mumbling his praises for you, which only further encourages you.

He’s unraveling before your eyes, and you take great delight in being a witness to it. You’ve seen him dance before so it shouldn’t be surprising how well he’s able to move his hips, but it does add an entirely new context to it and you hope the next time you see him on stage you’ll be able to not think of him like this.

An idea pops into your head, and you decide to jump on it before you lose your nerve, and you give a soft kiss to the very tip of him. He freezes in place, his eyes wide and shocked at your teasing, his chest rising and falling and you feel heat flood your entire being.

“I-I’m so-sorry,” you breath out, embarrassed that you may have unintentionally done something you weren’t supposed to do. “I just th-thought you mi-” you cut off as he chuckles at your obvious distress before giving you a sweet kiss.

“Just surprised me Honeybee, thas all,” he reassures you against your lips, before giving you a little nibble there. “Why don’tcha try that again?” he drawls, trying to not appear too eager, but it’s apparent even to you.

You get right back to it, and you give even softer kisses along the shaft, each one being punctuated by a low moan from him, until you finally get to the very top of him, and you run your tongue along the small slit to be found there.

His hips stutter at that and one second you’re wondering what’s happening to him, the next you’re a coughing mess as that salty stream hits the back of your throat. He’s now just as dazed as you feel his hand rubbing soothing circles on your back, as you settle, and he takes charge in getting you both ready for bed.

As you lay side by side, he has nothing but praise for you whispering how good and perfect you were between hungry kisses until you drift off to sleep.

The next day would mark the first time you didn’t write to your mother. Part because you have already accepted she wouldn’t reply, part wanting to also keep that as private as possible. It also marks the first time in your life you don’t share something that felt so important with her.

Your Mama never liked talking about your daddy beyond saying that they loved each other very much. She never went into detail beyond that believing you were too young to hear them, but she never gave you an idea when you would be grown enough to hear them. But now above all else you want to hear when she knew she was in love with him, because you think you’re falling in love with Elvis.

Scratch that.

You know you are but you would give anything right now to be able to talk to somebody about it. And it’s upsetting that the person you usually talk your worries through is also one of your biggest ones at the moment. But even then you would have been willing to discuss it with her, if only she was willing to do so back.

It seems the more upset you become with her, the more comforting Elvis becomes to you. Even still you hesitate to share your fears with him until he is the one that broaches it.

“What’s on your mind Honeybee?” he says as he draws circles along your hip.

“Nothing much,” you dismiss. “Just trying to figure out when it's best to plant everything.”

His sardonic smile tells you he doesn’t believe you one bit, “C’mon darlin’ I know ya’ better than that.” Which is a bit of an understatement, as it feels like these days he’s able to read you better than you can yourself anymore.

After letting out a long tired sigh, you tell him “I think she’s mad at me,” while you two were settling into bed.

“Now who could ever be mad at my Honeybee?” he says, bringing you closer to him.

“My mama,” you say solemnly, tears in your eyes. “She’s never replied to a single letter of mine, and I write to her everyday.”

“I’m sure she’s just busy,” he tries to comfort you. But they ring hollow knowing that she always used to say- something you even quoted her in your last letter- ‘I’m never too busy for you Rosebud.’ He pulls you close to his chest as he rubs his hand along your back, “Darlin’ your mama is a hard-headed woman- lord knows I got the scars to prove it- but I don’t think she could stay mad at you forever.”

“What?” you say, sitting up to face him fully.

“What?”

“What do you mean you have the scars to prove it?”

“O-oh…” he says with a slight grimace on his face, before giving a bit of an awkward chuckle. “We-well… ya’ remember before I left, I-I asked you to’ run away with us?” You nod your head slowly. “Well that night, when I went back to the farm to tell her… she… she had a bit of a fit.”

“That doesn’t answer my question E.”

His lips form a thin line, clearly reluctant to tell you more, but he does eventually cave with a long hard sigh. “She got so mad at the thought a you leavin’ she grabbed my hand somethin’ fierce, and… and… well…” he trails off as he presents you the palm of his left hand, where you can see some small jagged silvery lines along it.

“She… she did this?” you whisper, lightly touching the scars, unbelieving that your Mama could do such a thing. She was the one who hardly ever raised her voice and didn’t even swat at Bees in front of you. How could she hurt him like this?

“I-I understand not wantin’ your kid to run away,” he says, “but I don’t think hurtin’ one like this was needed. But that wasn’t even the worst part of it.”

“What is it?”

“She… she banned me from ever comin’ back to the farm again. Couldn’t even say goodbye to ya properly,” he says somberly, his eyes sad as he tenderly cupped your cheek.

“I’m sorry,” you say, at a loss for what else you could say knowing what you do now.

“You don’t got nothin’ to apologize for baby,” he says softly, holding your hand in his scarred one. “And listen Honeybee, if she’s so mad that she don’t wantcha back, you’ll always have a home here,” he promises before he gives you a kiss to your temple and turns off the light.

You know the words were meant to be comforting, but they have the opposite effect and make your stomach drop at the prospect that she may be that mad. It has never occurred in your mind that she may be that cross with you for leaving

But like a fowl little seed, those words are implanted in your mind and take root. You wish he had never said those words, but you can hardly fault him for his attempts to console you in your hurt.

Would she ever be so mad at you? You wonder to yourself. You feel Elvis hands wrap around your waist and you remember the marks your Mama left on him in a rage. And that was simply from the idea that you would leave. What would she do now that you've actually left?

Elvis has never had a bad word to say about anybody, but you realize even he was being far more generous than was needed for what she had done. All that over a stupid kiddy idea of running away?

You lay there for hours with the only sounds being Elvis’ steady breathing. The longer you’re awake the more you think about it, which fuels the vicious cycle as those thoughts make it harder to fall asleep. Doubt creeps into your very soul that the home you are so desperate to return to will even be there come spring, and you silently weep.

But not as silently as you thought, as Elvis is awake within seconds. He holds you so close and so tight that it truly feels like he’ll never let go.

“No matter what,” he whispers in your ear. “Your home will always be here with me, Honeybee.”

You’re touched by his words and the way he holds you makes you feel so safe now and you kiss him fiercely, and want nothing more than to be as close to him as possible.

Up until this point you had been reluctant to go that final step with Elvis, pretty much doing everything but that last act. As greedy as he could be with your body (given how many hours he’s spent with his head between your legs), he had asserted you would be the one to decide when you would cross that final line with him. Though from the tone of his voice each time he said it, you figured he was gunning for it to be sooner rather than later.

You don’t know what exactly it is about the idea that you may not have a home to return to that makes you want to attach yourself further to him. You want to forget about everything when you’re with him and he makes it easy to do so. Being with him makes you so happy in way you don’t ever think you’ve experienced on the farm, and you

“Are ya sure sweetheart,” he groans, before his eyes snap shut as you rub your lower lips along his shaft, as you’ve done dozens of times before.

“Yes,” you whine, wanting to feel him the way he was meant to be.

When he finally slides into you, you can’t help the satisfied hum that escapes you, as he slides right into you. You’re on top and he lets you set the pace for yourself, which is good as even with all of your previous practice with him, you still need some time to adjust to the size of him up that secret channel of yours.

You can see the sheer will power it’s taking for him to let you go your own speed, so once the pleasure overtakes the pain, without any more preamble, you begin to quicken your hips and ride him like your life depends on it. It may very well, considering the closer you get to you climax the more it feels like you may pass out before you get to that point.

“This right here,” he grons, rolling his hips up into you rubbing his thumb along that button of yours. “This is where home is.”

“Yes,” you sob, tears streaming down your face, “Home… you.” you cry, unable to finish as he hits just the right spot within and your vision is being blurred by stars.

You feel so whole as he spills within you, and with his now softened cock still snuggly within you, “I love you Elvis,” you sigh into his chest, content to fall asleep then and there, but you quickly realize your mistake as your words seem to reinvigorate him and he takes you a few more times until the crack of dawn. But between his filthy words and his declarations of love one thing he says sticks out to you the most.

“Ain’t nothin’ ever gonna take you away now Honeybee,” he groans as you pick up the pace, his hand squeezing your bottom so tight, only further cementing how secure you are here.

Slowly but surely you stop writing to your mother. What was something you previously did everyday, became every other week, to eventually once a week once February came. And even the ones you do send are limited to very basic and dry summaries of the week, as to what flowers you were focusing on and general questions as to how everybody else is doing back home. Gone are the days of you waxing poetically about your confusion over your feelings for Elvis and you plea for a single response from her. She’s shown her interest in your life, as well as shown how willing she is to be involved with it anymore so you decide to accept it, albeit with a heavy heart.

The last time you expressed anything even remotely emotional with her was how you find it hard to think of the farm as being home anymore when she’s been so cold to you these last few months, and how you doubt you even want to go back.

She doesn’t reply.

Elvis seems to take to his new role in your life surprisingly well. Always willing to help you through your emotional turmoil when he was home and shield you from the rest.

He seems to take great comfort in you as well, and the greenhouse has now even become a place away from all of it. When he’s home one of the first things he does is visit you there, and simply sit with you for a few hours. You think it’s mostly to serve as a breather between all the chaos that is his life outside of these glass walls, but you’re all too happy to help him in this way as he’s helped you.

That feeling of perfection you got when you first shared that pomegranate with him, you feel it almost everyday in that greenhouse with him. The light shining through the panes of glass keeping the place warm, the fresh air coming from the sproutlings in their pots, his soft humming. All of it adding up to a dream you never want to wake up from.

The beginning of Spring came and went and neither of you brought up the fact that you were meant to be back at the farm. The most you do allude to it was you telling him to forward that final payment directly to your Mama, mostly as a last ditch effort to get her to finally respond to you for once.

She doesn’t respond.

You and Elvis decide then and there to wash your hands of her, though it was perhaps the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do. But you can’t keep letting her silence break your heart so you focus all of your energy into two things: Elvis and making Graceland beautiful.

The first one is pretty easy to do considering when he is home, there is little to no distance between you two. He can hardly keep his hands off of you anymore when he’s here, with nights spent under the sheets, and days spent literally everywhere else on the property. He seems to be particularly fond of being in the Greenhouse, loving to see you so in your element in there only to bend you over your work table and take you hot and heavy from behind.

These encounters only make you feel his absence even more, as while you’re not exactly alone in Graceland it does make the big property feel all the emptier. Which in turn makes your second focus all the harder.

You’ve by now planted any and all flowers you intended to and they are all well on their way to growing strong, and now knowing you’re going to be staying, you’re happy that you’ll be able to do so for years to come. Now that you’ve gotten past the most trying part, tending to them is going to be a cinch…

Or it would be if you weren’t so tired all the time.

Oftentimes you find yourself napping in the most inopportune places around the property. Sweet Pea has apparently appointed herself as your official protector while you rested outside and by extension roped Brutus and Snoopy into it as well. You can’t even begin to count the amount of times you would want to rest your eyes for a minute only to find hours had passed and three dogs at the ready to guard you from whatever may come. WHich considering how you’ve been feeling sicker and sicker lately what with the fever you’ve been feeling and the nausea you’ve been having some mornings.

You don’t exactly understand why you’re far more sensitive to smell nowadays. You almost threw up the other morning from the smell of the eggs, which has Dodger and Miss Gladys looking very funny at you. You don’t pay it any mind though as you were just glad that you’re still able to appreciate the smell of flowers.

You’re in a far better mood today, what with Elvis set to return later, you decided to leave a surprise in his office. The roses were in full bloom now, so you decided to pluck a few for old times sake and leave some for him.

As you’re placing the vase down onto the desk, you watch as one of the blooms falls right off the stems and rolls to the other side of it. But when you go to pick it up, what you find is far stranger.

With the amount of fan mail he gets, you wouldn’t have paid the neat stack any mind if you hadn’t immediately recognized your own handwriting on the very top one. ANd you would have taken that as a very crazy coincidence if it weren’t for the fact that it also has your old address on the front.

And it’s not just that one, you find a couple dozen envelopes with your handwriting and address on the front, and an unpleasant feeling fills your belly as you tentatively remove a page from the envelope.

And it’s there that you read your own gut-wrenching words of your loneliness here and your wishes that your mother would write back to you. How you plead for her to reach out if only to reassure you that she’s alive and getting these letters.

You had imagined that they had either been destroyed the moment your mother saw them or gathering dust somewhere in your old childhood home. But now you find them here, a place you know very few are even allowed to be.

She didn’t get any of them you realize looking at the thick stack, an icky sense of violation creeping under your skin, seeing them worn and wrinkled in some places, but somebody definitely read these.

You want to throw up, and not just because of your newfound sensitive stomach, but due to the revelation that if he didn’t send any of them, then that meant… he had seen you be upset to the point of crying over this, all the while blaming your Mama for it and letting you take comfort in him.

Not only that, he read about your loneliness and actively decided to make you feel even more isolated by not letting you talk to your Mama. He held you as you cried over the fact she wasn’t talking to you and said nothing.

Your heart is pounding in your chest and you stagger back so far that you knock the vase full of roses right off the desk. You don’t pay it any mind and leave them and the letters where you find them. You have to get away, you have to go home.

You don’t bother to grab anything (it’s all his anyway), you simply find Jerry and tell him that he has to take you back to Tupelo right now. He’s stuttering trying to make the usual excuses of why he couldn’t take you, but he’s weak to your tears, and he silently leads you to the car.

It’s a long silent trip save for your quiet sobs from the passenger side. You don’t know if he’s intentionally stalling or if the drive is truly this long, either way it feels like forever before you can finally breathe within the Lee County borders.

You take comfort in the landmarks becoming more and more familiar until finally you see your home in the distance. You don’t take your eyes off of it for even a second, afraid it may disappear the moment you do so. You have a hard time believing it’s even real until you stand before the front door.

You hold the doorknob hesitating to open it, fearful as to what you may find on the other side, but ultimately you know that there is no possible way it can be any worse than where you just came from.

It’s oddly shocking how nothing has really changed in the months you’ve been gone. It’s almost as though you just walked out minutes ago, but you yourself feel you’ve changed so much since you were last here. The furniture arrangement is the same, as are the books on the shelf, and even your Mama's house slippers are in their usual spot.

You listen as someone is cooking in the kitchen, and you feel your heart warm knowing that at the very least you accomplished what you had set out to do and provide for your family, regardless of the sick feeling that work has left in your belly.

“Kate that you?” you hear from the voice that has accompanied you your whole life. “I told all y’all to take the da-” she cuts herself off upon seeing you.

You almost don’t recognize her, the streaks of white in her hair, the fine lines in the corners and the heavy bags underneath her eyes, overall speak to the way your absence has affected her these last few months. You feel guilty for every unkind thought you’ve had of her all this time, as you can now see for yourself how much she missed you. She looks as though she’s aged ten years in the months you’ve been away, and you can only imagine how you’ve so drastically changed in her eyes.

But none of that matters in the moment, as she drops everything in her hands and proceeds to take you in her arms and sob uncontrollably. You meet her halfway weeping just as fiercly in her chest, you thought you had run out of tears during the drive, only to find a new spring, as she blubbers in your ear “my baby’s home.”

Even after some time had passed like that, you can’t even begin to form any semi-coherent sentence as you blubber over and over again your apologies for being gone for so long. She’s long since stopped her own tears in favor of comforting you which only makes you feel all the worse.

“Shh, it’s gonna be okay,” she whispers, having long since stopped her own tears in favor of comforting you now. “You’re home now, Rosebud. Everything’s gonna be okay,” and guilt eats at you, that you could ever even entertain the thought that she wouldn’t want you back.

You remain in that state for what feels like hours, with your head in her lap as she smooths down your hair and in spite of all the turmoil you’ve undoubtedly put her through, it’s clear your comfort is her priority. Eventually though she does gather up the courage to ask you where you’ve been this whole time.

After all you’ve put her through you figure that she at least deserves the truth, so you sit up to face her. But before you can even open your mouth you hear the front door open. Any nominal contentment you’ve found being back home all slips away when you hear the familiar heavy footfalls of the man you’ve been dreading seeing all day.

“There you are Honeybee,” Elvis says, leaning against the doorframe, the familiar rakish smile in place. Those words are so familiar yet now they feel foreign as you no longer recognize the man who utters them to you.

It feels like in mere seconds your mama has brought you to your feet and now you stand behind her, and away from him. “What are you doin’ here!?” she shouts, her body tense and rigid, as though ready to defend you from a lion rather than a single man.

He hardly even glances her way, his eyes firmly set on you. “Here to take my Honeybee back home of course.” Your mama doesn’t even waste a second after hearing that, she only wordlessly approaches and takes a swing at him. But he was ready for that, as he easily catches her wrist, and brought her close to him “Ain’t so easy now I ain’t a runt no more?” he says, grinning ear to ear, a deadly look crossing his steely blue eyes.

This catches both of you off guard but your Mama is quick to recover and attempts to shove him right out the door with a mighty “Get outta my house!”

“Not without her,” he says, unnervingly keeping his voice low and cool, as though he were still very much in control of the situation.

He may still very well be, you think.

Before you can even think to help your mama, he easily maneuvers around her only to walk straight towards your frozen figure and put an arm around your shoulder.

“C’mon Honeybee,” he says, blatantly ignoring the tears streaming down your face. “Time to head home,” and you shiver when he runs his thumb along your cheek the way he’s done a million times before. You see your mama look wide-eyed at this familiar interaction, and to your horror so does Elvis. “That’s right you don’t know where she’s been,” he says, giving a faux innocent look while boldly admitting right in front of you he never sent any of those letters. “Why don’tcha tell her darlin’.” he declares, punctuating his familiarity with a kiss to your cheek. You don’t know what’s worse, the look of shock on your mama’s face as he does this, or the dissatisfied look he shoots you when you curl away from him.

Your mama doesn’t need to be a genius to figure out what he’s implying, as you watch her deflate as she looks at you and gives a very defeated “why?”

“Mama,” you whimper, wanting nothing more than to go to her, but Elvis’ arms keeping you firmly in place. “We-we needed the money, after the fire and…”

You stop yourself short as your Mama seems to contemplate your words, only to make some sort of realization of her own before, a look of horror slowly creeping onto her face. “It was you wasn’t it?” She seethes in a low voice.

“What was?” he says, trying to seem innocent but unable to fully mask his amusement at her state.

“The fire…” she said in a small voice, not even daring to continue.

No, you refuse to believe. Ain’t no way he would go that far, but then you remember Jerry’s skittishness when he learned you had a flower shop in Tupelo as well as his reluctance to deny you a single thing, that big favor he apparently did for Elvis to earn his shiny new Cadillac. All of it is making a lot of sense, but you’re still unwilling to go that far for a chance to be with you.

That is until he says, “Now that’s a mighty big accusation,” coolly, with a bit of a smirk as he looks down on her.

You freeze in place at that line. That’s not a no, you think, somehow still wanting to lie to yourself. He steals a glance at you and his face softens as he holds your shoulders and looks earnestly into your eyes as he says, “Honeybee you don’t think I would ever do something’ like that, now would you?”

You have to think on that for a moment, and you’re quiet until his grip tightens ever so slightly and his face noticeably drops from earnest to frustrated. You swallow deeply as you give a very unconvincing “No, of co-”

“Get your hands off her,” your mama spits, ripping you away from him, but he’s persistent, callously shoving her to the ground and gripping your jaw in his ringed hand.

“Because if it’s true,” he continues so softly even as the cold metal digs into your cheeks. “Then I wonder what else I’d be willin’ to do to keep ya,” he casually threatens a sadistic look in his eyes as a wide grin spreads across his face.

You feel your throat close as he glances down at your Mama, who’s struggling to get off the floor. He lets you go and you’re able to bring her to a chair. You once thought she was invincible but now you see her trembling clearly shaken up by this whole thing. Whatever your mama had; money, influence, respect, Elvis had in spades. She’s effectively powerless against him, but she still finds the strength to angle herself in front of you to try to block him.

She’s afraid of him no doubt about it, but she’s still willing to defend you with her life.

Would he be willing to go that far? You think and you let out a sob knowing the answer already.

“Choice is yours darlin’,” he whispers right next to your ear. “If you’re willin’ to choose.” and then he steps right out onto the porch. You hope in vain that somehow he’s decided to leave, but that quickly dies as you hear him strike a match and you smell the familiar miasma of his favorite cigars.

He wouldn’t, you think, but you can no longer put anything past him. You don’t ever want to truly find out what he’d be willing to if it meant keeping you by him, especially not at your mama’s expense. But you know in your gut how you can protect her.

If you have one thing to thank your earlier crying fits for, it’s that you’re tapped dry at this point, so as you say to her “Mama I gotta go now,” you can say it with a little bit of dignity.

“No… no Rosebud,” she pleads with you holding both of your hands. “Please stay… we can figure this out,” she says, the tears welling up in her eyes, as she comes to the same realization as you do.

“It’s gonna be okay Mama,” you vainly try to reassure her but mostly yourself. “But you gotta let me go,” you sob, wanting to do anything but. And you have to leave her crying in the home she made for you.

You find him leaning against the porch railing, eyes slowly opening as you move closer to him. “Yes Honeybee,” he says, cloyingly sweet, as he wraps an arm around your shoulders.

“Elvis…please… just-just take me home,” you whisper, burying your face into his chest.

“Course sweetheart, anythin’ for you,” he says, and you shudder knowing he means it. You walk away from the porch and you breathe a sigh of relief as he drops the cigar into the dirt and stamps it out. “I really oughta quit anyway,” he says. “Heard it’s bad for the baby.”

“What?” you say, your blood turning to ice hearing that.

“Ain’t it like magic Honeybee?” he sighs as you both get in the backseat of Jerry’s car, the owner of which is pointedly not looking at either of you. Elvis pays no mind to it, instead absentmindedly rubbing your lower belly back and forth. “You plant somethin’ so small, and it’ll grow up to be somethin’ else,” he sighs in contentment, and you close your eyes to yet another revelation that is coming far too late.

“But… but… you said, that it only happens when you’re married,” you say, though your spirit has long since been defeated.

“Don’tchu worry none ‘bout that sweetheart,” he dismisses. “We are gonna get married real soon, and ain’t no one gonna be the wiser.”

There’s something so final in that revelation that you are now forever tied to him not by your own choices, but by his. He chose you.

He knew what he was doing and he knew you didn’t.

Looking back you don’t think there was ever anything within your control. What’s worse is that a part of you wishes you had never gone into his office today and could have lived blissfully, unburdened with the knowledge of what he was willing to do to get you.

You love him, which makes this betrayal feel all the worse. You glance to the side to see the fields of flowers you’re leaving behind, as he slowly slips a ring on your finger. Now he’s not even gonna pretend that you have a choice in the matter, you are going to marry him because he said so.

With his hand in yours you feel as the car transitions from the dirt road to the paved one that will take you far away from your home.

You close your eyes and you don’t look back.

Alternate Summary: In which Elvis sees himself as a triumphant Orpheus when he’s actually a victorious Hades.

Taglist

@venus-haze @djsjs13949 @ilovehobi101 @butlerslut @richardslady121 @giabelia @sydneyyyya @meetme0614 @tacozebra051 @myradiaz @thelifes-world @maythesunshineagain @rakitirakiti @lostteenagetale @j-v-9-2 @eliseinmemphis @dkayfixates @immi547 @thatbanditqueen @marriedtoeddie @cuteejeno @itlover8000 @isthlsfate @mgparker @thatbanditqueen @softsatnin @literally-just-elvis-fics

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findingnemosworld · 8 months

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𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭 - 𝐛𝐞𝐧 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥

・𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲: @a-little-bit-rascal

𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞: 𝐢 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐟𝐮𝐧 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢 𝐡𝐨𝐩𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐠𝐮𝐲𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐚𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐥.

Y/N was a firm believer of fate, that whatever occurs was predetermined for her - and apparently going through two heartbreaks seemed to be the case, and while it does not seem that big of a deal to some, for her it was; as her heartbreaks were plastered online for everyone to see, Y/N was no ordinary girl, she'd been fortunate to break through the industry as a popular actor and dancer which had garnered her a sizable following, the exact following that saw her break down and come undone only to rise and get straight to work not allowing herself to fully grief the heartbreak until she was in her hometown, and yet somehow, after those heartbreak she was blessed, and it all started the day she had been invited to attend Wimbledon.

She was seated next to a handsome brunette man, around her age dressed in an all black casual yet stylish ensemble, with sunglasses over his eyes, and it wasn't until he removed them that she realized exactly who he was - Chelsea and England's star, Ben Chilwell.

The pair exchanged small talk which quickly formed into a conversation after the event as they exchanged numbers, Ben had even taken the initiative by asking her out on a date, then another and another when time was possible, yet in the midst of those six months nearing seven, they'd never discussed the possibility of becoming anything more than just two adults casually spending time together, while she didn't fault him for not labelling their relationship ( that's if it's a relationship ) she couldn't help but feel lost.

She knew she liked him, quite a lot yet the fear of abandonment, or worse, being dumped for the third time took over, hence why she never brought it up, firmly believing that Ben didn't see them going as far as they can.

Except he did.

You see, while Y/N was stressing over the prospect of them going far in their relationship, Ben was so enamored by her that his England teammates were the unfortunate victims of his affinity for the dancer, particularly James Maddison.

" Mate " James interjects, " I know you're obsessed with her, but for the love of all that is holy, stop! "

It was then that Ben realized that he had been oversharing a bit too much, " Sorry bout that " he murmurs.

" It's fine " James said, " I understand how you feel, I mean I was like that when I first met Kennedy, and here I am, three kids in and happily in love " he grew silent before smiling, " I have an idea, why don't we invite her to come? "

" I don't know mate, she's probably busy " Ben shrugs, as he knew she had a tight schedule of performances and the fact that he didn't want to scare her by making such a big move.

" Listen, Kennedy won't be able to come because she has to watch over the kids, I'll ask her to phone Y/N and see if she can come to Poland instead " James said, then adds with an eye roll, " If she says yes, you will man up, ask her to be your girlfriend and hopefully, get me out of my misery "

____

This is ludicrous, she shouldn't have allowed herself to be persuaded like this yet here she was, at the airport in the small shop looking at something to get for Ben - all the while she was debating if she should just walk out and miss the flight, her thoughts were soon broken by a familiar sound, she looks up to see Aine May in front of her, the girlfriend of Ben's teammate, Conor Gallagher.

" Y/N " Aine May smiles, embracing her before frowning. " You alright? "

Y/N attempted to wave it off with a smile, " Yeah, I just - I was looking for something to get Ben before the flight and I ... " she trails off and swallows the lump in her throat, " Am I making the right choice? I mean, we aren't even serious and here I am acting like a girlfriend " she chuckles.

The blonde girl shakes her head, " Show me your ticket? "

Y/N complies, giving her the ticket; Aine May grins, " we are literally sitting next to one another, come on, I'm getting a new cologne for Conor since he finished his last one "

They spent the next hour roaming through to get what they felt was fitting, and then boarding the flight. Y/N's mind felt messy, yet Aine May assured her that she'll be fine, that Ben would be happy to see her as several of the other WAG's would be there, the only thing she can hope for was that Ben would be happy to see her, otherwise ... this will be a terrible idea.

______________________________________________________________

( I know England flopped in the match but let's pretend they didn't )

The teams were in the tunnel, Ben stood behind James - and while he tried his best to focus, his brain draws back to Y/N and when James turned to him, he sighs. " Mate, relax! " he said, Ben sighs and shakes his head, " I should have asked her to come, I mean ... I miss her a lot, I know I sound like a sap but it's true "

" Yes, you do sound like a sap " James sighs softly, " Now, focus on the game and who knows, maybe she did come, I mean Kennedy didn't say anything but you never know " he shrugs.

They were ushered out onto the pitch, and Ben opted not to dwell on Y/N and instead try his best to pour his focus onto the upcoming match - they'd taken the pictures and were then dispersed onto the pitch in their assigned positions, the first half was definitely intense for England as clearly Ukraine were attempting their best to score early and unfortunately they'd done just that, the goal had definitely placed a damper on them throughout the first half up until the extra minutes when they walked in.

Y/N was able to catch the end of the first half and was heartbroken seeing the dejection on Ben as well as the England players as they had hoped not to concede, she took her seat next to Aine May who filled her on what happened earlier, the pair continued to chat until the second half began which seemed to pan out better for England who had thankfully equalized the scoresheet thanks to Kyle Walker's goal.

At around the 58th minute, England were awarded a corner which Ben jogged up to the corner to perform, and right then; he looked up and saw her, his face lights up almost instantly and just then, he turns around executing the corner which thankfully had the ball pushed into the net by Jude Bellingham thus granting England the lead over Ukraine, and provided them with momentum to keep the match in their favor until the very end.

Aine May nudges Y/N to alert her of Ben running over to greet her, what she didn't expect was to be greeted by a warm embrace followed by a soft kiss that radiated a deep sense of longing, " I missed you so much " Ben whispers.

" Yeah? " Y/N beams.

" Thank god you're here " James interrupts them, " He was driving us mad with how much he missed you " he laughs.

" Finally mate " Jude yells with a laugh.

" God knows how long we had to sit and endure him sapping over how much he missed her " Declan joins in.

" Stop it you two " came the voice of their captain and friend Harry Kane, " it's not his fault he's in love " he chuckles.

" But he had us wanting to drive heads up the wall Haz " Jude groans.

" Yeah, plus we couldn't sleep well " Conor said.

Y/N looks at Ben who blushes, " That bad huh? "

" You can't even imagine " Ben chuckles.

#ben chilwell #ben chilwell fanfiction #ben chilwell one shot #ben chilwell imagine #ben chilwell fluff #ben chilwell fanfic #ben chilwell x reader

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the-obnoxious-sibling · 2 months

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in which this story comes to an end. (fucking finally.)

part eight of the post-marineford portion of the near miss fics! (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) if you have no idea what i’m talking about but would like to read a shanks/buggy story about kissing in disguise and then having to deal with the emotional fallout of doing that, click on this link, that’s the tag for the whole thing in chronological order. (plus a fair bit of complaining about writing, one inspirational improvised musical number, and a snippet of shanks pov) if you do know what i’m talking about: it’s done! it’s done!! i wish i could say i planned to end this on 3/8 but lmao, did not know the significance of the day until, like, this tuesday. but it’s done. i’m taking a break from the world of this story to work on some gift exchange fics, but i will be uploading the first few fics to ao3 soon, and should start posting the shanks POV post-marineford story in late april. if there are scenes you’d especially like his POV on, let me know! i’ll do my best to incorporate them.

Buggy spent a very cathartic half-hour shouting at a bunch of guys who ate up his words with a spoon. Always eager to please, the men obediently found themselves disembarkation buddies, cleaned up the messes they’d made, and started gathering their things (mostly weapons they’d stolen off the guards at Impel Down).

It was nice to be respected, Buggy thought as he watched them scurry around the ship. However misplaced the respect, it made people listen to him, something Buggy had wanted for as long as he could remember. He’d never been able to get enough. Probably never would, if the hunger that grew every time these men cheered his name was anything to go by.

He wandered up to the room he shared with Galdino—thankfully empty, he didn’t want to end up in another slap fight over details—and took care of his own possessions. (It wouldn’t do to have any excuses to delay or hang back when they got to the meeting point.) With the modified Marine jacket and hat back on, Buggy could fit everything else in a small satchel that he strapped around his waist, neatly hidden by a twist in a sash and the way the jacket fell. He left the room… more or less the way it had been when he arrived—there was no way to hide that dent in the wall, and Galdino would have to be the one to deal with the smear of wax across half the bed—and exited the room for the last time, taking in the view of the deck below with a contented sigh.

The Red Force was a well-run ship—a compliment Buggy would never voice aloud, but in the privacy of his own mind he allowed himself to think it. Even with hundreds of strangers aboard who couldn’t help but get in the way, she was clean, well-equipped, and sailing smoothly. Buggy didn’t know if he’d be able to say the same in a few hours, when all these men would be trying to squeeze onto the somewhat smaller Big Top. Buggy rubbed a hand across his mouth to hide his involuntary grimace at the thought. Maybe the island they were meeting up on had some industry he could put them to work at? A farm would be fantastic, if he could get paid for their labor and get the produce at a discount as well…

Buggy looked over the deck in search of one of Shanks’ senior officers. He didn’t know most of them by name, but those cloaks and capes they wore were distinctive enough that he thought he should be able to identify them on sight, and surely if the one he found didn’t know anything about the island, they could point him to someone who did. The navigator? Roux, who seemed to know a little about everything? Beckman, whose job it was to know something about everything?

And, think of the devil, one of the doors to the interior of the ship opened to reveal Beckman, speaking with a few of those cloaked men. They each went their own way, and Beckman crossed to the railing, taking up a pose not dissimilar from Buggy’s a few levels above him. That was a first mate for you, always keeping an eye on things, one way or another.

Buggy sent his feet down the stairs and the rest of him took the shorter path, swooping down to Beckman’s side like a giant white bat. To his credit, Beckman didn’t react to this unusual approach. Instead, calm as anything, he said, “Whatever you said to those men, it seems to be doing the trick. Thanks.”

Buggy waved the praise off. “If they’re so eager to be under my command, they’ve got to start learning to behave themselves sooner or later. Might as well be now.” Leaning an elbow against the railing, Buggy looked Beckman over. He sure did seem a lot more relaxed now than he’d been outside Shanks’ rooms. Relaxed enough to share intel? “Tell me something.”

Beckman glanced sideways at Buggy. “Hm?”

“What do you know about this island where we’re meeting up with my crew? Is it populated?”

“Ah, I don’t think so, no,” Beckman said, tilting his head back, recalling the facts. “Snake picked a jungle island that’s a bit out of the way of normal trade routes. There’s some ruins, but no signs of recent habitation.”

Buggy tried not to visibly wilt. “Ah.”

Beckman’s eyes lingered on Buggy. “We didn’t want to risk a naval presence on the island getting word out to the rest of the Marines.”

“No, no, it makes sense.” Buggy sighed, shoving a hand under his hat to scrub at his hair. “Just trying to figure out how the hell I’m gonna feed all these guys in that case.” No way had anyone thought to tell Alvida that Buggy was bringing new guys with him, let alone a lot of new guys. She’d have gotten the ship supplied with their normal numbers in mind.

Well, the new guys were a tough bunch, maybe they’d see hunting for their dinner as a fun challenge. Assuming there was anything safe to hunt and eat on this island… Buggy dug his fingers into his scalp, biting back a frustrated groan.

Beckman laughed. “Yeah, I don’t envy you that job. At least we were expecting to take on passengers.” He whistled to get the attention of someone up in the crow’s nest and flashed a hand sign at them. After a few exchanges, he stopped signing and rolled his eyes. “Stubborn, overworking little—” He cut himself off and glanced at Buggy. “Was that all you wanted from me?” Buggy nodded. “Then I’ll see you when Shanks finally gets up the nerve to talk to you… or when we land. Whichever comes first.” With that, he walked over to the mast, got the attention of a young man who’d been leaning against it, and grabbed onto a low-hanging rope. The two of them pulled themselves up into the rigging—to harass whoever was up in the crow’s nest into taking a break, probably.

Buggy watched them climb for a minute, a frown crawling its way across his face. When Shanks finally gets up the nerve to talk to you… so there was something Shanks was hiding that he didn’t think he should, huh? Buggy had figured the feeling he was getting off Shanks was about one of those topics he’d had private conversations with Roger about way back when, not something that Shanks would consider any of Buggy’s business. But apparently that wasn’t the case.

Buggy’s frown deepened. He could come up with a list of topics Shanks wouldn’t want to broach but would still feel obligated to bring up, no problem. But that list was short, and Buggy didn’t like the thought of discussing anything on it.

Unsettled, Buggy leaned back against the mast, arms crossed.

“Look out below!!!”

Buggy looked up and shrieked at the sight of a man falling head-first out of the crow’s nest. He scattered—it wasn’t like his body would soften the blow enough that the guy would live—and then blinked, as a rope he hadn’t noticed went taut, and the falling slowed to a gentle, somehow mechanical motion.

“The hell is wrong with you?!” he demanded, floating up to be eye-level with the slowly descending man. This was, if Buggy remembered correctly, Shanks’ sniper, Yasopp, of the infamous years-long tempting out to sea. Someone with good aim, and a keen eye, but not particularly decisive—or, at least, he hadn’t been back then. He was also apparently someone with a shitty sense of humor; he wasn’t answering Buggy’s question because he was too busy laughing and pointing at Buggy.

“Your face! Oh, my stomach hurts,” he said, clutching at his waist. “Oh man, that was almost worth getting kicked out of the nest.” As they approached the ground, he shifted his weight so his feet would touch down first, and untangled himself from the rope with practiced ease. “Phew. Sorry, uh—Buggy, right? Yeah, sorry about that. The crew knows better than to stand so close to the mast when the watch changes, and I didn’t think to check before I jumped.”

“Jumping from the crow’s nest for fun.” Buggy shook his head. “And here I thought you people were almost respectable.” Yasopp, the maniac, cackled. Beckman, drifting down to the deck on his own rope mechanism, in a much more orderly fashion, chuckled a little.

“It’s possible we’ve been on… well, not our best behavior. Let’s call it better behavior than usual, these last few days,” Beckman admitted. “Except for Yasopp, who doesn’t know the meaning of the concept and so stays up in his nest.”

“You haven’t been on your best behavior, you’re as mean as ever,” Yasopp said, putting on an over-the-top pout.

Beckman rolled his eyes. “Because I need to be, to get anything done around here,” he said. “And you need a break. Drink, talk to someone, tinker with one of your ridiculous trick bullets, I don’t care, just—let someone else keep an eye on things for a few hours, okay?” He nudged Yasopp in the side with an elbow. “Or are you gonna say you didn’t train your juniors well enough at their job?”

Yasopp crossed his arms, sulky. “No,” he conceded.

“Good,” Beckman said. Giving Buggy an apologetic grimace as he untied himself, he said, “I trust he’s apologized to you already?” His tone suggested that if he hadn’t, Yasopp would soon regret it.

What a mother hen of a first mate, Buggy thought, fighting down a smile. “Yeah, yeah, it’s fine,” he said, shrugging off the incident like it hadn’t carved a decade off his lifespan. “I should’ve known you people had to be at least a little crazy, since you run around with Shanks.”

A small smile crossed Beckman’s face, and Yasopp muffled a snort of laughter in a fist.

Someone called out in a panicky tone for Beckman from a far corner of the ship, and the smile fell off his face. “If you’ll excuse me?” Not waiting for a reply from either of them, Beckman walked off.

“So mean,” Yasopp said, fondness creeping into his voice.

“That’s first mates for you,” Buggy said, unable to keep a similar fondness out of his own voice. Shanks had done a good job finding this guy. When you grew up with the gold standard first mate (or, heh, the Silvers standard?), it was hard to find someone who could measure up. “Keeping things in order when your captain’s lost his head.”

Yasopp chuckled. “Ah, the boss isn’t that bad off.” When Buggy gave him a skeptical look, he smirked. “Lost his heart, maybe, but he knows where his head’s at.”

“I—uh.” Flustered, Buggy cleared his throat. He’d really just gone and said it. “You’re a lot less subtle than your crewmates.”

Yasopp shrugged. “I leave subtlety to subtle men. I’m not built for it; I’m built for getting to the heart of the matter, and doing it fast.” He extended two fingers towards Buggy, lifted his thumb into the air, and twitched his hand like it was a gun recoiling. “We both know where things stand. What’s the use in dancing around it?”

“Sure,” Buggy muttered, his thoughts going back to what Beckman had said. What was it Shanks both didn’t want to tell him and needed to tell him? What was there left unsaid, besides the sort of thing Buggy had already decided didn’t need saying? He crossed his arms. Damn it, he’d been trying to avoid thinking about this shit!

“Hey,” Yasopp said, snapping his fingers to draw Buggy’s attention. “You work with bombs, right? You make them yourself?”

Welcoming the change in topic, Buggy scoffed. “Of course,” he said, “only an idiot trusts the kind of weapons manufacturers who are willing to sell to pirates to make explosives that are good, reliable, and cheap, and I have better things to spend my money on.” He narrowed his eyes at Yasopp. “Why?”

“Because Beck just gave me permission to tinker with my trick bullets, and if you make your own explosives you might be able to figure out what I’m doing wrong with this one.” Digging around in one of his oversized ammunition pouches, Yasopp presented Buggy with an unusually lightweight cartridge. “Here, what do you think?”

Buggy cracked the cartridge open, curious. Inside was a pool of silvery-black gunpowder and a thin-walled hollow bullet, which proved to have some other kind of powder inside. Buggy pinched that powder between two fingers, rubbing them together to feel the grit and then sniffing at the residue left behind. He stared at his fingers, baffled, and smelled them again. “What is that, aluminum and an ammonium salt?” Yasopp nodded. “Are you trying to make a cartridge that explodes in the barrel?”

Yasopp sighed, running a hand through his locs. “What I want is a smoke bomb I can fire out of a gun. What I’m getting is… that, more or less.”

“Yeah, of course you are, a big velocity change ignites this stuff easily. With a different catalyst, though, or maybe a better sealed chamber…” Buggy trailed off, considering the bullet. A miniature smoke bomb, huh? Something that could stand up to the initial shock of gunfire, and turns to noise and powder on impact… “Do you have a chem lab around here somewhere?”

Yasopp grinned.

The two of them didn’t emerge from Yasopp’s workroom until the bell rang out announcing last call for lunch. Buggy wasn’t sure he’d ever get the metallic burnt smell out of these clothes, but he didn’t care; this had been fun, the kind of idle experimenting with explosives that he hadn’t had time to do in years. Buggy hadn’t realized how much of a man’s free time it ate up, captaining even a smallish crew, until he’d gotten a fraction of that time back.

“Too bad we didn’t figure out a solution for your smoke bullet problem,” he said, dusting the last of the gunpowder off his shirt sleeves.

“Eh, I’ve been working on this on and off for months, it wasn’t gonna be an easy fix,” Yasopp said, shrugging his star-spangled cloak back on. “But it got both of us out of our heads for a few hours, so I’d hardly call it a waste.”

Buggy blinked at him, frozen with one arm in his jacket. “Both of us?”

“You were fretting, I don’t know what about. Shanks, at a guess. And I’m… not good at letting other people take on my responsibilities.” Yasopp grimaced. “Beck doesn’t always have to toss me out of the nest, but…”

Buggy frowned, sliding the jacket up his other arm. “I wasn’t fretting.”

Yasopp gave him an unimpressed look. “Sure. And what kind of concealer do you use to hide the frown lines you must have, if you make that face every hour of the day?” When Buggy scowled at him, Yasopp said, “I’m not a subtle man, remember? If you want somebody to pretend to believe your lies, you’re looking at the wrong guy.”

Buggy sighed. As Yasopp locked the workroom up behind them, he admitted, “It… was good to get out of my head for a while.” Yasopp gave him a squeeze on the shoulder, and they left it at that.

Lunch was a bit less exciting than the past few days had led Buggy to expect: the fried rice with pickled cabbage and ham that had been served with Shanks’ breakfast was the main dish on offer, with other repurposed leftovers making up the rest of the meal. When Roux wasn’t looking, Buggy gave him a curious look. The rest of the crew had been on their best behavior, according to Beckman… so, had Lucky Roux been showing off? If he had, it had worked on Buggy; he still wanted to poach Roux for his own crew, even if this less impressive offering was his usual fare.

Eating his bowl of rice with a couple promising-looking toppings—all well-spiced and delicious, of course—Buggy made his way out onto the main deck. A few Red-Haired and Whitebeard Pirates glanced Buggy’s way, but most of them had gotten used to Buggy over the last few days and returned to their meals without paying him any mind. He peered down at the lower deck, crowded with men in worn prison uniforms standing in surprisingly well-organized clusters of twos and fours, finishing their lunch.

“Afternoon, men!” he called.

“Captain Buggy!” they cheered.

“Let’s see,” Buggy said, and on a whim set aside his bowl to chop off his feet and swoop down, close enough to excite his men but just out of reach. “Aren’t you arranged all nice and orderly? It looks like you did as I asked.”

“Of course!”

“We’d do anything you asked, Captain Buggy!”

Buggy grinned. Music to his ears. “Then I suppose I should reward you, shouldn’t I?” A few excited sounds rose from the crowd as Buggy returned to his spot on the deck above them. “Hm… I’ve told you a few stories of the old days with Captain Roger, and a few more adventures of the great Captain Buggy’s crew. But there’s someone I’ve yet to introduce you to, a captain who’s been allied with me and mine these last few months.” Someone who might need some convincing to cooperate with the sudden appearance of all these guys… and who was more eager for praise than even Buggy. “Let me tell you how the strong, beautiful Iron Mace Alvida saved my life.”

A hush fell over the crowd.

“Yes, I know what you’re thinking: the great Captain Buggy, in need of rescue?!” The wide-eyed stares Buggy received confirmed this. And by the look of it, some of the men were mentally tacking on the phrase by a woman? to that question, as he’d suspected they would. Yeah, best to nip that potential problem in the bud. “Well, I’d been through a terrible trial in the days leading up to our first meeting. Separated from my crew, from my body, alone on a half-wrecked ship, starving, a vicious sea monster rising out of the waves before me, his many-toothed maw dripping with drool, eager to eat me—when suddenly! A great iron mace came down on his skull!” Buggy slammed his lunch bowl against the railing, the crash of metal on wood drawing the eye of every man below.

Buggy grinned. If they hadn’t been hooked before, they sure were now.

He fudged some of the details, of course—no need to reveal exactly who had put him through that terrible trial, or how his crew had behaved in his absence. But the broad strokes were true enough, and the changes he made were in support of his reason for telling the story: to convince these guys to respect Alvida, to flatter her as they did him, to make this joining of forces go as smoothly as possible. Sure, it didn’t put Buggy in the best light, at least not at first, but he didn’t want Alvida taking a perceived slight out on a man who might be able to stand up to her mace. If revealing one of his weaknesses was how he avoided that disaster, so be it.

He was just reaching the ‘rescuing his crew from cannibals’ climax of the story when a cry rang out from above: “Land ho!”

Finally. The relief that rushed through Buggy nearly made him cry. After all the many hells he’d been through since being arrested… things could finally start getting back to normal.

“We’ll continue this story after we disembark,” Buggy announced, to a few disappointed groans from his men. “Find your buddy if you lost track of him during lunch! Make sure you both have everything you’re taking with you! Stay out of the way of the Red-Haired Pirates while they’re get us to shore, but be ready to leave the second we’re docked!”

“Aye, Captain!”

But of course, it wasn’t quite that simple.

Buggy found Galdino sitting in the empty mess with Lucky Roux, making polite conversation over a pot of tea. Though, with these two, it might not actually be the conversation it seemed to be—something about the island Roux sourced his tea from? Apparently it was a distinctive blend, and hard to acquire.

“Did you need something, Buggy?” Galdino asked, an undertone of irritation to his voice. Because of course Buggy needed something, why else did he ever seek Galdino out?

Well, if Galdino didn’t want to be used, he shouldn’t have made himself so useful.

“The dock’s gone,” Buggy said. “Either rotted through or swept away in a storm.”

Galdino glanced up at him, and set down his teacup. “Well, at least it’ll be a challenge. Lucky Roux, it’s been a pleasure.”

“It’s sure been something, having you people aboard,” Roux said with a wide smile. “Hopefully not for the last time.”

Buggy snorted. “In your captain’s dreams.”

Galdino muffled a laugh in his fist; Roux didn’t bother concealing his amusement. Buggy realized how his words had come off, scowled, and stormed out of the mess with a mutter of, “Come on, Galdino.”

The two of them joined Beckman and the Red-Haired Pirates’ navigator at the bow of the ship, and considered the space where a dock clearly used to be. A ship this big, an island with such a sharp drop from shore to sea? They wouldn’t be able to land without a dock.

“Can you do it?” Beckman asked.

“I’ll need to begin from the shore,” Galdino said, thoughtful. “If it isn’t well anchored from the start it’ll drift away.”

“That’s no problem.” Buggy chopped his feet off and leaned forward, letting Galdino sit cross-legged on his back. He flew them to shore, where Galdino made some long wax spears that Buggy wedged into place. When they were securely dug in, Galdino melted the tops of the spears and, starting from that spot, created more wax to mold into a floating dock. Nothing that would be any good at anchoring a ship the size of the Red Force long-term, but they didn’t intend to be here any longer than necessary. So long as it could hold firm while the men disembarked, that was all they needed.

While Galdino worked, Buggy hovered above the canopy, looking for any kind of promising location to settle his men. He quickly spotted the ruins Beckman had mentioned—several of the old buildings were tall enough to be seen well above the treetops, the gray of the stone standing out against all the greenery of the jungle. There was one with a large paved area around it, not far from the shore, which seemed promising. Buggy took a moment to fix the spot in his memory, then went back to tell Galdino about it.

Galdino barely paid him any mind. He was focused on his work, and confident enough in it to stand on the dock as he was building it, a foot or two of wax all that separated him from the awful, helpless death that awaited any Devil Fruit user in the ocean. It was bold of him; Buggy preferred a nice, reliable boat any day.

“Any messages to pass on to the men?” he asked, hovering at Galdino’s shoulder.

“They’ll need to be light on their feet, and should stick to the center of the dock,” Galdino said. He was starting to sweat; extruding this much wax in one go must take a lot of effort. “If their weight isn’t balanced right, one wrong move could capsize this whole thing.”

Buggy blanched. Yeah, he could never. “Noted,” he squeaked, and flew back to the Red Force to convey these instructions.

Despite Galdino’s warnings, the disembarkation went well. Buggy watched with no small amount of pride as the buddy system worked beautifully, each pair of men walking down the gangplank, across the waxen dock, and onto the shore without any signs of a bottleneck developing. Being listened to was nice—it was very nice—but being listened to, having your orders followed, and seeing them work exactly as you imagined, now that was heaven. Buggy might not be the strongest pirate the world had ever seen, but damn it, he was good at this shit.

As the last dozen pairs prepared to leave the Red Force, Buggy felt a gentle weight press down on his foot. He frowned, tried to remember where he’d left his feet, and only then noticed a presence on the main deck that made his hackles rise.

Shanks.

“Are you holding my feet hostage?”

“That depends,” Shanks said, giving Buggy an unreadable look. “Are you leaving without saying goodbye?”

Oh, this guy. On his own ship, surrounded on all sides by his most trusted officers, and still managing to look like some kind of miserable wet cat, terrified of being left alone.

“And how was I supposed to say goodbye to someone who’s been hiding from me?” Buggy asked, instead of the dozen meaner things he wanted to say.

Shanks glanced away, suddenly awkward, and Buggy took the opportunity to look him over. The shower had done him good, gotten him clean of all that secondhand makeup—though it had not, Buggy noticed with a quiet little thrill, removed the bruises that had apparently been hiding underneath some of that makeup. His hair looked nicer, almost healthy, even pinned back by the sunglasses Shanks had propped up high on his forehead. “Are these the shame glasses I’ve heard so much about?”

Shanks’ hand rose to fiddle with the temple of the glasses. “Ah, yeah.”

“I thought your crew was supposed to laugh at you while you were wearing them?”

“They’ve been laughing at me, all day,” Shanks said, tired. “And they’ve been right to, given… everything.”

Well, that was ominous.

With a sigh, Shanks said, “There’s something I should have told you earlier, Buggy, but there never seemed to be a good time, and… I didn’t know how to say it.” A sheepish smile pulling at the corner of his lip, he said, “I still don’t, to be honest,” and pulled the sunglasses down over his eyes.

It took Buggy a moment to put it together. Shanks’ discomfort, the way the large mirrored lenses took up so much space on his face, the nervous twist of his lips… then Shanks ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead, and it clicked. All the blood draining out of his face, Buggy caught Beckman’s eye; he nodded, ever so slightly.

(Fuck.)

Buggy got up in Shanks’ face, looking past his own wide-eyed reflection to confirm that spark of recognition. Shanks leaned back, Buggy reconnected to his own feet, and at this angle… yeah, he knew that face. He’d kissed it, once.

(Oh fuck, he’d pickpocketed that guy, too.)

Fighting down a hysterical burst of laughter, Buggy said, voice high-pitched from the strain, “Well, uh, thanks for the ride, Shanks! I’d say I owe you one, but I’m pretty sure you still owe me another two or three dozen favors before we’re even.” He backed up, hands brushing along the railing as he inched towards the stairs, and beyond them the gangplank, the dock, the island, freedom.

(Somewhere he could have a little breakdown about this revelation in private.)

“Buggy…” Shanks cautiously held out a hand.

Buggy pulled back out of reach. “I’m not saying goodbye to you, Shanks!” he snapped. Shanks faltered, his hurt visible even past those ridiculous sunglasses, and Buggy sighed. Did he have to spell it out? “Stupid. I already told you.”

Confusion wasn’t a much better look on Shanks. Well, either he’d figure out or he wouldn’t.

Buggy rolled his eyes, spun around, and ran off. Over his shoulder, he promised, “Until next time, Red-Hair!”

#notfic #the near miss fics #one piece #shuggy #buggy #shanks #now if you’ll excuse me i’m going to sleep for a week #orz why is writing so easy at the beginning and so hard at the end

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aksually2008 · 1 year

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aksel's guide to relaxing media

A lot of people have asked me to compile a list of my go-to depressing/dooming media, but I feel it would be irresponsible to give you that without an antidote.

Maybe this will be of help to you on an anxious night and instead of smoking a cigarette you'll turn to this or maybe its a nice cozy afternoon and you need something to maintain that feeling.. either way here's stuff that I consume on those days:

Film/TV

youtube

Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep

This is something I have recommended to most of my friends at this point and if you ever give me the opportunity I'll probably talk your ear off about this man. I have a very special affinity towards this video, as it randomly found me on a particularly stressful quarantine night and boy am I glad it did.

I'm not gonna talk about it too much further, but if you're feeling a little bit lost or anxious, even after my 250 watches of this, I end up feeling a little bit better. If you like it make sure to check out his show, Joe Pera Talks With You on hbomax as it's one of my favourite shows ever!! The episodes are short and easy to digest :)

How to With John Wilson

It's hard for me to exactly describe this show, it's just one of those things you have to see for yourself to fully understand the appeal of it. For the most part, this show uses street footage of New York City and interviews with average everyday New Yorkers to convey some kind of narrative, usually disguised as a tutorial(hence the "how to"). There's a lot of absurdity, laughter and sometimes it plays with your emotions a bit, but sometimes it's nice to just unwind and learn about the insane industry of scaffolding in NYC.

youtube

Come and Visit Us Again

Okay, so this is probably one of the most niche things here.. Considering that it has 205 views as of me writing this and it's in estonian with no captions available.(Maybe someday I'll translate it)

As far as I can tell, it is a documentary short made by Liis Nimik, who at the time was a film school student. It follows the day-to-day of a village grocery store cashier and her interactions with the people who visit her store everyday.

Moms, dads, scary little kids and village bums.. It has it all and serves as this kind of a sweet time capsule of one particular week in this one Estonian village. I will admit this is probably extra comforting for me as I grew up near a village similar to this that also had a store just like this one. In a small village, the people who work at the local grocery store really become apart of your everyday life and I loved to see it captured like this.

I feel like even if you don't understand Estonian, it's nice background noise.

Malcom in the Middle

Need I say more?

Youtube

If you know me, you know I'm a fiend for comforting youtube personalities. Here are some of my favorites:

youtube

Steve Wallis

Even if you aren't particularly interested in camping, you'll still probably enjoy these videos. Steve is probably one of the sweetest dudes I've found on YouTube and he really knows how to keep a conversation. All in all, just nice to throw on if you just wanna disconnect for 30 minutes

youtube

Shirley Curry

I've loved Shirley's stuff for years now. She calls her viewers her grandkids and posts vlogs & let's plays. I think that covers the gist of it.

youtube

Featureman a.k.a. Tom Willett

This is an older gentleman, who for the most part shows you different meals that he makes & tells you stories about his time as an actor in the 1980s. Every video feels like you're visiting your grandpa.

youtube

GIFGAS

I found them quite recently, but they're quickly turning into my favourite Youtube channel. Videos of trainhopping, which are so well shot and the music choices are soooooo gooooood. Every travel vlog should have a mandatory requirement of at least (1) shoegaze song.

youtube

Roger Hance

Found this guy randomly on my recommended and him only having 4k subs feels like a crime. He's a bird photographer, who vlogs his outings and talks about all the little birds he sees. super cute.

Music

Below are a couple of playlists and tracks I recommend for this occasion:

Mixture of ambient tracks and just relaxing instrumentals. There's no vocals. During the summer, I would always listen to this if I was sitting in a park or doodling.

This is just some of my favourite ambient tracks. If you've never really listened to ambient music before, check this out I guarantee you'll like it.

I have fallen asleep to this so many times that sometimes i just constantly hear it in the back of my head. Maybe thats not a comforting thought but it helps me sleep so that's a price I am willing to pay.

That's about it though.. I didn't include everything, because this is already pretty long and I have to keep some things secret, but I hope you find use in some of this. bye

#comforting #aksually #Youtube #Spotify

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maxverstappensflatbrim · 9 months

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Show Me Yours | Matty Healy [24]

chapter twenty-four, act three: so far (it's alright)

masterlist

February 27th 2015

Tommie sits at the bar of this random rooftop party, swirling her drink around in the glass. It’s just a coke, Caleb had mentioned in front of the bartender how she turned twenty one later on in the year, so now the guy refused to serve her anything of interest.

“I’ll have a gin and tonic, please.”

The guy behind the bar looks up at the new woman beside her and she smiles, “ID?”

“Oh, shoot, shoot, shoot. Seems I have forgotten it, um, I was here last week, you served me, remember?”

“No.” The guy says deadpan, “Kid, you look twelve, no ID, no drink.”

“You should try the coke, it’s divine.” Tommie says sarcastically to her.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what’s that accent?” The woman with bright hair asks.

“Welsh.” Tommie says, then gets ready for her usual speech. ‘England, London, you know, the Queen, Brits, yeah well the UK isn’t just one country, it’s three, well three and a bit, I guess. And no, I don’t live in a whale, Wales is a country-’

“Oh, cool, I’ve been there once, it was a total accident though. My drummer took a wrong turn and we ended up in some place called like Chepton or something.”

“Chepstow.”

She nods quickly, “Yeah, it was actually a cute, little town, you from near there?”

“Uh, not far, grew up like an hour out of Cardiff.”

“Cardiff’s your capital, right?”

She nods, “I’m Phoebe, by the way.”

“Tommie.”

“Nice to meet you.” She smiles, and purses her lips turning away to look around the party.

“You from LA? Visiting?”

Phoebe nods, “From here, yeah. Uh, this guy- do you know who's throwing the party, what was his name, Brad, Bret?”

She shrugs, “Some arsehole frat name like that, I’m not sure, my boyfriend dragged me here.”

She chuckles, “Mine too, well, the guys an old friend of his and he’s trying to get my music heard by pulling some strings apparently, Brad Bret, has friends high up in the industry.” Phoebe shrugs, “I don’t want to do it that way, I want to be founded, like in a dingy bar by a producer who’s right on the tipping point of their career, struggling with their partner, losing custody of their kids and I’m the big break that turns their life around again.”

Tommie smiles at that, “You have any music out?”

She nods, “Yeah, some stuff on youtube.”

“I’ll give it a listen.”

Phoebe's smile brightens a little bit and Tommie finds her own mirroring hers, “Sorry,” She apologies before speaking again, “You probably get this a lot, especially around here, and I feel like an inconsiderate asshole, but I just want you to know, I think you’re great.”

Tommie blushes slightly, “Thank you.”

“Honestly, your writing is just absolutely amazing. I mean your poem Trial Child, stuck with me for weeks.”

Tommie’s smile brightens just a little bit when she realises she’s recognised for her poetry and not her band.

“Thank you, it means a lot. I don't really get complimented on my writing often.”

“Really? Why not, it’s great. More than great.”

She thanks her again as they go back to people watching, “Which one’s your boyfriend?” Tommie asks.

She points to a blonde guy standing with a beer in hand across the bar, “He’s the one with sunglasses talking to the short guy with weird spiky hair. Where's yours?”

“The short guy with weird spiky hair.”

Phoebe laughs. The pair stick together the entire night, when Tommie goes for a smoke (around the back so Caleb won’t see) Phoebe goes with her, sharing her last three cigarettes as they talk music.

The door behind them opens and Tommie’s glad that Pheobes is holding the cigarette in her hand, “Hey, babe, you ready?”

She nods pushing herself up, “It was nice meeting you, Tommie.”

She smiles, “Text me next time you’re around.”

Phoebe nods, “I should say that to you, I live here.”

“Right, well, I’ll text you when I’m in LA again.”

Phoebe nods, “I await your message.”

⋆｡ﾟ☁︎｡ ⋆｡ﾟ☾ ﾟ

“Who was that girl you were with?” Caleb asks as he hangs his coat up.

Mitchell perks up from the dining room table as the door opens, “Hey.”

“Uh, Phoebe… didn't get her last name actually. She’s a singer, was really nice.”

“I recgonised her,” Caleb tells her, nodding to Mitchellvand then kicking at Shane’s foot to wake him up, “Think I’ve seen her perform before.”

“She any good? She gave me the vibe that she is. She was confident but not cocky, you know?”

Claeb shrugs, “Not for me, but she wasn’t bad.”

She nods watching as he pushes Shane towards his bedroom in the loft apartment. “Where’s James?”

“At his female’s apartment.”

Tommie’s nose curls as she walks over to the kitchen to grab herself a drink, “Wow, and you wonder why no ‘females’ want you.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

She stands kicking the fridge door shut and leans on the counter, looking through the small little open window that looks into the living/ dining area.

“Don’t call women females if you want them to even look at your dick.”

Caleb smirks to himself, moving to pick at some of the grapes in the fruit bowl, arms tugging her towards him.

“Bridgers.”

“What?”

“Phoebe Bridgers, I remember now, I know her boyfriend Marshall.”

She lifts her head in acknowledgement, “You guys in the studio tomorrow?”

He nods, thumbs rubbing across her hip bones, “Yeah, I was hoping you could come in and give some pointers.”

“Different genres,” She shakes her hand as if to dismiss the idea, “I won’t be any good with country rock.”

“Your voice would better suit country. You have like this,” He pulls a weird face to try and make an example, “This sort of high pitched twinge, at the end of long or high notes. Sometimes you control it,” He sees the look on her face and quickly shakes his head, “No, no, it’s good. It’s what gives you that edge, that special sound that is only you.”

She shakes her head and reaches into her pocket for her phone, “I’m gonna give her a call, see if she wants to meet up.”

⋆｡ﾟ☁︎｡ ⋆｡ﾟ☾ ﾟ

February 28th 2015

“Hey.” Phoebe grins, holding the door open for her, “Come on in.”

She looks around the little studio, watching as some people play around with instruments, “You recording? EP?”

“No,” She shakes her head picking up her acoustic guitar, “Got one song on a Lost Ark album.”

“What’s it called?”

“Waiting Room, wrote it a while back, wanna hear?”

She nods and moves over to sit in the chair by the mix board, Phoebe leans over her to hit play and she lifts the big bulky headphones up over her head to listen.

Phoebe watches intently, sitting beside her as she watches her nod her head up and down, miming the lyrics a little.

Of course she knows who Tommie is. She’s not stupid, everyone’s heard of the 1975 in her band so it was only a matter of time. She just didn;t want to seem like a psycho fan going up to her yesterday.

“Can I make a suggestion?”

Phoebe nods quickly, “Of course, you’re the expert.”

Tommie brushes the comment off before asking, “Is this saved? I don’t want to change anything if you don’t like it.”

“It’s saved, three different copies.” She nods then moves forward.

“The drums, I think they should come in a little later instead of straight away,” Phoebe watches as she moves the mouse on the screen to remove the drum beat, instead of cutting it she delays it, “And you have a great voice, don’t hide it behind layers of instruments, make it the focus point.”

She pushes up the volume of Phoebe’s voice, pulling down the guitar and backing drums, “The guitar is great, did you write that?”

She nods quickly, “I did.”

“It’s amazing, how long have you been playing for?”

Phoebe shrugs, “Uh, I’m not sure, a long time.”

“Can I make another suggestion?” She nods again, gesturing to the board but Tommie turns to her instead, “Write more songs like this. Caleb said you’re in a band, Sloppy Jane?” Phoebe nods again, “I listened to some of their stuff, they’re good, but I think you’re better.”

Phoebe lifts her shoulders at that, “So what leave them?”

Tommie shrugs, “I’m not telling you to do that, but I do think you’d be better as a solo act, or at least with other singers that compliment you, not try to outshine you. You have a beautiful voice, don’t let it be silenced.”

“What if I told you the same? Told you to leave the band would you?”

Tommie thinks it over then shrugs her shoulders, “I’m not a solo act. I like being in the background, and by the way you’re performing in those youtube videos, you like being up front.”

Phoebe smiles, “Would it be cheeky if I asked you to record it with me?”

“This song?” She nods and Tommie sinks back into her chair, the confident producer persona she just had fading, “It’s your song, Phoebe-”

“Please?” She asks, “I won’t put it anywhere, just for us?”

“Okay.”

Tommie was in the studio with Phoebe for hours, after the first two hours where Phoebe spent their time teaching her the guitar tune, the band had left.

They played around with different instruments, isolated vocals, harmonised together perfectly until the sun went down and it was nearing one in the morning.

Tommie leans back in her chair with a successful grin and Phoebe leans over to hug her back into her chest.

“Thank you.”

“I had fun. Thank you.”

“Here,” Phoebe moves to download a copy onto one of the memory sticks before handing it over to her, “Who knows, maybe years in the future we’ll both be world class famous rockstars and they’ll dig this up from the archives.”

“Who knows.”

taglist

@thereisaplaceintheheart, @indierockgirrl, @sofaritsalrightt, @julezs-bl0g, @eaglestar31, @sophinthealpss, @noacfemcel, @if-my-heart-bleeds, @befrwime, @fallingforel, @sexorchocolateorpillowsorclouds, @3terna15unshin3, @1975sophie1975, @thesocraticjunkiewannabe

-let me know if you want to be added :)

#show me yours matty healy #matty healy x reader #matty healy x oc #matty healy imagine #the 1975 x oc

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pureasthedrivensn0w · 27 days

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Forever is the Sweetest Con // Part 1

omgomgomg this is my first time ever posting to tumblr.com and i am nervoussss. i’ve been a lurker for years (literally like since i was 12) and i’ve always wanted to share my writing but i’ve been too scared!!! but i decided to say fuck it and post some of my stuff. i’m obsessed w the hunger games, so that’s what this first post is based on! it’s totally self indulgent, but it’s probably going to turn into a series, so suggestions and feedback is super welcome and appreciated! i prob wont get any readers but that’s ok i just want to get my work out there and continue this hobby! anyway if you’re reading this i love you!!!

TW: Death, slight descriptions of gore, sadness

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆ .　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

The capitol says the dark days are behind us now. We have entered a new era, an era of peace. Any trace of an uprising was squandered. Any small act of defiance, intentional or not, is met with cruel and unusual punishment. We are lucky the capitol hasn’t done more to punish us, given the harm we did. The world could have ended. We should be grateful.

Anyone who steps foot in any of the districts will see that that is not true. Mention peace to a citizen of district eleven and he will laugh in your face. Talk about gratitude to a district eight worker and she will avoid you at all costs. In the districts, there is no such thing as gratitude, peace, tranquility, happiness. There is only survival.

When you think of survival to it’s core, the barren bones, the tired eyes, the heavy limbs, you are picturing the citizens of district twelve. The twelfth district in Panem specialized in coal mining, which is not only an incredibly dangerous industry, but incredibly taxing as well. The men go to the mines from 6 in the morning to 7 at night. Monday through friday. No breaks, no exceptions, the only time you are excused is if you are actively dying.

Roslyn Sage grew up in this environment. But she also grew up in a different world. The world of the covey. She looks back at her early days with fondness, remembering the times she would hold hands with her older sister and cousin and harmonize to the songs their elders taught them. Or braiding grass baskets with her mother. Or sitting on her fathers shoulders while they traveled from district to district.

“Papa, I’m hungry.” She remembers saying, playing with his long hair as he walked with the rest of the band. They didn’t know where they were going, they never did, and they liked it that way. “I know, sweet thing.” he said softly, keeping his eyes trained on the stretch of land in front of them. The covey never looks back, that’s what her papa said.

They were nearing four days of travel. They had just left district 8, spending two months there. They had a few injured, with the war going on all around them. They needed time to reciprocate, recharge. But they were always safest in the trees. That’s what papa said. So they left. Her uncle still needed a walking stick, and her grandfather couldn’t hear out of his left ear, but they needed to leave.

Roslyn Sage didn’t understand the complete reasoning. Her papa said it wasn’t safe, and that was all. They needed to get somewhere where they could sing. And sing they did. As they walked, she could hear her older sister sing one of the band’s favorite songs to pass the time. “Well there’s a dark and a troubled side of life,” Lucy Gray sang, as she held hands with four year old Maude Ivory, “There’s a bright and a sunny side too.”

Roslyn Sage grinned as her papa started to sing along, and then mama. Her uncle joined, then nana. “Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side. Keep on the sunny side of life! It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way if we keep on the sunny-“

Papa stopped so suddenly that Roslyn Sage swore she could’ve fallen off his shoulders. He reached forward and grabbed Lucy Gray’s arm, a silent way to get her to stop singing. “Papa, why’d we-“ “Quiet.” Papa whispered back harshly, as all the grownups looked ahead. When Roslyn Sage finally looked up to see what they were staring at, she felt her heart sink into her stomach. Even at seven years old, she knew this wasn’t good.

Peacekeepers. Sure- just a group of five, not a whole team, but enough. Big, strong, grown men who could take them easily. Everyone in the group knew this. Papa’s hand tightened around Lucy Gray’s arm and mama quickly scooped up Maude Ivory. “Wasn’t expecting to see anyone out here.” One peacekeeper said, a small frown on his face. He couldn’t have been older than 18. In fact- they all looked that young. One stepped forward, deciding to take the lead in the situation. “You’re past boundaries.” He said, his hand resting on the gun in his holster. “That’s against the law now.”

“We don’t want any trouble.” Papa said, his back straight even though Roslyn Sage could feel his heart pounding from here. “We’re traveling folk- we must’ve been away when that law was passed.” But they weren’t, she knew they weren’t. She had been half-asleep one day, cuddled in between Maude Ivory and Lucy Gray, when she heard the grown ups whispering about it. But she knew better than to say that. “Lead us to the nearest district and then-“

A twig snapped and the entire group looked up to see uncle Sam Flint running as fast as he could. He was only 14, he was foolish. Papa almost ran for it, screaming his youngest brothers name, but it was too late. The youngest peacekeeper had already gotten his gun, aimed, and shot. Sam Flint hit the floor in an instant. Even from here, Roslyn Sage could see the blood pouring out of his head.

“Now don’t take that-“ Papa was right back in defense mode, pulling Lucy Gray behind him. They already lost one, they couldn’t lose another. The peacekeeper who had shot Sam Flint looked shaken up but the tragedy only made the one in charge more upset. He held up his gun, and when he did, so did the rest. All five peacekeepers had their fully loaded rifles aimed at the group. “One step and you’re-“ her aunt let out a broken sob, holding her baby to her chest.

It all happened so fast. If you were to ask the covey children about what really happened that day, you wouldn’t get anywhere near a real answer. All Roslyn Sage could really remember was her aunts face as the bullet hit her chest, how her papa tried to catch the baby, mama’s scream as she reached for Lucy Gray before being dragged away, papa’s eyes as he laid in her lap, holding her hand until his last breath.

Lucy Gray tells her that the peacekeepers weren’t willing to kill the children. In a twisted way, they thought they were victims of the covey and not the captiol. After papa was gone, the one who killed Sam Flint picked her up. She was kicking and screaming, too young to comprehend that her father was gone regardless of if she was next to him or not. The punched his back, kicked his stomach, even tried to bite. The boy carrying her had tears streaming down his cheeks. Roslyn had never had any desire to hurt someone in her life, until now.

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khwxbeeda · 5 months

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The Almost Wedding (Ch.I)

Arjun was this close to murdering someone.

More specifically, he was close to grabbing his dear darling sister by her perfectly styled hair and sticking her neck onto a guillotine. At least then she would shut up and stop bothering him.

"Arjun I swear," Tanishka said for maybe the millionth time in the last two hours, "you had better be on your best behaviour, I won't have you- I don't know- flirting with anyone or something even stupider—"

"Aga majhi bai, I got it," he finally snapped, smacking his palms together in a sarcastic namaskar, making her click her jaw shut. "I'll be quiet the entire time. And Tai, why would I flirt with some random boy? He's probably homophobic, anyway."

Her hazel eyes narrowed in a glare, and he returned it with a flat look before turning around to look in the mirror, running his hands through his hair to separate the wavy black strands and checking his subtle eye makeup again. It looked good— just a little gold glitter on the lid and a smudge of kajal on the lower lash line, bringing out the soft golden specks in his eyes. His lip gloss was transparent, but it was enough to make his Cupid’s bow pop.

Tanishka, finally realising she was being ignored, huffed and strode away. Arjun snickered as the sound of her paayal grew fainter and fainter, then went back to applying concealer. College was a harrowing experience, especially for post graduate medical students, and Arjun was not getting enough sleep. At least the concealer helped hide the designer under-eye bags.

"ARJUN!"

He jerked in surprise, and glared at the open door of his room, cursing under his breath. He almost messed up his makeup, dammit!

"EK MINUTE ALO," he yelled back, twisting his concealer tube shut and throwing it onto the dresser, then slipped out into the hallway.

He rushed down the set of staircases three steps at a time, tugging at his collar and adjusting his jeans so the multi-coloured rhinestones on the back pockets arranged in the bi flag were visible.

He had chosen the basic white shirt and baggy jeans on purpose, because while the rest of the family was wearing traditional clothing, he did not have a single kurta to his name and he had been too busy with his studies to go out and buy one. He often thought he had made a mistake by saying he wanted to become a doctor. He really should have followed Krushna into the modelling industry. At least then he would not have to bust his brain— just his body, and he would have had his best friend with him instead of halfway across the world.

He jumped the last seven steps, and was immediately met with a resounding smack upside the head.

"Aai ga," he whined, rubbing his hand over the back of his head and scowling playfully at his snickering aunt as she walked past, the pallu of her baby pink saree swinging left to right. "Chinu Maushi, don't you get tired of being annoying?"

She tossed her hair over her shoulder and winked. "Nahi. Ata chal, get a move on, they'll be here soon."

Ah. Right. His sister’s suitor.

The Kulkarni family had agreed to a rendezvous to decide if their youngest was compatible with Tanishka, and Arjun’s mother had been going crazy setting the house to rights and getting the servants to clean out every single room of the mansion. Even the unused ones. Arjun had made the mistake of asking if the guests were to be hosted in the second basement, and had gotten a chappal thrown at his head for his troubles.

"Yeah, yeah, coming," he muttered, sticking his hands into his pockets and following her out into the kitchen, where his mother was already directing the servants to prepare food and drinks for the Ganpati festival, which was in less than a week, and for the guests that were set to come in about five minutes.

“Hi, Aai,” he said, leaning down to press a kiss to his mother’s temple, and grinned when he received the weird combination of a harried glare and a soft pat to his cheek.

Lavanya Deshpande was one of the most influential actresses in Bollywood, and at the ripe age of fifty-seven, was the richest producer of the Hindi film industry. Despite being married off at the young age of nineteen into a family that did not treat her well and popping out her first baby at twenty, she had risen to national fame and become a household name by the time she was twenty-six, having acted in over a hundred films and produced several blockbusters through the course of her career. She had divorced her husband at twenty-eight and taken her two kids away, changed her surname back to her maiden name, and proceeded to take the international film industry by storm in a short five years.

“Hi, babdi,” she replied, and promptly shoved something into his mouth. “How does it taste?”

Arjun chewed on the thing for two slow seconds, then brightened when he realised it was a gulaab jamun. He nodded enthusiastically and snapped off two quick finger guns.

“Kadak,” he said through the mouthful of the mithai, and she smacked him upside the head. He yelped, but she smacked him again, the look on her face halfway between fond and exasperated. “Swallow your morsel before you speak, murkha!”

Arjun whined in outrage, but one sharp look from her and he subsided, muttering complaints under his breath and rubbing his head. The kitchen— a large white tiled room with two island counters and a whole baking station that was actually used for making festival faraal and mithai rather than cakes and pastries— had been overtaken by the two workers who were cooking up a storm for the festival, and Arjun sniffed appreciatively at a container filled with saffron milk, only to be pushed away by Aai.

“Nahi, Arjunie,” she said sternly. “This is for the guests, you can have as much as you’d like afterwards.”

Before he could reply, the bell rang.

His mother rose to her feet and glided out of the room, the skirts of her baby blue Anarkali flaring out behind her, and a minute later Arjun heard the front door open and the muffled sounds of greetings from the receiving hall. He exchanged a grimace with Chinu Maushi, and exhaled through his nose. She poked him in the back to make him straighten his posture to appear at least halfway polite, and beckoned him to follow her to the living room.

He took a stand next to one of the sofas and stuck his tongue out at Tanishka, just as Aai walked in with the guests.

Four people— siblings, because the parents had passed away. They walked in behind his mother, who had her socialite smile pasted on her beautiful face, and Arjun's breath caught.

All of them were utterly, absolutely gorgeous.

The two women and two men were wearing well fitted casual ethnic clothes, with the older man and woman dressed in identical royal purple kurta and trouser sets with delicate silver embroidery at the collar, and the younger two dressed in white with purple embroidery. They had matching arched eyebrows, smooth skin, oddly perfect noses, and pink lips that were pulled up into polite smiles that made their dark eyes crinkle at the edges, giving the impression that they were actually paying attention to whatever Arjun's mother was saying.

Bappa knew Arjun was not paying attention.

No, he was distracted by the visitors' sheer beauty as they pressed their hands together into a namaskar and bowed their heads. If Tanishka was marrying into this, he was envious, because those were some magnificent genetics. Yes, he grew up around big name actors and actresses walking in and out of his house on a daily basis, but that just made it easier for him to recognise real beauty when he saw it.

"—and of course, my son, Arjun." He snapped back into focus and sent his most charming smile towards them.

"Everyone," his mother said, "these are the Kulkarni siblings. Chandan, the oldest—" the criminally handsome man waved— "Charuta, Charita, and Chaitanya, the youngest."

A chorus of greetings echoed around the room, and they all sat down as the house workers placed trays piled with food and drinks on the teapoy in the middle of the set of sofas.

“So, Chaitanya,” Lavanya began, a large, genuine smile curving up her red-painted lips, “how are you, my child?”

Chaitanya gave her wide smile, and Arjun was pretty sure he felt butterflies in his stomach. The boy was pretty, with almond shaped deep brown eyes, pouty rosebud lips and a pointy chin that would have made him look delicate if not for the sharp cut of his jaw and the intelligent curve of his eyebrows. "Mi masta, Madame, what about you?"

The older actress’s smile widened. "Oh, no need to call me Madame, my dear. Lavanya is fine, and I’m doing good as well.” She extended her hand out towards the food. “Please, do eat your fill, and now, shall we begin with the ‘interrogation’?”

She winked at the last word, and the siblings let out identical amiable laughs. Charuta reached forward and picked a banana chip off one of the plates and popped it into her mouth, pretty glossy lips twisting into a pout as she crunched the thing between her teeth. Arjun forcefully dragged his eyes away from the visual and focused on Chandan, who had begun speaking.

"How are we to do this, then?"

He had a curious accent— somewhere between Indian and French, Arjun realised a second later. He exchanged a look with Chinu Maushi, who smirked at him like she knew exactly what was going through his mind. He turned away without giving her the honour of a reply, but he could feel his cheeks heat up. Thank the Gods for his dark complexion that made it difficult for his blush to be visible, or she would never let him live it down.

"How about you ask first?" Lavanya suggested. "Tanishka asks the next question. Both of you have to answer all the questions posed."

Chandan raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow at Chaitanya, who somehow managed to make his shrug look elegant. Arjun honestly had no idea whether to be jealous of or attracted to the man. Both men.

"I don't mind if you don’t," he answered, in the same hot accent as his older brother, and Tanishka nodded.

"I don't mind either. Ask away."

"What are you doing, currently?" he asked, tongue curling deliciously over his R's. Arjun had to forcefully drag his eyes away from that pretty mouth. Chinu Maushi gave him a significant look behind his mother's back that said he needed to stop, and he exhaled with a shake of his head— drop it. Thankfully, she did, but not before she gave him another look. Arjun rolled his eyes went back to the Q&A.

"I'm working as a freelance influencer and content creator as of now," Tanishka replied. “I won’t be signing onto Aai’s company, but hopefully in a few years I’ll take up a contract with a reputable agency as an actress. What about you?”

Charuta and Chandan exchanged discreet looks above Chaitanya's head, who was hilariously short compared to his older siblings. Even Charita was a couple inches taller than him. Arjun had no ground to stand on, however; he was the same height. He had no doubt that if Krushna met Chaitanya, he would tease him for his height the same way he did to Arjun.

Gods, he could not wait to tell Krushna about this.

"I'm in the last year of my Master’s degree,” Chaitanya said, leaning forward to wrap slender fingers covered in silver rings around a glass of chilled panha. Arjun’s eyes tracked the movement, only half focused on the rest of the words he spoke. He glimpsed a small tattoo on the inner side of the wrist, but the sleeves of the kurta shifted before he could get a proper look. “My subject is Physics.”

Oh, pretty and smart.

And so the interrogation proceeded, with Tanishka and Chaitanya taking turns in asking questions and answering them. By the end of the hour, half the plates and glasses had been wiped clean, and Arjun knew the general details and history of the Kulkarni family.

Chaitanya was twenty-five years old, and the youngest of the siblings. Chandan was thirty-nine and married with a seven year old daughter, and Charuta was not aiming to marry at all. She was thirty-five, had passed the UPSC exams on her first try after her LLB, and was working as a diplomat in Delhi at the Italian Embassy in India. Charita was a famous actress who mostly filmed in England and France, and had married her husband two years ago at the age of twenty-seven. Chaitanya was currently teaching maths and physics to school students when he was not working on his thesis for his Masters.

Their parents— Nayantara and Dhruv— had passed away in a car accident sixteen years ago, and Chandan had taken the younger two siblings to Paris to live with their maternal grandmother, while Charuta attended National Law University in Mumbai. The three siblings had stayed in Paris for ten years until Chaitanya completed his high school, and then moved to Pune for his Bachelors degree at Fergusson College.

“And what will you do after your Masters?” Tanishka asked him, leaning forward in her seat with a manicured finger subtly twirling with a strand of her hair. Arjun had seen her use that trick before, and he smirked when he noticed Chaitanya’s eyes follow the slide of the edge of the short square nail through the black curl before flicking back to her face.

“Ah, I’m hoping to continue on to a Ph.D,” he said, and picked up his glass of panha to take a sip. “What about you? Are you planning on getting another degree or—”

“On, no,” Tanishka replied, shaking her head so her curls bounced just enough to attract attention. “I have a masters, and that’s enough for me. Frankly, I’ve had enough of being yelled at by professors.” She chuckled faintly as if letting the others in on a joke, and Arjun stifled a snicker when Chaitanya echoed the sound, eyes never leaving his sister’s pretty face.

“Shall we talk alone?” He asked her, and Tanishka smiled her most charming smile, but there was a gleam in her eyes that Arjun recognised— the one that made an appearance when she had gotten what she wanted. “Why not? I know a cafe ten minutes from here that has excellent French press, if you’d like.”

Chaitanya glanced at Charuta for permission, grinning boyishly when she nodded. When he turned back to offer his hand to Tanishka, his grin was a little shy. It was endearing, and Arjun exchanged a look with his mother, who looked like she had won three Oscars in one go. He stifled another laugh.

Tanishka winked at Lavanya as she slipped out of the living room with her hand in Chaitanya’s, Arjun politely excused himself by citing his studies as a reason and slipped back up the stairs and into his room. He shut the door behind him and threw himself onto the bed, pushing aside the mass of textbooks, and unlocked his phone to hit the speed dial for his best friend.

“Haye tauba,” he breathed the minute Krushna picked up the phone, “they’re all so damn hot.”

The laugh that Krushna let out felt like it was setting off the butterfly effect.

———————

Taglist: @orgasming-caterpillar @h0bg0blin-meat @musaafir-hun-yaaron @mrunmione @girlatreus @shanti-ashant-hai @yehsahihai (lmk if you wanna be added/removed)

#the almost wedding #arjun deshpande #tanishka deshpande #chaitanya kulkarni #amrut writes #chaptered fic #original character #original writing #original work

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overthinkingfandom · 2 years

Text

Protagonist Paradigm Exemplar - A character analysis of Tommy

(Part 1)

/rp /dsmp

The topic of Tommy’s hero complex is a discussion that pops up every now and then in fandom.

The discussion is often framed around a couple of specific moments: The time Techno asked Tommy whether he wanted to be a hero on Nov 16, and the time Dream accused him of wanting to be one during the Disc Finale.

Many people rightfully point out that being a hero is the last thing Tommy wants. He isn’t someone who’s praticulary driven by justice to protect the weak and helpless. Nor is he looking to be the person to swoop in and save the day, praised and admired for his heroics. In fact, he would probably be more than happy to never be involved with a war or a high stakes conflict for the rest of his life.

However, by focusing so much on those two specific moments the discussion gets railroaded in a particular direction. One that focuses on the idea of “hero” in the context of Theseus and Greek heroes.

Yet that’s not the only possible meaning the word “hero” can have. A lot of people use it as a synonym for the main character of a story. The protagonist. To be clear, despite being used interchangeably by many, protagonist doesn’t mean “hero”. It doesn’t even mean “good guy”. It merely means “main character”.

Having said that, we know Tommy doesn’t think of himself as a hero like the Greeks, but does he think of himself as a hero like a protagonist?

Tommy: “What if- what if the protagonist over there had a family bond that you simply couldn’t comprehend due to your loneliness on this server and lack of family, so he had to stick with him even though there might have been a slight amount of reluctance in there. Also, he’s had some pretty hard times over these past few months, such as exile uh depression uh lots of terrible things so maybe you should go light on this protagonist.”(x)

Yes. Yes he does.

This protagonist complex is something which accompanies the character from his very first days on the server and affected much of his development throughout the plot, but the true origin of Tommy’s protagonist complex started before even that.

It started with the very conception of the character.

Roleplay has always been a part of DSMP’s identity in one way or another. However, back when it first started it was more along the lines of a sketch comedy or a sitcom rather than the epic character-based tale we have today. The ccs would log on and play their personas, bouncing off each other and causing all kinds of shenanigans before eventually resolving it. There was no script to follow, instead the plot was formed through a combination of roleplay and improv etiquette.

It’s no surprise then that many of those personas took on qualities of the archetypes common in sitcoms. Those archetypes are more than just a collection of personality traits, they often also indicate the role a character has in the joke so it’s easy to fall into them naturally when looking to create humor through character interactions. The influence of those archetypes can be seen most clearly in Tommy’s character, but they also helped shape many of the other characters who grew from their streamer’s persona (like Tubbo, Fundy or Ponk, to name a few).

For cc!Tommy, his persona was a mix between what the industry calls Loveable Loser and what Tv Tropes calls unsympathetic comedy protagonist.

Loveable Losers are common sitcom protagonists. They’re those characters who are driven by their want for something, and in their quest for getting that want they’ll manage to go about it in all the wrong ways. Most of the humor with them comes from their impulsive ideas that are bound to get them in trouble as well as their ability to dig themselves deeper once consequences come knocking. The archetype is very much defined by the character losing, and making that loss as hilarious as possible for the audience.

Which is why it’s a natural fit for the unsympathetic comedy protagonist trope. Despite the name, the trope isn’t about characters who are so hateable no one could sympathize with them. They’re about characters who make it easy to laugh at their misfortune when they bring it upon themselves with their harebrained ideas or by being a jerk.

Of course watching such a character would get tiring fast, so the “loveable” part comes in to balance it out. Whether through their charisma, hidden heart of gold or just an otherwise adorable or cool manner, the character endears themselves to the audience with their charm and makes it fun to watch them, not just to watch them fail.

cc!Tommy relied a lot on what makes those archetypes function in his streams. There was this routine he would do in the early days of the server. He would log on, hatch up a zany scheme (often one which involved getting power, scamming someone or scamming someone in order to get power) and set about implementing it until something went wrong or he provoked people enough that they decided to retaliate.

What followed next was sure to be hilarious. With everyone else also being some shade of asshole, it made it easy to laugh no matter whether our loveable loser ended up bemoaning losing all of his stuff in the conflict again or if he somehow managed to overcome all the obstacles in his way and emerge victorious.

Part of what made this routine so compelling is that it gave cc!Tommy a great way to generate conflict and keep things exciting. Conflict, as we all know, is the bread and butter of stories and indeed that’s what his streams ended up feeling like. Like a story where things were happening, rather than just people hanging out on a live stream.

When cc!Wilbur joined the server the roleplaying really went up a notch. The scope of the bits increased. No longer did they fully revolve around minecraft mechanics - with the main sources of conflict being stolen items or murdered pets - but now they were also about drug monopolies and rebelling countries.

The comedy show aspect was still there but it existed alongside other kinds of stories being told. Sometimes more literally than others. It’s well known that during the Independence War cc!Wilbur and cc!Tommy were constantly referencing the musical Hamilton, with cc!Wilbur taking on the role of the mentor character, George Washington, while cc!Tommy adopted the role of Hamilton, the main character himself.

However, unlike the sitcom archetype cc!Tommy played up to that point, the character of Hamilton embodied a more heroic archetype. The impulsive sort, who doesn’t think before he acts but has his heart in the right place. Who despite all his faults still wants to do the Right Thing. You know the one.

That archetype wasn’t hard to incorporate into Tommy's existing characterization. He was already impulsive and not prone to much thinking. He had enough Pet The Dog moments to show that he did indeed have a golden heart underneath all of his many flaws. The only problem was the part about doing the Right Thing.

You see, sitcom characters don’t often concern themselves with the morality of an action, at least not anything beyond what could get them into trouble. Philosophizing too much about Right and Wrong tends to kill the humor, especially when the characters are all assholes to one degree or another. As such, the archetype doesn’t have many internal values associated with it in that regard.

The heroic archetype… also doesn’t have many values associated with it, surprisingly enough. It wants to do the Right Thing but once we start looking at specific details they get a bit scarce. Heroic characters rarely fight because of a specific ideology. More often than not they do so because they have some kind of personal stake in the issue. Those who do fight for a specific ideology tend to be portrayed somewhere in the range between a well intentioned extremist and a villain.

Still, there are some commonalities which tend to emerge. Power is Bad, unless the Right People have it. The status quo is Good, or at most it was Good until the villains made it Bad. Fighting for the personal is more heroic than fighting for the utilitarian big picture. Etc, etc…

Yet, where in most heroic characters those values are baked into the personality (to various levels of success), with Tommy’s character they’re tacked on top the sitcom archetype. Something which creates a lot of dissonance between what the character says he values versus what his actions show he values.

The combination of those two archetypes creates another interesting aspect to it. Both of them are commonly seen with main characters. It makes it easy to look at Tommy’s character and see him as a protagonist, if only because of how familiar that kind of character is. It doesn’t help that cc!Tommy plays into that familiarity because, well…

cc!Tommy: “Until the exile arc my character was basically just me cause I just assumed I was the main character.”(x)

However, DSMP is not a book or a movie. It’s a roleplay, it has no main characters. Or alternatively, everyone is a main character. Everyone is complex and three-dimensional, with their own agendas and internal worlds that don’t revolve around any other character. Furthermore, it’s a story told live on a minecraft server. The cc’s ability to make the world of the story bend over backwards for the sake of the plot is pretty limited. While stuff can be arranged, it’s not common.

So what we end up with is a character who acts like he’s the main character, expects the story to revolve around him like the main character, but isn’t actually the main character.

What we end up with is a character who has all the makings to be someone with a protagonist complex.

Of course, just because a character has the potential to develop a protagonist complex doesn’t mean they will. While those OOC reasons planted seeds, it’s really the plot and the character’s history which really made Tommy’s protagonist complex blossom.

We see those seeds in the way c!Tommy acted during the pre-L’manburg era. From the very beginning he viewed himself as set apart or more important than other people, whether it be by thinking he’s above rules he himself set(x) or by barging into meetings and talking over people to insist his issues were more important than whatever problem they were dealing with(3:43). At his worst, he went so far as to completely disregard any problems people had with him(x).

We see it also in the way he approaches morality, thinking he’s always a good person(x) or in the right(x) regardless of circumstances, as well as judging if someone is his friend by whether they’re on his side or not(x). Protagonist centered morality is what happens when a story treats everything the main character does as Right simply because they’re the main character. Usually it’s a meta trope, used to discuss the narrative, but here we see that Tommy believes in-universe this is how the world works.

Yet that belief is not confined to a single trope. Just in general Tommy seems to believe that life runs on narrative conventions.

Tubbo: “Wait what made us in the right to begin with? Maybe we’re the bad guys.”

Tommy: “No because we’re the funny guys and they’re always in the right.”(x)

Is it any surprise then that when Wilbur came on the server, spinning tales of evil tyrants and heroic revolutionaries, Tommy believed him wholeheartedly?

Not only did the stereotypical story make sense within his existing worldview, it came from Wilbur. Wilbur, who was Tommy’s guiding light. The one he trusted to point him in the right direction and hold him back if he goes too far. His mentor in all but name.

So when the time came to create and fight for L’manburg, Tommy threw himself into playing a persona that would fit the role of heroic underdog revolutionary that Wilbur’s tale laid out for him. As a result, L’manburg lies in the core of the persona he builds, in more than one way.

There are the obvious moments, like the ones we see during the Independence War where Tommy acts for the sake of L’manburg. Nothing says “heroic main character trying to salvage a hopeless situation” quite like butting into the leaders’ surrender negotiations(x) or making the fate of the entire country lay on his shoulders in a one on one duel with the enemy leader(x). Even the character arc Tommy acted out during all of it, of learning to believe in something bigger than himself and act on that belief - to be selfless for a change - fits the heroic persona he was playing.

(And it is playing rather than a genuine arc. Tommy shows a few notable moments of change, such as when he refrains from griefing Dream’s house or gives up the discs for L’manburg’s independence, but there’s no consistent followup on them later down the line. He continues to grief others and even ends up endangering L’manburg in his quest to get the discs without so much as reflecting on those acts. No actual internal change came from this arc, not even one that Tommy ended up backsliding on.

As cc!Wilbur said: “[Tommy] flips his values radically based on tiny non-emotional changes in his environment.”(x) For this reason, I’m describing him as acting a heroic persona which fits his situation rather than say he’s a heroic character with flaws.)

There are subtler ways in which L’manburg influenced Tommy’s protagonist complex as well. One of the first real values Tommy picks up, the values that actually stick with him and consistently influence his actions, is that L’manburg is Good. A value which was only reinforced by him trading the discs to secure its freedom. After all, his discs were Good, right? And if he gave them for L’manburg’s sake that must mean that L’manburg was also Good. Good enough to be worth his precious discs.

But more than that, L’manburg only existed because of his discs. Because of him. Or at least that’s how Tommy saw it. More than once he brought up how he gave up his discs for L’manburg(x) in order to argue that it’s worth preserving and keeping. In fact, it can be argued he felt entitled to L’manburg for his role in its creation.

On the flipside, feeling like L’manburg is his meant that any attacks against the country felt personal, like they were attacking all that Tommy did in order to preserve the country. And considering how L’manburg has been in the center of most conflicts on the server up until it got blown up for good, that made Tommy feel like all those conflicts were personal to him. Even when the other side's desire to destroy L’manburg was completely unrelated to Tommy.

This only reinforced the mindset that he was the one at the center of the story, the one the narrative of the world orbited around. A mindset that eventually led him to proclaim, “This server wasn’t about- this! It wasn’t- It was about me and Tubbo fighting Dream!”(x) when he saw the world moved on and changed during the month he was stuck in prison and/or dead.

(For the sake of not being misunderstood: Yes, Tommy said that because he was freshly traumatized from the events of the prison and his death. No, this does not contradict what I just said. That trauma didn’t create the sentiment behind this quote, it just brought Tommy to a mental state where it became a problem.)

We see Tommy’s possessiveness over L’manburg most obviously after Schlatt wins the elections. When Wilbur does his bad guys speech and asks if he’s the villain for trying to overthrow Schlatt, Tommy answers that he isn’t because “we started L’Manburg and… we should have won that vote.”(x) Even after Wilbur challenges him, correctly pointing out that Schlatt’s appointment is completely legal, Tommy continues acting like Schlatt usurped the throne of L’manburg away from its rightful heirs.

Yet for all of the ways in which Schlatt threatens Tommy during the Pogtopia arc, the one who truly leaves his mark is WIlbur.

Much of Tommy’s protagonist complex can be traced back to Wilbur’s influence in one way or another, an influence that is inextricably linked to the way Tommy sees him as his mentor. Despite being more self aware about it, Wilbur also acts like life runs on narrative conventions. This reinforced Tommy’s own belief, both because Tommy adopted a lot of Wilbur’s mannerisms but also because Wilbur treated him like a protagonist.

Wilbur: “And here’s Tommy. Here’s the man of the hour himself, Tommyinnit. The protagonist is finally here.”(x)

He even went out of his way to put Tommy in the spotlight sometimes. Such as when it was time to kill Schlatt and Wilbur decided to give Tommy the “honor”, despite there being people (like Niki, Tubbo or Quackity) who have an equal or greater claim to that honor due to being personally victimized by Schlatt(x).

But Wilbur’s biggest influence came from his downward spiral. “Let’s be the bad guys,” He told Tommy, “let’s blow that whole thing up!”. In that moment Tommy’s mentor died, stepping out of the story and leaving in his place a threat he had to contend with.

Like any mentor dying, this too forced the “hero” to stand on his own two feet rather than rely on someone else. It’s at this point in time that Tommy really internalizes the role. If Wilbur kept talking about being the Bad Guy, Tommy - who wants to stop him - is by implication the Good Guy.

We see it in the words he chose to use when arguing against WIlbur. “[Blowing L’manburg up] isn’t the moral thing to do,”(x) He told Wilbur when they first discussed it. A sentiment he didn’t express a few days before when he wanted to torch Manburg to the ground to avenge Wilbur’s honor after Fundy disowned him as a father.

Tommy: “Wilbur, take one look at Manburg. Cause it ain’t no more!”(x)

Because really, it’s not that Tommy suddenly gained a conscience about property damage. He didn’t. Even months later he would suggest blowing up the community house and had to be talked down(x). Rather, it’s Tommy retreating further into the “heroic” role in order to distance himself from Wilbur’s “villainous” role.

(Ironically enough, it’s at this point where he embraces the “heroic” role the most that he starts to reject the narrative Wilbur creates for him. The one that places him as the most important person. The one that would place Tommy as the president.)

Wilbur’s tales worked too well, and by the time Pogtopia came Tommy bought into the myth of L’manburg just as much as he bought into the myth of his discs, in a way that was independent of its origin. Seeing Wilbur - the man who came up with the idea and taught it to Tommy and bolstered his faith when it faltered. Seeing that man trying to shatter the myth and go against it shook Tommy to the core. It would’ve been like seeing Tubbo trying to burn his discs.

The more Wilbur spoke about destroying L’manburg the more Tommy dug his heels into the opposite position. If Wilbur wanted to blow it up, Tommy made sure to not allow a block to be out of place, even if he needed to grief Manburg as a distraction(x). If Wilbur went around calling himself the villain, Tommy would pull out the most stereotypical heroic arguments regardless of how relevant they were to the situation(x).

All of this, in addition to Wilbur’s death, left a deep imprint on Tommy. So much so that even months later he talks about the way Wilbur’s “let’s be the bad guys” line rings through his head when he tries to sleep(x). The ghost of that experience haunts him and even without Wilbur around Tommy tries to distance himself from being the “bad guy”.

However, it’s important to note that there’s a very specific kind of “bad guy” he tries to avoid. The image of the “bad guy” Wilbur evoked in his speech and downward spiral. Image being the key word here.

For all he talks about not wanting to be the bad guy, he sure doesn’t mind taking the same actions said bad guys take. That double standard is there in many of his actions, but we can see it even with his objection to Wilbur’s plan to blow up L’manburg. I’ve already talked about how he’s not really opposed to property damage, but one may argue that the thing Tommy took issue with was abandoning L’manburg rather than the way it was done.

Tommy: “So you have all the discs?”

Tubbo: “I believe so, yes.”

Tommy: “So- Sit with me, Tubbo. Right now we could- I mean we could run away from here and we’d never have to- We have everything we ever wanted.”

Tubbo: “We have everything we care about.”

Tommy: *resolute* “No. We can’t. We’re here for L’manburg. We’re not giving up now. We’re gonna restore it.”(x)

Except later in the day, after Wilbur made his speech and Tommy argued with all those pretty words, Tommy considered the very thing he condemned Wilbur for.

While he ends up deciding not to, the way he frames those two situations is very different. With Wilbur he framed it as a moral issue. But when he himself considered the idea, Tommy framed it more along the lines of whether it’s worth it to fight. Not because L’manburg may not be worth saving, but because the fight is hard and they may lose.

What we see here is Tommy’s protagonist centered morality from the early days after it has been entangled with the myth of L’manburg and the heroic role Tommy has been playing all this time. By the time the events of Pogtopia finished, that mindset grew much worse.

This was not helped at all by what came next.

Exile.

Exile did many things, but most importantly in the context of Tommy’s protagonist complex, it cemented Dream’s role as an irredeemable evil villain. Where before he saw Dream as his arch nemesis but still could accept the good sides in him (to the point where he seemed genuinely surprised that Dream wasn’t on their side during for the Pogtopia-Manburg war(x)), now the resulting trauma clouded over any attempt to see Dream outside that role.

Something which Dream abused mercilessly.

In order to pull off the Disc Finale the way he wanted to, Dream had to make sure his actions won’t be looked at too closely. Many of his actions and mistakes would make anyone familiar with his methods raise an eyebrow simply by how stupid they are for achieving his stated goal there. That level of scrutiny wasn't good for someone who relies on information warfare as much as Dream does.

So for the sake of masking his goals and win conditions, Dream played into Tommy’s existing expectations. All of which were colored through his belief that the world runs on narrative conventions with Tommy as the protagonist.

Confirmation bias is a powerful tool and we see Dream continuing to adjust his persona to give Tommy exactly what he expected. “Why?” Tommy asked, and Dream answered: “The server will be at peace now.” “Couldn’t you just do it to me?” Tommy continued, and Dream changed tracks: “This is much more fun.”(x)

The way Dream went about Doomsday was in large part because he needed to establish his supervillain persona before the Disc Finale so it won’t seem like it came out of nowhere. As soon as he got his hands on Tubbo’s disc, Dream switched from his normal, more reasonable demeanor to that of a blatant villain. The more stereotypical the better.

Techno: “Dream, Dream, what’s our plan for tomorrow? Why did you give them a full day? We could’ve been back there in like thirty minutes, Dream.”

Dream: “Well, it’s like an evil villain thing, right? Like you give them time and then-”

Techno: “Ah, an evil villain thing. Cringe. Been watching too much anime.”(x)

From Tommy’s POV, this didn’t seem like an abrupt change but rather Dream taking off the mask and showing his true colors, confirming what he always thought about him.

In fact, everything from exile up until the Disc Finale served to confirm and reinforce Tommy’s perception that the world runs on narrative conventions. Not necessarily because all of it was meant to cause that impression, but because thinking this way made it easier for Tommy to cope with all he has been through.

Tommy: “I fucking miss when times were simpler. When all I had to worry about was defeating one big green guy.”(x)

Seeing the world through narrative conventions allowed Tommy to make sense of things. There are certain ways in which stories go. Consistent arcs and patterns that show up over and over again. If Tommy is the protagonist and Dream his antagonist, that makes the way forward clear. He can rely on tropes and countless other stories told before to figure out what’s going on and put it in context.

But it’s also something that brings comfort. Stories are neat in a way that life isn’t. The good guys win, people learn to be better and once the bad guy is taken down everything is resolved. Tommy held on to the hope that once Dream was defeated, it would all turn out alright, even when Dream’s defeat didn’t logically solve the problems he was facing(x).

Dream’s supervillain persona being so stereotypical and generic made it easier for Tommy to believe in it. It played into two of his beliefs at the same time. Both that life runs on narrative conventions and that Dream is a mustache twirling villain. He had no problem believing Dream would monologue his actual plans or have an evil lair where he puts his schemes on display, because that’s just how villains act, right?

And if Dream is the evil villain and Tommy opposes him, that makes Tommy the hero right? The only one, by choice or by fate, who’s capable of stopping the villain’s evil.

Tommy: “[Dream] was just here to make sure- ‘cause I’m the only one that will thwart him. I’m the only one that Dream’s scared of.”(x)

As a result, Tommy ends up defining himself in large part through his opposition to Dream, which has the same effect as his desperate attempt to distance himself from Wilbur and the “villainous” label he chose during Pogtopia. Only by comparing himself to Dream he also exacerbates his tendency to think he’s always in the right. After all, when the bar for “evil” is set as low as Dream placed it, any lesser fault comes across as inconsequential.

We can see the results of how much he defined himself in his opposition to Dream in him saying that he feels like he has no purpose without Dream(x). We can also see it in his mindset in exile. In fact, this mindset is what allowed him to escape exile in the first place, which is another reason why it’s so hard for him to let go of that mindset.

However, it also opened him up to being more easily manipulated by Dream. Someone who always says no is just as easy to manipulate as someone who always says yes, the key is just presenting your goals as the opposite of what they actually are and then watch the victim rush to be a contrarian. Lying to Tommy also became significantly easier by abusing that persona and narrative conventions to get him to believe it.

Something the Disc Finale shows perfectly. Dream set up the confrontation and played the villain to a T, allowing Tommy to get a storybook ending while giving Dream exactly what he wanted.

This storybook ending marks Tommy’s “completion” of his hero’s journey, and unfortunately it also marks Tommy’s protagonist complex being fully cemented.

#dsmp analysis #c!tommy #tommyinnit #innitblr #dsmp #redtaxproject #character analysis

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bunny--manders · 9 months

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Some photos of Appalachia for @kjzx to set the mood as you listen to the podcast!

This is what the mountains look like. The range is so old that they've actually eroded a bit over time, so they look softer and more rounded than the dramatic ranges out west like the Rockies, Cascades, Olympics, etc.

Child coal miners in Gary, West Virginia in 1908. The coal mining industry could be incredibly inhumane to its workers, and some of the most brutal suppression of labor movements in American history happened when workers tried to fight for better conditions. The podcast goes into real life mining disasters.

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One of the most famous modern mining disasters--this coal mine caught on fire and couldn't be put out, and a whole town had to be abandoned because of it. The mine might continue burning for centuries.

I can't recall if the podcast mentions kudzu--it's an incredibly invasive plant that has been destroying Appalachian forests. Just driving by an infested forest is eerie because the vines will completely engulf trees and buildings.

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A "holler" is a distinctive type of settlement in mountain hollows. They have their own unique culture and accent which people outside the area often stigmatize as uneducated. People living in these areas are often cut off from the best jobs, education, infrastructure, and healthcare and their state governments have done very little to help them for centuries.

I'm very interested in historical stories about bootlegging, and you'll hear a lot about people hiding stills for distilling liquor in the mountains so that they could make alcohol during Prohibition or during times of high taxes on liquor. It's very hard to police a whole lot of small, isolated towns in the mountains where the locals know the forest much better than federal agents coming in from out of town. My home state's official anthem, Rocky Top, actually has a verse implying that federal agents were murdered in the mountains while they were searching for an illegal moonshine still.

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An example of music from the area. It's influenced by a combination of British immigrants, other European immigrants, and traditional African and African-American music.

A photo from the Appalachian Trail, a trail built in the 1920s that runs over 2,000 miles through the mountains. I'm biased because I love the forests where I live now so much, but I still think the Appalachians are some of the most beautiful parts of the country.

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A storyteller talking about the very long history of Appalachian folk stories and repeating a story passed on through the oral tradition. Some of the stories still told in Appalachia are hundreds of years old and come from a blend of European and African folklore. I really love the way the podcast captures that beautiful style and cadence. It very much fits into the long history of ghost stories set in the mountains. I'm intrigued that you picked up on similarities to Russian storytelling traditions. I bet there are a lot of similarities with the way working-class families living in remote mountainous areas pass stories from generation to generation.

That's just a little taste of Appalachian history and culture! Basically: It's one of the most beautiful parts of America, but also one of the most badly treated by companies that exploited its people and natural resources and state governments that didn't do much to help people living in the area. I grew up in a city near but not in Appalachia, one that made a lot of money selling its culture to tourists but ultimately didn't give as much back as it should to the people living there. Parts of Appalachian culture have definitely become folksy novelties.

(BTW, if you've ever heard of Dolly Parton, she's probably the most famous modern celebrity from Appalachia and she's done a TON of work helping the communities she came from, which is part of why people love her so much!)

#old gods of appalachia #Youtube

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b0ustr0phed0n · 1 month

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Over-Dubbed:

How to Lose a German Character by Making them Speak German

(I've never posted on Tumblr before, and this essay is longer than I intended. Hopefully the formatting works okay.)

Getting lost in the translation

When people say something was “lost in translation,” they are speaking of incorrectly or incompletely rendered meaning—a joke that doesn’t land, a pun that doesn’t work, a reference no one knows. But there is another kind of loss. The paradoxical loss that occurs when a translation creates meaning from incomprehensibility.

I went to see Anatomy of a Fall last week on a whim, in a German theater, in Germany, where I live. I didn’t know anything about it going in except that it was about a murder case and had won awards. And I will confess, I grew nervous when I saw the wall of French text that precedes the film. It was unsubtitled, which I thought was a bad sign. And it was, just not in the way I anticipated. Soon a voice started speaking German and I relaxed. For a while.

Now first, let me say that the dubbing was excellent. Germany has a long-established dubbing industry and the translators, voice actors, sound mixers, et al. are good at their craft. Side note: Let me also thank the German marketing department for recognizing what a gift they had in the title translation (Anatomie des Falls) and letting it stand. There always seems to be a strong urge in German cinema to tack on a superfluous secondary title. The film could have easily ended up called Anatomie des Falls: Tot in den Alpen.* The voice actor for Sandra, the main character, does a wonderful job—she is calm, she is desperate, she is sometimes enraged. She stumbles and hesitates and sometimes seems to search for words, and the sounds of the hesitation markers are well-timed to the visuals. At no point did I feel—as I often do when watching German dubs—that the actors were struggling to get all the syllables out in the time it took the original actor to say the same thing in their language. But there is also another reason the voice actor does such a great job.

*You should also be proud of me for not titling this essay "Anatomy of a Fail"

If you have seen this film or read about it, or if you are aware of the main actor, Sandra Hüller, you will know that she is German. She’s dubbing herself. I did not know who she was, and so I began the film assuming she was French and so was her character. Not long into the movie, however, I began to feel like I was missing something. Something more than the usual flattening of character that takes place when actors with various regional accents and speaking patterns are all dubbed into flawless Hochdeutsch. It took me a while to pin down what was going on. It wasn’t until midway through the film, when Sandra looks over at a court interpreter before she starts speaking, that I realized that all of this immaculately overdubbed German was masking something important: Not everyone in this movie speaks the same language.

The film gives you a few clues in the dialogue that point to her being a foreigner, but they are easy to miss. And why not? To anyone listening to the original voices, it’s abundantly clear. Possibly there is some crucial information in the opening conversation between Sandra and an interviewer, but I couldn’t hear most of it over the booming music that is the real point of the scene. At one point in the film, she mentions that she had been happier living in London with her husband. She also says something about “starting in a little German village and ending up in a little French village.” She surely wasn’t speaking German, though, because that’s what I was hearing and her mouth didn’t match. So I figured she was probably English.

If you aren’t an experienced lip reader—and I’m not—it’s not easy to pick out what language someone is speaking underneath a dub. You have to translate backwards in your head very quickly, try and get slightly ahead of the script, and then watch to see whether the person’s mouth matches the words you think they ought to be saying. I definitely missed some visual details in the courtroom (apparently they had a big tapestry of Justice in there?) because I was staring intently at Sandra’s mouth.

But eventually I was able to determine she was speaking English. Okay, I thought. Presumably she’s from England and prefers to speak her first language in a courtroom. Understandable. So would I. I must have misunderstood the line about Germany. Perhaps that line was changed in the dub script to reduce cognitive dissonance, since everyone listening would be hearing her speak perfect, accent-free German, the same as every other character.

This mystery solved, I moved on to the next: When is she speaking English? In court, obviously, but how about at home? Is she speaking English to her lawyer, who’s clearly an old friend? To her son? Did she and her husband communicate in English? Reader, I couldn’t tell. For one thing, it’s distracting and exhausting to spend the whole 2 ½ hours reverse-engineering English dialogue in real time (there’s a reason I’m a translator, not an interpreter), and for another, much of the dialogue between Sandra and her husband is reported speech, recreated through re-enactments, retellings, and audio recordings. There was no way to know how many layers of translation were involved.

Translation as theme

I’d like to pause for a moment (and I will!) to discuss some of the themes of the movie. If you haven’t seen it, don’t worry—I won’t spoil the ending. Sandra is accused of murdering her husband after their mostly-blind son finds him dead in the snow outside their home in the Alps. The film follows the investigation and trial, slowly revealing the secrets, struggles, and private grudges of the household. Sandra and her husband are/were both writers—one more successful than the other. They live in the village of his childhood. They argue about normal things: angst, guilt, feelings of inadequacy, who has sacrificed the most, what’s best for their child. At one point Sandra’s husband accuses her of stealing his ideas for her books.

In court, Sandra is tasked with interpreting these arguments for a hostile audience. A great deal of the runtime is spent clarifying feelings, relationships, moods, tones of voice, volume levels, et cetera. The media following the trial seem to find her interesting, but largely unsympathetic. In a flashback, her husband points out that she rarely smiles. Did she kill him? The film stubbornly refuses the audience access to unmediated facts. Even when we know there is more evidence, we have to wait to find out from an analyst in court like everyone else.

So: this is a film about translation. How do we translate observations into evidence? How do we translate our private lives for an audience? If you’ll permit me to wear my nerdiest of translator hats: In essence, all communication is translation. When you speak to someone, you are translating your thoughts into a new medium—spoken words—and hoping the listener will succeed in translating these words into thoughts that approximate yours. The fact that this is an imperfect process is evidenced by all the ways we misunderstand each other. Every layer of mediation results in a slightly altered reality. This is a crucial and often misunderstood aspect of translation: the translator’s job is not to recreate the same words in a new language or medium, it’s to recreate, as much as possible, the same effect upon the audience. That’s why your favorite foreign songs sound lame when you throw the lyrics into Google Translate: Only a fraction of a song’s power lies in the literal meaning of the words. When translated as prose, they turn into rhythmless husks.

Pass the language, it’s my turn

If you ever played the game “telephone” as a kid, you know how hard it is to send a simple message around a room in one language. Sending a message through multiple languages is what’s known as “relay translation,” and while it is sometimes necessary, it is never ideal. Have you ever amused yourself by putting the same text through a translation machine a dozen times? Professional human translators are better than machines, but there’s only so long you can stretch a chain of translation before the ends start to look very different.

When Sandra, who, by the way, is explicitly a translator—it’s stated in the film that she earns extra income through translation, although she does not say which languages she works in—has to explain her arguments with her husband in court, she is translating not only her own thoughts, but also what she believes his thoughts to have been. This is then translated again through the court interpreter, and then AGAIN, separately, in the dubbing process. (For simplicity’s sake, we’ll skip all the additional translation layers external to the film: writing the script, reading the script, acting, voice acting, filming, editing, the medium through which the film is played, etc.) The chain of translation, as I understood it while watching, looks like this:

Diagram 1: Translation chains*

Before you think I’m here to condemn dubbing as a practice, the chain for an audience reading subtitles would be just as long. That’s just what happens when a film reaches international audiences.The reason I’m illustrating the different routes meaning must travel to reach these audiences is because language does not exist in a vacuum. Our interpretations of words depend heavily on context. You may be wondering why I’ve included the court’s thoughts in this diagram. Well, the knowledge that the court is hearing Sandra’s words through an interpreter informs the way you listen to her. A French-speaking audience is aware that some of the people in this film are hearing Sandra differently, but they themselves are forced to interpret her through the medium of a language they may not speak fluently or at all.**

*Since we are shown Sandra speaking, I assume this split trajectory is present in both the undubbed and dubbed versions—that the audience hears her words rather than the court interpreter’s. In case you were wondering, if I tried to explain the husband’s motivations to you, you would be Audience C, three more steps and another language shift down from Audience B.

**I would be interested to know whether Sandra gets subtitled when this film plays to francophone audiences. I found one French review complaining that she wasn’t, but I don’t read enough French to search adequately.

Context is everything

Imagine for a moment you are walking down the street in some American small town and you pass a clothing store with t-shirts hanging in the window. Each features a design and a phrase, and all the phrases are nonsensical. The context of this store tells you this is on purpose—this store markets to people who enjoy the absurd. You may read the shirts, laugh, take a picture. Lol, look at this: [photo of shirt with an image of a ghost and the words “bump of chicken”]. You would then carry on with your day. Now imagine you walk past this same store in Japan. You could of course react the same way—Japan is equally capable of absurd humor—but now another option presents itself. After a few moments spent pondering the chicken shirt, it clicks: Goosebumps. Not an attempt at absurd humor but a casualty of mistranslation. The shirt has not changed; it is the context that prompts you to read deeper. Awareness of translation affects its interpretation.

It’s time for my grand reveal that is not a reveal to anyone familiar with the movie or who read the title of this essay: Sandra the character is not English. The line about the village was not changed—like the actor, the character really is German. I discovered this because I looked up the film during the bus ride home from the theater, not because I was able to tell at any point while watching it. What does this mean? It means this is a film about translation in which the main character is German, her husband is French, and she communicates in English both with him and with the court. Remember when I said there’s another reason the voice actor is so good here? It’s Sandra Hüller—she’s dubbing herself.

If we return to our chart, Audience B is aware that they are watching a French film. This means, when interpreting the plot, they can take it as presented in German, or try to put themselves in the shoes of Audience A and interpret it as they believe a French audience would. However, without the benefit of hearing Sandra and her husband speak, this is a difficult task.

Diagram 2: Audience A as imagined by Audience B

Depending on which languages you assume each person speaks, this chain may be as simple as French-French-French-French-French-German, as complicated as French-English-German-English-French-German, or anywhere in between. I believe Sandra’s careful deliberation of her words is meant to add ambiguity to her character. Is she simply struggling to explain her relationship, or is she using the time to come up with lies? By having her speak a language foreign to both her and the audience, the filmmakers make the situation even harder to judge. Audience A is hearing her speak English with a German accent, a constant reminder of all these layers of mediation. Audience B is hearing her speak German with a German accent, the same as every other character.

Hey, you dropped your accent

When I say “the same as every other character,” I mean that not only is everyone in the German dub speaking German (obviously), no one has an accent. Or rather, they all have the same accent, which amounts to the same thing. Accents and other dialectical features tell us a lot more than simply whether or not someone is foreign. In fact, they tell us more when the person is not foreign, because we are more attuned to minute differences in our own native language and dialect. Often, the first few words out of a character’s mouth tells us not only where they grew up, but also their social class, how they view themselves in relation to the person they’re talking to, and how they wish to be perceived: Are they trying to sound more or less educated than they are? Are they putting on a particular accent to blend in? Does their way of speaking gel with our expectations based on their physical appearance? Is it supposed to? Can we the audience even understand what they’re saying? Is their incomprehensibility meant to be funny or tragic?

When dubbing over a performance, we must return to our question of effect: To what extent can we replicate the effect of these dialectical markers on the new target audience? This is obviously a difficult task, and would necessitate looking critically at stereotypes and prejudices both at home and abroad. But I would respect the German film industry a lot more if they would even make an attempt.

Again, this is not a condemnation of dubbing as a practice. In fact, dubbing creates an opportunity here that is not present when subtitling. We cannot expect a foreign audience to pick up on dialectical cues in a language they do not speak, but we can replace them with similarly-weighted cues in their own language when those exist. German voice actors sometimes put on silly voices or use odd inflections to spice up a performance, but there is a stubborn resistance to using regional accents and dialects. Which is a shame. Like any language that evolved across a wide area for hundreds of years, German is secretly 47 languages in a trenchcoat, pretending to be the same thing for the purposes of national identity. Imagine if, in every British movie, all the actors were forced to speak in BBC English regardless of who they were and where they were from. Imagine if Jack Sparrow, Oliver Twist, Tony Soprano, and the cast of Bridgerton all sounded like they went to the same high school. How much of their identity would be lost? All of these characters are native English speakers. And none of their stories are about them struggling to defend themselves before a court in a foreign country.

As always, it comes back to effect. Not every character needs a regional accent. But sometimes their regional accent is important, and their actions and relationships make less sense without it. Many of the same associations exist internally between various German accents as exist among speakers of different types of English or French or Arabic. It doesn’t have to be a 1:1 equivalency. But why not make the effort to convey something? Am I saying all Texans in German dubs should have Bavarian accents? Yes.

So what?

I want to head off some criticism from people who will say I’m reading far too much into this, that no one is thinking about chains of translation while watching a movie about a murder trial, that dubbing is such a long-established practice in Germany that most Germans are hardly aware of it and consume films as if they were written and filmed in German. Perhaps. But this is also a problem. Not necessarily for all films—that’s a matter of taste—but certainly for this one. I read every non-professional German review I could find, and not one of them mentioned that German actor Sandra Hüller speaks English throughout this entire film. Three people did suggest it was better to watch it undubbed. Everyone else, even those who praised the film’s dialogue, did so without any acknowledgment that the film is bilingual. One German reviewer on Amazon seems to think this is a German film.

As I write this, Anatomy of a Fall has 4 stars on Amazon.com, 4.1 on Amazon.fr, and 3.8 on Amazon.de. Many of the German reviews there and elsewhere complain that the movie is boring. And why not? It’s slow-paced to begin with, and then, chances are they were only allowed to hear half the story. And how ironic is it that Hüller’s primary performance as a German actor playing a German character is inaudible in German theaters? Give the woman some more awards—she had to make this movie twice.

Germans’ over-reliance on dubbing accidentally erased the German identity of a character. If everything is always dubbed, a film could contain half a dozen languages and you wouldn’t even know. It’s easy to assume that underneath the German lies another monolingual script. Maybe you’ll wonder why, in a brief scene, Sandra’s son is making her repeat nonsensical phrases. To be honest, I feel the translation is partly at fault in this scene. I don’t remember the German phrases emphasizing any particular phoneme. I think it was nonsensical French for the purposes of speaking practice translated into nonsensical German for the purposes of nothing. This is a classic example of meaning-based rather than effect-based translation.*

*This is another difficult case, since normally you could focus on a particular German phoneme that is difficult for non-native speakers, such as /ü/. However, since Sandra is supposed to be German, we run into a recursive translation problem where, in order for the scene to make sense on its face level (Sandra is practicing her accent), it has to be illogical on another (Sandra is practicing her accent in her native language). Any solution is going to be imperfect, but I’d argue that it’s more important to understand what is going on in the scene.

Other ways this could have been handled

The obvious solution

Subtitle everything. This is an obvious answer, but not my favorite. For one thing, it risks driving away much of its potential German audience, who are used to dubs and generally prefer them to subtitles. For another, it implies that dubs are inherently inferior, which I do not believe is the case. They are both important translating tools and have different strengths and weaknesses.

My favorite solution

Dub the French parts, but leave the English parts in English and subtitle those. This is my favorite option. Why limit yourself to one tool? It doesn’t shorten the chain in Diagram 1, but it brings audiences A and B closer together by clarifying Diagram 2. Plus, are we to believe that German audiences are any less capable than French audiences of handling a bit of English?

The one I would love to see that will never happen

Dub everyone, but give all the other characters French accents. I think this is often considered hokey, but I personally love it. If I can’t hear the original language itself, at least give me some of its flavor.

Coming soon: A (hopefully shorter) post wherein I complain about subtitling practices

#subtitles #sandra huller #translation #anatomy of a fall #Anatomie des Falls #dubbing #synchronisierung

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factorialsotherfandoms · 5 months

Text

blip bloop bitching below. keeping this out of the tags as I need to scream but don't want it to travel.

I hate so much that I genuinely dread days when Philza and Tubbo interact. Because they're friends and should be able to just hang and stuff! And it can be fun to watch! But it seems every time they even go near each other the Philza tag becomes full of crap, then people kicking back, and its /worst/ now Sunny is here (I love her, mostly, but it makes it so much worse). The post about Sunny being scared of Philza with the screenshots was at the top of the Philza Tag (by how I access them at least) for 3 days. It always defaults to top before I flip it to most recent. It wasn't tagged as discourse or neg or anything - it was just screenshots after all - but the bitching which came out of that was so much, and every time I saw them it bought the bitching to mind, and half of that wasn't tagged either (on the original posts, in the tags, where I like looking for fic and meta and fanart and check my top 4 tags each morning).

And, yeah, a 30-off year old streamer probably not even on tumblr doesn't need defending online. BUT the shit and the way those posts talk and the things they shit on him for... a) its very much cc!Phil not q!Phil no matter what people say, because he talks in the same way even on the fucking pumpkin carving stream and more importantly b) mirrors very real bullying, discrimination and hate I and a lot of other English people have experienced. (yes of course its worse if you're an ethnic minority or have a Scottish accent or any number of other things, but just because other people have it worse doesn't mean it isn't a genuine axis of discrimination).

And sometimes I need to fucking defend not him but myself, because I feel like I'm going mad.

You might not see it, you might not even know about the north-south divide and English class politics, but its embedded into near every fantasy movie you've watched, accent wise at least!

Just personal shit... I have a southern parent and a northern parent. I grew up in the south-east. As a kid I could switch accents at will. Using my mother's northern accent (slightly more natural to me, as she was home more often) I would get marked down in class for being aggressive and argumentative and other kids would think I was angry with them. My father genuinely suggested I switch which I spoke with, and it was effort but doable, and guess what? My marks went up and I was seen as friendlier than the other children. It still wasn't the accent for the region - where I grew up has a very distinct one even for the south - and yet I was treated better for it.

Which. Could have seriously messed up my future if my grades kept being marked down and I kept getting into trouble for behaviour over stuff in another accent nobody bat an eyelid to.

[I had a section here too about different treatment while getting bra fittings, but given it involved members of staff literally hurting me as a literal child only when speaking one of the two accents, I removed it. Minor hurt, but hurt.]

And that was just personal experience! Of being read as aggressive or scary or like I didn't care for sounding northern.

And of fucking course this is only ever about fucking Tubbo, the southern who logs in regularly, this shit always starts. The southerner, whose accent is on the respectable side of this not-quite-a-class-divide.

And you know how deeply routed the north-south divide is? Sociologists generally date it back to /1066/ and the north being massacred for causing trouble for the new king. Economically and in terms of reputation, the north has never actually recovered from that. Even when it was major industry, even when major ports, its /always/ been behind the south.

Not just in terms of money going around, but things like life expectancy and education expectations. Rich northerners still have a harder time than their southern peers.

(Honestly, Sunny having 'verbalised' being scared of him for his tone of voice and not other adults who treat them older than they are [because yk its impossible to tell with an egg model] also kinda rubs me the wrong way, because of that sort of treatment of me as a kid. If I was aware of more fear towards other adults she doesn't know as well it'd be easier. Yeah he's a bit intense, and he should maybe be more delicate with a kid, but heaven knows he's not the only character that is. Maybe as more people drift back we'll see it more, I don't know, the admin probably isn't English either, but dear god. The daughter of a southerner telling her daddy that the northerner is scary is such a fucking classist trope. And a really offensive one at that. And shit which actually happens irl, which sometimes leads to the police getting involved.)

#fandom neg #discourse #keeping this out of the tags as I need to scream but don't want it to travel

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diejager · 4 months

Note

Honestly do not worry about not being good with Maths or Science as I am just probably worse at them (I am an essay and arts person), it is why I am getting a degree in English to my family's disappointment so I can hopefully become an English Lecturer/Teacher(I can deal with sassy or just plain horrid children as I have my younger cousins).

I only know so much about diseases as I had to learn about some in school but mainly because the main and favourite cousin I babysit has a special interest in diseases. He is actually the inspiration for the Plague AU as he started talking to me about the Bubonic Plague one day and I asked about why plagues had humanoid forms or representations based on some research I had been doing to understand diseases more but mix it with my own special interest which led to them teaching me the symptoms and explaining how they would be represented.

So I thought of the AU and discussed the basic ideas I wanted mixed with the specific details I definitely wanted in the design which he mixed with what he knew of symptoms and how to make it logical to make sense with the disease. He then drew out the designs which made it easier for me to describe.

Also, the details I am on about are how it affected Simon but it is his design as it has many references and the same goes for his backstory and companions. But please do not worry about not knowing as some parts of the UK's school system are just as narcissistic especially where I grew up so I understand that not everyone will know.

The posts for Plague AU König, Makarov, Roach, Price, and Soap will be just as detailed and hopefully can become a game with all my posts to see who can figure out the most or all the details and what they are references to!

Also, sorry about the late reply as we had a Christmas tradition I could not miss (Mrs Brown's Boys is something I recommend to watch) and please do not worry about me getting hangovers as for some reason I never get them even if I drink like a fish.

my parents were also disappointed in me until I showed them how much a concept artist in the game industry is paid :D

You have a sweet cousin, coming up with things and helping you with it. Teamwork makes the dream work, no?

I did see that you made a connection between his backstory and this AU, and I like it! I can't wait to see what you'll come up with, every little detail and information just give to us on a silver platter. I'll be letting people guess tho, I am BAD at guessing games despite having so many clues.

I should be the one apologising for replying hours later, I was playing Dead by daylight with a friend when I got this in my inbox. Anyway, good for you! Your kidneys sure are efficient at dissolving the alcohol in your system. I try to limit myself at two cups of Bailey's when I drink, I don't want to test my limit and wake up with a hangover and possibly embarrassing myself.

I hope you had a great Christmas, I'm calling it a day at 12pm and hopefully, you wake up without the sun shining in your face.

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vorrentis · 2 years

Text

Nayeon x Reader x Tzuyu - Worth Fighting For!

For this one both Nayeon and Tzuyu are the same age and go to the same high school together and Twice hasn't been formed.

===================================================

Being a K-Pop idol is not that easy.

K-Pop idol fans know just how hard it is to make it in the industry.

In fact, there are still many idols today who haven't been able to see the amount of success despite all their hard work and efforts.

Most people who have succeeded through hard work and sacrifice would probably tell you that there were moments where they wanted to call it quits.

While the degree of success isn't always the same amongst people, a rule that never changes is that hard work will eventually pay off in some way or form.

At least that's what you try to keep telling your two best friends: both of whom are trying to become idols themselves.

Chou Tzuyu and Im Nayeon.

Both are training with each other to become the best and be famous all around.

You?

You were just a supporter, a friend, a fan. While you didn't want to become an idol, you helped them out anyway you can...like right now.

=========================================

You three got into your car, with Nayeon in the back and Tzuyu in the passenger.

"Well...I think we did better than the last one." Tzuyu spoke up as you start the car.

"Wasn't enough anyway." Nayeon said in the back. "Those judges were harsh."

"Hey you were great, you both were. It's just that JYP is a hard industry to get into." You said starting the car. "How about a celebratory dinner?"

"Well if you're buying." Tzuyu asked as you nodded.

Tzuyu looked back and nodded. "Fine."

"Then let's find something along the way home."

====================================

You three just ordered dinner and were eating on the appetizers.

Since you paid for the whole dinner, both girls took advantage as they ordered the really good food.

You didn't mind though, these girls deserved it...with all their hard work for today's audition for Big Hit Entertainment...their third trial for it to which they also failed the other two times.

While you should be thinking of how to improve their talent...you couldn't help, but stare at the two as they chatted amongst themselves.

Yeah...it was pretty obvious to everyone except the two.

You had a crush on them...yes both of them.

You didn't know yourself and you didn't know why you began to see them like that.

Maybe it was the amount of talent they had. Their vocals and dance moves were impressive.

Maybe it was the amount of work they put in. Never straining nor giving up, keeping the positivity in their minds.

Maybe it was their visuals. They each were insanely beautiful in their own way. Tzuyu with her stunning beauty that looks like a work of art with her long flowing brunette hair that framed her face perfectly with, and Nayeon with her cute demeanor that just flows with happiness to everyone with her smile to kick off anyone's day.

...maybe it was all three.

But...you had thoughts about holding back...no way did they have time for you...and even if they did, once they became idols, it was known that dating has been an issue towards every agency.

Was it tough...yes.

Was it heartbreaking...yes.

But you held back, but it was difficult.

Overtime it just...grew. Grew that you couldn't wait to see them, hang out with them, talk with them, goof off with them.

Heck, call yourself crazy, but you even dreamt about them.

Right now you were just their assistant in helping them in their career. Whether it be driving them, hanging out handing them water and towels. Critiquing them during practice or just be there cheering them on while they were performing.

You didn't do much, but you were there for them.

And they appreciated it.

But you only thought that they see you as that...a supporter...a fan...a friend.

It hurt yeah...but nevertheless you were there for them.

"(YN)...(YN)?" You were brought out of your thoughts when Nayeon spoke to you.

"Are you okay." You realized that the food arrived and they were going to start eating.

"Y-yeah, just thinking. Sorry."

"It's fine."

"So...when is the next one?"

"Well this one is Pledis and it's in two weeks I think." Tzuyu spoke up.

"That's not far."

"No it's not, plus with our concert for the fundraiser at school in a little more than a month...it's going to be hectic." Nayeon said.

------------------

The fundraiser was an annual school event that helped bring in lots of people around to help with donations.

This year was to the animal shelter and the school has been cleared to host such an event this year.

And every year was a big success, bringing in many crowds of people and money towards their goal.

Food, music, dancing, singing, rides...it was like a pop up amusement park for one night of fun.

Nayeon and Tzuyu both signed up to be one of the many performers that were to perform live, they figured it be good experience for them along with their regular auditions.

--------------------

"Don't worry too much Tzuyu."

"Sorry it's just...today's performance wasn't as we planned. I messed up on a couple of notes." Tzuyu said.

"Yeah, I even almost tripped on the 2nd song...god that was embarrassing, it's no wonder they didn't call us back for another round." Nayeon spoke up

"Hey," You suddenly got their attention. "Girls, really, you did great and sure it may not be this time...but I know for a fact that you and you will be chosen for an agency. It takes time...plus you've only been at it for two years now. You'll only get better."

They both looked at you in the eyes and saw how soft they were and at that moment their bodies felt...at ease.

It was funny to them, only you seemed to do this to them after every mess-up or failed audition they had...which including this one was now four.

They were glad that you were friends with them.

"Thank you (YN)." Nayeon said as Tzuyu nodded.

You nodded and picked up your glass.

"Shall we toast."

Tzuyu rolled her eyes as Nayeon giggled, but they did it anyway.

"To you two having a successful audition at Pledis." The three clanked their glasses and drank their drinks.

Then the three of them went to eating.

===========================================

You went home after you dropped off the two at their homes and into your room and sat on your desk and checked on your computer at your e-mail.

To your surprise, an email caught your eye.

"Come on...please this one."

As soon as you read, 'Thanks for auditioning, but we regret-'

You pounded the desk.

"Damn it..."

Then you crossed off something.

"Well, they didn't care."

Thought-out the months you've been sending in the videos of both Nayeon and Tzuyu to multiple agencies, each and every time you could possibly do so...but no one has answered positivity.

While you didn't need to, you wanted to...for them.

They been doing this for so long and you felt that they need a push.

Even going as far as going to the companies themselves...didn't work out though well for each visit as they were not interested in hearing you out.

You didn't tell them though.

You didn't want to tell them that no one seemed interested in them.

You could only imagine their reaction to that.

...but at this rate, that seems to be getting to reality.

So you kept it a secret from them till someone would come and allow them to train in their agency.

So far...no luck though, but that didn't stop you from trying.

==================================================

ONE MONTH LATER

The three were currently driving to Nayeon’s house after another audition.

You were cheering for each one as they each performed their hearts out...but...

The judges were not impressed with what they saw...this has been the third time this month, and the judges weren't pleased.

The first one was back in JYP, the second was Pledis and this one was now Plan A...all three with mild attraction to the two.

They weren't terrible according to the judges, it was just they didn't have that 'oomph' that they were looking for.

You saw the girl's faces devastated after their remarks.

And each time you picked them up, they didn't look too good.

No one said a word as the silence was there as you drove a few streets down.

"Hey girls...great performance as usual." You said breaking the silence...

"..."

You looked towards them at a red light.

Tzuyu had her hand supporting her head while she leaned against the window. Nayeon looked out the window her arms crossed.

You drove Tzuyu back home first as she was the closest and all three didn't say a word on the car ride.

You didn't try to talk as Nayeon was clearly upset and Tzuyu clearly sad, but you had to do something...it was breaking you to see them like this.

---------------------------------------

"Alright Nayeon." You got out of your car and went around to open hers, but she got off on her own.

Then you walked alongside her to escort her to the front door.

The door opened as you both were nearing it and Tzuyu's mom was there to greet you.

"Hello (YN), how was it Nayeon?"

"..." She didn't answer as she stepped in the house, her mom sighed.

"Well that answers my question...thank you (YN) for taking her and back." She said.

"No worries...actually may I talk to her? She's a bit-"

"Upset."

You nodded.

"Yeah, go ahead."

You bowed and thanked her.

You turned around and caught Tzuyu’s attention as you held up one finger to give you a minute, as she nodded.

Her mom let you inside, as you headed to her room.

---------------------------------

KNOCK KNOCK

"Not now mom."

"Nayeon it's me...may I come in?"

"...okay."

You opened the door to see her sitting at her desk with her arms folded on it.

"Hey." You said as you went next to her and leaned against her desk.

"Nay, I'm sorry about today...there was some tough competitors, some of them trained for like seven years I heard."

"..."

"I mean they were probably trained under prestige trainers, and you and Nayeon were up against them."

"..."

"Nayeon, please say something."

"...Me and Tzuyu are thinking...about quitting."

You blinked for a couple of seconds before nudging your head.

"You're serious? Nayeon it's been six auditions. They'll be more."

She shook her head.

"You don't understand (YN), Tzuyu and I have been trying to get into an agency for two years...two years (YN)!"

"I know Nay, but we three knew that it wasn't going to be that easy, you know others have been up to ten years before even getting into one." You reasoned.

"Ten years...I don't think I can last that long...I'm so god damn tired of this." She said as she fisted the desk.

"Nayeon relax."

"Relax?! How can I relax (YN)!? Another performance and not one of them was impressed." Nayeon shook her head as you nodded.

"I know it's difficult Nayeon, but you just have to keep trying...plus the fundraiser will attract-"

She then turned and glared at you while standing up towards you.

"Trying? You're not the one feeling embarrassed or tired or pitied!" Nayeon said poking your chest. "Everything we've been doing seems like nothing at this point!"

"Nay-"

“We’ve have spent the last years finding time for us to train, to sing, to dance, to perform and no one doesn't even seem to care about how much work we put in! So don't 'I'm sorry' or 'next time' me (YN) because you don't know what it's like to fail again and again!" She yelled at your face.

"Nayeon-"

"You have no idea how difficult this is! All you do is stand there, do nothing and watch us fail! How about you do something!"

"..."

The room went silent for a few moments.

That hurt...

You shook your head.

"Okay...I'll leave you be then," you muttered as you walked towards the door and left her as Nayeon sat on her bed and placed her face in her hands.

Her emotions getting high.

----------------------------------------------------

You immediately got back in your car and closed the door and sighed deeply.

"What happened?" Tzuyu asked.

"Nayeon got angry at me."

She widened her eyes.

"An-what happened?"

"I said how sorry I was and she went off at me. She also told me that you two wanted to stop doing all this, that's not true right?" You looked at Tzuyu as she sighed and looked down.

"Oh come on Tzu, you can't give up." You leaned forward as Tzuyu shook her head.

"What they said...it hurts (YN)..."

"They're comments Tzu. You shouldn't listen to them."

"Yeah, but it's the same comments over and over and...sigh, I don't know, maybe we're just thinking it's pointless."

You reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder.

"Tzuyu, you can't think like that."

"How can I not (YN)! You heard them...the whole audience heard them...everyone heard them...we're no good..."

"Tzu-"

"Please (YN)...just, just take me home..." Tzuyu turned her body the other way as you kept your look.

You opened your mouth but closed it.

While you understood their emotions, it was just plain stupid that they were thinking that way.

"Alright..."

-----------------------------------

After you dropped Nayeon off, you didn't bother talking to her.

She didn't say a word at all during the ride, so you didn't see the point.

While you get that they were upset or depressed, you knew that there were going to be roadblocks and struggles for them...

You went to your room and you sat on your computer as you sighed deeply...what were you going to do...

Then you realized...

The fundraiser...

Maybe just maybe...

Then you checked your email as you looked through each one...until one caught your eye.

"Come on...come on...YES!"

Then you had an idea...it might be far-fetched and crazy, but it might work.

=====================================

THE NEXT DAY

"And here we are."

You walked inside the lobby of an agency...well if you can call it that.

It was an agency with some groups in it, not well-known groups, but you heard some songs from them and they were actually okay for the most part.

The agency, NV Uprising, was rather well known for bringing in talent and having them trade or sent towards big agency names all around, including some that went to JYP and Big Hit for example.

You didn't tell both Nayeon and Tzuyu, they were busy practicing their performance for tomorrow's fundraiser.

So instead of with them, you went to meet up with the boss, Mr. Huim, himself.

This was a lesser-known agency so you didn't bother with it before...but you were getting desperate.

There may be other performances, but with the results going like this...it wasn't looking to good.

You'll admit you got their spirits up for this one...so maybe they'll put up a performance like no other.

That's why you're here...to meet the man and hopefully send in some scouts to see them.

-------------------------------------------------

You stopped in front of the receptionist. A brunette hair lady.

"Hello...I'm here to see Mr. Huin."

"Name?"

"(YN) (LN)."

"Hmm...I'm sorry, I don't see your name on the meeting block." You blinked

"Uh, that can't be right. I even confirmed it over the phone." You leaned forward on the counter.

"I'm sorry sir, but he's already in a meeting with someone right now. We can make an appointment in two weeks."

"Two?! Oh no no no, I can't do-listen, I need to talk to him right now."

"Well I'm sorry sir, but that won't be possible." She sternly spoke as you leaned back, sighed and looked around...you saw a lone security guard just walking around and a couple of elevators in the back of the lobby.

"...Okay then...I'll make one...may I use your restroom first?" The lady nodded and pointed.

"It's right there on the right. I'll have your information ready when you return. And I am sorry about the mishap."

You thanked her and walked slowly towards the bathroom eyeing the guard then you stepped into the bathroom only for you to peek out of it to see him.

With luck, he turned around and you swiftly, but silently went towards the elevator.

You didn't look back as you quickly got inside the elevator and hid your body in the corner and pressed a button at the top of the buttons, if you know anything about bosses, their offices are always at the top.

As the door closes you see the elevator start to rise up.

You let out a breath of air as your heart was pumping...you were sure to get into real trouble for this.

------------------------------------------------

Then you saw the number light up to the 7th floor as you stepped off.

You saw the receptionist sitting there as she looked at you and you walked past her.

"Ohh excuse me...sir!" You heard the receptionist say as you walked past her and flung the big doors open to reveal a man behind a desk writing something on his desk.

He stopped and looked up.

"Who are-"

"I need to talk to you! It's about upcoming rookies, they're the best young talented duo you'll ever meet!" You were speaking your mind and heart out.

"Mary call security. Now." He pressed the phone on his desk.

"They work hard, write their own music and can perform-"

"Kid, I don't know who you are, but you are trespassi-"

"My name is (YN) (LN) and I want to speak about recruitment! Please hear me out!"

"Are you-Klein, how the hell did s/he get here!?" You turned and saw two buffed men in suits walking towards you.

"Whoa, whoa whoa wait-"

They grabbed your arms as you struggled.

"Sorry sir, he must have slipped past us in the lobby."

"It's fine Klein, just take him away." He said as your eyes widened. "And no need to call anyone, just kick him out and ensure he doesn't return."

They nodded and proceeded to carry you out.

"No wait, sir please." You said loudly, "I ain't leaving till you hear me! I ain't!" Was the last thing you shouted before the doors closed.

"Tsk...I really need to add more security in this place." Mr. Huin said as he continued his work as if nothing happened.

------------------------------------------

You were pushed hard out the door by both men, one of them, Klein, stood at the doorway.

"You're lucky my boss is in a good mood or you'd be arrested for trespassing. Now get out kid, before we make you regret it." Klein spoke up as the other nodded.

You turned at him and glared.

"I'm not going anywhere, I will talk to Mr. Hein!"

They didn't say anything, but closed the main entrance and stood to the side of the door on the inside.

"Well I ain't leaving from this spot! You hear me!" You yelled out at them.

You then went and sat on the stone floor near the door as you crossed your arms and sat there.

You didn't know what you were thinking, but you weren't just going to leave without consulting the man first.

"Tsk, stupid kid...should we throw her/him out some more." One guard asked.

"Nah, s/he's not inside the building and as long as s/he doesn't disturb the people, then we're good," Klein said as the other nodded.

"I give him thirty minutes."

===========================================

TIMESKIP

6 hours later

Well, the guard failed in his time as not one, not two, not three, but six hours passed.

You sat there on the ground, not moving, not checking your phone, not eating, not drinking, but sat there.

Many passersby noticed you and just asked if you were okay as you nodded.

The two guards were still standing there as well, but mostly on one-person shifts.

You could see them through the glass doors.

"S/He still there?" Klein asked as he came back.

"Yeah...stubborn little brat."

"Or determined," Klein expressed.

Then a sound of thunder cracked the sky as you looked up.

Dark clouds were starting to form and the wind was getting chilly.

DRIP...DRIP...DRIP DRIP DRIP

The rain started dropping as you sat there in front of the entrance...you brought a sweater thank god for that...but the rain was making it wet and cold.

Soon enough it started pouring.

You were still sitting there as the rain washed over you. You put the hood up to ensure your face to not soaked, but you weren't going to give in.

"Hehe, good. Now maybe s/he'll leave." The other guard said as Klein just stared at you.

"I don't know about that..."

Suddenly you stood up from your spot as the other laughed.

"Told you." The guard said, but he frowned immediately.

He saw you got up and moved a bit under the building for you to place your backpack under a nearby dry spot near the wall and returned back to your place and sat, glaring at the two.

"Whatever, no way is he going to stay. The weather says it'll be like this for the whole night." The other guard spoke up as Klein stared at you in silence.

10 minutes...

20 minutes...

30 minutes...

About 44 minutes have passed since the rain started.

You were shivering on the spot as the cold air and water were getting to you, your hands clearly shaking from the cold.

You felt so cold that you might have died...but it was for them as you kept that on your mind.

At this time, multiple staff and some idols were looking at you through the doors, questioning who you were.

"How long is s/he going to be there?"

"Isn't s/he cold?"

"Who is s/he?"

Where some of the questions were asked as Klein called his boss once more.

"Sir? Yeah s/he's still there, want me to call the cops?...you sure?...alright, we'll be there," Klein put his phone back in his pocket, "alright Rammus, we're bringing her/him in." Klein spoke up as Rammus locked his eyes on his friend.

"You can't be serious?"

"Boss's orders. The dumbass kid could get hypothermia out there." Klein then went to the counter and got an umbrella from the receptionist, he thanked her and left outside.

You didn't hear the door opening as you faced the floor, the rain was pounding on your head and back and all you heard was the splatter of each drop and thunder in the sky.

And then...the rain stopped pouring on you as you looked up in confusion.

Then your eyes widened when one of the men in suits had an umbrella over your head.

"Alright kid, you made your point."

"D-does h-h-he want t-t-" You were shivering hard.

"Yes, now hurry up and get your pack."

You nodded as you stood up with your frozen body you moved slowly as Klein followed you to your pack, grabbed it, and went inside the building with him.

Multiple sets of eyes were on you as you walked forward, heavy breathing from you as you breathed hot air into your hands.

'Finally...'

"Alright, first things first, you need to get out of your clothes. I'll give you something as soon as I find something."

You nodded and headed into the bathroom where he pointed out.

-----------------------------------------------

After a couple of minutes, they came back with clothes that they borrowed from a few idols there.

Each one gave an extra article of clothing they had in their locker rooms for practice.

Both guards saw you coming out with a white long sleeve hoodie, athletic pants, and some socks on with no shoes.

Then Klein came over and lent you his jacket as you thanked him.

"What's your name?" Klein asked.

"(Y-(YN)...(LN)." You said as your breath hitched.

"Hmm...well (YN)...you got balls, I'll give you that." You nodded unable to say anything. "Well, let's go meet him."

Rammus joined the both as he walked alongside you into the elevator with the doors closing behind.

=============================================

You went through the same doors as before and stopped to see the guy again.

"Here s/he is sir," Klein spoke up.

"Thank you." You heard the man as Klein looked at you.

"Okay go on in," Klein said as you walked into the carpeted room seeing Mr. Huin sitting as you previously saw.

"Klein, a cup of coffee...you drink coffee right?" You nodded. "Coffee then." Mr. Huin said as Klein nodded. "Rammus, bring a snack for him as well." Rammus nodded and bowed as he left.

"Alright, (YN) was it?" You nodded. "You know what you were doing was very stupid."

"I-I came to talk to you." You still were cold, but not as bad as before.

Mr. Huin had to admit, you had determination.

"Alright, talk. You were talking about two girls correct?"

"C-correct, I-Im Nayeon...and Chou Tzuyu..." You said as you went to your pack and grabbed your phone from it.

You scrolled into your phone and showed him photos of them as you handed them to him.

He grazed your hand for a bit and noticed the intense coldness of it as he slide his finger through each photo.

"Hmm....well, got to hand it to you, if you're willing to starve and freeze to death out there for them, they must be something."

"T-they are..."

"Age?"

"B-both eight-teen..."

"And you?"

"M-me too...I-I'm their friend. Same school..."

"And do you have some of their work?"

"I h-have a disks of their performa-"

"Here you go." You look to your side to see Klein with a type of cloth and a cup of coffee that was steaming.

"Thank you." You got the coffee and immediately gulped the liquid, not caring about the hotness of it going down your throat... (the coffee people, this ain't a smut)

"It's the best I could find." He added as he handed you the cloth.

"No worries," you took it from him with one hand, while the other was with your cup, "I'm getting warmer anyway." He nodded.

Just then you heard a cough on either side of you, from the other guard that originally threw you out.

He was carrying a plate of donuts and placed them on the table.

"Thanks." You said as he nodded.

"Klein, Rammus. Please give us some privacy." They both nodded and left the room.

"As I was saying, I have a drive with their performances, both in practices and in public auditions."

"Oh?..lets see them shall we." You handed him the drive as he placed it in his computer and clicked on the first video.

Throughout the video, you observed his face.

He seemed to have a poker face throughout, but you caught him smiling at some parts of the video and nodding his head at some of them.

You kept your poker face up as well to keep up with the professionalism till he pressed his space bar on the keyboard to pause the video.

"Well I got it to them, their vocals are pretty impressive, especially the smaller one."

"Nayeon."

"Nayeon." He repeated as you nodded. "Okay. The choreography could use help, but it ain't the worst I've ever seen...and you said they wrote some singles?"

"Yes," you got your backpack and pulled another drive of their songs on it. "It's just three, but each one has a different meaning and story behind the lyrics."

He grabbed the drive case and inspected it and looked at you.

"Are you like their manager?" He said.

"I'm just...doing whatever it takes to get them to stardom...it's been their dream since they were kids, well since I could remember. And lately, they haven't been doing well and it's taken a toll on them and I figured your agency might be the one for a starting step for them. I read about it, some major singers started here."

He looked at you as he inserted the drive.

"Yeah, our company is known for that. While we don't have big groups ourselves, it's a great start for idols to start their career. We're considered the g-league of the idol industry, but the most major companies often come and pick out most of our idols here."

"Exactly, I just want them to be successful, have a career and just live their life."

He gave a small smile while clicking on the drive.

"Hehe, well, let's take a listen shall we." You nodded.

Like the last video, he heard each song and nodded at some of the lyrics. He kept his poker face though as he listened in.

He then pressed the space key to pause and pulled out the disk.

"Well got to say, lyrics are pretty good. I understand the concept and story behind the words. Their vocals ain't bad either, but maybe a rap or even an instrumental behind it would work." He suggested as he listened to the songs.

"But it's good right?" You asked as that was what you wanted to hear.

"Oh yes, it is." You grinned. "Hmm...tell you what (YN), I'll talk to some others and we'll take a look at them. Audition for us personally. And if they perform like what I saw, then they might be something here."

Soon your body just went in a warm state as you looked at him astounded.

"R-really?"

He nodded.

You smiled and swore you were about to cry in front of the man as you felt your emotions rise.

"Easy, didn't say they got in or anything." He waved his hands as you just chuckled out of bliss.

"S-sorry...i-it's, it's been the only positive thing I've heard for a while." You said looking down.

Mr. Huin looked at you with a slight sympathy as he smiled.

"Well just tell them to come and I'll bring in instructors to witness them." He asked of you, but you shook your head.

"Actually, they're about to perform tomorrow." You told him as he raised a brow. "It's at a fundraiser at our school..." You said sheepishly. "I know it's probably not the best place, but I figured you might see how well they do in front of a crowded auditorium filled with people rather than you and some others. Plus they have this routine all prepped up for it too and they won't be expecting anyone in any agency there." You explained as he just chuckled.

"You're young, but you got agent vibes (YN). You had this all figured out didn't you?" He said and you looked away in embarrassment. "Okay. Then give me the address and time."

Your eyes widened.

"You'll really go?" He shrugged.

"Sure, I don't have anything planned for tomorrow. It's in the late afternoon right?" You nodded. "Good, then I'll see them live and if they perform as they did on the disc, well hopefully the others will be amazed as well."

You nodded and quickly wrote the information on a sticky note, not feeling the cold and numbness of your hands no longer, and handed it to him.

"Okay, well if you have any further questions, I believe we are done." He stood up and held out his hand. "(YN), thank you and I'm terribly sorry about what you went through."

You returned the shake.

"Don't worry about it. I'm sorry about breaking in."

"Hehe...keep the clothes. I'm sure the wet ones are still wet anyway."

You bowed and left the room as Mr. Huin eyed you leaving and then sat down and smiled as he went back to work, making a note for the concert.

You stepped outside the building and looked up at the dark clouds and raised your hands and yelled in happiness.

"YEAH!"

You did it...finally, you actually convinced someone to see if they might have a chance to join an agency.

Now was the second phase.

=================================================

THE NEXT DAY

You called Nayeon and Tzuyu over, since it was a Sunday they didn't have much to do so they complied after you said it was very important.

You were very excited, but you didn't want to tell them about the scouts coming over...it might overreact to them if they knew some agency was coming.

But you knew they didn't have any interest at all for the fundraiser...so you came up with a plan and speech last night.

You hoped it worked.

DING DONG

The doorbell rang and you went down the stairs swiftly and opened the door reveal Nayeon herself.

"Nayeon." You spoke, but your tone was groggy and gross.

Nayeon noticed it immediately as she frowned.

"(YN), are you okay..."

"I know, I'm getting sick, but what I have to say couldn't wait. Come on in." You sidestepped as she walked in and you closed the door. You turned to the stairs, but Nayeon blocked you.

"Wait (YN), before anything...I'm sorry. I'm sorry about getting angry at you. I was upset and-"

You held her shoulder

"It's okay Nay. I understand."

"No (YN) I-"

"Nay it's okay. Really. Come on. I need you to come with me right now."

You didn't care about her apology right now as you were focusing on the task at hand.

She just nodded and followed you as you opened the door to your room and Tzuyu sitting on your bed.

"Nayeon?" She called her as she looked up from her phone.

"Tzu? What's going on (YN)?" Nayeon asked.

"Can you sit please." You asked of Nayeon, “please." You asked once more as Nayeon just stared for a second, but sat next to Tzuyu.

"(YN) are you really okay? Doesn't it hurt when you speak?" Tzuyu asked as you shook your head.

"A bit. It is a sore throat, but I'm good. I just really need to talk to you both."

"(YN), we appreciate it that you care and are trying to help, but it's-" ou waved your hands.

"Look I know what you both said. I get it, but so do others."

They look confused.

"Others?" "Who?"

You grinned.

"I know you two aren't doing so well right now, but I want to show you some photos as well as a bit of information to each one."

You took your phone from your desk and opened your photo section. You went to one and turned it around to them.

They had questionable looks on their faces.

"That's IU...so what?" Nayeon recognized.

"Yup...the famous IU, probably the most popular K pop idol right now...she had quite the hardship when she started her career. She tried out numerous times at multiple agencies but was turned down each one...all 20 of them, including JYP. Eventually, her talents were noticed by Loen Entertainment and she debuted as a solo artist. It took her three years till she became a trainee."

The girls remained quiet as you flicked to another photo.

"That's Choa. AOA." Tzuyu pointed.

"She faced a really tough time when she was trying to become an idol. She tried out at JYP Entertainment and SM Entertainment but neither worked out. She had a hard time auditioning for both of them where she failed their auditions 15 times. 15 times girls. It took her six years before she became part of FNC."

Both girls looked at one another.

"But she didn't give up. Not after the first, not after the fifth, not after the tenth. She kept on working hard and then FNC found her. And the rest is history."

Both girls were starting to realize what you were doing.

Then you swiped another photo.

"Hani? But didn't she get in?" Tzuyu asked as you nodded.

"Yes, she got into JYP. She wasn't rejected and she was actually a trainee there but she ended up being cut by them. Do you both know why?" They shook their heads. "By the lack of faith, she had in herself. Kind of like two familiar girls I know right now."

Both girls just looked slightly away.

That was harsh, but they had to learn.

"Then she was scouted by Banana Culture Entertainment and became a member of EXID. So everything worked out in the end. It took her 4 years to do so."

"..."

The two were learning as to what you were telling them.

Then you flicked to another.

"J-Hope?" Tzuyu said.

"He had six years of training before he decided to try out for JYP and YG. When he wasn't accepted, he kept working hard and signed with Big Hit Entertainment a couple of years later...now the whole world knows his name and his group. Now that I think about it, JYP doesn't do too well with their idols do they...hmph their loss."

"(YN)-"

"Hold on I have one more. The most important one."

Then you brought up two photos, which looked very familiar.

"(YN)...that's us." Nayeon pointed at herself.

"I know. But I don't see just Tzuyu and Nayeon...I see two talented girls, who are willing to push their limits to get to the top...yes they failed auditions...yes they didn't get callbacks...yes they messed up...but that shows how strong they are...they never gave up in believing in their dreams and kept going till one day they will be scouted and picked by JYP, Big Hit, SM, YG."

Both girls were in awe of your words.

"I know it doesn't mean a lot coming from me, but as your number 1 fan and friend, I desire for you two to rise. And just like the other that I showed, you two can be just as popular if not more."

Then Nayeon looked down as Tzuyu looked away.

"Just know girls, that you're not the only ones who are being down...you're not the only ones who thought that they can't do it...well look at them now...and you're not alone, your family, friends, and I will be behind you picking you up."

They both looked at you and the tears were dropping down their beautiful faces.

"It's okay girls I didn't mean to make you feel bad. I just wanted to teach-"

Then they both stood up and lunged at you and hugged you instantly.

You heard their sobs as you held onto them both.

"I'm sorry (YN). I-I'm so sorry..." Nayeon said sobbing in your torso as Tzuyu remained silent.

"It's alright girls. It wasn't going to be easy, we knew that, but you both can do it. I know you can."

They stayed hung onto you as they cried onto your body, Tzuyu on your shoulder and Nayeon on your chest as you patted their backs and soothe them.

A few minutes passed and they were now silencing down.

"Better." You asked. They both pulled away from you and looked at you.

You saw their red eyes and tears streak-faced as they nodded.

"Now then...what are we not going to do?" You looked to Nayeon.

"Give up," Nayeon answered.

"And what are we going to keep doing?" You turned to Tzuyu.

"Achieving our dreams," Tzuyu said this time.

"Good. Now let's be happy girls. You got a big performance tomorrow and we can't have any negative emotions." You said looking right at them as you gave a big smile.

And there it was again.

Both Nayeon and Tzuyu had those feelings in their bodies as they stared into your eyes.

Seeing you caused them both to smile as well.

"There we go. I'm sorry for the lesson, but I really do believe in you two. I honestly do."

Nayeon and Tzuyu looked at each other and then back to you.

They took a step forward and they hugged you softly this time.

"Thank you (YN)...for everything," Tzuyu stated as she spoke through your shoulder.

"Yeah (YN). You're really incredible. We're glad that you're with us." Nayeon said.

Your heart beats with the closeness and words as you fought the blush coming up your cheeks.

"No worries you two. I'll always have your back."

Both Nayeon and Tzuyu heard as they smiled more and just snuggled into your body.

What you said was true to them, you had always been there for them ever since they could remember. Small things or big things, it didn't matter, they always appreciated your work and support for them.

"Okay...I'm sorry for ruining the moment, but we need to go over it tomorrow. Are you girls still going to perform?"

Both of them let go of you and nodded. They didn't need a second to think about it. Hearing your words, got them a surge of positive in their systems.

"Yes." "Yup."

You smiled.

"Good, good. What about the routine?"

Nayeon looked at Tzuyu and nodded.

"We have a few planned before we...whatever. But we want you to help us decide which one you like best." Nayeon said as you nodded.

"Well, that's going to be hard since whatever you two choices will be great."

Tzuyu rolled her eyes.

"Come on (YN)."

"What Tzu? It's true." The three of them laughed.

"Alright, can you still talk though?" Nayeon asked you as you nodded. "Okay, then let's get started." She said as the other two nodded.

So with the remaining night, you helped the girls choose which performance/songs they might go with.

They had it on their phones so they had all their plans with them right there.

It was about an hour of deciding, but they got their plans with Nayeon and Tzuyu deciding that it would be best to turn in the night for tomorrow.

But not before thanking you and hugging you one last time.

You then went to your room and lay on the bed.

As you gave a big sigh.

it was a hectic two days, but everything seemed to be going in order...hopefully

=======================================================

THE NEXT DAY

10 minutes before Tzuyu and Nayeon's performance

Performances have been done decently for the fundraiser, lots of people actually showed up, and the crowd was booming and stockpiling.

It seemed like a concert by the number of people.

Each group went out and performed to outstanding applause from the audience.

Two girls were ready in their costumes as they were practicing...well not really.

Both Tzuyu and Nayeon was checking their phone, and texting you as you never showed up the whole day at school.

Unfortunately, you got worse in your condition.

You weren't able to talk or move from your bed at all.

Both girls were worried about what was going on.

They would have gone over when school was done, but they needed the girls to participate in a practice session of mic checks, stage, and lighting that took nearly three hours.

Plus whatever time to get ready for the performances.

You, however, told them that it was okay.

"Nayeon..." Tzuyu said as she was looking at her phone. "S/He's still not able to come. Hope he's okay."

"S/He'll be okay Tzu, let's just get focus on this performance. You know (YN) will want that." Tzuyu let her phone down.

"It sucks that s/he won't see us. It feels weird that s/he's not here supporting us."

"I know, I feel the same." Nayeon agreed as Tzuyu looked at her.

"Nayeon, Tzuyu, you girls are ready to go out." A staff member spoke.

"Thank you," Nayeon said as she and Tzuyu went to the middle of the stage. "Alright, Tzu, let's do it."

She nodded as they both joined hands and the curtains raised.

==========================================================

And that's that!

Part 2 will be up soon so...

Thanks for pausing your life to reading this! Vote/Comment if you want and hanks again!

#twice #twice nayeon #twice tzuyu #nayeon x reader #tzuyu x reader

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